Archive for the ‘truth’ Tag
“Today, we don’t know the full extent of the coronavirus pandemic or its future impact on transnational economics, government, or societies.
But we do know that things we believed impossible became possible overnight.”
Rose Marie Berger, Sojourners magazine, July 2020, page 17
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“Inner peace will always be compromised until we recognize and affirm that we cannot be ruled by our fears but only by our hopes.”
Peter J. Gomes in The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus, p. 101
Salmon and the circle of life
By Jim Taylor – September 26, 2018
The conference hall was packed full. Five hundred people leaned forward to watch as an elder from a First Nations community along the B.C. coast moved down the aisle towards the microphones on stage. His red-and-black blanket cloak swished as he walked; the mother-of-pearl buttons adorning it flashed back at the spotlights following him.
This happened long before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called for better relationships with Canada’s indigenous peoples. But the church, my church, was making its first tentative moves towards that goal.
The old man – he may not actually have been old, but he was older than I was, and he had a deeply weathered face – climbed the stairs onto the stage. He took the microphone from its stand. He held it to his mouth.
We waited, breathlessly, for his words of wisdom.
“We are the salmon,” he said.
Then he put the microphone back, and left the stage.
Well, that may not have been exactly how it happened. But that’s how I remember it. Because anything else, after that opening statement, was padding.
“We are the salmon” said it all.
The annual salmon run up B.C. rivers defined the circle of his people’s lives. The food that fed them. The culture that sustained them. The myths and legends that shaped them.
They and the salmon were one body, indivisible.
All are one
We who live in an industrial cocoon are slowly learning that truth. Life has no individual components. You can’t treat the salmon, the forest, or bears and wolves, in isolation. They are one integrated whole.
Botanists wondered why the spruce and firs along spawning rivers grew taller, stronger, than forests a mere hundred metres further back. They found it’s because of the salmon. Bears catch the salmon, drag their catch back into the woods, leave the remains under the trees.
The rotting fish fertilize the trees. The forest, in turn, controls water flow into the stream. Provide shade to control the stream temperature. Shelter the bears who catch the salmon.
It is a single interlocking circle of life, and death, and new life.
This year is supposed to be a dominant sockeye run for the Adams River, possibly the finest display of spawning salmon in the entire province. At its peak, 10 million deep red salmon look like a solid mass filling the river’s pools.
But only about two out of every 100 fertilized eggs will survive a winter in the river gravels, a year in fresh water, the long migration down to the ocean, two years roaming wild in the Pacific, and then 500 kilometres back up the rushing Fraser, Thompson, and Adams river to spawn and start the cycle again.
The river flow, the forests along the river banks, the sediment runoff, even the smells in the water that the salmon follow to their home ground – all can be affected by as little as a slight change in temperature.
Tinkering with one variable in the great equation of life affects the total outcome.
Including the lives of the People of the Salmon.
It took me more than 500 words to express that concept. It took the elder in his buttoned blanket only four.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved.
To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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Sally McLean was arrested after she refused to leave the Ontario legislature’s public gallery in an act of protest. This courageous 73 year-old woman explains why she thinks she is obligated to stand up for democracy, and against injustice.
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Saudi dust-up defines our core values
By Jim Taylor, August 12, 2018
Take Responsibility
We Canadians live in such a comfortable cocoon. Because we have a government and social culture that is, for the most part, rational and compassionate, we look askance at the political infighting and partisan loyalties that afflict our neighbour to the south.
We find it hard to believe that 300-million presumably right-minded people – those who qualify to sit on a jury – allow themselves to be governed by a man who doesn’t seem to know the truth from one hour to the next, and who takes umbrage at the least of slights.
“Umbrage” –to take offence, to react strongly. It implies flying off the handle at minor slights. But recent events suggest we Canadians have tunnel vision. Obsessed with President Tweet, we have ignored an even more explosive personality on the international stage: Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
The National Post’s Terry Glavin describes him as “a chubby 32-year-old war criminal with a taste for fine art, French mansions, and luxury yachts, [who] launched a barbaric bombing campaign in Yemen that has resulted in the deaths of at least 15,000 people and has left half the population of that desperately poor country at the brink of famine.”
Retaliation rampant
The furore started when Canada sent a tweet that said, “Canada is gravely concerned about additional arrests of civil society and women’s rights activists in #SaudiArabia…. We urge the Saudi authorities to immediately release them and all other peaceful #humanrightsactivists.
The vehemence of bin Salman’s response outdid even Trump’s tantrums.
He immediately:
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expelled Canada’s ambassador;
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froze new trade with Canada;
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ordered his global asset managers to dispose of their Canadian equities, bonds and cash holdings “no matter the cost”;
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pulled 16,000 Riyadh-funded students out of Canadian universities and medical schools;
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transferred Saudi patients receiving medical care out of Canadian hospitals;
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suspended Saudi Arabian Airlines flights to Toronto;
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and stopped buying barley and wheat from Canada.
He also accused Canada of meddling in his sovereign nation’s internal affairs. His anger ignores the fact that the Canadian tweet used a relatively diplomatic term, “urge.” It didn’t “demand,” it didn’t “insist.” It also specifically referred to “peaceful” activists.
Should Canada have made its view known through traditional diplomatic channels? Possibly. Although Trump has pretty much rendered conventional diplomacy obsolete with his own inflammatory tweets.
Like Trump, bin Salman takes any criticism of his policies personally.
Saudi Foreign Minister Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir ruled out mediation. He warned of further measures to further punish Canada. It was Canada’s fault, he said: “There is nothing to mediate. A mistake has been made and a mistake should be corrected.”
Different sets of values
How can a simple – and relatively mild – tweet lead to such a conflagration? Basically, think, we misread the core beliefs of the Saudi ruling family. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, the ultimate patriarchy. As such, it bans political activism. It deals harshly with dissidents. One of the activists for whom Canada pleaded has been sentenced to 100 lashes and ten years in prison.
Last month, it crucified – yes, crucified! – a man convicted of theft, murder, and attempted rape.
Earlier this year, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman did permit women to drive — the last country in the world to do so. But many of the those who campaigned for women’s right to drive have since been arrested and imprisoned.
In the same way, though, the Crown Prince failed to recognize Canadian core beliefs.
The new national religion
As reader Steve Roney, currently teaching in the United Arab Emirates, pointed out recently, we no longer expect to impose our religion, Christianity, on other nations. But we will not tolerate their rejection of our science, our technology (including medicine), and especially our human rights. These have become an unofficial religion in Canada.
We expect any nation, anywhere, to welcome our polio vaccines. Our mines. Our money. And whether it’s Indigenous peoples in Canada, victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, slaves in Sudan, or young girls facing genital mutilation in Somalia, human rights are sacred.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared, “Canadians have always expected our government to speak strongly, firmly, clearly and politely about the need to respect human rights at home and around the world… We will continue to stand up for Canadian values and indeed for universal values and human rights at any occasion.”
Trudeau is right not to back down. If human rights are indeed our new religion, they are not negotiable. Canada must speak up in their favour. Even if taking a stand has economic consequences.
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Copyright © 2018 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
Barbara Ehrenreich has taught me some important lessons about how western society works, or doesn’t. I particularly appreciated her book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2001), because she allowed me to vicariously experience what life is like for those who are precariously employed, for example.
When I encountered a review of her latest book, Natural Causes: The Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, I was eager to read what the reviewer had to say. I was not disappointed, even though the topic of Ehrenreich’s book is not my first choice of reading material.
At one point Victoria Sweet, a medical doctor herself, writes about Ehrenreich’s take on our attitudes:
“In her new book, Barbara Ehrenreich ventures into the fast-growing literature on aging, disease, and death, tracing her own disaffection with a medical and social culture unable to face mortality. She argues that what “makes death such an intolerable prospect” is our belief in a reductionist science that promises something it cannot deliver—ultimate control over our bodies. The time has come to rethink our need for such mastery, she urges, and reconcile ourselves to the idea that it may not be possible.”
Check out the full review of Natural Causes, as printed in The Atlantic, at:
” It’s all about opening, really. When I open myself to the world and its possibilities – even its hurts – I become whole. But when I choose to close, my life becomes fraught with struggle. Everything I do becomes about shielding myself rather than inviting good energy to fill me. Everything is energy, so I try to let the negative pass through me, rather than holding on to it.”
Richard Wagamese in his book, “Embers”, page 112
Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners lives in Washington, D.C. That is true.
However, there seems to be some debate beginning about what is true these days, and what is not. This applies to politics in Canada, and possibly elsewhere. I can only speak from my experience of politics in the country where I live.
“According to Stanley Hauerwas, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught us that politics “can never be divorced from truth.” Indeed, Hauerwas maintains that Bonhoeffer believed that “cynicism is the vice that fuels the habits to sustain a politics that disdains the truth.”
The paragraph above is a quote from a posting by Rev. Jim Wallis, the title of which is “Christians” Call to Speak Truth to “Alternate Facts“. Wallis examines what role Christians may have in the coming days, and years, as he makes the following observation:
Christians are called many times in the Scriptures to be truth-tellers and to reject falsehoods, from scriptural commandments against bearing false witness to Paul’s exhortation in Ephesians 4:
“We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ…. So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.”
Yes, I believe that we are all in this together. As The New Creed in the United Church of Canada says, “We are not alone. Thanks be to God!”
The full column by Rev. Jim Wallis, from Washington, is available at:
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