Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?

OK. . .after re-reading my last post, The Biggest Sin of Pop Culture?, I recognized the all-too-familiar cynical twist I can put on things. So, I'm going to try again, keeping in mind Fr. Paisius' counsel which I wrote about in Flies and Bees.

God never abandons us. His mercy and grace are ineffable. My head is full of jingles, jangles, bits and pieces of pop-culture-trivia, and yet somehow God has managed to nourish me with it. Somehow God has taken all those assorted bits and pieces and created for me a mosaic of Himself which was "good enough" to create a longing for Him. Not only that, but He also commandeered the anemic oral tradition contained in pop culture and used it to prepare in me a way to comprehend and love Holy Tradition when I finally came in contact with it. When I think of pop culture in this light. . .it takes on the form of a servant rather than a taskmaster. It smells of God rather than stinks of the devil.

As a concrete example of what I'm talking about, I remember a story my College Humanities Prof. told us one day in class. After a little googling I found the story in a speech given at Harvard in 1986 titled REFLECTIONS ON MORAL LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY. It goes like this:

Some of you might best know the famed scientist Dr. Jacob Bronkowski from his television series, The Ascent of Man. Jacob Bronkowski was considered a value-free scientist. The value-free school of science teaches essentially that it is for the scientist to research, hypothesize, theorize, discover principles, turn everything over to engineers and others to do with as they will. The value-free scientist, in other words, assumes no responsibility for the use to which his work is put.

After the bombing of Nagasaki, Dr. Bronowski was asked by the U. S. Government to assess the damage. He entered the harbor and took a small boat to the fleet landing. On the landing was a group of American sailors singing the nonsense ditty of the day, "Is You Is, or Is You Ain't My Baby". It meant absolutely nothing to Dr. Bronkowski. He left the fleet landing, circled a grove of trees, looked down upon what had been the city of Nagasaki. He was utterly stunned. He could not believe the horror -- the devastation that lay before him. Then the words of the ditty took shape, pounded through his very being -- "Is You Is, or Is You Ain't My Baby", and then he had to ask himself: "Can I, can anyone call himself a value-free scientist, disclaim completely the work of his hands, his mind, his very being as I look at what this horror has wrought, "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby?"

That story has stuck with me over the years because when I heard it I marveled at how God uses common stuff, like pop culture, to speak to us. God's humility and condescension towards us floors me.