[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Penelope

Telemachus didn't tell his mother what he was planning. Instead, he 
borrowed a friend's ship, stocked it in secret, and rowed off without 
a word to her in order to search the world for his father. His 
mother, when she learned of this, was distraught. She'd spent twenty 
years as a single parent, raising her son, looking after his 
interests, managing their properties, fending off predatory suitors, 
and mourning her absent lord. And now she gets this treatment? She 
also has the legitimate worry that he might get himself killed. He 
hasn't seen much of the world; can she trust his judgment? I don't 
think I saw how accurate a real-life portrait this was until the last 
couple of weeks.

Nobody warns you about adult kids. You only find out about the 
problem when you fall over it, usually ungracefully and without the 
least preparation. I won't get into the details, but I've done such a 
morris dance of late, not quite blowing it but coming pretty close. I 
just didn't know how fast the rules of engagement can change and in 
such unexpected directions, how doors slam shut and boundaries shift 
like the staircases at Hogwarts Castle. It's unnerving.

The good news is (a) I developed much greater compassion for my own 
late mother; and (b) I did an awful lot of talking to other parents 
who've gone through this experience and have emerged with a 
significantly broadened understanding and some self-compassion, 
always useful for parents apt to beat themselves up, which is most of 
us. Just as I didn't understand infant abuse until I had an infant, I 
now understand how prickly and crazy-making the adult-to-parent 
relationship can be -- but now I understand it from the other side.

Which gave me to think about God, always a fruitful direction to take things.

God-as-parent changes so much through the course of Scripture: from 
the one-who-creates, to the one-who-imposes-consequences, to the one 
who's driven nearly crazy by our childish (not in a good way!) 
behaviour, to the one who covenants with us... I could go on and on. 
But the God of the Old Testament is never disengaged. He is a 
hands-on parent, guiding, directing, sometimes administering a slap 
upside the head

The God of the New Testament, however, we experience through Jesus, 
not directly (if I recall correctly, and if I don't, no doubt someone 
will correct me). The God of the New Testament has given us an adult 
child with whom God is in full and perfect agreement, and whom God 
wants us to follow.

Doesn't this represent an important shift? It's not that God has 
distanced Godself from us; it's as though we've passed through some 
sort of process whereby we need a new relationship with God, one that 
presumes that our job is to become grownups instead of just keeping 
the house rules. Not that keeping the house rules isn't a Good Thing, 
and not that God doesn't regard the children with extraordinary 
tenderness, but both parties to the relationship have shifted their ground.

We want to *understand* (at least if we're Anglicans!), to struggle 
first towards a sort of independence from over-simplicity that may 
very well lead us into confusion, even darkness. We want to go off 
traveling, like Telemachus, in search of our own mature 
understanding. And this may very well feel like God's becoming more 
distant, when in fact God is simply being patient, giving us plenty 
of space, and letting us get on with it.

It's hard to do, as a parent, because it represents such a radical 
shift from the caregiving we've done for twenty years and more. We 
may understand its necessity while still fearing and grieving (and a 
bit resenting) as Penelope did. Telemachus had no time for how his 
mother felt. He couldn't afford that, because it would have paralyzed him.

And God is wiser than Penelope, or our own parents, or ourselves with 
our adult children: God freely and lovingly grants space and freedom 
and time, in trust that the child will make his or her own way and in 
time find the right place to be.

It's hard though. God knows how it all turns out, which the rest of us don't.

Penelope, move over.



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