I feel like I’ve finally officially slipped into the Agnostic zone. While I still feel that I am a spiritual person, I am feeling increasingly uncomfortable with the buffet table approach I’ve been taking in regard to Christianity, just picking up the bits I like, and leaving the rest behind.

At the same time, I don’t think I could ever be a hard-core atheist; to my mind it would just be trading one set of unprovable beliefs for another. I enjoy science, especially cosmology, but am not comfortable with a meaningless, amoral universe, which I still believe is the only logical outcome of strict atheism. I’ve been involved in some long running arguments about that, and even though I cannot call myself a Christian, my position in the debate has not changed.

I don’t feel emancipated by this change;  somewhat saddened actually. There is a lot I admire about moderate Christianity and liberal theology, and I am angered when I see strident atheists attack all of Christianity by lumping all denominations in with right-wing American fundamentalists, to score the easy, cheap hit; they are being lazy and intellectually dishonest.

So where to go from here? I will keep an open mind, be open to experience, avoid hubris, and above all, I will do my best to remember that there is so much we don’t know about the universe. For example, dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of the universe and we don’t know what they are. Did the universe have a first cause? So much of what we experience is illusory.

And Christians, indeed all people of faith, haven’t cornered the market on illusion.

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Here is what I said:

When my wife Janice and I announced our engagement in 1990, my mother, pondering her new role at the wedding as a first time mother-in-law to be , jokingly wondered if she would be expected to “keep her mouth shut and wear beige.” While my mother did wear beige from time to time, I’m glad to say she never felt the need to shut her mouth. If her wit, creativity, and convictions had not gotten a chance to be expressed, we would all have been the poorer for it.

Some examples:

My brother James says that Mom “decided his career for him in 15 seconds” at a time when he couldn’t choose between a number of conflicting interests. She suggested he go to cooking school, and the rest, as they say is history. The initial push helped Jim find an amazing talent within himself, and use that talent in a very successful career as a chef.

My brother Dave has the following story:

“In the eighth grade I had a looming deadline for a science project. The project was to be on manufacturing and it had to be related to the electronics industry. Before going to school one morning I mention to Mom that I hadn’t found the subject for my project and I was feeling a little stressed about it.

That day while I was at school, Mom put her incredible research skills to work and found a General Electric plant outside of Waterloo. They manufactured giant transformers for the power grid in Canada. Mom contacted the plant and had arranged a tour for us later that week.

So of we went, Mom, Dad and I for a fascinating tour which was guided by the plant manager and we saw how they assembled these enormous transformers from start to finish.

We left the plant hours later and I had a box full of sample materials and a head full of information to start my science project.

Mom watched quietly from the sidelines as I put together a project that I would later receive 100% on.

Mom you always found time to give help when asked, provide inspiration when none was there, and provide gentle guidance from the side lines when needed. For that I thank you and love you.”

My sister Ainslie and I both have special memories of the many family Christmases. As Ainslie says, Mom “was Christmas.” The care and detail with which she approached that special season made it magical for everyone, from the decoration of the tree with beautiful ornaments many of which she made herself, to the fabulous food, Mom made Christmas what it was for us.

Ainslie and I also have very early memories of being young children in St. Therese in Quebec. Every day, Ainslie and I would watch Mr Dress-up, and then insist that Mom help us make the craft of the day, no matter how difficult or impractical. She always did, although there are times I’m sure she would have liked to have had words with Ernie Coombes.

Halloween costumes were also special, both from my day, through to the amazing Teletubbies costume she made for her grand-daughter Katie. Everything was detailed. everything was precise. Everything was perfect. Everything was beautiful. Everything showed how much she cared.

Everyone who knew our Mother knows of her sense of humour. Jim would rent comedies from the local video store, and they would watch the movies over and over and laugh together. Jim mentioned to me when they watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail, she would laugh so hard she would turn purple. A huge fan of Rodney Dangerfield, when she first met her future daugfhter in law Mary, when Mary said her favourite movie was “Back to School” starring Rodney Dangerfield, her eyes just lit up.

And she could crack jokes and witty comments with the best of them. When the family got a dog in the 1980’s, in recognition to how hard it was to get him housebroken, she promptly renamed him “The Golden Reliever.” And after her anuyrism in 2005, if anything, her sense of humour got even sharper: once, during challenging physio-therapy involving using parallel bars to walk, she said she felt like “a drunk, stumbling between bars.”   When I last spoke to my mother on a recent visit, even then she cracked jokes that had me laughing. By her own her own admission, my mother was “a master of the delicate art of locker room humour.”

One of my favourite sayings is by Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music still in them”

Thankfully, this saying did not apply to my mother. A lifelong lover of music, a member of many choirs, she sang. In her children, and grandchildren, she sang by installing a similar love of music, and by doing this she continues to sing. In the stories she read to us as children, she sang.

In her crafts and arts she sang through her amazing creativity, and when any of us look upon her work, we will hear her singing.

In our memories of childhood, and the memories of her held by her grandchildren, she sings. And even for her very youngest grandchild Sarah, the one she lived to see by defying the odds for so long, there will be the warm echo of the song of a grandmother who adored her.

And now, finally, she has taken her place in a greater choir, and I know she is singing. May her song never end.

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It’s not news that 2009 is shaping up to be a very challenging year on a number of fronts, and maybe that is exactly what we in the West need: to be forced to into a painful separation from what I’ll call the “Culture of Easy.” The Culture of Easy is marked by an impatience for in-depth thought, an avoidance of challenge, and a belief that entitlement and privilege will continue more or less automatically.( I should reinforce the point that this is a Western phenomenon; much of the world doesn’t have the luxury of being familiar with the culture of easy).

The idea for this post came while reading Mitch Joel’s Mass Media – Mass Destruction blog post from December 30th. One of the points he makes is about the decline of reading, and the insistence on bite-sized, easy to digest bits of content. I see the decline of reading as one of the prime symptoms of the Culture of Easy; why read a challenging book or article on an important topic when you can watch a thirty second Youtube clip? To gain a deeper understanding of an issue is seen as too difficult; it’s someone else’s issue’ let me get back to watching the reality shows.

The economic aspect of the Culture of Easy is pretty obvious and has been widely discussed: easy credit, the blurring of luxury and necessity, and in the case of business leaders, obscene riches without accountability, or having to personally experience the effects of downsizing, off-shoring, etc.

The third item I’ll bring up may not be as familiar to some, but personally it is one that I see a lot of, and this is the “Easy” trend in church liturgy; many people who still go to church do not go to be seriously challenged to examine themselves, or to participate in active social justice; they go for a “happy-clappy” experience, and to have their sense of entitlement reaffirmed. If church is not “easy”, people will not attend, or so the church leaders fear.

We are indeed permeated by the Culture of Easy, and 2009 will definitely shock many out of complacency, and indeed that is a good thing. So many marvelous ideas, inventions and artistic creations have been created in a sense of urgency, challenge, and need. There will be litle need to seek out challenges in 2009. The challenges will find us.

May we always live in interesting times.

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According to this story, Charles Darwin is to get an apology from the Church of England for its initial rejection of the theory of evolution.

What I found interesting though, was one of the comments on reddit, where I found the story link. The comment said “Hopefully some of their followers will get the message.” This is spite of the fact that the Church of England (Anglicans in Canada) has no prolem with the Theory of Evolution.

It is sadly obvious that in the U.S. at least, when people think of the Christian church, the socially conservative, right wing fundamentalists are the folks who come to mind. And while in the U.S. this brand of Christianity has an inordinate amount of power and influence, this not the case everywhere else.

It is possible to be Christian and believe in the theory of evolution (not to mention social justice, universal healthcare, same sex marriage etc.).

At least north of the border.
Tags: Evolution, Christianity, Darwin, Anglican

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A gift for my daughter

I’ve read this article a few times now, and am still saddened by the irony — the main point it tries to make is that the most important thing you can do for a happy life is to realize that no one owes you anything. Where do I begin?

The obvious flip side of this message is that if no one owes you anything, then you don’t owe anyone anything: no civic responsibility, no need to worry about global warming, since you don’t owe future generations anything, no need to worry about stewardship, etc. If it doesn’t affect you personally and you can get away with it, you can do whatever you want, since you don’t owe anyone the courtesy of acting like a civilized person.

The essence of being civilized is understanding what our shared responsibilities are to the society in which we live; the alternative is a “might is right” nightmare (sort of like U.S. foreign policy). The “no one owes you anything” philosophy can be boiled down to “Screw unto others before others screw unto you.”

I won’t go into a religious rant here; suffice it to say that framing this dog-eat-dog philosophy as a Christmas message  is the saddest irony of all — what did Jesus owe humanity?

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Christmas

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Ottawa cuts song from concert after Christmas controversy

I would like to contrast the travesty above with the experience I had attending my younger daughter’s Holiday concert this past Wednesday night. My younger daughter, like my older daughter before her, has had the privilege of attending William Burgess Public School in Toronto. This public school, located in central Toronto, has an extremely diverse student body; classes tend to look like mini United Nations. All faiths, creeds and traditions are represented at this school.

When it comes to the holiday concert, this school does not censor the word Christmas, or shy away from Christmas songs, even the religious ones. Rather, it makes sure to include music and content representing as many traditions as possible; this concert had references also to Ede, Hanukkah, Diwali, etc. The concert was also interspersed with quotes from various students about what they did at the holidays, and what the holidays meant to them.

The school gym was jam-packed (as always) with parents and other family members, many of course not of a Christian background, and guess what? No race riots, no angry murmurs or grumbling, no picketing of the school etc. Everyone enjoyed the concert, and the students are enriched by the exposure to different traditions.

I think the school in Ottawa could take a lesson from this.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Christmas, Political Correctness, School

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This is going to be one of those blog posts that pulls disparate elements together, so hopefully it won’t be too jumbled. I was listening to the latest DicknJanes podcast from Scarborough Dude, and really liked the part about how important Active Listening is to being a mediator, and how he portrayed it as an activity that requires concentration and effort.

This segment then got me to thinking about the seemingly never ending argument about participatory liturgy in mainstream churches, especially when it comes to music. On one extreme, one finds those who seem to feel that the congregation should never be silent, and participate in every musical moment of the service; you can’t be praying unless you’re braying, I guess. On the other side of the argument (where my bias is), the belief is that one can be silent and still be intensively involved in a service; if one is moved by beautiful music, he or she is already involved in a spiritual moment; we don’t need a shouting match to prove the point. And you can’t have this moment without active listening.

The other thread I will try to tie in here starts with a concert I attended last Friday night, put on by The Exultate Chamber Singers of Toronto, with guest Giles Bryant. The program consisted of Giles reading of the entirety of A Child’s Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas, interspersed with fine singing by the choir. It was a magical concert, and truly brought Thomas’s words to life. What ties this to my blog entry is that many years ago my mother attended a panel discussion regarding liturgy, and made the point of how active listening is an act of liturgical participation. Some members of the panel were dismissive of her comments, but Giles spoke up, opening with “Madam, I spring to your defense…” My mother never forgot that moment.

It is many years later now, and my mother, after a devastating aneurysm in 2005, and recently what we suspect are one or more small strokes, now finds it very difficult to speak, and even following a conversation is difficult. In a sad way, she shows us just how much of an effort active listening can be.

Tags: ActiveListening, Dylan Thomas, Exultate, Scarborough Dude

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Last evening, in what has become a yearly tradition, about ten of us from the morning choir of St. Thomas’s Anglican Church, fresh from a brisk Thursday night choir rehearsal, decided to relax by going to Sarah’s, a pub on the Danforth in Toronto, to do more singing!

The singing was unabashedly Christmas related, and by that I mean Christmas carols. We did not sing Silver Bells, The Christmas Song, Jingle Bell Rock or other songs of that type. What is neat that the reaction has always been very positive in the pub — we haven’t been thrown out, or told to stop singing yet; the other patrons of the pub have always seemed very appreciative. There was no hand-wringing politically correct awkwardness at the Christian content.
Last night was special though; we had a back room reserved, from which the sound of our singing reverberated into the rest of the pub. At one point, another patron stuck his head in and thanked us for our singing, and wished us a Merry Christmas. We returned the holiday wishes and kept singing. When it came time for us to pay our bill, we were told that this man had paid our tab on his way out!

What a nice gesture, and how privileged to be part of a musical moment that obviously meant so much to this man.

Tags: Christmas

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Yesterday, while walking through the Pittsburgh airport, waiting for my flight home, I happened upon the direction sign to the airport’s chapel. In addition to the English sign, there was one of those little pictograph signs. (I would have taken a picture, but I only had my cell phone camera with me, and besides, taking a picture in an American airport is to invite immediate arrest, but that is the topic for another entry..).

The sign had a representation of a window in the shape of a Gothic arch, and what was supposed to be a person in a church pew, praying. Looking at the pictograph, the image seemed to me to be capable only of two interpretations: one was of a person sitting in a pew, chin on their hands, completely bored (perhaps listening to a bad sermon?). The second interpretation, and the more disturbing one, was of a person holding their head in their hands, in a state of complete, solitary and desperate anguish, as if the person’s world had just been turned upside down.

I hope the artist did not intend for these two interpretations, but these are the ones that came to me, unbidden.

Tags: Pittsburgh,Religion

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There are certain pieces of music I believe that can only be truly experienced and understood if one is involved in a performance of the piece in question, and for me, there is no better example than the setting of “Ave Maria” composed by the English composer Robert Parsons in 16th century England (this time is better known as the Tudor period). What sets much of the music of this period apart is the fact that rather than having one basic melody, with underlying harmony, the piece is contrapuntal, made of up a number of vocal lines that each have their own independent beauty, but really shine when they are all brought together.

To be singing my part in this piece, in the midst of the other lines whirling and interweaving around me, is the kind of thrill that I don’t think I can adequately describe in mere words; think “Surround Sound” of a very special kind. When a performance of this piece is really clicking, the experience is trance-like, even mystical; I’m surprised someone hasn’t tried to make it illegal.

To listen to this piece is incredible, but to truly experience it, it must be sung, and the same is true of so much music; it is truly tragic that so many people merely consume music, instead of participating in its creation. Those who just consume music are in essence victims of a monumental theft, and many don’t even know it.

Tags: Music Tudor Culture

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