Easter Reflections

Spring has sprung . . . backwards

Tomato seedlings

Note:Words that have a different colour or are underlined are hyperlinks; they lead to a reference or to supporting information on the web. Just click on the hyperlink.

Good Friday. The name may seem puzzling; it’s a commemoration of an execution, after all. Holy Friday, Great Friday, Black Friday, are other names for the day, but Good is common in our day and likely comes from the archaic sense of the word when it still connoted Holiness. (The etymology of good bye is roughly: God be wi’ ye /  God by ye / Good bye).

                Here at Academy Bed & Breakfast, we’re hosting guests visiting families in Rosthern, we’re blanketed under a cover of fresh snow (with more to come) and the temperatures are 10 – 15 degrees below normal. There may be goodness in this prolonging of winter; I fail to feel it at present.

                Good Friday worship services have taken place in the Christian Church worldwide. I attended the ecumenical one in Rosthern. It was done in the form of a typical funeral: a participant read the eulogy, Mary Magdalene presented a tribute to the deceased as did the Apostle Peter. Primarily, God Friday services remind Christians of the sacrifice that was made when Jesus gave up his life as an offering for our redemption. Not everyone will comprehend that, logically, (including me) but the transaction that is variously called “being born again,” “conversion,” “accepting Jesus Christ as your Personal Saviour and Lord,” relies on the adoption of a belief that Christ grants eternal life to all who put their faith in the validity of this Black Friday sacrifice.

                There are protesters that say, roughly, that a God that is placated by human sacrifice doesn’t correspond to a creator of a universe and living things that he loves; it’s too bloody and violent to be credited. We must be misunderstanding—they may say—what is meant when we describe the transaction of redemption in this way.

Some explain the crucifixion more politically: a leader of a subversive Jewish group was executed by Roman authority. Leaders of rebellions have always been targets of official wrath (See "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth," by Reza Aslan). Still others think of it as a welcome Friday holiday, a good time to watch NHL playoffs and sitcoms on TV.

There’s plenty of ambivalence to go ‘round . . .

Easter Sunday

. . . as there is surrounding the entire Easter cycle in the church calendar.

“The modern English term Easter, cognate with modern German Ostern, developed from the Old English word Ēastre or Ēostre. This is generally held to have originally referred to the name of an Anglo-Saxon goddess, Ēostre, a form of the widely attested Indo-European dawn goddess.” (Click here for more.)

Orthodoxy has always insisted that contrary to our experience, a body that’s been dead for three days can recover physically, miraculously, and that that must be believed as fact, otherwise the gospel message is null and void. (I’ve been astounded at the lengths to which commentators on—and researchers of—the resurrection have been willing to go to prove or disprove the authenticity of the miraculous resurrection; see a typical website on the subject of the Shroud of Turin, for instance.) Liberal theology is more likely to accept a metaphoric resurrection, i.e. the ignition of a fire that spreads throughout the world and is evident today in the extraordinary impact Christ’s followers, equipped with his spirit and fervour, have had and are continuing to have.

By this reasoning, though, Genghis Khan, Winston Churchill and, yes, Elvis Presley are capable of “resurrection” and of lingering on as presences in the world, a thesis that’s not impossible to defend.

The metaphoric conception of the resurrection, of course, has to assume that early gospel writers stretched the truth, or else wrote in a code that they understood . . . but that we tend to confuse with historical accounting.

This kind of speculation, of course, plays havoc with those whose faith is founded on the hope of their own resurrection and that mystical transaction that makes eternal life possible, and makes belief the key. It also messes with our delight in Easter bunnies, Easter bonnets, Easter eggs and the euphoria surrounding the message and the music associated with both spring and hope arriving simultaneously (the former not to be the case this year, apparently).

No matter how one understands the Easter sequence, it seems to me the message in it must be remarkably similar in import. In a world of pain, suffering and hopelessness, there was one who saw in every human a child of God and found the strength to sacrifice himself to relieve the lostness he saw around him. To the hungry, he gave food; to the sick, healing; to still others, like Nicodemus, a vision for rebirth into a better reality; and to all, he offered hope.

No matter how the story of Easter is interpreted, unless it creates in us fervour for the core message it will remain meaningless and Easter bunnies, Easter eggs, and NHL playoffs will have to do, especially when spring seems a distant dream.

               

Rest in Peace, Jim Flaherty

Jim Flaherty was a politician who stood out in what often appears to be a humourless, ideologically-obsessive pack on parliament hill. Even his opponents recognized this; news of his tragic, early death had them rushing to the mikes to pay tributes to a man whose policies they had been castigating for years: diverting budget money from crime prevention to retribution, omnibus budget bills that made meaningful debate on vital matters impossible, maximum efforts toward resource exploitation without credible attention to climate change, etc., etc.

Stephen Harper called him his partner, and whatever was announced as regards policy and subsequent legislation (Fair Elections Act, for instance) rose out of the collaboration of Harper, Flaherty and others in the cabinet and caucus, obviously.  

                But to harp on this when family and friends of a man tragically taken before his time are in mourning would be a callous act. Eulogizing people’s strengths and forgiving their weaknesses is what we do to honour the lives of the recently-departed, so much so that the adage—if your wish is that people should speak well of you, consider dying—has a ring of authenticity to it.

                Watching Jim Flaherty do the public part of his job—the interviews, the scrums, all the stuff we normally see of politicians—led me to believe that the accolades regarding his demonstration of extraordinary humanity might not be misplaced. He tended to speak forthrightly and civilly to reporters and to questions in the House of Commons. The need to accuse and belittle opponents just wasn’t that well developed in Flaherty; he didn’t come to his job with a mouthful of razorblades as so many of his colleagues and opponents seem to have done. He smiled a lot, like a man who is constantly on guard against taking himself and the trials of the day too seriously.

                The parallels to the death of Jack Layton are obvious; responses to their deaths were almost identical and may equally have demonstrated that what we look for in leadership is not hard-edged idealism or even extraordinary work and dedication, it’s the consistent practice of kindness and empathy, a humanity that nurtures people first, everything else second.

Many of the tributes sounded hollow, especially comments like “He was the best finance minister we ever had.” History will decide if his work in the cabinet was characterized by more missteps than feats of brilliance . . . or the other way ‘round. That’s how it will be for all of us when we've walked our last mile; fortunate for us if the choice of those left behind is to “forgive us our trespasses, [even as they will one day be forgiven].”

                Simply put, there’s a time to place reflections on what a person was above analysis of what that person did. Many acquaintances and friends were interviewed and for me, comments like, “He was a really nice guy,” seem to sum up what will be his lasting legacy for those who really, actually knew and valued him.

                As for the rest of us, who get to know only what the media choose to divulge, we will simply watch as our country pays its formal respects on Wednesday, and some of us will pontificate on its meaning as if we actually knew what that meaning was . . .

. . . over coffee, maybe.

Been to Mass lately?

My church tradition doesn’t include the Mass, so when Duff Warkentin, conductor of the Station Singers asked me to write a review of their performance of Carol Barnett’s The World Beloved: a Bluegrass Mass, I began to Google for information.

For you Protestants out there who “go to church” and don’t “attend Mass,” here are a few things I learned:

·         The word “Mass” comes from the Latin missa, root of dismissal and generally has to do with sending of the people to be the servants of Christ,

·         It’s basically a structured liturgy of worship including penitence, a plea for mercy and forgiveness, acknowledgement of Christ’s sacrifice for our redemption, praise of the Triune God and a central act of worship, the taking of communion.

We Protestants were weaned off liturgical worship a long time ago, but lately I’ve noticed that worship leaders in my church organize the services in phases very nearly equivalent to the progression of the Mass: confession, praise, scripture, etc. Although different denominations have structured Mass differently, even given it different names like Holy and Divine Liturgy, the differences in the content of worship seem to include the same parts as the traditional Mass.

And along comes The World Beloved: a Bluegrass Mass and the two performances I attended, taking notes, photos, trying to come up with erudite descriptions of what I was hearing.

·         Note 1: It’s a concert I’m at, not a worship per se. Although I’m sitting in a church today and heard the same music in a theatre yesterday, the content is definitely church/Bible in origin. I paid admission, will write a review, people applaud boisterously. Hmmm.

·         Note 2: Although it’s a concert I’m at, my friend Ben singing the Credo, the Grinnin’ Pickers playing the Art Thou Weary  interlude move me almost to tears . . . what’s that about??

·         Note 3: Agnus Dei is sung so beautifully today: Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.

·         Note 4: I don’t know enough about music to be doing this; luckily it’s for the Saskatchewan Valley News—and perhaps the Canadian Mennonite, not the New York Times . . .

Sometimes some of us declare that a particular music genre is the only good music that exists, but I’ve noticed that the range of our preferences broadens when what we’re listening to is live—as opposed to recorded—is experienced in the company of others and is sincerely presented by musicians who love what they do. So although I’m supposed to love best of all the orchestral and choral works of dead Germans—and I do—I am also a lover of blue grass, folk, jazz, rock, hymnody, and a whole bunch of others whose names I get confused (I found out recently that “indy” is “independent”).

The Grinnin’ Pickers (bass, banjo, mandolin, guitar, fiddle, vocals) did a set of bluegrass tunes before The World Beloved. They also threw in a few banjo jokes for free:

·         Seems the banjo player in their ad hoc band realized recently that she’d left her banjo in her unlocked car. Hurrying back, worried that it might be stolen, she arrived at the car and found three more banjos had been tossed into the back seat.

·         What’s the definition of perfect pitch? Hitting a garbage can with a banjo at ten paces without touching the sides.

I feel a need to include lines from the Gloria:

Glory be to God below,

For feather, fur, for scale and fin,

For vine uptwisting, blossom’s fire,

For muscle, sinew, nerve and skin

And every feature set agow.

Oh, Glory be to God below.

               

You show me your world; I'll show you mine . . .

Wait for it, wait for it . . .

It’s odd. When you’re in church and you’re singing How Great Thou Art, and the preacher’s expounding on the Beatitudes and the choir is singing . . . and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, it’s easy to see everything that was, is and will be through the window of those words, those emotions, those harmonies.

                And then you go home and you listen to the news of what politicians, kings and armies, and corporations are doing to the world, and that becomes reality and you bristle in disappointment that the world is so material and crass, that it’s all competitive and heartless and grasping and nothing like the Kingdom of God.

                And maybe you pick up Stephen Hawking and read a conceptualization of the universe to which our planet and all that’s in it are integral, where distance is measured in millions of light years and the earth as we know it is a speck, a wart on the leg of a flea on a dog’s back in some incomprehensibly massive “everything” and . . . the glory of the Lord shall be revealed seems like a long-forgotten page in a child’s book of rhymes.

                Or you take a walk in the woods, see the stars as poets have seen them for centuries, lose yourself in a Manet landscape and the whole idea of belief falls away and the universe—you realize—is inside you, a something in your brief soul that is, in the end, the only reality there may ever be. It’s joy, it’s discovery, it’s art, it’s music. For a moment, sheer exhilaration casts off all those other “truths” like spent, dried shells.

                Is it any wonder that the concept of believing is being rethought by anyone who is well-off enough to own access to many different windows: television, radio, newspapers, the internet, books, lectures, schools, galleries, etc. Unless one is able to hold competing “beliefs” without too much dissonance, life becomes a game of accepting this, rejecting that or the other way ‘round. Not that that won’t always be the case to some extent, but it seems to me that the “everything” has to be—in the end—one thing, and that the apparent worlds have to be—logically—one world. In other words, the “everything” is a unity, no matter which window opens upon it at any given time.

                For most of us, most of the time, living actively in the idea of a unified “everything” is just not possible; it’s a case of trying to force a litre of water into a teacup; there just isn’t room. Lately, I’ve been finding some solace in exercising what is called in German, Gelassenheit, most closely translated into English as “yieldedness,” a sentiment that’s familiar to us in the proverb illustrated above and translated: “God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference (generally attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr).” By all means, enjoy studying the “everything” through all the windows available to you, but yield to the knowledge that in all time to this date, no one has been found who is able to gaze through all the windows at once with the sense of the completeness for which we long so desperately.

                There are plenty of witnesses around who will gladly draw the blinds for you on all the windows but the one that is their view of choice. Gelassenheit, to Niebuhr, never meant settling for ignorance, for the single-window understanding of the world. To that, I would guess, Niebuhr would say that choosing to explore a broader—as opposed to a manageable—range of possibilities falls into the category of “changing the things we can,”

              . . . and that takes courage.

                 

               

Wounded Soldiers

Viking Warriors Imagined

Veterans groups are turning on the federal government. Roughly, the complaint goes like this: you send us into dangerous battle in the interest of protecting lives and propagating Canadian democratic values abroad and when we come back—many of us wounded physically and/or mentally—you drop us like hot cannon balls! We deserve better than that!

               I don’t know how the armoured, sword-and-dagger-wielding gladiators of medieval conflicts behaved after battle, but the high rate of post-traumatic stress disorder among soldiers returning from Afghanistan should tell us that modern-day warfare is taking a terrible toll on soldiers. As to veterans’ contention that the government that sent them into battle is not sufficiently grateful, the suicides and the fights over compensation for the wounded speak for themselves. 

               But wait; doesn’t this bypass a bigger question? Is the work of a soldier really that heroic that special treatment for the wounded is obvious? Heaven knows that many of us are wounded performing day-to-day, unheroic services to humanity: road and bridge building, construction, farming, commercial fishing, and I’ve seen numerous teachers come away after a season with unruly classes exhibiting what could be called post-traumatic stress disorder. Granted, many injured civilians are fighting with Workers’ Compensation and disability pension providers much like the veterans are struggling with the federal government. Agencies that ostensibly provide backup services in case of injury at work are good at taking in premiums, not so good at paying up; a budget-balancing government is no different.

               Had Afghanistan been a war where a decisive victory over an enemy could be declared, the situation of veterans of that conflict might be different. But as I’ve said in earlier posts, the Afghanistan intervention had the flavour of a fool’s errand; Talibanism is woven into the cultural and faith fabric of that country and you don’t successfully combat religion with conventional military warfare. El Quaeda was driven out of Afghanistan but simply relocated, possibly only temporarily.

Granted, schools were built and large numbers of children—including girls—are attending, but it takes a great deal less effort to burn a school down than to build one. Maybe the slim hope that a few years of education will have changed what has been the oppressive factor in that culture can be legitimately held up as a worthy achievement of that war, but if that’s the case, the real evidence won’t be demonstrable for some time. The proof will be in the pudding, and this kind of pudding takes time.

Neither the Taliban nor El Quaeda have surrendered.

It’s my suspicion that Canadians just want to put Afghanistan behind them like a hockey game they should have won—but lost in a shoot-out. This is not good news for wounded veterans trying to rebuild their lives without adequate means to do so successfully.

              

Soon, but not yet

I enjoy watching Peter Mansbridge's The National in the evening, especially when the “At Issue” panel is on and his three clever informants analyze what we've been seeing and hearing . . . but might not be understanding. Last night's conversation was about the Quebec leaders' debate, Joe Oliver's appointment as finance minister and Alison Redford's resignation as premier of Alberta.

Hot topics of the day; some days, there's not enough new “news” to make it riveting.

      I watched it again on my computer this morning for two reasons: the first was to assess for myself how they expressed their opinions on the issues as opposed to what they said. It's my understanding that the exchanges among Peter Mansbridge, Andrew Coyne, Chantal Hebert and Bruce Anderson are only broadly scripted, that they are aware of the questions they will face beforehand but are speaking ad libitum. In other words, they're thinking and talking at the same time.

       It's when speaking extemporaneously that facility with language—or clumsiness, for that matter—sticks out like like either a well-turned or a sore thumb.

       My second reason for wanting to review the exchange was to hear again the use (or misuse) of the phrase, it begs the question. I thought I recalled Andrew Coyne using the expression in last night's At Issue and I guess I wanted to catch him “red-handed,” because all three of the panelists are—to my mind—eloquent . . . in general. I'd long been annoyed by the use of the phrase to mean it raises the question when it actually refers to an argument in which the whole point being made is supported by a premise that is unproven . . . as if it were proven. Put as simply as possible, the statement “Because boys are naturally cleverer at mathematics than girls, they are likely to do better in engineering disciplines,” is a case of begging the question. It's a logical fallacy described long, long ago by Aristotle: the argument requires that we accept the unproven premise that “boys are naturally cleverer at mathematics.” It's very much like the logical fallacy we call a non sequitur: the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.
    Begging the question is also described as "a fallacy in which the premises include the claim that the conclusion is true or (directly or indirectly) assume that the conclusion is true," as in "She's not pretty because she has unattractive features."

     I didn't find the phrase in question; maybe I missed it, imagined it or remembered it “out of place.”

      And besides, does it matter that we use begging the question in a different way than was once intended?

      One thing seems apparent to me: politicians utter begging the question statements all the time; it's a tragedy that we don't educate our children to recognize them when they hear them. Take this argument: “The Harper government is good for Canada because it has managed to maintain economic growth through a difficult recession.” The premises that the Harper government is responsible for the “maintenance of economic growth” or that the recession was “difficult” need to be shown with some proof before the argument, “good for Canada” even becomes a satisfying rhetorical conclusion.

      The question of whether or not “ecomonic growth” can be assumed to be good in any case begs yet another question. That premise is most certainly unproven, especially as it pertains to the generations yet to come.

      Meanwhile, I like watching and listening to At Issue.                

     Sometimes, I even pay attention to what's being said.