Moving beyond Awkward

            Have you noticed how “awkward” has become a buzz word in recent years? There is now a tendency for people, with limited social breading, to name an awkward silence as just that. They announce the awkwardness of a social interaction in a chitchy avant garde sort of way that they believe frees them from any rule of social etiquette, and then triumphantly march off to “do their own thing,” trailing a cloud of annoyance in their wake.

            I began to notice this tendency after I saw it modeled by Ricky Gervais in The Office, a type of humour so painfully awkward that it was found funny - after you went numb from wincing. What I think HBO was cashing in on in that series, was the fact that we now live in a society where we have deconstructed every form of social etiquette. We do not wish to impose rules of behaviour on our ourselves or our children, so we have abandoned social norms in the name of individual freedoms, and are left with a society struggling to remember how to be polite.

            As such I feel so deeply grateful to be a member of the Church of England. That old battleship of out-dated morals, etiquette, and standards from which to judge the World, and in a time when the World desperately needs to be judged!

            Now I have just committed one of the cardinal sins of our era and spoken of judgment. Those of us that have ridden the non-violent communication train know that we are no suppose to impose our judgment on others, as that’s oppressive and one of the hallways of Churchiness: moral self-righteousness. We, both C of E and Canadians, have become an unimposing people. A people who when in doubt answer “I’m sorry,” or “Excuse me,” at every available moment of confusion. This is a nullified politeness we practice that is more about avoiding strife then actually exercising our moral judgment, judgment that holds ourselves, and others, accountable for our actions.

            We need only look to England riots of the past month to see the result of a generation raised without the standards of its parents to see where this country, which (despite all the hype about the elephant across the border) has always fallowed the European lead, is headed.

            There is much talk of these days of the need of the Church to reinvent itself (again); to find a third space to meet the unchurched halfway in some café/art gallery where we won’t use the word “god” till the third date. Which is about the middlest road the Anglican Church has come up with to date, and is a fine one for individual parishes to take, but as a national Church we must now refocus as to what our mission in Canada is.

            To that end we should take a seriously look at some of the conversations that are happening in the UK now, especially from the mouth of our Archbishop of Canterbury, who in the wake of the riots has made repeated calls for a return to the notion of citizenship and virtue. In a speech he gave to the house of Lords Rowan Williams spoke of  how “[o]ver the last two decades, many would agree that our educational philosophy [in the UK] at every level has been more and more dominated by an instrumentalist model; less and less concerned with a building of virtue, character and citizenship - 'civic excellence' as we might say.  And a good educational system in a healthy society is one that builds character, that builds virtue.” An education system that creates not just workers or consumers but virtuous citizens, as what we do not invest in youth we pay in terms of criminal corrections.

            Working at a half-way house for parolees I have seen that fact plainly with my own eyes, and now that we have elected a government that is investing 10 billion dollars into the construction of mega-prisons (in a country that has had a declining crime rate for the past 10 years) I can tell you we are a long way from where we need to be in order to have the types of conversation we need to be having.

            Here, however, is a gleaming opportunity for the Anglican Church to show itself as a mission oriented Church and begin considering what a National Prison Ministry programme might look like. In prison ministry do we truly meet the commandments of Our Lord, caring for orphan (which is the case for many of the incarcerated), the widow (again the case for so many of the mothers of prisoners), and of course the prisoner. As well in this ministry we can also continue to work at healing the riff between our Church and indigenous people of this land as, the sad colonial fact is, they are the largest population represented in prison system.

            We live in desperate times, and in these times we must not risk falling into a “wait and see” mentality. We are called to be the Church that serves in the World and to serve the broken body of Christ in the places where angels fear to tread, but where are Lord beckons us to meet him.

The Spirit Versus the Spectacle

       I have been thinking of narratives as of late. More so after the riots in Vancouver, where the national narrative of the Canadian people took a gruesome turn. I know the first instinct is to distance ourselves from images of violence that have surrounded the conquest of Vancouver by drunken frat boys, but we must be careful not to separate ourselves from the story that we have been intertwined with. That story is Hockey. My tongue is nowhere near my cheek as I speak this, for, as one professor of mine was fond of saying: When people get out of organized religion they get into weird things. Terry Eagleton expounds
      "The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book."
      Hockey is very close to God in this country. Indeed if we were to measure this by attendance (Church versus arena) I would dare say hockey passed God by quite a while ago. As such we live in an age where “all things [have] become permissible,” to paraphrase Dostoyevsky. In a secular landscape, where there is no true north to navigate by, we are propelled by the power of the self-constructed images that our culture perpetuates to give it a level of cohesion that bolsters our lack of integration. Our fragmentedness is held together by the battles of the Colesseum. Tistin Markle:
      "In the absence of any shared collective progressive principles, the BC elite longed for a new solidarity forged from of this “fighting collectivity” of Canucks fans. You could not find a politician that didn’t reinforce the jingoism, not the least with Premier Christy Clark speaking exclusively in hockey metaphors.
      But grounding social solidarity in competitive spectacle is a risky wager, as the solidarity can be wiped away by a 0-4 tally. Spectacle is by its nature passive, the spectator powerless (without opportunity to attack the opposing “fighting collectivity”). The latent purely political violence cannot be directed at the enemy, and so Vancouver’s “fighting collectivity” turned on itself, individuals beating each other up on the streets (in place of the Bruin fans), attacking police (in place of Boston police), and looting Vancouver stores (in place of Boston stores). And so Vancouver had its war: it conquered itself."
      When I presented the above argument to a friend he stated the obvious truth: that if Vancouver had triumphed over Boston the end result would have been the same. I believe he was correct in that, but that does not dispel the reality of the war of images that exists is our society, a society mediated by spectacles, mythologies that disempower us from ourselves as we play into them. The mythology of hockey provides us with a sense of identity, a place in a wider narrative, it gives us rituals of belonging, victory, redemption, and (certainty in the case of the Canucks) long-suffering perseverance.
      This narrative, however. is escapism, it does not bind us to the world but replaces it. There is no influence that the standard hockey fan lends to the narrative of the Hockey Night in Canada, other than the odd painted face splayed across the jumbo screen for a precious 5 seconds of fame. His voice is lent to the cheers of the team, but it is present only in numbers and sound, there is no relationship formed, no struggle, no achievement, in the end the spectacle of the game provides all the redeeming qualities of a passing billboard.
      Let us now contrast this with a city immersed in a narrative that does involve them with the world:
"The whole city is full of it: the squares, the market places, the cross-roads, the alleyways; salesmen of old clothes, money changers, food sellers; they are all busy arguing. If you ask someone for change, he will philosophize about the begotten and the unbegotten nature of God; if you inquire about the price of bread, you are told by way of reply that the Father is great than the Son; and if you ask the attendant whether you bath is ready, he will answer that the Son was made out of nothing."
      These are the words of Saint Gregory of Nyssa, who observed how the city of Constantinople was afire with the theological discussions of the day, during the Second Ecumenical Council (381). Here we see a citizenry passionate about their collective faith, bound together in the unity of the Body of Christ, and the narrative of Jesus. But why should this make Constantinople superior to Vancouver? Can one narrative be better than the other? Do I have any right to say that Jesus trumps hockey?
      These are the musings of contemporary secularists who see each individual tree as having their own entitlements to never be a forest. So I will answer yes: Jesus trumps hockey, and He triumphs much because of the revelations at the Second Ecumenical Council. That God is heavenly and earthly, that to do for the least is to do for the greatest; that how you act towards your neighbours, your teammates, your city, matters.
      The speculative narrative of hockey, which is the same narrative that birthed the riots and all the media frenzy that fallowed the children of doctors and dentists home at night, is a narrative that cares nothing for the least, and certainly gives no thought towards the heavens. It is a narrative of denial, a play with no moral, it is exactly what it proclaims to be: a spectator sport. Our faith, by contrast, calls to us as human beings. It calls us by our bodies, that we should help the poor by the work of our hands. It calls us by our emotions, that we should share their suffering as Jesus did. And it calls us by our intellect; that we should have the presence of mind to see through the illusions of this world and not become involved in a mob mentality that leads only towards more suffering and death. Our faith calls us to be fully involved in the world as fully human, not as spectators.

Elizabeth May's (Very) Middle Way

         It’s Ash Wednesday and Elizabeth May has a dirty forehead. She greets me cheerfully, as she does every member of her team that comes through the doors of her headquarters here in Sidney by the sea. I’m intrigued by May as she represents my favorite underdogs, idealistically anyway. Of course May would be quick to say that she does not represent the Anglican Communion, drawing a firm line between her role has the federal leader of the Green Party and her Christian practice. When I ask her how her faith informs her politics she walks the multicultural line, aware of her own story within a larger one.
          “One answer is: in ever way possible. And the other is: as a leader of a federal political part which is not, and very clearly not, influenced by faith...” May’s been dumped by people who heard talking about her faith, and she’s hyper-congession about the tainted view people have of organized religion in these post-Dubya years. “[T]hey [the public] find out I’m a Christian or they see me talk about faith in a public forum and they say that well I was going to support you but not I’m not because I don’t like to see people in politics who are religious…so much damage has been done to public discourse, not to personify it too much, but it is quickly understood as George Bush style of a religious Christian right in the US [that] has driven a lot of people away from, and become very fearful, of a politician who says they’re Christian.
         May’s all about the separation of Church and State, recognizing that government is a secular machine that should not be greased with any religious fervor. She does, however, think it important for voters to have a perspective on what drives an individual politician: “I think it’s appropriate for voters to know ‘What does this person believe in and why? What drives them?’ That’s where I think it’s perfectly appropriate for people to ask me what me religious beliefs are, I don’t feel as if I have to defend them.”
         Still I look for intersections where the two may come together, like the press release the Greens issued “applauding the Church Council on Justice and Corrections for its opposition to the Conservatives’ incarceration and prison expansion project.” In it the Greens slam the Harper government for wanting to “spending billions of dollars to throw more Canadians in jail.” When I ask May about it she answers that “if that policy had been put out by the ‘Humanists of Canada’ we would have endorsed. It was a important policy statement regardless of where it came.”
         It’s interesting speaking to May on these issues, she walks parallel to her faith careful not to trip into muddy waters least she disenfranchise potential voters. In many ways she is caught in the postmodern trap of our era, maintaining critical distance from what she personally believes and practices so that she can do her job in the secular world. Not much different from any other Christians in the workplace I suppose, still, it’s an odd thing coming from someone who studied for the priesthood - but then there are many odd priests out there.
         I ask her about speaking to young generations, coming from this ‘tainted background’ she answers “…a lot of young people have grown up in a time when the awareness of their clout as consumers has over taken their role as citizens in a democracy. And in that confusion of consumerism versus citizenship, when you decided that the theater of politics looks so appalling…if you then decide that you are punishing the politicians and not voting it’s a conflation of that consumer notion with the citizenship notion and it produces the most perverse result of all…rewarding those people you wanted to punish.”
         Personal confession time: It has been somewhere in the neighbourhood of 7 years or so since I last voted. I am the great unwashed cynical youth (if at 33 I can still get away with that title) who has plenty of faith in God and His intuition, and very little left over for worldly government. Yet May makes some compelling arguments: “if you look at the last election,” she tells me, “[In] 2008, 41% of Canadians didn’t vote…a larger block of voters than the number of voters who voted for the conservatives… if even half of the people who didn’t vote voted, we’d have a different government.”
         Much of what May says is about getting over our disgust with the pettiness we see in the political arena, which I think is a Christian virtue; a learning to live with a falleness that is reflected in the secular powers-that-be, but then going that extra step to say that our participation can help to transform it into something better. I don’t know if I’ll vote in the next election, but I will at least pray for those on the ballot.

I’m religious, not spiritual

       Let us reflect a moment on the word religion. The Latin, religio, denotes obligation, bond, reverence, while religare means “to bind.” Hence this word, which has taken so much flack as we begin the 21^st century, means to bind us together in bonds of obligation and reverence. And while we still seem alright with the ideals of reverence and community, nothing seems more terrifying to us as the idea of being obligated. Indeed in this age of not-committal language, we go so far out of our way to avoid any connotation of obligation, which we now take to automatically mean oppression.

        We are all free-agents, free floating between ideals. On occasion, when we like an ideal, or a ritual, a symbol, a god so much that we pluck it from the ether and it becomes part of our personal spirituality. So we become “kinda of christain,” or “kinda buddhists,” or “kinda wiccan.” In this spiritual questing the individual selects those aspects of a belief system that resonate with him/her (the “choice cuts” if you will) and all those selections come together in the individual, which then becomes the only way to relate to others: on an individual basis. All these kindas are the result of the same sort of individualistic approach that can only be practiced in a society that has a consumer relationship to eternal truths. Where is the community in this? Where is the other? Where is our neigbour whom our Lord has commanded us to love as we love ourselves?

        We want to be spiritual, but on our terms. We order our spirituality from Ikea, it’s the latest fad, the pre-fab spirituality. Of course this type of approach to the inner life is only worth as much as the accessories that come with it, and one need only look at what the flatscreen as done to the tube to realize its ultimate destination. 

        Gandhi knew this. He understood exactly what he was talking about when he named worship without sacrifice as the seventh deadly sin of the modern age. That word, sacrifice, (which has also become a taboo of the postmodern era) means to “make holy.” When we worship we sacrifice ourselves. We offer to God the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and limit ourselves so that we too can be made holy under the bonds of obligation that we surrender to in faith that the Lord’s will may be done through us. 

       This is what it means to be a sacramental people, and it is a great liberty to live in limitation. It is within boundaries that the soul flourishes. As the French theological Jacque Ellul has said “the more narrow the canyon the more fierce the current.” This can be a bitter pill for the North American palette as we understand limitation to mean a restriction of freedom, an imposition to the multiplicity of potential opinions and experimentation that we are free to invoke. But anyone who goes to the supermarket without a list knows they’re setting themselves up for a longer, more arduous time as they will face the paralyzing reality of having unlimited opinions.

        Think of going to buy toothpaste and being surrounded with 32 different brands! The consumer standing before the line up weighing the pros and cons of minty-fresh to organic fennel. We are burdened by a thousand petty opinions that typifies our age as the age of anxiety, where all opinions are open to us and we are left alone with them, free to be ruled by choice. This is the alienation of the individual in the marketplace of a commercialized spirituality. It is a freedom that sucks the soul out of you as it means to live in constant re-evaluation, forever looking at the menu while you starve to death.

        Consider this during your Lenten practice: that you are practicing a freedom from want as opposed to the freedom to want. As Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church, has written “fasting implies a sense of freedom. Fasting is a way of not wanting, of wanting less, and of recognizing the want of others…[it] involves the process of absorbing pain and transforming it into renewed hope. It ultimately implies focusing on what really matters, prioritizing what one values, and acquiring an attitude of responsiveness and responsibility.” 

       This is the great challenge issued to us Christian North Americans, to be in this marketplace of spirituality but not of it. We have such an opportunity to offer guidance and clarity to those who are genuinely seeking a relationship with God. We can do this because we have a history, a practice, a gift of discipline that has been passed down through the ages by the handmaidens of Christ. We have the gift freedom to offer this angst ridden world, and we will be judged by how we have withheld it from those in desperate need of it.

Remembering Our Responsibility: Reffections on upon David Kato

     It was with heavy and angry hearts this that we began this month of February when we read of the murder of David Kato Kinsuule, a human rights advocate brutally beaten to death in his home, most likely, by someone he knew. Such is the state of viciousness that surrounds the advocacy of homosexual rights in Uganda.
      In Christ Church Cathedral some of us gathered to pay homage to a man who left the safety of South Africa, where his sexuality was not a danger to him, and returned home to his native Uganda where his work was, and still is, desperately needed. Founding the group Sexual Minorities of Uganda, Mr. Kinsuule put himself in harm’s ways, and there he remained up until his death.
      Upon his death, this member of our Church, was not buried by a priest but by a lay reader. During his funeral service, the reader began to make inappropriate remarks condemning homosexuality and stated the Church of Uganda's position, that homosexuality is a sin and goes against the Bible. In the midst of this diatribe a member of Sexual Minorities of Uganda seized the microphone from the reader and began to defend Mr. Kinsuule’s life and work in what had become an anti-gay rally.
      These are difficult times to be an Anglican, difficult times to belong to a Church that has such colonial baggage. I call this colonial because when the British Empire spread its commonwealth across the globe, it also spread its anti-sodomy laws with it, thus the same laws the imprisoned Oscar Wilde in 19th century Britain are the lineage of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill pending in the Uganda parliament.
     That is part of the history, but it would be a lie to call it the whole picture. Whereas the American Christian right has lost so much ground on homosexual issues on this continent, they have been strategically pooling their efforts into twisting other countries domestic policy. Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia, has clearly documented connections between the far right funding, to Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, to Ugandan politicians. In his report Globalizing the Culture Wars: US Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia he ties these connects together and does justice to the complexity to the hornets nest our communion is being sucked into.
     I wish only to allude to these issues to in this article and to present some of this complexity, as I fear that the polemics of the same-sex marriage debates within our Church gives the illusion that are easy answers on how we, as a globe communion, address the murder of David Kinsuule. I hold that it would be an added insult to his death to not see it as a result of a very complex mess. Let us do justice to his memory, let us embrace the complexity of this madness with the cutting light that we have been given by the example of Christ. For no matter where we stand in the maelstrom of homosexual issues, Jesus is quite clear what we are to do with stones and sinners.
     Our God is a God of reconciliation, a God that wishes for us to be as one, and I believe that our Church has been consistent in advocating tolerance and mutual respect. As Rowan Williams said to the African Bishops Conference 6 months ago: “We have a have the responsibility brothers and sisters of showing the world how precious a thing is a human being – and a special responsibility to show the world the preciousness of those who are hated or neglected by others or by society at large.”
     Let us live up to this responsibility. Let us not risk deepening the divides in a world already so fragmented. Our faith is about meeting the other, encountering the reject of society as Jesus would greet a leaper. Surely if we are so devout in our fight for the politics of the Church, we can be sincere in our approach to each other.

Beyond Guilt

   What does it mean to be forgiven? To be absolved? We, the great white Americans, struggle with these questions because we sit on the top. Engulfed in the technological society that we are born into, that rests upon the labour of people we will never meet, we are supremely alienated from those who fund our lives. It is a rare and challenging
thing to confront that privilege and to repent of it.
       There are those who repel against this society, but their rebellion plays to the stage of it, falling into the trap of identity, of self-definition that is just another form of alienation that prevents coming to know “the other,” the one beyond the self. Jacque Ellul, the French theological, has written of how Columbus’ voyage to America has now had such enormous impact across the globe that no one can claim neutrality in the continuing story of colonialism.
       We know this. We know we are not neutral in the World and we yearn for some way in which to passover our guilt for being so intertwined with the collective acts of destruction that our society, day and night, engineers. So paralyzed is the individual in this society that apathy is his only refuge, all holiness becomes profane through the vehicles of South Park and Family Guy; nihilism reigns supreme and we are safe in a meaningless world bent on its destruction.
       The Church feels this heaviness upon itself, and it too is paralyzed in the atmosphere of apathy where our morality is defined negatively, where you are a good person so far as you don’t hurt anybody else and let the guy in the seat next to you listen to his i-thing and remain undisturbed. If you have the good will to take your blue box out to the curb, you’ve broken mold; sainthood is around the corner. Such are our present day standards; the bar is around our knees.
       In Canada where we feel a special burden of guilt is around the residential schools. A collective shame hangs around us. It has become the drunken relative that we refuse to speak of, or when the subject arises it is as projection: something that was done by intuitions that we have no connection or control over and hence bare no responsibility. We are absolved by our non-membership.
       Thus it is with a mixed sense of pride and dread that I can tell you I am proud to belong to a Church that is repenting of its mistakes in the Residential Schools. At the beginning of December I attended one of the Truth and Reconciliation Council meetings that have been ongoing in Canada this past year. At these meetings Residential School survivors, Church folk, and government folk share what they know of the history of residential schools.
       It was a weekend that was spent in the confessional booth; the intimacy and dread hung in the air as we tried to unburden ourselves of past misdoings. It is an exhausting thing to hear confession, to listen with your whole being and allow the other person’s soul to be lightened, but it is part of the joy of service that comes after such trail. And so we heard the stories of men who, in their fifties, were finally able to speak of shame of having been abused by the same pedophile, of a granddaughter who was an alcoholic and who’s brother sexuality assaulted her, inheriting the abuse their father endured at the school, but never spoke off. I saw church men break under the weight of repentance, and glimpses of rage in-between the tears.
       To me the whole gathering was a lesson on the nature of sin, and I say that meaning to go beyond the “naughty list” mentality we carry around us and speaking more towards the other side of sin: that it can be cured by its repentance. Jesus is a rehab councilor: He gives us the knowledge of salvation for the remission of our sins. Now this is not the blank slate mistake where we come out the other side of the confessional and are good for another weekend of debauchery, but rather we are free to go forth and “sin no more,” confident in our forgiveness to do God’s work in the world.
       And what work needs to be done! So much healing needs to take place, and so much needs to be given back. That was one great gift I did get from the weekend: permission to move beyond guilt. To be part of a Church that is working towards its own salvation, engaged in the work of healing drinking from the wellspring of salvation, rather than performing an act of obligation out of W.A.S.P. guilt.
       Let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation, confident of God’s forgiveness for our mistakes, and moving towards the pain that shall lead us to heal