Beads, Anyone? > Marble Collegiate Church

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Monday, October 03, 2011

Beads, Anyone?
By webmaster @ 12:01 AM :: 301 Views :: 0 Comments :: Sister Carol Perry

We are the original bobble-heads, as a number of recent events might indicate.

We have epidemics and dinosaurs on both the small and the large screens. On Broadway, a musical as frankly retro as "Follies" has just had a glorious week at the box office, and now historians are urging us to take a closer look at beads. Did you get all of that?

As we either recoil from or lean forward into the moment, we need to be flexible to avoid whiplash. Monsters we will always have with us. (Didn't you check under your bed as a child to make sure nothing was lurking there?) Pandemics are possible and if you tend to be germ-minded then perhaps there is the box office for your dollars.

I was intrigued by the bead approach, encouraged by historians who are suggesting that we have short-sightedly neglected a vast expanse of the human story simply because there are no written records. A forthcoming book called "Deep History" calls our attention to such simple things as beads which exploded onto the Mediterranean world about 43,000 years ago.

Initially made from shells and the teeth of red deer, they proliferated as a medium of exchange and as a sign of wealth, a kind of prelude to credit cards and cash today. Was wearing beads as provocative as waving a filled wallet today?

My mind skipped nimbly along a related path as I thought of the first people to use beads. Who were they and was it by accident or design that a thing of beauty became an object of desire?

This gave me something to think about as I rode the subway and it recurred as I prepared a class on Genesis today. We are often so ignorant of the past that we let the future dazzle or frighten us without our taking care to say, "Hold on for a moment." And then I savor the image of a man some 42,000 years ago threading wealth onto a cord of some sort to give to a daughter about to be married.

Such portable wealth gives me a new reverence for the beads of the past.

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