Forgiveness

Forgiveness requires greater courage than apology.  If you do not know how to forgive, your apology means nothing.

Love In November?

What a sight it was!  The male duck, festooned in all his colours, sidled up to her, bobbing his neck and dipping his beak into the pond; while she responded by slightly mirroring him.

 

Whoa buddy!

 

He feinted a short turn around her and fast as fast can be mounted her feathered back.  I thought, “Whoa buddy!  This isn’t spring; whatcha doin!?”

He must have either had the fastest gun in the west or was involved in some dominance game with this feathered filly of the waters, because he didn’t ride her for very long. 

As soon as he dismounted he stretched his head and neck outward – an arrow skimming the surface in a menacing circle around her.  It was quick this faux love play and I wondered whether he was reminding her that she was his: a foreshadowing of love in the spring.

Gracious Indignities

I followed him through the entrance to Willow Park church.  From behind he stood tall and broad as a refrigerator capped by a bowling ball.  I’d come for my H1N1 and seasonal flu shots and had some anxiety about the fallout: my wife had spent a day and a half recovering from the double barrelled bursts she’d received before me.

At the registration table, I stood beside my giant, looked up and saw a lovely smile emerge from a face that bore scars from burns he must have suffered long ago.  He moved to one of the many inoculation stations and then I heard it…the plaintiff cry of a child pierced by a needle; in fact, I noticed dozens of children: innocent little lambs, hand in hand with mom or dad, unaware of what was to befall them.

Soon it was my turn and I confess that I am no braver than the pleading children that I heard desperately protesting while a parent held them firmly to facilitate the nurse’s grim task.  When I sat down I jokingly said that I wished my wife were here to hold my hand.  The nurse looked over at her colleague and said, “Alice’ll hold your hand…” and as she nodded I diplomatically declined.

My nurse was a virtuoso; I didn’t feel a thing!  I moved to another chair for the required anaphylaxis monitoring and listened to the chorus of wailing children.  One in particular captured my attention: a little boy with a stentorian voice now pleading, now shouting angrily, struggling against a tide of arms that wrestled him in place for the well meaning insult.

As I listened and watched, memories surged within me of a young lad, fifty or more years ago, undergoing a needed blood test; terrified of the firm grip of a rubber tourniquet, and what appeared to be a thick, giant, stainless steel needle entering his scrawny arm.  It hurt like hell!  And thereafter I have cringed at the approaching steps of the well meaning phlebotomist.

I knew exactly what those kids in the hall were suffering, and I wondered about my friendly giant: had he too, throughout his pained convalescence, suffered the repeated, but gracious, indignities of the needle?

 

photo: Andrew Barr – National Post

Future Shock

Future Shock is history.

The Purpose of Marriage

Like life, marriage was not designed to make you happy.  Those who enter it because they want to be happy will always be unhappy.  Happiness is only a byproduct of a good marriage, and a good marriage is hard won.  The purpose of marriage is maturity.

The Meaning of Life

People who consider happiness to be the ultimate value to be persued in life will always be unhappy.  LIfe was not designed to make us happpy.  Happiness is only a byproduct of a good life, not its goal – and a good life is hard won.  Life was designed for maturity – a process impelled by suffering, not by the desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.  Mature people – elders - value joy, not happiness.

Intuitions

INTUITION 1

DNA  is an organism that has consciousness.  We live in partnership with our DNA.  It provides the container in which we’ve chosen to live.  It was here before us.

INTUITION 2

The so-called junk DNA which geneticists say lie within our chromosomes is not garbage cast aside on the pathway of evolution.  It will be found to be very important.  It will contain things like primal memory – perhaps it even functions as the container of the collective unconscious – of the impersonal psychic forces that Carl Jung called archetypes.

INTUITION 3

We are composite creatures.  Our psyche is an amalgam of various identities.  The most powerful is the one we feed the most.

The Age of Oakley

Dr. Oakley’s baggy eyes looked directly at me as he searched my chest with the cold, round instrument.  Rubber hoses flowed from it, into his hairy ears.  And I looked back in fear, wondering if he would give me a needle.  At seven years of age, I was terrified of needles, and when my father escorted him to my bedroom, the surrounding comfort of comic books and electric train could not ease the fear I felt within.

The ritual was the same each visit: If he dropped the cold thing into his black leather bag, I would not be pierced; but if he placed it on my bed, then…oh then.  I watched him withdraw the probe from my ribbed cage and saw the jowls above me respond to the good news his meaty lips spoke to my anxious mother: the pneumonia had receded; I was getting better.  Thank God…I was saved.

As was his habit, my father invited him to stay a moment to share a glass of wine.  And I could hear them from the bedroom, chatting in broken English telling him how much they appreciated him.  And before he left for his next home visit, my parents would insist, despite his best efforts to decline, that he receive an offer of their best wine.  Every time he came, he always left with a gallon of appreciation.

Nowadays, home visits – let alone a gift of wine - would never happen.  Dr. Oakley’s home visits were more than professional service.  They were the essence of community life in those days, and the warmth of one heart giving to another.  People helped each other, they were fluent in the art of conversation, and built community on the principle of give and take.

I remember the kitchen-parties in our home: Italian immigrants in faded suits: card-playing, wine-drinking, hearty eaters who would spontaneously burst out in songs from the old country; beefy men who cried at Christmas because they were so far from home; smotherly hens who would cluck at their children to behave; and the graciousness extended to strangers.  Everyone was equal in those days, because everyone was poor. 

But some time in my teens, everything changed.  We moved to a different, larger city.  And when my father called our new physician, a young fellow from the South,  the doctor refused to come.  In hindsight, I can understand the decision of that new breed; but it’s a sad understanding informed by the realities of a cooler way of healing.

In high school I learned that Dr. Oakley had died of a heart attack.  And despite my memories of his black bag and needles, I missed him and the laughter he shared with my mother and father.  The age of Oakley in the healng profession is over, as is its warmth.  And I wonder whether we have lost more than we have gained in our trade with the cool steel of science and technology.  The age of kitchen-parties, like those I knew, are over too.  We discareded them, like faded suits, for Armani and stainless steel appliances.

Predictions

Sometime when I’m very relaxed: bathing, walking, reclining…I get a sense of things that may come.  I don’t mean to say that I’m psychic.  I mean that I may have heard about an event on the news and I see the potential ramifications of that event.  The event seems pregnant and it streams into the future where I see it giving birth.  Here is what I see coming.

• The United States will suffer ongoing natural and social catastrophes.  These, along with its increasing debtor status, will magnify the stresses on an already stressed economy.  This will be compounded by its overstretched military commitments.  These issues and others that increasingly plague that nation will cause a major decline in the fortunes of the people.  The economy will crash; there will be rioting.  crime will increase and the people will lose confidence in their leaders.  There will be the rumblings of secession from certain states.  There will be political and social chaos.  No one will know who is in charge.

• The United States will suffer a major defeat from an Asian power.  The defeat will be a naval one and the power will be China.  There will be no outright victory over America but she will be so weakened that she will not be able to withstand the ferocious will of China.

• The Chinese will gain power over the United States – economically.  Because of this, the Chinese will control much of the U.S. and will insist on increased emigration to that country.  They will transform the mores, attitudes and sensibilities of North America as they pour into the continent en masse.

• Five to seven years after the Chinese summer Olympics the conflict will begin.

• Russia will be allied with China but that once mighty power will be overcome – its natural treasures plundered by a two million man Chinese army.  In Russia there will be deep sadness.  It will never again rise to the pinnacle of power it enjoyed.  Christianity will flourish there – as it will in China.

• Christianity will be the rock in China’s shoe – and finally the boulder which will overcome it.

• Canada will be only a memory.  It will divide and the provinces will form economic unions with one another and with parts of the northern United States.

• The North American people will be severely humbled.  The great monuments to avarice – in particular the malls – will be no more.  We will be a chastened people in time and the glitter of luxury will dim.  We will live a much harder life.  The cornucopia of plenty will cease.  No more will we eat and drink ourselves into stupefaction.

• The church in North America and Europe will be taxed.  Churches will close; the faithful will go underground.  Home churches will proliferate.

• Times will become so hard in North America, and lawlessness will abound so greatly that some people will resort to robbing graves for the jewellery and other valuables that may lie with the dead.

Peeing II

I was bemused by the number of hits I received on my post called “Peeing” - a humorous reference to an entry by Andy Warhol in his diaries.  When I checked the referrers to my post I noticed that many seemed to show searches that revealed hits for pornographic sites.  I’m assuming that some of these people were searching for pages featuring bathroom sex.  Can so many people be turned on by urine?