From lupa at kos.net Sun Aug 3 16:33:50 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 03 Aug 2008 12:33:50 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080803163354.5E5741E41E5@justus2c.anglican.org> Lord God Interesting discovery: I now find that the phrase "Lord God" awakens in me an absolutely overwhelming sense of extreme exhaustion, a fatigue that goes bone-deep and is years old. The two words make me *tired*. Which is odd for someone who's been a committed Christian for the last ... umm... 20 years or so. Those two words ought (my head believes) to be my deepest delight. The Lordliness of God speaks to God's ultimate power and might. The Godliness of the Lord speaks to God's goodness and love. All of which is excellent Good Stuff. But it's not my head at work here; it's the rest of me, heart and spirit and body, and the fatigue is very real. So where's it coming from? A good friend remarked that there's such a thing as cultural Christianity, which, of course, is going to vary considerably, from Orthodox to Southern Baptist and round about by the southern route. It's the set of (largely unexamined) assumptions about what being a good Christian entails. If you're a preacher's kid, which I am, you tend to get a double dollop of your church's cultural Christianity, because it gets preached to you both in the pulpit and at the kitchen table. The cultural Christianity which I imbibed in my growing up stressed a lot of very real virtues: discipline, selflessness, responsibility, courtesy, care for others -- all the virtues that Paul cites as fruits of the Spirit. But because idealism was a big part of the picture, nobody mentioned "moderation in all things". But our familial version of cultural Christianity also failed to prescribe some balancing things, like intimacy, the existence of legitimate personal needs, self-disclosure, and self-care. In fact, it tended to prohibit these as selfish and indisciplined and generally in Bad Taste, perhaps even *vulgar*. It's only as I approach old age that I figure out that there actually needs to be a healthy balance between these two, and that the long-standing imbalance that I have been practicing for years is at the root of this deep tiredness. I've been overextending myself for as long as I can remember, and it's finally catching up to me. And so "Lord God" -- shorthand for the cultural Christianity of my upbringing -- reminds me not of God's love or care for me, but of my duty to keep up the prescribed pattern of cultural Christianity, regardless of the soup it lands me in. Maybe that isn't a true duty, though. Maybe it's something I should be questioning. What is it that God actually wants from me? I don't think it's this deep tiredness. I think God wants us truly to care for each other, but also for ourselves. I think God wants us to seek justice, but also to flourish. And if we care for each other and seek justice to a degree that becomes self-damaging, I don't think that's what God had in mind. All human ethical endeavours, religious or un-, can fall into the temptation of simple-minded black-and-white absolutes, and it's when we fall off that particular edge that we do harm to ourselves and others. Doesn't matter what religion it is -- including atheism or belief in science; when it turns dogmatic and fundamentalist, it does harm, because it's lost sight of our humanity. And that applies to *all* sectors of the Christian church. We are so tempted to save ourselves or each other by sheer hard work that we forget that the saving already happened, and it happened through God's free grace. So maybe we could stop bludgeoning ourselves and each other in the pursuit of righteousness and just live and let live? It might be less tiring. I skipped church this morning and am about to retire to the verandah with a good and holy book, and rock peacefully, and rest. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain From lupa at kos.net Sat Aug 9 16:26:56 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:26:56 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080809162703.E917C1E3E8A@justus2c.anglican.org> The Great Divide I spent last Sunday out on the verandah, peacefully reading a solid old-fashioned novel. In it, a little girl steals two small treasures. She does so out of love and for very good reasons, but still it's theft, and she knows theft is wrong. She knows she has transgressed. Now, there's a word we don't use often. In fact, I had to look up the definition of "transgress", which (according to the Canadian Oxford Dictionary) means to "contravene or go beyond the bounds or limits set by (a commandment or law)." There's also a geological meaning, of sea overflooding land, but that's a side road I'm not taking. The little girl makes herself ill and miserable over her transgression; it warps her whole life. She keeps throwing up. But she can't make good what she's done until she gets help from an intelligent and compassionate adult, who hears her confession and helps her restore the stolen goods safely, knowing that the tiny treasures she loves will still be available to her. I read another book last week, one that makes the case for Christianity above all other world religions precisely because Christianity is the best at dealing with situations like these. Instead of simply condemning wrongdoing, we view it with compassion. Most people don't do wrong things because they want to, but because they're muddled and confused and fearful and selfish. As Paul says, it's not that we don't want to stop doing what we know is wrong. It's that we can't seem to stop ourselves. But there's a grey area where transgression crosses some sort of undefined boundary and turns into real sin. The little girl's theft harmed only herself; that was what needed to be set right. But sometimes what we do, or fail to do, harms others. Our failures aren't small and easily set to rights, but serious and with important consequences. Then what on earth do we do? That's when Whatever-It-Is presents us with the great temptation: to whistle our way past the scene of the crime. I've come up with a personal concept for this; I call it meta-sin. Canadian Oxford Dictionary, "meta", definition 2(c): "of a higher or second order". Meta-sin is what sits lumpishly on top of sin, preventing repentance from getting anywhere near it. It's a combination of undealt-with fear, shame, guilt, and dishonesty that transmogrifies into wilful self-blindness. There are two rough orders of meta-sin: denial, and blame-the-victim -- or sometimes both simultaneously, as in "I didn't do anything wrong, and besides, you made me do it." There are all sorts of shades to these categories, all sorts of mechanisms by which we hide from our own sight and try to hide from everyone else's, God's included. Scapegoating our victim, assigning blame to others, lying to ourselves, minimizing what we've done, telling our victim to just get over it, "moving on".... But meta-sin has a truly deadly quality, in that it shifts responsibility for the sin to the person or people who have been sinned against, which multiplies the original sin and makes forgiveness and restoration far, far more difficult. It lands the victim with both the original wrong and with profound injustice -- and then it expects the victim to suffer in silence the injustice of having to suffer in silence. Nasty stuff. Why do we fall into such destructive patterns? After all, we have in the Gospel the ultimate good news of God's love and forgiveness, of Jesus' willingness to go to an excruciating death to break the power of sin and death. We're told in no uncertain terms that when we see ourselves clearly, we are blessed, and when we think we can save ourselves, we're in the most serious spiritual danger. We shouldn't need to cover up transgressions -- even real sin -- with meta-sin. We should be able to say "I'm sorry" and mean it, and see if there's anything we can do to make amends. So why don't we? Pride. Five letters, one syllable. Being forgiven is *exasperating*. It makes us feel small. It makes us feel patronized. It's very, very hard on the ego. And ego is what listens to Whatever-It-Is and yields to that temptation to fall into meta-sin. We want to believe that we're nice people, good people, not sinners -- and certainly not people who would actually *harm* other people. We want unconditional positive regard, whether or not we actually deserve it -- and frankly, I don't know anyone who does, myself included. We may suspect that we have a shadow-side, but we're just not going to go there. But sooner or later, reality has to have its say, at least for most of us. Maybe some people can put their hands over their ears and loudly chant "LA-LA-LA-LA!" indefinitely. I don't know. My acquaintance is not unlimited. That's where you can see people lining up on one side or the other of a great divide: on one side, those who have been broken and who have truly seen their brokenness, and on the other, those who haven't. Over eternity (C.S. Lewis makes this clear) the sorting-out process will continue, with God inviting us deeper and deeper into both our own brokenness and God's healing, merciful love, but never overriding our ability to say "no". Ego's something *we* have to abandon; that's the price we pay for love. Some of us will refuse to pay that price, and to them God says, "Thy will be done." Forever? We have no way of knowing. But God's an optimist, and God knows just how seductive God's love is. Eventually, maybe everyone will be able to step across the dread boundary into the realm of self-knowledge, where meta-sin has no place, sin can be repented and amends made, and transgressions seen for what they are. Maybe not in this life, for some people. But I trust God to sort them out. I have enough work of my own to do without taking anyone else's on. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain From lupa at kos.net Sun Aug 17 21:27:25 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:27:25 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080817212730.DF01E1E3E4A@justus2c.anglican.org> God and the River So driving all the way to Brockville to go grocery-shopping was a dumb idea on at least two levels: gas prices and carbon emissions. By doing so, I transgressed my own environmental beliefs. But I wanted the river. Very badly, in fact. I am blessed to live on one of the world's great ones, the St. Lawrence. It doesn't look so imposing at my end of it because it is bejewlled with the Thousand Islands. (Are there a thousand islands in the Thousand Islands, you ask? More than 1800, in fact.) But this, remember, is the outflow for the most imposing stretch of fresh water on this planet, the Great Lakes system -- a hydrogeographical system that drains a million square kilometers. So I tend to look upon this river with respect. I didn't attach to the river immediately; it's taken some time to dig my spiritual toes into this landscape. But this spring and summer, I've strongly felt the draw of it. It's been a very wet summer, rain practically every day, and the landscape's colours are extraordinarily rich: the profound green of the woods, the more brilliant emerald of lawns still actively growing, the soft shadows of reed beds, all laced with the shimmering silver of water, and across the way, the slate-blue of the other shore, which is equally beautiful in a completely different way. No wonder people fall in love with this place. The cottagers, some of whom go back generations, think of it as heaven on earth. I've taken to taking God with me on the road to Brockville, by the river. Which is silly, of course: God is everywhere, in all landscapes. But it seems easier, somehow, to quiet my own restless thoughts and calm my heart when I let the river's peaceful power keep me company on the road. The river's been here for such a long time, ten thousand years at least. When I let the river still me, then I find I can finally pray as I want to. Lately I've been setting down old things, especially old versions of God. There was the first version, the one I acquired from my family, and that God was undoubtedly good and powerful and excellent and all those things -- but he was also remote, not very interested, someone who seemed to stay in his own head. That God let me walk away from him without seeming to mind very much, and I went off on my own for a long time. When I wandered back Godward (for all the wrong reasons), the God I encountered looked a little different. The things that had gone wrong in my life (my new companions told me) had done so because I hadn't been a person of faith. Faith and prayer would make all things go well in future. I had a little trouble accepting this -- there's nothing like a degree in history to make a person skeptical -- but I figured they knew more about this Godstuff than I did, so I went with the flow. And lo, good things did happen -- for a while. And then it all crashed and burned, and I was left shaking a fist at a God who seemed to promise so much and delivered so little. As we say in the program, "An expectation is a premeditated resentment." It took a while to get over that, but I did, and last week I set both of my previous gods down and contemplated a new possibility: that there is indeed a God out there _of my understanding_, and that God and I can together work out what that means. This has little to do with theology (which is a marvelously entertaining head-game, best played like pairs' table tennis). This has to do with real trust and a willingness to hand over, because this is not the "God" who let me down before. I can look back now without resentment or the need to blame or excuse and say, at a fundamental level, I was misguided -- guided wrongly -- by people who were, in all love, trying to give me the God of _their_ understanding. That doesn't work, not at the deeper spiritual level. So the God of my understanding and I went for a drive to Brockville along the river, because it's in the peace and power and beauty of the river that we seem to be starting a different conversation, a more personal one. Of course theology is going to come into it, but this is something different, something healthy and whole. I get to get *my* God, my own personal version. We'll see what that God looks like. The great morning prayer, someone told me, is "Whatever." The great evening prayer is "Oh, well." I'll work on those. The Brockville grocery store didn't have mint, so I had to go to our local A&P anyway. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain From lupa at kos.net Sun Aug 24 21:44:44 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:44:44 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080824214447.A0C851E42E0@justus2c.anglican.org> English, Neon, Pink I have a friend who says that she'd really like to get her instructions from the Universe in English, neon, pink. She sighs in resignation, knowing that the Universe doesn't do that. Her Universe is her word for my Higher Power, aka God in religious circles. And yes, instructions would be wonderful if they came in "a language understanded of the people" and were really, unmistakably obvious. Indeed, I have known people who felt strongly that that's just what was going on for them -- who believed passionately that they were under direct instruction from the Almighty and had no choice but to obey. Problem is, for those of us onlooking, sometimes the will of God as a person perceives it seems to coincides a little too cutely with the will of the person in question. We watch as the person heads off in a particular direction, not so much led by God as driven by his or her own particular demons. That's often what spiritual wilfulness is about. It is a sad fact that spirituality and religion attract the healthy and the un-, and the un- can be pretty spectacularly strong-minded. It can happen to us too -- no finger-pointing without three fingers pointing back, as the saying goes. I've certainly found myself propelled in directions that turned out to be disastrous because I was so convinced that God was directing me, when what was really propelling me was my own substantial Stuff. Truly, truly, I am telling you: I speak from inside this particular phenomenon. (Formerly, that is; I plan on making fresh and original mistakes instead of repeating the same tired old ones over and over again.) Oh, there are prophets out there, real ones -- Martin Luther King comes to mind, and I don't doubt that at his best, he was channelling something genuinely divine, as all great preachers do at times. But that's different than getting on your hobbyhorse and going charging off in the divinely appointed direction as you've perceived it, and expecting everyone else to fall into line behind you. In fact, we mostly don't get English, neon, pink. Divine skywriting doesn't seem to happen, at least not often; we're more likely drawn gently, sometimes almost imperceptibly, in a particular direction without understanding why. It's only in retrospect that the patterns emerge; at the time, we're effectively clueless, only doing the best we can in what seems like a fog of confusion. And we beat ourselves up for being so unclear, because we're told by the English/pink/neon people that we should *know* God's will, because it's all there in the Bible, black and white. Doesn't work for me. I don't know about you. Opening the Scriptures with my eyes closed and laying finger to verse usually ends up getting me something weird in Deuteronomy. But I've come to believe that the fuzziness that often surrounds us may be a company of angels -- that uncertainty isn't a sign of unfaith, but a mark of humility and the willingness to listen very hard for that still small voice that shushes all the mighty winds. It also reminds us of the need to operate in community. It's not surprising that the healthiest spiritual system I've ever encountered relies on shared servant leadership and the consensus of group conscience to make decisions. Also, it's in this effortful discernment, this trying to make sense of things, that we grow in compassion, wisdom, and spiritual strength. The journey in faith is not a sprint; it's a very, very long walk. But the company is excellent. So we occupy this quiet space, in this diffused and silvery light, overhearing soft voices speaking wisdom in ways that we can only dimly grasp, knowing that the brightness and power of God's *real* voice direct would be far too much to bear. "Thy will be done," was Jesus' final prayer in this life. And how can I know what that is, when I've already made my decision? (For Sarah, the wise) ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain From lupa at kos.net Sun Aug 31 23:17:11 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2008 19:17:11 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080831231715.5650F1E38CE@justus2c.anglican.org> Blues Somewhere in the neighbourhood, fairly close to hand, someone is practicing the guitar on his (her? more likely his, around here) electric guitar. He's good. He's quite good, in fact. I am an inept guitarist, but I know enough to know good blues playing, and he's just fine. He's doing that good blues thing of smearing the notes around, looking for shadings, letting the notes hang and then ending with an abrupt leap, doing sudden runs. There's a problem, though. This music is *loud*. It's not so much the neighbourhood I worry about; it's still early. Too early for little kids to go to bed, too early for the blues to be a neighbourhood problem. It's the guitarist I worry about. Playing an electric guitar at this decibel level is seriously damaging to a person's hearing. I have the same concern when some young'un goes by with the car radio booming so deep and so loud that it sets the fire hydrants wobbling and makes the manhole covers dance. We seem to have lost a good deal of consciousness about actions and consequences, and that is scary. It's as though we're walking in some sort of dream world, where we live in the present moment without regard for the future. And in a sense, that's right. C.S. Lewis rightly said that the present is the closest we ever get to eternity. But Lewis also said that thought for the future's needs is part of the present's duty, and that part of the equation we seem to have lost. The guitarist is hanging in in the present, very fully in this particular moment. It's just that the future hangs over him like a wave, and the future (if he goes on this way) is going to entail some heavy hearing damage. That's perhaps where lovers of the loud blues do not want to go, like those who are so convinced of the imminence of the Second Coming that environmental issues are right off their screen. In fact, I am not one to boast about this, because I have taken approximately zero care of my health, assuming that this sturdy donkey of a body who is also myself will carry me through regardless. Yes, I know this is as dumb as a sack of hammers. But I never point out someone else's error without finding it in myself. A beloved lawyer of my acquaintance (you know who you are!) talks about "duty of care". Another good phrase is "due diligence". It has to do with responsibility. The guitarist is responsible to his or her future self to behave in ways that conserve his or her hearing, without unnecessary damage -- because trust me, there will be damage anyway. You said what? ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain