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Susan shared the worship service with Scott, then forgot about EfM until minutes after the worship time was over. It went great, Susan: Compline is a beautiful little-used service in our BCP.
Kaye emailed this to us, too: "The last time we met, y'all had asked for the book from which I chose our Worship. It is Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human, by Cole Arthur Riley. We read the prayer 'For the Beauty in Impermanence' from her 'Mortality' chapter."
Yr. D, 1st yr: Michael, Mason; 2nd yr: Lanie; 3rd yr: Joyce, Susan; 4th yr, Jessica, Rita; 5th yr "Wide Angle," Kaye. Mentor: Scott. Absent: Joyce, Jessica.
One of Mason's chosen questions doubled as our gathering question this week: Where did you find grace in your reading, watching, and listening this week? In your own life?
Our answers took us through some personal territory -- mourning losses and rejoicing over baby grandchildren. One of us who keeps very busy most of the time took some "personal grace" to just laze around in pajamas all day. Another found grace in the boss's reaction to a serious mistake -- and the boss's approval of his employee's effort to make things right.
There were also answers linked to this week's materials.
Bretherton's chapter on "Finitude" seemed "disheartening" to Rita because he seems to see no way that we can be better. That same fatalistic attitude showed up for the Y1 guys at the end of Joshua: The Israelites promised to be faithful, and Joshua predicted, "You won't be." The OT books contain so much violence and so little morality to our way of thinking (including the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter!), but Michael and Mason saw grace in God's continuing to care for his people despite the grief they cause him. Repeated comments in Judges about the horrific consequences when "each turned to his own way" are, for Scott, a sign of the spiritual growth of God's people, as later editors commented on the ancient stories.
We took a moment to answer a question that had gone unspoken: What do we mean by "grace?" Consensus formed around forgiveness that doesn't have to be earned, nor even asked for. Lanie came at this from a different angle: "It's a kind of permission," she said. You don't have to be afraid of making mistakes, so you're free to live and grow. Scott finds "grace" wherever the Sufi Muslim poet Rumi mentions laughter -- the top branches of trees at dawn catch fire with laughter; the poet at birth crossed from emptiness into laughter.... Lanie found an element of playfulness in Matthew -- including his mania for pairs and for coded numbers, which the author likened to the way that Shakespeare [may have] encoded his name in the translation [that he might have done] for King James's Bible -- "Shake" and "Spear" occurring 46 words from both start and finish of Psalm 46. So, we got some unexpected answers to our basic question!
Another question that Mason posed was about "great love, great suffering" as twin paths to change in life.
The book of Job came up, having been covered in both Y1 and Y5. For Kaye, the presentation of Job in Y5 opened her eyes to see this grim story in a new way. She and Scott both recommended to everyone that they see the short video about Job. Also, the book Bible Women gets at the core of Job in a fresh way by focusing on Job's wife, though she gets just 11 words to say in the whole book.
Rita, ruing how "mean" she'd been to Bretherton early in the hour, atoned by telling us an idea she liked about two kinds of time in Scripture, "temporal" and "eschatological," day-to-day time v. eternity. She quoted from EfM's introduction to Bretherton's chapter: "It is in the daily that we find God." That resonated with Kaye, who described a study of how often the word "path" appears in Proverbs [Smoot: like this year's theme of a "journey with God!"], the implication being that the path keeps going, and you can keep learning. That's an echo of Lanie's idea of "grace" as "a kind of permission."
When Lanie showed us the image of the frog included with this blog post, there was a lot of energy in just noticing all the details. The diamonds; the eyes asymmetrical, wide set, and looking up; the apparent smile; the legs flexed as if ready to leap; the textures in the gold and the green stripes. Asked if there were any story connected to this, Lanie told us that this had been a gift years ago, long forgotten until recently; and that Lanie has feared frogs from a very young age. Lanie saved a secret for us until Mason guessed it: "Does he open up?"
That became our focus, "The Secrets of the Jeweled Frog." We explored the world of the jeweled frog through a few theological categories. Creation is wondrous, and recalls the long list in Job of creatures who display God's power and love in making such diversity. Sin is the squeamishness we feel about non-mammals and creatures unlike us. Redemption is what this frog represents, in itself being redemption for our squeamishness as we come to recognize a beauty and lovability in frogs through this little work of art.
Before we got into Connections, we took a moment to talk about "low-hanging fruit." In a creative endeavor such as this, it's not fun if we just go to "the Cross" or "be a good person" for our reflection. Look for something a little off-center.
We thought of frogs in Tradition, a plague in Exodus, an unclean food in Leviticus (or so we vaguely recall). Then we recalled the serpent in Exodus hung on a pole that healed all who looked upon it. We branched out to include characters who were despised and feared, then accepted and even revered: Saul/Paul, young Moses, the prostitute Rahab, little tax collector Zachaeus: when you look at them more closely, their faults diminish in importance.
We put those in dialogue with all the cute cartoon frogs in our Culture. Frogs seem to be both good and bad -- or is it us? What are we projecting on this little creature?
For Insights, we saw a theme in "The Frog Prince," "The Ugly Duckling," and "Beauty and the Beast," all about repulsive creatures who become beautiful only after someone sees their inner beauty. This made us think of children, and those who are labeled "problems" in school. This jeweled frog redeems all frogs in our eyes in a way that calls to mind the way crosses can be made roughly or can be jeweled, too -- redeeming a horrific state-sponsored execution, drawing us all into that redemption.
We collaborated very well on this Collect on a Jeweled Image of a Frog:
Dear Lord, Creator of all things shiny and slimy, You have made the eyes of the frog far apart, able to see 360 degrees around it: help us to see beyond the surfaces of things, and to step outside of our own limited point of view , that we may find and be open to the surprise of inner beauty in all things and creatures. In Jesus's name we pray. Amen.
Read Week 10. Scott will send questions, lead worship, and bring a TR. We pray for Joyce and her family, for Jessica, her husband, and little Liam (we saw a photo of him in a onesie that says "I am proof that God answers prayers"), and for Lanie's niece and family.
