"A Marshmallow World"

This winter has certainly delivered a ‘marshmallow world’ to southern Ontario as well as most of the rest of Canada and the northern United States - and I must admit there is nothing exceptional in that!

Yet this song of the holiday season has irritated me for a number of years. And I have been vocal about this irritation, so vocal that a friend sent me a YouTube link to Dean Martin singing ‘A Marshmallow World’ this Christmas. Did that make me smile? Yes!
[Click here to hear the song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BOu3IMMzFc ]

BUT, it also has had me thinking these past weeks about just why I find that particular song so irritating. Dean Martin isn't now, and has never been, a particularly favorite singer of mine. But what is it that sets this song apart from his others.

One thing I have come to realize these past few years is that when something or someone really irritates me in some way, there is usually a reason. Peter Rollins, among other current theologians, posits that when we become annoyed with someone or something it is because we unconsciously recognize it in ourselves at a deep level. And so I turn to look at the lyrics for this song.

The chorus grabs my attention . . .

“The world is your snowball, see how it grows,

That's how it goes, whenever it snows,

The world is your snowball just for a song,

Get out and roll it along.”

It captures of the feeling of entitlement that is so common in our society. Life [or the world] owes us all that is good. We deserve to live the good life, and to have more and more and more …. [Envision that rolling snowball here]. And that more is just there for the taking, it doesn't demand anything of us in return. So if you don’t have more in the eyes of the world, then it has to be your fault in the eyes of others, for not getting out and claiming it.

So, WHY does this song annoy me? I can only think that somewhere buried deep within me that feeling of entitlement still lurks, that feeling I thought I had left behind. After all it does not fit in with my concepts that the world [read Creation] does not belong to us, that we are all interconnected, or that justice demands we all have ‘enough’.

Is there anything irritating YOU this week?

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