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Show RELIGION EDITOR; GAYLON GARBETT AO THE DAILY HERALD 5 SATL'RDAY. OCTOBER 24, l ipT'&y x j Marden J. Clark Economic turmoil has simple answer: Look at the manna V The recent worldwide drop and gyrations in stock markets have underlined for me a profound and distressing irony. At least a half dozen of these columns in the last year or so have involved the massive and distressing shift of wealth in America from the already poor to the already wealthy, until (as I reported two weeks ago) 'The richest 1 percent owns more than the poorest 92 percent combined." market-plac- buy!-buy!-bu- Ray Bradley, right, in American Fork. By MARTA MURVOSH cars to huge boats and the other If we had no other reason to change than the terrible drain on our natural resources, the mortgaging of our children s future for today's satisfactions, that reason should be enough. But I've suggested far deeper problems, especially the drain on our moral and spiritual lives that comes from disregarding the Master's teachings about how we treat one another. Yes, we need to insure that our children eat, but not We may even have to decide finally that we should provide them with a modern version of the manna from Heaven: plentiful but to lest it rot. be shared, not hoarded We may even find ultimate satisfaction in the new and simpler lives we create for ourselves. triple-decker- ? triple-decker- s. emeri- Marden Clark is a professor tus of English at Brigham Young University. Scout basics with Daniel Cherry as he joins a new nondenominational MacMurray devotes his opportunities. "I realized there were some things I missed," he said. There are plenty of scout troops in Utah Valley 4,107 to be precise. But few are nondenominational troops. Leader of the pack With years in Scouting under his sash and a reputation of being a mas25-plu- s ter Dutch-ove- n cook, Bradley became the leader of Troop No. 5098. It may be the sec- ond troop 0 For information on joining or volunteering, call Michele Thomas, community chairwoman, at 756-779- life to a Boy Scout troop in a town that has nothing for boys to do. Bradley said he understands what its like to miss out on things. He grew up in a small farming community were there weren't scouting . "It's exciting to see it grow with new people showing up and see it grow each week," Michael Thomas said. "You can really see develop in the kids as it progresses." Nondenominational Boy Scout Troop 5098 6:30-7:3p.m., Tuesdays Community Presbyterian Church 75 N, 100 East, American Fork AMERICAN FORK -Troop No. 5098 leader Ray Bradley sees himself as a Dutch oven wielding Fred MacMurray in the film "Follow Me Boys." In the 1966 Disney classic, motor homes to huge, luxurious homes. Until finally we have our capacity to buy and consume. And since we are still the No. 1 buyer and consumer for most foreign I AM, OF COURSE, arguing that any ultimate cure will have to come from a real sea change, a great new wave of disillusionment with our consumerism together with a nearly universal commitment to disciplined control of our consumer appetites. In other words, we will have to move back to simpler lives based on values that we have heard of before: Taking less thought of what we eat or wear or buy, giving of our surplus to the poor, loving one another and our God, finding simpler kinds of entertainment. Yes, I'm something of a dreamer. But when I look at the alternatives, these don t seem so impractical. Do we really want to continue the wild ride on the consumer price index and the Dow Jones averages? To continue having our lives manipulated by Madison Avenue and all its offspring? To see our children grow up thinking they are living only if they are having this breakfast food and that toy and Boy Fcr moro Information The Daily Herald super-expensiv- rot-'te- n goes over the Boy lie Daily Scout troop Among 4,107 Scout troops, this one stands out omy: We have produced and sold and encouraged other nations to produce and sell until we've flooded our own nation and the world with THINGS: all the way from gadgety e toys to expensive SUVs to countries, it also means that their economies stagnate: they simply add to the surplus here. The markets dry up in both directions. To compound the irony, the concentration of wealth in the rich has meant that they have succeeded only too well: The poorest 92 percent have lost much of their purchasing power. And they are the ones who drive most of the consumer economy. Maybe we all have succeeded only too well. We have sold ourselves and the world on the ultimate joys of consumerism, of spending and getting and having. We can see the results as simply a momentary blip on the upward ballooning of prosperity. Or we can force ourselves to look deeper, at what we are doing to ourselves and the world by what we have wrought. We have built the system and the values it embodies, and we have spread them to the world. And there is something deeply in what we have wrought. JASON Ol SON Nw recruit; econ- e Vv m i THE TERRIBLE IRONY: the global crisis is the inevitable result of our X fU nondenominational in northern Utah County. "There are boys who are members of the Presbyterian church, some from the Catholic parish, (and) other boys I'm not sure if they have any religious affiliation or not," Bradley said. The troop is sponsored by the Community Presbyterian Church and meets p.m. each Tuesday at the church, 75 N. 100 East. The troop will give boys in the nondenominational Cub Scout pack an opportunity to continue scouting in seta nondenominational ting, said Rev. Martin Geisel, Community Presbyterian Church. St. Peters Catholic Church sponsors the pack. "We can provide a service for the community that they can't find somewhere else," Geisel said. In many The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-daSaints wards, members of the Young Men's program are encouraged to become Boy 6:30-7:3- 0 y Scouts. "This provides an alternative program for any boys in the area and for whose parents might typically have a problem with the LDS agenda for Boy Scouting," Geisel said. New atmosphere Michael Thomas, a senior patrol leader, has been involved in scouting since he was 7. He belongs to two troops the American Fork 13th Ward and the troop. "In the community troop you get different people in different faiths not just one particular religion, a lot more personalities like a racial mixture but region," said Michael Thomas of American Fork. "With an LDS troop, it's more going into the spiritual side without offending anyone." No matter the denomina- tion, Boy Scouts are taught allegiance to God and country, Bradley said. Most of the six boys who have joined the community troop are about 11 years old. New friends Troop member Travis Oliver, 11, of Highland said he would not have met many of the boys in the troop anywhere else because they live all over the county. "It's pretty cool," Oliver said. For parents who want their sons to meet boys of other faiths and from outside their neighborhood school or wards, the troop may be a good choice. Oliver is working on his compass merit badge. He just finished learning how to tie knots. He said he like the half hitch the best "because its the easiest." "The bowline was the hardest," he said Travis' mother, Marilyn, said she found the program was more complicated than she expected. "I think it is really good," Marilyn Oliver said. "It's on a different level than what we are on the ward (troop)." Oliver said her boy joined because of the nondenominational aspect of the troop. She declined to specify her fami ly's religion. But doctrinal dif- ferences isn't what bother her. "My main complaint when it's associated with the LDS church is you make it a calling," she said. "You just get started and then change leadership." Larry Bothers, Utah Parks Council district council, said troop leader may serve from four months to two years. Church sponsorship Nationwide, the United Methodist Church sponsors the most troops with 418,427 youth enrolled, and LDS church sponsors the second largest amount with 402,828 enrolled, according to Boy Scouts of America records. In Utah County, there are t 13 Explorer troops and a total of 29 community troops, said Tom special-interes- Power, council scout executive. Not only is Troop No. 5098 looking for boys to join but also adult volunteers to act as merit badge counselors and teach skills, Bradley said. Thomas' mother, Michelle, is the community chairwoman. Call her at to volunteer or ask about scouting. 756-779- 8 Geisel said the troop's plans are to grow. "Then, we can work on more grand and glorious themes later," he said. long-ter- Japanese novelist visited most painful of Christian themes Shusako Endo, who died at the end of September 1996, ranks among the greatest Japanese novelists of the twentieth century, and was frequently mentioned for the Nobel Prize. Rather unexpectedly, at least from a Western perspective, he was also a very serious Catholic. The Basque St. Francis Xavier, one of the original Jesuit priests, brought Christianity to Japan in 1549. At first, the new faith spread with prodigious 6peed, and the evangelization of the entire island kingdom must have seemed a very possible dream. By 1614, Christian colleges and hospitals served approximately 300,000 Japanese believers, among a population of twenty million. HOWEVER, in that very year Shogun Ieyasu issued an expulsion edict against the missionaries and launched a brutal persecution of priests and converts that produced between five and six thousand martyrs by 1640. Men, women, and children were burned alive, while many others renounced their faith under horribly ingenious torture. Given that history, Shusako Endo's Catholicism could hardly have failed to make him feel somewhat alien in Japanese society. And his childhood in Japanese-occupieChinese Manchuria, coupled with d HIGHER THINQS story of a seventeenth century Portuguese priest, Rodrigues, who sneaks into Japan at the height of the persecutions, seeking both to serve the Christian flock and to search for his spiritual mentor, a priest named Ferreira. When, betrayed and captured, Rodrigues finally meets Ferreira, he discovers that the senior priest himself has already abandoned the faith under torture. The two Jesuits eloquently debate whether Christianity can ever really take root in Japan. Meanwhile, the audible groans of innocent Japanese Christians accompany their verbal jousting, and Ferreira informs Rodrigues, who has himself been n William Hamblin Daniel Peterson & his university studies in France, surely did little to lessen his sense of being an outsider. However, readers who might expect from them triumphant declarations of the superiority of Western Christianity will be surprised. For, in their repeated examination of the conflict between East and West, the Catholic Church too comes under sharp criticism. Endo's stories are, yes, about faith and God, but they are also about sin and betrayal, martyrdom and apostasy, and the anguish of faith. His intensely psychological approach to religious issues has led him to be called "the Japanese Graham Greene." His great novel Silence tells the undergoing torture, that their suffering will cease if and when the younger man agrees to renounce Christianity. As the authorities have demanded, he must trample a bronze image of Christ and the Virgin under foot. The crucial moment in the novel comes when Rodriques chooses to put aside debates and dogma, to lose himself and yield up all that he most values, in order to end the agonies of the weak and powerless: "The priest raised his foot. In it he felt a dull, heavy pain. This was no mere formality. He was about to trample on what he had considered the most beautiful thing in his life, on what he had believed the most pure, on what was most filled with the ideals and the dreams of man. How intense the pain in his foot! And then the Christ in the bronze spoke to the priest: 'Go ahead and trample. It's all right to trample. I more than anyone know the pain in your foot. Trample. It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross.' "When the priest placed his foot on the fumie, dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew." IMPATIENT with doctrinal disputes and with institutions that put their own interests before people, Endo included the Church as well as the Japanese elite in his judgment. Christ, he said, deserves our love and adoration not for reasons of abstract theology but because he never abandoned the dying, the downtrodden, or the suffering. (At 1:30 and at 6 p.m. on Oct. 31, Theatre Company Subaru performs Steven Dietz's dramatic adaptation of Endo's Silence at Brigham Young University. For ticket information, call 378-4322- .) William Hamblin is a professor of history and Daniel C. Peterson is a profesor of Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University. |