Friend M sent this on to me. A TED Talk by Tshering Tobgay, the former Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Bhutan, the little-known country tucked away deep in the Himalayas. He was responsible for establishing the People's Democratic Party as the first registered political party in Bhutan, and he continues to serve as its president. This tiny Kingdom of some 700,000 is bordered by India on one side and China the other. In his speech he talks about the wonderful idea ofcalculating a country’s GNH, Gross National Happiness rather than its GNP, Gross National Product, as a measure of its true values. The talk This Country Isn't Just Carbon Neutral, It's Negative is inspiring. What this country has been able to achieve in terms of conservation and climate change is astounding. It serves as a model for what is possible with few resources. If there, why not here?
0 Comments
“As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour an offering; not to share them would mean to betray them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.” –Elie Wiesel “What If We Truly Put Teachers in Control of Educating?” published in the Tyee, again puts the Finnish education system in the global spotlight as a system far superior to much of the world. Pasi Sahlberg and Timothy D Walker’s new book In Teachers We Trust: The Finnish Way to World-Class Schools is about that system. I have yet to read the book but the article rings true for me. This is not the direction that many of our schools are taking of late. “Sahlberg and Walker explain that Finland wasn’t trying to create a world-class education system when it reformed its schools 25 years ago. It was just trying to save money in the recession of the early 1990s. Instead of axing programs and increasing class sizes, the Finns looked at the well-paid bureaucrats who’d been running their mediocre system. Why not ditch them and let local teachers decide how to meet national curricular goals? That was a question few education systems would dare to ask, because in most countries, including Canada, there always seems to be a ready platform for critics portraying teachers as feckless layabouts who must be bullied into “accountability” by education ministries relying on standardized exams to judge student progress. But the Finns already respected their teachers. So school reform made them as professional as doctors, lawyers or architects: highly trained, taking guidance from one another instead of from government bureaucrats, and trusted to teach and assess their students with little reliance on standardized exams. Sahlberg and Walker have classroom experience both in Finland and overseas, so they’re aware of sharp differences between the Finnish and other systems — many the result of trust. They describe how teachers work with principals in small management groups to discuss issues before bringing them up at the next faculty meeting, where the feedback will determine the next management group meeting. The result is “distributed leadership,” with teachers understanding administrators’ needs and vice versa.” I’ve just read Susan Abulhawa’s 2010 novel Mornings in Jenin. The novel takes you through the expulsion of the Palestinians as the state of Israel is being formed up to the turn of the Century. Beautiful, painful, and heartbreaking and so many things to think and talk about in what now seems like a completely intractable reality. Arabic is a musical language to listen to but I was unaware of how gratitude is embedded into the language. What does this in turn say about the people who speak the language and how did this develop. “Thank you” I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself, “May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift”; “Beauty is in your eyes that find me pretty”; “May God extend your life”; “May Allah never deny your prayer”; “May the next meal you cook for us be in celebration of your son’s wedding…of your daughter’s graduation…your mother’s recovery”; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere “thank you” an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful. But the guttural silk tones of Arabic rippled through me as I heard the melodic calls and responses of my language. It’s a dance, really. A man at a desk was offered teas as I walked through the metal detectors. He said, “Bless your hands” to the one making the offer, who responded, “And your hands, and may Allah keep you always in Grace”. Calls and responses that dance in the air. Thank you seems rather pale and deficient by comparison. Let this be a challenge to us to express our gratitude more richly; to bless those who bless us. As we have found out this past year, pandemics can change long fixed patterns in our lives. For Jenny and me, the shape of our Sundays was fixed early in our youth. For me, Sunday preparation began on Saturday evenings with bath time for the whole family, two or three of us sharing cooling and increasingly murky bathwater. Mom at the kitchen counter making Sunday soup and someone assigned to polishing shoes for Sunday. Sunday breakfasts were always special, not because of what we ate, but that my dad was at the breakfast table for only that morning since his early morning bakery shifts prevented this from happening otherwise. With our newly polished shoes and Sunday clothes we walked the 6 or 7 blocks to church and later drove. The hour or so in church is fixed in my mind mostly as the comfortable feeling of sitting between parents and siblings, hearing my parents voices join the others in so many still familiar hymns and psalms, the passing of peppermints just before the sermon and collection plates to receive our nickels and dimes and then visiting in the church basement until we made our way back home, anticipating what my mom and later sisters, might have made for dessert, always enjoyed after church, with coffee and before lunch and often shared with friends or newcomers, who had been invited over to share that time. Depending who was visiting and who was most accomplished at playing organ, after coffee and cream horns, vanilla slices, or some other pastry we would sing around the organ until Sunday soup was ready to be served. Those Sunday hospitality traditions have been carried out in our life together in much the same way as we grew up. My parents would invite the new teachers hired into the church community, a newly married couple moving into town or other long-time immigrant friends. For many years it was unusual not to have someone over after church. Covid has reshaped our Sundays. For more than a year our Sunday rhythms have been disrupted. We listen to and participate in various online worship services. With Covid restrictions in place we don’t have people over for coffee and dessert. We read more books, do more zooming, and watch more movies than before. Some of these changes have been good but hospitality has been hard, taking new forms. Maybe like our immigrant parents who innovated upon arrival with new hospitality ideas, we will need to do the same. I was very fortunate to be able to teach W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel to high school students over many years. I believe I did a good job mostly because I was passionate about those books, their characters and maybe most of all because they were set on the prairies, the landscape of my childhood. I have always had a strong sense that this impacted me in ways that I can’t completely articulate. The landscape somehow becomes part of an interior world. Margaret Laurence wrote an article many years ago called Where My World Began that captures this. I really resonate with this. Below a few clips from that article. "A strange place it was, that place where the world began. A place of incredible happenings, splendors and revelations, despairs like multitudinous pits of isolated hells. A place of shadow-spookiness, inhabited by the unknowable dead. A place of jubilation and of mourning, horrible and beautiful. It was, in fact, a small prairie town. Because that settlement and that land were my first and for many years my only real knowledge of this planet, in some profound way they remain my world, my way of viewing. My eyes were formed there. Towns like ours, set in a sea of land, have been described thousands of times as dull, bleak, flat, uninteresting. I have had it said to me that the railway trip across Canada is spectacular, except for the prairies, when it would be desirable to go to sleep for several days, until the ordeal is over. I am always unable to argue this point effectively. All I can say is — well, you really have to live there to know that country. The town of my childhood could be called bizarre, agonizingly repressive or cruel at times, and the land in which it grew could be called harsh in the violence of its seasonal changes. But never merely flat or uninteresting. Never dull. When I was 18, I couldn’t wait to get out of that town, away from the prairies. I did not know then that I would carry the land and town all my life within my skull, that they would form the mainspring and source of the writing 1 was to do, wherever and however far away I might live. This was my territory in the time of my youth, and in a sense my life since then has been an attempt to look at it, to come to terms with it. Stultifying to the mind it could certainly be, and sometimes was, but not to the imagination. It was many things, but it was never dull." Happy Earth Day! Here is a small gift to help you celebrate. We recently came across this brilliant young British theologian, Carmody Grey, in an interview with Dr. Jason Byasee of ARocha, called Theology at Street Level. What this 45-minute Q & A is lacking in technical savvy and artistic presentation is made up for by this delightful young woman, her keen understanding of how we live in the world and might well be the best 45 minutes of your Earth Day Celebration. Grey’s understanding of Christian faith and the natural world is one of the most holistic I have ever heard. She is provocative, engaging and hopeful about the hurting planet we call home. For instance she says that what we purchase in the supermarket is casting a vote for the kind of world we want to live in. Ouch! We often pray the words, “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” When it comes to confession about our care of the earth, there is much that we have done to harm and much that we have left undone to care and preserve. May Carmody Grey inspire some small and lasting change in all of us this Earth Day for the sake of the next seven generations. Yesterday’s guilty verdict in Minneapolis for the killing of George Floyd felt like a colossal sigh of relief experienced collectively around the continent. May it truly be the beginning of the healing: the healing of policing systems, of gun laws, of race relations, of economic disparities, the beginning of justice for all. May we point to April 20, 2021 as that day it began to shift. May Cohen’s song be our prayer for a healing of body, heart, reason, spirit and mind. Come Healing by Leonard Cohen O gather up the brokenness And bring it to me now The fragrance of those promises You never dared to vow The splinters that you carry The cross you left behind Come healing of the body Come healing of the mind And let the heavens hear it The penitential hymn Come healing of the spirit Come healing of the limb Behold the gates of mercy In arbitrary space And none of us deserving The cruelty or the grace O solitude of longing Where love has been confined Come healing of the body Come healing of the mind O see the darkness yielding That tore the light apart Come healing of the reason Come healing of the heart O troubled dust concealing An undivided love The heart beneath is teaching To the broken heart above Let the heavens falter Let the earth proclaim Come healing of the altar Come healing of the Name O longing of the branches To lift the little bud O longing of the arteries To purify the blood And let the heavens hear it The penitential hymn Come healing of the spirit Come healing of the limb O let the heavens hear it The penitential hymn Come healing of the spirit Come healing of the limb Jenny and I got our first shot of the Pfizer vaccine yesterday and I am both filled with gratitude and dis- ease at how close to the front of the line we are. I am so grateful for a health care system whereby I can walk into an unused hockey arena and get vaccinated all within 20 minutes. I live in a country with plenty of ventilators. I live in a country where most of my thoughts over the last year have been about Covid because there really isn’t anything more pressing at the top of the news, my news. When I think of the research, the infrastructure, the systems in place in Canada, I am humbled and feel compelled to work harder at being sure Canada, its leaders and its people are being as generous as it can be to those in the developing world, many whom I am sure have not even thought about a vaccine for themselves or their family members. For them it’s the next protest, the next meal, the next police shooting, that crowd out thoughts of vaccination. We are [white] privileged, by virtue of being born in this place and time. God, may I never take this for granted and may I struggle for all to have this kind of access, peace, and freedom. Why me when there are so many more vulnerable than I? We can’t just always chalk it up to logistics, or politics or place. It is about privilege. When Jesus says, “the poor you will always have with you,” he might well be asking us if indeed the poor are always with us. With us or us with them? When I think of the years that we have been involved in Sierra Leone there is one person that stands out. James Tamba Koroma, JT. When I come into the country, his is the first phone call I receive and his is the last phone call before I board the plane to leave. We spent a very rich and wonderful two weeks in South Africa together visiting Christian schools and attending an African Roundtable. We have spent hours on the veranda in the dark talking about anything and everything. With JT every night ends in prayer and everyday begins the same. JT has a way of bending the ear of God unlike anyone else I know. JT does not need to have a single piece of paper from an institution to say that he had earned the certificate and was the wiser for it. He is a born learner and leader with a curious mind. Money has a hard time staying in his pockets since all know of his generosity. He is a gentle and wise father to his children and he loves his Proverbs 31 wife Sunkarie, deeply. After a long four long years of study, while still doing a host of other important things, my brother is graduating from Port Loko University College on April 24 with a Bachelor's degree. I am so proud of him. |
Archives
August 2022
Dennis deGrootCategories |