Don’t you remember your howling astonishment
at the sudden stranger who burned you with the glowing end of a cigarette?
And how for years later you tried, and still try,
to remember the wicked thing you did to inherit punishment?
And why this?
your lingering suspicion and final rejection of any new sprout of goodness that comes to you.

Too long you’ve lived your life as an appliance.
Being turned on,
adjusted, dialed, cuffed,
turned off, forgotten until needed.
Only a fool, and a wicked one,
would blame you for unplugging yourself from all that.

Do you really think, after your release,
finding yourself staring into the eyes of a sunrise,
Jesus would say,
go and sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee?
You really must learn to read those old pages with benign suspicion.
Or not at all.

This article was inspired by the documentary Food Inc.—a must on the list of anyone concerned about the gulf between our daily meal and the earth. This disconnection—which is a very real social illness—enforces contempt not only for the earth but for others.

(If you’re a regular reader of Grow Mercy, and why wouldn’t you be, you’ll recognize parts of this article from a post back in February.)

In 2000 Edwin Tuts sold a painting for $26,000. In 2006 he was selling similar pieces for $100 each—to fuel a drug habit.

Today, says Tuts, "Every brush stroke that I do, every painting that I do, I try to create for God. I try to be an open channel for God."

At five years old, Edwin Tuts knew he was an artist. "My mother was an artist and I loved watching her paint," he recalls.

He smiles, "One time, I went into her studio and dipped my finger into some paint and traced it across one of her paintings — oh no, I’m thinking, now I have to fix it! I worked the colours into the background of the painting—my mother didn’t notice!"

Tuts was soon simulating and expanding on his mother’s own elegant brush strokes. In school he drew portraits and intricate cartoons and sold them to other students. He laughs, "I had a lot of money when I was a kid."

In 1992 Tuts moved to Edmonton, where he met and married, as he says, the love of his life. He began working as a graphic artist, creating and crafting signs for various companies.

He applied to Grant MacEwan College’s fine arts program but was turned down because of his limited portfolio. "In fact," explains Tuts, "that was because I always sold most of what I painted and never took pictures. Some artists attach to their work; I’m someone who can easily release the paintings I do."

Tuts never received any formal training. Instead he made use of the local library, studying the great artists of the renaissance, including some modern works. He is inspired by many artists, but when things are coming together in front of the canvas, he says with a grin, "I like to think I’m in a kind of Da Vinci zone."

While he has experimented with different mediums and techniques, his true niche is wildlife and landscapes.

Tuts’ ability to capture the exquisite grandeur and intricate beauty of a natural setting, his penetrating eye for detail and his quest for perfection lead to burgeoning success. By the late 1990s he had paintings in a number of galleries across Canada and the United States. His originals were being scooped up by collectors and his prints were selling for $1,400 each.

But success and the allurements of the self-made artist brought complications and distractions. His own metaphor for this time was that his focus became skewed.

"God is in and around you. You split a stick and you will find him, you turn a stone and he will be there. But I focused on the sticks and the stones."

Tuts could see what was happening but confides, "It was like I couldn’t stop myself. I started using, my painting became stiff, nothing flowed. And I started pushing people away. I was losing my mind; I was losing my heart."

He would go backpacking in the mountains to reconnect with nature and to centre himself, but would come back to the same sabotaged relationships and the same self-loathing.

His life snarled up. He lost his wife and family, he began using drugs heavily, and with it, lost inspiration and despaired of the gift he had been given.

"Everything I touched turned to dust. I lived with a load of self-condemnation that I thought would never leave." Edwin comes to tears when he talks of the pain he caused his family and his parents.

Still, even in the darkest of those days, Tuts prayed and clung on to the possibility of God hearing him, the possibility of some kind of opening.

It came while talking to a friend who worked for Hope Mission. Tuts was ready. He needed to leave the basement he was living and working out of anyway, so he went to Hope Mission and joined its recovery community.

Months went by and Tuts saw himself progressing. Then his dad died, and he relapsed. But he had come a long way and he asked himself why he was going back — and for what?

Tuts says, "I could feel my dad crying inside me; I knew what he’d want for me. So I continued in recovery. If God has a face, it’s through my dad."

His life and his gift have been restored. The emotion now reflected in his paintings shows a mature delight and an intimate reverence of the beauty of creation. For Tuts, God’s embrace through Christ is not merely integral to his art, it’s what calls him and keeps him at his vocation.

He has donated prints to numerous charities. Now, with his desire to contribute to the ministry of Hope Mission and his passion for seeing artists help one another, Tuts, with a group of a dozen other artists, will be holding an art show and sale: Art for the Heart of Edmonton. The purpose of the show May 22nd is to create awareness and raise funds for artists and the Hope Mission.

"I see it as a circle; my paintings are gifts, they come to me through God, I let them go, and through others I give them back to God."

Yes I suppose, as CTV’s Tom Clark described her, Ann Coulter is (how many times has she been described as this?) a lightning rod, that, well, invites lightning. And yes, while there is justification to do more than simply groan about her three-city tour, preventing her from speaking turns her visit into a hard-right victory lap.

She plays the politics-of-resentment game better than anyone. Didn’t vice-president Houle of the University of Ottawa, who sent Coulter the prescriptive e-mail think that she wouldn’t counter by charging the University with hate crime—as spurious as that is? Yes of course the irony is odious. She has left a contrail of volatilizable prate in her wake, all later defended as I-was-only-joking.

But the calamity is not Coulter’s visit. The calamity is that believers in liberal ideals have become her mirror double by scapegoating her. Scapegoating is her territory. Pinning the woes of the west upon "Godless liberals" is her wasteland. Why occupy it with her? Miss Coulter has, and will continue to craft her own undoing. Her own fashioned outrage, which she preens and polishes relentlessly, in the end, always shows itself flaccid. Left to her own hyper-hyperbole, she will always fall wide of the mark. Why legitimize her? She will justifiably banish herself.

If we want Ann Coulter and her "creed-screeds" to go away, let’s keep our fascination in check. Our eviction of Miss Coutler makes her out to be a victim of free expression, over which she salivates, and sells even more of her flak-tracts.

Ann Coulter is a brilliant strategist for her own cause; and it clearly is—for all her deference to the GOP—a Coulter-cause. And her Christianity, as far as I have seen, is at once pedantic and inscrutable. Still, she is highly intelligent, and in this she far less than she could be—as a Christian and a commentator.

What’s to be done? Let her come…then, let her leave.

And yet, you cry out, and wait upon the absence, which you somehow knowingly feel will bring more light than weight. Why do you feel this? No one told you. It simply came—your hands bleeding, as you clung on to the sharp end of desire, a shard of hope.

And so it happens in the middle of your long involuntary call into the fog, that you dispel the Supreme Being God—that granting-or-denying-your-bidding-prayers God, and are opened up to the mystery beyond the nothing, or the mystery of the no-thing-God. And that long anguished why-forsaken solicitation—that heart’s dart propelled by Love—pierces the cloud of your mind, fusing mind and heart; and you recline into the other, the divine community, where presence resides; and, like this, you rest, even in the hurt, in hope re-ember-ed.

For the most part, this book will hold interest primarily for those who have had some intimate contact or at least some association with Hope Mission.

Growing Hope is what it is, a custom published, humble little work. It was, nevertheless, something like a labour of love. It wasn’t sponsored and I wasn’t asked to write it, but somewhere along the way, because I fell in love with Hope Mission, and the mission to raise the broken poor to dignity, I felt constrained to put the stories down before they disappeared. These are the stories of people who also fell in love—then grew to love Hope Mission—through faith in a God of compassion.

Growing Hope’s tone, like the Mission itself, is a blend of evangelical witness and social compassion. Still, overall, it’s a history book and so recalls the stories that brought Hope Mission through 80 years of service and ministry.

These are stories of the pioneers of Christian social care in Edmonton. Stories of Hope Mission’s matriarchs and patriarchs, disciples and offspring, largely told in their language—told within the central view of Hope Mission, that a spiritual awakening through Jesus Christ is a requisite for holistic healing.

It’s minus something–where Celsius and Fahrenheit collide and quicksilver goes brittle. Beelining as best I can across an empty parking, humping over drifts left over from a weekend blizzard, my foot breaks a wind-crust and twist-slips off an empty beer bottle. I catch myself. I walk a couple steps then think to go back and kick it out of the snow. There’s another and I toe it loose as well. There may be a party of Sleemans under there but the hard-pack stops me now. I pick up the bottles and make for the street.

I intersect two guys in clothes of many layers–toques, hoods pulled down, chins and eyes visible under the street lights. I wonder if they’ve been circling for the night. I wave a greeting and offer the bottles. They’re not picking just now, so I put the bottles in a nearby trash. They may be back latter. We walk parallel for half a block, wish each other warmth and I veer off across the street and see All Saints Cathedral a block ahead.

Inside, the dark wood and brick feel warm. Even the stained glass, still dark from a winter morning, is not unwelcoming. There are six of us in the congregation. We read from the old prayer book. Creeds, confession, prayer, psalm.

The lady who gives the homily has brought her teenage daughter. She refers to her. The lady tells a story about how a baby changes everything. Now she talks about the cultural differences, the levels of tolerance for child-play she and her daughter observed while flying Air Cairo. Kids, babies, crawling over seats, exploring isles, everyone attentive, yet oblivious to the commotion–which would be unheard of in Air Canada.

She’s constructing an obvious metaphor regarding the Christ story. Then she asks us to consider God as a baby. Asks us to think about that image…God as a baby. A baby God.

It’s not a simple point when you come to it. No Uber-father, no Avatar, God as baby–helpless, trusting, innocent, receiving–more like my friends who were circling inner-city streets for the night–not much power there. Just a wave of greeting and a bit of warmth.

Where I write this a young mother has brought in a baby in one of those baby-carriers-slash-car-seats. She sets the basket on a table and waits for her Americano. The baby stirs and smiles out. The mother is transformed, eyes brighten and a smile takes up her entire face, then cooing, face-making, reaching, caressing…the coffee waits, all things wait, the baby smiled.

The point I’m making, I think, is that the evolutionary arch of the human heart and mind, is: compassion trumping dogma.

Your article in today’s Journal touched me deeply for its honesty and sincerity. You reflect many of my feelings and views about the less fortunate in this world, and how we deal with them. Hinduism, which is the religion I was born into and I practice, also emphasizes that path to salvation is through Narayan Seva (rough translation: Serve the poor, because they are God).

-Vembu