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Posts by Ryan

Mar 31

8 Comments

COVID Conversations Over Breakfast

A few field notes from a conversation with my wife over breakfast this morning…

“I think I might be able to get used to this social distancing thing,” my wife says. I think she might be kidding, but perhaps only slightly. One thing this virus has forced many of us to do is to fairly drastically alter the pace of our lives. We’re not running around to endless meetings and the gym and yoga class and chasing the kids’ sporting calendar and the social obligations that so easily clog up our calendars. We’re being forced to sit. At home. Often without anything pressing to do. Read more

Mar 28

23 Comments

I Don’t Think I Want to Get Better at This

Sometime earlier this week, I read the post of some pastor of a small church somewhere out there in Internet-land who said his modest goal for the week was to “record a sermon that didn’t resemble a grainy Taliban capture video.” That made me laugh. And it was a sentiment that obviously resonated for many of us who pastor small churches and for whom the idea of recording or livestreaming services would have seemed absurd even a few weeks ago, whether for philosophical or technological reasons. Or both. Read more

Mar 20

1 Comment

Memento Mori (Or, a Few Thoughts while Social Distancing Through the Rocky Mountains)

I spent two of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic practicing social distancing in my van. My daughter was attending college in British Columbia this year and late last week the directive came that dorms would be emptying, and students would have to return home. So, twenty-five hours in a forty hour period were spent bombing over the Rocky Mountains and back. Read more

Mar 10

10 Comments

The Older Ones First

So, coronavirus is on everyone’s minds these days, not least due to the deluge of media coverage that ensures that this remains the case. Like many, I’m washing my hands a little more vigorously, looking askance at suspicious sneezers, pondering travel plans for the rest of the year, etc. It helps that I’ve been off social media for Lent, but coronavirus still seems to be front and center at every turn.  Read more

Mar 5

4 Comments

On Ambient Violence

Two women recently came to our church looking for help. Both were victims of domestic violence, both had children in the picture, both were indigenous, both desperately poor, both out of options. Both stories were soaked in their own unique varieties of heartache and pain. And yet, both stories were sadly, predictably, damnably ordinary. Read more

Mar 3

1 Comment

Nihil Nisi Bonum

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to listen in on the eulogy at your own funeral? What would people say? What memories would surface? Would your praises be sung naturally and easily or would the truth have to be massaged a little? Would there be tears of sorrow or would genuine grief be an uncomfortably rare commodity? Would the officiant struggle to weave your story into a broader narrative of hope and redemption or would your life fit like a glove? Read more

Feb 28

17 Comments

Dispatches from the Breaking Point

Last Saturday morning, I, like many others, gasped as I read Ian Brown’s Globe and Mail article describing how L’Arche founder Jean Vanier had sexually abused six women over a period of several decades and known of abuses committed by his former mentor and spiritual director, Père Thomas Philippe. I had received a heads-up from local L’Arche leaders that “something about Vanier might be coming” (our church has close ties with the L’Arche community in our city), but most seemed to think that it might have to do with what and when Vanier knew about Père Thomas’s abuses. I certainly wasn’t expecting anything like what I read in the Globe last weekend. Read more

Feb 26

7 Comments

Fix the System, Fix the Problem?

I spent Monday morning in a packed hotel conference room full of community leaders who had been summoned to hear a presentation on a plan initiated by our city called the “Community Wellbeing and Safety Strategy.” Like many cities, ours is facing significant challenges. Poverty, homelessness, crime, lack of affordable housing, and, of course, the scourges of addiction, mental health issues, and racism that bleed into all of the others. The opioid crisis is hitting our city hard. It is hitting the indigenous population particularly hard. And this spins out into all kinds of social realities that heighten suspicions and diminish good will in our community. The picture of the reality on the ground we were presented with was bleak. “We can’t fix these problems on our own,” the city representatives said. “We need your help.” Read more

Feb 19

2 Comments

On Unique Souls

Among my wife’s many laudable attributes (patience, longsuffering, etc.) is her keen sense of style. She has a unique sense of fashion and will routinely emerge out of long and laborious hours spent excavating thrift store racks with some quite striking ensembles. Where I see “ugly old crap” my wife sees boundless potential. There’s probably a metaphor or a theological lesson lurking around in that previous sentence, but I don’t think it would be convenient or flattering for me to pursue it. So I won’t. Read more

Feb 12

16 Comments

A Fool’s Errand

I’ve been out in Winnipeg this week attending a pastor’s conference on faith formation in a secular age. At one point during yesterday’s proceedings, the keynote speaker, Andrew Root, asked a couple of gut-level questions—questions that most of us feel on some level or another, but rarely name so bluntly. Why does faith formation seem so hard in this time and place? Why does it feel so hard to be a pastor in this time and place? Read more

Feb 3

6 Comments

A Tour of the Temple

Ok, I watched the Super Bowl yesterday. And, like most Monday mornings after the big game each year, I find myself wondering why, exactly, I do this. I am a casual fan at best. I prefer European football where they at least run around for a full ninety minutes, instead of producing about twelve minutes of actual action surrounded by hours of advertising and people plotting the next move through headsets. And there are certainly no shortage of reasons not to support the NFL (this piece from the New York Times highlights a few). It is not even remotely difficult to make a good case for refusing to support the violence, the misogyny, the hyperbole, the indecent expense of it all. Read more

Jan 28

3 Comments

On “Inherent Worth”

One of the movies getting rave reviews these days is Just Mercy, the film adaptation of Bryan Stevenson’s memoir of the same name. Stevenson is a defense attorney who has made a career out of fighting biases against the poor and minorities in the justice system, and often defending those deemed indefensible. It is, by all accounts, a powerful and inspirational story. I’ve not read the book or seen the film, but I plan on doing both.  Read more

Jan 22

17 Comments

Faith Adrift

I’ve long held a fascination with doubt and unbelief. As a child, I wondered why some people believed in God and some didn’t. It was unsettling to me that it was possible to “read” existence in such radically different ways and with, at least so I thought at the time, with such dire consequences for getting one’s reading wrong.  Read more

Jan 14

8 Comments

Mid-Way

I’ve lately been surveying the simultaneously bewildering and utterly banal landscape that is middle age. It’s a natural thing to do because, well, this is the terrain that I am in the midst of personally traversing. But in addition to looking inward, I’ve been looking out, too. And I’ve been struck by what emerges out of the cracks of conversations and comments of people in the same stage of life. It’s hard. Perhaps not harder than other stages of life, but certainly hard in unique and uniquely challenging ways. Read more

Jan 8

7 Comments

The Third Option

The early days of January are a quite natural slice of time for taking stock, personally, professionally, relationally, existentially. These are the days when we are encouraged to cast an evaluative glance in the rear-view mirror and to look purposefully ahead to what may yet be. These are the days of making resolutions that we will almost certainly break, but I suppose we can’t be faulted for that. We are wired for hope and newness and possibility. We don’t know what to do with ourselves, it seems, unless we’re expecting more from ourselves, others, and the world. Read more

Dec 31

5 Comments

2019 in Review

Well, here we are, on the cusp of a shiny new decade. December 31 is, of course, a quite natural day to reflect back on the year that was in the world and in one’s life. It’s also an opportunity to have a glance in the rear-view mirror in the life of this little blog. Incredibly, next month will mark my thirteenth anniversary blogging. I don’t think I ever expected that I would still be writing here in the year 2020. It is a testimony either to my stubbornness or your patience (or both) that this blog has survived as long as it has, particularly as the sheer volume of online content continues to wash over us in wave after indecipherable wave, and as our attention spans continue to be eroded by Twitter. Read more

Dec 24

5 Comments

This Child is Born for Us

Around mid-afternoon on this Christmas Eve, our city was shrouded by a dense fog. It had been a quite pleasant day—mild, for December on the prairies, sunny, calm. It felt like late fall rather than the dead of winter. And then the fog descended. It was so thick that at times I could barely see twenty metres in front of me on my drive to church for our Christmas Eve service. Read more

Dec 17

6 Comments

Tuesday Miscellany (On Going to the Gym, Pillow Forts, Trust and Change)

Last June, I decided that I had reached that stage of life where some changes to my routine were going to be necessary. I had injured my knee a few years ago, and due to a perfectly calibrated combination of apprehension, apathy, and procrastination, I had not gone the surgery route. One day, a friend who had been through a similar knee-injury gloriously vindicated my indecision by saying, “Forget surgery, just hit the weights. You’ll be fine.” I very much liked the “forget surgery” part of this injunction. The “hit the weights” part? Well, not so much. But, you know, mid-life and all. I figured that I had reached a point in proceedings where some maintenance was going to be required to stay active and reasonably healthy. So, off to the gym I went. Read more

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