Archive for April, 2008
April 27th, 2008
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.
April 22nd, 2008
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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April 21st, 2008
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.”
April 17th, 2008
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.
April 14th, 2008
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.
April 12th, 2008
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.
April 9th, 2008
In Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and Glory, the priest, known only as the “whiskey priest,” does not find his salvation…at least not in any way that would be recognized by his church. He is, as he himself says, a bad priest, given to drink, slipshod at his clerical tasks, and somewhere along the way he fathered a child.
There had been a time he was considered a good priest. A time when he believed it himself. And if not quite believing it, believing he could aspire to such as long as stayed within the structures of the church with his piety out front and hardened around him. 
But it’s when he’s on the out, living within the givenness of his “sin,” that God meets him. And it’s in a soiled and stinking and overcrowded prison cell, where he finds beauty and his own humanity. Here in the company of his own, the weakest kind of flesh, his heart swells with the compassion of Christ. Swells even for the immensely pious woman who counts herself far above the fornicators, thieves, drunkards and beggars that share the cell.
This, then, was the “whiskey priest’s” revelation: “When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity…that was a quality God’s image carried with it…when you saw the lines at the corner of the eyes, the shape of the mouth and how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”
- The prison scene is not only one of the great pieces of English literature, it is a scene of profound theological depth.
- Greene published this book in 1940. In 1954 a ban was placed upon the book by the Vatican.
April 6th, 2008
Friday evening was a Cuban reunion of sorts. We four couples (and some friends) who had shared company in Cuba, gathered at the Blue Chair cafe to hear the great Bomba. Three of the six-piece band are from Cuba. 
Our friend Philip, who has no social hesitations, soon discovered the details of the Cuban musicians, and would have, if it were possible, invited them back to his place for an extended concert. This is something he successfully accomplished with another band during our stay in Veradero. I listened in as Luis, the leader, explained to Phil how his association with an artists community allowed him leave of Cuba as well as an ability to make return visits. This however, wasn’t the case with the drummer from Matanzas. Such are the mysteries of Cuban emigration.
I was again reminded of our visit to Cardenas. On that late February day we rode a short ten miles from Veradero to Cardenas to met Oscar, a friend our companions John and Odette had met on a previous visit to Cuba. Our taxi, after its race with a 58ish Pontiac–a race that gave us several life-flashing-in-front-of-our-eyes moments–drove into what John called, “the real Cuba.”
The “real” Cuba is an eviscerated thing. Like the two-days-dead chicken we came across on a sidewalk at the edge of the city, it’s splayed body open to reading. But Cuba is harder to read than chicken entrails.
The checkered entrepreneurial glory of the 20’s–50’s was long gone. But so too were the dreams of a struggle that was to sweep away a corrupt dictatorship and leave a collective, in want of nothing, in its wake.
Today Cuba is one animal with two backs. The increasingly prosperous Cuba, paid for by tours of whites; and the decaying Cuba, haunted by principals of a revolution that looks out from billboards and sides of buildings through the eyes of the two (once) revered revolutionaries. But 
those eyes are now full of smoke, the revolutionary symbols, the beret and star, cigar in teeth, the bearded profile, the fatigues, rendered hollow, bereft by the gutted sugar cane factory, the eternally postponed train, and the kneeling and prostrate habitations.
We walked this prone, prostrate Cuba for an afternoon. Narrow streets, fissured and pock marked, cracked open domiciles slumping on burdened sidewalks. Cinder block and and concrete squares. Blistered paint on the ironwork that covers window holes. And occasional architectural intrigue, as with the stone cathedral–closed to comers.
And other sightings and impressions: Clusters of young people sitting on sidewalks, backs to the walls. Old men, selling guava, shouting in the street, lost faith in ideology, a child playing with a 30 foot length of video tape. Two young men playing dominoes on a make-shift table held on their laps. And everywhere, underfed horses pulling carts for passengers–calling them coaches would be an overstatement. And ubiquitous bicycles exceeding load limits–one man balancing a washing machine on what had to be a fortified rear fender.
Later in the afternoon, Oscar, our new friend and guide, hailed us a buggy and off we went to his house. We clacked along curling pavement, and across 
cracked stone intersections. We rode the wrong way on streets designated as one-way, but the traffic rules are suspended, all except the main streets.
Upon arriving we met Oscar’s mother, a compact woman who smiled incessantly. We were invited to sit down in the front room and were offered coffee and rum. We talked of family. The neighbour was introduced as Oscar’s second mom. She also smiled constantly. We asked her, through Oscar, about her family. We were told of children, uncles and aunts. The neighbour very much hoped we would come to see her home as well.
Shortly an uncle of Oscar’s arrived. He manoeuvred his bicycle into the small portico and sat down on the edge of a couch. He was wearing a forties suit coat, faded blue baseball cap–permanently fixed–rolled up white slacks and sneakers with toe-holes worn through the canvass. He was 87. We asked about his occupation. He was mechanic and had worked on diesel trains. John asked about his life before the revolution and he pinched his lips and shook his head, as if keeping a lock on stories that could cost things untold. Stories now lost through a controlling, ubiquitous, inexplicable fear.
We talked of lighter things… Oscar had helped build his family’s house. A two-
story concrete square, comfortable, and by Cardenas’ standards, of a higher stratum. From the front room we toured the kitchen and bathroom and an upstairs with its three small partitions forming bedrooms. A small patio at the rear of the house had a large concrete sink and an enclosure with a pig. We returned from the brief tour and shooed away flies attracted to the sweet rum.
Oscar had retrieved a cd-player and put on some Latino music. John, and his wife Odette–who never misses a chance to dance–mamboed round the front room. We talked more and smiled at each other, and as guests, aware of a simple charm presiding over our time.
Our friends had brought Oscar gifts. Newspapers, reading material (Oscar loves to study language, and if there is a key to advancement and even emigration, it’s through language.) Also t-shirts, a new pair of Dockers and a CD-Walkman. Every item was passed around. It was Christmas, a birthday…more rum was offered, cigarettes were lit.
The father came through and shook hands, silent but smiling, retrieving a smoke and then leaving, to walk or wander. Oscar’s eight year old nephew arrived back from school. Neat and clean in his uniform. Without hesitation or instruction, he offered me his hand. Demure and smiling he moved on, bending forward and in turn kissing Deb and Odette on their cheeks and shaking John’s hand before skipping upstairs to change.
What will become of the light in the nephew eyes? What of Oscar? Of Cardenas? Earlier, while walking the streets by the crumbling factories along the shore, Oscar repeatedly dreamt-out-loud about his hope of leaving Cuba. A grey government migration building, imposing and vacant except for one car in the drive, spoke a death-knell to his hope. But still, despite this desperate longing came the Cuban laugh in all its expansive capacity.
There lives here a gracious horizon of life, perhaps ennobled by threads of hope, woven together. There is an obvious decrepitude on all the surfaces. Yet, from within, the colours of survival, of life and love and breath, shine through at places. All the colours of a vibrant spirit, of life not yet utterly defeated.
April 3rd, 2008
Soren Kierkegaard is hands down my favourite philosopher, not that I know that many philosophers. I’m a picker and chooser–a collector that doesn’t always understand what he collects, but is compelled to collect just the same–as I think I’ve mentioned someplace before. The reason I choose Soren is because he too is skinny and likes walking.
Witness: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” SK
Kierkegaard perambulated himself into some truly insightful ideas. Yesterday, I stumbled upon one of his thoughts that explained why atheism doesn’t stand a chance in hell of becoming pervasively accepted. At least until someone even more brilliant than Stephen Hawkings forever takes the meta out metaphysics, and is able to communicate it to the unwashed lot of us.
Here’s Kierkegaard (anticipating Rene Girard’s mimetic desire theory): Please forgive Soren’s gender biased language–it was 1850.
For from “the others,” naturally, one properly only learns to know what the others are–it is in this way the world would beguile a man from being himself. “The others,” in turn do not know at all what they themselves are, but only what the others are. There is only One who knows what He Himself is, that is God; and He knows also what every man in himself is, for it is precisely by being before God that every man is. The man who is not before God is not himself, for this a man can be only by being before Him who is in and for Himself. If one is oneself by being in Him who is in and for Himself, one can be in others or before others, but one cannot by being merely before others be oneself. (Christian Discourses)
The double bind of being human is that we seek to become ourselves by consciously and subconsciously imitating each other. But without a model beyond our collective selves we never find a self. And so, as Charles Bellinger (whose essay comparing Girard and Kierkegaard I’m completely indebted to here) points out, the only context in which we gain coherence, stability, and purpose is found in the transcendent relationship between us and God our Creator.
So wouldn’t it be the case that even if there were no God, our existential lack, that small niggling, sometimes overwhelming sense of incompleteness, would never allow us to be content with a closed, nobody-here-but-us-chickens universe?
April 1st, 2008
In the first whisper of morning light I watched a 20 foot cedar move its slow movement outside the sitting room window at St Peter’s Abbey. A picture of a child running through tall grass by the edge of town moved in my mind. Later in the day I would walk the silent monastery halls, arm in arm with Father James, his 82 year old frame a little more bent, his step slightly slower, and he would say with that smiling voice, that he’s had enough birthdays. For most of his live he’s been a monk in community, and a hermit–so he knows how to let go.
But how do I let him go? How do I let anything go? Or, is this the monastic journey?
The evening before, over tea and raisin cookies, we talked, as we always did, about God, mindfulness, failings, innocence, history, loss, promise, personality, church… I’m not a great conversationalist, but in the presence of Fr. James I always feel elevated and connected through the simple give and take of words.
We talked about poetry too. On the drive to St. Peter’s Deb and I had stopped in Saskatoon. We took an unplanned detour and came across a used book store. I bought a book of Rilke poems. I didn’t know about the Duino Elegies–Rilke’s last work. I showed Father James my book, he laughed and said he was reading the same book.
How do you sustain the picture? The picture of the innocent child running through tall grass and feeling as though she was entirely in God and God was entirely in her? How do you sustain a shot of heart-gladness that makes you feel as though death is behind you? That makes you feel a depth of forgiveness that precludes any sense you needed forgiving. Is this too the (monastic) journey? The letting go of the picture so that it can return again…the perpetual letting go, so as perhaps to enable it’s infinite return?
The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
