[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

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.



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