It was my dear aunt Jeanne who introduced me to the art of Paul Gaugin.  Over twenty years ago, she and my mother traveled to Chicago to take in an exhibit of his work at the Art Institute.  I'm so happy she did.  Today, Gaugin is most well known for his depictions of the people of Tahiti, the island on which he spent his later years.  Though we can read many things into these paintings, perhaps the most instructive is how different the Tahitians seem from people living in the West.  It's as if they are living in another world.  In a way, they are.

It is a world from which we have much to learn.  Yes, Europeans bravely set sail across the Atlantic in quest of India.  But they had prior information about some aspects of the passage.  The Tahitians and their fellow inhabitants of Polynesia, however, set off from the east coast of Asia with no inkling of what they would find.  And they did so, not as did the Europeans, to find worldly riches, but to simply find new worlds.  Rather than try to subjugate the world, they let the world come to them.

     Many Christians point to God's commands, as they are recorded in Genesis, to Adam and Eve to "rule and subdue" the world as justifying anything people might do to survive on this planet.  Such a conclusion is based on highly risky exegesis.  To rule well is to care and steward that which one rules, to let the world be as it should be.
     Not to twist it into what we think it should be.
     Thanks, Monsieur Gaugin.  Happy trails.