Goat-Stealing

Today is July 23, the 204th day of the year; there are 161 days still to go in 2010, and 60 of those are summer days. Supposedly the “dog days” of summer last from mid-July until the beginning of September (the ancient Romans called the hot, sultry part of the late summer the dies caniculares based on the notion that the Dog Star, Sirius, was somehow responsible for their climatologically-induced suffering; they offered Sirius the annual sacrifice of an unweaned, brown puppy to ease the heat). If the Texas heat thus far this season is any indication, though, there may be few little brown dogs left come Labor Day.

The calendar of the Western Church today puts forward two great saints for veneration: St Brigit of Sweden, a medieval mystic who was herself the mother of a saint, and St Apollinarius of Ravenna, a Syrian who ended up bishop of a big Italian city. Eastern Christians celebrate the feast of St Hannah, mother of the Prophet Samuel. The Coptic calendar for the 16th of Abib (that’s today) commemorates the discovery of the relics of St George, the Great Martyr (of dragon-slaying fame) and the death of St John the Evangelist (the Copts call his Gospel “the Golden gospel”). The Jewish calendar reckons today as the 12th of Av, 5770, and, when they weren’t sacrificing small dogs to stave off the heat, the Romans celebrated July 23 (ante diem IX kalendas augusti) as the “Neptunalia,” to honor the god of oceans and rivers during the parched time of the year. Beginning in 1971 and continuing since despite whatever opposition and criticism they’ve had to face, the Congress of the United States has ordained this day to be National Ice Cream Cone Day.

Though today’s date is crowded with events both portentous and memorable (Sir Harry “Hotspur” Percy, President Ulysses S Grant and novelist Raymond Chandler all passed to eternity on this day), the dog days focused my attention on what happened in St Louis, Missouri, 106 years ago this afternoon. That day, the World’s Fair (formally known as the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition) opened, sprawling over a 1,200 acre site with more than 1,500 buildings. Among them were the immense Italianate Festival Hall, the Palace of Education modeled after a Greek temple and the Egyptian-themed Palace of Mines and Metallurgy. John Philip Sousa opened the Exposition with a concert that sweltering July morning, and a congratulatory telegraph was read to the crowds from President Theodore Roosevelt. But hidden among the Palace of Machinery and the Venetian-inspired Palace of Electricity were ice cream stands, and there, a handful of vendors helped assure the otherwise-forgotten Exposition an abiding place in history. In Ernest Manwi’s waffle stand that afternoon, the Ice Cream Cone was born. It could have been Nick Kabbaz and his brother Albert, Syrian immigrants both of whom worked in Hamwi’s booth, rather than Hamwi, who developed the notion. Nick says it was his idea, and he told Hamwi about it the day the Fair opened. Abe Doumar, also a Syrian vendor at the Fair, claimed that he was the first to wrap a waffle around a ball of ice cream. Abes’ nephew, also named Albert (we’re getting close to needing a chart here, but I don’t know how to do one up), later wrote a book to substantiate the Doumar claim, called The Saga of the Ice Cream Cone. You can’t find a copy on Amazon, but the Smithsonian Institution does have a copy in its archives. David Avayou, a Turkish ice cream salesman, also had a concession stand at the Fair. You won’t be surprised to learn he claimed to have come up with the idea first. “Long before the fair,” he wrote later, “I wanted to make an edible cone for ice cream, having seen metal ice cream cones in France. It took me three weeks and hundreds of pounds of flour and eggs, but I finally got it right.” Charles Menches and his brother Frank sold ice cream at the Fair, too. They don’t claim to have come up with the idea—Charles says a woman he knew was at the fair and wanted to find a “dainty” way to eat some of his ice cream. She bought a fresh waffle from a nearby vendor (could it have been one of Doumar’s waffles? we’ll probably never know) wrapped it into a cone and had Charles fill it with ice cream. Though the Menches brothers aren’t officially credited in the books as the originators of the First Cone, they went on to make a fortune from a candy factory they built in Akron. They made a concoction of caramel-coated peanuts and popcorn they first called “Gee Whiz.” Later they changed the name to “Cracker Jacks.” Whether it was Hamwi, the Kabbaz twins (who later opened the St Louis Ice Cream Cone Company), Abe Doumar, Avayou or the unknown lady friend of the Cracker Jack kings, everybody who’s anybody acknowledges that on the afternoon of July 23rd, 1904, lightning struck someone at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition and World’s Fair at St Louis and the ice cream cone was born. Popes and emperors may come and go, Presidents and Constitutions may rise and fall, but the crunchy ice cream cone might well outlive our American Republic.

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Walking the Labyrinth—Somebody’s been stealing the goats off my parent’s ranch. That may sound like the opening line of an improbable joke, but there are goats missing and more than a few (now even I’m starting to think of punchlines!). There are some large clusters of Live Oaks right on the fence line running alongside a road and clear imprints of truck tires pulling right up to the fence. Sherlock Holmes isn’t needed to figure out this caper. The local sheriff’s office told my mother when she called to report the thefts “Yeah, it’s happening a lot right now. Price of goats is up, so somebody’s taking advantage.” He’s right about that. Goats have almost doubled what they bring at auction in the past year. When she asked the local representative of Law and Order what could be done, his reply was succinct. “Well, shoot ‘em” (I’m pretty sure he meant the goat-rustlers, not the goats). I’m also pretty sure this lawman had no idea who he was talking to. Giving my almost 80 year-old mother carte blanche to fire off the somewhat impressive collection of weaponry at the ranch may devolve into many more official visits to the property than if the Sheriff had bothered to come and commiserate with her in the first place—to say nothing of goats shot dead in the middle of the night!

The situation will have to be addressed—it is a goat ranch, after all—but I can’t escape the potential humor (or the potential deadliness) of the situation. As usual, my mind goes off in its own direction. I found myself meditating, not on how to frustrate the rustlers, but on the role of goats in Holy Scripture, particularly the parable of the sheep and the goats found in the Gospel of Matthew. It’s about the Last Judgment (St Matthew 25. 31-46): “…when the Son of man shall come in His glory…before Him shall be gathered all the nations: and He shall separate them one from another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats: the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on the left.” Things continue downhill for the goats for the rest of the parable, culminating in the final verse: “these [the unhappy goats] shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous [the smiling sheep] into eternal life.”

One of the unmentioned commemorations this day marks is the gathering of the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 AD, called by the Emperor Justinian in the imperial city of Constantinople. One hundred and sixty-five bishops, drawn from across the Mediterranean world, condemned “Origenism,” the writings of a third-century Christian teacher. In particular, they condemned his teachings on the soul and what was called Universal Salvation. Origen, it seems, taught that nobody was going to hell, God would save everybody in the end. He evidently taught (or at least, theorized) that whatever the temporary discomfiture of the goats, eventually they’d be reunited with the sheep (who might be a bit surprised at the new arrivals into bliss). Nobody will know for sure, because the original records of the Council have been misplaced.

The question of hell has long been debated by theologians, professional and otherwise. Though there are many permutations of the argument, succinctly stated it runs: how can a God of love construct a creation which incorporates eternal suffering for any of His creatures? There are many issues to consider, i.e., He is a God of both Justice and Mercy, He gives every human being free will to choose the good or the evil, or simply, “it says so in the Bible.” On the other hand, a very good and dear friend of mine, Merlin Liversidge, used to say, “The idea of subjecting someone—even Adolf Hitler who I fought against in WWII—to an eternity of suffering seems unworthy of an all-loving, all-knowing God.”

It seems to me the first thing to consider in any theological argument (and the thing to continually acknowledge as we go along), is that the question is too deep for us. When we talk about God, we’re guessing. We have things like Scripture, the teaching of faith which has preceded us and our (very limited) reason to guide our discussions, but there is much more we don’t know about the mystery of God than we do. The most important verse in the whole of Scripture, and the most abused, is “God is love” (first letter of St John, 4.16). Any theological consideration which doesn’t continually set that before its face will wander off-base. The problem is that theology is done with words. We use words (because we have nothing else) to describe Something Infinitely Beyond words. “Love” is itself a word so misused and twisted we would have a hard time agreeing what that means in our own situation, much less in Eternity.

We’re not gonna solve the question of the eternity of hell and the sufferings of the damned on these pages, though we may very well turn to consider certain aspects of the question from time to time. What interests me today is simply the question of misplaced goats. When I have listened to the arguments of those who press for the eternal damnation of the goats (Calvinist, Catholic or anything in between) one thing always raises its head. “If there isn’t a hell, why bother to be good? Why not eat, drink and be merry if I’m not going to have to answer for it in the end?” Some of the sheep, at least, want to make sure those goats get what’s coming to them. “We’ve paid our dues here, now it’s their turn!” It is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a pathetic argument, but one I’ve heard many (not just lay people) make time and again. “Why do all this if I don’t have to?”

I think any person, Protestant, Catholic, Jew or Muslim (with maybe many a thoughtful agnostic and a brace of atheists throw in), would agree that the unending joys of Heaven aren’t a reward for good behavior, but the gift of an all-loving Lord. Somehow, in the mystery of God, Heaven is not a reward nor is hell a place of exacting penalties. St John is right, more right than we can or will ever know. God is Love, and if that’s so, hell is part of His mystery of love. Here, seeing through this glass so darkly, we don’t know the particulars. And my old friend Merlin was right, too. God is bigger than our most grandiose conceptions. What seems to us an impossible conundrum, exists as such only for us. Somehow, whatever the fate of the wayward goats, they are encompassed eternally in Love.

Now if I can only figure out how to lock up all those guns at the ranch…

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