The lake below our house has been glassy calm lately. This happens, sometimes, in spring and fall. The water lies so still that it’s hard to tell the reality from the reflection.
I feel compelled to take pictures. My computer enables me to turn photographs upside down. Sometimes, the mirror image is so perfect even I don’t know which way is up.
A mirror surface may delight photographers, but it’s not good for the lake.
Like humans -- indeed, like every living thing -- lakes have to breathe. Oxygen has to filter deep into the water. Without it, the lake dies.
Where winter temperatures drop low enough, the change in season helps a lake to breathe. When water cools, it grows denser. Colder water also carries more dissolved oxygen. So when surface layers get cold enough, they sink through the slightly less dense waters beneath, carrying oxygen from the surface into the depths.
Cold-weather lakes breathe once a year.
Storms also help lakes to breathe. As winds stir up the surface, they expose more water molecules to the atmosphere. The bigger the waves, the deeper the stirring goes.
Conversely, of course, the stiller the surface, the less oxygen that a lake absorbs. The little that does get absorbed stays near the surface. It doesn’t get swirled down deeper, where fish live.

Like a mirror
Utterly placid water becomes stagnant.
Rather like us.
I don’t want to be stagnant. Like a lake, I welcome the input from the streams and rivers of thought that flow into me.
But I have to admit that I’m not keen on having storms in my life. They upset my preconceptions. They force me to adapt. In calm waters, I can feel as if I’m in control; when storms strike, I know I’m not. All I can do is try to keep my head above water.
But I know that glassy calm is not good for me, either.
Funny things, mirrors. Have you ever noticed that it’s almost impossible to pass a mirror without checking your reflection? Men check their comb-over, their posture. Women check their lipstick, their hemlines.
You have to feel really driven by deadlines and appointments not to glance into a mirror.
But mirrors have their negative side. In the Greek legend, Narcissus became so entranced by his own reflection that he could not turn away from it, and so he perished.
Mirrors represent our obsession with ourselves. We start to think we -- me as an individual, or us as a race or religion or species -- are all that matters. Other life forms, other faiths, other ways of seeing the world, become irrelevant, distractions, falsehoods to be stamped out.
In his book The Naked Now, Richard Rohr suggests that people who have never experienced a crisis -- of life or of faith -- can never progress past a shallow and superficial spirituality. They will remain forever stuck in an unthinking acceptance of conventional norms.
Perhaps the moral of this story -- as my Sunday school teachers used to say -- is that every life needs to get shaken up now and then.
Like a lake, the shaking-up renews life.
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Copyright © 2016 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
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YOUR TURN

Alex McGillvery thought I had not been fair to the Ten Commandments in last week’s column: “While your comments on the Ten Commandments demonstrate how we don’t follow them, they do so in a similar tone to angry atheists who mock the commandments because there are variations between the different versions. Thus demanding we read them literally, ignoring both our context and the context of the commandments.
“A more nuanced reading might look at the first three commandments as referring to the need for us to commit to something larger than ourselves instead of making our own needs our god. The third commandment isn’t about speaking God’s name. It is about using God’s name as an excuse for us to do evil.
“The commandments which follow are indeed about our relationship with each other as you suggest. What is really being asked is for us to respect each other. 
“I find it interesting the prophets talk about a sabbath for the land, and the rules around farming also include this concept. So, not just people but creation deserves our respect. The best explanation of sabbath I’ve ever heard is the call for us to take the time to enjoy each other and God.
“The last commandment, not to covet, may be the most important in today’s consumer society, not because it undercuts the advertising, but because it speaks to our relationship with ourselves. As long as we want to be different or have different things, we are not loving ourselves. When we see and are content with who we are, there is space for God to work and the rest of the world falls closer to the place it needs to be.
“The Ten Commandments, far from being outdated rules to be mocked, contain within them the potential for us to finally start the ethical evolution we need if we aren’t going to destroy ourselves and creation with us.”

Steve Roney also focussed on the commandment against coveting: “No objections to this column, except for your comment on item ten. Advertising might convince you to want to buy, to covet, something, but it seems completely unrelated to coveting your neighbour's goods.”
In response, I argued that the command is about coveting, in general, with the neighbour’s wife, etc., as examples.
Steve replied, “Your reading of the commandment seems to be well-established elsewhere. You read it as primarily aimed at acquisitiveness, materialism. I read it as primarily aimed at envy. Acquisitiveness is of course also bad, agreed, but envy is also wrong, and I do not see it addressed elsewhere. So I take that as the main thrust of the commandment. I note that everything it says thou shalt not covet specifies ‘thy neighbour's,’ without exception.”

Frank Martens connected the commandment against killing to reports from Israel “that perhaps only about 5% of Israelis felt that the soldier who ‘executed’ the wounded Palestinian should be tried for murder… it gives you an idea of how far present day Israel has gone from God's admonishment that ‘You shall not murder’.”

Isabel Gibson thought I was being too optimistic: “I think we'd be expecting too much of the Ten Commandments, asking ‘the universe to unfold as it should’ if they were followed. I understood that they were to govern action within the community, and they represent a pretty good set of rules for doing that, if one happens to be looking for rules -- something a little more detailed, say, than ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’
“In either event, what they have to do with faith is beyond me.”

Ted Wilson felt that the Old Testament needs to be read in the light of the New Testament: “The first two commandments for a Christian can be found in Mark 12: 30-31. All the rest must be compared to those two before implementation. I would argue that in most instances living that second commandment is the manifestation of the first. There are a lot of people attending church every Sunday who fail miserably at it, and a lot of people who never darken a church door but are doing a fairly good job of [living the second commandment].”

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PSALM PARAPHRASES

Here’s one way of looking at Psalm 148 (with a few allusions to other biblical passages).

1   Jubilation, exaltation, celebration, one and all! 
2   Within the womb of the heavens, the orb of earth leaps to praise its Creator. 
3, 4   As the pearl necklace of the planets swings around the sun, 
as the shining oceans embrace the continents, 
so do all living things praise the giver of life. 
5   For God expressed a thought, and the thought took life. 
6   God wanted to speak, and the Word became flesh and lived among us. 
7   In that Word was holiness, 
the spirit that makes every life more than the sum of its chemicals. 
From the tiniest plankton in the sea to the great whales, 
from the ants that burrow in the dust to the eagle that soars in the heavens -- 
all owe their existence to God.

8   Fire and hail, snow and frost, sun and drought, wind and rain--
in God, all things work together for good. 
9   The mighty mountains erode into rich silt; 
fruit trees and cedars aerate the atmosphere.
10   The dung beetle depends on the wastes of cattle; 
birds and breezes carry seeds to new orchards.
11   No one is cut off from the energy of God, 
neither presidents throned in offices nor derelicts huddled under bridges. 
12   For in God there is neither male nor female, old nor young, black nor white. 
13   All have been equally created by God; 
their lives all witness to God's grace.
14   With profligate generosity, God scatters new life among weeds and rocks. 
And all of creation responds with rejoicing. 

For paraphrases of most of the psalms used by the Revised Common Lectionary, you can order my book Everyday Psalms from Wood Lake Publishing, info@woodlake.com.

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YOU SCRATCH MY BACK…
Ralph Milton has a new project, called Sing Hallelujah – the world’s first video hymnal. It consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at www.singhallelujah.ca
Isabel Gibson's thoughtful and well-written blog, www.traditionaliconoclast.com
Wayne Irwin's "Churchweb Canada," an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. <http://www.churchwebcanada.ca>
Alva Wood's satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town are not particularly religious, but they are fun; write alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
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 twatson@sentex.net

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TECHNICAL STUFF

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