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Morning Devotion for the Season after Pentecost
May 24, 2024
Feast Day of Alcuin of York
Reading: Bel and the Dragon 23-27
Now in that place there was a great dragon that the Babylonians revered. The king said to Daniel, “You cannot deny that this is a living god, so worship him.” Daniel said, “I worship the Lord my God, for he is a living God. But give me permission, O king, and I will kill the dragon without sword or club.” The king said, “I give you permission.” Then Daniel took pitch, fat, and hair and boiled them together and made cakes, which he fed to the dragon. The dragon ate them and burst open. Then Daniel said, “See what you have been worshiping!”
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
One of the most debilitating aspects of too much religious piety is that it infects belief with a deadening seriousness. It allows no room for hilarity – the kind of deep laughter that erupts only from the realization of just how stupid we can be. (If the mere mention of stupidity, here, is offensive, some kind of piety is already in play). Comedy is essential to us because it’s disarming; it can reveal our worst and most injurious traits without these revelations being immediately caustic and damning. It provides us space to realize things that would be too awful to bear under the weight of seriousness. And given what is at stake in religion, humor is necessary.
The full text of Bel and the Dragon is one chapter that is part of the “extended Book of Daniel.” It is printed separately in the Apocrypha. One might wonder why this chapter wasn’t simply included in the Book of Daniel. I wouldn’t be surprised if its sheer hilarity wasn’t a problem: here’s how to slay a dragon, serve it cake! Even funnier, the Babylonians mistook this beast for god. The dragon died by bursting open. We as readers are invited to burst out laughing at the silliness of it all, that such a creature would become the object of worship.
And yet we do the very same all the time. We worship creatures – increasingly celebrities – whose downfalls are often just as swift and embarrassing, especially in light of the esteem they were granted. The comedy of this text from Bel and the Dragon makes possible, and tolerable, our own self-realization that our own worship is often misplaced, and, laughing at this, we can then take better measure of its true seriousness.
David Foster Wallace, in his famous commencement address to students at Kenyon College (which was not without its own humor), said the following, with a seriousness that was meant to be edifying:
In the day to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship… If you worship money and things… then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough… Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they plant you… Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – and you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Ultimately, he observed, if you worship the wrong thing, “it will eat you up alive.”
It’s as good a complement to Bel and the Dragon as I can imagine.
Prayer
O God,
it is good to be alive and numbered with those whom you have made,
I thank you for the gift of life.
O God,
it is good to count in word and deed for ends beyond our own;
I thank you for your use of me if I have been of any service to your purposes.
O God,
it is good to rejoice and to be glad,
I thank you for each person, for each experience of life,
that has brought me happiness.
Miles Lowell Yates: Give Us Grace
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