posted on October 25, 2010 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

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We watch as shadowy figures cross the street while police lights alternate from red to green.

posted on October 25, 2010 in Columns, The Messy Table

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Beangirl was sick at home two days this week. Not much fun anytime, but it is really hard when you have just started at a new school. So we have been trying to keep fun on the agenda. In between long naps on the sofa and the general business of feeling dreadful.

posted on October 18, 2010 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

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One thing city dwellers take for granted is the availability of merchandise. In smaller communities you soon learn to “make do”.

posted on October 18, 2010 in Columns, The Messy Table

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Andrew Stephens-Rennie posted this brief but provocative thought on Empire Remixed this week, and I wanted to share the idea here. Is he onto something? Are we mainlining Presbys wishy-washy on resurrection?

posted on October 15, 2010 in In Song

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Today I suggest a few more psalm paraphrases that merit attention.

posted on October 15, 2010 in Columns, Wondering Wanderer

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This is the last chapter. I can’t promise a happy Hollywood ending but maybe there’s something better.

posted on October 11, 2010 in Columns, The Messy Table

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A couple of months ago, I went to the baptism of a little boy named Isaac. He is the son of good friends of mine and the happy first born in their family. The baptism wasn’t in a Presbyterian church, so some of the liturgical furniture was a little different. But that was all to the good.

posted on October 11, 2010 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

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Pauline Brown’s visit was to be very special. It was obvious from the first moment that we were going to get along famously.

posted on October 4, 2010 in Columns, Patricia Schneider

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He had already cautioned her “You’d better learn to say please and thank you if you are going to stay at Grandma’s house.”

posted on October 4, 2010 in Columns, The Messy Table

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Although we’re almost a month past the bonfire date, that issue is still in the air, primarily because it wasn’t a new issue in the first place. The Rev. Terry Jones merely announced an already awkward reality, loudly and dangerously.

posted on October 1, 2010 in In Song

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More how-to comments on some contemporary and global songs in the Presbyterian Book of Praise. Listening to songs and artists of the same genre is a key ingredient in presenting the music on its own terms.

posted on October 1, 2010 in Columns, Wondering Wanderer

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In the dozen years I have been a member of the Presbyterian Church in Canada my life has been touched and transformed by some remarkable people. Many of them have been other lay members whose friendship and inspiration have nursed life’s bruises and rekindled flagging spirits, but important in a different sense have been those called to the ministry of word and sacrament.

posted on October 1, 2010 in People & Places

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Sunday, July 25th was a special day at Emmanuel, Nottawa, Ont., as we recognized Rev. Dr. A.R. Neal Mathers for his 25 years of ministry with this congregation. Pastor Mathers was presented with a plaque in recognition of his years of service; his wife Debbie was presented with a bouquet of cut flowers. A luncheon followed the service.

posted on October 1, 2010 in People & Places

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One Sunday in August, the congregations of First, North Pelham, and Rockway, Ont., celebrated a service on the banks of Fifteen Mile Creek, the site of the old Presbyterian church in Rockway. One of the elders even wrote a poem about it, which you can read on our website.

posted on October 1, 2010 in Features

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Three events in the early 1990s precipitated a crisis of faith and a reconsideration of my relationship with aboriginal peoples — indeed, with all people.

The first event began when the mayor of Oka, Que., proposed the extension of a golf course onto land that Mohawks claimed as ancestral. The Mohawks responded with a barricade. The situation escalated when police attacked and an officer was killed. Only with the involvement of the Armed Forces did negotiations begin. Finally after almost six months, the stand-off ended.

The second event was the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops in Saskatchewan, held because of breaking awareness of abuses at residential schools run by Roman Catholic Church entities. Aboriginal people at that meeting were invited to tell their stories; I heard, firsthand and for the first time, stories of sexual and physical abuse.

Lastly, I visited two residential schools run by the Presbyterian Church: Birtle in Winnipeg, and Cecilia Jeffrey in northern Ontario. Having naïvely believed that abuses did not happen at Presbyterian schools, I listened to former students detail the abuses they had suffered.

All three experiences, particularly the last, were traumatic. In all my years of ministry, I had never realized how cultural dominance had been so devastating to aboriginal peoples. An education model sponsored by my church had led to one of the most horrendous events in Canadian history. This realization forever changed my life.

Born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland, I grew up with little exposure to aboriginal peoples (the term used was “Indian,” or “red Indian,” to avoid confusion with people from India). In cowboy movies, Indians were portrayed as bad guys, with white settlers being good guys to whom, by right of conquest, North America belonged. Any good Indians were supporting whites in their conquest. In history class, good Indians supported the British conquest of Canada. A major cultural image was the world map with the “pink bits” representing countries that were parts of the British Empire.

Shaken by the three events, suddenly I could not remember those pink bits on the world map without thinking how a European understanding of colonial conquest had been imposed on indigenous people on every continent. No longer did I believe that my way was the only way. Learning about the pain and struggle of the aboriginal peoples of Canada broadened my life and forever changed my worldview.

In 1992, the Presbyterian Church in Canada set up a review committee. It recommended how the church should work with aboriginal peoples, and that the church adopt a confession to God and aboriginal peoples, acknowledging the church’s complicity in an assimilation policy and recognizing that the residential school system was systemically flawed, allowing the possibility of abuse. While a confession needed further work, General Assembly agreed with recommendations, “That the church commit itself to listen to the issues as they are named and described by aboriginal peoples … support healing processes that arise from aboriginal peoples themselves … [and] commit itself to seeking ways to work with aboriginal peoples in calling the Government of Canada to acknowledge that its policies were harmful … ”

Two years later, the church adopted the Confession with moderator Rev. George Vais presenting it to Grand Chief Phil Fontaine of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs in the fall of 1994 in Winnipeg. Accepting the apology, the Grand Chief said he could not yet forgive the church. (He attended and was abused in a school run by an order in the Roman Catholic Church.)

By this time a growing number of claims made against the Government of Canada and the churches required resolution. Participating in the challenge of trying to resolve the impact of these claims included working with colleagues from the United Church, the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church, as well as government representatives and native peoples.

The many meetings with aboriginal people gave us opportunities to become acquainted and to know each other by name. While anger was often expressed, there was also forgiveness as the church recognized its complicity in the assimilation policy. From our aboriginal brothers and sisters, I have learned there is another way of thinking about life and its challenges. I am eternally grateful to them for teaching me.

My most difficult and rewarding responsibility has been as PCC representative at the individual assessment program hearings. After the claimant’s lawyer and the government representative speak, the church representative addresses the claimant. I speak of how I became involved with the PCC, how I learned only of the good things that happened at the schools, and how shocked I was to learn that my church was no different from the others. Then I speak of my healing journey and the church’s struggle to adopt a confession to God and aboriginal peoples. I usually read aloud portions of the confession, and say that the church asked me to share this confession, to apologize for any hurt that the claimant has experienced through the neglect of the Presbyterian Church, and to ask for the claimant’s forgiveness.

At one hearing after I spoke, the claimant stood up opposite me, walked around the table, passed his lawyer and the health worker until he reached me. He reached out and gave me a firm handshake and hug, saying that the church was forgiven. He returned to his seat and stated, with tears in his eyes, “This is the happiest day of my life,” because the church admitted what it did was wrong.

Where do we go from here? The church must be involved wherever and whenever it can in the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The church must continue to pressure the Canadian government to deal with outstanding issues about land and indigenous rights, and revive the recommendations in the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. The hardest job will be convincing the people of Canada to accept that the aboriginal peoples of Canada have a unique relationship with those of us who have come to these shores, regardless of how long ago or how recent.

posted on October 1, 2010 in News

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Melanie Ferrier began an eight-month internship at a Waterloo-based ecumenical peace centre Sept. 1, making her the third intern to be hired through a partnership with the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

“I enjoy communications and building relationships with donors,” said the political science graduate, who spent time working with the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee before her internship with Project Ploughshares.

Ferrier has set her sights on a career in journalism. She plans to begin courses next September in Carleton University’s master of journalism program. She attends Cheyne Presbyterian in Stoney Creek, Ont.

Ferrier will be the final intern employed through a three-year program sponsored by the Presbyterian Church.

Project Ploughshares, the ecumenical peace centre of the Canadian Council of Churches, is mandated to advance policies that prevent war and armed violence and build peace. Its work is supported by the PCC. — C.Purvis

posted on October 1, 2010 in Letters

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An Editorial Request, by Ron Nichol, Vernon, BC

Thoughtful response, by Diane Eaton

Oh Katie!, by

A Spiritual Struggle, by Gunar Kravalis, from online forum

Let Justice Flow, Not Noise, by Geoff Johnston

Live And Learn, by Frederic Forsyth, Barrie, Ont.

Otherwise thoughtful, by Charles Neill, Edmonton

Good Memories, by Janet Ophus, from online forum

A Matter of Perception, by Margaret Miller

Praying For Them, by Rev. John C. Carr, Ph.D., Edmonton

A Balanced Approach, by Gord McCrostie

A Change Is Gonna Come, by Jim Thomas, Stouffville, Ont.

GA Has Passion For The Cause, by Rev. Wendy Adams, Armstrong, BC

posted on October 1, 2010 in Outreach

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St. Paul’s, Prince Albert, Sask., could have died, but through valiant effort and a strong faith in God many people — men, women, and clergy — were able to persevere. Today at 143 years of age, we are still a viable community-based church.

St. Paul’s has been affected, just like others, by a general decline in attendance. The Sunday school and the church choir became inactive. Older church members who had been christened and married in St. Paul’s were overheard saying, “As long as the church is still here till they bury me, that’s all I ask.” Remarks like this triggered many session meetings that went on for hours discussing the future of the church.

Should we just close the church? Should we sell the church building and property and move to the suburbs? But where in the suburbs? Should we limp along until there is no more money and then close the church doors? Because St. Paul’s was the only Presbyterian church in Prince Albert where all Presbyterians could come, why not look upon the church as a “cathedral?” It certainly had many of the attributes of a cathedral — an elegant sanctuary, beautiful stained glass windows, massive organ pipes, crafted pulpit chairs and a classic architectural exterior. This concept seemed to be the spark that ignited new life into the church.

A session meeting was held using a think tank format. Everything was on the table for discussion. Participants were asked to prepare a list of all those activities that had occurred in the church. Yes, there was no Sunday school or choir; but once people got talking, a host of activities, both past and present were discussed. A decision was eventually made to reorganize the operating structure of the church, so four main committees were formed with session at the head: worship and nurture, mission and outreach, finance and maintenance, and policy and planning. Each committee had its own area of church life to organize and spearhead and each committee chair from time to time would take a few moments at the church service to explain their activities to the congregation.

It wasn’t long before the church family began to realize that maybe St. Paul’s wasn’t in as much trouble as was originally thought. We could become a mission church again and reach out to local aboriginal people and others. So the congregation began to grow again. A Sunday school began to emerge and a youth group is in the planning stages. The mission and outreach team swung into action and partnered with Riverside Community School to provide gallons of nutritious soup for hungry students at lunch, as well as cookies, milk and apples for breakfast. Many of the students are being raised by grandmothers, so they were invited to share in these two important meals of the day. Volunteers from St. Paul’s visit Riverside to read to the younger students.

These outreach activities encouraged more activity in the church. The Sunday school is growing and now has up to 12 attending, increasing to over 20 at special Christmas and Easter services. Approximately 50 Christmas hampers are prepared by the church for needy families. The support staff and inmates at the local provincial jail also raise money to help the church provide the Christmas hampers. Members of the congregation make layettes for single mothers who are involved in the Family Futures organization.

The Christopher Lake summer camp is strongly supported by St. Paul’s — our minister, Rev. Sandy Scott and his wife have participated in a marathon to raise funds for the camp. Coupled with funds raised within St. Paul’s congregation and money raised from downtown business donations, a sizable amount is gathered each year. Shoeboxes are filled by the church each year to send to needy children at Christmas.

Special services are held to mark occasions each year including a Christmas Eve candlelight service, an Easter service, a Robert Burns Sunday, and a Sunday to honour those who keep us safe — the police, ambulance personnel, firefighters and custodial workers. St. Paul’s has held a Building Bridges Sunday with our aboriginal people, an all day event at Riverside Community School with talks and demonstrations focused on mutual understanding. The Presbyterian Men’s Club of St. Paul’s has taken the lead and organized family social outings throughout the year, such as bowling, curling and picnics.

St. Paul’s, Prince Albert, did not die. With the help of the congregation and its leaders, the church has taken a close look at itself and found it has much to live for. That is good news, because there is continuing need for a Bible-centred, community-based church in Prince Albert, and it might as well be St. Paul’s, the mother church of Presbyterianism in Saskatchewan.

posted on October 1, 2010 in Theology 101

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photo by Aldo Murillo/istockphoto

In our particular life in the world — from the slow breakdown of a relationship, to years of physical abuse, from sudden accidents which devastate a family, to illness and death, to our common life in the world — from plagues to genocide and war, suffering due to sin and evil is our intense experience. In response, people of faith, as well as those who struggle with their faith, and even those without a working faith ask: “Where is God?” People asked it after 9/11, after the earthquake in Haiti, after a child is abused and murdered — where is God? How does faith in God make sense on a planet soaked in tears from crust to core? We hope this is a straightforward question which requires a straightforward answer. Yet great art, scholarship and of course sacred texts and world religions have grappled with this very issue from prehistory. All come to the conclusion that easy answers will not be forthcoming. Where does evil come from? Why do the cruel seem to prosper in God’s good creation? Where is God when we are hurting? In the space of this column, we may only take up the last of these questions.

There is us and there is our pain and there is God. The connection between the first two terms appears straightforward: we feel pain, indeed if it is deep enough it breaks the limits of our humanity, and some human beings are broken beyond any apparent wholeness. But where is God? God is not present as a deus ex machina, a being who appears on the stage in the climax of a tragic play to make all things well to the satisfaction of the audience. The book of Job makes clear that the god Job was worshipping, sacrificing to and trying to placate was a god made in Job’s image, or the image of the wisdom of the day. Indeed there is a God beyond what Job and his friends could conceive. When Job finally gets a glimpse not before but in the very midst of his terror, when the unnamable One is revealed within the whirlwind, Job, the man who knows human anguish from the inside, confesses that he does not know: “I have spoken of the unspeakable and tried to grasp the infinite.” (Job 42:3)

That being confessed, is that it? Is that where we are left in our own anguish?

The answer in our scriptures is No! A world deformed by suffering and broken by evil requires not only insight but redemption. And so God incarnates God’s self in the world as compassion. Jesus’ story of The Compassionate Father (better known as The Prodigal Son) is the manifestation of compassion as forgiveness. Here the guilt of the younger son manifest in his own degradation, as well as the devastation his actions cause to his family and village, is absorbed by the father in the costly forgiveness, welcome and restoration of his son. Jesus’ story of The Good Samaritan manifests compassion as care for a bleeding mass of flesh left for dead by the side of the road. Compassion is not only suffering with, compassion effects actual change, at great cost it restores what evil and suffering have devastated. This restoration happens not “in the sweet by and by” but in the here and now.

Ultimately for Christians, God assumes our suffering in the Christ. In history, in the midst of concrete suffering, demons are exorcised, the sick are healed, oppressors are confronted and sin is forgiven. God labours in the world to mediate the transformative power of compassion. On the cross, evil is transmuted into God’s own suffering. Evil is not perpetuated, it is absorbed. This is the divine response in the world in the face of radical evil. All the evil in the world cannot overwhelm the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. After listing the reality of suffering, from hardship to the sword, the Apostle Paul asks: can any and all of this together “separate us from the love of Christ?” Then he affirms what has been revealed to him in his own life and body: “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:37-39)

These are not easy words to express. We receive them as a word from the Lord to us, because we know human beings can be broken by suffering. There are front-line care-givers who work with victims of torture, those who work with traumatized soldiers, those who work in the rehabilitation of prisoners, who testify to the reality that some people will never be whole again. If we deny this reality, compassion can degenerate into sentimentality. Within the Christian tradition, such persons are at the foot of the cross, they are closest to Jesus who cried out: “Why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15.34) They may come to taste the divine love in the very centre of their soul, even when they have lost everything else, including their dignity. In such circumstances the exchange of compassion from one human being to another is nothing other than a dying to self. Simone Weil, the French activist and mystic, called this form of compassion “attention.” In touching the afflicted with their eyes or their hands, what those who practice attention are in fact doing is “very different from feeding, clothing, or taking care of them.” Through the practice of attention they enter those they help and “give them for a moment — what affliction has deprived them of — an existence of their own.”

God is not present as a benevolent deity manipulating history or nature to prevent the suffering of creatures who feel pain, nor a cosmic magician who makes our anguish disappear. God is present in the poor, the sick, the imprisoned and the hungry, but God is also present in the power of compassion extended to each of the least of these. (Matthew 25.40) God entered time and space in the Christ in whom evil was absorbed and death was defeated, and God continues to be present, even in a fragmentary way, in communities gathered by the power of the Spirit to bear the suffering of the world. Finally, the defeat of evil on the cross, and the defeat of death in the resurrection, is God’s promise to us that though we live in real time within a veil of tears, suffering does not have to define us nor does it have the final word on us. The final word belongs to the One who has created us and redeems us in costly love from which nothing can separate us.

Study Guide:

I offer three books for further reading and reflection:

Wendy Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990

Douglas John Hall, God and Human Suffering: An Exercise in the Theology of the Cross. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986.

Simone Weil, Waiting for God. Trans. Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

1. The book of Job indicates that the reality we call God is greater than the containers we have for this reality. Do you think it is important to acknowledge the mystery of God when considering the relationship between the Creator and creaturely suffering? Why? or why not?
2. Theologians have distinguished between the suffering due to sin (one’s own guilt), and innocent suffering (which is not a consequence of guilt). From the biblical tradition, how does God respond to our suffering in each of these circumstances?
3. How do you respond to the reality of radical suffering? This is the kind of suffering which is said to destroy a person from the inside. In other words one is not made better through this suffering — one is not brought to a greater maturity or understanding, rather the capacity of a person to know hope or to feel love is degraded. Consider the particular instance of child abuse or torture, or the political reality of genocide. How can faith in the God of the bible make sense here? What is available to us in the biblical tradition: within the wisdom literature, the psalms, the prophets, the gospels, the epistles? Can you think of art: music, painting, literature, which gives expression to radical suffering? Is there any particular artistic expression which you have found meaningful? In giving artistic expression to radical suffering, do you think anything is changed?
4. When people ask where is God in the midst of one’s own suffering or after mass devastation, what would be your response? How might God be felt to be absent in these situations? How might God’s presence be mediated in such situations?
5. More than the abstract question: “does God exist?” people ask the question: “if God exists why is there so much suffering in the world?” Is this a question that you ask? What are some responses from the bible? What are some responses outside the scriptures or the Christian tradition?

posted on October 1, 2010 in News

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Presbyterians have given thousands to help those left homeless after flooding in Pakistan. Photo courtesy of the Presbyterian Church of Canada.

When the Canadian government announced it would match individual donations for Pakistan in a Pakistan Floods Relief Fund from Aug. 2 to Oct. 3, Presbyterians responded. More than $147,000 had been donated to Presbyterian World Service and Development by the time the Record went to press in mid-September.

As of Aug. 30, the floods had destroyed an estimated 3.5 million houses, leaving approximately 4.6 million people homeless, according to the United Nations.

The rebuilding process is slow, even for skilled workers, as prices for housing materials more than doubled after the floods. Through the Canadian Foodgrains Bank and the ACT Alliance, PWS&D is supporting more than 150,000 people in Pakistan with food, shelter, emergency supplies, health care, and cash-for-work initiatives. — A.M. with files from PWS&D