*this is a transcript of a recent sermon I gave on prayer

The Prayer of Faith
¹³ Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. ¹⁴ Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. ¹⁵ The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up, and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. ¹⁶ Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. ¹⁷ Elijah was a human like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. ¹⁸ Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth yielded its harvest. (James 5:13-18)

“This call to interconnected living defined the early church, and it resonates today for us, in the evangelical covenant church, as we seek to embody Christ’s radical love in our relationships with others.” (Evangelical Covenant Church)

PRAY FOR ONE ANOTHER

Here in James we find the call to pray for one another.

If only it were that simple.

And maybe it really is. I don’t know about you, but I would be the first to put up my hand and say, okay, but I actually genuinely believe that I suck at praying.

The evangelical covenant church is currently in a denomination wide invitation to participate in this series titled “One Another.” When I was given the invitation to put together a teaching for our local community on the subject of prayer, I actually had a choice, between a couple different one another topics, prayer being one and the other option seemingly embedded in an obscure teaching on circumcision from Galatians.

And yes, I am bad enough at praying that I debated going with the latter

When I settled on prayer as my teaching subject, I asked my wife (Jen) for advice. Her response- Dave, get out of your head and just be practical. Anyone who knows me knows I’d likely disappoint her here. But she knows me well enough to be on to something here. I am somebody who needs to parse through the what and the why of a given thing. And the what and the why of my struggle with prayer? As an introvert prayer makes me anxious. Praying publically, but it also represents a struggle when it comes to getting stuck in my own head, be it struggling to find words, not doing well with silence, or even wrestling with the implications of what prayer expects.

I could probably spend a good deal of time unpacking that struggle on a surface level, a topic I seem to come back to in an almost cyclical nature as the years go by. But in this case, I suspect the real struggle when it comes to prayer runs deeper, and that it’s worth digging a little to unearth what the real root of that struggle actually is.

The covenant write up seems to suggest the real crisis of prayer is found in it’s vulnerability. To pray in the face of our given reality, the reality of this world, to acknowledge the actual shape of our lives, is to find ourselves risking much, even simply in our perception, in the eyes of God and one another, and even risking feeding our questions and our doubts. I feel like that makes sense. At the root of it, prayer creates a crisis that forces us to reconcile these tensions. And in truth, a lot hangs in the balance, particularly when we stop to actually pay attention to what pray is.

Easier maybe to imagine that as personal struggle and stay in my own head. But it gains a whole different kind of weight when we see prayer through the lens of this mornings passage- the call to pray for one another. Or to pray “together”- the stakes get bigger.

That has been the lingering question I’ve been pondering over this past week- how do I get from the challenges prayer represents for myself to those specific concerns for what prayer means for our lives together. Because it seems to me that, if I actually can’t get out of my own head and into the practice, it’s the one another of it all that suffers. Which is what this series is all about.

Last week was about how love, which emphasized that love is the foundation. Love is what this whole thing is all about. If love (of God, of others) is the point, prayer seems to be a first step in fleshing that out. But here’s the thing: prayer is the source of the tension. That’s easy to see. The much more difficult thing to parse out is, it’s also the grounds by which we address the tension, and even redeem it. That vulnerability opens us up to a conversation about:

• our ideas of who God is, who we see ourselves to be, how we view the world
• the story of God and Christ that is holding all of this together.

And what we find in-between these two ideas is the one another of it all. To pray for one another is to take those initial struggles and bring it into conversation with the story.

Coming back to James chapter 5. Part of the great power of the text in terms of helping us to wrestle with this tension, is the way it can remind us that we are not alone in feeling and dealing with this tension. The first thing that stood out for me to this end, taking from the commentary I read (Peter Davids), is the suggestion that 5:13-18 finds James “returning” to the subject of prayer. Meaning, this subject of prayer doesn’t come out of the blue, it’s actually the culmination of a subject that James has been fleshing out the whole way through. Thus I decided to begin by seeking out where James actually starts with this idea of prayer.

Which brought me all the way back to Chapter 1:

⁵ If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you. ⁶ But ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. ^7,8 For the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord. (James 1:5-8)

I want to pause on that first line: “If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God…” (1:5)

The word you… “Whenever you face”, consider it joy… “because you know” endurance will be produced through… “your faith”… “so that you may be” mature and complete, lacking in nothing (1:1-4)… indicates the thing being made whole, or complete. But that you is not an I, it is, in this case, a we.

Second, the phrase lacking in nothing (vs 4), is contrasted with the ensuing phrase “must not expect to receive anything (vs 8), with the thing bridging these two realities together being the word “Wisdom.”

The inference here, borrowing from my commentary, is that lacking in nothing becomes synonymous with having wisdom. Or to put it another way, to have wisdom means that we lack in nothing. This, here in James, is what “we” seek in prayer.

What then is wisdom? As someone who does spend a lot of time getting stuck in their own head, it’s easy for me to intellectualize this word, to turn it into a statement of abstract intelligence and controlled theology. However, wisdom in James is better understood as the true knowledge of the character and story of God that comes through weathered, experiential, participatory knowledge. This is what leads to maturity. And it is described in 3:17 as having the following quality- pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, fully of mercy and good fruit, no partiality, no hypocrisy.

If this is true, I wonder, and this is purely my thought. But I wonder if the real point here is not distinguishing between those who lack and those who don’t, but rather resting in the proclamation that “all” lack in the endurance this wisdom produces and proclaims. Precisely because none of us  is whole. We, as it is with the whole of creation, are in process.

Here I think we are getting closer that tension I was talking about earlier. This idea that we are a transformed people, and that we are also in the process of being transformed. That’s a difficult and hard thing to make sense of in my head. And yet, where this leaves a liminal space in-between, forcing us to wrestle with both realities all at once, the more I think about it the more it seems to make sense of the lived life. We know this tension to be true, that much is intuitive to the human experience. We know the world, this life, contains struggle, and where the Christian story breathes truth into this picture what we are handed is a seeded tension.

If this tracks, at least for me this is where it was leading me, the subsequent discussion of that charged word double mindedness starts to make sense:

But ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind; for the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord. (James 1:6-8)

Here we find two co-existing operative words- faith and doubt. To doubt, in this case, is to lose sight of this basic truth of the Christian story. Faith on the other hand, becomes the beating heart of this wisdom that is so central to James’ view. A wisdom that is made manifest in our lives as a an act of God. It comes to know a thing precisely through our act of participation in the story- the vulnerability of prayer is our way into this participation in faith that brings this Wisdom into view.

But, here’s the real revelation that comes breaking in through James’ letter- this is a gift. This is not leaving us to fight against the tension in order to bring about the world, the life, the outcome that we want. Rather it is God’s work in inviting us to participation in this liminal space as He brings about the promised transformation. In 1:4, this endurance, or process of transformation, is something we are asked to “let have it’s full effect.” This Wisdom is that which our generous and loving God gives through prayer.

This is good news, but it also comes with a warning in the larger context in James’ letter concerning this particular community- there is a false wisdom that comes not from God, but a different power. It is described as envy, selfish ambition, boasting, falsehood. This is described as “unspiritual,” which for James’ hearers means an opposing power to the God whom holds the world’s redemptive force in His hands.

So when James goes on to point out right after naming these powers the evidenced fact of “those conflicts and disputes among you…” this is about how prayer brings these two kinds of wisdom- true wisdom and false wisdom- to the forefront of our lives together. That double mindedness that he speaks about  is given a flesh and blood application. It becomes a question in James of which story we are participating in, and what that participation brings about in the one another of it all. Where this opposing power is given reign in our lives there is, as the verse puts it, disorder. Where the Wisdom of God is given reign in our lives there is a reordering of the chaos.

This is, then, what faith calls us towards, is the Wisdom that comes from God, a wisdom that has the power of reordering the shape of our community and our lives.

I love how Amar Peterman puts it in the book Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local:

“Faith is the polyphonic hum of belief and devotion. It begins with the glimmering incantation of our souls, O God, you are my God… My soul clings to you (Ps 63:1, 8) It blooms when our endless hunger and longings meet the divine reality that God is with us here and now. Faith is the gentle vibration of the Spirit that lives in us, providing the baseline of hope. It is our orientation to God and the world. Even if all else is stripped away, the hum remains. Christ with me, Christ, before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me.”

As he puts it, “Belonging must become the hermeneutic starting point” of our lives. Or, our lives together.  

The elephant in the room. Here I’ve been dancing around the part of the passage that most often trips people up- pray for one another, so that you may be healed. What throws things into crisis more than this- we pray for an outcome, we don’t get that outcome, our faith is thrown in crisis. What James is reminding his readers of is that the thing that ultimately gets affected is the one another of it all. There is a two-fold nature to this observation however- it is also the one another of it all that becomes the healing and revealing process.

There is a more important observation though. Notice how the phrase “Will save” is attached to the phrase will raise: “The prayer of faith WILL save the sick, and the Lord WILL raise them up…” (James 5:15)

What often gets neglected here is that there is a past, present, future dynamic at play here. What’s interesting to point out is, when we lose sight of the true story, when we enter into the world and it’s story, often given the label in our modern day, “secularity,” what ultimately happens is this liminal space gets erased. There no longer is a past, present, future dynamic in which the tension is allowed to emerge, there is only the future we are left to fight our way towards. And often against the past.

Augustine once put a similar idea this way regarding the nature of secularity. He looks to bring forward a more ancient definition of the secular, describing it as the space between the first coming of Christ and the second coming of Christ. As he famously put it, we can live ordinary lives with redemption behind us and before us. And the thought I had when thinking over this basic redefinition was simply this- what if the tension itself is the gift. That is the point of the Christian life, is recognizing how the story creates it precisely by redeeming it. This is how Wisdom emerges.

So what do we do with this? In our lives? In our church community? In our neighborhoods?

First thing- make sure we are soaking ourselves in the story. Let it get baked into every facet of our lives, both together and apart. Let the hope be spoken into the mix.

Second, expect a prayer shaped life to expose the false wisdom that is robbing us of that hope. And expect that what this brings to light in the midst of that tension is the gift. The gift of Wisdom and the gift of community. The primary shape of our Christian formation is the body of Christ, and as I once heard it put, prayer is the great leveling ground. And in truth, what other story frees us to actually name the tension for what it is? What other story allows us to co-exist in community where one person can speak the word “I am not alright,” while another can speak about the workings of God in their life. Where one can be found in a deep rooted space of doubts while another is being illuminated by a strengthened faith. Where one is bringing their struggles and another their victories, one is bringing a story of healing and another a deep rooted sense of grief and loss.   

Third and lastly, recognize the power of our liturgy. If James 5 is the culmination of this larger argument, prayer begins first with repentance. Note the first part of this morning’s verse- “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another.” Confession, the turning, is the forming ground for entering into true participation with the body through prayer.

A last thought, once again from Peterman in Becoming Neighbors. He recognizes the challenge of the tension, that it can find us coming up against a wall that seems insurmountable. And yet, faith beckons us to ask a different question- “What will we be to each other if the world doesn’t end.”

It’s a question that breaks into the what and the why of the struggle prayer represents. This quote isn’t about some unnamed future, it’s actually about pushing us all the way back into the present with a resurrected imagination. After all, at the heart of this all is the similar question, “how then will we live.” That’s the invitation of prayer.

Looking back at my reading over the month of April, three things have become clear

1. I have apparently adopted a new experimental approach- having multiple books on my currently reading list but reading small portions of each at a time in a given sitting. A chapter or two of four different books instead of my usual 50 pages of  one fiction/50 pages of one non-fiction a day (when I look at my average). This wasn’t intentional. In fact, I think I know where the idea came from- finishing Hwang Bo-Reum’s Every Day I Read earlier this year. In it she gives each chapter (or essay) to one idea or reflection or approach that opens up the bigger questions concerning why we read. Some of the chapters speak for themselves, others are even designed to sit alongside contradictory notions, with the aim of breaking one out of “must read this way” mindsets and demands. The chapter on reading multiple books at a time is not only positioned alongside chapters that suggest doing the opposite, but speaks to the ways exploring different approaches can open up our awareness of how we encounter stories and their inspiration. Given that this approach is different from the way I usually approach reading, it has been an interesting exercise both to find myself quietly incorporating it in my subconscious (as in, waking up and wondering how I got here) and to explore it’s impact on my reading. life. I can say this- it does tend to distinguish which books have the more powerful draw (as in, which ones I can’t wait to return to) and which ones don’t, even at times distinguishing between when that draw comes (I might not be drawn to a book in the first hundred pages, but then suddenly I find myself looking  to cheat by sneaking in a few more chapters). There is a second conciliary impact that I think is directly associated with this new found practice though which is even more noted, leading to my second observation
2. I find myself more ready and more willing to put a book down. Which I don’t usually do, especially with purchased books. I did this most recently with Ken Follett’s Circle of Days, a most anticipated of mine, Dennis Bock’s Strangers at the Red Door, and Kate Quinn’s The Astral Library. I am presently feeling like it might happen with Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know. But if I was to entertain the positive end of this equation, there is a certain liberation with learning how to do this without regret.
3. Thirdly, it would seem my year continues the trend of reading stories that pair well together. For example, I could not have imagined a more timely one-two punch than Why I Am Not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer by Christopher Beha and Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art and the Path of Unknowing by James K.A. Smith. Beha’s answer to the question of the title utlimately ends on the classic The Cloud of Unknowing, and Smith’s book makes that his starting point. Or my presently reading The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi by Boyce Upholt and Eddy L. Harris’ Mississippi Solo: A Memoir. No Two Persons by Erica Bauermeister blends perfectly into my currently reading of Libby Page’s This Book Made Me Think of You. The Library of Lost Maps pairs with a book I finished last month, This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why it Matters). The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection, leads to my currently reading Our World in Ten Buildings: How Architecture Defines Who We Are and How We Live. Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local by Amar D. Peterman fits well with the similarly themed (on the act and power of communion) Feasting on Hope by Hannah Miller King. For whatever reason, I find this following my reading year as a visible pattern, often without realizing it until I’m a decent way into the book. It’s something I am really enjoying.

The Books

The Library of Lost Maps: An Archive of a World in Progress by James Cheshire, started things off with the real life journey of this accidental stumbling across a treasure trove of old and forgotten maps that tell the story of the unfolding of Western history by way of the map’s particular shaping of a world both with particular fixed context and in flux. As an armchair lover of maps, I always find the ways in which they shape and tell the movement of history fascinating, and the book has the look and feel of a grand old treasure hunt.

Speaking of book pairings, much of this fits well with two choices on my currently reading list- The Discovery of Britian: An Accidental History by Graham Robb, in which his own stumbling into a paradigm shifting encounter (in his case with the landscape) reshapes popularized histories and understandings of Britian, and Europe: A New History, which of course reaches more broadly into the shaping of an idea connected to this particular space.

I had a good time with The Faraway Inn by Sarah Beth Durst. It’s a breezy comfort read indicative of the type of magical realism (or low fantasy) that helps reimagine the world as a place where our struggles can meet whimsy, wonder and delight. It also delves into themes such as family, lostness, and love, following a young woman in flux as she uncovers some of the secrets and dynamics of her family’s past and discovers her place in it’s present. On a different front, and certainly geared much more towards a younger audience, Oscar and the Mystery of the Glowing Orbs by Don Everts does something similar with the motif of found family.

If those themes might be given a practical lens through which to apply them to our everyday lives, a book like Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices For a Whole and Holy Life by Grace Hamman really opens up the relationship between the expectations and demands of the world and genuine transformation. One of the great insights it afforded me is considering how virtues and vices essentially belong to the same idea, operating and functioning together as a nuanced picture of the way they bring us to growth. What lies behind our sense of virtues is the equal presence of vice, and it is equally true to say that whatever we consider virtuous (or good) also, by it’s nature, causes harm. This is what the old paths can reveal, is a way beyond virtues as moralism and measure and towards the idea of practices embedded in actual transformation of self and world.

Or the even more stridently practical Becoming Neighbors: The Common Good Made Local by Amar D. Peterman, a small book with a powerful punch. I left this one saying that I know I will be returning to it, and my best advice would be to buy a copy and bring your highlighter. If you are looking for a book that gives flesh and blood to the idea of community and relationship bound together through our disagreements and, equally so, our convictions, this is essential reading.

Speaking of connection and belonging, The Bridge Between Worlds: A Brief History of Connection by Gavin Francis proved to be a bit of a mixed bag, but it’s central conceipt- that places are bound together by bridges, and those bridges can tell the stories of the different elements of our connections across place and time, is compelling enough to keep it afloat. The unfocused nature does strand it’s naming of bridges with a particular conception or idea (such as The Bridge of Immortality, or The Bridge of Home, or the Bridge of Commerce), preventing it from becoming fully realized as an idea, but it is a reminder that who we are (and what this world is) is intimately connected to our sense of place. and time.

In it’s own way, having picked up and read 101 Fascinating Canadian Film and TV Facts by Thom Ernst after attending a seminar on the history of Canadian film, it’s a reminder of how essentially every subject can be a window into world history in it’s own way (be it bridges or be it cinema). And in many ways, I am who I am and the place I occupy is what it is because of theses “facts,” which was a fun romp through the emergence of cinema and screen within our borders.

Bridges of course would denote the importance of crossing borders all the same, which is something that I found in Recovering Paul’s Mother Tongue by Susan Grove Eastman. I’ve been working on fixing a major blindspot by filling in Eastman’s work, and I’ve been loving it thus far. The father tongue, as Eastman explains, denotes the language of the dominant power within our present context shaping public discourse. It creates a gap between the subject and the self for the sole purpose of finding a cohesive and collective idea that allows us to progress a given society. The mother tongue is the art of conversation, or turning together. It is the private language that binds the intimate forms of our relationships and our communities. These two things form a coexisting marriage that allows us to understand the nature of these connnections between space and time. Not inconsequentially, it is also the only way to truly get at a proper portrait of those things that are lost in time and yet remain profoundly important (in their interpreation) to us in this present moment. One of the powerful things that emerges from this concerning Paul is the way it also helps address one of the biggest point of controvery embedded within Pauline scholarship- the relationship between Paul as Jew and his ministry to the Gentile world. Here both father and mother tongue help shed light on how and why so much of this hotly debated subject requires us to learn how it is that Paul existed with both forms and language at the same time (as we all do).

And hey, if you want a fun way to play this same idea out, New York City Coffee: A Caffeinated History by Erin Meister reflects this same idea in telling the history of New York City through it’s relationship to coffee. Here broader movements and narratives meet with the particular stories of pioneers, coffee shop owners and communities and businesses. Or the cross-cultural movement in Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton, where it documents the real life story of Dalton’s chance encounter with a live Hare, something that opens up a world she never knew existed, and even teachers her about her own sense of personhood and understanding of humanity.

It’s interesting to compare the weightiness of The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery, another blindspot I checked off my list, with the breeziness of The Faraway Inn. Both appeal to a sort of magical realism, a conceipt rooted in the existence of a particular place that opens up a world previously unseen. In The Blue Castle it is a wanted escape from reality. In The Faraway Inn it is an unexpected answer to the existential wrestlings with reality. For Montgomery’s richly sacrastic protagonist (the way she responds with such stark cynicism in the face of a dire and fatal diagnosis- the book’s premise is built around a woman whom finds out she has a year to live- I found to be deliciously irreverant), reality is the pull where the the veil is suddenly lifted on the way the world actually is leading to a life of endless expectations and motions being left to feel startingly and uncomfortably meaningless. There is a transofmation that takes place, to be sure, but in The Faraway Inn we begin with an inate awareness of that cynicism and move towards a different kind of unveiling. Both in their own way can tell a journey towards a similar place, just by way of very different paths.

I’m thinking here too of If Only Love: A Memoir of Second Chances by Shelley Staywell and This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page (again, unexpected pairings). Staywell’s memoir is built around encountering a set of letter’s after a devastating loss that tells a story not just about the loss and the past that now holds it under lock and key, but about her. In No Two Persons, Page is telling a story of a woman encountering an unexpected gift in the form of books in the wake of her own devastting loss that opens up the story not just of the loss and the past, but of her own self. Speaks to the ways in which everything exists in relationship.

Speaking of that skepticism and cynicism that Montgomery so wonderfully brings to life, two of my favorite reads of the year thus far came in April with Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian by Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman, a book that reminded me of why I remain so enchanted with the Inklings- the art of debate and charged discourse across diffferences as a means of forming relationship has become lost to (and on us) today where it has become synonymous with online discoourse, and it was so wonderful to come across a flesh and blood example of such a thing alive and well today. And Why I Am Not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer by Christopher Beha. While I have written elsewhere about what this book means to me, in giving voice to my own story and journey, words don’t suffice. This is the sort of book that helped me to understand my own self better, precisely because it understood my journey. It asked my questions. It went through similar struggles. It found similar paths through when it comes to facing cyncism and skepticism head on and seeking a rational way forward. I am extremely grateful to it for this. As a sweeping treatment of the history and development of continental philosophy it’s also excellent. As an argument for a rational approach to belief in God that doesn’t fall into the trappings of modern, western apologetic interests, its as refreshing as it is compelling.

Lastly (but not least), is my token comfort read in Twighlight Falls (Shady Hollow #4) by Juneau Black. I’ll be sad when the series is done. Another murder, more small town drama, more exploits between the city dwelling creatures, and of course more coffee.

It’s also worth throwing The Gospel According to Mark by James R. Edwards into the mix. I’ve been working through that one since December, and finally finished it along with The Gospel of Mark itself. We do have different theological dispositions, but that should not diminish Edward’s scholarly work. Sitting within a conservative, reformed tradition, that certainly does bleed through along the way, but the attention to the history and the scholarship is equally on display, in some really exceptional portions on textual criticism as well. The biggest thing I took away- his idea of the parallel narrative threads in Mark, briging together a way of reading that sees Mark telling the story of Jesus (the passion narrative), the story of his readers (the post resurrection/new creation narrative), and the story of Israel (the cosmic narrative) all at the same time. One can read it as though it is telling the story of Jesus from his emergence to his resurrection, and one can similtaneously read it as though the opening words are telling the story of it’s readers situated within the new creation. The beginning of the Gospel, as it begins, can read equally from both fronts. Holding this together is the story of Israel, which gives it that cosmic focus. The more I have been applying this, the more it has been coming illuminated and alive.

While certainly a primary aim of reading is the act and interest of understanding the other, be it a perspective, person, or story that is different than your own, one of the great joys of reading is also finding those stories and voices that allow you to feel seen and understood. Even better (in my experience anyways) when it arrives completely unexpected.

This was the case with Christopher Beha’s recent book, Why I Am Not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer, a book that I am in the middle of re-reading. A book that, upon first glance, might appear to be yet another tired entry into the world of christian apologetics, rife as it is with intentional and targeted polemic. Turns out that’s not what this book is. At all.

This is, in fact, a book I wish I could put in the hands of all of my atheist friends- more than that even; all of my “friends,” as a way of saying here, if you would like to understand my own journey, my own path, read this, the basic thrust of what I am arguing for and against. A book which, in it’s introduction alone, seems to capture my journey nearly beat for beat, so much so that it left me certain now that I, with a life time of feeling like I have never truly “belonged” anywhere, exist as a type. That sounds like a negative, but trust me when I say it was a liberating revelation, if indeed I could qualify it as such. And yes, I use the word nearly with intent, as there are subtle nuances that distinguish us, certain questions I follow with more vigour than he does, and small points of departures in terms of where this shared journey lands. But I can’t remember the last time I’ve had such a mirror held up to this extent and this degree. That’s something I am deeply grateful for.

At it’s heart, the book walks through the history of continental (western) philosophical development. Not as an information dump, but as a way of mapping his particular pathway by way of his particular questions, engaging with the studied and analyzed philosophical threads. It seeks to caputre the lay of the land for what it is so that any move into the larger interests of a rational discussion about God and reality and empiricism can be held in check. Whether we recognize it or not, and whether we like it or not, modern atheist-religion debates are birthed from the same soil.

One of the things Beha captures with an especially astute voice and hand is the way these philosophical roots become the thing that ultimately sets him in express conflict with his honed and articulated atheism. It brought me tumbling back to those moments in my own life where, equipped with the thing that had promised to liberate me from religion, and in-particular Christianity, I suddenly found myself face to face with a re-molded and re-casted dogmatism closed off to inquiry. In short- I found myself face to face with angry atheists reacting against the very same thing that had supposedly energized their own weaponized empiricism- that history of philosophical development.

Why the reaction? Because those same philosophical voices, when cited back to the ones that claimed them as their own, challenged their tightly guarded positions. The real problem was, for this particular expression of atheism in this particular point in history, it would seem it became commonplace for the actual tensions and divide apparent within these philosophers, largely between materialism and dualism, to get swept under the rug in favour of expressed positions that refused to attend for either while trying to retain both in service of defeating the basic claims of relgious belief.

It’s in chapter sixteen (The Artist Forming the Work) that Beha really made this come alive for me, where he moves into Kant’s “greatest atheist disciple,” Schopenhauer, set as it is against Hegel’s great reconstruction efforts (of metaphysics).

Like Beha, Schopenhauer found me on my journey through his express interest in not just the what by the “why” of things (which he understood as “the mother of all sciences”). That is, any coherent and rational discussion about reality cannot be content to simply appeal to the commonplace rhetorical device of the “I don’t know,” but must be willing to atend for the nature and shape of knowledge itself. It is the why question that bridges any concern for the empirical with the intuition of the lived life, and it is on this level that Shopenhauer “believes that the nature of sufficient reason has been consistently misunderstood” within an incoherent appeal to how it is that we know anything at all (his exploration of the relationship between object and subject, or the notion of all things in relationship, stemming from the relation between the will and representation).

Now, not to get lost in the nuances of Schopenhauer’s particular philosophical interests and development, there are three central points that overlap with my own story of first encountering that resistance within my newly adopted atheist communities (armed as we were with the Bertland Russell’s and the famed Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris/Dennett four horsemen). The first is this:

• “(In Schopenhauer’s view), if our sense of ourselves as freely acting will is inconsistent with our picture of material reality, we should not assume that the former must yield to the latter.”
• Schopenhauer’s appeal to a world that is, in reason, not ordered nor rational, and more importantly represents “a kind of thoughtless, meaningless pulsing,” and through it’s representation, “an endless parade of suffering.”
• “For Schopenhauer (and critical to much of his thought), there can never really be an ethical “ought,” so one can’t exactly say that it’s “wrong” to take one’s own life, but one can say with certainty that it is no way to escape the problem of the will. For suicide is a preeminent act of the will (in Schopenhauer’s express definition of that term). The appropriate response to the reality of existence is instead a kind of stoic quietism. The will’s “self-elimination,” comes not by suicide but by resignation: “This is the ultimate goal, and indeed the innermost nature of all virtue and holiness, and is salvation from the world.”

It’s the last point in-particular that stands out for me and my own journey, as this is precisely the thought exercise that I landed on when asking those in my atheist communities to attend for their own indebtedness to materialism and the implications our beliefs hold for the ways in which we make sense of the lived life. My own repeated questions, “if there is rational grounds for me to kill myself, is there good reason not to,” and secondly,”If there is no good reason, why do I will not to do so?” were questions that would eventually, in my admittedly loaded term, “ex-communicate” me from these communities. But here is the irony- I got the question from Schopenhauer, one of the central voices forming the very soil out of which these modern atheist expressions would arise, including the inate tendency for modern atheism to fill in the gaps of it’s own incoherent arguments with that catch all term- “art.” Somehow it became acceptable for reasoned arguments to replace God with art while still imagining a stark empiricism rooted in materialism as the highest order. These are the things my own atheism needed to hold to the fire, and what remains baffling to me today is that it is thinkers like Schopenhauer who offer the most coherent and rational means of getting there, it’s simply that “many atheists” find the implications of his reasoning, to borrow Beha’s word, “repugnant” (hence the anger I faced).

It should be said too, this tendency isn’t isolated to Schopenhauer. What I also found way back then is that this modern atheist expression was equally as adept at ignoring the consistent appeal to god apparent within the very philosphers it was founded upon (the ones who shape the western ethos). There is an (again, ironic) express sense in which Schopenharuer actually could be considered the most truly atheistic of the bunch if we use the modern expression of that term. Part of what gets shoved under the rug is the fact that atheism today means something quite different from what it meant in the world of those philosophers. and there is a strange sense in which, in what I would argue is a modern world built on a practice of leaving such terminology largely undefined so as to make it immune from critique, the modern western world has handed us a Christianity that couldn’t be more atheistic in thought and expression and an atheism that could not be more religious. What runs underneath that sentiment for both stated positions is once again the bread and butter of modern western thought- materialism. A materialism that is both necessary to hold the western enterprise together, and yet cannot make coherent sense of the lived life.

Beha suggests that Schopenhauer’s work has a special appeal to “an artistically inclined depressive,” and the western persona holding a particular interest in the buried eastern traditions. Both of which would be true for me. The restless skeptic (or cynic) whom is not content to appeal to the sort of rationalism which is content to finding ways to keep the why questions at a distance. In many ways, what I was after as someone posing those questions above to my shared atheist communities was the sort of atheism that could be held to the fire precisely because it was honest about what it actually holds to be true and states it believes. That’s why I love the philosophers, even where I disagree. It’s not enough to be persuaded away from something, it needs to understand what one is bneing persuaded towards. Modern athiesm (and religion or Christianity- these two things are often hard to tell apart) has become good at trying to pretend as though we can get by on it’s narrowed approach to empiricism, with the less hostile versions bringing in the “I don’t know” rhetoric as a means of forging some level of a broadcasted humility. I have never found this compelling or satisfying. It doesn’t take much poking and prodding to get behind this rhetoric and find an express allegiance to that materialism that isn’t willing to contend for the implications within the lived life of what one actually believes. Much harder to get beyond the resistance towards the inherent questions it poses of itself, and into the sorts of unencumbered debate that allowed these philosophers to coexist within their impassioned disagreements. In many ways, both atheist and religious (and in-particular Christian) alike continue to be addicted to the method of modern apologetics precisely because it provides them empirical certainty about the materialism that is being held on to so tightly and so fervently. Which is why I have tended to see that as the first battle ground for getting beyond it (mostly not to much fruitfulness unfortunately).

And I do think a book like this is a welcome breath of fresh air to this end. No better way to break the modernist bubble than through an honest analysis of it’s “fathers” (and yes, the inevitable patriarchal language applies in and outside of religion to this end). Funny enough, this is the exact basis for my critique of Protestantism (or many of the tenants within it) as well- no better way to get beyond that bubble than by bringing an honest exploration of the “fathers” and their great debates to the table.

Which is also to say, looking at where my journey has brought me to, if I am going to be able to honestly assess the why of where I am and what I believe to be true, I can’t base it on my critique of modern evangelicalism or modern atheism or protestantism. Rather, for me, I need to be able to articulate why I ultimatley find Schopenhaur’s arguments less than persuasive as part of that larger development of thought. An argument for or against, to borrow Beha’s phrasing, skeptical belief, has to be able to converse with what are it’s honest and reasoned alternatives. Anything less is simply avoiding such rational critique.

“This is a book aboute how to be when you don’t know.”

Or, as James K. Smith puts it in his latest book, Make Your Home In This Luminous Dark, a book about “how to live when you don’t know what to believe or who to believe, or how you could possibly know.”

The liberation of what he refers to as “profound uncertainty.”

Here he makes an important distinction- it is not about “not knowing,” rather it is about the process of “unknowing.” A word he borrows from the anonymous fourteenth century author of The Cloud of Unknowing.

What distinguishes the act of unknowing from not knowing? One word- conviction. Or better put, uncertain conviction that the mystery worth knowing does in fact exist and can be known.

This is difficult for those of us (or at least all of us in the western hemisphere) whom live in what Smith calls a “knowledge economy.” Knowledge=value and worth, and such knowledge is defined as the aquisition of certain right information regarding what this world is and how it can be controlled. This is what hands us our identity, is whether we know or not. This is what ultimately matters to the human enterprise.

What we ignore is the simple notion that, in our need to control such a conception of knowledge becomes a defense mechanism against the idea that “mystery” means we are not in control. Thus philosophy, Smith’s profession, has become an endless stream of necessary justifications regarding what we know and what this knowledge enables us to control.

As Smith puts it,

“It might be that our uncertainty is not a problem to be eradicated but a country to inhabit, a place to wait for some other way of being to come over the horizon- not certainty or clarity or comprehension, but an awareness…”

An awarness of (and for) the mystery, someting that Smith imagines being caught up in Meister Eckhart’s well known prayer, “God, rid me of God,” a prayer designed to find a God (Truth) beyond “God” (our certain constructions).

In his introduction, Smith talks about being a young man navigating the two worlds of his present aspirations, that of an itinerant preacher speaking to farming communities in rural Ontario, and working his way through school to become a professional philosopher.

Both things he describes as being fundamentally about a need to “get it right.” Both things feeding eachother in one of the book’s first observations of an exercise in later humilty- that he ever imagined his didactic sermons based on delineating a certain conception of knowledge having “anything to do with their lives.”

“Here was a twenty-two-year-old-kid who’d read a lot of books, standing in front of them trying to parse Trinitarian personhood through mineteenth-century scholasticism as if it mattered.”

A second point of later humility emerges here- recognizing that this approach to knowledge was, at it’s heart about “winning.” Win the argument (even with the argument itself) and you have the Truth. Here Smith imagines this as offering a security that became quietly aware as a prison. A prison that the entire enterprise of western philosophy has created for itself, from Aristotle’s “All men by nature desire to know,” (and Plato’s formative foundations standing behind him) to Alexander the Great, cementing this relationship between the development of western philosophy and conquest. There is a constant found embedded within this historical reality- that of the excluded middle. The construction of binaries to encase and protect what we call truth. And this exclusionary practice is what leads to the “profession” itself.

“Philosophers love to know more than anyone- which is to say, we philsophers love thinking about knowing, trying to understand knowledge… (as outposts of metaphsics and epistemology) Questions about the nature of being are reduced to questions about the nature of mind, which, whatever it might be, is the “it” that knows and understands and conceptualizes. But precisely because the philosopher knows- knows how knowing works and is able to pierce through to the essence of things- the philosopher is a cultural arbiter of meaning and truth… They would become kings- emperors.”

And, not inconsequentional, that exclusionary practice hands one a road paved with polemic, one where Smith “imagined the world’s problems ammounted to a failure of analysis.” Good arguments will save us.

That is, until you are forced to attend for the lived life.

Smith has this great confession,

“As a young Christian philosopher, I wanted to be the confident, heresy-hunting Augustine, vanquishing the pagans with brilliance, fending off the Manicheans and Pelagians with iron-clad arguments. As a middle-aged man, I dream of being Mr. Rogers… I used to imagine that my calling was to defend The Truth. Now I’m just trying to figure out how to love.”

Having recently finished the great book Augustine the African, I’m compelled towards the ways that book illuminated those taught tenants (within Protestantism) as part of a more nuanced picture of Augustine wrestling with his own sense of this luminous dark.

Here Smith turns to something more revelatory than observed. He speaks about how that observation, that such efforts are about winning, is actually a facade for the real desire that this “knowledge will save” mindset obscures- that need to belong. Smith doesn’t say this, but my own interaction here wonders about the ways in which those with knowledge about how knowledge works become experts in isolating themselves from a world where what really matters to people is their constructs. Where philosophy’s aim is to break the apparent illusions that hold our lives intact, it also means breaking from the connections those illusions create and sustain. Thus why philosophy (or the well read thinker) turns inwards towards it’s own sense of itself, convincing itself that what set one on this path to begin with is what truly matters- seeking the Truth of things. As Smith puts it, “Mabye philosophy begins in wonder, but a doctorate in philsophy is where wonder goes to die,” bent on the conquering the niche territories we have reduced knowledge to in order to control it.

But Smith pushes this notion further. It is not simply about the one with the truth learning how to belong in the world of the living, where the truth matters less than the illusion; it is about learning how that way of thinking is in tself symptomatic of the larger problem. Here he comes back to that cloud of unknowing, A cloud that cannot be dispersed and conquered by our “winning” the argument. What happens when the same knowledge that hands us progress and technology cannot prevent “the deep rifts in our social fabric.”

Here that observation about belonging resurfaces. I’ve been thinking about this idea over the course of this morning. That exclusionary practice might appear like we are rightly pushing untruths into the distance in order to help ourselves and others see more clearly, but where it applies to the lived life, such actions take the shape of pushing away those whom we come to say in the process- “we no longer know.” Precisely because, that we now know what its true and they do not, the one whom is still in the darkness cannot see us, even as we endeavor to place them out of sight and mind. It’s an irony that underlies this approach to knowledge. What is revealed through this act is the fact that in doing so we come to accept that “they no longer know you either.”

The sort of knowledge we have mastered “in modernity” cannot “solve” this problem. In fact, it would appear, as Smith points out, that the more knowledge we accumulate and thus control in the language and form of modernity, the more anxiety and unahappiness “besets us.” If Smith is right, this is because of the distance it creates, between one another, and likewise us and the mystery, ” leaving our lives to be “shadowed by alienatation and distrust” of anything and anyone we deem not to be the truth.

Smith goes on to describe a life changing moment for him, where he faced something out of his control (or the control of his philosophical weapons), and eventually found something that reached beyond “an exchange of ideas,” which he calls an act of “re-narration.” Learning, as an act of imagination, to embody a different story.

Holding “swirls of contradiction…” This is what allows us to truly enter into the logical implications of whatever story/narrative is actually governing our lived lives. This is the real interest of the logical argument. At the end of the day, story, not philosophy, is the universal language. If philosophy is to have real and true formative power when it comes to awakening us to knoweldge of what is true, and Smith believes it does and it can, it needs to begin with desire. Our desire to know Truth. And subsequently, it needs to end with msytery. Apart from that there is nothing to draw us towards Truth in a way that can preserve it and allow it to be known.

Smith brings in a different question then- why do we want to know? What do we (actually) want when we want to know? Both questions that lead to the central observation that holds it altogether- the recognition that I (we) want to be known. There is a word for this- phenomenology. Rather than a dusty, intellectualized conception, this word, if properly recaptured and reconstituted in practice, has the power to reawaken the wonder behind this desire for knowledge. More importantly, it places us directly back into the realm of the living, where knowing comes through necessary participation in the spaces we occupy.

I’ve been thinking (and praying) this morning about how this intersects with my own story and life. What, as someone who very much resonates with this interest in philosophy and who spends a lot of time reading a whole lot of books, does this speak into my own tendencies and prisons? One thing I can say for sure- I know this luminous dark.

I wonder where and how I am caught up in this polemic. Perhaps there is a fine line that is easy to step over in any given moment between engaging this modern philosophical landscape on its own terms and the desire to speak to the issues and frustrations Smith is tabling (is it a polemic to go after the penchant for polemic?). A greater awareness of this line I think can be a good thing.

I know the isolation he describes. When so much of the necessary work seems to require the dismantling of the world’s constructs (including within Christianity), it hands you a mix of disinterest, anger, rejection, puzzlement, and distance from others. Where this desire for knowledge means you exist everywhere but seemingly belong nowhere. There are two things Smith references that I think are helpful here- offering a reminder that forming convictions is necessary for any pursuit of knowledge. Which is more a recognition that we all have them in the form of a guiding narrative. This matters if we are to reclaim a proper redefining of knowledge as more (or something other) than our modernist terms of true information. It exposes not just our interpretation , but the interpreter. It’s a reminder of the persons, and indeed the whole of creation, occupying the mix of this shared experience.

Lastly, and I’ve included a screenshot here of the fuller discourse, I resonated deeply with Smith’s descriptive of how he has learned to move from from the intellect of the head to true knowledge of the lived in spaces of this world. He speaks of needing the artists and the mystics. to act as a brdige. I have often spoken about how for me the cinema is like a sanctuary, a way of moving from where I am (often in my head) towards an encounter with the transcendent. With God. With the mystery. To me it is a sacred space. Reading also occupies this space, more so these days with the continued disenchantment of cinema as a space once meant to evoke wonder. Here Smith legitimizes this practice as an essential part of knowing. Of seeing it as a way to expose the limits of logic (our our logical arguments), and challenge our methodologies of control. It’s a reminder of why these sacred spaces matter both to our convictions and our desire to know, and above all to our ability to belong.

“As I see it, “yes” to life takes care of the “no” to death- by complexifying the “no” as well, by making one say a kind of “no” that includes a confident “yes”… We llive toward death as those who are suspended over nothingness all along; even our liveliest moments could have not been. How long will God keep nothingness from swallowing us? Contingent as we are, we live because a “no” to death- our own “no” and God’s- in the form a “yes” to life, is being enacted across the entire span of our life.”

In his book Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian (written with Christian Wiman), Volf speaks about the paradox of one of the apostle Paul’s central convictions, that the “present form” of this world is passing away (1 Corinthians 7:31). A present form defined as what? Death, Paul says. Or more pointedly, the “Powers” called Sin and Death.

This is precisely what leaves Paul with that lingering observation- is Death part of the present form of the world we inhabit? Yes. But this is also the basis for Volf’s stated “no.” Would it be true to say that any and all form of life is passing away? This then, is the paradox. Here Volf cites Heschel saying, “Death is the end of a prelude to a symphony of which we only have a vague inkling of hope.” Hope in what Heschel would call the renewed or new creation.

Of course, Christians see this renewed creation as having arrived in the person and work of Jesus, namely the died, raised, and ascended incarnated Christ. Christian Theology then, is ultimatley about the ways in which these three things relate to eachother. To this end, Volf goes on to unpack a common Protestant approach, which tends to see the resurrection as illuminating the crucifixion, as though small letter death is in fact the point and epi-center of the story of Jesus. As is often assumed in this approach- something has to die for justice to emerge. What typically flows from this is a conception of the death of Jesus enacting a “saved from this world in order to go to heaven” version of salvation, with small letter death, defined as non-existence or the end of life itself, existing as some form of a just punishment by a good God for human sin. 

Pushing back against this is the idea that it is through death, the central quality of an enslaved creation, that the resurrection reveals a new creation reality. In this view death is not the point of the person and work of Jesus- nor is it a quality of God or the good, new creation is. What flows from this narrative is a conception of the resurrection of Jesus bringing about a renewed world, one that is liberated from the enslaving Powers of capital letter Death. This is what human participation is responding to- it is not about eternal versus infinte existence, but about the fundamental shape of reality itself.

Looking back at that aforementioned quote from Volf, the question such narratives hinge on is, can we name Death. Or in Volf’s language, can we, or do we, say no to death. This might seem like an odd question, but in actuality the whole of life hinges on it, whether we recognize it or not. Where the percieved illusions of prosperity and progress reign here in the West, we have been taught that such a question is no longer necessary. After all, the great human project we have come to call to the Enlightenment has effectively solved the great problem that nature imposes on our endless potentials, and through our great ambitions and abilities we have brought about a world of greater lifespans, the eradication of disease, and technological marvels. What quietly slips into this picture is this whispered call which seeks to justify this percieved progress by nudging what Volf calls the biggest question (of truth and meaning) off to the side, where it need not and cannot interfere with this human agenda.

And yet (there is always an “and yet”), one of the outcomes of this whole endeavor is this quiet collapsing of any such coherent definitons and categories that allow us to distinguish between death and life. In this grand Enlightenment narrative, to live is to die and to die is simply recast as “life.” Our ability to attend to the problems that emerge from reducing such words to what is at it’s core a materialist assumption based on crude and non-sensicle (impossible to define) definition becomes eroded and challenged. We fail to see that Death is in fact a word that soaks into every aspect of what we would, if properly attending for that which is “lived,” call Life.

In this Enlightenment view it has become trendy to accuse the old nature our humanity has now overcome of enslaving us to the “old” gods, conjured up illusions meant to satisfy our inate fear of death. But this is never what fear is actually rooted in, certainly not in a world where, as the proper physicalist/materialist must insist, the old threats to our survival have been eradicated. What modern psychology and neuro-science tells us is that fear, detached from the threatened eradictation of a reductionist take on the physical or biologically defined life, just as easily, and perhaps more accurately, turns inwards towards the fundamental questions our conscisousness pushes us to consider- what is Life and why does it matter to the act of living. As it would seem, or as it turns out, take away the immediate threat to our biological definitions of life, and what emerges from it’s midst is the world itself, telling us that Life and Death never accorded with such reductionist terms in the first place.

In other words, every step, every observation, every choice, every action, every circumstance and every interpretation of that circumstance, every value, every conviction, all of it necessarily distinguishes between Death and Life precisely by revealing the ways in which these words hand us coherent categories and definitions to distinguish the living within a reality framed by Death.

This concern is what lies behind the fascinating dialogue between Volf and Wiman. What was really interesting to me, now having finished the final quarter of what was a beautiful book, is what really comes to a head at the climax of their cordial but honest, sometimes tense conversation about God and Jesus and faith, is how all of these disparate parts that emerge along the way come tumbling back into the picture at once, where finding some sense and clarity is sought- to make sense of life leads to bringing in Jesus. To make sense of Jesus inevitably brings in the scriptures and Tradition. To make sense of the scriptures and Tradition leads to bringing in Jesus. To make sense of Jesus leads to bringing in life.

And, as it is, to get stuck or mired in one of those aspects of the larger discussion is to find onesself unable to flesh out the other (or to abuse it). And if there is a single revelatory point that bursts through all of this, it is the simple idea that at it’s heart lies that fundamental truism- learning that Death is not Life and Life is not Death is essential to making sense of any of it.

And, perhaps this should not be surprising, but as Wiman demonstrates, the biggest obstacle to this end tends to be the scriptures (or scripture and Tradition). As Volf puts it, “What is “sacred” about the book (or Tradition) in which those portrayed as moral examplars behave in what seem to us morally repugnant ways. Why should we elevate the Good Book (or Tradition)…” Here, to elevate means to elevate as a means of dealing with and defining the tension that exists between Death and Life.

Part of what Volf is teasing out here is to say, exploring that question requires us to attend for how it is that we view the role of the sacred to function in our lives. A curious word, “sacred.” It is not that we elevate the scriptures above what we might call the Book of Nature (or in the working equation above- life), meaning the sort of knowledge that comes through an embodied life existing in relationship to the world. The scriptures do not function as a text book of facts, ideas, science, or rules that work or act apart from life itself. Tradition is not about propositions. And yet this is what we so often attempt to do with our handed down Enlightenment script. The irony being that we actually desacralize the text/Tradition in the process. In truth, we cannot isolate the scriptures or Tradition from that which makes it sacred in the first place and still find a sacred text or sacred liturgy

What makes it sacred? The lens through which we read it. Or more importantly, the lens through which we live it. The story we are standing in as we engage the text in conversation with the whole. Thus it is never about, to borrow a common phrase my Protestant upbringing handed me, “right theology.” As Volf so poignantly states, “protracted debates about the minutiae of Biblical texts are rarely about nothing.” Which is to say, they are almost about something, and and that something which we might call the bigger (and ultimately the biggest question) informs our encounter with the text, with life, with Jesus, captured as it is within our understanding of the relationship between God and world.

The reason we see the scriptures/Tradition to be sacred is because they are reflective of a sacred practice, a way of knowing Truth. And it is that act of participation that  reveals the truth of things. The story we participate in sees this world and it’s history as being shaped by the sacred reality that gives Death and Life its definition. We don’t move from the scriptures outwards, we come to the scriptures as part of a larger expression of that sacred truth and sacred dance, precisely because scripture and Tradition is in and of itself an expression of that same (messy) participation.

And here in lies one of the more profound revelations contained within this thought (for me). What distinguishes this extant story and movement as having the power to direct and inform my allegiance in the first place? What allows us to move beyond the simple and percievably defeatist observation of a world filled with contrary and contradicting “stories” into such a scandalous view, which all of us hold whether we admit it or not, that says this story which we ourselves hold to be sacred has the power to make sense of all the world’s stories? To be a measure of something True?

That’s the paradoxical nature of how the sacred works. It’s where the tension must humble us and move us to see beyond the static and false promises of our sought after exercises of desacralization, be it through secular or religious dogmas. The Enlightenment project, the myth of progress, is in fact all about de-sacralization. It sells us on a life without a governing and defining narrative while deceptively reframing the world through the lens of it’s own working narrative.

In truth, such a question can only ever begin with our experience and observation of the world. It is only here that we can begin to step into the illuminating spaces that have the power to hold our obsessive inclinations for “proofs” and “certainties” in this modernized story to account. Such obsessions always, always, always begin with the same assumption- upholding a kind of dualism that seperates the oridinary (the material or natural) world and the sacred. Why? Because it hands us a material world we can control. The great deception at play here is that such a world cannot make sense of our actual convictions, of the way we live, the way we experience, the way we value, the way we love- of the sacred. Like it or not, all of us have our “scriptures,” precisely because all of us occupy this same, shared relaity in which Death and Life stand in effective and defining tension. We all live a story.

The far more difficult thing is to enter into the ongoing conversation about the defining narratives of our lives. That’s where an active logos comes into play. That’s where genuine logos is able to speak, precisely by forcing us (or inviting us) to wrestle with the tension. For me, this is where I begin when it comes to the biggest qeustion. As someone who is encroaching on having lived nearly 50 years, one thing that I have come to learn binds all the world’s stories together is the way they all wrestle with that basic tension between Life and Death. All else flows from this. This is what story is. This is why story matters. The way into the sacred story then, is the simple acknowledgement that Life is defined by this stated yes. Life itself illuminates the necessary “no” to Death. Apart from this, the reality we all share ceases to be coherent.

If that is my starting point, this is why the particulars of my own convictions matter to how I percieve this tension taking on an embodied (or incarnate) form. For me, it is resurrection that invades our historical premise, shaped as it is by Death. I find this a powerful image, precisely because it seems to be the single uniquely revelatory and intuitive movement and desire that forces it’s way into all of our world’s stories.

And why do I find the story of Jesus’ resurrection to make particular sense of the shape of this revelatory movement? Beyond simply being compelled towards finding it as an observed historical reality, it is the one place where I have found all of these stories gain a coherent interpretive expression. Where we wrestle with matters of Life and Death, I just keep finding myself coming back to Jesus. And not just Jesus, but the story Jesus embodies as an incarnate act. The city, one of my great loves and passions, has always been contstructed, as an image, with it’s temple sitting at the center. Find it’s temple, find it’s sacred story. This simple fact is precisely what makes, for me, the scriptures use of the symbol of the city, rendered most alive in the symbol of tabernacle/temple, so compelling. To imagine a “temple-less” domain feels entirely counter-inutitive and incoherent. This is a city without an identity. And yet, this is what the story of Jesus imagines as bringing coherency to this world in which Life and Death sit in tension. In this story the city is the world (creation), and creation itself becomes the temple. And when one understands the city as creation, suddenly all conceptions of this ordinary-sacred divide become abolished. What we find in it’s place is the stated and defined tension between Life and Death and the promised new creation. Rather than the ordinary being sacred, or the related axiom “finding the sacred in the ordinary,” reality itself is revealed to be a sacred Truth, the source that embodies all of our participatory acts (our living). All the world’s stories, for me, seem to be seeking after this Truth, this awareness. This is, to borrow from Heschel, that vague inkling of hope that pervades this existence and informs its movement.

“Throughout the Gospel, Mark has warned that signs, miracles, and portents do not evoke faith… Along with early Christianity as a whole, Mark is interested in faith in the resurrected Jesus, not in proofs of his existence. It is an encounter with the resurrected Lord, not the empty tomb, that produces faith.” (Edwards, The Gospel of Mark)

I was commenting on a thread from a friend recently, which was posing a question regarding the reliablity of the Gospel accounts, particularly regarding the resurrection. This led me to recover this quote above from one of my commentaries on Mark, a Gospel which was cited in this thread as not only the earliest of the canonized compositons, but as one which percievably doesn’t cite encounters with the resurrected Jesus. Setting aside the later addition of the extended ending, the Gospel famously ends at the empty tomb, with the command of the angel to “go tell” leading the women to flee the tomb in terror and amazement, “saying nothing to anyone.” (16:8) Something many a scholar and sermon has weighed in on in over the years with stated reflections on the ambiguity of it all, evoking thoughts that span the spectrum from poetic and astute to disconcerting and incomplete.

As I’ve been reading through this quote again, and thinking through the aformentioned thread, I was struck by the following observations:

The apparent intentionality by which the empty tomb, if read in light of Mark’s literary structuring of the Gospel as a whole, arrives not as the focal point of the narrative but rather becomes the means by which the author brings the larger and overarching concerns of his writing to the surface in a climatic and pointed fashion. As the commentary by Edwards suggests, a significant part of this can be seen as the constant movement in the Gospel between unbelief and belief (or more accurately, seeing and not seeing), consistently positioning both within the growing tension of these counter-intuitive expectations. This is something the citation above is capturing in Edward’s assessment that, for Mark, signs (or proofs) will never convince, only an encounter can.

But there is an important addition to this point that needs to be said. Here, the author of Mark’s Gospel would not have our appeal to modern empiricism in mind. This is not the language of the ANE. For the ancients, and for Mark’s audience (and the author), that the world is filled with signs and miracles would be assumed. This is the shape of the world they both observe and experience and also inhabit. This is important, because for the author and the audience, the concern here was not for seeking modern proof texts of the gods existence, but rather for how Jesus fit into the equation in a world full of gods.

For modernists, and in-particular those of us occypying the narrative of the West, the empiricism of our day is asking a very different question with a very different set of concerns, beginning with the fact that it assumes a contrasting starting point when it comes to the shape of the world. This matters because, this is precisely how and why modern objections to the legimacy of the resurrection tend to also evoke a redefintion of the word “faith.” Here, faith becomes a word that juxtaposes the claims of the Gospel over and against our modern demands for a kind of science and a kind of history that fits with our present and culturally constructed conceptions of knowledge or truth. Unlike the Gospel of Mark, the concern is not for how Jesus fits into the equation (the modernist will happily pull Jesus the crucified “moral teacher” out of the equation), but for how we accept a world filled with signs and wonders. In truth, the modernist assumption assumes the resurrected Jesus does not and cannot fit in the equation at all as it’s default position, forcing the text to bend to our own demands rather than seeing what the text is saying to it’s original readers. It is on that level that the modernist can then say, because the text does not appear to be satisfying our demand and answering our questions, it must be (fill in the blank). 

Set within that ANE context, faith did not accord with modern usages which evoke a kind of belief in something without evidence. Why does this matter? Because when one pulls something like the Gopsel of Mark out of it’s world and forces it to bend to our modern expectations and conceptions, things gets confused and misconstrued, and, in my opinion, what gets missed is this most important question concerning Jesus for our modern questions and demands- why this Gospel would have been compelling  and necessary to the context of it’s original readers in the first place (which it undoubtedly was).

Recovering that question is precisely the in-road into why, again in my opinion, the presence of this resurrection story in the pages of history is or should be compelling to modern readers on objective grounds. Faith in the ancient sense is not belief without evidence. The assumption that this evidenced witness exists is the very reason why we find this discussion about the empty tomb in the Gospel of Mark preserved at all. Rather, faith here, in it’s proper contextualized understanding, is a participatory word. It evokes allegaince to a conviction regarding what one is compelled towards in light of what they have observed and experienced. It concerns their interpretation of the crucified and risen Christ, not their struggling with the concept of a resurrection. Faith, in this sense, is a word birthed from the social contracts of their day, bound as it is between two things set in a particular relationship to one another- in this case the relationship being that which exists between Mark’s audience and the Jesus that has entered into their story and is informing their (Jewish) expectations. 

It’s important to note here that, if this is correct, and if the narrative in the Gospel of Mark is constructed around an obvious and pre-existing conviction in the resurrected reality of a resurrected Jesus, and if it is correct, as I would argue along with numerous scholars, that this is the only way to make sense of Mark’s literary work on a thematic level, then such efforts to force the Gospel, as certain circles of modern scholarship are want to do, to adhere to modern demands for certain empirical approaches, are actually not acting (or their argument is not acting) in good faith.

What should be of interest here, or the questions we should be asking, is, if it is clear that the Gospel according to Mark is written to a historical community formed around these Jewish expectations in the 60’s, and if the logical implications of the existing Gospel is the pre-existing story of the resurrected Christ which they are already aware of and are already living in and with, both of which I think are fair assessments on reasoned and logical grounds, this means two things- this credal awareness is not bound to or emerging with the Gospel of Mark, and this credal awareness is expressley rooted in an active conviction (faith) in the resurrection for a reason. Otherwise, to put it simply, the conversation the Gospel represents between author and audience does not make logical sense.

Thus we are burdened as modern readers to ask why and how this is the case in those same terms. To use our own modern expectations to force this scenario to reflect what is commonly reflected in certain polemics as a community somehow uninterested in or unable to distinguish between true and false experience, or proper and improper evidence, is only setting us at a distance from the necessary and rational and logical questions.

There is another point to be made here too. If it is true that Mark’s Gospel has a particular narrative structure and form, one that is almost certainly borrowing from recognized and common ancient biographies among other forms and devices, the logical conclusion is that the author is accentuating and using these narrative devices and literary constructions to say something specific to his audience and their context. Thus, to understand how these specific literary devices and emphasis and themes are being used not only roots us in a world grappling with that pre-existing witness, but connects it to what the author sees as “their own” relative modern concerns.

Which is to say, just because the text has a literary form does not evoke the logical conclusion of invention in and of itself. Just because it is borrowing from ancient biography does not evoke the logical conclusion that this literary form is bringing to light a Jesus that is somehow being co-opted out of the historical presence of a “moral teacher” and reformatted as a resurrected divine figure by later editors. There is in fact little to no evidence that such a conclusion would be warranted.

The audience, as would be true for such writings, are being placed within the narrative. They are being asked to see themselves and their own story within the story of Israel and the story of Jesus, and largely in ways that, if we are to read the Gospel at face value, assume these readers understand the hyperlinks and the allusions and common witness evidenced in the text itself.

Which is to say, the Gospel only matters if a resurrected Jesus mattered to it’s audience first.

This is made abundantly clear by the Gospel’s opening line- “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Which, not inconsequentially, is the very thing that should awaken us as modern readers to what Mark’s literary structure is ultimately bringing to light with it’s ending.

We can say the same thing about Paul’s writings as well, where Paul is writing to and engaging with a people in the late 40’s and 50’s regarding a story they already know and are living within. Paul’s writings assume that his readers know all of these extant details which are lingering in the background of what Paul does say regarding his particular concerns for the ever changing context of these communities he crosses in his travels, informing the what and why of his concerns.

Which is to say, his letter’s don’t make sense unless there is a pre-existing conviction and witness at play in the lives of these communities, and for that matter a witness that logically places us in the very imagination of the eye witnesses that Paul would have existed in proximity to, something we see being referenced all over the place in these writings.

Thus, as those of us studying his works today, those are the questions we have to ask in our own cross-cultural movement and ensuing process of contextualization.

If one wants to make the argument that there was no pre-existing conviction regarding the resurrection, someting common modern polemics against Christianity often simply assume on their way to some shape or form of an argument for invention, the burden is placed on such an argument to justify how and why this would be the most likely interpretation of this composition history. how and why this would be the most likely interpretation of a world, both in it’s hellenized and, even more importantly and compellingly, Jewish context, which arrives for the audience of these writings with an established credal presence.

And not just an established one, but one that they take with the utmost seriousness. This might be a world somewhat lost to us today when it comes to manuscripts, as would and should be expected, but the most serious scholars understand that this doesn’t (or to use the more aggressive word- cannot) preclude us from asking what the logical implications are regarding what we do have, the Gospel of Mark and Paul’s writings being amongst that. This becomes especially prudent when we consider how smartly structured Mark’s Gospel actually is on a literary level. It should go without saying, but unforunately it needs to be said more often than not, but the text knows the difference between literary form and invention.

This conversation doesn’t simply end here however. Both the fact that the Gospel of Mark seems to be pushing us to consider that knowledge of the resurrected Jesus comes through encountering the resurrected Jesus, thus shaping the way we see and know the world as faithful (lived conviction) participants in this story, along with the fact that, as with much of our reasoned arguments, we are always dealing with the category of logical implications, point to this simple idea- who Jesus is and why Jesus matters in relationship to the resurrection witness sets such encounters with the resurrected Jesus within the bigger questions that our lived reality bear out in response. As modern readers, this forces us to contend with how our own worldviews, the narratives we are participating in and the realties we are encountering, make sense of the world we observe and experience today.

Here my mind is shifting back to a book I am presently reading called Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologican, by Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman. In many ways, the questions they are wrestling with wonder about how it is we find Jesus today in a world that no longer makes space for the possiblity of the narrative form we find in Mark speaking to something true. At best we have empty metaphors that we apply to our materialist interpretations. At worst, we have the intentional underwriting of a Jesus we have remade in our own modernist image. The problem being, neither of those things seriously contend with what the Gospels are. Such an encounter is, in many ways, made and deemed irrelevant and impossible.

Perhaps then, the most pertinent thing for such discussions in the modern sphere is that aforementioned question of and concern for the logical implications of a given worldview or belief. Have we in fact attended for the logical implications of the worldview driving our modernist readings and approaches? In what is essentially an ongoing conversation between Volf and Wiman, this is, I think, what is ultimatley being wrestled with on their way to the bigger questions (or, as it is stated at one point, the biggest question- is our reality shaped by God or not).

I really resonated with this observation from Wiman to this end:

“It’s not easy to love reality. I’m certain I have never managed it. Why would the chief injunction of our lives be so nearly impossible? Who is Jesus for me (then)? He is the one who makes suffering sacred, the one who harmonizes love and action, the one who makes it possible to love God…. If we understand God as love, the problem of how to love God is not clarified by simply swapping the terms. We’re not released from the objectlessness of God… Perhaps (then) we are meant to love reality.”

Volf adds this poignant observation to the mix in response:

“Modernity: the realization of freedom from. The necessary new era: the call of what freedom is for…. Freedom is both spiritual autonomy with regard to God and humble servitude with regard to humanity. It’s appallingly simple- but so very difficult to live out.”

Freedom from or freedom for. Two different questions with their own implications for how we see the world. In Volf’s view, the implication of a modern world that has built itself on the assumption of freedom from (the chains of history and the past), has in fact clouded the fact that we have lost the ability, and even in some cases the presumed interest, in asking what this freedom is for, if anything. To what end are we to live and why must we live so, are not the questions that the myth of progress are asking. Where in this world do we find the kind of authority that can freely make sense of the ways in which we do in fact live. For both Volf and Wiman, there is much to consider regarding the implications of a god-less world on this front-

“If God were not the God of all, God would dissipate for us all into “divine individuals” and each of them drawn into our fraught relations with one another… This transmutation of God to will to power is in the logic of God being the God of a particular without at the same time being the God of the whole world.” (Volf)

That’s a quote I’ve been reading and re-reading for a bit. Sitting with. In many ways this is why I find power in encountering the narrative of Mark’s Gospel in it’s world, as I have been over the past while. However much it flies against the modernist assumptions and worldview that I have been handed, there is something for me in it’s narrative of resurrection, in it’s story of new creation coming in Jesus amidst it’s liberating from the enslaving “Powers” that awakens something in me regarding how it is that I actually experience the forces of Death and Life in this world. It gives a proper name to that which I know to be intuitively true about how this world works. More than this, it gives me a logical basis for understanding the true shape of this world, unlike what my modernist treaties taught me, for making sense of a world seemingly shaped by this universal witness to a reality that that is not reducible to it’s materialist and utilitarian functions.

I am struck by something I came across in my commentary as well. This reoccuring theme in Mark regarding the difference between watching from a distance or participating in an encounter:

“Mark concludes the crucifixion narrative by including the names of several women who “were watching from a distance.” This is undoubtedly an allusion to the lament in Ps 38:11, where the righteous suffering individual mourns his friends and neighbors who “stay far away… In Gethsemane (14:34.38) Jesus commanded “watching”…The word Mark uses for “watching” here is different however. Apart from its description of the women in 15:40,47;16:4, it occurs four times previously in Mark, and in each instance it depicts spectating or detached observation as opposed to seeing that leads to perception and conviction.”

Here, the Gospel according to Mark paints a picture of how it is that we come to know the truth of the resurrection in our own lives. Not as some extant, empirically proven, data point, as though we can fit it into a world that refuses to accomadate it’s shape and have it make sense. The reality is, no such “signs” would get us to such an encounter with a risen Lord. At best, if such a thing were to manage to break through that initial wall of resistance and unsettle us, we would be left with that same confusing witness of fear and amazement, standing as we would be from a distance. For Mark, even in the ancient world of second temple Judaism with it’s own set of concerns and questions, the good news is in fact found in the truth that, even where this distance exists, the risen Lord “goes ahead of us,” preparing the way forward into that promised new reality. This is where the Gospel begins (“See, I am sending my messanger ahead of you.” 1:2), and it is where the Gospel ends (“He is going ahead of you to Galilee.” 16:7)) Not in some version of divine hiddenness, but into an act of revelation. “There you will see him,” states the author of Mark, on the way, preparing the way, found in the particpatory nature of the faithful life.

Yes, this is unsettling for modernist conceptions of knowing. And yet this is precisely what Volf and Wiman are getting at in Glimmerings- such conceptions of knowing do not make sense of the lived life. That’s what the resurrection of Jesus helps uncover. On many fronts, and I am speaking for myself here, the modernist world I have been handed and find myself swimming within is the romanticized view, the invention of it’s illusions of progress and constructed versions of immortality spun by different names and different images, all in the name of infusing this existence with meaning. All of the ways in which my once atheist predications sought to colour over the shape of such a reality and it’s logical implications by way of giving our newly constructed myths an authority they do not otherwwise have. All explained, biologically, socially, mentally, as mechanistic functions designed to colour our experience of reality with the comforts that such illusions afford us.

I know I am not alone in this, but for me this was one of the most difficult things to confront, was the logical implications of a world that takes this shape, and yet still needs to make logical and rational and coherent sense of the lived life. It doesn’t make our experiences of these illusions less real, but it does lead to some very real and difficult questions when conronting the question of what is actually true within this given framework of reality.

This to me is the great paradox of trying to make sense of something like the story we encounter in the Gospel according to Mark. On one hand, yes, it is about hope. It is about being handed a story that can tell us what freedom, so defined (or in need of defintion) is for. But in this sense there is an irony- that the contrary positions which assume a worldview that has no room for the resurrection would seem to be, logically speaking, hinged on a narrative which states that hope itself, when defined according to those processses, is a necessary illusion.

It would seem then, and I think this tends to be the central point of modern forms of skepticism, the source of the tension is that tricky word called truth. What seems to be abundantatly evident in either case is that narrative matters to shaping what we see as true. For the Gospel of Mark, true sight comes by way of the lived life, and to live we need a narrative. This is as fundamental to the human experience as the breathe in our lungs.

I am reminded here of an old familiiar hymn, one that, in a moment of reflection on my guiding narrative I (somewhat) re-wrote verse 2 with a slightly different or shifted emphasis as a way of capturing those particular nuances. Every time I sing this song or hear this song in it’s common form, I bring these re-accentuated lyrics to mind, reminding myself of the story I am particpiating in. The reason I am reminded of this here is because, i think it captures so much of the narrative I have found on my journey through the Gospel according to Mark over these last number of months, the very narrative that comes alive for me in encountering the resurrection of Jesus in this world afresh:

Crown Him the Lord of Life who triumphed over (the Powers of Sin and Death), and rose victorious in the strife for (the creation) He came to save. His (the gift of his glorious indwelling presence in creation) now we sing, who died, and rose on high, who died to bring (the new creation) to be, and lives that (the Powers of Sin and Death) may die.

In the book Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian by Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman, Volf references Scheler’s Ressentiment in referencing Scheler’s particular critique of Nietzsche “wrongly lumping” modern western morality with Christian morality. In his view, one cannot understand the Christian narrative apart from understanding the ways in which love itself frees us from the restraints of our moral constructs. The westernization of our world has largely led us to neglect the fact that “All ancient philosophers, poets, and moralists agree that love is striving, an aspiration of the lower toward the higher. The beloved is always higher, the lover is always lower.”

For Scheler, the difference between Ancient Greek and Christian accounts of love, which is what we find being made apparent in the life and letters of Paul (beginning with what is arguably one of, if not the earliest reference we have to the Christ confession, the borrowed poem of Philippians 2), is it’s conception of love’s directionality. For the Ancient Greek, the stories represent the “universe” as a great chain, where “the lower always strive for and is attracted by the higher.” Here there is only this upward movement, stories which beckon one to ascend to the deity, which “itself does not love, but represents the eternally unmoving and unifying goal of all these aspirations of love.”

In other words, as Volf puts it, “In this account, love is a vehicle that carries one to the state of non-love.”

In Christopher Beha’s exceptional book Why I Am Not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer, he offers a sweeping view of this Greek philosophical movement through it’s continental historical development, growing into the tenants of modern western culture and society. One of the most striking things about this development is the natural trajectory that we find from this upward movement to deism to western bents towards utilitarianism. The inevitable outcome of this narrative is both that we elevate ourselves to the form of the gods while distancing the gods from the world we are reconstructing. That we call this rationalism simply hides the fact that buried within these same philosophers is this consistent awareness of being held captive by the shadows of this reality we are constructing. And one of its most powerful chains that we bind ourselves to is in fact its moral systems.

Which is where Paul’s words break through all those years ago with his own awareness and critique of this inevitable trajectory. As Volf writes, “In the Christian account, the direction of movement is reversed,” which is precisely the point of Paul borrowing and using the poem in Philippians 2 in the way he does- he reframes it so as to illuminate it’s own need for the revelation of God to to be made known in it’s midst, rather than as something that needs to be attained. As he cites from Scheler, in the reversal of this movement from upward attainment to downward descent, in the story of Christ “There is no longer any highest good independent of and beyond the act and movement of… Love itself. (Love) is no longer a value of a thing, but of an act.”

This is a narrative that stands as antithetical to the myth of progress, the very story that continues to uphold the entire enlightenment project. The reality that this myth upholds is that this upward movement, seeking towards that which we must attain, requires our detachment from the chains of history. We don’t simply do away with the old gods, marked as they are by a lesser way of seeing and being and knowing, we recreate the world in our own image. The “our” in this case being an elevated and better human society. And yet, behind this sits the shadows of progress, justifying itself through the construction of its systems and technologies in a world where the imagined and largely defined aim can never reach beyond the authority of its own primordial and Neanderthal past- always and forever bent towards survival, with every fresh iteration of the newest and next enlightened generation convincing itself that it is the thing history has been desperate for and striving to obtain. Only, as things go, turning to perceive the emerging generation as threatening to send it all back to the age old rhetorical image of the dark ages from which we came.

All of this giving way to this inherent and underlying sense that maybe, just maybe, we will find ourselves arriving at the end of this ascent to find nothing but the shadows, the illusions that this whole human project thought it could create something that never existed in the first place.

Such are the cycles of the western narrative. The Christ narrative thus stands today speaking the same Gospel, the same revelation, into that central human tendency- the need and desire to remake this world in our own image. In Christ, this upward movement, in which we become gods and the gods become distant, is exchanged for the truth of the incarnation. Love made known, Love made true in this story of it’s downward decent. In its taking up residence in the world, in residing within it, transforming it’s view of it’s own idenity, shifting the story from that which it needs to attain to that which is gifted as the beloved. 

Some Good Friday reflections:

“This, then, is not a resume of advancement, but of downward movement… these two acts of incarnation and death are actually part of a larger story.” (Michael Gorman)

“What is interrupted- in this case, the old age- does not cease to exist. At the same time, however, what is interrupted does not continue as if nothing had happened… The cross interrupts or invades the old age- the old myths and conventions and rationalities of the world. The cross unmasks the powers of this age for what they are; not the divine regents of life, but the agents of domination, violence and death. The cross inaugurates the new age or new creation in the midst of the old. And through this interruption of the old age by the new, the cross creates a space where believers may be liberated from the powers of this age both to resist their deadly ways and to begin living in the new creation.” (C Campbell)

“Here we encounter an apostolic witness to the reality and consequences of Christ’s odd triumph, whose relevance is found precisely in its irrelevance, it’s willingness to stand in the tension with some of our contemporary sensibilities… Death is here an instrument of the Savior’s proper work, something by means of which salvation is worked out… But at the same time, Death is also an instrument of the (Power’s) proper work, something by whose power women and men are held in fearful captivity. In the first case, Christ takes death upon himself for the sake of (the whole); in the second, the devil threatens and inflicts death upon (the very thing) Christ comes to save. Human life itself- “flesh and blood”- stands in the midst of this deadly contest over who controls death…. In this frame of reference, Death is anything but natural for it has been weaponized, as it were, within the disorder of the cosmos (the Latin Vulgate’s the “empire of Death).” (Philip Ziegler)

“It is not death as such (non-existence) but rather the vision of Death (the Powers, or the Empire) as divine judgment upon sin- death fundamentally repurposed and dentatured by sin- that terrifies… The Power of Death (the rule of Empire) as the future and final horizen of life reaches back into life itself to torment, alarm, oppress, and so to enslave.” (Ziegler)

“In some ways, and paradoxically, the casting off of the useless weight of the armour (by Frodo in the Lord of the Rings) is itself a kind of stripping for battle. Tolkien would have been familiar with the lines from the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood” in which the Passion is narrated by the cross itself, and the cross sees this stripping of Jesus not as an opposed humiliation but as a heroic preparation.” (Guite Golding)

I’m nearing the end of my journey through the book of Mark, the Gospel we have been reading with my Church body since Advent, and the Gospel I have been studying through at home alongside that. I have noted this in earlier reflections and posts, but one of my biggest take aways from my time with this Gospel is this notion of Mark’s narrative concern having three distinct parallel lines.

The first is telling the story the story of Israel. The second is telling the story of Jesus. The third, which is perhaps the one most neglected in common discourse and readings, is the fact that the author is writing this Gospel to a new creation community and telling their story.

As I noted previously, it’s original audience, and likewise those of us approaching it today as we endeavor to unpack that context, understood that these three parallel lines ran together, interweaving with one another through it’s interest in this singular and important question- what difference did the death and resurrection of Jesus bring about in their world.

To ask that in different terms- how does the world look different given the reality of the death and resurrection (and ascension) of Jesus.

What gets illuminated by taking these parallel lines together is the fact that, as these initial readers were reading the Gospel according to Mark they were also understanding this not simply to tell Israel’s story, nor only to be telling Jesus’ story, but to also be telling their story in light of this inquageration of a new creation reality. Readers would pick up on the narrative consruction, understanding the ways in which “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God,” (1:1) is in fact the beginning of their own story “in Christ.” At an editorial level, “their” own context is woven in to Mark’s Gospel all the way through, with language and references hyperlinking back to their own story as a community of people going through their own version of genesis, exodus, exile and liberation.

What informs the Gospel writer’s conviction however is in fact that this “version” of this familiar story is being told within the timeline (to use a crude word) of this inaugerated new creation reality.

It remains abundantly clear, this isn’t invention. This is conviction. And this conviction pours out into this central idea for Mark that they, and by natural conclusion for us occupying this new creation reality on the other side of Jesus’ death and resurrection in this same timeline, we are all living this same story. In the framework of the Gospel, telling this story becomes an invitation to see it in the very same apocalpytic imagination that this second temple Judean context would have been steeped in- a revealing of where we are in this story, and, in the Christian narrative, to both find in Jesus the promised inaugeration of the new creation and, as Mark begins with the prophet isaiah, locating the image of Christ as being present in the entirety of the cosmic and historical story of Israel. To borrow from the citation above, “What is interrupted- in this case, the old age- does not cease to exist. At the same time, however, what is interrupted does not continue as if nothing had happened…”

This is the central concern and tension behind the questions pervading this Gospel’s original audience, set as they are against the shadows of Rome. These are the same questions we ask today in our own contexts.

For me, one of the great challenges I have long wrestled with as someone who embodies and occupies space in the particular framework that is the larger western enterprise, with it’s own visions of Empire, is this way in which this necessary question has been seemingly buried by our shifting emphasis on to the empirically laden “is Jesus historically true” and “is the bible true” type of concerns. In the language of this enterprise and it’s Empire, the question that Jesus’ death and resurrection once posed to these early communities, soaked in the conviction that something did indeed happen, gets entirely rewritten, exchanged for apologetics and it’s counter-factions. In the process, something my 7 year old self was already picking up on and wrestling with and pushing back on all those years ago, the real dilemma of our conscious awareness of this existence becomes a kind of sacrificial lamb. Rather than recognizing the cosmic reality that our rational senses intuitively understand to be true within the framework of our lived lives (the world we observe AND experience), we give interpretive precedence to the human instituions of our age (the Empire and it’s sciences), as though they can lay claim to their own authoratative presence, and in the process we incorporate romanticized and reductionist redefinitions of Sin and Death based on what are at their core materialist presuppositions and the moral (constructed) systems that afford these presuppositions a kind of power and control over the cosmic reality we both share and embody. And by and large, I think it can be argued that western christianity came to incorporate this same language, recasting it as it becomes it’s own sort of institutional alignment with the enterprise and it’s new found myths.

In short- we have become experts at remaking the narrative in our own image, and at deceiving ourselves about the root of the problem- cosmic enslavement.

There is an addtional element to this as well, which has its own parallel lines being made evident within the Gospel according to Mark. That is how the author understands the role of “the Powers” which stand in stark resistance to the resurrection of Jesus. As a decidely and distinctly Jewish conception, situated within the language of second temple Judaism, the Powers were seen to be synonymous with the terms Sin and Death, and these terms could (and would) flow interchangeably between the three central uses of these terms- a cosmic ruler, an enslaved state, and the distinct participation in this state or in allegiance to this ruler. As such, much scholarly work over the last 20 years has been recovering this partiuclar understanding of this language, lost as it’s become within the lengthy movement of a western, evangelical rhetorical reconstituting of what, as I am arguing here, is in fact a far more robust picture of sin than the “moral failure” distinctions made common today. This is something we also see made abundantly clear in the Gospel according to Mark. Ancient readers, standing in that long Tradition concerning the story of Israel, were equally adept at applying the “Powers” to the earthly ruling Empires. Leaders are made synonymous with the “seed of the serpent,” and the Empires are made synonyous with the cosmic Powers that enslave the whole of creation. This ability to move between the comsic and the particular is paramount for undersetnading the story that is being told, and for understanding how it is being told (and indeed, the story of the early community it is being told to).

At it’s heart, understanding this cosmic story matters because it is what allows us to frame the realities of both Empire and our own questions of participation within it in the light of a narrative which makes sense of the lived life- our observation and experience of this world shaped by a historical imagination. Here, Sin and Death are not reducible, as they become in western appeals to forms of secular materialism, to “non-existance” and our moral constructs, both definitions which the above enterprise has intellectualized into forms of primary and governing “truths.” Rather, Sin and Death, taken within the Gospel narrative and the world that is informing it, is a systemic reality that this enterprise does not and cannot address. In fact, it effectively opposes it. It gives us actual language to name Death, and thus subsequently to name Life, and to make sense of that within the paramaters of our human observation and experience of this world. What has seduced modern, western Christianity, in line with the enterprise itself, is strikingly and startling, a romanticizing of Death. The problem with this of course is, Death is not reducible to non-existence. The language of Death speaks to the very qualities of our participation in in the world. To set this within the interests of logic, reason and a proper appeal to rationalism, the “world” our narrative is handing us needs to make sense of the world we observe and experience. And such a world must attend for the kind of reality we live in relationship to.

Put in other terms- it must make sense of the way life itself functions. That means we need a story that can qualify it and define it as something distinctly different from death. This is the inference of the citations above.

No amount of building of such human, constructed moral systems can free us from an enslaved reality to the Powers of Sin and Death. And yet, as I think the Gospel according to Mark is trying to argue, we continue to tell ourselves that it can. Growing up in the world of western, evangelical chrsistianity, I was long taught to think in such terms. In my circles, the problem was my moral failure (sin), and the solution was God’s satisfying a necessary payment of death. Thus, salvation, or it’s active component, atonement, was all about how we (or more accurately, I) build our lives (or in the more reformed version, how God builds our lives) in a way that accords with what becomes a Gospel of Jesus’ “moral accomplishment.” Meaning, Jesus reflects the moral perfection we were meant to but failed to attain ourselves, thus making Jesus’ sacrifice effectual because of that perfection and leading us to, in some way shape or form, give our allegiance to these moral constructs and the social/societal constructs that hand them to us on political grounds, an elevated position of authority. The problem with this narrative is not just the obvious abuses this make available to such allegiances to the Powers (regardless of political allegiances), but about how it misses the story of salvation altogether. The former is about the world we seek to control by way of Death. The latter is about the world that needs liberating according to LIfe.

It misses the movement that the story represents, between these two realities defined by different rules.

It misses the ways in which the sin of participation is inately clarified by the thing (the cosmic rule or enslavement) it is participating in.

It misses the way in which the Gospel writers, including Mark, along with the world these Gospels emerged within (including Paul), understood terms like atonement and salvation, terms that, if we are to answer the question of our own participation in the new reality it brings about, must begin with the cosmic narrative, the cosmic concern. Here, the victory is not, as the citation suggests above, the Death which has been de-natured, but the Resurrection and ascension- the inagueration of a new reality. As a book I’ve been slow-reading over the past while puts astutely, Union with the Resurrected Christ: Eschatological New Creation and New Testament Theology (G.K. Beale), for the ancients this eschatological reality was inherent in this story from the beginning. It is what allows the ancients to think in terms of past, present, future all at once. Thus we have misundertood the apocalyptic language and phrasings to think only in terms of an ending. Jesus, breaking into the middle of history as He does, complicates this way of thinking, precisely because it forces us to ask the perennial question, what changed. How are things different. Here, the emphasis of modern theologies on the death of Jesus as the atoning sacrifice consistently confuses the what and the how, precisely because it’s trying to answer it outside of the temple imagery this language is trying to evoke.

I think this confusion is more self evident than many want to recognize. Rather than engage that question, it becomes far easier to simply edge it into the background of our tightly guarded and cleverly constucted theologies. We ignore the fact that this is also what the whole enlightenment project does with its own percieved stumbling blocks. The stuff that challenges the tightly guarded commitments of the myth of progress gets swept under the rug where it doesn’t have to be attended for.

In both cases, and in its own way, the thing being swept out of mind and sight is in fact Death itself. In the case of the western enterprise, the stuff of Death takes on the language of Life. In the case of the Christian narrative, our efforts to define atonement in terms of the “death” of Christ leads us to miss the very grounds upon which the writers and the cultures and communities in the ANE make sense of the new reality Christ brings about- the resurrection and ascension. For them, the sacrificial language is not rooted in death (in fact, death is precisely the thing it wants to reconstitute as resurrected life, in practice, a concept rooted in this movement between two spaces or two realities). What make the person and ministry of Jesus a saving work, a saving work that indeed brings about atonement, is His effectual defeat of the Powers of Sin and Death. It is the fact that Jesus brings about the inaugeration of a new reality as part of that familiar and entrenched eschatological way of life and thought.

This, for me, is the true power of that narrative, and why I think it encompasses a true form of hope. In naming these two realities, it hands us a way to name Death. And in naming Death, it hands us a way to name Life. Not as a future reality, but as a qualitative one that we experience in the here and now.

As I’ve been reading through the Lenten devotional, Wardrobes and Rings: Through Lenten Lands with the Inklings by Guite Golding, I’ve been struck by this unique group of individuals whom I think got this in a way very few have. Standing in this liminal space, between the modernists and the romantics, they had this sense that something was off, and they used story to attempt to communicate and flesh this intuition out. as they wrote and discussed and debated together. At it’s heart was their deep understanding regarding the importance of the story itself. More than this though, woven into the fabric of all of their narratives is this sense that our myths must, and need, to attend honestly for both Death and Life. Apart from this, and indeed, for them they would also say apart from Christ, we are only left with the echos of our great deceptions.

As my commentary on the Gospel according to Mark notes, “When Jesus dies, rejected and alone, the most significant event of the Gospel transpires; the temple curtain is torn in two…” Thus, it becomes clear, is the resonant sound of God’s presence, residing as it did in the temple (the temple itsself being a microcosm of the garden space within it’s liturgical expression) now abiding in the whole of creation. This becomes the central movement of God in Christ. Death is reconstituted as Life, or more accurately put, in the defeat of the Powers of Sin and Death, that which Death holds in its grip has been reconstituted as Life. Meannig, it, even creation itself, becomes a qualitatively different thing. The question is, do we have the language to recognize what this is, and do we have a narrative that can justify our hope that this, this basic and evident dynamic of our observation and experience of the world we occupy, has in fact has been made true in our midst.

Before I was born, both of my parents left the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) for Winnipeg, leaving the rest of my extended family behind. Being the only ones not living in the GTA, at least until my later years when we were joined by one of my cousins, meant that we grew up somewhat distanced from those relationships, and certainly from the drama and dynamics of being in close proximity. Distance, of course speaking geographically, but also, and more important, to lesser and greater degress in connection.

It might be more appropriate to say that it gave the relationship to our extended family a unique flavour, marked most notably by our annual trips Eastward, either to my grandparent’s cottage in the summer or to my cousin’s house at Christmas. It was rare for them to come our way, thus most of my memories come from those intentional trips, mainly by car, sometimes by train.

This is also likely why the strongest of those relationships was with this particular set of cousin’s. What made that unique was not simply that we spent the majority of our time with them, and they were closest in age to us, but that they consisted of three girls while we were three boys. Very different households, and yet this difference I think allowed us to form those bonds over the years. The distance would become greater once us three boys graduated, no longer having the anual traditions of heading East to depend upon. This would be something I would revisit over the years in different seasons of my life, be it through establishing a new-found routine when we got married, and once again when we adopted our son Sasha years later.

It’s interesting to note that, being older now I am far more aware of our specific cultural differences, coming as we do from different parts of Canada. It’s apparent in the accents. It’s also apparent in the lifestyles. Maybe one of the most prominent differences is the fact that when it comes to Ontario, they tend to be a lot more centralized in the way they think, live and function. It makes sense, as that whole “center of the universe” mentality emerges from the fact that very short drives puts them in any number of major city populations, not to mention never being far from the next city or town over. There is a sense in which Canada’s identity flows from the capital outwards. In contrast, the closest Canadian city of significance (sorry Brandon and Regina) to Winnipeg is a 14 hour drive one way, and a 24 hour drive the other way. Hence why for a Winnipeger the road trip is ingrained in our psyche. It is nothing for us to turn Calgary or Edmonton into a weekend trip. Equally so, it is a Manitoba tradition to head over the border, being situated 40 minutes from it, for anything from a day trip to a weekend to a week away in Fargo or Minneapolis.

And while we certainly know what it is to make our home in this river town, we tend to think with one foot grounded and in, and the other out exploring the greater world. If we are horrified over the thought of being stuck for hours on the 401 as a lifestyle, a cognitive disonnance created by our 20 minute commutes (this is changing, but forever and a day that is one of our calling cards, that you can get to the other side of the city from anywhere in 20 minutes), we do have this ingrained and in-born love for experiencing these other lifestyles as visitors and as learners. Just as long as we know we have our famliar community back home (and not inconsequentially, that community is what lends us a strong sense of culture, especially when it comes to the music scene).

I am well on the way to digressing here, but the reason I was bringing up my extended family, and in-particular my cousins, was to simply note that this absence of girls in our household changed dramatically during our time at Morningmeade with the arrival of our foster sisters. While I am using sisters in plural, some didn’t stay long (I remember one didn’t even last a day), while others were more permanent fictures as part of the family, travelling with us as we continued to move again, and again, and again. It’s interesting to note then, while I technically only have two siblings, both brothers two years apart on either side of me, it would also be true to say that those same formative years included my sisters in a very real way. And not unlike my three cousins, I always found it easier to connect with the girls. This would flow out into my young adult life, but here I think the presence of my sisters did afford me something of a reprieve from my experiences at school.

What’s significant about Morningmeade in particular is that this is where most of those relationships were initially established (including with the one whom would go on to marry my brother). In some ways, while my brother’s were out building their lives (or planting the seeds for where life was soon going to take them), I was spending time with these then strangers becomming more and more of a common fixture.

It would be when I aproached my later years at Calvin Christian School that we would eventually move again, this time a bit southward to a street called Sharon Bay, a smaller house in a still developing area (that I subsequently no longer recognize today). A single floor bungalo, with a fully finished basement, This is where I got my first job, delivering papers for the Winnipeg Free Press. This was back when they let younger kids work. It was also at a time when paper delivery happened in the afternoons rather than the mornings, making one of my routines coming straight home from school to complete my route.

Delivering papers would actually be a job I would return to at a few different junctures in my life, usually when I found myself between jobs. I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. When it eventually became an early morning gig, I came to cherish the early rising. It was quiet, and there was something about the nature of the job leaving you largely on your own that I appreciated and enjoyed, save for the brief period when they made you go house to house collecting your money from customers (that part I didn’t enjoy). Plenty of time to spend getting lost in thought. Saturday’s was it’s own special routine, racing to get it done so that i could make it back for what was 5 straight hours of Saturday morning cartoons. That was back when saturday mornings cartoons were still an institution.

Eventually those “early morning” hours transitioned into middle of the night hours, the paper trying to compete to get it’s news out first. Those 3 AM wake up calls were an extra special kind of quiet, that’s for sure.

Delivering papers in the afternoons did have it’s own set of perks, being out as I was in the light of day. Unbeknownst to me, I had a secret admirer for a while. At least until one day the girl finally decided to stop and talk to me. It was actually on a day when I was out collecting from my customers. Having knocked on one door and having no one answer, I turned around to come back to the sidewalk where I had left my bike. That’s when a younger girl had made her way over. Looking at me, she gestured behind her. “See that girl over there,” she says. I look, and see a girl who looks closer to my own age. “She likes you,” the younger girl says.

At this point I found myself frozen in place. I didn’t know what to say, and the more I stood there in silence the more the terror was building up inside me. It wasn’t particularly hot out, but I was starting to sweat like I had stepped straight into a sauna. “Well,” the younger girl speaks up again, breaking the silence. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

At that moment, panic finally taking over, I got back on my bike and raced off. I did run into her again at a later date. Suffice to say I was no longer getting a look of admiration.

I have mentioned the gradual and growing absence of my older brother in my early years already. While much of this had to do with that two year difference creating seperation between our social circles, and certainly him being in different schools for most of my life played a factor, there was also the fact that he found himself on his own path at this point in his life, wrestling with some of our handed down beliefs. In truth, this sort of questioning and wrestling is actually a quality that we have shared over the years, and something that has played a role in keeping some level of connection alive as the years have gone on. But, it was also a source of tension, both in the ways it created that distance and in the way I tried to make sense of it.

When we moved to Sharon Bay, this is when tensions between him and my dad were at their highest. I would have been 13/14 years old, my brother 16. My brother had gravitated towards staying out late, coming home at erratic times, or not coming home at all. And usually when he did he reeked of smoke or alcohol. There were encounters inside the house, one specific one which was capped off by the distinct and memorable phrase “if you don’t like the damn rules, there’s the damn door.” There were locked doors and signs out that night after my brother left, indicating that should he make his way back home he could find shelter in the garage instead. Eventually he disappeared altogether, having started a relationship with one of our foster sisters whom was a few years older than we were. All I knew at that time was that he had more or less disappeared from life at home, no longer around in the evenings and largely absent from family suppers. Definitely absent from church.

It was around this same time that my younger brother had moved to a different church, getting involved in a youth group that had bonded him to a new social circle. In a sense, while my one brother was moving in one direction, my younger brother was staking his claim in another, planting the seeds of what would become over 30 years in ministry work. Both shifting in their own ways meant the dynamic at home was changing, and I was left feeling somewhat lost in the middle (there’s that middle child syndrome again). Much of my time was spent at home alone with my favorite t.v. shows (back in the era of Full House and Perfect Strangers) in my room with my favorite books, spending time with my dog, who subsequently became my best friend over those years, or down in the basement banging away at the drums.

This is where I think my relationship with one of my longest standing and most consistent friendships, with a guy named Dan, also began to take a greater shape. While Dan had been a part of my life for as long as I could remember, the fact that they lived over an hour outside of the city meant that, up until this point, it was a relationship reliant on our parent’s planning. It was when we moved to Sharon Bay that they moved into the city, and thus he became something of an anchor during those years where more and more of the space at my house was becoming vacant. Sleepovers became a routine, wasting the hours away with our select role playing video games (back then it was the nintendo, and then eventually the super-nintendo). We were bonafide nerds, with one of our favorite choice of games called Uncharted Waters, which was modeled after the real world map, and in which we would promptly have our own large physical map unfolded and layed out on the floor beside the chips and cheesies, tracking our path and exploring the geography on screen.

As life would have it, at one point we eventully made a move all the way to the southern part of the North Kildonan/Elmwood area, to Johnson avenue, coming from the furtherst northern location we ever lived (Glenway Crescent). This was not only a change in social class, coming from a more upper class part of the city to a lower income area (it was actually one of our rental properties that my dad had been investing in over the years, now finding things stuck after the market crashed). it was a change in lifestyle. More importantly, as things went, we actually ended up moving right next door to Dan’s family, although it was somewhat short lived as they ended up moving again. And, much later I would find out that my future wife actually lived right across the street from us as well.

Sharon Bay is also where I transitioned from the old family drumset to an upgraded blue pearl set. This was around the time of my transitioning from Grade 9, then middle years, to Grade 10, the start of high school, a school that was actually a short walk from our Johnson avenue house. This would also mark a switch in schools, and with that came an opportunity to play. While I had been toying around with the guitar, an unfortunate fight with my dad resulted in him taking away my lessons. I can still see the disappointment on my teacher’s face as my dad yanked me out of there mid session. If I’m honest, this is still one of those “what if” moments, because I genuinely felt I had potential.

As life would move forward however, it became more and  more centered around the drums, to the point where that ended up subsuming my musical aspirations. In these early years however, it would be starting to take the drums more seriously that would become an in-road back into my younger brother’s world, being invited to play in the worship band at church, and also the starting point of what would become a whole new social circle, connecting with a group of musicians that had been hanging out with my older brother jamming from time to time in the basement. As my brother disappeared, they became my new identity.

Reflecting back on this ever shifting dynamics, it seems to me that life is a constant interplay with both fixed and malleable or shaping realities. Might it be that a single different trajectory or circumstance would be telling a much different story? Without a doubt. And yet, it’s hard not to also feel that who I say I am, the person for whom those influences are interacting, remains visible. As though all of life is a process of figuring out who that is within such a relationship. These are interesting questions for me. Am I shaped by a perpetual wrestlessness and anxiety, a need to dwell on the big questions, because circumstance created this need or this response, or is that a product of my interaction with such a world. This is the stuff, as I would discover later on, philosophers have spent endless books and traditions fleshing out throughout history.

Either way, this is the shape of my reality. This is the shape of my experience. Had I been born and lived in the GTA, in relative close proximity to Toronto, my story certainly changes. But it’s pretty difficult to imagine a reality where I am not drawn to story, where I don’t have this strong sense of isolation and being misunderstood, where I haven’t fostered a genuine love for all God’s creatures, where I don’t find myself disenchanted with the modern world.

Where I am not that middle child, or that biological case prone to anxiety.

Less difficult I suppose to appreciate what my particular circumstnace did gift me with- a love for maps and travel, the slower pace of life, the drums, my particular friends, my wife, my dogs.

Thus I am prone to think in terms of both-and. It is the push and pull of those fixed and malleable qualities of my life and story, and thus who I am, that sets me in relationship to it. Which is precisely where I can come to know both myself and the reality that surrounds me. As time pushes forward, this is going to become more and more distinct, beginning to to see some of those more concrete directions taking shape. A different season of my life, but as part of that larger conversation nevertheless still part of that narrative whole. The stuff above might seem and sound like benign deteails, but all of it will come to play an important role in where my life heads.

First quarter check in at the movies, 2026

In many respects, the first quarter of 2026 has demonstarted itself to be a relatively strong start to the year. As per usual, made stronger by the usual slate of awards contenders finally seeing wide release over the course of January. I am thinking of the likes of Vallade and Han’s Little Amelie, Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, or my personal favorite of the bunch, Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee. All of which would be topping my 2026 list had I included them (as it is, I added them to my 2025 list). 

Alongside this though, is a year that started with the follow up to last year’s exceptional 28 Years Later (Bone Temple) . While I was a bit less high on it than many others, finding some narrative weakness in the overall story conception, there is no denying the strength of the trilogy, and having this leading the way definitely elevates the slate. 

Surrounding that was the dependable if predictable Statham led action flick Shelter, which I found to be refreshingly understated as a straightforward, no frills, thriller with a satisying script and a solid young star complimenting the weathered action hero (here less hero than weathered and aging soul), the underseen but surprisingly solid Austrlian apocalyptic zombie drama We Bury the Dead, which makes the most out of a creative premise and its alluring lead in Daisy Ridley, and lastly the by the numbers January filler in Primate, which is a short but competent formulaic suspense movie where a Primate kills everyone on screen.

Leaving aside Timur Bekmambetov’s slightly misguided Mercy, which despite not being as bad as the critics made it out to be, and even making it’s “made for IMAX 3D” format worth the investment, does fail to read the room regarding the temperament around AI in the present moment. The absolute highlight of January for me was the wide release of Bi Gan’s Resurrection, a film that plays with matters of perspective as it explores those liminal spaces between illusion and reality, standing as a thematic and cinematic celebration of the form itself. That and the experimental film The Mother and the Bear by Johnny Ma, a film about Winnipeg made by a local filmmaker, telling a story that is in many ways a love letter to the city, and which I got to see with a local crowd. This led the way in what has been a really good year thus far for Canadian film.

Not wanting to be left out, February came out swinging with the much anticipated and highly successful new film by Sam Raimi, Send Help, which for my money stood out most for McAdam’s go for broke performance. I never knew she had that in her.

Inbetween that buzzy release and later in the month the much talked about Wuthering Heights, a film that I didn’t care for but which definitely captured the moment on a cultural level, was a mix of VOD and smaller theatrical releases. On the VOD side, Pike River was definitely one of the standouts, a New Zealand project about a real life story involving a mining accident and the politics that surround it, and the women who fought back against the powers trying to silence it. A strong, quiet, emotionally laden effort with a real eye for it’s characters.

Batting straight down the middle were a handful of fine but forgettable films, including the latest Dave Bautista film, The Wrecking Crew (which had it’s moments for a bigger, surface level action film), and two rom-com’s in F Valentines Day and Kissing is the Easy Part (I liked the former more than the latter).

Topping that list of VOD films however was without question La Crazia, the latest from Paolo Sorrentino (The Hand of God). A timely political movie that is less about the politics and far more about those universal questions regarding what it means to be human and what it means to wrestle with ones legacy as a human. And more so, how this seeking after legacy can enslave our sense of personhood or identity to it’s narrative in ways that often run larglely external to our own sense of control. It’s a character study, but it’s also a philosophical exercise to this end, and one that I resonated with in a big way.

Back on the big screen was the next Canadian effort in line, Nirvanna, the Band the Show the Movie, which for someone like me going in blind with zero awareness of the show definitely cemented itself as likely the funniest film I will see all year (and one of the most enjoyable theater experiences). And finally got to see the new Luc Besson film as well, which was his take on the Dracula story. It took that story in certain directions I did not expect on a visual and thematic level, and it really won me over to it’s mix of serious and camp, giving me lots to think about and sit with regarding larger themes of life and death and what redemption means in light of those tensions.

Say what you will about the Angel Studios release Solo Mio (and trust me, I have a lot of my own words about the studio), but my wife Jen and I have a ton of great memories of routinely watching King of Queens before Letterman (or Conan), and equally from our time in Rome. Setting the quality of the movie aside, checking those two boxes were enough to get us out to watch it, and sure enough we got some version of “King of Queens goes to Rome.”

Quietly taking over the box office in the midst of this was the little animated movie that could in GOAT, which earned it’s way into the conversation with a good script and that off the radar appeal.

A film that actually did pretty good for it’s genre, but neverthless deserved more eyeballs on the big screen was Crime 101, a throwback to those old school car chase thrillers that, if a bit too long in runtime, gives us a little bit of everything. That and the follow up to the really solid Emily the Criminal in How To Make a Killing. While not as good, it was still the sort of film that we need, in a healthy theater landscape, to support. The mid-budget, smaller scale originals made by boots on the ground creatives (in this case John Patton Ford). The uniquly ambitious and bombastic Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die by Gore Verbinksi would also fit this bill.

March really became known for three things- the success of Hopper, the advertised failure of The Bride, set alongside the complete takeover of Project Hail Mary. In my opinion, Hoppers hits all the marks it needeed to in order to justify it’s rise to prominance, even while, for me, still sitting behind films like Elio and Elemental in terms of it’s creative vision. The Bride is where I would want to go to bat the most however, as it’s one of my favorites of the year thus far, messy but creative, and never less than interesting as it balances fun and serious in a visionary fashion. Whatever expired milk some of the critical voices were drinking, unfortunately it controlled the narrative surrounding this film, seeeping intto the cultural ethos and announcing it dead upon arrival before it even had a chance. There’s still hope however that the film could somehow gain some kind of cult status down the road, as I do know those who are on it’s side really liked it a lot, to the point where it has a passionate defence.

Not much more needs to be said about Project Hail Mary- big movie that’s hitting the marks people want in dire times. Much more does need to be said though about EPIC: Elvis Presley in Concert, one of the definite films of the year made by the same director who gave us the recent biopic (one of my favourites of that year). It’s not just an excellently crafted and edited concert film, which weaves far more into the territory of narratively driven documentary, it’s a suprisingly satisfying viewing experience, in that the footage manages to somehow give fresh insight, or at least shed a fresh light on, the enigmantic figure. That alone is impressive, but it’s the spell the film casts, inviting us into his charismatic and complicated (and tortured) allure, that was most memorable.

Some other films to note from March, which I did seperate thoughts on recently (so brief mentions here)- an experimental Canadian film, Alberta Number One, the always compelling Jim Jarmusch in his latest effort Father Mother Sister Brother, the Ukrainian sci-fi film getting swalloed up by Project Hail Mary, U Are the Universe, the decent follow up to Ready or Not (Ready or Not 2: Here I Come), the unsettling horror film The Plague and the Canadian film Undertone.

As well, there was Winnipeg Directors McLellan and Trudeau in the northern thriller Hair of the Bear, Canadian Director Anita Doron in the compelling and quite explicit Maya and Samar, and my two top releases of the month, the haunting The Voice of Hind Rajab and the emotionally captivating All That’s Left of You.

Still needing to catch up with three anticipated films I missed- They Will Kill You and Forbidden Fruits, both of which still have at least another week in their theatrical runs, and Kristen Stewart’s The Chronology of Water, which unfortunatley finished it’s run.

In terms of larger narratives, the dominant storyline of course has been the up again, down again dramatics of the WB merger, which remains in disarray and will likely be mired in all sorts of complications over the coming months- don’t be surprised to see it challenged. An unfortunate distraction as things go, given that the real issues this whole thing has been bringing to the surface regarding the present state of the industry would be far better served by addressing actual regulation and vision.

As things go, there’s been a notable trend towards the different ways in which the artists are beginning to speak up about the present state of the industry as of late. And it should be noted, I am noticing a willingness to speak more bluntly and unfiltered. What comes from the select few whom find success these days (leaving the discussion of measure to the side) tends to be different than the creatives, established or not, whom find thsemselves fighting against the system just to stay alive. Listen to the differences between voices like Emerald Fennell, Daniel Chong, and Lord and Miller, and conversations with those like Maggie Gyllenhaal and John Patton Ford, films that were labeled failures. One can hope this serves to tease out the nuances of the discussion over the next while, as playing the success of something like Project Hail Mary, as great as that is, as a catch all for “there is not a problem” continues to miss the forest for the trees (sorry Gosling, I don’t think your speech really gets it).

And yes, if because I keep banging this drum precisely because I think speaking about it is necessary, one of the biggest things people can do is keep watching how a giant like Netflix continues to take advantaage of a landscape weak in regulated terms and caught in continued chaos. That’s the thread with the most relevance and the most power.

To note some positives of the last whle:

– the discussion the merger helped bring to the forefront still feels like it’s somehwat in play, save for getting caught in the political war

– there seems to be some genuine interest in challenging the Canadian film culture to step up to the plate when it comes to defining it’s shape and it’s presence (see the platform the Directors for “Nirvana…” have been utilizing over these last few months), especially where it comes to actually looking at what Canad’s Online Streaming Act is meant to defend (once a product of 20th century anxieties about American cultural influence, it is now grappling with the present global realities- see OPEN CANADA article, “Preserving Canadian Culture in the Platform Era from March 18th). To cite that article, ” 

If Canadian cultural policy was built on the assumption that supporting domestic production would shape what audiences see, that link is now mediated by platforms that Canada does not control

That is the conversation at the forefront right now over these last few months- how to connect powers and agencies outside of our culture to a systsem that continues to feed our cultural values, including indigenous and french, independent and canadian theater chains, production, education, ceativity, even as the powers keep pushing back (which of course they will)

– a move like Universal (see: Universal expands their theatrical window) and Amazon (recommitting to more investment in theaters- see Project Hail Mary) is good news

– Voices like Ted Hope, whom has been in the spotlight speaking to A24’s continued value for investment and their call for advocating for regulation is good news

– European regulations being brought into play alongside Canada, arguably where regulations and systems are much stronger than ours, is good news (see the article by Leslie Griffin, Trade Barriers Evolve With Movie Streaming Trends, from Hinrich Foundation). Back in the 1920’s, European coutnries offered subsidies to combat the Hollywood system encouraching on the “keepers of culture” in foreign locations, subsidies that “imposed screen quotas and (windows).” Eleven countries still have this in place. These are the things that now global entities have been challenging and that discussions must address. An interesting note here that breathes some nuance into the ongoing discussions, which is assessing how regulations to protect against Hollywood have also in some ways hindered local film cultures in that it makes it more difficult to find their own global presence.

In any case, some thoughts that have been with me over the past three months. Been also watching the continued redevelopment of The Garry Theater, of which I became a friend (donor) in its preservation. Attended a session at Winnipeg Public Library on the history of Canadian and Winnipeg theaters. I continue to support my local arthouse as a member, which is deeply embedded in fostering and growing Winnipeg film and its filmmakers.

Lastly, here’s where my top 12 of 2026 stands as of the end of March (with the picture rounding out the top 20):

1. All That’s Left of You
2. Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert
3. The Voice of Hind Rajab
4. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
5. La Grazia
6. Resurrection
7. The Bride
8. Project Hail Mary
9. Send Help
10. The Plague
11. The Mother and the Bear
12. We Bury the Dead