When I was the age to get a classic red Radio Flyer wagon (1944), the country was at war, so all metal was being used to make ships and tanks and the like. By the time civilians could once again purchase wagons for their children, I was too old to have one. To ease my disappointment, for my ninth birthday, my parents gave me a strange-looking present. It was the right color–fire engine red–and it had four wheels. Otherwise, it bore little resemblance to the wagon I’d so wanted.

An Irish Mail was sort of like home-made box cars that little boys constructed in those day and raced down any hill they could find. Low-slung with a seat on which the user sat, this contraption moved when the person in that seat pumped their arms and steered with their feet firmly planted on a horizontal bar connecting the front tires. It went very fast but you needed to stay going in a straight line since turning was distinctly unwieldy. Invented by one Henry Hill, this vehicle caught on and Henry soon formed his own company, Standard Manufacturing, to handle the clamor from buyers. Needing a name for his invention, Henry chose “Irish Mail” after the Irish Mail Train which held the distinction of being the fastest train in the world at that time–the early 20th century. First built in 1902, this toy had its heyday in the 1950’s, precisely when I got mine.

I stored my treasured machine on our front porch and then took it inside on Halloween night since neighborhood boys always egged the houses on my block and sometimes dragged porch furniture out onto the owners’ lawns. My mother worried about my riding it, since she liked to keep me on a pretty short leash. Our house was at the top of a perfect hill so she feared I’d careen into a light post or, worse, into the street. But I became adroit at maneuvering the little red buggy, so no harm ever came to me. It let me pretend I was off to exotic places even if I always wound up at the bottom of Holly Court in Fairfield, Alabama–not exotic at all. I never minded the somewhat demanding chore of dragging the Irish Mail back up the hill because the reward was simple–I got to ride it back down again with the breeze in my face and escape in my imagination.

At some point I must have outgrown the Irish Mail. I have no idea what happened to it, but when I Googled “Irish Mail” before writing the blog, there was a picture of a little red machine that looked just like my “wheels.” I should add that no other girl I ever knew had owned one and Henry Hill intended this as a “boy’s toy,” along with BB guns and erector sets (both of which my parents gave me at some point in my maturation process). Had a boy in my world have been seen on an Irish Mail, he’d have been branded a “sissy” of the first order. So, once again, my parents provided me with serious mixed messages about gender appropriateness. But I just loved to sit in the red seat, pump my feet very fast, and steer my personal “train” out of my front yard.

As we in the congregation at my church leave our pews to process up to take communion, we sing a simple set of words about what we hope will happen as we receive the host and (if chosen) wine.  Recently, those words were these:  “Take, oh take me as I am,/Summon out what I shall be/ Set your seal upon my heart/ and live in me.”  I can’t get the words out of my head, often waking to their melody’s returning to me.  I’m pretty sure the reason lies in the second line; what does it really mean to ask anyone or anything to “summon out” some aspect of one’s being?  My trusty unabridged Webster tells me that to summon means “to order, as by a summons, to appear in court.”  So am I asking God to order me to be more of what I am capable of being?  In a beautiful poem, John Donne implored God to change him through violent means, but God replies that force is not his MO.  Rather Donne must love God himself if he wants to come closer to the God-head.

Webster also tells me, however, that “summon” means “to call forth, rouse, gather, collect,” and this seems to illuminate our chant most helpfully.  The author of the verses implies that what we “shall be” is already within us, just lying dormant or perhaps dealing with our having pushed that fuller self to the side in order to pursue some smaller, more secular goal.  The speaker begins this request of God, however, by knowing that s/he is acceptable as s/he already is, so judgment is precluded from the process.  The supplicant also uses the future perfect tense–“shall be–leaving no room for failure.  When I sing this, albeit slightly off key, I feel certain that the God of my understanding wants me to be all of which I am capable, to assume full stature.  I am even asked to consider how I will become more of my possible self than I am as I walk toward the communion server.

I will be able to answer the summons, sent not aggressively but lovingly, by having my Higher Power set a seal “upon my heart,” not “on” it or “in,” it.  I flash to my attaching one of my vast supply of stickers to the front of boring envelopes containing payment of bills or even personal cards.  I set those little seals UPON the paper to be a signal to the recipient that I hope they are having a pleasing day as they go about their mundane tasks such as opening my envelope.  I also have an image of my going about my life with some temporally invisible but spiritually detectable identifier.  If I let God into my life, others will sense the implantation within my heart and I will be able to be what Mother Teresa thought we each was–the face of God working in the world around us.

Though we vary these little verses sung as we take communion on a given Sunday, this one clearly has a profound effect on me.  Often, these days, when my larger world seems to be being fractured and shredded by the current president and his spokespeople, I sing these simple words as I walk early in the morning or as labor to quiet my disturbed mind at night as I try to go to sleep.  I believe I hear the summons and I work hard to burnish the “seal upon my heart” by acting in concert with others who feel similarly to me.

Traditionally, the phrase “natural disasters” refers to serious disruptions brought on by forces outside human control.  Some call these “forces of nature” while others name them “acts of God.”  Either way, we are assured that we had nothing to do with them.  An easy list of such moments would include floods, forest fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, landslides, tsunamis, lightning strikes.  Perhaps there was a time in human evolution when such events truly were caused by forces beyond human prevention, but that no longer is the case.  In the United States, one of the worst weather events in recent history was Hurricane Katrina.  It was quickly labeled a “natural disaster” caused by a massive hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast and Atlantic Seaboard.  Even if we allow that the hurricane itself was a natural disruption, what happened to New Orleans and other parishes in Louisiana most certainly was not attributable to natural forces alone.  In fact, as scientists and investigators from various areas of study analyzed what happened to New Orleans, it became clear that the devastation to that old city was not caused by the hurricane itself.  It actually deflected at the last minute and hit the Gulf Coast with much less force than had been predicted by meteorologists originally.  The devastation was caused by levees that could not hold in the face of the heavy rains and from water coming from the north of the city itself.  These levees had been inspected years before the hurricane and glibly and falsely pronounced as being able to hold against natural forces.  So the “disaster” that was played out on TV screens and in people’s lives for weeks was “caused” by human agencies and individuals who were unwilling to spend the money it would take to strengthen existing levees and build new ones that might actually defend residents from strong natural storms. 

Or consider images seen more and more frequently as the planet warms alarmingly fast of tornadoes tearing through parts of this country and the larger world at seasons and with a strength not experienced in the past.  Just a day or so ago, New Orleans itself was struck by a tornado that demolished scores of dwellings, many in the wards most devastated by the waters that followed Hurricane Katrina’s landfall.  So people who had only just restored something resembling the lives they lost in that earlier unnatural disaster now find themselves once again homeless and destitute.  Or listen to veteran fire fighters in California and other places in the United States who appear on the nightly news saying in all their decades of fighting forest fires, (only some of which were ever “natural disasters” since many have been started by arsonists or careless people who toss a still-burning cigarette in the wrong brush pile), they have never seen anything like the one they are trying futilely to control at the moment.  These catastrophes that are so expensive in terms of loss of trees needed to ward off a hotter and hotter atmosphere and of human property should no longer be referred to as “natural disasters.”  Our own selfish behaviors are the real causes.  Until we are willing to name them truthfully, we have little hope in getting legislatures to pass laws that might at least slow down the rate of atmospheric warming that will cause worse and worse events that may continue to be mis-labeled.

It is convenient to call all these current tragedies by the old, familiar term.  But we hide our heads in this particular sand box at our own peril and, more significantly, at the peril of the planet we call home.