Foolishness Stories

Le Chambon

There are two things, it has often been said, that human beings cannot gaze at directly without going mad – the glory of God and the darkness of human evil. After years of studying human cruelty, Philip Hallie, professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University and a veteran of World War II, must have felt close to madness. Working on a project on Nazi cruelty, he focused on the medical experiments Nazi doctors conducted on Jewish children in the death camps.

“Across all these studies,” Hallie wrote later, “the pattern of the strong crushing the weak kept repeating itself and repeating itself, so that when I was not bitterly angry, I was bored at the repetitions of the patterns of persecution…. My study of evil incarnate had become a prison whose bars were my bitterness toward the violent, and whose walls were my horrified indifference to slow murder. Between the bars and the walls I revolved like a madman … over the years I had dug myself into Hell.”

During this time Hallie came across a short article about a small town of three thousand in the mountains of southern France, which was the only safe haven for Jews in all of German-occupied Europe. Reading with academic objectivity in his effort to classify types of cruelty and forms of resistance to it, he was about halfway down the third page of the story when he became “annoyed by a strange sensation on my cheeks.” Reaching up to wipe away a piece of dust, he felt tears – “Not one or two drops; my whole cheek was wet.” Those tears, Hallie wrote, were an instinctive “expression of moral praise.”

What Hallie was reading was his introduction to the citizens of Le Chambon and their heroic rescue of more than five thousand Jewish children in the Second World War. Later written up in his modern classic Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, Hallie came to realize the rightness of a summary by one of his readers: “The Holocaust was storm, lightning, thunder, wind, rain, yes. And Le Chambon was the rainbow.” Yes, he concluded, “I realized that for me too the little story of Le Chambon is grander and more beautiful than the bloody war that stopped Hitler.”

What emerges in his story is the strands of the stubborn courage of the Chambonnais. They were Huguenots, French Protestants fired by their faith in Christ and the experience of three hundred years of persecution following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. And they were led, taught, and encouraged by their indomitable pastor, Andre Trocme, and his equally heroic wife, Magda. But what comes across repeatedly is their character and the down-to-earth, no-nonsense quality of their faith.

Many French let themselves be deceived by the infamous “night and fog” propaganda with which the Germans concealed the death camps. But the Chambonnais simply did what had to be done, what they’d been taught to do, what Christ would have expected them to do – they sheltered and saved their neighbors, the Jews, who were in danger.

The evening Pastor Trocme himself was arrested illustrates the whole story. The pastor and his wife had been invited to dinner by church members who, knowing they often forgot such invitations, sent their daughter to remind them. But when she entered the dining room, she saw the police arresting her pastor. So the word flew around the village: Andre Trocme had been arrested.

Typically, however, Magda Trocme invited the two policemen to have dinner with them. Friends were later incredulous and upset with her. “How could you bring yourself to sit down to eat with these men who were there to take your husband away, perhaps to his death? How could you be so forgiving, so decent to them?”

Madame Trocme always gave the same answer: “What are you talking about? It was dinner-time; they were standing in my way; we were all hungry. The food was ready. What do you mean by such foolish words as ‘forgiving’ and ‘decent’?”

Such a response was typical. The Chambonnais shrugged off praise again and again. They would look Hallie in the eye and say, “How can you call us ‘good’? We were doing what had to be done. Things had to be done, that’s all, and we happened to be there to do them. You must understand that it was the most natural thing in the world to help these people.” An outsider’s words of moral praise, Philip Hallie concluded, are “like a slightly uncomfortable wreath laid upon a head by a kind but alien hand.”

Source: Os Guinness. The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life (Kindle edition. Locations 1092-1095).

The Lake Becomes a Whirlpool

November 21, 1980 began like any other day for the men aboard a Texaco oil rig on Lake Pegneur, a 1300 acre lake in Louisiana USA. Day in, day out they would sink a drill down through the muddy bottom of the lake searching for oil. But on November 21, 1980 things got a little crazy. Below the surface of the lake was a salt mine, and it appears someone on the Texaco oil rig made a miscalculation that sent their drill straight into one of the salt mine’s tunnels.

What happened next was not dissimilar to pulling the plug out of a bath. A massive whirlpool formed, that first brought down the oil rig (the workers had earlier evacuated), took down a second oil rig, eleven barges, a tug boat, trucks, trees, and a loading dock. In three hours all 13.2 billion litres of water in that lake were drained, along with everything on and around the lake.

For a history.com video report see https://youtu.be/p_iZr2-Coqc

Environmental Application

I suspect this story is an apt parable for our times. God has given us a beautiful and amazing planet, a planet with two unique features. First, it has the ability to renew itself. We can harvest fish from the ocean and the fish that remain will reproduce to replace those we have taken. We can take trees from the forests and new ones will grow up to take their place. Second, the earth has the capacity to take the waste we produce and recycle it into something useful. Perhaps the greatest example is the one we all learned in school – trees absorb the carbon dioxide we produce and turn it into oxygen.

It’s quite amazing. But here’s the bad news. We are withdrawing resources from the earth at a rate faster than they can replenish and we are creating waste at a rate faster than the earth can absorb and recycle. And scientists tell us that we are heading for disaster.

In 2009 a group of scientists wrote a paper called “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity”. The concept was profound but simple. The earth has a number of key systems that we depend on. But these systems all have limits, and once we cross those limits the negative impacts begin to cascade. Of these systems they were able to measure seven, and they found we have already crossed the safe boundary on three and we are rapidly approaching the boundary on the rest.

We’ll Get Bigger

George Mallory was the famed mountain climber who may have been the first person ever to reach the top of Mount Everest. In the early 1920’s he led a number of attempts to scale the mountain, eventually being killed in the third attempt in 1924. Before that last and fatal attempt he had said “I can’t see myself coming down defeated.”

Mallory was an extraordinary climber, and nothing would force him to give up. His body was found in 1999, well preserved by the snow and ice, 27,000 feet up the mountain, just 2000 feet from the peak. Give up he did not. His body was found face down on a rocky slope, head toward the summit. His arms were extended high over his head. His toes were pointed into the mountain; his fingers dug into the loose rock, refusing to let go even as he drew his last breath. A short length of cotton rope – broken – was looped around his waist.

When those who had set up camp for Mallory further down the mountain returned to England a banquet was held for them. A huge picture of Mt Everest stood behind the banquet table. It is said that the leader of the group stood to be applauded, and with tears streaming down his face, turned and looked at the picture. “I speak to you, Mt Everest, in the name of all brave men living and those yet unborn” he said. “Mt Everest, you defeated us once; you defeated us twice; you defeated us three times. But Mt Everest, we shall someday defeat you, because you can’t get any bigger but we can.”

In 1953 two climbers, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzig Norgay, reached the top.

 

Source: Information reported in Seattle Times (Jan 16, 2000) and Illustrations Unlimited

The Fall of Rome

The Roman empire was one of the “greatest” to rule the world. For hundreds of years the Romans dominated the Mediterranean, building magnificent cities, roads that remain today and imposing their “peace” upon those they conquered. At the time of Jesus and in the centuries after the power of Rome seemed unassailable.

By the fifth century after Christ the citizens of Rome had enjoyed eight centuries as a superpower. Regaled with tales of victory by their armies in far off places and convinced of their superiority to the barbarian hordes they were convinced their city could never fall. Then in the first decade of the fifth century they awoke to find Alaric, king of the Visigoths, standing at their gates with his army.

What a preposterous man he was thinking Rome would fall to his power! Envoys were sent out to conduct negotiations to have him move away. They began with threats: an attack on Rome would be met by the almighty strength of her innumerable warriors.

Alaric’s reply was simple: “The thicker the grass the more easily scythed.”

The envoys realised Alaric could not be fooled by their empty threats. What then would be the price of his departure. Alaric explained that his soldiers would move through the city taking all the gold, silver and anything else of value that could be moved. They would also take with them every barbarian who had been enslaved.

The envoys became hysterical. “But what would that leave us?” the demanded.

“Your lives” Alaric replied.

And with that Rome’s centuries as an apparently unbeatable superpower came to an end.

 

Source: Story of Rome’s fall found in T. Cahill, How the Irish Saved Civilisation (Hodder, 1995)

 

The Dr Fox Hypothesis

J Scott Armstrong, associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, has demonstrated in a series of tests for both written and spoken communication, that people are impressed by “experts” from within their own field even when what is said is completely unintelligible.

Armstrong calls this the “Dr. Fox hypothesis”, based on an experiment in which an actor posed as Dr Myron Fox and delivered a lecture to a group of science professionals of “double talk”, patching raw material from a Scientific American article into non-sequiters and contradictory statements interspersed with jokes and meaningless references to unrelated topics. An anonymous questionnaire was filled out afterwards in which the professionals reported that they found the lecture clear and stimulating.

Source: Leadership Magazine, Spring 1983 (Armstrong’s results and research originally appeared in Interfaces Vol 10, No 2 and were reported in Psychology Today.)

The Arctic Expedition

In her book Teaching a Stone to Talk (New York: Harper Collins, 1988) Annie Dillard reveals a sad, but poignant story about what happens when we set out unprepared. She tells of a British Arctic expedition which set sail in 1845 to chart the Northwest Passage around the Canadian Arctic to the Pacific Ocean. Neither of the two ships and none of the 138 men aboard returned.

Captain Sir John Franklin prepared as if they were embarking on a pleasure cruise rather than an arduous and gruelling journey through one of earth’s most hostile environments. He packed a 1,200 volume library, a hand-organ, china place settings for officers and men, cut-glass wine goblets and sterling silver flatware, beautifully and intricately designed. Years later, some of these place settings would be found near a clump of frozen, cannibalised bodies.

The voyage was doomed when the ships sailed into frigid waters and became trapped in ice. First ice coated the decks, the spars and the rigging. Then water froze around the rudders and the ships became hopelessly locked in the now-frozen sea. Sailors set out to search for help, but soon succumbed to severe Arctic weather and died of exposure to its harsh winds and sub-freezing temperatures. For some twenty years, remains of the expeditions were found all over the frozen landscape.

The crew did not prepare either for the cold or for the eventuality of the ships becoming ice-locked. On a voyage which was to last two to three years, they packed only their Navy-issue uniforms and the captain carried just a 12-day supply of coal for the auxiliary steam engines. The frozen body of an officer was eventually found, miles from the vessel, wearing his uniform of fine blue cloth, edged with silk braid, a blue greatcoat and a silk neckerchief — clothing which was noble and respectful, but wholly inadequate

Source: Anne Dilliard, Teaching a Stone to Talk.

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