Month: April 2012

Are we there yet?

On By Charis PsalloIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I want my newsfeed back. It seems to have been hijacked by some people who have noticed that there will be an election going on months from now –in another country –where I do not have a vote.

How many important stories about the conditions facing billions of other people in the world are being displaced by speculations about a few rich men as they jockey for position in a race which determines who gets to move on to the hemi-demi-semi final? You’d think they were running for the position of god. I pray for leaders everywhere, but sorry guys, that job competition is closed.

Here’s what I think: I think the ideal candidate would demonstrate the ability to come up with creative solutions to staying within a tight budget, be able to resolve disputes, show no favoritism, resort to force extremely rarely and then only to protect the most vulnerable from certain harm, inspire people to move in the same direction and to share their resources, have ties to neither lobbyists nor big business (including their own) nor be dependent on government hand-outs. They should respect other people’s beliefs no matter how weird, have a perfectly clean criminal record check, pay the same percentage of taxes as the average wage earner, respect the needs and hopes of parents, promote a safe clean environment for individuals to follow their dreams and develop their talents whilst obtaining a good educational foundation, be quick to deal with breaches of a well-defined code of conduct, place high value on good nutrition and health care for all, be constantly alert for outside threats,  make room for animals and respect nature. They should be able to speak well in front of groups and explain complex concepts in simple language. They should have the ability to think clearly in highly stressful, chaotic environments under threats of violence whilst inspiring hope and always having an eye to future development. They should be willing to lay down their lives for the people they serve, yet command respect for their position.

Yes, the ideal presidential candidate is a nursery school teacher.

Mom’s treasure

On By Charis PsalloIn Neither animal nor vegetable8 Comments

I grieved my mother’s death ten years before she died. Like a lot of nurses her body gave out under the physical strain of caring for people. Pain forced her to leave her perfectly starched cap on the shelf and her white stockings in the drawer. She never gave up her duty shoes though. Years after she went on disability she would lean on Dad’s arm and hobble in to the same shop downtown to buy another pair.

We assumed it was the pain meds that clouded her once brilliant mind -that or the chronic lack of sleep. Even after the pain gave her an excuse to stay in bed she seldom slept more than four or five hours a night. She would bake bread and wash floors before her day shift when she still rushed into the oncology ward for report. I don’t think she knew how to sleep more than that. She was the hardest worker I ever knew. Sitting still was a sin. A dreamy bookish daughter was a totally alien creature to her.

The Alzheimer’s kind of snuck up on us. But she knew -and wrote final letters to her children and gave instructions for her funeral while she could still write. We found them stored in her security box.

My greatest grief came early in the disease process after we finally sat down for the heart-to-heart she had been promising for so many years. She finally listened.

An hour later she repeated a question that made me realize she had not retained a word of what I said.

I grieved for the conversation that would never happen. I drove home and stopped at a roadside rest area when I couldn’t stop the tears. I never cried like that again, even though I was aware, at every visit, of saying goodbye to another little part of her that was gone forever.

The disease progressed relatively slowly. Dad was heroic in his efforts to care for her by himself, but after he had a mild stroke and wouldn’t consider moving and none of us lived close enough to take over the 24 hour intensive care she required, there was no choice but to find a facility to look after her.

She was a lousy patient. This frail little lady who was too weak to lift a piece of sandwich to her mouth decked two nurses she considered to be incompetent.

Here’s the other embarrassing thing. Mom was never racist -well, perhaps mildly, but less than most people of her generation — but to her it was 1930 something in Saskatchewan and she was a young girl who had never seen a person of colour before. She was very frightened of the staff who were all, with the exception of one fiery no-nonsense Scottish woman, Asia or Jamaica born. She didn’t know what country she was in. She thought she had been abducted.

There was one night though, when she and I sang our way through a dozen hymns. She didn’t know who I was, but she knew all the words and even sang harmony. After she sang she told me about the Jesus she was singing about. She lit up, “Oh, he’s wonderful.”

Two minutes later she was crying out in agony. When a young patient was rolled through the hospital on a stretcher she thought it was her dear brother who been killed in a car accident. He died in that accident sixty years before, but her grief was as fresh as if she was hearing the news for the first time.

One afternoon while out for a hike I cried out to the Jesus she loved and asked him to please take her. I hated to see her suffer. She was so confused and no position the nurses put her in was comfortable.

Two hours after I prayed my brother called. Mom died –two hours ago.

I didn’t cry.

Dad said he was holding her hand as he read a book. She had been in a lot of pain that day. When he looked up again to check on her, her eyes were focussed on something on the other side of the room. He said she had a look of surprised delight on her face, as if she recognized someone she loved and had been waiting for. He tried to see who it was, but before he could ask Mom, he knew she was gone.

When I was sorting through my mother’s things in drawers and closets I found bits of rolled up paper with bible verses written on them. Promises. I knew that at one point she had memorized huge portions of scripture and quoted it at night when she couldn’t sleep. I took the verses and put them in a wooden box. They are my treasure.

Yes, I have a good inheritance.

Words

On By Charis PsalloIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I had a good friend, the adult son of a pastor, who told me he perceived God as saying, “Love me or die.”

Then he added, “I’d rather die.”

Yes, he was the son of a pastor and spent many hours sitting in a pew hearing the words about God — but he also had a parent who put a knife through his hand rather than have him use his considerable musical talent to “play worldly music.” To him (and to many others) God was a sad construct of his abusive parents. We do tend to create God, if not in our own image, in the image of authority figures we have known, good and bad, from detached irresponsible fathers who went away to physically and emotionally abusive mothers to indulgent Santa Claus-type grandfathers.

I think the way we hear words someone says depends on how we view the person who speaks them. For most of my life I heard God’s words as disapproval and laying down impossible expectations.

These same words, “Do what I tell you or you will die,” have completely different meanings dependng on whether you perceive the person speaking them to be a rapist with a knife or a rescuer hanging by a rope from a helicopter.

For years reading the Bible, at best, felt like reading a phonebook from a city I had no intention of visiting –meant for someone else. At worst it felt like reading court documents listing the charges against me.

What I never realized was that the judge loved me enough not only to hang from a helicopter to get me out of a certain death situation, he hung from a tree. He said, “I love you so much I’d rather die than be without you.” So he did –and then conquered death so we could be together forever.

I am adored by the King of the Universe who wants a relationship with me. He invented love. Heady stuff. I hear his words differently now.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

On By Charis PsalloIn WaterLeave a comment

Once the Pharisees and the Sadducees arrived together to test Jesus, and asked him to give them a sign from Heaven. But he replied, “When the evening comes you say, ‘Ah, fine weather—the sky is red.’ In the morning you say, ‘There will be a storm today, the sky is red and threatening.’ Yes, you know how to interpret the look of the sky but you have no idea how to interpret the signs of the times!

Matthew 16

Seek, seek, seek the Lord

On By Charis PsalloIn MountainsLeave a comment

Perplexed.

I feel perplexed a lot.

I don’t have the answers to all of life’s problems, or even most of them. Ater I have tried the same old solutions that didn’t work last time (is that not the definition of insanity?) I keep coming back to the same plan of action that does:

Seek the Lord, seek the Lord, seek the Lord.

When will I learn to make this my starting point?

When all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives my brothers, don’t resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends! Realise that they come to test your faith and to produce in you the quality of endurance. But let the process go on until that endurance is fully developed, and you will find you have become men of mature character with the right sort of independence. And if, in the process, any of you does not know how to meet any particular problem he has only to ask God—who gives generously to all men without making them feel foolish or guilty—and he may be quite sure that the necessary wisdom will be given him. But he must ask in sincere faith without secret doubts as to whether he really wants God’s help or not. The man who trusts God, but with inward reservations, is like a wave of the sea, carried forward by the wind one moment and driven back the next. That sort of man cannot hope to receive anything from God, and the life of a man of divided loyalty will reveal instability at every turn. (James 1:2-8 Phillips translation)

Can you relate?

The Cross: a bizarre symbol

On By Charis PsalloIn Uncategorized1 Comment

The cross becomes a symbol of controversy again. In the UK a legal battle ensues over whether or not an individual may wear a cross on the job as a symbol of their faith. A Scottish bishop is urging Christians everywhere to don their cruciform jewelry in protest.

It’s bizarre, really –the cross as an identifying mark. Only Jesus could turn a symbol of ultimate humiliation into a symbol of ultimate victory.

But only those who do not understand the depth of God’s love, or recognize the horror of the cross or how far God was willing to go to demonstrate his love and provide a means of salvation could trivialize that symbol to the status of “pretty.”

The cross was an instrument of torture and execution, people!

Put it this way, what if we substituted other such instruments in our songs, expressions and living room-friendly art work?

How about some songs?

“Oh blessed noose that will not let me go…”

“The gas chamber in which Jesus died, is a shelter in which we can hide…”

“At the electric chair where I first saw the light…”

“At the foot of the firing squad, I lay my burden down…”

Or how about sending someone a greeting card with a lily bedecked hypodermic syringe and I.V. tubing, superimposed with the message, “To comfort you in the loss of your loved one?”

Can you picture driving by a cemetery with row upon row of chopping blocks and axes?

Hear your long suffering aunt sighing, “It’s just my water board to bear,” or the preacher urging his flock to “take up their rack and follow Him.”

I’m imagining a certain accident prone friend saying, “Here. Hold my beer while I try something,” then making the sign of the iron maiden by poking himself several times with a finger before proceeding with his next misadventure.

On Sundays we could have a colourfully robed line of clerics solemnly proceeding down the aisle of a cathedral wearing those arrow-through-the-head costume pieces we see at Halloween.

How about a golden guillotine on the top of the steeple or the carved figure of a nearly naked man, eyes bulging and tongue lolling as he is garrotted, mounted on the wall behind the altar –or a fifty foot sign beside the parking lot that reads “First Church of the Holy Stake and Flames. Sunday Services 9:00 A.M. and 11:00 A.M. Everyone welcome?”

I’m thinking of creating a new jewelry line –little spears, mines, arrows, swords, machine guns, chainsaws, missiles, flame throwers, personal fire arms, and atomic bomb mushroom-shaped clouds, fashioned in jewel-encrusted gold, silver, platinum –dangling from ears, hung on intricate chains over impressive décolletages or hairy muscular chests, and clinking on charm bracelets. If someone asks, I can say these represent the various ways in which people have misunderstood the message of Jesus’ submission to the cross and the methods they have employed to impose their version of “peace” on each other without paying attention to anything Jesus actually said. They might even represent the torture and execution instruments being used on his disciples around the world today who have chosen to truly follow him –or could even be used on Christ himself, if he showed up in our malls or meeting halls and challenged the way we think.

Do Christians need to wear jewelry to identify them as believers? Did not Jesus Christ say that this was the identifying mark?

“By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”( John 13:35)

If the world can’t tell us apart without metal crosses around our necks, going to court and demanding our rights is not going to solve a thing. If it takes jewelry to identify those of us who call ourselves by his name, we need to be introduced to the real Jesus.

The wonder of love and the power of grace

On By Charis PsalloIn Water2 Comments

I will both lie down in peace, and sleep; For You alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety. Psalm 4:8IMG_0394 dutch harbour cut out

For so many years my sleep was erased by “what-ifs.” The opposite of love is not hate; it is fear. Hate is simply one of fear’s many manifestations.

I was so afraid that pursuing God would be another disappointment. I was afraid that I would get to the finish line and he would inform me I was disqualified on a technicality because I had missed meeting some requirement no one told me about, or done something out of order, or didn’t try hard enough -or tried too hard.

I once had a music student who failed a Royal Conservatory exam because I made a mistake. I misread a page number and taught her a song that was on the approved list for the next higher grade level. Did she sing poorly? Not that song. She sang it beautifully; she actually did more than required -and that was the problem. Being informed that she had done something wrong threw her concentration and she did not do well in the sight singing and ear trainng requirements she needed to perform later. Even when I explained to the powers that it was not the girl’s fault, but mine, my pleas were met by the recitation of rule book and the necessity of the penalty of docking a large percentage of her mark. I felt absolutely horrible.

I assured her that she did not fail. The goal was to sing, to develop her talent  and enjoy music; she had done that. She nodded, but she still felt rejected. I could see she was crushed in spirit. She quit singing shortly after that.

In a way, this was like my experience with churchianity. Even when I exceeded what was expected, I felt like I missed the approval mark. I was accused of “showing off” or “not being submissive.”  I was judged by a book of man-made rules and found wanting –but I was the one who chose to be a human approval junkie, essentially turning “church”  into an idol, something to be appeased, something it was never intended to be.

I felt rejected, crushed, and after a while just gave up. I feared I would never be good enough. Fear morphed into anger, and anger congealed into bitterness as hard as concrete. The same walls that served as a defense against pain also trapped offense inside and kept out joy.

After many years of long, dark, sleepless nights I heard the voice of the One who knew what it felt like to be rejected and condemned by the religious establishment. He sang me a love song and said, “If your fear of me keeps you away, you have no idea of who I am or what love is.”

He threw pebbles at my window and called me to come away with Him.

I did.

He wooed me on long walks in the woods, on mountain tops and valleys, in snow storms and desert heat. He spoke kindly and patiently as to a wounded child and invited me to let him pull the stronghold walls down.

He didn’t give me a definition of grace; he gave me a demonstration.

There is no fear in His love. He loves patiently, gently, relentlessly, unselfishly, kindly, perfectly –and perfect love casts out fear.

I hear the music again. My heart sings.