Today I am moved to step away from my usual light fare to speak of something serious: nun buns.
The NunBun™, to be specific. A cinnamon roll with an uncanny resemblance to the late Mother Teresa, housed until very recently in a glass case at the Bongo Java coffee house in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.
Bongo Java is a local institution. It’s where I get my decaf Peppermint Daddy and my Skinny Pumpkin Muffin and, on occasion, the best black bean burger in Music City. Known as the irreverent cool spot that’s “just too weird to franchise,” Bongo provides a second home for artists, businesspeople, pets, and at times my own university classes.
For nine years, it also provided a home for the NunBun™. Shellacked and placed under glass, the NunBun™ was a symbol.
Of what? You may ask.
After all, the fine folks at Bongo Java were the subject of derisive jokes for their celebration of the alleged immaculate confection. And they got more than fifteen minutes of fame for their trouble, including angry allegations of blasphemy and an up-close-and-personal dialogue with the real Mother Teresa’s attorney.
In the end, however, Nashville got the message and the joke. Bongo regulars got NunBun™ shirts. And Mother Teresa herself got into the spirit. (As she lay dying, she indicated her successor, and then left joking instructions for the Bongo Java staff “to find a cinnamon bun that looks like her.")
On Christmas day 2005, however, no one was laughing.
Bongo Java was burglarized. No cash was taken. Only the NunBun™ was gone. Of course the Nashville paper reported the theft, but the crime went on to become an international story, reported by such institutions as The BBC News.
See? I told you the resemblance was uncanny.
Perhaps this will end well. Maybe one day the NunBun™ will mysteriously reappear. Perhaps she won’t be alone, but instead she’ll bring along an ImamEclair or a RabbiRicecake. Maybe this entire affair will end in an even bigger punchline than the NunBun™ originally offered.
But I fear it won’t. The timing of the theft, and the lack of any leads in the case or communication from the responsible party, suggests this is not a playful stunt. It seems to be the action of those who found the NunBun™ and what it represents offensive, and who decided on behalf of everyone in Nashville that the laughs were through. And this, my friends, is frightening. At the end of the day, nothing – not terrorist attacks, not avian flu – is more terrifying than a people who cannot take a joke.
I worry when I read about situations such as the recent censoring of South Park, one of the most sophisticated political satires ever televised. The series is not to all tastes, to be sure. If viewers don’t appreciate the show, however, they can switch the channel.
And if coffee drinkers didn’t like the NunBun™, they could have gone somewhere else for their morning latte.
What’s next? Sam and Zoe’s is a hop, skip, and jump away. That lovely little coffee house (if you’re keeping score, my regular there is the Rachel’s Choice, no dressing, with a decaf Grasshopper) boasts a mural in the ladies’ room of the artist's idea of inspirational women. This oddball but endearing painting depicts Princess Diana, Oprah Winfrey, Joan of Arc (who for some reason looks oddly like LaToya Jackson in armored lingerie), several others (hey, it doesn’t take me that long to apply lip gloss), and – you guessed it – Mother Teresa all shoulder to shoulder, wearing grins like Cheshire cats. Will someone sneak in and deface the wall now? Can’t the gals be allowed a giggle in the little girls’ room?
Along with a good coffee, I recommend a dose of Get Over It to those who insist on being the gatekeepers for ideas and the arbiters of the popular dialogue. Paternalism is the lowest form of insult. Getting a sense of humor is the first step to getting a clue.
Those who would Do Good could take a lesson from Mother Teresa. Your time is better spent following the Golden Rule, acting as you wish others acted, changing the world with the personal choices you make and the example your life provides. Mother Teresa knew how to change the world. She also knew how to make a joke.
It’s not rocket science. This is not about a faith or an organization. It’s about a cinnamon roll, a laugh, and a purely voluntary community born in a coffee house.
In 1927, the great Norwegian-American novelist O.E. Rölvaag wrote an epic story about the brutal struggle for survival and sanity endured by early immigrants on the U.S. prairie, a novel entitled Giants in the Earth. In the book, he asked a key question: “What can avail against folk who laugh?”
Stick around. We may discover the hard way what will avail against a society made up of folk who can’t.
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