NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

The gang had always met on Saturday morning. There were those who worked, and those who didn’t want to drive at night and so a Saturday morning worked for everybody. However after a couple of years the makeup of the group changed and there was no longer had anyone attending who was employed five days a week.  But we kept the Saturday morning hoping that some might return.  However at the end of that third year, the consensus was that we would go to a weekday afternoon which better suited the current members of the group. So Monday afternoon was picked.  The new year saw us with two new members; one brand-new and the other, the person we had kept the Saturday time slot for   hoping she would   come back. It turned out that she actually preferred a weekday too and was willing to adapt her work time schedule to fit! Some people might say in a case like the that you can’t win! I prefer to think that we actually won in more than one way. We got a meeting t...

‘If you are lucky enough to be different, don't ever change.’ … so it was written on a sign board in front of an elementary school in south-western Ontario As a former teacher my first response was that that was EXACTLY what the school system tried to do, to keep differences within an approved range. A little creativity went a long way. Those who thought outside of the prescribed box were not often applauded. And here we had a school actually encouraging the students to be different! We are all different. We react differently. We have differing likes and dislikes. We have different talents and dreams. But I suspect we have all learned to hide those differences deep within. I know I did. In order to fit into the norm [as we see it] we become someone else on the outside. Who you are on the inside, never changes. It can be hidden, but it is still there.  We can’t change the differences, we can only change our willingness to let others see and appre...

‘ We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.’ -Malala Yousafzai What difference can one person [or one voice] make? That is a question I hear repeated over and over. We feel so helpless, so powerless in the face of whatever tragedy has befallen, whatever need there is. I know. I’ve been there nightly watching the human suffering on the TV news as I’ve seen the women and children huddling in the rubble hoping to escape from the next blast, the appalling conditions on our own reservations where again the children are doing without the necessities of life. ‘How can this be?”, I ask myself and feel even more hopeless.  With all the focus on the Syrian refugee crisis in the news recently, my mind has gone back some 37 years to 1978 when I was part of a group that sponsored a boat family. In fact over the next 6 or 7 years that same group sponsored 27 people, at four different times, coming from Vietnam and South America. I clearly recall at ...

As I was driving through the hamlet where I live in the northern part of the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) I saw two ladies out for their morning walk. Nothing unusual about that. But what was unusual was the fact the they were wearing hijabs. Other than the ‘token’ Chinese family who own the local Chinese restaurant I have not noticed any other visible minorities on the streets of this hamlet. Now don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that various cultures haven't become a visible part of surrounding municipalities. They have. My mind went back to a Vietnamese/Korean wedding reception that we had attended in Mississauga just a couple of weeks ago. The venue for the reception was a restaurant in a Chinese mall. At 5:30 on a Saturday afternoon, on a long summer weekend, the parking places were all full and all the stores were bustling.  Free enterprise was alive and well. Just this week (not a long weekend either by the way) I was in one of our local malls. Had I not...

Theology is defined as ‘the study of religious faith, practice, and experience; especially:  the study of God and of God's relation to the world’ [Mirriam-Webster online dictionary] A preacher began his sermon with the statement ‘There is no theology of food.’ which alone of all he had to say made me sit up and take notice.  Not only take notice, but to begin to consider just why it sounded wrong to me and what exactly was my understanding of the connection between food and theology… because I felt very strongly that there was one! For the better part of two years I was part of a Meditation group that followed their weekly time of meditation by sharing a light meal provided by the various members of the group. Over that food, experiences were shared from our everyday life, ideas were voiced, and connections were made, all of which echoed our various understandings of just what it meant to try and live as a Christian in today’s world. This was theology, t...