[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

(A day late -- sorry!)

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Klingon

I am currently being a Klingon. This is because it's the very tail end of 
summer. Things are still green, but only just barely. In a week or so, 
we'll be into high autumn; in a month, we'll be sliding gently into the 
grey-browns of fall Mud Season; and then we won't see green again until 
(likely) the middle of May. At this time of year, I want to cling on to the 
green.

I'm not alone in this. Most of my friends are stubbornly clinging on to 
summer -- putting off the putting-on of jackets and socks, insisting on 
wearing sandals and shorts and sundresses until the last possible moment. 
If the sun's strong, as it is today, you can ignore the slight chill of the 
air, not quite enough for goosebumps and certainly not enough for covering 
up.  A slight trickle of sweat down the back of your neck isn't the 
nuisance it was back in steamy July but instead something to be noted, 
almost savoured, because it's going to get rarer and rarer in the weeks to 
come.

It's not just summer either. We cling on to all sorts of things that we're 
just about certain to lose: childhood, illusions, self-sufficiency, power, 
pets, kids' childhoods, parents, even very bad marriages or jobs, because 
loss always looks at the very least a little dangerous if not outright 
grief-inducing. Maybe there are people who let go of significant stuff 
without a backward glance, but I've never met any. We forget that 
attachment to outcomes is apt to get us clobbered and that change is 
inevitable. I may be being childishly stubborn about my sandals, but this 
is Canada and this is fall and within two weeks, three at the most, they'll 
be in the closet until May and that's that.

We can cling on to an image of God that's of our own invention -- say, of 
an omniscient, omnipotent Power who plans everything to the last detail and 
who is infinitely all-loving, except, perhaps, towards the unrighteous 
people who annoy us. It's a sort of God-doll of the god we want God to be. 
The problem with that is that reality is apt to break our hold on the 
God-doll, sometimes finger-by-finger if we're being especially 
stubborn.  The only way we can evade this process is to maintain a very 
carefully selected and protected set of illusions to filter reality out -- 
say, that poor people are that way because they have no get-up-and-go, or 
that a loving god could purposefully inflict leukemia on a three-year-old 
because of something her parents did wrong, or that a hurricane could hit a 
city for its sins. Walter Brueggemann writes of "moral incongruity": the 
punishment definitely does not fit the crime, if crime there was in the 
first place. To cling to the God-doll, we have to cherish the illusion that 
God intervenes in human lives in ways that are completely just. But that 
doesn't work.

For myself (I can't speak for you), I find more and more that illusions 
don't bring me closer to God; they drive me in the opposite direction, 
because they inevitably leave me disappointed.  The illusion that I can 
pray for X and X will be delivered to my doorstep -- nope. And then I'm 
childishly angry and disappointed with God because God didn't give me what 
I wanted. Lord, I'm sorry, but you know that I have an extremely strong 
will, and sometimes I manage to point it in Your general direction, and 
sometimes I don't, and when I don't. it's not Your problem but mine. It's 
not that You punish me when I do this; it's that I've gone and behaved in 
ways that bring their own punishment.

Now, Lord, if you'd just do skywriting, it would be so much easier....

I rush home from church and, in my summery dress and dress sandals, hang 
out a small load of laundry. It may not air-dry by suppertime, but I can 
hope. I know that summer's end is inevitable, and that the next stage is 
glorious fall, but I'm not ready to give up on summer. Yet.



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