Of Bees and Workers

Canadian and American culture tends toward “doing” on the “doing/being continuum.” When things get tough, the tough get going. When a crisis comes along and we need to pivot, we take it in stride and work a little harder to accomplish the things that must be done, and the objectives we want to accomplish. On the surface there is nothing wrong with this and it has served our culture well over the last many years.

Of course, there is another side to this, and we have all become aware of what happens when the Lord “makes us lie down in green pastures.” In those times when we are forced to isolate, forced to stop the busy commute, forced to work and play in the same location, some of us have amped up the frenetic pace. I know many who must rise to the challenge of working a full-time job from home, learn the new platforms that allow this work, learn how to use the tools sent home by teachers to help the children learn and then communicate with the teacher, find new ways to keep in touch with family and friends, say yes or no to another drive-by birthday celebration, figure out how to keep a three-year-old occupied all day so that both parents can work from two make-shift home offices, keep the wi-fi network working at its peak to support two Zoom calls, a Disney movie, and two smart-phones so that the bandwidth doesn't freeze up one of the apps and make us look like an idiot on the Zoom call with the boss. (I mean literally looking like an idiot with our features frozen in some odd expression and our hair sticking out from our slouch cap.) 

But back to the Lord “making us lie down in green pastures,” there are days when we must rest. There are days when we cannot be as productive as we want to be. There are days when we fear that we will fall behind the flock of sheep and be left lying in yesterday’s green pastures. There are days when we are anxious that others might see us as not pulling our weight and that we might just miss that promotion or, in fact, be one of the first to be laid-off. There are days when we are forced to lie down in the green pasture of our home while the three-year-old bounces on our chest.

In a recent blog, Carson Pue relates a story of a bee in a greenhouse that frenetically bashes against the glass ceiling trying to find a way out. The bee is a worker bee. The bee works hard at getting out of the situation in which it finds itself. Despite the open door and vent, the poor little thing just keeps smashing against the glass until it is too exhausted to fly and must crawl along the frame of the vent. It is a revealing picture of our own levels of fatigue. Carson Pue goes on to speak of what we can do in these times of stress and the entire article is very helpful. Yet, I could not help but think that sometimes I just need to be the bee. There is a time for simply being rather than doing. It was not until the bee reached a point of simply being on the greenhouse frame that the solution to its plight arose. Then it was able to crawl beyond the inner frame, to the third dimension of the greenhouse, and find its way beyond the glass.

Where am I today? Am I being or doing? Am I seeking to be all I can be? Am I seeking to do all I can do? There is a time for both being and doing. Where am I, where are you, in the tension?

Trinitarian Bash

In Robert Farrar Capon’s The Third Peacock: The Problem of God and Evil#, chapter one, “Let Me Tell You Why” opens the book like this:

Let me tell you why God made the world.

One afternoon, before anything was made, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost sat around in the unity of their Godhead discussing one of the Father’s fixations. From all eternity, it seems he had had this thing about being. He would keep thinking up all kinds of unnecessary things—new ways of being and new kinds of beings to be. And as they talked, God the Son suddenly said, “Really, this is absolutely great stuff. Why don’t I go out and mix us up a batch?” And God the Holy Ghost said, “Terrific, I’ll help you.” So they all pitched in, and after supper that night, the Son and the Holy Ghost put on this tremendous show of being for the Father. It was full of water and light and frogs; pine cones kept dropping all over the place and crazy fish swam around in the wineglasses. There were mushrooms and grapes, horseradishes and tigers—and men and women everywhere to taste them, to juggle them, to join them and to love them. And God the Father looked at the whole wild party and he said, “Wonderful! Just what I had in mind! Tov! Tov! Tov!”* And all God the Son and God the Holy Ghost could think of to say was the same thing. “Tov! Tov! Tov!” So they shouted together “Tov meod!”^ and they laughed for ages and ages, saying things like how great it was for things to be, and how clever of the Father to think of the idea, and how kind of the Son to go to all that trouble putting it together, and how considerate of the Spirit to spend so much time directing and choreographing. And forever and ever they told old jokes, and the Father and the Son drank their wine in unitate Spiritus Sancti,+ and they all threw ripe olives and pickled mushrooms at each other per omnia saecula saeulorum %. Amen.

It is, I grant you, a crass analogy; but crass analogies are the safest. Everybody knows that God is not three old men throwing olives at each other. Not everyone, I’m afraid, is equally clear that God is not a cosmic force or a principle of being or any other dish of celestial blancmange we might choose to call him. Accordingly, I give you the central truth that creation is the result of a Trinitarian bash, and leave the details of the analogy to sort themselves out as best they can.

One slight elucidation, however. It is very easy, when talking about creation, to conceive of God’s part in it as simply getting the ball rolling—as if he were a kind of divine billiard cue, after whose action inexorable laws took over and excused him from further involvement with the balls. But that won’t work. This world is fundamentally unnecessary. Nothing has to be. It needs a creator, not only for its beginning, but for every moment of its being. Accordingly, the Trinitarian bash doesn’t really come before creation; what actually happens is that all of creation, from start to finish, occurs within the bash—that the raucousness of the divine party is simultaneous with the being of everything that ever was or will be. If you like paradoxes, it means that God is the eternal contemporary of all of the events and beings in time.

#The book is out of print but still available as part of a trilogy, The Romance of the Word: One Man’s Love Affair With Theology : Three Books : An Offering of Uncles/the Third Peacock/Hunting the Divine Fox.
*Tov is "good" in Hebrew.
^"Abundant good" or "very good."
+In the unity of the Holy Spirit.
%For ever and ever.