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18
Oct
2022
Sunday October 16, 2022
It was painful, watching Andrea Skinner, the interim chair of Hockey Canada’s Board of Directors, as the Parliamentary Committee on Canadian Heritage grilled her mercilessly about charges that Hockey Canada had covered up a gang rape.
Skinner squirmed like a worm impaled on a hook as she tried to defend the indefensible.
I don’t need to go into the details. In broad terms, as everyone now knows, Hockey Canada paid out $8.9 million as hush money for 21 sexual assault accusations since 1989.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Hockey Canada, sexual assault, cover-up
Thursday October 13, 2022
I can picture it clearly. A heavy wood picnic table, cut from raw logs, varnished, perched on a point of land sticking out into the Skeena river. Four of us eat ham-and-lettuce sandwiches – me and my wife and our two children, both under six years age.
I can’t remember exactly when this happened. But I can date it fairly accurately. Because our car is a bright yellow 1962 Plymouth Valiant.
Why do I remember that? It has no relevance to anything in my current life. It simply exists in the hard drive of my mind.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: memories, filing, erasing
unday October 9, 2022
Could Jesus have been wrong? This is not a hypothetical question. It bears strongly on how we can – or should, or might – respond to a variety of current controversies.
Could Jesus be wrong? The mind boggles. Christian faith worldwide is founded on the conviction that Jesus must have been right, regardless.
Now, there are certainly things that Jesus said and did that stretch our credulity. Walking on water, for example. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t work. But we rationalize away that experimental failure, by arguing either that it’s a skill limited to the divine, or that it proves our lack of faith.
But then there are those troublesome parables.
Tags: Trump, Jesus, parables, wrong
Thursday September 28, 2022
There was a fad, a few years ago – maybe there still is – about going on silent retreat. Spending an hour, a day, or a week, alone, in silence. To get in touch with yourself.
I’m not sure what that would do for me.
I live in silent retreat. I live alone, since Joan died. I don’t have the radio or TV on during the day – I don’t like disembodied voices nattering away in the background. I don’t wear earbuds. I don’t sink into my cellphone.
How would a silent retreat differ?
Tags: Retreats. silence
Sunday October 2, 2022
Friday September 30 was Orange Shirt Day, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
Forty years ago, such an event would have been unthinkable.
And then, in March 1985, a woman named Alberta Billie did the unthinkable. She told a meeting of the United Church of Canada’s Executive that the church should apologize for its role in running “Indian” residential schools.
A little more than a year later, on August 15, 1986, the church’s moderator, the Rev. Bob Smith, led the church in Canada’s first-ever apology to Canada’s indigenous peoples.
Tags: United Church of Canada, apology, Indian, Sudbury, consensus