Years ago an unimportant and diffident man was giving a tour of a homeless shelter—of which he was manager. Requests for tours were not overly frequent and they could be pleasant, and the guests were often interesting—which always made the man question his own credibility and worth. Still, his tendency toward introversion and his perpetual hope for a day on his own terms often caused him to feel ambivalent about the tours.

On this particular occasion, as he was walking down the hall leading his guests through the shelter’s medical dorms, explaining, as he always did, the dimensions of the work, the problems of poverty and mental illness and addictions and abuse associated with those living in the dorms, Mr. Fond came shuffling down the hall. As usual his pants were gathered at the front, held up by and one clutching arthritic fist, and his shoes were loose with laces dragging. For a moment Mr. Fond’s eyes searched the tour guide’s eyes—who knew what was wanted. But time taken to lace up his shoes would be a waste; he would soon have them untied, sloppy-loose and would return to shuffling. And so the tour-leader, who was conscious of appearance and wary of spectacle, and able to define the nuances between the two, resolved to smile, greet Mr. Fond, and politely yet efficiently continue his tour without interruption.

But as these two minor bodies closed distance, our man of moral lassitude was nevertheless unable to pass by. And so he stopped. And as he knelt before Mr. Fond, catching the miasma of blotched and liniment-chafed flesh; and as he raised the crusted cuffs of the pants, taking the flat-frayed and soiled laces in his hands, crossing and looping the ends into a double knot; and while feeling the sting of embarrassment from what he thought must be the indulgent glances of the dignitaries standing off to the side, he felt within his solar-plexus a small warm growing thing. It was like a malleable ball of desire deep in the centre of his nervous system that continually changed shape from Mr. Fond, to himself, to the well-appointed noblesse, and back again.

Now he liked this himself-but-not-exactly-himself feeling, and being the selfish sort he wondered how to keep it, own it perhaps—this “it” that now, sitting back at his desk and staring into the glass-brick window, still felt sweet and pleasant, like mulled wine pooling at the pit of his stomach.

And as he stared, seeing dimly through the clouded glass, thinking he saw that bright yellow ball of desire—within or without he didn’t know—his teetering mind fell to reflect upon the occurrences carried out daily by heart-filled workers and volunteers at shelters and hospices and homes and streets around the world—habits of millions of ordinary humans. And he opened to the thought that this “it” was the natural, renewable, waiting-to-be-discovered desire at the centre of every-body and so could hardly be something kept, held or owned, but was always moving, shifting and weaving. Always and everywhere stopping and stooping and kneeling in the name of Jesus, in the name of Allah, in the name of Nothingness, in the name of human kindness, in the name of the Creator, in the name of Kookoomis Manitou Muskwa, in the name of the one Spirit, which is of one genus, which is love.

I am in front of an exhibit. Behind glass upon a circular stand is what looks to be scraps of cracked wax. Below I read about the mother who saved the melted skin of her nine year old son, the skin to show the father, a soldier, who is away still fighting, not knowing everything is lost. The mother, shielded from the original blast will soon die of "A-bomb disease."

I see a photograph, a boy standing, arms held out as if feeling his way, sheets of skin hanging off muscle like Spanish moss.

I read of a woman on a street car who watches people on the street. She sees small fires start at the tips of fingers, then she sees the fires spread and cover bodies.

I read about a girl who was making 1000 paper cranes which will grant her wish to live. She dies of leukemia ten years after the bomb. She made 644 paper cranes.

There are 140,000 other stories.

How do you place Hiroshima within Easter? Easter within Hiroshima? With what perspective do you frame 140,000 crucifixions? Is it not reasonable here to see Easter as a joke?

On behalf of the Allies, President Truman thanked God that this "awful (atomic) power has come to us and not to the enemy." Hiroshima was still burning, Nagasaki to come, when he prayed that God, "may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purpose."

I am looking at a tricycle. Another exhibit. It has slumped from the heat that arrived immediately after detonation. I’m in deep here, hanging on to Easter in the middle of Hiroshima.

All my received Sunday answers fail, all the ones I repeated to my children: Easter: the settling of a payment for sins—a human/divine sacrifice required by a righteous God—us just off-stage knowing everything turns out all right at the end. Easter: the right to eternal life for believing the right thing—a new fraternity reserved for those who believe in the one way—the knowledge that after death heaven awaits the steadfast and upright, while in the mean time, we are given a pass to go on playing by the code of lesser evils, the miserable dictates of death, the rules of reprisal and sacrificial violence.

What is Hiroshima except a barely imaginable spectacle of the game of death? With us thanking God that it fell to us to be able to play deadlier than our enemy. The grizzly victory gained, in the name of God.

But what is Easter except Jesus voluntarily stepping into the toxicity of all our deadly ways of securing our lives? And what is the resurrection but an end to the game of death?

If this is how Easter truly is it undermines everything we believe about death. It is the new and dangerous reality that makes it possible to live as though death were not. If it isn’t true, well, then you’d expect things to look much like they do now.

Or, it is true, but we’ve missed the point of the best story ever. Or it is true, but we’ve put in on hold because violence appears always to win. And winning is what counts. Security trumps trust. Which of course it does in a closed system. Or it is true, but only in those church-rehearsed, spiritualized ways that secure for us a personal paradise over 140,000 non-believers. Which of course makes it all false.

But I also see how easy it is to blame the "administration," and be blind to my own participation. What damning prayers—in the name of God, and thus justified—have I whispered for my security, preservation, recognition?

Easter is an event toward humanity, but there is a personal response to Easter. A daily response that has nothing to do with mouthing verses, but everything to do with seeing, in the lynching of Jesus, my propensity to exclude another for the sake of me and mine, which is nothing but the fear of death; and everything to do with a resurrection that makes all that fear, all those death-grip moves to solidify the group, unnecessary.

If there is such a thing as original sin, it is simply this: my participation in sacrificing another for the sake of my group, my nation, my world—which diminishes everything and destroys oneness—an abiding oneness which is God’s desire for us.

If Hiroshima (insert Gaza, West Bank, Afghanistan, Iran…and any number of Old Testament nations) can justifiably be sacrificed in the name of God, can Easter be true?

Easter is the witness that there is nothing behind Jesus, no warrior God in disguise, nothing except love. Easter is not a narrowing of options in the false top-down reading of "I am the way the truth and the life," but an opening up of possibilities in the bottom-up witness of one who is inhabiting death for us—and who returns to us in the ones we exclude. Easter is not assented to, it is undergone.

We read that the U.S. Army staff sergeant suspected in the killings of at least 16 Afghan civilians, nine of which were children, was on his first tour of duty in Afghanistan after three tours in Iraq.

In the weeks to come the Army Criminal Investigative Command will be seeking a motive for the slaughter. A slaughter that, according to the Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, may warrant the death penalty.

We will wonder about the emerging picture of the 38 year old army sergeant, married with two children, whose act of horrific human destruction was finally an act of self-destruction.

And we will note that while this is not, historically, an isolated incident, it is rare. And in this way we will distance this event from the everyday acts of war. Perhaps the problem will be found in the screening process. We will dismiss the man as:

"Apparently deranged", "probably deranged", journalists announced, a soldier who "might have suffered some kind of breakdown" (The Guardian), a "rogue US soldier" (Financial Times) whose "rampage" (The New York Times) was "doubtless [sic] perpetrated in an act of madness" (Le Figaro).

Surely the strong, the balanced, must be unaffected by war. It is the weak, the sensitive, those unable to objectify the enemy who die inside and become a hindrance to the mission. Or those on the other side who—to stay in the “arena of war”—must come to bestialize the enemy, and so kill out of hate or sport.

Well, I make these observations from a distance. I write them out to help me live in a world of violence, perhaps to keep insanity kept at bay.

Still, does not killing another human require a shift of mind? Something’s required that goes beyond bias and approaches the xenophobic. The human made inhuman. Racial slurs devolve, enemies becomes bugs.

Or is it possible to engage in war with the belief you are only and always a defender and so maintain a certain innocence?

But then, isn’t it the defenders that end up wanting war? And from here, as Rene Girard has said, battle lust always ends up overwhelming reason.

There are no romantic wars, no wars fit for cinema. The enemy is never courted as equal, how is he loved?

I read about the pacifist churches. They talk of the contagion of violence, the un-bleachable stain of slaughter. They talk of the Christian imperative: that the nonviolence of Jesus is not an addendum but an inseparable element of Christian faith.

GK Chesterton, not a pacifist, would take offence at my use of his quote in this context. No matter, it fits: "The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried & found wanting but that it has not been tried."

Consider the current Republican race. Candidates claiming fastness to their particular version of the Christian faith. All with swords up and out rattling one another in defence of God and America. Iran the new demon and scapegoat.

Our own Christian Prime Minister, while more circumspect and temperate, has at the same time sounded like the Likud party.

But the casualties of war are always an afterthought of the waging.

In our own city, the Single Men’s Hostel—now Hope Mission’s Herb Jamieson Centre—was built primarily in reaction to the human fallout of WW2. Soldiers returning home—the flush of welcome over, haunted by memories handled by intoxication, unable to rise to domesticity—found themselves on the street.

These "bag men" of the 1950′s and 60′s were experiencing what we’ve now named as post traumatic stress disorder. It’s important we have named this, as it gives us some hope of treatment.

Presently, veteran homelessness in Canada is more a potential problem. And thankfully, it will not reach that of the last world war.

But what does that matter to the soldiers who are even now struggling under the weight of what they’ve experienced?

PTSD of course is not isolated to veterans of war; but far and away, soldiers—who have seen "active duty"—remain the most vulnerable. Certainly the US Army sergeant was in some way a sufferer.

The cure? Nonviolence. Yes, I see the unreality of this. But at least let’s start supporting those in America who are campaigning for troop withdrawal in Afghanistan. (Remember Obama’s promise about this four years ago?)

In the meantime, we can move toward nonviolence in our own lives. One heart at peace with itself affects a thousand hearts.

Dusk on the Cornwall coast, close to Ronald Duncan’s hut

The impulse toward spirit surrounds us, its mystery is open to us daily. But sometimes it takes something more to prime our capacity for mindfulness—a dangerous capacity that needs constant tending.

Sixty years ago, when Ronald Duncan sat composing The Mongrel, in his stone hut, high on the Cornwall cliffs, he wasn’t thinking of hikers coming in from the trail reading his words and leaving changed, or at least momentarily arrested and marked for later. He was inscribing his own transformative arch, a kind of seeing, an experience coming to him from beyond his own fulcrum.

The slippery illusion that there’s no slow magic left—which is too easy to do in our methamphetamine culture—burned out, as we are, by just keeping up to the headlines. Burned out by food that comes from too far away, by fast medicine, speedy solutions, all forms of exhaust, and lack of things green and growing. Burned out by believing that everything has already been explained, and anything unexplained will be explained tomorrow because of the parameters established yesterday—which leaves us so starved for mystery that crop circles seem worthy of our singular devotion.

There is an inexorable Spirit moving below the crust, mercifully breaking up our categories and controls, working with us when we choose love, and working around us, leaving us to our isolations, when we choose envy and indifference. But never leaving us alone for long.

He confessed that from that moment, he was interested. He might as well have said that he was smitten, but I knew what he meant. These were delicate matters, better to understate.

Dad was 73 when he told me this story. And as he did, it seemed as though the creases on his forehead smoothed out and his blue eyes deepened to the colour of the lake we were walking beside.

One day dad stopped the horses, or the car, or whatever he was driving, and got to know mom. A cracked and yellow edged picture from their courtship shows mom sitting on the front of a 1930 something Chevrolet. Dad has his arm around her waist and is leaning into her, one foot is raised, resting on the running board. Mom has that shy smile and those bright eyes that dad spoke of; and she seems ready to float up off the fender.

They married after a brief courtship, settled into the vagaries of farm life, and raised a family.

In her quiet and charitable way mom gave herself to her kids; and over the years taught us forbearance and industry.

She is a woman of faith. It was needle pointed, embroidered, stitched in pictures and religious thoughts, and hung up around her home. Most often it was taped to the fridge in hand copied bible verses.

If she was worried, verses would appear on the fridge door. The greater the difficulty, the more bible verses.

They also showed up in the tobacco pouch I thought I had hid well enough. Over the years, as her kids grew up, I’m certain the entire King James Bible passed across the refrigerator door. And all the while, she maintained her forgiving and magnanimous spirit.

This is the part of her faith that floats to the top. And many of us here have experienced the beauty of her heart, faith and spirit.

I saw her beauty in other unexpected ways. Being raised in an evangelical home we were taught a doctrine known as the rapture. In church, it was preached with intensity and it made an impression on young minds. The rapture is the belief that before the great tribulation, as mentioned in the book of Revelations, God will rapture, or take up all true Christians from the earth.

I was nine or ten years old the day it happened. It was Saturday and I had slept in. The morning was fresh and bright. But the house was still. There was no usual muted mid-morning clamour. No squeak in the floor that told me dad was leaning back in his chair. There was no little sister rustling about, no usual rattle in the kitchen.

I went down stairs. I stood at the landing and knew the rapture had happened. The door was wide open, they hadn’t gone through the ceiling, they were sucked through the door. I was left behind. And the amazingly bright day turned dark.

I ran outside in a blur. I turned toward the street… nothing. I ran to the back of the house…my mother was hanging up the wash. Oh no! Mom didn’t make it either!

I stood blinking. The world returned. My sense returned, and I realized that if my mother was still here, nothing happened. She would easily have been the first to be snatched up. The day came back in a blaze; twice as fresh and twice as bright, as a result of my survival.

My mother was a vision, as radiant as an angel, beautiful as she stretched and stood on her toes pinning white sheets to the sky.

Today would be a good day. I would find a wild crocus for her. She liked wild flowers.

Mom taught us an appreciation for growing things. She loved her garden and the fresh things it produced. But I remember her saying how she wished she could grow fruit like they could in Kelowna.

I have a favourite picture of mom. It’s from a vacation that mom and dad took in B.C. In the picture mom is holding on to the stem of a cherry, pulling off the ripe fruit with her teeth. Her other hand is holding down a loaded branch. On her face, an expression of sheer delight. Occasionally she gave herself permission for sheer delight.

Delight is what she has given and still gives to her children. Like the kind of delight my dad experienced when he first spied her through a thin line of poplar trees.

Thank you mom, for your steady grace and secure love. You are numbered among the ones who will inherent the earth.

Today on your 90^th birthday we lift a glass to you…you, to us, remain, always, beautiful.

Please excuse me. You see I just read a Gallop poll that suggests the more devout and pious one is, the more one attends church, the more one is likely to favour war. "In general, the more frequently an American attends church, the less likely he or she is to say the (Iraq) war was a mistake.”

So how does this work exactly? A friend sent me Gary Kohl’s recent article, What kind of Christianity is this? It may shed some light on this.

But before I head for the narthex, here’s something: A survey taken by Baylor, published a few months ago in Christianity Today, suggests that frequent bible reading will nudge one toward a more liberal world view. There are a bunch of caveats in the study but I found this possibility refreshing. And of course it makes sense, especially if, as is my position, that the bible must be read through the lens of the gospels. It was however disappointing to scan the 95 comments. Most disagreed with the conclusion; in some cases there was hostility.

I suspect we’re still some distance from Kohl’s contention that,

Jesus of the Gospels was an outspoken, nonviolent leftist who tried to reform his authoritarian conservative, dogmatic church but also refused to shut up with his call for justice for the down-trodden – even when his superiors threatened him with serious consequences if he didn’t.

But let me end with this: It’s lexicon we’re stuck with; but how weary liberal/conservative, right/left. Don’t we—on either side—drag our feet in our attempts at understanding? Don’t we scapegoat the scapegoaters?

We use our doctrine, our concept of God to shield us from undergoing necessary heartbreak, the very thing that could lead us into mercy and love and conversations without agenda, except for a desire to understand.

Over the decade, my comfort at these things has increased. I’m becoming practised at rising above my introversion. But even if this wasn’t the case, I’d still enjoy coming. Yes, the setting is salutary, but most of all I enjoy meeting and listening to people from across North America who do what I do, who have come naturally or intentionally to the vocation of relieving certain aspects of human misery—which means raising resources to that end. And our partner here is Russ Reid, an organization (largest of its kind) dedicated to helping missions like ours flourish. In effect they’re partners in offering real hope to homeless and destitute people. Russ Reid, incidentally, was once an Edmontonian and an acquaintance of Herb Jamieson, a Hope Mission patriarch.

Coming here also restores a certain faith in American people for me. Well, it’s my own lack of reasoning and imagination that this occasionally needs restoring. But perhaps I’m not so different. While we Canadians—when stopping to think—know there are millions of grand-hearted people in the States, it sometimes slips away from us because of the caricature we get from the politicized broadcasts of FOX and CNN—not to mention the sudsy culture of Hollywood. But coming here, and hearing from and seeing hundreds of people who have invested themselves in caring for homeless people is always hopeful and redemptive.

Russ Reid is Hope Mission’s (and close to a hundred other mission’s) partner in the business of fundraising. Or as I prefer: the bizarre vocation of convincing people to follow their deepest desire—bringing them the joy of being the cause of someone’s welfare through the simple act of giving.

And as in every vocation, there are some virtuosos here. Some dazzlingly skilled women and men who have come up through the ranks of frontline inner-city work, or have cultivated a certain humility of mind and character, or both. Whose presence enjoins a particular open-handed posture and invites another into the vision of relieving human misery. And this presence—which is nothing other than a gospel presence—is aptly represented in the leadership and all the staff of Russ Reid.

Now I occasionally have caught myself thinking, and I suspect I’m not alone, that the nature of what we do has an elevation to it. A sort of mark that distinguishes. Of course this is a great danger. And if it’s not caught the "industry" of fundraising takes over and "technique" becomes the driving force; and a chasm opens between the thing we hope to happen and those we need to make it happen, and both it and we become an ugly thing.

This is how fundraising can loose its spirituality—the invitation to join in communal caring, if not continually nourished and pruned, can too quickly devolve into mere manipulation. Well, guilt works for awhile; and if it’s creatively-clever-guilting, it works better. But this kind of fundraising is momentary and has no lasting appeal, no vision.

Certainly, all the creative work is necessary, as well as the research, and too, the science. And when this is joined to a narrative compellingly relating the hard inhumanity of homelessness and the real possibilities of restoration, people connect and respond. What is happening here is that a vision for relief of human despair and the bolstering of liberty is being articulated’; and when the vision is articulated well it touches on something greater than either asker or giver, and a community of love forms and money—the great classifier—is relegated to its proper corner, and the important rises up.

This is the kind of ardent air I don’t mind breathing.

Like Tim said,

As my friend, the late pastor Dr. Jerry Falwell told me personally, ‘Speaker Newt Gingrich is the most qualified man in America to run as president of the United States.’

You see, this is why USA politics is so darn entertaining, and so hard not to watch, even though later you feel a bit bloated, like you’ve had too many Krispy Kreme donuts.