Book 4 of 2014 Who's Got Time?

I was intrigued when this one came out but it was not then available as an e-book (at least not on KOBO, it might have been on Kindle).  So I had to wait.

Then one day I was browsing and happened to check again.  Bingo!

As it happens, this would have come in really handy last fall when I was leading an adult CE session on spiritual practices (though none of the participants nor the leader would qualify as young adults anymore).

I liked this book.  I could well see myself suggesting it to someone who is searching for spiritual practices that suit their schedule.  While I read it straight through I would actually suggest people pop around in it as the chapter titles draw their attention.

And I am wondering if I can just assign the final chapter to folks to read in lieu of a stewardship program......

Book 3 of 2014 The Fellowship of the Ring

Now be honest, you all saw this coming right????

To be honest I pondered this post.  Is LOTR one book or three (or possibly 6 since each volume is divided into 2 books)?

So what are the highlights of the first volume?

One is the idea of fate/doom/destiny.  Gandalf says the Bilbo was meant to find the ring.  When Frodo offers to take the ring to Mount Doom Elrond it is suggested that this is how it was meant to be.  When the company opts to go through Moria Aragorn foretells the fall of Gandalf.  What is Tolkien saying about fate?  What is he saying about foretelling?

Another is the idea of the epic.  Not only the epic being told now but how that epic ties in with what has gone before.  This story may stand alone, but the characters in it are clearly linking to the epics that have gone before.  This is a wonderful sense and understanding of how we relate with history.

AS I mentioned previously, I first started reading LOTR when I was in Grade 4.  Over the next decade I read it almost once a year.  What fascinates me is that I was always finding new things, making new connections in each of those readings.  Which of course is part of why I can continue to read it.  Earlier today I saw a CS Lewis quote on Twitter:

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.

Lord of the Rings certainly meets that description.   (As does Lewis' Narnia series for that matter)

And as it happens, I have used LOTR for two papers.  One was my final/major paper for English 30 in Grade 12, where I explored some of the thematic elements in the novel (I know I gave particular emphasis on the ideas of light and dark).  The other was in my first year of seminary, where I wrote a paper on Christology as found in the book.

And now I should relly finish one of the non-Tolkien books I have going.....

Friday 5 -- Encounters

It has been an epoch since I have done a Friday Five...

Over at the RGBP site we have this prompt:

In this week some of us are preaching about a woman who encounters Jesus at the well, please name five encounters in your life leading to unexpected results. They might include learning a new skill, making a friend, falling in love, discerning a call or anything around or far off from those ideas.

1. I have told this story before, but it just fits so well.  After all, who goes to a Presbytery meeting to find a spouse?  But that is what happened to me at the first Presbytery meeting after I started in ministry. 
2. When I was in Grade 5 there was a chance to take part in the production of A Christmas Carol.  I decided I would, had never done anything like it before (and ended up playing Scrooge).  And from then until the end of high School being involved in theatre was one of the things that saved my sanity (such as it is) and indeed my became my major in university.
3. I needed a summer job.  ANd I had fond memories of having gone when I was a child.  So I applied for a job at Camp Maskepetoon.  There is a very direct (if not exactly straight) line between that choice and where I am now.
4. It was for Integration Seminar, a class in social ministry in my 2nd year at St. Andrew's.  Part of the class was to volunteer at a social agency.  I met with the Placement Co-Ordinator and we decided a good place for me was the Saskatoon Crisis Nursery.  In the end it may not have been the best placement for me to meet the goals of the place and my own learning needs (though those learning needs may not have been met in any placement as it is probable I was not yet ready to face my demons), but that experience prepared me for the time two years later when I needed a job and got a job at an equivalent agency in Edmonton -- Kids Kottage and spent almost 3 years there.
5. Wandering through the mall in Atikokan during my first 6 months of ministry the Catholic Deacon called me over to have coffee.  Did I know that that coffee group would become my main non-church contact point for the next 9 years? But it did.

Book 2 of of 2014 The Hobbit

It was the fall of 1978.  I was in Grade 4.  Our teacher had a practise whereby the first block of time after lunch on Friday's he would read to us, generally a whole chapter.  The first book he read to us that year was The Hobbit.  So began my love affair with Middle-Earth.

As it happened, my dad had (and still has) a box set of Tolkien books on the shelf at home (which I think was fairly new at the time) and so as I grew tired of the chapter a week pace I started to read the book by myself.  I quickly passed the out-loud reading and was well into Lord of the Rings by the time Mr Davies finished the book in the class.

I have, of course, read the book many many times since then, though I think it has been 15-20 years since my last reading.

What is it about this book that makes it worth multiple readings?  Is it the story?  Partly  Is it Bilbo's growth over his "There and Back Again"?  Partly  But there is just something that grabs me, just as it grabbed me 25 years ago.  Once again I eagerly traveled from Bag End and the Unexpected Party to Rivendell, to the Halls of the Elven-King, to the Lonely Mountain.  Yes I knew what was coming.  But still it is worth reading.  It is, after all, a classic.

Now I just have to find a way to convince the girls to let me read it to them.......

Book 1 of 2014 --The Silmarillion

AS I mentioned in the previous post, on the first Tuesday of this year I discovered a series of Webinars dealing with Unfinished Tales by JRR Tolkien.  AS I was watching the first one I thought to myself "it has been too long since I read those books".  And so one of my goals for the year was formed....

Where do you start when sitting down to read Tolkien?  THe order in which they were published?  (WHich would be The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and then the many volumes of the History of Middle Earth series).  There is a logic to that, and certainly Hobbit is the most accessible read of the bunch.  But of course I am not a newbie to Middle Earth (my introduction to Tolkien will be discussed in the next post).  And so the next logical choice is to read the books in "chronological" order (sort of like if I read the Narnia Chronicles now I start with The Magician's Nephew but for a newbie to Narnia I would always suggest they start with The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe).

And so I went downstairs and grabbed my old, well-worn copy of The Silmarillion off the shelf.  It is the copy I received as a Christmas gift 30+ years ago.  I can not remember the last time I read the book....

For those who are less familiar, this book is the history of the First Ages of Middle Earth. It begins with Creation, and follows through the struggles of the Eldar and the Edain against Morgoth in the War of the Jewels.  Then there is an account of the downfall of Numenor, which leads directly to Elendil and his sons returning to middle-Earth and creating the realms of Gondor and Arnor.

For those who have only read The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings this is a different book.  But I like it.  It is a quick read (I started Tuesday night and finished it by the end of that week -- although the challenge in reading a book I know so well is to take the time to find new insights in it), but you get to explore the grey-ness of an epic struggle between good and evil over a number of fields and ages.  And it sets the stage for what comes after...

Gift? Punishment? Blessing? Burden?

Which of those things is death?

Earlier this month I stumbled on to Mythgard Academy.  Both of the last two Tuesdays I have sat in on the free webinars (or at least the beginning of them before having to play chauffeur) exploring Tolkien's Unfinished Tales.  A comment made in the second one sparked the thoughts leading to this post.

But first I think we need some background....

In the mythology of Middle Earth as presented in the Silmarillion, there are two races who are referred to as the Children of Iluvatar.  These are Elves and Men.  Elves are immortal, unless they are slain they will live forever.  Men are mortal. Not only do they die of old age but they are far more likely to die from wounds and are susceptible to illness.  It is stated, repeatedly, that this death is teh gift of Iluvatar to men.  They are not bound to the world.  Elves, it is said, grow weary of the world but are bound to it, they do not have the release of death. (It is my belief that this world-weariness is far more a fate of those elves who have left the Undying Lands to live in Middle-Earth proper and/or those who are born in Middle-Earth.  Does one grow weary of living in Paradise?)

But the nature of life is that Men have difficulty seeing death as a gift.  It seems more like an unfair burden.  And they chafe at it.  The downfall of Numenor, the island of the Gift, was brought about largely because of this issue.  The last king of Numenor, in his vanity and arrogance (and egged on by Sauron) sailed with a mighty fleet to the Undying Lands to wrest immortality from the Valar.  To be fair the Elves also have trouble understanding death as a gift, but they may not taste the bitterness of the gift quite as directly (with the notable exceptions of Luthien in the Elder Days and Arwen in the early years of the Fourth Age).

In the webinar last Tuesday the presenter mentioned that Tolkien claimed nothing in his Middle-Earth mythology was in contradiction to standard Roman Catholic theology.  It was then mentioned that questions have been raise in this regard when it comes to the idea of death as a gift (remember Silmarillion, Unfiinshed Tales, and all the other books that have come afterwards -- there are a fair number--have been published after Tolkien's death by his son Christopher so Tolkien himself has  not necessarily been a part of these discussions).  It was also mentioned that there is a hint in one of the volumes of the History of Middle Earth series of a "Garden of Eden" type of story.  So is death the Gift of Iluvatar?  Or is it a punishment because the earliest fathers of men in Middle-Earth had their own Fall at the hands/instigation of Morgoth? 

But what is the "proper" theology of death in our world?  Is death solely a punishment accruing from the Fall as described in Genesis 3, a result of having been turfed out of Eden and no longer able to access the Tree of Life?  Or have we as humans done what the men of Middle-Earth have done when it comes to death?  Have we taken something that was part of ing, part of existence, possibly even a gift and turned it into something terrible and against God's plan?

The Men of Middle-Earth, for a variety of reasons, generally see death as a burden, not a release, not a gift.  They seek ways to avoid it.  They embalm the bodies of their dead in a statement against death's bitterness.  Does this sound familiar?

What if death, particularly a natural death after a life well-lived in old age, is not the enemy?  What if death was always a part of being alive?  Not a punishment for wrongdoing, but merely a part of reality.  What if the Fall was not the beginning of death but the beginning of humanity's struggle with death?

How many people in their later years have expressed a weariness, a wondering why they are still around?  How many families, at the end, have referred to the death of a loved one, particularly after a long or trying illness, as a release or relief too long in the coming?

What if death is, in a way a gift??  A double-bladed bitter gift too be sure.  But is there a way or a time when it is a gift from God? What is the "proper" theological approach to death?

I suspect it is somewhere between simple acceptance and Dylan Thomas' admonition "Do not go gentle into that good night".  It may be part gift, part burden, depending on a variety of circumstances.  In the Appendicies of Lord of the Rings we read of the death of Aragorn.  To Aragorn is given the opportunity to embrace his death peacefully before it is forced upon him in a period of dotage.  It is bitter for Arwen to watch happen, but it is embraced peacefully as a gift.  Maybe there are times when that would in fact be healthier for us too.  SO maybe Tolkien's theology is right after all...

Book 11 of 2013 -- Pastrix

I am not big on memoirs or autobiographies (or biographies for that matter).  But when I saw some of the online comments about this one I thought it was worth a read.

And I was right.  Bolz-Weber tells her story with honesty and open-ness.  And in doing so casts a different light on the Gospel as she interacts with it.

There were a couple of times as I was reading her story that I saw a way to preach annual festivals (Baptism of Jesus and Easter) in a slightly different tack.  I especially liked her image of Jesus with the dirt of his tomb under his fingernails....

I would suggest this as a light, enjoyable, and very worthwhile read

Of Snow, and Snow and Removal thereof...

Thus far this winter it has been fairly safe to say that if it is a day ending in Y then you will need to go out and shovel....

This pile has had its top knocked off 2x this year

I first started thinking about this post 2 weeks ago when this story came out (for those readers who still think in feet and inches, 30cm=1 foot, 100cm=39 inches).

In Canadian cities (and I assume many other places) there are two favoured winter past-times.  Complaining about snow plowing/removal and complaining about property taxes.  Lots of times they get combined -- such as "for the insane amount of taxes we pay the streets should be plowed as soon as it snows".

This winter has been no exception.  But it HAS been an exceptional winter.  As the link above states, a seasonal average snowfall is 154cm.  Up to two weeks ago we already had 132.  Twice the average in November and 3x the average for December by the middle of the month (note today I found this story which shows we have had another 35 or so centimeters in the last 2 weeks -- much of it in the last week, as the snow pile beside our fence shows).  A week before Christmas I heard someone who was born and raised here say that the snow piles looked normal--for March.

This pile had been completely cleared on Saturday afternoon (and does not include last night's dump of 4 inches or so)

So in an area that averages 154cm of snow in a winter we have now had about 177cm in two months.  Would anybody care to guess what people's opinions on snow plowing are?

Well I am sure there are a lot of people being realistic and fair....

I KNOW there are a lot of people whose expectations are, well, unrealistic.  Yes snow removal is not happening nearly as fast as anyone (including the city) would like.  But when it never stops coming what can you do?

THe city has a fairly logical plan that they do Priority 1 and 2 roads (arterials, bus routes that sort of thing) first and then start working their way through the residential streets.  And in a normal year they hope to get to all residential streets 3 times (they even post the rotation so folks can see what order neighbourhoods are being done in and where they are at in the cycle).  Makes perfect sense to me.  Of course the job is not made easier by the large number of people who (for whatever reason) park on the street, even when signage says not to to allow for snow clearing or by the fact that in most of the city the sidewalk is right on the street so all the snow needs to be piled into windrows and trucked away, or piled on the sidewalk (which has a whole set of other problems) rather than being piled on a boulevard.  And of course when it never seems to stop snowing then you never get past Priority 1 or 2 roadways anyway (and Priority 2 roads, which are No Parking as snow routes Nov-May still seem to have lots of cars on them)

But there seem to be a whole bunch of people who expect residential streets to be done within 48 hours of a snowfall.  And so as December rolled on and some places had not seen a plow at all after 132 cm of snow there was a lot of flak.  So the city instituted a temporary solution.  To get streets passable they would do a quick plow, with the goal to get the surface flat not go down to pavement, and leave piles on sidewalks and driveways for residents to clear.  And while some people applauded that emergency measures were being taken (and I for one would argue that they could/should have made that decision a week earlier) it just gave some people something else to whine about.

But hear is the thing.  No matter how much snow falls there are only so many plowing hours available.  Drivers need days off.  You can only clear so much roadway an hour.  and the equipment and wages that are used for snow removal are paid by taxes.  So you can not logically complain about needing more service and ask to pay less taxes in the same sentence.  Right?

And well I do believe there is a time for debate the snow removal plan and discuss whether it is adequate, no plan would match a year like this. I would suggest that the city is too reliant on contractors in an average year as it is, which means that in a year like this you have already tapped the resources that are available, so it is hard to ramp up even more.  So yes, maybe there is a discussion to be held -- though at the same time I have seen an improvement in snow removal each of the last two years.  But despite what some people seem to want, it is not responsible to plan so that in the exceptional year you can provide the same level of service as an average* year--then in a normal or sub-average year you have massive investments sitting idle.  And imagine the tax complaints when that happened.  I would suggest the best plan is to have a structure to deal with a "heavy average" year, with a level of resources that leaves some untapped ones in the plan to call forth in a heavier year.

In the meantime let's be thankful that we have snow plows. And that snow is not like an ice storm that throws thousands into a blackout.  And maybe someone can turn off the tap on the snow machine for a few weeks?  Please?

*I also have to mention that average is a hard thing to use in these discussions.  I assume when they say average the mean the mean which is calculated by adding however many years worth of data they are using and dividing.  I would suggest a more helpful metric would be the mode which is the most common value in the data set.  Of course if patterns are consistent both those values should be fairly close together.

Book 10 of 2013-- The Underground Church

When I read a teaser of this book, I knew that I just had to buy it...

One of my passions in ministry is the question "Who is God calling us to be?" (I believe we have to ask this both as individuals and as a collective community).  It is my fondest hope that by the time I retire I have a clue how to answer that question.  But this book helps in the search for an answer.

And I know that I have at least one sermon that will be very directly influenced
by having read this book.  A sermon on the idea that we are called to be contaminants/contagion in the world (based on the parable of the yeast in Matthew).  A sermon that is scheduled for the week that Presbytery will be present for worship.

I am not at all sure I agree with all of Meyers' points.  But I find most of what he has to say well worth a read.  In fact I am thinking that this could be a valuable resource for a book study. Hmmm, maybe that will happen....

I encourage folk to read this book.  At least those who wonder where God might be calling us to go...

Merry Christmas!!!!!

God Bless Us, Every One!