[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

The Bundle

It's fascinating, having a roommate -- because that's what Katrina is, 
really. We're not related; we don't share the same expectations or habits. 
Our assumptions about the world are different. It's okay, though, because 
one of the cultural expectations of this household is that differences 
aren't wrong, just different. Yes, we have our ways of doing things, but 
when they're different from Kat's, it's not "do it our way" but "is this 
the way we should be doing things?" The answer is sometimes yes: this 
household puts much more emphasis on recycling and environmental issues 
than Kat is used to. Sometimes the answer is no: CBC FM does not have to be 
the only radio station played in this house. Yes, there is a reason why I 
load the dishwasher this way; no, there's nothing wrong with watching TV on 
Saturday afternoon just because I never do it.

I'm especially aware of this these days because Kat's arrival has 
catapulted me into reexamining the values I grew up with -- for instance, 
the automatic assumption that every single family member would go straight 
on to university right after high school, and that was that. My kids have 
had to break my tight grasp of that one, finger by finger, and it was hard 
on all of us. Or assumptions about money, prosperity, careers, success: for 
a family that claimed to be profoundly Christian, we were really awfully 
seriously focused on this world's godlets. Or assumptions about 
intelligence and feminine sexuality (you could be bright or attractive, but 
not both). I spent a lot of time in the last week writing out stuff from 
the past, walking around it, kicking the tires, and seeing how stale and 
old and wrong so much of it was.

Don't get me wrong: I like custom and tradition as well as the next 
Anglican. But I'm also aware that our ancestors handed us down a package of 
very mixed goods including both Christian beliefs and cultural values that, 
in fact, were completely contradictory to the message of the Christ. It's 
been one of the major blessings of the collapse of old Christendom that we 
can now open that package and sort out the contents. God tells us to trust 
in God's providence for us; culture says "make sure you're all set for a 
comfy retirement". God says "I came to sit with the most beaten-up and 
despised of this world"; culture teaches us "devil takes the hindmost". And 
up until a generation or so ago, parent handed the whole belief-package to 
child and child passed it on to grandchild, without anyone questioning its 
inherent rightness or paying much heed to the rampant inconsistencies. If 
some child in the crowd pointed out the problem, we'd shrug and say, 
"Christianity is all very well and good, but we have to live in *this* world."

Well, yes we do, and no we don't.

It's been a good exercise, unpacking the parcel my own parents handed me 
and examining the contents, holding the Christian stuff in one hand and the 
world stuff in the other, rather like matching socks. "Take responsibility 
for your own actions": yes, that's a good one, matches Christ's call for 
self-awareness and repentance.  "God helps those who help themselves" -- 
wait a minute, that's not an evangelist, it's Benjamin Franklin.  "You must 
come to terms with what's hurt you and struggle towards forgiveness": yup, 
there's a Gospel match.  "If you're intelligent, there's no excuse for your 
not getting straight As" -- nope, no match. I found myself at the end with 
a satisfactory number of matched socks, but also with a fair number of 
mateless ones: in one pile, beliefs that had no real Christian root but 
were simply upper-middle WASP traditions, handed down unexamined, and in 
the other some Gospel stuff that lacked a cultural equivalent, like "love 
your enemy" and "give all to the poor".

But I had to be pushed into opening the parcel in the first place, 
something Kat's presence forced me to do. One problem with parcels like 
this is that up until fairly recently, we weren't supposed to examine them. 
We still aren't, in some church cultures. It never fails to astonish me 
that there are denominations out there in which our duty to the poor isn't 
part of the package at all, whereas "family values" -- which have very 
little Gospel support -- occupy an  enormous amount of space. It's a case 
in which people have simply passed the bundle without taking a serious look 
at what it contains. Likewise, there are parishes that worship the music, 
or the building, or the rector, or the collective long-standing 
dysfunctional patterns; nobody's questioned whether or not these objects of 
adoration should really be sitting in God's spot, because the parish has 
simply passed the bundle, unquestioned.

It explains why people can do something that's been driving me nuts for 
years: sit in the pews, week after week after week, without apparently 
taking any of this Godstuff in. If Mr. Horsenbach's hereditary parcel tells 
him that people who pay their bills and their taxes, keep their lawns 
mowed, go to church regularly, and don't get in trouble with the law are 
good people, then Mr. Horsenbach *knows* that he's a good person. Calls to 
repentance are going to sail right past him because he's met a defined 
standard for goodness, and the calls are to sinners, of which he is not 
one.   The fact that he's slandering the parish priest to the bishop is not 
on his "no-go" list and is therefore not sinful; it is, in fact, righteous 
behaviour because the priest isn't looking after the rectory lawn and 
*that's* sin.

But if we open our hereditary parcels and look, *really* look, at the 
contents, we're free to do some extremely hard and useful work. We're able 
to say "No, I don't have to fit this pattern, and I don't have to pass it 
along." We're liberated to take the Gospel seriously and see how far we can 
run with it, instead of assuming it's only there for decorative 
purposes.  We might find healing for old wounds, when unquestioned 
traditions were destructive. We might find new ways of being, fresh 
pathways to explore. We may choose to retain, or to discard, whatever isn't 
Gospel-mated, depending on how well it works. We may keep old songs and 
write some new ones and set others aside for someone else to sing. But the 
essential thing is that we'll have gone through the parcel with a loving 
but critical eye and come out with something that's now *ours*.

I plan to pass this model along to my kids. It's a tradition I think I'd 
like to hand down to them, one that they can open and explore, about which 
they can make their own decisions. I could leave them worse things.


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