Archive for December, 2006
December 30th, 2006
An article by Wency Leung (Vancouver Sun), reprinted in today’s Journal, held no surprises but did confirm something most lapsed or lapsing conservative evangelical Christians know.
In researching the apparent link between religion and intolerance (believing if there is a link it needs to be shown empirically) University of British Columbia professor of social psychology, Ara Norenzayan, found that faith in God itself does not make people less tolerant to others who don’t share their beliefs. Rather, so-called "boundary-setting" tendencies, or dogmatism, seem to be the culprit. Also, research participants who agreed to the statement, "My God or belief is the only true one," were more likely to support violence.
No news flash there but another study by Norenzayan and fellow researchers was a bit more interesting. They found that Muslim Palestinians who prayed to God frequently were no more or less likely to support suicide attacks than those who did not. However, those who frequently attended mosque were more likely to endorse violent martyrdom. Similarly, Jewish settlers in the West Bank who attended synagogue were more likely to support violence against Palestinians than those who did not. Norenzayan said synagogue and mosque attendance likely contribute to boundary-setting. "It’s ’my group versus the other group.’
The family resemblance with Christian fundamentalism is obvious enough. And this surely shows the link between the Sunday after Sunday boundary-setting sermons and "worship rallies" of too many conservative evangelical churches and their resultant or correlative acceptance and sometimes endorsement of violence.
According to Norenzayan’s research, perhaps not too surprisingly, prayer on its own doesn’t have that kind of factious effect on people.
So unless your church has given up the taste for group-defining, here’s a New Year’s resolution to consider: Make 2007 a church-free year. But with more prayer.
Technorati Tags: Wency Leung, Ara Norenzayan, Diffee cartoon, Christianity, Islam, Zionists, Peace, Religion, Violence
December 29th, 2006
An old prayer for a new year:
By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. (Zeckariah)
There are saints that live out and enjoy bone deep peace. They live around us undetected, and on some level hold our world together.
They love peace. They have loved peace so much as to be guided into peace’s domain.
Ice climber in Malign canyon (January 2003)
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I love peace too, but I fear I mostly love it on my own terms…when my little world is right…which of course isn’t true peace. So perhaps I don’t really love it. I mean really love it.
Because sweet peace, deep peace, is something that lives beyond acquisition, competition, reputation and the fear of death in all its subtle forms.
Well, here’s lifting a glass to at least taking another step in the "way of peace."
Technorati Tags: Peace
December 28th, 2006
In this week’s Vue:
Here’s some advice that is so sound and sweet and sensible that it deserves all kinds of dissemination. Thanks Connie Howard! Spread the love and the caviar.
Happy New Year!
December 27th, 2006
Sometimes we say things without thinking–perhaps even in jest–that turn out to be truer than anything we could have consciously come up with.
Some time ago Judy followed the slight tug of a half-formed impulse, stoped her car in front of the house of a casual friend of hers, walked to the stoop and rang the doorbell. Her friend had been ill and upset and was feeling desperate for some encouragement. Things with her family weren’t well. After she poured out her story, she asked plaintively, "Where is God in all this?" Before catching herself, Judy said, "Here I am!"
An untitled sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins ends with these lines:
Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
How mysterious, how wonderful that Christ plays in ten thousand places, that Christ plays in us.
Benedictine spirituality also teaches us to contemplate Christ’s presence in all of us, and especially the hungry, the lonely, the imprisoned.
Perhaps more difficult, is to contemplate the presence of Christ in your relatives, co-workers, neighbours. Or maybe most difficult, in you.
The reality, wether sensed or not, is that even now, in some place, in a thousand places, God is present, happening, entering a conversation, joining an event, moved by a touch, delighted by a greeting, at play in people eating and drinking together.
As some poets say, In God we live, and move, and have our being.
Technorati Tags: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Beauty, Benedictine, Christianity, Peace
December 24th, 2006
This article was published last Christmas.
Here’s a pdf version
To all occasional and regular readers, to all of you that I read…to all of us sometime pilgrims, aliens, travellers and homebodies, Merry Christmas!
Much love and more light.
Technorati Tags: Bruce Cockburn, Christmas, Christianity, Peace
December 23rd, 2006
The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. (…that is, Wonderful Councellor, Mighty God, Prince of Peace)
What Christians believe is fantastic. They believe that something comes from nothing…and not nothing comes from nothing. They believe that this something from nothing points always to something that can never be identified as an object. They have this in common with other monotheists, but they go further.
They believe in an invasion. An invasion that makes any Star Trek or Star Wars episode perfectly tenable and ordinary.
They believe the invasion came by way of a virgin birth. They believe that this happening was not self-fertilization or parthogenesis as found in some plants and lower animals. Instead they believe that this was a conception from "elsewhere."
They believe that the immensity of the power from "elsewhere" was displayed in the weakest way as "virgin and child." Because of this invasion of powerlessness they believe that in the "IAM no-thing" there is no fear, only peace, no wrath, only mercy, and no violence, only love and freedom.
And so they believe that this "no-thing" from "elsewhere" completely relativizes and makes irrelevant our gods of "speed and steel, success and safety."
They believe that because of this our murderous ways of grouping are dethroned. And that there is no longer a sustainable "us" and "them."
Well, that is what they should believe.
As it is the signs still show that we are all, too often, functional atheists; because all of the above is still too much an idea and too little a discovery.
May Christmas find our theories slightly more undone. May we be open to discovering and undergoing the immensity of love behind this powerless invasion.
Technorati Tags: Virgin birth, Monotheism, Christianity, Peace
December 21st, 2006
One close-to-Christmas day at Starbucks:
The lady at the counter was trying to decide how many gift cards to get, presumably for her colleagues or friends or both. Well, she hemmed awhile but it really didn’t take her that long to decide; but I still felt a swell of indignity rise within me.
And the swelling continued as I mulled over my perfectly good reasons for stewing. My God, who would pick the morning coffee-rush to do Christmas shopping? Why didn’t she know what she wanted before she came? Why was she paying with a credit card? She knows it takes longer that way. And why didn’t she at least have the card ready instead of forever fishing around in her purse. And that last minute addition of an extra gift card that caused the clerk to re-tally her total, well, that was really pushing it.
Why was she so inconsiderate to me?
And so, as I waited, I decided to practice meditating. See how pious and self-deprecating I am? See how I’m taking on this great slighting, almost martyr-like, turning it into a spiritual testing, and rising mightily to the occasion. 
See how I’m overcoming her obvious lack of respect for me, as I stand, straighter now, five persons back. See how my Christ-like forbearance is shining through my serene smile? Isn’t this good for me and the new morphic pattern I’m creating in the world? Isn’t the world just a bit better because of my tranquility in the face of such adversity?
Please spike my coffee with lorazepam. Danke schön.
Technorati Tags: Patience, Christmas, Starbucks
December 20th, 2006
I’ve decided–getting a little help from my friends–that it’s good to continue to expose this old Folkie to some alternative music. So last night I went to see a band called Seven Devil Fix at Edmonton’s Sidetrack.
They’re loud, energetic–particularly the frontman–all talented, with an outstanding young guitar player. While they’re not message oriented, they do have a message. It’s understated and as a result, received.
David Howard from 7DF
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I hear some of you say, how could it not be understated when you can’t always understand it? Well, if you get a chance, see them live, the message, in songs like "The Seed" comes through nuanced and textured. Even while the energy is in your face. You can check them out here.
But what of the name Seven Devil Fix? It strikes me that it’s on a continuum from subtle to out-in-front, allusion to proclamation, depending on your history.
I like it. Here’s a personal take:
Now after he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.
Mary Magdelene, the wild woman of the gospels, shows up all around the death and resurrection of Jesus. Yes I know it’s Christmas. But the Christmas birth–if it holds anything at all–already has within it the seed of resurrection, that is, the reversible garment of death; the gospel.
And Mary M. is what the gospels are about. She’s homeless, has a rap sheet, and she’s a woman. Three annihilating strikes.
She’s been used and thrown out of all the respectable and semi-respectable places. But then she meets someone who treats her as an equal. (How socially bizarre.) And loves her into being. He loves her into completeness or, in new testament language–recalling for a moment the biblical understanding that the number seven connotes something complete–from her he "casts out seven devils."
Mary M’s story is both a restoration and a resurrection story. Undergoing this courtship-relationship she’s loved completely into complete beauty and released into an understanding that death-is-not.
The rumours she sensed were true all come clear to her in a flood-tide when after turning death on its head, she is the first one Jesus comes to upon returning from the tomb.
It’s an emancipation story for all of us occasionally haunted ones. It’s a dawn-story for all us night-sitters. And so it’s a Christmas story.
Technorati Tags: Seven Devil Fix, Sidetrack Cafe, Mary Magdelene, Christmas, Christianity, Religion
December 19th, 2006
"We take beautiful walks together. it is very beautiful here, if one only has an open and simple eye without any beams in it. But if one has that it is beautiful everywhere." Van Gogh
But Jesus said to them, "Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me."
Here is my task as I run out these few days to Christmas. I will intentionally try to keep my eyes peeled for things of beauty.
I’ve tried this before. On the surface it seems a simple enough task. But keeping a look out for beauty is like craning your neck to peer around a tall person for an entire theatrical production. And even though you want to see the play, your muscles give out and for much of the time, you simply resign yourself to shadows and half silhouettes.
But the longing remains. The simple impulse toward beauty is in all of us. We sense that we have been created for beauty and we are haunted by a hazy memory that we too, are beautiful. And we also sense that beauty has to do with truth, that it will not lie. We see that this is why beauty is not about pretty things, and has nothing to do with glamour.
I try to follow this sense, this memory, this impulse, deeper, beyond mere appreciation. But I find beams in my eyes.
I recall a few years ago during one of my "intentional weeks" a simple thing finally helped me, a grace really. It was a phone message from a lady who introduced herself as Jean McKenzie, 73 years old, and "a bit handicapped."
She said she couldn’t do much for Hope Mission (where I work), but said a poem had come to her, as she put it, "from scraps of paper lying around". She hoped it might encourage people at the Mission. She read her poem into my voice mail. It spoke about how some days are so empty but how in those times we need to "let brightness and colour into our lives". She read how, God herself gives birth to each day and in the beauty of these autumn days, she reaches out and touches us. Jean spoke about God’s painters making us pictures. Her poem ended with an exhortation to "inch our way forward," feeling God’s love as we approached her, and that as we did this, the world would be filled with warmth.
I saved the message and put the receiver down. Later, when I played the message for a couple other people, what came up was the fact that Jean had referred to God as a she.
Beauty is found in a moment or just as easily lost in a moment. I wondered at how much beauty I have missed through my own inattentiveness.
When I was in my high school years, living on the farm, I recall on more than one occasion, as I stepped out of the house into the still air of an early evening, hearing the tractor pulling the cultivator a half mile or more away, and then I hearing my father’s voice riding higher waves, singing clear above the roar of the Cockshutt tractor. He sang what he always sang in the middle of a field… this old hymn, How Great Thou Art.
In the self preoccupation of my youth I was deaf to the beauty of this worship that brought together soil and spirit, diesel and the divine.
I was as blind as the disciples who were troubling the woman for pouring precious ointment on the head of Christ. My dad, was doing a beautiful thing to Christ.
Beauty calls to us but never asserts itself. Because of this, deeper beauty is found only as we move imaginatively and mindfully, and as we walk in humility. Beauty of lasting value must be unearthed, mined through the divining rod of attentiveness, humility and a transfigured imagination.
And if, at times, our eyes are clear enough so that we can move and walk in this way, if, at times, our eyes grow accustomed to the light of a different world, we not only heighten the beauty of God’s creation, we point beyond ourselves becoming conduits of beauty for God. And we touch a world where everything is beautiful. A world where beauty comes from "scraps of paper lying around".
Technorati Tags: Cockshutt Tractor, Beauty, Spirituality
December 18th, 2006
"I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy, I can’t tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away."
This could have been a quote lifted from Michael White’s book "Stranger at the Gate" but it’s Paul Barnes, the latest evangelical pastor to be called out of ministry…into possibility.
But not if the church has it’s way. They hope to "restore" Barnes as a victorious and proper heterosexual.
"Men of Grace" (taken from GC’s website)
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Paul and Char Barnes will get counseling, but unlike Haggard, they will not go into seclusion or report to a board of reconcilers, (associate pastor) Palmer said. He said it will be more personal and that church members will play a role.
However, reading between the lines of the Denver Post article Pastor Barnes seems to be opening himself up to self-integration. Even though Palmer, the associate pastor, said he wasn’t sure what Barnes had meant, and that Barnes told him that he believes God views homosexuality as a sin:
Barnes expressed hope for a future where one can "be who you are" and be accepted and loved in the Christian community and also spoke about "separating some of the teachings from Scripture" from Jesus Christ.
My heart goes out to Paul Barnes. You don’t say something like this without believing somewhere deep inside that you just may be "created" homosexual. But what an amazingly difficult journey this must be. And gravely trying for his family. The question is whether it will be more trying in the long run to be "restored" and attempt to live out a sadly divided life.
When Barnes experienced a Christian conversion at 17, it gave him a glimmer of hope. But his homosexual feelings never went away, he said.
Barnes said he asked God many times why he was called to ministry, to start Grace Chapel, carrying a "horrible burden."
Barnes described struggling with what he believes is the biblical teaching that homosexuality is an abomination. Over the years, he grew to accept that "this is my thorn in the flesh."
My prayer is for the well being of Pastor Barnes and his family. I do not pray that his homosexuality be taken away. I pray for his own prayer to be answered…that in the future a Pastor Barnes may be accepted and loved in the Christian community. That his being gay be as much an issue as the heterosexuality of his would be counselors.
In their only talk about sex, Barnes said his father took him on a drive and talked about what he would do if a "fag" approached him. Barnes thought, "’Is that how you’d feel about me?’ It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed."
Technorati Tags: Paul Barnes, Homosexuality, Evangelical, Denver Post, Christianity, Grace Chapel Denver
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