[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

(...with apologies for having finked out for the last couple of weeks)

A Matter of Choice

Is it because the long spell of horrible, hot, muggy weather has finally 
broken (thank God!) or is it just my perception, but are people being a 
little friendlier these days? Normally people in my neighbourhood don't 
make eye contact or speak to each other, but these days, we're nodding at 
each other and saying "Isn't this a nice day?" It's a pleasant change.

It's as though we need extremes of weather to drive us together, because 
the default is apartness, separation, even alienation. I'm not entirely 
sure why this is. It's just the way this town tends to operate. Perhaps 
it's because there are so many communities that don't communicate with each 
other (university, military college, community college, prisons, 
bureaucracy, military, commercial, Aboriginal). Perhaps it's rooted in the 
city's Loyalist and Victorian British history, with its emphasis on 
reticence and stiff-upper-lipping it. Perhaps it's because there are 
significant numbers of the walking wounded -- former convicts, 
ex-psychiatric hospital patients, the unemployed, the marginalized -- 
roaming the streets downtown. It takes years to find community here; the 
city knows it and sighs over the knowledge, but it shrugs and accepts that 
this is just the way things are.

But that acceptance makes me cranky. I keep wanting to say to this town 
"Smile! It won't break your face." I keep remembering the yarn store where 
I spent much of my vacation, in a little town named Fergus; the yarn store 
had a friendly floating community of knitters who promptly wrapped me in, 
making me immediately at home.  The group chooses to be friendly and 
accepting.  It's a choice people make, to be welcoming or unwelcoming, to 
be friendly or cool, to smile or be frozen-faced.  We can choose to go with 
the prevailing culture or we can choose to challenge it. When I make eye 
contact with my neighbours and smile at them, I'm choosing to challenge the 
neighbourhood culture. I can't be attached to the outcome; I may or may not 
get a smile back. But the choice I've made is a Godward one.

Love is a choice. It's not a feeling; it's a decision. I can choose to see 
the best in you or the worst. I can choose to put a positive spin on your 
words or a negative one; I can choose to read the light in your soul or the 
darkness. I can choose to accept you or to judge you. I can choose to 
regard you as a beloved "thou" or as a mere "it", to be used and abused for 
my own selfish purposes, and that choice is something God will take very 
seriously in weighing what I've done with my life. Of course my choices 
have to be realistic; idealizing you isn't loving either, and if I have a 
problem with you, I've got to be honest about it. But I can still make the 
choice to love or not-love, and it's a choice for which I will be 
answerable to my Creator.

To be conscious of these choices and to take them seriously -- this is the 
way in which we point our lives towards God or in some other direction. 
Choosing not to examine our choices is also a choice, and not a good one. 
We can turn towards or away from self-awareness, but it's clear in which 
direction Jesus calls us.

I can't necessarily change the local culture, but I can certainly choose 
not to go along with it. And so a small group of knitters has formed and 
intends to meet in the downtown coffeehouse on Monday nights, with the aim 
of drawing other knitters in and building a community in which people do 
make eye contact, do smile, do share their stories, do encourage each 
other. We've chosen to do that. It's a good choice.  And dammit, I'm going 
to go on smiling at my neighbours. It won't kill anyone, me included.



http://spindlegeek.blog-city.com/


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