tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57502394191187878562024-02-07T04:06:01.214-08:00Brokenhead SojournBrokenhead:
the tragic name of a beautiful river; a story of Aboriginal displacement; the mystery of that "sacred head, now wounded;" the place where I live.Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.comBlogger47125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-81834621741252673822022-03-31T14:04:00.007-07:002022-03-31T14:12:50.132-07:00Love on a human scale: The Gospel according to Ivan Illich - Book Review<span style="font-family: courier;"><br />Clarion Journal for Religion, Peace & Justice, August 26, 2021<br /><br /></span><h2 style="text-align: left;"><br /></h2><span style="font-family: courier;"><br /></span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/#" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img src="https://www.clarion-journal.com/.a/6a00d834890c3553ef027880439833200d-320wi" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: courier;">Every now and then a book comes into my life that puts me in a happy dilemma: I want to lend it to all my friends, but I don’t want it to leave my house. Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey is a labour of love by Illich’s long-time friend and co-conspirator, David Cayley. At 552 pages, its heft reminds me of the boxes of “a good, but inexpensive wine” that Illich managed to write off as a teaching expense. This opus represents many, many evenings of intelligent, friendly, and finally life-changing dialogue that culminate in a near-symphonic quality. Cayley’s deep understanding and clear prose pull a complex, balanced harmony out of themes that to the casual reader of Illich could seem eclectic. What does medical overreach have to do with the 12th-century innovation of silent reading or the New Testament concept of the Anti-Christ or the dissolution of gender as a capitalist phenomenon, for heaven’s sake? <br /><br />In a confusing and troubling time, this book gave me the permission to weigh the harm done by coronavirus against the harms done in the fight against it, a model to help me accept and be grateful for some of what medicine provides, and still have the confidence to resist to the hysteric shunning of my unvaccinated friends. In the wake of the discovery of more than 1,308 unmarked graves for Indigenous children who were coerced into residential schools and never came home again, the book helps me name the totalitarian hubris of a church that thought it could “do what God cannot, namely manipulate others into their own salvation” through brute force, child abductions and mind control, and repent of such hubris through a closer walk with Christ, rather than by running away from my spiritual inheritance.<br /><br />One of Illich’s mottos was “I fear the Lord is passing me by.” Illich receives in Jesus’ parable of the Samaritan a radical freedom to encounter the other Other in the human other—an opening to friendship that can not be guaranteed, a surprise that cannot be institutionalized. His other motto was Corruptio Optimi Pessima—the corruption of the best is the worst. Glorious innovations tend to have dark shadows. A faith in which there is neither male nor female, neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free is uniquely prone to an imperialism that flattens Indigenous cultures and drives men and women out of the complementarity of gender into the competitive, unidimensional arena of sex.<br /><br />This last idea risks generating much more heat than light, and a book review by a white man about a biography by a white man about another white man seems unlikely to help the cause. I may just be securing my copy from being borrowed! At the risk of mansplaining, I will spill a little more ink on what may be a stumbling block for many in accessing Illich. Many of Illich’s friends advised him against publishing his thoughts on this matter, and when Gender came out in 1982 it did mark a fall from grace for Illich among the New Left.<br /><br />Cayley’s chapter on “Gender” takes care to first understand what Illich had to say before critiquing some of his nostalgia and gender essentialism, a courtesy that was not granted him by early reviewers. Cayley summarizes Illich’s argument as follows:<br /><br /><br />Illich speaks loudly against equality as sameness. But he also speaks loudly for equality in its sense of equity, arguing that most women suffer irremediable disadvantages in a realm of universal circulation and competition. The two points are connected. Illich claims that idealizing equality may allow some women to rise to new heights of wealth and influence but that it will hurt many more—by lowering the status of every form of sustenance that occurs outside the cash nexus in which equality finds its measure, by fostering an illusory sense of opportunity, and by inviting those who fail to seize these opportunities to blame themselves. His analysis of feminism, in this respect, took the same form as his analysis of every other modern institution that he explored—it incites envy and delivers frustration. Only by reversing economic growth, unbuilding the global megalith, and restoring human scale will the majority of women regain their dignity, he says, because only then will the contribution of those who have been shunted aside in the rat race begin to matter. This is the sole sense in which he speaks against equality: equality-as-justice, he says, cannot be achieved without a firm rejection of equality-as-sameness.<br /><br /><br />Illich is on the lookout everywhere in his work for one-size-fits-all solutions that ignore the bonds and bounds of our bodies, whether the social bodies of community and culture or the physical bodies of women and men. Visions of justice that require everyone to have the same kinds of jobs, visions of health that require everyone to take the same kind of medicine, visions of education that require everyone to have the same kind of standardized credentials are for Illich a liberal power fantasy with an ugly underbelly, a perversion directly inherited from a church that could envision the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven as the mass conversion of global humanity into a single catechism and a single rite under a single worldly authority with divinely underwritten supremacy. Such a universalism inherently corrodes human freedom and erodes “the soil of friendship” which is always limited and local. “As long as you think of the world as a whole,” Illich said, “the time for human beings is over.” <br /><br />Illich is trying to protect islands of the homegrown, the homemade, and the homespoken. I think of feminist friends who make homegrown pickles with their homeschooled children when they could easily get jobs that would pay for cheaper pickles, cheaper child care, and then some. Perhaps at the kitchen tables of these mothers, Illich’s analysis of gender has “reached the hour of its legibility,” as is hoped by Giorgio Agamben, another male commentator. Besides the voice of Illich’s colleague Barbara Duden, and a comment from Cayley’s wife, we hear little sympathetic commentary from women in this chapter. That is too bad. <br /><br /> Illich calls this domain of the homemade “the vernacular,” reviving an old Latin adjective that could be applied to one’s mother tongue as well as to a cow raised at home instead of acquired at the market. He hopes such islands can align in an “archipelago of conviviality”—a chain of islands where life is still livable on a human scale, where we can love one another as neighbours and renounce the kind of “care” that implicitly takes the point of view of a systems administrator. It is not that Illich is against institutions and systems organized to achieve social goods, but as a loyal dissident of the Roman Catholic Church, he is acutely sensitive to the harms done in the name of good, and of the importance of limits and humility for those of us who get caught up trying to save the world, whether with sacred rites or secular ones. “Risk awareness,” Illich said to Cayley late in life, is “the most important religiously celebrated ideology of today.” That was before the Coronavirus lockdown.<br /><br />Illich blesses the missionary impulse at the same time as he chastens it. He understands that whether inspired by Jesus or by a medical breakthrough, people will want to share their good news. But he sees with near-clairvoyant power how the good news is accompanied by a terrible danger. Humans inspired by visions of God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven all too easily construct an artificial, man-made world from which there is no escape. <br /><br />As a reader of Illich via Cayley, I find myself more deeply drawn into the good news of Jesus, and more able to discern and rebuke the spirits that dress up like Jesus while perverting his good news. I find myself both grateful for a vaccine that reduces the symptoms and spread of a nasty virus, and alert to the shadows of a campaign of global vaccine compliance. When a frightened neighbour who does not attend my church recently reached out to me to ask if I could write a religious exemption for her son so that this unvaccinated young man could attend college this fall, I said yes. As I did so, I silently thanked Illich and Cayley for helping me get my head around what the hell is going on in this strange time and how in heaven’s name such a yes to my neighbour could possibly be a yes to Christ.</span>Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-60267876851137825292020-04-06T15:42:00.000-07:002020-04-06T15:42:23.864-07:00A Time for the Vernacular<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><i>Rediscovering the home economy inside our COVID19 quarantines</i></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><i><br /></i>My wife cut my hair this weekend. In recent years, I had become accustomed to the pleasures and precisions of professional haircuts. The home hairdo was a bit nerve-wracking for both of us. When your hairdresser says, “Well, there’s always hats. You like wearing hats,” you do not feel the same boost in your confidence and sense of your own handsomeness as when you walk out of a professional barber shop.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">But it was fine. I looked in the mirror and did feel handsome. And loved and taken care of in a way I don’t get from the barber. That’s the difference between a professional haircut and what Ivan Illich would call a vernacular haircut.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">My wife has been rendered unemployed by the COVID19 crisis, and my own work hours have shrunk to about 5 hours a week. Many, many others are suddenly in similar situations. But our un- or under-employment does not mean that we are doing nothing. It does not mean that we have no economy. Many of us are rediscovering the skills and joys of a home economy. I have a friend who is taking up beading again. Another is playing her violin for the first time in five years. Another has started a youtube channel and has taken up baking bread for his family. Prairie Flour Mill at Elie, Manitoba, is suddenly milling around the clock trying to keep up with the demand for flour as thousands of home bakers have suddenly rediscovered this vocation.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">According to Illich, <a href="http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1980_vernacular_values.html"><span class="s2" style="color: #0000e9; font-kerning: none;">the vernacular </span></a>used to refer not only to home-spoken dialects, but to the economy of the homemade, the homespun and the homegrown. For example, a vernacular cow was an animal that had been born on your home farm, as opposed to an animal you purchased at the market.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Illich reclaimed this term to refer to “activities of people…not motivated by thoughts of exchange,…autonomous, non-market-related actions through which people satisfy everyday needs—the actions which by their nature escape bureaucratic control…[and] that we want to defend from measurement or manipulation.” Illich noticed in the 1970’s (another time of economic “downturn”) that the narrative of progress and development was confronted by a force that had not been anticipated: the rich and the privileged were carving out spaces for themselves that were free of “the damages inflicted by development.”</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Decades prior to the advent of telecommuting, Illich notice a trend in which “You have arrived if you can commute outside the rush hour;…if you can give birth at home…are rich and lucky if you can breathe fresh air; by no means poor, if you can build your own shack.”</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Just this morning, my daughter passed along a youtube video of a 25-year-old British do-it-your-selfer who built her own tiny home with the help of friends and family. “This is my dream home,” Johanna said. “That’s what I want to learn to do.” Bingo, Mr. Illich.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">I do not want to make light of the terrific economic pain that a predicted 30% unemployment rate will cause in this country, and the even greater pain it will cause in <a href="https://eand.co/why-were-underestimating-american-collapse-be04d9e55235"><span class="s2" style="color: #0000e9; font-kerning: none;">“the world's first rich failed state” </span></a>on our southern border, where the social safety net is weak, polarization and inequality are extreme, and the private gun arsenals are vast. A kick at this darkness will not bleed daylight. We need to go gently, very gently into this dark night. The more fairly and evenly our governments can spread the burden and redistribute resources in this crisis, the better.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">But I also don’t want to miss out on a rediscovery of the pleasures of a slower, more home-based economy that is underway on a massive scale. I was talking yesterday with a restauranteur friend who tells me that despite COVID19’s terrible impact on her business, she is hoping that we actually don’t return to “normal” as we knew it. She is reading about signs all across the world of animals and birds coming back, of eco-systems healing as the pollution and noise of “economic activity” abates. In her own life, she is experiencing a badly needed rest, and rediscovering parts of herself coming back out into the open, like shy woodland creatures long-banished by the noise and bustle of her business.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">Another friend is suddenly much happier in his marriage. How much was the pain and alienation he had been locating between himself and his wife really just the collateral damage of the double income young suburban family structure that has become the normal formula in hyper-capitalist late modernity? When every morning is a frantic race to get everyone out the door, who can hold a space in which family can come home to one another? At the risk of committing a professional heresy, I have begun to wonder out loud whether some part of the drop in business in family therapy is not the fear of a Corona-virus infection, but the fact that just being in each other’s presence with few outside pressures is the healing balm that many couples and families have been aching for. I look forward to a bump in babies nine months from the onset of our self-isolation.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">The last century has seen the professionalization and monetization of many, many tasks that used to be exchanged in the informal economy of human community. Decade by decade, we capitulated to the logic that it does not make sense to bake your own bread, grow your own garden, educate your own children, carry your own teachings, perform your own ceremonies, do your own healing work, if you can specialize in one of these areas as a professional, and get paid a rate that is worth more per hour than your time would be worth if you yourself did any of those other things for your loved ones. You can buy all that stuff with fewer hours of your time.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">You could. And now perhaps you can’t. What are you discovering about the trade-off? <a href="http://debate.uvm.edu/asnider/Ivan_Illich/Ivan%20Illich_Energy%20and%20Equity.pdf"><span class="s2" style="color: #0000e9; font-kerning: none;">Illich once calculated </span></a>that for all the extra time and labour it took to pay for a car and the infrastructure of a car-based society, we weren’t actually getting anywhere more efficiently than if we walked or rode bicycles.</span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1" style="font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span class="s1" style="font-kerning: none;">One more consideration. As it was in the 1970’s, the option of the stay-at-home economy is the luxury of a certain class. One of the greatest evils that Illich documented about our present age is that it has destroyed the world in which it was possible to live without money. This is perhaps the greatest injustice our present society has done to the poor. The poor among us are those who have lost access to both to the economy of “good jobs” and to the intact land base and the intact human communities inside of which the pleasures of the vernacular economy can be found. If you are finding a new satisfaction in your days at home in this strange time, do not forget about them.</span></div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-14426020908488031682020-01-02T10:31:00.001-08:002020-01-02T10:33:27.598-08:00The EventIn an article entitled, <a href="https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1">“Survival of the Richest,”</a> technologist Douglas Rushkoff talks about how the wealthy are plotting to leave the rest of us behind after “The Event”—a euphemism for the environmental collapse and societal breakdown they have come to see as inevitable in the looming climate crisis. Rushkoff describes an eery meeting, for which he received “by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary,” where he sat down with five super-wealthy hedge fund managers, who soon made it clear that they were not interested in his prepared presentation on the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own: <br />
<br />
“Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska?…Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?’…They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time."<br />
<br />
It’s a longstanding pattern of the super-rich, this next-level logic of the gated community—like the Viking aristocracy who condemned themselves to starve last in the collapsing colony they had fancifully named “Greenland,” the icy island where they had attempted to impose the pasture and dairy agronomy of Scandinavia and despised the Indigenous life ways of the Inuit. In their case, a global cooling of a few degrees was the tipping point toward death. In our case, global warming is the existential threat. Jared Diamond, who tells the story of the Greenland Vikings in Collapse, wonders what it is that makes humans double down on unsustainable and inequitable ways of life in moments of cultural crisis. Like the Easter Islanders who felled their last trees to cart one last batch of stone idols into place to save them from the ecological breakdown of their island economy. Instead of building life boats to get off the island, they prostrated themselves one more time before the cult that was condemning them to death. <br />
<br />
Death cults are nothing new. The kind of political power that rises from sacrificial altars has been with us from the dawn of human civilization, and is with us still. Once we had high priests who determined who would die and who would live in the ceremonies that guaranteed our prosperity. Today we have the infallibility of the market determining the sacred necessity of misery and extinction at “lower” levels of existence for the sake of an energetic, consumptive bonanza in the upper levels of global capitalism. Ask a question about the validity of this cult and you can expect the same frantic condemnations heaped on iconoclasts of the past. <br />
<br />
The iconoclastic prophet Isaiah described the escape fantasies of the elite of his day in words that need little translation to land smack dab in the middle of Rushkoff’s meeting with the five super-rich hedge fund managers: <br />
<br />
"Hear the word of YHWH, you scoffers who rule this people…Because you have said, ‘We have made a covenant with death…when the overwhelming scourge passes through, it will not come for us, for we have made lies our refuge…’ I will make justice the line and righteousness the plummet; hail will sweep away the refuge of lies and waters will overwhelm the shelter.” (Isaiah 28:14-17) <br />
<br />
There is no safe place to sit out a civilizational collapse. We’re all in this together. This is the truth that the elite are blind to in their bunkered refuge of lies. Rushkoff sees a blessing in the fact that the vast majority of us cannot afford the fantasy of high-tech, high-security hideaways: “Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways.…we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.”Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-65111470040223472962019-03-08T14:05:00.000-08:002019-03-08T14:05:22.623-08:00A Small Glory Story<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><a href="http://thesmallglories.com/">The Small Glories</a> began their touring season of 2019 on a cold February night in a little old country church in Beausejour, Manitoba. Not the church that had been planned, mind you, because the furnace conked out and the toilets froze. We could see our breath when we got to the venue. “How do they heat this place?,” I wondered. “Looks like candles,” said JD. I laughed. “That’s it. Just light all the fucking candles!” I swear more when the temperatures drop from below zero Celsius to below zero Fahrenheit. That’s what the minus F stands for for me. </span></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">JD lit some candles on the old altar, and I called my buddy Mike McLean. Mike got the furnace going again, but when JD went to take a piss and found the water in the toilet bowl as solid as the porcelain that was holding it, Cara said, “What are we going to do?”</span></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 12px;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4x856h_Q-4VQCpkxFtjvg4ThJILPkRKb-E19FnXEG3DMmSrpt7v_1NCW2mGtnw6FC4NaN0B_XvuzpeMKShDPtVWgkhGKTLrId4SpNzBkYIDdBGXtXvONuJ4oY_ZDfbumqOvzi_9HHN-eQ/s1600/100759.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><img border="0" data-original-height="467" data-original-width="700" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4x856h_Q-4VQCpkxFtjvg4ThJILPkRKb-E19FnXEG3DMmSrpt7v_1NCW2mGtnw6FC4NaN0B_XvuzpeMKShDPtVWgkhGKTLrId4SpNzBkYIDdBGXtXvONuJ4oY_ZDfbumqOvzi_9HHN-eQ/s320/100759.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">By that time folks were streaming in for the gig. Darlene Omichinski had a key for Zion Lutheran, but they were hosting a tap dance thing. Duane and Deb Versluis had keys for Grace Lutheran. Don Zueff joked that we would be going over to the dark side, but we all piled out the door and headed for Grace and warmth and working toilets. In the end it was just another Small Glory story, a story about trying to make something work, about failing and picking up the pieces and starting all over again.</span></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 12px;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">It struck me that The Small Glories made it safe for us that night to all gather in one church, then safe to leave it and gather in another. That’s no small thing. I know this because I am friends with a lot of the people who came that night. Some of them can’t go to each other’s church, and a lot of them can’t go to church at all, because it’s dangerous for them. So it was odd, and glorious, to enter into music in a church that night that held space for all of us.</span></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 12px;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">People have been gathering in churches for hundreds of years. Sometimes you came because you fell in love with somebody and you wanted to make a big promise. Sometimes you came because you had a new baby and you wanted to share this new happiness with your neighbours and enlist their help. Sometimes you came because someone you loved had died, and you needed good way to say goodbye. Sometimes we came to tell ourselves a story that made us feel better about ourselves than the people who weren’t there. And sometimes we came to fall on our knees, praying like the angel from Montgomery: “Just give me one thing that I can hold on to, ‘cause to believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”</span></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 12px;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">Those places are emptying out now. And after a while the toilets freeze or some other damn thing breaks down. I don’t know if we need churches any more. I do know that we need some songs that can gather us, and some places where we can sing together, now more than ever. “Truth is bread,” said Simone Weil, the 20th-century mystic who refused Christian baptism, “you know it by its taste.” I believe the same is true of art. It’s bread for the journey, and people nowadays are starving for it.</span></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 12px;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">The Small Glories are feeding the people. They know something about truth and art and harmony. They know that one note can get together with a different note and open up a space between them that brings us all in. They know about the many ways we suffer, the many ways we love, the many ways we heal. Their new album is about a couple of come-from-aways who landed at the meeting place of the Assiniboine and the Red, a side-winding meanderer and a fat and lazy prairie river with more power than you would guess. Two wondrous travelers arrived here and made their home with us. I’m so glad they did. </span></div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-88081242796019797552019-01-13T11:41:00.001-08:002019-01-14T18:59:01.938-08:00Love Supreme, Supreme DangerI've been catching up on the literature of CPT. CPT stands for Christian Peacemaker Teams. But today when I read their publications, I more often read the adjective "Christian" in reference to problematic nouns like "hegemony" or "Zionism." You can still see "christian" in the small font of their elegant logo, a white dove sitting on a length of barbed wire that is vining into an olive branch under the dove's feet. The dove's eyes are keeping close watch on the barb. The olive leaves are either less interesting than the barb, or simply growing of their accord, like the seed of the kingdom that sprouts and grows, we know not how. (Mark 4:27)<br />
<a class="irc_mil i3597" data-ctbtn="0" data-cthref="/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwixrqa3wuvfAhUF7YMKHZEPDHIQjRx6BAgBEAU&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cpt.org%2F&psig=AOvVaw2fRVl0cTqjm9AlmOarOSho&ust=1547495048868524" data-noload="" data-ved="2ahUKEwixrqa3wuvfAhUF7YMKHZEPDHIQjRx6BAgBEAU" href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwixrqa3wuvfAhUF7YMKHZEPDHIQjRx6BAgBEAU&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cpt.org%2F&psig=AOvVaw2fRVl0cTqjm9AlmOarOSho&ust=1547495048868524" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;focus:irc.rl" rel="noopener" style="border: 0px; color: #660099; cursor: pointer; font-family: arial, sans-serif; text-align: center; text-decoration: none;" tabindex="0" target="_blank"><img alt="Image result for christian peacemaker team logo" class="irc_mi" height="213" src="https://www.cpt.org/sites/default/files/reversedlogoCPT-red_0.jpg" style="-webkit-background-size: 21px; background-color: white; background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(45deg, rgb(239, 239, 239) 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239) 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239)), -webkit-linear-gradient(45deg, rgb(239, 239, 239) 25%, transparent 25%, transparent 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239) 75%, rgb(239, 239, 239)); background-position: 0px 0px, 10px 10px; border: 0px; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.65098) 0px 5px 35px; margin-top: 122px;" width="433" /></a><br />
<br />
In its repentance of Christian hegemony and its growing friendships with peacemakers of many faiths, CPT today identifies its mission as "<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); text-align: center;">Inclusive, multi-faith, spiritually guided peacemaking."</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); text-align: center;"> I am encouraged and troubled by this, both at the same time. CPT for years has been a light on the hill that I could point to to say, this is what authentic Christian action looks like in the world. With so many abuses committed in the name of my saviour, CPT was an example I could feel proud of. "No one after lighting a lamp puts it under a bushel basket," says Christ in the conclusion of the Beatitudes. Then, not long after, he says, "Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them." Oh, Christ, you're on to me again.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); text-align: center;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">The early Christians, in their astonishment at the light of Christ, made bold claims. "God...highly exalted him...so that at the </span></span><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">name</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> of Jesus every knee should bend...and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord." (Phillipians 2:9-11) David Cayley, in a <a href="http://theferment.ca/4-david-cayley-christian-thought-and-public-radio/">recent interview on The Ferment</a>, says that anyone who is a Christian, if they really are a Christian, wants to share the Good News. But he soon after adds that the prerequisite of this sharing is a profound silence before the other. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">In the great "every knee, every tongue" hymn of Phillipians, Christ's glory is coupled with and preceded by Christ's supreme humility: </span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">"though he was in the form of God, </span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">did not regard equality with God </span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">as something to be exploited,</span></span></span><br />
<span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">but </span></span></span><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">emptied himself,</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">taking the form of human likeness.</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">And being found in human form,</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">he humbled himself</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">and became obedient to the point of death--</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">even death on a cross."</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">(2:6-8)</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span>
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">In light of this example Christians are exhorted: "Let the same mind be in you that was also in Christ Jesus." (2:5)</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span>
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">It is such a mind that repents of chauvinism, that resists the temptations of prestige and recognition, that empties itself of divine claims in order to bring out divinity in the other. It is such a mind that drops me to my knees.</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span>
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">For many of us Christians who are waking up to our history of arrogance and our complicity in colonial oppression, there is an impulse to recoil at the early church's proclamation of the universal lordship of Jesus Christ. Of course. A more convenient handmaiden to empire could hardly be found.</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span>
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">But this continues to cast the problem of Christian mission into the categories of who is better than whom. The early church cast the problem in categories that are more radical, and more revealing: Christ/Anti-Christ. They understood the Love Supreme that was astonishingly, uniquely and indispensably revealed on the Cross of Christ to be accompanied by a supreme danger: a new "mystery of wickedness" nested in the church, capable of a kind of evil not seen in the world before. Ivan Illich, who I am following here, taught me to see that the lordship of Christ, uncoupled from Christ's humility, could become an imperial standard that could violate not only the geographic sovereignty, but the spiritual sovereignty of the other. Roman spiritual imperialism only insisted that you bow before their gods. Christian spiritual imperialism insisted that you invite the colonial anti-Christ into your heart.</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span>
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">In a recent interview, Cree elder Walking Buffalo (Stan McKay), reflecting on the confusing character of Canadian racism that he experienced in residential school, said, "Many of them were nice to us, even as they were destroying us." As I watched the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100011251092673">viral video</a> this week of calm, polite CFS workers and RCMP officers take yet another baby from the arms of yet another weeping Indigenous mother, Stan's words rang in my ears. There is a mysterious, confusing evil at work among us.</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span>
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">When Stan recalls the teachings of his mother and father to never take more than you need from the earth, and to consider anything extra you have as something to be shared in community, I have to confess (as did a significant minority of early missionaries) that the cultures that Europeans encountered on Turtle Island were spiritually more attuned to the way of life outlined in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount than the grasping, control-seeking, imperial cultures that funded the drive for Christian conversions in this place. When my Haudenosaunee friend Adrian Jacobs asserts in an Indigenous Testamur that Indigenous theology is the host of any non-Indigenous spiritual tradition brought into this place, I breathe in the hope of the Beatitudes: that it is the </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">anawim</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">, the humble, righteous, simple-living people--who we call in English "the meek"--who are the rightful inheritors of the earth. When the people who in their own languages call themselves Inninew or Anishnaabeeg tell us that they are the keepers of the earth in this place, set here by the Creator to practice Mino Pimatissiwin--the good life lived in harmony with all our relations, I understand them to be saying little else. When these meek (again) inherit the earth, I will understand our prayers for Christ's kingdom to "come on earth as it is in heaven" to be answered.</span><br />
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span>
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span>
<span style="caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"><br /></span>Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-4342380340728283862019-01-12T09:13:00.000-08:002019-01-12T09:14:10.574-08:00Gospel and Trauma<br />
<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There is a vast generation that has been traumatized by the Gospel story as a propaganda tract for terror and war, as a bedtime story for cultural euthanization. Before this generation the evangelist must now keep silent. But there is another generation coming up behind this one that will be traumatized by their lack of any story at all, of a story that can make sense of their twittered and splintered existence, and of the apocalypse that is coming for us all. The day will come when they will need the story of the angel in the fiery furnace, or they will go mad in the great conflagration that is underway. Already any of them who are awake see the flames licking at the doors of their house. It is for them that we must hold the story of a peace not as the world gives, a story of forgiveness, resurrection, and the eternal possibility of beginning afresh.</span></div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-6574172773808219802018-10-14T19:52:00.000-07:002018-10-14T19:52:14.554-07:00Spinning Water, Flat Water<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(92, 67, 43); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; color: #5c432b; font-size: 18px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 8px; text-align: center;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A Visit to Chùa Hải Hội Temple</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-kerning: none;"></span>As an assignment for my Spirituality and Family Therapy course, I was tasked with attending a spiritual gathering outside my comfort zone and write a reflection on the experience. It was an assignment I enjoyed very much. Here it is.</span></i></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;">
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: center; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>"In my contacts with these new friends, I feel consolation in my own faith in Christ and his indwelling presence.”</i> </span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px; text-align: center; text-indent: 27px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: center; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">- Thomas Merton, upon connecting with Buddhist monks in Tibet.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I pull into the parking lot quickly, a little later than I had intended. Beside me, an Asian woman is just getting out of her Porsche SUV. She opens her trunk and pulls out a plain grey tunic, which she begins to pull on over brand-name clothing. I walk quickly past, hoping to get inside and meet up with my interpreter before the service begins. A nun with saffron robes and shaved head greets me - the same calm and friendly voice that I spoke with on the telephone two days ago. She introduces me to Di Van, a soft-spoken, slender woman with slightly greying hair: “She will interpret for you and answer your questions.” We shake hands (on my initiative, I think) and bow to one another (on her initiative, I think). East meets West on friendly terms, and she leads me up several flights of stairs into the temple.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">We enter into the back of what feels to me immediately like a throne room. I associate it in my mind with the royal courtroom of Kublai Khan as I saw it in <i>Marco Polo</i> on Netflix. Three large, gold-embossed buddhas are enthroned across the front of the room. The side and back walls are adorned with thousands of identical little Buddhas. Worshippers are kneeling and bowing toward the front. Di Van tells me to bow and I follow suit. Now is the time to be a gracious guest and not the time to make a stand about bowing to idols. I don’t even know if that’s what’s actually going on here. I have the feeling of being surrounded by powers and facing a power that do not quite understand. I am in someone else’s territory. I am grateful for a guide who speaks to me with gentle courtesy, doing her best to orient this Western stranger, who has come for reasons she accepts to be his own. Neither she nor the nun ever asked why I wanted to come here. I asked, and they welcomed. It was that simple for them.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">All the prayers and scriptures are chanted, to the rhythm of a huge slit drum, accented by massive bells that seem to ring endlessly into their diminishment. I cannot tell apart the tonality of the language and the tonality of the musical scale in which the group is singing. To my ears, the sound is plaintive and primal, the cry of humans reaching higher than themselves for help and blessing. The drum varies the pace of prayer considerably, like a train leaving the station, gradually picking up the speed for all those aboard, and then with perfect control applying the brakes for a smooth stop at the next station. The physicality of the ritual cultivates a feeling of calm alertness. The body is seated, but the back is straight. The voices call out, the liturgy guides. The song is a balance of passion and structure.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I am impressed by how much the prayers are other-oriented. There is a long prayer for the spirits of the deceased who are stuck in lower, more miserable states of consciousness, “different levels of hell,” in the words of Di Van. A significant aspect of the community’s spiritual work seems to be to come to the aid of these lost spirits. Later, the scripture reading relays the story of the Buddha going into the spirit world to find and assist his mother to let go of attachments that kept her spirit in a state of suffering.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Memorials for the recently deceased are part of the ceremony, and celebrants walk amongst the congregation with pieces of paper that they lay on the heads of family members, “so that their relatives will recognize them,” Di Van whispers.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Next are prayers for those who are suffering in this life. I don’t know what I miss in the content that is not translated for me, but I am surprised that at no point do I hear anything of the type of self-help spirituality that I tend to associate with Western practicioners of meditation and mindfulness. There is talk of helping others to reach nirvana, but not of seeking nirvana for oneself. </span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Next there is a food offering ceremony for the Buddhas. I am reminded of similar ceremonies in Indigenous community, and I wonder about the cultural and genetic connections as I look at the woman chanting with the slit drum, her long black ponytail running down her back. </span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There are some things going on that I am not comfortable with. Are the food offerings, in Buddhism or Indigenous practice, a way of “wheeling and dealing” with the spirit world? Why do these spirits need earthly food? Why do they need paper certificates to recognize their relatives? And I don’t like the Buddha I discover in the corner of the room, with big hair and angry eyes and sword in hand.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But I know that my own religion is full of pomp and garishness and superstition, and that from its swollen body it has birthed saints. Who can say what is bloat and what is pregnancy? We too have caked the Christ with gold and addressed him as our feudal “Lord.” The laughing Buddha and the banqueting Christ seem to suggest that the subversion can run powerfully in the other direction, that they are more than capable of seducing the status-obsessed monkeys that build their shrines into a glory beyond our schlockiest dreams. So if they aren’t worried, I can relax too, even about that crazy red swastika on the chests of the ten thousand Buddhas gazing calmly at me from their perches on the walls. Whatever it means to them, I know it’s not what it means to me.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">After the ceremony, Di Van leads me downstairs to a banquet hall where folks are sitting down for a delicious vegetarian Vietnamese noodle soup. I ask her about the grey tunic she is wearing, and she explains its significance. The grey colour is to encourage calmness, to reduce distractions for the eye in the temple. I get a sense that part of what is being discouraged is the rating game by which humans signal our specialness and stature to each other through the clothes we wear. “Rivalry,” as James Alison says, “is the enemy of worship.” It is as true here as it is in Christian sanctuaries.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The grey tunic is also a sign that Di Van is a devotee of “The Five Precepts” - which are to stay away from killing, avoid lying, avoid adultery, avoid intoxication and avoid stealing. Each of these cloud the mind and sow discord in the human community. Anger seems the most important state to avoid and calmness seems to be the most desirable state of being, but again, not for one’s own sake, but in order to be reincarnated into a higher state of consciousness, to return to the world able to help people. Di Van admits that those who come to the temple infrequently typically come just to seek favours for themselves and their families. “They do not yet understand the real teaching.” I am impressed that her tone is neither blameful nor embarrassed. Her voice is untroubled, matter-of-fact.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">A young boy chimes into our conversation. He introduces himself as Christopher, and I have to laugh to myself that here in this place, at this table, I meet a young friend whose name means, “Christ-bearer.” </span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Excuse me,” he says. “When I was at Chinese temple, I went to the toilet to pee, and when I flushed the toilet, the water spinned around and around and around.” I am delighted by his change of subject and his passion for it. He proceeds to tell me of other places he has seen this spinning water: bathtubs and raging rivers. “That river is dangerous. You can’t swim in that spinning water. You have to swim in the flat water.” He sounds like a little Buddha.</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Excuse me,” he says. “Look at that Buddha.” He points behind me to a fat and jolly laughing Buddha who looks like he’s just heard the best joke he’s heard all week. </span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“He looks like he’s having a good time,” I say. </span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Excuse me, because he’s happy?” says the boy. “The Buddha loves children,” he adds, and then, out of the blue, “And I love Jesus.”</span></span></div>
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Di Van smiles into her soup, and Christopher’s slightly embarrassed mother laughs.</span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-size: 12px; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 27px;">
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">“Well, how ‘bout that,” I say. “So do I.”</span></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-kerning: none;"><br /></span></div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-20203936881140466822018-05-02T19:19:00.002-07:002018-05-02T19:19:43.123-07:00Planting onionsToday was the day for planting out the onions.<br />
<br />
I think onions must be the most painstaking crop we grow. We started them in February in south-facing windows that looked out on to an expanse of frozen whiteness. We watched their little green dinosaur necks crane out of the soil, watered them, gave them haircuts, watched them grow some more and gave them haircuts again. And today we teased them apart and pushed them into soft warm soil, four inches apart, in six one hundred foot rows. It is the first long day in the garden. The body humps along, the mind wanders. I listened to some excellent podcasts: The Verdict of Sir John A. MacDonald (actionable wrongdoing by the standards of a civil trial, but not guilty to the standard of crimes against humanity in his role in the reign of terror in the Red River Settlement and the rations policy that sickened and starved to death hundreds of First Nations people on the prairies) "Is Liberalism Doomed? (in a serious identity crisis at any rate, judging by the range of representations made by the panelists). When I took a break from my iPhone, I noticed the songs of the returning birds. There was a small war among some robins that skirmished through the onion patch with great energy. But mostly, decorum was observed and the contests for territory conducted with such gentility that it hardly seems a contest at all, but the disciplined coordination of a vast community setting up house to raise their kin according to a Rule of Life that surpasses St. Benedict's in its elegance and humble submission to the Creator's word. The birds compete and coexist beautifully.<br />
<br />
Beyond the birdsong this afternoon, and the hooting of the owl now as evening settles in, is the steady rumble of large tractors. Every spring I have this thought as I inch along with my handful of onion seedlings, and they plant an acre in less time than I can plant one hundred linear feet: how are they and I living in the same world? I will sell my onions for a dollar a piece at the farmers' market. They will measure their success or failure by tonnage and millions.<br />
<br />
I am on my way out of this game. This will likely be my last season as a commercial market gardener. I have developed too many other foolish passions that I pursue for love and not for money. But for today, I am thankful for the day spent on the soil, for the passing of little living things through my hands and into the ground, for life in a world that can be made sense of only through the eyes of love.Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-62623878627287087632018-04-26T07:04:00.000-07:002018-04-26T07:05:40.492-07:00This Little Light of Mine - An Appeal<br />
<br />
Someone with a tearful smile told me recently that I made her want to be a Christian again. Of course, I did no such thing. No more than St. Peter made Jesus rise from the dead by declaring him risen. He just found himself known and loved and forgiven and told the story. I'm just someone who stumbled upon an understanding of the Cross that wasn't all emotional blackmail and convoluted back room dealings with the devil, and onto a Christian social vision that didn't divide the kingdom of heaven into God's staff and God's clients. I caught something. This Gospel is infectious, and I got infected. <br />
<br />
And now someone wants to help my book go viral. At least a little viral.<br />
<br />
Some people call Mike Morrell the Forrest Gump of progressive Christianity. If something big is happening, he's there in the background somewhere. <br />
<br />
Mike works with well-known and little-known authors alike, and has helped ignite conversation on titles ranging from Sara Miles' <i>Take This Bread </i>to Brian McLaren's <i>A New Kind of Christianity.</i> He was the only initial marketing on the breakout novel <i>The Shack,</i> which has gone on to sell 26 million copies worldwide. <br />
<br />
Mike wants to do a campaign for my book through his networking outfit, a collection of some 1,100 bloggers and 100 podcasters he calls Speakeasy.<br />
<br />
Here is the breakdown of what Mike is offering:<br />
<br />
1) Create an Executive Summary of Life at the End of Us vs Them for my approval. <br />
<br />
2) Send this summary to his 1100+-strong blogger network and a version to his 100-strong podcast and radio show host list <br />
<br />
3) Send copies of the book to those requesting, their agreement being to blog about it within 30 days. <br />
<br />
4) Retweet/share the best reviews to his personal social networks, 90,000 connections strong. <br />
<br />
5) Send me a summary of results 60 days after our campaign launch, containing links to all reviews.<br />
<br />
6) Run an excerpt of the book on his blog at <a href="http://mikemorrell.org./">MikeMorrell.org.</a> He'd also like to send it out to his personal email newsletter, which has 25,000 subscribers. He doesn't do this for every Speakeasy campaign, but in my case, he thinks it would really resonate with his readers. <br />
<br />
There is a lot of overlap between the themes of my book and the themes of Mike's own work. Mike's <a href="http://mikemorrell.org/">blog</a> of "opti-mystic reflections on spirit, culture and permaculture" speaks to people who are returning to faith AND who are returning to the land. If there is a publicity expert who knows my tribe, it's Mike.<br />
<br />
Mike's standard fee is $2,500 USD. He is dropping that by $1,000 for me, which I appreciate a lot. After putting thousands of hours and significant investment into the book, I am at a place where I feel that any further financial support for the book needs to come from a community beyond my wife and family. If I do this campaign with Mike, I will do it based on the support of people who have caught the vision of <i>Life at the End of Us Versus Them</i> and want to share that life with others.<br />
<br />
James Alison tells me that the book is too good to rest in a backwater. I take that in the sense of the old Bible camp song lyric: "Hide it under a bushel - no!" <br />
<br />
I would greatly appreciate your support in this campaign. If you are so inclined, please send a pledge of an amount you are willing to contribute to <a href="mailto:rempel.marcus@gmail.com">rempel.marcus@gmail.com</a>. I will follow up with you from there. If pledges above and beyond the cost of the Speakeasy campaign come in, I can put them towards my podcast, <a href="http://theferment.ca/">The Ferment</a> with <a href="http://alanalevandoski.com/">Alana Levandoski</a>, or towards the publication costs of an audio book, or towards another book tour (westward perhaps?). I will seek your input on this.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It makes me smile to think that I of all people am raising money for what is really an evangelistic effort. (I had a dream a couple weeks ago that a warm and friendly Billy Graham bought my book from me, despite my warnings that it might push his edges a bit - Ha!) I guess I am going with, "this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine." </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Thanks for helping me lift that light up to where people can see it.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Peace and all good!</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Marcus</div>
<div>
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-50861342552887340912018-02-07T06:51:00.000-08:002018-02-07T06:51:09.190-08:00Going for GoldSt. Paul says a lot of strange things. This week was no exception:<br />
<br /><i>To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, so that I might by any means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings. </i>(1 Corinthians 9:20-23)<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Paul seems to be describing a kind of undercover evangelical strategy here: putting on the appearance of Jewishness to evangelize Jews, and the appearance of being pagan to evangelize pagans, etc. A cynical reading would suggest that Paul is doing nothing more than listing the tricks of an Amway salesman. But I have slowly been getting to know Paul, and what I now hear him saying is this: All the religious and cultural packaging and baggage people carry around is just that - packaging and baggage. It's a container that can be filled with clutter and bullshit, or it can be filled with gold. Paul is after the gold. He is done fretting over non-essentials. He has caught hold of something essential that he wants to share with everyone he meets.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Which is...?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The kids in the front row of the Sunday School class are pumping their hands up in the air. They know, they know! It's JESUS!</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Paul is excited about Jesus, no doubt. But two thousand years after writing his letter to the Corinthians, the name of Jesus is as encrusted with religious and cultural baggage as anything else on offer, then or now. What would Paul get excited about now? Where would he see and celebrate the "good news"?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I keep thinking back to something that got me excited this week. I keep telling people about this conversation I listened in on between Rabbi Sarah Bassin and Imam Abdullah Antepli, hosted by Krista Tippett in an episode of On Being. The episode, entitled <a href="https://onbeing.org/programs/sarah-bassin-and-abdullah-antepli-holy-envy-feb2018/">"Holy Envy"</a> celebrated the surprising friendships being built between Jews and Muslims in North America over the last several years.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The rabbi and the imam were funny, they were candid, they were self-critical, they were affectionate towards their own tribe and the tribe of the other. The term "holy envy" came from the experience they described that comes with the mystery of genuine encounter with a person of a different faith - the gifts that are carried by that tradition make such an impression that one finds oneself thinking, "I wish we had more of that." </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And the imam confessed the toxic anti-Semitism he is trying to get out of his system, and the rabbi confessed the Islamophobia that poisons her community. They named the powerful mystery that in meeting with the other, one can meet with God, especially when the other has been one's scapegoat.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
What else does the Incarnation entail?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I have to be careful here. Overlaying a Christian category onto the spiritual genius of a rabbi and an imam can easily morph into a colonizing micro-aggression. A respectful engagement must leave intact the Jewishness of the Jew and the Islam of the Muslim. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But of course, my respectful engagement has to proceed from the particular tradition in which I stand, which is Christian. And as a Christian, I have Paul's voice in my head, trying to explain something odd about how a Christian engages with religious plurality: With a Jew, become as a Jew. With a Muslim, become as a Muslim. In his terms, Circumcision/uncircumcision is nothing. The new creation is everything! </div>
<div>
<i><br /></i></div>
<div>
When I listened to Rabbi Bassin and Imam Antepli, my heart was in my throat. In their friendship, the real thing was happening! What is that real thing? All the words that I have to point at it with are Christian words. Their words are Jewish and Muslim words. But in them, I heard the good news and said, "Amen!"</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Reading Paul this Sunday, I think he was saying, "Amen!" too.</div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-14089259022306700262017-12-30T16:06:00.000-08:002017-12-30T16:10:31.373-08:00Blasphemy (All I have to praise him with)"Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven..." (Matthew 12:32a)<br /><br />When I say Jesus is LORD, which I do say, as a Christian, what I am saying is this: The humble, self-effacing God is the one true God.<br /><br />Anyone who turns the triumph of the cross into a triumphalism has already forgotten its content: the humiliation of the Son of God.<br /><br />So how can I possibly hope to communicate this mystery to a world full of rivalry, a world bent on dividing everyone into winners and losers? When I say that Jesus has won, how can this not be irreparably distorted, falling into an arena where the victory of one blood-soaked gladiator always means the condemnation of another?<br /><br />The answer seems to be swaddled in the humiliating descent of the incarnation. The word, to be received, must become flesh. “Jesus is Lord” as a disembodied truth claim is terrible. It is an idolatry - not because I am mistaken in whom I am ascribing divinity to, but because I am mistaken in what I am ascribing to the truly Divine. The whole point of the incarnation is to reveal God as Immanuel, God-with-us, not as some royal totem apart-from-us. God as woundable, God as a beggar for our love, not as the one to whom we beg for love, God taking on the form of a slave, not the form of a king. <br /><br />Really, the only ones who can witness truthfully to this God are the poor. Only those who are themselves defaced and humiliated can say, boldly and with full confidence, that the humble, self-effacing God is the one true God. To the extent that I have been privileged by the world with status and respect, a chauvinism inevitably creeps in to my declaration of these same words. The meaning goes off. I cannot be confident of my witness. It is a revelation that the world can only hear aright when it is looking down at Jesus, not when it is looking up at him. This is why he had to descend from heaven. This is why he had to empty himself of divinity to communicate the message of God’s love. God is not only in the sunlight shining down from heaven. God is also in the grass trampled underfoot. In the greening, and in the trampling of the earth is a holy mystery. God is not only source of all that is, but the receiver. Not only refuge, but refugee.<br /><br />Words break apart on the word made flesh. Those with the words do not know, and those who know do not have the words. For the Christian, it is impossible to speak of this revelation, it is impossible not to.<br /><br />So yes, Jesus is Lord, and I am his fool, and this is my gibberish. By raising him up with these wooden, roughhewn terms, I have crucified him yet again. Only by his mercy am I allowed this blasphemy. I trust that he knows that this blasphemy is all I have to praise him with, and that he suffers me to do so. <br /><br />By his cross is he made known. <br /><br />And thus do I know the joy of the Christian: the joy of being wrong, and thus do I dare hope to share it.<br /><br />Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-16915827859852106622017-11-30T08:50:00.001-08:002017-11-30T10:25:22.180-08:00What would happen in Lake Wobegon?<div class="p1">
Let me first say: I love Garrison Keillor. Or rather, I love his work. I don’t know <i>him</i>, so cannot love him.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The News from Lake Wobegon made my family laugh till we cried when we were mission workers in Europe. We saw our own people in his gentle lampooning of the foibles of the Minnesotan Sanctified Brethren. He opened a portal for us homesick Manitobans to escape for a while into a world where we didn’t feel like foreigners. He was our prairie home companion. His stories were our stories.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Again: we loved him, but we didn’t know him. It is an odd wonder, so ubiquitous now as to disappear from conscious awareness, this splicing of a human person knowable in the flesh, and that person’s voice, spirit - the Romans would say genius - out into the world via what we call information technology, first through the airwaves as radio, then as television, today as digital traffic on the internet, bringing first the word, then the image of another across the threshold of our homes: disembodied guests, bottled genies we summon with buttons and dials.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And so I read today in my newsfeed a story, copied and pasted hundreds of times over, of a Garrison Keillor scandal. Hodge-podged onto a handful of verifiable facts are a truckload of opinions and feelings. We are all arguing and venting and speculating about what has happened and what should happen with this quirky old geezer caught in a dodgy situation.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I wonder what would happen in Lake Wobegon. The deep nostalgia that Keillor tapped into with the powers of a cypher was our hunger for neighbourhood. For a world where people knew each other. Where there were understandings. And where there was a good narrator. An affectionate, all-knowing voice that saw into the hearts of everyday women and men and loved them. And helped them find their way to a satisfying resolution of their silly troubles. Lord, we miss that.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I don’t know how far Garrison’s hand slid on the back of his female co-worker. I don’t know if, as he says, he just meant to comfort her in a moment of sadness, that he apologized when she recoiled, and they were able to work together as friends until her lawyer called. I know that I want to believe this storyteller. I know I want his more innocent world to be real. He’s always had that effect on me.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
What I am pretty sure of is that this is none of my business. It’s not nobody’s business, but it’s not my business. The question for me is, when we discuss a problem like this, what is the shape of the we that is talking? What is its scale? It seems self-evident that a nation-wide scandal is as useless as it is disproportionate to the dilemma between Keillor and his accuser.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
That said, I come from a people who have closets littered with skeletons we kept there for centuries by telling ourselves and the world that we could sort this out amongst ourselves. Our victims, most often women and children, by and large did not get a hearing, and our perpetrators, by and large men of authority, were not held to account until our cozy, down-home communities were breached by outsiders, whether with their legal systems, or simply by their ideas, smuggled into our homes via books, via the radio, the TV, the internet.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I would like to imagine a gathering back stage at the Prairie Home Companion, a gathering with food and good coffee and a good outside facilitator. A gathering where things get said that need to get said that haven’t been said for a long time. A gathering where Garrison doesn’t own the microphone, doesn’t direct the show, where his fertile imagination doesn’t seduce everyone with how he wants the story to end. There would be tears. And honesty. And I hope, in the end, but not too soon, there would be laughter. And it would be their tears and their honesty and their laughter. It would be their conversation, not ours.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The genius of creating a fictional neighbourhood like Lake Wobegon was that it allowed an intimacy and an honesty that kept it at a safe distance from the real people in Keillor’s life and the real people in our lives. We laughed because he told all about us without violating our privacy. This made us better able to see our mistakes. I wish Mr. Keillor and his former co-workers a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<style type="text/css">
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica; min-height: 14.0px}
</style>
<br />
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-28593746732373557042017-09-13T03:49:00.001-07:002017-09-13T03:49:14.330-07:00Conspiratio comes full circleI wrote this song three years ago, this time of year, for my friend Coralie Schmidt who had received a terminal diagnosis of cancer. Coralie's funeral was in the week of Palm Sunday the following spring, when the church sings the Hosanna echoed by the autumnal Hosanna in this song "casting their garments, Hosanna of the trees.<br />
<br />
I loved the song, but it always felt like it wanted a third verse. Early this morning that verse came and woke me from my sleep. I haven't been visited by my musical muse for a long time. I think I wrote one more song after <i>Conspiratio</i> came to me, and that was it. The arrival of this verse feels like something in me is turning over. Fall is here, the last week of vegetable deliveries is here, the final proof of the book is revised and ready to send in to the publisher, a new worship cycle is about to begin at Saint Julian's Table, I'm launching a podcast with my musician friend Alana Levandoski, the leaves are turning and I'm cutting firewood. Good things are ending and making way for new good things. Hallelujah.<br />
<br />
<i>O could I fall as beautifully, as graciously as these</i><br />
<i>Casting their garments on the ground, Hosanna of the trees</i><br />
<i>This timbered choir sings Hallelujah, Glory to the King</i><br />
<i>Casting down their golden crowns and crimson robes they sing:</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Exhaled airs of greener leaves, sweet substance of my breath</i><br />
<i>In requiem these golden friends tell of bodies new in death</i><br />
<i>O symmetry of life and limb, inspiration prior to voice!</i><br />
<i>Conspired breath in holy kiss, invitation to rejoice:</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, </i><i>Hallelujah</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>O let me sing of Trinity, of rest and holy peace</i><br />
<i>The Holy Spirit in the wings to receive and to release</i><br />
<i>And when she takes the centre stage and scales fall from our eyes</i><br />
<i>Our inward breath will turn around in relief and in surprise, singing,</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, </i><i>Hallelujah</i><i>.</i>Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-39349943472657675422017-09-12T13:57:00.002-07:002017-09-12T13:57:38.047-07:00Remembering Darrell Little Black Bear Phillips, 1964-2017My friend Darrell Little Black Bear Phillips died this summer. He left behind his beloved Charlene and ten strong and beautiful sons and daughters. He was a massive personality. He was an organizer and a facilitator, passionate for justice, eager to see people live well together in this land. He could bring a moose home from the bush as capably as he could bring home a grant and a program plan from the halls of power. He picked a mean guitar and crooned big-hearted songs, classic country & folk covers, worship songs, as well as songs of his own creation. The last two he shared with me expressed the two great griefs of his devoutly Catholic, fully Anishnaabe heart - a song for residential school survivors and a song for the aborted unborn. Darrell had a spirituality that seamlessly married the drum and the sweat lodge to the rosary and the daily prayers of the missalette. I was attracted to the integration he embodied. Hanging around with Darrell, I could imagine what a healthy, vibrant coming together of our two cultures could look like.<br />
<br />
I first got to know Darrell in the "Chretien Come Clean Car Wash" - a shamelessly corny bit of activist street theatre that I scripted for an Aboriginal National Day of Action, held on the one year anniversary of the release of the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RRCAP). Darrell hammed the thing up with characteristic enthusiasm and conviction, caking his family's mini-van with mud and chasing a local actor in a Jean Chretien mask, demanding that Prime Minister Chretien follow through on promises to implement the RRCAP recommendations.<br />
<br />
Darrell took out all the event planners to Red Lobster after the protest, and it was then that Jenn and I saw that Darrell and Char were interested in us not just as political allies in the fight for Indigenous rights, but as friends. Jenn and I had children whose ages landed them right in the middle of the growing Phillips "brood." We loved getting together to cook and to visit. The kids would pile downstairs into the basement, with one or the other always lingering or returning to sit on a lap, taddle on a sibling or beg a foretaste of supper, which always took us well past 6pm to prepare together. Jenn and I would bring fresh vegetables from the garden, Darrell would bring out wild meat from up north, he would tell big stories that Char would whittle down to size with one lift of her eyebrow. We would cook and then we would feast, crowding around their kitchen table with Darrell always at the noisy centre of a storm that swirled with small children, big hugs, minor squabbles, threats of "The Manigotogan Mitt!", jokes, spiritual counsel, greasy chins and diaper wipes.<br />
<br />
Most of the time we visited at Darrell and Char's place. Their sizeable family had a kind of gravitational force field that attracted others into itself. But they came our way too. They came out to the farm once in the early days, when it was hardly a farm yet at all: just a garden and a trailer and an outdoor bucket toilet. They came to swim with us in the Brokenhead River and see what we were up to.<br />
<br />
I felt like the land was happy to feel the footprints of an Indigenous family again. I think I probably told Darrell the story I had heard of how the Brokenhead got its name, a tragic story of a Cree tribe wiped out by the Lakota in a war over access to guns and trading opportunities with the new pale-faced people in the land. The Cree never settled along this river again.<br />
<br />
I do know that I asked Darrell what advice he had for me about how to live in this place in a good way, because I still remember his words that day. His answer was simple and definitive: "I would listen to the land."<br />
<br />
A man and a piece of advice not to be forgotten.<br />
<br />
Travel well, Little Black Bear, travel well.Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-42771463780820108302017-09-05T15:44:00.000-07:002017-09-05T16:39:33.833-07:00Turning 150Regarding the anniversary of Canada's confederation...<br />
<br />
What a bunch of<i> Englische</i> did or said in a room in Charlottetown 150 years ago is really neither here nor there for me. My history and home are found in other stories. My ancestors at the time were raising wheat, sunflowers and watermelons on the Steppes of the South Ukraine, thanks to an equally colonial decree issued from Moscow by Catherine the Great, inviting the Mennonites to displace the nomadic sheep-herding culture of the Kosacks. In this place at that time, another nation was being born, one that captures my imagination considerably more than the Dominion declared by John A. MacDonald and his compatriots.<br />
<br />
Manito-Ahba, "The Place where the Great Spirit Rests," is the birthplace of the<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Métis </span>n</span>ation. The <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Métis </span>were neither a colony of foreigners transplanting a European clone culture onto native soil, nor were they strictly an expression of the treaty principle negotiated in the Two-Row Wampum: We'll share the river, but you stay in your boat and we'll stay in ours. At the Red River Settlement was a community descended of White people and Red people who had more than jumped into each others boats. They had made babies and raised families together. They had birthed a whole new culture.<br />
<br />
It keeps happening in Manitoba. Stan McKay, the elder who taught me the meaning of my home province's name, is a Cree man from Fisher River. Stan married a lovely farmer's daughter from Gladstone, Manitoba. Together Stan and Dot did not only raise a batch of strong, beautiful bi-cultural children, they also assisted in the birth of the Dr. Jessie Saulteaux Centre (now known as the Sandy-Saulteaux Spiritual Centre), a school and retreat centre for cross-cultural education just a few twists of the river downstream from our farm.<br />
<br />
Many of us feel ambivalent about celebrating 150 years of confederation. To just shoot off some fireworks at the Forks and wave those adorable little paper Canadian flags they hand out on such occasions feels like an endorsement of a fundamentally arrogant colonial act: to stand on the far eastern edge of a continent and declare sovereign nationhood over vast lands and diverse peoples that the founding fathers had little knowledge of, nor rights to. I have stood and taken a piss at the edge of a number of woods and farmers' fields. It did not make them mine.<br />
<br />
Still, I am too grateful for my life here and too aware of beautiful births arising from settler-Indigenous contact to stand grumbling outside the big party.<br />
<br />
I grow suspicious of the hand-wringing of some of my white liberal peers, flagellating themselves, their country and their faith tradition over colonial this and colonial that. At a certain point, this becomes a connivance to assert one's moral superiority over one's elders, the very opposite of deep listening to the nations on whose hospitality we are here. And it becomes an escape from the messiness of real relationships.<br />
<br />
To be fair, the well-meaning progressives probably just don't know what else to do. They feel bad, as they should, about their ease of access to Canada's bounty, when Indigenous people continue to be poorer, more disrespected and more criminalized than any other social group in this country. Something is very wrong with this picture, and we should resist the temptation to paper over this unjust reality just in time for Canada to have a nice birthday party.<br />
<br />
Maybe what we need is a different kind of party. I am getting excited about one - a festival and a feast that some settler and Indigenous people are planning together. We'd like to re-tell the history of Europeans and First Nations coming together. And for this occasion at least, rather than grieve what was the worst in that encounter, we'd like to lift up what was best, in the hopes of our descendants being able to celebrate another anniversary together 150 years from now. (Or, to choose a marker of time more native to this place, seven generations from now.) We would like to assert, with John Raulston Saul, that Canada is truest to herself when she recognizes that she is a <span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">Métis </span>civilization, and not a colonial satellite.<br />
<br />
Provisionally, we called our event a "vernacular feast," drawing on a term Ivan Illich uses in inspiring resistance to what he calls the "war on subsistence." Illich sees the West's mania for "development" as the latest and most pernicious mutation of the colonial impulse Westerners have to "rescue" the other. Today, the same drive that gang-pressed Aboriginal children into compulsory Western schooling takes aim at "underdeveloped" people in need of full recruitment into consumer society. Witness the latest ads by Facebook, pulling beautiful children out of the doldrums of their dusty village life. The internet arrives, the party starts, the heavens open.<br />
<br />
For Illich, a revival of the vernacular means partying locally, convivially - not by escaping our rootedness in place, but by re-discovering it. It means pushing back on colonization and reclaiming a wide range of activities, from speaking one's mother tongue to connecting with mother earth. Illich reminds us that the Latin <i>vernaculum </i>meant “whatever was homebred, homespun, homegrown, [or] homemade.” It is around the home-made and non-commercial that people can gather as friends. For Illich, friendship can only be practiced in activities that escape commodification, “activities of people . . . not motivated by thoughts of exchange, . . . actions through which people satisfy everyday needs—the actions which by their nature escape bureaucratic control.”<br />
<br />
In that spirit, Indigenous community leaders and settler allies are going to gather for a week of subsistence activities on the land at the Sandy-Saulteaux Spiritual Centre in October of this year. We called it Mamawe Ota Askihk, "Sharing Together on the Earth." We will winnow wild rice together, tan an animal hide from a local farm, smoke fish, can berry preserves, share skills and tell stories. We will remember how English industrialists used to complain that access to England's great forests and common pasturelands made English peasants "too much like the Indians" - self-sufficient and unwilling to leave the land for shitty factory jobs in smoggy cities. Perhaps we will laugh at that together while we feast. Perhaps we will even birth a new culture.<br />
<br />
<i>If you think you would like to get in on the party, click on this link to learn more about <a href="http://sandysaulteaux.ca/event/mamawe-ota-askihk-sharing-life-together-here-on-earth/">Mamawe Ota Askihk</a>.</i><br />
<br style="font-family: Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif, EmojiFont, 'Apple Color Emoji', 'Segoe UI Emoji', NotoColorEmoji, 'Segoe UI Symbol', 'Android Emoji', EmojiSymbols; font-size: 16px;" />Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-87841441749434238712017-08-29T10:49:00.000-07:002017-08-29T12:40:54.786-07:00How to go the distanceI heard the whooshing of wings overhead while I was picking broccoli yesterday. I looked up to see a perfect V of twenty cranes heading west. They are not migrating yet, but they are practicing - grouping up to rehearse the efficiency of movement, the just right spacing of bodies, the timing of wingbeats, the trust of the others, and most importantly, the deep listening to the mystery within that will coordinate and orient them for the long, long flight to their winter home. When they are ready, these twenty will join with other tens and twenties, riding the thermals in a great communal spiral that will climb to heights I can barely see, then glide southward on a descent more drawn-out than I can fathom.<br />
<br />
If you want to go fast, go alone, goes the African proverb. If you want to go far, go together. The human race has gone incredibly far, both by going together, and by going against each other. In a sense, that has been the nature of any togetherness we have known so far. I learned what it means to be on a team by putting on a uniform and squaring off against others who wore a different uniform. I knew who I was together with by knowing who we were together against.<br />
<br />
In recent centuries, new social possibilities have emerged. One is the possibility of going it alone. The possibility of an "I" that is prior to the social "we." There is a positive aspect of this that the African proverb does not convey. The possibility of individual conscience, of innovation, of telling truths that the collective would rather hide, entertaining ideas the collective has forbidden, making friends with people the collective has declared enemies.<br />
<br />
Which is the other new social possibility. A togetherness much bigger than my tribe of origin. A togetherness not against anyone else. A universal togetherness.<br />
<br />
But the cranes remind me that before I am ready to join the great community in its epic journey, I have to practice the skills of community in a smaller group, making smaller excursions. It is with a few, specific friends that I learn how to come close and how to give space in a way that is safe for everyone. How to be a helper and how to accept help. When to follow and when to take my turn in the lead.<br />
<br />
On the news, I hear continuously of big collective problems requiring big collective efforts to turn things around if the human race is going to go much further together: climate change, fossil fuel addiction, mass incarceration, habitat loss, refugee crisis, soil degradation, groundwater depletion, etc.<br />
<br />
One response is to despair. To withdraw into myself. To go it alone. (Or rather, to pretend to go it alone, while I float along in a sea of other disorganized individuals all making remarkably similar consumer choices, carried along by a wave so large we neither perceive that we are in it, nor that we could possibly move against it.) Another is to join consciously into large counter-movements. This is a more hopeful response: to sign the petition, to attend the march, to send some money to support the cause.<br />
<br />
But I moved to the farm because I was dissatisfied with that kind of activism. I found it necessary, but not sufficient for the task at hand. What I learned from Wendell Berry's <a href="http://www.clarionreview.org/2014/03/in-distrust-of-movements/">In Distrust of Movements</a> or from Ivan Illich's idea that at a certain size, human institutions inevitably produce results opposite to their stated goals, is that bigger is not always better. To quote one more luminary in this tribe of contrarians, the solution to many of our big problems may be to rediscover that "small is beautiful." (E.F. Schumacher)<br />
<br />
It is at the level of local community that deep integration is possible. This is where practices of stewardship, habits of eating, ways of thinking, methods of praying can knit together and be given form. The local is the womb of the universal. We are birthed out of small spaces into the larger world. That is the way of things.<br />
<br />
It seems to me that our peculiar challenge in this networked, global age is to respond to global issues without succumbing to the fantasy of a global civilization. That has been the dream of tyrants throughout the ages, and we should let it die with them. We know by now that no one world religion will save us. We are more tempted by "universal human values" or universal declarations of human rights, or global accords on climate change. But do we really want the one world court, and the one world police force that enforcing such a universality would require? For a healing, universal global movement not to turn tyrannical, it must be voluntary, and for it to be voluntary, it must be local. Its grand coordination will have to remain a mystery. I will have to get together with friends in one place and pursue there our particular vision of the Good, and you will have to get together with friends in another place, and pursue your vision of the Good according to your own lights.<br />
<br />
And if we practice well, we may just find that when the time comes, a mystery bigger than us all will draw us together to go the long distance on the journey we all need to take together.<br />
<br />
<br />Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-50135329729338312192017-02-26T16:20:00.001-08:002017-03-14T19:20:11.238-07:00"...gems of brilliance left and right."<i>This is the foreword Brian McLaren wrote for my forthcoming book, </i>"Life at the End of Us Versus Them: cross/culture/stories<i>." It is more recognition than I ever expected. To support my publishing adventure and pre-order copies, you can check out my <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2055622635/life-at-the-end-of-us-versus-them-cross-culture-st">Kickstarter campaign</a>, or simply send me an email at rempel.marcus@gmail.com.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<br />
I read recently that the world’s largest “Christian” university is spending over a million dollars on a gun range. This same university is led by a man who proudly and loudly endorsed Donald Trump, the arrogant and unscrupulous billionaire for whom a sizable majority of (white) church-going American Christians voted, in spite of his cavalier attitude toward violence, Islamophobia, sexual assault, and torture, not to mention intelligibility, coherence, science, or the truth. <br />
<br />
Against this backdrop, Mennonite sage Marcus Peter Rempel claims that the time has come for us to “figure out what in the world Christianity is, and isn’t.”<br />
<br />
Can there be any doubt Marcus is correct?<br />
<br />
I am drawn to Marcus not only because I agree with his audacious claim, and not only because he is a penetrating thinker and a graceful, vigorous, engaging writer, but also because he has been shaped by two of the same “madmen” who have shaped me: René Girard and Ivan Illich. (Other shared influences show up in these pages as well, including Wendell Berry, Walter Wink, Simone Weil, James Alison, and Cornel West.)<br />
<br />
In each of the chapters you are about to read, you’ll witness Marcus generously dropping gems of brilliance left and right, on a range of subjects as wide as the Manitoba sky under which he lives. <br />
<br />
For example, he defines faith as a kind of “hopeful craziness.” He compares the medieval Church’s attempt to “motivate” heretics to accept orthodox belief by means of torture to the U.S. government’s attempt to motivate non-Westerners to accept Western-style democracy by bombs and bullets. He notes the fascinating relationship between “ethnic” and “ethics.” He observes how easily freedom of expression can descend into freedom of exploitation. He sees the Zombie Apocalypse as a code for the xenophobia and the environmental crisis that we are too scared to talk about, and the Zombie survival tactics of stashing bottled water and practicing head shots as veiled instructions for a future where social hope has been abandoned. He talks about sex with a candor and decency that is nearly unprecedented. He even dares to reflect upon pooping in a bucket in a Joni-Mitchellian way, “from both sides now.”<br />
<br />
I’ve read a lot of books, but very, very few have been as rich in generative insight as this one.<br />
<br />
The only “bad” thing I can say about “Life at the End of Us Versus Them” is that it is impossible to read quickly. Which is, of course, a good thing in the presence of writing that is so beautiful, meaning that is so important, and a subject that matters supremely.<br />
<br />
Earlier, I said that Marcus has been shaped by two madmen, Girard and Illich. I really should have said three, because 20 centuries behind Rempel’s mentors lies another mentor whose message and example seem like madness to so many people today, including, we have to say, millions who identify themselves with the religion named after him. <br />
<br />
We have come to a moment, I believe, when we must rediscover the wisdom and ways of that original madman - if we are to “figure out what in the world Christianity is, and isn’t,” and if we are to find life at the end of us versus them. <br />
<br />
Because if we don’t, “us versus them” will surely be the death of both.<br />
<br />
It is not often that a book about such life-and-death matters is so beautifully written or so enjoyable to read. But that is the case here, because the vision Marcus presents is one of conviviality, of aliveness, of beloved community, of harmony, of joy. <br />
<br />
This is a book about “the end” and a book about “us versus them,” but most importantly, this is a book of life. Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-73383442198662095722017-02-09T20:32:00.000-08:002017-02-09T20:32:48.171-08:00A Joint Fast<i>This is an excerpt from my soon-to-be-published book, </i>Life at the End of Us Versus Them. <i>To reserve a copy, please send an email to rempel.marcus@gmail.com</i><br />
<div align="CENTER" class="western" style="line-height: 0.5cm; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<br />To anyone who would say that Islam diminishes women, Shahina Siddiqi, the director of Islamic Social Services (ISS), is a living counterargument. One of her many responsibilities is to keep abreast of what is being said about Islam and Muslims in media across the continent. Whenever Islam is in the news, she is called upon by media as a spokeswoman, which is pretty much all the time now.<br /><br /> I first got to know Shahina in 2001, during the aftermath of 9/11 and the indiscriminate bombing of Afghan villages. Christians and Muslims in Winnipeg were grieving and angry about having our faiths invoked by perpetrators of terror, and so a delegation of Christians and Muslims (headed by Shahina) hatched a plan for a joint Muslim/Christian fast, beginning with Ramadan and continuing through into Advent.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote1sym">i</a> <br /><br /> We celebrated the end of our joint fast together at Eid, the feast marking the end of the Ramadan fast, on the campus of a Christian college. We prayed together for peace and released a joint statement “on war and violence that are not holy.”. . .<br /><br />Recently, I bumped into Shahina at an open house luncheon at ISS, and she was curious about my work, whereabouts, and faith. “Are you still involved in the church?” she asked. I was caught off guard for a half second. Was Shahina fishing for an opening to proselytize? When I told her that we were quite involved in a small church in our new area, a big smile spread across her face. “Oh, I am so glad!”<br /><br /> Shahina’s profound “yes” to her religion was not a “no” to mine, for her religion has led her to open outwards, beyond either/or dualisms into the expansiveness of a both/and universe.<br /><br />Monotheism, says James Alison, is a wonderful discovery, but a terrible idea. The idea of the One True God, revealed in the one true message, guaranteed by the one true messenger, easily begets an understanding of faithfulness to this message that seeks to “recreate the uniqueness of God by developing a strong sense of what is other than us—gentiles in the case of Jews, the unbaptised ‘world’ in the case of Christians, and infidels who aren’t members of the Ummah in the case of Muslims.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote1sym">i</a> Alison goes on to show that in this approach, “we don’t believe in God, but only in conflict.” For Alison, the real gem of monotheism is the exact opposite. Interpreting Isaiah’s account of divine encounter, he says, “the fundamental experience of God is one of being at peace and unafraid since God is so much stronger than everything else.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote2sym">ii</a>. . .<div id="sdendnote1">
<div class="sdendnote-western">
<br /></div>
<div class="sdendnote-western">
<a class="sdendnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote1anc" name="sdendnote1sym">i</a>Islam’s holy calendar follows a lunar cycle, so there are slightly fewer than 365 days in each liturgical year. I was lucky to participate in the sun-up to sun-down fast of Ramadan during winter in Winnipeg, where the days were about as short as they can be anywhere in the Muslim world. </div>
<div class="sdendnote-western">
<a class="sdendnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote1anc" name="sdendnote1sym">i</a>James
Alison, <i>Undergoing God, </i>19–20.</div>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div id="sdendnote2">
<div class="sdendnote-western">
<a class="sdendnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote2anc" name="sdendnote2sym">ii</a>Ibid.,
26.</div>
</div>
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-71476796715337063082017-01-30T08:26:00.000-08:002017-01-30T08:26:06.238-08:00Dance-off with Dionysus<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>The Dionysiac sacrifice is the voice of the mob, and the Christian solution – the victim is innocent – is the truth of a very small minority. The aristocrats are there. They happen to be, socially, a fisherman here, a good-for-nothing there – what does it matter – they turn into aristocrats at the moment when they oppose the mob around them, according to Nietzsche. But Dionysus is obviously the mob. There is not one episode of his myth that is not decided by the mob. Christianity is the exception, saying no to the mob, and Dionysus is the acceptance of the mob. </i>- René Girard<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote1sym">i</a></blockquote>
When I attended my first Pride Parade in June 2013, I saw Winnipeg’s streets full of same-sex couples walking hand in hand, relaxed, smiling, laughing at the antics of some of their more flamboyant peers. Many of them sported T-shirts with slogans supporting the right to same-sex marriage. <br />
<br />
I was there with my friends and neighbours, Heidi and Irina. When I first met Heidi and Irina, they introduced themselves as one another’s wives, and I loved them for claiming a covenantal definition for their relationship. I dislike the generic term “partner” because of the costly, unique relationship I have with my wife. Partners are for tennis, business, or crime. I appreciate how the gay rights movement has spent much of their political capital (which was slender enough in the beginning) pursuing marriage, while so many heterosexuals seem to be giving up on it.<br />
<br />
But I wrestled with the mix of signals in the Pride Parade. While there were strong signals rallying support for covenantal sex, there were equally strong signals suggesting casual sex. The atmosphere was charged with bacchanalia, those riotous, intoxicating behaviours named for Bacchus, Dionysus’ Roman counterpart, the “man-womanish” god of wine, fertility, ritual madness, theatre and religious ecstasy. <br />
<br />
When we passed an athletic young man wearing a Speedo, running shoes and body glitter, he danced and gyrated provocatively, his slender body shining and glistening in the bright sunlight. Heidi and Irina laughed: “He can’t help himself. He’s just gotta dance.” <br />
<br />
My reaction to his open eroticism was more mixed. Of course, part of that came from my remaining homophobia and my Mennonite discomfort with any kind of open sexual display. I realized that the young man was challenging me to get over my puritanical fears of sex, for as Sebastian Moore observes, “Homophobia is at root erophobia.”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote2sym">ii</a> And yet, while I had to accept that an essential element of the Pride movement was to celebrate unapologetically a form of sexuality that for so long has been shunned and shamed in this society, I also had to wonder how the sight of this young man was affecting the gay male couples walking arm in arm down Broadway Avenue. For if the sight of a scantily clad young man moving his body suggestively would have the same effect on a gay man as a similar young woman would have on me, such a presence would be very distracting at a public celebration of my marriage—if not outright offensive.<br />
<br />
In the myths and orgiastic rites of Dionysus, the wine, dance and revelry ultimately climaxes with the devotees tearing a young person limb from limb with their bare hands, sometimes quite literally consuming him. The lines between bacchanalian ecstasy and madness are fluidly ambiguous, as in, “You Say Party! We Say Die!”<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote3sym">iii</a> At the Pride Parade, I saw many of the participants playing with this ancient, real and ultimately murderous fire as they mixed the message of grace and acceptance with the pressure release valve of a Dionysian carnival.<br />
<br />
Of course, I was not worried that the young man would actually be torn limb from limb by the end of the night, though I’m pretty sure he aroused in a number of potential assailants an animal hunger to get their hands on him. But what I saw on parade under the rainbow flag was not only a banquet of justice where all are welcome, but also a dramatic rehearsal of a particular story about sex—a hedonistic tale where, by the end, somebody is going to get hurt. This story is not unique to the gay rights movement by any means. Take any romantic comedy: you don’t want to be the main character’s fiancée or spouse at the beginning of the show, for the same reason you don’t want to be the cowboy with the black hat at the beginning of an old-fashioned western. Your elimination is essential to the climax of the plot.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote4sym">iv</a> <br />
<br />
At the Pride Parade, I witnessed a “two-spiritedness,” by which I do not mean the mix of masculine and feminine spirits, which Aboriginal communities have discerned and affirmed in queer folk. I am talking about two spiritual powers, two competing meta-narratives, each with a truth claim that is ultimately unreconcilable with the other. One spirit was telling a story about human culture from the perspective of those it has marginalized and hurt while also seeking healing. This spirit was pursuing what Martin Luther King Jr. called “The Beloved Community,” a togetherness compassionate and conscious of “all God’s children,” as MLK proclaimed in soaring voice at similar marches for similar rights. The other spirit was holding out a narrative about a kind of freedom that is the opposite of community, the opposite of coming home to one another: the freedom for me to pursue what I want and for you to pursue what you want and in our pursuits to be left alone. That somewhere in this striving is the inevitable category of the unwanted is something we don’t talk about. Both meta-narratives turn on sacrifice: the first on its unveiling, the second on its veiling. . .<br />
<br />
<i>This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book</i>, Life at the End of Us Versus Them: Cross, Culture, Stories. <i>To reserve a copy, email me at rempel.marcus@gmail.com</i><br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote1anc">i</a>“The Scapegoat: The Ideas of René Girard, Part 5” on CBC Ideas. Podcast available at davidcayley.com <br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote2anc">ii</a>Commendation for James Alison's Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay, iv. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote3anc">iii</a>This is the former name of a Canadian dance punk act—ironically employed, as far as I can tell. Their lyrics are impenetrable to me, but they seem like nice people. They recently dropped the “We Say Die!” part of their name after their drummer died of a brain hemorrhage on stage. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote4anc">iv</a>That’s a funny word, by the way: plot, which is a simple and ancient word that can mean either the place for a garden or a cemetery, the act of marking out a line on a map, the central narrative of a story, or a secret plan for murder. For a fascinating exegesis of how these meanings all cohere in the sacrificial Roman rite of marking the boundaries of a family field, see Gil Bailie, http://cornerstone-forum.org/ss_01mp3.aspx.<br />
<div id="sdendnote4">
</div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-86267431105118009302017-01-24T09:50:00.000-08:002017-01-24T09:50:36.799-08:00A Beatitude for Bucket-poopers<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i>A contrary view . . . prevails when a community chooses a subsistence-oriented way of life. There, the inversion of development, the replacement of consumer goods by personal action, of industrial tools by convivial tools is the goal. . . . There, the guitar is valued over the record, the library over the schoolroom, the back yard garden over the supermarket selection. . . . They try to “unplug themselves from consumption,” . . . women seek alternatives to gynecology; parents alternatives to schools; home-builders alternatives to the flush toilet. –Ivan Illich<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote1sym">i</a></i></div>
<br /><div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I poop in a bucket. Does this mean that I am poor? <br /><br />I also co-own 144 acres of farmland. Does this mean I’m rich? I spend my summers bending my back, working outside, with dirt under my fingernails. Does that mean I’m poor? I find restaurant food sub-par compared to my regular diet of made-from-scratch meals, loaded with meat and organic produce. Does that mean I am rich? Our family’s after tax income last year was about $25,000. The poverty line for a Canadian family our size is calculated at $34,829. Does that mean we are poor? We own two vehicles, one of which is a 2003 Mercedes Benz SUV, sold to us for a silly low price because the seller likes us, and I think because she thinks we are poor. Does that mean we are rich?<br /><br />. . .back to the bucket-pooping, exhibit A in this goofy, but serious, argument about the meaning of poverty. It’s not that gross. We cover our business with sawdust, so it’s really no more smelly or unsightly than a kitty litter box. When the bucket is full, I add the contents to a pile covered with straw, where all that carbon and nitrogen are digested by a community of microorganisms that turn filth into fertility. This eventually goes on our hay-land, making it bloom a verdant green wherever the humanure has fallen. These are things that make me happy.<br /><br />But here’s where things get complicated. For while I am happily closing the loop of my poop, Aboriginal communities in Manitoba are trying to get my larger and privileged Mennonite faith community to lend their voice to those of local chiefs, who are challenging the government to address the scandal that in the twenty-first century, Aboriginal reserves still lack basic plumbing. That is to say, they have to poop in buckets.<br /><br /><div>
Here I have to reckon with the strange but indisputable fact that my white male privilege allows me to enjoy and celebrate the practice of twenty-first-century bucket-pooping, which remains to my Aboriginal neighbour a disgusting misery. When I carry out the poop bucket, I am thinking back to the Gandhi movie, which I watched with adolescent fervour with a pile of other liberal Mennonite teens, as we stuffed our faces with taco chips and packaged macaroons while Gandhi defeated the British Empire with fasting and nonviolent truth-force. . . <br /><br />Ivan Illich names the odd way in which I am rich and privileged by growing my own food, living in a cabin built of reclaimed hog barn lumber, cutting my own firewood and composting my own crap. I am freer to refuse the “progress and development” package than my Aboriginal neighbours, who are penned in and bureaucratically administered on the reserve. I can pick and choose my renunciations. By way of these renunciations, I can find “a way back to a self which stands above the constraints of the world,” as Illich puts it. I can choose my story. I am not “underdeveloped.” I am breaking free. . .<br /><br />Illich draws angry rebukes for his criticism of development. He is decried as unsympathetic to the poor and as an enemy of their advancement. . . I believe that time will tell that Illich has a more compassionate, honest and hopeful vision than the champions of progress and development. As a closer reader of history, he can see further ahead. He . . . can imagine a good life for the poor beyond the collapse of unsustainable, globalizing missions. He can make out “rivers north of the future”. . .<br /><br /><i>This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book</i>, Life at the End of Us Versus Them: Cross, Culture, Stories. <i>To reserve a copy, email me at rempel.marcus@gmail.com </i><br /><br /><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=5750239419118787856#sdendnote1anc">i</a>Ivan Illich, Vernacular Values, 1980. http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Vernacular.html<div id="sdendnote1">
</div>
</div>
</div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-42526166598902141232017-01-09T09:56:00.000-08:002017-02-01T20:35:20.116-08:00A Trinitarian Yes<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Do I believe in God?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I don't know how to answer that
question anymore.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
To say yes, I would allow for the
adequacy of a sentence structure where one minor swap could ask: Do I
believe in Santa Claus?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Is there an ineffable mystery before
which my soul opens outward and says yes? I cannot say no. Every
thing that is in me wants to say yes. Longs to say yes. Does my soul
pant for God as the deer pants for streams of running water? Yes.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Do I accept Jesus as my Lord and Saviour?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Again, I stammer and hesitate. In a
bumperstickered world, where language is highjacked, trampled,
photocopied, run off and repeated without end and without meaning,
where we are wedged between the self-certain impositions of
propaganda and the chaotic rantings of the online wall of noise, I
recoil from casting a public ballot that aligns me with a Christian
“us” against a non-Christian “them.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Does the cross of Christ move me to
tears? Yes. Am I stirred by a gospel that names a God who suffers,
disciples who sleep and betray, and a Risen One who forgives all?
Yes. Is this vision of the Divine - taking our punishment, instead of
meting it out – the one vision I trust, that I cling to for
assurance, for sanity, for truth, for hope, for light against the
falling dark? Yes and yes.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Have I received the Holy Spirit?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Now we are in territory where even my
kinspeople have no words. Mennonites are no holy rollers. But am I
falling in love with the Holy Spirit anyway? Yes. Am I stunned by the
implications made by St. John, pitting the Paraclete, “The Attorney
for the Defense,” against Satan, “The Accuser”? Yes. Do I want
to join in declaring the whole world innocent? In busting the ugliest
criminal out of his prison of shame – the prison within me and the
prison without? Yes! Am I drawn to the beautiful bridge between
transcendance and immanence, between the Father and the Son who goes
- for our sake - as far from the Father as it is possible to go? Am I
enchanted by the Trinity's dance of love, between the Light
Unspeakable and the Word made flesh? Do I strain for the music that
conducts their dance? Does its pulse tug at my own sinews? Yes, yes,
and yes.</div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-71524822970249337012016-04-22T17:01:00.000-07:002016-04-22T17:01:07.513-07:00A Bigger Death MachineHello.<br />
<br />
It's been a while.<br />
<br />
I am just wrapping up edits on my book, which has absorbed all my writing energies these past few years. That's where I've been all this time.<br />
<br />
But today I wrote something that I couldn't shove into one of the chapters. And I'm not about to start a new one. Spring is here. Time to put in full workdays outside, not at the keyboard.<br />
<br />
This reflection comes from a question I have often asked myself. How did European civilization colonize this place so efficiently? To what degree is Christianity complicit as handmaiden of Empire?<br />
How can we talk honestly about what is wonderful and what is terrible in our religious heritage? What follows comes out of my reading of Ivan Illich and Rene Girard, who have given me terms that help me name the goodness of my tradition, and the mystery of its evil:<br />
<br />
We arrived here with a bigger death machine, a machine capable of pacifying a larger space with a monopoly of legitimate violence. Which is to say, we arrived here bearing both the Christ, and the Anti-Christ.<br />
<br />
The European death machine was larger in part because Christian restraint of the passions had made it possible for larger numbers of Europeans to get along with one another without their frustrations boiling over into violent rifts. It was larger because Christianity had deconstructed smaller death machines. Witch hunts and other sacrificial cults that had successfully channelled internal tensions onto a single scapegoat had begun to look too much like the crucifixion, and had had to be abandoned. Any machine that would henceforth channel collective aggression had to look more official, make more sophisticated claims, purport to higher values. In 1492 Europeans could no longer happily burn to death an odd-looking old woman because of a local crop failure. But to invade a continent, project all their fantasies and fears onto its "savage" inhabitants, lay waste to their lands and cultures in a grand project of advancing Christianity and civilization - that they could do. It was of course a demonic inversion of the Gospel, but a perversion that would have been impossible without the Gospel's revelation in the first place.<br />
<br />
For the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, whose aggressions and collectivities were still smaller and tribal, what we brought was catastrophic. The fact that the profound evil we visited upon them had been nested inside a profound goodness made it no less horrific. It made it more so. We stole lands and children from them, and tutored them to name our atrocities "salvation."<br />
That so many First Nations people embraced Christ and continue to do so is miraculous to me. I believe that this is a testament, not ultimately to efficient colonization, but to the depth of spiritual sensitivity among indigenous peoples, who could to discern a holy presence, crowded about by so many evil spirits.Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-17920121465920430482013-03-21T20:34:00.002-07:002013-03-21T20:54:42.239-07:00The Gospel according to Harper Lee - II<b>A Meek
and Lowly Father</b><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Scout says of her father,
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
“Atticus was
feeble: he was nearly fifty...Our father didn't do anything....
Atticus did not drive a dump-truck for the county, he was not the
sheriff, he did not farm, work in a garage or do anything that could
possibly arouse the admiration of anyone.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
But when the Sheriff hands his rifle to
Atticus to take out a rabid dog in the street with a difficult long
shot, Scout is excited to finally have something to brag about.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
“When we went
home I told Jem we'd really have something to talk about at school on
Monday. Jem turned on me.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
“Don't say
anything about it Scout,” he said.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
“What? I
certainly will. Ain't everybody's daddy the deadest shot in Maycomb
County.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
Jem said, “I
reckon if he wanted us to know it, he'da told us.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
“Maybe it just
slipped his mind,” I said.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
“Naw, Scout,
it's something you wouldn't understand. Atticus is real old, but I
wouldn't care if he couldn't do anything - I wouldn't care if he
couldn't do a blessed thing.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
Jem picked up a
rock and threw it jubilantly at the carhouse. Running after it, he
called back: “Atticus is a gentleman, just like me!” (Chapter 10)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In this story, Scout discovers in her
“feeble” father a heroic sharpshooter. Jem's discovery is deeper.
He begins to understand the depth of his father's character, a
discovery that fills him with love, and, instead of a desire to revel
in his father's skill with a gun, a desire to imitate his gentlemanly
humility. One might say that Scout is still seeing the father with
the eyes of the Old Testament, while Jem has begun to see the father
with the eyes of the New.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Truly admirable, loving, but also
unattainable, Atticus provides a perfect model for what Girard calls
“external mediation.” Atticus inspires imitation without ever
engendering rivalry (unlike the internally mediated dynamic between the siblings Jem and Scout, where rivalrous fights frequently break out). We live in a world where such fathers are increasingly deposed, exposed as
just as imperfect as the rest of us - no longer “arousing the
admiration of anyone.” Now we have only one father left who we can worship the way Jem worships Atticus: the Heavenly Father.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
With the Christian deconstruction of
the scapegoat mechanism, we can no longer come together by being
<i>altogether against the single other</i>. Nor do we have earthly fathers left who can keep our mimetic rivalries from getting out of had with the big scary "Because I said so," of patriarchy's sacred wrath. Now our options are reduced to
the rivalrous anarchy of each against each, or coming together<i>
altogether for the Other One</i>.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The Christian God can seem old and
feeble. Out of fashion, and revealed in weakness. What kind of God is
that? It is indeed a strange claim that Christians make: that of all the powers competing for our worship, the single one that is worthy is the Lamb that was slain. God the Victim, the Vulnerable One, the Suffering Servant. Strange, and yet, the more I think about this, the more I feel like Jem. I want to throw something, my joy in this humility is so fierce.</div>
</div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-81809412379170694222013-03-16T17:21:00.000-07:002013-03-16T17:21:14.352-07:00The Gospel according to Harper Lee - Part IThe girls and I just finished <i>To Kill a Mockingbird.</i> It's the third time round for me. Some books just keep getting better. This time, I read Lee's masterpiece through the lens of Rene Girard's thought on the role of mimetic desires and the scapegoating in forming human communities, and the role of the Gospel in exposing and overturning these. Lee is dead on.<br />
<br />
The next few posts are dedicated to <i>To Kill a Mockingbird,</i> with my attempt at some girardian commentary.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
“When he gave us
our air-rifles Atticus wouldn't teach us how to shoot. Uncle Jack
instructed us on the rudiments thereof; he said Atticus wasn't
interested in guns. Atticus said to Jem one day, “I'd rather you
shot at tin cans in the back yard, but I know you'll go after birds.
Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember
it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
That was the only
time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something...”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
In Atticus' pronuciation, Harper Lee
condenses all the petty sins of conservative southern society into
one: the hypocritical lynching of an innocent victim. Various other
voices in the town are scandalized by sins against fashion, against
class, against American sensibilities, against polite decorum,
against Jim Crow racial rules, and each one of these scandalized
reactions is exposed, through the innocent observations of Jem and
Scout, and the patient integrity of Atticus and Calpurnia, as hollow
and hypocritical.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Jesus boiled down the multitude of the
old commandments into a two-in-one: Love the Lord your God with all
your heart, soul, mind and strength, and the
second one like it:<i> </i>Love
your neighbour as yourself. The second is like the first because in
Jesus God becomes the Neighbour, and this
Neighbour God becomes our Victim. “Whatever you do to the least of
these, you have done unto me.” The mockingbirds who it is a sin for
us to kill are each and every one the Christ.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
One
look around the postmodern world reveals that the harming of innocent
victims really is the only sin we believe in anymore. What scandal
on the news is not a story of
the cross: either the story of a victim, told from the victim's point
of view, or an
expose of corrupt authorities, often judged from the perspective of their victims?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The
only ones we still feel justified to righteously condemn anymore are
the mockingbird-killers. It's
the only scandal we have left. But like the titilated missionary
society ladies of Maycomb, we are finding our little gatherings
breaking down, because a voice is breaking in that gives the lie to
our shared gasps of dismay.
The
gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as well as the
gospel according to Harper Lee, reveal the
mockingbird-killers to be
none other than
ourselves.</div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5750239419118787856.post-49539087803655288932013-03-03T20:07:00.002-08:002013-03-03T20:07:59.480-08:00A TALE OF TWO TREES<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
(A sermon preached this morning at St. James Anglican, Beausejour)</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i>Texts: Exodus 3:1-14, Luke 13:1-9</i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
first tree in this homily, the one Moses encountered in the
wilderness, made me remember an encounter of my own.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">I
was just crossing the river, coming back from the neighbours, when a
bald eagle flew close over my head, heading downstream. I could hear
the air pushing through his great, dark, outspread pinions. For a
moment, his nearness made him so solid that the fact of his gliding
through air seemed pure sorcery. It is easier to believe that eagles
are real when they are far off than when they come close. And then,
in one sharp intake of my breath, he was gone again, around the bend
of the river, and I was suffused with joy.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">And
I was struck, struck that this place of reverence is exactly where I
try so hard to take people as a worship leader or preacher. I can
spend hours poring over songs and scriptures, crafting prayers and
poetic turns of phrase to construct the road that will lead the
faithful exactly here: Awe. Self-transcendance. Holiness. Joy. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">And
here I had been waylaid by it, entirely without human contrivance or
effort. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">We
are reminded today that Moses' most profound encounter with the
Divine was in the wilderness, with a voice speaking out of a strange
and burning bush. Moses did not meet YHWH in the sacred shrine where
his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, attended. He met YHWH
in the wilderness.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Mark
McDonald, our Anglican indigenous bishop, talked about this story at
the sacred circle last summer. The Anglican indigenous elders he grew
up with taught him to understand that the miracle in this story is
not something that God does to the bush, but something that God does
to Moses' eyes. What Moses sees in the bush is the holy indwelling of
God's power and spirit in every living thing in the creation. The
bright and living divinity in which we all live and move and have our
being.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">I
am glad to have an indigenous bishop. It gives me hope that this
church that came over from jolly old England so many years ago is
finally landing, here. Hope that our faith is finally being
indigenized, finally making a home, here, in this place, finally
recognizing that right here in Canada, we are walking on holy ground.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
Poet Kathleen Raine has noted that, "the holy places of the
Bible...to the Jews are real places on earth" whereas to the
Christians the Holy Land is remote...The holy land should be the
place we live on." </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">I've
been thinking about the difference between thinking of holy land as
the place I live on and someplace faraway. I think this is a basic
difference between an indigenous theology and what I would call an
imperial theology.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Indigenous
theology sees holiness in the land and in the living things to which
we all have access. It encourages a kind of spiritual democracy.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Imperial
theology assigns holiness to objects and places and rites that are
owned by religious authorities. It concentrates power in the center.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Moses
was very familiar with imperial theology. Raised and educated in the
house of Pharoah, he has grown up in a religious system that
celebrated a god-king who sat atop a pyramid-shaped society, a
society that thrived at the top and deprived at the bottom. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Moses'
great revelation at the burning bush is that YHWH is with the slaves,
and not with the Pharoah. God is not the guarantor of human pyramid
schemes, but the spoiler of those schemes. YHWH is the one who hears
the cries of the slaves, and the one who will lead them out of the
house of slavery. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">And
I think we can see a pretty direct connection between Moses'
revelation that the Holy One is in solidarity with the commoners
rather than the kings and his revelation that the very ground under
his feet is holy.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">A
theology that hallows the human being – that says that not only the
Pharoah is made in the image of God – but that every single human
being is so dignified, so holy; such a theology will also reveal the
holiness of the land on which we humans walk, the land out of which,
as the Bible tells us, God makes us.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
biblical word for the human being is Adam. The biblical word for the
fertile soil, the earth, is Adamah. The Adam is that strange and
sacred combination of God's breath and good earth.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">A
theology that enslaves, exploits and oppresses the Adam will be a
theology that enslaves, exploits and oppresses the Adamah, the humus
out of which God forms the human being. (Interestingly the wordplay
is the same in Hebrew and in English. The words Human, humus and
humble interplay as closely in our language as Adam and Adamah do in
Hebrew.) Hallow the one and you will tend to hallow the other.
Enslave the one and you will tend to enslave the other.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Canadians
don't enslave people anymore. Or at least, if we do, we don't call it
slavery. Canada is flirting with something close to it in its guest
worker program, where last year we brought over a record-setting
30,000 low wage workers from foreign countries to do the jobs that
we don't want to do, cutting chickens apart or picking apples or
building pipelines, workers who are easily shipped off when they get
injured or try to organize for a better deal or simply when they try
to switch to a preferable employer. That's the pseudo-slavery we
allow inside our borders. I'm not even talking yet about degraded
workers doing miserable jobs for us outside our borders.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
writer Wendell Berry has a comment about this in his essay “Racism
and the Economy” Berry, a Christian farmer-poet is someone else who
has helped me a lot in indigenizing my faith to this land. I will
quote him throughout the rest of this homily)</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">About
slavery, and whether or not it is still going on, Berry says,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
“<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">as
long as there are some people who wish to believe and are
economically empowered to believe that they are too good to do their
own work and clean up after themselves, then somebody else is going
to have to do the work and the cleaning up. In an exploitive economy,
there is what we might call a “nigger factor” that will remain
more or less constant. If some people grow rich by making things to
throw away, then many other people will have to empty the garbage
cans and make the trip to the dump.” </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">In
another essay Berry carries this idea to an inevitable conclusion:
“If we began by making niggers of people we have ended by making a
nigger of the world.” Just as we have done with human beings, now
“We have made of the rivers and the oceans and the winds niggers to
carry away our refuse, which we think we are too good to dispose of
decently ourselves.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">We
have made, as Berry says, with a word that is shocking and ugly, a
nigger of the world. We could be be offended by his language were it
not so apt. What we have done to the earth is shocking and ugly.
Scientists tell us that “nearly two-thirds of the natural machinery
that supports life on earth is being degraded by human pressure.”
To pause to parse the meaning of these rather technical words is to
contemplate horror, atrocity. We have treated the earth like our
slave, something alive yes, but not something to be dignified, to be
hallowed. As something to be used, and worse than that, as something
to be used up. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Which
brings me to another parable in Moses encounter with YHWH: the living
fire that burns in the bush but does not consume. If the indigenous
elders are right and the miracle is indeed something that YHWH does
to Moses' eyes rather than the bush, then the bush is a sign of how
everything that lives is kept alive by the grace of God with an
eternal dance of an energy that burns without burning up.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Here
again, I want to quote Wendell Berry, this time contrasting the
consumptive economy of the machine to the“energy community” of
biological creatures:</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 1.25cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">They
die into each other's life, live into each other's death. <i>They do
not consume in the sense of using up.</i> They do not produce waste.
What they take in they change, but they change it always into a form
necessary for its use by a living body of another kind. And this
exchange goes on and on round and round, the Wheel of Life rising out
of the soil, descending into it, through the bodies of creatures.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Our
creaturely bodies live by a fire that burns in every living thing,
but does not consume in the sense of using up.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Of
course, we Canadians live most of our lives by a fire that does use
up. The gasoline that got me to church today will not grow back. Oil
is not something we produce, regardless of what the corporations tell
us. It is only something we can extract. It is billions of years
worth of God's sunshine that we have been burning through in one
bright flash of a century. And it can't go on. We who have been
taught to ask in prayer only that God “Give us this day the bread
we need for today” are urgently needing to learn prayers and lives
that ask only that God “Give us this year the sunlight that we need
to live on for this year.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">All
the other living things - the sparrows, the lilies of the field, the
bushes in the wilderness - these remind us that it is possible to
live on God's good earth without using up that which sustains us,
without soiling our nest, without burning the world up, without
making our Mother Earth or our fellow human into a degraded slave.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">YHWH
still hears the cry of the oppressed, and still moves to lead us out
of slavery.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Which
brings us to the other tree in the scriptures today: Jesus and the
fig tree.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Jesus
is speaking to Jews who are desperate to be led once again out of the
house of slavery, and want to see if Jesus is the new Moses, God's
man to take on the new Egypt: Rome. They tell Jesus about a group of
Galilean rebels who have been cruelly executed by Rome's local
enforcer, Pilate, who let their blood mingle with the blood of their
own sacrifices at the Temple. This is blood that cries out for
vindication.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Jesus'
contemporaries want precisely a holy fire from Jesus – a holy fire
that will consume. A fire that will consume the Romans. But the holy
fire that Jesus offers is precisely a fire that does not consume,
that only transforms and changes, but that does not destroy. He is
warning that the consuming fire which they want is a fire in which
“all will perish.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The
fruitless fig tree is a symbol of the kind of enemy-loving community
God has been trying to grow Israel into, so far with poor results.
The manure laid down by the gardener is the gift of Jesus' life laid
down, the ultimate lesson in enemy-love. By this time next year,
after the sacrifice on the cross, perhaps Israel will bear the fruit
the gardener has been waiting for.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">To
gather all these themes together, I would say that whether we are
talking about oil addiction, land abuse, Roman tyranny or any
oppressive system, the temptation is always towards solutions that
point the accusing finger at others rather than looking to our own
transformation.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Here
again </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Wendell
Berry </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">says
it better than I can, </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">this
time</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">
in </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">an</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">
essay</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">
</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">encouraging
the environmental movement to </span></span><a href="https://www.msu.edu/~kikbradl/little.html"><span style="color: #d8471d;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">“Think
Little”:</span></span></span></a><br />
<div style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border: none; line-height: 0.48cm; margin-bottom: 0.4cm; margin-left: 1.25cm; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Nearly
every one of us, nearly every day of his life, is contributing
directly to the ruin of this planet. A protest meeting on the issue
of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a
convocation of the guilty....The
environmental crisis has its roots in our <i>lives.</i>”</span></span></div>
<div style="background: #ffffff; border: none; line-height: 0.48cm; margin-bottom: 0.4cm; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">As
I read it, t</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">his
admission of guilt is exactly in the </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">s</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">pirit
of “Just as I am without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for
me.” </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Or
maybe more to the point,“shed </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>by</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">
me.” </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Any
gathering around the cross is always a convocation of the guilty. </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">To
face the cross is to face my own violence, </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">the
blood on </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>my</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">
hands, the log in </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>my</i></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">
eye, though I'd rather distract myself with the speck in yours</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">.
This, painfully, is the way forward </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">in
</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">our</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">
altar call: </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">It
is by facing my violence that I can become non-violent. </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">I</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">t
is by facing the inauthenticity of my love that I can become
authentically loving. </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">I</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">t
is by facing </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">the
wasting, consuming fire I live by that I can catch the fire that does
not consume</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">.
</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">By
the grace of God, such miracles can surprise us, everywhere we walk
in this holy land.</span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
Marcus Rempelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04331544356684866927noreply@blogger.com0