A Climenhaga Home

The Razor (Part 3)

2012-01-01T15:34:00.005-06:00

We just visited home for Christmas -- drive to Minneapolis; train to South Bend; rent a car and drive to Harrisburg. Drive back to Greenville and then South Bend. Fly to Minneapolis; and drive home. Events and people: wedding in Minneapolis, sister and brother-in-law in IN, parents and son and girlfriend (and other son and daughter-in-law [and dog] and other sister), mother, sons and wife+girlfriend and dog, friends in Minneapolis, and finally northwards and home! If it makes your head spin, ours certainly were.

At my Dad's a surprise awaited -- a razor sent by Gilette (I think) for our older son on his 16th birthday (13+ years ago). Since none of us lived anywhere nearby then, the razor became my father's instead. A double-edged razor of the old kind. Younger than my razor (two posts ago), but harking back to yet earlier days.

I did not use it. Vaughn did not take it. It remains with Dad, reminding us of days long past. We stand on the edge of a New Year, having shaved off 2011 and watched it fall to the ground behind us. I stand still between two razors -- a simple single-edged Schick, and a fancy dandy new Gilette arrived (of course) unsolicited in the mail. Between past and present, and embracing both.

The Devil's Razor

2011-11-26T18:23:00.002-06:00

Gillette must have read my blog. No sooner do I refer to my faithful Schick, used since 1968, than a package arrives in the mail. A promotional from Shoppers here in town, including a new ProGlide Gillette razor.

What to do? I had just proclaimed my undying loyalty to the razor that had stood the test of time, shaving my scanty beard for 43 years, when a competitor arrives in my house and sits invitingly on the counter! What to do?

I suppose I will use it. I guess I'll at least try it (although my light facial hair hardly needs four carefully calibrated blades to provide extra comfort. The devil's razor to tempt me, or an unexpected blessing from Shoppers? (I was going to say "from God", but I don't want to exalt a local pharmacy to that status.)

Penn State

2011-11-20T17:27:00.001-06:00

Joe Paterno. Extraordinary coach—remarkable man—enduring, committed to the right—now we add the flaw that reminds us he is as human as you and I.

What do we make of the events of the past month in which Paterno’s legacy was tarnished by the revelations of his former assistant, Sandusky, showering with many, many young boys while serving as their mentor and friend? What do we make of the likelihood that such “showering” was a cover or stimulus for pedophilia? What do we make of Paterno’s failure to pursue the discovery of this activity after Sandusky left Penn State, but while still a coach emeritus? What do we make of Sandusky’s claims that there was no sexual activity, only horsing around?

My sister wrote in her blog using the words from David’s lament at the death of Saul and Jonathon, “How are the mighty fallen!” She expressed well both the real goodness, indeed greatness of Paterno’s legacy, and the real and destructive failure of the university—including Paterno—to deal with the knowledge they had.

I don’t know what more the university should have done. Report the matter to the police? It seems that they did (although I find it difficult to know who really did what), but without pursuing the matter as vigorously as they should have. Reports were made up the chain of authority within the university. I hear people say, “Paterno was king, therefore he carries the greatest responsibility.” That makes little sense to me: Paterno, like any of us in the academic world, worked within a chain of authority, which he honoured as he should have. Certainly that chain failed.

I do know that we can hardly grasp how destructive Sandusky’s activity was. I think of a friend who tried to respond to similar activity within the church, and found the aftermath so destructive that he eventually took his own life. Even if the actions had not been with young boys, what was done with the victims without their consent was and is terribly destructive.

I still do not know how culpable Sandusky was. We’re waiting for the victims to tell their story, so that we can evaluate Sandusky’s claims that he was “horsing around”, but did not engage in sexual actions with the boys. On the face of it the claim seems unlikely, but we must listen to the boys before we make up our minds. I still do not know if Paterno should have been fired. He was at least naïve in his response, underestimating the seriousness of Sandusky’s actions.

I notice several other facts about our society in the aftermath.
There was a remarkable rush to judgment, with the sports media especially deciding they knew all the facts from the start.
We readily judge past actions based on present knowledge. It’s ironic that Paterno the football coach should be condemned by Monday morning quarterbacks. He himself agrees now, with what he knows now, that he should have done more. As a society we are convinced that we would have done more than he did—so good is our view after the event.
We continue to underestimate the destructive potential of wrong actions, such as Sandusky’s actions in showering with the boys. The showers may have begun innocently; they can hardly have continued so. (I am as sceptical as anyone, although I want to wait for a fuller version of the story.)

I think of one good result of Paterno’s final failure. I listened to the first game after he was fired, on Lion radio on the internet. Every commercial break included information about child abuse and efforts to persuade us to take abuse more seriously and bring it to an end. When Penn State was driving for what would have been the winning score (except that the drive failed), the students took up their iconic chant: “We are! Penn State!” It was a spine-chilling moment, and then there was a timeout—and a radio break. The chant was replaced with the reminder to end sexual abuse of children. The emotion of the game was framed in proper perspective.

In time perhaps we can recover a real sense of Paterno’s enduring legacy—a great man and great coach, who is as human as you and I, flawed and able to make serious mistakes in assessing another person’s actions. In time perhaps we can rediscover college football as a wonderful pastime. Framed within the far more serious and enduring task of relating to each other and taking care of each other the way that God intended us to. Ending abuse—abuse of children, abuse of any other person—is greater than any Penn State game. I think Paterno would agree and would be glad to see steps towards that goal as the best part of his own life. I hope he would agree.

The Razor of Time

2011-11-15T17:10:00.007-06:00

In 1968 I bought my first (and only) razor. Then last month we visited Nevin and Ali in South Bend. It was a good visit. I attended a conference in Elkhart (the final celebratory gathering of the Global Mennonite History Project) and Lois spent time with N and A in their new house.

In order to do this together, we flew to TO, then drove from TO to SB in a rental car. That meant that I had to place my razor in the checked luggage for the firtst and last stretch of the journey. In between we drove. It was a good drive south, except for the hour spent sitting in line at the border at Sarnia. A small tip: Don't cross when everyone is going home.

The visit and conference were great. Breakfast with my sister and brother-in-law. A banquet at which we (Lois and Nevin and Ali joined me) sat with Paul and Nancy and reminisced and enjoyed. Then the drive back thorugh Sarnia -- five minutes max this time. A small tip: Sunday afternoons are good for crossing the border.

Monday was excellent. Spent the night in Vaughn's micro-rental: 300 square feet near the U of T. Lovely spot (and small). Walked around the university and environs, and ate a breakfast in one place and lunch in another (a lovely Thai restaurant). Then flew back to Wpg. I put the razor in the checked suitcase.

But when we unpacked, I could not find my razor! Forty-three years of faithful service, and my razor was missing. I considered buying a new one -- discarded the thought. i emailed Vaughn and Nevin and asked them to search their residences. Vaughn's search was quick (small space); Nevin's was longer (two-story house). Both agreed: no razor.

I survived for two weeks on disposables then made a final search of the now empty suitcase. There was a soft plastic container in the suitcase. There inside was the razor -- lovingly placed there by Lois to protect it and the contents of the suitcase. How she missed it in unpacking, and how I missed it in looking there before that night I don't know.

But there it was. And now that part of my life is complete again. A symbol of continuity in the midst of so many other changes. My razor.

Change

2011-09-14T11:09:00.002-05:00

Waves rolling, heaping up
Overwhelming crushing force of water pouring down
Deep deep breath
Face into the crash and roar
Riding through froth and foam and cataract
Of change.

Promises

2011-07-31T17:03:00.006-05:00

Thirty-four years ago Lois and I were married. July 30, 1977--a day that lives in my memory, a good day, and the beginning of life as I know it.

I cannot imagine life without Lois, and I do not want anything other than what I have been given.

On our anniversary Lois gave me a little book edited by Scott Peck, a collection of sayings about love and marriage. Peck observes the way that his own marriage of 40 years (at the time of writing) illustrated Kübler-Ross's well-known five stages of grief: denial that the romantic love of the honeymoon phase had died; negotiations trying to recapture that first glorious stage; anger when it became clear that married life is a journey quite different from the courtship; depression as the realization of what married life is really like settled in; and finally acceptance of that reality. Peck observes that once the couple come to that final stage there is a depth of union and commitment and joy unknown to the young couple, and available only to those who persist through the whole journey.

It makes sense to me then that the first 20 years of our life together--lived in Indiana and Pennsylvania and Kentucky and Zambia and Zimbabwe--were more difficult than the past 14--since we moved to Manitoba. The first 20 were good years, but they were the learning years, the years in which we discovered what those promises meant, which we had made to each other so earnestly and yet with so little understanding. These later years have been richer precisely because they are the later years, the years in which the fruit of the first years come to maturity. There are still struggles: Struggle and life go together. But there is a safety and strength in our relationship that allows us to deal with the struggles of life.

My mind goes back to those first promises. We decided that we wanted to write our own vows. I think now that I would use the vows written by the church and shared by so many other couples through the centuries. Perhaps a bit of tweaking--to love, honour, and obey sounds strange to children of the Sixties, unless we can promise to obey each other (which would at least come closer to Ephesians 5: 21 than requiring the woman alone to obey does). But I have a greater appreciation for the strength of tradition now than I did then. Perhaps one of the effects of growing older, perhaps greater maturity, perhaps.

But we wrote our own vows anyway. I remember the dress rehearsal. We had decided to recite our vows from memory. I did not yet have them memorized. Lois was--shall we say concerned. I was not particularly worried, inasmuch as I was active in theatre at the time and knew that I had my lines well enough to say them the next day. And of course we both spoke our lines from memory. No problem.

Actually, a small problem. I have no idea today what I promised. Lois claims that it includes such things as, "I will always answer the telephone and write all letters that need writing." I'm pretty sure that those specific promises were not in our vows. And then she made a discovery. When our sons were visiting, she was going through boxes in the basement looking at old clippings and other memorabilia--and then she found the vows. I wanted to close with them, but we can't find them again. We'll look. Maybe some day I'll find out what I promised 34 years ago. For now I know it was a good deal. I've kept my promise (whatever it was). Lois has kept hers. The journey continues, and I like it.

Debt Crises and the Stanley Cup

2011-07-08T12:32:00.002-05:00

Some time ago I was in a discussion about the various political upheavals we have been experiencing. Riots in Wisconsin (budget cuts), riots in Greece (budget cuts and debt crisis), riots in Vancouver (hockey – Canada has its own version of what is worth rioting for), and on and on. One member of our conversation laid the blame for all our troubles squarely at the foot of socialism. Of course Canadians would riot in Vancouver: We’re socialists!

One is tempted to tune the speaker out. He has (as they say) a bee in his bonnet about capitalism and socialism. Republicans (in the USA) are good; Democrats are bad. America in general is good; Canada in general is bad. International politics buttresses the argument – the United Kingdom is clearly in trouble because it is even more socialist than Canada. (Never mind that Canada and the UK both have Tory governments; when the bee is buzzing it doesn’t look for full facts.)

I’m sure I have misrepresented my friend’s viewpoint, but not by much. It sparks two thoughts for me. One is stated quickly: Resorting to this kind of stereotyping cuts off discussion, which is unfortunate. When I press him beyond his stereotypes, he shows himself to be thoughtful and intelligent, with good reasons for the positions he holds. His positions may be incomplete and a bit arbitrary, but so are mine. I wish that we could have more discussion in which we could both give reasons and leave out the stereotypes: We have something to learn from each other.

The second is the larger, more important point. When one discounts a group of people and all that they say, one tends to mis-diagnose the reasons for – in this case – the riots in various places. In the example I began with, attributing the riots in Vancouver to socialism in Canada is nonsense, but a bee in the bonnet buzzes whenever the enemy is in sight. The result is failure to see real causes, and thus failure to deal with real causes.

What was the real cause? I don’t know. But I contrast the events in Greece and London and Vancouver with the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan. If any event should have led to rioting and looting on a mass scale, these events could have. But instead we read reports of Japanese people queueing quietly, remaining orderly under great stress? Why?

I don’t think that the difference between Vancouver and Japan has anything to do with political systems, some sort of socialist-capitalist divide. Nor is it simply a difference between Asians and North Americans – there are so many Asians in Vancouver that one could look for similarity on that account rather than so sharp a difference.

I would locate the difference in the larger Canadian and larger Japanese context. Canada has built a society on individualism writ large. Privacy laws elevate the individual above community. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms serves as a fundamental social and legal document to enshrine the individual as the basic building block of society. Japanese society is more communally-oriented, with politeness and harmony enshrined as the fundamental qualities needed to live.

Canadians are called “polite”, especially in comparison to our American cousins. But we would lose any politeness competition between Canada and Japan. Noel Paul Stookey (of the 1960s folk group, Peter, Paul and Mary) tells a story of performing in Japan. He comments that when they met anyone in Japan, they realized that they could never outdo them in polite behaviour.

When a great tragedy strikes – such as the earthquake and tsunami, or the loss of the Stanley Cup (I know that’s a lesser tragedy, but hey!)– underlying social values are revealed. The Japanese people continued to seek harmony and help each other. The crowd in Vancouver let off steam by rioting. Now Canadians have shown the ability to work together and help each other out in times of crisis. The floods that we experience regularly here on the prairies show Canadians at their communal and helpful best. But what is most clear to me is that social analyses such as my friend’s – it’s because they’re socialist – are badly misplaced.

I am working at this myself (more or less successfully): I want to move past easy stereotypes and avoid laying blame quickly in the various crises we face. I think that certain social and political positions make the best sense, but those with whom I disagree strongly often have significant wisdom for all of us to include in our social and political decisions. And we have a much better chance at solving the problems before us (such as the debt crisis) if we stop blaming each other and listen to each other more carefully.

A simple, almost naive, conclusion, but true nonetheless.

Easter Thoughts

2011-04-27T18:10:00.001-05:00

I liked Easter. Holy Week moves me deeply as we progress through the depths to the greatest joy possible: He is Risen!

Some of us made that statement our facebook status on Resurrection Sunday: Christ is risen! On one such site one person (who happens to be a profess or philosophy, but that is a detail) left a comment as a question: Why do we use that tense construction? Why not “He has risen”? Which is after all what those who were first at the grave heard and repeated. “He is not here. He has risen, just as he said he would.”

He is risen. A couple of years ago I took a grammar course at Providence (AL 2), a venture back into the classroom from the student’s viewpoint. As we approached Easter that year I asked the instructor the same question, since it has rattled around in my mind for many years. Her response: “Subject + verb + complement.” that is: he is the Risen One. Like saying the grass is green: He is risen.

So what? As I thought about it, the simple grammatical shift from “He has risen” (verb in the past tense) to “He is risen” (Risen as adjectival complement) means something important. “Risen” is not just something Jesus did one day two thousand or so years ago. Risen is who Jesus is. He changed reality at its core and brought new life into the centre of death.

When Paul says that we walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4), he expresses this new reality. The people who have walked in darkness have seen great light; they have moved from the realm of death into the realm of life. They – and we – walk in the resurrection.

He (subject) is (verb) Risen (complement). Reality is changed forever,

Political Speech

2011-02-20T16:20:00.000-06:00

As an American who is now also a Canadian, politics is a subject I venture into with trepidation. It is easier to simply get in trouble than to say anything constructive. Nevertheless, here is one thought only, echoing some thoughts my sister has expressed in her own blog: Resolved, that we state our position without recourse to fear-mongering.

Using fear is a potent weapon, more common south of the border than here in Canada. (Our Canadian version of “fear” is to end an argument by saying, “But that’s what they do in the USA!”) Voices on the right assure that Obama is the end of democracy as we know it and seek to rally the faithful against the greatest threat that America has ever seen. A few short years ago voices on the left claimed just as shrilly that Bush had made us a joke to the rest of the civilized world: his lack of intelligence and generally belligerent posture would destroy us if we didn’t vote him out.

There are real issues at stake: Bush’s brand of international policy was too aggressive for me; Obama’s commitment to universally-available health care costs too much for some Americans. But the use of fear as a primary weapon makes any real discussion of the issues almost impossible.

I noted this factor in, of all places, the American government’s response to the crisis turned victory in Cairo. I was driving and tuned in the AM radio. Rush Limbaugh’s voice filled the car – with his firm belief that Obama was primarily to blame for all that has gone wrong in Egypt. Say what? The only way that he could conclude that Obama was to blame for something that had almost nothing to do with him was by starting with the premiss that Obama is to blame for everything – a virtual anti-Christ. I tuned in to the next station as quickly as I could: 94.3 with music of the 60s and the 70s, restoring some sanity in my Corolla headed north on route 59.

What frustrates me in these conversations is the fact that voices on the left and voices on the right have significant contributions to make to discussion of the issues facing the USA. Social conservatives can help bring sense to abortion rights that trump any right of the unborn. Social liberals can help bring sanity to fiscal policies that leave the marginalised stuck outside the system. Fiscal conservatives can help us to find ways to avoid national bankruptcy. Libertarians can help us to reign in government control of every area of life. Classic liberals can help us find more progressive ways for the government to help in every area of life.

But a constructive discussion can take place only when the participants show respect for each other, listen carefully to each other, express their own viewpoint without using fear as a weapon, and recognize their own limited grasp of the whole picture.

I apply this critique to myself in the area of climate change. Those who see the danger of planetary destruction are as likely to try to scare everyone else into some sort of sanity by threatening doomsday if we don’t use long-life bulbs, recycle everything, take to bicycles, and eat locally. Well, the dangers are real; but it does not follow that those who are not convinced that climate change is caused by human activity therefore hate the planet. Or that they will change their actions if scared enough.

Better than trying to scare everyone is a straightforward description of one’s position. In my case, that takes the form of asking the question: How should a Christian treat God’s creation? One can give positive suggestions, with passing reference to the problems – rather than focussing on the problems and persuading everyone to become either profoundly depressed or a complete sceptic.

So, resolved: That we state our position without recourse to fear-mongering. Speak with respect, with passion, with a real belief that the other is a real person who also cares deeply about life and about what is good. Disagreeing with others is fine, healthy even. Trying to destroy the other is not.

Postscript: Part of my commitment to constructive speech is to avoid the “fair and balanced” claim of FOXNews or the “no rant no slant” claim of NPR News. We all have a point of view: Simple honesty allows us to express it, and respect allows us to benefit from the perspectives of other people.

Being Sixty (2): The Minnemingo Effect

2011-01-29T20:10:00.003-06:00

Getting older teaches something, something I should always have known. I am not in control. Of anything. Forty-two years ago on the day before my 18th birthday I floated down the Minnemingo (or Yellow Breeches Creek) in flood. dale and I began our canoe trip celebrating the end of the semester. A half hour later he almost finished it grieving the end of life. He ran from bridge to bridge under which the Minnemingo flowed, wondering if I had drowned, while I held with desperate strength on to the overturned canoe. Then Dale found me, and some nearby fishermen pulled me out, a bigger catch than usual!

At 18 I felt little outward fear -- the stereotypical invincible teenager. I feel the danger in retrospect, but then, not so much. Today, safe in my chair and pen in hand, I feel the river sweep me on, out of control towards a destination I cannot properly guess. "I am a stranger here within a foreign land ... ." I know that the destination is heaven: Siyekhaya ezulwini! True enough; but I cannot guess clearly what that means.

Meanwhile the Minnemingo effect is at work. Time flows in flood, each moment washing over me remorselessly. Some moments are wonderful; some are quiet; some painful. they all sweep me down the Minnemingo towards the great river (the Susquehanna, in earthly geography; the Jordan in some greater dimension). And I'm still clinging to my little canoe with desperate strength.

Life is good. And I am not in control.

Fritzie!

2010-07-12T20:06:00.005-05:00

We have a dog. A lovely mostly black (with a bit of grey and white) longhaired miniature dachshund. We got him our first Christmas in Manitoba, so his age and our life in Steinbach have run together. Thirteen years old now. He and I fit together. We tend to be feisty at the same time, and creaky at the same time. I watch him stumble along some days and know that our old bones are moving on similar trajectories.

Last night he and I had a contretemps. We had friends over for a cookout, which included grilling corn on the cob in memory of African days. While we were eating our hamburgers Lois realized that he had gotten one of the corn cobs we had laid aside.

Now in the picture above and below, Fritzie is a delightful cute and cuddly dog. But with the corn cob in his mouth he was the mighty hunter with his prey. We would have let him chew his fill, but past experience suggested that he would then be sick. Worse, if he choked on a bit of corn cob, I might have to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on a dachshund! Not a happy thought.

I broke off a piece of nearby hamburger and went over to him. Fritzie ran. He is normally convinced that I am up to no good, and he is sometimes right. So he ran. He would have run from anyone and anything to protect his hold on the cob. I ran after him trying to get the hamburger in front of his nose. Drop the cob, eat the hamburger, and let me take the corn cob to safety. No such luck.

Finally I grabbed his collar and held him still, twisting the collar to get him to release the cob. With a yelp he let go of the cob, turned his head and caught my wrist with his teeth. Nothing deep or serious, just a scraping of the teeth across my wrist, but the blood flowed freely. I grabbed the cob, threw it on the table outside where we were eating, and ran for the bathroom.

I let cold water run over my forearm, and then applied rubbing alcohol to kill any bacteria. After about 15 minutes we decided that I would go to Emergency (with as low a level of emergency as one can think of) to make sure that the wound was cleaned and properly dressed -- and to get a tetanus shot. Three hours waiting for five minutes of medical care; but the ER personnel were gracious, and didn't laugh at me (at least not out loud). And I got my shot and my dressing, and finally also got my dessert back at the house.

Our guests spent half of that time waiting with me, which was a shame with the lovely weather we had yesterday. But I appreciated it; much better than waiting alone. Now Fritzie is lying at my feet as though we're best friends. Which we are. But i wish he wouldn't hunt so aggressively when there are defenseless corn cobs lying around.

Turning Sixty (1)

2010-06-26T20:52:00.001-05:00

I used to think that age was unimportant. I enjoyed having people think that I was younger than my actual age, a state of affairs that lasted until about age 50. I remember quite clearly the evening a group of faculty went out to a restaurant. The hostess asked if I qualified for the Seniors’ Discount: I had gone from about 40 to 60 overnight! (I think it was something to do with my hair – sandy or reddish one day; white the next.)

I remember turning 40. We were in Zimbabwe at the time. Mike Burgess and I are about the same age, so we comforted each other as we went over the hill together. I remember that I could joke about it because the truth was, I didn’t feel old. I felt like 30, not 40. Fifty was a different story: it was the beginning of feeling older too.

Lois gave me a wonderful present: 50 birthday celebrations for my 50th birthday. We finally finished the last one as part of my 60th! And of course I was in good health, able to enjoy life in so many different ways; but I felt the reality of years, whatever the case.

Now 60. I feel older indeed. I enjoy playing recreational soccer in a six a side soccer league in Winnipeg. I am able to climb many many steps up to my office in the seminary five days a week. I met my old friend, Mike, last year. We were both 59 this time, but the years have weighed more heavily on him than on me. So why should I feel anything other than an appreciation for the years I have had?

The process of aging is difficult for us to comprehend. North Americans like to control their destiny. We have built a society (both in Canada and in the United States) on controlling our fate. But you can’t control time. Day by day, year by year, time moves on. We say that age is only a state of mind; but the years continue to move, whatever one feels. Your state of mind may help you feel better about it, but it does not stop the process – or even slow it down.

I suspect that the particular piece of “60” that I need to come to terms with is precisely this remorseless march of days. Since you cannot stop or slow (or speed up or otherwise change) the movement of time, one choice remains: to embrace it.

I haven’t gotten there yet. I played my first 6-on-6 soccer game the week after my birthday – and scored my first goal as a 60-year old. (I made sure that the goalie, someone I’ve played against often enough, heard about that afterwards!) I am still climbing the stairs to the seminary. I am grateful, truly grateful, for health and strength, for the ability to keep reading and processing and working in my professional field. I want to embrace my age.

But the struggle remains. I wish sometimes that I could go back to 40 and stay there – at least physically. I have no desire to re-visit earlier stages of life generally. Once was enough. But our senses live within our physical body, and the body is what ages. My inner self still sometimes feels like the 15-year old who first moved from southern Africa to Pennsylvania, or the 20-year old at Messiah College, or any of the other stages between then and now. But the body ages, and the struggle remains.

If anyone can solve the life-cycle for me, let me know; but for now I continue to thank God for the health I have, the years he has given me, and the days ahead.

Individual Rights

2010-05-24T14:19:00.002-05:00

Recently my sister had an interesting blog on going to the movies. We share an upbringing in which we did not go to movies. I still don’t, although only because I don’t enjoy watching movies; she is now (in my eyes) something of a connoisseur.

One of the first movies she went to was “The Cardinal”, which includes the following (as she my sister describes it: “What I particularly remember about this movie is one scene where the central character, who is by now a cardinal (hence the title), learns that his sister is pregnant. When she is due to deliver her child, she learns that the baby's head is too large for the mother to safely deliver. The cardinal is faced with a decision. Give permission for the fetus's head to be crushed, and the sister thereby saved OR refuse permission in which case his sister will die.” The Cardinal chooses the latter.

That memory connected in her blog to a recent news story, quoted here from an NPR report: “Last November, a 27-year-old woman was admitted to St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. She was 11 weeks pregnant with her fifth child, and she was gravely ill. According to a hospital document, she had ‘right heart failure,’ and her doctors told her that if she continued with the pregnancy, her risk of mortality was ‘close to 100 percent.’” An administrator at the Catholic hospital decided that the abortion was permissible under Catholic Law to save the life of the mother and authorized the procedure. When the administrator’s bishop learned of it, he excommunicated her.

So the question, to which many Americans and Canadians give the answer as self-evident: “What is wrong with these church officials?” Even asking the question that way suggests that our categories are such that we cannot understand what is going on in their minds. We start with such differences in our basic assumptions about life that we don’t even know what has actually happened.

In the rest of this blog, my own short (short) version of the problem: The basic assumption that negates the decisions of the cardinal and the bishop is our cultural commitment to the supremacy of personal individual choice. The USA was built on the search for freedom, especially the freedom of the individual to run his/her own life as far as possible. In this respect Libertarians and Pro-Choice are alike (however differently any individual libertarian and pro-choice person may be) – they share their commitment to the supremacy of individual rights.

I know that this value is also at the centre of the way that I process life; but I am uneasy with it. The study if cultures reveals many different patterns in different societies, balancing the rights of individuals and the importance of the larger community in a variety of ways. I share our cultural commitment to the centrality of the individual; but I also believe that commitment to some larger whole is necessary for social and mental and emotional health. The movie and news story that we stated with pit the right of the individual against the value of community and conclude that the right of the individual cannot be limited in any way.

But what if the individuals in question have voluntarily chosen the larger community (in this case, the church) and voluntarily submitted themselves to the authority of the larger community? When we ask this question, people think of various tragic situations, such as Jonestown, and conclude that we dare not ever allow such a commitment. But devaluing this commitment can also become oppressive. How can we say to the individuals involved, “You have no right to choose to be part of a larger community like this”?

I do not like the choice made by the cardinal or the bishop: I think they got it wrong. But I wonder what we lose when we throw their options out the window. I am at least equally sure that a tyranny of individualism is no better than a tyranny of collectivism.

Preparation

2010-03-20T14:33:00.002-05:00

Two weeks ago I attended a board meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. Now Manitoba is generally colder and more wintry than Atlanta, so I enjoyed the relative warmth of Georgia in March. I didn't reckon with the dead grass season, so I was disappointed not to find green grass and blooming trees, but the meetings were good, and I could enjoy a trip back to Atlanta sometime. While travelling, I wrote the following as a way of coping with the 1 a.m. start to my first day of travel.

Friday morning one A.M.
For to early to be ... morning.
Quick shower, coffee, toast to go
Two hours and a half on the road.
A flight waits patiently
For groggy passengers, half asleep.
An hour later we land
Short flight -- long drive --
Still too early to be morning.

A new flight waits in turn,
Soon we climb -- higher, faster, further.
Voices pierced by one strong voice
The announcement cutting through conversations
Replacing sports and casual talk with
The business of flying ... and landing.

On the ground walking and walking,
Long passages, sign after sign calls out
"Baggage" -- somewhere ahead.
Pictures spring out, huge rocks on the walls.
Home! Ngivela eMatonjeni!
Words spring out within the rock pictures.
Nkosi sikelela iAfrika.
Thoughts of home, unbidden, unexpected
Interlude before we consummate our flights
And meet.

6 March 2010

Old Friends

2010-02-08T20:45:00.005-06:00

Part One

Many years ago when the world was young, 1960 to be precise, our family moved back from a six month stay in Pennsylvania to what felt like home to me. We left the green grass of Pennsylvania behind and sailed off (it was long enough ago that ships were the cheapest mode of travel) to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Deepest darkest Africa, so my friends thought. To me, home.

I re-entered the school I had left six months earlier -- standard three at Hilside Junior School (which was, being interpreted, Grade Five in North America). I sat down in my new class at my old school beside a new friend, Norgrove Penny. Norgrove and I made friends quickly, as 10 year old boys sometimes do.

The next day Norgrove brought me something from his Dad. An envelope. With a picture inside. "My Dad says to take this to your father." I did.

Part Two

That same year Dr. Cherer Penny, a doctor for the Rhodesian Railways, flew across the oceans from Zimbabwe to the United States. He went to Chicago, to a medical course that would help him stay current with the latest medical practices and improve his skills for his work in Bulawayo. Being a thrifty man, he stayed at the local YMCA, while most of the American doctors attending the course stayed in nicer hotels. But not all. One other man stayed at the Y with him, Dr. Alvin Heise. Dr. Heise and Dr. Penny shared something also, a strong Christian commitment. On the weekend Dr. Heise invited Dr. Penny to his home in Ohio to visit his family and attend church with him. (Below: Drs Heise, left, and Penny, right.)

Dr. Heise's pastor was Rev. Andrew Slagenweit. Andrew and his wife Ruth were delighted to meet this Rhodesian doctor, especially since Andrew's sister, Dorcas, was moving back to Bulawayo with her husband, David Climenhaga.

Part Three

The stories came together. I took the envelope home, all unsuspecting. My Dad asked me what it was. "I don't know. My friend from school gave it to me to give to you." Dad opened the envelope and found a picture of his brother-in-law, Pastor Andrew Slagenweit, taken by Dr. Penny on his visit to Chicago and Ohio not long before. "How did you get this?" Incredulous question. "From my friend, Norgrove." "Who is Norgrove?" "My friend at school." How did he get this ...." You can imagine the questions that flowed, with no answer possible.

My parents and Norgrove's parents got together of course, and all was revealed. Norgrove and I played cricket and soccer and remained friends, but only for two years. Dr. Penny accepted a call from the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada to open a clinic in Hay River in the Northwest Territories of Canada. I suppose all the Canadian doctors knew how far north Hay River is! So he went, and eventually moved to British Columbia. Norgrove may still live there, but that is another story. We have not seen each other since.

I have seen Dr. Heise, though. I married his daughter, Lois. Our stories come together more than 32 years ago -- his encounter with Dr. Penny and mine with Norgrove.

Christmas 2009

2010-01-03T20:44:00.002-06:00

We just travelled to visit our sons and my Dad and my mother-in-law for Christmas and New Year's. It was a good trip, spending time with family from both sides. A basic feature of such a Christmas is driving -- three days to Minnesota, then Indiana, then Pennsylvania; and back to Ohio, to Indiana, then Wisconsin (just before the Minnesota border), and home. Here follows an impressionistic reflection of the trip.

Driving to snow and slush we know lie ahead.
Driving from clear skies, wide open space left behind.
Driving, opening a way to people we love and miss.

Cold behind, deepest cold. Cold ahead, damp and biting.
Driving past rock outliers, seen by peoples past.
Driving into trucks, traffic, roads of mayhem and mess.
Closer, closer to those we miss and love.

Tunnel after tunnel, deep in rock,
Outside signals blocked and lost.
Toll piles on toll as trees and mountains
Crowd around our car, driving, driving home.
Dogwood -- Chestnut -- County Road -- Cripe.
Each place a piece of home with those we love
And miss when we are home

then

Driving, driving back from turnpike to interstate
To 10 and 59 turning north.
Driving north, sun behind and cold ahead,
Darkness falling early, moon shining bright on snow,
Driving back to deepest cold clear sky
And home. (Away from those we love and miss.)

Daryl Climenhaga, 3 January 2010

Advent Lessons and Carols

2009-12-02T21:18:00.003-06:00

I am listening to the Lessons and Carols for the Choral Evensong in the first week of Advent from Rochester Cathedral in England, courtesy of the BBC. I appreciate these readings and carols, partly for the beauty of the music and partly for the depth of the readings.

Advent is a season of hope in the church's year. We anticipate the celebration of Christmas, remembering how the birth of a baby proved greater than the machinations of rulers and powers in the ancient world. The memory nurtures hope in us that the trials and terrors of our world also may prove weaker than the small blessings of our lives. A baby is born, and thousands of soldiers are sent to Afghanistan. Only hope can say that the birth is the greater event; but so proclaims Advent.

This weekend we have our annual Festival of Christmas Praise at Providence. I have a similar response to the readings and music each year in our own celebration. Hope requires constant nurture in a dangerous world.

But another note sounds in the readings and songs. Each year the hymn, "Lo, he comes with clouds descending", begins the Advent season, reminding us that the hope found in remembering the birth of Jesus is linked with the hope of his return.

Lo! He comes with clouds descending,
Once for favored sinners slain;
Thousand thousand saints attending,
Swell the triumph of His train:
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
God appears on earth to reign.

Every eye shall now behold Him
Robed in dreadful majesty;
Those who set at naught and sold Him,
Pierced and nailed Him to the tree,
Deeply wailing, deeply wailing, deeply wailing,
Shall the true Messiah see.

The dear tokens of His passion
Still His dazzling body bears;
Cause of endless exultation
To His ransomed worshippers;
With what rapture, with what rapture, with what rapture
Gaze we on those glorious scars!

Yea, Amen! let all adore Thee,
High on Thine eternal throne;
Savior, take the power and glory,
Claim the kingdom for Thine own;
O come quickly! O come quickly! O come quickly!
Come, Lord, come!

This link from youtube gives a good performance of this hymn, which is most sobering and stands alongside the hope of Advent with a kind of warning that we usually avoid today. The second verse, sung in the Choral Evensong as printed above, speaks of judgment on those who oppose the Messiah.

Judgment is a theme we prefer to omit from our thoughts about God or about the end of all things. But I don't see how to believe in hope if it does not also promise judgment. Revelation 6 pictures the saints persecuted through the ages as sitting within God's throne and crying out, "How Long, O Lord, will those who persecute us triumph?" Revelation then pictures these same saints as triumphant themselves, worshipping God with all evil removed.

I live in a world filled with evil -- from Zimbabwe to Afghanistan, and deep within my own countries of the United States and Canada. If that evil cannot be removed (because we are squeamish), I don't know how to anticipate Christ's return with any real hope. Or for that matter, how to live in the present with real hope for the future.

These thoughts are, I think, at one level somewhat simplistic or banal; but I note that they echo the lessons and carols. The lessons and carols themselves echo long and careful reflection on the core of Christian faith. As I said at the beginning, I appreciate these readings and carols, partly for the beauty of the music and partly for the depth of the readings.

More Friends

2009-11-23T20:09:00.002-06:00

To restate my last post in quasi-poetic form:

Circles of life, within without
We sit, stand, walk together and alone.
Someone said: We are human only with people:
Umuntu gumuntu ngabantu.
We seek our circle.

I have heard somewhere
We must all as they say
Individuate.
Fusion of self makes bad health.
I am because I am.

God says: “I am.” We are
Because God is, and God made us
To find ourselves in us,
And only so to find God.

I have heard somewhere of soul’s dark night.
Forced individuation, isolation, atomization,
Alone in darkness
Pulsing with life yet lost
In wilderness of One.

Soul’s dark night brings blessing
So they say
So I believe (and have found).
Forced to one’s need in awareness of need
The place of pain and life.

When we stand again and enter light
We cannot remain
Alone.
We reach out our hands seeking
Communal life, pulses mingling and merging
In shared humanness, Ubuntu,
Life together.

If you love God,
Love brother, sister, neighbour, friend –
Else call God liar
And lose yourself as human.
In God we become each other’s
Bread and wine: Christ appears.

Friends

2009-11-22T15:22:00.003-06:00

Over the past year I have spent a certain amount of energy in thinking about friendship. For whatever reason I have thought about the question of who my friends are probably more than I really need to. I know that others also ask this question: a facebook friend posted his status some time ago as “I’m finding out who my real friends are”; so here are some ideas that have surrounded the exercise, but without consideration of who my real friends are. (That question is one that does not belong in any public space!)

First thought: I was at a conference last February where one of the presenters described an idea behind the way that some emerging churches in Australia structure their lives: Everyone needs three circles of friends – a work circle, a community circle, and a church circle. These three circles are, of course, in addition to one’s own family circle. As I reflect on my own processing, I realize that I tend to overemphasize one or other of these circles. I sometimes try to load the whole of my friendship needs on to church, or on to work, or on to community (i.e., those people in my life who fit together as my friends, but are not part of my church family or my work group).

Friendship circles, especially in the individualized West, are usually not strong enough to bear the whole weight of any one person’s friendship needs. Therefore I need to nurture each one in its place and not call on any one circle to bear the whole load of friendship needs. Socializing with co-workers, involvement in a care group at church, and participation in interest-based groups all work together to supplement the foundation of care received from one’s own family circle.

Obviously for each person the blending of these three circles will be different, and there will be overlap as some people are found in one or two or all three of these circles. But the basic point remains: we lean on each other in ways that fit the respective places in which our friendship lives.

Second thought: We all bear responsibility for reaching out to others for our own friendship needs, and for inviting others into our circle for their benefit. Personality plays a huge part in this process: some reach out naturally, almost instinctively, while others struggle to reach out at all. Some need many people in their circles; some need three or four and find more than that stifling or draining. But in one way or another, we are all responsible both for ourselves and for each other.

I have experienced this dynamic in different places more than once. I find it relatively easy to reach out to others, but more than once I have stood on the edge of a new group wondering how to join in. I have been the one needing to be invited. I have also been the one looking at someone who wants to join a circle and speaking words of welcome while showing with my body language that the newcomer is not welcome. Of course, the newcomer reads the unspoken message and moves off soon enough.

Why do we sometimes close ranks like that? I can speak only for myself. I know that sometimes I think the newcomer is boring. Sometimes I think that he/she will get in the way of another friendship I want to nurture. Sometimes I’m judgmental. Sometimes I just want to be left alone. Since no one can be open to every one else all of the time, some sort of selection must go on. Friendship circles cannot be infinitely open, or they lose their ability to support and nurture those in them, and they lose their meaning.

But if they are simply closed, they become cliques, potentially destructive, whether at work or in the church, or in our communities. C. S. Lewis has written about the effect of the “Inner Ring”, the circle of people who are in the know and who wield an unhealthy influence in society. Somewhere between the infinitely open and the destructively closed, we need a balance in our friendship circles, inviting others in and yet remaining a healthy size. As one who has moved often, I see the difficulties inherent in maintaining such a balance.

Third thought: Friendship is one of the basic ways in which we love each other. Jesus often referred to his disciples as, “my friends”. Alongside the incredible love of God (agape) and the wonderful intimacy between a man and a woman in marriage (eros) stands simple friendship (philia). (One can add familial love or affection – storge – as Lewis does in The Four Loves.) Friendship is a basic way in which we discover God’s presence and in which we become fully disciples of God’s Son, Messiah Jesus.

That is, I believe, why we need more than one friendship circle: we mediate God to each other daily in the way that we treat each other – if we do so in genuine and caring friendship. To lack friendship, then, also means to be deprived of the full blessing of God’s presence in this world. God has made us so: that we mediate him to each other through our friendship.

Obviously this mediation occurs at different levels: with one person the friendship will be more on the surface, and with another more deep and full of meaning. Yet in every case it is truly God’s Spirit flowing through the bonds of friendship.

I wish I knew fully what I am trying to describe; but after almost 60 years of life on this earth, I know only that I need friends with every fibre of my being, and that I need to give friendship as deeply as I need to receive it.

Today

2009-11-11T21:16:00.003-06:00

We call it Remembrance Day, and we remember. I think back to 1968, when I was drafted for Vietnam. I received a four-year student deferment, and I was a CO, so in the end I went to Zimbabwe doing a three year term of alternative service with our church instead of going to Vietnam. Of course, others drafted with me whose number in the draft lottery fell below about 130 (mine was 113) went to Vietnam.

I think back to to another war, Desert Storm. Lois and I had just returned from Zimbabwe to find talk of war everywhere. In Zimbabwe nobody was talking about invading Iraq. In Europe on the way back nobody was talking about invading Iraq. In the USA that's all we were talking about. It was like entering an parallel universe. Or coming from one.

I think of the present military actions (may we call them "wars" now) -- in Iraq and in Afghanistan, with the horrible shooting on an American military base. A counsellor who needed counselling and who acted out our worst fears, the enemy within.

I rarely wear a poppy -- more a matter of not thinking to put it on, or not thinking to put on MCC's alternative poppy. My poppyless state is less a statement than a lack of care about dress. But today many wear the poppy, not to remember war, but to remember those who fight. We all (or almost all) pray for peace. We all (or almost all) recognize that war comes when what we want fails. "War is hell": so said a soldier.

So we remember together. Our own brushes with war, and with all the other forms of violence in our world -- whether against children, or abused women, or through oppression and poverty. The acts of war and violence that plague or planet, the disease of our race: people made in God's image, fighting and destroying the image of the Creator.

As we remember war, we remember and pray also for peace. We work for peace. We want the Shalom of God's presence, life full and running over in place of hatred and death and separation. I wish God's blessing on all who work for peace in our world, whether sharing my convictions as a CO or somewhere around the world with the American or Canadian military -- or in the many armies of our world. God keep and guide us all.

More Thoughts on Acedia

2009-11-02T21:22:00.000-06:00

In earlier writing I have noted my experience with what we might call acedia. I am not yet certain that the term accurately describes what I experienced; it may be that I was closer to a simpler depression than I thought; but I think that the spiritual element found in acedia (also known as “sloth” in the seven deadly sins) fits my own case better than simply the process of trying to deal with aging.

The key aspect I see in acedia is a focus on self that makes life difficult. Christian doctrine teaches us that our centre is to be found in God. As the Westminster Catechism puts it: “Man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” If our purpose in life is to glorify and enjoy God, then self-centredness is one form of the first and primal sin, in which we dethrone God and enthrone self.

All of this is the most elementary material in becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. Jesus said, “He who would be my disciple must take up his cross and follow me.” I have heard this text and many like it from my earliest days; but I’m a slow learner (or late in coming to any real spiritual and emotional maturity). So elementary or not, I restate some basic lessons for my own benefit. These lessons are variants on a theme: Let go of yourself; take hold of God.

The first notes the benefit of regular prayer. An old verse says it: “You must seek him in the morning if you want him through the day” (Ralph Spaulding Cushman, “The Secret”). I have said more than once that the regimen of early morning devotions I have often heard prescribed fits certain people better than others. I still say that; but I recognize that the appeal to personality type (you can’t expect an ENFP to be so regimented!) had become an excuse for not centring on God. The basic step over the past year of beginning the day with the Lord’s Prayer has been a small step. I have been surprised how big a step it has also proved to be.

From that small step grows a second and more helpful discipline, including prayer for myself, my family, my friends, and my own community. I am working at bringing regular reading of Scripture into the process. At the least I no longer can say that such a regular practise of discipline is antithetical to who I am. In fact, the very spontaneity of my daily life requires such discipline to construct a framework within which I can be most truly myself. Focussing on God at the beginning of the day makes me able to be God’s child more fully, which in turn gives me a real more substantial identity than the self-centredness of the past (a self-centredness that creeps all to close outside the door of my heart).

Third in the small steps towards God that I am taking is greater physical discipline. I have been exercising more regularly and carefully in the past months. It might seem that a focus on physical well-being would turn one’s heart and mind towards oneself and away from God. That can happen easily enough. So the way that I exercise becomes more important. I am experimenting with a rhythm of combining exercise with Taizé music – not everyone’s cup of tea (or glass of wine), but it may be mine.

A final step for now is to plan specific ways that I interact with other people. Inviting friends and acquaintances into our home for a meal; accepting greater involvement in our congregation’s life; playing chess on a Tuesday evening with friends; having a young person in the grip of despair over for coffee; genuinely listening to people in the dining hall (how often have I wanted them simply to listen to me?) – there are myriad ways in which one takes the focus of oneself.

I am a neophyte at this discipline. I recognize that I still take my mental and emotional temperature all the time. Perhaps we all do to some extent; but I want to find the kind of fulfillment that the Westminster Catechism describes, and I know that such fulfillment requires an intentional awareness of God and of others to a greater extent than before in my life. I feel a faint resentment that full healing of my own sense of being crushed requires that I stop looking at myself, but I know that resentment and being ridiculous are closely allied. And I want to keep moving away from acedia towards Paradise.

O'Hare in Prose

2009-10-27T17:21:00.004-05:00

Last Thursday we left for my niece's wedding in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Our plan was to fly from Winnipeg to Chicago, then Chicago to South Bend, where we would stay the night with our son. Then we planned to drive from SB to Harrisburg, stay with my folks and enjoy the wedding on Saturday, and finally fly back on Sunday Harrisburg to Chicago, and Chicago to Winnipeg.
Generally speaking, that's what happened; but as my previous post suggests, O'Hare did not cooperate with the program. We arrived in Chicago on schedule at 7:30 in the evening to find the gates in F packed with people waiting for delayed flights. A weather system was bringing huge rain to a large area south of Chicago (and to Chicago), which meant that flights from Cincinnati (for example) were late, and flights on from O'Hare were delayed.

We quickly joined the delays, first from 9:15 to 10 pm, then from 10 to 11 pm. Finally we boarded our flight, and two hours late for the 25 minute hop across to South Bend seemed not too bad. But of course the evening was only beginning. As we sat at the gate, and sat, the captain announced first that a weakness had been noted in the floor near the door. Then he told us that the weakness was "within specifications" and we would take off. Then we learned that the weakness was worse than thought. Finally we deplaned (with some relief), and went back to Gate F12. Finally came the announcement that the flight was cancelled.

Lois went down to the specified gate to get a voucher for a hotel and make plans for the next day. I waited at the gate for our bags, two carry-ons that had been tagged and placed under the plane. Then I realized that I had the boarding passes Lois needed to make arrangements. A quick trot the quarter mile between us carried the passes to Lois, and relieved some of the building tension I felt. No bags. I went back to Lois and talked a bit, then returned to the gate to wait for our bags. Then we were told that the bags would be delivered to baggage area 6 in terminal 1. I went back to find Lois, and she was gone!

A female attendant at the desk checked the wash room for me, eliciting a voice from somewhere inside, "I'm not Lois!" Then the attendant who had given Lois our vouchers recognized me and told me that she had gone to baggage area 6, so I set off again at a brisk trot through a now deserted O'Hare. Out through security, on down the stairs, to the lower level of Terminal 1.
Here I found Lois, along with 40 or so other irate passengers. Apparently our luggage was to be held, and then sent off to South Bend the next day, where we could pick it up. While we milled about Lois told me that we had a voucher for the hotel, and that we could take the next bus to South Bend at about 7 in the morning. It was now after 1:30 am, and the time was moving.
Finally our luggage appeared at baggage area 2, relieving the growing frustration of passengers on the edge of rioting. We took our bags and crossed to the bus terminus. There we found that the first bus to South Bend left at 5:15, just over three hours later. So we forgot about the hotel and rested as well as we could.

Two young girls just back from Mexico shivered on a nearby bench, until a car arrived to take them off. I talked with JJ, a former football player from the Bronx headed back to his old university's homecoming. He had flown from New York to Detroit, then to Chicago, and now was waiting for a bus to take him to some friends in Portage. An even more convoluted journey than our own!

At 5 am we boarded the bus, and left at 5:15. Lois slept almost the full three hours on the bus, and I slept for an hour or two. At 9:20 we pulled onto the Notre Dame campus and looked around for our son to pick us up. I had woken him from a deep sleep with directions for where we would get off. When he woke, his handwritten note said cryptically "Notre Dame Holy Cross 9:20". Missing was the word "intersection" between the two street names. So he went to the Holy Cross College on the Notre Dame campus, where there was a bus terminus.
Meanwhile, Lois and I stood in a wet and rainy morning, in a wet and chilly open air bus terminus. Across from us at the main gate of the campus was a guard, who invited us into his heated shelter, called our son for us (on his cell), and soon we were at our son's apartment.
The journey was almost over. After a shower and breakfast, we got into the car and left for Harrisburg -- 10 hours through constant rain. A final twist came as we left the turnpike, five minutes from Dad's house. Lois reached for the ticket to give to the attendant at the toll booth, but it slipped down behind the ash tray. We could see it, we could touch it, but we could not get it out. We pulled over into the toll area's parking lot and took turns trying to reach it. Finally our son hooked it, and I carried it across to the toll booth. At last we could arrive.
The wedding was wonderful. The reception lovely. Brunch on Sunday delightful. We had good family visits in between. The trip back was unnaturally smooth. We arrived back in Winnipeg 20 minutes early. Every light except one was green, and less than an hour after leaving the airport we were home. A trip to remember!

Our son looking for the ticket.

A tree outside our son's apartment.

Another tree outside the apartment.

Resting in the bus depot at O'Hare.

Travelling Dreams (O'Hare)

2009-10-26T19:37:00.004-05:00

Misty, ephemeral lights below
As we glide ghost-like to the ground.
A slow dash through the rain
And we sit and wait and sift our thoughts.
Flights delayed or cancelled
Float just out of reach -- the traveller's quest.

I'm tired
Too many people crowding around
Waiting
And waiting.

Buried in her magazine a young girl leans against the wall.
Middle-aged, a man sits perhaps asleep with music in his ears.
Soft conversations suggest
More life in cell phones than in people.
Someone vaguely Asian moves down the aisle
Tapping on some handheld device (secret Asian man).
My mind drifts, picking berries more real than phantom airplanes
Circling like tired hawks searching for a place to land.

Backs collide in the press of people,
Exclamations of apology press out,
A thin wine of relational juice.
One harried woman cries out in lament:
"Paper! Give me paper! To take your names! Hear me! Help me!"
Harried staff relieve their tension,
Laughing at her distress once she is gone.
We sit by, too weary in our own journeys
To aid her in her quest
For a winged steed to carry her away
From O'Hare, our fallen Camelot.
We sit and dream of our own quests,
Some place beyond this swamp of delays and cancellations.

"I should have rented a car."
A few hours drive to Springfield in place of
So many hours sitting and waiting.
Friendships form, from Fort Wayne to Beijing,
As ephemeral as the clouds
Drifting apart as flights land.
Stories float through the air:
A missed connection to Iowa leaves a young woman distraught,
Confessing her despair to her cell phone,
The ubiquitous companion of solitary souls
Held in cell phone cellophane wrappers.

Some sleep, or sit silent alone. Next to me
A man slides his hat down over his eyes,
Blocking the glare of bright bright light,
Chasing the dream of life outside
O'Hare.
A mother walks past, baby in sling crying,
but only a bit. The baby is at home with mother.
We only dream of home.

An attendant consults the computer
To tell a traveller what
The computer
Already says from every wall around.
Another with less ceremony wrests real information
From the computer,
Giving hope to our dreams.

A football flies by,
Two boys in their own quest for glory.
Penn State fans meet someone from Iowa,
And jest of dreams already past.
A crowd gathers round the Sports Bar TV.
One man, neat suit and tie, shakes his head
In dismay as the Yankees fall behind
on this stage of their own quest.

So many people, drinking and eating,
Laughing and crying and loving.
My hope of warm bed fades
Into the bright bright light and hard chair.
She is here anyway, and my dream lives.

22 October 2009

Flying to PA

2009-10-21T20:52:00.002-05:00

Considering how much flying I have done -- to Zimbabwe and back several times, and places in between, plus occasional flights east and west of Winnipeg -- it's perhaps a bit surprising how little I like flying. The actual experience in the air is fine (providing there's no turbulence), but the thoughts of being so far above the ground makes me uncomfortable. Too much imagination.

We're flying this time to Pennsylvania -- or more precisely to Indiana, then driving to Pennsylvania. We'll leave out the driving on the way back and fly from PA to Wpg. My niece is getting married, and we would like to be there! Family gatherings are a good thing, especially when one's family is as scattered as ours.

I have pointed out to our sons that it would be okay for them to settle close to home, but I admit that the example of the past three generations has predisposed them to ramble. We're just glad that they're in the general orbit of our families of origin.

And of course the wedding. My niece is getting married. I wondered to myself why they didn't get married in London: it would have given us an excuse to fly further to a place we enjoy even more than PA. (May as well be hung for sheep as well as a lamb; if we're going to fly, really go somewhere! And wherever did that expression come from -- a sheep as well as a lamb, and why hung?) It should be a good celebration, and we wish the newly-married couple a long and joyful life.

Meanwhile, the airplane. We've taken our dog to a friend for the weekend. We've almost finished packing. Lois has vacuumed and mopped upstairs (must be sure the house is clean while we're gone). And the plane is waiting. Tomorrow afternoon I will once again close my eyes as we taxi out onto the runway, and I will once again pray for safety and protection, and (I hope) I will once again enjoy the actual experience of flying.

Thanksgiving 2009

2009-10-13T20:11:00.003-05:00

The times today are uncertain enough. Mary Travers (of Peter, Paul, and Mary) just died, and with her died some of our idealism for those of us who come from the 1960s. We thought that we understood what the world needed, and we have failed completely to create the world we wanted.

Almost 50 years ago Bob Dylan wrote these words (Bob Dylan 1963):
Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

If the times have changed, they have not become more clear or certain. Rather, they continue as twisted and confusing as ever.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

It is not clear to me that the time has yet come to speak. Winners and losers from my youth are still spinning. John Kennedy was a winner – maybe. Except that his legacy in the political corridors of Washington includes a bitter fight for control, currently in the debate (a word we use by courtesy) over some sort of national health care system. The debate threatens to consume American society, and there really is no predicting the loser or the winner.

In Canada, we have tried our own great social experiment with “The Charter of Rights and Freedoms”; but has it worked? You would have to be wise indeed to know the answer to that question, as the courts try to work out the balance between an individual’s right to privacy and the needs of the larger community. Certainly we struggle with our multicultural identity, and our world is still spinning.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

The battle outside today is economic, social, religious, political – so many battles that leave us feeling the full force of our uncertain times. We check our RRSPs and hope that our jobs don’t disappear. The idealism of the 1960s is but a memory, and the winds of change continue to rattle our windows and threaten our safety.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.

Dylan was singing to his parents (and ours); but now we are the ones who don’t understand what’s happening to us. We thought that we were putting the forces of change in motion. In reality, we were caught up in forces much broader than ourselves, blowing not just through North America, but throughout the world. Afghanistan and Steinbach are part of the same world now.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

The dyads Dylan sets up end with one we recognize, pointing towards the end of all things when God brings in the true new world order. Whether we understood it or not in the 1960s, the uncertainty that we face in this world finds its resolution only in God.

Thanksgiving 2009

2009-10-10T20:32:00.002-05:00

Thanksgiving is a strange time. For our college community the anniversary of a young man's death always echoes, and I feel the echoes although muted by being in the seminary. For our church community, the death of another young man this year makes thank yous bittersweet for some and impossible for others.

For me, spending the weekend alone (Lois is with her mother, which is a good Thanksgiving indeed) feels strange. I enjoy some time alone, but reach a point where I need to talk with someone. Is blogging sometimes a substitute for talking, except that one really doesn't know if anyone is listening? Maybe.

I like the timing for Thanksgiving here in Canada. The American custom of waiting for the end of November separates the Day from the Harvest. Our timing here reminds us that we give thanks for provision, for food and lodging, for life itself. In the States, I think, holding the celebration so much later plays into our excessive commitment to money. Commerce reigns supreme!

So tomorrow I preach a sermon; find something to eat; spend more time alone at home (not really feeling sorry for myself -- but eager for Lois to return!); maybe some telephone conversations. Then Thanksgiving Day: Read papers for school; prepare a Bible study; read a bit professionally and personally; some facebook and reading of blogs; and Lois comes back!

I find myself wondering what stitches everything together. What do I say relatively little about, but is the fabric within which I live (and without which I cannot live). God. Talking to God; listening; realizing how I ignore, then trying to reconnect with. And saying thank you. To God.

Remembering Mary

2009-09-19T19:48:00.003-05:00

They are Peter and Paul now. Mary is gone. PeterPaulandMary. Now Peter and Paul. "Where have all the flowers gone." "If I had a hammer." Song after song with which the trio serenaded us. I know that the trio has been gone for many years, but the death of one of them is our death.

When we got the news, I started pulling up youtube videos of the trio singing. "It's the hammer of justice, the bell of freedom, a song about love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land." Quite a change from listening to the health care debate.

I found myself feeling the loss -- not so much of Mary Travers, but rather the loss of our generation. Such high ideals we had. "All the world over, so easy to see, people everywhere just got to be free." We wanted to hear the oppressed and impoverished speak into our lives. We wanted to learn from them and work with them to build a new world. We built something all right: a bigger house for each of us than our parents would have ever imagined.

At least for each of us who has money and resources. Think again of the health care debate in the United States. The Sixties suggests that we would embrace health care for everyone, that we would care about everyone around us. But we have had 40 years to build something, and we have cared more about building a bigger garage and driving a bigger car than anything else. Once we railed against The Man. Now we are The Man.

I feel betrayed when I listen again to the two records of PP and M that we have. I believed them then; I still believe them now. But Democratic and Republican administrations and congresses alike have taken us down a different road than any PP and M sang about.

The ideals we held in the Sixties resonate with me at least partly because so many of them spring from deep Christian roots. But when I turn to the church, so many of my brothers and sisters there are busy fighting against any effort to build those ideals into our society. The protesters (who learned the ideals from the church) fell to the goddess of greed (or is greed a god?); and the church (who gave them the ideals in the first place) seems to have forgotten them.

I know that my rant is overdone. There are many counter-examples. Ron Sider's work with Evangelicals for Social Action is one. Ben Lowe has an excellent book, Green Revolution, in which he gives many other examples of Christians who have begun to remember who we are. Perhaps some degree of funk emanates from sitting and thinking of what we hoped to be and do, and knowing that Mary Travers just died. And perhaps reality is deeper and better than our many glimpses of failure.

Her songs remain, with Peter and Paul. And a wonderful youtube version of the trio singing "If I had a hammer" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. We were so young, and so wrong about so much; and so right about the fundamentals. Freedom, justice, love, peace. All good.

Falling

2009-07-25T16:58:00.004-05:00

I've been thinking about weddings for the past few months. Watching a son watching his bride come down the aisle, and then watching them walk together out of the church and into each other's future does that. In less than a week I also celebrate our own wedding anniversary. Different people remember different things. I don't remember the events of the day at all clearly, at least not as a narrative. Rather they stay with me as a dream, an impression of joy and naivete, and as something that at one level defines me. I have been alive as a married man five years longer than I lived as a single man. I don't know that there is some profound truth there; I simply note the reality.

Remembering that day (however hazily) I think back to meeting my wife, and to falling in love, and wonder how it all happened. I know that the feelings of "falling in love" have been less important than the settled commitment to each other that we share -- not "as long as love shall last", but "as long as life shall last". That committed love, an act of will deeper than feelings, is crucial.

But the feelings are there anyway -- whatever we mean by "falling in love". And as I sat watching my son's wedding rehearsal, I wrote the lines below to my own bride.

Falling

I wonder when I fell in love ….
So many years ago,
So gradually and gently.game long past
No bolt of lightning, fading as quickly;
but a growing joy and lasting light.

I remember a circle of people,
Young we were then.
She sat somewhere
Across from me, where I could watch her
Carelessly, or seeking her eyes (beautiful green eyes).
Did she watch me?
I wonder when I fell in love.

I remember the piano,
She and another both played.
The other was good, all runs and trills.
She was better!
Competent, complete, divine!
I know the process had begun,
watchful attraction deepening to love.

I remember walking
Under the trees beside the river,
Holding hands
Forever.
(Though I did not know it then.)
She had a composure, a completeness
I lacked and desired.
Calm and controlled
(How little I knew!)
In a world of chaotic change
I felt the attraction of perfection
(though neither of us had it).
And I fell in love.

I’m still falling.

Beneath the music,
Beneath the lively intelligence,
Beneath the challenge of her competitive spirit,
Beneath the long hair (long flowing auburn hair)
And green eyes (beautiful hazel eyes)
And her body moulded to my touch,
Beneath all else I find

Love, Compassion, Grace;
Desire for God’s love, compassion, grace;
Her spirit more beautiful even than
Face and eyes, hair and outer form;
Her spirit seeking God’s Spirit
Echoing my own inner desire for
True Perfection, True Divinity.

10 July 2009

Mother

2009-07-07T10:54:00.002-05:00

Mother would have been 90 today. She died 18 years ago, in another lifetime it seems. My sister blogged that she was "channeling her mother". Memories are strong, and shape us whether we will or no. I suppose sons are supposed to channel their father. Dad just celebrated his 90th birthday three weeks ago, a great event! I can feel him inside me sometimes in the way that I act. But I can feel mother as well in thought and action.

Dorcas Mildred Slagenweit. Born this day in 1919. Died May 12, 1991. Living forever with the blessed Trinity. Living forever in our hearts and memories.

Understanding: Depression or Acedia?

2009-06-27T18:09:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I posted on the "crisis" of the past year. In some ways I feel quite shy about it. I have no intention of giving specifics, or describing the triggers, or speculating on what I think may be the underlying personal stuff from which the crisis grew. But I do want to say a bit more generally.

My first thought was that I had walked up to the edge of possibly a major depression. Since then I've read a book recommended by a friend: Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me. Acedia is the sin of sloth, one of the seven deadly sins. You can check Wikipedia's definition here.

Norris suggests that one test for whether one is experiencing acedia (the lack of caring; a sort of massive indifference) or depression is to see what helps. Acedia, she suggests, is not amenable to therapeutic counselling, but does respond to spiritual care. Depression, she states, is not helped by spiritual care, but does respond to therapeutic counselling.

Some bits of what I walked through fit her description of acedia; other bits fit what I know of depression. Certainly the two, acedia and depression, mimic each other. And certainly, whichever one a person experiences, the body, mind, and soul are all involved. But my own journey as I reflect on it was a spiritual journey, not a therapeutic one (in a counselling sense). Healing there was, but healing that came through prayer and an experience of God's grace.

I have walked closely enough with clinical depression to know that it does not yield to advice from well-meaning friends to "pray more." This brush with acedia suggests that for some of us -- Kathleen Norris and I share at least this much -- acedia is a lifelong companion, and spiritual discipline is a necessary part of life lived in defiance of such torpor.

It is a good journey, and at this stage I am glad to be on it.

Dreams and a Voice

2009-06-26T21:30:00.003-05:00

Prologue
In some sense the six months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 were the most difficult of my life. In objective terms I see no reason to have experienced a particular crisis. There were professional pressures of working in a tight economy. There are the personal pressures of living in one's 59th year. But many around me have had more real difficulties to deal with than I. But for whatever reason I came to the edge of some sort of crisis in February, which found the beginning of resolution in March. Lent was a season with more than usual meaning this year.

Resolution began with two dreams and with a voice in the silence. The following lines describe something of the experience -- a journey into darkness to find God's limitless love, patience, and grace. I do not yet understand what happened, or why. This record of the path through the undergrowth (of my life) to the cliff overlooking a pit, the cross beside the road, the sea, and the circle around the ashes is an effort to keep the whole in mind long enough for it to form the journey of the coming months and years.

One: The Path
The path wandered through the undergrowth,
A pathless way deeper into the darkness.
Wandering unwilling, compelled, pressed, constrained
I stumble like a sloth into the dark.
It did not seem so dark at first,
this crosspath; but as I walk on
Through under-undergrowth, the need grows
To break clear, escape
Some cataclysm, a burning.
Wandering aimless and looking for freedom
I, trapped in fear.

Relentless the pathless path wanders down
The growth of many year, shapeless fears
Forming in the darkling gloom.
So many years of growth underfoot
Obstructing, clutching, pulling.
At last I break free into a clearing
At the edge of a cliff, and find
Only darkness burning deep within the pit of myself.
A pathless path balanced on the edge of time.

Two: The Cross
Beside the road stands a cross, unheeded, unneeded.
People hurry past, hardly looking.
I stand, lending my weakness to keep the cross
From falling.
I am not needed, not heeded -- let me go!
A building close by beckons, offering safety, privacy,
A chance to slip out of the light, a place to hide.
Stay!
I cannot leave.
Unnoticed, unneeded, I want only to go and change.
I promise to return ....
Stay!
There is no escape,
Compelled to stay, to stand by the cross beside the road.

"I want nothing between us."
Immediate fervent assent
To live at the cross by the side of the road.

Three: The Sea
A dream
A dream of floating
A dream, floating in the sea.
Completely secure, endlessly rocking
Floating in the sea of love.

Four: A Voice in Silence
Circled around the ashes
Waiting for a sign,
We sat in silence, ritual simplicity.
My friend gave up coffee for Lent,
Waiting for a sign.
My friend gave up wheat and wine,
Waiting for a sign.
We sat in silence, ritual simplicity.
Circled round the ashes I heard (can I say "heard")
A voice in silence.
"There is no more. I have done all. Receive."
The imposition of the ashes.

Epilogue
To put divine encounters in words, no matter how couched in imagery, gives the impression that I think I have found more than I have. As I said, I do not understand what happened -- except to say that I became a person again when I stood on the edge of losing myself. In this life to find ourselves, however briefly, is a gift from God.

An Even Bigger Birthday!

2009-06-14T15:16:00.004-05:00

Four weeks ago we travelled to Pennsylvania for our son's graduation from Messiah College. My Dad has made it to all of his grandchildrens' graduations (I think). This one was easier in a way: the venue was 10 minutes from his front door. But today we see what makes it more remarkable, as he celebrates his 90th birthday.

I remember well the day that my mother died, and Dad was left alone. Eighteen years and one month ago she left us. I remember Dad saying to me of her death: "I didn't know you could hurt this bad, but I know I'm going to be okay." Over the next two years he learned to care for himself, without his lifelong companion who had helped him so much in so many ways.

I remember Dad's wedding, 16 years and two weeks ago, to Verna Mae. The have been married now longer than many much younger couples, a relationship that has grown richer as they have grown older.

And today I remember Dad. He has walked with God throughout his life -- in Zambia and Zimbabwe, in Pennsylvania and California, in Indiana and in Ontario. When we talked today he referred to some of his favourite verses from 2 Corinthians 4: 16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.

C.S. Lewis preached a sermon (during the second world war) called "The Weight of Glory", in which we celebrated the eternal glory that we are becoming. On his 90th birthday I celebrate seeing glimpses of that glory in my Dad's life.

Happy Birthday!

2009-05-28T15:32:00.003-05:00

Unless I got my dates mixed up (which I may have -- see below), today is my step-mother's birthday. I have borrowed a picture of her from my sister's blog.

Verna Mae's Birthday: May 28. Dad and Verna Mae's Anniversary: May 29. My birthday: May 30. A full week! At least, if we lived close by it would be a full week.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Verna Mae! You are a wonderful part of our family, so good for all of us!

Birthday Reflecting

2009-05-21T14:20:00.002-05:00

One trouble with blogging is deciding what to put in so public a forum. The past six months have been among the most spiritually significant of my life, but I'm not sure that this is the right venue for what I have written about that. But my 59th birthday is approaching in just over a week, so here are some lines reflecting.

This doesn't rise to the level of poetry, but does provide me for a medium to think on paper.

Birthday Reflecting

At nine I climbed rocks
The hills of Matopo:
Into the crack between the rocks;
Up to the bell that called to us all.
School there was, with memories;
But over and under all were Rocks,
Ancient and lasting Matopo Hills.

A young man in a new school,
Fourth school in four years.
A year later I remember myself,
Nineteen, second-year student, in and out of my element.
My first girlfriend;
Lost alone in the woods;
Soccer and theatre – more play than work.
Becoming so slowly a man.

Three years of teaching; four more running a folder
(Constant clatter of machine: paper and ink gets in your blood),
Now at twenty-nine a man: back in school, and far more
Married; Wife and Friend and Lover,
Still too new to know.

Father, a role to learn and discover;
At thirty-nine two sons call me
Father, and other names.
I remember, but memories slide away,
Too shy to let me see them clearly.
What at that moment was important?
Many roles – husband, father, friend;
Pastor, teacher, print shop labourer:
What really mattered?
Memories slide around the corner
When I look at them. I remember
Anticipating forty, the angst of aging.
I remember preaching, teaching, caring,
Loving, fighting, living: memories slide.
What matters? I did them.

Forty-nine. A new country, new job;
A new life as fifty looms.
The path led back to school at forty-one,
That bend ended two years later;
Back to pastor, church in a cornfield;
And after four years in the cornfield
With trains sawing back and forth:
Again a teacher, back to the present.

I come to now.
Fifty-nine.
A number.
What matters?

God. Above all, beneath all, around all, in all. God.
Family: dearest companion; children grown.
Community: sometimes at school;
In the coffee shop and living room;
On the soccer field, across the chess board.

What matters?
Family, students, colleagues, friends,
Gathered community of people,
Bound together by the search for
Truth and life.
Truth, the Good, matters:
Family, friends, colleagues, students
Relationships make life.

Fifty-nine. I remember, and
Memories slide
Leaving a trace, a shape,
A desire for more
Life, and Truth, and Good, and
What matters.

21 May 2009

Mother's Day

2009-05-12T16:41:00.003-05:00

I know that Mother's Day was on Sunday. I liked the blog that my sister wrote for our step-mother and aunt on Sunday. Verna Mae has been a wonderful blessing to my Dad and to our family, and Aunt Leoda is wonderful. I remember staying with Aunt Leoda in Manhattan over 30 years ago: just a few days, but memorable, and good.

But Mother's Day is also always May 12 for us. On this day in 1991 our mother died, and we don't forget. We were blessed to have her as our mother, even if her time feels as though it was cut short (as my younger sister wrote to me). Memories are clear, as they should be: mother standing on a ladder at around age 50, hanging something in the church basement, and falling off the ladder in a kind of somersault. Scared everyone around; but she was fine. Mother inviting the woman who became my wife to lunch -- before we had started dating. Mother boxing with me when I was a moody teenager: you can't stay moody when your 5 ft. tall mother starts boxing with you.

Today is Mother's Day every year, alongside the Sunday celebration. We don't forget.

Deer Strike!

2009-05-08T16:39:00.002-05:00

Last Saturday Lois and I went in to visit Kim and S'kha, taking our Zimbabwean friend, Mike, along. Mike had taught Kim over 20 years ago. now Kim is professor of African history with a double PhD. Mike still lives in Zimbabwe, dealing with power cuts and a lack of running water. He came over for his son's college graduation, giving us a chance to visit in the city and renew old friendships.

We had a good evening, and headed home as the sun set. North of the 49th parallel, on a Spring evening (or in what passes for Spring in Manitoba) that means driving around 9:30, so that we approached our home town after dark.

Two or three miles north of home Lois suddenly yelled, "Stop!" Now she has called out surprising things sometimes, such as the other morning when she told me to get something from the car outside. Turned out she was still asleep and the request was part of her dream. Not this request, however. I hit the brakes, and a deer passed lightly in front of us. I thought we had dodged the danger, but then we saw a second deer and felt a significant thump. The sound of the impact was enough by itself to shake us all up.

I kept going. After 10, so close to home, one dead deer (I thought): why stop? At home we checked the damage, which was remarkably slight. The passenger side mirror was gone, and there was some slight scoring of the passenger side doors. The repairs come to $1,200; but the damage was less than I could have expected based on the sight and sound of the unfortunate deer.

We're glad to be home and grateful for so little harm. I hope that the deer just bounced, and went on his way a bit startled. But I'm afraid: a snapped neck seems more likely.

School Days

2009-03-25T14:36:00.003-05:00

We have a snow day today: hazardous driving conditions from about six inches of Spring snow. With extra time available I looked through a series of pictures from one of my facebook groups: Hamilton High School. I attended Hamilton from January 1963 to April 1965 -- two years and one school term.

I remember the school, although not nearly as well as some in the facebook group. I wore a grey uniform with a blue and maroon striped tie, grey knee high socks, maroon cap, and black shoes.

I was in Form Three (Grade 10) when we left, and entered Grade 11 in Pennsylvania that September. But Hamilton is the place where I really began to grow up, and the facebook pictures called back many memories. Pictures of the school fields recalled hours spent during school walking over the ground that would one day be a rugby field, picking up stones to clear the field for planting grass. Not a particular punishment: just an activity by which all students participated in upgrading the school. Today the rugby field has virtually returned to the bush from which it came.

Other pictures showed the way that an all boys school puts on musicals. The girls chorus was populated by boys wearing dresses and singing the girls' parts -- which we could do because our voices had not yet broken. I was Ellen in Oklahoma, a minor part with three lines. I still know the women's music in Oklahoma better than the men's.

The pictures recalled a day when girls from nearby Montrose school studied with the boys of Hamilton, until they had enough students in the upper forms to fill their own classes. We were an all-boys school, and the sight of girls on our grounds filled us with fear. Some of the comments under the pictures (posted both by girls from Montrose and boys from Hamilton) recalled how strange and desired the experience was for both. Little wonder that my Grade 11 in Pennsylvania was a bit frightening: too many girls in the classroom!

Most of all the pictures recalled a day when the vast majority of the country's education was directed towards the White minority. I benefited with a superior education unavailable to most Rhodesians of the day. Now the school grounds and buildings are in disrepair. The Thistle on the school gate (Hamilton is a Scottish clan; the Thistle is the Scottish emblem) is faded and pockmarked. Pictures from an old boy who had visited Hamilton recently showed the decay.

I know that Zimbabwe is necessary, and that Rhodesia was an unjust monstrosity. But I mourn the passing of what was good in the old, and its death in the new. They say you can't go back. Except I suppose in our memories. Pictures of a time past, in a country that no longer exists, of people that I haven't seen for over 30 years and don't expect to see again. Even on facebook.

Driving Again

2009-03-24T20:41:00.002-05:00

I should take pictures like my sister does, then illustrating narratives would be so much easier! But I am not the photographer in our family; and Lois was sick on Sunday. So I drove down to Minnesota alone.

There was a lot of water out. The Red River is filling up with water, and the Red River valley is on full flood alert. When I candidated at Providence in 1997, the crest of that year's flood was moving through Winnipeg: The Flood of the Century. Now people are talking about a repeat. It doesn't look quite as bad here in Manitoba; but in Minnesota and North Dakota the danger is real.

I saw fields full of water, fields that needed a skiff more than a tractor. They aren't as bad yet as they might become, but they're bad enough. I was preaching at a Covenant church in a small northern Minnesota town -- mostly farmer families. Not everyone was there: at least one family was sandbagging their yard to keep the place safe from rising water.

Meanwhile we wait. Tonight we're supposed to get two or three inches of rain (or its equivalent in snow). That's the fear -- that a major storm will add to the frozen or waterlogged ground and run off into the Red. Then ice jams downriver closer to Lake Winnipeg can add to the problem.

The Red flows north, an unusual thought for most Americans. usually it is a placid, mild stream. Now we're watching it grow and praying that it doesn't get too high.

Updating Spiders

2009-03-05T20:37:00.002-06:00

Last October we thought we were infested with spiders. I wrote about our adventures here and here. A lot has happened since then. We bought a new mattress (first one in 30 plus years). We sprayed for the little critters. I slept on my own while we took measures to clear the house.

Now I know that I killed a spider on my ear at 2 am or so, just after the doctor told me that my swellings looked like a spider bite. So our actions were more or less rational. Besides, we found several friends with similar stories. Maybe there was a spider or two involved!

But long after we were sure that the spiders were gone, the apparent bites continued. Finally I had to conclude that some sort of allergic reaction was under way. I tried avoiding peanuts, milk, msg, all the usual suspects. The effort brought no more relief from the swellings than sleeping in another room far away from my sweetie had.

Finally I ended up at the allergist's office, where my arm was swabbed and pricked with 30 or so substances. Only the histamine prick formed a reaction, which said that I was normal. But my arm was itchy the next day where they pricked and smeared me! Blood tests ruled out any other underlying cause, and the reactions continued unabated.

Finally two weeks ago they did start to abate, and finally I am more or less clear of reactions. They may return, but for the moment they have receded. The most likely culprit seems to be some low level allergic reaction, exacerbated by stress. Well, it has been a stressful six months, harder perhaps than any similar period that I've been through. But spider bites? I ask you!

Anyway, they are gone for a bit now. Some time I may try to describe what stress feels like, besides just itchy!

Edmonton

2009-02-22T18:39:00.003-06:00

I went to Edmonton last week. I thought that maybe I had visited Alberta's capital before, but consulting my father, I learned that on the previous trip (in 1954) we drove from Saskatoon to Leithbridge, avoiding both Edmonton and Calgary and proceeding to Vancouver. So after over eleven years in Manitoba, I have finally visited beyond Saskatchewan.

John and I flew from Winnipeg to Calgary, and thence to Edmonton. A tight schedule gave us ten minutes in the Calgary airport, time enough to leave WestJet and re-enter at the gate next door. Thursday afternoon we arrived in Edmonton, where we met Bill, who had rented a car. He took us on to Taylor, where the conference was held.

The meetings were good; time spent in conversation, learning and thinking: on some other occasion I may pursue some of the thoughts generated there. But when they were over the next day, I had a new experience. For the first time in many years I met another Climenhaga, one I have corresponded with but never met.

Dave lives in Edmonton, close to my age; and he gave John and me a tour around the city before going back to the airport. Our grandfathers were brothers, and our fathers first cousins.

The conversation as we drove and then sat at the airport was wide-ranging and enjoyable; recounting it would be tedious and unenjoyable. Enough to say that I saw Edmonton for the first time, and connected with a delightful person there. I gather that I have four or so more second cousins in Edmonton. I'll have to go back again!

My Sister

2009-02-16T16:30:00.003-06:00

She is my sister, five years older than I.

When I was born, she waited in the dark of a vanette in the African night,

Waiting for a brother,

Waiting for me.

When I came on the scene, she left.

Went to boarding school almost as soon as I appeared.

Seven years later, I followed.

Hillside hostel -- so close, so far from Landon House, Evelyn School.

She came by bus on weekends to visit,

Renew friendship, sibling bond in a strange city,

Alone among the Rhodesians.

Soon she went on ahead of all of us.

Fifteen years old, left behind, gone on ahead.

We went to Bulawayo; she went to Woodbury.

We had the African sun; she had the seasons of Bedford County.

We returned, and found that she had gone further ahead,

A young woman of twenty, with varied experiences.

No longer just my sister, now so much more.

I went to college, and she was already there.

I took mathematics to avoid her, a dreary failure.

Embraced English and found her there,

My teacher as well as my sister for the next two years.

"Put that down, you'll drop it!

Why are you always fidgeting?"

I found her office a refuge,

Which made it less of a refuge for her.

Then graduation for me;

My sister was married,

Her son, my nephew, followed the month I left school and headed

Back to Africa.

My sister put down roots; I travelled to Africa and back.

There and back again several times, as her roots grew deeper.

Growing and changing in marriage, and children --

New career in journalism, administration, government

While roots went deep into the Pennsylvania soil.

In my travels I found my wife, my sons, my family.

My sisters both, and I, also lost family.

Dearest mother, took her own journey home.

The Christmas after a box arrived.

Shortbread that had always come from mother

Now came from sister.

I'm putting down my own roots now in far away Manitoba,

But she has gone on ahead,

And I never can quite catch up.

Even if I take the last journey before her,

In some sense I never will catch up.

Happy birthday to my sister,

Dearly loved and never forgotten.

Winter 1978

2009-01-17T19:50:00.004-06:00

The pictures set the theme of snow. We really have more cold than snow here, but I wanted a particular ambience. I must look for old pictures and see if I can scan them! Story follows.

We have so much winter in Manitoba that it reminds me of our first winter together. Lois and I were married in July 1977. The following January she was teaching Grade 2 in Nappanee, I was working at Evangel Press (running a folding machine), and we lived in Nappanee. And it snowed and snowed and snowed.

Lois had more snow days than any other month of her school life. Of course I walked back and forth to the press regardless. Towards the end of the month we had a major blizzard on top of all the snow we'd had that far. My memory says that about two feet of snow came on a Thursday. A google search reveals that in nearby South Bend three feet of snow fell on January 26, 1978. That was indeed a Thursday.

I worked my usual 7:30 to 4, with a half hour for lunch. Running a folder is another story: proof that even the radically non-mechanical can run a machine. But back to the snow. Just before 4 pm Lois called from home. She had had another snow day. After 31 plus of being married to her, I wonder what she did or if she felt cooped up. In any case, she had decided to shovel a path from our front door through the four feet of snow in the driveway out to the road, to let me into the house. (True love runs true!)

Well, there was too much snow. When she opened the main door, which opened inwards, she found that the outer storm door was fast closed in by the snow. It wouldn't move, and she was stuck inside. So she called and warned me.

When work was over I walked home, where I found the snow piled against me. Lois stood inside the storm door, and I stood outside on the road, and we just laughed at the ludicrous situation. Eventually I waded in, floundering up to my chest in four feet of snow. The snow shovel was propped against the wall just outside the door, and I dug out a patch in front of the door, just enough to open the door and go inside. Supper was wonderful, and the house was warm and a wonderful place to be.

The next morning we heard how thoroughly the snow had covered the state. Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio had been blanketed, and the northern half of Indiana had been completely shut down. In our town of Nappanee, the police had posted themselves at the four roads by which people could come and go, and were stopping anyone who tried to leave town. People out in the country were snowed in for days -- friends of ours were stranded in their home for six days until the oil truck broke through to replace their oil supply.

So far as we could tell all of the businesses in town were closed -- except for mine. Lois had no school. The shops were closed. Factories shut. But two good men walked into the press, opened up, and called the rest of us. I could walk too, so I had to admit that I could make it. But first I shovelled our driveway out properly: six feet of snow piled straight across. That took a good hour or two. Then I shovelled a path from the road to our neighbour's door. She was a widow, and another widow lived across the street. So of course I had to shovel her out too. Finally after lunch I walked on into work.

It was a most amazing snowfall. One of our friends used the packed snow to build and igloo in his backyard and sleep in it. Lois and I had the impression that we had settled in a winter wonderland where it would snow forever.

Years later (15 years later) we brought our sons back to Indiana from Kentucky. We made sure that they knew this was the land of snow; but of course there was little snow. The blizzard of the century came only once in the century. So we moved further north to Manitoba, looking for snow. We have found cold, more than enough; and although it doesn't snow like that one incredible blizzard in 1978, the snow we get stays and stays, clear and bright and sparkling. And Lois and I can look across and laugh for the delight of winter.

New Year 2009

2009-01-07T10:47:00.002-06:00

I have been trying to put my feelings and thoughts at the New Year into words -- a harder task than sometimes. Last night our son called to say that he was okay after the accident (wiped on on I-79 on icy roads), and again I realized that all of the good that we experience can change in the briefest of moments. The past semester in my teaching was filled with stress, and I realize that I do not enjoy change the way that I once did. So the words below: an effort to grasp some security within the constant change of life.

New Year 2009

We had a dachshund, loyal, loving;
I remember too clearly
A warm summer day,
The dog seemed more weary
Than usual. Dogs die.

Deep roots diving deep into the earth.
I had friends when I was young;
we went to school together,
Talked, played, ran, and sang;
the bond we shared was real and strong.
Now years and miles between.

He held his blanket, grasped it tight
As it hung on the line to dry.
Life was real and life was right
When he had wrapped it so;
It answered his possessive cry
And calmed the ebb and flow.

At midnight we circled round the game
Our glasses lifted in a toast;
The past poured out, an empty night
A day begun, shaken roots still holding.

I need my friend, my dog, my love
(I have not even tried to speak of her),
Comfort and strength to grasp what's now, what's new.

6 January 2009

A Christmas Drive

2008-12-24T11:43:00.004-06:00

Twenty-six years ago, Christmas Eve was on Saturday. I finished preparing the Christmas sermon for the congregation. Lois did last minute packing. Vaughn enjoyed the world as only a six month old baby can. It was unusually cold for Pennsylvania, a real white Christmas.

Our VW Beetle was giving trouble starting. So that night I parked it at the top of the hill leading down to a our house. There were a good hundred yards of fairly steep hill coming down to our driveway, so I thought for sure I could start the car by rolling, if the battery was dead.

Christmas morning was about minus 25 Celsius. The engine did not respond at all to the key: not even a click. Fine. I turned the key to on, pushed in the clutch, and let the car roll down the hill, popping the clutch several time3s as I gained speed. At the bottom of the hill I rolled into our neighbour's driveway, no closer to starting the car. Not a cough; not a hiccup; not a sign of turbo charged life in the frigid morning air.

Our neighbour Jay came out and helped me with jumper cables. It took a good 10 minutes of charging to get the car going. We did not turn it off again!

I love Christmas on a Sunday. We went to Speedwell for the Christmas morning service. Then piled into the VW, which started, mercifully, and drove off to Wilmer and Velma/s for Christmas dinner. They have been friends with my folks and Lois' family for many years, and their children are among our best friends (and cousins); so we had a wonderful dinner and time together, visiting, singing, celebrating.

About 4 pm we started on the next and final part of our day -- driving from Lancaster County to New Madison, Ohio, about an eight hour drive. As we neared Pittsburgh, daylight was fading fast, and the temperature started to drop. By the time we reached Zanesville in eastern Ohio, where I filled up the car with gas, it was minus 30 Celsius.

The car very nearly did not start again after I filled it up: the cold was too much for a dying battery. We started off through the Ohio night, with the old VW forced air heater doing its best. we had no fan to push the air in faster, just the speed of the car. A thin layer of frost formed all around the windows so that we could see only out of the windshield through a small arc kept clear by the defroster. Vaughn slept happily in his car seat, surrounded by enough luggage to keep him safe even if he wasn't seat belted in! His parents were less happy. I have never been so aware of how thin the car body is: a few inches of metal between us and the coldest weather we had ever experienced.

The last stretch from Zanesville to Mom and Dad's (Lois' parents) was about four hours; but we were not stopping for anything. Now I would have to stop for some sort of break, but we were young enough to keep going and foolish enough to have started without replacing the old battery! So we kept going. We got into New Madison about midnight. Mom and Dad were waiting for us and helped take everything inside, including their grandson snug in his car seat.

The next day (Boxing Day) we tried starting the car. Nothing. That battery was dead and needed to be buried. Dad took me to the store and bought me a new battery. He didn't say so, but I think he may have been worried that I might take his daughter back into the Winter's cold and get her stranded this time! Not to mention his new grandson. Now that I have sons close to the age I was then I understand him better, I think!

We have minus 30 temperatures regularly here in Manitoba, and it no longer seems so cold. Cold enough, but you learn to deal with it. We have a blanket in the car in case of emergency, and keep batteries and tires well checked, and make sure that we're safe when we go outside. In any case, I love Christmas. And I love family. And I'm grateful that God kept us safe 26 years ago so that I can remember that drive through the bitter Ohio night.

Belonging

2008-12-21T15:54:00.002-06:00

We joined the church today. Many gave warm congratulations, welcoming us back. We had been members from late 1997 to 2005, when we helped start a church plant nearby. That is its own story, worth telling; but it closed in May 2007. For two years we were committed to outreach in a small community. The end felt abrupt, although one could see it coming from some distance away. For the past year we have been back at SMC, and today we renewed our membership there. Sometimes I wonder why: what does the gesture mean? Anything?

Not everyone sees membership as important. I am (I think) in a minority in the value I place on it. Many attend a large church and never consider any more formal step. Others participate in smaller fellowships where they feel fully at home, welcomed, belonging; no formal membership seems necessary. Our society prizes flexibility, choice, freedom; and membership can become a cumbersome obstacle. Why not define membership by attendance? If you come here, you belong. If you don't you don't.

I can speak only for myself, knowing that others whose judgment I respect do not share my impulse to make a public declaration for the thing itself to be real and true.

So first, for myself, I note the sound sense contained in our societal reflex. Formal membership can become formalism all too easily. Some substitute a public display for a real relationship, whether in a failed marriage or in a disappointing church experience. My first commitment, then, is to truth, to be true -- to God, to myself, to my family. Formal membership must grow out of real belonging. Public witness grows out of, comes out of, springs from real, lived, dynamic relationships. If the formal outer display exists alone, hypocrisy results. I'm a child of the Sixties: I commit myself to be true!

But I do not only reflect my age; I follow the beat of God's drum. Family requires commitment, not just liking and feeling good. A man and woman grow together and fall deeply in love. No formal commitment seems necessary. We sang so many years ago, "Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?" No formal commitment; just stay with me! Of course, she didn't. Wedding vows help one keep one's deep inner desire to love forever. The promise means something, not just at that moment, but in the work and joy that follows.

So also in my church family. I belong at a deeper level than the formal commitment; but I make the promise to belong and act like I belong for at least two reasons: 1) I know that I will not always like SMC. But the longer I keep my commitment as a member, the greater the space to feel the greatest joy of belonging. 2) I know that I feel the sense of family that we have at SMC. I want others to know it too. Just as baptism functions to witness to the people around us that God is at work in our lives, formal membership is a witness to the community and to the church that we are God's family.

My reasons are not profound, deeper than thought. They are surface, I think, and somewhat trite. But they are real; they are mine; I belong here and now to God's family at SMC.

Preaching

2008-12-20T20:33:00.003-06:00

I preach quite often. Once or twice a month I help usually in churches that are engaged in a pastoral search. Some thoughts based on the experiences.

I use words professionally.
Use: employ; manipulate; try to use, an unsatisfactory thought.
Professional: paid; paid to use --
Sounds almost obscene, a prostitution of the gift of words.

"In the beginning was the Word."
"I opened my mouth to speak, and the word is there:
formed by the lips, the tongue, the organ of voice."

Should I be an amateur instead?
An amateur wordsmith,
playing with words like an incompetent Shakespeare.
I could not, cannot,
Have not the wit, the skill to play such art.

Should I be the servant?
Beg the words to do their work,
Then sit and wait for words to form themselves,
To make sense, make nonsense integrate and coinhere,
become The Word before me, commanding me.

Perhaps. I could.

Word, Spirit, some mystery magic
Takes control when I preach teach make sense
Beyond my own understanding.
"Don't try to understand mystery," my African teacher said.
"Stand under mystery."

I use words as
Words take me and do their work.

20 December 2008

Sifting

2008-12-17T16:06:00.004-06:00

Accumulated piles of life
Laid out, scattered across the floor.
She sits, quiet -- almost serene among the debris;
Flotsam and jetsam: Thirty plus years

I helped to make.
"Whose is this?"
"What is that?"
Simple profound questions that question
our lives.

Music in the air more peaceful
Than the scattered pastiche:
Song reflects and magnifies jewels, diamonds
Thrown out of the rubble.
An old letter, a fragment of life
four decades old.
Pictures, reminders of that long past;
Some pitched without remorse,
Hesitating, Gone. So many sermons.

"We should do this more often."

We did once.

14 December 2008

Christmas and Students and

2008-12-13T19:44:00.003-06:00

I just finished putting together our Christmas tree. "Putting together" signals that we did not forage through the forest and find the perfect "real" tree and cut it down. Rather I assembled 9with the usual stops and starts that such processes engender for me) the tree we have had for quite a number of years. Then Lois fluffed it out, and wrapped some presents, and put them under the tree. No decorations yet, except for some stray tinsel left over from last year. "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas ..."

In the background "The Fellowship of the Ring" played (extended edition). We have had Christmas music on for some weeks, so I didn't mind something different. I enjoy the weeks before Christmas: Advent, we call it. Anticipation. Hope of Christ's Return, and memory of the baby's birth. "All poor men and humble, All lame men who stumble, Come haste, nor feel ye afraid." But that's only one side of life for a teacher.

At the same time the semester winds down. The rhythm is similar each year. A frenzy of final assignments leaves students pressing, almost gasping, and all of us praying for strength. Then papers are done, exams are written, and faculty endure the pressure to finish grading and assessment for the semester.

I deal with those pressures easily enough. But there's another part of Advent that I find more difficult. Each semester ending means that people leave, and I walk up and down the empty corridors. The end of the second semester is much worse. The hardest day of the year for me is the day after graduation, when I go in to a school empty of students. Advent, and Easter, have their specific Christian meanings, to which I add the meaning of leaving.

Last night we met with our pastor to talk about the process of renewing our membership at SMC. (We had moved to a church plant in town for a couple of years; with its passing, we have moved back to SMC.) As seven of us talked about what church membership means to each of us, one stated that she has been part of four churches in her life. I sat there thinking through the churches I have belonged to (or attended regularly): 13, I think. It's hard to keep track.

Perhaps my peripatetic past leaves me more sensitive to the transitory nature of the school year's rhythm. It is not a bad thing. It is, I believe, a profoundly good thing. The past is passing, and the Return comes nearer. But transitions still leave me feeling shaky.

Happenings

2008-12-03T20:45:00.003-06:00

I posted pictures and thoughts on mortality on the 25th. A week has passed, full of happenings. The next day was our younger son's birthday. Twenty-two years ago he joined us after a day spent in the Baptist Memorial Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. I remember Lois hooked up to a monitor after the doctor had done an exam during a routine pre-natal visit, "You're having a contraction now. Don't you feel it?" "Well, I feel a sort of tightening. is that it?" "If that's all you feel, I'm not letting you go home. You won't know you're in labour until it's too late!"

So we spent the day with Lois hooked up to a monitor. Every so often she would say, "Am I having a contraction?" And I would look at the monitor and say, "Yes." Nevin has not always been so unobtrusive; but for 22 years he has been a joy and delight in our lives. Two sons, and both wonderful men today.

The next day (the 27th) was Thanksgiving. We're in Canada, and most people here ignored American Thanksgiving. Considering how little attention Americans pay to our Thanksgiving celebration in October, one understands. the pictures I posted last time, reminding myself of what Lois and I looked like 32 years ago, are cause enough for thanks. I am sometimes simply surprised at my good fortune, to be in my 32nd year of marriage to a wonderful woman.

Then Sunday began the Advent season. "Lo, He comes with clouds descending, once for favoured sinners slain. Thousand, thousand saints attending swell the triumph of his train." Remembering our Lord's first coming in weakness, and anticipating his return in power and great glory.

When I think of these things, I think also of Zimbabwe -- or any place where injustice has a grip on people's lives. "All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well." Was that Julian of Norwich? I'm not sure. But the truth is there. Our world is in a mess -- ecologically, morally, politically -- but the prayer, "Your kingdom come on earth as in Heaven" holds true, and I can give thanks. Always.

Such language falls into sermonizing too easily; but I need strong hope for the pessimism that lies just beneath the surface. Family and faith in God: these are sources of strong hope indeed.

Appearances

2008-11-25T20:21:00.005-06:00

I was sitting the faculty lounge having lunch. Several others around me started comparing thoughts on hair style and care. My own powers of observation are limited, so that I tend not to notice that Lois has had a haircut unless I was forewarned. But I realized quickly enough as I listened that I am as vain as anyone else about appearance.

I observed that I used to have red hair. Some were sceptical, but the picture of Lois and me when we first were engaged shows the truth.

Their scepticism is easy to understand. Here we are today.

Lois tells me that white hair is good, and I am willing to believe her. I notice the thinning, the weathering, the truth that time passes whatever we feel like inside. When we left Pennsylvania to go back to school, after about nine years of marriage, we had become a small family.

Lois, Vaughn, and I -- ready to leave Speedwell heights for Wilmore. I think I was less concerned with appearance then. A kind of carelessness that went with being 36. Now I'm not so sure. I know that I am older, and I notice.

Speedwell had been good for us. I preached 45 to 50 Sundays a year. The picture below comes from my ordination service, with John Byers sitting behind me. Time passes, and John himself is gone now.

One of the things that I notice most now is my aversion to the sun. I can't stay long in the sun under any conditions. When we last travelled abroad, I remember trying to avoid the sun often. First picture, making sure that I'm under the roof of the bicycle taxis in London.

Then hiding under a blanket while an electrician works on our wonder car in the Kalahari desert.

In a way the last picture is a metaphor for appearances. Sometimes I don't want to be seen, not just by the sun. As I get older, I become aware of both sides: wanting to be noticed, and wanting to hide away. Appearances. Alternately showing off and hiding.

The chance conversation about hairstyles and colours is an excuse to remember what we look like. The shell of physicality that encloses our selves (these "ensouled bodies") matters more than we might think. In the end, the shell crumbles and the self remains, so that the shell of John in the picture above lies now in a grave. John himself is stronger than ever; but appearances matter. He has a new body (shell), Paul tells us.

It's good to remember what we have had and been; the memories are ourselves anyway.

Banya

2008-11-20T20:01:00.003-06:00

This afternoon I went to a Russian sauna, or banya. One of my colleagues has extensive experience in Russia and has taken advantage of Manitoba's similarity to the Russian winter to build himself a banya in his backyard.

He found a supply of cedarwood and built a shed with a small outer room. I entered the outer room and stripped off my clothes, hanging them on a hook. Glasses came off immediately: too much steam to see with them on anyway. A swimsuit (too much of a new comer to this sort of thing to consider au naturel), and I was ready to go further in and much hotter. My friend only makes the banya about 70 Celsius (about 160 Fahrenheit). We're not setting any records, but it feels warm in the early Manitoba winter.

Soon sweat drips from my face and body and every pore. I can't see well without my glasses in any case, and with sweat flowing freely down my face I spend most of the time with my hands wiping my eyes. Three other men are there. They all sit on the top seat (we have three levels in the small sauna). John pours water into a container on the woodstove, and steam fills the air.

After about 10 minutes one of the others leads the way out; he's the closest to a newcomer besides me. I sit on the bottom seat, where the heat is lowest. And I follow him out without hesitation. The four of us cool off outside. The snow just covers the ground, so no rolling around in the snow today. The two who are most experienced take cold water from a tap and pour it over themselves. I just cool off, grateful to be able to see again.

Then back inside. John adds oil with some peppermint to the water this time, and scent mingled with steam fills the air. Soon I am holding my hands over my eyes again. Another 10 minutes and my first banya of the year is over. I cool off outside, put my clothes back on, and head for home.

It's a good experience. Physically it helps to bring out anything inside the body that needs to be purged. The four of us found that the steam and heat and cold also greases conversation and friendship. Perhaps holding one's hands over one's eyes helps men to speak more easily ....

The banya over, I walked back to the main campus building with one of the others. The two stalwarts remained in the banya for another half hour. I fingered my glasses, waiting for the frames to shrink enough for my to reinsert the right lens. A hot metal frame combined with a cool plastic-glass lens makes for loss of lens: unanticipated consequences of the banya. Next time I'll leave my glasses outside the hut entirely.

A Rocha

2008-11-16T18:50:00.004-06:00

I've been reading a book that brings together two of my passions, the story of the founding of A Rocha in Portugal. Peter and Miranda Harris were working in an English pastorate (curacy, if you prefer) when God called them to begin a bird-watching conservancy, specifically as a Christian outreach in Portugal. Under Bright Wings is the story of how they began the venture now known as the A Rocha Christian Field Study Centre and Bird Observatory.

A Rocha means Rock -- on this rock I will build my church. We have built often enough on dubious foundations, some thought that we might gain some credit for growing the church. And we have seen efforts struggle and fail even when they seemed to be succeeding. The story Peter Harris tells does not include great numbers of people in the Algarve (where they lived) becoming Christian. It does, however, show that genuine Christian faith came to be possible for people who thought that the church was quite irrelevant to the challenges of living in Europe today.

I think of other ventures, such as the retreat centre at Taize in France. I am in more sympathy with the theology of A Rocha, which is (to my mind) evangelical; while the theology of Taize is less clear. But both incorporate Scripture and prayer at the centre of everything they do. A deep abiding desire to know God and be in close communion with God endures in the human spirit, even when our culture, indeed so much of the world, tries so hard to get rid of God completely.

When I think of my two passions: knowing God and treating God's creation with respect and care (what some call "environmentalism"): it is clear to me that treating the earth rightly (conservation) is a form of worship. Secularists who want to save the earth mean well (as they might say of me also!), but why should I bother if we can't succeed and if there's nothing after this life anyway. But caring for creation, expressing my love and obedience for the Creator who has given us this incredible gift we call "earth"; that's another matter altogether.

I don't need to pursue environmental causes with a deep need to succeed, and thus to despair of doing anything when human greed destroys another part of nature (or, more accurately, Creation). Instead, I can do what is right (from using less fossil fuel to recycling to keeping the yard neat and enjoying Lois' garden because in all of this I am celebrating the goodness of the Creator who gave us this wonderful gift we call "earth".

Life Continues

2008-11-06T19:50:00.002-06:00

The American Presidential Election is over (except where they're doing recounts, such as the Minnesota senate race). Obama won, for which I am grateful. I wanted change, which is his watchword. I want a government and country that is more willing to be part of the whole world and less ready to invade other countries. I want a country in which it's okay to disagree with each other, without having one's patriotism questioned. Obama has promised such a country, although we're the ones who will have to make it work.

When it comes to specific policies, I tend to be fairly conservative -- a registered democrat who can vote republican without a lot of difficulty. But I am also a part of the world. I have lived in too many different countries to buy into the neo-con vision of America as the world's conscience and policeman and governor.

So I'm glad; but I know that the real disagreements I have with Obama (for example, taking the right away from the States to legislate on abortion) will remain. Now that the electoral message has been sent: don't invade other countries; use our military in self-defense: I can consider republican candidates again. I know that many others who voted for Obama had other issues in mind, from the economy to a dislike of conservatives in general. Those issues aren't mine. I am conservative, and I can't say as I dislike liberals. Many good people are some of each. And the economy stems from problems far deeper than republican policies, not least the greed that is endemic to American society. Overspending on a war we did not need to fight has lessened our ability to deal with the economic crisis, and that war was my single most important issue this time around.

The sun came up today. God orders the stars and planets in their courses, and God brought another day, regardless of who we voted for. The stock market fell, and the economy continues its antics. Our car needed repairing, and the plumber fixed a problem with the water softener. Our dog looks out the window and welcomes us home ecstatically, and then sleeps beside me as I type. He's old enough (11 and 1/2) to know that companionship and love are more important even than elections. Meanwhile, the election is over and Obama won. Some of my friends think that's a bad thing, but God reigns anyway. I think we all won this time, but I know that the real truth is that God reigns and the sun came up this morning.

Postscript: We have a new bed, higher than our old mattress (the same one we had when we got married over 31 years ago!). We've sprayed for spiders. So finally I am sleeping better and back in my own bed. I don't know yet if the saga is over, or if something else is going on. i still have some unexplained bumps on my head -- not the Slagenweit kind, but swellings that come and go. They may be the after effects of three weeks of spider bites, or something else. Who knows? But the sun came up this morning, after a good night's sleep in my own bed.

More Spiders and Stuff

2008-10-26T14:16:00.006-05:00

First, a reminder of Autumn. We don't have all the sugar maple reds that we used to in Indiana, but we've had a gorgeous Fall anyway. By now, approaching the end of October, we are used to the weather having turned much colder. It will, but so far we've had lovely weather and the yard and garden remain beautiful. Lois' autumn joy (above) is a special delight.

And now the spiders. Or, if you prefer, spiderman (as my car pool mates call me). We have tried vacuuming out the bed, plugging up holes in the wall, everything except setting off Konk (a pressurized aerosol that kills everything in the room -- but I can't quite imagine sleeping in the residue). And I have still gotten bitten each night for the past three weeks. We have found two different friends who have had the same problem, so we know more about what's going on; but we still do not know what kind of spider is involved.

I did get a brief respite by sleeping in Nevin's room for two nights, well covered up. Last night I returned to my own bed, attired thus:

Socks tucked over the sweatpants, gloves pulled over the sweatshirt, and a mosquito net over my head. I'm not sure that it actually worked: things tend to gap when the wearer is asleep, and I may still have gotten a bite. But it gives me some sense of taking action while we try to find the spiders. If I hadn't killed one crawling over my ear a couple of weeks ago, I would think that the bites came from something else. But one of the two friends who had spiders described the nest she found: 20 some spiders quite small (1/2 inch across) and perfectly round (body like a little ball and legs also making a circle), a tan coloured body. The description matches the one that I killed.

They may be in our mattress, which is quite old. We can of course replace it. They may be in the wall. We'll do some spraying of baseboards and see what happens. Eventually I hope we get rid of them, and I can return to lying in bed comfortably, without putting on a suit of spider armour.

Spiders!

2008-10-21T20:08:00.002-05:00

Some of my blogging friends do wonders with pictures. I wish I could take pictures of spiders, but as soon as I see them I squash them! I'm usually quite calm when I see a spider (or insects flying about the house): I tell Lois to kill them. But I have a good reason for becoming more active in my response.

I like spiders. They kill and eat other insects and keep the mosquito population (for example) under control. But at this moment I am in an uncharitable mood. Spiders bite! At least I think that's the problem. Here's my story.

Two weeks ago and a bit, I found a swelling on my neck. A couple of days later the swelling migrated to my left eye. Now I already feel self-conscious about the 58-year-old bags under my eyes. Usually I don't mind them: badges of honour I think. But when they fill with fluid and make me look puffy and drunk, I don't like them! At first I thought the swelling might be a reaction to a medication I had started taking. (One of those 50something things that 20somethings don't understand. I didn't 30 years ago. I do now.) I went to the doctor and showed him the original swelling and my puffy eye. He took me off the medication, but added that both looked more like the result of a spider bite to him than anything else.

So the saga began. I remember now that I have had similar swellings on my neck for some months, but disregarded them since they went away quickly enough. The doctor (who used to practice in Indiana) observed that our Manitoba spiders do not produce as severe a reaction as bites down south. That's good, but I kept checking for bites.

They came regularly. Over the past two weeks I have had bites on my scalp and neck almost every night. At least I think they're spider bites. The most compelling evidence came last week. I woke up to feel something on my ear, slapped at it, then turned on the light. Lo! A dead spider on my pillow! I thought, "Great! Now I can sleep without getting bitten!"

No such luck. The bites kept coming. Finally Sunday afternoon Lois and I pulled the bed out, cleared everything from under the bed (no more boxes of memorabilia there), and vacuumed carefully, including the baseboard. Lois performed a temporary plugging of a hole in the corner that could have been providing access for the spiders. Then we moved everything back into place.

Sunday night I tried to sleep, but Monday morning I found three more bites on my scalp, along with a puffy left eye. Back to the doctor, who saw no infection in the eye, so no real problem, but agreed that the bites were a nuisance. I also killed a spider that I found on the floor. I think it got lost trying to get back home after feasting on me! Lois had plugged its usual escape route, so it wandered about the floor until morning. I killed another downstairs this evening, which may or may not be connected to our bedroom spiders.

This morning I think there were no new bites. My eye has returned almost to normal. The swellings on my head have migrated together into one lump on the back of my neck, and I'm waiting to see what happens tonight.

"What happens to Lois?" I hear you ask. They don't bite her. If they did, I might suspect bed bugs or mites or some other pest. But she has escaped unscathed. She buries her head under the blankets every night, as she has for a long time. The spiders can't find her! So they crawl over the head they find -- mine. I've tried to copy her, but 58 years of sleeping habits can't be so easily undone. I think that all I've done is make sure that the bites are on my scalp.

I don't even know for sure that spiders are the problem. I do know that the swellings are not from the medication! I feel like I need my old mosquito net from sleeping in Zambia. If anyone has any advice or help for me, let me know!

A Long Autumn

2008-10-19T20:35:00.004-05:00

C. S. Lewis once wrote that old age was the best time of life, like Autumn. But like Autumn, he said, it doesn't last. Old age, or maturity past the full flower of summer.

We are having a delightful Fall in Manitoba. Our colours are not as showy as I remember from Indiana and Pennsylvania. In spite of the leaf on our country's flag, we have few red maples here: they are (I'm told) back in Ontario, which thinks it's Canada. (Hence the flag.) But the colours and temperatures and sun and clouds have all been lovely. Like a fading maturity.

I'm approaching 60 in another year and a half: maybe that's why I think of this. Sometimes getting older is a delight. To be with the wife of my youth (I was 27 years old then: it seems so young now, but it certainly did not at the time) for 31 years has been great joy. Another 31 years would bring me close to my father's age today. Which gives an idea of how old he was when I was born.

Sometimes I enjoy the Autumn, or at least late summer, the declining season of my life. Not always. Physical things that one shakes off quickly when young become more difficult to deal with. I exchange news of physical ailments with my friends in a way that no 2o something would think of doing! But most of the time I realize that God is good, and that Autumn is a wonderful season. Just too short -- especially in Manitoba.

The snow should come next month and stay until April, if past years are any guide. Meanwhile I listen to my jazz and world music, and work on my sermons and class lessons, and listen to people around me and listen for God's voice. Scott Peck said that the gift of our declining years is to be stripped of self-sufficiency so as to enter the presence of Omnipotence with an attitude of complete and total dependence: the only safe frame of mind with which to enter the presence of Omnipotence.

Autumn: long and warmly chill, coloured and shaded with reflective joy.

Back Again

2008-10-16T21:28:00.004-05:00

School has started -- almost halfway through the fall semester. I'm in a routine, sort of. Car pooling with several other people from Steinbach to Providence. Teaching class. Reading and assessing essays. Learning to know new people and situations, and trying to keep a genuine awareness of God at the heart of the whole process.

We've just finished an election in Canada. That vote was pretty easy for me: Go Green! It's a protest vote in our riding, where the Conservative candidate takes almost twice as many votes as all other candidates combined. I'm also hoping to help the Green Party gain enough of a percentage to get people's attention, especially political type people.

We could vote in the American election too, based on dual citizenship; but somehow I don't feel right voting twice. So I vote where I live at the moment. If I did vote in the States, again it would be an easy call. I have opposed the invasion of Iraq from the beginning, and the primary recourse our system has for expressing such opposition is by voting against the architects and their supporters.

Whoever wins (McCain or Obama), I feel more hopeful about the future. It's a funny thing that: I hear one person after another talking as though, if the other guy wins, we're doomed! Obama will be the end of freedom in our country! McCain will take us to war with everyone else! I doubt it. Both of them seem to me to represent positive change in our foreign policy. They differ more at home, but congress carries the greater responsibility to pass any legislation proposed. I'm looking forward to a change.

Bush? I feel real regret. I supported him once, and wish I still could; but the course he has taken have pushed me right away. I'm looking forward to the next presidency. It won't fix very much, but at least I hope it won't invade anyone else.

Relating to People

2008-02-17T20:29:00.003-06:00

I have a blog for a class I teach on World Religions. I posted this to that blog, and repeat it here.

A fuller title for this post could be "relating to people of other religions", but the title says what I want to say. We live in part of Manitoba that has a fairly high level of immigration. Once upon a time, immigration meant "more people like us" from Paraguay or Russia or Germany or Mexico. now it means people from all over the world. Filipinos make up the largest group of immigrants. Many others come from Asia and Africa. People who speak Low German and have a Mennonite background are no longer the overwhelming majority.

Christianity is still the primary religion represented among immigrants. But many from Europe are people who see their Christian or secular faith as so private that any question about faith makes them feel suspicious. Others from Asia and Africa are Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists. Although the overwhelming majority of Steinbach is still at least nominally Christian, we have many neighbours who represent other religions. How should we relate to them?

The European answer meshes with the Canadian approach: "Faith is private, and none of your business." I must admit that I have trouble with this approach. Private belief issues in public action, and refusal to admit who I am inside makes it harder for others to deal with the choices I make in public.

The desire to keep faith private is based in good sense. We see people around the world engaged in conflict, and faith seems to be an integral part of those conflicts. So we teach tolerance for all people and keep quiet about our faith. Does the fact of faiths in conflicts mean that we should keep quiet about faith or religion? I don't think so.

Many people in Africa and Asia are quite comfortable talking about religion, without assuming that the person they are speaking with must convert to their faith. The real roots of conflict in our world are political and economic. People then use religion to energize the conflict already felt for other reasons. What we need a primary commitment to peace and to respect.

Tolerance is such a weak word. Respect is much stronger. I can talk to you and listen to you respectfully. I do not need to accept that you are right, if I don't think you are; but I do need to continue to treat you fairly and respectfully.

As I said above, private faith results in public actions; so I would like to know what faith is behind the way that people live. I want to know if someone is a Christian or a Muslim, a Buddhist or an Atheist, and so on. I want to be free to say what i am (a Christian), without having my rights as a Canadian placed in jeopardy. I want to continue to respect and accept and work with all people around me, as Jews or New Age or whatever they are, with the freedom to say who they are and who I am. I want to relate to whole people.

A common concern is that such openness will lead to proselytizing. I suppose it might. Sometimes Liberal Party members try to convince someone from the NDP that he/she would be more at home in the Liberal Party. Is that a bad thing to do? Sometimes people who discuss bringing a a power line down the west side of Lake Winnipeg try to convince others that west is better than east. Is it wrong for them to do so?

It would be wrong to mistreat people with whom we disagree politically. One should not, for example, give less money to one school district than to another because it voted for the other party in the last provincial election. Nor should one break friendship with someone because the other thinks that the power line should be laid along the bottom of the lake. But we find out what is right and true in a free exchange of ideas in which we can say what we truly believe.

Religion is no different. We treat people from other religions as people. If we find they don't want to talk about it, we don't press the issue. If we find they are willing to talk about matters of faith, we may talk. At the least, we should be free to say who we are without embarrassment and without proselytizing.

Christmas 2007

2007-12-26T18:15:00.000-06:00

Our family has been watching old videos. Seventeen years ago we lived in Kentucky, then Zimbabwe, then Kentucky. Many memories surfaced as we watched the Heise family gathered together for our last time before Dad died. We sang hymns for about 45 minutes in February 1991, a wonderful time together even in death's shadow. Many more memories came with pictures of Mike and Lyn, and of the memorial to their daughter. We saw images of Zimbabwe, from Bulawayo to the Eastern Highlands, a beautiful country, so delightful, and today so ravaged by corruption and greed for power.

Memories are good. They remind us of who we are, for better or worse, and help ground our present existence. Those reminders took me off guard at times as we watched. During Vaughn's birthday party an old man carrying a bag stopped at the guest house, of which we were the hosts. I was taking the video of the children playing, and called out to him, "UBaba, tshaya ibell" -- ring the doorbell, father, implying that someone would take care of him.

I watched that clip, incidental to our family memories, and wondered at myself. Within the Ndebele culture an old man deserves respect. I showed some, by way of the courtesy of calling him "Baba", but I continued my own task of shooting the video. I wished as I watched that I had either stopped the video or handed it to someone else and walked over to him, greeted him with the courtesy due his years, and inquired after his health and life and finally his business with us. It would have cost me little, and would have also showed him a white person treating him with the kind of respect white people too rarely give to others.

In my regrets I wonder also if perhaps I wish this only because then I would have shown myself a better person. Such habits as caring genuinely for others are developed throughout a lifetime, not manufactured for the moment in Bulawayo.

For Christmas 2007 then, I have an early resolution -- to learn from the best of southern African cultures the value called "ubuntu": an acknowledgement of the other person's value as part of the human family, expressed in word and deed whenever I interact with others. This resolution I know I will break, but seeking to carry it out, a practice that takes a lifetime to perfect, is worth the effort.

Christmas Joy to all in my own family and in every part of our world.

Whose Religion?

2007-11-02T20:50:00.000-05:00

I teach several courses that include questions about what is true, how we know what is true, and the like. A recurring theme is the fact that everyone has a perspective, a way of looking at life, a way of processing the raw data of reality that bombards us each day.

I remember learning about the beginning of the United States. My school days, when I learned such things, are long gone; but I remember among various influences the desire to be able to worship freely, without interference from the State. People who were religiously disenfranchised in Holland or in England found a place where they could worship according to their own conscience. The way that the United States encapsulated this religious freedom in the Constitution is one of our better moments. We have much to be ashamed of, and much to be proud of in our history. Enshrining religious freedom in the First Amendment and in our laws is one of our better actions.

Of course, the action has been interpreted in different ways throughout our history. Earlier in our life as a nation, the First Amendment functioned to prevent the new country making one denomination the official church of the new state. Americans who had left the established Church of England behind avoided establishing another church in their new country, even when it was the church of their own choice. More recently, as the United States becomes increasingly pluralist (religiously and culturally), the First Amendment has come to serve as a way to keep religion in general out of the public square.

The ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) is well known for its activities in protecting the civil rights of Americans, often with respect to the First Amendment. A statement from its web page on religion is instructive:
"Some people, however, mistakenly use the word "public" when they really mean 'governmental.' This can be seen, for example, with Ten Commandments monuments. The right of churches and families to erect such monuments on their own property is constitutionally protected, regardless of whether it is public or private and regardless of whether someone is offended or not. A Christian cross that is fully visible from a public sidewalk is constitutionally protected when placed in front of a church. But if that same cross were moved across the street and placed in front of city hall, it would violate the Constitution. The issue is not 'religion in the public square' - as the rhetoric misleadingly suggests - but whether the government should be making decisions about whose sacred texts and symbols should be placed on government property and whose should be rejected."

I like what I see on the ACLU's web page. I agree with much that I find there. But their statement quoted above gets at the difficulty I feel. To express that difficulty, I digress into the history of my own church. The Brethren in Christ have roots going back to the Anabaptists, who began in Switzerland, Germany, and Holland at the end of the 16th Century. The Swiss Anabaptists in Zurich, Switzerland began as followers of Zwingli, and his movement against the Roman Catholic Church. I remember in seminary learning about the way that Zwingli and his young followers sought to purify the church in Zurich.

They cleaned out the decorations and symbols of the Roman church, scrubbing their sanctuary clean of all the religious symbols they could. There was one problem. The pulpit set in a clean sanctuary, with white walls and no other symbols, became a powerful new symbol, reflecting the new church's commitment to the preached word. The Anabaptists followed through on the power of the new symbol more consistently than did Zwingli, which became a basic cause of their own separation from him to form their own church.

In a similar way, a public square (or governmental square, in the ACLU terminology) scrubbed clean of religious symbols is itself a symbol of a particular religious commitment. The commitment to "no religion" is a commitment to secularism, in which secularism functions precisely as every religion always has.

One reason that some Christian conservatives have felt pushed out of public discourse in the United States (and in Canada, where I now live) is that they recognize, however vaguely, that their Christian religion has been supplanted by another religion. The problem is not that Christianity needs to be enfranchised, but that Secularism needs to be disenfranchised. What a genuinely free public/governmental square looks like is another question. In this essay I have tried to lay out a basic problem that operates within the USA and Canada, especially in the Academic community (where I make my living) and in that part of the public square which is controlled specifically by the government.

No new ideas here; just a problem to keep wrestling with: Whose religion does the country live by?

Thanksgiving Thoughts (with little reference to thanksgiving)

2007-10-08T14:48:00.001-05:00

Today is Thanksgiving Day in Canada. I am grateful that Lois continues to recover, although with occasional headaches and mild mood swings. A concussion will do that to you! We are expecting two families to join us for supper -- one from Zambia, and one from Singapore/Korea. It should be an enjoyable evening.

But my thoughts turn instead to something that I am reading, a History of South Africa by Leonard Thompson. Given that I grew up in Zambia and Zimbabwe, and given my continuing concern with Southern Africa as a whole, Thompson's work is of great interest to me.

I could reflect on various aspects of the story: the way that the indigenous peoples worked with and fought with each other; the story of the European settlers, whose efforts transformed the region for good and for ill; the difficulty of encompassing all the divergent stories in one primary story of the country as a whole. But I make two points only.

One builds on the last of the short list above: divergent stories held in tension within one story. Going to school in Rhodesia of old, I learned the story from the White Settler perspective. Our story was the narrative into which the stories of subject peoples were expected to fit, and within which their lives were supposed to find meaning. Now that perspective is reversed, and our story is seen as smaller than we thought -- important, but only a part of the whole. Our story now derives its meaning from the narrative of the majority peoples of Southern Africa.

The change in perspective is humbling, but necessary if we are to understand what our part really has been in this part of the world. The majority narrative may not understand our story fully; but the total picture surely belongs to the indigenous people of Africa. We are made part of the whole, and the meaning of our part depends on the whole.

Two is a mild critique of one statement that Thompson makes. He suggests that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was ultimately a failure, by which I think he means that it did not bring about a full reconciliation between the races of South Africa. In this he is certainly correct; but I suggest that his definition of success is unnecessarily strict.

Without the TRC, we do not know what would have been over the past 10 years of the new South Africa. Certainly deep divisions remain, primarily (but not exclusively) along racial lines. Certainly many hurts continue to fester. But so difficult and damaging were the decades before 1994 that even a successful TRC could not simply heal all that had happened. It may be that these past 10 years would have been worse, not simply the same, as they in fact were.

Insofar as I have a point, it is this: the story is always more complex than any brief history can describe. Thompson knows that and does a superb job of writing succinctly and accurately. But here (and at a few other points in the book) I think he forgot what he knows. Greater credit than he gives is due to De Klerk, and to other White activists over the past 200 years, and to ordinary people Black and White who were not simply pawns of apartheid.

I don't know if South Africa will move beyond the depressing histories of Zimbabwe and other countries where one-party rule has led to brutal dictatorship. It may; it may not. I don't know. But so far, the progress made is worth a Thanksgiving.

Falling 2

2007-08-25T18:55:00.000-05:00

I didn't see her fall
A sound to my left
Thud and bounce of body
falling
hitting
stopping
There was no cry, no shout alarmed
Only thud and bounce of body
on beam and walls and steps and floor

Well-travelled steps
to laundry and family-room
Each day we climb a hundred times
Well-travelled steps
No cry, no shout alarmed
A body lying on her face

The path we all travel someday
loomed suddenly in front of me
I saw the road we follow unwillingly, unwittingly
beside her body, face-down, unmoving

"What day is it?" "I don't know"
"Do you know what year it is?" "No"
In light from common-place questions
the road not yet travelled fades
No stroke, no broken bones (what miracle!)
Bruised and concussed
she heals and walks and sits and lies
with me still

I take well-travelled steps
down and up
a hundred times

As often my hand reaches out
Touches the beam that struck her head
Relives the thud and bounce of body

In mind's eye I see replayed
The fall I never saw
A silent loop of film, no cry of alarm
Fall into the road not yet travelled

Daryl Climenhaga
25 August 2007

Postscript: The prose version appears in the post before this one.

Falling

2007-08-13T21:13:00.000-05:00

A week ago last night, Sunday August 5, my life spun round for a bit. It was about 10 pm, we had just finished talking to Nevin on the phone (trying out Skype, with mixed success), and Lois went upstairs for something. On the way back down the steps, we (Kyle and I) think that she slipped or tripped or somehow lost her balance. She pitched forward, hitting her head on something. She then fell, quite relaxed, bouncing from side to side, the rest of the way down the carpeted stairs and lay on the carpet of the basement floor. I ran over to her, and found her unconscious. She did not respond to my calls, and made a sound as if snoring. Kyle Burgess (with us for the summer) immediately called 911, and the paramedics arrived within five minutes. Lois had started to regain consciousness. They asked various questions. “Where are you?” “I don’t know” What day is it today?” “I don’t know” “Month?” “Don’t know.” “Year?” “Don’t know.

They immobilized her on a hard board, checking for other injuries as they did so, and carried her up the stairs and out to the ambulance. Kyle and a friend of his (Jason) helped carry. Lois threw up on the driveway, and then they got her into the ambulance and drove off to the hospital, about two minutes away. Code Amber: with my limited knowledge I think that means serious, but not critical.

At the hospital between about 10:30 pm and 2 am, the emergency personnel did a cat-scan and an x-ray of Lois’ neck. They also kept checking her eyes, ability to respond with her extremities, and asking questions. By 12:30, she was able to point out that it was now August 6, not August 5, because it was after midnight. So her mind was clearing. At about 2:00 I went home and to bed. Lois slept most of the night in emergency. Other cases (an overdose, and a baby who didn’t want to wait for the doctor were two that I remember) meant that they did not move her to a room until early morning, maybe about 6:00. Lois called me at home at 8:30, and I joined her at the hospital at about 9:30 am. She was obviously much better, and at 3 pm, after the doctor on duty had checked her, she came home to rest and recover.

Lois had significant bruising on the right side of her face, and on the outside and inside of her upper lip. We went out a few days later briefly, and the looks we got from passers-by were noticeable. But now, a week later, the bruising has faded; one wouldn't know that for a few minutes my world was reeling on its foundations. "I feel the earth move under my feet" -- but I don't think this is what the song was referring to.

So what could have been very serious has been just a bit scary. Lois is doing well, and I'm recovering. One realizes quickly how we elevate relatively unimportant things in our lives; and such shocks restore needed perspective. We are grateful and thank God for life and health and for each other.

The Garden, Part Two

2007-07-16T08:51:00.000-05:00

As I thought would happen, Lois looked at the blog and said, "You were right. You got all the wrong pictures!" I gather I used more annuals than perennials, even though the garden has more perennials than annuals. And I showed too many close-ups so that one cannot grasp the shape of anything, let alone a flower bed. And so on.

She is right. I don't know a pansy from a daffodil. I have learned to recognize autumn joy, but they aren't flowering yet. It's not Autumn! Anyway, the pictures that follow are her selection, and they confirm me in my belief that I am incredibly fortunate to live in the midst of such beauty.

A problem with these pictures is that I don't feel like following the necessary steps for a more attractive format. So I place them here, stacked one on the other like a card house. They need more commentary, so that you can see the fire pit at the back of the yard, or discern where Lois' flowerbed blends into Mary's (our neighbour's, who planned her flowerbed to extend from ours), or see where the local park flows from our yard outwards. But enough. It's summer, and time for gardens.

Summer Garden

2007-07-15T20:46:00.001-05:00

In Manitoba winter is for snow, and summer is for gardens. Lois enjoys summer. When we moved here, our yard was surrounded by mature, full, well-tended hedges. But they had fireblight in them and had to come out. They left lots of wonderful space for Lois to express herself.

The boys and I remember the beginning process well. Lois marked out the flower beds, and together she and the boys and I dug out and hauled away the Manitoba muck that permeates our yard and this whole area. This muck grabs you and won't let go when it's wet, and bakes hard when it's dry. Not good for gardens. We brought in and spread topsoil, filling in the beds, which Lois carefully shaped to give her dreams shape.

Since then she has filled the garden, mostly with perennials, carefully placed so as to bloom at different times throughout the summer. We have mosquitoes in Manitoba, and sometimes we have to compete with them to enjoy the flowers. But the garden is wonderful!

The pictures below can't convey adequately what we see in front of and behind the house. Pictures can't. (And I am quite certain that Lois would have chosen different pictures: but I wanted to show a bit of what is there.) We have extraordinary beauty, God-given, carefully tended (Lois as God's steward), constant reminder of the creation: "And God looked at what he had made and it was very good."

In Manitoba winter is for snow, and summer is for gardens. When the winter bites, and snow covers all around, we remember the summer garden. Snow lasts from mid-November (usually) to late March/early April. Close to six months of winter a year. It has its own beauty, and we have come to enjoy winter also. At the moment, we're enjoying the garden.

When you're tagged ...

2007-07-09T20:18:00.000-05:00

My sister tagged me. Sort of, she says; but to a brother a tag is a tag! This tag consists of a simple instruction, which I shall try follow, at least partially:
- Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
- People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
- At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to tag and list their names. Leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog. (Participation is optional, and it's OK if you defer.)

I will give eight random facts about myself, but refrain from tagging anyone else, whether by good breeding or shyness or lack of appropriate network.

1) I was born in Zambia. My sister (the older tagging one) says that she no longer starts with the fact of growing up in Africa. I think I still do. Perhaps it is partly because the immigration officer at the border occasionally asks me: "You were born in Zambia. How did you become a citizen?" I was born an American, not an American in Paris, but an American in the Southern Province of Zambia.

2) I cross borders often enough to notice. We went across the border again today, Lois and I. We wanted to send in our American passports to be renewed, and had some questions that a trip to Minnesota helped answer. One of my questions was how I show I am an American if I need to the next time I go down to Minnesota in August. Birth certificate? I was born in Zambia. But I have an old passport (showing a younger and red-haired Daryl), and I have my certificate reporting my birth to the American Embassy in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia. The immigration officer's son had been born in Japan, so he was sympathetic and helpful.

3) I am a dual citizen. American and Canadian. My American identity is well-established, and if I had to hold on to one or the other, I would hold on to my citizenship by birth. But the Canadian identity runs deep, since one of my grandfathers was Canadian by birth. I am told that when he used to cross the peace Bridge returning to southern Ontario, he would say, "Ah! The free air of Canada!" I'm learning what he meant.

4) I like sports. Cricket; Soccer; Basketball; Football; almost any sport. Cricket and Soccer and basketball and floor hockey for playing. After 42 years without a cricket bat in my hand, I was able to play three times last week because several Indian families have moved to our town. Joy! And the fact that I can still play Soccer, at a slow and gentle pace, is a delight. At 57 I have learned to be grateful for such delights.

5) I like the music of southern Africa. And I like dancing. Lois forced me to take dancing lessons as the price for a DVD player. It was a good deal!

6) My sense of humour is an acquired taste -- like orange soda drunk through a licorice straw (a favourite treat from my college days).

7) Reading, ideas, chess, arguing: I like the things of the mind. Physical play is good; mental play is good. The best jobs have a sense of play within the inevitable drudgery.

8) Perhaps not a random fact: I cannot conceive of life without God. Paul talks about how all things "hold together" in the person of Jesus. Another meaning of the word translated "hold together" is "find their meaning"; that's life for me: something that finds meaning in walking with Jesus. I honestly can't imagine myself any other way. I know that there are many "ways": I teach world religions among other things. But my own life only makes sense within my faith. Maybe it's like that for everyone in one way or another.

Well, no tags for anyone else. But eight is a good number. Okay Denise, Donna tagged you too! Your turn!

Reunions

2007-06-30T18:03:00.000-05:00

Last week at this time I was at my 40th High School Class Reunion. What may be surprising about this fact is the limited attention I have given to reunions in general. I would like to get to the annual Slagenweit Reunion each Labour Day in Martinsburg. But I'm a teacher. In Manitoba. There is no way I can be in Pennsylvania at that time of year. I have attended one or two college reunions, and I felt closer to my classmates in college than in High School.

Certainly I had never gone back to see my High School mates. I went to Annville-Cleona Area High School for only one year: grade 12. (That school has been torn down, but this link shows what is there now.) I have lived most of the time since then far away from Lebanon County. I have not stayed in touch with any of my classmates.

Although I have been curious about former friends, even if only friends for a year, I probably would not have gone back this year either; but ... A group of bicycle riders from 1976 decided to have a reunion (okay: it should have been last year for 30, but we made it for 31). Some 33 of us had ridden our bicycles from Kansas to California at about this time of year, led by a group called "Out-Spokin" (then a Mennonite ministry from Elkhart, Indiana) and riding to the Brethren in Christ General Conference, held that year at Azusa, California.

So we had a bicycle reunion on Friday night in Pennsylvania, and a High School reunion the next night at the Timbers in Mt. Gretna. So Lois and I flew to Toronto, rented a car, and drove to Pennsylvania. (On the way we learned that Lois' mother faced emergency surgery, but that is another story.) And we reunioned.

I enjoyed it. I knew hardly anyone there, but that was no surprise. The bigger surprise was that I knew anyone. Certain people (such as the two Harolds) I would like to have seen were not there; but I didn't really expect them to be. And everyone was friendly. They were dressed up a bit more than I was: I really have taken to the informality of the prairies! But they were generally people I could enjoy being with. They looked older, but not older than I expected. There were memories, but not so many thrown out as you might expect. Mostly a realization that this group is part of who I am. I noticed also how little such things as who was popular mattered in a reunion: what matters more is who comes.

One memory stands out. Joan McCulloh was our English teacher, perhaps the only teacher whose name I remember. I remembered her as strict, demanding, and good. I said something about her, and a classmate said, "You remember here because she is probably the best teacher you ever had." Well, I've had a lot of teachers, and I may have been more teachable later in life for some of those others. But I know what he was saying. The ability to construct sentences, to make sense with words, to think with some semblance of clarity: these were gifts from "Flint" McCulloh.

There was a silent auction. Maybe other teachers donated something to the auction as well; I doubt it. But Miss McCulloh did. A quite remarkable connection, a bond that 40 years later jumps out so that the casual observer sees that this teacher and these students belonged together. For one evening 40 or 50 of us belonged together again. Five years from now, some of us will again.

Happy Fathers Day

2007-06-18T13:06:00.000-05:00

With my sisters I wish Dad "Happy Father's Day!" Donna remembered several things: I echo three.

1) The hair combing. With his hair combed straight back, Dad appeared to have moderate length hair, but of course, pulled straight forward it became quite long. We used to comb it a lot, especially at Matopo, I think. When my hair was at its longest in college, Dad's hair was probably longer. Mine just hung straight down!

2) Bicycles. I remember learning to ride at Matopo. The long straight drive between the eucalyptus trees. Dad running behind, encouraging, letting go; and the feeling of accomplishment when I stayed upright. Many years later in Ndola I enjoyed repeating the experience with Vaughn.

The pictures above show the house we lived in then, with the driveway passing in front of our house, and some rocks we used to play on, pretending they were a ship in the ocean, or ...

3) Music. The Beethoven string quartets were the Rassumovsky Quartets, somber in comparison to the Haydn Emperor Quartet which he also had. That particular quartet has remained in my memory as a particulr favourite. When Lois and I had our first date, we went to hear a string quartet at Notre Dame. She remembers (I think) that we got lost on the way from Nappanee. I remember that we heard Haydn's Emperor Quartet, with the wonderful second movement known as the Austrian Hymn.

There are many other memories: Thank you Dad! And Happy Father's Day!

Crossing Customs

2007-06-15T17:35:00.000-05:00

When I wrote about taking a driver's test in Zambia, Donna remembered the outline of another story from that time period. February 1988. Lois and flew from Pennsylvania to south-central Africa for a three-year commitment teaching at the Theological College of Central Africa (TCCA, in Zambia) and the Theological College of Zimbabwe (TCZ). Vaughn was five years old, and Nevin about 15 months.

The morning that we were set to fly, Nevin started throwing up. We hurried off to our doctor (Lois' brother, Glen), and he told us, "He'll be fine, but you won't enjoy the flight!" In fact we had a great flight: from Harrisburg to Philadelphia (a small plane, 12 seats or so, absurd for leaving for Africa) to New York (another small commute) to London (overnight flight) to Lusaka (another overnight flight). Nevin slept the whole way, including the day layover in London and was no trouble at all.

Sunday morning we arrived in Lusaka. The cold damp of Pennsylvania gone, we entered summer as only south-central Africa can give. Mile high elevation, wonderful blue sky, occasional puff clouds growing to quick thunderstorms, a world away from winter in Pennsylvania.

Customs and Immigration were not in summertime mood, however. We were carrying our computer, with monitor and printer. This was 1988, and we thought that our 20 meg hard drive was pretty hot stuff. So did the customs officer. Once he established the contents of the three boxes marked "computer", "monitor", and "printer", he informed us that the officer who could clear these did not work on Sunday. He would be in on Monday.

Rich Stuebing had met us at the airport, ready to take us on the drive to Ndola, close to 300 miles away. We had no choice. We left my passport with the customs officer and the computer equipment, and gave instructions to the MCC representative (who had also met us) to clear them the next day and pick them up for us. Then we drove to a friend of Rich's who agreed to ship them up for us as soon as they cleared customs. In fact, it all worked. Later that week we received my passport safely, and computer equipment intact. And off we drove to Ndola.

In the late 1980s Zambia had police checkpoints about every 50 miles or so. South African agents made regular incursions into Zambia, occasionally blowing up things, partly to show that they could. The waning days of apartheid were no better than its heyday. There were seven checkpoints between Lusaka and Ndola.

We passed through the first five without incident. Rich responded to the questions routinely. "Where are you going?" Ndola." What do you do there?" and so one. Then came the sixth checkpoint, at Kapiri Mposhi, where the turn-off to Tanzania is. Because of its importance as a junction for international travel, this checkpoint had an immigration officer. And he wanted to see our papers.

Rich handed him his ID card and our (three) passports. The officer looked at the papers, checking each one off against our van's occupants. Then he asked Rich, "Where is his passport?" Rich explained the situation: "We had to leave it at the airport to clear some goods tomorrow. It is coming up this week." "But I must see his passport." Back and forth, speaking more clearly and distinctly with each repetition. Stalemate.

Then Rich handed him the one paper I did have, a copy of my Temporary Employment Permit for Zambia. On the top of the paper, it noted I work for the Brethren in Christ Church. The officer asked, "You re Brethren in Christ?" "Yes," I said. "Do you know Sikalongo?" "That was my first home," I replied.

I was born in Livingstone, when my parents lived at Sikalongo 140 miles away. We lived there until I was three years old, and I have a sister buried there; so indeed, I know Sikalongo. The officer continued, "What was your father's name?" "David Climenhaga." The officer looked at me. "You may go," he said, "I am from Sikalongo."

The customs of the country! We were "homeboys". In Zimbabwe, we would call ourselves "abekhaya": people from the same home. With the whole country to choose from, we got an officer who knew where we came from, even though we left there in 1953. It was good to be home.

Driver's Test

2007-06-13T12:42:00.000-05:00

In her blog Donna has recalled her experience in learning to drive ("Now -- weave through this obstacle"). Many of her readers responded with their own memories, and in fact her post had been inspired by one of those same readers, who had described her own life with cars more fully. Which brings me to my own memories of one particular driver's test.

August 1988. Lois and I had been in Zambia for five months, teaching at TCCA in the Copperbelt, waiting for a work permit to enter Zimbabwe. Then the call came: we had a week to drive to Bulawayo from Ndola and take up our work permit. We did so, and drove back just after to wrap up affairs in Ndola. Then flew back to Bulawayo (and that is another story). But here is where the fun started.

We learned on a Monday that we needed to drive south by Thursday. We used the Stuebings' Toyota Hiace van (which we were keeping while they were on home assignment in the States) to go from Ndola to Choma; but we needed a Brethren in Christ Church vehicle for the second stage, from Choma to Bulawayo. (Short version: to cross the border at Victoria Falls, we needed a vehicle with a letter of permission from the owner: thus, the Hiace owned by the BICC in Choma.)

In order to use the BICC Hiace, I had to have a valid full driver's licence from Zambia. I had been driving on a temporary licence, so I had to go take the driver's test at the VID (Vehicle Inspection Department) on Wednesday. I went there duly when the VID opened Wednesday morning, and they told me to return for the test at 2 pm, bringing with me a small photograph, taken at a specified shop in Ndola. I went to the shop for the photo, and the Asian shopkeeper told me it would be ready the following morning. No good! I pleaded with him for faster service; he relented, sort of, and said: 4:30 pm. Still no good!

As I sat for the picture, the photographer stepped beside me and said, "Meet me at the Post Office at 1 pm." I did so, and for the equivalent of US$1 received a set of prints from the sitting. (Later, at 4:30, I returned and received the official set for another dollar!)

At 2 pm, illicit pictures in hand, I went back to the VID. I took the deacon of our Brethren in Christ congregation in Ndola with me, not knowing that he was later to become the mayor of Ndola. Maybe that explains what happened at the VID. As we arrived I saw the driver before me trying to back his car through a row of drums set just far enough apart to allow a vehicle to back between them. (Remember, I had a 12-seater Hiace: no fun for backing!) The driver before me hit the fist drum with his car. The VID inspector got out of the car, yelled something over his shoulder, and went back into the office.

I asked my companion (Mudenda) what the inspector had said. M said: "He told the driver to go home and not come back until he has learned to drive." I wondered if I should have had an envelope with some compensation inside to hand to the inspector and wondered also how we were going to get to Bulawayo without driving down!

we were next. The inspector came and got in the car. We drove out of the VID compound. He motioned to turn left; then three rights; then left again. A triangle of three roads, ending up back at the VID. "Here it comes," I thought, anticipating backing through the drums. instead, he got out, walked into the office, stamped my driver's licence (with its illicit pictures), and handed me my valid Zambian Driver's licence. Good for life!

We drove south, through Zimbabwean Immigration (no trouble there) and Customs (well ... I only lost the computer, which we got back a month later), and headed on to Bulawayo. We arrived after dark, the needle on the gas tank resting on E, drove to Youngways, and started the process of moving to TCZ for the next two years.

I wonder what that VID inspector thought: here was Mudenda, with some muzungu (white guy), with a need for a quick licence. And no extra mula? When I told the story in Zimbabwe, people familiar with the VID in both countries expressed surprise at my good fortune. I just say thanks!

Random Blogger Thoughts

2007-06-09T16:57:00.000-05:00

1. My last blog (May 30) was written to continue various Mother's Day thoughts. It was also my 57th birthday. Time passes, as we observe often, and we grow old(er).

The picture shows an earlier and younger day: Daryl at 13 or 14, Denise at 6 or 7. Yesterday Denise turned 50. The week before I turned 57. Some things don't change. My blog shows that I still start things and have trouble finishing them.

2. Donna was remembering the summer of 1966 in her blog. Other summers come to my mind. The summer of 1968 I spent mowing lawns in York, Pennsylvania. The next year, summer 1969, I spent in San Francisco. Now I watch PBS specials telling me how special and amazing the summer of 1969 in San Francisco was. It was broadening, certainly. I remember also the moon landing that year, and dropping my glasses on the floor to prove that they were unbreakable. (They weren't.)

3. Vaughn is home for a couple of weeks. We've played some table tennis, watched some soccer (and hockey and basketball), and talked some. I've joined facebook now, but I feel like an intruder there. Vaughn is at the upper end of age in facebook, if the pictures and profiles speak true; so I am really over the hill! But where else can one join a group of people who have eaten at Eskimo Hut in Bulawayo? Or a group named "Climenhagas Anonymous"? I had never thought of my name as something to enter group counselling for: "Hi. My name is Daryl, and I'm ... a Climenhaga." There are a fair number of Climenhagas who surface in facebook, but only three Slagenweits. None of whom I know.

4. Last Tuesday I went to an emergent conference in Winnipeg. Alan Roxburgh joined us for a conversation (which is what emergent likes to call itself). Al's contribution was on target: learning to live as strangers and guests who come to our neighbours with no set agenda in our hands, to stuff into their unwilling hands; learning to live with people and discover their stories as part of our own and of God's story. Much more to be said, of course. The only drawback for the evening was that Al stood on a stage (at Ellice Theatre -- itself a wonderful movement within Winnipeg's city centre) and we sat below him in the theatre seats. Hard to converse as equals in such a setting, but one trusts that the conversation will continue in Winnipeg's (and Steinbach's) churches and cafes and pubs and parks.

5. Last evening Lois invited several families who have been part of her intensive English class in Steinbach to join us for dessert. We had 15 of us sitting around conversing in English and Spanish, with a variety of accents. Her invitation extends Roxburgh's thoughts: entering other people's lives, in this case by extending hospitality. Southeastern Manitoba is experiencing huge immigrant growth, so I sat next to a truck driver from England, as he described crossing the channel and driving through Spain. "Winding roads through the mountains. The Italians go through mountains, but in Spain they go around. Harder to drive." A delightful evening as the light faded into darkness somewhere after 10 pm.

Mothers Day, Part 3

2007-05-30T13:00:00.000-05:00

On Mothers Day I remembered my mother. Part Two was for Lois. Of course, we remember another mother in our family, who stands in the background somewhat because of the other memories. She deserves to be remembered and honoured.

Two days ago was her and Dad's anniversary. Fourteen years ago David Climenhaga and Verna Mae Ressler were wed. Yesterday was her birthday, so this time of year is full of times to celebrate. Today is my birthday: I now have 57 years from which to reflect on life.

I remember Verna Mae from Missions Office, when Lois and I went to Zimbabwe (1988 to 1992). Lois knew her before that through connections in New Mexico, where Verna Mae worked with the Navajo people, and where Lois lived for three years as a young girl. (Lois' Dad was the clinic doctor at the Brethren in Christ Navajo Mission in the mid 1950s.) Always we knew her as someone who cared for many details around her, competently and carefully.

Now we know her as mother, living with and loving Dad. They have lived together, played together, travelled to many places, and made a home for us to visit from so far away in Manitoba and for our sons to stop in. We are blessed by her love and care and presence, and honour our mother and grandmother on Mothers Day, Part 3.

More About Lois

2007-05-27T20:21:00.000-05:00

These three pictures come from London, on the way to southern Africa in 2003. The second and third pictures were taken on the London bridge, with the Tower Bridge in the background. As our guide told us, the original London Bridge was sold to an American, who was somewhat startled to find that he did not get the Tower Bridge. But then he didn't buy the Tower Bridge!

I put these pictures up because Lois looked at the staged picture from our backyard, which Nevin had taken for a class, and wondered if the two from the London Bridge weren't better. I don't know. Any picture in which I get to be with her is a good picture in my book.

This year marks our 30th anniversary. We have travelled to three continents and lived in four different countries. We have realized some of my dreams, and now her dreams are also taking more realistic shape in our lives. When we got married I was the dreamer and impulsive one. Now I like stability and consistency, and Lois surprises me with new ideas and dreams.

Just now she was talking about microloans with MEDATrust, an organization which promotes microloans in developing countries. I have thought from time to time that we are doing what we should be doing to help others in this world. She keeps reminding me that we can do more, that God wants us to do more.

It's neat being married to someone who keeps growing and developing and discovering more of what means to live in the image of God.

Mothers Day, Part 2

2007-05-20T20:08:00.000-05:00

Because of the memories of my own mother on Mothers Day, other mothers in my life get mentioned second. You can't really rank people, placing this one before that one, and no such intention exists in remembering my own mother. Her death on Mothers Day 1991 is sufficient reason for remembering her as we do. Her beauty and character would also be enough by themselves.

But of course I remember Lois on Mothers Day. This year she was visiting her mother a week ago, so we celebrated her special day this evening, going out for supper to a nearby restaurant and enjoying quiet meal and conversation.

We met some 32 years ago. I had just returned from three years of teaching secondary school in Zimbabwe. Mother invited three young women for lunch. They were from our church and were attending Goshen College, and Lois was one of them. We had met 10 years before. Our family had come back from almost 20 years in southern Africa, and we stayed with her family. I played chess and table tennis with her older brother, who later became my classmate in college. I didn't notice his younger sister. I was 15; she was 11.

Ten years later in Nappanee, I noticed her. We dated for a year or so. Then she went off to Belize for Goshen College's "Study Service Trimester" (SST). Before she left we stopped dating. I thought it would be good for both of us to be free to pursue other relationships while she was gone. I was wrong! I don't remember how long it took for me to know how wrong I was, but a few weeks later I wrote to Lois to ask if our relationship could be back on. She agreed, and sometime after she returned from SST we were engaged and married. It has been almost 30 years.

The picture at the top was staged: Nevin wanted a picture for a photography class he was taking. But there is no pretending in how important Lois is to me. I don't know how I would have experienced the past 3o years without her. I know that my life would have been much poorer, and I know that I am more grateful than I can express. Happy Mothers Day, Lois!

Welcome Home!

2007-05-17T13:59:00.000-05:00

Last night I went to the airport to pick up Lois. The plan was simple. Lois went to Ohio last week to spend mothers day with her mother and younger sister. She was set to return from Dayton to Chicago to Winnipeg, arriving about 10 pm.

Kyle and I drove in from Steinbach, arriving just before 10. The board showed that her flight was delayed (en retard) until midnight. I am grateful to Kyle for accompanying me. We spent the next hour and a half cruising around Winnipeg: Grant park to Corydon to Osborne Village (sort of a miniature Greenwich Village, I'm told), on to Broadway, Portage, and north to Red River College, and finally back to the airport.

The board was unchanged, and at midnight around 100 passengers emerged noisily to the waiting crowd. Passengers from international flights come in to the lower level at the Winnipeg airport, go through Immigration and Customs, then pass through opaque doors to those waiting for them. The trouble was that no one from this noisy crowd was from Chicago. They had arrived from Minneapolis. The flight from Chicago was still "en retard", with no clear idea of when it would arrive.

We learned later that Lois boarded her flight on schedule in Dayton, then sat in the aircraft on the runway for about three hours because of stormy weather in Chicago. The controllers refused to let the plane take off when they knew it could not land in Chicago; so they waited. And waited some more. About the time Kyle and I first checked the board in Winnipeg (10pm), Lois was landing in Chicago.

An hour later she was on her way to Winnipeg, while we waited in the terminal. Kyle was cheerful, enjoying the random responses of the few others who were still waiting for the Chicago flight. I was less calm, walking up to the observation deck and back to burn off the energy that comes from frustration and annoyance. I talked with another man waiting for one of the passengers, and we agreed that we were needed to hold up the central pillar of the waiting area. So we leaned against it. Then I talked with another woman who turned out to come from near Johannesburg. Her husband is (if I remember the story right) planning to bringing the King Pie franchise from South Africa to Winnipeg. So perhaps I can get some good meat pies now in Winnipeg!

The board gave no new information, and no one from the airlines or airport was left around to give information. There were security personnel, and two of them did some checking for us, finally telling us that the flight had now landed. But no one came out: another delay, waiting for baggage. Then everyone else came through the automatic opaque doors, but no Lois.

As people went through the doors, we could see others waiting at the baggage carousel. Lois and I saw each other, and she gave a gesture of helplessness, waiting for bags that never came. Finally at about 1:30 am she too emerged, baggage-less, but with a form that promised she would get her bags the next day, sent out by bus to Steinbach. So today she has to go to the bus terminal and pick up her luggage. We hope it's there.

We got home about 3, and to bed and sleep around 4 am. A late night, and today has enough to do. But she arrived safely, and I am grateful. And the visit with mother and Janet was good, and I am grateful. Waiting isn't so bad, even if I do dislike it. At least, when we're together again, the waiting doesn't seem as bad. For the longer separation .... We'll cross that bridge when we come to the river.

Mothers Day

2007-05-14T18:20:00.000-05:00

Both of my sisters have already posted, remembering our Mother, who died on Mothers Day in 1991. Sixteen years ago, 12 May, 1991. Donna tells the story of Mother's last months: surgery on the day after Easter to replace a defective valve; complications after the surgery including a staph infection that eventually took Mother's life; the last days as family and mother knew that she was dying; her death on that particular Mothers Day.

It is a story worth telling, worth remembering. Mother was the centre of our family, as we knew well. Dad has told us often that his life would have been less fulfilling, less significant without her. I have often thought that Dad and Mother complemented each other particularly well. She grew up in dairy country in western Pennsylvania. Morrison's Cove: a beautiful place, which always remained as her heart's home, I think; yet a place that would have been too small for her if she had stayed there all her life. Dad grew up in Zimbabwe, and Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma, and California. He has told us how he once filled out his address on the front of a map, reflecting his own sense that the world itself was his address, and that he could not call any one place, this one or that, his home.

She gave Dad roots; he gave Mother the world. Both benefited and their lives showed it.

Donna told how she and Denise both spent time with Mother before she died, but on her advice I stayed in school in Kentucky, waiting for the end of the semester to come home. I have never (that I remember) felt as though she gave me bad advice, or that Lois and I made the wrong choice. But of course not seeing Mother in those last six weeks remains a loss in the whole experience. Some years later (1995, I think it was) I did have an experience that helped bring further closure.

Bethel was a member of the congregation in which I was the pastor, a small church of 40 or so people gathering each Sunday morning. Bethel had three daughters in the church as well. She was in the hospital, and I knew from the family (the daughters were close to my age) that their mother was in serious condition. One afternoon they called and asked me to come quickly; I drove to the hospital and joined them for the waiting that precedes death. The medical personnel had said that they thought Bethel would die that evening, and the family asked if I would be with them.

I remember well enough. how the evening went. We waited sometimes at Bethel's bedside. She had been in a coma and unresponsive. We waited outside of her room in the "waiting room", talking as people do in the presence of death: mundane conversation, as we cloak our deepest thoughts with everyday realities.

Then the nurses called us, hearing the distinctive breathing that heralds the last moments of physical life. As we stood beside her, I took Bethel's hand. She looked up at me, focused clearly, and a tear came from her eyes. Her daughters became very excited. (I normally avoid the use of "very": a weak word, but the only one I can think of for this account.) "She recognizes you!" Their mother had been gone from our awareness for more than a day, but she was clearly back with us. Holding her hand, I prayed aloud for her, for us, for her family, for her church. As I prayed, the monitor beeping in the background went flat -- I now know what "flatlining" is. She stopped breathing, and she was gone, at least gone from us.

In some indefinable way, as I held Bethel's hand while she died, I held my mother's hand also. They were two different people, but they walked the same path, the path that we all walk. It is a strange path from our perspective on this side of the curtain. I and her daughters and their husbands walked with Bethel as far as we could, and then she was gone. She walked through a door, or behind a curtain, somewhere where we could not see or go. One moment we were in each other's presence; the next, we weren't.

The old song says, "You've got to walk that lonesome valley, you've got to walk it by yourself. Nobody else can walk it for you. You've got to walk it by yourself." True, but not completely. Bethel, and Mother, and each of us goes on alone, at least alone so far as our eyes here can see. But we all walk the same path. And Bethel gave me the great gift of seeing where my own Mother walked, and taking me as far as anyone can be led on that path.

I think also of C.S. Lewis' words when his wife died -- something like: "She smiled, but not at me." Mother, and Bethel, and all who truly walk with God, walk the valley with a kind of joy you can't get here. Perhaps that sadness and joy were mingled in the look Donna describers from their last Thursday together. Mothers Day is bittersweet indeed, but I'm not sure that the bitter remains forever bitter. Always grief, always sorrow, always on this side of the grave an emptiness that only Mother could fill. But also always, on both sides of the grave, a joy deeper than any sorrow. "For all the saints, who from their labours rest; Who Thee by faith before the world confessed; Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blessed: Allelluia!"

Late Nights

2007-05-05T21:35:00.000-05:00

These weeks are my busiest of the year, even busier than Christmas. Three weeks ago was the last week of classes. One could see students standing straighter as the load of assignments lifted, and teachers bowing over as the same load descended. Two weeks ago I was marking at full speed, while also taking in the faculty retreat. This week were the doctor of ministry modules. I direct the programme, so although I did not teach, I was still on call throughout. The last paper is now finished; the modules are over. Two more weeks of classes in Global Studies (which I am responsible for arranging) lie ahead, but the heaviest times lie behind.

This is the context, then, for last Sunday. Just before 11 pm the phone rang: one of our incoming doctoral students was stranded at the airport. I started calling around, trying to find out what had happened, and finally got in touch with the student himself. Albert's flight from Calgary had been cancelled. He had been put on a flight from Vancouver which stopped over in Calgary, and arrived about 45 minutes late. Meanwhile the student who was to pick him up arrived at the airport, found no evidence of a flight from Calgary, and after waiting an extra half hour, he went back to Providence.

All this we figured out later. At 11:25 all I could do was put on some clothes, get in the car, and drive to the airport. I met Albert at 12:30 am, brought him back to our house (quicker than stopping by the school) by 1:30, and then went to bed. Of course the adrenalin was flowing, and I went to sleep rather later than that. Sometimes you can't just "go to sleep".

The next morning Albert and I were up on schedule and off for the day at Providence. What I notice about the whole thing is how little trouble it actually is to respond to surprise events. I was tired; but doctors in emergency rooms would smile at the thought of so little. Truck drivers regularly deal with harder schedules. To lose sleep one night is less than new parents experience every night -- and forget remarkably quickly as their children get older.

Instead I notice how I had a good chance to be with Albert, and appreciate his genuine interest in what is happening in my life and at the school. We had a brief chance to talk about some research he hopes to do. In all, it was a serendipitous event, good to find oneself in, rather than an imposition or hardship.

There are of course lessons for how to handle airport pickups: provide the person being picked up with a number to call (a cell on the pick up person would work well) to give any changes of plans when they happen. But more important is the goodness of the events we experience. My sister asked recently what lessons others have taught us. I remember this from my mother: good and bad things happen all the time and you can't help that; but you can decide how you will respond to what happens. That personal choice usually matters more than anything. I wish I could always remember that.

In Memoriam: VTI

2007-04-25T18:45:00.000-05:00

I have just returned from our annual faculty retreat. During one session I was reflecting on the shootings at Virginia Tech (my mind was straying a bit). The words below are the result.

A couple of words of explanation. Last Monday the university resumed classes, one week after the shooting. They rang a bell 32 times, one for each of the victims. The number four is associated with bad luck in many Asian countries, since in Chinese it sounds like the word for Death. With those thoughts in mind, my reflections:

PART ONE

Thirty-two tolls
The bell rang thirty-two times
Thirty-two, young and old
The bell rang thirty-two as all fell silent and listened
For thirty-two tolls.

Thirty-three dead
And thirty-two tolls.

Four fours, twice repeated
The Chinese number of death
Squared and repeated
Death takes us all, one day.

Eleven threes: a trinity of twelve less one
Three sets of flawed disciples

Thirty-three dead
And thirty-two tolls.

PART TWO

A family grieves, whose son
Died many times as he died.

A killer justly censured
Turned away from help in others' hands
And filled his hands with thirty-two others.

Caught between cultures, identities, a fractured self
Exploding in misery and rage
Thirty-two tolls from the bell
I grieve also the thirty-third.

Daryl Climenhaga, 24 April 2007

Monty Python

2007-04-23T21:35:00.000-05:00

I didn't mean to break a long silence in so ignominious a way. I am in the last week and after of the semester, and grading has squeezed out any journalistic impulse. But this news story from NPR "All Things Considered" at least notice. A crowd of 4,382 "coconut-bangers" playing along with "Always look on the bright side of life". Wow!

Well, back to the papers.

Easter Death

2007-04-06T12:40:00.000-05:00

Alvin L Heise: Lois' father.

Alvin and Maxine: Mother and Dad Heise's wedding picture.

We sometimes call this Dad's movie star picture.

Mother and Dad just before Dad's death

One of the last family pictures for Lois' family.

Today is Good Friday, sometimes called Dark Friday. It is good, of course, and it is dark, even though the sun is shining. Easter comes on Sunday. As Tony Campolo reminds us, quoting from a black preacher in his home church in Philadelphia, "It's Friday. But Sunday's coming."

I could run with that sermon, that theme, on this Dark Friday, as forces of evil work behind the scenes in the USA and Zimbabwe and every other country in the world. I could think deeply about the darkness that envelopes Zimbabwe today, in which a cameraman this week was shot to death by security forces, because he dares to take pictures of the brutality that stalks Zimbabwe daily. "It's Friday. And some people in Zimbabwe wonder whether they will ever be free of tyranny and hunger. But Sunday's coming!"

But instead I remember another Easter, 16 years ago. Mother was scheduled for heart surgery the day after Resurrection Sunday, and Lois and I and Vaughn and Nevin were visiting Mom and Dad for Easter weekend.

We lived then at Asbury Seminary in Kentucky, and spent most weekends with Lois' parents in New Madison, Ohio. Dad Heise was dying of lung cancer, and we treasured every moment we could spend with them in his last days. But Mother was scheduled for surgery to correct a defect in a heart valve (I have never been good with these details), and we wanted to see her and Dad before the surgery. So we drove to Pennsylvania for Easter weekend.

Friday and Saturday we spent a lot of time with friends from our days living in Lancaster County. Sunday was set aside for Mom and Dad. Then about 4 a.m. Resurrection Sunday, my Dad came down the steps to wake Lois and me. Dad Heise had suffered cardiac arrest, brought on by the trauma of the cancer in his body, and died just before.

Sleep was forgotten. Plans to be with my parents that day were set aside. We dressed, woke the boys, gave up plans for the day and started driving to Ohio. I don't remember much of that weekend or the week that followed: only pictures in my mind.

The family sitting in a circle, laughing and crying, remembering and grieving. It is quite surprising how much laughter there is in times of grief, as those who have experienced such bereavement know.

Amazingly long line of people to pay their respects. Dad was the family doctor for New Madison from somewhere around 1960 until 1991, when he retired as his cancer took hold.

Nevin standing by the grave as the casket and body were lowered into it: a detail I felt was important -- to see the casket into the grave and throw a handful of dirt there. Nevin (four years old) singing softly to himself. I was afraid that it was his favourite "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", but it was "1, 2, 3 Jesus loves me; number 4 more and more; 5, 6, 7 we're all going to Heaven; 8, 9, 10 He's coming back again."

The funeral service, as we pictured to ourselves Dad singing in heaven's choir instead of the choir at Highland Church. More tears, more remembering, more laughter, more tears.

Easter Sunday. The day Dad died. Joy and grief live together, a union God has joined together.

Postscript: Mother went into surgery on Monday. Six weeks after Dad died was Mother's Day: May 12, 1991. On that day an infection on the new valve in her heart brought her life to an end. Joy and grief joined together forever.

Men and Women Blogging

2007-04-01T16:04:00.000-05:00

In my sister’s blog the question of who writes blogs and participates in the blogosphere more: men or women. It is certainly something I have observed: that in the few blogs I read men and women write and respond quite differently.

I read Vaughn’s blog, a loose collection of thoughts that appear periodically, apparently when inspiration (or guilt at a long time without a post) strikes. Often the trigger is some event in his life, such as driving to help with reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina, or trying to fix the car.

I read Donna’s blog, an equally loose collection of thoughts (I suppose that might be one definition of “blog”) that appears rather more regularly. Either she is more disciplined than Vaughn, or just less able to keep quiet for any length of time. Similar triggers apply: cats and dogs and birds, mixed in with the vagaries of students and weather forecasters.

I would read Kristen’s blog, but she only posts when she is in Ghana. And I would read Nevin’s blog, but he only posts when he travels to Europe. So, although one is male and one female, my niece and son don’t help me with understanding the way that blogging works. Or if they do, it is negatively, by posting only when something quite unique is happening in their lives.

I would also read Denise’s blog, but she posts less often than I do. There is a pattern here: from oldest to youngest of me and my siblings -- either more talkative to less, or more disciplined to less, or perhaps more accurately, from more likely to post on their blog to less likely to post. I don’t think I can discern anything from that!

I would read Hendrik’s blog (a colleague at Providence); but he only posts when controversy strikes, and he seems to be feeling less controversial these days. And I read Ben and Leah’s blog, usually Leah, but sometimes Ben. Here is a seam for mining: compare for gender differences! But the project is scuttled for lack of data. Leah posts more often, if only because Ben is going full tilt trying to finish his M.Div. program.

I read several other blogs periodically: for theology and the emergent church, Andrew Jones ("tall skinny kiwi"); Ed Buller (a former student at Providence now pastoring a church in Hawaii); and so on. But family and one or two friends are the most regular.

When I don my researcher’s hat and put all of these together, I am forced to say that the whole question is scuttled for lack of data. A proper piece of research remains to be done. But here are some thoughts.

1) I suspect that men tend to write more about ideas than women do. Perhaps just a stereotype in my mind: certainly Donna is quite likely to address ideas (such as those surrounding climate change); but I think I am more likely to ramble on about what community means than she is. I also doubt one can read anything into this. If the hunch has any truth, the converse would be that women are more likely to write about stuff that’s happening around them. But then Vaughn and I are just as likely to write about such stuff, so I still doubt one can read much into this.

2) I suspect that men are less likely to make comments on each other’s blogs, except for some specific purpose, and that women are more likely to make encouraging comments, however brief. When men do say something, they may be more likely to cite a point of disagreement. Again, this is hunch based on stereotypes and could be quite wrong. Donna, at least, has always been able to argue when she wants to! Not to mention Denise.

I don’t have other hunches here yet, and I mistrust these two. I think it would be most interesting to do a thorough and careful piece of research, controlling for the presence of stereotypical hunches of the sort I have just laid out and checking to see if more men or more women blog and comment, and in what ways their contributions may differ.

I enjoy settings in which men and women both contribute, and in which whether one is male or female is relatively unimportant. Differences in how we contribute remain (I think), but they are the sort of differences that make the whole conversation richer, more enjoyable, and more profitable.

Helen Keller

2007-03-30T21:19:00.000-05:00

We went to see The Miracle Worker last week. It was the major production at Providence College, and Kyle Burgess (semi sort of adopted son living with us: from Zimbabwe; attending Providence) played the part of Helen's half-brother.

(Kyle at Christmas)

Now Lois and I are watching the movie version on NPR with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Or I should say Lois is watching and quilting, and I'm listening and typing. Even this movie, so stirring and predictable (when I have the play fresh in my mind), is hard for me simply to sit and watch. The Final Four tomorrow evening is another matter!

One line out of the play: "Obedience is the gateway to learning": one line stands in sharp contrast to what we think today about raising children. Certain strands of that older way of thinking repel me: the idea that one must break the child's will in order to train the child is not one I endorse.

We have gone to the opposite extreme today. In Winnipeg there is a group of youth who steal cars for kicks, and recently have started trying to run down pedestrians and joggers as part of the game. As we try to work out how to respond to this situation, one realizes that many factors are at work: broken families; schools that no longer engage the children involved; the factors are almost predictable.

But the courts have added their own bit of lunacy to the picture by treating the epidemic as a case of children who just need a scolding. One of my colleagues referred to the practice in New York City of treating juvenile crime more seriously: working on the assumption that, if young offenders are punished severely at the beginning, they are less likely to enter a full life of crime.

I don't know the practice she is referring to, but one sees a kind of basic logic. Children learn early and quickly. If their first lessons in crime and law is that their actions receive a light sanction, they internalize that lesson and build on it. For Helen, breaking the cycle of tantrum-enforced misbehaviour was the first step into unlocking the world for the rest of her life.

I don't know what should be done in Winnipeg to reduce car thefts. Diagnoses are easier than constructive action. But the benefit of discipline is part of the answer -- for me individually, and for the U.S. and Canada as a whole.

The Minnemingo

2007-03-19T08:18:00.000-05:00

May 29, 1968: Dale and I had finished our final exams at Messiah. He was a senior, and I a freshman. We decided to celebrate the end of semester by going out on the Minnemingo (Yellow Breeches Creek, running through the campus) on a canoe. Dale might tell this story differently, and remember different details than I do. The event in itself is one; our memories partial and fragmented.

I remember going upstream for a short way; but the creek was high with Spring flooding and running fast. We turned around to go the other way, downstream. I don't know how we planned to return against the current. Maybe we meant to walk back, as indeed we did in the end.

We paddled with the current until we came to a bridge at the edge of the campus, where a branch across the river confronted us at water level. Normally one would have passed well underneath it, but the creek was high! I remember Dale yelling, "Lean left!" I called back, "What?" And we tipped right, into the water flowing swift and deep.

I do not swim. I took seven years of swimming lessons (1958 to 1965), growing up in Zimbabwe. I was told that I was the only one to leave my junior school (Hillside, in Bulawayo) as a non-swimmer. Not one of my proudest achievements.

The water was deep, probably five to six feet in general. Dale was in the back of the canoe: he grabbed the branch that tipped us and pulled himself out. I was in the front of the canoe, and grabbed the canoe. It took several times pulling on the canoe (tipping and re-tipping it) before I managed to support myself with it and float on down the stream.

I remember little of that experience, except that it must have lasted about a half hour. The creek wound through the woods near Grantham, and the road which crossed where we tipped ran relatively straight. One, two, three bridges. At the first, we tipped. At the third, Dale finally caught up with me. He found two men fishing nearby, who both had training in lifesaving. One brought me to safety and the other pulled in the canoe.

Another bystander offered us a ride back to the campus, but it was evening, I was cold and wet and felt like I needed to walk -- both to compose myself and to warm up. We walked several miles back to Messiah, where the ladies in the dining hall were kind enough to find a late supper for us.

I have wondered often enough about that branch, the spinning canoe, and my flailing arms. I turned 18 the next day. Now that our sons have passed 18, and I watch young people of that age take life in their turn, I understand my own actions a bit better. We didn't think. Eighteen-year olds often don't! But we lived through it, and Dale and I are connected forever (whatever "forever" means) by this shared fragmented memory.

A postscript: years later Messiah College bought and moved the covered bridge from the place where I was pulled from the river to Messiah College itself. So now the third bridge rests close to where Dale and I began our canoe trip.

I thought of all of this again when Dale sent me an email yesterday. I end this post with Dale's email and poem. (To see more poetry that Dale has written, click here.)

The Email:
For what it's worth, here's my feeble attempt to commemorate our infamous canoe trip. Dale

Parallel Worlds

If we hadn’t gone canoeing that spring day,
if we had worn life vests or been more careful,
if we had both been strong swimmers,
if my friend had been the one to catch
the tree and work his way to shore…

On the other hand,

if neither of us had made it to shore or
I had run more slowly along the swampy bank,
if there hadn’t been a house with two skilled men,
if they hadn’t acted so quickly and wisely,
if my friend hadn’t been able to hold on…

But in our universe,

we took foolish risks and cheated death
and in that bond maintain a long friendship,
though we still disagree about important things,
demonstrating that neither of us is unnecessary,
that we aren’t wasting the universe we’re in.

More About Sikalongo from September 2003

2007-03-17T19:04:00.000-05:00

A couple of posts ago I wrote about travelling in Zambia. I was looking again at the digital pictures we brought back and wanted to add them to this blog, looking specifically at Sikalongo. We drove out from Choma to see my first home. Lois and I, Vaughn and Nevin piled into the Merc and headed off.

My memory says that we took the Great North Road (the main road to Lusaka) to the turn-off for Sinazongwe, a tarred road that runs down to Kariba Lake. This is not the route that my parents described to me from the days before I remember, but it was the way we were told to drive if we wanted to get to Sikalongo. The road passed through increasingly hilly country as we neared the edge of the escarpment. Sikalongo sits close to the edge of the great plateau running along the centre of the country: the highlands. Beautiful country.

This hut along the edge of the road was one of the more remarkable for its location; for its construction it was unremarkable, revealing the gap between wealthier folk in Zambia and ordinary villagers living in the rural areas. Zambia is 50 percent urbanized, so this scene is both ordinary and beyond the experience of many city folk.

Then we turned off the main road and headed across country, on a track that our sedan could only barely negotiate. A 4X4, all-wheel drive would have been most welcome!

When we say the anthill, which had been raided for brick-making, I knew we must be getting close to the mission school. Bricks mean buildings, and brick buildings often mean schools. The anthill of course also is a common feature of the Zambian countryside: huge hills built up by successive colonies of ants.

The sign signalled the presence of the primary school, but of course there is also a secondary school, a Bible school, and a clinic: in the middle of the bush one finds people living and working together and building a life for each other. They take real pride in what they have built, and look forward to what they might be able to become.

The school still bears marks of the mission that once was. The church, the schools, the clinic: all grows out of the work of many people in the past, including my parents, whose names are so well remembered there. The trees are typical. Wherever Europeans settled in the days when they settled Zambia and Zimbabwe, they planted trees: gum (eucalyptus) and jacaranda and others that I don't know. The trees remain.

The grave of Dorothy also remains. The cemetery is well cared for. I found myself really quite grateful for this courtesy. We live across the ocean, but we know that people who do not know us remember our name because a daughter and sister's remains lie in the earth nearby, where they can see the grave site.

Part of the story is that Zambians are generally more aware of death than North Americans. Death is a constant presence in their lives, and they know also that we are all bound together in death and in life. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.

But no grave can have the last word in anything (not even the empty tomb). The last word is beyond the skies, and the sun shining through the leaves and flowers of the trees catches something of the beyond.

We spent a few hours there on this trip. We need a week at least: to watch and hear people; to walk around and see the country (not just a few buildings and the space between them). I am surprised as I look at the pictures to feel a kind of homesickness for my first home, a place where I do not expect to ever live in again. At least the beauty there is part of the world God gives us, and points us to a recovery of beauty beyond.

That Car

2007-03-12T19:30:00.000-05:00

This is a car. This is a car to remember. When we arrived in South Africa (August 2003) we had three days to get a car and head north to Bulawayo. We went to a car dealer recommended by a friend (without whose recommendation we would indeed have been stuck): the car above was the result. A 1988 Mercedes Four-door Sedan. Looked wonderful. Wasn't.

We made the mistake of setting the amount we thought we could afford, and bought a car for that amount. We sold it when we left in December -- back to the dealer for close to the original price. It all worked out in the end, definitely a better deal than trying to hire a car for five months. But oh my goodness, what a car!

I could write about the roads instead. We travelled over good tar roads and rough dirt tracks. We drove from Johannesburg to Gaborone to Bulawayo, then north to Livingstone and Choma. We drove back south through Botswana to Jo'burg. Then 16 hours West to Windhoek, out to Swakopmund, and back to Jo-burg (but going the long way round. not through the desert this time). So we made the car work.

At first it seemed like a good deal. Nevin wrote in an email that we could never afford a car like this in Canada. Later we could add that we wouldn't want to. Driving north to Bulawayo went okay: we had cruise control and air conditioning. The car was a bit sluggish, but not bad. After seven weeks in Bulawayo we headed north -- 280 miles to Victoria Falls. And the trouble began. We had had new brake pads put in while in Bulawayo: they squealed the rest of the time we had the car. But far worse was the petrol (gas) problem.

We were half way to the Falls when the car lost power and coasted to a stop: quite a helpless feeling on a relatively deserted road in a country with almost no fuel. we looked at the motor, not knowing what we were looking at, then Vaughn and Nevin wondered aimlessly down the road to look at the road and the trees. Within five minutes a car appeared -- a couple with their daughter, on their way back from taking pictures of animals. He was a naturalist-photographer. More importantly, he showed me how to open the fuel line, blow into it to clear it, suck on it to get the petrol flowing again, and replace the line. I did this about 10 times between that first stop and the Falls. We stopped in Hwange, the only town between Bulawayo and Vic Falls, where they blew out the fuel line with an air compressor. Didn't work.

The Falls deserve their own post: enough to say that no human problems with running a country can dim its glory. It truly is an amazing sight. Lois and I had a cup of coffee, while Vaughn and Nevin went to watch the sun set through the spray and haze on the south side of the Falls. At sunset we crossed into Zambia, car and all.

The experience led to a surreal exchange with the Customs Officer at the Zambian border. "This car is registered in your name." "Yes." "But you are a visitor in South Africa." "Yes." "But the car is registered in your name." "Yes" "But you are a visitor in South Africa!" "Yes." I don't know how many times we repeated this; it evidently bothered him. I felt like saying, "That's their [the South Africans'] problem; don't worry about it", but managed to say nothing. Finally with an expression of disgust he stamped the papers and sent us on into the Zambian night.

We were headed about three miles into the country to a well-recommended collection of rondavels, where we planned to stay the night. About a mile short, the car stopped again, and I fiddled in the dark to try and clear the fuel line. Then a pick-up arrived, with load of helpful Zambians on the back. They clustered around, pushed me aside, and fiddled less expertly than I (but with the lights of the pick-up shining on the motor). Then one of them bumped a plastic piece attached to the radiator, snapping it off and spraying hot, hot water everywhere. By the time we had given them all the loose foreign exchange we had (US$5 and 100 Rand) for their help (I use the word loosely), we felt frazzled and limped into the Rest Camp.

The next day I nursed the car on into Livingstone, where a garage owner located a replacement for the broken piece (ordered and then rejected by a local Merc owner!) and drilled a hole in the petrol tank cap (to let air in so that it wouldn't stop on us -- brace try, but wrong answer to the problem). Then we headed on to Choma. Half way there we were able to verify that the fix didn't fix the problem.

In Choma, the mission mechanic (Given Mweetwa: pictured at the top of the blog) spent his off-day -- eight hours on a Saturday -- diagnosing and fixing the problem He replaced the fuel pump: that wasn't it. He then removed the petrol tank through the trunk and found that the filter at the tank was so rusted as to let very little through. He cleaned the filter gently with a toothbrush and paraffin (kerosene), since there were no replacements here in Choma. And that problem was fixed. All the way back to Jo-burg.

In Johannesburg we had a mechanic give the car a thorough over-haul. What he didn't know was that our tires were bad. We had two flat tires on the way to Windhoek -- the second about an hour from the half-way Rest Stop at Kang. As we sat, watching the sun set and knowing we were stuck in the desert, a big new Merc truck pulled up, and picked up our luggage and tire and us and took us to Kang. I got a tire sent up from Gaborone by country bus (no Merc tires there: special order only), had the tire put on the rim, and got a ride back to the stranded Merc. Soon after Lois heard me and Vaughn come driving in: she heard us before she saw us thanks to our squealing brakes.

The next day we set off for Windhoek (day three of what should have been a two-day trip). About an hour out of Kang I stopped to check the tires. They were fine, but when I tried to start the car there was nothing. General electric failure. I guess the Jo'burg mechanic didn't find everything. We should have realized we were in trouble when we entered the Kalahari two days earlier. The air conditioner gave out, and the heater came on. We couldn't turn it off, so we drove through the desert with the heater on, pointed out the open windows -- our contribution to global warming.

Pushing the car didn't work. The first vehicle that came by did what they could, but no luck. The next car by was headed towards the Rest Stop. They took me back to Kang. When I walked in the owner looked at me and said: "What are you doing here?" I said, "General electrical failure." He found an electrician, and provided us with a jeep to take the electrician back to the car, where Lois and the boys waited. They had five hot hours in the more than 40 C (104 F) sun.

There the electrician re-did the connections to the battery, rewired the alternator, and bridged three fuses that had blown out. We had our air conditioner back! We gave him all the Pulas (Botswana's currency) we had left, and headed off for Namibia. When we found a proper garage, we had all of the work re-done, and in Windhoek spent another 2,000 Rand on repairs so as to drive safely back to Jo-burg. But I never did quite feel safe after that.

One can draw lessons. In our time in Bulawayo 1988 to 1992 we drove mission vehicles -- all paid for by the church. This time we experienced life more like many residents of Zimbabwe and southern Africa, driving what we could get. We also discovered how ready people are to help. We never waited more than ten minutes for help, although we were in unpopulated areas. The Kalahari is not where you want to break down!

I remember Nevin's comment in another Rest Stop the evening after the general electrical failure. With five hours waiting in the desert, and another three hours driving to the Rest Stop in Namibia, where we stayed that night, we had finished all of the water and other drinks we were carrying. Just before we went to bed, Nevin said: "You know where Jesus says, 'I'm the living water'': I think I understand better know what he meant."

And I remember the car. Next time we won't ask, "What can we get for this amount of money?" We'll ask, "What does a reliable vehicle cost?" The memories are good, but I don't want to repeat them.

Memories of Zambia

2007-03-06T20:06:00.000-06:00

October 2003 we made it into Zambia, for one short week. Far too brief a time, but it was good anyway. The country, or at least the geographical place where I was born. We entered at Victoria Falls and drove the few miles from the border to Livingstone, where I was born so long ago.

The car was packed, and Vaughn wasn't the only one scrunched up to fit. The driver (me) had the best deal: at least until we had fuel problems and I had to get out every ten minutes or so to clear the fuel line (unfasten fuel line, blow in, suck out, try not to get any fuel into your mouth, get back in car and drive for another ten minutes).

Soon enough we were rewarded with a chance to view the Falls -- the evening we arrived, from the Zimbabwean side; the next morning (while our car was worked on, but not entirely repaired) from the Zambian side. Here is a rare pose from in front of the Falls (Zambian side here) -- rare because he became our family photographer for the trip.

As we got further into Zambia, we saw the jacarandas. We had been too early for them in Bulawayo, but here they were in full bloom. We only had to stop twice over the 120 miles to Choma to clear the fuel line (the car's and mine). At one of those stops we took a picture of the jacarandas: introduced by White settlers, these trees are gorgeous, but also greedy. They drink up too much water in the semi-arid conditions of Zimbabwe. During good rainfall years in Zambia they are welcome.

In Choma we stayed at the missionary guest house (just as in Bulawayo, but more modest than the former children's hostel: space for six to ten guests instead of 20 to 30). Lois and the boys went into town and found (among other things) this tailor working on the side walk. They brought him some material, and he made shirts for the boys, which they have worn with delight many times since.

Nevin also searched in Choma for a good drum to take home. He had checked in Bulawayo for a good drum, and learned that the best drums came from the Tonga in Zambia. We found one near the end of our stay the a cultural centre in Choma. That drum had its own adventures later.

Then it was off to Sikalongo. The 20 miles I remembered were not accessible for a car, so we went around, about 30 miles instead. We had trouble finding the run-off from the tar road on the track that crossed the final six miles or so to get to the mission and school, my first home. So we stopped and I asked directions. My parents tell me that when I was three I had some Tonga, but I can tell you that at 53 my Tonga consisted of "Hello" and "Thank you". The people I talked to did not have much English either, but we managed, and we found the road to Sikalongo.

There of course lies a grave. Dorothy. My sister, who died before I was born, and has always been part of my consciousness.

I discovered a curious thing at Sikalongo. My parents, uncle and aunt, and grandparents have all lived in Zambia or Zimbabwe at different times. Our family is known well enough throughout the Brethren in Christ Church there. When I would say my name, I was always identified as part of my family: walking like my grandfather and father, and with the red hair of my uncle.

But at Sikalongo, when I met the headmaster of the secondary school and said my name, he said: "Oh yes. Your parents were David and Dorcas Climenhaga. Your sister is buried there." And he pointed across the schoolyard towards the cemetery. One of the teachers took us for tea (actually, Fanta orange and cake) in his house. He told us that his brother had lost a child the year before, and that they used the same verse at that funeral: Suffer the little children to come unto me.

Back in Choma, then, it was little surprise to meet a 10-year old boy named Climenhaga Hamaseele (son of the Overseer for the church in Choma). The effect of leaving one's own flesh and blood in the ground has a powerful impact, even after 55 years. There, in that place, I was with people who remember my mother and father, not just the rest of the family.

The week was over. We headed out of the country, but this time crossing the Zambezi at Kazangula instead of at the Falls (and so avoiding Zimbabwe on our way back to South Africa). There was no bridge into Botswana, so we crossed the river on a ferry. Our confidence was not increased by the news that a couple of weeks earlier the ferry had been overloaded with passengers, turned turtle in the water when a badly-loaded truck drove on to it, and drowned about 100 people. Of course I was the one to drive our car onto the ferry -- and me with me water phobias! The authorities carefully kept all passengers off (of which this time there were only about 20).

So we crossed the Zambezi, entered Botswana (drum and all), and left the land of my birth. So short a post omits watching Vaughn and Nevin play soccer with young children at the guest house, struggles with the car (to which I will return in the future), church in Choma, so many things from my home. I keep a flag of Zambia in my office, remembering the land where I began life on this earth.

Memories of Zimbabwe

2007-03-05T19:39:00.000-06:00

I have decided to continue the process of recalling our sabbatical, June to December 2003. I say "our" (although it was technically "mine") because this was a last intentional family trip: Vaughn (then 21) and Nevin (then 17) joined us in a trip back to south and south-central Africa, so formative a part of my own growing up, as well as for our family.

While we were in Bulawayo we stayed at the Guest House, where years before there had been a children's hostel. It was both a delight and a bit surreal to live where I had lived in the 1960s.

While we were there we learned to know Mrs. Shumba. She had lost her home -- evicted for not paying the last $100 or so on her mortgage. She had cataracts and was almost blind, and had ignored the warning notices. (Long story: that's the short version.) She stayed at the Guest House while looking for a new home, and she and Lois became fast friends. Here she is singing with her children (who were part of a group called "Divine Appointment"): "Thula Sizwe" -- a song by Freedom Sengwayo, to comfort the Ndebele people.

We drove out to Matopo Secondary School, where I had lived and taught in the early 1970s, and where our family lived in the late 1950s. Matopo is deep in my consciousness: the place where I used to climb rocks, teach school, try to understand what it is to become an adult.

Elephant Rock is on the way to Matopo. Remarkable rock with remarkable resemblance to the elephant. Ndlovu. Over half of the 3000 acres of Matopo Mission is granite rock above the ground. This is just one of the rocks, so engraved in my memory.

We drove to get around. We bought a Mercedes Benz for what we could afford: wrong car for driving around Africa! Here a someone who worked for a local businessman siphons petrol into the car -- the only reliable source of fuel in a country where the economy had once been so strong. You could still get what you need in 2003, but foreign exchange helped. I could write many stories about this car, and may yet. But here the petrol is the problem, not the car. It managed its way out to Matopo and back, although the roads were so much worse than they had once been. In the late 1980s we could drive out easily. in 2003, the 30 miles took about two hours of careful driving around potholes and following the occasional tire tracks beside the road instead of in it.

We also re-connected with Mike and Lyn Burgess (third generation Zimbabweans). Mike and I taught together at the Theological College of Zimbabwe (1988 to 1992). He and I are age mates. We turned 40 together in 1990, just a few months apart.

Here he is 53, as am I in the picture below. Life in Zimbabwe is hard. Combined with health problems, it makes Mike look so much older. I noticed that many of my friends in their 40s and 50s had grey hair. Had I seen one or two like that, I would put it down to their genes. But so many: life in Zimbabwe today is hard.

Kyle is standing with them in the picture -- 16 years old. Now four years later he lives with us in Manitoba, going to school at Providence. A small chance to find a life beyond the loss of opportunity in Bulawayo.

I'm standing beside my house, or what was once my house. Two pictures from 30 years apart. Left: during our visit in 2003. Below: when I taught at Matopo in 1974. The house has changed a bit, but not as much as I have. Except that I don't feel all that different: married, children, a whole different life; but the same essential person inside.

It was so good to be in Bulawayo and to visit the Matopos. The beauty remains; the people are wonderful, amazingly strong and resilient. Click here for the sound of the region beyond the pain, or here for a website maintained by the Ndebele people in exile. But the country is also full of pain. After six weeks, knowing we had only a week left, I told Lois I didn't know if I could stand another week. And our friends there have endured almost four more years. Some wounds are too deep to talk about.

Sabbatical Remembering

2007-02-28T19:24:00.000-06:00

Finding and inserting a picture for my profile sparked memories: the picture shows me waiting for Lois to come out of one of the many delightful little shops in Swakopmund, Namibia. The sign on the bench reads: "Bored Husbands": delightful! We visited Swakopmund during sabbatical in 2003, just over three years ago now. Amazing how quickly three years have gone by.

I could write about many parts of that trip -- time in Bulawayo with inflation beyond understanding; the trip up to Victoria Falls and then on to Choma, car sputtering all the way; driving out to Sikalongo and seeing Dorothy's grave; the full day that Gift (the mission mechanic) put in to get the car running again; back down through Botswana along country that looked and felt like a hot, hot Manitoba; from Johannesburg through the Kalahari to Windhoek (two breakdowns, and five hours in the desert sun waiting for relief); back to Pretoria for another month (with an office at UNISA and living at the Operation Mobilization headquarters); and finally Cape Town. Five months of stimulation: mental, spiritual, family, academic.

But Swakopmund. We drove from Windhoek through more desert, of which much of Namibia central and south appears to consist. The countryside moved from dry underbrush to sand and rocks, progressively dryer and bleaker. One had the sense of a moonscape (as part of the area is actually called). This link gives the official Namibian Tourist Board's description of the area.

Then suddenly, Swakopmund. Water, palm trees, delightful German village on the beach of the Atlantic Ocean. The dunes south of the town had sand-boarders, as well-practised as any snow boarders in western Canada.

We climbed dune seven: well, Lois, and Vaughn, and Nevin climbed the dune. I waited in the shade of the trees, which were being gradually engulfed by the dune. We saw signs on the road warning of drifting sand, with sand plows designed like snow plows in Manitoba to keep the road clear.

And next to all of that: the ocean. Spray and rocks and swell after swell rolling in. Vaughn stood a little too long next to the rolling swell, and one wave drenched him completely as it broke on the rocks. Lois found a pile of rocks facing out towards the ocean, screened from the desert behind, which she pronounced her own secret spot to sit and watch the waves. Whether eating supper with the sun sinking into the ocean, or walking through the shops of this little German community buried on the south-west coast of Africa, or talking to travellers in the backpackers' hostel where we stayed: we enjoyed Swakopmund as an unexpected treat in the middle of five months of a true sabbatical.

Blizzard!

2007-02-26T08:57:00.000-06:00

I know the title is overdone, but I drove down to Thief River Falls on Saturday evening. About 40 minutes out of Steinbach, and 15 minutes north of the border, I found myself in white-out conditions. I knew that there was a winter storm watch on; but I had driven into Winnipeg in the morning under the same storm warnings without difficulty. So it was with some dismay that I found myself driving deeper into blizzard conditions, not sure of where I would end up.

I preach in Thief River Falls about once a month, driving down Saturday evening and back on Sunday afternoon. I could have -- perhaps should have -- called Mel and said: "I can't make it. Sorry!" But I kept going straight. Out on the prairie it is easier to go straight than to turn around: through Rouseau and Tolstoi, on towards the border.

Homeland Security soon decided that this strange traveller, emerging from the blowing snow into the relative comfort of the border crossing, was no threat to the United States and could be allowed in. I had no desire to go back into the blizzard immediately, so engaged them in conversation about the weather -- and the possibility of accommodation in Lancaster, 10 miles down the road. (I knew the answer: none; but I thought I might stay with someone from a church I have preached for there.)

Half way from the border to Lancaster the blowing lifted a bit and I was left with a half hour of daylight and steadily falling snow. But now I could see the road, or at least the stubble on the verge, which showed me where the road stretched out ahead. I pressed on to Karlstad, where a motel offered some possibility if Thief River was just too far. Following a stop at the convenience store in Karlstad, I decided to press on to Thief River: the last 35 miles took another hour. Total travel time: four hours; normal time from Steinbach to Thief River: two hours and a bit.

When I got into Thief River at 8:30 in the evening, my host informed me that Mel (the associate pastor where I was preaching) had just called to say that the services for the next day had been cancelled and I could go home. Right!! I was relieved to discover that this announcement was a bit of prairie humour. Garrison Keillor would have approved.

Following two services the next morning, I drove back to Steinbach -- only two hours and 45 minutes this time. I also had a lecture to give Sunday evening in Winnipeg, with two more hours there and back and two and a half hours of lecture. So, a tiring weekend, but I am so grateful for safety. I have often said that I prefer blizzards to tornadoes, because you can't really avoid a tornado, but you can always stay inside in a blizzard. I should learn to listen to myself sometimes.

Happy Birthday, Donna!

2007-02-17T13:08:00.000-06:00

I know your birthday was a few days ago -- five years older than I, all our lives. It took me until now to get these pictures that mother had put in an album for me (she may have given you a similar personalized set of your own: I don't know).

So for your birthday present, here are some memories!

Love, Daryl

Mother's label: "Daryl and Donna": although of course it is Donna and Daryl

"Donna and Daryl in Pretoria, S. Africa"

"Sikalongo Mission"

Donna--Daryl--Mother--Macha Mission

"Bulawayo Park--1953"

"Leaving Choma, Zambia--1954"

"In Cherbourg, France--1955"

"On Queen E, 1954, January"

"Bulawayo Park--1958"

"Family--1957--December"

"Bulawayo Park--1958"

No label, but it must be around Christmas 1974.

Back: Daryl, Donna, Carlin, Denise

Front: Mother, Geoffrey, Dad

World, Country, Family, Church?

2007-02-12T18:34:00.000-06:00

I have pursued the idea of community in several posts. As I write, my thinking clarifies: sediment sinks to the bottom (I hope I never have to dig around there!), and a somewhat clearer brew rises to the top. I think I'm starting to get it.

I have taught often in my classes that our emphasis on individual fulfillment, basic to our identity as North Americans, is detrimental to the larger community to which we belong; and I believe i am right. But I am also a child of the Sixties. I desire the right, at least for myself, to determine as much of my present and future as I reasonably can, and I can't see any good reason to deny anyone else the same privilege. "All the world, so easy to see, people everywhere just got to be free."

So I face a basic fact: I am committed to the same individualism that I find destructive of community within our society as a whole. I am also a child of my own culture. Africa has taught me that we are most fully human within community: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (a person is fully a person with other people): but I am an American anyway.

This note of community lies behind my embrace of Penn State fight songs. It is the force that binds me to my countries, however frustrated I am with what we do as Americans or Zimbabweans or Canadians. It is the commitment that keeps me human within the whole human family.

I thought of this all again most recently in the aftermath of a church discussion. I grew up Brethren in Christ, and that church identity is deep within me. My grandfather's grandfather's father was a lay minister in our church, in Ontario in the early 1800s. But after this particular conversation, I felt so annoyed as to wonder if I should embrace my Mennonite identity and leave the Brethren in Christ behind.

The answer is, of course: No. Asking the question also answers it. As I have said on various occasions, the hardest part of moving to Manitoba has been the fact that we have moved out of the geographic orbit of the Brethren in Christ Church. I have sometimes wished that we could have remained as a family within the church, rather than having to find a new Mennonite identity (however closely related our faith communities are). As soon as I raise the possibility, I know that I could not do it: my extended faith family is too much a part of myself to leave it behind.

If I had to rank the communities within which I find myself, I would place church and family together -- in practical terms, family (since one lives most closely with family), but the two hardly separate. In the second rank, I would place country and the whole human family -- again in practical terms, country (since one lives first within one's country), but again the two hardly separate.

I find myself, I find my fulfillment, within the various communities in which I live: worldwide, country, church, family, and work. (I notice that the workplace has not figured in this narrative: perhaps because so much of my work life has been in the church, and now continues in a seminary, I tend to equate work and church.) Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.

Valentine's Day Is Coming

2007-02-09T19:42:00.000-06:00

Valentine's Day is coming. I know because WITF (accessed by internet) told me so. I always have trouble remembering which precise day is Valentine's: I know that it is on one side or the other of February 13, because I know my sister's birthday.

I'm not sure what the day is for really. In Manitoba it marks a necessary break from the deep freeze of the True North Strong and Free (and cold). Perhaps most fundamentally the day is not so much for lovers (at least that, of course: but so much more) as it is for family. In our case, lovers and family go together.

I remember coming back from Zimbabwe 32 years ago. People asked what I hoped to do, going home (wherever home is) after three years teaching at Matopo. I gave various replies, including, "Get married". I look back and wonder at my naivety, the audacity to think that one could simply look around and find someone and "get married". I did. Mother invited three young women to lunch, all from our church, all with connections to Africa, students at nearby Goshen College. I already knew all three, but over time drew close to Lois. I remember playing the romantic lead in "Brigadoon": the director and cast were convinced that Laura and I would take our on-stage roles into off-stage romance. But there was Lois, and in July 1977 we were married. She was and is my only romance.

I think of another romance, so many years ago. John and Emma, written up by my sister. A story bracketed by two walks: the last along the same railroad track as the first on the day before she died. They remembered how so many years before John had clambered down the embankment to pick a flower which she admired. Our father's parents, romantics in their own way.

Then David and Dorcas, our parents: together a few months less than 50 years, until mother died. On this day it is hard to believe that was almost 16 years ago. Their courtship was long distance, both in geography and in time. My memory (which of course only covers the stories I was told: I was not present) says that they were engaged for three years. If I am wrong, I will be corrected!

I wish I had the story also for David and Cora, mother's parents. I know only that this young man from German background connect to the Brethren in Christ married a young girl, also from German background, but Lutheran; so that she gave up jewelry and fancy clothing to marry him and join the Brethren.

Lois' parents? Alvin and Maxine Heise: engaged before World War Two, but married after. In the weeks before Dad's death he and mother described their courting and early family life. Dad grew up on the farm in Kansas; so did mother. They were to take over Grandpa Heise's farm when they got married. But World War Two came; the draft board refused to give him an exclusion for farming: that went to his father. But Grandpa Heise's health was not good enough to keep farming. During the war he had to sell the farm, and when Alvin and Maxine got married, the farm was gone. So -- as a second best alternative to farming -- Dad went to medical school, became a doctor, and practiced family medicine for 30 years in the same small town in Ohio. I always assumed that he chose medicine first. but he and mother meant to farm.

Today we have sons: four of us. Valentine's Day includes them. We have a fifth too -- a virtually-adopted son from close Zimbabwean friends, but he took the picture. Romantic Love (eros), Family Love (storge): we celebrate all kinds of love. (Eventually I'll add love of pets: our dachshund, Fritzie, is a member of the family.) I said a few posts ago that we show our love for humankind in our love for our country -- that's the beginning of community; I could add that family is the best laboratory for community. At least, it has been for me.

Sitting By The Window

2007-02-02T20:25:00.000-06:00

Lois and Kyle have taken over the television downstairs, watching some movie that takes off on The Taming of the Shrew. My tolerance for movies is low: give me Pink Panther movies or The Court Jester, and I'm happy. (There are of course a few other exceptions.) But in general movies play too strongly on my imagination, and I find it easier to leave the room. Years ago (15 or more), Lois and I went to see Dead Poet's Society in Bulawayo. I have never gone so often to the lobby to buy popcorn, to the washroom for a break, anywhere to avoid the tension I felt watching the actual show.

So I am upstairs, looking out the window at the snow sparkling in at minus 30. More than crispy! Sparkling like diamonds! In the background a vinyl record plays Bach's Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord. A pile of unsorted papers waits beside me for attention, once the blog is done.

One could almost imagine that the world is right, sitting by the window with the bitter cold so close, and so far away. Today another report came on the imminence of a world less pleasant to live in: climate change. It seems far away behind the crisp, crunchy snow; but it is also intensely real here in the North. Winter roads in the far north are now back on schedule, but they were delayed again this year by the lateness of the deep cold of winter. Further north in Churchill, the polar bears walk through town, seeking restitution for lost habitat.

The moon is remarkably bright tonight. Almost one could imagine snow blindness after the sun goes down! Looking in my window I can almost hear the moon ask why we take the environment so lightly, so much for granted. I have no answer. Nor, I think, is there one. Sitting by the window, the bitter cold so close and so far away, fading into the past.

I am a Christian. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son, born of the Virgin Mary .... The Apostles Creed and climate change war within, and both speak of sin and salvation. I wonder when it will come.

A Larger Community

2007-01-28T21:56:00.000-06:00

So I keep chasing the idea of community. I'm pretty well convinced that the pursuit of individual fulfillment is inimical to community: even while I seek to do that which is fullfilling and significant. I see also a basic problem with the anti-authority binge baby boomers (me!) did so well. (I took a personality test on the Piaget-Kohlberg stuff once: scored as making decisions on principle, rather than legalistically: felt really good about it! Then the test asked one last question, which revealed that at least some of my oh so principled choices were actually just a manifestation of my distrust for authority. Ouch!)

So, along with a life lived protesting government actions and the seemingly arbitrary decisions of church and business authorities (to name only three sources of dissent), I find myself arguing that we need the community that come from patriotism and school spirit and general commitment to the larger group.

Are there any conditions? Should we just commit to the larger group and then look for the utopia to follow? We need at least one larger commitment: to the human family. As a Christian I subsume this commitment within my commitment to God; but speaking in purely human terms, speaking simply as a person regardless of religious commitment, that person who does not have a fundamental commitment to the good of the whole human family is dangerous indeed.

The point is obvious. If allegiance to a school (since I have been writing about school spirit) were to run so unchecked as to take priority over allegiance to our country, we would recognize it as flawed. If in the name of Penn State one were to fight, and even seek to destroy, supporters and alumni of Pitt, the police would step in and the courts would take away one's freedom.

Speaking as a member of the worldwide community, we have come dangerously close as Americans to acting like such deranged Penn State fans, except with bigger weapons. Perhaps that sense of caution that is so typically Canadian is a necessary ingredient for a truly good patriotism to flourish. I love the USA, and I love Canada: but I love both as part of the whole human family. I call my country to account when we step outside the bounds of being good members of the international community because I love my country, and because it is mine.

In short, to realize community at home, within the context of my larger political community, in the country that is mine own, I am a citizen of earth; I am part of the human family. I am also, and even more deeply, a citizen of Heaven, and believe that only as a citizen of heaven can I truly love my country rightly.

What Is Community Anyway?

2007-01-27T13:57:00.000-06:00

I said some time back that there is something sacred about community. North American society, both in the USA and in Canada, has been on a long trajectory towards individualism, even at the expense of community. My generation (1960s baby boomers) used to talk about dropping out to find ourselves. as though our identity was floating around the world waiting for us to catch up with it and internalize it. Supreme individualism! As I observed a few posts back, Canada has as its central constitutional document The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, based on the value and rights of the individual almost without regard to the larger community.

That is of course an overstatement: the notwithstanding clause, for example, is a tribute to the desire to strengthen community at the provincial level; continuing conversations about "unique societies", whether in Quebec or in Nunavut, reflect the same desire to preserve community. But the stronger force in our society is the push towards individualism, and that force is destructive of human community unless it flowers within a commitment to the larger whole.

The common saying from southern Africa is: "A person becomes fully human in and through community." At some level we all know the truth here: that we need each other. We know also that people search for community insistently, even as it slips away from us. Whether in church youth groups discovering the value of true community, or in voluntary associations (clubs of different kinds), or in immigrant communities that seek to maintain something of their ethnic identity after moving to Canada -- repeatedly we hold on to each other. As we must.

But figuring out what really makes community is even harder than finding it. Because our communities, even our identity as Canadians, are essentially voluntary, people routinely leave community behind: then we wonder how we lost what we gave up. I'm struggling to figure out what this thing really is. I remember reading Bonhoeffer on community: profound (whatever he said), and hard to penetrate.

I wonder if some sort of real final commitment is necessary: to God (citizens of Heaven), to country ("Breathes there a man with soul so dead ...."), to something or someone big enough to encompass our whole life. I don't know: I think it is, but I don't know. I'm pretty sure that if there's anything less at the centre of our lives, the individual will beat the centre by default.

An Individualistic Socialism?

2007-01-22T14:42:00.000-06:00

In a casual conversation about the last post, a friend observed that those countries I identify as highly individualistic are also among the more socialist in the world. Certainly that is true of Canada. Canadians expect more of government than Americans do. As another friend said some years ago, "Americans value life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; Canadians value peace, order and good government." "Good government" sounds like an oxymoron to many Americans, for whom the only good government is less government.

Thus Canadians willingly pay significantly higher taxes than our American cousins -- and expect more from our government, from paying for health care to paying for education.

I thought of this point when I ran across a recent news story, which stated that Manitoba is the most generous of the provinces in terms of charitable giving, but ranks behind 26 other states in the USA. The Fraser institute did the study, and concluded: "Americans gave 1.67 per cent of their aggregate personal income to charity, more than double the 0.72 per cent of the total personal income Canadians donated to charity."

One could conclude that Americans are more generous than Canadians, a view at odds with Canadian self-perception. I suggest that our belief that the government can and should take care of so much (that is: socialism) is at least as important a factor.

In the end these points all revolve around trying to understand ourselves as Canadians. We have embraced the concept of good government, that government has a responsibility to take care of its people. Perhaps a sense of entitlement is one way that this basic socialism coincides with the individualism that is also basic to our society.

Canadians have shown our good qualities in many arenas of our world. But there is a corresponding weakness to our relative courtesy and good neighbourliness (compared to brash Americans). We can be as self-centred as anyone, when we put our minds to it.

I do wonder if we will push back against the forces of radical individualism. We may yet do that. But then we will have to find out what really does bind us together. And in a nation of immigrants, even more intentionally immigrant than the USA, finding common ground is a difficult task.

Committing -- Canadian Style

2007-01-19T10:28:00.000-06:00

Part 1 (nothing to do with the title):

I actually typed this post last night, but lost the post through misunderstanding the way tht Blogger works. It is annoying to think and type and reach the point of publish, only to lose the whole. But I have been processing these particular thoughts for a few weeks, so re-writing them is perhaps a good thing, however frustrating.

Part 2 (the actual post):
Some posts ago I observed that Canadian universities exhibit less school spirit than their American counterparts, and that this reticence mirrors the overt patriotism of Americans as compared to the understated Canadian version.

I have asked a number of Canadian friends for explanations, without real success. Like defining what it means to be a Canadian, we are reticent with reasons for our laid-back approach to life. In this context I advance one possible explanation. It is at best partial, and cannot be the whole reason; but if I am right in my diagnosis, it is an important feature of our national character, and source of significant problems in our lives together.

It is a commonplace in the study of culture that Western societies generally have built on the rights and dignity of the individual. The Declaration of Independence in the United States begins: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”. We (Americans) have (as I have heard a commentator observe) fought a war to determine whether or not “all men” includes Black people”, and worked through a difficult period we call the suffragette movement to determine whether or not “all men” includes men and women. We have, so far, concluded that the term is inclusive. (For a separate post: the next struggle may be to determine whether the term “all men” means people from all nations, or “all Americans”.)

My own hunch is that Canadian society has taken this emphasis on emphasis on the individual further than most countries in the world. I don’t know who else has gone as far as we (Canadians) have: perhaps some of the Scandinavian countries; perhaps the Netherlands. One the whole, however, I suggest that we have gone further than anyone else, although we are all going in the same direction.

In Canada this emphasis on the individual is enshrined in The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, with its repeated phrasing of “everyone” or “each individual”. One particular product of our Charter rights is the Privacy Legislation, which has worked out in surprising ways in the past years. I teach at Providence College and Seminary. If I ask where a particular student is, so as to give him/her a message, the school is not allowed to answer the question, not even to say if the student is in class or not. The student’s privacy is held to be infringed by telling me where he/she is. One can multiply examples: the depressed patient released from a Winnipeg hospital, which was not allowed to inform his family – even though the patient went out and committed suicide.

In theory, the rights of the individual and the importance of the larger community are held in balance. In practice, I suggest, the rights of the individual generally trump community in Canada. The Liberal Party of Canada articulates this emphasis in the first sentence of its section on philosophy on its web page: “The Liberal Party of Canada believes that the dignity of each individual man and woman is the fundamental principle of democratic society. All political organization and activity emanates from this guiding principle.” In this respect I suggest that all of the political parties are essentially the same, reflecting a radical emphasis on the rights of the individual, unique in the history of human societies.

What does all of this have to do with school spirit, or patriotic fervour? One aspect of a radical individualism is its reluctance to commit to the larger community. I suggest that in this respect Americans are more oriented to the larger community and Canadians are more oriented to the individual self.

There are positive and negative aspects of our national characters for both Americans and Canadians. This reluctance to commit to the larger group within the Canadian psyche is, of course, a matter of tendency only: Canadians have committed deeply in the past, and within every local community many individuals commit to club, to church, to group of friends. But even after I add all the qualifiers, I remain uncomfortable with this piece of my Canadian self: reluctance to commit to the larger community. True enough that American patriotism shows its own dark side in the willingness to follow a leader into military action overseas; but selfish individualism is no cure for misguided patriotism.

In the end, I will continue singing along to “Jerusalem”, and “Fight On, Penn State!”

Kinetic Chaos

2007-01-15T15:38:00.000-06:00

Pictures hung in disarray
Long wall with rhyme and reason plenty, but
Pictures hung in disarray

Drainer full of dishes piled
Sink as full, replete with repast past
Dishes piled in disarray

Order fills the greater halls
Chaos fills the tiny walls within
A great grand narrative of order, beauty
A thousand acts of chaos bound by duty
To fill out the Great Hall of
Rhyme and Reason and Rithmetic
My mind, my self fights with overpowering chaos
Scarcely aware of rhyming reason bounding All
Pictures straightened hang on One Great Wall
Dishes done, laid out in grand array
For grander banquet in One Great Hall
“A neat metaphysical conclusion”
Or one piece of flying crockery
One falling picture
Hoping

30 November 2004

Quest

2007-01-15T15:35:00.000-06:00

By what right say you are a man?
By whose name do you lay claim
To name yourself?
Whence your authority to hold identity?

I know a man who knew himself
With such clear knowing that we could not speak
Such certainty – Opaque to human eye
Such confidence – His soul I could not reach
When my own self quivers tense, alert
Taut and tensing search and questing
seeking only to know, to find By Whom?

To be a man
To be in Being’s chain
Created
Confused
Caught
At last, knowing by being known

29 November 2004

Thanksgiving 2004

2007-01-15T15:11:00.000-06:00

Talk went as talk does
“God bless America, Land that I love”
“Nkosi, sikelel’ iAfrika”
“Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who never to himself has said, ‘This is my own, my …’”
What citizen are you?
By what right do you hold this passport?
Do you really? Are you – I don’t know
Identity
Card, home, rights, responsibilities
Kit, Mr Fix-It, do it yourself
Who are you? Really – Who am I?

Talk went on, around the swirling mists of
Identity
Mashed potatoes and Turkey
A stew of memories
“King of the wild Frontier”
“Zorro!”
“Have Gun, Will Travel” to rocks bold and old
Climbing, playing, teaching, singing
Mixed together – season with talk and Canada
“This is my home and native …”?

Or something else that all the rocks and grass
All the sea and mountains and people
Can only hint at?

28 November 2004