Author Archives: Gillian

The Year in Review

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This year…

January… I didn’t do much other than school. But I did spend some time wandering around Chinatown with my camera.

February… I caved and went over to check out all the fuss around the Olympics. I ended up wandering around with my friend Clare and bumped into a bunch of other people I knew. It was cold, grey, and wet, but now I can say I’ve been to the Olympics.

March… I, and some others, did a series of interactive, contemporary reworking of the Stations of the Cross as an installation in the south lawn of the Cathedral. It was really well received and quite impacting for those of us who created it as well.

April… My cousin got married! I went to Montreal for the wedding.

May… The conference I spent far too many hours working on finally happened on my birthday. I got to have a birthday lunch with Brian McLaren!

June… I went to Portland for an Episcopal Church mission conference. I road-tripped down and had a lot of fun!

July… spur-of-the-moment trip to France! On my friend’s boat! Viva la France!

August… I finally got to Symphony Splash on the long weekend. The Victoria Symphony plays a concert from a barge in the middle of the Inner Harbour. We sat on the lawn of the Legislature for the show. It culminates with the 1812 Overture, complete with fireworks shot off from one of the Navy boats.

September… I didn’t take many pictures. I didn’t do much other than school. I did pick a lot of blackberries though.

October… Also took very few photos…


November… Jen and I went to San Francisco!

December… It snowed in Victoria again! And I went to Edmonton for Christmas.

Eclipsed: Who Has Seen the Moon?

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I remember the first lunar eclipse I saw. I was young, I don’t remember how old. Young enough that Dad would still pick me up and hold me in his arms.

We lived on Bleecker still, in Belleville. My room was the bedroom across the hallway from my parent’s bedroom.

My parent’s bedroom had a little balcony off of it. It was over top of the sunroom, what had been an old porch when they moved into the house. I am not sure if the balcony was there when they bought the house, but it was a great thing to have when I was younger. I recall many lunch times sitting up there with Mum and Jen in lawn chairs. I guess it got more sun than the front porch and the garden.

I remember one evening being woken up by Mum or Dad. They brought me out onto that porch off of their room and Dad pointed up at the sky.

The moon was gone. Hidden behind the shadow of the earth. Or at least that is what I know now.

I don’t remember if I was given an explanation of what was going on. I just remember the wonder of the full moon disappearing.

The next morning, pictures of the eclipse were on the front page of the Belleville Intelligencer. I felt important at school for having been up to witness it happen in real time.

* * * *

It was an overcast day all day today in Victoria, nearly the other side of the country from my first lunar eclipse sighting. The clouds cleared up just long enough to watch the moon disappear. Then they rolled back in again.

If the moon has reappeared, I cannot say.

Advent 4

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We believe that God is present in the darkness before dawn;
in the waiting and uncertainty where fear and courage join hands,
conflict and caring link arms, and the sun rises over barbed wire.

 

We believe in a with-us God who sits down in our midst to share our humanity.
We affirm a faith that takes us beyond a safe place:
into action, into vulnerability and onto the streets.

We commit ourselves to work for change and put ourselves on the line;
to bear responsibility, takes risks, live powerfully and face humiliation;
to stand with those on the edge;
to choose life and be used by the Spirit
for God’s new community of hope. Amen.

from our Affirmation of Faith this Sunday

Advent

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Breathe out empty yourself: of hate, of fear, of anxiety
Breathe in fill yourself with love, with life, with mercy
Breathe out empty yourself of busyness, of selfishness of greed
Breathe in fill yourself with peace, with joy, with hope
Breathe out empty yourself of idolatry, of self worship, of false gods
Breathe in fill yourself with God, with Christ, with the Holy Spirit

from jonny baker.

Crazy Relatives

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I’ve learned that one of the biggest indicators for success in life is having a few crazy relatives. So long as you get only some of the crazy genes, you don’t end up crazy; you merely end up different. And it’s that difference that gives you an edge, that makes you successful.

Douglas Coupland, Player One

Not meant to be a specific autobiographical commentary. Unless you’re a relative and you want it to be.

Back to Community

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Back on the subject of community… I think I first broached here in March 2009 and it has not been far from my thoughts since then.

A friend made an interesting comment the other week. This friend is most assuredly not connected in anyway to a Christian or religious community and would likely run the other way if I were to suggest a visit to a church or meeting with too many religious folk. I, on the other hand, have never been shy to mention in my friend’s presence the fact that I have received great benefit from church communities and love being a part of one.

I tagged along to a 100-mile dinner party last weekend. It was a birthday celebration (a celebration where I did not know the birthday boy) and potluck where people were invited to bring dishes made from ingredients produced within 100 miles. It was a veritable feast and some wonderful experimentation happened. During the evening, we ate a lot of food, some excellent conversations happened and I met some very interesting people, some games were played, and then I needed to go home (1:00am is quite late when you have to be at church at 8:30am). As we were cycling away from the home where the dinner took place, my friend said something like, “Environmental people are a pretty good and responsible group to spend time with. It is the best community to be a part of.” I know I am off on the wording, but the gist of what I took from the statement was a gybe directed at religious groups (a fairly common occurrence in our discussions) and a statement advocating community and belonging.

Here we had, on a Saturday night, a group of about 20 young adults, in the 24-30 range, gathering together to share around something they are passionate about. There was good and engaging discussion. There was food. There was a common purpose. It was fun.

But it also felt like it was lacking. Yes, I can get behind no-waste initiatives. I can agree with a moratorium on offshore drilling on our coastline. I am all for urban sustainability projects and food security. However for me it goes deeper than that. At the heart of all of these discussions, I always come back to Christ. Why do I care for people and for the environment? Because of my faith in God.

If I didn’t have that hope and that knowledge of my future, I am not sure that I would see the purpose of environmentalism. I would have loved for discussions at the 100-mile dinner to go beyond the surface to more fundamental questions of life and belonging. These questions need to include discussing how we relate to and deal with the environment, however they cannot be isolated to them. These are questions that are best answered in community because community can be the core force needed to jump-start any initiatives. Community strengthens, supports, challenges, and encourages. We need more of these types of communities – with Christ at the centre – that are unafraid to challenge the status quo on all issues. That is a community I would be a part of.

Lottery of Life

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Some hard-hitting images from Save the Children UK this year. They were brought to my attention by Mike at Waving or Drowning.

He writes about blessing and cursing. Namely, how we talk about how “blessed” we are to live in the place where we do. The converse of this is that we somehow say that those who live in less wonderful places are somehow cursed. While I hadn’t thought about this dichotomy before, at least not the way Mike describes it, I have definitely experienced a bad taste in my mouth when we talk about how blessed we are and how much God has blessed us to live where we do…

Check out their campaign at The Lottery of Life. If I were born today, I would have a minuscule chance of being born as a Canadian: I can’t even see Canada on the wheel as a percentage of world population. Today, I’d have a much better chance of of being born in China, India, Nigeria, or Mexico. The interesting thing is, regardless of which country you end up in, there are issues that need to be dealt with in each place. While we might be “blessed” in Canada, there are still issues that need to be dealt with. We are amongst the worst in the developed world at dealing with our environmental issues. Our First Peoples are routinely marginalized. I walk downtown and see dozens of people asking for money, for food, offering work for food, desiring a place to live. The cold snap of a few weeks ago brought to the forefront our inability to house everyone in this city. Our foodbanks cannot keep up with demand and the foodbank at the university is the emptiest it has ever been. We have kids killing themselves because of bullying… or kids being killed by bullies.

No, we do not have land mines to be wary of when we go for a walk in the meadow or down by the ocean. No, we do not have armed rebel groups or rioting after electoral fraud (we just have two leader-less political parties and plenty of in-fighting). But we are not all there and there is a lot of work to be done. Are we blessed? Yes… but not to the exclusion of everyone else.