Chasing our Tail

It seems to me like people spend an awful lot of time chasing their own tails. It is the ultimate excercise in futility. Why would you even want to catch your tail? Perhaps because it is some part of you, and essential component, that you have somehow lost control of or lost sight of and need to get back.

I often do this, going through phases, wanting one thing and then the other. First I try to eat super healthy because it is good for the body and I want to be fit and able when I am eighty, if I ever get there. But eventually the strict diet gets to me and I break down into junk food paradise, fried food and cookies and cake interspersed between my salads and almonds and low-fat milk. I can't seem to stick to one track or the other. I want the food that taste sooooo good and I want to be healthy, but I can't have both at once, so I run in a circle, chasing my tail.

Moderation in everythying is my grandmother's motto. I think she's definetly got a point there. Too much junk food, too much health food are both bad. I have to find the healthy balance and only then will the tail-chasing, the endless spiral, stop.

Of course, eating habits are just one example. I can think of many more, and I see the same circle in people in all around me, chasing their tails, unable to find balance.

Individuals aren't the only culprits. It is part of our culture, and part of our churches. People branch of into groups that exemplify the extreme sides of the circle we are all running around in.

Take the issue of women in the church. All throughout the middle ages women were key to starting and growing movements. They got out and did good stuff like setting up hospitals and helping the poor, and the church engouraged them for a little while. The work needed to be done and the women were doing a good job. Then the pope decided that the women shouldn't be out doing so much, they should be kept inside where it was safe and told them to hole up in the abbey and stop doing their good works. So the women were shut away until the next generation started the same circle over again.

It happens with all sorts of issues. People want a break, want a change, so they try something new despite the old traditionalists who are set in their ways. Eventually that something new becomes the old thing, the tradition that they cling to and fight to keep when a new group comes along wanting to make a change and do soemthing new with the order of worship, type of music, or types of clothing deemed 'acceptable' at church.

Take a look back and you'll see that today's traditional, acceptable, conservative is yesterdays' radical new challenge. We keep wanting change and then forgetting how to make change. We keep chasing our tails, clinging to the past, looking for the future, not sure which direction we're actually going while we turn in circles.