Archive for the 'Will Loewen' Category

There was a church once, and like many other sim­i­lar Men­non­ite churches it was very proud of its music pro­gram.  They orga­nized a spring music fes­ti­val with “Sing a Joy­ful Song” as the theme.  It fea­tured, among other things, Sat­ur­day work­shops in four part singing, con­duct­ing and con­tem­po­rary music inte­gra­tion.  The fes­ti­val was to cul­mi­nate with a Sun­day morn­ing wor­ship ser­vice where choirs would sing, the acoustics of the sanc­tu­ary would finally be showed off and the newly instructed con­gre­ga­tion would then be more equipped than ever to make a joy­ful noise unto the Lord.

The fes­ti­val of course took months to plan and all of the best musi­cal minds of the con­gre­ga­tion assem­bled to make it work.  The most dif­fi­cult deci­sion was over who should be the song leader on that Sun­day morn­ing.  After all, the con­gre­ga­tion would be larger and louder that morn­ing and a new song or two should be intro­duced, so a strong and steady voice was needed.  After some delib­er­a­tion, the com­mit­tee chose Geof­frey a recent uni­ver­sity grad­u­ate with a music degree.  He had a good music pedi­gree, com­ing from a strong musi­cal fam­ily, and he had received voice coach­ing for over ten years.  Some on the com­mit­tee also felt that it was good to high­light his youth­ful pres­ence as a sign that their good musi­cal her­itage was being passed on to a new gen­er­a­tion.  After some prod­ding by his par­ents, Geoff agreed to lead the singing for that morn­ing and started to prac­tice the new songs.

By the time that Sun­day morn­ing arrived, Geoff knew the song flaw­lessly.  He knew the tricky parts and knew exactly what needed to be pointed out to the con­gre­ga­tion to guide them through it.  The night before also, Geoff had been an active par­tic­i­pant in the work­shops and had stayed for the potluck sup­per.  But some­thing, prob­a­bly some under­cooked meat or fish prod­uct, wasn’t sit­ting right with his sys­tem.  When his girl­friend Char­lotte stopped in to pick him up for church, he was planted by the toi­let bowl, clearly in no posi­tion to lead the singing later that morn­ing.  Had he been of sound body, he would have been happy to lead singing.  If he had been of sound mind he prob­a­bly would have thought of a music com­mit­tee approved replace­ment song leader.  Since his thoughts were only on his fail­ing body Char­lotte stepped up and made the deci­sion for him.

She knew the new songs as well or bet­ter than any­one else at the church, she was not afraid of being in front of large groups and there was far too lit­tle time to get any­one else to replace Geoff, so of course she would be the song leader.  She stayed with Geoff long enough to help him clean up a bit and to get some med­i­cine and vital flu­ids acces­si­ble range to him, and then she had to leave.  The phone was already ring­ing when she left his apart­ment, but answer­ing it would make her late for church and Geoff had no energy to pick it up either.  On her way into the sanc­tu­ary of the church Char­lotte was met by more than one per­son want­ing to know where Geoff was.  It was unclear which news was more upset­ting, that he was vio­lently ill, or that Char­lotte would be his replacement.

Peo­ple loved Char­lotte, even peo­ple on the wor­ship com­mit­tee, but music was not her strong point.  Sure she had lead singing before, but only because she had been will­ing while oth­ers had not.  She met up with the pas­tor and wor­ship leader in time to join them on the front pew.  Dur­ing the call to wor­ship and words of greet­ing, there were a few peo­ple ask­ing around if per­haps some­one else could fill in for Geoff, and even though nobody knew the new song some­body was still appointed to replace her.  But before the more pro­fes­sional style song leader could get to Char­lotte, she had already been called up to lead the first hymn and since she was already on the stage, it wasn’t worth the embar­rass­ment of inter­rupt­ing her there.

As the ser­vice pro­gressed, the Wor­ship Com­mit­tee vet­er­ans could only look on in dis­be­lief.  Char­lotte was invit­ing the chil­dren to shake keys and whack hym­nals as per­cus­sion instru­ments, she was rarely in per­fect sync with the pianist, she laughed at her own mis­takes and gig­gled when the con­gre­ga­tion made mis­takes.  Most song lead­ers here would sim­ply stand in silence to revel in the har­monies of a well sung hymn, but Char­lotte vocal­ized her admi­ra­tion.  She had utterly ruined their festival.

Old Mrs. Miller summed up well the thoughts of the entire com­mit­tee when she said, “How were we sup­posed to sing with joy with all her car­ry­ing on, noise mak­ing, gig­gling, and laugh­ing?”  The ques­tion remained though in their minds, next year will there still be the work­shops, will they still try to teach new songs, will they be able to sing with joy?

There’s a new genre of book out these days that fol­lows the writer on a one year jour­ney of some sort.  A young woman named Julie Pow­ell set out to pre­pare every dish in Julia Child’s Mas­ter­ing the Art of French Cook­ing she also blogged about her reflec­tions. That blog lead to a book con­tract, and after the screen writer cleaned out some of the swear­ing that book became an award win­ning movie.

This year instead of mak­ing a New Years Res­o­lu­tion I real­ized in the mid­dle of Feb­ru­ary that I hadn’t yet eaten at McDon­alds, so I decided to see if I could last the whole year.  A few months later and I’m still going strong.  If I were to keep a run­ning diary of my McDon­alds free year it prob­a­bly wouldn’t be all that excit­ing espe­cially since I’m now real­iz­ing how easy it is to do so.

April 22nd — I was doing errands by myself at lunch today.  Even though nobody would have known had I gone to McDon­alds for lunch today, the thought didn’t even cross my mind.

April 28th — I drove through my old home­town today and saw the McDon­alds I went to all the time in high­school.  I thought about going in for old times sake, and then I thought maybe I shouldn’t.  While I hummed and hawed about it, I saw a con­struc­tion crew work­ing on some hydro wires and for­got all about my fast-food conundrum.

So I would prob­a­bly need a bet­ter idea.  There are some less than great ideas out there of this genre.  A.J. Jacobs’ first book of this genre, The Know-It-All: One Man’s Hum­ble Quest to Become the Smartest Per­son in the World fol­lowed his one year task of read­ing through all forty-four mil­lion words of the Ency­clopæ­dia Bri­tan­nica.  That title sounded a lit­tle dull, even for a trivia nerd like me.  His sec­ond book sounded much more inter­est­ing, A Year of Liv­ing Bib­li­cally: One Man’s Hum­ble Quest to Fol­low the Bible as Lit­er­ally as Pos­si­ble, so I picked up a copy.

You can prob­a­bly guess the writer’s under­ly­ing the­ory, that fol­low­ing every Bib­li­cal law is impos­si­ble and any­one who says they do is a hyp­ocrite.  Jacobs states that premise in the begin­ning of the book and reminds us of it a few more times.  I expected to find cyn­i­cal reports of var­i­ous reli­gious groups and the odd nugget of spir­i­tual insight.  After all, Jacobs is a sec­u­lar Jew, or he is Jew­ish, he writes, “like Olive Gar­den is an Ital­ian restaurant.”

He vis­its with a few groups I appre­ci­ate such as the Amish and the Red Let­ter Chris­tians and gives them a favourable review, but one of his most pro­found spir­i­tual encoun­ters is with snake han­dling Chris­tians in Ten­nessee and a new friend he makes is a Jew­ish man who makes a liv­ing assess­ing the threads of people’s clothes to assure they are not wear­ing clothes woven of two fibers.  There are times when he presents a few extreme Chris­t­ian groups and then presents a mod­er­ate Jew­ish teach­ing, but over­all he gives a sur­pris­ingly fair treat­ment of all groups.

Jacobs faces the great­est dif­fi­culty in his inter­ac­tions with his wife.  The Old Tes­ta­ment includes a num­ber of laws regard­ing clean­li­ness, notably that men­stru­at­ing women are unclean and should not be touched.

Day 34. In case you were won­der­ing, Julie got her period yes­ter­day — which is bad news in two senses.  First, it means that our attempt to be fruit­ful and mul­ti­ply has failed yet again.  Sec­ond, it ratch­ets up the bib­li­cal liv­ing to a whole new level of awkwardness.

This was a reminder of how some­thing that is merely an incon­ve­nience for women today had pro­found social and reli­gious impli­ca­tions in Bib­li­cal times, an insight that adds mean­ing to the sto­ries of some of Jesus female ances­tors.  This also meant that Jew­ish men in that era would often touch­ing women at all since there was always a chance that they could be unclean.  Since Jacobs already likes an abnor­mally high amount of per­sonal space he is happy to use this as an excuse to keep his dis­tance, but when he explained why he wouldn’t shake hands with them, a sur­pris­ing num­ber of women offered up that infor­ma­tion freely, some even emailed spread­sheets with timeta­bles for his benefit.

Over­all, his opin­ions don’t change all that much.  While he learns to respect the reli­gious devo­tion of the peo­ple he meets, like any good Jew or Chris­t­ian, he can eas­ily point out the incon­sis­ten­cies in their beliefs.  He learns of a num­ber of ben­e­fits of rigid law-keeping, even if it’s illog­i­cal.  He writes with skep­ti­cal humour and self-deprecation with­out being too cyn­i­cal.  This is nei­ther a the­o­log­i­cal dis­course nor an irrev­er­ent attack.  My wife and I both found it to be a worth­while read.

A long time ago, a strug­gling Team Canada turned to Bobby Orr to guide them to inter­na­tional glory. In those days his knees were so bad that hey were wrapped in ice more often than they weren’t. Today, if a pro ath­lete had knees like his, they would get arthro­scopic surgery in the off-season, and he’d be good as new when the puck dropped again in the fall. Even though Bobby’s sup­port­ing cast was weak, and their oppo­si­tion was strong, he put them on his shoul­ders and car­ried them to victory.

These days another fledg­ling squad has called on #4 to give them a boost. Mr. Orr can now be reg­u­larly seen on Chevro­let com­mer­cials endors­ing their most recent line of auto­mo­biles. It’s no secret that Gen­eral Motors is in trou­ble; their vehi­cles seem to be falling behind their com­pe­ti­tion in terms of per­for­mance and effi­ciency stan­dards, and finan­cially, they’ve been in the red so deep for so long that they needed mas­sive gov­ern­ment bailouts just to stay afloat. The for­mer defense­man even made ref­er­ence to this in the com­mer­cial when he asserts that “They are def­i­nitely back in the game.” Is GM admit­ting that for a cer­tain amount of time that they were out of the game? It seems to be an unchar­ac­ter­is­tic show of weakness.

But before he makes this bold asser­tion, Bobby quoted some­thing else that I was much more inter­ested in. It looked as though he was refer­ring to a new vehi­cle pro­duc­tion mantra: “Build them the best, or don’t build them at all.” I won­der if that’s just a catchy one-liner that their mar­ket­ing depart­ment came up with or if it is some­thing they are directly hear­ing from their cus­tomers. It seems to me that even if GM con­sis­tently tests lower than their major com­pe­ti­tion in per­for­mance and effi­ciency, they will con­tinue to make auto­mo­biles, no mat­ter how prin­ci­pled their man­age­ment is. How­ever, rank­ings aside, if sales num­bers don’t pick up in time to sta­bi­lize their long­time finan­cial pic­ture, they will be forced to shut down pro­duc­tion and this mantra will become true in a whole dif­fer­ent way than they were intend­ing.
This mantra could eas­ily be mis­taken as a mis­sion state­ment, but the inclu­sion of the word “or” (and the implied “or else”) makes it par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing. I’ve seen a tonne of mis­sion state­ments of churches and var­i­ous Chris­t­ian char­i­ties and I can’t remem­ber any that included this kind of “or else” con­clu­sion, but it does present some inter­est­ing possibilities.

Con­sider the Chris­t­ian Peace­maker Teams. They owe much of their found­ing to an “or else” kind of speech by Ron Sider. Could they use some of those same words to form a mis­sion statement?

“Ready to die devel­op­ing new non­vi­o­lent attempts to reduce inter­na­tional con­flict, or else we never really meant the cross was an alter­na­tive to the sword.”

Men­non­ite Church Canada’s mantra is also void of any “or else”‘s. I think the mean­ing becomes a lit­tle more urgent if we add some, even if the or else that I add is already implied.

“Form­ing a peo­ple of God … or else when we gather we’ll think we’ve already arrived.
Becom­ing a global church … or else we’ll assume ours is the only way to do things and we’ll for­get that Jesus came for the whole world, not just us.
Grow­ing lead­ers … or else the busi­ness of doing church will scare off any­one who might oth­er­wise want to lead.”

It’s maybe a bit wordy, but I think it leaves a nice touch.

What about indi­vid­ual con­gre­ga­tions though? They have their own mis­sion state­ments too, some­times dis­played as promi­nently as any scrip­ture verse. But if we add an or else to those state­ments, what tone should it take? We could take a prac­ti­cal slant and say “or else peo­ple will stop com­ing” or “or else our funds will dry up”. It might also be appro­pri­ate to take a spir­i­tual slant and say “or else we aren’t pay­ing close enough atten­tion to our pas­tor” or “or else the Spirit isn’t in us”. Or how about some­thing that com­bines them both?

“Liv­ing out our faith and bring­ing good news to our neigh­bours, here and around the world …
or else we have no right to gather as a church and should board up our doors and walk away.”

That might take up too many of those move­able let­ters on church signs though.

The world in which I grew up was a lit­tle bit Men­non­ite, a lit­tle bit evan­gel­i­cal and a lit­tle bit con­ser­v­a­tive.  As a child it seemed clear to me that the youth and young adults of our com­mu­nity who ques­tioned or dis­re­garded var­i­ous teach­ings were sim­ply rebel­lious by nature and had likely been absorbed in the think­ing of the world.  As a teenager though, some of this started to change.  I started to real­ize a few things; one, that I should at least lis­ten to what these rebels were try­ing to say, and two, in turned out that the church wasn’t pre­pared to lis­ten to me as much as maybe I’d hoped they would.

So on a num­ber of issues, I started doing a fair bit of research.  I thought that if the truth was clear, I should be able to find it on my own.  I approached the var­i­ous sub­jects cau­tiously, per­haps more slowly than my more liberal/progressive friends did but more reck­lessly than my par­ents or child­hood church com­mu­nity might think was prudent.

There was one par­tic­u­lar issue that was espe­cially hard to deal with and it con­tin­ues to have a divi­sive impact on mine and a num­ber of other sim­i­lar reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties.  I’m sure it’s a fairly sim­ple issue for a num­ber of out­siders, but his­tory has shown that this issue hasn’t always been eas­ily resolved every­where else either.

I didn’t really know any­one who lived out this kind of lifestyle, so it was a bit of a the­o­ret­i­cal issue, but a lot of my peers had for­mu­lated opin­ions on whether or not it would be right for some­one to indulge in this kind of lifestyle if they were so inclined.  Those on the “pro” side of the argu­ment said that undoubt­edly peo­ple had been made this way and it was sim­ply a mat­ter of them express­ing them­selves.    Those on the other side insisted that good Chris­tians shouldn’t just give in to their ani­mal instincts and that this kind of activ­ity was almost cer­tainly what the Bible talked about when it men­tions “sex­ual immoral­ity”.  I’ve prob­a­bly spent most of my life on the “anti” side of the argu­ment, but I con­tin­ued con­tem­plat­ing the rela­tional and recre­ational impli­ca­tions of the issue on var­i­ous people’s lives.

Then there came a point where I started to won­der about the long term real­ity of hold­ing my point of view.  Would I ever find a wife that would share this point of view?  Did I have any hope of pass­ing this opin­ion on to my chil­dren?  It was becom­ing clear that the world around me had changed, and it would be much more dif­fi­cult for me to see things this than it was for my parents.

Then, even­tu­ally I decided to make the switch.  Per­haps I had been wrong, and I was ready to see things com­pletely from the other side.  I decided that maybe danc­ing wasn’t so bad after all.

But when I changed my mind, I noticed a few things.  On the pos­i­tive side, it quickly became clear that it did come very nat­u­rally to some peo­ple and that it didn’t nec­es­sar­ily lead to greater sins.  How­ever, there were a few dis­turb­ing rev­e­la­tions as well.  I sud­denly real­ized when I got out onto the dance floor that a the­o­log­i­cal shift wasn’t enough.  The intel­lec­tual change I had under­gone had in no way pre­pared me for the phys­i­cal and social envi­ron­ments I would soon be exposed to.

At first I thought that any dis­com­fort I was feel­ing was from some lin­ger­ing guilt, as though my early edu­ca­tors were still con­trol­ling me. Then I won­dered if I just felt self-conscious, wor­ry­ing that these peo­ple were much more judg­men­tal than I was lead to believe. Either way, I soon under­stood that it was going to take a long time for my body to catch up with my mind.  No mat­ter how sound or con­vinc­ing the logic behind my deci­sion had been, it wouldn’t mat­ter until I actu­ally put in the work of fig­ur­ing out how to dance.  I’m still strug­gling through it, and that is obvi­ous every time I step out onto the dance floor, but it’s a process, and I under­stand it will take a long time.

Host Mary Hynes admit­ted she had sec­ond thoughts about it.  My expec­ta­tions were also pretty low.  So, when the famously vocal athe­ist Richard Dawkins appeared on one of my favourite podcasts/radio pro­grams, I almost deleted it with­out even upload­ing it to my ipod.  Some­how I decided to lis­ten long enough to make an informed decision.

This epis­doe of CBC Radio’s Tapes­try began with the host dis­cussing the dif­fi­culty of hav­ing an athe­ist on a pro­gram about spir­i­tu­al­ity, and to add to the irony, they were hav­ing the inter­view at a bar.  The guest too sort of won­dered about why he, as an athe­ist, was invited to speak on this par­tic­u­lar type of pro­gram.  “Athe­ist” as a term is sort of like “Gen­tile”, the word Bib­li­cal writ­ers used to define any­one who wasn’t Jew­ish, or “Angulsche”, the Low Ger­man word my par­ents used for girls I prob­a­bly shouldn’t date; it only makes sense within one cul­ture to define every­one out­side of that culture.

Mr. Dawkins was not on the pro­gram to dis­cuss his spir­i­tual per­spec­tive, but to com­bat an opin­ion shared by many spir­i­tual peo­ple.  His lat­est book, The Great­est Show on Earth, asserts that the evo­lu­tion­ary process out­lined by main­stream sci­ence is nei­ther ran­dom, imper­sonal nor void of deeper mean­ing, in fact, it’s quite the opposite.

I was sur­prised at how inter­est­ing and enlight­en­ing his expla­na­tion was.  He talked about how a scene such as a val­ley full of spring flow­ers is actu­ally sur­vival of the fittest at work.  That colour­ful dis­play is the result of var­i­ous forms of plant life comet­ing for the visual atten­tion of pollen car­ry­ing bees.  We as humans ben­e­fit from this show that isn’t really intended for our eyes.  He also spoke about how each of us can cel­e­brate that we exist purely because our ances­tors demon­strated enough strength health and guile to deem them­selves wor­thy of repro­duc­ing and sur­viv­ing.  He also takes issue with label­ing the process as ran­dom.  The species that sur­vived did so because the genetic muta­tions they had under­gone gave them an advan­tage over others.

Some of what he said cre­ated moral and spir­i­tual dis­crep­an­cies in my mind but much of it res­onated with my view that God designed and ini­ti­ated the var­i­ous life pat­terns on this earth that work in a beau­ti­ful and self-sustaining way.  One of my biggest objec­tions is that he tends to talk about human­ity as though we are on a con­tin­ual path of progress (ie. smarter, there­fore stronger, there­fore bet­ter).  This doesn’t jive with my the­o­log­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of the nature of human­ity nor does it fit with my view of human his­tory.  Still, he pre­sented his points thought­fully, clearly and with a gen­er­ally respect­ful demeanour.

When the con­ver­sa­tion devi­ated from the book to his own life, it was still inter­est­ing.  He spoke about how he still had a cer­tain admi­ra­tion of the church of Eng­land.  I’m not sure that the feel­ing is mutual.  Dawkins also plans to have a tape recorder at his bed­side so that it will be impos­si­ble for peo­ple to spread rumours of a last minute con­ver­sion to Christianity.

Mary Hynes may have been pre­loaded with talk­ing points from a pre­vi­ous guest on the show, Chris Hedges, the author of I Don’t Believe in Athe­ists (which I found to be an excel­lent read).  Hedges accuses Dawkins and his col­leagues of being nar­row minded and insen­si­tive, essen­tially athe­ist fun­da­men­tal­ists.  As Hynes bought up a few points con­nected to Hedges’ cri­tiques, Dawkins pre­dictably demon­strated those neg­a­tive per­son­al­ity traits.

In the final por­tion of their con­ver­sa­tion, Dawkins high­lighted again how athe­ists are the least likely group in Amer­ica to be elected to pub­lic office.  He uses this and sim­i­lar points to jus­tify the aggres­sive nature with which he and his athe­ist col­leagues assert them­selves.  Hynes coun­tered with a final ques­tion which had been posed to her by some spir­i­tu­ally minded friends of hers.  “What about peo­ple who have spir­i­tual expe­ri­ences but are afraid to share them for fear that they might be looked upon as simple-minded, unin­tel­li­gent, etc.?”  Up to this point I was pre­pared to call it a draw.  The good things he’d said prob­a­bly bal­anced out the bad, and if he gave a good answer to this ques­tion I could write him off sim­ply as a sci­en­tist who had to talk a big game in order to sell books but still a fairly decent, under­stand­ing indi­vid­ual.  Much to my dis­ap­point­ment, and I think the host’s too, he really gave no answer.  He actu­ally laughed and said that he couldn’t imag­ine why any­one would think such a thing.  I’m sure he won’t lose any sleep over fail­ing to gain my endorse­ment, but I’m sure he could have come up with a bet­ter answer than that.

The debate con­tin­ues as Tapes­try hosts Terry Eagle­ton, an ongo­ing par­tic­i­pant in this debate.  I’m look­ing for­ward to it.