Farm stuff

Well, spring has definitely sprung at the farm. The last two weeks have seen us finalize the re-planting of three and a half acres and get started on spraying Callisto on the fields.

Callisto is a herbicide and we are trying a new application method in the hopes of cutting back on the work load that comes with wiping weeds in the summer.

Last year we spot treated the weedy patches in May and then had a tremendous growth of Yellow Loosestrife, Sheep Sorrel and buttercup throughout June. Mid-July is when the pre-harvest interval for Callisto kicks in so the only way to deal with the infestation was to wipe.

The tool for wiping is a hollow tube shaped like a hockey stick. On the blade it has a bit of absorbent material that that the mixture of Roundup and water in the handle weeps out through and which is wiped on the tops of the weeds. Very laborious, particularly in thirty degree weather.

This year we are spraying all of the vines and early weeds and will repeat the treatment after about two weeks. We shall see if this works to control the problem.

Daughter Jessie is following true love to Halifax on Monday. I must say that my feelings are very mixed about the move. Joe is a good guy and it is apparent that they are deeply in love with each other. He has a great opportunity back east and his family is in New Brunswick, so there will be some support for them there. On the other hand, I will miss the girl something fierce.

Alley starts college on Monday. Now this is good news. She is just coming up on the first anniversary of her graduation from high school and has not shown a lot of interest in getting a job or going to school. The course is training to be a care aid in hospitals and she seems really enthused by the prospects it will offer her.

Well, that should be enough for now.

EfM Quiet Day

Yesterday was a Quiet Day at St. Dunstan, Aldergrove, for Education for Ministry students from the lower mainland. What a wonderfully powerful prayer experience.

At my home parish, St. George, in Maple Ridge, we are blessed with a rector who tries out many different services throughout the year. Our central service at 10AM on Sunday is the communion service from the BAS. Every Thursday and at 8:30 AM on Sundays we have communion from the old Book of Common Prayer. Once a month we have an evening Taize style service. Two or three times a year we have an Ionian style service. At least a couple of times a year we have a Stations of the Cross service. Then there is Evensong, The Blessing of Pets, Maundy Thursday and a host of other Occasional Services. All of these I have at times treasured, but the impact of the Quiet Day and the service that framed it was on a different level from what I have grown to think of as regular worship.

Perhaps this was because, as EfM has been drawing to a close, I have felt some, for me, portents of a change of direction in my faith journey rearing up beneath my daily rituals.

I am not certain. What I am certain of is the deep impact of the silent experience of that day. Such a wonderful reward for attending!

Why is Canada in Afghanistan?

With the 117th Canadian now dead in Afghanistan it is past due time to ask, what are we doing there.

Most of us know that the Taliban government of Afghanistan gave aid and support to Al Queda and that this support was instrumental in allowing Osama bin Laden to plan and carry out the attacks against the United States on September 11.

The punishment for that support was an all-out assault on the Taliban, led by the United States, and the removal of the Taliban as the governing authority. Unfortunately no one thought to follow up on that victory by building hospitals, schools and the other civil projects that might have won over the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan.

That being said, the Taliban is no longer in power in Afghanistan. They have been replaced by a consortium of folks who appear to be uniformly corrupt and whose leadership of the nation would likely qualify it as a failed state were it not for the economic and military presence of Nato on the ground.

The current government of Afghanistan seems to share few of the values of those nations that prop it up and without them showing some movement towards those values we have fallen into the unfortunate circumstance of supporting the lesser of two evils.

The question that I ask myself is, why.

Afghanistan is currently in the midst of a civil war. The Taliban is attempting to overthrow by force a government that owes it's existence to the overthrow of the Taliban government by force. It appears from media reports that Al Queda, in Afghanistan, is pretty much irrelevant.

Why are we taking sides?

Today a group of women who were peacefully protesting the proposal to implement Sharia law in Afghanistan were stoned by militant counter protesters who think women should be under the absolute control of their fathers or husbands. Not all that long ago a woman in Afghanistan who was raped multiple times was charged with a number of crimes that resulted either from her allowing herself to be raped, or being so provocative that the men were forced to rape her or....well, who knows what she did wrong.

Canada should not wait until 2010 or 2011 to leave Afghanistan. We should just leave. Now.

We are not on the side of the good guys in this conflict. We are enabling despots and misogynists and in doing so we are participants in their crimes against their own people. It is time to let these folks sort out their own problems. If the winner of their ongoing dispute is willing to meet certain international standards of conduct we should support them as we are able. If they are not wiling to meet those standards, we should do everything possible to wall them off from the benefits of membership in the international community.

For now, right now, Canada should withdraw her troops from Afghanistan. The country is not worthy of our soldiers blood.

Good Friday

Good Friday, 2009.

Today Anglicans join Christians around the world in remembering the death of Jesus. As Holy Week draws to a close with the Great Vigil tomorrow and as the mystery of resurrection Sunday is celebrated we start anew the annual cycle of worship that is the framework through which we mark the Christian seasons.

The importance for me of Good Friday is that it serves as remembrance that we, all of us, throughout all of the ages of humankind, have taken part in crucifying Jesus. Every time we have turned away from hope, turned away from neighbour, turned away from those we deem to be other, we have again taken up the hammer and driven in the nails. Remembering this, and through remembering doing some small penance offers the hope of redemption, of change.

Easter itself is not to me a promise of eternal life in the kingdom of God, nor is it a promise of reward if I believe, nor is it a memorial that Jesus came back to life and walked from his tomb and did recorded things within his community.

Easter is captured so sublimely in the lyric of Jim Manley that concludes his hymn, The First Gleam of Christmas:

The light that first shone forth from God, like star-fire on the Earth

became a baby long ago, reborn with each new birth.

Peace in the heart, the home, the world, it dims but never dies

and the first faint gleam of Christmas still is wonder to our eyes.

And the first gleam of Christmas, the first hint of cheer,

lights the days of winter in the dawning of the year.

God Bless

life

Six hours today putting Casaron on the neighbours vines. What a day!! The forecast was for fourteen degrees, but the high haze seemed to concentrate the sun and it felt like about eighteen. Of course I have managed to get a bit of a sunburn, not having thought to bring sunscreen. Oh well.

Running the spreader up the north end of field two I came across a dead coyote. It was a hell of a thing. The little critter, he looked to be not much more than a year old, had stuck his head down a length of four inch Big-O, probably trying to get at a mouse or mole, and gotten stuck. He must have pushed pretty hard, because a full twelve inches of it was encasing him from shoulders to nose. We don't leave pipe scraps laying about, so, near as I can figure, he must have thrashed about until this piece came out of the ground. In any event he was dead and it must have been a pretty harrowing passing. Poor little bugger.

Tomorrow the temperature is supposed to get up around twenty on the Pitt Polder and I am looking forward to taking the new canoe out on the Allouette River for a couple of hours. Spring is sprung.

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.