I forget which psalm that line comes from but it has become a truism. I think it has all sorts of meaning. if we have a bad night, then the morning brings the joy of being able to get up and do something. Even if it is just read the paper or watch TV. (yeah, I know you can do that in the middle of the night but it’s not helpful for getting back to sleep again). Or we sleep on a problem and our unconscious gets to work on it while we sleep and we wake up with a solution at best, or some optimism at least. For me, as I have written before, morning is starting to bring the joy of greater peace and serenity.
I sit on my balcony and enjoy the light. The turquoise sky shimmering in the west through the clouds, and the light bathing the city in freshness and often gentleness. If there is any sun at all, it bathes me in warmth, and even at high summer, it is rarely too hot to sit outside.
Mind you, I am not up in the wee small hours, or even the small hours. More like 8.00 or 8.30 AM. But it is lovely out there. And I am grateful for it.
Melbourne in the Morning
Recently, I shocked my devout B-I-L by saying that I was a believing agnostic or an agnostic believer-take your pick. Yet it was only the honest truth. When I was younger, I believed everything I had been told about my Faith tradition. As I got older, and reflected on my own faith experience, my “belief set” changed; from my image of God to the way I prayed. Feminism challenged that set yet again, and once more I pushed my boats off from the shore and set off for the deeps. But always there was an abiding sense that God ‘was/is/will be.
Now that sense is gone, stripped bare, and all that is left is a choice to believe in the Something bigger than we all are that I still believe exists. But it is a bleak and barren plain at the moment. I struggle with theodicy again: that is, how does a good God let bad things happen? I can accept the Rabbi who sacrifices God’s omnipotence to save divine love and justice. But, au fond, I struggle with evolution. Not the world evolving, or us evolving. That is a given. But when it comes to starting the whole shebang off, even Richard Dawkins can’t come up with anything better than “Well, there was this really Big Bang!” So Who or What lit the fuse? And if God knew what suffering and evolving world would entail, then how could that be justified?
I am not talking human sin now. I can come to grips with the reality of our quasi free will. We have to learn and sometimes people get hurt or things get broken. I am thinking of what we might call innocent suffering. The animals who die injured and hurt from a fall for example. Children who die from painful illnesses we don’t understand or know how to cure. All part of evolution. Sometimes genes mutate and cause dreadful suffering. All part of evolution. How does God justify that? What joy would be great enough for us to say, “It was all worth it.”
I was thinking about war and conflict in so many places of the world. Conflicts between ethnic groups which are often tied to religion and social power. Even within religion, whether that be Jewish, Christian or Islamic, people who all believe in the same God will fight each other over what to believe about God, or how to pray to God. In turn, that is often tied to fear that God will punish the whole community if something isn’t done just right. Yet this same God is one the Hebrew Scriptures say is slow to anger and quick to mercy, who loves us like a mother loves a child. The Christian Testament says the God’s perfection lies in the fact that God forgives all enemies and loves us while we are yet imperfect and when we are off the moral compass.
Sometimes these enmities span not decades or generations or even centuries, but millennia. So what chance do we have of healing them?
Is this where we need to call on the God of the Impossible to reveal divine hea healing to us again? To reveal that Love will trump death at every turn? Do we have to believe in it first? People talk about the weight of belief. Does that weight alter the probability of something happening? I think of the Peace Marches in Northern Ireland when some women said “enough!” and marched for peace. And in doing so, helped make it possible.
There are always, of course, intimations of hope. The campaign against landmines for example. And then today, I saw another small intimation of divine effects. An ethical gifts website is selling jewellery crafted out of munitions. At first sight, bizarre or even grotesque, you might think, but it made me smile. Talk about swords into ploughshares. Here we have swords into beauty that provides work for those whose economic well-being has been jeopardised or destroyed by war. A harbinger of hope.
Spiks and Specks is a very funny TV show here in Australia. How to desribe it. Sort of a game show played by two teams. Generic theme is popular music, though other genres get a look in. The host is comedian Adam Hills and the regular team captains are knowledgeable and witty. Each team always has one comedian and one muso. But the aim is not so much to win as to have fun. Last night we went to a taping. It was so much fun. We hadn’t laughed so much in ages. My daughter was with us and I had forgotten how enchanting her laughter is. Some of the creme de la creme of Australian comedy were on the teams. Colin Woodely and Hamish Blake. The former’s humour is a bit sharp and spiky, but like Adam, Hamish is a genuinely nice, witty, funny guy. We watched about 3 hours of taping which will be cut to two, half hour episodes. Reader’s Digest was right. Laughter is the best medicine.
Not a really uplifting topic is it, when people are homeless in Chile and Haiti, when a young friend of mine was on a train that hit and killed a woman this morning in Melbourne. But after weeks and weeks of hassle, I actually tried some of the labyrinthine solutions on the iTunes website, and behold, they worked to the extent I now have my contacts, calendar and music back again. Now I can listen to it on the plane tomorrow.
Call me shallow, but I love my iPhone. I just like it to be fully functioning. Now if I can just get it to synchronize my pictures, my joy will be complete.
Melbourne in the Morning
Each morning I have to go outside as soon as I wake up to allow the light to touch my skin. This helps balance the melatonin levels in my body. Sometimes I potter with my plants, or sweep the balcony, but always I sit and take some quiet time. I resented having to do it at first. It seemed just another of the apparently endless disciplines to help my body heal and function as efficiently as possible. But then it became a time of peace and healing. This has been a hot summer, so often it is warm, but rarely too hot at about 8 am. I often pray-and when I pray I almost always feel I have to do something. Say prayers for people-as if God, if s/he exists-doesn’t care about them even more dearly than I do-though (segue coming) what research has been done does appear to show that praying for people makes a difference. Perhaps the pyschic atmosphere transfers love the way ethernet cables transfer data, and love heals (end of segue). But lately I felt drawn to just sitting quietly. I muse, of course. Am not brilliant, or even good at meditation. But I remembered what St Thomas Aquinas said in a sermon I read long, long ago. That just as we are warmed if we draw near to a fire, if we draw near to God, we will be healed and changed. It is nothing we do, it is nothing God “does”. It is something God is. Fires warm, God makes us whole. So the touch of the sun is my reminder from God’s dancing Spirit that we just have to be together, and change will happen. My soul will be warmed, relaxed, malleable, pliable, moulded to the shape beside me, around me, within me.
The rabbis have a proverb that God writes straight with crooked lines. I take this to mean that God can take our imperfections, even our sins, and like the medieval alchemists, transmutes them to gold. I first got an inkling of this when I watched the musical of The Secret Garden. There was this spoilt, angry little girl who was regarded as disobedient and difficult. And yet, when tragedy struck, it was her very anger that fuelled her determination not to be quelled by all the dreadful changes in her life. Following the robin, she finds the key and enters the secret garden. Not only that, she finds her frail cousin and her own spoilt nature, recognising his, refuses to be cowed by his tantrums. Thus is a friendship born that will see him healed and his father’s broken heart mended. Much later, I was thinking of David and Bathsheba, one of the great love stories involving both adultery and tragic murder. David covets the wife of his general, and sends him into the front lines of battle where he dies. He then takes Bathsheba to wife, and of their partnership is born one of the wisest kings of history: Solomon. I don’t think this is a case of God approving of adultery and murder to get Solomon born. Rather, God can wring hope and justice and even goodness out of evil. And the ultimate illustration of this is Christ’s death and resurrection.
What I find consoling is that even my sins can serve me. Like the weeds that shouldn’t be pulled up lest the wheat, the grain of life, is uprooted too, they shelter the growing plant somehow. When the harvest is in, the weeds will be burnt with the chaff and returned to soil to nourish it further for another crop. What a joy that is. Amazing. Makes me wonder if God was the first recycler.
Well, I am ashamed of myself today. I made a commitment to write everyday about everyday joys and I didn’t keep it. I had lots of excuses. Nobody is reading it anyway. I had an idea in the morning but I forgot it by the time I got to the computer. Nothing joyful today. But that is really all just nonsense. It is hard to keep up the discipline of looking for the everyday joys. Which brings me to Sarah McLachlin’s song, Just another ordinary miracle today. I first heard it last year, when we were travelling in Canada. Our tour guide played it everyday on the bus. Then Sarah sang it at the opening of Winter Olympics. And it reminded me of how much we take for granted. There we were,, sitting in our living room in Melbourne, Australia, and there is Sarah singing it in Vancouver and we are hearing it live! Images are captured by cameras and then beamed to satellites orbiting earth and then beamed to a satellite dish on our building. And we get cranky if there is a flicker on the screen. What an everyday miracle this is. Is not my ability to write this blog a miracle: well yes given my brain has gone blunt as an old pencil, but just think. I type on a wireless keypad. Words appear on my monitor, but are really being encoded on a server somewhere in the USA. And if I had a reader they’d be reading it on their own computers at home. How is that not a miracle?
There’s a line in The Senator and the Priest that really got me. When an abduction attempt is made on the Senator’s daughter, the abductor keeps screaming that she has to be rescued from the hell her parents are dragging her into. The terrified little girl is reassured by her father. “God won’t let you go to hell. He loves you too much to lose you.” It was so compelling because Greeley isn’t pontificating on God. I’ve not long read The Shack, and a similar image of God is found there also. Hell may be part of Christian Doctrine, but we don’t have to believe there is actually anyone there. The scandal of Christianity is that God loves everyone and would die to save us from the regret, pain and torment we not only cause others, but ourselves, when we are destructive and self-destructive.
Yes I know, what I am doing reading American Irish-Catholic schmaltz by a priest who is so prolific that a cynical professor of mine once said, “As a sociologist, he never did research he didn’t publish. As an author, there’s not a fantasy he hasn’t published.” Yet his book, The senator and the priest, makes some good points. It is about a man who runs for the US Senate but rejects ‘hate politics’, attack ads and soliciting money. He wins against all odds, but is subject to violence and the vituperation of his brother, the priest. The priest sees him as a sell out because he won’t run against abortion, homosexuality or stem cell research. The senator’s position is that Catholic Senators don’t have the right to impose their beliefs on the nation. And if men like him take the alternative and quit, there will be no Catholic voices speaking for social justice.
