Inadequacy?

Dearest Wisdom,
Dutifully, I sat with this week’s readings every day. I thought about prophets- good and bad and my assumption (presumption) that I speak for you. I thought about being humble and reminding people to be suspicious of my words. I thought about how even if well meant, that was a sickly performance of humility that would come across as ironic.
I thought about talking about “fake news” in our world and also critiquing the church but I realised I was performing contortionism to make that what the readings were about. I have come to Saturday afternoon on a hot and busy weekend and I have nothing but my admission.
I don’t get along with these readings and the way they are juxtaposed and I didn’t really find you in them, no not at all!
Power, authority….seems typical of the church to go on and on about those things in a top-down way while meanwhile real ordinary people are suffering disillusionment and lack of representation and lack of material things (eg food, safety) and a rapidly dying environment.
If I have encountered you (true Word) in words this week, then perhaps it was in the words of Naomi Klein and Clarissa Pinkola Estes. Or was it that I encountered you in doors being opened, in the sweet juiciness of mango- slightly tart about the seed, in sister’s returning from far away, in a meal shared with a former lover and his new partner, in the affirmations of people at work, in children taking my hand begging for a story, in dispossessed peoples telling us again that enough is enough and we should not be celebrating their dispossession.
Was it you I felt in the touch of an over-hot sun and in the cool breeze that blew through it, in the trickle of the creek and the fragrance of lemon myrtle in my refrigerated water? Were you in the purr of the naughtiest of kittens or in the voice of a son telling me he had no need of my mothering (shades of Cana as I asked others to listen to him and stepped back). But if it’s bread you were in then it was in fried potatoes because I ran out of bread this week and was too busy and hot to go to the shop after work. If it’s wine then it is white wine spritzers with ice in them- something I never thought I would try.
You were in the small self-denial of refusing to turn on the air-conditioner, and in the caring colleague who came out to swap because I had been outside too long. You were in the famous writer who offered me her support and affirmation and in the refugee I was pow.erless to offer real help to You were in the 5am rising and the midnight going to rest, in the memories of having been in love and in the stabbing pain whenever I move my knee.
As usual I have used many words to try to reach you, only Word. But you have been in life more than in structures. You have brought life and meaning into each day. My readers may fail to find you in my words, but will have their own bodies and moments and meanings to seek you out in and in the end a prophet (true or false) is not so significant after all. You made us to know you not to follow each other. You made us to touch truth for ourselves not to obey authority (or not blindly).
You made us to dance and sing.
You made us to love better than this.
You made us to be loved more fully than we have known yet.

You made us for love.

For love.

Love.

Teach me to love them- the ones who bring me joyous gifts and the ones who bring me challenge. Teach me to seek out the ones who are hurting. Open my eyes and ears and heart to know I am beginning from the place of love.

From being loved.

Loved by you.

Dearest Wisdom, I leave this week’s readings to someone more wise or more obedient.

In love (however flawed).

“Justice will be done for them”; remembering who we learned this from

 

I got to give the “reflection” at church this week so this is what I said. I realise there is so much more that could be said on these readings but I tried to keep it positive because the people who asked me to speak deserved that.

There’s a scene in Genesis where Jacob wrestles with an angel and refuses to be give ground. He demands a blessing. I mention this because it is a form of faithfulness that I think we sometimes need to bring to our tradition and even to the scriptures and having found this week’s readings quite tough I bring to you my beginnings at wrestling, in the trust that each of us will find a way to continue that.

I used to read the gospel story as if God were the unjust judge and I in the place of the powerless widow was supposed to constantly harangue God with my prayers. I found this idea as appalling as a photo of a beloved that has had obscenities scribbled on it. God is beautiful precisely because of her justice and kindness and I don’t have to use prayer to bring her into line or force her to care.

If anything I am like the unjust judge, I like to be secured in my relatively comfortable life and ignore the plight of the less fortunate and God is more like the tiresome widow always nagging at me and dragging me out from my rest to talk about my supposed commitment to justice or to my vocation or to plead the cause of her children in some way.

So I question who we are in the story. When Jesus says “God will see to it that justice is done for them speedily” the use of the third person “them” is telling. When I studied Critical Indigenous Pedagogy we were asked to avoid using the third person “they, them, those people over there” because it is a set of pronouns for “others” for the people who are “not us”. But Jesus is using the third person to reclaim those who we have excluded, whoever they may be. God is interested in justice for “them” (he could have said “you” if he just meant believers and those who pray).

So it’s a bit of a stretch for us to ignore our privilege in this world, our comfortable and consumer-good heavy lives and to assume that we are the widow in the story. Are we actually so urgent in our desperation for justice? But I am not so sure that it is completely true either to say that we are not desperate for justice, to say that we are not also in some ways the powerless and the marginalised. The story may speak to us in two ways, encouraging me- the widow to persist and call for justice more loudly and naggingly and also warning me- the unjust judge that God sides with the nagging widows.

What does faithfulness mean then in the light of these roles I may play in my life?

I circle back to the first reading and leave aside for later my wrestling with the patriarchal and militaristic models of God’s relationship with human kind. I also pass over a model of God’s grace which is shown as success in mowing people down with a sword. I need to find a chink in the tradition that will let the light of Wisdom through.

Here is Moses, the great individual- larger than life and filled with power.

His body is exhausted so that his arms must be held up by others (this reminds me of one of the recent popes who was still brought out in old age and held up by others instead of being allowed to rest). The stress on an individual who is the ONLY conduit of God’s action is too great.

Whether we take a leadership role and beat ourselves up for our bodily limits, try to go beyond ourselves to cheat ourselves of rest, relationship and support or whether we take the passive followers role and stand back and let our leaders do too much, allow their hands to be held up past endurance I think there is a flawed model of church here.

Can’t we instead ask God to flow through all of us, so that my contribution becomes important but I can trust that another will do the work that I can’t get to? Can we learn by seeing that even this great leader, Moses was not able to act or wield that unbalanced amount of power without assistance. Our choices as a community support different models of leadership and it might be time to question who we are showing faithfulness to, why and how. Without having easy answers for questions like that I wonder whether at times it is better to stop holding up the hands of tired old structures and institutions and instead allowing God to come to each of us herself. In so far as we have power over others, it might be time to stop controlling, stop fighting even our own bodies.

The second reading invites me to be faithful to what I have learned because of where that learning came from. I need that encouragement not to give up on the church, to retain my membership to something that has been my family for so long and to respect my links with a history that is longer and more complex than my own life.

But I personally did not first learn to believe from a priest, bishop or pope and so it is not exclusively them that form “the church” that I am part of. My mother and grandmother spoke to me about faith on a daily basis. My dad read to me from the bible in my own language (Latvian). At church on Sundays all the older people put up with my toddlerish behaviour and tried to feed me lollies (although mum, a dentist, put a stop to that pretty quickly). Our parish priest was a family friend who went fishing with my grandfather. My teachers at school were mainly women, both the principal and the religion teacher were Mercy sisters.

Each of you has a different story of the particular way you learned faith but I would guess that you too did not learn it from patriarchs and crusading lords but from people who loved, accepted and sometimes challenged you (like my year 10 science teacher who upset me by telling me I was wrong to always use the male pronoun for God). Even now into my forties I am still relearning my faith from the same source. From love manifest in other people and creation.

So that source of faith

-The love of God shown in loving communities or individuals

-The beauty of God shown in the beauty of the earth

That is what we remain faithful to. This sort of faithfulness is not our Sunday best, but our every-day gear that comes with us into every situation, spreading that love and beauty to the whole world.

And then the persistence in demanding justice from worldly powers, or help from God will be grounded also in our faithfulness to the source of our knowing that God. Which is love

Thank you for the love you show by allowing me to speak. Please take a moment to reflect on your own path of persistence and faithfulness, or to wrestle with these readings and then if you choose, you might share your thoughts with each other.