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Posts from the ‘Books’ Category

Mar 25

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Faith is Change

A few days ago, we got together with some good friends to share and to pray. These are people we have, in some cases, known since we were teenagers. When we were younger and flush with spiritual fervour and the optimism of youth, we would get together like this more frequently, praying for revival, for victory and blessing, for change, for all kinds of wonderful things that we believed lay just around the bend.

We’re a bit older now. Maybe even a bit wiser. If nothing else, life has left its mark on all of us, in the wide variety of ways that life always does. We have had to negotiate the death of parents and others we love, we have watched relationships fracture and fragment into divorce and separation, we have participated in the elations and agonies of parenting, we have negotiated the challenges of infertility and adoption, we have struggled with physical health concerns, vocational anxieties, and crises of faith. We have seen, in short, that life is a mixed bag, and that faith is not (and has never been) some kind of inoculant from the pain of living.

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Mar 14

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The “Self-Aggrandizing Fairy Tale” Upon Which We All Depend

Earlier this week I turned the last page of Joseph Boyden’s highly acclaimed third novel, The Orenda, recent winner of CBC’s Canada Reads and, to the great consternation of many, long listed, but not shortlisted, for the prestigious Giller Prize. It is, as many have said, a remarkable book about the seventeenth century Huron-Iroquois wars in what is now Eastern Canada, and the French Jesuit colonial missionary enterprise that inserted itself into the mix. It is gripping, insightful, heartbreaking, and, yes, at times almost unspeakably violent.

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Mar 4

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Hope is a Condition of Your Soul

Fear. Of nothingness. Of dying. Of failure. Of change. It is of different degrees, but it all comes from one source, which is the isolated self, the self willfully held apart from God. There are three ways you can deal with this fear. You can simply refuse to acknowledge it, dulling your concerns with alcohol or entertainment or exercise or even a sort of virtuous busyness, adding your own energies to the white noise of anxiety that this culture we have created seems to use as fuel. This is despair, but it is a quiet despair, and bearable for many years. By the time that great grinding wheel of the world rolls over you for good, you will be too eroded to notice. 

Or, if you are strong in the way that the world is strong, you can strap yourself into life and give yourself over to a kind of furious resistance that may very well carry you through your travails, may bring you great success and seem to the world triumphant, perhaps even heroic. But if it is merely your will that you are asserting, then you will develop a carapace around your soul, the soul that God is trying to refine, and one day you will return to dust inside that shell that you have made.

There is another way. It is the way of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, pleading for release from his fate, abandoned by God. It is something you cannot learn as a kind of lesson simply from reading the text. Christ teaches by example, true, but he lives with us, lives in us, through imagination and experience. It is through all these trials in our own lives, these fears however small, that we come close to Christ, if we can learn to say, with him, “not my will, Lord, but yours.” This is in no way resignation, for Christ still had to act. We all have to act, whether it’s against the fears of our daily life or against the fear that life itself is in danger of being destroyed. And when we act in the will of God, we express hope in its purest and most powerful form, for hope, as Václav Havel has said, is a condition of your soul, not a response to the circumstances in which you find yourself. Hope is what Christ had in the garden, though he had no reason for it in terms of events, and hope is what he has right now, in the garden of our own griefs.

— Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

Feb 24

Monday Miscellany

Hockey is Canada’s Religion! So blared the headlines yesterday after the second of our nation’s triumphs with skates and sticks on the Sochi stage. For much of yesterday, Canadian media outlets were aglow with videos and tweets and updates about brave, patriotic Canadians getting up at ungodly hours of the morning and braving frigid temperatures to heroically make their way to the pub (sometimes, without even the lure of alcohol, if you can believe it!) to watch the big game. There were even heartwarming video clips of mosques and churches that decided to show the game before morning worship. The overall mood was exultant. This is what it means to be Canadian, we rehearsed to ourselves over and over again in myriad ways.  Read more

Feb 18

“I Am What Comes After Deserving”

 The news is bad today. But then the news is so very often bad.

Where to begin? Violent conflicts in the Ukraine, Syria, the Central African Republic, and so many others grind wearily on, with all the predictable innocent pain and suffering that drags along in the wake of tired, old, struggles for power. A volcanic eruption in Indonesia displaces more than 100 000 people. There is political unrest in Egypt and Venezuela. There are the places that we need only name to know that there is bad news: Afghanistan. Iraq. North Korea. Iran. Haiti. And all of this bad news takes place while our eyes are mostly fixed upon a very expensive extravaganza for the rich  at a resort on the Black Sea.

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Feb 13

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“You Should Take Care of Your Theologians”

I was in a social setting recently where someone introduced me as a “theologian.” I smiled weakly, fraudulently, unsure quite how to respond. I was flattered, of course. “Theologian” sounds so much more impressive and loaded down with scholarly weight than “pastor” or certainly “blogger.” But while I am well-practiced in fraudulence and generally quite inwardly pleased to have my ego stroked, I have never been particularly good at accepting compliments. So instead of a simple straightforward “thank you,” I awkwardly umm-ed and ahh-ed whilst turning a strange shade of pink and staring at my feet, and mumbled, Ah, well, you see, I’m not really a theologian… I’m at this little church… I have this little blog… But, um, thanks… that’s nice of you to say… even though it’s not technically true… but, yeah, um, thanks. 

Very eloquent, I know. A real theologian would surely have had a more coherent and articulate response than, well, than whatever that was. Read more

Feb 5

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“I Am Being Read By What I Am Made Of”

Yesterday was one of those delightful brown-parcel-in-the-mail days—one of those days when the good and kind people of Canada Post come bearing glorious gifts from afar, gifts of crisp, unblemished pages, gifts brimming with fresh insights and exciting tales, gifts of possibility, hope, and promise, gifts of delight and discovery… Gifts of words.

Or, to put things a bit less dramatically, “I got a new book yesterday.” Read more

Jan 15

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Gravelly Grey

It is the middle of January and I wish it was colder than this. I wish it was brilliantly white and crisp and clear. I wish I could see my breath and that the snow crunched under my feet as I walked. I would prefer an idyllic winter scene.

But it’s well above zero here, these days. There’s a 100 km/hr chinook wind ferociously screaming daily in my face, relentlessly wearing down optimism and good will. All around there are shades of grey and brown. The barren trees bend and shake, wearied by the wind, plastic bags and garbage clinging to their lonely branches. The roads are choked with gravel and salt and the last dirty remnants of snow. The world seems grimy and plain. Read more

Jan 13

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Vanishing in Order to See

I get a lot of books in the mail, but there are few that I can recall anticipating as keenly as the one that came in a little brown box today.  Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss has been on my radar for a while now, whether due to the almost unanimously affirming reviews it has received, or simply to the nature of the story behind the book: poet/writer/scholar gets cancer in his thirties and begins (begins again? continues?) to chart the rocky terrain from secularism to religious belief.  The story and the subject matter both compel me, but it is the writing that is blowing me away.  This man is, truly, at home with words.  I am reading, and rereading, and reading more slowly than I have in quite some time.  Occasionally, very rarely, I come across a writer whose words leave me thinking, “Yes, I have found a friend.”  One chapter into My Bright Abyss, and I am convinced that Christian Wiman is one of them.

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Jan 9

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Love is Our Fixed Address

A few days after Nelson Mandela’s December 5 passing, I checked out his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom from the local library. This morning, I turned the last page. The book was, of course, inspiring, illuminating, heartbreaking, stunning, rage inducing, hopeful, profound and a whole host of other superlatives. Given the subject matter and the nature of the story, how could it not be? Read more

Dec 12

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On Choosing to See

Reading David Bentley Hart makes me happy to be a Christian. The closing few pages of The Experience of God are simply a joy to read. Hart’s diagnosis of our present cultural moment with all of its lightly informed and category-confusing debates about atheism and religious belief is penetrating and razor-sharp (not to mention more than a little unsettling!). More importantly, though, his call to return to wonder at the very heart of existence and gratitude toward its source, is welcome and necessary.

It’s easy to gloss over long-ish quotes, I know. But resist the urge in this case. Hart has much to say that is worth thinking about. And he says it, as usual, in truly arresting ways. Read more

Dec 3

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Not Everyone Can Wait

Here in southern Alberta, we find ourselves in the grip of quite the blizzard. It’s been snowing for about a day and a half and there’s more on the way. With the wind chill factored in, it’s -26 degrees out there. My wife and I woke up early today to check on the status of the roads and the schools and to peer curiously out our window. Surely no one would try to get out today, would they?! Well, it’s 8:30 am, and we have already pushed/shovelled out two neighbours who were determined to head out into the wintry wonderland, despite all the warnings to stay home and wait out the storm. Not everyone can wait, it seems. Read more

Dec 1

“As Long as There Are People, Christ Will Walk the Earth as Your Neighbour”

Jesus stands at the door knocking. In total reality, he comes in the form of a beggar, of the dissolute human child in ragged clothes, asking for help. He confronts you in every person that you meet. As long as there are people, Christ will walk the earth as your neighbour, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to you, makes demands on you. That is the great seriousness and blessedness of the Advent message. Christ is standing at the door; he lives in the form of a human being among us. Do you want to close the door or open it? 

It may strike us as strange to see Christ in such a near face, but he said it, and those who withdraw from the serious reality of the Advent message cannot talk of the coming of Christ in their heart, either…

Christ is knocking. It’s still not Christmas, but it’s also still not the last great Advent, the last coming of Christ. Through all the Advents of our life that we celebrate runs the longing for the last Advent, when the word will be: “See, I am making all things new.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger

Nov 28

“We Spend So Much of Our Lives Wandering in Dreams”

A meeting cancellation last night left me with the delightful predicament of how to fill a few an unexpected few free hours. Option A was parking myself on the couch and watching a hockey game, but that space was, lamentably, already occupied by my wife and daughter who were engrossed in a movie. So, naturally, I decided to pick up a book by David Bentley Hart 🙂 (I’ve written before about the delights and challenges of reading Hart before here). The Experience of God is not quite the test of one’s vocabulary (and the blow to one’s pride) as some of Hart’s other works, but it’s still not exactly the shallow end of the pool. Read more

Nov 14

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Thursday Miscellany

Let’s see if you can follow the Thursday afternoon rabbit trail….

I spent part of this afternoon hearing the story of an Anglican minister who recently participated in the El Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. We talked about the nature of pilgrimages, about history and tradition and communion with saints who have gone before us, about silence and prayer and participating in something deep and wide and long…

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Oct 3

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Faith is Homesickness

I’ve mentioned this before here, but one of the first books I tend to reach for when the well of inspiration is running dry and Sunday is approaching distressingly quickly is Frederick Buechner’s Secrets in the Dark. It’s a risky endeavour, to be sure, for reading Buechner’s sermons can either be an experience of inspiration and wonder at the sheer beauty of words and of the skill and poetic brilliance of a finely crafted sermon or one enormous exercise in crashing, at breakneck speed, back down to earth from whatever modest heights I had previously been pleased to imagine I occupied. I usually console myself by imagining that I am only reading the “greatest hits.” Even Buechner must have preached a few lousy, or at least ordinary sermons, even if I haven’t come across one yet… Right? Read more

Sep 18

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Wednesday Miscellany

I’m sitting here on a grey, rainy Wednesday morning thinking that it’s high time I wrote something here.  It’s been over five days of silence on this blog, which, if the social media experts are to be believed, is a virtual eternity fraught with all kinds of weighty perils.  I am surely running the risk that readers will look elsewhere, that traffic will decline, that my “brand” will suffer, that I will fail to “build upon momentum” or any number of other hazards that come with blogging too infrequently.

So, right.  Time to write.   There are certainly no shortage of potential topics. Read more

Jul 12

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“I Pray For You Every Day”

I’ve written a number of times here before about some the difficulties I have with prayer (here, for example). I am convinced that prayer is a crucial part of how God works in and through us for the salvation of the world. And yet the questions abound. How does prayer work? Does prayer work? How can we tell? Is God influence-able? Is God reactive? Does God need prayer? How can God “listen” to so many different (often wildly contradictory) prayers at once? What does it even mean to say that the God of the universe “listens?”  Read more

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