Friday, February 16, 2007

"What are you going to do, bleed on me?" and other things you shouldn't say in chapel.

Today in chapel in the course of a "lesson" about the history of William Cowper and John Newton, the speaker talked about an old plantation house that during the civil war was used as a hospital. He vividly described how wounded soliders would be operated on and then the amputated limbs would be thrown off the balcony of the house. Eventually the professor got around to a sort of point. He went on to say that even now, hundreds of years later, there are still blood stains on the floor of that plantation house. He said that whenever he thought about the blood stains he thought about the sacrifice of Jesus. Let me just say that I am in no way trying to make light of the sacrifice of Christ, but my twisted little sense of humor was working a mile a minute on this one. Now I'll admit that he probably lost me with the word amputate, but seriously judging from the giggles that rippled across the Benson during the talk, no one else had a clue where he was going with the talk either.
Now a couple of images came to my mind also while he was speaking, but they weren't quite the same. The first was the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where Arthur fights the Black Knight. I'm not sure that I'll ever manage to disassociate the word amputation from that scene. "Oh, it's just a flesh wound," I whispered to my suitemate who was sitting next to me. We then spent the next several moments giggling over the scene.
The next thing I thought about was, "What does God think about this little talk?" I had this mental image of God groaning, "Oh, no no he isn't talking about severed limbs again..." as he hits himself in the head. Perhaps slightly sacreligious, but seriously I wonder what God was thinking as he listened to it. I'm completely and totally convinced that God has an incredible sense of humor and I like to think that he was probably laughing along with us during this rather ridiculous chapel service. It's kind of like those Pug dogs, that are so ugly they are cute. Or watching the really awful singers on American Idol, they are so bad that you watch for all the wrong reasons. Maybe it's totally inappropriate to laugh at it, but today was truly the worst and yet the best chapel I have ever attended.

Ironically the last song we sang was, "There's a fountain full of blood." You try keeping a straight face during that one.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

that's really terribly sacreligious but too funny. i think i slept through most of chapel...if only my friend down the row wouldn't have kept waking me up to tell me random stuff...

MSS said...

Hey at least I was awake ;)