I am not sure what this entry will be. I had some ideas earlier in the day. One came to me as I was driving back to my apartment past a local synagogue. On the parking lot wall, someone had written, with apparent care, words along the lines of "There can never be enough love." "Love" was written in red, the rest in black, providing the writer's emphatic point.
It occurred to me that it could not be much about love that someone would deface a synagogue wall. Did he know it was a synagogue wall? Does it matter? Graffitti is as old as mankind, but something about the modern man continuing to engage in it is discouraging. After all, we are so much more enlightened, aren't we? Well, we think ourselves so, but we really have not grown much beyond the neanderthal, for all our inventions and conventions.
I thought about writing about the desire to rebel. Not in anything big, of course. I am too well trained from childhood to rebel in any large way, although the feeling is large and is tempting. Children think that when they leave school, and move on their own, they will no longer have to answer to anyone. In fact, as we realize all too quickly, we answer to even more people as adults, at all levels of the work, cultural and social food chain. To be a "boss" is to answer to a higher "boss" or to the recriminations of a staff that knows its rights, even ones that they create out of whole cloth. To be part of any community is to see human beings edge to whatever small or large power they can grab to wield. My internist advised me of recent blood tests that show nothing importune, but he still wants to do further tests. I have a family cardiac history so that is where tests lie. I had several a year or so ago, with no ill result so why more again? He does not tell me what tests. I received a call from one of his staff, who in the most indifferent manner imaginable instructs me to call her to set up these tests. My rebellion consists so far only in this: an e mail to my doctor to ask about their necessity. The e mail comes back to me. I am not allowed to communicate in that manner in my role as patient. I must call, or set an appointment. My further rebellion consists in ignoring the requirement. Earlier in the week I attended a meeting in which I was nothing more than a performing cog in a small political cyclic machine that has been as it is long before I came and will be the same long after I am gone from that place having aged from young woman to senior citizen there. Perhaps that day, among many such days, in which I have been told implcitly and explicitly that my talents are less than sterling for one in my allegedly (but I can tell you not) noble profession, fuels my small rebellion.
I find that keeping my true thoughts to myself in favor of diplomatic expression (essentially lies given those thoughts) is becoming impossible. Small example. Our so called green culture applauds bicyclists on the streets. Whole lanes have been eked out for them, with friendly signs about how happy we all should be at their presence with the motorist. It is hoped, no doubt, that one day all of us will be huffing and puffing on the way to work in preservation of the environment, damn the strokes that occur as man is not nearly as important as the earth upon which we toil and tarry. But those who hope thusly, are a vocal minority, while the rest of us would prefer to be able to actually go more than five miles circumference from our homes. And those happy bicyclists, not so blissfully pumping only inches to the right of our several ton machines, with ear buds blotting out the reality of the traffic into which they have plopped themselves with ever so many rights expect that nothing could ever happen to them. In fact, we cannot move past them as they wiggle and wriggle on the road and we hold ourselves and the rest of those late for work at the slowest possible speed, fearful that each of us might be the one into whose hood the greenest of the green might wander. But they are the bosses. And this is for our good?
As you can see I have wandered in this entry, all on a theme, I think. Naturally, I comprehend that my complaints do not raise me even to novice religious thinker of my faith, where the desire to be nothing should hold sway so that I might be open to the Fullness of Grace, without expectation. It is what it is.
