Thursday, October 09, 2003
Getting Stoned for the Holidays
I have all these fun notes for goofy things to blog about but it’s late (as I type this up) and the day has been challenging. After a tasty supper of squash roasted in white wine and butter, and then stuffed with black rice, fried sausage and braised sweet onions, I don’t feel like making jokes and being flip. Instead I’ll just unload another of my new year’s essays if I’m not being too tedious. (Like you could stop me.) I was going to use another one that’s kind of a downer, but after yesterday it seemed like too much. So here’s something I wrote while waiting for the first service to start:
*****
My idea when I sat down here was to write something funny. Cute. Sha-na-na tovah, a cheap giggle and a superficial wink. But as I sit here, things don’t seem so funny. Nor are they sad. Hopeful is a decent approximation of my mood. This sweet old church is filling with the same sweet faces I’ve slowly grown to start to recognize, and I flatter myself to think that they recognize me back - in fact, my old boss’s husband, from whom I learned of this congregation, just sat down in front of me with a broad smile and a warm greeting. But I don’t actually know him. I don’t pretend to know anyone here for real, neither the softeyed congregants nor the preoccupied crew who will lead the services nor even, truly, my own self. Because this is the time of year that I confront the frustrating truth that I keep surprising myself, can’t anticipate my own behavior, that I foil my own plans and either surpass my goals or fall utterly short of them with maddening unpredictability.
All I can truly count on, year in and year out, is the cycle. The sun rises higher in the summer and less in the winter; I struggle against my enslavement in the spring and celebrate my frailty in the fall. Musical instruments litter the pulpit in front of me - piano, dulcimer, shofar; electric bass and drumkit and singing bowls and oboe. They rest quietly as the hall fills, with strangers and old friends, with traditional families, new age units, and solos like me. Voices well up in the lofty room as I sit quietly with my pen. It’s now 7 pm - time for voices to be still and instruments to come to life. I don’t know what that means, if it means anything at all. That might be my first lesson tonight: I don’t know what any of it means; but I embrace its happening with all the soul I am favored to call my own.
*****
That’s pretty brief, given my late propensity for overlocution. (BTW “shana tovah” means “a good year” - the traditional greeting. Makes my sha-na-na joke slightly less unfunny, no? No? Okay, no.) Let me round it out with another tidbit:
That evening, at the door to the hall, I was greeted by ushers with baskets of polished stones, red and green and black and white and blue. We were each told to select one that “spoke to us.” I looked into the basket until I saw a stone that was sensuously rounded, so darkly black that it seemed to glow. I took it. Later in the service we were told that the stone stands for our favorite bad habit - the one we know we shouldn’t love, but that we love anyway; the one we keep telling ourselves to give up every time we succumb to it. And maybe this year we’ll be ready to let it go. If we are, we can just go to the beach or a stream and toss it away and we’ll be free of it, once and for all. This relates to the ancient ceremony of tashlich, in which, on the day after Rosh Hashona, we are to go to a body of living water into which we are to empty breadcrumbs out of our pockets, each crumb representing a sin we intend to cast away. When you get a lot of people together dumping out breadcrumbs, though, it can agitate the geese, so they encouraged us to use stones instead - even to the extent of giving us little baggies of rough small stones for this purpose, together with a short ceremonial primer for personal use.
But, to return to the special polished stone that represents our own favorite personal failing: maybe we’re not ready to give it up yet. We still enjoy it. It still speaks too sweetly to us, shines too brightly for us to let it go. We’re not done with it, or it with us. For such ongoing habits, we should take our special stone home and leave it where we’ll see it. It will remind us of how it is part of us still, encouraging us to reevaluate our relationship to it every day. And someday, eventually, it will seem less shiny and will stop talking so sweetly. Then it will be to us what it truly is - a dead thing, inert and hard and cold. Till then it should live with us as we live with those things that we are not ready to change about ourselves.
My shiny rock is next to my computer at home on an old rusty can labeled “dehydrated water” that’s arranged thoughtfully on the funky biomorphic magazine table. I’ll have to see how long it stays as beautiful as it was when I plucked it from the basket last week. But frankly it still looks pretty good to me.
