Compensation

A gift in honour of our fiftieth . . .Thank you, Zachariases

Another great tomato year!

What much boils down to is this: do we as a global village think long term, or short? 

            CBC's The National showed a computer-generated animation last night that condensed the time required for matter to coalesce into present galaxies after the Big Bang; 13,750,000,000 earth-years of cosmic activity in a one-minute video animation.

            I'm not talking about that kind of long term.

            A year ago, Jack Layton died and the country mourned the passing of a man who was to become a legend. In a matter of mere weeks this robust, energetic man was overtaken and defeated by a particularly aggressive cancer.

            I'm not talking about that kind of short term.

            My point is modest in comparison to these two examples: can we visualize the results of today's choices for our descendants 100, 300 or 500 years from now? And if we can, can we also find the courage and energy to act decisively in the interest of a future beyond our own? 150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote an essay called “Compensation” in which he pointed out—speculatively—that everything we do has a compensatory opposite. This is not news: the pleasure of smoking tobacco is paid for in diminished health; the ability to drive here and there in a car is paid for in pollution, etc.  

            One of the tragedies of our day is the degree to which the major exploiters of nature's largesse are passing the compensations on to others, present and future.

            And another tragedy is the ease with which the public (some of the ones who will pay for the exploitation) are bought off. Stephen Harper's recent tour of the Arctic was primarily in support of the exploitative extraction of wealth; the public was diverted from the obvious compensations this would require with a national park announcement (albeit with a big chunk of the recommended area excluded for future mineral extraction reasons) and—of all things—a government-sponsored push to find the sunken ships of the ill-fated Franklin expedition. Thrown in was that other Canadian shibboleth: sovereignty over the Northwest Passage and the polar seas and islands.

            The Arctic and its people pay an inordinately high compensation for wealth extraction in that fragile environment. We know this, but some of us just don't give a damn. Summarize that with an obscene quote from Kevin O'Leary in a promo for the CBC's “The Lang-O'Leary Exchange:” I'm happy to be a communist if I can make a buck! Reminds me of Paul’s words in I Corinthians 9:22 (NIV): “I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some make a buck!”

(Shame on CBC for opting for showmanship instead of objective honesty . . . again!)

            But to end on a less pessimistic note: Wednesday night we got our weekly basket of produce from a small, local market garden. It was a heaping cornucopia of potatoes, tomatoes, celery, beans, cabbage, beets, Kale, carrots, and turnips, all raised “by hand” without the crap that commercial food production is required to add to make it transportable.

            Compensations for our gardener friends’ modest living? A great deal of hard work under a Saskatchewan sky, I guess. But for us, the taste alone is reward enough for the extra washing, preserving, etc. And the ecological footprint for feeding us is small indeed!

            I wonder where Stephen Harper, Brad Wall, Vic Toews, John Baird, etc.—the ones in charge of our economies currently—get their vegetables? Not on King William Island, for certain.

            Hmmm.

On bylaws, creeds, confessions and handbooks

In Agnes' Garden.

A charitable organization operates under strict federal and provincial laws which must be satisfied if it's to maintain its charitable standing (I can already see you yawning). Underneath these imposed laws, it generally creates bylaws and a procedural handbook, partly to ensure that the provincial and federal laws are satisfied from generation to generation of boards and partly just to make it easier for newcomers to leadership to understand the history of “the way things have been done up to now.” That's simplified but will have to do for today's purposes.
    Although I've never heard it in this way before, I think it's a usable analogy to the writing of creeds, confessions of faith, even the hymns and sermons in our churches. Historically, the Holy Bible has been the federal/provincial “law” that over-arches common faith and practice; creeds and confessions have been the bylaws that have sought to regularize their application and the hymns and sermons are, let's say, handbook material.
    One would think that if the over-arching “law” remains the same, the subsidiaries should also be static, but in the case of a charitable organization, almost every membership meeting includes tinkering with bylaws, and handbook directives are even more fluid.
    Without stretching the analogy too far, can creeds and confessions also be seen to be tentative and subject to amendment, not because the “law” changes necessarily, but because the understanding of the “law” changes in response to scholarship and the passage of time? It's no surprise that since they are interpretive of the Bible itself, they carry the aura of sacredness and their rethinking is undertaken only reluctantly and with appropriate gravity. But clearly, whatever view we take of the inspiration of scripture, creeds and confessions are man-made.
    Let's go back to bylaws and handbooks for a moment. My experience has been that occasions arise—and not infrequently—when it just seems right to take an action even though it's not prescribed or sanctioned by the “rules” we drafted last year, and so we break (or bend) them to fit what seems right at present.  History has shown that the sky doesn't fall at the circumventing of a “rule,” say, to hold the annual meeting in February when bylaws specify January.
    Does the same apply to confessions and creeds?
    There's a case study on the horizon for many churches. The law of the land allows for same-sex marriage; if the Confession of Faith of a certain church says that God has ordained that marriage is a union between one man and one woman and the license to perform marriages is granted or withheld by the state, and a loving gay couple asks to be married in a church, what's a pastor to do? (That's a rhetorical question; the answer is already proving to be different from denomination to denomination, from congregation to congregation.)
    Typically, the circumventing of a bylaw or handbook provision draws protests from those who take comfort in rules, especially written ones. “You can't do that; it's not in the bylaws,” is a typical response and the protestors have a version of right on their side: if you don't follow your own rules, why write them in the first place?!?
    One answer to that is that we draft creeds, bylaws, confessions to slow down change, to prevent precipitous adaptations that might incrementally draw us away from our goals and mission, or put us in opposition to the over-arching law of the governing body—the Bible in the case of the church. Another answer is that the slavish adherence to rules set at a given time is retrograde to progress; every bylaw, handbook, creed and confession is, in effect, an anachronism—a thing out of its time—precisely because it was written for a day that is not now.
    Critical to the change vs. stability tension is not so much the question of what precisely we believe on a subject (like same-sex marriage, let's say) as is the approach by which we contemplate, debate and decide what action we will (or will not) take together. The adversarial system in which we live has pervaded every facet of our lives; typically, we fore-go real, discerning debate and go straight to picking sides and working to see that our side wins. Or we keep silent on tense issues in order to preserve unity. Neither approach is salutary in the long run.
    Ideally, when pressures of one kind or another suggest a possible “bylaw” change, a process of consideration should exist to guide us; would the person who can teach how this is done well please step forward.
    The analogy breaks down, of course, as all analogies do if stretched too far. The law of the land changes with time; the Bible is “written in stone,” for all intents and purposes. The strain on scholarship and “interpretation for our time and situation” has caused some of the tensions we're experiencing right now; unable to anticipate any adaptations in The Book, we must decide if same-sex marriage, for instance, is retrograde-to or supportive-of the spirit of the will of God, which is clearly to rescue people from the tentacles of evil and to restore creation to an Eden-like harmony.
    At least, that's my understanding . . . today.


   

Number 18

Beware the Castor Bean

Andrew Kooman titled his play, She has a Name, an odd name until you realize early on that the subject of the play—a fifteen year-old prostitute in a brothel in Bangkok—has for five years known herself only as “Number 18.” 
   Burnt Thicket Theatre in conjuction with Raise Their Voice is on the road this summer, travelling the Fringe circuit and stopping over at other venues where possible to present a message through Kooman's play: "The trafficking of women and children for purposes of sexual exploitation is a multi-billion dollar business worldwide."
    The play was read by the actors at Ebenezer Baptist on Monday night; it was a one-performance stop so a full staging was likely impossible. Even so, a superb cast told the story of Number 18 and the aid workers who try to save her with such passion that it hardly mattered.
    A business? Really? Doesn't a business imply entrepreneurs? shareholders? managers? capital? consumer/customers? Well, actually, the play presents a set of characters who are most of the above except—and I wondered about this—the North American or European customer who will pay big money to rape a child, double if he's the first. There's the pimp who is Number 18's ruthless owner; the Madam who is the perverted foreman, and hovering just offstage are the police who are silent-partner shareholders, their silence their investment, the pay-offs their dividend cheques. 
    As I understand it, the business plan goes something like this: find a destitute widow with children but no means to support them, entice her to sell one of them for an amount that would be a pittance to many but seems like salvation to her, take the child to Bangkok or Phnom Penh and offer her for rent to the tourists crowding the street in the brothel areas. Chances are the price will cover both her purchase and transportation, and renting her out thereafter will be clear profit.
    Director Stephen Waldschmidt writes in the program: “[I want] my two little boys to grow up in a world where men are not conditioned to demand access to the bodies of women and children, [and] for the name, Number 18 . . . to resound in the ears of every girl on earth.”
    At the very root of the sex-slave horror is the little boy in the first world who may become an enabling customer when he grows up . . . with the means to purchase whatever he desires. Waldschmidt's emphasis is correct; the means to the end he seeks, though, remains as elusive as it ever was.
    There are a number of NGOs working on the rescue or recovery of these exploited women and children. Raise Their Voice (raisetheirvoice.com) and A Better World (www.a-better-world.ca) are partners in these efforts, and Ratanak Internationl (www.ratanak.org) is “a registered Canadian charity working on the front lines in Cambodia to rescue and rehabilitate children sold into slavery.”
    Maybe you and I can begin to help by checking out their websites and giving their work a boost. If you know of other ways to help in combating the atrocities of sex slavery, let me know and I'll post your information. Send a note to g.epp@accesscomm.ca.
    She has a Name is at the Calgary Fringe August 3 – 11, in Victoria August 24 to September 3, in Kelowna from September 18 – 21, in Edmonton from September 25 – 30 and in Red Deer from October 2 – 6. Unfortunately for those of you in Manitoba and east, that part of their tour is done.

What about Shylock? What about Daniel?

Opening the Book of Daniel

Shylock the money-lender

We used to debate whether or not Shakespeare was anti-Semitic, given his creation of the grasping moneylender, Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice. 
    There were those who felt the portrayal (not to mention the name) of “Nigger Jim” in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn made it inappropriate material for high school study. 
    There’s hardly any doubt that both Shylock and Nigger Jim are stereotypes common to the the time in which they were written, although a case could be made that the writers are making use of caricatures of those stereotypes satirically.
    Concern by educators about how these books should be taught—if at all—shouldn’t come as a surprise given the current climate on the subject of racial profiling.
    It certainly raises questions about the skills required for the appropriate reading and interpreting of texts “out of their time” without—as it were—throwing the baby out with the bathwater. (I really hate it when I have to resort to cliché.) It requires a judgment regarding the writer’s stature in his or her time, his or her intentions, the sophistication of the audience (both Shakespeare’s and Twain’s target audiences and the audience that might be a present-day high school class, for instance).
    I’ve written enough fiction to know that my audience will have some readers in it who will assume that if my character says something controversial, I must hold the same opinion. I wrote it, after all. There are also readers on whom irony, metaphor, and other figurative speech are bound to be misread primarily because their experience with such language is not broad.
    All of which takes me to this concern: how do we appropriately read and interpret one of the most read and revered texts of all time, namely the Holy Bible? More importantly, how do we agree on a way to read it with integrity, a way that might bring about debate, but not quarreling? 
    A man sat down beside me at coffee a few days ago and knowing I had just been in Vancouver at the national church assembly of the Mennonite Church began to quiz me rather forcefully about what had been decided “about the gays and lesbians.”
    “It never came up,” I said, half-truthfully. “We decided on a plan to deal with how we ought to interpret the Bible before making any far-reaching pronouncements on such a controversial subject,” I went on.
    He gave me his interpretation of what the Bible had to say, including reference to all the usual proof texts and numerous mentions of Sodom and Gomorrah. “How’re you gonna get around that?” he asked, as if I were the chief organizer of the Toronto Gay Pride Parade.
    I concluded with a bit of a scolding I tend to use in such situations. “Perhaps we should read the Bible as it applies to us personally . . . and avoid applying it to everyone else.”
    We parted amicably; he thanked me for listening to him.
    It seems unlikely to me that we’ll easily get Christians with a variety of backgrounds, experiences and worldviews to learn to read the Bible differently from the way they have heretofore, any more than we’ll get consensus on whether or not Shakespeare’s creation of Shylock means this or that.
    Meanwhile, Christians generally could benefit from a thorough reading and discussion of N.T. Wright’s Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today. But then, that too is a book written in a certain context with a certain style and I can already hear the cries of “Yes, but that’s not what he’s saying!” or “I can’t make any sense out of that!”
    And to what audience is Wright writing? A chapter sub-heading like “A Diminishing Focus on the Narrative Character and Israel-Dimension of Scripture” gives a clue; what percentage of the people in the pews can process that language with confidence?
    In Shylock’s famous “If you prick us [Jews], do we not bleed?” speech, he also says:

If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction (III,i).*
 
So is Shakespeare an anti-Semite? I don’t know for sure what his private thoughts were, but can’t think of a more enjoyable afternoon than one spent with you interpreting Shylock’s speech! 
    I'm far from ready to tackle the Book of Daniel with confidence though. 


*Roughly paraphrased: If a Jew does harm to a Christian, what will the Christian do to regain his pride? Well, take revenge, of course. And if a Christian does harm to a Jew, what should he do to gain back his self respect? Well, take revenge, naturally. The evil of revenge that you Christians taught me I will practice on you, and although it won't be easy, you'll see that I'll do what you taught me better than you showed me.

When we all get together . . .

Khortitza Mennonite Church ca. 1895

When we all get together - MC Canada Assembly 2012

It was 6:00 pm. We'd just concluded a lengthy session of debate on three resolutions, a process elongated by a move to change some wording and considerable back and forth before the proposed change was rejected. It was probably a good suggestion but clearly, the 250 or so delegates in the room had had enough talk on the matter. Subject fatigue had set in. It happens.
    I fled to my room, practically trampling a number of good friends with whom I should have taken the opportunity for a greeting at least, if not conversation. I turned on the TV to a Hamilton/Toronto football game, a contest in whose outcome I had no interest whatsoever, put my feet up and promptly fell asleep. After three days of meetings, conference-floor interaction, taking minutes, listening to material I already had in my head, I was suffering from acute verbiage fatigue. I found myself nodding like a bobble head, not so much in agreement as in the faint hope that it would hasten speakers' inclinations to stop talking.
    I woke up late for the evening worship, but fortunately, it began late. I realized as I sat down in the auditorium that I should probably have had a meal before coming. Prayers were said (one involving the batting about of balloons; the purpose eluded me), a worship band led us in songs I'd never heard before with no notes to guide where on the scale we were to sing and inspirational Bible passages and other words were spoken. I wasn't “into it,” apparently and I realized that—is this really possible—I might be suffering from worship fatigue. Can there be too much lofty dialogue, too much invoking of the Spirit, too much robust praise singing for the human mind to endure?
    More people came in—behinder than I was apparently. Seats filled up around me. The world was closing in—my exits were cut off. I began to feel claustrophobic and as the moderator of the service worked valiantly to set a worship mood, I contemplated ways to escape gracefully. None presented themselves. By now a tingling, near-numbness was beginning to assert itself in my gluteus maximus. I was definitely suffering from chair fatigue.
    Next morning, a fellow delegate and I met in the hallway. I asked her, “So how's it been for you?” and she gave back the standard "It's been OK, but very busy" answer.
     “I'm ready to go home,” I said.
    “Oh, so am I!” she said. “So am I!”
    I know that if we're going to bring a lot of people together at great expense in order to be democratic and even-handed, the effort to cram in as much input as time will allow in hopes of harvesting a vast amount of product seems logical. What we may not consider adequately is that it's not  just time that is limited, it's also energy. When we ask people to take on a task, the relevant question should not be just, “Do you have time for this?”
    Our energies sometimes run out long before the clock ticks down.
    Conference fatigue: a phenomenon that is the sum of chair fatigue, worship fatigue, verbiage fatigue, subject fatigue and—possibly—face fatigue (we seem always to be SO MANY!). It probably affects us to different degrees, but I suspect we're all prone to it.

But on the other hand . . .
    Mennonite Church Canada brings together up to 450 people to its national assemblies, many of whom know each other personally and all of whom share a common faith and vision. Well, let me qualify that last statement: although we range from a traditional to a post modern worldview, though some are what could be called “agnostic Christians,” others clearly Biblicists and many of us somewhere between, we feel with considerable certainty that we are swimming in the same pool. We call this the Holy Spirit, a common warming at the fire ignited by Jesus Christ so long ago. A spirit that unites despite differences.
    It's most evident in the singing; the Sheraton Vancouver Airport Hotel may have to re-shingle,. Song after song extolling the majesty of the universe and the God who made it. And it's evident in its themes, in the eloquence of our great speakers throwing life-giving light on the assembly: Tom Yoder Neufeld, Gerald Gerbrandt, Sheila Klassen-Wiebe.
    A disinterested observer would probably draw attention, though, to our similarity to a corporation. We have a board and commissions that carry out the business of the conference and we are obliged to hold “shareholder” meetings so the actions of the boards and commissions can be vetted. Debates and decisions are regulated by a relaxed version of Robert's Rules of Order. What's not similar is the brevity of the business meeting, the preponderance of social activity, communal worship and sermons. This afternoon at our post-assembly board meeting, a staff member noted the glaring difference between the two “states of being,” the communal worship and the business, and we all knew what he meant; someone said, “we're still so European.” It was an interesting observation considering that much of the worship was led by congregations of the Asian Mennonite churches in Vancouver and we'd been welcomed to Vancouver by a representative of the First Nations of the Vancouver area. 
    The signs that we're shedding some of our Germanic anal retentiveness, though, are promising.
    Conferences require travel; we finished our last afternoon meeting early so I was in the Vancouver Airport fully five hours before my flight to Saskatoon. At about the time we were scheduled to board, they told us that the flight would be delayed for three hours and issued us dinner vouchers for $10.00.
    Unfortunately, I had eaten and paid for a big dinner three hours earlier. 
    Agnes would have to meet me in Saskatoon at 3:00 am; I phoned her with this unwelcome news.
    I'm a nervous air passenger in the first place and the excessive turbulence of the flight had me declaring “never again,” . . . again.
    This is a personal reflection and shouldn't be assumed to be the general experience of people who attend assemblies and conferences; I know people who can't get enough of travel, debate, visiting and taking notes on lofty subjects. It boils down—in the end—to how intentional communities survive in a changing world. Video conferencing and similar technologies may end up being cheaper and less intrusive in terms of cost and time spent, but I doubt that there will ever be a satisfactory substitute for the handshake, the embrace, the singing together in harmony, the absorbed listening to subject, nuance, body language, tone that makes up a great sermon, and can only be appreciated by those physically present.
    So be it. The fatigue, the travel, the inconvenience will all pass.
    Bring on another conference!
    But not before a really substantial break, please.
   
   

   

   

Sunset at Little Manitou

Manitou Beach, Saskatchewan
 
IT was once a glacier-melt spillway, they say, abandoned when in the aeons of time-before-man, the ice melted back to its Arctic home where it belongs. Now it's a sausage-shaped lake about ten kilometres long and half a kilometre across between rolling, grassy, banks.
 
Centuries of waters seeping through the Saskatchewan soils, picking up magnesium, sodium and potassium salts and with no outflow have created a brine five times saltier than the oceans and half as salty as the Dead Sea; lie on your back in the waters of Little Manitou Lake and you'll marvel at your cork-like ability to defy gravity. Make the mistake of splashing its waters into your eyes and you might wish you'd stayed in your beach chair. 

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
 
And one thing the Creator gave to the Aboriginal people who valued these waters is the legendary healing quality often associated with the great spas of the world. I remember watching a man at a mineral spring in Aachen in the late eighties; dressed for business, he nevertheless washed face and hands under the fountain built there for that purpose, drew a cup from inside his suit, filled it several times and drank the contents. Faith in the curative powers of mineral waters is evident in various cultures, it appears, and should not be dismissed lightly no matter how absurd it might seem to insist that water on the skin could affect one's inner organs.
 
Manitou is the English-spelling-version of an Amerindian word for the "Good Spirit," the Creator. The name for this lake therefore suggests a spiritual more than a physical healing, although legend has it that some were cured from Smallpox in its waters.
 
Skeptics might well invoke the "I'll believe it when I see it" aphorism . . . (or its antithesis: "I'll see it when I believe it.") Soul-health is fundamental to all-around health, though, and for some, a certain place  may provide the avenue toward soul-healing, especially if its unusual nature arrests and turns routine, counter-productive thought patterns onto new and better roads. "Rebirth" comes to mind.
 
Is Little Manitou Lake one with Lourdes, Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem—a place for rebirth, for renewal of spirit? Is it a place that heals only if you believe in it? Is Little Manitou Lake drug or placebo?
 
We were in a cabin with sticking old windows and sloping floors on the shore of Little Manitou Lake on Tuesday. After a violent storm, the electricity was off more than on for the night and the next day. Apparently even Manitou's country is not immune to the darker fits of nature; slashing rain and hail, lightning and thunder, wind and threats of tornadoes. It gave me some time to sit back and read the brochures and ponder again the meaning of healing.
 
I cut my thumb recently but it healed. I can no longer tell which thumb it was (even though I have only two) because it's been restored to the state of health it enjoyed before. The biology of cell reproduction as the great healer of physical wounds is pretty well understood by us, although we still have a long way to go in encouraging our bodies to restore themselves from Heart Disease, certain Cancers, Huntington's Chorea or Lou Gehrig's Disease, for instance.
 
These days, I need to go to the East Wing in a nursing home if I wish to visit my sister. It's the dementia wing and everything about it says that there is no restoration to health expected here.
 
My sister is a most positive person, most open to joy in my family, maybe in the entire nursing home, maybe even in the world. When we moved her from her previous rooms, she watched from the doorway as we discarded or saved, bagged and boxed, left or carted off the many items she'd accumulated over the years. I asked her if she was OK with what we were doing. "I think I'll go sit outside," she replied. "The less I see, the less I need."
 
There was certainly healing there, if not of the physically-restorative kind . . . not to mention a pretty substantial sermon thrown in for free. Healing in the midst of separation and apprehension.
 
We spent a total of 2 hours in two sessions in the healing waters of the spa fed by Little Manitou Lake. We floated, thrashed, joked and floated some more. I felt pretty good and slept really well that night.
 
Perhaps salt waters do heal . . . somewhat. Or perhaps all waters do.
 
If you let them.

. . . Can't get level

. . . the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil

I’ve been reading The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better by Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett lately. Recommended to me by a reader (Thanks Dave S), the title caught my attention immediately. I’ll review the book at http://readwit.blogspot.ca/ in a few days.
    At the centre of Wilkinson’s and Pickett’s thesis is that it’s not poverty that breeds crime and addictions and school-dropoutism and all the other illnesses we’ve come to associate with slums, reserves and other places where incomes are low, but that the real culprit is inequality. I can hear you jumping to the question: “But inequality in what? Wealth? Education? Gender?” Wait for the review, but for now, let’s say it boils down to money. Let’s say the primary method by which our North American society is herded into strata is the possession of means, and that from that stratification all kinds of ills arise.
    This would, after all, be Biblical:   For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. (I Timothy 6: 10). (An aside: from the King James Version to the New English Version “the root of all evil,” turned into “a root of all kinds of evil.” I leave this significant difference to text scholars to elucidate.
    Think about the income inequality question at a more local level for a minute, let’s say the town of Glad in rural Maniskatchewan. The town has an upper-middle class group of astute business and respectable professional families who have done very well, earned a living over the years with enough surplus to build large houses, own several vehicles, spend winters in warmer climates, and in general, live securely and comfortably . . . plus. 
   But it’s also a place which some sociologists call “a Canora situation:” the modest housing abandoned by the wealthier citizens has been bought up by real estate entrepreneurs who rent them, primarily to social services who place their charges in them because they are all that’s available. Many of them happen to be young, unwed mothers, indigent families and individuals from nearby First Nations, seniors and poorly-educated younger persons from marginal farming areas north of town, etc.
    Glad has become a test case for the effects of income inequality, with a huge gap between the woman in the fur coat who doesn’t even check prices in the grocery store and the unwed mother who is down to Kraft Dinners for her children this week. They may well be courteous to each other as they pass in the grocery store, and the unwed mother may have benefitted on occasion from the can of soup the lady in the fur coat drops routinely into the food bank basket at the front door of the Groceteria.
    But it’s not these two women I’m concerned about. It’s their children and their grandchildren. What happens in school for instance, when children in cheap and worn clothing, poorly fed, unable to afford sports equipment, are placed adjacent to those with IPhones, mountain bikes, designer jeans, etc.? Well, we know what happens. Stratification. A caste system. The children of the parents that run the town, run the playground. Status is conferred. Status is denied.
   And with it, dignity is conferred and denied. And those who are denied dignity and status drop out; the system, after all, clearly doesn’t belong to them. They will find their status in another “playground” and the children of the elites in Glad will cross this other “playground” at their peril.
   The USA and Singapore are by far the most “income-unequal” countries in the world according to the sociological markers Pickett and Wilkinson are using. Japan comes close to being the most egalitarian in this regard. The homicide rate in the USA is 62 per million population annually; in Japan, the corresponding number is 3. Canada rests at 17. Now there’s obviously more than inequality involved here, but there’s no disputing that inequality contributes mightily to social illness when looked at statistically.
   What’s most alarming is that the gaps are growing. No, actually, that comes second. The most alarming is that we don’t have politicians smart enough to understand which is cause here and which is effect. How thick do you have to be to meet the problem of social illness by building more jails!
   There is no substitute for the fair distribution of resources that the earth provides for its citizens. There are groups and individuals, of course, who work at plucking individuals from the morass of illness that predominates in the underprivileged classes and settling them on a higher, safer plane. Applaud them for attempting to help in the only way they know how, but urge them to know that their efforts don’t deal with the cause of the illness itself, and may in fact be perpetuating it.
   I finish with a gem from Fay Wattleton quoted in The Spirit Level: “Just saying ‘No’ prevents teenage pregnancy [in the same way] as ‘Have a nice day’ cures chronic depression.” (p.119)

Rainmaker, Sunmaker

This morning, the sun is shining on everyone . . . in Rosthern, at least

  
But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? (Matthew 5: 44-46)

Interpretation, elucidation, discernment. Wrestling the true, intended meaning from a text.
 
The above passage quoting Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount may seem simple at first reading. I’m not sure, though, that I’ve ever discerned its full intent, especially if I consider what “loving your enemies” does to the meaning of the words love and enemies. 

Unfortunately, furthermore, I can’t think of anyone in this world that is truly my enemy. Perhaps if I was a Christian living in Darfur, Nigeria, South Sudan or Egypt, or a Muslim in New York City, it might not be so hard to think about an enemy to love and pray for.
  
The temptation, therefore, is to apply it to someone else, not to me.
 
And what about context? How would the first hearers of this difficult passage comprehend it? How would Jesus have said it if he had been preaching to us . . . today?
 

And what is this about rewards? Is it for the achieving of rewards that one loves? That can’t be the intended message, can it?
 
And since we don’t have the tax collectors mentioned here as symbols of the dregs of our communities, what career choice would render the same meaning? Drug dealer? Prostitute?
 
There are plenty of excuses available to render this passage incomprehensible or impossible to apply.
 
Try on these two possible images of the gospel for size:
1)    The world is a sea. The gospel is a life boat. We are all drowning except that some have been pulled into the lifeboat and their task now is to pull as many as are willing into the lifeboat with them; to save them, in other words.
2)    The world is a sea. All of humanity is in a ship on this dangerous ocean. Some are “chosen” to be the crew on this ship, their task to enable everyone to reach the destination safely, although some go too near the rail and are washed overboard, some jump and others are saboteurs, but the “chosen” do what they can to guide humanity to the safety of the harbour.
 
Implied in the metaphor of “thinking as children of the creator” is a hurdle that’s understandably difficult for us to spring over, namely the blessing of the “righteous” and the “unrighteous,” the “good” and the “evil:” indiscriminately. It seems to point toward the second example above: we’re all in the same boat.
 
Or is this pushing the metaphor beyond what was intended?
 
It may seem at times that the Creator could better meet the objective of a safe harbour for all his children by raining selectively on only the righteous; that way the unrighteous would see their errors, their “evil” deeds would not bring them prosperity and they would change their ways. But every farmer knows (this is actually an agricultural metaphor) that where and when the rain falls is not influenced by the “righteousness” or “unrighteousness” of the region in question; it works on a model of indifference in that regard, apparently.
 
Without going too far afield into the conflicting notions of how much or how little the Creator actually interferes in the chaotic circumstances of our lives, in this passage from the Sermon on the Mount, at least, we are meant to see creation as more than us versus them. If us versus them is the way we choose to see the world, then we are obviously harrowing its people with a finer-toothed harrow than the Creator him/herself. At least as regards sun and rain.
 
If you and I had control of where and when it rains, where and when the sun shines, what principles would govern OUR choices?

Walking the wires: high and low

A wire, yes, but not a high wire

Why would anyone want to write a book? Maybe the question belongs in the same drawer as the ones we chatted about the other day (I and my chicken friends who get vertigo tying our shoes). Questions like "Why would anyone willingly jump from an airplane," or, "Why would anyone walk from the USA to Canada on a high wire strung over Niagara Falls?" A friend and I discussed this on the street the other day. He's authored ten books, good books although fitting into niche markets. I think we concluded that if we worked hard and saved our money, we could probably each afford to write another one.

Ah yes. We carry impulses that are not easily explained! If writing didn't satisfy some need in me, I certainly wouldn't have written these lines and you wouldn't be reading them. At the same time, I can't think of any hunger that tying wings on my arms and jumping off a mountain would begin to feed.

There are, of course, some impulses that are more commonly held. S_x, for instance. And, of course, the hunger that causes us to salivate at the sight of money, the love of which is said to be the compost in which evil so readily takes root. Many take satisfaction in order, in military stuff, in art, in music, in old things or new things or things generally. A man interviewed on TV the other day
. . . runs. Marathon after marathon. Jerking along on knobby, aging legs, he has plans for running a few dozen more this year.

The world is in crisis: Europe, Libya, Syria, Africa, America--need I say more. I just got well into John Ralston Saul's The Unconscious Civilization, a book some might consider as prophetic for our times as Isaiah's was for his. It chronicles the emasculation of the citizenry of Western democracies by corporatism; it's an enlightening read. What it doesn't do, though, is explore the source of the greed and the appetite for power behind the destructive, compulsive behaviour patterns that have the potential for destroying economies, environments for healthy living, the fabric that holds together functional societies. It's not good enough to proclaim that "it's greed, of course!" Greed itself is not a cause, but a symptom.

Over time we've gradually been seating biological, anthropological, psychological explanations in the chair where the devil used to sit enshrined. Now we smile ironically when we say, "the devil made me do it." Seems to me if the root cause of engrained, compulsive-impulsive behaviours is ever authentically isolated, the remedies will be found to lie with parenting, teaching and a warmer embrace in the arms of truly functional families and communities.

But please, don't find a cure before I finish this novel that nobody wants to read!

A Message from the Leader of the Opposition

Surveying the prairies ca. 1860 Photo courtesy of Saskatchewan Archives Board.

(Recently, I wrote Thomas Mulcair chastising him for the clumsy way in which he introduced the subject of "Dutch Disease" into the Canadian dialogue and informing him that if he meant to garner votes in the East by playing on Ontario suspicions of Alberta, I would have to reconsider my support. He responded to me as follows below; I'm flattered that he did, although this may well be a form letter sent out to a bunch of people who had problems with the way that unfolded here in the west.)

" [George];
 
Thank you for writing. I welcome this opportunity for an open exchange on how best to develop our natural resources.

As you may know, I recently did a western tour that included key stops in all three Prairie provinces. This included a tour of the bitumen sands operations and a discussion of oil sands development with the Deputy Premier of Alberta and the Mayor of Fort McMurray.

Whether in Yellowknife, Red Deer, or Miramichi, I have been clear about my intentions to work with all those - across the country - who support a vision of long-term, sustainable development that will create wealth and prosperity for generations to come. My focus is on the Harper government's failure to make polluters pay and on the serious consequences for our environment and our economy.

Further, there is a growing body of research supporting the claim that the failure to make polluters pay is having a negative impact on our economy. One report sponsored by Industry Canada says that - at least - one third of job losses in the manufacturing sector were caused by Canada's artificially high currency. You can read it here: http://www.michelbeine.be/pdf/BBC2012.pdf.

Another report, Overview of the Economic Survey of Canada, by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), found that the run-up in commodity prices is leading to an uneven economy in Canada. It goes on to say that Canada needs to do more to develop non-resource sectors of the economy. Read more here: (http://www.oecd.org/document/30/0,3746,en_2649_34111_50538526_1_1_1_1,00.html).

Further, the NDP is proposing a balanced strategy for our natural resources that would include:
(1) the need for a made-for-Canada energy strategy that prioritizes the interests of Canadians;
(2) the protection of quality, value-added jobs in the refining sector;
(3) the need to ensure sustainable energy security in all parts of the country; and,
(4) the importance of responsible, sustainable resource development and a robust environmental assessment process.

In a recent Regina Star Phoenix article, economist Eric Weir said that this is a "balanced approach to resource development that would generate more public revenue, a more competitive exchange rate, and more manufacturing jobs."

Once again, I appreciate having this opportunity to address your concerns on this very important challenge facing our country.

All the best,
 
Thomas Mulcair, M.P. (Outremont)
Leader of the Official Opposition
New Democratic Party of Canada

You give that thing back, or else!

Lake of the Woods country

Western Newfoundland country

Note: Most of you are readers, so you might be interested in a new blog I've started. See the note in the right-hand column.
With Bruno Klassen's permission, I'm publishing his letter to me in response to the last blog -- as my first "guest blogger." (Others are welcome to submit, of course). Bruno has gone from retail grocer in Rosthern to other pursuits in the last decade or so and his comments are recollections of incidents of "petty crime" in his store. Restitution is often a sore point and largely unresolved. Levitical law said that if a man killed another man's son, he was obliged to give his own son to that man in restitution. But let's let Bruno tell us about more modern times from his perspective.
ge
---
A topic [crime and punishment] was quite important to met at one time. One of the objects of sentencing that seems to be ignored is restitution. After twenty five years of trying to nab a very skilled, known thief, I finally did catch him and for all my trouble, he paid a $50 fine and I got nothing. I apprehended a thief that had stolen a dress from me, the dress was taken as evidence, returned to me two years later, and there was no restitution.
    I'm not an advocate of imprisonment, but I am an advocate of dealing with crime. I recall making an effort to help a disadvantaged shoplifter and when I mentioned this to the police, they advised that this not be put in the report because the courts frowned on the perpetrator and victim dealing with each other. (Italics mine, ge.)
   I used to try to be "redemptive" by not charging shoplifters, but it became apparent that in many cases the only way to make people face up to their problem was to charge them. There are people whom I did not have charged, and regret it to this day because they have never faced up to their issues.
  Two things did work well. One was offering a shoplifter the chance to make restitution. The first case [I recall] was a known thief, and when given the chance to make restitution brought in $1000. (The lawyer said it was not blackmail, but compensation for stolen goods!?) Our relationship was maintained, and he continued to shop - but hopefully not lift!
   The other was a lifter who was known to have stolen at several businesses and I caught her at our store. I decided to have her charged so she would have to face up to her problems. She had a "sentencing circle" arranged at which her family, the other businesses, her pastor and several friends attended. It was good for all involved.
   I recall a man who stole cookies from the store and was finally turned in by his wife: "I don't care if you put him in jail, I want it stopped!" We caught him and when I asked how long he had lived in town, he said 8 years. We calculated that to be about 2400 business days so he would have stolen 2400 cookies over the years. To his shock this came to several hundred dollars, but I loved his first line of defense, "Some stormy days I couldn't come in!"
 
Bruno

Jails, Gaols and Healing Lodges

Sky, sea, land - nature's lesson in harmony

Harmony in small things

A visit to the Willow Cree Healing Lodge on the Beardy’s and Okemasis First Nation got me thinking again about the three legs of sentencing: retribution, rehabilitation, deterrence. Typically, these are given as the three primary goals of punishment for crime.

·        Retribution: “You do the crime, you’ll do the time.” “An eye for an eye . . . “

·        Rehabilitation: “We’ll make a better, law-abiding person of you.”

·        Deterrence: “We’re making an example of you so others won’t make the same mistakes.”

Of course, we use other terms as well.

·        Penitentiary is one whose root—penitent—Oxford defines as “feeling or showing sorrow and regret for having done wrong.” Ostensibly, this could align with rehabilitation, particularly under the Christian concept that penitence must precede rebirth.

·        Then there’s jail, or gaol, whose origin is given by Oxford as “Middle English: based on L. cavea (see cage); the word came into Engl. in two forms, jaiole from OFr. and gayole from Anglo-Norman Fr. gaole (surviving in the spelling gaol).” If you drive Highway 1 to Winnipeg from Regina, you’ll pass a sign that points to “Headingly Gaol.” The word is related to cage; an interesting association very much in line with retribution.

·        Correctional Facility is a euphemism, a term that softens impact, like “passing away” serves as a euphemism for “dying.” The term also serves to emphasize the rehabilitation goal of incarceration.There's a mile of semantic difference, though, between correction and healing.

·        Prison conjures images of cages, like jail or gaol.

·        There is any number of pejoratives, some harking back to the Wild, Wild West, Like hoosegow. Slammer, Big House and a host of others spring to mind.

·        And then there’s Healing Lodge, a term that diverges radically from the traditional and the typical, and leads us to see the rehabilitation goal most emphatically.

I find the interplay between cultural practices and values and the words we use to talk about them fascinating. What major change in cultural values would have to take place before we would begin calling the Prince Albert Penitentiary the Prince Albert Healing Lodge?

As I understand it, the concept of the healing lodge emanates from the First Nations value of harmony among all aspects of being. Defined in one study, “healing is ultimately about the reparation of damaged and disordered social relations. The individual, through outwardly and self-destructive behaviours, has become disconnected from family, friends, community, and even his or her heritage. The reason for undertaking healing is often found in the clients’ desire to make amends and to be accepted back into the web of relationships. Healing, then, speaks to a form of Aboriginal sociality that reduces the degree of self-indulgence and self-pity and frames one’s problems and the solutions in broader, collective terms.” (http://www.ahf.ca/downloads/aboriginal-healing-in-canada.pdf)

               Victims of crime can hardly be faulted if, in their bitterness, they can only visualize justice as served if the perpetrator is made to feel suffering to a similar degree that they are suffering. But surely the goal for a national justice system can’t be focused just on making sure retribution happens. Prevention, rehabilitation and reintegration have been undervalued and I would hope that all the efforts made by those who work at restorative justice will eventually produce a vibrant cultural value affecting how our justice system sets goals.

               May all our gaols finally have healing lodges attached.