This blog is my forum for venting, for congratulating, for questioning and for suggesting, especially on subjects of spirituality, the news, and whatever strikes me from day to day. I am also on Twitter at @epp_g
Shekinah had two groups of guests this weekend. Down in the Chalet was a Cub Scout troop; in the Timberlodge were 45 or so women from a Baptist church in Saskatoon, retreating for a short time from the busyness of their lives. Agnes and I were their hosts.
Note 1: Before we served them lunch, the women’s group held a worship service in the great hall of the Lodge. They were singing off a screen just as I walked through the room with an armload of mattress covers, a song I didn’t know honouring the majesty and glory of God. Just as they concluded, the snow on the roof let go and avalanched onto the deck with a thunderous roar. The ones nearest the window dived for cover before they realized that the sky was not falling, or that the Lord was not particularly adding audio-visual effects to their song. They were silent for a few seconds until the relief of knowing that they were safe set in, when they burst into spontaneous laughter.
Note 2: From the Timberlodge, I went down to the Chalet to check on the cub scouts. A dozen or so 10 year-olds were seated in a circle on the floor with their leaders; they obediently sang out “Good morning, George,” when I walked in. They wore brown shirts with yellow bandanas tied around their necks. I had some work to do in the furnace room, but I heard their leader say, “We ought to start our day with ‘O Canada,’ I guess,” but they didn’t sing it. I think they forgot to bring a song leader.
Note 3: In some of our (Shekinah’s) literature, you’ll find a note that says people experience the presence of God in this place. This morning, walking along the path that leads from the Timberlodge, past the silent cabins nestled among the poplars to the Chalet, I experienced what I think they meant. The squirrels have decided that winter is over and their footprints are everywhere; I startled a pair of chickadees and one of them flew past my ear so close that I could feel the breath of her wing-beats; the wind whispered through the treetops above and I remembered how the spirit is described as a wind in scriptures.
It’s clear that the Spirit of God hasn’t taken up residence at Shekinah; that would be antithetical to our faith. But it is also clear that many people who have felt themselves starved of the spirit in the busyness of their lives have felt the breath of the spirit here whereas they have been missing it walking day after day on concrete streets and tiled floors.
From here, you can’t see a single habitation (well, one, actually, since last fall, across the river), a single town, a single factory. Cell phones don’t work here; your laptop won’t connect you with the internet unless you’re in the office building.
Note 4: A minister dropped in a few weeks ago. In the course of our conversation he asked me this: Why do you call this place Shə-KEE-na? It’s actually pronounced Shə-KY-na. I know he was trying to impress me with his erudition, particularly as regards the Hebrew language, but to be kind I said. “That’s interesting! I call it Shə-KEE-na because everyone calls it that, and has since it was established!” (Incidentally, the Oxford entry in Babylon pronounces it Shə-KEE-na, and the meaning is: “the glory of the divine presence, represented as light or interpreted (in Kabbalism) as a divine feminine aspect.”)
Note 5: I’m listening—as I write this—to Tapestry on CBC 1. It’s an interview with the author of a biography of the current Dalai Lama. The author says that the Dalai Lama would say, “We don’t need religion; what we need is basic human kindness.” I didn’t get whether he actually said this or whether it’s a condensation of some things he has said.
What does embryonic stem cell research have to do with me?
What is moral? What’s immoral? What’s amoral?
I remember a discussion in church a long time ago on the subject of sin. Specifically, it questioned why we never hear the word anymore and whether or not we’ve written the concept of sin out of our theology—or at least out of our dialogue about our theology.
Interesting word, sin. Oxford says it’s “the breaking of divine or moral law, esp. by a conscious act.”
“The soul that sinneth, it shall die (Ezekiel 18:4),” says the prophet Ezekiel. “But he that sinneth against me [the LORD] wrongeth his own soul (Proverbs 8:36.).” (References to KJV)
This is serious stuff.
It may have been in the backs of our minds the other day as we talked over lunch about President Obama’s move to end the restriction on embryonic stem cell research. On the one hand, such research may open the door for shysters to make a business of harvesting embryos (human offspring in the first eight or twelve weeks from conception – Oxford) like a cash crop. On the other hand, embryonic stem cells (undifferentiated cell[s] from which specialized cells develop – Oxford) offer hope for cures for debilitating diseases: Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, to name two. As I understand it, stem cells exist in everyone’s body in small amounts, can be found in umbilical blood and can be retrieved from aborted or miscarried embryos. But like the work of Einstein led to the creation of the nuclear bomb, this scientific development has potential for massive misuse.
So is it immoral (sinful) to research embryonic stem cell harvesting? Although a broad moral code regarding the sanctity of life could be applied here, we lack a specific “moral law” that could be applied. I assume it would be clearly immoral to kill a person in order to harvest his organs for sale, and so it would likely be clear as well if we deliberately destroyed a developing embryo for the sale of its stem cells. We have already settled the question of utilizing organs of consenting, deceased persons. We accept it as a moral act. A fetus that is miscarried, by this token, would be an eligible donor of stem cells. Probably not so if human embryos are cultured in a Petri dish solely for their stem cells, or if a person needing stem cells pays for a woman’s abortion in order to get them.
Are those who research the application of stem cells to medicine “breaking [a] divine or moral law, esp. by a conscious act?” I don’t believe so; they are more likely following the natural course of genetic research in the hope of finding cures for illnesses.
I support science’s search for knowledge, even when it leads into areas of discomfort. At the same time, since the people through their governments are ultimately responsible for deciding where the borders between immorality, morality and amorality lie with regard to embryonic stem cells, it is the people through the processes of democracy who must enunciate the moral code on this subject. Governments must find a way to lay the relevant information and a proper question before them.
Or, the point may end up being moot. There is, apparently, a promising line of research that “is developing techniques to convert skin cells into Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells(iPS cells) that emulate embryonic stem cells (http://www.religioustolerance.org/res_stem.htm). If this technique proves to be efficacious, there may be no need to visit the question of the embryo as a human life for this issue. We will, however, still experience the raging debate over the humanness of an embryo as regards abortion.
So is all this about sin? I don’t see people consciously breaking divine or moral codes in their search for ethical answers regarding the treatment of human embryos. Mind you, a lot could be happening out of my sight.
Healing people’s diseases is definitely a moral undertaking; that’s clear—philosophically and theologically. The principle of revering human life is implicit in the healing arts; it must also be implicit in the search for new cures.
GM and Chrysler are asking for a new number on the loan request to the Canadian government. Guess what, it's higher than the earlier one. Would you personally lend $900.00 to GM and Chrysler, given the fact that they're teetering on the brink of bankruptcy? If the number ends up being $9,000,000,000 (nine billion) and if there are 10,000,000 (ten million) serious income-tax payers in Canada (which I doubt) than the loan to the failed car companies would amount to $900.00 per taxpayer. If we include every man, woman and child in Canada in the count, it amounts to about $300.00 per person.
Now I know these are loans, but if they fail to stave off bankruptcy in the end, they will be repaid by us, not by the functionaries of the car companies. And there will be little to show for it, like paying for a wrecked automobile because we borrowed money to buy it.
Here's my plan: the government of Canada expropriates all the GM and Chrysler facilities in Canada, takes over their work force and pensions, puts the workers to work retooling these factories with the object of building energy-efficient vehicles especially designed for the Canada, Russia, Scandinavian markets . . . a real winter/summer car. I'm sure both companies would be happy to see them go; it would make the best plank in their restructuring platform to the American government. And if Canada paid them the 9,000,000,000 (nine billion) it would help them recover their profitability in the US.
Agnes and I would be happy to invest our $1,800.00 share in a venture like this, and we would buy one of those cars and wave an unregretful good bye to our Taurus.
A couple of anecdotes arrived almost simultaneously in the inbox of my consciousness this weekend. I was teaching an adult Sunday school lesson on the book of Esther, and I had the radio on as I drove the 30 Km. to church.
First: Xerxes I as portrayed in the book of Esther is a drunken sot of a king who—although powerful—is swayed this way and that by his advisers. When his wife Vashti defies him one day, he asks his advisers what he should do to respond to this impertinence. Basically, their advice is that he divorce her, replace her with a new queen and make sure this action is noised abroad, so that “each man might be master in his own house and control all his own womenfolk (Esther 1: 22, NEB). Now we need to remember that Xerxes’ chief adviser at the time was Haman, portrayed as an egotistical, self-serving tyrant who would later connive to initiate a pogrom against all the Jews in Persia. We need to remember also that these events were reported by Jewish storytellers, not Persian.
As I was driving to church with these thoughts roiling around in my head, the dialogue on CBC 1 was about gender equality in corporate board rooms and government. By some measure—and I didn’t quite get by whom and how the measuring was being done—Canada was ranked 85th of 160 or so countries on the matter of working toward gender equality, i.e. ensuring that the halls of power had equitable female representation. Haman would probably have been appalled at the suggestion that men folk should even consider giving up any authority to their womenfolk.
(Typing this just now, WORD informs me that there’s no such word as menfolk, but that womenfolk is quite all right. Now what do you make of that?!)
For the sake of modern readers of the Christian Bible, I wish that a part of Mordecai’s objection to Haman’s and Xerxes’ behaviour had been directed toward their suppression of women. Unfortunately, no such objection is noted there.
We still have a lot of Hamans in positions of power, men who see it not only easier, but also scripturally sanctioned, that “each man might be master in his own house and control all his own womenfolk.”
Fundamentalism is a way of looking at the world in a severely simplified form. Ordinarily we apply it (these days) to religious fanaticism, but that kind of thinking can exhibit itself anywhere. Take patriotism, probably one of the most pervasive and deadly forms of the disease. In Belleisle, New Brunswick, principal Erik Millett was ordered by the superintendent to reinstate the daily playing of O Canada after numerous complaints, threats and vitriol had been hurled at everyone who was seen to have authority in the situation.
Fundamentalism could be defined as a form of deductive reasoning, “the inference of particular instances by reference to a general law or principle (Oxford). In a patriot, the applicable law or principle in the Belleisle case might look like this: “People show their loyalty to their country by singing the national anthem; ergo, the non-singing of the national anthem obviously proves disloyalty.” Poor Erik Millett; the rage against his perceived disloyalty resulted in one parent coming to his office and threatening him with physical harm, or worse.
Deductive reasoners don’t hold with a lot of dialogue, and certainly not with the consideration of exceptions to the rule. If they did, then Erik Millett would have found himself in a much better situation; as it was, what he got was: “Don’t bother us with the explanations. You used to have O Canada every morning. You’ve reduced it to once a month in assemblies. That proves you’re un-Canadian. There’s nothing more to talk about. I should beat you to a pulp!”
Erik Millett was responding to a sound educational principle. Segregating young students from their peer activities should be avoided because it can lead to stigmatization and damage to self image. In his school were a few children whose parents believe that patriotic symbols are hypocritical in a people whose allegiance is—first and foremost—to God, not to a state. Millett didn’t want to make these kids stand in the hallway with their hands over their ears while the anthem was being played and everyone else stood at attention.
Millett’s actions were based on compassion for his students, not disloyalty to Canada. He saw some of the children caught between their parents’ (deductive) logic and the public’s (deductive) reasoning, and he sought to reach a compromise in the interest of the children. He was reasoning inductively:Logic characterized by the inference of general laws from particular instances (Oxford). Millett was showing the characteristics of a good educator; what he failed to do was to appease the fundamentalists before making the change. They’ll kill you for that. Millett may never go back to his job.
That’s the problem with deduction. It invariably sees compromise as a bad thing, a way down a slippery slope. In religion as well as in patriotism, liberal, inductive reasoners are at a disadvantage; they don’t have a Bible verse or a flag to nail their conclusions to because they are thinking from the notion that the principle is derived from the events, not the other way ‘round. What’s more, threats, vitriol and worse are typically fundamentalist tools. They have this built-in urge to clean up the environment, particularly of the deviance they see in their opposites.
Too bad. We probably lost a great teacher. I don’t know how the superintendent for the region can live with herself; she acquiesced to the fundamentalists when leadership was called for.
What opinions do we North American Christians hold with regard to the Israeli state today? Where do our opinions come from? Which arguments swirling around us do we credit and which do we dismiss . . . and why?
In “Does the Promise Still Hold?” in The Christian Century, January 13, 2009, Gary A. Anderson, Old Testament teacher at the University of Notre Dame, writes: “Some Christian fundamentalists have insisted that because we live on the cusp of the messianic era, anything Israel does in Palestine must be construed as part of its larger divine mandate. But even if we are witnesses to the beginning of the final messianic age—a possibility that can never be wholly dismissed—we should certainly expect that whatever God does with the Jews during this time will conform to the character of his relationship to this people as it is revealed in the Bible. A unilateral land-grab that takes no moral cognizance of the plight of Israel’s neighbors is not consistent with Israel’s foundational story (p. 24)”
(You can access this article and three responses—by Marlin Jeschke, Walter Brueggemann and Donald E. Wagner—at http://christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=6095)
It’s clear that Anderson sees the reports of the Biblical relationship of the Jewish people to God as recorded in the Christian Old Testament as fundamental to understanding the relationship between God, the Jewish people and the rest of the world, and by extension, the current events in Gaza. Is the current assault on Gaza a “land-grab?” Or is it a move to increase Israeli security against a recalcitrant and belligerent Hamas? It makes a difference . . . except to the innocent citizenry of both Gaza and Israel, who pay in pain and immeasurable loss. Is Israel’s attack on Hamas moral? If it isn’t, Anderson would probably agree that invoking “manifest destiny” by God’s decree just won’t wash. God doesn’t condone immoral acts in order to secure land for his people, I hear Anderson say.
Well, then—I hear you say—what about Jericho and the slaughter of Canaanite inhabitants of Palestine in the time of Joshua? It’s hard for us to square an act of ethnic cleansing with Anderson’s assertion, unless the writers of the history of the exile got it wrong as follows: then—as now, possibly—the actions of God’s people were immoral and self serving, but the story was altered and augmented to make it appear to be an act of manifest destiny, bearing God’s approval and encouragement.
The actions of the State of Israel and Hamas must be judged by Christians on the ethics that Jesus taught, and they were clear: treat your neighbour as you wish to be treated; eschew violence; love your enemies; don’t fix your hopes on land and possessions; value and protect all life as sacred; etc. Seen in this way, understanding the events in Palestine is not that complicated.
P.S. A fundamental error that befogs all this may be the notion that the “Children of Israel” and the “State of Israel” are synonymous. Is it logical to assume that the current political leadership of the State of Israel is the vessel in which the Abrahamic promise of a peoplehood and a homeland is carried? I have doubts. What do you think?
Friends; I received a response to my recent post on Gaza (below) from Garry Janzen, Conference Minister at Mennonite Church British Colombia and my nephew. Hope you feel led to participate in this small but important effort for the people of Palestine, I plan to participate on Wednesday, January 14: Thank you Uncle George. There is a growing group of people fasting for peace in Gaza and the Holy Land. To join, email Jon Nofziger (peace@mccbc.com) and give him the day you choose to fast. Garry Janzen
A religious denomination built a hospital in a foreign country where it was having considerable success converting people to its brand of the Christian faith. It was a small hospital, but the need for medical care was enormous and so the beds filled very quickly. A policy was enacted that since the hospital couldn’t hope to deal with all the medical requirements of the area, preference would be given to converts.
Shortly thereafter, the hospital director was leaving the building after a particularly strenuous day when his attention was arrested by a commotion at the admitting counter. A woman was begging loudly and with many tears that her child be admitted. The director immediately identified her as an adherent of a rival mission, one he considered to be teaching questionable—if not false—doctrine.
“Ma’am,” he said to her, “we can’t help you. I want you to leave the building quietly.”
“But my child is really sick” she protested, “and I know you could help her!
Would you please, at least, look at her?”
“Ma’am,” the director said, “it’s not right to take the children’s food and toss it to the dogs.”
The woman was desperate. “But sir, the dogs still wander around the table, snatching up the scraps that fall!”
The director was moved by her persistence, and flattered by the confidence she had in his hospital’s ability to help her. He thought for a moment, and then directed the nurse at the counter to have a bed placed in the hallway for the child, and to tell the resident doctor to examine and treat the child.
“Excuse me for my impertinence,” said the nurse, “but you know that this will open the floodgates. What will we do then?”
The director turned back to the woman. “We’ll treat your child, but only on the condition that you tell no one about it, understand?”
The first time I heard this exact story was just now, as I wrote it.
But I have heard a version of it before, in Matthew 15: 21-28 and Mark 7: 24-30, to be specific. There, the director is Jesus—a Jew—and the supplicant is a Canaanite woman. I had occasion to revisit the story just a few days ago because it was the text for an adult Sunday school lesson and I had a contract to write teachers’ guide notes for it. At the same time, the state of Israel was bombing Hamas targets in Gaza and Palestinian militants were continuing to fire rockets into Israel. It’s no surprise that the story and the news would come to be related in my thoughts.
On its face, Jesus’ metaphor (if he, in fact, said it) is racist, and that’s troubling to anyone who has built his image of Jesus around, say, the Sermon on the Mount. As we end up doing so often, the Oxford Study Bible excuses it by attributing the words to Matthew’s pen, and saying that “The story revolves around a non-Jewish woman and the question of Jesus’ mission. Matthew thinks of a mission limited to Israel during Jesus’ human career but ultimately intended to reach out to all (p. 1285).” True, Jesus appears to say that his mission is to his people—the Jews—and then seems to “change his mind” for the sake of this one extraordinary Canaanite woman.
The Jew/Gentile consciousness haunts the world today like a canker that grows and wanes, then grows again. (It has its equivalent, of course, in North American black/white, Indian/white and in Germany—when I worked there in the ‘80s— German/Turk distinctions) Matthew’s story may have been intended to tell the people of the temple and the synagogue that the incarnation was for them—the fulfillment of their messianic hope. Unfortunately, most readers of the story are obliged to see themselves in the roles of the dogs—not the children.
That, at least, is one interpretation, and it’s troublesome.
There are plenty of references in Paul’s writing that hint at the end of these distinctions. Unfortunately, some of the Christian world has chosen a far-too legalistic approach to faith and has never fully embraced Paul’s admonition in Romans 10:12: “For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him. . . .” In fairness to them, it has to be said that Paul himself was unable to free himself completely from the notion that there isa difference. In Romans 1:16, he uses the terms Jew and Gentile racially: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.”
I suppose that when a group of people live in proximity to each other for generations, the development of a unique outlook, unique cultural markers, and a unique religious worldview is inevitable. The rest of the world will apply a name to them; that name will eventually become part of the world vocabulary, and even group members will begin to think of themselves as defined-by-their-label. And as all we recyclers know, it’s a lot easier to stick a label on a bottle than to soak/scrape it off.
Is the conflict in Gaza Jew-versus-Gentile? Is it Palestinians against Israelis? How shall we understand it? The word “Palestine” has its roots in “Philistine.” “Palestine” came to refer to the area of the world known variously as the “Levant,” or the “Holy Land,” etc. People of the area were called “Palestinians” for centuries, whether they were of Arab or Jewish descent. Are we seeing a reverse of the David and Goliath story where David is the giant (with jets and tanks) and tiny Goliath is slinging stones (rockets) into his territory with a sling, hoping he’ll eventually hit a vital organ? Or is it better described as a multi-generational feud like the Hadfields and McCoys, or the Star-bellied Sneetches?
There’s hardly any doubt about the conflict in Gaza being territorial, on top of anything else. Its rhetoric is most often about borders and land access, homelands and hinterlands and to whom this field rightfully belongs and who can say where a person can and can’t go, or work, or grow figs. It certainly hasn’t helped that the West has declared one side (on the basis of race, ethnicity) in the dispute to have a right to a certain territory and then poured in money and resources to back it up. I can’t think of a better way to create resentment, to start a feud.
Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman and the metaphor of the dogs vs the children occurred early in his ministry, according to the gospel records. From then on, we see in his parables and later, in the early church, a shifting away from ethnic consciousness to the point where Paul can write: “For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him. . . .”
George Bush summed up the current US policy toward the conflict when he said, “Israel has a right to defend itself.” At about that time, the death toll on the Israeli side was 4, and on the Gaza side, 500+. Since then, both numbers have risen considerably, but the proportions have remained the same. Defend itself, yes, but what about the “defend itself, how?” question. Even an inkling that there might be a prophetic destiny playing out is tremendously harmful to our commitment to a solution, and we have to exorcise that demon in North America if we’re ever going to contribute to peace in the Middle East.
God is NOT territorial; if he is at all interested in defining homelands, he is as concerned about a homeland for his “Muslim” children as he is for his “Jewish” children. Get that through your heads, Christians. I think Obama’s got that. I hope.
Jesus healed the Canaanite woman’s daughter. Take it from there.
It’s Christmas Eve eve. Cold. Really cold . . . I think; I haven’t stepped outside since yesterday.
I’ve been writing teachers’ guide commentaries for the Adult Bible Study series, a good job to be working at when winter grabs the countryside like it has this year. Today, I was working on a lesson for late December, 2009. The subject was the arrival of the wise men in Bethlehem and the flight into Egypt. A great deal of traveling going on.
Meanwhile, Canada’s airports are clogged, flights late or cancelled and a lot of people are sleeping on airplanes, benches, but not—to my knowledge—in a stable in Bethlehem. Donna Molnar got caught in a snowstorm in her car and was found alive after three days cradled under a snow bank in the Hamilton area, 200 metres from her car. Christmas and travel go together like zipper-skin oranges and Cracker Jacks.
Makes me nostalgic for some Christmases I can barely remember, say in 1950. We rehearsed in school and in church for concerts at which adults gave us bags of candy and peanuts, oranges and Cracker Jacks and we sang the drifting snow spread a robe of white on this beautiful Christmas Eve. And Christmas Eve—after the church concert usually—would be dark and cold and we’d light the candles on the tree in the parlour, eat peanuts and anticipate opening gifts on Christmas morning after the chores were done and breakfast eaten. I can still hear the sound of the poker as my dad banked the fire in the furnace downstairs, still smell the faint odor of coal dust and coal smoke, a promise that although the cold would creep in through the shrunken window sashes and door frames, we would not freeze tonight.
There was no thought of traveling past the Eigenheim Mennonite Church, one mile away.
The passing of the years struck me tonight as I loaded music onto the Mpeg player I gave Agnes for Christmas. It’s just big enough so you wouldn’t swallow it by mistake, but I loaded it with about 50 Christmas songs from our albums and it told me it had room for about 5,000 more. In the late 40’s, my brother bought a waist-high phonograph from a neighbour. We’d crank it up and play scratchy Wilf Carter records. One at a time. Each record weighed at least as much as 10 Mpeg players.
I have no idea what I’m trying to say here, except that I’m getting old enough to break into nostalgia at the drop of a hat.
I want to wish all of you a blessed Christmas season and a hopeful New Year. I finally decided—as I pondered what I might write about the Magi seeking the Christ—that the star is symbolic of our longing for a better world. In the story, they took up to two years to hunt down the child whom their astrological observations seemed to be predicting. Its like Jesus’ parable about a man who finds a treasure in a field, and sells everything he has to buy that field.
801 First Avenue, Rosthern. November 22, 2008 (The north unit of a Triplex)
State of the Union?
By George Epp
It’s a crisp, sunny day at Shekinah in the valley of the North Saskatchewan, and because the weekend is coming, we’re slowing down. I like the German word, Feierabend, which means the dusk of the work day or week, when tools are being put away and rest beckons. This weekend, a women’s group of 38 from a church in Osler is “retreating” in the Timberlodge, but since we’re ostensibly off for the weekend, I hope to do some writing and reflecting.
Writing what, you ask? I’ve accepted a second contract for writing the teachers’ guide to a quarter of Bible studies for adults. My job is to take the lessons prepared by others and write a companion guide for teaching them. It’s enjoyable, but demanding in time and energy. That’s one thing that’s on my mind.
This morning, the building committee of our church spent time with the contractor plotting out the location of the new structure we’re hoping to erect. That, too, has its demanding aspects; as committees, we often have to decide things as if a whole bunch of people were standing in our shoes with us. And sometimes, church members are not as forthcoming as they could be, and other times, committee members don’t listen as well as they should. Those who have served on any kind of building-planning committee with a lot of money at stake, various sentiments at play, and a lot of differing tastes being expressed, will know well what I’m talking about. That’s another thing on my mind.
At the same time, Agnes and I are in the middle of purchasing a home now under construction. The builders are friends, so much of this planning is pleasant and convivial, but at the same time, we have to whittle down our preferences and actually decide on a lot of details. Would you want a fridge with the freezer on top or on bottom? Is crown moulding significant enough to justify the extra cost? Stuff like that. It will be a small place; we’re well aware that this may be our last home purchase, and it’s the first one in which we’ve actually had a say in where a wall will go. That’s on my mind these days.
The news is telling us that the government may face defeat over its economic statement and the lack of projected economic stimuli. That would mean an election or a request from the governor general to the opposition parties to form a government. Strikes me as being so un-Canadian that I don’t give it much credence, but who knows? These are ground-breaking times. That’s on my mind as well.
And then there’s the news from Mumbai. I have to confess that I was just barely aware that there was a city in India by that name. What’s on my mind in that regard—besides the empathetic agony over the loss of innocent lives—is the matter of determining what soil is required for such hatred to take root.
Some 5 years ago, the Rosthern Library moved to new premises and needed a new janitor. I was asked and accepted, probably because Agnes was in charge of the library at the time and it was she who asked me. My thinking was this: vacuuming, cleaning windows, dusting, washing counters, clearing the sidewalk of snow, etc. would be good exercise, something that retired people have to make a deliberate effort to maintain a reasonable level . . . of.
I realized very quickly that I’d lived my life to date as an elitist, in this case a person who looked upon people who clean up after others with a condescension bordering on scorn. But in order for a public place to be maintained sanitary and appealing for us elitists to work in or visit, I now know that someone has to do at least some of the following tasks.
1)Clean up after the phantom crapper. This character gets caught short while in the vicinity of a public washroom and uses the provided facility. This happens on a day before a weekend. He is notorious for forgetting to flush, and by the time the janitor gets around to cleaning, the whole place smells like a stable. Our job is to hold our noses and return the facilities to a pristine, hygienic state before the elitist people happen by.
2)Clean up after the livestock handler who likes to read (do business, get a chest
X-ray, whatever). This person doesn’t have a pair of oxfords handy in the pickup truck, and so walks in with residue of his day on his boots. This probably includes animal feces, mud, straw, pebbles, leaves and definitely some unidentified substance that adheres to carpet like Velcro. His 5-minute visit will cost the conscientious janitor at least an hour of work to undo.
3)Clean up after vandals. It’s highly predictable that the most clean and airy of places will be most attractive to persons who need to be noticed through the medium of graffiti, obscenities or simply scratching their initials into the paint on the railings. What takes a vandal ten seconds to create takes a janitor hours to put right again.
4)Clean up after a roof leak, a broken window, a toilet overflow or a flood. It happens. Janitors get to wade in flooded basements picking soggy boxes out of water, drying the contents and wet-vacuuming late into the evening after all the elitists have finished dinner and laid their tonsured heads on satin pillows.
5)Clean hand prints off glass. Why is it that even when a glass door has a perfectly placed metal push panel, almost everyone opens the door by pushing on the glass?
6)Put up and check the trap line daily. Professional people in buildings report the evidence of mice on the premises; janitors trap them, dispose of them and reset the traps. They also clean up the spoor. The elitists screw up their faces and say eeeyooo! We all have our roles.
7)Etc., etc., etc.
Janitoring will probably always be a thankless occupation. A janitor’s work is only noticed when it’s done badly. “Did you forget to dust the counters?” “Yes I did, sorry. But did you notice that I cleaned the toilets inside and out?”
Janitoring is boring, like washing dishes. It’s maintenance work, is neither creative nor constructive. The floor needs to be vacuumed or mopped in the same way every day. Variety is introduced only when something disgusting happens, like a child throwing up on the carpet.
There is some satisfaction to be had in looking back at a shiny bathroom, or noticing that the windows all sparkle, or the toilet is functioning perfectly again. Seize these moments, all you cleaner-uppers; it’s all you’re going to get.
At Shekinah, I’ve been able to apply some of my janitorial skills. Some of my tasks as a volunteer involve cleaning up the leavings of one group so the place is ready for the next group. That’s what chamber-persons in hotels do. That’s what thousands and thousands of people are doing late into the night in thousands and thousands of office towers and banks.
Some time ago, I sat in the emergency area of the RoyalUniversityHospital in Saskatoon waiting for staff to get to my brother. I watched a burly man, about 30 years old, mopping floors—fruitlessly, it seemed: it was a slushy day. “Poor bastard,” I thought as another pair of muddy boots clomped across his freshly mopped floor. “Can’t you find a better job?”
Ours is a caste system. Professionals are Brahmins. Janitors, garbage collectors, restaurant dishwashers and unskilled labourers are untouchables. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but if positive regard and pay are the measures of our esteem of people around us, it doesn’t fall far from the truth.
But then, I personally don’t want to live in a world in which hotel rooms contain a washer and dryer, a mop, pail and a vacuum and the requirement that the room be left in the condition in which I found it. Neither do I want to wash my dishes in a back room of the restaurant after eating. “Being served” in the less-glamorous aspects of daily living is—at least in part—a frequent reason for leaving the house!
My short career as library janitor reminds me that I am in debt to people who clean for me—and after me. I’ll try to pay the debt as I go along—with praise and gratitude, probably, although talk is cheap.
Are you puzzled by the current economic misery gripping people-with-money these days? Are you confused by the fact that—although the economic landscape in your neck of the woods appears much as it did yesterday—all the news on the international front is insisting that we’re in for difficult times?
In the most recent issue of The Christian Century (October 21, 2008) Economics teacher at Wheaton College, James Halteman, explains what has happened nationally in the US to cause this international economic influenza. In summary, US financial institutions have been selling bond issues backed by mortgages with sub-prime interest rates, which mortgage brokers have been peddling like magic hula hoops. Inevitably, buyers of homes with far-too-generous conditions have had to walk away from their purchases, flooding the market with unsaleable homes, driving down the values of real estate, subsequently driving down the value of the bond issues, decimating the cash flow through the various lending institutions, consequently making it nearly impossible for many developers, manufacturers and exporters/importers to do business. The resultant state of panic has decimated the value of stocks and bonds, and has resulted in widespread selling-out behaviour, the curtailing of consumer confidence and the long skid down the recession slope.
Halteman’s conclusion: “Regulation of the financial markets needs to be updated—something that has been hindered by an anti-regulatory political climate.” That may be the understatement of the week.
I was told yesterday about a well-to-do Christian who is in a blue funk these days because the economic collapse has cost him massively. One presumes that his investments have tanked and the loss is on paper and might be regained if he holds on for the long term. But I have to wonder: What is an active Christian doing in the stock market anyway? The poorly-regulated way in which those institutions function these days means that they are less about acquiring an interest in the economic engines of the country in order to further common goals, and more about getting rich through non-productive, speculative behaviour. Take derivatives, for instance, buying and selling of futures, etc. This behaviour wouldn’t be so reprehensible if it weren’t for the fact that it “bets” with the common currency that you and I depend on to feed our families and further worthwhile goals, like schools, hospitals, art galleries.
I read on my currency that it is the property of the people of Canada through the Bank of Canada. How is it that we allow the misuse of our common currency by shysters who demand the right to unregulated speculation with it?
It’s time for big changes. Halteman is right. Trouble is, we’ve just re-elected a government that is congenitally gun-shy when it comes to market regulation. Let’s see what this whole mess leads to; with any luck we’ll come out smarter on the other side.
As a kid, I and a couple or three of my siblings walked to school in the spring and fall: half a mile east, one mile south. Some years, the telephone post at the junction where we turned south was plastered with election posters. Walter Tucker was the Liberal Candidate in our constituency, and I would probably have drawn a mustache on him if he hadn’t already had one.
At the time, the only credible rivals for government in Saskatchewan were the Canadian Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and the Liberals. I clearly remember how most of our neighbours supported the Liberals, but that my father was a staunch follower of Tommy Douglas and his democratic socialism. That meant that perversions of the CCF name—as in “Crazy Cat Farmers” for instance—were taken as personal insults when hurled out as playground taunts.
Elections were serious business and volatile emotional experiences.
I think I still take elections too personally, probably in part as a result of those childhood experiences. The New Democrats have always been my team, like the Saskatchewan Roughriders or the Montreal Canadians; a Grey Cup or Stanley Cup loss for the home team still stings, although less with the passage of time.
Seeing Conservatives in office is like having a sharp stone in my shoe.
Mind you, it’s not just about loyalty to my father and his political allegiances. I’ve become convinced through my courses in university and my years of teaching in the humanities that the cooperative (socialist) model is superior to the competitive (capitalist) model as a way of doing government. The debate on this subject is certainly being reopened by the “Wall Street Crisis” going on in the US at the moment. Capitalism has made such a gigantic blunder that it can’t think of any other way to save itself except to appeal to taxpayers to rescue it. Had the US been governed after the Social Democratic model, government might long since have reined in the excesses of corporate greed and the country would have been spared the spectacle we’re currently watching.
The astounding thing is that many people still believe—apparently—that the “invisible hand” that guides the workings of an unfettered marketplace will also lead us all to the best possible world. Greed should never be allowed to drive the bus; to ride in it maybe, but under a watchful eye. It’s a government’s role to act as guardian of the public interest and to ensure that resources are distributed equitably enough to provide the basics of a reasonable life to everyone. For this, there must be controls on those who would make their living by speculating with and manipulating the economic system in order to become wealthy without actually providing any goods or services for the public.
I may vote strategically this election. My MP is a Conservative who believes that crime can be fought with harsher punishment and that day care centres cause women to go out to work when they should be raising their children. Whichever Candidate comes closest—in my opinion—to being able to deliver a challenge to this kind of thinking may well get my vote, although I may stand in the voting booth for a long time with pencil poised, struggling to look beyond old allegiances and at the big picture.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Kennedy on US political scene.
Robert F Kennedy said in a speech you can see on the truthout website: “80% of Republicans are uninformed Democrats.” He goes on to show how Republicans and Democrats showed no difference in their opinions when they were given accurate information on the question—for instance—of the morality of the war in Iraq. There’s a great deal more to his speech that will energize liberals (small l), something that’s badly needed in North America with two very important elections coming up.
It may not be appropriate to compare Canada’s Conservative Party to the Republican in the USA; it is nevertheless as important for us to be informed about the issues of corporate control of government and the consequences, and to ascertain which party is most likely to keep a check on government-by-lobby. “Where the government controls the corporate world, you have communism. Where the corporate world controls government, you have fascism.” Another quote from Kennedy’s speech. “Democracies have to walk the fine line between the two extremes.”
Kennedy also points out that the USA no longer has an investigative press, and so the population is getting very slanted news reports from Fox and it’s equivalents.
It’s a Shekinah morning. There’s some time yet before the staff at the Retreat Centre meet in the office below our apartment to set priorities for the day. Time to sit on the couch with my laptop and reflect for an hour. Time to pause at the commas and periods and scan the high riverbank opposite with its clumps of yellow poplar, red cranberry bushes and rusty chokecherry shrubs. Autumn is the most magnificent time of year here, colour-wise.
I’ve learned in the last weeks that I love nature, but at a distance more than up close. As we drove the sharp bend before descending into Shekinah late last night, two sleek whitetail deer streaked through the wash of our headlights, close enough for us to see their frightened eyes, far enough away for me to take evasive action. Cars and deer colliding on the roads is a regular occurrence around here.
And then there are the peskiest children of Mother Nature: beaver, squirrels, chipmunks and mice. Along the banks of a ravine that runs behind our apartment, the beaver have found a haven. A spring-fed stream winds its way down the gully to spill itself into the North Saskatchewan, a perfect setup for beaver, who will build dams across this stream as often as we can break them apart (I have yet to be involved in this), denuding the ravine of already-sparse poplar growth.
Yesterday we cleaned out a garage of accumulated bikes and bike parts, camping gear, old records in boxes and the mountains of odds and ends that tend to accumulate in garage-like places where order is not immediately of the essence. And we cleaned up mouse shit. I hate mouse leavings with a passion. But here at Shekinah, there will always be mice; the appropriate response to them, I guess, would be to admit that it is we who are encroaching on their territory, not the other way ‘round. Until that consciousness sets in, however, I will set traps for them. Not the other way ‘round.
The bushes around the retreat centre are tangles of beaver-cut stumps, fallen poplar and the berry and cherry shrubs that thrive on the banks of the Saskatchewan. At this time of year, the high bush cranberries are overripe, and as they burst and give up their juices to the wind, they exude an aroma that you wouldn’t want to harvest as a household fragrance. It’s not skunk, but it suggests skunk. I understand now why my mother called these Schtinkberren. Chokecherries are at their best now though, and I strip a handful of them from a shrub every time I walk down to the Timberlodge, suck off the meat and spit stones like a baseball coach (or a Rhinefeld Mennonite) spits sunflower seed shells. I’m told the chokecherry is a great herbal remedy for, well, whatever ails ya.
Poets and artists of the Romantic Period introduced us to the idea that the natural world isn’t a dirty, hostile place that one does best to avoid. Oh, there’s obviously danger out there; if the poison oak don’t get you, a black bear might. On the other hand, traditional aboriginal spirituality stresses our unity with the natural world, and since Darwin explained to us that we humans are intricately bound up with all living matter on earth, we are more prone to see our connectedness to nature. Not like the pre-enlightenment folk, who believed that the night air carried a foulness that caused illness and death, and that evil spirits roamed the midnight woods. Life for us now is much quieter than it was in town. Here at Shekinah, a cloudy night renders our surroundings so dark that even following the gravel road down to the meadows is a challenge. The onset of evening darkness is like a signal to all of nature to hush; sound seems to “leave the building” along with the light.
I don’t think I’ll ever master the art of being one with the earth. I curse when a bramble catches my sleeve, I hold a mouse trap at arms length when called upon to dispose of its contents. High on the bank above us, Shekinah offers a house called “The Hermitage,” a primitive log structure characterized more by what it hasn’t got than what it has. It doesn’t have a bathroom, running water, electricity, gas, and so, of course, lacks pretty much all of the amenities and gadgetry that we associate with comfortable living. Agnes and I helped Lorne clean it yesterday.
Agnes said, “You couldn’t pay me enough to spend a night in this place!”
I said, after noting the rough walls, the crude wood stove, the flies and mouse droppings, “There’s nothing wrong with this place that a can of gasoline and a match wouldn’t fix!”
And yet, The Hermitage is booked as much as any facility on the premises. There are people who want to experience the primitive life, who want to be so close to nature that it pokes it’s fingers through the windows beside their bed as they lie there, gazing at the stars through poplar boughs.
Our apartment, by contrast, has all the good stuff we’ve decided we need. And it manages to allow us a good look at nature’s magnificence through big picture windows while keeping most of that nature outside . . . where it belongs.
There are two ways to enjoy nature: theoretically, and at an appropriate distance.
I had occasion to talk church history with a member of the SalemBibleFellowshipChurch in Waldheim, Saskatchewan recently, primarily on the question of their history as a congregation. She couldn’t help me very much, since she hadn’t paid much attention to the congregation’s historical roots, but she gave me one of those rural community history books that were being produced in the 1980’s all across Saskatchewan, and there a few pages summarized their story.
They began as the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren church (Krimmer: German for “Crimean”), an offshoot of the Mennonite Brethren movement in the area of the Molochna Colony just north of the Black Sea in Ukraine. In the 1870s, a group of about half a dozen families emigrated to the US where they settled in Kansas for a time before some of them decided to move on to the area between the Saskatchewan Rivers at present day Waldheim. Here they worshipped in homes until a “revival” saw their numbers increase and the need for a permanent worship home emerge. The building that grew from that burned down in the late thirties and a new building was erected west of Waldheim, but subsequently moved into town and added to. (This may not be precisely accurate, but I’m not so much interested in the building.)
Time came when the Krimmer churches in Canada merged with the Mennonite Brethren, except that the Salem Group chose not to participate in this merger, joining instead another branch of the MB church called—I think—the EvangelicalMennoniteBrethrenChurch. In the 1980’s, as I recall, the Salem group joined the Fellowship of Evangelical Bible Churches and parted company with the “Mennonite” name for good.
Salem “Mennonites” are considerably more conservative in their theology than the Zoar Mennonites (Mennonite ChurchSaskatchewan) and the MennoniteBrethrenChurch a stone’s throw away. The website for the Fellowship of Evangelical Bible churches has a pdf download available on their tenets regarding controversial issues: Not surprisingly the stand on abortion is “conception marks the beginning of a human life;” on homosexuality: “it’s a sin but homosexuals can find redemption;” on gender roles: “God gave the tasks of eldership and pastoring to men, but women have important other roles in the church,” etc.
Waldheim could well form a useful case study for the branching that occurred in the Anabaptist world in the last half of the 19th Century. The last names of people in at least the three branches of Anabaptism represented in Waldheim are often the same, and so I wonder how it came to be that I am attending this branch and not that. If my ancestors had lived a few houses over in the Ukrainian colonies, would I be a conservative of the Kleingemeinde or Krimmer branch? Are my more-liberal, less-literal Bible interpretations a matter of choice, or are thy consequences of historical accidents?
I’ll think about this in church this morning as Allan delivers his sermon and the Gideons bring greetings to the congregation, and as we sing hymns, some from Hymnal: a worship book and some from Sing the Journey. And I’ll remember what Robert Frost said so eloquently:
Our kitchen at Shekinah
