[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

High Autumn

On fall days like this, I'd like to stop time in its tracks for a long, 
long moment. I wish I could take the day by the scruff of the neck and hang 
it up on the coat rack in the front hall, so it couldn't get away on me. I 
want to preserve it, conserve it, keep it around for a month or more.

There is still an astonishing amount of green around, for the end of 
October, and it doesn't have that typical fall washed-out look; it's still 
vibrant. But there's glorious colour as the trees have begun to turn.  One, 
on my daily walk to the university, is almost dandelion-gold, lighting up 
the street. A tree or two further down, it's succeeded by a flaming maple. 
All this against the clearest and most blue of skies...

It's cool enough that brisk walking feels very good indeed, the more so 
since I know that walking won't be so pleasant in a couple of months, when 
we're into winter. Part (but only part) of fall's beauty is its evanescence.

The day, in its boldness, speaks to me of courage.  It talks about leaving 
anxiety behind and simply getting at whatever needs to be done, because, as 
Christ rightly points out, anxiety doesn't do a thing for you. Quite the 
opposite, in fact: anxiety is paralytic. I had one of those WAHOO! moments 
yesterday when I realized that action and anxiety are inversely related. 
Actually *doing* something gets my anxiety levels down, but if I indulge in 
anxiety, I find myself pinned me to my chair.   And of course it's 
cyclical: anxiety's paralysis means not getting the necessary things done, 
which makes me more anxious, which means that even more doesn't get 
done....Life becomes a matter of tending to anxiety, of ministering to it, 
of looking after it, of asking other people to minister to it too, instead 
of my ministering to them. Which is a really stupid way to live.

Anxiety is inverse not only to action, but to trust. I'm anxious because I 
don't trust Providence to provide, because I've spent more time with the 
ugliness of life than with the beauty of the day. I'm anxious because I'm 
spending time, as I know I shouldn't, with the past and the future, instead 
of with the present.  I'm anxious because I'm scanning the horizon for that 
cloud the size of a man's hand instead of staying with that spectacular 
tree on Union Street.

We get our knickers twisted because we pray for particular things and 
sometimes we get them, and sometimes we don't, and sometimes the thing 
prayed for turn around and bite us in the butt. Which makes Providence 
problematical. But maybe that's because we're praying wrongly, not because 
God is indifferent or unlistening or (worse) someone who plays cruel jokes 
on us. Maybe, in my anxiety, I shouldn't pray for particular things to 
happen, solutions to problems that I worry about. Maybe instead I should 
just pray for a state of mind in which I can move more freely and more 
confidently.  Maybe, instead of praying for things hoped for, I should 
simply pray for hope.

Maybe, instead of thinking that all this beauty will pass in a couple of 
weeks, I should simply give thanks that it's here for the moment. I don't 
have to seize hold of it and manage it; that's futile, anyway. I don't own 
time and I can't make it do what I want it to. But I can simply be with the 
beauty in this particular day and do my best to commit it to memory; I can 
trust that if it doesn't stick around (for it won't, not for long) it will 
certainly come back. And I can find a drift of leaves to shuffle through, 
as I do every year, for the sheer pleasure of the moment.

I can trust in love -- not necessarily in human love, which can be pretty 
frail and selfish, but in the reality of a love beyond all measure that 
holds me. Always has. Always will. If I hang on to that, I can live in this 
particularly moment, with joy.



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