Author Archives: Marc

Supernova

I have loads of reading to do with a theology class I’m taking (in San Diego!) at the beginning of February, which is precisely why I’ve started reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything again. Because that’s what I do when there are things to get done: distract myself with other things.

I came across this in a passage about supernovae and it ground my brain to a halt:

The question that naturally occurs is “What would it be like if a star exploded nearby?” Our nearest stellar neighbour…is Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years away. I had imagined that if there were an explosion there we would have 4.3 years to watch the light of this magnificent event spreading across the sky, as if tipped from a giant can. What would it be like if we had four years and four months to watch an inescapable doom advancing toward us, knowing that when it finally arrived it would blow the skin right off our bones? Would people still go to work? Would farmers still plant crops? Would anyone deliver them to the stores?

Weeks later, back in the town in New Hampshire where I live, I put these questions to John Thorstenson, an astronomer at Dartmouth College. “Oh no,” he said, laughing. “The news of such an event travels out at the speed of light, but so does the destructiveness, so you’d learn about it and die from it in the same instant” (36).

What?

So it takes 4.3 years to reach us, moving through 4.3 light years of space in that time–that is, moving from A to B and covering the distance between–but we would never see it approaching. I imagined it, much like Bryson, rather like watching a ball approach one’s face from a distance. Not so.

Instead, it would kind of be like the running scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except without the extended approach–Sir Lancelot would simply appear suddenly at the gate and kill the guards without warning.

I understand that (as far as we know) light is the fastest thing in the universe and we wouldn’t see the event until it reached us, meaning that as soon as we saw the event it would have arrived. Conceptually I get it. But it nevertheless boggles my mind–I can’t “see” it in my imagination.

Violence begets violence (and other thoughts)

I was sitting in my office early yesterday afternoon before a dress rehearsal for our church’s Christmas concert. While I waited for the call for our skit, I opened the Globe and Mail website. There were a couple of headlines about various aspects of the school shooting in Connecticut. Those headlines did not stand out out to me. What stood out was something seemingly unrelated: “Warplanes bomb Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus.”

On the face of it, they seem like unrelated stories, but in the broad scheme of things, I don’t think they are. They’re related because they reflect a persistent problem in our world: we solve our problems and disagreements with violence. I shouldn’t make blanket statements I suppose, but I’m reluctant to express a more focussed statement than that. We solve our problems with violence.

We do this over oil and other natural resources, over despots and tyrants. We do it over sports events. We do it over spilled milk, if we’re the angry sort. We do it in our movies, where the good guys defeat the bad guys using the bad guys’ weapons and methods. We solve our problems with violence, whether they’re problems of oil or plot.

I wonder if this is a learned approach? We see how it’s done by our governments, by our international neighbours, by our heroes, by our friends, by our parents. We learn violence as our means for solving our problems, for getting rid of our troubles, for protecting our rights and our property, for protecting us against…violence. And so the cycle goes on and violence begets violence. The ones that grow up to be the “good guys” and “bad guys” learn the same methods of problem solving; the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are distinguished by their cause, not their methods.

We talked a bit about the school shooting in Connecticut in Sunday school on Sunday morning. The issue of gun control came up–how it’s different in Canada. I made the comment that while gun control isn’t the total solution, I nevertheless see no reason for any private citizen owning an assault rifle or a handgun. One of my students replied confidently that there is a reason: “For self-defense.” But that’s precisely it: I need a handgun or assault rifle to defend myself against someone else with a handgun or assault rifle. Violence begets violence.

I want to be careful here that I don’t offer a simple explanation for such a tragic event as a school shooting. I’m not trying to explain the event, I’m just reflecting on an interesting and possibly overlooked relationship that popped out at me as I read yesterday’s headlines. Weak or lack of gun control may be a factor, mental illness may be a factor, the example of problem-solving through violence may be a factor, bullying may be a factor, the media may be a factor, our “good guy” heroes may be a factor, and so on. Any one of these things and a host of others may be part of the problem–singling out any one of them, as I read somewhere online today or yesterday, is little more than a coping method, a way for us to regain some control, some semblance of order, over a chaotic and inexplicable event. But the reality is much more complicated, much more difficult to unravel, because this event and others like it is really the culmination of millennia of human beings turning in on themselves, an infection that has worked its way into (or humans have worked into) every aspect of human culture. And how can we possibly unravel that? Certainly not with simplistic explanations.

It is complicated. So complicated, so overwhelming, in fact, that I feel nothing but helplessness and frustration, to the point of simply giving up. Giving up hope, maybe, or maybe just giving up paying attention to the world, retreating into my own little sphere, just doing what I do, but maybe without passion or care, with a dull look in my eye. Except I no longer have that luxury in my line of work. Thankfully, I tend to be an optimist. There’s always some hope and joy smoldering deep inside me somewhere. You might say that’s because I’m an optimist. Or you might say that I’m an optimist because I have that hope and joy smoldering within.

How can I be optimistic about a school shooting? Well, I can’t. I say I tend towards optimism, but there are some things that are simply dark and inexplicable.

And yet…

We’ve been working our way through I John in Sunday school. “Love” is one of the main themes of that letter, and yesterday I went back to something we had discussed earlier. In chapter 3, John says this, “For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another… This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.” We had covered this material already a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn’t help but think of the stories coming out of Connecticut of teachers protecting their students, giving up their own lives to save others. I don’t know whether these teachers were conscious Jesus-followers or not, but what they did was true love, what they did was walking in the way of Jesus.

What does this have to do with that dark, evil event? Only this: that even in the darkest circumstances, we can still find light, we can still find hope, we can still find goodness and love–they won’t be defeated.

At times like these, we rightly ask, “How can this be?” The problem of evil is highlighted in weeks like these, and rightly so. But this same question is rarely, if ever, asked about goodness and light in the world–we never ask, when we hear stories of self-sacrifice, of the giving up of one’s own life for the sake of another, “How can this be?”. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome or understood it.

This in no way is meant to dampen the horror and pain of events such as this school shooting. It is only an observation that light continues to shine in our often dark world, and it will continue to shine. And the darkness will not overcome it.

I Love You The Brownest

Madeline, my (nearly) 10-year-old daughter, had to write a poem for a school assignment last week. She has kindly given permission to me to post it here.

I Love You The Brownest

I love you, Dad, the brownest.

Your beard is like a soft bear’s fur.
I love you like creamy chocolate.

I love you like a sweet gingerbread
cookie, like the chewy taste of caramel.

I love you like the smell of warm,
fresh baked chocolate cake. I love you like
the fuzziness of the cat-tail plant, like the
wheat field swaying in the breeze.

I love you like the oak tree’s rough
bark and I love you like a monkey’s fur
as it swings madly through the trees.

I love you like the rolling hiss and warm,
creamy hot cocoa after being out in the
cold winter.

I love you, Dad, the brownest.

~ Madeline Vandersluys (December 2012)

Keeping the ‘X’ in ‘Christmas’.

It’s that time of year again, folks, where Christ begins to disappear from Christmas…

These days we are likely to see “Xmas” written as often as “Christmas,” and this is of major concern for many Christians. Christ disappearing from Christmas is certainly something to give us pause, but this has been going on for a long time, and the way “Christmas” is written is not, ultimately, the problem.

In Koine Greek (the common language of the early church and the original language of the New Testament), “Christ” is written (here in equivalent English letters) “Xristos”(pronounced “Kris-toss”). The early church would use “X” as shorthand for “Christ”. Look at one of those Jesus fish sometime. Inside some of these fish are these Greek letters: IX[TH]YS.* These signs have been found at ancient Christian sites. Each of these Greek letters is the first letter in the words that say: “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour”. You see the “X” there is short for “Christ”.

In English, there is no natural correlation between “X” and “Christ”. It is such an unlikely connection, in fact, that I’m inclined to think that it’s origin in English is most likely Christian as well, from someone or a group familiar with Koine Greek. So there’s nothing for Christians fear there–the loss is not in the name but (potentially) in the way the occasion is celebrated.

What we call Christmas is ultimately irrelevant. It is now for most people a cultural, consumption-based holiday event, including for most Christians. Whether or not the the word “Christ” is in the name is not going to change that fact. The name “Easter” has nothing whatsoever to do with Christ or the Resurrection event, so far as I can tell (wheras “Paschal” does), and it takes nothing away from the religious end of that season for those who choose to focus on it that way.

So keep the ‘X’ in Christmas and keep the ‘Christ’, too, for that matter. Keep Christ in there not by means of spelling the word a certain way, but by entering into the season reflectively and with open hearts, preparing for his arrival, remembering his birth and anticipating his second advent. That’s a choice we all have to make, regardless of how we spell “Christmas”.

______________________
*in Greek there is one letter that represents the English “th” sound.

“That’ll do”: God’s Grace in the Old Testament

“I have no charges against you concerning your sacrifices
or concerning your burnt offerings, which are ever before me.

I have no need of a bull from your stall
or of goats from your pens,

for every animal in the forest is mine,
and the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know every bird in the mountains,
and the insects in the fields are mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you,
for the world is mine, and all that is in it.

Do I eat the flesh of bulls
or drink the blood of goats?”

- Psalm 50:8-13 (NIV)

I read the above Psalm this morning and it got me thinking again about animal sacrifice in the Old Testament. I have never understood what it was about the blood sacrifice that could possibly atone for individual or corporate human sin. What strange ancient magic in the universe could this be? From my 20th/21st century vantage point, that sort of thing has always seemed archaic, a relic from the ancient world that made sense in a particular context but not a whole lot in our own. And yet there it is: sacrifice, the shedding of blood in atonement for sin, is embedded the Christian meta-narrative. An essential aspect of Christian theology and doctrine that I don’t fully understand. I’m okay with that, actually. I don’t need an answer to all my questions to be compelled by the birth, life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

And yet the mystery remains. Atoning sacrifice still doesn’t make complete sense to me. And to complicate matters, there are plenty of scriptures like the above Psalm which indicate that sacrifices are not needed by God or, in some cases, wanted by him. There are a couple of instances in the Psalms and perhaps most famously, Hosea 6:6: “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, / and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.” So we have a situation where sacrifice is necessary for atonement, but a God who does not desire those sacrifice.*

BUT… I’ve been reading John Stackhouse’s book Can God be Trusted?: Faith and the Challenge of Evil. Later in the book he gives an overview of the Christian story of creation, fall, and redemption. He briefly covers the topic of sacrifice and I was struck by this passage:

Two principal images have been used by Christians to explain what Jesus accomplished on the cross: Christ as Sacrifice, and Christ as Victor. The former harks back to the extensive symbolism of Israelite temple worship, in which animals were killed and offered to God as substitutes for the human sinners who gave them up. “Life for life” was the basic principle, because sin at its root is the enemy of life. The Hebrew prophets themselves made clear that these rituals together formed an elaborate picture of God’s holiness (God views sin as mortally serious, and therefore the most graphic symbolism of life and death was necessary to portray its cost and its redemption) and God’s mercy (God was willing to accept animal substitutes, although it makes no logical or moral sense to do so: how can the blood of bulls and goats possibly make up for human sin?). The ultimate payment for, the ultimate cost of human sin, had to be borne by human beings. (133-4 in the 2nd edition)

What particularly struck me about this paragraph was animal sacrifice as a picture of God’s mercy. I have often been reminded that grace is not a concept limited to the New Testament and the coming of Jesus. The Old Testament is also filled with God’s grace to humankind. Looking at the story of Israel in particular, we see God repeatedly calling the wayward Israelites back. The Israelites were constantly breaking their covenant with God and therefore constantly placing themselves under God’s judgment. God is the giver and sustainer of all life and to sever our relationship with the Life-Giver means the end of life. God was perfectly within his rights to let Israel perish on any number of occasions. But God is slow to anger and rich in love, mercy, and forgiveness, and each time Israel severed their ties with him and walked away from the Life-Giver, God pursued and called them back to life and wholeness.

So grace and mercy are there in the Old Testament; Jesus didn’t bring in anything new in that regard. But I had never thought of the sacrificial system as a grace-filled thing. It was about restitution, atonement, making things right, and even (in my tradition) salvation by works. But the reality is that animal sacrifice itself does not forgive sin–only God forgives sin. And in his grace and mercy he provided Israel with a way to enact their repentance–to show that they acknowledged God–which, though not in itself sufficient to forgive sin, moved him to forgive.

Perhaps I’m taking Stackhouse’s words farther than they should be taken. Fair enough; what he said simply set my mind to thinking about grace. It makes a great deal of sense to me that, even though human sin is serious enough that death is a legitimate result, God, because he loves humankind so much and wanted things to be right between himself and Israel and the world, set up what was in fact a sub-par arrangement to atone for sin and said, “That’ll do,” and restored his wayward people.

Yes, things did change significantly with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We no longer need to offer blood sacrifices because the Final Sacrifice has been made. But God has always been full of grace and mercy, even in the Old Testament.

________

* This leads to a tangent issue, of course: if we were merciful and truly acknowledged God, sacrifice for sin probably wouldn’t be needed.

Sunday thoughts on a Monday morning

Sometimes during a church service I become aware of what we are doing–the raw details of it, I mean. Usually this is during the singing time, when, depending on where I am, 50 or 100 or 120 men, women, and children stand and sing songs together, we stand reading words from a screen or from a book and sing. What a strange thing! What are we doing? Sometimes the songs are beautiful, sometimes the words seem meaningless, but always we sing. How strange!

This thought and feeling came over me again yesterday morning. I again became aware of how odd and unprecedented it and even not normal it seemed. People from 5 to 90 facing forward, singing songs.

And then it dawned on me. It’s not just the standing reading theological and worshipful words on a screen, it’s the whole package. We are singing together: people of all ages, genders, and races, singing together about and to a God they have gathered together to worship. People of different incomes, walks of life, opinions, histories, all gathered together to sing, to listen, to learn, to worship, to pray. This is remarkable, when you stop to think about it.

I realized that it’s not just the words we sing, but the act of singing together itself that is powerful and symbolic–no, even an enacting of the Kingdom of God.

Concert review: Dylan with Knopfler.

So I went to a Bob Dylan concert and I could barely understand a word he said.

No surprises there, of course. Dylan came through Edmonton with his band and Mark Knopfler last Tuesday, and I went with a friend. Dylan played an outdoor show in Lloydminster in August which I had wanted to attend, but that didn’t work out. I think an outdoor show would have been better, but I wouldn’t have seen Knopfler.

It wasn’t clear to me whether Knopfler was opening for Dylan or playing with Dylan and his band. As it turned out, it was more of a double-billing. Knopfler essentially played his own full-length concert before Dylan. And that’s perhaps how it should be. Dylan may be a legend, but Knopfler’s no slouch either.

The Knopfler set was excellent. I didn’t come to see Knopfler; he was a bonus and I had no idea what to expect. He played what was as far as I could tell mostly new material. Only his encore went back to his Dire Straits days. That song (“So Far Away”) sounded vaguely familiar, but it was the cheering from the audience that clued me in. Knopfler’s sound (new album released just a couple of weeks ago, I think) these days hovers around the Celtic–mandolins, flutes, fiddles, etc–with a touch of country blues, but always with his signature finger-picking stratocaster sound. The Edmonton Journal Review said that “Their flute and fiddle tunes sometimes bordered on Zamfir and Titanic cheese.” False. This is only cheese if you have something against the flute and fiddle in the first place. Don’t bring Zamfir or Titanic (i.e. the James Cameron film) into this. There was no cheese in Knopflers music. But there was bittersweetness, melancholy, and much beauty, and at times it bordered on the spiritually moving (I may or may not have closed my eyes prayerfully at one point).

Knopfler was appreciative of and engaging with the audience–thanking us, telling us he was having a great time. Whether he was or not doesn’t matter. He engaged us (you can probably anticipate where this is going). His sound was tight, crisp, and well-mixed, and their technicians made good, mood-appropriate use of the stage lights. After Knopfler’s show I was that much more of a Knopfler fan.

Dylan… I went in with high expectations, low expectations, and not knowing what to expect. I had various stories about how Dylan does not interact with the audience at all, that I wouldn’t recognize any of the songs, that he is either on or off and if he’s off he’s really off. So here’s the lowdown: it was underneath a number of issues, a great concert. Actually, it was really only one issue: sound. It was way too loud. This is a common problem at concerts, but Knopfler managed to be loud without having all his music become a wash of lows. I wish I had remembered to bring earplugs–I don’t know how many concerts I’ve been too where it was clear that plugging my ears provided the perfect filter, presenting me with crisp, balanced sound and distinct instruments. But I didn’t want to sit with my fingers in my ears all night. Well there was also the lighting–which mostly had kind of a streetlights-in-Paris kind of feel, which is nice, but does not work well in such a large setting–and the fact that when Dylan was sitting at the keyboard he was nearly indistinguishable from the stage set.

He didn’t really interact with the audience. I was suprised to see him get up from his keyboard and walk around stage singing. He may have even gestured at the audience, though with my eyesight at my seats I couldn’t really tell. He even spoke outside of introducing the band: he bleated something about not playing his best or something (which I later learned was an apology for a poor cover of a Gordon Lightfoot song).

It was true what they said about not recognizing the songs: pretty much every song had a new arrangements. The only songs remotely close to the original were “Watching the River Flow” (the opening number) and “Summer Days” (from Love and Theft). With the rest of the songs it took some careful listening to Dylan’s semi-intelligible, and in the words of the Edmonton Journal writer, “raspy, cram-all-his-lyrics-into-one-sentence delivery” to discover what song he was doing. The set included “Things Have Changed,” his Oscar-winning 2000 song, but with a polka beat; “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”; “Tangled Up in Blue”; “Thunder on the Mountain.” The set included 15 songs total. I recognized most of them, but here’s perhaps the biggest oddity of the evening: he did not play a single song from his recently released album Tempest. Sort of bizarre, but then maybe by the time an album is recorded an artist is sick of those songs. Only slightly less disappointing than the mix was his one-song encore. It was “Blowing in the Wind,” mind you, but one song? Not a good encore.

I think the Edmonton Journal headline was right–”Knopfler outshines Dylan at Rexall Place concert”–but not because Dylan and his band played a poor set. Underneath the poor mix was a great band playing some excellent arrangement of classic Dylan songs. I’m glad I got to see Dylan. I even bought a t-shirt. And you know what? I’d go to another one of his concerts in a heartbeat (but maybe I’d opt for an outdoor show), though I have the feeling there won’t be many more of those.

But Knopfler earned an album sale or two from me.

What happened to Judas?

I’m not sure where her question originated (since it wasn’t discussed in class), but after Sunday school on Sunday one of my jr. highers asked me how Judas actually died. The question is arises out of the apparently inconsistent scriptural details surrounding Judas’ demise. Matthew 27:3-8 says this:

When Judas, his betrayer, saw that Jesus was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. He said, ‘I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.’ But they said, ‘What is that to us? See to it yourself.’ Throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself. But the chief priests, taking the pieces of silver, said, ‘It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, since they are blood money.’ After conferring together, they used them to buy the potter’s field as a place to bury foreigners. For this reason that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day.

Acts 1:18 says,

Now this man acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness; and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out.

So did Judas hang himself or fall to his death? And who bought the field–Judas or the priests?

Let’s break this down. The details on which both passages agree:

The field was bought with blood money.
Judas died (suicide is suggested by both passages, but that might be Matthew influencing our reading of Acts).
The field was known as The Field of Blood.

Details on which both passages may or may not agree:

How Judas died–did he hang himself? or did he fall to his death? Or was it both? This, I think, is only an apparent contradiction, not a real one, because Acts doesn’t necessarily contradict Matthew on Judas’ death.

Details on which the passages disagree:

Who bought the field.
The reason for the field’s naming.

There are a number of ways we could deal with these discrepancies. With a little help from the ol’ noodle as well as commentaries on Acts by F.F. Bruce and I. Howard Marshall, here are three possibilities:

1. Who bought the field? Perhaps the priests, wanting to distance themselves from Judas’ blood money, purchased the field in Judas’ name. In this way, the story Luke (or Peter) had heard around Jerusalem had Judas’ name associated with the purchase. Matthew’s source perhaps knew who was actually behind the purchase. (As an interesting aside, the Greek does not specifically name Judas as the purchaser, but context makes it pretty clear that the writer had Judas in mind.)

2. Did he hang himself or fall to his death? It could be both. It does not say in Acts that he threw himself down, but simply that he fell. Actually, it’s not even clear that it says that. The word that is usually translated “head first” or “headlong” could also mean “swelled up”, as a footnote in most modern Bibles indicates (though, to be fair, “headlong” is the more likely meaning, at least as a standalone word). Additionally, the verb “falling” does not appear, but is an interpretive addition by the translators, presumably to makes sense of the noun “headlong.”

So here’s a proposal: Judas hanged himself, his body bloated in decomposition, and then the rope broke or his decomposing body broke apart and it fell to the ground, splitting open his stomach and spilling his guts. Gruesome!

It’s difficult to decipher much from the context. The passage in Acts is only one sentence and really seems to be glossing over the details anyway. I’m no expert, but it seems to me that falling in a field doesn’t generally cause one’s stomach to split open. Pertinent details are clearly missing from both accounts, and the writer of Acts doesn’t seem all that concerned about it–he really tells us very little. He’s just interested in telling us that Judas is dead and needs to be replaced in the Twelve.

Which leads me to the third and probably best approach:

3. Don’t reconcile the two accounts at all. It’s certainly fun to surmise, but it’s not an exercise necessary to understanding these passages or trusting scripture in general. The writers of Matthew and Acts don’t seem too worried about those particular details, so why should we be? Scripture is a divinely inspired text, but it was nevertheless written by humans with all their limitations in perspective and knowledge. And it was written in a time when the kind of detail modern, “enlightened” westerners expect was not necessary. And this: even a divinely inspired text need not have every detail spelled out to their minutea.

So, there are theoretical ways to deal with discrepancies between the two accounts of Judas’ death, but they remain theoretical. And they are in the end unnecessary, particularly for a minor point of history like this one. So, in the end I have no firm resolution to the problem presented!

The warmth of memory

Last year at this time Dixie and I would have been in the middle of our dinner at the St. Paul Hotel (?). We would have already seen Wallace Shawn walk in and out of the restaurant and I would have already spilled most of my glass of wine into the purse belonging to the lady at the table next to ours. We would have been in St. Paul for 24 hours or so already, having had breakfast at Mickey’s Diner and done some shopping at the Mall of America, and been in the audience for this episode of A Prairie Home Companion.

That weekend has quickly become one of my favourite memories–one of those special moments that will forever have a warmth to it as it comes to mind. I have a number of these moments, all of them occurring during my married years, so they are all Dixie and me and sometimes the kids.

There was the Thanksgiving weekend with Dixie’s family, including Granny and Grandpa, at the cabin on Christopher Lake. It was a beautiful cool-but-not-cold autumn, the aspens still holding on to most of their bright yellow leaves, but the musty smell of drying and decomposing leaves nevertheless filling the air. We’d go for sauntering walks on the ski trails nearby, grandpa too. We’d snooze on the deck overlooking the lake. We’d play games.

There was the weekend Dixie and I spent at the mineral spa in Manitou Beach. The mineral spa wasn’t all that impressive (floating around in extra buoyant water is only interesting for so long). However, the Saturday night of that weekend we went to Danceland, famous for one of the last original hardwood-on-horsehair dance floors.

We spent the evening dancing polkas and the charleston and a number of other styles. The lighting, the general atmosphere, the dancing in the crowd of mostly seniors and retirees. Something about that evening was magical and it remains with me as one of those moments.

There were particular locations in our 10th anniversary trip to England–our London hotel, early morning market in Oxford, cream tea in Lyme Regis.

There are others I’m sure that aren’t coming to mind at the moment. Memories that stick with me in a way that other memories do not. And as much as I may want to recreate that experience, as much as I wish I could do that again, these moment can never be truly recreated. Having been done before, they will already have lost that edge of newness, and expectation–something that wasn’t there before these moments were experienced the first time–tends to undermine the effort of recreation. That’s what makes these moments special I think–because we don’t see them coming. They just happen and until you’ve experienced it you won’t know that it’ll be one of those moments.

I’ve marked this date in Google calendar for every year in perpetuity. It’ll send me an email reminder every year at this time. And every year around September 24, I’ll listen to a recording of that show and I’ll think of our time together in St. Paul, Minnesota. The show, the diner, the Italian bistro around the corner from our hotel, Garrison Keillor’s bookstore in the basement of a building up the hill and beyond the Anglican cathedral. The memory will stir feelings deep inside me, and I will think of that time with joy and fondness and also a bit of sadness, because as beautiful as that memory is, that moment can never be relived outside of my memory.

But that’s probably a good thing, I guess. That moment is probably best as a memory. Memory has probably shaped in a way that may not even reflect the reality of the moment–or perhaps it’s not that it has been reshaped, but that memory has teased out the things that one doesn’t catch in the moment.

Quiet now… Garrison is singing.

I’m not dead!

“Yes he is,” you might be saying.

To which I reply, “I’m not.”

“Well, he will be soon, he’s very ill.”

“I’m getting better.”

And so on.

I see I haven’t posted in nearly two months, which is longest hiatus The Eagle & Child has ever seen. August has a big, fat “0″ post count. A first for me. A lot has been going on, as you might be aware. We moved a thousand miles to Alberta, for one. I started working at Malmo Mission Covenant Church out in The Field somewhere in the middle of the triangle formed by three large towns. The kids have started school here.

My blog also disappeared for a while. Perhaps you noticed. Seems some domain renewal notifications were being sent to an old email address and vandersluys.ca expired and was turned into an advertisement for something else. For a short time I wondered if that was it for vandersluys.ca. And the funny thing is, part of me was okay with that. I got that all sorted out, but wasn’t much inclined to write. Maybe this is the beginning of the end. Or maybe that began a long time ago. I hope not. As I keep saying, I just need to reimagine this place.

So we’re settling into our new home. We’re about a quarter mile or half mile down the road from the church on a farmyard house we’re renting from someone in the church.

What you don’t see behind the house is a lot of the stuff that hasn’t been removed from the yard by the previous owner.

Our yard is surrounded by this:

The house came with a cat, which we gladly adopted. Nobody knew what the cat’s name was, so we just started calling it “Kitty.” You know, “Heeeeere, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.” Seemed to make sense. It took a while for us to determine Kitty’s gender. Apparently you can’t just check the way you do with a dog. I checked and I got it wrong. Kitty is a boy. We found out later that Kitty’s previous owner called him “Black Guy,” for obvious reasons which you’ll see below, but somehow I found that name to be within in the realm of Potentially Really Offensive and Possibly Even Racist. But maybe I’m too sensitive.

Anyway, this is a poorly shot but still kind of cute picture of Kitty:

Aside from working at the church, we’ve spent the last couple of weeks unpacking, buying furniture–IKEA!–and waiting for furniture and picking up furniture and assembling furniture. I’ve developed some serious Allen wrench skillz (yes–with a Z!).

We are enjoying life out here, but it’s taking some time to get adjusted to living 20 minutes from town. At the moment we have only one car, so that means some careful coordinating of what needs to be done and where. Grocery lists need to be up-to-date and whatnot.

Things are more complicated in Alberta. It seems like everything is privatized and compartmentalized. Car insurance and registration, for example. In Manitoba and Saskatchewan it’s all government run, so you go to one place for your registration, insurance, and plates. 20 minutes and you’re done. In Manitoba we had to do an out-of-province inspection, so there was one extra step, but it wasn’t a big deal. Here we had to do the following:

Go to the registration company for a little piece of paper that asks for the out of province inspection. The mechanic won’t do the inspection without that little piece of paper.
Go to the mechanic for the out of province inspection. In our case, I drove to town for our appointment at the shop, only to be told they had overbooked and could I come back next week? Okay.
Fix what needs to be fixed. I think we did well, considering our van has 240,000kms on it. We needed to replace the passenger-side wiper blade, polish the headlights, and replace one of the rear light assemblies (the light was working, but Luke had knocked a hole in it with a baseball bat a couple of years ago). Replaced the wiper blade and polished the headlights myself. Back to town to replace the light assembly.
Take signed inspection to insurance company. Sign many papers. Pay some money.
Take insurance back to registration people. Pay some more money. Receive plates.

The truth is that it was all relatively painless, but it was a bit of a nuisance compared to the Saskatchewan way.

Anyway…more could be said, but the morning wears on and the kids are looking for a snack and someone just opened the door and the fresh, cool autumn air blowing in beckons me on to other things.