For what it’s worth Jumanji was the last place I expected to find meaningful theological discussion. But it actually presented me with an opportunity to engage with my son in some heathy and timely dialogue surrounding faith and God. A likely testament to how simply and effectively the film handles its narrative.
Particle Man
On our way to see this film my son happened to start talking about his school year and some of what he has been learning. He mentioned that he was struggling to believe in the idea of God or religion. Using his limited vocabulary (he was adopted from Ukraine so his english is still limited) he went into some pretty impressive existential and philosophical reasoning for why faith in God was a difficult thing to understand. He made reference to the fact that we are simply particles coming together with other particles to form something real, knowable, seeable, touchable, and went on to say “I believe in myself” while suggesting that, on the other side of this equation he can’t see, know, or touch God in the same way. And so we should do our best to spend this life being our best selves, but he is not sure we need God to do that.

I went on to dub him “Particle Man”, a hero destined to change the world for the better.

Lives Versus Life
If you have seen Jumanji you will know that it does some neat things with contrasting the way we play this game (of life) with 3 lives versus 1 life. This idea sparked some conversation about this contrast afterwards when we got home. When the game is going well and we are advancing to the next level and making progress, the game is fun and enjoyable to play. But in these moments we aren’t always paying full attention to our surroundings, or anticipating what could be coming around the next corner. And we don’t always concern ourselves with the bigger questions of why we are doing what we are doing or what the end goal of this game really is working towards.

In Jumanji lives are measured by bars on your wrist. When a bar is lost it has a way of making us more intently aware of these questions. It causes us look at the game differently. It has a way of encouraging us to think about why we are doing what we are doing and what risks are worth taking.

It also makes us far more aware of the people we are playing the game with and the ways in which we need these other people (with their strengths) in our life in order to play the game well. Especially in those times when our weakness- our struggles, our insecurities, our failures, our sins, become more apparent.

The message of the film of course doesn’t intend to reach into the realm of theology (with its one life to live, so make the most of it message). But it did set the stage for some really good and timely discussion in our home about some of the bigger questions. Questions about what it means to recognize our strengths while also being okay with our weaknesses, something that follows these characters as their avatars begin to expose their real world struggles, the stuff they have been hiding behind in the every day. This can be especially pertinent in times when we like to believe we don’t have any weaknesses at all, something Johnsons character must come to terms with over the course of the film.

Or Questions about how our weaknesses reveals our need for an other in our lives, and how our strength can help the weaknesses of others in their time of need. There is a key scene in the film that really drives this point home, showing the power that this kind of sacrifice and sacrificial language can really change the way we play the game in some real and amazing ways.

And ultimately this is what we are reminded of in the story of scripture. God came into this world to be that visible, knowable, touchable other who demonstrates this sort of self sacrificial language on our behalf. A God who then calls us to follow in his footsteps and to do likewise for the life of others. These are the most important rules for the game. This is the way to the next level. This is the end game. This is the bigger picture.

The next morning following our evening viewing my son asked me to give him a marker. He said he will draw three bars on his arm. And then he’ll show this game how its supposed to be played. I suggested that when you get as old as me life has a way of reminding us of just how fast those bars are fading every single day. I can keep trying to scratch them back on all I want, but I can’t control them from disappearing. Which is a reminder to me to keep playing the game according to the most important rule. Love God and love others.  Which is really what I hope and pray this Christmas season can be for our family, and especially for my son in the midst of his questions and his wrestling. A time of fresh perspective. An opportunity to see the one who entered this game to make God knowable, touchable, seeable. Who taught us how to play this game on His terms rather than ours. Who infused it with purpose, gave us our strength, and offered grace and meaning in our weakness, the same grace we are called to give to others.

May this be the spirit by which we play, and may we remember the spirit by which He came this season.

The other night I couldn’t sleep, and so I came downstairs. My son happened to be curled up on the couch rather than in his room. I found myself looking at my son and wondering about what I had to offer him as his father. I wondered about all the things I wanted to promise him. I thought about his hopex and dreams. And I thought about all the ways this world can steal these promises, these hopes and these dreams.

And then I just started to write. And what came out was this series of questions:

 

The Meaning of a Life
The moment we discover gravity is the moment we realize that we cannot fly. And so we learn how to walk.

The moment we learn to walk is the moment we learn to die. And so we begin the work of learning what it means to live.

But what is life if not the slow process of dying?

And so we choose to believe that death gives life meaning.

But if death gives life meaning, why do we spend so much of our lives trying to find a way to fix death? We work and we give and we fight so that someday we might conquer disease. We could not imagine a public request for money to help fund a cure for cancer while also hearing that this same cancer cannot or should not be cured.

Which begs the question. Would most people not accept a pill that could cure them of all disease, especially if this disease was threatening to take their life? Or would they take it?

We hope for more. We hope for better. We hope that one day life can change. This is human nature. To live life we must face death. To change life it seems we must change death.

But what kind of world, what kind of life do we expect to find on the other side of death and disease?

What motivates us to long for this world?

Which begs another question. Would most people not accept a pill that could cure the life of someone they love, especially if this disease was threatening to take their life? Or would they give them this pill?

And so we find motivation to live through investing in the life of others.

We learn that we are not the meaning of this life, and so we work to make others lives meaningful.

But how do we convince others that their life has meaning if ours does not?

When we work to make other lives meaningful, it gives our life meaning.

But what are we helping others to live for if not the long road towards death?

And if we are helping them to live for more, what kind of life do we expect them to find on the other side of death and disease? What do we believe should motivate others to long for this world?

And so we hope that they too will find motivation to live through investing in the lives of others. Because we also need to be reminded that this life has meaning. That there is something to hope for on the other side of death and disease, that fine line between meaning and meaninglessness.

Hope that maybe, just maybe there is a chance we are able to fly after all.

---

 

A Marriage Analogy
First we enter the Honeymoon period where anything is possible. Love is ours for the taking. This new world is an enchanting and wondrous place. Romance is very much alive and well. Everyday is made up of big, extraordinary moments.

We believe we can fly.

 

And then reality sets in.

Routine. Struggle. Conflict.

Innocence lost.

 

Which presents us with an opportunity.

We must learn to walk. We grow through the struggle. We find meaning in the routine. We come to cherish the small moments in the midst of what is sometimes an overwhelming sense of conflict. We realize that one day this romance will be stolen, one day death will take its toll.

And then we learn to live.

 

But we also learn to live for more.

The reason we walk is to remind ourselves of what it was like to fly. We spend the rest of our lives trying to reclaim the wonder and the romance that the world stole and continues to steal away. In the midst of this reality- the routine, the struggle, the conflict, we find ways to fall in love with our spouse over and over and over again.
Where reality steals, we give.
We give towards the relationship that offers us meaning. Because in giving we are able to let them know that they mean something to us.
We hope for more than til’ death do us part. We hope for new life.

 

Lately I have been gaining more and more interest in the work of author Carolyn Custis James. She talks a lot about the importance of contextualization when it comes to engaging with the Bible and Christian theology. One of her biggest passions is learning how to read scripture in the context of a Patriarchal society, although much of what she has to say about contextualization can easily translate to any societal norm, especially when it comes to dealing with familial structures (to which the Patriarchy belongs).

She argues that the best way to navigate this conversation is to see the Patriarchal society as the backdrop to the world into which scripture first spoke, not the message of scripture itself. When we see it from this lens it becomes possible to recognize how the stories of the Bible are reshaping and even confronting the notions of Patriarchy. She goes on to say that for many who live(d) in a Patriarchal society, the Biblical narrative (sacred scripture) was revolutionary. It exposes it as a system of oppression, a process of exclusion, and illuminates the work of God in the world as the process of reconciliation rather than opposition. For those of us who don’t live in a Patriarchal Society, or at least not in such obvious ways, this context is not as easily understood. The Patriarchy was a way of structuring the family in the ancient world, and what makes this even more important is that for ancient culture, these family structures also tended to shape and impact their approach to politics as well. And so in the ancient world, the family represents two competing forces- oppression (exclusion) and freedom (belonging), which is why contextualization becomes so important for us today, especially when it comes to comes to recognizing how the idea of family also plays a central role in God’s work of reconciliation.

Coco and The Contextualization of Family
As a Pixar original animated film, the creators of Coco were interested in giving voice to an underrepresented (and also currently oppressed) culture by highlighting the multi-generational household that defines the family context in Mexican culture. It then contextualizing this for a modern and international audience (which comes most clearly in Pixar’s efforts to intentionally translate the film seamlessly for English speaking audiences). From what I have heard, the film does well in celebrating the strength of a culture that values strong generational ties, incorporating some the quirks and subtleties that give this culture so much colour. It also becomes a metaphor for the oppression the culture faces in our modern age, using that line between the living and the land of the dead to imagine a very real U.S./Mexican border. Here it brings these same competing forces- exclusion and belonging, to light in a powerful way.

However, the film also does some interesting things in exploring the ways in which this family structure gives attention to what is ultimately a very human struggle- the struggle to forgive, the reality of rejection, identity issues and the struggle to belong in a system that often excludes based on elevating the worth of blood ties and family name. It reminds us that while we can see the oppression on a socio-political level, what is not always as easy to see are these same things happening on a deeply personal level in the context of our own families and relationships on our own soil and in our own homes.

By the end of the film we see these two competing forces come together through a resonating message that, however messy family can get it is also the context in which we are able to learn forgiveness, grace, and the merits of unconditional love, all of the things necessary for belonging. For Coco (and the Mexican tradition it brings to light), the call to “remember” ones family is not necessarily about narrowing our perception of the places to which we belong, but it is about the opportunity to envision these acts of forgiveness, grace and love into our personal context.  But in a world as vast and as colourful and as intricate as the one Coco illustrates for us on screen, it also operates as a stark reminder of just how quickly theses things can become lost when our vision of family becomes too narrow, when the family structure and name becomes our idol, the means by which “we” belong (somewhere) rather than the model for how we relate to and include the “world”.

 

Adoption: A Metaphor For the World
As parents of an adopted son (internationally) and as parents who could not have biological children, so much of our ability to function as a family lives and dies on our ability to claim ourselves as a legal family in the eyes of the law. And so much of our ability to function as a family depends on seeing family as a cross-cultural journey. All 3 of us need to be able to hear and understand that family is not bound by a Patriarchal structure, or in our own modern context, by blood or by legal construct or shared culture, otherwise we would could not truly belong, we would not be fully included or accepted in society according to equal measure.

So the more I read and hear from James, the more I become convinced there is a very good reason why adoption becomes the singular, most dominant metaphor in response to the Patriarchal society that we find in the backdrop of scripture, because no matter which context the family takes, whether it is the nuclear family of American society or the multi-generational households of Mexican society, it still doesn’t reach broad enough, it can never be big enough to encompass God’s vision for His people and his world. Adoption, then, in it’s Christian context, is the only idea, the only familial narrative that truly reaches across our dividing lines, that touches us all and enables us to belong across borders, across multi-generational lines, and above any and all contextualization.

Reaching Towards Adoption
The truth of the Patriarchy, or any other familial system that binds us in terms of blood and status, is that these are things that can be stripped away and stolen. They are, by nature, exclusive, which means no matter what form they take they will always carry the potential for oppression. And it is this realization that pushed Carolyn James to look for something that could not be stolen, a truth about our identity that moves beyond contextualization and towards a universal truth about the work of reconciliation she saw saw breathing between the lines of the sacred scripture. And her search returned her to the pages of Genesis 1 and 2 in order to ask the question, what does the Bible have to say about us “in the beginning” that is true in birth and remains true in death. She arrived at 3 central truths (as she explains to Pete Enns in a recent interview with The Bible For Normal People podcast), of which the most important for me was number one:

We are image bearers meant to know the God we are imagining.

Out of this truth flows the mission of God’s people as image bearers, which is to break down the things that separate us from knowing God and of being a part of God’s family. And she creates a powerful picture of a nation which exists in the story of scripture to as an adopted people called to extend this message of adoption to the world, a world held hostage by their family structures, a world full of people in desperate need of freedom and a place to belong. For the early Jewish nation, and later the disciples of Christ followed by the apostles and the growing Church, this message of adoption was a reminder that the family of God knew no bounds. The family of God was not defined by the blood of relatives, but by the blood of God Himself. A blood stained image that uses the idea of sacrifice to flip the worlds power structures on its head. A self giving service that attempts to redefine the ways in which we belong and challenge the ways in which we don’t.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the Bible is interested in doing away with the idea of family or family structures, only that it wishes to set the idea of family into the bigger picture of God’s grace, work and story, the same story to which we are called to belong. This becomes in this narrative the contextualization of God Himself into our world and our circumstance, a contextualization that comes in a way that is fully realized in the incarnation, in the Gospel witness.

Reaching towards the Christmas Narrative
In the Christmas story the message of adoption that has been given to the Israelite Nation comes full circle. It has now been given to the world. As God’s image bearers created to know God’s image, each of us has been given the full imagining of God Himself, God in the flesh. And in this revelation we see ourselves for who God made us to be, sons and daughters of God, a title that cannot be stripped away or stolen by opposing forces. This is a familial structure that has been established through the birth, through the ministry of Jesus, and through the Cross, the final demonstration of what it looks like to belong to God’s blood-line. Here God demonstrates the nature of a Father and His first born son in a world which desperately needed to reshape its perspective of a Patriarchal order. In the Gospel story the Father (God) becomes bare and the first born becomes a servant, and in its place we are able to see stories of the oppressed and the marginalized, the women and the sick, the sinners and the broken, being raised up and being made visible through the act of adoption in an ancient world that had made them invisible, giving them the full rights of the firstborn son and the Father in the family of God.

In Christ each of us has been welcomed into the family of God because we share in the blood of Christ. And it is because of this that each of us has been called from our own context to continually broaden our perspective of family to include all nations, all peoples in this adoption truth regardless of context, regardless of culture. To go back to the story of Coco, for as much as it tells a wonderful story and is a celebration of a wonderful culture, I can’t help but feel like this same Gospel, this same message of adoption, would be as welcome in the context of that story as it was for the ancient Israelites and as it certainly is in my own. For all the potential for family to be oppressive for young Miguel, the truth of the Gospel is that family is also the place we can be redeemed when we set it in God’s story rather than our own.

If I was to try and summarize my life story in a few sentences it might go something like this:
I grew up in a home that valued faith and Christian tradition. I went to Church every Sunday, I attended Sunday School and Youth Group and Christian Private school, and eventually went on to graduate from a Christian University. And then I went through a crisis of faith. After a period of searching I came back to God, got married, became a youth pastor and eventually started a family.

 

Of course there are a few curves and corners I could add to this, including a decision to step out of Pastoring and an international adoption. But when I take these sentences at face value it’s hard not to feel like it comes across as a bit cliché.

The Measure of a Cliche
A cliché can be considered, according to its definition, “an expression or an idea that has become so predictable or overused it has lost its original meaning or effect.”

So what happens when this represents your life? How do you find meaning in a story that feels too familiar, too predictable, somewhat like the overused baptismal testimony I gave all those years ago.

Or maybe a better question might be the one Tom Albrighton asks in his article If cliches work, use them, which is the question of why (or how) clichés become clichés in the first place? I found the way Tom attempts to answer this question helpful as well, suggesting that they become cliches BECAUSE they’re so useful.

Albrighton goes on to explore this idea further, suggesting that “clichés endure because they serve a unique purpose… they get worn out precisely because of their appeal.”

In other words, when I look at my story, rather than see the cliché it is possible for me to see a story that serves a very real purpose, a story in which who I am today owes much to who I was or where I’ve come from. In this sense, growing up in a faith based environment is the thing that prepared me to face this crisis of faith, and it is the crisis that eventually helped me to see that my faith had meaning.

Carolyn Gregoire says it this way in an article for the Huffington Post, simply titled Cliches.

“(Some cliches) have stood the test of time because they do reveal certain universal truths about human nature.”

My story, for as much as it feels like a cliché, is important precisely because of the truths it has “revealed” about my life, about God, about others, and about the world to which I belong.

 

A Cliché In Crisis
In the summary above it should be easy to point to my crisis of faith as a pivotal point in my life story. This is the moment in which so much of what I thought was true about my life, God, others and the world was shaken. And stirred, but not in the cool, collected James Bond kind of way. The illuminating affects of post secondary education made all the more immediate in the light of friends and family who seemed to be walking away from Christianity (and faith) had left me uncertain about where I stood. It kind of deconstructed my world and left it in pieces, and when the old paradigms had been torn down I found it difficult to consider what exactly to build in its place.

 

To say this in another way: Scholarship recognizes the idea of a worldview, or the stuff that shapes our underlying view of the world, to function largely according to the hidden or unspoken (or assumed) beliefs that help us make choices and decisions in the day to day. This is referred to as the iceberg analogy, with a small portion of our worldview actually visible, or above water, and the vast portion of our worldview hidden out of sight, or under the water.

 

What my crisis of faith did is it attempted to first pull these hidden beliefs to the surface and then secondly threw the entire iceberg into question, including questions about how deep the iceberg goes or even if the iceberg exists at all. And when the iceberg was gone it was gone, leaving me with the feeling of sailing aimlessly on the water with no sense of direction, unable to reconstruct a belief system, another iceberg, to take its place.

This crisis of faith wrecked me. It not only reshaped how I viewed my story and my upbringing, but in order to find my way again I was forced to exchange those old beliefs for something I remained equally uncertain of. And this loss of identity, partnered with a growing sense of uncertainty, caused me to spiral into a place of despair. I became severely depressed. My undiagnosed anxiety was through the roof. I felt hopeless. Mostly though I felt stuck, stuck between two worlds of thought, two competing worlds of experience that seemed like they couldn’t be farther apart or more irreconcilable.

 

And frankly, the feeling sucked big time.

 

I remember falling asleep one night with the weight of this existential crisis (for lack of a better term) weighing particularly heavy on my shoulders only to be woken in the middle of the night in sweat and panic. A familiar sense of fear and dread that I recognized only from the chronic nightmares that had plagued me as a young child resurfaced. In that moment I had become convinced that God no longer existed, and when I say God I mean my life, my identity, and ultimately my sense of community.

I got up the next morning understanding that I would never be the same again. I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other, choosing at that moment to go through the motions in a world that no longer made any sense, a world in which I no longer belonged.

Or more importantly, a world I no longer accepted.

 

Where Crisis Meets Community
There is something to be said about the loss of community that follows this sort of personal, existential crisis. Neiburh argues in his exposition on the revelation of God that without a common experience, a shared experience, community is impossible, or if not impossible certainly incredibly difficult. And when you lose that sense of community it becomes easy not just to feel lost, but to remain lost.

I admit I remained lost for far too long.

But I also couldn’t seem to let go. And so I continued.

One foot in front of the other.

 

Coming To Terms with the Idea of God
I waded in these waters for a while, wearing a smile, pretending to belong. But eventually it all came to a head.

I was house sitting at the time, and following a lengthy online discussion about the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life I found myself contemplating the vanity of it all. I had resigned myself to sitting alone in the dark with only the dim, shimmering light of the moon left to break the silence. And in this moment I decided to have what I determined would be a final and fairly direct conversation with God. In all of the questioning and pretending I had also been looking, or hoping desperately for a way forward, a solution to my discontent, something that might make sense in a senseless world. I looked into other faith systems, religious pluralism, atheism, yet very little of it made sense when I tried to rationalize it all against my confusion, my questions. The only thing that really made sense was this- the life I was living, that we all were living, was at least in some sense of the word, a lie. A biological construct intended to trick our brains into believing that life has meaning, that the things we think and feel and do according to countless chemical reactions and genetic markers are in fact expressions of some form of personal autonomy.
And yes, I realize this sounds like a cheap form of nihilism. Just because this might be true doesn’t mean people can’t find meaning and beauty and purpose in the midst of this realization.

But that still didn’t make any of it true.

And for as much as I tried, I could not get past this fact. Now that the curtain had been pulled, now that I had seen the light, I could not go back. I could not get past the idea that the only way for any of this to have meaning was to accept the delusion of created or manufactured meaning. And no matter how much philosophy I read or how many great thinkers I approached, once you sifted through all of the colourful academia, it all essentially boiled down to this truth. And if I had let go of my old value system based on reason, how could I in turn accept something that felt so unreasonable.

 

I was literally at the end of my figurative rope. And so I turned to thoughts of suicide. The reality was that I could no more reconcile life with God than I could make sense of life without (a) God, which admittedly really narrowed my options. And so I decided if I started on a cliché, ending on a cliché didn’t sound so bad. So I went all in. I made a final bargain with God. Give me something, anything or it was time for me to let go of the rope.

And with that I fell asleep.

 

And God Spoke into the Darkness
I still remember the feeling of getting up the next morning. The shimmer of the moonlight was gone. The clouds had rolled in, and with it a cold, bitter rainfall followed. The world had not changed. I was still exactly where I had left off the night before. My words had fallen on deaf ears, the ears of a God who did not exist in a universe that had no real meaning.

 

But then something happened.

 

God spoke into the darkness.

 

The voice arrived unexpectedly and within the doors of the Church (the irony is not lost on me). It arrived through the timely and faithful prayers of an individual whom I did not know and who did not know my circumstance. In a place of deep skepticism and unbelief God used this individual to interrupt the path I was on and remind me that God still cared.

 

I know this kind of religious language, this sort of religious experience, is subjective and suspect at best for many. There is no sure way to qualify it or explain it. But I also know that when it comes to telling my story, I cannot simply explain it away either.

 

It turns out that God had spoken to this individual while they had been praying earlier that day, and God gave this person words tor write down and to share specifically with me. I call it my Letter from God. When I encountered this person they were hesitant at first to tell my anything. They felt a great deal of uncertainty and fear surrounding what they had to share.  But eventually they did, and nearly at the moment when I was about to walk back out the door. And the words of this letter hit deep into the darkness of my struggle. It not only recounted my personal and private conversation with God from the night before, but it provided me with a way forward.

 

I remain forever grateful that this person had the courage to share this letter with me. When I first heard the words the only thing I could think to do was laugh. Not the best reaction I’m sure, but it was all that I could think to do at the time. And while there were other things shared in this letter, the single word that sticks out for me is this- remember. And ever since that day I have found myself on a journey of self-reflection, of remembering.

 
Remembering To See God Again
I have revisited and reimagined my child hood experiences finding new ways to engage with my story. And the thing that continues to surprise me is the way God left His footprints all over my journey in ways I had (and have) long forgotten. And here’s the thing. Although this letter represents a pivotal point in my life story, my faith in God moving forward did not depend on this letter to give it meaning. This letter did not take away all of the struggle. I still have my doubts. I still have my questions. I still struggle to trust that there is meaning in the midst of so much vanity. What it did do though is show me how to best position my life in a way that could allow this uncertainty, this mystery, to draw me closer to God rather than push Him away. And that comes through the act of remembering and learning how to remember well.

 
It is by the grace of God that I am able to believe again. And it is by the grace of God that my belief looks different today than it did before. And here in lies the challenge of rediscovering faith in my life. All of us live with unspoken assumptions that inform our choices every single day. For as much as this is called a worldview, it is also an act of faith. As our character is shaped by the things that surround us- culture, biology, family, relationships, societal norms, environment- we also learn what it means to trust in the sort of foundation that these things afford, allowing us to make choices and act accordingly without needing to second guess or scrutinize our decisions.

 

But every once in a while something ends up letting us down, and so we begin to question our choices and we challenge our assumptions. We lose some of our ability to trust. And sometime this pushes us to make a decision to change our environment, to allow ourselves to be shaped by something new, something different, to surround ourselves with a fresh set of cultural, societal and environmental influences.

 

But in the end we still come back to the same place, living according to the unspoken assumptions that inform our choices, simply from within the context of a different environment. Sooner or later all of us must choose to learn what it means to trust in something again, otherwise we aren’t truly living. And the thing about trusting is that it frees us necessarily from having to depend on manufactured meaning by offering us meaning that comes from outside of ourselves, the sort of meaning that can only come through the presence of a shared community, the presence of an “other”.

 

The Hope and The Hopeless
And what it came down to for me is this. I believe all of us fall into one of two categories, those who have hope and those who have lost hope. Pare back our unspoken beliefs far enough and every single one of us will find we sit somewhere on either side of this picture, even if we don’t recognize it in the moment. And where we sit informs how we make and determine our choices.

I found myself on the hopeless side of this picture, and what I realized was that I could not live without hope. And for me, God, or the idea of God, gave me hope. Having faith allowed me to trust that God had given my life meaning rather than trying to create it or manufacture it myself.  And this meant I had a place to begin again.

One foot in front of the other.

Only now I could see the footprints of God going ahead of me into the darkness, forging the way into the uncertainty, welcoming me into the difficult questions- into the positive of embracing the mystery. A local pastor once said it this way.

“Everything passes and vanishes, everything leaves its trace. And often you see in a footstep what you could not see in a face.”

– Daren Redekop

 

It is no small thing that I find myself writing this during the season of Advent, as there is no greater expression of this mystery for me than the incarnation, the Christmas season, a time when God spoke definitively into our human story in a way the world did not expect.

A true hope for a world.

I heard it suggested that, between our experience of the here and now and the appropriate mix of fear and expectation that often shapes our consideration of the future, we find a human tendency to immortalize the present while neglecting our past. This is especially true in times of struggle or crisis, where personal failures and encroaching hardship, or encounters that alter our view of the world can sometimes work to disassemble us from the voices of our past.

When we set this same tendency into the context of faith or religious conviction, as I have found myself doing lately, being disassembled from our past only heightens the struggle that this failure, hardship and existential crisis becomes, which also limits our ability to reconcile our day to day experience of this world with the hopeful promise of our faith and religious conviction.

I think this is why we find the Divine answer to this human tendency being represented in the Jewish and Christian scripture often through a single word or concept: the call to “remember”.

 

Remembering: A Purposed Response
For the ancient writers, the practice (or process) of remembering allows us to anticipate the ways God can (and will) speak into the uncertainties of this world, not only into an unknowable future, but also into our limited perception of the present.

As Doug Ward puts it in his article “The Biblical Concept of Remembrance”,

“The Semites of Bible times did not simply think truth, they experienced truth.”

For this  “zakar, the Hebrew word for “remember”, is both “thought” (literally rendered “think”) and “deed” (to record, or literally act in faith).” For Ward, the act of “remembering” in the Bible usually leads to or results from purposeful action.

And we see this all over the Biblical witness. We see it in the command to remember the Sabbath and the promise given to Jeremiah to write His name on our hearts, both of which position us in such a way as to remember or consider our creator, as the teacher of Ecclesiastes so wonderfully puts it in chapter 12.

We also see it in the Biblical narrative itself, from the call to remember the Exodus to remembering Jesus. From the exile and forgetting God and forgetting the language of scripture in Nehemiah. From the practice of carrying the ark to the making of alters.

One interesting story that Ward points to as another example is Numbers 15 and the thread to the temple that coincides with “the forgetting of the language, to the exile and the forgetting of God.” He mentions that “the tzitziyot (tassels) that the Israelites were commanded to attach to the corners of their garments (Num. 15:37-41) are another form of remembrance that God designed for His people, (with God saying) ‘You will have these tassels to look at and so you will remember all the commands of the Lord that you may obey them….”

Ward goes on to point out that “it eventually became customary for each tassel to consist of eight strands and five double knots. According to one Jewish numerological tradition, the numerical values of the Hebrew letters for the word for tassel (tzitzit) totalled 600. Fittingly, six hundred plus eight plus five is 613, the traditional number of biblical commandments.”

So this act of remembering is clearly important to the God/human relationship. When we fail to remember we find pictures of exile. And in remembrance God’s people find pictures of freedom and grace. And the powerful thing is, in scripture this act of remembering moves both from God to us and from us to God. We hear cries for God to remember us in our struggle, and we see praises to God in remembrance of what He has done in our lives. We also see God calling us to remember His works, and God remembering us in our time of trials. And as a recent study through the book of Ecclesiastes instilled in me, this practice of remembering is what reminds me of just how fleeting the present moments of our lives can be and how important it is to remember our Creator in the moments we have been given, as these are the things that speak meaning into the “vanity”, hope in the hopelessness.

 

A Personal and Communal Transformation
There is little question that this process of remembering remains a deeply personal and intensely subjective exercise. And yet, as spiritual practice, the ancients saw it as more than individual meditation. For them it was also seen as the outward expression of our shared human experience. Even for the teacher in Ecclesiastes, whom bears a name that can translate between that of an individual speaker or an assembly, or one who “assembles” a community, each of us is a bi-product of the outside forces that shape our worldview, the stuff that intersects with our lives and give it meaning, purpose. These forces, the stuff that shapes us, is typically what also defines the community to which we belong. And our worldview, or who we are, is being shaped and reshaped by the experiences of our past, our present and the unknowns of our future that happen within the context of these communities.

The act of living then, or in religious terms, the act of faith, or the act of meaning (as the Teacher would put it), is about the ways in which we are personally transformed through a shared human experience.

The more we live the more we experience, and as our experience transforms us, it our ability to remember that connects who we were to who we are now and ultimately towards the person we are becoming. It is when we disconnect our present from our past that we become blind to this transformation, unable to engage with ourselves or the world around us, and thus what disconnects us from ourselves also ends up disconnecting us from our community. This is why this process of self-reflection, of remembering is such a necessary part of our common humanity- our community, our shared human experience. To consider what shapes us, to consider the forces of our lives, we must also then consider the shape of our community.

 

The Stories That Make us and Bind Us
In the book the Londoneer’s, one of the true to life characters bemoans the product of London’s multicultural existence by suggesting that what is perceived as a positive means of co-existence has actually appropriated a culture with no identity at all. The answer to bridging the diversity of human experience with a common humanity- a communion of saints and sinners, is not the absence of faith and conviction or the stuff of personhood. Rather it is the ability to remember. It is our story which we know best and which remains ours to tell, and so this is where we must begin- by remembering our story and considering the ways in which our story, the stuff that makes up our worldview, is able to cross paths with another. In other words, we remember our story not only to remind us of ourselves, but we tell our story so that we can hear and recognize the story of others. And in this act we are given a better reflection of who we are, of who God is, and who God is shaping us to be as His sons and daughters.

As we enter the season of Advent, a time of waiting and anticipating and ultimately remembering I have been encouraged to heed the words of the Teacher from Ecclesiastes, to take up the cause of remembering the one who entered into my story all those years ago. The one who wrote His name on my heart and called me by my name. The one came into this world to share His story, the story of God, the story of our Creator, so that we might have hope, that we might have life. For this I am forever grateful. And as I consider this, I hope to continue to remember all of the ways that God has showed up in my past and my present and ways that I continue to wait on Him to shape my future in the midst of this Advent season.

 

Brigsby Bear is the sort of film that (I think) benefits from viewing it without knowing much about the actual story going in. I say that to suggest you take the time to watch it before reading this post, as I will be dialoguing rather directly with the film itself.

The film centres on Mooney’s character (James) who is on a journey of discovery, and as viewers we are given a like minded opportunity to discover the world that this eclectic team of writers, directors, comedic talent are also building around him through the story itself. It is a world that defies categorization in many ways but, as we are able to watch the layers of this film slowly being peeled back, it is also a world that feels more and more recognizable as the story unfolds.
Someone suggested to me that this is the kind of film that will stand out for people in different ways depending on the experiences we read into it. For me personally, as someone with an adopted child (internationally), I couldn’t help but view this movie through the lens of that journey. In the context of the film James is being returned to his “original” family after having been abducted as a baby, but the integration process of reentering the world for the first time mirrors what I saw and learned in the process of our adoption. The parents find themselves having to work through the unknowns (and knowns) of their child’s past while learning what it means to accept that past for all that it carries with it- abuse, darkness, loss, confusion, along with joys, comfort, identity. The process James goes through is learning how trust this new world, this new family he has entered into while also dealing with the emotional reality of the “family” and memories he is being forced to leave behind in the process. For as negative we might assume all this is and was (and we would probably be right to a great degree), what the film exposes for me is that this was the only family, the only world he had ever known up until this point. And that fact alone is significant to consider.

 

We adopted our son from an orphanage at 12 years of age. His birth parent(s) lived close to the orphanage before he was placed. So life in a confined area of a somewhat isolated community in a corner of a rather large Country was all he knew. The experience of being introduced to a whole new world, of having to learn to trust in this world (and shifting world view), was very real for this brave kid who had very little time to consider or prepare to face this new reality.
And as the adoptive parents of this kid I definitely resonated with the struggle of James’ parents in trying to define who James would be in this cross cultural context based on their own perceptions of who he should be in adjusting to this new world. This is especially true when it comes to working through this on a “psychological” and sociological level. It is far too easy to take the wrong approach when it comes to our role as new parents to this unfamiliar kid. And when I do it causes me to miss who this kid really is in the process, in a given moment. It also, and this perhaps the greatest struggle, causes me to miss what this kid actually needs in the process, in a given moment.

This struggle that I observed in Brigsby Bear is a struggle I (we) face every single day as adoptive parents. The fact that the experiences of our kids past remains a big part of who he is was a really hard thing to learn, and something we are still trying to wrap our minds around. This is true about the stuff we know. Even more true for the stuff that we don’t know, just as the parents of James must come to terms with his past being locked up in isolation for all his growing and developing years.

I have come to learn there is no greater reward than seeing some of these pieces of his past that are hidden to us now come to the surface. And yet for every new piece of the puzzle that makes up this wonderful kid that we have the privilege of discovering, I find myself having to relearn some of the lessons and realities of Brigsby Bear all over again.

I think a big part of the struggle on the side of me learning how to be a parent is that there is a mythos that is built into my interpretative process that I must continually tear down as well. There is a part of me (us) that assumed we were “saving” this kid from the darkness and abuse that he should never have had to endure. And of course a big part of us wanted him to have the opportunity to be able to leave that past behind for a more favourable future. The hardest thing was coming to learn that a big part of adopting was being willing to accept and embrace all of that stuff as a part of who he was and a part of what would shape him moving forward in this new family, this new world. This world he was leaving behind might seem entirely negative to us, and something that we felt compelled to save him from, but in reality these were friendships, realities, relationships, experiences that he was leaving behind, that he would find himself grieving and missing and reinterpreting through the lens of this new worldview. There is a scene in this film where James is sitting down and facing his captor that was especially powerful for me as I considered this thought. There has been little tougher for me than allowing my son the freedom to wrestle with his memories of his birth parents and celebrating his memories of life in the orphanage. Because as a parent it just makes me angry to consider what he had to endure in such a brief amount of years. But for him it is important. It is necessary. It is life giving even. And the film does a masterful job at juxtaposing the world of James’ isolation against his emergence into the world he is now coming to discover. For years he had been raised on episodes of Brigsby Bear where the imagination of these childhood images ended up mixing with subtle and confusing messages that had fostered empathy for his captors, for the world that had been handed to him. We catch glimpses in this show within a show of strange phrases such as “Prophecy is meaningless. Trust only your familial unit”, or “curiosity is an unnatural emotion!” These are phrases meant to instil in him a sense of compassion for the world that has kept him safe and fear for the world outside that might or could infringe on this sense of safety. And a part of the process for him as he remerges back into the world is figuring out how to come to terms with what is real and what is not, what is the truth and what are the lies that he has been told, and perhaps most significantly which emotions he can actually trust when it comes to what is good and what is bad in his mind.

 

And here’s the thing about the journey that James eventually embarks on as he confronts these conflicting emotions and thoughts. In losing this sense of safety and familiarity, and in being forced to face these fears, to confront the greater reality of this world, the film never devolves him into a caricature, a fish out of water story. A part of the fascination of Brigsby Bear as a film is coming to learn what it is that James knows and what he doesn’t know and how this all translates into his new social reality. He is educated but completely unaware at the same time, which becomes a fascinating study of James’ character as a layered and complicated (and wholly interesting) entity. And this is where the film uses the character of the bear itself to help pull these idiosyncrasies together in a meaningful way.

 

The way James has come to view himself is through this bear. And so this bear becomes his way of coping, of growing into his new reality and discovering new relationships and new experiences. Which was meaningful for me to watch on a symbolic level, as this was also true in the experience of our adoption. It is common for adoptive children to arrive with a greater level of maturity when it comes to understanding experiences other children their age have never faced. But it also true that they arrive in this cross cultural context with a level of maturity that seems below others in their age group. And this is difficult to know how to reconcile as parents. But what I have come to realize is that there is danger in simply choosing to see their ability to abandon some of these less mature aspects as the marker of the eventual maturity we want to see them reach. Far more often it is the places where these two seemingly competing notions are able to come together where our son has been able to grow into his new reality most effectively. For James’ parents, and for his sister, coming to accept Brigsby was in a very real way coming to accept James as well.

One of the interesting ways about how the story of Brigsby Bear moves forward is that things never truly resolve when it comes to James’ development or when it comes to offering us definite statements regarding the good and bad of his past and present (the kind that I want to impose). And I think this ambiguity was intentional. James never truly becomes normal, whatever normal means. The abusers are never truly given a full exposition regarding who they are and why they did what they did. The only resolve we really find is the idea that growth, healing, resolve, creativity- these all happen in the context of a caring community. And that really is what adoption is about- providing, showing, building and exemplifying the true strength of family as a caring community, one that can hopefully build a sense of trust and belonging as the unknown and untold parts of this story, and our story, continues to move forward.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The last time I remember spending quality time in the book of Ecclesiastes I was working as a Youth Pastor for a Lutheran Church. The funny thing is, when I was hired as Youth Pastor it was my first time stepping through the doors of a Lutheran Church. So I had a lot to learn, especially when it came to getting my head around the liturgy and the traditions. I also learned that Lutherans love to sit around and have long talks about theology… a lot of long talks. My dream job!
When I think back to those years, some of my most memorable discussions happened around a series I was asked to do on the book of Ecclesiastes. And if there was one thing I took away from these discussions, it is that the themes in this book have a powerful way of digging underneath the surface and getting very, very personal very, very quickly in ways that other topics might not.  Which tells me this is a challenging book not just to teach, but to read, to study, to meditate on. A challenging book for many people for many different reasons. And I think, if I could take my best guess, this it at least partially because the book has a way of exposing the things we bring to our reading of the text out of the particular places we find ourselves on this journey called life, most notably our fears and our anxieties about matters of faith and matters of doubt.
Making Sense of Life and Death
When I was preparing to speak on Ecclesiastes this time around, an old cartoon came to mind:

The more time I spend in Ecclesiastes, the funnier this cartoon gets. And truth be told, this is how I tend to picture the teacher of Ecclesiastes in my mind. Sitting up in his bed and thinking about life and death, struggling to figure out what it all means. The teacher is on a journey, having grown old and left to ponder the worth of his life. So we get everything, the good the bad and the ugly of this candid reflection. This also means we find contradictions of course, reflections that we see changing and overlapping from one moment to the next as he tries to weigh his experiences and struggles through the lens of a complicated ancient world (and in truth, Ecclesiastes ends up as a hard book to categorize, especially as it tries to fit into the OT canon and the wisdom tradition). In an effort to find meaning and purpose, the teacher offers us a very intimate portrayal of what is a very personal and very human struggle, on one hand finding solace in things like work and rest, merriment and relationship, while on the other seemingly haunted by the idea that even these sort of temporary joys remain allusive and finite.

 

The Little Prince and The Search For Meaning
I have written elsewhere in this space about this film, but “The Little Prince”, based on the novel by French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, had much to add to my own reflections on Ecclesiastes, especially when it comes to fleshing out this very human struggle. It tells the story of an aging Aviator, who is searching for someone to share his story with, and his growing friendship with a little girl who lives next door, a girl who ends up, after facing the vanity in her own life, wanting to help him find the right ending to his story, the one she believes would be more just. The story that the Aviator wants to share is the story of the little Prince and his rose who both live on one of many asteroids in the sky (the stars that the Aviator and the little girl look up at and admire). The Prince forms a relationship with this rose but eventually becomes distracted by the promises of the world around him. He decides to forget about the rose and heads out to explore the other asteroids in the universe. As he does this, we come to discover that each of these asteroids represents one of the many places in which we tend to find our identity in this world of ours- admiration, success, money, work.

 

In a similar way, the teacher in Ecclesiastes is searching for wisdom. He writes, “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had failed to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind. Nothing was gained under the sun.” (2:11)

And so he record his thoughts, saying, “I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the sun.

A note about the phrase “under the sun”. It is mentioned over 30 times in this book. It is an all encompassing phrase that depicts a sun rise and a sun set, the days of our life measured and counted.

And what does the teacher find when he studies all that is done under the sun?

“What a heavy burden God has placed on humankind.” 1”13.

No wonder Charlie Brown can’t sleep.

 

Looking Between the Bookends: The Search For Meaning
Just to reinforce this idea, a further word on the structure of the book itself. Ch1 and Ch 12 act as bookends, told from a Narrators perspective, which hold together the words, or the searching of the teacher that makes up the body of this work. These bookends are marked by the phrase vanity of vanities, all is vanity, or all is meaningless.

 

In this light, the recognition that life is meaningless, the vanity of it all, becomes the starting point towards the books final word, the conclusion of how, and if, God fits into this whole discussion as a sacred text. And as one commentator (Donald Berry) puts it, this starting point moves us through 3 essential crisis of faith (or meaning) that the teacher sees as the root of this very human struggle, this wrestling with the vanity of it all:

1. Ignorance of the ultimate, or those big questions surrounding who God is, where He is and why He does what He does.

2. The sense of life’s injustice, that in looking at the world around us life is inherently unfair.

3. And a perceived lack of gain or reward for our actions and effort, the fact that for as much as we try and try and try again, this world, and our life, still spins outside of our control.

And as readers, as we move through this book, we become aware of these three crisis of faith through the realization that there is nothing new under the sun (1:9), the limitations of self indulgence, hard work and even wisdom to truly define us in chapter 2. The plight of the oppressed and oppression in this world in chapter 4. Envy, lonliness, worry, the foolishness of our actions all come up as the Teacher also considers the inability of material possession, wealth and status to bring us true joy and satisfaction.

 

And so the sun rises, the sun sets, we get older and death eventually has its way, with all of these temporary and finite sources of identity and purpose eventually fading away with into the vanity of it all.

 

Here we arrive at the true challenge of learning how to read this book well- to know how to move from this place, the vanity of it all, to the idea of a God who gives this heavy burden, this persisting sense of vanity, meaning.

And this challenge exists both in understanding the authors intent or purpose for writing this book, but also for understanding who we are as readers and hearers of the text. Here the teacher assumes that we are either aware or we remain unaware of the vanity that he observes, struggling with or choosing to deny the struggle. And (he) is convinced that for us to move towards the God of 3:11, who it says is making all things beautiful in His time, the same God who resurfaces again in the final chapter (12) as the book pushes towards its conclusion, the result of its searching, we must learn how to face this vanity, this sense of meaninglessness, head on. And the result of facing this vanity? Here, after all has been measured, after all has been considered, is the end of the matter: Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of humankind.

And here is something I have found important for my own study of these final words: Fear God does not arrive as an alternative to all the vanity, all the meaninglessness. Rather, it is the end result, the conclusion of this grand experiment called life, this search for wisdom that has consumed the teacher, the result of wrestling with the uncertainties of life instead of running away.

 

A line in The Little Prince puts it this way. “What makes the desert beautiful, is that somewhere it hides a well.”

 

Fear God: A Complicated Notion
So what does this phrase actually mean, practically speaking, this call to fear God? I have struggled with this phrase for a while now. I think the first clue we get though is found in the “for” statement that follows:
“For God will bring everything into judgment, every secret and unknowable thing regardless of good or evil.”

 

If life is simply a roll of the dice. If the way the cards fall is less than fair or just or forgiving when we take a long and searching look at the state of our world, then it is the judgment of God that arrives not as a defeatist notion or condemnation, but rather as a source of life, a judgment that breathes hope into our reality, a renewed sense of purpose. It is in this sense of hope, this renewed sense of purpose that we find unconditional love, forgiveness, and grace. These are the things, the teacher believes, are the things that can help us make sense of this world, of the question of God. We begin with vanity, but the vanity opens us up to our need for God.

In all Things “God”
The words “all, whole, every” in chapter 12, and through the whole of the book, carry a certain force in this text. They tell us that God is source of everything and everything belongs to God. And when all else fades away, as the book insists it will, God will remain.

 

And here is the amazing thing. if this is true, if this something we can truly trust and give our lives towards, then this means we also belong to God, the God who is making something beautiful out of the mess, out of the tragedies, out of the brokenness, in the midst of so much hurt and pain in this world that surrounds us every, single day. And this truth arrives not in our moments of certainty and clarity, but in the places of our uncertainty, in the unknowable, n our limitations, and in our lack of control over taming the evils, the injustices that we see in this world.

Yes, this book recognizes that the feeling of vanity, of meaninglessness might not always feel welcome. It never feels welcome actually. But the teacher reminds us that the vanity represents an opportunity to see God at work and to learn what it means to trust Him even when we can’t know or see what’s ahead. The teacher reminds us that where we cannot control the evils and injustices in this world, in faith God is able to use us as agents of hope of something better, something meaningful.
And here’s the thing. I think the whole point of Ecclesiastes, of the Teacher’s reflections, is to teach us how to position our lives in such a way as to “consider” the work of God in a world that often seeks to blind us to it so that we can then be God’s hands and feet in this world, God’s presence and voice in the meaninglessness.

 
From Vanity To Grace
In the film The Little Prince, as the Prince goes from asteroid to asteroid searching out the universe, eventually he comes to the same realization as the teacher. All is vanity. And while he has long forgotten his relationship with the rose, eventually he remembers the value that the rose gave his life. And so he desires to return, to fin this rose again, only now he fears he has wandered too far, and that there is not enough grace in the world to help him find that rose again.

In one particular scene in the movie, we find the Aviator and the little girl lying in the grass and staring up at the stars imagining the lessons of the Little Prince for their own lives as they consider their own discontent with the world around them. The Little girl laments having to grow up, to grow older, to which the Aviator says, “Growing up is not the problem, forgetting is.”

Learning to Remember
If all of this seems a bit lofty or difficult, or even too theological, we also arrive at a final, very practical piece of wisdom in the opening verses of chapter 12 that can help us make sense of what it means to Fear God in our day to day life. This is the same advice that the aging Aviator gives the little girl, now coming from the mouth of the Teacher: “Remember” the teacher says. “Remember your creator.”

And while this passage speaks about remembering “in the days of our youth”, I think it more accurately supposes a concern for the present, regardless of age. What I hear in these words is a sentiment to never stop remembering regardless of how old we are, to not let the stuff of growing up cause us to forget who we are as a reflection of God’s work, God’s grace. If you are 7, remember. If you are 70, remember. It is never too early or too late to remember your Creator. Because it is this act of remembering, this act of positioning ourselves so as to see God in the vanity, that remain our source of life and hope and meaning in our final breathe.

 

My Story
On this same practical note, this verse is an important one for me in my own life. Sometimes I am very protective of this story. Sometimes I feel the need to share it, usually to remind myself of what it means in my life. It is a story that fits with the text of Ecclesiastes and the words of the Teacher. It comes at a very tough time in my life, a time when I was wrestling with many of the questions of Ecclesiastes and when circumstances had kind of left me bare and wondering who I was. One particularly tough night everything kind of came together in a perfect storm. I remember laying in my bed much like Charlie Brown and thinking about life and death. I was at the end of my rope, struggling with suicidal thoughts. And in that moment I had a very direct conversation with God. I asked him to give me something, anything, to hold on to. I made it through the night. The next morning I went on my way. I was broken on the inside, but still doing life on the outside. I was very involved at my local Church. And this day I was heading out to meet with someone at the Church for something completely unrelated. When I got there, there also happened to be someone else there, a third party who at one point eventually asked to pray for me. I said yes and they prayed for me. This prayer ended up catching me off guard, as this person, whom I did not know and did not know my situation, ended up recounting my conversation with God the night before. As it turns out, they had been praying earlier that afternoon and God had given them words to say specifically to me, words that I call my Letter from God.

 

This letter said a few things, but the thing I remember most are the words “remember”. Remember back to a time when your faith was strong. Remember back to a time when I expected God to work in my life.

 

And so from this time forward I began to give myself over to this remembering process. I built into my life a practice of self reflection. I went through my old photos and old letters. I spent time thinking back over memories of my life. And what I found is, the more I looked the more I saw God working in ways I had long since forgotten. In more recent years, I started a blog, following my 40^th birthday actually, so that I could (and can) keep reflecting and keep remembering through the written word. My 40^th year was a really tough one for me to be honest, and it kind of rekindled some of that encounter with God all those years ago. It gave me my first real sense of growing old, of the kind of loss that comes with growing old. And I had the feeling this loss was only going to grow harder and harder from here on in. And so I continue the journey, continue the search, wrestling through the vanity to try and see God, and to allow God to infuse this vanity with a sense of joy, a sense of purpose.

 

The Strength of Aging Well
I found myself in a discussion with my brother and my sister in law recently while I was working my way through Ecclesiastes. They are both connected to the field of social work and social services. After having read through and reflected on Ecclesiastes in preparation for this, I came away with the thought that, man, it has a really negative view of aging. Getting old, according to the Teacher, seems like it is really going to suck. So enjoy life while I have it.

 

My brother and sister in law said something to me that caused me to go back and read through the book again with a different perspective. They were talking about long term care homes and the struggle of seniors in these homes. They said the number one problem that seniors face in these places is depression. There is a loss of identity that is very real for them, a sense that they no longer matter or are needed in this world. That they have nothing left to contribute. And sadly this is something that many people my age (and younger) tend to perpetuate. The truth is, after all, that life has a way of swooping in and stealing our faith, stealing our sense of meaning, of God, of what matters. And we can try and try and try and give ourselves to creating the best life possible, but in the end it is out of our control, just like the powerful montage in the movie UP that shows an aging man coming to terms with the cruel realities of this world, a reality that leaves him shutting himself away from the world and giving into his own sense of misery and grief.

 

And yet, their (my brother and sister in law) conviction was that there is a really simple solution to the problem- social activity. Social interaction. This is the same thing that we see in the movie UP, a friendship giving the aging man a reason to come out of his house, to face the world and to go on living. Giving the aging population the opportunity to contribute to society on a daily basis. They brought up statistics. The aging population today has much to offer still. They are the ones (not all, but many) who are known for saving, for having worked long hours and building the sort of ethic that has much to give to our economy, to our society. My generation (and younger), statistically speaking, is not great at saving, has not had a lifetime to accumulate, and is known for having gone through multiple careers before we have even reached 25. We (and they) are known for contributing in other ways.

Two generations that live very differently, and yet the one thing we share is the one thing that is a big part of the solution- time. We have time to give and the aging population needs our time, something I have neglected in my own life. And in the view of the teacher, time is what we have in the present, however fleeting it will eventually become.

 

It’s kind of funny. The last time I spent time in Ecclesiastes I was a good deal younger than I am now. Having moved away from years on the assembly line doing wharehouse work, I was still a bit stuck in a mindset that tended to look at aging with a lot cynicism. In the wharehouse you fell into one of two categories- you were either young or you were considered a lifer. And we often argued about where the line was, that point of no return when you become too old to leave. And the assumption was this- young means the opportunity to make something of yourself. Old means it’s too late to be something meaningful. And those of us who were young used to look down on the lifers.

But then I started to get older myself. And I realized how much my young self didn’t know. How little I could really depend on those ambitions, those opportunities that I assumed gave worth to my youth.

I bring this up to say, when I considered this conversation with my brother and my sister in law in the light of Ecclesiastes, I found myself reading back through the text and discovering that the text actually presupposes the value of aging. Yes, there is much that aging steals away from us and much that we can rightly grieve. But this call of the teacher to fear God, to consider the work of God, to remember our creator, is a practice that no only allows us to age well, but a practice that gains that much more worth in the text the older we get. The call to remember our Creator in this text is not so that we remember while we are young and forget when we are older. It is so that when we grow up, when we grow older, the vanity doesn’t steal our vision of the God who is carrying us forward, who is the source of our meaning. And here is what I missed on that assembly line all those years ago. How amazing is it to find a witness of faith in someone who is 80, someone who has experienced and face the vanity head on and still managed to say, I trust God with all my life, all my heart. And how much empathy did I need to give myself as I fail to do that (in so many ways) as I cross that dreaded 40 marker. And instead of fearing becoming a lifer, I wish I would had known what it meant to fear God instead.

If I have something to offer to those who are young, it would be that I never knew back then how much I would  need the voices of the aging  and the experienced in my life, voices that made the decision to remember their creator.  And I feel shame over the fact that I neglected what I could also give to the aging as well, those who might be struggling to remember their creator in the midst of the vanity of life.

 

But as the text says- grace. Remember your creator in the present. Do the work of fearing God today. And for me, I see an importunity to invest in the live of the young people in my own place or work, and perhaps to push myself to sit and listen with those who are older than me.

Learning to See the World Again
“The world conspires to make us blind to its own workings; our real work is to see the world again.”
– Adam Gopnik (in his commentary on The Little Prince)

This is where the teacher leaves us, with the work of seeing God again, of seeing the world from His perspective. If there is a final message to the film, The Little Prince, it would be that it is in community that our commonness becomes uniqueness. It is when I learn the name of my neighbour and hear their story that they, and I, become distinguishable, are given meaning. The Little Prince learns this when he finally remembers and considers the value of the Rose. The Aviator learns this when he finds friendship with this little girl, one who is wiling to hear his story. And the girl finds this when she is forced to face the ending of the Aviators story, something that reminds her of the worth she has in her own.

And in the same way, in our communion with God, our shared struggles, our wrestling with the vanity, whatever that may be, becomes a personal expression of God’s grace, a grace that then is able to extend meaning to the world around us as well. And as Christians, we have the ultimate expression of this communion in the coming advent season. The celebration of the most practical examples of God’s work in our lives and our world- Jesus. In Jesus God chooses to enter into the vanity and the meaninglessness in order to share in our struggle. And in this sharing we find our meaning, we are given meaning.

 

And here is the truth this offers to us as ones who trust in what we cannot always know, what we cannot always see. God is okay with the mess. God is okay with us trying to make sense of him from the places that we find ourselves, however uncertain those places might be.

 

Merest Breathe, All is Merest Breathe
As a closing word, one commentator that I read left me with a word that I found very helpful. The word “vanity” is what the indicates breathe. And in translation it can move between two meanings. One indicates the fleeting sense of “breathe”, the vanity. The other is life giving, the breathe, or the exhale of the spirit of God Himself. This commentator suggested that maybe the text is better translated as “merest breathe, all is merest breathe”, a picture of God exhaling his spirit over our struggle, our finite efforts. And in translating it this way, maybe there is a picture here of God breathing life into the emptiness, of breathing meaning into vanity. I think this fits with the teachers own conclusion of his search, his journey. When all else fails, as he would insist, God remains. And it is in God that we find our true identity. Amen.

 

 

This past Sunday my church walked through the parable of the barren fig tree in Luke 13:6-9, exploring what it means to be open to God’s tilling of the dirt and the muck of our lives as we say goodbye to summer and welcome the fall. Strangely enough this is actually the fourth time in the past 6 months that the image of the fig tree has surfaced for me in my personal study and devotions, and to be honest I don’t even like figs all that much (unless they are in the form of a gluten free fig newton).

Every time I come across a fig tree in scripture I find myself seriously wrestling with the image. The tree is always barren, there is always a threat to cut the tree down, and there is always some sort of discussion about God’s judgment, our sin and a coming destruction. Luke 13 is no exception.

But the more I continue to reflect on the image of this fig tree, the more hopeful it seems to become. The more fruitful it becomes. And over the course of this past week I have been uncovering fresh perspective in Luke’s call to consider the image of the tree as a hopeful expression of the spirit’s working in my own life. After all, as my pastor suggested this past Sunday, nothing we do or experience is outside of the spirit’s reach.

 

A Motivating Question

“There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way?”
– Luke 13:1-2

Before we arrive at the fig tree we are first presented with a motivating question or statement in verses 1-6 that helps provide us with a bit of context. Considering the circumstance of the fallen “Galileans” mentioned here (which is not mentioned anywhere else but does fit with other passages concerning Pilate), some followers of Jesus had begun to wonder about the reason for their death. Namely, as Jesus goes on to imply, they had begun to wonder if it was the sin of the Galileans that led to their suffering?

The idea of suffering as a sign of individual sin was a popular belief in Jesus’ day. Recognizing this, Jesus goes on to answer this (implied) question with a question of his own.

 

“Do you think (these Galileans) were worse sinners than all the (others)?”

 

We can be tempted to think many things in the face of suffering and loss. Is God good? Why does God allow this to happen? Why does this happen to (us, them, me) and not to others? What is the point of this suffering? Did something we (they) do cause this suffering to happen? All of these questions have to do with the way we perceive God’s relationship to us and to the world, and this is what the followers of Jesus were trying to wrestle with. Scholars understand the ones asking these questions were likely considering the challenge of following God (and Jesus) in the midst of a complicated political system, one that flows out of the persistence of Israel’s exile and the destruction of their temple and God’s seeming absence in the midst of ongoing oppression. These are human questions that reflect a common human experience shared with Israel’s long and storied past, and it should be noted that asking these sorts of questions is not the problem that we find in this passage. In fact, the question(s) are a part of what set them into relationship with Jesus.

The problem, rather, has to do searching for answers to their questions in the wrong places, places that lead them towards making false assumptions about God’s relationship to us and to the world. These false assumptions are what Jesus looks to challenge.

“Do you think (they) were worse sinners…?”
Equating suffering with the personal sin of the “Galileans” has led them to entertain a false dichotomy. As Jesus insists, if they suffered and died because of their sin then that must mean they were worse sinners than those of us who are still alive. So, logically speaking, in order for me to avoid similar suffering and death I must make sure to be less sinful than they were…. or more “fruitful” than they were.
To which we arrive at Jesus’ final and definite answer to this whole line of reasoning- “NO!”

This sort of false dichotomy leads nowhere helpful, nowhere good, and yet so often it is the first place we go in our efforts to reason with God in the midst of our own suffering or the suffering we perceive around us. We need a reason. But the truth is when we follow this line of thinking we end up divided, hating God, hating others, and ultimately hating ourselves. We are left, as Jesus is about to point out, as a barren tree in a barren landscape relegating everyone else to equal barrenness.
And so Jesus leads them towards a different way of thinking about God’s relationship with us and the world. a way that does away with this false dichotomy and opens itself up to the Spirit’s work.

“No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

The Art Of Repentance
And here we arrive at a pivotal point in this passage, a point that I have found (so far) to carry equal force in all of the other “fig tree” references in scripture as well: the idea of repentance.

Repentance throughout the Gospel has little to do with living “perfect” or fruitful lives. It has everything to do with which direction we happen to be looking when we consider the fruit of our lives. In the case of the Gospels, we are either looking in the direction of Jesus or away from Jesus, and repentance simply means to turn our eyes in the direction that Jesus is heading, in the Way of Jesus.

Without the idea of repentance we are left with only the negative in this passage in Luke. As the chapter begins, they suffer therefore they are unworthy. They suffer therefore God no longer cares for their circumstance. The world is seen as a complicated, politically laden mess and therefore must be outside of God’s grace. But of course the truth of these kinds of assumptions, as Jesus points out, is that they force us to draw the same conclusions about our own lives as well. If this is how God looks and deals with the world, then this is how He must look and deal with me as well. Their suffering means that I have to earn God’s care for me. Their suffering means I must prove that I am more worthy of the grace that I have been given. Likewise, to find myself a sinner means I must deem myself equally worthless in the eyes of God.

Jesus chooses to answer their own line of reasoning with a question of his own, because He knows where their assumptions are leading. He switches the focus from “them” to “you”. He goes straight to the heart of the matter. If they think this is how God sees the Galileans, where does this leave them?

And then Jesus goes on to offer a story, a parable, about a lonely fig tree and its lack of fruit.

 

The Man and His Vineyard

“A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard, and he came seeking fruit on it and found none.”

Parables tend to place their audience directly into the story. Look hard enough and you will find you and me in the starring roles. So the first question I found myself asking is, who is the man in this picture? For me this is the most important question to ask because who we see the man to be determines who the tree is in this passage, and who the tree is determines our response.

So here’s what I know. The man appears to be the owner of the vineyard, this much is clear. The man is also the one in the story who calls for the tree to be cut down because of its apparent lack of fruit (“Cut it down! Why should it use up the ground?”). Beyond this though is where scholarship seems to be divided, approaching the question of the “man” in one of the two following ways:

1. In some commentaries, the man symbolizes God the Father, the Vinedresser is Jesus, and the tree is Jerusalem. In this view, the passage looks to echo themes of exile, the fall of the temple, and the judgement of God’s people. Some scholars view the passage this way because the most common interpretation of the fig tree is as a symbol of the temple and Jerusalem.

Hand in hand with this is a Judeo-Christian tradition that represents Jesus as the one who goes to the Father on our (humanities) behalf (Hebrews 7:25). As a part of His ministry, Jesus sees our circumstance and takes our prayers and our concerns to the Father (John 17:20-22). Jesus enters our suffering and failures and struggles and pleads our case to the Father, much in the same way as Abraham once pleaded for the case of Sodom. Scholars see this reflected in this passage as well. Jesus comes into the picture as the “vinedresser” in verse 7 in order to “plead” the case of Israel and Jerusalem (the fig tree) and make the request to delay the Father’s judgment for one more year (verse 9).

But of course this leaves us with a couple of problems. If we view it this way, it forces us to read verses 1-6 in an entirely negative context. Repentance in this case is not about hope but about their eventual (prophesied) failure to be obedient to God. The vinedresser lobbying to give the tree one more year becomes less about grace and more about a judgment already made. And of course, in my opinion, along with this we are also forced to wrestle with two opposing views of God, with the Father and the Son differing in their perception of what a good judgment is.

2. The second option, which also happens to be the direction I lean towards, finds scholarship connecting this passage more directly (and intimately) to verses 1-6. If we hold the first six verses in view, we find the man in the parable is the one making assumptions about the fig tree that the vinedresser hopes to challenge. If we look at it from this perspective, the man fits very well with the “some present at that very time” in verse 1 who were asking Jesus about the Galileans. In this case, Jerusalem (or in a more general sense, the place in which we live) is the vineyard while the Vinedresser is Jesus “addressing” their questions by challenging their assumptions about the Galileans (or in a more general sense, the others) whom I see symbolized in the tree.

The Lonely Fig Tree
For me, this second option fits better with the nature of the parables in the Gospels. Parables always proceed from an incident or a question that Jesus encounters along His journey towards Jerusalem, and the parables are offered by Jesus as a way of shedding light our circumstances and questions through revealing the truth about God in “hidden” ways. In this passage we find the honest questions that come from living in a world that does not look the way we believe it should, of a God that we sometimes feel is more distant and more removed from our world than we expect Him to be. To which we arrive at this lonely fig tree standing in the middle of a vineyard. So to further apply this parable to our present day, if the Vineyard is the place in which we live and the man in this picture is a reflection of you and me, what can the vinedresser teach us about God’s relationship to us and to the world?
First, I discover a God who has chosen to enter into our world, through Jesus, into the vineyard in which we live.

Secondly, I find a God who judges impartially rather than in the way of Pilate. One of the more powerful pictures in this parable is that of a tree stuck between these two opposing forces. To be judged by the world is to be left wanting and unworthy according to who the world says we are, and Pilate emerges here as a foreshadow of the lack of impartiality that eventually finds Jesus hanging on his own barren tree. To be judged by God is to see ourselves as purposed and worthy according to who Jesus sees (and declares) us to be- a people freed from the bindings of our own questions and assumptions and made alive in the spirit just like the woman whom proceeds this story in verses of 10-17. What is also worth noting is the way the ending of chapter 12 sets us up to encounter this message of impartial judgment.

Thirdly, I find a God enters into our world in order to plead the case of grace, the cause of love. Give them “one more year” the vinedresser says to the man, and see what comes from my digging and fertilizing and tilling and caring and growing. And how amazing is it that the primary picture of this caring, this growing is by using the manure, or the “shit” of our lives and this world to do this.

Yes there is suffering. Yes there is feelings of hopelessness and uncertainty. Yes we do have to contend with our lack of fruit and not measuring up again and again and again. But there is hope to be found in this parable. There is hope to found in Jesus. And this hope comes from learning to see and trust in God’s way of dealing with the messiness of our world and our lives, to repent and look in the direction of Jesus, in the direction of Jerusalem and the barren tree that he bore for the sake of the world.

As this passage points out, this is not easy. That much is clear. We want answers in the moment. We want to know why and we want to know how and we want to know when. But the truth about the work that Jesus is doing is that it requires trust, it requires patience. As I have already said, this passage looks at the suffering of the world, and then it turns our questions in on ourselves. “If” this is what the mess of the world means for them, what does that then mean for me? And then in the end of the passage it turns it back around again.

If this is what God is doing in my life, how much more is He doing in and for the world.

This is what hope looks like. This is where I find power in interpreting the “man” in this passage as you and me. The untold assumptions, and the unasked questions that Jesus pulls out of us is our tendency to judge the work of others in order to feel better about our own lack of fruit, to feel more certain about where we stand according to the judgement of Pilate. But through the act of repentance, the Spirit of Jesus sets each of us on equal footing in the light of God’s impartial judgment. Jesus’ persistence in asking each of us to offer one more year of grace, and then another, and then another yet as I imagine in my own eyes… is a grace that flows all the way back to us and then back out into the world once again, reforming our perspective and changing our assumptions along the way. This to me is what it means to anticipate the fruit of the spirit’s work in our world and our lives even when we can’t always see it so clearly.

 

 

“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
– Aurthur Schopenhauer.

Our world recently lost one of its more saintly souls. Today I had the privilege of celebrating the life of this saint, Debbie Moffatt. And yes I know, there is little doubt in my mind that Debbie would resist this title with every ounce of her being if she could. She would insist she belongs not with the saints but with the sinners, not on a pedestal but in the trenches. And she would resist this title not with any feigned sense of humility, but with a steadfast conviction that such titles should be reserved for those who need it, who truly deserve it.

And then she would turn around and call you a saint and call me a saint with equal conviction.

Which is exactly what makes her a saint in my eyes. Of course she was also was a mother, a daughter, a wife and a grandmother- each a reflection of the family God had blessed her with, and a friend to many. But the name she came to cherish most of all was “child of God”, and it is because she believed so strongly that she was a child of God that she gave her life to giving and serving whoever crossed her path. If there was a single constant to be found in the words shared by her family this morning, it is the idea that Debbie herself has been written and imprinted into the fabric of their lives “because” of the way she lived as a Child of God.

 
If the lyric “in the morning when I rise, give me Jesus” became a part of her daily ritual, her daily blessing, I am convinced that she longed for this to be so only so far as she would have more of Jesus to give to others, even as she continued to wage a courageous battle against ALS.

And that is the thing about saintly souls. They are the ones that help us to see God. And simply put, Jesus was imprinted all over Debbie.

 
Past, Future and Learning to Be Present
The older I get the more I struggle to remember my past and the harder it gets to predict an increasingly uncertain future, which means the most important thing right now is the present. And this is exactly how Debbie lived her life.

Not long before she was diagnosed, my wife Jen and I had an opportunity to reconnect with the Moffatts over supper. This was at their house of course with the full red carpet treatment included… even as two people neither of them had seen in a fairly long time. Because this is Debbie. This is the Moffatts. No matter how much space there was between you and them, the minute you entered their company you picked up right where you left off.

As the evening went on and we were enjoying a wonderful meal and relaxing over glasses of wine and some wonderful conversation, we found ourselves talking about their trip to Italy. If you wanted to see Debbie’s eyes light up all you had to do was ask her about Italy. At which point she suddenly turned from giddy, passionate and excited to somewhat serious, finding a timely moment… she was always so timely and sure of her words, something I am so not good at… to share something important that was on her mind. And what she (they) shared with me in that moment has stuck with me after all these years.

“Don’t wait! Don’t wait to experience the world.”

Of course this was not simply a reference to travel. Rather, it was a reference to living.

“Don’t wait.”

Choose to live. Choose to live in the present.

It would be short while later that Debbie would be diagnosed with ALS, a diagnosis they would get on the same day we happened to be officially celebrating the arrival of our new adopted son. I feel a degree of shame for not letting Debbie know this, but if I had I would have told her that the decision to adopt our son from Ukraine was a product of our best effort to take her words to heart. Our effort to not wait. Our effort to live in the present and to trust God with the rest.

And the fact that this led us to our new found “family” is even more fitting given Debbie’s heart and passion over the last few years.

I remember looking around during the celebration of our adoption for the Moffatts. We had not seen them in forever and had a feeling they might be coming, and they were the kind of people that you looked forward to seeing even when the room was full. We found out later why they were not there. I am grateful that my brother convinced them not to come. Because you see, even after receiving a terminal diagnosis, in true Debbie fashion she still considered coming to support us. Because that’s who she was.

 

Catching Up With the Past
Often life forces us to leave our past behind. It’s the nature of taking different paths, of becoming and discovering who we are. And as we leave the past behind we are forced to grieve the many losses of this life in order to anticipate the many gains, growth and new reveals. But sometimes our past also manages to catch up with us. And when it does, it can often catch us off guard, reminding us of how we got to where we are, with the good, the bad and the ugly.

It is no small thing that the most common phrase I heard coming out of the funeral today was “hey, another blast from the past”. It was like stepping into a time machine and going back 20 years And I love time travel. A bit obsessed with time travel actually. But this was different. All these people. All these stories. All these experiences. Vast memories being brought together through the life of a single person. And having shared this Church Community with Debbie for many years, these memories, this history has her face plastered all over it. It would be impossible to turn left or right into any of those stories and not find an imprint of her influence and her presence.

In The Shadows and the Light
There is truth to the idea that I came to her funeral knowing that Debbie gave me far more than I could ever offer her in return over my lifetime. Over many lifetimes. I came knowing that in the many ways I often saw myself as that “other” brother trying to navigate my way through the shadows of two other spiritual giants in the life of Riverwood past, Debbie was someone who always chose to ignore the shadows. In her house she made sure to shine the light straight on you. I hope and trust that she was looking down on that massive gathering of people this afternoon and being able to see the light being shone on her.

 
Grace and Admonition
We dropped by to see the Moffatts at their lakeside house a while ago because we happened to be in the area. Her speech was just beginning to slur (which of course, in true Debbie fashion she felt the need to “apologize” for), but she was still sporting all of her trademark spirit and energy and humour. It was my first time seeing Debbie since her diagnosis, and I’ll be honest, words failed me big time in the moment. Here was this courageous woman facing the biggest struggle of her life and she is doing the same thing she had always done. She was treating us like honoured guests, serving us until there was nothing left to give. She refused to let the disease dominate any part of the conversation. And, I am ashamed to admit that the only thing I feel I ended up doing in the moment was ranting about our own petty and superficial family issues.

And yet, for as terrible as I feel over this loss of words, what struck me the most is the grace that I found in her company without her having to say anything. I am even more grateful though for the fact that she did eventually say something (after I stopped spewing the trite and superficial complaining for a couple seconds of course). After we had exhausted our list of petty issues, she turned and said something so simple that it managed to bring everything into perspective.

“There is a battle going on out there right now” she insisted, “and it is causing the world to lose sight of what is most important- family.”

Not only does Debbie deserve screen credit on the Fast and the Furious, she also deserves credit for being an expert in admonishment. Her comment was generalized, but of course it hit right at the core of what I needed to hear in that moment. And she did it with such grace, with such purpose and such gentleness, that in all honesty I didn’t even recognize it as admonishment. It was simply the wisdom of a saint. And even in the middle of her struggle she found a way to elevate my petty issues to something important. A truly humbling moment.

Navigating A Valley of Strange Humours
I once heard it said that life is a “valley of strange humours”. Debbie embodied this. In all of our flaws, in all of our uncertainties, in all of our mess-ups and failures and successes and joys, in my years growing up as a young teen and a young adult the one thing I could always count on was the fact that Debbie would always find a way to laugh at all of our idiosyncracies, to laugh at the messiness of life. And the fact that she was also willing to laugh at herself meant that she was constantly teaching us how to do the same, to laugh at ourselves. I have since come to know that this is one of the most important things we can learn to do in life.

It was said many times at the funeral that one of the great tragedies of ALS is the way it steals, slowly, over time. And most tragic, as family members confessed, is that it steals memories. But what was also confessed is that Debbie’s smile, Debbie’s laugh was something many would never forget, and there is something rather poetic about this fact, that in the midst of the valley her laughter can still be heard. In the midst of tragedy her smile is still finding a way to persevere.

Loss comes in so many ways. And often the loss of these kinds of spiritual hero’s in your life remind us about all the ways in which life has moved forward, and the ways in which life continues to move forward. I didn’t have much contact with Debbie over the last number of years. With circumstances at home I didn’t have much contact with her while she was sick either I hate to admit. And yet there is not a moment that has gone by in the most recent weeks where I haven’t spent some time remembering how Debbie played a big role in allowing me to become who I am today. And being able to gain glimpses along the way of how she approached and faced her sickness, and to watch her family stand by her side the whole way and walk through it together through much pain and sorrow, has inspired much thought and conversation in our own home about what is most important as well, and what it means to live in the present rather than wait for an uncertain future.

And as the past managed to officially catch up with me this afternoon, I was also struck by the thought that a big reason why Debbie and her family was able to approach all of this with such courage and strength is because it is the way she lived her life before the sickness as well. A great inspiration to start living in the present today rather than tomorrow. Because none of us knows what tomorrow will bring. In my desire to be a youth leader to a small, rambunctious group of kids (including her own) in the early days of Rothesay/Riverwood, I see Debbie’s willingness to allow me to learn from my many mistakes and her encouragement to me to try and try again. In the years that I lived on next to nothing while struggling through school to get my youth pastor degree I see her constant desire to support me and pray for me in so many different ways. In the years after Rothesay changed names to Riverwood when the old community of the past began to give way to the new, The Moffatts were a constant voice of encouragement, comfort, familiarity and confidentiality. Change is never easy, and they had a way of reminding me I was not alone. I could say anything to them positive or negative without being judged, and while Murray was often front and center for those conversations, it was Debbie who I always knew was lingering in the background ready to offer me a timely and poignant word of wisdom along with a refill on my drink (or another slice of that cake).

And if ever there was a final point of convincing (which certainly isn’t necessary… Debbie is a saint through and through), I look to my wife Jen. Having met in her first few months of starting to attend Riverwood, and having left Riverwood for a new job not even two years later, it is significant that Debbie (and Murray) were two of a handful of people that she was going to miss with all her heart. Two out of a handful of people that she came to feel she had shared history with even after knowing them for barely two years.

Because, of course, that is Debbie. A saint. A mother. A daughter. A Wife. A grandmother. A friend. A child of God.

 

A number of years ago I decided to embark on a study of angels in the Judeo-Christian (and surrounding) traditions. It was a fascinating and entertaining topic to explore, but the more I delved into the subject the more I started noticing a peculiar trend in the way angels were being described.

To me, angels had always been kind of synonymous with the idea of a song, and when I thought of angels I thought of the “chorus” of an angelic presence or a picture of trumpets helping them to set their heavenly voices on display.

But where was the singing?

A discussion of angels is far more complex than this, of course, but in terms of challenging my very base level assumptions regarding what angels “should” be doing (how dare you!), it seemed nearly every time I encountered a story or a picture of an angel, especially when it came to the context of Scripture, they were either “shouting” or “speaking”, or generally doing something other than singing. And the few examples that did connect them to song appeared to vary in translation.

So I started to dig deeper, to see if there was anything more to this theory that angels did not, in fact, sing as I once assumed they did. Of course, coming to terms with this working theory involved a rather delicate dance through the richness of the Hebrew language and tradition, through which certain words might or might not denote a sense of musicality and where the influence of surrounding cultures complicated the picture even further. My efforts ultimately proved inconclusive, however, I did come to realize I was not the only one asking this same question. And there seemed to be enough compelling evidence out there to at least cause me to wonder, what if “song” in the Judeo-Christian tradition is a distinctly “human” discourse? What if music, in this specific tradition anyways, was recognized as a uniquely human gift?

My first thought? What does this mean for a voice like mine? You know, the kind of voice that appears more in line with fingers scraping down a chalkboard? Perhaps I am better suited for shouting along with the angels. After all, I did marry into a good Ukrainian family. Angelic praise in its finest form.

And good thing I have the drums to hide behind. Making a joyful noise is easier when no one can really see me… or at least making some kind of noise anyways.

But then I remembered something my pastor said a few years back that happened to stick with me (look at me paying attention). Finding himself one Sunday morning sitting in his customary seat in the front row where his back is always towards the congregation, he started to think about his experience of hearing our voices being sung over him instead of actually seeing us sing. And since our Church is very good at showing up fashionably late (or right on time depending on who you ask), oftentimes it would be the sound of the voices that was his first indication that the empty sanctuary he had entered minutes ago was now being filled by people.

And what struck him, according to his eventual confession, was that in singing we have a reflection of a true community. Where a single voice by itself may or may not hit the necessary notes, as a chorus even the most unlikely voice is able to find a melody.

Singing as an expression of community. We are stronger together, stronger in the places where we allow ourselves to lift one another up, and to be lifted up, in the context of our strengths and our weakness. Stronger in the places where we are able to recognize what we share as sons and daughters of God regardless of how well we can hit the right note on our own.

In this sense, if a song is truly a distinct human discourse, music then becomes the language of relationship. Relationship to God and relationship to one another.

In an interview from years back, Switchfoot’s Jon Foreman once described this same idea in the following words:

“As a musician, when I am singing, I always think of it as co-signing God’s blank checks. That there’s this currency that I’ve been given to operate with—notes and words—and I can pay them however I want.”

The cheque is the gift of the Spirit empowering our souls to create and to sing, and using this currency is our way of becoming “musicians”, of participating in the spirit’s moving in our world and in our lives as we sing and play “together” in a community.
And here is what is most incredible to me about this thought. The true power of community flows from the reality of our cultural diversity. And where is this diversity more properly expressed than through our music? A momentary glance through this list of musical regions and genres-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cultural_and_regional_genres_of_music

proves just how important music is to building cultural diversity. It is a humbling thought to consider the sheer expanse of this universal language at work in our world, bringing definition to neighborhoods, cities, regions, and Countries.

But before you find yourself thinking, “yeah, this is all good for those who can actually sing or play, but what about the rest of us? Are we then left to fend for ourselves?” The truth about making music, the reason why it is an expression of true community, is that it is about more than just creating. It is also about hearing. When we discover music that speaks to us, speaks to our spirit, we are being moved by the Spirit to listen to the story that music is sharing and expressing. And in hearing that story, the invitation is for us to enter into that story, that melody, by harmonizing our own story with the one that we are now hearing. This is how music brings us together. This is what makes music meaningful and expressive, the idea that music is primarily a “relational” or social function rather than a solitary one.

A final and important learning for me through all of this “wondering” has been the idea that this sort of approach to musical expression, musical community if you will, is indiscriminate by nature. It does not draw lines between what is godly and what is not. It does not draw lines between who is good and who is not, or what kind of song is worthy of hearing and which kind of song is not. It simply expresses. It creates. And then it invites us to participate. It is human. And the great truth is that out of this humanity we are able to gain a better picture of who God is in the rawness and in the honesty of our human experience as well.

If music truly is a distinct human discourse, a gift of the spirit, then it remains a visible representation of God no matter what form it takes in our personal expression. God is being made known in the songs of our doubts and our questions as much as He is through our songs of intentional worship. God is being made known through a bad note as much as he is in the beauty of a perfectly constructed melody.

But most important, God is being made known in our willingness to enter into, to listen and to hear and to participate with, the songs that others are singing. This is where we are free to join in the chorus, to join in the dance even when we feel we don’t have a good note to bring to the table. And when we do this, we might just find ourselves surprised by the strength and beauty of the melody that follows.