From lupa at kos.net  Sat Apr  1 17:02:24 2006
From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf)
Date: Sat Apr  1 17:02:31 2006
Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing
Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.2.20060401103014.0293ecd8@post.kos.net>

The Neighbourhood

Simcoe, Maitland, Emily... the three block-long dead-end streets run south 
like the bars on a capital E, sandwiched between an apartment block on the 
east, the park on the west, lakefront on the south, and King Street (the 
upright of the E) on the north. Emily is the most handsome of the three, 
with its huge classical limestone houses serenely fronting the public face 
of the park. Simcoe and Maitland are architecturally odder, a mixture of 
the grand and the peculiar.  Maitland has, at its far end, the Kingston 
Yacht Club, a welter of slightly shabby stucco buildings.

I'd long wanted to explore these streets and I did so a day or two ago, 
when the weather was so gorgeous as to make walking obligatory. What 
fascinated me was the tangle of old buildings -- ex-stables, mews, 
storehouses, who knows? -- lurking just behind the street-side buildings.
There must be ways of cutting through from one street to another, through 
yards and gateways. There must be small walled gardens, inner courtyards, 
grown up mostly by accident and expediency. Whatever this area was, it 
wasn't planned.

I longed to push open a gate and see where it might lead me; maybe there'd 
be a laneway into another stableyard, another gated passage past a 
limestone wall out onto the next street... But I'm an adult. Adults don't 
trespass on other people's property. Adults know better than to intrude on 
other people's privacy. Adults think beforehand of the consequences of 
pushing into someone else's backyard and the potential for embarrassment if 
caught. Adults don't take that sort of risk.

It made me want to be a child again, because children can get away with 
trespass and intrusion; they're supposed to be finding odd ways through 
tangles of walls and into magical spaces. It's their job. It's their 
business to find shortcuts and secret ways and hidden passages and secret 
gardens. Turn a bunch of 8-year-olds loose with encouragement to trespass 
and within an afternoon, they would have swarmed the area and found every 
possible way through.

"Blessed are these little ones," Jesus says, and we can take that any six 
ways from Sunday. Blessed are the innocent (well, comparatively -- anyone 
who's dealt extensively with five-year-olds knows a thing or two about 
Original Sin). Blessed are the vulnerable and powerless and fragile. 
Blessed are those who aren't valued by our society -- children in Jesus' 
time were the lowest of the low, lacking any worth except perhaps to their 
parents.

But also, perhaps, blessed are those who are fearless and curious, as 
children can be; blessed are those who light out for the back alleys and 
push open gates and insist on penetrating the fascinating muddles that 
adults shun as being too problematic. Children aren't fearless -- anything 
but! -- but they have areas of fearlessness compared to adults. They have 
their notions of propriety, but they aren't the same as ours.

Maybe this isn't such a bad approach to faith. I know it's scary, feeling 
that we may be getting it wrong and making trouble for ourselves with God; 
we worry that if we trespass, we won't find forgiveness, only anger. Our 
God is a God who counts down from the top and has high expectations; what 
do you mean, you got A- in math when you could have gotten an A+? We may 
model our God on the worst of the adults who mattered most to us, parents 
whom we could never please, neighbours who yelled when we cut across their 
yard, teachers who were remote and uninterested, grownups who were large 
and powerful and not always benevolently inclined.

Or, if we're luckier and more hopeful, we have a sunnier and more merciful 
God, a God of peace and serenity, a God of love and mercy, a God who holds 
us safely. But is this a God who will let us wiggle down off God's lap and 
go boldly out in search of snails and garter snakes?

What about a God of mischief? What of a God who might delight in a bunch of 
8-year-olds swarming an old neighbourhood, rejoicing in eager exploration? 
What of a God who might indeed value curiosity and be willing to allow us 
to take risks, to make mistakes, to get it wrong, to trespass in the eager 
pursuit of understanding? What sort of God might that be?

Could we have faith in a God who loves us so much that he loves our 
curiosity? Now that we have indeed gone ahead and eaten of the tree of the 
knowledge of good and evil, and we've paid the price, perhaps we're 
supposed to go further, exploring more, using our intelligence, trusting 
enough to allow ourselves a certain fearlessness. Maybe it's our job to 
explore our own souls as I'd love to explore this warren of old buildings, 
finding out what's connected to where and how it all fits, or doesn't -- 
but above all, to learn, to pry, to discover.

I walk down Maitland Street, wishing I was eight again and able to get away 
with pushing open that particular gate, ducking down into this courtyard, 
finding the way through -- but I'm grown-up. I know better. I wish I didn't.

******************

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


From lupa at kos.net  Sat Apr  8 15:45:08 2006
From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf)
Date: Sat Apr  8 15:45:15 2006
Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing
Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.2.20060408101516.02911ea0@post.kos.net>

Mood

My dear friend Richard (hi Richard!) pinned me to the cyber-wall a 
couple-three weeks ago, pointing out that my waffling about what I should 
do for a living wasn't, in fact, mere waffling.  The old bootstrap 
therapies aren't working, he wrote with loving sternness; "you are at sea." 
And he made a simple suggestion: antidepressants. I've tried them before, 
but they'd made my gastrointestinal system intolerably grumpy, so I'd given 
up on them. Okay, Richard, we'll try again. I still had half a 
prescription. I called my doctor and set up an appointment and started 
faithfully popping one pink-and-grey capsule a day with my morning oatmeal.

This time, my GI system appears to have made its peace, or at least a 
truce, with the medication, but my mood hadn't. I'd forgotten, until 
yesterday, that one quite normal consequence of taking SSRIs is that you 
feel a lot worse before you feel better. Okay: that explains the sense of 
being wrapped in greyish damp-chilly cotton wool, a deep and pervasive 
gloom that stretches like an ill-defined but sticky webbing, reaching back 
in melancholy time and out into the ominous future, bleagh. Right. This is 
supposed to happen. It means the stuff is actually *working*.

In times like this, the practicing Christian is advised to turn to her 
Bible for comfort, and especially to the Gospels. So I cracked my old and 
battered paperback NRSV, the one with a very wise Pogo cartoon permanently 
enshrined in  the nether reaches of the lesser prophets, and looked for 
comfortable words. And of course what I got was Jesus ripping strips of the 
scribes and Pharisees. Oh, thanks. Just what I needed. I flipped around a 
bit and read of the forthcoming destruction of the Temple and times of 
tribulation and woe and all that. Some Christians seem to be able to scan 
the Gospels and take enormous joy and comfort in what they read; they fish 
those waters for the love of God and dredge it up by the shining, straining 
netload. I'm jealous; whenever I try, I always seem to fetch up with the 
slap-up-the-side-of-the-head passages.

But even in the Slough of venlafaxine-hydrochloride-enhanced Despond, my 
mind works theologically. It's a knack, like being able to curl one's 
tongue backward or balance on one foot for a minute at a time.  It may very 
well be that I'm getting the SUTSOTH passages because that's what I'm 
readiest to see. That's what I'm expecting. I expect to be classed with the 
harsh and unforgiving oppressors instead of with the oppressed, with the 
wolves instead of the beloved lambs, and therefore I am expecting a God 
who's persistently pissed off. If so, maybe I need to figure out where that 
particular God-of-my-imagination is coming from. Maybe I expect Jesus to be 
a harsh figure, pointing an accusatory finger at my own unforgiven hurts, 
not the tender shepherd or the faithful friend. Maybe I have trouble 
hearing love because for me it's been so problematic.  Maybe the deep anger 
I hear in the Gospel is my own. .

Theologically, I know that penitence shouldn't, in fact, be like this 
mood-dip, a further wallowing in misery. The moment at which we turn into 
the light of God's inseeing love, the moment we realize how flawed and 
imperfect we are, is the self-same moment at which we discover God's love, 
grace and forgiveness -- at least in theory, although I am by no means the 
only person who tends instead to wallow.  I know that the anger Jesus 
expresses in the Gospels is anger at whatever or whoever blocks God's love 
from the tender, vulnerable soul, not at those who struggle with their own 
sense of unworthiness. Jesus is protecting, not judging, those of us whose 
experience leaves us with deep and complicated scars to our own faith and 
forgiveness. He wants our healing, redemption, and reconciliation, not our 
being cast out into the darkness. I *know* all this. Nonetheless, I have 
always the same problem: getting that knowledge down past my larynx, 
especially at 5:30 in the morning, when the sirens singing of despair are 
particularly fetching.

But. You go on. You put one foot in front of the other, because that's what 
needs to be done. I look out on a sunny late-mud-season day; the tulips are 
up, and scilla and crocii are already blooming, and soon it will be mild 
enough to hang the laundry out. The air is full of mating-season birds and 
the geese are back. Whatever my struggles with the Word as written, the 
Word as created is still, as always, a comfortable Word. Not just in the 
new "nice" sense of the word, but in the old: cum + fortis, to be 
strong-with, to strengthen. Gerard's Herball says that clove gilliflower 
"doth wonderfully comfort the Heart" -- meaning not that it makes you feel 
better emotionally, but that it's a cardiac tonic.

I have to trust that sooner or later the pills will indeed "wonderfully 
comfort" my mood and will help me get back energy, direction, and 
hopefulness.  In time I will be able to scan the Word and hear the 
comfortable (in both sense) words. Meanwhile, I'm going to get my hair cut 
and wallow for a blessed half-hour in Debbie's unfailing love, and tomorrow 
there's church -- singing is always, always good for my soul.  I'll look 
out for gleaming light on the water and listen for the croon of mourning 
doves and do my level best to trust that "all will be well, and all will be 
well, and all manner of things will be well". For real, I hope and trust, 
and not just in the Life to Come.

******************

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


From lupa at kos.net  Sun Apr 16 18:08:07 2006
From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf)
Date: Sun Apr 16 18:08:14 2006
Subject: [SB] Easter Sabbath Blessing
Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.2.20060416125834.028afec0@post.kos.net>

Turn, Turn, Turn
(with thanks to Richard Ascough, who pointed out the problem)

"But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to 
look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body 
of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They 
said to her, 'Woman, why are you weeping?' She said to them, 'They have 
taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.' When she 
had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did 
not know that it was Jesus.  Jesus said to her, ' Woman, why are you 
weeping? Whom are you looking for?' Supposing him to be the gardener, she 
said to him, 'Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have 
laid him, and I will take him away.' Jesus said to her, 'Mary!' She turned 
and said to him in Hebrew 'Rabbouni!' (which means Teacher)." -- John 20:11-16

Try this. Stand up from your desk and look under it, as though you are Mary 
looking down into the tomb, trying to see what's going on. Now, turn and 
face away from the desk; pretend there's someone in your doorway, someone 
you don't recognize. You talk to this person for a minute, and then he says 
your name. And you turn --

-- you turn. Which way? You're already facing the man, remember. What 
direction do you turn in? Toward your desk, turning your back on him? A 
quarter-way around, so you're looking at the wall or out the window instead 
of at him? This doesn't make any sense.  Mary has already turned to look at 
the man who is Jesus. Why should she turn again?

We always get into trouble when we try to take the Bible too literally; it 
breaks down very quickly if we see it as mere empirical observation.  It 
only yields its meaning up when we back away from simple black-and-white 
and begin to see a pattern that has very little to do with factual accuracy 
and everything to do with truth.  The word "turn" is a good example.

Turns don't necessarily have to be physical rotations. "To turn, turn, 
turn, will be our delight" might be a Shaker's spinning dance, or it might 
be a process of exploring, turning back, exploring again, turning back, or 
it might be a heart turning from one god to Another. The seasons turn, but 
not literally.  "To everything, turn, turn, turn, there is a season, turn, 
turn, turn, and a time for every purpose under heaven," Peter Seeger sings. 
My extremely large Webster's gives the word "turn" more than two full, 
large, three-column pages in tiny, tiny type. It's a small word exploding 
with meaning.

It's a small moment exploding with meaning too. Consider: the angels call 
Mary "woman", as so often women in the New Testament are called by their 
gender, not their true names. The "gardener" calls her "woman" too. It's 
when Jesus gives her her true name -- when he calls out not to all of 
womankind, but to this one particular absolutely-unlike-any-other 
God-created individual woman, that something in her turns and sees who he 
really is.

Giving her her name makes a tiny seismic shift, as though something in the 
universe had popped into a new place. Jesus isn't just dead-and-risen for 
the whole of humankind, to bring us into alignment with God's ultimate 
purposes; it's not only a matter of grandeur and millennia and salvation 
and all those things -- although they too are true. It's also a matter of 
intimacy. There is no either-or here, only a both-and.

These two are friends, after all; this is a woman who dearly loved this man 
as her friend and teacher. This is someone utterly desolated by her loss, 
with no understanding as she weeps, helpless and bewildered, that maybe it 
wasn't a loss at all but a transformation. And suddenly, when she hears her 
name, her whole world swings around in its tracks and heads in an 
incredible new direction.  She has been turned by his calling out to her.

The moment happens so quietly, without any fuss or to-do, in a place of 
grey, dewy quietness, with no apparent glory: plain rock and perhaps a few 
plants and the first uncertain light of morning. There's been all sorts of 
glory in churches last night and this morning, paschal fires blazing up, 
splendid chants and anthems and processions and wonderful rich vestments, 
organs and trumpets bellowing seemly joy -- and more power be to these 
things; they express something real and rich.

But for me, the turning of my heart seems to happen mostly in quiet dusty 
places where nothing much is going on. It's in silent dawn-light places 
where I weep in desolation that someone I'd just about given up on calls me 
out by name, and something in me turns and wants to answer.

******************

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


From lupa at kos.net  Sat Apr 22 14:12:01 2006
From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf)
Date: Sat Apr 22 14:12:18 2006
Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing
Message-ID: <7078.153.106.4.93.1145715121.squirrel@www.kos.net>

Endings

The grief, when it came, was something I?d expected. It?s like watching a
long death: you know it?s going to happen, and then there?s the moment
when it does, and in that moment there?s a sort of peace because it?s done
and over with.
	Four books: they?ve garnered good praise but not the sales I needed. So
that?s that. There will be no fifth, unless I choose to publish on my
own. I was expecting this word and I heard it yesterday.
	It isn?t something I could rail against, even if I wanted. The fact is
that most writers don?t make it ? that?s just the way of the business.
And I was writing in an area (faith) and in a form (essays) that are
notorious non-sellers.
	Of course there?s sorrow; it?s a death of sorts, and I cried a little
when I found out, but I also felt at peace because I?d known this was
coming and it?s good to get it over with.
	But two things came to me:
	First: now I can go back to writing Godstuff purely for God?s sake,
accepting the impermanence of my pieces, not having to worry what happens
to the words. They float free out into cyberspace, and what happens to
them after all doesn?t matter. It?s an odd liberation. I don?t have to be
?on?. It?s returning to where I began, and so in a sense it?s a
homecoming.
	Second, I?m at the Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing this
weekend.  I?ve had a marvelous time talking to writers who have succeeded
and likely will go on succeeding.(hi Ellen! Hi Delia!) Bless them, may
their royalties ever increase. But their way lies in one direction and
mine now lives in another. It?s as though they?re big rigs on a
superhighway, and I?ve just turned my small car off, taken the exit,
heading down a quiet side road into country I?ve never explored.
	I don?t know what the next thing will be; I don?t know where I?m intended
to go now. I do know, though, that I?m still travelling with God. Maybe
it?s just habit; I don?t know. The presence sits beside me. There?s a
quietness here; it?s just the two of us now, companionable. The funny
thing is that I?ve come away from the death more faith-full and trusting
than I could have expected. I?m still in your hands, Lord; just let me
know what you want me to do.
	I?m sorry; this isn?t graceful or poetic or especially inspired. But
sometimes we?re called to stand in plain and quiet places, and that?s
where I seem to be. But perhaps all landscapes, properly considered, have
their holiness. This one too.

From lupa at kos.net  Sat Apr 29 19:36:56 2006
From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf)
Date: Sat Apr 29 19:37:03 2006
Subject: [SB] thanks
Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.2.20060429152852.0290b098@post.kos.net>

I wanted to thank everyone who's written me in the last week in response to 
the last SB. I should write you each personally, and I will try to get 
around to that, but at the moment, I'm a bit overwhelmed. Yesterday my son 
Ross and his young woman Georgiana (who was my beloved friend and "other 
daughter" long before she and Ross became An Item) left to take up 
residence in Toronto. My dear friend Connie Jones wrote a marvellous book 
called _She's Leaving Home_ that talks about the grief parents go through 
when they release their kids into the world. Grief's appropriate, as this 
process is a "death-in-life" -- a real loss of something precious. I don't 
think we're ever really ready to let the children go -- especially two at 
once! -- and yet we must.

So: I'd appreciate your prayers and patience as I struggle with 
considerable grief. I know God is with me, and that grief is just something 
to weather and will ease with time. I thank you all for your support. Pray 
for the kids too, as they begin their new life.

All blessings --
Molly


