The supine and gutless Democratic Party, which would have feigned outrage if George W. Bush had put this into law, appears willing, once again, to grant Obama a pass. But I won’t. What he has done is unforgivable, unconstitutional and exceedingly dangerous.

Curiously, even the FBI, the CIA, the director of national intelligence, the Pentagon and the attorney general didn’t support it. They believe it may hinder their ability to investigate terrorism, “because it would be harder to win cooperation from suspects held by the military.”

But it passed anyway. And I suspect it passed because the corporations, seeing the unrest in the streets, knowing that things are about to get much worse, worrying that the Occupy movement will expand, do not trust the police to protect them. They want to be able to call in the Army. And now they can.

We’re having a condo Christmas this year, son Justin is home from the misty coast; Daughter Teryl (who just finished her bachelor of science) and entrepreneurial Jordan, Musical son Mark and Blackbird Amanda will be ’round about; Deb, my wife, (who just got a job as staff manager of the Spady Centre) will be around as well:); a few weeks ago we spent a fine weekend with son Lucas and Jamie and granddaughter Madison (“motored to Saskatoon” as Julia Y. would have so aptly wrote it up in Local Happenings in the Yorkton Enterprise); as for eldest son Michael, we’ll be Skyping him in from Japan. (Awhile back we "Skyped" in a hockey game with him—the hockey game, that Olympic one—not long ago we Skyed an entire game of Monopoly with Justin, just a matter of getting the camera angles right. But he took too much pleasure in the win…so we’re wondering about the camera angles.)

But on this Christmas eve, dear reader, I’m finding that the older I get the more I want to plant myself in earth and family and friends. I’m pining for dirt in my ears and creased smiles over mashed potatoes and thinking that the closer I get to the microbial mass of humus and the hug of a sister or brother or mother the nearer I sidle to something eternal.

And the closer I get to that still point, the more I know I rely on ties. The immediate ones like Christmas with kids, New Year’s with friends. And the looser ones of memory—memories of you, to the memories of jokes my late Dad used to tell down at the Springside Sask. lumberyard like: Fellow comes in, says to the lumberyard guy, "I need some four-by-twos." "You mean two-by-fours?" The man says, "Ah, let me check," and goes back to the pick-up truck, his buddies roll down the window and they confer a while. He returns and says, "Yeah, I meant two-by-fours." Alright. How long do you need them?" The man thinks for a bit and says, "I’d better go check." After conferring again, he returns and says, "A long time. We’re gonna build a house." And that would crack ‘em all up.

These ties of matter and memory do matter. So thank you dear friends. And thank you to anyone and everyone who reads and/or responds. Know that my embracing thoughts are on their way and even now are arriving under your doors and settling upon your Christmas trees.

And on this eve of yet-another-Christmas for we ripe ones, and on this eve of a still-new Christmas for you suppler ones, have a wonderful Christmas.

After all, and for us all, ripe or supple, Christmas still signals the Incarnational mystery of "God with us"; the beauty and fragility of earth and family; the hope and sign of friendship and everlasting peace; and the wonder of resurrection, through the birth of baby.

May you all, dear friends and family, celebrate well and celebrate hearty, and have many fishes and loaves left over.

That was the season of lice and scabies and gallon jugs of Benzo-benzoate. And it was the season of a large landlord standing on my feet outside a pub on Government St. telling me I had a week to get him the rent or he’d "do something worse." He was a junkie and unpredictable.

Winter had moved in and it was rainy and I was broke, as we all were, and so it was back, once again, to Port Alberni for a few (Mac and Blo) lumber-mill pay cheques.

The months and years of no-fixed-address had been piling up and all around I sensed things were winding down, preparing to break up. Like there was a ledge somewhere down river and you could hear the water whitening as it fell over rock shelves but you couldn’t tell how far down, or on which bend you should start to back paddle.

It was a year or so after we were kicked off Hornby Island—banned for a year for building a raft out of driftwood, setting it on fire and swimming it out into bay then swimming back and watching the beauty of the thing burn into the horizon. A flaming eye in the night, fixed back on us, pinning us to the beach.

Well, we had taken too much for granted. Like we were the only ones living on the Island. The first or last tribe. And I had fallen for it all. The beach, the salt, the oysters cracking open in a fire and eaten off the shell, the arbutus trees—their skin as sensual as the legs of Tina Turner—the turn of the tide like a seeking heart, the small store with the screen door a short hike away, the communal come-and-go.

That time was too spiritual to last anyway. It was too basic. Too Huck-Finn-human. I mean we built a driftwood hut, called it a house, and why not, it had two rooms and a big open door you hardly had to duck under to get in.

For a while there was a nudist family—a couple with two daughters—that camped on the beach just the other side of a rivulet that ran throughout the summer; and Joe, who wasn’t paired up, was always going over to the rill playing with the running water, then finally making excuses to go over and visit. One evening he just stripped naked and went and joined them by their fire—sat there on a log grinning. From where we were, we could see his teeth shinning in the orange-yellow light.

The morning after the raft-fire, police came and tore down our house and escorted us off the island. Ferries from Hornby to Denman Island and on to Buckley Bay, they saw us all the way to the main island.

Nobody said it but it seemed to mark the end of a beginning. Still we hiked, walked and rode, and landed on Salt Spring, flirted with other gulf islands; always finding ourselves in Victoria and then in Port Alberni when things got too bare-bone.

But the frays came, edges showed and life slowly became serious. People left, moved, found paths that lead far away. There was a time on Hornby that I thought it possible to live out a life entirely untethered—but for that sustaining bay. Silly. And yet here, writing this in the innocence of pre-dawn, I think; and why not?

A prayer prayed, a responsive reading, a Psalm, the Nicene creed intoned, and a homily from the gospel of John delivered, we six unsubstantial creatures now kneel, all of us, I imagine, grateful for upholstery. As it is, the signals of age are in my back and knees but I’m still the youngest here.

I kneel and wonder what is it that brings me out on a morning like this—still dark, blowing snow and brassy cold. I suppose the possibility of emotional instability exists. Or perhaps it’s the momentum of a penitent thought. Or maybe it’s the thought that Jesus, like Alexander, might show up with a sword and cut through the Gordian knot of questions, doubts, and all the unresolved matters of the soul.

And why here? This cavernous post-war cathedral is not the antithesis of allurement, but it’s in range. Well, why here is easy enough. For me it’s the lack of diversion. It’s sensory detox from life in the 21 century. It’s the bodily need for liturgy over lexicon, stillness over oratory, altar over technique. It’s not stimulation deprivation so much as sensory reorientation.

But is this still enough? What of this story? John, running off with Andrew to go and see Jesus; John the gossip, spreading news about the socially-illicit Jesus—just because he felt loved. Loved in a way that left no residual claim, that left John compelled by freedom to love as he was loved. 

Maybe that’s my deal. Barely aware and often blind to being driven by the desires, affirmations, expectations and glances of the social other, I’m here in the hope of some retraining.

Today I may be afraid of catching something from the priest, but I’m counting on catching something from Another other who is not driven by the social other (to paraphrase James Alison). I’m here to open myself to a mimetic contagion of a different kind. One that is free from rivalry and antagonistic reciprocity; and free from parsing out good and evil and choosing the good us over and against evil them.

I’m here hoping, like John, to receive myself through the eyes of the Other other. The One who is entirely outside our petty competitiveness, not to mention our sacrificial violence.

We six have returned to our pews and now await the benediction—our creaturely substantiation.

On these few points there is recollection within our family, on the rest of the story there is ambiguity. That’s probably because my father never made a thing about being a conscientious objector. Only his actions revealed his convictions; on the finer points, he was silent. There was no moralizing, no kitchen-table debates with phantom war mongers, no regimented training in nonviolence, and no banners hung from our house.

And yet, these many years later, I see how my father could have been a local embarrassment. Even on the most innocuous level, being a conscientious objector is like volunteering to be the skinny kid on a Charles Atlas beach. On the other end of the scale, CO’s are seen as traitors to cause and country. After the first world war the Canadian government, pressed by public opinion, rescinded the privileges of an 1873 Order in Council and barred entry to Mennonite immigrants. It was successfully repealed a few years later, but the passions that surround war,  specifically the second world war, again made ripe the possibility of targeted persecution.

I don’t know how those days unfolded for my father, and I don’t know how he felt or what his thoughts were in the middle of the night. What I’m awake to today is that conscientious objectors do not, and did not, take the path of least resistance. Often bearing social outcast status, they took on roles of noncombatant military service, from serving on medical wards to gathering the injured from the front lines. Some were asked, or were enlisted, for medical experiments, some volunteered for prolonged starvation in order to study its effect and apply the knowledge gained to help POWs. The more fortunate ones, like my father, were allowed to stay where they were and work.

All this has settled in upon me and my many years of adherence to "just war" theory in an unexpected way; like some epigenetic trigger pulled, like the apple not falling far from the tree, I’ve been slowly encircled by the notion that the fundamental evil of violence can only be met by nonviolence; that nonviolence is not an addendum to Christianity, but is at the heart; that the life and the death of Jesus exposes the myth of redemptive violence. I have come to see that not only the theology, but the anthropology of the cross, is this: that peace through blood shed is not merely temporary, but finally a lie.

I do not have the strength of my father. But I do hope to embrace his example—that it is possible to have the quiet dexterity of heart and mind to compassionately remember the war dead, without in any way honouring and legitimizing war.

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.