[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Garlic

It feels more like March than like January; warm, open weather that's 
erased most of the remnants of the big snowstorm we had a month ago. I'm 
grateful for the weather because with fuel prices what they are, the poor 
in this city would be having it even tougher than usually if we were having 
a proper High Winter. Each day the sunlight gets longer and stronger as we 
swing back towards the Sun, which lifts higher off the south horizon. It's 
easy to be cheerful when you can go outside in sneakers and shirtsleeves, 
at least for a little while.

Is it the lengthening of the days that causes the annual Garlic Problem? It 
might be at home, where my basket with the garlic heads sits facing a south 
window. That might explain why all the cloves of garlic (and the onions in 
the onion basket, for that matter) are sending out shoots. I pick up a head 
of garlic and there, under the strong, papery skin, I see the trace of 
green. Another head already has pushed shoots out into the open air. Garlic 
doesn't keep well, this time of year.

But the same thing happens to the garlic in the supermarket, where there 
are no windows and the only light is brash fluorescent. When I went to pick 
up some fresh garlic, the bulbs showed the same curl of green under the 
papery skin.  The part of me that did a B.Sc. in biology 
however-many-years-ago wondered what the "time to sprout!" signal is. It 
doesn't seem to be photo-activated; could it be chemical? number of cell 
divisions? literally a matter of timing? I should check this out, but I 
don't have time to google garlic-science because I'm already late and I 
have to get my bread started.

But driving home from the supermarket, I thought of the blessedness of 
plants, which naturally turn toward growth and the light. Maybe garlic 
doesn't keep well in the first months of the new year, but it's a 
tremendously encouraging thing to watch its insistence on sprouting and 
striving to grow into the fullness of healthy garlic-hood.

I wish people were more like that.

I would like to believe that it's in human nature to want to be healthy and 
integrated and pointed Godward -- and truthfully, I think most people are. 
I'd like to believe that human beings are innately good and loving. But if 
that's the case, we're far too easily set awry.

It's not just that this is a messed-up world; it is both that and a 
glorious place. It's that I've seen that people can choose to do the 
opposite of what garlic does: instead of naturally growing toward the 
Light, they seem to shrink away from it. Instead of seeking healthiness and 
integration, they jealously guard the knots in their heads. Instead of 
reaching for spiritual health, they protect those head-knots from 
inspection and intervention, strenuously rejecting any self-knowledge or 
insight. Instead of integration, they dis-integrate: walk over here, talk 
over there, and let's not look at any discrepancies.  Keep everything 
neatly compartmentalized and don't open the compartments. I am a good and 
nice person and don't anyone even hint that maybe my actions are less than 
perfect, because if they do, I will go for your jugular.

This is (sadly) normal enough; what's especially painful is that it seems 
to happen as often as it does among religious people. God is loving and 
merciful, but some of God's more seriously head-knotted ground troops are 
anything but.  It's easy to take refuge in "spirituality", and especially 
in piety, while striving with might and main to avoid dealing with one's 
own Issues. Anyone who hangs around with churchy people has seen the 
pattern. And it's terrifyingly easy for the rest of us to feel we're being 
loving when we're really enabling for this sort of behaviour.

The problem is not just that challenging this pattern is very apt to get 
one clobbered. (See "going for jugular" comment, above.) The deeper and 
more entrenched the pattern, the greater the need to protect it with layer 
upon layer of defences. Dig the trenches deeper; heap high the ramparts; 
crown the fortifications with sharpened stakes, set to gut the enemy. The 
more "but there's something not right here," the more strenuous the denial.

This is where faith is such a blessed thing to have. When I get close to 
someone like this, I know that it's strictly "let go and let God". I can't 
challenge this pattern; to do so is both risky and counterproductive. 
Sometimes we've just got to live with someone who's dug in. Sometimes we 
have to walk away.  It's not my job to storm the fortress and liberate the 
shivering soul within it and set him or her to rights. As the joke about 
the psychiatrist and the light bulb says, "First the light bulb has to want 
to change."

I've learned this the very hard way, but it's a lesson I intend to take 
firmly to heart. The head-knots I'm responsible for are my own, and the 
only person I can heal is myself, although with a little blessed luck, my 
love for another person might help him or her in the healing process. If 
I'm saddened by this pattern, at least I can learn from it. There is, after 
all, nothing better than a really bad example.

(for Jacobus, with love)

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

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