[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

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.





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