[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Fusions

I had something neat and graceful planned, all about the abundance of 
fallen leaves and the way that shuffling through drifts of fallen 
leaves is good for unhooking the stitches in a person's soul -- and 
then on Thursday, it snowed. Freezing rain, actually, with snow as a 
chaser. Instead of gliding down the long dim corridor of Fall Mud 
Season, we seem to have tripped over the doorsill, tumbling from true 
Fall to the onset of Winter with a resounding thump. (I think there's 
a pun lurking somewhere in there, but I'm not going to try to tease it out.)

I'm okay with this state of affairs. I know that by Low Winter 
(March), I will have begun to hate winter and be desperate for the 
first few blatts of Spring Mud Season, but the first day of Winter is 
like the first day of school (and unlike New Year's Day): a true 
beginning of sorts. For me, it's back to Normal. Winter is the 
baseline state of affairs where I live, something to which we are all 
adapted, except, perhaps, in Toronto, where they seem to forget every 
year how to drive in snow.

It's appropriate, too, because tomorrow's Sunday is the end of 
Ordinary Time: the long, largely featureless liturgical stretch from 
Pentecost to Advent in which we play catch-up with all the 
non-seasonal stuff, shuffling through all those other things in the 
Bible (at least, so we hope). It's pure coincidence that in my neck 
of the woods, Advent tends to hit a major seasonal change, but so it 
is, and I am grateful. I like tidy fusions. They're very satisfying.

I am grateful too for my brother in this essay business, Lane Denson, 
who wrote a sterling piece this week on another fusion: that the 
Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday in Ordinary Time, is also 
Recovery Sunday, the special Sunday for us 12-Steppers. As he points 
out, this is a Godincidence, not a coincidence, because it's God who 
has the victory over addictions of all sorts.

The state of addiction is an illness of the spirit, a state in which 
something that is emphatically *not* divine has malign authority over 
our souls. Doesn't much matter what that something is: can be 
alcohol, drugs, gambling, undealt-with-issues, codependence, 
ideology, whatever. Once, probably because we loved the kick it gave 
us, we gave that something houseroom, encouraged it to move in and 
take up residence; but now it's taken over the joint and is running 
things. The kick went long ago, although we still quite desperately 
miss it; now what remains is a guest who's turned itself into a 
tyrant and cannot apparently be given the bum's rush.

Jesus, in the New Testament, continually casts out "evil spirits". 
Back in my semi-secular days, when I had one foot in the camp of 
faith and the other foot firmly outside it, I thought of this in 
terms of Jesus healing (say) psychotic breaks and epilepsy. Now, I'm 
starting to wonder.

There is such evil in the world: you read of (say) the use of sexual 
violence in the Sudan and wonder how any decent human being could 
possibly victimize women like this. At the same time, if you're a 
rational, liberal sort of person, the notion of Satanic possession is 
so -- so -- *squidgy*, and worse still, it seems to leave the 
perpetrator off the hook: "The Devil made me do it". No, I don't think so.

But perhaps it's a matter of allegiance, of choosing rulers. We can 
be ruled by our own selfishness, for example; we can set our own 
self-interest up as an object of worth-ship and make that our primary 
allegiance, and from that choice will flow all sorts of behaviours: 
some pretty innocent, others thoughtlessly destructive. If I am the 
God of my sacrifice, I will cheerfully sacrifice others to my cause. 
What's a little exploitation between friends if nobody gets really 
badly hurt and if I get what I need?

If tribal or national identity is the God of my sacrifice, 
sacrificing others to that cause is my joy and my duty; CBC just ran 
a major program on the former Yugoslavia and the atrocities there. I 
can worship religion without worshipping God, sacrificing the heathen 
(or myself, for that matter) on the altar of orthodoxy -- or 
sacrificing genuinely holy people and important good on the altar of 
skepticism, for religious idolatry can go either way. And so on and so forth.

But the essential thing is that idolatry and addiction are at the 
very least very close relatives, and breaking the bonds requires (as 
AA figured out a while ago) something much greater than ourselves. We 
need help in bumping the wrong god off the altar, and the only one 
with the strength to do that is the rightful occupant. For those of 
us with faith, that force has a face and a name and a real, 
historical existence; for others, it's more shadowy. And that's okay. 
Those of us who are on the road to recovery don't judge the other's 
journey; we're too busy with our own.

I got sucked into this idolatry pattern some years ago, into a 
powerful, malign bond of the spirit that I could not seem to break. 
The addiction I fell into was (in a sense) worse than drugs or 
alcohol because it had the veneer of true holiness. It presented 
itself not as a tyrant but as the deepest blessing, and I was most 
completely snookered.

I rejoice to say that last week, with the grace of God and the 
support of those who convey that grace to me, I smacked the tyrant 
sharply across the snout and it has slunk away. If it tries to 
return, it will be met with a clue-by-four, wielded by those who have 
seen it for what it is and who have no use for it (but who have a 
whole lot of use for me). I feel as though I'm surrounded in perfect 
safety by a company of pilgrims -- and again, this is a place where 
faith and recovery come into fusion, as the feast of the King and 
Recovery Sunday, fall together, as Advent and the new cleanness of 
Winter fold hands together.

We make the Journey one step at a time, one day at a time, one choice 
at a time. But we who walk in faith and recovery make the 
Journey  certain that the victory is God's. We of faith believe that 
the victory was won a couple of thousand years ago; what remains are 
the cleaning-up operations, nasty as many of them are. We in recovery 
know that the battle is won one day at a time. And so we walk in 
perfect confidence, not unaware of what lurks in the shadows, but 
knowing that it has no real power over us any more. In obedience, we are free.

It's snowing again, lightly. I think I will put on my winter boots 
and my thick handknit green socks and walk across the footbridge, 
past the basin where the town swans raised their cygnets last summer 
and where ice has begun to film the calm. I spent the summer 
delighting in the full-bodied trees by the river, and I spent the 
fall shuffling joyously through riffs of their leaves; now that it's 
winter, holy time, the place and I can really start to get to know each other.