The Hockey Sweater

The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places – the school, the church and the skating-rink – but our real life was on the skating-rink....

I attended a church planting conference last week in Calgary. Its focus was on many of the new things happening in church work, and particularly some of the new ways church is engaging the “post modern” world. It was great.

At one point the emcee, Cam Roxburgh, shared the above quotation. It’s from The Hockey Sweater, by Roch Carrier and is printed on the five dollar bill. – I was convinced he was pretending to read it, but when I got home I discovered that my wife actually can read it, but only with her glasses off. Go figure. – If you have not read The Hockey Sweater you owe it to yourself to do so. By clicking on the title you can watch a neat little National Film Board short in which a slightly edited version is read by the author. It’s a Canadian classic.

At any rate, the statement by Carrier is profound, and something all teachers and pastors should understand. School and church are places of retreat from “real” life. They are extremely important, to be sure, but places apart nonetheless. If school doesn’t introduce us to the market place and church doesn’t lead us to the street, what good are they?

When Jesus came, as he said, “that we might have life”, he came to a stable, not to a church, and taught in the market place, not in a school. And so it is with us. When we come to life, we come to the world, that great skating rink. For, as Roch Carrier continues:

...Real battles were won on the skating-rink. Real strength appeared on the skating-rink. The real leaders showed themselves on the skating-rink. School was a sort of punishment. Parents always want to punish children and school is their most natural way of punishing us. However, school was also a quiet place where we could prepare for the next hockey game, lay out our strategies. As for church, we found there the tranquillity of God: there we forgot school and dreamed about the next hockey game. Through our daydreams it might happen that we would recite a prayer: we would ask God to help us play as well as Maurice Richard.

Preparing for Advent: Forgiveness

Matthew 18:21-22 Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times ?"

Jesus answered, "I tell you, not seven times , but seventy-seven times.

It has always intrigued me that schools put so much emphasis on games and sports. This is partly because kids need to work off energy, and exercise is necessary for healthy physical development. But it’s also because the playing field is a microcosm of the real world. Fair play, loyalty, endurance, and coping with victory and defeat are concepts encountered and appropriated in the heat of athletic competition.

But, as far as I’m concerned, there is one concept from the playing field that outshines all the rest; the venerable, time honoured, compassionate and merciful “Mulligan”. I know there are rules about even this great leniency (only one per game, in clearly defined circumstances), but it is still a chance to undo a mistake. It is a great mercy.

In life there are some things done, of course, that cannot be undone. But sometimes even we can let an offence go by, forgive a debt, or overlook bad judgment. And sometimes God forgives, restores, renews, and lets us just start over, because he is the Compassionate, the Merciful.

And so we come to him and one another, as children and as sister/brother, caught up in webs of error and deceit, to seek a “Mulligan”, forgiveness and a chance to start again. And we trust that he and we will grant it, just this once, as he and we have done so many times before, and undoubtedly will do again.

God is good to us, and so must we be good to one another.

Just Wondering

My cousin, Guy, sent me this interesting little download about the history of Arabic numerals. (Click here to view.) (This is not working for everyone, so I've added the two relevant slides as pictures) I was suspicious about it because the 7 and 9 seemed a bit contrived, so I did a little research. It appears that, just as I suspected, the line through 7 is a recent innovation, and the little curlicue on the bottom of the 9, though it does add angles, doesn't show up in any historical examples I've been able to find.

The download is interesting, however. The fact that someone would take the trouble to put this little theory together in a power point, and then send it out to everyone in general and no one in particular, says something about our need to make logical sense of the world, and then to communicate what we've discovered, even if it doesn't quite fit all the facts. And I have a modest example of my own.

I've always wondered how it happened that the names of the continents all begin with A: Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and the two Americas. – It’s true that Europe doesn't fit the pattern, but then it's really a political/cultural division of Asia rather than a true geographical continent. – Is this a fascinating mystery or just some meaningless

coincidence?

My research seems to indicate that it's a meaningless coincidence, and a lifetime of experience suggests that our lives are filled with meaningless coincidences. Which leads, of course, to the mother of all questions; CAN ALL THESE MEANINGLESS COINCIDENCES BE JUST A COINCIDENCE?

Still workin' on it.

MY ANNUAL TRIBUTE OF AMBIVALENCE

Tomorrow, November 11^th, we will all be remembering the soldiers of today and days gone by. Being a pacifist, this is an ambivalent exercise for me. Though I have no faith in the sword, and believe that the demands of war are utterly incompatible with the demands of Christ, I do have an appreciation for the brave men and women who risk so much to do what they believe is right. Tomorrow the horrors of war will be gilded with silver and bronze, the roar of bombs and mortar-fire muffled by solitary bugle calls, and the cries of shattered victims drown in one minute silences, time zone by time zone round the world.

But, if glitz and glitter and calls and silences conceal the horror, they also hide real gold. Every fallen soldier and civilian is somebody’s child, sibling, friend. Courage, strength, self-sacrifice are precious wherever they are found. And surely we remember it was Jesus who first used the military metaphor in reference to the church. The gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Matthew 16:18 And Paul reminded us to put on the full armour of God. Ephesians 6:11-17

So whatever else might be said about the military endeavour, it is a shining illustration of devotion at the expense of comfort, safety, and even life itself. And if ordinary people are able to accept such sacrifice for king and country, surely we can do the same in the service of the Prince of Peace. ...whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. Mark 8:35

We are soldiers of the cross, lest we forget.