Yesterday, in a prayer, someone was naming a bunch of situations of terribleness around the world, and then asked the Spirit to "brood" over them. It struck me as odd.
Normally, when we say a person is brooding, it is not seen as a good thing. "Brooding," for people, seems to connote anxious, moody, unproductive worrying -- exactly the kind of thing most of us do about the world's messy circumstances, like shootings and genocide and tsunamis.
So why would we want the Spirit to do that?
But then I got to thinking more about the word "brood." When the Spirit does it (did it?), it was over the waters of the deep, and it was the last thing from unproductive. It was the creative process. It was the brooding that led to life (and order?) (and beauty) emerging from the deep. Artists will tell a similar story, I believe.
Then, I got to thinking about chickens. Chickens are the other things (in English) that brood. And when chickens do it, it is also a productive, life-creating process. The formlessness that is inside an egg is brooded into a baby chicken. (So yes, using the biblical witness as a guide, the chicken must have come first?)
So perhaps it is exactly right to beseech the Spirit to brood over the chaotic messiness of our world, if brooding brings forth order and life from chaos.
It even seems possible that the reason "brooding" obtained negative connotations is merely because of our *surface culture's obsession with happiness. Brooding does not seem happy, so we assume it must be a bad thing. Perhaps it is merely a necessary, not necessarily unhappy just not happy, thing for the creation of life. It's work, brooding. It takes focus and concentration on the task at hand. A chicken can't brood if it's running around like its head's been cut off (happily or otherwise).
Perhaps this insight can help us in our quest to find good emerging from the messes our world is in.
* "Surface culture" is a term I just invented to refer to the unhealthy superficialities of our shared life. I believe that there are multiple layers of culture, and that the ones underneath represent our better impulses, whereas a lot of the stuff on top - with which we content ourselves far too often -- constitutes cheap short cuts. To happiness, for instance. Perhaps it's a useful idea and perhaps not. I invent; you decide.
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In "Man of La Mancha," Miguel De Cervantes explains to his fellow prisoners that he was "brooding, brooding, brooding" after pouring through books morning, afternoon, and late into the night. It drove him mad, he said, leading to the emergence of Don Quixote. But as it turns out, there was method to his madness.
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