so far...

Victoria has tagged me for this one, so here goes...

25 years Ago I...
- was three years old, lived in Trenton, Ontario with my Mom, Dad, and sisters Pam, Kim, and my brother Jeff;
- I had probably just started nursury school, Wednesdays and Fridays at Dufferin.
- my best friend was Darren Somerville and our hobby was general mischief;
- Little did I know at this time that we would soon pack up into a Ryder truck and move to British Columbia the week before Christmas, 1982. Or was it '83? I can't quite remember right now.

20 years Ago I...
- was eight years old, in Mrs. Wiens' class at Little Mountain Elementary School in Chilliwack, BC;
- had just made friends with Ryan Wugalter;
- had been baptized the previous summer by Rev. Dal Marston in the swimming pool at Camp Charis.

15 Years Ago I...
- was finally beginning to lose my baby fat;
- had my nose pierced in a daring act of self-promotion as part of my campaign for Student Council at Chilliwack Junior Secondary (which worked... I won!... Oh, the ecstasy of taking minutes about soc-hops and year-books;
- was beginning an idolatrous obsession with U2 (this was the year of Achtung Baby!).

10 Years Ago I...
- living on my own for the first time (albeit with strange roomates - Andrew, a lover of Christian thrash-metal and James, a body-builder from the Yukon),
- was beginning my first year of University at the Nazarene College in Calgary;
- was listening constantly to Wilco's Being There;
- had a first girlfriend;
- had long been friends with Gabe, and Kurt and Vic;
- was not eating well (Cream of Wheat and Apples) because I was spending all my grocery money on things like Rilke's Book of Images;
- got involved with starting Trinity Church, and attended my first services at St. Peter the Aleut.

5 Years Ago I...
- Had just gotten back from almost two years of living in Manchester, England;
- Dr. Dave Neale offered me a sessional teaching job: a three-hour, once a week evening class at www.auc-nuc.ca my old college called "Apocalyptic Imagination;
- Had several crazy part-time jobs, including for some highly neurotic Lithuanian lawyers that prohibited whistling;
- was living in Calgary, first with Tim and Tamara, then Katie and Blu, then John Hadley.

2 Years Ago I...
- had totally uprooted my life and moved to Edmonton;
- was working for a perfectionistic and gifted artisan baker;
- had met and fallen in love with the women I would marry;
- was finishing up working on a project with the iconographer Heiko Schlieper.

1 Year Ago I...
- was getting used to being married, and having a pretty intriguing, demanding, & satisfying job;

Yesterday I...
- made butter chicken from scratch;
- bottled ninety bottles of homemade wine.

Today I...
- had the morning off, slept in with Krista, then got up and made French toast;
- will rake the leaves;
- may finish The Brothers Karamazov.

Tomorrow I...
- will take it as it comes.

weak, lazy, undisciplined...

I am home sick with a nasty cold. Krista is just now getting over it. I went in to work today, actually to a conference, and my boss generously sent me home. A much needed rest before I head down to southern Alberta next week: Red Deer, Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat.

I came across a passage today in The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann that hit home. It is the entry for Monday, April 10, 1978. After describing what he describes as "sad parish struggles" here and there, he admits his temptations (he even calls himself "weak, lazy, and undisciplined." - that gives us some hope, eh?) But then he witnesses to what still holds it all together for him:

I feel no desire to fight. (Where? In the Russian daily paper?), only a desire to leave as far as possible. Not out of cowardice, but out of a conviction that it is impossible to even hint at what would be the goal of such a fight. To hint at the joy - mysterious, never loud; at the beauty and humility - secret, never showy; at the goodness, never extolling itself.

"Come to me and I will give you peace" - How can this be reconciled with a never ending, thunderous "we declare, we demand, we protest..."

As a result, I feel weak, lazy, undisciplined - I realize that, "who am I to talk?" I feel a kind of fear when faced with activism (of the young at the seminary) who passionately want to be pastors, to guide. It always seems to me that it's not not needed - for if a man would see what I call joy, or if a man would simply love Christ - just a little, would come to Him, nothing else would be needed. If not, nothing will help. All begins with a miracle, not with conversations. I feel tired of the noise and the petty intrigues that surround the Church, of the absence of breathing space, of silence, of rhythm, of all that is present in the Gospel. Maybe that is why I love an empty church, where the Church speaks through silence. I love it before the service and after the service. I love everything that usually seems to be "in between" (to walk on a sunny morning to work, to look at a sunset, to quietly sit awhile), that which may not be important, but which alone, it seems to me, is that chink through which a mysterious ray of light shines. Only in these instances do I feel alive, turned to God; only in them is there the beating of a completely "other" life. I felt it most acutely when standing on Second Avenue changing a tire in a garage. I contemplated people on the street who were going home from work with shopping bags; and earlier, a mother with two little boys, all three in poor but obviously festive clothes, all three lit up by the setting sun. Why do I like it so much? I, the most non-sentimental and indifferent man (L. said!), want to cry. Why do I know with such certitude that I am in contact with the "ultimate," that which gives total joy and faith, the rock against which all problems crash?

Pope Benedict's Wit and Wisdom...

The Ochlophobist has another tour de force. This time its about the current furor surrounding an academic lecture given recently by Pope Benedict. Go check it out.

My Husband's Birthday...... :)

Wednesday, September 13th, 2006,

This has been a somewhat crazy start to school! I know that it is just past mid-night, but I wanted to write a little blog to wish Matthew Francis a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!! He's out of town right now doing a tour to help launch a new program with his work.....as I do believe he mentioned in a previous blog. Anywhoo, just thought it'd be fun to look at birthday cakes....whaddya say?
I know Matthew is not three, but I did like this cake to the left of us....
.........yup! Or how about the blue puppy dog cake above?

Regardless, I just thought I'd pay a tribute to both my husband, Matthew and to birthday cake! May God Grant you Many, Many Years Matthew, My Love.....and Happy birthday!!!!!

The morning of September 11, 2001...

...I woke up deep in the Black Forest. Well, actually on the floor of Matt Friesen's dorm room – but it was in the Black Forest – in Freiburg, Germany, to be precise. I’d been visiting Matt for a while and we’d arranged months previously… while walking around in the West End of Vancouver to see the Icelandic singer Bjork in Stuttgart, Germany. So Matt bought the tickets – quite pricey as I recall and we made arrangements to go to the show. I’d moved back to Manchester, had just submitted an MA dissertation entitled The Apocalypse of Sacred Space: Christian Conceptions in the Book of Revelation. But I was about to learn something about apocalyptic apocalyptic. I was about to witness an apocalypse (or two).

Matt and I arrived at the Hoptbahnhof (sp?) and made our way through Karlsruhe to Stuttgart. On the train we talked – no joke – about the end of the Pax Americana: Bush’s sabre rattling with China, etc. We were early and had several hours before the show. The city seemed to be built in an awkward postmodern guise: decimated as I assumed it had been by the ravages of Allied bombing in the WWII. We strolled around. There were street performers in various places, but we were unimpressed with Stuttgart’s apparent bleakness. We went and found the hall where the Bjork show was going to be. Matt bought an alarm clock at a department store in the centre of the city (first reports of an aviation incident in New York were on TVs), we browsed in a feminist bookstore (all in German) tried to use the washrooms in one building that looked public and were shooed out. We finally went and got something to eat at a Turkish kebab shop. On the way, walking through a tunnel, past some skate-punks with graffiti, I had the ominous premonition. I said to Friesen, “I think the world might end today.” It was there, as the proprietor made our kebabs, that we saw the footage. Al-Jazeerah was playing, and the first thing we saw was Palestinians rejoicing, cheering. What is this? Then the planes, again and again.

A crack in the universe.

“Are you Americans?” he asked, in English. Strange, since Matt had ordered in German.

“Canadians.”

“Ah, well, Canada’s next you know! Thirty cities have been hit so far!” he said.

I thought immediately of my friends in London. And Calgary’s an oil town. No doubt they’d be one of those. My head swam. We stumbled outside and I gazed at the sky, fully expected fighter planes to swoop overhead to bring on the end. My thoughts, selfishly, went to my dissertation. "Good Lord! Was I wrong?! – were those nut-jobs right?” Forgive the expression, but I was thinking of The Rev. Jack Van Impe and the like. (Comedic sidebar: In 2001, Jack Van Impe Ministries won the Ig Nobel Prize for astrophysics for their assertion that "black holes fulfill all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell.") This sounds like their kind of thing. What is this? My head reeled. I wanted to search out a priest, to confess all of my sins. I felt like falling to the ground right there. But the heavens did not open up like a scroll. Instead, I looked at Friesen. He looked at me. We looked at the price on our Bjork tickets. It was something like one hundred and fifty three German marks (yes, they still had marks then). “Do you think the show is still on?”

We walked around the corner to the concert hall. A gaggle of Bjork fans were standing about. The ambient noise group Matmos was opening for Bjork. It was like any other day – any other group of people milling around. This was about 5:30pm German time – maybe 9 or 10am in New York. They probably hadn’t heard yet! Matt and I walked in an adjoining cemetery for a while. A moment of quiet. We waited around a couple of hours, processing, thinking, praying, uncertain of what was to come. And then, the doors of the hall opened. It was a gorgeous theatre. We found our seats. Friesen smuggled in a small recording device and captured the whole show. Matmos was good. And then, Bjork, with a full orchestra, a choir of female singers from Greenland. It was captivating. Her ethereal voice rang out, “It’s not up to you… it never really was.” And then, in English, she spoke of hearing the news of the disaster. She said she had written “a prayer that day for the people of the island of Manhattan.” She sang it in Icelandic – a prayer she called “Gotham Lullaby.” The whole show was full of such astonishing beauty that I was given hope that the world would survive. We walked through the streets buoyed by the goodness of the people around us, talking about the show in excited German. Hearing some French in the crowd. And then, we found ourselves in this new place, this square we had not found before. And in the middle of the square was a tall column, with an archangel poised atop – illuminated. It had been raised over a hundred years before, to commemorate victory in a war. This messenger of God appeared to be standing in the “fear not” pose. And to us it was a revelation – an unveiling of a kind of mercy, an apocalypse of hope on that darkest of nights.

We walked through the park and Matt played some portions of show back. We slept on the cold station platform in Karlsruhe, and the next day awoke to a changed world.

Dutch Blitz with Genius Friends

What follows is a pleasant domestic and non-philosophical post, somewhat random...

Here's our lovely Victorian friends Mira and Matthew D. in our dining room, getting ready for an exhilarating round of Dutch Blitz. As I recall, Mira won, and Krista came in second, with the two sorry gentlemen following accordingly. Matthew D., however, raised our Dutch Blitz playing to the next level by teaching us how to 'stack' the card in our post piles... "whoa!" this is a whole new world. Sweet.

Krista took this other shot, so here you get the whole sweep of the Dutch Blitz game, as well as our dining room. As you can see, these days both the theoloblogger and I are sporting whiskers. One real joy of the weekend was, after Matthew and Mira left, listening to Matthew's 2003 cd "The Waiting Place," which is absolutely beautiful, and features this astonishing piano piece with footsteps layered over it. They also left a few lines of Czeslaw Milsoz on our blackboard guestbook. We are truly blessed in our friendships.

And, just for fun... here are some trees from our camping trip at Pidgeon Lake a few weeks back.

Krista's away at the Women's retreat this weekend... I will doubtless stay up far too late and eat too much ice cream. Good books are helping... The Tables of the Law continues to be great, and I've also finally cracked open Beauty of the Infinite. That should pretty much describe my weekend...

The Tables of the Law

Krista and I had a rejuvenating Labour Day weekend. It got started with dinner out at Murrieta's on Whyte Ave., and then Amy's birthday party on Friday night was a convivial time with friends old and new. On Saturday we cleaned and made beet borsht (with beets from our garden), waiting for our good friends from Victoria, Mira and Matthew to arrive. Spending the weekend with them was a breath of fresh air - good food and drink, conversation, prayer at Church and home, a visit to Fort Edmonton, and also reading the whole of Four Quartets together Sunday night.

My other good friend Matthew (from work) passed on to me Thomas Mann's novel about Moses, The Tables of the Law. It has a promising beginning:

"His birth was irregular, hence it was he passionately loved order, the absolute, the shalt and shalt not.

In his youth, in a blazing fit of rage, he had killed a man; so he knew, better than the innocent, that to kill is very fine but to have killed is most horrible, and that it is forbidden to kill.

His senses were hot, so he craved the spiritual, the pure, the holy; he craved the unseen, because he felt that the unseen was spiritual, holy and pure."

I am thinking that this novel would be a good companion to Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses.

This image of the giving of the Law, and the accompanying Golden-calf shenanigans in the Valley, is by the contemporary Jewish artist Shlomo Katz.

Reaching out...

The Ochlophobist has a brilliant post on the Orthodox theology of touch - matter, creation, personhood.