[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Kvetch

I try to maintain a tough hide and a long fuse, but every now and 
again I find something really, really annoying. At the moment, I have 
two things that are really, really annoying, and I hope that in 
writing about them, I may clarify the connection between them, 
because there is one, and maybe also write my way to peace

Both focus around the issue of truth.

The first has to do with Easter. Every time we get to one of the 
major public Christian feasts -- of which Christmas is generally 
thought to be the most important, whereas Easter really is -- we get 
back to what Huston Smith has called the two dogmatic 
fundamentalisms: those who deny that these events happened at all, 
and those who claim that these events happened exactly as written in 
the Bible (preferably King James Version, which is the Word of God). 
The two sides lob shells at each other over the heads of those of 
us  in the middle, who believe that (a) nothing can be proven one way 
or another, and (2) spiritual truth is not the same as empirically 
established evidence.  Things can be psychospiritually true without 
being factually verifiable.

But another part of me resonates in a sort of grumbling way with an 
equal and opposite issue: that psychospiritual truths do, in fact, 
have to be connected to reality. (There! That's the connection I was 
looking for. Funny how my fingers think better than my cerebral cortex.)

This latter is, I believe, a problem that my generation is largely 
responsible for. I am, forgive me, a Boomer (I wasn't given a choice 
about this). I can see where it comes from. Our parents' generation, 
traumatized by the Great Depression and the war, retreated from 
emotion, often into the bottle or into silence. We grew up in an era 
of substantial psychological and emotional repression, which was not 
healthy. Not surprisingly, we arced in an equal and opposite 
direction -- the boomerang effect. Emotional truth became our 
watchword. If we felt repressed, we were repressed. (The fact that we 
were usually repressing someone else was not part of our emotional 
truth, something that the second wave of feminism had to learn the 
painfully hard way.)

A lot of us eventually clued into the fact that sometimes an emotion 
is real and justified and important and in need of attention, and 
sometimes it's just plain out to lunch. Feelings may be very real 
without being realistic. You learn this essential lesson by taking 
emotion in one hand and reality (as best you can see it) in the other 
and seeing how the two line up. This can be a tricky and difficult 
business, especially given the prevalence of human self-deception and 
low self-esteem, but it's an important practice.

Problem is, there's a sort of  mindset based on the cult of freedom 
and individualism, that says that emotional truth *is* truth. If 
having a heavy fender-bender after a really bad office blowup feels 
like a huge crisis, it *is* a huge crisis. And this turns into all 
sorts of spiritual issues.

Self-deception is a huge issue with emotional truth, as John remarked 
in his first epistle: if we think we've got it all right, we're lying 
to ourselves. We're all sinners, and that's a reality we have real 
problems facing.

Possession of the emotional truth can easily morph into yet another 
dogmatic fundamentalism, another tug-of-war, because your emotional 
truth and my emotional truth may be absolutely contradictory. And 
then we're back to being on opposite sides of the battlefield lobbing 
shells at each other, just like the other dogmatic fundamentalists.

Moreover, when we focus on our emotional truths, we have a tendency 
to blow things out of proportion, as in "I have a zit on my nose! 
Omigawd! My life is ruined." Or we become completely self-absorbed 
and self-focused (a character flaw, I admit, sadly common to 
Boomers). Emotional truth may be the high road to real narcissism, 
and we've all got more than a trace of that.

So how can I put this all together for myself?

I can do so in two ways: first, by looking at Creation and honouring 
the Creator. I am only one among billions and billions of souls, all 
dearly and individually loved by my Creator God. My truths are very 
real and precious to me, but they are not the only truths. I believe 
in my beliefs, but I also know that nobody has yet succeeded in 
walking around God. I remember that my first duty to God and to 
myself isn't to freak out when things aren't going the way I want, 
but to get my nose out of my navel and give thanks for what I have, 
remembering how much worse others have it. I can't prove or disprove 
the existence of God, except that God is a highly elegant solution to 
the problem of Creation (just think of the human nervous system).

And second, by re-assuming some antique virtues, which had gone very 
badly out of fashion but seem, perhaps, to be on their way back in: 
humility, selflessness, a willingness to bend my individuality to the 
community, self-honesty, love for others, a willingness to spend more 
time with the suffering of others than with my own, trust in the 
provision of Providence.

Somewhere, at some point at which all the shells cross the 
battlefield, there is a quiet spot where no shell shot by a dogmatic 
fundamentalism ever falls, and that's where Truth is sitting. I won't 
find it in this lifetime, but I trust in my bones that it's there, 
and that I will find the deepest peace when I get there.







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