By Susan Wordal
Some of us are old enough to remember a great comedy team, husband and wife George Burns and Gracie Allen. If you don’t remember them, try looking them up on Google. He was a child of immigrants and people knew him because of his huge smile, his eyebrows and the ever-present cigar in his hand. Gracie was just that, grace personified, but she was good at acting like the naïve, slightly bubble-headed wife. George was known for closing out their performance each night with the line, “Say good-night Gracie.” Supposedly, she replied, “Good night.”, but I’m not really sure that’s not a little Hollywood myth. She died in 1964, but was known for her “Gracie-isms”, but what could you expect from a woman who ran for President on the Surprise Party ticket? George went on to entertain millions with his act and in movies, such as “Oh God”, and died just after he turned 100 in 1996. What a life!
Years ago, the UCC decided to use the line: “Don’t put a period where God has put a comma.” When they first adopted this for their advertising campaign, people wanted to know who said it. Turns out it’s one of those Gracie-isms. Wonder when Gracie Allen went to seminary? Because that line is perfect.
The advertising campaign was controversial and the 4 major networks didn’t want to run the ad which had a traditional family sitting in a traditional church in a traditional pew. Near them is a woman with a crying baby. Cue the irritated glare from traditional family. Then, they push the “Eject” button and the woman and baby are gone. The “Eject” button continues to be pushed, expelling from the church the poor person, the gay couple, and a Middle Eastern-looking man. The end of the commercial was the voiceover: “God doesn’t reject people. Neither do we.”
As people began to use the slogan about not putting a period where God has put a comma, it evolved. The Comma became the symbol and the words were rearranged to “God is still Speaking”. Shorter, but the message is still the same. Just because the Bible is a book which has been in existence for thousands of years doesn’t mean God is done talking. That’s fortunate, since I can’t imagine that book is the be all and end all of what God had to tell us.
There used to be a bumper sticker (don’t you just love bumper stickers?) which said “The Bible says it. I believe it, That settles it.” Now really, is that any way to talk to another person and convince them of something? It’s a little like the statement, “Because I said so, that’s why.” Like any argument has ever been won with those words!
As someone with a degree in English Literature, I had to read my share of Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, etc. It sometimes gives me the willies to read about characters calling for a Doctor and realizing these people were trained to heal using leaches or blood letting as a cure for what ails you. Or the people who believed if you became ill it was because you had sinned and God was punishing you. But living in that time, that’s what they knew. That was what people taught in school and preached from the pulpit.
But if you look over the course of the last 20 centuries, you can see these little bursts of discovery. People like Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Messier, Florence Nightingale, Michael Faraday, Christian Doppler, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Alexander Fleming. And those bursts are becoming more and more frequent. These individuals were born with a curiosity, or a drive, or some innate instinct to look at the world differently, to question preconceived notions, and push those envelopes between what we “know” and what is possible. If we didn’t believe God was still trying to tell us something, to get us to open our eyes and see what is possible, then many of the things the scientists and inventors and chemists and astronomers of history brought to us might have remained hidden from us, and we would have been the poorer for those lost gifts.
So, when you see a comma, consider that maybe, just maybe, you are being invited to unwrap a new gift from God. Or, maybe you are being invited to open to a new experience or a new connection. You never know where that experience or connection might lead.
You were saying, God….?