[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Ice

We've had the mildest winter I can recollect in the twenty-some years I've 
spent in this province (Ontario), but last week, briefly, it turned cold. 
Not real-cold, but cold enough to freeze at least the nearer edges of the 
lake. When I drove home from downtown this afternoon, it all looked quite 
beautiful; a winter-blue sky coming down to the glittering sunlit open 
water, and opalescent ice nearer the shore, dotted with tiny black figures. 
People were out there, some with their dogs. It wasn't skatable ice -- too 
rough for that. But clearly it was strong enough to walk on.

I shuddered at the very idea. I know it's cowardly, but I have never set 
foot on lake ice and I have no intention of ever trying. I don't like ice 
at the best of times; it's slippery, after all, and I hate falling -- hate 
even worse the horrible moment when you feel your feet going out from under 
you and know the inevitable. (CBC's "Wanted Words" has come up with a word 
for the horrible little dance one does at that very moment: "Ice kaputs".) 
It's the indignity as much as the physical pain.

But to stand on ice with cold, cold water dancing right below the surface 
-- no. I'm not going there, not ever. Doesn't matter if a dozen people 
grouped closely together could jump up and down without breaking through: I 
still don't trust the stuff. Intellectually, I know that under the right 
conditions, lake ice gets thick enough that you can drive a car across it; 
there's an established ice bridge (for example) between the mainland and 
the eastern reaches of that almost-island, Prince Edward County. But this 
isn't an intellectual thing; it's a gut thing. There's *water* under there, 
and it's COLD. Every step I took, I'd be waiting for the stuff to yield 
under my foot and imagining trying to pull myself back out, sodden, frozen, 
clinging to the sharp edges -- no. Absolutely not.

This is not an unreasonable attitude to take. Not walking on lake ice isn't 
anything like a deprivation; there's nothing that says I have to try it. 
I'm not having to rearrange my life in significant ways to avoid going out 
there. At least 99.9% of the human species will never walk on lake ice, and 
it won't hurt them one bit. (Although if global warming keeps up, that 
figure may begin to approach 100%.) There really isn't any reason for me 
ever to have to set foot on the stuff, if I don't want to.

It did, however, occur to me that I all too often take the same position on 
God's good providence for me that I do about lake ice. I just don't trust 
it.  Intellectually, I may believe in it, but at a real level --? Maybe for 
people who've had easy lives (they do exist, don't they?) that sort of 
faith may come easy but for the rest of us, providence seems to give way 
underfoot on a regular basis, at least on a practical level.

It makes it hard to argue with non-believers: "If God really does look 
after people of faith, why don't they have it easier?" I don't have a ready 
answer to that one, except perhaps that "having it easy" may not be 
providential. That certainly isn't the lesson of history in any time or any 
place.  To think that faith is somehow going to protect us from life's 
elbows is not terribly realistic; if it were, we wouldn't be in the forty 
days leading up to the Crucifixion.

What may be providential is figuring out what we're going to do with the 
not-easy stuff.   That we are not loved in the ways that we need to be 
loved may lead us deeper into the bramblebush of fearful self-pity, or it 
may become a call to give more than we've been given.  We've suffered hurt: 
well, we can resent or we can at least point ourselves in the direction of 
forgiveness. We've been disappointed by this world's standards: we can see 
ourselves as failures, or we can quarrel vigorously with those standards. 
We feel like losers: we can align ourselves with those who are lost.

And we can choose. There's nothing that drives me out to walk out on lake 
ice; I can choose never to do that. Or I can ask myself what draws other 
people out onto such a risky surface -- what they've learned to trust, that 
I still fear. I don't *need* to walk out on the ice, and maybe I'll never 
do so. But then I will have chosen a constriction instead of a liberation; 
my world will be just a little bit smaller when it could be a little bit 
bigger.

Maybe not this winter. Maybe next. But I'm not going to say "never", not now.

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

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