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Posts from the ‘Stories on the Way’ Category

Apr 14

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At Just the Right Time

“That’s it?”

He looks at me with a mixture of incredulity and suspicion across a grungy table in a glorified storage closet at the jail. The setting, even given the context, is unimpressive. A broken vacuum cleaner. A bunch of haphazard toilet paper rolls. Some dust-covered supplies from the pandemic era. A couple plastic chairs. On the other side of the door, the buzzing and clanging and crashing and shouting that is the near-constant soundtrack out on the remand units. Read more

Mar 3

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Hagar

At a church retreat last weekend, we spent some time talking about stories. Our own personal stories, the stories that we have lived into or out of, the broader stories in which we are all enmeshed. And, of course, the stories of Scripture, which for many of us have shaped us in the deepest ways, for better or for worse. It’s fascinating, as someone who is often tasked with selecting the scriptures that we will hear and reflect on each Sunday, to get a window into how people in our church look at the Bible—the stories they are drawn to, the stories that repel them, the stories that inspire them, the stories that confuse them, the stories they struggle to know what to do with or how and when to tell them. 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

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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

Nov 19

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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

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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 9

The Devil Made Me Do It

In contrast to my expectations—and against my most stubborn and misguided intentions—spiritual warfare was on the agenda again at the jail yesterday. I had a safer topic in mind, but no sooner had I began my talk than we were wandering in the thickets. Read more

Aug 27

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I Guess I Just Have to Try Harder

What do a young man in prison, a senior struggling with cognitive decline, and a global superstar athlete have in common? All three struggle with feeling like they are “enough.” And all three, to varying degrees, feel like the solution to this feeling of “not enoughness” is to work harder, do better, be better. Which is to say that all three—again, to varying degrees—have a hard time with grace. Read more

Jun 9

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The Flower Thief

I think it was around day ten or eleven of the Camino when we found ourselves talking to two Estonian women on a sun-baked terrazza near Pontevedra, Spain. It had been a long hot day of walking, and the patio appeared like an oasis as we emerged from a heavily treed, hilly section that seemed to go on and on. Rarely had the sound of laughing voices and clinking glasses sounded so welcome! Read more

May 30

5 Comments

The Lord is Near

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here. As you may know, I’m on a three-month sabbatical and I’ve spent roughly the last two weeks walking the Camino de Santiago (Portuguese Way). On May 27, we reached the Cathedral in Santiago! I even received the Latin documents to prove it. I may have a few more reflections on this experience at a later date. It was a rich and rewarding one in many ways and I’m still sifting through a few stories along the way. What follows is a bit unpolished as it is gleaned from some handwritten journal reflections over the last few days.

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Apr 29

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I Had a Bad Dream

I felt a touch of weariness as I stared at the request form on my desk at the jail recently. A woman had seemingly requested every item that could conceivably come from the chaplaincy department. A bible, correspondence courses, bookmarks, address book, diary, notebook, colouring sheets, word searches, a rosary, calendar, inspirational verses, pencil crayons, stamped envelopes… She almost ran out of room on the form. Near the end, almost as an afterthought, she wrote, “Oh yeah, and I would also like to talk to a chaplain. I’ve been going through some hard things I want someone to pray for me.” I grabbed as many of the items as we had and trudged off to the women’s unit. Read more

Mar 25

90/10

I was in a social context the other day where a few of us were grumbling about 90/10 conversations. You know the kind, right? One person takes up 90% of the conversational space. It’s pretty much one-way traffic. You feel more like you’re being talked at than with. Your 10% contribution mostly involves nodding and emoting at the appropriate times. I was in gift shop in Montana last summer that hawked various knickknacks (coffee mugs, tea towels, greeting cards) containing funny, often irreverent little sayings on them. One of them said: “I’m sorry I slapped you, but it didn’t seem like you’d ever stop talking and I panicked!” I’ve never considered physical violence to end a conversation, but I have had my moments of desperation! Read more

Mar 18

3 Comments

The Grace Guy

I was asked to give a last-minute presentation at a regional denominational gathering last weekend. The guest speaker was ill, so a bunch of pastors were tapped to plug the gaps. 2025 has been designated as the 500th anniversary of the Anabaptist movement so this was a focus throughout the weekend. How we mark these things is, of course, at least somewhat arbitrary. The people who make such decisions have designated the beginnings of our branch of the Christian tree as the date of the first believer’s baptism in Zurich in 1525. But of course, threads of Anabaptist thought run throughout Christian history. And to whatever extent “Anabaptism” can be spoken of as a monolithic movement, the 2025 version looks very different than whatever was bubbling up in 1525. History is poorly behaved and stubbornly resists our desire for clean lines and unambiguous markers. Thus, has it ever been, I suppose. Read more

Mar 7

6 Comments

Where Can I Flee?

Around the circle at the jail recently we were talking about the God who meets us at our lowest point. It’s not particularly difficult for the guys to think about their lowest point. It’s not exactly a remote hypothetical for many for them. They’re living it. They’re at the bottom. They know precisely what most people think of them—they often think it of themselves. They are well aware of their weaknesses and proclivities, their addictions and destructive habits, their character flaws and worst impulses. They know who they are, they know where they are, and they know why. Read more

Dec 23

All In (Sing!)

So here we are at the doorstep of another Christmas. This is a time of year that tends to be drenched with an awful lot of hope and nostalgia and longing and kitschy expectation. The family will be together and the snow will be lightly falling and there will be candles and cheer and lights and the perfect present (always gratefully received) and funny movies and good food and hot chocolate and eggnog (or perhaps something stronger) and wistful smiles and everything will be magnificent. Christmas, perhaps like no other holiday, has a lot to live up to each year. Read more

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