Christmas

Well, it is time for my annual rant about putting Christ back into Christmas.

Not that I want you to, rather, I want people to stop saying we should.

I mean, really, what part of Christmas and the real world we live in do you really think is bad? Do the people that are worried about the way we celebrate the season dislike the light shows on people’s houses which bring such joy and wonder? Are we all complaining that the music on the radio and in the mall is about giving, and loving, and sleigh rides, and visiting family and all of those dangerous ideals? What about this whole giving gifts to other people and showing our appreciation, surely that is the slippery slope to moral bankruptcy.

Sorry, I let a little sarcasm slip in there. The thing is, there is nothing about the season of Christmas as it has been adopted by our culture that goes against anything I believe in. Although, I should point out that if you really feel you need to buy someone a car for Christmas, or a thousand dollar piece of jewelry then you might have a problem recognizing limits; and for the record I would like an orange Jeep.

But at its heart everything about this time of year is good, and reflects values that we all want, that we all need, and that are in keeping with every single religious point of view; including secular humanism. We are talking about recognizing value, we are talking about giving gifts, we are talking about family time, and we are talking about feasts and parties… all good things.

The other thing we tend to forget is that the ways of the world influence our way of understanding our faith, and that is not a bad thing. Take the curious story of Santa Clause.

Way back in the early church there was a Bishop, Nicolaus, who was the patron saint of the poor and of Sailors. His Saint Day is December 6^th and he was known throughout history as the one who brought presents and filled stockings. But Christmas was no big deal in the church; just another Sunday service with readings about the Virgin Birth.

Then some American Poets got a hold of the idea of Saint Nicholas… then Coca Cola one upped them and invented him as the jolly old elf in red fur who brings presents, particularly a case of Coke… and it caught the public’s attention. Santa Clause became the centre of Christmas and Christmas became a bigger and bigger deal.

I am of course condensing history into a paragraph so you know it is slightly distorted, but consider this, before the poem “The Night Before Christmas” no one thought Santa brought gifts. Before Coca Cola and The New York Times and Norman Rockwell, no one knew what Santa looked like. Santa has evolved from Saint Nicholas because of the corporate, secular, advertising world…. But what they did was make Christmas popular… and the churches needed to get on the bandwagon.

So here is the rub, post 1930, churches started upping the ante, adding things to their celebration of Christmas. The protestant mainline churches never had a Christmas Eve service until the 50’s sometimes not until the 60’s for example…

So because the world started Christmas shopping, the churches started celebrating Christ’s birth.

The thing is, there is this feeling out there, no matter who you are and what you are talking about, that the world is us and them. It never is. Everything is tied together in unexpected ways. EVERYTHING. And when we spend our energy trying to convince people they aare doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, we are fighting a losing battle for no reason.

So put up your silly Holiday trees, wish everyone compliments of the season, whatever you want to do… it doesn’t matter to me because I am with Dickens on this one…

“There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say… Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round… as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys… I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!”

Grief and Depression

I have been thinking about grief lately as a cumulative process.

By this I mean that it adds up. I think we can see this if we think about it. The more things that happen to you, the more stressed you become, or the sadder you feel.

For some reason this simple bit of wisdom does not register when we are thinking about our life, or our day to day living, or what our friends are going through. It is like we get amnesia and can only remember this one moment, this one tragedy, this one death.

Psychologists have long known that there are life stress events. Buy or sell a house, have a child, change jobs, move, get a divorce, have a friend die, start a new relationship, have a death in the family, get a bad medical diagnosis or turn 40 and you are going to have some major feelings about it, and a whole lot of stress. Enough stress in fact, from any one of those that it might cause a period of depression.

Now, in our world, where we all move a lot, where the economy tanks, where relationships are more fragile, and where our friends are all aging as the majority of the population gets older… and the truth is, many of those things happen to us all the time.

And people are more stressed than they ever have been.

If you are at all familiar with Christianity you might remember that story where Jesus found the woman who was going to be stoned to death because she was accused of adultery. The crowd had gathered and Jesus casually knelt down in front of the woman and began drawing in the sand. Then he asked the crowd a question – do you think any of you are free from guilt? Has anyone here never done anything wrong? That person should throw the first rock.

No one did.

And we get that, we really do, all of us are guilty of white lies, or we have at the very least broken a few traffic laws in our day. All of us understand that we are not perfect and that we should not judge what other people do too harshly.

But when it comes to feelings, when it comes to emotion, for some reason we have blinders on. We think that everyone should be able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and just carry on. In fact, the British war time meme “Keep Calm and Carry On” has come back into our lives with such a vengeance that it is supposedly our whole mantra for the modern way of life.

I think we should start admitting that we all have mental illness as well. Sure, you might not be ADHD yourself, or suffer from multiple personality disorder, although having dealt with a variety of people in a variety of situations, I bet we are all closer to that one than we think… but we all have depression, and the beginnings of mania. We all have our own delusions.

Who is going to, seriously, cast the first stone when someone has a major bout of depression. Or when the situation builds up to the point where one cannot get out of bed in the morning?

The reason I started thinking about all of this was because of being a clergy person. I deal with more death and loss and change than most people will in their entire life. Some days it is hard to want to continue on in the face of it all.

But then I got thinking about everyone. We do not take grief and emotional pain seriously enough. We do not make room for it. We do not accept that it is part of the way we were made, part of our very nature.  

Buddha once said that all of life is suffering. And although I feel moments of joy, I get his point.

I guess this column is a plea to take our mental health as seriously as we take everything else. There are times when we just need to recover and there are people out there, who you are walking by every day, who are having the worst time of their life.

Be compassionate. That is what being faithful is all about. 

Jesus and the Missus

Faith Today - Moncton Times and Transcript - October 13th 2012

Archaeologists have discovered, it is believed, a fragment of an ancient text which suggests that Jesus was married. It is being called the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, and it contains, among other things, the line: “Jesus said to them, my wife…”

Pretty ambiguous… but there are a lot of things we assume about the life of Jesus that come from far smaller clues.

The Vatican, of course, says this is a fake; that someone took ancient papyrus and wrote ancient Coptic script, in ancient ink and; well, maybe it is; but what is interesting is the discussion that this debate has caused. If Jesus did have a wife, so what?

The truth is that the Bible as we know it was stitched together by committee during the reign of the Emperor Constantine about 300 years after Jesus lived. There were hundreds of Gospels and manuscripts from the early church, and they chose which ones they liked best. Scholars have known for some time, for example, that there was an entire popular gospel, the Gospel of Thomas, that got left out. So it is possible that this is real.

There are other things to the marriage if you read between the lines as well. For example, Jesus turns water into wine at a marriage feast after his mother tells him they are running out of wine. Why is this Jesus job? Why should he care about running out of wine? Maybe it is his wedding.

Then there is the whole Mary, Martha and Lazarus saga which comes up over and over. Lazarus’ death is the only thing in the Bible that causes Jesus to cry; perhaps because he was like a brother, or a brother in law? Perhaps Mary or Martha was Jesus’ wife?

Or how about the fact that Jesus is called “Rabbi” a lot. Did you know that you cannot be a Rabbi unless you are married? Or the fact that no matter where the disciples go there is also an entourage of women following them; would that not be unseemly unless they were their spouses?

I mean, okay, none of this is proof. But the thing is, why does it matter? What difference does it make one way or another?

I can see that if the Roman Catholic church is using the bachelor lifestyle of Jesus as the sole reason to keep its priests unmarried that this may be a bit of an issue for them; but for the rest of us, and let’s face it, there are not many religious people that say being single is better than being married; why would it matter?

There is a positive side. Our lives are supposed to be modelled after the life of Jesus. We are called to follow in his footsteps as disciples of Jesus. If being in a relationship and being as loving and open and hopeful and faithful as Jesus is not only possible, but also the norm, that is good news indeed.

The second thing it might do is to show us that the church, over 2,000 years of history, just might have got some things wrong. You know how if you ask 10 people what happened at the scene of an accident you might just get 10 different versions? Well, there are four Gospels in the Bible which talk about Jesus life and even those four do not agree. There are at least a dozen that did not make it in the Bible which muddy the waters even more. Then there are all of the scholars and Biblical critics, and preachers who over the years have added their own flourish and twists…

Maybe we need more discussion. Maybe we need more investigation. Perhaps we need to be less serious in our claims to know absolute truth. What if we took the time to look at how religious people have tried over the years to live life the best way possible and tried to do the same?

I hope he was married. It makes little difference to me if truth be known, but I like the idea that he fell in love, had arguments about the way the fish was cooked, and maybe even raised a family.

That is a Jesus who I could understand better. That is a Jesus who I could try to be more like. And after all, is that not the point?

Politics of Faith

Faith Today - Moncton Times and Transcript - Saturday September 08th

What are some things that it is not polite to talk about? I wager politics ranks up there in most people’s minds.

You may have heard in the news that the United Church took a stand on the whole Israel/Palestine thing lately. To narrow it down to the way it gets reported, the church agreed to boycott products made in Israeli Settlements in Palestine.

This made national and international news and managed to bring cries of anti-Semitism, of stepping over boundaries, of all sorts of things.

Whether right or wrong, the most interesting complaint I heard was that the church had no right being political; which is a statement that has nothing to do with the specifics of this debate, but rather about the role of the church.

Really, the church should not be political? Have we not “always” been political from Jesus on up? Jesus complained bitterly about social conditions in the Middle East. He always talked about how we needed to treat widows and orphans better. Before Jesus the Old Testament is full of statutes and capitulations about how to run countries and how to treat slaves. We are nothing if not firmly embedded in a tradition that sees no difference between politics and faith.

Skip ahead to the modern era… it was Jesuit priests who first made inroads in colonizing North America and dealing with native populations, albeit not often with the best intentions. The churches built the hospitals; we founded all the universities; and we created the social safety net.

What was the organization that started the movement to end slavery? The Methodist church. Who were most of the people behind the civil rights movement in the United States? Baptist ministers. Who worked for child labour laws, alcohol moderation, welfare and universal health care? The church.

It is not like these sentiments are out of the blue. Christians have always worked for social change; so have Muslims in their own worlds, so have the Buddhists; who, I might add, were on the forefront of the protest movement for Vietnam.

So why all of a sudden should the church have nothing to say to the world?

I adhere to the idea that the world, according to religious tradition, is supposed to be good; and that all people, according to religious tradition, are supposed to be equal. Until such a time as that seems to be the way the world is working, I am going to stand up and complain.

And churches rarely take naïve stands – just unpopular ones because we are looking at things like environment, or equality, or justice over some of the more popular things like nation building or economics.

But my real point in the end is this – everyone should be political. Whether it is getting involved in the local school board, figuring out what Fracking is and why we should care, or voting in a new regime… the earth and all that is in it are our responsibility, each and every one of us.

And the real sadness is that most of us coast through life unaware and uncaring about what is going on around us. How else do you explain that only about 60% of us even bother to vote?

Saying “don’t be political” is the same as saying, do not care about anything around you and how it is working and why. Everything in the world is in some way or another political; because we all belong to systems and those systems are all run by someone.

The United Church might take some stands that garner bad press. We might seem like we are stepping on toes; but at least we are taking stands. So, I would argue are other churches. The real issue is not that a church can and should be political; it is why we are not more political.

GETTING ALONG

Faith Today - Moncton Times and Transcript - August 06th 2012

I saw a cartoon on Facebook today. It showed a picture of the God Zeus on his throne atop Mount Olympus. The caption read, “Stop the war on the Olympics! Put Zeus back in the Olympics!”

All of those silly “put Christ back in Christmas” slogans have come full circle.

I have written about this before; but having just written a funeral, which is a liturgy that uses a pretty practiced and traditional type of language and format. I am reminded of how some people get stuck on words and symbols.

It happens both ways. Those who see Christ-mas as needing to be controlled by the church believe that Jesus has to be the centre of everything. For many people the way they see things is controlled by the language they use, or at least influenced by it.

On the other hand are the people who want to change French fries to freedom fries because of some perceived slight during a Middle Eastern war. The same folk who insist that we have Holiday Trees and try to edit out every reference that causes them to have to think in a way that they don’t want to.

Both groups are fundamentalists, just one on the left and one on the right. Both groups find it hard to imagine what the other is thinking. Both believe that they and they alone, are right.

I am lucky, I have two careers. With one group of people I can say that I am a writer, and with another I can say that I am a minister. I call that lucky, but I suppose it is sad. There are people out there who are in one of the two camps I listed above, or somewhere in between; who either know in their hearts what a minister is and love it, or have ministers all figured out and hate them.

I went to the doctor once with a problem and he said to me, “well, we know it is not alcohol, you are a minister” which struck me as so odd because I cannot even name a clergy person who does not drink, at least the occasional glass of wine.

But it is about perceptions, right. There is another group who when I tell them I am a minister get all self-righteous about how terrible I am because I am using organized religion to brainwash people to believe in fairy tales and ruining the world.

You are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

But again, I am circling around my issue. So here it is: People use symbols, language, and words in a too narrowly defined way to imagine they understand where everyone is coming from. Because of that, they miss the nuances that say we are all more similar than we would like to think.

If I say, “My personal relationship with Jesus gives me strength” or if you say “My faith in God gives me hope” or if someone else says “my experience of the goodness of people restores my faith in humanity” We are all talking about the same thing.

We use different words and different references and ideas to paint a picture of the world around us. And I wish we could stop fighting over the made up differences between “atheist” “agnostic” “liberal” “fundamental” or any other imagined label.

Most everyone believes the exact same thing: There is a moral code. There is purpose to life. People are essentially good. Bad things happen despite that. There is more to life than first meets the eye. Freaky things sometimes happen.

It is simply that we define the words differently.

And yes, there are differences. Some people think abortion is wrong and some think it is right, for example. But we blow the differences out of the water without stopping to think that on both sides of the debate is someone saying the health and welfare of a human being is important.

To quote Rodney King after the LA Riots, “Can we all just get along?”

Stages of Faith

Have you ever heard of James Fowler?

He is a psychologist who looked at things like the way children grow up and go through different stages and decided to take that research and look at faith.

What he found was that there are six stages, or ways of being faithful. There are technical terms for them all, but let me try to say it in a common sense way for him.

Stage Zero is the primal faith. Think our ancient ancestors, who thought in black and white. You are either safe or not, it is either raining or not; and it is God’s fault.

Stage One is the intuitive projective; which simply means we think God is a little more imaginative, but we mostly think God is just like us.

These are the two learning stages, the ones that kids have when they think about God.

Then we move into what he calls the Mythic Literal stage. This is when we start to apply rules of right and wrong. But they are still very black and white. We take everything literally though and we expect that if we pray to God, God will answer.

Stage Three is the Synthetic –Conventional stage. This is where we put things together, and start to believe what everyone else believes. We go to church, and generally adapt our beliefs to the majority we find around us. This is where most people stay.

Stage Four is the dangerous one… this is the Individual Reflective stage. What that means is that something happens to make us question everything, maybe a death, or divorce, and we stop believing what we have been taught. It makes us look inward and be critical.

Stage Five is Conjunctive Faith. It means that you start putting the pieces back together. You look at spirituality and other faiths and read the Bible and decide for yourself what you believe.

Finally, Stage Six brings us to Universal Faith. Which Fowler claims is only reached by the very few; Ghandi, or Mother Theresa, for example, where nothing matters except love.

Let’s put all this a different way… when we are a child we think like a child, when we grow up, we ask too many questions.

The thing about these stages is that they are fluid, they can happen anytime, and to anyone, anywhere. We all have those moments where we blindly trust, and we all have those moments where the trust is broken.

The problem comes when people do not realize that each thing is a stage. It is a place we are when life has put us in that place. And it can change. This works either way; one can be totally convinced they believe everything just the way it is, and something can happen to shake that belief. Or one can be totally convinced there is no God, and then something goes and makes you think you might be wrong.

Life is like that, faith is like that.

What Fowler does is to reassure us that each of us responds to God a little differently for a variety of reasons. What we believe at any given time is a reflection of what has happened in our lives so far.

I am glad for this, because it means I am not necessarily stuck. It also means that when I am older, I will probably be wiser. I had a friend tell me that what I worried about at 30 would not even bother me at 40; and he was totally right. My understanding of who I am in the world and how I relate to the divine spirit which is all around us has grown deeper and easier with age.

I also believe this information to be helpful because it allows us to see that not everyone has to be in the same place. Having preached sermons and immediately after asked people what I said, I know that each person thinks differently, each person hears differently, and each person believes differently. And that is ok.

The trick is accepting people where they are, and helping them grow in their own way.

Pentecost

Faith Today - Moncton Times & Transcript

Ah, Pentecost. 

There is, I think, no festival of the church year which I like better. Perhaps it is because this is the only one I can truly wrap my head around religiously. I mean, Christmas is about Jesus being born, it is just a birthday party. Easter is about Jesus dying and being resurrected, and I can’t really figure out how that happened, or what it means…

But Pentecost… The day that we remember how the Holy Spirit empowered the disciples to start the church, and how that same spirit continues to empower us. That I understand.

It is like love. Love inspires me to be nicer to people than I normally would. Or it is like creativity, which causes me to all of a sudden have this great idea for putting mustard on corn on the cob. (try it, you’ll love it).

The spirit is something we cannot see, but we can feel. It is the power of the universe seeping into my pores and strengthening me to do things I was afraid to do, or giving me ideas I never would have come up with, or empowering me to do it anyway, even though I am afraid.

So, the story says that these followers of Jesus, who were having a pretty rough time, were all gathered in Jerusalem and they were talking… and suddenly it was like their tongues were on fire… it was like everyone understood what they were saying… it was like they were inspired to speak in such a way that everyone wanted to join the new movement…

So partly this is the birthday of the church. It was from Pentecost on that people flocked to hear the disciples preach. But more importantly, this is a time when we celebrate a concept, the concept of divine inspiration.

There is a passage in the Bible where it says that when we are too sad to speak, the Holy Spirit speaks for us, and it does it through sighs and tears.

I like that. Once more it is a practical explanation of how God is active in my life. God is that power that goes beyond the strength I have. The divine is what gets me through it.

Albert Einstein was one of the world’s most creative minds. He could imagine things that others had not even dreamt of. He once put what I am trying to say this way:

“The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”

It is when I stand and stare at the sunset over the Miramichi River and feel joy, and awe, and love in my heart that I am empowered to go out into the world and help others, or write creatively, or paint a picture….

Religion really is as simple as this. Jesus said that all of the laws, all of the rules, all of the sacraments, all of God could be wrapped up in the idea of having love in your heart.

It is that love and the inspiration that bore it that we celebrate during this time. Once upon a time there was a man who loved so completely, honestly, and compassionately that everyone wanted to be like him. That same spirit lives on in those of us who try and follow to this day.

Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail, but once a year we stop and remind ourselves that the power of that spirit goes beyond our imaginations; and that when you truly feel it, it will change your life.

So happy Pentecost everyone!

Spring Dawn

Faith Today - Moncton Times and Transcript - April 21 2012

Whatever your views on climate change, this spring sure seems different.

I can’t remember ever being out mid-April in the 25 degree sunshine in the Maritimes. I can’t remember the picnic parks opening up long before the Victoria Day weekend. I have even considered swimming… but when I put my feet in the water that idea quickly changes.

It may seem like it was ancient history, but it was not so long ago that people with a religious bent prayed, sacrificed, danced, and otherwise implored the gods to change the weather. Most of us have probably even tried this ourselves, praying to god for sunshine when we want to go to the beach, or rain when we want to get out of something. How about a snowstorm on exam day? I was guilty of that once or twice.

I am not if anyone remembers the movie Bruce almighty, where there is this one man who is given the power of God to teach him a lesson. He tries to change the weather, or make the moon brighter, and in the meantime nearly wipes out the other side of the planet because he has thrown off all the tides and oceans.

There is a balance that is impossibly complex to figure out. In fact, some scientists claim that if a butterfly flaps their wings on the other side of the world it changes the air currents way over here.

Which I guess is what has always troubled me about the whole prayer scenario. If I pray for sunshine and the farmer really needs rain, do I win if I am more faithful? I’m a minister, do my prayers count double? They don’t seem to on those beach days when it rains.

This may seem trivial, but what about when we start praying for a child to survive a night of sickness? What if we pray to survive a natural disaster?

It seems to me just a little arrogant to think that my needs trump the needs of the rest of the planet; even if it is life and death.

Also, realizing the complexity of all things, how can I personally decide when my needs are more valuable than the needs of other people?

So perhaps I am more inclined to be like the people who say, “It is in God’s hands” and trust in that. This is what Jesus supposedly did in the garden of Gethsemane when he said, “If there is any way to get out of this crucifixion thing, God, I would be good with that; but whatever needs to happen…”

Well, actually, I am little further along the line of thinking that what really matters is what happens after the fact.

It seems pretty clear that life is random. Weather patterns come and go; people who are good have accidents and bad people stumble across riches. I do not think that any of these things are changed because of prayer.

What does change is me. Prayer is an after the fact thing in which I connect to the divine spirit and get the strength to face the reality of my life.  So, it rains, and I have to learn to accept it and move on. I get sick and I have to learn to accept it and live whatever time remains well.

I think of God as the creative and positive spirit of the universe that flows through each one of us, to connect to it is to be able to see the world differently.

So in essence it does not matter if it is 25 degrees in April or not, what matters is how I feel about it. Do I accept it for the gift that it is and have a picnic, or do I complain about how unnatural it is and live bitterly?

The choice, ultimately, is up to me. Way back in the story of the people of Israel finding the promised land God is rumoured to have said to them, “I put before you life and death, blessing and curse; choose…”

How are you going to choose to live your life.

You Can't Make Me Go...

Religion Today Column for Saturday March 17th 2012, Times and Transcript

Why don’t you go to church?

Well, to be fair, if you are reading this you probably are, but why aren’t your kids?

I have spent a lot of time talking to kids, to teens, to young adults, and even middle age people about this; about why they don’t go, or why they don’t get involved, or where they give their money and the number one answer is because it is an obligation.

The next generations do not want to be obligated to do things; they want to do only the things they care about.

It sounds simple, but it seems to be true… pick a day, and say, "at 10 in the morning on your day off you need to go here"; and no one will.

And when you probe deeper you will find two things to be true, they don’t get anything out of Christianity and they don’t know where they fit into it all. There is no personal investment because it simply does not mean anything to them.

We pretend we don’t have answers to questions like this, but we do. And we also like to play nice and to be open and honest so we don’t point out some obvious truths.

Economic and educational class matter a whole lot. If you are poorer and less educated you tend more towards church participation. The conservative churches have messages geared to this demographic and have higher participation. 

The mainline churches are middle class and hyper educated and no one comes.

Again, it is a rubber meets the road why does this matter to me sort of attitude. The idea that heaven will bring you peace, happiness and riches sure does sound nice when you are struggling to put food on the table. There are no athiests in foxholes as they used to say.

But if you are self-sufficient, buy all the things to make you happy, spend your time thinking about social issues on your own, what difference does the message of faith make, really?

And even the conservatives have troubles now because the message goes against the general way we are socialized no matter whether you are rich or poor, young or old. Nowadays everyone is told we can make it on our own. That we should do what makes us happy. We are told that we just need the right car, or the right jeans to be popular. In fact, society is not only all about me, it is about me and my stuff.

Christianity says stuff does not matter. It drags you down. Christianity says you are just one person, that God loves everyone and so should you.

And what we have all failed to do, whether you are Catholic or Wesleyan or anywhere in between, is really, definitively, come up with an answer to this. We are not fighting back.

Why should you not be self-centred? Why should you not be concerned with material things? Because God says so? So what?

Until we can look the younger generations who are struggling with identity and purpose  in the eye and tell them truthfully, "You are not going to be happy till you start looking outside yourself", with the greatest of conviction, we are not going to convince them.

And they won’t listen anyway; people spend billions ensuring this. If cars do not make you happy, then the auto industry, the economy, and life as we know it is in jeopardy. So trust me, the auto industry alone is throwing more energy, money, and intelligence into creating a value system then the church ever could.

What we need to do, is be there to pick up the pieces. We need to accept that we can be a dissenting voice in society, but like the parent of any teen, it is going to take years of experience before they realize we had something to say in the first place that made sense.

Young people are not the future.

They will be the future of church and religion later, when their kids have died in car accidents, when their friends succumb to Alzheimers, when their marriage falls apart because of indifference and self-absorption.

As sad is it might seem, we have an answer to the meaning of life that no one hears till they are brought to their knees by the failure of their current life.

And having that answer is one of the most important things we are about. We preserve the truth of life, of the Divine nature of the universe, we are hope incarnate. And we will be here when you need us…

EROS

Faith Today - Times and Transcript - February 11th 2012

As an aside, I have been researching an article for Valentine’s Day about how to celebrate it in the most creative ways without breaking the bank. What I have discovered is that 90% of the people out there are either traditional, buy a rose or a box of chocolate type people; or they are the “scrooge” of Valentine’s Day.

In the Ancient Greek language there were different words for different types of love. First off there was Storge, which simply means affection. Then comes Philia, which is an affection type love, like friendship. Then we have Agape, which might be seen as “true love” or deep love, or sacrificial love… some sort of love that risks everything. Finally, there is Eros, which is passion, plain and simple. The modern word “erotic” comes from this Greek word.

Now, you might be saying, “so what” by this point. But I maintain that the English language causes us problems because it has so few words. Course and barbaric as it is, we only have the word, “Love” which is supposed to mean everything from how I feel about Roast Beef right through my bond with my children, and on to the person I share a romantic Valentine’s Dinner with.

Clearly, those are all different feelings. That is where, perhaps, we get confused. Valentine’s Day is a celebration of and for Eros; plain and simple.

The day actually is a religious holiday, one of the many “Saint Days” of the original church declared to honour Valentine, or Valentinus in Latin, who was martyred in Rome. The problem is that there were actually 14 Bishop Valentinus (Valentinii?) martyred, it is a popular name meaning strong or powerful.

Then the story took on a bit of a romantic twist…

Although this is not actually what historically happened, and there seems to be no such law on the books, legend said that under Emperor Claudius II there was a law that all young men should remain single, probably so they could easily be drafted into the Legion. Valentine then supposedly acted as a go between, carrying love notes in secret, and even performing secret weddings. And because of this he was killed.   

Thus on his feast day we trade love notes and celebrate romance.

So back to my opening point; as I have been asking the question, what do you do for Valentine’s Day most people tell me they buy chocolates or go out to a restaurant. Neither of which is very special in our day and age, and both of which are celebrating Agape, not Eros.

I mean, if this Valentine guy was willing to go to the grave in order to preserve our right to be romantic, shouldn’t we? If Jesus came that we might have full and abundant life? Shouldn’t we?

Religion at its core is about how we are as people. It is saying that we were created to be fully in tune with our selves, our world and each other. Christianity is a religion that puts love at the centre of all we do; so does Judaism and Islam and they do not just mean this agape type of deep love.

Some of the greatest erotic love poetry is actually found in the Bible, in Song of Solomon, which begins with these lines: “Kiss me, make me drunk with your kisses! Your sweet loving is better than wine.” And only gets racier from there.

My point is this, if we are creations of God, and if we are to live life to its fullest as Jesus suggests, then that means loving to its fullest as well. Do not let another Valentine’s Day go by without embracing some passion for those you love. Many have lived loved and lost so that we could be free to take one day of the year and show our love in an over the top way.

Not doing so would be a sin.

The Times and Transcript has made its online copy a "pay to see" service. So I am going to resume posting my columns on this site after the fact.

FAITH TODAY - Times and Transcript - December 2011

Most of us self-identify in some way. We are happy today, or sad; we are young, or old; we are male, or female.

Some of those identifications get thrown onto us, like whether we are part of the lower economic trenches or the middle class, or wealthy. When people say someone is poor, they have an image in their mind, and whether or not you fit into that, you are labeled.

Some of them are classic genetic differences that we cannot really do anything about, like being left handed; or fitting more into the world as an introvert or an extrovert.

So you are religious or atheist, right?

The best line ever in my education was this story about one of our professors. He was teaching a first year religious studies class at university; those classes are almost always filled with hundreds of curious students by the way and one very angry young man confronted the teacher after a lecture.

“I don’t know why I’m even here,” he said, “I don’t believe in God!”

To which the wise professor replied, “Tell me about this God, perhaps I don’t believe in them either.”

This is what always gets to me when I read books like Christopher Hitchins “God is not great” where he argues against Christians as being silly. Well, I have been ordained for 16 years, I went to church for a couple of decades before that, and I have undertaken four university degrees in religious studies; and you know what, I think the Christians he is talking about are silly too.  

He picked one narrow definition of someone who is religious and attacked them as the stand in for everyone.

Pick any issue of the faith that you are concerned about – were we created or did we spontaneously erupt from protoplasm, for example, and there will be people in the church, the synagogue, the mosque or the temple who will believe every single scientific and philosophical variation of this issue possible.

In other words, religious people are just as human and just as different as anyone.

I guess I mention this for two reasons: the first is that when I say I am a Christian, I am often judged, and judged in a way that is not very accurate of who I am. Most Christians for example, seem to argue I am not. 

Which is neither here nor there, just that we do not all come from a cookie cutter mould.

The second reason is that one of the things that has brought religion to its cast off state is this precise problem. People in the church think everyone has to be the same, or think the same, and act the same. We assume when people come to worship they are all looking for one thing.

Think about it, for the majority of people worship is: 200 year old music, liturgical moments where the leader does something almost magical, prayers that sound the same as they always have.

Now, on the plus side, tradition evokes emotion and allows us to easily enter into the experience. On the negative side, they are all cookie cutter moments designed for one type of person.

Within the pews of my church as an example, I have six generations of people. Some of them grew up listening to swing music, some to hippy folk music, and some to techno pop. What music should I play to inspire an emotional response from them?

There are people out there who firmly believed that moral issues like abortion, divorce, homosexuality and the like are so bad we should not even talk about them; while the people younger than me cannot even fathom why these should be issues.

And when it comes to faith my parents grew up in a world where a Catholic would not talk to a Protestant; by the time I was maturing that seemed silly, but there was no way a Muslim or a Jew or Buddhist was right about anything. For those born today they will not be able to fathom why we thought there was such a big difference between any religions.

Whether we are talking about church or culture, the one thing we need to do as soon as possible is realize that almost everyone is different. So let’s respect that and incorporate it into how we do the things we do. 

Then, perhaps, we can turn this world around.