From lupa at kos.net Mon Jun 8 00:49:46 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:49:46 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20090608004949.24E022A4B8E@barracuda.rutabaga.org> Psalm 91 Redux Every few years, Psalm 91 and I eye each other across the wrestling ring and prepare to engage once again. We had it in hymn form this morning in church, and it gave me to reflect. It always does. To save you reaching for your Bible, Psalm 91 is the "Safety Psalm": You who dwell in the hand of the Lord have nothing to worry about because angels are going to descend and protect you from all manner of ill. You won't even skin a knee or stub a toe, because God is looking after you. To quote Bill Cosby, "Riiiiiight." This is one of the places where, if you take Scripture as literal factual truth, you are rapidly going to find yourself heading up the crick without a paddle. God does not, in fact, protect us from suffering. In fact, walking Godwardly tends to lead us deeper and deeper into suffering, following Jesus' example. God does not intervene to save us from earthquake, war, famine, domestic violence, or schoolyard bullying. This is very much a fallen world, our consequence, not God's choice. And so taking Psalm 91 literally is not a spiritually healthy choice. It just gets a person terribly muddled, like that bit about God always giving us what we pray for. (My children might beg me for candy, but dammit, I'm going to give them bread. I might compromise about whole wheat.) If we assume that by turning our minds and hearts and souls towards God, life is going to become somehow simpler and problem-free, we have another think coming. That was my first argument with Psalm 91. Life doesn't work that way. But still, it's an incredibly compelling piece of work: the sense of resting in absolute security in God's loving purpose, like a newborn resting peacefully in its mother's arms. Here, nothing can harm me, nothing can hurt me, nothing can damage me or make me wounded or ill. God's in charge. God knows what God is doing, and I can trust in that. That's what animates the psalm and makes it beautiful. Of late I've come to a new accommodation with the psalm. I feel as though I've gone through the wardrobe or the looking glass or whatever and have entered a strange new country, in which literal truth has been sent out to play on the sidewalk while Other Truth takes the best chair in the parlour. And the best truth is this: If you turn your soul Godward and persist in pointing it in that direction, no matter what life hands you in the way of horrible stuff, you will emerge eventually with your soul in battered but spiritually prosperous shape. The journey really does shape you, and the better you obey Meyer's Law ("in any emotionally difficult choice, the harder path is probably the right one") the more you are apt to fetch up in a space where angels *have* upheld you ever step of the way, even though it didn't feel like that at the time. We only figure out the angelic upholding business after the fact, not in the middle of it. Sometimes it feels as though the angelic horde is dragging you along a bony mesa, scraping your knees to bloody rubble instead of keeping you from stubbing a toe. But in fact, the soul emerged not just unstubbed but radically transformed by the experience. Love grows with being tested, although not because being tested is right, but because the choice to love is right. Hard as it often is. What matters isn't the safety of my toes, finances, emotions, life, desires: what matters is what I make of my soul. By entrusting *that* to God, I ensure that I safely carry out of this life the one and only thing that I can take with me to the other side of the River. I ensure that what is essential to me lives in safety, however much the rest of me is tested and battered. And so, in the end, the psalm is true. Because you have made the Lord your refuges, the Most High your dwelling place, no evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone. ***************************************** 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 Mon Jun 29 01:45:02 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:45:02 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20090629014505.9C81E2E2ED1@barracuda.rutabaga.org> Four Things The younger kid and I went down to Toronto for a tourist-y weekend, taken in conjunction with the older kid and his partner, my other-daughter. We spent much of our time in two prime exhibition spots: the Ontario Science Centre and the Royal Ontario Museum, invariably known as the ROM. I also went to church this Sunday morning at my other-daughter's nosebleed-high Anglican parish, St. Mary Magdalen's (aka St. Mary Mag's), Healey Willan's long-time church, possessing the best church choir in Canada. Not my judgment: the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's verdict. Okay. That was the informational set-up. Out of this visit, four things emerged: The ROM is putting on the first Canadian exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I have now leaned elbows over a display case showing the exquisitely scribed fragments, put together like a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces, of a psalm dating back maybe two millennia, to the dry lands whereupon our Lord walked with his calloused humble human feet. The delicacy and beauty of the script clobbered me far more than any historical or theological element. I assorted this with the equally exquisite scribing of a Qu'ran, an early medieval New Testament, and an ancient Egyptian text (the ROM is nothing if not eclectic). I associated it with all the human beauty of extraordinary craft, stuff we in the early 21st century simply don't get -- how intelligent, patient, perfectionist, devoted, passionate, our ancestors were about stuff we take contemptuously for granted, like the brocading of a length of 18th-century silk, the turning of Venetian glass, the precise strokes of a brush or pen. How beauty is rooted in the human soul. How the scribe, the weaver, the embroiderer, the maker, spends time, takes time, tunes experience and craft, to something extraordinarily important. We have forgotten this. That beauty, that perfectionism, that care and passion, were in the music I heard at St. Mary Mag's this morning -- music and liturgy dedicated to excellence and solemnity and beauty of a high order. The church itself is quite plain -- nothing fancy in the way of decoration or glass. No; it's sunk all its emotional and spiritual energy into liturgy and music, which it does supremely well and in complete devotion. And that too was deeply admirable. But the Science Centre and the ROM also gave me two wild, unmediated, not-human gifts, the other two of the four. The Science Centre had a series of photos from the Hubble space telescope: five images in colour of galaxies and nebullae, of swirling masses of billions and billions of stars, from infant to dying, clouds of interstellar gas -- amazing images, wild and free. And there was a tidy diagram showing how it all starts from the point of the Big Bang. I know that an in-depth awareness of the vastness of the universe is supposed to make us feel insignificant and unimportant. The blessedness of faith is to be able to say "Woohoo! God made all these stars in their vastness and glory, and God also made the ants' nest in the rain forest exhibit of the Science Centre, not far from the Burmese python, and I stand between the two, wholly known and wholly loved, as are the ants and the galaxies and the python, because God is very, very, unimaginably large Love." The ROM, meanwhile, had an astonishing exhibition of minerals: a gazillion (it felt like) cut, uncut, lumpish, polished, honest and dressed-up variations on primal elements and what nature had done to them: in vivid colour. The beauty was extraordinary, far more searching and intense than the human-made jewelry in a nearby gallery. It was also playful. I thought of the line from Psalm 104 about Leviathan, whom God made "for the sport of it". Yes, I understand the science -- how amethyst geodes come to be, how colouring elements create blues and greens, sharp yellow, rich reds. I do get it. But it still feels as though these things come into being "for the sport of it." Which convinces me more, the human-mediated spirituality of the scrolls and the solemn eucharist, or the wilder, wider creativity of the nebullae and the geodes? I have to vote for the latter, for myself -- not for anyone else. This is a personal thing. I have been deceived too often and too deeply by piety; I prefer to range free, trailing my fingers through Creation in search of the Creator, because to me, the ultimate theological question is the Problem of Creation. What stands before that point on the tidy diagram, that instant before the Big Bang? What causes minerals to crystalize in what we see as extraordinary beauty -- beauty we can strain at but not ultimately own? (Although the straining-at, as in the Scrolls and the liturgy, is where we grow our souls.) But our mileage will vary. That's a given. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain