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Posts from the ‘Faith’ Category

Jun 6

8 Comments

How the Bible Sounds in Occupied Territory

One more reflection based on my time spent in Palestine and Israel over the past few weeks. After this, I shall endeavour to give this “blogging sabbatical” thing another, better try.

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It’s an interesting thing how geography and social location affects the way you read and hear Scripture. Most Sundays, I am reading and hearing Scripture as a relatively comfortable, white, middle-class Christian in a more or less peaceful country where religion often occupies a peripheral (at best) role in most people’s thinking and living. This affects how I read and hear the words of the Bible. My default, whether I want this or not, tends to be to listen in ways that will more or less endorse and validate myself and those who are like me. This is, as I said, most Sundays. Last Sunday, however, I worshiped in Palestine.

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Apr 25

3 Comments

Older Brothers

I made a rather remarkable discovery yesterday. Well, remarkable to me, at any rate. I have only preached one sermon on the parable of the lost (or prodigal) son in ten years (and that was seven years ago). This surprised me because it’s one of my favourite stories that Jesus tells. I’ve written about it a fair bit on this blog. I’ve described it in pretty breathless terms. But I haven’t preached on it much. This seems a rather glaring omission. Read more

Apr 20

2 Comments

Same Jesus

Last night our little church had the opportunity to hear from what is a bit of a rarity in southern Alberta: a Syrian Orthodox priest. We have a connection with Father Lukas Awad that goes back three years. I first met him when he was touring the province with a group connected to MCC Alberta. Through a series of events, this initial meeting led to our group of churches sponsoring families from his parish in Homs that were refugees in Lebanon at the time. Father Lukas has thirteen families from his parish scattered throughout the province of Alberta, including six here in Lethbridge.  Read more

Apr 18

3 Comments

Hard to Hallow

Richard Beck is a blogger that I have been reading for quite a while now. He’s a psychology professor and “progressive Christian,” although he seems to have a level of distaste for the term that approaches my own. He has, in my experience, an ability that is rare among progressives—the ability to be unflinchingly self-critical and to acknowledge the challenges and inconsistencies that are bound up with many forms of “progressive Christianity.” His recent nine part series “On Tribes and Community” should be required reading for anyone interested in how faith communities are formed and maintained, and how our cultural and ideological context works against this. Read more

Apr 10

10 Comments

For Those Who Want to Grieve in a Religious Way

I’m in Saskatchewan this week for a speaking engagement. Of course, no matter where I go, all anyone is talking about is last Friday’s horrific bus accident, which claimed the lives of fifteen members of the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team. It is a story for which there are barely words. It’s made headlines around the globe. Not surprisingly, here in the Saskatoon area (about two hours from the crash site) it’s ground zero. The grief is raw and palpable. Hockey culture runs deep in each of Canada’s prairie provinces. Many people (myself included) have personal experiences of blasting down wintry roads in terrible conditions to play a hockey game. But in Saskatchewan, a sparsely populated province where vast distances often must be traversed to get from town to town, hockey culture is a different level altogether. Hockey binds these far flung communities together in a way that few things can.  Read more

Mar 28

9 Comments

In Search of a Holy Week

Holy Week is upon us, and with it the usual wearisome parade of articles and blog posts and podcasts offering more palatable understandings of Christian faith and crosses and empty tombs than the dreary orthodox fare. Rational people can obviously no longer be expected to believe the outdated and unbelievable story of miracles and dying for sins and actual coming-back-from-the-dead. But the narrative of Holy Week is still deemed to have a few residual nuggets of potential worth mining for us in our spiritual journeys. You’ll be relieved to know. Read more

Mar 26

10 Comments

I’m Not Doing So Good…

Victor* is the last of a handful of inmates to trudge into the Monday morning support group that I’m a part of at the local jail. He’s a small Latino guy, middle aged, a wispy beard and a short ponytail. He looks apprehensive about being there, but then that’s not uncommon. He sits down on a chair and stares at his feet waiting for the group to begin.  Read more

Mar 20

3 Comments

A Miserable Human Being

I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.

— Linus Van Pelt

I suspect that most of us can, at various points of our lives and to varying degrees, identify with this statement that Peanuts creator Charles Schulz puts in the mouth of good old Linus. “Humanity” as an abstract category seems entirely worthy of love and good will. Individual human beings? Well, that’s another matter entirely. Read more

Mar 14

6 Comments

There Goes My Hero

I got a phone call from my daughter this morning. It hadn’t been the greatest of mornings to that point. A few phone calls and emails had had brought unwelcome news. Our church is in the middle of dealing with a flooded basement mere days before we’re supposed to host a provincial conference. A few tasks that I had little energy for were stubbornly beckoning. I was generally feeling uninspired and uninspiring, bored and boring, tired and tiring. I probably resembled Jonah, pouting under his pathetic little plant. And then the phone rang and a beautiful voice dispelled the clouds for a moment. Read more

Mar 7

2 Comments

On Divided Hearts

As I’ve mentioned before, I often join a few Anglican colleagues for morning prayers on Wednesdays. When I do so, I invariably come away with something to ponder from the Scriptures we read together and the traditional prayers that we join our voices with. This morning’s Psalm was a portion from the longest of them all, Psalm 119. Our reading began with these words: I hate those with divided hearts…

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Mar 6

4 Comments

The Old Wanderer

There’s a marvelous scene in Will Ferguson’s novel The Shoe on the Roof where Thomas Rosanoff, a medical student is having a discussion with his Catholic friend Frances about faith and reason and science and God, about what human beings can know and how they can know it. They are discussing a time when a patient’s shoe inexplicably (miraculously?) appeared on the roof of the hospital. Frances demands a rational explanation:

“How do you explain the shoe on the roof, then?”

“I don’t have to. It’s what we call an ‘anomalous experience.’”

“Tommy, everything we do is an anomalous experience. Being alive is an anomalous experience. That’s the problem with science; it always falls silent right when the questions start to get interesting.”

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Feb 20

3 Comments

What a Silly Reason to Lose Your Faith

I listened to a podcast the other day where a comedian was talking about losing his faith. I was intrigued when I heard the preamble—I nearly always am, when the topic has anything to do with faith, whether losing it, finding it, or hanging on to it for dear life. As it happens, intrigue quickly gave way to a yawn. He had grown up in what sounded like a pretty conservative religious environment. He had imagined that faith was something like a formula where believing and doing the right things when it comes to God would yield desirable outcomes in life. And then his wife had left him. And his career had floundered. So clearly, his faith was misplaced. God didn’t exist. And I remember thinking something like—I’m not particularly proud of this, I confess—“Oh, is that all? What a silly reason to lose your faith.” Read more

Feb 15

35 Comments

Joy is One Kind of Courage

Christian Wiman is one of a very small number of writers who I will read pretty much anything they write, regardless of the subject matter or form. His book My Bright Abyss is probably one of my favourite books of the last decade. Consequently, I happily seized upon a recent piece he wrote for the New York Times called “The Poet of Light.” It is ostensibly a reflection upon the life and poetry of Richard Wilbur. But on a broader level, it’s about the relationship between nature of art and writing and joy. Or, more frequently, joy’s absence. We live in times where it often seems like the darker the themes of a given work—writing, film, television, whatever—the more “authentic” it must be. Happy endings are passé. Joy is obsolescent. No serious artist would want to be outed as a cheerful optimist. Dark, brooding, tortured—this is where the action is. Read more

Feb 12

8 Comments

I Wanna Open My Heart

His eyes rarely leave the floor, even as he’s baring his soul. He’s young, tough-looking, brown skin marked with tattoos, black hair slicked back over the middle of a mostly shaved skull, rosary around his neck. It’s the first time he’s showed up at a group I participate it in at the local jail. He’s looked wary about the whole thing since he walked through the door. But he mustered up the courage to begin a sentence like, “I think I wanna say something…” And the story comes pouring out.  Read more

Feb 8

16 Comments

The Magic Wears Off

Up here in the Great White North (and it truly is white these days, caught as we are in the grip of a wintry blast!), the media has been having fun with our dear Prime Minister’s “peoplekind” comment delivered at a recent town hall in Edmonton. Some young woman made the calamitous error of using the word “mankind” in her essay-length question, and, as luck would have it, our fearless leader deigned to correct her. “We like to say ‘peoplekind,’ not necessarily ‘mankind.’ It’s more inclusive.” Well, yes. “Mankind” is a perilously uninclusive word (I know “uninclusive” isn’t technically a word, but if our PM can make up words, so can I). Also, “peoplekind” is much more 2018, much more fitting for our enlightened, unshackled times. Granted, a white middle aged man telling a young woman what words she’s allowed to use doesn’t sound very feminist, but I suppose I’ll have to defer to those more knowledgeable about such things.  Read more

Feb 1

28 Comments

Undone

Once a week or so, I join a few Anglican clergy for morning prayers. Like many who grew up in a “low church” tradition with its relentless demands (real or perceived) for extemporaneity in prayer and worship, I have taken a sort of refuge in the solidity and predictability of the durable prayers and liturgies found in the high churches. I’m glad for a few Anglican friends who don’t mind a stray Mennonite showing up and stumbling along through forms that still feel at least somewhat foreign (and beautifully so). Read more

Jan 22

2 Comments

The Guts to Love

We pray all of these things in the name of your son Jesus, who had the guts to love…

So concluded a prayer spoken together by a handful of inmates and a few of us volunteers at a support group at the local jail that I am a part of on Monday mornings. The guts to love. What an interesting phrase, I thought. I suspect the word “guts” conjures up for us ideas of courage or resolve or a willingness to keep going even when it would be easier to turn back or a refusal to care if others think love is weak or impotent or whatever. It evokes this image of someone who has dug down into the deepest part of themselves and of the world and emerged with love. The guts to love. Yeah, I like that.  Read more

Jan 3

9 Comments

Nothing to Hide

Some people choose a word to guide them into a new year. A word to orient them, to remind them, to challenge and convict them. I’ve done this before with varying degrees of success. This year, however, I’m choosing a story. It’s a story I’ve written about often on this blog, but one that I never tire of reading and re-reading and writing about and discovering new ways to situate myself within. It’s a story that, like all the best stories, tells the truth in different ways and from multiple vantage points. It’s a story that keeps on teaching and inviting and rebuking and restoring. It’s a story that has kept me busy for a few decades at least, so it’s probably up to the task of another year. Read more

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