Monthly Archive for March, 2009

Soup

Published on March 29, 2009 by Dick Benner. Closed

I like soup. Some­one in the cook­book Sim­ply in Sea­son said that they see the steam ris­ing from their soup as a prayer to God. Maybe that is true. I’m not sure I would say that soup is holy, but it sure is delicious.

I also like borscht. As you may infer from my last name, I am one of the so-called Russ­ian Men­non­ites. Although my last name is in no way Russ­ian, my love of borscht prob­a­bly has some­thing to do with my ances­tors’ stay in Rus­sia. Accord­ing to my exhaus­tive research (aka wikipedia) Borscht is a spe­cific kind of soup from East­ern Europe, either a beet soup, a tomato/potato/cabbage pot of deli­cious­ness or som­mer­borscht (they have another name for it, I believe soup with sorrel).

As you may also have inferred from my intro­duc­tion to this blog, I am a young per­son. Young peo­ple do not often make borscht. In fact, yes­ter­day was only the sec­ond time I ever tried to make it. We had a young people/older peo­ple din­ner at church and we were sup­posed to make borscht for it. It turned out sur­pris­ingly well. I may make some more tomor­row actu­ally. (But tomor­row I won’t make the broth from bones. I went all the way for church.)

The rea­son why I bring this to your atten­tion is, first, to make your mouth water. Then, it is to tell you that you too can make borscht. I fol­lowed a more-with-less recipe, more or less. Ok, the actual rea­son I wanted to tell you about this is because I think that this soup was key to pro­mot­ing com­mu­nity. In church we so often are rushed and never get beyond say­ing hi to our friends, and, despite our best inten­tions, those new peo­ple we’ve seen a few times slip away before we get a chance to meet them. We are espe­cially inclined to be friendly towards peo­ple in our own age group. So, this event was a great oppor­tu­nity to com­bat all those things, and I think deli­cious soup was the key element.

So I’m getting married tomorrow…

Published on March 27, 2009 by Cheryl Woelk. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

We’re get­ting mar­ried tomor­row. It hasn’t sunk in, and yet it’s the most nat­ural pos­si­ble thing in the world to do when I get up in the morning.

The excite­ment of fam­ily and friends all com­ing together in one place thrills me. I have already seen this week the way God works so unex­pect­edly through the most unlikely con­nec­tions. Who knew my brother and brother-in-law would have the same cell phone!

I know this adven­ture will change us irre­versibly. Yet we also know God calls us to this very trans­for­ma­tion. As I look back, I see God’s amaz­ing gifts of beauty and good­ness in the midst of hard­ship, of encour­age­ment and affir­ma­tion in the midst of despair. Jour­ney­ing together will not be easy. Yet walk­ing side by side we will build each other up through chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties, con­flicts and tears.

I have no illu­sions of hap­pily ever after. Tomor­row only marks the begin­ning of a life­time of giv­ing effort, serv­ing love, and for­giv­ing grace. I antic­i­pate the per­son I will become along this path and wait for God’s mirac­u­lous hand of pro­vi­sion, care and sur­prise to lead us on our way and guide us home.

Contusion confusion

Published on March 27, 2009 by Will Loewen. Closed

Like many Cana­dian men, I love ice hockey.  I have been lucky enough to find a group of other men who have sim­i­lar pas­sions here on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.  Most of the play­ers, includ­ing myself, haven’t been play­ing for very long, so the level of play varies and my play­ing style also dif­fers from theirs.  The way I see it, I can learn from their Con­fu­cian devo­tion to prac­tise and skill, and they can learn a lit­tle from my Cana­dian impro­vi­sa­tional style.

The enforced prac­tise how­ever is pay­ing off, and I think my skat­ing is actu­ally improv­ing, to the point that they now trust me to play defence some­times.  My last full game at that posi­tion actu­ally went pretty well, or so I thought.  More than once I used my stick to block passes or to steal the puck from oppo­nents.  At a key point in the game, I went down to block a shot with my shin pads and man­aged to kick the puck to one of my team­mates who car­ried the puck out of our zone, thus con­vert­ing a scor­ing oppor­tu­nity for them into one for us.  The play that I talked about the most when I got home, was when my wrist shot from the blue line tied the game at one, and fuelled my team’s momen­tum into four more goals shortly after.  I raised a few eye­brows on another defen­sive play when one of my oppo­nents wound up for a slap shot at the blue line, and even though I was directly in the way I didn’t move from its path until it bounced off of the part of my chest pro­tec­tor cov­er­ing my lower rib cage.  I com­pli­mented myself on how tough I was and I con­tin­ued the play with­out pain.  After the game, I went home and regaled my wife with my exploits.

Later that night, or early the next morn­ing, our baby daugh­ter woke us up with her cries.  Won­der­ing if per­haps my hero­ism had not quite ended, I thought I would get up to tend to her first, since I had awoken before my wife.  But, when I tried to sit up, I felt an intense pain in my chest.  I found less a painful way of get­ting up, but there was obvi­ously some­thing wrong with me.  No bruise devel­oped, but the pain got much worse and more con­sis­tent.  It felt very sim­i­lar to the time I took a funny fall on my cousin’s tram­po­line and frac­tured my wrist.  I hoped the pain would go away, not only for the obvi­ous rea­sons, but also because clinic vis­its for me here always involve hav­ing to find a trans­la­tor.  Even­tu­ally, I couldn’t han­dle the pain any­more and my wife couldn’t han­dle my com­plain­ing, so I got a trans­la­tor and set up a time to go the hos­pi­tal.  I had men­tally pre­pared myself to face a lengthy reha­bil­i­ta­tion from my self-diagnosed cracked rib.  I mostly just expected him just to give me a brace and tell me to take it easy for a month or so, but I needed to at least go for the confirmation.

After a maze of admin­is­tra­tors, lab tech­ni­cians, pay­ment kiosks and wait­ing rooms, I even­tu­ally found myself sit­ting in the office of the X-ray spe­cial­ist.  Unlike the other work­ers I had seen to at the hos­pi­tal to that point, this doc­tor had the con­fi­dence to speak some Eng­lish to me.  He looked up at me and said, “So you are hav­ing some kind of trauma.”  I knew by the inflec­tion in his voice that he was in fact ask­ing me a ques­tion.  I hoped it meant that, like many speak­ers of Eng­lish as a sec­ond lan­guage, he was unsure if he had cho­sen the cor­rect word (and likely ‘pain’ was what he was look­ing for).  My fear though was that his full sen­tence was a ques­tion because he saw no rea­son on my X-rays to believe that I was hav­ing any kind of trauma.  He showed me where the hard bone tran­si­tioned to car­ti­lage, but nowhere did we see a crack, a frac­ture or any­thing that would indi­cate that I was even expe­ri­enc­ing discomfort.

After a few more ques­tions, he told me that I had a con­tu­sion, and that it wasn’t seri­ous.  Three days of pain killers and anti-inflammation pills, and I could be back on the ice again.  This was, of course, good news, prob­a­bly the best case sce­nario, but, oddly enough, it was hard for my ego.

I thought my prob­lem was very seri­ous.  I also expected that my expe­ri­ences had equipped me to assess and then address my con­di­tion.  Speak­ing to the expert was just sup­posed to reaf­firm what I thought already I knew.  I thought I was cop­ing with my dif­fi­cul­ties rel­a­tively well because of my strength, and that because of this strength, the heal­ing would be slow and grad­ual, but quicker than it would be for oth­ers.  I was wrong, quite wrong.

The real­ity is that my pain was actu­ally quite small and it was my weak­ness that made it seem big­ger.  Before the heal­ing could start, I had to some­how acknowl­edge my own weak­ness.  If I was in such great shape, I wouldn’t have needed the doc­tor.  Only when I fol­lowed the doctor’s guid­ance did the heal­ing begin and it hap­pened faster and more com­pletely than I even thought was possible.

I used to think that when Jesus talked about only the sick need­ing a doc­tor he meant that the biggest sin­ners appre­ci­ated Jesus even more. I have since come to appre­ci­ate that we are all sick, we all need Jesus, but it is our pride and our own egos that pre­vent us from rec­og­niz­ing that.

Praying for a Stretchy Heart

Published on March 25, 2009 by Cheryl Woelk. Closed Tags: , , .

I read about the hard­ened heart of Pharaoh and the Egyp­tians. Is this not my heart too? Dur­ing this Lenten sea­son, I reflect on God’s pro­vi­sion, God’s bless­ing for ser­vice, God’s chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quos of the world. I don’t want my sta­tus quo chal­lenged. I don’t want to go out in ser­vice. I don’t want to be thank­ful and depend on God’s pro­vi­sion. I want com­fort, ease, and good feel­ings all the time.

Yet the Israelites wan­dered in the wilder­ness for 40 years. Did it take that long for them to learn what they needed to learn there? It seems we only learn when we wan­der in the wilder­ness. I don’t want to go to the wilder­ness. I like my com­fort­able bed and walls around me. Yet God leads me again to wilder­ness. I know I will learn, grow, expe­ri­ence trans­for­ma­tion beyond my imag­i­na­tion, but I know from past wan­der­ings it won’t be easy or comfortable.

I also know, though, that the harder my heart, the longer I will wan­der. The less I will learn to love. I prayer for soft­en­ing, for stretch­ing, for open­ing my heart to what I don’t want to let in. I pray for God’s trans­form­ing power to let me entrust this hard­ened heart to the elas­tic­ity of God’s love with infi­nite stretch­a­bil­ity. I wait for God’s mir­a­cle of wind­ing us together, to the most unex­pected peo­ple, to even our ene­mies, in this love.

How Mennonite are you?

Published on March 23, 2009 by Dick Benner. 4 Comments

Yes­ter­day I was really scram­bling for some­thing to write about for this blog but noth­ing came to mind. This could be because I was try­ing to write a pre­sen­ta­tion and so every word com­ing out of my mind was in Span­ish or maybe I was just too tired to write. So, nat­u­rally, I went on Facebook.

Lately, many friends of mine have been doing quizzes and post­ing their results. On Fri­day I did the ‘what Toronto neigh­bour­hood are you’ quiz and found out I should live in the Annex (near the uni­ver­sity). Maybe this is true, maybe this isn’t. Then, yes­ter­day I saw a much more inter­est­ing quiz that claimed to be able to answer the ques­tion ‘How Men­non­ite are you’.

First of all, any quiz that pre­tends to be able to decide how Men­non­ite or what­ever else any­one is can­not be taken seri­ously. But, the results for this test were inter­est­ing. I am 100% Men­non­ite. Then I tried to answer some ques­tions dif­fer­ently. Face­book had some prob­lems so I don’t know if I still would have been 100% Men­non­ite but I kind of think that I would have been. So, even Face­book isn’t claim­ing to answer the ques­tion. It shows that any­one can be Men­non­ite if that some­thing they choose.

Isn’t that a nice mes­sage? Any­one can choose to be Men­non­ite, that is, can choose a par­tic­u­lar under­stand­ing of the way to fol­low Christ?

(Of course, mak­ing the ini­tial deci­sion and try­ing to live out that choice in every choice one makes are two dif­fer­ent things. We prob­a­bly don’t even con­sciously make the first choice. But the sec­ond part is a choice we should be mak­ing every part of every day.)

Oh Brothel, where are thou?

Published on March 20, 2009 by Will Loewen. Closed

Recently I had arranged to meet a few friends in the big city.  We agreed it would be eas­i­est for every­one if they met me upon my arrival at the train sta­tion.  Now this par­tic­u­lar city is sim­i­lar to other cities I’ve vis­ited around the world in the sense that the train sta­tion is not in the nicest part of town.  Maybe because of where they are built, the pol­lu­tion and messi­ness of the var­i­ous cargo, or it’s the prod­uct of the pres­ence of a tran­sient group of peo­ple, but many pas­sen­gers choose not to stick around train sta­tions for too long.  A while ago, when I had over an hour until the next avail­able train, I took a walk around the sur­round­ing area look­ing for restau­rant options.  I didn’t real­ize it until I was walk­ing past the shop win­dows, but the glow­ing pink lights I’d seen from the dis­tance indi­cated that this area had a num­ber of prostitutes.

When I met my friends in the train sta­tion, they sug­gested we have lunch together.  The last time we met this way, we had a good tra­di­tional meal in a nearby depart­ment store food court.  This time they decided to look for another restau­rant by foot.  Since both of my friends were school chap­lains, ordained in min­istry, I thought that per­haps I should warn them, or at least guide them away from the pink neon light dis­trict.  Then I thought for a sec­ond that it might not reflect well on me if I demon­strated a knowl­edge of this par­tic­u­lar sub­ject, so I didn’t say any­thing.  Besides, it was the after­noon, so it prob­a­bly wasn’t exactly reg­u­lar busi­ness hours in this industry.

We found a restau­rant even­tu­ally with­out see­ing any of these women.  Walk­ing back to their car, we were again spared any obvi­ous dis­plays of the local eco­nomic activ­ity.  I thought I had been spared from an awk­ward con­ver­sa­tion; besides the issue itself, Eng­lish was not the first lan­guage of either of my friends.

Then they offered to drive me to my des­ti­na­tion, sav­ing me the sub­way fare.  As it turned out, the short­cut to the express­way was through this same set of build­ings.  This time, as traf­fic slowed to a halt, we were pre­sented with an obvi­ous dis­play of what I hoped we could avoid, but my friends were more awk­ward about it than I was.  They spoke of their regret that I had to see this, apol­o­giz­ing both for choos­ing that route and apol­o­giz­ing on behalf of their coun­try.  They asked if I had seen this kind of thing before.

I explained that it exists in Canada too, but  that this busi­ness is gen­er­ally oper­ate in secret.  And then for some rea­son I felt it nec­es­sary to add, “because it’s ille­gal.”  They were quick to assure me that it is also ille­gal in their coun­try.  I had to hold back a laugh.  These were per­ma­nent struc­tures, designed for this spe­cific pur­pose.  Noth­ing looked “ille­gal” about it.

Now, as a vis­i­tor, when I see some­thing that looks off to me, I try not to pass judge­ment and quickly try to find sim­i­lar weak­nesses in my own cul­tural and national back­ground.  Some­times I have to try harder than oth­ers.  At first I thought I’d also have to pre­tend that we weren’t so great in this regard either.  Sure our law enforce­ment agen­cies have lit­tle suc­cess at curb­ing the sup­ply or demand for this ser­vice, but at least they try to enforce the laws.

How­ever, it didn’t take me long to real­ize a few things.  While they may have a few pros­ti­tutes in their win­dows, we cer­tainly have skele­tons in our own clos­ets.  In var­i­ous parts of Canada, police depart­ments don’t have the ambi­tion or the per­son­nel to inves­ti­gate mar­i­juana growth or pos­ses­sion, and in most parts of Canada that I’ve vis­ited, dri­vers are so addicted to speed­ing that no amount of ticket cam­paigns will dis­suade them.  Our churches don’t get off too eas­ily either.  Most Chris­tians would state that glut­tony is a sin, but that doesn’t mean that lunch buf­fets are any less pop­u­lar on Sun­day after­noons.  Even many Men­non­ites who espouse com­mu­nity val­ues cel­e­brate eco­nomic dis­par­ity within their con­gre­ga­tions and would scoff at the idea of a fel­low parish­ioner dis­ci­plin­ing them or their children’s behaviour.

Their are a num­ber of uni­ver­sals betweens nations and cul­tures.  Some beliefs are unique to cer­tain peo­ple at cer­tain times, but many morals and val­ues are uni­ver­sally held.  How­ever, the more I see, the more I am con­vinced that hypocrisy and falling short of our own prin­ci­pals is also a uni­ver­sal practice.

Food for Thought

Published on March 16, 2009 by David Driedger. Closed

I was asked to write an arti­cle for my church’s newslet­ter.  The theme of the newslet­ter was food and I was asked loosely offer some food for thought.  These may be unhelp­ful car­i­ca­tures but I offer them any­way for your considerations.

Philoso­phers tend not to be as fran­tic as sci­en­tists. The sci­en­tist can work fever­ishly because he still by and large believes that he is in con­trol of his envi­ron­ment. In the search for DNA decod­ing the sci­en­tist assumes that there are no exter­nal, unknown vari­ables then what he sees before his eyes. The sci­en­tist trusts that his lab is a closed sys­tem and so it is only a mat­ter of time before he con­quers his par­tic­u­lar goal. This is of course not a fair label for all sci­en­tists. What I hope this illus­trates is that typ­i­cally the sci­en­tist assumes that all vari­ables can be accounted for because all of his mate­ri­als can be con­nected by a string of cause and effect chains. There is noth­ing out­side of his field of study. The philoso­pher is a dif­fer­ent ani­mal.

The philoso­pher is not quiet so bold in her assump­tions. She has high hopes yes (per­haps the high­est), but she under­stands her role much dif­fer­ently. The philoso­pher must be atten­tive. The philoso­pher can­not assume mas­tery of her envi­ron­ment. There are insights and con­nec­tions that come in a flash and are gone in an instant. If the philoso­pher was not open to this event it could be lost for­ever. She can­not climb back up the chain of cause and effect, for even cause and effect are sim­ply part of some larger truth. So, at times, the philoso­pher must stop, pull her­self back and … savour.

There is some­thing pow­er­ful in sim­ply allow­ing your­self to be present to your envi­ron­ment. The sci­en­tist views the world as ulti­mately pas­sive. He believes that a dead cadaver would teach us as much as a live human or at least would teach us the same sorts of things. We are mat­ter and noth­ing more. The sci­en­tist is like Charles Dicken’s char­ac­ter Ebe­neezer Scrooge who has a bla­tant spir­i­tual encounter but writes it off say­ing it was just, “an undi­gested bit of beef, a blot of mus­tard, a crumb of cheese, a frag­ment of an under­done potato.” The sci­en­tist explains all expe­ri­ence on the basis of mate­r­ial causes. The philoso­pher is more like the reflec­tive unnamed nar­ra­tor of Mar­cel Proust’s Swann’s Way. As a young boy the nar­ra­tor dis­played a par­tic­u­lar sen­si­tiv­ity. He seemed able to find mean­ing in the most com­mon expe­ri­ences. The begin­ning of the book finds the boy tak­ing a sip of tea and bite of cake. He recounts the expe­ri­ence as follows,

No sooner had the warm liq­uid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shud­der ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extra­or­di­nary changes that were tak­ing place. An exquis­ite plea­sure had invaded my senses, but indi­vid­ual, detached, with no sug­ges­tions of its origin.

This sim­ple expe­ri­ence of eat­ing trig­gered some­thing larger, some­thing unknown. The nar­ra­tor under­stands quickly that the mate­r­ial object is not the mean­ing or the end itself,

It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself under­stand, and can only repeat indef­i­nitely, with a grad­ual loss of strength, the same testimony.

He then says, I put down my cup and exam­ined my mind. The sci­en­tist like Scrooge is in dan­ger of lim­it­ing expe­ri­ence to mate­r­ial expres­sions but the philoso­pher allows the mate­r­ial world to speak beyond its lim­its. If we are able to savour the world around it us it may still take us new truths, insights, and experiences.

In light of this it may be help­ful talk about our under­stand­ing of com­mu­nion. But I will save that for another time …

Prayer

Published on March 14, 2009 by Dick Benner. Closed

Some­times I wish I knew the future. It would be a whole lot eas­ier than trust­ing that God would work it all out. That’s just frus­trat­ing for a con­trol freak like myself.

There are things in life I’m wait­ing for. I don’t like wait­ing. If God’s going to do some­thing about my life any­way, can’t God tell me now? Maybe, I think to myself, if I do some­thing for God, it will hap­pen the way I want.

Per­haps my first expo­sure to the pos­si­bil­i­ties and per­ils of bar­gain­ing with God came when read­ing Anne of Ingle­side. In that novel (prob­a­bly the worst of the whole Anne series) one of Anne’s twins decides to make a bar­gain with God, and if God does what she asks she’ll walk through a cemetary at night. God pulls through, but she is scared. She finally tells her mother and then one night they walk through the cemetary together. So, she learns that bar­gain­ing with God is not the appro­pri­ate way to pray, but also that you have to keep your end of the bargain.

This whole idea of bar­gain­ing with God is appeal­ing for many rea­sons. It sug­gests that we can influ­ence God, that God cares about the small silly things we do and that God needs us to do things as acts of wor­ship or penance. The part that just doesn’t sit well with me, how­ever, is the idea that God requires us to do things in order to gain favour with Him.

Now, return­ing to my orig­i­nal prob­lem: what if there’s some­thing I really want, think I deserve, and know that God can help me with. What to do. Well, all I can bar­gain God with right now are essays that I’m quite sure no one wants to read, so that’s out. So, I resort to say­ing my wish over and over, to cross­ing myself when doing it and con­tem­plat­ing going to a Catholic church so that I can pay money to light a (prob­a­bly fake) can­dle and make it hap­pen for sure.

Why do I think this? No where in my Men­non­ite faith is there any­thing to do with cross­ing myself. Or light­ing can­dles. In fact, I think the early Men­non­ites were prob­a­bly opposed to the idea of buy­ing favour with God.

Maybe I really am meant to be Catholic. Or maybe a more sen­sory rela­tion­ship with God is what I need.

Oh the assumptions we make

Published on March 13, 2009 by Hinke Loewen-Rudgers. 1 Comment

There are so many greet­ings and appro­pri­ate phrases to use under cer­tain cir­cum­stances in the Ara­bic lan­guage. There are phrases to say when enter­ing a house, when receiv­ing food in someone’s house, when leav­ing a house, when get­ting out of a car, when meet­ing a friend and on and on. This makes it chal­leng­ing to a new learner of the lan­guage but offers other chal­lenges as well.  It causes some­one with a Cana­dian mind­set to think about the rela­tional mean­ing of each of these phrases and forces one to focus on the rela­tion­ship before get­ting right down to work.  It seems that in Canada we are quite accus­tomed to shorter per­func­tory greet­ings fol­lowed by some weather talk as a warm up and then we get down to business.

Many of the greet­ings here focus on bless­ing the per­son you are talk­ing to or call­ing on God in some way.  My guess is that there are var­i­ous cul­tural rea­sons why one might feel the need to call on God before or after enter­ing a house and so on.  Rea­sons aside, it is inter­est­ing to think what Cana­dian cul­ture might be like if we focused on bless­ing and greet­ing each other in God’s name each time we met those we met or stranger’s alike.  This approach really doesn’t seem to fit with Cana­dian cul­ture as it exists today.

I am not say­ing nec­es­sar­ily that one way is bet­ter than another since all cul­tures have their pros and their cons.  I am mak­ing obser­va­tions.  I won­der what the cul­ture was in the time of the early church? Was there par­tic­u­lar lan­guage used in cer­tain cir­cum­stances?  We cer­tainly have par­tic­u­lar lan­guage in the church today.  If a stranger who has not been exposed to church enters one of our places of wor­ship, what does that per­son under­stand from the ser­vice? Do idioms and phrases that we are accus­tomed to make sense to them?  Do those cer­tain phrases or ways of speak­ing tell oth­ers about what we are as a church cul­ture?  I would hope that the way we inter­act with each other and the lan­guage we use acts as a wit­ness that is just as open in hos­pi­tal­ity as the cul­ture is here. But I would also hope that it gives a clear indi­ca­tion of the grace and love of Christ.  Is the wit­ness one of real­ness, of gen­uine being and of gen­uine joy or pain depend­ing on one’s situation?

It takes being out­side of one’s own com­fort zone to real­ize all of those assump­tions one makes about a cul­ture – assump­tions that would be mean­ing­less to some­one from the out­side until explained by an insider.  It is cer­tainly a per­spec­tive to pon­der as one thinks about how to be a dis­ci­ple of Christ in a new context.

Old Partner

Published on March 13, 2009 by Cheryl Woelk. Closed Tags: , , , .

 oldpartner2

The slow ring­ing of the bell fills the the­atre. My eyes flick back and forth between the bright greens and browns of the rural scene before me and the sub­ti­tles writ­ten in stan­dard Korean on the side. An ox moves slowly along a wind­ing coun­try road, pulling an old wooden cart. A aged man with closed eyes rests against a stack of freshly cut hay as they crawl along. The ox and man resem­ble each other, swollen joints and old injuries, sag­ging skin, and uneven spikes of hair along their fore­heads. Even from the start of the film, I feel their connection.

 

“Old Part­ner” came out recently in Korea as a doc­u­men­tary film. Orig­i­nally planned as a TV series for 2009, the year of the ox, direc­tor and screen­writer Chung-ryoul Lee decided to mar­ket it as an inde­pen­dent film when broad­cast­ers later rejected it. In Jan­u­ary it appeared at the Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val in Utah, USA, and has climbed to the top of the box office in Korea.

 

The doc­u­men­tary fol­lows the lives of an elderly cou­ple and their ox in rural Korea, near Bonghwa (which also hap­pens to be my Korean family’s home­town!) in Kyongsang-Buk Province. For 30 years, the ox has lived and worked with them. The man’s farm­ing prac­tices, includ­ing a rejec­tion of pes­ti­cides and machin­ery for the health of the ox, meet ongo­ing com­plaints from his wife, who laments the con­nec­tion of her hus­band and the ox and watches the mod­ern­ized farm­ing tech­niques of their neigh­bours. As both the ox and her hus­bands healths fail, though, the love of the woman for both of them becomes clear. When the ox finally passes away, the cou­ple both mourn the loss of their com­pan­ion and life­time friend.

 

A sim­ple story on the sur­face, the doc­u­men­tary reveals the dras­tic change that has taken place in Korea over the last 40 years, from agri­cul­tural prac­tices to the rela­tion­ships of the cou­ple and their chil­dren, who live in Seoul with a very dif­fer­ent lifestyle. Themes of integrity, com­mit­ment, sac­ri­fice, and rela­tion­ship wind expertly through­out the film. Lee films the scenes won­der­fully, cap­tur­ing the sim­ple har­mony and beauty of the Korean landscape.

 

Watch­ing the film, I felt the power of rela­tion­ship both in the ani­mal to human con­nec­tion shown through the man’s stub­born care for the ox, as well as a love that reaches beyond under­stand­ing in the mar­riage rela­tion­ship of the cou­ple. So often, I con­di­tion my love to a cog­ni­tive under­stand­ing of the other — if I can’t under­stand, we can’t have a rela­tion­ship. Through all of her com­plaints and all of their hard­ships over the years, the woman is still deeply com­mit­ted to rela­tion­ship, care and con­cern for her husband.

 

The true story of this film reaches into our lives. I won­der what incred­i­ble sto­ries are unrolling around me, but I just don’t see? In an absorb­ing world of fic­tion at the the­atre, “Old Part­ner” points to the beauty and mean­ing of our real world and invites us to look around.