In Calgary, in the Shaganappi Golf Course by the Bow Trail,
the coyotes are singing above the city’s sirens.
At 5 o’clock the robin begins, at 5:30 the house finch,
and with it, the blunt rumble of the city rises like a giant bubble.

Close your windows to the noise, and you’ll miss the songs—is what
I tell myself. Sometimes I listen.

Above the sovereign Rocky Mountain horizon,
a helicopter beats out prophecies of traffic.
By a calm watercourse, under the elms and spruce,
the first golfers have arrived; one stands apart,
studying a place in the distance, unconscious
to everything but the arch of his swing and the flush strike.

The entire scene, not unlike these birds,
single-mindedly singing at the edge of the freeway,
like they have this voice of knowledge,
and they can’t keep quiet.

There are crowds of orchids yearning in this alkaline city,
like the bodies under blankets, slumped near the C-Train,
or the steely couples in the corridors of money, who do not
go out to the foothills and wait into the evening,
beside a small fire,
smelling the river and feeling the loam beneath their legs.

Alright then, sit here with me, in this abused park.
The finch is not forensic, the robin is not revelation,
There will be no examination. There’s nothing to conclude.

Only to wait. Perhaps a taste of enchantment in the purples
of crocuses, or a flash of holy on the wing of a pigeon,
in the cant of a street light—and if not, well enough.
Wait, listen, sooner or later some Francis-like saint
will come whistling, like those birds, to gather up
all our troubled applications for hope.

But even among the molecules love was the building power that worked against entropy, and under its attraction the elements groped their way towards union.                                -Teilhard de Chardin

Start with the understanding that all matter is a concentration of energy,
and that the physical world of mass-energy, within all dimensions
of cosmic life, is under a force of attraction, where all elements
grope their way towards union.

What is this force of attraction? Science gives us the mechanics, but can say
nothing about its presence, which escapes our laws of mathematics.

It is here, where you and I might ask, is it God? which is to say, is it Love?
is it Agape? that’s rooted in, that is, the fundamental nature of reality,
in which we, the human person—among this vast cosmic array
of elements—lives and moves, is given being?

Science, in devotion to matter, is indispensable as part of our evolving
understanding; that all life is intrinsically communal
(confirming what the mystics long since knew).

But science cannot tell the whole, cannot propel the heart. Here
we enter the unifying domain of spiritual insight, the I-Am-the-Light,
that searches our hearts and invites us to trust the Us of love,
the healing We of divinity.

We are the stuff of creation, ineluctably partaking in its gathering
evolution. You and I are a we, before we are I’s. Only in union with you,
am I an I, only in merging, do we emerge.

And here, in this divine entanglement, even a not-yet-I—who serves
and employs the entropy of only-me, who as a child was hijacked
by joylessness and dissolution—is not beyond the reach
of divine compassion, the love-energy of community.

Love is all, and in the absence of love,
there is only human devolution,
and malignant disenchantment with nature.

Give us capacity to hold, to have, to be, love, without needing to agree;
to love the hard way: to resist, to speak, to stand against all forms injustice,
without losing our souls to the voids of resentment and hate;
to stretch our hearts toward the unfolding universe,
the unfinished struggle of Light, of Love.

I don’t call you servants, because a servant implies a master; I call you friends, because I open my heart to you, and I share everything I know. -Jesus in John’s Gospel (my paraphrase)

Many years ago I had a philosophy professor who upended my view of the world. It wasn’t merely the concepts he taught—which I didn’t always grasp; it was the way he taught. It wasn’t the text so much as the teacher, that tilted my reality.

Everything flowed. Beliefs, enshrined, cherished, or nascent, were not in need of protection, all were open to examination. He had no fear of being wrecked by a rogue wave, as though tied to some dock of received dogma. He lived, it seemed to me, upon the waves, with only the steadying effect of big abiding faith in life—his sea-anchor.

Sitting with him in his office, or meeting for coffee in the cafeteria, the oxygen seemed denser, the energy livelier. It flowed through him and you felt your own energy responding. He had a superior mind. A student/teacher relationship, should it have ended there, would have been natural. But instead he offered me friendship, freely, like that of a fellow traveller.

While my picayune beliefs surrounding the Jesus Story have leaned this way and that, there’s never been a time the Story left me. Now, in these narrowing days, it’s reasserting itself at something like ground level; and I do mean ground: take a moment away from the ugliness and you glimpse it: mineral, animal, human, all matter, this universe, imbued by divinity, by Christ, the creative, vital, evolutionary energy of love. The love that made and the love that holds together the tiny planetary system called atom.

What I’ve always found astonishing about the central protagonist of the Story, is that he offers those he meets along the dusty roads of Galilee, this same kind of ego-less friendship. Declining the power inherent in his unique position of knowledge and impossible-to-fathom status, he became, “…just a slob like one of us (Joan Osborne).”

No obvious pedigree, celebrity, prestige, clout. What this suffering scullion offers, is friendship. But it must be said, a somewhat destabilizing one, unscripted, unformatted, radical, and revealing. Friendship with Christ is not Christianity, not a denomination or even, an added dimension, but a new orientation. Too grandiose? Then compare it with finding a soul-mate, it’s a start.

We’ve just come through Easter—the axial moment of the Jesus Story—the pan-historic moment that subverts death, destroys our anxiety about death and transforms us into people, living as though death were past. No longer run by death, we’re existentially and psychologically free to look at reality and still love, still have an abiding faith in life.

It wasn’t part of some transaction, Jesus died out of radical friendship. Some deep desire to evolve us, free us from our asphyxiating fears—which underlie our distorted structures of power, forms of violence, planet devastation, hatred, greed, racism, war—and gather us together as friends.