Thursday December 1,, 2022

This is the first week of Advent. Advent is the four-week period in which Christian churches traditionally prepare for the birth of Jesus. It’s considered a time of waiting, while we tidy up the dusty corners of our lives to prepare for a special visitor.

            I don’t know about you, but I dislike waiting. I feel as if I’ve spent most of my life waiting for something, even if I didn’t clearly know what I was waiting for. 

            As a child, I waited to be considered an adult. 

            As a young adult, I waited for my career to find me. 

            As a father, I waited for my children to grow up. And when they did, I waited for them to come home.

            I’ve waited for flights in crowded airports. I’ve waited for meals in busy restaurants. I’ve waited for traffic gridlock to clear itself. 

            Meanwhile others have waited weeks, months, even years, for surgery. Or for a CT or MRI scan that will finally let them know, well, whatever they’re waiting to find out.

            I think all of us I resent waiting. 

A different perspective

            Recently I waited several hours, several days, to get my passport renewed. 

            When I sounded off to my daughter, she didn’t offer sympathy. “If you’ve got your laptop with you, and a book to read, you’ve simply moved your workspace to a different location,” she told me.

            Practically, she’s right. I don’t need shelves of reference books when I have Google. I don’t need my own coffeemaker when I can buy a “double-double.” If I have a cell phone, I’m not cut off from communication. 

            Emotionally, though, her rationalization misses the point. Because when I’m fidgeting on a hard plastic chair in an impersonal waiting room, I feel as if I have been demoted. From a human being to a thing. A number, a code. I’m no longer Jim Taylor; I’m PC009.

            I’m not in control anymore.

Creating our futures

            Maybe being in control is a delusion. You can’t control when your child falls off a playground swing and breaks her arm. When your spouse comes down with cancer. When your ability to think flits away like a butterfly. 

            These days, my generation have all passed our “Best Before” dates. Sooner or later, our time will run out. While we wait, we try to defer that date as long as possible with diets and pills and exercise. 

            And with meditation programs, which promote “mindfulness” – living in the present moment. Not getting trapped in either the past or the future. 

            Right or wrong, we can’t change the past. And we can’t live in the future because it hasn’t happened yet. The future will be shaped by what we do, or don’t do, in this present moment.

            The future is still fluid, swirling, waiting to gel. 

            Ah, I get it. It’s not just me that’s waiting. The future is also waiting. 

            The shape of that future depends in part on who I am, what I do, how I react, right now. 

            I’m suddenly aware that resentment is not a good foundation on which to build the future. 

            I’m not missing out on a future I fondly imagine, just because I’m waiting. It’s being born, every minute. 

            I am my future, already.

*****************************************

Copyright © 2022 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved.

                  To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca

*****************************************

YOUR TURN

Two or three of you wrote to say you had received last week’s column, about vulnerability in love, twice. I hope it won’t happen again for a while. I don’t own or control the program that does the actual mailing – it’s on  commercial server somewhere – and it seems someone who has access to that computer gave it a DNS, “Do Not Send, command.” 

            I didn’t know that when I posted the column the second time, so when the glitch got fixed, it sent both columns out. 

Tom Watson further explored the notion of love: “Love -- or what we call love -- seems easy when we're young and looking for a life-partner. But as time passes we discover that love means risking at a deeper level than we even considered at the outset. Love means, as that marvelous story The Velveteen Rabbit put it, being as much ‘in love when we're old and wrinkled and gray’ as we were when we were young. And what, too, are we to say about finding love the second time around?”

Isabel Gibson: I guess there's a country-music song for every occasion. On love, here's Clint Black's song: Something that we do.

            Isabel sent a YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQE3DiWbIwY

The column reached Ginny Adams at just the right time: “Today is our wedding anniversary, #19.  This is my second try at keeping a loving relationship going, the first for my spouse, and we need to remember our cats' belly rubs, and do the same -- well, maybe not exactly.  But being vulnerable to the other, whatever posture that makes, is the key to marriage, this I do believe.”

Steve Roney: “It is a sad commentary on how we’ve lost touch with our moral traditions, that the notion that a starving man has the right to steal a loaf of bread appears to be ‘a different value system, for most of us’ (Mirza Yawar Baig). This is Christian as much as it is Muslim morality. An ancient Christian maxim: "If I have two coats and my neighbor has none, I am a thief." Also St. John Crysostom: "Not to enable the poor to share in our goods is to steal from them and deprive them of life. The goods we possess are not ours, but theirs."

            “You have to realize this to appreciate Les Miserables. Valjean is persecuted for stealing a loaf of bread to feed a starving child. He is in the right, the government is in the wrong.”

*****************************************

Psalm paraphrase

The laws we live under shape our lives. We should not think of them as separate from our faith. A paraphrase of Psalm 72.

1          Help our governments to govern rightly, God.
Lend them your wisdom. 

2          May they govern the people with justice;
May they fairly represent the poor and the voiceless. 

3          May their legislation create mountains of prosperity for their people;
May their laws level out every inequity.

4          May they not look after their own interests;
May they look after the needs of natives and immigrants,
of nobodies and outsiders. 

5          As long as the sun rises and the rivers run, God will guide them. 

6          Like the rain that makes the grass grow,
like April showers that bring May flowers
God will nurture those who govern wisely and well.

7          God does not wax and wane like the moon;
Because God is constant, those who remain responsive to God will never wander.

18        Only God can make such a promise. 

19        Thanks be to God. Amen. 

Apparently the print version of my paraphrases of most of the psalms in the Revised Common Lectionary is now out of print. But you can still order an e-book version of Everyday Psalms from Wood Lake Publishing, info@woodlake.com, or 1-800-663-2775

*******************************************

TECHNICAL STUFF

If you want to comment on something, send a message directly to me, jimt@quixotic.ca.

                  To subscribe or unsubscribe, send an e-mail message to jimt@quixotic.ca. Or you can subscribe electronically by sending a blank e-mail (no message or subject line) to softedges-subscribe@lists.quixotic.ca. Similarly, you can un-subscribe at softedges-unsubscribe@lists.quixotic.ca.

                  I write a second column each Sunday called Sharp Edges, which tends to be somewhat more cutting about social and justice issues. To sign up for Sharp Edges, write to me directly, jimt@quixotic.ca, or send a note to sharpedges-subscribe@lists.quixotic.ca

                  And for those of you who like poetry, please check my webpage .https://quixotic.ca/My-Poetry If you’d like to receive notifications about new poems, write me at jimt@quixotic.ca, or subscribe yourself to the list by sending a blank email (no message) to poetry-subscribe@lists.quixotic.ca (If it doesn’t work, please let me know.)

********************************************

PROMOTION STUFF

To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. Some spam filters have blocked my posts because they’re suspicious of some of the web links.

                  Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca He’s also relatively inexpensive!

                  I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also has lots of beautiful photos. Especially of birds.

                  Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)

ALVA WOOD’S ARCHIVE

                  I have acquired (don’t ask how) the complete archive of the late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures. I’ve put them on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. You’re welcome to browse. No charge. (Although maybe if I charged a fee, more people would find the archive worth visiting.)