Continuing my war on dichotomies, this morning I take issue with Ecclesiastes 3 (even though I’m never sure how to spell it). “There is…a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance…” Anyone who has experienced much of life knows that all times are one. Just as there can be joy and laughter at a funeral, there can be sorrow and regret in the midst of happy times. We never – or almost never – think, “How do I handle, how do I get over, how do I at least conceal this joy?” Others never – or almost never – feel called to remind us that feelings of happiness will pass, that soon we will get on with our lives without feeling happy. We have labeled joy and happiness as good, sorrow and regret as bad. Yet all are simply emotionally honest responses to life. And life is complex – deep and rich and multi-layered. God is complex – the perfectly good, all knowing Supreme Being who created a very imperfect world. I think accepting the coexistence of complex, conflicting emotions may be a small step towards accepting the complex, holy, not-completely-knowable reality of God. If we cannot be comfortable with our own emotional complexity, how can we ever hope to be comfortable with God’s complexity?

And one of the ways we have been taught to reduce God’s complexity is to think of God, to worship God, solely as male, the Supreme Him. So much Christian misogyny flows from this. It is a challenge to accept both that God is a personal Being, in relationship with us, and to avoid assigning God a sex and gender. Might this be something our LGBTQ compatriots could help us become more comfortable with?

Morning meditation thoughts: More and more I feel that to follow Jesus the person requires that we stop thinking in dichotomies. We can’t think of loving or being loved, success or failure, or even – as St. Paul said – man or woman, believer or non-believer, slave or free (or immigrant or native).

And here are my third grade theologians’ insights from last Sunday:
When we were talking about The Lord’s Prayer and the meaning of “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven” one of my quiet girls offered softly, “I think it means we should always act as if we were right in front of God.”

Later another girl asked what the words “sanctifying grace” (that she had heard in Mass) meant. So we talked about it for awhile and then one of the boys said, “Oh, so sanctifying grace is God’s soap for our souls.”

On the night flight over to Paris, I watched a young mother pace the aisle with her almost sleepy baby. She jiggled and patted and swayed as she walked, that young mother. Even when she paused she did not stop moving, always swaying, patting, gently jiggling. She looked tired. And I thought, this is love. No matter what she is thinking, what she is feeling. No matter if she resents her baby right now, if she is doing it only for the sake of the other passengers, if all she wants is to sit down and sleep. Her body loves her baby. With every jiggle, every pat, every step, her body gives her baby love.

This is how I want to love God. Not with feelings that come and go and depend on how rested I am, what I’ve had to eat or what has annoyed me, whether I have time and quiet to pray. I want to love with my doing.

I’ve given up on love as a feeling (except in songs). I choose to believe in God, I choose to believe God loves me, I choose to base my actions on love for God, myself and others. Like that mother, I choose to walk in love.