[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

*Squonk*

The church is cool and dim. We're in the choir stalls, as we always are for 
the Thursday noon reflective Eucharist, a small group that gets together 
every Thursday for a service full of intimate silences and for lunch in the 
church kitchen. We've just finished our prayers of the people, our 
intercessions and thanksgivings. I said aloud the names of friends who are 
struggling with cancer themselves or in their mates. Others spoke prayers 
for peace, for the marginalized, for the dying. Some gave thanks for the 
beauty of the day and for a depressed child's improvement. One man gave God 
thanks for the remarkable healing of a patient in hospital, a miracle.

At that, in the back of my mind, the mental equivalent of a small 
rubber-bulbed horn went *squonk!*

After the prayers of the people, we do confession in silence, and we take 
our time about it. Today, that *squonk* and I were sitting with each other 
and with God. I apologized fervently and silently for the doubt that 
forever dogs me. When one patient experiences a miraculous healing, I can't 
forget the guy in the next bed who died. When we pray to a God who is 
active in this world, I involuntarily remember that Dan Brown is a 
best-seller and Barbara Brown Taylor is not. When we pray to a God of 
peace, Darfur pops onto my mental screen. I look at the blissful faith of 
others the way a starving child might press her nose up against the 
candy-store window. But I can't seem to do unquestioning faith. God knows 
I've been trying for the last 20-ish years, but there's still that damned 
*squonk*.

It's not easy, trying to write Godstuff with this @#$% horn in my head. I 
have a theological mind, one that romps happily with other theologically 
minded people in the delicious fields of God-talk, but when it comes to 
faith (as opposed to belief), I am a rampant skeptic. It's a source of 
shame and discomfort. It always drives me a little bonkers when other 
people have a serious walk-talk divergence -- when they fail to integrate 
faith and life. But to quote Wolf's Law of Sin ("whenever you see a louse 
in someone else's hair, check your own scalp for nits of the same species") 
I'm in no position to criticize them The gap between my theology (the talk) 
and my involuntary skepticism (my walk) makes me feel like a hypocrite, 
dis-integrated. This, I know, is a Bad Thing. This is what I'm laying out 
to God in this cool dim church in confession.

But today, in the quietness there's a very small rumour of condolence -- of 
forgiveness and understanding. Something whispers to me that maybe doubt is 
a vocational thing for me. Maybe, just maybe, it's in my job description.

If I were a person of simple, unquestioning faith, I wouldn't be able to 
write towards the people who, like me, struggle with that damned *squonk*. 
I have to answer not just to my community of believers in space and time 
but also to my honest atheist -- the person who points out that God does 
not, in fact, always intervene to give people what they pray for, whatever 
the Gospel of Matthew might say. I have to struggle honestly with Biblical 
texts that seem false or even horrifying to me. I have to include the data 
that don't fit the curve. That's my job as a writer. It isn't easy, but 
I've never been one for easy.

I could take myself off the hook by abandoning either faith or writing, but 
those choices don't have that sense of rightness, of calling, that guides 
me and that I believe has an echo of the Spirit. I wish I could abandon 
skepticism, but it seems to refuse to abandon me. Paul spoke of the thorn 
in his side; it was a goad, driving him, never letting him abide in 
comfort. I don't seem to remember his getting over it, however hard he 
prayed. I have to trust that I'm made this way for a reason, and the reason 
has something to do with balancing my theological "bump" in important and 
honest ways.

There is, in Christianity (well, not in Christianity so much as in human 
nature), a terrible desire for *niceness* -- for happy endings, for the 
good being rewarded and the bad punished, for simple pray-and-you'll 
receive vending-machine theology. But that isn't what the Gospels are 
about. They're about struggle and difficulty, even death -- a shameful, 
agonizing death. You don't get to the Kingdom by ignoring reality; you get 
there by going head-first through struggle. The horns going *squonk* in our 
heads serve to keep faith honest.

But just for now, I have, in this moment of confession, a momentary sense 
of being scooped out of my hard pew and held briefly on a lap full of 
comfort and warmth, resting back against Love as quietly as a tired child 
in its parent's arms. I feel myself held gently, being told yes, exploring 
-- which is what doubt is really about -- is what some children are called 
to do. Not all, but some. I can accept the *squonk*-ing horn; it's there 
for good reasons.  I know I have been absolved and forgiven and in some 
deep sense set to right. It's all right. This is the way I'm supposed to be.

And then, rested and comforted, I demand to get down again and explore, and 
God lets me go, laughing, trusting in me always to come back, however far I 
may wander.




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All you can do is preach the Gospel. Then duck.  -- +Thomas Ely