Rest amid Chaos - a view on Sabbath.

{ Posted on Monday, September 29, 2008 by alan }
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Prolific blogger Lon, who recently made it into church.alltop.com asked a question recently while preparing for a collaborative Sunday sermon. Oh, how I envy him sometimes...

I commented my thoughts, and since I haven't blogged anything noteworthy since spending a week-long road trip with Liz to Cape Cod and the Adirondack's (oh, and Boston for a great fun wedding in Harvard), I figured it best to recycle.

Sabbath. According to Lon's online survey, the question at hand is "Finding rest and wholeness in a world of chaos and brokenness". I dig that. I imagine most of our lives are caught between running to work, running to home, running to family, and running to church. Well, I suppose some people cut out the last one. But for the churchies, it's a whole lot of running.

The standard idea, I gather, is that Sunday is the sabbath day of rest, the day the people rested in accordance with the day that God rested. And so we take the day off, go to church, and celebrate God. The problem - Sunday isn't all that restful when you have to lead worship, teach Sunday school, have church program meetings, etc. (It's compounded by the commuting culture that makes us so far from each other - check out the Jews this weekend in the Globe, a plug for Options for Homes no less - that we can't meet during the week, but that's another post altogether)

It's a big problem, actually. I think often, the Christians who form the backbone of Sunday worship services get really tired from it all. The best ones rationalize it - Sabbath isn't just about rest, it's about discipline and priority of worshipping God in our lives. All good stuff, but simply sidesteps the rest part. The smart ones leave the church and find God on different terms. All great for them, but nothing for the transformative institution of the church which gets less transformative each time it happens.

So, this is where my thoughts take me: There’s the aforementioned standard of God’s sabbath. I wonder if one moves to the dangerous realm of principle, what would you see?

I see that sabbath is the whole rest,reflection,seeing-your-place-in-God’s-big-picture-humbly bit. 

The practical realization regarding rest is different strokes for different folks - not everyone sabbaths (in principle) on a weekly basis. And even those that do, if they are church servants, don’t do it on Sunday. Like pastors, many congregants work more on Sunday then on a Monday. So, while the farmer might be the last person who sabbaths a la biblical tradition (once a week for a day), today’s Christian cubicle monkeys do so differently. They sabbath is ways that honour God, respect reality and work for themselves.

One friend, who is a fantastic Christian Educator, sabbaths once a quarter by not going to church and enjoying the day, at home, stopping. I think that’s fair. Rest and wholeness is more about knowing who you are, who God is, the whole serenity prayer bit, without getting lazy, and changing the world, but putting that responsibility in God’s hands. It’s what I call theological tension. Pulses that pull in sometimes opposite, but ultimately balanced ways.

Me? I sabbath every day. :)

Canada's own explosive politics.

{ Posted on Wednesday, September 10, 2008 by alan }
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Thanks to my friends over at electionproject.ca, I saw this article from Joe Clark. Now former prime ministers don't get the same adulation as former presidents, so we'll have to look at his social commentary and intellectual merits of his argument.

First, a little note about electionproject2. Back a couple of federal elections, Tammy got fed up with all the sniping and partisan bickering. Wanting to get to the actual platforms, she recruited a bunch of friends and contacts, myself included to prepare an election primer to clearly, and without bias, indicate what each party had to offer on that issue.

What came to pass was nothing short of brilliance, churches that had previously only politically told against homosexuality, were now passing around documents about poverty, nationalism, and cities. Closet political fans in high schools started sharing the project and talking. We did some fantastic work, and I gather the document in the two weeks before the election reached a dozen institutions and over a thousand people.

What can we do now with a full 5 weeks before the election? What can social networkings add to a conversation that's taking place across the country? Welcome to electionproject.ca! Tammy and her tech dude partner Clinton have brought their pen and paper project to the web. Sign up, and we'll talk Dion, Layton, Harper... and May.

Speaking of Elizabeth May, can you believe what the Green Party has done? Every election, they are told that to be considered a national party they ought to have candidates in every riding, and they were shut out of the debates (don't mention the Bloc here). Last election, they worked the ground hard and found enough national support to have such candidates in each riding and they are overruled, because they have no members of parliament. Now, independent MP Blair Wilson, ousted as a Liberal, has come to represent the Greens one day before parliament dissolved, May now has that last piece.

But still, no, she has been disallowed to attend the debates, and why? Because three of the four party leaders thinks it's not fair.

Not fair? The old farts should see it from another prospective: That the Greens have made it this far is a testament to hard work, and a willingness to step it up. And they did it without guns, violence or any of the other machinations that minority voices have to use in other countries.

Joe Clark's article: globeandmail.com: Let Elizabeth May speak

Go sign the Green Party petition, and get involved in this year's federal election at electionproject.ca!

Ambient Awareness

{ Posted on Monday, September 08, 2008 by alan }
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Certainly this is true for a particular demographic - the constant flow of information via Facebook updates or use of twitter (Tweeting, apparently), and even gTalk status provides insight into the rhythm of your life and of your friends.

But is it true for most of us? Is it important or part of your lifestyle? Check out this article: I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com

It's called "ambient awareness." Quoting: "very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood
through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray
comments — out of the corner of your eye."

Now, I feel just as the article says. I would never want to do this. TMI, right? But so too do many of the most prolific users. And those users, realize there is another kind of intimacy, and a good one, a digital intimacy that results. One person calls it a kind of E.S.P. (extra-sensory perception), and keeping good, but distant friends, closer.

Ignoring the big-brother privacy concerns for a moment - I think they're largely overstated, and certainly not yet abused - and considering a world of long drives to work, and not enough hours in a day, I think the open mind would have to at least think about this:

Ambient awareness is a way back into our small town beginnings in a brave, new, global world. A new way of knowing our meta-physical neighbours, and keeping up with local going-ons. A blessing in the keeping together of a community that has been destroyed by a global environment, unhealthy focus on the nuclear family, and isolationist values of North America.

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Now, if I could only figure out a way for that twitter thing to not take so much time...

Need to organize...

{ Posted on Friday, September 05, 2008 by alan }
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Organization is such an important part of being effective in a multi-faceted world. 

But there's a caveat to that. I vacillate between being an organizer, and just being. When I was still using Outlook, I would keep up with all the contact changes and schedule completely through it. When I gave up desktop email for webmail (google) a few months ago, I never fully migrated my contacts over, and have already lost my new pen/paper day-planner. When I get down to life satisfaction, I really just like to come home and see what's going on - being scheduled for me is the sucky reality of life.

One could argue that being better organized would free me to be more laid back. But that takes forward thinking that I'm sometimes not capable of.

Let me quickly list the things I need to do so that my life can be better kept together.
-As mentioned, migrate my contacts from Outlook to gContacts and find my day-planner.
-Figure out how gCalendar can be effectively shared for both Liz and myself so we have our own records of each other's plans.
-Make a concerted effort to coordinate all photos through one piece of software (right now, we do some things through Picasa, some through Windows Live Gallery, and some through Explorer!)
-Identify where all our money is, and make decisions on mortgage renewal, credit card plan, and finally set a proper budget
-Find out how to simplify my computing experience from RTV stuff (1, 2, 3), email, RSS, blogging and all the other social and commercial interactions online.
-Organize what we own: product warrenties, licenses (my sister-in-law just lost her Office 2003 license, and now has to re-vert to my Office 2000), expired/new and (un)charged batteries, rebates
-Sort through our documents: file financials, taxes, extra-curricular stuff like youth group and RTV.
-Set some personal goals and remember them: book lists, movie lists, writing lists.

Or I should leave things as they are - the chaos that exists doesn't really hurt my life. I can always just continue getting by. Right?

The Solar Crash

{ Posted on Tuesday, September 02, 2008 by alan }
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If there was one thing I could change about last week's softball extravaganza, it would have been the date. The collision meant that we couldn't participate in the Solar Crash. Good friend Lon, who turned 30 that day, put together a smashing time at the El Mocambo. Liz and I were able to stop by towards the end of the night, all decked out in dusty softball gear, to appreciate the environment. By that, of course, I'm referring to the 20 various artistic acts and displays.

Of course, we're ecstatic that proceeds from the event are going to Living Water, which in turn is exploring potential to bring safe, clean water to our friends over in Kanga, the newest partner of Raising the Village. See the tribute over at RTV's test-SN site.

The best part is hearing what Lon has to say about engaging a population: The SolarCrash - Crafting beauty. And so contrary to the simplistic targetted marketing that we talk about that actually doesn't even work, he was able to use a variety of tools, to engage a variety of people, in a variety of ways. That's novel, but not really. That, I think, is what makes it beautiful. Then, and only then, can we let things fly...


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