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28
Dec
2016
“Car Crash Changed His Life Forever,” declared a pre-Christmas headline. The story below the headline described the effects of the accident on a young father. Brain damage affected his employability, family income, etc.
The story was, of course, intended to elicit support for regional Food Banks. Christmas brings out heart-tugging stories as surely as silver bells, Santa hats, and plum pudding.
I don’t mean to disparage efforts to help the unfortunate. Nor do I want to make light of this particular father’s predicament. But I did find myself wondering, as I read the headline, why only the major crises, the tragedies, are considered to “change life forever.”
It’s worth considering, as we move into a new calendar year.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags:
25
Last autumn, I bought a copy of John Cobb’s book, “Jesus’ Abba.” Cobb argues (as do I, sometimes) that over the centuries the institutional church has smothered the close relationship Jesus obviously had with his Abba by turning a loving Daddy into a distant and autocratic God-The-Father-Almighty.
But it was Cobb’s subtitle that caught me: “The God who has not failed.”
I heard myself asking, why can’t God fail? Or, perhaps more precisely, why are we not willing to let God fail?
Categories: Sharp Edges
21
During the next week, families will gather. Most likely for a festive dinner – often turkey and trimmings. Perhaps just for gift giving. But they’ll want to get together.
The ritual is reflected in the songs of the season. “I’ll be home for Christmas.” “There’s no place like home for the holidays.” Other songs evoke nostalgic images: chestnuts roasting on an open fire, sleigh bells ringing, stockings hung by the chimney with care….
Satirists love to skewer the sentimentality of Christmas rituals. Families sit “in old stone circles,” wrote the Irish poet W.R. Rodgers, cracking open “the tinned milk of human kindness.”
Because, to be honest about it, not all Christmas gatherings are harmonious. Some families are, and will always be, dysfunctional. Members dread getting together. They know old wounds will be torn open, old scars exposed, old grievances rekindled.
Tags: Christmas gathering
18
Apparently, we have entered a “post-fact world”. A couple of news stories used that term this past week.
Post fact. Not just post truth. Post truth simply implies that there is no absolute truth anymore. All truths are relative. Your truth was shaped by your society, your education, your life experience – it was, therefore, just as true for you as my truth was for me.
But those relative truths were always tempered by reality.
That’s not how it works in a post-fact world. The new criteria become – Who says it? How often? How loudly?
Tags: reality, Trump
14
Around Christmas in North America, children (and many adults) hang their hopes on a man with a white beard.
In the war-torn Middle East, they’re more likely to hang their hopes on men in white helmets.
The White Helmets are standard construction-worker hard hats. The men need those helmets, because they go into places where no North American construction worker would venture. Into shattered buildings, where concrete block walls teeter. Where floors have collapsed, trapping victims beneath tons of rubble. Where snipers’ bullets fly, and unexploded bombs await the unwary.
In Syria, the White Helmets – officially the Syrian Defence Force -- have saved at least 70,000 lives, and probably many more.
Tags: hope, mercy, rescue