Category Archives: spirituality

Via biography

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Further to the previous post’s musings on living in the age of memoir —

In the midst of this week’s celebration of the passion and resurrection of Christ — what the Christian faith knows as its Holy Week — it’s worth noting that what we most clearly know about God also comes via biography. It came in the lived life of Jesus, but we know that life because it was written down. The Gospels carry the voices, research, concerns, and passion of their authors. They tell a life using the thematic approach of memoir.

So we listen to and read and use the Gospels as the life-writing they are, not to make the texts themselves the focus of our veneration, but to enter into and explore in order to know a person. 

Life-writing, though, it’s important to remember. Not public relations, as Philip Yancey notes in The Jesus I Never Knew, quoting Scott Peck: “I was absolutely thunderstruck by the extraordinary reality of the man I found in the Gospels…”

Reality. For the age of memoir.   

A blessed Easter!

photo by C. Dueck

 

 

e-admiration

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A couple of things came together for me today.

One is a column by Catholic writer Ron Rolheiser I’d stuck into a file folder some years ago, about the need to admire. “One of the defining traits of human maturity is the capacity to admire,” Rolheiser writes. He quotes Thomas Aquinas who said that to withhold a compliment from someone is a sin — because we’re withholding food a person needs to live. But, adds Rolheiser, admiring others is also food we need. Admiration opens us to others, it sees clearly those who do as well or better than we. As per Hugo of St. Victor’s words, which Rolheiser also quotes, “Love is the eye!” (Read the whole column here.)

The other is realizing anew the amazing capacity of the internet and other electronic media to connect us with people. Consider links, for example. The computer cursor moves over a word that also exists as a link, and click, another world opens, and there, more clicks await to take us to other places and people if we wish, and on it goes. I know this is old, old stuff by now. But what’s involved in considering if and who and what to link to in a blog? And in the time it takes to create the link? Sometimes a link is simply there as a short cut to information, yes, or as a way of setting up a bit of an argument or response. But I think links can also embody a kind of admiration.

Such admiration of another person or their ideas, or at least attention to them, is always implied, of course, in writing that references the work and stories of others, and in scholarly work will be properly footnoted. But the way the internet is increasingly able to link to sources directly, and to those who build into one’s life (for me, the bones I borrow, and borrow), the admiration is not only more immediate, but deeper in a risky sort of way. It’s like introducing a friend to someone else at a party who may be much more interesting than you are, leaving you sipping at your drink with no one to talk to!

Another example comes my way via Facebook. One friend updated her status by speaking of her discouragement about an art project she was working on. Some time later, she returned to find a whole row of encouragements and also admiration for her work. “It’s truly amazing,” she wrote, “that Facebook (which is derided by so many) can reduce me to productive, cleansing tears.”

There is plenty to critique and to worry about in contemporary electronic communication — its addictive nature, its effects on attention and time, and so on — but there’s also room in it to practice life-giving admiration. Food for others, and food for ourselves.

What I like about Lent

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Lent was not part of my experience growing up in a Mennonite church. It was something that “others” did (read: Catholics), and when one is young, what those others do often seems vastly inferior to what one’s own people do. We celebrated Good Friday and Easter and that was enough. Lent had an aura of gloominess and “works righteousness” about it, and we were beyond all that striving and uncertainty and climbing the stairs to heaven on our knees. (I speak as a child.)

But in the meanwhile, many Mennonite churches adopted various practices of the liturgical calendar, and I’ve come to appreciate Lent’s invitation to reflection, to deep consideration of Christ and the cross, to give up or to take on. To see oneself as one is: in the words of Thomas Merton — “I walk from region to region of my soul and I discover that I am a bombed city.” To hear oneself named “Beloved” in the midst of that desolation. 

One can do this any time, of course, but Ash Wednesday with its formal beginning, and the six Sundays leading up to Easter with their liturgies and sermons and reminders are helps along the way.  

So it’s a good time. But one of the things I like best about Lent is that it’s not a big deal in the wider culture. It’s not commercial. Having ashes imposed (I love that word for this ritual) to mark repentance and awareness of being “dust” seems, by now, in fact, the strange activity of a strange minority. 

Oh I know Mardi Gras is a big party and that many people participate in some form of Lent. I also know that Lent can take on a kind of trendiness. Just the other day I caught myself asking someone — casually, as if inquiring about the latest flavours at Starbucks — what they were giving up for Lent. As if it was any of my business. (It’s a fast, isn’t it?)

But mostly, Christians observe this odd season quietly, almost underground, like seeds swelling for the resurrection, while the real days get longer and winter turns to spring, while the Olympics play out, while ordinary life goes on. There are no cards to send or gifts to buy. No advertisements guilting us into spending, like at Christmas or the Hallmark holidays. No aisles of Lent toys or candies. No Lent carols playing in the malls. And nobody shouting “Happy Lent!” 

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Photo: facade, Black Creek (B.C.) M.B. Church