Flip flop and fly.

When I was a kid growing up on Cherry Street in Mission City, BC, the joke in my family was how much I twirled around in my sleep. Each morning, the blankets on my bed would be twisted and flipped and often I’d find myself with my head near the foot of the bed and one leg dangling off the side.

In short, I moved around a little.

Flash forward a lifetime later and throw in Parkinson’s.

Turning over in bed is not without a lot of strategy. Prior to diagnosis and the addition of all the meds, it was almost impossible. Now, it’s mostly achievable but not without serious consideration. I have no idea what muscles are involved, but clearly, the message from the brain to the appropriate muscle has worn thin, a frazzled connection that delivers an ever weakening and skinny signal.

But move I must, because staying in one place too long causes the neck to seize or the legs to begin their own special painful reminder that being stuck in one place is not good.

Sometimes, if I fling my one leg over the side of the bed, I can use that to leverage the move. Other times, I have to sit up and scooch my way into the turn, the trick always is to somehow get the pillow bunched up in just the right way to hold my neck in the perfect position. Otherwise. Well, it’s not good.

And then, for whatever bizarre reason, lately some other signal gets jammed and my brain gets stuck on an old Sunday School song.

God Sees the Little Sparrow Fall. Seriously?

Let me back up a little…back in my childhood, at the aforementioned house on Cherry Street, robins regularly bashed their beaks sideways into our spectacularly clean living room window.

They would lie, stunned and gasping for breath beneath the picture window.  Sometimes they would die under different windows, but most often, it was that large expanse of living room glass that tricked them into thinking they could fly right through the house. They were oblivious to the invisible barrier that determined their distance. 

I would run outside and stare at the flopped over neck, the open and closing beak, the few downy feathers stuck to the window, and those beady darting eyes. I would wait, and then, once the bird’s chest quit fluttering, I would carry the still-warm and surprisingly solid weight of their small bodies to the back of the garden. After digging into the dark dirt, I’d find Holly, Carol and Bridgot so I could conduct another funeral. 

I think now that my earliest questions probably started with those dead robins and the lyrics of that tried-and-true Sunday School classic.

My questions were, of course, never spoken aloud. Not since I’d made Mrs. Rempel cry and run out of the Sunday School class, when I kept asking about where the extra people came from for Cain and Abel to marry? It was obvious there was a big hole in that origin story. After that I knew to keep my thoughts in my head. I already knew how close I was to eternal damnation and Hellfire. But every time we sang this hymn, more questions spun around in my head:

God sees the little sparrow fall, it meets His tender view, If God so loved the little birds, I know He loves me too. He loves me too! He loves me too! I know He loves me too! If God so loves the little birds, I know He loves me too. 

Given the ongoing dead robin situation, it seemed to me that birds could smash themselves to death on a regular basis and God’s tender view didn’t change a damned thing. That was love? Tenderly watching someone die? How on earth did that possibly prove He loved me too? It seemed like very flawed logic. 

Also, given how many church funerals we attended, if God was looking upon His creations with His tender view, He was basically quite ineffectual. No matter how many beseeching prayers were implored from the pulpit, the sick person being prayed for would inevitably die. Then the message would change to how it was part of a much bigger plan and that we had no way of knowing of God’s intention for any of us.

Or the other crowd pleaser was the ridiculous (and mercifully not too common) observation that God had picked another flower for His garden. I always wondered why they kept praying and begging God for a healing miracle if it was all fated anyway? And what kind of a monstrous God picks people off like they’re some kind of flower for His centerpiece bouquet on His big Heavenly table? 

 

 

Also, this God, who was all about looking at us with his kindly tender view, was more often described with tales of smiting. He was really big on smiting His people.  I thought smite sounded as spectacularly horrible as it was. I always envisioned a gigantic white God-hand doing an open-palmed smack-down on anyone He wanted to hurt. 

For that matter, from what I could see with my father, who was God’s representative on earth (and always with my mother’s admonition to Wait Until Your Father Gets Home), and from what was preached to us from the pulpit, God seemed to be more of an angry-smiting God than a tender-viewing kind of guy.

Considering the big ace up His sleeve was eternal damnation and the tortuous flames of Hell, the idea of a tender-loving God was lost in the message of His righteous anger and all the retribution. In all the stories, He regularly doled out deadly abuse to the unsuspecting and the unrepentant. 

And when I first heard the story of Job…I couldn’t believe God would play games with a man’s life like that. It was nothing more than a Vegas bet with Satan, who had way too much fun torturing Job.  This was the same God, who, except for one arkful of randoms, drowned everything on the planet. 

If you compared this Big Guy’s behaviour with a regular parent? You’d have that guy jailed for abuse. Yes you would.  It seemed to me that God did not make man in His image. Nope, man made God in his own image, just bigger and badder and meaner. 

Let’s face it. This is a God, who, no matter how much they talked about as loving, could, and oh yes, He would, just like that, smite you into the ground. As easily as snapping a robin’s neck against living room glass. 

But that was then and this is now…

I no longer twirl and spin in my bed.

I no longer believe in stories that should never have been sold as literal truths. In fact, those old stories hold so much more power as metaphors and instructive origin myths.

I no longer believe, or more correctly, am terrified by, the angry God of my childhood. That too has been replaced with a spirituality that sees god in all living things, including me. It’s a pantheistic view that the divine or consciousness or love, call it what you will, imbues all reality.

But birds still crash against windows.

And fundamentalists of all stripes continue to wage ‘holy’ wars, sure of their God’s particular might and convinced that the ‘other’ is the evil that needs to be eradicated.

And truly?

All I really want to do is to be able to turn over in bed.