sciatica saturday

It's back, has bothered my walking all this week, step lightly instead of lively, inch my way along lest its sudden searing pain drop me. Attention to weight shift and hip joint involvement in going from one foot to the other. Special care going up and down steps. Don't turn quickly. Don't carry much weight, don't carry anything that if dropped because of the sudden excruciating pain would shatter or make a mess. Walk and Be close to something to grab onto.

My life this Holy Week: caution.

It happens every five or six years. One morning twenty-five or so years ago it was so excruciating when I got out of bed that I had to inch across the floor into the bathroom to find pain meds, pop six or eight aspirin with a cup of water, and wait for the pain to be masked sufficiently for me to keep my commitments for the morning, which at the Time included getting Kristen to daycare. I was upstairs in my bedroom at The Old Place, mama downstairs in her room, Kristen at her house next door. Linda was either at home in Apalachicola or in Birmingham.

It passes over Time. In the meantime, lots of pain pills and, as I say, cautious movement.

What brings it on, what causes it? My observation is that it's always my own fault. That Time years ago it was sleeping in an awkward twist on a horrible mattress. This Time it's sitting at my little desk table here by the Bay, crossing my right leg over my left leg, a bad habit, almost unconscious, that I'm taking care to stop.

Besides the pain pills, what helps? Being still. Walking and walking and walking, but very mindfully, and no surprises for the right side where the femur meets the hip joint. Forego running up and down the stairwell this morning.

Holy Saturday. The church has effective liturgy for late in the day, sunset where Easter begins &c, exsultet and the candle, lessons that tell our Story. I did all that once for a period of Time, exciting years.

The theology today is that, Jesus lying in the tomb, God is Dead. The question is, God being dead, who or what is in charge of Creation? and it rambles off into chat and chatter about the Trinity. Can the Father and the Holy Spirit BE without the Son? Is only Jesus dead, or is the entire Logos dead? Do we need to take another look at posits of the Nicene Creed? I've had this conversation, and I've watched it being had by others at theological seminary. It's easy in this chatter to overlook that Holy Saturday is but a commemoration, not the faith event itself; and also to forget that what's Truth for us may seem ludicrous to other faiths.

So, Pilate: what is truth? And our own proverb, Seek the truth, Come whence it may, Cost what it will.

For myself, I will confess that seeking, the search, has proved quite costly indeed.

Discomfiting. Yet, I've come to prefer disillusion to illusion. And I can see Truth more clearly in my questions than in anyone else's answers, doctrine, dogma, creed, certainties.

RSF&PTL anyway,

nce every