girltheology

I'm not usually one to poke fun (ok... maybe I am) but you gotta laugh at this link.

After being duty-bound last night and completing most of my sermon, I got to sleep in this morning (usual practice is to get up at some insanely early hour, write sermon, go back to sleep until an hour and a half before church). Last night I was positive it was going to snow when Helen and I were leaving Saskatoon - and quite possibly it did snow there. I'll have to check. Anyways - lucky me (but also unlucky because I'm really anxious for it to snow.... I know, I know.... mid-January I will be kicking myself for saying that) it didn't snow last night so church in Loverna will definitely be on this afternoon.

My whole point is the picture. Take a look at the frost on my porch railing. Pretty cool, hey?

OK - off to finish sermon.....

Wow - has been a busy few weeks. Mom came out from Vancouver on the 16th of October - just in time for my covenanting service. It was amazing to have her here. The covenanting was between me and the Marengo Pastoral Charge. I was presented with symbols which represented our joint experience in covenant:

Bible - to be among the congregations as a fellow learner and teacher of the Word.

Water - to be reminded of our baptisms, our first covenant with God.

Towel and Basin - to commit to being in relationship with each other and to serve one another.

Hymn Book - to remind us of the diverse ministries and traditions of the United Church of Canada, and our common joy of song.

Tissues - to be with each other and to share our tears of sorrow and of joy.

The choir sang an anthem which my grandparents had sent music for as a birthday present. It was nice to have that participation from them, even if they couldn't be there in person.


Mom was here for 4 days, and we had a great visit. While I worked on Monday, she cooked amazing meals to put in my freezer (all KINDS of yummy stuff). Tuesday we went in to Saskatoon for the day, Wednesday we visited a quaint little tea house in Eatonia, and then Thursday we drove to Calgary so that I could fly to Toronto and she could fly home.


I spent the weekend in orientation with the Canadian delegation to the World Council of Churches 9th General Assembly which will be in Porto Alegre, Brazil next February. I am one of three delegates to be sent by the United Church of Canada. It should be a pivotal time in the ecumenical movement - especially in negotiating the relationship between Christian Orthodoxy and the Protestant churches (a very inaccurate distinction, but one that is generally accepted).

While I was in Toronto, I had a chance to connect with Fran Deacon, a dear friend of my grandparents from their time in Rosedale. We had a lovely visit over lunch, and then we went for a tour of the renovated sanctuary at Rosedale United Church. This posting's picture of me is taken in the chancel of the sanctuary. The renovation are gorgeous. It's truly a magnificent place.

Anyways - sermon to finish for tomorrow. Hence, it is probably appropriate to end with some Wordsworth:

As promised... here is a picture of one of my two churches. It's Grace United Church in Loverna, SK. I don't have much to say, but will leave you with yet another e.e. cummings poem:


i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and
squalor of hurrying cities
--i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily
striving (finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols of hope,
and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic world with its
rapture and anguish) at peace with nature
--i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)


95 Poems,
77 - e.e. cummings

Not much new to say.... busy preparing for the Youth Rally (November) and my covenanting service (this Sunday! ohmygosh). Just thought rather than stress out my computer all at once by trying to upload all the pictures I got developed this week, I'd just put one up for now.

This is a picture of Zen and me sitting outside "the 7-44" otherwise known as the Red Lion (gas bar and chinese restaurant). It's called the 7-44 by the locals of Alsask (AL-SASK, alberta-saskatchewan) because it's at the junction of highway 7 and highway 44. I'm sensing a pattern here. Hmm... Chuck (local gas station attendant - who, curiously, is always wearing a UVIC Vikes hat, but doesn't go to UVIC) took the picture of us just before we left to go to up to Loverna so I could take some pictures of my little ghost town church. Maybe tomorrow I'll get the photos of my two churches up.

Anyways, today I went to a quilting class and got 80% finished a double wedding ring patterned table centerpiece. It's quite cool... if you like that kind of thing. I am quite excited about it! I'll maybe post a picture of that one day soon too.

Blessings all on your many and varied journeys.
Enjoy autumn.

There is so much in life to be grateful for. I had planned to write a long entry on Thanksgiving, maybe include parts of my Thanksgiving sermon. But now I'm too tired after fighting with my computer all day. The long and the short of Thanksgiving for me was that I was giving food by my congregation. Like enough to cover my entire kitchen table. It was amazing - almost a whole trunk full of fresh veggies and preserves and eggs.

I'll leave you with a poem of thanksgiving by e.e.cummings.

i thank you God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I've been thinking a lot about my thesis I'll have to write next year, and for the past month I've really done no reading related to it. I think that this is not a bad thing in itself - it's good to take a break from things. But at the same time, I miss being captivated by research. Anyways - tonight I was messing around looking up some stuff, and I found this guy's website with pictures of the WTO protests, and it got me to thinking about an article I'd read by Naomi Klein in the New Left Review. In it she writes about the definition (or lack thereof) of the anti-globalization movement, and how it's somewhat hypocritical to an extent because the means of networking to protest globalization is itself a benefit of a globalized society.

This seeming contradiction is also articulated by Nobel Peace Prize winner Amartya Sen - a Cambridge Economist who writes on issues of freedom and development. He writes:

To be generically against markets would be almost as odd as being generically against conversations between people (even though some conversations are clearly foul and cause problems for others - or even for the conversationalists themselves). The freedom to exchange words, or goods, or gifts does not need defensive justification in terms of their favourable but distant effects; they are part of the way human beings in society live and interact with each other (unless stopped by regulation or fiat). The contribution of the market mechanism to economic growth is, of course, important, but this comes only after the direct significance of the freedom to interchange - words, goods, gifts - has been acknowledged.

As it happens, the rejection of the freedom to participate in the labour market is one of the ways of keeping people in bondage and captivity, and the battle against the unfreedom of bound labour is important in many third world countries today for some of the same reasons the American Civil War was momentous. The freedom to enter markets can itself be a significant contribution to development, quiet aside from whatever the market mechanism may or may not do to promote economic growth or industrialization. In fact, the praise of capitalism by Karl Marx (not a
great admirer of capitalism in general) and his characterization (in Das Kapital) of the American Civil War as "the one great event of contemporary history" related directly to the importance of the freedom of labour contract as opposed to slavery and the enforced exclusion from the labour market. ... The freedom to participate in economic interchange has a basic role in social living.

- Amartya Sen Development as Freedom pps.6-7

Yesterday was officially Thanksgiving Day. But since I had already had Thanksgiving dinner at the Thomson's with a whole crew of their family on Sunday night, and since I'd run out of dog food (I couldn't believe myself! I had dog food on hand 3 days before I got Zen, but somehow neglected to notice I was running low and it was a holiday weekend), and since the closest place that sold dog food on a holiday Monday was Saskatoon - Off I went!

"Off we went" is probably a more accurate statment. Zen came with, because the thought of her sitting in the back yard starving while I went on a round trip to a city 270 kms away was heart wrenching. So instead I let her starve in the back seat.

Isn't she adorable? It always breaks my heart to leave her anywhere!

Anyways - once the food shopping was out of the way, we met up with my friend Sean who is doing his Master's in Philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan (Aristotelian Ethics - right up my alley!). We took Zen for a long walk around the University and threw the frisbee for her and let her have a good romp. It is a beautiful campus, and it was a beautiful day.

It's strange because although we get autumn on the coast - it doesn't have the same feel as here. Here the leaves fall more suddenly - you wake up one morning and the tree leaves are no longer green, they are brilliant shades of yellow and gold that match the fields. Sometimes in the past week I've sat and watched the leaves fall in the wind and they swirled around and looked like glitter falling from the sky.

Speaking of glitter from the sky - there have been a lot of geese around because of the rain this year, and while driving into the city, there were a couple of instances where I looked up and all I could see were swarms of geese. That's right - SWARMS. No "V-formations" here - there were so many they looked like those big patches of starlings or sparrows that fly over the Fraser delta in BC. It was phenomenal.

Thanksgiving Sunday I celebrated with my two normal services - hopefully will have another entry about that sometime tomorrow.

The quote at the top of this entry I got from a little bulletin board sign that my Grandma Wallace popped in the mail to me. I'm so lucky she's always popping things in the mail to me.

Anyways - in this season of gratitude we have so much to be thankful for. It's easy to be joyful, and that is exactly what I am today - full of joy.

"We call 'happiness' a certain set of circumstances that makes joy possible. But we call joy that state of mind and emotions that need nothing to feel happy." -Andre Gide.

Strange Angels

November 18-19, 2005 I will be co-hosting the Prairie Pine Presbytery Youth Rally. Students from grades 7-12 will be invited to participate in a special event for youth which coincides with the regular 2 day presbytery meeting. The Rally will take place in Unity, Saskatchewan. Jacob Zacharias (my co-host) and I chose the theme "Strange Angels" because the kidz will be putting together a drama presentation out of a book called "Strange Angels and Other Plays" by United Church playwrite Scott Douglas...

Stay tuned for more comments on our progress...