[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Snowflakes

It wasn't until well into middle age that I finally figured it out: I'm 
really right-handed.

Yes, I know that sounds strange. Most people figure out this handedness 
business sometime in kindergarten -- and I do distinctly remember 
considerable debate when I was five or six about whether I should be right- 
or left-handed. Parents then were told to look at which hand the child used 
to pick up a spoon, and I picked up spoons more often with my left hand 
than with my right. My parents were good liberals of the Dr. Spock era; 
they therefore fostered my left-handedness. I had enormous trouble learning 
how to write, but we put that down to poor manual dexterity, which has, in 
fact, been a feature of my entire life.

It wasn't until almost half-a-century later that I realized something: I 
use my right hand to open doors, cut with scissors, iron shirts, handle a 
kitchen knife, use a computer mouse, polish silver, pick up the paper. In 
weaving, my good selvedges are the right-hand ones. I only use my left hand 
to write with and for a few other purposes.  I'm not a leftie. I'm not even 
a natural mixed-dominant. I'm right-handed.

So what happened?

I am 13 months younger than my exceedingly strong-minded elder sister, who 
has always known the Way Things Should Be and who laid down the law for me 
from the time I was in diapers. Her infant nickname was "the little 
colonel". She taught me to read and write when she was in Grade 1 and I was 
in kindergarten. She oversaw my early development, briskly and with martial 
authority. She routinely clobbered me, ostensibly for the good of my soul, 
in adolescence and young adulthood.

And she is naturally left-handed.

Nobody now could remember, including the two of us, but I suspect that she 
told me in no uncertain terms that THIS is the way we hold the spoon or the 
crayon. And always wanting to please her, I agreed. Yes; you know. You're 
older. You're the authority.

It was a pattern with consequences. My manual dexterity is terrible, unless 
I can take a task very slowly and deliberately; I can sew a neat seam, but 
I have to fight constantly to keep my handwriting from turning into a 
scrawl -- a major hassle in hard-page editing, where extreme graphological 
perfectionism is the norm. When I was little, I couldn't play jacks or 
reliably catch a ball. I cannot play the guitar or piano worth beans; my 
fingers won't move quickly and well.  Knitting is a hassle. Weaving isn't, 
because it doesn't require much manual dexterity.

It's okay; I've adapted. (And perhaps it has its benefits; mixed dominants 
apparently do better after strokes than strongly-handed people because our 
wiring involves both cerebral hemispheres and we can transfer functions to 
the non-damaged hemisphere more easily. Ideally, that applies to acquired 
mixed-dominances as well.)

But yesterday, I discovered something incredibly neat. It's a website 
that's donating money to the dear old Sally Ann. When people design and 
submit e-snowflakes, money goes to the Salvation Army.* The website sets up 
a snowflake, like the paper ones we used to make in elementary school, and 
you click and drag to make the cuts that unfold into sixfold symmetry.

Now, cutting and dragging is a place where all my manual klutziness 
surfaces big-time. I cannot draw a straight line or a wiggle-free curve 
with a mouse. It's just not on.

But with the sixfold symmetry, it doesn't matter. I can make the ugliest, 
klutziest cuts and they turn into beauty when they're times six.

I tried, over and over, dragging the mouse around, making ungainly 
displeasing loops and clumsy inserts to the triangle of "paper", and 
without exception, my snowflakes were awesome. Beautiful. Some formal, some 
bold, some intricate, some lace-like, but without exception, gorgeous.

It has been borne home upon me recently that maybe God is quite capable of 
doing things like this -- of taking our brokenness, ugliness, neediness, 
seediness, all our slashes and lopped-off bits, our gulfs of disgrace and 
shame and disappointment, and quietly unfolding them into beauty. In fact, 
my snowflakes were (forgive me!) far more beautiful than those of people 
who had meticulously aimed for symmetry and who clearly had great manual 
control.

My weird (non)handedness is part of the package now, like the ugly teeth 
and the crazy hair and the inherited rosacea and the figure issues. If I 
ever had any beauty in the world's sense (and I never had much), it's gone 
now. What I have to learn to accept -- and it is not easy -- is that our 
sense of ugliness is a function of our own perfectionism, our holding 
ourselves up against the world's standards that we can never, ever meet, 
not against God's gift of love and grace. God never demands that we get it 
right; God only asks us to be integral, authentic -- and that's not often 
beautiful. God's grace operates sixfold, opening up what seems to be crude 
and ungainly into an extraordinary beauty that we can't begin to foresee. 
In God's eyes, the more broken we are, the more beautiful. I know: it's not 
easy. But it's true.

Wildness times six equals extraordinary elegance, plus authenticity and 
strength. Woundedness times faith equals a richer, deeper, sweeter, more 
authentic grace -- if we're just willing to allow it.


For Bob Hales+, and for MJW and JMW