Red Sea Moments: Embracing Waiting and Trusting God’s Glory

(audience applauds)
Dr. Kenneth Hawley: Good morning and welcome to day two
of our riding carnival.
You'll find that after chapel today,
you'll be dismissed into the mall
where lunch will be provided to you
by our friends in dining services and Aramark.
There'll be lots of games and prizes available to you there
and in a few days after this,
we'll come back to chapel and announce the winners
of those prizes.
So feel free to enter those events and submit your answers
and there will be prizes.
To do that and as we take photos,
we took some last night and more today,
please follow us on Instagram, lchumanities_official.
We'll be documenting those things that we do today
and also the winners of the prizes.
We talked last time about the kinds of stories
that we keep telling ourselves
and how they have a deeper and richer meaning
that is above and beyond them
and goes farther back in time than we can count.
But we also noticed how there are lots
of different interpretations and ways
that people have interpreted those stories
and we find that the same kinds of curses and problems
and obstacles that they faced in those stories,
fantastical as they may seem to us,
are everyday real problems that we still face
like people who are super superficial,
people who are fake,
people who appear to be one thing
but turn out to be another.
Things like being lonely and afraid and worried,
you might never find the love you're hoping for.
Things like being mistreated and abused
and not given the love you need and that all of us need.
These stories are read to children,
they're read by adults,
they're understood by many to be
the kinds of stories that aren't really real.
But at their heart, I think you'll find a lot of things
that are actually true to life
and that challenge us today to think about how we live it.
In our study this afternoon,
we'll just look briefly at the classical myths
and some of the stories that lay behind
the stories that we're already familiar with.
There are story types, there are kinds of stories
that just keep getting repeated and shifted
and retold and reimagined.
In many cases, what we find is there's a larger tragic story
or a really troubling one that gets lightened up a bit
or animated for a younger audience
that can't quite handle some of the realities
of the original.
We find this in Ovid.
We talked last time about the problem of objectification,
the problem of passivity and the problem of identity crisis.
The story of Apollo and Daphne is an old one,
2,000 years old when Ovid wrote it down.
Obsession and objectification are at the heart of this story.
Apollo was a little bit prideful,
he insulted Cupid, God of love,
and Cupid paid him back by striking Apollo
with an arrow that compelled him to love
and striking the object of his affection, Daphne,
with an arrow that repelled love.
So the very person he just had to have
didn't want anything to do with him.
She ran from him, physically was chased by him,
stalked by him, and as she's running to safety,
she prays to her father, a river god, for help,
and she is transformed into a tree.
It doesn't stop Apollo.
He's the first tree hugger, maybe.
He's still embracing the tree.
He's kissing its bark, and Ovid describes the bark
as cringing and retreating from his affections.
Then he breaks off her branches, she is a laurel tree,
breaks off her limbs and uses them to decorate
the men who achieve victory in battle.
And so if you've ever seen anyone crowned
with a laurel wreath or anything like the old Olympics,
that's what it's alluding to.
It's kind of explaining why we do that.
And this story explains that it was a story of obsession,
a story of objectification.
He wanted her so badly, he went to any lengths,
and she needed to escape that she would rather be
an object than a living person, and she escapes,
but she's still mistreated.
And this story is a horrible one.
It's an awful one.
And yet, how many times do we still see stories
where women are treated as objects,
pursued by men to their own destruction?
There's another sweet story, Pyramus and Thisbe.
You might know it.
You know, they're divided by a wall,
and their parents don't want them to be together,
so they sneak out at midnight and hang out in cemeteries.
It's all very wise stuff.
They eventually, though, agree to meet one night,
and when he finds the place where she was supposed
to wait for him, he sees a lioness, a ravenous lioness,
jaw still dripping with blood.
It had just killed an animal.
And when Thisbe got there to wait for him,
she retreated to a place of hiding.
But when she did, she dropped her scarf,
and the lioness had taken up that scarf that she dropped,
and when Pyramus walks up, he sees the lioness
with the bloody scarf in its mouth.
He assumes that she has died,
and so he impales himself with his knife.
When that happens, she walks out,
and he lives just long enough to see her kill herself
before he dies.
What a sweet, sweet story.
And sleep tight.
This is such a wonderful little love story,
but we consider it one of the greatest love stories
ever told.
It's the source for Romeo and Juliet.
And we know that this story is a strange one,
but is it really all that strange?
How many other stories since then have we had
of people who really want to be together,
but circumstances keep them apart?
Whether it's a simple thing,
like some sort of romantic comedy,
where all it is is some guy in a plaid shirt,
and a beard, and a truck, and a tree farm
that needs to be saved by Christmas.
If it's that kind of conflict,
or something much more serious,
like actual family violence.
In this case, they're dead, and no one lives on to love.
But we just animate it, and show it to our kids,
and call it "Nomio and Juliet."
It's the same story, and in fact,
"Nomio and Juliet" is truer to Pyramus than it is
because they're actually on two sides of a wall.
Another kind of myth, not just star-crossed lovers,
but this time, it's an awakening myth.
Pygmalion and Galatea.
In this story, Pygmalion is kind of unimpressed
by the women that he knows,
and so, like any normal guy would do,
he obsessively hides away in his basement,
and makes a woman for himself,
carving it out of ivory.
And, kind of like Apollo, becomes obsessed with this object.
Even starts decorating it with jewelry and dresses,
and then starts liking it so much,
he begins to embrace it.
And as he does so, he prays out to Venus
that she might send him someone
like his beloved ivory girl.
Venus answers his prayer, and she comes to life
while he's embracing the ivory statue.
Creeper.
(audience laughs)
She wakes up, and we don't know
whether Galatea was okay with that.
It seems fine to Ovid,
and they go off and live a life together,
and she is alive.
She is living and breathing, not just stone.
In this story, though, the question of,
did she have a choice in the matter,
and did she even want that,
it reminds us a little bit of Sleeping Beauty.
Someone wakened up in an embrace.
But then we have another story
that many of us remember from the '80s.
Mannequin.
You might even remember the Starship song,
"Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now."
"This world runs out of lovers,
"we'll still have each other,
"me and my mannequin."
He's working in a department store.
Somehow, a woman who centuries prior
had been cursed by an Egyptian goddess
is in his department store window,
and it comes to life, but only for him.
Everyone else thinks he's the weirdo
with a mannequin on his motorcycle.
That's what that scene happens to be from.
She is only alive in his presence alone.
Eventually, it all works out, of course,
and the good guys win, and they get to be together,
and it's a romantic comedy.
Again, we lighten up these stories,
and we assume that they would be happy to be together.
That story was retold in the early 1900s
by George Bernard Shaw.
It's a play called "Pygmalion,"
and it's the story you might recognize
as the source for "My Fair Lady."
A girl selling flowers, and she is taken in
by a man who would teach her fine manners
and proper speech, and she becomes a lady of distinction.
It was later made into a film in 1938,
but when it was a play, people didn't like the ending.
The ending that Shaw had in mind
was that Galatea should take some responsibility
for herself, and he wanted the last line of the play
for her to argue with the guy who was trying to control her
and order her around, and to tell him no,
and then begin to walk out, and then come back on stage
and yell her own name, Galatea, close the curtains.
Nobody liked that ending, and so the person
who was putting it on changed it
and started throwing flowers.
The male lead threw flowers to the female lead,
and everybody thought that was sweet in the end,
and so they turned it into a romantic comedy
when it was supposed to be a story about female empowerment.
The film version did something like that,
but the one that we know better,
it was a musical before it was My Fair Lady in 1965,
Audrey Hepburn, but it was later remade, you might say,
into Pretty Woman, which is another way
of saying My Fair Lady.
She wasn't selling flowers,
but everything worked out in the end.
(audience laughing)
And in this story, just like in My Fair Lady,
the male lead was changed.
He was transformed.
In My Fair Lady, he becomes a little softer.
Every time he thinks of her,
he's grown accustomed to her face.
He becomes a little bit nicer in the end
before the final film rolls,
but in Pretty Woman, he actually becomes a nicer person,
goes around barefoot,
decides not to be a mean businessman anymore,
and she has an effect on him,
but it's essentially the same story.
You might recognize something like this as a glow-up story.
You just take somebody,
they can take off their glasses and fix their hair,
and they're ready for prom.
Whatever has to be done
to give someone a little bit of a makeover,
and all of a sudden, all their problems are solved.
Again, we recognize this also as the story of Cinderella.
It's essentially a glow-up.
It started with something like Pygmalion,
a kind of awakening,
but it's become a simple little romantic comedy formula
whereby someone just gets a little bit better looking,
and all their problems are solved.
This was remade into the film Ever After,
starring Drew Barrymore.
And this film tries to tell the true story, it purports,
of how Cinderella came to be.
And it begins by having Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
enter into a room at a castle with an old lady who's saying,
"I appreciate your little book of stories,
"but the one about the cinder girl,
"you didn't get quite right."
And she takes out a slipper and proceeds to tell him
about her great-great-grandmother, Danielle de Boberac.
And the whole film is the backstory,
it's a flashback to the life of the woman
that inspired the story of Cinderella,
according to this film.
And she was a happy, fun-loving, rough-playing girl,
loved to wrestle in the mud with boys,
throw apples at people, get into trouble,
and she was a little bit of a daddy's girl,
but then when he passed, she was miserable.
And you know the story, Wicked Stepmother,
Wicked Stepsisters, all that.
She sleeps among the ashes, but she reads books,
one of them being Thomas More's Utopia,
a book of political philosophy.
And she doesn't just sort of read it
to put herself to sleep, as it might appear,
she's taking these ideas in,
and she even takes them to town.
She gets dressed herself one day,
and goes into town and argues with the people at court
for the release of one of her servants,
using arguments from the book by Thomas More.
When she does this, she's arguing directly with the prince
that she's supposed to fall in love with.
He's a little bit annoyed at her,
but she's right and she gets her way.
The other people at court are pretty impressed with her,
and the servant is freed.
She then gets to actually spend some time with the prince,
who even though he was a little bit annoyed,
he was a little bit impressed too.
They spend the day together until,
whoops, they get attacked by gypsies.
You don't ask questions, just go with it.
They're attacked by gypsies,
and she is the one who argues for their release.
When she gets the approval of the leader
of the band of the gypsies,
he says you can leave with whatever you can carry.
So she picks up the prince,
and carries him out of the forest.
Pretty clever, pretty strong.
She saves not just herself, but him as well.
It's kind of turning this story type on its head.
She also gets to spend real time with the prince.
This isn't some sort of love at first sight infatuation
at the ball.
They actually get to know one another,
and talk about books, and literature, and art,
and nature, and all kinds of things.
Along the way, she does have these stepsisters,
but one of them is actually quite nice, Jacqueline.
The other is terrible, just like her mother,
and they want to steal the dress from Danielle
that had once belonged to her mother, who had passed.
At one point, Danielle gets in trouble,
and it's only Jacqueline who stands by her,
and nurses her back to health after she's been beaten.
When she makes it to the ball, everything's perfect,
until, instead of a spell breaking,
that horrible mother-in-law and sister expose her publicly,
and make it to where she has no hope at all with the prince.
She is then sold into marriage to this skeevy bald dude,
and in this moment, you would think this story
is going a terrible direction,
and yet she's strong enough, and smart enough,
and quick enough to fight for herself,
and free herself from this guy who would ruin her.
When the prince shows up, she's already safe.
She has saved herself, but he's got a proposal to make,
so he picks up the shoe, tries it on, everything's great.
They are happily married, but sister and mother
get forced to work in a garment factory,
and eventually get pushed into a vat of dye,
because they're awful.
Then, back at the palace, she's happy.
Leonardo da Vinci has painted her portrait,
the one that the story began with, and all is well,
and when she and the prince enjoy a kiss,
it fades back into this image of her painting
that the film started with, when it started the flashback.
This whole story, told by the film,
is essentially a glow-up, essentially a remake,
and a revision to the original story,
making her a little more assertive,
with much more agency and personal responsibility.
She's not just kindness and sweet temper,
she's wrestling and throwing things.
She's not just staying at home, cleaning and ironing,
and helping with dresses and hair, and crying a lot.
She dresses herself, goes to the palace,
argues philosophy, frees a servant, and rescues the prince.
The magic spell breaks at midnight in the original,
this one she's publicly exposed.
In Perrault's version, they reconcile
and everybody gets married, but in Grimm's version,
people lose a few toes trying to fit in that shoe,
and the eyes get gouged out.
But she is eventually freed from that marriage
by fighting for herself.
Ultimately, Cinderella takes responsibility
for her situation and wins, triumphs,
fights back, and becomes her true self.
We think about what we talked about last time,
the real challenges of this world are real,
and awful, and challenging at times,
and it takes characters actually acting
for their own self and benefit,
and also for the good of others,
to fight back against the evil of the world.
In this story, they fought back against a type,
a story type, where objectification and passivity
are the order of the day.
Instead, she knows her true self,
she lives in accordance with that,
and she makes a life of her own,
with the prince, and they're happy,
but they actually know each other before they get married.
Imagine that.
All these stories continue to show us
that one thing we might take from them
is what would you do if you had an opportunity
to rewrite your story?
If you had a chance to change some things
about how your trajectory is headed,
what kind of changes might you make?
What kind of self-assertion might you declare?
And how might you, as your true self,
change the life that is ahead of you,
for your own good, and for the good of those
in your life that you love?
This is one of many stories, there are a lot like it,
we could barely scratch the surface of all the stories
that fit into this category of fairy tales.
But when you watch it, or when you read it,
think about what it's saying, think about what it means,
and think about how it pertains to your own life.
Whether it is or it's not about romance,
it is about making choices, and choosing wisely,
and not looking at the things that never last,
and not looking at the things that are only on the exterior,
but thinking about true virtue and true love.
As you enjoy the carnival today,
hope you not only have a great lunch,
but participate in all the games, and have a good day.
You are dismissed.
: (audience applauds)