I stopped at one of those highway gas-station convenience stores a few weeks ago, searching for some invigorating M&Ms. I couldn't find them, but I said to myself, this is America and I'm an American, and if there's one thing I know it's that there are going to be M&Ms somewhere in this quickstop. I poked around a little more and sure enough, just a little out of the way, there they were -- five different kinds of M&Ms. I went for the classic multi-colored ones. Am I the kind of person who's going to experiment with peanut butter M&Ms? It wouldn't be me.
But I'm off the point, which is, that when you're a native of the place, you know more or less what to expect. You're not likely to be taken by surprise very often. But every once in a while, something hits you right between the eyes, and you say, where the heck am I? I had such an experience today when I read a flyer from the West Fairlee Center Church, which is right over there on Middlebrook Road, not more than three or four miles from where we live.
I have no quarrel with the "Old Fashioned Community Hymn Sing" on July 12 or the "Shape Note Singing" on August 2 -- that's exactly what I would expect from a church in West Fairlee Center. I'm a little puzzled by the "Blessing of the Animals" on July 19, but then I remembered St. Francis, in some ways my favorite saint, and I remembered that he preached to the birds and that when he was dying, he thanked his donkey and (this is a bit hard to believe but what the heck) his donkey wept. So I'm OK with blessing the animals, although I myself would feel hypocritical blessing the particular animals that I was preparing to transubstantiate into lambchops or hamburger.
But what makes me feel like a stranger in a strange land is the event that is scheduled for August 9 -- the "Blessing of the ATV's" (sic). ATVs, for those of you who don't know, are "all-terrain vehicles," and are very useful if you're out on the range in the vast West patrolling miles and miles of barbed-wire fence, but which in the crowded East are used mostly for "recreation," which seems to involve tearing up private land (someone else's private land, that is) or government land, making a whole lot of noise, and sometimes driving underage and illegally, and much too fast, on our usually peaceful "unimproved" dirt roads. No mufflers, no insurance, no license.
So what's with "the blessing of the ATVs?"
St. Francis has become the patron saint of environmentalists. Is "the blessing of the ATVs" supposed to be a rejoinder to St. F and to ecological thinking? Are we experiencing a Christian sanction of anti-environmentalism? Or have these back-country bible churches long been blessing tractors and balers and pickups and backhoes, and I've just not noticed?
WTF is going on? Am I in the America I know and understand? Why am I feeling vertiginous?
Would St. Francis have thanked his ATV? And if he did, would his ATV have wept?
Comments