City Of God 2

I wouldn't exactly call myself an ex-fundamentalist, even if at one time I held a rather literalist view of the Bible. I was taught by my early mentors to respect scripture as authoritative and to believe that every word written had somehow come from the mouth of God. But I also had doubts about certain passages, and by the time I was in my early twenties was already revising some cherished earlier positions I had taken. I was finding some of Paul's writings increasingly hard to swallow, as well as the genocidal passages of the Old Testament. I was becoming increasingly puzzled about the eschatological and apocalyptic teachings. We had based so much of our zeal when I was a teenage Jesus freak, on the anticipated second coming of Christ, and we all believed that this was going to happen in our lifetime. Israel was once again a nation (no one seemed to give a second's thought to Palestinians languishing in refugee camps) and Jesus said, according to a very twisted and distorted understanding of a line ascribed to him in the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew that within a generation of the refounding of Israel, the rapture would occur and we would be taken up into glory and Jesus would return in power and glory and so would be established the New Jerusalem. None of us believed that we would reach an old age. We were dead-certain that there would be in our lifetime, likely before the year 2000, a nuclear confrontation in Israel over the rebuilding of the new Jewish temple where now stands the Muslim Dome of the Rock mosque, Christ would descend to earth with his heavenly armies in the midst of the destruction, slay all his enemies, and we would live in the paradise of heaven and earth united while skipping and dancing along streets of burnished gold and surrounded by walls of precious stones and diamonds. Christies and Sotheby's would have it so good! We are now in 2018, and not much has changed really. Things do get scary at times, with the monsters inhabiting Washington, Moscow and Beijing, but things have always been scary. please tell me, Gentle Reader, when we haven't been mostly frightened like chickens. Even with the looming threat of climate change the earth goes on spinning in its orbit, the sun goes on shining and now, in my time zone, another day is beginning to dawn. Will things always go on like this? Well, who knows? What about Biblical prophecy? Isn't Jesus coming back? Was he mistaken? Was Paul wrong? Are we being led about by a farce? I can only answer this with one lame little effort of mine: no one has ever really known. Not even Jesus. But surely I believe he was (and is) divine? Well, yes. I also accept that when Jesus lived and walked among his fellow Jews that he also was subject to the same limitations as his comrades. His knowledge was limited to what was commonly held in Palestine during the Roman occupation. Being divine did not make him omniscient, at least not during his earthly life. He was born a human child and grew and was educated as a human child. Yes, it is reported that at the age of twelve he showed remarkable insight and wisdom, at least insofar as holy matters are concerned, but he still lived within the same limitations as his peers. That was part of the price of incarnation. How could God possibly have fully identified with us, but to also begin life the way we do: a helpless, weltering and crying vulnerability weighing between five and ten pounds, completely dependent upon his parents for everything. Which means that he would spend his first year or two suckling from his mother's breast, needing his nappies changed, learning to walk, talk, explore his surroundings, ask questions, fall down, cry, get up again and keep learning. We know precious little about the childhood of Jesus, but likely he developed quite normally, although was probably exceptionally bright and precocious in some ways, and yes, he also had to experience puberty and his awakening sexuality, and all of this while living within the limits of life in the Middle East two thousand years ago. It is unreasonable to expect that he was going to be factually correct about everything. Even being God in human form, he was still in human form. This isn't to suggest that there is no meaningful essence in the prophecies he spoke in Matthew 24, and to this day, Biblical scholars wrestle and lose sleep over these things. We have though these two promises: he is coming again; and he is with us always. How, or when, or whether he comes again, really is none of our business, which perhaps is why he was being, maybe, intentionally obscure when he spoke of those things. But we have now the assurance that he is with us always, and this truly must reassure us as we move forward, manifesting in our lives the kingdom of God on earth.

City Of God 1

Yesterday I was enjoying a walk in Stanley Park, when something rather extraordinary happened. I didn't notice much at first. I had just left the forest and was coming out to Lost Lagoon by way of the arched bridge. Then I saw the sun in the foliage of the trees just ahead of me. I was transfixed and felt transported into another realm. I hardly even noticed the fellow riding his bike ahead of me over the bridge. Bikes are prohibited from that bridge because it's for pedestrians only, and cyclists who ride in pedestrian zones are a bête noir of mine. But the way the light displayed itself in the leaves of those trees was enough to keep me from noticing nor from becoming even vaguely annoyed. I knew that, if ever so briefly, I was in another place, in a realm that held little regard for our petty little world, and even after the sense of splendour had passed, I found myself walking the rest of the way in a state of quiet but empowering joy. It's been a while since this has happened for me last, perhaps a few months. I always know, when this is happening, that I am suddenly in another place. This is neither hallucinatory, nor delusional, because I always maintain a strong and rooted awareness of the here and now. Only the here and now has been somehow transfigured. As I continued to walk I thought of the children of God and of the City of God. Who are they? Where is it? These glimpses that occur to me, sometimes with an unabashed frequency, are experiences I can never replicate or synthesize at my whim. This is a visitation, a divine visitation bringing together the two worlds, the two realities of heaven and earth. And these visitations always carry with them a kind of message or portent. Sometimes of things to come, whether of good or ill omen. Sometimes as a manifestation of the divine will in my life. Sometimes to simply comfort and console. I remember the days leading up to September 11 2001. I would be taking long walks in the late afternoon and early evening sun, transfixed in this other realm, this sense of visitation. Then that grand disaster hit the World Trade Centre and all pandemonium broke loose. I knew I was being prepared and that those were indeed holy visitations. This can occur anywhere, at any time. I have no control over these experiences, nor do I want to control them, because these are visitations from God, and it is God who decides and chooses the hour and day. I have come to believe that this divine presence is always here, always implicit, though we don't see or sense this. Few of us anyway. I think that, rather than God wanting only to reveal his presence to a chosen few, that the paucity of these sacred encounters speaks rather of how dense and preoccupied most of us are with things that don't really matter, or of how bowed down we often are with sorrow, regret, anger, and fear. Of how many of us have become reservoirs full of unwept tears. I don't know what it takes for most of us to make ourselves ready and available for these meetings with the Holy One. There seems to be with many of us an obstinate fear of the light, the interpenetrating light of truth and divine love that leaves no stone unturned. Here we live in a world that many of us think is lost, beyond hope and quickly going to hell, but we seldom, if ever, have the eyes to see the sacred and eternal reality that flows beneath and through this material existence, that really has created and sustains this material existence. We live at the very portals, on the threshold of the City of God, and so few of us are ever going to know this!

Faith And Collective Trauma 20

I am thinking this morning about gratitude, Gentle Reader, a theme on which I have already blogged to extinction, and you can rightly expect that I am going to continue to blog to extinction this subject. Why? Because gratitude is so damn important and vital to our survival and wellbeing and there just isn't enough of it. I have also blogged to extinction about how bored and disgusted I am with people who whinge on about their First World problems. We have it so good and we have so little appreciation of what we have already been given. I am not addressing this, by the way, to people who are homeless, living with chronic illness and pain, or are terminally ill, nor for those who have just lost a loved one (I am thinking here not of your little doggy or kitty, much as I love pets, but your mom, your dad, your spouse or your child) Also, if you are in prison, on death row, or being subjected to war, bombing or torture, I am not addressing this blogpost to you. Almost everyone else is fair game today. So...what do we have to be grateful for? I think of the three f's: food, friends and flowers. I never complain about having too much food in my fridge. I have at times found myself complaining about not being able to fit everything I've bought in the supermarket in my little fridge (and it is on the small side). Then I check to see if there is any spoiled food that should be discarded, which in itself is a huge reality check. I am well-off enough to have this wondrously decadent privilege of wasting food. Now, I try to be careful to not waste food, partly because I am on a low income, but also for the sheer ethic of gratitude. I have enough, more than enough. And I'm not grateful? It doesn't matter if I can't afford artisanal cheese or organic produce or fair trade whatever. I still eat well. I don't care if I can't afford to eat out. I save my money for a month's vacation every year in Costa Rica or elsewhere down south where, as well as living in blessed Spanish immersion, I will be eating out in restaurants every single day. Decent food in decent restaurants. And I have something to complain about? Because of the blessing of incredibly low rent in my BC housing apartment, I really don't have to complain about my chronically low wage. I have still been able to reduce my hours to around twenty-four a week, also thanks to early CPP (Canada Pension Plan, for those who don't live in this country), which also puts me in a further reduced rent category. For this reason, I enjoy a good, healthy diet, I enjoy my meals and still get to eat chocolate every day. For the same reason, I do not complain about having too many friends. I used to have few close friends, and even fewer people I could trust. These days, my life appears to be full of people. At times I am tempted to complain about feeling stressed trying to maintain social commitments, but it is such a small trade-off. I enjoy these people and they add so much to my life as I hope I can do for them. How trustworthy are they? We all have our flaws. How trustworthy am I? Ever since I have moved my focus from having friends to being one my social life appears to have changed and improved monumentally. This doesn't mean that there aren't disappointments. As I told a Colombian friend of mine recently, more friends sometimes means more headaches and more reasons for being driven crazy. But such is life and I think that if we are really motivated by a sense of unconditional love towards others, then we can also roll with the difficulties, the disappointments, the betrayals, the failure of nerve that can really impact one from other people. And even if you have allergies, never, ever, complain about too many flowers. Now get out there and embrace the day!

Faith And Collective Trauma 19

I had yet another series of vivid dreams, most of which I do not remember. I often wake knowing I have dreamed dramatically, but I think it's just as well that I go through periods of poor recall. It is an intense and at times onerous burden to have such strong and present dreams, because it makes my dream life every bit and real as my waking life. But dreams are still, by their nature, very surreal, and I think my memory gets selective as an act of mercy for keeping me focussed on the waking reality. My last dream was of a house I was in where I was receiving visitors and guests, young men who looked like they had been street-involved, but were also themselves gifted and highly sensitive. I was making tea for one of them, I think. I had also previously been in a store looking at books of very beautiful bird illustrations, a huge focus on iridescence and the colours of blue and red. I believe that my dreams are actually another dimension, and that I am in contact with others whom I do not know in waking life, but nevertheless are real people. Some, perhaps many, have been long dead and I am in communion with their spirits. We are often conferring and consulting together, and I think that in these dreams I am both teaching and learning. I know this is quite a departure from some of the orthodoxies of dream interpretation, but I think that's because the psychiatrists who delve into such things are themselves, usually, atheists, who attribute anything spiritual to pathology. I used to bend over backwards, sideways, forward, then inside out in order to understand my dreams, usually adopting a Jungian model for dream interpretation. Sometimes, even often it has made sense. But there have always been those stubborn holdout dreams that resist that model. It was when I had that dream of a Mexican doctor in a clinic. She told me her name so I looked her up on the Internet. I wasn`t sure if she was actually Mexican, but I knew she was Latina and we were speaking Spanish in the clinic where I was visiting her. I also know that it was 11:30 am and she asked me to come back and see her at 3 in the afternoon. There were also present a troubled looking young man who could be her son, and a recently deceased coworker of mine. She told me her name. When I looked her up, there she was on a YouTube video giving a presentation about service delivery to an audience of medical professionals in the Mexican city Aguascalientes. Same age (fifties or early sixties), short hair, face, build, voice, accent of Spanish. I have had so many different encounters like this with so many complete strangers in dreams and I have come to believe that some, maybe many, perhaps all, are real people. The veil between life and death, the seen and the unseen is very thick in some places, thin in others. I heard a sermon recently about thin places, where we are more likely to encounter God. I also believe that by extension, some of us become those thin places. I believe that I am one of those people, and that my long life of prayer, Christian service and care for the dying has made me uniquely open and vulnerable to others, both known and unknown, living and dead, and this is not something that creeps me out. This is not Twilight Zone. This is a divine gift and I feel so very privileged and so rich to be able to experience those meetings with the cloud of witnesses who surround us.

Faith And Collective Trauma 18

What makes us strong? There is lots of talk about empowerment and disempowerment. I live in a statistical category that does not allow for weakness. I am a white male. It is assumed that I have the benefits of white privilege and that I should simply coast through life, graduating from a decent university, working in a meaningful and nicely paid profession, marry and have a family, own a nice home, two cars, go on annual world vacations and cruises, source my food from Urban Fair and Choices, dine every week in the finest restaurants, get politely drunk in the best cocktail lunges, buy my clothes at Nordstrom and Holt Renfrew while living in socially and professionally connected heaven. If I don't enjoy these sweet and low-hanging fruits of privilege then I probably haven't worked hard enough. That is the stereotype and it is appalling how many stupid people there are out their who swallow this nonsense. I am a white male, and I struggled through two and a half semesters of community college and had to drop out because my low wage job as a home care worker sapped all my energy and night classes were no longer an option, not if I wanted to do my job well and pay the rent while studying. I couldn't handle the exhaustion, and no one was going to pay the bills for me if I left my work, and I was already traumatized from collection agents for what I already owed in defaulted student loans, defaulted because my low wage employment didn't leave me with anything left after paying for the necessities. I had neither the Bank of Mom and Dad nor Hotel Mom and Dad to rely on, except for two semesters at Langara when my father shelled out a few hundred for my support at community college under duress from both my mother and from Canada Student Loan. Otherwise, I was on my own. I was a child of divorce and spent my teenage years surviving two hostile parents who kept defaulting on their responsibilities towards me as their son. I was also a survivor of abuse from both of them and my older brother combined, so I didn't have a lot in the way of emotional reserves for doing spectacularly well in life. In the meantime I worked hard to survive, being unable to get even into decently paying union work. Doors simply kept closing on me. A lot of people in my situation, ended up on the street with addictions and mental health issues. I managed to avoid a lot of that while struggling on. My faith in Christ and my experience of his presence and desire to honour God kept me a float through all this. In my weakness I have become strong. I know what it's like to be poor, insecurely housed and not at all housed. I know what its' like to be harassed by police while simply minding my own business, I know what it's like to be judged by others for not doing as well as them. I know what it's like to be marginalized and wrongly hated. These things have all made me stronger. I am nobody's victim. Every day when I go to work in my underpaid employment as a mental health peer support worker, I do not dwell on how unfairly we are treated and how unfair is our low wage. I think of my clients, of how to work well with them and almost always find something to appreciate and enjoy in each contact. When I come home to my tiny subsidized apartment, I but rarely complain about difficult neighbours and noise outside in my unappealing downtown neighbourhood. Sometimes, yes, but usually I am grateful that I have a place to live in the city where I was born, and that I am safe and secure in this little apartment which has become for me a sanctuary. My family is dead and gone and I have had to make new friends, but the latter blessing is much better than the former. I enjoy good health and each day I can walk outside and absorb something of the beauty of the natural world. Without the false illusory privilege that white males are supposed to be entitled to, I have come across something of infinitely greater value and on top of that I am envious of no one.

Faith And Collective Trauma 17

I got an email from the security manager for the pacific Centre Mall yesterday. He mentioned that he received word from Nordstrom, the chichi department store about one of his security guards telling a panhandler to leave when he was on public property, the sidewalk, that just happened to be in front of the store. I have already mentioned in another post my communications with the manager of Nordstrom, confirming that it is not their policy to expel beggars from sidewalks even if they are adjacent to their store and that this was a matter to be taken up with the mall and security management, which has nothing to do with their store. The security manager asked me for more details about what happened, then later he responded again saying there had been a misunderstanding, the panhandler was sitting in front of an exit door, the security guard was concerned he could get hit by the door by someone leaving the building and it was for his safety that he was asking him to move away a bit The panhandler, according to the security manager, opted to leave the area altogether. I wrote back, telling him his explanation was plausible, though it didn't make sense of the security guard's defensive and rude reaction to me. Perhaps I was coming across as rude and threatening and, being older, I morphed into his mean and horrible dad for those fifteen seconds or so. This does happen, and likely far oftener than we think. Or the young security guard might have really been telling the poor guy to leave and his explanation to his boss was simply a little white lie to cover his little white ass. I have no way of knowing, and I am conflicted about this, so I am not going to give him the benefit of the doubt, nor am I going to call him a liar, simply because I do not have enough evidence. But the young rent-a-thug's reply to me is still troubling. The tone suggests that he did not want to be seen when he was talking to the panhandler, much less addressed about it. And with the focus being on the lack of affordable housing in this city, a lot of people are starting to see that they themselves are but one or two paycheques from the pavement. It has become bad PR, it seems, to be perceived as poor-bashing, even though everyone still does it. It is just now considered bad optics. Which I suppose is a tiny, tiny step forward. But still, even if what young rent-a-thug is saying to his boss is true, and he's not relying on his shining Nordic good looks as a foil (and it goes without saying that physically beautiful people get away with a lot more than the rest of us) there is still an underlying bad odour in this particular bathroom. No one has heard from the panhandler, who alone can really tell us the truth, and we are less than likely to get his version of what happened. If he did volunteer to leave, as has been alleged, then this is likely his experience of disempowerment speaking, which suggests that even if young rent-a-thug was being as kind as possible, he still likely felt threatened and intimidated and not willing to put up a fight that he is sure to not win. In the meantime, housing in my city remains obscenely unaffordable and a growing number of people living in this city are being faced with a very unappetizing menu of options. Housing still is not being regarded as a fundamental human right, and our crisis of homelessness is still not being tackled for what it really is: a crisis, a humanitarian catastrophe. And the street homeless and beggars still get treated like crap.

Faith And Collective Trauma 16

Life hasn't been easy for me, Gentle Reader. But it could have been much worse. I have undergone the bitter divorce of my parents, the full range of child abuse, all opportunities for higher education snatched from me largely because of the former and the latter, underemployment, poverty, sometimes extreme poverty, police harassment in my youth and middle age, social exclusion, homelessness, have never known what it is to have a life-partner or a family of my own, hundreds and hundreds of deaths of people dear to me and in my work of care giving, religious cult abuse, a breakdown of my mental and emotional health, stigmatization, more poverty and underemployment, abandonment by my family and friends, and a lot of vicious dog attacks, I have been stalked and harassed, my life has been threatened and endangered. Well, boohoo. I have never really gone hungry, have mostly enjoyed fairly good health, and even when homeless, have always had a roof over my head. And one other thing. I don't complain a lot. I know people who have had it very well compared to me: lovely careers, university, high incomes, homes, cars, families, good health, and they have never really gone without, and you know what? Some of those people are miserable. And they are delicate. They haven't had their ass kicked. They have coasted on white or middle class entitlement and privilege and have never had to do without anything. And they complain. Relentlessly complain. I think a lot of them have never really learned to love. It's always about what they can get or extract out of life, knocking off their bucket lists, and whinging and complaining about their favourite restaurant suddenly serving frozen vegetables or a wine vintage they don't approve of. I don't know well a lot of people like that because, really, why would any of them want to be seen with someone like me? I live in a subsidized apartment and work at an occupation full of built-in stigma. I really own nothing much outside of my books, paintings and art supplies, my computer and a few modest household appliances and utensils: a small laptop computer, a landline phone, no TV or cell or smart phone, no microwave, no stereo, a couple of radios and a CD player (gifts), with mostly secondhand CD's a small portable electric fan, a few items of clothing (mostly secondhand or found), furniture that is well-past its best-before date, a tooth bush, and almost nothing else. I wake up early every morning and I feel, not deprived, nor cheated by life. I feel blessed. Every single morning. Because life has not been for me a cakewalk, because I have known much sorrow, rejection, abandonment, and danger, I treat life not as an entitlement, but as a gift. I know that even though I have suffered some, many have had it far worse than I. I also follow a Saviour who has also suffered and this is why God is so real to me: not because he has protected me from suffering. He has not. But because he too has suffered, and he suffers with me and in me and for me as he does for every last one of you entitled ungrateful losers. I could not imagine a God who did not know intimately through his own experience what it is like to be a suffering and broken human being. Life has become for me a gift and every day I step outside to enjoy the wonder of nature, his creation, and the beauty of other people, even spoiled little gods like some of my privileged Gentle Reader. I have friends again. Many. And I appreciate each one as a gift, perhaps because I know how easy it is to lose friends, just as I am aware from my own contacts with death, how easily and quickly this gift of life could be snatched from me. I have never stopped loving, and all the crap that has happened in my life has but served to teach me to love more. And that is the secret, I have found, to a happy and meaningful life: love, joy and gratitude, and these also are gifts that are always being offered us for the taking. If we will but only, in exchange for such precious bestowments, will respond by rejecting selfish and self-interested fear and by offering nothing less than our very selves, souls, lives and beings. The words of St. Francis of Assisi: It is in giving that we receive, it is in loving that we are loved, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life."

Faith And Collective Trauma 15

What is fire? Is it energy, and purely a material property of a material universe? Is there a spiritual property? I have an idea. Fire and electricity and other forms of energy somehow straddle the seen and the unseen. Energy is spirit made materially manifest? I don't know. I haven't given a lot of study to this matter and on these pages I can only offer ideas and suggestions. We still have to do the work of research, reading, study and learning. But fire is fascinating. The Zoroastrians revere fire as sacred, and it has throughout the world religions and spiritual practices a kind of sacred status. In Christian churches, notably Catholic, Anglican and Orthodox, fire is used in all the masses, eucharists and divine liturgies, in the form of lit candles, as a visible reminder of the presence of the Holy Spirit and the light of Christ. During the Easter Vigil service each year the sacred fire is rekindled and blest, and becomes the source of the sanctuary light that is always burning above the altar. When we were given the gift of fire we were granted something huge, something potentially lethal, helpful, comfortable, healing, and inspiring. Fire also cleanses: for example the annual bush and forest fires, human causes and climate change notwithstanding, are essential for keeping ecosystems healthy and flourishing. Fire purges, in the smelting of precious and other metals it burns away the dross till only the pure gold and silver remain shining in the basin. Fire is also a deadly force, a lethal weapon. It has been used from time immemorial as a weapon of war, from the burning of thatch huts and wigwams to the fire bombing of Dresden to the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the church perverted the doctrine of Christ in the Middle Ages and became a political and military instrument for the conquest, control and extermination or forced conversion of unbelievers, fire became employed as that most pernicious and deadly instrument of torture and execution that found its apogee during the Spanish Inquisition and beyond, leaving thousands, perhaps even millions of innocents falsely accused of witchcraft and heresy reduced to ash, following the most horrendous and excruciatingly painful prolonged death that could be imagined. The excuse of the church was that fire was an instrument of purging and cleansing for those heretic and pagan souls, possibly saving them from a worse destiny in the fires of hell. The Upanishads call love a fire that burns forever. I mentioned yesterday that astrologically-speaking, water and fire are my dominant elements. I sometimes see myself as a river of fire, or water on fire flowing and overspilling the banks and setting ablaze forests, towns and cities. Fire is a sacred element and we are always in the midst of a sacred dance with fire. It is deadly, comforting, enlightening, inspiring, healing and cleansing. We can never quiet control fire, we can only live in it and try to avoid its worst devastation while taking advantage of its many benefits. "in the vault of the heavens, in the cradle of the earth; at the moment of death, in the agony of birth. Sages of old have sought to know the worth of the Sacred Fire, the Luminescent Flame, whose tongues have embroidered and licked the Mystic Name that is born in the pupil of the shining eye of God, having burnished the places where the saints have trod; it pours down holy mountains and immolates the land, till rocks and stones split open and crumble into sand, making desert wastes into regions bright and grand...Fire of destruction, from eternity you roar, fire of creation, our spiritual core, fire of destruction, from eternity you roar, fire of creation, our spiritual core...…In your all-exposing light we are naked and alarmed, we draw nearer to your flame for our bodies to be warmed, as you burn within our hearts to reveal your dwelling place, the Theophany's new home where he measures out the grace that will recreate for each of us a face as we sing in the silence to the mystery of your name, that melts our bones like wax as we plunge into your flame, our beginning and our end forever and the same....Fire of destruction from eternity you roar; fire of creation, our spiritual core. Fire of destruction from eternity you roar; fire of creation, our spiritual core...our spiritual core, our universal core....our spiritual core.

Faith And Collective Trauma 14

I have long been interested in the elements: not the elements of the periodic table but the traditional elements of classical antiquity: fire, earth, air and water. I have also long been intrigued by astrology. I perhaps do not take this pseudo-science as seriously as some, but I am not about to debunk it either. There are parallels and they are more frequent than mere coincidence. I am thinking here both of western, or occidental, and of eastern, or Chinese or oriental astrology. I tend to take these things with a grain of salt, neither am I prepared to take seriously my daily horoscope, even if I do read it sometimes, more for entertainment value. In my case, I am a Pisces. My element is water. I have many classic Piscean traits and qualities: spiritual, intuitive, psychic, highly sensitive, compassionate and empathic, creative. I was also born in the year of the Fire-Monkey, 1956: I have higher than average intelligence, I am analytical, crafty, an excellent communicator, and bold to the point of being reckless. All those things make sense in the alchemy of Aaron. However, I want to focus on my two governing elements: fire and water. This makes for a curious combination, because fire is put out by water, which also produces steam and energy. And fire causes water to evaporate. Fire was discovered and first used by protohumans, when? I just asked Uncle Google. It could be as long ago as one million years or longer that our ape-like ancestors were first cozying around a campfire munching on antelope on a stick, or whatever they might have been cooking. This makes us and our less distant ancestors the only animal in this planet's history to have actually harnessed fire and its energy for our own use. We learned how to cook, making meat more palatable and adaptable to our predominantly vegetarian diet. It also provided us with heat and warmth, making it possible for us to venture into colder climates and thrive there. It also provided us with a source of light to frighten off night predators and give us an excuse to stay up late. We didn't have TV so we invented and told stories instead. In ancient Greek mythology fire is also the gift of the Titan god Prometheus to humans, for which infraction he was condemned by Zeus to be chained to a rock on a mountain face forever as a vulture visited him each day to feast on his perpetually regenerating liver. And this discovery of fire was, of course, the beginning of the end for our Mother earth. We owe to this little convenience our current crisis of global warming and climate change. Could this be why Zeus and the other gods of Olympus were so pissed-off at Prometheus? It wasn't that they didn't want those newfangled humans to do well. ?Rather, they knew that we would lack the foresight to know what our dandy new convenience of fire would end up doing to the planet, and we were really too selfish to care. We still haven't changed that much, have we Gentle Reader? We are more aware of the problem than before, but don't get too optimistic while after wringing your hands and whimpering over the fate of our planet and our species because of our short-sighted selfishness, you suddenly change gears and start grumbling again about the high cost of gas as you get into your SUV and drive to the mall. Yep. You're sad, alright. Real, real sad.

Faith And Collective Trauma 13

There really isn't that much to us humans when you think about it. We originally lived in trees, having much smaller brains, and then we descended to the ground and learned to walk on our hind legs. This freed up our forepaws to turn into very able little hands. we learned how to make tools. We also learned how to make weapons which we used to kill animals for food and each other because even back then one million years ago we didn't seem to like each other much. We walked around everywhere and our brains grew. We got smarter. We began to look more human. We developed language, clothes, constructed shelters that eventually became crude looking homes. We left our ancestral Africa because we wanted to see the world, or maybe it was because of climate change and shrinking food supplies. Even then, our population was growing, and we liked each other even less, so tribal warfare made migration essential. We roamed, we hunted and gathered, formed settlements, domesticated animals and took up farming. Our homes became bigger and more sophisticated. We formed social orders and hierarchies and our spiritual beliefs and practices became complex religions as we learned how to write. We became adept at feeding ourselves and some became wealthy. We learned how to smelt metals and made better tools. We also made better weapons, and became even better at killing each other. We formed cities and went to war with each other and captured slaves and soon enslaved and oppressed entire nations of subject peoples as we formed empires and traded all manner of goods across land and sea. We co-opted religion, made it the state power, and conveniently forgot all the uncomfortable parts about love, peace and humility while demanding others, thanks to our powerful and tyrannical priesthoods to submit to gods we didn't even know. Only in our art could we portray the real beauty of the faith and mysticism that ever escaped our experience. Now we are more powerful and more numerous than ever. Our discoveries of science have made us masters of the planet and our Mother Earth languishes from our industrial abuse. There are nearly seven billion of us infesting her sacred skin, like a mass infection of scabies or lice, and we are making this planet unliveable while imagining and planning to travel to other planets and other stars where we can spread our disease and destruction. We have come so very far from those small brained monkeys that swung from trees. Or have we? For all our arrogance and intellectual hubris, how different are we really, from half-brained hominids fleeing from sabre-tooth cats and bears almost as big as elephants? We still love and long for nature, for simplicity. We want to reconnect with nature, without accepting that we have always been part of nature. We still have the instincts of our hunter-gatherer ancestors while pondering the mysteries of the universe and of our own existence. We still hate each other, we still enslave other humans, even if they get paid a miserable wage for their efforts. And some of us are those being enslaved. Really, I think we're all slaves and only when we really learn how to serve one another while protecting our Mother Earth and loving the Creator who gave us all existence and life, are we going to find our way through and out of this mess we have made.

Faith And Collective Trauma 12

I have just corrected some incomplete information from my blogpost on 18 September, Gentle Reader. It was not Nordstrom who sent the young rent-a-thug from Paladin Security to harass the panhandler in front of their store but the Pacific Centre Mall. Please contact the general manager of Pacific Centre and express your displeasure. Apologies to Nordstrom for the miscommunication. I have also corrected my Google Review. The manager of Nordstrom actually reached out to me in an email yesterday to express concern for the panhandler and to also correct my misinformation. I am leaving online the corrected review as an act of repentance and as a reminder that just as there are douchebags all over the place, there are also good people everywhere and this needs to be remembered especially by zealous social activists such as myself who sometimes forget that we have a brain. There are people of goodwill in all strata and in all categories of our humanity. There is a lot that gets done behind the scenes that few of us know about, a lot of silent activism and influence towards kindness and social justice. This of course isn't enough, because it is always the virtuous few being the donkeys, the beasts of burden doing the bulk of the work. Everyone else can follow it online if they're not busy on their Twitter feed, Instagram, Facebook updates, reading inspirational blogs such as yours truly, wasting time on Tinder or Hey Cupid, discreetly looking at porn, getting run over on crosswalks. We need more people to take action. Young Rent-A-Thug got away with bullying that panhandler, only because he could. At least Blonde Hitler Youth heard from me about it, and perhaps as the manager of Nordstrom has also raised the concern with Pacific Centre Mall management, maybe young Rent-A-Thug will get his pretty ass fired, or at least sufficiently kicked and he will accept this teachable moment for improving his attitude towards the less fortunate. We really need to put our phones away and our earbuds too and start paying more attention to the people around us, because they are also our neighbour, they are also part of our extended family. If only people weren't so addicted to smart phone technology, but the bastards from Apple and Macintosh and other places have most of us by the short and curlies, Gentle Reader. Those phones are the new tobacco. They have become the legal crack, and it is scientifically verified that this technology is addictive and this is an intentional strategy to keep us hooked and to keep us buying their perniciously clever little product. Don't get me wrong. I am glad there is good will out there. I am also saddened and distressed that we often feel so paralyzed and helpless. We need to start paying more attention to one another. We need to stop just minding our own business. Hello? Anyone out there?

Faith And Collective Trauma 11

It's a dog-eat-dog world, they say. I've heard that one several times in recent months. Is it true? Well, it could depend on a few factors. For example, which world are you referring to? The world of capitalism and finance? yep. Or maybe more like a shark-eat-other fish world. How about social media? Depends on who's tweeting and whether or not you're still dumb enough to read comments sections. The natural world? Well, that depends on whether you want to take a Darwinist view of things. Charles Darwin was heavily influenced by the zeitgeist of his day, being the Industrial Revolution and Post-Industrial England, so his view of the brutal competition among organisms to survive and thrive to pass on their genes was much informed by the brutal capitalism of his era. This of course is also very much a part of our ethos of war and war-likeness that we seem to be so slow and reluctant to shake off. When I visit the cloud forest in Monteverde, Costa Rica, for example, I don't see species competing against each other. I see them working together in very complex rhythms and harmonies and symbioses. In my interactions with others I try not to get in other people's way, and I especially try not to treat others as things in the way. Unless I happen to be running for the bus. Or I'm on my way home with an excruciatingly full bladder. And especially don't get in my way if I happen to be running for the bus with an excruciatingly full bladder. here's an elephant in the room? my Anglican priest friend (I won't say which one) and I were talking about war and the military and he was trying to persuade me that it's governments abandoning the soldiers after they're no longer available to kill for their country (my interpolation) that causes military PTSD. I countered that it's rather because they are trained to kill and that this goes so contrary to our essential human nature that they are literally traumatized and psychologically destroyed on the battle field, because they are killing other people., My friend, who presumes to be not just any Christian, but a Christian minister, took exception to my argument, saying but that's already accepted that they are going to do that. I countered that it's still the elephant in the living room and no one wants to talk about it because it is true. He couldn't argue, but I think he might be a little bit mad at me for a while. More, much more needs to be done to persuade us to question our governments and the whole perverted ethos of nationalism that we are bred on. Remember the words, "Question authority, before they question you." We need badly to learn the ways of peace and reconciliation and this is going to make us dangerous rebels, because we will be challenging the very foundations of capitalism, globalism and nationalism, and they do not want us to do this, because they so rely upon our manipulated compliance in order to pull off their nasty agendas. As children are educated and nurtured to grow into intelligent, caring and loving adults, who can reach generously across barriers of race, ethnicity, religion, poverty and nationality; if we can learn and teach our children to work and live together, not competitively but cooperatively; if we consistently award generosity and kindness instead of competition and winning, then just maybe we will get through this particularly rough patch that our planet, thanks to our stupid violence and greed, is facing. The opposition is going to be fierce and relentless, because there are so many invested interests in greed and violence, and so much the more must we resist and work against this.

Faith And Collective Trauma 10

I'm skipping back and forth on my thematic material right now, because things happen every day that I'd like to write about, Gentle Reader. Yesterday I wrote about the nonsense of Christians who insist on supporting the military and war. Today, I will be weighing in against poor bashing. Not just any poor-bashing. Yesterday, I was on my way to see my next client, which took me walking through the downtown core on my way to the Skytrain. There was a man panhandling on the sidewalk on Robson Street near Granville, just in front of the chichi Nordstrom department store, which exists to cater to the growing population of wealthy people and other money launderers in Vancouver. This man appeared gentle, quiet and harmless. He was seated on the pavement with a couple of cardboard signs. He would have been perhaps in his early thirties, long hair, but seemed reasonably clean. I am assuming that he is homeless. I think I have given him money on occasion, yesterday, no, as my budget is still rather tight these days. Then I saw a Paladin security guard approach the man on the sidewalk. He was tall, very young and handsome, in a blonde, Hitler-youth sort of way. He told the panhandler to move on, which he did, quietly. I approached Young Blonde Hitler Youth and said "He shouldn't have to move. You and I at least have homes. Shame on you" As I was walking away (had I not been due at work I might have stayed a bit longer and chewed him out some more) Young Blonde Hitler Youth said, "Thanks for walking away, sir." At least he called me sir. I was quite concerned about what had happened, and when I got home from work I contacted the City of Vancouver. The young lout named Michael, who took my call, might have been a relative of Young Blonde Hitler Youth. He didn't want to talk about it, said that panhandling is illegal in Vancouver, then basically hung up. I did a little quick online research which revealed that only aggressive panhandling in certain areas (near a bank machine, an open car door, or a public washroom, for instance) is illegal. Otherwise beggars have a right to beg and to be left alone by young fair-haired Rent-A-Thugs. I called back the City of Vancouver. Michael took my call. I told him who I was and what my research had shown me. Then I asked to speak to his supervisor. He seemed reluctant and I insisted so, he passed the phone to his supervisor. She wasn't sure exactly what to do after I told her what I had found out, and also mentioned my displeasure with her subordinates way of handling my first call. She connected me to the police nonemergency line. The woman representing police and I had an interesting chat. I had to explain things very carefully and thoroughly to her before she could figure out that the panhandler really ought to have been left alone by young Rent-A-Thug. He was not on private property, he was occupying a sidewalk which is public property. Of course there was nothing further that she could or would do. The poor do not have rights and vast and wealthy corporations such as Nordstrom, because of their wealth, have all the power. I am still going to send Nordstrom an email about young Rent-A-Thug, and then I am going to post my opinion of that poor-bashing enterprise on Google Reviews. It's the least I can do. One of the sad and bitter fruits of our human condition is in the way we are expected to ruthlessly compete with others for even a morsel of bread, and those who cannot or will not compete are expected to die in the gutter. This is what we have become. An ugly, money worshipping, selfish and arrogant pack of hyenas. (at least hyenas take better care of each other). In my faith, as a Christian, the poor are regarded as having preferential love from God, and it is our sacred calling to make this real as we live and weep in a world that is so far and so alienated from the tenets of love......……………… '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''This just in...Nordstrom is not at fault here, but Pacific Centre Mall to whom they are attached. The manager from Nordstrom explained to me yesterday and expressed compassion and concern for the panhandler. My apologies to Nordstrom.

Faith And Collective Trauma 9

One has to work hard in order to understand the kind of thinking, or lack of thinking, behind those Christians who want to justify the use of the military and war. There always appears to be some essential piece lacking in their personal experience of God. I am not referring here to the emotional responses of joy and warmth and fuzziness when your favourite hymns are being sung, or when you really like what the preacher said. Here's an idea. I tried to explain to one of my Anglican priest friends about a theology of love. He didn't seem to get it and even disagreed at first. He couldn't wrap his head around the concept that God is love. Truth, justice, holiness, and most important of all orthodox theological correctness, yes, but first and foremost God is love, and that is how we are meant to understand and experience truth, justice and holiness. This is a very important distinction, because Cristian warmongers can support the military for one simple reason: they do not really know God, or they do not know the God of love who is God. Really, because of the kind of toxic masculinity that hobbles their spiritual and psychological growth. Toxic masculinity (and women suffer from this syndrome as well!) leaves one embarrassed and ashamed of any show or betrayal of weakness, and the toxically masculine have a very distorted view of love. To them it is something feminine (which to them means weak and inferior) and emotional (which it is not really, or not exclusively) and toxic masculinity worships and adores strength. Those same Christians would far rather uphold the violent and genocidal campaigns of the armies of Israel of the Old Testament, than really focus around God, their God, my God and your God, as a vulnerable and suffering human being, being impaled naked on a cross and breathing his last in the presence of his grief-stricken friends and mother and jeering onlookers. That is love in full display and in full action in all its raw human divinity and divine humanity. There is no indication of this God-Man and Man-God taking up arms to defend himself, and his answer to his most devoted apostle who drew a sword and struck off the ear of the servant of the high priest in the defence of his saviour and friend was in these very simple and succinct words: put away your sword; those who take up the sword, by the sword shall perish. We are called to be pacifist Christians who love and follow a pacifist saviour. Guns, bombs, bullets and swords are not part of the Christian arsenal, but love, and the thirst and work for peace, justice and mercy. Nor must we, as pacifists and Christians, seek or accept the protection of guns, bombs, bullets or swords. Just as Jesus commanded Peter to put down the sword so does he say now the very same to us, his disciples and followers. There are no military solutions to our national nor for our global problems. That has been tried over and over throughout our blood-drenched history as traumatized and traumatizing humans, and it is still being tried. We cannot even claim whether things would have gone worse had we refused to go to war in 1939, because our view and thinking of the Second World War is so distorted by the victor`s lens and victors' justice. It may yet be several generations more that have to pass before the descendants of the allies have really got a clear-eyed picture of what really happened, and it is finally revealed that our soldiers also committed crimes and atrocities against the enemy. Do I believe that Canada should dismantle and scrap its military? Well, why not? They did the same thing in Costa Rica seventy years ago, despite their bellicose neighbour, Nicaragua, and they only have been invaded by tourists while enjoying the best standard of living and the stablest social infrastructure in Latin America, as well as one of the happiest citizenries not just in Latin America but in the world.

Faith And Collective Trauma 8

I am thinking of the words from Paul's letter to the Romans where he wrote that all of creation now groans and travails with the expectation of the fulfilment of the Kingdom of God, or something like that. This passage, from chapter eight, has always resonated with me, ever since I first read it with my bowl of Shreddies (TM) or whatever I was eating for breakfast one Sunday morning during the summer when I was a fifteen year old teenage Jesus Freak. This is the same chapter where it is said that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called to his service. These words have stayed with me and I still often remember them. I am thinking right now of what a wretched and broken mess is our humanity, and what a wrecked and broken mess we have made of our Mother Earth. We also tend to get certain things right, for example, public health care and housing, when we are getting those things right. But, honestly, Gentle Reader, we are still so hobbled by greed and self-interest thanks to the vectors and apologists for global capitalism, and this chronic refusal to stop repeating old mistakes that I sometimes wonder if we really have a lot of time left. Our handsome Prime Minister Brainless and his bosses and masters from the corporate sector has dug in his heals, court order or no court order, and is determined to push through the purchase and twinning of the Kinder Morgan pipeline to what will amount to around ten billion dollars of our tax money. If our governments and their bosses from Big Oil insist on exploiting all petroleum deposits till they can no longer get it out of the ground, then we could well be so far gone in climate change from global warming that we will not have much of a planet worth saving. I also find it hard to believe, as I am sure you will, that there are people who still believe in armed and military conflict as necessaries in maintaining global order and pursuing the interests of nations. Some who still believe this tragic nonsense are Christians. Two of them whom I know as friends are Anglican priests! Two otherwise intelligent men (one of them anyway) and they see absolutely no contradiction between training men (and now women, too) to go out and kill people we don't like, and the Gospel of Christ which is, among other things, the Gospel of Peace. But Anglicans are notorious for their capacity for trying to rationalize almost anything. Or should I call us Angle Cans, as in any angle can. (and will!) Our military history is so full of myth and lies that it is impossible to have a rational conversation with diehard conservatives and other idiots who insist on believing them. We cannot invoke the Second World War as a necessary conflict for preserving world peace and freedom for the simple reason that we are the victors and therefore the least likely to know or want to know the truth about war. We won. Victor's justice. No one has any record of war crimes and atrocities committed by the Allies for the simple reason that those things have been erased from history. We do vilify the Russians for rapes and other war crimes, but they are Russians, and after the war they became our enemies. And they still refuse to call war crimes the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, likewise the firebombing of Dresden, Hamburg and Tokyo. But Canadians, and a lot of Anglicans, remain brainwashed and made stupid by propaganda and jargon. Try telling them that our poor soldiers did not make the ultimate sacrifice for their country, rather they were sacrificed by their governments. Cannon fodder. Just the other day at a meeting at work a South African colleague mentioned in a conversation that she didn't do military service in her country because there are no women in the military. (they still haven't figured out that for women to be really free and equal, that they might do a bit better than imitating the worst characteristics of men. Toxic masculinity looks bad enough on men. It is equally ugly on women.) Another colleague, an alleged Christian, said that they should start enlisting women if they want to be progressive. I piped in "If they really want to be progressive they would abolish the military." No one said a word, but oh, the faces in that room!

Faith And Collective Trauma 7

The near death experiences all seem quite consistent, at least the ones that we hear and read about: on the impact of sudden mortality one finds themselves outside their body, observing and hearing those attending to them, then they are going up a kind of stairway or they are taken up through a great funnel then find themselves meeting loved ones who have already died and they are in a place full of love and light and beauty, then they are facing a great light that appears to be God, challenging and confronting them about their lives so far and offering them to be sent back into their earthly lives. They are revived and returned to life, and often find that their lives are drastically or subtly changed and that their new spiritual awareness has made them kinder and more generous people, often changing entirely their way of life and their manner of work in order to conform to this new sense of life calling. Atheists and scientists hate those accounts because they are not quite so easy to debunk as they originally thought. I find those accounts quite persuasive, but as a believing Christian I am already prejudiced. There Is something about near-death experiences that persuades me that we do live in a state of separation from the Holy, and it is in death that we are reunited. Every person reporting this kind of near-death experience mentions that they felt as though they had finally come home. As I said, I am not skeptical, and I look forward to when this should happen to me. But what about this state of separation? We go through our earthly existence cut off, or very distant from the Holy. Some have a sense that they live in a perpetually thin place and that God is always near to them. I seem to be one of those fortunate ones. But for most of us, it is an experience of separation, of being cut off. Now, I don't see angels every day. Actually, I never see them at all, except for one experience that stays with me to this day, and it really could have been just a dream. This happened in August, 1996. I was going through a very difficult time, struggling with near incapacitating toothaches and no money for dental treatment due to my incredibly stingy and meanspirited employers. A youth draped in white appeared on my bed. He had incredibly intense, dark and wonderful eyes. There was light in the room. I asked him who he was and he replied, I want you to tell me what is troubling you. So I told him, everything that I had been through, from early childhood to that present day. I felt enormously relieved and unburdened. Then I asked him again who he was. He smiled ironically and said, you think I'm twenty-two, but I am much older than that. Then I knew that he was at least tens of thousands of years older than that and I embraced him begging him to not leave me. I fell back to sleep. I woke up again in the morning, then drifted into a dream and saw all the planets aligned as they made their way around the son and a voice, it was the same voice as the angel, saying, I am always with you, you can never get far from me.

Faith And Collective Trauma 6

Who are we? Who am I? You cannot ask one of those questions without also having to ask the other. What makes us, us? What makes me, me? I am recalling what I consider to be Doris Lessing's greatest novel, the Four-Gated City (otherwise I would have not read those six hundred plus pages more than twenty times in my life). She described her protagonist, Martha Hesse, in her experience of herself as she wandered alone at night through the streets of London five years after the Second World War, having just arrived there from her home in southern Africa. She found herself to not really be a concrete or solid self at all, but rather a soft, receptive intelligence. I do not have a problem with that concept and it actually squares with my own experience. I was visiting a friend yesterday, an Anglican priest (a lot of my friends appear to be clergy!) in a coffee shop. I mentioned how I do not have a definable personality, but I seem to be fluid, not a chameleon, but something that flows and eddies like water. This could also be from my relative lack of baggage. I have never owned my home, a car, I have never worked at a legitimate well-paid profession, I have never married or raised a family. I do not have any of those milestones that mark one in contemporary middle class society as a legitimate contributing adult. Even though I am a legitimate, contributing adult. If there is an image that fits my personality, such as it is, I would call it fire. Sometimes a small flame blazing against the surrounding dark; sometimes a river of fire sweeping and overflowing the banks. This isn't to say that I don't do anything constructive. This morning in the very small hours, I got up at three, following a deep six hour sleep, and made bread, which is now cooling on the counter. I am doing laundry, and sipping Costa Rican coffee that was grown and roasted on a farm just three or four miles from my friends whose bed and breakfast I stay in when I am visiting Monteverde. I have spiced the coffee with cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg. Exquisite. And I am listening to a radio documentary about panpsychism, which expounds the idea that not just humans and higher animals, but everything in the universe has consciousness. I believe this, but also because my experience of life is that the spirit of the living God fills and inhabits everything in the universe, including us, and the interlocutor has just said that it is so magical and mysterious that science may never really figure it out, and that what may need to change is the way we do science. I did wait till the program concluded before I went downstairs to put my clothes in the dryer. I am responsible, and generally try to free up the machines for others who need them, but I thought this program about panpsychism to be so fascinating that no one should mind at five in the morning if I leave my clothes for five or ten extra minutes. I suppose that this little thumbnail sketch of my morning so far would give you, Gentle Reader, a small idea of who I am? And I forgot to mention that I changed my bed, showered, cleaned my apartment (quietly!) and did my devotional readings (Bible in Spanish, Psalm, and reading from Acts and from Matthew's Gospel, followed by a reading from a devotional book called God Calling). The laundry I do once a week, first thing in the morning, when I am also baking bread (whole wheat, natch!) My breakfast will be freshly baked bread with peanut butter and honey, and an omelette made either with extra old cheddar or Asiago (cheese, of course!). Then I will take my clothes out of the dryer and fold and put everything away, following which I expect to relax, work on an art project and maybe take a nap. Then, I will take a long walk of some three to four miles or so, to arrive early in a coffee shop where I will be visiting a friend I haven't seen in a long time. I will spend much of the walk singing hymns, or conversing with God in Spanish, or in silent enjoyment of the lovely surroundings. So, Gentle Reader, I have just provided you with a number of potential adjectives and metaphors with which to describe me. I am probably both all, and none of those things. Just like you, darling.

Faith And Collective Trauma 5

We are spiritual beings. First and foremost. This doesn't negate or diminish the physical. We are made up of mortal flesh that has to be nourished and sustained and eventually we are all going to die and decay and return to the elements from which we are made. Not much to look forward to, I guess. But let's think for a moment about what really makes us as human bodies. We are matter, or material, yes. But what makes matter, matter? I remember having this conversation with a chemistry major back in my salad days and we concluded over the obvious: matter is merely highly organized energy. The atoms that make up the molecules that are our basic substance, where do those atoms come from? What holds them together? They are energy. And what is energy, or where does energy come from? And now your head is going to hurt for the rest of the day, Gentle Reader! Some believe that the human soul, or identity, is a fiction or a social construct. But when you consider the uniqueness of each organism's DNA, then there must be something that sets each of us apart from others. The differences are going to be minor, so very minor, and yes, we are human before we are beings. Or is it the other way around? This is what happens when, like me, you have a tendency of beginning to think rather too early in the morning. My guess is that each one of us is a kind of divine spark and this is what makes us living beings. Interesting that they still haven't figured out how to create life in the laboratory. I don't think that they ever will. But this is where belief comes in and science has quite the hyperallegic reaction to matters of faith. In the meantime we have ethics. There are in our human nature longstanding and disturbing selfish tendencies. Yesterday while watching a nature video in Spanish about southern Spain I couldn't help but note how much like us were the vultures flocking around a decaying carcass and fighting among themselves for the best place at the table. Of course, hunger, the drive to survive is a major motivator and this is true of all species, including our own. But can't we be better than that? Sharing within human communities and kinship and familial groups is a no-brainer. That is how the tribe survives. Outside of the family, the community, when touching on outsiders, people who don't look or sound or dress like us, then problems begin, given how we still tend to exclude the outsider. We have progressed from nomadic tribes and family groups over the past one hundred thousand years, to nations. Now we are being faced with xenophobia and populism. In a lot of countries where racial and cultural homogeneity are the norm: Hungary, Poland, Russia, Italy, to name a few, there are governments voted into power whose raison d'etre would appear to be to keep their countries as white, as Hungarian, Polish, Russian and Italian, to name a few, and as Catholic, Catholic, Orthodox, Catholic, to name a few as possible. Liberal, multicultural and inclusive Canada is becoming more and more a global anomaly. And a huge global necessity. Regardless of what I might think of how illegitimate a construct Canada is, given how we basically stole this country from the First Nations and have rebranded it as our own colonialist paradise, we still have something really important to offer on the world stage. And once our First Nations take their rightful place, as the legitimate leaders of this country, then Canada will be less tainted by hypocrisy and we will be armed with the moral authority to lead the world. That is, if we can still maintain our love and respect for diversity. The divine spark is made of many different colours and they shine, oh, so bright in the surrounding darkness!

Faith And Collective Trauma 4

I can't speak about other faiths, but in the Christian experience there is a long tradition of humility. This has nothing to do with lovely cathedrals and liturgical vestments and certainly nothing to do with the pious imbeciles who launched the Inquisition. It is said in many parts of Scripture that God has a preference for the poor, the humble, the weak, the marginalized. Those seem to be the pages that the academic egghead atheists who like to diss religion never seem to get around to reading but I suspect that none of them has ever picked up and actually read anything in the Bible in all their lives. But over and over, in the psalms, the writings of the prophets, and especially in the Gospels, like a platinum thread weaves that theme of humility. There is no getting away from it. Simone Weil famously wrote that Christianity is the religion of slaves. During the first centuries of the early church, it was largely the slaves and the poor who were the real practicing Christians. And they paid dearly with their lives for their courage and faith. Remember the words: the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Whoops, the atheists seem to have missed that one too. Christianity is the religion of the traumatized. We have been through so much in life that we know that only God can heal our broken hearts and sooth our wounded spirits. It seems that the most fervent believers are those with the least to lose. Those of us who have lost everything, or as in my case, have never really had anything. I am currently navigating my way through a new Anglican parish I began attending four months ago. We still don't really know each other. There seems to be a lot of mutual liking and good will and I understand that appearances can be very deceiving, so I am taking care to not categorize them all as well-off bourgeois who live inside a bubble of white upper middle class privilege. I suspect that there are some who are like that, but time will tell. Still, I want to address this sense of bourgeois paradise that everyone seems to accept as the ideal norm. People whose lives are untouched by trauma, poverty or unexpected calamity. People who all live in nice spacious homes with lovely lawns and gardens in leafy neighbourhoods, who have two lovely cars in the garage, healthy good-looking children who excel in school and will never be a burden on society, who will always enjoy nicely incomed meaningful employment, good health and stellar health care. People who will never want for food, adequate housing and loving family and friends and supportive community. I imagine that there are enough people who have attained that reality. Many more who do not and cannot, and for one very simple reason: if everyone on this earth had the privileges that our upper middle classes enjoy by entitlement, we would need five planet earths to sustain us. There is something tragically abnormal about our accepted normal and this is an elephant in the living room. We live in an era where we are moving into unprecedented social and economic inequality. Here in Vancouver, housing has become so unaffordable to most of us, that we have to import monied immigrants and investors to buy up luxury properties, and only now that the horse has been out of the barn for a long time already are we starting to address this. In the meantime, we have to expose this lie of privilege for what it really is. A lie. It keeps us cossetted, sheltered and safe, with a huge collective illusion of safety from the mean horrible world where bad things happen only to other people. So, we have a huge population of entitled bourgeois. People so chronically soft and spoiled that if we ever have a huge natural disaster, for example that huge earthquake they keep telling us should have struck and sunk this city last month, that they would be absolutely useless for helping others: they would be too absorbed in lamenting the loss of their wi-fi and would simply sit or lie wherever they happen to be whinging and whimpering in their trauma of stolen privilege, waiting for someone to rescue them.

Faith And Collective Trauma 3

All of the mythologies throughout our human history are united and woven together by certain ongoing themes and threads. Everything suggests that there was once a lost paradise, a time of innocence, purity and blessing that we somehow lost or were expelled from and that ever since we have yearned after that original golden age. It is rather hard to square this with the Darwinian norm. If we are to take seriously the fossil records, and I do take seriously the findings of paleontologists, then our hominid ancestors divided from the common ancestor that we share with the great apes, some five million years ago. Our earliest ancestors descended from trees, became hunters and meat-eaters and developed bigger brains. They lived in constant danger of being eaten by predators, and this is where I believe our collective human trauma has its earliest origins. We formed family groups, tribes and bands and began to war among ourselves. Eventually we reached our evolutionary apogee, and ancestors who would have looked and behaved very much like us (but I don't think they had smartphones or laptops) and in waves of migration, because of climate change and food scarcity, emerged out of Africa into the Middle East, Asia, Europe and Australia, and eventually the Americas. As cultures and languages, and skills of tool making developed we continued to evolve, always on the run from dangerous predators, natural disasters and from one another. We evolved a sense of suspicion and distrust. We also developed spirituality, a mystical sense and ultimately religion. All of those tribes and bands had shamans or seers who had a window onto the unseen, and received in dreams, vision and hallucinogenic drug-induced euphoria, messages from the gods, from dead ancestors, from the creator of who they were, where they were going, of what their next step or passage would be. Offerings, sacrifices and rites of devotion and adoration were made by the people. This went on generation after generation for tens, even hundreds of thousands of years. This appreciation and experience of the numinous is hard-wired into our brains and our collective unconscious is full of spiritual dynamics. We only became rational atheists in the last three hundred years or so, hardly a fly speck on the map of our evolution. We still carry all the baggage and neuro-wiring of our ancestral spirituality, no matter how much our academics and thinkers and scientists try to pooh-pooh this out of existence. It is not about to go away. is there such a thing as the spiritual, the numinous. Yes, otherwise how could we have possibly developed such a capacity? Aren't we really rational beings? No, not a single one of us. Rationalism is but a very convenient dance of denial. Science does nothing to disprove the spiritual reality because it cannot be objectively measured or quantified. Yet, this is so much a part of, so foundational to who and what we are as humans. We still long to get back in the garden, to refind our lost paradise, the Garden of Eden. There is no scientific evidence for a Garden of Eden, and it will never be found, not because it never existed, but because it existed as our primal human reality and no fossil beds in Africa nor anywhere else in the world are going to reveal its location.

Faith And collective Trauma 2

Faith is a very interesting word. it suggests belief, or an intellectual acceptance of something for which we have no ontological evidence. But there is another meaning. Faith is devoting and adhering our lives and our hearts to another. It is devotion that also implies love, persistence and adoration. This is the meaning of faith that I wish to pursue here. It goes without saying that in order to practice a religion one has to have faith. When I say that I have faith in God, I am implying that I am believing in something for which there is no visible, material existence. If you are an atheist, one could say that I am putting my faith in a fiction, or a mental construction based upon myths, legends and fairy tales for which there is no concrete evidence or credibility. An atheist might even take this a step further, knowing that I am operating on the second meaning of faith: a loving trust and devotion in that supposed, ostensibly imagined reality. This can really get you into trouble in some circles. If you have been to a psychiatrist it can actually be dangerous to be too open about your religious beliefs and experiences. I did this with an allegedly atheist psychiatrist, who responded by putting on my medical record a bogus psychiatric diagnosis as having a schizotypal personality. Of course he didn't tell me, and I only found this out some sixteen years later. Fortunately, no one else who knows about this agrees with his diagnosis of me, and I certainly don't either. Believing or not are certainly matters of choice. And we all have a plethora of underlying issues and needs that influence and dominate such choices. I am not going to try to read the minds or psyches here of those who choose not to believe, except for one little caveat. No matter how many abuses and crimes have been committed by people of faith in the name of their gods, no matter how little actual material evidence exists to give us the kind of evidence of God's existence that would stand in any court of law, at the end of the day there is one unifying principal that all atheists and other intentional nonbelievers seem to share in common: a stubborn and obstinate refusal to accept the authority of a higher being over their lives, not for lack of evidence but because they would rather each be their own little god. I say this because the need, the instinct to believe, to experience and accommodate the spiritual, the numinous, is hard-wired into the human brain. There is plenty of peer-reviewed scientific evidence about this, Gentle Reader. A lot of it has to do with the Enlightenment, which was a necessary corrective against the huge abuses of religion and of humans in the name of religion that were being inflicted on people throughout the dark history of Europe. But as we became more interested in thinking than in the experience of the spirit we became intellectually arrogant, and basically threw away all manner of faith and creed, without seriously considering or investigating what a pivotal place belief and the need to believe holds in our lives. So, reason, and its bastard offspring, atheism, has become the dominant faith. And it is still a faith. Evidence-based? Well, so they say, but really the evidence is often construed across any number of finds, discoveries and resulting theories, that in themselves become orthodoxies because the scientific community is often every bit as orthodox, dogmatic and conservative about their creeds and findings and positions as are the despised religious hierarchies. Neither is it often taken into consideration how much our environment, childhood experiences, education, genetics, economic status, position in social hierarchies, gender, sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, physical and mental health, parenting, socialization, era, generation and other such matters are going to play key if subtle roles in forming us and in turn forming and influencing our beliefs and opinions. Stay tuned....

Faith And Collective Trauma 1

On the heels of writing here my spiritual autobiography, Gentle Reader, it does behoove me to continue on this theme of faith, spirituality and religion. I would like to pursue this around the theme of collective trauma. I am not thinking here about the trauma that is suffered by ethnic groups or statistical categories of persons who have been historically or ontologically mistreated. I have already explored this theme to exhaustion, only to conclude that really we are all traumatized, and to be a human being is to partake in the huge collective trauma of our species. I would like to begin this series with a little reflection based on a portion of an article in this weekend's Globe and Mail (Canada's own little brother or sister version of the famous New York Times) written by historian Yuval Noah Harari. Now like most eggheads this guy is going to be an atheist, and like all atheists, whenever the subject of faith, spirituality and religion is touched on, his eyes suddenly glaze over and all critical thought goes out the window as he categorically dismisses it all as fantasy and lies. Not because he has troubled to critically investigate the matter, but because his bias against God is so profound and so blinding. We are all selective in these matters, even the most rational persons among us, because, Gentle Reader, at the end of the day, none of us is ever really very rational. This is part of being human. We read and interpret things selectively and all to correspond with our prejudices and fears and to protect ourselves from things that could badly hurt our precious worldview. Religious people do this about science and anything that casts doubt or skepticism on their sacred cows. Atheists do the same. For example, Harari's refusal in his article, "Why Some Fake News Lasts Forever", published in this weekend's Globe and Mail. He lists sacred writings as "fake news', while offering as a kind-hearted sop to the offended faithful that even if the sacred writings of Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus are all lies, at lest they provide a cohesive sense of ethic and morality that helps bind people together in communities dedicated to doing good and performing acts of charity. He clearly has not given much time or study to those writings, and rather than have his sacred atheism threatened with the possibility that there might be truth in some of those writings, he dismisses them all wholesale as fake news. It is impossible for humans to be truly objective. About anything. We are too damaged and too wounded by this ancestral brokenness that we all share in common. We have only glimmers of light along the way to guide us through this and to bring us to places of healing. It is very tragic, but inevitable that throughout history we abuse and debase those glimmers of light, and turn them into something ugly and destructive: for example all the abuses of the Catholic Church; Islamic Jihadists; Buddhists in Myanmar committing murderous genocide against Rohingya Muslims. And in the other corner, the bastard offspring of the Enlightenment: the atheists, who simply will not consider the transcendent reality that inhabits the human soul (they don't believe in the existence of the soul. It's all neurons and bio synapses) and the human existence, out of which have sprung all the sacred writings and teachings throughout the world. It takes a lot of humility to sit in the seat of the unlearned, especially if you're an academic egghead atheist who presumes to know everything, and also especially if you're a religious dogmatist who refuses to allow his sacred tenets to be challenged. But we have to acquire humility and accept that we really know nothing if we are going to ever really begin to learn anything of value. Knowledge can either empower or it can breed hubris and we have to learn humility if we are going to extract the ultimate value from learning without falling into intellectual or religious arrogance. In our collective woundedness it is very difficult to face that we are broken and incomplete beings, but for us to begin to learn anything of value that is the place where we are going to have to start. In fact, throughout history this has been the only way to really learn anything important in life.

Spiritual Autobiography: Summary, 4

Living as a Christian in a world and society that does not acknowledge my values has not been a cakewalk. I think this is true for everyone who wants to be faithful to Christ, or to whichever religion they adhere to. In my case, I had my introduction to the Christian faith in rather unusual circumstances. The Jesus People were at turns hippies, revolutionary, puritanical, fundamentalist, paranoid. They had to come to a conclusion and the Children of God cult performed the mercy killing. But still, I had been given, bequeathed something that I knew I had to carry on. It was more than a legacy. It was a living torch. Only, I wasn't carrying the torch. I was the torch. Here I was living with a mother, and briefly with a father, who did not share my values: they were materialistic, acquisitive, selfish, and unconcerned with others outside of their clan. They were not bad people, but there was clearly a huge clash of values and of motives between us, and legally I was required to live with one of them till I was eighteen. Both were involved in non-marital living arrangements, which was clearly against my values as a Christian. My father was an alcoholic and I somehow had to obey and honour him. I have since come to realize that when he abused me as a child this forfeited any claim he could possibly have over me as his son. Likewise with my mother. I chose not to judge their lifestyle because we had to coexist, but also because I saw how important it was to be kind. I think that this acceptance of others is something that I partly owe to living with my parents as a Christian learning to care for and show kindness to people who didn't share my beliefs or values. It's been on the whole quite a difficult life for me. It was particularly difficult sourcing adequate employment and to this day I still don't know why, except that I could not use making money as my sole motive for working. I wanted to work in occupations where I could express values of love, care, compassion and justice. Since my financial and life situations made it almost impossible for me to complete any post-secondary training, I had to settle with low-paying contracted positions in home support, and now in mental health peer support. Rising rents and a shrinking paycheque have made it all the harder so it was no wonder that I was homeless for a while. But Christ has always been there with me, not to make me richer, but to care for and provide for my daily needs. Even though I came close to hunger at times, I never once went without adequate food. Even though I was homeless for ten and a half months, every night I had some kind of roof over my head and a bed or couch to sleep on, and I never once had to turn to emergency shelters for help. I know that in my case god has called me to live simply and entirely dependent upon him. Not an easy way to walk in a world that is made up of greed, competition, avarice and indifference towards the needy. It isn't simply that I chose to live this way, as insisted one rather stupid fundamentalist I was once friends with. Rather, liking it or not, this is the direction that God has taken me in. He has closed to me one door after another where I might have improved my income and employability. I do not begrudge him this. But it is also impossible to explain something like this to any atheist or unbeliever who judges me as lazy or unwilling to work. I have worked hard all my life and God has chosen to lead me on a specific path that has nothing to do with material or career success and everything to do with meeting Christ and witnessing to him daily in simplicity and poverty. For a while it was grinding poverty. But he was there, with me and for me. Now my circumstances have improved a little. I am still officially poor, but well provided for and able to travel every year. My life is very simple. I almost never go out for dinner or to concerts or shows or whatever. It isn't just that I can't afford to, it is more because I need the quiet time for prayer, rest and reflection. This is what restores and enables me to carry on in my work with people living with mental health issues and addictions, and this is what also prepares me for my small acts of social justice. My family is dead or they have all abandoned me, and in that sense I am very alone in the world. But I would like to believe that I till bear that inextinguishable light of Christ as I seek to live out his life and teachings in the place where he has put me, loving this world that I am not really part of without coveting its dubious treasures.

Spiritual Autobiography: Summary, 3

I have learned, by being a Christian, to love and value truth. I am not thinking here of biblical truth. My appreciation of that has changed and morphed somewhat over the years. I did begin, like many in the Jesus People, as a biblical fundamentalist. I believed literally in the Bible, in everything, and being a thinking child, I soon found it harder and harder to square a lot of it the teachings with reality as I understood it. It was also impossible to talk to others in the Jesus People about it because they believed that it was wrong to ask questions and they were all suspicious of education or anything that had to do with higher critical thinking. Those were all the same ones who fell for the Children of God cult, by the way, which I, because I refused to shut down my capacity for thought, was able to get away from. There was, I concluded, a danger in too much togetherness. Everyone would end up thinking alike and anything that deviated from the accepted lexicon was shot down as heresy. I came to focus my attention more on the life and teachings of Christ and less on the commentary of Paul and others. I also came to view much of the Old Testament as having allegorical value, even if I couldn't stomach the slaughter and the barbaric executions, and saw in much of the readings I did something of what God was trying to speak to me about here and now. For example, instead of accepting that it was okay for the Israelites to slaughter the natives of Canaan (it was not, it was genocide, no matter how the fundamentalists will try to apologize and justify), I would extrapolate an understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit conquering and taking out all the sin and resistance in my life to the work of his love. Etcetera. Of course=, now I see the Bible rather differently. I still accept its authority as divine revelation, but not as the literal word of God. Perhaps as the Word about the Word of God, because I do accept that Jesus is the word of God and the Bible is the message about God made incarnate in human flesh as an act and sacrifice and victory of love. `Word of the Father now in flesh appearing. O come let us adore Him`. Truth is more than a compilation of facts. Truth is the very essence, the undivided whole of things. The truth of the universe is contained in the integrity of the human soul. And this very truth has been made manifest to us, not as a religion, nor as a creed or a set of sacred writings and texts, but as a person incarnating in his very essence the truth of the universe and it's creator and sustainer who fills all and holds altogether in a dynamic and mesmerizingly complex balance, rhythm and dance. by living in the presence of this same creator we become people of truth and what we delight in and aspire to is going to be in itself true. This has also become my way of reading and understanding scripture. For me it is not a record of miracles, healings and apocalyptic warnings, but each word bears something of the divine presence and weight. Do I believe literally in the miracles of Jesus in the Bible? At this point I do, simply because, why not? We do not live in a merely rational universe and time after time we run across experiences and evidences of a transcendent reality. Does this mean that the healings, miracles and exorcisms actually did take place exactly as they are written? How should I know? I accept that those things were recorded by flawed, limited and imperfect humans, much like you and me, and so we are not going to get the full story. The Bible is in itself a flawed document, because it was written by humans. But they were still inspired by God to write those things, so even with the errors, the miscalculations and the lack of insight and comprehension of reality as we now boast to know it, it is still the best document we have for communicating something to us of the reality of God's truth and love. Flawless, no. But that is the way of God to take limited and imperfect things such as us to manifest and show forth the perfection of his goodness and grace. Because God is love, as well as truth, and truth is made perfect in love.

Spiritual autobiography: Summary 2

Love has to be key and foundation to any attempt at understanding Christianity or the message is completely lost. That is what I extrapolated from my time with the Jesus People, Mom, the Dutch Lady, in St. Margaret's, the Live-In retreats, then it all got kind of lost for a while with the radical Mennonites, Dayspring, and resurfaced again briefly at the Foursquare Pentecostal church till they got a new pastor, then got horribly misplaced at St. James and in much of my explorations of the Anglican Church, nor was it to be found with the fundamentalists. In the gay church Christian love was often conflated and confused with sex and romance (same gender, of course!) and it didn't really turn up again nor has it really, since my return to the Anglicans. This isn't to say that none of those people were what I would call loving, but it just has not really been practiced or lived in any of these churches at the intensity or the lived reality that I experienced elsewhere. But love, nonetheless, is my cornerstone, my keystone and my lodestone, for that is the reality on which this whole universe is hinged. And this has become the operating principal of my life. Love was incarnated as Jesus, for God is love, and love bore all of our misery, despair, loneliness, terror and sin on the cross and love died their for us only to be raised again from death and the grave because love the all-conquering can never be conquered. In the mass at St. James, I was daily reminded of this supreme work of love and was challenged each day to live out this love in my interactions with my clients and friends, many sick, lonely and dying. This same love taught me about social justice and the importance of speaking truth to power because without love, neither have we truth. And this all hangs on this persistent and stubborn universal and eternal reality: that God is love, and regardless of what we believe or of what religion we prefer, we are all being drawn by his love into that ultimate and eternal feast where we can live out eternity basking in his presence, the presence of universal love, personified in Christ. Here I will not go into that wasted exercise of comparative religion because for me it is not a matter of whether or not Christianity is superior or of whether all faiths are equal. That is for God to decide. But it is for us to be open to the call of love to draw us out of our limited and broken selves into something better and higher and for this cause Jesus died and lives again and now he can live in us. This is what I believe and this is how in my faltering steps, I have sought to live.

Spiritual Autobiography: Summmary 1

This has not been an easy path for me, nor an easy life. Things are much better now, but the first thirty years since becoming a Christian have all been particularly costly to me. I have lost everything, but this is also the cost of discipleship, and I have gained so much more. When I first encountered Christ in the attic bedroom of that old house on the Fairview Slopes, here in Vancouver, it put me at odds with everything and with everyone that had theretofore made up my fourteen years of existence: my family, my friends and peers, my school and education, my values, my direction of life, ad my future. This was not an ordinary response to "Just As I Am" at a revival meeting, nor an Anglican, Catholic or Lutheran confirmation ceremony. This was God, meeting me where I was, on his terms, calling me to be his. The Jesus People were but the vectors, and when they got snapped up by the Children of God and I was suddenly alone, I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that my calling to follow and witness to Christ was true, genuine and singular. There would be no turning back. I had the good fortune of encountering the Holy Spirit at a very early stage, before I could put up too many barriers against this wonderful and stupendous blessing. It has been this experience of the Holy Spirit that has kept me going, because without God's living presence in my life, I don't think I would have coped or held on to his hand as he was leading me through some very dark places. The influence of the Christian faith upon my life has been huge. I will begin in this post, Gentle Reader, with my economic values. It was during my first weeks as a Christian that I became aware of the economics of Jesus. My first mentors, the Jesus People, were dirt poor. Many were on social assistance, some worked part time and there were many churches, organizations and individuals donating money and goods. We took the attitude of the Early Church of the first century. We shared everything and in our poverty we became rich, in generosity, love, good works. No one considered their things as being their own, but being gifts from God to be shared for the common good. The widow who gave all she had, one copper coin, to the temple treasury, whom Jesus honoured as giving more out of her poverty than all the rich hypocrites offered from their abundance, she became our unofficial patron saint. I knew that because of my values as a Christian, that I would never be rich, and I knew that would be somehow ant ethical to the values of the Kingdom of God. The many severe disruptions that were waiting for me in my family life would also further seal my fate as someone who was destined to be permanently and perpetually poor. I also came strongly to believe that it was out of our poverty that God would bless us as we continued to give and share, and I have found this to be true. Even though I have always been poor, I have always been generous, giving money to beggars and money to the food bank, even while I was pulling less than a living wage, even when I was unemployed, even when I was on welfare. somehow, the books have always balanced for me, and I have always had enough, or almost enough to eat. hospitality has always been for me a strong value, and even if now, in my tiny subsidized apartment during this prolonged bedbug pandemic in my city, I cannot freely have guests over , I can at least carry with me wherever I go a spirit of hospitality, and approach strangers in a spirit of good will and respectful friendship. My sense of spiritual wealth has also infused my natural gifts, and I feel that through my art and intellectual and writing abilities and gifts that I have something to offer others. And this is all transfigured by love. I feel at a huge debt to Mom, the Dutch lady I knew when I was fourteen, for teaching me the supreme value of love, and of how this has influenced, motivated, and beautified my life and interactions with the world around me. Love is the message of the Gospel.