The Fire Sermon

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank.

For those unfamiliar with that title outside of part three of T. S. Eliot's poem “The Waste Land”, it's a sermon Buddha gave emphasizing liberation from suffering through sensual detachment. In Eliot's extensive notes following “The Waste Land” in most printings (which seem to alternate between reference to primary sources and red herrings) he says that The Fire Sermon as the importance in Buddhism that the Sermon on the Mount – Matthew chapters five through seven in the New Testament – does in Christianity. Not being Buddhist myself, I can't really attest to that.

Nor can I picture Scrooge McDuck, “the world's richest duck”, ascribing to a fowl-oriented version of either faith. But even the Walt Disney character who swims in his money bin and saved the first dime he ever earned under glass had to start somewhere – in this case, as the last McDuck of Clan McDuck in Scotland, born 1873 and, in Don Rosa's first volume of “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck” (ISBN 9781608865383) from there traveling to America to work on his uncle's riverboat and then on a Montana ranch and back to Scotland, then South Africa to dig for diamonds.

Along the way he interacts with Disney-fied versions of real life persons such as a certain cowboy in the Badlands and, in the words of a Washington Post review Scrooge “starting from scratch and amassing a fortune while he loses his soul by degrees”. Well, whether that is true or not – modeling Scrooge McDuck based on his more familiar fictional namesake Ebenezer Scrooge from Dickens' A Christmas Carol – we find it more … satisfying reading and even laughing at how the future uncle of Donald Duck succeeds and fails and keeps plugging away. We could learn something from that.

Last night I went to our church's Bible study of the book of Acts – I always get their late because of my work schedule, but I catch up – and the group of sixteen there started talking of Bethany beginning a healing ministry. I'm not entirely sure what that is or how we'd go about it, but I'm confident that going forward in the word of God we cannot fail. And with the pizzas in our bellies from last night and today's needed reading done … I am just ready for great Great GREAT things today! 

Aren't you? David