Penguins Just Gotta Have Faith
Wayne Dodge muses on love, fear, and faith, with wisdom from Stephen Tobolowsky, Bloom County, and Sapphire.
Wayne Dodge curates a page for Haven faculty and assistants called the Haven Zeitgeist. Here, in some recent entries, he muses on love, fear, and faith, with wisdom from Stephen Tobolowsky, Bloom County, and Sapphire.
Bloom County has always been one of my favorites – and I have dragged this particular clipping – faded from long use – with me for decades. Here’s to all the penguins out there.
Stephen Tobolowsky’s Adventures with God
My Adventures with God by Stephen Tobolowsky, Simon & Schuster, 2017
Stephen Tobolowsky (known as Tobo) is a character actor (perhaps best known as Ned in Groundhog Day or as Sandy Ryerson in Glee). He is also a podcaster and writer of anecdotes. And he is one of my favorites. He instills his writing and tale-telling with a deep humanity – as well as a deep thinking about things.
My Adventures with God covers in writing what Tobo has already covered in many of his podcasts (The Tobolowsky Files) – yet done so finely that I did not mind the repetition at all.
I highly recommended this book, for its entertainment value as well as the challenge to routine thinking. Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the book:
Some lessons you hope you learn only once. One of them is that love should always be treated as an honored guest. As soon as you start asking it to pay rent, it will leave.
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Devotion is affection mixed with faith. It is a substance more durable than reason.
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Why do people keep doing things that make them afraid…? Fear makes us feel whole. People think they want to be happy. What they really want is to feel whole. And the two best ways to do that are fear and love.
Then why don’t we go for love? … Because we can do fear on our own.
Today
by Sapphire, from Black Wings & Blind Angels
Today is the day you have been waiting for
when you would finally begin to live
when you would at last open the door.
This is the what, the circumstance, the more
you have been withholding, saving to give.
Today is the day you have been waiting for
when you could sit down to your desk for
hours, take pride, time, find out what work is,
when you would at last open the door
to your own self-development, what god has for
you. Today is the day you come out of prison, live.
Today is the day you’ve been waiting for
the tomorrow you pined away yesterday for.
I think love rhymes in a way with give.
You at last open the door
to the possibility of now, the core
of life is the moment, now, how you live.
Today is the day I have been waiting for
when you would at last open the door.
