March is a month of odds and ends getting done at the farm. Here we have an image of Sage and Alley walking vines off a neighbours field. Some farmers are death on having any vehicles drive on the vines, so walking off is the order of the day. Not the easiest way to bring in a ton and a half of vegetation.

Our cranberries at Sandhill are showing signs of coming out of dormancy. The terminal buds for this year are starting to swell and the winter purple is slowly changing to green.

Next week we will start scattering prunings from our farm over about three and a half acres. When stippled, and if they take as new plantings, this bit of work will increase our actual planting by a little over ten percent. Mind you, the vines going in this year will not yield a harvestable crop for three years, but, that's farming.

My EfM journey is almost complete after four years of effort. It has been interesting, over these past three months, to move along the latter stages of the process of trying to discern what ministry we might be individually called to. For me, the more I have thought about it the further I have felt from any sense that I am being called to a specific task or to fill a new role. Fortunately my companions on this journey have come up with a suggestion that I would not have come upon by myself and I will make a best effort to follow their direction for me.

Alley had a nasty bout of pain last week which turned out to be a ruptured ovarian cyst. An ultrasound on Friday past should reveal whether surgery will be necessary to take out any others that are in her. Following a couple of days on that was Jessie telling me that she was going in for surgery in early April to remove ovarian cysts. I had quite forgotten that she'd had a diagnosis of this problem when she was 14 years old with advice to have them out when she was in her early twenties.

It seems quite impossible that in six short weeks Jessie and Joe will be moving to Halifax. Every parent has to deal with the kids moving away, but five thousand plus miles seems a bit much! Thank God his family lives in New Brunswick and will be close enough to provide love and support. I'm going to miss having her here something fierce.

This moving out and into their own spaces of my kids has drawn into sharp relief the major consequence of my not having been able to craft a deep relationship within my own life. Alone is not a place where I particularly want to spend my post-kids-at-home years. Oh well, perhaps it is true that we reap what we sow...

Enough of this maundering...having before me the choice of cleaning the house or going for a walk along the dike out at Pitt Lake, I will choose the latter.

lurking

A wet week at the farm. Lots of small jobs that only need doing once a year and that don't drag on. All in all a good week, so far.

I have just finished an audio course that I ordered called, Augustine, Philosopher and Saint. Whew!!! what a heavy duty thinker. In EfM we covered him off in half a lesson. After six hours of lecture material, a written course outline and referencing of Confessions and City of God throughout the course I know much more of his thoughts, but understand less than I did before. Hmmm...

I found the description of Manichaeanism particularly enlightening. The idea that they were materialist and rationalists is interesting, especially given that a good portion of Christianity, as practiced today, is both. The really fascinating element of their belief, and it is an element that seems to run through many of the so-called heresies, is the view of creation as being dualist. The good stuff versus the bad stuff or good versus evil or God versus the devil. Well I thought, isn't a variation of that preached from most pulpits today?

Augustine took his argument against this concept of the universe being possessed of a dual nature and put it into simple and elegant language: the whole of creation is divinely worked and therefore good, but there are holes in it similar to holes in a garment and these absences of what is right and divine where the holes are is what we call wrong or evil. I am not certain that I agree with him, but he articulates the response to the the question of good and evil very well.

Well, I am going on. In short, a good course. I enjoyed the thoughts on inward and outward sacraments, on grace and on charity. The sections on original sin, the treasury of merit, the damnation of un-baptised infants, predestination and double predestination and subordinationism, well, these seemed to get pretty far from the new testament, the gospels anyway.

I'll finish this off by sharing a thought. I enjoy reading about and studying the tapestry through which Christianity flows. That being said, I cannot think of a single person in my life that I have a relationship with where I can sit over a coffee and shoot the breeze about such things. I did have a friend not all that long ago who I could do that with, though I suspect she thought me a little tedious. There is a hidden insight into my character lurking in this thought. Oh well, I've had my fill of personal insights for this quarter of the year, so I'll let this one lurk.

learning

Today was our final day of classroom studying prior to writing the BC Pesticide Applicators Test. Lots of capitals, makes this seem very important. In truth I guess that it is important, though I believe that many of us will continue following the patterns of application that we have learned over the years are effective on our farms, irrespective of what best practices the Ministry of Agriculture teaches.

Tomorrow's test should be interesting. Our instructor has done a great job of highlighting those areas of most importance and I expect we will all pass easily. That being said, there is that little tickle of pre-examination anxiety.

Which ever way it goes, it will be good to get back to the farm on Monday.

I received a terrific package of CD's today from an America outfit called, The Learning Company. I ordered three separate courses on CD, Augustine, an eight hour series of lectures, Religion and Philosophy, which runs to 24 hours, and the Old and New Testaments.

This is getting near to the part of the farm's season where there is a lot of spraying of weeds and the hours walking the fields pass pretty quickly when a good and interesting program is flowing through the headphones. I am really looking forward to working through these courses over the next couple of months.

Well, that is enough of rattling the can for today.

blessings

After church today I headed into BC Children's Hospital to visit with Summer and her folks.

Little Summer, five years old and possessed of a vivacious and outgoing personality, started off Friday little girl perfect and finished the day in a sirens wailing, lights flashing ambulance being transported from the hospital where she had been diagnosed with type one diabetes to Children's, where she was to be treated.

Five years old and in a coma is the shape and size of a parents worst nightmare. The fine folks who make Children's work did their magic and today Summer is back to her old self. A couple of days in for everyone to understand the ins and outs of a diabetic diet, of blood tests and insulin injections and they will all be back home.

So, what are the blessings?

The love that binds Summer's family together. Grandparents who took Logan, her brother in for the duration of the crisis. A medical system that, for all of it's many faults, worked swiftly and compassionately to diagnose and deal with the problem. A faith community that rallied around with it's prayers of support for the family. A society that includes all of the systems needed to deal swiftly with medical problems that in another day would have resulted in a line entry in the family bible, died young. Thank God!

God and suffering

We have come to that time in our fourth year of EfM where we are considering God and suffering. The initial point of departure in the lesson is that the human condition is basically wretched and the question of the lesson is, how does a loving God fit into that reality. Good grief, as dear Charley Brown often said.

We Christians are so caught up in the cross, in the horror of one man's death, that we seem not able to look at the grace of his life. Not willing, also, to look at the grace that has flowed from him and through so many over the last couple of Millenia.

There is no doubting that in life many horrible, sad and damaging events happen to us individually, and also to us as part of the collective that is humankind. These things impact and then affect a significant portion of our psyche and cause a conditioning of our worldview, and so, by extension, develop within us either a reflex to compassion and service born out of grace or a deadening cynicism that draws us inward to an illusion of security and away from the call to form community with all.

To my mind, Jesus saw clearly the evil resident in the latter approach and saw also the liberation, liberation from fear, liberation from despair and liberation from isolation that could be available to those prepared to channel grace, expressed as compassion and service, and allow it to flow out to others.

Suffering is not a theological problem, how we respond to it is. The grandest and the least of all creatures who inhabit this world die in what amounts to, in the long passage of time, just a few short years. How those creatures die does not change the reality that they do die. Nor does the degree of suffering that accompanies their journey from birth to death change the reality of their few short years.

I don't think that one has to believe in the stories that Jesus sits on a throne at the right hand of his father in order to understand that through his death he transcended death. How did he do that? In his death, as in his life, he gave so completely of himself, he loved so wastefully that the penalty imposed upon his material body could not suppress the message of acceptance, of forgiveness, of the universality of grace that defined his existence.

Here today, in every corner of this wonderful world, Jesus lives. He lives in the hearts and the actions of Christians and of non-Christians. He lives in smiles and in gentle touches, in expressions of love freely given and freely accepted and in that innate understanding which most of us possess that our lives, no matter how small they may seem in their details are heroic in their scope.

Having experienced a bit of it myself and witnessed much in others I know that suffering is often present in our lives. I do not believe it is a reflection of some test that God is trying us with. I do not believe that it is punishment for being, "fallen." I do not believe that, in and of itself, it is a particularly important part of our journey. I do believe that how we respond to suffering, especially suffering in others, is at the heart of our Christian experience and at the heart of our salvation.

I truly believe that if Jesus knew of the perversion of his message that is encompassed in the current belief that if you accept Jesus as your personal Lord and Saviour you will inherit an everlasting life in the Kingdom of Heaven he would be moved to tears of grief at how lost we are.

Jesus, in the gospels is repeatedly moved to action by the force of his Father expressing through him. We so often deny that same force as it seeks to express through us. It seems passing strange that we declare ourselves Christians through our judgements in favour of ourselves or against others, rather than through our actions towards others.

Some of my dearest and, at the same time the most helpful guides on my faith journey, Roger Cooper, rector, Melody Goguen, EfM mentor, Michael Ingham, bishop, spend their lives doing the work of God rather than vainly asserting their ownership of Him or His ownership of them. All of them are aware of suffering, all of them are moved to action by the spirit working in them to respond to suffering and all of them are blessed by the blessing that works through them for others.

Education for Ministry is a wonderful program and has been a blessing to me as I have grown in Christ, but on suffering and God the curricula seems to pretty much see only the forest while not noticing the trees.