Thursday, February 26, 2009

Nobody likes the “N” word.

Each week I write a little “Word of Preparation” for our Sunday bulletin. The idea is to help us all get pointed in roughly the same direction as we prepare for worship. This coming Sunday is the first Sunday of Lent and, since Lent is for all of us, I thought I’d share my prep word with you. – Lent is the forty day period set aside by the church during which the faithful prepare for Easter, and the rest of us recover from Mardi Gras.


I haven’t forgotten that I had promised this post would deal with the reasons I do not sing the national anthem. That post is coming soon. And this year I'm going to give up promise-breaking for Lent. Honest, I really am, cross my heart.


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By the time I was two I had learned to say “no”. I wonder how old I will be when I’ve finally learned to hear it.


It’s a hard word, perhaps the hardest, and yet I believe most of us would grudgingly admit that “no” has blessed our lives like few other words we’ve known.


When I first wanted to go out all by myself, my mother said “no”. When I wanted to go to school without brushing my teeth, my mother said “no”. And when, as a child, I wanted a BB gun, a crossbow, a machete and a rattle snake, despite my promises to be ever so careful, my mother said “no”. And, as a consequence, I have never been run over by a car, I still have all of my fingers, both of my eyes, and most of my teeth. And I have never had occasion to die from, or survive, a venomous snakebite.


Yes, part of the secret of my happy life has been learning to take “no” for an answer. And learning to say “no” to my friends, my spouse, my parents, my children, my boss, and myself.


A lot of people don’t like Lent because they think it’s mostly about “no”, and they think “no” is a bad word. Well, they’re right about Lent, but they’re wrong about “no”.


Lent is really just a little refresher course for all of us. We’re learning to say “yes” to “no”.

Friday, February 20, 2009

Whoa Canada

I see in the news that Erik Millett, an elementary school principal in New Brunswick, is being pilloried for deciding that O Canada, which previously had been sung in his school every morning, will, henceforth, be sung monthly at general assemblies. Seems the whole country’s in an uproar about his outrageous lack of patriotic fervour. We used to say “Slow as molasses in January”, but I guess news days in February are slower still.

It’s hard to tell from the news articles and phone-in shows exactly what all the excitement’s about. In fact, I get the impression that, like most emotional reactions, it isn’t exactly about anything. Some seem offended that his decision was an accommodation to a few families who objected to the anthem on religious grounds. Others are concerned that once a month isn’t enough for the children to master the complexity of our national hymn. – All children seem to manage Happy Birthday and Jingle Bells, so I doubt that this can really be the case. – And some feel that Millett has revealed himself to be a traitor, and should, therefore, be deported to nowhere in particular; I suppose just forced to wander like Cain of old.

The real news story in all this, of course, is the reaction to Mr. Millett’s decision, not the decision itself. And the more the talk-shows can stir the pot the more they have to talk about. It’s all pretty hard on one hapless school principal and his family, but that’s show biz.

I understand that people are frustrated by what they perceive to be political correctness run amok. But the idea that children should be singing O Canada every school day seems bizarre to me. That’s about 200 times a year, or 2400 times in their 12 years of schooling. What better program could we possibly devise to ensure that kids grow up hating this song, or at very least treating it with utter indifference. If I were a supporter of the national anthem I think I would be applauding Millett’s plan.

We live in such an intemperate time. People get beaten for supporting the wrong football team, and shot for changing lanes without signalling. Our politicians misrepresent and vilify one another for marginal political advantage, and school principals receive death-threats for unpopular decisions they make. I know a church where a hymn book was thrown at someone during a congregational meeting, and another church where a fist-fight broke out in the parking lot over a decision that had been made. On several occasions I’ve even seen worship services disrupted by people storming out in anger because they didn’t like the sermon or the music.

Perhaps, rather than getting our kids singing incessantly about “patriot love” we should get them thinking and talking about just plain ordinary love. Perhaps, rather than repeatedly challenging one another to “stand on guard” we might better suggest that we all “stand down” a little.

Now, to be completely forthright, I should probably declare my own bias here. I am one of those folks who does not sing the national anthem. It has been my practice for about 35 years to stand when it is sung, but not join in. Like so many others, I have reasons for not singing it; faith reasons. And, if everyone will put down their pitch forks, in my next post I’ll tell you what they are.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Just gettin’ my fix

Putting out a posting every day in Advent just about cured me. In January just four postings, and I haven’t posted a single thing in February. For a while I thought perhaps I’d actually kicked the habit entirely, but deep down inside I think I always knew this would happen. It starts innocently enough with thoughts just forming in my mind. Then words begin to gather and sort themselves into rows like strings of DNA. Then they commence replication and, like Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerers Apprentice, everything I do just makes the situation worse. If I chop them to pieces they just multiply and keep on coming. And if I close the door and hold it against them they simply pile up on the other side and force their way through. And worst of all, like DNA, they eventually become an undeniably living thing, and all my resistance morphs into nurture. Before you know it I’m sitting on an egg again, watching it hatch, and then sending it off to the net to try it’s wings. It’s an affliction I tell you, an addiction affliction. But, like most addicts, everything is about getting another fix. Even my cries for help become another post. O, retched man that I am.


And, speaking of DNA, did you know that:

- each length of human DNA comprises about 3.2 billion letters of coding?

- the number of possible unique combinations is so large that written in conventional form it would be a 1 followed by more than 3 billion zeros?

- it would take more than 5000 average sized books to print that number?

- your body contains about 10 thousand trillion cells, each containing about 1.8 meters of DNA?

- if you could join all these strands into a single strand it would be long enough to reach from the earth to the moon and back twenty-five times?


The other day someone told me that this is the sort of thing that convinces them there must be a God. I don’t actually see the logic in that, but then I don’t need convincing. It does, however, make me wonder about the evolutionary biologist who dismisses the idea of God as too far-fetched.