May 28
I’ve spent the last few days at a retreat centre in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains with a small group of fellow pastors. The setting is magnificent and the weather has been surprisingly cooperative for springtime in Alberta. There’s been plenty of unstructured time for walking in the forests and reading by the river or just sitting and contemplating the vast beauty of all that God has made. It’s been good for the soul. Read more
In his new book Liturgies of the Wild, Martin Shaw writes of growing up with a preacher for a father and of a house that “reverberated with whatever sermon he was currently coaxing into life.” I liked that phrase, “coaxing into life.” Boy, does it resonate most weeks for me. Shaw also talks about being fascinated by the opening pages of the big book his dad was always preaching about, in particular this sentence: “The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” “I liked it,” Shaw says. “It was weird.” Read more
Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
— Jeremiah 6:16
***
A few days ago, I attended the funeral of a young Christian man who took his own life. A few days from now, I will attend the funeral of another young Christian man who took his own life. These sentences feel grotesque and offensive even as I type them. These things should not be. Mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and spouses and friends should not have to stagger to the front of church sanctuaries to read tear-stained eulogies, to bear witness to, to lament the unfairness of, to rage against, to somehow attempt to drag bewildered meaning from these cruel endings.
Lately, I’ve been noticing and delighting in instances when couples are kind to each other in public spaces. One reaches for the other’s hand. A bit of playful banter. An arm on the shoulder. An affirming word or expression of fondness. A smile in the other’s direction when they don’t imagine anyone is looking. A head on a shoulder. Little tokens of warmth and affection that probably wouldn’t even have registered with an earlier version of me, but which now seem to be extraordinary. Read more
A few days ago, a story and photos surfaced about a few members of the Israeli Defense Force who took a sledgehammer to a statue of Jesus somewhere in southern Lebanon. The incident drew immediate and widespread condemnation from a wide range of ecclesial and political figures around the world. Read more
“That’s it?”
He looks at me with a mixture of incredulity and suspicion across a grungy table in a glorified storage closet at the jail. The setting, even given the context, is unimpressive. A broken vacuum cleaner. A bunch of haphazard toilet paper rolls. Some dust-covered supplies from the pandemic era. A couple plastic chairs. On the other side of the door, the buzzing and clanging and crashing and shouting that is the near-constant soundtrack out on the remand units. Read more
On Saturday night, I attended The Great Vigil of Easter at an Anglican church in our city. It was a beautiful liturgy, leading worshipers through the broad sweep of Scripture, from creation to new creation. There were candles and holy water, Dante and Herbert, a baptism and the renewal of baptismal vows, the gradual physical transformation of the sanctuary from the bleak deathly tones of Good Friday to the light and the life of resurrection. And there was the celebration of the Eucharist, of course. We remembered Christ’s death, proclaimed his resurrection, and strengthened our resolve to await his coming in glory. Read more
It seems that scarcely a day goes by without encountering some troubling headline about the encroachment of AI into every corner of our lives. Today’s entry was an article by a novelist named Andrea Bartz in The New York Times called “The ‘Shy Girl’ Fiasco Shows Why Trust in Writers Is Plummeting.” I knew nothing about Shy Girl, and what little I learned from the article made me long to return to my state of unknowing. Apparently, it is a horror novel that readers and journalists flagged as “having prose that sounded like AI slop.” What doesn’t, these days? At any rate, what piqued my curiosity was the bit about the plummeting of trust in writers. As one who writes for a living (essays, sermons, blog posts) I obviously have a skin in the game. Read more
It’s difficult to avoid clicking on an article with a title like “The Six-Second Hug.” At least it was for me. Perhaps I’m not quite as immune to click-bait as I flatter myself to imagine. Maybe it was that I had read the author before (Julian Baggini) and found him to be at least somewhat insightful. Perhaps I just needed a hug. At any rate, it was the subtitle that reeled me in: “From art to religion to sex, instrumentalisation has drained away intrinsic value.” Read more
At a church retreat last weekend, we spent some time talking about stories. Our own personal stories, the stories that we have lived into or out of, the broader stories in which we are all enmeshed. And, of course, the stories of Scripture, which for many of us have shaped us in the deepest ways, for better or for worse. It’s fascinating, as someone who is often tasked with selecting the scriptures that we will hear and reflect on each Sunday, to get a window into how people in our church look at the Bible—the stories they are drawn to, the stories that repel them, the stories that inspire them, the stories that confuse them, the stories they struggle to know what to do with or how and when to tell them. Read more
He looks at me warily as he approaches the guard’s station at the jail. He’s thirty-something, huge beard, menacing tattoos snaking up and around his neck and bald head. I stand there, inoffensively, with my clipboard and my death notification. “I’m a chaplain here, just wondering if you’d like to talk to someone about losing your dad?” I motion over to the interview room over in the corner of the unit and start to walk in that direction. His expression doesn’t change. “Not really,” says. He follows me anyway. Read more
I recently read a book by New York Times columnist David Brooks called How to Know a Person. It’s a good book and I commend it enthusiastically. Brooks offers a compelling diagnosis of our cultural moment and a heartfelt plea to recover the moral skills necessary to actually see and understand people, particularly in a context of deep polarization and difference. Read more
Anyone who is involved in giving leadership to corporate worship regularly finds themselves in the position of putting words in people’s mouths. Asking people to read Scripture, inviting people to participate in responsive liturgies or corporate prayers of confession, selecting songs to be sung by the gathered community—each of these elements of worship (and others) involve, on some level, some people telling other people what they should say or pray or sing out loud. Read more
Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files are always a welcome sight when they show up in my inbox. I don’t always agree or resonate with his responses to queries from his fans, but they are almost invariably interesting. Today, for example, Cave responds briefly (often only a word or a sentence) to a wide range of questions from around the world. Naturally, I am always drawn to the ones that have to do with faith. Two fans were fairly disgusted with Cave’s, for lack of a better term, “religious turn” in the latter part of his career. One American fan wondered how anyone with “half a brain would believe in God.” Another, JL from Canada, queried, “Is religion not the refuge of the weak?” Cave responded thus:
Yes, JL, it is precisely that. Christianity in particular.
There is nothing more ordinary than suffering.
There is nothing more extraordinary than suffering.
Both of these statements are true.
The last few months have been characterized by a number of people that I know and love enduring significant pain. Sometimes the pain is physical, sometimes it is relational, sometimes it is existential. Sometimes it is all the above. Always, it is excruciating to watch people suffer. Read more
We read the Christmas story out at the jail yesterday. Matthew’s version, all the way through. We read about Mary and Joseph angelic visitations and prophecies fulfilled and Magi from the east bearing strange gifts. We read about a mad king’s maniacal decree, about the slaughter of innocent baby boys, about the Holy Child of Bethlehem being hunted from the day he was born. I had taped images from William Kurelek’s A Northern Nativity on the wall throughout the chapel and invited the guys wander around looking at them while I read. I wanted the Nativity to somehow migrate from words on a page or sanitized religious images to their world, to them, to us. Read more
Christmas at the jail is invariably a night of brutal dissonances. Kitschy decorations (Santas, elves, cardboard fireplaces, candy canes) labouring to add a bit of colour to drab concrete and plastic. Christmas carols competing for auditory space with the squawk and buzz of intercoms and the clanging of heavy doors. Ornate words about hope and joy in a place where despair and cynicism come more naturally. In the Christian life, there is always a gap between the hope we proclaim and the reality we experience. This is life in between Christ’s advents. At the jail, the gap just seems exponentially wider. Read more
Speaking of Gen Z… I’ve referred to the work of Freya India here before. She is a Gen Z voice worth paying attention to for so many reasons. She seems unusually insightful for someone so young, on matters ranging from the dangers of therapeutic culture to living perpetually online to the risk aversion of so many in her generation. She recently interviewed Rusty Reno on this last one in a post called “Training Ourselves to Be Loveless,” a sad and sobering title if ever there was one. Read more
 | Ryan on Joy on the Line |
 | Elizabeth on Joy on the Line |
| Elizabeth on Give Praise |
 | Wes on Joy on the Line |
 | inquisitivelypinkcd4… on Give Praise |
Rumblings 