[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Slippers

I forget where I read it, but it's one of those curiously indelible 
bits of stray info that permanently adhere to the geeky mind: the 
slippers in the original Cinderella story weren't glass but fur. In 
medieval times, the fur of a variegated squirrel was used to line 
mantles and gave rise to a particular heraldic pattern. The fur and 
pattern were both called "vair". The French word for glass is 
"verre". From "vair" to "verre" is a short step, and so Cendrillon's 
footware morphed from a warm, silky, quite special, variegated 
heraldic fur slipper into something delicate, rare, and rigid, sized 
only for the exactly right foot. It probably had a four-inch spike heel, too.

In the glass-slipper version, when each ugly stepsister's toes 
weren't the right shape for the shoe, she cut off bits and pieces in 
order to force her foot to fit. This always mildly horrified me, 
although not as much as the rest of the original story (which, like 
many "nice" fairy tales, was originally gory and vindictive).

So what's this got to do with Godstuff? It's a bit roundabout, but 
bear with me.

I got into a discussion a while ago with a Christian whose faith in 
Scripture and traditional theology is exceedingly strong and 
admirable. We were getting on with the problem of evil. My friend 
believes firmly that all suffering goes back to humankind's turning 
away from God and trying to put humankind in God's place. This is a 
position I agree with on most levels. You can't live in this world 
and *not* see the power of sin; it's boldly out there. Toxicity 
floods our societies and our relationships, and too often Creation 
itself, where we have abused it.

But is Creation itself swamped by sin? My friend thinks so. I can't 
quite go there.

The problem is that I have a (thoroughly outdated) degree in biology, 
and I follow the sciences with interest. When someone gets cancer, I 
see genes switching on that should be switched off or vice versa. The 
events causing cancer are complicated and not fully understood, and I 
don't know them in any detail; but my understanding is that cancer is 
a natural process gone very wrong, and that the factors involved are 
complex. Cancer is tragic, no doubt about that; it can be redeemed, I 
believe; but is it the product of sin, particular or generalized? I 
don't know.

My friend and I got into a discussion of the great tsunami of 2004, 
the one that killed hundreds of thousands in southeast Asia. Was 
this, I asked, the product of sin and death? My friend said firmly 
that it was -- that in an unfallen world, death would have no dominion.

I have problems with that. I have problems because I do believe that 
science has provided us with a set of data that can, on the whole, be 
relied upon, and the data strongly suggest that Creation simply *is*, 
neither wicked nor ethical, but simply *there* in all its beauty and 
muddle and complexity. The moral interpretation we slap onto it is 
just that -- our interpretation. The spider eating the fly is neither 
guilty nor innocent, just hungry, and the fly's suffering (hopefully 
brief) is simply a condition of life.

Those who wrote Scripture (and my friend does accept that Scripture 
was written by people, divinely inspired) had no notion of tectonic 
plates; how could they? Neither did the great theologians over the 
ages. A volcanic explosion was an act of God, pure, plain, and 
simple, and likely God's punishment for sin.

These wise and holy people explained nature as best they could from a 
moral and spiritual point of view, but they couldn't explain what 
they didn't know: that bubonic plague is caused by bacteria; that 
rabies is viral; that malaria involves parasites transmitted by 
mosquitos; that earthquakes and volcanoes and tsunamis result from 
the blundering about of chunks of the Earth's crust. And then there's 
astronomy...

Which does *not* make our forebears stupid or naive (the opposite 
error). In many, many ways, our ancestors had insights and 
observations of the most profound emotional and spiritual wisdom. 
They built magnificent structures, physical and intellectual, with 
the tools and materials they had and with sheer genius. They had 
skills that we can no longer aspire to. We've gained in some areas of 
knowledge and understanding; we've lost in others. Third-world 
weavers, sitting at "crude" hand looms, can still produce webs of a 
complexity that no Westerner can begin to emulate. I look at the 
brush strokes in a piece of really good 17th-century painting and 
realize that those techniques have been lost to us.

The problem arises when one knowledge-set simply rejects the other. 
Dogmatic fundamentalists on both sides insist that they, and only 
they, have any real hold on Truth. My friend, considering the 
tsunami, says that sin and death *have* to have caused the ocean 
bottom earthquake. But, I countered, tectonic plates are far, far 
older than humankind; they've been clanging into each other long 
before anything crawled out of the sea, much less stood on two feet 
and raised a fist to God. And tectonic plates are essentially 
innocent. This world is indeed a fallen and hurting place, but not 
because of them. Tectonic plates are just the way this world is 
built, and presumably our Creator wanted it that way. My friend 
simply would not go there. If tectonic plates don't fit into Genesis, 
then they're off his theological radar.

Back to those slippers:

In a theology of glass slippers, when other information doesn't fit 
into the belief system, it has to be sliced off and discarded like 
the stepsisters' toes and heels. That is where Scriptural 
fundamentalism inevitably leads us. In that case, everything that 
geology and biology and cosmology and the other natural sciences have 
uncovered is true if, and only if, it fits the scriptural slipper. 
Otherwise, lop it off.

Ditto for the glass slipper of fundamentalist science: if it can't be 
hypothesized and subjected to the scientific method, it is 
non-existent. (Very few scientists actually take this position, by 
the way; but the ones who do get published, because scandal sells.) 
The problem, as Huston Smith wisely observed, is that "absence of 
proof is not proof of absence."

But what if the slipper is fur?

Fur has some stretch to it; it's shaped, it's defined, but it has 
play. In a theology of fur, the fundamental foot-shape is still 
there; there's a definite heel and toe and instep and sole. But in a 
fur slipper, living toes could wriggle and stretch, fur surrounding 
and warming foot, foot informing and fitting into fur. Fur is 
intimate. Glass is not.

I can conceive of a theology in which scripture and science are not 
set at irrevocable odds with each other, but where they play with 
each other -- playing perhaps like lion cubs, a serious, intent, 
demanding, and quite rough play, but also perhaps playing in sheer 
fun. The two need to answer to each other as viol answers violin; 
they're both essential to the music of truth.

What kind of Creator would set tectonic plates lumbering into one 
another? What's the result of evil (the power of sin and death) and 
what's simply Creation doing its Creative thing, with humankind along 
for the sometimes dangerous ride? Were we once pure and sinless and 
immortal, and we fell? Or are we slowly blooming, with all kinds of 
retrogressions and deep errors, into what we are divinely called to become?

In my friend's narrative of Creation, humankind's relationship with 
God is absolutely central. In a science-based narrative of Creation, 
humankind is a very late arrival and an opportunistic and aggressive 
species. And both versions are true.

We have no evidence of pre-lapsarian immortality, other than belief; 
we do, on the other hand, know that death is a natural part of *all* 
natural life. Even when clone-forms like stands of bamboo appear 
immortal, every individual within the clone must die. Is this our 
fault for our rebellion against God? Or is it simply the natural 
order of things? Maybe there's a different sort of death we're 
talking about. But in that case, what sort?

What on earth do we do with what Creation says to us, when we're 
willing to shut up and listen? Perhaps original sin is just as much 
our arrogance against Creation as it is our arrogance against the 
Creator. The two are not mutually exclusive, after all. In calling 
Creation fallen because it sometimes makes us suffer, haven't we set 
ourselves at the centre of the universe? When we say that *our* 
failure taints even tectonic plates, isn't that a whopping piece of 
human narcissism?

Aren't we dragging Creation down to our own level? And is that what 
our Creator wants of us? Maybe that's where the real sin lies. 
Whatever Creation is, it has God's thumbprints all over it. Who are 
we to pass our limited, self-absorbed judgment on what God has 
declared to be good?

Back to those slippers again.

The glass slipper is authoritative: it says what goes and what 
doesn't, because it *knows* the way the foot should be. It expects 
the foot to adapt or find some other footwear. The fur slipper is 
experiential; it says, let's work this out together; there's truth 
both sides. And yes, maybe that gentler approach can be too 
loosey-goosey and over-personal. Nothing human works perfectly, after all.

The odd thing is that I can see virtues on both sides. I make as much 
progress in fighting with rigidity as I do in exploring in gentleness 
and openness. I have to know what it is I question, and that means 
accepting that what I question is important enough to argue with. I 
cannot reject either side, Scripture or science. I can only try to 
hold them together and work out my own reconciliation.

But it's in the struggle that I do my best God-thinking.

My own personal slippers are soft, trodden-down sheepskin. It's still 
January, and my floors are cold. Time to go dig them out and put them on.



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