The Babel Fish

In Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there is a unique little creature called the Babel Fish: a small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. If you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. When its comes to the adventures of Arthur Dent, this means translating a myriad of languages spoken by aliens. A little closer to home (but no less universal), it means translating how the royal vibes of the Spirit speak to you.

Our first ever babel fish is Ruth. Thanks, Ruth!

We started off listening to 'Mr. Blue Sky' by the immortal Electric Light Orchestra and studied a painting called the 'Freshness of Cold' by Leonid Afremov. 

[Editor's note:how royal is this combo, galacticaly speaking? ELO was way into all things outer space and Leonid is also the name of an annual meteor shower]

To get the full vibe effect, give 'Mr. Blue Sky' a listen while looking at the painting below. It's OK, we'll wait until you are done before we go on. 

Freshness of Cold

Sun is shinin' in the sky,

There ain't a cloud in sight
It's stopped rainin'
Everybody's in the play
And don't you know
It's a beautiful new day.

Runnin' down the avenue,
See how the sun shines brightly
In the city on the streets
Where once was pity,
Mr. Blue Sky is living here today.

For Ruth, the song and the painting both speak to a renewal of the spirit. In the time before, it was cold and rainy, but now the rain has stopped and things are bright again.

Which brings us neatly to our continued discussion of the Noah story from Genesis, where I guess you could say rain played a small part in the story...

Yes, that is an ark... go with us on this one

Some profoundly weird things happen in the story of Noah, so we set about reading it, collecting questions, and placing them into one of three different categories: collywobbles, good vibes, and bad vibes.

NEW VOCAB WORD ALERT! A collywobble is an intense feeling of anxiety of nervousness, especially with stomach queasiness. In the Royal Club of Friendly Vibes, we are using the word to describe the feeling of "what the heck!?!" we get when we hear something that does not vibe with us.

Even setting aside the Nephilim, there are some things in the Noah story that give us the collywobbles. For example, Noah was 500 when he had children... and he named one of his sons after lunch meat. Ham, delicious!

On the good vibe side, God is trying to start over and is willing to save at least some living things . But on the bad vibe side, before deciding to save Noah's family and two of each animal, God not only regrets creating humans but is willing to destroy the human race AND all the animals and every living thing? Really?

The group had a major case of the collywobbles over this: If God is all-knowing and had first deemed everything in creation 'good,' wouldn't God know that humans were going to turn out this bad? Did this mean that the all-perfect God made a perfectly catastrophic mistake? One of our youths even compared God in the Noah story to an 'emotional teenager' who is over-reacting when things do not go his or her way.

We probably should not think of the Noah story as a literal retelling of history. Scripture was written by inspired human hands and not by God. That's why, as responsible readers, we should always question how accurately the writers depict God and the events in the stories. This responsibility is especially important when the writer's account of God or what happened is contrary our experience of God or the world.

Like most Bible stories, the story of Noah was handed down orally, generation upon generation for many, many years. The writers are writing from a specific time and place in history, and thousands of years ago they were working with very limited resources. Their grasp of the world was much simpler, much smaller, and much flatter than we now know it to be in the 21st century.

Coming full circle to the babel fish, the writers are trying their best to communicate their vibes so that readers can better understand God's relationship to human beings. Like all things, humanity's understanding of God evolves. This is why, thousands of years later, it's natural for us disagree with certain parts of the story (like God's extremely questionable impulse to destroy everything) while affirming other parts (like the God-given responsibility of caring for the future of creation).

And to get to THAT point, we'll finish up next week with the conclusion of the Noah story. We hope you all can be there because we are going to have a fun lesson - make sure you have your creative writing pencils sharpened!

With royal vibes to all!

Chris & Timothy