Not long ago I was at a conference on how to raise money for missions serving homeless people. The conference took place in upper-crust Orange County. Newport Beach to be precise. I see the irony, but I’m not complaining. I’ve seen the irony for seven or eight years now. Haven’t complained once. If anything, I’ve developed a sense of vocational entitlement. After all, people who serve the poor don’t have to subsist themselves—I’ve heard. They don’t have to work in impoverished conditions. Do they? The answer to that, like the answer to so many questions of this sort is: that depends. But what clear-eyed child has ever been content with, that depends?
There is a larger question here. How do we live, any of us who are affluent, in the awareness that our neighbours are impoverished? Yes, moderation, modesty. But then there are those nagging examples like Francis of Assisi.
What is, after all, my responsibility? My call? And who lives a called life anymore–besides my siblings maybe, and Francis? A calling is so non-postmodern…or is that non-postmortem. (Do see the wonderment of English?)
I decided—for the third time—that I wanted to write, maybe be a writer, when I was living at 2.3 Acres—and empty lot just off downtown Victoria. I had a spot behind a willow, a sleeping bag, a chewed Bic pen and scraps of paper. I wrote "thoughts." I never dared to show or tell anyone.
And here I am, still writing scraps of thought. But daring to show and tell, and hoping occasionally to write with heart, wit, humility, intelligence. And hoping to have my work mean something. "My work!" Now that sounds lofty. I’m a whore for an approving glance. ("Approving glance," is a phrase I stole from James Alison.)
And now I’m flat. I have nothing. Perhaps what I had, if had, is gone. I feel a depression moving in. I’m so celled in by comparison. I trudge like a tramp through this late half-lit smoggy afternoon. I park my slight shadow on a bench. My shallow collapse will not register. There will be no butterfly effect. The water will close in leaving no trace of me.
I was afraid of that empty conference hotel room. I needed the distraction of a large screen and a remote. Where have my victories gone? “The Victorious Life…” Do you remember that Sunday-morning salvo arching toward your chest like a live grenade? Kaboom!
Hold on, wait, I do have a "victory,"…a wife who is a friend. Oh, and a quiver full of kids–precious, you know, hmm…like things that are precious (thanks Moe Szyslak). Oh yes, and I have a divine community that I can slink back to, sink into, that will give me a glass, and even help me raise it.
And I have Emily and her lilies and Teresa the Little Flower, who when asked to choose one of many coloured ribbons said, "I choose all." And I have Jesus and all that wine and spikenard.
Enjoy life in time. Enjoy its gifts for to refuse them is an offence. Endure life when you’re lost or stuck. Roll with it. But look for brightly coloured hallways. Be generous without evaluation or comparison or consternation or judgment. Recall that all flesh is grass. Recall that grass blooms and flowers and dries up and waits again for spring rain. Fast. Pray. Cultivate peace. Move to simplicity. Resist little. Don’t harm; farm.
Upon a distant balcony hangs a basket,
umber vines have fallen over its eyes.
Across the ally a bright chilled wind bullies a brown mottled leaf,
leftover, without strength, or sap enough to let go.
On the street, busts behind windshields wear sunglasses and pinned-up hair,
beneath the balcony, busts in cars move from lane to lane to lane.
They run the yellow lights, the pragmatic,
no patience for unfinished news.
No thought for the tillerman,
who may yet find green in dun-things.
When the fog of anguish blocks sensory contact of your feet with the floor of your bedroom, or the hallway leading out of your condo, or the snow covered sidewalk, and when you reach somewhere not remembering how you got there; when numbness replaces grief, and despair looks like the better side of hope, and relief is remote—like Andromeda; when the structures of "Health Services" make mannequins out of people, and referrals lead only to the next manqué appointment; when a regional ache overruns the boundaries and takes up residence in every cell, and when running through grass laughing is an irretrievable memory, and prayer has run dry—is it not reasonable to ask about God’s occupation, sleep habits, hobbies?
And yet, you cry out, and wait upon the absence, which you somehow knowingly feel will bring more light than weight. Why do you feel this? No one told you. It simply came—your hands bleeding, as you clung on to the sharp end of desire, a shard of hope.
And so it happens in the middle of your long involuntary call into the fog, that you dispel the Supreme Being God—that granting-or-denying-your-bidding-prayers God, and are opened up to the mystery beyond the nothing, or the mystery of the no-thing-God. And that long anguished why-forsaken solicitation—that heart’s dart propelled by Love—pierces the cloud of your mind, fusing mind and heart; and you recline into the other, the divine community, where presence resides; and, like this, you rest, even in the hurt, in hope re-ember-ed.
I watch, with millions, the spinning symmetry, the aerial magic, the split-second speed of the super-bodies—and I see the pain around the eyes from a flood of lactic acid, forgotten in the exaltation of everything coming together at the right time, culminating in a personal best, a first, a gold. This is not, man-on-skates-goes-real-fast. It is, in it’s purest form, a celebration of the body as temple. And it’s as inspiring as a new idea. And I, like millions, am caught up in the spell of sport—the Olympiad—the Olympic spirit.
The problem—and it is always the problem of any gathering rooted in fascination—is with the money changers that hang around the temple. That so much planning, energy, creativity, imagination, not to mention time and money (six years and six billion dollars) can be concentrated on a 17 day event with only rudimentary forethought for the bodies of the displaced, shames the enterprise.
For example, according to Dr. Christopher Shaw in an interview with This Magazine, the 250 units (Athletes Village), once promised for social housing, will now have to be sold to recoup a mushrooming 60 million dollar operating budget. (This needs watching.)
That the IOC, a country unto itself, is never burdened by social cost, that developers are subsidized but seldom bound to social welfare considerations, that aboriginal communities have been split by money and promise, that tokenism is no where near dead, that governments continue to talk a good game–is the detritus left over from the supposed legacy. And that’s the tarnish.
It’s time to give the Olympics a permanent venue. It’s time to focus on the fun and beauty of sport for its own sake. Most of all it’s time to realize that, as Vancouver resident and tent-dweller-for-a-night Gillian Young says,
If we can’t take care of our brothers and sisters, then we’re not going anywhere.
On this Ash Wednesday I meet no eyes on my walk to work. All cast down. All otherwise gone. Where? Into the not-yet-day-to-be? Busily neutral? Or gone south? Away from this month? Or away from difference, other-contact? Or like me, in search of a self not yet owned? Wished for but as distant as Venus?
And I wonder if it’s true as Rosenberg says, that all we want, above all other things, is to be the cause of joy in each other. And I wonder if it’s true, As Moore says, that the most fundamental truth of humans is that we want to love each other.
Is it desire circumferenced by fear that keeps us barbed, nettled, noduled, stinging, and shallow rooted?
But I remember too (and I’ve seen this in you) that occasionally desire overcomes fear and we green-up, draw deep from a clear table, and flower full and heavy, and bend and bow and drop our pedals upon the ash-grey Ganges.
There was hope in 1979. What happened however was that one brutal, oppressive and corrupt regime was replaced with another brutal, oppressive and corrupt regime.
It’s a failed revolution that millions of Iranians desire redressed.
The Iranian government has consistently violated basic human rights. It is responsible for executions (Recently two activists who were accused of inciting the post-election protests on June 12th were executed – even though these men had been held in detention long before the violence erupted), torture, arbitrary arrests, countless abuses and of course censorship, wherever and whenever possible.
But censorship is increasingly difficult to maintain in today’s networked world. And so, Grow Mercy, along with thousands of other blogs are making today, Unite for Human Rights in Iran day.
Spread the word. Link your Facebook page, your blog, your website.
Ours wasn’t a 100-mile diet–it was a 100-yard diet. Our family ate what sprouted from a large patch of tended soil behind our house. What wasn’t eaten straight from the garden was put up in jars and in a root cellar.
And we ate meat. Chickens and pigs mostly, occasionally a young steer or heifer. Sometimes, although rarely, we ate wild meat. Deer or moose—barter with an uncle—as my father didn’t hunt. What we raised and what we didn’t sell, we butchered. Mostly we butchered pigs and chickens. And what we butchered we used.
I didn’t mind the taste of chicken foot soup, it was the thought of the feet. Feet I knew. Feet that’d run through barn-slick mud, feet that scratched up grub-life from beneath the dirt.
Feet I snagged with wire and hook, then held skyward while the chicken, arched-up, caught my sleeve in its beak, and beat my arm and the air with frantic wings. Not effecting its escape it dropped down in a flurry of feathers, breathless and half limp while I pulled it across the stained block and chopped the head free of the neck. Blood splattered on the hard-packed dirt, and the headless chicken flapped its insanity into stillness.
After the blood, after the scalding, the chicken was plucked as it hung with a dozen other chickens from a length of wire stretched between a stall in the barn. After the plucking, after the propane torch singeing to remove the pinfeathers, they were taken to the kitchen for cleaning and cutting. At the end of the day, up in my room, I still caught the smell of chicken entrails as I fell asleep.
When it came time to butcher a pig, a neighbour was called. He placed the gun barrel a few inches away from the forehead of our hog and the bullet entered the brain. Then, strapping hind legs to a block and tackle hung from a protruding beam behind the barn, the pig was pulled up, suspended head-down, its front feet left grazing the ground. My father then eased a bright blade through the soft skin above the breast bone, sticking the carotid artery, and I watched the pig finish twitching and the blood pool like it would never stop. There are pails of blood in a pig.
After the pig was bled it was dipped in a barrel of scalding water then scraped clean of hair and bristle. Finally it was cut from breast bone to pelvis, and opened up, its offal spilling on the ground. The mound was later shovelled on the manure wagon and taken to the field, but not before the cats and our dog were full-gorged.
The carcass cleaned, my father lowered the pigs bulk onto a makeshift sawhorse table and used a meat saw to cut it into manageable chunks, ribs, ham, bacon.
My trip to Sobey’s has none of this drama. And it has none of the understanding or the connection or the remorse. Finally, it has very little of the gratitude. What it does have is emersion in an abundance of cheerful packaging.
And mostly we believe the propaganda on the packaging—that all is pastoral out in the pasture. In truth, today, chickens are formulated en masse, pigs are machined, cows are designed. Unable to bear the strain of hot-feed and growth hormones, the organs and skeletal structures of these animals are sacrificed in the race for the earliest possible finished product. Any thought for the well-being of the animal has evaporated in the heat of ever expanding production and efficiency, within the demand for cheap fast food—a demand created and sustained both by conglomerates and consumer choice.
The disconnection we have to our food has given food conglomerates the power of ancient feudal lords and forced farmers into a new form of serfdom. And our turning away has licensed the engineering of animals over their ethical treatment. But farmer Joel Salatin, in the documentary Food Inc., goes further and says,
A culture that just uses a pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure, to be manipulated by whatever creative design the human can foist on that critter, will probably view individuals within its community, and other cultures in the community of nations, with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling type mentalities.
Joel is one of a growing number of people that see the consequences of our food choices, and our attitude toward food, as an unacknowledged social illness, and part of our communal and spiritual disease. Without a renewed connection to our food through a new heedfulness of the earth and a mindfulness of its plants and animals—that is, without the practice of stewardship, all our supposed productivity is a diminishment of life itself.
But should we take time to reacquaint ourselves with the network of events between our breakfast and its origins, we may regain a sense of our indebtedness—the giftedness of food, in effect, the spirituality of food. And through this, perhaps we may begin to make wiser decisions regarding our food choices—choices that effect the earth we live upon.
The writing of Growing Hope – The Story of Edmonton’s Hope Mission began about six years ago, sat relatively dormant on a computer file for four years, then it was taken out, dusted off, and over the course of last year, Hope Mission’s 80 Anniversary, it was completed.
For the most part, this book will hold interest primarily for those who have had some intimate contact or at least some association with Hope Mission.
Growing Hope is what it is, a custom published, humble little work. It was, nevertheless, something like a labour of love. It wasn’t sponsored and I wasn’t asked to write it, but somewhere along the way, because I fell in love with Hope Mission, and the mission to raise the broken poor to dignity, I felt constrained to put the stories down before they disappeared. These are the stories of people who also fell in love—then grew to love Hope Mission—through faith in a God of compassion.
Growing Hope’s tone, like the Mission itself, is a blend of evangelical witness and social compassion. Still, overall, it’s a history book and so recalls the stories that brought Hope Mission through 80 years of service and ministry.
These are stories of the pioneers of Christian social care in Edmonton. Stories of Hope Mission’s matriarchs and patriarchs, disciples and offspring, largely told in their language—told within the central view of Hope Mission, that a spiritual awakening through Jesus Christ is a requisite for holistic healing.
