[SB] Sabbath Blessing

Sat Jun 11 17:41:24 GMT 2005

URL

I am ever-so-gingerly beginning to slip a timorous big toe into the Great 
Big Ocean of Website Stuff. I have bought the Dummies' guide to creating 
web pages. I have begun to blog (actually, I've been doing it for about a 
month now and I'm finding that it's quite fun). My favourite and 
ever-estimable 'Net God (hi Brian!) has done a basic update on the old 
Sabbath Blessings page (http://sabbath-blessings.org) and I'm hoping to 
learn how to manage it for myself.

Of course I should have started doing this years ago, but that's a 
"shoulda/coulda/woulda" statement and they're never of much use. I was 
frankly intimidated; I thought "I can't do this!" -- forgetting that I've 
marked manuscripts for production and programmed in long-defunct languages 
like SNOBOL. I even dabbled in Basic Assembly Language during a sweltering 
summer, back in the very late '60s.  It isn't (say) higher-level 
mathematics or quantum physics; it's simply figuring out what you want to 
do and what instructions will get you there, and then working out the bugs.

This is rather like my friend Stephanie-the-Yarnharlot's story about 
knitting in a hospital emergency room. A doctor stopped and admired her 
work-in-progress, saying "I could never do that!" Stephanie looked up and 
saw that the doctor's name tag listed her as a neurosurgeon. Now, knitting 
is just a matter of two very simple operations involving two pointy objects 
and a bit of string: there is the knit stitch and the purl stitch and 
that's that.  It's also almost endlessly forgiving; get it wrong and you 
just rip it out and try again. Neurosurgery on the other hand....

It's a matter of intimidation. It looks so complicated that the mind simply 
shuts down, unable to see that it's really only a series of small tasks. -- 
inserting instructions to tell the machine how you want the text to look or 
where the reader should be directed, or whatever. For the longest time, I'd 
see something like <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "- // W3C//DTD HTML4.01 Frameset 
// EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/ htm14/ frameset.dtd" and freak because I 
thought I had to understand, or perhaps even create, something so obviously 
tricky and complex, demanding such in-depth command of all sorts of arcane 
knowledge.  But in fact, that bit of gobbledygook is only a label that you 
tie onto a document to tell the Web that it's got a HTML document to deal 
with. Someone else invented and understands the label; I don't need to. For 
which I am deeply grateful. What I have to do is to figure out what labels 
I need to use, not make up the labels.

God-stuff, I find, falls somewhere between knitting and HTML, or has 
elements of both. It *is* simple: God is love; Jesus came to live among us 
to bring us back to God's love when we'd walked away from it; the Holy 
Spirit moves in our hearts, tugging us Godward.  The whole aim is 
reconciliation, the soul's growth and flourishing, and the ultimate triumph 
of the goodness of God over all that keeps us from it. But it's also not so 
simple. Sometimes God seems to answer prayers, sometimes not. How can we 
believe in the ultimate triumph of God in the midst of this world's 
darkness? How can we believe in the rightness of the Holy Spirit when our 
own apparently God-called vocations collapse in ruins around us? Jesus' 
words are often riddling and harsh, hard to understand -- and we're not 
sure what those words truly were, as the Gospels weren't exactly 
word-for-word unedited transcripts, recorded on the spot. We know, too, 
that we're dealing with translations, and that makes the Word even less 
for-certain, especially when we're translating Hebrew. Above all, we're 
facing mystery and paradox: God is love *and* justice and is ultimately 
unknowable, at least this side of the River.

God-stuff is simple and not-simple because that's where we are. We're 
simple in wanting to have our fundamental needs met, including the need to 
love and be loved. We're simple in needing environments in which we can 
grow and flourish. Truly we are children at heart.

But even children aren't simple. We have push-pull feelings even about love 
-- perhaps especially about love, because our need is so fundamental and 
our fear matches the need.  Do we want to take that risk, be that 
vulnerable? We have bitter experience in how complex things can be, how 
difficult it is to read even our own hearts, much less any other's.  Truly 
we're as straightforward as knitting and as complex as the most convoluted 
code, both at the same time -- as simple as water, as complicated as DNA.

But as the wise old song says, simplicity ought to be our goal. If we can 
just let go of the fear and the need to control, the desire to possess and 
to determine outcomes, then maybe we can simplify, at least a little. Even 
the most complex piece of Fair Isle knitting is still just two stitches, 
knit and purl. Ultimately all code comes right back down to binary.

I'll try to remember that in my forays into HTML, just as I told myself 
when I was learning to make pasta that if Italian _paisanas_ can manage 
this, so, most likely, can I.

But stand by, Brian. I may still need a little hand-holding at times.

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

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