On Grapes of Wrath and Wonder

Following recent mention of sour grapes, a bout of doxing, and edutcher’s observations on current political clusters, the phrase “grapes of wrath”  came to mind.  And I wondered what it referred to or meant?  “An unjust or oppressive situation, action or policy that may inflame a desire for revenge”  was the first explanation/definition to come up online, ahead of other references to a song, a book title, and a verse from the Bible, which all appear to have come beforehand and been behind that summation, giving shape to the meaning it holds today.  

The kickoff goes back to one of the visions received by the apostle John and recorded in the book of Revelation around 96 AD/CE.  It involves a brief, unadorned, single sentence description of an angel swinging a sickle on the earth, gathering its harvest of grapes and throwing them into “the great winepress of God’s wrath”. 

 A thousand years or more down the road (tracking as far back as 1103 and on into the 18th century),  a host of  iconographers inspired by that allusion began envisioning  and writing icons depicting Christ in the Winepress.  Two different scenarios were preserved in paint for present moment “gazing” and posterity:  One reveals the Christ figure standing in the winepress along with the grapes about to be crushed,  and the other has him taking the place of the grapes, with his blood pouring out as wine.  

Further down the road, the Revelation reference also caught Julia Howe’s attention, long enough for her to envision a slightly altered version and enshrine it within the Civil War Battle Hymn she wrote in 1861, in this now-familiar and oft sung line from the first verse:  “ He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”.  As her story goes, after hearing of a need for new lyrics for the fight song the men had been singing she “ went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, "I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them." So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pencil which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper". 

Hearing those scrawled words, first published in the Atlantic, publicly sung by others years later, led Steinbeck’s wife to suggest Grapes of Wrath to him in 1938, as a fitting title for the book he was finishing, according to the following story: As is well-known, it was Carol Henning, Steinbeck’s wife, who provided the almost-finished novel with its title, drawn, of course, from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” As Steinbeck reported in his journal for September 3, 1938, “Carol got the title last night…The book has being at last.” But what was the “being” the novel had achieved…? The story proceeds: because Steinbeck had already destroyed a 70,000-word draft of an earlier version in which California growers were polemically attacked, he was very sensitive to the political meaning of the new version and decided that one way to avoid the charge of radicalism, foreign-inspired propaganda was (almost literally) to wrap the book in the flag by insisting that the words and music of “Battle Hymn of the Republic” be printed in the endpapers. In fact, when the first proof was returned by his editor with only one verse [of the song] as prologue, Steinbeck wrote back “I meant to print all, all, all the verses of the Battle Hymn. They’re all pertinent and they’re all exciting. And the music too.”

A quirky video side trip in the 1990’s reveals another somewhat popular at the time but less well-known image of the Grapes of Wrath set to song in a Veggie Tales cartoon presentation entitled  “God Wants Me to Forgive Them!?!”.  It features a different visual and perceptual twist in “two stories about forgiveness, the first a parody loosely based on "The Grapes of Wrath" by Steinbeck, and the second  a parody of the 1960s sitcom, Gilligan's Island.”

Nothing new under the sun it seems. The idea of an envisioned grape harvest, preserved in writing two thousand years ago, ripening over time to invite others to swing their sickles or press their perceptions of that scene into use and service, intrigues me.  As does the present day definition, which appears to fit what I perceive to be growing and forming in our culture today, along with a strong sense of more pressing and change about to take place.  

What is the main difference between wrath and anger?   “Anger is a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility, while wrath is the extreme form of anger,...once anger escalates from emotion to action, it turns into wrath.”

Where's the wonder in the grape connections mentioned above?  They all appear to involve vision, imagination, intuition (and a dose of humor?) to meet needs or move things forward.   Which makes me wonder where or when you might have recently encountered or experienced something similar that gave you pause, affirmed a conviction, invited awareness or offered hope?