The Da Vinci Code juggernaut continues unabated. It has been on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years, is about to be a movie and has spawned several new sub-genres in publishing. Where to begin talking about this phenomenon?
Well, I finally did it. After years of checking out prices, I finally talked myself into buying one. After years of admiring those tiny leaves and gnarled branches, I mustered up the courage to bring one home. It sits in my living room window now. Soaking up the sun's rays. Reaching out for moisture. And growing… ever so slowly.
Christian Peacemaker Teams operate around the world, showing solidarity with those in the midst of war and upheaval. They advocate for human rights, speak with extremist groups and preach peace amongst chaos. It was created in 1988. Since then, teams have worked in Iraq, Palestine, Mexico, Haiti, North America and Colombia. Their motto, Getting in the Way, has enabled them to do Christ's work in the world's most heated conflict zones.
"Daddy, Daddy, you will never guess what Mom and I saw." Chelsea was bouncing up and down on the dock as I was paddling in from fly-fishing. It looked like she was so excited that she was going to do a two-and-a-half gainer right into the drink. I thought to myself, "Great! Some stupid ole bear stumbled into camp while I was gone." This meant now I was going to have to convince Linda that we should stay at this camp and maybe even have to dispatch a problem bear. The truth is, I am lousy at convincing Linda of anything and I don't like shooting bears just because they begin to hang around camp.
Music makes the people come together
Comedy was not my first choice. I wanted to be strong and good-looking. I was neither. So my dad tried to console me, "Poverty is hereditary," he said, "you get it from your children."
"Boy did I ever get a surprise!" exclaimed Linda as she opened the door of our little travel trailer.
The hardest task in this book was picking my Bible. I saw this book sitting on my editor's bookshelf and immediately accepted the challenge. I thought this would be exactly the thing to introduce me to the Bible and help me gain a nice, rounded experience of the different texts.
I have probably witnessed in excess of 1,500 sermons over the past 35 years. Of those, I remember about a dozen vividly. There's another two dozen, maybe, of which I have some residual memory. The older I get, the more sermons I hear, the more I want to be challenged. I grow weary of safe, predictable interpretations; I am tired of brow-beating mean-spiritedness; bored with clichéd punch lines; I yawn at sickly sincere limousine lefties. Are we too polite as Christians, or specifically as Presbyterians, or perhaps as Canadians, to question the value of Sunday service? Perhaps we have a life long training in genuflecting to the clergy — regardless of what they say must be so?
It was Sunday morning, the setting a serious Church of Scotland Service in a formidable stone building several hundred years old. As the minister, I stood to read the announcement which the elder handed me. "Yesterday's kirk fayre was a huge success. Great crack was enjoyed around the tables." His face drained of all of its colour as he realized that my Canadian accent brought a somewhat North American interpretation to the Gaelic word craik. My Highland vocabulary was expanding, but not without a lot of concern on my part over what I had just read and gales of laughter from the congregation. Craik means a good chat, a conversation to catch up on all that has been happening.
I was a crazy kid. Teachers didn't appreciate me and my parents wondered if there was hope for me. The trouble with being a crazy kid is that God has a sense of humour and one day He may give you some children of your own. The other night after scolding my sons and sending them to bed snackless, I sat in the living room, wondering if there's any hope at all for my descendants. "Do you ever wonder," I asked my wife, "what will happen to a generation that doesn't even know which way to wear their hats? Or how high to pull their pants? A generation raised on Nintendo and Eminem?"
Chicken Soup for the Christian Woman’s Soul: Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Patty Aubery, Nancy Mitchell […]
It sure is awful darn cold!" exclaimed Linda as she opened the door of our little travel trailer.
My memories of Stanford Reid are not happy ones. As a young teenager at St. Paul's, Ottawa, I remember dismissing the anniversary speaker as tiresome and old. Ten years later, that impression was not remedied when I heard him holding forth at Knox College on the ordination of women, the WCC program to combat racism and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It is with some surprise, therefore, that I found Donald MacLeod's biography of the man to be a very good read (sic).
The Pagan Christ – Recovering the Lost Light Tom Harpur Thomas Allen Publishers There is, it seems, in popular culture a sense that when it […]
My father died horribly just before his 70th birthday. By then he had been ill with a form of Parkinson's disease for the better part of a decade. It's an insidious illness that slowly eats away the victim's motor ability. In the last year of his life, my dad was trapped in his own body. Everything that was him — his voice, his smile, his touch, his wit, his love, his knowledge —was locked in his flesh. It was his body, but it was not my father.
The unhealthiest individuals are those who think there is no sin in them. Coming a close second are those who fear or know something is terribly wrong and can't or won't deal with it. Pity both, and pity those around them. The garbage becomes more deeply entrenched, seeping out to poison all systems: the person's own body and spirit, marriage, family, congregation, church, from generation to generation.
Dear Son,
It seems like last Wednesday that you graduated from kindergarten with a Life Saver dangling from your cardboard hat. I congratulate you on waiting until the final prayer to crunch that candy. And I congratulate you today on an even greater achievement: graduation from high school.
I have recently read two great books: Nikos Kazantsakis' St. Francis, which offers us the heights of love with its costly demands upon life, and Peter Balakian's best selling, The Burning Tigris, which in focussing on the Armenian genocide at the beginning of the 20th century offers disturbing testimony of the intensity of human evil and affliction. Based on my experience of these books, I have derived four criteria for measuring the substance and authenticity of spiritual guidance:
In his classic A History of Christian Spirituality, Urban T. Holmes writes "to be spiritual means more than to be capable of receiving God into our lives. It means that we are called to know God… God communicates… and we can receive that communication. How we receive that communication is another question." In Christ Wisdom: Spiritual Practice in the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer, Christopher Page delves into those deep questions about how we know God, and how we are known by God and transformed.