Forgiveness...Wow

Her son was recently killed--brutally killed--in a racist attack. This is how she has responded to the conviction of the two murders:

"Why live a life sentence? Hate killed my son, so why should I be a victim too? said Mrs Walker.

"Unforgiveness makes you a victim and why should I be a victim? Anthony spent his life forgiving. His life stood for peace, love and forgiveness and I brought them up that way."

Her daughter, just lost her precious brother, said:

"I did say I forgive and I do still stand by that because you have to. That's one of the things I was raised on and what my mum taught me."

Read it all here.

Cheers,
Kev

Switch Up: Feel the Burn!

I decided to try something different today at the pool. Normally, I'd just do laps for 30 mins. Today, I went for 40 laps.

Here's the run down:

14x25m breaststroke
8x25m front crawl
6x25m front crawl
2x25m breaststroke
4x25m front crawl
2x25m front crawl
4x25m breaststroke
--------
40x25m = 1000m

Unfortunately, I'm slow as hell. It took me ~37 min.

I like this method better. I think I'm going to stick with 40 laps for the next month or so. I'll see if I can shave off some time too.

At any rate, I'm feeling the burn...harsh...feels great.

Tomorrow, back to paper writing...ugh.

Cheers,
Kev

Quoteworthy - The Hospital Chaplain

Slacktivist mentions Real Live Preacher's (RLP) experience as a hospital chaplain intern in this week's Left Behind Friday entry. (You'll notice both have been on my frequently travelled blog list for some time now).

I wanted to provide a few excerpts from RLP's 4 part story, especially part 3 - "dark night of the soul":

You see, people facing death don’t give a fuck about your interpretation of II Timothy.
Some take the “bloodied, but unbowed” road, but most dying people want to pray with the chaplain. And they don’t want weak-ass prayers either. They don’t want you to pray that God’s will be done.

Hell no. People want you to get down and dirty with them. They want to call down angels and the powers of the Almighty. THEY ARE DYING and the whole world should stop.

I threw myself into it. I prayed holding hands and cradling heads. I prayed with children and old men. I prayed with a man who lost his tongue to cancer. I lent him mine. I prayed my ass off. I had 50 variations of every prayer you could imagine, one hell of a repertoire.

I started noticing something. When the doctors said someone was going to die, they did. When they said 10% chance of survival, about 9 out of 10 died. The odds ran pretty much as predicted by the doctors. I mean, is this praying doing ANYTHING?

...

Then I met Jenny.

30 something. Cute. New mother with two little kids. Breast cancer. Found it too late. Spread all over. Absolutely going to die.

Jenny had only one request. “I know I’m going to die, chaplain. I need time to finish this. It's for my kids. Pray with me that God will give me the strength to finish it.”

She showed me the needlepoint pillow she was making for her children. It was an “alphabet blocks and apples” kind of thing. She knew she would not be there for them. Would not drop them off at kindergarten, would not see baseball games, would not help her daughter pick out her first bra. No weddings, no grandkids. Nothing.

She had this fantasy that her children would cherish this thing - sleep with it, snuggle it. Someday it might be lovingly put on display at her daughter’s wedding. Perhaps there would be a moment of silence. Some part of her would be there.

I was totally hooked. We prayed. We believed. Jesus, this was the kind of prayer you could believe in. We were like idiots and fools.

A couple of days later I went to see her only to find the room filled with doctors and nurses. She was having violent convulsions and terrible pain. I watched while she died hard. Real hard.

As the door shut, the last thing I saw was the unfinished needlepoint lying on the floor.

...

It’s funny, when your faith finally caves, it goes all at once. You realize you were just a shell held together with hackneyed rituals and desperate hopes. You are not strong. You do not have answers.

I don’t remember the walk back to the office. I must have had the classic, “Young chaplain just got the shit kicked out of him” look because people left me alone.

...

St. John of the Cross calls it "The Dark Night of the Soul." He says those seeking God will walk the paths of others but eventually those paths will end and there will be no path. They will be left with “Nada, Nada, Nada.” Nothing, Nothing, Nothing.

It broke my heart. I grieved in joint and marrow. My reptilian brain cried. I was sad all the way to the bottom.

Now that's real life.

-Kevin

Centennial

I just noticed that my last post was my 100th blog post.

Woooo!

The End,
Kev

Bob Marley and Hermeneutics

So the good Bob Marley came up on the ol' iPod today as I pulled into Park Royal on the people's limo. There's a wonderful song Mr. Marley sings entitled, "No Woman, No Cry". Let's just look at that title and have a little fun.

What does "No Woman, No Cry" mean? I see two possible ways of interpreting it:
1. "(if) no woman, (then) no cry" - a statement of result. If you don't have a woman, then you won't have reason to cry; with relationships comes pain and so on, you know the drill. Perhaps the more obvious meaning from the syntax and word choice alone.
2. "no woman - don't cry!" - an imperative. Here you're telling the woman to not cry; it is an imperative command. This one isn't as obvious - unless, like me, you've heard brown ESLers speak.

Now, if you've actually heard the song then you know that the answer to my question is obvious. But that's the key - you need to have heard the rest of the song.

Just thought this would be a fun example to show how complex interpretation of language actually is.

Cheers,
Kev

My Problem With My Methods Course

I think I've pinpointed the reason why I am disappointed with my 'methods in the study of religion' course.

I was expecting a course that was going to cover various approaches to interpreting religious literature. I wanted a course to cover all the various criticisms I'd heard of: historical criticism, literary criticism, narrative criticism, source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, reader response criticism, etc... Basically, I expected a course on exegesis and hermeneutics. These were the types of courses I had seen as part of the curriculum of both graduate biblical studies programs, as well as all the undergraduate biblical studies programs in the UK, which, by the way, I spent many a day drooling over.

However, what I got was a course on how to interpret religion on the macro scale. We are talking about how various theorists have studied the phenomenon of religion. Figures such as Eliade, Marx, Durkheim, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Otto; approaches such as colonial, postcolonial, and feminist. As you can see, this is very different from what I expected, and wanted.

Although, yes, I am interested in the stuff we talk about--how do we interpret religion? how do we interpret the 'poetics'? the 'politics'?--it really isn't super interesting to me. I want a course to guide me through the various approaches to interpretation of religious documents and literature.

I guess I won't be getting that at UBC. Oh well.

Kev

God Wills It

This is one of those posts where I've had something mulling about my head for some time and just needed to put it down in sentences and try to get my thoughts straight.

I often hear people talk about the "will of God". They will do so-and-so if "God wills it"; they don't know if they should do such-and-such because they don't know if God "wills it". As I hear this, I thinking to myself: God doesn't will anything. I'll explain.

I take very seriously the fact that humans are free creatures (yes, Free-Will). To qualify this, sometimes we have physical barriers to action (alcohol? illness? handicap?); sometimes we have economic barriers (no money?); sometimes we have mental barriers (fear? insecurity? shock?). But, in light of all this, I think I can still say that human beings have a free will.

The next step in my thinking is such: if we are free creatures, then we are free to make our own decisions. The fact that we are creatures capable of making our own decisions makes me think that perhaps that's the way God intended us to be. So then, God has allowed us the capacity to make our own conscious decisions in life.

One may say at this point that indeed we are free - free to choose the path that is God's will. Well, maybe that's the way it is. But I want to propose something else: God won't make the choice for us. That is the reason we are free creatures, to make our own choices. Now, we have guidance: we want to strive to build character, and we want to avoid actions that are morally wrong (e.g., murder, robbery, and other universally recognized wrongs); we have wisdom, experience, and common sense; we have the advice of others. Why would God provide us with all this if he wants us to make the choice that he himself has already made?

I think what I'm getting at is that there are two different paradigms of how to approach living the Christian life and making decisions. One approach is to try and figure out the one-and-0nly-one thing which God wills that we do. The other approach is to recognize the boundaries (don't kill, act in love, etc...) and make our decision using the heart and head which we all have.

If God made a creation which can self-create (no lies, I'm an evolutionist)--and I would think he very much enjoys watching this process--then surely he enjoys seeing created beings create their own paths through life.

I have rambled long enough. I can see a dozen loose ends and logical faults in what I've said. But I ask for your grace as you read - consider this a publicly available freewrite.

Cheers,
Kev

Rabbinic Nugget - The Short but Long Road

Another great snippet from the Babylonian Talmud:

I was once on a journey when I noticed a little boy sitting at the cross-road. 'By what road,' I asked him, 'do we go to the town?' 'This one,' he replied, 'is short but long, and that one is long but short.' I proceeded along the 'short but long' road. When I approached the town I discovered that it was hedged in by gardens and orchards. Turning back I said to him, 'My son, did you not tell me that this road was short?' 'And,' he replied, 'did I not also tell you: but long?'

Wonderful!

Rabbinic Nugget - "My Sons Have Defeated Me"

I want to share a wonderful quote from the Babylonian Talmud (a major text of Rabbinic Judaism):

But R. Joshua arose and exclaimed: 'It is not in heaven.' (Deut 30.12) What did he mean by this?-Said R. Jeremiah: That the Torah had already been given at Mount Sinai; we pay no attention to a Heavenly Voice, because Thou hast long since written in the Torah at Mount Sinai, After the majority must one incline. (Ex. 23.2)
R. Nathan met Elijah and asked him: What did the Holy One, Blessed be He, do in that hour?-He laughed with joy, he replied, saying, 'My sons have defeated Me, My Sons have defeated Me.'

I must say, one thing I love about Judaism--and the Rabbis in particular--is their playfulness and their constant dialogue and reinterpretation.

Multitasking?

A humourous, but true, depiction of 'multitasking':



Hats off to 43 Folders.

Cheers,
Kev

Today We Remember

Today we remember



Lest we forget



The casualties of war

Take Home Midterm

That...was...long.

Because of a shortage of class hours, our Ancient Jewish Law prof gave us a take-home midterm. Ugh. Nasty. He said it should take around 6 hrs. It took me more like 8. But, to redeem myself, half of that time I was only half concentrating. So, really, I'm not that stupid. Haha.

I really wish we just had an in class exam. One hour plus a few pages of writing sounds good to me. SEVENTEEN pages of typed material - Yuck.

Now I have two days to try and pick a paper topic and prepare a preliminary outline for my Jewish Law term paper. Good luck Kev, good luck.

Cheers.

A Night at Kev's - Running Blog

11:15 AM

Welcome back to life Kevin. No hangover - well done! Eug and Lucas are still sleeping. King left before I got up.

That was a good night.

4:30 AM

If you want to see guys talk, get them drunk. We open up like you wouldn't believe, I swear it.

We really should sleep soon...maybe...I dunno...hopefully??

...Nothing like a good Vodka and Juice to put you to bed.

2:15 AM

We're watching Pulp Fiction, man I love this film.

And seriously, the GI Joe clips at eBaum's World had us rolling around for like 15 mins. I haven't seen Lucas laugh so hard ever in my life. Especially this one.

12:30 AM

Charles, Andrew, Dan, Wing, and Eric just left. We're down to me, Eug, Lucas, and King. Watching Lucas is...fun. Haha. Even King is awesome. Eugene just giggles all the time. As for me, I'm still good. I'm on to #3 - Sapporo. Sapporo is pretty cool, it comes in a huge 650mL metal can (like twice a regular bottle).

And Eug has dripped beer on my laptop twice now. Dork.

11:00 PM

Eugene is very Buble-ish. Dan Wong is addicted to Battlefield 2. Wing is crying and saying he wants to go home and do his midterm. I'm on to #2 - Stella Artois. I think I've noticed a general pattern: beer from the tap is way better than from the bottle.

10:10 PM

Dan and Wing have shown up. Others should be showing up within an hour. I have to say, Beck's was a disgusting beer. Seriously, it was like piss in a bottle. And Eug says that Rickards Red is not anywhere near as good as off the tap. I believe him.

9:30 PM:

We're having a party at my place to celebrate Lucas' and Roxy's birthday. After a beer, I have decided to do a running blog of the night. This is mostly so we can chronical the evolution of Lucas.
Anyways, the Canucks game ended - we won. I spent half the time trying to get F.E.A.R. working. After some initial troubles with the sound, it's all good. And man, what an awesome game. I had the lights off and the speakers turned up - it's like a horror film. Eug and I were jumping every few minutes.

Find your love

If you've been around my blog for a while, you know that when I come across an awesome post out in the blog-o-sphere I love to share it. Well Maggi Dawn has found another excellent nugget. (Original here). Enjoy.

Find your love

You know that dream you carry around with you each day?
It's kinda important.
Wasn't it what you were put on planet earth to do?
They say everyone has a calling, can your still hear it?
Doesn't it eat away at you? That treadmill you are on, did it ever get too much?
Did you ever wonder what it would be like to do your thing?
Did you ever feel time was passing you by?
Just how many days have you left before your last?
Did you ever wonder about stuff like that?
Did you ask yourself 'what was stopping you?'
There is never a right time.
You will be too old. Too young. Too something or other.
When was last time you took a risk?
Did you remember how alive it made you feel?
There are no guarantees of success.
It's not called a leap of faith for nothing.
It's not too late, honest.
Jump.
You might fall.

You might fly.

Worship Dilemma

I'm undecided. Is worship (in that formal sense of singing) supposed to be a. the congregation praising God, or b. the congregation being led to an experience--an encounter--with God.

Are both options mutually exclusive; in other words, can worship be both about praising God and about encountering God. One may counter: how could they possibly be exclusive? I'll explain. If your primary focus is to praise God, then the act of praise does not necessarily mean one in any way actually encounters God. Praising in no way guarantees, nor presupposes, an encouter with the Holy (yay, go Otto). Whereas, if your primary focus is to encounter God (as Otto would put it, to encounter the numinous), then that also does not require one to be praising.
But, having said this, does that mean that if your focus is to praise God then having an encouter with God is not an issue. And vice versa, if your focus is to encouter God then praising God is not an issue.

The logic is a bit fuddled, I admit, but I think the problem remains.

What is worship ultimately about: me or God?

Thesis...antithesis...now time for a creative synthesis.

By the way, I have see-sawed between both sides of the fence over the years.

-Kev

Tango

Man, the Tango is hard. I'd love to get it down though, it does seem like a really cool dance.

This one is gonna take some work. I don't think I'm a natural 'tango-er'.

Kev

Noteworthy Quiz

Surprise, surprise, I'm a Postmodern Christian. I have no idea how Wesleyan ranked over Liberal. And 0% fundamentalist, OHhhhhh yeah! Spot on.

You scored as Emergent/Postmodern. You are Emergent/Postmodern in your theology. You feel alienated from older forms of church, you don't think they connect to modern culture very well. No one knows the whole truth about God, and we have much to learn from each other, and so learning takes place in dialogue. Evangelism should take place in relationships rather than through crusades and altar-calls. People are interested in spirituality and want to ask questions, so the church should help them to do this. Emergent/Postmodern 86% Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan 64% Classical Liberal 50% Roman Catholic 50% Modern Liberal 43% Neo orthodox 43% Charismatic/Pentecostal 25% Reformed Evangelical 21% Fundamentalist 0% What's your theological worldview? created with QuizFarm.com