Religion in Daily Life

By the Rev. Edward Chinn, D.Min.

http://www.allsaintstorresdale.org

Michael J. Fox received the 2209th star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Fox’s star is located in front of the Hollywood Galaxy Theatre complex. Fox is now battling Parkinson’s disease. He is devoting most of his time to campaigning for funding to research the disease. At the ceremony that unveiled his star, Michael J. Fox said, “Acting is a great thing to do for a living, to do something you love, and to hear all the time that maybe you’ve done something to make people happy” (The National Enquirer, January 1, 2003). Many an aspiring actor steers his life by those stars on the Walk of Fame.

Suppose we create a “Walk of Faith” to correspond to that Hollywood Walk. Who are the stars that would have a place on the Walk of Faith? First, I’d nominate John Masefield (1878-1967). Born in England, John boarded the training ship Conway at age 13. Nearly three years later, John was apprenticed aboard a sailing ship that was bound for Chile by way of Cape Horn. In Chile he became ill and had to return to England. John became the Poet laureate of Great Britain. He never forgot his days at sea. In 1902, he wrote the poem, “Sea Fever.” The poem begins, “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”

Another star I’d put on the Walk of Faith is Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist in Vienna who was arrested and taken to Nazi prison camps. Frankl developed a new psychiatric approach he called “Logotherapy” described in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning. In this book, Frankl wrote: “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.” Such a goal becomes a star of hope, a purpose by which a person can steer his life.

Another star I’d put on the Walk of Faith is the first century Jewish Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, who became a follower of fellow-Jew Jesus of Nazareth. For the rest of his days, Saul, renamed Paul, unpacked the significance of the words he heard on the Damascus Road as he was knocked from his horse. The Voice said, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Gradually Saul/Paul realized that fellow-Christians, indeed all fellow humans were members of “the Body of Christ.” Paul wrote to friends in Philippi about the people around them: “Among them you shine like stars in the dark world” (Philippians 2:15, EB).