Posts filed under 'Christianity'
March 12th, 2008
In 1971 there was a Christian revival in Saskatchewan. I was caught in it, swept up in it like a broken straw in a prairie gust. My uncle, his two sons and I drove the 200 miles to Saskatoon to hear the “Sutera twins,” Ralph and Lou. My uncle had heard there was something going on at the crusade in Saskatoon and in a move to “save” his sons–one, a responsible son who I thought didn’t need saving, and a wild one, the one I hung out with, who probably did.
In Saskatoon the wild one and I slipped out of the auditorium after the first hymn. This was the big city. We wandered the nearby streets and checked out the neon lights and tall buildings. We became curious about the diagonal crosswalks the city had at the time and we crossed back and forth, controlling the traffic on all four sides.
I was hoping that the revival meeting would be wrapping up when we returned, but the place was just getting electric, the twins were on the rheostat turning up the voltage. Or, as either Ralph or Lou said, “The Holy Spirit’s finger was pointing at people.” We made our way back, close to where we’d been. Soon one of the preacher twins, came to the precipice of his soul searing message: “Choose now or it may be too late.” Then came the “call.” Then the full-on piano and the rising tide of “Just as I am…without one plea…” Then the streaming eyes and the tributaries of people in pews moving to the aisles and forming rivers of penitent souls flowing to the front for prayer. My uncle and cousins were swept up in the current with me hanging on to some exposed root. I scrambled up the bank and out of the heavy doors into the street. I waited and paced under a gas light. Shivering some.
In a few minutes my cousin, the wild one, now wilder, came to get me, said I needed to come back inside. He was not so much pleading but pulling me back through the high doors down a carpeted hall into a room torrid and moist by sweat and tears. No resolve left, I was on my knees from the weight of hands on my head and shoulders, upon which came a crescendo of intoned supplication. And with that I was up with an inexplicable smile, invaded by a brightness and a lightness. I was in fact quite high and vertiginous. Full, I supposed, of the Holy Ghost.
On the giddy ride back, we cousins planned the conversion of the rest of the “gang.” Which didn’t quite work out.
March 11th, 2008
My mother isn’t a feminist. She was born a few years after women were given the right to vote, that is, when women became “legally human.” (Check out this timeline.) Her role as a woman was pretty much mapped out for her. Not that I’ve ever heard her complain. But sometimes I wonder…
She is, as we all are, a product of her time and place; but her “place” was primarily given to her from the point of view of the church.
It has been the church that has roped off and relegated women to a lesser realm. (Catholic and many Evangelical churches are still examples.) And it has been government and secular agencies that have progressed towards gender equality. But primarily because they were pushed by women who refused to be content, who risked being vilified often and misunderstood constantly. Women who were seen as anti-Christian even when they followed the Gospel.
Has the church and its leaders (mea culpa) ever lead the way? Why, when the sometime chauvinist Apostle Paul, had the foresight to see the direction of things? (”There is neither male nor female…but all are one in Christ.” Of course here most pastors gave us to understand that this was an eschatological utterance, having nothing to do with the then and there and here and now.)
And why has the church so little egalitarian traction when we have an exemplar par excellence who modeled this basic understanding? Here’s Dorothy Sayers’ thought:
Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the cradle and last at the cross. They had never known a man like this Man- there never has been another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as “’The women, God help us!’ or ‘The ladies, God bless them!’; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious… Nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything ‘funny’ about women’s nature.”
But in spite of the ambivalence in fundamentalist churches, sphere mapping for women is inevitably breaking down. I’m taking the liberty of sharing a quote from a recent email I received. “There is such a wave of strength in the collective conscious of the women around me lately. We’re realizing that we don’t need permission from the men in our church to lead. We refuse to be treated as second-class children of God. It’s amazing how the awakening is rippling out—the more I talk to women, the more I hear the same voices. We will use our gifts! We will be who God made us!”
February 23rd, 2008
If you’re a Grow Mercy reader (Thank you by the way!) you’ll recognize this article (Edmonton Journal Feb. 23, ‘08) from a few posts a month or so ago.
(Click on the image to open in a new window)
Or Click here for pdf version
February 21st, 2008
The morning plays pel-mel on both sides of story-high plate glass. People scurry, scuttle like crabs, sideways, their lives lived on a slant, everything is akimbo, topsy-turvy, but not nearly as comic as the words imply. In fact to look at the faces, mine included, things are dead serious. And there are no connections. Instead, there is a perpetual race at every stop light, walk light, cop light, shop light, neon light, florescent light…but no florescence.
This is a day when a tree, full grown and green and growing still, must break through the concrete and asphalt in front of The Bay; leaf first, leaf after leaf after twig after branch rising to thick tapered trunk, stretching higher than a sequoia and wider than a cypress. It must, or we will all starve for oxygen.
But under that shade a climate is born and borne where we will lounge like the King of Hearts, freed from the asylum. We will rest in this adult Day Care and remember to ask the long forgotten questions. We will wander no more. And all the strident fundamentalist causes will pop like soap bubbles. And under that tree the world will find its imagination. And each of us will find our poetry.
February 19th, 2008
A few years ago on the morning of an Ash Wednesday I came out of Hope Mission’s shelter for men and saw a man urinating on the sidewalk beside one of the concrete garbage containers. Relieved that his back was to me I walked by, keeping my eyes on the corner ahead which would take me back to my office just a block away.
I was a few paces past him, pretty sure he hadn’t noticed me, pretty sure he wouldn’t care even if he had, when I heard my name. “Steve”, the voice called, “Steve, don’t be ashamed of me, wait.” I stopped and turned around. Tom came lurching toward me, one hand holding up his pants the other hand pulling on his zipper. The smell of Listerine reached me before he did. He was drunk from it. His face was wet from watering eyes, a running nose and drool. His shoes and pants were splashed and wet with urine.
“Steve, I’m going crazy, I can’t stop, I can’t help it.” He poured himself out in front of me. “Steve, you know me, I’m your my friend.” I’ve known you for a long time, you’re one of my only friends.” These are the words he said, but they came out slurred and sideways.
I’ve known Tom from the first days I came to work in the inner city. I’ve learned of his wounded background. The last time I had seen him, a month or so before this, he was sober. We had a conversation beside my car. I was leaving work and he waved me down as I crossed the street. I took my glove off and offered my hand. Tom said he didn’t want to shake my hand because he just finished crapping in the alley and hadn’t found much paper. I told him how thankful I was for his consideration. We both laughed.
He then told me he was doing okay, that he was thinking about getting away from downtown. This is something he always says. He knows I’ll say that it’s a good idea, and I think he hopes by saying it, it will help him do it and keep him sober longer, and at times, I think it does. When he’s sober, which usually lasts a couple weeks or even a couple months, he sometimes stays away from the inner city but usually he stays at the Mission. He can be a good guest, polite, helpful, responsive. Then gradually he finds the days too long and the burden of carrying the weight of his own success too much to bear. Often the slide starts by his pointing out the failures of other guys on the street. He becomes independently righteous and scornful of other addicts. When this happens it’s only a matter of days until he finds something to ingest; and then he becomes the thing he just scorned.
Today Tom was in front of me weaving back and forth, repeating how he was going crazy and hitting his head with the heel of his hand. As he was carrying on a young man in his twenties came towards us from across the street. He was loaded down with a large back pack and had work boots tied by the laces to one side of the pack and a heavy parka lashed to the other side. He must have heard Tom and he called out when he was half way across the street, “Tell me about it man. I know what you’re saying.” When he got close the young man smelled Tom and said, “C’mon partner your drinking shit, things can’t be that bad.”
Tom looked blank and pointed to the half finished cigarette in the young man’s hand. The man gave it to him, saying, “Here you go friend.”
In the mean time I was planning my exit, thankful for this diversion. But just when I was about to go the young man turns to me and says, “Just tell me one thing…that things are going to be alright.” I blink and then I say, “Things are going to be alright,” and then I add something I’ve heard myself say too many times to too many street guys: “Where there’s breath, there’s hope.” The young man nodded and said, “That’s right,” and walked on.
I looked at Tom beside me, he was breathing, but I didn’t see much hope. I walked him back to a bench at the front of the shelter.
Two hours later the bishop at St. Joe’s marked a cross on my forehead with ashes and said, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.
It was appropriate enough. I felt as powerless as dust. But perhaps that’s the point of Ash Wednesday and the lesson of Lent. While I believe with my heart that where there is life there is hope, too often it’s been my security systems, my insurance policies, my protective barriers, that have supported and sustained this faith. A healthy understanding of dependence doesn’t come easy–for Tom, caught in the extremes–or for any of us. But to recall that we are all marked with ash, ultimately dependent on the giver of breath, is also to recall the mystery of hope and life and salvation.
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Lent,
Ash Wednesday
February 7th, 2008
For my kick off to Lent I read Sam Harris’, "Letter to a Christian Nation." It’s the new edition released just last month with an afterword–where he reiterates his disdain for moderate religion and gives some thought to the origin of religion…which he was just coming to at the end of the previous edition.
And it’s here, on his ruminations on religion and blood sacrifice, that I want to call Sam up and say, please, please, read Rene Girard …and by the way, it’s okay, he’s not a theologian, he’s an historian, ethnologist, and an anthropologist.
Harris says, "Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere." Well, Girard, has done peerless research in this exact area, but he has done so much more. He has taken his discoveries and worked forward, showing how the expulsion of a victim, and the resultant "peace," enforces both the belief of the guilt of the victim and the victim’s paradoxical power to bring peace. Social unity is restored over the divinized surrogate victim and a ritual of remembrance (more sacrifices, prohibitions, myths) is encoded into the culture. This is how religion got every ancient human culture off the ground.
Of course to Harris the purpose of religion has long past. And in this important but incomplete understanding of religion he is exactly right. Now if only he could take this research he seems to agree with and stay with it a little longer…begin to sit with the theory that scapegoating, sacrifice of the one for the sake of the all, is everywhere transcribed in antiquity as myth, and that scripture itself in this sense, is also mythological (justifies violence), but is finally revelatory. Revelatory in that we are confronted with the fact that scapegoating is still indelibly inscribed in us. Here’s James Alison:
Professor Girard had assumed that the Jewish and Christian sacred texts would show exactly the same thing as all other ancient texts and myths – the threat of collapsing social unity leading to violence and the emergence of a new peace around the cadaver of the victim. To his amazement he found that although they did exactly that – they really are structured around sacralised violence – there was a unique and astonishing difference: the Jewish texts, starting with Cain and Abel – gradually dissociate the divinity from participation in the violence until, in the New Testament, God is entirely set free from participation in our violence – the victim is entirely innocent, and hated without cause – and indeed God is revealed not as the one who expels us, but the One whom we expel, and who allowed himself to be expelled so as to make of his expulsion a revelation of what he is really like, and of what we really, typically do to each other, so that we can begin to learn to get beyond this.
The forms of Religion railed against by Harris are indeed in need of deconstruction. And if God is a capricious God of wrath and blood sacrifice, then I am an atheist. But a move to the logical positivistic philosophy of Harris will not get at the root of violence. In my thinking, the key for this is in being confronted with our ways of vicitmizing and the acquisitive desire that spawns it. This is the revelation found in the gospel, through which we can see our way free of hatred, abuse, torture, and all forms of violence.
January 31st, 2008
I’m in LA, away from the cold. Away from the bone cracking temperatures that disallow airplanes to take off because it’s too frigid for the de-icing machine to take the frost off the wings. The magic degree for that to happen is minus 37. That temp was fortunately reached; but only after the sun rose and began its climb to the late January zenith. A few hours later the natives were telling me, "It’s cold here in LA.
From climate to culture, relativities abound. And what I mean when I use the word relative is not that everything is reducible to essentially the same thing, but that my everyday experience of life is relative to my cultural and geographical context. So while the measurement of temperature is not a relative concept, what is, is our experiences of what is hot and cold. But of course, herein–my relative experience–lies the seeds of another’s incomprehension. An incomprehension that can only be overcome through a shared experience.
I was confronted with my own incomprehension at the Russ Reid conference I’m attending. And it exposed within me a nervous protectionism regarding my job and Hope Mission that I won’t go into, but only say that I needed to recall the Californian who thought he was experiencing cold; because, of course he was. In this small act of recalling, I was, I realized, beginning to enact a shared experience.
How is it possible to have a shared experience of faith, of culture, of tradition? (These are the biggies.) Or how is it possible to have a shared experience of poverty, abuse, ill-health, emotional manipulation, addiction, mental breakdown, and on and on? Frankly, how is it possible to feel the viewpoint of the one in front of you?
Isn’t this why we’ve been given an imagination? Because we can’t live inside the hearts and minds, or even the shoes, of our acquaintances, neighbours, or co-workers, or even our friends and relatives. But we can imagine what it might be like, if we care to take the time to ask…and listen. Perhaps a good measure of our fear, our protectionism, our combativeness, is both birthed and nursed by lazy imaginations.
And so, my recipe…of sorts. Take a poultice of creative imagination, mixed with the essence of empathy–about a cup–and apply it to the welt of incomprehension. (A caveat, cooking, baking, whatever, has everything to do with timing and context.)
This acknowledged, know this: if the incomprehension exists both ways–which is often the case–the use of this poultice, should you be the one to make the overture, will make you vulnerable. This is however, the vulnerability practiced by Jesus and the long line of peace-making saints.
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Russ Reid,
Relativity
January 17th, 2008
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky. (Psalm 85)
Moishe the Beadle said to a young Elie Wiesel that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer. (Night, Elie Wiesel)
If this is right, then, as the Beadle knew, it is our questions that draw us close to God, not our answers. And not even God’s answers. Because God’s answers–when they are not merely our own answers thrown up against the sky–dwell in mystery and misapprehension at the depths of our hearts until at some tear in time, or at the end of our life, or in the next, they bloom, and seem to have always been understood. On that soil questions and answers are indivisible.
But if this is true about questions, well, then our search must not be for the grand answer(s) but for the right questions. Because questions make a path to the garden of mystical truth where love and faithfulness spring up from the ground and where righteousness and peace kiss.
Now, this is of course a mystical move but how else can I "understand" things I can’t understand? How else can one endure the brutish side of humans and still have faith? For Wiesel, who witnessed and suffered the unspeakable, God was killed in Birkenau, and Auschwitz. And even though I believe what the young Wiesel held true, how can I argue with his giving it up? And while I believe that the life of Christ holds the key to the questions of suffering and violence, in the presence of Wiesel I could not speak a word, but only listen and grieve.
December 26th, 2007
A really good book isn’t comfortable. It’s probing, convicting and full of challenge without being prescriptive.
Perhaps fiction still carries this off the best precisely because it can never be prescriptive. I also find more and more that good poetry, both dark and love-soaked, from Sexton to Rumi is also revelatory and freeing. But there have always been non-fiction titles, essays, memoirs, that make the connection and move me.
Without sounding like this is the right answer to a Sunday School question, the Gospels are this for me as well. But this wasn’t always the case. Quite likely because, for me at least, Sunday School and later Church, took the story and made it a code, then took the code and made it an absolute and in turn destroyed the story not realizing that the story is the only thing capable of carrying the truth.
I now see the gospels as creative non-fiction. That is, behind each book is a single active imagination grappling with a piece of reality, trying to make sense of a jumble of events. But this imagination is embodied and is writing from within an historical and cultural frame, just as I read embodied and shaped within my own history and culture. The magic is that there can be a connection. The wonder is that there can be a ring of truth at depth. But this is the beauty of great creative non-fiction.
It happened for me again the other day. Reading the gospels in this way reached an area in my life that needs so much surgery that I fear I may die in the O.R. before being able to look back to say, yes, Steve, there, right there in that place where you spent so much time comparing yourself to others, working out ways where you might be seen as set apart from the hoy-poly, right there is where you now spend a little less time, time that you now spend listening and engaging in a bigger world around you.
When this happens I again become aware that the story that has reached me is much grander than I had ever dreamt. Because it’s a story not based on the exclusion of something or the expulsion of someone better or worse–as if I could actually judge that–but based on a love story. It’s a story of a mother and her baby. A story of a gathering community around a person who becomes a victim and who returns only to forgive. And of course there is nothing special about this community. It is not over-above or underneath anything.
December 20th, 2007
It’s early and dark. In the south-east there is a place were the sun will come up, should it choose. Indications are good. So I wait for the first signs of brightening behind the city-scape.
Winter waits too. 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 for 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 industry is bringing waiting to an end. Commerce keeps company with the future. Companies 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. A destruction of both.
There is madness here that we’ve normalized. We forget that this life, our second womb, has something to do with waiting. Waiting, not like Estragon and Vladimir, but waiting without excessive effort in acceptance of a serial now.
Advent is the season of specific expectation. A time for rekindled waiting. A rendezvous with a midwife.
In Advent, we wait in a commemorative way, for the birth of Jesus. But as people of the paschal mystery we are always anticipating some kind of birth and some kind of resurrection, in the knowledge that there was a birth and that the son has risen. We wait as one waits for dawn.
I can’t see it yet but soon the east will grow lavender. Behind the berm of buildings across the North Saskatchewan river, the trees high on the bank will become skeletal as behind them the light strengthens.
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I was hoping that the revival meeting would be wrapping up when we returned, but the place was just getting electric, the twins were on the rheostat turning up the voltage. Or, as either Ralph or Lou said, “The Holy Spirit’s finger was pointing at people.” We made our way back, close to where we’d been. Soon one of the preacher twins, came to the precipice of his soul searing message: “Choose now or it may be too late.” Then came the “call.” Then the full-on piano and the rising tide of “Just as I am…without one plea…” Then the streaming eyes and the tributaries of people in pews moving to the aisles and forming rivers of penitent souls flowing to the front for prayer. My uncle and cousins were swept up in the current with me hanging on to some exposed root. I scrambled up the bank and out of the heavy doors into the street. I waited and paced under a gas light. Shivering some.
The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
