[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Horizons

Home from downtown (needed to spend serious money at the Church Bookroom); 
as I often do, I drove along the lake. I'm very fond of this big piece of 
water and I like to visit it frequently.  There's one spot, just at the 
foot of the university campus, where the view goes out past the end of 
Wolfe Island and over open water. It's a view I attend to, every time I 
pass, checking in on the state of the horizon.

You'd think something as simple as the visual intersection of water and sky 
would be a pretty ordinary thing. It isn't, at least not always. The two 
hues are related but not identical, and the play between them is a 
changeable and fascinating thing. I've seen the sky a deep grey-blue as a 
late afternoon storm moves in while, slanting in from the west, the sun 
still lights the water and makes it sparkle. I've seen the deep, gorgeous 
blue of a high winter's morning bouncing off white and brilliant grey of 
ice and open water.  I've seen peaceful cyan blue against equally peaceful 
slate-grey.

And sometimes, as today, there is no horizon at all. The only thing 
suggesting the existence of such a thing was a black buoy out on the water. 
It looked like a sharp drop of ink on a background of dove-grey fuzz. I 
pulled over and stopped, just to make sure. Sometimes I get the illusion of 
no-horizon, but in fact there's a very faint horizon. Not today there 
wasn't.  Zip. Zero. Nada. Not even the hint of a line.

This made me smile, because it resonated so tunefully with where my 
spiritual head is at this week. I've just finished reading (yay! first book 
finished in I -dunno-how-long!) Philip Yancey's _Rumors of Another World_, 
a book that talks about two worlds -- the world we live in and a world we 
only suspect or experience indirectly. I won't try to summarize any 
further. Go buy the book. But it's something I've been aware of since 
childhood: that there's another reality out there, just touching this 
reality. Or sometimes more than touching.

If atoms and molecules are real (and I believe they are) we can believe 
that they're all there is -- that the world is simply a material place and 
there's nothing out there but the galaxies. But atoms are mostly space, and 
space is hugely mostly space; what might fill that space, blending the two 
worlds just as the horizon between air and water vanished this afternoon?

I lean back in my chair and press my hands to my eyes, trying to come up 
with a phrase, a metaphor; I am aware of the bones of my fingers, 
constantly being remodeled, of the slippery protein filaments slipping past 
each other to tighten or loosen muscles, of the tendons hooking muscle to 
bone, of blood coursing through capillary beds, of the warmth generated by 
glucose metabolism and the currency of adenosine triphosphate -- and I am 
also aware of my own awareness, which interpenetrates my body, as my body 
carries and informs my awareness. The boundary between the two blurs, as 
the horizon did.  We can't set them apart from each other -- at least not 
in this life. And we hear rumors of another life in which they are 
rejoined, but differently.

I like these softened boundaries, these interpenetrations. I like having a 
little chaos, a little uncertainty, a smudging of absolutes. I know that 
even when the horizon seems as clear as a line ruled by the sharpest 
drafting pen, the true division between air and water is a little blurred 
by the interplay of vaporization and oxygenation -- that air and water are 
in a dancing equilibrium with each other, not rigidly separated.

We can choose to ignore that other reality; I know people who live 
perfectly reasonable lives without giving it more than a passing glance. We 
may choose to deny its existence and believe that this world, the material 
world, is all that exists. I doubt if God is much troubled by either attitude.

Or we can search for it, sniff it out, watch for it attentively -- desire 
and pursue that other reality, let it tug us towards itself. For me, that 
way lies light and colour, delight and mischief, and above all the mystery 
of Love.

What I believe God wants is the union of Creation with Love, so that all 
Creation is blessed and all Love is fulfilled -- not just a blurring of the 
boundaries, but their ultimate collapse. It's not likely to happen next 
week or even next year. But it will come about in the fullness of time. 
That I believe.


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