The retreat that began October 16, 2015, can end now

In January 2016, my Blog entry was about that retreat. The retreat had started as usual, but after a few days, I began to experience abdominal pain. I ended up driving home early from Guelph to check it out in Kingston. I thought it was appendicitis. But after 8 hours in Emergency at KGH, the doctors had done a CT and found a mass. I was quickly referred to hematology oncology, and started treatment after the diagnosis of lymphoma was confirmed.

There began the most incredible spiritual journey. The amazing thing was that the beginning of the retreat, prior to the pain or the trip home, etc, turns out to have been the beginning of my spiritual journey with cancer, and the opening of a retreat that did not end with my leaving the property. Here is a paragraph from the January Blog that describes what took place when Fr. Govan gave me a book to read by Clarence Enzler, titled “Let Us Be What We Are.”

Enzler had a devotion to St. Therese, and also faced cancer surgery. Following the spirit of abandonment that St. Therese wrote about so eloquently, Enzler decided to approach the surgery by uniting himself to the Passion of Jesus. Like St. Therese he let himself experience his “smallness” so as to be completely filled by God’s will for him.

Now why would I write that? Well, I was going to be having minor surgery for a basal cell skin cancer, and I had been talking about my devotion to St. Therese, in particular about her ‘Little Way’ and her uniting herself to God’s will.

The book set the tone for my treatment experience, and I do not mean basal cell treatment. From the beginning, after absorbing the news that I had lymphoma, I was given the grace, as was Peggy, to treat this as our reality. I learned to stay in the present with God’s graces, and to trust that nothing happens outside his Will (which is not the same as saying that He causes bad things like this to happen. Only that it would not be permitted to happen if He willed otherwise). The gift of peace came with that, along with the realization that slipping out of the present into the future (the land of what-if, and of terrible possibilities) brought terror with it.

Through the six rounds of Epoch and the subsequent three rounds of high-dose methotrexate, the physical toll got bigger as the doses increased and the effects accumulated. Worries about the chemo pump alarming over air in the line or ‘occlusion’ in the line became the attention-getters. Two trips back to hospital with fever spikes provided additional drama, especially when of those trips led to a two day admission. But I was spared the terrible experience of getting sick, as sometimes happens, and mostly had to deal with losing my hair, with fatigue, and with vigilance about catching infections. I was very graced in that regard. I understand it can be really awful. I am so grateful for the development of the science in the chemo itself and in the supplementary meds that counteract side effects. I am so grateful for the skilled hands of doctors and nurses in our Regional Cancer Centre.

And I never once Googled anything about my condition. I left that to others, because I know from experience that the results you get are varied, and you could develop panic attacks thinking about the worst case scenarios, even if they have low probabilities attached to them. That’s just me.

Anyway, throughout the seven months, I also made the decision to keep the parish informed. My motivation was to prevent rumors, and to dispel the ‘elephant-in-the-room’ phenomenon in which no-one talks about the thing that is on everybody’s mind! Well, the dividends from this decision were unexpected and wonderful! People talked about their own journeys with cancer. I heard some incredible survival stories that buoyed my own ability to remain hopeful. Most of all, though, were the prayers and the promises of ongoing prayers. We talk about being a community of love in a parish like this. No experience has ever driven this home or made it more real than have these interactions.

And all the while, my role, I came to realize was to witness to the goodness of God, and to show people what it looks like when someone trusts the will of God for them, and is at peace. I heard over and over that this was being noticed. People would comment that such an attitude would bode well for my own healing process. But I think an even more important outcome was that people were shown, perhaps, how to do it, and to be encouraged to trust in the same way - for cancer or any other body blows that life might deliver. I am grateful for the grace that was given to me to do this right from the beginning.

And so it all came down to the ending of the nine rounds of big treatment. Two CT scans had shown shrinking of the mass, and no involvement of other organs (we won’t mention the compression fracture in my back! Hopefully on the mend). The second of those scans showed an ambiguous bit of tissue that might be scar tissue or cancer still present.

My wonderful doctor had warned me that this might very well happen. And so, as we had discussed, she sent me to Ottawa for a PET scan - kind of like a CT but able to confirm cancer sites. If it was cancer, we would be in for a course of radiation. If not, we go straight to maintenance chemo (2 hours every three months, for two years).

On July 22, 2016, we went for the results appointment. Fully prepared to receive a date with radiation. Our doctor walked in and said: “All good. You are in total remission. Perfect health, my friend.”

What? The world stood still for a moment. What? Peggy jumped up and hugged her. Me, I’m crying. Well, sobbing if you must know. Lol. Then I hugged the doctor. Plans were made for the first round of maintenance which I have now had.

I was preaching on the weekend that immediately followed. Scripture on prayer. Homily on prayer. And mercy. And trust. I saved the big announcement for the end of Mass, though. Cheering and sustained applause.

I told the parish that this was the result of the power of prayer, I have no doubt about that. And since their prayers have been steadfast for the past now 8 months, I offer this outcome to them as a gift from God. Let it be said that our God is awesome. Let it be said that God mostly wants us to trust him, and to let him show his miracles in whatever way he chooses. For me, the first miracle was the peace I received right after the diagnosis. And then the deepening trust in his Will for me. I would have still been there if the PET scan had said cancer.

And so the retreat that began October 16, 2015 can now end. July 22, 2016. It has changed me. Praise God. God is awesome. God loves us. God loves you. Never ever give up on that thought.

The retreat began October 16: it has not ended yet

The trip to Loyola House in Guelph is a much-anticipated annual getaway for my retreat – some 23 years now, and counting. Pretty much always in the fall, and for many years my week has been embedded in the larger 40 day retreat that is already on. The retreat atmosphere of silence is already in place, and my immersion in it is seamless and easy.

Every year I spend some time thinking about the grace I will be asking for on the retreat. Every year, God takes me on a turn in the road, a change in direction. I smile when this happens, and I take it as a clear sign that God is watching over me from the very beginning.

This year, I was still reflecting on a gospel I had preached on recently, the one of the young man asking Jesus what he must do to gain eternal life. The message from Jesus was that he should basically empty out and come follow him. For me, this led to a reflection on emptying myself out to totally trust God for upcoming surgery I was to undergo for a basal cell skin cancer. That in turn very quickly led me to reflect on the suffering of St. Therese of Lisieux in the last year and a half of her life when she was essentially suffocating with tuberculosis. I talked to my director about this and came back to it a couple of times. He gave me a book to read by Clarence Enzler, “Let Us Be What We Are.” Enzler had a devotion to St. Therese, and also faced cancer surgery. Following the spirit of abandonment that St. Therese wrote about so eloquently, Enzler decided to approach the surgery by uniting himself to the Passion of Jesus. Like St. Therese he let himself experience his “smallness” so as to be completely filled by God’s will for him .

This is where my turn in the road really began. I was just getting into this and resonating with it not only for my upcoming minor surgery, but for my life in general. And then, I started experiencing the pain in my lower right abdomen . It became sharp, and I began to be worried about an appendix attack.. I left the retreat three days early and drove home, straight to the Emergency department . After several hours of investigation, a CT scan was done, and they found the mass in an abdominal lymph node. There followed a referral to hematology oncology and a whole new diagnostic process. Long story short, a diagnosis of lymphoma was confirmed a couple of weeks later. It was decided that chemotherapy would begin right away, on an inpatient basis. I would have six rounds of this, a week at a time, every three weeks.

At time of writing this, I have completed three rounds and have tolerated the chemotherapy very well. The Kingston Regional Cancer Center has just adopted the Princess Margaret portable pump protocol for my particular brew, and I have been able to have this last round at home!

Back to the retreat. It clearly has not ended, and it clearly has continued to deepen the themes that were opening up in the few days that I was in Guelph. I have smiled many times at St. Therese and asked her if this is what she had been up to all along, preparing me for this over the past three or four years of my devotion to her. The first fruit of that devotion and of my being totally taken with her Little Way was that I have not had a moment of anger or sadness or despair or indignation or “why me?”. Very shortly after absorbing the significance of the news, my response was, okay Lord, what are you asking of me here?

The answer to that also unfolded over the weeks. I developed a very sharp perspective on what was important and not important in life. I suddenly could not believe the things that have upset me in the past, including how righteously indignant I could be at the behavior of other people! I recalled in a whole new way the story St. Therese tells of how she decided to love the nun who drove her crazy by criticizing her every little move. Therese eloquently framed the discussion within her own reflection of the love Jesus has for all of us with our foibles, sinfulness, and brokenness.

This is all stuff that I had previously read and reflected on. I was amazed at how much deeper it was all going. And then I recalled a reflection exercise we had done at a workshop on Discipleship here in Kingston on November 28 last year. The reflection was on the story of St. Paul being knocked off his horse by a blinding light and being led blind to Ananias. Ananias laid hands on him and said “Saul, my brother, the Lord has sent me, Jesus who appeared to you on the way by which you came, that you may regain your sight and be filled with the holy Spirit.” Immediately things like scales fell from his eyes and he regained his sight.

I have tried to be a prayerful person. I have lived long enough to become aware of my own brokenness and sinfulness. I am grateful every day for the gift of being in ministry as a Deacon. I therefore had no idea that I had scales on my eyes. But I did. The cancer is the blinding light that knocked me to the ground. Therese of Lisieux is Ananias. And Jesus has blessed me, dramatically getting my attention! I have never seen or appreciated or experienced my relationship with Jesus as clearly or as personally as I am now. And I know that this is not done! For that reason, there is no other way to characterize this journey than as one of great giftedness. Can you believe that in the middle of the chemotherapy and everything that goes with it, I am overwhelmingly grateful for what is happening in my relationship with God.

For that reason, the retreat continues. More later.

What just happened in Ireland?

    On May 22, 2015, the people of Ireland voted 62% in favor of including the following words in the Irish Constitution: that “marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex.” The turnout for the vote was 60% of registered Irish voters. The result was therefore not a squeaker. Moreover, the census of 2011 shows that Catholics make up 84% of the Irish population. This means that many many Catholics voted in favor of the constitutional amendment.

    Polls taken prior to the referendum suggested that the amendment was going to carry. Nonetheless, I have to say that I was very surprised at the outcome.

    As I grappled with a way to make sense of it, I recalled being in Ireland in 2012 for a tour of the country and to attend the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. Hanging over the Congress was the ugly specter of the history of child sexual abuse by members of the clergy over many years. Also hanging in the air and producing palpable anger in the Irish people was the realization that the abuse had been denied, that priests had been moved, and that documents had been withheld from investigators.

    Given that history, which remains fresh in the minds of people, I was certain that the outcome of the referendum was an act of revenge against what was perceived to be an autocratic ecclesiastical authority. Moreover, it appeared to be a repudiation of the Catholic Church itself.

    It seems that I could not have been more wrong.

    We had a gathering of our local Deacon support group at our house last night. We always have a topic for discussion, chosen by the hosts. The referendum seemed both timely and urgent, so I started to read up on it, confining myself to the Irish secular press. The most prominent headlines tended to focus on Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin’s comment that the Church needed a reality check in the wake of these results, “… A reality check right across the board, to look at the things it’s doing well, to look at the areas where we really have to start and say, ‘Look, have we drifted away completely from young people’?”

    In an article titled ‘All churches in Ireland in need of ‘reality check’‘, Patsy McGarry, a writer with the Irish Times said the following: “It’s not just young people. The people who voted for this referendum included tens of thousands of practising older Catholics in the cities, towns and country side of Ireland. People who will continue to practice their faith but who no longer accept that their gay sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, grandchildren, even their gay parents, are “objectively disordered” with a tendency to evil, as their Church teaches. Rather, by voting Yes last Friday, they embraced their gay minority and trumpeted to the world “You are my son, you’re my daughter you are my brother, you are my sister, you are my grandchild you are my mother, you are my father, you are my equal in law whatever the church may teach. It is an irony that those who opposed the referendum out of concern for the family were defeated by the family. The difference being that the No family was a concept, whereas last Friday’s Yes families were flesh and blood, living, breathing, flawed, impossible, loving humanity.”

    The writer goes on: “where our major church is concerned, the facts are stark and indicate that the Catholic Church as it was throughout the 150 years from the mid-19th century until the 1990s is gone.… Yet, there is hope. It rests with those priests who listen to and remain close to their people; those men in parishes throughout Ireland without whom the church would have been washed in the tsunami of scandals. It is such priests who bring solace and comfort to gay people in their congregations as they discover their identities and who then help ease families into accommodating that identity.”

    The take away from this and several other articles I read, is that Ireland voted to keep their gay children, relatives, and friends, in the family, with all the meanings of the word family. The tone is not at all about revenge on the clergy or on the church in general. The interesting thing, though, is that the Irish Catholic Church more than anywhere else in the world, will now be challenged to make this meaningful within the life of the Church. It will be the first real proving ground of everything Pope Francis has been saying about welcoming everyone. The tension of course will be that Church teaching has to dialogue with the pastoral mission of the Church. Where does all this go? I do not know the answer to that, but I am pleased in the end that this is happening in Ireland and not in North America.  Over here it would have been framed entirely along the lines of ‘my rights’ with an aggressively anti-religious overtone, perhaps. In Ireland, the faithful will remain faithful. The Church is going to grow up in a way it had not anticipated.

    I can’t help but think that the Holy Spirit is really up to something here.   

Patch Adams: not the movie

I had the great pleasure of hearing and seeing Patch Adams for the first time, on February 20 at the Ontario Psychological Association Annual Conference where he was a keynote speaker.(Remember the movie? Here's a correction for you: the person who was murdered was not a girl, but a buddy of his. "Hollywood took some liberties.") He talked for an hour and a half with no notes. Partly because he has talked to groups all over the world, and knows his message very well. He dressed in clown get-up, and he showed two short clips of his work. One was a breathtaking scene in Peru in which he got down to face level with a young girl with cerebral palsy and whose head was in her hands on her wheelchair. He literally brought her to life.

He is funny, but he is very serious. He says he has been at this since he was a medical school renegade in the mid-60's. He will never burn out because it is not possible when you love people so much and have such great joy being with them. Hospitals are not happy places, he says, because they do not teach medical students compassion, and those students land in the treatment world full of themselves (he used harsher language than that). Well, make of that what you will, he is the embodiment of something different, that is for sure. 

A few quotes:

"Care is the verbing of love."

 "There is no treatment prescription in the Diagnostic Manual that says, "Could use more love."  

"Caring is the chance to be enthusiastic."

"Caring is good for you. There are no papers in science showing the value of being serious. Or nasty, rude, or apathetic."

The whole thing is interesting not the least because he made it clear "I do not believe in any God." But then he used examples of Mother Teresa and Jesus. He asked the audience to put up their hands if they have done anything recently that was life-giving for another person. Lot of hands went up. He said, you are heroes. Then he said, when I count three, shout out "I am a hero." He mocked the effort and had us do it again. Much better. Then he said, how could you ever burn out if you are a hero and if you are Jesus? That's what Jesus wanted, isn't it? To be him to the people you meet?"

"Can you imagine going down the street saying I am a hero!"? Can you imagine going down the street and saying I am Jesus? Don't say that one near a psychiatrist!"

I was amazed. And everybody was quite moved. He talks with tremendous confidence, and he says "I cause havoc in an elevator!" But "When we go to a hospital or a home, I always look for the kid in the corner. That's the one who will be missed."

I am thinking to myself, we need this guy to fire up our evangelizing efforts. "Be Jesus to other people"? When you sign on to spend time with Patch Adams ("We have people from 3 to 88 coming to the clowning schools")  you dress in clown and you go to where people need to be cared for. He was going to be doing a visit to Sick Kids, and so the President-elect of OPA was in clown get-up to accompany him.

When we sign on to be with Jesus, to follow Jesus, do we make that kind of commitment? Most of us do not, sadly. We let other people put on the Jesus garment. We are not able to do that. We are not worthy of doing it. We make our commitment by praying. By trying to be a good person.

But BE Jesus to other people? That is ministry, that is discipleship.

There is going to be a workshop in Kingston on November 28, and it will be about intentional discipleship, the very thing Patch Adams is about, in a slightly different context. Someone I was talking to the other day lamented that it might be just another workshop with some good ideas that we go home and forget about.

We will forget about them only because we are not really taken with Jesus yet!

You can't hang around Patch Adams and not be taken with him.

BE Jesus to other people?

Oh my goodness, he's got me thinking, wheels turning. More than anything, heart turning - to Jesus. Nothing but nothing will happen if we merely like the idea of Jesus. It happens when we are engaged with, in love with, embraced by, the person of Jesus.

Thanks, Patch. Whoda ever thought?

Warm thoughts on a cold day

First, the cold. I have a small complaint for Dave Phillips, Senior Climatologist at Environment Canada. Here is what he said (CTV News) on Dec 1, 2014:

“Not as long and as brutal a winter as we had last year … for all Canadians,” said Phillips. “We won’t have to be migrating and hibernating like we did last year.” Phillips says Canadians can thank the phenomenon called El Nino. Dave, my complaint is in the form of a question: it is -14C here in Kingston as I write, with same temps forecast for the next several days. How is that milder, shorter, El Nino thing working for ya?

On a much happier note, I became aware as I was preaching at our 5 Masses this past weekend - there are a LOT of 20 and 30-somethings here! Young parents with their kids, as well as singles and other young couples. I am moved by that, in a world that touts its no-need-for-religion philosophy. I am humbled as well, because we who lead the liturgies could so easily drive them away. Is it ever nice to know that a significant group of our younger population want to be nurtured in a faith community at prayer. Pray for them, pray for us!

Finally, a note on Ste. Therese of Lisieux. I talked about her in my last posting, and how she inspires with her faith and her devotion to Jesus. No wonder she has the world-wide following she does. Before she died her agonizing death at age 24 (suffocating from the effects of tuberculosis -same disease my Dad got in 1954, and was cured of with the new drugs), she said this:

"My mission - to make God loved - will begin after my death...."  "I will spend my heaven doing good on earth. I will let fall a shower of roses." Roses have been described and experienced as Saint Therese's signature. (Website, Society of the Little Flower)

There are thousands of people who have trusted her a lot longer than I have. I am new to this devotion, and she has come through very large in two circumstances I have prayed for. Not only that, the confirmation of the roses was present in each case.

Here is the thing I have discovered about the roses. You can't go around looking for them or doing something like putting a picture of a rose on your desktop. I have seen lots of roses and pictures of roses, and have had no reaction to them. The ones that are convincing following a prayer or novena, are the ones that you did not expect and did not see coming, but hit you in a way that you know immediately what it is. And on the two occasions I refer to, Therese was very creative. In the first, I was asked to meet a young girl who was ill. Her name was a variation on the word 'rose.' That did not evoke anything in me until I met her and saw that she was a red-head! I knew, and I just smiled. The second was actually in a dream. In the dream I was walking through our kitchen and there was a vase with two roses in it, on our island. I turned and looked at them, and said, 'How did they get here?', and kept walking. When I woke up later, the image was clear as a bell, though I could not remember anything else about the dream.

Both of these came after particular prayers. The whole business is a matter of personal faith, and the Church teaches that my experience imposes no obligation on anyone. Indeed, there are all kinds of alternate explanations, starting with the one of sheer coincidence. I used that one for years. Not any more.     

Computer crash, emptying, and freedom. Oh yes, and a girl named Therese.

Once again I learn how important it is to keep praying for the eyes to see. A lot of things are put in front of us by a very generous God, and we can so easily miss them. 

This year in Fall and Advent, the generosity was pretty significant for me. And the outcome was a journey-to-Bethlehem experience like none I can recall.

I guess it started on retreat in October. Always happens that the gifts or graces I really desire on the retreat are a little deeper than the ones I go in being able to articulate. This year it became a new sense of the desire for conversion. For years I had prayed for 'the rest of my conversion.' If you stop and reflect on that, you will see between the lines an awareness of holding out on God.

One day as I walked through the fields of Loyola House in Guelph, I was really made aware of the beauty of the land and of the power of the One who made it. I wanted something from that land, and I picked up four little stones that I figured had taken maybe hundreds of years to come to the surface. I also picked a red clover. For no other reason than that it was there - and it was life. I held them all as some kind of connection with the Creator. Back in my room hours later, I still had them, and I noticed the clover wilting and dying. Which produced a startlingly clear awareness that there has to be a dying in creation, for new life to occur. And they can both occur in the midst of the hardness of the rocks. In my journal I noted,  "This is it, isn't it? This is what you want me to see."I ended the retreat, asking for a sign of confirmation about all this.

Flash forward a few weeks. Computer gets hit with a virus that destroys data that had not been backed up. I make the very hard decision to re-install Windows and go back to factory settings. I realize in the process that while I am losing some stuff, I am also eliminating all the junk on the computer, from content right down to temp files, system files etc etc etc. In the middle of it, I laughed as it hit me - the computer was now open to new life because old stuff was gone. The clover had died. And I felt strangely liberated from all kinds of stuff I had been saving.

While this was all happening, I was reading Therese of Lisieux's autobiography, Story of a Soul - a book I have had for years, but could never warm up to, with its flowery language. Suddenly it totally captivated me, and I found myself wanting to get to know this young woman. She is very bright, and totally - but totally - committed to love of Christ. The fact that there are many pictures of her (she died in 1897) makes her real in a way other saints cannot be. One of the kickers in our new relationship turns out to be an anniversary we share. To hear her tell it, the most important day in her life was her First Communion, at age 11. An extremely important sacramental day in my life was ordination to the diaconate. The date for both is May 8. We are kindred spirits, lol, yes?

Therese has been wonderful to get to know. If you have heard anything of her, you will know that she has this little thing of confirming prayers by putting roses in your path. I promise, I have never really trusted that - or, more accurately, never really experienced that. I trust it now. And I am quietly impressed at the creative ways she does it sometimes. More on that another time.

Among the many powerful statements she makes in her writings, there is this little section: "Jesus does not demand great actions from us, but simply surrender and gratitude. ...... (A)mong his own disciples, alas, He finds few hearts who surrender to him without reservations, who understand the real tenderness of His infinite Love."

'Without reservations.' I realize I have always had reservations, are you kidding?

The theme of my homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent became that of journeying to Bethlehem with Mary and being conscious that if we make that a journey of love as Therese has described, we will arrive at Bethlehem to see and maybe hold the child Jesus, knowing that we are free - freer than ever, perhaps, to let our relationship with Jesus totally occupy the moment - because we are holding nothing back on him. We do not suddenly become perfect, what we become is honest. And open to all he so much wants to give us.

 (Here is that homily, from the parish website:https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40557533/pdf/Deacon%20Carney%27s%20PDF/Deacon%20Carney%20Homilies.pdf  )

January 4 2015 will be Epiphany, the visit of the Magi. Homily is not written yet, but my thoughts are that the gold, frankincense, and myrrh we might consider bringing to Jesus in 2015 are the gifts of honesty (everything there for him to see - everything), hunger (because we have emptied ourselves of all the stuff that deludes us into thinking we are able to handle everything on our own, including our salvation), and love (which burns away all that stuff - overwrites the hard-drive, as it were).

'Without reservation.' Nothing held back. I think we will find we are different people as we continue our journey and 'return to our own land.'

Happy and Blessed New Year 2015.

Of Jeremiah and Spirals

Long long time between posts! Going to take some of my own advice that will be in my homily this coming weekend, and that is to tell of the Lord. The scripture for this Sunday is Jeremiah telling God how he gets in trouble when he tells about him - but then he notices that if he tries to not tell of God there is this fire inside him that won’t let him keep quiet.

In my homily, I will note that this is a kind of beginning of a new year. It is, of course. School is about to start again and all of us are pretty much winding down vacation mode. Time to get back at it. And there is Jeremiah's message telling us in 2014 that means renewing our relationship with Christ and letting others know who we are. We do, after all, gush about our fabulous good friends, right? In my own case, we have told everyone about meeting up with Don and Janet again on our Las Vegas trip. We have even told - likely bragged - about a wonderful encounter with Louise Pitre who sat next to us on the airplane (Google her).

How easy it is to let that kind of thing slip with Christ. Who will never ever forget me. Who will never ever tsk tsk or roar or raise clenched fist at my stupidity but will rather do something like my dad did the night I couldn’t walk very well - I had been scared of his reaction but he looked and said softly, ‘You should have known better.’ I have remembered that better than any scolding I have ever received, and I have told all kinds of people about it. Really embarrassed on the one hand, really touched and grateful and influenced by it on the other. God is like that.

Sherry Weddell notes a theory called The Spiral of Silence. According to this theory, we are reluctant to speak up when we find that we are in the minority - because we fear being alienated by the majority. And so our voice goes quiet and what we have to offer might not get heard. Is that what Jeremiah was talking about? I bet it was. I have looked in the mirror and I have seen Jeremiah.

But I have also listened and kept track and monitored. The burning fire is there too. I guess we develop it. But we do not give it to ourselves. I think it is part of the design. Everyone of us has it. New year coming up. Time to pay attention maybe.

Reflections at the end of 2013

As I look out the window a few days before Christmas, I see a skating rink of a street - ahhh, just ruined by a sander!. We are between ice/ rain storms, apparently. On this busiest of shopping weekends, we are told. 

Text message tells me son #two, wife and child safely off the 401, arrived in Kingston. Thank God.

All of this a bit of a metaphor for this past year. Deep freezes followed by thaws. And vice versa. Nature (as influenced by the Bush Administration and others nearer to home) serving up weather contortions like never seen before!

Civilization doing its best to imitate. The 1% outdoing themselves. The poor being outdone. Government official asking 'is it my job to feed my neighbour’s child? I don’t think so.” 

Publisher of the Toronto Star (December 21, 2013) writing his own editorial, says:

            Minister Moore’s words were neither compassionate nor particularly conservative..........          (For a growing number of  Canadians and Americans) Theirs is a world in which we don’t live our lives as caring neighbours and united citizens but as isolated, self-motivated economic actors.     Relationships are transactional in this world — not based on trust or tradition........ This is the world of A Christmas Carol, published by Charles Dickens as a satiric attack on the economic attitudes and morality of his day 170 years ago this week. 

But son#2 and his family did get safely off the highway on an icy, dangerous day, in spite of weather that makes us think of climate change wrought by humans. 

And good will does live on in spite of growing cynicism and greed. Numerous articles talk about the joy of volunteering and giving in Christmas campaigns for the poor. They also talk of people helping each other in the middle of power outages - and so on. 

The bah humbug factor? Jewish authors Bernie Farber and Avrum Rosensweig have written another of those great articles that appear this time every year in which non-Christians puzzle about the resistance  to saying Merry Christmas. I love it, and I always make a point to answer whether online or in print. Wishing Happy Chanukah or Eid Mubarak to authors who earnestly want us all to get in touch with what these feasts mean. They are times of goodwill, expressions of oneness among all peoples, respect for each others' religious traditions, and reminders that we have work to do in the world.

In the end, we have to decide. My own temptations to cynicism need to give way to rejoicing in the very thing I fear we are trying to get rid of: the celebration of the birth of Christ. The Savior. The One who ensures we truly are not alone and don't need to act like fools going it alone!

A very Merry Christmas to all, and a healthy, peaceful 2014!