Hell in a Handbasket

On Liturgy and Honesty

2011-10-20T10:17:00.001-05:00

We went to church on Sunday for the first time in a very very long time; to an Anglican church with a socially-relevant and historically-grounded sermon and worship that as a mix of Coldplay and the Common Book of Prayers. I have never been a big fan of liturgy – I find that the words can easily be rattled off without sincerity or thought, and that when I do stop to think about what I am mumbling with the rest of the congregation, I am often unable to actually proclaim the words with the heart-felt conviction that I feel like a communal profession deserves.

But, while I still stayed silent for parts of the recitation of the Creed on Sunday, I had a realization: there may be space for people like me (that’d be people who call themselves Christian, but don’t profess many of the tenets that other Christians deem “fundamental”) in the liturgical practices of a Church like the Anglican Church. You see, when a more evangelical church says the Apostle’s Creed, or includes it in their sources of doctrine, I generally assume that they are interpreting it literally – that this is the starting point for their theological framework. And, in this context, standing up and saying it along with the group when I don’t believe everything it says “we believe” feels false and uncomfortable.

But in a church that is based on liturgy, it feels like the intention of the community in saying those words changes: the Creed becomes a placemarker in the tradition that the church comes from. Saying it is as much about situating the congregation in a historical and global community, rather than as a literal affirmation of everything it says. And I feel like there might be some room for me to be there, honestly; that I can read it as metaphor and history and poetry, and it’s ok if I don’t read it as fact. I don’t think I’ll ever escape from the feeling of impersonality that comes from a heavily liturgical service; and maybe I am reading into this completely wrong, and the Anglicans read the Creed because they each individually are professing the belief it espouses, but I think that in some ways, a more “traditional” service structure may actually open up more freedom to participate honestly while staying true to what I believe.

in which the author descends into a completely post-modern world-view...

2011-10-17T09:19:00.002-05:00

I recently finished reading A Strange Stirring by Stephanie Coontz, a book which is essentially a “biography” of The Feminine Mystique, the seminal book on housewife dissatisfaction that came out in the 1960s. It was a fascinating read, but what really captured me the most is how so much of what is considered the “traditional” North American family, and what many people (a large number of whom share the same faith tradition as me …) are fighting to preserve, is really quite a recent phenomenon. In fact, Coontz suggests that it’s normal for societies to go through waves of conservatism after times of upheaval – in other words, what’s exceptional about the post-war suburban nuclear family dream is that it lasted for so long. I was struck by the same theme when we read Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God last winter – this time with regard to theology and Biblical interpretation. Armstrong also highlighted how what is often termed “traditional” is actually relatively recent tradition, and we can quite easily look through history to the time before that tradition took root. Which has got me thinking about the importance of knowing our history: it’s so easy to assume that the bounds of one’s own experience encompass the world as it is, because we all live in our own point of view, but stepping out of your own (historical or cultural) place can quickly reveal that there’s a whole world of points of view out there, and you only live in one of them.

where i was when ...

2011-09-12T16:30:00.005-05:00

Having just been called out for claiming, 3 months ago, that I was going to fill the handbasket with goodies once more, and then sitting back and doing nothing but reading other peoples' blogs in the intervening time, I am really and truly back. A very hot summer has come and gone, in which I saw my triumphant return to the stage (Question Period the Musical at the Ottawa Fringe), spent a full week at the cottage truly doing nothing except for reading, swimming and hanging out with family, and had an amazing two-week trip to California with PJ. And now, it's the fall which, after years of programming, is still "back to school" time in my mind, even though it's been 5 years now since I actually WENT back to school after Labour Day.

The year between my undergrad and law school was the first fall that I didn't go back to school. It was also September 2001. As yesterday was the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I've been thinking about where I was. I was at a farm belonging to family friends. The daughters of the family were also done their degrees and between travel and work, so we hung around a fair amount that fall while we were all back in the homeland. They had 5 or so Scottish lads visiting - these guys had been in New York the week before, and were spending some time experiencing the famous hospitality at the farm. I'd stayed over after a dinner party the night before, crashing on the couch. So, I watched the second tower fall live on TV with some of my oldest friends, and a group of guys who I'd known for a few days.

After sitting in stunned silence for a few hours, and after the guys had all managed to call home to a) reassured their parents that it was last week that they were in NY, and that they were safe in rural Canada; and b) be reassured that family members who worked in European capitals were ok, we went to the lake and went canoeing and swimming. It was warm and quiet, the motor-boaters and week-long vacationers having left with the close of the Labour Day weekend. And we felt like we shouldn't be getting on with life, enjoying ourselves, when we were pretty sure that the world had just changed. But we also knew that you can't not get on with your life. And so, when I remember that day, I have sympathy for the young New Yorkers who were photographed sitting in the sun as the towers burned in the background, and have been accused of being callous for looking normal while they sat and processed what had happened. Because we, who were more removed from the tragedy, drove away from the TV altogether down a country road and out onto the lake, even though we didn't yet know all that had happened, but knew the world had changed.

Zombie Blog Returns from the Dead

2011-06-16T10:31:00.001-05:00

I thought this blog was dead. I told people who asked if I was still blogging that I had slipped out of it. That I had found myself thinking about issues, but not in a way that leant itself to blogging. Or I was only thinking about issues tied up in my work, which I am less comfortable blogging about. Or that I wasn’t thinking about issues at all. Whichever way, Hell in a Handbasket was dead. If I blogged again, it would be something different, something in a new home. That I would move to wordpress and reinvent myself as a food blogger, or something. But recently, I’ve felt the blogginess coming back. The rants and explorations that have made Hell in a Handbasket seem to be percolating once again. So, what the Hell – I just might resurrect this zombie blog, and see if it can say anything coherent without eating my brains.

Lakeshore - the Cultural Mosaic gets Trashed ...

2010-11-12T13:10:00.002-05:00

I, not having cable, have never seen Jersey Shores. But I HAVE seen the promo for the Canadian rip-off, Lakeshore, which is coming soon to some channel near you that will, thankfully, not be beaming in through my bunny ears. This promotional video is so mired in reality television tropes, that I seriously thought it was a satire when I first saw it on a friend’s facebook feed (he was so appalled that he didn’t want to confirm it was real, and didn’t want to check up on whether it had been mentioned in the news so he could remain in his belief that it was a joke …. But of course he shared it with the rest of us …). We have the under-dressed 20-somethings who all describe themselves as “fun”, “sexy”, “crazy”, or some combination thereof. It appears they do things like drink a lot and show off their chests. They maybe live in the same house, but there doesn’t appear to be any kind of contest inherent in the show. What is fascinating is that the producers have decided to cast all first- or second-generation Canadians, who are identified by their ethnic origin: “the Armenian;” “the Vietnamese” etc. There is nary a WASP in sight. On the one hand, it’s an interesting concept – a recognition of the cultural mosaic that is Toronto, which is a good thing. But, ah, then you have “the Turk” saying “I’m not racist. I hate everyone equally. Especially Jewish people,” and I’m pretty sure that this stereotypical parody of a reality show is going to keep its cultural diversity message at the level of stereotypical parody of the stars’ native cultures …. I sure hope that fine minds at Racialicious get a whiff of this – I’d love to see some good analysis from someone more qualified than myself (and, uh, with cable …).

Too Smart for Everyday Life

2010-11-12T13:08:00.000-05:00

As a child, I benefitted from our board of education’s “enrichment” program. I got to leave class to do fun activities once a week, and spend a day with kids from all over the county once a month. We did science projects and word puzzles. I remember visiting the weather station in Wiarton once. We made friends and had crushes on all the “exotic” kids who were from some small town other than the one in which we’d grown up. But I spent most of my time in my own class with the kids who lived on my block, who were in my Sunday School class, who were born down the hall from me at the same hospital.

And I am very grateful that I had the opportunities I did through Trail (as our program was called). But I am also very grateful that I did spend most of my time in my “normal” class. I think that growing up with people with different interests and abilities is important. As I’ve continued my education, my direct circle of friends and acquaintances has become more and more educationally (and socio-economically) homogenous. What would I have gained if that streaming had started when I was 8?

All of this is one of the many reasons why I was so annoyed with the following paragraph in a Globe and Mail article about “gifted” programs for children: “Calgary parent Ralamy Kneeshaw didn’t want to wait until Grade 4, so she worked to get her son enrolled at Westmount in Grade 3. “They don’t become gifted at Grade 4,” she says. Her son was enjoying some extra attention at his old school in a “pull-out” program once a week, but it wasn’t enough. “He was only gifted for an hour a week. He loved that. But then he had to go back to regular everyday life.””

This parent has a completely skewed vision of what it means to be “gifted”. Her child is “gifted” all the time. Whatever intellectual capabilities have gotten him labelled as such exist no matter what kind of classroom setting he’s in. It’s the preferential treatment that he only gets once a week. And maybe that’s ok. A lot of life, even for those of us blessed with a superior intellect at the age of 8, as this child apparently is, is “regular everyday life”. I can hardly imagine that this parent is helping her son to be anything other than dissatisfied with it, if she expects his talents to be developed and catered to every minute of every day. A child who is raised to believe he’s too good for regular everyday life is not likely to turn out to be the kind of person we will want leading our next generation – an aspiration perhaps worthy for overly-involved parents of gifted kids?

The Shameless Self-Promotion Edition

2010-10-20T20:22:00.003-05:00

For the past several months, I have been volunteering as a coordinator for the One World Film Festival. It's been a challenge - it's a lot to do in my spare time, and I've frequently felt out of my element. More than once, it looked like the festival might not happen, but now it's only two weeks away, and we have a line-up of amazing films. And, one of our amazing volunteers has made this amazing video to promote it!

The video makes me excited about this event that has consumed so much of my summer and fall. And to all of my 8 faithful readers ... help to make OWFF a success - come watch fabulous documentaries at the Library and Archives, November 5-7, and tell 8 of your friends ....

Gender Studies, Classics, and Who we Are

2010-09-20T16:43:00.002-05:00

Leah MacLaren wrote a piece last week encouraging undergraduates to steer clear of gender studies, and to stick to the classics. Her argument (I think) is that, in the end, women’s studies (or the new studies of masculinity) are facile, while classical literature and philosophy, which just happens to be mainly by men, contains real revelations about humanity that these theories can’t even come close to elucidating.

Now, I’ll agree with Leah that Shakespeare knew a thing or two about human nature and that we don’t necessarily do students of literature any favours by inserting random female writer here just to make sure we have a woman’s voice in our Elizabethan literature class, if the woman in question couldn’t really write (I once took a class entitled literature and social change, which ended up being exclusively on suffragist literature …. while it would have made a fascinating unit in a larger class, there really weren’t enough suffragists who could write well to, in my opinion, warrant an entire class to their work – I had been hoping for Voltaire, Swift, Martin Luther King Junior’s speech, and maybe some Bob Dylan.)

Gender, whether you believe it’s biologically determined or socially constructed, effectively divides the world’s population into two halves (yes, I know that I am ignoring middle-sex, transgender, gender-queer …. but that’s outside of the scope of what I’m trying to say, so work with me …) and which half you fit into has such a profound effect of your life, no matter what culture you live in, that I can’t agree with Leah that the study of gender is facile. Maybe some of the theories that emerged in the early days of the second wave of feminism are, but all the more reason for a continued academic dialogue on the topic, an antithesis to these early theses from which new understandings of how the gender assigned to us affects the choices we have and, ultimately, the quality of the lives we live.

liberal guilt

2010-09-20T16:40:00.003-05:00

It’s always strange to return to the blog after a bit of a hiatus – I feel like my first post back has to be somehow momentous, but I don’t always have momentous thoughts …. so it can delay the post even further. This is not a momentous post, but I’m getting back on the horse.

One of the many things I’ve been doing while not blogging for the past few months is organizing the One World Film Festival . This means I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries about people from all over the world. For a fundraiser for the festival last week, we showed Remnants of a War, a movie about de-miners who are working to clear up cluster bombs in South Lebanon. Most of these people are locals who go every day out into the fields and orchards of their homeland to find and remove bombs. I’ve also been watching films about Afghani-Canadians who broadcast a radio station to Kandahar from Ontario and American honey farmers who are trying to deal with colony collapse syndrome (among others).

And seriously, the world is so much bigger than my little corner of Ottawa, and there are so many problems that are so much bigger than whether I have a functional iPod for when I work out or time to wax my legs. And I know that, by watching the films and reading the books, I am aware these problems exist, and I can put faces to them, and that’s something. But even though I watch the films and read the books, I still put the vast majority of my energy into things that, in the end, will really only serve to make my life more pleasant. But how do I get beyond that, and how do I get beyond knowing what’s going out there, but actually doing something about it, rather than just wallowing in liberal guilt?

histories and apologies

2010-06-17T17:00:00.001-05:00

In the news this week, the PM of the United Kingdom has given an unqualified apology for Bloody Sunday. I’ve also been reading about apologies for civilian massacres in Guatemala during the civil war. Both stories talk about how much it meant for the survivors to have the government stand up and say that what happened was wrong, and that the victims were innocent.

These stories caught my attention because we were talking about apologies for past wrongs at our Jean Vanier talk the other day. Jean Vanier spoke in his lecture about forgiveness: he said that to forgive a group, you had to start with an individual, so that you had a real human to deal with, instead of just considering the whole group as a faceless mass. As an illustration, Vanier talked about a young black woman who had hated all whites for all the oppression they had caused, and continue to cause, until she made a white friend in high school and realized that that individual, at least, was a person just like her.

And, while I hesitate to weigh in at all, from my position of privilege, I couldn’t help but wonder – while there are many things that we privileged whites have to own up to and apologize for here and now, is it fair, or productive, to hold me responsible for the abuses of generations past? Is there a statute of limitations on apologies, or is it better late than never, even if 200 years have passed? Our histories are important, especially in a multi-cultural experiment like Canada, and I don’t doubt that we have to name our mistakes, and accept them as part of our communal story, but how do we strike the balance so that we can do that, without forever looking back?

where we live and how we live

2010-06-17T16:59:00.000-05:00

I haven’t been writing much over the past few months. So, what have I been doing? Well, among other things, buying a house and going to Spain ….

PJ and I got talking at Easter about the fact that it might be time to move. We like our condo, but we’d like a bit more space, and a yard so we can have a garden. So, the search began, and we finally found the perfect place – it’s a middle of 3 row-houses in Chinatown with a little space out back to do some planting and put up a clothesline, a 3rd bedroom, so we can separate our office/sewing room from the guest room, and a basement for storage.

The whole process was, of course, fraught with anxiety. Should we be buying a bigger place? Paying more? Giving up location for yard? Giving up yard for location? The bank would have given us a lot more money if we’d wanted it, and the house inspector definitely found a few flaws in the 100-year-old property that we’ve chosen. So, even though we’re excited, there’s been an undercurrent of questioning whether we made the right decision.

But then, we spent a week in Spain. The trip was a total reality check re. the North American expectations around housing. In Spanish cities, most people, whether they own or rent, live in apartments. And in a city like Barcelona, which has been inhabited since the Roman empire, 100-year-old properties are just like new! Seeing how the Spanish live has reinforced the reasons that we chose our new place, shared drainage aside: we’re going to be able to store some things, but we’ll have to continue to be smart about what we accumulate; we’re going to be right downtown in a mixed neighbourhood close to work and friends; and we’re going to be able to entertain people, without being lost in our rooms when it’s just the two of us at home.

Becoming Human

2010-05-22T16:08:00.005-05:00

For the last 2 Mondays, I've met with a few friends to listen to audio recordings of Jean Vanier's 1998 Massey Lecture "On Becoming Human" . The thesis (from what I've heard so far, we're not done the series yet ...) is that we all need to be in deep community to really experience life the way it's meant to be. That we need to be loved for our individuality. At Ecclesiax, we've always talked about community - about how the idea of the church is to be really, caringly, involved in each others' lives. But I don't think we've ever really done it. And I don't know if we can - can you actually bring together a random assortment of people and really create a family? Most communities, as Vanier says, are based on commonalities or, more specifically, on common strengths. This is equally true of churches - but then how do you create a church that is actually inclusive of, and encourages, difference, when it's the common ties that bind? And it doesn't have to be church - whatever groups you are in, how do you make them a "community"? To be honest, there's people that I don't want to be in community with, people whose company I don't enjoy. It's easy to say that I should still be nice to them and treat them with dignity and respect, but Vanier's call is to enter into relationship with them. Blech. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if anyone can. I feel like I'm I long way from becoming human.

Helping those who help themselves

2010-03-20T07:16:00.000-05:00

Last week, I attended a workshop on security sector reform (known as SSR in the biz – and I am talking about working with developing countries to reform their police and justice systems, etc, rather than financial markets ….). Of course, one of the big issues in undertaking this kind of exercise is local engagement – we shouldn’t just be importing “our” system into someone else’s context, so the idea is that the locals should be the ones driving the process. This seems like a no-brainer in a supposedly post-colonial world, and echoes some of what I have recently read about the need to integrate traditional justice in Afghanistan.

But, it gets tricky in practice. First of all – which locals are we engaging? The government and the people could have very different interests. In a simulation that we did as part of the workshop, the representative for civil society was pushing for transitional justice, while everyone in the government, who would be implicated by any kind of truth-telling process, were resisting. Or, there may be a rural/ urban split in which a few elites want one thing, and everyone else wants something else. Traditional justice, while widely-used, could be based on a gender or class hierarchy that doesn’t respect human rights. Can we, as a country that supports universal equality, help to develop a system somewhere else that undermines it?

Next, as well as our responsibility to support local direction, we also have a responsibility to spend our money well. In the simulation, the Minister of Justice for the host country was pushing for assistance to build more courthouses. I am not convinced that, as a starting point, that is the best way to improve access to justice. But I was supposed to be supporting local ownership. It was hard not to feel like an imperial baddie when I was saying that perhaps our resources would go farther doing something less focused on physical plant, and more on human capacity.

We didn’t come out of the workshop with answers to any of these questions, but we at least came out being aware that they have to be asked. Development is hard, and there is never going to be a one-size fits all solution. We need to be smart about what kind of help we offer (I recently heard about an initiative to send wheelchairs to Afghanistan – very thoughtful, but not particularly practical in a country with a serious shortage of pavement ….), but we can’t give up either.

Biographia

2010-02-03T22:05:00.001-05:00

My parents’ copy of Sisters in the Wilderness (the biography of early Canadian authors Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill) has been on my bookshelf for around 7 years now. It made it onto the back layer of the top shelf at some point, so it didn’t exactly leap out when I’d go looking for something to read, until a recent re-org brought all my unread books to one place, at eye-level. And, to be honest, I was expecting it to be a bit dull – something that I kind of felt like I should read as a good female Canadian English major, but not something that I was really going to be dying to pick up.

But, after my most recent dose of Twilight, I was ready for something a bit weightier, so I decided to give it a go: and it’s been incredibly interesting. The story of these two sisters touches on everything from survival as pioneer homesteaders, to the challenges facing female authors, to old-world prejudices against uncouth colonials, to the influence of the Orange Order, all the way to spiritualism and table-rapping. And it’s reminded me that good biography is history through the lens of a life. And really, that’s what history is. It isn’t dates or artefacts – it’s the lives of people who, like ourselves, have fractured identities, and make choices based on circumstance and necessity, but nevertheless build things up and tear things down, and in doing so lay the foundation for the world as we know it.

being an artist

2010-02-03T22:04:00.001-05:00

Ecclesiax is organizing an art auction to raise money for relief in Haiti (Evening of February 26, for anyone in O-town who’s interested in attending), and I am donating some photography. I think this is a great initiative, but it’s also weird to call myself a visual artist and try to sell my art. As I’ve explained in previous posts, I love taking pictures, because it makes me see what’s around me. And, yes, I like it when my shots work out.

But this is something different. This is me standing up and saying “I take good enough pictures that someone who doesn’t even know me should want to put them on the wall.” And that’s a vulnerable experience – because if nobody does want my photos, it will be hard not to take it personally. I’ve been through this with singing, acting and writing over the years (even this blog carries the same anxieties of “I am assuming I have something worth saying …. Maybe I don’t”): it’s scary to stand up and own my talents, because then they are open to being refuted.

It’s like I am trying to cross some kind of line from amateur to “real” artist. And I know that that’s not the point: the fact that taking pictures makes me see the world through more fine-tuned eyes is reason enough to keep taking pictures, even if nobody wants to buy what I offer to the auction. But it’s still scary to put it out there, to let perfect strangers decide whether the way I have captured what I see is actually interesting or not …

A little education is a dangerous thing

2010-01-16T10:03:00.005-05:00

At work, I've been reading about women and development, and particularly about women's experiences in Jamaica. At home, I recently finished Miriam's Song by Mark Mathabane, the story of the author's sister growing up in South Africa during apartheid. I noticed a theme in all of my reading: the importance of education. In both Jamaica and South Africa, young girls go to school despite poverty and sexual and physical insecurity. Around the world, studies that show that in homes where women manage the household income, the children eat better. And it's easier to be in charge, and to provide for your family when you have an education. So, I was planning, at the end of last week, to sit down and write a blog post about the importance of education in general, and educating girls in specific.

But before I got a chance to write that post, I came across an article talking about how Americans have turned the term the "educated class" into a dirty word. Apparently, "educated" people are out of touch with "real" people. And this rhetoric proves that a little education is, indeed, a dangerous thing. Nelson Mandela spent decades in prison, but continued to study throughout, because he knew that his country would need educated people to lead it when the liberation struggle was over. Teaching slaves to read in the American South was forbidden, because the more educated they were, the harder they would be to control. This was the same idea behind the inferior "Bantu Education" that Miriam and Mark Mathabane were subject to in South Africa. Across time, and around the world, people, quite literally, have been willing to die for the right to learn.

But in the United States, where lower education is universal, anyone who continues on to higher learning (I am assuming the "educated class" refers to university-educated) is vilified. And this position shows a total lack of awareness of how privileged Americans are to have education. It's like voter's apathy - only a society that is as sure of its democracy as ours here in Canada, or the U.S., could have the kind of low turn-outs at the polls that we have. Saying that the problem with people that you don't agree with is that they're "educated" doesn't only miss the fact that "education" makes a person more able to think critically and expand her worldview, but it undermines, and shows a total lack of awareness for, the struggles of people around the world to improve their lives through education.

I see hope

2009-12-15T22:23:00.000-05:00

As my faith has changed over the last few years, I’ve faced the challenge of trying to determine what Christmas means to me. I believe there is power in secular aspects of the holiday (that haven’t been completely poisoned by mass consumerism) – it’s a dark, cold time of year in this part of the world, and there’s value in lighting lights, cooking special foods, and taking the time to be with family and friends. But, as long as I call myself a Christian, I feel like my Solstice celebrations should not completely ignore the fact that this is one of the biggest holidays of the Christian calendar.

But, when actually seeking to understand the meaning of the holiday, what’s a non-Biblical-literalist atonement-questioning liberal girl to do? My attempt at finding an answer: take a page from the book of Borg, and read the Christmas story for its metaphorical truth. Despite my previous life as a student of English literature, I like what Borg said about seeing metaphorical truth in the Bible, but I haven’t actually put it into practice very often. But, staying home from Church this past Sunday, and spurred on by the feeling that the third Sunday of Advent shouldn’t just be spent with a cup of tea and a novel, I opened up the gospels and read the accounts of the Christmas story in Matthew and Luke.

First stop was Luke. For those of you playing along at home who (like me) don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Bible, Luke is the guy who brings us Mary’s hymn and the shepherds. And I noticed a link between these two images: in Mary’s hymn, she talks about the proud being humbled while the poor are raised up. And then, with the story about the shepherds, we see this put into action: God’s own messengers appearing to farm labourers. If there’s a central metaphor in Luke’s Christmas story, it points towards a social order that undermines the usual hierarchies, and it suggests that our hope can be found in the most unexpected of places. After the angels chose the shepherds as the unlikely welcome party for the new king, they sent them off to visit a baby in a barn: hardly a symbol of power.

Next: Matthew. Matthew gives us the Magi’s journey and Herod’s schemes. There are a lot of dreams helping people to make the right decision and, of course, the star. The repeated refrain is that everything that happened took place to fulfill the prophecies. On one level, it feels a bit like a murder mystery that brings the clues together all too neatly at the end. But on the other hand, it contextualizes our hero: the message is that Jesus didn’t come out of nowhere; that God always has a plan and that; in God’s own time, that plan will get carried out. Like the story from Luke that big things that can come from a baby in a barn, this, too, is a message of hope.

I’ve been finding myself getting depressed by the news recently. It seems like when people aren’t blowing each other up, they’re screwing each other over or, at the very least, taking pot shots for a cheap laugh. So this year, I am going to try to find the hope and the promise in the Christmas stories, and try to have them affect the way I look at, and interact with, the world. After all, only one more week and the days start getting longer again.

it doesn't even make sense ...

2009-11-30T18:33:00.002-05:00

I know that people are frightened of “the other”, and I know that, since at least September 11, 2001, primary alien number one for the west has been Islam. But I am still astounded by the racism (or religionism, as the case may be …) that is directed towards Muslims by people in North America and Europe.

Last week, I read an article about a Michigan town that has put in a bid to have the Guantanamo detainees housed in their empty jail. The fact that this plan to save the town from economic ruin is controversial is not, in and of itself, surprising. There’s always going to be NIMBYism associated with prisons. What is surprising, though, is some of the rhetoric coming from the townspeople who oppose the plan. Regarding the jail’s former inmates – murderers and rapists – one of the locals is quoted as saying: “well at least they're human, they're just like you and I, American citizens.” In other words, what dehumanizes terrorists and “enemy combatants” is not their acts of violence, but their foreignness.

Next on this week’s anti-Islam hit-list is the recent Swiss referendum to ban minarets on mosques. What we’re talking about here is an architectural feature that identifies mosques as, well, mosques. According to my trusty sources at wikipedia, the minaret is used for the call to prayer. But that is not the case in Switzerland, so what we’re really talking about is a physical identification of a building as a mosque. The ban is weird for several reasons: there were only 4 mosques in Switzerland; and there apparently aren’t problems with Islamic militancy there. The purported reason behind the ban is pure fear-mongering: the argument is that the minaret is “the thin of the wedge” of allowing Islam to take a foothold in Switzerland, and will lead to covered women, sharia law, etc etc. And, despite the strong opposition to the ban by many Swiss leaders, the public bought it – voting 57% in favour of the ban.

One of the things that strikes me about both of these reactions to the stranger in our midst is that they are irrational. Justifying that some anti-social killers are “human” because they come from the same place as you, while others aren’t, because they don’t, doesn’t make any sense. Neither does restricting the practice of a religious freedom that is not causing anyone harm. And so the question is, why? Is it because people need a “them” so there can be an “us”? Is it because the thought of seeking commonalities, rather than focusing on differences, is somehow a threat to our own identities? Or maybe it’s just because these people don’t know any Muslims, and it’s easy to dehumanize when you are considering a concept, rather than actual people. Whatever the cause, this conflict between civilizations, or whatever it is, is never going to end, as long as people on both sides react to “them” with visceral fear, rather than reason.

seeing with different eyes

2009-11-29T22:48:00.008-05:00

Today, I knew I would have to walk home from church, so I brought along my little pocket camera, because I often find myself wishing I had my camera when I am on a walk. And it wasn't long before I had my first photographable subject:

And once the camera was in my hand, I started seeing everything I passed with different eyes. And I realized that that's one of the things I love about photography - it makes me engage in my surroundings, and see the art in the mundane. I used to consider myself an artist, but I don't act, or sing, or any of the things that I used to do. But walking down the street with a little camera on a grey november day made me realize that I can still be an artist: I just have to think like one.

The World's Greatest!

2009-11-03T20:09:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, it was the world’s biggest bowl of taboulleh – made by a Lebanese chef who wanted to wrest the title back from the Turks. And today, it’s the biggest meatball – because the record rightly belongs to the east coast of the U.S., and those Mexican usurpers who stole the title last August have to understand that nobody messes with the birthright of the Italian-American.

Now, I understand national pride associated with traditional foods, and I understand the appeal of seeking world records (while I don’t feel the personal drive, I can intellectually see the appeal behind wanting to be the first or the fastest). But I don’t understand the drive that causes people to combine these two desires (I also don’t understand the need to make the longest paper-clip chain: a record captured by students at Wilfrid Laurier shortly before I attended: my residence don had participated, and told us how cool it was. I was sceptical …). I guess there’s a certain kitschy appeal, but still . . .

The desire to achieve world records of no consequence seems to come from the same place that makes people want to be on reality television: a wish to be special without necessarily having to perfect a skill or craft of any kind. And it’s kind of sad, because fame doesn’t make people special . . . we are all special, intrinsically. I have to admit that I still dream of writing the Great Canadian Novel and/or becoming Secretary-General of the U.N., and it’s partly because I want to be important. But since I will likely not become Margaret Atwood and Kofi Annan’s love child at any point in the near future, I choose to put my energies into small things that can make a difference, instead of grandiose gestures that are ultimately empty.

in the image ...

2009-10-21T20:28:00.001-05:00

Back in the 90s, the United Church issued its new hymn book, Voices United. As with any change, there was bound to be controversy and resistance, but the most controversial issue with this publication was the use of gender-inclusive language: any reference to “mankind” etc. or to God, were changed to be gender-neutral. And, I have to admit that, at the time, I was one of the people who were against the change. I thought that it was an example of excessive political correctness, and was silly to change well-known songs that were written in a pre-feminist era – I figured I was advanced enough to be able to sing about mankind and know that it included me; and God is bigger than our gender constructs, so if we want to use the masculine pronoun, it’s just about convenience and doesn’t reveal any truth about the nature of God.

I’ve been rethinking this issue recently. I’m reading “All We’re Meant to Be” right now, a book of feminist theology that was written originally in the 1960s, and then updated in the ‘80s. The authors explain that they initially didn’t think that inclusive language was important, but have moved towards it, and changed their references to God throughout the second edition of the book to use non-gendered language. Their argument is that our language shapes the way we think, so that if we refer to God as male, even if it’s just for convenience’s sake, we think in those terms, and we are therefore less likely to truly embrace the fact that women are equally made in God’s image.

So I’ve been thinking about how we talk about God can affect how we view God, and I am going to try an experiment – I am trying to only refer to God in gender-inclusive language, and see if it does change my perception. This is tricky – even in writing this, I have had to stop myself from typing “him” and “he” whenever a pronoun would usually be inserted. I generally don’t think of God as much of a “person” which, on the one hand, means that it might not make much of a difference, but on the other hand is all the more reason to move away from personal pronouns.

Going forward, I am not too worried about the other element of gender-inclusive language: it is generally accepted (at least in the circles I move in) that it’s “humanity”, and not “mankind”. But I still am not sure what I think about changing per-feminist texts to insert inclusive language. On the one hand, how can we move to gender equality in the church if we continue to tell women “oh don’t worry, when it says ‘man’, it really means you too . . .”, but then, this is art that was created in a certain context, and I am a bit uncomfortable with changing art to make it meet our sensibilities (à la fig leaf on David) …. So I don’t know where I will fall on that debate, but (despite reservations about the musical difficulty of a number of the songs . . . a topic for another rant . . .) I definitely now appreciate what the writers of Voices United were trying to do, and why it is important.

Song and Dance

2009-10-21T17:42:00.000-05:00

I saw the Drowsy Chaperone last night, and it was fabulous. Now, when I was young, I loved the big Broadway hit musicals – I had a scrapbook of all of the different ads that would come out in the Toronto Star for the Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables. I eagerly awaited every new Andrew Lloyd Webber production. But things went sour sometime around Sunset Boulevard. Mom and I went to see it, and it was just dull. The next night, we saw a production of Aristophanes’ Clouds in a simple black box theatre for a fraction of the price, and laughed until we cried.

My estrangement with the big musical was deepened by the advent of the Disney Musical and, despite the fact that Mamma Mia was hilarious (hee hee, flipper dance = genius), the “take a bunch of songs from a famous band and make a musical out of it” musical. I am under no delusions that musical theatre was ever made for purely artistic reasons, but I do feel like there’s been a certain increase in the crassness of the commercialization of musicals in recent history: the model is to take something that already exists (music, movie, toy), get Oprah to endorse it, charge $100/ticket, and call it theatre. I even saw a poster for a Legally Blonde musical last time I was in NYC, for goodness sake! (And, yes, I know I am a snob . . . an unfortunate fact that led to me being denied the joys of Buffy the Vampire Slayer until 12 years after it debuted . . . but that’s another story.)

I’d like a bit of pure intentions with my glitz . . . which brings me back to the Drowsy Chaperone. I was excited about seeing it, because of the story of the show’s background: it started as a skit, was expanded to a fringe show, and kept on growing until it made its way to Broadway, and 5 Tony nominations. In other words, its buzz wasn’t artificially created by some kind of entertainment juggernaut – it earned it.

It is not a particularly deep play. It’s a spoof of 1920s musicals, narrated by “the Man in the Chair,” a character who comments on the history of the actors that are supposed to be playing each role, and the various contrived twists and turns of the plots. But, it skewers the genre perfectly, while being full of the entertaining song-and-dance numbers that make it so great. And, through the Man in the Chair, there’s even a theme about our attachment to theatre, and our wish to escape through entertainment.

We don’t need media personalities telling us what to watch on the stage – that’s what we have TV for. Please, if you want to watch Legally Blonde, spend $5 to rent the movie. If you want to go see a musical, go to see something that was designed first and foremost to entertain you, rather than to make money for its producers.

bad things happen . . .

2009-09-16T09:33:00.001-05:00

There was a short piece on the radio this morning about white collar crime. They interviewed a woman who had been defrauded, and (particularly after just learning that the latest ponzi scheme perpetrator was someone from my hometown) I really felt bad for her. She obviously felt betrayed and wounded by a person who she’d trusted. But then she said something that made me pause – she said “I always told my kids that if you are a good person, good things will happen to you, and if you’re a bad person, bad things will happen to you, but that’s not the case here.”

And I thought . . . wait a minute, why would you ever tell your children that? Because that was never the deal. Whatever justice may mean on a human or more divine scale, history has not given us any indication that good things happen to good people, and vice versa. Jesus got crucified, Martin Luther King Jr. got shot, and Nelson Mandela spent an awfully long time in prison. Kanye West is a superstar with legions of fans.

It seems to me that having a worldview based on good and bad being doled out on a quid pro quo basis is dangerous. Because what happens when something bad happens to you? There are two possibilities: either a) something bad has happened to you because you are actually a bad person; or b) your worldview was wrong, and even though you are a good person, this will not protect you from bad things happening. Either way, why bother continuing to do good?

So, I don’t know what you should tell your children (maybe I should add moral philosophy to my fun fall reading list, along with feminist theology and development theory ... ), but it seems that if you build your moral framework around the idea that good things happen to good people, you’re going to be ill-equipped to deal with the tragedies and betrayals that are part of life.

election malaise

2009-09-14T10:01:00.001-05:00

I try to care about politics – we’re talking about the leadership of my country, after all. I watch the leaders’ debate before every election, and try to be informed of every party’s platform and vote based on what they are promoting, rather than on a knee-jerk reaction based on general party ideology.

But, as the Globe and Mail and the CBC start to talk election, my gut reaction is “I’m so bored!” I am so tired of elections and, just like the one at this time last year, I can’t see that this one is necessary. The polls suggest we are still in a conservative-minority holding pattern, and neither the Conservatives nor the Liberals are talking about any big ideas that would change business as usual.

When this election gets called, I will see what they each have to say, and I will go and vote, because I believe that it’s part of my responsibility as a citizen in a democratic country. But I’m not happy about it.

look up

2009-09-10T11:17:00.001-05:00

The annual Gatineau hot air balloon festival took place over the Labour Day weekend. What this means is that, if you happened to be biking to foreign affairs at about 7:15 each morning, there were dozens of silent splashes of colour drifting by or bobbing in and out of view between the buildings, depending on which way the wind is blowing.

Hot air balloons are magical – they sneak up on you from behind the trees and make you look up. I’ve been wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase every day, working long hours (I was biking to the office at 7:15 am every day during the Labour Day weekend . . .) and I haven’t had much time to reflect on anything beyond my work. My morning ride along the river, against a backdrop of splashes of colour behind the half-finished apartment buildings, has kept me looking up. And looking up makes me breathe a bit deeper, and keeps me grounded in a world that is bigger than the four corners of the daily grind.

revenue and relevance

2009-08-17T12:59:00.000-05:00

I have passed by a few Gatineau busses recently that have a very interesting poster on their side. No, it’s not the “God probably doesn’t exist so stop worrying and enjoy your life” ad that has caused such a stir (I know that Ottawa has refused to run those ads on OCTranspo – I don’t know if STO was ever approached with a French version). What’s caught my attention is an ad from the Catholic diocese of the Outaouais, which says “Money doesn’t fall from the sky: your Church needs you.”

Maybe Catholicism is sufficiently different from Protestantism that this is an effective strategy, but these ads really surprised me: from my experience, it can be a big enough challenge to get people who actually attend a church to support it financially – and this campaign appears to be aimed at those members of the Catholic church who aren’t actually there on Sunday morning. So, my first thought was that this was basically an ineffective campaign, and unlikely to pay off in more returns than it will cost to run the ads. But, as I said, I’m not Catholic – so maybe there are enough people who have a cultural/historical connection to the church that they will contribute, even if they don’t attend regularly.

But it also makes me wonder if they’re missing the point – the church shouldn’t exist just to self-perpetuate . . . it is only of value if it is serving the spiritual needs of a community. The shrinking church attendance in the past two generations suggests that churches are not meeting the needs of the community. And the fact that the diocese is running these ads suggests that there are not enough people involved in the community who are meeting the financial needs of the church. So, maybe the church needs to shut some buildings down and let go of the expensive bricks and mortar that are probably a large portion of its operating budget. Or maybe it needs to think about reaching out to whoever the target audience of the ads are, and finding out why they aren’t coming to the church (and subsequently not giving), rather than guilting them into paying a system that they appear to not be getting anything out of. I guess what I’m saying that these ads seem to address the symptom of a lack of revenue, rather than the root cause: the lack of relevance of the Church in today’s society.

consumed

2009-07-30T15:50:00.001-05:00

While in Vancouver, we went to the flea market – most notable among the piles of over-priced plastic crap was the sign indicating that I was looking at “vintage” Star Wars figures . . . from 1995. Earlier this week, we wandered into a furniture store that was having a clearance “event.” Facial soap followed by cream is a “system.” It seems like every purchase has to be an experience . . . . and we drive from big-box store to big-box store, looking for . . . what? Belonging? Excitement? Glamour? Whatever it is, you probably can’t buy it at Canadian Tire and put it together with an allen key.

consume: [kuh n-soom] –verb (used with object) 1. to destroy or expend by use; use up.

a hollow victory

2009-07-28T11:04:00.002-05:00

For those of you who have not had the pleasure of visiting the left coast, the jewel of Vancouver is Stanley Park, an amazing park on the edge of downtown with beaches, big forests, and a great aquarium, among other things. Since the 1880s, one of the attractions has been the hollow tree – a massive hollowed out stump, so big that you could back your Model T into it for a photo op. A few years ago, though, a big storm took out several of the trees in the park, and the hollow tree has been leaning at a dangerous angle ever since. The Park board decided that it was at danger of falling on tourists, and approved its removal. It’s sad, but that’s nature, and an inevitable part of our interaction with nature. We build roads so that we can easily access the hollow tree, the root structure is weakened as the soil is changed, and eventually the tree is at risk of falling onto the very road we built so that we could get to it – a victim of its own stardom. And so the landscape changes, as landscapes do, both because of and despite our interaction with them.

But wait. Enter the Stanley Park Hollow Tree Conservation Society. Wanting to ensure that “future generations of Vancouver residents and visitors alike [can] enjoy [the tree] with the same sense of wonderment, awe, and humbling perspective” as previous generations, the society has raised millions of dollars to brace the hollow tree. Nature will not have its way, so that we can continue to be awed by . . . the power of nature. I can understand the urge to preserve the tree – it’s an icon in the Vancouver landscape. However, the big old stump being propped up by metal poles is one of the saddest things I have ever seen. It stands not as a testament to the wonder of nature, but to our misguided attempts to control and tame nature to suit our own ends.

manufactured emotion

2009-06-30T09:52:00.002-05:00

My generation, and the ones that follow even more so, have been numbed by media bombardment. We are constantly fed images of “happenings” around the world, and we desperately want to be part of one. The problem, though, is that half of the events we have the opportunity to participate in have been designed as events, so that someone somewhere else can see the images and wish they were there, being part of the action. The whole point of Woodstock was that it was spontaneous. Woodstock II was a manufactured simulacrum of the original, designed to sell t-shirts and CDs. None of this analysis is new, but I’ve been thinking about it in light of Michael Jackson’s death and the separation of Jon and Kate Gosselin.

The immediate reaction of so many people to MJ’s death seemed to be a sense of personal grief and loss, and I don’t get it. Yes, he was a very talented singer and dancer. And his life and death were tragic. But he was, from the age of 5, a product of our celebrity-obsessed culture. In some ways, his entire life was manufactured as a “happening”, and it seems like his death will just be one more.

Likewise, the Gosselins, who I had never heard of before their marital troubles landed their faces in the super-market aisle, have turned their entire lives into a media event. Lo and behold – raising 8 children under a constant spotlight is stressful, and they recently announced their divorce on the show. What astounded me was their position (since shut down by the network) that the show would go on – the public wants to see their children grow up, and the public must get what it wants.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that we dull our real senses when we let the media dictate what we should care about – what we should celebrate, who we should mourn. People are crying for the loss of a musician who hasn’t put out a new album in a decade or longer. Meanwhile, a couple whose celebrity has destroyed their marriage are continuing to seek the limelight – it’s like their entire lives are Woodstock II – a shiny media event staged for the fans at home. And we’re soaking it all up, while real people are unsung musical geniuses, real children are growing up, real friends are experiencing the joys and tragedies of marriages good and bad, and the backyard barbecue of the century may be just a few phone calls away. But we miss it, because it doesn’t have the shiny gloss of celebrity. But this is the stuff of life, and it’s happening right under our noses.

where I've been

2009-06-25T09:14:00.000-05:00

I haven’t written much in the past few months – a realization that is usually kind of depressing, since I write here to organize my thoughts, and nothing to write suggests no thoughts worth organizing. It’s true that I have been somewhat free of the pursuits that usually lead to blog posts – I have been reading only fiction, I haven’t been to church very much, and I’ve been working a lot.

I have managed to squeeze in a good amount of time with family and friends, though. And it’s been good. I’ve learned from my six-year-old nephew what happened to the dinosaurs (they all froze and their arms and legs fell off). I’ve had dinner with friends of friends and family of family when I was a visitor in their home town. I celebrated my Grandma’s 80th birthday with my whole family, and she was pleased, even though she’d never admit it. I went winery-hopping on the first real day of summer with some dear girl friends, and then headed back to the boys at the cottage to stack rocks on the beach with the baby and eat a delicious dinner.

And so I’ve been thinking about people. I’m not advocating ignorance of world events, or only caring about what happens in our own home town, but maybe sharing a glass of wine on the deck is true wisdom, because the people you share it with are really what it’s all about.

Money Talks

2009-06-11T13:32:00.002-05:00

Back a month or 2 ago, Miss California was all over the news – she was under fire for: 1) stating (when asked by a pageant judge) that she was not supportive of gay marriage; and 2) having posed in sexy photos at some point in her past.

On the first topic – while I don’t agree with her position, she was asked a direct question and gave an honest answer. For Perez Hilton (who asked the question) to come back and call her a stupid cow is problematic on a number of levels: aside from the disingenuity of attacking her for bringing her personal politics into a beauty show when she was succinctly answering his question, I don’t think that dismissing someone with whom you disagree as a stupid cow is exactly the best way to foster constructive dialogue.

And, on the second topic: Swimsuit competition good. Underwear modelling shots bad. WTF? Enough said.

So, Donald Trump, who apparently owns the whole Ms. USA shebang was called upon to decide if Miss Cali should be dismissed for her missteps. The answer was no. However, today, that ruling from on high has been reversed. Apparently she’s been skipping out on appearances she is obliged to make under her pageant queen contract, while at the same time doing unapproved stints in her new role as the poster child for traditional marriage. So, due to breach of contract, the crown is being passed onto the runner-up. I guess that, while I will never understand the blind curves and contradictions of popular American morality, I can rest assured that there are constants – money talks, and at the end of the day, a contract is a contract.

living in the moment

2009-04-30T09:53:00.002-05:00

It seems like I am in the middle of some kind of Zen perfect storm, where all indicators point towards my need to focus on living in the moment. Without going looking for it, it’s been a major theme in a few of the books I have read recently, including In Praise of Slow , Eat Pray Love , and Cold Tangerines . PJ’s been learning about being present in his aikido practice and, generally, I’m just realizing that always striving, striving, leads to nowhere by discontent (see my post from a few months ago on over-achieving).

So, I am trying to slow down and to be present. To realize that I am here right now, and don’t need to always be moving towards some perfect future when I will be the person I want to be. My sporadic attempt at meditation are part of that. Watching my plants grow has been good too – they come up when they’re ready, no matter what the seed chart says.

It’s also about realizing that I am not off on some grand adventure right now, but here in Ottawa, and there are plenty of things going on here. I am trying to get out and do things around town a bit more, instead of always going home and spending the evening reading or watching DVDs. Even when I am home, I am trying to do more “active” pursuits. Cooking something new and making dinner an event. Working on some crafts. Anything that engages my brain or my body, and is good.

I am trying to give myself grace, too, because sometimes I am just tired and need to vegetate. I don’t want my attempts to live in the moment to be another pressure on myself to always be bettering myself, but I don’t want to let the moments slip by, while I’m waiting to start saving the world.

green stuff

2009-04-29T08:45:00.003-05:00

I do not have a lot of experiencing gardening, but this year, Rah asked if I'd like to share in the garden that she is planting for the first time in her back yard. So, under her super-organized instruction, I've been getting ready. We spent a chunk of Saturday digging beds, sifting rocks out of the soil, and counting the prolific earth worms.

More excitingly, I started my seeds a few weeks ago, and I now have a bevvy of shoots in my little window-side garden, waiting to get tough enough to head on outside. Every day, before work and again after, I go and check out my shoots. The peppers were slow-bloomers, and I thought I'd failed completely, but they are now shooting up left right and centre. The zucchini came up just when they were supposed to, and I've already transplanted two of them to larger pots. And, honestly, it's a miracle, how these little seeds turn into little shoots with 2 leaves, and then four, and then more and more until there's food. We'll see how they do when I actually put them in the garden, but at the moment, I am tranfixed with wonder every time I look at my little plants and all of the possibility they hold.

silence

2009-04-15T11:19:00.004-05:00

This weekend, I read Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Part of the book (which chronicles the true adventures of the author while she spends a year trying to find “balance” in her life) takes place in an ashram in India. In the ashram, she spends a lot of time (no surprise) meditating, and she talks in the book about her experience of learning to still her mind. Which has got me thinking – I am not very good at stilling my mind. I don’t just sit and try to listen to God. Even when I am praying, which I don’t do enough, I am always talking. Or else I multi-task – praying while working out or while biking to work or while trying to drift off to sleep. Never just listening. I would probably benefit from sitting in silence. But the thought of trying to add that to my schedule stresses me out. How sad is that?

what's been really bugging me . . .

2009-04-15T08:13:00.007-05:00

I have not been reading the news about the Afghani Shiite Family Law too closely. This is partly because of a challenge in the last issue of Geez that got me thinking about my consumption of the news - it made me question whether I am making the world a better place or myself a better person by being constantly bombarded with everything horrible that is happening all over the world. So, I've heard about it when I had the radio on and seen the headlines, but I haven't delved in.

Even in that limited exposure, though, there have been something about the discourse that has rubbed me the wrong way. I take it as a given that marital rape is bad, and that governments shouldn't legalize it - the fact that this is a "no brainer" for me is one of the reasons why I didn't feel the need to "follow" the story any further. However, what's been sitting poorly with me is the way that the media has covered this issue. Today's Globe and Mail says, in a line that is indicative of what I've been hearing, "The law, passed last month, says a husband can demand sex with his wife every four days unless she is ill or would be harmed by intercourse — a clause that critics say legalizes marital rape."

A clause that CRITICS SAY legalizes marital rape?! I don't know if the media is trying not to be judgemental, but if they do have their facts right, and the law does indeed say "a husband can demand sex every four days", then there is no other side of the story - that's not a controversial interpretation by critics: this clause legalizes rape. Are the Canadian media outlets trying so hard to be culturally relativist and sensitive that they are suggesting that rape might be okay in some contexts? If there was a law that said a man could kill his wife for adultery, would the papers report that "critics say" it legalizes murder? I find the suggestion that there are any shades of grey concerning whether forced marital sex is rape to be offensive to women both in Afghanistan and around the world . . . apparently even in the western media a woman's sexual autonomy is still open for discussion, rather than a given, and that's sad.

post-evangelical

2009-03-20T10:46:00.004-05:00

I recently read “Reading the Bible Again for the First Time” by Marcus Borg, and it was like coming home. Borg reads the Bible in a “historical-metaphorical” way, rather than literally, and manages to find great meaning and power in it without saying that it’s God’s instruction-book for our lives. What to do with the Bible has been one of the major challenges in my faith venture in the last several years – I didn’t take it literally, so I didn’t know how to, as Borg says, use another framework to “take it seriously”. The method that Borg offers makes sense to me, and actually made me feel like the Bible might have something to offer for the first time in a long time.

One of the things I also realized was that Borg often stated that the theological interpretation he was advancing was accepted by most mainline churches, and it made me miss my mainline roots. Ecclesiax is an amazing community, and I can’t imagine going to church anywhere else right now, but ideologically, I feel like the United Church is my home. Which is interesting, because while I’ve always had great affection for the United Church, there was definitely a period in my time when I thought that many of the positions I now long for were dead wrong. And this, coupled with all of this buzz about “Christian hipsters” (see my last post) has made me think about the fact that I truly in a “post-evangelical” space (an interesting realization, since even at my most “Christian”, if you want to call it that, I never really wore the term evangelical completely comfortably).

I am also uncomfortable with the term “post-evangelical”, though, because it suggests that I am at some higher stage of growth that evangelical Christians, and I don’t like saying that. I used to think that I was right and people who thought the way I now do were wrong. My experiences, study, and self-examination have led me to another point of view, but I don’t want to fall into the same trap, and consider that I was initially mistaken, and NOW I am “right”. I know that there are people of the faith who will start praying for my soul when they read these words, but I am becoming more and more comfortable without certainties as time goes on. I don’t know if that’s “growth”, but it’s “change”, and it feels right.

Christian hipsters - el Maggie jumps into the fray

2009-03-18T10:35:00.005-05:00

I recently came across the blog post “are you a Christian hipster” by Brett McCracken, a guy who is apparently writing a book on the concept of Christian cool. I thought that his description would be all about suburban evangelical kids with nice hair and cool cars, so I was quite surprised that he’s actually talking about the “emergent” end of the spectrum – apparently Christian hipsters don’t like contemporary Christian music and do like Henri Nouwen. There are hundreds of responses to the blog post, ranging from “Hey, I’m a Christian hipster – good for me” to “uh, you’re just describing most mainline denominations” to “Christians should never strive to be hip”.

While I think that the author’s idea is to explore the relationship between the church and popular culture, I also found that he kind of missed out on the roots of what he deems the “Christian hipster” movement. I am not completely sure, from his writing, where he’s coming from, but it seems that he is suggesting that Christian hipsters are doing various “cool” and “edgy” things in an attempt to mimic mainstream hipster culture (as embodied in the skinny-jeans-wearing rebels of today) within a Christian context. This, to me, misses the point.

Many of the “hipsters” I know come from an evangelical background, but have not found themselves at home in either the evangelical movement or Christian pop culture. For many people at Ecclesiax, at least, this journey began with a dissatisfaction with the sanitization of the church and the unwillingness to embrace doubt or accept darkness as part of life. From there, it moves into exploring alternative ways that Christian communities have interacted with each other and with God, and claiming what is relevant to the community in question. As such, the practices that seem edgy from an evangelical point of view are often ones that are practiced in mainline churches, or were popular in other periods of history.

So, yes, there are questions to be asked – why are young protestants moving away from the evangelical church and into a, in some ways, more “catholic” mode of worship? How comfortably can Christianity and popular culture co-exist (but this is only worth exploring if both “Christian pop culture” and the interactions of secular pop culture and Church are considered)? The more established churches would do well to consider why the hipsters McCracken is examining are becoming more prevalent, but to consider them as Christians that just want to be cool is selling short what could be a fruitful dialogue between different branches of the faith.

Over-Achievers Anonymous

2009-02-25T10:36:00.001-05:00

I want to foster meaningful relationships, practice my hobbies and develop new ones, weigh ten pounds less than whatever I weigh at any given moment, cook all locally organic food from scratch, read books that will teach me more about the world, and excel at my work. For some reason, I can’t quite pull that off. So, I end up feeling vaguely guilty when I am sitting on the couch eating canned soup for supper.

And it’s not just me – I’ve had this conversation with multiple friends recently – when I summed it up as I have at the beginning of this post, one of my girlfriends said “Get out of my head!” – that’s exactly the way she feels too. So here we are, a bunch of over-educated thirty-somethings paralyzed by the weight of the expectations we put on ourselves. And what we expect out of ourselves isn’t bad. It’s good to want to be creative and to want to care about our footprint on the earth and our physical health, so it’s hard to break out of the pattern.

On the other hand, though, we just can’t achieve everything that we want to. And while I don’t want to make it an excuse for spending every night of my life sitting on the couch eating canned soup, I’ve been trying to give myself grace for the times when I can’t achieve everything – maybe sometimes I need to give up the organic meal or adding another workout into my weekly schedule to spend time with friends, or get a bit of quilting done.

I also try to acknowledge the little steps that I have taken – I am not eating all local organic food cooked from scratch, but we’ve moved to eating about 90% local organic meat, and trying to make sure there are homemade soups and stews in the freezer at all times. It’s a good step. I am not learning any new hobbies, but I am finding a few that I like and trying to make time to keep them up.

Another way to get over the guilt associated with falling short of your over-achiever expectations is to honestly examine how much of those expectations really come from ego. Yes, it’s good to be fit and well-rounded and competent at work, but do I want these things so that people will look at me and see how good I am at keeping all the balls in the air? If I examine my motivations, and they aren’t as pure as they might seem on the surface, this also helps to let go.

I am a long way from being a recovered over-achiever (though going to law school was great for putting things in perspective . . . I’ve managed to find a profession where I am slightly less type-A than most of the other type-As, so I look positively slackerly at times . . .), but I am trying to keep a balance, and giving myself grace to accept that I am only one person with only so many hours in the day.

plus ca change . . .

2009-02-12T13:43:00.001-05:00

I recently read Three Nights in Havana, a book ostensibly about Trudeau’s state visit to Cuba in 1976, but more generally about the Cold War, the Cuban revolution, the personalities of both Trudeau and Castro, and Canada-Cuba relations. In reading that book I learned that the FLQ was socialist (which makes sense, considering the time, but I’d never made that connection before) and that anti-Castro Cubans bombed Canadian government buildings. Missing out on the height of the cold war (I was a blissfully ignorant child regarding the significance of the wall coming down, even if I am old enough to vaguely remember it happening), it had never really struck me how much uncertainty people lived with for the whole period after WWII until the late 80s. And it made me realize that in every era there has been some kind of uncertainty and upheaval. I think it’s easy for our generation to feel like the “post 9/11 era” is completely uncharted territory. And, in some ways, it is – but I guess what I realized is that every generation has faced its own challenges and its own uncharted territory. In a way, it is the uncertainty of the situation that links us with history, and I find that oddly comforting. Maybe the world that we know it is coming to an end, but maybe the world that we know is always coming to an end and every day a new one, in some ways better and in some ways worse, is being born to take its place.

reserved Obama-mania

2009-01-21T14:53:00.003-05:00

Like millions of people around the world, I watched Obama’s inauguration yesterday and, like millions of people around the world, kinda wished he could be our guy. I am generally not given to being more interested in American politics than our own – unlike many people I know, I passed over the Biden/Palin debate to watch our own leadership candidates duke it out. Obama is exciting, though. Not only is he the first black president of the United States, which is amazing when you think of how recently black Americans actually got their civil rights, but he’s also a visionary who seems ready to lead his country in the current challenging times, and to give them a sense of identity and pride.

And so I watched the inauguration with excitement yesterday but, while I have a bit of charismatic leader-envy, there were elements that reminded me how different America and Canada are, and made me happy that I belong to this relatively boring and laid-back nation.

The first thing that struck me (and many of my colleagues have also mentioned it) was the overt Christian-ness of the whole process. While Obama did point out in his speech that Americans are of all beliefs, they still had Rick Warren give his very Christian prayer, leaving no question that American is one nation “under God”. The religious background of most Canadian leaders is a non-issue – I hear that Ignatieff is Orthodox. Who knew? And who cares? We let our leaders’ personal beliefs quietly affect their convictions, and judge them by their actions more than their affiliations. I like this – it gives more room for people from diverse backgrounds to truly feel like they belong.

The other thing that I have always found odd, and noticed again during yesterday’s ceremony, is the role of the First Lady. Both Michele Obama and Biden’s wife held the Bible when their husbands were sworn in. While it is true that the role of President of the United States is going to affect a person’s spouse profoundly, it still made me think of the way that churches expect pastors wives to find their own fulfillment in supporting their husband’s vocation (see my rant on this subject here ). I like our method better, where the wife of the P.M. generally does whatever she does (lawyer, full-time mother, hippie/debutante), and while it’s probably not good form to get drunk with the Rolling Stones, she is more or less left alone.

I feel like Obama is going to be a defining voice in our generation, and I will be watching him from up here in the North, but as much as I would love to have a leader whose speeches make me cry (ahem . . . in the good way . . .) I would not trade our pomp-free ways for all the inaugural balls in the world.

Tuesday Afternoon Philosophy

2009-01-13T16:34:00.001-05:00

“I need to figure out what I believe in metaphysically and morally, and how the two are related. That’s the essence of a spiritual identity.” This thought wandered through my head while I was trying to get to sleep the other night. Not as bad as my brain adding to my to-do list for work the next day, but also not as conducive to drifting off as thoughts of summer vacation. It might just have been my mind processing the philosophy of a character in the book I was reading, or I might to be onto something. So the first step in answering this question is to probe the premise – is there a link between morals and metaphysics – and is that, indeed, where the crux of spirituality lies?

Is it possible to have a moral system without it being linked to your understanding of the nature of the universe and your place in it? It seems to me the answer to this is no. At least, I can’t think of any examples – even if you don’t believe there is a God with a will who is pleased by some things and displeased by others, to even have a sense that there is “right” and “wrong”, you have to have an idea of how your actions fit into your larger context . . . and I don’t see how that can be done without an idea of what that larger context is. Even pure moral relativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Alright, so if there’s a link – so what? If I figure out where my morality comes from, will I know what I think about the nature of God? Or if I figure out what I think the nature of God is, will it guide me in right living? If I believe something is inherently good or bad (or that there is no inherent good or bad), that belief must come from some measurement of utility, that seems it would come from my understanding of being. It seems a bit harder to make the link in the other direction, though – in any worldview in which there isn’t some kind of anthropomorphic god, how do we take cues from the nature of the universe to shape our action?

This is twisting my head, and I don’t think I’ve yet figured out if it’s useful or not. I guess that’s why I am a lawyer, and not a metaphysician (or metaphysicist, which sounds much cooler, if you ask me . . .).

feminist rant #84

2009-01-07T11:42:00.000-05:00

I resent that I have to be careful. I resent that I have always felt uncomfortable walking home from the Transitway late at night, and that those twinges have been confirmed as something more than paranoia by the news reports of a sexual assault (in mid-day) on the path between the mall and my street. And I resent that our government no longer funds Status of Women Canada, because it considers that women have obtained equality. No man that I know worries about how they’re going to get safely home in Ottawa.

the affleunza report

2009-01-03T09:24:00.006-05:00

Since the book club read Affluenza as our November pick, I entered into the holiday season thinking about consumption of stuff stuff stuff. In the lead-up to Christmas, I also came across a great website - Advent Conspiracy - which is pragmatic in its approach to giving less over the holidays. Realizing that most people like to give gifts, it doesn't advocate the "buy nothing Christmas," but instead encourages people to give one less gift and to focus on gifts that bring people together.

We headed into the season making our own attempts to kick the bug in the butt - we drew names with PJ's mom and sisters, so that we each only bought one gift; we managed to make a fair number of gifts; including our usual canning for friends (which we completed in the fall when there was still stuff to can); I passed on some books that I had read, rather than buying new copies; I resisted the urge to buy one more thing for my parents (who have everything they need and more) just because I felt like I wanted to give them gifts; and when I was dry on ideas to give PJ, I decided to give him coupons for 5 dates to do some of his favourite things.

What was cool to see, through the holiday season, is how other people in our lives are thinking in the same vein, and so I want to share some of the amazing consume-less gifts we received:

- Rather than buy them new, my grandma, who has spent years of her life collecting antiques, gave us two dishes out of her collection
- PJ's stepmother made us an amazing blanket with Swedish embroidery
-some of our friends made a donation in the name of our group of friends to a charity that helps send girls to school in Tanzania, and my sister and her husband gave PJ an Oxfam goat (i.e. the goat has been given to a family in need on his behalf)
-several of our friends gave us home-made baking, and another couple also did canning
- a couple of our friends have, for the second year, given some bottles of their favourite environmentally friendly cleaning products

I like giving gifts and I like receiving gifts (unless, to be honest, they are things that have no function and will just sit around my house). It is an ingrained part of our culture at this time of year, and I like the generosity of a season in which everyone shares. It is exciting to see more and more people in my life finding creative ways to participate in this tradition without going into debt or adding to the mass of consumer goods in our homes and landfills.

good to be home

2009-01-02T17:38:00.002-05:00

We've been back from our Christmas south-west Ontario junket for a few days now. As usual, the first part was spent frenetically visiting everyone while shuttling back and forth between PJ's mom and dad in Waterloo, and the 2nd part was spent drinking wine and reading books at my parents' place in Walkerton. It was a good trip - despite some horrible driving, we saw all of our closest friends from our pre-Ottawa lives, including one dear friend who lives in Europe and I last saw 3 years ago at a wedding over on that side of the Atlantic, and a few others who have gone away for the past few years when we came home for the holidays, but were all around this year. It's amazing how, with good friends, the passage of years does nothing to stilt the conversation.

Now, we're back in Ottawa. We had a wonderful quiet New Year's Eve with some close friends, making "gourmet diner" food and playing Rumoli, and a great day yesterday, alternating between being productive (finished the latest baby quilt, got the new wireless router installed, made 2 soup recipes out of a new Christmas gift cookbook - which is all vegetarian recipes which feature alcohol as one of the ingredients . . . ), and ODing on DVD television.

And the funny thing is - it was good to be "home" where we grew up and where we used to live, but then it was also good to come "home" to our little nest and our regular lives here. It's horribly trite to say that "home is where the heart is", but I guess it's one of those sayings that is over-used because it's true. I like that I have multiple homes, and can feel like I belong in a variety of places.

and the band played on . . .

2008-12-02T10:31:00.005-05:00

We live in strange times. Last week, the world was riveted to the story of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. This week, here in Canada, we’re waiting to see if the government will fall. Ever since the unravelling of the American economy back in October, it has felt like the world is on the edge of something momentous, while at the same time the enormity of it all seems surreal – it’s happening and I am continuing to go from day to day doing my thing – work out, go to work, cook, eat, make Christmas gifts, repeat.

I was looking at the Globe’s “day in pictures” collection one day last week, and there were two shots that stuck out in my mind – the first was of a huge Buzz Lightyear balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the second was of a child in a refugee camp in the Congo wearing a clown suit. Neither of these shots were about the all-consuming stock crashes or corporate bail-outs, they were about the rest of our lives, that are going to be lived regardless of what happens.

Sometimes I feel like it’s inappropriate to just go on doing my thing when the world is in some kind of crazy spiral of uncertainty and change. But I guess the truth is, there is always going to be uncertainty and change – and while I am not advocating complacency, I want to avoid getting paralyzed, or blinkered, by the headline news items. My life is happening right here, and the whole world is continuing to turn. Gotta live it and live in it.

the act of creation

2008-11-12T10:50:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, I had the day off work and spent it sewing, punctuated only by coffee dates with a couple of friends. The sewing machine currently resides in the bedroom, so I set up the ironing board and a cutting table, put my music on shuffle, and had a wonderful day stitching bits of brightly-coloured scrap (thrown all over the bed and floor) into crazy quilt blocks. I’ve also been knitting, for the first time in over a year, and that’s felt good too.

I have come to realize that I have an inherent need to create, and when I am not exercising it, I feel out of sorts – much in the same way as I do if I am not exercising physically or giving my social and intellectual muscles a stretch by spending time with interesting people.

There was an article in Geez a few issues back that outlined a theory that God is creativity. Not that he is the creator, or the source of creativity, but that creativity itself is actually the embodiment of the divine spirit. I was intrigued by this concept – it’s maybe a bit further than I am willing to go, but I cannot argue that there is something integral in the experience of taking raw material (whether it’s a pile of fabric, a bushel of cucumbers, or a blank piece of paper) and making it into something.

a gospel I can preach

2008-11-05T10:20:00.002-05:00

Over the past few months, as I’ve had time to recover from our pastorless state and have removed myself from the board at Ecclesiax, I continued to find church to be a somewhat empty experience on more Sundays that I’d care to admit. It was partly that I was so used to church being a place of stress and business, and feeling responsible for everything that happened there, and I needed time to come down from those associations. There was another part, though – I’m going through another period of examining and deconstructing my faith, and the conclusions I am coming to make me wonder why I am there.

Throughout the fall, I’ve had the nagging feeling that, while church means something to me, it is not what it means to everyone else. If I am honest, I don’t really believe that the point of Jesus is that he died to remove our sins and bridge the gap between us and God. But I am still there, calling myself a Christian – so what is the point of Jesus? Because if there is no point, I might as well stay home on Sunday mornings and read the paper (and sometimes I do).

This past Sunday, I remembered why I was there. One of our members was giving the sermon, and he preached the social gospel. I’ve had a similar experience, when my faith was teetering on the edge, and an uninspiring looking Bible study book full of liberation theology was put into my hand. It was a similar jolt of recognition this Sunday, while I was sitting in the back corner knitting. Jesus is an example of an inverted social order in which the last will be first, and his message is about experiencing and serving God by recognizing the dignity and worth in every single person in the world. That is a message I understand, and being in a community of people who want to act it out in their lives is a reason to be there.

a positive telemarketer experience

2008-11-03T18:37:00.001-05:00

Ok, not exactly a teleMARETER, but after my rant about the cable TV guy, I wanted to share that I just had the opportunity to participate in a survey on waste collection in Ottawa, and say things like "we should totally get a green bin program and make people pay to get rid of their garbage . . . ." Yaay!

green. relativism. muddle . . .

2008-10-31T10:18:00.001-05:00

The other day, there was an article in the Globe and Mail about “eco-bullying” – i.e. people at work who make other people feel bad for photocopying single-sided or throwing recyclables in the garbage. And, of course, I did what I do against my better judgement whenever I read something in the Globe online that I don’t agree with – I read the comments. And, of course, the comments reaffirmed that I am actually a freak who is way off the mainstream. Because I THINK IT’S OK to make people feel bad for being environmentally irresponsible – and was shocked by the self-righteous attitude of the people who feel it is their right to be wasteful.

As I was processing this, my first thought was that I would write a blog basically explaining why we SHOULD be going out of our way to carry our pop cans down the hall to the recycle bin. But as I am thinking about it, a more interesting issue comes to mind – why are some people (particularly those from a similar cultural and socio-economic background to myself) not concerned about waste, while it strikes me as fundamentally wrong?

And, I guess, since I do believe that it’s important not to waste, the next issue that comes to mind is – how do you bring someone with a different value system alongside your point of view? Judging from the invective in the article in the Globe, nagging doesn’t work – it just makes people resentful. So what does work? I guess leading by example is the least obnoxious method – but is it really effective? And then to give some credit to the ranters in the Globe – should I even be trying to change people’s behaviour? I think I should, because I believe my perspective is right. But I would be annoyed if someone, for example, tried to make me wear skirts all the time, because it’s their idea of what is right for women . . . . and is this any different? Relativism always seems a bit too convenient, but absolute right and wrong is hard too.

More questions than answers today, folks . . . .

my favourite telemarketer conversation

2008-10-24T16:53:00.002-05:00

el Maggie (eM) - Hello?

Cheery Telemarketer (CT) - Hello ma'am, I'm calling from Rogers, is Mr. E-M there?

eM - No, but you can talk to me?

CT - Are you, uh, Mrs. E-M?

eM - yup.

CT - Phew - I never know what to ask there. I am calling with a special offer for Rogers Cable.

eM - Sorry, we're not interested. Thanks for calling.

CT - Oh, is it because of the price?

eM - No, we just don't want cable.

CT - You mean there's something missing in our service that you can get from other providers?

eM - No. We don't have cable and we don't want it.

CT - Is that because of something lacking in our package?

eM - Uh, no. You're talking about cable TV, right? Like a whole bunch of channels on the television? We don't have that and we don't want it. At all. From any service provider.

CT - Seriously?! Uh . . . . thanks for your time.

eM - Have a great evening.

activists make me nervous

2008-09-24T09:16:00.001-05:00

This post has been percolating in my head for a few weeks now, and I thought I better get it written down, or else it would slop away . . . I already realized that it would be a perfect story pitch for the next issue of Geez magazine a day after the deadline!

There was definitely a time when I found the counter-culture allure of “activism” glamourous, even if I was always a bit too goodie-goodie to fully participate in the culture myself. However, I have found in recent years that people who identify themselves as “activists” or state that “activism” is important to them trouble me.

My problem is not with anti-globalization, anti-war, or environmentalism movements – to list some of the ideals that people who call themselves “activists” would generally say they stand for, if pressed to define more precisely what the term means. Nor is it with the “activist” modes of expression, in and of themselves. Protests, rallies, and grass-roots organization can all be powerful ways for a population to express its discontent with the system and to get its message out. Living a life that treads more lightly on the earth and trying to buy products that don’t exploit the people that make them are concrete ways to actually change the system.

My problem is with the appropriation of the term “activism” to embody a specific subculture. Because, of course, there are other things that go with the subculture beyond the idealism and action that the idealism inspires: as a subculture, activism is also about a certain look, listening to a certain type of music, etc. etc. And the problem with this is twofold. First, it’s alienating and, second, it divorces the idea of activism from action, in all its myriad forms.

Defining activism as the counterculture is alienating because it doesn’t leave room for people who might be behind the movement, whatever it is, but don’t participate in the subculture. People who believe in the environment but like bubble-gum pop, or elderly church ladies who believe in peace may feel there is no place for them in the movement, if it is populated by a group that believes that the only true agents for change are part of the subculture. Even if those on the “in” don’t actually believe that – there’s still an “in” and an “out”, and it can be hard to face that barrier for someone who feels out.

The other problem is that when activism becomes a subculture, it can actually become divorced from action. By its very nature, activism is about doing something – not just listening to Ani Difranco. Activism is like politics – it should be a means to an end, not an end itself. Listening to people say “activism is important”, I wonder if they remember that what’s important is protecting the planet, global equality, and safety and security. Activism, whether through letter-writing campaigns, chaining yourself to a tree, or buying fair trade coffee, is all about creating a better world for everyone, even if they listen to bubble gum pop.

3 days of Ramadan

2008-09-10T11:08:00.001-05:00

Last week was the first week of Ramadan, and I spent a few days in the most populous Muslim country in the world. I have to admit that, despite being used to facing preconceived notions about Christianity, I still came to Ramadan in Indonesia with my own cultural assumptions. Fasting seems like such a hard-core thing to do, and I guess I had it in my mind that anyone who was willing to go without food or water from sunrise to sunset would be extremely pious. As a result, I associated fasting with other signs of piety in Islam – modest dress, prayers several times a day, etc. It’s not like that though – women who bare their shoulders, people who date westerners, people who try to pray regularly (since it’s Ramadan) but are flexible about it, all participate in the fast.

In general, there is as much diversity in the ways that, and degree to which, Indonesians practice their religion as you would see in “Christian” countries. It’s kind of like I imagine Canada was in the 1950s, when the majority associated with the Christian church, though the actual day-to-day practice of the faith varied greatly.

While in Indonesia, I was generously given lunch by locals who explained what all the dishes were, and then sent me away to eat in another room because they weren’t going to be eating until the sun went down, and I also had the opportunity to break fast with my Indonesian counter-parts once the sun did set. All in all, I left being reminded that the diversity of humanity is a beautiful thing, feeling blessed by the tolerance and inclusion of my hosts, and impressed by these people who would practice such self-denial, one month of the year, to stay in touch with their faith.

Style v. Substance - Olympic Style

2008-08-13T09:02:00.000-05:00

I have to admit, I haven’t exactly been caught up in Olympic fever. However, like any other non-sports fan who likes a good story, I am still willing to get caught up in the controversy of the faked aspects of the opening ceremonies.

My first thought on the matter was that it was, if not exactly outrageous, kinda ridiculous . . . it reminded me of reading about how, during the cultural revolution, farmers would take all of the rice from several fields and transplant it into one plot so that when Party leaders came to visit the village, they’d see how much it was prospering. While I am by no mean an expert of all things Chinese, computer-generating fireworks when the actual ones came out a bit fuzzy seemed like just another example of Chinese smoke and mirrors – a desire to put appearance before substance.

But then the more I thought about it, I thought “so what” – the opening ceremonies is a show, and it’s hardly a trend unique to China to put flash before substance in the name of a good show. Are the opening ceremonies of the Olympics any different than a good movie – the point is to use spectacle to move people and create a mood. Having perfect fireworks achieves that goal better than ones that are supposed to look like footprints, but don’t quite. The producers of the opening ceremonies, after all, are not the athletes – they are not there to be judged on the technical success of one specific performance.

But then I’ve been thinking more about the little girl who lip-synced during the show – apparently the real singer wasn’t cute enough, and China didn’t think she portrayed the right image to the world. While that may be just another example of pageantry and the desire to put across that perfect spectacle, I find it more troubling. Not because it was lip-syncing in general, but because it is sad that in “putting its best face forward” a country would only want to showcase beautiful people. Apparently, the little girl who did the singing was very talented, and the message in keeping her hidden from view is that that isn’t enough –her talent is undermined by her appearance. That’s a sad message to send out to little girls the world over at the dawn of the Olympics, an event that is supposed to be about celebrating skill and talent.

spouses subsumed

2008-07-22T13:47:00.000-05:00

How many jobs are there where your spouse comes to the interview with you? Where one partner is hired to do the job, but the other is expected to take on certain roles and responsibilities within the organization? The only one I know is ministry – it is common practice for the position of “pastor’s wife” to be viewed in the church as a vocation, in a way that no other spousal role is. I don’t expect that I will ever be expected to show up at PJ’s place of work and tutor because I am the professor’s wife . . . and as a lawyer’s partner, he might have to go to boring dinner parties, but he’ll never have to come to the office and type up my submissions – nor was he called upon to give his opinion on the carriage of justice before I could be called to the Bar.

I know that Ministry isn’t like any other job –your role is to be a spiritual and moral leader, and this makes a pastor’s home-life more relevant to his job than it is for most other professions (I am referring to pastors as men and their affected spouses as women throughout this post because I have not seen the same dynamic play out in situations in which the wife is the one in ministry).

However, it still makes me uncomfortable. I am sure that there are couples where the man is in ministry and the wife’s true calling is to be in ministry along-side him. However, I suspect that there are an equal number of families in which the wife has a passion and calling that is separate from her husband’s. By relegating her to the role of “pastor’s wife,” she cannot follow her own passions, and her identity is subsumed in his.

A marriage should be a partnership in which each person supports the other in becoming the best individual they can be. I worry that by making pastors wives an annex to their husbands’ ministries, churches (which generally consider marriage to be a sacred and important thing) are undermining the very foundation of this relationship in their leaders, by expecting the support to flow only one way.

dancing around the world

2008-07-13T08:12:00.007-05:00

I just came across this strange video , which in some ways is hilarious, but in others is totally touching. It's by the guy named Matt, and basically what he does is goes around the world and does this silly dance, and gets people to dance with him. He dances in the rain in Montreal, with kids in the Philippines, in the DMZ in Korea (they guard does not dance too . . .), on the beach in Rio, in the mountains of Bhutan, etc etc etc. It's always the same silly dance. But what's so cool about it is that he looks so happy doing it, and this very silly dance becomes an expression of profound joy. Dancing happens across cultures - I think it's a fundamental human experience, and Matt catches this, by dancing badly, but having so much fun doing it.

Canada the irrelevant

2008-07-10T11:06:00.006-05:00

Poor Canada. Like any nation, we want to believe that we’re leaders on the world stage. When we manage to escape the usual trap of negative identity definition (i.e., we don’t know what we are, but we sure aren’t America . . .), we have relied on some pretty tired images to define ourselves. Lester Pearson came up with the idea of a UN peace-keeping force back in the 50s, so we define ourselves as a nation of peace-keepers. We have a lot of rocks and lakes and trees, which we quite enjoy, so we define ourselves as environmental leaders. If you look at the evidence, though, neither of these characterizations are exactly true in 2008.

Not only are these tired and not-so-true definitions becoming globally revealed as the empty shells they are, but by hanging onto them so strongly we are quickly moving to – horrors – global irrelevance. I was looking at international coverage of the G8 summit, which is currently taking place in Japan, and the pundits were weighing in on whether the G8 serves a useful function and, if it does, whether its membership should be amended. In the discussion about amendment, Canada was one of the main targets for questions about the relevance of the current membership. Canada has a smaller economy than Spain – why is one included and the other isn’t? Canada “brings nothing to the table,” and emerging super-powers like India, China, Brazil and South Africa have as much right to be there as we do, if not more. Apparently, PM Harper has been talking about the importance of the G8 as bringing together “the major advanced democratic nations of the world,” but it seems that fewer and fewer people are buying the benefit of these annual summits.

It seems like it’s time for us to look long and hard at what we do, and how it’s perceived, if we really want to continue to be a “leader on the world stage” – or maybe we don’t, and we should just strive to be a middle power with the best domestic policy possible, in which case we are still going to have to take that good long look in the mirror, and figure out what facets of our identity actually stand up to scrutiny.

totem figures

2008-06-30T10:45:00.004-05:00

Yesterday afternoon, I managed to catch a show by Fringe Festival regular, TJ Dawe. Dawe is a bit of a legend, having done the Canadian Fringe circuit for 10 years now, with a new one-man show each year, but this is the first time that I actually made it see him. His style is more creative monologue than play – part seminar, and part story-telling.

This year’s show is “Totem Figures” – an exploration of, as Dawe puts it “the Mount Rushmore, or Sergeant Pepper’s Album Cover of my life.” For Dawe, his totem figures included his father, Jesus, Robertson Davies, and Luke Skywalker, among others.

But the larger message, of course, is that we all have a personal mythology – we all have historical or fictional characters that speak to us, or that we identify with more than others in an ensemble work. What are mine?

When Dawe was talking about authors, the one that came to mind for me was Margaret Atwood. I have been reading her for over 15 years now. I think I’ve read every novel she’s written, and most of her poetry. I read “the Edible Woman” when I was too young to get it, and again when it made perfect sense.

Other figures that have resonated with me include U2 (from songs like With or Without You that are as haunting now as they were when I first heard them as a teenager to the electronic era and back again), Trudeau (who made Canada believe in itself, and kinda made me go to law school), and my Grandma (who has always been a curmudgeon, but has always been there, grumpily proud of what I’ve achieved).

What are yours?

eco-rant of the week

2008-06-25T13:33:00.000-05:00

I was biking home last night, enjoying the fact that it actually hadn’t rained all day and I’d had a two-way goretex-free commute for the first time in several days, while also noting how green and jungly all the paths were as a result of all the rainfall. And then, when I cut off the path system to head home, I passed a house with the SPRINKLER ON! That’s right, folks, after an exceptionally rainy June, these people were watering their emerald green lawn (and a good portion of the road and sidewalk). Sometimes I don’t think that people in this country deserve the resources we’ve been blessed with, if we’re going to waste them so blatantly.

south of the border

2008-06-17T10:14:00.001-05:00

I am always surprised when I go to the United States, because I expect it to be just like home, but it’s not quite. Little things (like advertising for prescription medication) and big things (like the shrine-like monuments to presidents past on the National Mall) jar my senses, when I am expecting business as normal. When I was in DC last week, I was struck by the use of military language in advertising – when I was riding the subway, I saw a variety of ads for things like investment banks and software products that used language about “knowing the enemy” and being “ever vigilant.” It was weird – it wasn’t necessarily that fear was being used as an advertising tactic (à la “buy our insurance or your family will end up on the street when your house burns down and it will be all your fault”), but just that this was a metaphor that the advertisers were using to speak to their audience – as in “everyone knows how we have to be ever vigilant in war, so clearly this translates to business too . . .”. This highly militarized discourse was particularly interesting in light of another thing that I have noticed about Americans – they’re generally quite friendly. From my experience, on the one hand, it’s a nation that can be convinced to buy through mention of “the enemy”, but on the other, it’s a society full of people who are quite happy to start up a pleasant conversation with a stranger in the elevator. Weird.

the appearance of action

2008-06-11T21:16:00.002-05:00

Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of going through airport security (pre-clearance for flights bound for the United States) twice in about as many hours. I was on a flight that was cancelled, so they took us out through security - and by the time we had collected our bags, my colleague had called the travel agent and booked us on another flight, so we basically looped through the line and went back through security. On the second pass, the airline said they wouldn't book us in if we had to check our luggage (I am not sure if that was a time constraint issue . . . though as it turned out the plane didn't arrive in Ottawa for another 4 hours, so that doesn't seem quite accurate.) In any regard, on my second pass, I had my suitcase with me, whereas I had checked it on the way through before . . . and I had carefully put my liquids in a ziploc for clearance, but they TOOK MY HAIR STUFF because it was 150ml instead of the requisite 100. I was really annoyed (remember, this is after doing the thing involving taking my shoes off and my laptop out and filling out a customs card twice in as many hours . . . ) because, seriously, my extra 50ml of texturizing spray is not going to make our plane any less safe. Even if I was planning to make a bomb out of hair products and toothpaste, it would probably not be that extra inch of product that would make my devious plan a success. Obviously, we need airport security, and I can accept that I can't carry on my swiss army knife (which I got busted for the other week because I am an idiot and put it in the wrong make-up bag), but the shoe thing and the liquid thing are way more about the appearance of security - by the time those modes of security were implemented, the plots involving shoes and liquids had been foiled, and it is unlikely that anyone intent on doing damage is going to replicate these methods . . . but the general public must endure the arbitrary restrictions on their luggage (along with my personal favourite, the Heathrow one carry-on rule . . . which is awesome when you're transiting through on an airline that doesn't have that rule and are between two other airports that don't have that rule . . .). Ok, I am ranting, but I was supposed to arrive at Regan at 8pm last night, and got to Dulles at 2am, having walked barefoot through the metal detector twice, and stripped of my "trying to look more like a lawyer and less like a 22-year-old-kid" pre-meeting hair routine.

sexGod review

2008-06-05T10:38:00.004-05:00

I just finished reading SexGod by Rob Bell. Bell explores (from a Christian perspective) the links between sexuality and spirituality, his main thesis being that the unity of sex and marriage are the most potent earthly example of the unity that we are supposed to be in with God.

Reading this book is part of a recent foray I’ve been making into reading Christian books once again – now that I am becoming more comfortable with my unorthodox faith, I can appreciate more orthodox scholars, and consider them in the framework within which they are operating.

Generally, I appreciate what Bell is doing with his book – he is honest and compassionate and pays a lot of attention to the cultural context of the Biblical passages he’s talking about. He also makes a valiant effort of examining the passage about husbands being the head of a marriage and wives submitting to their husbands, and situating it in the context of the passage as a whole, saying that really everyone is supposed to submit to everyone, and the husband is supposed to be willing to die for the wife, so really it’s about equality.

I still came out of the book feeling like women are getting the raw end of the stick, though. Despite Bell’s assertions that Paul is talking about equal submission, the overall message in the book is that a marriage is like the church’s relationship to God. God is always the groom and the church is always the bride in these situations. . . . and, well, God is God and the church is people, so I don’t see how that is supposed to be an equal relationship. Therefore, if the analogy is reversed (instead of saying that our relationship with God is like a marriage, but saying that marriage is like our relationship with God) – women are somewhat infantilized (God is, after all, also understood as being the benevolent parent). And that doesn’t match up with my understanding of what or who God is. Which leads me back to my mistrust of the Bible as the Word of God . . .

frivolous rage

2008-04-22T15:23:00.001-05:00

In the last few months, I have listened to the radio and heard about: monks in Burma being dragged away and beaten by the police for protesting the military control of the country; election unrest and long-simmering discontent leading to ethnic cleansing in Kenya; lawyers in Pakistan taking it to the streets over the corruption of the judiciary; and pro-independence Tibetans facing off with the Chinese authorities. This morning, I was lying in bed while the CBC covered the burning and looting that took place last night in Montreal after the Habs won the play-offs.

I am not an advocate of violence against people or property in general, but in looking at this list of events – one of these things does not belong. In all of the other situations, people took to the streets because they were oppressed. In Canada, cop cars get burnt because the home team WINS a game. It makes me sad and, frankly, embarrassed to be Canadian.

My first thought in analyzing this event was that this was an indication of western privilege – it seems like only a nation with the luxury of knowing that you can torch a police car and they won’t open fire into the crowd, and most likely won’t beat you, can riot over something as frivolous as a (won) sporting match. But as I was writing those words, I thought that there have surely been similar riots over soccer in developing countries . . . so I realize that this analysis might be open to challenge.

Setting aside a contention that only rich nations would have the luxury of rioting over hockey games, I think that last night’s activities are still telling that something is just a bit off in the society that we live in. Canadians don’t generally riot, and when compared with the Pakistani lawyers and Burmese monks, it’s a pretty sad event that’s made us rage against the machine. While we do have it pretty good, our nation is not without injustices, and yet it took a professional sporting match to inspire the kind of passion that was exhibited in Montreal last night. That’s sad.

anti-pro-ana

2008-04-17T10:13:00.004-05:00

While in Washington last week, I was up late with one of my friends discussing criminal policy (hey, I never claimed to be cool or interesting . . .) – we were talking about criminalization of various sexual things, and I came up with the proposition that sexual activities that caused harm should be criminalized, and that those that didn’t cause harm shouldn’t. My friend challenged this notion, coming from the position that too many people justify doing morally questionable things by saying that they aren’t causing harm. The idea of harm as a grounding principle for criminalization is interesting – we were trying to think of crimes that were only against oneself, but had a hard time coming up with any – drug abuse could be seen as causing harm to society because of its drain on the health system and other social services; some people would argue that prostitution is a victimless crime, while others would say that the women themselves are all victims (or, by extension, women at large, who must deal with the consequences of a society in which sex and the female body are commoditized).

Whether you ascribe to the harm principle or not, criminalization is all about the social contract – what a given society has decided is prohibited, with the aim of enforcing desirable behaviour and interactions between individuals. Even with the most blatant examples of the harm principle, there is always a moral judgement implicit in criminalization – murder is only illegal because we have decided that life is worth protecting, and that people have a right to maintain their life (whereas if the same person is on the battlefield or attacked first, we have determined that they have forfeited their right to life, and can be killed without it being called murder).

Against the background of these percolating thoughts, I learned that France has criminalized pro-ana websitesthis week. For those of you who don’t know – pro-ana is a movement (I guess it’s a movement) of anorexics who want their condition to be recognized as a lifestyle choice rather than, well, a condition . . . pro-ana websites are forums for anorexics to encourage each other to continue to starve themselves, and to maintain solidarity against the people in their lives who are encouraging them to be healthy.

While I am sure I could write a post or 2 on the topic of pro-ana, what struck me, in light of the recent conversation on criminalization, was comments at the end of the article that some MPs in France were against the move because they didn’t think that criminalization should be used as a tool of health policy. As mentioned above, criminalization is always the tool of some kind of social policy, so this comment in and of itself seems almost naive. Yes, criminalization of pro-ana websites, on its own, will not solve the problem of social pressure on women to be thin. However, along with other moves, such as requiring fashion models to have a healthy weight, it might make a difference. Anorexia causes harm – to the individual who becomes physically ill as a result of this condition, and to society at large, which has to look after these sick women and girls (and, I know, some men and boys . . .). Promoting anorexia, it seems, could cause harm to girls who are battling against this condition, but could be swayed by the “normalizing” effects of pro-ana communities, which encourage them that it’s not a sickness and there’s no need to fight.

On the other hand, though, stigmatizing mental illness has never really done much good to society, and there is a danger that criminalizing pro-ana forums could do just that. France (and other countries that may choose to follow suit), should not refrain from criminalizing pro-ana because of a general notion that criminalization has no place in health policy, but they should make sure that they have conducted a sophisticated analysis to determine whether more harm will be caused by the permission or the prohibition of pro-ana websites.

spring cleaning

2008-03-28T09:36:00.000-05:00

I know that I have spilled an inordinate amount of cyber-ink on this blog regarding my battle with “stuff”. The problem is that I want to live simply, and I don’t really like being buried in clutter – but I am a packrat by nature. BUT, we have been back in purge mode recently, and I am always amazed by how good it feels to get rid of stuff. We bought a new (to us) TV cabinet, which had led to a fair amount of furniture moving and reorganizing, and along with that a lot of going through the stuff that lives in/on that furniture. It even kicked me into gear to delve into the coat closet, and a few more things have been freecycled onwards. My next project is to read borrowed books and return them to their owners . . . which should do wonders for our shelf space. I know that I will never cure myself of the desire to acquire stuff, but it feels good to let go and get old unused things out of the corners of my house. Spring may not yet be here, but the cleaning has begun!

that's me in the corner . . .

2008-03-25T13:52:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about faith stuff recently – about what I believe, about what most Christians believe, and about the gaps in between and what to do about them. I haven’t been writing much, because I am shy about broadcasting these things. I fear condemnation.

An old friend from the camp days e-mailed me a while ago, and asked about God stuff. So, in my mission to be honest in my spirituality, I tried to explain a bit of where I was at. After a bit of back-and-forthing, the ball is in my court with some questions about a statement that I had made, which is that I don’t know that the Bible is the word of God. My friend asked me what, if not the word of God, did I think it was – and what was the point of doing anything with it if I didn’t think it was divine? Good questions, and ones I’ve been kind of waltzing around for the last little bit.

I guess the first issue, which came up in my friends’ questions, is that I don’t think that believing the Bible contains historical accuracies necessarily leads to the conclusion that it’s therefore the word of God. By saying it’s historically accurate, I mean to say that the Bible talks about things that are backed up by other accounts or by archaeological evidence – I am not trying to make any statements about the objective versus subjective nature of history. The Bible also talks about things that aren’t supported outside of its text (and I’m not suggesting that a lack of supporting evidence in itself means that these things didn’t happen, just pointing out the fact). However, the question of whether the Bible is actually divinely inspired, and was meant by God to be taken literally as the primary source of guidance for humanity exists outside the issue of its historical veracity.

So, when I say I am not so sure that the Bible is the word of God, what I am saying is not that I doubt that there was a guy named Solomon who built a temple, or a guy named Jesus who rattled the authorities and suggested a path of love and humility, but that I don’t think that the people who wrote the many texts that make up the Bible were channelling God’s will into a perfectly discernable resource that we can clearly follow so that we know we are doing what God wants us to. Which leads to my friend’s further question – if you don’t believe that the Bible is the word of God, then why believe anything about it at all? Good question – and sometimes I wonder about that myself.

To answer that question, though – I have to answer what the Bible is – if I don’t think it’s a combination of 100% factual history and God-breathed instructions on how to live our lives. I guess I think that the Bible is a story of people trying to understand God – of them putting into words their experiences that they believe were full of him, and their interpretations of how he moved in their lives. As such, I guess I believe that the Bible is one of the sources through which we can understand the nature of God and of the kind of lives he wants us to live. We also see him in our relationships, in the world around us, in amazing art, and in so much more. I guess what I am trying to say is that I don’t see the Bible as the source of truth about God, but at its best as a source of truth about God. It’s tougher this way – having to discern what I think is actually godly, rather than assuming that it all is. I definitely don’t feel wise enough to make these discernments all of the time – but I also don’t feel comfortable saying that hatred and oppression or disregard for the planet we live on (for example) should be accepted because they are in the Bible.

Working through this makes me squirm, but I know it’s an important thing to do, no matter how much more uncertainty (or unorthodox certainty) lies ahead.

things seen while walking around in Indonesia

2008-03-07T13:19:00.004-05:00

Growing Up

2008-03-07T13:16:00.001-05:00

I remember when I had just moved into my first apartment, in 2nd year of undergrad. My roommates and I went grocery shopping, and we felt so mature buying fruits and vegetables, and going home to make ourselves dinner. There was the sense that we were grown-up, and yet at the same time, a nagging feeling that we were only playing grown-up . . . as if taking personal responsibility for our nutrition was a temporary gig while our parents were out of town, instead of the new reality of our lives.

It’s been almost 10 years since we lived in that first purple closetless triplex, and all of the roommates have moved onto partners and careers. We’ve all managed to avoid getting scurvy, so I guess we’ve been successful in nourishing ourselves. I still have that feeling of playing grown-up, though. It’ll hit me suddenly when I’m washing the car, or look in the mirror and realize I’m wearing a suit.

What’s even stranger, though, is that I’ll be going about my daily business and suddenly realize that I’m living a completely adult life. I remember when I was deciding if I was going to go to law school, and I had this sense that I was not sure enough of myself to put that kind of time and effort into professional training. This week, I signed my letter of offer for a permanent position at work without a blink. When PJ and I were first dating, the thought of marriage terrified me. Even when we got engaged, I was overwhelmed that I had made the decision to spend the rest of my life with him. Now we’ve been married for almost 4 years, and our inter-connection is a given.

I am still the same person who proudly brought home her very own frozen juice and pasta from the grocery store, but somewhere along the way, I’ve learned to trust my judgement, make decisions, and take care of myself. Weird.

el Maggie in Asia

2008-02-27T01:33:00.006-05:00

I am writing to you all from the Hong Kong airport, trying to mentally prepare for the flight back to Canada, which will begin in a couple of hours. I've been in Asia for a week and a half now, and have just got over the jet-lag in time to turn around and do the 12-hour time change in the opposite direction.

The purpose of this trip was for work meetings in Indonesia. The meetings were in Yogyakarta, a mid-sized city on Java Island. I found Yogya to be pretty concrete and bustling - everyone drives a motorcycle, and those who don't drive motorcycles sit on the back of their friends' motorcycles (or, if they happen to be a small child, in front; or, if they happen to be an elderly woman, on back, side-saddle).

For my mini-vacation after the meetings, I headed to Bali for a few days. I felt very sophisticated jetting off to Bali for a long weekend, let me tell you (a fact which probably belies my lack of sophistication . . .). Bali has beautiful beaches and green green rice paddies. The people there are Hindu, while the majority in Indonesia are Muslim.

I was a bit nervous about travelling alone, but I found it to be actually quite easy. It really re-affirmed how spoiled Anglophones are, as we can go anywhere in the world and people will know our language. I also never felt truly harassed, the constant "where you from? What your name? How many time you in Bali?" didn't really border on anything dangerous - my closest call was to being forcibly manicured, and I managed out of that one. At the end of the day, I am infinitely more wealthy than any of the Indonesian people who tried to hustle me on the streets, and I have come to comsume a slice of their paradise, so who can blame them for trying to sell me an hour of para-sailing, an over-priced silk scarf, or a massage on the beach?

God doesn't want me to be pretty

2008-02-10T22:19:00.002-05:00

Through the blog of a friend, who belongs to a pastor’s wives blog roll, I’ve discovered a woman who is married to a Baptist pastor in Chicago. She is a completely different kind of Christian from me, and probably would not even admit that I deserve the title (and/or would pray fervently for my soul, if she knew about my spiritual state). Anyway, I appreciate her optimism and delight in the world around her, and her solid simple faith in the Bible as the word of God. These are all things which I lack, and while I am happy with my honest doubts, I fear I would look like a grumpy cynic were I to dismiss anyone else whose spiritual walk was not wracked with similar ambiguity.

This woman is leading a woman’s Bible study on "A Woman and her Appearance" which she posts on her blog. Basically, she has looked at various Biblical passages and come to the conclusion that God cares about our appearance, and He wants us to look beautiful and womanly. I, to put it mildly, disagree. In fact, the first sermon I ever gave at Ecclesiax (back in the days of innocence, before I became de facto pulpit supply) was about our bodies – about our need to accept them and then to move beyond them. If I believe anything about God’s interaction with humans, it is that He sees our souls, and that he wants us to do likewise when we look at other people.

I believe that every person has inherent worth, and a focus on beauty separates us from this truth. In our society, old people are considered ugly – but I can’t accept that God does not love old people, or that he wants women to try to hide the outward evidence of their life experience. Also, poor people are often not as beautiful as rich people, because what we consider beauty is a luxury taking time and money - Jesus was pretty loud and clear about his preference of the poor over the rich.

I do not embrace many absolutes in my faith, but from what little I understand about God, I am pretty sure He does not want me to put my energy into trying to be pretty.

hope's in the bag

2008-02-03T21:37:00.000-05:00

I am, as my regular readers might have noticed, a bit of a pessimist. So, it is with great delight that I am able to inform you that I have noticed a trend that is ENCOURAGING, and in relationship to human wastefulness, nonetheless! I am talking about the proliferation of reusable shopping bags. I have been reusing plastic bags or carrying cloth bags for years (my mom started using them in the 90s). Just 5 years ago, I would get confused looks from store clerks, and they would insist on wrapping my meat in a plastic bag before putting it in my cloth bag. The worst, I remember, was when Grandma took Sim and I to Disney World many years ago - if we had a large plastic bag from an earlier purchase and were buying something from another kiosk, they would put it into a smaller Disney-branded bag, even when we tried to say we'd just put it in the bag we were already carrying.

Now, though, I see more and more people with reusable bags. It's more common for store clerks to ask if I want a bag, rather than assuming, when I am getting just a few items or an already carrying a bag. A lot of this spread seems to be related to the President's Choice black bags with green logos on them - they've somehow become cool. I knew the tipping point had come when I was walking across the parking lot in the grocery store and saw your average cool looking 20-something guy (cell phone, flip-flops, baggy shorts, golf shirt with the collar up) heading towards the store swinging his black grocery bag. If cool male university students are doing something that's somewhat inconvenient, as opposed to a more convenient option, you know it's become mainstreamed. . .

Despite my glowing optimism, there are still an awful lot of plastic bags going out of Loblaws every time I am there. We are making progress, and I think we're ripe for the next step - make people pay for every plastic bag they use. The plastic bag tax in Ireland actually reduced plastic bag usage by 94%! Plastic bags are the type of environmentally harmful thing that really only exist for convenience - we're starting to change the culture to favour environmental responsibility over disposabal convenience, and this trend will only continue if we consumers took a hit in the wallet every time they wanted a plastic bag.

fame and fortune are mine

2008-01-24T09:16:00.001-05:00

I am a finalist in the Canadian Blog Awards. Considering, as PJ pointed out, only about 15 people read my blog, I was quite surprised to make it past the first round of voting – maybe all 15 people voted for me! Anyway, there I am, in the top 5 “religious blogs” in Canada – which is a bit funny considering that I actually wrote a post this past summer on the fact that I get nervous putting my thoughts about God and my faith down in such a public forum as the blog.

In this funny little experience, I can also feel the tugging of my contrasting feelings about my blog – I started it imagining that it would only be read by people who I know – it was basically a more formalized version of the group e-mails I would send out with links to interesting news stories. I was a bit weirded out by strangers reading my thoughts and commenting on them. As I’ve been writing, though, I have to admit that I am excited when new people find my blog, and that people actually find what I am writing to be worth reading. My sporadic attempts to publish have led to naught, and this keeps me thinking that maybe at some point I will actually reach that goal.

So, I guess despite my conflicted feelings about my blog becoming public, I am pleased I am a finalist – as Napoleon Dynamite would say, Vote for el Maggie.

deep dark materials

2008-01-21T19:58:00.001-05:00

PJ and I saw The Golden Compass the other night. It was a pretty good movie, though it suffered from the common ailment of movies made from long books, i.e. it kinda zoomed through the highlights of the story without much development in between.

The movie got us talking about the Dark Materials trilogy in general, and particularly Philip Pullman's opinion of God. There’s been a fair amount in the media about this – various Catholic school boards have been banning the books for their anti-God stance. It’s been interesting talking to people about this. Non-Christians generally assume that the hysteria is akin to the “Harry Potter is satanic” excitement. Some of our friends, who had seen the movie, thought that it was anti-church, but not necessarily anti-God. Spoiler alert: the series may seem only anti-church in the first installment, but God is clearly the villain by the third book.

I have a Christian friend who refuses to see the movie, as she doesn’t want to support the work of someone who is anti-God. Since she’s a reasonable and intelligent person, this statement challenged me. I knew that I was comfortable with reading these books and seeing the movies, but why? How do I reconcile this with my faith? After seeing the movie, PJ and I were talking about this the other night. It was one those conversations that spanned from the initial topic to issues as diverse as the general inability in fantasy and science-fiction literature to create realistic religions (a topic I plan to blog on soon) and the Dresden fire-bombing controversy at the Canadian war museum (a topic I have previously blogged on, and I have no idea how we got to from the Golden Compass).

To get back to the topic at hand, though: why am I ok with reading books and watching movies by a guy who apparently views God as an impotent and power-hungry old man, and ultimately the enemy of humanity? I guess the first response to that is that I think Pullman is entitled to his views of God, but I don’t think he’s right. And, in some ways, broad exposure to his harsh impression of God may facilitate opportunities for me to talk to people about how I understand the divine. Next, I like having my faith challenged. I would not be following this God if I thought he was an impotent and power-hungry old man – and if one book makes me waver on this point, what kind of faith is that? Finally, though – I appreciate a good story and I think that the Dark Materials trilogy is just that – Pullman creates a compelling fantasy world framework and fills it with interesting characters doing interesting things. In many ways, it follows the basic hero-myth story-arc, with a bratty little girl who grows up into a brave and loyal young woman as our hero. As a longtime female fan of fantasy and fairytales, how can I resist?

practical theory

2008-01-17T11:34:00.000-05:00

I began my academic career as a student of literature. I went into English because I like reading and I like writing – and it also dove-tailed with my interest in theatre, in which I obtained a minor. In the end, though, English was maybe not the best subject for me. When I look back over the essays I wrote during my undergrad, almost every single one is about situating the work in its social or historical context. I never got into heavy theoretical analysis and, in fact, it drove me insane. It has always seemed to me like nothing more than games that we play in our heads, looking for meaning that isn’t there and laying our after-the-fact interpretations on the text as if it’s something definitive. I recently had a conversation with a friend who studied art history, and found the same thing.

When I was almost done law school, someone finally explained the point of theory to me – that we use it not because it gives a full and real picture of the subject we are analysing, but because it gives the researcher a structure framework in which to conduct the analysis. While I still maintain that psycho-analysing Hamlet (a fictional character with no sub-conscious) is of limited value, that explanation made sense to me. I wish that someone had told me that when I first started university – I think it would have made the whole game make at least a bit more sense.

what it's about

2008-01-13T20:04:00.000-05:00

So, I run a church in my spare time. Ecclesiax has been pastor-less for a few months now, and the Board has been keeping things together. It's been exhausting. Two out of the five of us have resigned from the board because it was adding too much stress to their lives. The rest of us really aren't sure what's going to happen next. We have bills to pay, rental contracts to sort out, snow to shovel, relationships to manage, and a budget to write. To be honest, I've found myself wondering a bit too frequently why I bother. And then today, we had a service focused on prayer. I didn't deliver a message, but just led the congregation through a variety of prayer exercises focused on the idea that prayer is basically us saying two things to God: thank you and help. We wrote our confessions on paper and burnt them. We sang a Psalm of thanksgiving. We lit candles as we sent prayers for our community up to God (hmm . . . not sure what the emphasis on fire says about me . . .). Our band played a couple of wonderful songs, but we also had times of silence. It was good, it was like the early days when Ecclesiax was a place of experimentation and vulnerability. We told the congregation how badly things were going, and received a lot of offers of help. One guy who was with us for the first time went right out and bought us salt for the walkway. Leading the service was still exhausting, and I didn't manage to get out of there before 2pm after the offering was counted, but at least I've been reminded that church is a group of people on a spiritual journey together - and that's what it's all about.

becoming one of those people

2008-01-13T19:57:00.000-05:00

I haven't been doing too well with my usual attempt to go to the gym three times a week - busy times at work followed by Christmas holidays, followed by more busy times at work and travel with work (not to mention this whole "I run a church in my spare time" thing) have got me down to about once a week for the last month. Yesterday, I actually went at 4pm on a Saturday to at least get that much in - and it felt great. I thought that the cardio would kill me, since I've been so sporadic, but I was feeling wonderful while I did it, and after a walk home with my earphones still plugged into my workout playlist, I felt so healthy and invigorated that I ate a grapefruit. I don't know how it happened, because I never was before, but I have become one of those people who just feels so good when they exercise. Eek - if I'm not careful, I'll be taking up running next . . . .

new year

2008-01-03T10:09:00.000-05:00

For a long time now, I’ve kind of disliked New Year’s Eve. There’s always this feeling of expectations on this one night, and it seldom lives up. We’ve had New Years’ where we’ve tried to see everyone, and therefore ended up spending more of the evening in the car than actually seeing anyone. We’ve also had New Years’ where we waited so long to try to figure out what to do that we really didn’t end up doing much of anything.

The answer, you may be thinking, is obvious – put the expectations behind you and just treat it as an extra Friday night. I’ve realized, though, that I believe in New Year’s. I believe in the significance of the new beginning – when you can officially say that whatever needs to be put behind you will be, and start into a fresh new year awash with fresh new possibilities. It was odd when I realized that I had these deep expectations riding on the day, because I’ve never particularly been one for New Years’ resolutions, and I’ve never really done any great gala New Year’s event (this year, I finally realized my lifelong dream of hosting a New Year’s dinner party – yup, I’m quite the dreamer . . .).

I guess I made this realization because I was hoping for a new start this year. 2007 was a big year, and the fall was pretty tiring for both PJ and I. It was with a sense of dismay that I realized that things were not going to be any calmer in January, and it then dawned on me that I had been counting on the New Year to be a new beginning.

So, now I am trying to figure out what to do with this longing for change on January 1. I don’t believe in ritual for the sake of ritual (which is why, I think, I’ve never been huge on resolutions – I don’t make one unless I think I will stick to it), so I am not going to do something unless it would actually resonate with me – yet I need to in some way acknowledge the potential for a new beginning, even when it feels like I am back to the same old grind.

fog and frost

2007-12-27T11:18:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, we were up early, driving from the in-laws to the folks'. If there is one road that I know like the back of my hand, it's the route from Waterloo to Walkerton - I've driven it countless times in my life, so that the scenery is pretty much background. Maybe if your front door opens onto some kind of spectacular mountain range or the sun sets over the ocean during your commute home, this doesn't happen, but I think it's pretty common to get fairly indifferent to the beauty of home. For me, the farms of Waterloo, Wellington, Huron, Bruce counties are usually just what's there - the trip is time to be put in from point A to point B. Yesterday, though, I was kicked with an amazing show - the kind of beauty that explains why, as mentioned in my last post, I've been able to sense God more in creation than in anything else. When we left Waterloo, it was fairly foggy, but we could see that there was hoar frost on the trees. It was pretty cool, and as we transitioned from suburbs to farmland, it changed from kinda neat to truly magical. As we were driving, the fog burnt off, and we were suddenly in a world of bright blue sky with the full moon hanging over the horizon and every tree an amazing white wonder. I know that I often grumble through my life and my surroundings, and I really feel like this experience was grace - a blessing that I didn't deserve, but received nonetheless.

season of wonder(ing)

2007-12-24T14:06:00.000-05:00

Christmas Eve is here and I feel nothing. I don’t like feeling like this – Christmas is supposed to be a pinnacle of spiritual experience for Christians – a time to reflect on the miracle and wonder of God coming to earth in the form of Jesus. I don’t feel that. No reverence. No awe.

I guess, throughout all of the stages of my faith, it’s always been like this. I have always felt more connected to God the creator than to Jesus. Christmas has been a time for all of the secular things that people go on about – family and tradition and giving and such, but I’ve never felt a deep connection with the story of the baby Jesus. To be honest, I feel more of a spiritual stirring from the tradition of lighting lights to drive away the long dark nights at this time of year.

This whole lack of connect might be partly because it’s become such a cliché in our culture –perhaps the telling of the story in children’s pageants and the singing of sacred songs on the radio have stripped it of any ring of personal relationship for me. Knowing that the Christmas story becomes more fleshed out as the Gospels are further from the actual life of Jesus doesn’t help either, though. Generally I wouldn’t say that I don’t believe in miracles, but I don’t really believe that the miracles in the story actually historically happened.

When I actually admit things like this, I wonder if I am, somehow, a pagan who thinks she’s a Christian. I sometimes wonder how I can claim the faith for my own when I don’t agree with fundamental tenets – PJ says I’m just not a fundamentalist, but I still wonder, at times like this, what I’m doing here.

you just gotta laugh

2007-12-22T16:40:00.001-05:00

There's a part in Garden State where Natalie Portman says "you just have to laugh sometimes, or else you'll cry." That came to mind this morning, while we were leaving a day late for our Christmas vacation, with the fans running to hopefully dry out the water that has been seeping into our house from the roof since yesterday. It's been a stressful couple of weeks for PJ and I (deadlines, meetings, the promise of more deadlines in the New Year, emotionally intense experiences with people we care about), and the water yesterday morning was the icing on the cake. So last night, we decided to stay in town, and in between running the towels through the dryer, we ordered pizza, cracked a couple of beers, and watched the Princess Bride. Sometimes, you just gotta laugh . . .

all I want for Christmas . . . is everything

2007-12-04T14:17:00.000-05:00

In today’s Globe & Mail , there was an article about the extent that parents in Toronto are going to to get their children tickets to a “Hannah Montana” concert. Apparently, these tickets can cost up to $1200, and the article was featuring a father who was considering taking a second job so he could get these tickets for his daughters, and another mother who was offering 2 days of her husband’s plumbing services in exchange for tickets so she could take her 7-year-old daughter.

For once, I have to say that I whole-heartedly agree with the posters in the Globe’s online discussion, who all suggested that these parents were insane to be even considering spending that kind of money to take their children to a concert, and that their children would get over the disappointment eventually.

There was another article a few weeks ago in which a “mother of two grown children” was asking for advice – her daughter had requested no presents for her family, her son was upset about this, and the commentators were weighing in on how even if the parents didn’t want gifts, the children shouldn’t be deprived.

Somewhere between nothing and $1200 concert tickets, there has to be a happy medium. We want to get gifts for our nephew, because he’s excited about presents under the tree (last year, when he was almost 4, if you asked him what he wanted for Christmas, he just said “presents” – not games or toys or books . . . it was the excitement of something mysterious and just for him that mattered). He’s (for one more Christmas only) an only child, grandchild, and nephew – meaning there’s a lot of people to provide those presents.

I feel like I am slipping on the responsible gift-giving front this year. I don’t have a lot of ideas for crafts (or time, for the few ideas I have, or for shopping further afield). We haven’t even got to the little guy yet, and I know I’ll have the same quandary I always have – it doesn’t make sense to give a gift that someone doesn’t want – but there is a large gap between want and need, and the Hannah Montana tickets reveal that it may not be good to give someone everything they want either . . .

Oh seasonal Tree

2007-11-30T13:06:00.000-05:00

Wheat Sheaf recently wrote about the Dutch Santa Claus tradition, in which Sinterklaas and Zwart Piet go around giving toys to good children, and coal to bad children (and, apparently stuffing REALLY bad children in a sack). He was examining the Dutch attempt to come to terms with multiculturalism and the suitability of a character such as Zwart Piet (potentially colonized servant/slave of white St. Nick) in modern Christmas celebrations.

Well, I don’t have an easy answer for WS, but his post did get me thinking of other Christmas symbols. At work, we’re starting to decorate for the holidays –something to take our minds off the fact it’s getting dark at freakin’ 4pm, as we head into the final month of the year. I overheard a (non-Christian) co-worker reminding the organizer of this initiative that the decorations should be non-denominational – which is only appropriate, in my view.

It got me thinking, though, about what would be acceptable in this context. Obviously, the crèche is out, and probably angels too. But what about Christmas trees? Christians notoriously borrowed a wide variety of fertility and solstice symbols from other traditions as the faith spread throughout Europe back in the day. The tree is a prime example of that – associated with Christmas, but having its roots in pagan beliefs (and I use that in the sense of revering the earth and its inherent power, rather than in any pejorative way), and today the epicentre of the secularized commercial face of Christmas – where all the gifts come to rest. What about lights and candles – also appropriated by the Christian faith to symbolize the star of Bethlehem, or the light of God entering the world in the form of Christ – but originally designed to take peoples’ minds off the fact that it’s getting dark at freakin’ 4pm.

To me, these symbols are completely secularized, and actually can detract from a Christian’s interaction with the spiritual element of the season. However, I know that I am speaking from a position of privilege as a member of the Christian (or nominally Christian, at least . . .) majority. Maybe the fact that they’ve been appropriated by Christianity is enough to make others feel like they’re having the faith pushed on them, and we should be respectful of that. But I do feel like we could all use a little light and green at this time of year, and hope that these symbols can continue to evolve as the culture does, and belong to everyone.

blogiversary

2007-11-22T22:03:00.001-05:00

I have been blogging for a year now. I am not as prolific as Wheat Sheaf, who hit his 100th post last week, after only blogging for 4 months, but it's still a milestone. I can also be proud that I inspried Wheat Sheaf. My blogging inspiration, Constant Traveller, killed her blog after a few months.

Blogging is an interesting phenomena. In exploring blogs, I have discovered that most people use them either as a way of sharing what they've been up to, or they seem to have blogs that centre around specific passions. I don't really do either. I am a bit reticent about being too autobiographical in the broad forum of the internet, and I am much too flaky to keep a whole blog going on one subject. A friend of Wheat Sheaf's was teasing us about blogging once - saying that nobody wanted to read that I biked over to his place for a bbq and ate a delicious salad. Well, many people do blog that kind of thing, and I have to say it's strangely compelling - and maybe my friends who are all over the world WOULD be interested to know that . . . That's not why I blog, though, I do it to force myself to develop my thoughts, and to put them out there in a coherent enough form that I am not embarassed to have other people read them.

It's been interesting to look back and see what topics I revisit. My blog is a record of what I have been thinking about, or what's got me agitated. Seeing the themes laid out over a year has been revealing - I don't think that I realized I was so fixated, for example, on possessions and clutter. It's also affirmed what MB noticed once - I've become quite a feminist in my old age.

Sometimes I have a lot of time to read the paper and be aware of what is going on in the world. Sometimes (like this week), my days are full of work (which would be much to dull to keep a blog going, even if it wasn't privileged), and my evenings are full of working out, laundry, and personal stuff (which is also either too dull or too privileged to post to the world at large). During these times, it is good to have my blog, to challenge myself to have at least one coherent interesting thought a week . . .

one of those days

2007-11-15T16:29:00.000-05:00

It’s one of those days. It’s one of those days that follows one of those nights (those nights when you try to go to sleep and then go downstairs and huddle under a blanket reading until you are too tired for your scattered thoughts to bombard you). It’s one of those days when people you know and care about are dealing with big crappy issues, and it’s all part of life, and you realize you’re grown up and it’s going to become more frequent, not less, that people you love will face big crappy issues, and you’ll be looked at for a source of strength. And sometimes you’ll give too little too late, and you’ll have to live with that. And sometimes you’ll be the one who needs the support. It’s one of those days when Pakistan is disintegrating and children are dying in Sudan and being sold in Cambodia, and the malls are already playing bad Christmas music. It’s one of those days when it’s unseasonably warm, and you know that more people are glad than freaked out that the natural order is off. Yup, it’s one of those days.

community of strangers

2007-11-08T20:47:00.001-05:00

At Ecclesiax, we want to be a community. We don't want to be a church that people come to on Sundays, kinda get some kind of spiritual fix, and then leave until the next week, without getting into each others' lives. However, it seems that for many people we are a church that people come to on Sundays, get some kind of spiritual fix (I hope . . .), and then leave until the next week, without getting into each others' lives. And, I don't know know what to do about that. It seems that we need to have things going outside of Sunday, where people can get to know each in a smaller setting or through having a more hands-on shared experience. We need small groups and events, but to have small groups and events, we need people to lead them, and we need people to come to them. We've tried some things over the past few years where there's been pretty dismal turn-out. Even the craft workshops (which, by the way, are great) have more non-members than members. So, how do we get people coming? And do we get to throw up our hands if they don't come to what we offer, but then complain that they don't feel connected? How much of creating a community is the responsibility of the church leadership, and how much is the responsibility of the people who want to plug into it?

I am tired today, so I don't have many answers to this, or even the ability to flesh out the issues completely, but it's something that's been on my mind this week.

the road to hell

2007-11-01T13:32:00.000-05:00

I saw my first glimpse of the Chadian orphan debacle was on the TV at the gym – it was when the story was first breaking, and all I saw were the allegations that these people were trafficking the children into sex slavery/ black market adoptions. Since then, the news has suggested that the French “traffickers” were trying to rescue orphans from Darfur and bring them to France. The idea (I think) was that the children would be hosted by French families, and could claim refugee status. I think they thought that the appearance of these helpless orphans on French soil would arouse a groundswell of support for their cause, and the cause of Darfur in general.

Contrary to the first report I saw, it seems that these people aren’t slave traders, but it seems they’re still not quite the saviours they want to be – the latest allegations have included the fact that most of the children were Chadian, rather than Sudanese, and actually had parents or close family members who could look after them. All in all, it seems like a very misguided mission – as a French official said in one of the articles I was reading – the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

And the road to hell can be seen in this whole confusing story . . . Republic of Congo has already cancelled all international adoptions, keeping bona fide orphans from finding a new home in a western country. Children ranging in age from 1 to 8 have been away from their families for over a month. NGOs that have tried to work with the local people are under suspicion.

As someone who can understand the urge to DO SOMETHING about the horrible things happening in the world, I have a certain amount of sympathy for these fools riding their chartered jet straight into the gates of hell. Furthermore, this whole thing has left me wondering when I have been responsible for misplaced good intentions. I think that it happens whenever we go galloping into a situation, determined to help, without stopping to get to know, or to actually listen to, the people we are aiming to help.

While I was at law school, the Christian Legal Fellowship did Operation Christmas Child every year. I would marvel at some of the items that would come in the boxes that people had assembled to send overseas – stuffed snowmen and other Christmas kitsch, candy and bath gel, despite the instructions to avoid things that could leak or melt . . . the people who send these gifts mean well for these children, but have not stopped to consider the context these kids are living in. Now, I wonder if the idea I’ve been batting around to send toys to Cree kids is any different. In my defence, the idea came from someone who has spent time in a Cree community, but still . . . do these kids really need teddy bears? And do they need teddy bears from me? Ecclesiax has worked with some people in the area, but this gift could still be perceived as a bunch of useless crap from whites in the south . . . should I send it unless I know that this will not be the message?

monsters on the inside

2007-10-31T12:36:00.001-05:00

For my entire life, I have loved dressing up – when I was a kid I would start planning my Halloween costume for the next year somewhere around November 10, the candy not yet eaten from the previous event. This year, despite Halloween falling on a Wednesday (a prime positioning for 2 weekends of activities), I don’t have a single costume event lined up – nor have I looked that hard. There are various people in various levels of fancy-dress walking around work today, but I didn’t give any serious thought to joining the ranks when I stood in my closet in my bathrobe this morning.

I had been clinically observing my own detachment from the festivities, thinking “heh, that’s strange . . .” until I came across an article in today’s Globe about sexy Halloween costumes. I, for the record, have never dressed up as a naughty nurse or a French maid for Halloween. However, there always was that pressure to look somewhat sexy or cute (while not wanting to be over sexualized).

At this moment in time, I am not feeling awesome about my body – the body monsters that tell me my butt is too big have been buzzing in my brain, so that every day dressing in normal clothing can be enough of a challenge for the psyche . . . who would want to add the pressure of a costume for an occasion in which most women (while eating candy and other such junky treats) show off their ass(ets)? So this Halloween, I’ll go and listen to scary stories with my sweetie, while the monsters are on the inside, and there’s no need to dress up to bring them out.

inspired

2007-10-30T14:23:00.000-05:00

Today, when I should have been doing other things, I was thinking about an idea for an Ecclesiax project. The other week, our Sunday service focused on annual work trips that members of our community take to a Cree community in northern Quebec. As we were talking about the poverty that affects many first nations people, one of the girls who had been up north suggested that maybe we could dovetail with our sustainable gift workshops and make toys for Cree children for Christmas. I was kinda thinking about that, and then today Sen Smith sent an e-mail around to the board on the subject of the Good Samaritan (inspired by my favourite Christian book – Unexpected News by Robert McAfee Brown) – he had found a sermon that talked about how being a neighbour was an active pursuit – and that the Samaritan is a neighbour because he puts caring into action. So, this swung me back to the thoughts of doing something – and a toy bee.

All of the above is background to explain how I stumbled upon "One Red Robin" . This crafter’s blog (which has a doll pattern that I think would be easy to amend into a teddy bear if the toy-making actually happens) is stunning. This woman, who is a mother of 2 and works fulltime, makes amazing things which she has photographed beautifully on her site.

I am totally inspired, and just want to go home and sew and knit and collage and quilt! I have been trying to figure out what this fall’s baby quilt #3 will look like (and I’m not even done #2 yet!), and this is giving me some ideas . . . we’ll see what it turns into. This inspiration also has me thinking of how awesome it is that women (and some men too!) continue to work in textiles, making beautiful things, just like women have for generations. Another pipe dream of mine is an exhibit of “women’s work” in the Ecclesiax gallery – all modern textile art. . . .

Parents and other Saints

2007-10-29T09:45:00.000-05:00

As many of you will know, we are not too sure about this parenting thing – we don’t know if having children (or adopting children, or any other form of building a family that involves children) is going to be in our future. Many of our friends, on the other hand, have taken the parental plunge in the past few years, and are bravely raising amazing young individuals from baby to toddler and beyond.

I’ve been thinking of parenthood, because I think that raising children is one of the bravest and scariest things you can do. I guess this week’s entry is an ode to the young parents in my life – you are all amazing and I am so proud of you.

I talked to Beek yesterday. Her 2nd child (just born last June) is going to have surgery on his skull this Wednesday. Naturally, she’s terrified. But in the meantime, she’s continuing to be a wonderful mother to her older boy – to try to think about his needs in the back and forth to the hospital and the general disruption of their lives. She is so philosophical – she has tried to be very intentional in her parenting, and to incorporate her ideals about how she should interact with the planet and people into raising her children, but is managing to give herself the grace to make the compromises necessary to get through the day during this crisis.

Meanwhile, Sen Smith and wife have just had kid #3 – their first girl. The Senator, who is definitely a guys guy, is nervous about having a daughter – he feels like he could relate to his boys, but isn’t sure how he’s going to relate to a girl, and is worried about a whole world of new problems. But I know he’ll be a great dad to his daughter, because he’s a great dad to his boys, and he’s going to love this little girl just as much. I am sure that when #1 was born, he was nervous about being a father at all . . . and he’s done great.

I used to go to weddings and think of how brave those people were – making the decision that they were going to spend the rest of their lives with one partner, and publicly committing to form a new family. Well, many of those people are growing those families, and I guess what is on my mind this week is that I am still so proud of them and all they’ve accomplished.

Mini-Skirts Need Not Pray

2007-10-21T19:35:00.000-05:00

I've read "Infidel" and, as anticipated, it was a bit more thought-provoking than your average Tom Clancy. There were a pile of themes, and I might unpack more of them in subseqent blogs (we'll see where the conversation goes when we have our book club). Not knowing much about Islam, I found that I read the book through my Christian experience - drawing parallels between Christian and Muslim fundamentalism.

One of the things that caught my attention is the focus in the devout end of both religions with controlling sexuality. Ali, the author of Infidel, grew up honestly believing that the trains would all crash and the country would descend into chaos if women showed their necks (until she left Somalia for the Netherlands, and realized that the transit system was quite effective, tube-tops notwithstanding . . . .). Earlier this week, I was reading the homesite of "Ladies against Feminism," a right-wing Christian organization, and there was an online forum on the question of whether it was sinful for a woman to marry if she didn't want children (the general consensus being that it was).

Another common thread is the belief that women are responsible for the sexual purity of the community - that men cannot control their sexuality, and women are responsible to not tempt them. I have always found that to be an interesting argument, considering that it is generally advanced by people who also believe that women are the weaker sex in every other area of life, and must be protected by men.

I am not a hedonist - I believe that there is sexual morality and immorality. However, this is only one aspect of morality, and I think that it is a shame that it has become such a focus of two of the world's largest religions. It does not seem that monitoring sexuality has generally helped people to be kinder, more loving, individuals.

I don't know why sexuality has become such a huge focus of religion - on the one hand, I could argue that religions, as hierarchical power structures, can only allow a certain number of people at the top, and by conveniently dismissing half of the population as defiled, the number of people vying for power is severely reduced. This answer, though, only gives a reason for why women are subjugated - it doesn't answer the general issue of rejection of sex, which is ultimately unhealthy for both men and women. Maybe it's because sex is about bodily pleasure, and in religion, ecstasy is supposed to be spiritual? I don't know . . . but these threads run deep, and they're troubling.

In Praise of Frivolous Books

2007-10-12T10:43:00.000-05:00

After much back-and-forthing, I finally ordered "Infidel" from Chapters. It’s our next book club book, and I am looking forward to it. It’s the story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is a refugee from Somalia who became a member of Parliament in the Netherlands. She is, from what I’ve heard of the book, and read about her in other places, pretty harsh towards Islam and its treatment of women. I am looking forward to reading this book and engaging with her controversial take on multiculturalism.

But in the meantime, I have about 100 pages left to get through “Clear and Present Danger”. Generally, I go for John le Carré or Robert Ludlum for my spy lit, but I picked this up at a book sale at some point, and figured I might as well read it. Tom Clancy is not exactly high literature (I’m not picky, but I prefer books where the language either a) enhances the story or b) doesn’t get in the way of the story – Clancy, like Dan Brown, tends to stray into category c)).

Despite the language, though, this book has been interesting. Written in 1989, it’s about the “war against drugs,” the idea being that the President of the United States decided that cocaine being shipped into the United States is a “clear and present danger” to the people of his country, and therefore wages a covert war against a Colombian drug cartel. And so, it’s all about the issue of waging a “war on drugs,” and the soldiers and intelligence agents who go through the moral quandary of what they are doing – how to define an enemy, when the ends justify the means, etc etc.. I never understood the basis for the “war on drugs” rhetoric, and while I still think that it’s dangerous to go around waging “wars” on amorphous enemies, I at least now understand how it could possibly be characterized as a war.

Generally, I find spy books fascinating because they always reflect the paranoia of the age in which they are written. If you read through le Carré’s career, for example, you’ll start with the cold war, and move through state-sponsored terrorism, drugs, and finally multi-nationals as the bad guy of choice. These books, as much as a memoir like Infidel, can reveal things about the world we live in. Another recent thriller I read was “the Odessa File” by Frederick Forsyth. Under the cat-and-mouse Nazi-hunting plot was a fascinating theme of the German population’s inability to deal with the collective guilt of the Holocaust. Even the only Danielle Steele book I’ve ever read gave me a solid introduction to tsarist Russia.

So, I am looking forward to sinking my teeth into the weighty issues in Infidel, but I don’t think that it’s been a waste of my time to read Clear and Present Danger – if we read with our brains turned on, even escapist literature can challenge and teach.

Thank God I'm a Country Girl

2007-10-05T19:43:00.000-05:00

Today someone at work said he was surprised I was from a small town, because I seem like I would be from a big city. Funny, because just yesterday I was ordering merchandise from the Ontario Cattlemen's Association and telling another friend all about the glory of Big Bruce .

On Sunday, we will be doing our annual Thanksgiving dinner. I am excited about it, and I am glad to not be driving 8 hours this weekend, but I do miss Walkerton at this time of year. Thankgiving was always the time for walking out at the lake, taking fun pictures among the hay bales. Every year at church, Rev. O. gave the same sermon about "thanksliving", and there were usually corn stalks on the altar brought in by one of the farmers in the congregation.

I really don't think I will ever live in Walkerton, or any small town, again, but it is still home. Even if I don't seem like I am from the country to the casual observer, I know that my rural upbringing has affected the way I see the world. Back before Walkerton was infamous, it was the place that I couldn't wait to leave, but it was also the place I lived for 19 years. There are opportunities that I didn't have when I was growing up, but overall I think that having lived in a small town, and then moving to a city, has enriched my life. Not many people do it in the opposite direction, so it's given me a diversity of experiences that city folk (strangely, in more multi-cultural settings) don't experience.

So, it's Thanksliving this weekend, and I will spend it in the city (we still don't have a car, so can't even escape to the Gatineaus tomorrow) before flying off to Washington on Monday night - but if you're wondering what I'm thankful for - I thank God I'm a country girl.

Who's your daddy?

2007-09-26T14:03:00.000-05:00

This week’s Globe & Mail offerings: coverage of a 32-year-old mother who died after liposuction, revelation that it’s predicted that women will eventually fill the wage gap (and subsequent comment that women shouldn’t be expected to make as much as men, since they choose to have children and shoulder the burden of child-care), and an opinion piece on why a woman should keep her own name (and subsequent comment by man with very Anglo-Saxon name that all of this whining and navel-gazing about “identity” is ridiculous).

And so I maintain that my statement made earlier this week, in discussion with the Ecclesiax Board on another issue, is true: the patriarchy is alive and well. I think that it is appropriate to use that term when referring to any traditionally male-dominated status quo that controls people’s lives, whether they are male or female – but I don’t even need to get into that definition, because all of these examples pertain to the narrower concept of patriarchy as oppressor of women.

Story #1 – obviously there is a whole issue of the safety of cosmetic surgery in this tragic story, which is beside what has struck me about it. From all accounts, this woman (who had opted for liposuction over a tummy tuck because she thought it was safer and less invasive) was not a big risk-taker in the name of beauty. However, she still felt strongly enough about the belly fat that had become a regular part of her post-pregnancy body that she was willing to undergo an invasive procedure. She was not overweight, from the look of her picture, but she apparently looked like she’d had a baby, and she felt that was bad – that she shouldn’t carry the marks of motherhood on her body. The fat that covered her previously rock-hard abs was sufficiently offensive and ugly to her that she was willing to undergo surgery to make it go away. And, of course, the choice is not an isolated one, only the tragic consequences are. I only hope that out of these consequences will come a dialogue that doesn’t just examine the safety of the procedure, but examines why women go through the procedure at all.

Story #2 – as is often the case, it’s the comments, more than the article, that I have found revealing. The article is about a study that predicts the gender gap will finally close on wages in the next decade or so. The responses were rife with comments about how women choose to have children and can’t expect companies to compensate them for taking off time when their kids are sick. A few lone voices suggested that maybe we should view child-rearing and pregnancy as valuable contributions to society, but were quickly blocked out by a man saying that, all things being equal, he would always pick a man over a woman in hiring, because the man was going to be more productive. There was very little discussion about the role that fathers could (and, increasingly, want to) play in parenting. And there was, also, the usual snide remark about how it was unfair that there would be no affirmative action for men when women passed them in earning power – no historical context considered.

Story #3 – basically, the author was advocating that the only reasonable choice for a woman to make when getting married was to keep her own name – largely because it makes things easier when the divorce rolls around. The comments were, I thought, largely pretty reasonable. I liked that someone pointed out that the author argued that keeping one’s name was about identity, without any acknowledgement that with personal identity comes personal choice (I know very intelligent women who chose to take their husband’s names, while fully aware of the historical significance – it just worked best for them). The other good comment was on the fact that the author felt the need to make it clear “I’m not a feminist,” while feminists had made such choice possible in the first place. However, the comment that best illustrates my thesis of today – that the patriarchy is alive and well – was by a man (with, as I mentioned in my intro, a very Anglo-Saxon sounding name) saying that all of this thought and discussion about personal identity is self-serving and ridiculous. I can’t believe that anyone who has ever experienced being a minority would dismiss the importance of identity so quickly. Some men seem to want their wives to take on their names, and take it as a personal affront if a wife objects, who would never consider changing their own name. Why should they? It’s their NAME, after all . . . passed on from father to son. A woman, though . . . well, it’s only the natural progression.

And so, in two days of flipping through the paper online, I see women who are willing to undergo the knife to erase any evidence of pregnancy from their bodies, and who carefully separate themselves from feminists, while claiming a choice that feminists fought for us to have. And I see men who don’t understand that a woman might want to have a job and a family, like men have had for centuries, but that her biological role in the whole family-production process makes it a bit harder, and who can’t even fathom why one would feel the need to assert one’s identity. And I have to conclude that the patriarchy is alive and well, and coming soon to a neighbourhood near you.

Book Learnin'

2007-09-20T09:36:00.000-05:00

Here in Ontario, the provincial elections are swiftly approaching, and the talk has been pretty much high-jacked by one issue – the funding of faith-based schools. Launched onto the agenda as a Conservative draw for their constituency, the issue is close to all I’ve heard in my limited exposure to the election build-up (based largely on listening to Ottawa morning on CBC while getting ready for work). A few weeks ago, Wheat Sheaf asked me what I thought of the issue, and I wasn’t quite sure. So, I’ve been thinking and discussing with people since then, and this is what I’ve come up with.

For starters – I was raised in the public school system, and I believe in the public school system. I believe in the democratic process of kids from all walks of life interacting with each other at school (I guess that my small town experience reflects that more than it would be in cities, where neighbourhood divisions lead to school divisions along economic lines). So, I would love to see our education money going to fund one strong education system. A system in which all kids have the opportunity to take arts and sports, and also have the opportunity to learn about all different religions in a respectful manner.

I guess the point of faith-based education is that a given community’s faith framework has led to a set of values that they would like to impart to their children. On the CBC, they were interviewing people involved in a small Christian school somewhere south of Ottawa. Some of the differences in curriculum were to be expected – evolution taught with the caveat that it is a theory that is wrong, no sex education. Some were interesting – cursive hand-writing starting in grade 1, no computers. Some were, in my opinion, unfortunate – teaching Biblical history instead of modern Canadian history. It isn’t that Christian children shouldn’t know Biblical history, but modern Canadian history is important – these kids live in Canadian society, and we can only understand the nuances of where we are if we understand the nuances of where we came from. I mention all of this by way of illustration, and to get to the point that maybe parents need to take the responsibility for their children’s supplemental and value education. There are things that every Canadian should know about to function in our society, and there are things that are going to be specific to faith. Maybe school should only be in charge of the things every Canadian should know about, and should give kids the tools to explore the issues specific to faith and value systems.

So, my general feeling is that we would be in a better position if our education money went to building us one quality education system. However, we already have two education systems, one of which is faith-based. This, of course, is one of those times when understanding our history can explain our present. The Catholic school system is a remnant of a historical point in time when almost all Canadians were Protestant or Catholic, and the Catholic Church had a huge hold in the lives of its adherents. Today, Catholic school seems to be only nominally faith-based. I have several non-Catholic friends who went to Catholic school because it was the better school, or the only school with French. In Ottawa, the French Catholic school system is so under-utilized that they advertise on public transit to attract new students.

As is probably obvious from the tone of the paragraph above, I think that the 2 existing school systems in Ontario should be integrated. However, I am a pragmatist, and I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. SO, in the meantime, despite all of the above ranting and raving, I have to say that if we are going to fund Catholic schools due to a historical deal that doesn’t reflect the reality of our demographics today, other faith-based schools should be funded too. I make this statement with the proviso that they should have to follow a standard curriculum to a certain point, but if we are going to fund Catholic schools, there is really no reason why Protestants, Jews, or Muslims who want to have their children educated within the faith shouldn’t also have the same opportunity to have public funding to do so.

Celebration Thursday

2007-09-13T21:15:00.000-05:00

I haven't had much time to think this week, but one thing I have been thinking about is what there is to celebrate in my life. In 2 weeks, I am in charge of the service at Ecclesiax, and we're doing "celebration Sunday." The idea is that, instead of being the angst-ridden post-modern specimens that we usually are, we are going to celebrate the things in our lives that bring us joy, and thank God for our blessings. My vision is that people will share little things - a picture of a favourite place or person, a favourite poem, a song that makes them dance, etc. Afterwards, we are going to have a potluck, because every party needs food.

Since this was my idea, I've been feeling the pressure of trying to find the perfect thing to share. I can think of exceptional instances of overwhelming joy - climbing over a hill on the Isle of Skye and suddenly being faced with the sun setting on the sea and countless tiny islands; catching fjordmania with Simone, and getting sillier and sillier as the wind buffeted us on the deck of the boat; the first time Paul and I kissed, almost 10 years ago . . .

But, I think that I want to celebrate the normal things that bring me joy. These are the ways that I sense divinity in my normal life. And so, tonight, in the midst of the busy-ness, and despite my sore back, I sit in a candlelit room with soft music playing, and I celebrate:

Biking in big groups in the dark
Making a good meal with Paul
Sharing a bottle of wine with the girls
Homemade mittens
Red Sweaters and striped socks
Wildflowers in the city
The Rideau River, when it's calm as glass
Being stormstayed when I have nowhere to go
Red leaves
Soft music, candlelight, and a roof over my head.

It's bedtime,
el Maggie out

rest in peace

2007-09-06T16:14:00.000-05:00

Last week, there was an article in the Globe and Mail on the increased popularity of public acts of mourning. Setting the stage with the mounds of flowers placed at Buckingham Palace after Princess Di died, the article talked about the proliferation of roadside monuments and internet memorial sites. Then, in the latest Macleans (or one of the latest – as usual, I am a few weeks behind . . . . ), there was an opinion piece on the opulence of mourning. The author lamented the loss of reserve in obituaries, and the change in emphasis from “funeral” to “celebration of life.”

I found the first article interesting – the idea of grief for a stranger who has passed away and of the desire for a person who has lost a loved one to grieve in a public way are both fascinating. I’ve been a reading a book about Generation X and faith (“Virtual Faith”by Tom Beaudoin). Generally, it’s full of the kind of questionable textual over-analysis that made me decide not to continue studying English literature, but last night I hit upon something that rang true – he mentioned that because our generation is so saturated with media, we see our own experiences play out like a movie or TV show before our lives, rather than really living them. I have noticed this in life in general, and it makes sense that it would spill over into our grief. If we are taught to mourn through the media, it is not surprising that mourning has become more public – that there has been an increase in candlelight vigils, with press releases sent out ahead of time, and other mourning “events”.

In the second article, the author bemoaned the fact that funerals are too sugar-coated, and avoid the possibility of death. The author talked glowingly about funerals from days gone by, in which the homily was a reminder that all life is transient, and we’re all going on to something bigger. I thought the author missed a pretty major fact here – not everyone believes that we are going to something bigger. I have mourned with an agnostic family during the tragic and sudden death of their son/brother. This family didn’t know where they thought he had gone, and were working through those issues, while trying to figure out how to memorialize him. It was important for them to be surrounded in objects and photos that spoke of his short life. Playing a hymn wouldn’t have meant anything to them, or reflected their relationship to him, but some country music from the CD that was in his truck did. Serving “tradition” would have done nothing to help this family grieve.

While the author of the Macleans piece had some good insight into the lack of focus that some funerals seem to have, epitomized in eulogies that are really more about the speaker than the deceased, I think that he misses the point that mourning is a very personal thing. Every person’s mourning experience is going to be coloured by her relationship to the deceased, the circumstances of the death, and her spiritual beliefs. It seems to me that a celebration of life can be a very positive focus for a funeral. When we lose someone we love, we are going to be sad, so why shouldn’t we dress in bright colours and surround ourselves with people who care about us, and remember the good things about the person we’ve lost?

lingua franca

2007-08-31T09:26:00.001-05:00

Canada, in case you hadn’t noticed, is a bilingual country. If you are an Anglophone in Ottawa, like myself, you are probably hyper-aware of this fact. Coming from a unilingual small town in Ontario, followed by attending a unilingual southwestern Ontario university (I am sure Francophones the world over shudder at the way we pronounce “Laurier”), I grew up in the world of dominant culture English-language privilege. In 1995, I didn’t understand why so many people in Quebec wanted to separate.

In 2000, when I lived in Scotland, many of my closest friends were French Canadian. We hung out with Australians and Southern Americans, and we all learned about each others’ cultures. It was the first time that I really appreciated that French Canadians weren’t just the same as us in another language – they really have a whole different culture. It was also the first time that the Francophones had a sense of being Canadian, and not just Quebecois. When they came to visit me back in Canada, I took them to Lake Huron, and Bru looked at the lake so big it’s a sea, and then turned to me and said “this is part of my country,” realizing it for the first time.

So, anyway, here I am in Ottawa – a wiser and more cosmopolitan (ha!) person than I was at the age of 22. In keeping with the bilingual mandate of the university, speeches given by Anglophones at law school and conferences were often begun by a short “bonjour, je suis très hier d’être ici aujourd’hui” – before switching into English. Sometimes, the accent of the person who says that, especially if it’s a visitor from America or parts more west in Canada, can be pretty hideous. I was talking recently with a Francophone friend, who finds this practice totally offensive – she would rather not have people try at all than to put in the token effort of their well-rehearsed 2 lines of French to get the language police off their backs.

Coming from the point of view of an Anglophone, I always thought it was good that people tried to speak French. Most of the people who open with the French one-liner would not be able to deliver their entire speech in French – so they are going as far as they can. Learning a language is a long and on-going process, and somewhere between the point of being unilingual and bilingual, you have to muddle through in your second language, or you’ll never get to point b.

The discussion on tokenism came up in response to a Anglo friend of ours who did one of those one-liners, and had a French-speaking colleague mutter “I’m sorry, I don’t speak English” – which completely crushed her after she’d made the effort to speak in her second language, being scared of getting it wrong and being perceived as stupid.

I, and many other unilingual Anglophones, have realized that to really succeed in this town we need to learn French. Suddenly those years of high school French (which I at least took all the way to grade 13) seem awfully far away. But this is what offends my friend – people who only learn French to pass their government language tests and “get by in this town” – but don’t really appreciate that it’s a whole language that embodies a way of thinking, as all languages do. But it seems to me that many people don’t even realize that about their own language. How many Anglophones have read great French poetry?, she asks. But how many Anglophones have read great English poetry?, I couldn’t help but respond.

I am in the linguistic majority. Not just in Canada, but in the world. Anglophones experience a great level of privilege by being able to expect that other people should learn and speak their language, rather than the other way around. I saw it in Ecuador, when people would apologize for their bad English, and I would always be amazed that I had to tell them that my Spanish was the problem – I don’t think most Anglo tourists that they encountered would have shared my sentiment. In Norway, people speak amazing English, but my Grandmother was still upset when not all of the museums were in our language. I think that it is generally bumping up against this privilege – the assumptions of entitlement – that make Francophones frustrated with token French phrases.

I am going to continue to learn French. I honestly don’t know if I will ever be able to read great French poetry, but I hope that I will be able to laugh when my Francophone friends make jokes. I am going to do this both because I need to for my job, but also because I live in a bilingual country, and I want to experience it fully. While I am learning, I will say things poorly when I get the courage to say them at all – and I hope that Francophone will appreciate the spirit in which the effort is given and encourage me, because I will never get their jokes if they don’t help me through the baby steps.

the gift of stuff

2007-08-22T11:35:00.000-05:00

It’s that time of year again – Ecclesiax craft workshop time. Last year, Sarah and I came up with this brilliant idea (if I do say so myself) to lead craft workshops that would empower people to make sustainable Christmas gifts (check my posts from last November for the neat little gift-giving guide we put together). We had fairly good feedback, so are trying to come up with a roster to run another session this year.

This has led me to examine how successful we were last year – because just because it’s a craft doesn’t mean it’s sustainable. The overall goal of this gift-giving philosophy should be to make crafts that are using recycled materials, or in some other way leave less of an environmental footprint than buying stuff. If you are going to Michael’s and buying a plain picture frame or box to decorate, how’s that lighter on the earth than buying one that is pre-decorated?

As I’ve been trying to sort through this sustainable craft conundrum, I’ve been amassing stuff for the upcoming garage sale. I couldn’t help but notice that a large percentage of what we’re passing on was, at one point, a gift. So here’s the rub: I love gifts. I love giving gifts and I love receiving gifts. However, our culture of gift-giving ends up with people having more stuff in their lives than they possibly know what to do with. I have definitely been a giver who has either a) thought I was giving the perfect gift, but I was wrong; or b) was so right that it was perfect that the recipient already had one, and I was giving them a double.

I also struggle with imposing my tastes on other people – what’s the good of giving someone a homemade recycled whatever if it’s just going to sit there and they’re not going to use it? Wouldn’t it be better to give them a store-bought plastic whatever else that they really want? I also like practical gifts - but I know that some people don't want to receive a frying pan for Christmas.

So, I don't know what to do. I would like to give something that is homemade, useful, and that the person will love, but it doesn't always happen. So, I am trying to give less gifts, and think about what I am giving and the person I am giving it to - but let me warn you that your baby will receive a quilt from me whether it needs it or not . . . and you better like it.

thou dost Protest too little (?)

2007-08-21T11:26:00.000-05:00

Generally, I don’t go to protests, but a lot of people that I love and respect do. I have participated in one official protest, and one other “rally” in my life. The protest was against the Iraq war – a march from the Hill to the American Embassy and back. There were signs and cheers, and it was all very friendly. Canada didn’t join the war – so that was good. The other rally was in high school – the provincial government was going to close down our hospital, and our students’ council organized an event with all of the students in town (2 high schools, 3 elementary) to “hug the hospital” – we formed a big human chain around it. It was a standard “media event” – we created something for the news to capture, and then talked about why we were doing it - I was the spokesperson for our school, and had my 2 seconds of media fame. The hospital survived the cuts. So, I am 2 for 2 – you’d think I’d be a great believer in the power of protest. But I am not a protestor, though at the same time I am fascinated by protests, and the dialogue that surrounds them.

My reaction to protests, and particularly those in the amorphous anti-globalization vein, has had a profound effect on my life. When I was deciding if I was going to go to law school, the Quebec City summit was going on (G-8? I’m not even sure). People that I knew went to protest. They participated in alternate forums. They were radical cheerleaders. They took indie media videos. They got tear-gassed ad naseum. And back in Waterloo, we saw the news coverage. McDonalds was vandalized. Fences were pushed. The police responded. The people back home tsked at the hooligans, and the leaders inside of the fence did their thing, coming to the same conclusion as they would have if the people were not there facing rubber bullets on the other side. All of this left me deeply discouraged and feeling like if the system was going to be changed, it had to happen from the inside. So, off to law school I went.

Anyway, here I am on the inside, but I still can’t just write off protests. I believe that radical change, from the women's suffrage movement around the world to the civil rights movement in the United States and the anti-apartheid fight in South Africa wouldn't have happened if people hadn't got out and made some noise. And I am still fascinated by the noise they are making - when the G-8 met at Gleneagles, I combed the Guardian daily during the lead up and the event, and I’ve found myself doing the same thing with Montebello. But still, while I follow the dialogue closely, and while I respect many people who are out there marching, I have no desire to join them.

I think part of my antipathy comes from my experience that the “average person on the street,” as far as I have been able to discern, feels alienated from anti-globalization protestors. They don’t understand the cause, and they don’t feel like the protestors are speaking for them. I have experienced this reaction from people I know and have talked to, and it's evident in the comment stream on the CBC website today (which is a bit less abrasive than the average G&M comment stream). I guess this is my pragmatism talking – I don’t want to participate if I don’t see it working. But, as I noted above, there have been protest movements that have worked - so the question is - how can anti-globalization protestors get there?

I wrote in response to Wheat Sheaf’s blog that protestors have to be informed and creative. They have to be informed because, by choosing to participate in the protest, they have taken on a role as a public figurehead for the movement that they are out supporting. Anyone at a protest could have a news microphone shoved in their face, and their response will affect the way the movement is viewed. I’ve often noted in media coverage that there is a sense of confusion as to what the message of the protest actually is – this is partly because when a protest is against a multilateral summit, there is not going to be one grievance, or one cohesive message. However, at other times, it’s because the protestors don’t know, themselves, why they’re there. Protestors are painted poorly when they can't explain themselves coherently – they have to prove that they are not “uncivilized,” as the Chair of the Canadian Council of CEOs has suggested.

They have to be creative because the media is going to grab onto the most sensational thing that it can – and if that is window-breaking, a thousand peaceful protestors are going to get lost in the shuffle. Protestors also have to be creative because, even if their protest is completely peaceful, it’s one of a million news stories coming in - and it has to stick.

But somehow that creativity has to make sense too – when I was responding to Wheat Sheaf, I commented on Fathers 4 Justice. They dress up like superheros and climb government buildings, to bring attention to what they see as a mother-centred bias in custody cases. These guys feel passionate about their kids, which I respect. But, I don’t know if they are doing their cause any good – their mode of protest just seems somewhat random and disconnected from what they are fighting for. You have to hear an interview with one of them to understand why they’re doing the superhero thing (dads are like heros to their kids . . .). If you don’t hear the interview, they just don’t make sense.

I don't know if this opinion is in any way helpful, but I felt like I should throw something into the dialogue that I've been watching so closely.

Distribution

2007-08-20T08:01:00.000-05:00

I might add a comment to this in a bit, but I thought I'd post it. Asad sent it to me in response to an e-mail asking how he was adjusting to life in Canada after spending close to a year in Ethiopia.
How the World Shapes Up

A woman's place . . . .

2007-08-17T08:59:00.000-05:00

The other day, there was an article in the Globe and Mail about the fact that female lawyers are killing themselves with stress. Women are literally hiding heart attacks from work because they don’t want to be perceived as weak. So, while we make up over half of the new lawyers in Canada, women are still leaving practice at over twice the rate that men are.

This is not news, though the extent still shocked me (actually hiding cancer and heart attacks . . . .). Throughout law school, we were aware of what it meant to be a woman n law. Women who were thinking of having children in the near future, or who already had children, had to decide how they were going to balance careers and family (men were thinking about these issues too, but not with the same urgency). I’ve held to the belief that, through the force of sheer numbers, we are eventually going to change the profession. If there is a need for lawyers (a debatable point, but we’ll let it stand for now), and more and more of them are women, the profession is going to eventually have to change to be a more woman-friendly environment. And, men are going to benefit from this as well – most men that I know would also like a challenging career, while at the same time having a life.

What surprised me, then, was not the content of the article, but the comments posted in the online discussion forum. I always make the mistake of reading the comments in Globe and Mail discussions, and I am always discouraged, so I shouldn’t have been surprised . . . but this was shocking. Ninety percent of the comments were full of venom – at lawyers, at women, and at female lawyers. People were actually saying things like “if you can’t handle the heat, get back in the kitchen,” and “these women have been whining for equality for years, but now they can’t hack it. Why should the system change just because they’re weak?”

This commentary was eye-opening to me. It shows (in case the McLeans “Lawyers are Rats” articles the other week hadn’t made it abundantly clear) how little regard the profession is held in by the public. That, I can deal with, for now. What I find most upsetting was the hatred directed towards female professionals – the delight in their downfall and disregard of their pain.

Something systemic is still very wrong. This reminded me of recent news stories about the shortage of women in China, since under the one-child policy, parents are aborting girls so their one child will be a son. It reminded me of the fact that there are fewer women in Canadian politics than there were in the 1990s. We’ve come a long way, baby, but we’re not there yet.

(PS – on a happier note – check out a new feminist law firm, being launched by some of my former classmates. Opting out of the established firm system is one way that young women are re-shaping the profession in their own image: www.galldinliew.ca ).