[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Susanna

My "other daughter" Susanna is just back from Toronto, where she went on a 
brief and intensive job hunt. Nothing panned out. I was concerned for her, 
because I know she's had a tough time of things and I worried that maybe 
this defeat would leave her flattened. But instead she's staunch-hearted. 
"My right job hasn't found me yet," she says quite cheerfully, and I am 
pleased and proud of her.

This is an attitude that I know I need to cultivate more than I do.  I'm 
quite good at belief. I can do God-thinking happily, and my God-thinking 
does include a God of love, who will ultimately provide all that I need, 
even if it isn't always what I want.  (The Rolling Stones made an important 
theological point there.) But I also struggle with doubt about trusting in 
Providence next week, which is not surprising, given that life has at times 
been Like That for quite prolonged periods.  I know it's a spiritual 
failing on my part -- my human nature being very human indeed. I apologize 
to God on a regular basis, knowing that God knows how I got where I 
am.  God understands, as even I don't, where the deep-down trust issues are 
coming from, because God knows every square inch of my soul, in loving 
detail. That too is part of my theology.

But Susanna would remind me that the trust issues result largely from my 
own not-so-brilliant choices in the past and from the not-so-brilliant 
choices of others, not from God's actions, and that faith has in fact borne 
me up even in the worst of troubles. It's not belief but faith that gives 
me my considerable resilience; it's the source of all love that's reached 
out to me or that I've reached out to others. It's the deep certainty that 
I can touch, the quiet voice in my centre saying "Child". It's faith, not 
belief, that keeps me scrambling for self-knowledge at whatever cost. Faith 
lives in my intuition, in the directions I take without thinking.

I may not trust in my faith, any more than I trust in my own essential 
goodness and worth, but that's maybe another choice I have to 
challenge.  Maybe I need to remind myself that Providence takes the long 
view and the view for the greatest number, and my own particular patch of 
life is both much smaller and much happier than I sometimes remember. And I 
still don't know the end of the story.

Susanna will be fine; I know that. Maybe someday, I'll know that I will too.