Breathe!

November 3rd, 2012| Topic: RaMbLeS | 0

The other day, there was a strange report from New York City. (Of course, pretty much any report from New York City is strange, at least to those of us here way down south. But this was real strange.)

Apparently you don’t have any idea what you are breathing up there in the Big Apple.

Scientists have made a remarkable discovery. NYC’s air is “a bizarre brew of bacteria, pollen, clothing fiber, fungus, tire rubber, dead skin cells, cooking fat and carbon emissions.”

(I loved it! Not the report, but the alliteration of “bizarre brew of bacteria ….” It takes a preacher to recognize the genius of assonance!)

Roughly 33,000 times a day, into your lungs goes this malignant mélange, this gruesome goulash, this portentous potpourri of yucky, gross stuff.

None of this surprises Judith Zelikoff, professor of Environmental Medicine at NYU: “A lot of things that are in the air are a kind of a signature of what’s in that environment,” she declared. Indeed!

Chinatown, it seems had noticeably more starch and fat in the air. From rice and noodles? What next? White, green, and red air in the Italian concentration? Curry powder following Indians around like an aura? Believe it or not, Williamsburg, the hub for indie rock and hip culture, had high levels of blue jeans fibers and nail polish! Makes sense! (Though why Williamsburg also had a high concentration of human hair in the air is anyone’s guess.)

Of course, that’s not say that these things are harmful. One can never know without an actual particle count. But it’s all there in the air. And into your lungs it all goes.

The skin cells interested me … for obvious reasons. Skin cells from every complexion manifest in humankind. Red and yellow, black and white, ….

But this didn’t turn off Papa Sab, 28, a tourist from France. “The air has to be better than in Paris,” he said. “It is way more polluted there.” But at least we’d be inhaling more wine and cheese, one would think. I’ll take that any day to fat and skin and jeans.

No wonder Franklin Rodrigues, 18, has been afflicted by asthma ever since he moved to the South Bronx a decade ago. “I have an inhaler, I just live with it.”

But all this awfulness was not in Marie Barnett’s mind when she wrote:

This is the air I breathe
Your holy presence
Living in me

And I … I’m desperate for you
And I … I’m lost without you

This is the air I breathe ….

Marie Barnett, 1995

I agree. I’d rather breathe the life-giving “breath” (or “spirit”) ….

Thus says the Lord GOD,
“Come from the four winds, O breath,
and breathe on these slain, that they come to life. …
I will put My Spirit within you and you will come to life.”
Ezekiel 37:9, 14

Of course, we know what happened then. The toe bone connected to the foot bone, and the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, and the ankle bone connected to the leg bone, and the leg bone connected to the knee bone, and so on ….

Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living being.
Genesis 2:7

And God’s Spirit personally dwells in each believer.

Or do you not know that your body
is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you,
… and that you are not your own?
1 Corinthians 6:19

No more the foul air. Stay pure!