From lupa at kos.net Sat Mar 1 15:04:52 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 01 Mar 2008 10:04:52 -0500 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080301150504.90F551E3D7C@justus2c.anglican.org> Deserts It snowed a little last night, only an inch or so, but enough to refresh the snowbanks and turn them dazzling white under a blazing high-winter sky. I should be sick of snow by now -- we've had a lot of it, this winter -- but oddly, I'm not. I got a break from winter when I went to northwestern Arizona to deal with my late sister's house. I spent a full week in real desert. It was odd going out in sneakers and a sweatshirt in mid-February, odder still to see kids wearing flipflops instead of heavy boots. It was odd being in desert -- real desert. I'd never done that before. Except for 12 years in the Midwest, three of which I was too young to remember, I have spent my entire life in the northeastern quadrant of North America, most of that in southeastern Ontario. I am utterly familiar and comfortable with the sort of waste spaces that this part of the world contains, mostly scrub timber. I have stood at the edge of the Real North, Sudbury, knowing that it's an 18-hour drive to the Manitoba border, and except for a few towns, most of that's just woods and the occasional moose. I know in my head that north is just as potentially dangerous as desert, especially in summer, when the mosquitos and blackflies can eat you alive. I know in my head that winter is just as dangerous as desert. I'd experienced that on my way to Arizona, running into lake effect snow on my way down to the airport at Syracuse. For those of you who don't know lake effect snow; it's like walking into a wall of white where the road disappears completely, while the big transports roar past you undeterred and terrifying. It's scary. It's just that northern dangers are the ones I'm familiar with. They are comfortable dangers. I know how to handle them. (Get off the road and wait the snow out somewhere warm.) The desert struck me as dangerous and utterly foreign. The mountains, while beautiful, were barren and looked as though they scraped the sky raw. I'd never been in a place where you parked anywhere in the front yard because it was all gravel and sand. I felt as though I'd been dropped into a lunar barrenness, and it was very odd. Odd and disquieting, although I could see its beauty. I tried to think, during my time in that landscape, that this is what the Bible really speaks about. The words we rely on come from a culture firmly rooted in a landscape like this one, where finding green pastures -- such an ordinary part of *my* landscape -- is indeed almost miraculous. Jesus would have walked in a landscape that looked far more like this one than like my landscape of woods and snow and water. "Living water" means more here, where water is life itself, than it does in my landscape of rivers and great lakes, where fresh water is in careless abundance. We bring to Scripture whatever knowledge we have, and sometimes that's close to the experience that Scripture narrates and sometimes it isn't. There's a lot in Scripture that I didn't get until I got hands-on with a month-old Shetland lamb and experienced that quivering, half-fearful, half-trusting, liveliness and curiosity. I don't think I got "make straight in the desert a highway for our God" until I saw Arizona. But I also bring Scripture into my own landscape. Jean Brebouef, 17th-century missionary to the Huron people, wrote tenderly of the newborn Jesus, wrapped in ragged rabbit skins and laid in a lodge of broken bark. "Make straight in the desert" might, in my landscape, mean making a way through the toughly beautiful Canadian Shield, or through beaver-dam swamps and scrub timber, swatting away the blackflies. Or it might mean making a way through the tough thickets of a spirit bruised almost to extinction, because there are deserts in the heart. I know; I've spent time there too. It shocked me to hear plans to build tens of thousands of homes in the Arizona desert; what on earth would that do to the aquifer? Odd that someone who lives a stone's throw from a river churning in spate worries about water, when the desert locals simply assume that enough will be there. We'll see who's right. It was good to get back to snow. It's a nuisance sometimes, but I'd miss it. From lupa at kos.net Sat Mar 22 13:41:14 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 09:41:14 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080322134133.2473D1E48A1@justus2c.anglican.org> Feet It was a good Maundy Thursday sermon, thoughtful and well-delivered by a gentle man, clearly but quietly holy. I don't know why it shocked me a little to notice that his feet were bare. Bare feet made perfect sense; we were shortly going to do the foot-washing thing. I'm just not used to barefoot preaching, I guess. Especially not in someone so important, for this preacher was the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, Archbishop Fred Hiltz. Bare feet are free and humble; you don't see them in places like downtown Toronto. Bare feet are far more naked than bare hands, more naked even than bare knees, which are perfectly possible anywhere that culture and climate permit. Bare feet are vulnerable. They are in contact with a world that can be cold, hard, unfeeling, and possibly quite dangerous. It makes much more sense, in a city, to stay definitely shod, possibly even in steel-toed work boots, depending on the circumstances. Sandals in summer, of course, but not bare feet, not outside the home or perhaps the beach. That would be taking really stupid risks. It's such a contradiction: we're commanded, mandated, Maundied, to give love and also to receive love, God's love, transmitted through our Lord who died for us and through each other. And yet to receive love we have to be barefoot souls, naked and vulnerable -- and how can we be that, in this cold, hard, dangerous world? How can we love others when we need to keep the walls up and the boundaries defined, because otherwise we can be trashed and overrun and oppressed? There isn't a simple answer. In Toronto, the day before I got there, a man smiled at a stranger on a bus, wishing him good day, and the stranger took offence and stabbed the man. No, you can't go barefoot in the city, not at this time of year. Take that kind of risk, and you'll get frostbite, for sure. Love can get your heart really truly broken. And yet the Archbishop preached the mandate of love and service, bare-footed, his toes right out there in the open. Admittedly, Church House's chapel is a safe and well-heated place and he was among staff people with whom he works -- I was the only stranger there -- but still, it's a statement. A little later, I took my own sneakers and white cotton socks off and allowed a complete stranger to cradle each foot in turn, pouring warm water over it and drying it with a white cotton towel. It was oddly impersonal. Then I took my turn and cradled another stranger's feet, cradling each foot in my hands, pouring warm water over it, and drying it with a white cotton towel, noticing a mole on the white skin of her left foot. I looked into her pleasant face and tried to imagine loving her as a sister, but I'd need to get to know her first. And that would be a risk for both of us. Then again, our model -- the one who fed us the meal and gave us the mandate -- took one huge risk. Did he know he'd come out of it resurrected, that he'd move through death and be broken back into life? We don't know, although we've fought about that one for a couple of millennia. I prefer to believe that he hoped, but without certainty. That maximized his vulnerability; that left him absolutely open to God's willed outcome. That way, he'd know on a purely personal level how hard this job is, this business of loving others in a dangerous world. It may be -- really is -- the only right thing to do. But in doing it, we live in Holy Saturday, in the hope and expectation of Easter, if not in this life, in the Life to Come. How beautiful are the feet -- and they are, miracles of engineering, humble, capable, strong, flexible, grounded, underpinning us, our single strongest point of contact with this world, which is (with all its problems) still such a beautiful place. It's still winter here, Easter or not, a time for boots and warm socks. But come summer, I will take these feet of mine out back and treat them to a sojourn in soft grass; I will remind them of how, when we were children, we would race barefoot through cool grass without a thought of stones or splinters. That's what it's supposed to be. That's what it was once and will be again, in God's good time.