Monthly Archive for January, 2009

It should come as no sur­prise to any­one that the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in this part of the world (Israel/Palestine) is over­whelm­ing and often seem­ingly hope­less, par­tic­u­larly given the recent dev­as­ta­tion of war in Gaza. This is most likely true no mat­ter what “side” you might take. I have always been the type of per­son who sees sit­u­a­tions of human suf­fer­ing, par­tic­u­larly those caused by other humans, and absorbs them painfully. Per­haps this is why I have so much dif­fi­culty watch­ing movies that detail hor­rific events. I have been told that we much watch movies that describe his­tor­i­cal events of human suf­fer­ing because they are edu­ca­tional and open our eyes.  To those who can sit through movies, doc­u­men­taries, or clips depict­ing immense human suf­fer­ing and come away moved but not shat­tered – I sup­port you in your view­ing. You are the ones who come away inspired to speak about what you have seen and moved to take action or per­haps just to pon­der for a while. I come away moved but in a way that leaves me absolutely depressed, amazed and some­time par­a­lyzed by the human capac­ity for cruelty.

This does not mean that I deny the exis­tence of these sit­u­a­tions.  On the con­trary, I con­stantly real­ize their pres­ence but find that the only way I can take pos­i­tive action in the world in any con­struc­tive way is to focus on those redeemable qual­i­ties or small moments of hope in a sit­u­a­tion and hang on to them for dear life. Is the appre­ci­a­tion of beauty or any glim­mer of hope a naive way to approach life? I find that that actively search­ing for that seed of pos­i­tivism, humour, and hope allows me to see the redeemable in sit­u­a­tions that are often seem­ingly less-than-redeemable, but oh what a chal­lenge this is. This should not be con­fused with denial of real­ity of course or a fake pos­i­tivism that does not allow for the real­ity of pain and bro­ken­ness in the world and does not lis­ten to oth­ers. 

Lately I have thought of those I admire in life with a strong faith and a firm grasp on real­ity. So often they are the ones who have faced seem­ingly insur­mount­able obsta­cles in life or per­sonal tragedy that should, one would think, leave them bit­ter and cyn­i­cal for life. But these are the ones who have over­comes and some­how the tragedies are the things that have made them able to find joy in the small things in life and given the courage not to make do with the sta­tus quo.  Some­times through some­thing as sim­ple as join­ing a fel­low human being on their jour­ney through life by lis­ten­ing to a story.  These are the peo­ple who seem to me truly wise, not that they expound intel­lec­tu­ally on this or that, but they can sit with some­one in pain or in joy and be fully present in both with the simul­ta­ne­ous abil­ity to see beyond.  I hope to meet more of these peo­ple in my life because they serve as an inspi­ra­tion of greater vision and a model for transformation.

At a Christ­mas party this past Decem­ber I was in a friendly con­ver­sa­tion in which I was asked what I hoped to achieve or accom­plish in my ser­mons. I talked a lit­tle about how at the very least I hoped the con­gre­ga­tion could actu­ally learn some­thing about them­selves, God or the world. I talked a lit­tle about my hope that the ser­mon con­tributed broadly to a person’s over­all spir­i­tual for­ma­tion. Then today I preached par­tially on Jesus’s com­mand to store up trea­sures in heaven. This pas­sage of course is found in The Ser­mon on Mount. As I pre­pared for this mes­sage I began to ask myself what Jesus pos­si­bly could have hoped to ‘accom­plish’ in his ser­mon. Before I came to any­thing very rel­e­vant I felt as though Jesus was first of all estab­lish­ing his author­ity. Going up the side of the hill evokes images of Moses ascend­ing Mt. Sinai to receive God’s instruc­tion. The imagery in Matthew is com­plete with a tiered ascen­sion with Jesus at the top, the dis­ci­ples in front of him, at the crowds in back­ground (at Sinai the 70 elders ascended part­way while the rest remained at the foot of the moun­tain). Jesus acknowl­edges the law but places it under his author­ity. Fol­low­ing this I won­dered whether Jesus hoped to cre­ate a cri­sis for the peo­ple. The ser­mon runs along in a dialec­ti­cal fash­ion always exposes the audi­ence to the appeals of two author­i­ties from which they must live.
I shared some this in the ser­mon and then in the adult edu­ca­ton time after­wards we talked a lit­tle about the mes­sage. I asked the group about my sug­ges­tion that per­haps Jesus was try­ing to cre­ate a cri­sis in his audi­ence. There was some gen­eral agree­ment to this idea but then the con­ver­sa­tion quickly turned to whether or not God wills or cre­ates ‘cri­sis’ in people’s lives. To this we could not of course agree. God does not send ‘bad’ things to us, right?  God does not cre­ates crises, right, though he seemed to be doing in so in his mes­sage.
Is this the dif­fer­ence between nat­ural the­ol­ogy and dog­matic or revealed the­ol­ogy? Does nat­ural rev­e­la­tion func­tion in the same man­ner as spe­cial rev­e­la­tion. It seemed to for Isa­iah. And today I would argue that at the very least nat­ural (and human) crises are in fact rev­e­la­tory. Crises expose false foun­da­tions and de-centre our lives. They expose the spirit of a per­son or com­mu­nity.
Is it so hor­ri­ble to say that indeed God caused per­haps even that God sent that cri­sis? Why does this have to then be equated with ret­ri­bu­tion for sin? Most often what a cri­sis reveals today is not the sin of those who suf­fered but of the ones who ordered things so that oth­ers might suf­fer. The con­nec­tion of God with nat­ural events car­ries a whole host of unhelp­ful asso­ci­a­tions. I am ask­ing hon­estly, is it so hor­ri­ble to say that God causes all or par­tic­u­lar (I am not sure what is more help­ful) crises? Is it pos­si­ble to say that in a waythat then allows us then to appro­pri­ately dis­cern and respond to the rev­e­la­tion latent within that event?

By now I’m sure many of you have heard about how part of Toronto (the city where I live) lost power yes­ter­day. Last evening, when the power went off, I was not in my own apart­ment (which did not lose power) but at a friend’s. Each month, she and her house­mates put together a com­mu­nity din­ner and invite their friends and class­mates to eat with them. This is a fine idea, in and of itself, and yes­ter­day, when the power went off, it got bet­ter. By can­dle­light, the con­ver­sa­tions became more sub­dued, and some peo­ple enjoyed tak­ing pic­tures in the dark with a new cam­era. Then, all of us decided to do some­thing together. We played a game. In that moment, I think com­mu­nity hap­pened. More than sim­ply gath­er­ing in the same place at the same time, we were forced to inter­act and enjoy the com­pany of all the other peo­ple present.
Now, los­ing power brings to mind not only this event yes­ter­day, but also my life last year where the power would go on and off rather unpre­dictably (the rolling black­outs for some areas of Man­agua were pub­lished, but my home was too close to a pub­lic hos­pi­tal and my work­place was too close to an impor­tant embassy…but I digress) and every­thing would shut down. At work, we would sweat out­side our offices and drink coke and chat with one another. At home, we would also chat on the porch.
I do not want to ide­al­ize either of these two occur­rences (because they were actu­ally incred­i­bly frus­trat­ing and often meant that work that should have hap­pened, didn’t, or that exist­ing fam­ily prob­lems would worsen due to the added stress of liv­ing in the dark) but they do point to some­thing. Some­times, in the dark, we can see one anther bet­ter. Some­times, when we turn off all our gad­gets we can really inter­act. And some­times, when we inter­act with oth­ers, and begin to see them as real peo­ple, good things can happen.

This past Sun­day at church the pas­tor focused on our overuse of tech­nol­ogy and in par­tic­u­lar the cell phone.  He talked about the way that the cell phone makes us eter­nally acces­si­ble to the world thus destroy­ing our con­cept of healthy bound­aries.  The break­down of good bar­ri­ers means that qual­ity fam­ily time is eroded because our addic­tion to being over-communicative tech­no­log­i­cally causes inabil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate inti­mately with those who are right next to you.  Also iron­i­cally, the increase in effi­ciency has meant a decrease in real rest. 

But I wasn’t hear­ing this ser­mon in a church in Canada.  I was in Kenya on a two week vaca­tion from my assign­ment. His key points were “rest, refo­cus, recon­nect” and all three of these are typ­i­cally things we think belong to a West­ern style high-paced life style.  Inter­est­ingly, the focus on rela­tion­ships here in Kenya and the unwrit­ten rule that com­mu­ni­ca­tion in rela­tion­ships comes before all else has given the cell phone a cer­tain type of con­trol over its owner as it must always be answered.

The mes­sage made me think about the effect of tech­nol­ogy on our con­cept of war. I read an arti­cle recently about how tech­nol­ogy has made it eas­ier for those in the mil­i­tary to keep some dis­tance between them­selves and the effects of their actions.  This arti­cle was about the war in Gaza and talked about how easy it is for an air force pilot, for exam­ple, to press a but­ton as com­manded with­out need­ing to directly face the destruc­tion and death the button-pressing caused.  To add to this, I would say that our tol­er­ance for vio­lence has dras­ti­cally increased due to tech­nol­ogy.  We have the abil­ity to know all things as they hap­pen with­out need­ing to become directly involved.  Has this led to a cul­ture that can be vir­tu­ally men­tally removed from real­ity at will with­out even entirely real­iz­ing it? Has it led the West to the assump­tion that all the world oper­ates by the same cul­tural “rules” because we are after all con­nected by glob­al­iza­tion and online gadgets?

How is war related to cell phones?  On a very small scale, per­haps if we are will­ing to put aside our cell phone/laptop cul­ture long enough to really and truly engage with our hearts and actions, we might break down walls.  These may be walls in the fam­ily, between co-workers, between friends, between peo­ple groups, or between reli­gions.  Truly engag­ing means car­ing enough to know that peo­ple do come from dif­fer­ent places in life and they have dif­fer­ent jour­neys that can­not be pre-assumed despite the won­ders of glob­al­iza­tion and instan­ta­neous news.  Truly engag­ing means dig­ging in deep enough that you feel your own per­cep­tion of real­ity is chang­ing as you incor­po­rate oth­ers’ sto­ries into your under­stand­ing of the world.  I won­der if this also needs to be done with a healthy under­stand­ing of bound­aries as we learn how to be acces­si­ble in decreased quan­tity but with increased quality.

I have been over­whelmed by the news of war in Israel/Palestine and I don’t know if my fol­low­ing every detail has led me to any pro­duc­tive thought or action. Like so many oth­ers, I’ve been fol­low­ing the num­ber of dead and wounded, the sto­ries of those with­out food, health care or basic needs until I lie awake at nights on edge won­der­ing what might hap­pen next. So this is why I’m pon­der­ing the things above.  I’m try­ing to fig­ure out how I can actu­ally work against a war men­tal­ity and a war cul­ture in any small way with­out being con­sumed and par­a­lyzed by the need for con­stant infor­ma­tion or with­out being con­sumed by par­a­lyz­ing anger. And how does all of this relate to my faith?  Well I think I will save that for another blog entry.