The Walking Dead 3

Remember the Sony Walkman? And it's various knock-offs? They predate the Discman, for CD's and the MP3 player which of course is the au courante personal listening device on which you can upload all the music you want from the internet while starving professional musicians, since you're getting it for free. The Walkman, of course, was loaded with tapes. Remember tapes? Then you must be at least forty or older. I had a Walkman knockoff, I can't remember the brand name, back in the early nineties. I didn't use it much. I found it too distracting. I have always preferred to interact with my environment, not ignore it. I don't know why. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. But as much as I love music, I have never needed or wanted someone else's tunes playing in my ear twenty four hours a day. Not even four hours a day. I simply don't have that empty place in my soul that has to be filled up with music and distraction. I love music, especially classical and especially Baroque and Renaissance music. But I also like to hear what's going on around me. But why don't I need to be constantly listening to music? Well, I actually wonder about those who are so afraid of silence, so afraid of their own inner voice and inner void, that they can't bear to live without it. What is wrong with those people? They can't live without this constant noise, from rock, pop, rap and other stars, whom they elevate to the status of gods, mere mortals, flawed human beings like ourselves, though perhaps talented human beings with incredible marketing and self-promotion savvy. So, the emptiness of the masses, their collective spiritual and moral vacuity, makes them all sitting targets for grandiose, and talented narcissists and their agents and promoters, because truckloads of cash stand to be made off the adulation of the vacuous and gormless fans. And this is all because we are the Walking Dead. We have no soul, no substance, we are spiritually empty shells of humanity. This could be blamed on a lot of things, and I think that the erosion of religion and belief in God does play a role here. There is nothing in secular atheism that is going to address that soul-emptiness that has come to mark us, and to make us marks for marketing greed and genius. It doesn't matter where you go: on the sidewalk, in the mall, the grocery store, in coffee shops, on transit, in their cars, even walking on forest trails, you will find them all plugged into their private, personal listening device. It is particularly sad seeing this in the woods. There are so many lovely and subtle sounds in the forest: the different birds, songbirds, ravens and eagles, the wind in the trees, and the rustle of leaves and branches, such things as shouldn't need an artificial soundtrack. But so many people invest so much of themselves, their identity and their soul into their music gods, and this has become a serious idolatry. By default, we have sold ourselves to the lowest bidder, all because God no longer matters to us, all because we have opted through our own arrogant self-will, to detach ourselves from the very source of life that upholds, nourishes and sustains us, and as trade-off we have opted for the sounds and noises emitted by flawed human beings, every bit as fallible and wounded as ourselves, only a bit more arrogant, and because of our undiscerning worship of such talented fools, all the richer and greedier than the rest of us. And this is the state religion of Zombie Nation.

The Walking Dead 2

Here I am, somewhat awake at four in the morning here in the heart of Zombie Nation. Vancouver is its capital city. I think that my city of Vancouver is particularly deserving of this less than flattering epithet. We of course, have about as high a percentage of smartphone users as anywhere else, and this is where the walking dead really seem to excel in their lack of awareness. They are like walking heads, completely detached from their bodies as they walk into everything and step in all kinds of disgusting substances because they can't peal their eyes for one moment from their precious little screens. One woman on Facebook (which I no longer read), a born-again atheist intent on proving to the world that atheists are not only every bit a righteous as people of religious fait, but even more righteous, was writing a series of shrill and strident posts about how people have no right judging parents who are stuck on their phones while they are out with their children. This apparently had been her reaction to a sign that was posted in front of a local school. The principal was kindly suggesting that parents picking up or dropping off their precious little darlings spend more time interacting with their kids than their phones. Little Miss Righteous and Godless screamed loud and harsh that anyone agreeing with this was being judgy-ass. That they might be looking for employment and checking listings, or they could be desperately seeking housing, or access to a food bank, or whatever. I'm sure that all those things and others could provide very valid reasons for mommy and daddy looking at their phones. But I think that little Miss Righteous and Godless was protesting a little bit too much, and the likelihood that mommy or daddy were in the middle of an emergency was not going to be all that likely. Truth is, children can be very boring, especially when they are your own and especially when you have no choice but to have to be around them all the time, when really you would like to be somewhere else, do something else and naturally you're going to want some kind of harmless small distraction before you are driven crazy by yet one more dumb little kid question. And they do not love their precious little spawn any less. But they feel stranded and trapped, just like all the citizens of Zombie Nation. There is no life in a smartphone, no healing magic, no spiritual mana to convert our souls and spirits into suddenly perceiving visions of joy and universal bliss. But we are hopelessly bored, which is to say that we are hopelessly frightened and paralyzed by fear, while stuck in occupations and living arrangements that are far less than ideal, while unable to make ourselves beautiful and perfect and god-like the way the advertisers pushing useless cosmetics and other products tell us we need to, if we are to buy their useless garbage, which would seem particularly true for women. Even though women have made huge advances in securing equal rights and empowerment (and still have a lot farther to go), many are going to be naturally fearful and suspicious of men, since for the most part, a lot of representatives of the male gender still tend to behave like pigs. While queer people have also been making admirable advances, we still have a lot of (mostly) male homophobic wankers shunning us, and being afraid of being thought to be gay. Even though we have become a multiracial and multicultural society, there is still a fear of the other that keeps a lot of people isolated within their ghettoes. And even among regular white folk? We are the most pathetic! We whine and whimper about how hard it is to make friends in this god-awful, but creepily pretty city, and yet we cling to our phones and ignore each other, perhaps because we only want to make friends with the right kind of people, and no one is going to wake up and notice that we are the right kind of people, and just by reaching out to us we suddenly find them way too needy to be the right kind of anybody, which is exactly how we are going to be perceived when we reach out to them because we, the citizens of zombie nations are such a pathetic swill of narcissism. And those who do wake up, and come to life, we are the ones least trusted and held in suspicion because we have dared to break the code of silence.

The Walking Dead 1

I remember the first time that nature really came alive for me. I mean, in such a way that I would maintain this consciousness for the rest of my life. There had been fleeting glimpses when I was a child. I am thinking especially of the time I first really discovered the flowering red hawthorn that grew by the side of the driveway. It was a cool, luminous morning of early May, and when I stepped outside before breakfast, or perhaps on the way to school, there it was in shimmering splendour, capturing the beauty and strength of the gathering sun. That image will stay with me forever. This really began to happen for me again when I'd just turned sixteen. I was walking in Stanley Park with a new friend, a boy of nineteen or so. We were wandering the forest trails and there was something so intense about the gathering new life around us. It was, I think mid or late March, and there was fresh green and new flowers already beginning everywhere, and the light of the sun made it all almost painfully beautiful to our poor human eyes. We later visited the aviary of the zoo, which hasn't existed in many years now. There was an exotic pheasant, called a Himalayan monal. Look it up on Google, because they are breathtakingly gorgeous! My friend, like me in that era, was a bit of a fundamentalist and on seeing this bird, was so gobsmacked by its splendour that he almost shouted out, "And to think they say that evolved!" We all rejected Darwin in those days, now I have no problem at all with Evolution, anyway, though please don't ask me how it really happened, Gentle Reader, because I wasn't there. Less than two years later, my friend died from cancer. I really wonder how many people really see the beauty of nature around them. When I am walking the trails in the forest a lot of people are either in pairs or small groups or they are totally obsessed with their dear little tech toys. I don't think they see very much. Likewise the joggers and cyclists. They are moving too fast. I live in a Zombie Nation. I often feel like I am the few Living among the Walking Dead. From time to time I am pleasantly surprised when I hear someone remark on the beauty around them, but this beauty is always surrounding us. It is always within us too, and takes the Holy Spirit to waken in us this vision, and to open our tired, weak and wounded eyes. This isn't to say that you can't be an atheist and still appreciate beauty. You can, but you are going to have to suspend all your scientific materialism and biological and evolutionary theories about the biochemical compositions and processes and the effects and angles of light, because such presumptions and assumptions only distract your minds make you less receptive to the beauty around you. We really have to learn to be in the present moment, to quiet our minds if we are going to do this, and also to humble ourselves and become like little children, because it is really the child-heart that is also going to receive and appreciate the blessing.

More Limbo

Good morning, Gentle Reader. The computer store was closed yesterday, being Sunday, so I have to bring in my laptop today. I expect things to be up and running by Wednesday, or so, and in the meantime the blogposts are going to be short and sweet. I was one of the speakers at church yesterday, at the end of the service, and had been asked to speak about my experience of God during times of change. I ended up telling them about the conditions that led me to this particular parish, and the vision of interdependence in nature that I had while hiking the cloud forest in Costa Rica recently. I was very well received, with applause, even (they hadn't clapped for the others). I spoke for a while with a man there, around my age, and we have had very different lives. Even though at times I wonder if I am not a full adult for not having married and raised a family, I don't think I have anything to worry about. There are many ways to grow. This fellow had mentioned his children and grandchildren, and I am thinking, wow! One year you're changing diapers and before you know it, you're a grandparent! I could write more, but this is one of the communal computers I am writing at in the living room downstairs and I want to get to my coffee before it gets to stale. In the meantime, I shall be writing in limbo.

Limbo

Gentle Reader, my computer is not working, and I am taking it in for repairs this afternoon, and expect that it will be functioning again Tuesday or Wednesday this week. Of course, this does give me time to reflect on how dependent even righteous little old me has become on this technology. It is easy to disdain phone zombies walking into lamp posts, but really we are all hooked. I am afflicted with that neurotic sadness, now, that says that my life is on hold, even if it isn't. I have books, art to work on, and a landline phone if I need to contact the world around me. Strange how the enough of yesterday is not enough today. I am also fortunate that there are computers in the common room of my apartment building and, being an early riser, I can have access while all the other tenants are tossing and turning in their narrow little beds. I wonder if it might be time to become less dependent on these machines, and to accept this break as an opportunity for rest. There is something inherently addictive about all this information and imagery being at the ready twenty-four/seven, and when it's gone, what do we do? Why, other things of course! I of course have also had to cancel Skype visits today and tomorrow with friends in Mexico and Colombia, but I'm sure we'll all live. I do feel very fortunate that I can afford a laptop, and the online connection, and that at this time, when it needs to go in for repairs, that I have enough money stashed away to pay for it or even, should the time come, to buy a new laptop. In the meantime, life goes on, with or without tech, and something tells me that where tech is concerned, less is still more.

Something Needs To Change

It's a question of change or be changed. Because it's one of those things that we really don't have a lot of choice over. Change has been for all of us the one constant, the perpetual norm, since we emerged from the womb, and really were it not for the constant change of the very cells that make up our bodies multiplying and replicating and repairing and replacing themselves, without all that perpetual motion of change, we simply wouldn't be. Not to mention all the changes that occur as we go through the various stages of life, till we breathe our last and our bodies, through a process of change and disintegration are returned to the elements from which we all came. I am thinking of the various changes I have undergone. As a child, making friends with other kids in the neighbourhood, losing and making new friends, or coping with loneliness and learning to use my solitude constructively when I found myself at times friendless. Going from kindergarten to elementary school. Changing residences when my parents decided to buy a bigger house on a much smaller property in a more densely populated subdivision. Changing schools. My parents' divorce. Living without my father who, since becoming a fisherman, was usually absent half the year, anyway. Changing schools, then moving into junior secondary school, experimenting with drugs, puberty, discovering that I was suddenly more small adult than large child. Exploring ideas and alternatives and different philosophies (this was 1970!). Becoming a Christian, or in my case, a teenage Jesus freak, and the changes that occurred in my life from that momentous decision, or rather, acceptance of God. New friends again, and learning to live a life that was very Christian, unselfish, generous and focussed on Christ. The change from the infilling of the Holy Spirit, filling me with such a force of love, power and joy, such as I had never known was possible to human experience. Even when I tried to backslide, I couldn't stay away forever from the direction my life had taken. I tried to enforce change against the change that was inevitable and it was the inevitable change that won over the intentional. I went through a variety of churches and forms of community and spiritual experience and expression while negotiating a secular world that does not recognize faith. I had to keep changing in order to accommodate the imposed and inevitable changes that life and necessity were always imposing on me. For change not to be a destructive force we have to find ways to accommodate. We have to let change transform us, because if it doesn't it will kill and destroy us. We have to let go of our sense of entitlement and embrace what is already here, because it is already embracing us. This doesn't mean that we have to like or approve of the change. We do have to accept it. It doesn't mean that we are unable to or powerless to address and influence change. We all have those capacities but we have to carefully measure them against the inevitable. This can be particularly hard, especially when people are being hurt and lives are being destroyed. I am thinking of our current catastrophe of homelessness thanks to legislated poverty. It is possible, in a democracy, to influence government to change policies that are harmful to people. It is a long and thankless process, but it needs to be done. In the meantime, we are living in conditions that are less than ideal. They have always been less than ideal, and there is always going to be this intricate dance as we negotiate between powers of change that we cannot control, and channelling them into forces of transformation as we offer our lives anew, to the new, and continue to move forward despite the opposition looming before us.

Something Needs To Change 6

Cosmetic change is a very popular and common salvo. If it looks the way it should, if it sounds and talks the way it should, then that is all the change we need. Everything else will follow. If only! it is still believed by many frustrated and scared aging women, and a growing number of frustrated and scared aging men, that just a little bit of Botox, a little nip and tuck will make them look ten to twenty years younger and they will be chrismed with instant sex appeal, they will find that dream job, that dream spouse, that dream vacation, that dream everything, and all for the price of a little cosmetic alteration such as, at best will leave them looking like one of Madame Tussaud's waxworks and at worst, something not exactly human. Other cosmetic changes that often turn into an exercise in futility? How about the fatuous notion that more women in politics and in positions of elected office will make the world a nicer and more peaceful and loving place (are you singing Kumbaya, Gentle Reader?). Especially now that Vancouver is blessed with a city council dominated by women (eight women to two men). But what if some of those women represent a particularly obnoxious and rightwing party, aka the Non-Partisan Association or the NPA. Being women is not going to make those people any more compassionate or nicer, they still do not care about housing for the poor, all that matters to them is business, generating wealth and satisfying the demands of their rich backers. Suzanne Anton for Mayor? That almost happened in 2012. how about those five years or so of Christy Clark as premier of BC? Need I say more? Has the world been made a better place with women as prime ministers and presidents? I think Angela Merkel has done a good job in Germany and with the mess of the European Union and the refugee crisis. On the other hand, the UK languishes under Theresa May, a woman, natch. And let's not talk about that dreadful Margaret Thatcher woman! Or Golda Meir. Or Indira Gandhi, all barbarous warmongers! Their is a certain fly that spoils the ointment. It is called power. We all know about toxic masculinity, don't we, Gentle Reader? It is caused not by testosterone, nor by anatomy. It is caused by power. Has allowing women to serve in the military made our war machine a kinder and gentler place? If they really want to be progressive they might abolish the military altogether as they did in Costa Rica seventy years ago, a country that enjoys one of the highest standards of living in Latin America and one of the highest life satisfaction and happiness indexes in the world. Oh, and another newsflash here: the incidence of rape and sexual harassment in the Canadian military are now way up. But how about women in the clergy? Surely the Anglican Church of Canada is now a much lovelier and more progressive, compassionate and inclusive place now with female priests and bishops (ah, you're singing Kumbaya again, Gentle Reader!), as well as gays and lesbians. In my experience, the worst, nastiest, most vicious and damaging priests that I encountered were a woman and a gay man. By the same token, two of the best, kindest, most compassionate and most helpful priests that I encountered were also a woman and a gay man. So, go figure! The straight white men in clerical collars have all had rather a mixed record, in my experience. And what about people of colour? There has been a lot of whimpering and hand-wringing in local progressive circles about the lack of ethnic diversity in City Hall in my city. I really don't see what the problem is. The two Asian-Canadian candidates for mayor were both running for rightwing parties and, even if one of them was also a woman, there is still no way I would vote for either of them, not because of their skin colour but because of their policies and platforms. And if you really want to get an ide of what it can be like having a person of colour as head of state, we have only to remember the eight years of the US under Obama, which weren't at all bad years and he was a really decent president as well as a great human being. And his wife was pretty decent, too. (Oprah for president, anybody?) And so was Nelson Mandela in South Africa. On the other hand, look to Zimbabwe and they had...Robert Mugabe! Not to mention the dangerous, and black, demagogues heading Uganda and Tanzania and their campaign to exterminate gays, lesbians and transgender people from their countries. I am not writing this in order to dismiss diversity, nor diverse representation in positions and offices of public responsibility and power. I am merely expressing concern that we need more and better than cosmetic change if we want to see our conditions and living environment also change in positive ways. I think a lot of this begins with changing ourselves, which is likely going to be a little bit harder than using tokenism to remind us of how good we really are.

Something Needs To Change...5

Yesterday, a colleague told me that change is inevitable, growth is optional. Interesting perspective, and I think very true. I also think that whatever changes in our environment or in our life circumstances is also going to change us. Even those of us who remain diehard resistant to change are still changing under the impact. Not necessarily growing, and in such circumstances we run the danger of gravely damaging our soul. No one is doing themselves or anyone else a favour by resisting change. And when we do, we are not safeguarding the old and traditional, as we like to delude ourselves into believing. We are, rather, turning the old experience, the old way into a caricature of itself, and we by extension become its attendant caricatures. The novelty and beauty of the new experience can not be preserved as in alcohol or formaldehyde. It is already dead and useless. And we also do this to ourselves. Does anyone ever pay attention to celebrities (usually women) who go under the knife? They want to stay, or at least appear, eternally young and beautiful, but at best they come out looking like one of Madame Tussaud's waxworks, and at their worst like an alien trying to disguise itself as a human. No one is being fooled. This does not mean that we don't value the old, the traditional and the familiar. Nor is their anything wrong with cherishing fond memories. There are also ways of adapting the old to conform to the new. And how we end up doing that is going to be a creative act. Constant change can also leave us feeling unmoored and unsupported. This can be frightening, especially to those who have been spoiled by chronic stability. We tend to make idols of the familiar. Especially if your life has been particularly privileged and safe. There is an illusion about safety, since the world, the universe is not a safe place. Yet we need safety, or an illusion of safety if we are going to do well and thrive. So, we create stability and with that the familiar and a sense of safety. This is the function of culture and traditions. But if we stay in this bubble zone of security then we aren't going to grow. There is something about the unknown and the dangerous that makes us grow and move forward. If we can survive it. Some are more fragile than others, and cannot handle change, sudden or otherwise. How do we address this, and how do we offer support while ourselves moving forward? I wonder if the real dynamic isn't in change itself, which can also become a fetish, but in that state of tension and flux between change and stability. We are always having to negotiate and I think that is an essential corollary to our growth. It isn't in change itself, which is only inevitable, but how we harness the forces of change to work in the best possible way for all of us. This is rather different from the classic Darwinist position of survival of the fitness through natural selection. Change is best negotiated through love. Those who want to move forward the most and the fastest need to slow down in order to accommodate those they are leaving behind. Those who cannot keep up with change need to learn to accept change not as a threat, but as a boon and an opportunity. We always need to find and put in motion new ways of caring for one another, and that is perhaps the most important change we can ever work within.

Something Needs To Change...4

I have been invited to speak in my church. I will be the last of a series of five laypersons speaking briefly at the end of the service about how we have experienced God during times of change. This is an honour, of course, but it is also a challenge. It isn't because I have never experienced change in my life, and neither is it from a lack of experiencing God's grace and love during those times. Rather, it is finding a way of communicating effectively and constructively to a church full of persons whose lives and social class and life expectations have been very different from mine. These are upper middle class, mostly white Anglicans of a certain age. Nothing at all wrong with this by the way, and they are lovely and very kind people. However, they are also people for whom change has probably never been the constant in life, and change has always been my constant, with perhaps a slight exception with the relative employment and living stability I have been enjoying for the past sixteen years or so. This is not the style of stability to which anyone in St. Faith's would be accustomed. I do not own my home. I am not even in a nice market rental. I live in government-subsidized social housing in a building located in an unsafe downtown neighbourhood and forty percent of the tenants here are living with a mental illness. However, for me, it is a roof over my head, it is affordable, and knowing that the alternatives would be either street homelessness or having to move altogether out of the Lower Mainland, I am counting my blessings and staying put. And there is no way that I am going to disclose this kind of personal information in front of a room full of upper middle class Anglicans whom I scarcely know. Neither am I going to mention my own experience of homelessness and unsafe housing that led up to my living in this building. It isn't that it is none of their business (and it isn't any of their business) but because of the huge gap of life experience between us, this kind of disclosure is going to be misunderstood, misinterpreted, and the response will be any combination of pity, contempt and fawning admiration for my courage, and none of those for me are desirable outcomes. Neither am I going to disclose one single iota about my own mental health diagnosis of PTSD and the following diagnosis and psychiatric treatment that not only cinched my recovery, but opened the way for my current employment as a mental health peer support worker. There are several reasons for not disclosing. There is still stigma and I am not going to further this stigma by betraying myself. I also refuse to talk openly about my work as a peer support worker. There are reasons, of course, not least of all I do not want to betray the confidentiality of my clients, but also there is embedded stigma in this occupation. In order to be a peer support worker you have to have lived experience of a mental health issue, and I am not ready to reveal this in front of a church, though I will mention it one to one in conversations where I can be assured that nothing is going to be taken out of context. This is not stable employment, by the way. It is contract work and I am paid, per client or meeting, a whopping fourteen bucks an hour with absolutely no opportunity for advancement, and there is absolutely no hope that I will be paid a living wage. And if my supervisors can't come up with new clients for me, this is also going to affect my bottom line, and though this has never happened, it is not inconceivable that I could end up with no income for an entire month! Neither am I going to tell them that I have no family, am completely alone in the world, and that surviving relatives have such contempt towards me that I didn't even learn about my father's death until he had been cold and in the grave for almost three years! I could talk about my experience of living as a queer, asexual, non gender-binary man in a world that does not have a place for me and has resulted in a lot of doors being slammed in my face, but they are not going to get it. I have compromised myself enough in the past with this kind of self-disclosure, been really hurt by the consequences and this is not going to happen again. I am new to this parish, having been in attendance for the last six months. This is November, which in the Anglican Church of Canada is also known as Stewardship Month, or, the Great Diocesan Cash Grab. This is not my favourite month by any measure. November is the month of death and dying. The summer is long over and autumn begins its chilly transition to winter. We have the Night of All Hallows, or Hallowe'en night to kick off the month, followed by los dias de muerto, or the days of the dead, as celebrated in Mexico, with All Saints' Day November 1, followed by All Souls' Day. Then there is the great death fest of Remembrance Day, November 11, where it seems everyone remembers their own war dead while conveniently forgetting all the foreigners (most innocent civilians), they were sent overseas to murder. And I am one of the few pacifists in attendance of an Anglican parish. November is not my favourite month. I do not have fond memories or associations with Stewardship Month. When I began attending St. Paul's Anglican in September 2007 they really ambushed me about it just two months later. They already knew I was on a low income, and could barely afford to keep body and soul together, yet, four times I was nagged and harassed to start shoving out some of my income to the parish. I of course refused, and actually left the church in protest for a couple of months because this was traumatizing. I have many other unresolved issues with the Anglican church by the way, and certain clergy and others in this diocese have also been vectors in aggravating my experience of trauma, thus compromising my employability and helping entrench for me a life of poverty. If I could afford to hire a good lawyer I would sue this diocese, but this is not going to happen, so my only retaliation is in withholding funds. They are not getting a bloody nickel from me, though they also have the privilege of my forgiveness and my willingness to try again with them and to give them my heart instead of my pocketbook. Here endeth the lesson, Gentle Reader!

Sometning Needs To Change...3

Change is inevitable. Change is always inevitable. Change is always. I find it laughable that there are still people around, a lot of folks, who seem to think they are immune. No one is. Change is the driving organic process of existence. Who knew? A lot of us have all kinds of ways of insulating ourselves against change. We have favourite myths that we cling to, like a toddler's favourite blankie, to keep us all warm and safe and comfy-womfy and safe from uncomfortable and challenging truths. People who enjoy a certain economic security and social status are often the worst for clinging to illusions. If anyone spends any amount of time in the affluent West Side of Vancouver we will see on almost every block in some neighbourhoods these large, ugly and very angry, red, black and white lawn signs accusing the government of theft of their hard-earned savings for imposing a very modest surtax on properties valued at more than three million dollars. They cling so tightly and ferociously to their privilege and any hint of change is viewed as a lethal threat. Even if nothing is going to happen to even dent the quality of life to which they have come to feel entitled. People like to think they are immune to change. No one is. To think otherwise is tantamount to maintaining the Descartian nonsense that humans are somehow separate from nature. We are not separate, we are part of nature. Change is the driving force of nature and change, whether we like it or not is going to be our driving force. We are composed of organic matter, just like any other animal or plant or fungus. If you leave a banana in the fruit bowl for a few days, it is going to change, from almost green, to yellow, it becomes softer, sweeter, then little brown spots appear and it gradually turns brown, then black then it is rotten. Kind of like us when we stay in one place for too long. It isn't just the world around us that changes. Like it or not, we also are changing with our environment because we are not separate from our environment. We are part of our environment and liking it or not we also are the environment, just as we provide for others a sense of environment. We are all integrated, together, even if we prefer to think otherwise, and we are always impacting and being impacted, influencing and being influenced. I think that once we begin to recognize and accept this, even to embrace and celebrate that we are indeed part of the change that happens around us, then we can also harness the forces of change in ways that will also help advance us forward. People who have known privilege and status all their lives are often the least likely to know this or accept it. There is something about power and social position that damages the human soul, I think even more and worse than being marginalized and excluded. A lot is said and written about how dehumanizing poverty is, but what about having more than you need, and hording it? Selfishness shrinks and murders the soul. When the neo-liberal "reforms" were being implemented by our governments during the nineties, a lot of vulnerable people were hurt, and homelessness, extreme poverty and hunger have since become constants in dear, righteous and progressive Canada. There is a mistaken presumption that money and wealth sometimes makes us better. Well, they insulate us, but do they make us better people? I have been poor all my life, and I have also found that privation hasn't done one single thing to make me less the person that I am. I also try to share what I have, even if it's only a couple of loonies or an offer of food to a panhandler on the sidewalk. It is hard, walking by people so desperately poor every day, and feeling paralysed to be able to really help them. And I notice how others try to ignore them, averting the eyes, focusing more intently on their smartphones, anything to stay insulated. I know why this happens. There is something about this kind of vulnerability that so reveals the inner person, the raw bleeding humanity that many struggle to conceal from others, and most of us cannot face it, we cannot look the desperately poor in the eye because we don't want to see ourselves, reflected in them, we don't want to see ourselves as we really are. But all these social, political and environmental changes that we are living with are also changing us, and I fear that many of us are changing for the worse. If we can learn to love our vulnerability, to accept not only as something inevitable but also beautiful are weak human fragility, maybe this can help us be a little bit kinder to one another and to accept the changes we are living with, not as a threat, but as a divine tool for shaping and molding us.

Something Needs To Change...2

Something needs to change, and it starts with you. I have already mentioned that bit of graffiti I used to see on a wall on East Pender. A personal message, I took it as, because during that period in my life, much as now, I was quite preoccupied with personal change and transformation. how does change occur? Well, it does. It's always inevitable. Another question: how do we respond to change? A lot of variables here. As I am involved in that interesting liturgical catch-all, also known as the Anglican Church, which I have returned to following some very toxic experiences in some very toxic parishes, I will be focussing this post on Anglicans. There is that famous little in-joke: how many Anglicans does it take to change a lightbulb? None. The prefer the old one. Yes, Gentle Reader, they like the old one better, even if it's burnt-out, hasn't worked in years, and they're left reciting the liturgy in the dark. They like the old one better. Not true for all Anglicans, of course, and there will always be those Anglicans who embrace the new with absolutely no common sense or sense of theological proportion. I am thinking of my twenty year penance at St. James, the only high Anglican parish in Greater Vancouver. Well, it wasn't entirely bad, and there was the blessing of God's presence in many of the services, regardless of how rigid and inflexible and resistant to change many of the members. A lot has changed at St. James in recent years. The problematic members see to have all died off and are now enjoying their tea and crumpets and marmalade in the Great Jurassic Park in the Sky, and all reports I have heard indicate that things are really moving forward there. By the way that auspicious graffiti I just mentioned, I saw while I was attending St. James. People seemed particularly deaf to entreaties that more be done to welcome the local poor and indigent, since the church is situated smack dab in the middle of Vancouver's poorest postal code, the Downtown Eastside. A lot of the old saurians seemed to think that the St. James Social Services Society already covered their hienies and that all that was needing to be done for the poor was indeed being done, thus leaving everyone else off the hook while love to the loveless was being shown that they might lovely be. The local poor were often treated with indifferent hostility, and some members, especially one particularly disgraceful woman, would actually verbally abuse them for coming into the hall after high mass for free buns and marmalade, apparently reserved exclusively for the faithful. Neither I nor my partners in the Community of the Transfiguration, which I belonged to, made many friends there for trying to highlight this concern. But they didn't like change and they were bound and determined that everything in St. James remain just as it was back in the fourteenth century, even though St. James had only been around since 1881 and Anglo-Catholicism was even then a phenomenon less than forty years old! There was even an enormous fuss being made about installing a sound system with wall speakers so that people could actually hear the readings and the sermon. And it was the oldest and the deafest who were making the loudest fuss, not wanting the sacred walls of their blessed St. James (aesthetically, an incredibly beautiful space) desecrated by any presence of modern technology, not even if that technology was already a bit dated. That was nothing compared to the howls of protest about the impending apostasy coming, courtesy of the new Book of Alternative Services. They did not want their precious Book of Common Prayer replaced and even the special section in the new book that accommodated the dinosaurs was still a bit too suspiciously modern for some of them. I remember one lady in particular, now long deceased and sipping Earl Grey with the Archangel Gabriel, and likely from the finest bone china that England ever saw. She loudly declare that she would not accept any change in her beloved St. James, even if she had to fight. And fight she did. We were actually friends, and despite our huge differences we were really fond of each other. I remember seeing her often in the chapel in the back for weekday mass, her face radiant with the light of Christ, and that was a side to her that she didn't readily show, but that side was definitely part of the reality that was this interesting and complex woman. Still, someone with absolute zero tolerance for change. Even during breakfast following a weekday mass, I made the mistake of sitting in her chair. There was hell to pay. And when I legally changed my name, I didn't hear the end of it from her. She was kind enough to buy one of my hummingbird paintings, by the way. When she was writing the check, she could not bring herself to write my new, and legal name, so she asked me to write it in for her! As much as I honour the huge legacy that St. James has left me in terms of a rich and deepened spiritual life, I do feel a certain sadness, if a dry-eyed sadness, for all those people, like my stodgy friend there, who never could seem to welcome change as an opportunity, indeed, as an essential vector for the personal transformation that we all need to undergo and experience if we are to truly grow into the people that God calls us to be.

Something Needs To Change...1

This is the first of a new series, Gentle Reader. I have been asked to speak next week at church about change and how God has revealed himself to me in times of change. I see change as the norm and not the exception in life. And this is true, it seems, for a lot of people. We live in times of change, yes. But haven't we always? Maybe we're just more aware of change. Or more frightened by it. There are many kinds of change that impact us, from the personal to the ontological: change of residence or employment, change of marital status, the birth of children, change of diet, change of economic status, to name a few. These are changes that we often, but not always, have control over. Then there are the ontological, the changes that we have little or absolutely no control over: political change, change in the economy, war, climate change. Those are the constant changes that we have to live with, or die from. These are the changes that can leave us particularly vulnerable. In the final analysis there is really very little over which we have control. We do not choose to be born, and we don't pick our families. As children we live more or less at the behest and at the mercy of our parents. As adolescents we, hopefully, are acquiring gradually more autonomy and soon we are emerging young adults. The battles between teenagers and their parents for control over their lives are the stuff of legend. It is also a right of passage, and a very important one for entering full adulthood. No one comes out unscathed, but hopefully everyone comes out alive. There is one other thing we have no real control over. We are all going to die. Even those who manage to make it a few years past our best-before date. This is the big change that none of us ever becomes completely reconciled with. Even as we now have made doctor-assisted suicide (I refuse to use the politically-correct euphemism!) for persons who are already chronically and gravely ill, at least this can give us an illusion of control over the inevitable. The stock excuse, of course, is that no one wants to die without dignity, or attached to machines, unable to speak or feed themselves, and completely reliant upon professional strangers to bathe them and wipe their bums for them. It is not an attractive option, and physician-assisted suicide, or whatever you want to call it, can be a very convenient way of avoiding that kind of drawn out and pain-ridden humiliation. But is it really that simple? Could it also be that we simply don't want to lose control, even if it's an illusion of control. I have written elsewhere on these pages that people become atheists, not because they have no empirical evidence that God exists, but as a way of flipping the bird at the Almighty, as a way of assuming complete control over their lives and thus vindicating their primal urge to be their own little gods or deities. What would be a more eloquent way of sticking it to our Maker, than assuming ultimate control over our passing from this life into the next? Control is everything, especially with the Boomer generation and those following them, all marked with an incredible sense of entitlement. Why give God, who doesn't exist (well, they don't want him to), the last word? But God does get the last word. Even if we kill ourselves or pressgang someone to do it for us (thus making them murderers), God still gets the final word. We end up dying anyway, and after that we have to face him and the way we conducted our lives. And some of us are not necessarily going to like it.

City Of God 50

I get particularly concerned about the way self-improvement and self-loathing can so easily overlap. The frenzy of modernism, methinks, with the tyranny of capitalism thrown in for good measure. We're fine the way we are. We need to get better. These are the two contradictory messages many of us seem to carry around with us all our lives. I think we want to be loved and accepted the way we are, given how difficult it can be to really change. Neither do we want to be punished through censure and exclusion for not living up to the standards of others. Then there are those of us who impose on ourselves some of the most brutally exacting and unattainable standards. Recently I heard from a friend that he doesn't think that I accept him for who he is. Well, I don't accept some of his behaviour or values, nor do I agree with everything he tells me. Do I love my friend? Hard to say. I think sometimes that love is more of a process than an already given. But I also understand that without love, we are nowhere. It seems to always come back to love. I am trying to imagine what happens to us if we never change. It isn't pretty. Try to imagine, being stranded in the terrible twos for all eighty-odd years of your life. You have not yet graduated from potty training, and always need someone to wipe your bum for you. You are only beginning with language and getting stranded there, you are going to be inarticulate for the rest of your life. In order to express your needs and wants you are going to resort to whining, crying, screaming and meltdowns. What is particularly scary will be the way you can only focus on yourself, because age two is the age of narcissism. It's all about me. It's mine. And you are very adept suddenly with the word no. The frontal areas of your brain, which should be developing and growing like mad, have slowed to a halt, so you are never going to become literate, but the TV and computer and phone screens will always be there to keep you entertained and diverted. Now fast-forward this arrested development just past puberty and....YIKES!!!!! You have a contemporary adolescent! Arrested development plus testosterone (for males, anyway), sexual development, greater size and body strength and you have a candidate for a street gang. Or for Donald Trump's dream team. Take your pick. We cannot afford to stay where we were, nor as we are. I wonder if part of love, whether we are loving ourselves or others, could be in recognizing in ourselves and in others the potential for development and growth, the potential to evolve, and that is what we need to love. This doesn't mean that we fall short on forgiveness. None of us ever really gets there, and really, I think that for most of us our progress in life is going to be slow, miniscule. We cannot stay as we are. Common sense demands that we grow. In growing, if it is done right, we can also become less selfish and more caring, more giving and more actively concerned with others, with our communities, with our world, because it is for this very lack of concern for anything outside of immediate gratification, taken on a large scale, that has got us into this mess of global warming and climate change, not to mention the growing crisis of poverty and homelessness in our own country. Steven Pinker and other privileged Pollyanna eggheads and prattle as much as they want that things are getting better. Right now we are faced with such challenges as to prove whether or not he is right. In the meantime, we lurch forward, slowly, we stumble, we fall, we forgive ourselves, we forgive each other, get up again, help each other get up again, and move forward a little bit more, always being present to support one another in our anguished and slow progress to the City of God.

City Of God 49

We are at the end of modernity. The planet cannot sustain any more progress. We are at the end of modernity. There are too many of us to make our advances sustainable. And the human blessing keeps on growing. It isn't just that a lot of people don't seem to have ever heard of or believed in using birth control. Capitalism depends on population growth. There has to be an ever-renewing market for purchasing and consuming products and services if the CEO swine want to stay obscenely wealthy, so we have to go on breeding and multiplying like bunnies to keep the machine going. but the earth can only take so much human presence and abuse, and we are already starting to reap the consequences. There is only so much arable land to go around before the natural economy of the planet's essential functions become so impacted and impaired as to make large portions of the earth uninhabitable to humans and other species. We have only the spectre of the new president of Brazil, Jair Balsonero threatening to destroy the Amazon rainforests in the interests of agriculture and resource exploitation and you will have an idea of what I am talking about. The fabled lungs of the earth, the largest and most biodiverse forest on the planet, and much of it could get ploughed under because of stupid capitalist greed. We already have President Dump squatting in the West Wing of the White house, promoting coal and other environmentally hazardous resource extraction while blaming the killer wildfires in California on poor forest management, which is to say, he wants more trees chopped down for the forest industry. And we have here in righteous smug little Canada our own Prime Minister Junior who still refuses to budge on the Kinder Morgan pipeline, making himself deaf and monumentally stupid to the common-sense pleas and arguments on behalf of the environment, given the obsession with putting the economy ahead of the environment, and in the long-run, the viability and sustainability of our Mother Earth. No one seems to be cutting back, on anything. Capitalism, and by extension, modernity, cannot sustain anything that isn't growth. We keep multiplying, putting greater strain on our planet's resources. We keep practicing unsustainable practices of agriculture and resource extraction, straining and compromising the earth even more. But we still can't seem to hold still. I think there is something in our human nature that insists on constant forward motion, hang the consequences. Since some of the big atheist eggheads have decreed that the earth is likely going to cease to be inhabitable in another century or so, thanks to us and our relentless innovation, there is a renewed push for further space exploration and colonization. We are not going to be content with ruining our own planet, but now we are looking at ways of going out and colonizing and wrecking other worlds as we have been doing to our own. If we could only harness and redirect our relentless curiosity and drive for invention and innovation, and harness our creative instincts in ways that could solve the problems that our short-sighted greed and selfishness have created: to not just abandon all fossil-fuels, but to invest all that creative and muscular power in the innovations and development of clean, renewable and green technologies and energy; if we could develop new ways and forms of agriculture that keep us all well-fed while protecting and honouring our Mother Earth, and if we could devise economic systems not dependent on greed or Darwinist domination, but cooperation and adaptation for meeting every human need and harnessing and channelling the human potential and gifts of every single person who lives on this planet. These are tall orders, but once we get away from the old and familiar ways of doing things and ruining and destroying everything in our wake, perhaps we can put our creative potential and forces to work at ways that are going to benefit all of us. We can still have our little space program, too. Let's put Donald Trump, Jair Balsonero, and all the other deplorables on the same rocket ship, and send it off to Mars and beyond. It'll be, of course, a one-way trip!

City Of God 48

"Something needs to change. And it starts with you." That bit of graffiti I used to see almost every day while walking along East Pender Street just past Chinatown, going downtown. I always took that as a personal message, to be inwardly pondered and digested and lived. A young woman with whom I was connected in a charismatic Christian community said it another way: "God not only loves us just as we are--he loves us too much to leave us that way." More living words to live by. This is the kind of change, growth, improvement of self that I can endorse, and for the simple reason that we just simply never are there, we have never arrived, there is always going to be new ground for us to gain, new territory in our lives to conquer. This has nothing to do with the relentless egress of modernity, even if there are parallels, and even if the forward thrust of modernity has affected our notions of growth and personal change, which it indeed has. This also gets carried into the extremes of neurosis. Early one morning, I was out for a walk in a park nearby (forgive me, Gentle Reader, if I am repeating myself here, because I might well have written about this already in an earlier post). There was a group of a dozen or so young women exercising in a kind of fitness boot camp. They all looked like successful young professionals, driven to stay competitive and to do well in their professions, which is to say, corporate slaves. They were all lying on the grass doing leg raises and suchlike and their trainer, a blonde young women who could easily have doubled as Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. I can't remember if she was wearing tight black leather, but she should have been, and when I commented "Ah, the fascism of fitness", and at least two of her participant fitness slaves burst out laughing, I am sure she would have aimed her whip at me had she been carrying one (and maybe she did have a nice leather buggy whip hidden away in her goody bag somewhere. And yes, she was blonde, and I'm sure she had high cheekbones.) Yes, we need to change. We all need to change and grow. No, we are not okay the way we are, never were and never will. It would help if we would stop hating ourselves. No matter how much we immerse ourselves in the cult of self-improvement, there will always be room for more. it is the gift that goes on giving. We need to know where to draw the line and when to blow the whistle on our self-loathing, but we also need to know when we are becoming stagnant and too comfortable with our crappy attitudes and behaviour. Not an easy balance. I try to use common sense. I eat well, carefully, making sure I get a good balance from all the food groups, but I also prepare food that I will enjoy eating and I don't deny myself pleasures of chocolate or good cheese. Food has to be enjoyable, though, and kale is not an option. Exercise? yes, every day, around two hours or more of walking if I can fit it in. I have added walking up the seventy-one stairs to my fifth floor apartment at least once a day, instead of using the elevator, and doing more upper body exercise at home, because my body has been craving more activity. I have never had, and never will, have a killer body, and really, who can live photo-shopped twenty-four hours a day? I do all the other healthy stuff too, without getting obsessed about it. But the important thing is beauty of soul. Becoming a person who is truly good, kind and loving. A person who cares for others. A person who doesn't simply live for himself. A person. There will always be challenges and obstacles to self-improvement, and I think it would help to know when to let it all go for a while and simply accept that we are not there, will likely never get there, but we can still keep moving in that direction, on our pilgrimage to the City of God.

City Of God 47

I heard a little bit on the radio this morning about the problem of perfectionism and how it is afflicting young millennials. This has long been a problem, and not just for the millennials. We still live in the throes of modernity. Everything has to improve, be improved, made better. This ties in nicely with global capitalism, where it is always about improving the product, the delivery of services, and always finding new and more effective ways of manipulating the consumer (we are no longer persons, but life forms that consume, that inhale and suck up goods and services), suckering them into buying said goods and services, making the manufacturers rich, and if your name happens to be Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, so obscenely wealthy that if he gave ninety percent of his wealth to the most needy Americans, poverty and homelessness might actually be solved in the USA and Bezos would still be obscenely wealthy. In advertising, we are bombarded by images of young, fit, beautiful people, fabulously dressed and undressed. People, for the most part, are poorly equipped for critical thinking. They respond emotionally and viscerally to this constant onslaught of beguiling images and beautiful sounds. Even if they are smart enough not to get suckered into buying the product or service (and some of you, my Gentle Reader, are that savvy), they will still be left feeling somewhat incomplete, wanting, and inadequate. They have just been visited by all those visions of perfection and beauty, such as they can never hope to fulfil for themselves. We are imperfect. Yes, I get it. We will never be good enough. Good enough for what? I suppose the ultimate underlying and not so subtle goal and motivator for many is to make themselves sexually attractive so that they will be chosen as sex partners and, but for the intervention of birth control, can pass on their genes to make a more perfect humanity. Well, that is the take from evolutionary biologists. But the atheist eggheads have a very limited scope of our shared humanity, and for the simple reason that they do not believe, nor accept the essential part that spirit and spirituality play in the reality, formation and progress of our humanity. I have a rather different take. Read the mythologies of various cultures from antiquity, particularly the Greco-Roman. Study the gods and deities. They're almost all, for the most part, unassailably beautiful. Jung would have called them archetypes that have arisen in our prehistory to become dominant to our human collective unconscious. We aspire to be gods and goddesses. We long to be divinities, to be divine. We want somehow to make ourselves sacred and holy, and we seem to feel that we can only arrive there by becoming perfect. Or becoming better. Modernity has really ploughed and sowed this field and now we are reaping its fruit. In our near-animal existence in prehistory as hunter-gatherers, there were constant dangers to our survival and modernity, following agriculture and the rise of cities, modernity has provided a way out, or a way through: making everything better, more efficient, cleaner, healthier, more beautiful, more comfortable, less poor, less sick, more desirable, and we have to work hard, harder, and harder still to attain that elusive jewel of perfection, and the advertisers who are the mouthpiece of global capitalism have very neatly cinched the deal. We are slaves now, not to cruel human masters, but to products and a chimerical image of beauty and perfection that dangles always before us like a little piece of gourmet chocolate baiting a very sharp and deadly hook. There is a vision of perfection that could be of benefit to us, but this speaks of perfecting the inner self, a self that loves, that appreciates, that cares and that gives and shares. The self that isn't warped and made into a devouring monster by the lies of competitive capitalism. I am referring here to what the holy scriptures refer to as the beauty of holiness, the gateway to the City of God.

City Of God 46

What gave rise to modernity? I would imagine that enough people were just sick and tired of the brutal difficulty of their short and thankless lives on an earth that seemed to care even less than the indifferent universe they found themselves existing in. There were no toilets, no plumbing, no indoor privies, no running water. All human waste was thrown into the street below and if people got sick from it, it was blamed on witchcraft and the tyranny of the church ensured that those poor hapless women would be burned to death at the stake. The church and king together were determined to keep the people stupid and uneducated and thus pliable and easy to rule. Medicine was frowned upon and considered another manifestation of witchcraft, sending even more innocents to the stake. Women died often in childbirth and not many children made it past their fifth birthday, and women were expected to obey their loutish and often abusive husbands and keep on breeding and bearing children to beyond the tenth, the fifteenth, sometimes twentieth pregnancy. People were ripe for modernity. The conditions that they were expected to accept as God-ordained were intolerable during the best of times. Almost everyone was infested with fleas, lice and scabies. Bathing regularly simply did not happen. There was never enough water available, so everyone lived with their and each other's stench. Most crimes were either capital offences or would be punished by torture and long imprisonment. You could not say even one word remotely critical of king or church without consequences. And there was war, constant warfare and deaths upon deaths upon deaths, and this had been going on for hundreds, for thousands of years. Privacy was nonexistent. Only kings and princes and bishops had the privilege of private bedchambers. People were ripe for modernity. Coffee is credited for having helped push us forward. Until the discovery of the magic bean, everyone stayed drunk and stupid on beer and wine, since the water was usually unpotable. Try educating a people that is perpetually wasted. Caffeine got the brain going, it opened up the neurotransmitters and coffeehouses opened all over Europe, and the chattering and scheming began. The merchant class was becoming literate and upwardly mobile. Education became more available. Scientists, despite the church's opposition, resistance and punishments, were making sudden and rapid advancements as they discovered the truth of the cosmos (the sun is at the centre of the solar system), microbes and then came the need to discover and invent effective medicines. Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, later Shakespeare was writing plays and Cervantes was working on Don Quixote. Then Vivaldi was composing concerti. And meanwhile foreign lands were being discovered and colonized and native and African peoples were enslaved, exploited and massacred or converted to a degraded and disgraced form of Christianity brought over from the Spanish Inquisition. The rise of the bourgeoisie began to displace the aristocracy, then the Industrial Revolution created a new underclass of abused and mistreated workers. There were revolutions. There were new discoveries, new lands colonized and robbed of their wealth and settled by desperate and greedy white folk from Europe. In lurches and forward thrusts life was improving, for a few people, then for a few more, and eventually for many. Every decade brought with it the expectation that things would improve, that people's living conditions would become more tolerable. In the twentieth century we survived the most devastating wars in human history. Technology knew no bounds, and life became not only tolerable but rather sweet. For the many. Toilet paper, indoor plumbing, clean and potable running water, clean homes with private bedrooms, for everybody. Horseless carriages, later known as cars, run on environment destroying fossil fuels were within the reach of almost everyone, and if not everyone, then quite a few could now own their own little parcel of land with a house on it. Cities were clean and full of trees and parks and beautiful, or at least very efficiently designed buildings. Everything got better and kept getting better. Now, we almost all live in such conditions as two hundred years ago, would only be expected for gods or royalty. And we're still not satisfied. We still want it all to be better. We want to be better, stronger, healthier, more intelligent, more competitive, more successful. We don't want to be mere mortals. We want to be gods inhabiting Olympus.

City Of God 45

I am thinking this morning about modernity, and it's idiot offspring, post-modernity. We seem to have had for many years now this expectation that things are always going to get better, that they are always going to have to get better. Better technology, better health, better food, better homes, better living conditions, better work, better everything. Science and technology are really pushing it to the max and we are now getting the self-driving car, robots to do all our unpleasant work for us, robot sex-dolls, and better phones, microchip implants that will transform us into demi-borgs. There seems to be in our genetic structure an undying desire to be or at least to live in the illusion that we are gods or that we ought to be. No wonder, at least in the so-called Christian West, God has been dethroned, declared dead and nonexistent and now it's all about us. The shallow optimism of secular humanism, that states that we humans, us, those physically weak bipedal simians with big brains, are of inestimable value and worth, and all because we are human. What is so special about being human, that we should expect to live as gods on this planet? What makes us so special? I suppose I could say that I have more of a Christian-humanist take on things. I believe that we are special because God made us, loves us and sustains us. I could also add in here a Christian-humanist-pantheist perspective. Also the creatures of the earth, every single species that exists, and even the dirt, water, rocks, stones and the air that we breathe, all have infinite value, because these things, like us humans, are the handiwork of God. But God, they say, is dead, and religion is useless. So, they have reinvented spirituality, not to link us to the divine, but to help us all feel...divine. We can all be little gods and goddesses, each in our own right as we meditate and practice mindfulness and other bastardized Buddha-babble to our own selfish little enlightenment's content, and still go on thinking that we are better, healthier, more well, more content, more spiritual, but none of this is going to show worth a damn in our daily lives as we go about being as competitive, selfish and uncaring of others as ever before, but only with one little enhancement: we are now spiritual. This is where this post-modern, secular adaptation of ancient spiritual practices falls flat over and over again. Taking meditation, yoga and other practices and adapting them to the very self-centred secular lifestyle and enhancing us all as self-deluded little deities. I am going to posit here another idea. It wasn't just because of the hypocrisy of the churches and clergy that people have deserted Christianity. And it isn't only because the spiritual life of the church had long ago dried up. There was something else at work. I call this the ethos of selfishness. The main drive, the central focus and demand of the Christian, as well as other faiths is simply too much and too overwhelming and costly for the secular humanist mentality: the call to give your all to God, the Creator, and by extension to love and serve humanity and the planet. Too tall an order for the fragile but very stubborn selfishness of our species. And now that science has decided that we are all organic machinery, nothing more and nothing less, then someone please, pray-tell, inform me then of just what it is that makes humans so valuable, if the atheists of secular humanism are to be believed. In the meantime, people lived hollowed-out kinds of lives, that cannot be fulfilled simply through acquiring things, or money, or hedonistic pleasures or family life ad diversions. Unable to cope with the bottomless pit of hell that the kind of global capitalism that has been unleashed has turned our lives into (and this was all brought on by not the death, but the murder of God), and unwilling to dedicate their lives to that same God who isn't really dead, but waiting for us to return to him (and we will, even if we have to die first), we turn to do-it-yourself spirituality. We get all peaceful and mindful. Even science says that it works. But does it make us kinder? More compassionate? More caring? More generous? But those are virtues that only come with giving of ourselves, because love, and not self-enlightenment is the heart of true spirituality, and only those who truly love, and live love from their hearts are the people who are truly spiritual. God is love, and lives at the very core of our being, and whether or not you are a professing Christian, Muslim, Jew or Buddhist, or whatever, it is that heart of love that delights in the universe, and that reaches out in love to others that is going to save us in the end.

City Of God 44

Today they will gather at the cenotaphs and in churches because today is Sunday and November 11. There aren't many survivors left, people who saw action during the Second World War. The youngest would be in their nineties. The oldest are already dead. Their children and grandchildren, if they have any, and any who care enough, will be there also, as will others, such as those who were present for the more recent charnel houses in the Balkans and in Afghanistan. I don't think that any of those people love war, nor are the kinds of war mongers that peace activists, such as myself, might be tempted to paint them as. Each carries in their mind and memory their own idea, their unique experience, of what happened. I think they all believed in the rightness of what they were doing. At least while they were in the war. Some might be wondering now, as they have hobbled through the years of following peace scarred in their deepest soul by the trauma and the horror of what they saw, experienced, and, dare I say, of what they did. Not everyone went there willing, nor did every mother willingly give up their sons to those furnaces, and I think that in order to cope, they have had to create a certain myth of war, of valour and heroism. I heard on a radio program the other day just one line, but it was very telling, and I don't know whether it was just following the first or the second war, but a British woman was congratulated by the Queen for sacrificing her five sons who died in combat. The woman, still grieving, retorted, "Ma'am, it was not a sacrifice: I did not give them up willingly." We know very well, the losses, the huge sacrifice of human life in times of war. No one wants to be seen as a killer, as a wanton butcher, and certainly no one wants to see themselves as such. So we focus, not on the millions of innocent victims of war, and certainly not on the deaths of the enemy soldiers, nor the grief and weeping of their widows, mothers, fathers, siblings and children, but only on our losses. It's largely about narrative. I don't think there will be anyone gathered in front of the cenotaph who is going to be pondering how our governments dispatched thousands and thousands of our youth to invade and conquer and occupy foreign countries, while committing such murder and mayhem along the way that the social impact, not to say environmental devastation in those countries still are being calculated and weighed. But that is what happened. Yes it is but one narrative, of many, but no less inaccurate and no more flawed than any of the others. No matter how horrible were the brutal policies of Hitler's Nazis, and yes, they were the first invaders and occupiers and that also must be acknowledged. No one seems to know the truth of what really happened then, nor the truth of the incidents and developments that led up to the war. All we have is myth, and myth is the bread that sustains cultures and nations. At least in the churches there will be a little more pull for peace, or one would hope. Yes, compassion and respect for the fallen soldiers, for what they endured, and if not sacrificed, that they themselves were sacrificed by politicians too unimaginative or too intellectually and morally lazy to seek and employ the ways of peace. But here is where I draw the line. I do not owe to those same soldiers the quality of life I am said to enjoy here in Canada, because even if the myth says that they were fighting and sacrificing for our democratic rights and freedoms, that is in itself just what I said it is. It is a myth. It could be partially true. But the devastation that resulted. The millions, tens of millions of lives wasted and people butchered. If Remembrance Days are to have any future relevance or cred, then we are going to have to start placing new emphasis on the importance of peace, of dialogue, of peace-making and reconciliation, and we are going to have to decide, all of the nations once and for all, that war, military intervention, should never be considered, not even as a final resort. It doesn't matter how much good comes out of war, and we have to really rein in our greed and self-interest here, because some economies go absolute gangbusters during and following major wars, especially for the victors, and also for compliant, conquered nations who are well-treated and rebuild afterwards. Monetary wealth does nothing to heal the scars, the broken hearts, the trauma, nor the environmental devastation, nor the buildings and cities of beauty and antiquity that were bombed into rubble. We have to start letting go of the myths, we have to start facing the truth about war, and we have to start finding and inventing creative ways of moving forward in peace and reconciliation.

City Of God 43

Our species has a very long history of warlikeness to reckon with, that is, if we really want to learn the ways of peace. This probably isn't going to begin anytime soon. But begin it must. There must surely be some way more effective than a bunch of gentle and meek Quakers or peace activists sitting in a circle singing "Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me." About as effective as singing Kumbaya, methinks. Or using a walk signal to stop a buffalo stampede. We have all the historical baggage, the millennia of toxic masculinity (and femininity too. Has anyone ever heard of Boadicea? Golda Meir? Margaret Thatcher, anybody?) It seems that throughout history, nations or tribes always reach a certain tipping point, and war becomes inevitable. There are even some pacifists who would agree that the Second World War was one of the few, if not the only, examples in history of a truly "just" war, and there is much to lend to that argument. I even find myself feeling conflicted over that one. Who can think of anything to compare to the horrors that the Nazi Germans unleashed on the Jews, the Roma, homosexuals and other people they didn't like? How else could they have been stopped? But so goes the narrative of the victor nations and I am still left wondering how much of our perception of the war and its outcome is influenced by this, that we were the winners? I don't think this notion has really been given its due, and this needs to be explored, or we are never going to acquire empathy for those who ended up on the wrong side of history. And empathy, if it is only confined to those who look, think and dress like us, isn't going to get us very far either. I wasn't there. I was born eleven years after the war ended. I don't know what I would have done, if I were a young man of combat age during the later thirties and forties. In those days, people did not tend to question or doubt their governments the way we do now. And the government told the people everything they wanted them to know about Germany and Europe. I wonder to this day what wasn't being told. As a Christian, I find war repugnant. But I have never lived through a war, so it is something I really cannot speak about with authority. As a Christian, I think that not even then, as now, could I have in good conscience participated in the killing, even if it was to drive back Hitler's armies. Being a Christian, I cannot kill. Under any circumstances. That is not the way of Christ. But war still happens, and for some time to come, is going to go on happening. And I think it can be said with some truth that we owe our freedoms and privileges to the Allied victory. Carrying this festering stewpot of mixed emotions, I decline to wear the red poppy, which only remembers and honours the fallen soldiers and, by extension, glorifies war. I am sticking with the white poppy that I am wearing even now pinned to my shirt while I am typing this. To remember all the victims of war, and to believe that there is a better way. Might there have also been a better way eighty years ago when the drums were already beating in Europe? I don't know. I don't have all the facts of what really was happening then, and you know something, Gentle Reader? I don't think that anyone really knows for sure. But it happened. Seventy-five million deaths throughout the world. It happened. The incineration of cities and human lives. It happened. The mass slaughter of Jews and other innocents. It happened. It wasn't just the soldiers that died. Honour them yes. But don't forget to include all the others who also were killed, and some of whom were killed by our soldiers.

City Of God 42

Happy Friday, Gentle Reader. It is the first day of my habitual long weekend, and as a bonus I have Monday off as well, because of the long weekend, thanks to Remembrance Day. For whatever else I might think or opine about this august occasion, it does give me a day off. Which also means I get paid less, because as a contract worker I don't get compensated for not working on statutory holidays, neither am I permitted to work on those days. Don't ask me how my employer can get away with it, but they do. Should they be challenged about it, the response could well be, "We are the your Regional Health Authority! We are omnipotent! (so fire me VCH!). If I didn't live in social housing I couldn't afford to live in this city, given that I get paid a whopping fourteen bucks an hour for my work, and they are very stingy about just remuneration for peer support workers, since they seem to think that that is a living wage, at least for damaged mental health consumers (which I am not!) who subsist on a meagre disability pension (I do not, I work for a living and that is how I survive!) And that is the logic of our regional health care provider? I could say more, but I don't want them to really feel they have just reason for firing me, so better to pick my battles. Aside for that minor and ongoing complaint, I am enjoying this morning, even if it is cloudy and grey, but the long weekend promises sunshine and blue skies, and that is not necessarily going to be the ideal backdrop for the ceremonies at the cenotaph this Sunday. But why not celebrate with blue skies and a sunny day? Does it always have to be so morose, sad and solemn? I mean, we won the war, didn't we? And didn't our soldiers kill tons of the enemy in the name of king and country in order to secure and safe-guard the liberty and democratic freedoms that we enjoy now to this day? That's what the propaganda says, anyway. Except they always leave out the killing part. It's only the enemy, Hitler's armies, etc. that did the killing. But our troops, who killed at least as many or more Germans and Japanese, etc. as Allied troops were slaughtered, didn't kill. They merely fought, in the name of king and country. The victors never do the killing. Only the enemies. And that is where the propaganda of war that is churned out by the Remembrance Day war machine just sticks in my craw year after year after year after year. in war, no one is innocent. To this day, it is considered heresy to speak honorably of the enemy dead from the wars. Even the innocent citizens of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Dresden, Hannover and Hamburg. But they were also innocent victims, like the Jews butchered by the Nazis, whom like the Jews, Roma, homosexuals and people with disabilities languishing and being gassed and worked to death in Auschwitz, wanted only the war to end, the madness to end, the killing to stop, and to be able to resume, if at all possible, their normal lives that had been so cruelly snatched from them. Don't get me wrong, Gentle Reader. I also honour our soldiers. They were duped by their government, perhaps, but I think they went to war with the noblest intentions, and that they died with the noblest intentions, though they were horribly deceived into fighting wars that they did not invent, and had to swallow the lies of their governments, if only because they lived in an era when media was much less developed and evolved, and alternative news sources that could give the lie to government propaganda were virtually nonexistent. This isn't to say that there was not a huge and credible threat coming from Germany and Japan. Of course there was. Was armed conflict the only way the threat could be contained and prevented? Probably. But that was also a simpler time, when black and white perceptions and solutions were never conceived of. Now we have a little more insight, and I think we have better tools for preventing future wars, but only if there is a strong enough public will, and political will, and only if enough of us are prepared to think clearly, research and learn the lessons of history, and not become lazy and simply fall for what ever propaganda, lies and half-truths that our governments will be dishing out, because that is what governments always do.

City Of God 41

November is the month of death. It begins with Hallowe'en, or All Hallows Eve just before All Saints' Day November 1, then all Souls' Day on the second. November 11 we remember the war dead on Remembrance Day. In the meantime, nature dies all around us as the trees become naked and skeletal against the cooling and darkening sky, the rain becomes frequent, hard, and cold, and we hunker down in the warmth of our homes. There is a dark poetic rhythm to this month. It is a sad and depressing month, a time for introspection, quiet, and escape into our favourite addictions. The fragility of our lives looms dark and large before us in the dark reality of death. Remembrance Day has surged in popularity. The tub-thumping and drum-beating of recent conservative governments have brainwashed yet another generation, and Vietnam is a forgotten and distant memory. We love soldiers again, the military, killing enemies overseas. The propaganda of war becomes more insidious and overwhelming. It is all about the dead and fallen soldiers, committing the ultimate sacrifice, giving their lives for their country, for the fatherland, for the motherland. No embarrassing mention is made about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, Dresden, the possibility of war crimes committed by anyone but the enemy or the Russians. Aside from the cannon fodder we send off to Afghanistan and elsewhere, no one who isn't old enough to remember the Korean War has a clue about war. I certainly don't. But I do know that truth is the first casualty. The second? Our integrity. We are people who thrive on lies. No one wants to think of the death and loss sustained by the enemy. War dehumanises all of us when we cease to think of the enemy as human, when we declare a nation as the enemy. We no longer want to see or know or hear about their lives. We don't want to know that they also fall in love, marry, raise and love their children, have neighbours, friends, care for their aged and infirm, love their pets, weep at funerals. They are the enemy. nothing destroys or distorts like war. Nothing so effectively numbs and disables our critical thinking. What our veterans endured was indeed horrible. But we have never known what it is like to be bombed, invaded or occupied by a foreign power, unless we are First Nations People languishing from the toxic and tragic hangover of colonization. We carry the innocent and cruel arrogance of the victors. We haven't been humbled. Our ass has not been kicked. We have no sense of empathy for the enemy, and without that empathy towards those who threaten or have threatened and harmed us we will never complete the process of peace, because peace comes through justice, justice through reconciliation, and reconciliation comes from humility. War is ugly, the ultimate expression of our human darkness. It is also good for the economy, if you happen to win, but winning makes us shallow and obtuse, victory blinds us to the humanity of the other, victory blinds us to our weakness, to our human fragility, and without that awareness we will be inhibited in reaching out to others in love. Will we always have war? it's hard to say. Most of us will probably say yes, but I don't want to share that certainty and for one simple reason: by saying that it has to go on happening, that our species is going to go on killing and destroying itself, we are closing our minds, our imaginations and our souls to any sense of hope that things might ever change, and without hope, there is no imagination, no creativity, no forward motion to work and prepare for peace. Will we ever change? Nothing is impossible.

City Of God 40

About ten years ago, or so, on the bus, I was seated perpendicular to a young soldier wearing combat fatigues. He had a full duffel bag with him, so I imagined he had either just arrived or was just leaving. He would have been very young, no more than twenty, and really a very beautiful, sensitive looking boy,. He hardly seemed to fit the stereotype of military macho. Perhaps now, ten years later, the sensitivity has all been kicked out of him, or he could have left military life very soon after our encounter...Who knows? We didn't talk. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn't know what. I wasn't going to judge or criticize him for his choice of vocation, out of respect, and also knowing that even if I am a pacifist, there are simply no black and white answers to why we do the things that we do. I decided to leave it, leave the boy in peace, and simply wonder about his circumstances. Soldiers are, after all, just human beings. and they do, for the most part, want to protect. That is part of their role, and their myth. But I think that anyone who has been in a war or armed struggle will tell you that, even in so-called legitimate combat, the first time you kill someone, take their life, is the most difficult. It is like losing one's virginity, only much worse. It changes you. And it also scars your soul in a way that you have to live with for the rest of your life. Even if your sole desire in being a soldier is to protect the vulnerable and the innocent. And you just cannot let yourself ask or wonder about the life that you just snuffed out, but will truly to ameliorate the anxiety by saying, well, it was going to me or it was going to be him, and I was doing my duty. And there are also the drinks afterward. So many veterans become alcoholics and drug addicts. That is the only way they can staunch the pain, the soul pain of having been turned by the state into licensed killers. I actually have a lot of affection for soldiers, and I believe that they often have the best motives for entering military service. I also have a lot of compassion for them because of the way they are manipulated and how their lives get distorted and misshapen by government propaganda. It seems telling that the majority of the people who enter military service come from working class families and have not had a lot of education. There is also the honourable instinct of wanting to give one's life for a higher and noble cause. Soldiers should not be demonized. They enter into their vocation unknowing and unaware, like sheep to the slaughter. They are not just killing machines but hapless pawns in this grand tapestry of death and destruction that our governments and the corporation and banking interests that dominate government policy keep weaving and extending, like the work of a clan of particularly fat and venomous spiders. And those spiders live off the blood of others. For this reason, I do not judge those who gather every November 11 at the cenotaph. Their loved ones perished, fighting for the defense and honour of their country, fighting to contain and disarm the threat of global tyranny. Yes, I do get it. I also know that war and its many causes and fallouts provides us with a myriad of such nuanced conversations as to make it absolutely impossible to every fully understand or comprehend why such huge-scale killing and destruction should be permitted or condoned. We humans really are a half-formed lot. We are like children playing with matches. Our very future on this planet, and the welfare and future of other species, are going to depend largely on how responsibly we choose and make and enact policies and reforms. War as an option has become inconceivable. The technologies of war are such and the interconnectedness of nations, peoples and species and the biosphere have become so delicately construed and evolved as to make any wrong or destructive move potentially dangerous and deadly to the integrity of the whole. This is why I wear the white poppy. I want to be a voice, if but a small solitary voice, that will still be heard, that will still proclaim that we have to start seeing beyond the myths and half-truths that have held us captive, and that we have to start engaging with one another in peaceful ways that abet compassion and beauty, if we want to continue as a viable species. We have not yet learned to be adults, and the gift of fire bequeathed to us by Prometheus seems always to be burning our fingers and singeing our hair.

City Of God 39

I am going to begin today's blogpost with some copy of a recent court case of self-defense, taken from the CBC that I think anyone should find troubling: "A Hamilton jury has found Peter Khill not guilty of murdering Jon Styres, a First Nations man from Ohsweken, Ont., who was trying to steal his truck. A 12-person jury reached its verdict Wednesday morning after deliberations started Tuesday afternoon. There were gasps from supporters on both sides of the trial, then tears, as the verdict was read. The 28-year-old man previously admitted he fired the two, close-range shotgun blasts that killed 29-year-old Styres in Khill's suburban Hamilton driveway on the night of Feb. 4, 2016. Khill pleaded not guilty to a charge of second-degree murder, based on self-defence, with his lawyer arguing the shooting was "justified" because he believed Styres had a gun and he feared for his life. The Superior Court of Ontario heard Styres did not have a gun that night. He was carrying a knife, but it was closed and in his pocket. The case was being watched by Indigenous community leaders, because it raises similar legal issues to the controversial case in Saskatchewan involving the death of Colten Boushie, an Indigenous man. In that case, an apparently all-white jury acquitted Gerald Stanley of second-degree murder in Boushie's death. Ava Hill, chief of the Six Nations of the Grand River, said she and her entire community were shocked and left in disbelief by Wednesday's verdict, which she sees as another example of Canadian courts failing Indigenous people. "This young man that was killed did not have to die. We could have helped him, been there for him, instead he leaves behind two young girls." Chief Ava Hill speaks on the injustice done in the acquittal of Jon Styres' killer. She said it left Styres' entire family, especially the mother of his children, Lindsay Hill, a wreck. "They're all in shock, they can't believe it. I can't believe it either. Is a truck worth more than a young man's life? Obviously it is." Prospective jurors were screened for possible racial bias and the jury included at least one non-white person. Race was never raised in evidence during the trial. In his closing arguments, defence lawyer Jeffrey Manishen did touch on the race of the two men. In the pre-dawn pitch-dark there was no way Khill could have known Styres was First Nations, said the lawyer — Khill didn't see skin colour, he only saw a threat. "Race cannot, it does not, play a role in the case," said Manishen. But Hill did not agree, describing the verdict as "racism rearing its ugly head" again. "The whole justice system needs to be redone. Look at the number of people we have in jails. It's not a hidden fact," she said. "We've been talking about the justice system and how people are getting trapped in there for years." The verdict was met with sighs of relief and hugs among Khill's supporters in court, including his wife, Melinda Benko, who was with him on the night of the shooting and dissolved into tears, crying into the shoulder of a woman sitting next to her. There were tears among Styres' supporters too. Hill began sobbing as the verdict was read and had to be held up by two women wearing T-shirts with the words #JusticeForJon printed on the front as she was walked out of the room. Another man stormed out, angrily saying "This is f--king bullshit." The emotional responses the gallery contrasted with Khill's, who remained largely expressionless as he learned of his acquittal. "Mr. Khill, you're free to go," said Superior Court Justice Stephen Glithero. "Thank you, your honour," he replied. Two court officers stood between Khill and everyone else in the courtroom until it cleared. The jury reached its verdict after a trial that ran for just over two weeks. During that time the jury heard from Khill, a former reservist, that he and his girlfriend were woken up by two loud, banging noises and when they looked outside, realized the lights were on in his 15-year-old GMC pickup truck. Prosecutors did not deny that Styres was trying to steal Khill's truck on the night of the shooting. Khill told court that at the sight of those lights his military background kicked in and he grabbed a 12 gauge shotgun from his bedroom closet, loaded it with two shells and headed outside to "confront and detain" whoever was out there. He ran through a breezeway between his house and garage, opened the door and came up behind Styres, who he testified was leaning over the passenger-side seat. "Hey, hands up!" he shouted at Styres. Khill told a 911 operator that night that Styres had turned toward him with his hands sweeping up to "gun-height." But experts during the two-week trial testified that the angle of the shots showed it was their opinion Styres was facing into the truck when he was hit in the chest and shoulder. The Crown's position was that Khill was not acting in self-defence and that instead of calling the police and staying safe in his home when he realized his truck was being broken into, he "took the law into his own hands." Assistant Crown attorney Steve O'Brien cited testimony from Khill's superior officer with the reserves who said military training also includes gathering information and never "charging blindly" alone into danger. "It is inexcusable that he did not call 911," said the Crown, in its closing statement, suggesting also it was Khill's shouted instructions that caused Styres to jump in surprise, which was enough motion for the man with the gun to feel frightened and open fire. The Six Nations council issued a press release Wednesday calling on the Ministry of the Attorney General to appeal the verdict, citing "questionable moments" from the trial including the judge's decision to exclude video of a police interview with Khill in which he described shooting Styres, and "non-expert" evidence about the effect of Khill's military training. When contacted by CBC News, the ministry declined to comment on the outcome of the trial and the possibility of an appeal. After the verdict, Khill was led out the back of the courthouse. Manishen said his client wanted to thank the jury for their verdict and his family and friends for their support. Gentle Reader, it isn't for laziness or lack of imagination that I am allowing the CBC to write today's post, but to illustrate s clearly as possible that war and militarism warp, twist, damage and wound the human soul You see the tragic result in this man with the unfortunate but telling surname, Peter Khill. This story could be approached of course from many different angles: racism, toxic masculinity, violence and peace, etc. I personally find it ironic that the killer here is an Indo-Canadian with years of military training. So, this isn't simply a white guy attacking and killing a First Nations person. There is a lot to unravel here, of course, but suffice it to say, when men (and women) are trained for war, for military action, they are being dehumanized in a most egregious manner. This is what our government and society have done to the soldiers who were and still are being sent overseas to fight wars in other countries. When they leave combat, when they leave military service and become civilians, they are going to be carrying those scars with them, and they are going to continue till the day they die to live in that dehumanized state, unless there are interventions. I am not simply talking about finding ways of treating PTSD, but of restoring for those same people the value for human life that was trained and kicked out of them in boot camp: not just the lives of other Canadians, but all human lives on the planet. We have to stop thinking in terms of the Enemy and find real ways of reconciliation, here in our own country and abroad.