Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 63

Writing Wednesday 41: Fleeing Distraction

This is my shortest vlog ever, but to balance it I’m wearing what may be the coolest shirt ever. Really, the only news this week is that I’ve finished my first draft and am spending a lot of time on research and editing. I guess I can update the video a little though, because I made and posted it before I left the house this morning, but now I’m sitting in Starbucks on my laptop posting the video to my blog … instead of editing. So I think it’s safe to say that no place with Internet is free from distraction!

Searching Sabbath 19: The Law of God

This is a huge topic, and rather than simply being a stand-alone statement of doctrine, it’s really intended as an introduction to the next several beliefs, which are all Adventist beliefs about behavior — how we should act towards God and one another. Stating that we believe God’s law, especially as expressed in the Ten Commandments, is intended for Christians to keep, is a necessary foundation for everything that follows.

As I’ve tried to touch on all-too-briefly in the video, this is a hugely complex topic on which the New Testament itself is by no means simple and straightforward. The most Biblical answer is perhaps, “Yes, we are saved by grace … and yes, we are saved by keeping the law.” Which is hard for us to wrap our minds around, as we like either-or answers. Perhaps the best way is to think of law and grace as two concepts that always have to be kept in balance, in tension. Growing up Adventist in the particular time and place I did it was very easy to see the dangers and evils of legalism and to wholeheartedly embrace, as I have done, the message of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus — something in which I thoroughly believe. It took much longer — and again, I tried to touch on this in the video — to see the possible dangers of an overemphasis on grace as well — the danger of a religion that becomes nothing more that lip service to a set of doctrines, and does not express itself in ethical and loving behavior towards others. I’ll try to discuss this a bit further when we get to the doctrine called Christian Behavior … but for now, as always, I’m interested in your opinions. I particularly like it when readers/viewer share bits of their own personal journeys, whether those have been toward, within, or away from Adventist Christianity, or along some other path altogether — so please let me know what you think about The Law of God!!

Writing Wednesday 40: (More) Thoughts from Port Union

This turned out to be not much of a week for blogging — I didn’t get that other follow-up post on Port Union done nor did I make a Searching Sabbath this week, and someone has started an in-depth discussion on my last Searching Sabbath video that I haven’t taken the time to reply to in detail yet. So, generally I’ve been kind of a slacker. But hey, I made a new Writing Wednesday! Mostly because when we were in Port Union I took a lot of video footage of things around the town, and decided to make a second video somewhat in the style of one of John Green’s “Thoughts from Places” (not that my vlogging is ever going to approach John Green’s level of awesome, but you have to have goals to shoot for). Enjoy.

Writing Wednesday 39: On the Road

Jason and I just got back — I mean literally rolled into the driveway a couple of hours ago — from our two-day getaway to Port Union. It was a great trip — fun and relaxing for the two of us to get away sans kids, useful to me from a research perspective, and Port Union itself was a thought-provoking town. Since it’s Wednesday, the first thing I did was throw together some of my video clips to make today’s Writing Wednesday, which only scratches the surface of what I have to say about this fascinating town. Look for a blog post later this week and a Part II vlog next week about my trip to Port Union — but for now, enjoy today’s quickly-edited video!

A Little Hoarse

Sorry, there’s no Searching Sabbath video this week. I’ve had a sort of cough/sore throat thing going on all this week and yesterday, when I was going to record the video, my voice had this kind of husky/scratchy sound that I didn’t think would be at all appealing on video, so you’ll have to wait till next week for my next installment of the Adventist fundamental beliefs, and my thoughts on them. Kudos to anyone who’s stuck with the series thus far. I would have loved a little more discussion / debate on the Ellen White entry last week, so if you’re so inclined you could scroll down to last Sabbath and leave a comment there.

The combination of having this sore throat (fortunately without any other coughy/fluey symptoms) and a week of really unpleasant cold/gray/wet weather, has made the first week of summer vacation less idyllic than it might have been. Mind you, the kids have enjoyed sleeping late, lounging around the house, watching TV at all hours, and I have been productive and written at least 10,000 words, maybe more. But the things I enjoy about summer — taking the dog for long walks dressed only in capris and a T-shirt (me, not the dog), taking the kids and some friends to Manuels River to swim — will have to wait. Maybe this coming week?

Actually, this coming week Jason and I will be hitting the road as I go on a little research trip to the town of Port Union, where part of my novel is set. We’re leaving the kids behind with my dad, because while I can count on Jason to do his own thing and let me focus on learning about Port Union, if the kids come too then it becomes a family vacation and there’s a whole different dynamic going on, and I won’t get the research I need done. We’re only going for two days but I’m quite excited about this little trip so you will be hearing more about it later. Just wish a little sunshine for us on our way, please!

Writing Wednesday 38: At Least I’m Not Painting

Today’s video is kind of an update to this blog post from last year. I’m so happy and grateful that I’m in a better mental space, writing-wise, than I was this time last year.

I haven’t really solved the problems that got me into that mental logjam. The three unpublished manuscripts — contemporary novels that I think are quite good, but have so far not been irresistible to any editor or agent — are still gathering dust (which is what they do after they gather rejections). But I’ve decided to focus on what I know I can do that people enjoy reading — which, right now, is historical fiction set here in Newfoundland. There are enough stories to tell in that field to keep me busy for quite sometime, and as for those other books, maybe their destiny is to be published someday or maybe not. I’ve just decided to let that go for now. I’m glad I got immersed in this current project and I really believe the decision to create this vlog to document the process of writing the novel helped me keep going, especially at the beginning of the project. And as I plunge into a summer of writing and further research, there are lots of fun videos to come as I take viewers along with me on some of my adventures. Stay tuned!

Searching Sabbath 18: The Gift of Prophecy

I think for the last few weeks I’ve been forgetting to put the actual text of the belief statement in these blog posts where I’m discussing my church’s beliefs, but this is probably the most controversial one of all so in addition to reading it in the video above, I’m pasting the full text of the statement here:

One of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is prophecy. This gift is an identifying mark of the remnant church and was manifested in the ministry of Ellen G. White. As the Lord’s messenger, her writings are a continuing and authoritative source of truth which provide for the church comfort, guidance, instruction, and correction. They also make clear that the Bible is the standard by which all teaching and experience must be tested.

As I say in the video, there’s no doubt that this is a highly controversial doctrine – that the spiritual gift of prophecy, given to people in Biblical times, was given in more modern times to a specific 19th-century American woman, Ellen White, who as a result of her visions and insights became one of the founders of the Seventh-day Adventist church. It’s a deal-breaker for a lot of people who are otherwise attracted to and interested in the Adventist message, and it’s one factor that makes some other Christians view Adventists as more of a cult than a genuine Christian church. How you treat the writings of Ellen White has also become somewhat of a shibboleth within the church itself, with her works often being used as a rallying point for conservatives while being seriously questioned or (occasionally) outright rejected by more liberal Adventists.

So, how to approach this difficult topic?

My video above explains how I like to look at Ellen White and put her work in context of other writers and thinkers that people have called “inspired” (or, capital-I, “Inspired”). But even though I went on for seven minutes, used my classroom whiteboard AND had visual aids, I still only scratched the surface of what there is to be said on the subject. A couple of quick points that I didn’t get to reference in the video:

While Ellen White was certainly a founder of the SDA church, she was not, as some people believe, the founder, nor is Adventism based solely on her teachings. The relationship is much more complicated than the relationship of, say, Mary Baker Eddy to Christian Science, or, as I pointed out in the video, Joseph Smith to the Latter-Day Saints. Early Adventists were very much a community who believed in studying the Bible, discussing things through and arguing when necessary. While there were certainly times that Mrs. White’s visions (or “visions” if you have difficulty believing that visions from God can be a real thing, as some do) gave essential guidance, early Adventists were very aware of the need to ground all their teachings in the Bible.
Official Adventist teaching is very insistent that Mrs. White’s writings are not to be treated as equal with the Bible, but Adventist practice does not always conform to this (I did touch on this a little in the video). Generally the more conservative the Adventist individual or community, the more likely he/she/they will be to quote and use Mrs. White’s writings as if they were Scripture. I was just reading my daughter’s teen Sabbath School lesson with her this evening when an example of this jumped out. Because of a decision-making process about which I as a parent am not terribly happy, my local SDA church does not use the official church program materials for children and youth, but uses another curriculum developed by a more conservative faction within the church. This quarterly I was reading to my daughter was telling the story of the fall of Judah to the Babylonians, complete with plentiful Scripture references, when suddenly it inserted a lengthy description of how the priests in the Temple hid the Ark of the Covenant in a cave so that it would not fall into Babylonian hands, and God preserved and protected it to this day! I pointed out to my kids that there was no Scripture reference for this because the Bible makes no reference to what happened to the Ark, and that this description was drawn from Mrs. White’s book Prophets and Kings. (Mrs. White herself may have been drawing on a tradition whose roots are in 2 Maccabees: Adventists, like most Protestants, count  Maccabees as part of the Apocrypha and thus not divinely inspired Scripture, but Mrs. White was influenced by a wide range of religious texts and has taken a lot of criticism for not citing her sources, even in cases where she copied word-for-word from other writers). Typical of this curriculum material my church is using in the children’s classes, my daughter’s quarterly did not make a distinction between what’s in the Bible and what’s in Ellen White, which troubles me. This would be much less likely, however, in a curriculum that was produced and approved by an official church department, particularly in recent times as the church is keenly aware of the need to clarify our position that Mrs. White’s writings are not equal to Scripture.
Despite this important distinction, there are a few Adventist teachings that are quite difficult to support from Scripture alone without reading the Bible through the interpretive lens of Ellen White’s writings and other traditional Adventist teaching. In this, I think, we are very little different from other Christian churches, including others that, like us, claim to base our teaching on “sola Scriptura” and “let the Bible be its own interpreter.” In practice, this is very hard to do and we all read the Bible with a particular set of interpretive lenses on. In the case of most Adventists, those lenses were generally designed and tinted by Ellen White, because she had such a formative influence on how we read Scripture.
You’ll notice that in this blog and vlog I haven’t talked much about the Scriptural foundation for this teaching, partly because my mandate throughout this series is to explore my own responses and reactions rather than to rehash a Bible study, but also specifically in this case because it is by definition hard to talk about what the Bible says about the role of a writer and religious leader who lived 1800 years after the Bible was written. The rest of the discussion in Seventh-day Adventists Believe… about Fundamental Belief #18 does talk quite a bit about what the Bible says about prophets and how to apply this to would-be modern prophets, but any specific application to Ellen White or to her writings must of necessity be extra-biblical. 

With all those extra points in place to support the rather important basic point I made in the video — about where we place Ellen White in the context of other writers we might consider “inspired” — I’d love to hear other people’s opinions. Adventist? Former Adventist? Non-Adventist reader of my blog who now thinks Adventists are MUCH STRANGER than you thought we were before? Let me know what you think.

Writing Wednesday 37: Flat and Round

As I explain in the video, this one had to be put together pretty quickly (and the quality is a bit odd, as it always is when I use a different camera), so it’s not one of my proudest moments as a vlogger. But it does talk about an issue that’s absolutely central for a writer — characterization. I’m having  a bit of a problem with two minor characters in my novel right now, so it got me thinking about how characters are developed.

Searching Sabbath 17: Spiritual Gifts and Ministries

Another relatively straightforward and non-controversial topic today, except insofar as it lays the groundwork for an extremely controversial topic next week. I think, like the earlier “Growing in Christ,” doctrine, the concept that the Holy Spirit gives us gifts to be used in service for God and others is such a basic assumption of the Christian life that it probably doesn’t even need to be in a statement of any church’s official doctrines (not that there’s anything wrong with it being there). I do think there are some interesting questions to be raised and discussed around spiritual gifts, some of which I try to touch on very briefly in this video. For example: What’s the relationship between our spiritual gifts and our natural talents? Are they one and the same? Also, how do we explain the fact that some of the gifts that seemed most impressive and important in the early church — miraculous healing comes to mind as the obvious example — are so rarely witnessed in the church today? While I don’t believe any of these are major doctrinal points, they are certainly worth some Bible study and discussion.

However, I believe the main reason we as Adventists have a Fundamental Belief about spiritual gifts is that we have another Fundamental Belief — #18, the Gift of Prophecy — that is extremely difficult for non-Adventists — and even for some church members — to accept. In order to even begin talking about that, a foundation needs to be laid whereby we can talk about what spiritual gifts are and how they are used. So belief #17 is setting a context for belief #18 and I’ll be back next week to talk about that — with visual aids! It’ll be fun, I promise. Controversial, but fun.

One Crow

“One for sorrow, two for joy,

Three for a girl, four for a boy,

Five for silver, six for gold,

Seven for a tale that’s never been told.”

I am not superstitious at all. I think superstitions are silly. I make a point of walking under ladders and crossing the paths of black cats just to show my disregard for superstition.

But there is one superstition that’s clung to me for years and that’s the above counting rhyme about crows. I’m not particularly worried about anything beyond the first line — I’ve already got a girl and a boy, and it’s going to take more than crows to get me to have any more kids. I’m not particularly concerned about silver or gold, and as a writer I’m always in favour of a tale that’s never been told, so if I see groups of crows I don’t bother counting them or worrying about how many there are.

But one crow? Has always made me nervous. Whenever I see one crow I think “One for sorrow,” and then I look around for a second so I can claim there were really two crows and it was Two for Joy. This is about 98% joking and 2% deep-seated irrational atavistic fear that a single crow is somehow able to predict upcoming sorrow for me. I’m not alone in this superstition: I shared my crow-fear once on Facebook and although there were several people who’d never even heard of the crow rhyme, I also heard of someone who makes an X with their thumb to cross out sorrow whenever they see a single crow, and someone else who says “Hello Mr. Crow, where’s your friend?” whenever they see one crow, on the assumption you can trick fate into thinking there were really two crows. Usually, I find, if you look hard enough you’ll see a second crow nearby and I can convince myself that good things are ahead.

Funny thing: ever since my mom died I keep seeing single crows everywhere. One crow in a tree. One crow on a telephone wire. One crow staring at me from the sidewalk as I drive home. There is a single crow walking through the rain-soaked grass outside my office window as I type this. One for sorrow.

Whenever I see them now I nod and think, “That’s right, one for sorrow. And I’m sad. How appropriate.”

Somehow, I’ve gone from seeing the crows as predictive to seeing them as descriptive. The single crow — one for sorrow — is not predicting a terrible sad thing that will happen in the future. A terrible sad thing has already happened, and the crow is reminding me of what I feel. Sorrow.

If I’ve learned one thing of value as adult, it’s this: it’s OK to feel what you’re feeling right now. Feeling sad or mad or afraid is not wrong. Feelings are responses to our circumstances. Bad feelings don’t need to be papered over with good ones.

This has been a hard lesson for me, ironically because I’m basically a happy and positive person and I’ve been fortunate enough to lead a relatively easy and trouble-free life. So when I do feel bad, for a lot of my life I’ve had the feeling that this is something wrong that needs to be fixed. A certainly type of Christianity — the kind that penned the song “You’ll have happiness all the time, wonderful peace of mind, when you’ve found the Lord!” can play into this too  – like God needs to immediately fix the problem if I’m not feeling good.

I’m slowly coming to learn (and trying to pass on to my kids, though I have to resist the temptation with them to try to “fix” bad feelings too) that being sad can be a completely appropriate reaction to bad things happening, and it’s OK to feel that sadness– to be right where you are at the moment.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t believe positive thinking is important, or that I don’t recognize that people sometimes get caught in a pattern of negative thinking that hurts them. But have you noticed that negative thought patterns are almost never about feeling what you’re feeling right now? They’re almost always about projecting back into the past or ahead into the future.

Negative thinking says, “I have lost someone I love, and I didn’t have the chance to do/say x, y or z before that person died.” Or, “I have lost someone I love and I will never be happy again.” 

Feeling what you feel right now says, “I have lost someone I love, and I miss that person, and I am sad.”

Losing my mom is definitely the saddest thing that’s happened in my life so far. Losing my friend Jamie two years earlier was the saddest thing up till that point. Presumably, human life being what it is, there are more losses ahead, as well as lots more good times. And I’m trying to learn that it’s OK to be sad about the sad things, and happy about the happy things. It’s OK if in the morning I see one crow and in the afternoon I see two. They’re not omens, predicting future joys or sorrows. They’re reminders that right now I am feeling real things and I can experience those feelings and honour them and not try to fix or change them.

It’s OK to feel sad in the middle of  a happy family get-together because my mom is not there. It’s OK to jump around and sing and feel happy at a Great Big Sea concert a week after my mother’s death. It’s OK to be where I am at the moment, which is often an odd mixture of happy and sad.

While I was typing this the crow flew away. Maybe he’s gone to find a friend, or maybe he’s going on alone, a single crow for sorrow. Either way, it’s OK.