I had hoped to complete this post and publish
it between Christmas and New Year. In addition to all the things I write about
in the rest of this post, we visited our youngest son and family in Atlanta,
GA. While there, no time or opportunity to write! Returned home yesterday and decided to post a
piece I had written earlier for such a time as this, when it is high time to
post but have nothing ready.
I don’t write as many posts as I would like.
So many other things that keep me busy, like getting all my published books,
articles, lectures and some correspondence—some trivial even or attempts at
humour—onto my website at < www.SocialTheology.com >.
The time you may have spent on Christmas shopping in December, I spent
on writing and a host of other things like….
I am an active member of our local West End
Seniors Network (WESN) here in Vancouver as well as a couple of churches. I am
the co-ordinator for the WESN’s monthly Men’s Breakfast Club, while wife Fran
does the calling the day before to remind people. We both love social life and
often accept invitations to or organize coffee times and visits from or to various
friends and relatives whom we have here in BC by the bushel! We visit
especially older people who are alone.
Fran, my wife, and I love to entertain people
for lunch at home over soup and salads. She enjoys making salads while I
specialize in soups. We are both good at our individual specialties. Such
invitations are of a “social revolutionary” type, since the people in our West
End area of Vancouver almost live in restaurants and do very little
entertainment in their homes. Sharing lunch with them at home seldom is reciprocated,
except perhaps over a coffee in a coffee shop. Individualism and a sense of
exaggerated privacy has gone amuck so that people don’t easily open their doors
to each other and loneliness has become a serious malaise in the neighbourhood.
This particular sentence was written during the early morning of Christmas Day 2015. We had invited four
people to enjoy Christmas dinner with us, all of them people who have no family
nearby. In fact, all of us, including Fran
and myself, are either immigrants or former refugees, except for one, an Asian born in Canada whose
family lives far away in another Canadian city. I do have family near by, but
the others don’t and needed a place to celebrate.
I also mentioned churches. Yes, we are full
members of the Christian Reformed Church here in Vancouver, while we are
“adherents” to First Baptist Church in downtown. Why two? Well, that’s for
another post sometime in the future. But these take time as well. We love
attending church services and participating in other stuff during the week. The
why and how, well, that, too, is for another time.
In addition to all that good stuff we’re
involved in, we are both from very large families. Fran is the youngest of
seven while I am number five out of ten. She has three brothers, two of whom
have already passed away, and after them came four sisters, one of whom passed
on. I have four sisters older than me and five brothers younger than me, with
one sister and one brother already with the Lord. All of these siblings have
together produced an entire battalion of kids, grandkids, even some great
grandkids. This battalion is scattered all over North America, with Fran’s
concentrating on Michigan, where her family immigrated to back in 1942, while
mine are concentrated in British Columbia (BC), where our family immigrated to
in 1951. I was thirteen at that time. Being as family-conscious as we are, we
serve sort of as the glue for the two different families, though more so for
the Boers in BC, since that’s where we now live. For example, we organize the annual Boer
get-together on Boxing Day (December 26) in Surrey. Fran is the Boer family
consultant, since she keeps track of addresses and birthdays down to at least
the fourth generation.
Our own three children and seven
grandchildren are scattered—near Seattle, in Silicon Valley and in Lagos,
Nigeria, with regrettably none in Canada. Well, they did not grow up in Canada
but in Nigeria, while they did their undergraduate work in Michigan in the
shadow of my in-laws and our mission employer. This means travel and more
travel for us to all three of them. Seattle is close by. So, there we can do
weekend visits. But when we visit the Silicon or Lagos crowds, we spend a lot
of time; Silicon often takes up to ten days a couple of times a year, while we
recently spent almost a month in Lagos.
All of the above personals have—or is it
“has”?—two reasons. One is my own feeling that when I deal with people over any
length of time, I need to know who they are, where they come from and how they
spend their time. I think and live wholistically. I cannot divide my own life
nor that of people I associate with into little boxes that would make me deal
with them only at the specific point of contact and never mind the rest. I just
cannot relate that way, nor do I want to.
We are basically social creatures
more than isolated individuals. Put
in another way, we are individuals in
community. When either one of these is emphasized over against the other, we
get social distortions, sometimes with very serious consequences. I hope to
do a post on this subject one of these days. So, if you are one of my regular readers,
you may be curious who I am, where I come from and what I do. Well, here it is.
I have tried to satisfy your curiosity. That’s one reason for this post: to establish a stronger connection with you.
I hope I am not just imposing a personal opinion or relationship on you guys
but filling a need also on your part to firm
up our relationship.
The other but related reason for this
personal stuff is to explain the occasional time lag between posts. Work,
travel, socializing often intervene and leave me little time for blogging, as
much as I love this writing activity. No matter how short of time, my heart constantly urges me to write
So I have made a decision, a policy decision
of what I have already started practicing, namely to intersperse my own
writings with “guest articles.” Such guest articles-- while perhaps expressing
opinions I agree with at least partially, or that I take on to undermine, or
that I simply enjoy and want to share with you--, take less time to produce
than fresh stuff from me. Of course, many of my “fresh stuff” also frequently includes materials from and references to other writers, something I always faithfully
indicate.
This semi-new policy will not only prevent unpleasant gaps but also
create variety. My Dutch language has an expression, “Verandering van spijs doet eten,” which is to say that a change of
diet increases your appetite and your enjoyment of food. Though not part of the
expression, change is also more pleasant for the cook, at least, for this writer-cook. The same is true of both
reading and writing.
I had really intended to feed you a guest
article about Justin Bieber, the singer, today, to be preceded by a short
explanation and introduction. Well, that “short explanation” turned into a
complete post! Justin will have to wait a
few days. Sorry, buddy. I don’t think it will bother him, since he is not, to
the best of my knowledge, one of my regular readers.
In the meantime, you’ve
learned a bit about me, while I snuck in a bit of social philosophy on the
side—but that’s also me. I am not a professional philosopher, though I wish I
were, but I do like to philosophize about social stuff, especially about the
relationship of religions and worldviews to culture and society.
Time to wind up. I hope you had a good
Christmas celebration in the midst of family and friends. I end this post with
wishing you a very happy 2016. For me, such a wish always goes together with
the unexpressed silent Biblical prayer, “Maranatha,”
“Lord Jesus, come back soon.”
