montréal reflections: day seven

NOTE: We are on holiday for rest and reflection in Montréal before a new year of engagement, teaching and creativity begins. This is the seventh in a series.

We have been chilling it in Montréal for a whole week. Today is Labor Day in both Canada and the US. According to the new liturgical season of Creation, however, in addition to honoring the heroic struggles of working people, today also invites us to celebrate what the ocean tells us about the holy. Instead of immersing ourselves in our own thoughts and words, Ocean Sunday exalts the first word of the Lord: creation itself. Further, the constraints and hubris of our anthropomorphic limitations are called into question for an entire month. This new season closes on the Feast Day of St. Francis (October 4) with a blessing of our pets. (NOTE: You really haven't been to "church" until you join the faithful of all varieties at St. John the Divine's festival of blessing the animals. Paul Winter et al provide a contemporary jazz context before joy and peace wash over all who assemble. Check this out.)

Once upon a time, in a very different life, a person in one of the churches I served said to me, "Ok, we've done the season of creation twice now... can we move on?" I was struck dumb. As if we could ever exhaust the wisdom God shares with us in nature? As if we could ever grasp the magnitude and majesty of the ocean? As if we might be opened to authentic humility by 8 weeks spread over two years? In the Jewish wisdom tradition, such arrogance is called out by the holy in a reading from Job 38 wherein Job asks the Creator why the world works the way it does?

So the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?  Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?—when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?

Who, indeed? If you have ever happened upon a quietly tumbling stream in the forest - or stood on the rim (or at the bottom) of the Grand Canyon - or been beside the ocean as the wind and the currents crash waves upon the beach - or even looked up at the night sky when the world is dark and silent...? Then you know something of the awe and mystery invoked by the Source of Creation as a response to Job's self-importance and despair. Job, like each of us, must learn sacred wisdom from the inside out. By astonishment, experience and enigma rather than just liturgy and linear thinking. Douglas Wood puts it like this in Old Turtle and the Broken Truth:

"First, my child," said Old Turtle, "remember that there are truths all around us, and within us. They twinkle in the night sky and bloom upon the earth. They fall upon us every day, silent as the snow and gentle as the rain. The people, clutching their one truth, forget that it is a part of all the small and lovely truths of life."

Cynthia Bourgeault suggests that without living into the mystical truths of wisdom born of our bodies, our feelings and our intellect - without living in alliance with the inter-connectedness of the cosmos within and among ourselves - we will make decisions without sensing (or caring about) their implications. We will act without compassion. We will look only to our immediate gratification. We will become small, selfish and eventually cruel. Hmmm... I like the way Marv and Nancy Hiles put it in All the Days of My Life:

We are overdosed on data and underfed on the mysterious. Our brains inflate while our souls wither. Constant interference by interpreting and explaining can distance us from life itself. God woos us into the wildness of unknowing where we are tempted by deeper senses. 

There are many ways to appreciate the wisdom of Job here from the political and inter-personal to the paradoxical and poetic. My hunch is that they are all true. If you would like to know more about the Season of Creation in Christian liturgy, try this:

http://www.christian-ecology.org.uk/ocean-sunday.htm. D. Keith Innes begins a reflection for Ocean Sunday with cutting clarity:

Our human words and ideas can obscure and confuse God's wisdom, hindering ourselves and others from receiving it. Job is challenged to declare how much he knows of the origins of things, and how far he understands their true nature. The creation of the earth is viewed under the metaphor of erecting a building, with foundations and pillars. The sea is pictured as a child bursting out of the womb: God acts as a midwife or a parent, clothing and disciplining the waters. Close to the surface here are Ancient Near Eastern ideas of the sea as an unruly, hostile power. Humankind now has vastly increased scientific, analytic knowledge of the composition and potential of creation. This knowledge has brought many benefits, but has also reaped a harvest of loss and destruction. The harnessing of technology to greed and selfishness points to a lack of wisdom. We urgently need to respect the limits that God's wisdom sets to our activities.

It feels like the poet Kwame Dawes does much the same in the poem: Tornado Child. (https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2019/08/27/197-tornado-child)

I am a tornado child.
  I come like a swirl of black and darken up your day;
  I whip it all into my womb, lift you and your things,
  carry you to where you’ve never been, and maybe,
  if I feel good, I might bring you back, all warm and scared,
  heart humming wild like a bird after early sudden flight.

I am a tornado child.
  I tremble at the elements. When thunder rolls my womb
  trembles, remembering the tweak of contractions
  that tightened to a wail when my mother pushed me out
  into the black of a tornado night.

I am a tornado child,
  you can tell us from far, by the crazy of our hair;
  couldn’t tame it if we tried. Even now I tie a bandanna
  to silence the din of anarchy in these coir-thick plaits.

I am a tornado child
  born in the whirl of clouds; the center crumbled,
  then I came. My lovers know the blast of my chaotic giving;
  they tremble at the whip of my supple thighs;
  you cross me at your peril, I swallow light
  when the warm of anger lashes me into a spin,
  the pine trees bend to me swept in my gyrations.

I am a tornado child.
  When the spirit takes my head, I hurtle into the vacuum
  of white sheets billowing and paint a swirl of color,
  streaked with my many songs.

Blessed Sabbath: we're off to Marché Jean-Talon before walking around the port in the sun and then taking in a block party on Blvd. St. Laurent.