City Of God 33

It is amazing that we have survived this long as a species. Not so amazing that we seem to be taking down the biodiversity of this planet and soon, by extension, ourselves. Kind of a mass, slow-motion suicide, methinks. We could blame any number of factors, but I think the Greeks got it right in the myth of Prometheus, as the Bible gets it right in the first chapters of Genesis. This is to say that very early in our evolutionary development, we humans were already too big for our breeches. Prometheus gave us fire, and was eternally punished by the god Zeus, who had him chained to as cliff face forever while a vulture came regularly to feed on his liver, which kept regenerating. Fire was received, of course, as a boon. It warmed us at night and on winter days, frightened away predators, and cooked our meat. This helped us transform from largely vegetarian omnivores to hunting carnivores. Apparently, that is how our brains grew and we became earth's most intelligent and by extension, most destructive species. We became peripatetic and the most opportunistic species to ever crawl on the surface of the earth. Our high intelligence made us very able exploiters and our self-interest was so tied to our survival that we were not going to even consider the wellbeing of other lifeforms. Our brains grew before our hearts. We became thinking organisms without conscience, without compassion. Empathy only existed within the family, the tribe, where there was kinship. The gods, in the Promethean myth must surely have known this, for which reason they did not want us to be like them. We weren't ready. We would simply be always like children playing with matches. By the same token Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden, not simply for disobeying God, but because of the consequences of disobedience, and the reason why they were forbidden from eating the forbidden fruit: they would become conscious before they had the maturity for being able to handle this new power. has anyone ever noticed how teenagers never seem to be ready for puberty? This has given our species a very long, sad and violent trajectory of learning very hard lessons. We still haven't got it yet and we are teetering on planet destruction from global warming, caused by our own very human and selfish activity. We live together in cities and communities for the simple reason that we are not able to cope alone, not physically and certainly not psychologically. We are cursed by being a highly social species that hates itself and each other, weak, half-formed things consumed by fear and hostility. it isn't so much that we are better than that, but that we are capable of improving, and some of us are equal to the task, but it is going to be a monumental task getting others to follow in this way, when ourselves can hardly get moving without a lot of kicking and screaming. It is very hard to survive being a role model. Even when we are not being self-righteous and obnoxious about it. One ends up chronically hated because of envy, but someone has to take the bullet. Are we improving as a species? Are we even improvable? That is the sixty-four thousand dollar question. The Enlightenment did help us move forward, but then it was declared that we are not part of nature, but superior and in control of nature, and this hubris infected our sciences and our social and political institutions, and the Industrial Revolution gave us lots of easily and cheaply manufactured goods and a compromised natural environment. Being part of nature, but in denial of it, we of course are negatively impacted by environmental degradation, because as big as our brains are, we are still creatures made from dust, and to dust we shall return. Those of us who refuse to pull our heads out of our asses, of course, aren't even going to care. Those living in the US or Brazil or Russia or Italy or the Philippines or elsewhere, will go on electing fear mongering demagogues who coast on violence and oppressive policies. This could also happen hear in Canada, where the Conservative Party enjoys thirty percent support. Are there solutions? I can think of one idea: don't give up. Despite our many defects and obstacles we have made incredible gains in history, and this is not going to be easily forfeited. Conflict is part of growth. We will get through this. Our asses are going to be very sore for a while.

City Of God 32

Once upon a time, I lived in a city where everybody had a place to live. No one was homeless. We did have social inequality and there were beggars on the street. But they weren't quite that many and they all had at least a room to go home to. I was a young man then. There was some short-term homelessness, of course, and we had shelters for people, but at the end of the day, it was always easy to help them find housing and to move them along. How things have changed. One of the hardest things to address is our collective memory, which doesn't seem to accommodate that homelessness hasn't been with us always. I often seem to be the only one in this city with a long memory. I remember in 1990 or so when things were already beginning to get worse, and our Liberal politicians of the day were just a year or two from gutting our national housing strategies, and it wasn't long before, in just over a decade, our sidewalks were choked with the bodies of people sleeping rough. Everywhere. This was, in British Columbia, anyway, government-enforced homelessness. The then newly-minted BC Liberal government took the greatest care to further eviscerate its services to the economically vulnerable and marginalized, making welfare much harder to get, harder to live on and easier to be thrown off of. Within a year of their election in 2001, the homelessness population in my city rose by almost four hundred percent, and has kept rising year after year. There was never a shortage of places to live, and construction and new condos and monster homes have turned entire neighbourhoods and the downtown area into unliveable hell-holes of noise and racket. People need places to live, as said one particularly dull-witted individual when I complained about the noise. So, all those shining new condos and looming monster homes were bought up, not by the local poor and low-inco0med, no, let them sleep under the bridge nearby. Our government changed and spiffed-up its immigration policies, giving priority to wealthy and university-educated successful newcomers, carrying bags of money- often illegally-sourced in their native China, India or Dubai- to launder to a pure snowy white in our burgeoning and booming real estate industry. So, who ended up living in those new luxury properties? Go figure! Real estate costs doubled, then they tripled, then they quadrupled, and quadrupled again. While many of those costly condos remained empty, but little hollow gold mines, platinum diamond mines, flipping and doubling in value, our homeless poor huddled in the sidewalks below, with just blankets or sleeping bags to ward off the coming cold of winter. As the cost of real estate skyrocketed, so did the rents, and before you knew it, droves of people on decent incomes and salaries were migrating out of our fabled city, seeking places they could afford to live in, where they could raise their children. How did this happen? Well, there was a time, when my city, Vancouver, was smugly known as Regina-By-The-Sea. Lovely and quaint and not very bright, but surrounded by green forested mountains and shining blue sea. Rather like a young man or young woman of very average intelligence and mediocre talents, but blessed with a fabulous beautiful young body. Who wanted to social-climb. New clothes, new toys, and lots of attention. And the gentleman and lady callers came a running, from all over the world, hoisting their big bags of money in exchange for the nubile feminine charms and the robust and muscular manly appeal of this most beautifully situated city, this city without a soul. The word "world-class" was suddenly being thrown around with abandon. Our little city by the sea became an arrogant whore, a handsome rent-boy full of hubris, putting out for foreign wealth, while starving their poor relations. Vancouver is a very beautiful city, Gentle Reader. But this place is not the City of God, and will never be. But the City of God still grows among the poor and humble, and the real beauty is not going to come from the mountains and trees and ocean but from humble and loving hearts that have resisted this corruption and canker of greed.

City Of God 31

It's hard to stay positive about the world when you listen to the news a lot. The radio stations and other news outlets aren't interested in telling us everything that's going on in the world, only the bad stuff, or mostly anyway, since that is what gets our attention, and it also keeps us warned and on the alert. I just wonder if that is healthy in the kinds of mega-doses that we end up feeding ourselves. I am not thinking here of so-called "fake news." I don't think that any of it's fake. Neither are we given the whole picture. We can see videos and hear news reports, for example, of crime and murder and narcotrafficking in Mexico, and I have heard a lot of people say they would never go there. Who have never been there and would rather listen to the news than go there and see for themselves. But who wants their all-inclusive fun in the sun holiday ruined by getting shot or kidnapped. I have been to Mexico City five times, as well as to Puebla and Chiapas, and the worst thing that happened to me was a teenage boy in the zoo (they really should have fed him to the leopards), demanding that I give him my wallet. He was wearing his school uniform, along with his friends, and I assumed that the little brats had skipped classes for the day. He might have been all of sixteen. I scolded him for trying to rob a visitor, and really, my wallet was safe in my hotel safe where it belonged, but he accepted my rebuke then left me alone. Otherwise, I always found Mexico, and the people I encountered there to be warm, friendly, inviting and but for the problems with water and traffic, very enjoyable. My experiences in Colombia have been similarly positive (and there you can drink the tap water), but for a couple of close calls with criminals posing as police who wanted to rob me, but I did manage to get away. Still, after two stays of a month each in Bogota, not bad, considering all the scary news stories. I could go on, but I won't. We live in a world where awful things happen, where people do horrible things to each other. There are also a lot of acts of kindness and benevolence and for the most part, everyone is just getting on with their lives, but you rarely read about that in the news. Even though my own downtown neighbourhood is kind of sad and ugly, and at times unsafe, it isn't horrible. I can still come and go without getting shot at, and I always have a reasonable certainty that I will get home alive. I suspect that there is a huge problem with the Internet, and our social isolation. The horrible person who shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh the other day, resulting in eleven deaths had been posting anti-Semitic hate drivel on social media for years. And no one caught him? Freedom of speech is not a cover for spreading hate. And a likely Trump supporter, like that other loser in Florida who was sending bombs to ex-presidents and other democrats and other, shall I say, people who speak critically of his dear president. We also have the world's worst president in US history rising in popularity (forty-seven percent now, after, a few months of hovering at around forty), and Balsonero, the Trump of the tropics being elected as president of Brazil. It is troubling that so many people would vote for those idiots, not knowing or caring about the consequences. It is safe to say that the vast majority of their supporters are themselves poorly educated, and this for me begs the question of how inaccessible higher education is to people on low incomes. With both those arrogant blowhards in power the world is not going to be a safer place, especially with the new P. of Brazil "promising" to develop the Amazon, trample over the human rights of the indigenous people who live there, and make the world all the less safe for climate change and global warming. It can make you want to not get out of bed, but get out of bed we must, and hear those awful things we must, and rise above our fears and talk and network and take care of one another and take care of the outsiders and strangers we must, because we do not need only more fear and ignorance, not if we want to work for something better in the world.

City Of God 30

What makes a city, a city? I was thinking the other day (no, really, I actually WAS thinking the other day!) about the kind of infrastructure that makes it possible for us to cope and live here in Vancouver. Even now I am trying to visualize the vast network of pipes and tubes and watermains under the ground and underneath the pavement. Those are things we don't ordinarily get to see. They are hidden from us. Unless you happen upon a city road crew at work digging everything up and catch a glimpse at all the equipment that runs throughout the hundreds of square miles (or kilometres, if you will). I mean, if you are flushing the toilet, or brushing your teeth, taking a shower, or washing the dishes or whatever, how likely is it that you are going to visualize just where the waste water and other stuff is going to go and how it's going to get there? We simply take for granted that it's all taken care of, and we don't even give a thought as we turn on the faucet or flush the toilet. It's as though we have accepted that we all live by magic, that this is our entitlement, and why shouldn't we all live like gods and princes? There is also the blessing of electricity. You turn on a lamp, or simply you open the door and the lights come on. Your fridge hums faithfully along, keeping the food cold and fresh. Your fob key magically opens the door of your apartment building. The alarm system is flawless, and needs only the magic code to disarm it. And let's not get on about computers or we will never stop writing this. No one really gives a lot of time to think, to visualize the massive networks, the thousands and thousands of miles of cables wires and fibre optics that run through our buildings and underground everywhere to make it possible for us to function: to turn on a switch to start the computer, to turn on the intravenous drip for the patient in hospital emergency. Now, try to imagine the hundreds and thousands of years of civilization, of technological and scientific discovery, of that huge socio-historical phenomenon in eighteenth century Europe, known as the Enlightenment, and all the labour, work, research and discovery of so many heroes, sung and unsung, to make it possible for you to make a smoothie in your blender, then turn on your dishwasher. To imagine life in cities, before the advancements and discoveries that we accept now as entitlement: no sewers, since human waste was simply tossed out the window onto the street below. Can you imagine the absolute horrid stench of cities in that time? In the warmest weeks of summer? No electricity meant, well, no power. Homes, if heated at all, were heated by wood or peat burning fireplaces and that is when we first encountered air pollution. Candles and torches lit interior and exterior spaces at night, and people usually went to bed early. Those who weren't illiterate read books, which were more precious and more costly, being harder to manufacture and come by, even after the inventions of Gutenberg of movable type printing. People travelled on foot, or horseback or carriage. Old age as we know it, was a fairly rare phenomenon, since not many people made it past fifty. There is a relationship between spirituality and gratitude. I think that even some atheists will admit to this, though they are still not likely to acknowledge the existence of the God of All Existence. But it is a beginning. Here is a suggestion: the next time you are going to the toilet, especially if you have to sit there for a while, put down your smartphone and give a thought or two to the many people throughout history and at this present time whose thought, discoveries, hard work and labour have made it possible for you to take your privileged dump, and to not have to worry further about the results with just a press of a handle. Try to visualize where all that crap and toilet paper is going, of how carefully and thoughtfully the pipes and ducts and valves have been manufactured and are being maintained, so that one unpleasant and daily bodily function can become downright tolerable, quick and trouble-free. While you are turning on your computer, try to imagine all the technology, work, research, study and discovery that has made it possible for you to connect with Uncle Google, that motherlode of all knowledge and information and world history. The next time you are on Facebook, try to imagine and think of those people who make it possible for you to connect equally to people you care about, and really care very little about. The next time you are on Skype, try to remember that not very long ago we could only talk to people in other countries by long-distance telephone and that could be a costly process. Now, free of charge, you just turn it on, and Bob's your uncle as you are chatting with someone on screen, almost as though you are sitting in their living room, even if you are in Canada and they are in Colombia. Give some thought to those people, to those complex technological processes that allow us all to live like princes and gods. Once you feel the gratitude welling up in your heart, you will have the very beginnings of contact with the Divine and so you will find yourself entering the portal to the City of God.

City Of God 29

If the city of God is to become real in our midst, if we are going to gain access, then we have to start from where we already are. There is no other way. It isn't just that our current city and experience of the city and of co-existing with unsympathetic humans is a rehearsal. This is it. The Eternal City is already in our midst. We are in it. Even if we don't see it. It isn't that we need a certain code or password to gain entrance. Each person here is the code. Each one of us is the password. Even in difficult and unpleasant neighbourhoods, such as where I live, and maybe even especially because of such difficult and unpleasant neighbourhoods. All the human need and misery at my doorstep is for me a reminder of our humbled and lowly state as humans, something we all share in common. We are all born in pain and weakness. We all die in pain and weakness. And during our eighty-plus years on this planet we all shit and stink the same. Does this suggest that the City of God is really quite debased and lacking in anything special. The City of God, rather, is the invisible reality that holds us altogether, and we are like fetuses in utero. We are all in a state of preparation and the outcome has yet to be seen. I have no theological perspective to contribute here, because for me it is all a mystery. Meanwhile, we coexist. This is one of the most difficult and poorly understood dynamics of being human, or should I say, how we get along, or fail to get along. There is something innately and uniquely human about the way our mutual contact, and conflict, help shape and form us. It is through one another that we actually become truly human. It is in one another that we each and all exist. It is through others that we come to know ourselves and in the faces of others that we come to know and remember each of us our true and unique human face. There is no other way. Even here in Canada where there is a marked preference for solitude and living alone, we exist as a community, or as communities within communities within communities. Here in the apartment building where I live, it is impossible to avoid other tenants, unless I decide to shun using the elevator and the laundry room, but I still have to encounter my neighbours from time to time at the front door of the building. instead of avoidance, I try to be friendly, and it often works. We will chat a little bit, then leave each other alone. We do need to be left alone, often, I think. But we also need to connect. By the same token there are the tenants in the building next door, another subsidized facility that houses people with histories of street homelessness. There is one man who coughs a lot, and loudly. It is annoying of course, when it is chronic, and I have never met this individual, nor do I know anything about his medical history or condition. I think he does it now, partly for attention, though I am sure there are legitimate health issues. I used to get annoyed, and would shut my window to block out the sound. I still get annoyed, but last night, when he started again, I called to him: "You sound like you're dying. Are you alright?" He immediately went quiet and just coughed quietly, then I didn't hear him at all. Then there is the young man whose window almost faces mine, though it's a couple of floors lower. I was wondering if he was trying to get my attention, then one day, he was lying by his window on his bed, naked and leaving nothing to the imagination. Of course I didn't signal interest and even a few days later he seemed to be calling to me and I ignored him. Things have calmed down since, and there are some calls for attention that I simply refuse to dignify. on the street, as I step outside the building there is the usual parade of human indifference. One young idiot nearly ran me over on his skateboard, and would have had I stepped outside just a second sooner. I caught up with him as he was waiting for the light to change and told him calmly and assertively. He seemed to get it. Others are just too focussed on their smartphones to even know where they are. There are beggars on the sidewalk, of course, and even though I don't give them money, I still try to acknowledge them. There are also the various shops and services, none of which being of the variety that can help facilitate community. If anything does show itself here, it is the raw undisguised humanity that we all share in common, that also brings us together, whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not. It isn't that people on this block are more damaged than others. We simply don't make an effort to lie about the damage and woundedness that binds us altogether and that every human on the planet shares in common.

City Of God 28

The city is a necessary evil. Like taxes. Like toilet paper. Like family. We cannot live together and we cannot live apart. We need one another as humans because we are an intensely social and intensely vulnerable species. We cannot live alone, away from one another. Every time it has been tried it has resulted in some kind of tragedy. Even the most introverted hermit cannot exist outside of the collective. But we all share in common a certain feature, or trait, that makes co-existence difficult and nearly impossible. Each one of us thinks that we are a little god. Sad, eh? I think this is what they mean when they talk about original sin, and that that was the intent of the story of the Garden of Eden. The bad tree full of tempting and delicious fruit, is the tree not simply of knowledge of good and evil, it is the tree of human arrogance and hubris. So we live as though in two conflicting states of mind: our need for one another, and our overweening desire to be alone. As I wrote in yesterday's post, in many ways, living downtown sucks. Big time! There are noises day and night from sirens, construction, idiots in altered states and the usual daily douchebaggery that we all share in common, but multiplied by a factor of perhaps one hundred because there are so many of us crowded together in this damn city. There is also the matter of how we perceive others whose lives and presence and sometimes physical selves crowd and invade our personal space. Negotiating boundaries is not a cakewalk. In my less grumpy moments I try to see those around me through the eyes of a kind of tender, disinterested love, and when I give way to this force, I often become even less grumpy. But there is a catch. Chances are that I am the only person in the room or on the sidewalk or on the bus who is thinking that way. Everyone else, it seems, just wants to get through their day, without having to bother with any of the brainless idiots around them, and hurry back with their little smartphones keeping them company, all the way back to their apartments and condos, where but for their little doggie or pet iguana, they will have only their own useless, lonely and unhappy presence to contend with. Caught again in that pleasant illusion of solitude. My father was like that. He spent his elder years living in a small community. He became increasingly withdrawn, and really grew to hate people (not a huge stretch, since he had always been a misanthrope) The social isolation seemed to make things worse for him. He did have friends nearby, but during the period I was sporadically staying with him, when he was already in his early seventies, I seemed to be the only person in his range who could challenge his backward and very narrow-minded thinking, and seldom without consequences and blowback. He had lots of peace and quiet, and the birdsong in the mornings and evenings was something from the portals of heaven. He never seemed to notice the singing of birds, and when I tried to alert him to this, he claimed, or feigned deafness, which I found odd because, even if he heard a slight creaking on the floor as I was on my way to my room, he would from the safety of his bedroom and closed door unleash on me such a volley of verbal abuse as to make it very necessary that I make other plans. There was nothing wrong with his hearing. He just happened to be very selective about it. One day, while he was reading in his living room in the middle of the day, the family on the property next door was outside and the parents were playing with their children. There was some noise, nothing intolerable. My father went out there and yelled at them all to shut up. It was only two years later that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I don't know where the chicken began, and where the egg. But I am persuaded that even if dementia was inevitable to my father, I wonder if it's progress might have been slowed or even significantly delayed had he lived in the city, in close contact with others, so that he couldn't avoid having to cope with the whole rough fabric of coexistence with others. I am, understandably, nervous about Alzheimer's, given that I am my father's son, regardless of his dislike for me and my uneasiness about our relationship. I would like to believe that living and doing things differently from the old man will provide a buffer to mental and cerebral deterioration, given that I am fluent in another language (Spanish) have a rich and active social life, that I am politically and socially active, that I am a practicing artist, a professing Christian with a rich spiritual life, and that I live a healthy life without harmful substances, and especially given that I take a lot of joy in life, and this could be because I consider life to be a gift from God. Time alone will tell. But because we are such narcissists, and because we like to think of ourselves as little gods, more than ever we need to be together, if only to teach us humility, if only to help us to learn to appreciate and love the strangers among us, because we ourselves are strangers among others.

City Of God 27

Cities are not nice places. They are densely populated with humans, or they are repositories of the most noxious species on the planet. It can't get worse. They are stressful, unsafe, noisy and polluted. Especially downtown, where all the action is. There is traffic everywhere, buildings and people, none of them predominantly anything, so at least we re a poster child for diversity. Our local beggars are still predominantly Caucasian, then Aboriginal, and this is an unpleasant reminder. The people who get left behind are disproportionately aboriginal. Almost all the other panhandlers are white, or the ones who didn't win the White Privilege Lottery. I have never seen an Asian begging on the street, nor can I recall any blacks or Latinos sitting on the sidewalk, perhaps one or two. The racial and ethnic diversity really begins to reveal itself in the government-subsidized apartment buildings, as well as the workers and clients of the local nail spa, Subway, Blenz, three sports bars (three too many), hair salon, thrift store, Seven-Eleven, and last but not least, that obnoxious private liquor store next door to the front door of the building I live in. There is also a middle-brow hotel with all the diversity our little hearts desire. Living downtown has both its conveniences and its obstacles. It is easy to access quick public transit to get anywhere you need to in a relative hurry. Services and shops are nearby. There are people everywhere (always a mixed blessing). Of course, some cities are more liveable than others, and if you are blessed with a lot of lovely heritage architecture that has avoided the wrecker's ball (not on my block), then that is some compensation. I do not like my particular neighbourhood, and really, it is not a neighbourhood but a transit hub. It is difficult to get a stranger to acknowledge you if you say hi to them here, very unlike many other areas of Vancouver. People generally seem in a hurry to get somewhere, or on their guard, or looking for a quick opportunity. This is not a nice ambience. It is rather hostile. Young people come in the evening hours to party in the many bars nearby and as they get drunk and high they turn this neighbourhood into one gigantic urinal. And they throw garbage everywhere. One evening, while on my way to the store, I noticed a young woman, with her two white middle class young woman friends, out to party and maybe pick up guys, and she casually dropped her vodka cooler can on the sidewalk. She seemed puzzled and perplexed when I told her that I didn't like it when people litter my neighbourhood. She didn't realize that people actually live here. With some gentle shaming from her friends (thanks, girls!) she did apologize, picked up her empty can, and instead of throwing it at me, took it to the nearest receptacle. not everyone is that nice, and usually the young males are particularly obnoxious and sometimes threatening. Like the young waste of DNA who threatened me with rape when I asked him to not urinate in people's doorways of their apartment buildings, and the other idiot who swore at me when I asked him not to smoke in the doorway of my building. This is why I seldom go outside after dinner. It either feels unsafe, or there is so much public idiocy afoot that I invariably return home feeling disproportionately upset. I have lived here for sixteen years. I would like to think that things have improved here but they haven't. They're actually a bit worse. I'd like to think that we could do better. I really would like to know what it would take to change this area into a community. I would also like to be one of those ones who actually stop cursing the darkness and will light a candle. I seem to have run out of matches.

City Of God 26

I was sitting in a café in my old neighbourhood, just the other day. It is called Continental Coffee on Commercial Drive. I used to source my beans there, long ago, when Reagan was in the White House, Thatcher in 10 Downing Street, Mulroney in 24 Sussex Drive, the Berlin Wall was still standing and everyone lived in terror of global nuclear annihilation. That was before Commercial Dr. became known as 'The Drive", or the Drivel as one guy from Alberta (where else?) tended to call it. But here I digress. I had a little extra time on my hands between client appointments and this gave me time to sit by the window with my sketchbook and Americano and simply enjoy the relaxed communitarian ambience of Vancouver's premier roots neighbourhood, despite the gentrification that has already made it unaffordable to someone like me. I saw someone walk by outside and wondered immediately if it could be a friend I knew twenty years ago, but no, this guy would be twenty years older now than the way this stranger looked. (Where does the time go?). I thought of how this individual helped me when I didn't have a stable place to live in 1998-99. He had a photo studio where he worked and lived in an exposed brick loft in a heritage building on Hastings Street. I showed my art in his studio and he allowed me to stay there on his futon sometimes when I was in need. A very kind individual. Then I pondered the whole chain of events and occurrences that made it possible for me to know this man, and that had none of those links been in place, he would not have been there to help me and my situation might well have ended up even worse. I was told about this person by another artist I knew. We had rather a brief friendship. I found her a very difficult person to be with, given her opinionated bossiness, and when I confronted her about it in a coffee shop she burst into tears then left. I never saw her again. She was well-intentioned, and kind, but hyper-critical and controlling. She was doing a show at this man's studio, spoke highly of him, told him about me, and on her recommendation I visited him and we became as they used to say in vintage British novels, fast friends. He liked my art. And me. The mutual friend who introduced us I had become acquainted with under the most fragile of circumstances. I met her at a special program to help get starving artists off of welfare. I lasted there but one day. The facilitator was an awful person, rude, mean-spirited, chronically angry and judgmental. I found her actually traumatizing, and realized by the end of the first day that I was already on my way to a major meltdown. This other artist and I did exchange contact information and hung out for a few months. She was the one who got me in touch with the kind photographer who befriended me and gave me shelter when I was homeless. It was another artist, a friend, who informed me about the program for starving artists. We had become friends after several years of seeing each other hanging out in the same café, a warmed-over hip joint named Café S'il Vous Plait on Robson and Richards Street (now a sushi joint). For the first couple of years we eyed each other with mutual distrust and suspicion, but also curiosity and intrigue. it seemed a very tenuous and fragile process forming a friendship with him, but good friends we became, and he also sheltered me in his home during my period of homelessness I had already been a regular at the S'il Vous Plait since they opened in 1986 or so, and had already met and befriended or been befriended by a number of people there, staff and customers. I felt a strong connection with the establishment and it somehow seemed that my destiny was somehow connected to that café. It turned out that my intuition served me well. Simply by being there and staying open and receptive to others opened doors for me, and also helped save my life in the end. I find it curious how our lives are often run and guided along such spontaneous and serendipitous threads and chains. We are all connected, if tenuously, and these fragile connections have to be recognized and celebrated. We are not alone, not in the world, nor in the universe.

City Of God 25

In my city, Vancouver, we have a new mayor and a new city council. Concern has been voiced that almost everyone on city council is white, and for this reason our large Asian and other non-white populations aren't going to feel represented. Let me break down my own process of voting, before we move on. We had, I think well above 150 candidates on the ballot this year, making voting a daunting process. We also had Asian-Canadian candidates, especially for mayor, and they did well in the polls. Had I agreed with their policies and platforms, I might have voted for them. However, the candidate who came in as a very close second, Ken Sim, son of Hong Kong immigrants, is a right-leaning and well-monied businessman with no political experience and little or no evident compassion for the poor and homeless in our city. For this reason he was not getting my vote. His race had nothing to do with it. Then there was Wai Young, born in Hong Kong, who campaigned on the promise of dismantling bike lanes and lowering taxes. No way I'm voting for someone with such backward policies, regardless of her experience as a Conservative MP in Ottawa. Oh, yeah, she's a Conservative. I do not vote for Conservatives, never have, never will. I also heard her speak on the radio: rude, obnoxious woman. I'm glad she didn't get in. During the 2014 election I did consider voting for Meena Wong, the COPE (Committee of Progressive Electors) candidate, but I decided to give Moonbeam, aka Gregor Robinson, the incumbent, another chance, but only for two reasons: 1. he appeared to be embarking on a fairy aggressive housing program for the homeless (still not enough) and his opponent from the right wing NPA (Non-Partisan Association), stood a strong chance of winning, so I voted strategically. Personally, I do not care about the racial or ethnic origins of our political representatives. And I also suspect white privilege when progressive pale faces whine and whinge that people of colour or visible minorities might not feel reflected or represented by so many Caucasians. This is typical white privilege thinking and it is patronizing. It is this assumption that every Chinese Canadian is going to cluster around the same candidate, not because of their policies and platform, but because they are Chinese Canadian. I happen to know for a fact that no one votes according to race, but they are going to pick candidates who are compatible to their values and desires and needs. Exactly the way that white folk vote. That's right, Whitey! The coloured folk are also thoughtful. And well-educated. And they don't think as a block. Just like everyone else. By the same token, even though I'm Caucasian (as far as I can tell!) there is only one new member of our freshly-minted almost all-white city council who comes even remotely close to representing me and my interest. That is our local legendary anti-poverty activist, Jean Swanson. Why? Because I have been homeless, and I am poor. Sheesh!

City Of God 24

It is baffling that after two thousand years of almost never getting it right, the Roman Catholic Church still insists that they are God's representative on earth. How did an already flawed organization get to such heights of denial? There are many answers to this question, but I think it also alludes to the huge power of human denial. I am a believer. Not in the church, but in God. I don't simply believe in God, but I presume to put my trust in him, not as though he is a living reality, not because God is a living reality, but because God is the living reality. God is not only living and not only real. God is life. God is reality. Stephen Hawking had it wrong. He tried to determine the nonexistence of God by presuming that God is simply another alleged entity or thing whose existence can be determined or not by empirical evidence. He could not have had it more wrong. We cannot see, or gauge or judge God's existence like he's a planetary or star system simply because God is so much bigger and so much more than that, so much more present, so alive and present in the very heart and nucleus of each particle of existence, life, matter and energy, and this makes us so much a part of him, that we cannot see or judge him empirically. We don't have the faculty for this. We are too limited. I suppose the church has played a role in making these things real for me, not really the Catholic but whichever church I happened to be connected with at the time. and certainly through the words and writings and lives of various theologians, thinkers, saints and activists in the church. But I still never could see a human organization as being God's sole representative, nor necessarily as being God's representative at all. Human institutions are by their very existence and fiat, flawed. And even though God makes himself real in our human flaws and weakness, this should never be used as an excuse to cover for the churches, many crimes, historical and current, against persons. On the other hand, I love the presence of an open church building, especially when I'm visiting a foreign country. For example, throughout Latin America, or where I have visited in Latin America, which certainly isn't everywhere. I am thinking of such cities as Mexico City, Coyoacan, San Angel, Puebla, San Cristobal de las Casas, all in Mexico; San Jose, Costa Rica, and Bogota, Colombia. All very Roman Catholic countries. But the churches were like places of beautiful and quiet refuge. Where one could sit, or kneel in silence, surrounded by beauty and history, but also breathing in an atmosphere soaked in the tears, prayers and music of centuries of worship and presence. This visible presence in no way apologizes for the Crusades, the Inquisition, the raping of children. I think that even if the church has failed, and failed so miserably at her purported divine mandate, simply that there are people in the institution who are faithful, who do love, who are dedicated, then this perhaps helps compensate for her many crimes. But God needs no earthly representative, at least not in the form of an institution, but perhaps through individuals who love and care enough to make him real in their lives. I remember when one pastor, whose teaching I sat under in my teenage years, said in a sermon that a Christian is someone who loves. I would imagine there are also Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and perhaps even the occasional atheist who loves. Does this makes them Christian? Well, that depends on what you mean by the word Christian. If you take it in its most fundamental (not fundamentalist) meaning, Christian simply means to be like Christ. Jesus Christ, if nothing else, loved, and his life was marked and defined by love, the very love that nailed him to the cross. If you love, like Christ, you will be like Christ. Purely and simply. You might still be a Jew, Buddhist, Muslim (preferably a Sufi) or even an atheist, but if you love, then you have become like Christ, and in a sense you have become to others Christ, or the face or presence of Christ. Which makes you, in the most de facto sense, a Christian. And you might never on your earthly pilgrimage profess a belief in him. But that's okay. We will still meet him together, on the other side, in the New Jerusalem, and we will be walking and dancing together on the streets of the City of God, that very city that begins and is, here and now, bonding us together in love, whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not.

City Of God 23

We all have our fictions. These are ways of seeing the world, of living and coping with others, that aren't necessarily factually representative, but work well enough, if only to help get us through the night. This isn't necessarily putting a positive spin on things, as I have known plenty of wailers and whiners who insist that the end of the world will occur one minute after midnight tonight. (those are the glass-is-half-full pessimists. The glass-is-half-empty pessimists say it's going to happen at one minute before midnight) Which is, of course, another fiction, just a negative fiction. But negative people insist that they are realists, and there is a general tendency in our population to accept as real the negative, and as a pleasant fabrication anything that has a positive spin. Except for one little detail...sometimes it is positive. I have heard and read this argument before. Stephen Pinker, psychologist and author, has famously written about this in his book "The Better Angels of Our Natures" that there has never been a better era for humanity than these last one hundred years: proportionately speaking, we have less hunger, less premature death and infant mortality, better food, better health, longer lifespans, better health care, human rights, less war, more knowledge and information, and the list goes on. Like most Pollyannas he neglects any salient details that could ruin his precious formula. Such as that our economies and our governments are in the grips of venal, selfish and greedy international corporations and banks, and that we are teetering on the precipice of planet destruction through catastrophic climate change, and this is of our own making. Yes, we know this, and we have to know it. But if it's a beautiful day, if you are surrounded by people you love, or at least feel a sense of love for the strangers you are with, if you have a love of the natural world of which you are a part, if there is a strain of music from your listening device, or the old-fashioned way, coming from your own sweet, pretty little head, and you want to sing it (but please don't whistle it!), is it wrong to feel the bliss, to feel the joy? to enjoy the joy? What I am saying is, we have no way of knowing exactly what is going to happen, or the way it is going to happen, but there is a reasonable and scientifically-founded certainty that things not only could but are going to get worse. Why be happy? And I say, why not. I was thinking the other day, while seated alone in a coffee shop (a nice, elegant French bakery, actually, run by a nice elegant Parisian woman), of how little we know people. There was a youngish hipster-ish couple at the next table. They seemed nice, artsy-creative, sensitive types. Then I heard their voices which betrayed, to my ears anyway, a couple of ambitious, selfish little hard-asses. Now they could actually be authentically nice people. Or essentially nasty. Or maybe, like almost everyone else, a rather inconvenient and alarming mixture of both and everything else. I am one of those people. And so, Gentle Reader, are you. So here we are, teetering on the abyss. What do we do? Our very best, I hope. Everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint and to live as greenly as possible. And if no one else is doing this? We keep doing it. We keep hoping. We keep smiling. We keep laughing. In short, we keep loving. I remember as a fifteen year old young Jesus freak when I bought a poster at the Canadian Bible Society (I think) with the words, "Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God," ascribed to French monk, Teilhard de Chardin (look him up. He's amazing!). This isn't the same as putting on a happy face (and it don't mean sitting on a happy face either, there, I said it first), it doesn't mean there won't be sadness and weeping. Remember Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, and it was his love for his God and his people that led him to write some very awful and bleak prophetic messages. I only hope he also had his moments of joy and hope, and they are indicted in isolated passages of his book. There are some very sad and upset people out there. Some have good reason to be upset. Some are simply miserable about a bad Facebook post, or not enough likes, or maybe a bad nail job. We generally are miserable when reality collides with and intrudes on our beautiful illusions. But joy is something more than an illusion. It is more than a fiction. It is the very essence of the air of the City of God. I told a friend recently who was wondering why I could be so happy. My reply? Throughout my life, almost every possible conceivable bad thing has happened to me. At my very worst, when I was homeless, absolutely poor and traumatized, God visited me with a gift of joy, and this joy has never left me. My life has been given back to me, which I receive as a gift, and cherish and nurture as a gift, and in gratitude, this life returned to me I have consecrated anew to the God who has given me back my life and who makes all things new. I do not know how we are going to get through this mess coming our way, but get through it we must, and get through it we shall, because this might just be what it's going to take to transform us into the better humans we were made to be, those of us who are going to survive. Not necessarily stronger or more advanced. But more compassionate, caring, dedicated and responsible!

City Of God 22

It goes without saying that we are in the hands of fools, when it comes to the people and the various groups and interests that are running our countries and, by extension, our lives. And many of those fools are elected by us the people to run our affairs for us. There is no other way that President Dump could have got in the White House, but for the massive support of his beloved uneducated and hyper-angry heartland Americans who wanted to punish the Democrats for leaving them behind. Or so the narrative goes. But there it is, folks, one sizable contingent of dumbasses electing a particularly wealthy, noxious and deplorable dumbass to the highest office of the land in the most powerful and influential country on earth. Ah, Democracy! We've done somewhat better here in Canada, replacing the deplorable fat little Napoleon, Stephen Harper, with Sunny Days Pretty Boy, Justin Trudeau. But he has also turned into a big disappointment, shelling out what will eventually add up to well over ten billion dollars of our money for an oil pipeline to keep carrying its fuel of death to our west coast and to China, one of the most flagrant polluters of the atmosphere and vectors of climate change through global warming. China is not a democracy, and their leaders are particularly deplorable. One has only to read about what they are doing to the Uyghurs in Xinxiang province in the west, more than one million put in detention camps for...being Muslim? I could go on, but I don't want to ruin this Saturday for myself, nor for any of you, my Gentle Reader. But there you have it. We are in the hands of fools, idiots, greedy despots, short-sighted imbeciles, and vindictive little dictators, and this is the way the world turns. This could be very worrisome and alarm raising, but for one little caveat: those are the class of people who have always run our world, and the current crop of deplorables in high office might even be a little bit better than some of their predecessors. Faint hope, perhaps, but we still have hope. But now to get through this looming nightmare of climate change, to see if we really can make the needed improvements and adjustments in our energy practices over these next ten years that we have before everything goes down the great global toilet. I shudder think that there might be anyone equal to the task. It could be that those of us who survive the coming catastrophe might still be glued to their smartphones, no longer operating of course because Wi-Fi will be gone, but they will cowering in caves and still be clinging to their little rectangular pacifiers the way a toddler clutches onto his security blanket (Gentle Reader of a certain age will remember Linus from Peanuts), when they are not out trapping and killing small animals to eat. And that could be one of the better case scenarios. But let's not go there, eh? President Dump, if he's still around, will be pretend tweeting from his underground bunker, waiting to see how much longer his hoarded Big Mac supply will last till he becomes a toxic banquet for the surviving vermin, and Junior Trudeau will just have to live without a mirror. I don't think it's going to get that bad. I do believe our ass is going to get kicked, and kicked hard, but we will still get through this somehow. We always have, and we (hopefully always will). In the meantime, it is still awfully hard to feel comfortable about the human race when in my own city, the first response to our homelessness crisis was, well: a sudden proliferation of nail spas and doggie boutiques sprang up like toadstools on a wet autumn morning. At least there is a chance, however slim, that we can go into our uncertain future looking fabulous and feeling unconditionally loved by our little doggies. Provided we don't end up having to eat them in the end. Or they don't end up eating us. Gentle Reader, on this beautiful October day, really pay attention to the people around you, and see what small, tiny gesture of kindness you could make, some act of beauty you could perform, to help make life a little bit better for them. Seize the day, before it seizes you.

City Of God 21

I often get it wrong. Sometimes very wrong. Other times, I will calculate in advance the likely outcome, decide whether it's worth my effort or not, then, knowing the risks, walk into0 a bad situation anyway, do or say my bit and reap the consequences. The nasty confrontation with an aboriginal street women was a bit of both. This was in my neighbourhood, of course, because I live in a rundown and unsafe part of downtown Vancouver, near the Granville Bridge. I was on my way to a work assignment in the area and squatting at the northeast corner of Granville and Davie, there she was, asking for money. I said no and kept going, for several reasons: I suspected the money would be used for drugs, and I also don't wasn't people in the neighbourhood where I live to think of me as a resident cash cow. Not to mention, being myself on a low income, I have to live within a strict budget. Even if a lot of the people begging on the street have limited or no capacity for such things, it is easy to get annoyed and resentful at people who simply don't take care of themselves. It's easier if I know their story, but I am not able to in most cases, so I try to shut up and stop judging. This aboriginal woman started swearing at me and called me a homophobic slur. I walked back and told her firmly but politely, ":lease don't say things like that to people." She became almost violent. Swearing, calling me a fagot, spat at me (missed, thank heavens) then ran away, still in mid profanity-laden scream. I just smiled and said "thanks for leaving, because at that moment," I was only glad that she had left. Even though this woman merits compassion, I don't feel it towards her, for the way she lashed out at me. But I know and accept that she deserves more and better. I know nothing about her. She could be a mother, likely addicted, probably suffering from mental illness, and almost likely from fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and-or a brain injury. Childhood abuse? Very likely. I can only guess. Should I have just ignored her and moved on? Probably. But I decided not to for a couple of reasons. One is, I don't care who is saying it, I will not put up with homophobic slurs. Maybe she doesn't know better? Too bad. Time for her to learn. My other reason? One of our problems in relating well and effectively to people living with challenges is a tendency to patronize and talk down to them. Of cutting them so much slack for negative and destructive behaviour that we are no longer engaging with them as adults who merit respect but as children or idiots. This is where harm reduction becomes harm production. In my work with people who are living with mental illness and addictions I have found that the best way of engaging in a healthy and therapeutic rapport is in talking to them like they are adults, and placing on them the same expectations of adult behaviour. This has very rarely backfired. I understand and accept that that woman was not in a place where she was willing or able to engage as a responsible adult. I don't know what her day was like, but my guess is that if she is homeless, hungry and malnourished, sick, using drugs, and hurting from a history of abuse then there is no point in expecting anything from her. she shouldn't be out there. But there is such a lack of services and supports for people like her that they end up on the pavement, almost dying in public view, and it just gets uglier and uglier. Do I blame her for lashing out? no. In her position might I have done the same? Probably. Do I regret my actions? No. Would I do it differently in the future, or not at all? Could be. I need to develop more compassion, and this is how it's done. Small steps and false steps and missteps too. I really hope she finds the help that she needs. Unfortunately there is nothing that most of us can do for her unless we are already in positions to offer her the help she needs. But I am not going to feel sorry for her. She is an adult and I trust that she can make her own decisions, even if this means continuing on her current path of self-destruction. By robbing someone of their adulthood you are also denying their personhood. Do I forgive her for lashing out? I'm working on it. Do I forgive myself for what I said to her? Time will tell. There is also the race issue, me the big white settler-oppressor being mean to the exploited indigenous woman. Except, it didn't even occur to me till after that she might be aboriginal. And in terms of White Privilege, for very valid reasons that is a luxury cruise liner I never got to ride on. on some level I want to believe, and actually do believe that we are all in this together, and that in building the City of God we also have to be willing to interact and talk to one another. Even if things don't go as we'd like them to. There is no telling what kind of change even our smallest efforts might bring about in the long run, for ourselves, and for our world.

City Of God 20

Small is Beautiful. I think I still have Schumacher's eponymously titled famous book somewhere on my shelves, but I'm not sure now. The concept is beautiful. It squares nicely with the idea of the mustard seed parable, that smallest of all seeds that produces the huge mustard tree (more a big plant) that provides a home for the little songbirds. It also suggests Paul's opening address in his first letter to the Corinthians, where he writes that Christ's strength is made perfect in our human weakness. It summons to mind the very foundation of my Christian faith: that God deigned to come to us in human form, but born in the humblest of circumstances, a baby of poor parents and questionable paternity being born in a stable in the middle of the night in a foreign town. The same Jesus died in great humiliation, executed by the Romans with the approbation of the Jews, that most ignominious of deaths, crucifixion. This is the same Christian faith that was embraced by kings, princes and nations, and also horridly perverted and distorted by them and their crony priests: the crusades, the Inquisition, the debauchery of popes, and in our day the sexual abuse of children by priests and bishops and cardinals. The church never seems to get it right. This is the religion of slaves, as Simone Weil so eloquently stated. Christianity. The religion of Christ. This is the faith of poverty and marginalization. Of human frailness and human weakness. This is the fellowship of the rejected and the unwanted. We are the City of God. But we are not a church, not a building, nor an institution. We are not a chartered organization. Not all of us read or even believe the Bible. Not all of us are confessing or professed Christians. Yet we are all part of this city, this great unseen fellowship of suffering humanity. We are people of love and compassion, who love others. Even though we are fearful, we are not cowards. I have known this for a long time. We are Christ's presence in the world. We are the presence of God. We do not know who is not a member of this fellowship, but we know one another. Are we exclusive? No. we are always accepting membership. What makes us members? I don't think there is a church membership here. You will find in our midst all people and all kinds of people. We are not organized. We don't live together, but scattered throughout the earth. Some of us worship together, many worship alone. This is the closest I can come to naming or identifying us. It is the power of our powerlessness, the strength of our weakness and the wealth of our poverty that makes us rise above and overcome the scorn and insults of the many who hate us. In the great sorrow that we have known in our lives have sprung even greater rivers of joy. I remember a time when I thought of what it would be like to feed other people. Then I tried it, till my funds ran out. We were a community then. but then something miraculous happened. I found that even when I was very poor, I could still have enough to share with someone, if only a simple meal in my tiny room. I have always had enough, and there has always been something to share. I know this defies logic. But love is its own logic. This doesn't mean that I feed every beggar that I see on the street, but on occasion, yes, I can do this. I might do this more in the future, because really, the only thing that is different between them and me is they are sitting on the pavement and I'm walking. I still find it odd that I've never had to beg. I used to think it was because of pride. Now I'm not so sure. I do know this. We are all poor beggars, every last one of us. Even the angry West Side home owners with the angry signs festooning their lawns because they are wroth about being expected to contribute a little more of their largesse to the communal good. They don't appear to be grateful for their big beautiful homes, nor for the many other blessings that God has bestowed upon them. Maybe because they believe, erroneously, that God didn't give them anything. They did it all themselves. That is real poverty, Gentle Reader. Not those of us with little more than nothing, but those who have everything, and they are still miserable. "Tu no puedes comprar el viento; tu no puedes comprar el sol; tu no puedes comprar la lluvia; tu no puedes comprar el calor; tu no puedes comprar las nubes; tu no puedes comprar los colours; tu no puedes comprar mi alegria; tu no puedes comprar mis dolores...mi tierra no esta de venta." In English from the Spanish: you cannot buy the wind; you cannot buy the sun; you cannot by the rain; you cannot buy the heat; you cannot buy the clouds; you cannot buy the colours; you cannot buy my joy; you cannot by my sorrows...my land is not for sale."

City Of God 19

Today, pot becomes legal in my country. Uruguay is the only other country that has beat us to it. By the way, for all you English-speakers, it is not pronounced Yoorugway, but Oo-roo-gwai. This is a historic date. Nothing is really going to change, except that marijuana, as of today, loses its rebel cred. I phoned in a comment last week on the morning CBC Radio show, the Early Edition about pot. I said, more or less: "Now that pot is legal, it's no longer fun, like when I was smoking it, and for a while selling it in Toronto, back in the seventies, or when large animals were still roaming the planet." They broadcast my comment, and on hearing it played back I can't remember ever laughing so long and hard, with the hope that it was at least half as entertaining for other listeners. But seriously, folks, I lived in Toronto in 1975 and was trying to finish smoking a huge dime bag of pot I had purchased, and it was really too much for me and my partner. So, I would hole up in a back table in a chic little coffee shop on Isabella off Yonge street, called the Ritz. Staff and management knew what was going on, but the odd free doobie helped keep them quiet, and I would sit there discreetly rolling reefers, me a slim, gentle and very pretty teenage boy (which helped add to my appeal, and immunity), selling them for a buck a pop (in today's rates, more like between five and ten dollars). I made a nice bit of mad money off this little venture, and then promptly retired from the pot business. Then I experienced a spiritual reawakening, returned to Jesus and gave up drugs altogether. It's not going to be the end of the world, nor the world as we know it. Are we going to see a sudden increase of potheads, now that it's legit? Who knows, but maybe a little bit. Which for me begs the question of our relationship with drugs, addiction, and intoxication. I have to admit, smoking pot was fun. I loved it. I would get silly and giddy, and getting stoned with friends was more than half the fun, then we'd all get super hungry and go out and eat like pigs. Do I think I'd enjoy it as much now, should I start smoking it again after more than forty years of abstinence? That is hard to say. There are extenuating factors here. I am much older now. I enjoy having both clear lungs and a clear mind. Marijuana is also going to be a bit expensive, given my tight budget, and my aversion towards spending on silly vanities. I budget strictly every year in order to take those month long trips in Latin America, and getting high on my precious dime would make that difficult. I also don't feel the need to get high. I'm already happy. Pot is also a lot stronger than the stuff I was smoking, at least four times as potent with a much higher THC content. This could be problematic, especially for young users, and there is always the risk of addiction, however minor. Still, to quote the late folk-singer, Phil Ochs, smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer. (Too bad he died so young, just twenty-seven in 1970. The talent the world has lost!) The science is also basically in that smoking pot is less harmful than either alcohol, or tobacco, two substances that have never been illegal (apart from a brief and ill-conceived period of prohibition of alcohol), two vastly more harmful substances, and the hypocrisy of straight-laced nay-sayers condemning reefer-madness between sips of their martinis is absolutely obscene. On the other hand, why do we need to get high? There are clear medical benefits to smoking pot, but for me, the fact that there will always be a lot of people so sad, miserable, unfulfilled and empty who will need some kind of drug to make their dark grey lives a little more bearable fills me with sadness and concern. I do not want to deny them their enjoyment, but still wish and hope that they will find in themselves the resources of touching the hem of Christ's garment and find the healing and sweet release that a few tokes alone cannot really emulate. I am also concerned about arable land being wasted on yet another cash crop, land that is going to be required for feeding the hungry masses, especially as climate change from global warming makes large tracks of this planet unliveable. I could go on. Somehow, as we become more aware of the incipient and implicit City of God in our midst, I also wonder and hope, however feebly, that this acceptance of our weakness and frailty as imperfect humans, can also inspire us to judge less and love a little bit more. If only we can get past all the hungry sharks that are salivating over the huge cash grab that is going to be theirs as they morph from sidewalk dealers to legitimate entrepreneurs.

City Of God 18

Our use of energy has always been problematic. For centuries it was wood, peat or cattle dung, and lots of smoke was made, making our atmosphere increasingly unbreathable. Then coal was discovered and everyone knows what happened to the lovely air of London, later in Beijing. Oil was the deal breaker, and the invention and accessibility of the horseless carriage has resulted in gridlock, traffic jams, a further reduced air quality (with the exception of a few electric vehicles they are all run on gas) and now we are being warned that with luck we just might get through another decade, given that we are going to lower our carbon emissions to raising the global temperature by less than 1.5 degrees centigrade. in other news, they are wanting to ship liquefied natural gas from our province to China. The reasoning is that if china switches from coal to LNG, then that will considerably lower their carbon footprint. Our government always says things like that, not because they are true but to shut down debate. It is already known that the extraction and manufacturing process as well as the transport and burning of LNG is only going to be a little bit less harmful than bitumen, that dreadful thick tar they want to ship through this province from the tar sands of Alberta to be refined in China. There seems to be no window of hope in sight. now we have had a natural gas disaster near the northern city of Prince George. There was an explosion and the pipeline has been shut down, thus reducing the fuel supply to people all over the province, including here in Vancouver. Winter is coming. People relying on natural gas are being told to turn down the temperature, wear sweaters. Public indoor pools will not be heating their water. This God be God trying to talk to us, but not a lot of people believe in him these days, and they are not likely to listen. Even some of those who do believe are still going to turn a deaf ear. Hasn't it always been like this? What re they doing to develop and improve green technologies, such as wind and solar power? Not very much. How further ahead would we be had our governments taken the initiative years ago and used the truckloads of cash they have been wasting on fossil fuels for renewable energy? We would like have by now a robust renewable energy industry contributing to full long-term employment and a much cleaner environment, and possibly more time before the window closes, we are all left gagging on our emissions while fleeing from wildfires, floods, killer storms and rising sea levels. And all this because our government leaders don't want to see their friends in Big Oil and its various ilk suffer financial loss. This is, of course, beyond deplorable. But I would also like to focus a bit on the rest of us, our use of energy, our expectation that no sacrifices will have to be made in order to save the planet. We are for the most part soft, lazy, spoiled and selfish. We are addicted to our phones, computers, and comfort. especially in the cities where population density requires power grids so high and complex as to ensure a chronically threatened earth. When I was fifteen years old, and already the science was in about the relation between car exhaust and air pollution, I decided that I would never drive. This has made me in the eyes of some kind of a loser, since car ownership is considered in our culture a rite of passage into adulthood, like home ownership. So I have always gotten around on foot or by public transport. Perhaps I am also poorer because of this, but my conscience at least is clean. I do not see anyone willingly giving up their cars. This seems to them too much a blow to their self-esteem, I suppose, but isn't this exaggerated self-esteem what is already at the root of the damage that we are inflicting on our mother earth? Jesus said blessed are the poor for they shall inherit the earth. The City of God is made real when we have humility. Otherwise, the gates are closed to us.

City Of God 17

How can the City Of God be anything but a lovely chimera, a beautiful fiction, unless we are prepared to change as human beings. I am thinking again of Che Guevara writing in his journals about revolution and the new man (sic). Of course Che, like Mao and Lenin, was impatient and wanted to take that most brutal shortcut by murdering everyone he disliked or didn't agree with him. Che was not Jesus, rather he was Barabbas, the violent insurrectionist who was set free in place of Jesus. And he killed a lot of people. But no one really changed to his satisfaction, and not even Che as he was gunned down in the jungles of Bolivia and his own blood-stained hands were chopped off at the wrists. And Cuba, as we all know, is no City Of God, but a very poor and oppressed country where people live in fear of their government. On the other hand they also all have housing and free health care and post-secondary education, making them still more secure, healthier and smarter than a lot of other people. But worth the cost? Worth the massacres and the extra-judicial killings? I think not. We have to deal with our propensity towards violence if we are to really move ahead, and we are going to need to invent and devise new and improved ways of being human. How are we going to pull this off? Especially living in a society that glorifies violence, be it in the military or in sports. While they are being bombarded by video games and some of the most atrocious messages in pop culture, how are children going to be persuaded to embrace and develop the higher angels of their nature? I do not accept that aggression is part of human nature, but we still have a propensity for aggression and a history of making war and this is going to be problematic. I have been listening off and on to some lecture presentations on the ideas program of CBC Radio One featuring prominent historian Margaret McMillan speaking on our very human history and propensity for war. I don't think that Ms. McMillan would go so far as to call herself a pacifist, but I'm not sure. She has not been shy about listing the many benefits of war, how it brings societies and divergent social classes together and countries (the victor nations, that is, the conquered have always fared badly) have benefited enormously with booming economies and enhanced social programs and human rights. She has not been shy about questioning whether it is worth it, if the ends do justify the means, and she has tried to maintain as her focus the importance of preventing war from happening, no matter how inevitable it might seem to be. I would like to make one other suggestion here. In times of war, people have to work and cooperate very closely together, forget about social and economic class differences, and to focus and work together towards their survival and wellbeing as a nation. What this really does is summon forth our roots as hunter-gatherer societies, where everyone was equal because everyone had to pull together for the survival of the tribe. Agriculture and civilization changed the game. Cities, as we know and experience them, breed inequality, the very existence of cities is founded and dependent upon social inequality. The only way that this is going to change is when people make the effort and take the courage to reach across barriers and there are many ways of doing this, but it is always going to be costly. If the city of God is to become a present and prescient reality to us then we are going to have to take risks and make sacrifices. Otherwise, we are going to remain a sad collective of frightened little snobs, each clinging in their own little enclave or ghetto to their illusions of privilege, entitlement and exclusivity. Inequality of wealth and income of course are hugely to blame for this, and so much the more important to reach across the barriers. How this is going to happen, of course, is going to be up to the individual, but hopefully it isn't going to take something so horrible and tragic as a war or a killer earthquake to pull our heads out of our asses, Gentle Reader.

City Of God 16

The city is what surrounds us. It is also what lives inside us, just as much as we are inside it. The city is the people around us, and we are the city to those who are near us. I was chatting with a friend on Skype the other day, who lives in Mexico City. He mentioned that when he is out on the street, he really tries to ignore the other people, not get in anyone's way, and just does whatever he needs to do, then returns to the safety of home. This I think is a very universal experience. We expend a lot of energy in blocking out the other. Tech makes it easier, and so you see a lot of people plugged into their listening devices or fiddling with their dear little phones. Anything to block out the people around us, I suppose. I won't do this. As annoying as I find everyone, I still want to know that we are together, if only physically in the same space because this way I am reminded that I am not alone (none of us is, really, one of the great lies of existential atheism and post-modernity is that we are alone). I also ,simultaneously, want to be alone. Yesterday when I was out walking I was faced with an unpleasant choice: either put up with two young women walking and talking interminably behind me as they were pushing a kid in a stroller, or cross onto the other side of the street where I would be facing oncoming traffic and blinding headlights, since a lot of drivers don't seem to know or care that they have their fog lights on in the middle of the day and that they are going to take out our retinas. I crossed the street, guarded my eyes as needed from oncoming headlights and once the chatty Cathies were no longer around, crossed back to the other side. I like audial privacy when I walk alone, as I am often processing things, and I have always had trouble filtering out other people's voices, especially from behind, but there is a reason for our hearing to be particularly sharp when it comes to noises from behind. This is how our ancestors survived not getting eaten by sabre-toothed cats or cave bears. They had to hear, and very clearly and well, the noises from behind to escape getting ambushed. We carry in our post-modern selves their DNA. Although we are all cheek by jowl in this lovely urban density, we still react and are impacted as though we were hunter-gatherers eking out our survival in the wilderness. There is actually quite a bit of lunacy to wandering around in the city with earbuds. You might have your favourite playlist to distract you from the boring everyday that surrounds you but it is going to be at a cost. You are not going to hear the sabre-toothed cats or the cave bears behind you. Neither cars that could put a sudden and decisive end to your sad, solitary existence, nor other pedestrians who want to walk around you. And if you are riding your bike in traffic with your phones on then you are being particularly stupid and as a prime candidate for natural selection you might be a little bit less deserving of our pity. Living downtown, as I do, I am surrounded by people, and by noise. There is the old derelict with the loud, chronic cough in the special-needs building right next door, and other little delightful sounds from some of his neighbours. there are the workers in the sushi restaurant downstairs yapping interminably on the pavement outside my window during their smoke break. There is also the occasional homeless unfortunate screaming from the alley while high on crack. There are also some of my own neighbours. The two smokers across the hall with their chronic coughing fits, and one of them still doesn't seem to know or care that it is no longer considered acceptable to fill the hall with his secondhand cigarette smoke. and there are the sirens: police, fire or ambulance, anytime, day and night, as well as the noise from construction nearby. Earplugs often help, or simply closing my window for a while. Other times, it is better to keep an ear open for trouble, in case someone needs help, like the woman screaming repeatedly from the special needs building next door. I phoned the staff there, not to complain about the noise, but out of heartfelt concern for her wellbeing. There is also my neighbour in the adjoining apartment who sometimes is shoving or wheeling different items into her unit, noisily. But when I see that it's her, or another tenant, I simply ask if I can help. Annoyance is part of the job of coexisting, as are the legitimate needs for peace quiet and privacy. But we also have to know and respond appropriately when we are being reminded that we are all in this together and that liking it or not, we are all part of one another in this strange and sorrowful boot camp that is training us for the City of God.

City Of God 15

I am going to provide you here, Gentle Reader, with a concise CV. A friend recently suggested to me that even if I claim to have never benefited from white privilege, surely by default I must have benefited in some way by being Caucasian in Canada. For example, I must have been hired for employment instead of a person of colour, or been rented an apartment for being white, thus displacing other, equally worthy or worthier candidates solely because of my skin colour. Just to be polite I simply agreed that that might be a possibility though I didn't feel persuaded. Now, my friend and I have certain things in common: we are the same age and we are both white Canadian males. Our upbringings have been particularly different and I have never enjoyed any of my friend's privileges or advantages. I was also hugely impacted by chronic sexual, physical and emotional abuse by family members throughout my childhood, as well as my father's alcoholism and my parents' divorce when I was thirteen and subsequent very selfish choices that left me without any support or stability so that by the time I was eighteen I had to live on my own and survive on low-paying work with some runs of employment insurance and welfare, since I often had a difficult time persuading employers to hire me and this constant struggle to survive made it impossible for me to complete my post-secondary education. I was also both queer and a super-devout Christian (still am!) I have never in my life earned anything near a living wage. All the jobs that I have had have also put me in workplaces and environments that were racially diverse, allowing me firsthand to share with people of colour the kind of social and economic marginalization that no one seems to believe anymore can also be part of the purview of anybody, regardless of their skin colour. Only in the past sixteen years of BC Housing have I lived in safe and secure housing. I have been homeless (for ten and a half months between 1998 and 1999). In the workplace, often my supervisors have been people of colour. Sometimes I was the only white person, or almost the only one working there. I have never in my work history felt that preference was being given to me based on race. Likewise with my housing experience. Most of my landlords have been persons of colour. In most of my living arrangements there has been diversity, especially more recently, and now in the building where I live, the majority of the tenants represent visible minorities. I am writing this because I am frankly sick and tired of the way people use identity politics as a brush to paint everyone in the same broad strokes of black and white. And there is so much anger and emotion fueling the justified outrage of many persons of colour that it is probably going to be nearly impossible to have a rational conversation about this with anyone for a long time to come. Do I believe that white privilege exists, then? Of course it exists. But it is also tied in with economic and social status. Especially as people of aboriginal and African heritages become more empowered, they are also going to be more angry, and anger can be a very blinding as well as a motivating force. Not all people of colour have this anger and I have been blessed with knowing and working and being befriended by a lot of decent and lovely people of African, South Asian, Asian and Latino heritage. Neither do all white people share in white privilege, and often for reasons I have just stated. We are, each one of us, more than our categories. In the City of God we don't see categories. We see persons. We recognize and respect the influence and impact and influence that our racial and ethnic heritage has had, how it has shaped us, and how it has been used against us. But if we are living in the City of Love, which is the true identity of the City of God, then we become more focussed on the person, less on the categories and the identity politics and move towards a dynamic of mutual servanthood, which also means hearing and learning from one another's stories of all our life experiences, struggles, failures and triumphs. But we have to get beyond thinking in categories which is really for the intellectually lazy, and learn how to think and see things more clearly. The current talk about white privilege and historic oppression and racial profiling are useful as a model, but fall short as a narrative. Like all models this is going to be flawed, and the human being is far more complex and far more nuanced than this.

City Of God 14

We are in the midst of our civic and municipal elections in my part of the world, Gentle Reader. There are tonnes of candidates, more than a hundred, vying for twenty-seven positions: one mayor, ten councillors, nine school board and seven parks board trustees. We have independent candidates and at least ten different parties representing every single shade and tone and economic, social and political position and preference, from some real loony toons, and everything left right and centre. The wealthy neighbourhoods where I like to go walking--not because they are wealthy, but because they are tranquil and leafy, are festooned by mostly purple and red, white and blue signs for the pro-business and right of centre candidates. They have no time for the politics of compassion and social justice that drive the engines of the more progressive parties. Rather than concern themselves with the lack of affordable housing for their less fortunate brethren, they simply are going to dig in and protect the excessive wealth that they have already hoarded for themselves. In the meantime, they continue to drive carbon emission-spewing cars, expensive ones of course, but almost everyone is still driving carbon emission-spewing vehicles, except perhaps people like me who can neither afford them, nor care to participate in this particular dance of death on wheels. One particularly obnoxious right-of centre candidate, a Hong Kong transplant named Wei Young, actually is campaigning on the promise of dismantling many of the bike lanes that the outgoing administration had built in Vancouver. Even though the bike lanes are being used more, and not quite as many people are driving cars now (keep the champagne in the wine-cellar, darlings, the vast majority of commuters still drive and pollute). There is no significant threat that that horrible woman is going to get elected, but never say never, and, yes, so sue me Wei Young! I attend a church full of older, middle class, mostly white parishioners. It is not easy having a conversation with people there about climate change, not when I am the only one attending who doesn't drive a car to church, not when they are getting ready to repave the parking lot, not when one of the older middle class white parishioners is getting ready to give his fifteen year old son driving lessons, no conditions that the kid is going to drive an electric car, and the priest of course is nodding in polite cheerleader agreement. It seems to me that one of the baptismal vows for Anglicans is to help safeguard and protect our dear mother earth. (Who knew?). In the meantime this dance of death continues and we are all participants. I just voted, two days ago, when the advance polls opened. Naturally I picked only progressive, left of centre candidates, without even a tincture of assurance that any of them are going to get elected. It's the least I can do. We have another ten years left before this planet really starts to get flushed down the toilet, and all because there are too many powerful and influential interests at work on the planet to prevent real solutions and real measures to be taken to help halt global warming. And no one seems interested in giving up their precious cars. Most people would probably get by very nicely without those polluting death machines, but there is something hardwired into the brains of most Canadians (and people in other countries) that views car ownership as an entitlement, and satisfying the fragile ego is always going to be given priority over saving the planet. Does it have to be this way? I really hope not. I still am optimistic that enough of us are going to wake up, perhaps a bit too late to reverse some of the disasters, but perhaps just enough to turn things back before we are all tumbling into the abyss. I only wish I could see more evidence in my church, in my city, in my neighbourhood, that we are all going to start caring enough, that we are all ready to make a few sacrifices, even if they hurt a little, before we are all sacrificed on the altar of death, greed and selfishness. It isn't too late, Gentle Reader, but we have no time to lose.

City Of God 13

Yesterday I had a spare hour or so to walk through one of our richest neighbourhoods while on my way to my next work assignment. In my job I work in three distinct sights flung across the city, so there is significant travel time on most days. I was walking down one leafy street between mansions just one block for so from where I found that pile of money, some $525 just four years ago, and now here was an opportunity to give back, so to speak. I saw an envelope next to the sidewalk. I felt curious so I picked it up. It was soaking wet. It had not yet been opened and it had the logo for the TD bank on it. I read the address. The name was of a Chinese resident and this person lived just a half block away. I thought, and weighed the risk. A lot of these estates are locked and sealed and electronically monitored, and some have vicious guard dogs prowling around. I thought I could just leave the letter on top of the gate, or wall or fence or whatever. it turned out to be a huge, Georgian-style mansion, one of the vintage houses in the area built well over a hundred years ago. The gate was open. There was a car parked in the driveway and no sign of any dogs. I cautiously made my way to the front door, expecting that a servant or maybe a Filipina nanny would answer. No one came to the door. Not surprising, given that we live in an age of fear and especially in a wealthy neighbourhood no one is going to come running to the door if a stranger happens to be knocking. I carefully sliped the wet letter into the letter slot, then continued my way to work. I did this because at the moment it seemed like the right thing to do. The letter was important, being from the bank, and someone might easily get hold of it and crack the coded information to break into the recipient's cyber security and all hell could break loose. Not that I have a lot of sympathy for wealthy people who get preyed on. I have an instinctive Robin Hood reflex and I have few qualms about the poor benefiting at the expense of the wealthy. But I still wanted to do the kind and right thing, and despite my distaste for rich people (and, Gentle Reader, I do not hate the wealthy, nor envy them, I simply disapprove of social and economic inequality), I didn't want the recipient to come to harm. Neither was I going to let my disapproval of wealthy foreigners buying up our property and sending housing prices into the stratosphere to affect my act of kindness. There is also a wealthy burgher in the area, a lady of a certain age, who has befriended me. I often see her sweeping or gardening just outside her property. She likes to chat, and we often stand for up to twenty minutes or so shooting the breeze. Last Saturday she walked with me a few blocks. This lady in some ways seems atypical of the area. She is very friendly, seems to like to talk to people regardless of class differences, and seems like a genuinely kind person. From what she has told me about her politics, she appears to be conservative, but definitely more a red tory, and I get on well with red Tories, though I tend to be way off in left of centre land and a strong supporter of both the Green Party and the NDP. She isn't fond of the Chinese millionaires buying up her neighbourhood, finding them unfriendly and materialistic, and I have felt behooved to remind her that they are not typical of their people, the vast majority of whom I have found to be decent and kind especially given the harsh treatment they have historically suffered in this city. I already mentioned that I disapprove of inordinate wealth and economic inequality. Does this mean that I believe a doctor and a ditch-digger should be paid the same? Yes. They both work hard, both do useful work, and really, why should one have way more than he needs while the other hast to struggle to feed himself ad keep[ a roof over his head. Do I think the Chinese householder where I delivered the letter is vastly overcompensated? Yep. Likewise the lady who chats with me outside her home. But they are also human beings and if we in our zeal for social justice keep forgetting this then we will also run the risk of repeating the brutal and murderous errors of Mao, Lenin and Che Guevara. In the City of God all is love and even love must come before justice, because justice that is not driven and motivated by love becomes a cruel and implacable tribal vengeance. We must never forget the humanity of those who oppose us, even while fighting and struggling like mad to uphold and show forth our own humanity and the humanity of those for whom we are fighting.

City Of God 12

We could be on the brink of what could turn out to be one of the greatest global disasters since the last ice age. I am talking here about climate change from global warming. Two days ago, Thanksgiving Day (in Canada) the UN report came out that, at the very best, we have another eleven years to change our fuel consumption habits and significantly reduce our carbon footprint, or that's it. Schnitzel for you, Tootsie. The climate will have warmed by at least a full four degrees and we will have such killer storms, floods, droughts rising sea levels and crop failure and devastation of arable land that we had might as well all join in a global chorus of Nearer My God to Thee, because our species is about to go the way of the Titanic. (Atheists don't have to sing nearer my God, they can substitute it with closer to the eternal abyss of existential despair, if they choose). Worst case. Yes, it isn't a pretty thought. But we have to think this and face it. This doesn't mean that it actually is going to be that bad. I could even turn out worse. Or better. Science never has all the answers and we could be thrown yet a few unexpected curve balls to either accelerate or mitigate the cause for panic. So, now the mindfulness industry is going to go at full throttle. Between people's addictions to their smart phones, increasing globalized pressures to perform and compete well in the workplace, and that Sword of Damocles called climate change hanging over our heads by an ever thinning thread, a lot of folks are going to grab at any placebo or panacea that will help calm them down, be they tranquilizers, prayer meetings or mindfulness meditation and yoga sessions. We are being faced, as never before, by the reality of our mortality. And most of us, it seems, still can't get our heads out of the sand, or out of a particular orifice that everyone of us has on our bodies. To worsen the odds, there is in the Paranoid States of America a huge lobby of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, with huge political clout (they love el Presidente Dump), and they are insisting either that there is no danger of climate change and that it's all a plot from pantheists and anti-Christian tree=huggers, or that this means that the Apocalypse is nigh, Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled and the Second Coming of Christ is imminent, so let's hasten the devastation because Jesus will be coming back all the sooner and we can't wait. Well, I am a theologically orthodox Christian and this kind of crap really hurts my head and leaves me rolling my eyes. We have no way of knowing for sure how things are going to turn out, but all the scientific models are in and our prognosis is not pretty. If we don't have more people on board with this, if we don't have a sizable lobby of concerned and responsible citizens who will give up completely the use of fossil fuels (in other words, give up your cars!), and to quit eating meat and significantly reduce the way we waste energy, then we'd might as well just sit where we already are, put our heads between our knees and kiss our sweet ass goodbye. The City of God is not some fabled New Jerusalem that will magically appear to house the already redeemed once we have made rubble out of our mother earth. This is the City of God., It is here, in our very midst, and only our failure to adequately love God, one another and our precious planet earth is going to slam shut the gates in our faces. I am optimistic. I believe we will get through this. However, we had better prepare now to get our ass royally kicked over the next several decades, and we had better start caring more. This massive collective tsunami of greed, selfishness and competitiveness that has been ushered in by global capitalism is going to be one of the greatest setbacks to our moving forward on climate change, and the time is now to start challenging this pernicious myth of economic prosperity. Our survival as a species hangs on the necessity of our willingness to become better human beings, less selfish, more caring, more responsible and...more loving. Kumbaya, anyone?

City Of God 11

First, something from the letter to Hebrews, in Spanish with English translation: In English translation: They all lived by faith, and died without receiving the promises; rather, they could see them from afar, and went in search of their homeland. Had they been thinking of that homeland from where they had come, they would have been able to return there. Rather, they were longing for a better country, which is to say, the heavenly,. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, and he is preparing for them a city....Interesting words, Gentle Reader, and we are not going to guess exactly what they mean, but I do want to focus on one particular theme in this little passage: this is the theme of longing. Of yearning for something better, something good, pure, sacred, beautiful. But also the place that is our true home. In Spanish patria, or our homeland. We seem to be, all of us, a people in pilgrimage, and I use this term in the most general sense. I imagine that the evolutionary anthropologists would have a neat and tidy explanation for this one, as the evolutionary whatever-they-want-to-prove-that-God-doesn't-exist, have neat and tidy explanations for everything. I imagine that some of them would claim that this restlessness and longing for a homeland that erupts in our lives like a nagging itch is simply our ancestral longing for the Africa that our most remote ancestors came out of some one hundred thousand years ago. Fair enough, though I have never experienced even a smidgeon of a longing to visit Africa. Nothing against Africa, Gentle Reader, but they just are not on my bucket list. What are we really longing for? The writer of this letter to the Hebrews, some two thousand years ago, claims that this is the City of God. The New Jerusalem. And this isn't just the purview of Christians nor only persons of whichever faith that sustains them. There appears to be something universal to this longing, and those of us who dedicate ourselves to a life of faith, for us, this longing becomes particularly focussed, and we dedicate our lives to knowing this place, to refining our journey in that direction, and to making this City a living reality in our present lives and situations. We are often, it seems, in search of improvements, of ways of making ourselves and our environment better. But it's all so much stumbling in the dark as we are tempted, delighted, tormented and mocked by this City of God that dangles like a mirage on our horizons. I am thinking of some of the really pathetic efforts in the twentieth century for making this real, particularly in communist experiments in Russia, China, North Korea and Cuba. Say what you want, but the architects of these revolutions, some of them anyway, really wanted to live out a vision of a kind of heaven on earth. Every one of those experiments has descended into a farce of oppression and brutality. I read some of the memoirs of Che Guevara, in Spanish, and I had to put the book down and leave it in one of my less accessible bookshelves, for the simple reason that I found what he was saying and the way he was saying it, to be particularly depressing. In his writings about revolution and the new man (sic) he repeated himself over and over again about the importance of purging the revolution, of taking out and killing anyone who didn't conform. So, this is how we build the City? We exile or murder whomsoever doesn't fit or conform to our vision? And this thinking often prevails in many religious undertakings. Perhaps not necessarily to kill everyone, but certainly to punish or drive into exile those who don't have the "right stuff." This happened to me. It is a horrendous and traumatizing experience, to be so brutally informed that you are not one of the chosen. You are defective. It is also sobering to think that really, there probably isn't anyone on the surface of the earth who would qualify because we are all flawed, damaged and imperfect. Every single on of us. Then how can this City be built. But I've already said, it can't be built. It can only be lived, however imperfectly in our feeble efforts to stumble forward. If God is love, then his City will be a City of Love, and for us to lay even the first brick in its wall, we must ourselves be transformed into a people of love, and love is made perfect in our flaws and human weakness.