Peace/Spirituality

Epiphany as GPS

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

I was nine years old. It was Sports Day in Springside Saskatchewan. Everyone in the known universe was there. I had six dimes in my Red Tag jeans–money my mother had given me to spend at my wild discretion. My favorite food group, Fudgsicles, were a convenient 10 cents.

I was savoring my first of the day when I noticed I was being watched. A boy, younger than me, bare feet, bad clothes, his body a smudge, his small face turned to me.

I walked over and gave him one of my dimes. He bought a Fudgsicle and came back and stood beside me. I gave him the rest of my dimes.

And we stood together behind the chicken-wire fence watching a ball game. Me, elated and no clue why without money to buy Fudgsicles. Him, grinning and dripping chocolate.

GPSSatelliteI know this kind of experience is not unique to me. I believe these small epiphanies are given to us as signs of what it is to be truly human.

I also know that I have betrayed this experience and its meaning a thousand times. I didn’t have to practice being self-absorbed, or secretly competitive, or discriminatory–that I picked up mimetically, naturally.

But our epiphanies, what ever they are, how ever small or subtle, are signs. They are our GPS’s giving us our life coordinates, leading us out of a self-referential slavery and into community.

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Beauty/Christianity/Peace/Spirituality

Jeremiah and Dorothy Day

Posted on by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

He made sure that justice and help were given to the poor and needy, and everything went well for him. Isn’t that what it means to know me?” asks the LORD. -Jeremiah

For me, this utterance by the weeping prophet puts cement into the notion of knowing God. It puts concrete into the notion of spirituality.

Bob Fitch’s photo of Day’s arrest (1973)
DayUFWBFitch

How can we measure our spiritual life? Inner peace, serenity, a meditative approach to life, a familiarity with faith traditions, good things, right things all. But without the leavening agent of an outward gaze–to our neighbour, to the obvious or hidden “poor and needy”–our spirituality, our knowing God is moribund.

I came across this thought by the late and wonderful (Benedictine Oblate) Dorothy Day:

The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner. But we are destroying crops, setting fire to entire villages and to the people in them. We are not performing the works of mercy but the works of war.

Besides being so very contemporary, Dorothy’s spirituality is integrated, her knowing God, well engrafted.

Her and Jeremiah are saying: Use the gift you have, that is, your steam, your powers of administration, your words, your art, your poetry, your intellect, your hands, your money, your connections, to offer help to the “poor and needy.” The spirituality of the world will be blessed and eased. The zeitgeist will be changed.

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Beauty/Peace

Bicycles as Civilizing Agents

Posted on by stephen t berg / 2 Comments

Today I saw what is perhaps the most convincing sign of spring…police on bicycles.

I’m not sure why, but seeing police officers on bicycles makes me feel more secure. Maybe because it makes the world seem less dangerous. And maybe that’s because I’m reminded of the British Bobbies in the movies who rode bikes and were always well mannered and good natured, and proper, and didn’t seem to care that their helmets looked like suppositories.

bikeOr–forgetting for a moment the guy who rides like he can, on a whim, be either car or pedestrian–perhaps the world seems kinder simply because of the civilizing effect of bicycles. Like Iris Murdoch said, "The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man."

I agree with Iris. On a bike the world seems slower, purer. The light streams brighter and the air feels cleaner.

While these days I walk, for years, I used a bicycle for a daily 17 km commute. And I rode through the winter months if the snow wasn’t too deep. Even before we moved to the city I commuted the five miles from our acreage to my work in town.

me on trekOne very foggy morning in the semi-dark, while riding the dirt rode leading to the secondary highway, I sensed movement beside me. I was riding slowly because of the fog. Then, wheeling through a lighter patch, I could make out three of four deer trotting on each side of me. I was part of the herd, rolling down the road. In a moment they sensed me as well and scattered into the ditches on either side.

Another morning, crossing the bridge that spans the Little Paddle river, I saw a bald eagle gliding low, vigilant to the surface of the water. She sailed overhead, close, and I took it as a good sign.

Over the years, riding a bicycle, I’ve seen light’s contours, tasted the rush and sometimes bitterness of wind, and smelled the changing of seasons. All things that are stunted or missed from behind a windshield.

And so I think there is something to the rest of Iris Murdoch’s quote. "Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart."

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Beauty/Spirituality

Together in the World

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

I begin my morning with the feeling of being in this world alone. I’m in that moment where the envelope of sleep has opened but I’m still an inch below consciousness. It’s where, some mornings, past distant ghosts float free and torment. But where nothing human is sighted to give comfort or leverage. And in this moment, I crave something human. I crave.

I believe this is a small taste of what it might be to live an overlooked life. Abandoned or just ignored. What would it be like to awaken to this as a daily reality.

Ian & Erin
Ian&Erinsm

I think hermits survive only by knowing that there is someone out there, and that it was their choice to leave the world. Because the alternative, that there isn’t anyone out there, or worse, that there is, but that they have chosen to ignore, overlook, or abandon you…well, what sort of hellish life might that be?

Odd that these thoughts surface after a lovely wedding. A nephew. His beautiful new bride. Families circling and congratulating and later, cheering and dancing. It’s human contact in over-drive. And the couple are fully prepared to be each other’s human contact for life. And that’s the beauty.

But if this goes sour, as it did with my first marriage, as it can with the most intimate of lovers, the world is suddenly out of reach, and there is nothing, no hope, no human in sight, even in the middle of a crowed city. Without knowing we care about each other, we are corpses.

Without a "we," we are all stillborn. But in a peaceful, merciful, flowering "us," we find something we call God and a place we call paradise. My prayer for Erin & Ian, and for us all.

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