Make it interesting

Some time in the 1980s, I think, a neighbor of mine, a river, the sleepy Floyd, gave up a hunk of something some farmer dug out and had analyzed. Experts in natural history determined it was the tooth of a mammoth. 

Not having ever seen the tooth of a mammoth before, I might have walked right by it, assuming it was granite. I've seen molars before, but not something the size of a shot put.  But there it was, in the middle of our local museum, along with other artifacts: an treasured old immigrant trunk, a dozen or more Dutch costumes, and some incredible hide paintings from Northern Plains tribes.

I'm no geologist. At the museum, I'll admit I was far more attracted to the Native American collection; but it's the mammoth tooth that I'm thinking about this morning, and an adventure long ago, when our kids were grade schoolers, a camping trip to the Black Hills. 

I don't remember thinking much about it back then, but one of the spots we decided to see was a place neither my wife nor I had ever visited, the Mammoth Site at Hot Springs. It's a sad place really, the spot where 61 Colombian mammoths, 26,000 years ago, got themselves trapped in a spring-fed pond that became, sadly, a burial vault. What researchers have uncovered seems a horrific mix of huge skeletons locked in a dance macabre. 

Yet today, there are some openings for next year's gang of paleontologists--you can go to the website and apply. No experience necessary. If you're chosen, you will spend your tour brushing dust from still-embedded skeletons, in an ongoing attempt to identify the specimens. When we visited, way back when, and then again a couple of years ago, men and women in white smocks carry on while bands of tourists are ushered by. It was, and still is, an amazing place.

My son, now approaching forty years old, was, back then, taken by the place and by the workers uncovering those treasures. Given a crash course, I think we could have left him there. He was ten, maybe a little young.

But me?--I couldn't help thinking the place was somehow reprobate. My elementary education was accomplished in a Christian school, mid '50s, when it was an article of faith that dinosaurs were phony baloney created by godless evolutionists determined to destroy the faith. I watched my son's imagination dance at what he was seeing, and I couldn't help contrast my education with his. There he was, greatly taken by mammoth bones some 20 thousand years older than the earth itself.

Just last week, on Facebook, a concerned mom put up a critique of a film her son or daughter had watched in the Christian school my own grandchildren attend. She wasn't happy. She felt the film denigrated science itself by its dogged adherence to what we've come to call a "creationist" perspective. She wasn't sure at all she wanted her kids to be taught the world is only 6000 years old, not when science took as an article of faith something otherwise.

Some things don't change. What's clear--in this highly politicized era of ours--is that believers, like those woolly mammoths, can also get themselves trapped in a dance macabre. If the school administration wants to raise cane, all they have to do is call a general meeting and then ask. "Okay, who here is for evolution?--raise your hands. Thank you--and now who here believes in the Bible?" 

Wouldn't that be fun.

December's National Geographic features a cover story titled, "The Real Jesus: What Archaeology Reveals About His Life." If my mother were to read the title, she'd be skeptical. To her, the face-off between science and faith was a constant threat. 

The article quotes Father  Eugenio Alliata, a professor of archaeology and the director of the Studium Biblicum Franciscan's Museum, in Jerusalem. Father Alliata is a priest who is also a scientist, a man of God, a man of faith, a man who would likely say that his "tradition" of faith is Franciscan, which is itself a traditional branch of Catholicism. 

Father Alliata "seems at peace with what archaeology can--and cannot--reveal about Christianity's central figure," Kristin Romey, who wrote the article, says. He is more than willing to admit that faith and science may well often be at odds, but he insists, she says, that "tradition gives more life to archaeology, and archaeology gives more life to tradition." In other words, the two don't need to fight when they already compliment each other. 

"Sometimes they go together well," Father Alliata says; but then added, "sometimes not," and this wonderful line: "which is more interesting."

That's wise.