Trego's Mountain Ear

I was sent to Sunday School as a small boy. I’m fairly certain my parents believed it was part of a process to civilize the young – but at the other end of life, as an old man, I’m realizing that it taught me about areas that have been filled with strife and conflict since the dawning of civilization. In general, my Sunday School lessons showed that the mid-east is an area with a long record of strife, war and conflict.

Gaza, as I recall, was the place where Samson went to see a girl, and left town ad midnight, taking the gates to the city with him. At age seven, I wasn’t real sure what he was doing with the girl, but I was definitely old enough to realize that he was violating the code of the west: leave all gates as you find them. It’s downright un-neighborly to haul a guy’s gates – and gateposts- to the top of the next hill. I could understand how Samson had PO’d the town elders.

Later in the Samson story, I learned how the guy got a haircut, was weakened, and the local constabulary gouged out his eyes. It left me cautious about haircuts for years, and thinking that some folks just don’t have any sense of humor about people who mess with their gates. At 75, I’m not sure that Sunday School was intended to teach me to leave all gates as you found them.

On the other hand, there was the way the Israelites were treated in Egypt. The story didn’t totally make sense. When I hashed my way through it, and figured it out, I came up with the idea that the Israelites came down on irrigated cropland with their sheep and goats, and that the Egyptians’ courts sentenced them to labor to make up for the damages the sheep did to the wheat fields. That still makes sense to me.

There was a bit of a problem in keeping tribes straight as a little heathen in Sunday School – I didn’t know any Philistines – but I knew quite a few Filipinos. Tough little bastards. I came out of that lesson knowing that Samson had kicked ass on 10,000 Filipinos. Probably not the intended lesson – particularly since I liked the Filipinos I knew.

So I’ve never been surprised by wars and atrocities in the mid-east. And I don’t expect any of the players to wear white hats. The record they showed me in Sunday School suggests that staying out of the middle east, and making a specific effort to avoid Gaza, makes for a healthier, happier life.