Archive for June, 2008
June 30th, 2008
The picture is not too clear, the wings of the moth were vibrating when I took the shot. It was still early in the day when I came across her so I suspect she may have been warming herself. But in the brief moment her wings were still I was amazed by the evolutionary intelligence I was witnessing.
It’s difficult to see in the picture but this blue-eye wing-patterned moth keeps its predators away by looking for all the world like a predator itself. The visual effect, with both wings splayed, is that of the face of a cat. A good thing when your predators are mostly birds.
It’s a deception that works. Any bird on the hunt will take one look and glide on. The eye-spots on the wings are a kind of power equalizer.
In this context I’ve sometimes wondered if deception can be a form of truth. I recall a story a friend told me about a grade-school teacher who in front of the entire class asked a student if his father was abusing him. To the teacher, it was obvious that something of the sort was happening, but the student said no. The ignorance of the teacher notwithstanding, the student, in a very real sense told the truth. In that public context, in front of peers, friends and everyone else…how else could the young boy have answered? To say no was as natural and right as having eye-spots on his wings. Context is still often everything.
I grew up in a Christian tradition that told us that all deception, all lying, was wrong. I recall the seriousness of a childhood debate in which we posed the question that if the Gestapo/Nazis etc. came to your door, would you lie or not, to keep your family safe. We were taught to be less wise than moths.
We can learn from the moth. Where there exists a power structure injurious to the life and well-being of a weaker person, a lie can be truer than the truth.
June 26th, 2008
This morning walking in the overcast, the winds light as a caress, the scent of moss and dew somehow eclipsing pavement dust…I feel the pull of flow…and walking, I give into it. And in that flow, I see how obstructed and jarring a day can be.
St. Benedict was on to and into the pull of flow. He found a way to let the day find itself…and so discovered within it, ways to cycle the mind, body, and spirit, giving each its proper due. He found a way to swerve around time jams and walk past its warps and blocks and weave the day into a week and a month and a life. And, I suspect, he had a full schedule, but was never busy.
No one stops the movement of a day. Not Stephen Covey. Not even Joshua. The time capturing mechanisms are all illusory. What we have and what we’re built for is movement and motion, and if we’re not true to that–time is our enemy. So give in to the pull of flow. Look to the river. Or as Bruce Cockburn puts it, “To the motion be true.”
Outside this broad window, a young Trinidadian woman has no idea how perfect her pace keeps rhythm with the song I hear.
June 24th, 2008
George Carlin died yesterday. Sad news. My fondness for him began the first time I saw him on Ed Sullivan. I don’t remember his material for that show but I do remember the time he did the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman. “Forecast for this evening…increasing darkness tonight with light patches toward morning…” it was far and away my favourite Carlin character.
Still, not wanting to speak ill of the dead–although of course Carlin had no problem speaking ill-of, living or dead–but when George Carlin traded in comedy for caustic commentary, even though few could cut better, I dropped out.
His biting satire of all things may have gained him a new audience, but for me, he became just too much of a projectile. He showed no mercy. Well, admittedly, that’s his right, and as he saw it, his job as a comedian. As David Hinkley’s obit in the NY Daily relayed, “he always said his often-cynical satire simply reflected his real-life disdain for mankind’s greed, stupidity and inconsideration.”
But the comedy became wincing. For example, to wring a laugh out of the beheading of an Oklahoma corporate executive was satire that defeated itself. It was a sideways attack on greed perhaps, but Carlin was wilfully blind, or just blind, to his own special kind of inconsideration. 
With age, he became unfunny. Caustic satire, yes, fair game in context, but a steady stream without so much as an inward glance not only loses appeal, it gets boring. Carlin seemed to just have one track. When things got boring he just upped the outrageous-ante. I guess I still appreciate a self-deprecating comic. One who draws me in by pointing out her own mania and then with a few great lines implicates the lot of us. I think Carlin used to do this. But over the last number of years he just sounded angry and miserable.
The tributes are coming in, he’s being lauded for telling us the “harsh truth,” and I guess he did that. Although harsh truth about humanity is hardly revelatory. I suppose it’s my problem, but I never got the sense that he interrogated himself anywhere as close as he did his targets, and admittedly, not all of his targets were straw-men…he wasn’t a fool. It’s just that I’m left wondering how his comedy and voice may have evolved had he developed, along with his annihilating ability at piercing pretensions, an accompanying self-questioning stance.
Seems to me that’s the kind of broad quizzical standpoint Al Sleet, the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman would have taken. He had the insight to see an encompassing view. As he said in his final and definitive broadcast, “The weather will continue to change on and off for a long, long time.”
June 23rd, 2008
The existential lack you wake up with is real enough. The thing you fill it with is not. The thing, whether object or being has no substance. You look and see and desire and look to another to know what it is you should desire and it is all helium. Up it goes, no hanging on or retrieval. But you tell yourself the romantic lie that in fact you did hang on and that it is now what is filling you and giving you your bit of buoyancy. And without knowing what you’re doing you add to the lie by convincing yourself that if only you could acquire a bit more of whatever that was, you would finally satisfy that deficiency and come into yourself discovering your trueness. And without knowing you’re doing it you cast about to see who it is that is leading the fulfilled life and seize upon your neighbour three doors down. Your neighbour two doors down you know well enough to conclude he has his own problems. In fact one time you caught him giving you the envy-eye so you know his environ is a dead end. But she, of the next-door-to-the-two-doors-down looks altogether put together. She had seemed average enough but you caught something else, something more the day you passed her on the sidewalk outside your office. What was it you wonder? You catch yourself looking for an answer but not really looking and not conscious that you’re looking yet one morning at 3:30 AM you wake up and wonder what kind of salad she eats. What’s her breakfast? She might as well have her own line of clothes, fragrance, hair products, so well is she pieced and plaited! Where did she find her poise you wonder? What’s her regime? Her program? Her magazines? Yes, obviously, she lacks the lack you wake up with. Can’t be. Can it? It is! Has her own line of clothes? Silly! Go back to sleep! You press all this down far under the threshold of awareness from where it came and you get on with your day. Except without knowing it you allow the play of the romantic lie and you make little raids on the inarticulate something that tells you of her preeminence. And now you move beyond her surface to the substance of things and consider her friends, her intimacies–yes, of course hers are the right friends and intimacies and soulish powers and here lies her secret. But just how did she acquire them? No, that’s the wrong question…she has them…how do you get them? Now we’re getting someplace. And then the conclusion comes naturally enough, almost divine in its revelatory shimmer with you self-possessed and in control of your innocent desires not trying to evince a solution in any way, and now you know that in order to be yourself it’s her being you must possess. And so in every way you must kill her off. Your existential completeness is just that close. Three doors down. This is your awakening that you remain unaware of.
June 20th, 2008
Now on magazine stands near you…GEEZ…30 sermons you’d never hear in church.
Whether playful, mischievous, or serious, there’s a foyer full of artful, imaginative, and compelling sermons here; and as promised, nary a one will you hear in church. (Also between these covers…my own “detoxification sermon.”)
An excerpt: Genuine worship is a detoxification process. It’s about releasing our fascination with who’s in and who’s out. It’s about letting go of our obsessive competitiveness that reduces us to shadows of each other. It’s about escaping the grip of this acquisitive fascination with one another in order to truly encounter and be open to one another.
While I’m always gratified to be published and thankful for being given a voice, I have to immediately add that this “sermon” owes its life to the thought of James Alison. (See below for the full detox.)
The Detoxification Sermon (GEEZ Summer 2008)
“Worship is the high and holy art of spiritual architecture…” -Dr. Leonard Sweet,
Now I’m sure, asked again about worship, Dr. Sweet would expand and qualify. My point with this quote is simply to point out that in practice contemporary Christian worship is understood to be about producing an atmosphere of high anticipation, a sweep of holy enthusiasm, a spirit of godly unity. And here, while it is theologically acknowledged that the One worshiped is already and always present, what is rehearsed is producing a mood that encourages God to show up. Worship, it appears, needs orchestration, needs an architect.
We are scarcely aware of how, and how often, we are caught up in the “architecture of worship.” From the carefully crafted emotional pitches for products that ensure us a correct lifestyle, to the religiously charged political rally, we engage in worship. It’s a high and unholy industry. And we are all susceptible to being duped by this ersatz worship and its blanketing effect of mimetic fascination. And under this blanket we are scarcely aware of how worship can become a form of exclusion and a prelude to violence.
I remember the irresistible pull of belonging to the right group of Christians. I remember how much I thought I needed this. And with distance I can now remember moving with a certain self-righteous priggishness that knows itself to be on the inside—countenanced of course by a veneer of humility. It happens.
That’s why distinguishing genuine worship from worship makes all the difference in the world. There is nothing inherently wrong with contemporary styles of Christian worship. Nothing wrong with emotional and spirited celebration of God. But when there exists, or when there is encouraged a sense of moral distinction within the worshiping group, “spirited” worship can produce a lie. It can produce an abstraction, a reduction of particularities, a spirit of sameness as opposed to real unity, an enclave instead of an unfolding congregation.
When Christian worship subtlety links itself to patriotism, or leans into pietism and moralism, worshipers can soon identify themselves not simply as believers, but as “true believers.” And the category “true believers” is only sustainable as being over and against what isn’t “true.” That is, over Muslims, Jews, gays and lesbians, atheists, communists, Catholics, Protestants, and so on. And as Christian history shows, this is tinder for rivalry and violence. Of course worship, as in group-defining architecture, works for any assembly and in any direction.
But in real Christian worship no high or holy architecture is needed. There is nothing to produce. Everything has been concluded. Worshiping Christians are nothing more than witnesses to something done and transpired. Witnesses to the “forgiving victim.” The victim who has absorbed our exclusion and victimizing violence and in return, forgives. And in this forgiveness our ever again needing to secure ourselves by being part of an “us against them” is undone.
Genuine Worship is a detoxification process. It’s about releasing our fascination with who’s in and who’s out. It’s about letting go of our obsessive competitiveness that reduces us to shadows of each other. It’s about escaping the grip of this acquisitive fascination with one another in order to truly encounter and be open to one another.
True Worship, as theologian James Alison contends, “…leads to a slow, patient discovery of being able to like people in their bizarre particularities, and see the beauty in those things, not abstract from them.” The test of true worship then is finding yourself beginning to receive others specifically within their peccadillo’s and annoyances and not as “loving the brotherhood,” as abstracted beyond persons with personalities through a grand unifying purpose, Christian or otherwise.
What this means is that real Christian worship is relaxing, and in some sense entirely unremarkable. It is ascetical. It is the long discipline of removing whatever distracts us from inhabiting the hidden, unassuming presence of Jesus who is “simply here.” It is about becoming unexcited, un-aroused, un-fascinated, so as to grow attentive to what and who is around us. And in this restful attentiveness flourishes true hospitality and peace. And this is always contemporary.
Here’s a little litmus test: If you’ve been attending worship for years and still find yourself duking it out at church business meetings, still find yourself wishing not altogether pleasant things upon the irascible Mrs. Smith, then stop “going to worship” already, and begin worshiping.
Stephen T. Berg
June 19th, 2008
This morning I read…
If the LORD had not been my help,
my soul would soon have lived in the land of silence.
When I thought, “My foot is slipping,”
your steadfast love, O LORD, held me up.
When the cares of my heart are many,
your consolations cheer my soul. (Ps 94)
But LORD how does this work for Brian? How can you remove the slick black emotional tumour stuck fast within his ribcage?
Will you run these words about steadfast-love through a fine glass tube and inject them straight into that heavy mass? And will they kill the all those cagey cells and melt the growth?
He’s lived with that swelling for so long and the street has stitched it so tight to his organs so that it’s hard to know where his heart leaves off and the malignancy begins.
And yet, when I talk to him he sees a kind of hope in the day, and we agree that in every physical and natural way, it’s a beautiful morning. And it’s almost as though I need this hope of his for himself more than he does.
I sometimes fear that if Brian losses all hope I’ll lose my faith. Almost as if he’s my anchor to sanity today?
Your words…can they break curses and hold us all up? We need you Lord…need your your present moment, your eternity–need your ground, your earthness, your hereness–need to look back to you and forward to you. But you’re so silent.
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Psalm 94
June 17th, 2008
…I seem to be following a thread from yesterday’s post.
Years ago I came across a quote, which I can no longer locate, that said something to the effect that we need to ask for forgiveness from those we care for.
On this, initial confusion has given way to some clarity: When I started work as manager of a homeless shelter, the work was, in my mind, something far more noble than the industry I was leaving. I relished comments like, “Oh, the work you do is so difficult…but it must be rewarding.” And I didn’t resist the implication that other work, by virtue of its secularity or its attention to widgets, was socially (and spiritually) inferior.
Thankfully, over time, a number of small rancorous events served to reflect my attitude back to me. What I see now, a thing of distress to me and an irony that escaped me entirely, was that this rarefied attitude automatically undermined my compassion for the people I tried to serve. If inwardly, I saw “my work” as elevated above the kind of gainful employment I encouraged “street people” to seek, of what use was that? Worse, if I fell (which I did) for the accompanying inside message that told me that my identity is all about my work? well, now it’s not just what I do that’s more important, it’s that I’m more important. And what does all this project into the ether?
Of course it’s easy enough for those on the so-called receiving side to detect the smell of this attitude–an attitude which is really a subjugating spirit that extends a hand only through condescension.
But anyone in a position of helping another person is in a position of power. And so any sort of giving outside of some humility is mere self-congratulating care. The help may be received but not welcomed. Received, but resented. Think of America’s bewilderment at not being liked even after dropping bags of rice on drought-gutted African countries. A sense of social and spiritual superiority is a creeping vine. It takes time and perhaps outright in-the-face hostility, and then a willingness for reflection, to cut it off at the base.
Care that is condescending, that draws attention to itself and so unduly points out need in others just sets up and reinforces socio-spiritual class systems. No, the only way through this is acquiring, through contemplation and practice and much rehearsal and many refresher courses, a transformational understanding that knows, in the thick of human encounter, that we are all one.
June 16th, 2008
On a highway outside of Edmonton is a large sign that says, “Farmers feed cities.” It’s a reminder worth more than a billboard because we do forget this fact, or we take it for granted, which is a form of forgetting. What’s more is that in a world ruled by financial and corporate institutions, a farmer, even a farmer who farms on a corporate level, is still at the lower end of the mercantile caste. That is, upon the grand estate of commercial enterprise, farmers live in the servant quarters. But this old work hierarchy holds true in social and religious spheres as well.
It’s almost a tedious thing to be reminded about the real intrinsic worth of all honest work…because even while we give it a nod, too few of us believe it at depth. But what if we did believe it, absorb it? Wouldn’t it have a modifying and humanizing effect upon our social structures? Wouldn’t it soften the hard edges of our competitive proclivities?
I’m not saying that all work is alike, or should be rewarded in the same fashion. And I suppose, on some level, especially today, not all work is essential. But what is true is that any work that adds something to the flower-bed of humanity–that place of curiosity and surprise, where not everything that looks useful is, and where many of the things that seem useless are not–is ultimately indispensable and valuable and worthy of respect. It’s this important bit of gleaning that I didn’t truly get.
In my case it’s taken me a long time to realize that working in a grain elevator–something that I did for 12 years before my near score of years at a mission–was truly of worth. Not that I saw it as demeaning, it was just, I thought, a low rung on the vocational ladder. But beyond this, I had ingested the churchly-message that buying grain was something less spiritual therefore less valuable.
June 13th, 2008
As a follow-up to the Federal apology to aboriginals, here’s a link to an article in the Surrey Leader that you’ll find insightful, realistic, and hopeful. The article contains an interview with Ernie Crey, author and Sto:lo activist. (…also my sister-in-law’s brother.)
But it was economic policies “designed to keep aboriginal people in poverty” that hit hardest and deepest, Crey says, virtually imprisoning aboriginal people on reserves in living conditions most non-aboriginal Canadians would never accept.
June 11th, 2008
Dear Prime Minister Harper, In light of the apology you will offer our First Nations people today, I thought it might be fitting for you to say these words:
Thank you to Wendy Morton, for sending me this picture/poem, and for permission to post it. (click on the picture to open)
This is one of 20 evocative poems that Wendy wrote, now on exhibit at the Alberni Valley Museum in B.C. She was given journals and archival photos to help her write the poems, many, like this one, where put onto the archival photos.
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The picture is not too clear, the wings of the moth were vibrating when I took the shot. It was still early in the day when I came across her so I suspect she may have been warming herself. But in the brief moment her wings were still I was amazed by the evolutionary intelligence I was witnessing.
Front Porch Pictures
