Refractions

  Speak up. Step up. Yesterday’s attack on the United States’ Capitol building by rioters seeking to disrupt the work of the American congress, egged on by months of the president’s unhinged rhetoric – and perhaps more immediately by Rudy Giuliani’s call for “trial by combat” – is over. But the spiritual realities that nourished it remain.  All this on the western Christian feast of Epiphany, whose central act is the visit of the Magi, first to King Herod and then to the little family in Bethlehem.  That visit is followed closely by the first attempt on Jesus’ life, by means of the extra-judicial murder of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two. As was the second – and successful – attempt to bring about Jesus’ death, Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents” is driven by fear and expressed as rage. Jesus survives because his father has fled with Jesus and his mother to Egypt. But the families of Bethlehem’s toddlers are shattered. I began the day as I have begun every ...

Precious Lord, take my hand,  lead me on, let me stand, I am tired, I am weak, I am worn; Through the storm, through the night,  lead me on to the light, Take my hand, precious Lord, Lead me home.  (Composed in 1932 by Thomas Dorsey as he grieved the death of his wife and newborn son) The people on the video-conference all nodded when one participant said what so many are saying in so many places.  Things are never going to be the same. The other bookend is this – Nobody knows how things are going to be. We are in the perfect place in the calendar of the church to speak about and into the loss of the familiar and the uncertainty of the outcome. You could easily call Holy Week by another name: “Things-Are-Never-Going-To-Be-The-Same Week”. The week begins with Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem and ends with his execution, with his friends and followers cowering behind locked doors. Twenty years ago a colleague, Paul Maclean, introduced m...

Mean-Time Lent 5, Year A. Ezekiel 37.1-14, Romans 8.6-11, John 11.1-45 In the past weeks, life and the absence of life have become a matter of such sharp urgency that they dominate the considerations governing our daily lives, our hourly choices. An entire world economy has been all but suspended, we adopt new language and practice (such as “social distancing”) as normal and necessary, and we begin to understand that this meantime may be longer – and meaner – than we had thought. It is as a people whose sense of life and the absence of life has become focused and could easily become anxious that Ezekiel introduces us to the bonescape in the midst of which the hand of God has set him down. “It was full of bones… and they were very dry.” It is as a people whose sense of life and the absence of life has become focused and could easily become anxious that Paul opens the question of the relationship (or not) between flesh and spirit. It is as a people whose sense of lif...

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...

After a brief interlude, we turn from the traumatized Isaac, unable to contribute anything to the story except for the next generation, we meet Jacob, ready to tangle, on the make, a trader with a keen eye for the main chance.   We will follow his story now for several weeks – a hinge on which the whole narrative shuts on Esau and opens on Jacob, on Joseph and his descendants, on bondage and then freedom, on Moses, Aaron and Miriam, then Joshua and the Judges, the Kings and the Prophets. Jacob comes out of the womb ready to rumble.   At birth, he fights to be first, holding Esau by the heel and, presumably trying to pull in front of him.   What fails at birth he eventually wins by exploitation and deception.   Every classroom, every workplace, every soccer team, every extended family has one of these characters, ready to knock anybody off the ladder in order to get ahead. It will take Jacob years to learn what “ahead” looks like.   On July 31, he will come ...