Spirituality

It’s a night in 1876 and Vincent van Gogh looks outward from his room’s window. In a letter to his brother, Theo, he writes what he sees. “Over those roofs, one single star, but a beautiful large friendly one.”

Rabbits are wonderful animals to bring a smile to any child, especially chocolate rabbits, but you’d never place much hope for peace on the Easter Bunny. Not that a rabbit can’t speak to Easter. It can. Once my little girl’s rabbit went into eternity, so to speak, in Uganda, after the neighbour boy experimented with how many times it might spin in midair.

I’m gardening with my son, the cool, wet dirt between our fingers. I think of John, my friend, a fellow traveller, recently dead of cancer. He’s still somehow, seen. Still felt. Funny how that goes, how you often miss what’s right in front of you. Then, when you take the time to pause, the smelling salts of life get you to sit up and do what your mother always told you: pay attention!

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, June 18, 2016) HAMILTON, CANADA ✦ It was my daughter's first teenage birthday party and the family van was full of giggling girls. The verdict on the Tim Bosma trial wasn't in, not yet, when we pulled into the bowling ally across from Carmen's banquet hall and I said, "Tim Bosma's funeral was in that hall. And his wedding too." Silence fell. One girl said it was terrible what happened to Tim. Then my barely 13-year-old asked, "Why would they have his wedding and funeral at the same place?"

(The New Vision – Tuesday, March 22, 2016) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ It’s the foolish things of this world that can shame the wise and the weak that can upend the strong. This is how it was put a couple of millennia ago by the apostle Paul when he foreshadowed this great reversal, this deep sorting out that will be known only fully in the hereafter. But it’s the story-tellers in the here-and-now who often say the very same thing, and you’d have to be blind or deaf or both not to see it in the new Star Wars movie, “Episode VII: The Force Awakens,” which recently made it here to Uganda.

(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, December 5, 2015) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ I am not Catholic. And, like you, I have my images of fatherhood. The better ones have more to do with the holiness of, say, my boy with a ball and a catching glove on our sun-filled front lawn than with the Holy Father coming to visit.

(Christian Courier, October 12, 2015) MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ They’re out there, people who’d say that they don’t believe in hell any more than they believe in heaven, but you can never be sure what anyone really thinks about these sorts of questions because you can hardly expect anyone to be honest with you when they don’t know how to be honest with themselves. Your neighbour might say that it’s nothing but malarkey – heaven, hell, God, the devil, the entire lot of it (this is the 21st century, after all) – but he’d tell you that he doesn’t believe in gravity, yet his disbelief doesn’t run so deep that he’d actually step off a tall building.

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, June 6, 2015) CHARLESTON, S.C. ✦ We're in the ocean, waves crashing at our knees, salt on our lips, my daughter and me and all these poets in my head. My daughter (today she turns 12) laughs and dances and spins in circles and says, "No, Daddy, don't take any more pictures. Just come and run with me. Enjoy the moment."

(Christian Week - April 2015) MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ It’s easier to kiss a lamb than a lion, I suppose, even though I’ve personally never tried to kiss either. Even in Africa all these years, I’ve never been that close to a lion.

  In November 2014 I returned from my African home to speak at the Hamilton Convention Centre on the theme of The Nature of Peace. This was on the invitation of the YMCA of Hamilton-Burlington-Brantford, which holds an annual Peace Medal Breakfast to honour the people of Hamilton region who work towards peace. Following is […]

(Christian Week, February 2015) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ “Love is better than wine,” is how the writer of the Song of Songs put it. “Love is stronger than death.” Solomon, said to be the wisest of men ever, is credited with the words that resonate with meaning even now, almost 3,000 years later, even in our time, as insecure and fickle an age as any.

(Christian Week - December 2014) Today in the food court there was a piano. The pianist, wearing a red Santa hat (naturally), finished “Jingle Bells” through the dull roar of shoppers, their winter coats unzipped, hats aside, while they sat and talked and ate KFC or New York Fries or whatever they happened to have. Then a young woman, scarf thrown loosely over her shoulder, stood and put her cellphone to her ear. Strangely enough, she sang into the phone. And her voice, somehow, melodious and majestic, carried through the entire food court. Brows raised. Heads turned.

(The Hamilton Spectator - Saturday, October 18, 2014) KAMPALA, UGANDA ✦ It’s hard to know what it means to be human some days, let alone a saint, but there are clues here and there, like in this novel, The Plague, by Albert Camus, where two atheists – one a doctor, one a journalist – have a brief conversation. They’re in Africa fighting a devastating plague when one says to the other, “It comes down to this. What interests me is learning to become a saint.” There’s a mystery to the whole thing, a hunger, a longing ...

Rex Murphy called the other day. Then he interviewed My Bride for CBC’s Cross Country Check-Up. Wanted her on-air from Africa to talk about something called Ebola. Hmm. If you missed it, here’s the show. + When Rex said bye, he also made the remark, on-air as far as I could tell, that Jean practices what she preaches. That’s true. […]

(The UCU Standard - Monday, September 29, 2014) MUKONO, UGANDA ✦ The problem with university life is that it can bypass your heart and feed your mind directly with foolish notions about the work world, namely that some grand career will make you a personally large being. “Hey, look at me! I have this job now. It’s who I am!” And maybe you’ll win much of that war that’s so well-known around the world, that is the war to get ahead.