One time, when I was working in the Arctic, one of my employees got religion. While it lasted, he went about his work with an uncharacteristic zeal, singing joyfully and loudly, if off-key. One day, I actually listened to the words he was bellowing to the seemingly unimpressed seagulls and realized he was saying "rejoice-us" instead of "rejoicing": "We will come rejoice-us.. . ." I didn't bother to correct him, figuring it pointless to embarrass him over something that would be short-lived anyway. Sure enough, a few weeks later I saw him being physically thrown out of a bar. He lolled in the middle of the gravelled street for awhile, shouting drunkenly at the bouncer. The words he was using -- and pronouncing correctly -- aren't in most religious lexicons! Since then, I've often pondered the question of how deep a religious doctrine can really run if one doesn't understand the words in it. Can a person really be understanding the virgin birth, for instance, if he or she thinks the words to "Silent Night" are "Round John Virgin / limber and wild"? I have my doubts. This book doesn't resolve my concern about that -- or about anything else I can think of right off hand -- but it sure was fun to read. It is a collection of the author, Charles Allbright's, anecdotal columns in the Arkansas Gazette. The unifying theme is "the less solemn side of religion." Many of the columns deal with the kind of linguistic humor reflected above and in the title, The Consecrated Cross-Eyed Bear. Others deal with pastoral predicaments and embarrassments, such as the preacher who locked his keys in the house then got stuck in the doggy-door as he tried to crawl through it to retrieve them (pp. 87 - 89), the visiting preacher who preached at the wrong church and did such a good job that the congregation hired him (pp. 99-101), and the like. It's a funny book. But it lacks substance. For instance, many of the narratives might have scholarly use if more detail were given. Pages 140 - 141 provide a good example. Here, Allbright gives a recounting of the urban legend Jan Brunvand calls "The Heel in The Grate" (Curses! Broiled Again! W. W. Norton, 1989, pp. 167 - 172), but gives no indication that he is even aware that it is a legend. Or, there's the one about switching babies left asleep in wagons at a church picnic (pp. 131 - 132). I'm sure I've seen that one before, too. (Even if not the specific one, the "changeling" motif is a pretty good indicator that it probably is a legend.) Unfortunately, though, Allbright doesn't give enough other information about the supposed incidents and their sources for them to be useful to those who do recognize them as folklore. The book is completely devoid of any scholarly apparatus -- no introductory essay, no afterword, no index, no biographical information about the author or the informants, virtually no details of who, what, when and where in the stories themselves, no way to tell what of the information is reported and what made up, not even an indication of when the columns were published. But it's a funny book, and fun to read. The incidents he relates are so true to human nature that, if they aren't true, they could be or ought to be. I can't recommend the book for scholars, but I can and do recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who enjoys good clean fun. Jim Vandergriff |
