April 14th, 2008 09:16pm
Stephen T. Berg
Anger, articulate and otherwise, percolated up through the speeches at Saturday’s rally for justice at the Legislature. The anger was directed at a succession of governments and a justice system, together perceived as coddlers of young killers. The message: when it comes to youthful perpetrators of violent crime, judges and legislators are milksops, afraid of ramping up minimum penalties and ambivalent about meaningful consequences.
No one there was ready to take up a vigilante stance, but the frustration of deferred justice was great enough to wonder about this, at least as a future subtext. Was this an option discussed around the tables of homes that had lost a son, daughter, friend? If so, entirely understandable, perhaps even cathartic.
I had the feeling though, sitting there on the edge of the small crowd, that people were wrestling with a Cohenesque, “things sliding in all directions” future. Not yet apocalyptic, but close. People were asking, how did we get here and where are we going? When murderers were doing one sixth of a twenty-five year life sentence, when cutthroats were getting out on bail and allowed to roam for two years before being called back to an ineffectual trial, when punks with bats take the conscious-life of an elderly man and are hand slapped and given warnings as they head out on their parole, where then is the light of the future?
There are other forces at work of course, economic and bureaucratic, but primarily, the gradual reduction of penalties for violent crime is a consequence of our increased sensitivity to victims. It’s not that we don’t recognize that those who have been maimed or killed, or those who have lost a son or daughter, sibling or friend, to violent crime are truly victims. It’s that we have also come to see that perpetrators of violent crime may also have been victims. And we believe justice isn’t done if a crime is taken only at face value. The “story” of violence and crime, we believe, is beneath the surface. As well, because we see the indicted as at least part victim, we believe in rehabilitation. This we take as a sign of a progressive society.
But for those who have lost someone intimately close to them this is nothing but an egregious twist of logic. Evidence of a screwed-up society. And while I couldn’t agree with all that was said, neither could I disparage or ignore any of the voices.
Where and when will justice and mercy kiss? I don’t know. Until we enter an age of wisdom and peace, we will have to strive to weigh things rightly to keep from entering the alternative. From the slain to the slayer, from the injured to the inured, from grieving family to grieving family we will need to come together with our scales and balances, not mentioning forgiveness, just working on fairness as a start toward other possibilities. And fairness requires that we listen first to the voices of the aggrieved. By taking away their recourse to justice there will be nothing for them to offer back.
April 12th, 2008 12:10pm
Stephen T. Berg
The Imam is tall, slender, academic but in a wholly engaging way. The Pastor has a boxer’s build and is as fiery and passionate as a Pentecostal can be. The Imam’s eyes light up with experience and intelligence as he speaks of his Islamic faith. The pastor, reflecting on Christianity’s teaching on peace, radiates an urgent and hard won love. The Imam looks at the pastor with the tenderness of a mother and says he likes him even though he’s a Christian. The pastor returns the gaze and then looking back at the camera, says, “I love him because my faith teaches me to love my brothers. He is my brother, we are husband and wife, for the sake of ourselves and of our children we must stay together, we must not separate.”
This exchange of humanity goes on even as they speak of the teachings of their diverse faiths. A diversity says the pastor–without any note of paradox–that allows them to live together. And they have been living and traveling together for the past 12 years.
This dialogue and human exchange is rare enough. Now consider that the contextual experience, the immediate history of each man is one of having personal and community property burned and looted, and as having lost family members to a raging violence endorsed and perpetrated by each of these men upon the other and upon their perspective religious communities.
I had the opportunity to view this remarkable documentary the other evening at All Saints. It’s a film of reconciliation–of how perpetrators of violence become instigators of peace–and it should be required viewing in mosques and churches across the country.
When you consider the pressure upon these men to take revenge, to keep the cycle of reciprocal violence going, when you consider the slender thread of trust that had to hold all the these opposites and the oppositions together, that had to overcome the welling up of unbidden hate…as for example–in the early stages of their relationship, the very real temptation the pastor had to smother the sleeping Imam with his own pillow–you understand you are in the presence of something like a modern miracle.
You understand that in some deeper sense both are Imams, and both are pastors. They have become brothers. Not because either has given up their faith. In fact, we come to see that it’s precisely a closely practised faith that allows each man a connecting point beyond their situations.
April 9th, 2008 06:37am
Stephen T. Berg
In Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and Glory, the priest, known only as the “whiskey priest,” does not find his salvation…at least not in any way that would be recognized by his church. He is, as he himself says, a bad priest, given to drink, slipshod at his clerical tasks, and somewhere along the way he fathered a child.
There had been a time he was considered a good priest. A time when he believed it himself. And if not quite believing it, believing he could aspire to such as long as stayed within the structures of the church with his piety out front and hardened around him. 
But it’s when he’s on the out, living within the givenness of his “sin,” that God meets him. And it’s in a soiled and stinking and overcrowded prison cell, where he finds beauty and his own humanity. Here in the company of his own, the weakest kind of flesh, his heart swells with the compassion of Christ. Swells even for the immensely pious woman who counts herself far above the fornicators, thieves, drunkards and beggars that share the cell.
This, then, was the “whiskey priest’s” revelation: “When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity…that was a quality God’s image carried with it…when you saw the lines at the corner of the eyes, the shape of the mouth and how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”
- The prison scene is not only one of the great pieces of English literature, it is a scene of profound theological depth.
- Greene published this book in 1940. In 1954 a ban was placed upon the book by the Vatican.
April 6th, 2008 03:33pm
Stephen T. Berg
Friday evening was a Cuban reunion of sorts. We four couples (and some friends) who had shared company in Cuba, gathered at the Blue Chair cafe to hear the great Bomba. Three of the six-piece band are from Cuba. 
Our friend Philip, who has no social hesitations, soon discovered the details of the Cuban musicians, and would have, if it were possible, invited them back to his place for an extended concert. This is something he successfully accomplished with another band during our stay in Veradero. I listened in as Luis, the leader, explained to Phil how his association with an artists community allowed him leave of Cuba as well as an ability to make return visits. This however, wasn’t the case with the drummer from Matanzas. Such are the mysteries of Cuban emigration.
I was again reminded of our visit to Cardenas. On that late February day we rode a short ten miles from Veradero to Cardenas to met Oscar, a friend our companions John and Odette had met on a previous visit to Cuba. Our taxi, after its race with a 58ish Pontiac–a race that gave us several life-flashing-in-front-of-our-eyes moments–drove into what John called, “the real Cuba.”
The “real” Cuba is an eviscerated thing. Like the two-days-dead chicken we came across on a sidewalk at the edge of the city, it’s splayed body open to reading. But Cuba is harder to read than chicken entrails.
The checkered entrepreneurial glory of the 20’s–50’s was long gone. But so too were the dreams of a struggle that was to sweep away a corrupt dictatorship and leave a collective, in want of nothing, in its wake.
Today Cuba is one animal with two backs. The increasingly prosperous Cuba, paid for by tours of whites; and the decaying Cuba, haunted by principals of a revolution that looks out from billboards and sides of buildings through the eyes of the two (once) revered revolutionaries. But 
those eyes are now full of smoke, the revolutionary symbols, the beret and star, cigar in teeth, the bearded profile, the fatigues, rendered hollow, bereft by the gutted sugar cane factory, the eternally postponed train, and the kneeling and prostrate habitations.
We walked this prone, prostrate Cuba for an afternoon. Narrow streets, fissured and pock marked, cracked open domiciles slumping on burdened sidewalks. Cinder block and and concrete squares. Blistered paint on the ironwork that covers window holes. And occasional architectural intrigue, as with the stone cathedral–closed to comers.
And other sightings and impressions: Clusters of young people sitting on sidewalks, backs to the walls. Old men, selling guava, shouting in the street, lost faith in ideology, a child playing with a 30 foot length of video tape. Two young men playing dominoes on a make-shift table held on their laps. And everywhere, underfed horses pulling carts for passengers–calling them coaches would be an overstatement. And ubiquitous bicycles exceeding load limits–one man balancing a washing machine on what had to be a fortified rear fender.
Later in the afternoon, Oscar, our new friend and guide, hailed us a buggy and off we went to his house. We clacked along curling pavement, and across 
cracked stone intersections. We rode the wrong way on streets designated as one-way, but the traffic rules are suspended, all except the main streets.
Upon arriving we met Oscar’s mother, a compact woman who smiled incessantly. We were invited to sit down in the front room and were offered coffee and rum. We talked of family. The neighbour was introduced as Oscar’s second mom. She also smiled constantly. We asked her, through Oscar, about her family. We were told of children, uncles and aunts. The neighbour very much hoped we would come to see her home as well.
Shortly an uncle of Oscar’s arrived. He manoeuvred his bicycle into the small portico and sat down on the edge of a couch. He was wearing a forties suit coat, faded blue baseball cap–permanently fixed–rolled up white slacks and sneakers with toe-holes worn through the canvass. He was 87. We asked about his occupation. He was mechanic and had worked on diesel trains. John asked about his life before the revolution and he pinched his lips and shook his head, as if keeping a lock on stories that could cost things untold. Stories now lost through a controlling, ubiquitous, inexplicable fear.
We talked of lighter things… Oscar had helped build his family’s house. A two-
story concrete square, comfortable, and by Cardenas’ standards, of a higher stratum. From the front room we toured the kitchen and bathroom and an upstairs with its three small partitions forming bedrooms. A small patio at the rear of the house had a large concrete sink and an enclosure with a pig. We returned from the brief tour and shooed away flies attracted to the sweet rum.
Oscar had retrieved a cd-player and put on some Latino music. John, and his wife Odette–who never misses a chance to dance–mamboed round the front room. We talked more and smiled at each other, and as guests, aware of a simple charm presiding over our time.
Our friends had brought Oscar gifts. Newspapers, reading material (Oscar loves to study language, and if there is a key to advancement and even emigration, it’s through language.) Also t-shirts, a new pair of Dockers and a CD-Walkman. Every item was passed around. It was Christmas, a birthday…more rum was offered, cigarettes were lit.
The father came through and shook hands, silent but smiling, retrieving a smoke and then leaving, to walk or wander. Oscar’s eight year old nephew arrived back from school. Neat and clean in his uniform. Without hesitation or instruction, he offered me his hand. Demure and smiling he moved on, bending forward and in turn kissing Deb and Odette on their cheeks and shaking John’s hand before skipping upstairs to change.
What will become of the light in the nephew eyes? What of Oscar? Of Cardenas? Earlier, while walking the streets by the crumbling factories along the shore, Oscar repeatedly dreamt-out-loud about his hope of leaving Cuba. A grey government migration building, imposing and vacant except for one car in the drive, spoke a death-knell to his hope. But still, despite this desperate longing came the Cuban laugh in all its expansive capacity.
There lives here a gracious horizon of life, perhaps ennobled by threads of hope, woven together. There is an obvious decrepitude on all the surfaces. Yet, from within, the colours of survival, of life and love and breath, shine through at places. All the colours of a vibrant spirit, of life not yet utterly defeated.
April 3rd, 2008 08:30am
Stephen T. Berg
Soren Kierkegaard is hands down my favourite philosopher, not that I know that many philosophers. I’m a picker and chooser–a collector that doesn’t always understand what he collects, but is compelled to collect just the same–as I think I’ve mentioned someplace before. The reason I choose Soren is because he too is skinny and likes walking.
Witness: “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.” SK
Kierkegaard perambulated himself into some truly insightful ideas. Yesterday, I stumbled upon one of his thoughts that explained why atheism doesn’t stand a chance in hell of becoming pervasively accepted. At least until someone even more brilliant than Stephen Hawkings forever takes the meta out metaphysics, and is able to communicate it to the unwashed lot of us.
Here’s Kierkegaard (anticipating Rene Girard’s mimetic desire theory): Please forgive Soren’s gender biased language–it was 1850.
For from “the others,” naturally, one properly only learns to know what the others are–it is in this way the world would beguile a man from being himself. “The others,” in turn do not know at all what they themselves are, but only what the others are. There is only One who knows what He Himself is, that is God; and He knows also what every man in himself is, for it is precisely by being before God that every man is. The man who is not before God is not himself, for this a man can be only by being before Him who is in and for Himself. If one is oneself by being in Him who is in and for Himself, one can be in others or before others, but one cannot by being merely before others be oneself. (Christian Discourses)
The double bind of being human is that we seek to become ourselves by consciously and subconsciously imitating each other. But without a model beyond our collective selves we never find a self. And so, as Charles Bellinger (whose essay comparing Girard and Kierkegaard I’m completely indebted to here) points out, the only context in which we gain coherence, stability, and purpose is found in the transcendent relationship between us and God our Creator.
So wouldn’t it be the case that even if there were no God, our existential lack, that small niggling, sometimes overwhelming sense of incompleteness, would never allow us to be content with a closed, nobody-here-but-us-chickens universe?
April 1st, 2008 08:32am
Stephen T. Berg
In the first whisper of morning light I watched a 20 foot cedar move its slow movement outside the sitting room window at St Peter’s Abbey. A picture of a child running through tall grass by the edge of town moved in my mind. Later in the day I would walk the silent monastery halls, arm in arm with Father James, his 82 year old frame a little more bent, his step slightly slower, and he would say with that smiling voice, that he’s had enough birthdays. For most of his live he’s been a monk in community, and a hermit–so he knows how to let go.
But how do I let him go? How do I let anything go? Or, is this the monastic journey?
The evening before, over tea and raisin cookies, we talked, as we always did, about God, mindfulness, failings, innocence, history, loss, promise, personality, church… I’m not a great conversationalist, but in the presence of Fr. James I always feel elevated and connected through the simple give and take of words.
We talked about poetry too. On the drive to St. Peter’s Deb and I had stopped in Saskatoon. We took an unplanned detour and came across a used book store. I bought a book of Rilke poems. I didn’t know about the Duino Elegies–Rilke’s last work. I showed Father James my book, he laughed and said he was reading the same book.
How do you sustain the picture? The picture of the innocent child running through tall grass and feeling as though she was entirely in God and God was entirely in her? How do you sustain a shot of heart-gladness that makes you feel as though death is behind you? That makes you feel a depth of forgiveness that precludes any sense you needed forgiving. Is this too the (monastic) journey? The letting go of the picture so that it can return again…the perpetual letting go, so as perhaps to enable it’s infinite return?
March 29th, 2008 05:38pm
Stephen T. Berg
Here's a link to my article in today's Edmonton Journal. The article is a reflection of my (attempted) Easter poem.
Icon of the crucifixion of Christ; of unknown origen.
March 26th, 2008 08:23pm
Stephen T. Berg
I finally had the sense to pick up Father Joe. The book had been in my “to read” pile for more than a year. Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul is a memoir of sorts. It’s a story about a seemingly unlikely relationship between the author Tony Hendra and a religious.
The book begins with the fourteen-year-old Tony who finds himself entangled with a married Catholic woman. When the husband, a sincere-to-a-fault Catholic, discovers the tryst, he whisks the boy off to get straightened out by a priest. The priest he meets is a gentle, stammering, quirky, and wise Benedictine monk named Father Joseph Warrillow. The monk is nothing like what he imagined and a bond develops between them.
So taken is Hendra with Father Joe that upon graduating from high school he is intent on joining the Benedictine community. However, Father Joe’s deeper wisdom is that he wait. Then in one of the more fascinating moments in the book, Hendra describes losing his faith, as if over night. The remainder of the book is a description of an alternately sinking and surfacing life. Hendra slides into substance abuse, goes through a ruined marriage, but the one anchor in his life is the non-judgemental Father Joe. It’s this relationship that, in the most practical sense, saves the author.
At every level it’s a wonderful story, but it might also be worth mentioning that 
Tony Hendra, while attending Cambridge, performed frequently with his friends and Monty Pythons-to-be, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. He was editor in chief of Spy magazine, and the original editor of National Lampoon. He also played Ian Faith in the movie, This Is Spinal Tap, and was the co-creator of Spitting Image. He has written frequently for New York, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, among other magazines.
–
The bad news: Just after I wrote this little review I learned that the “delinquency” of Hendra may have gone far deeper than the memoir divulged. When the book was published, Jesscia Henda, 39 at the time, “unable to bear the hypocrisy,” wrote that she had been sexually molested by her father when she was seven and that it happen two more times after that. The charges are denied by Hendra but the New York Times article, to my mind, seems credible.
So what do you do with a non-fiction memoir you profoundly enjoyed only to find that the author may have committed one of the most grievous and damaging of crimes?
What saves the book is that while it’s ostensibly about Tony Hendra, it is more properly about Father Joe, the joyful, generous, wise monk, who had the kind of presence that could save one from religious cynicism. In fact at the end of the book we learn of the immense impact this humble Benedictine monk had on hundreds of people, including Rowan Williams, currently the archbishop of Canterbury, and Princess Diana.
March 24th, 2008 10:02am
Stephen T. Berg
It’s the kind of spring morning that confuses itself with early fall. Hardly knowing its place or mode of presentation…it asks, “Should I be about receding or resurrecting?” And I with it, ask, what’s my place in this brown-grass-beside-cracked-sidewalk day?
Out of habit I’ve pointed myself to a door and a desk, but eight blocks is a long way on a morning such as this, and I’m disoriented. Where to find direction? The sky is closed for reading, its entrails sealed behind a splotchy blue grey hide. The cards falling from my sleeve are all jokers. And no tea leaves have escaped their perforated cells to rest on the bottom of cups. Where are the signs, my signs?
Yesterday I saw them and knew my place. Yesterday I felt somehow adjusted–kneeling beside a man bulky from folds of clothes, who smelled street-sour, and whose fingers were black from removing tobacco from butts. He came in half way through the Easter liturgy, sat down and rolled a cigarette, joining the six of us for the early service. When it was time, he was first at the eucharist rail and I steered toward him, lowering myself beside his already kneeling frame. He had the face of a pugilist…a George Chuvalo with long thick grey hair, stiff from dust.
The lot of us–an older man in a suit, a smartly-dressed business woman, an elderly woman with a broach, a middle-aged woman in flowered blouse, and a younger man in blue jeans who knew his way around the Book of Common Prayer– lined up like robins, mouths open, waiting for a wafer, some wine and over our heads, the sign. When Eucharist was done the man got up and not waiting for any closing hymns or prayers, walked out of the sanctuary, presumably through the front doors to light up his cigarette. Maureen, the presiding priest, thanked me for coming and I walked out, my way marked for me by a small wooden table covered with flowers in bloom.
Today the only things blooming are indoor daffodils on a counter beside a cash register. And the only thing holding them up is hairspray. They will have to do.
March 23rd, 2008 05:36pm
Stephen T. Berg
The following poem was written in response to a friend's far more clever poem. (See Holy Hangover comments.) In the likely event that my poem fails, an upcoming article will hopefully give it some crutches.
Osiris, Isis, Horus
shrouded in sacred awe
and swollen footed Oedipus
bearing our hidden flaw
You god's of death and life
phantasmic transformation
upon the canvass of strife
once goats, now exaltation
Yet flung among antiquity
is Jesus' low-brow myth
while crude and poor symbolically
are victims revealed herewith
O Adonis, child eternal
shield us from place and time
since before myth was ritual
but first came our crime
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The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
