[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

The Darkness

I keep wanting to write about the glories of High Autumn, but the weather 
won't let me.

It's overcast out, so dark that I need the lamp on, even though it's late 
morning. It's a disquieting sort of overcast too, with a sharp, strong wind 
that gives the outflying geese a thorough workout, down by the water's 
edge. If it were a quiet, still sort of overcast, maybe a little misty, the 
newly-turned leaves might be only the richer in colour -- that happens 
sometimes. But this is different. It's edgy, anxious-making weather, the 
sort that finds you picking things up and putting them down again and 
walking from room to room, not quite able to remember what it was you were 
looking for. It's weather that points forward into all the roughnesses of 
winter instead of holding you still in this moment of beauty, and I am not 
happy about it.

I don't know what to do about it, either. Weather isn't something a person 
has any choice about, after all. With weather, it's pretty much "thy will, 
not mine, be done". I think of what weather has been up to in the last few 
weeks in Haiti, Grenada, Florida and the rest of the Caribbean and I kick 
myself sharply for unwarranted self-pity. The worst storm I ever went 
through -- the Great Ice Storm of '98 -- had nothing on the string of big 
ones that battered those places. My job ought to be to stop wanting sun and 
to sit with those who still picking up the pieces, and will be for a long, 
discouraging time.

But is it really the weather, or is it something else? Usually I'm pretty 
good at accepting the weather on its own terms, whatever they are; you have 
to do that in Canada or you'll find yourself permanently frustrated.  I can 
usually poke around the landscape without anxiety or judgment, looking for 
whatever beauty there is on offer -- and there always is some, if you look 
carefully.

Prodding around the back of my soul, looking for the spiritual equivalent 
of a big cavity, I find that it's not really the low electromagnetic light 
levels that are getting to me; it's the low ethical light levels. It's the 
sheer nastiness of the American election, the war in Iraq, the conflict in 
the Middle East, the human disaster in the Sudan. The world is being Like 
That these days, and a person can't miss that unless she stands here with 
her eyes tight shut, something I decline to do.

It's particularly discouraging because so much of the violence and malice, 
the revenge-seeking and the power-grubbing, the dishonesty and the economic 
exploitation, the torture and the violation, is being carried out by people 
who are extremely loud about their religious fervour. This behaviour 
discredits religion terribly in the eyes of onlookers -- especially the 
young, who have a clarity about 2 + 2 that we sometimes fail to see that 
we've lost -- but that doesn't seem to matter to the perpetrators.

It makes it hard for those of us who are in the God-proclaiming business 
(Christian, Muslim or Jewish) to get on with our jobs, because we have to 
stop and clear the wreckage left by those who use God's name to further 
agendas that are anything but Godly. I meet the eyes of Islamic people in 
my town and we both smile in comforting, mutually understanding 
embarrassment; each of us has to live with the idiots of his or her 
religious persuasion. They can no more stop Islamic militants than I can 
stop the Religious Right, but we all get to live with that "walks with 
fanatics" label pinned to our lapels. It's extremely frustrating.

Aside from the mess that the war has made of the entire Middle East, what 
will be the long-term spiritual consequences for the people of the U.S., 
Iraq, and Israel? What sort of soul-choices are people making? Because 
that's what we take with us into God's presence: not whether we were 
adequately fervent or pure or good, but what our choices have made of our 
souls and done to the lives of others. It doesn't matter if your cause is 
technically just if it costs you your love of God and neighbour -- 
neighbour being defined as Christ would have us define it, very broadly indeed.

The more we boast about what good God-fearing people we are, the more we 
invite others to look at our talk and compare it to our walk and draw the 
inevitable conclusions. Do I claim to be a Christian? Then I'd better act 
ethically, or I invite the judgment of my peers and my God. Do I claim to 
follow the Word of God? Then I'd better not take verses from the Bible or 
the Qu'ran, rip them out of context, ignore the meat of the message, and 
use them in ways that discredit the good news of God's love and mercy.  Do 
I judge others while being less than honest about my own failings? Then I 
invite those others to be extremely honest with me about what those 
failings are. Denial, after all, is a sizable sin, all by itself, and 
immensely destructive.

It's hard to look around the human scenery at the moment without developing 
a nasty case of self-righteous anger, but that's as useless as railing 
against the weather, and it's a poor choice for the soul to make. I'll pray 
on it, Lord, and try to remember that prayer *is* action and not a 
second-best. And I'll take myself out, properly wrapped, for a good walk 
after lunch, to give the world's beauty my best attention, whatever the 
weather.




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