[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Coffee

I had coffee on Tuesday with a man and his dragon.

I'd been looking forward to meeting the man. I wasn't expecting the dragon.

We'd met to talk because I needed some background for a piece I was 
thinking about writing and I'd been told that this was the person I needed 
to speak to. The man is one of those who dodges into Hell to rescue people 
and bring them out. I'd heard much that I was prepared to admire -- and 
did, in the event, admire greatly. I could not do the work he does.  I do 
not have his courage, his passion, his knowledge or his expertise.

It was neat, listening to him talk about what he does -- but then, in the 
middle of the conversation, all of a sudden a great blast of greeny-gold 
flame would erupt from the dragon sharing his seat and looking over his 
shoulder.  He'd be discussing (say) the re-victimization of victims, and 
all of a sudden he'd launch into a paean of rage and despair. He sees so 
much suffering -- and I do believe that. I know he harrows hell. He's seen 
too much of human evil, much, much too much, until it fills his landscape 
from horizon to horizon and drives him mad.

But the dragon refuses to see anything *but* hell. The dragon refuses to 
accept the possibility of any non-hellishness in this world, or the 
possibility of the goodness of God at work in the landscape, because (the 
man believes) if God were good and at work in the landscape, there wouldn't 
be so much evil out there. He's turned his back on a God whose impotence he 
despises. He's made a theological choice about the Problem of Evil, but he 
fails to see that it is a *choice*, not an absolute truth. There are 
alternative ways of looking at things.

Meanwhile, the dragon rejoices in its own rage and despair. I've seen 
dragons like this before; they feed on the evilness of the evil, focusing 
all their energy on the gap between what should be and what is, and it 
makes them bigger and fiercer. It's idealism run amok, I suspect. But it's 
also a sort of romanticism and, like all romanticism, it's profoundly 
self-centered. *This* is the only landscape with any reality, this 
landscape of Hell; *this* is the only true statement you can make about 
God, that God does not help the suffering; *this* is the true state of 
affairs, and I know better than anyone else; and *I* am the only person who 
can state the truth.

It's hard to be a heroic hell-harrier without lapsing into arrogance, and 
the man had clearly done just that. He sneered about the authorities, who 
he sees as being useless and corrupt; he's perpetually getting in trouble 
with them, something in which he takes considerable pride. But some of what 
he said about his tactics made my jaw drop, and not in admiration. Jeez, 
bud, I found myself thinking, no wonder you've got problems with these 
people.... He was fiercely proud of what he'd done, and if the authorities 
didn't like it, they could go <bleep> themselves.

The whole point about dragons is that the person with the dragon doesn't 
see the dragon, because the dragon is looking over his or her shoulder, but 
to anyone looking at the person, the dragon is obvious.  It's why it's so 
important to be self-aware. Dragons come to be because we don't pay 
attention to our own sinfulness, or if we notice it at all, we deny it's a 
problem -- or even perhaps boast about it. As well as idealism, I saw a lot 
of the Sins of Pride and Anger in the man across the coffeeshop table from 
me, not just unchecked but actively nurtured into dragon-status -- just as 
(say) jealousy can be blatantly obvious and terribly destructive, while the 
person with the jealousy problem firmly denies that she feels jealous at all.

I found myself wanting to say to the man, "Excuse me, would you mind if 
your dragon and I had a word in private?" I wanted to take the dragon out 
of the coffeeshop and down to the edge of the water, where the geese are 
gathering for their southward migration and the ducklings are all grown up 
and the swallows still swoop after bugs. I wanted the dragon to exhaust its 
fire trying to warm up a small Great Lake. And then, when it was too winded 
to protest, I wanted to show it the beauty of the day, the goodliness of 
Creation that reflects the goodness of the Creator.  I wanted to take the 
dragon into the cool, dusty silence of my church, where the empty cross 
shows that the victory *has* been won and is only waiting for the clean-up, 
hard as that is to believe in these times. I wanted to take the dragon into 
the rooms of my own heart, to show it the places where devastation has been 
healed or is now healing and peace is looking like a distinct possibility.

The man had put it all into black-and-white Good vs. Evil (with an 
overwhelming focus on Evil), but this world isn't like that; it's a mixed 
bag of darkness and light, terror and hope, real wickedness and 
just-as-real love. Focusing so exclusively on the darkness invites the 
darkness into one's own soul, and that is a terrible error.  We all have 
our moments of despair, but insisting on being stuck in Despair is a sin 
against the Holy Spirit.

I wish I could say this to the man, but I don't think he'd hear me. I had 
the feeling that he'd already made up his mind and wasn't prepared to 
change it. He'd only write me off as just another fool.

I got the information I needed and said goodbye. He and his dragon climbed 
into his truck and went off to harrow Hell some more, and I went for a walk 
by the water and prayed.




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I'm about to hit some sacred cows, and they moo so badly. -- Phyllis 
Tickle, aka The Divine Miz T.