Add comment May 11th, 2008 11:05am Stephen T. Berg
If a meditation/polemic on Mother God interests you, here’s a link to an article I had published in yesterday’s Edmonton Journal.
(Photo: Cover art for Lost in Wonder -Esther DeWall)
And Happy Mother’s Day!
Add comment May 9th, 2008 09:34am Stephen T. Berg
Pain conspires to separate out our constituent parts and experience them as unassociated. Pain proposes a symptomatic view that can lead us away from our holistic memories. And as in the bodily organism so in the communal organism. Pain will plot to part us. But it will fail. The anonymity that pain desires, that would also lead to its intensification, will be overcome by the interconnection of compassion. The suffering of one will be borne by others, and the healing of the others will be transferred back to the sufferer. Just as a touch, a slight loving pressure, an acupuncturist’s needle in an extremity, will free an endocrine gland for proper secretion, or move the liver to synthesize, or strengthen a heart. Truth is found in the interconnected whole.
2 comments May 7th, 2008 10:34am Stephen T. Berg
Regrettably, the posts have been sparse…I have been travelling and, not so regrettably, I’ve been at the cabin watching….
Blithe seagulls ride thermal drafts and sing in their coarse-throated way. They are high into the blue. High enough to blend in, appearing like micro-clots of cloud. Hairy woodpeckers, dizzy from pounding away at a young poplar beside the cabin, take a break in the sun, re-reddening their tiny crowns. Squirrels scold and tease and robins pull worms out from under a mat of leaves, like perfect quilters pulling fat bits of thread through cloth.
In the mean time I’m obsessing about ways to move a mother skunk along. She’s taken a home under the shed and I fear she may have young. It’s May so the possibility is there. I’ve considered marking my territory with my own urine, not knowing if this is an offence for her, or if it’s of no consequence, or inviting. Who knows, really, the way of skunks.
I’ve also thrown the rest of the mothballs as far as I could under the shed where her run is. I know about mothballs. They worked a couple of years ago when we had a skunk, perhaps the same one, under the cabin. She moved out in a couple days.
I check back occasionally, rattle some wood planks that rest there, and listen for a response. She’s still there. I hear her grunting. It’s a guttural spastic-larynx effort. Something between a cough a hiss and a moan. I try imitating it but it’s beyond me. I haven’t the cords or the chords, for it.
I envy the skunk. A thoroughly humble and innocent creature, that at the same time understands the world begins and ends with her. And who am I to her? A passing annoyance. Perhaps she pities me. Pities my consciousness, my future and pastness. She has no quarrel with me, it is I who am dictated to, she controls the game. And it’s me who’s reduced to hissing and moaning.
Add comment May 1st, 2008 06:50pm Stephen T. Berg
May dawns gray. My screen dawns a dull white. I yearn for the sun and long for words transcendent. Words that commune as much as communicate.
I have most of the tools of communication at my disposal but what I need most is communion. I’m not alone.
We are blessed with a broad spectrum of mediums. But we’re neophytes when it comes to recognizing and understanding this blessing. It almost seems that there is an inverse relationship between the number of methods of communication and true communion. We live in this place, over-turned, unaware, missing the forest for the trees, where communication either obscures or masquerades as communion.
Yesterday, a friend pointed out the difference between communion and communication, and how we often confuse the two. As a father, he had believed that when in conversation with his children he needed an outcome, and that without one there was a failure of communication, an opportunity was missed, a point of intimacy lost. He desired and aimed for communion, but got stuck at communication. A deep desire for communion’s intimacy was lost in a kind of forced communication. When we shine a light on the two, the difference between communication and communion becomes obvious enough. But in practice, we muddy them up. We fall prey to the illusion of utility. That is, we trust communication technique over the art of communion.
Perhaps it’s our culture, perhaps it’s our insecurities, our fear, our impatience. Perhaps we are bewitched by management and order. Communication is hailed as generative of outcomes and so we construct and manipulate and are left without that special kind of energy that enables us to release and wait–waiting being a particular kind of trust.
But the good news is that our adolescent infatuation with technique–the same technique that we also use to shield us from communion–can be transformed. We can grow up. We can awaken to the truth that all streams of media are handmaidens of communion. Beguiled no longer we can take back the end from the means. We can call…just to talk. We can try silence in the presence of friends. We can play, walk, breath, break bread, commune.
If we enter the art, we find that life has its own order. Ours is to trust life to lead us into communion. Ours is to listen to life, as St. Benedict exhorts, “with the ear of the heart.” And it’s here we find communion within time and play. Just so–in the middle of a spontaneous egg fight in the backyard with his son, my friend found communion.
Add comment April 27th, 2008 09:45am Stephen T. Berg
Even driving by at 100 km/hr, you can easily count the slouching clapboard houses of Kandahar. On the east side of the hamlet there is a large boxy building as well, that I believe was once a school. From the highway you can see that all the windows have been broken out, like teeth. And the faded brown siding, having lost all desire, has been sliding off for years.
But Kandahar was once famous for its steakhouse. I remember because The Kandahar Steak House always got mentioned 70 miles east, down the Yellowhead, at Yorkton’s CKOS. At that distance I knew it had to be special. Those were the juicy tender years. An earlier time when I didn’t know businesses had to pay for getting mentioned on the television. I thought that places just had to be good to get advertising.
I remember the Sunday my parents went for a drive with their friends with the express purpose of going to for a steak. They may have gone more than once but I remember that day, because I was instantly envious and vowed that one day I would do the same. And I did…one weekend, some ten years later, while driving back from Saskatoon where I was enrolled in an Agriculture diploma program at the University.
It was early evening when I drove up the gravel drive to the steakhouse. I stepped through a paint blistered door into a red-carpeted room. There was no one else in the restaurant. I found a table and sat down.
A thin, wrinkled, Chinese man came and asked me what I’d like. I asked for a menu and he obliged. Was he annoyed or surprised? My steak was tough, quite tough. A mistake perhaps? Perhaps not. Perhaps they had been tough for some time. I ate in dim silence. Years of anticipation spattered and burned off like bits of marbled fat. It was a gristly, uncomfortable and ultimately lonely meal. In less than a year, after my only visit, the windows would be boarded up and eventually, I suppose, the building pushed in and hauled away. There isn’t a trace of the place today.
Today, even though I suspect that some of its 15 houses are occupied, Kandahar, Saskatchewan couldn’t feel much more desolate or unfortunate. And naturally, one wonders about that name, a name–bestowed upon the settlement by C.P.R. at the turn of the century–meant to honour the British victory in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the 1880s.
Still, I can hear the engaging voice of Linus Westburg on CKOS, and see the large sign atop the burgundy restaurant at the entrance of town, and then the presentation of red place-mat, silver steak knife, and the black-brown cross-grilled T-bone on a white plate. A meat-eater’s Shangri-la.
Add comment April 22nd, 2008 09:53am Stephen T. Berg
It’s Earth Day! Now if we could only see the good earth it would certainly help work up a conscious appreciation. Currently, our slice of earth is covered by great sheaves of snow…snow that’s still coming down at a cruel slant.
But one thing that did help was my morning coffee. Since I normally dispense with paper in favour of porcelain, or in Starbuckian parlance, a-for-here-cup, I got it free–in honour of Earth Day. So take a few minutes off, head to Starbuck’s (where they’re doing their part), order your coffee to-stay and enjoy a free cup…and think about the lovely earth under all that snow.
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Add comment April 21st, 2008 11:38pm Stephen T. Berg
The author of Sirach, one of the books that you’ll find scrounging around the back porch of the biblical canon, offers this observation. “See with your own eyes that I have laboured but little and found for myself much serenity.”
I like serenity and if “little labour” is the way to find it, all the better. But I have an inkling that “little labour” is not little labour. Even a lazy person can be notoriously laborious. He just labours at avoiding labour. No tranquility there.
No, the “little labour” that puts out the welcome mat for serenity is the releasing a busy-mind. Of course busy-ness, either that excessive striving to keep adding cushions between insecurity and what we perceive as need-to-have in order to feel secure and comfortable, or that work-in-overdrive that helps keep all the self-worth questions at bay, will give serenity the bums rush every time. Now while I don’t know about excessive-labour, I do know about a busy-mind.
Which brings me to describe the brush with serenity I had this past weekend. It came in the low clouds that arrived with everyone else at the funeral of my uncle. Nothing direct, just an absence of discomfort, a kind of apophatic solace. And then the next day, almost as a follow-up, serenity settled upon me as I sat in an empty chapel. And the day after that it tagged me as I crossed the living room floor. It was serenity, I was sure; repose I suppose. It didn’t last but while it did I picked it like low-hanging fruit.
In these few moments I was in the grip of something like a long-view. I saw past, or through, the immediate worry that threatened to overtake, past the named and unnamed fears that loom like thunderheads and anxiously charge the atmosphere. Past those stresses that mock any attempt at creative work, that shred hours that otherwise may have been lived well, that could have produced some good, perhaps even adding something worthwhile to the world.
It was the long-view that was the conduit. It was this that offered me a connection with mortality. And a mortal experience, whether at a funeral or through gazing at a work of art, always questions my priorities, and with surprising alacrity questions what I labour at and give meaning to. The paradox of the long-view is that it nurtures an attentive appreciation for the present. St. Benedict must have known this when–without a trace of contextual morbidity–he penned, “Keep death before your eyes daily.”
1 comment April 17th, 2008 08:34am Stephen T. Berg
Sadness comes in and recedes like the tide. Happiness on the other hand, catches you like a gleam from a lighthouse you didn’t know was out there.
Happiness comes in glimmers…as when listening to a melancholy Burt Jansch while cooking Basmati rice. While at a stop light, talking about the weather with a bottle picker on a bike. At seeing a name beside an e-mail. During a long silence. While walking across an empty lot, the morning sun low and at your back, and watching a thin 30 foot shadow meet the future ahead of you. While giving away a few dollars to a street-survivor you’ve known for years. While shopping for cheese in Safeway. While reading an offer, over coffee, of shedding a burden, taking up a yoke that’s easy. At the prospect of finding rest. For no reason at all.
2 comments April 14th, 2008 09:16pm Stephen T. Berg
Anger, articulate and otherwise, percolated up through the speeches at Saturday’s rally for justice at the Legislature. The anger was directed at a succession of governments and a justice system, together perceived as coddlers of young killers. The message: when it comes to youthful perpetrators of violent crime, judges and legislators are milksops, afraid of ramping up minimum penalties and ambivalent about meaningful consequences.
No one there was ready to take up a vigilante stance, but the frustration of deferred justice was great enough to wonder about this, at least as a future subtext. Was this an option discussed around the tables of homes that had lost a son, daughter, friend? If so, entirely understandable, perhaps even cathartic.
I had the feeling though, sitting there on the edge of the small crowd, that people were wrestling with a Cohenesque, “things sliding in all directions” future. Not yet apocalyptic, but close. People were asking, how did we get here and where are we going? When murderers were doing one sixth of a twenty-five year life sentence, when cutthroats were getting out on bail and allowed to roam for two years before being called back to an ineffectual trial, when punks with bats take the conscious-life of an elderly man and are hand slapped and given warnings as they head out on their parole, where then is the light of the future?
There are other forces at work of course, economic and bureaucratic, but primarily, the gradual reduction of penalties for violent crime is a consequence of our increased sensitivity to victims. It’s not that we don’t recognize that those who have been maimed or killed, or those who have lost a son or daughter, sibling or friend, to violent crime are truly victims. It’s that we have also come to see that perpetrators of violent crime may also have been victims. And we believe justice isn’t done if a crime is taken only at face value. The “story” of violence and crime, we believe, is beneath the surface. As well, because we see the indicted as at least part victim, we believe in rehabilitation. This we take as a sign of a progressive society.
But for those who have lost someone intimately close to them this is nothing but an egregious twist of logic. Evidence of a screwed-up society. And while I couldn’t agree with all that was said, neither could I disparage or ignore any of the voices.
Where and when will justice and mercy kiss? I don’t know. Until we enter an age of wisdom and peace, we will have to strive to weigh things rightly to keep from entering the alternative. From the slain to the slayer, from the injured to the inured, from grieving family to grieving family we will need to come together with our scales and balances, not mentioning forgiveness, just working on fairness as a start toward other possibilities. And fairness requires that we listen first to the voices of the aggrieved. By taking away their recourse to justice there will be nothing for them to offer back.
3 comments April 12th, 2008 12:10pm Stephen T. Berg
The Imam is tall, slender, academic but in a wholly engaging way. The Pastor has a boxer’s build and is as fiery and passionate as a Pentecostal can be. The Imam’s eyes light up with experience and intelligence as he speaks of his Islamic faith. The pastor, reflecting on Christianity’s teaching on peace, radiates an urgent and hard won love. The Imam looks at the pastor with the tenderness of a mother and says he likes him even though he’s a Christian. The pastor returns the gaze and then looking back at the camera, says, “I love him because my faith teaches me to love my brothers. He is my brother, we are husband and wife, for the sake of ourselves and of our children we must stay together, we must not separate.”
This exchange of humanity goes on even as they speak of the teachings of their diverse faiths. A diversity says the pastor–without any note of paradox–that allows them to live together. And they have been living and traveling together for the past 12 years.
This dialogue and human exchange is rare enough. Now consider that the contextual experience, the immediate history of each man is one of having personal and community property burned and looted, and as having lost family members to a raging violence endorsed and perpetrated by each of these men upon the other and upon their perspective religious communities.
I had the opportunity to view this remarkable documentary the other evening at All Saints. It’s a film of reconciliation–of how perpetrators of violence become instigators of peace–and it should be required viewing in mosques and churches across the country.
When you consider the pressure upon these men to take revenge, to keep the cycle of reciprocal violence going, when you consider the slender thread of trust that had to hold all the these opposites and the oppositions together, that had to overcome the welling up of unbidden hate…as for example–in the early stages of their relationship, the very real temptation the pastor had to smother the sleeping Imam with his own pillow–you understand you are in the presence of something like a modern miracle.
You understand that in some deeper sense both are Imams, and both are pastors. They have become brothers. Not because either has given up their faith. In fact, we come to see that it’s precisely a closely practised faith that allows each man a connecting point beyond their situations.
The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
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