Opinion

Cree chief, lawyer and author Harold Cardinal speaks at a symposium on “Native Peoples” at the University of Waterloo, Ont., in 1976. The event was planned by Conrad Grebel College students, and attracted Indigenous students from other universities, as well as Dene and Haudenosaunee participants and civil servants.

Almost 400 years ago, the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from [people’s] inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Pascal was probably being hyperbolic, but he was making a profound point, one that aligns with something I discovered and wrote about during my own recent season of solitude:

A few months ago, my wife and I watched a film called CODA. Seventeen-year-old Ruby is a child of deaf adults (CODA). Her parents and brother, who is also deaf, rely on her to interpret the outside world to them. They need her to be present on the fishing boat on which they earn their living, to monitor radio communications and listen for warnings, among other things.

In this beginning time of 2022, while we are coming out of the dark of winter, and hopefully out of the dark of this pandemic, what is it that endures? Also, what is it that gives us hope?

Genesis 1 describes God’s creation activity as, among other things, blessing the male/female that God had created, and commanding them to rule over every living creature that moves on the ground. Meanwhile, Indigenous spirituality offers stories of hunters extending thanks to the fallen creature that gave up its life so the hunter’s community might have food, shelter, warmth, tools.

For a few years now, I have felt good about my slow but steady pace of reading reflectively through Scripture. It is a spiritual discipline I’ve moulded in a way that works for me. Prayer, however, is one that, although certainly not absent from my life, could use some work.

It was a lifelong dream coming true. In a crowded stairwell I inched toward what we had all come to see. Down in the basement, below street level, the room smelled of the smoke from oil lamps dangling precariously overhead, the very place, according to tradition, where Jesus Christ was born. I was in the Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

As we move into 2022, many of us look back at our experience of church last year with dismay and we look forward with hope. Or do you look back with longing, and forward with dismay? Might we look both back and forward with hope?

Yet again, I read last month about another pastor, an Anabaptist leader at that, being accused of sexual misconduct. It was Bruxy Cavey, pastor of The Meeting House, a Be in Christ megachurch. I thought to myself: “yet again.”

Barbara Nickel has done something very clever with her book Dear Peter, Dear Ulla.

A very big community of not-very-close friends
Re: “Weak ties matter,” Sept. 27, page 11.

Alternative service camps during the Second World War brought young men from various traditions and regions together. Pictured, Reverend David P. Reimer of Manitoba, centre, is posing with conscientious objectors in Seebe, Alta.