My last couple of days

I am OD-ing on orange soda.

I had to stay in town last night, because I had to lay down some guitar tracks for our church's Christmas CD. My wife and younger daughter went up to the cottage, and my older daughter and I are holding down the fort.

The studio work only took about an hour. I was asked to lay down a Stratocaster guitar sound (of the Stevie Ray Vaughan sort) on O Holy Night. I just love O Holy Night, I have to say. It is such an inspired hymn, and the fellow who is getting to sing this song is a wonderfully soulful singer. One of the reasons that I enjoy gospel and CCM singers so much is how much soul goes into the singing of hymns and praise music. In an era with so much synthetic music, it is one of the realms of music where the singers aren't put through the auto-tune pitch control to fix their singing - you don't need to, when a joyful noise is at hand! Michael W Smith, John Michael Talbot, Hillsong ("Shout to the Lord") - I just love them. And I cannot picture any of them lip-synching.

After the recording was done, I headed to the church for a party. Our associate pastor is leaving for another church, so they threw him a party that was I guess a sort of surprise party. The theme was country hoe-down, so I square danced half the night. My music group's fearless leader managed to secure tickets to the event before it sold out, so I got to hang out with friends. There's nothing I hate more than being a wallflower, but I really am something of an introvert when my wife is not around.

Today, I may fiddle around in the recording studio. We live on the edge of the greeenbelt, a huge swath of untouched forest that surrounds the city. I may go out into the woods, walk, and think. I find that I am just not right unless I spend my weekends in the woods.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. I was thinking about this - although there are always people trying to scare the crap out of us all (I am thinking specifically of the latest videos released by Al Qaeda), we cannot live our lives in fear. I refuse to. I know, too, that I am accountable for the time I spend in fear, because it is time not spent enjoying God's good gifts, and it is time not spent devoted to the love of my family, my friends, people I meet, and even God. But I'm still checking all the Halloween candy tomorrow. ;-) You know, I have to, um, prudently taste test some of it. Yeah, that's the ticket!

Peace be with you.

100,000 civilians have died in the Iraq war

100,000 civilians have died in the Iraq war. By my calculations, that is more than thirty three times the number of people who died on September 11, 2001. The report suggests most have died from airstrikes by coalition forces. Death by violence is now the leading cause of death in Iraq. Half the population of Iraq is under sixteen.

Note carefully. None of these people, half of whom were children, are "liberated." They have not been given "democracy." They are simply dead, their destinies altered forever by death raining from the sky.

This is not of God. If anyone thinks this was a moral war, re-read my entry on Just War with that 100,000 figure in mind, and ask yourself if you can support the war, and if the people who decided to wage it it can lay any claim whatsoever to the label "Christianity."

I ask you to pray that those who idolatrously worship Mars, the god of war, lose their influence on our hearts, and pray above all that the people of Iraq may soon be spared of their ongoing suffering.

Hobbits of Flores may have lived til modern times, and may not even be extinct!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/28/whuman228.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/28/ixnewstop.html

Big dog

Last night my brother in law came over for tacos. I was sitting petting my eighteeen year old cat in the living room when the doorbell rang. I went to let him in, but the door opened and I saw he was letting himself in. Next thing I know, his huge, gigantic great dane is bounding up the stairs. I ran back for the poor cat. (The dane is harmless and by far my favourite dog in the world, I should note.)

Anyway, I foolishly picked up the cat. As the dane came into view, my cat had the same look on his face that the lawyer on the toilet did in Jurassic Park when the tyrannosaur is looking down on him. I realized the foolhardiness of my actions - I was probably going to lose an eye before long when the cat would inevitably scramble for the ceiling. I asked my brother in law to just keep the dog in the kitchen while I brought the cat upstairs. Up he went, and he seemed relieved when I brought him into my room and closed the door on him. And he didn't even scratch me!

Thank you Lord for leaving me with two eyes. :-)

When another kind of human shared the Earth

Twelve thousand years ago, just prior to the time when people in the middle east were about to settle down in towns and start the march towards civilization, men and women of a very different kind from us eked out a living on the island of Flores. The more advanced Neanderthals, with brains as large as ours, had already been extinct for seventeen thousand years.

These people made tools, started fires, and cooked food on those fires. They cooperated in activities such as hunting. Some anthropologists are wondering whether these people should be considered a member of the Homo family tree. Well, of course they should. Aside from their advanced hominid morphology (yes, along with a handful of apelike traits), they engaged in behaviours we associate only with branches of the Homo family tree - fire and cooperative hunting do not date back to the Australopithecines.

What makes me really wonder at the possibilities is that a volcano wiped out their population. Just think - if that volcano had not erupted, we Homo Sapiens would not be the only kinds of hominids alive today. What would it be like to see these relatives of ours? Would we consider them like us, or would we put them in a zoo?

I think one thing it does do is beg the question, "What is it to be human?"

We know we're unique. But I think we are often quite ignorant about why. Yes, we are intelligent, but so are many animals. Chimpanzees can solve the same kinds of shape puzzles that are used in human intelligence tests, with comparable skill. We make tools, but so do certain kinds of crows. We speak with an advanced grammatical language, but even this is a question of degree and not kind - apes can be taught to use sign language, and many other animals have highly advanced forms of communication, using vocalizations, body language, and scents.

So what makes us different? Are we just better at some small tasks? Nothing more than animals with a couple of strong aptitudes?

No. There is a difference. We quest - we strive to know. Some other curious animals may want to learn as much about their environment as they can. But only we seek to understand what creation itself is. Only we seek to understand what place we have in it, and if we have a place in it at all. Only we peer to its edges with radio telescopes, as if we could spy the one who made this creation if we look hard enough.

If there is a seat to the human soul, the image of God we believe ourselves to be created in, it is this. What are the possibilities? What heights are we capable of reaching? What is our destiny? The paintings on the cave walls of France show that, some forty thousand years ago, human beings became the first Earthly creatures to start to ask such questions. It is the dignity that first called us to find out who we really are.

What are you looking for?

What are you looking for?

Jesus asked a group of people why they had sought John the Baptist, "What did you go out into the wilderness to behold?" What a provocative question! Who has not gone seeking in his or her life, hoping to find the answer to life's mysteries? But we so often forget what the question is. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy makes light of this by telling us that the answer to the mystery of life is forty two. Only later do we learn that the question is six times seven. :)

Is God the answer? Probably, but if you are looking to find God - if you are looking to find where God is in your life, perhaps the best place to look is to figure out what the question is.

For me, that question has always been, since I was a small child, "What am I doing here?" And yes, I believe God is the answer to that question. I am here because God wants me to be here. He loves me. And he wants me to love others. He wants my love to be a way I make his presence felt to people, at various times and places, just as God shows his love for me through the many people who wander in and out of my life. I do not do perfectly at this. I do not even do particularly well at it. But I knocked, and I found. It is what I am to do.

Is this your question, "What am I doing here?" It may be something like that, and it may not be. But I can tell you this - figure out what the question is, and you can surely look to God to help find the answer. There is a good chance He in fact is the answer. :)

Blame it on the Rain

I don't know who the heck Ashlee Simpson is. She's the sister, I gather, of someone else I don't listen to. But on SNL the other night, she had a Milli Vanilli moment. Blame it on the rain, I guess. :-)

I cannot say I have much sympathy. I spent ten years partipating in a weekly blues jam called "Blues Tues" (every Tuesday.) The idea of a blues jam is that you go up on stage with other musicians you may or may not know, and coherently try to play together without any idea of what the other guys (or gals) on stage are going to do. It is a big risk, musically - you'll either create unmatched heavenly blues, or a pile of steaming.... well, let me just say the colour is not blue. :-)

But working at that for years, I gained an appreciation of how real musicians can just figure out how to go with the flow, and improvise their way out of mistakes and mishaps. What did Simpson and her band do? Well, when she lost her cue, she did a silly embarassed dance and then left the stage. The band kind of tried to chug ahead with the song as-is, without trying to do anything interesting with the gaping hole left open by the lack of singing.

So I suppose my problem is not with the lip-synching per se - it is just the lack of general musicianship that seems to have taken hold these days. Let me tell you, when Mark Knopfler or Ry Cooder screw up a song, they take the mistake and do something wonderful with it! Today's pop-dance artists take their cues more from Milli Vanilli than from, say, the Police or even Phil Collins... when the computer screws up, they don't know what to do.

All We Have

In his wonderfully funny and insightful work Utopia, Sir Thomas Moore writes, "The Utopians wonder that there is any man who delights in the faint gleam of a little gem when he can look at some star or even the sun itself. They marvel that there is any man so foolish as to think himself the nobler because of the fine texture of his woolen clothing. No matter how fine the thread, a sheep once wore it, and the sheep was still a sheep for all its wearing it."

There is a reason, I think, that chasing wealth is considered a vanity - the vanity is in thinking we can own anything at all. Our stewardship of our possessions is limited to the length of our lives, or less, if we are robbed, or our possessions become damaged. God creates everything. Even the works of our hands are only vainly our creations - tonight, as I looked up at the pink left on a jet contrail by the setting sun, I realized that the beauty was entirely God's. A company may have built the jet, but the physics that allow the jet to fly, the physics that necessitate the expulsion of a contrail, the atmospheric particles that colour the atmosphere when the sun travels through it at the sunset's angle - all of that comes from God. The materials that allow us to fashion new things come from God, and so do the principles of chemistry and physics that permit the processes we manufacture with.

Consider the lilies, Jesus asks us. Was even Solomon arrayed like them? And as he tells us, tomorrow the fields of lilies are cut down. No, our fine woolen clothes do not make us better people. They make us people dressed in sheep costumes. Perhaps that is what I shall wear for Halloween! :-)

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on Earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." (Matthew 6:19-21)

More on Just War

An article on the history of the Just War doctrine.

Was the Iraq war just?

The upcoming election in the United States is the business of Americans. What politicians Americans choose to elect is not for anyone else to decide, although we will all be interested in the outcome.

What I do feel is open for discussion, however, is a decision the sitting President made to invade Iraq. What any country does in the world internationally is the business of everyone worldwide, because we all have to share this globe. As most people who know me can tell, I filter just about everything I observe through a patina of my Christian faith, and I intend this essay to do just that to the question of the Iraq war.

The Christian scriptures contain passages that, in general, express a preference for peacemaking, but do show specific instances where a war appears to be sanctioned. The reason for this of course is that the Bible is an extremely complex scripture, crafted over a thousand years, including periods of time when Israel and Judah were at real risk of being extinguished by the great kingdoms of the Iron Age.

But you can look to faith for guidance on this issue. There is a traditional approach to understanding whether a war can be considered just in Christian tradition. It draws on scripture as well as the didactic thinking of some of Christianity's greatest minds, in particular St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. This approach is called the Just War doctrine.

1. the damage inflicted by the aggressor (ed: the party upon which war is to me made) on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
2. all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
3. there must be serious prospects of success;
4. the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition" (CCC 2309)

1. the damage inflicted by the aggressor (ed: the party upon which war is to me made) on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;

There can be little doubt Saddam could once have been seen as a threat of this magnitude. Shortly after nearly devastating Iran in the 1980s, Iraq declared that Kuwait was a province of Iraq, and conquered it. Since the cold war, the world community has made it a matter of simple international law that no country can just go in and conquer a county for spoil. And yet this is exactly what Iraq did.

However, the first Gulf War and the aftermath clearly ended this threat. Iraq's Republican Guard was destroyed by that war, and weapons inspectors that came in after the war emasculated Iraq's ability to create and work with illegal weapons of mass destruction. Although the administration at current claims it was unaware that Saddam had lost this WMD capability, the administration's own statements belie this claim. In February, 2001, Colin Powell said, “And frankly (the UN sanctions) have worked. (Saddam) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”

Did this intelligence change on September 11, 2001? It is unlikely. No reliable information has ever demonstrated that Iraq had involvement in that terrible day, and there is even less evidence to suggest that the terrorist attack mysteriously improved Iraq's military capabilities; quite the contrary – with Iraq under increased scrutiny, Saddam could not sneaze without it being noticed.

In short, the threat to either America or the world community was nearly non-existent, and, despite the hype that followed, known to be so. Iraq was certainly a minor irritant to Israel. Iraq provided pensions to the widows of terrorists who suicide-bombed Israelis. But an issue of such local scope should have been Israel's to resolve. Thus, in my opinion, theBush administration fails this first Just War test.

2. all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

The war began in March, 2003 after only a preliminary weapons inspection report in February, 2003 by Hans Blix. The Anglo-American coalition did not wait for the final report of the weapons inspector, because they did not want to wage a war in the scorching summer heat. In short they timed the war for the most convenient time to fight it. They did not wait to see if diplomacy and inspections would resolve the Iraq issue. They pressed ahead when it was logistically most feasible.

In the runup to war, Condoleeza Rice complained that the cost of keeping troop pressure on Iraq during the inspections process could not be maintained indefinitely. So money was a factor in the decision to go in as well (especially since the neo-conservatives pressing for war were convinced Iraq would be an easy victim that would roll over and quickly free up the troops for other activities.)

In short, the call to go to war did not come as a last resport. “All other means” were not waited out - the war was waged before it ceased to be convenient. Test two of the Just War doctrine fails.

3. there must be serious prospects of success;

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld did not like conventional war strategies; as he planned the war with his CENTCOM generals, he continued to challenge them to come up with less costly ways of winning the Iraq war. General Eric Shinseki had told Congress an Iraq occupation would require hundreds of thousands of troops, but the civilians in charge of the Department of Defense were not spending much time on what would happen after the war – they wanted to come up with innovative ways of fighting the war itself, and seemed to consider the aftermath question to be a boring puzzle they could handoff to the military afterwords, perhaps.

As we now know, the war itself was won easily. However, the coalition did not have enough troops to occupy Iraq, because clever planning and tactical skill can't make up for the raw manpower needed to own and run a country. Immediately after the war, Iraq's museums, containing much of the history of humanity's original civilization in Mesopotamia, were looted, including the historical ten commandments (Hammurabai's code.) It was the worst archaeological and historical loss since looters burned Alexandria's famous library two thousand years ago. Within months, an insurgency was bombing at its pleasure, striking even inside the Green Zone. That continues to this day. The lack of security in post-war Iraq has negated any intangible “freedom” benefits the Iraqi people have allegedly gained. Women are at tremendously increased risk of rape. Families are shot and killed at checkpoints by demoralized and nervous troops. And the unsteady provisional government may not be able to run elections throughout Iraq as planned, because it does not control the entire country. Insurgents have retaken or destabilized about 20% of Iraq's area.

The DOD's own experts were telling the civilian leadership that they needed to do some postwar planning, and that they needed the troop strength to do it. Instead, ideological decisions were made, such as disbanding the entire Iraqi government and throwing them out of the street, robbing the coalition of needed governing expertise and creating new insurgents. The experts were not listened to, and a less than successful quagmire resulted. Test three of the Just War doctrine fails.

4. the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

The coalition, much as it vaunted its smart bombs, was not particularly humane. Smart bombs or not, death still fell from the sky, dropped from the safety of out of reach airplanes.Ten thousand civilians died in this war, more than three times the casualties of September 11, 2001. The number who died in the war was greater than the number Saddam would have persecuted in the same time. And Iraq may continue to be unstable for years, something it would not have been under the authoritarian rule of the Baath party. Potable water and electricity remain issues. Considering how little evil was actually eliminated, given the dearth of WMD, can we really say the Iraqi people deserved to have such suffering inflicted on them? Test four fails.

In conclusion, the risk proposition posed by Iraq was far from lasting, grave, and certain. all other means of putting an end to the threat had not been exhausted, and in hindsight were more effective than thought. Despite the early military victory, the war in Iraq has brought more chaos than success, and the war has resulted in more evil (in terms of the insurgency and aforementioned chaos) than would have been the case if peaceful means had been pursued. Every single test of Christianity's traditional Just War doctrine was failed by the Bush administration.

Christian voters have many different issues to consider when they go to the polls. Concerning the war, they should consider how fall short of the Christian ideal this administration fell, when they enter the voting booth.

If only the world would listen

Jesus gave a simple prescription for blessedness. It would work as well today as it would have two thousand years ago. I wish people would listen, because it would improve their own lives, and the lives of everyone they touch:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

O Little Town of Bethlehem (Part ii)

I'm up early this morning. I had a hard time getting to sleep, because of how pumped up I was about my time in the recording studio. And I got up really early because my wife had a bit of an asthma scare (she's OK - she could not find her Ventolin, but we found it.) So I have had very little sleep.

Let me tell you about my small part in my church's plan to make a Christmas CD.

I showed up at Fat Dog Productions about fifteen minutes before I was supposed to be there. The studio is housed in an A-Frame house that stands all by itself along Ottawa's Hunt Club road. I opened the door and let myself in. I could see the control room, and there were two young men, an engineer and a guitarist, working on a pop song in there. At first I couldn't see what instrument the guy was banging away on - it sounded like a keyboard-sample of a guitar at first it was so clean.

I looked around the office. I have to say I have always loved recording studios. They are not built like most workplaces. Where most offices are built with that professional, business-like sanitized look, recording studios are almost always built for comfort. There is usually a kitchen, there are always couches everywhere you look, and there is usually a kind of "organized mess" feel to them. The lighting is always ambient - you won't see fluorescent tubes or any other kind of typical office lighting. Fat Dog was no different in this regard. The fact that the studio is in a house, and not a standard-style office helps create that relaxed studio ambience. On the wall was a sign that said, "Professionals learn something new every day. Amateurs already know it all." I pondered on that wise thought for a moment.

The main engineer (and owner) Chad showed up a few minutes after I got there. The church's music leader, Chris, arrived a few minutes after that. Chris introduced me to Chad, and said to him that I had more experience in the studio than all the other church musicians combined. Mindful of the "professionals" sign I had just read, I was embarrassed. (I have had a lot of experience in recording studios, going back nearly twenty years, but like a lot of musicians, I consider myself an enthusiast who gets excited about new experiences in the studio, rather than dwelling on past glories.)

Chris told me that he had thought about it, and was more than happy to do any arrangement I had worked out for the tune. It would make for a more diverse record. For my session, I had brought a CD with tracks that I laid down in my basement studio at home. I do this - whenever I hear about some great musical project I am going to be involved in, I get really excited, rehearse my brains out, and go into the basement and rehearse the recording. As over-enthusiastic as usual, I stayed up until two in the morning on Monday working on ideas. I'd laid down the ideas so fully formed that I brought them with me on disk.

Chad played a mix of the arrangement I had done for Chris, and Chris liked it, and started having ideas immediately. Chad loaded the track files I had prepared into the Cubase software, and Chris started playing along on the piano. The percussion track I had on my mix was rudimentary, but since I knew the beats per minute, Chris was easily able to replace it with something that sounded remarkably like real drums, even though it was just MIDI (a kind of music programming language for computers, keyboards and drum machines.)

After he recorded his drum performance, Chad was able to go through the drum track, and move elements of the performance around - taking out a kick drum here, adding an extra snare there. It was fascinating to watch. Even though I knew it was theoretically possible, as I have seen MIDI editing tools for years, I had not seen it at work in the hands of someone so capable. When I first went in the studio in the winter of 1986/1987, this kind of editing was just not done. Music was recorded to large reel tapes, using audio, and not computer interfaces. If you had to fix a small mistake in a performance, you had to recreate that portion of the performance and "punch it in." Now, "punching it in" is a technique of last resort.

Chris said that he wanted to play around my singing. I had recorded a voice track, a guide vocal, on Monday night, but it wasn't very good, and Chris needed to hear the song as it would be sung on the recording. I went in to the large high ceiling soundproof room where singers and acoustical musicians perform, and went through the song a couple of times by way of rehearsal, while Chris experimented with piano sounds. Because I'd done "O Little Town of Bethlehem" in such a seventies style, trying to invoke Steely Dan, early Dire Straits, etc., Chris suggested a kind of electric piano sound popular from that era (the Wurlitzer/Fender Rhodes for the musically inclined.)

I blew the vocal the first time through. I had gone out of tune, out of time, and I blew the lyrics of the second verse. I didn't get nervous about this - that's just how it goes in the recording studio. One take wonders are rare. I did a second take, and although I was not completely thrilled with my performance, it was fine, and I was not embarrassed about it. (On a compilation record, you can't be too much of a prima donna :)

One thing that I'd done almost randomly was start to scat at the end of the song. My arrangement of the song had me singing in a kind of quiet understated way, and as I told Chris as I got out of the booth, people would know it was me if I didn't holler at the end of it (I normally sing loud, high and boisterously.) The scat portion of the recording needed work, so I punched in a new part and then a harmony to it. I worked harder at that harmony than I had on the original recording, since I was trying to harmonize with an improvised scat.)

Chris told me that he was going to try and talk D & C (the brother and sister who founded the music group that I'm in) to add some vocals to the recording next week. Then I got my real treat - Chris played some of the material he had recorded with some of the other churches' singers.

These are fantastic singers. First, I got to hear one fellow singing "O Holy Night," my favourite Christmas song. He had done outstandingly; the studio can be a tempting place for a singer to overdo a song, since unlike in live performance, you can fix your mistakes. But he had not - he kept the right sense of reverence while giving full voice to his voice, as it were. He played me another singer, a favourite of mine. She sang an old French hymn, and it was lovely. She has a voice very similar to Charlotte Church, and such a voice works extremely well in romance language music. She has another song to sing later in Latin, and will have to teach the rest of us how to imitate her pronunciation.

Anyway, I went to bed last night and thanked God profusely for having been given such a wonderful experience. My prayer was Psalm 63, and I practically hollered it as I got to the line "When I think of you upon my bed, through the night watches I will recall that you indeed are my help, and in the shadow of your wings I shout for joy."

St. Augustine was surely right. He who sings prays twice! What a wonderful gift music is, not just for the listener, but for those privileged to record it, too! :)

O Little Town of Bethlehem

The musicians at my church are going into the recording studio to make an album of Christmas tunes. I'm going into the studio tonight to work on "O Little Town of Bethlehem."

I find it interesting that Christianity's holiest season is Easter, but our best music celebrates Christmas. Perhaps it is because Easter is such a mix of sadness and joy. Christmas is just awe - the easiest emotion by far to make wonderful music about. God as a little child in the manger is definitely an awesome thing to picture. :-)

What is happiness

Happiness - the quest for it seems to motivate everyone I know, and everyone I read about, living or dead. And yet we are all devoted to this feeling which is so ill defined.

I am pulling the Webster's off the shelf. What does it say?

Happy, hap'I, adj. Lucky; possessing or enjoying pleasure or good; pleased: furnishing or expressing enjoyment: apt felicitous (e.g. a phrase) - adv. Happily, - n happiness, - adj. Happy go lucky, easy-going; irresponsible. (hap)

Not particularly clear is it? But what I find interesting is everyone knows happiness when they reach it. Even people with no experience of happiness know what it is. I remember my brother, when he was born, cried for more than a year - he just did little else. But there is a picture of him I love, when he was a year old, standing in his crib, smiling his face off with a beaming grin. He had not had much experience with happiness, to be sure. But he took to it naturally when he was able. Then there's that song of Suzanne Vega's about the boy with the small white wooden horse, based on a true story.

My daughter certainly knows what happiness is. She just got back from the casino (with her uncle), and won fifty bucks! But I digress.

I ask again - what is happiness? The dictionary does not tell us much. Maybe biology can help! Feelings of contentment, if I were to guess, probably have their root in the limbic system, one of the most primitive parts of the brain. What I alluded to earlier - that instinctive recognition we all have of what happiness is - is probably an important evolutionary trait. For any creature to strive to reach an ideal - to be well fed, healthy and safe (along with the collective), it must have an innate sense of what that ideal is.

But biology does not fully answer the puzzle that is happiness either. Biology can tell us what happens (a rush of endorphins), and it can even explain in a cold and logical fashion how happiness evolved as a useful trait. But happiness, as we all know well, is experiential. You cannot explain happiness outside of the context of either being happy, or remembering happiness, or imagining the ideal that brings us happiness. So theorizing on where it came from does not help to understand happiness.

Human beings are given the gift of recognition. Unlike a computer, that can tell only probabilities, when we latch onto something we believe we know, it is because in that flash of a moment we just know.

So what is it that makes us happy? I believe that is quite fluid. We can actually train ourselves to find happiness in specific ways. Nobody is instinctively made happy by gambling, for instance (is that too snide? ;-) Instead, we are inculturated into finding happiness in gambling - the casino is glamorous, it feels like you're James Bond, a risk taking high roller, and despite the long odds, you might win big, and be seen winning big by others. The happiness-bringing aspects of gambling have to be explained first, then imagined, and only at that point, lived.

I think one of the easiest ways for human beings to find happiness, with little explanation, is in spirituality. I remember reading a story about Jane Goodall's chimpanzee friends in Gombe. (I hope I get this story right, because it has been a long time since I read it.) One time, after a storm, the chimpanzees looked out at the terrible beauty of the clouds and the sun emerging from them - Goodall described the chimpanzees getting excited and one by one, drumming on a log. She'd never seen the behaviour before, and never saw it again.

In these, our nearest relative, we see the most primitive echo of our own spirituality - and it is rooted in what is the newest of the primitive limbic emotions - awe. I remember when I first saw pictures of a star forming nebula taken by the Hubble telescope. The beauty of this stunned me. I cannot really tell you why I was so taken with it - really all I was staring at were carefully angled line screens put down on glossy paper in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink by a printing press.

But is it not ironic that so many things, that make us realize how small and inconsequential we are, are the very things that make us happy in the purest way? Unlike the casino or dinner and a movie, none of us requires any training to be made happy by a delightful coincidence, the presence of family, or a beautiful sunset.

If we have so much difficulty seeing God through our suffering, why is the reverse also true? People know spiritual happiness when it hits them - we know it in the most primitive parts of us. And without understanding even what happiness means, people today who experience true joy cannot fully understand what it is they are experiencing. This often includes that growing category of people who say they are "spiritual" but not "religious." But how can we ignore a God who makes happiness so core a part of our being that the quest for it is printed on our very soul?

"Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruits each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There shall no more be anything accursed, but the throne of God and the Lamb shall be in it and his servants shall worship him." (Rev. 22:1-3)

Fixing Things

Jesus said to his disciples:
"Gird your loins and light your lamps
and be like servants who await their master's return from a wedding,
ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.
Blessed are those servants
whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.
Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself,
have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.
And should he come in the second or third watch
and find them prepared in this way,
blessed are those servants." (Luke 12:35-38)

I've often said that God is not in a hurry. I can't tell how many times I've prayed hard and even impatiently, and discovered to my continuing humility that God does answer the prayer in a spectacular way beyond anything I'd asked for.

That said, I don't see any point in wasting time. There are many things in my life I've let languish. I am a procrastinator by disposition, but why wait? Knowing you need to change something about yourself, and not doing it, is a kind of suffering. You see the chasm between the you that you are, and the you that you need to be, and ask yourself, "Why am I not going over there? I can see the bridge from here!"

I have many things to get done. Time's a wasting, I tell myself. And oddly enough, when I set about getting these things done, more piles up. But that is the way of things, is it not? God only gives you what you can handle.

Love is our only legacy

This weekend, we cleaned out the garage at the cottage. As we looked at the paint shelf, my brother in law laughed. His wife had left all kinds of cans of thinner, paint, finishing, varnish... few of which we would ever use. She was a kind of paint packrat.

As we moved and got rid of all these cans of paint, I started to realize that more and more the cottage is becoming a place without her. It still carries her signature - so many things to attract hummingbirds, and paintings of them everywhere. But we've moved just about everything. There are few linens, groceries, paints, golf clubs, or any other objects that are now where she left them, by her own hands. She would recognize the place, but could she find anything?

Eventually, just about everything will go. Not immediately, of course. But as time passes and more of us go, children and nieces will get keepsakes passed on. Less sentimental and/or useful items will be sold at garage sales, or taken to the dump. The photo albums will last long past us - great grandchildren may still have them a century out.

But the only thing that truly lasts is love. It is the only seed you plant that takes root eternally, passing a seed of itself forward through time, and leaving a history ever backwards through time. Like I told my brother in law this weekend, I can remember a time when I did not know my wife. But I cannot remember a time when I did not love her.

In fact, I believe love has no tense. It has no past, present, or future. Like the eternal God who is Love, it says only, "I AM."

VENI DOMINE IESU

Our pastor pointed out last night that the Bible ends with this hope, in the Book of Revelations - "come Lord Jesus!" Perhaps our lives mirror it. We live our lives learning to know God, trying to understand him, and pleading for him to make himself known to us. And at the end, will we cease to "see through a glass darkly" and instead know fully, even as we are fully known?

Hydrogen cars

Some scientists developed a new way of delivering sufficient fuel into Hydrogen cars, possibly setting the stage for the end of petroleum engines, if this optimistic scenario plays out.

However, in my opinion, it is not officially the future until they develop flying cars.

Communion for carnivores?

One time at church, the choir played a communion hymn whose refrain is, "Take and eat, take and eat."

My wife was pleased to see my youngest daughter singing along, until she realized my youngest had misheard the words, and was singing, "Take the meat! Take the meat!"

Entertain me, galdurnit!

Even though I am at work, and actually getting quite a bit done, I'm still managing to be bored. Someone sing me a song, show me a card trick, or juggle something.

Be still and know

There are some people who seem to think that you cannot find God anywhere but in the Bible. I was reading this op-ed the other day by some fellow named Olasky. He was criticizing John Kerry's spirituality (which I will neither attack nor defend here - it is only peripheral to my point.) One of the digs he tried to get in is attacking Kerry seeing God in the natural world as "pantheism," deriding any attempt to see God in his works.

Christians are panentheists - we do not believe God is the universe (which is finite in space and time.) But you better believe that creation is holy, and that, yes, he is indeed present to all of it! And it is not "worshipping" nature to take awe in its power, for Solomon himself says,

"If through delight in the beauty of these things people assumed them to be gods, let them know how much better than these is their Lord, for the author of beauty created them, And if people were amazed at their power and working, let them perceive from them how much more powerful is the one who formed them." (Wisdom of Solomon 13:3)

So if we are not supposed to see God in his creation, what then is the point of Psalm 46? We are told, "Be still and know that I am God!"

So what does this stillness bring us? If God's own word is to be believed, when we remove all the background noise, God's ever-presence will become known to us. Is the artist not to be found in his painting? Is the watchmaker not found in the timepiece? How much more so God in his creation, when he sent himself to live and die in it 2,000 years ago!

I am not a "nature worshipper" when I see God in a sunset. I am appreciating the magnificent work he has wrought. And I'll say it bluntly - if a person is so hard hearted that they cannot do the same, then he or she does not himself know God.

God asks Job, "Has the rain a father? Who has begotten the drops of dew?" He is here.

Be still and know it.

Man with a plan?

I have a spiritual method, which I live by. Do you? I think it is important to have a method, at least for me. It brings discipline to my spirituality, to be sure, but it also brings some understanding, and I am quite sure it brings me some help.

I did not come up with the method I use; I learned it from a church renewal movement I belong to. It goes kind of like this:

Learn about yourself: who are you, and who do you want to become? What is your self-objective? If you do not have a map to where you are going, you aren't going to get there. It is that simple.

But knowing who you are and what your goals for self-improvement are is just the beginning of getting there. These are the pillars that I build my ideal self upon...and it is not a twelve step program. I work on these three pillars (however inexpertly) all at once, all my life.

Learn about God: who is God and how does he fit into your life, the lives of the people around you, and the world itself? What help does he offer you? There are many sources for this information. Obviously, for a Christian, the Bible is foremost amongst these, especially the gospels and letters of the New Testament. But it does not end there - you can learn about God from the lives of good people who embody holiness. You can learn about God from inspirational writers who make sense about faith. And you can learn about God by learning about the world he has created, and the environment he has placed you in.

Live in God: St. John says, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love." Three times Peter denied Jesus. But Jesus did not cut Peter off - rather, he gave Peter the opportunity to answer the question, "Simon son of John, do you love me?" This is what prayer is. There's no great mystery to this. God is your best friend, by far your most loyal friend. Just tell him you love him! You will abide in him if you heed those simple commands to love God and love neighbour - everything else is just commentary (as the great Rabbi Hillel, considered the founder of modern Judaism, once said.)

Let God live in You: Again, St. John says, "God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them." Making the internal you available for what some call the "indwelling Holy Spirit" is how you let God dwell in you. Let joy be a part of you. And when joy is a part of you, do not keep it to yourself; share it with everyone and anyone! And don't let anyone put out the light in your eyes, because the eye is the lamp of your soul. "Love one another as I have loved you," Jesus says in John's gospel (15:12.) That is really not that difficult, even if stumbling on that path is inevitable. if God is love, then you make God visible to everyone around you every time you love! You are the salt of the Earth, the light of the world.

So take your candle, to quote a hymn, and go light your world!

How Many Second Chances?

How many second chances should I get? I don't know of any objective criteria that tells me how many times I should get to screw up. But I know that in my life, I get many more chances than I should. In Matthew 18:18, Peter asks Jesus how many times he ought to forgive someone, and tosses out a number than seems generous enough - seven times. Jesus responds by taking Peter's number and moving it another decimal place! He gives us chance after chance after chance to get it right.

In the parable of the Prodigal Son, (Luke 15:11-32), the younger son runs off with his inheritance and wastes it all on living in the moment. Money never lasts, and soon the boy finds himself living a poor man's life, feeding pigs. The boy's thoughts of returning home are not repentance - not yet. Instead, he remembers how it was - his good father surrounded him with an environment that treasured life much more than where his dissolute living had gotten him. Even his father's servants were cared for better than where he had ended up.

When he decides to re-approach his father, it does not even occur to him to ask for forgiveness. Instead, he intends to plead for a lower station, some way of attaining his father's mercy in a reduced dignity. But similarly, it never even occurs to the father to do anything but welcome home his son, as his son! Even though the boy has still not demonstrated the maturity to fully evaluate where he went wrong, the mere fact that he turned his path homeward was enough. His father leaps for joy at only this!

We do not have to get it totally right, for our Father to rejoice at it. He is more than happy when we even start to look in the right direction. Every journey begins with a step, and the Father is already rushing out with a ring for our finger when we begin to take it.

Bigley, Dignity

Mark Steyn argues that Ken Bigley ought to have been braver, when he died. He tries to correct Mr. Bigley: chiding him for not emulating the beheading of an Italian who shouted, "I will show you how an Italian dies!"

Mr. Steyn's callous opeds have always repulsed me, but surely this takes the cake. From Fleet Street comfort, reporters get to tell those who risked their lives by going to Iraq how they should submit to their beheading?

Steyn tells us that the individual doesn't count. He writes, " A war cannot be subordinate to the fate of any individual caught up in it." But that is how unjust wars like this are rationalized, for defending individuals is the only just reason for a war. When a war is not about defending people, then its usually a question of follow-the-money. And if money is not the reason for war, then it is usually about the acquisition of power for already powerful people who never themselves fight.

If we cannot allow ourselves to be concerned with the fate of one man, then we cannot honestly say we have anything but theoretical interest in the fate of many. For the many are all individuals, first and foremost, and every hair on their heads are counted too.

The Family Church

In the 1960s, a radical idea was introduced to Christianity - the home is a church. But it was hardly a new idea. For Christianity's first three hundred years the only churches you could find were in homes. The commandment to honour mother and father can be regarded this way - from Mount Sinai came the word that God trusted family to be the instrument by which wisdom and honour were maintained in the world.

St. Paul tells us even that by marrying, we save each other. ("For the unbelieving husband is consecrated husband through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband." 1 Corinthians 7:14) That was certainly the case with me.

Although I was nominally Christian, I had no great faith when I married. And you know, neither did my wife. We had a United Church minister preside at our wedding, but I think we did this largely out of fear - my grandmother, her mother would not have approved of anything secular.

When the time came for my eldest daughter to go through her first communion and confirmation classes, my wife found herself drawn back to the faith of her childhood. The peculiar ideas about God that she had developed, born in teenage rebellion, were slowly whisked away by a nun friend, who was nothing like the stereotype. Soon everyone was wandering around my house, cheerily singing hymns. And grinch that I was, all this did for me was annoy me. :)

But curiously enough, my journey back to the God who had made me had already begun. When my wife had become pregnant with our youngest, I had just lost my job. One night, I just stayed awake staring at her. I asked myself, "How are we ever going to get through this?" And then I heard this voice - deep, musical, golden, like trumpets but less shrill and far calmer. And it said only this, "Everything will be alright." Just that, and nothing more. Two weeks before she was born, I had a dream about happy days to come, and three years later, the dream happened. Amazingly enough, I was still plagued by doubt and cynicism.

But I eventually came around, moved by music, moved by the way my mother in law was laid to rest. I went into the RCIA, and grew with a group of strangers who became friends. My wife was on the RCIA team, and was seeing all her patience with me come to fruition. I was coming full circle. And the day of my confirmation, during a retreat, I saw it clearly - all the times Jesus had been with me during my life, and I had never seen it. When I was fourteen, and just learning to water ski, a powerboat cut across the tow-roap. He had pushed me off the line. When I was fifteen, and foolishly decided to pass my brother on the right when we were both riding ATVs, I ran up his tire and the ATV and I flipped into the air. I should have been killed, and most people in such an accident are killed. The ATV landed on me, bounced off and flew eight feet into the woods, and I emerged with nothing but a bloody nose. Now I knew why.

That night, when I was anointed with chrism, and the priest said, "Peace be with you," I replied "Et cum spiritu tuo" (and with thy spirit.) I had joined a community stretching across thousands of years, back to those dusty days in the desert when Jesus had first said, "Shalom" to his apostles.

My wife led me to this place, and leads me still. And I have come to realize recently in new ways that I still take her for granted. Two weeks ago, I asked myself when the last time I prayed for her, and I could not find an answer. I must constantly renew my membership in this church of the home. We are each of us, in our own families, on a pilgrimmage to Heaven. We are all traveling at different speeds. Some of us are stalled, the blind leading the blind. But by the grace of God, who even made family the home of Jesus so long ago in Bethlehem, where we were once blind, now we see.

Newest war rationale

The latest attempt to justify the Iraq war, in lieu of non-existent weapons, is the Oil for Food program. I kid you not - it is not just magazines on the left (like the Nation) saying this either. From the right, FrontPage Mag is talking up this justification as well.

I just... the idea of blowing people up because of a financial scandal/corruption investigation... words fail me. They just fail me.

Fall

http://leavethelighton-scenery.buzznet.com/

Superman

Why do bad things happen to good people? This is the question that religious believers are asked more often than any other, I think. I saw someone ask it the other day with regards to the passing of Christopher Reeve, the actor who famously portrayed Superman in the series of movies made about that superhero.

Personally, I think they are asking the wrong question. First let me be clear that I am not being callous - but at no point did God require Christopher Reeve to mount a horse that fateful day, nor did he script the events of that day in such a way that Mr. Reeve would live out his remaining years with the difficult disability that his accident left him with. Reeve himself never believed God caused his accident.

No - where you see God working in Mr. Reeve's life is what he did with his life afterwards. Who spoke out for spinal injury patients before? And what kind of a Superman was Christopher Reeve in tights, when compared with that Superman, Christopher Reeve, who fought hard to regain a meaningful life, after an accident that took so much? He shared his struggles with us publicly, he lobbied politicians far and wide, and gave everything he had to help the cause. The faceless people in wheelchairs now had a superhero to stand up for them. And Reeve, though not religious in the traditional sense, credited God with giving him the grace to take his difficult circumstance and "take a hard look at what it means to live as fully as possible in the present." (his words.)

And that is how much of the history of the world has unfolded. People have always taken their suffering, and used it to make joy, healing, and love for others. How much great art was born in misery? How many doctors were moved to fight for a cure because of their grief at seeing patients die?

The former religion editor of the Toronto Star, Tom Harpur, wrote in his book "Would you believe?" that the best way to understand our grapple with suffering is to look at the story of Jacob struggling with the angel in Genesis 32:22-32. The blessings of God do not always come from the easy route. Sometimes we struggle hard for them, and sometimes we struggle all our lives. But the blessings do come, and they redeem our suffering.

Christopher Reeve lived a short life. But he lived it large, and if you want to find meaning in his passing look at how he lived, not how he died. Because he could have died years ago. His accident was a serious enough one. But he didn't, and he used the years he was given to serve many worthy causes. He raised millions for research into spinal injuries. He changed the minds of many politicians, and many more voters. And he impressed us all with his courage in the face of an enormous obstacle.

We saw a man who did not need to fly, or arrive to us from a distant planet, in order to move mountains. We saw a superman in our own lifetimes, and God used Mr. Reeve's suffering to show us what we are all capable of becoming. Sometimes good things happen to us, too. Mr. Reeve's testimony to the human spirit was one of them. We should celebrate this, and not question God (or Christopher Reeve) that we were given it.

Thank you for my life

We came, we laughed, we cried. We ate.

We did Thanksgiving twice. Up at the cottage on Saturday, my wife's family gathered, and we ate a huge turkey dinner which one of my sisters in law had spent a week preparing. Yesterday, we went to my brother's, and did it all over again. We worked on outdoorsy things at the cottage. At my brother's, I worked with my father on his book. This morning we are going to breakfast with my parents and my brother, before my folks leave town.

The leaves peaked this weekend, and I took about 40 pictures of red, orange, and yellow leaves. I'll post some of them soon. The flaming red maples and bright orange oaks made the forests look like they were on fire. I could not help but notice that, for the trees, it is at the ending of things that they bring out their truest beauty. In summer, every tree looks the same - the oaks, the maples, the poplars are all just brown trunks that run up into huge seas of green. But before they end, each one gets to stand out and be something so completely distinct from all others, that you could never mistake it for another, and never see its like again.

So it is with our lives. At some point, what differentiates us from everyone else comes to the fore, and makes us special to everyone around us. And just as God gives us brightly coloured trees to remind us that his beauty is found at all times, even especially as the days grow dark and grey, he gives us our individuality, so that we may make our mark in the world. And our individuality is indeed a great gift, because do we not all long to make a mark in the world? Do we not all want to be there to cheer for others when their moment is at hand?

We have only moments for this. There is not a second to waste. We want to be fully awake when our moment comes, so that we know it and revel in it when we are in it, rather than reflect bitterly years on that there it was, and we did not see it. For life is a short summer, and then fall must come.

In the seas of flaming red and orange that cover the hills in Lanark county, life prepares to sleep. A deep November darkness will soon cover everything. But the white snow that follows it will brighten the woods, and the sun will begin anew its ascent to summer. Even in the dark, life prepares to awake from its slumber. Just as one day, we will awake from ours.

Leave the Light On

I plan to not gain 20 lbs this weekend. Canadian Thanksgiving is this weekend, and I have two families' turkey dinners to attend. I do have much to be thankful for. Losing someone you love makes you grateful for the ones you still have. :-)

Psalm 85:8-13

Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts.

Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land.
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky.
The LORD will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase.
Righteousness will go before him, and will make a path for his steps.

Should Saddam still be in power?

War supporters have taken to asking this question. They ask it, because all that is left to support the war is rhetorical trickery, now that it has been confirmed that Iraq was free of the weapons that were the reason for the war.

So should Saddam still be in power? Of course not.

Some good can come from an evil. The evil of invading Iraq for false pretenses resulted in the good that is the removal of Saddam.

Similarly the evil that resulted in the mugging of a traveler in the Gospel of Luke resulted in the good of a Samaritan coming to his aid. Does that mean I endorse the beating of the traveler?

Many children are dead because George Bush ordered the war that caused their deaths. One can talk about "unintended consequences," but the British and American war planners were well aware that 50% of Iraqis were under 16. They knew without doubt what would happen in this war.

None of those children are liberated. They are simply dead. Meanwhile, Saddam is still gardening during his quite comfortable detention.

An evil is an evil, and the incidental good that may come from it does not negate that evil.

Taking, Giving

Jesus is quoted by one of the epistlists as saying that it is better to give than to receive. I think most of us can see that intuitively for ourselves. But one of Jesus' other famous sayings is that we should remove the plank from our own eyes before trying to take a speck out of someone else's.

And I think what we can learn from that is that we do have to do enough receiving (particularly of God's good gifts) to be able to do good giving. For if it is true that it is better to give than to receive, then surely there is much that God wants to give us! And the good news is that, indeed there is:

'Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.' Matthew 11:28-30

We can do nothing on our own, but only with the strength of the Father who sends us. It isn't wrong to ask for that strength - He gives it freely, oftentimes when we don't ask. Don't be afraid to ask for help, just as you yourself offer your help to others. It was always there for the giving - not always in the form you expect, but there nonetheless.

See, my servant shall prosper; he shall be exalted and lifted up, and shall be very high. Isaiah 52:13

Paying my no-respects

Rodney Dangerfield has passed away. Loved him in Caddyshack.

Rodney had trouble getting respect in real life, as well as in his act. The link above notes he was rejected from academy membership once by Roddy MacDowall, who wrote him that he had not had "enough of the kinds of roles that allow a performer to demonstrate the mastery of his craft." Roddy MacDowall's principle fame, I should note, is playing a chimpanzee in "Planet of the Apes." Rodney apparently had a lot of fun with that.

Thanks Rodney, for finding a way to make us laugh even after you've gone! :-)

Father's Day, 2003

I flew to New Brunswick for my grandmother's memorial service the weekend of Father's Day, last year. We flew on one of the propeller driven commuter planes Air Canada uses for smaller routes on their Tango service. As I looked down on all the greenery and lakes, I wondered how my mother was coping with her sisters, and I worried (as I always do) about staying with a stranger, a childhood friend of my mother's. I searched the landscape below for the feelings and open tears I had six months earlier when my grandmother had passed away, but I could not find them. Instead I worried about my guitar, buried in the bowels of the plane.

I made the trip to Canterbury, New Brunswick, in my parents' car (they drove.) My mother had longed to get out of Canterbury for as long as she could remember, and through hard work and sacrifice, she made it, and made a name for herself in the world. But the woman driving back to Canterbury was the little girl from there who had lost her Mom.

My Mom had to see the minister before the service. The nominal purpose was to help pick out readings and tell her about our family, but I think she needed something more. Finding the minister's house was not hard; it was right beside the church, a church I knew well, but only from photographs and a dim childhood memory of my aunt's wedding. The church was also in my parents' wedding album. It was unchanged, and I half expected to see on the steps my blushing Dad in a tuxedo, my Mom in a white dress on his arm.

We knocked and a young woman let us into an old fashioned parlour/living room. I looked at some of the books on the bookshelf, an exotic collection of classic literature and modern self-help books. The shelves were decked with antiques, like my parents farmhouse had been. The minister, a woman who, because she was part native, looked remarkably like one of my sisters in law, appeared at the top of the stairs, dressed in nothing but a towel. She told us she would be right down. Outside, the rain began to come down in a light drizzle.

When she came down to the parlour, she was dressed in black, with a roman collar, looking very much the minister. My mother asked her a little about what would happen, and the minister told us that the funeral could happen any way she wanted - graveside, or in the church. My mother began to talk, now, haltingly about what it was to lose Nanny. The minister said quietly, "I haven't had to go through what you are going through yet."

My mother said, "This is really hard," and looked at her, searching for something - faith perhaps - My mother has always sought for it, but it seems out of reach for her at times.

Her eyes full of genuine compassion, the minister returned her gaze. They sat, each in their chair, looking at each other quietly, for a couple of minutes. Outside, the rain tapped on the window-sills, and the light grey clouds kept their lazy pace in the sky.

My mother needed her grief acknowledged uniquely. The minister responded the only way she could: silent, sincere empathy.

The bridge back from grief

Let me start by saying something I once would have found shocking, if someone had said it to me: grief is inherently selfish.

Does that sound insensitive? It should not. We cannot avoid ourselves all the time. And just as we need to eat and sleep, when we lose a loved one, we need to grieve. It is that simple. Grieving is the means by which we adjust to the cruel finality of our new reality - life without the person whom we loved. Our story continues; his or hers does not.

Few people can help you with grief, but everyone will try. Even the moment that grief begins is completely different not only with every person, but also with every circumstance. Does grief begin with numbness, despair, relief, or sadness? Yes. No. Maybe. It will be different every time.

But what never changes is the halting, but definite, attempt that everyone makes to help. When you lose someone, everyone you are close to rushes to comfort you. (and even a few you didn't consider close) They don't know what to say, and you will hear some real zingers. But they have all been through grief, too, and they are trying to relate their own experience to yours, in an effort to try and guide you through it.

The morning my wife's sister died, a friend told her husband to "be strong." I remember thinking that this one of the most inane things anyone could have said to him. How can you ask a man who has just lost his wife to be strong? But I learned later that, as much as anything, the man was talking as much to himself as he was to my brother in law. During the eulogy my brother in law gave (that he remained composed for), this very man cried like a baby.

There is nothing that anyone can say to you, no words that provide relief; however, what people say is not important. They are making an effort to reach you where you are. They are using their own experiences, their own awkward platitudes, to extend you a bridge. And it is a long bridge, one that takes months and years to cross. But the commitment people show you to support and hold that bridge for you is the solace they try (and fail) to reach you with using words.

That morning maybe a hundred people descended on the cottage - other local cottagers, old friends seldom seen in recent years. Awkwardly, they brought their words of sorrow, words of hope, words of (poor) advice, all things that none of us remember today. But we remember the hugs. We remember the chickens and pizzas brought over, the rides and trips to the store taken care of, the phone calls made. We remember above all the love they showed by deed, the only true way love is ever shown.

I misled you a little about grief when I began this (once again) overly long blog-vel. I said grief is selfish, and it is. But grief is also selfless. For grief is also love; it is our way of reaching beyond the circles of the world and saying to the one we lost, "I love you, I miss you, and I wish you were here." And it is our way of saying to those who are with us in grief, "I love you, thank God for you, and I need you to stay with me." It is, in the story from earlier this week, the hole in your perfect heart, the one you slowly fill with the inexact pieces offered to you from everyone who tries to extend you that bridge.

The death of St. Monica

St. Augustine's beautiful recollection of the loss of his mother, St. Monica (a great saint in her own right.)

I closed her eyes, and a great wave of sorrow surged into my heart. It would have overflowed in tears if I had not made a strong effort of will and stemmed the flow, so that the tears dried in my eyes. What a terrible struggle it was to hold them back! As she breathed her last, (my son) began to wail aloud and only ceased his cries when we all checked him. I, too, felt that I wanted to cry like a child, but a more mature voice within me, the voice of my heart, bade me keep my sobs in check, and I remained silent. For we did not think it right to mark my mother's death with weeping and moaning, because such lamentations are the usual accompaniment of death when it is thought of as a state of misery or as a total extinction. But she had not died in misery, nor had she wholly died. Of this we were certain, both because we knew what a holy life she had led, and also because our faith was real and we had sure reasons not to doubt it.

What was it, then, that caused me such deep sorrow? It can only have been because the wound was fresh, the wound I had received when our life together, which had been so precious to me, was suddenly cut off...

Then little by little my old feelings about your handmaid came back to me. I thought of her devoted love for you and the tenderness and patience she had shown to me, like the holy woman she was. Of all this I found myself suddenly deprived, and it was a comfort to me to weep for her and for myself and to offer my tears to you for her sake and for mine. The tears which I had been holding back streamed down, and I let them flow as freely as they would, making of them a pillow for my heart... And now, O Lord, I make you my confession in this book. Let any man read it who will... And if he finds that I sinned by weeping for my mother, even if only for a fraction of an hour, let him not mock me. For this was the mother, now dead and hidden a while from my sight, who had wept over me for many years so that I might live in your sight.

New song I wrote

Spare me a Room

This one is strangely coincidental with a graphic of a bird fleeing a cage I saw the other day. :-)

"I have become all things to all"

"For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more." (1 Corinthians 9:19)

People often assume St. Paul is talking only of an evangelical strategy for early Christianity, perhaps nothing more than St. Paul posing as a Jew to proselytize his religion. But there is a deeper reality he is speaking to - the importance of reaching out to people as they already are. When we meet people in their world, in the place they already inhabit, our love is truly unconditional.

Love that we are only willing to give when people meet us where we are is not love.

"To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some." (1 Corinthians 9:22)

Transforming Suffering, Again

I've noted many times that one of the primary subjects of this blog is the mystery of suffering. I do this deliberately, and for a few reasons. One of the reasons I think is to reaffirm any of my readers; suffering often brings people a wavering in their faith - it is the first time faith is truly tested. And from everything I have seen, those who suffer the least are those who find in their suffering that mustard seed that leads to deeper faith. Why do we suffer? The quest for an answer either leads us to despair or hope. I have always hoped to persuade you, dear reader, to seek the latter.

I was originally motivated to write, and write, and write on this topic after reading a book called "Transforming Suffering," which is a set of essays redacted from a multi-faith meeting at Gethsemane held by monks and nuns from a variety of faiths and traditions. I've always had deep respect for the wisdom of people who have committed themselves to contemplative religious orders. Having gone on just a few short retreats, I have learned an awful lot from meditation. Those who devote themselves to it as a profession clearly gain insight from it, and we are fortunate whenever they share it.

I was particularly moved by one essay by Abbot John Daido Loori, writing about the passing of his mother. He writes, "I have dedicated my whole life to helping people. I do it all the time. But I didn't have the tools to reach her. Then suddenly I thought, 'What has been the continuing center of mother's life going all the way back to when she was a little girl?' It was prayer."

He writes that he began to pray with her, and even though she was barely conscious and frightened, she started to pray along. And when the Abbot switched to Italian, her native language, "her voice then came into it." Peace overcame her and she fell asleep. And though she passed away the next morning, Abbot Loori writes, "In helping a person find peace at the moment of death, the method is not important, it's the heart behind it that makes the difference."

So it is with any of our sufferings in life. It is not how you helped someone.

It's that you did help someone.

Gold Outrage!

Word is that Canada is lobbying against a plan to reduce 3rd World Debt by revaluing the IMF's gold.

It is an outrage when rich countries like Canada (which will soon overtake South Africa as the leading source of the world's mined gold,) are more interested in protecting a handful of companies than in solving one of the world's critical problems - one that keeps billions of people in poverty. The absolute hypocrisy of this is that the Bank of Canada trades in gold itself, in order to position the Canadian dollar where it wants it. When you think of all the good that could be done reducing the burden on governments in Africa and South America, it is criminal to stand in the way of something like this. Not a year ago, our Prime Minister, Paul Martin was parading Bono around telling everyone how we were going to do wonders with third world debt.

Well Mr. Martin, it is time!

Jesus once wailed on a group of hypocrites who, in his words, "devour widows houses." As a Canadian, I stand as one of those hypocrites now.

What would it be like to be someone else?

When I was a kid, I loved watching the episode of Gilligan's Island when the crew got stuck in a mad scientist's castle, and their minds were transfered to other bodies. It was cool to watch Marianne act like Gilligan, etc.

In real life, it seems a lot harder to do. And yet it is a critical ability that we human beings must develop further. Our empathy - our most important trait - depends on us bettering ourselves in this area.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 5 that if someone forces us to walk a mile with them, we should go two miles. What I have always taken from this is not that Jesus is evoking a forced march as a prisoner - but the above and beyond that you take to respond to someone's inconvenient plea for help.

None of us likes to be made uncomfortable. I am a fairly shy person (my internet outgoingness notwithstanding) so I know how uneasy it can be to learn about someone else. But I have learned to make myself gregarious, for other peoples' sake. Because people need that sometimes. When you talk to an elderly person at a rest home, you may be the only meaningful contact that he or she has had in a long time. What if his or her children don't visit, for example? (Sadly, I rarely visited my father in law his last few weeks, and I will always feel badly about that.) When someone begs you for spare change, yes, there's a chance they will head to the liquor store - but what credit to you is your denial of them even if it were so?

Jesus quotes his future self telling the future righteous, "Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me."

To the hard-hearted - and we are all of us the hard-hearted in our worst moments - the hungry are "welfare mothers", the thirsty are "bums", the stranger is a "foreigner", the naked is the "degenerate", the sick are the "freeloaders", and those in prison should be locked up with the key thrown away. Do we have to literally become one of these to understand that compassion is not just for the model citizen in a bad run of luck, but in fact is meant for everyone?

Jesus tells us that God sends rain on the just and unjust alike - and each one of us has been just and unjust, so this is a very good thing! He adds, "For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?" (Matthew 5:56) If we allow our judgements to get in the way of our love, than truly there is no hope for us. For if we condemn by our judgements, how could we dare fall on our feet before our creator and ask to be excused from his condemnation? God has seen every hurtful thing that we have done, and yet is prepared to forgive it. But - at least in this respect, he expects us to follow his example.

If the urge hits you to scowl.. (and it does me - I can be particularly cranky at work, though I hide it well... type A personality traits suck!)

Where was I? Ah yes, if you have the urge to scowl at someone just because of who they are, and what that might represent to you - try to bite it back. If we need the unlimited mercy of the ever-loving Father, then it behooves us to take our part in that mercy as well.

The Perfect Heart

Giving selflessly is hard. When you walk a mile in someone else's shoes, you share in their sore feet. Sometimes the love that you give out is not returned, and when that happens, you learn a lesson in sadness from which you can never fully reclaim your joy. But a life spent in giving is the only kind of life that has the potential to be a life of joy. Everything else we make on Earth is offered up to moths and rust, and leaves us by the end of life. Love is our only permanent edifice; but we build our lives with it at great risk.

This poem (I don't know who wrote it) was one of my sister in law's favourites.

One day a young man was standing in the middle of the town proclaiming that he had the most beautiful heart in the whole valley. A large crowd gathered and they all admired his heart for it was perfect. There was not a mark or a flaw in it.

Yes, they all agreed it truly was the most beautiful heart they had ever seen. The young man was very proud and boasted more loudly about his beautiful heart. Suddenly, an old man appeared at the front of the crowd and said,

"Why your heart is not nearly as beautiful as mine." The crowd and the young man looked at the old man's heart. It was beating strongly, but full of scars, it had places where pieces had been removed and other pieces put in, but they didn't fit quite right and there were several jagged edges. In fact, in some places there were deep gouges where whole pieces were missing.

The people stared -- how can he say his heart is more beautiful, they thought? The young man looked at the old man's heart and saw its state and laughed. "You must be joking," he said. "Compare your heart with mine, mine is perfect and yours is a mess of scars and tears."

"Yes," said the old man, "yours is perfect looking but I would never trade with you. You see, every scar represents a person to whom I have given my love - I tear out a piece of my heart and give it to them, and often they give me a piece of their heart which fits into the empty place in my heart, but because the pieces aren't exact, I have some rough edges, which I cherish, because they remind me of the love we shared. Sometimes I have given pieces of my heart away, and the other person hasn't returned a piece of his heart to me. These are the empty gouges -- giving love is taking a chance. Although these gouges are painful, they stay open, reminding me of the love I have for these people too, and I hope someday they may return and fill the space I have waiting. So now do you see what true beauty is?"

The young man stood silently with tears running down his cheeks. He walked up to the old man, reached into his perfect young and beautiful heart, and ripped a piece out. He offered it to the old man with trembling hands. The old man took his offering, placed it in his heart and then took a piece from his old scarred heart and placed it in the wound in the young man's heart. It fit, but not perfectly, as there were some jagged edges. The young man looked at his heart, not perfect anymore but more beautiful than ever, since love from the old man's heart flowed into his. They embraced and walked away side by side.

Fall in all of its glory

Fall has arrived in Eastern Ontario in all of its glory. Many of the oaks are a deep orange, and the park is full of deep purple maples, and bright red ones. We stayed in town this weekend, for the first time in many months, so I can imagine how spectacular the drive would be at the cottage.

Not that we're deprived in town. We live near a NCC park, Conroy Pit/Pine Grove Forest, that is plenty wild. If I can find the disc, I'll post some pictures from that forest. I often wonder what it would be like to live in a place where the seasons are not so emphatic - fall colours bright enough to blind you, winters cold and snowy, muddy springs, and summers hotter than Los Angeles. You can't help but notice the passage of time in Ottawa!

(Edit: 9:53 AM: I updated my companion gallery at BuzzNet. The pictures should be in those thumbnail photos on the left side of this page.)

Reunions

My Dad is off to his RMC (military college, kind of a Canadian West Point) reunion today. You know, he has always told me how much he hated being in the military; all the discipline was something he found opressive, meant to stifle his spirit and creativity.

But every time we went to Kingston as kids, he would take us to see RMC. And he gets totally into the RMC reunions and all their activities, and keeps in close touch with his classmates. In his book, the central character (whom I suspect to be based on himself) thinks that shared miseries lead to close bonds.

Masochism? I don't know. But he will have fun this weekend. Of that, I am sure. :-)

Mini-vesper

I shall lift my eyes to the hills:
where is my help to come from?
My help will come from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.

(Psalm 121:1-2)

Finish the Kitchen

The song I wrote for my sister in law is now online in MP3 format. Lane, if you're still around, you had such kind words about it, and thank you for that.