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29
Dec
2019
When the streets get icy in winter, I walk more carefully. Especially after the snowplow has gone by, and polished the fresh snow into a surface as slick as anything created by a Zamboni. I can’t take the risk of stepping forward and having my heel skid.
The more slippery the surface, the shorter the steps I take.
And when I’m going down a slope, I employ something like a curler’s slither. I don’t lift my feet at all.
The length of my stride is directly related to my confidence in myself.
“Walking,” Paul Salopek explained in National Geographic, “is falling forward.”
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: walking, Salopek, National Geographic, confidence
26
‘Twas the day after Christmas, and all over the floor
lay the littered remains of the day just before…
That’s a cynical view of Christmas. No presents left under the tree, just bags of tattered Christmas wrapping to go into recycling. The carcass of leftover turkey lurks in the refrigerator. The music channel has put Christmas albums away for another year and gone back to golden oldies.
There’s not much left of Christmas.
Or is there?
I rather like the idea that the walls of an opera house might somehow still resonate to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s soaring soprano. That a sports stadium might remember Roger Banister’s Miracle Mile. That a street in Jerusalem might remember Jesus’ sandaled feet.
Because that means something isn’t over, just because it’s over.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Christmas, memory, Christopher Plummer, Bruce McLeod
22
Today is the last Sunday before Christmas. I can confidently predict that every Christian congregation -- and possibly those of other religions too -- will hear a sermon about the birth of Jesus.
I can also predict some of the themes of those sermons.
Some will use Mary’s status to urge people to do something about poverty. Or about justice. Or perhaps about historic discrimination against women. The Christmas story becomes a means of getting at a social issue.
Others will use a series of carefully selected Bible verses to prove, beyond any doubt, that God Almighty became a helpless crying baby. And/or that biblical prophets knew all the details of an obscure birth that would take place 500 years later.
And therefore, by extension, that every other word in the Holy Book must also be 100% accurate.
A friend and retired preacher calls all of this “head stuff.” It’s wonderful material to argue about. But it makes no difference at all to how you drive on the highway. Or how you treat the cashier at the grocery store.
Tags: Michael Dowd, Evolution, brains, belonging
20
Sam Steele still makes headlines. Steele is, of course, the legendary hero of the RCMP who brought law and order to the Canadian West.
Although the RCMP -- the Royal Canadian Mounted Police -- didn’t exist yet. And the “West” wasn’t fully Canada yet.
But Steele was certainly a real person. As a staff-sergeant in the North West Mounted Police, which later became the RCMP, he ended the Riel Rebellion in the last formal battle fought on Canadian soil.
Steele established the first NWMP fort west of the Rockies at Galbraith’s Ferry -- since renamed Fort Steele in his honour.
And he went on from there to the Yukon Territory, where the discovery of gold launched the famous Klondike Gold Rush. Thousands of gold-hungry gun-totin’ Americans flooded north. Steele made his own laws. By requiring every person entering the Yukon to bring along a ton of supplies, he prevented the Yukon from turning into the OK Corral North.
But he’s back. By a circuitous chain of ironies.
Tags: RCMP, Sam Steele, uniforms, copyright
15
don’t see many Christmas cards these days. Between Facebook and email, religious cards with traditional nativity scenes have become less popular.
But the scenes themselves haven’t changed much. A mother and child. Sometimes with a father, sometimes not. Sometimes with animals and a stable, sometimes not. Sometimes with shepherds; sometimes with visiting Magi.
And the child is always holy.
But how does an artist paint holiness?
It’s easy to draw a baby. It’s not as easy to show that baby as God embodied.
The Christian church has historically claimed that God – also known as Father, Almighty, Creator, all-knowing, immortal, unchanging – became a human infant. Who is none of those things. At least, not yet.
Tags: Nativity, artists, paintings