The trees were holding out on me.

Thank you to those who contributed to my survey in the last post... interesting data, indeed! Feel free to add a comment, if you haven't yet, and I will let you know when I draw conclusions.


It's amazing how much Vancouver can change in a week and a half! As I walk the route from my bus stop to my house, I am reminded that I do not know the trees at all. I do not know the flowers at all. I thought I did, because I've walked that same route for three years now, with one important exception: I've missed a crucial 4-month period every year. Yes, this is my first Vancouver summer. This is my first Vancouver month of May.

Familiar trees that I know by heart in September and March are now unrecognizable, covered in unexpected blossoms or fresh leaves. There are strange and beautiful orange flowers growing by the front steps that I have never seen before. I am enjoying being taken by surprise. Trees and bushes I scarcely noticed before are springing to my attention, like when one instrument suddenly stands out in the orchestra.

Let me give you an example. There's a scraggly tree on Alma &3rd, he's a chaotic mess of thin branches growing in all directions from a thick stump. He's a species I've never seen before, and I've never been able to identify him. He grows in the yard of a man who collects other people's junk. He's not an immediately lovable tree, but I've grown to love him for his scraggliness, just like I've grown a secret affection for this little long-haired junk-collecting man I've seen but never actually talked to. The other day, as I approached the tree on my walk home, instead of scraggly branches, I saw what looked like soft pink dreadlocks. Every branch was covered with the tiniest pink flowers, bringing out a softer side of him I'd never seen. He reminded me of something out of a Dr. Seuss book! Or perhaps Sideshow Bob's hair, if it were pink (for the Simpsons fans out there). I felt a sense of pride in this tree I'd grown to love over three autumns and winters and springs. He had been holding out on me! Actually, I had been missing out on him. I imagined everyone looking at him and enjoying him a little more than usual. I also wanted people to know that I loved him before I knew he was beautiful.

This whole experience of Vancouver flora in May reminds me of similar experiences with people. I don't know if anyone else is reminded of people when they look at plants... it may be a weird side effect of being both a biologist and a pastor-in-training.... Anyway, I am being reminded of times when people I love reveal some gift or talent I never knew they had. Like when I returned home from Belgium, and my brother could suddenly play saxophone. Or when I heard Chris sing for the first time. Or the first time I saw Danice interact with her youth. It's such a great feeling, because you already love the person, but it gives you one more reason to love them, one more dimension to that love. It also reminds me that even when I think I know someone, I don't know all of them. This is something God's been teaching me for a few years - people are rarely as good or as bad as I think they are. There are beautiful and ugly sides to people I rarely see. Which is great motivation to pay closer attention in all seasons, and love them in all seasons.

Home life

I'm at my family home in Saskatoon. I just swept the kitchen and the three bathrooms and both entrances. My mom is exploiting my love for sweeping the floor. I really do love sweeping the floor. She never forgets that. I enjoyed getting in her way in the kitchen tonight while she made meatballs. They're very easy. I could make them back in Vancouver.

My dad just walked in. He's wearing his greasy mechanic one-piece outfit and holding some rusty car part from Rachel's car. Hopefully the part that's making it hard to start the car. Yep, he just confirmed it, it's the starter. He's a pastor, but he looks very at home as an engineer.

It's great being home and settling into a different rhythm, even though it's only for a while. I have enjoyed the simple things - picking dandelions out of the grass, having a drink at the coffee shop where Rachel works, watching the crabapple blossoms bloom on the tree, and laying on the backyard lawn in the sun. My family is awesome.


It was fun being at the Webbers, too, for our yearly gathering of four families. Sam, Cindie and Danice were the newbies this year, and they all live in Vancouver, so it was a strange meeting of two worlds for me. Lots of laughs, theological discussions, visits to cattle ranches, rides in the back of pick-up trucks, gopher shooting (I didn't participate), and eating. Some pictures of Danice experiencing the prairies:


Oh yeah, I'm also doing a survey right now. It's a dialectical geographical survey, and you can participate. It's very important. Here's the question - please leave your answer as a comment, and state where you live: What do you call the game where you knock on people's doors or ring their doorbells, and then you run away before they open it?

Please answer. Vancouver, I'll see you in a couple days.

Thomas Merton rocks

The rain has stopped. The afternoon sun slants through the pine trees: and how those useless needles smell in the clean air! A dandelion, long out of season, has pushed itself into bloom between the smashed leaves of last summer’s day lilies. The valley resounds with totally uninformative talk of creeks and wild water. Then the quails begin their sweet whistling in the wet bushes.

Their noise is absolutely useless, and so is the delight I take in it. There is nothing I would rather hear, not because it is a better noise than other noises, but because it is the voice of the present moment, the present festival.

(Thomas Merton - "When the Trees Say Nothing")

Digestion

I was thinking about how it takes me so long to digest things - information and art, especially.

For example, when I read a book, I usually underline or mark passages in it that I like. When I get to the end of the book, I don't feel like I've really "got" it unless I go back through it again. Otherwise, nothing sticks - it's all gone. So I usually flip through it and type out the parts that I like, and remind myself of the structure of it, and the point of it. It takes twice as long for me to read books as it takes a lot of other people.

And in order to actually feel like I have a handle on a song or a band, I have to sit and listen intently to the music while looking at the lyrics and concentrating on the song as a whole - I can't just have it in the background. Lately this has taken up a lot of my time, because I've been "getting into" a few different artists (U2, obviously, as well as Ani DiFranco and Death Cab for Cutie). All of them have been around for a while, so it takes time to sit and really get my head around their body of work - in each case, I have a lot of catching up to do. I need to start getting interested in brand-new artists so that this catch-up takes less time!

I guess this is ok. I'd rather know what I know and know it well. I'd rather really appreciate a few things, instead of spreading a broad and shallow net. Next things to dive into: Brothers Karamazov and Radiohead.

So what's been going on my life lately... I'm looking and looking for a 3-bedroom house to rent with Danice and Lindsey, preferably further east in this lovely city, but so far, the search is fruitless. I have started working full-time at Jacob's Well. I got two TA jobs for the fall 2008 semester (Iain and Darrell), so I will not have time to take many classes come September! I just played guitar at a pastor's conference at Regent, where I got to listen to and meet Marva Dawn, who is an amazing writer and a hero of mine. I finished watching Season 2 of "Lost" with Danice, on to Season 3. I'm playing piano at Tora and Jordan's wedding tomorrow. The cherry blossoms are almost all gone, but there are a lot of other things blooming here that I've never seen before (because I've always been in Saskatoon by May!). I'm going to Homowebmape in a week, and I'm bringing Danice with me. After that, I'm spending a week in Saskatoon, so Saskatoon friends... let's do coffee, between the 19th and the 25th of this month.

Women, let's talk.

Disclaimer: This blog is about... menstruation. Many men (and probably some women) will likely not want to read on. I, myself, am not very comfortable talking about this, as Danice would attest, and I am even less comfortable writing about it for the masses of people who read my blog. But I'm writing as an effort to get rid of some of that awkwardness, as I will explain below.

I made a decision about menstrual products last year, and it was probably one of my best choices all year (you know, next to deciding to become a pastor!). Since it was my sister who inspired me to do this, I'd love to inspire more women to follow suit. Also,I want to brag about how hard core I am, because I'm proud of it, and I don't exactly drop it into casual conversation.

This is what I did: I stopped buying tampons and pads, and instead, I bought two reusable products: the DivaCup , and Lunapads (designed and produced locally in Vancouver). Both can be ordered online.

Together, these cost me about $70, and will likely last me several years. My wallet is happy!

I am no longer contributing any menstrual products to landfills (an average woman throws away 12 000 pads and tampons in her lifetime, not to mention the packaging). The planet is happy!

I don't know much about the health risks of tampons and the bleaching and all that, but I'm kind of glad to not have to worry about that now, too. Bonus advantage: you can't feel the DivaCup, and Lunapads are much, much more soft and comfortable than plastic pads. My body is happy!

So... good for the environment, good for my body, good for my budget. All I had to do was to get comfortable with seeing my own blood. Which was easy, once I reminded myself that the people making me think it was dirty and embarrassing (maybe even shameful), in need of sanitizing, bleaching and immediate disposal were... drumroll please... the producers of the tampons and pads! How convenient for them. They're so embarrassed for me that they use a strange blue liquid to substitute for blood in their little scientific demonstrations on their commercials, and tell me I need "protection" from something that comes from my own body! An interesting article I read online (read it!) talked about how disposable pads (Kotex brand) were invented in 1921, after WWI, from an absorbent wadding used to bandage wounds in the war. The part about advertising is fascinating:

"...the menstrual product industry has employed a three-fold marketing strategy that remains remarkably unchanged almost 100 years later, though its methods may vary: medicalize menstruation as a problematic bodily function; emphasize the importance of hygiene (menstruation as "dirty"); and stress the potential for embarrassment ostensibly inherent in menstruation itself. In these ways, menstruation is itself constructed by the marketing of the product. In conjunction, these strategies effectively instruct women to be silent on the subject."

So I'm trying to break the silence, and change my own perceptions about my body and the way God made it to function. But I won't say much more - you can check out the product websites. (I will warn you that the DivaCup takes some practice and you have to be ready to give it several tries. Before starting with it, I used "ob" brand tampons, without applicators, and I think that was a good intermediate step.)

Feel free to ask me more questions about this, if you want... it might help me become less awkward talking about it.

One love, one...liner.

On the plate today are some of Bono's great one-liners from that same book, "Bono in Conversation":

(okay, some of them are two-or-three-liners!)...



"The sound of getting out of a ghetto is very different to the sound of getting into one."

"To be relevant is a lot harder than to be successful."

"Coolness might help in your negotiation with people through the world, but it is impossible to meet God with sunglasses on."

"Decadence is when you have it all in front of you and don’t notice. I noticed everything. And I appreciated it."

"You know, celebrity is ridiculous. It’s silly, but it is a kind of currency, and you have to spend it wisely."

"One of the great ironies of these concerts is that our songs are very intimate: incredible intimacies shared with people whom you’ve never met. And I wouldn’t trust that. Who would trust that?"

"It’s inevitable. Love has to become an action or something concrete. It would have to happen. There must be an incarnation. Love must be flesh."

"It’s the loss of money that leads to the love of it."

"This is how we worship God, even though we don’t write religious songs, because we didn’t feel God needs the advertising."

"The thing that’ll make you less and less able to realize your potential is a room that’s empty of argument. And I would be terrified to be on my own as a solo singer, not to have a band to argue with."

"No one does anything interesting for just the right reason. It’s the flaw that makes the frame... You wouldn’t write a song if you didn’t have a hole in your heart."

"Yeah, a great rock show can be a transcendent event... it’s an extraordinary thing to get 70000 people or 7000 people to agree on anything."

"God is love, and as much as I respond in allowing myself to be transformed by that love and acting in that love, that’s my religion. Where things get complicated for me, is when I try to live this love. Now, that’s not so easy."

"It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the Universe...And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “As you reap, so will you sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff."

"The Greeks may have come up with democracy, but they had not intention of everyone having it."

"The quality I admire in people the most is lack of self-pity."

"Laughter is the evidence of freedom. A sense of humor is not always defensive. It can be a great attack dog."

"You just get on with your life, and you slowly find a place to put Africa, this beautiful, shining continent with all its ups and downs. Occasionally, you’d take it out, you’d look at it again, and then you’d put it back in that safer place called distance and time."

"“Be silent, and know that I am God.” That’s a favorite line from the Scriptures. “Shut Up and Let Me Love You” would be the pop song."

When wrestling with God, wear a cup.

This is what I'm paying the big bucks at Bible School for...

This morning in my last Genesis class, we studied the story of Jacob wrestling with God. It's in Genesis 32 (we didn't quite make it all the way through Genesis!).

If you know the story, a man meets Jacob in the dark and starts wrestling with him. It's not until daybreak that Jacob realizes he's wrestling with God. The match is lasting forever, and no one is winning. Here's how verse 25 goes in my Bible:

"When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man."

And verses 31-32:

"The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip. Therefore to this day the Israelites do not eat the tendon attached to the socket of the hip, because the socket of Jacob's hip was touched near the tendon."

This gets kind of technical, but bear with me, I promise it will get good... My professor, Dr. Provan, started talking about the Hebrew words that are translated "socket" ("kap") and "hip" ("yarek"). He explained that elsewhere in Genesis and in the Old Testament, these are actually words associated with flesh and muscle, not bone (eg. "yarek" is translated "thigh" in Gen. 24:9). It's hard to tell exactly what parts of the body the author is referring to. The custom it describes (not eating parts of the meat) didn't even make it into the Jewish law - this is the only mention of it. The word translated "tendon" is "gid-hannasheh", and this is the only place it's used, so it's impossible to know exactly what it means, but it seems to be some sort of "fleshly appendage". At this point, the less mature students in the class (including me) were already giggling.

So Dr. Provan has a theory, unprovable, but very appealing, in my opinion. Instead of talking about hips, sockets and tendons, he thinks that this passage is euphemistically talking about Jacob's genitalia. Basically, he thinks God kicked Jacob in the groin. That's why he limped. God canned him. God sort of cheated. Which makes sense, because if you know Jacob, you know Jacob is a cheater, and it would be poetic justice for Jacob to be kicked in the crotch by God.

Although in this painting by Eugene Delacroix, it looks like Jacob is trying to turn the tables and knee God in the crotch...


Anyway, as you can tell, this has given me a whole new appreciation for the story, and for Jacob. I think he might be a new hero of mine. :)

Bono in conversation

I've been reading this book of conversations with Bono. It's by Michka Assayas, and it's entitled "Bono in Conversation." Very appropriate. You know I've been getting into U2, and the thing is, I kind of thought they might be an accident. I thought that maybe they stumbled into a lot of great things, and that maybe they didn't really know what made them great. But I was wrong. At least in Bono's case. This man is freaking brilliant. So much of what he says is full of wit, humor, wisdom and humility. Here's how he describes himself in the book:

"I’m a scribbling, cigar-smoking, wine-drinking, Bible-reading band man. A show-off who loves to paint pictures of what I can’t see. A husband, father, friend of the poor and sometimes the rich. An activist traveling salesman of ideas. Chess player, part-time rock star, opera singer, in the loudest folk group in the world."

He is, of course, very involved in Africa. This one thing he said really grabbed me. Check it out:


"Right now there is the biggest pandemic in the history of civilization, happening in the world now with AIDS. It’s bigger than the Black Death, which took a third of Europe in the Middle Ages. Sixty-five hundred Africans are dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease. And it is not a priority for the West: two 9/11s a day, eighteen jumbo jets of fathers, mothers, families falling out of the sky. No tears, no letters of condolence, no fifty-one-gun salutes. Why? Because we don’t put the same value on African life as we put on a European or an American life. God will not let us get away with this, history certainly won’t let us get away without excuses. We say we can’t get these antiretroviral drugs to the farthest reaches of Africa, but we can get them our cold fizzy drinks. The tiniest village, you can find a bottle of Coke. Look, if we really thought that an African life was equal in value to an English, a French, or an Irish life, we wouldn’t let two and a half million Africans die every year for the stupidest of reasons: money. We just wouldn’t. And a very prominent head of state said to me: “It’s true. If these people weren’t Africans, we just couldn’t let it happen.” We don’t really deep down believe in their equality."

Crazy. I think he's right. I might be posting more quotes from the book soon...

Unless a seed falls

I spent today at Jacob's Well, like every Wednesday this year. I'm getting paid now! I'm on staff! After two and a half years of volunteering. I will be working there full-time this summer. Here's a taste of today, a taste of the Well... (check out our website if you want)

I took the bus for 40 minutes to arrive at Jacob's Well, on Main and Cordova.

I spent the morning tackling the problem of how to reconcile Quickbooks with our bank statements for 2008. I rejoiced when the numbers added up!

I cut up half a pineapple to share at Colleagues' lunch. Every Wednesday, we invite other people who minister in the downtown eastside to come eat lunch with us. Usually we have between 5-10 guests. It's great - a lot of us bring food to share, and we share stories and prayer requests and pray together and drink tea.

I wrote a cheque to Telus. I wrote a cheque to the Receiver General.

Someone came in to use our bathroom. They asked if we were trying to fix doors. Berto explained that those are our tables. (Our tables are made of old doors.)

I headed out to the Farm. We have two community gardens in the downtown eastside, and we call them collectively "Red Clover Farm." Today, I got to plant onions, parsnips and lettuce. I also transplanted two trees with Berto. We have too many for the farm, so we put them outside the garden, near the street, on city property. An elderly Chinese lady came by and encouraged us, although she couldn't speak English. She used her fingers to show us that she is 78 years old. She laughed when I tried to repeat after her in Mandarin, and gave me a thumbs-up sign. Maybe I should try to learn Mandarin.

At 5:00, I walked to the bus stop with very dirty hands. On the way, a lady tried to sell me a flower. My heart sank. It was our friend J., the flower lady, for whom we had tried to find temporary housing in January. I had spent a whole afternoon with her that month - she had been off drugs for a while, and we tried to set up an interview for her at a drug-free housing unit, so that she could stay clean. She had been very kind and articulate that day. But today, I could hardly recognize her, and she definitely didn't recognize me either. It was like she was a different person, disheveled, bent over, scowling and shuffling along with her flowers, getting angry at me because I didn't want one, yelling and complaining to everyone who passed. Another attempt to stay clean, foiled. This was the first time I'd seen this kind of "before and after" change in a friend of ours... my co-workers, Joyce, Jane, Dawn, Berto, Tom and Dave, see this all the time. I'm starting to realize how discouraging ministry on the downtown eastside can be. Watching friends make good choices, and then turn around back down the same destructive path again.

I rode the bus home, another 40 minutes. Tried not to think about the flower lady. Tried to think about those seeds I planted... thinking how crazy it is to put something that tiny into the dead ground, and to expect life to burst from it.

Thank the Great Spiritual Beings!

My brother was asked to say a prayer at his high school grad banquet in Saskatoon, SK. He eagerly accepted.

Then they gave him the "school board approved" prayer... if it can even be called a prayer. Check this out:

"In the spirit of humility we give thanks for all that is.
We thank the great spiritual beings who have shared their wisdom.
We thank our ancestors who brought us to where we are now.
We are grateful for the opportunity to walk this planet,
to breathe the air,
to taste the food,
to experience sensations of a human body/mind,
to share in this wonder that is life.
We are grateful for the natural world that supports us,
for the community of humankind that enables us to do many wondrous things.
We are grateful that we are conscious,
that as intelligent beings we can reflect upon the many gifts we have been given."

Gag me. Danice says he should just hijack the whole thing and pray something of his own. It's grad, he's finished school ... what can they do to him?

What would you do?