Robbie and Rosie

Thanksgiving watching dogs play - what fun!

What am I thankful for?

Not in any particular order

• That I have a good vet to keep Robbie healthy and found a good doctor to keep me healthy
• that we hired three great students to be student chaplains this year
• that I got to spend a week with my goddaughter this summer
• that I got to go on holidays to Saskatchewan and Winnipeg
  
• that I've discovered the joys of playing scrabble on facebook
• that I got to serve Ascension for another year
• that I got to celebrate another birthday with friends
  
• that I have a new office at the college and a new espresso machine at the university
• that I finally bought a denim jacket
• that I discovered Prismacolor pens
• that I get to watch Boston Legal Season 3 with friends this weekend
• that I got to spend last weekend playing scrabble with friends
• for East Indian food, especially the green chicken at the Royal India in Calgary
• for Bonny and the Round St. Cafe
• for Unchurch
• for my best friend and my Ya Yas
• for the kids in my life
• for B who mows my lawn and J who cleans my house and for all the ways they make me laugh and delight at how they are growing up
  
• for the ECM board and the golf tournament committee and all the volunteers who make the chaplaincy work
• for jig saw puzzles and cards and lazy evenings
  
• for lattes
• for adopted family, for meals spent with them, for finding home in Lethbridge
• for friends and family, for home and hearth, for dogs and cats, for faith and grace, for books and music, for films and plays, for food and drink, for work and rest, for love and tenderness, for joy and surprise
• for the opportunity to plant vineyards and eat its fruit
  

Feline Symmetry

The Darby and Joan Club

Just got home from hearing the Darby and Joan Club play at the Slice. It was great! I love live music and I really like their British pop sound. They debuted a new song tonight that was really good. I went with a friend who's my age and I figured we'd raise the age of the crowd considerably but there was actually a table of 50+ year olds who did more than us to change the demographics. The Slice is a neat bar - pretty mellow crowd and good live music. Check it out!

Volf on Memory

Our theology reading group met last night for our second session on Miroslav Volf's book The End of Memory and it was a really good evening. We had two new students show up and the discussion was lively. There were some interesting connections with what we had discussed the night before at Unchurch about the dangers of knowledge too.

Volf has some very interesting things to say about the connection of memory to personal identity both in terms of how we are shaped by memory and of how we shape our memory. We ended up getting into a long discussion of the ways in which formative memory may be both personal memory and collective memory.

We also talked about the problem memory poses for us now when we have the technology to record so much of what is happening and yet seem to lack the cultural tools to interpret and remember events. The example one of the students gave was of parties where everyone is taking lots and lots of pictures so that they can run home and post them on facebook rather than actually participating in the party. Experience becomes a form of commodity.

Volf says this:

Currently added to this dangerous moral ambiguity of memories is a powerful sense of their importance. There is today something of a memory boom, a widespread desire to memorialize events -- at times almost an obsession with remembering. This memory boom has, I surmise, two principal causes (plus many subsidiary ones). Almost paradoxically, the first is the fast-paced, novelty-obsessed, entertainment-saturated culture in which we live. On the one hand, it makes most of us quick to forget -- forget even those things that once meant a great deal to us. As the media nail us to a narrow strip of the extended present, and as the new replaces the old with breathtaking speed, the past seems like a landscape viewed from a fast-moving train -- a blur that quickly fades to black. On the other hand, as we lean forward in time we extol memory and memorialize experiences to counter the slipping of the past into oblivion, to prevent our memories from faltering "like old veterans parading," as E.L.Doctorow puts it in City of God.

Witness the readiness in the U.S. to erect memorials to events that have only just happened. Debate about the appropriate monument for the victims of "9/11" was running full speed only a few weeks after the terrorist attack, when we could not possibly have had enough time to absorb the impact of the disaster and reflect on its meaning! We demand immediate memorials as outward symbols because the hold of memory on our inner lives is so tenuous. And then, because we have tangible, observable memorials, we feel absolved of the obligation to remember on our own; we feel free, in good conscience, to immerse ourselves in the blur of the present. Thus does the memory boom try to compensate for an actual memory bust.

The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006, pp. 39-40.

Unchurch Week 4

Tonight was Becky's turn to preach and she spoke on the story of Adam and Eve, Genesis 2-3. Beginning with Walter Brueggemann's interpretation of the story as essentially about the problem of knowledge Becky preached a very interesting sermon on the centrality of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. She's said she will send it to me so that I can post it.

The thing I love best about Unchurch is the conversation after the sermon. Tonight we started to get into all the other interpretations of Adam and Eve but Becky drew us back to the issue of knowledge and we got into a very interesting conversation about the difference between knowledge and understanding or wisdom. We talked about the way in which knowledge can change us, particularly the knowledge of evil. And we talked a lot about the relationship between intimacy and knowledge.

We are becoming a little community too. People are sharing more and seem more and more comfortable together. At the same time a friend of mine came for the first time tonight and seemed comfortable sharing despite being new. He was also included in the conversation which I thought was really neat.

I'm loving this!

Walking the talk

It is good to write about community and communication. It is even better to practice it. Two of my closest friends and I went to Calgary for the weekend to play scrabble. They are both celebrating big birthdays so I told them we had to go to Calgary so I could take them out for a birthday dinner. Any excuse for a weekend with them I say.

We got ourselves a suite and the Holiday Inn staff kindly found us a table and extra chairs for our board. We took some breaks for meals and some shopping but managed to play 15 games. We each won 5 and one husband told us that was very socialist of us. The games were fun and we had a lot of time to talk and listen to music and just enjoy hanging out together.

We also enjoyed Indian, Thai and Greek food. Yum. What a weekend.