SSS: SSSS, or Why the Convoluted Title?

My favourite comic strip of all time is easily Calvin and Hobbes. That should be obvious to anyone who has seen my room given there’s a knitted Calvin and Hobbes that a friend made for me a few years back sitting on the shelf above my bed. I’ve always loved reading up on the adventures of that six year old boy and his stuffed tiger. Actually, his childhood has always made mine look kind of boring by comparison. Whereas I spent most of my time tracking down stars in Super Mario 64, Calvin was getting into all kinds of trouble with his anthropomorphic best friend.

My favourite story is still probably one of the Sunday Calvinball ones. (Side note: Please tell me I’m not the only one who tried playing this as a kid!) Calvin gets hit with the Calvinball and forgets to touch the opposite pole or something, two of the many made up rules that are never allowed to be repeated for each given play through. And as a result, he has to sing “the very sorry song,” a song which I still hum the same melody for every time I read it. It’s silly and kind of stupid, but it’s one of those strips I found hilarious as a kid and still get a kick out of today.

Now that I’m older though, I’m a lot more interested in the world that Bill Waterson created in his comic. Somehow, he managed to combine a simple art style with an attention to detail and realism that astounds me. Calvin, his parents, Susie Derkins, Miss Wormwood – heck, even Hobbes! – all seem like real personalities. But even Waterson himself agrees that part of the magic of the strip is that Calvin’s fantasies are often drawn with a greater realism than the so-called reality of the comic (He says so in an interview found in the book Exploring Calvin and Hobbes). And perhaps it’s this mixture of realism and wonder that draws us in, resulting in some fascinating, hilarious, and sometimes even deeply moving stories.

I’ve grown to love the role of Calvin’s dad in the strip more now too. At first, he seems like this boring, unexceptional man. His life goal seems to be building Calvin’s character. He goes to his desk job, he eats oatmeal, he actually likes going for a run at 6:00 AM in the middle of winter… I personally find that last one a little unbelievable, but if that’s you, more power to you. On the whole, however, Calvin’s dad seems like a regular, boring man who tends to lead a rather stale life.

Then there’s this wordless Sunday strip fairly early in the comic’s run where, after a fresh snowfall, Calvin begs his dad to play outside with him. His dad is swamped with work and has to say no, resulting in a very sad Calvin. Dad works for a few more minutes, looks at his watch, looks out the window, and then books it outside to make a snowman with his son. And for a few brief hours, he trades the staleness of life for a fun-filled, snowy afternoon.

There’s a point to all of this, I promise. But first, a small digression to a very different part of the strip.

I remember being rather annoyed by G.R.O.S.S. as a kid. This wonderfully frustrating little acronym stands for Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS, Calvin and Hobbes’ secret club where they plan all sorts of dastardly pranks against the ever so slimy Susie next door. Both the club and its resulting antics were funny enough, but even Grade 4 me was bothered that the acronym wasn’t correct. And yet, funny enough, these strips are part of the reason why I chose the name for this blog. (I’ll give you a moment to flit your eyes to the top of the screen and make the connection.)

Let’s do the math here for a moment (or maybe the English). This is the first of the Second Sunday Switch-Up’s that I’ll be posting each month. The titles for these will always be prefaced with the alliterative acronym SSS. Additionally, should I apply Calvin’s amazing acronym making skills to Shed the Sunday School Glasses, then the blog’s abbreviated title is also a whopping 4 S’s instead of the usual SSSG.  

I’m an English major. Don’t ask me why, but we get kicks out of things like alliteration. And the possibility to abbreviate what I’m writing today to SSS: SSSS while making a reference to my favourite comic was just too good to pass up.

However, most of you probably aren’t English majors. And you probably don’t care that much about alliteration or obscure references to comics. So to avoid boring the limited readership I currently have with my alliterative nonsense, let me return to the more legitimate reasoning behind why I chose this title for my blog.

Before I started university, I attended a tiny school off the coast of British Columbia called Capernwray Harbour. I’ve been a city kid my entire life, so spending a year on an island in the middle of nowhere was a huge adjustment. But getting to see deer walk up to our classroom or eagles dive bomb out of the sky on a daily basis was pretty cool.

Anyways, one of the lectures there was on when Jesus fed the 5000, and our lecturer for that week said something that has stuck with me since. You may be able to guess where I’m going with this. Just before he started to read the story, he asked us to take off our Sunday School glasses. Now I’ve obviously replaced “take off” with “shed” for alliterative reasons – TOSSG just doesn’t have as good a ring to it – but the point still stands.

One of the more challenging things I’ve found when teaching kids (or even when talking to adults) who have grown up in Christian homes is that they’ve heard some Bible stories hundreds of times. And believe me, I’ve been there. Stories like the feeding of the 5000 can become stale really quickly. You can easily lose a little wonder and amazement each time you hear these stories until eventually it seems normal that someone turned 5 loaves and 2 fish into enough food to feed 5000 men (plus women and children).

The danger with this is that the messages behind these stories can easily grow stale too. When we regurgitate from memory a bleh, muddled version of a story that we’ve pieced together from umpteen remembered tellings, we tend to find that the teachable moments of those stories become just as bleh and muddled. Or, to put it another way, we grow bored with the message as we grow bored with the story. Kind of like Calvin’s dad in his everyday life, bogged down by boring work so that he forgets the beauty and wonder of an afternoon in the snow with his son.  

And honestly, while I have no data to back this up, I sometimes wonder if this staleness towards the stories of the Bible is one of the reason adults walk away from their childhood faiths. The miraculous becomes uninteresting, which in turn leads people to question the truth, reliability, and relevance of not just each individual story but that of the entire Bible.

This is why I think the idea of taking off one’s Sunday School glasses when reading Scripture, especially for the more familiar stories, is so important! To shed the Sunday School glasses is to stop just glazing over whenever you hear or read a story you’ve heard plenty of times before. What this phrase is asking you to do – and what I’m asking you to do when you read my versions of these stories – is to consider the details behind the story that the Bible might only implicitly address.

For instance, if we as Christians believe that the Bible is true, as we should, then we are saying that these are actual stories about real people. That means that Jonah ACTUALLY got swallowed by a fish, Jericho’s walls ACTUALLY came tumbling down after the Israelites walked around them, and Jesus ACTUALLY turned a kid’s lunch into a village-feeding feast. When you stop to picture some of these moments, you should experience nothing less than sheer amazement! But we so often miss this because the stories have become too familiar.

Moreover, because these stories are about real people, the characters of the Bible would have had real, human reactions to things. So the next time you read a Bible story, think about the freak out, the terror, the shock and awe, the wonder and excitement that the events of that story might have inspired in the characters involved. Although the Bible doesn’t make a huge deal out of his reaction, I highly doubt that Moses just walked up to the burning bush as if there was nothing out of the ordinary! If it helps, think about how you might have reacted if you were the one confronted by the divine in these situations. It’ll help you to remember the humanity behind biblical characters.

Shedding the Sunday School glasses also means seeing the comedy, the pain, and the irony in different Bible stories. The Bible is filled with witty sarcasm, hilarious situations, and an emotional intensity that can only be accessed if you will actually take a second to look a little deeper into some of the stuff you’re reading. And when you do take that time – when you read Scripture with more than a surface glance – both the stories and the messages behind them will come alive to you in a way that might surprise you.

That’s my goal when I write these posts. I don’t plan on providing some revolutionary theological message behind a classic parable or some new interpretation of some Old Testament historical narrative. My goal is to uncover the truth that is in the Bible, not try and make it say something it was never trying to say. But I do hope that by asking you to shed your Sunday School glasses, it will help restore some of the childlike wonder you might have lost when reading these stories. And, in turn, I hope that will make the truth behind these stories easier to relate to as well!

And if I inspire you to enjoy alliteration or comics a little more in the process, even better!

~Brentagious