I’m beginning to get a glimmer of what it must have been like during the time of Noah. It’s been raining here for three days and three nights and more is to come. The ground is squishy when you walk on it.

I wonder what it must have been like for those people when it began raining and raining and didn’t stop. It was the first time anyone had ever experienced rain according to the story. In ancient Hebrew it is written that prior to the flood, the earth was watered from springs that welled up from the ground and mists that came down at night. But the first rains happened when Noah finished the ark, and got all the animals on board. He closed the doors and the first drops began to fall.

This morning the sun is shining again and I can see blue sky with no clouds. But the rivers, ponds, lakes and streams are all at flood levels. My much loved Lake Champlain in Vermont is more than 10 feet above it’s normal level for this time of year. I feel we have escaped with only three days and breath a sigh of relief at the sunshine.

For some reason, this little fellow makes me think of that first rain. I wonder how the humans perceived it? Some may have thought it miraculous. Some suspicious. Some may have danced. Some may have hid. All until the waters started rising. But the animals just got wet. They still do.

I started to comment on Brother Maynard’s blogpost pointing to Sally Morgenthaler’s article in Leadership Journal. Both are very good. But I realized that my comment was a post of its own and I shouldn’t be hogging the good Brother’s space.

You’ll need to read Sally Morgenthaler’s article, or give it a good skim, before this makes sense. But I’ve been thinking about this whole idea of professional pastorate for some time now. I’m not sure that having professional pastors is necessarily wrong, but I am sure that how churches treat those pastors in some cases is. I am certain that for too long we have used a few key Scripture references to force pastors, and folks who are in paid ministry positions, and their families to live up to impossible levels of sin free behavior. (I also think we do this to Presidents and politicians, but that’s another story.)

I have good friends for whom Sally’s story would resonate. With a key difference being that their marriage has managed to stay whole. I have other friends who have left ministry positions simply because the pressure to perform outweighed their calling. We have, in many perverse manners, managed to take the simple heart of a shepherd and twist it, mangle it, stretch it, and turn it until the position is no longer recognizable. Those who are in ministry, more than any other, need friends in their local faith community with whom they can be vulnerable without fear of retribution. Without fear of losing face, or God, or love, or community. Without fear … period. But we humans have removed that safety net from them.

What’s that verse in John 15? We’ll be known by our love? Or something like that.

We went out to dinner last night with a rag tag group of friends. By this I mean that it was a bunch of friends that one wouldn’t always picture being together. It was a group that came together sort of at the last minute. We went to our local Indian buffet where the head waiter and waitress know us and love to give us cooking tips. They also bring us baskets of piping hot naan so that we don’t have to rely on the stale naan in the buffet line. Everytime we go there we get a lesson in Indian culture and cooking.

For some reason the conversation drifted at one point to vegetarian eating. I recalled what had to be the very funniest thing I’d ever read about some vegetarians. It was in an article I read some years back (maybe 4) about raw cooking. The term alone is an oxymoron, but I’ll leave it there. In any case, the article focused on a particular restaurant in California which specialized in raw cookery. This restaurant also refused to use honey as a sweetner. This was considered odd in vegan circles because honey is a raw sweetner. However, this chef would not use honey because s/he believed that use of honey promoted, condoned, and continued the oppression of bees. S/He did not want to have any part in the ongoing trade in bee slavery. I have to say that the term raised all sorts of pictures in my mind of tiny bees rising up and yelling in tiny bee voices, “Help, help I’m being oppressed.” I wondered what sort of chains were used for bees? How does one whip a bee? How exactly does one keep a bee under oppression? Slavery, you see, implies that a creature is being forced to do something for which it was not intended by someone larger and more powerful. However, bees will make honey no matter what humans do or don’t do. I expect they might cease if we somehow managed to remove all the flowers from their territory.

I am the last person to suggest that creatures be used inhumanely. But I have a problem with all of the folks who protest against hunters. I wonder if the protesters have seen what happens when a deer population goes unchecked by hunting. The weak and young die cruel deaths by starvation and water depravation during the winter months. Which is worse, a quick shot or a long drawn out starvation? I do not condone hunting for the rack, that is killing for the antlers and leaving the corpse to rot, but using the whole deer for meat is not such a horrible way to control the herd.

The same goes for eggs and chickens or milk and cows. Chickens will lay eggs. It’s what they do. Anyone who thinks that milking a cow is cruel has never attended milking time at a farm. The cows are desperate to relieve themselves.

Let’s imagine for a moment what might happen if we were to all become vegans. What would happen to all those eggs? They’d all become chickens. They would produce more chickens. Have you been to a chicken coop? Even a small one in the summer time? Peee-uuuuuu. It stinketh greatly and cannot be abided.

On the other hand, I hate condoning the industrial farming methods that have become deriguer on most corporate farms. They are inhumane and treat animals as if they are mechanical products. In the end, I believe, they mistreat the people those animals feed. I wonder if it is really the farming methods that many vegans are opposed to and not the food itself? As in so many areas, we have taken this to such an extreme that I wonder if we’ll ever be able to see our way back to balance again?

As a mother, one of my hats is as etiquette doyenne of the home. It is up to me to ensure that my children enter the world with manners and decorum. This usually takes place at the table and involves conversations such as this, “Elbows off the table.” or “Hands to your mouth; you’re not a pig slurping out of the trough.” or the much favored “Hannah, Hannah, strong and able, get your elbows off the table.” I don’t say these comments nearly as often as I actually see the offenses. I would become exceedingly bored under those circumstances.

The other day LightGirl and I went out to lunch. We were having a lovely conversation over bruschetta (me) and meat calzone (her). All of a sudden she burst out with, “MOM! Where have your manners gone??!! Please take your elbows off the table.” She was correct. I was sitting at the table, with my elbow firmly planted. My reply? A breezy, “Oh, I must have lost them last week.” And we both giggled.

She’s having a lot of fun telling on me to anyone who will listen.

I have a time machine in my home. It will only go backwards. This is still saying something. It’s in my basement. I found it this week.

Earlier this week, I became the custodian of my guild’s community service fabric. This is all the fabric that has been donated to the guild for our community service projects. We make quilts for babies at our local hospital who’s mothers have (literally) nothing, for the local impoverished nursing home, for our county’s CASA (court-appointed special advocates for young people), and for the soldiers in Walter Reed’s amputee unit. There is a lot of this fabric. My friend and I are putting together kits for a sewing day this coming Monday. We had to sort this fabric. Then we went through my “stash.”

Every quilter has a stash. It is the bounty of fabric she (or he) uses to pull together quilts. It is the rare quilt that is made entirely from fabrics purchased outside the stash. That is where creativity lies: taking the pattern and using one’s own stash to make it sing.

So we went through my stash. The fabrics that I have been collecting for 12 or so years. The original sort of the community service fabric was interesting because it was a walk through quilting fabrics from the 1970’s to the 2000’s. I enjoyed that for it’s own sake. But when we got to my fabric, it got personal. I was able to identify so many of those fabrics and remember when and how I came to have them.

“This was a dress I made for LightGirl.”
“This was the matching outfits I made for LightGirl and I for her first Easter.”
“I remember when I got that … I was in a fabric exchange on-line.”
“Oh … ugh … I’ve never liked that.”
“What was I thinking??!!”
“Here is some fabric I just loved and was going to make an outfit for LightGirl … but never did.” There was more than one of those. Yeesh!
“I used to have a whole yard of this and I loved it,” now holding a scant 3″ square in my hand, “I used it in everything I could. But I can’t get rid of this and I can’t find it anywhere anymore.”

In the end, I was able to release most of my old fabric to the community fabric stash. I know it’s going to good use. And I have room now to store fabrics that I’ll really use. I’m not running out to purchase more … although I did do a little of that yesterday. I went to my favorite quilt store, purchased some of my favorite designer’s fabric and a book, and signed up for a class (while the LightChildren are visiting grandparents). But I have quite a bit of fabric that doesn’t have an official home and now it will. I’ve had my trip in the time machine, but now it’s time to be in the present.

We went out for dinner this evening and then ran some errands. One of those involved paying some rather (ahem) overdue fines at the library. Once our cards were clear, we turned around and checked out some more books. We were a little more circumspect with our borrowing this time.

I remembered an old friend from my childhood and looked it up in the electronic card catalog on a whim. Lo and behold, they had a copy in that branch of the library. So I checked it out. When I found it on the shelves, I discovered that a new introduction has been included. I read part of it and thought this was interesting:

The twentieth century has produced a world of conflicting visions, intense emotions, and unpredictable events, and the opportunities for grasping the substance of life have faded as the pace of activity has increased. Electronic media shuffle us through a myriad of experiences which would have baffled earlier generations and seem to produce in us a strange isolation from the reality of human history. Our heroes fade into mere personality, are consumed and forgotten, and we avidly seek more avenues to express our humanity. Reflection is the most difficult of all our activities because we are no longer able to establish relative priorities from the multitude of sensations that engulf us. –Vine Deloria, Jr. (1979) in the Introduction to the 1979 edition of Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux as told through John G. Neihardt (originally pub. in 1932)

Electronic media shuffle us through a myriad of experiences … in 1979? That was the year I graduated from high school and began college. If my memory serves me correctly, life moved at a slower pace then. I had more time to reflect and connect with “the reality of human history.” Heroes stuck around longer. Now it would seem the wheels are turning ever faster and faster. What was true when Mr. Deloria penned it in 1979 is truer ten times over now.

I’m anticipating a reread of my old friend with great joy. I haven’t turned these pages since I was LightGirl’s age. I wonder how much more I will understand now. How will the intervening years change my perceptions? This will be interesting.

Most of you know that LightGirl is obsessed with hockey. Those of you who talk to her at church or on the phone know that she speaks of little else these days. One morning recently she asked her father, “Dad, what do you dream of?” His reply, “That today you’ll talk about something other than hockey.” Tonight is the last (I’m breathing a sigh of relief) game of the Stanley Cup finals. The hockey obsession will not be over as she is going to hockey camp next week, but the games in the evening will be over.

There is another obsession on the horizon. We didn’t see this one coming. It began innocently enough. We even gave it unknowing encouragement. LightBoy picked up a book, War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. He read it in two days. As he read it he told us every detail. Then he began drawing pictures of the Martians. There are pictures of Martians, UFOs, and other assorted space vehicles scattered throughout the house. Today he assembled a Martian Attractor 2000 and ran around outside with it. It involved a coat hangar, a belt, and some other paraphanalia. He came back inside disgruntled that it “hadn’t worked.” He refused to accept the fact that Martians are fantasy creatures for an answer.

When we sit at dinner LightGirl talks hockey, Lightboy responds with Martians. It’s very confusing. On the other hand, I see the potential for a research project for LightBoy looming … Mars makes a good topic I think.

I got a brief glimpse of the Kingdom of God this weekend. It was fleeting to be sure, but solid nonetheless.

My church is helping a Muslim refugee family. They have many needs and among those is stable housing. We have gone about the process of securing that for them. The wife in this family was a doctor in her home country and she is going through the slow process of learning English and studying to take the tests necessary to become a doctor here. She told us on Saturday that she is, “… writing all of our deeds in a book …” so that when she becomes a doctor she will rely upon our church to find needy patients that she can treat, pro bono.

Grace makes beauty out of ugly things.

Listen to this … it’s kind of how I feel sometimes.

Well … I don’t have a beautiful wife, but you get the idea.

In a comment on my earlier post, entitled “Influence,” my friend, Scott wrote:

As to the bible and the story of the Garden of Eden. Perhaps it was God’s plan all along to have his children leave the garden. All was peace and beauty in the garden; frightenly boring if you ask me. How else is the soul/person to learn if not through being presented with challenges, with decisions, with different paths to choose from? Perhaps the fabled Tree of Knowledge, that Eve took an apple from was indeed a test that god had placed in the garden as a sign….as a sign that indeed his children had grown up enough, and with a tear in his eye, God would be able to send his children out of the nest and into the world at last.

I’ve been pondering this in odd moments over the past few days. It keeps popping into my mind. It is certainly unorthodox scholarship 😉 at best. I find that I want to reject it and then not reject it all at once.

Here is some of my thinking. First of all, I suspect my reasoning will be at cross purposes because I’m a “believer.” I take it on faith that these stories are true. So it’s difficult for me to separate my faith from my reason. I’m not blindly faithful, but these are stories that I hold dear. On the other hand, I also like to unpack my faith and look at it from all dimensions; question my stories, find their holes and peer at God anyway.

I have always loved myths. I’ve read them since I discovered my mother’s highschool Greek mythology textbook when I was nine years old. I read that book cover to cover many times over. The Greek pantheon of gods and all the humans that interacted with them sprang to life that summer. Next I discovered Native American creation stories, Norse, Egyptian, Australian, etc. I read them all as I found them. They fascinate me.

So, just what is a myth? What must a story contain to make it a myth? I looked that up and found several pages of definitions here on the internet. The definition that resonated most with me was this: “a traditional story accepted as history; serves to explain the world view of a people.” It is broad enough to be inclusive and yet definitive enough to exclude just any old story. There were many other definitions that also helped define the term for me, and you can read them all here and see which resonates most with you.

As I have read myths over time, I have discovered they all contain similar threads. (And as I wrote the last sentence, LightGirl walked into the room saying, “Mom, why do myths have to be so predictable?” She is reading Tristan and Iseult by Rosemary Sutcliff of her own volition. Perhaps I have passed one of my great loves onto my children.) Those similar threads have to do with the great similarities of human nature on one hand. On the other hand, the creation stories or myths, are also all very similar across continents, oceans, and cultures. So are the stories which account for how evil came into the world.

It has always been interesting to me that in every culture there was a time before time. During that time all was dark and chaotic, formless and void (as it is written in the Bible) or tohu va bohu in ancient Hebrew. Most creation myths involve the earth (or water) and the sky coming together to create the rest of the world and humans are created either last among the animals, or last after the gods. They also involve an early shadowy being which creates the earth (or water) and sky. This being is not always well-storied. The next interesting similarity is that the original creation has a level of perfection, goodness, or beauty that is desireable to the humans. The humans must be obedient to some stated rule of the god(s) in order to maintain that level of perfection, goodness or beauty. Inevitably, tho, the humans are disobedient. They break the rules and thus, allow all manner of evil, malady, pestilence and a level of chaos back into the world. Or they are removed from the perfect place and put into a world where there is evil, malady, pestilence and a level of chaos that did not exist in the perfect place. Here’s a website where there are links to several different creation stories from all over the world and the resulting entrance of evil into the world stories as well.

I circle back to the Garden of Eden again in my thoughts. I know that most anthropologists will posit that myths are the efforts of a primitive culture to explain the nature of humans and the natural phenomena around them. Therefore it is to be expected that most myths will contain common threads in them. There is a certain level on which I find that valid. And then there are the bits which that cannot explain. There is the shadowy pre-creator who is sometimes not well-storied. There is the common thread of a pre-existence of a better place. Then, too, there is this idea that across continents, oceans and cultures we humans share a code of morality which cannot be explained. We know what is inherently “wrong” and what is “right” at base. There are some cultural differences, but we know that killing and torturing others is wrong, we know that it is right to respect our elders and our parents, stealing is wrong, caring for those who have less than us is right, etc. Those are written into our cultures, religions, communities, myths, and our DNA. How to explain that? That is where I turn to my faith.

I don’t need to believe that the Bible is literally true for it to hold great truths. There are many Christians who believe that the Bible is the literal truth, the Inerrant Word of God; that every word written there is so true and real it can leap off the page and hurt one. That each story is literally and virtually true. There are many Christians and others who believe that the Bible is just another nice story book, filled with advice about how to be a better person. As you may see, there is a spectrum of belief and I probably fall somewhere in the middle. I don’t believe the words in the Bible can do anything any more than the words in any other book can. Any work that is done in my life or in the life of my soul is done through the activity of the Holy Spirit (but that’s another story).

So, what do I think about the Garden of Eden? What did happen there between Adam, Eve, the serpent, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and God? Can we know God’s motives? Taking the last question first. Hmmm … the omniscient, all-powerful, Alpha-Omega, Beginning and End … can we know His motives? I rather doubt it. Or, I doubt we’ll ever know all of them. We’ll only know those He chooses to reveal to us. Now, even by my own standards I’m starting to sound like a looney. But the motives He revealed in the story were that His desire was to remain in a relationship with Adam and the woman (she wasn’t yet named). If they ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, He’d have to break it off with them, kick them out of the Garden and kill them. None of that sounds particularly good. It doesn’t sound like a testing ground. Read the whole story for yourself here. When God cursed or punished Adam, the woman and serpent, he was not tearfully but joyfully sending them out into the world as a parent does a grown child. He was an angry God, disappointed that His creation had been marred by evil and thoughtlessness. There is that part of me that agrees with Scott; the Garden does sound kind of boring. If everything is perfect, what would one do all day? After he named the animals, what did he do? I’ve often wondered that. Now, we’ll never know. We’ll never know what it would be like to not have the knowledge of good and evil simply because we all have that. We all know what is good and what is evil; they are to a certain extent universal.

I’m still toying around with Scott’s version of the story. There are parts of it that are much more approachable and appealing. But there are also parts that just don’t conform to the myth that has been told by Hebrew story-tellers for eons. Those are the important bits for me. They are the bits which inform my faith. They help me to know who my God is and how to have a relationship with Him. This is the first instance in the Bible where God sets a standard for obedience. He tells the humans He has created that obedience is important to Him. We are almost completely and utterly incapable of meeting that standard. That fact is played out over and over again through out story after story in the Bible. The goodness of God and the inability of humans to meet His standards. These are the themes of all the great stories whether they are in the Bible or written by other authors. We humans love to hear about redemption and grace. And ultimately that is the story told over and over again in the Bible, even in Genesis. God’s initial description of His punishment for eating the fruit was death, but when the time came, He redeemed His creation, and merely sent them away from Him. Grace.

I like the fact that Scott has gotten me thinking about this and that I’m unsettled by it. I like that I don’t have any answers, just more questions. For me, this is the place where I’m willing to stand precariously on my faith; that place of being sure of what I hope for and certain of what I cannot see. I’m still approaching the cliff of unknowing, looking over the edge, seeing what’s below and wondering what is on the other side.