rambling on...

tenebrae service

2008-03-31T23:49:00.004-05:00

In March my darkness rose with the temperatures
As crusted snow turned to slush and daylight hours grew in length,
Until here, at month's end, I find myself facing
An unforeseen Good Friday:

Hours turned from prayer and vigil, departing lighted hours,
Turn from the initiation of Our Lord's Supper, when wine in cup
And bread in hand became memorial, before memory was needed,
Turning towards hopeless hours.

To remember:
There, in the midday minutes, memory became necessary.
Tenebrae settled in darkest reality, the inexorable
Extinguishing of the Light of the world, snuffed down

To a single candle's trembling flame--
When all the world hung from a tree, dripping blood,
Water pouring out, spilled on the dusty soil,
Vanished in the lavish violence of love--

Gone, lamented, we are left bereft.
Old, withered hands, prominently veined, reaching out in the darkness
To steady themselves on pews and the sturdy shoulders
Of younger energies--still

We wander in the darkness,
Existential and utterly material. I reach
My veined hand out, hopeful despite its fearful self--
Do I dare remember?...

Easter came a week ago--risen indeed?--annually lily-white;
Yet these dark hours find me still, always,
Searching for perennial meaning, sifting through these
Ashes and palm husks in the fading light.

what about today?

2008-02-29T22:17:00.008-06:00

Today is the day that comes once every four years, February 29. It is the hiccup day, the catch up day, like paying off a debt owed to Time itself, as though we'd overdrawn on our proper allotment of time. Or perhaps, as in a board game, we are held back a day like a penalty round spent in jail. Or held back like the schoolchild who couldn't quite get the hang of long division...

Perhaps that's not quite right at all--perhaps today is pure bonus, a reminder of the gift of life, that it's less like "putting in time" and more like "enjoying the view." Either way, it gets me to thinking about how today came about, when the monks realized all those years ago that they had the days in a year counted out all wrong, that the year wasn't (strictly speaking) 365 days long. And to right this wrong, back in 1582, the Julian calendar was scrapped in favour of the Gregorian calendar; they skipped 10 days to bring the year back to itself and get back on track. And to maintain this crazy scheme, they instituted a leap day every four years, arbitrarily, February 29, slotted in to keep the days and seasons and the human time table happening just like it should. These monks figured it out, that each year is 365.2425 days (which works out to be 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 12 seconds), that the solar calendar repeats every 146 097 days, which works out to 400 years, which works out to be 20 871 seven-day weeks. So each year is cut short, in a sense, and then caught up again on the leap year. Precisely, it takes 365.2425 days to circle the Sun once, our own brilliant celestial event, Solaris. And we figured out a way to make our years match the physical universe...

I suppose all this is something of a salute to the Copernican revolution when we realized that we weren't the centre of the universe or even the galaxy, that our existence and our stories are all happening in this massive context of shuffling stars and shooting comets, and the grand ballroom dance of the ever-exploding cosmos! And then the question arises once again, whether we'll join in this mysterious and passionate dance...

Einstein said that God doesn't deal in dice, meaning that God doesn't leave things up to chance. And I guess if you consider his theory of relativity (famously, E=mc2), he's right. Some people hold that even life itself isn't left up to chance, and I suppose, in a way, they're right too. But if you get to looking at everything, if you think about a life lived honestly and earnestly, if you think about the grand gamble of love and trust, if you think about how you go through your days and nights with hope and fear-- Hold all that for a moment, unfocused in your mind like one of those 3D pictures with the chaotic backgrounds, and maybe something emerges there. Maybe a shape emerges out of the page, out of the chaotic pattern, but if you try to focus on it then it sinks away, receding into the unfathomable chaos, ripples in a pond.

Einstein had the celestial scale figured out, the speed of light and the vast interplanetary fields of gravity--but he couldn't make it work on the miniscule scale, not in quantum theory or on the atomic level (for more on this see Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe). There was some gap in theory, some gulf in knowledge, that prevented an understanding of how the physical universe operated--and this dilemma still exists. The cohesive and comprehensive theory of (the physical) EVERYTHING is still at loose ends (just like the metaphysical everything). The thing that seems certain in all this is that the cosmos is unutterably more complex, more finitely infinite, more minuscule, than we can possibly wrap our minds around.

Some days that makes me feel so small and so fragile and so vulnerable. And some days, it makes me feel like a miracle; it allows me to be free...

So where does all this leave me? Well, today seems like a certain kind of day, a once-in-a-long-while day, which in the grand scheme of things isn't all that rare. The world turns on its axis and the elegant dance spins on and the random hiccups continue, and I ramble along still in the midst of this chaos and precision, perfectly imperfect...

Two weeks ago I decided a few things:
1) I am returning to school to finish my BA Honours in English (with a second major in Philosophy), which I will (hopefully) begin in Spring Term.
2) I will cease to live with any of the gnawing regret that paralyzes action, and I will take that regret to the interiority of reflection with the impetus to action.
3) I will give this life my all because there's really only one shot at it and it's far too precious and beautiful and captivating to be carried away on the waves of numbness...

Maybe all that doesn't sound like much--or much of anything to be making "decisions" about--but I tell you, it is.

We are all in this thing, just trying to live our experience and understand the truth of our existence the best we can, and while we try and try to shape the world to fit ourselves, really, we can only shape ourselves to fit the world. Not because we're purely determined or fated, but because we understand (imperfectly) that there is a grand image in the patterning of chaos, in the precision of the cosmos, and in the utter breathtaking beauty of encounter. We live in holy moments--or perhaps in the holy moment--in which the moment doesn't change but we change.

Here I stand then, as one naked and exposed--. There are some who know, who have walked through my waste land, this desert, this dark hollow of the land, with me. Friends who have offered a place to rest, a pool of refreshment, an open ear and an open mind--and slowly I have come to myself, as a man and as a follower of Christ, as a writer and a student, as one who realizes he's still on a journey and will not arrive until the moment of departure. And the deepest struggle in my life has proven to yield the deepest rewards: I am gay.

I've struggled with this fact as a man, as a Christian, as a scholar, and as a son/brother/friend. But perhaps this is what happens when order and chaos meet, when what we think and are given to believe conflicts with who we find ourselves to be and how we experience life. There is always a clash, an explosion, a struggle--but in the end, whether it destroys us or we somehow weather the storm and become (impossibly) better, the struggle is not the final word. Somehow we find our way, perhaps by the grace of God, perhaps by the will to survive; and we stumble through, usually with some scars and a few (un)healed wounds that will always ache, that will never fully heal, that give way to a limp or an arthritic joint--the metaphorical soul wounds that make us more beautiful. And when all is said and done, somehow these wounds make us all the more beautiful, like those portrait pictures you see of people with wrinkled faces and unruly hair and wild eyes and crooked, missing teeth--but underneath it all like a fine fabric made all the finer with the wearing, there is a wisdom and a peace there that shines through it all...

This, of course, is what I aim for--what, I think, we all plot a course towards--that somehow, at the end of the journey, we will be wise and peaceable and beautiful like we truly are. That somehow, whether at the end of things or along the way, we will realize how beautiful we all are, how worthy of love we are (simply because we are), and how truly we were these things all along...

If somehow we find these things in our deepest struggles or in our most brilliant glimpses, then somehow we have found the grace of God that gives way to forgiveness and mercy, that brings us hope and peace, that brings us Life and Love. With all our scars, with all our deep and dark secret struggles, we are becoming who we truly are: the Beloved Children of God, in the darkness and in the light...

juicy hearts

2008-02-14T17:35:00.004-06:00

And so, another Valentine's Day is upon us...

I sometimes think that love toys with me, sits and watches, bobbing its head like a cat to keep its green eyes on me. Occasionally, I glimpse love: I see it, fleetingly, as in the face of a passing stranger or in the wildness of a sparrow alighting on a railing not more than two feet from my hand--

More often, I see love in the faces of friends and family, in the gentle summer breezes that bend the upper tree branches stretched out towards the hazy blue sky, or in the odd lumbering gait of injured hearts--

Most certainly, I see love in my quiet moments, when I cease my striving and my activity and my frenzy, when I quiet my soul and stop comparing notes. It is there, in the moments when I stop trying to measure the things I've lost, the relationships I deserve, the places I hope to be, the ambitions I cannot achieve... Love comes in those moments, quiet and observed, like a deer pawing delicately in a clearing in the early morning dew, wet back and cautious eyes, and not a breath of movement as I observe its approach... Love comes truly in a quieted heart.

So, for all those in love,
for all those who wish for love,
and for all those with an aching heart,
I wish you all the joy of Love, unasked and unsought,
in the quiet realms
of newly born spirit...

* * *

Passing stranger! you do not know
How longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking,
Or she I was seeking
(It comes to me as a dream)

I have somewhere surely
Lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall'd as we flit by each other,
Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me,
Were a boy with me or a girl with me,
I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become
not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes,
face, flesh as we pass,
You take of my beard, breast, hands,
in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you
when I sit alone or wake at night, alone
I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

-Walt Whitman

* * *

I suppose it's something like Rumi says:
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.

Maybe I'll begin to see a little more clearly in the coming year. Maybe I'll meet people that I didn't even realize I loved, the strangers who I've been longing for without even knowing about it. And maybe, somewhere along the way, that'll mean finding out how to be myself and how, in this wide and lonesome world, to love someone else without obliterating myself... If the coming year brings even a fleeting glimpse of these things--the connectedness of Love and the beauty of Being and the dignity of Self--well, I suppose it'll be a good time. So let that bleeding heart ooze and don't hesitate to embrace this moment of contact...

first fotos

2008-01-08T16:22:00.001-06:00

These are my first photos of Ayvlyn, my dear niece, taken yesterday evening with my camera phone when I visited her and Gillian and Steve at the hospital.

You can't really see her face very well in this one and her eyes are closed, she's sort of slouched into her swaddle, but you can tell that she has a head and a bit of hair. You can also see a little bit of Gillian's arm there, too.

In this one I'm standing there and smiling, happy because I'm holding Ayvlyn. She's kind of sleeping, but there was awhile when I was there that she was looking around at different things (me included) with her 8cm sight range. She didn't smile, but I think she's happy nonetheless. In the background you can see a very pastel-y painting and the "Soiled Linen" container. But the highlight is her little sleepy face underneath the spotlight...

Ah, sweet life--. Some days it seems that only poetry or soaring music can hold the simple beauty and love of it all... But maybe all you parents out there feel a little differently. After all, you're the ones who deal with the cranky nights and sicknesses and tears and fears of these tender and fragile little lives. Though I suppose there's beauty and love in those things too, maybe especially in those things. In the end, the love born in the fullness of life, in the joy and sadness, in the triumphs and failures, in those easy moments and then the difficult ones--the love that is carried through thick and thin, and comes to its realization in all the various peculiarities of living together--this love is borne into Life itself...

a niece is born

2008-01-07T15:46:00.000-06:00

I'm writing to you in a very fine and rather giddy mood because I have fallen head over heels in love. And I know you're thinking that it's pretty weird to write an email about it, but it's not and I think you're weird to think that it's weird. Because honestly, it's one glorious day since I get to say that only yesterday a baby girl was born to my brother Steve and wife Gillian. I love them very much and I love my new niece, the newest member of the Doucet-Campbell families. She is very small still, but I have a feeling that given a bit of time she's going to grow. And even though I think she's gorgeous right now, it's possible that other people might think she looks a little flat-nosed, long-skulled, and like a fuzzy alien. Either way, though, she's beautiful because she's a fresh furnace of life, newborn and in good health.

Her name is Ayvlyn Cora Doucet Campbell and she was born at 3.24pm on Sunday, January 6 (which happens to be the twelfth day of Christmas, also Epiphany Sunday in the liturgical calendar, and Eastern Orthodox Christmas Eve--Yowzah!!). She was born at 8 lbs. and 10.7 ounces, packed into trim 20 inches.

And I don't have any pictures yet, but I hope to soon, and when I do I will post them here. And I will post other things too, like any proud uncle would. That's right, I have no shame in saying that I'm going to be a proud uncle, with tears in his eyes with every baby milestone, from first poops to first steps to first words and so on... I'll be keeping (possibly sporadic) updates on my blog about uncle-y type things. But be assured, even if you don't read about it here, Ayvlyn is on my mind and in my heart...

So, all this to say, I'm now officially a proud uncle to the most beautiful baby I know (sorry to all you other babies--you're all cute too, but just not quite as cute as my niece)...

winter days

2007-12-22T09:16:00.003-06:00

straw hats and apple cores
left in the street
snow falling like white flowers
flying through the air
bringing an enduring bloom
to icy streets
eventual thaw in brown tones
(decomposed winter garden)
a fertile colour
gives way to green
birthed in the white darkness

departures and arrivals

2007-12-22T09:08:00.000-06:00

In one sense we are always traveling, and traveling as if we did not know where we were going.

In another sense we have already arrived.

We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life, and that is why we are traveling and in darkness. But we already possess Him by grace, and therefore, in that sense, we have arrived and are dwelling in the light.

But oh! How far have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived!

-Thomas Merton, Dialogues with Silence

bad promises

2007-12-17T14:21:00.000-06:00

I'm afraid I must apologize and renege on my promise to post previous Nog's Eve posters and pictures... In promising these things, I have spoken rashly and succeeded only in making a fool of myself. I have raised your expectations unnecessarily and then dashed them on the rocks of my inability to fulfill them; and for this, I am sorry.

But as a sort-of consolation, please enjoy (and by "enjoy," I mean, "feel free to react any way you like, even with mild disgust") the following cartoon regarding our beloved Egg Nog...

nog's eve: a brief history

2007-12-01T00:59:00.000-06:00

The Nog’s Eve Historical Society is pleased to present “A Brief History of Nog’s Eve”:

The origins of Nog’s Eve are shrouded in mystery. Doubtless, the reasons for celebrating Egg Nog are utterly transparent—after all, a tasty holiday beverage deserves all the respect and celebration one can muster. But how did Nog’s Eve come to be celebrated in its current tradition?

Up till now, there has never been a concentrated inquiry into the origins of Nog’s Eve, but as far as we can tell, the Nog’s Eve tradition followed a rather circuitous route into Winnipeg via Regina from Vancouver. In tracing these origins, we have relied on second hand accounts and, admittedly, unverified sources; as such, this brief history serves only as an overview. In years to come, this account will be expanded and updated. However, let us now turn to the history of Nog’s Eve, which begins with a fellow by the name of Craig Cadwell.

At the end of the last millennium, a fellow by the name of Craig Cadwell attended Canadian Bible College, located in Regina. One of his degree requirements obligated Craig to complete an internship at a church; he ended up in North Vancouver at North Shore Alliance Church. Legend has it that Craig encountered Ben Taylor, a fellow from North Vancouver who had celebrated Nog’s Eve for years, refusing to partake of Egg Nog until the beginning of December each year; as a result, November 30th, the last day before December, became Nog’s Eve, and a vigil was held to observe the first nog of the season at midnight. However, at this point, it is unclear how exactly Craig encountered the traditions of Nog’s Eve or from whom he learned the ways of Nog; but we can be fairly certain that he took them to heart, bringing these learned traditions back to CBC and Regina with him.

Some years later, in the year 2000, a year filled with all the hope of an entire millennium, an American lad by the name of Colter Diehl moved to Regina to begin attending CBC. There he met Craig Cadwell and while decorating for the annual Christmas banquet Colter was introduced to the traditions of Nog’s Eve. On this early Nog’s Eve, Craig and Colter, as well as Dave Coutts and Aaron Gerrard, toasted the commencement of the 2000 Nog Season precisely at midnight. The basic rule of Nog’s Eve, firmly established at this early stage of Nog history, was to refrain from the consumption of Egg Nog until the month of December had officially begun. And the toast at midnight officially begins the Nog Season and celebrates both Egg Nog itself and the good holiday cheer of the Christmas/Advent season.

At this point, Nog’s Eve history becomes less opaque, moving from the realm of second-hand information to the more familiar territory of personal experience. It was in the autumn of 2001 that I (i.e. Chris Campbell) moved to Regina and began attending CBC, at which time I met and became fast friends with Colter. And it was through this friendship that Nog’s Eve has come to such fabled notoriety.

On November 30, 2001, Colter introduced me (as well as Joel Gorrie and Tom Mulhern) to the tradition of Nog’s Eve. But due to a mishap in timing, this Nog’s Eve was celebrated in a bus shelter on Fourth Avenue between the CBC campus and Kline’s, the local convenience store. We huddled in the glass booth with a litre carton of Egg Nog each, toasting the commencement of the Nog Season in the cold and snow. But this cold celebration proved to establish the seeds of a warm tradition, these cold roots grew to produce many branches.

The following year, 2002, saw the beginning of Nog’s Eve celebrations in Winnipeg under the guidance and careful planning of Chris Yorke and Steve Campbell. This first annual Nog’s Eve celebration in Winnipeg took place in Fort Garry at a common, shared house and was met warmth and acceptance. Unfortunately, although I had brought the ways of Nog to Winnipeg, introducing both Steve and Chris to its traditions, I was unable to attend the first annual celebration; I was on a trip to the very small town of Munich, North Dakota, with Colter and Dustin Hrycun where we celebrated with a very warm family and several friends.

At this point, Colter and I parted company and I have attended Nog’s Eve celebrations each year in Winnipeg. It has been hosted in various households throughout the city of Winnipeg, from its original celebration location in Fort Garry to a house in Fort Rouge and, most recently, the West End. Today marks Winnipeg’s Sixth Annual Nog’s Eve, the commencement of the sixth season of Nog. And I suppose we are all better for such a celebration of friends and family, of the holiday season, and the warmth and joy of Egg Nog.

Over the last five years, subsequent Nog’s Eve celebrations have occurred throughout Canada and the United States. To my knowledge, Colter has celebrated Nog’s Eve each year in California, but ever since 2003 in Redding, Colter has not thrown a Nog’s Eve celebration; rather, he has marked the commencement of the Nog season in private observance.

Dustin Hrycun, who was introduced to Nog’s Eve in 2002, has gone on to celebrate Nog’s Eve each year in larger and greater celebrations in Regina, Calgary, and Edmonton. This year, Dustin threw a Nog’s Eve celebration in Edmonton and, in future years, hopes to expand the commencement of the Nog Season to include philanthropic enterprises, such as, for example, an opportunity to raise funds and awareness for non-profit relief organizations.

Each year I receive several emails around this time of year letting me know about the spread of Nog’s Eve, about a party here or there, and always wishing me the very best with the commencement of the Nog Season. I have no knowledge of whether Nog’s Eve is still celebrated by any at North Shore Alliance in Vancouver or whether Craig Cadwell still partakes of the tradition. I don’t know whether other celebrations have picked up or begun freshly across this continent or perhaps some other. I don’t know whether the Nog Season thrives with greater recognition and widening notoriety with each passing year, or whether the years pass by simply in the minds of those key figures of Nog history. But whatever does or doesn’t happen each year, I remember those early days of Nog’s Eve and I remember these last few years of Nog celebrations, and I feel a burgeoning hope bloom within me that Nog’s Eve will grow in the fecund soil of goodwill and hope, peace and joy.

So on this, the commencement of another season of Nog, I wish you all a happy Nog’s Eve 2007!!! And a most holly jolly Nog Season!!! Here’s to you and to all your friends and family!!!

ps- Past Nog's Eve photos and email poster adverts will be posted to follow... If there are any you wish to contribute, please email them to me with something like "Nog's Eve memories" for the subject label. Many thanks and much fond feeling...

my daily bliss

2007-11-23T15:09:00.000-06:00

Today at work I heard a Christmas song. I think it was Bing Crosby's version of "Frosty the Snowman." It played over the Christmas satellite radio station that gets piped through the whole store, through tinny speakers, usually all but lost in the ambient white noise of the vents blowing dusty, recycled air. And for anybody that has to listen to it--if you do hear the music day-in and day-out throughout the Christmas season--it becomes rather tiresome. An understatement perhaps. So I might say, without much fear of contradiction, that it becomes the retailer's incessant irritant, the straw that all but cripples the camel and makes for the longest and most tiring days. Of course, there is always the constant customer pressure, which undoubtedly begins to wear on the nerves, but it seems that Christmas music bears the brunt of the retailer's wrath during the Christmas season. It spills over to taint Christmas parties and tarnish those warm, holly jolly moments at home around the tree--any place where that dreaded music begins, it seems to echo and amplify within the hollow chamber that used to fill with warmth and good cheer by the same auditory stimulus. It used to be that there was a sense of magic and awe that surrounded the Christmas season--I suppose partly due to the legendary Santa Claus and partly the grace of all those gifts. There was a time when the music was like magic, when it would conjure brightly coloured packages and reindeer and a gilded evergreen from the very bare air. But I suppose the utter bliss of Christmas fades, partly when the legend becomes myth and partly when the joy of giving begins to outweigh the anticlimax of getting. Or perhaps that's not the case at all and what really happens, as happens with almost everything else, is that we simply lose our sense of wonder, our awe at the intricate delight of all things as we grow older. The beauty, the mystery, and the majesty of springtime rains and fresh buds, slow-falling snow and visible puffs of breath, the cycles of seasons and the cycles of life... All of it begins to fade into the background, becomes taken for granted. But every once in a while, wonder still bursts through our pragmatic vision of the world and ripples our easy understanding, our blase attitude. And then we wake up. And then we remember...

Well, today I remembered. I heard through the white noise, the background music that had become (at best) un-notable or (at worst) willfully disregarded, and I heard the wonder and awe of Christmas in a burble of emotions and a swelling of memories and sensations. I wouldn't have expected "Frosty" to bring all that back to me, but suddenly and unexpectedly, he did. And if you remember that old cartoon with the crank magician who threw away his hat, then you'll remember the kids who used it for their snowman and how he came to life; and you'll also remember Frosty's gentle voice. I guess it's something like that, some chain of recollections, that finally reminded me of what Christmas used to feel like. And it's not just that it's changed feelings, but it's changed associations. Now when I think of Christmas, I don't think of the magic of softly falling snow or evergreen trees, or even that ancient manger that made history (quite literally). I think of piles of junk and adverts and someone trying to sell me something. That's worth some mourning, I think. But today, as I said, Frosty reminded me, in his gentle and impossible snowman's voice that there was some magic left. That it had never really gone anywhere.

I guess this could come across as a big farce, as some cheesy, feel-good attempt at heart-warming sentimentality, but I don't mean for it to come across that way at all. I hope , rather, that it conjures some sense of loss and some sense of found. I hope that it reminds you what it did feel like--not simply in a nostalgic way, but in a real and significant way--and what it could feel like again. I hope that you can see, for one bright and golden moment, that the magic hasn't really gone--it's just that our vision to see it has been dulled with time.

And it's not just a call to return to the "spirit of Christmas" or to meditate on the joy of the true meaning of the season; it's a reminder that all of life has become the same, all of life has become rather dull. And maybe it's just that today was lucky, but I found myself wandering home in a bit of a wonderland--cool and still, snowflakes seeming to hang in the air, almost as in a snow globe, with bare, black branches tangled against the gray sky, and all around the soft and crunchy fresh fallen snow. In that moment, walking along Rosedale Avenue, I realized the magic and wonder of the moment. I remembered what it felt like to be delirious in a wonder-filled world.

As Emily Dickinson wrote:

I had a daily bliss
I half indifferent viewed,
Till suddenly I perceived it stir,--
It grew as I pursued,

Till when, around a crag,
It wasted from my sight,
Enlarged beyond my utmost scope,
I learned its sweetness right.

And there it was, laid out before me, a daily bliss--half-forgot in all the shuffle of things-to-do and places-to-go... Suddenly, it grew beyond my imagination and I glimpsed Eternity, touched down in a moment, telescoped through all temporality... Suddenly, I was filled with wonder.

chris write more

2007-11-03T14:07:00.000-05:00

Many long and arduous months have passed since I last posted here... For those who have eagerly awaited a new post and some fresh writing to stretch itself out here in this virtual space, I thank you for your patience and persistence in your faithful, perhaps sporadic, visits to my unchanging blog. I remember all my good intentions, when I wrote last January, about how I would update more frequently and use this space to hone my writing. But they just seem to dissolve into the ether of things to do and scattered living...

I tried, shortly after my last post, to write something new. I was on the fourth floor at Millenium Library at the computer banks nestled along the back wall among the stacks of non-fiction. It was a Sunday afternoon, March 18th, and I was feeling unsettled trying to move on in my day. The school season was almost finished, my final semester of classes, reading thick and heady volumes of philosophy and theory and literature, and I was consequently swimming in minor indecision about what should come next, wondering what kind of effect my personal, relational, emotional constitution were having on my "professional" life (which, up to this point, had been a student's life, but was soon to become the direction of whatever came next--whether writing or community work or stopgap work or a full-blown career). That Sunday morning, I'd spent over a leisurely breakfast with a friend that left me feeling profoundly unsettled about my values and my role in life. And as I sat down to write, these thoughts bubbled in my mind, and this is what I wrote...

There are many people in the world, and in among all those people there are only a handful with which we are able to establish a lasting bond. If you look at your life, you can probably name them--the ones that linger in your memory and remind you that you feel a little less alone when they are around: in many cases, these are the people we marry; the people we tell our secrets to; the ones we talk with late into the night. They are the people for which we can give no account of except that we find them easy to be around because they simply understand us. But there always comes a time of decision--a point at which we realize that we need to work at that connection if it is to hold. There are fears and misgivings at these points...

And with that, I felt the burning in my soul, felt the restless spirit rear up--

I saved the draft of a post that would never be finished and I went to find a pack of cigarettes... It'd been almost 2 months since I quit smoking and I felt that I had a pretty good handle on not doing it. I felt like I knew my trigger points and how to deal with cravings and what to do when I felt unreasonably drawn to them... But in this moment, it all failed me, I didn't care anymore, and I beelined out of the library and crossed Donald to CityPlace to find a pack of Number 7's. I stood in the courtyard behind the library, the banks of snow surrounding me, and I drew heavily on the familiar addiction, toying with thoughts of fate and absolution of responsibility and divine providence. Perhaps I simply was a smoker. I looked up at the sheet of windows that cover the southern facing library windows, seeing the reflection off and up into the atmosphere, and I pondered the direction of my life...

Lately, I've been having an almost constant crisis of purpose. I wonder what I should be doing and whether it's selfish ambition or my actual calling, whether it's simply a hobby or very deeply my vocation. And how much can I--should I--possibly sacrifice for it? It seems that whoever it is that I'm becoming follows directly from all the choices and decisions and investments I make now. That is, whoever it is that I will be begins right now. Begins in the ripple of this present moment...

Whether it needs to be said or not, I gave up smoking three days later. It was easier the second time--the habit was already cracked. But I was left wondering, perhaps floundering, for a few days (maybe weeks, arguably months)... There's still so many questions, still the usual struggles over how to spend my time, my money, my emotions... And in the end, I come back to the thought that the person I am becoming begins right now. In this moment, in this present heartbeat, I am choosing who it is that I will be. In this moment, I am becoming.

So please bear with me...

to love and to be loved

2007-03-13T13:08:00.000-05:00

Some quotes on the little kernel at the center of everything:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements, lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason. "I knew thee that thou wert a hard man." Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.
--C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

To take love seriously, to endure it, and to learn it the way one learns a profession--that is what young people need to do. People have misunderstood the role of love in life like so much else. They have turned love into a game and pleasant distraction because they thought that games and distractions are more blissful than work; but nothing is filled with greater joy and happiness than work, and love, exactly because it is the most extreme joy and happiness, can be nothing but work. A person in love thus has to try to behave as if he had to accomplish a major task: he has to spend a lot of time alone, reflect and think, collect himself and hold on to himself; he has to work; he has to become something!
--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

loving the enemy

2007-02-25T21:18:00.000-06:00

Last Sunday, February 18, I read Luke 6.27-38 and then the following reflection (which I wrote):

I’ve heard it said that all theology is at its very heart autobiography, and that what the theologian is attempting to do is to examine the various circumstances and experiences of his or her life and express the truths they’ve discovered about God and human existence in logical, reasonable terms. And this makes a lot of sense, and not just for theology—also: poetry, philosophy, psychology, artistry, biology, etc. Whatever you happen to think about begins within the borders of your own mind, begins with the basic assumption that I am thinking in the first place. And so, I suppose, to think about God is to think about myself. What all this has to do with the passage I just read may seem obvious once I say it, but please bear with me: I am going to say what I think about this passage.

The most striking thing about Jesus’s words is the thing that everybody seems to be talking about, namely, the impossible suggestion that I love my enemies and treat the people who hate me and abuse me and curse me as nicely as I can—maybe even better than that. While I have a very difficult time just trying to figure out what it means to love my neighbour, it seems that everything just gets more complicated when Jesus asks me to love my enemy. And it doesn’t really help me to make the clever observation that often times my enemy turns out to be my neighbour and vice versa because really, the only thing I know about my neighbour is that they are the person who ends up close to me, whether they live next door or have taken the empty seat next to me on the bus, whether they are the person asking me annoying questions while I’m trying to read in a coffee shop or the person I wake up next to every morning. That’s neighbours for you: they are hard enough to love simply because they’re always there next to me, but they’re nothing compared with my enemies.

Enemies, on the other hand, are the ones out to get me: they don’t like me and they tell me so, usually without saying anything to me at all. They say offensive things and act cruelly. They make me feel unlovable. And so, they are enough to make me yell and scream, even though that takes an awful lot of provocation, for me to tell someone what I really think of them—although there are a few people who have heard about the time when I (rather explosively) told someone that they needed to exercise more patience in their life. But aside from very rare outbursts, I try to practice a civilized enmity: that is, in my free time I smolder with rage and nurse bitter feelings against all the mean and hurtful people in the world. If someone hurts me or cheats me in some way, I’m much more likely to bear it as a grudge and silently label that person “my enemy,” than I am to scream at them—although the screaming and shouting does feel good from time to time. So when an enemy mounts a surprise offensive on my usually well balanced, equitable sensibilities, it stops me in my tracks. I’ll be humming along all tickety-boo and suddenly, as if out of nowhere, someone will begin telling me about how homosexuals are going to hell because they are deviants and they celebrate their sin unashamedly. Or how Hindus are misguided people who are actually worshipping demons and not the Almighty. And immediately, my back goes up and I want to shout swearwords and kick over tip-able, breakable things; but instead I nod my head and smile a little, and make some vague comment about how grace is a lovely idea, isn’t it?—and then I carry away all my hurt and I label that person as an enemy in my mind. And the very strangest part is that I feel entirely justified—and even a little bit giddy with pride—in condemning that person and calling them an ignorant, unloving hypocrite. I strut my stuff in my head and quote scripture to myself, saying, “O woe is you, my enemy—for the scriptures proclaim thusly: ‘Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.’” And so on. But, of course, it doesn’t take much to realize that that’s exactly what I’m doing, and I’m also really enjoying my glorious judgments. I am treating people in just the way that I deserve to be treated, and maybe that’s the whole problem here—there is no mercy, there is no grace.

I guess the real question is who is doing all the real damage here. If I’m the one carrying around all this anger and all these bitter feelings then it seems that my enemy didn’t have to do all that much to hurt me—I’m doing it all to myself. I’m carrying around all the hurt and all the pain. I’m the one who’s becoming angry and mean and annoyed with everyone. I’m becoming more judgmental and less giving. I’m the one who is shriveling up. And so I think, in the end, I am turning out to be my own enemy—perhaps more than anyone else. While I seem to be loving myself, I am simply caught up in my own self-absorbed—maybe self-obsessed—thoughts, and so I am hating myself by carrying all that anger and hurt around. And it’s truly damaging because I don’t even notice I’m doing it. I direct all the awful, volatile feelings inwards because I think that it’s more pious and makes me a better person, but I have forgotten that the anger persists—it grows stronger and it goes deeper. So the trick in all this is to find some way to deal with all my hurt and injury, all that enmity and hostility—find a way to let it go. To forgive myself and other people. To extend mercy and grace. And I think that can only be done inside myself—by being a little kinder and gentler and more tender with that injured part of me. At the end of the day, the more I am myself, the better I will be able to love other people.

Throughout the passage I just read, the frame of reference is myself: “…do good to those who hate you… Do to others as you would have them do to you… Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Everything seems to begin and end with me. And so maybe that’s the place to start. Maybe it’s less about the enemy “out there” and more about finding out who I really am in here. I think a lot of times we get so hung up on defining who our enemy is that we forget that we are meant to be loving them. At the root of all this, we aren’t only loving the people who love us, but we are also loving the people who make us feel unlovable—maybe, strangely, that turns out most often to be ourselves…

st. valentine and the praying mantis

2007-02-14T11:06:00.000-06:00

When I awoke this morning, in a sudden flash of insight, I realized that it was St. Valentine's Day. Now having never had a Valentine's Day that didn't consist of the continual realization (and the subsequently bothersome awareness) of my singleness, this epiphanaic flash of what day it was was followed very closely by thoughts of the praying mantis. I suppose that may seem strange, and indeed I find it so as well, especially since waking up most days I find it difficult to string together even the simplest of thoughts, let alone two rather striking thoughts. Usually, "Boy, it's sunny outside today," is a brilliant and insightful moment when I am dragging myself from sleep. But today I had two, followed closely on one another's heals: (1) it's St. Valentine's Day and (2) the praying mantis is a bug that kills her mate.

Looking into the praying mantis, I found out a few things. I found out that the mantis gets its first name (i.e. praying) from its prayer-like posture, as it clasps its hands before it. Its second name (i.e. mantis) is derived from a Greek word meaning prophet or fortune teller. So the praying mantis is some kind of praying fortune-teller prophet. The female of the species, interestingly enough, rips the head off her mate during the mating process. Or, as Wikipedia puts it: "The female praying mantis is known for her habit of biting the head off her partner while they are mating, though contrary to popular belief, this act has no influence on the reproductive process, save for terminating the male's ability to pass his genes on to any other females. Sexual cannibalism may be rarer in the wild than in captive mantids kept in a cage, due to the lack of room for the male to evade the female after mating ends." I find it particularly troubling that one mantis biting the head off another seems to be the best method that the mantis has come up with to ensure monogamy.

As for St. Valentine, I was surprised to learn that he wasn't simply one person. It seems that there were at least three different St. Valentines, all of them martyrs, recorded in the early martyrologies under February 14. One was a priest and one was a bishop, and these both suffered near Rome in the second half of the third century. The third Valentine suffered in Africa with a few friends, although that's all that's really known about him. Now normally this sad sort of tale isn't enough to get people in the mood, so to speak, or to cause them to pluck that saint's day from the calender as the perfect occasion to buy their significant other flowers; no, it seems that Valentine's day developed into its conventional, popular form (as celebratory of love sweet love) in the fourteenth century in England and France, where February 14 (i.e. the middle of the second month) came to be known as the day when birds pair off. In "Parliament of Foules," Chaucer writes:

For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne's day
Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.

Ah, the seeds of romantic love--you can almost feel it buzzing in the air, as the birds return and find their mates... Of all the seasons, Spring seems to be that romantic time of year, that young-love-in-Paris season. Of course, Valentine's Day seems less about spring and little birdies than it does about dragging ourselves through the last weeks of winter. All in all, Valentine's Day past seems to be filled with violence and depression and regret: Valentine(s) the martyr; the praying mantis mating ritual (which although it may seem like a good idea at the time, will inevitably come to be remembered with regret--especially when baby mantis asks about daddy); those creepy birds who return in the middle of February; and Chaucer's poor spelling. It all seems so made up and contrived. Like the perfect opportunity to sell more greeting cards and chocolates after the holidays--just enough to get us from Christmas to Easter.

But then, if you ease your soul a moment, and simply reflect on what love looks like to you, you can let the strictly narrow-sighted sense of romantic love drift away, and you begin to see all the love in the world. Last week in church, for instance, we talked about the Sacred Heart of Jesus (or, as the French say, Sacre Coeur) and about all the compassion and intensity of unconditional love. Maybe Valentine's Day isn't so much what the commercials have made it to be. Maybe it's less about romantic love and it's more about all love--that is, capital "l" Love.
A little while back I had this idea that maybe because God is love, in the sense of being love-unconditional, and that since this means that his love is boundless, the only way to have true love is to have eternal love. And that's not to say that only if you love someone for all eternity can you love them at all, because I'm not sure if that's possible. Rather, I think I'm trying to say that loving someone is like dipping into eternity--like dipping into the very heart of God, and realizing that love itself is a sign of the Divine. And you can glimpse, in a fleeting moment, the boundlessness and the depthlessness of Love. You realize that it takes you as you are only if you will take all of it.

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.
--Thomas Merton

ending and beginning

2007-01-23T21:50:00.000-06:00

Oh, sometimes, I simply feel that this life is far too weighty for me. Every moment, as a beginning and an end...

Robert Frost says, "You're searching, Joe, for things that don't exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings -- there are no such things. There are only middles."

And I suppose that in this middle moment, I am feeling an ending. (Is that allowed?) I am feeling rather sad with it.

Thomas Merton says, "We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves."

If you remember something like that, then in each moment you are becoming more or less yourself through the choices you make. And if you think that there are no choices, then your choices are being made without your even noticing. That's how you end up living a plain and uninspired life.

Henry David Thoreau says, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation."

And so as you may be rolling along through your days, as I roll along through mine, you might try to think about the things that are worth changing -- the things that make you more yourself. Because as Merton says, "For me to be a saint means to be myself."

season's g---s

2006-12-30T16:58:00.000-06:00

I haven't been very good at keeping up this blog thing recently, but there's a new year coming on and I suppose this is one of those times to try and sort things like that out. Resolutions and such. I guess it would also be appropriate to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, too.

And, as 2006 passes by, it only seems right to briefly update my state of affairs: First, I finished all my various papers for the Fall Semester at University of Winnipeg. Also, I pretty much made it through the Christmas season unscathed by the embarassment of buying poor presents (because I got people decent presents--like books and teapots and things). But I did experience some minor embarassment this afternoon at work when I wished someone "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy New Year." The fellow was almost out the door, and I realized that I'd misspoken, but he turned around and came back and started to go, "Ah--" and then I said, "Yes, I'm sorry, I know Christmas is over--I meant to say 'Happy New Year.'" And he kind of nodded and walked off. And it was, like I say, minorly embarassing.

At this point, there's only a couple more days until school starts again, but it'll be a little less ridiculous this semester because I'll only have two classes. And I'll keep working at the bookstore in order to make ends meet. Etc.

So, those are the basics--but, of course, there's always so much more rolling along through this mind of mine. Hopefully this semester I'll be able to keep up a bit more of a regular blog-o-rhythm. In the meanwhile, outside it's dark and the streets are lit only dimly by streetlight and snow is falling softly in the streets; tonight is second Christmas (i.e. with Steve and Gillian) so it all seems very fitting.

rude awake

2006-11-24T12:09:00.000-06:00

So the days are just rolling by. It's end of semester time, so classes are ending and the days feel a little less hectic. But there's still the looming papers to write, all my thoughts on life stories and the street-walking flaneur and public-private division of society and Martin Buber and relational morality... Yes, the semester is winding down, but I'm still feeling the pressure to produce. And then it's the beginning of the holiday season, too. Nog's Eve is only a week away, and it should be a fine time. I'll be starting work again at Hull's Bookstore come next weekend. By the 14th I should be done all the essays and papers and pressures of this semester at school. And I will have made it. This week I had my birthday. I'm 25 now, which is the quarter century mark. It seems strange to have passed another year, or rather, maybe it passed me. I wonder if that's especially meaningful somehow.

This morning, my Critical Theory class made a trip to Polo Park mall to talk about the social, everyday space of the shopping mall. So we settled at tables in the foodcourt, about 15 of us altogether, hunched down and talking over the din of octagenarians and mallrats and fastfood clattering. By the end of it, I couldn't concentrate at all, feeling distracted and fractured and worn out by the effort of trying to ignore everything around me in order to talk about it. I found that I was consumed, in some way, by this palace of consumption. I couldn't think of anything but how unappealing it was to be here, and how unattractive all this garbage was becoming. But it was stuck in my mind, just looking around, absorbing all the bustle and flash and bam of the place. Neon signs and flashing TV screens, the food court smells, merchandise in windows - all of it just striving for my attention. But nothing got it, because everything did. I couldn't think about the mall. I certainly didn't want to be in the mall. And, in fact, I didn't want to do anything at all - I felt lost.

I caught a ride back to school with John, with a cup of coffee and muffin for the road, and split myself off from the place. I wandered up the U of Winnipeg escalator corridor and into the computer lab, intending to read something on feminist symbolism in Hinduism for one of my papers. And I made a valiant effort... I tried. But then, I had to stop. Because I couldn't bring myself to care about that. I couldn't really care about most things in that moment. I felt that I needed to buy something (which seems to be an especially strange urge on culture-jammed Buy Nothing day). And I began to think about how distracted all things become, in so many different ways in all the moments of the day - with TV, books, malls, cars, adverts, glossy pictures, telephone calls, emails, style, deadlines, work, leisure... It's enough to lose the day. I think it's even enough to lose your mind. Maybe especially once you wake up and snap out of it.

future-tense present

2006-10-17T12:24:00.000-05:00

Time is just racing onwards and with barely a present-tense glance, I'm running too. School is just a downpour of reading and assignments and some presentations... And everything is packed with doing and producing. I'm feeling a little worn by the whole thing. It's to be expected I suppose. I'm even writing this at school, in the Uplink room off the (Jimmy) Buffeteria and I had to wait in a lineup to get a computer, and I think somebody is eating cake because I can smell its sweetness. On either side of me, there are people doing assignments and scrolling through pages of text readings, some with charts and graphs and tables of information, all laid out neatly in the standard academic type. Then there's the guy in the corner who is slumped against the wall watching soccer highlights and online skate videos. It's all research, of course. And no one looks to the right or left because that would be rude. So there's rows and rows of us, just sitting, staring intently at our screens, the buzz of fluorescent lights above, on all the exposed pipes and electrical cords snaking over the roof.

In the back of my mind I'm thinking about the Reflection Paper I have to write tonight, which won't be especially hard (I console myself), but will still take a couple hours to do. Two hours from now, I'll be sitting down in Storied Lives to talk about Anne Lamott's Traveling Mercies, and I'm sure it'll run in circles and I'll feel tremendously frustrated by the end of the three hours. And then there's half an hour from now, when I'll be meeting with one of my professors about the presentation that's coming up next Wednesday--just to say, is this okay, will that work for class? And I'm not even especially feeling the words I type just now, or even retrospectively savouring the breakfast I had with Steve this morning. Even walking to school, I couldn't roll in the now; I couldn't settle into the regular walk and just enjoy this transitory journey. My life is anticipation and planning; it's looking at the next thing that's happening and trying to play my cards right, trying to clear Wednesday night, or planning the paper that I'm confused about so I have something to say when I talk to my prof about it. The "will" and "should" are commanding all the attention and dragging me forwards. I'm living the present in future-tense.

So, let's see... The whole point of this thing, this existence, is simply to be. It's to pay attention to the present moment because there's something holy about this present moment. There is something sacred in slowing down, in the silence of a quiet soul. There needs to be some attention paid to the future, to what's coming next, but never at the expense of the present. I would think there needs to be a balance. And I wonder if the whole world is built in such a way as to be merely anticipatory, neglecting the present heartbeat, the current of now, and simply consumed with doing whatever needs to be done next. Or maybe there are seasons in life, and this is one of school stress and anticipation and production and soaking up learning... My mind runs on ahead of me, eager to consume itself, because the completion of the next thing to be done is one less thing that will need to be done. And maybe then I'll be able to relax and be.

Of course, it's all very well and good. The learning is a rushing flow that I'm happily tapping into, and it's hard not to be carried on ahead of myself. But, it's all very good to be in the flow. All things considered, the student's life is a pretty good life. I just don't have a moment--

and again, here i am

2006-09-18T16:14:00.000-05:00

I haven't visited my blog in some time. Life has picked up a little bit since my trip to Portland, which was a great time, you know. It had all the signatures of the classic road trip: miles and miles of driving; meeting new friends; catching up with old ones; getting to know a new town; time alone for introspection and self-reflection; many good conversations; and the peculiar restlessness of leaving what you know and the people you love for something else, and then leaving that too, full of excitement and melancholy, and the constant awareness of small significance. Yes, it was a good trip. (But I didn't become friends with, or even meet, Rick McKinley or Don Miller - so it goes.)

And then, coming home, I wandered Winnipeg trying to get my wits about me again and settle into life here. There was about two weeks between coming home and starting school once more, and the time just slipped away. I did some reading and some writing and generally felt lost in the familiar.

I'm through my second week at University of Winnipeg now. The school year is rolling by as quickly as the summer. I decided not to work for my first semester because I'm enrolled in five courses, which is a real full load. To give you an idea, here's my five courses: Storied Lives (a third year Religious Studies course that focuses on the ways in which individuals situate the narrative of their lives within their religious tradition); Critical Theory (a fourth year English seminar course that has little to do with literature, focusing on theories of everyday life, which is basically all those little things that comprise a person's life and usually go unnoticed); Existentialism (a second year Philosophy course that looks at - *surprise* - existentialism, reading Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre); Philosophy and Social Reality (a third year seminar course on the way that society is "constructed" and the role of humanity); and Topics in Moral Philosophy (a fourth year seminar course on ethics and morality, dealing with questions like "What makes an action good?" and "What motivates good or moral action?"). So, needless to say, I'm pretty busy these days with all the reading and philosophizing.

Things on my mind these days:
Well, I'm wondering a little about purpose. The very heavy emphasis on philosophy at school has me reeling a little. I don't have a problem with philosophy and I think that I actually really enjoy it (or at least aspects of it). But the more papers I write and the more philosophy I read, the more I wonder why the hell I'm bothering with it anyway. My questions of purpose have less to do with "Why are we here?" and more to do with "What am I going to do with myself?" (which might be a bit of an existential dilemma...). I guess I'm wondering, thinking about the thousands of years of philosophy and systematic reasoning, how all this is going to resolve itself. I suppose God has a pretty good handle on these questions, but sometimes, even if you know you won't have a ready answer, the important thing is to ask the questions anyways.

More and more people I know seem to be settling into their lives, from starting careers to buying houses, having babies and finishing school. And I look out from my (admittedly) very limited perspective and I think, "Hm, well, this all seems to be going very much as unplanned." I know that I'm not ready for most of the usual things that make up an average life. I don't even think I would change much in my life, if given the chance to skip back the years and start over. I feel pretty good about where I am and what I'm doing. But I still feel like I'm stumbling along blindly and trying to feel my way forward.

So, here I am.

Finally, to finish this off, some Emily Dickinson:

If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain
Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain.

happy travels

2006-08-15T17:02:00.000-05:00

I'm staying in Lethbridge for a few days with some friends of mine. I left Winnipeg last Saturday morning for something like 10 days, although nothing is set in stone. I drove to Lethbridge my first day out, a long and lonely drive, but I didn't feel the isolation of it. I felt the quickening of travel, the movement of my soul, and it is not a lonely prospect; it is just alone. On Thursday morning I leave for Portland. I'll spend a few days there and meet new people and become acquainted with a new place. I've been told I will like Portland and I certainly hope so. I've driven through it several times before but never stopped there. I'm going to do a day hike that is connected with Imago Dei Community in Portland called "Great Books in the Great Outdoors" (click if you're interested to hear more about it).

And planning this trip has been so simple and inspiring. But at the same time, faced with this big adventure to move on and race the open road, I miss Winnipeg already. I guess I'll be back before I know it and I'm very pleased to be traveling once again, but each time I leave, I feel more and more uprooted. There is something, the friends and family I have, the community which I am a part of, and the history of the place... it all draws me back. It's all very beautiful, really.

So, a few quotes about travel...

First, on traveling alone, which is a mostly unpopular prospect:
"The man who goes out alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready." -Henry David Thoreau

On being conflicted about leaving home to travel:
"A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it." -George Moore
"I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home." -William Hazlitt

On the philosophy of traveling:
"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." -Robert Louis Stevenson
"A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it." -John Steinbeck

On traveling as a lifestyle:
"The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see." -Gilbert K. Chesterton
"The world is a book, and those who do not travel, read only a page." -Saint Augustine

And finally, on the endless traveller:
"Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends." -Seneca

This last is a very funny quote. Everywhere as nowhere seems to imply that everywhere is anywhere. Well, if everywhere is nowhere, and everywhere is anywhere, then anywhere is nowhere; and the person who stays in one place may also simply have many acquaintances without any real friends. The problem is presence; paying attention to this moment and this person and on and on... If you miss the simple and obvious things, if you ignore the world for want of entertainment, then you will always have mere acquaintances, regardless of travel or immobility.

But for the traveller who holds that everywhere is nowhere, it's interesting to look at how St. Augustine described the nature of God: as a circle whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. In other words, the traveler has no better companion than God Himself, who resides everywhere, in all places and in all things, and never has an end. Then everywhere suddenly becomes somewhere, a familiar place, presence is all about you. Suddenly, traveling or staying, everywhere is somewhere holy (or at least potentially so); and this moment is for me as much as you.

at work today

2006-08-03T16:36:00.000-05:00

music rises like water
in the penthouse above
dripping down to the street below
flowing for all to hear

and then there's sulphuric acid
in that creepy staircase, love-
making, heart-breaking hate,
brewing potato beer

waking up to streets paved with brown carpet
squishing like worms between my toes
and nobody knows
why?

oh why, curses, oh! fie!
why oh why the hell is there acid in the closet?

~~sigh

-written by Rachel Reimer, Brock Tyler, Kami Pennicook, and Chris Campbell to commemorate the 3rd day of August in the year 2006

**note: this blog entry is also a commemoration of my first collaborative blog entry

street bird

2006-07-14T06:39:00.000-05:00

I found a bird on the sidewalk at sunrise this morning. It wasn't dead, but I think it may be by now. I mean, it wasn't in very good shape. The little thing was breathing all heavy and its little body was quivering, feathers all puffed up and ruffled. It could have been that it was in quite a bit of pain. I stooped down to get a better look at it and it didn't budge, except that its little eyes were darting all over. The expression on its face reminded me of a very old and grumpy man. I guess maybe that's what he was.

so tired

2006-07-12T18:19:00.000-05:00

And there are many kinds of tiredness, many types of exhaustion. I realized yesterday that I am tired, and I can feel it dragging into today, stretching on into tomorrow. Physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually… Maybe not all at once. That’s an awful lot, but I guess if you’re physically exhausted or mentally stressed, emotions begin to jitter. It’s part of that holistic sense of self. Every bit a spiritual action, every concrete event, every smile or tear, every fire and misfire of the brain, all of it echoes in the spirit.

Sometimes I sigh. I let out one of those big exhales that tells more than I even realize. A lot of times I don’t even notice that I’ve done it. And people will say, “That was a heavy sigh.” And I say, “Oh. Really?” “Yes, it was. Are you all right?” That’s when I have to stop and think and I begin to realize that yes, maybe I am very tired. It’s a chance to look inwards and realize what I have done, why I feel so heavy. Usually it only takes a moment to say, “I guess I’m tired.” But sometimes it’s more than just tiredness...

The expression “bone-weary” is an interesting one. I guess it means that you’re so tired that you can feel it all the way down to your bones; even your bones are weary. That would probably be the physical type of tired. A couple weeks ago I felt bone-weary after having too little sleep and too much activity playing hours of paintball. I couldn’t walk right for almost a week, all my muscles seized up and I had to lock my legs in order to walk. Crouching was especially difficult, but it felt great once I got down there. Problem was getting up again. I had to put all my weight forward on my hands, kind of like a chimp, and then straighten my legs and let my torso follow. Anyway, the night I got home from paintball I fell into bed around eight o’clock and slept through until about eight the next morning. That’s how I think of bone-weary.

I guess you could have a “brain-weary” and “feel-weary” and “soul-weary,” too. Brain-weary would probably be like after exams at the end of a full year of school. Come to think of it, this last year, after exams in April, I had about a month of brain-weary, so much so that I lost any sense of appropriateness. Not that I wandered about spouting profanity in front of children or telling all my secrets to strangers on the bus. But I did lose that sense of when I’d said too much or how to connect my thoughts. I felt a little emotionally spent and a big part of it was not being able to think in a straight line. They say that if you drive when you’re tired, it’s the same as if you’d had a few too many drinks. Judgment impediments and all. Well, that’s what the end of April and most of May felt like, a drunken walk. And then one day, I got dumped out the other end.

“Feel-weary” is a little harder. I don’t get there quite so easily. I suppose relationally, it happens every once in awhile. I get a panicky sense of claustrophobia, like someone is holding me too closely, and I just have to walk away, leave the day and leave the person(s) behind. Wander off on my own and let the thoughts settle. Sometimes sitting in church I get that rippling feeling up my spine, like a physical restlessness and I just want to move along. Somebody once said that it was the spirit (Spirit?) rustling and I really like that idea. I hold onto it when I feel like running away because otherwise I just might. And that’s not even it, because feeling restless isn’t feeling tired. No, I guess there have been times when the restlessness died away. A few years back I went through a deep, dark time — like the dark night of the soul — and I would wake up late and stumble through my days, and then go to bed early, just tired of feeling.

Maybe you’ve been so tired that funny things start to happen in your body. Like when the carpet squiggle starts to squirm and you think you’ve just seen a bug. Or you start to get itchy in a dozen different places all of a sudden. Maybe your eyes un-focus a little bit and begin to act like you don’t need the glasses that are sitting on your nose. Or right after a cup of coffee your eyes begin to close and you feel drowsy like you will sleep anywhere, just so long as you get to sleep.

And to be soul-weary seems to be a little bit of all of these things, something that weighs on your heart, soul, and mind. It begins to feel like the only way out is to surrender to the exhaustion and to sleep. You put aside all the worries and concerns, joys and pleasures, and you sleep. It is when you give up being in charge of your life and you put yourself into the hands of night, as Frederick Buechner says, “when you trust yourself to the same unseen benevolence to see you through the dark and to wake you when the time comes—with new hope, new strength—into the return again of light.” Maybe that’s what the call is all about: Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead...

ah, yes

2006-06-28T21:19:00.000-05:00

The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it.
-George Bernard Shaw

What a cynical thing to say...

an excerpt

2006-06-21T10:44:00.000-05:00

From Gilead by Marilynne Robinson:

That mention of… joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

what i really meant

2006-06-13T13:05:00.000-05:00

Looking back over my last few posts I realize that they don’t seem to resolve. There doesn’t seem to be much of an arrival or satisfaction to my thoughts, which seems very strange to me. And yet it doesn’t. I feel like there is this mass of thoughts that seems to be bubbling to the edges of my mind and spilling over like there isn’t enough room for them all. Right now, it’s Monday night and the rain has stopped, but the world is wet and the smells blowing in my window are fresh and damp. Colours seem exceptionally vibrant, even though they are blanketed in darkness, and despite the breeze everything seems very still. It seems that nighttime is usually full of quiet and calm, and that’s why stormy nights have that eerie quality; they seem abnormal, uncomfortable. The night almost seems to have this dampening effect on the world, when snow falls softly and rain rolls through easily. And all seems quiet and somehow peaceful. But occasionally there’s a booming storm, full of thunder and lightning and terror, and the trees seem to bend in half and reach for the ground before bouncing back and over to begin again. Or there’s a wind such that beats against the walls of your house, and you can feel its power through the wood and plaster and stucco siding, and the windows rattle in their frames. And that’s the time when something inside feels both free and scared in the wildness of it all.

A couple of posts ago I quoted a D.H. Lawrence poem called “Song of a Man Who is Not Loved,” which I think is a bit of an unfortunate title (but who am I to say such a thing?). In that poem there is a line that says, “I feel myself isolated in the universe, and wonder / What effect I can have… / I hold myself up, and feel a big wind blowing / Me like a gadfly into the dusk, without my knowing / Whither or why or even how I am going…” I never really talked about that quote too much, but it seems to me to be a description of the human condition; all of us feel a little isolated and confronted at times with our own inadequacy and ineffectuality. Whether it be a simple accident or sudden circumstance or raging tantrum or something as simple as having to wait an extra twenty minutes at the bank, it’s especially in these little things, things that cause us to sputter and complain, when we begin to understand that we aren’t in absolute control. I guess it’s the times when things don’t go my way that I begin to see what kind of condition my soul is really in. Every once in awhile it feels like I’m being swept along at a pace, towards a place, that I never could understand. It almost seems like the simple events of life conspire around me and compel me towards something “without my knowing.”

Well, it seems a little like that with my last post on community. I guess I was kind of wondering why and how and where community seems to form, especially in light of the individualistic mindset that prevails in our culture. If I am number one, then who cares about forming community? Who cares about including these people in my life? The easiest and most pessimistic answer is that I open myself to a few people because the pain of being alone far outweighs the pain of a few friends, and in a lot of cases, despite including other people in my life, I feel a little like I can control them, in some sense. I don’t mean that I can make them do what I want, but rather that I can keep them from knowing me in certain ways. “Knowledge is power” is a pretty common concept and I wonder if that isn’t the only way that we can come to know people, that is, if we feel that we know more and have more power over our position. (Incidentally, I’m listening to Ben Lee right now, singing: “Woke up this morning and suddenly realized that we’re all in this together… Long division doesn’t matter, because we’re all in this together...” [By the way, just for Jeff, I’d kind of forgotten about G-Chuck and long division until just now, and I think long division does matter, and it may even be an indication that we are all in this together...])

I guess all this is to say that community is a bit of a miracle because it is a group of people who are attempting to let go of their own lives, disentangle from their closed and distracted selves, and experience the spooky openness and otherness of people. It's like Steve said, in his comment on my last post: "there is a great deal more risk, choice, and richness to be found in actively pursuing other people as well, if we could only rid ourselves of our fear of being rejected. Then maybe we would be more free to bring ourselves honestly into all of our relationships with our primary motive being not to be accepted and affirmed but to know, respect, and love others. True community is being vulnerable and authentic with others while remaining free of fear, pretension, and self-consciousness. And while I agree that often the thing that holds a community together is some common element or characteristic, wouldn't it be powerful if the main common motive was to simply know, care, and love others." And it’s a dangerous proposition because there is no return — not, that is, without some amount of pain and regret and feelings of isolation. It seems a small wonder, and maybe this is a mother-child thing, but upon entering this world, we seem utterly immersed in other people. We are born into a little familial community, and indeed, are even formed within another person. And then we seem to grow up and grow out. Thinking about Sunday afternoon when I dropped in to see Tim and Chandra and baby Arlo, I feel a bit of a heartache to remember holding Arlo: the beautiful miracle of new life; the palpable love in the room for this tiny little bean of a person who will sprout and grow with life; and looking into his eyes, his little foggy eyes that are just seeing all this for the first time. And I thought a lot about how moms and dads begin as babies themselves and about how much of our development is relational. And about the absolute freedom a child has. It just doesn’t seem right to consider a person apart from the fullness of their being: their freedom, choices, beauty, wisdom, and foolishness; their pride, anger, love, fear, loneliness, and peace; the isolation in the universe and the yearning to do something that matters; the absolute, stormy depths that they descend to, and the infinite heights they soar in... Well, I guess we’re in this together. It might be a little painful, it might be a bit rough, but I think we’re screwed without each other. I think that’s what I was trying to say about community.

thots on community

2006-06-09T21:55:00.000-05:00

“Community” has become one of those very popular words. It’s used a whole lot and, if you really think about it, it’s not hard to see why. It’s used vastly and variously to express so many different situations, and to look at the way it’s used is to see its wide appeal. Community can be all the people who live together in a common place; or it can be the people of an area considered collectively in the context of social values and responsibilities; or a group of people who have a particular characteristic in common, such as religion, race, or profession. (I suppose I should cite the Oxford American Dictionary for these definitions). “Community” has its root in the word common, which does indeed seem to make sense. After all, it is common characteristics that seem to gather a group of people together. And there is something particularly beautiful about this because it may only be one or two commonalities that can establish a community. Such as an AA meeting, which is a community that gathers together in need of support and understanding for the particular addiction of alcoholism. I don’t think it matters all that much once you get there whether the other people in the group make the same amount of money, live in the same area of town, hold the same political ideals, or even believe the same things about God that you do. What matters is that they have been where you are and that they are not judging you; they are able to understand you in a way that a non-alcoholic does; they are able to help you gain your footing on a slippery slope and walk alongside you, even as you help them get their feet about them.

In some sense, you are able to choose your community (or at least whether you will become an active participant in a certain community), but a community must also choose you. There are certain circumstances and commonalities that must already be present for community to exist and those cannot be forced. To some extent, they are natural characteristics and there is little choice (on your part) as to whether a community will open up to you; the decision is out of your hands. The beautiful thing about a community though, is that it seems to imply inclusion. Particularly, a communal familiarity with an individual seems to be enough, in many cases, to include you within a community. Look at the way you make friends, the way a neighbourhood community works, or the way a faith-based community works. In some sense, there needs to be more than simple familiarity involved in the process, but it is certainly very important.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had the opportunity to decide whether you wanted to be someone’s friend. Maybe you keep running into X all over the place, in a coffee shop and in the street and outside your apartment, and you’ve just been introduced briefly, but you decide that, yes, X will be a friend of mine. I think it’s probably a little like deciding who you will marry – or maybe there is merely a passing resemblance that I can’t understand at this point. But I have heard a few times from a few different couples that there came a point in their relationship when they looked at their girlfriend/boyfriend and decided, yes, this is the person I am going to marry. And I suppose this could be a little like when people say that love is a choice, although I think it’s more complicated than that. Well, that’s kind of like the mutual decision for community, I think. Commonalities only take you so far, and then comes the decision, then comes the commitment...

restless hearts

2006-05-15T13:57:00.000-05:00

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-T.S. Eliot

What are we searching for? I honestly don’t know how the majority of people would respond to this question. I’m not even sure how I would answer this myself. I guess a lot of people are searching for someone to love, because we all feel that need, that sense of emptiness at the thought of going home alone, or the thought of going on through life without someone close. I suppose others of us are looking for success, a good job that will provide the necessities and comforts of life, like a place to live and food and a bit of money to burn, etc. And there are those who search for justice, truly devoting themselves to social work, seeking peace in the world. Other people pursue knowledge, seeking to learn, to gain a philosophic or scientific understanding of the world and existence and everything else. There are those who search for God, dedicating their lives – anything they think about, every action they take – to service and to a better understanding of their creator… Lovers, dreamers, activists, workaholics, alcoholics, materialists, artists, and everyone in-between are searching for that thing to make them happy and bring them peace. That thing to give them meaning.

But what does all the searching mean? It feels that somehow any kind of searching is connected somehow, and not just by the simple awareness that life must have a purpose. The pursuit of any purpose, if too self-centered, is meaningless and worthless. Somehow there must be a sense of things – other people, other places, other beings – outside oneself. I guess this is one of those relational things, something that often gets lost in the bigness of life. There are so many activities that vie for my attention, it hardly seems like there is time to accomplish anything. I don’t suppose that’s entirely true, but you probably get the idea. Whether I realize it or not, every bit of my day is prioritized, organized in little chunks of time as to what gets my attention. There is always time, but what am I spending time on?

Spending time searching for something that has meaning. I don’t know quite what that means, but I just scanned back over what I’ve written so far, and that seems to be the best I can do. In order to get anything done, I need to make it a priority. I need to consider it important enough to spend time on. But even that’s not enough, because I could spend every second of the rest of my life writing, scribbling down thoughts, pounding out questions and answers and opinions and arguments… and after all this, have nothing. Because there is no meaning in writing, in the actual task. Meaning comes from what results from the writing. Meaning comes to others when they read what has been written. I suppose this could be said, in slightly modified terms, of almost anything. But to suggest that I do not have time is to suggest that I am dead. It is a shameless conviction to assert that I am powerless in my circumstances. It’s an apathy of the mind and the soul and the spirit, a depression of the will, and it destroys the creative ability of any person. If you take a look at the great people of history, scan the shelves at a bookstore, stroll the galleries of the world, attend a concert, or look at the people you admire most in life… They’re people who are searching, and there seems to be a holy fear in their lives, whether they acknowledge it or not, that the only thing worse than not finding, is not looking at all.

Maybe we search for many things at the same time, but the thing we find is something we didn’t expect at all. Maybe we seek God and a loving relationship and justice and success… But maybe the searching itself is a condition of the soul, a symptom of dissatisfaction, of yearning; there’s something that we’re trying to fill, some ache we’re trying to assuage, or some desire we’re attempting to satisfy. If searching is the active participation in life, then it’s also the way I work to repair the condition of my soul. I guess Jesus said something like this, that those who seek would find, but I wonder if our searching can only take us so far. Maybe it just brings us to an awareness of our dissatisfaction; it just creates the questions that can’t really be answered until we finally surrender. Until we consent to God in an active act of passive surrender. Maybe purpose constricts and limits our surrender. The longer we search and the better we are at asking questions and performing the activities that we feel bring us worth and create meaning in our lives, the harder it is to relinquish the control we feel that we have gained. It’s a scary thing to let go, to surrender control of my life. To let go my dreams and desires, the precious things I hold close to my heart, and to lay down my life creates a feeling of terror, a feeling that I am forfeiting the very things that make me human. I am letting go choice and control, and the only thing that seems to be left is hope. Hope that there is something better, something to be gained by giving up what I have. And our surrender isn’t the type that destroys, as we fear it will be, but it is a surrender that brings life, that brings meaning. Because it is borne of love.

who are we?

2006-05-08T12:54:00.000-05:00

The space of the world is immense, before me and around me;
If I turn quickly, I am terrified, feeling space surround me;
Like a man in a boat on very clear, deep water, space frightens and confounds me.

I see myself isolated in the universe, and wonder
What effect I can have. My hands wave under
The heavens like specks of dust that are floating asunder.

I hold myself up, and feel a big wind blowing
Me like a gadfly into the dusk, without my knowing
Whither or why or even how I am going....
-D.H. Lawrence, “Song of a Man Who is Not Loved”

A lot of old thoughts — ideas and stories and conversations — have come drifting back to me in the last couple days. I don’t know why, but I’ve been more than a little disconcerted lately. And I think that’s why these past-tense circumstances are floating up in my mind, unchecked and unguarded, and they’re pulling me somewhere. I’m trying to sort them out, sift through them to find the gold, or whatever it is that won’t be burned away. But I’m not having much luck. After work a couple nights ago I just wandered my apartment, talking to Sarah on the phone, feeling aimless but okay because of the voice in my ear. It’s a wonder that the idea of individualism ever caught on. I mean, not to be too close-minded or absolute about it, but to erect this little edifice to myself, and to bow down to my own supremacy and primacy as an individual is a little messed up. Good things have come about through individualism, I admit, and obviously it came at a time when it was (and still can be) very worthwhile, providing a standard for the rights and equality of all people, but it has become a justification to separate and isolate. Often we place ourselves in a position of prominence and privilege, even to the exclusion of any others. I guess the thing I’m trying to get at is that when a person is isolated, truly suspended on his or her own, things begin to crumble. It became pretty apparent to me a couple nights ago, after getting off the phone, that a person wasn’t meant to be alone. Humanity is a relational creature, intended to be joined (in some way) with other people.

I was talking to Alyssa on Saturday about names and identity, specifically this one passage in a Frederick Buechner book, Wishful Thinking. The book is a dictionary of sorts, a “Seeker’s ABC,” and in it Buechner defines his name: “BUECHNER: It is my name. It is pronounced Beekner. If somebody mispronounces it in some foolish way, I have the feeling that what’s foolish is me. If somebody forgets it, I feel that it’s I who am forgotten. There’s something about it that embarrasses me in just the same way that there’s something about me that embarrasses me.” My identity is somehow wrapped up in my name, in what I’m called and by what I’m known as. The way I live is the way my name is made known. It seems like an unusual thing that a name should hold so much meaning, even while it’s possible to change it and “go by” something different. But the way we exist in the world depends on our choices, and it really seems that a person’s choices are not meant to be made with only one’s self in mind.

So... I’m reading Proverbs of Ashes right now, by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, and it’s getting me thinking about how violent the world can be, and wondering about what a Christian response should be. The immediate feeling is that the Church should stand up and oppose violence and denounce unjust social structures, affirming that which is good and working to better the world in which we live. I think there are very few people who would disagree with this, but there are a great many who do not see that everyday we implicitly endorse violence and injustice. And I’m not talking about supporting businesses that use sweatshops or the unjust trade practices of many nations or genocide wars in far-off countries (although these are problems that deserve our attention). I’m talking about our attitudes towards those who are victims of abuse and neglect and violence — not simply physical, either, but emotional and mental — people that we meet and interact with everyday. To suggest that you don’t know anyone who has been abused or is a victim is to suggest that you have never met anyone. I don’t mean for that to sound confrontational or to imply that everyone is an unequivocal victim of abuse, but rather to draw attention to the limited capacity of every person to know those people that surround him or her. There is no way that we can know what our friends have gone through, what they struggle with, and what their pasts look like. There is no way to know what they feel guilty about or what they have done. There is no way to know a person’s heart.

I say all this because of the way I treat others and the way others treat me. The word “victim” has very negative connotations in our society, often associated with powerlessness and shame, but I use it just the same, attempting to save it, and maybe even save ourselves in the process, somehow. Because all people are victims, in some capacity, whether they admit it or not. We have all been trod upon, taken advantage off, dashed against the rocks, or left for dead. All of it feels very acutely like death. And each of us responds differently, whether it be a quiet, withdrawn individual or an aggressive, angry person or a gentle, humble soul, etc. Sometimes I think about how the people I meet must feel when I go strutting off about something that hurts them, even though I don’t necessarily know that it’s a vulnerable and tender wound. Maybe it’s better to be soft-spoken, to speak few words, and to be gentle and gracious. Maybe it’s better to listen to people than to tell people. I don’t know. But the tendency is to figure people out so that they won’t surprise you and so you won’t be hurt by the things they do. If you have a person figured out, then you will never “go too far” or “say too much” with them, and you will never know that hurt or betrayal that a careless word can cause. The problem is that to live like this is painful, and it causes a much more harmful and self-inflicted type of hurt: isolation.

So, here is the big question for me these days: what saves us? Returning to Proverbs of Ashes, Brock and Parker suggest that to see Jesus’s suffering and death as the instrument of redemption is to valorize an unjust and extremely violent circumstance. They argue that suffering and sacrifice have no place in redemption or in Christianity. The implications of such a doctrine are terrifying and a little disorienting. Effectively, without the atonement of sin, the foundation of evangelical Christianity has been kicked out from beneath our feet, and we are left in freefall. (Admittedly, I am new to the whole realm of liberal theologies, so I won’t do it justice, but I’m still pressing on because there’s something here…) The oppressor uses the idea of self-sacrifice to control and coerce the oppressed. The oppressor says that in order to truly exhibit love and grace the oppressed must sacrifice themselves, to be taken advantage of, to be walked upon, and eventually to be destroyed by their subservience. So the question is raised over what self-sacrifice should look like: Do you tell a woman who is being beaten by her husband that she should suffer gladly? Do the mistakes of a homeless man justify the suffering he now endures? Does a child-molester deserve to be loved? Is there redemption for the murderer? How do you balance justice and self-sacrifice? Does love really suffer all things? How can self-sacrifice exist in a world where the poor and afflicted are pushed farther to the margins and further oppressed? Is there a difference between self-giving love and self-sacrifice? The “skin” that I have covered these ideas with is meant to grate, to reveal the tenderness and ache that exists, the pain and conflicted feelings I have about these ideas. It seems obvious that you shouldn’t tell a woman she must suffer the beatings of her husband gladly, but if you were her, where would you draw the line between showing love and extending grace and exhibiting self-sacrifice to your husband, and actually caring for yourself in simple self-preservation? I don’t mean to say that it’s greedy or self-centered to consider oneself as holy and worthy of love — rather, it seems to be good common sense that’s hardly ever preached. But where is the line between self-sacrifice and common sense? Do you give people a second chance if they hurt you? Do you forgive seven times seventy times? Or do you recoil, preserving your self and your dignity and your life? Or is there some way to forgive and withhold your inner self at the same time? Is that a Christian thing to do? Or should you just keep giving of yourself, regardless of pain or injury?

And now, a very difficult question: If I take Brock & Parker’s argument at face value, and just accept that Christianity based on an oppressed and violent suffering only condones more violence, then I wonder why Jesus did have to die? Of course I know the standard response that Jesus came to die for my sins so that I could be reconciled to God forever and ever. But if this is true, if we are finally able to (re)gain our proper place in the universe, why are we still such assholes? We were made to be in relationship, but when we are, we just end up hurting one another. It seems that only by the grace of God that anything we do is redeemable. And like the D.H. Lawrence quote, all I can do is hold myself up, but the big wind is blowing, and I don’t know where I’m going...

key moments

2006-04-25T19:04:00.000-05:00

I just finished reading The Alchemist yesterday and started thinking about dreams. Not the nocturnal kind, but the ones that are close to the heart. Lately I've been trying to think about life as a possibility, not so much the one chance you have to get things right. It's more of a question, kind of a what-are-you-gonna-do-today thing. And I don't mean it to be an inspirational/motivational feel-good speech... I mean, there's always that dream in your life that makes your heart beat a little faster and makes you think hopefully about tomorrow. Advertisements play on this quite a bit. Especially those retirement ones, about the twenty-something couple who wants to retire at 45 and wants to be able to buy a boat and multiple cabins on the same lake for their kids and their families to live in, etc. The idea is that you can't just follow your dreams. Instead you need to have the monetary security to follow your dreams. Hence, retirement savings plans. Work and work and work so you can get all the stuff that you need to be happy and then you'll be able to take that round the world trip. Or write your novel. Or go live in Buenos Airies. Or whatever your particular dream may be. Well, that seems to be a load to me. It seems pretty obvious that you have to be aware of the future, because it's not going to plan itself. I guess that's one of those things that everyone tells you, over and over. But what about right now? What about tomorrow?

I often feel like there will be a time when everything will come together in just the right way to make things happen for me. Because so far it seems that that's exactly what's happened. But maybe the time is right now. "Don't put off till tomorrow what you can do today." I think that's a saying. The consequence of which will be never a moment of free time, never a chance to realize the precious moment that is now. Buechner says something along these lines: Listen to your life and see it as the fathomless mystery that it is, because in the final analysis, all moments are key moments. And to paraphrase/quote Annie Dillard: The way you spend your days is the way you spend your life. That's always sobering for me. Because often I while the days away and hope that tomorrow I'll have the time to chase my dream. A bit of wasted time here and a bit of wasted time there, and suddenly life seems to be wasting away. (Are you inspired yet?) Well, I guess these are the problems, the obstacles that need overcoming.

Talking with Jesse over the weekend about monastic movements: she asked what attracted me to the idea of a monastic lifestyle (not that I'm going to be a monk, but there is something very appealing about it, isn't there?). I said that I liked that you had to rearrange your life to join. You have to give up everything and you have to be completely available to your community. And that's a beautiful thing. Often I think that we want everything to conform to us, to arrange itself around me, the individual. It's all about me, as we say. And we act as though this is the ultimate truth. But it's not, and I suppose that's hard to hear. In some way, we all know this, instinctively we understand that we are relational beings, that there is something other than just us. The thing I'm trying to get at here is that dreams are a like anything else. It's easy to have them and just be content to entertain them. In some way they bring hope and they help us to face every day. But that's not all there is. Dreams point us to something bigger. I think they connect us to the dizzying heights and depths of being. Kind of like the whole idea that you can't experience the sweetest parts of life without openning yourself up to the greatest pain. And if dreams are the sweetest parts, the greatest pain is failing. But I guess the question is: what if you never even try? Giving up before you even start.

I guess there's nothing for it. Like Mother Teresa said: a person can do no great things; only small things with great love. The dreams are realized in the small things, in the way you arrange your life and the simple things you do. You can't start by writing a novel; you start by writing a word.

creative discourse

2006-03-30T11:11:00.000-06:00

The creative impulse is kind of funny. I've been reading a lot of philosophy from the Medieval period, and they talk a lot of discovering truth, and how there's a certain way to go about it. They develop complex systems of ideas that would take years to follow, just to understand, before even considering if they're right or not. That seems like a bit of a pain. And as I was sitting in Logic class last night, I realized that an education in philosophy is really kind of a drop in the bucket. I was sitting there, just listening to the discussion and I realized that I had no idea what anybody was saying. Maybe it's just that I'm a little bit dumb, but everyone was saying stuff like, "Well, considering Russell's conception of truth, it seems that he is relying on logical monism, which suggests deviation." And that might make perfect sense. That might be all fine and dandy. A few minutes later in class, the punchline to someone's joke was, "That's Wittgenstein for you." And people laughed. I had no idea what it meant or why it should be funny. I laughed anyways, mostly because this whole thing seems so ridiculous. And it occurred to me that there was this very specific type of language that grew up around any discipline. You know, a psychologist will have words that only another psychologist will understand. A theologian will have terms only another theologian can understand. A doctor has a whole language built up around saying what are the proper names of body parts and diseases and types of treatment. A philosopher will speak in concepts that only another philosopher can understand, and make references to Derrida's early work that are intended to clarify things. The thing I'm getting at is that each language system is closed, it excludes people. Foucault came up with the term "discourses" to describe the body of knowledge that encompasses the practices, assumptions, language, and behaviour of a particular group. I think the big problem is when a discourse does exclude people, does keep truth from someone else. I've heard it said that the theologian's job is translation; trying to interpret God for each generation and try to show how he is relevant. But in order to do that, in order to make any headway in any discipline, you have to learn the language. And this realization bugged me because I think there's a lot of people who think about pretty brilliant things, but they just can't communicate it. I might try to explain God, or at least how I understand God to be, to a philosopher, and they might jump back and yell heretic because I said that God exists. And the problem isn't my saying God exists. The problem is that the philosopher has climbed this precarious ladder into the heights of philosophy and "discovered" that strictly speaking, God does not exists, but rather God is. And once you're teetering on this magnificent ladder, the only thing that's keeping you upright is your careful use of language, the use of very specific and defined terms and concepts. So it seems perfectly legitimate and understandable to most everyone what "God exists" means. But it just gets in the way if you're not able to step outside the language. I think this is why people are so convinced that philosophy is just posturing and defining words. Just kind of kicking the can around the parking lot. Because in order to gain any ground, you need reliable terms that you can work with.

And so, in the last fifteen minutes of my last logic class, I was no longer able to pay attention. Instead, I wrote a little song at the bottom of my page. It went a little something like this: "Say logic, it's pedagogic, you can't dodge it..." That's just the beginning, but it went on. And then I drew these little stylized lines, with an ornate kind of circle thing. I spent a few minutes shading it all, and making sure that the shadows all went the same way. And then I wrote "End of Logic" in stylized letters. And then it felt finished. (Then the stifled buzzer went, and if you've sat in any classes at University of Winnipeg you'll know what it sounds like: the sound comes from the clock on the wall and always makes me think that there's a couple hundred volts pulsing through the wall.)

Finally, this brings me to where I started: the creative impulse. Being faced with all these discourses, ways of making sense of the world, I couldn't help but do something creative. And I don't necessarily think that these two things are directly connected. They are related, because any type of making sense of the world seems to be a creation, a kind of making up. But I just want to abandon any attempt at discovering the truth of the world as it is, at trying to reveal how people have wrong conceptions simply because they don't use words the same way I do. I want to find those connections. I want to give the benefit of the doubt, and have it given to me. I don't want to lose myself in some closed system. I want to create something. Dorothy Sayers talks about the creative mind a lot, and how humanity has this need to create because we are made in the image of God the Creator. And I like the idea that any time I make something, I'm becoming human. In some way, I'm being a little bit more who I was meant to be.

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -TS Eliot

grandma

2006-03-22T15:35:00.000-06:00

On Sunday, March 12, 2006, my Grandma died. And while we kind of knew it was going to happen soon, it was still pretty tough. I've been thinking about Mom a lot lately because she was very close to grandma. Kind of like best friends, which is a pretty beautiful thing.
Every Sunday after church for years, we'd go over to Grandma's house for lunch. And we'd always spend most of the day there after eating the best food. It was the kind of thing where you ate so much you felt like your belly would split open. She always had mashed potatoes (and they were so smooth and creamy and I'll never know how she got all the lumps out) with the thickest and tastiest gravy, and she'd make broccoli with cheese sauce (which was my absolute favourite), and always some kind of meat - sometimes a roast, or a chicken, or this great meat pie that was amazing when you poured gravy all over the crispy crust... Yup, it was all very nice. And there were rolls, and she would put out pickles on this little ceramic dish with a handle that could easily be passed around. And candles would be lit in the center of the table which would burn down thru the meal and, at the end, would be extinguished with this classy little candle snuffer. And when we'd finish eating, we'd run to the TV room where Grandpa would watch curling or golf, and we'd play card games (ie. war), or build card houses, or roll around on the little footstools they had. And when Grandma had cleaned up (usually with Mom and Dad's help) she'd come join us by the TV. Of course, in summertime we'd go outside to climb the crab apple tree and sometimes help pick the tiny apples so Grandpa could make jam. Or we'd run around playing tag, or stealing raspberries off the front bushes.

Grandma was born today, 97 years ago (March 22, 1909), in Sheffield, England. When she was 2, her family moved to Canada. They lived on a little homestead out near Ashern, and later moved to the city, where Grandma started working at Great West Life. That's where she met Grandpa. They were married in 1941. Later, Mom was born, and a bit later after that she met Dad, and they got married. (Of course, I'm summarizing a bit, just hitting the big stuff, which I don't like to do, but I will for the sake of space.) I say all this to try to remember the scope of Grandma's life. The changes she saw in the world were enormous. She had this wonderful way of just being (at least in the eyes of her grandchild - me), and she would keep up with news, do crossword puzzles, play cards, and on and on.
I dunno. I guess I'm just really glad that Grandma was my grandma. It feels right to tell everyone, and just say that I loved her. And it's hard to say goodbye. In some ways it just feels like it's done, but I think it's one of those things where the people you know, who come into your life, tend to stay there. You don't forget. And the best way of remembering is to keep on going with them in mind.
She was the last of the grandparents to die, the last of my parents' parents. That itself feels like the end of an era. These thots run around my mind (not as rampantly as last week, but still, they bump around), and I like to think of them in some beautiful banquet hall, with tall candle sticks and simple, good food. And the windows are open and the warm air is blowing in scents of summer. And they sit and talk and laugh, and they glory in it. This is what I like to think.

For the funeral, which was last Thursday, Steve and Alyssa and I were asked if we would write something for the back of the bulletins. I wrote:
When I think about Grandma, I think of simple and profound love. I don't remember when or why, but one time when I was sick, years ago, I went to stay at Grandma's house for the weekend. She made me a little bed on the good couch in the living room, and made me the best kind of "sick food," like chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. I remember I had to take these big, white, powdery pills and I just couldn't swallow them. So when pill time came, Grandma would crush the pills up and smother the powder in syrup. Then she would bring me this brimming spoonful of medicinal sweetness. I guess this is how I often think of Grandma, not just on this one weekend, but all the time. She didn't deny the sickness or the bitter medicine, but she made taking it a little bit sweeter, through her generosity and comforting presence, and always her love.

monsters trucks - good vs. evil

2006-03-07T12:36:00.000-06:00

and this past week i went to monster trucks at the mts center, which was pretty good. the coolest part, by far, was when galactatron (who was this transforming car from outer space) entered the arena and declared his war on all that was evil in the universe. and, as it turns out, there was even some pure evil in the arena at that moment. so galactatron commanded evil to "show yourself." and out came another transforming car named reptar (who was a bit of a reptile and a bit of a machine - but i think even the reptile part was painted metal). and he made a speech about how he was pure evil and how he would destroy galactatron. then he started shooting fire out of his mouth and shot his canon-arm at galactatron. "how dare you shoot at me?" galactatron retorted, and then proceeded to shoot off reptar's arm and blow a giant hole in his chest. then galactatron, having defeated pure evil right before our very eyes, asked for all of our help in the neverending battle against evil. so we had to search down deep within ourselves to find that special something with which to join the battle against evil. galactatron's special something was his canon-arm which also shot fire like a flamethrower. i think my special weapon might not be that cool. anyway, it was something else.

it was very nice

2006-03-07T11:50:00.000-06:00

Last night I lay awake in bed, the street lamps coming through the window in a soft, orange glow, and I felt calm. I thought about all the reading I have to do and papers I have to write, but it didn't seem to matter. I spent more time thinking about grilled cheese sandwiches and how tasty they were. The stereo was playing Death Cab for Cutie, "Crooked Teeth": "I'm a war, of head versus heart, and it's always this way. My head is weak, my heart always speaks, before I know what it will say. And you can't find nothing at all, if there was nothing there all along. There were churches, theme parks and malls, but there was nothing there all along."

And I was wrapped up in my sheets, but I didn't feel trapped at all. I kind of felt like I was floating along in a big wave that was carrying me to a place of quiet and peace and rest. I could hear the cars outside on Assiniboine Avenue, revving their engines at the stop sign, and trying to find a place to parallel park. I would peek my head out from the covers and look at the snow-covered trees, dark and bare, stretching across the street. Dozens of apartment buildings all around, all with dozens of people falling asleep, next to a frozen river that still channeled water under its crusty top to the Forks, and then north to a wide open lake, surrounded by wide and empty land. And it all felt so still. Despite all the chaos around, all the nothing that is everything to us, it all seemed to fade away in my mind, and my heart didn't feel like it was being devoured. It felt like it was suddenly very free.

long time coming: rant

2006-02-22T16:17:00.000-06:00

It feels like a very long time since my last post. But I was in Regina, visiting Colter & Jordana, Zach, Danny & Erin, and Joel Gorrie. (I didn't have to mention them all, but I've heard that it's exciting when it happens. So there.) It was a good trip, but now I'm back in Winnipeg, feeling a little restless. School's throwing a minor fit of assignments, and that tends to happen this time of year. I've got an exam starting in something like an hour and a half (but I'm tired of studying so I've moved on to other things). Papers are brewing like a storm in the distance. I kind of wish it'd just rain somewhere else, but I don't think that's an option. I suppose that's why analogies are crummy. But they sure do make a person seem poetic. I'm not really, though. I think about brass tacks all the time.

Anyway, I may as well start by saying thanks for coming back again. I was warned when I first started that it's bad form to leave a blog for too long without writing anything. So thanks for the patience and for coming round again. It's kind of strange that you can make a place for yourself to write about whatever you feel like. I mean, I could say lots of cuss words, like BS or the f-word, and whoever came would read them. And I think it may have something to do with the fact that the people who come to see my blog are people who love me. Not entirely, I suppose, but there's some value attributed to a blog visit. That's why people feel the need to say, "Hey, I saw your blog" or "Liked what you wrote" or whatever. (And I think we all love that, eh? -- please don't stop...) And when I go blog reading (every Thursday, around 4pm -- am I joking?), it's like getting a letter or an email. But much different, of course. It's like a mass email, but not nearly so sad. It's like a magazine or editorial from someone you know. And they don't send it to you. The only reason you get it is because you want to. There's no bones about it, you're there so you can see what the person thinks or to laugh about what the person says or to just hear what's going on. I find it mildly fascinating. Like fish in the sea; yes, like fish in the sea.

I know that last bit didn't make much sense. But why should it? Afterall, I'm poetic, this is my blog, and I'll do what I like... I'm sorry, that was pissy of me. Maybe you can tell I've had one of those weeks that feels a little overwhelming. Kind of like I've lost control. All the pent up aggression rises to the surface and I end up challenging-- well, nothing really. Because I don't really know why things are going the way they are. It's one of those nonsensical things.

And so, getting to the point, here's a story: Monday this drunk and belligerent fellow came into Hull's and started talking shit about blue keys. Really, I don't know what it matters or why some street fellows have such a hard time understanding the concept of "donations," but he told us that we were false advertising and that we shouldn't be selling the keys because they don't work. And, well, this is kind of a dumb story, but after politely trying to explain it to him, and he didn't want to hear it because he was a little belligerent, I kicked him out of the store. And, boy, did my blood boil. Why? Good question. I have no clue. It's been happening more and more lately. Little things are so irritating. It drives me nuts. I think it even gives me a bad night's sleep (like on Monday night - terrible night's sleep). But when I come face to face with my own angry self, it makes me very, very sad. Just writing the story from Monday brought it all back, and I feel so helpless at not being able to do anything. I get angry, but I don't know why I do. Little annoying bits of my day. And a lot of times, it doesn't even bother me that much. But sometimes the slightest thing seems to set it off. (For instance, today at the library, there were no available computers. Can you believe it?) Buechner says that of all of the seven deadly sins, anger is the most fun because you get to put on a real show. Well, I usually don't put on much of a show. I just kind of talk the same and make stupid threats that don't mean anything or just say, "Oh, I'm so angry..." It really just comes to nothing. But what do I do with anger? That's what all this seems to be building up to. Usually, I don't do anything with it. Righteous anger is hard to come by, but it can be a pretty powerful thing. In some way it should motivate action, repairative action. Never retributive action. In some way anger is the realization of injustice. It's usually pretty self-involved injustice, but nevertheless... I have a notion that it might be best not to let anger control you, but rather inform you. Otherwise, you might just carry around a head full of rage that inspires very little except a tantrum now and then.

And, to end the rant, it only seems appropriate to rage, as every good rant should: BUT AT WHAT PRICE?

backward tracings

2006-02-03T12:21:00.000-06:00

Memories
How sweet the silent backward tracings!
The wanderings as in dreams—-the meditation of old times
resumed—-their loves, joys, persons, voyages.
-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

So you might have guessed, I’m on a bit of a Walt Whitman kick. But this one just fit so perfect with yesterday. Actually, I wrote this yesterday (well, not this part—-but what if I did?—-) while sitting in the Ellice Café, which is kind of my favourite new breakfast place on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I usually wander on down Ellice from the university and have a decent breakfast in between my classes. It’s kind of like Cheers when I walk in, everyone shouts “Chris!” and then I grab my usual stool and tell some quirky anecdote from my morning. Well, it’s not quite like that, but you get the idea. And now you all know how to find me… But that’s really not what I was writing about. Yesterday morning, I rambled on down Ellice to my favourite little spot and ordered oatmeal (no raisins, please) and toast, and mused over my morning:

It’s snowing outside and the temperature is dropping. But there’s something pure and crisp in that. And despite the mass of work that needs to be done, despite work, despite the fact that I miss friends I haven’t seen in awhile, I feel that pureness. Almost like life has been birthed anew. And memory floats in silver strands, a bittersweet sensation of longing. Memory is imperfect; it tends to idealize things, makes them seem so golden. It plays the heartstrings making a deep reverberation that hums in the mind and warms the soul. But that’s an illusion, a façade of “golden days” that makes it seem like there was this perfect time. It’s kind of a yearning for utopia or heaven, an unconscious plea for life and peace and young love. Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing.

This morning I woke from unremembered dreams. During class they floated back: an image from the lake, looking out across the water from the beach and feeling the excitement, the quickening heart of being free, in the darkness of mid-night. There was this sensation that always went with times like that: a communal feeling maybe, of intimacy and connectedness. It has something to do with the isolation of the moment. Being so late, being so dark, the only people around are the few you’re with. That’s a powerful feeling and it usually goes overlooked. Mostly because life doesn’t have a lot of those moments, not in an urban setting. Even dead night can crawl with people. Isolation, with just a few, is something else—-the word “solidarity” comes to mind. It’s not something that can be forgotten.

perspective

2006-02-02T09:52:00.000-06:00

After the dazzle of day is gone,
Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars;
After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.
-Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

That’s when my defenses come down, that’s when real honesty happens, in the evening, after the sun is gone. And it’s a brilliant thing when the dazzle is gone, and the darkness reveals the stars. When silence settles around you and cuts to the core, and the song lingers on and moves you still. Sometimes it’s not until the day is done that you realize it was so beautiful.

time to kill (as in waste)

2006-01-24T11:43:00.000-06:00

So here I am again. Looking for something to write about, just sitting in the university and waiting for class. I imagine that there is work I could be doing... research for papers or reading for classes or writing emails. There isn't a whole lot that will get accomplished here, but I think that's why it's good and necessary (in some way).

This past weekend Danny and Erin, friends from Regina, came to visit me. And it was a very busy and very social weekend, and it felt complete afterwards. Not like we necessarily accomplished anything (actually, I cleared my life as much as I could for their visit, specifically so there wasn't any need to accomplish anything). And just so we could hang out and be together. I think that this is the most basic element of friendship, well, any relationship, really -- being present.

So, I spent the weekend being present with those around me. But the problem with being present is that sometimes you forget what being absent is. Maybe "problem" is the wrong word. It would likely make more sense to say that being absent, being able to be alone, is necessary. It is a good thing to be able to sit, without any agenda or pressure or entertainment, and let life happen. Like a day of rest, but I'd just as soon call it a period of rest. There are times in life when being active seems to be the only way to get through the day. But at other times, resting, just being quiet and practicing solitude is a source of strength and healing. And I don't think I'm just speaking as an introvert (although that's undoubtedly part of it).

Sleep seems like this to me. I think regardless of the type of person or the way in which you relate to other people, sleep is rest (obviously). But I think it brings a person the quiet that they crave. It's an entirely passive activity. It just kind of happens. All a person has to do is decide that, yes, it is time to sleep. And sometimes people don't even make that decision. Like falling asleep in a movie theatre or after supper on the couch. The body brings you to the point where there's no denying it, you need sleep.

Occasionally I think about how I'd love to not have to sleep. I wouldn't even feel tired. I would simply be free from that need. And I would be able to do all the reading I want to and I'd learn to ice-skate. I'd probably start reading the newspaper and get a second job. I would find time to exercise and always be the last guy at the party. I'd volunteer somewhere I was passionate about. I would get a dog, just because dogs are great. Yes, such great plans... And even though I'd probably just end up getting satellite and watch a ridiculous amount of television, there's a problem (and yes, this time "problem" is the right word); my presence would be worn out. Sleep is necessary because the body needs rest, but it seems that the mind and the spirit need it too.

So, I guess what I'm getting at would be something like this: the need for activity, the need to accomplish and be productive is misleading. Every day, a person has an average of, say, 16 hours to work with. (I probably have a little less because sleep is one of those habits that's hard to break.) And at the end of each day, I'm pretty hard-pressed to say how I spent all that time. But I no longer think that's something to be sad or pissed off about. In a sense, time is meant to be wasted, but the way it's wasted makes a difference.

Here's a song by Bright Eyes that I think seems especially relevant. Don't let it make you sad, because I don't think it is sad. Just try to see it as a statement of "wasted time" and your presence in the world...

Bright Eyes - "Bowl Of Oranges"

The rain, it started tapping on the window near my bed. There was a loophole in my dreaming, so I got out of it. And to my surprise my eyes were wide and already open. Just my nightstand and my dresser where those nightmares had just been. So I dressed myself and left then, out into the gray streets. But everything seemed different and completely new to me. The sky, the trees, houses, buildings, even my own body. And each person I encountered, I couldn't wait to meet. I came up a doctor who appeared in quite poor health. I said "(I am terribly sorry but) there is nothing I can do for you (that) you can't do for yourself." He said "Oh yes you can. Just hold my hand. I think that would help." So I sat with him a while and then I asked him how he felt. He said, "I think I'm cured. No, in fact, I'm sure of it. Thank you Stranger, for your therapeutic smile."

So that is how I learned the lesson that everyone is alone. And your eyes must do some raining if you are ever going to grow. But when crying don't help and you can't compose yourself. It is best to compose a poem, an honest verse of longing or simple song of hope. That is why I'm singing... Baby don't worry cause now I got your back. And every time you feel like crying, I'm gonna try and make you laugh. And if I can't, if it just hurts too bad, then we will wait for it to pass and I will keep you company through those days so long and black. And we'll just keep working on the problem we know we'll never solve of Love's uneven remainder, our lives are fractions of a whole. But if the world could remain in a frame like a painting on a wall. Then I think we would see the beauty. Then we would stand staring in awe at our still lives posed like a bowl of oranges, like a story told by the fault lines and the soil.

i've been thinking a lot lately

2006-01-17T15:46:00.000-06:00

So I've been thinking that my posts have all been pretty heavy so far. I don't mean that it's necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it's nice to think about snow and my favourite pair of socks and chocolate bars and that peculiar sensation of touching frosted glass. Or maybe the way that the stained glass looked the other night while walking thru the exchange district, a magnificent window set two stories above, lit by street lamps. Or how badly i have to pee because i drank too much coffee and water at the Ellice Cafe today, where an old man came sidling up to my table and kind of embarassedly asked if my name was Cornelius. Or the way the sky looks today, kind of a glowing gray, sending down a few snowflakes, but holding so much more...

A lot of times I just set myself down at the table and keep trying to stand up triangles and I lose sight of the big one that's just outside my window.

epiphany

2006-01-17T09:54:00.000-06:00

Therefore, that divine element in you, whatever it may be – the element because of which you have always sought after what is fitting and worthwhile; because of which you have preferred to be generous rather than wealthy; as a result of which you have never wanted to be more powerful rather than to be more just; the reason you have never given in to adversities and improprieties – that element, I say, which has been lulled to sleep by the lethargy of this life, a hidden Providence has decided to awaken by the various hard reverses you have suffered.
-Augustine, in the dedication to Romanianus, Against the Academicians

In starting with a quote from Augustine, I’m trying to funnel my thoughts in a certain direction, though they will still meander. First, I freely admit that I am a bit of a pessimist and a cynic, though I enjoy neither of these things. But I hope that there’s some redemption possible in them.

A little while back I was wondering about the endemic cynicism that seems to pervade my generation. I came to a bit of a sloppy conclusion (which is a shameful thing for a philosophy major). Nevertheless, I can’t help but try it out. And I suppose the best way I can say it would be something along the lines of disillusionment: this generation is disillusioned over the state of the world and the human condition. In a sense, there’s little hope because we’re told there’s little to hope for. We see broken people all around us and we come to ignore them. We see broken relationships in our own lives and in the lives of those we care about and, subtly, we begin to think that this is just the way things are. We’re suspicious of any institution because we see that institutions fail on a personal level, the very place that where we live and interact. Idealism runs rampant, but is never pursued because of the fatalist notion that there’s nothing that can be done. The idea that the world is too complicated, and that change is too hard to effect, deadens our passions and restricts our actions. News reports inform us of corruption and murder and the declining state of our countries; they criticize competence and gossip about the celebrities that we’re told to admire. All the information that bombards our senses and all the responsibilities to which we must attend make us dizzy. Education rates us and determines our status in a “productive” society. We’re no longer taught about right and wrong, but immersed in a permissive culture that essentially lulls us to sleep.

And this is only the beginning, you see, because, after awhile, we start to think this way. We fall asleep to the good. We lose sight of what it means to buzz with life and to feel deeply, because, as we see all around us, feeling deeply opens us up not only to pleasure but also to pain. I suppose the thing that scares us is the vulnerability of it. Any hurting person aches because they feel deeply. We try to cover it up with activity and addictions and sex and superficial relationships and anything at all that we can grasp at, desperately trying to take the sting out of our pain and the possibility of feeling the pain of others. But I think we all, at some point, have a “hard reverse” and suddenly life seems to freeze and we realize that we do feel. Despite our best efforts, we’re still right where we were.

I read that quote from Augustine and I catch a little flash of all this. Strange as it seems, I find an enormous sense of hope in the “hard reverses” and difficult periods of life. Not when I’m in the middle of them necessarily, but inevitably afterwards. It is through the difficulties that the illusions of disillusionment are revealed, and an opportunity is created. I might call it a return to innocence, except that it comes (usually) in the midst of painful and sullied experience. Still, it is a refreshed perspective on life and a fresh chance to change things that you, suddenly, can see clearly again. Like a revelation, an unveiling of the mysteriously shrouded.

I’m never very comfortable with this revelation because it’s always a challenge, an affront to the way I conduct my life and relate to people. God whips the shroud away and shows us what we knew all along but forgot: you’re treating that person like an alien. It’s almost like a magic trick, a sleight-of-hand misdirection, and then we’re revealed, in all our cynical self-involvement. And even if I make the choice to drape the cloth back over the ugly, revealed wound, something is changed. It could be the choice to harden my heart, cover the wounds and pretend they’re just not there. Or it could be a fresh awareness, a soft spot that has been created in my soul that isn’t healed, but at least it knows it’s hurt. Either way, I come out changed. Hopefully, it’s for the better. And hopefully, I’m a little more awake... a little more willing to be vulnerable... a little further along the rambling journey of my soul...

finding home

2006-01-10T09:54:00.000-06:00

Some days I feel like my heart is just lost. I suppose that everyone feels this way at some point, but then, we often don’t talk about it. I usually just cram it down inside and think that maybe it’ll get better on its own. I hope that whatever it is I’m troubling about will just solve itself and suddenly I won’t have to deal with it anymore. Lately I can’t seem to figure out what I’m doing with my life. One day I think, yeah, it’d be great to just travel around and find some ultra-transferable job skill that I can hop around with. And the next day I want to finish my Philosophy/English degree. Or maybe go back and finish my Bible college degree. But then I slip out and get a little tired of all the abstract learning that doesn’t seem to be worth a damn when it comes to actually loving people and living.

Walking around downtown Winnipeg, I see these hurting people who are lost and homeless and asking for help, but I can’t see any kind of practical or enduring way to help. It could be as simple as just giving what you have—but then it seems I could be drained away to nothing. The Christian cliché comes back to me that God will fill you up; the “popular” idea that “running on empty” is simply a lack of trust in God. But that doesn’t really do all that much for me. I have enough trouble trusting God to talk with me, let alone sustain me. (It seems a little screwed up when I see it in writing.) This faith thing can be pretty tricky, but then the beauty is that we’re not on our own. And I don’t just mean God (although he’s pretty good too), but love and community. Strange mystery, that is. When you feel it, really actually experience community, you know exactly what I mean by “mystery.” It’s the sudden and overwhelming sense that, yes, I’ve found home.

Home is a funny thing. It’s usually the place where you grow up that you call home. For me, Mom and Dad’s house was home. And I think the reason home is home is because there’s love there. Some people may never have a place like that though, and I find that one of the most disturbing thoughts: the fact that “home” has been stripped of love and security, warmth and acceptance. In some sense, home is defined by who’s there, not by where it is. But still, one day, you leave it. I went to a wedding last year and the couple being married said that home would be wherever the other person was; home was where they were together. That’s a beautiful thing.

I think I left home in the Fall of 2000, when I went to England to Capernwray Bible College. I didn’t know it at the time, but eventually it just dawned on me that I had left home. And it’s not that I lost love. I think it might be that I lost the acute awareness of a safe place to be loved. I had moved on. Don Miller wrote in the dedication to Through Painted Deserts, “Mom, Here is the first book, rewritten a bit. I didn’t know, when I was living it, that it was about leaving home. I think you always knew. Thanks for letting me go.” Even though I left home and came back again, it wasn’t really the same. In some sense it will always be home, but something gets lost. One day you realize that you’re adrift in the world.

Frederick Buechner: “Yet we are homeless even so in the sense of having homes but not really being at home in them. To be really at home is to be really at peace, and there can be no real peace for any of us until there is some measure of real peace for all of us. When we close our eyes to the deep needs of other people whether they live on the streets or under our own roof—and when we close our eyes to our own deep need to reach out to them—we can never be fully at home anywhere.”

I guess I’m just saying that it’s far too easy to be selfish and to forget about love—both to be loved and to love others. I find it exceptionally easy to let people alone, some kind of emotional detachment maybe. But I also find it exceptionally hard not to become attached to people. You know the way, hanging all our hopes on a friend or confidant, on any relationship, and expecting it to make us whole and fill all the empty bits and unmet needs we have. No one person can do that. And I have to say that I find it endlessly frustrating that God doesn’t have skin on to touch and meet with and talk to and, ultimately, help out with all this. Then again, he kind of does in the church. It’s community that can truly embrace you with “human hands that hold you and show you God’s faithful love,” as Henri Nouwen puts it. That’s the mystery I mean: the fact that human touch has some kind of spiritual and divine aspect to it. You’re never so aware of a person as when you reach out and touch them, whether it be a handshake or a hug or a poke in the ribs. And stranger still, you can touch somebody without laying a finger on them. Call it the meeting of souls.

on rambling

2006-01-04T12:42:00.000-06:00

There are times in life when everything seems to line up just right. I think that’s kind of how this blog has come about. A friend here (shout out to Phil and Philip) and a friend there (props to Tom) brought it up in a simple and serious way and the idea just didn’t leave me. That’s probably only part of it though; I can’t help but think there’s more to it. After all, life sometimes plops me down in funny places that put me in funny moods. I try to remember that it’s best to keep a sense of humour, though. Laughing has a way of taking the sting out of the cuts and scrapes of living. Even at the best of times, moments when my soul is singing along, sometimes I feel an emptiness, a hollow kind of loneliness that creeps in and puts me under its great shadow. Maybe that doesn’t make much sense, but I’m seeing more and more that living is a paradox: I feel that hollow feeling, where everything seems to be crumbling away, but at the same time, I feel so loved and so grateful for my brilliant friends and family. It comes down to something like you can’t conceive of loneliness unless you can conceive of love.

And so, I ramble on thru life. It’s a good name for the blog, I think. I looked “ramble” up in the dictionary—to ramble: wander around in a leisurely, aimless manner; talk or write in a discursive, random way; walk without a definite route, taken merely for pleasure; or (my favourite) grow in a random, unsystematic fashion. I think that last one refers to plants or vines, but it’s probably closest to what I’ll be rambling on about. Straying from one bit to another, just writing about whatever comes. But I should mention that I also have a tendency to ramble about (as in wander off). For instance, I just got back from Phoenix three days ago. Every once in awhile, I just seem to get that itch, and I go wandering off. Or rambling on...