[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Over the Dishes

George gave me a hand with the dishes, as I was on solo duty for our 
church coffee hour this morning. Maybe it was something in the sermon 
-- Mike had preached on fear, a bit, and how it deforms our lives -- 
but George got going on bullying. He experienced some pretty brutal 
stuff in his high school days. Moving into a new school for grades 11 
and 12 can be a difficult experience.

I sympathized. I only got bullied for one year (Grade 6); after that, 
our class was in with the high school kids, and senior students took 
a dim view of bullying, recognizing it as loser behaviour. Besides, 
the bullies who'd gone after me were, on the whole, not high 
scholastic performers, so they ended up in the shop wing, out of sight.

But my kids -- that was a different story. Both of them caught it 
going and coming for years, the older one worse than the younger one. 
We lived in a tough town, with a deep-set cultural belief that you 
clobber the other guy before he can clobber you. My kids, being too 
bright for their social good, stuck out enough to be hammered. It was 
terribly hard to watch, and it made me feel so helpless.

And it was something we couldn't understand. Why do kids feel 
impelled to torture other kids? It's gotten worse, in some ways, with 
the arrival of cyberbullying; you can turn a whole school against one 
vulnerable young person with a few well-placed text messages. We had 
a horrible case in Toronto (the trials have just been completed) in 
which one 14-year-old girl psychologically manipulated her boyfriend 
into murdering a young girl whom she barely knew but hated anyway. 
And there rest of us look at this and say, "Huh?"

But if I pull my nose out of my own self-absorbed navel and look 
around the world, there is so much of this stuff going on. 
Recognizing others' even greater suffering does not diminish our own, 
but it does put it in perspective.

I cannot fathom how you can live with mothers and sisters and 
daughters, aunts and female cousins and grandmothers, and maltreat 
women the way women are maltreated in some parts of the world -- and 
so often, women are part of the maltreatment, mothers-in-law abusing 
daughters-in-law, women mutilating young girls.

We lack the empathy to empathize with those who have no pity and no 
remorse. We just can't go there. Or at least I can't. It's a failure 
of imagination that I have every intention of cultivating.

Some of it, I know, comes from fear, for fear begets cruelty (begets 
fear begets cruelty...). Bullies, as George observed, tend to be 
people who know that all is not right with them and who are terribly 
afraid of being outed and clobbered, so they get the first licks in, 
just to be on the safe side. I have seen this up close and terribly 
personal, and if it weren't so outrageously *wrong* it would be very, very sad.

And maybe that's the part I should be concentrating on -- how 
terribly sad it is to feel the need to clobber first or to clobber 
back (but harder and more nastily). How sad that we flee from fear 
into inflicting fear.

How sad that we have this overwhelming human drive, with hurt, either 
to pay it back or to pass it on.

The whole point of Easter, it seems to me, is that God steps in and 
yells STOP THAT! Jesus takes on the whole hurt of the world and stops 
it in its tracks: you will not pay this back, you will not pass it 
on, because I have scooped it all up into myself, and with my life I 
have made sure that all this suffering will, in the end, be 
completely redeemed.

I have a wonderful sad memory:

Back in my early 20s, when I moved to Canada, I spent some time 
working in the Byward Market, at that time a still-unyuppified warren 
of small but funky shops, several of them run by people with blue 
numbers on their arms. Ottawa was a chilly burg in those times (it's 
a bit better now), and I was lonely and homesick.

I don't think I've ever met with more kindness than I found in that 
grubby, lively warren. For the good thing about experiencing and 
recognizing your own reasonable suffering (as opposed to fending it 
off by whatever means possible) is that it gives you a conscious 
choice to say "This happened to me; it must not happen to anyone else."

Give thanks for all who take their suffering and simply set it down 
for God to pick up and deal with. It's the hardest work in the world, 
sometimes, and sometimes it's something we have to do over and over 
and over again. But we know in our hearts that it's what needs to be done.



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