Hope Mission was contacted about the problem of homeless veterans. At this stage it’s more of a potential problem. But it’s a problem that our governing Conservatives may want to do better than sleep through.
Here, Paula Simons does a good job at “frying Calgary MP Rob Anders’ bacon.”
You know I hardly blame the guy for falling asleep in the House during Question Period, but when it comes to veterans struggling with psychological wounds from a war supported by the party he represents, one has to say, Wake Up already. At the very least, if there’s a medical problem here that needs addressing, admit it and get engaged.
You say I shine like a rising sun.
But how can I trust you?
Your news comes to me second hand.
Through the hands of several dead scribes.
First let me join you at the Sea of Galilee
and stand at the shore and feel the wind
from the Golan hills stir up the waves
and watch you dance on the foam.
Or at the Dead Sea, let me watch
you sink beneath the still surface
and lie at the bottom like a shoe.
You say, Come now, these are tokens for children.
And what is the Dead Sea
but a salt lick for born-again tourists?
You say if I could see me through your eyes
the earth would slow and time would stop
and death would fall behind me
like a yellow line behind a speeding rear window.
But why should I believe you when
last night I heard Angel at the dumpster.
She was inside tearing open the plastic bags
looking for a can to crumple and collect.
Yesterday I tried telling her what you told me;
about her having a beautiful heart
if only she could see it;
and if she saw it she might crawl right out
of that skip into the womb of a new world.
She looked at me with sympathetic eyes
and said, How can I trust you?
Your news comes to me through a book.
First come help me with these cans.
A friend linked me up with this article. I think it has a kinship with Grow Mercy.
What Margaret Wheatley describes in this short essay is not hopelessness as we commonly think of it, but a kind of hopelessness that can liberate us from being controlled by outcomes. Results, outcomes, is the language of the day. We are slaves to effectiveness. Not that these are unimportant, rather, they are not the final criteria for measuring value or success; they do not offer us meaning.
However, giving up the hope that things will turn out well is to walk a dark valley. It is to live with disorientation and misunderstanding and insecurity. But perhaps it is only here where we learn the relative worth of positive outcomes, as compared to the real worth of relationship. Then, what is done is not for outcomes, what is done, is done because it is right. And what is right has everything to do with nurturing human relationships—something that effectiveness, results, know little about.
Wheatley wrote this a year after 9-11. No matter, she could have written it yesterday.
As the world grows ever darker, I’ve been forcing myself to think about hope. I watch as the world and the people near me experience increased grief and suffering. As aggression and violence move into all relationships, personal and global. As decisions are made from insecurity and fear. How is it possible to feel hopeful, to look forward to a more positive future? The Biblical Psalmist wrote that, "without vision the people perish." Am I perishing?
I don’t ask this question calmly. I am struggling to understand how I might contribute to reversing this descent into fear and sorrow, to help restore hope to the future. In the past, it was easier to believe in my own effectiveness. If I worked hard, with good colleagues and good ideas, we could make a difference. Now, I sincerely doubt that. Yet without hope that my labor will produce results, how can I keep going? If I have no belief that my visions can become real, where will I find the strength to persevere?
To answer these questions, I’ve consulted some who have endured dark times. They have led me on a journey into new questions, one that has taken me from hope to hopelessness.
My journey began with a little booklet entitled "The Web of Hope." It lists the signs of despair and hope for Earth’s most pressing problems. Foremost among these is the ecological destruction humans have created. Yet the only thing the booklet lists as hopeful is that the earth works to create and maintain the conditions that support life. As the species of destruction, humans will be kicked off if we don’t soon change our ways. E.O. Wilson, the well-known biologist, comments that humans are the only major species that, were we to disappear, every other species would benefit (except pets and houseplants.) The Dalai Lama has been saying the same thing in many recent teachings. This didn’t make me feel hopeful.
But in the same booklet, I read a quote from East German dissident Rudolf Bahro that did help: "When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure." Could insecurity, self-doubt, be a good trait? I find it hard to imagine how I can work for the future without feeling grounded in the belief that my actions will make a difference. But Bahro offers a new prospect, that feeling insecure, even groundless, might actually increase my ability to stay in the work. I’ve read about groundlessness – especially in Buddhism – and recently have experienced it quite a bit. I haven’t liked it at all, but as the dying culture turns to mush, could I give up seeking ground to stand on?
Vaclav Havel helped me become further attracted to insecurity and not-knowing: "Hope," he states, "is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out."
Havel seems to be describing not hope, but hopelessness. Being liberated from results, giving up outcomes, doing what feels right rather than effective. He helps me recall the Buddhist teaching that hopelessness is not the opposite of hope. Fear is. Hope and fear are inescapable partners. Anytime we hope for a certain outcome, and work hard to make it happen, then we also introduce fear – fear of failing, fear of loss. Hopelessness is free of fear and thus can feel quite liberating. I’ve listened to others describe this state. Unburdened of strong emotions, they describe the miraculous appearance of clarity and energy.
Thomas Merton, the late Christian mystic, clarified further the journey into hopelessness. In a letter to a friend, he advised: "Do not depend on the hope of results … you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself … you gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people… In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything."
I know this to be true. I’ve been working with colleagues in Zimbabwe as their country descends into violence and starvation by the actions of a madman dictator. Yet as we exchange emails and occasional visits, we’re learning that joy is still available, not from the circumstances, but from our relationships. As long as we’re together, as long as we feel others supporting us, we persevere. Some of my best teachers of this have been young leaders. One in her twenties said: "How we’re going is important, not where. I want to go together and with faith." Another young Danish woman at the end of a conversation that moved us all to despair, quietly spoke: "I feel like we’re holding hands as we walk into a deep, dark woods." A Zimbabwean, in her darkest moment, wrote: "In my grief I saw myself being held, us all holding one another in this incredible web of loving kindness. Grief and love in the same place. I felt as if my heart would burst with holding it all."
Thomas Merton was right: We are consoled and strengthened by being hopeless together. We don’t need specific outcomes. We need each other.
Hopelessness has surprised me with patience. As I abandon the pursuit of effectiveness, and watch my anxiety fade, patience appears. Two visionary leaders, Moses and Abraham, both carried promises given to them by their God, but they had to abandon hope that they would see these in their lifetime. They led from faith, not hope, from a relationship with something beyond their comprehension. T.S. Eliot describes this better than anyone. In the "Four Quartets" he writes :
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
This is how I want to journey through this time of increasing uncertainty. Groundless, hopeless, insecure, patient, clear. And together.
Passing by a farm house, dad saw a figure through a thin stand of trees. He leaned back, reining in the team of horses and wagon he was driving. The trees moved by slowly, allowing him to see a young woman bending over a rake. She was in a garden, close to the road. She was wearing a light coloured dress but dad was drawn to her profile. She caught him staring when she raised her head and looked back across the shallow ditch. Dad said he remembered her face well. Shy smile, bright clear eyes, wavy long brown hair. "She was sure pretty," he said.
He confessed that from that moment, he was interested. He might as well have said that he was smitten, but I knew what he meant. These were delicate matters, better to understate.
Dad was 73 when he told me this story. And as he did, it seemed as though the creases on his forehead smoothed out and his blue eyes deepened to the colour of the lake we were walking beside.
One day dad stopped the horses, or the car, or whatever he was driving, and got to know mom. A cracked and yellow edged picture from their courtship shows mom sitting on the front of a 1930 something Chevrolet. Dad has his arm around her waist and is leaning into her, one foot is raised, resting on the running board. Mom has that shy smile and those bright eyes that dad spoke of; and she seems ready to float up off the fender.
They married after a brief courtship, settled into the vagaries of farm life, and raised a family.
In her quiet and charitable way mom gave herself to her kids; and over the years taught us forbearance and industry.
She is a woman of faith. It was needle pointed, embroidered, stitched in pictures and religious thoughts, and hung up around her home. Most often it was taped to the fridge in hand copied bible verses.
If she was worried, verses would appear on the fridge door. The greater the difficulty, the more bible verses.
They also showed up in the tobacco pouch I thought I had hid well enough. Over the years, as her kids grew up, I’m certain the entire King James Bible passed across the refrigerator door. And all the while, she maintained her forgiving and magnanimous spirit.
This is the part of her faith that floats to the top. And many of us here have experienced the beauty of her heart, faith and spirit.
I saw her beauty in other unexpected ways. Being raised in an evangelical home we were taught a doctrine known as the rapture. In church, it was preached with intensity and it made an impression on young minds. The rapture is the belief that before the great tribulation, as mentioned in the book of Revelations, God will rapture, or take up all true Christians from the earth.
I was nine or ten years old the day it happened. It was Saturday and I had slept in.
The morning was fresh and bright. But the house was still. There was no usual muted mid-morning clamour. No squeak in the floor that told me dad was leaning back in his chair. There was no little sister rustling about, no usual rattle in the kitchen.
I went down stairs. I stood at the landing and knew the rapture had happened. The door was wide open, they hadn’t gone through the ceiling, they were sucked through the door. I was left behind. And the amazingly bright day turned dark.
I ran outside in a blur. I turned toward the street… nothing. I ran to the back of the house…my mother was hanging up the wash. Oh no! Mom didn’t make it either!
I stood blinking. The world returned. My sense returned, and I realized that if my mother was still here, nothing happened. She would easily have been the first to be snatched up. The day came back in a blaze; twice as fresh and twice as bright, as a result of my survival.
My mother was a vision, as radiant as an angel, beautiful as she stretched and stood on her toes pinning white sheets to the sky.
Today would be a good day. I would find a wild crocus for her. She liked wild flowers.
Mom taught us an appreciation for growing things. She loved her garden and the fresh things it produced. But I remember her saying how she wished she could grow fruit like they could in Kelowna.
I have a favourite picture of mom. It’s from a vacation that mom and dad took in B.C. In the picture mom is holding on to the stem of a cherry, pulling off the ripe fruit with her teeth. Her other hand is holding down a loaded branch. On her face, an expression of sheer delight. Occasionally she gave herself permission for sheer delight.
Delight is what she has given and still gives to her children. Like the kind of delight my dad experienced when he first spied her through a thin line of poplar trees.
Thank you mom, for your steady grace and secure love. You are numbered among the ones who will inherent the earth.
Today on your 90th birthday we lift a glass to you…you, to us, remain, always, beautiful.
Remember walkathons? Sure you do. People sponsoring you to walk a few miles in support of everything from painting the church to Girl Guide camp-outs.
Well, for all our fundraising efforts, Hope Mission has never done a walkathon, until now. And we’re doing it on ‘The Coldest Night of the Year’ (which is Saturday, and so a stretch with this year’s weather).
Nevertheless, balmy or blustery, we’ll be out there walking…but not for the paint. We’re walking—with other Missions across Canada—in support of hungry, homeless and hurting people in our community. People like Arnold and Angel who visit the dumpster behind my condo and are beautiful people.
But because I’m heading to Saskatchewan for my mom’s 90th birthday (she had me when she was 60) which is on the same day as the event, I’ll be walking the 10K a couple days before, (my goodness, that’s tomorrow) all by my lonely self. 
As a result the team captain’s (that’s me) morale has tanked. But there’s a way to get me back on top (which reminds me of what Delmar says to George (Baby-face) Nelson as he’s being lead to the chair at the end of O Brother, Where Art Thou…)
Anyway, if you’re interested, amused, or merely confused, click on this link. (But only if you want to. This is a soft-sell all the way.)
If you do, it will connect you to my personal fundraising page for the ‘Coldest Night of the Year’ winter walkathon—where you can tap on the sponsor me button and give securely. I know it’s secure because I sponsored myself—which was only mildly satisfying.
Thank you either way!
P.S. If you don’t like me, there are a are bunch of delightful walkers you can sponsor.
You are watching a father in a mall, walking and chatting with his son; a man in a blue parka on a bicycle loaded with bottles; a girl with an arm load of books running across a street; a speaker at a luncheon, bright-eyed with nervousness; your friend, waiting for news; a old woman alone at lunch, and you are suddenly overwhelmed by inexplicable tenderness.
You are watching the thousands of kind moments, awkward and sublime, ordinary and heroic, played out by people across the glove because of the one thing that makes us human.
You are drawn deeper, and know somewhere within that you are sustained by this one thing; more, you are saved by it. Saved from yourself. Saved for others.
Sebastian Moore, a favourite theologian/poet, says, "Desire is love trying to happen."
If you read Grow Mercy you’ll know that I’m an ardent fan of Chris Hedges as well. In this essay that might as well be a homily—in the good sense of that word—he describes something similar to Moore: "Love is an action, a difference we try to make in the world."
Love is not selflessness. It is the giving of one’s best self, giving one’s highest self unto the world. It is finding true selfhood. Selflessness is martyrdom, dying for a cause. Selfhood is living for a cause. It is choosing to create good in the world. To love another as one loves oneself is to love the universal self that unites us all. If our body dies, it is the love that we have lived that will remain—what the religious understand as the soul—as the irreducible essence of life. It is the small, inconspicuous things we do that reveal the pity and beauty and ultimate power and mystery of human existence.
I will just come out and say that my rage on behalf of your pain,
when spent, mocks the hell out of me.
I thought that if I had the grit to carry on through the night,
burning with the words of Genesis,
wrestling with any angel,
gripping the leg of God,
you would wake up laughing,
the way you did in your child’s body.
It is tempting to think in the midst of it I am gaining,
that my railing is reaching the bench,
a decision in your favour, imminent.
Yet with every blow I go back like the parabolic widow,
begging a loaf for you,
or even a snake, for a snake is something.
But when the ash is cold, the blood dry on my burr coat,
and my treaties come back to me torn,
I remain—alone with a gift of stone,
and curses, that coil at the ends of my fingers.
Should I forgo the pardonable backspace?
For what is pardon or repute to your knife-edge nights?
And if I were called up to those cliffs of accounting,
made to stand at the edge of that great fixed gulf,
should I fear the lake and taste of sulphur?
How could I when I come carrying only
your silent banner of pain.
In a canoe, late June, and Phil has broken out into one of his old Morris songs as we paddle the Pembina.
Along the banks are coal seams. Exposed, punky, bituminous coal.
We find a camp spot—a clearing with a bleached log that suits to anchor a tarp.
Gear put away, canoe pulled up on a gravel shore, a fire, and garlic sausage on willow sticks.
We watch stars come out.
The air is crisp and we bank the fire up with river coal; it burns pale yellow, spits and smokes acrid in our faces.
We crawl into sleeping bags and fade, hear beavers in the dark, not remembering they are nocturnal creatures.
Phil is sleeping. Then an explosion.
Coal flies past my head—bits bright with heat and smoke trailing like comets.
Phil had been under but the blast brought him out flaying like a Cornish wrestler.
We settle back, discuss whether to use coal for tomorrow night’s campfire.
The beavers go back to their work.
I am the first to arrive.
I find the table in the corner.
The wood one with the loose grain and medium stain
and cracks that run its length.
I burrow down here through many layers of care.
My coffee cools.
At 7:15 I see the first bluing of light between the building blocks.
I believe I arrive at acute consciousness.
She has one silver earring touching a raised shoulder
pushed up from folded arms resting on a wooden table like mine.
She says, it is Monday my dear,
I urge you toward simplicity.
