The Pentecostal Feed Bag

A tourist lady was wearing a big, boxy, loose-swinging shirt in a big, boxy, loose-swinging cotton fabric, and I thought “Gee, it would be nice to make one of those in red for Pentecost.” So I betook myself to my fabric store, which was having a major sale anyway, and (among other goodies) I brought home big shirt’s worth of loose-woven slubbed cotton, in red.

By red, I mean fire-engine red. Screaming red. Not my colour, but it was about time I started to fool around with dyes, wasn’t it? So I did that, and the fabric came out a deeper red — still very bright red, but not screaming. Barking loudly, perhaps, and a bit blotchy, but the blotches could be a design element. Necessity is the smother of intention.

This fabric I then ironed and laid out, and upon it I pinned out a pattern for a big, boxy, loose-swinging shirt, and I measured everything (with one exception — I’ll get to that), and all looked good. So I cut the shirt out and pinned the pieces together and sewed the seems, all with a newfound sense of confident pleasure: Hey, I know how to do this now!

Tried the thing on. Oh.

There is loose and boxy, which is kicky, and then there is feed bag, which is just plain sad. This was a feed bag.

Remember I didn’t measure everything? The thing I hadn’t measured was the width across the neck at the back, which, now that I looked at it, might accommodate a small kayak, perhaps even a canoe. Think wide.

I am getting used to these revelatory moments in my seamstress novitiate. I have concluded, with the assent of the sewing people I know, that every novice at perhaps every art or craft faces a stack of standard errors — think a pile of “to do” papers in your in-basket. The newbie has to make her or his way through every error in the stack, ideally only once (although variations on a theme are common), in order to build the needed repertoire of skills. Now that I thought of it, when I was a newbie cook, I made the standard error of confusing a clove of garlic with a head of garlic, which is a very good way of determining how you feel about garlic.

Check shape of back neckline in non-standard patterns. I’ll remember that.

Sewing, I find, is a little like doing your own theology: if you try this at home, you’re going to make a whole bunch of mistakes and the occasional real disaster. Which is likely why those in ecclesiastical authority sometimes feel that a large part of their job is to protect the religious hoi polloi from fooling around with their own ideas, because they might get things wrong (by the authorities’ standards, which may or may not be God’s).

But mistakes are often where we do our most in-depth learning. I remember my first university chemistry class: I’ve now forgotten virtually everything about Ideal Gas Law except the Law itself (PV = nRT), but I could likely still teach Acid-Base Balance, which damn near cost my my sanity for a while and now seems amazingly obvious.

In my own faith journey, I think I’ve now hit most of the major heresies except the goofier parts of gnosticism, and in each case, someone or something has given me a gentle nudge back into a more balanced way of thinking. Heresies are, I think, almost always the result of our need to overvalue one side of a paradox because mystery is so uncomfortable, and we were brought up with the tidy-minded Graeco-Roman “either-or” approach: human or divine; justice or mercy. But life and God are not so simple. We are not guilty or not-guilty but a confusion of rights and wrongs that only God can straighten out. We certainly can’t. Look how hard we’ve worked and how much harm we’ve done, trying for perfect rightness.

The only way to stay out of trouble in sewing, or in theology, is not to get into it at all. But that takes out all the creative fun. Is that perhaps why this world is as gloriously, inchoatly messy as it is, because God knows something we strenuously reject: you don’t get it perfect if you want it to be interesting? Maybe God is still fooling around with this world, just as the red shirt could still use some work on the front neck (it’s developed a sag since I hung it up — loose weaves are fluid substances, like the lead in stained-glass windows).

Would God prefer us to buy our theology ready-made at WalMart or some more upscale emporium, put together by others’ better trained and nimbler fingers? Certainly that’s better for the general economy, and it makes sense for those without the time or inclination to make things from scratch. But if you buy a thing, you don’t engage with it the way you engage with something you’ve made; you take it for granted instead of seeing it critically, squinting over the present lamentable mess to where there might be possibilities for new and glorious creation.

If you want to learn something, really learn and understand it, you have to get hands-on, and that inevitably means making mistakes — and emerging with an awed sense of the skill of really good craft. I am a purely terrible weaver/potter/stained-glass artist, but boy, do I appreciate the well-made stuff far more than I ever did before I tried it. Creation is like that.

I think perhaps that our Creator God is a whole lot more tolerant of error than we are, just as adults will smile over children’s first pictures and put the scrawls up on the fridge door. None of us has it completely right after all, because none of us — not even the sum total of all of us over all of human history — has ever walked all the way around God. So we are all in error. Get used to it. Knowing that basic truth is the priceless gift of humility, and it helps us take ourselves less seriously and turn ourselves towards God’s joy and love. As we become less full of ourselves, our emptying out leaves room for the Spirit to sneak in and find a hidey hole.

Back to the red shirt. It has a new design element now, a centre back seam, which considerably reduced the neckline so that it accommodates nothing larger than a four-quart saucepan; also the side seams are a tad shapelier and the V-neck is no longer placed so as fashionably to reveal my undergarments — this thing is supposed to be for church after all. It still looks like a barking-loudly red feed bag, albeit a shapelier feed bag. But put on, it still looks like hell.

I have a tie-dyed t-shirt dress….

*Ping*

Some emotions are like smells — not necessarily bad smells, although those are generally the ones you want to track down for good-riddance purposes, but smells that catch at your attention and need you to find what they are and where they’re coming from. Sometimes I know the scent (lavender, bergamot, sandalwood), but not the source. Sometimes (eucalyptus outside a hotel spa) I know neither and my curiosity goes *ping.*

The same went for emotion that’s been threading through my spirit of late like a thread of colour dissolving slowly into water. It took forever to figure out what it was about. I knew it was grief with an undertow of anxiety. But I didn’t know where it was coming from, until I looked at the dates: this weekend is both Mother’s Day and the 9th anniversary of my own mother’s death. *Ping.*

I didn’t — couldn’t — grieve for her at the time. My grief was far too complicated, too much a tangle, stuck like an impacted tooth, incapable of emerging. All I could do was to accept that impacted state as a necessary thing, go on with my other psychospiritual stuff, and wait for time to take its time. Which it did, in the end.

I do miss her now; not as my mother — we were never much good at the mother-daughter thing — but as a friend and colleague. We played theology the way two athletes might play squash, zinging Godstuff off with and at each other and having immense delight in the process. It was, we agreed, as much fun as a person could have with her clothes on. By that time, she was full of the healthy humility that AA teaches, and so she could listen to me and *ping* off my observations instead of always needing to teach, as she had in the past. For a few years, she was the first person I wanted to call when something significant happened.

And then pain took her away again: shingles, neuralgia, towards the end a broken pelvis; and the necessary painkillers (they really were necessary) stepped between the two of us and silenced our Godtalk, as her alcoholism had, thirty-some years before, quelled the motherly-daughterly love that never really had a chance to grow between us. I won’t say more than that, and perhaps that’s more than she would have liked me to send out over the Internet. She was an intensely private person.

But one thing I can say about her, and she would smile to read it on her screen: she taught me to be tough in faith. Not in the tough-guy sense of being hard-nosed and muscularly judgmental, but tough as certain plant roots are tough. When I think of her faith, I remember a place we once camped in at Palmer’s Rapids, where tree roots wandered, like snakes petrified in the sun, across bare rock to get at the tumbling water of the Madawaska. My mother’s faith was like that, and that is what she taught me.

Tough faith goes deeper than belief, which can be not much more than intellectual assent, a thing of duty, the price of belonging to the clan of Christianity. But it’s not the ecstatic visions of Julian or Francis, nor the holiness of Teresa (pick one), nor the intellect of Thomas or the insight of Meister Eckhart. It’s full of grit and maybe it’s a bit grim, but it’s bloody persistent in a wiry way, and damned if any mere catastrophe (much less Christopher Hitchens) will break it or even dent it much.

Tough faith just hangs on, sometimes by its fingernails, and it raises its face in defiance of despair. Doubt is in its fibre and obedience to the Spirit’s authority is its living sap: no matter what the qualms you can’t whisper even to yourself, much less God (who already knows them), you still get on with the next right thing. That was what she laid down in my grain when I was small, and it carried me through all sorts of desolate places.

Tough faith is what you grind between your teeth when you need to bite down hard on something. Another friend once wrote of clutching the fleece of the Lamb with all her fingers, curling them in deep and and scrubbing her face against the rough, lanolin-scented wool. You cannot prescribe tough faith for anyone else; you can only take it on for yourself, of your own ongoing free will. It is a 24-hour choice and you make that choice today, knowing that God will not hold you to it tomorrow. But it’s your own free will that chooses. You cannot send someone else on your own pilgrimage, after all.

I’ve thought since of my mother’s soul, after it parted company from the odd, stiff body-object that looked like no one I’d ever seen before. I thought of her sitting at peace in God’s waiting room, a place of soft colour and gentle light, where God’s healing mercy could reach through her own tight impactions and into her defended heart, clenched so hard for so long over the pain and frustration of her early dreams of love. I thought of God enjoying her brilliance, twinkling God’s light back in exchange, *ping* for her *ping*, and of how she’d smile (she almost never laughed) over her new knowledge of what, in life, she’d played with: a living Christ-child instead of a doll. And I see her sweeping, grand-dame with a twinkle, into God’s nearer presence, softened and gentled but also brought to grandeur. Well done, child, God will tell her. I know how hard it was.

There; grief out, laid bare, a thread of colour on my lap desk, bright as crimson silk. Be at peace, Ma. And thank you.

Spiders and Rivers and Stuff

For tonight’s piece the ideas came bouncing in piecemeal, like so many tufts of wool pulled from a shedding sheep. At one point, I had on screen the late great Eva Cassidy, the nature of authority, the Canadian Shield, glaciation, Victor Frankl, Jung (or was it Freud?), and the hacktivist group Anonymous. This would clearly not do.

So I loaded up the iPad, keyboard, and stand and ambled over to the Socialist Pig, our coffeehouse, which is a good place to sit and stare/swear at a piece of writing that’s turned into an exercise in herding cats (and mixing metaphors). I am a good structural editor, but the bits and pieces have to have *something* hanging them all together, and while all these had a common thread — authority and its relationship to integrity — trying to sneak up on it sideways was not going to work. Not even with Eva Cassidy singing backup.

This preface is by way of explaining why, at 9 when the Pig shut down, I found myself walking slowly home across the footbridge over the river, stopping to stare at a very well-fed spider who’d had the sense to put its web right under the footbridge light, and thinking about the river’s age.

Now that spring has come and the south bridge is open after repairs, I’ve been down to the water’s edge where one of my two beloved rivers flows into the other larger one. Both arise in and flow through a landscape raked, millennia ago, by glaciers that left claw marks running northeast to southwest across this landscape, with lakes feeding into the great St. Lawrence system.

Millennia ago; and the rocks the glaciers clawed are older, far older, a thousand thousand years at the least. I look at this landscape and see something with the authority of great power, but it is the power of a spirit that has suffered and endured and learned, and will therefore not put up with no shit from no one no how. (Yes, I know this is anthropomorphizing, but I’ve got Aboriginal tradition on my side.) Try to turn it into English-style farmland and it will bide its time and freeze you out and plague you with biting bugs until you have the sense to respect its nature and let it go back to flourishing in the ways that God, not the British Colonial government, meant it to flourish.

That’s where the power of gospel music comes from, as well: the authority and authenticity of people who have borne oppression and injustice with their backs straight and their eyes clear, and who have hung onto their humanity and human dignity in spite of all. Those of us who have been broken know better than to judge others; “there but for the grace of God…” But when we learn to be honest about our brokenness, then we can undertake the business of becoming authentic. And from honesty and authenticity come whatever authority we may have.

You can’t buy this stuff; you can’t get it by magic or inheritance or even the most perfect submission to the rules. God does not give out spiritual authority as a good-conduct prize, nor as a family heirloom. Jesus established that in challenging the religious authorities of his own time. His authority came from God, not the Temple.

The authority of a singer who stands, feet a little apart and hands on her broad hips, and rears her head back and delivers herself of a piece of Gospel scat music equivalent to a skater’s landing a perfect triple lutz — that power comes out of the authenticity of suffering borne with prayer and perhaps with honest anger, but not with bitterness. Job is honest; he comforters are not. The Twelve Steps put honesty as a first step to the precious gift of serenity, attained through humility and the willingness to hand over to a Higher Power all notions of control.

And yes, these things do all connect. There is a triple point, like that in physical chemistry between gaseous, liquid, and solid states, where honesty, humility, and authenticity come together, and from that point authority comes naturally. It is, in fact, the only authority truly worth respecting.

Which is why denial is incompossible (George Ade’s lovely word) with authority. Partly it’s because others see with discomfiting clarity that from which we’d sooner avert our eyes. But it’s mostly that people don’t think much of being lied to. Therefore, if you’re knee-deep in self-deceit, or trying to redirect attention from your failings to everyone else’s, you can’t expect spiritual reverence, not because they aren’t hearing you, but because they are.

It’s not so much that the walk must match the talk — hell, we’re all human; we all blow it now and again. It’s the ability to see that discrepancy in oneself first and foremost that leads to the sort of lovely humility that grants the possessor the ability to say “this way, not that way” and to be taken seriously. Pride is at the root of denial, and Pride is the granddaddy of all sin. Humility (not mere obedience) is at the root of all spiritual health, but it’s something you and God have to work out as a joint project, not something that can be prescribed at you — particularly not by someone who’s avoiding the need for a good dollop of humility of his or her own.

It’s staying light later; the northern sky was still a perfect lapis lazuli blue when the spider and I stopped communing and I turned for home, past shaggy lawns not yet mown this year and dandelions shut down for the night. A bantering wind played with me up the walkway towards my street, slapping me gently to remind me to stand straight under whatever life hands me, and to keep my back straight, my head up, and my own eyes clear and open. Then I can sing with Eva:

No storm can shake my inward calm
As to this Rock I’m clinging.
Since Love is lord through all the world,
How can I keep from singing?

Tailoring 101

It is late and I am tired. I’m tired because I’ve spent roughly 10 hours, minus travel time and a quick supper, working at making the basis for a shirt that really, truly fits.

There were six of us in the sewing class, plus the instructor Laurel, a gentle woman in a supremely fitting shirt of her own making, with exquisite plackets and meticulous buttonholes. She led us through the general process (measure self, lay out paper pattern, mark seam lines, measure pattern, adjust pattern, fit pattern to self). Much of the work was fiddly and detailed — until the moment when each of us stood and Laurel pinned and taped each pattern to each person. Then it got a little crazy.

None of us was young, and so gravity had had its way with our bosoms and we all had, to varying degrees, that middle-aged sub-umbilical bulge that cannot be flattened by mortal means. (One woman called her rounded belly her “wisdom,” a concept that I clasped to my own descending bosom.) But even if we’d been washboard-bellied twenty-somethings, the same pattern-fitting process would be necessary. Patterns are standardized. Bodies are not.

What I found interesting was that all the meticulous planning and calculating, necessary as it was, seemed like nothing compared to the radical process that took over when 2-D tissue paper hit 3-D womanly flesh. Shoulder seams went up an inch; side seams clutched in or (more often) veered out, dart lines dropped, necklines rose, as Laurel rebuilt armholes and reshaped bustlines, all with pins and scotch tape and slips of tissue paper and experiential skill.

Next step: we would use the transmogrified patterns to cut out muslin pieces to baste together and try on for proper all-over fitting. The completed muslin model, disassembled, then becomes a pattern for a real shirt or is used to retrofit the paper pattern, which can then be laminated to a backing and used till kingdom come, or until you gain five pounds, whichever happens sooner. (No guesses on that one.)

As I was marking and cutting out my muslin after I got home, I thought about belief and faith, the definitions of which had lately been under discussion in a group I belong to. One person noted that you can believe *that* or you can believe *in* , which is a fair-enough distinction. But I’ve always felt for myself that belief is a head-thing and faith is a trust-thing.

Belief, to me, is a little like the paper pattern as unfolded from its neat envelope: one pattern fits all of that size (say, Christian or size 12) but it fits badly. A paper pattern is an agreed-upon set of conventions that, if taken literally and very carefully applied, will produce a beautifully made garment that doesn’t actually fit very well — that strains at the shoulder and gapes at the neck, pulls across the hips and is too big in the waist, because the pattern itself conforms to certain industry conventions, not to actual human bodies.

Making faith, for me, requires starting with that set of beliefs and then fitting them and my life together. Some would say that the right way to do this is modeled on Cinderella’s stepsister’s approach to shoe fitting: if the shoe doesn’t fit, amputate. If my self, the flesh-and-blood-and-bone-and-soul of me, does not fit the model as laid down by Simplicity sewing patterns or the Council of Nicaea, the solution is to adapt the living being to fit the dogma. The pattern stands; the self gets ruthlessly padded or pruned to fit.

But this is bad construction; it privileges paper over flesh and makes our humanity into a thing to be snipped and tweaked until it suits a standard — but a standard set by whom? The Lord to whom we answer? Or traditions that we now know may have been coloured by archaic issues and beliefs long since outgrown? Age makes the paper brittle and, as the hymn says, “time makes ancient truths uncouth.”

The central question is, then, which does God care more about, doctrinal correctness/ conformity or the living breathing creature? To me, the answer is painfully obvious. Can the pattern dance or sing or fall in love or suffer? Does it breathe? Does it live? All those gazillions of species of God-beloved beetles conform in general terms to the pattern Coleoptera, but boyohboy, do the details vary…

I could make up my shirt pattern as it came out of the envelope with a few minor tweaks. I’ve tried that. The results looked robotic; there was nothing natural to them. Or I can adapt the pattern to fit my own living self, with a far greater likelihood of making something of beauty that brings me joy. That seems to me to be a no-brainer.

Seamstresses like Laurel have it right: the pattern is only a starting point, a necessary preliminary but only that. Paper and 2-D are only the cleared ground for building on. The process from here on in may have its difficulties, but oh, what fun we’re having.

For my sisters the Sisters

Tailoring 202

It is late and I am tired.  I'm tired because I've spent roughly 10 hours, minus travel time and a quick supper, working at making the basis for a shirt that really, truly fits.

There were six of us in the sewing class, plus the instructor Laurel, a gentle woman in a supremely fitting shirt of her own making, with exquisite plackets and meticulous buttonholes. She led us through the general process (measure self, lay out paper pattern, mark seam lines, measure pattern, adjust pattern, fit pattern to self). Much of the work was fiddly and detailed -- until the moment when each of us stood and Laurel pinned and taped each pattern to each person.  Then it got a little crazy.

None of us was young, and so gravity had had its way with our bosoms and we all had, to varying degrees, that middle-aged sub-umbilical bulge that cannot be flattened by mortal means. (One woman called her rounded belly her "wisdom," a concept that I clasped to my own descending bosom.)  But even if we'd been washboard-bellied twenty-somethings, the same pattern-fitting process would be necessary.  Patterns are standardized.  Bodies are not.

What I found interesting was that all the meticulous planning and calculating, necessary as it was, seemed like nothing compared to the radical process when 2-D tissue paper hit 3-D womanly flesh. Shoulder seams rose an inch; side seams clutched in or (more often) veered out, dart lines dropped as Laurel rebuilt armholes and reshaped bustlines, all with pins and scotch tape and bits of tissue paper and experiential skill. 

Next step: use the transmogrified patterns to cut out muslin pieces to baste together and try on for proper all-over fitting. The completed muslin model, disassembled, then becomes a pattern for a real shirt. 

As I was marking and cutting out my muslin after I got home, I thought about belief and faith, the definitions of which had lately been under discussion in a group I belong to.  One person noted that you can believe *that* <something> or you can believe *in* <something>, which is a fair-enough distinction.  But I've always felt for myself that belief is a head-thing and faith is a trust-thing.

Belief, to me, is a little like the paper pattern as unfolded from its neat envelope: one pattern fits all of that size (say, Christian or size 12) but it fits badly.  A paper pattern is an agreed-upon set of conventions that, if taken literally and very carefully applied, will produce a beautifully made garment that doesn't actually fit very well -- that strains at the shoulder and gapes at the neck, pulls across the hips and is too big in the waist, because the pattern itself conforms to certain industry conventions, not to actual human bodies.. 

Making faith, for me, requires starting with that set of beliefs and then fitting them and my life together.  Some would say that the right way to do this is modeled on Cinderella's stepsister's approach to shoe fitting: if the shoe doesn't fit, amputate.  If my self, the flesh-and-blood-and-bone-and-soul of me, does not fit the model as inherited from Simplicity or the Council of Nicaea, the solution is to adapt the living being to fit the dogma. The pattern stands; the self gets ruthlessly padded or pruned to fit.

But this is bad construction; it privileges paper over flesh and makes our humanity into a thing to be snipped and tweaked until it suits a standard -- set by whom? The Lord to whom we answer? Or traditions that we now know may have been coloured by archaic issues and beliefs long since outgrown?  Age makes the paper brittle and, as the hymn says, "time makes ancient truths uncouth."

The central question is then which does God care more about, correctness/conformity or the living breathing creature? Can the pattern dance or sing or fall in love or suffer? All those gazillions of species of God-beloved beetles conform in general terms to the pattern Coleoptera, but boyohboy, do the details vary...

I could make up my shirt pattern as it came out of the envelope with a few minor tweaks.  I've tried that.  The results looked robotic; there was nothing natural to them. Or I can adapt the pattern to fit my own living self, with a far greater likelihood of making something of beauty that brings me joy. That seems to me to be a no-brainer.

Seamstresses like Laurel have it right: the pattern is only a starting point, a necessary preliminary but only that. Paper and 2-D are only the cleared ground for building on.  The process from here on in may have its difficulties, but oh, what fun we're having.

For my sisters the Sisters

Of Swamps, Not

Of Swamps, Not

I looked up from my computer, with which I had been involved in a nasty struggle for some indeterminate amount of time, to find that it was already past midnight and I hadn’t written my Friday piece. Ohgodohgodohgod… there’s nothing like being an over-responsible obsessive-compulsive perfectionist (okay, you may all put your hands down now) to leave you wallowing in the guilts.

It’s Apple’s fault. Honestly, it is. I’d been trying to download iTunes music to an MP3 player without entirely understanding the difference between MP3 and MP4, and not surprisingly, my MP3 device had the collywobbles. Meanwhile, the piece I’d sorta-kinda had in mind to write lay disassembled on the carpet. Not disassembled as in an Ikea product waiting to be put together. Disassembled as in as-yet unmilled lumber.

No, not really Apple’s fault; mine. I’d done it again, left off getting started until the last possible moment to meet a self-imposed deadline. This is a very bad habit. I’ve been trying of late to remember to start thinking about the piece by Wednesday at the latest, to have something sketched out on Thursday, to be whomped into shape for dispatch by Friday bedtime (not infrequently Saturday morning; I am a night owl). But I get busy and forget. Is it still procrastination when you genuinely have a rotten memory?

And this time, the faint idea I’d had in mind — something about swamps — had three separate and apparently totally unrelated parts (something about swamps being the first to turn gold in the fall and the last to turn green in spring; the bit from_Monty Python and the Holy Grail_ about the castle built in a swamp; and the line that came into my head from parts unknown, “yes, but you’re just going to have more alligators until you drain the swamp”). Somehow, I imagined, it should be possible to yank these three together, tether them to some cute bit of theology and let ‘er float off into cyberspace like a helium balloon.

Not after midnight, it isn’t. I may be awake, but “I cannot brain; I has the dumbs” by this hour. Anything I produce will not float. More likely bump in a surly fashion along the ground, if I’m lucky.

So, I thought, perhaps I could simply burble on for a bit about writing, something writers tend to do when they can’t think of anything else and have exhausted the obvious (their cats). Non-writers often think that there’s something magical about the process. There isn’t — usually. Usually it’s just wrangling the ideas into some sort of shape and matching them up with something that’s been a thumbtack in my back pocket for a while, plus some conventional wisdom or some bit of insight I got from somewhere else, and then — well, I was a professional editor for most of my working life. It’s just getting it to sound right, that’s all.

Except sometimes.

Sometimes, something happens to my fingers and they take on a life of their own, and then God help the keyboard that isn’t fast enough and doesn’t let me touch-type, because when this happens, I write at an incredible rate, and it comes out beautifully, needing only a touch of the editor’s thumb here and there. But when that happens, what’s especially delicious is that I know perfectly goddam well that my only role in the writing is as word processor and copy editor — not even stylistic editor, and the piece’s structure has arisen from the words as a whale breaches, but more peaceably. No, I’m just tweaking the ends in; the work’s been done for me. Pure bliss.

And yes, of course I bring something to this particular picnic: experience and facility, plus some excellent mentors and models (God bless Rosemary Sutcliff, wherever her soul is). But that’s easy. The hardest single part of writing is all the internal wrangling that has to go on before you can speak with anything approaching integrity, and that is hard, but it’s also the selfsame work of the soul that ultimately drains its own habitual swamp. (See? I did get swamps in, after all.)

And that, my dears, is how the good ‘uns happen, and why authorial modesty comes more easily to me than I have any right to expect. The bunts are my own. The homers come from God.

Back to the computer-wrangling, late as it is. I scent victory just over the horizon.

Sam Again

[Note: This piece was written for April 13, but somehow I didn't manage to get it to the published stage. My bad.]

I was jivin’ in the water to the strains of Mary Chapin Carpenter in a Bad Girl mood (she does that sooo well) when Sam and his helper Bruce waved at me from the shallow end of the pool. I called out a civil greeting without pausing — I wanted to finish the particular work I was doing — and they settled in companionably. Sam was not in a pool-ish mood (last time he was here, apparently, he could not be induced to get in at all) and so they stopped on the steps, Bruce waiting for and encouraging Sam who, while he dithered, was bending like a little ivory willow, his sparse body pearly in the afternoon light.

And in that moment, I felt something quake inside me, a sudden shudder of feeling so powerful it had me floundering. Just for a moment I *LOVED* Sam. I had that sense I haven’t had in such a long time, that sensation of being totally helpless, of being pierced through, love hitting me like a bolt of electricity.

I hadn’t felt that in such a long time. I dearly love my kids with an easy-going connected sort of love that gives them space and a sense of steadfastness: I am very fond of my friends and my cats and all. But this was different — not affection, not _philia_ nor _eros_ nor any of those categories, maybe not even _agape_. It was just plain old high-wattage love.

And it sent me scrambling for the far corner of the deep end just as fast as I could.

The next lot of exercises, I found, required me to face the window, with my back to Sam, because the thought of looking at him was so appalling — not because of anything in him (he doesn’t change) but because this love was so terrifying. I prayed and hoped that the two of them wouldn’t stay long, because as long as they were there, I was going to be frightened of this feeling.

It was not, I knew, something upon which I could or should act; I’ve learned that one the very hard way. Action requires more thought and far more humility than feeling does, and those who act on feelings without thought or humility are, frankly a menace in traffic. Sam is well cared for. He’s also quite shy and needs gentleness and care, which don’t always go with that knocked-off-your-donkey feeling. So heading for the deep end — but with no rejection — was perfectly okay, from a functional standpoint.

After they left, I water-marched to Holst and thought of what I’d just had driven home to me: if we as Christians are so gawdalmighty awful at being loving, it may not be (just) self-absorption or any of the other obvious sins. It may be sheer downright fear of the potential costs involved. Maybe this is what the fear of God is, the same fear i might face looking into the face of Aslan who, as Lewis pointed out, was not safe.

Living in my head is so much easier, so much predictable — and that, of course, gets back to those two demented drives, the need for power and the need for control. Especially for those of us with a theological bent, we’ve been rigorously trained to live in our heads, and to critique other head-dwellers rather like bull moose in season. That’s where the *real* God-stuff happens, we believe, more or less secretly. And I have to admit, it’s great fun, which is not, in my experience, always true of love. Jesus knew that too.

But even so, we may recognize the great hearts: saints like Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa or Jean Vanier and know that they are carrying out Jesus’ commandments while we’re just obsessively picking over the lint we found in our own navels. Our hearts are to theirs as shriveled walnuts are to honkin’ huge *muscles* — for there is nothing soupy or schmaltzy in them. Their love is too active, as well as too unself-centred, for mere sentimentality.

They are also learned and disciplined in the ways of love, as I am not. My sudden burst of love for Sam was like the flare of an untrimmed lamp, which only leaves soot all over the glass chimney; they have trimmed their lamps so the light comes clear but soft, adapted for the weak-eyed and the hurting head. I’m not good at doing that.

I also knew that I have yet to deal with learning to feel again, an ungainly part of recovering and growing. Too much of our fear of love has solid roots in experience and memory; we learn to detach and live in our heads for sheer safety. This world is not a kindly place for some, and the people who promised to love us sometimes reneged. My skittering for the deep end was actually, in its own way, the loving thing to do: I cannot promise love to Sam because I can’t be sure I can deliver on the promise. It’s far better not to promise in the first place than to promise and renege. Not that we can always help it…

That is, I think, where our doubt in God comes from, from the experience of promises unkept and trust betrayed and from our sense of being abandoned, which God knew on the cross. That is, perhaps, why doubt is so close to faith, two sides of the same coin. For doubt is really longing. We long to love and be loved, and we’re so damned scared, so we scurry into our minds as I scurried into deep water.

But even in my sorry panic, at least I know what, in my soul, needs doing — the next right thing. Which is, I suppose, a step in the right direction.

What If He Had Said?

What if he had said something like this?

It happened. It hurt like hell at the time, as I knew it likely would, and part of me was desperately unwilling and most of me knew that it was only the next right and necessary thing. It was that knowledge that got me through the injustice, the humiliation, the physical agony, the mockery, the incredible cruelty that frightened people who know they are wrong can inflict on the object of their wrongness. It happened, and it was agonizing and horrible, and I bore it as I knew I could. Then the light dimmed and it was over and I could no longer feel the pain as I slid away into velvet blackness.

Do I want you to go back there, with where I was and what I went through? Does it help — is it the right and necessary thing to do? Those are questions for you to answer for yourself. For some, whose lives are sheltered from the storms they themselves create, perhaps a good dollop of my suffering might be in order. There is something obscene in dishing up grilled lark’s tongues while Lazarus starves at the gate; perhaps a little vinegar on a sponge would cleanse the palate. Perhaps, if you really believe that national security requires extraordinary interrogation techniques for suspected terrorists, it might defrag your soul you to feel the touch of the barbed Roman scourge on your own naked shoulders. No two of you have the same story. You must work out your own crucifixion in humility and trembling.

But perhaps you are where I was before my body was at last so broken that I, my spirit, Mary’s son Yeshua, left it, and I was dead. You don’t need to re-enact my passion if you are still in your own. What you need to know is not that you are with me as I walk the road to my breaking, but that I am with you in having been broken, so broken that the life spilled out of me. I am with the addled prostitute mainlining OxyContin on Vancouver’s Lower East Side. I am with the tough blonde systematically drinking herself to death. I am with the sloe-eyed Ojibway teen rigging a noose for himself in Sioux Lookout. I am with the boy with a face like a sharpened knife who no longer cares what harm he does on the way to his next fix. They have no need to carry my cross; they are too exhausted carrying their own.

Rough hands took my body down, but tender hands received me and shrouded me and laid me to rest. Perhaps you could have those tender hands — not for me; I no longer need your caregiving. But there are all the other broken ones: Raymond, rocking back and forth on a wintry sidewalk; Giana, crazy as a hot wasp on steroids; Eliza, rebounding like a steel ball in the pinball machine of drinking; Mary Frances, turning from relationship to relationship in search of the love her high-living parents failed to give her. Aboriginal peoples we dispossessed and despised. Young men who die or who are condemned to prison for the high crime of living while black. The lovely Congolese woman crawling sobbing into the bushes after the troops were done with her. The blood-spattered bodies in a small Iraqi house. if you wanted to spend some time with these of my beloveds, it would be the fittest of Good Friday liturgies.

Why did I take on death for you? Because my father, my tender Abba, was so pissed off at you that I had to stand between you and him or see him crush you like a bug? That’s not a God worthy of your worship. Because your mythical ur-parents, fresh and naive, made a really stupid wrong-headed choice and you’ll have to pay for it generation after generation until time runs out? Would God create you only to damn you? Doesn’t make sense.

Or could it be that, just as Christian tradition invites you to suffer with me, in my death God invites you to see God sitting next to you in your suffering? God always knew your suffering as a mother knows her baby’s cry; but now *you* know that God knows, because you’ve seen God suffer just like you, just as human, naked and vulnerable.

I could and did show you to walk right into suffering and out the other side, not naively, but with willing obedience. And I showed you that your suffering could, if you chose, be transformed.

I took on death as I took on life: to be close to you. My arms are always open to you, whether you know it or not, whether you walk into them or away from me. When you’re most in need of tenderness, I am there. I always will be. And not just for you, but for all humankind.

There is a children’s story involving a miller’s daughter who (her mother claimed) could spin straw into gold. She couldn’t, of course. But God can. I did. The straw was anything but clean and fresh; it was the straw left over from the stable of my birth, trampled, broken, shitty, dull. But the gold is very real indeed.

Pick it up. I made it for you, from myself.

The Cherry Chest

I know where everything is in my house, just as long as it’s in sight. Once it’s been put away, I can never remember its very existence, much less where I put it. For this reason, paperwork migrates to the top of the cherry chest in the dining room — my one and only good piece of furniture, the only true heirloom I own.

It was built my my great-great-grandfather on the Pugh side, back around 1840, likely for a daughter, Martha, who scratched her name on the top. (When I was born on St. Martha’s day, my parents named me after Lazarus’s sister and the cherry chest. Molly is a nickname.) Greatly-grandpapa must have picked the wood with extreme care, as the drawer fronts are quite beautifully burled. The chest has, sadly, been mucked about with, losing its original legs and hardware and taking something of a beating during more moves than I care to think about. But it is still a lovely thing, the lovelier for being one of my very rare connections to my family past.

So I know a little — a very little — about the chest. I know it has been passed along through my father’s side to me. But there’s one thing I don’t know, which is where it will fetch up.

I have two very modern sons whose idea of furnishings starts and stops with Ikea and who are likely, in the nature of modern society, to be pretty mobile themselves. Their idea of moving involves green garbage bags and cardboard cartons from the grocery store, not antiques. Nor, so far as I can tell, has either of them the remotest interest in their families’ past, and certainly not in the American side, which they know very little.

I can’t ensure that a child of theirs will own the cherry chest; hell, they may not even have children. Families do die out, and their cherished pieces end up in the marketplace. It happens.

I think it’s happening to my church, too.

Not that I have a long ancestral Anglican heritage; all four of my grandparents were good Iowa Methodists. I grew up Episcopalian and have never really taken to Canadian Anglicanism, although I’ve been an ACC member for almost half my life. I also don’t have a whole lot of investment in any part of the future, because I concentrate on living in the present.

I especially don’t have much investment in the survival of the Anglicanism inherited in these parts — the heritage of British/Upper Canadian Anglophile class structure that probably reached its peak (or nadir?) in the old Loyalist strip along the St. Lawrence, including the town where I now live. This culture used to live and breathe English superiority, particularly in church, and it confidently expected its culture to carry forward from generation unto generation. That belief, which, in this diocese, built dozens of confident brick or stone churches and one truly beautiful cathedral, began to die at Vimy Ridge, although it took a while for it to realize it was dead and lie down.

Instead, I am … detached. Not from Jesus, who wasn’t even a Christian much less a Commonwealth Anglican; not from the wider church, in that my sociocultural heritage is Christendom and my worship is the Eucharist; not in my values, which are stolidly Iowa Methodist of the Lowland Scots liberal persuasion. But I am detached from the institutions and from the buildings that now seem to run church, or to *be* church, at least to the crustless-sandwich brigade. I have been saying for years that what this diocese needs most is a competent professional arsonist.

And in feeling this way, I may be riding the wave: we know what’s happening to churches everywhere, even increasingly to the mega-bubble-churches, many which are slowly collapsing like over-risen bread dough. We’ve been trying for 30+ years to stem the tide, either to move back into the old ways of being church (crustless sandwiches) or into new ways that we think might appeal more (whole-wheat with heirloom tomatoes and sprouts).

We haven’t, as best I can tell from this Anglican ground, spent a lot of time considering the possibility that maybe God has other things in mind than keeping these scraps of Christendom going long after our best-before date. And that just maybe, we should trust God on this one.

Maybe, just maybe, Christianity as we know it is going back to the wild, as the painfully cleared farmlands in the Shield are now (probably thankfully) reverting to scrub that will, in time, give way to the forests that those settlers battled amid clouds of mosquitoes, back when the cherry chest was built. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll find entirely different ways of being spiritually together, ways not involving canons or canons (much less cannons), of celebrating the Eucharist in ways both ancient and post-modern. Something like that seems to be afoot in the Third World. It may not suit us and we may not fit it, but who’s to say the Spirit won’t move in us in similar ways?

I expect that whatever happens, some variant on Church as It Has Always Been will survive, just as really good historical costuming survives, and for much the same reason: it’s beautiful in its own way; it’s old and a little exotic and definitely *cultured* and classic, like a beautifully constructed 1870 ball gown. I’d like that to survive, done well (no zippers!). I’d like the connection with and the deeper understanding of the long-ago, and while the beauty doesn’t really reach me, I can see that it would reach others. I just don’t want to wear the corset.

We can keep a handful of churches going as living sacramental theatre. What we can’t do is to force the future to adopt the past as its highest value, which is what we mostly seem to want. That transmission has broken down, largely because the young have such clear eyes. It may well be that we’re in for a new and equally radical reformation, mediated by the Web as the 16th-century reformation was mediated by the printing press.

Yes, this change in the world may mean losing the cherry chest that my greatly grandpapa built, but if it means gaining the things Christ really passionately cared about — justice for the oppressed, food for the hungry, care for the wounded, love for the unloved and unlovely, the Kingdom of God in practice on earth, liturgy as love for God and neighbour in bloom — then the cherry chest is only, really a thing. A piece of furniture, without breath, without life, without even a hamster-level soul.

Adrienne Rich, who died this week, wrote a lovely piece about a woman turning her back on all the dispute and passion among the men, and sitting down at her kitchen table, to play absently with scraps of fabric and to sit quietly with her own soul. I can see Jesus sitting down on the other side of the table, away from the monotonous clamor in the parlour, grateful for the plain loaf she set before him, and the fresh curds, and the cup of well water. That too I could love.

I won’t be around to see what happens either to my cherry chest or to my church, but in both cases, I don’t worry. The present is enough for me; too much of the past was “wreckage and rust [to be] left in the dust” and the future doesn’t exist. God and C.S. Lewis tell us to live in this day and let God look after the future. Who am I to argue?

Mastery

Mastery

I still remember, without affection, struggling to install a zipper in a skirt of poor design and worse execution, constructed as part of Home Ec class, required (in my day) for all girls in grades 7 and 8. I’d cut the thing out badly, and it sort of went downhill from there. I may have worn the skirt once; I can’t remember.

The situation did not improve when I tried to work with my older sister, who was as close as my family ever came to being a sewing genius. My sisters and I were rarely on better than speaking terms throughout our adolescence. It would be unfair to call my older sister “shrewish” for her reflections on my sewing technique, but her comments were not favourable or, for that matter, kind.

I’ve tried to sew off and on since then, but only a few months ago, when a desperate need for flannel nightgowns hit me, did I actually succeed in getting on good terms with a sewing machine. I’m still not much good at dressmaking, but I’m starting more humbly than I ever did before — and that, it turns out, is the key. Humility.

Funny: it’s not difficult to sit at the feet of a Julia Child or a Jacques Pepin when it comes to learning to cook; they are kind and matter-of-fact and explain things clearly. I did that for a year or so, back when, and by the end of it, proper from-scratch_sauce mayonnaise_ held no terrors for me. In microbiology, I accepted the rules of Aseptic Technique without a hiccup. I am generally pretty good at taking direction.

Except when it’s about God.

Tell me the “right” way to do something spiritual/religious whether it’s how to respond to the prayers in the Eucharist or the proper technique for meditation, and my individualism gets all twitchy and eye-rolling and breaks into a froth like a bad-tempered horse.

Part of it really isn’t my fault: church can be a maddening place, apparently far more interested in doing the next thing right than in doing the next right thing. All it takes is exposure to the legal and business end of church life (that is, to a church’s need to control the outcome) and the flesh under my thumbnails begins to itch in a peculiarly maddening and unfixable way. “Because we’ve always done it that way” affects me much as does biting into tin foil. I seethe inwardly when told to cut the crusts off a loaf of salmon salad sandwiches (“sockeye, dear, not that horrid pink stuff”) for a funeral reception put on by the Ladies of the Parish.

And part of my snippishness is peronal history: my own God-help-me life has been screwed up in exceedingly interesting ways by persons of the churchy persuasion. Major cities should have AA branches specializing in the spiritual issues of alcoholic adult children of alcoholic clergy because there are so many of us, and our issues with our Higher Power resemble richly festering Stilton cheese. We AA/ACoA PKs (now, *there’s* a t-shirt logo!) tend, as well, to fetch up in codependent relationships with people who are trying to use piety to shimmy past their own well-strapped emotional baggage — what has been called “the spiritual bypass.” Crazy-making.

But a good part of this fractiousness seems to go deeper than that. It’s as though I have to do some things the very hard way, because my way isn’t the highway but a narrow deer track through hawthorn bush and wild blackberry canes. I can no longer ascribe this, as I can my earlier failures at sewing, to an arrogant belief in my ability to figure it all out without reference to the directions. I’ve learned better than that, mostly.

No; doing it the very hard way can be a calling of sorts — look at the prophet Jeremiah, for example. Generally the prophets seem to have gone out of their way to piss off whatever the establishment was because the establishment pissed them off by failing to do reality checks between what it proclaimed and what it did.

Christianity, to my mind, is supposed to be about having the humility to accept grace and pass it on — to accept it, knowing that you’re given it, not that you’ve earned it by right thinking or right action; and to pass it on, even to people who scare you senseless or give you the squeams or the heebie-jeebies, or who have hurt you to just about breaking point. I may not like some people out there, but I have no option but to do my best to forgive and to ask forgiveness. Not if I’m serious about being a Christian.

And I am. I have years of practicing being a Christian, and I am a better cook (and a worse seamstress) than I am a person of faith. But I do trust that this path through the wilderness is indeed the way I’m supposed to be traveling, at least as full of fruit as it is of thorns. And I do trust that somehow, like my puttanesca sauce and unlike my Grade 7 skirt, it will all turn out right in the end.