From lupa at kos.net Sat Apr 12 14:59:06 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2008 10:59:06 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080412145930.772AC1E3B25@justus2c.anglican.org> Mud Season I almost hoped we'd skip it this year. The snow was so heavy that the tulips were pushing their way up into the sun before the end of run-off. We had some wonderfully pleasant days there, mild and sunny. So maybe this year, just for a change, we'd go straight from very late winter into very early spring without Spring Mud Season. Fat chance. Yesterday was pure Spring Mud Season: sodden and ugly, miserably cold. Today it isn't actively raining (yet), but it still has that nasty interseasonal feel, as of a low-pressure system settling down for a leisurely visit. And of course the melting snowbanks have left their little deposits behind, most of them unpleasant. Even a very pretty town like this looks grotty in Spring Mud Season. I have to sigh and remember that this season has its virtues. It's the time in which the landscape tells us what needs to be cleaned up or dealt with. It's at this time that we inventory what needs to be tackled next. You can't fix a structural problem with the bridge right now, because the river's in spate; you'll have to wait until low river in August. But you can note what needs to be done. This is the point in confession, or in the Fourth Step of the Twelve, or in accepting that we're sinners who really do need Christ to save us: it's not a question of beating ourselves up for what we've done wrong. It's a question of determining what needs to be dealt with -- what needs to be cleaned up. And if we can't manage it by ourselves, asking for help from One who can. But it's something we tend to avoid doing. It looks like hard work. It may involve confronting stuff in ourselves that we dread confronting, just as we don't look forward to raking up and dealing with the sodden leaves that we didn't rake last fall. Easier just to let Mother Nature deal... and with sodden leaves, that may be just fine. The problem is that sodden leaves may do no harm, but our unexamined issues may do much, to ourselves and to others, especially those we love. We're propelled by emotions based in old hurts, or by unexamined assumptions, or by the need to win, and we're so driven by these compulsions that we don't see what we're actually doing. We visit our stuff on those we say we love, and it hurts them and hurts our relationship with them; it builds barriers and enmities. And then we stand among the rubble and wonder what went wrong. Or rather than dealing with our own stuff, we toss it to Those Evil Awful People Over There. We feel the purity of anger and judgment -- and oh, anger feels so cleansing! I'll rid myself of this old ghost by tossing it into the river -- well, what does that do to the river? I don't care. It feels so good to judge surely and cleanly and powerfully, forgetting that it's not our business. I'm not here to take anyone else's inventory. I have enough work of my own. I've watched these patterns happening in a couple of situations this week, and they remind me of situations I've been in, both wounding and being wounded, and they make me intensely sad. I have to trust that just as spring is inevitably around the corner in a matter of weeks, and this current ugliness will vanish into beauty, so God has the power to redeem and transform us all, even when we seem to be nothing more than Mud Season incarnate ourselves. Meanwhile, on one of the milder days last week, I collected, rinsed, and put into recycling several very muddy plastic bags that littered my front garden. I haven't got out to the back yet -- there's still a fair bit of snow there -- but I hope to, as soon as I can. I know I have my work cut out for me, but it will be pleasant, when the sun is stronger, to get out there and start cleaning up. From lupa at kos.net Sat Apr 19 14:38:58 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2008 10:38:58 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080419143911.28FAE1E3A8F@justus2c.anglican.org> Shovelling It's not often I find myself vigorously shovelling snow on a beautiful mild April day. In fact, I can't recollect ever having done so. But last winter's heavy snowfalls are taking time to go away. Next to my house, in a particularly shady spot, the snowblower had piled the stuff hip-deep, and even after a couple of weeks of real thaw, there was still a significant mound of dirty white. I could just let nature take care of it, I suppose, but with the crocuses blooming and gardening only just realistically in sight, it seemed right to go out and *do* something. Last winter was a difficult one, and I'd sooner get rid of any reminders. So on with the clogs and gloves; I grabbed a garden spade and went off to attack the snowbank. It sat right next to our shared asphalt driveway, which opens up into the paved space where my neighbours and I park our cars. So it was just a matter of transferring the snow from bank to asphalt; after that, the sunwarmed black pavement will take care of the problem. I shoveled and tossed, shoveled and tossed, working for a bit and then taking a break -- it's warm work, shoveling snow in mid-April. The real problem emerged as soon as I got to the main block of the pile. Time, rain, its own weight, and repeated refreezing had condensed the top five or six inches into a hard pack I could easily walk upon, and I am no snowflake. Attacking it with the side of the spade was like beating up rock. I even tried jumping on it. No luck. The only solution I found was to dig out the softer snow from under the pack, flinging shovelsful onto the driveway, undermining the hard stuff until it broke off in big chunks that I could manhandle out of the way. I've known from experience that being undermined is far more effective than being attacked. Attacks I can fend off; being undermined is insidious and much more dangerous, especially when the undermining is in the name of love. It hadn't occured to me, until I dug out from under the snow crust, that undermining could be a positive force, a force for transformation. I find in general that when I try to attack my bad habits -- for I am very much a creature of habit -- they rear up on their hind legs and fight right back. But can I find ways of undermining them? Can I dig under them to the softer underlay of where they started, and perhaps deal with them with compassion instead of anger? with gentleness instead of righteous wrath? with acceptance instead of shame? We don't get better by hammering on our problems with brute force; we get better by slowly digging out from under and letting the sun's warmth, the warmth of love, do its gentle work. And could I do this in dealing with others as well? It's worth thinking about. Meanwhile, I spread the old snowbank out over a large, warm area and let the sunlight and warm fresh air get at it. A day later, it was a remnant. This morning, it's gone. From lupa at kos.net Sun Apr 27 17:24:12 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2008 13:24:12 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080427173101.680711E41CB@justus2c.anglican.org> Beauty and the Beast The news this week is deeply disturbing: soaring food and gas prices, war (as usual), atrocities (ditto), the R-word that nobody's using but which (the newspapers predict) we won't emerge from for another two years.... And yet I can't remember a lovelier spring. Maybe it's because we're just past a truly brutal winter, but we seem to have headed straight into outstanding beauty with barely a hiccup of Mud Season. Down the street from me, a magnolia is in magnificent flower. There are daffodils everywhere and scilla forming Smurf-blue patches on lawns. Because we had so much snow, the earth is abundantly damp and perennials were sheltered from hard high-winter cold. It all happened Wednesday: it was as though we were teetering on the tip of the season's finger and tumbled happily into warmth and colour, the way I imagine the soul after death topples joyously into God's love. But still the news is as brutal as last winter's weather. Especially the food price crisis: is this a real supply-and-demand problem, or is it the usual combination of hysteria and greed that propels so much human evil? I don't know. I only know that a world already beset by hunger is about to get hungrier, and it makes me feel so helpless. If you're reading these words, you're rich -- phenomenally rich by world standards, if not by North American middle-class ones. If you're reading these words, you're likely sitting at a computer, with a roof over your head and glass in the windows and food in the fridge and clean water there at the tap and enough clothes, and shoes. You almost certainly have a phone. You probably have several hundred books, at least. I could go on. If we're looking at the story of the rich man and Lazarus, we know where we sit, and it is not outside the gates where the dogs lick the sores of the suffering. But the little ones we see in the newspapers and on TV go to bed hungry and wake up hungrier, and their mothers suffer alongside them. The weak will die, and the strong will still suffer damage. Too few calories when the brain's rapidly developing in those first childhood years, and the harm is permanent. How can we live in a world of such beauty and such brutality? How can we not sit helpless, paralyzed by our own wealth and the fear of losing it? There's no question about what the Gospel way is. It's why it's so hard for the wealthy -- us -- to follow the Way. Me included. On my way to church this morning, I stepped out into this spring landscape and gasped at the beauty: the tender green of new leaves and the stronger green of grass, the silver sheen of water, a sky most delicately blue, a magnolia tree in fullest flower, daffodils abounding. And then in church we heard a representative of World Vision Canada plead for us to reach across the gulf between our affluence and their deprivation, one child at a time. I already have a child in the Congo, but I bought drought-resistant seeds and tools and farming advice for six families. It cost less than dinner out for two. Sending food will help. Sending the means to make them independent will help even more.