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.

Time, love, quarks, discrete math, other minds, healing touch, the efficacy of hugs;
that words, as Elie Wiesel says, in moments of grace can attain the quality of deeds;
that our deepest desire is to be each others joy;
that an inner void must not be leaped over but into;
that both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were necessary;
that you can love the earth and not love God, but you can’t love God without loving the earth;
that God with a cherry-bomb equals a big bang;
that mycelium will always remain mysterious;

 
that there is life on Gliese 581 C, and Harvey Pekar and Peter Popoff live there;
that the mind is not separate from the body, except perhaps for Benny Hinn, augurs and certain certified psychics;
that a sock prefers the single life;
that if scientists were mere sceptics we still wouldn’t know about the Copernican system of planetary movement;
that extraordinary claims do not immediately need extraordinary evidence;
that beauty is its own proof;
that if everything was verifiable life would cease to be;
that doubt is necessary and healthy but that the spirit of scepticism is a sickness;
that most things we hold as true are by way of other authorities;
that it was exalted certainty that sent the boxcars to Birkenau and not iffy disconsolate minds;
that to live without faith is impossible and to attempt it is a castration of life;
that there are more than a few fish swimming around with coins in their mouths;
that desire is triangular, and its nature is mimicry;
that a cultural obsession with sex is not a sign of social depravity but an indication of deep loneliness;
that if and when we humans become fully real we will no longer impose ourselves upon creation but see ourselves as one aspect;
that Gary Larson and Al Purdy are pure tellurians—and each in their own way;
that science is humble in theory but not so much in practise and that this is what it has in common with religion;
that faith needs a frame, and reason needs a trellis;
that we are not born with an existential void but develop it over time;
that the non-existence of God can be proven by symbolic logic;
that a formally valid argument can nevertheless be false; 
that the argument of infinite regression is absurd;
that the earth rests on the back of a turtle…and that there are turtles all the way down;
that positive universal claims and negative existential claims are not testable in all possible worlds;
that all ravens are black, except for one or two, maybe; 
that presuppositions are held viscerally and emotionally and half-consciously;
that God is a verb and not a noun and that existence is not a property;
that the word piffle can be appropriately applied to a plethora of propositions;
that when the Mayan Calendar is up, we’ll just switch to the Dan Brown Calendar;
that our deepest and dearest beliefs are not logically verifiable;
that miracle is still the best term to describe life’s origin;
that hope and mercy are stronger than hate and violence;
that Holderlin was shining in his wooden tower when he said, “But where danger is, grows the saving power also.”
That at the end, heralding a true beginning,
comes not the apocalypse but apocatastasis;
that instead of escalation toward extremes,
the possibility of universal hope, reconciliation and restoration.

The following is taken from the Occupy Advent Facebook page:

“Come participate in the only Christmas service this year that is a political action, performance piece, flash occupation, and act of worship.

Jasper Ave and 102st from 5:45-6:15 every Wednesday from now until Christmas.

The backdrop of a previously occupied and evicted lot will serve to illustrate the current struggle between the forces of oppression and the Force of Justice and the time of our waiting for the Promise of Hope during the season of Christmas.

The short liturgical service will be officiated by Reverend Thomas Brauer, and will include a candle lighting, scripture reading, reflection, prayer, and communion.

This is an outreach event by Occupy to the Christian community of Edmonton. Occupy is an open-faith community, and this segment of that community welcomes anyone to attend and participate to whatever degree they wish.

2000 years ago, Jesus was born to a people oppressed, in exile, occupied by a foreign empire.

During the season of Advent, the month leading up to Christmas, people all over the world remember those people who waited for a Messiah with a message of hope, justice, and life for the poor and oppressed.

Today, we continue to wait for the new earth that Jesus taught about, the just and beautiful earth that will be inherited by the meek.

Occupy invites you to remember with us that change is coming and that a new world is possible in four Advent observances each Wednesday leading up to Christmas.

All people of all faiths are welcome to come and simply attend or participate in any portion of these elements to whatever degree they wish.

Winter waits. The soil of summer-fallow waits, bulbs wait, bamboo is excellent at waiting, geese wait until the time is right. Beavers don’t abide waiting, but orb weavers don’t seem to mind. They spin and wait as long as it takes. The earth spins too, waiting its equinox.

But light bulbs, street lights, clocks, little chips in computers, never wait and will never care to wait. And we use them and anything else we can think of to train the waiting out of our lives.

The world of commerce is bent on bringing patience to an end. Industry and commerce keep company with the future. Corporations race each other to see how far they can project themselves into the future, or how much of it they can drag into the present, which destroys both.

There is madness here that we’ve normalized. Because life, our second womb, is about waiting. Waiting, not like Estrogon and Vladimir, but waiting without excessive effort in acceptance of a serial now. Impatience has nothing to do with waiting.

Advent is the season of expectation. It’s a storied rendezvous with a knowing midwife. A time for rekindled waiting—should we see to turn this to our soul’s advancement. 

And in Advent, we wait in a commemorative way, for the birth of Jesus. As people of the paschal mystery we are always anticipating some kind of birth and some kind of resurrection. And so we wait as one waits for dawn.

I can’t see it yet but soon east will grow orange. Behind the berm of buildings across the North Saskatchewan high on the bank, the trees will turn skeletal as light strengthens behind them.

At the same time, that 99% of the clergy have been silent or quietly opposed, or even actively opposed, is for me a Jeremiah-sized lament. They have failed to recognize that this is more than a movement opposing corporate state bailouts and corporate controlled governments. It is a movement that challenges our very way of being in community. It challenges and condemns our celebrity culture and our atomistic consumerist culture; and for those of us who still name ourselves Christians, it is beginning to shame our spiritualized Christian culture.

We like to quote Dietrich Bonheoffer’s “Cost of Discipleship” as we are able to spiritualize and privatize it to where it has no bearing on how we live outwardly. We forget that Bonheoffer also said things like, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

Chris Hedges is one who is leading the “spoke driving”. On Sunday he gave a speech worthy of MLK at Trinity Church in New York. (I thank my friend Connie Howard for pointing me to it.) It was in fact a sermon that should be circulated, perhaps used as a template, in churches across the land. Holding up the Beatitudes—from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount—on behalf of social justice and the Occupy movement will offend many including salvationist-Christians, but I have a notion that it won’t offend Jesus.

Penitence

This old monk, hermit, says to me,
go ahead and swallow
the camphor with your tea,
but don’t expect the glory of the Lord
to shine round about.
And I thought; what,
the itch to retch sin and shame
by rending will and flaying flesh—
a vestigial tail, a tumid tonsil?
The denial of bread and wine,
to gore my guilt—an appendix?
And I catch the glint of freedom
in those cowled eyes,
and feel a sudden pull
to move in those arms.
My stony world, its caste of blight
now in full relief—
I turn to that lavender light,
and feel within a gathering leap—
when I remember all those years
of mete remorse and mulled regret.
All my work to put ahead what lies behind.
My daily wail, my ashened face.
All that comfort of lasting Lent,
blessed by Sunday mourning chorales of praise.
Oh Ascesis, would thou waste me this late?  
My years of pious breast pounding a-wash?
No, sooner drink the brine of self-deceit.
Sooner hail the sour estate.
And serenely model
the righteous rigour of self-hate.

–

When dogma and doctrine come to define us, and the command to love your neighbour as yourself is always willed as an “ought”, but never consented to as a sweeping irresistible power, the ought finally twists itself into self-hate. That’s what I think.

With much love dear reader, Stephen

My friend Peter wrote to say, “I read your article in today’s journal, and as usual I am always intrigued by your thoughts…In terms of content, I found your views somewhat apocalyptic – something I have had cause to wonder about given my perception that there seems to be a lack of balanced perspective going on in today’s topics du jour. I recall as a young man returning from my military trips delivering aid through Africa and the Asian sub-content with a profound sense of how fortunate we are where we live, and how little many who live here appreciate or understand that good fortune. This has led me more recently to wonder why it is we have such good fortune, while others don’t, and I become more and more convinced it is due to the evolution of our politics. I know many disagree with that, and attribute our good fortune to exploitation of others, but I don’t believe that stands up to scrutiny when one looks at countries in the last 50 – 60 years that have moved towards a similar political system and those that have moved away – contrast North and South Korea for example, India and Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Ghana, and so on. I didn’t mean to get diverted onto this topic, but given the tone of your article, I thought you might find the attached article and book a refreshing antidote to the gloom visited on us 24 hours a day.”

Here’s my far too lengthy response: (Besides being lengthy it also takes a theological turn; just wanted to warn you. Feel free to stop reading anytime.)

First of all, it’s gratifying to remember how our military was known for peace keeping and delivering aid. The last decade seems to have blotted out this memory.

Secondly, that even bad democracies are better than good totalitarian states, and that this has in part contributed to our good fortune, I think is accurate. However, that our fortune hasn’t on some level been due to exploitation, I think is inaccurate. I would only point to our own country’s historical expropriation of land and exploitation of First Nations people. There are more examples.

Most intriguing however was the essay (I’ve discovered more essays) and the book Peter referenced.

In "Our Better Angels,” author Steven Pinker has shown through some pretty exhaustive research and an accumulation of data that violence, contrary to our belief and intuition, has actually decreased over the centuries. We’ve taken it for granted that the 20 century has been the bloodiest ever, but according to Pinker, we may be living in the most peaceful time in human history.

Of course, there are several ways to interpret data. Mr. Pinker’s choice is to view data on violence in relative terms, and not in absolute terms. The principal behind this, as one blogger put it, is that 10 people killing 4 is less violent than 4 people killing 2—which for many of us without the data, is hard to accept since over 100 million people were killed in 20th century terrorist attacks, genocides and wars. Still as Pinker has shown, violent death per capita, has fallen.

However, there are those that say his research is hardly broad enough and dispute his findings. And there are some who dispute his interpretation.

Personally I find it impossible to draw hard conclusions when it comes to statistics on violence. Because violence is more than a body count. Consider the intensity of violence (Hiroshima, Holocaust), the new impersonal violence of drones, consider war’s injuries, physical and psychological, which apparently isn’t part of the data. And as well, forms of cultural and religious violence are still prevalent; gang violence is rising, and domestic violence, violence against women is only beginning to be addressed.

So concerning per capita death, our intuitions may be off. But considering violence on a broad scale, probably not. Here is a 2002 study by the World Health Organization on a more comprehensive view of violence; it doesn’t dispute Pinker’s findings, but would dispute his interpretation.

That Pinker may be ideologically driven to support a particular view of human progress may or may not be true, but to look for instances of light, as he does, is hardly a bad thing in this climate. An attempt at balance that my friend rightly pointed out.

Whatever the case, it’s important not to dismiss Pinker’s work. The last paragraph of the (forwarded) article by Steven Pinker is most intriguing to me:

“But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man’s inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” If our behavior has improved so much since the days of the Bible, we must be doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.”

Earlier, Pinker talks about the rise of empathy, the possibility that evolution could have even bequeathed us with an "empathy" gene.

I like Pinker’s reversal of the question. Because asking why there is peace—or if I can rephrase, why in our state of apparent perpetual war, are there outbreaks of peace—gets at the kernel of anthropologist Rene Girard’s theory of desire. A theory I’ve dropped into Grow Mercy since the outset of this blog. And a theory that casts new light on Christian revelation, or better; through it, Christian revelation is more fully revealed—and as such, it introduces ourselves to ourselves.

Here’s a story by Brian MacDonald that encapsulates Girard’s theory:

“Picture two young children playing happily on their porch, a pile of toys beside them. The older child pulls a G.I. Joe from the pile and immediately, his younger brother cries out, “No, my toy!”, pushes him out of the way, and grabs it. The older child, who was not very interested in the toy when he picked it up, now conceives a passionate need for it and attempts to wrest it back. Soon a full fight ensues, with the toy forgotten and the two boys busy pummelling each other.

As the fight intensifies, the overweight child next door wanders into their yard and comes up to them, looking for someone to play with. At that point, one of the two rivals looks up and says, “Oh, there’s old fat butt!” “Yeah,” says his brother. “Big fat butt!” The two, having forgotten the toy, now forget their fight and run the child back home. Harmony has been restored between the two brothers, though the neighbor is now indoors crying.”

With a bit of imagination we can easily see how this little story operates on communal and national levels. We form social groupings—often without even being aware of it—through scapegoating, through being over and against the Other—other groups, other nations etc. Think of junior high school, the office cliques, the Balkan wars and the sudden nationalistic fracturing of countries.

MacDonald goes on:

“It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Girard builds his whole theory of human nature and human culture through a close analysis of the dynamics operating in this story. Most human desires are not “original” or spontaneous, he argues, but are created by imitating another whom he calls the “model.” When the model claims an object, that tells another that it is desirable—and that he must have it instead of him. Girard calls this “mimetic” (or imitative) desire. In the subsequent rivalry, the two parties will come to forget the object and will come to desire the conflict for itself. Harmony will only be restored if the conflicting parties can vent their anger on a common enemy or “scapegoat.

With the lucidity characteristic of French thought before the “deconstructionist” writers, and a consistency reminiscent of Calvin, Girard shows, throughout the body of his work, how his theory of “mimetic” desire can illuminate and unify an extraordinarily disparate set of human phenomena. It can explain everything from sacrifice to conflict, from mythology to Christianity.”

The theory of mimetic desire also explains Pinker’s findings, which of course are not original to Pinker. For example, it takes into account the anthropological and archaeological data that there probably wasn’t an idyllic era of tranquillity, but that ritualistic tribal and national violence, covered by mythical interpretations, was a near if not entirely a universal phenomenon.

But Girard’s hypothesis—his anthropological reading of the bible and the gospels—also takes into account what Pinker says about the seeming increase of empathy, while at the same time explaining the volatility of our world.

It may sound odd to say that gospel revelation is responsible for both the rise of consciousness of the victim, the ‘outbreaks of peace’, as well as the greater volatility of social violence. But the gospel story revealed the innocence of the victim, revealed the workings of the mechanism and so dealt it a death blow—because it only work effectively when undetected. The “peace” once gained through the surrogate victim, the mutual enemy, is now, in this stage of our evolution, entirely precarious, because we see through it.

Pinker of course is an atheist and would no doubt scoff at this suggestion. And yet, to honestly take in the arch of the past two millennia, we should see that in no other time has the victim been as visible in art and literature, in our judicial policies and politics. There has been an evolution of empathy. We no longer believe that it was the sins of parents that caused blindness in their child.

Victims for the most part are spared blame, we don’t believe they deserve their state. This evolution, the process of hominization, our calling into humanity, had its culmination in the gospel story. It was this that exposed our common culpability for scapegoating. This mechanism which is the founding principle of religion and culture, was exploded by Jesus, who gave himself to it, in order to forever expose it.

But in exposing it, it lost its power. Scapegoating no longer works, or at least, it no longer lasts. And this is both Good News and dangerous news—a precarious freedom requiring great responsibility.

Of course the richness of Girard’s research and mimetic theory goes far beyond what can be said here, except to say that Pinker’s research, like Girard’s, suggests humanity was founded on violence. Girard simply goes further and shows that the process of hominization, or the calling of humanity into freedom, is an evolution away from the generative principle of social grouping.

Along the way he offends human progress secularists through his realism and warnings, and by his adoption of the gospel as the key that demythologizes our justifications of sacrificial violence.

But as much or more, he offends Christians who hold to a traditional (since Anselm) propitiationary theory of atonement: The reversion to a sacrificial reading of scripture, that sees Jesus’ death as an appeasing sacrifice to a wrathful God. Our failure to see Jesus as a “sacrifice” that exploded the sacrificial systems, instead of another Aztec-like sacrifice, only on a grand scale, has been the tragedy of Christendom. And it is why Christians are still able to justify violence and war.

The life, death and resurrection of Jesus was the ultimate overthrowing of religion and sacrifice, the ultimate intrusion of mercy that should have resulted in the growth of mercy, because it revealed a God entirely free of wrath and violence and sacrificial hankering—and the possibility of true peace on earth.

Photograph by: Christina Ryan, Calgary Herald

Here’s a letter by Mark Maxwell, President of Prairie Bible Instituted, who first informed the RCMP.

This is a sad and tragic story—one that we’ve heard within the halls of Christian faith all too often. Of course abuse happens in other institutions; but as one who tries to still follow the faith, the question this specific allegation raises for me is this: Is there anything in the way the Bible is interpreted within conservative, fundamentalist, neo-Calvinist institutions that enables and harbours sexual predators? Beyond this, is there something about the way a literal interpretation of Scriptures fosters the injustice of patriarchy and so supports the ongoing “soft” abuse of gender inequality?

My wife Deb attended Prairie for one year. She says, "I can certainly agree about the unhealthy, unbiblical male dominance teaching that was taught. At the time when I was young it was harder to ‘think’ against it but even then I knew within me that something was not only unhealthy but wrong about their teaching."