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Posts from the ‘Faith’ Category

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 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 Rational people can obviously no longer be expected to believe the outdated and unbelievable story of miracles and dying for sins and actual coming-back-from-the-dead.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 our personal 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 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

Dec 20

2 Comments

Dwell With Us

“I think that the Christian doctrine of redemption—this idea that we need to be “redeemed” from something—is just wrong. And it’s done all kinds of harm.” The comment came in the midst of an invigorating and wide-ranging conversation with an acquaintance over coffee recently. It was one of those delightful encounters where the person you’re talking with is much smarter than you—where you feel like you’re kind of scrambling to keep up. It was good exercise for the brain. Read more

Dec 12

6 Comments

Wisdom Raises Her Voice

If you’re not a socialist at twenty, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain. 

As far as quotes go, this well-known offering of unknown provenance could probably raise the ire of people across the political spectrum, particularly on the left. No one enjoys being implicitly told that they do (or don’t) have a brain or a heart. Those are fighting words, right there. Which is of course why the quote is repeated and why it’s memorable.  Read more

Dec 7

1 Comment

Pain Threshold

“Not only are Americans becoming less happy—we’re experiencing more pain too.” A headline like this from the Washington Post is bound to grab the attention even of a non-American like me (we Canadians have been habituated to more or less seamlessly insert ourselves into headlines like this over the years—trends in America often more or less map on to those in Canada, even if in ways that aren’t as noisy or impressive… except when we’d rather define ourselves by not being American… or when someone whose name is Trump is involved… or… well, our relationship to America is rather complicated). Anyway, I didn’t see “Canada” in the charts and graphs in the article, so I can only assume that we have somehow been subsumed under the category of America. Based on mostly anecdotal evidence, I doubt the trends would be much different up here in the Great White North. Read more

Dec 5

1 Comment

What if Love Isn’t Enough?

On Friday night I went with a friend to a concert at a local club. It was a good show—just three guys with their guitars, and a packed room. But one of the singers insisted upon ruining the cheery vibe. He kept talking about how the world was in such a bad place, and about how he didn’t know if or how we were ever going to get ourselves out of the messes that we have made. Read more

Dec 1

1 Comment

Doesn’t That Make God a Hypocrite?

I have a category on this blog called “Conversations with Kids.” Early on in my blogging “career,” I discovered that the questions kids ask about God often provide a window into some pretty interesting and important theological issues. Questions like, “How do we know that God is real and zombies aren’t” and whimsical musings about whether God is kind of like an alien with an evil detector have provided plenty of good writing fodder over the years. Over ten years, this category has accumulated some fifty posts based on listening in on how my kids think about all this God business.  Read more

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