floating

Merry Christmas! We’re having a quiet holiday but it's tough to write when everybody is home, so I’m giving myself another hour with this and then I’m going to give up and post. Apologies for any incoherences caused.

The biblical texts for the exercises these last two weeks have been about Joseph, whose primary role in the Bible is to do whatever crazy thing the angels in his dreams tell him to do (marry a pregnant girl, pack up the family and go to Egypt, etc.). The idea seems to be that if I get this spiritual stuff right (like Joseph, like Madeleine Delbrêl), then I too will be able to discern God's plan, and from there it's a question of obedience. Not that following God's directions is guaranteed to be easy or comfortable, but in submission to a higher power there is at least some relief from uncertainty, from indecisiveness, from those constant nagging questions of conscience. God, like a loving father, will always set me on the right path...if only I'd let him.

Sigh. I dunno... Lately I think God is: the incomprehensible infinity of all-that-is. And God's plan is: this one timeline we find ourselves in, with all its complexity and contradictions. And the future is: an infinity of possible others, over which we have only the tiniest amount of control. Short of a mystical experience, I just don't see myself becoming convinced that I’m capable of downloading and executing specific divine instructions. 

On the other hand, I could sorely use a hefty dose of Joseph’s drive to get up in the morning and get right to work. 

Water metaphors kept coming up in my meditations about this. The serenity of floating on a deep pool: relaxing, breathing, feeling held at the surface. The joy of being carried by a river: not clinging to the bank or trying to swim upstream but going with the flow, watching the world go by. Also that scene in Spirited Away where a giant stinky blob is revealed, after being given a very thorough hot bath, to be a river spirit clogged with layers and layers of mud and debris. (This, not coincidentally, after we had a meeting with a guy at the bank about retirement planning. Ick.)

And as frustrated as I get with the biblical stories sometimes, I keep being struck by how much we need them, and others like them. Not because they are true in a scientific or even in a historical sense, but because they are true in the mythical sense of “something that has never happened, but is happening all the time” (a definition of myth attributed to Joseph Campbell). Could it be true that even today, under the radar, beneath the news of money and power and manipulated facts and violence justified by religion there is, somewhere, a baby who will become a prophet whose teachings will become a movement of nonviolence that will save us from ourselves? Keeping this story alive in no way guarantees its success. But it is an act of hope, a spark of light against all the darkness.

My favorite nativity scene from this year's exhibit at the Swiss National Museum is a diorama set under glass in the wreckage of a gothic church. The scenes this year are grouped by setting, and this group’s description explains that "...the birth of Christ represents a time when a fresh start is possible, when something new can rise from the ruins of the past." I love the image of a ruined church sheltering the Holy Family…the circularity of it, the failed dream as a necessary ingredient for the newest hope. May it be so.