“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

“A religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man’s social conditions….Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind the Marxists like to see—an opiate of the people.”

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, quality and freedom for their spirit. Many people fear nothing more terribly than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everybody.”

“All too many of those who live in affluent America ignore those who exist in poor America. In doing so, the affluent Americans will eventually have to face themselves with the question that Eichmann chose to ignore: How responsible am I for the well-being of my fellows? To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.”

“Let us say it boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the law breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.”

“There is nothing that expressed massive civil disobedience any more than the Boston Tea Party, and yet we give this to our young people and our students as a part of the great tradition of our nation. So I think we are in good company when we break unjust laws, and I think those who are willing to do it and accept the penalty are those who are part of the saving of the nation.”

“The straitjackets of race prejudice and discrimination do not wear only Southern labels. The subtle, psychological technique of the North has approached in its ugliness and victimization of the Negro the outright terror and open brutality of the South.”

“Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato or Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermo-dynamics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

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.

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.

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.

We live in a violent world. That’s hardly a secret. We have been formed by a culture of war and violence, the nature of which we are mostly unconscious of, and from which we wilfully keep ourselves hidden. Violence is so embedded that it’s impossible to imagine a world without it. That we live in an incarnate world sustained by intrusions of grace, well, that’s a little less obvious—almost imperceptible.

Two days ago our country intentionally remembered war. “Lest We Forget" was on billboards and on the front of buses. We remembered, so to honour the war dead, and we remembered so that we can in some way dispel war, so that at least violence of the scale once experienced, can be named and thwarted. And we hope that in the naming, in the remembering, something like grace and peace may appear.

Of course war cannot create peace and violence is never the cause of grace; but it can, in its gross distortions of social solidarity and communal life, reflect back to us our own propensity toward envy and rivalry, and in this uncovering, perhaps give us the unwelcome gift of seeing ourselves as we truly are—which if it happens is an occasion of mercy.

A personal and writerly goal I repeatedly come short of, which is never less a goal, is to stay awake to those intrusions of grace and occasions of mercy. And such was this past Friday where 30 or so people took the afternoon to study peace, and then took the evening to walk and pray, from City Hall to Canada Place, from the Gandhi Memorial to the War Memorial.

And we sang that old promise: to study war no more. But with the understanding that if we are blind to the nature of violence, and if we miss the intrusions of grace, then war, rivalry, ongoing reciprocal violence will remain our reality.

Once in our history the nature of violence was laid bare through a definitive intrusion of grace. And no one wanted to see. Once, the truth about human and social identity was spoken, and no one wanted to hear. Two thousand years later, through two global wars, the invention of a nuclear end, many genocides, and an imminent ecological disaster, and still we refuse to see and hear.

To take a day to remember and honour those who died fighting for our country is good. But it’s not, and never was, good enough. For if we stop short of trying to authentically identify with not merely our own, but all victims of war, and all the fallen, then we have already forgotten. Because failing to see ourselves as original combatants, failing to understand the (Good Samaritan) point about who our neighbour is simply leaves all the old mechanisms of sacrificial violence in place.

In effect, continuing to believe that war is occasionally necessary and normal, and that violence is in some way part grace, smothers every intrusion of grace; and it is this that even now is ushering in our apocalyptic era. That we Christians, above all, have failed to see and hear the living words of the one we purport to follow, and have even used the texts as justification for war and sacrificial violence—unconsciously giving the nod to Caiaphas over Christ—is perhaps our greatest shame.

Yet, despite our failure there are still intrusions of mercy. And if time is no longer one of them, perhaps violence’s own undoing is. For we are, as no other age has been, witnesses of violence’s growing excesses; and in this, we see its utter ineffectiveness to create or change anything—except, as Rene Girard says, to escalate to extremes. The choice is now plain. To not choose complete repudiation of violence is to choose annihilation. Seeing the truth behind the false reality of violence to the extent that these two alternatives are now clear, is not a prelude to despair, but of hope—a luminous intrusion.

This is in no way a protest or replacement for traditional Remembrance Day observation, it’s simply a way of remembering all victims of war, and honouring and remembering the way of peace.

Here is an Edmonton Journal interview with Scott Key, organizer of the Prayer Walk and Chair of  Edmonton Ecumenical Peace Network.

Nov. 11 Timetable

- 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. All Saint’s Anglican Cathedral (10035 103rd St.): War and Peace, a workshop exploring different ways Christians have interpreted the teachings of Jesus, led by Rev. Tim Chesterton, rector of St. Margaret’s Anglican Church.

- 6 p.m. McDougall United Church (10025 101st St.): Inter-denominational prayer service.

- 7 p.m. City Hall: Public prayer walk for peace begins, with stops at the Gandhi statue, Canada Place and the Jasper Avenue war memorial.

What appears to have raised Dr. Newcombe’s eyebrows the extra inch however is the fact that ‘progressive’ evangelical Jim Wallis, a thorn in the fleshy-cheek to less ‘progressive’ evangelicals, is saying that Jesus is already there. Of course if that’s true it’s all too embarrassing to the more pious E’s who have built a safe spiritual Jesus on the ethical absolutes of the Almighty. You see how it looks bad for this Jesus to be at the protest; too many occasions for misunderstanding, even scandal, maybe jail time.

This doesn’t seem to bother Jim Wallis, who’s already been arrested 22 times, and is married to a Vicar—I suspect some evangelicals think the later should lead to the former—but of course the arrests  have all been for civil disobedience. Wallis has tempered his activism as he’s aged; these days he’s even rubbing tailored elbows and offering spiritual advice (progressive evangelical advice one supposes) to Mr. Obama. Hard to say if this has helped anything.

In any case, you see how these two evangelicals may simply end up glaring at one another across the valley of Raphaim; Jim’s Jesus isn’t Jerry’s Jesus. Jim’s Jesus, is, well, an able-bodied misfit and first century hippie with a work ethic that kind of sucks, at least one that tapered off, making him a poor role model for hard working fishermen; then again he was irresponsible from the age of 12, had questionable family values, was a nard wastrel, wine maker, anointer of people with oil from undisclosed herbs, curser of fruitless fig trees and religious systems (must have seen a link), who was apparently okay getting arrested to make a point, noncompliant while in custody, and to the end—forgiving of thieves and most everyone else…I mean hardly a ‘Truth In Action’ kind of guy—even though he claimed all he did was do the truth—just someone who might like to hide out among the rabble at the "Occupation." I suspect Dr. Newcombe’s Jesus might be easier to spot down at the park.

Thing is, as both Jim and Jerry know, Jesus is the merciful type…forgiving even of fraudulent CEO’s and their tax lawyers. Perhaps you’ll recall Zacchaeus’ bump with Jesus, so smitten that he gave half of his possessions to the poor and paid back everyone he cheated—four times the amount. Imagine now, with me, Goldman’s CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, up a tree in Zuccotti Park, scanning the crowd…and that’s why I’m going with Jim’s Jesus.

Hegel perfected his dialectical theory which was adopted by Karl Marx. Clausewitz wrote On War, a book still read by Generals the world over. And Holderlin withdrew.

Holderlin’s "madness" was precipitated by the proximity of the gods. His torment was acute. He oscillated between self-glorification and self-repudiation. The gods were never at a proper distance.

Holderlin desperately wanted to be like his mentor and poet friend, Schelling. Along the way however he became conscious of his own "insatiable ambition" and knew his desperate campaign for the world’s affection, represented by the affection of a few, would destroy him. He rented a tower from Mr. Zimmer, a Tübingen carpenter, moved in and set up living there for 40 years. He paced, recited poetry and would lay prostrate for hours at a time.

He withdrew into silence; still, he received guests. Most thought him mad, but those who visited knew him to be lucid and engaging. (I like to think that his friends Schelling and Hegel visited, but there’s no record.)

He saw that a God that could be appropriated was a God of destruction; he gave up believing in the Absolute, and found his way by finding the right distance from God.

And he wrote. He wrote through the red sunrise and east wind of self-loathing—wrote through the starry nights, electric and voluptuous—his mind rising above the world. By years of practice he endured the prodigious swings.

He kept an internal Farmer’s Almanac and was able to forecast a poem. He saw when a line was ripe for harvest and when a single word needed weeding; he waited on his body to inform his meter.  He knew fairly well, the time for planting a notion.

His conversion came slowly—40 years of walking and lying prostrate. He returned to a simple form of Christianity; a reverence for Christ. Having suffered from his mentors, and from the pressure of friends and fashion he entered a relationship that was without rivalry. Rising to the nobility of silence; he found a presence in absence that was not present in proximity.

Settling into a mysticism of hope, Holderlin wrote these words:

Near is
and difficult to grasp, the God.
But where danger threatens
that which saves from it also grows.

(This post was gleaned primarily from the book, Battling to the End – Rene Girard)

I wanted to expose what I saw as our eroticism of revenge. But then I wondered whether the death of Bin Laden might help heal deep wounds experienced by the families who lost so much.

As many have done, I’ve imagined myself a father, husband, friend, of someone murdered on that horrific day a decade ago. And I am at loss.

By accounts, some are finding a sense of what they call closure, and others consider Bin Laden’s killing a hollow thing, a pyrrhic closure.

And so anything I say from here on must come under the judgement of people who were closest to the tragedy. As it is, I am neither counsellor nor sociologist, I am an expert of nothing much—simply an observer.

What struck me then was not the legitimate desire of justice for the aggrieved, but the fascination that polarized a nation; the great western gallery was suddenly galvanized by the death of one man. There was a surge of nationalism; an instant brotherhood through focused hatred; unification by hostility; coalesced by being on the good, right side.

Then came the voices of past administrations: justice is done, we will be avenged, time is no object. (No mention here that our war on terror has cut down civilian families far surpassing the number of those on 9/11.) Now we are freer and safer and stronger—say the voices—our lives have been returned to us.

There was dancing and chanting in the streets, at state capitals; and at the hallowed centres of Capitol Hill and Ground Zero there was near delirium—all ritual aspects of the sacred mechanism of security and supposed peace through singular reprisal—with the latent lust for ready violence heavy in the air.

It can’t be sustained of course. Now a couple weeks later there are reasoned discussions on the symbolic versus the real. Bin Laden: cipher or malevolent genius. His death: harbinger for peace talks or ersatz victory or catalyst for terror?

But it’s not the event itself—it’s our response to the event that we should consider. And the question we should face is whether we have the self-awareness to see that irrational fanaticisms are not one-sided.

Christianism—that strange brew of nationalism and fundamentalism and resent-driven neoconservatism—and Islamism are twins. They are locked together in an escalation of extremes.

Here, biblical apocalyptic literature begins to make sense. Not as the view of God’s end-time wrath dropped on the heads of the unregenerate, but in the anthropological understanding that our own wrath is visited and revisited upon ourselves by unrestrained reciprocal rivalry.

When scapegoats are fed to the fire like sticks—their power to restrain violence ever decreasing—when the pockets and periods without violence steadily shrink, when military technology has become master, and is its own raison d’etre, when government policies feed the machinery of war, and when governments themselves have lost the means to control violence, total war becomes a daily possibility.

Add to this our acceptance of violence as legitimate for sustaining communal life, our complicit silence that feeds the notion that war is normative—that war is simply a prolongation of policy—and talk of peace is thought to be incomprehensible, passé, or a romantic delusion.  And the apocalyptic spectre grows.

Yet even here, hope is not incompatible. We can recover our souls and our sanity. The way of empathy, kindness, and mercy, born out by leaving violence behind, is the narrow way opened to us and modelled in the life of Jesus.

Salvation is given meaning in the denouncement of violence. And not only in obvious violence, but in the low-key violence of commerce, and in our own grasping skirmishes and daily retaliations.

In detachment, in unlearning envy, in relearning desire through eyes unmoved by fear and death, eyes that delight in us, that gently hold us, that invite us out of “us and them”, to “we”, there is hope and peace.