[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

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)





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