A Conversation with Myself

Yesterday morning I sat at my usual table at my local Tim Hortons, midpoint of my usual early morning walk. Two articles on my iPhone got attention this time – amazing these days the info available in the palm of one’s hand! Don’t leave home without your iPhone lest your steps not be counted.😀

Anyway these articles, both written by devout Christians and yet offering a considerably different worldview, or Weltanschaung as my college and seminary professors used to say. The first was a cheery newsletter written by a missionary on ‘North American Assignment’ spelling out an allotment of recent faith and children and grandchildren’s adventures as well as new opportunities coming along seemingly day by day. It's an account of what might be described as life well-lived, including the donate button providing opportunity for us readers to click in the monetary support needed to keep all this going. It was one of those reads which stirred up some inspiration and also a hint of the envy I sometimes encounter reading friends’ Christmas letters, where all is roses and grandchildren with adult children getting PhD’s, etc. – you know the feeling.

The other was an article written by Adam Russel Taylor, recently appointed president of Sojourners, a print and online magazine of faith, culture, and politics. He begins this way.

I was born in the shadow of the civil rights struggle. My Black mother and white father made the controversial decision to marry in 1968, the same year Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a tragic turning point in our nation’s history in which progress was replaced with riots, the Vietnam War, and a backlash to the advances of the civil rights struggle. I became convinced my generation inherited the unfinished business of that movement (SojoMail).  

This is a magazine with edge, and I have been a subscriber forever - a constant in my reading diet since its inception as The Post-American in 1971 (yes 50 years ago) when in my early twenties, I was a ‘radical student’ at Canadian Mennonite Bible College (now CMU) in Winnipeg. While excitedly discovering my Anabaptist roots there I also discovered American draft dodgers, very opposed to the Vietnam War, some of whom showed up in Canada as 1W volunteers to work in nursing homes or institutions, many of them becoming part and parcel of the youth scene in many of our churches. My social conscience was awakened during those good college years even as I was learning the Bible and a lot of theology, much of it written by European authors with awe-inspiring names like Bultmann and Barth and even a guy named Nietzsche. They were the experts we needed to read and write essays about. [Only in later years did I get a better contextual picture. Some of them were still in recovery from Hitler’s Naziism and that’s why they were so dogmatic (or existential) in their writings.] These stolid undergrad studies happened alongside the countercultural hippy movement going on those years. Radical social action became a part of my faith education and subsequent years of pastoral ministry.

So, these two articles, a missionary newsletter and an editorial, accompanied me home yesterday. One of the benefits of these morning jaunts is that I get the fresh air along with the think time. This homeward half had me thinking about these two rather different reads. I do not yet consider myself old but recognize that my thoughts cover a few years by now. I’ve been at this for a while! I regularly think about how things have changed, and also some things remain the same. The current need for social awareness is essential - at least for those not just stuck in opinions. Environment, indigenous and immigrant issues, and of course the spiritual and/or political search for freedom and peace goes on in this still fractured world. I suppose that is why the minute I retired I got to participate in the very thing that has been my lifelong interest! 😌 I landed an assignment from our Mennonite Church Alberta to see how we as Mennonites might walk alongside the many South Sudanese Christians and other immigrants showing up in Calgary. Together with them I’ve been knocking at the doors of one of our churches, and grateful for the welcome we are receiving here.

Further to this never-ending social awareness there is a yearning clearly evident also among our immigrant friends for something more - kind of reminds me of the Psalmist, "deep calls to deep" (42:7). There is need to pray together for healing, perhaps recovery, for evangelism. It's the spiritual yen. In John 14:6 Jesus says“I am the way and the truth and the life” spoken so clearly to his keener disciples and to all of us whether newcomers or oldtimers. And Matthew 11:28 also the big invite,“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Jesus' help for solutions to the many needs, family, employment, mental stability, or … is so often requested and welcomed! Many of us even in our socially conscious urban somewhat educated faith communities possibly could also use a refresher in basics. 

As shared in a recent blog, I also serve as Mennonite rep on Calgary Interfaith Council, presenting good opportunity for relationship with persons of other faiths. Of interest to me is that most conversations here, whether with Muslims or Mormons or Unitarians or Christians of ecumenical or evangelical stripe, roll easily on topic of my faith in Jesus the Christ. ("Growing Faith Closing Churches," September 28). Hmm, a good reminder here that I need to practice a little more of what I am, in fact just a plain old born-again follower of Jesus, child of God, something I already knew before I became that radical student way back there! 😌 In that vein I totally enjoy a missionary report devoid of national and international pain spots, simply celebrating the good! Social action and evangelism, living and being, both so important, so very eternal.

I close with another quote from the latest anniversary issue of that 50 year-old magazine. “Started by students who were convinced ... that the gospel calls disciples of Jesus Christ to be agents of change in our fallen world”(Sojourners, November 2021, p.23).

I got home from that stimulating walk just in time to log in with a number of others for Daily Prayer, forty-five minutes of guided prayer, also sponsored by our MCA. It's a nice way to put this exercising and this thinking in proper perspective.