Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Spectacle or Spectacles?

Twenty some years ago, i got home from leading two worship services and sprawled on the couch to watch (or doze through) PBS’s Great Performances, but on this particular Sunday, i discovered a dream not for the drowsy – the Earth Mass at New York City’s Cathedral of St John the Divine. A few weeks ago, i experienced the Earth Mass (now named The Feast of St Francis) at that great gothic pile in Gotham City.


The music (much of it by Paul Winter) was stunning, incorporating the howl of wolves and the sonic soundings of the humpback whale, creature cantors. As well as the Paul Winter Consort, worship was deepened by two dance companies, a puppet artist, 8 guest choirs joining the Cathedral choir, and the presence of animals throughout the sanctuary (mostly dogs, who sometimes added their thoughts to the proceedings). The Cathedral was packed – i imagine it is not this full on Christmas Eve – and the high holy event was not the sacrament of communion, but another sacrament, the procession of animals.

An air of reverence and awe enveloped the requested silence as, lead by a service dog, the procession of creatures to the altar went by: camel, yak, tortoise, llama, gibbon, macaque, swans, sheep, snake, pig, bunnies. i experienced a deep sense of thankfulness for Creation, for the amazing diversity of life on this planet. Each creature reminded me of my own creaturlyness, the marvel of DNA and adaptation. i will have some further reflections on this part of the worship in a subsequent blog, but for now, i am pondering the role of spectacle in Protestant worship.

The Cathedral of St John the Divine is Episcopalian (that’s American for “Anglican”), and there was certainly a high church tone to the proceedings, including incense, several processionals, chanting, and the recessional. But there was also dance – exquisitely beautiful dance – filling the aisles, fabric ribbons on what appeared to be fly-fishing rods expertly floating overhead, an amazing fish puppet that swam through the air above us, and, of course, the spectacle of the animals.

In mainline Protestantism, there is nothing like it. Crazy Appalachian Bible churches have a frenzy culminating in handling poisonous snakes (no thanks),

and evangelical churches are not adverse to people clapping, dancing, ecstatically harmonizing. But we mainline Protestants have let our deep love of education erect a wall of suspicion about any emotion-provoking form of worship. Yes, we are permitted to shed a tear or two at a funeral or baptism or wedding...less so if something else in worship moves us deeply. We place our emphasis on the arts of music, preaching, liturgy, and are suspicious, if not snooty, about ritual, drama, spectacle.

Of course, few of our churches have the budget of a St John the Divine (see below for their current list of artists and ensembles in residence (thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s budget!). And if we Protestants believe that liturgy truly is the work of the people, is our reluctance about spectacle in worship that we are afraid it won’t be “good enough”? Would we be willing to risk liturgical dance that had some fumbles and flaws if it was honestly offered by a local dancer? Can we receive the gifts of the people, not just in money, music, baking, pastoral care and the church’s assorted administrative tasks, but also in drama, dance, clowning, acrobatics, visual arts – stuff that moves us to a place of ecstasy?

There is a legend about Amish quilts and Islamic carpets – that a mistake is built into the art, because only God/Allah is perfect. Might we mainline Protestants, while seeking to offer our best, also make room for what is not perfect in our worship. It doesn’t need to be Broadway quality. It just needs to move us, to open our hearts as well as our minds.


Artists and Ensembles In Residence at St John the Divine:

Mary Buckley, Painter

Jason Robert Brown, Composer

Judy Collins, Musician

Glen Cortese, Conductor

Early Music New York

The Forces of Nature Dance Company

i Giullari di Piazza

Jean Claude Marchionni, Sculptor

The Mettawee River Theatre Company

The Omega Dance Company

Christopher Pellettieri, Stonecarver

Philippe Petit, High Wire Artist

Simon Verity, Sculptor

The Paul Winter Consort

Greg Wyatt, Sculptor

Cynthia Zarin, Poet

Monday, August 23, 2010

Saint Sullivan

News flash: Local church says “Everybody welcome”!

Compare and contrast with Martin Luther King, Jr’s observation that eleven o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated time in America.

Is it just me, or is western culture becoming more and more segregated? As well as the usual suspects of race and class, we are increasingly fragmented in the 1,000 channel universe, able to avoid any music, TV show, dance, theatre, etc. that we think we don’t care for in favour of stuff that confirms our own prejudices.

When i was a youngster, one of the most unifying hours in North America was the Sunday evening at eight o’clock TV show, The Ed Sullivan Show. With a host who could only be described as unbelievably uncharismatic, the show offered a true variety of entertainment. It was on The Ed Sullivan Show that i first saw and heard the Kirov Ballet, the Moscow circus, the great African American singer/actress Ethel Waters breaking my heart with her song, “Suppertime” about the mysterious disappearance of her partner, old burlesque comedians like Henny Youngman and Milton Berle, puppetry (anybody remember Topo Gigio?), Broadway musical show-stoppers with the original cast in costume (Carol Channing singing “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”; Julie Andrews and Richard Burton singing the title song from Camelot and even the hirsute kids from Hair). Sullivan was famous for the Beatles’ appearance and Elvis before them, but he also made sure that African American performers – Harry Belafonte, Eartha Kitt, Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino, the Supremes – got airtime. To a kid growing up in the WASP enclave of suburban Toronto, this was heady stuff. Is there an equivalent of Ed Sullivan on air today – a show that eschews niche marketing and seeks to expose us to a broad palette?

Last spring, i had a great rambling conversation with Cynthia Dyck, the administrator of the Refinery (the arts centre affiliated with St. James Anglican in Saskatoon, SK). Although hired by the church, Cynthia is an arts administrator. She maintains that not being a church person makes it easier to do her job at the Refinery. As someone well-known in the arts community, Cynthia had the credibility to bring in the artists/renters. Any defences the artists might have felt about coming into a church space was dissipated when they asked Cynthia, “Do you go to the church?” and she answered, “No, I don’t, but this building is for everyone.” That leant credibility to the Refinery, as potential renters thought to themselves, “Huh! It really is for everybody, or you wouldn’t be working here.” For Cynthia, the joy of her job is that people can’t silo – they have to deal with each other. She says: “The yoga students have to deal with the theatre people upstairs. The theatre people have to deal with the tai chi class. The 12 Step Program has to get directions from the weird gay guy up there. So they’re always forced to deal – they can’t silo. If they want to work here, they can’t silo. Even if it’s just sharing the same doorway, it’s amazing how we are changed by sharing space. We’re going, Hey! This is important! Look at these two people having to work things out, and they normally wouldn’t run into each other. Relationships are the most important. If you get those relationships right, then everything else falls into place.”

At the church i live and work at, our congregational demographic doesn’t match the demographic of the neighbourhood. Nor the city. While i would like to think that Martin Luther King’s statement about churches and segregation is no longer true, i am not convinced that churches, rather than being meeting places, are silos. Perhaps these silos are reflective of our wider culture, the iPod age when we download what we already like and ignore the rest. Congregations tend to have their own “playlists” – musically, theologically, socially. How do we Ed Sullivan our churches so that we can expose ourselves to rhythms not our own, to arts that challenge our spirits, to the music of Saturday night (as opposed to the four-square hymns of Sunday morning)? When i consider a new pantheon of saints, Ed Sullivan now comes to mind.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Money Talks

Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts? -Gabrielle Roy


Suggesting the church could function as a Third Place (the place of community that is neither home nor work), the workshop leader asked us to take out a five dollar bill and look at the fine print on the side of the bill showing Canadians at winter play – hockey on the pond, learning to skate, tobogganing. My middle-aged eyes had a hard time with the tiny text, but when i got focussed, i was delighted to read this:

The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We had three places – the school, the church and the skating rink – but our real life was on the skating rink.

This sent me on a quest to see what other quotes are on Canadian money. i discovered that we put out a Canadian Heritage banknote series between 2001-2004. Check out the Bank of Canada web page (you’ll have to poke around a bit to find the series, but once you do, scroll over the bills, and all kinds of elaborations pop up – www.bankofcanada.ca).

i am not a student of money (seems i can’t hang on to it long enough to be collector), but i wonder if Canada is the only nation to have quotes and images from our artists on our money? For the record:

$5 – the above quote from Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater and the image of children at play;

$10 – “In Flanders Fields the poppies blow/between the crosses, row and row,/that mark our place, and in thy sky/the larks, still bravely singing, fly/scarce heard amid the guns below” from John McCrae’s poem, In Flanders Fields. The image is a Peacekeeping scene.

$20 – “Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?” Gabrielle Roy, and images are by Haida artist, Bill Reid – Raven and the First Men, and Spirit of Haida Gwaii

$50 – from the UN Declaration on Human Rights, this quote: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and the image is Barbara Paterson’s statue of the Famous Five women who made sure that Canadian women are considered persons

$100 – “Do we ever remember that somewhere above the sky in some child’s dream perhaps Jacques Cartier is still sailing, always on his way always about to discover a new Canada?” from Miram Waddington’s poem, Jacques Cartier in Toronto. The images are of exploration: a canoe (is anything except Maple syrup more Canuck?), maps, radar.

Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts? Our money talks, and says something about who we are as a nation.

Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts? Can you think of some arts that have helped you to know a culture (your own or another’s) more deeply?

Have a look at the Canadian money in your pocket/purse. What does it tell you about what Canadians value and celebrate?

Have a look around your church, both inside and outside. What does it tell you about what Christians value and celebrate? (below is the Jubilee Church in Rome)


If you were designing a new building for your congregation, what would it look like? How would you communicate visually what Christians value and celebrate? (below, a different kind of church)

Monday, July 12, 2010

the beauty of all things broken

Even dressed for the weather of a Saskatoon winter, it must have been cold and dirty work. It was cold because it was Saskatoon in January. It was dirty because it was combing through the wreckage of the fire that destroyed St. James Anglican Church for the second time in its history – rubble, ice, ash, broken glass, burnt timbers, Bibles and prayer books charred beyond use, a congregation in shock.

Day by day after the fire, St. James member Mr. Pascoe patiently dug shards of stained glass out of the rubble. This labour of love began long before the congregation had decided what to do in the face of this disaster. Digging through ice and snow and soot and ash in search of what once glittered and now was blackened, smoked. What once was whole, beautiful, inspirational was now dirty, sharp-edged, fragmented, broken.
In her book Finding Beauty in a Broken World, Terry Tempest Williams uses the metaphor of mosaic to begin to make sense of the spiritual, ecological and political fragmentation of our time. Mosaic, she notes, is a conversation between what is broken. The play of light is the first rule of mosaic, she discovered when she travelled to Ravenna, Italy to learn this art. Mosaic as a metaphor is not exactly a new thought – our Jewish friends have long believed their mission to be tikkun olam, mending the world. And those of us who claim Christianity also take what has been dis-membered, and re-member, particularly in the sacrament of communion, a feast of re-membering as we remember the story of Jesus’ daring love and seek to affirm our membering among the people of the Way. Yet Williams’ image of mosaic resonates deeply with me in this broken world. How we need this dazzling conversation of light and broken glass, artist and viewer.

Great art – whether it be mosaic, theatre, dance, music, writing – great art brings what is broken to our hearts and urges us into conversation with it. If we are blessed, the conversation with the broken inspired by the art changes us, and we begin to see differently. Sometimes, we might see beauty and commit ourselves to protect it (the work of Robert Bateman, say); sometimes, we might see horror and know we aren’t doing enough to make peace in our day (the stunning play Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad).

But it begins with someone like Mr. Pascoe, someone who knows that the broken shards are worth gathering. When St James Anglican decided their church would rise from the ashes, decided to rebuild, they commissioned stained glass artist Lee Brady to do their new windows. Below, is the window he created with the broken fragments lovingly gathered and kept by Mr. Pascoe. The tree of life is the symbol for both St. James congregation and their arts centre, The Refinery. Rooted in history, this rich symbol of life, growth and care for the creation speaks to the community out of the ashes, out of the fragments, offering hope in creativity.

What are the broken pieces in your world, your neighbourhood that you want to gather carefully? How did they get broken? Where do you need to go to find them?
What new thing might be made of those fragments? How might artists and church folks work together on such a project? What art form might these fragments take to best speak to your community – visual, spoken word/theatre, musical...?
How is your congregation already engaged in tikkun olam (mending the world), mosaic, re-membering what has been dis-membered? How might you move that work forward in art?

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Ben Hur meets Harriet the Spy

When Senora Monte went looking for her black shawl, she didn’t like what she found. It took her some time to find the shawl, which was not where she left it. And when she did find it, there was a hole in it where no hole had been before, a hole that no moth had made, unless that moth had the dexterity to use a pair of scissors. A little bigger than a playing card, and about the same shape, the hole in the black shawl was a portal to the magical world of film-making for Senora Monte’s son, Fernando, a frequent flier at coffeEco, a hip and happenin’ java joint in downtown Kingston, Ont. Four or five of us (the numbers were fluid) gathered around a table as the enthused (from en Theos, filled with god) Fernando told us of his Cinema Paradiso childhood. He borrowed his mother’s shawl to make a movie for his neighbourhood pals. Not just any movie, but the famous movie of the day, Ben Hur. He had no camera, no film, no projector – all that would come later. But he had his mother’s shawl, a pair of scissors, and a series of Ben Hur trading cards, which he flashed by the hole in the shawl to the derision of the children who had paid admission for this.


An indie film maker, Fernando Monte is currently completing a trilogy on the Bible’s wisdom literature – Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs are done, and now he faces Job, a subject he frankly admits is terrifying. “This age in my life is frightening, it’s the Job age. You feel so small, but you try to make the best with what you’re given. In my case, it’s a camera.”

Fernando saw his first film at the age of 3, and grew up inside his family’s cinema, experiences that set him on his creative path. For me, it was encountering Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, the story of a loner-child, an observer who records her snap moral judgements about her friends, family and the unsuspecting souls on her after-school spy route in her spy journal. i was in grade 6 when i met Harriet, and knew i wanted to be a writer. My mother, by the way, did not find my witty observations nearly as clever as i did. i exercised my moral outrage that she had read my PRIVATE journal (which i had left on the dining room table, hoping it would be read and my family would at last understand what a genius i was). My indignation relieved me of dealing with the content of my mother’s comments. Dodging critics is a good skill for artists. But so is taking them seriously, and engaging in conversation.
One of those gathered around Fernando’s table (a classics prof, if i remember rightly) said, “If you find a job you like, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Which is true and not true. Oscar Wilde said he spent the morning taking out a comma, and the afternoon putting it back in. Making art is work, sometimes inspired, sometimes tedious, sometimes physical. It is also joy, the place where your deep joy and the world’s deep hunger meet. Claire Marchand grew up in Brandon, Manitoba and became, of all things, one of Canada’s most astonishing flamenco dancers, unexpected in the land of farmers and ranchers. How did that happen? Is it divine mystery, divine calling?

How did it happen for you, whatever your art form? What was the spark that set you on fire for painting, gardening, gourmet cooking, wood carving, photography, quilting, theatre, liturgy, tap dance, blues harmonica?

Is there a sense of call for you in your art?

Is this the place where your deep joy and the world’s deep hunger meet? How does your art celebrate the world, and/or speak to the deep wounds of the world?

If you were to bust out of your comfort zone and try a different art form, what might that be? What might you discover by trying your hand at writing hip-hop or taking a modern dance class?

Do you see the divine spark in arts not your own, in arts outside your own zone?

Monday, June 21, 2010

Extreme Make-over

A wave of Italian immigrants to 1950s Toronto was followed by a curious culture clash, as police officers kept breaking up gangs of Italian men hanging around on street corners – vagrancy, loitering...or, according to my pal Vince from Winnipeg’s Italian Holy Rosary parish, a culture clash. The immigrants were used to piazzas, the ubiquitous public squares in their home country. Most piazzas have a house of worship on one side of the square and a house of government on the other, with bars, cafes and shops on the other sides. They are places of intersection, places of meeting and mingling, “thin places” as Celtic spirituality might say – places of encounter with the Holy. In this case, the Holy as met in neighbour and stranger.


St. Angela de Merici, a founder of the Ursaline religious order, urged her sister-nuns to “be like a piazza” – be open, gracious, hospitable, and engaged in the world. Tracey Lind, dean of Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, took this vision to church, inspiring a historic cathedral designed for a lost world to demolition and reconstruction. Pews? Gone in favour of chairs which are both more “traditional” in the cathedrals of yore, and also free up the cathedral’s space for other uses. Storefronts attached to the diocesan office boast Cafe Ah Roma and a Ten Thousand Villages shop. An attractive outdoor garden with street access (above), gives neighbouring university folk a place to enjoy their coffee breaks and lunch. An art gallery has been incorporated into the reconstruction as well. And, the cathedral’s upgrade made it Cleveland’s largest geothermal heating and cooling system, cutting electricity costs from $78,000 to $35,000 in its first year of operation – and making a green witness to the wider community. The welcoming lobby of Trinity Commons boasts two soothing floor-to-ceiling fountains and inviting benches, a public space of serenity in the heart of the city. Trinity Cathedral has clearly reinvented itself (or perhaps “restored” is a better description), offering hospitality not only to church folks, but to the city.

i am just back from Toronto, busily preparing itself to host the G-20 (at a security cost estimated to be 6 times higher than the security for the FIFA World Cup). On my way to meet relatives at Smokeless Joe’s downtown, i chanced by the security fence – some ten feet high and much tighter than chain link. There was already an enormous police presence on the streets, bigger than any i can recall seeing in Canada – ever. Shops and businesses inside the security perimeter are closing for the duration, with a loss of wages for the workers, including a congregation member appearing in a show at the Royal Alex theatre.

Canada has no history of piazzas (could it be our winters?), but we increasingly have a story about the disappearance of public space. When Toronto hosted the Du Maurier Jazz Festival, that city’s public Nathan Phillips Square became corporate space, owned by the sponsors. While churches are hardly “neutral” space, we do have the gift of uncontested space to offer our communities.

If your church were inside the security perimeter, what would its ministry be during the G-20? Would you join the other businesses, and shut down or relocate for the duration?
Would you offer hospitality to journalists? To protesters? To diplomats? To police?
Would you hold a worship service lifting up the wounds of the world that your church thinks should be on the agenda of the meeting?

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Via Lucis

We often speak of the spiritual life as a journey or pilgrimage (early Christians were called People of the Way), but not until i picked up Margaret Visser’s The Geometry of Love did i realize that Christian churches are designed with the metaphor of journey as well (think processional, think aisle). Our Roman Catholic friends have the Stations of the Cross in their churches, a moving meditation (literally and figuratively) as pilgrims go from station to station, usually within a church building, meditating on images of what the Empire believed was the final chapter of Jesus’ life.

At Sydenham Street United Church in Kingston, Ontario, another kind of pilgrimage took place a few years ago on the Sundays between Easter and Pentecost. Using Mary Ford-Grabowsky’s book, Stations of the Light, as a spring board, a visual artist, a poet , the minister and several other kindred spirits met in the fall to deeply engage eight Biblical stories of resurrection. Independently of one another, the poet and the visual artist went to their respective studios to create. On each of the Sundays between Easter and Pentecost, there was a time in the worship service when the visual artist’s response to the resurrection story was front and centre, and the poet’s words, which took the form of contemporary psalm, were read. The minister asked a resident musician if he could play some meditative music in worship to give an opportunity for those in the pews to reflect on this Sunday’s visual gift. He responded not only by playing but also by composing. Today, there is a Via Lucis, a Way of Light, in Sydenham Street United’s sanctuary, as the works of the artist are hung in a journey around the sanctuary, and the psalms of the poet are paired with each piece. After Pentecost, when the congregation had had their own pilgrimage from Light into Light as the installation was known, there was an invitation to the general public, and some 200 people responded.

Most moving for me in the images were the decidedly Canadian touches: trilliums bloom in the garden where the women encounter the resurrected one, the northern lights appear above doubting Thomas (recast by the poet as “Honest Thomas”), and fish swirl and splash in a way i KNOW is Canadian but cannot say how. I had a wish that the Holy Spirit might be portrayed as a Canada Goose, but the artist likely has a lighter touch than i do.
The project took a decent amount of lead time for strong preparation. First, the minister read the book, then enticed some others to read it. The group met to wrestle with the Biblical stories. The poet and the visual artist were given a few months to create (and, in the case of the visual artist, to attend to framing, lighting, having the pieces professionally photographed for use on the worship bulletin cover, and hanging them in the sanctuary). Blessed be the patient ones who did not let their enthusiasm get ahead of the project! They not only created works of great beauty and fresh reframing of familiar stories, they also opened up a new path, a new pilgrimage – via lucis, the way of light.



If you could imagine such a project in your church, what Biblical stories linked by a common theme might you choose? Sydenham Street chose a journey into light – what journey might your church embrace? Be comforted by? Be challenged by?

Who are the artists in your church? Would there be some wisdom in using a mix of church and community artists, and how might you invite artists outside the church to participate?

Are there any art forms that make you so uncomfortable you can’t imagine inviting them in (Country music or hip-hop, modern dance, multi-media installations)? How do you respond to the critique that if a particular stream of music is not welcome in your worship space, neither are the folks who embrace that kind of music?

What is the journey, the via, that your church is called to make at this time in its life?

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

You Can Always Go...Downtown

The Presbyterian USA Old Stone Church in downtown Cleveland is a graceful old beauty, almost lost amongst the skyscrapers of finance. I say “almost” on several fronts. Location, location, location – Old Stone Church fronts onto Public Square, which is a combination park, impromptu concert venue, and bustling public transit hub. Beyond that, Old Stone is offers a subtle mix of traditional Christianity (some of their windows are Tiffanys) and arts offerings such as weekday yoga and their own art gallery, managed and animated by Beth Giuliano.




Currently, The Gallery at Old Stone boasts an installation of photographs and text by students from three schools: Euclid, Ohio, Manassas, Virginia and Sierra Leone. Deeply moving, as these young people reflect on their identity, what helps them succeed in school and what difficulties they face getting an education. The Gallery at Old Stone is committed to a strong vision to exhibit local, regional and national artists whose art speaks to the downtown core and its vitality. The gallery seeks artists who strive to be an active part in the dialogue towards the city’s faithful revitalization. (See the church’s website at www.oldstonechurch.org for more info.)
In our conversation, Beth and i noted some similarities between Cleveland and Winnipeg – particularly the challenges of our respective downtown cores (what some of us like to call “historic neighbourhoods”). Out for a walk near my hotel last night, i was struck by the quiet: storefronts boarded up, an absence of pedestrian and vehicular traffic...i walked for blocks and couldn’t find even a corner store to buy a copy of The Cleveland Plain Dealer, a newspaper whose title has always appealed to me. We spoke of people we know in our respective cities who are afraid to go downtown, particularly after dark. i’m in a hotel on Euclid Avenue in a section of street that has had a great restoration and make-over, including the installation of a wonderful transit corridor. Alas, construction took so long that many shops closed up, and the area, it seems to me, is struggling a bit.

Later in the day, i rode the double-long bus called the Healthline out to the Cleveland Museum of Art, and i was struck, as i often am riding public transit in Winnipeg, that i was the only white person on the bus. Which set me to thinking about the fears we have about downtown, and how aggressive panhandlers are named as a problem, and sometimes even gangs, but rarely do we (at least in Winnipeg) talk about race as a factor in the downtown’s struggle. Americans are pretty forthright in naming White Flight, the exodus of white folks to the supposed safety of the suburbs and shopping malls. We Canadians mostly like to pretend we have no race problems. But the face of our downtowns, and the faces we see on public transit, tell us something.

Are you afraid or even wary about your downtown?

Do you use public transit? If not, why? If so, what do you notice about who is riding with you?

What role might downtown churches play in a city’s faithful revitalization?

What would a “faithful revitalization” look like to you?

Sunday, June 6, 2010

Open Up

Bev Orr of Saskatoon’s St James Anglican/The Refinery (www.refinersonline.org) told me about a minister from a very conservative background who, in his retirement, has taken on a job auditing some city employees. This new context, where nobody treats him like The Minister or The Pastor, has made him realize how isolated he was all those years in the church. In his new setting, there is no pretence, no fake politeness – and he’s lovin’ it. He says, “I can’t believe how big my God is getting. And I can’t imagine how big my God is going to be.” Bev said, “It just sent chills down me, because here’s this guy from this very narrow place, and he’s just doing this:



She went on, “And that’s what we’re doing here, too, at The Refinery. For everybody that comes, whether a congregation member or a community member, it just makes their God get bigger, or their world view open up. ” Formerly the parish hall of St James, the congregation decided to welcome community artists to use the space, and well-used it is, from yoga & tai chi & meditation classes to live theatre, visual arts and book launches. The line between sacred/secular is erased. Thank God.

It seems to me that drawing lines doesn’t work so well with a God notorious for coloring outside the lines, that the desire for purity, for separation, doesn’t serve religion well. It’s the impulse that gives us the nasty fundamentalism that leads to Inquisitions and the oxymoron of “holy war.” i’ve been thinking about church as space, which is leading me to think about church architecture. On a recent trip to Spain, i was awestruck by the Cathedral of Cordoba, not so much the Cathedral as its earlier incarnation as a mosque. Mercifully, the mosque (or mezquita, as it is known there) did not get the full Christian make-over, and much of it is still intact, including some 580 amazing pillars topped with red and white candy-cane arches. In its days as a mosque, the doors would stand open to the world. Visually, the eye would follow the forest of pillars out into the massive courtyard, where the vertical theme continues with orange trees. Other doors opened out onto the market place, a reminder that all aspects of our lives are holy – possibly even something as mundane as buying a piece of fruit or a pair of shoes. All of this was by purposeful design to blur the sacred and the secular, or perhaps even to unify them. While medieval churches were similar, the mezquita’s Christian make-over came later. It shut up the doors, some permanently, and the sense of airiness, the sense of expansiveness, was sealed off and lost. How, when and why did Christians start building places of worship as fortresses, or sanctuaries removed from the real world?



If someone unfamiliar with Christianity/religion were to look at the outside of your church building, what would they see? What lessons might they take from the architecture?

What does your building communicate about God? About your congregation?

What changes could you make to your building to blur the line between sacred/secular, inside/outside, us/them?

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Soft Chairs, Warm Lights


Marriage is a great institution, if you don’t mind being institutionalized. So said the always quotable Mae West. Me, i would say the church is a great institution, if you don’t mind being institutionalized.

Think of your typical church basement. What screams INSTITUTION more than stacking tables and chairs (especially the panty-hose snagging wooden chairs...and don’t get me started on the haemorrhoid-inducing metal chairs)? Add in the overhead florescent lights and walls the color of whatever was on sale at Home Hardware 15 years ago and the hand-me-down early student sofa ...let’s just say it’s not a pretty sight.

What would it be like if we spent money to be hospitable?

St James Anglican church in Saskatoon has done just that. When the long-term lease of their parish hall to a Ukrainian dance school wasn’t renewed, they were faced with an opportunity. Situated between the university and Broadway Avenue’s thriving arts community, St James decided to transform the parish hall to serve the community, and The Refinery was born. It took renovation and commitment, and most of all, an embrace of the spiritual practice of hospitality.

Today, The Refinery is a place for tai chi and yoga, book launches, art shows, belly dancing and meditation, quilting, concerts, local theatre troups, the Fringe and its own box office (yes, they take VISA), to mention just a sampling. Refinery events often spill over into St James’ church basement.

Visiting last week, i met with several folk, including The Refinery’s staffer, Cynthia Dyck, an energetic and forthright theatre person turned arts administrator. We met in the reception area of The Refinery, a large yet intimate room with soft chairs and warm lights. In the center of the room is a seating area with matching sofas and comfy chairs, strategically placed on a tasteful carpet. Around the edges of the room are some retro chrome kitchen tables and chairs, each table boasting an individually decorated table lamp. A couple of tall cafe tables with stools give lots of options for intermission conversation. The kitchen offers up wine, beer, coffee, soft drinks and water to thirsty thespians. As Cynthia and i met, a group arrived to set up for that evening’s concert reception – “Wow, this doesn’t look anything like a church basement,” said one.

i asked Cynthia what churches might do to be more hospitable to artists. Among other things, she said to ditch the florescent lights and go for something warmer. Get rid of stacking tables. Get rid of anything that says INSTITUTION in favour of something that says COME IN. This includes our heavy exterior wooden doors, which church folk think look lovely but project the image of fortress and secrecy.

Perhaps it’s time we in the church stopped settling for good-enough-for-the-church-but-I-wouldn’t-want-it-in-my-own-living-room cast offs. i’m not suggesting a return to the days of the Ladies’ Parlour (a lavish room that very few were actually allowed to use). But imagine if we furnished our sacred spaces not only to welcome the community in, but to say, you are important to us, you are an honoured guest here. Could we spend money on hospitality, not in the hope that we would get something back (maybe they’ll join our congregation, especially to be hoped for if they have kids), but as the spiritual practice of our faith? Could we spend money on hospitality because we love our neighbours, because we care about the community?

What does hospitality look like to you personally? To your faith community? Are those two streams of hospitality different – if so, how? What would a generous hospitality look like in your own life? In the life of your faith community?

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Sacred Space

April Fool’s Day seems a fitting day to begin a Sabbatical. i hit the road to the Benedictine community of St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, not too far from a sign for Lake Wobegon of Garrison Keillor fame. i’ve been working through Joan Chittister’s The Rule of Benedict, which offers a cycle of daily readings of the old saint’s rules for Benedictine monasteries and Chittister’s insightful commentary on the rule.

St John's Abbey church



Chapter 52 of Benedict’s rule is The Oratory of the Monastery, and emphasizes that the place of worship is a place set aside. Chittister offers the advice of a creative writing teacher: “Write every single day at the same time and in the very same place. Whether you have anything to say or not, go there and sit and do nothing if necessary, until the very act of sitting there at your writer’s time in your writer’s place releases the writing energy in you.” It is only by making space for a thing, whether the thing is writing or an encounter with the Holy, that the thing can be experienced.



The church where i live and work, like many in the United Church of Canada, has undergone a renovation to make the sanctuary more user-friendly for the performing arts. Multi-purpose space is all the rage, and makes utilitarian sense. After all, we worship once a week, not four times daily like the Benedictines.



What is sacred space, and how does it become sacred? Who decides?

mosque/cathedral of Cordoba


The Roman Catholic cathedral in Cordoba was one of the world’s most beautiful mosques before the reconquista, the program to wrest Spain back from the Moors and secure the country for Christianity. For three centuries of Moorish rule, the mosque had been a site of worship and community in a city where Jews, Christians and Muslims lived side by side. The mosque was once a pilgrimage site for devout Muslims, second only to Mecca itself. When Cordoba was conquered, the mosque was slated to become a cathedral. And so, plunked in the middle of one of the world’s most stunningly beautiful spaces with its more than 800 marble pillars and astonishing mosaic, tile and inscription, is a cathedral. A cathedral that would have been alright on another site, its own site, but here looks like a carbuncle. This embarrassing bit of Christian imperialism is only somewhat softened by the fact that the mosque stole its pillars from a Visigoth church, who in turn had stolen the pillars from a Roman temple. The concept of co-existence didn’t have much traction during the Spanish Inquisition.



But what of today’s temples? i recall the excitement in the Toronto of my youth when the CN Tower was built – then the world’s tallest free-standing structure. But it wasn’t long until the TD Bank built a monolith of its own – you guessed it, taller than the CN Tower. These are temples of another empire whose enterprises also aspire to world domination.



What is sacred space, and how does it become sacred? Who decides? Is interfaith sacred space possible, and, if so, how will we get there?



      

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Easter Joy

Here at St John's Abbey, Minnesota, where i have been so privileged to experience the rich worship life of the monks: gregorian chant, incense, the pascal fire. For these Benedictines, care of creation is a strong thread in their common life.
And now, this Easter Day, the green blade rises, and the song of the turtle (or at least the spring peepers) is heard in the land. At today's Morning Prayer, we heard the Canticle of the 3 Young Men, a song of praise and thanksgiving for all creation. With the rhythm of the chant in my bones, i have begun work on a Canadian version. Here's my first run at it - hope it speaks to you of the goodness of creation on this day of celebration.


Canadian Canticle for Easter Sunday




Take joy in your being, all creatures of the earth!

Take joy in your being, all creatures of the air!

Take joy in your being, all creatures of the waters!



I take joy in my being,

sing joy and thanks to my Maker. (Refrain)



Small flitting birds, you chickadees, you nuthatches,

you croaking frogs, you croaking raven,

you eagles and hawks, soaring and seeing. (R)



You earth-bound creatures, you mice, you hares,

you lumbering bear, you most timid deer,

you porcupine, you who have no enemies. (R)



You white and arctic creatures,

polar bear and arctic fox,

you wild wolf and sly coyote,

throw back your heads and sing. (R)



You mother moose with her twins,

circling bison who shelter your young,

you caribou cov’ring the tundra. (R)



You painted turtle shyly showing your beauty,

you monarch on milkweed drying your wings,

you dragonfly defying gravity,

you mosquito who finds us, always. (R)



You garter snake, skink and skunk,

you bees busy about honey,

you beavers building with branches,

Loon, with your haunting cry. (R)



You mirrored lake and thund’ring falls,

you rapids and still waters,

you northern pike and rainbow trout,

you spiders that walk on the water. (R)



You crocus and apple blossom,

your sweetness incensing the air,

you maple trees with sweet sap rising,

sweet and wild as the Word. (R)



You northern lights and hoar frost,

you icicle that hangs by the wall,

you bursting buds of promise,

you leaves of scarlet and gold. (R)



You of our founding nations,

First Peoples of this land,

you who have come from across the sea,

sisters and brothers to me.



Take joy in your being, all creatures of the earth!

Take joy in your being, all creatures of the air!

Take joy in your being, all creatures of the waters!



I take joy in my being,

sing joy and thanks to my Maker.



(C) barb m. janes,

Inspired by the Benedictine monks’ worship at St John’s Abbey, Easter, 2010,

and inspired by all creation.



Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Pilgrim's Tales: Good Friday

Like Chaucer's travelers to Canterbury, a company of folks are heading to Jerusalem with Jesus in the 40 day pilgrimage Christians call Lent. Each week during Sunday worship, Crescent Fort Rouge United will meet one of that company in a monologue. This Good Friday, we hear from the Serving Girl who fingered Peter (Mark 14:66-72).
I told him, right to his face.
There are enough people in my life like him – fakes, all of them. Fakes and phonies, think if they toss you a few coins as a tip later that gives them permission to pinch your ass. Or worse. Users, that’s what they are, and I don’t like it. They don’t pay me enough to put up with that crap, pardon my language.
It had been a crazy night, even for this place. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking, but let me tell you, being a servant girl in the house of the Chief Priest is no different than being the servant girl anywhere else – you’re run off your feet, and certain men take certain liberties. The only difference in working here is that they’re certain they can get away with it. Like I said, they throw a tip at you, buy your silence, give you guilt money.
I don’t know everything that was going down that night, but I know enough to know it’s not a good thing when the boss loses it and starts ripping his clothes and yelling about heretics. No kidding, we could hear him all the way down to the courtyard.
That’s when the penny dropped. That’s when I realized there was a fake sitting by the fire, a phony, one of those guys whose friendship…Well, let’s just say his kind of friendship made me think of those certain men who take certain liberties. A user, a guy who’s your friend when everything’s going good but pretends like he’s never seen you before when the chips are down. A guy who thinks he can get away with it.
It ticked me off. I stared at him, hard. And he didn’t flinch.
So I told him, right to his face. I said, “You were with that guy they brought in, the Nazarene.”
The User says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Can you believe that? Liar. A liar and a User.
So I told some others, and a couple of other people held his feet to the fire. He tried lying some more, but it didn’t work so good. He broke down and cried about the same time that rooster went off.  
Most people left then, or turned back to their drinks.
Not me. I stared at him. Just stared.
He thought he was something special, something better than the rest of us.
But he’s just like those guys with roamin’ hands – a user and a phony.
And I told him, too. Right to his face.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Pilgrims' Tales: Passion

Like Chaucer's travelers to Canterbury, a company of folks are heading to Jerusalem with Jesus in the 40 day pilgrimage Christians call Lent. Each week during Sunday worship, Crescent Fort Rouge United will meet one of that company in a monologue. This Sunday, we hear from Emperor Tiberius Caesar Augustus (with files from William K. Wolfrum Chronicles).

Good morning, members of the press.
I will make a brief statement.
Because this is a matter of national security, I will not respond to any questions after giving this statement.

There will be no investigation into the alleged torture of the enemy of Rome known as Jesus of Nazareth, A.K.A. “king of the Jews.” We want to assure you that his treatment does not meet our Empire’s definition of torture as defined by our policy manual Advanced Crucifixion Techniques.

Thus, no charges will be brought against members of the Sanhedrin, Pontius Pilate or Herod Antipas. These operations were carried out within the parameter of legal opinions provided by the best scholars of the Empire. The Advanced Crucifixion Techniques memos represent a careful policy decision made in the proper place by our intelligence agencies and our Justice Department.

Nothing we have done violates the Empire’s law. We again want to assure you that his crimes pose a genuine threat to national security.

We hold the family of Judas Iscariot, our courageous informant, in our thoughts and prayers.

That is all. Thank you.

Pilgrims' Tales: Palm Sunday

Like Chaucer's travelers to Canterbury, a company of folks are heading to Jerusalem with Jesus in the 40 day pilgrimage Christians call Lent. Each week during Sunday worship, Crescent Fort Rouge United will meet one of that company in a monologue. This Sunday, we hear from a midwife (Luke 19:29-40).




It was bands of cloth from my cloak she wrapped him in so long ago,
And now I find myself giving up my cloak again,
laying my cloak down on the road,
my cloak paving the way
for this parade of nuisances and nobodies.
He comes riding a little brown burro,
a work horse not a war horse,
a little brown burro, so small his feet almost touch the ground,
a little brown burro, not unlike the one his mother rode
to satisfy the census-taking soldiers years ago.
Birth in a borrowed barn!
We are never safe from surprises in a world made cruel.
He was a baby like all the others I’ve brought into the world:
Wet and slippery and full-voiced
until I put him in his mother’s arms,
she who sang of justice to the poor,
her cradle song – her manger song.
Now, on this parade route, we sing Peace.
Peace on earth! We sing as if it’s possible,
just as the angels sang to startled shepherds.
Peace on earth – not just his birth announcement
but his marching orders.
Ours, too.
And so once more I offer him my cloak,
along with all the others who line this back street,
we who have only one cloak to give,
give it
as the hope of the world parades by
on a borrowed brown burro.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Pilgrim's Tales: Lent 5



Like Chaucer's travelers to Canterbury, a company of folks are heading to Jerusalem with Jesus in the 40 day pilgrimage Christians call Lent. Each week during Sunday worship, Crescent Fort Rouge United will meet one of that company in a monologue. This Sunday, we hear from Lazarus, raised from the dead (John 11:1-44; John 12:1-11).


Thank you, God, for the grave digger who made the hole and sealed me up. And thank you that I do not need the grave he made, at least for now. But bless his work anyway.
Thank you for my sisters.
Thank you for my sister Martha with her sharp tongue and blunt ways – 
she was the one who told off Jesus for coming too late, 
and for telling him that after so long in the earth I would stink to high heaven.
Thank you for my sister Mary the dreamer, the soft one. 
She cannot be relied on to get a meal, 
but will always bring a flower to grace the table.
Thank you for the funeral food I now enjoy.
Thank you for olives, for the tree that grew them.
Thank you for lemons, and the farmer who tends them.
Thank you for lamb and barley,
and the smell that fills the house, mingling with my own smell,
the smell of the earth, the smell of the grave.
Thank you for wine for celebration.
Thank you for friends with food in their beards
and rejoicing on their lips.
Thank you for life.
Thank you for life!
I who stumbled through my days,
carrying my life like a heavy burden instead of a treasured gift.
I did not have a life before my death, but now…
Thank you.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Pilgrim's Tales: Lent 4


Like Chaucer's travelers to Canterbury, a company of folks are heading to Jerusalem with Jesus in the 40 day pilgrimage Christians call Lent. Each week during Sunday worship, Crescent Fort Rouge United will meet one of that company in a monologue. This Sunday, we hear from a mother.




His father got it wrong.

It wasn’t just our younger son who was lost, the one who skidded off the rails so dramatically, the one who got us to sell half our land so he could have cold, hard cash, only to waste every last coin on intoxicants and bad company. He was lost to us, yes, treating us like human vending machines instead of parents with a bit of wisdom about the world and a lot of love for him. He’s the famous one in the story, the younger son. Everybody likes a bad boy.

But my husband got it wrong.

Our elder son was lost, too.

If the younger treated us as human vending machines so he could squander it all on a way of life I don’t care to think about, our elder son also didn’t see us as parents. He never could just lean back into the love we have for him, but always was trudging around trying to please us. I often wished he would show a bit more spirit. He was so worried about earning his place in our family that he built a wall around himself with bricks of resentment and the mortar of bitterness, imagining nothing he did was ever good enough. He was trying to earn his place in a family he was already part of. It’s as if he thought, “If I work really hard, they will like me.” Not “If I work really hard, they will love me” – he was so lost he was content with like from his own family. He was so lost he couldn’t see the love that was already there.

I don’t know how both our boys got so lost. Being family is the hardest work in the world. 

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Pilgrims' Tales: Lent 3

Like Chaucer's travellers to Canterbury, a company of folks are heading to Jerusalem with Jesus in the 40 day pilgrimage Christians call Lent. Each week during Sunday worship, Crescent Fort Rouge United will meet one of that company in a monologue. This Sunday, we hear from a gardener.
                                                                                     
I like to stay put. In fact, this journey with Jesus is the first time I’ve ever been on the move like this. Gardening takes a long, long time in the same space. You till and dig and compost and manure and dig and weed and till and compost and manure. You invest the sweat of your brow into a piece of land. It’s not like having a dairy cow that you can lead down the road to another location. If you’re a gardener, you have to stay put to see the fruit of your effort.


Which is why no one could believe it when I walked away from my fruit trees to take to the road with Jesus and the others. See, Jesus gets it, gets it – he gets it. Sure, others celebrate the harvest, the goodness of the earth, all that stuff. But that’s about what the earth can do for us, how the earth feeds us with grain and grape, gives us timber to build tables and temples. But Jesus sees something more, something that good gardeners know: nothing is ever lost. Nothing is ever lost.

You can prune a grapevine or a fig tree, cut off the dead branch that is sapping the life of the plant so the plant can use its inner resources to blossom and bear fruit. And most folks focus on the fruit – grapes, figs, what’s not to like?

But those dead branches aren’t ever lost. They go into the compost, take years to break down in the company of other dead branches, orange peels, apple cores, kitchen scraps, all that stuff nobody wants. All that stuff people think is useless just takes more time to do it differently. It’s a holy mystery how it breaks down, changes into rich dense compost. And the gardener uses that compost to enrich the earth, to help other things grow. Nothing is ever lost, just changed.

Jesus treats people that way. Those who are dead to us, those who are lost to us: the lepers, the collaborators, the sick, the sinful, the ones we turn away from – they are not lost to Jesus. No one is ever lost to him. And here’s the miracle: when Jesus finds them, he finds us, too. We are changed by that holy mystery of insistent belonging. Like a good gardener, Jesus helps us grow. Nothing is ever lost, but things can change.



Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Pilgrims' Tales: Lent 2

Like Chaucer's travellers to Canterbury, a company of folks are heading to Jerusalem with Jesus in the 40 day pilgrimage Christians call Lent. Each week during Sunday worship, Crescent Fort Rouge United will meet one of that company in a monologue. This Sunday, we hear from the Pharisee who saw Jesus weep over Jerusalem.
                                                                                                                                                      

It’s odd that tears make for clearer vision. You’d think with all that water and salt coming out of your eyes, your vision would be blurred.
I am a scholar. I value deep debate, the struggle to understand what God requires of us, the tension between our rich tradition and the new spirit that calls for change.
And the tensions of living a life of faith in these bewildering, bedeviled times.
These struggles call for a sharp intellect.
And yet…and yet…
I am beginning to realize that it’s when I see through my tears that I see most clearly.
When I sat in the hospital room, holding my grandmother’s tiny hand, no longer pretending to be brave – there are my tears.
When I watch that Tim Horton’s commercial, where the man goes to the airport to meet the plane from his homeland, to at last be reunited with his children and his wife, and he says “Welcome to Canada” – there are my tears.
When I see the desperate people in Haiti – so many family members dead, so many missing people, not being able to feed your children, to protect your daughters – there are my tears.
Or the Winnipeg woman who died in a bus shelter, died of exposure, died of poverty, died of neglect – there are my tears.
Or when I held our new baby for the first time, that little miracle of bright eyes and fingers and toes and baby-smell, that gift, that blessed, blessed gift – there are my tears.
Tears make for clearer vision.
Salt opens the icy road, that long, long road between my head and my heart.
And I see.
I see what matters, through my tears.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Pilgrims' Tales: Lent 1

Like Chaucer's travellers to Canterbury, a company of folks are heading to Jerusalem with Jesus in the 40 day pilgrimage Christians call Lent. Each week during Sunday worship, Crescent Fort Rouge United will meet one of that company in a monologue.

Lent 1: The Devil

You don’t know it, but I’ve got you already.


And the beauty is, you don’t know it because you don’t believe I exist.

Not that I mind. It makes things so much easier for me.

See, I know you.

I know you gave up long ago.

I know you look at the time you were passionate about your faith – remember that time, so long ago? – I know you look at the time you were passionate about your faith with a certain smirking paternalism, the same way you remember your youthful idealism when you got swept up in Trudeau-mania or the Young Communist Party or Greenpeace.

Your faith is like the rusty protest button in the bottom of your sock drawer.

I know you gave up long ago.

You decided there was no contradiction between being faithful and being comfortable.

See, I do know you.

Used to be, it was easy for me to pick out the Christians in the crowd – they were the ones visiting the sick, welcoming the stranger, working on the underground railroad, scouring pots in the soup kitchen, walking the picket line, going to jail.

Time was, the Christians not only went to jail.

They went to the lions.

They were known by their love for everyone, even their enemies. They recognized no distinctions of class or gender or race, and that made them stand out. Which made it easy for me to pick them out.

Which was not the same thing as making it easy for me to do my job.

But now? Piece of cake.

You have confused peace with not making waves.

You’ve become devoted to what makes you feel good instead of what mends the world.

You blend in with everybody else.

You’ve decided to be nice instead of to be faithful.

You are already mine.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

If I Were Boss of the Olympics...


Won't be long now until the 2010 Winter Olympics in beautiful British Columbia, an event so important that our Prime Minister prorogued parliament (or was that to shut down the Afghan torture inquiry?). Nobody has asked me, but if i were the boss of the Olympics, here's what the winter games would look like.
Opening ceremony: Clara Hughes, the only Canadian athlete to have won medals in both winter (speed skating) and summer (cycling) games will light the Olympic flame. Singing of Canada's national anthem will be led by James Keelaghan. Other Canadian performers will include Bruce Cockburn (who will debut a new song about irresponsible parliaments and the evils of torture), k.d. lang (who will debut a new song about the Women's Ski Jump event, which is going on because the Men's Hockey teams would boycott otherwise), and Marg Delahunty (who will threaten to smite the Prime Minister unless he gets back to work, pronto). Further, the corporate sponsors will have agreed that, for the sheer joy of supporting the games, no athlete will have to wear a logo on their uniform, thus reverting to the days when we could readily determine nationality without having to look for a flag among the Nike swooshes, and logos for VISA, Coke, Cheerios, etc. i know this is hopelessly naive, but i am actually old enough to remember when corporations were high-minded enough to sponsor great television programming like a play from the Stratford Festival, with an ad only at the beginning and the end -- "This special program is brought to you by IBM."
And speaking of corporations, the sponsors (bless them for their deep pockets) will be big enough to allow the charity RIGHT TO PLAY high visibility at the Games, even though none of the sponsors are "official" sponsors of this worthy NGO.
Clara fans will recall she donated $10,000 to Right To Play after she won gold at Turin - and our government did not give athletes a financial bonus for medalling (to use that strange new verb). If you haven't, check out RIGHT TO PLAY online.
Back in 1980, my first visit to New York city, i went to the famous toy store, F.A.O. Schwartz on 5th Avenue, where there were a ton of teddy bears wearing Olympic sweaters...and they were being offered at a deep discount. Do you recall the boycott of the Moscow Olympics? Do you recall why so many nations withdrew? It was in protest of Russia's invasion of Afghanistan. Funny old world, isn't it?
Protest doesn't usually sit well with sports fans. Sport can be an escape hatch, a time to enjoy the physicality of people unlike us (that is, those who train hard and push their bodies to perfection), team spirit, national pride. But if these spectacles come at the cost of shutting down worthy causes like RIGHT TO PLAY, continuing sexism (no Women's Ski Jump events), denying freedom of speech....hmmm. Even those cute red mittens we're being encouraged to buy to show our support for Canada's Olympians are made in China. And CBC news recently revealed that souvenirs being sold at the Games as Aboriginal art are likewise made in China (okay, maybe by Chinese aboriginals?)
i'll watch the games, especially the Speed Skating, the most elegant sport on offer. And i'll be rooting for Clara, an amazing athlete, a generous spirit, a deep thinker (to hear her on spirituality and sport, go to www.cbc.ca/tapestry/archives/2008/021008.html).
But part of me will be longing with all my baby-boomer heart for the days when all of us were gutsier about protesting injustices. Remember Carlos and Smith at the 1968 games? Sport is not above comment, or above debate, or above human rights.

So, go Clara! And on the podium, show us your RIGHT TO PLAY T-shirt!