NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

  “ Sages leave your contemplation; Brighter visions beam afar. (Angels from the Realms of Glory)  It is the afternoon of Boxing Day and these words have been echoing throughout my head since early morning. They remind me of the opening paragraph of this year’s Christmas letter. “As I look back over the Christmases of 2020 & 2021, as well as ahead to Christmas of 2022 I can see changes occurring. Changes that reflect the availability of vaccines as well as a growing knowledge on our part to what we need  to do to live safely with COVID-19. Christmas 2020 saw gifts being delivered outside the door and stuffed turkey from M&M’s for the Christmas feast. By Christmas 2021, we had progressed to opening gifts with the family in our apartment wearing masks, and Christmas dinner arrived plated from the festive table upstairs.  Never had anything tasted so good! This year will be much the same with visits from family on both Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Becaus...

  It was you who formed my inward parts;  you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Psalm 139:13-14(a)     I have spent most of my life trying to fit in…. sure that there had to be something wrong with me. I simply preferred the company of a book or one or two friends to a  more lively or congregant setting. I found  myself unwilling to take part in discussions as my words were either ignored or met with upraised eyebrows. Over the years I worked at ‘fitting in’ until I finally realized that that wasn't who and what I was. Now the pandemic restrictions  are being  or have been erased, I find that old feeling returning. Perhaps you’re an extrovert and glad to be in the midst of people again, to eat  inside restaurants and bars, to go to indoor parties,  to take a bus trip, to go to the theatre, or to have people to your home. While on the other hand, I am not comfor...

We all need comfort foods especially in these times of uncertainty.  Mine is macaroni & cheese made the way my mother made it. There is nothing like it when I feel the need for reassurance that is well in my world.  I ‘m sure everybody reading this has their own comfort food that they turn to when the stress of everyday life gets them down. However an everyday diet of that comfort food would soon prove to be detrimental to our overall health. A friend was telling me about going to a funeral just last week. Having been raised in a parsonage she enjoyed hearing the old hymns again as well as the oh so familiar words of the service even though she noticed that in her mind she was questioning the words she heard. However she found  it strangely comforting after not hearing those words for so long. It was another kind of comfort food. Nothing’s wrong with either kind of comfort food as long as we don’t make a steady diet of it  …forgetting that the other foo...

Easter is here for another year. The forty days of Lent are behind us as we go into the  3 act drama that tells the Easter story: Maundy Thursday   with the last Supper and the vigil in the garden, Good Friday with the crucifixion and the burial, followed by the glorious news of Easter morning   that Christ is Risen! Each year we seem to focus more on the three days of Easter then we do on the 40 days of Lent. Yet without those forty days, the Easter celebrations wouldn’t be the same. Those forty days to study, to learn, and to focus on the story we are celebrating add immeasurably to those celebrations as they add another layer to our understanding of the story. We got our 4th booster shot of the COVID vaccine regimen   this past week. While the first 3 doses were important and added to our immunity, this 4th dose will not only bring our waining   immunity up to what it   after the previous shots, but will add another layer of immunity… just like Lent d...

As  masks are removed, vaccine mandates disappear and as cases rise, we are being encouraged to venture forth into this brave new world. So these two words rang true to me. .. Anticipatory Anxiety. As I gingerly put my toe into the water, I find myself wishing for the four walls of home. Nightmares which were common in the first few months of the pandemic have returned. Just thinking about venturing out is enough to make the muscles in my stomach clench. Yes, I am anticipating the worst,or at best the unknown, that awaits me outside the door. I notice in the stores that whether you wear a mask or not seems to depend on the colour of your hair. The grayer the hair is the more likely that person is to be wearing a mask-at least right now. Probably because we are in the season of Lent and also because I have been reading ‘Witness at the Cross’ by Amy Jill Levine, I find myself seeing corollaries in the story of the events leading up to the first Easter and my current experience of t...

“Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”   by Louise Penny  As the restrictions for COVID are being lifted, there is a general thirst for the ways things used to be, remembered as the perfect society in the perfect world. We want to get back to doing and being the way we remember life as being. This poem reminds us that life was not perfect, indeed is not meant to be perfect.The pandemic has shown us some of the cracks that were there: racism, poverty, and food vulnerability being just a few. By exposing those and other cracks in our society, it has opened up the way for us to make the necessary changes in our new world to address these problems and others. Jesus, in Matthew 5:16 said “let your light shine before others“ .  I would like you to consider  this in light of what Louise Penny had to say in her short poem. We spend a lot of our time trying to be perfect especiall...

“Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them…“ Matthew 6:26 NRSV Right now the colouring app that I use daily is running a series of pictures called ‘Moments of Happiness’. What are these pictures about you might wonder. Celebrations? Family gatherings? Attending  a concert? All things we have missed over the last two years. The answer would be NO, NO, NO!  The pictures to date have shown instead getting a good night’s rest, enjoying a morning cup of coffee, making time for some self-care, cooking, and for today, exercising at home. All things that were part both of our lives both before and during COVID… and will be afterwards as well. I was once told as an adult that not only could I not sing, but that I never would be able to. Immediately I stopped singing (even in the shower). For the most part conductors in the various choirs I had sung in over the years had left me alone. So I had had that!...

  “For he will command his angels concerning you: to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.”   Psalm 91:11-12 We are all familiar with how angels are portrayed in religious paintings; beautiful ethereal beings, dressed in white with golden wings. Indeed we may have or have had a guardian angel of our own especially as a child. For many of us, our guardian angel may well be another person who looks out for us, sheltering us from the worst of life’s trials, while we take on that role in the life of another. These last two years have been especially hard on all of us as we struggle to cope with or without that  guardian angel.  A friend (who tells me I was one of her guardian angels when she was a child) sent me this poem this past week. It struck a chord in me. And I hope it does on you too…. Whenever I thought of angels, perfect symmetry came to mind,   A Christmas choir of thous...

  “So much has been taken, but not everything. What this moment has taught us is that we have the ability to radically reimagine and reshape the world.” - Marc Lamont Hill, We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility (2020) As I heard Dr.  Eileen de Villa,  Medical Officer of Health for Toronto say on TV this past week, “COVID is COVID is COVID” . We might want it to be something else. We might be wishing for it to disappear.  We might try to deny its detrimental effect on both our health and the health care system.  But we can’t. COVOD is here and not going anywhere soon, if ever. Just like mumps, measles, influenza, cancer and a myriad of other illnesses, COVID-19 is here to stay. Our job is to accept this,  to stop pretending that life is going to get back to the way it was pre-COVID which is not going tp happen and learn to live with this new reality. As I was writing this, Hebrews 13:8 was going through my head. “Jesus Christ is...

  ‘By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.’   -Hebrews 11:8  Dr. Theresa Tam, Chief Public Health Officer of Canada, says this, too, will pass . Dr. Eileen de Villa, Medical Official of Health for Toronto, says this, too, will pass . Justin Trudeau , Prime Minister of Canada, says this, too, will pass . But will it really??? Some days this feels like an unending struggle with just one tiny step forward and not just two, but more like a dozen steps back.  Of course I’m talking about COVID-19 with all its associated variants. We might even be forgiven for rewriting that well known quote from Ecclesiastes to read…. For everything there is a season,…but  just not for this ! Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French priest,  might well have been talking about COVID   when he penned the lines below: We should like to skip  The ...

As Epiphany came and went this year I found myself thinking about the story of the magi and the gifts that they brought to the baby Jesus, gifts of gold, frankincense,  and myrrh. These gifts were harbingers of who Jesus was: gold was a symbol of kingship, frankincense (an incense) a symbol of a deity, and myrrh (an embalming oil) a symbol of death.  Then I began to wonder what gifts the last two years under COVID-19 had brought with it. And there have been many gifts - most of them disrupting our lives and our livelihoods. But not all! And we are still learning from them.  There is the gift of patience which as the saying goes is seldom found in women and never in a man. If we have learned nothing else from COVID it is that we need to have patience, that as the top doctors say it will end one day and until that time all we can do is to have patience. A second gift we have received is a new appreciation of the importance of friends . ZOOM  chats, phone cal...

July    24th this year marked 2 years since Clarke had cancer surgery. It seems like it happened in another lifetime.    Mid-August, that same year, granddaughter left to teach in England. She came home for Christmas that same year but then we didn’t see her again until then end of July this year.    Our long-time cleaning lady has just returned after 17 months.    All of these seem to have happened much longer ago then they actually did.  I was reminded of a programme on Time featuring Stephen Hawking that I saw on the television a few years back. He made the comment that time doesn’t exist except when we use it to mark ages, hours, years or distances, heat or cold, etc. Time is in fact something that we humans have invented to serve our own needs.    When nothing new is happening, time slows down for us. Remember those summers when you were a kid that lasted forever? But when new things are happening, time speeds up and you hear p...

Five days before the movie theatres were to open their doors for the first time in months, but with limited capacity, an industry advocate was saying that 50%wasn‘t good enough. They wanted it to be 100%! At no time did he thank the government for moving the reopening forward a few days, nor did he thanks all the people in the province who had made it possible by embracing vaccinations and following the other guidelines. I wondered what had happened saying those two simple words, ‘Thank you‘! Of course they wanted more, but surely what they got was worth something. I have noticed as this pandemic has dragged on, how little appreciation is shown for small or even larger gains.    People want it over, and things back to normal RIGHT NOW! There are very few ‘thank yous’ being heard on air,    but there are a lot of complaints. They seem to take it as being their right to get what they want and to get it NOW with no consideration as to ...

There is no doubt that this pandemic has brought with it lots of challenges. Here, in a first world nation, we have seen it hitting hardest those who are underprivileged, who have crowded living conditions, who work at minimum wage jobs (without sick days) to put food on the table for their families. Some areas like Toronto have targeted the people in these hot spots with pop-up clinics in order to get them vaccinated as soon as possible and curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus in these neighbourhoods. This has resulted in a higher percentage of vaccines being administered in these areas as compared to some of the more affluent ones,  where  it has brought down the number of new cases dramatically.  But then we have the luxury of having an adequate supply of vaccine arriving monthly.    What if we didn’t? What if we were like South Africa where a week or so ago only 2% of the health care workers had been vaccinated, where 3 million of their citizens over 6...

  “The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.“ William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice   This phrase, ‘sins of the fathers’, comes originally from references primarily in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Numbers and relates to generational sins passing from one generation to the next. Despite what the church said, I must say it always seemed to be unfair to me that the children would suffer because of the father’s sins.  Recently however I heard a new term (for me at least), transgenerational. While this talks about passing from generation to another, it isn’t about about the children inheriting the sins of the fathers but rather about the children inheriting the emotional scars of their parents. And now I wonder if that is perhaps what is being alluded to in the Old Testament, that it was not the sins of the fathers but rather the scars those sins left behind.   It certainly sheds a whole new light on the problems that beset various facets of ...

We all know someone who tells the same story over and over.  Do they not remember telling us before we sometimes wonder…. Research conducted at Queen’s University and funded by the Government of Canada’s New Horizons for Seniors has discovered a pattern in the stories told over and over by aging parents. There are really just Ten Stories (more or less) The role of the storyteller is important  Many of the stories come from the 2nd & 3rd decade of life which is when values are learned  The facts of these stories aren’t important. What is important is the meaning within them. The next time you find yourself listening to (or telling) a story for the second, third , or fourth time,  try listening to it in a different way to see if you can hear what is really being said! These same four points hold true for any stories that were part of an oral tradition such as stories of Indigenous people, folklore, and yes, stories in the Bible. All of these, based on what w...

  An iconic saying for our generation, “That’s one small step for man. One giant step for mankind” is attributed to Neil Armstrong as he stepped onto the surface of the moon. However, what  Neil Armstrong insists he actually said and the tapes from NASA confirm is “That’s one small step for a man.  One giant step for mankind.” Interesting how millions of people hearing the broadcast live on July 20, 1969 heard one thing while Armstrong actually said something else, isn’t it!   I thought of this saying earlier in the week when a group of high school friends were planning to meet over lunch this month. Patio dining was now allowed! We had all had our first shots, and some our second! We felt the need to celebrate! Only 4 were allowed at a table? Well we could just use more than one table and move them closer together! This didn’t sound like Armstrong’s small step to me….  Armstong’s quote is the way forward from this pandemic. If everyone was to take one sma...

  “In times of stress, the best thing we can do for our children  (and each other) is to listen with our ears and hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.” -Fred Rogers, You Are Special (1995) Controversy has been swirling around the heads of our children.  Many families have one or two children and in the large urban areas live in apartments or condos.  Children are feeling isolated as they try to cope with online learning and a lack of social stimulation resulting in depression and anxiety. The question on the minds of both children and parents has been ‘Will schools reopen in June or remain closed with online learning until September?’ They finally got the answer on Wednesday of this week  when Premier Ford made the announcement that schools would indeed be closed to in-person learning until September. He spoke of the possibility of play dates and summer camps and ended by saying that NOBODY wanted to see the chi...

  I find myself on a Saturday morning counting out my pills for the next week prior to restocking the weekly supply. Do I count the pills out one by one? No! Do I put them immediately from the pill vial into their section of the box? No! I arrange them in two groups: one of 3 pills and one of four... just as I was taught over 70 years ago in Grade One by Mrs Dawson. How many other things, I wonder, do I do a certain way because that’s the way I was taught as a child? 1 Corinthians 13:11 ran through my mind. “When I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.“  So for the next few days my mind was busy considering just how many of those ‘ childish things’ still were part of my life. We might have grown up in a house where alcohol was used to excess, where violence was a way of life, or where those who looked or sounded different were denigrated. That is no reason for us to repeat those things as adults....

Will we have a one dose or a two dose summer? No one knows and what’s more there is nothing that we can do about it. It depends on two things completely out of our control: how much vaccine will be available and how many people will take advantage of that vaccine.  Last fall we organized getting a new deck built this spring. The builder has the required lumber and is ready to go but we are waiting on the local township to get our building permit to us. Nothing we can do to hurry that process along. All the ‘i’s have been dotted and the “t’s crossed. The Bible came into being over a period of hundreds of years. It involved many people copying and editing texts, deciding what should stay in and what could be discarded.  So considering just why a certain story was included is sometimes an interesting way to approach scripture.  Some of the post-Easter stories can be helpful to us as we struggle to relate to this current pandemic. One of my favourite of these stories is ‘...