From lupa at kos.net Mon Sep 15 00:20:18 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:20:18 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080915002021.98C91314304@justus2c.anglican.org> Masks It was a wise and loving woman who helped me peel the old masks off the face of God. I understand the masks; they were the versions of god given to me, in honest love, by my parents and (later) friends. Wanting to help me find my way towards faith, they gave me their versions -- their understanding, what worked for them. My parents' god, for example, was theologically impeccable, utterly correct, majestic, inscrutable, transcendent, eternal, a fit and proper god for Anglicans of the anglophile persuasion. A touch remote, perhaps, maybe even a little chilly, and certainly with high expectations, which it would not be wise to disappoint. Rather like my parents, now that I thought about it. I wandered away from that god when I was young, while coming unglued from family in sheer self-protection, and when I wandered back, I didn't find him particularly persuasive or appealing, although I did my dutiful best to please him. There didn't seem to be much juice in our relationship. Perhaps I needed to find a different god, I thought, and turned to my circle of Christian friends. The god my friends wanted me to see was the god they prayed to every time they set a nail, the god who actually *does* answer prayer, if you pray hard enough and just right and don't doubt even for a nanosecond. This was a god of boundless enthusiasm, a god of dazzling high-resolution clarity, as witnessed by his Scriptures, which were to be taken literally (something with which I had difficulty). Problem was, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't keep my head turned off. My head insisted on noticing that this god couldn't deal with the Problem of Evil no matter which way I sliced it. People pray like crazy all the time and things still don't turn out well. Just as my parents' god stayed remote and above the fray, this god seemed pretty capricious, even cruel. "Be careful what you pray for" turned out to be true. So there I stuck for a very long time, having found neither of these gods to be especially helpful on a personal level. Although I'm pretty good at Godtalk, that's just my theological streak. In terms of personal relationship, not so much. I did get the occasional glimpse or murmur of Something Else, but it wasn't a reliable supply. I realized, fairly recently, that part of the problem is being a preacher's kid, especially in an alcoholic family. That's not a good combination. We all tend to glue our parents' masks onto the face of God; double the trouble when the masks are of a highly successful pastor (my father) and a brilliant theological thinker (my mother); quadruple the problem when there's alcoholism around (both). No wonder I was having such a struggle. That's where my wise friend helped me out. With her assistance, I found that I could peel away masks from the face of God, first my parents' version, then my friends'. They had, in real love, tried to help me find God by handing me the versions that worked for them. But I had to find God for myself -- a God of *my* understanding. When I took a theology course some years ago, the instructor kept saying: "What would a God look like who was worthy of my worship?" -- which, at the time, appalled me. Who are we to determine what God is like? God is God is God is God; it's not up to us to determine what God looks like. But with my wise friend's help, I realized something: obviously no version of God is completely right because none of us can walk all the way around God. But a particular aspect of God may be more immediately meaningful. For a person deep into social justice, for example, God's voice might be a clarion call. For a mystic, the Cloud of Unknowing; for a cosmologist, the First Cause -- I don't know. I'm sure there are dozens of examples. So, understanding that my own perception of my personal Higher Power is going to be pretty limited, because I am pretty limited, what could God's face look like? I think it would look like the face of a parent bending down to a newborn child. A face full of wonderment and gentleness and intimate, exquisite love that had nothing to do with anything the child had done, merely with the child for the child's own sake and because of the relationship between the two. A love bent on nurturing and protecting, but also liberating and enabling (in the good sense). That could be a start. God knows I'll get it wrong, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that we seem to be on different speaking terms these days. (for Diane, with thanks) ***************************************** 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 Sep 21 23:21:25 2008 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2008 19:21:25 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20080921232125.F06CF314C4D@justus2c.anglican.org> Equinox I cannot remember a more equinoctial equinox than this one. (Yes, "equinoctial" is a word. I looked it up.) Just as day and night are exactly poised, ready to tip winterward, so the landscape is exactly poised between very late summer and very early fall. A couple of days ago, the marshes were green, exquisitely tinged with gold; now they are gold, exquisitely tinged with green. The foliage too is poised: mostly the trees have got that almost-black deep late-summer green, but some are letting the green go, starting to shade towards yellow, and a few are already turning. This equinox is unique. That's a cliched word, and I rarely use it (especially because a whole lot of people now think that it's just a more elegant way of saying "unusual", which it isn't -- sorry, editor's pet peeve now ). It's unlike any fall equinox I can remember because an unusually mild and rainy summer gave the landscape a richness lasting well into the season when grasses usually die back and the greenery fades. Everything that could flower has flowered profusely and at length. Now it's the asters, which are riotous, but only a week or so ago Queen Anne's lace was turning whole fields white. But now it's perfectly balanced, on the cusp, waiting. One good frost, or another week, and we'll definitely be into fall. I say this equinox is unique, and of course it isn't: each and every year, the fall equinox comes and goes and each and every fall the landscape makes that turn into autumn; all that's unusual this year is that the two events are in such near-perfect coincidence, and that's noticeable, at least to those with eyes to notice, living in places where the landscape is still right up front there. It's probably a whole lot more obvious in the Thousand Islands than it is Toronto, and it's more obvious to me than to others because I have a bug about landscape. But it made me think, as I walked down by the water, of this odd thing we've got about turning points. That grand old hymn "Once to every man and nation/ Comes the moment to decide" got canned from the revised hymnal because it implies that every choice is a one-of-a-kind occasion, irretrievably determining the future. And of course, that's true in a sense, but it isn't true. We have any number of kicks at the can, so far as salvation is concerned, something that drives the judgmental around the bend because dammit, we *want* the bad guys to get no second chances. Or at least, not thirds. In that sense, we're more like the turn of the seasons, year after year. We make mistakes; we do real wrong. Ideally, we repent and make amends. We make fresh and original mistakes, or perhaps we go on repeating the same old tired ones over and over again. And yet, God's love is always there. In today's Gospel (the parable of the vineyard workers, at least in these parts), it's so bloody unfair: the long-suffering hardworking all-day guys get no more for all their hours than the guys who put in an hour in the cool of the day. That's what mercy is about. But at the same time, the hymn, while not true, is still true. Each choice leaves something done and something undone, and that choice has consequences. What we do has effects, some of them far more far-reaching than we could ever begin to imagine, stretching out like ripples in the water after you've dropped a stone in. Individual choices may end up canceling each other out, or being of not much importance, or developing in unexpected ways, or finding up in the most exhilirating or exasperating or terrifying places.. But while choices are one-of-a-kind, like this fall equinox, we have *patterns* of choices, like the general swing of the seasons; and those patterns are soul-determining. We may, for example, choose to take things amiss, reading ill intent into the most innocent matters and failing to do a reality check. Everybody does this now and again; the question is whether it turns into a regular thing. We may indulge in righteous anger; we may have a need to win at all costs; we may be selfish -- there are any number of ways in which patterns of choices may, in the long run, turn us either towards God or in other directions. In short, there are choices and there are habits, and the one turns into the other and the other determines the one. Maybe that's what the hymn is about. As always, it's not an either-or; it's a both/and -- and perhaps a neither/nor. We are forgiveable; we are also responsible. We can exist on the cusp and tumble forwards or backwards, but (unlike the equinoctial landscape) we do have choice. We can do this over and over again, as long as we're willing to be conscious of the choices we're making. And ultimately, we choose one way or the other the plurality, and then the majority, of times; and that gets to be defining. Meanwhile, the day is exactly half light and half dark, something that shifts as we swing around the sun and my half of the Earth (especially the more northerly parts) turns away from the Sun, like a dancer swinging head back down at arms' length from her partner. I know where we're heading; I also know we'll come back again, on the other side of winter. For now, it's just beauty, wobbling on the cusp. I'll hang here with it for as long as it lasts. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain