Ageism

I was carrying a box with papers piled on top up the stairs at work to prepare for a meeting when the woman in front of me caught a glimpse of my face as we rounded the corner and she paused for a double-take. "Do you work here?" she asked. I was a little bit confused because I was clearly carrying agency belongings, but I was not wearing my identification badge so I agreed that it was an acceptable question. "Yes." I replied. I had not met this woman before, so I asked her the same question. She said "Yes, I do, I work upstairs. But you, you look so young and I was thinking to myself how can this girl be working here she looks like she should be in school. How old are you?" At this moment, my nostrils flared so wide that I must have looked like a dragon.

I am judged by my appearance all the time. This has happened for as long as I can remember.

I have been asked on airplanes, while of legal age, if I will be travelling alone suggesting that I am under the age of 13 and would normally be accompanied by a parent.

I have been asked for identification while purchasing clothing because I "do not look old enough to have a credit card".

In the past, I brushed off the frequent comments about my youthful looks but now with my experience in the Diversity Education office I have learnt a great deal about discrimination and recognize these comments as examples of ageism.

My conversation with this women in the stairway continued. "How old are you?" I ask, with snarky expression. "Oh me, I am very old, but you, you look very young." I did not give the woman my age but with disdain replied, "I have a degree, I am employed full time and this is my career."

Maybe this was not the best way to respond to the discrimination I was feeling. I am sure this woman was simply unaware of the offense of her outrageous assumptions.

I am wondering if you have experienced an "ism" lately. When was the last time you encountered racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, heterosexism, ableism, elitism, classism or others? Where did you experience or witness this, at work, school or church? How did you respond?

Shake it like you mean it!

A friend shared this poem with me a while ago because it caused her to think of me when she read it.

When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder.
Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much.
A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did.
Where the smoke from the chimney ended.
How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
—Jonathan Safran Foer

I took dance lessons for nine years in grade school. I took class in jazz and hip hop because I was told at the age of eight I was too old to pursue ballet thus quashing my dream of becoming a ballerina. None the less, the classes I was able to take were the highlight of each week. My closet overflowed with brightly coloured spandex and I had a make-up box the size of a tool kit. When I was awake I was dancing and when I was sleeping, I was dreaming about being on stage.

When I got to the age of school dances, I started to notice other people noticing me. For one school dance, I decided to wear my favourite spandex outfit and dance until the music stopped. At this dance, my only Christian friend told me that I was getting all this attention because I was dancing too provocatively. I thought about her comment and decided that that it might be more acceptable to dance like a goof-ball. This is when the flat-hand-air-jab move emerged. I tried my best to keep my hips and torso in line, to glue my feet to the floor and concentrate on moving off-beat. As I had hoped, I began to attract less attention because I appeared completely uncoordinated. Now the flat-hand-air-jab is my signature move.

I feel most alive when I am dancing. When I dance, I feel unhindered to move with the music and with other people. I feel satisfied by the the energy exertion and fulfilled in creativity. I thrive on the performance aspect and feel as though people are listening or taking in what I am giving. I do not feel ashamed when I dance. Collaborating with other dancers and musicians significantly enhances the joy that I receive while dancing.

Why does dancing in church almost always suck? How do we create places for people to dance and explore dance in a positive way?

This video was taken on a visit to The Reach art gallery in Abbotsford. When a young woman started to play the piano, I felt that it was appropriate to collaborate, and Duncan with all his film training was able to collaborate as well and captured the moment. This is now one of my most favourite art gallery memories.

Woody Allen and Billy Graham

A wonderful example of respectful good humoured dialogue...

Stories. Pt. 2. The Fire Chicken.

The Fire Chicken resides above the entrance to my kitchen. The Fire Chicken arrived sometime in 2009. The chicken was drawn by a friend and was pinned to our wall with great pride, and minimal ceremony. Had I know the staying power of The Fire Chicken, I would have celebrated its arrival with trumpets and cymbals.

Like all stories, it changed with time. It shifted from a fun drawing, to a picture with history and some form of meaning. The shift was based on jokes about the position of prominence it holds, where other home might place a crucifix, we have The Fire Chicken. It now lays claim to being “The Deity of the House” (Please do not take this too seriously – It is a Fire Chicken).

Today, The Fire Chicken was dethroned. I took The Fire Chicken off the wall to scan it. I know all my previous roommates felt a shutter in the force, as The Fire Chicken moved for the first time in years. Do not be too alarmed, The Fire Chicken has been returned to it proper place.

As I ponder The Fire Chicken, I think off the number of people who have lived under its “Diety” or those who have visited its shrine (my home). I count at least ten people who have lived here, and countless people have asked us about The Fire Chicken. Its story continues to propagate and the influence of its story spreads far wider than its local impact. Roommates move on, friends change, and stories spread; such is the nature of life and stories.

What prompted this post? The Fire Chicken now has a new story to tell. It was my birthday earlier this month, and my roommate Sam commissioned his younger sister, Laurel, in New York, to write a story about The Fire Chicken. He gave her the title, she created, and I received. The story is excellent! It now hangs on the wall near my desk. It took me two or three readings to fully appreciate the story. So without further ado:









In my previous post about stories, I began to argue that we all live interrupted stories. I think “the Story of a fire Chicken that went Skiing” can help us understand this. The postmodern genius of this story arrives in the third frame. It is here we have a choice, either dismiss everything because a new story breaks in, or accept the interruption and move on with a syncretised understanding. We cannot ignore that we see bunnies and not a fire Chicken in the third frame. Thus, we must conclude that in this story world either a fire Chicken can shape shift, or the story world contains more animals and more spectacular creativity that one originally anticipated. The interruption spurs us on to better understandings, more creative understandings, and more holistic understandings.

There is, however, another option. One may conclude that “the Story of a fire Chicken that went Skiing” is the only story. One may refuse to accept that there has been an interruption in panel three. One may deem panel three “wrong”. I, however, cannot make such claims. I respect the creativity of the author. I acknowledge the limited scope of my understanding of the story. I look to the interruptions for a greater understanding of the story. The story reflects on me, showing my own limitations, while simultaneously showing others (specifically the author) do not have the same limitations. Consequently, I find panel three not to be “wrong”, but to be the best panel in the story because of the immense discovery that goes along with it. The discovery that leads to a great ending. An ending directed at home. Home!

So now. I want to make it abundantly clear. As much as I was talking about “the Story of a fire Chicken that went Skiing” I was also NOT talking about “the Story of a fire Chicken that went Skiing”. Levels, so many levels ;) Stories are great at levels.

Stories Collide. Pt. 1

What is reality, what shapes it, and how do I understand my experiences? These questions have been prodding me towards story. Story has been a journey of a thousand miles, begun a long time ago. I grew up a scientific modernist giving lip-service to the possibility of the supernatural, then passing through fundamentalist, and into “biblical”, now I find myself somewhere in a matrix of post-modern/modern/undecided/conglomerate. What I have learned through this development is that the story one lives into shapes all arguments, experience, actions, and epistemology.

I was blessed with a lot of dissonance in my life. I grew up in a “Christian North American” story. It was a story that held to a scientific modernist understanding of the world, but refused to take it to the extreme of excluding the supernatural. This, however, was brutally interrupted by a jaunt to a post-religious/secular/European worldview and story when I lived in England; I was twelve and thirteen years old. The stories clashed, I was too young to understand the significance of such an experience. It is hard to describe the clash of story, they do not battle openly with argumentation that is easy to follow, but a feeling is evident. A feeling of being unsettled. A story is supposed to follow a plot, but when the first story is interrupted and a second story enters in the middle, there is a sense of loss. The flow is incomplete, there is no past and the present seems to have no grounding.

Upon returning to North America, I attempted to pick up my old story, but it was now disjointed. One attempts to reconcile the themes, motifs, and symbols of a different story. It was with this muddled story I entered Bible College. Little did I know I was about to disturb my story in unimaginable ways. Coming from the Christian Reformed Story, I entered the Anabaptist Story. I attempted to “argue” the stories, but I ran into the same problem as before, stories do not respond well to argument. They are different with different pasts. Instead, stories syncretise, usually to the detriment of both. Stories have a funny way of picking the worst of both, rather than the best. It is not that the best parts cannot come together to make a better story, but that takes active participation by the character (you and me). I saw an example of bad syncretism in East Africa where Christianity comes with consumerism, modernity, and hyper-spirituality, but does not get rid of the tribalism, thus blending the negatives (tribalism, consumerism, and modernity) and the positive seem negligible (loyalty, direction, hope). Similar awful syncretism led me to a brief period as a fundamentalist. I syncretised the scientific absolutism of modernism with the Bible. It resulted with a “data quest” into the Bible. I attempted to pull out the absolutes. (This is my critique of Systematic Theology, even when not “fundamentalist”, it is a syncretism of a scientific method with a story. It does not ask the questions of the story, rather it imposes the questions of another story – Greek influenced scientific thought – onto the biblical story).

In reaction to fundamentalism, I attempted to become a purist. For a few years, I attempted to understand the biblical story, attempting to read it on its own terms. This was going well, but then I went to East Africa. This cross-cultural experience rattled my “bible only” conception of truth and reality. The “same” Christian stories clashed, this shook my naïve understanding that one’s private experience is able to arrive at a purist Biblical understanding. Rather one’s private experience and story will completely subvert the entire story. Our private experiences ultimately determine our stories, what flows in and that which is discarded. I came to this conclusion as I sat across from another reading the same text, we both claimed it as authoritative, and we would come to completely different understandings, each significantly shaped by our cultures. The common ground seemed negligible compared to the differences. Everything is relative. Thus ended my purist pursuit.

Where does one go from complete relativity? N.T. Wright goes to critical realism, a noble option, but a method still rooted in a Greek history. Others walk forward into post-modernity with their arm open come what may. Yet others revert, either back into modernity, fundamentalism and its syncretism, or even to a pre-modern-esque type of understanding. This is the crossroads many of us encounter; it is a crossroad I continue to navigate. It is here Story becomes significant. Newbigin’s book “The Gospel in a Pluralist Society” argues for the church as the agent telling the Gospel story and thus persuading the world. Here Duncan’s articulation of Gospel becomes incredibly important; for if Gospel is a part of the story it can be persuasive and syncretised into our stories becoming a story changer. However, if it is a coercive, totalizing, story it co-opts our stories and leads to bad syncretism.

I am attempting to create some hermeneutics for myself as I wallow through this nebulous crossroad. First, honesty. It does me no good to neglect my past or the biases I know I hold. I must be as honest as possible, lay my cards out and attempt to proceed with all the guidance there. Second, virtue. What do I want to become? What do I want my story to look like? Here I lay down my card of compassion. If it is not compassionate, I ought to consider alternatives. Third, story. I must continually remind myself not to argue myself into the “correct” option, because by doing so I have already been co-opted by one story, that of rational argumentation arising out of the modernist era I grew up in (thus following the first hermeneutic). I must continually open myself to persuasion. What story persuades me to follow hermeneutic two? Fourth, keep the biblical text as authoritative. Thus, as the stories blend together I want the narrative of scripture to have significant weight, specifically life, death, and resurrection, as living, dying, and rising throughout my life, even daily, and hopefully in the cosmos, lead me towards greater compassion (hermeneutic two). Fifth, choose wisely. The ability to choose, to choose what is authoritative, choosing the story one lives into, choosing to ones hermeneutics, I must choose contemplatively.

With that, I find myself at the point of syncretising stories. None of them can be “taken out” as they have all entered into my story, but I can mix and mould. I can choose the back-story of the Bible. Therefore, I can incorporate the Gospel (as Duncan articulated) into my story. I can affirm the story of modernism, its conclusion, and collapse into post-modernism. I can look relativism in the face and walk forward with the most persuasive story I can compile, given my experience, which includes the Gospel and compassion. Further, when I am confronted with other stories, such as in East-Africa, I can affirm the parts that blend, while persuading the parts that clash. This has significant influence on my thoughts on pluralism, because if I truly believe that the story I tell and the parts I have chosen to incorporate, it is honestly the best possible story and the most persuasive, there is reduced fear of bad syncretism if I choose to tackle it head-on.

Some of those reading this might be more than a little bit uncomfortable with my choice of words, specifically syncretism. But you see, I have no choice but to syncretise if I wanted out of (or to change) my original story. Since I cannot erase my past and my mode of though, remembering my first story was that of a scientific modernist in North America and NOT a first century Jew in Palestine, I must syncretise the stories I encounter. If I want to change story it involves delicate syncretism. Or to use more “Christian” words I might choose “conversion”, understanding conversion to be the continued gradual change of my story into one I desire.

Evolution...

As we listened to lecture, by Dr. Paul Teel, on evolution last week, a friend leaned over and whispered to me, "I'm going to ask, 'If evolution is true how come there are still monkeys?'" I suggested he casually scratch his armpits while he asked. He responded, "Yeah or shit in my hand then throw it at the lecturer..."

Evolution is a hot button topic for Christians particularly evangelicals so it seems fitting that we address it. Most of us are familiar with people the passionate Young Earth Creationist position: the earth is 5-10 000 years old Genesis 1-11 is concrete historical reality, evolution is lie perpetuated by sinful unbelieving scientists, if Genesis isn't "true" than why should we believe in Jesus...

I have sympathy for this position. I have held it within the past 10 years. And while I no longer hold this position and in fact, I would use words like "false teaching" to describe it. I want to affirm that these are people with good intentions passionate about their faith and scripture. 

Another group can be loosely described as the "It doesn't matter" group... This I think is approximately where my parents stand and where I was prior to my couple of years of fundamentalism. This group generally argues that creation "perspectives" are a non "salvation" issue and therefore not worthy of argument or broken relationship. The focus on "salvation" issues highlights our "salvation" priority that I pointed out and questioned in What is the Gospel? last week. 

The third position I present is Evolutionary Creationists. This is the position of Dr. Paul Teel. This would be how I categorize myself. This is is the position that recently got a Regent professor uninvited from preaching at the church he pastored for 10 years...! This position takes science, the Bible and theology very seriously. It affirms variation in breeding, leading to advantageous mutations which are paid off in increased reproduction (natural selection), and that this process is continuous and ongoing... This position affirms the authority of the Bible and argues that Gen. 1-11 are not concrete history (a position already held by Augustine) but mythic theological presentation and reflection. Thus this position considers creation to by a dynamic community of beings upheld through space and time by the Triune God. Evolution does not interpret itself and does not require one to be an atheist. 

Ok so these are three positions. There are a few more, which are nuances of these, but I am not going to address them.

I want to affirm that all truth is God's truth. I want to affirm science and scientist's pursuit of the truth and embrace with them their discoveries of the good creation God has created. I want to be aware of both the limits of science to speak to metaphysics and that the foundations of science rest on Christian theology. I want to be able to talk about faith and science without fear...

I have some friends who no longer identify as Christians. These same people are passionate seekers of truth and believe that evolutionary theory is true. While, like with everything, beliefs and conversions, either to or away from faith are complex, I wonder to myself would it have been as easy to walk away from a church deeply engaged with positive dialogue with science? Does the common Bible vs. Science binary, create a very strong sense that if one accepts science, one must reject faith? I think this perception is very common and unfortunately is unwittingly perpetuated by those who say, "it doesn't matter..." This group is very difficult to determine the size of because of their effective silence within the conversation. Usually this means that the YEC position gets the megaphone and the floor... From my perspective this is a problem on a number of levels. 1) it perpetuates poor literalististic/"first glance" Biblical hermeneutics and exegesis 2) Christian youth are either prepared by the church to be dogmatic fundamentalists or not prepared at all, and therefore liable to reject the church when they discover the church has largely rejected/not engaged "reality"... 3) Those outside the church most engaged in truth seeking are, not inaccurately, likely to be dismissive of a community that out of ignorance and misguided loyalty has rejected observed reality 4) Scientists inside the church are largely ostracised...

Therefore, the way we handle this issue in a very real way has consequences both in keeping and gaining community members... Of course taking a positive position towards evolution is liable to get you declared a heretic by someone, people might leave your church, if you are a pastor you might get fired, or you may be "uninvited" to speak at a church you previously pastored... I expect that someone will declare this post "heretical"... Given that Darwin was a Christian, and many early evangelicals such as Benjamin Warfield and Augustus Hopkins Strong were strong supporters of evolutionary theory... I think it is sad that we have subsequently allowed this issue to be divided and polarized in such an unfortunate way. So speak up next time it comes up and say, "I believe in evolution and I believe in God and I believe in the authority of the Bible."

If you are interested in further exploring the Evolutionary Creation position (for you doubters, yes this is actual science, I promise) check out:

BioLogos - founded by Dr. Francis Collins (head of the Human Genome Project)

The best would be if churches started having legitimate scientific symposiums with these guys...

Ok. My final comment is my dream of both Biologos and AnswersinGenesis being at Missionsfest Vancouver next year and engaging in a dance battle right in the middle of all the booths to some old school Hokus Pick or maybe DC Talk... 

Public Service Announcement

For whom it may concern we have, with a twinkle in our eye, placed the boxes "Brilliant" "Interesting" and "Heretical" below each post as a quick way of giving us feed back regarding your reaction to what we write.

It may seem given their order that they effectively mean: "Agree" "Neutral" and "Disagree". This however is not the case.

It is perfectly conceivable to acknowledge something as "brilliant" even while "disagreeing... it is perfectly conceivable that you find something that you agree, disagree or aren't sure about "interesting"... In fact I often find the stuff I disagree with far more interesting than stuff I agree with... "Interesting" in particular suggests appreciation regarding presentation and topic...

"Heretical" or as I like to call it the: "I'm an asshole box."  There are two possibilities I consider when we receive a check in the heretical box 1) that you have great sense of humour and feel positively about our post but are affirming that there are assholes that would call us heretics and clicking the box because its hilarious or 2) you are an asshole.

The word "Heretic" is a loaded term that gets thrown around way to much in current theological discussion, particularly at the average level, where study is shallow, nuance is minimal, emotions are excited and actual relationships are at stake.

Because of the baggage of, most notably, the Inquisition the charge of heresy is significantly greater than mere disagreement which is potentially amicable enough. No the charge of heresy has the distinct connotation that a position and therefore a person has stepped so far outside what another person considers acceptable that they are minutes away from tweeting "good bye" to their ex-friend/colleague and newly pronounced heretic. The terms excommunication and damnation are certainly the implied potential or imminent consequences for heretics, who enjoy the sixth circle of hell in Dante's inferno.

Unless you are Catholic or Orthodox you have no way determining orthodoxy with any communal authority so declaring us heretical is either hilarious or mean or both... If you are Catholic or Orthodox then we were officially heretical according to your community before whatever it is we posted that you didn't like so now you are just being mean and superfluous.

Heresy, Heretic and Heretical are conversation and relationship ending words that should either be used either with hilarity in safe relationship (with other safety words like "button") or used very very sparsely, with humility and the utter seriousness. We don't know who you are when you click "Heretical" but be aware it brings an equal amount of judgement on you as you have brought on us. If you click it, we know we are doing our jobs well. Because if we are not deemed heretical every so often clearly we have become irrelevent toaters of the status quo, and our Jesus really messed that up so we are following the greats in rattling the pot and encouraging thought and interaction with ideas. We want people to feel free to click that box, if they would deem something heretical. Of course, we expect you to also comment if you are laying such a charge... this way, together, we can redeem its current tendency to end conversations.

Now as you look at the boxes below remember this is not a simple agree or disagree system. If you want to agree or disagree make a comment... These boxes are more like a "high five" "a thoughtful nod" and "kick to the nuts/punch in the boob/crucification" and we will interpret it as such and pray for your redemption. "Funny" is of course self explanatory and is the appropriate box to tick for this post.