From lupa at kos.net Sat Jul 5 20:49:26 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:49:26 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080705204939.808631E38BC@justus2c.anglican.org> Electronica Yesterday I bought two lovely and extravagant bits of electronica: a high-definition television and an eentsy-weentsy laptop, one that weighs less than a kilogram. (I'm slowly getting used to the eentsy-weentsy keyboard.) These purchases, of course, put me on a steep learning curve. Both involve trying to read user manuals written by people who are on the inside of an edifice of understanding, while I am outside the building trying to figure out where the door is. If you already know the material, it's clear as a bell. If not, not. When I'm put in this position, two things immediately happen: my anxiety soars to crippling levels and my ADD kicks in, likely because these manuals make me feel ashamed of my ignorance. Suddenly the words on the page shift from English into some unknown language (what means this WiFi word?) Even if I manage to follow the diagrams and plug things in right, damned if the thing will actually work ? and troubleshooting takes me right back to the freakin' manual. Damn. it's not that I'm especially stupid; it's that the documentation has been written with expectations that I do not currently meet, and when I hit one of these expectations -- say, my wireless connection requires a password, which I do not have and have no idea how to find -- I short-circuit. I know that I *should* know, but every time I go near this stuff my brain seizes up. Technically speaking, this is no great sin, but it makes me feel like an idiot. I am old enough and my ego has been sufficiently pruned that I can admit that I need an intermediary, someone who knows enough about this stuff to make the machines do what they're supposed to. In short, I need a 15-year-old boy. This is, I expect, how the unchurched seeker may feel when we start telling him to read the Bible, or preach to her the ordinary theology-school sermon, or pray the standard prayers. These things are fine for us because we know the lingo, we've got the basic concepts, and we have a fair concept of the context and interpretation. But hand such a person ?By the waters of Babylon? or some of the naughtier bits of Revelation and her brain may seize up, just as mine does when I run across terms like ?Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet?. ?Jesus saves? --- well, what? and from what? and how? What does it *mean*? The answer to this problem is the same as the answer to my problem with electronics manual. Someone needs to take me gently, kindly, nonjudgmentally, and patiently back to kindergarten, assuming that ignorance is not the same as stupidity, but that ignorance is also cumulative. If you're not taught basic arithmetic -- which is where I stand with electronica -- you can't do fractions, much less algebra. We live in a society that seems to have divided itself between secularists and fundamentalists, with a patch of struggling mainliners in the middle. We can leave the fundamentalists to their own devices; the question is what we're supposed to do if a secularist wanders in. Meet him kindly; that's obvious. Help her with the hymnal and prayer book, since they're not familiar. But also, take our own faith right back down to the bottom of the ladder of sophistication. Challenge every word that comes out of our mouths: not only is it true and good, but is it comprehensible to the hearer? Does it make real-life sense? This isn?t a bad exercise for our own minds and souls, either. It?s easy to galumph through (say) the Lord?s Prayer without stopping to take it apart and look at the components. (Okay, what does ?hallowed be your name? mean, anyway?) It?s by struggling with this stuff that we make it real for ourselves. I was once on a diocesan commission that prepared a report to go to all the churches in our largely rural, largely not-so-well-educated diocese. The report was written by a professor and a theologian, both quite brilliant, and they had a lovely time with it. I tried to read it, and I found myself as defeated by it as I am by electronics user manuals, and I *am* well-educated. I pointed this problem out to the gentlemen in question, and they smiled in a gently patronizing sort of way and said that people just had to try harder. Their own minds were firmly closed. They were just fine with the report's high level of literary abstraction and anyone who wasn't could go suck worms. But there is no better way of turning people off than making them feel stupid. If seekers in churches are made to feel stupid, we've lost them and our chance to walk companionably with them into the fullness of God?s love, joy, and peace. So that's the challenge. It?s a serious one. Meanwhile, I packed the eentsy computer into my shoulder bag and have taken it down to the river to write at a shady picnic table. The three swans are a few feet off, settled breast-to-breast, heads together, necks curving in unison, reminding me of the Rublov Trinity. The beauty of the day is so astonishing that I have to slip it into this piece, however irrelevant. I'll get used to the teeny-tiny keyboard (as soon as I stop hitting ENTER instead of SHIFT) and I will find someone to help me with the wireless connection and the TV. There?s a 17-year-old guy next door . ***************************************** 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 Jul 13 20:39:44 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 13 Jul 2008 16:39:44 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080713204102.3FBE91E3748@justus2c.anglican.org> Wakey, Wakey A friend recently got the diagnosis of a particular disability that he's had all his life; it's not a visible physical disability -- that would have been obvious long since -- but a behavioural disability, quite subtle and apparently mild. He has attention deficit disorder, without hyperactivity. Okay. This explains much. Thing about ADD (which I also have) is that you simply don't operate like other people. When you're focused, you're *focused*. I remember when I was a child, I could take a messed-up skein of wool -- one of those total tangles -- and spend over an hour patiently untangling and winding it into a neat ball. I was absolutely focused, and being absolutely focused was pure bliss. The same happened if I got seriously into a book or stared off into the woods. On the other hand, in algebra class, if I didn't get something right away -- and my capacity for abstraction is not great -- my brain (and my attention) went elsewhere, somewhere up in a corner of the classroom, perhaps. I turned space cadet, and it was not something I had any choice about. Some types of reading give me the same problem; my eyes slide off the page and I have to will them back to the words, sentence by painful sentence. Retention is murder. Especially when I'm under stress: there is stuff I literally cannot do because I cannot stay focused on it for more than a few seconds. I need to ask for help with these things, or to find coping mechanisms. Mostly I muddle through pretty well, but it does help if I'm aware of the patterns -- if I'm awake to them. My friend has just been awakened to his own ADD. It helps him understand why he is as he is. He knows that ADD isn't something he asked for. His, like mine, is likely inherited. It is, on the other hand, something he has to manage, because unmanaged ADD can get one in real trouble with the world. It's that awakening that's so crucial. He can't manage the ADD if he doesn't know about it or if he pretends it isn't there -- if he isn't woken up to it or rolls over and tries to go back to sleep. Problem is, sleep is far more comfy than being awake -- more restful, more peaceful -- and sometimes our awakenings are rude indeed, as when the boss calls us into the office or the spouse packs a bag and leaves. And it's not just one awakening but a whole series of them. We have, for example, been asleep to our addiction to fossil fuels and what they're doing to this planet, and some of us are still asleep while others have their heads under the pillow, refusing to hear the alarm. We don't have any choice, on the other hand, of wakening to the effects our short-term greed for profit have had on the economy; the subprime crisis isn't a mere alarm clock but a honkin' big train whistle. Of course the biggest bell of all -- and the one that we're most frightened of -- is the Gospel. It wakes us up to stuff that we really, really don't want to deal with. Our own sinfulness, for example; the degree that we turn away from God and heed the other side, the side that leads us into behaviour that harms ourselves and others, sometimes quite horribly. The Gospel calls on us to be awake to the possibility that we really are sinners, and that God knows how and why we sin, and that God's love encompasses us around so thoroughly that we can afford to know it too. We can begin to realize that likely we never asked to be this way, that it's often old coping mechanisms gone stale and sick, but it's still something we have to manage. And the only way to manage it is to be awake to it. Rolling over and going back to sleep -- the even deeper sin of denial -- is not an option for a Christian. Unless, of course, the Christian is sleepwalking. We can, of course, be awake to a destructive pattern and have no intention whatsoever of putting an end to it -- awake, but refusing to get out of bed. I know a woman who actively dislikes her young stepdaughter; she's aware that this is causing major friction in the household and is harming both the child and her marriage, but she has no intention of making any changes. I don't hold up much hope for that marriage. And I think she will ultimately have to answer to God for her refusal to change. Or we can be awake to a pattern but unable to take any significant action, a very painful state of affairs. The rest of us are watching the suffering in places like Myanmar and the Sudan, in Zimbabwe, Iraq and Afghanistan; we do what we can, including prayer and not shutting our eyes and ears, but it's hard to watch the suffering from a position of helplessness. So the wake-up call may be awaking from our helplessness itself, including learning to trust in the power of prayer. Of course it's not just one wake-up call; it's dozens and dozens over a lifetime, and likely some of the wake-up calls never get through to us, at least not on this side of the River. Only when we stand in front of our Creator will we be really, truly, finally, and completely awake. And that reality will be pure glory. I've lent my friend a couple of good books on ADD and explained my own understanding of it. He's fascinated; this really does explain an awful lot. It's a bit of a blow, in that he's got a disability, but it's a breakthrough, in that there are ways of understanding and managing better. Awake is better than asleep. Or so I believe. (for Jane) ***************************************** 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 Jul 19 21:18:11 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:18:11 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080719211820.8D16D1E3F83@justus2c.anglican.org> Higher Math All my life I've had a problem with high-level abstraction. The minute we leave the pavement, it seems, my mind starts stuttering and goes into a sort of frozen panic. Which means that standard math teaching tends to leave me twirling in a combination of anxiety and ADD, and frustrated to boot. Why all these silly proof-things? I did manage to get through university statistics and calculus, but only just barely. We do have a mathematician in the family, and I have it on good assurance from her that mathematics at the high level really is full of elegance and beauty; the problem isn't the tune but my tone-deafness to it. She is a truthful person and I believe her. I also know, from taking the occasional pulse, that physics continues to hunt for a Grand Unifying Theory that will tie everything together from galaxies to nanoparticles. As usual, I get lost when they start talking about string theory, but when I saw an article in this week's _New Yorker_ (having slithered past the front cover), I did sit down to read it. The _New Yorker_ has a long history of making things intelligible, and I had hopes. I didn't have any trouble with the math or physics, but I did get stopped in my tracks by one statement. The subject of the article, Garrett Lisi, was quoted thusly: "'The only thing that makes sense.' he said, 'is if the universe is beautiful and simple and elegant.'" Oh? Okay, I'm not up in the airplane, high above the clouds, with the mathematicians and physicists, and perhaps I don't see the world as clearly as they do. I'm down here on the (currently July-sticky) ground. But who said that the universe MUST be beautiful and simple and elegant? What if it's actually muddled and messy and complicated? Of course this has nothing to do with physics, which I will leave to the physicists and the real mathematicians, and may they revel in the beauty of their work (remembering always that beauty must also be true, and no, the two are not necessarily identical). I'm thinking more of the ways of the soul, not their professional province. The ways of the soul may not be straight and uncomplicated. In fact, they can be quite remarkably inelegant, involving panicky charges off into the undergrowth and all sorts of sincere but mistaken choices. I'm thinking about this because I've just come through a particular process that's usually exceedingly complicated, even Byzantine, and time-consuming and paperwork-heavy -- and almost at the very end of it, the person in charge realized that there was a quick, neat, and quite elegant solution to the problem that would take a couple of weeks instead of months, if I collected and handed in *these* pieces of paper instead of *those* pieces of paper. So I went off and did just that, phoned and got faxes sent, and the quick and elegant solution will be in place next week. But the process... ah, the process.... We'd gotten quite far along the complicated path, the muddled and messy one, before we took the clean and elegant shortcut. I swear up down and sideways that this was the Holy Spirit in action. I *needed* to take the complicated path, for a major piece of healing and forgiveness. The process (which many see as an ordeal) had, in fact, liberated me and brought me deep blessings. I had relinquished the need for judgment and could act with disinterested love, and I experienced real love along the way. And now when the Tempter whispers at my shoulder, "Well, what about justice?" I can tell Whatever-It-Is to go fry ice. I think I prefer a Creation in which the Creator allows things to be muddled and messy and complicated, because that's when the soul's work often gets done. Math and physics entirely aside, when we insist on our souls being beautiful and simple and elegant, we are usually in denial about something pretty important. That beauty is not true. But the beauty we step into after the difficult path *is* true, and perhaps the harder the path, the deeper the beauty and truth. I'll leave the Theory of Everything up to the people who love that higher math, and more power to them. I'm sure God appreciates their deep delight in His equations, even if they think they found them for themselves instead of realizing that they'd stumbled over them. There's joy up there in the stratosphere, and I'm sure that makes God beam with pleasure. But there's joy down here in the muss and the muddle too, over a single sinner saved. God takes huge joy in that. ***************************************** 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 Jul 19 21:29:09 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:29:09 -0400 Subject: [SB] oops... Message-ID: <20080719212910.B83FC1E32A9@justus2c.anglican.org> Please add "(for Kay and Marlene)" at the bottom of today's SB. Thanks! Molly ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain