Monday, September 29, 2008
Sweet poetic justice
So, I was driving around town doing multiple errands today, and one of the areas I went through was a fairly long school zone at 40km/hr. So I was driving along at about 45km/hr, with some guy tail-gating me. He then swerves around me, gives me the finger through his window, drives another block, and then gets pulled over by a cop! Bwahahahahahahahaaaaaa, I couldn't help saying as I kept driving through the school zone. So there, bozo!
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Eulogy for the family farm
So I spent a good chunk of my weekend helping out a farmer friend harvesting his apple crop, which I try to do every year. So there I was, amongst his Jamaican workers, picking apples off of trees, deciding which ones were good enough to bring to market, and which ones would have to stay home and be used for personal use. Of course, those ones would be the ones determined "too ugly" or "too deformed" to eat, the ones that consumers would eschew, thinking there was something wrong with them, when really, a fruit growing too closely to a twig, or struck by inclement weather would be the only cause for the lack of perfection.
A few small anecdotal observations this year:
1. The staggering number of Jamaicans (I was told about 5,000+ people!) coming up every year through the temporary worker's visas, in order to try to make decent wages for their families back home, many of them coming from March through November, staying home for three months, and returning again, year after year, leaves me scratching my head. Why do we have such economic systems in place that we take cheap labour from other countries that takes them away from their families and communities for significant chunks of the year? Why are there no safeguards for them? The workers I met were quite happy with the situation that they found themselves in with my friend, but there are stories of outright abuse against some of these workers. Why do Canadians complain that there are not enough jobs for them, when perhaps it's simply that we don't want to participate in jobs for "untouchables"? We don't seem to mind hiring foreign workers to glean our food, to raise our children, and to construct our buildings, some of the most fundamental jobs of all, as long as we don't have to pay them too much.
2. A few climate change notes:
a) There were still many, many mosquitoes out and actively biting! This is a first for me, as I am quite used to them pretty much being gone from Southern Ontario by this time of year. I was told that they had noticed it was a strange summer, much warmer and wetter (well, that part we all noticed), allowing the mosquitoes to thrive longer than usual. How this bodes for their preparations for next year, well, I guess we'll see when we go camping!
b) They had also told me that there was much hail, besides the rain, this year, destroying a good quarter of their orchard. Arriving there, I noticed huge swaths of trees were gone - all destroyed by the repeated hailstorms they experienced this summer. This is a huge economic blow to a farmer. Which leads me to:
3. So, they are talking about packing it in. Another farmer, biting the dust. Another food producer, in decline and heading to extinction. At their age, the cost of replacing those trees in the orchard, and waiting for them to start producing fruit to pay back their costs, is not worth it. They had decided it wasn't worth the cost nor the time to try to rebuild. Which means they have a smaller number of trees with which to earn their living. Which means that farming becomes less and less viable, year after year. Which means we have that much fewer fruit available to Ontarians. I am not sure why this doesn't worry people, but it happens with stunning rapidity; I just had never encountered a farmer I knew personally, and seen the state of the farm, to actually see it in technicolour...
A few small anecdotal observations this year:
1. The staggering number of Jamaicans (I was told about 5,000+ people!) coming up every year through the temporary worker's visas, in order to try to make decent wages for their families back home, many of them coming from March through November, staying home for three months, and returning again, year after year, leaves me scratching my head. Why do we have such economic systems in place that we take cheap labour from other countries that takes them away from their families and communities for significant chunks of the year? Why are there no safeguards for them? The workers I met were quite happy with the situation that they found themselves in with my friend, but there are stories of outright abuse against some of these workers. Why do Canadians complain that there are not enough jobs for them, when perhaps it's simply that we don't want to participate in jobs for "untouchables"? We don't seem to mind hiring foreign workers to glean our food, to raise our children, and to construct our buildings, some of the most fundamental jobs of all, as long as we don't have to pay them too much.
2. A few climate change notes:
a) There were still many, many mosquitoes out and actively biting! This is a first for me, as I am quite used to them pretty much being gone from Southern Ontario by this time of year. I was told that they had noticed it was a strange summer, much warmer and wetter (well, that part we all noticed), allowing the mosquitoes to thrive longer than usual. How this bodes for their preparations for next year, well, I guess we'll see when we go camping!
b) They had also told me that there was much hail, besides the rain, this year, destroying a good quarter of their orchard. Arriving there, I noticed huge swaths of trees were gone - all destroyed by the repeated hailstorms they experienced this summer. This is a huge economic blow to a farmer. Which leads me to:
3. So, they are talking about packing it in. Another farmer, biting the dust. Another food producer, in decline and heading to extinction. At their age, the cost of replacing those trees in the orchard, and waiting for them to start producing fruit to pay back their costs, is not worth it. They had decided it wasn't worth the cost nor the time to try to rebuild. Which means they have a smaller number of trees with which to earn their living. Which means that farming becomes less and less viable, year after year. Which means we have that much fewer fruit available to Ontarians. I am not sure why this doesn't worry people, but it happens with stunning rapidity; I just had never encountered a farmer I knew personally, and seen the state of the farm, to actually see it in technicolour...
Thursday, September 18, 2008
FFT
I read this on someone else's blog and found it so eloquently put; this is one struggle that I have not been able to see clear around for quite some time, and I'd have to shamefully admit this is where I, and many of my friends and compatriots are heading... or perhaps we are already here...
"Traditionally Christianity has been the religion of the common people. Whenever the upper classes have adopted it in numbers, it has died. Respectability has almost always proved fatal to it.
The reasons back of this are two, one human and the other divine.
Schleiermacher has pointed out that at the bottom of all religion there lies a feeling of dependence, a sense of creature helplessness. The simple man who lives close to the earth lives also close to death and knows that he must look for help beyond himself; he knows that there is but a step between him and catastrophe. As he rises in the social and economic scale, he surrounds himself with more and more protective devices and pushes danger (so he thinks) farther and farther from him. Self-confidence displaces the feeling of dependence he once knew and God becomes less necessary to him. Should he stop to think this through he would know better than to place his confidence in things and people; but so badly are we injured by our moral fall that we are capable of deceiving ourselves completely and, if conditions favor it, to keep up the deception for a lifetime.
Along with the feeling of security that wealth and position bring comes an arrogant pride that shuts tightly the door of the heart to the waiting Savior. Our Very Important Man may indeed honor a church by joining it, but there is no life in his act. His religion is external and his faith nominal. Conscious respectability has destroyed him.
The second reason Christianity tends to decline as its devotees move up the social scale is that God will not respect persons nor share His glory with another. Paul sets this forth plainly enough in his First Corinthians epistle:
For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him (1 Corinthians 1:25–29).
When God sent His Son to redeem mankind He sent Him to the home of a working man and He grew up to be what we now call a peasant. When He presented Himself to Israel and launched into His earthly ministry, He was rejected by the respectable religionists and had to look for followers almost exclusively from among the poor, plain people. When the Spirit came and the church was founded, its first members were the socially unacceptable. For generations the church drew her numbers from among the lower classes, individual exceptions occurring now and again, of which Saul of Tarsus was the most noteworthy.
During the centuries since Pentecost the path of true Christianity has paralleled pretty closely the path Jesus walked when He was here on earth: it was to be rejected by the great and accepted by the lowly. The institutionalized church has certainly not been poor, nor has she lacked for great and mighty men to swell her membership. But this great church has had no power. Almost always the approval of God has rested upon small and marginal groups whose members were scorned while they lived and managed to gain acceptance only after they had been safely dead several score years.
Today we evangelicals are showing signs that we are becoming too rich and too prominent for our own good. With a curious disregard for the lessons of history we are busy fighting for recognition by the world and acceptance by society. And we are winning both. The great and the mighty are now looking our way. The world seems about to come over and join us. Of course we must make some concessions, but these have almost all been made already except for a bit of compromising here and there on such matters as verbal inspiration, special creation, separation and religious tolerance.
Evangelical Christianity is fast becoming the religion of the bourgeoisie. The well-to-do, the upper middle classes, the politically prominent, the celebrities are accepting our religion by the thousands and parking their expensive cars outside our church doors, to the uncontrollable glee of our religious leaders who seem completely blind to the fact that the vast majority of these new patrons of the Lord of glory have not altered their moral habits in the slightest nor given any evidence of true conversion that would have been accepted by the saintly fathers who built the churches.
Yes, history is a great teacher, but she cannot teach those who do not want to learn. And apparently we do not.
-A.W. Tozer
"Traditionally Christianity has been the religion of the common people. Whenever the upper classes have adopted it in numbers, it has died. Respectability has almost always proved fatal to it.
The reasons back of this are two, one human and the other divine.
Schleiermacher has pointed out that at the bottom of all religion there lies a feeling of dependence, a sense of creature helplessness. The simple man who lives close to the earth lives also close to death and knows that he must look for help beyond himself; he knows that there is but a step between him and catastrophe. As he rises in the social and economic scale, he surrounds himself with more and more protective devices and pushes danger (so he thinks) farther and farther from him. Self-confidence displaces the feeling of dependence he once knew and God becomes less necessary to him. Should he stop to think this through he would know better than to place his confidence in things and people; but so badly are we injured by our moral fall that we are capable of deceiving ourselves completely and, if conditions favor it, to keep up the deception for a lifetime.
Along with the feeling of security that wealth and position bring comes an arrogant pride that shuts tightly the door of the heart to the waiting Savior. Our Very Important Man may indeed honor a church by joining it, but there is no life in his act. His religion is external and his faith nominal. Conscious respectability has destroyed him.
The second reason Christianity tends to decline as its devotees move up the social scale is that God will not respect persons nor share His glory with another. Paul sets this forth plainly enough in his First Corinthians epistle:
For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength. Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him (1 Corinthians 1:25–29).
When God sent His Son to redeem mankind He sent Him to the home of a working man and He grew up to be what we now call a peasant. When He presented Himself to Israel and launched into His earthly ministry, He was rejected by the respectable religionists and had to look for followers almost exclusively from among the poor, plain people. When the Spirit came and the church was founded, its first members were the socially unacceptable. For generations the church drew her numbers from among the lower classes, individual exceptions occurring now and again, of which Saul of Tarsus was the most noteworthy.
During the centuries since Pentecost the path of true Christianity has paralleled pretty closely the path Jesus walked when He was here on earth: it was to be rejected by the great and accepted by the lowly. The institutionalized church has certainly not been poor, nor has she lacked for great and mighty men to swell her membership. But this great church has had no power. Almost always the approval of God has rested upon small and marginal groups whose members were scorned while they lived and managed to gain acceptance only after they had been safely dead several score years.
Today we evangelicals are showing signs that we are becoming too rich and too prominent for our own good. With a curious disregard for the lessons of history we are busy fighting for recognition by the world and acceptance by society. And we are winning both. The great and the mighty are now looking our way. The world seems about to come over and join us. Of course we must make some concessions, but these have almost all been made already except for a bit of compromising here and there on such matters as verbal inspiration, special creation, separation and religious tolerance.
Evangelical Christianity is fast becoming the religion of the bourgeoisie. The well-to-do, the upper middle classes, the politically prominent, the celebrities are accepting our religion by the thousands and parking their expensive cars outside our church doors, to the uncontrollable glee of our religious leaders who seem completely blind to the fact that the vast majority of these new patrons of the Lord of glory have not altered their moral habits in the slightest nor given any evidence of true conversion that would have been accepted by the saintly fathers who built the churches.
Yes, history is a great teacher, but she cannot teach those who do not want to learn. And apparently we do not.
-A.W. Tozer
Gurl power
One of the things that I have been pondering the last little while has been how to approach the issue of women in the church. Not that that should really be an issue in the first place, actually. However, I'm beginning to appreciate that there is a difference between true freedom and freedom-as-we-define-it, which tends to be freedom-to-do-whatever-I-want-damn-the-consequences. I also, for the most part, am under the persuasion that sola Scriptura does actually mean something significant, and that, I cannot ignore.
That being said, I cannot shake the notion that women, despite our inherent stronger abilities to communicate and to identify spiritually in comparison to our male counterparts, have been given the short shrift in the history of the Church. Without question, much of the suffering of women, be it belittlement, abuse, rape, identity as non-persons, castigation to the home, deprivation of education, raising children alone, or living in poverty (all of which, we are well aware, greatly affect far more women than they do men worldwide), can be linked to religious attitudes through the ages. This particularly, in a religion that promotes the idea that Jesus loved and elevated women to positions of respect, and that proclaims that there is no longer male nor female in Christ, bothers me. How can a faith that says such things, and claims to believe such things, continue to act in ways that clearly demonstrate it does not?
Certainly, I know we are fallen creatures, and the good we wish to do and be we fail to fulfill on many occasions. I know also that other divides, such as racial and socio-economic reconciliation, are even wider gaps that still need to be bridged.
But I also wrestle with the fact that church discipline also means something as well, and in our hyper-individualistic culture, just because my feelings or opinions don't jive with where things are at, doesn't necessarily mean that I'm right, and 'they' are wrong. There is a reason for tradition and practice, and I also fully understand the notion of how women are not actually subjugate and are not lowly creatures in the hierarchy of the church. I understand how we rationalize it in words, and I can agree with it, provided we actually lived that way. But we don't, and the practice of mutual submission is sorely lacking. I think also we tend to ignore how the Holy Spirit may be empowering and gifting women to do tasks that we then prevent them from doing, in the name of staying true.
Sigh. It is a difficult business.
That being said, I cannot shake the notion that women, despite our inherent stronger abilities to communicate and to identify spiritually in comparison to our male counterparts, have been given the short shrift in the history of the Church. Without question, much of the suffering of women, be it belittlement, abuse, rape, identity as non-persons, castigation to the home, deprivation of education, raising children alone, or living in poverty (all of which, we are well aware, greatly affect far more women than they do men worldwide), can be linked to religious attitudes through the ages. This particularly, in a religion that promotes the idea that Jesus loved and elevated women to positions of respect, and that proclaims that there is no longer male nor female in Christ, bothers me. How can a faith that says such things, and claims to believe such things, continue to act in ways that clearly demonstrate it does not?
Certainly, I know we are fallen creatures, and the good we wish to do and be we fail to fulfill on many occasions. I know also that other divides, such as racial and socio-economic reconciliation, are even wider gaps that still need to be bridged.
But I also wrestle with the fact that church discipline also means something as well, and in our hyper-individualistic culture, just because my feelings or opinions don't jive with where things are at, doesn't necessarily mean that I'm right, and 'they' are wrong. There is a reason for tradition and practice, and I also fully understand the notion of how women are not actually subjugate and are not lowly creatures in the hierarchy of the church. I understand how we rationalize it in words, and I can agree with it, provided we actually lived that way. But we don't, and the practice of mutual submission is sorely lacking. I think also we tend to ignore how the Holy Spirit may be empowering and gifting women to do tasks that we then prevent them from doing, in the name of staying true.
Sigh. It is a difficult business.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Visionaries wanted
Certainly, one of the things that I had been discouraged by this summer was the lack of passion and vision amongst my peers for Kingdom living. The feeling that people were more concerned about being social than about being different from the predominant culture. The feeling that mostly people were hanging around church to go for food or for beer afterwards than they were about falling down at the feet of Almighty God. The feeling that our scope and vision for the Kingdom barely extended beyond our small social circles, and had a barely registered notice for the larger planet. The feeling that people were more concerned about being good than about being righteous.
That being said, it did help me realize that I value those whose passion is the pursuit of the knowledge of God's heart. I realized also that it is those that I most deeply respect; more than those who do good, who perform justice, or who enjoy people more than they enjoy God. I also realized I didn't have to agree with their conclusions on God, but a solid, sincere, orthodox approach was sufficient for respect being due.
It was also heartening for me to be at the grand kick-off for Perspectives and to see the number of bodies there; people who are hopefully keen to learn about Kingdom and see how it grows, not just for here and now, but for all peoples and all time. That was a huge encouragement to me!
That being said, it did help me realize that I value those whose passion is the pursuit of the knowledge of God's heart. I realized also that it is those that I most deeply respect; more than those who do good, who perform justice, or who enjoy people more than they enjoy God. I also realized I didn't have to agree with their conclusions on God, but a solid, sincere, orthodox approach was sufficient for respect being due.
It was also heartening for me to be at the grand kick-off for Perspectives and to see the number of bodies there; people who are hopefully keen to learn about Kingdom and see how it grows, not just for here and now, but for all peoples and all time. That was a huge encouragement to me!
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Myth busters
You know what is a bit deflating? When a certain myth that you've always cherished gets blasted out of the water! I had recently had a discussion with some friends, and they completely demolished one slightly antiquated, though charming, myth that I held dear. Sigh. So, I had to re-orient my worldview and figure out what that meant to my reality. It's unfortunate when you believe something like, say, that peanut butter always tastes better with a touch of jam, but then get jarred to the fact that, no, mustard also goes well with it, as does bacon (what?!?!). How can this be? I've believed that all my life! Now what am I to do?
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