Violence

Names

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

I thought of you that morning last week when we sang "Open the eyes of my heart Lord."

I saw you, as if time hadn’t passed. Saw you walking the way you did…one long step, one short, always compensating for your severe lean. You walked with your school books clasped tightly to your breast bone as if for balance, as if for protection, a shield from the brutal epithets. God, how you needed a shield.

Who were you when you were you? When you didn’t have to guard your every glance and step? When you were with your one friend, or at home, with your family? Who were you when you didn’t have to concentrate on surviving?

You were called "rooster" or "hen" or "chicken," not because you were afraid–although perhaps you were–but because of the way you were hunched over. Your one shoulder blade, like a wing standing out on its own, and all that misplaced muscle and tissue, everything horizontal, distended, throwing you forward and to the right. Your body a listing hull…and the names.

Did you survive? Did your friend stay true to you…the one who walked down the Junior High halls with you? Who was she?…I don’t remember. I know now she was brilliantly defiant and as beautiful as you. How I wish I could ask your forgiveness for my silence, my complicity.

Why now, after thirty-nine years, do you glide into my memory on the strength of a song? Your image, invoking shame, guilt and tears. All the names you were given and I didn’t know the right name and now recall I never took the time to learn it.

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Christianity/Peace

Incomprehension and shared experience

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I’m in LA, away from the cold. Away from the bone cracking temperatures that disallow airplanes to take off because it’s too frigid for the de-icing machine to take the frost off the wings. The magic degree for that to happen is minus 37. That temp was fortunately reached; but only after the sun rose and began its climb to the late January zenith. A few hours later the natives were telling me, "It’s cold here in LA.

Deicing the plane From climate to culture, relativities abound. And what I mean when I use the word relative is not that everything is reducible to essentially the same thing, but that my everyday experience of life is relative to my cultural and geographical context. So while the measurement of temperature is not a relative concept, what is, is our experiences of what is hot and cold. But of course, herein–my relative experience–lies the seeds of another’s incomprehension. An incomprehension that can only be overcome through a shared experience.

I was confronted with my own incomprehension at the Russ Reid conference I’m attending. And it exposed within me a nervous protectionism regarding my job and Hope Mission that I won’t go into, but only say that I needed to recall the Californian who thought he was experiencing cold; because, of course he was. In this small act of recalling, I was, I realized, beginning to enact a shared experience.

How is it possible to have a shared experience of faith, of culture, of tradition? (These are the biggies.) Or how is it possible to have a shared experience of poverty, abuse, ill-health, emotional manipulation, addiction, mental breakdown, and on and on? Frankly, how is it possible to feel the viewpoint of the one in front of you?

Isn’t this why we’ve been given an imagination? Because we can’t live inside the hearts and minds, or even the shoes, of our acquaintances, neighbours, or co-workers, or even our friends and relatives. But we can imagine what it might be like, if we care to take the time to ask…and listen. Perhaps a good measure of our fear, our protectionism, our combativeness, is both birthed and nursed by lazy imaginations.

And so, my recipe…of sorts. Take a poultice of creative imagination, mixed with the essence of empathy–about a cup–and apply it to the welt of incomprehension. (A caveat, cooking, baking, whatever, has everything to do with timing and context.)

This acknowledged, know this: if the incomprehension exists both ways–which is often the case–the use of this poultice, should you be the one to make the overture, will make you vulnerable. This is however, the vulnerability practiced by Jesus and the long line of peace-making saints.

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Poverty

The Cold

Posted on by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

Van Morrison is in my head singing…."gotta make it through January, gotta make it through February," and I pine for summer and the stirring of a warm western breeze.

I was happy to see Brian this morning. I hadn’t seen him for a long time. He said he spent a bit of time in jail…something to do with refusing to stay out of the subway and off the LRT. He likes riding the LRT. But he is back panhandling at Starbucks and things seem right again. (But how could they be for Brian?) He was glad of today’s slight moderation in temperature, and added that he was happy he lived here in Canada, away from the "crazy weather." I agreed. Then he said, "But February is coming and that’s always the coldest."Men Sharing a Drink (sm)

I recall a very cold mid-winter day years ago, so cold that my truck refused to completely warm up. A mile out of the city stood a woman, her hand weakly raised in a hitch-hikers signal. I slowed and stopped beside her. She seemed warm enough in a giant overcoat and scarf and Kodiak boots. She opened the door, laboriously it seemed, and she didn’t bother to look at me. She had high prominent cheek bones, a round face and deep watery eyes. She shut the door behind her we started off toward the city.

She said, "I had a dream about you." I caught my breath. "I know you, your name is Bruno," she added. I smelled the sour odour of disinfectant. I noticed she had no gloves on and in one hand she gripped a wad of tissue which she would hold up to her nose and mouth every few moments. She had soaked the tissue with Lysol. I remember hearing that Lysol when inhaled can make you feel warm. She never felt her hands freezing.

I stopped across from a Chinese café. This is where she was determined to get out. I wondered if I should just drive her to an intox centre, the Spady perhaps. Instead I gave her money for a meal and then gave her orders to throw away the Lysol and make sure to get something to eat. She offered a sexual favour for the money. I said no and tried to hurry her out of the truck. I felt shame, shame for me, shame for her. I said a quick prayer for her and drove off. She could have been any age between 20 and 50. I felt nauseous and helpless. I didn’t ask her her name, something I almost always do. It was the cold, I reasoned.

Beauty/Spirituality

Erato the muse

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

This morning I was in conversation with my muse. Well she’s not really a muse, but I don’t know how else to describe her. Still, I want to name her after Erato, the muse of lyric and love poetry, but she’s far too impulsive and precisely imprecise. But then, maybe I’ve just described love poetry. In any case I hadn’t seen her for such a long time so I asked her what happened and where she’d been. She said,

Oh, it’s going to be a long walk back, but the walk must be taken, and frankly, I could use the air. You see, somewhere, last year, I don’t remember, fall perhaps, I lost my bearings. There at the foggy conjunction of worry I lost my power to observe. I was assailed and even seduced by anxiety and drawn shallowly inward, taking nothing with me except a tin shield. A kind of day to day shell-shocked existence took root.

Well, I had forgotten that every perfect outward gaze is also a look deep inside. I lost the connection. And with it I lost the courage, the force, the energy to gaze. Lost the taste for it, and so the ability to blend and produce new flavours, new shapes and colours. So now I’m going to trace my steps backward–which how ever you cut it, is forward movement–and walk as long as it takes to find that murky crossroad. If all goes well, I’ll then emerge from the mist on a new path.

With this, her coffee only half finished, she left the table and walked out the door. But not before hooking up with the tall thin man. I had barely noticed him sitting silently in a corner. He gathered himself, a bit stiffly I thought, got up and took the offered hand of the nameless muse who is not. He straightened visibly and as they left they shared a laugh.

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