[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

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.