http://www.azdiocese.org/dfc/newsdetail_2/1039
thanks to Keith
Showing posts with label chaplaincy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chaplaincy. Show all posts
Monday, March 7, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Our Annual Lecture Series
The Cade Community Lectures
“On Being Human”
Annual Lecture Series
Lethbridge Public Library
Wednesdays
7:00 pm
January 19th - “What collecting has taught me about being human”
Erin Phillips, Chaplain, Ecumenical Campus Ministry
January 26th - “What policing has taught me about being human”
Hugh Richards, Criminal Justice, Lethbridge College
February 2nd - “What facebook has taught me about being human”
Jennifer Davis, General Studies, Lethbridge College
February 9th - “What volunteering has taught me about being human”
Mike Mahon, President, University of Lethbridge
Sponsored by Ecumenical Campus Ministry, the President’s Office, University of Lethbridge, the President’s Office, Lethbridge College, and Lethbridge Public Library
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Just one more reason why I love this time of year
Bags collected by Ascension
This is what approximately $10,000 in groceries look like!
Two of our student volunteers!
The line-up
Checking out the goodies
Maureen Mahon, whose husband is the new president of the U of L, helps out!Yesterday was the day we handed out campus care parcels at the university. For a month my admin assistant has been distributing grocery bags to south Alberta churches. The university has had a bunch made for us but this year the budget didn't allow that so Safeway generously donated a lot of their bags. Last week Beth started gathering up a lot of bags and some of the churches started dropping theirs off to Immanuel Lutheran who graciously offer their hall for our depot. I brought in the bags Ascension donated and some that were dropped off at my house from one of our rural congregations. Then Saturday a bunch of us sorted the bags. Yesterday was the day we distributed them! IVCF staff and students came and helped Maintenance load them all up and drive them down to the University where they unloaded them and then the fun began.
Students began lining up a half hour before we began the hand out and we managed to hand out 442!!! bags in 20 mins. An hour later when I checked my email there were two lovely messages from students thanking us for the food and the encouragement. I love my job!
Monday, November 16, 2009
Observations on Giving
A number of years ago the college Student Association did a food drive for the college food bank. All the clubs went out as groups and sang Christmas carols while collecting food. I went out with the Student Association itself and we started in an older neighbourhood. Most of the people were seniors or students and everyone who was home gave us something.
Someone in the group decided we'd get even more food if we went to one of the ritzier, newer, ie. richer neighbourhoods. Sadly, after a few blocks they began to sing, "You're a mean one Mr. Grinch." At house after house people told us that they had given at the office, or had nothing in the house to give, or even refused to come to the door but stared at us rather hostilely through the window. The students began to ask how people who lived in such big homes could claim they had nothing to give. I suggested that they probably spent beyond their means and that they were house poor. I suggested we return to the poorer neighbourhood but they said, no, let's go to the rich neighbourhood (the old money neighbourhood).
If people were home in that neighbourhood they gave generously but mostly they weren't home. These are people with lots of Christmas commitments and no doubt they were out at some Christmas function while we patiently rang their doorbells.
When we returned to the college and compared the haul the club that had collected the most food was the club that had gone to the poorest neighbourhood in the city. The students didn't understand how this could be so but it struck me as consistent with the pattern in Canada where the poorest province, Newfoundland, gives the most per capita to charity.
Just thinking about this lately as I prepare for all my Christmas programming. My congregations may be aging, and membership may be declining, and they may be the subject of doom and gloom articles in media but they give and they give generously. At this time of year I am so grateful to all the Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian and United churches in South Alberta for the ways they open their hearts and their wallets to care for our students. I am so proud of their deep sense of hospitality and their compassion on stressed out young people. I am so blessed to serve as chaplain to our two campuses and as pastor to one of those small loving congregations.
Someone in the group decided we'd get even more food if we went to one of the ritzier, newer, ie. richer neighbourhoods. Sadly, after a few blocks they began to sing, "You're a mean one Mr. Grinch." At house after house people told us that they had given at the office, or had nothing in the house to give, or even refused to come to the door but stared at us rather hostilely through the window. The students began to ask how people who lived in such big homes could claim they had nothing to give. I suggested that they probably spent beyond their means and that they were house poor. I suggested we return to the poorer neighbourhood but they said, no, let's go to the rich neighbourhood (the old money neighbourhood).
If people were home in that neighbourhood they gave generously but mostly they weren't home. These are people with lots of Christmas commitments and no doubt they were out at some Christmas function while we patiently rang their doorbells.
When we returned to the college and compared the haul the club that had collected the most food was the club that had gone to the poorest neighbourhood in the city. The students didn't understand how this could be so but it struck me as consistent with the pattern in Canada where the poorest province, Newfoundland, gives the most per capita to charity.
Just thinking about this lately as I prepare for all my Christmas programming. My congregations may be aging, and membership may be declining, and they may be the subject of doom and gloom articles in media but they give and they give generously. At this time of year I am so grateful to all the Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian and United churches in South Alberta for the ways they open their hearts and their wallets to care for our students. I am so proud of their deep sense of hospitality and their compassion on stressed out young people. I am so blessed to serve as chaplain to our two campuses and as pastor to one of those small loving congregations.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Posting Secrets
Faith and Leadership has a very interesting article on young people and the confession of secrets here.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Give me that old time funeral
On my first day as chaplain, I received a phone call asking for my help organizing a memorial service for a member of the faculty who had died the month before. His close friend asked me to help him organize something 'with grace and dignity that was religiously neutral.' Since then I have organized many services for people whose connection to the church was tenuous at best but who had ties to the university or college. These services took place on campus or at a funeral home. When I was ordained people in the parish began to ask me to do funerals and the funeral homes too began to ask me occasionally to do services for people with no church ties. I still do far fewer funerals in a year than many of my colleagues in full-time parish ministry but I suspect that I've done proportionally more funerals for people who have died young and tragically.
I was intrigued, therefore, by the latest issue of Christian Century. The focus of the October 6th issue is funeral practices and the main article, featured on their website, is Thomas Long's piece "The Good Funeral: Recovering Christian Practices." In it he observes a number of trends in the past 50 years in funeral practices:
He goes on to suggest that while "[t]hese newer practices are attractive mainly because they seem to offer relief from the cosmeticized, sentimental, impersonal and often costly funerals that developed in the 1950s, which were themselves parodies of authentic Christian rituals," they represent a corruption of a Christian understanding of death. He suggests, "[c]ontemporary Christian funeral practices certainly need to be changed, but change should be more a matter of recovery and reformation than innovation and improvisation."
At the heart of what he sees happening is a significant shift in understanding of what the purpose of a funeral/memorial service is:
In response to the growing trend of people asking that there be no service at all when they die (just read the obituaries regularly and you'll notice it becoming much more common), I have said many times just as Long suggests that 'funerals are for those left behind.' So I was stung by his argument that these trends have a great deal to do with the loss of faith in the resurrection of the dead:
These changes in theology coincided with the development of cemeteries set apart from where people lived so that the tradition of carrying the casket from church to grave ended and the two parts of the service were severed. And I would add to this that in most communities now, no longer do members of the family or extended community prepare the grave or fill it once the casket is lowered. Filling the grave by the mourners is an option here but it only happens in the Jewish section of the cemetery.
Long concludes his piece with a call for the church to regain its theological vision:
This article is excerpted from his new book, Accompany Them With Singing: The Christian Funeral, a book I look forward to reading.
I'm still mulling over Long's argument and I'd love to have a discussion about it with a group of clergy. I have some suspicions about how my colleagues might respond to his argument. Certainly the Roman Catholics have maintained much more of the traditional structure and theology of Christian burial. The personalizing trends he identifies are relegated to the prayer service the evening before. Most of us I suspect hear requests consistent with what he describes regularly - that the service be a celebration of the life of the one who died, that the high point be the powerpoint presentation of pictures, and that the music be from their favourite cd.
The problem with saying things like this is that it sounds like we're putting people down for requesting them. As much as I agreed with much of Long's argument I cringed to think of people I know and love reading it and thinking themselves criticized or dismissed because of the way they buried grandma. In fact, I put together my father's memorial service and it was pretty much as Long described the hypothetical service at the opening of his article.
Very few of the funerals I do are in the church or for people with strong ties to the church and so it isn't surprising that they do not reflect a traditional Christian understanding of death. So perhaps this article raises for me a whole different set of questions about how Christian clergy should/could respond to the requests of people on the edges or outside the church for burial (and one could add weddings and baptisms of their babies).
Having said that there are a couple of contemporary trends that really set my teeth on edge. The first is trend to call services 'a celebration of life' and the second is the word 'closure.' When I'm sitting with a family and they have that "gutted, we've been hit by a truck, sitting on the verge of tears" look about them and they tell me that they don't want the service to be somber because they want it to be a celebration of mom's or grandpa's life I want to ask them, why are you saying this? why are you trying to do this to yourself? I know that they won't be capable of pulling it off, that they are going to enter crying and spend most of the service trying and failing to hold themselves together. And there is nothing wrong with that. Why do we think it is inappropriate for funerals to be sorrowful? Occasionally people will say that they know their loved one is with God so it isn't right that they grieve. I always want to say, and have said in some funeral homilies, that Paul said, 'we do not grieve as those who have no hope, ' not, 'we do not grieve.' Somehow instead of holding together the grief and the hope that we have in the face of death we have lost the ability to acknowledge the grief. At least rhetorically. At the service grief usually has its say.
As to the word 'closure' I wish it could be banned from the English language. I was at a conference on grief once where the speaker said the word wasn't helpful because people didn't want to close off the dead person. She said it can get in the way if you tell someone who is grieving that they need closure because it sounds like what you are saying is that the person who has died shouldn't still really matter to them. Amen sister! Better to say that what we are trying to do is make some sense of the death, that we are trying to find a new way to relate to the person who has died, that the relationship we have with them is being transformed, and that the funeral is helping to do that.
And yes, I'm aware that that reflects the attitude Long identified that the funeral is about the living and their issues but I'm okay with that. Because as much as I think our funeral practices, like our wedding practices and everything else that we do, should be about teaching people how to look at the world in a distinctively Christian manner I also think we are there to care for people in their time of sorrow.
I was intrigued, therefore, by the latest issue of Christian Century. The focus of the October 6th issue is funeral practices and the main article, featured on their website, is Thomas Long's piece "The Good Funeral: Recovering Christian Practices." In it he observes a number of trends in the past 50 years in funeral practices:
With surprising swiftness and dramatic results, a significant segment of American Christians has over the past 50 years abandoned previously established funeral customs in favor of an entirely new pattern of memorializing the dead. This new pattern is not firmly fixed (indeed, variations, improvisations and personal customizations are marks of the new rituals) but it generally includes the following characteristics:I would add to the expressed desire that the service 'bring closure.'
• a memorial service instead of a funeral (i.e., a service focused on remembering the deceased, often held many days after the death, with the body or the cremated remains of the deceased not present)
• a brief, simple, highly personalized and customized service, often involving several speakers (as opposed to the standard church funeral liturgies presided over primarily by clergy)
• a focus on the life of the deceased (often aided by a physical display of photos and other mementos)
• an emphasis on joy rather than sadness, a celebration of life rather than an observance of the somber reality of death
• a private disposition of the body, often done before the memorial service, with an increasing preference for cremation
He goes on to suggest that while "[t]hese newer practices are attractive mainly because they seem to offer relief from the cosmeticized, sentimental, impersonal and often costly funerals that developed in the 1950s, which were themselves parodies of authentic Christian rituals," they represent a corruption of a Christian understanding of death. He suggests, "[c]ontemporary Christian funeral practices certainly need to be changed, but change should be more a matter of recovery and reformation than innovation and improvisation."
At the heart of what he sees happening is a significant shift in understanding of what the purpose of a funeral/memorial service is:
For example, the current shift to a memorial service with the body absent means that Christian death practices are no longer metaphorical expressions of the journey of a saint to be with God. The saint is not even present, except as a spiritualized memory, a backdrop for the real action, which happens in the psyches of the mourners. The mourners are the only actors left, and the ritual now is really about them. Funerals are "for the living," as we are prone to say. Instead of the grand cosmic drama of the church marching to the edge of eternity with a fellow saint, singing songs of resurrection victory and sneering in the face of the final enemy, we now have a much smaller, more privatized psychodrama, albeit often couched in Christian language. If we take the plot of the typical memorial service at face value, the dead are not migrating to God; the living are moving from sorrow to stability.
In response to the growing trend of people asking that there be no service at all when they die (just read the obituaries regularly and you'll notice it becoming much more common), I have said many times just as Long suggests that 'funerals are for those left behind.' So I was stung by his argument that these trends have a great deal to do with the loss of faith in the resurrection of the dead:
The fact is that many educated Christians in the late 19th century, the forebears of today's white suburban Protestants, lost their eschatological nerve and their vibrant faith in the afterlife, and we are their theological and liturgical heirs. It was not, of course, as if the whole of 19th-century Christian society woke up one morning and suddenly found that they no longer believed in eternal life. The loss of conviction about the otherworld came slowly and gradually.
These changes in theology coincided with the development of cemeteries set apart from where people lived so that the tradition of carrying the casket from church to grave ended and the two parts of the service were severed. And I would add to this that in most communities now, no longer do members of the family or extended community prepare the grave or fill it once the casket is lowered. Filling the grave by the mourners is an option here but it only happens in the Jewish section of the cemetery.
Long concludes his piece with a call for the church to regain its theological vision:
Surely the task before the church now is to retrace our steps and to recover the grand liturgical theater in which Christians embrace their dead with tender affection, lift up their voices in hymns of resurrection and accompany the saints to the edge of mystery. This will not involve a mere repristinating of funeral practices or a rejection of cremation, but a recovery in our time and in contemporary forms of the governing symbols of the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, and the journey of Christian dead toward the life everlasting.
This article is excerpted from his new book, Accompany Them With Singing: The Christian Funeral, a book I look forward to reading.
I'm still mulling over Long's argument and I'd love to have a discussion about it with a group of clergy. I have some suspicions about how my colleagues might respond to his argument. Certainly the Roman Catholics have maintained much more of the traditional structure and theology of Christian burial. The personalizing trends he identifies are relegated to the prayer service the evening before. Most of us I suspect hear requests consistent with what he describes regularly - that the service be a celebration of the life of the one who died, that the high point be the powerpoint presentation of pictures, and that the music be from their favourite cd.
The problem with saying things like this is that it sounds like we're putting people down for requesting them. As much as I agreed with much of Long's argument I cringed to think of people I know and love reading it and thinking themselves criticized or dismissed because of the way they buried grandma. In fact, I put together my father's memorial service and it was pretty much as Long described the hypothetical service at the opening of his article.
Very few of the funerals I do are in the church or for people with strong ties to the church and so it isn't surprising that they do not reflect a traditional Christian understanding of death. So perhaps this article raises for me a whole different set of questions about how Christian clergy should/could respond to the requests of people on the edges or outside the church for burial (and one could add weddings and baptisms of their babies).
Having said that there are a couple of contemporary trends that really set my teeth on edge. The first is trend to call services 'a celebration of life' and the second is the word 'closure.' When I'm sitting with a family and they have that "gutted, we've been hit by a truck, sitting on the verge of tears" look about them and they tell me that they don't want the service to be somber because they want it to be a celebration of mom's or grandpa's life I want to ask them, why are you saying this? why are you trying to do this to yourself? I know that they won't be capable of pulling it off, that they are going to enter crying and spend most of the service trying and failing to hold themselves together. And there is nothing wrong with that. Why do we think it is inappropriate for funerals to be sorrowful? Occasionally people will say that they know their loved one is with God so it isn't right that they grieve. I always want to say, and have said in some funeral homilies, that Paul said, 'we do not grieve as those who have no hope, ' not, 'we do not grieve.' Somehow instead of holding together the grief and the hope that we have in the face of death we have lost the ability to acknowledge the grief. At least rhetorically. At the service grief usually has its say.
As to the word 'closure' I wish it could be banned from the English language. I was at a conference on grief once where the speaker said the word wasn't helpful because people didn't want to close off the dead person. She said it can get in the way if you tell someone who is grieving that they need closure because it sounds like what you are saying is that the person who has died shouldn't still really matter to them. Amen sister! Better to say that what we are trying to do is make some sense of the death, that we are trying to find a new way to relate to the person who has died, that the relationship we have with them is being transformed, and that the funeral is helping to do that.
And yes, I'm aware that that reflects the attitude Long identified that the funeral is about the living and their issues but I'm okay with that. Because as much as I think our funeral practices, like our wedding practices and everything else that we do, should be about teaching people how to look at the world in a distinctively Christian manner I also think we are there to care for people in their time of sorrow.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Charity
Years ago I found an old book plate in a used book store that both disturbed and amused me. It was a depiction of charity and it showed a well dressed woman delivering something to some obviously impoverished people. She towered over them and looked more self-satisfied than compassionate. I kept the picture for several years until it got ruined by a leaking pipe while in storage. It wasn't something that I really wanted hanging on my walls and yet my ambivalence about the depiction of charity made me keep it.
In my work I am often engaged in 'acts of charity' especially around Christmas. We hand out bags of food to students at the university at the end of each term and we help do Christmas hampers at the college. I love doing this stuff - it makes my Christmas actually. Yet there are also times when I worry about becoming the self-satisfied woman in the picture, grateful to the poor for giving me the opportunity to feel good about myself for my generosity. Jim Tagg has an interesting post on the problems of charity at home that speaks to some of my own experience. Read it here.
In my work I am often engaged in 'acts of charity' especially around Christmas. We hand out bags of food to students at the university at the end of each term and we help do Christmas hampers at the college. I love doing this stuff - it makes my Christmas actually. Yet there are also times when I worry about becoming the self-satisfied woman in the picture, grateful to the poor for giving me the opportunity to feel good about myself for my generosity. Jim Tagg has an interesting post on the problems of charity at home that speaks to some of my own experience. Read it here.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Unusual Month
People have asked me why I haven't written much this past month (and my mom keeps asking why I haven't emailed) and I kept saying I was busy but tonight I decided to make a list of what happened this month to see how busy it was. Here are the results:
25 hrs sitting in hospital with people
11 services including 3 out of town, 2 funerals, 1 wedding and 1 baptism
2 Bible studies
2 theology reading group meetings
student referendum
1 pool and pizza party
1 potluck
1 turkey dinner for 400 students
250 campus care parcels collected, sorted, and distributed to students
220 little Christmas treat bags for residence students assembled and distributed
Peter Erb's visit including his 3 talks and 2 dinner parties with him and Betty
1 talk at the public library
2 trips to Calgary
and a whole bunch of meetings, coffees with folks, emails, shopping, photocopying, and general admin stuff
I'm tired but boy I am having fun! And if it wasn't for a huge crew of volunteers this wouldn't have all happened. I am truly blessed in my ministry by wonderful people.
25 hrs sitting in hospital with people
11 services including 3 out of town, 2 funerals, 1 wedding and 1 baptism
2 Bible studies
2 theology reading group meetings
student referendum
1 pool and pizza party
1 potluck
1 turkey dinner for 400 students
250 campus care parcels collected, sorted, and distributed to students
220 little Christmas treat bags for residence students assembled and distributed
Peter Erb's visit including his 3 talks and 2 dinner parties with him and Betty
1 talk at the public library
2 trips to Calgary
and a whole bunch of meetings, coffees with folks, emails, shopping, photocopying, and general admin stuff
I'm tired but boy I am having fun! And if it wasn't for a huge crew of volunteers this wouldn't have all happened. I am truly blessed in my ministry by wonderful people.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Peter Erb's upcoming visit
I'm very excited that my teacher, Peter Erb, will be coming here to give a series of lectures for ECM, the U of Lethbridge and Lethbridge College. When I went to WLU to do my MA I didn't know about Peter but five minutes into our first conversation and I knew I had found my teacher. He taught me to read carefully and introduced me to so much of the Christian tradition.
Here is a great article on his latest work on Christianity and murder mysteries. How wonderful to know that reading mysteries isn't a waste of time!
Here is his schedule here:
Sunday, November 16th
2:00 pm
Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd
2406 11 Avenue South
"Ecumencial gift exchanges: What Lutherans and Anglicans have to offer the Church at large -- a Roman Catholic perspective"
Monday, November 17th
7:30 pm
Lethbridge Public Library
"Christian Killers and Atheist Heroes: Religion and Detective Fiction 2008"
Tuesday, November 18th
12:15 pm
University of Lethbridge, Turcotte Hall 277
"Can Christians be Citizens?” A Victorian Debate in a Twenty-First Century Setting
Sponsored by Ecumenical Campus Ministry, the Office of the President, Lethbridge College, the Office of the President, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge Public Library and Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd
Here is a great article on his latest work on Christianity and murder mysteries. How wonderful to know that reading mysteries isn't a waste of time!
Here is his schedule here:
Sunday, November 16th
2:00 pm
Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd
2406 11 Avenue South
"Ecumencial gift exchanges: What Lutherans and Anglicans have to offer the Church at large -- a Roman Catholic perspective"
Monday, November 17th
7:30 pm
Lethbridge Public Library
"Christian Killers and Atheist Heroes: Religion and Detective Fiction 2008"
Tuesday, November 18th
12:15 pm
University of Lethbridge, Turcotte Hall 277
"Can Christians be Citizens?” A Victorian Debate in a Twenty-First Century Setting
Sponsored by Ecumenical Campus Ministry, the Office of the President, Lethbridge College, the Office of the President, University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge Public Library and Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd
Thursday, September 4, 2008
ECM Start Up
We are holding a service September 14th at 2:00 PM at St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church (1818 5th Ave South) to kick off the school year and to pray for our campuses. Everyone is welcome.
And our theology reading group starts up again next Tuesday evening. This term we are reading Jurgen Moltmann's The Way of Jesus Christ. Everyone is welcome so let me know if you want details of time and location.
And our theology reading group starts up again next Tuesday evening. This term we are reading Jurgen Moltmann's The Way of Jesus Christ. Everyone is welcome so let me know if you want details of time and location.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Ordered Ministry
The more I have to blog about the more overwhelmed I feel by it all and the less likely I am to do it. So I'm choosing one thing to get me started again.
A couple of Saturdays ago I went to a fundraising dinner for the United Church seminary in Saskatoon, St. Andrew's College. This isn't my seminary, nor my denomination, and if I'm honest I would say I wouldn't have gone except that we've had students from the chaplaincy go through there and the people putting the dinner on are huge supporters of the chaplaincy. So, out of a sense of communal support I paid my $100 for roast beef and a talk by Lorne Calvert. I knew Calvert had been the NDP premier of Saskatchewan but didn't realize he had been in active ordained ministry in the United Church before entering politics. And lets be really honest here, I was expecting the same old social gospel/United church/NDP message I've heard many times before. Don't get me wrong - this is a message that has shaped me profoundly and I find it a bit like comfort food, warm and nourishing, if not exciting.
It was a surprising delight when I heard one of the most encouraging articulations of the place of ordered ministry (he began by saying he didn't know what to call it since the United church has all sorts of different forms of ministry - licenced lay, ordained, diaconal.... - but he was talking about the person 'up there' who everyone knows is the 'minister'). He used three passages of scripture for his talk:
Isaiah 52:7 - how beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news
Romans 10:14-15 - How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? 15And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!"
Mark 2:1-10 - A few days later, when Jesus again entered Capernaum, the people heard that he had come home. So many gathered that there was no room left, not even outside the door, and he preached the word to them. Some men came, bringing to him a paralytic, carried by four of them. Since they could not get him to Jesus because of the crowd, they made an opening in the roof above Jesus and, after digging through it, lowered the mat the paralyzed man was lying on. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven."
Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, "Why does this fellow talk like that? He's blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?"
Immediately Jesus knew in his spirit that this was what they were thinking in their hearts, and he said to them, "Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up, take your mat and walk'? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins . . . ." He said to the paralytic, "I tell you, get up, take your mat and go home." He got up, took his mat and walked out in full view of them all. This amazed everyone and they praised God, saying, "We have never seen anything like this!"
He started by suggesting that the church has so emphasized the ministry of the many that they haven't articulated an understanding of the ministry of the few. He pointed out that Paul certainly understood the many gifts of the entire body of Christ but that Paul also understood the role of some who are set aside for particular ministry. The heart of that ministry Calvert understands to be being the servant of the servants of God.
He said people working in the world have multiple portals to the world. He described how he has multiple sources of information/advice as a politician and suggested that this isn't that unusual. He went on to say though that he doesn't have many portals to the holy. The image he used was of the four men who carry the paralytic to Jesus and have to create an opening in the roof through which they can lower the man to Jesus. This is what he suggests ordered ministers do: we create openings to allow people to encounter the holy that they seek. He went on to talk of the ways in which the proclamation of the word and the administration of the sacraments are critical is allowing people to encounter God. And he told us that we should never underestimate the value of what we do on a Sunday morning. Take the eight hours to write a sermon, take the time to work with the music team, because that may be the one place in a person's week where he or she will become aware of the holy.
It was a really encouraging talk and I wish more clergy had heard it.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Laughing the morning away
This morning was our monthly board meeting and we laughed a lot, even while discussing some serious business. I love that. I left the meeting with a grin on my face.
I'm a firm believer in laughter being good for the soul. And there is a comic over at Joe's blog that cracked me up. You have to know churchy kinds of things to get it. If you don't know Shine Jesus Shine just think the 90s version of Kum Ba Ya. Check it out here. And then check out this joke over at Letters from Kamp Krusty. I howled but when I tried it on my board they didn't. Oh well.
I'm a firm believer in laughter being good for the soul. And there is a comic over at Joe's blog that cracked me up. You have to know churchy kinds of things to get it. If you don't know Shine Jesus Shine just think the 90s version of Kum Ba Ya. Check it out here. And then check out this joke over at Letters from Kamp Krusty. I howled but when I tried it on my board they didn't. Oh well.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Still Crazy After all these Days
So little has changed...things are really nuts here. But now I have only one major project left before the end of term. Of course there is lots happening in the parish with Easter. But most of my big projects are done!!!!!
Interesting conversation tonight in theology reading group about the resurrection and last night at Unchurch about sacrifice. This afternoon I gave a lecture at the university about Christian views of friendship and family - lots of fun unpacking Augustine and Aquinas. So lots of stuff whipping around my brain these days.
And the Sunday School has started raising money for their lenten project to buy animals through Plan Canada. We're off to a good start after serving lunch to the parish this Sunday.
And the Sunday School has started raising money for their lenten project to buy animals through Plan Canada. We're off to a good start after serving lunch to the parish this Sunday.
On another note we've begun to plan a celebration for this summer for my folks' 50th anniversary. Look at how young they were:
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Internet friendships
Peter Leclaire, vp academic.
Our final lecture in the friendship series took place last night and it was a big success. Peter Leclaire, the VP Academic, came from the college to introduce Marko Hilgersom who is a very popular teacher at the college. He's receiving a NISOD Excellence in Learning Leadership Award this spring (I think learning leadership is some new way of saying 'teaching'). He teaches all sorts of culture/film/religion courses at the college and is developing a new course on narrative. And he's my neighbour.Marko brought clickers along to allow him to poll the audience (about 50 people ranging in age from 15-70+) which was a lot of fun. For the first half of his talk he mostly polled us about our attitudes towards friendship, how many friends we had, what qualities we most valued in friendship... Then he introduced Aristotle's categories of friendship and related what we had identified to those. And then he talked about the qualities of friendships mediated solely by the internet and asked the question of whether these really counted as friendships. His answer was a qualified yes. He suggested the same qualities can be present in these relationships but they are easier to fake. And he suggested that ultimately true friendship required face to face meeting although we debated that in the discussion afterwards. My counter example was the friendship between Helen and Frank that is described in the book 84 Charing Cross Road - a true story of two people who become significant friends through letters but never meet.
It was a great evening and a really good way to end our series. Now we look forward to the fall when we will do another mini series, this one of religion and fiction.
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Friendship with people with differing abilities
Bruce MacKay spoke last night on friendship with people with disabilities. He outlined different approaches to defining disability and pointed out that views of disabilty dominant until recently, views which led often to institutionalization of people with disabilities, made friendship difficult. As an alternative Bruce talked about differing abilities and suggested that we benefit from friendships with people different than ourselves. In part this is based on the realization that we are all mortal and vulnerable to disability ourselves. We are all 'TAB's, temporarily able bodied.
For the last few days I've been struggling with a nasty bug and have felt very mortal. Bruce's approach made an awful lot of sense to me.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
What would you do for a friend?
This week's talk by John von Heyking was really interesting and I've been talking with people about it ever since. The main focus of his talk was the issue of the implications for civic friendship of Canada's political culture. He began though by looking at studies of Canadians' views of friendship. One of the questions people were asked was whether they could rely on their friends and a high percentage said that they could. The numbers dropped significantly though when people were asked whether or not they could borrow money from their friends. John's question was does it mean to rely on our friends. Then he asked how many people outside of our immediate families were we willing to die for. At the break we decided probably the more challenging question was how many people were we willing to live for.
Since then I've had a number of conversations with friends about the variations of what it means to live for others from are you willing to take over a casserole if they have a death in their family to would you be willing to take over their personal care if they were sick for six months. Some of the folks I've talked to about this have found this a really uncomfortable topic. I think it raises the fear that maybe we can't count on people in tough times. A couple of people commented that they weren't sure people could always count on their immediate family either in a tough time. I wonder though if it wouldn't be easier for people to live out that vow to their spouse if they had the support of a whole community.
John asked the question of whether or not Canada's political culture encouraged the kind of virtues needed to form these kinds of friendships before turning to the issue of civic friendships. I wondered whether or not the church is a place where these kinds of friendships form. I know we talk a lot about Jesus' example of service and the call to love our neighbours but I think the cultural forces that isolate us and encourage self-obsession are strong and difficult to resist.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Friendship Series
Our series on friendship continues tonight at the library and I'm looking forward to hearing what John von Heyking has to say about the possibilities of friendship in a liberal democracy.
Last week I spoke about the tension within the Christian tradition between the recognition of the ways in which friendship can deepen our love of God and can be seen as a gift of grace from God and the commitment to a more universal, non-exclusive love of neighbour. This dance between exclusive, particular committed relationship and an openness to others plays itself out in so many places and in so many kinds of relationships. Here's to being light on our feet.
Last week I spoke about the tension within the Christian tradition between the recognition of the ways in which friendship can deepen our love of God and can be seen as a gift of grace from God and the commitment to a more universal, non-exclusive love of neighbour. This dance between exclusive, particular committed relationship and an openness to others plays itself out in so many places and in so many kinds of relationships. Here's to being light on our feet.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Friendship Talk
Last night we began our lecture series on friendship. Bill Cade, the president of the U of L, gave a very funny and interesting introduction to the series using examples of friendship from the insect realm and then I gave my talk on whether it is possible for Christians to be friends. More on that later.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Hospital chaplains
For years what ER has really needed was a good chaplain written in. They've had clergy come in as patients and occasionally had clergy come in to minister to a dying person but no chaplain. Well, this season they finally get one and she is so lame it hurts.
Last night's episode is a case in point. One story line saw a prison doctor save the life of a young boy from drowning. It turns out that he was responsible for executing 17 prisoners including the boy's father. He has come to the conviction that he was wrong to execute these prisoners and is now doing everything he can to make amends to the families before he dies. He is convinced that what he has done isn't enough and that he will be condemned to hell for killing the inmates. The doctors call in the chaplain to help relieve his torment and she is as helpful as spitting on a forest fire.
She says nothing of significance, doesn't understand his fear, and walks away distraught because she was able to bring no relief. In a scene with one of the doctors she says that she was ordained, she studied Buddhism, she went to an ashram, she thought that kind of synthesized approach would be good in a hospital but what people want when they are suffering is certainty and she can't provide it. Well, duh.
The issue of how to provide spiritual care in secular institutions is a complex one but I don't think the answer is to create some kind of weird esperanto of religious language that speaks to no one and for no one. There is an implicit criticism of the patient in describing what he wants as certainties. I think that what is at the base of this is the idea that people who are firmly within a religious tradition and take the worldview seriously are really people looking for fixed answers because they can't handle ambiguity or uncertainty. Someone who is satisfied by her vague, contentless reassurances is obviously much more spiritually mature.
The patient is tormented because he believes he is a moral agent and that his actions have consequences. Her platitudes aren't just useless, they are insulting, because she fails to take him seriously. She is in effect dismissing his ability to earn damnation, not for theological reasons - she isn't arguing that his repentance is all God needs to forgive him or that God does not condemn people to hell - she is neither a Lutheran or an universalist - but because no one would take the idea that human beings can do things worthy of condemnation seriously. When she concludes that she has nothing to offer patients I responded - ain't that the truth!
How different was the story line a few years ago when Luka treats a bishop dying of Lupus. The bishop sees Luka's torment over the death of his family and speaks words of absolution with authority.
Friends would say to me, it is just a tv show, and it is of course. But the issues raised by this episode get played out in chaplaincy programmes in many places. And you have to wonder how many struggling patients/students/prisoners get offered this kind of spiritual pablum.
Last night's episode is a case in point. One story line saw a prison doctor save the life of a young boy from drowning. It turns out that he was responsible for executing 17 prisoners including the boy's father. He has come to the conviction that he was wrong to execute these prisoners and is now doing everything he can to make amends to the families before he dies. He is convinced that what he has done isn't enough and that he will be condemned to hell for killing the inmates. The doctors call in the chaplain to help relieve his torment and she is as helpful as spitting on a forest fire.
She says nothing of significance, doesn't understand his fear, and walks away distraught because she was able to bring no relief. In a scene with one of the doctors she says that she was ordained, she studied Buddhism, she went to an ashram, she thought that kind of synthesized approach would be good in a hospital but what people want when they are suffering is certainty and she can't provide it. Well, duh.
The issue of how to provide spiritual care in secular institutions is a complex one but I don't think the answer is to create some kind of weird esperanto of religious language that speaks to no one and for no one. There is an implicit criticism of the patient in describing what he wants as certainties. I think that what is at the base of this is the idea that people who are firmly within a religious tradition and take the worldview seriously are really people looking for fixed answers because they can't handle ambiguity or uncertainty. Someone who is satisfied by her vague, contentless reassurances is obviously much more spiritually mature.
The patient is tormented because he believes he is a moral agent and that his actions have consequences. Her platitudes aren't just useless, they are insulting, because she fails to take him seriously. She is in effect dismissing his ability to earn damnation, not for theological reasons - she isn't arguing that his repentance is all God needs to forgive him or that God does not condemn people to hell - she is neither a Lutheran or an universalist - but because no one would take the idea that human beings can do things worthy of condemnation seriously. When she concludes that she has nothing to offer patients I responded - ain't that the truth!
How different was the story line a few years ago when Luka treats a bishop dying of Lupus. The bishop sees Luka's torment over the death of his family and speaks words of absolution with authority.
Friends would say to me, it is just a tv show, and it is of course. But the issues raised by this episode get played out in chaplaincy programmes in many places. And you have to wonder how many struggling patients/students/prisoners get offered this kind of spiritual pablum.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Religion on Campus
The December 2007 issue of The Journal of Higher Education Academic Matters is on religion on Canadian campuses. Check it out here.
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