[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

The Party

The annual Epiphany choir party (okay, so we were a little late this year!) 
happens at Irene's house, a charming piece of Victoriana, beautifully 
furnished. In general, I am not much of a party person; small talk isn't my 
forte and I am considerably shyer than most people believe. I just fake it 
well, coming away tired and relieved to be home. But this year was 
different. This year, I got into real conversations with my choral chums, 
conversations in which I learned something, or found myself saying 
something that mattered to me, or got to know someone at a new and deeper 
level.  What had changed was the sense of community. It felt as though we'd 
moved into a new and different depth.

Why is community so difficult, when it's so obviously desirable and matters 
so much? I think it's because community requires two things that go against 
our experience and expectations: it requires trust, which is foundational 
to intimacy, and it requires a sacrifice of some of our autonomy and 
individuality.  Trust is a big one for many of us who were brought up in 
untrustworthy families or in cultures that put a high premium on 
appearances, or who have suffered deep betrayal. Honesty can get you 
clobbered -- and sometimes rightly, when it's *that* sort of honesty, the 
sort that inflicts more hurt than it does good.

Individuality is another big one, and one in which community is at odds 
with contemporary culture. To be in community does require some 
self-sacrifice. The choir struggles with our choices in music: there are 
those who think that all old hymns are stuffy and want to sing nothing but 
contemporary "praise music" and there are those who detest praise music and 
would sing nothing but Bach and Vaughan Williams week after week.  We 
compromise; we sing some of each, doing our best by the hymns we don't much 
like, for love of the people who love it. We lay down a bit of our 
individuality for the good of the community. And if we're good at this, we 
don't even grumble. (Much.)

But at the same time, we accept our differences. I may choose to set aside 
a bit of my own individuality in love for my choir friends, but nobody's 
expecting me to be other than the person I am. Community doesn't require me 
to sacrifice (say) my political views, any more than it expects me to 
straighten my hair. It isn't about conformity or control. I assume that 
since we all say the Creed together every Sunday, we are all Christians in 
good standing, although we may have significant theological differences. 
While I might disagree with Jim or Sheila or Sharon on some issue, I'd 
respect his or her right to hold a different opinion -- again, a small 
sacrifice of my own individuality for love of the other.  "You shall love 
your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and your 
neighbour as yourself" and certainly more than your own righteousness, 
however impeccable.

It keeps coming back to "and" instead of "either-or". It is right for 
community to ask minor sacrifices of me, as a question of love, *and* it 
right for my community to value me just as I am, without expecting me to be 
other than the soul God made me.  If individuals can sing too much in the 
Key of Me, so can groups -- especially highly like-minded groups -- and in 
neither is it music pleasing to God's ear. It isn't, or shouldn't be, a 
matter of sacrificing individuality for harmony, but a matter of loving the 
two of them in blessed tension with each other. Blessed tension is never 
easy, but isn't it what Christ exemplifies for us in holding together the 
human and the divine?

Tomorrow in church we'll celebrate the Transfiguration, one of God's 
infrequent sky-writing events. What I felt last night at the party was a 
smaller transfiguration, one of the sort that arrives without fanfare, 
gently and incrementally --  a greening of the landscape, here in the midst 
of winter. But that's how transformations usually come, in my experience. 
You don't notice them happening until they're quietly *there*.

Thanks be to God.



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