Eighteen days of fog at the farm. Fog accompanied by sub-zero nights and quite cool days. Fog that precipitates onto the vine uprights and then freezes, building up thin layer upon thin layer. Fog that seems cool and damp until one rides around the farm in the Gator and the dampness slicks the face and chaps the lips and sucks all moisture out of any exposed skin. Yuk!

We are repairing bird damage in our to be planted areas. When the bogs are flooded at harvest time ducks and geese and sometimes swans dally in the water and feed on any weeds growing from the fields. These birds dip and grasp the plant firmly and shake their heads until the plant, root and all, comes free from the soil. You might think this is a good way to rid a field of weeds, root and all. Not so, the shaking of the plant disturbs the soil sufficient that that soil is displaced in the water. The net effect is that we have holes in the fields that range from a half foot across to five or six feet in diameter and that are up to ten inches deep. This week alone I have moved about forty yards of dirt into the fields by wagon and shoveled same into the damaged areas. And there is at least the as much to be done over the coming week. On the up side, the head cold that I have is getting the tough love treatment in the great outdoors, the musculature of my arms and shoulders is in fine tone and I am sleeping really well.

EfM this week has seen us delving into the murky world of existentialism. Lordy, lordy, but the practitioners of this arcane element of the philosophical arts do spend a lot of their effort inspecting their navels and engaging in apparently self indulgent moaning and groaning and gnashing of teeth. Thank God I'm not intelligent enough to devote my mental efforts to such pursuits.

Well, enough of this for now...

Praying in the harvest

Today at St. George we saw off Zoe Fetherstonhaugh. Zoe was a faithful member of our community whose time with us came to an end due to misadventure.

From the turnout at the funereal service she was much loved and will be sorely missed.

I don't remember when I first met Zoe, but it was shorty after I started to attend St. George. She was a woman who spoke in a straightforward manner, listened well, easily invited one into her space and who radiated the assurance of her faith. Zoe, perhaps without realizing she was doing so, helped me in my journey along my faith path. I will miss her but doubt she will ever be far from my thoughts and in that sense the missing will be a blessing.

What is the real crime?

So, the Government of BC has finally approved the filing of charges of polygamy against Winston Blackmore and James Oler who lead a group of fundamentalist Mormons in Southeastern BC. Whatever could they be thinking? They being the Attorney General of BC and his bureaucrats.

The law respecting polygamy in Canada is largely untested as it relates to the Canadian Bill of Rights and in this case will probably not survive appeals to the Supreme Court if indeed lower courts convict these men.

Polygamy is quite common in Canada if one looks at it from the point of view of the government which says that if a man is in a live-in relationship with a woman for one year, then they enjoy a common-law marriage relationship and she is protected by property and other considerations as though she was married to that man. This notwithstanding the reality that that man may still be legally married to another woman. Then there are those cases where a man and more than one woman or a woman and more than one man co-habit with all of the circumstances of marriage applying in their lives, though no formal ceremony has so recognized the relationship.

Speaking as one who has been married three times, admittedly sequentially rather than concurrently, I am amazed that folks can maintain relationships with multiple partners.

It seems to me that the heart of the Blackmore case, from a community point of view, is not the question of polygamy as much as the question of the extent to which fundamental decisions about a girl/woman's life are made by men who make those decisions from the authoritarian position that they hold within the structure of the church community.

Raising a girl to be a woman within a religious tradition where the very formation of her reasoning process is so controlled by the patriarchal/authoritarian worldview of men who believe they are carrying out the work of God in making their decisions is hardly a practice of the development of free will in that girl.

And then there are what I think of as the icky parts of this sect's practices. The marrying of teen aged girls to men in their forties and fifties and sixties. The senior wife, junior wife structuring of the family units. The apparent imperative to validate the new marriages by means of the young wife producing offspring as quickly as possible. The absolute lack of choice given to these young women in the decisions of these old men. Very icky.

So, what do I think that society should do to deal with such cases?

First and foremost, apply the law in Canada that delivers special sanctions against persons in positions of perceived authority who exploit younger people sexually. Usually this is applied in cases of teachers who engage in sexual conduct with teenagers, but it certainly would apply to religious leaders who do such or who facilitate marriages between older men and younger women. Secondly, communities should make known to organizations that engage in the domination and exploitation of youth that this is not appropriate conduct. Whether the avenue by which this might be done would be to cut off social and business relationships, or to campaign for education of potential victims of such behavior, or to set up organizations that provide a meaningful route of escape from the sect and support in leaving it, I don't know.

I am pretty certain that the answer is not to try to beat the problem with laws against polygamy.

I wonder how many of Mr. Blackmore's and his male co-adherents of his beliefs, wives have any meaningful concept of the Canadian view that women are equal to men, that choice is a right supposedly enjoyed by all in this country, that leaving the polygamous community will not result in damnation or social ostracizing in the real world or that the single greatest support that they can call on in the world outside their small community is that they are loved and valued as human beings rather than as objects representative of a mans supposed vigour or stature or holiness.

Waiting

Snow time is waiting time at the farm. There are always lots of little make-work jobs to fill out the hours with during snow season, but as each day passes the desire to be doing the big things that lead one into spring grows. Re-building dikes, moving the pruner over and servicing it, flagging the areas of the fields to be mowed, these are all big jobs that I prefer to see done before winter begins to break in March.

Waiting seems to be a fairly central feature of my Christian faith. Before Jesus we were waiting for the coming of the messiah and since he left we are waiting for his return. My experience is that waiting is a nice way of describing the act of procrastination.

I often find myself waiting for Sunday so that I can relax into a spiritual moment, I can be counted on, at least monthly, to suffer irritation while waiting for my girls to do things that are their jobs rather than letting go of my frustration and just doing them myself, I have been waiting for over twenty-five years to win the lottery. On the latter, I think that if I'd taken to throwing a hundred bucks a week into a savings account way back when, I would probably have the equivalent of a lottery win in my account. Oh well, I am human, do procrastinate and prefer to think of doing that as meaningful waiting.

I wonder what the world would be like if we Christians gave up waiting for God to answer our prayers and started to take daily responsibility for all of those things that we ask for? We' probably stop being Christians and become Christ's.

Happy New Year

December 31st, 2008. Another year is gone. And what a good year it has been.
Youngest daughter, Alley, graduated this year, eldest daughter, Jessie started her first year of music studies at college, son Eli took some steps towards stabilizing his life in Victoria, my relationships at work and at church carried me through some challenging times and over and through it all the Spirit guided me. A very good year.
Not being much of a socializer on New Year's Eve I have spent the last few hours reading, A Wing and a Prayer, by Katharine Jefferts Schori. An amazing and inspiring woman. The scope of her vision as a bishop and her ability to articulate that vision in examples drawing from folks who's lives have intersected with her lifeline, from you and me, is quite breathtaking.
As I read this book two thoughts kept running through my head...first that a bishop is truly a servant of the servants of the people of God and also that for one who thinks as Ms. Schori does to be elected bishop must only be possible through the intervention of the Holy Spirit. She is neither conventional nor orthodox. We, Christians, have been liberated from the vicissitudes of the fates by the message of hope and that hope is so well presented in the life of Katharine Schori.
In one of my earliest posts I said that this journey that I am on had no sign posts and no mileage markers. I see now that such is not the case. Whether in the form of Kent Haruf, or Robert Frost or Anna Akhmatova or Katharine Schori, whether in the music of Alan Jackson or Anton Dvoric or Leonard Cohen, whether in the Bible or the Koran or in the Vedas, the sign posts that guide me on this journey are everywhere. Especially in the hearts of those who come into my life.
I wish all who may read this a new year filled with challenges and trials such that who you are capable of being is forged not in the complacency of everyday predictability by in the crucible of change charged by the diversity and wonder of this beautiful world. Happy New Year.

Quitting smoking

Eight o'clock tonight will mark three full days without a cigarette. Not that I'm counting...much.
I can remember my first cigarette. I was eleven years old and we lived in Barrie, Ontario. Four of us had walked, on a Saturday afternoon in late spring, up to the end of our street and then, from where it ended, up the hill that rose beyond town. In a small copse of trees we sat in a circle and passed around a Lucky Strike. I coughed and I sputtered and I knew with absolute certainty that I was a smoker. I guess I was patterned by my dad who was a pack a day man.
I can remember thinking in my early twenties that I was going to quit pretty soon. And at times in each of the succeeding decades of my life.
I can remember hiking on Mount St. Paul up near the summit of the Alaska Highway, and climbing the Hermit in Glacier National Park and cross country skiing five miles outside of Faro, Yukon, and in each instance dropping to my knees at some point early on in the trip and puking from shortness of breath, from thirty fags a day. Boyo, smoking and the great outdoors only go together in the commercials that sell smokes.
Although, truth be told, I also remember, while on backwoods hikes, finding some small cover in rough and rainy country and bending in to roll a smoke and light it and deeply enjoy the warmth of that small comforting rush of nicotine.

It seems to me that I've quit smoking now four or five times. That does not include the countless times that I've packed in the habit for a day or a week. As Mark Twain wrote, quitting smoking is easy, I've done it a thousand times.

Every time that I have started smoking again that first smoke has tasted like the first one I ever had. Ummm. It has also tasted as though I had been waiting for it for each of the days that I had been without.

My dad spent the last twelve years of his life in Memorial Pavilion, a VA hospital in Victoria, suffering from emphysema and recurrent congestive heart failure and all of the other diseases that are so often the legacy of a life time of smoking.

When he finally passed at 79 years of age he was years beyond when he'd begun to wish he was dead. A hard way to go. Strangely, not once during his illness did I think of quitting myself.

So, why now. Well, I feel the effects of the habit more now that I'm pushing into the last quarter of my fifties than ever before, I watch my youngest suck back more of these things than I do and feel guilty at the example I've given her and I guess I feel that I want to have the extra energy that has always been in my life when I'm not smoking.

All of that being said, the habit of smoking is harder to give up than just the physical addiction to nicotine. I do miss them.

If you've read this, say a small prayer for my continued success.

Christmas day, 2008. My girls are still snuggled down after a late night that ended with church at midnight. In a couple of hours they will be up, the presents will be opened and the day will settle into the annual ritual of passing the time between morning services and Christmas dinner.

The St. George Education for Ministry group has broken for the holidays and will not get back together until January 8th. I am, with a group of five others, half way through year four of the program. We also have eight participants spread between years one two and three. The Rector of St. George, Roger Cooper, is our mentor and last year Melody Goguen, who finished her year four while I was in year one, took mentor training and joined in to work with Roger in guiding us along our path.

This program, developed out of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, has had a wonderful impact on my faith journey. The most obvious effect of the course has been a new and deeper understanding of the bible, of the progression of creeds that have developed since the beginning of the church and of our story as Anglicans.

As much as I love the learning, the greatest impact of EfM on my faith has been the spiritual growth that has come to me through the process of theological reflection that we follow and through our worship together during each session. The other members of the group are imbued with such a deep and wholesome faith that I sometimes feel that I don't belong amongst them. Only sometimes though. I believe that I am brought to this gathering to learn from these fine folks, and being bathed in the reflection of the Holy Spirit working through them is an experience that transcends learning.

I wonder where the Spirit will lead me after this fourth year is finished?

Well, I hear stirrings from the girl's rooms. Merry Christmas to all who may chance upon this.