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Posts from the ‘Quotes’ Category

May 21

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Mud People

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

May 7

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Stand at the Crossroads

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.

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Apr 7

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Sectored to Grace

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

Mar 26

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Can a Bot Long for its Maker?

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

Mar 19

6 Comments

Anatomy of a Hug

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

Feb 24

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Haunted (Whispers in a Ruined House)

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

Jan 13

7 Comments

Tuesday Miscellany (On Weakness and Strength)

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.

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Dec 23

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“We Cannot Wait Till the World is Sane”

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

Dec 18

4 Comments

God is Born

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

Dec 11

Love’s Great Blessing

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

Dec 5

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On Friction

I’m not particularly proud of the story I’m about to tell but here goes. I recently asked ChatGPT to create an image for me. I provided what I thought were clear instructions, but the image that came back was nothing like what I had in mind. After a few more back and forths, the image did not improve. I began to get exasperated. I recalled someone telling me that one of the most annoying things about these chatbots is how unfailingly nice and affirming they are. Every question you ask, no matter how dumb, is a “great question.” They’re always “delighted” to help and eager to provide far more than what you asked. It’s like having an obsequious butler following you around. Read more

Dec 1

Love is Smiling Through All Things

A friend recently told me that one of her goals in this middle stage of life is to learn how to live with an “undefended heart.” That struck me as an interesting and somehow essential way of putting it. It was term that I resolved to ponder more deeply. An undefended heart. What a thing to be able to say one has amid all the pain we endure and inflict upon each other. What a ballast for a world so riven by division and chaos, deceit and manipulation. Read more

Nov 25

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Climbing Toward Love

Today, incredibly, my wife Naomi and I have been married for thirty years. This is a number that fits awkwardly with my subjective experience of myself and our relationship. In my mind, we are still love-struck twenty-somethings with our whole future in front of us. The odometer, weirdly, tells a different tale. Read more

Nov 19

3 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany: On Sex and Transcendence

Whenever a topic or cluster of topics keep showing up in different areas of my life and ministry, I eventually decide it’s worth paying attention to and, if possible, try to write something about it. When I can’t quite seem to come up with a solid piece of unified writing, I default to a “Miscellany” post. So, what follows is not necessarily a coherent argument, just a few short reflections and observations picked up over the last little while. Read more

Nov 4

Forty Chickens

Hope builds a bridge across the abyss into which reason cannot look. It can hear an undertone to which reason is deaf. Reason does not recognize the signs of what is coming, what is not yet born.

— Byung-Chul Han, The Spirit of Hope

*** 

We were talking about hope out at the jail yesterday. A few guys had shared about how they desperately needed hope, to believe that there could be something different in their future, something besides the same old habits, the endless tired returning to the same endlessly tired dead-ends. One guy looked up with a half-grin that was somewhere between cynical, mischievous, and dejected. “I don’t got no hope anymore. I stole forty chickens and there’s no future for me.” Read more

Oct 21

2 Comments

On Slop, Sadness, and Shared Humanity

Any given Monday at the jail contains no small number of sadnesses. I feel sad when I see grown men and women who can barely read. Sad when I see inmates being yelled at. Sad when I hear loud crude conversations out the door as the inmates make their way to chapel. Sad when I read incident reports. Sad when I hear stories of the damage inflicted by damaged people. Sad when I see inmates whose birth years are earlier than my kids’. Sad when I hear people tell me that jail is the only place where they feel safe from themselves and their addictions. Sad when I hear about the casual chaos and violence in which so many lives are (mal)formed. Read more

Sep 17

The Shape of Our Hearts

I’ve lost track of the number of articles, podcasts, video clips, etc. I’ve seen over the last few days bearing a headline or title something along the lines of, “Will Charlie Kirk’s death be a turning point for America?” American media, Canadian media, international media (because of course, American culture wars are among their many exports to the rest of the world). I haven’t clicked on many of these links mostly because I think the answer to the question is a rather obvious, “almost certainly not.” Read more

Sep 2

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On Mental and Spiritual Health

For at least the last few decades, I have regularly encountered a shift in how Christians employ the categories of mental health and spiritual health. I can’t remember precisely when this shift started, sometime in my twenties or thirties probably. Often someone would share some story of a clumsy pastoral interaction where they came to the church with a problem—say trouble in a marriage or a difficult child or abuse of some kind or some traumatic experience that was proving debilitating—and the pastor left the impression that all you really had to do was pray the problem away. Read more

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