Grow Mercy

Visible victim decontructs myth

7 comments March 29th, 2008

Here's a link to my article in today's Edmonton Journal. The article is a reflection of my (attempted) Easter poem.

Icon of the crucifixion of Christ; of unknown origen.

Father Joe

Add comment March 26th, 2008

I finally had the sense to pick up Father Joe. The book had been in my “to read” pile for more than a year. Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul is a memoir of sorts. It’s a story about a seemingly unlikely relationship between the author Tony Hendra and a religious.

The book begins with the fourteen-year-old Tony who finds himself entangled with a married Catholic woman. When the husband, a sincere-to-a-fault Catholic, discovers the tryst, he whisks the boy off to get straightened out by a priest. The priest he meets is a gentle, stammering, quirky, and wise Benedictine monk named Father Joseph Warrillow. The monk is nothing like what he imagined and a bond develops between them. 

So taken is Hendra with Father Joe that upon graduating from high school he is intent on joining the Benedictine community. However, Father Joe’s deeper wisdom is that he wait. Then in one of the more fascinating moments in the book, Hendra describes losing his faith, as if over night. The remainder of the book is a description of an alternately sinking and surfacing life. Hendra slides into substance abuse, goes through a ruined marriage, but the one anchor in his life is the non-judgemental Father Joe. It’s this relationship that, in the most practical sense, saves the author.

At every level it’s a wonderful story, but it might also be worth mentioning that Tony Hendra, while attending Cambridge, performed frequently with his friends and Monty Pythons-to-be, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. He was editor in chief of Spy magazine, and the original editor of National Lampoon. He also played Ian Faith in the movie, This Is Spinal Tap, and was the co-creator of Spitting Image. He has written frequently for New York, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, among other magazines.

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The bad news: Just after I wrote this little review I learned that the “delinquency” of Hendra may have gone far deeper than the memoir divulged. When the book was published, Jesscia Henda, 39 at the time, “unable to bear the hypocrisy,” wrote that she had been sexually molested by her father when she was seven and that it happen two more times after that. The charges are denied by Hendra but the New York Times article, to my mind, seems credible. 

So what do you do with a non-fiction memoir you profoundly enjoyed only to find that the author may have committed one of the most grievous and damaging of crimes?

What saves the book is that while it’s ostensibly about Tony Hendra, it is more properly about Father Joe, the joyful, generous, wise monk, who had the kind of presence that could save one from religious cynicism. In fact at the end of the book we learn of the immense impact this humble Benedictine monk had on hundreds of people, including Rowan Williams, currently the archbishop of Canterbury, and Princess Diana.

Monday, Easter Monday

3 comments March 24th, 2008

It’s the kind of spring morning that confuses itself with early fall. Hardly knowing its place or mode of presentation…it asks, “Should I be about receding or resurrecting?” And I with it, ask, what’s my place in this brown-grass-beside-cracked-sidewalk day?

Out of habit I’ve pointed myself to a door and a desk, but eight blocks is a long way on a morning such as this, and I’m disoriented. Where to find direction? The sky is closed for reading, its entrails sealed behind a splotchy blue grey hide. The cards falling from my sleeve are all jokers. And no tea leaves have escaped their perforated cells to rest on the bottom of cups. Where are the signs, my signs?

Yesterday I saw them and knew my place. Yesterday I felt somehow adjusted–kneeling beside a man bulky from folds of clothes, who smelled street-sour, and whose fingers were black from removing tobacco from butts. He came in half way through the Easter liturgy, sat down and rolled a cigarette, joining the six of us for the early service. When it was time, he was first at the eucharist rail and I steered toward him, lowering myself beside his already kneeling frame. He had the face of a pugilist…a George Chuvalo with long thick grey hair, stiff from dust.

The lot of us–an older man in a suit, a smartly-dressed business woman, an elderly woman with a broach, a middle-aged woman in flowered blouse, and a younger man in blue jeans who knew his way around the Book of Common Prayer– lined up like robins, mouths open, waiting for a wafer, some wine and over our heads, the sign. When Eucharist was done the man got up and not waiting for any closing hymns or prayers, walked out of the sanctuary, presumably through the front doors to light up his cigarette. Maureen, the presiding priest, thanked me for coming and I walked out, my way marked for me by a small wooden table covered with flowers in bloom.

Today the only things blooming are indoor daffodils on a counter beside a cash register. And the only thing holding them up is hairspray. They will have to do.

A kind of Easter poem

Add comment March 23rd, 2008

The following poem was written in response to a friend's far more clever poem. (See Holy Hangover comments.) In the likely event that my poem fails, an upcoming article will hopefully give it some crutches. 

Osiris, Isis, Horus
shrouded in sacred awe
and swollen footed Oedipus
bearing our hidden flaw

You god's of death and life
phantasmic transformation
upon the canvass of strife
once goats, now exaltation

Yet flung among antiquity
is Jesus' low-brow myth
while crude and poor symbolically
are victims revealed herewith

O Adonis, child eternal
shield us from place and time
since before myth was ritual
but first came our crime

Good Friday and Racism

Add comment March 21st, 2008

The conjunction of Good Friday and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is appropriate. Racism, like discrimination of all kinds, is a symptom of the soul-sickness that was finally and forever uncovered by Good Friday. This “original sin,” our primal brokenness, has to do with our distorted desire (Girard) and our deeply sensed existential lack (Kierkegaard). A lack we attempt to slake through acquisition and self-elevation (twisted desire). That’s the abstract.

Here’s the personal: Good Friday is not about a vicarious substitution that saves me from a wrathful God. (The only wrath going on in the Easter story is ours.) It’s about a shot to the heart that cracks open my habit of trying to fill my “lack of peace,” my lack of self, by stepping on someone else. And concordantly, it’s about my willingness to be co-opted by any movement, club, church, campaign, crowd, that defines itself on the basis of being not like some other group, and so lifts me, by virtue of my belonging to it, to a status above the fray and field. A status that I cling to through violence, if necessary. Violence of any form that I’ll always have a way of justifying, “redeeming.”

This day, designated by the UN to focus on the problem of racism, I just discovered, marks a horrendous event that took place on March 21, 1960 in Sharpeville, South Africa, where 69 peaceful demonstrators were killed during a protest against apartheid.

Here was a case where societal disintegration–the fomentation inherent in apartheid–was resolved through the identification and killing of a chosen victim, (the group of peaceful protesters). Beyond instilling fear through a show of force it was hoped that the killing would reinforce and re-form the social unanimity and cohesion of the National Party and the white populace. In fact it was the beginning of the end of apartheid.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, the reason this kind of scapegoating no longer works is because of the Easter event. The redemptive violence on Good Friday is of the same order as that of racism. But because of Easter the justifications for racism and discrimination of any form fail. The “victim” is now visible.

And if the victim can no longer be hidden through justification we are without excuse if we refuse to do nothing. And so Good Friday also exposes our refusal to grow, or our acquiescence to immaturity within the shelter of a non-growing group–the same group that also shields us from the knowledge of our immaturity.

Good Friday invites us to grow. The Easter event asks us discard our notion that creation is a completed event in the distant past and instead see creation as an ongoing event in the present where we are continually being called into a great forgiving and creative love.

Holy Hangovers

3 comments March 19th, 2008

It’s holy week. Here are some of the holy hangovers many of us used to live with:

That God is not concerned with our happiness…only desires our holiness. But how is a desire for joy and happiness opposed to holiness? Maybe…God wants our happiness more than our holiness. Somehow I’d sooner want my kids to be happy than holy. Maybe happiness is holiness. Maybe the dichotomy is false.

That holiness has a certain face.  But I know some ordinary and some rather ribald people who have an inner light I’d call holy. I’ve met them and they are all generous. Some live on the street, some work in office towers. Some publish heavy equipment magazines. Many of them are mothers. Yes, some preach but you couldn’t call it that.

That holiness is being set apart for God’s purpose. Or as one Christian apologist has said, “Holiness is itself a drawing of a boundary around that which is uniquely associated with God.”  Oh, now here’s a dangerous one! A kind of hyper-sacred-profane-dualism with the inference that God’s purposes are obvious. The unholy thing here is the idea that some created things are holy, uniquely having to do with God, and the rest is refuse…outside of God’s sphere. How many people-divisions has this spawned?

It’s holy eon, please enjoy everything, but pick up after yourself. 

Palm Sunday at All Saints

Add comment March 17th, 2008

We gathered in the anteroom and were given palm fronds to hold. After a prayer of blessing we formed a line and entered the sanctuary, palm leaves in hand. Once around the sanctuary while singing “Ride on, Ride on in Majesty,” and then to our seats.

In the mean time Jesus had found a place at the front. Judas was in the back and Peter off to one side. Caiaphas and a few chief priests and elders were above us, up in the balcony. And Pilot was up there as well, standing off on his own.

Thus began the narration with the readers adopting their roles…and as well, a part for us, the crowd. We made our way through Matthew’s description of Judas’s sellout to Caiaphas, Jesus’ anguish in the garden, the betrayal of Peter, and the desertion of the disciples.

As a crowd, we found our voices during the trial. In response to Pilate’s question about who to release we said, “Barabbas.” And in reply to Pilate’s, “Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” We all said, “Let him be crucified!”

Of course there was no resemblance to the dusty, sweaty, bloody, event. No one was dressed for the part. And while we tried, “the crowd” was lacking conviction…and yet, in that cavernous sanctuary there was this second, one meteoric moment where I was placed in the swirling fomenting mood of the bloodthirsty crowd, calling, with everybody else, “Crucify him!”

Liturgy, this liturgy, was an iconic entrance into an event where symbol confronted me with the actual.

Hopeful News stories

Add comment March 15th, 2008

Two stories from the Reuters news service, reprinted in today’s Edmonton Journal, should bring a measure of hope to our tattered world. (These are Grow Mercy news stories.)

The first story is about Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade. His county is hosting the world’s biggest Islamic conference, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). And in Abdoulaye Wade’s address to the Islamic organization he said believed the past antagonism between Islam and Christianity should be consigned to history, and not be allowed to trigger a clash of civilizations.  “The era of crusades and jihads is over and Muslims and Christians should strive to coexist and not allow extremists to drag the world into a war of religions.” Senegal practises a tolerant brand of Islam and Wade publicly opposes those who wage war in the name of Islam. It’s moderate leaders like Abdoulaye Wade that desperately need to be heard, and it’s a news story like this that needs airing on networks like CNN.

The second story is about “atheist China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs issuing a licence to the Taiwan Buddhist charity group Tzu Chi.The Buddhist group has been quietly conducting charity work in China for almost two decades. This is the stuff of history because Tzu Chi is the first foundation in China in which a non-mainland resident serves as the legal representative.

Of further interest to me is that the main reason China’s “atheist Communist rulers” have made the “landmark concession,” is so they can “use Buddhism to help curb rising social unrest and help fill an ideological vacuum which has spawned corruption and eroded ethics in the post-Mao era.”

Is this a recognition that atheism, without something like a humanist manifesto, without something that points beyond itself, without something like a transcendent view–something which according to Richard Dawkin’s et al, is not atheism–is in the end impoverished and socially debilitating? Or is this just China’s experience of imposed atheism?

But the real story remains the work of the Tzu Chi Foundation. For those of us who used to think Buddhist philosophy always mitigated against any real efforts of social compassion and practical relief, the Tzu Chi foundation should put us straight.

(Above: Tzu Chi relief team caring for maimed Palestinian refugee children.)

A Girardian Cartoon

Add comment March 13th, 2008

Oh, delightful, a cartoon for me and Rene. Check it out here. Thanks Len.

Caught in the 1971 Saskatoon Revival

3 comments March 12th, 2008

In 1971 there was a Christian revival in Saskatchewan. I was caught in it, swept up in it like a broken straw in a prairie gust. My uncle, his two sons and I drove the 200 miles to Saskatoon to hear the “Sutera twins,” Ralph and Lou. My uncle had heard there was something going on at the crusade in Saskatoon and in a move to “save” his sons–one, a responsible son who I thought didn’t need saving, and a wild one, the one I hung out with, who probably did.

In Saskatoon the wild one and I slipped out of the auditorium after the first hymn. This was the big city. We wandered the nearby streets and checked out the neon lights and tall buildings. We became curious about the diagonal crosswalks the city had at the time and we crossed back and forth, controlling the traffic on all four sides.

I was hoping that the revival meeting would be wrapping up when we returned, but the place was just getting electric, the twins were on the rheostat turning up the voltage. Or, as either Ralph or Lou said, “The Holy Spirit’s finger was pointing at people.” We made our way back, close to where we’d been. Soon one of the preacher twins, came to the precipice of his soul searing message: “Choose now or it may be too late.” Then came the “call.” Then the full-on piano and the rising tide of “Just as I am…without one plea…” Then the streaming eyes and the tributaries of people in pews moving to the aisles and forming rivers of penitent souls flowing to the front for prayer. My uncle and cousins were swept up in the current with me hanging on to some exposed root. I scrambled up the bank and out of the heavy doors into the street. I waited and paced under a gas light. Shivering some.

In a few minutes my cousin, the wild one, now wilder, came to get me, said I needed to come back inside. He was not so much pleading but pulling me back through the high doors down a carpeted hall into a room torrid and moist by sweat and tears. No resolve left, I was on my knees from the weight of hands on my head and shoulders, upon which came a crescendo of intoned supplication. And with that I was up with an inexplicable smile, invaded by a brightness and a lightness. I was in fact quite high and vertiginous. Full, I supposed, of the Holy Ghost.

On the giddy ride back, we cousins planned the conversion of the rest of the “gang.” Which didn’t quite work out.