Category Archives: Life

Leaving

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IMG_0793The last few weeks have felt, as I’ve joked with friends, like my “farewell tour” of the West Coast. I spent a solid week of visiting with friends before leaving Victoria, often two-three coffee/meal dates in a day. While tiring in some ways – it was a lot of here and there – it was so much more rewarding and life-giving than a big goodbye party would have been. I cherish the chance to actually speak with people and have good conversations, and that just doesn’t happen in large settings at restaurants. Its been hard to say goodbye to the people I love and the place I have lived for so long, even though I know it is not goodbye and is more of a “see you soon”.IMG_0383 My house and belongings were packed well in advance of move day and, as I had no furniture remaining save a couple of pillows and a camping mattress, I spent much of my time at other people’s houses and in coffee shops.

I have lived in Victoria since August of 2004. Sure, there was a two year period in there where I travelled extensively around China, Europe, and then on a ship in the Pacific, but Victoria has been my home. In fact, it is the longest I have lived anywhere since my first 13 years in the small Ontario town where I was born.

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Christ Church Cathedral has been my church home and the centre of my spiritual community and the beginning of the my more recent, formal journey towards ordination, for the last five years. We said farewell last Sunday and it was tough to not know when I would be back inside that gorgeous building with all of the familiar and supportive faces of friends.

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I have spent the last five days in Vancouver, continuing the “Farewell Tour” with saying goodbye to family and to friends here before I head to Ontario tomorrow.

Today I worshipped in another Christ Church Cathedral, in Vancouver. Again, some familiar faces and familiar spaces were there to greet me.

It is bittersweet, leaving the West Coast. I love it here. I love my friends, I love my way of life. Yet I am so very excited about what the next three years in London will hold and what things I will learn and the people I will meet and, perhaps, the places I will fall in love with there. And, BC, as I have said, it is not a goodbye. It is a See You Again Soon.

(And in the meantime, I’m going to head off and eat some more fresh sushi. Again. Because you never can have enough of that on the West Coast before moving inland!)

Boxes

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I’m in the process of boxing up my life to prepare to move. The process of going from the order of my lovely little home to the chaos of packing is a little unsettling and I’m looking forward to taking this chaos and unpacking it to order when I get to London.

All of my furniture has been sold or spoken for.  My dresser is gone and my clothes and linens are in two large totes on the floor in its place. My armchair is gone. The bookshelves went in a “bookshelves for boxes” trade with some friends who moved a few months ago but needed shelves for their books. My bed is gone and I’m camped out on my very comfy thermarest. The couch will go in two weeks and then I’ll have nothing left but boxes.

Spare moments are few and far between right now, with most of them taken outside of my house: partially because of the sunshine and partially because being at home seems to mean needing to pack.

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I’m at the library right now. Well, I’m sitting right outside because I overheard staff talking about a fire drill at some point today and I thought I’d rather sit in the sunshine and use the wifi than have to pack up and move mid-way through something if the drill were to happen. There is a distinct odor of urine around me that I hope I haven’t sat on top of. I’ve seen a number of my clients walk by and passed even more on my way to the library. The way that they and I interact in public, while largely driven by them, is yet another set of boxes. Sometimes we exist in completely distinct worlds and frames and there is no acknowledgement of the other. Sometimes, like yesterday, we’ll run into each other downtown and walk a block together, talking and enjoying the day, before going our separate ways.

“Crazy”

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What if your parents were crazy?

From time to time I think that most of us joke about one or both parents having “gone crazy” because of something or other that they have done, but what if they really did have something going on?

I was reflecting on that as I was thinking back to some of the wonderful clients I have worked with at the shelter over the last couple of years. Quite a number of them are, for one reason or another, alienated from their children or wider families. Some of them are desperate to reconnect. Others have nothing to do with their children. Some don’t even know where their families are.

Sometimes it is because the parents really do have struggles – mental health, addiction, or otherwise – that would cause people to label them as “crazy”.

As someone involved in the caregiving of a dying parent, I can’t imagine what the caregiving of a parent with mental health and/or addictions might involve and, as someone who frequently cares for the parents of others at my place of work, I can understand the difficulties.

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I was having lunch with an older and wiser friend a few weeks ago. As we updated each other on our various comings and goings over pizza and wine, we got to talking about the upcoming changes in my life. He asked, as a lot of people do, what my family thought of my plans to study towards becoming a priest. After a somewhat lengthy reply that detailed the love and support I have always felt from my family for whatever choices I have made in life and the love I have for my mum and my dad, he said something that made me stop and think because it was something I hadn’t ever really thought about before.

“You realize, don’t you, how lucky you are to have parents like that, and how rare it is?”

Lucky, blessed, fortunate. Whatever word you want to use, I’ve got a fantastic and not [too] crazy dad!

Happy Father’s Day to you today.

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UPDATE: Thank you for comments so far. I have changed some of the language and I hope it sits better and better conveys what I was trying to say. Please, keep the feedback coming. I am sorry for the ill-thought out original language.

For the Love of Coffee

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This originally appeared on justgeneration.ca

IMG_3799I like coffee.

A lot.

Youth Council members both mock and adore me for travelling to meetings across the country with my own, individual coffee maker, coffee bean grinder, and locally roasted beans.

It has only been in the last 3-4 years that I’ve begun to take a keen interest in coffee; I made it through my undergrad career without needing that daily dose of java and still don’t need it to survive. It is the flavours, the smells, the joy of sitting in a coffee shop with my laptop or a good book that keeps me coming back over and over again to try different roasts and brews. I like sitting down in a local coffee shop and chatting with the barista about where the coffee has come from. If I’m lucky enough to be speaking to one of the shop owners or roasters, they are likely to be able to tell me a story of having climbed up mountains in Guatemala to pick coffee with their growers in that country or of wading through fields of coffee growing in Tanzania with local producers.

Coffee is more than just a morning stimulant or mid-day meeting prop. Coffee production is one of the largest employers and it drives the economy of many regions around the world.

At the beginning of May 2013, PWRDF Youth Council met in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia to talk about Food Security with local food producers. One of the places we visited was Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-op. They have the distinction of being Canada’s first fair trade coffee roaster and have the tag line of “People and Planet before Profits”.

But what does that mean for my coffee? Because coffee is such a hot commodity (pun intended), the potential for growers to be exploited for profit is quite high. Coffee growers often endure long hours and backbreaking work for a wage that will not support their family. When the coffee is fair trade, the purchasers travel to coffee-growing regions to meet with coffee growers, to get to know them and their families, to work together to grow the best coffee possible, and to ensure a fair price for their product. Does this mean that I might pay a slightly higher price for my next latte? Maybe. But it also means that I know the people who grew the coffee can live on what they are paid and that there is a focus on sustainability with each crop that is grown.

So what can you do? Check the labels on your bag of coffee to see if they’ll tell you who grew it. Is it fair trade? Chat with the barista at your local coffee shop. Chances are they’ll be more than excited to talk coffee with you. If they’re not, then it probably isn’t a coffee shop that places a high importance on connecting with their coffee growers either. Ask around at coffee time at your church. My parish in Victoria only serves fair trade coffee (from local roaster Level Ground Trading.) The Diocese of Edmonton recently voted to go completely fair trade in all of their parishes and offices.

So investigate your coffee and try fair trade. You’ll love how it tastes and you’ll feel good about how it was produced.

For more information on fair trade, especially coffee, visit the Fair Trade Canada website, they have some excellent resources and tips on what to look for when investigating fair trade.

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photoI think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

– Shug Avery to Celie in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

Imagining God

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“When you think of God, what image comes to mind?”

This was a question put to me by one of my assessors at ACPO (the Bishop’s Advisory Committee on Postulants for Ordination, that “Church Big Brother” that I spoke of in my last post).

I didn’t know how to answer her. Images for God? I suppose some people think of a big, bushy, white bearded fellow who sits on a throne in the clouds. Others might see an image of Jesus, perhaps on a cross. I’m not sure what I said in response to the question. I think I stumbled through some descriptive words that are helpful to me now and then.

The question, however, stuck with me. When I returned home, I looked up the assessor who had asked that question and decided to read one of her books. In it I discovered that the question, “When you think of God, what image comes to mind?” wasn’t too far off of a question she had posed to the women she had interviewed as a part of her research: “If you think about God, do you have any picture in your mind?” In the pages that followed I gained a better understanding of what my assessor was perhaps getting after with her question to me.

However rather than recount her findings here, I will continue off along the path my reflections took me. Rather then focus on specific images for God, I began to think more about why I didn’t have any actual images that jumped to mind when questioned. It isn’t that I am not a visual learner, I am to some extent as I picture things I have read on the page when trying to recall. It isn’t even that I don’t see the value of images as I appreciate meditating on an icon.

Instead, I turn to Madeleine L’Engle who, in one of her works of non-fiction, perhaps A Circle of Quiet, (I’ve read them all so many times that they begin to blend into one), talks of the difficulty of bringing to mind a picture of those for whom we have the most familiarity and the greatest amount of love. Try it. Start by trying to picture a friend, coworker, or neighbour. Someone who you see and interact with on a regular basis but don’t get into the great depths of relationship. Then try to bring to mind a image of someone you love deeply, perhaps a spouse, parent, or child. It is much more difficult! Perhaps the better we know someone, and know them through different and many senses, the more difficult it is to picture them in our minds.

Something to think about.

 

(Post Script: This isn’t to say that I think I have God all figured out or that I am a super person knows God so well that I am superior to all of those people who have visual pictures in their mind of who God is… Rather it is me thinking out loud about how I relate to this concept and how I have been understanding myself and my relation to God in light of the question posed to me a few weekends ago.)

Approved and Accepted

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Spring is in the air, summer is not far away, and changes are afoot.

Some of you may know that this last year has been a year of a lot of change and transition for me. My temporary full-time position came to an end and so I took a two-month leave and ran away to Africa to hang out with my sister in South Africa for Christmas and New Years. I came home to working two jobs on a casual/on-call basis and have been working (nearly) full time hours at that for the last four months. I’m going to keep doing that for the next two months…

…and then I’m moving to London, Ontario!

Let me back up a little bit further. A little over a year ago, I embarked on a fairly intense process of intentional discernment with the idea of determining whether or not I am being called into a position of ordained ministry – that is, to be a priest. That process has entailed both one-on-one conversations with my spiritual director, the priest at my current church, and the Anglican bishop of my diocese as well as group discernment (what I have called reverse group counselling with myself as the lone ‘client’ and a whole group of people talking with me), formal interviews, and weekend-long assessments. It has been both exhausting and intensely rewarding.

Three weeks ago I had a full weekend ‘retreat’ (aka Church Big Brother) with a group of other candidates from across British Columbia where we were in conversation with assessors from all over the province. Their job was to assess our competencies, strengths, weaknesses, and gifts for ministry. The resulting report heartily recommended that I be approved for training and ordination as a priest.

Step two: school. A funny thing happens when you say you won’t do something. You frequently end up doing it. My standard response to the question of whether or not I would do a PhD when I announced I was doing my MA in Counselling was, “No, because I’d like to be done school by 30.” Well, here I am, past that, and going back to school, not for a PhD but for another Masters. Yesterday I received my offer of acceptance from Huron University College (on the campus of Western University in London – anyone else see the humour of me moving east to go to a school called Western??) to begin study towards a Master of Divinity degree, starting in September.  This is a three-year program approved by the Anglican Church of Canada for training postulants for ministry within the Anglican Church.

As much as I am loathe to leave Victoria – I love it here – I am looking forward to living back in Ontario after nearly 20 years! I’ll be closer to family and friends than I’ve been in years and am looking forward to exploring a new corner of the country. Now all I need to do is figure out how to get my stuff from here to there and collect boxes to put it all in!

Two Journeys

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Journeys.

In the last few weeks, few months, year, I’ve been on a journey. In some ways both of these pictures are representative of that for me; one directly and the other indirectly. Both of these photos were taken this month (if you follow me on instagram, you’ll have seen these and other images from my adventures already) as I travelled around different parts of the country working towards this new adventure. To the left was a weekend trip I took to the Interior of BC, to a retreat centre in the Shushwap. To the right is train tracks in Wolfville, NS, where I went for a meeting of PWRDF‘s Youth Council.

It is exciting? You bet!

Am I a little nervous? Definitely.

I’m still waiting for some of the pieces to fall into place (really, there is only one more piece left) before I feel comfortable broadcasting to the world.

I think that this voyage of discovery is one reason I have been rather reluctant to post anything on here in the last year or so. I have been doing a lot of thinking and a lot of writing in the last twelve months. However much of it has been in aid of my own internal processing and not really for public consumption. When one is so engrossed in internal and personal discernment, there isn’t a lot of creative energy left over for generating different content for the world. When one’s head is in internal space, it is difficult to move outside of that in order to share, still in a meaningful way, thoughts in a public space. Thank you for respecting that, and I look forward to sharing more soon.

Soccer, Connections, and the Health of a Community

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This was written for justgeneration.ca, the forum for youth engagement with the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund, of which I am a part.

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The sun was setting as we walked along the road that went up and over the hill. As we wound our way through large, brightly coloured vacation homes, the road slowly deteriorated and gradually the tar turned to a dusty dirt track. Dodging cow droppings in the waning light, my self-imposed mission was to keep my feet as dust and dung free as possible. A difficult challenge given the road. Two-story homes turned to low thatch-roofed rondavels with a kraal (cattle pen) out front. Of course, as I dodged yet another cow wandering free, the cattle weren’t inside the kraal yet.

The view from the hilltop was magnificent: to the left, the Indian Ocean stretching out as far as the eye can see; to the right, the Keiskamma River wandering through undulating green hills dotted with coloured thatched houses. It was my last night in South Africa and we were going to watch the football.

The weekend before, I had been fortunate enough to road-trip to Port Elizabeth, a large city about three hours south, with three employees/volunteers at the Keiskamma Trust to watch the second night of Africa Cup of Nations action. After much deliberation, we decided to cheer for Ghana’s Black Stars over the rivals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). After all, they had done well at the World Cup a few years previously and they had the best souvenirs. No sooner had we put our “I ❤ Ghana” headbands on than we were bombarded for photo opportunities by hundreds of Ghanaian fans, who had made the trip to South Africa.

It was a fantastic game and an incredible experience. I caught Cup fever and that is how I found myself climbing up the hill to the other side of the village from where I was staying; to watch the local boys, Bafana Bafana, play a match on one of the only TVs in town. The house with the TV belongs to one of the original community health workers employed at the Keiskamma Trust. The house is currently inhabited by the public health doctor who is living, working, and studying in Hamburg while she facilitates the delivery of health care in the community and surrounding region.

Begun in 2002, the Keiskamma Trust works through a network of community health workers to combat the high rates of HIV/AIDS in their corner of Eastern Cape. The number of stories I heard of people’s lives being changed simply through access to antiretroviral (ARV) medication would be too many to recount here. Stigma is still a difficult thing to overcome and HIV/AIDS is a challenging discussion topic for anyone, yet the Trust has done amazing work in their community. Through funding from PWRDF and CIDA (the Canadian International Development Agency), this work is now being broadened to include psychosocial programs. The psychosocial and health programs compliment the other programs the Trust already runs: art, music outreach, sustainable agriculture, community development, and education.

And so the sun went down on my last evening in Africa; I sat outside with friends, new and old, to eat dinner and revel in a South African soccer victory. As we leaned against the side of the hut overlooking the ocean and underneath the stars, I reflected on this community and my connection to it, on the change ongoing in the lives of people there, on the friendships I’d made in two short months, and on how to avoid the cow droppings as we walked the dirt road home in the dark night.

Absences

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Its been nearly a year of silence.

I’ve done a lot of thinking.

A lot of reflecting.

Reading

Growth

Talking

Discerning

Refreshment

Relaxing

I don’t know how much I’ll be around here, and I certainly won’t be blogging as much as I was before. but I think I’ll keep things open and see where it goes.