[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

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.





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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in 
no other way. -- Mark Twain