[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Houses

We haggled for, oh, it must have been a good 15 seconds, maybe 20, about 
the price Mark was willing to pay for my house here, and then we reached a 
figure we could both live with. He's happy. He's a landlord of houses he 
rents out to St. Lawrence College students; my house here is only two 
blocks from the college and has five small bedrooms. It will be, for him, a 
little cash cow.

I had a sense of immense relief, not just because I'd got the deal I 
wanted, but because the house and I seemed to have settled something -- 
resolved some tension that's existed between us ever since I bought this 
place, four years ago. The house and I have never hit it off. I don't feel 
at home here. It might be going far to say that a house is uncomfortable 
with the people who live in it, but if that's possible, I think that's been 
the case. We haven't been a good fit, this house and I. This house isn't a 
particularly good single-family dwelling; it's poky and awkward, and the 
neighbourhood is both transient and unfriendly. As a student house, 
however, it will find its niche, its vocation as a dwelling place. It may 
not be a good place for the sort of reflective work I specialize in, but 
it's a great place for beer and pizza.

There are so many souls out there that aren't attached to human bodies, or 
so I've come to believe. My cats have distinct and particular essences, no 
two alike, and so do the dogs I've known. I know that Shetland sheep have 
personalities not at all akin to the personalities (much less vivid) of 
Dorpers, although I haven't got up close and personal with Romneys or 
Corriedales.  (Yet.) My old house, the one before this one, full of 
problems as it was, had a wonderful soul, golden and peaceful; it was a 
house for the raising of intelligent, thoughtful, imaginative children, 
although it also saw more than its share of pain.

Churches too have souls. My home parish's church building has a robust, New 
England matriarchal soul, paying not a whole lot of attention to its own 
extraordinary beauty. The local Anglican cathedral, on the other hand, is a 
little *too* conscious of its beauty. The Roman Catholic cathedral is also 
beautiful, but it's too busy with prayer to care very much.  And churches 
in the other sense, as groups of people, have corporate psychologies. I 
became aware of this when I spent some years in the most flagrantly 
unhealthy parish in its entire diocese, a parish famed for tantrums and 
snits and long-standing grievances and other behaviour in flagrant 
disregard of all Gospel admonitions. It amused me but didn't surprise me 
when, in the Diocesan archives, I found that the patterns were the same in 
1872. Souls tend to get set in their ways, for good or for ill.

Would it be possible for a larger church body to have a soul? I know that 
my own diocese's personality was forged by its historical origins -- the 
migration of people dispossessed by the American revolution, plus the 
presence of the British military and of Victorian colonialism, with its 
strong sense of duty and propriety and its terrible elitism.  There have 
been times when those forces seemed almost to overwhelm the Gospel, to the 
grave detriment of our collective psychospiritual well-being.  Other 
dioceses and churches come from different background, which have marked 
them much as parenting marks the child.

My church as a whole, Anglicanism, bears witness to its own origins: a 
matter (some would say) of expedience; others would call it pragmatism. 
Regarding the religious storms across the English Channel, Elizabeth I and 
her successors took Roman Catholicism in one hand and Protestantism  in the 
other, forcibly jammed them together and said to them, "Nobody much cares 
about your personal theology; just say the Nicene Creed, take Communion, 
follow the rules, and place nice, or else!" And mostly, people got over it 
and accepted the new order, although it took a century or so to settle in.

Unromantic, I grant you. Pragmatism seems so flat, so unexciting, even 
ignoble.  It seems to stand in opposition to idealism. We hanker after pure 
white light, not this apparent greyness. We want our truths to be sharply, 
cleanly edged, not fuzzy; we want clarity and certainty. But Elizabeth 
said, "No; if you go there, you'll only tear this country apart, and I 
won't have that."

Perhaps she saw more clearly than most, from her own bitter experience, 
exactly how addictive anger is -- how doctrinal purity gives you that 
wonderful charge of righteousness that justifies any spiritual (or even 
physical) violence you may commit. What name-calling you indulge in, 
whatever vindictiveness you display, what revenge you seek, isn't your 
responsibility; your enemy made you do it.  Elizabeth forced her people 
away from that, roughly wrenching the nascent church back from the joys of 
factionalism  into simple good (if boring) civility.

But.

If there's one thing I have learned from the vicissitudes of life, it is 
that our God is indeed a sneaky beggar.

Our God is wonderfully creative with the stuff we give him to play with. 
Give him simple political pragmatism and a couple of centuries, and 
something gets transmogrified. Elizabeth's church has a potential, because 
of its roots, of being a profoundly loving and deeply pastoral place, if 
we'll let it.

Loving and pastoral because when you and your enemy *have* to sit under the 
same awning, you learn something. You get tired of fighting, and maybe you 
start listening, at least a little. Maybe you see the weariness in your 
opponent's face, or overhear her sorrow. Maybe he asks you to pass the 
mustard and you're so startled that you actually do pass the mustard 
instead of throwing it at his head.

Maybe you both have to get up and cooperate, simply to stay dry, when the 
awning springs a leak. Maybe you learn that your enemy is actually pretty 
good at some things that aren't part of your own skill-set -- that he's 
better at awning-mending than you are, and you find yourself just standing 
there handing him tools when he needs them instead of fighting about 
anything.  Maybe, after the awning's fixed, you share a beer or a soda and 
show each other pictures of the kid or the dog or the family house and 
learn that you actually know some people in common.

Maybe you see that your enemy is human too, and that the words you used in 
your pure and glorious wrath actually *hurt* her. Maybe you said some 
things that made her justifiably angry with you. Maybe the splinter in her 
eye is up to her to deal with, because the only person you can change is 
yourself, and you'd better deal with the two-by-four in your own optic socket.

Maybe you can agree to disagree. Maybe the stuff you were fighting about 
really isn't all that important, compared to the Gospel message of love and 
forgiveness.

Maybe, just maybe, you may even realize that your love for this human 
being, your care for his God-beloved individuality and his hurts and needs, 
not doctrinal correctness, is what the Gospel is all about.

It's perfectly possible. It's just a matter of choice.

For we *are* free to choose.  Unless someone's holding a gun to our head, 
we can't be forced to do what we don't desire to do.  Unless it's physical 
self-defence -- and certainly, doctrinal differences don't qualify! -- 
cries of "You made me hit you!" do not cut it. We do have the choice 
between hanging onto our righteous anger and laying it down for 
love.  _Pace_ Martin Luther, "Here I stand; I can do no other" is really 
"Here I stand; this is really important to me and I will act on my beliefs" 
-- but the operative verb isn't "can", but "will".

It's so odd; I get accused of being liberal, but in fact, I am a deep-dyed 
conservative -- even reactionary! -- where Anglicanism's soul is concerned. 
We do need to stay under that awning together; I'm hoping and praying that 
those who disagree with me will understand that. If others choose to leave, 
I will be sorry. But that's their choice.

Oh -- back to house-souls. The soul of the house I'm buying is a warm and 
peaceful one, beautifully suited to writing and editing and spinning and 
weaving. It's red brick Victorian with a wrap-around verandah and it makes 
me very, very happy. The cats are going to love it.

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NOTE:

Feel free to redistribute or web-publish this piece. All I ask is a credit 
line: "Molly Wolf is the daughter of the late Rt. Rev. Frederick B. Wolf, 
former Bishop of the Diocese of Maine"