From lupa at kos.net  Sat Mar  3 05:27:44 2012
From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf)
Date: Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:27:44 -0500
Subject: [SB] Scrambling towards Zion:  Sam and John Doe #24 (March 2)
Message-ID: <4F51ABD0.3060801@kos.net>

Sam and John Doe #24

Peter, his helper, tells me that Sam has double joints, which accounts 
for the oddity of Sam's elbows and knees but does not, I think, account 
for his dowager's hump.  Sam's spine is so curved that he has to peer up 
at you by turning his head, like an arthritic little old man. I don't 
think he's so old, though, even though he seems shrunken and wasted in 
his overlong swim trunks -- well under 5 feet tall and fragile to look 
at, although Peter says he can be surprisingly strong. Hard to tell how 
old Sam is, but I doubt he's even middle-aged.

I don't see Sam often -- it depends on whether we both show up at the 
pool at the same time -- but nonetheless, I'm very fond of him because, 
like so many Downs Syndrome people, he exudes a sort of fresh sweetness, 
the sweetness of almonds or really, really good vanilla ice cream, an 
uncomplicated dearness like the best toast with honey. Oh, he's not 
perfect: he can be very stubborn and compulsive, and I've seen him flap 
with helpless anger. But he's shy and friendly and easy to get along 
with, in the pool.

He's easily scared, and so concern for him tends to make me move slowly, 
gently, thoughtfully and keep my voice quiet and warm: a spiritual 
exercise of the first order. He may laugh when someone in the pool 
splashes him, but it's a frightened laugh and he really hates the shock 
of water in his face. One of his helpers splashed him a few times "just 
for fun," and now Sam has to be tempted into the pool, praised for his 
courage when he finally creeps down the steps and into the shallow end.

But today the pool was empty except for me, Peter, and Sam, and I felt 
gentleness hovering over the water, and a sort of friendly intimacy. 
Peter works with the profoundly handicapped, and that brings out either 
kindness or cruelty, and in him it has brought out a kindness that I can 
feel and that relaxed my own self-protective guard. Sam nodded and 
babbled sotto voce as we talked about Downs Syndrome and Fragile X and 
Sam's loving mother, who died five years ago, and other quiet subjects. 
I turned off my music and simply moved in the water, keeping my body 
busy without trying actively to work out.

I can't tell you what we talked about because it wasn't that sort of 
conversation.  It was about Sam even when it wasn't.  Sam made the 
occasional contribution in English and then returned to his own private 
language, Peter keeping half an ear tuned, the way you do with small 
children, monitoring the babble for something that might need a response.

After a while, Sam got cold, and the two of them retired to the hot tub 
and I got back to my workout and turned on my private music: the Wailin' 
Jennies, the Dixie Chicks, the McGarrigles, Paul Simon, the Beatles.  
The guys were still in the hot tub and peace was still brooding over the 
water when I came to the end of my workout hour and started to cool down 
and stretch.

And then through my earphones I heard a much-loved quiet guitar 
noodling, the intro to Mary Chapin Carpenter's "John Doe 24," and I 
found myself swamped by memory.

I first heard this lovely meditation years and years ago, late one 
Saturday night in Washington, DC, driving back from a dance with a guy 
whose understated, sustaining affection had kept me afloat through a 
very bad time, the way my swim belt now keeps me upright (and my iPod 
dry) in this blue water. I thought blessings back at him as Carpenter's 
thoughtful amber voice, pierced through with love and tender 
imagination, wrapped itself around the soul of a deaf-mute black man 
called John Doe #24, judged to be a half-wit and institutionalized for 
almost 50 years in Illinois until his death, still unidentified.

I lay back in the water and watched the blue dusk deepen as the guys 
left for the changing room, and thought to myself that this really is 
the love of God: this willingness to be completely present with those 
whose lives are so stripped bare of all pretension and ambition.  People 
like Sam and John Doe #24 can do so little by this world's standards; 
they can only *be* -- Sam babbling quietly in the water, John Doe 
playing the harmonica and dancing with the nurses in a state 
institution. I've known people like little Billy Bly who could do even 
less, who really were "only" just *being*, but whose whole existence was 
poured into the essential business of being soul.

Jean Vanier has it right: we serve our own souls by serving those who 
are little by this world's worth. They are the people to admire and give 
worth to, because they show us what it really all comes down to: 
vulnerability, gentleness, hopefulness. He followed Jesus' clear example 
in pointing us in their direction and in joining them himself, wrapping 
them round in the thoughtful amber of love.

The blue dusk closed down as lights came on. Chapin's singing ended, and 
Brantford Marsalis's wistful sax lifted John Doe's soul up toward a God 
who would open his ears and loosen his singing tongue, as God will add 
strength and freedom and fullness of being to Sam's sweet generosity 
when Sam comes before God, perfecting what needs perfecting and bringing 
to fullest fruit all this lovely promise.

-- for Allen Stairs
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From lupa at kos.net  Sat Mar 10 04:22:08 2012
From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf)
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2012 23:22:08 -0500
Subject: [SB] Scrambling towards Zion: Terminology (March 9)
Message-ID: <4F5AD6F0.5060601@kos.net>

Terminology

At my age, I really should have less trouble with any part of the word "no." I am a retired editor, which is rather like being a retired border collie; give me a manuscript and I will scramble up on my arthritic hind legs and lumber off in pursuit of the straying phrase or the inconsistent use of hyphens. But it makes me grouchy these days, does editing, and that's why I should have said "no" when this project came along. Except it was an author I'd worked with before and rather liked, and it was a bittie little job, two new chapters and a preface for of a revised edition, no big. It would take me an afternoon or two and help pay for the sewing room furniture.

I should have remembered that bit about grouchiness.

The author is a good soul, and I know what she means when she talks about the problems presented by intentional or unintentional additives to food that may mimic hormones and affect weight gain or cause other problems. I do understand. But she persists in calling them "chemicals", and that turned my crank. (I have let her know this in a note, but it's her book and if that's the term she wants, she can use it.)

Chemicals simply*are*. In normal amounts, some of them affect us positively (calcium, in everything from teeth to wallboard to eggshells), some of them are neutral (helium), some of them are harmful (arsenic). Mostly, it depends on what form the chemical is in and how we respond to it; oxygen is great in dihydrogen monoxide (water) and not so good making the rounds as a swingin' single (free radicals). So using "chemicals" as a synonym for "bad stuff" -- stuff for which the music of "Jaws" would be entirely suitable -- is apt to crankify* anyone with a knowledge of science.

The same goes for words like "organic" and "natural".  Botulinum toxic, lethal in tiny amounts, is organic; so are curare, nicotine, rattlesnake venom, formaldehyde, and carbon monoxide.  "Organic" simply means something that's based on carbon fixed by photosynthesis, plus hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and a few other elements.  Some organic compounds are good for us, others bad, some just smelly (anything with a thiol group).  Perhaps Americans tend to be a little more idealistic about nature than Canadians; we have, after all, far more biting bugs (and bears). But nature is neither guilty nor innocent, good nor bad; it just*is*. We can objectify it for good or for ill, but it's still objectification.

It's a human thing to invest single words with whole freights of meaning based on a limited understanding or a misguided usage or on our own projections; look at what's happened to that perfectly honourable word "Islamic." Neither "liberal" nor "conservative" has four letters, and when we use them as dirty words we lose something essential in their full meaning. An editor gets cranky about this because editors are fusspots about meaning and precision, and heavily freighting a word can warp it right out of shape. Behaviour like this sets us yapping, snarling, and nipping at heels.

Two such crankifying terms are "spiritual" and "religious." Most people who say "I'm spiritual but not religious" would, I think, have a hard time answering the question "What do you mean by that?" Rejection of traditional religious institutions, like church, is the easy part of the answer.  There's no doubt in my mind that churches are apt to fade from the horizon, possibly within my lifetime, almost certainly within my kids'.  I don't know what will happen in other faith traditions, but I don't think too many are flourishing, at least in North America.

But what about the big ceremonies -- weddings, baby-namings, funerals, solemn occasions? These are times when communities draw together to do jointly some sort of organized, formal special event that's set aside from the dailiness of things and that involves a celebration or commitment or something else ... well, holy. How can these occasions be "spiritual but not religious" unless they're free of all rites and traditions? No vows, for example; no presentation to the community; no dedicatory words. Uh-huh.

And how do we deal with our sense that there really is an Otherness, a something that cannot be reduced to the Lego blocks of the periodic table of elements? That is, perhaps, what people mean by "spirituality." They try to find places other than the traditional pew to park it in, and that isn't something I can criticize.  I am a cradle Episcopalian, an adult Anglican, a preacher's kid, a church adherent for most of my life now, but I'm not stupid and I can easily see where my Christianity, just like all other faith traditions (Marxism and Social Darwinism included) has royally FUBARed.

But that doesn't warrant a split between religion and spirituality.  The great world religions all have mystical traditions in which the soul meets one-on-one in prayer and meditation with Whatever's Out There/In Here; and all of the ancestrally wise spiritual traditions involved religious rites, some of them quite messy. This split between "religion" and "spirituality", like that between "chemical" and "organic" is very recent. It is (I suspect) really a sort of waffling -- a way of touching base with the soul-ish side of things without commitment and without laying oneself open to attack by people who think anyone who believes in God is as dumb as a sack of hammers. It's a soft option.

It is, however, also creating an artificial divide, like the divide between "chemical" and "organic," that's based on a human need for villains and heroes, not on Creation as it exists.  That particular word-fission is a variant on TEAPOT ("those evil awful people over there") -- substituting substances for people.  But it's just the names we give things. Citric acid is what makes lemons taste sour; malic acid is in apples. Adenosine triphosphate is the essential coinage of energy transfer within living systems. Sacrifice is giving something up for a greater good out of a sense of a Greater Good. Liturgy is the work of the people; CHNaO3 is sodium bicarbonate is good ol' baking soda.

My own faith needs belief the way a laundry line needs poles to keep it up when it gets saggy.  Yours may be different; your soul is your business, not mine. It's hard for me, however, to imagine spirituality without faith and belief of some sort. Isn't that as fugitive as mist? How can that nebulous unvoiced wisp of feeling sustain a soul when the weather gets heavy and the hard winds commence to blow?

God is out there in the sunset and the Navajo flute tune and in here, struggling to get through my mind and fingers into a computer and out through the electrons, and in church and synagogue and ashram and temple and mosque. God is in mitosis and meiosis and the spaces between atoms and galaxies. We're the ones who split things up and slap labels on them. Not Creation. Not the Creator.

For Deborah and Linda

* Recovering copy editors are permitted the invention of vernacular neologisms. It's part of the healing process.

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From lupa at kos.net  Sat Mar 17 05:20:26 2012
From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf)
Date: Sat, 17 Mar 2012 01:20:26 -0400
Subject: [SB] Scrambling towards Zion: The Shield in Mud Season (March 16)
Message-ID: <4F641F1A.40007@kos.net>

The Shield in Mud Time

A sloppy, tussocky, grey-brown field populated by mud-sodden beef cattle bellying up to a roundel of last year's hay; surrounding the field, the usual half-grown woods that you see wherever someone sensible had decided to give up on trying to cultivate this land, but time has not yet restored the forest that ought by rights to be here.  Behind, two startling monoliths of rock rearing up maybe two or three storeys, baring their ancient uncompromising iron-stained teeth to the world.

Yup.  It's March.

Around here, lessons for the apprentice driver include tackling the mess of Mud Season; roads not yet roughly scrubbed by the graders, full of potholes and washboard and simple greasy mud (pebbly enough to be not too slick and surmounting rock close enough that you're not apt to get stuck up to your axles -- I have seen Real Mud, and this is not it). The apprentice driver at the wheel in the seat next to me was doing just fine, which left my attention free for the landscape.

Which was unlovely in the extreme.  This country can be beautiful but it is almost never pretty,  especially when it's free of the cleansing innocence of snow cover and not yet tenderized by leaves.  In fall, it has a ruminative aspect, like the ancient rite of Tenebrae. The fall's leaves lie umber on the ground, thick with the memories of summer.  In spring Mud Season, not so much.  It's just grimy and untidy, like a house that's been moved out of but not yet cleaned up.  You're conscious of all the litter of winter storms, and there is a lot, some of it going back to the Great Ice Storm of '98.

You're conscious too of the reappearance of turkey vultures in graceful mating pairs, soaring contentedly above the line of the 401 as they feast on the remains of those critters, dozy and gaunt from hibernation, who get smooshed by their hundreds on the highway, this time of year. But you're also conscious of the noise of songbirds, a presence whose previous absence you had not noticed until the song came back again, a yearly surprise.

For that's the upside of mud season in the Shield.  It's no more beautiful than morning is in that grey light before sunrise, too late for stars but too early for colour, when there's only a suspicion of a fair or cloudy day.  But it holds promise.  If you know what to look for, you see the thickened leaf-buds and the way willows have turned that odd greeny-gold, the first to signal spring as the marsh rushes are the last to turn green.

Looking at that grotty field and the dirty cattle and the two grim monoliths with their covering of winter-damaged scrub, I thought of other landscapes, smooth and green under clement skies, where winter only comes in for a quick curtsey and summers are well-behaved as good children, and there are hardly any mosquitoes and no black flies. Eden, we call it. Oddly, I wouldn't want to live in a place like that, except perhaps for a week or two in late February after a hard winter.

I like -- no, I love -- the Shield in this and every season because it speaks to me of God.  If I lived in gracious country, it would be easy to think that a good and pleasant life is all that's meant to be and we're to live, love, eat and drink well, bear trials nobly, and accept our own final extinguishment with regretful good grace, like Marcus Aurelius.  To do so, however, I would have to stand apart from the suffering that surrounds us, to overlook the poverty and injustice that we have brought to our own kind in this world -- and also the roughnesses of creation.  If humankind can be a nasty piece of work, so can your average mustelid.*

Or I could go to the opposite extreme, pointing at this scene's ugliness and snarling "See? Here's reality; let me rub your nose into it.  Don't give me this bullshit about a beneficent Creator!" I could rail against a God whose callous indifference left children dying of starvation and dozens of small furry smashed corpses on the 401, nature red in tooth and claw (see mustelids, again).  Belief is a choice, but so is hope, and in our arrogance we can choose indifference or despair and blame God for forcing our choice. But it's we who choose our own limitations, and we do so out of pure spiritual arrogance. If I refuse to see it, it doesn't exist.  Right.

The Shield is the Shield is the Shield, a vast apron of rock, utterly indifferent to humankind, that dominates my country.  It's very nearly as old as Earth itself, at least in its older parts -- my part is merely a couple of billion years old.  It does not exist for my purposes nor for any other human being's, a fact made clear to those who tried to clear and settle it back in the mid-19th century.

But it is also a place where artists open to a certain spiritual wildness have found a piercing beauty.  Canadian art, as such, starts here, in this landscape, with extraordinary impressionist paintings, colours laid on thick and buttery and urgent.  And just as I thought this, late-afternoon sun suddenly spilled across the field and the cattle and the monoliths and touched everything with tender sienna tints.

The Creator is in Creation; we only have to set down our prejudices, accept the mosquitos, and be quietly open to whatever's out there.

*Mustelids: members of the weasel family, including weasels, martens, fishers, mink, wolverines, otters, and others like stoats and ermine -- all short-legged long-bodied omnivores loved more for their fur than for their dispositions.


