This week's Theme: Life In Common
Day 1: Deceptive Delicacies
My friend’s mother turned to greet us as we entered her kitchen. I’m not quite sure why we went to her house that particular day—my friend lived fairly close to our school, but I can’t ever recall going home with her during recess before or after that one time.
I made my way over to the sink where Mrs. M. was peeling green bananas for the midday meal. “Oh!” I said in surprise. “You eat green bananas too!” “Yes,” she replied with a funny smile, “we eat green bananas too!”
In an island that was mostly centered on agriculture, bananas were then the lifeblood of most farming communities, including mine. My parents were not full-time farmers, but we grew bananas and a few other “ground provisions” mostly for our own consumption—but occasionally we would have enough to supplement mom’s teacher’s salary, on which we were largely dependent.
By the time our bananas got to the foreign markets where they were sold, they had usually morphed into golden ripe fruit. Thus the culinary secrets of the green banana—a potassium-rich, vitamin-laden vegetable that functioned much like a potato—would remain locked in growers’ sorting processes and in village pots and river-cook-outs.
But to my ten-year old sensibilities, the humble green banana did not grace the tables of the well-to-do. My friend’s family lived in a “big wall house” and they owned a “passenger bus”— a diesel-fueled locomotive with long wooden seats that ferried passengers to town early in the morning and returned late afternoon most days.
The paid passenger service was adjusted twice a week on “Banana Day” when the bus would be retrofitted for transporting bananas. The wooden seats would be removed, and the roof taken off to allow for bananas to be stacked several feet high, then secured with tarpaulin to prevent slippage.
I was convinced that between the passenger service and the twice weekly banana transport business my friend’s family was rich. The “evidence” was quite clear. Unlike my own mother, Mrs. M. did not work outside the home. And on my few trips to town on their bus, I had watched saucer eyed as the “conductor”* deftly socked dollar bills into his tightly held canvas bag.
It was a long time from my recess visit, that—with late-blooming wisdom—I understood Mrs. M’s enigmatic smile. A million years later with experience and maturity, I finally understood the assumptions, the limits, and the naiveté of my childish perspective.
Nowadays, I view green bananas, and poverty, and cultural norms, and a whole host of issues in a much different light. But new challenges abound around making assumptions, and developing false perspectives.
Increasingly in today's world, the real and the tangible seem to be swallowed up in illusions, phantoms, mirages, and shadows. Entertainment, sports, celebrity culture, and social media all display carefully curated “evidence” of the glowing and the glittering, the glazed and the gilded. Scenes of everyone's "best life" constantly beckon, entice, taunt, dishearten, and embitter. Discontent, despair, envy, jealousy, and violence can increasingly take hold.
It is easy to feel disoriented, but Scripture provides us help in navigating through the mists of deception, treachery, falsehood, and superficiality. It calls us to wisdom, and understanding, and to recognition of reality, and soundness, and beauty, and purpose.
The apostle Paul tells us, “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (Philippians 4:8).
God’s wisdom warns against craving the deceptive delicacies of the prominent (Proverbs 23:1-4). And what good is it to crave the life of painted caricatures—to covet the fare of those who are only apparently mighty? Because the truth is, they too, eat "green bananas." And hunger and thirst for fulfilment just like all of humanity.
* A bus conductor was usually a family member or other trusted individual who accompanied the bus driver on all trips to collect fares, regulate the flow of passengers, settle gripes, and in many cases squeeze seating out of every nook and cranny in the vehicle in order to increase fares.
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