Back to the Garden

  Intro: A Song for Change In 1963, tensions were high. Police turned fire hoses and dogs loose on Black youth protesting for civil rights. In Birmingham, the Klan bombed  a Sunday school killing four young girls. In Jackson, Mississippi, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in his home. Between these punctuating acts of terror, the structural violence of Jim Crow ground on adding indignity after indignity to Black life in America. In October of that year, the celebrated R&B singer, Sam Cooke, found himself on tour in Shreveport, Louisiana. On October 8 th , Cooke called ahead to a Holiday Inn to make reservations for himself and his wife. However, upon arrival later that evening, the desk clerk looked nervously at Cooke and his group and declared that there were, in fact, no vacancies that evening. Cooke was righteously furious and started yelling at the clerk, demanding to see a manager. His brother Charles pleaded with him to just let it go and leave. H...

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...

Last week, the Anglican Church of Canada was rocked by a report that the last member would leave the church by 2040. Decline in church membership is nothing new to Anglican Church of Canada. There has been a steady decline in this denomination since our apogee in 1961, decreasing from 1.2 million adherents to just over 300k today. But for a denomination that was the third largest in Canada for most of its history, it is difficult to come to terms with the news that the institution will flatline within a generation if nothing changes. Of course, this report is, at least in part, a trick of how statistical modelling works. It is unlikely that many of the young families who still call Anglicanism home will somehow disappear in the next 20 years, but given that the overall demographic of the denomination skews elderly, it is not preposterous to suppose that many parishes will be closing their doors in the coming years. As a postulant for ordination in priestly ministry, and a PhD stud...