"This little book is an attempt to speak to myself and to my friends about the Eucharist and to weave a network of connections between the daily celebration of the Eucharist and our daily human experience. We enter every celebration with a contrite heart and pray the Kyrie Eleison. We listen to the Word — the scriptural readings and the homily — we profess our faith, we give to God the fruits of the earth and the work of human hands and receive from God the body and blood of Jesus, and finally we are sent into the world with the task of renewing the face of the earth. The Eucharistic event reveals the deepest human experiences, those of sadness, attentiveness, invitation, intimacy, and engagement. It summarizes the life we are called to live in the Name of God. Only when we recognize the rich network of connections between the Eucharist and our life in the world can the Eucharist be “worldly” and our life “Eucharistic.”"
Last Spring I read a book of Henri Nouwen’s letters, a selection of the some 16,000 that he wrote over the course of his lifetime. There were so many beautiful letters written by Nouwen to friends, colleagues and strangers. One letter in particular caught my attention, when he wrote to a friend who was leaving the Catholic church for an Evangelical fellowship and Nouwen expresses his sadness that his friend would no longer have the Eucharist at the centre of his worship. It got me thinking about my own Reformed tradition, the Reformation, church architecture, the centrality of the Word and even now our infrequent celebration of the Eucharist. Why the overreaction and ought we not to correct this? The quote below is from Nouwen’s little book, With Burning Hearts, where he writes about this. I need to read that and have some conversations about this on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.
"This little book is an attempt to speak to myself and to my friends about the Eucharist and to weave a network of connections between the daily celebration of the Eucharist and our daily human experience. We enter every celebration with a contrite heart and pray the Kyrie Eleison. We listen to the Word — the scriptural readings and the homily — we profess our faith, we give to God the fruits of the earth and the work of human hands and receive from God the body and blood of Jesus, and finally we are sent into the world with the task of renewing the face of the earth. The Eucharistic event reveals the deepest human experiences, those of sadness, attentiveness, invitation, intimacy, and engagement. It summarizes the life we are called to live in the Name of God. Only when we recognize the rich network of connections between the Eucharist and our life in the world can the Eucharist be “worldly” and our life “Eucharistic.”"
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Last night we had the privilege of listening to artist and storyteller Roy Henry Vickers. It must be more than 30 years ago that we first encountered Vickers and his work at the Eagle Aerie Gallery in Tofino. Our boys were very taken by the impressive gallery and the spirit that lives in this lovely cedar building. The prints and carving were alive with stories that belong to First Nations People of the West Coast. Last night again, as Vickers was introduced and welcomed by the Kwantlen People and also when he spoke I had a new appreciation for the fact that stories belong to a people and ought not to be given away lightly. I think our indigenous peoples have always known this. “The story was the bushman’s most sacred possession. These people knew what we do not; that without a story you have not got a nation, or culture, or civilization. Without a story of your own, you haven’t got a life of your own, says author Laurens Van der Post. Westerners are more careless about this, probably to our peril. It may come from the fact that we are inundated with story, there are too many to sort out which ones we belong to and are ours. Sam Keen says, “We are the first generation bombarded with so many stories from so many authorities, none of which are our own. The parable of the postmodern mind is the person surrounded by a media center: three television screens in front of them giving three sets of stories; fax machines bringing in other stories; newspapers providing still more stories. In a sense, we are saturated with stories; we’re saturated with points of view. But the effect of being bombarded with all of these points of view is that we don’t have a point of view and we don’t have a story. We lose the continuity of our experiences; we become people who are written on from the outside.” I wrote last week about the resilience of people who know their family narrative. It gives a sense of belonging and purpose. I think this is what Roy Henry Vickers was talking about last night; finding your story, hearing it over and over and then living out of it. Frederik Backman, author of the recently published novel Beartown is both novelist and armchair philosopher. The story is set in the small, hockey-crazed little hamlet of Beartown in the Swedish forests. But it could just as easily have been set in many small Canadian towns that dot our landscapes. Though it’s about hockey culture it’s about a whole lot more than that. About family and marriage, about male and female socialization, about gender and orientation, about friendships and hatred, and all the human foibles one could pack into one book. It would be a great high school novel. Backman shows the cruelty and the kindness of teens and the seeming helplessness of parents in the middle of adolescent turmoil. I love the way Backman is able to succinctly capture so much common sense and deep wisdom in each chapter. Reading book quotations alone is worth the price of the book. If you are thinking of putting your child into a soccer or hockey club, read this first. If you are a coach of athletic director, read this novel. If you are a teacher, pick up the novel. “The very worst events in life have that effect on a family: we always remember, more sharply than anything else, the last happy moments before everything fell apart.” “Being a parent makes you feel like a blanket that’s always too small. No matter how hard you try to cover everyone,” “It doesn’t take a lot to be able to let go of your child. It takes everything.” “Another morning comes. It always does. Time always moves at the same rate, only feelings have different speeds. Every day can mark a whole lifetime or a single heartbeat, depending on who you spend it with. ” I wrote about Ruth Everhart’s book Ruined a number of months ago. Our church’s Just Faith Forum is co-hosting a weekend with Ruth about a month from now. I thought I would give you a heads up. This is going to be a good but challenging few days. Ruth is a pastor and author and on the Friday evening, 7 pm, October 20 at Willoughby Church she will share her story with us: her experience of sexual violence as a young college student, the reaction of her Christian subculture and her faith journey through the following decades. The Saturday event at New Life Church in Abbotsford will be more of a workshop format. Ruth will use her story to encourage churches to be places of safety, acceptance, hope and healing. And on the Sunday morning she will preach at Willoughby CRC at 10 am. The US President’s speech to the United Nations was predictable in its utter disregard for the mandate of the UN: the search for peace, stability and the well-being of all humans in this world. Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump have no understanding of what it means to be true leaders of people as they escalate toward violence like two school yard bullies. Trump’s US first is really about “me first.” It brought to mind some of what Henri Nouwen has said about the path of downward mobility. He writes about this so beautifully in his book The Selfless Way of Christ. But it takes a rather radical transformation for any of us in order to walk on this pathway. “We are taught to conceive of development in terms of an ongoing increase in human potential. Growing up means becoming healthier, stronger, more intelligent, more mature, and more productive. Consequently we hide those who do not affirm this myth of progress, such as the elderly, prisoners, and those with mental disabilities. In our society, we consider the upward move the obvious one while treating the poor cases who cannot keep up as sad misfits, people who have deviated from the normal line of progress. The story of our salvation stands radically over and against the philosophy of upward mobility. The great paradox which Scripture reveals to us is that real and total freedom is only found through downward mobility. The Word of God came down to us and lived among us as a slave. The divine way is indeed the downward way. The disciple is the one who follows Jesus on his downward path and thus enters with him into new life. The gospel radically subverts the presuppositions of our upwardly mobile society. It is a jarring and unsettling challenge. We want people to pay attention to us, to recognize us, to give us our due. This is how our identities, worth and significance are grounded. We want to be relevant, spectacular or powerful. So we go through life fishing for such things, a grasping that keeps knocking us off center, spiritually speaking. It seems nearly impossible for us to believe that any good can come from powerlessness. In this country of pioneers and self-made people, in which ambition is praised from the first moment we enter school until we enter the competitive world of free enterprise, we cannot imagine that any good can come from giving up power or not even desiring it. The all-pervasive conviction in our society is that power is a good and that those possessing it can only desire more of it. Surrounded by so much power, it is very difficult to avoid surrendering to the temptation to seek power like everyone else. But the mystery of our ministry is that we are called to serve not with our power but with our powerlessness. It is through powerlessness that we can enter into solidarity with our fellow human beings, form a community with the weak, and thus reveal the healing, guiding, and sustaining mercy of God. We are called to speak to people not where they have it together but where they are aware of their pain, not where they are in control but where they are trembling and insecure, not where they are self-assured and assertive but where they dare to doubt and raise hard questions; in short, not where they live in the illusion of immortality but where they are ready to face their broken, mortal, and fragile humanity. As followers of Christ, we are sent into the world naked, vulnerable, and weak, and thus we can reach our fellow human beings in their pain and agony and reveal to them the power of God's love and empower them with the power of God's Spirit.” Wherever we might be in human history today, I am confident that this downward way has already saved the day. Jenny and I went to see the movie The Glass Castle this summer, based on the memoir by that title, written by Jeanette Walls. Jeanette is the second oldest of four children who are moved around the country by their parents as they seek to escape debt collectors or other misfortune, living with grandparents and then finally in West Virginia. The father Rex is a drunken dreamer and the mother an artist of sorts and the children grow up in squalor, chaos and hunger. The promised glass castle house remains only a blueprint as the children one by one leave home as they are able. Despite the seeming madness of it all, the children love their parents and have some sense of a strong family narrative that holds them together and creates in them a resilience that carries them forward. In a 2013 article in the New York Times entitled The Family Stories that Bind Us Bruce Feiler asks the question, “ What kind of families make for resilient and happy children?” The simple answer that he comes to based on Marshall Duke’s 1990 research is: develop a strong family narrative. The strongest predictor of a emotional health and happiness in children for the long term. The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned.” The stories did not have to be good stories. In fact it seems that even knowing bad family stories was better than no story. The children that knew the ups and downs, successes and failures, triumphs and tragedies and could retell these stories and pass them on, seemed most happy and content. Duke concluded “that children who have the most self-confidence have what he calls a strong “intergenerational self.” They know they belong to something bigger than themselves.” That makes a lot of sense to me and presents parents and grandparents with a unique challenge. Tell the family stories, all of them and often so that children grow knowing their place in the narrative. John Chrysostom was a fourth Century Christian Mystic and later Archbishop of Constantinople who died an early death very likely because of his fearless preaching, especially against those who oppressed the poor, also including church leaders. He was given the name Chrysostom, which means golden-mouthed, for his brilliant sermons which read like they could have been written today. “If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the church door, you will not find Him in the chalice.” I was introduced to Etty Hillesum by reading Jean Vanier. He had these remarkable quotations from the diaries and life of this little known Dutch Jewish woman who died at 29 years of age in Auschwitz. I picked up a book by Patrick Woodhouse called Etty Hillesum: A Life Transformed. She began writing her diaries in 1941 at the suggestion of her analyst Julius Spier who later became her lover. She grew up in a rather chaotic family and went to see him do deal with her depression. He introduced her to the Bible and St. Augustine through which she has a major awakening. In a remarkably short period of time, from March 1941 until her death in 1943 she writes in her extensive diaries about this transformation. Towards the end of her short life she chooses to help Jewish people in transit at the Westerbork Camp on their way to the concentration camps, rather than escape, as was offered to her. She finally becomes an internee herself, along with most of her family and she continued to serve selflessly until her own death. She writes "Those two months behind barbed wire have been the two richest and most intense months of my life, in which my highest values were so deeply confirmed. I have learnt to love Westerbork". No where does she deny the horrors of the camps but rather shows a remarkable love for the “indestructible beauty of the world.” As her own death approaches she seems to grow in love, and her life becomes more meaningful and expansive. “By 'coming to terms with life' I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich it.” There is so much to learn from her short life and its 'downward' trajectory. The garden has been a great pleasure this growing season. Each evening we get to look at our dinner plates and marvel at the abundance that comes from the miracle that is our vegetable garden. Small seeds into moist soil in the Spring, add water and watch it happen. There is a bit more to it than that. The planting, weeding, watering and weeding and weeding and more weeding, but the result is truly gratifying. We have had some great garden mentors over the years, good neighbors and friends, a green thumbed father-in-law and his son, countless little tips and experiments that slowly build good soil and yearly garden surprises. Visitors often suggest how much money we must be saving by not having to shop for vegetables. Possibly, though we have never done the math. We do it because there is nothing quite like the flavors that come from a sun ripened, home grown tomato, or a cob of corn picked only minutes before being slipped into boiling water on the stove or even the comfort food of winter potatoes mashed into a traditional Dutch stamppot. The miracles get to be enjoyed almost year-round. Today the barn begins some of its ordinary work. The work of storing hay, hanging tools, feeding cows, cooling vegetables, sorting screws, gathering eggs, all the things that good barns can do. Saturday was a day of inauguration for the Swallowfield Barn and a wonderful gathering of people from Telegraph Trail, from our circles of friends and work, and our common life together, sharing good food and conversation for a few hours, as late summer rains enlivened the fields again; good rain on parched pastures and an appropriate champagne against the prow of this ship as it sets sail. It was wonderful to gather so many people together just to allow surprising conversations to happen. I was watching people talk who might never have met otherwise. It was good to see the very young running among the rain soaked gardens with newly found fast friends as only the young can do. Sweeter still to see older and younger dancing to the beat of well sung tunes, because that is what legs are for. The barn began its life for all the things we had hoped it would do and will keep doing. I believe our son Asher got it right in his design and it reflects what the words below say about good architecture. I came across these beautiful words yesterday in Image Magazine about good films, “My friend the architect Colin Fraser Wishart says that the purpose of his craft is to help people live better. There’s beautiful simplicity but also enormous gravity in that statement. Just imagine if every public building, city park, urban transportation hub, and home were constructed with the flourishing of humanity—in community or solitude—in mind. Sometimes this is already the case, and we know it when we see it. Our minds and hearts feel freer; we breathe more easily; we are inspired to create. If architecture at its best helps us live better, then it is very easy to spot bad architecture. In a space intended purely to house the so-called “making” of money, for example, we are touched by melancholy, weighed down by drudgery, compelled by the urge to get away. But in a space whose stewards seem to have known that human kindness is more important than the free market, that poetry and breathing matter beyond bank balances and competition—a concert hall designed for the perfect reflection of sound, a playground where the toys blend in with the trees, a train station where the transition from one place to another is honored as a spiritual act—we know that it is possible to always be coming home.” It is our hope that the barn will always be a coming home of sorts, a place where hearts and minds feel freer, people can breathe more easily and we leave inspired to create other good things in the world. |
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