[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Calm and Civil

A woman I once knew quoted her very British father-in-law as saying 
"Emotion is quite acceptable, as long as it is calmly and rationally 
expressed." She always said that this little _mot_ said volumes about her 
father-in-law. I say it says volumes about a whole approach to things.

Living, as I do, in that still-neocolonial and very strange southeastern 
wedge of Ontario, much of which would really sooner be under the rule of 
the Dear Old Queen (Victoria, of course), I am painfully aware of this 
approach to things. I hate saying that it's British, because the Brits are 
good folks too. Let's just say it's part of the Victorian colonial 
heritage, and a part that (like so many other heirlooms) has taken on a 
life of its own around here. Emotion is simply not in very good taste. 
Reason, dignity, restraint, civility, self-discipline, independence -- 
these are all excellent things in their way and in their place. But they 
have become not ways of living a good life; they have become ways of 
holding emotion very firmly at arm's length. We are not going to touch 
pinky-fingers with this feeling-stuff, because it is yucky. (And scary.)

I am one for reason, dignity, restraint, and all those good things, 
although I fear I honour them more in theory than in practice. (Okay, I've 
got an oversized laugh and I cry easily. Deal with it.) But I also believe 
that sometimes the ancients had it right: we need those lines of 
professional mourners, beating their breasts and tearing their robes and 
ululating to the skies. Because while reason needs to be honoured, so does 
feeling.

That seems so self-evident in this age of self-indulgence -- but is it? 
Feeling isn't about self-indulgence; it is, in fact, a form of discipline. 
It's being willing to sit with hurt, our own or others, and that is not 
easily or cheaply done.  Feeling isn't about narcissism, either; it's not 
indulging our own selfishness. It's being willing to set Self down, to sit 
silently with something else, our own loneliness or grief or anger, or 
someone else's.

I had a vision, a long time ago when I was in the middle of very serious 
Bad Stuff: I saw God sitting in a plain, grey place. Not a God suffused 
with Glory, but a highly approachable God, a lean and wiry ageless figure, 
gnarled and bent, ugly as Gollum, his head sunk in his bent hands. He was 
sitting in silence with all the suffering in the world -- simply being 
there with all who hurt and mourn. And I had the sudden since that there 
was only one possible right thing to do, and that was to go sit down next 
to him, sitting there in quiet solidarity with him, joining him silently in 
the grief.. I saw also that if it were a choice between that silent sitting 
and all the joys and glories of the Heavenly Banquet, I would still sit 
with him, for all eternity if that's what was called for. Because it was 
the only right thing to do.

I retold that vision this morning to a church friend who went through a 
dreadful long loss this last spring, a terrible time. She looked up at me 
with dark luminous eyes and said, "But that's beautiful." It is. I knew 
that, and so did she. I don't know who else would feel the same way.

Tomorrow, five years ago, we sat helpless and in suffering, unable to fix 
anything or save anyone as the unthinkable unfolded; we sat afterwards with 
those who had lost loved ones and who were themselves sitting helplessly. 
There's no denial in that sitting, no turning away from the reality. It 
does require those good qualities of stoicism and endurance, discipline and 
dignity, but they are the means to an end that deeply honours feeling. 
There is patience and acceptance and the willingness to listen, 
really  *listen*, which is what love is about. It's about sharing the 
suffering, not turning away from it either in denial or in self-indulgence 
-- and really, they're both the same thing, now that I think about it. 
Shutting off someone else's suffering is a profound act of non-love. 
Doesn't matter what the methods or the cultural excuses are.

So tomorrow we turn (I hope) away from anger and vengeance and the strong 
desire to *do* something, and we also turn away from any impulse to say 
"Okay, it's five years, get over it", and we go back to sitting quietly 
with that suffering. I hope we take that practice out into our churches and 
our lives, where emotion sometimes needs to be uncalmly and irrationally 
expressed. Above all, we remember where God sits. Which is where we should 
be sitting, too.