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Rockies, Prairies, Badlands - all in one day. That was the drive back from Fairmont BC to Drumheller, Alberta. And along with the changing topography, fresh ideas about the God who created and shaped these changing landscapes. The road between Banff and Canmore ran by some knife edged ridges, violently thrust heavenward from the earth’s core, expressing the violence of God’s creative power, the Lord of Hosts, awesome in glory.
The highway then passes through foothills, and gradually the land around becomes prairie - great swathes of grassland with just a few ranches and oil wells dotted here and there, and the occasional combine harvester picking up the end of the season’s harvest. Suddenly the heavens are wide and empty with amazing arrangements of cloud stretching from horizon to horizon. Although it’s just sky and atmosphere, this heavenly canvas seems to possess a solidity that brings to mind the old fashioned word “firmament” - something firm and in place, while in a constant state of flux - a flowing palette of translucent blues, pinks and grays. This express the breadth of God in his Omnipresence, constantly there, constantly watching over that which He has made.
We skirt round the northern edge of Calgary and reach Drumheller just as the sun sets in a red blaze of colour. The road dips below the horizon into a deep valley of dry broken rocky slopes, each one exhibiting a whole history in sedimentary layers of shale and sandstone. This is the badlands - dinosaur country - the landscape carved out by a great ancient water system long since dried out to leave weird rock formations, called “hoodoos” and a rich treasure in the fossil remains of ancient creatures. Here, then, is the Ancient of Days, the Lord of time, who is from everlasting to everlasting. So a drive through Western Canada becomes an education in finding out God.
Well, I feel I did find God over this past week here in the Canadian Rockies. Yet in an elusive sort of way, a bit like the bears they kept warning us about at the resort. “There have been a few sightings this past week,” we were told. “They’re timid creatures, really, so make sure you make some noise, holler and clap when you’re walking the trails, so they keep away.” It added just a little bit of silent menace to those otherwise wonderful walks, But it wasn’t altogether unpleasant. It added to the richness of the experience, to have that dangerous strength somewhere lurking in the undergrowth. A bit like Mr Beaver’s description of Aslan, the lion, in the Narnia books. For me, the presence of God this past week felt like the presence of the bears, always there, just not visible. This was their territory. This was their land. We were their guests.
On the way back, driving to Lake Louise and Banff, we listened to a Tim Keller sermon on the jealousy of God - "I the Lord your God, am a jealous God" - and how that jealousy is manifested in what Keller called, God’s “angry love”. The phrase that immediately popped into my mind, I suppose because we were still driving through Bear Country, was “a bear robbed of her cubs”. That snarling blind fury of an animal when anything threatens its relationship with its children. And when anything happens to move us away from our relationship with God as our father, including what we ourselves do, with our laziness, our faithlessness, our waywardness, then we bear the full brunt of that fury of a Jealous God. But it’s a jealousy whose aim is ultimately not to destroy but to heal and put right that which is out of joint. The old prophet Hosea 13:18 describes it in his customary colourful language
“I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of Egypt...I cared for you in the desert, in the land of burning heat...But when I fed them, they became satisfied and proud.....Then they forgot me... So, I will come on them like a bear robbed of her cubs. I will attack them and rip them open....”.
James, in the New Testament, links this fiery jealousy to the reality of God’s grace which we receive in ever greater measure, and which works in us to heal the relationship, and thus avert the fury brought on by His jealousy.
http://sermons2.redeemer.com/sermons/jealousy-god
Hosea 13:4-8. James 4:1-6 “God’s spirit, which He caused to live in us, longs jealously for us. That’s why he gives us more grace...”
Still on about Joni Mitchell, and, on the same album “Blue” she sings “Turn this crazy bird around, I shouldn’t have got on this flight tonight.......”
Well, ours is a day flight, out over the North Atlantic, Greenland, Hudson Bay and the North West Passage -- fabled place names and memories from my boyhood readings of Jack London and John Buchan **. Well, Joni may have wanted to get off her plane and back to her lover, but we’re quite happy to be heading out to Canada!!
And it’s down into the flatlands of central Alberta, out of the airport, and on to a road so straight you hardly need to use the steering wheel. Just set it on cruise control and sit back and enjoy the ride. Trans Canada Highway, and up through Banff, and over the Continental ranges of the Canadian Rockies, and down into the valley of the Columbia river to Lake Columbia
What is it then about this Canadian vastness that lifts the soul, and that seems to reach right up into the heart of God? It’s something in the majesty of the peaks, the green pines carpeting the lower slopes, and just the sheer scale of the place. With distant thunderings providing the soundtrack. I think I want to find my God in this place over the next few days.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Call_of_the_Wild and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_Heart_River
Sunday morning, (tomorrow!) we travel out to Calgary for yet another adventure. Two weeks in Canada, Alberta and Toronto. I shall have to dust off my Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young discs (or virtual discs as its all on mp3 now) so I can fill my head with lovely Canadian music on the way there. It all came about following a few conversations we had. First, together, just the two of us, when Anna asked me what would I really want to do to celebrate turning 60. I have always loved travelling, and central Canada is one of those far off places I’ve never been to. Then a conversation with our friends Rod and Donna Black, who live in Alberta, and it was sorted.
"On the back of a cartoon coaster
In the blue TV screen light
I drew a map of Canada
Oh Canada
With your face sketched on it twice"
Such poetry - Joni Mitchell, who, in a few spare words, can express both a deep longing for place and for person. Come to think of it, not unlike the spirit of fado music * that I’ve come to love here in Lisbon.
And then another amazing Canadian songwriter, Sara MacLachlan ** :
"Spend all your time waiting
For that second chance,
For a break that would make it okay.
There's always some reason
To feel not good enough,
And it's hard, at the end of the day....
...In the arms of the angel,
Fly away from here
From this dark, cold hotel room,
And the endlessness that you fear...."
Well, for us, it’s not exactly a dark, cold hotel room... but, we still need to get away. And, in our case, the Canadian angels God is sending are Rod and Donna, who have promised to whisk us straight off from arrival at Calgary airport up into the Rocky mountains.
Time to rest, reflect, think, pray, converse, listen, walk and talk, smile, laugh, and.... Bring it on, Rod!!
* “A Case of You” from Joni Mitchell “Blue” (1971) And for a genuine fado version of this song, you can’t get better than Ana Moura, complete with black shawl and Portuguese guitarra - www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiC_J8kCmzM
** “Angel” from Sara MacLachlan “Surfacing” (1997) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CbAjj80NIM
I always thought that ‘hugger mugger’ was a word made up by our family, as it was so regularly used, during my childhood growing up in Northern Ireland, for any clandestine activity that involved wrapping presents and hiding them, or making secretive phone calls. Well, it’s actually listed in the Oxford dictionary, where it is defined as secrecy or secretive behaviour.
Well last week, there was a lot of hugger muggering going on in our apartment between text messages, emails, that culminated in the most amazing unique and unforgettable surprise party that Anna threw for me, on my 60th birthday last Saturday.
So, I’ve reached this milestone of 60 years. Earlier this year George Verwer celebrated his 75th. So that means that he was 35 when I was a 20 year old student at Imperial College, London. Having just recently found faith in Christ, I went up with a group of friends to a University CU meeting near Russell Square to hear this crazy American guy talk about Missions. I was totally struck by his straightforward way of talking, his utter frankness, and his insistence that you don’t need to wait till you get a theology degree something or have a packet of money before you engage in missions for God. Get on with it, get on out there, the world is waiting, was his message. What are you doing enjoying a spiritual feast here, when half the world hasn’t even had its first spiritual breakfast yet, he bellowed!
I suppose it is largely his inspiration that has given me this spirit of adventure that has taken us to Iran, Pakistan and now Portugal. In the party on Saturday night, they played a short video that the family, Judith Sharon and Colin had put together as a kind of retrospective of how they saw me. ( https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1WuAn0nscLeaEFWWkktemJZYk0/edit?usp=sharing ) It was totally unique, touching and very special for me. And this spirit of adventure was part of that view they had of me. I like that. It’s the way I’ve always been. So....thank you, George.
I’m always sceptical of news reports that start something like “Recent research has found that...” or “According to a recent survey...” because the supposed results of the so-called research quite often contradict what has been reported the previous month. According to the news this morning, the latest one is that recent research has shown that bottling up your emotions and harbouring negative thoughts will increase the possibility of cancer by up to 70 % and knock years off your life expectancy.
Now the idea that “the joy of the Lord is your strength” might be millenia old, having been first declared by Nehemiah to the people of Israel in the 5th Century BC, but it seems that it might just be the right solution for our stressed-out twenty first century lifestyle. This last week, I spent four out of the five working mornings in hospital waiting rooms for tests and treatments in relation to my recently diagnosed melanoma.
It struck me as I watched people come and go, just how debilitating cancer can be. Just the expression on peoples’ faces, the way that they carried themselves, indicated how totally the cancer knocks you for six - the surgery, the anxiety and the waiting, the chemo and the radiotherapy. It all has the combined capacity to take the wind out of your sails, and the legs out from underneath you. One minute you’re up and busy, buoyant, full of the joys of life, and the next, you’re wondering what tomorrow will bring, and will you survive to the end of the year. It was written into the faces of the patients as they passed through the clinic, bowed down, enslaved almost, by this tyrannical force that had taken over with and was threatening to kill them.
So important then, to draw on the “joy of the Lord” for strength - to know that, not only, is He all powerful and all knowing, but also He has a plan, and it’s a good plan, for your life, and that His joy - that eternal, ebullient undiminished capacity to revel in life, and to enjoy it to the full - is part of that plan too.
No, not about the movie, but rather the concept of what it means to be a godparent. It’s one of those churchy things that people look at as a nice way of including your best friends in the joys of having children and bringing them up. Here, in Portugal it’s taken pretty seriously, and considered a great honour (and responsibility) to be asked to be “padrinhos”. And not just in the Catholic tradition, but also it’s very common among the evangelical churches, and not just “padrinhos” at the time of baptism/dedication of the child, but also at weddings. Friends who will stand alongside the new couple, and commit to give a spiritual support and nurturing to their relationship.
It’s certainly given us a special relationship with Duarte, our godson. At the weekend, I was detailed to look after him while Anna and his Mum were with other ladies at a party. When mum Sandra told him that Peter will be looking after you, he said “Yaay!” And then she said “You know that Peter and Anna are your padrinhos, don’t you.” and explained a little bit what that meant. “Oh”, and then he thought for a minute “Então, Peter pode me afinar também?” (Peter, can refine me as well)
He had just been attending a children’s summer camp, at which they had apparently had a session in which they had been talking about spiritual growth and maturity. The leaders had mentioned the role that parents and godparents can have in refining or polishing our character as we grow up (afinação). That was a nice touch. Makes me want to make sure I do a good job as well.
