Refractions

Caesar has never wanted us to know anything but the grinding juggernaut of inevitability, of just the way things are. Caesar has never wanted us to know that there is an alternative to Caesar, another way, another kind of power and a different kind of future.   Caesar has only ever offered the extension of current arrangements to create a known, predictable, imposed future. “Resistance is futile.” Mostly we accommodate ourselves to this, deliberately or by default. We argue realpolitik and “It could be worse.” Some choose to make a deal, to become agents of Caesar, entrenching his power ever more deeply in the fabric of communities and the lives of households and persons, shoring up its claim to permanence and inevitability. Some retreat – to private and ahistorical spiritualities, to addictions, to one or more of the “isms” that embody our penchant for idolatry. Some are destroyed by the greed and violence of Caesar, Pharoah, Nebuchadnezzar. Some rise up violently to overthro...

Quite a few years ago, following a Sunday evening service at a local seniors' residence, one of the participants took me on, quite fiercely, about the Magnificat, a staple of Anglican evening worship. He didn't say "bullshit", but he was just being polite. He wanted to know why we say things that aren't true and that we don't believe. "I don't see the mighty suffering or the poor lifted up," he said. I just see the same old world, powerful people thriving and poor people suffering." And on the surface of things, he had a point. There really isn’t a lot of evidence that the dreadful inertia of history has ever truly been interrupted. Power, wealth, and status continue to dominate the life of the world.   Even the fragments of progress that we celebrate – universal health care, women’s rights, Old Age Security – are woven into a fabric that also contains the generations of trauma suffered among indigenous peoples’ , a “war on terror” that...

The Landscape There is a trail in Lake Superior Provincial Park that we have hiked together two or three times. The Orphan Lake Trail is not our favourite. But is has its rewards. The lake in the middle of it is quiet and green, and the stone beach of the great inland sea is as close to primordial as I have known.  But it is a lot of work, and has none of the panoramas of other, equally-demanding trails. There is a part of the Orphan Lake Trail that had, a decade or so ago, a forest fire. There are no large trees in that part of the forest. If you are in the lumber business, this is not what you would call a profit centre.  There is something there, though, in July, something lovely and rare - wild blueberries.  You won't find them in the forest, but you can find them where the forest used to be. If you are in the lumber business, the blueberries might not make much of an impression on you. But if you are just noticing what's there, they are a delight, a kind of gra...