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.

But then–like he’s caught a slip of horizon during all his spastic postulating–you see him lift his carked old head, sputter like he’s been under water, and like a low pressure system moving off shore his brain, he calms himself and begins to wax effulgent. "Look," he says. "See?" There’s sweetness in wine, and joy in food, and delight in work–and beauty in the seasons with time enough for all things, and all things in their time.

He hath made every [thing] beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.

And at that moment, with that knowledge, he plops down like a child in a warm bath with toys. Thinks better about wanting to be God, or know God-stuff, which he also now realizes is about the same thing. And he receives his inscrutable beginning and end.

And that’s the mad preacher. He’s a beast when he’s on you, but a bonny breeze when walking with you.

The good thing about reading him once a year is that you’re forced to let up on the gas pedal. Maybe even roll down the window and let some self-forgiveness wash through and nourish that inner-darling of yours.

You say, this year, I’m not going to take myself so seriously; so that maybe, I can take love and compassion and beauty more seriously. And perhaps you write something down–so you can go back to it–like: All my crazy shooing and flapping at all those ducks, trying to get them in the same old row, well, I’m just going to let them go free range. And you spy the health in that.

And now, when those sage contemporary prophets, Steely Dan, ask the fishbone-in-throat question: Are you reelin’ in the years, stowin’ away the time? –you laugh, because you’re seeing clearly enough, thanks to the preacher, to stop reelin’ and stowin’, and let what’s left of the magic float up.

Because now you see that we’re under the slippery illusion that there’s no slow magic left–which is so 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, and by fast medicine, and fast solutions, and 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 by the rules we set in place yesterday–which leaves us so starved for mystery that crop circles seem worthy of our singular devotion.

The preacher seems to have it about right. There is an inexorable Spirit moving below the crust, breaking up our categories and controls, working with us when we choose love and working around us—and leaving us to our isolations—when we choose envy and indifference.

Me, I’m going to do my best to hang in with the preacher. Sure, he’ll wake me in the night and scare the guano out of me with his vex’s. But when the sun comes up, like it does, he’ll be like, "Hey, sleepy boy, look, see? here’s your nectar necklace."

I wait, dawn is promised. These days I take my sunrises anyway I can get them. Brightly mirrored on glass-sided high-rises. In pale auras surrounding inner-city towers. Angular, in frames, squares and rectangles. Muted on glazed concrete. Even parodied by 30 stories of orange poly tarps, draped over a gestating condo. And if I can’t get them here, I remember them.

I remember another window on a hill out of town. I’m there. Red horizon streaks swell, become redder, and then, as if their own brilliance was too much to bear,  they loosen their terrestrial grip and spread themselves into soft shades of coral and meadowlark-breast yellow.

Sunrises belong to bodies. They speak possibility, they show up the lie of just another sunrise. They burn away the ethereal feel of indoors. The sunrise you receive today deposits itself and is stored in somatic cells for a future smile.

Yesterday evening, unsmiling, I walked home, east past the condos, past the strip mall, and my mind walked into an open field and watched the last of twilight play through a row of naked poplars.

This morning, along the less obstructed view south of the CN Tower, I see some crimson at the edge of town. And then I see it rise in the inexplicable smile of a young woman crossing 104 Avenue.

Last night, on Edmonton’s inaugural Prayer Walk for Peace we wore white doves and we remembered.

I went because on Remembrance Day I wanted to remember our soldiers, but I wanted to remember soldiers on both sides of war. I wanted to remember all victims of war and violence.

We were over a hundred strong. Mennonites, Quakers, other Christians for active nonviolence, brought together, not to demonstrate or to protest Remembrance Day, but to open it up to broader possibilities.

To not only remember, but to light up the message that there is no glory in war, that there is no peace as a result of war, that there are no just wars, no reasonable wars, that to remember only our side, only our own soldiers, is often used as justification for more war.

And so we stood and lit candles on the steps of city hall, considered a world beyond violence at the Gandhi statue by the Library, prayed for our policy makers at Canada Place and sang Francis of Assisi’s hymn–considering our own inner peace–at the war memorial on Jasper Avenue.

See you there next year.

Programs, projects, missions–political or religious–that emphasize group identity or national security, that are premised upon technique and efficiency, diminish our possibilities by fencing ourselves off from reality. And so we turn neighbours into antagonists, see enemies as inhuman, and secure our comfort at the inevitable expense of the poor.

We need people of action–not people of activity. But being a person of action and not merely activity, is always risking being misunderstood, ignored, judged, derided, disliked, or vilified. But an even greater struggle for the true activist is in facing her own self doubts, illusions, disillusions, and self-intoxication. Courage to sit with these, to explore what they might teach, is the necessary work of an activist. The true activist does not lose herself in that embrace, she only learns the truth about herself and is therefore capable of true engagement with the world.

Who has a wide vision? Who acts for human maturity? Who continues to act in the apparent absence of promise? Who acts with faith that our broken acts of compassion are yet redeemable by a larger spirit? Who understands that there is something greater at work, but that this larger spirit is only released through local acts of mercy and charity?

As Christians, our job is to disappear in the world and join the ranks of all those doing the work of personal disarmament, of creative protest, of active peace, of love. That is, as Christians, our job may very well be to become non-Christian.

This article published in the Edmonton Journal yesterday was a small expansion of a previous post. International Peace Day being September 21, it was also five days late, and so was edited accordingly. Nevertheless the important parts were retained. Basically it’s me banging my drum again.

It’s our move…

Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end
of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun.  -a Psalm

We sat on wet sand beside a cranky ocean. Caught hermit crabs in tide pools before dusk. Decided their makeshift houses gave them their makeshift lives. Then we set them free.

The rain came. A gray dome close as raised hands delivered a torrent that covered our driftwood shelter and pooled around our bedding.

Soaked. Denim stuck to skinny frames, hair in wet ropes falling outside jacket hoods. Someone had a flare, but even with that a fire was impossible and we hugged ourselves under low spruce boughs.

We shared a screw-top bottle of syrupy wine and shivered and watched a streak of dull orange return a reluctant horizon.

The dome lifted leaving a moon-shot mist, illuminating a silver-grey sea. Scattered blue dots flamed through gaping clouds.

We warmed ourselves by running across acres of sand. We jumped toward the surf, scrambled over shaley rock and barnacle covered boulders. We gamed it–and dared each other to find as many rock islands for our feet as we could; we flew farther out over the water–every successful leap becoming a possibility for one more. A body went down on the slick seaweed beside me and I hesitated. The wind was up spraying foam flecks and salt over our wet faces.

The tide surprised us and we needed a different route to make our retreat.

Safe on flat shore rocks we sat on our heels and caught our breath.

That’s when we saw the lights, a continent away, surging up and falling back like notes on a steel guitar. Marking time in troughs and swells. Looming, brooding lights. They kept us company for the night. Life bobbing on the high seas. Hermits on fishing boats.

A warm mid-morning sun bleach-dried our clothes and loosened our limbs and we slept.

The ocean woke us in the afternoon–quiet.

We looked up our tide pools and searched for our hermit crabs. We found some Black-eyes and Hairys living in an array of mollusk carapace’s. Some were on the lookout for new hermitages.

Sometimes you need to change shells–trade up.

The Elders are shining a light on a weekly Palestinian demonstration, and in doing so supporting one of the longest-running and best organized protest operations in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s a protest that draws several hundred Palestinians every Friday, and has for almost five years, and is, for the most part, nonviolent.

With the moral weight of The Elders behind the protest, the pressure on Israel to withdraw increases–perhaps dramatically. That’s optimistic but Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela and the others are no strangers to the international scene and they understand that success in undermining apartheid will only come through more efforts at exposing what is happening in places like East Jerusalem.

Here’s to The Elders continuing the campaign for a Palestine free from occupation. The Wall must be dismantled and the Palestinians given a home.

In the mean time this once anonymous farming village will continue to be a symbol of Palestinian civil disobedience.

Use your voice to help press the U.S and U.K to take action. The U.K. and U.S. have an unparalleled opportunity to take action, since they serve as President of the U.N. Security Council in August and September respectively.

In the mean time opposition leader Suu Kyi, detained for more than 14 of the past 20 years, has been sentenced to another 18 months of house arrest (August 11) after being found guilty of breaking the terms of her detention by sheltering the American “intruder,” John Yettaw.

Aung San Suu Kyi has asked us to “Please use your liberty to promote ours.”