Flood watch

The state of Vermont is under a flood watch for today.

Somehow for me the incessant rain represents holy tears falling from our Creator who watches and listens to the utterances ('emissions') coming from Lambeth and wondering why humankind just can't get its act together and why such a small percentage of the population has garnered so much attention and demands such angst.

According to Elizabeth Kaeton's blog, 'The line from +Sudan that has not made the press but is on the recording is: "We love him. We don't want to exclude anyone, we just want them to go away."'

Is that any better? We just want the queers to go away. We just want those people who do not behave according to our standards to go away. Since we alone are interpreting what the 'faith once handed to the saints' (a phrase that means absolutely nothing and absolutely everything depending on how you interpret it word for word, i.e., it can't be pinned down and can only be twisted) means, that means we can shun whomever we chose to cast off.

But we aren't going away. No matter how many times the church kicks us in the gut, as it manages to do at least every triennium at General Convention, we are not going away. We are full members of the church by virtue of our baptism. We are also God's beloved children.

Before ordination into this church in which I have grown up, and have been a member since my fourth month of life, I decided it was better for me to agitate from within rather than from without. And so I continue.

Meanwhile, back to God's tears... Mystic Maggie Ross in The Fountain and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987, 227) writes:

Tears are a mark of having touched reality, or having been touched by Reality, of integration and regeneration. They are a sign of the reunifying of the person, the healing of fragmentation. Tears are the body's participating in God's indwelling life in the person.

Tears are fire.

At the foundation of the world, so the rabbinical tradition tells us, God struck spark on spark, and took a certain drop from the abyss.

In the beginning of creation, when God made the heaven and earth, the earth was without form and void, with darkness over the face of the abyss, and a might wind that swept over the surface of the waters. God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light; and God saw that the light was good. (Gen 1.1-4, NEB)

What is this 'certain drop from the abyss? I think it is God's first tear: I think it is the weeping of God's self-limiting, that self-absenting of God that not only made creation possible, but also necessitated the abyss. God weeps because of the abyss between God and creation, that the abyss must be a condition of creation. Only God through continual self-outpouring — only God can cross it. And God does, in the ekstasis of God's love for creation.

Perhaps this first tear is God's weeping over the ineluctable consequences of the perilous freedom God is giving to creation, and the knowledge that God will suffer within the ravaged weeping of time and mortality. Does God foresee the consequences God will suffer along with God's people — all God's people?

She continues to develop Christ's tears and those of the prophets.

Maybe we also need to weep more.

But God knows there are already too many who weep.

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I will return later on but I need to finish up a sermon for a funeral this afternoon.