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."

And if only we could grasp the truth of metaphor, this wouldn’t be unreasonable language to help describe instances of evil. If we could, imagine.

But this is our modern problem, our hangover: the keg of Scientific Method long tapped, the many draughts of spiritual materialism downed before grey dawn, our Christian heads aching and pounding, now thinking that a literal reading must be the only true reading, a fundamental reading, an inerrant, authoritative, infallible, inspired reading.

And in the empirical fog surrounding our Thomas Nelsons and Scofields, our imagination sputters out leaving us self-condemned by literalism’s stasis. In this exegetical irony we bind ourselves to errancy and ignorance.

Certainly a literal reading, what pre-Enlightenment folk called a "plain reading," is often a true reading. But many times a literal reading is an inferior reading or simply a nonsensical reading.

Biblical writers’ understanding of the nature of reality could not be more removed from our own. And too, our understanding of the purpose of literature is not that of a writer in the first-century. So to adopt a reading without wrestling with this is lazy and dishonest.

Because the problem of literalism is mistaking a flame for the fire. One facet for the whole gem. One colour the whole spectrum. You get my drift.

And so, Satan, is just that volitional metaphysical entity jamming up the works, devouring the undevout and looking for any chance to trip us up. What comes of such a failure is to miss the satanic, the evil, that hides within dehumanizing institutions—systems of domination. That lives at the heart of state repression—from forms of socialism to fascism—that exults in racism and patriarchy, and hides within bureaucracy and capitalism.

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.

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.

To become the thing you are not, quick-
march after your nearest obsession;
the one dressed up as fair desire,
the one that, if your hand was unclenched,
could be found filed under Romantic Lies.

To become what you are not,
bind yourself to acquisitive pursuit,
be a pawn to the approving glance,
a puppet to tomorrow’s fascination,
a slave to pomp and self-pity.

And when your heart is self-housed, 
and your mind oxidized by envy,
you will conclude that to be,
you must possess, not merely,
the object, but the other.

And so you arrive at connivance,
and betrayal, if it comes to that.
For most often, the prick
of existential lack, is sharpest
when with your choicest friend.

And in the furnace of ill-shapen want,
your surrogate victim is offered,
to the grim gods of scarcity.
And you—once earnest and eager disciple—
are hidden from mercy, hostage to malice.

But to become the possibility you are,
the shining dust of the hidden God,
simply love a model that is true,
and receive yourself through eyes,
that love you at depth.

–

Thirty years ago, poet Pat Lowther was to read at the Ironworkers Hall on Columbia Street in Vancouver, with Patrick Lane, David Day and Peter Trower. Just a few days before the event, Pat Lowther was murdered with a hammer by her husband Roy, also a poet. Roy had not been invited to read. Earlier, he had raged on the phone to Patrick Lane, "She’s got no right to take my only audience away from me." Roy Lowther died in prison in 1985.

I follow them for three blocks–four. They lead past the car dealership by my condo. Then the wound stops—a gathering of drops. They must think, and think fast. They move on and pull me across the street. I flash to an incident, see a knife, a tear in flesh, a sprint.

I follow still. They pass my door. Leave me to my couch and pillow and book shelf and blue screen and dreams of country. They walk, talking six-foot steps and disappear downtown.

~

When Abraham walked down from that stony hill in Moriah, having escaped indictment, what glory was there left to him? Still, he was blessed, apparently, added to, which his wife found more than amusing. But like drops of blood on a sidewalk, there is far more to the story.