Happy Sunday morning everyone! Hope you are less tired than I am today and that your weather is much better than what I am looking at outside my windows.
Yesterday was a very full, very good day, but I am paying for sitting too long by being awake all night due to tight leg muscles causing cramping in my "hardware" leg.
We began the day at Dr. Kelvin Friebel's excellent seminar on the book of Lamentations. We talked about the iterary form, how it brought structure into the chaotic emotions of the poem, we talked about the historical conditions of the time it would have been written (likely during the Babylonian seige and captivity circa 586BC), we talked about the four different voices heard in the poem, we talked about how the way each line or thought in each of the first four chapters began with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet is not translatable into other languages such as English, so that we miss some of the impact of what is written. We talked about the way North Americans and some other western civilizations have distanced themselves from the very idea of death, how death has been moved out of the home and into funeral parlors, from out of the church and into fifteen minute grave side services so that we can get the whole nasty "death thing" over and done with and get on with the after party, how we no longer want to use the term "funeral" and prefer "celebration of life", how we have started saying more often that the person has "passed on" instead of "died". There are few wakes held in the home any more. As soon as the person dies the body is whisked away out of sight.
I laughed when I discovered that Dr. Friebel despises the whole idea of a funeral being a celebration of life of the person who died as much as I do. As he says, the FUNERAL is not about the life of the person who died. It is a time for the family and friends to grieve their loss together and to be reawakened to the hope of heaven that Jesus has provided for us. The person is dead. The funeral is for those who are still alive. I remember my mother in law being appalled by people who refused to say that someone had died, but instead that the person had passed away or passed on. Listening to her reasons certainly helped me understand better how we need to accept the fact of death. I suspect that as we have moved farther away from hunter-gatherer culture and even farm culture where people are faced with death every day, our more urban, technological society has removed us too far emotionally and mentally from the fact that it is a normal transition to go from life to death. Anyway, for whatever reasons we can no longer handle well apparently the reality of death and suffering. The point of Lamentations seems to be that talking to God in the midst of our grief is the normal, expected mode of conversation between us and our creator. It is not only expected, but necessary for us to live fully as Christians. Lamentations gives us the words to use, the thoughts to communicate to God. Somewhere along the line we began to equate honest grieving as showing a lack of faith, when true grieving shows instead a strong stance of faith: we express ourselves honestly to God and to our Christian community because we actually HAVE hope that our God will eventually answer. Since he all ready knows our feelings and fears and griefs it is quite dishonest to keep them to ourselves as if he doesn't know and it is dishonest to our Christian communities to lie about our reality, it shows a distrust of their love for us. (sometimes well founded, admittedly) The Hebrews being talked about in Lamentations knew they were reaping the consequence of their own deliberate sin in breaking their covenant with God and they accepted responsibility for it. BUT they were still free to grieve and to await God's deliverance with hope, even if the deliverance didn't come for several decades afterward. They grieved openly and loudly because they accepted their present circumstantial reality but had hope in God's help in the future.
So, coupled with what I am learning about the book of Job and its handling of grief from a person who was suffering despite NOT being guilty of disobedience to God, I am feeling a great release inside: a freedom to be able to honestly grieve, to ask God when he is going to bring help for some ongoing problems, and life long woundings, to talk to him more honestly than ever and to stop feeling like I have to hide every problem from my church family because they might think if I can't keep up a never ending babble of positive "God speak" there is something wrong with my faith. Whew! What a relief!
The seminar was fantastic. The sitting with little opportunity to stand up or walk around for nearly six hours was less so and I paid for it overnight.
Right after the seminar we raced home to prepare a cole slaw for a potluck dinner at the home of friends. We had a fantastic roast beef meal and then played cards for awhile. It was so much fun and a good chance to get to spend more time with some new friends we haven't had a lot of opportunity to get to know.
However, as great as the evening was, I spent another three hours sitting down! Not so good....
This morning my husband had to leave for his own parish much earlier than usual due to a bit of a storm that came through overnight. Strong winds, freezing rain and blowing snow made rather a muck of the local highways, so he wanted to get on the road with plenty of time to spare just in case he had to drive slowly to be safe. So, I didn't ride to my church with him as I would have arrived long before the doors would be open. Since he has a meeting after his own service that would delay him picking me up after my service and I would have to walk five blocks on very icy sidewalks in the howling wind to catch a bus home, I decided it was time to take a Sunday off and stay home. Going to church would have involved nearly three more hours of sitting. There are a number of friends who would have happily picked me up and taken me to church and back, but by staying home I have been getting lots of exercise by doing the laundry, so the cramping in my "bad" leg has finally ceased. I am disappointed to miss some special organ music today, along with the celebration of communion and the singing of one of my favourite choruses, but sometimes you have to obey your body's signals and remain at home.
This week I learned the origin of the term "decimated"! In our day it has come to mean total destruction, but I always wondered where the "deci", component of ten, came into it. Apparently the word originally applied to a disciplinary procedure carried out against units of Roman soldiers who failed to accomplish whatever their assigned mission had been. The punishment was that the unit would take their formation and every tenth soldier was killed as retribution for failure. That way punishment was meted out but without destroying the entire army. Interesting bit of trivia...at least to me. hahaha
We will see what the rest of the day brings. I brought home enough cole slaw left over from last night's dinner to feed us both for a meal today. I think I will add some tuna to my portion. With a couple of thin slices of seed bread it will make a wonderful lunch. Speaking of which, it is getting to be that time.......... YAY!
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