Looking south into the Pitt Polder from Pitt Lake.

What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan

Five Canadian soldiers killed in one week in Afghanistan. Thirty-eight this year. If her majesties loyal opposition had any guts they would bring down the government on the question of whether our troops should be pulled out of that country immediately. I know that a majority of the House of Commons voted to extend our commitment to NATO until 2010, but, we do get to change our minds as circumstances change. And they have changed.

The government of Afghanistan abuses, some say torturers, prisoners. The government of Afghanistan is in place as a result of a rigged election. Relatives of the President of Afghanistan hold key positions in the government of that sorry country. Ministers known to be corrupt have been reappointed subsequent to the election by the President of Afghanistan. As the war escalates more civilians are killed and the citizenry of Afghanistan increasingly sees NATO and their own government as complicit in those deaths. Al Queda may inspire and finance the Taliban, but it is universally accepted that their headquarters are not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan, supposedly a friend of the west, but one which has taken precious little action to strike at the Al Queda leadership. The current sources of the Al Queda threats against the west are in Africa, not Afghanistan. The Taliban and a significant portion of the Afghan people rely on opium poppies to eke out an existence and NATO has targeted this crop and economy without building an infrastructure that will replace it.

Canadian soldiers are dying for absolutely nothing in this country. It is time to bring them home. It is time to walk away.

We are not fighting Al Queda in Afghanistan. We are not fighting to uphold democracy in Afghanistan. We are not fighting so that egalitarian values might be extended to women or Christians or gays or any other group in Afghanistan. We are sure as hell not fighting for a right cause in Afghanistan.

It is time to call in the planes and bring our troops home.

I know what I know

It is the day after Christmas and I am enjoying it by myself. A bit of picking up around the house this morning, a couple of chapters of New Seeds of Contemplation this afternoon, maybe a movie this evening if the DVD player will work (it has a ghost defect that has it working or not with no apparent cause one way or the other).

My previous post, The Christmas Gift, has opened up a wonderful mish-mash of thoughts over the past few days that have quite unexpectedly led me to some enlightening, and interesting and, occasionally, troubling insights into myself.

I have come to a, hence unknown, understanding that I am full of experiences that have lost little of their impact or immediacy as my life has moved along it's path. For all of my smartness, or intelligence, for all of the gifts of understanding that being well-read has brought, I do not think of myself as being much of a thinker.

Hmmm, I'm saying this poorly. What informs my interactions with the world is not what I know in the sense of what I have read or heard, but what I know in the sense of what I have experienced.

There is that lovely line in the Gospel of Luke: "And Mary kept all of these things, reflecting on them in her heart." (NAB)

I seems to me that my development as a spiritual person has been forged in the crucible of experience rather than through the accumulation of knowledge. Whether those experiences are rock my world events like the births of my kids and the deaths of my parents and of my girl's mom, or moments in contemplative prayer, or the day to day happenings that take me out of time as I am touched by others, the result is the same. The experiences become a part of me and I keep them, and increasingly reflect on them in, my heart.

The Education for Ministry program at St. George, has brought this knowledge of self into full flower. After four years of taking the program and half a year of mentoring and all that I have learned in that time, I believe less of our creeds than I would have thought possible while remaining a Christian, yet my faith is greater than it has ever been.

Most of the touchstones of my earlier faith have become quite insignificant.

Was Jesus God? did he do miracles? did he rise from the dead? do you need to be a Christian to be saved? is there life after death? are heaven or hell places?

To all of these and more I am inclined to say no, or at best, it doesn't matter.

Yet for that, I know that my Christian tradition has led me to experiences where I can say..I believe in one God, creator and steward of heaven and earth, most clearly revealed to me through Jesus and existent on earth through this glorious Spirit that invades our hearts and enables our actions.

It seems that in today's world right belief is required to be based on proofs. Whether those proofs are scientific or apologetic or charismatic is not important as long as you can shore up your beliefs with something that can be dressed up as a proof.

I guess that I am out of step. I know what I know to be true. It is a funny world...

The Christmas Gift

The beginning of Christmas week. Where has this year gone? It seems to me that thought comes with more frequency as the years pass.

We have lit the forth Advent Candle at church, the sandwich ministry has served the pre-Christmas December meals, the Live Nativity and the Christmas Pageant were great successes and the presents are wrapped and the cards mailed.

Now, all of these wonderful and necessaries being done, the anticipation of the celebration of the Light come into the world begins to take hold.

This is a wonderful part of my year, when, all of the stuff that precedes Christmas being dealt with, there comes a moment during a day when my heart lets me know that it is opening itself in anticipation of, in yearning for, the gift.

This moment is not only with me at Christmas, what a poor thing that would be. But, while those moments of God revealed within come with pleasing irregularity throughout the year, that moment at Christmas is Christmas.

I do not have the combination of education or skill to explain the nature of this gift, this experience. I suppose, even if I had such talents that I believe God to be inexplicable and the experience of God to be something that cannot be communicated well in words.

Here is the closest that I can come, by describing everyday incidents that mirror and approach the anticipation and then the gift that my faith gives me, always at Christmas, occasionally at other times:

When Laura was pregnant with Eli and her time came around she had a very difficult labour. Hour upon hour in the hospital, me alternately raging at the doctors to do something and fearing that what was happening was not OK and occasionally being possessed by rather unkind thoughts towards the imagined object of the delay (Laura). Always, entwined about this maelstrom of feeling, a space, an until then unknown emptiness, and the anticipation of that space being filled.

And then, after what I recall totalled twenty-three hours of hard labour the fear born of the suddenness of the nurses wheeling Laura down the hall with great speed and the hurried words of another nurse explaining-we'll do a c-section, don't worry, she'll be OK.

In a bit they came and got me and said that Laura was fine and I looked into the plastic box that Eli lay in, pink and wrinkly and still sticky with yellow and red stuff, and the hole inside was filled. God, was it filled. Overflowing, uncontainable, laughing, crying. Joy? Tenderness? Completion? I don't think that there are words to describe that which filled me such that me was no more for those moments.

And it was no less a decade and a half later when Patty brought Jessica, and two years after that, Alley, into the world.

Life is not always about new babies and such, so I'll tell you about the other experience in my life that mirrors the gift of Christmas.

My mom, Fran, had a tough time with cancer at the end of her life. God but it ate her away. At the end mom was in hospice and the family was gathered and the time came around and she took one last breath and was gone.

The nurse came to do her necessaries and, in what seemed like no time at all, the family left.

I sat beside this old woman whose body had borne me, whose arms and warm bosom had comforted me, whose hopes and prayers had lifted me up, and within me a desolate foreboding, a dreadful anticipation of her passing, an overwhelming fear, all of which I had secretly harboured all the days of mom's illness, was subsumed within a flood of joy, of thankfulness, of the rightness of this moment. What filled me was such that for those moments I was no longer me and all that I was was the gift of this woman's life and a companion with her in her passing.

I rested with my mom for a bit until our moment was broken by one of the hospice nurses who came in and, sitting beside me, asked if I was OK. Yes!

Then she took my hand in hers and I was blessed with yet another experience, different, yet the same as that which followed mom's death and which accompanied the births of my children.

And which graces me every Christmas, and sometimes in between.

God bless you all. Merry Christmas

You'll have to click on this photo to make out the detail blending into the road. This Heron is not likely to make it through it's first winter if it keeps up the behaviour it evidenced when I took the photo. First sight of it, it was wandering through a plastic culvert. Wandering is not really editorial. Not an apparent care in the world. Stumbling, squawking, and noisily flapping. Trying, in my opinion to attract every coyote within half a mile. Sheesh!!! After I snapped the photo I walked up to within about four feet, at which point the bird flapped and croaked and then took to the air. Natural selection looking for a place to happen.

It is pretty cold outside these days, at least by west coast standards. Pretty tough times for the homeless who live in our midst.

There is a petition going the rounds at church these days calling on the government to decriminalize prostitution and to criminalize the actions of the Johns who pay for the services of prostitutes. It does seem to me like knee-jerk thinking. The social conditions that foster and sustain the sex trade will not be significantly challenged by changing the laws. As a society we seem incapable of engaging with the underlying conditions that lead men and women into prostitution. Even more incapable of changing the mindset that sanctions the actions of those who use prostitutes. The petition being what it is it is pretty hard to say no to the request to sign. The implication in a no is that one either supports prostitution or sanctions the status quo.

idle thoughts

November is about over and Christmas is near. Whew!!! where has this year gone?

Most of the post-harvest cleanup at the farm is done. Another year...

Alley is off visiting Jessie in Nova Scotia. I'm glad that she could work in the trip before starting a new job. That work-a-day thing pretty much gets in the way of cross country family visits.

I spent the better part of today cleaning the carpets in the house. Well, in truth I cleaned half of them. Moving bookcases and such out of the front room required moving the books and albums and I couldn't resist stopping to look through the old photos and spending more than a few moments delving into books that haven't come to hand for a time. I can hardly call this exercise procrastinating. Or is it that I won't call it such? When pushing 60, one should seek out moments to indulge in visiting memory lane.

Alley is going to move into her new suite in Poco on the fifteenth of December and I will have to get used to being an empty-nester. Should be a challenge. I don't think most of us really engage with the concept of being alone until we are.

Sheila's cancer has moved into yet another nasty stage and this winter will be long for the whole family. I think that she and Dick have been married for almost fifty years. It is a blessing to them both that they are together.

Well, this is bordering on maudlin, so I'll put it to bed and head there myself.

another harvest

This can will hold about 60,000 pounds of cranberries when full. Sounds like a lot. This year harvest came in at about twenty percent less than last year. The joys of farming! We pulled off about two hundred and forty thousand pounds of berries, which is fifty thousand below 2008. Trash and rots were high and the price is low.

Oh well, as farmers are wont to say, next year will be a new year.

I am attending a series of seminars in North Vancouver on Contemplative Prayer. The program rises out of the work of Fr. Thomas Keating, a Trappist monk from Snowmass, Colorado. The material is a loving exposition and extension of an ancient tradition in Christian practice. One of my many guides in recent years has been Thomas Merton, also a Trappist, and the work of Brother Keating encompasses much of the personal journey of Merton.

Given the precarious state of the farm's affairs I have taken a layoff for the balance of the winter. I expect that, in between seeking work, I will spend a good part of the winter doing small stuff at the farm to pass the time and in anticipation of my recall in late winter. Thank God for Canada's Employment Insurance program. I am not certain that the powers that be at EI would understand the concept of me working for no money during a layoff, but just ignoring the day to day necessities on the farm while I await recall seems wrong to me. Of course I will seek a like position in the cranberry community during the winter, but it's not likely that anyone will be hiring before my expected date of recall.

My friend Sheila's cancer has entered a new and difficult stage. She is such a strong person, physically and in faith, and is doing much more than just coping with this new reality. I do wonder at the strength that adversity reveals in folks who are tested beyond what seem bearable limits.

Alley has finished her care aide course and will now begin looking for work in the real world. Jess continues her piano teaching in Sackville, Nova Scotia. She called a couple of days ago to report fresh snow on the ground. I remember the wonders of first snow and am excited that she is experiencing them.

Well, enough of this for now...