Newspaper journalists are supposed to be dispassionate observers of the subjects they write about. They’re not supposed to have feelings themselves.

            Stan Chung flips that dictum upside down. In the columns he writes for the Kelowna Courier, he’s more than just personal. He spills his guts. And then he lays his guts out on the operating table and dissects them.

            Stan first ventured into this first-person style while he lived in Prince George. Where he wrote car reviews. He made them personal too. And customers flocked to the car dealerships.

            So when he moved to Kelowna, he checked to see if the Courier could also use his talents. The Courier already had an automotive writer. Managing Editor Tom Wilson encouraged Stan to write about his life instead.

            It wasn’t your typical Canadian life. Stan’s father had been second-in-command at the Korean CIA. But his vision for Korea didn’t coincide with President Park Chung Hee’s vision. He escaped to Canada, studied for ministry in the United Church of Canada, added English, Greek, and Hebrew to his native Korean, and was sent to Williams Lake in B.C.’s northern interior.

            Young Stan was brought over from Korea. Given a new English name -- a new identity, like the indigenous children in residential schools. And like them, not allowed to speak the language he grew up with.

            Williams Lake in those days had two social classes – white, and non. Stan, in Grade 9, was a non. An outsider. He got bullied, regularly. He got death threats.

            For a whole year, he says, he held his breath going through the woods to school. In fear.

            That experience led to the title of his latest book, I Held My Breath For A Year. Like his first book, Global Citizen, it’s a collection of his columns and essays. In part, it explores his relationship with his father, who eventually had to be committed to an institution for mental illness; with his mother, who both loved and hurt him; with his wife and children; with his work as an educator and administrator.

            The professional side comes through periodically in his essays. Stan reads voluminously – sociology, biology, economics, psychology. He filters that learning into simple, lucid, explanations of why we act the way we do. Not just “we” as individuals, also “we” as communities, as governments, as corporations.

            In his current role as Vice President of Education and Applied Research, at the College of the Rockies in Cranbrook, B.C., he regularly visits the city’s mayor and councillors, to encourage a more informed vision of how the city can grow.

            He gets frustrated by systems. Having held faculty positions at four B.C. colleges, he can say, without bragging, “No one knows the system better than me. But our organizations do not change. They still use a hierarchical model that goes back centuries.”

            The same with corporations. And governments.

            “If anything’s going to change, it won’t happen until we change ourselves,” he insists. “We have to be the change we seek.”

            He reaches back to his roots as a preacher’s kid. “The church taught us that as individuals, we have free will. We don’t. We are socialized creatures. Until we realize how our culture has shaped us, shaped our identities as male and female, for example, we’re prisoners.”

            His columns are one vehicle for cracking those prison walls. Stan bares his soul to grab us by the heart.

            He describes his writing technique as “creative non-fiction.” It’s real. It’s fact. But it’s dramatized for impact.

            Most of us – and I include myself in this generalization – tend to sandpaper smooth the raw edges of our psyches. We find rationalizations for our actions. We shift some of the blame to someone else.

            Stan refuses to buy into that pattern. He’s ruthlessly honest with the feelings most of us try to forget. Or to bury. He writes a biography of pain that is also a celebration of survival.

            Or, in religious terms, a resurrection.

            But you never quite know whether he’s talking about himself. Or about you.

            “Kiss me now,” he says, in a column exploring his love for his wife. And then a little later, “Kiss me now” becomes an invitation to his readers, to enter into greater intimacy, with him, with each other.

            Stan Chung doesn’t hold his breath anymore. He doesn’t run in fear. By taking the risk of opening his soul, he invites us to do the same.

            Intimacy, he teaches by his writing, is not only possible, but necessary.

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Copyright © 2016 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.

                  To send comments, to subscribe, or to unsubscribe, write jimt@quixotic.ca

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YOUR TURN

As I expected, last week’s column about drug use and drug abuse evoked a lot of mail.

Cliff Gieseke wrote from Texas, “Is marijuana legal in Canada?  It is in some parts of the U.S. I would like to see it legal in every U.S. state.”
            To answer Cliff’s question, for readers outside Canada, marijuana is not legal, in general, although it is legally available for certain medical treatments. We expect that it will be legalized when the government gets the necessary paperwork done.

Isabel Gibson answered Cliff, in part: “As one conservative commentator here said (more or less) about the lengthy and complex process of legalizing marijuana: ‘How pathetic is government?  It can't even figure out how NOT to ban something.’

            “In looking ahead, science fiction has tended to handle drugs in one of two ways: ignoring them completely, or postulating a world in which a permanent underclass dopes itself into effective unconsciousness.
         “While it hasn't worked to approach the problem from the supply side, it's not clear that working on the demand side will be effective either, at least not in the sense of reducing demand. 
          “I also fear that there will always be criminals ready to make drugs available on the margins -- whether that margin is age (supplying minors) or legality (providing new designer drugs for thrill-seekers and staying a step or more ahead of our government-sanctioned approval/production/distribution system).
          “Maybe there's no fixing it.  Maybe we should just get on with settling for causing less harm -- a pathetic state of affairs, to be sure.

I started last Sunday’s column with some questions. James West responded, “To answer your question: 700 deaths only register when they happen at the same time. Then there is the ‘moral hazard’ that if we had safe places to get high, everybody would do it. Senseless yes, but that is how the body politic works. Also, I am not going to pay to make it easy for people to do bad things. Forgetting how much it costs to pay for police, jails, emergency services and so on with the current policies in effect.”

Kay Cox had her own questions: “One way to slow down the production of illegal pills is to limit/restrict high speed pill presses. Alberta has done it, with a sizeable fine for anyone possessing one. Why doesn't B.C. do the same?”

“Dead right,” wrote James Russell, and added, “Additional points: 
1) Cops, lawyers, judges, politicians, jailers and pharmaceutical companies benefit from keeping drugs illegal.  They get jobs, prestige, bribes and excuses for otherwise inexcusable behaviour (privacy and human-rights violations, for instance); these private interests tend to Trump (pardon the expression) the public interest.
2) The taxes "saved" by illegal businesses (and corrupt officials) would, if collected, easily pay for the costs of regulation, rehabilitation and health care for addicts, general drug education, cut costs for the legal system (and social services for the spouses and children of jailed offenders) and provide a healthy surplus for other uses.
3) The endless and odious "moralizing" about the weakness of addicts and the thrill of punishing them for it would, perhaps, fade and do less to undermine the reputation of Christianity.”

Brian Ames: “The best way to stop illicit drug use is NOT TO TAKE THEM! If you know that by taking a drug, regardless of where you are or with whomever or what you are trying to prove, will kill you, and you still take it, then good luck!  Please do not ask me to bail you out if you survive by opening rehab clinics or whatever. Take responsibility for your own actions!”

David Gilchrist wrote a long and passionate letter, of which I can only use a few excerpts: “I have a serious question about ‘Safe Injection Sites’ being a good thing. It seems to me it condones the behaviour of those who chose to start taking something they knew to be illegal, without doing anything to free them from dependancy.

            “We forget that there are leaders who really do care about consequences, and do their best to prevent people getting into dangerous behaviour. There were some very good reasons why Prohibition was tried as an attempt to solve the tragedies in society created by alcohol. The fact that it was not a successful effort doesn’t mean that it was a stupid idea…”

            David suggested the education and research into why people seem to need mood-enhancing drugs, could be useful

            “I have not done any study into ‘drugs’; but I did for alcohol early in my ministry:

(a)approximately 1 in 10 Caucasians (different for other races) have a brain chemistry that will inevitably lead to alcoholism if alcohol is used for anything more than the small amount common to some religious rites.

(b)that this is most frequently found among the brightest minds (highest I.Q.s) This alone might have caused many of our more brilliant minds to be more aware before ‘joining the crowd’.

            A.A. has pretty well established that (at least with alcohol) addiction can only be overcome with complete abstinence. If the same is true of ‘Safe Injection Sites’, treatment centres would make more sense.”

John Shaffer (of Auburn) had some thoughts on “ministering to both sides of a dispute.

            More failures than successes on that one.  Oppose the war in Vietnam and then try to be the pastor for those who disagree.  My only success was in Sitka, Alaska, where a pulp mill was doing damage to the environment.  Too expensive to upgrade to stronger standards, so members of my congregation went to public hearings hoping to close the mill and other members of my congregation worked at the mill.  The mill closed.  Because I encouraged the opponents privately, I was able to be the pastor to a few of the 400 people who lost their jobs.  It other words, the church was not the center of the battleground and I was able to bridge that gap by NOT taking a public position.  To do otherwise would have split the congregation.

            “Years earlier, I lost many families (in the Juneau-Douglas Parish) over the Vietnam issue by taking a clear public position.  My governing body allowed me to ring the church bell in grief over the dying in Vietnam (on both sides) on a vote of 3-2.  That was a lesson:  don't miss a church board meeting.  Something significant might come up.”

A Mr. Milne-Ives (no first name given) wrote, “I accept many of the points you make, but I think you oversimplify the issue of addiction with the assertion that... ‘Addiction is not, in itself, an evil. Many business leaders enjoy daily doses of alcohol. Your surgeon may have a heroin addiction; your accountant may rely on cocaine to keep going; your child’s teacher may smoke pot to unwind. That doesn’t stop them from doing their job.’

            “We all need basic biological conditions, such as oxygen to breathe, liquid water to drink, food to eat, conditions of temperature and pressure within tolerance ranges for our type of organism...  As social primates, we add to those individual biological needs a few additional psychological needs… These needs don't constitute addictions, except in a trivial sense. In this context, addiction describes psycho/physio-logical dysfunction that, while not evil in itself, can readily lead the addict into behaviour that has evil consequences.

            “A surgeon addicted to heroin [or] an accountant who relies on cocaine to keep going’ would not be able to perform to the minimum standards of professional competence for any length of time. The examples of alcohol and marijuana don't necessarily entail addiction; if someone can stop taking either of these without physiological or psychological distress, they are not addicted. Clearly, there are many who are addicted to alcohol, and probably many who are addicted to marijuana.  There might be rare individuals who can use heroin or cocaine without become addicted, but I think this is not generally the case.”

Rob Brown added further dimensions: “I’ve been struggling to make sense of your column, both personally and professionally Some details to put my thinking in context:

1. I live with chronic pain. All day, every day. It does not let up, unless I take something to calm it down.

2. I need opioid medications— prescription narcotics —  in order to function in the world.

3. That is partly because I have used other medications to deal with my pain in the past; as a result I live with chronic kidney disease and chronic liver disease.

4. I feel like having a prescription for narcotics is like having a loaded gun in my hands. I know how dangerous these can be, and I’m uneasy.

5. I worry that, if we change the rules covering narcotic prescriptions, I may not be able to get the medications I need in order to function reasonably in the world.

            Not exactly minor considerations.

            You list two groups of people who die.

Those who have been at a party, and taken something they thought was safe.

Those who  been using drugs for years, with no ill effects. And then one day, it kills them.

But you forgot a third group: the people who are perhaps new to opioid medications, and who figure that if one pill is good, two will be better.

            “Actually, people in the second and third groups likely got their medication by prescription from a doctor, though some in the second group may be using street drugs, illegally.

            “Which, I think, leads BC’s medical health officer to observe: ‘You move very, very slowly, even when you’re trying to be helpful.’ You don’t want to cut off people who have a solid medical reason for using the drugs.”

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TECHNICAL STUFF

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PROMOTION STUFF…

Ralph Milton ’s latest project is called “Sing Hallelujah” -- the world’s first video hymnal. It consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at www.singhallelujah.ca

Ralph’s HymnSight webpage is still up, http://www.hymnsight.ca, with a vast gallery of photos you can use to enhance the appearance of the visual images you project for liturgical use (prayers, responses, hymn verses, etc.)

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Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, www.traditionaliconoclast.com

Alva Wood’s satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town -- not particularly religious, but fun; alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.

Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatso@gmail.com or twatson@sentex.net