[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

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
.




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