My writing has taken various forms through the years, from years of regular blogging (which are memorialized here, not all of which I stand by!) to my more recent infrequent posts capturing my sermons & creative writing. Thanks for visiting; please comment and join the conversation.
Good Friday brought up a lot of thoughts in me. Holy Saturday brings more. I spent part of the morning pulling a red wagon full of large rocks through the DTES, and dropping them off in various locations. I got a lot of comments and funny looks. I felt a bit like the disciples who were sent to get an untamed colt for Jesus, and the strange questions they might have been asked. I felt foolish, but the good kind of foolish...
There are suburban Christians who come into the DTES regularly to hand out tracts and to preach. I don't think this, in and of itself, is wrong. I am especially sympathetic with the ones who take the time to get to know the people to whom they preach. I remember talking to one woman in my neighbourhood whose journey to faith and freedom from addiction began thanks to a woman from Abbotsford who stopped by her tent in Oppenheimer Park every Friday night to give her a sandwich and a tract, and to talk to her...
The elders lead a familiar refrain, a depth of pain and pride
drawn by drums to the surface, song spreading back through the masses
in sporadic echos. I've only heard it at protests and funerals
and I realize I don't know which this is...
I had a dream last weekend. In my dream, someone placed a very small child in my arms. Something was different about this girl - at least, I think it was a girl. Her face had bird-like features: her eyes were enlarged, and her nose was shaped more like a beak. But as I gazed down at her, I was suddenly overwhelmed with love for this delicate, vulnerable creature. "You are... beautiful," I said to her. Hearing the sincerity in my voice, she looked up at me and whispered, "Does that mean I'll be safe?" An odd exchange. When I recounted it to Danice the next day, it sounded creepy, but I assure you, this scene was actually quite moving in the dream....
...It was my day off, and I was riding a new bike to my friends' house on Commercial Drive, when I heard a man calling out in French, asking if anyone spoke French. I thought, "What a coincidence, I speak French." So I stopped to ask him what he needed. He told me that he was from Quebec, but was in town with his wife and child so that his wife could get surgery for breast cancer. He had been charged unexpected extra medical costs because the surgery was out-of-province, and he needed some money to buy some medicine and groceries....
I went to a local park to eat my lunch yesterday, one of the main hang-outs for low-income folks in the neighborhood. I was sitting on the bench, reading my book, when I saw a man out of the corner of my eye who didn't seem to fit the scene. He was wearing nicer clothes than anyone else (including me), and he seemed to be praying over two people on the bench across from me. Sure enough, when he was finished, he approached me and handed me a tract and a yellow lollipop. He asked if he could pray for me...
...I know that some of my self-sacrificial desires were idealistic and unrealistic, tied up in pride and the social-justice-image I wanted to project, with my dreams of a "Mother Teresa"-style martyrdom, suffering alongside the poor. But I genuinely did want my friends from the neighborhood to feel comfortable in my house, to feel like equals, to know that I want to be counted among them, to understand their reality and to be "in it" with them. And even more than that, I desperately didn't want to be counted among the "gentrifyers" in the DTES...
