Post 202--Ash Wednesday 2018

Better late than never, as the trite saying has it.  It's 1:40 am, Friday right now. Two days after Ash Wednesday. Another way of saying, "Late!"  I so confess, but the truth and significance of Ash Wednesday still holds,.  It is too important for my tardiness to undo it.  It is too objective for my subjectivity to undo it. 

The rest of this post constitutes a meditation on Ash Wednesday written by Rev. Gary Patterson of the St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church at Burrard and Nelson in downtown Vancouver, just a few blocks from where I am writing. In Patterson's style, I invite you to sit back, relax and ponder what he offers you. 

However, Patterson being a liberal, there are some elements in his Ash meditation that are missing. Some of that will be expressed in the next post. I had hoped that would be tomorrow, but I will be away. To leave the matter till my return a few days from now, puts it too far from the actual day, even further than Patterson's. So, I will do that follow-up post a few hours from now. Not sure whether the computer will record it as the 16th or 17th. 

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THINKING ABOUT WHAT MATTERS

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and there will be a special worship service here at St. Andrew’s-Wesley, at 7 pm tonight, in the Chapel. It’s not a “popular” or well-attended service in the United Church. But I remember four years ago, during my time as Moderator, when I was in Bogota, Colombia on Ash Wednesday and decided to go to a morning service at a nearby Catholic church.

Imagine my surprise to discover the church was full to overflowing, and when the brief service ended there were long line-ups, hundreds of us waiting to receive the mark of ashes on our foreheads. During the rest of the day, as I wandered about the city, it seemed that every other person was similarly marked. It was a strange sight… and sobering, knowing that everyone bearing the ash symbol had heard the priest softly say, “From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return.”

Lent is a pondering time, an opportunity to think about some of those questions about life’s meaning that too often get neglected in the day to day busy-ness. Questions like… “Who am I? What’s truly important to me? What am I doing with my life? When I look at myself in the mirror, what do I see? What am I doing with my dreams, with my regrets?” And there’s nothing like being reminded of your mortality to give some oomph to those questions.

In our culture, we are encouraged to avoid thinking about death, and we go merrily along, pretending we have all the time in the world. It’s not true, and in our hearts, we know that to be so… it’s why that Ash Wednesday ritual can be such a helpful reminder.

Ash Wednesday goes further than simply being a stark reminder of our limited time. The phrase, “From dust you have come and to dust you shall return,” is traditionally followed by some kind of statement that invites, no, calls us to “Repent!”… which is to say, “Turn your life around. Change the way you are living. Let go of a way of being that sucks the life out of you.” Thus, Lent invites us both to think seriously about our days, asking, a la Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” AND THEN … to start making changes.

This Lent season many of us will be reading Eric Elnes’ book, Gifts of the Dark Wood, in which he suggests that struggles and hard times can become moments of discovery. Finding ourselves uncertain, or facing emptiness and loss, these experiences can, with grace, become a gift, … a bit like having ashes on your forehead and being reminded that you will soon return to the dust from which you came.

I was recently reading a book of essays by Ursula Le Guin, who, when she was 80, was asked what she did with her “spare time.” Her response is something to ponder in the season of Lent:

"To a working person… spare time is the time not spent at your job or at otherwise keeping yourself alive, cooking, keeping clean, getting the car fixed, getting the kids to school. To people in the midst of life, spare time is free time, and valued as such … But to people in their eighties? What do retired people have but “spare time? … When all the time you have is spare, is free, what do you make of it? And what’s the difference really, between that and the time you used to have when you were fifty, or thirty, or fifteen?

… The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case, I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living … I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up with kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, … None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it… I am going to be eighty-one next week. I have no time to spare."

(from No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, Ursula Le Guin, 2017)

Post 194--Meditation by Labyrinth

Like most other cities on North America's west coast, Vancouver is a chillingly secular city. Nevertheless, we live in its central West End and are quite surrounded by churches that range from outright liberal to  Evangelical that in turn range from the classical to the mushroom variety that meets behind various facades, though nothing like store fronts. They are peopled by highly educated  and relatively well-to-do young people.  One of the more liberal is St. Paul's Anglican just two blocks down the street from us, one that we pass on average twice a week.  

It's an unusual church. For one thing, its over-a-century-old building is designated a heritage building by the city. Its exterior consists of maroon-painted cedar shingles, not a facade still common in the city. It is well maintained with its gracious appearance and, unlike the recently razed  modern United Church just a couple of blocks away, it appears well attended and is under no threat of coming down. Typical of our liberal churches here, it plays an active part in our downtown culture. 

Example:  More than twenty years ago, before we arrived here, our West End was inundated by pimps and prostitutes that so dominated the streets and traffic that the residents complained enough for the city to install all kinds of traffic calmers and other obstacles such as one-way streets, unexpected diversions, dead ends and cul-de-sacs. The police moved in and hassled prostitutes as well as their clients that eventually they moved out of the area to go who knows where, probably the Down Town East Side, known as the country's poorest postal code just a couple of clicks away. Sanity returned and the people were happy.  

Twenty years later, the dominant spiritual and social attitude had changed. Forces within the community instilled a sense of guilt for driving away that trade. Its practitioners were now seen as victims of circumstances not of their choosing and they should have been protected, not driven out. They were no longer regarded as unwanted; the traditionally negative attitude towards prostitution had given way to acceptance. Well, no surprise. Secularism has little in the way of moral standards. 

Last year, 2016, St. Paul's, along with a segment of the local population and reps of the City Council, established a memorial statue right in front of the church, to remember the victims of that "shameful" cleansing of decades ago.  Now that prostitution era was romanticised and its practitioners practically awarded a sort of sainthood!  The atmosphere had done a complete topsy-turvy. Next time you are in the area, you really must come and take some pics, for this is really something to see. Right there in front of a church! I suspect it is the world's first and only memorial to prostitution, unless New York or San Francisco beat us to the honour!

Now years ago I wrote a blog about a hymn-singing prostitute in the south of Nigeria. I showed plenty of sympathy for her terrible situation that led her into that trade. I was fully aware that this was hardly by choice and that she had few other options. In other words, I did not condemn but understood and sympathized. I am as aware of the terrible dynamics as anyone. 

But understanding and sympathizing is one thing, but to elevate the "profession" to hero status or even sainthood is another.  From all the reading I've done on the subject, most practitioners have descended into its horrible depth because of earlier negative choices that inexorably led them into this pit. It was not their destination of choice, but they landed up against a brick wall that would not budge. They had burnt too many bridges behind them and felt they had nowhere else to turn. 

So, what of that memorial in front of St. Paul's?  I sympathize with prostitution's victims and therefore join the community in its sympathy. A case of sympathy on top of sympathy!  But now to turn its practitioners into saints and ignore all the warnings in the Bible against it or to pretend it has no serious social and physical consequences, enough to turn it into a vice, is another. I have no answer really, but this has gone too far. Sin turned into virtue!  The spiritual atmosphere in the community has changed that much--unbelievable. If the trade were to make a come-back in this area, I doubt that the police would have the balls to counter it or, for that matter, the public--until it once again turns into the terrible nuisance it had become. It might be bound to happen.  

Now, you would never expect this subject from the title above this post. I did not either. the main subject was intended to drive me to that subject. Instead, it became the main subject. So, I'll let that title stand but treat that subject in Post 195. That way you won't be turned off by what became today's unexpected main subject!

Post 184--Trump's Clergy Friends

The Religion News Service (RSN) has done us all a huge service by publishing an extensive report on meetings between President Trump and an assortment of what Americans tend to call “white Evangelicals.”  Here’s the bibliographics of the document: 

Adelle M. Banks, Emily McFarlan Miller , Yonat Shimron and Jerome Socolovsky, “All the president’s clergymen: A close look at Trump’s ‘unprecedented’ ties with evangelicals.” Religion News Service, September 5, 2017.

http://religionnews.com/2017/09/05/all-the-presidents-clergymen-a-close-look-at-trumps-unprecedented-ties-with-evangelicals/?utm_source=RNS+Updates&utm_campaign=8dea16e014-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c5356cb657-8dea16e014-127937033

I am merely sharing the URL of these events—yes, “events,” plural—so you can read all about them. Basically, I am doing the same thing these RSN writers have done—passing on info and leave the choice as to what to do with it or how to interpret it all with you. 

I will say, however, that I do not feel these guys and gals represent me, a Reformational writer. If you want to get a feel of a writer like me, read back posts of this blog or go to my website < www.SocialTheology.com >.

I am always concerned that this blog not appear too American or deals with too many American issues. The point is, that American affairs affect Canada more that most of us like. Probably the biggest influence of these American events on us is the way we Canadians interpret them, especially the Canadian media. They are so ignorant of religion in general, it stinks. They are even more ignorant of what they regard as the Evangelical religion of the American south—and even more prejudiced against it. They pass on their wretched interpretation to us so that we react to that interpretation rather than to that community itself.  There’s a whole firewall between that community and us. Its first name is “Canadian media;” its last, “Liberal.” 

So, on the face of it, a short post. If you open up the URL above, it is pretty long.

What do you think of these meetings and the concerns broached in them? 

Post 150--The 149 Story Continued

The time between this and the previous post is a lot longer than intended. This time it is not an excuse such as being too busy or traveling. The problem was a technical one with this blog as a whole that I, try as I may, was not able to overcome. I needed a techie to get back on the road. I did find a techie soon enough, but he was not able to come until just two days ago. So, I'm back.  Please welcome me!

The material in this post was supposed to have been placed only one day after no. 149. It was actually written that day. Thus it reads that way as well. It is the next day's development of the March for Life. 

It is time I make something clear. This post along with 149 may give you the impression that I am a conservative and a supporter of Trump and his ilk. People assume that a pro-lifer must be conservative, right?  The same if you say something positive about Trump.  When on top of all that you include a negative reference to liberals, well, then you've clinched it: you're a true blue conservative.  

Well, I'm not. But neither am I a liberal. I am a Christian with a different frame of reference. I support some conservative issues as well as some liberal ones. I disagree with many conservative issues as well as many liberal ones. Being associated with conservatism embarrasses me to no end as a Christian, for conservatism embraces so many causes I could not possibly support. Same for liberalism. This is the reason it may seem that I sometimes jump the fence between the two sides. I am neither; I have my own "side."  So, I don't jump fences! It's almost like "A plague on both of you," but Christians don't wish a plague on anyone. Hence, I won't go there. 

Alright, having made that clear--at least, I hope I have!--let's get back to the topic of 149.  In the next post I will move on again.

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This is the same writer of 149:  Kristan Hawkins--

If there's one thing I took away from yesterday's March for Life, it's that the hundreds of thousands of young people who showed up are ready and willing to get to work to abolish abortion.

You and I already know that this generation of young people is the Pro-Life Generation. In fact, polls show that a majority of Millennials support severely restricting or banning abortion!

But despite the media's narrative that young people are lazy and just want to be coddled, the more than 1,800 young people that showed up ready to get to work at today's SFLA East Coast National Conference (and the 500 more that showed up last Sunday at our West Coast National Conference) have proven that narrative couldn't be more wrong!  

These young women and men are determined to win the battles ahead of us in the next few weeks: to defund Planned Parenthood, confirm a pro-life U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and abolish abortion in our lifetime.

I'm so grateful for the support we have received from you to be able to put on the nation's largest pro-life conference.

We're providing so many valuable resources for these young people to go out and make a pro-life impact in their community, and we couldn't have done it without your support.

Today, students are learning the best messaging to reach their peers on the life issue.  They're learning what rights they have -- this is critical as we see more and more high school and college campuses cracking down on "free speech" (i.e. everyone who has a different opinion than the left-wing college administrators).

Students at our national conference are also learning how to help women in crisis by working with their local pregnancy center and taking part in SFLA's Pregnant on Campus Initiative.

For Life,
Kristan Hawkins
President, Students for Life of America

P.S.  President Trump and Vice President Pence have forced the media to take notice of our March for Life.  Yesterday, SFLA was featured in at least 18 different news articles or interviews from Fox & Friends to CBS News, The Weekly Standard, TIME, and even NPR!
P.P.S.  This morning, I'll be on MSBNC to debate a former Clinton staffer and Planned Parenthood executive, so please keep me in your prayers!