Unanswered Prayers or American Dream

VACCINE: OPIATE OF DEM ASSES

Before there was medicine, we had magic, and up until Medieval Times, parlor tricks and some grand illusions delighted children who stood in awe at that which they could not comprehend, and when it was realized that these same tricks stumped less discerning adults, thus arose the dark arts and the occult. Those fascinated with the paranormal accept these things they cannot understand as those things about which science will one day comprehend, but religion, by the learned, is dismissed as mere superstition for the less educated. In part this disparate treatment arises from the fact that the church, even in ancient times, enjoyed a celebrity that attained political power, a theme that is even evident in the Gospels.

Even before the Age of Reason, Galileo had an early skirmish to advance another political power, and, as you may have gleaned from Umberto Ecco's Name of the Rose, possession and control of knowledge that can be withheld is a power in itself, and what else is politics, but the quest for power?

But here is a true story about science in a church setting from my childhood, growing up, like the President, in a black church. Back in the old days, in part because of segregation, but also because of a different time, it was not uncommon to entertain visitors from out of town in your family home, and, quite often when visiting ministers, like Dr. Benjamin Mays, the spiritual mentor I shared with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Dave Shannon, the former President of Virginia Union, spent a weekend in the guest room in our family home. But once, while I was in the fourth grade, we had a visit from Dr. Henderson, one of a long line of white ministers who also preached in my father's pulpit and stayed in our home, and, just like many people have a hypothesis that all vaccines are good, per se, he had a thought that all kids loved ice cream, and he had an old recipe that he wanted to share, as a cordial guest. He had us go down to Sears & Roebuck, where he purchased an electric ice cream churn, and then off to the Food Fair to purchase the ingredients for our desert at Sunday dinner.

Well, it was a great hypothesis, but perhaps his pride and overconfidence got in the way, because the final product was so bad that he would not even finish eating it. Momma always said, "Smile, because this is how your daddy makes his living," and advised us that, no matter how horrid, any food item we were given was the best whatever we had ever had, but, Dr. Henderson was not so proud that he could not acknowledge that he had messed up. And, before departing, he gave us the ice cream churn as a gift. We never used it, but, it was the thought that counted.