Remembrance Day

My grandfather fought and was wounded in World War II. He landed at Dieppe with the North Shore Regiment. I happen to come from a family where my father, grandfather, and pretty much someone from every generation as you go back was a soldier. I even started my illustrious adult life heading down that path. 

On the other hand, my grandfather was a teacher, my father was a doctor, I am a minister and a writer, and if you go back through each generation of Anningsons you will find a lot of similar professions weaving their way through our ranks.

Remembrance Day is always a curious mix to me – there is the fact that we are remembering specific events, there is the fact that we are thankful for soldiers who decide to risk their lives to protect their culture, family, and country both now and then, there is the idea that we wish we really could beat those swords into ploughshares and forget about war, there is the reality of those among us who have seen too much and done too much to ever forget.

Life is filled with these sort of tensions the way we balance remembering and honouring, the way we balance war and peace. The tensions are what make us human while at the same time making it easier to fight on Facebook.

Remembrance Day is a civic holiday – it has nothing to do with church and religion (it also has nothing to do with shopping and decorating, people have to let that go) but at the same time, it has everything to do with faith.

In our own Islamic-Judeo-Christian tradition we are a people of the story. History and its unfolding are what bring us closer to God and help us understand God’s will. Remember your ancestor Abraham is the type of thing you will read all over the place if you pick up the Bible. Do not forget what God did at… name a place, Bethlehem, the Red Sea, in the Land of Canaan, when the Babylonians came…

From a religious point of view we define ourselves from where we came from. We are the people who follow Jesus who lived 2000 years ago. He was a Jew and knew God because of what God had done for the people of Israel for 2000 years before us.

It is not just church that sees the world this way. To be Canadian is to remember Cabot discovering things, Samuel de Champlain settling here, the depression and cooperative movement, and how our troops were the scariest thing the Germans ever saw. Kilts and Bagpipes will bring fear to anyone on a battlefield. These are all things that define us as Canadian – and come from our history.

So how do we be respectful to the idea of Remembrance Day while still holding everything else in our minds? That is a question that church is very adept at answering – we do it all the time. The past is the past; we remember it for the people who made the best decisions possible in the time. We also remember those decisions hoping that we can make better ones now.

We do not always do it – witness the Iraq war which almost no one sees as a good idea any more… But for what it is worth, a lot of people went into it with the right motivations, especially those on the ground who lost their lives. Same is true in Afghanistan – where over history everyone has learned it is a really bad idea to fight a ground war and we probably should have talked to the Russians before we went in… but the soldiers we remember on November 11^th, they were the ones who were trying to make a difference and make the world better for Canadians and Afghanis alike.

To be faithful is to live out the ideals that God values – to try and make the world a better place – to try and promote love and hope. In the end that is what we remember – that is what my grandfather fought for.

Getting Ahead by Losing it All

Just when you thought reality could not get any more like the science fiction of the 1950’s and 60’s scientists in Russia and a surgeon from Italy have announced that the first head transplant will be happening early in 2017.

Actually they say it is a body transplant. They are giving the head a new body to control.

I have not heard any of the backlash or religious arguments yet – but I am sure they will come as we think about this. It is a most intriguing idea, one that has been around since we talked about cryogenically preserving brains and then giving them new bodies when the science caught up.

Just the idea that they call it a body transplant shows a bias. People are saying the head, and really they are saying the brain, is what makes us who we are.

Does it?

I don’t have a definitive answer to this, but there is a lot of argument and theory over the last thousand years that shows it is an important question. We could start with René Descartes who famously intoned, “Cogito, Ergo Sum” which means I think, therefore I am. In a nutshell Descartes was saying the only thing we can trust is our own mind – that is how we know we are alive, because we are thinking.

But what of this mysterious idea of the soul? Is there something about the human body, some physical and spiritual aspect that both connects us to God and survives after death? And if so, what is it and where is it?

In the ancient Greek world the soul was thought to be the home of the emotions, and of such concepts as right and wrong. Things like love and courage came from the soul while rational thought came from the mind. Later we would speak of emotions as being matters of the heart – so are brain and heart two separate parts of what makes a person who they are?

It was Thomas Aquinas sometime in the 1200’s who came up with the idea that the soul survives death – that it is somehow part of the divine, of God, and it is how we go on after we die. For Aquinas the soul was not a physical thing but a spiritual thing – maybe a spark of divine energy that exists in us for a while before returning to heaven?

Modern Neuroscience is convinced that everything we are and do and feel comes from the brain; that everything is rational thought and so something like love is actually just our brain doing a cost effect benefit analysis really quickly and telling us the reasons we should like this other person outweigh the reasons we should not. It is not a very romantic view.

I have heard it argued that the appendix is the soul. No one really knows why we have one. Of course, mine got inflamed and was removed so if that is true then I am in trouble.

Go ahead and do some research; every religion talks of the soul, every person struggles with what makes us unique… is it really just our brain? Can you put my brain into another body and still have me be Brett? If so I am choosing Channum Tating.

But what if it is more than that? Am I more than the sum of everything I think? Does my body, my heart, my emotions come from somewhere else? What if all the different pieces are what makes me me? What if the soul is in the heart? Or the stomach? Or anywhere else but the head?

 
I guess we will see in 2017….

The More Things Change

Have you ever sat at your dining room table and looked at the things on it and wondered... wondered what the archaeologists are going to dig up in 500 years?

I may, admittedly, spend too much time in museums or at King's Landing – but I am forever thinking about what people will think in the future. Why Tupperware, for example. I can picture it now, “they made this throwaway material and then stored food in it” “What, there are so many better ways to store food.” “I know, right!”

Imagine the fun someone is going to have figuring out just what the hell a Keurig is.

It also may be a product of being a little older when I ended up with young children. I get asked on a daily basis questions such as did they have cars when you were little. People tell me I should answer honestly, but I find it more fun to describe in great detail the horse and buggy I supposedly owned and how when I was little the world was black and white because they had not invented colour yet.

But you can see it right? Whether you are 15 or a hundred you can see how much things have changed, can you not? In university I typed my assignments on a typewriter. I first learned to dial on a rotary telephone. I did not even hear of the internet until I was in the workforce. I can name a hundred things I had, or did, or ate that people no longer do. And my kids cannot even picture some of what I am talking about without an example.

The above five paragraphs are a metaphor – an example – that I want you to keep in your mind because it is very visual and very true. We can all imagine how much the world has changed in terms of what is physically in the world.

Now, take one step to the left and ask yourself, is that not true for how we think and feel as well?

When I was growing up I knew for certain that I would get a job. Hell, I could get any job I wanted. When I grew up it was expected that you were going to fall and break your arm. No one was going to stop you from getting on that damn spinning death trap on the playground. When I grew up I never met anyone that was not Caucasian. I may have never met anyone who did not have Scottish blood in their veins somewhere. Whenever an adult talked I listened and did whatever they said. I was out from dawn to dusk without my parents even asking where I was.

But there was more to it. Men and Women did different jobs. Your type of job was determined by what class you belonged to. Everything from swearing to j-walking was so taboo that you felt as if you were a gangster when you did it. Only men and women fell in love with each other. You had kids. You belonged to the boy scouts, the PTA, the Rotary club, the masons or a bowling league. There were not a whole lot of surprises waiting on the horizon – or at least, that is what you were led to believe.

We knew what we owned and we knew who we were. Believe it or not, it was more black and white. Now... take one more step off of that track to the left and let's think about God.

Within the last forty years, within the last 10 years, within the last 2 years, a lot has changed.

Why is it we are so sure that whatever it is the church and God were about 2000 years ago has not changed? Why do we think that the faith that was good enough for my grandfather is good enough for me? The television he had is certainly not good enough for me. His attitudes towards women and sexuality are certainly not good enough for me. Why is his faith good enough for me?

Everything evolves. Our understanding of the universe and of society. I just think we should be more willing and open when it comes to how the church and faith and our relationship to God evolves. What would happen if we just let go?