Recent Columns

The country knows when a mother loses one child for a short while during an outrageous hospital abduction. And the entire world knows when an airliner leaves Malaysia and then vanishes mysteriously. But what about when mother upon mother lose their newborns? Or an airliner full of mothers goes down? It happened yesterday. Did you hear? And today. […]

A boy can love many things – pizza, pulling his sister’s hair, climbing trees – but my boy loves few things more than putting on his hockey skates. He’d wear them to bed if allowed and has already asked, wanting to follow, apparently, what Guy Lafleur did as a boy – he wore his skates […]

(Christian Week – Friday, May 23, 2014) PARIS ✦ Dead rock stars aren’t the only idols to worship out there. Houses and cars, retirement portfolios, relationships and sex—or, well, religion—can be equally distracting in a fallen world looking for things as nebulous as truth and meaning. But come to the Père Lachaise Cemetery and see for yourself the cult of rock-star celebrity. In this gothic and tumbledown resting place of some of the world’s best-known artists—Chopin, Bizet, Proust, Oscar Wilde to name a few—Jim Morrison’s grave is by far the most visited.

We had to pee in the bottle the other day, all of us for our annual check-up and vaccinations against death in Africa. I mean we did this one at a time, in privacy in different bottles, of course, and it wouldn’t even matter that much except for the fact that the doctor soon after […]

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, May 17, 2014) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ There was a time when a neighbourhood school was a place that nourished your soul. It wasn’t that long ago. I’m not that old. You’d go to play, say, baseball on Saturday morning or, in winter, hockey on the rink that your Grade 6 teacher lovingly flooded outside the row of windows where even the good students looked out to daydream. It was a time when you’d walk to school every morning. By yourself. Even when the school bully – her last name was, fittingly, Greenall – went the same way. It somehow even brought out courage that you never knew you had.

This is about a boy who loved to play hockey. He played in rinks, sure, when he could, even outdoor rinks, but more so just on the road, hour after hour, with or without his buddies, often until dark, calling the play-by-play, shooting, scoring, winning with the crowd going wild, of course, at least until […]

Liz: Dad, I have a riddle for you. Okay. Liz: You have to guess what it is. Uhuh. Liz: This is a job. It’s a job where you work all the time. You can never get any rest from it.  You just keep going all the time. Right. Liz: Yeah, it’s 24-7. Especially at first. You have to work […]

The two neighbour boys are 8 and 5 and it looks like their father is about to die. It’s this morning. My kids and I walk to school with them and the boys’ mother. The 8-year-old is in Hannah’s class. What can you say? + It’s yesterday evening and we, Mother and I, that is Jean […]

There was a time when a neighbourhood school was more than a place you simply went for classes and drudgery, when it was more than a place of fear. My own boyhood experience was that we kids would go to school after hours and on weekends to – imagine – play, say, baseball on a […]

There was Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, of course. We biked through the heart of Paris on Day One, four hours in the morning, anther four in the evening, enough to give the kids a few blisters before we finally got back to our Montmartre flat just past midnight. That was […]

Even on this side of Easter, forgiveness is no easy thing. Christ said so much during a beachside breakfast with his friends on a lake not long after the remarkable events of Easter weekend. He did this during that rather poignant exchange with Peter, that friend of urgency and largeness who, just days earlier, while […]

The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, April 20, 2014 KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ Forgive and forget is how the old saying goes, but you and I both know that it’s not worth spit, that we’ll never forget certain crimes committed against us, maybe even imagined crimes like those in a recent dream of mine. It was a nightmare with Africans carrying machetes. I looked out my window. The university grounds where I live was crawling with the killers. “We won’t kill anyone,” one said. He looked at me through a window of a bedroom where my 10-year-old daughter lay sleeping. “We’ll just cut your arm off.”

Judas, giver of history’s best-known kiss, has always had a bad rap. While Judas was a very capable individual – he was picked to be the treasurer of Christ’s preaching and healing and wandering and laughing troupe for a reason – we know that he was more interested in skimming the coffers and in other […]

My relationship with my own father has mellowed much over the years. This is what marriage and children and grandchildren and an ocean of separation can do. (I think you know I live in Africa most of the year, the genesis of which is for another conversation at another time.) But there was a time […]

We don’t give much thought to the devil these days – we’re well beyond all that. The best you might get is a funny t-shirt that says ‘The devil made me do it’ with, say, a picture of a naïve but guilty looking figure beside another with a pitchfork and red leotards. But what if […]