Back to the Garden

  Introduction: Let it be with me according to your word                 We’re almost there. Here on this 4 th week of Advent we stand on the very precipice of the changing seasons, from fall to winter, Advent to Christmas, 2020 to 2021. On Wednesday we watched as Manitoba front-line workers received the first dose of the new Covid-19 vaccine and felt, for perhaps the first time since March, that there just might be an end to this time of pandemic after all. The time we are in is pregnant with anticipation, so it is fitting that our gospel reading today should rest on the story of Mary and the pregnancy that would forever change the world. The  Annunciation   by Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1898                At the beginning of Advent, I pointed us to our end, to death, and here at the end, I point to our beginning. We stand with our neighbours, with our city,...

In My Beginning is My End The famous poem, “East Coker” written in the early years of the Second World War by the great poet laureate, TS Eliot, contains a stanza most fitting for our service today:   Do not let me hear Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.   We enter the season of Advent, the beginning of the Christian Calendar, in the midst of a pandemic that is raging out of control. Over 1.4 million people have died already of this disease, 12 thousand of those deaths have been Canadians and over 250 of those are here in Manitoba. Large numbers of deaths are hard to comprehend, rather than tragedies we experience them as statistics. But 250 dead Manitobans is as if my entire hometown had been wiped off the map this year. That is a lot of pain, a lot of ...

  The Generations...   “Jacob settled in the land where his father had lived as an alien, the land of Canaan. This is the story of the family of Jacob.”   One of the peculiar things about the book of Genesis is its structure. The book is structured around the word, “toledoth” which is often translated “generations” in English translations. Sometimes this makes sense given the way we use “generations” in normal English usage, as there are several genealogies listed throughout the book, including the genealogy of Esau in the chapter immediately preceding our reading today. But elsewhere in Genesis, the toledoth marks a narrative of origins. Our reading today is this latter type, and is the opening scene of the toledoth of Jacob. This is the longest toledoth in the book of Genesis, stretching from chapter 37 to the end of the book.   Given the toledoth structure of the book of Genesis, we may be tempted to read Genesis as history, for what else could a book of...

This year, due to the coronavirus, St. Margaret’s Anglican got permission to celebrate Holy Week with the Orthodox according to the Julian calendar, so everything is running a week behind. This is a reflection I was asked to provide for our “Palm Sunday” weekend, Saturday service.  I don’t like Palm Sunday. It always seems a bit too forced, a bit too put-on, a bit camp really. For over a month Lent has dragged on, making me face my mortality and the problems of sin, evil, and suffering. I read this book by Ben Myers once when I was 18 or 19 that introduced me to Rowan Williams and T. S. Eliot and the “lenten” spirituality they represent, and I’ve kind of loved staring down the barrel of Good Friday ever since. A religion that takes seriously the problem of godforsakeness that we see made manifest on the cross is a religion I can sign on to. But for some absurd reason this melancholic spirituality that suits me just fine is interrupted by the carnival procession of foliage we...

What a time to be alive. I recall a conversation between a fellow seminarian and one of our New Testament professors during my time at Providence wherein the student suggested that maybe we should pray to receive more suffering. The professor immediately exclaimed, "NO! We never pray for more suffering, suffering will always come, we pray for the grace to get through it faithfully." I've thought a lot about that conversation over the years, and especially now, in the middle of a global pandemic. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were still planning on spending her Spring Break in Lisbon. Two days later, I was booking a flight home from the UK in an attempt to get back to Canada before borders and airports started shutting down. Beyond the re-location, my own life hasn't changed much, I continue to sit at a desk reading books all day, except now I get to do that at the family farm instead of a moldy office on the edge of the University of Birmingham. I have a deep appre...

             The tradition of agrarian theology that I seek to dialogue with in my research and in this blog owes much to the writing of Wendell Berry and his interpreters. Agrarianism, in its North American register, is inescapably bound up in the structures of settler colonialism that has been incredibly displacing to the indigenous peoples who have called these lands home from time immemorial. [1] This form of agrarianism has had such a displacing edge specifically because it has been driven by the settler demand for new land. The agrarianism that shaped my own life in Western Canada was largely created by a race between new immigrants and American ex-pats who were hungry to swallow up land as quickly as the Canadian government could sign treaties with the remaining indigenous nations that centuries of war, famine, and disease had not already extinguished. [2]             With this settler-...