[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

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.