Postmortem 52

First, a word about my maternal grandfather.  We used to call him Charley.  He was born in 1889 of German immigrants from the Crimea in rural Saskatchewan, on a farm near Regina.  He was a very interesting man.  I remember him as being mischievous, playful, with a robust sense of humour and a razor sharp wit.  He was a wheat farmer, but under different circumstances and with different parents he might have done very well academically and professionally.  I remember him as being open minded and very curious and interested in the world.  I am a lot like my grandfather.

My grandfather used to enjoy teaching us card games, since on the prairie during the winter the short cold days and long cold nights were often passed, once the chores were done, playing cards.  This was before TV, and for a while, before radio.   He taught me how to play a particular version of rummy, called Michigan Rummy.  His idea was that you could pick up just one of the discarded cards, or you could pick up all of them.  It was fun, picking up. sometimes as many as twenty random cards that no one else wanted, and having to find and figure out whatever way I could play them.  This move would make you or it would break you.  You would find so many different runs and three of a kinds as to win hands down, or you would be saddled with so many unwanted singles and pairs as to have to count yourself out well after the others were already finished playing..

This soon became my way of life, from the age of eight.  Grabbing as much as I could, hang the consequences and to see what I could do with it.  My interests, and tastes in everything became almost alarmingly eclectic.  I didn't care.  For me, diversity became its own reward.  Or like the line from Leonard Cohen's song, Suzanne: "and she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers." 

This isn't quite the same thing as slumming, though I would suppose there are parallels, but the idea is to accept all resources and all things without judgment, which is to say, not without discernment.  There is beauty in everything.  There will be found hidden jewels and treasures in the unlikeliest places, if we are patient and if we have humility, because those will be the very jewels and treasures with the highest and most eternal value.  For example, isn't it rather ironic that the most expensive coffee is sourced from coffee beans picked out of the dung and shit of elephants and civet cats?

I have encountered incredible kindness and brilliance in some of the most unexpected places, from people unwanted and rejected by society, but whose lives still shone out in the surrounding darkness.  I remember when my mother died, and some of the greatest kindness, support and compassion that I received came from the very street punks and male and female survival sex workers, themselves unwanted and still barely young adults, that ostensibly were there for me to minister to them the love of Christ.  But Jesus filled and inhabited those same people whose lives were themselves a complete shipwreck and disaster,and I still feel the warm embrace of their friendship.  One of many reasons why I will never return to the Anglican Church.

I am not worried about when things get messy.  Life is messy. The very beauty of the universe is in its messiness, and has nothing at all  to do with a sterile Newtonian or Euclidean order, and everything to do with the random chaos that is its own organic order, birthed into existence by a God of love that will never be known, defined or tamed.  The same God who calls and claims us to dare to risk wandering into the mire and mess that is life, where the beauty and joy of the very universe is held in its very germ and nucleus.  All those random cards, and such random adventure, and such random, messy, imperfect and beautiful life, Gentle Reader!