[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

One Right Way

My friend Ardyth, who is on the torturous path of qualifying as a master 
spinner according to the protocols of the Ontario Handweavers and Spinners 
Guild, knows how to card fleece the right way, and she has repeatedly shown 
me what the right way is. Placing my hands correctly on the two hand cards 
(slightly curved paddles with bent wire spikes, like a dog brush) she shows 
me how to tease the wool fibres out lightly and gently, turning the hand 
cards over and changing the stroking motion, breaking up the locks, 
transferring the fibre to one card, and then rolling up the light and 
fluffy stuff into a fat wool-and-air sausage called a rolag. In Ardyth's 
small but capable hands, the process is seemly and graceful; it takes her 
only a moment or two to produce a handsome rolag. I fumble to follow her 
movements and to remember them -- to make them automatic for my own hands.

Doesn't work.

Turn me loose with two hand cards and some fleece and I will indeed produce 
light and fluffy rolags that spin up well -- but as I card, my elbows are 
poking out, my hand posture is atrocious, I have to work about three times 
as hard as Ardyth, and I'm courting repetitive stress injury.  I don't seem 
to be able to do it the right way; I've tried, but my hands won't go there. 
They want to do this wool-carding business in their own way.

It's not just Ardyth, either; Maura, a spinning maven, watched me try to 
flick-card Romney locks and winced. My technique (or lack of it) caused her 
actual pain  She showed me how to do it right, using a small dog comb to 
break up the locks of wool into soft, open, spinnable fluffs. I tried. It 
didn't work. I went back to doing it my way. The same went for combing 
wool; I'm comfortable using the big lethal-looking combs, with their jagged 
teeth set at right angles to the wooden handles; I sweep them back and 
forth fearlessly and pull off the lovely fluffy white rovings -- but not 
the way I'm supposed to.  I horrify Maura. I don't dare prepare fleece in 
front of anyone who actually knows how to card, flick, or comb. I don't do 
it right.

I have spent just about all of my fifty-we-won't-say-how-many-more years 
toddling along behind my seniors who knew what the right way of doing this 
is, without my being able to copy them. It started with my older sister, 
whose infant nickname was "The Little Colonel". She always knew what was 
the right way of doing things, and it was not my way. She is 
left-handed.  I am naturally right-handed. I am the only right-handed 
person I know who writes left-handed because there was only One Right Way 
to hold a pencil (spoon, whatever) and that was in the left hand. My sister 
knew that for a fact. I was, at two or three, her obedient disciple.

Likewise, I took on what my elders said about how to be a person of faith 
-- about how it was a matter of discipline, service, selflessness, 
forgiveness, self-abnegation, obedience, modesty, seeing God as 
unimaginably Other. They knew better than I did, after all. It didn't occur 
to them, or to me, that this approach also happens to be a perfect set-up 
for accepting long-term abuse -- which, in fact, it is.  (Workers in 
shelters for abused women tend not to be fond of Christianity, for that 
reason.) It is also an approach that badly neglects some crucial concepts: 
love, for example, or joy. One was supposed to get to joy through this way 
of profound service, and by no other path.  Joy through suffering -- but 
sometimes all that lies on the other side of suffering is more suffering.

But what if this is one place where we aren't in the least like God?  What 
if (to contradict Leonard Woolf) the arrival, not the journey, matters?

Yes, I card/flick/comb wool all wrong by the experts' methods, but I still 
produce pretty good spinning, and it's getting better, and I don't have 
carpal tunnel syndrome and I haven't impaled myself on my ferocious wool 
combs.  My ways are not seemly or masterful, but my body and the cards or 
combs and the fleece seem to have arrived at a sort of practical understanding.

Maybe God isn't so concerned about whether or not we're moving in God's 
direction in a correct, proper, seemly sort of way; maybe God is not about 
controlled and careful motions. Maybe God is just plain glad that we 
*noticed*, and God is delighted that we're turned around and are headed in 
God's general direction.

Maybe there isn't One Right Way. Maybe there are any number of right ways, 
depending on the individual and the season and the moon's phase and 
whatever. Maybe we're allowed to fall off the right way and into the 
bramblebushes, because we are all happily sinners and we don't have the 
Right Way (or God) taped. And maybe that's okay.

Maybe this faith journey isn't about fear and control and correctness and 
doing it all right. Maybe it's about simply *doing* the journey, in trust 
and honesty and true integrity, in whatever way seems best for us wherever 
we are, whoever we are -- although always with the understanding that the 
other people on the journey may know a thing or two that we don't, and that 
it behoves us not to reinvent the wheel.  Maybe it's at least partly about 
being goofy and creative and trusting deeply in God's love and mercy and 
willingness to see that we really are *trying* the best we can. Maybe God 
gives good intentions and hopefulness more credit that we can ask or 
imagine. Isn't that a radical thought?

I do hope so. It's not that I don't want to follow my olders and betters; 
it's not that I think that my way is better than theirs. It's that my hands 
want to hold the hand cards *this* way, and no other. It may not be 
correct. But it's the way my hands work; don't fix it.