[SB] Sabbath Blessing (a little late)

[Molly Wolf]

Pentecost 2006

(for Bob Hales, who strong-armed me)

It was most peculiar. I'd put on church clothes and my godfather's big 
silver cross and got myself to church in good time to suit up for choir. 
But when I walked into the choir room, it was as though a large, soft, 
solid, invisible hand stopped me in my tracks, turned me around and walked 
me back out the door. "I'll stay for church," I told the choir director, 
but the hand was having nothing of that. It gently propelled me back to my 
car and drove me home. I changed into jeans and a shirt, started a load of 
laundry, and then hunted for my car keys as the hand guided me ineluctably 
to my car and back to church, where I sat in a back row and wept silently 
for most of the service.
	
I *said* it was most peculiar.

This has been happening a lot lately. On Thursday, waking grumbly and 
contrary-wise, I resolved to skip the mid-day reflective Eucharist and 
subsequent lunch. I've had enough hard times with churchy people that I 
have a nasty cynical streak, and it was chattering away like a demented 
squirrel. I called up the other Thursday point person, St. Bev of the 
Kitchen, and excused myself. Nonetheless, my body took a different decision 
and I fetched up sitting there in the cool silence, praying. The lunch 
bunch made it very clear that they wanted me there not for what I do in the 
way of lunch-setting-up-work, but because they miss me when I'm not present.

The hand pushed me out for a good long walk, when I took streets that I 
never walk down and waved at faces that I didn't know belonged there.  The 
hand nudged me into a downtown shop, where I found a friend who's going 
through Interesting Times, and we went for coffee, and I was (I hope) of 
some practical help to her. The hand has been doing that ever since: a 
nudge here, a stop there, a slight shift of direction, a question asked out 
of the blue to someone I didn't know at all well. And it's all been 
startlingly fruitful.

*Extremely* peculiar.

All of a sudden, it feels as though God's fingerprints are all over my 
life, my quibbling, whining, grousing doubt to the contrary; it's as though 
God and Doubt are playing checkers for my soul and God's getting all the 
double jumps. This morning in church, for example: it turns out that I had 
a significant piece of mourning to do, but I had to be lined up for it just 
right -- and I was. It was okay, because my church is used to me losing it 
during the service, but my soul needed to be reminded of that. And after 
church, the Godincidences kept whipping around and banging into place like 
the staircases at Hogwarts, people-contacts arranging and rearranging 
themselves in brilliantly productive ways. My mind has nothing to do with 
this; I couldn't plan it, even if I wanted to. It all just -- happens.

The evidence for doubt is so strong that sometimes we forget (or at least I 
do) the evidence for faith. I wonder if perhaps it's because impatience and 
doubt/anxiety are so closely related, two hamsters chasing around on the 
same wheel, propelling themselves faster and faster: yes, but I don't *see* 
the miracle anywhere on the horizon; therefore there is no miracle.  I 
forget that God operates in God's time, which is not my time, and that God 
operates in God's ways, which are more often at the micro than the 
grandiose level. God does not stick out a catcher's mitt to stop airplanes 
from flying into office towers. God does, however, bring  slow, 
incremental, infinitesimally small but ultimately successful healing to a 
person who's open to it.

We like to think of the Holy Spirit as a grand, important character, 
bursting into upper chambers and scattering tongues of fire around -- and 
sometimes that does indeed happen. But sometimes the Holy Spirit is 
quieter, sneakier, more subtle. Sometimes we need to look at the small 
stuff to see where God's hands have been.

I just have to listen, to be open to that loving, nudging hand, to be 
willing to cross the street I hadn't intended to cross -- to show up, pay 
attention, and not hang on to the outcomes. A reasonably way of operating, 
I think.

Thanks for the nudges, my dear.