Though I sort of doubt it.

  The last few weeks have been tumultuous-- not only with regards to personal stakes, but over the last week, my spirituality has been greatly challenged.  In particular, the way I write and what I write for has come so sharply into question that I am going to leave it for a while-- and leave this blog entirely.  No more even infrequent updates-- just nothing for a while after I write these scant few words.  Ah!  I'd better make them count.

  Am I scared?  Yes.  Though I still believe that the power of self-expression is one I have received from God, the places I go to and the powers I draw on when I write may not be.  Now that is a hard thing to hear, especially when one believes all along that one has been labouring for the glory of the Lord and the furtherance of His Kingdom.  Yet I am frightened more because I have relied so heavily on knowing myself and being known as a budding writer that to see myself as valuable and significant outside of what I do and have done is a leap I cannot, at this moment, make.  The question of "who am I" is answered easily enough by "you are God's beloved son", but there is no feeling in me to answer it thus.  I might as well be saying "4 is the sum of 2 and 2", a mathematical fact that has no emotive value except to say that God is rational and constant.

  The promise of all of this is that I should know myself as God's Beloved, something I admit that I am not always capable of seeing.  The last time I remember feeling such love was when I returned from a run one Friday afternoon and, walking in through the door, suddenly felt the closeness of God and something of a divine embrace.  I choked back a sob.  In that little moment, every nagging worry that I carry with me evaporated in the blaze of such immense gentleness. 

  This goes further, deeper than just writing-- though writing is how it often gets in.  It touches on painful memories I have yet to be healed from, glances across betrayal and nakedness of many kinds, and works tendrils and runners into what I do now.  There is, I am told, a taint to my writing and to my preaching that reaches the people.  Hearing this makes me not want to preach anymore-- what preacher worth his or her salt wants to be known for poisoned lips?  Yet I will still preach.  Only now, I must be more careful where I draw from when I do.

  Those of you who can pray, I would ask to pray-- though I am somewhat tired of people laying hands on me over the last couple of weeks.  There are things operating around me and in me that I am only now becoming aware of, so pray that these things be dispelled and cast away.  I'll not do them anymore honour than to mention them in briefest terms for now, but pray that I might be delivered.

  Until I write again,

ed

  Oh, I'll keep blogging-- but it won't be nearly as frequent as I used to do it. 

  Only when I have a mental clog. 

  Things I Sing When I'm Alone:

  Bon Iver - The Park (see vid below-- it takes a while to get to the song, but it's worth it.)

  Great Is Thy Faithfulness (Incongruous, I know.  But sometimes you just gotta sing it.)

  That is all.

 

 

  It's snowing in Edmonton.  In the middle of May.  But strangely enough, it doesn't bother me half as much as it bothers everyone else.  I suppose the Vancouverite in me shrugged off inclement weather as being part of the price to pay for living in such a beautiful city, but then I stopped and realized that this is Edmonton, not Vancouver.

  It is not as though Edmonton is without charm.  It has a genuine small-town feel that reminds me of Saskatoon, except perhaps with a great deal more sprawl.  I borrowed my sister's car and drove down to South Edmonton Common today to look for a sweater and possibly a suit.  It was not the snow that bothered me as I stepped out of the car and surveyed the stores placed so far apart that the thought of walking from outlet to outlet was somehwat unpalatable.  No, what unsettled me was how unnatural the entire thing seemed-- as though the buildings were more machinations against the way of nature, a distinctly fallen attempt to "civilize" things when things needed no such "civilizing."  Even though the facades of these stores were done up in cultured stone, I could not help but feel the cognitive dissonance of urban life, something that has been on my mind a lot lately since finishing Jacques Ellul's The Meaning of The City, one of the better books I have read so far in 2009. 

  I can't live without the city.  None of us can.  The way the world is set up is that we will inevitably urbanize the face of the earth because this is the simple truth of living in an industrialized society.  And as a shepherd, I go where the people go.  Though I sometimes fantasize about having a mountain retreat (or a Fortress of Solitude) to sit and write in, the truth is that we Kingdom folk aren't called out of the city, but because of what Christ does and the hope we live in, to engage in the city.

  And no, I'm not actually a fan of that Chris Tomlin song.  I actually can't stand it.  Maybe Tomlin has read Jacques Ellul, but for the hundreds of thousands who sing it, I am afraid that it might be a misinterpreted invitation to participate in pre-millenial self-justification by works.  But that's just me.  I'm sure everyone else just sings it and thinks "what a pretty song."

  Edmonton is built for snow.  It felt somewhat Christmas-y as I sat in Second Cup reading John Stott.  The raisin scone and americano helped with that feeling too.  Things seem more compact in the snow, or else maybe driving these interminable distances to some distant Prairie horizon has led to a shrinking of the city that seems so vast and yet so small at the same time.

  Every time I visit a place I find myself wondering "could I live here?"  Lately, this has also meant asking the question "could I minister here?"  The answer for many places has been "yes".  Vancouver, Hong Kong and Singapore are all places I could easily see myself living and working.  Edmonton has crept into my conscience over the last several days, and as I talk with people who live here, what strikes me is the lack of alternatives for those seeking something more than Sunday morning solipsism.  Thus the question I have been asking myself has now evolved into general feelings of meeting people and feeling them to be "sheep without a shepherd."  I wonder if Christ did not go to Rome because he would have been overwhelmed with the teeming multitudes and would have been so busy with healing the sick that he never would have had the opportunity to die.

  This is completely unrelated, but I was struck by a song on a CD in my sister's car:  Rufus Wainwright's rendition of Shakespeare's Sonnet 29.  As I waited to turn left on Whyte Ave., I found myself thinking about the characters I have written and how this song might be a perfect complement to many of the things I have written.  There is something deeply moving about the way the cello reverberates a steady river of dusky tones.  It put me in the mind of Adam, not dressed to run but running anyway-- with a smile on his face and dashing down the broad sidewalks in lower Central outside the glass and steel Cheung Kong building with the daylight fading and the streetlights just shyly coming in.  It was a strange image, but a pleasurable one nonetheless. 

  There was another image too, of when Adam sees Persie near the end of the book and he can't do anything but feel his heart rupture for her.  When Wainwright sings

"Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;"

  This is Adam staring up at Persie.  Though those of you who are reading my book and reading this blog (all, what, two of you?) might have now realized the contrasts between Persie and April, there is something in me, the author, that is inspired by relentless and terrifying beauty.  I suppose this is why artists sometimes find themselves muses.  Me?  I have strange revelations while waiting to turn left from Whyte onto 109.

 

  I'm not sure what to write about these days.  Shall I write about how typing the last words of my first ever novel made me feel?  Shall I write about how, in the shower one morning, I suddenly felt incredibly content with my life?  Why not both?

  Thirty-four chapters later, and the book is done.  Well, perhaps not done, but drafted and given bone and bits of flesh.  What remains is for me to polish the manuscript and tighten things up or loosen others, a bit like how I imagine Mario and Luigi go around directing water flows in Mushroom World.  As I keep saying, it may never get published, but having written something now of great length (somewhere around 210,000 words), it feels as though I have finally given birth.  The question is, now that I have this precious thing in my care, what am I to do with it?  Why, raise it of course-- mold it and shape it according to the pleasure of God.  That will take some time and effort of a different kind, but it will be easier in one way at least:  I won't have to generate pages upon pages of brand-new material.  A snip here, a slash there, a new conversation here, a silence there-- now we're onto the finishing strokes that make a sketch into a painting.

  It took so much more out of me than I imagined it would.  Part of me still thinks writing must be like those cut scenes from Finding Forrester where you see the kid blazing away at a typewriter to some Miles Davis tune.  Sure, there are moments like that, but they last about thirty seconds before you're gritting your teeth and trying not to use verb-adverb constructions and listening as you write for echoes in the text.  Damn, it's hard.  Yet the best piece of advice I got as I finished off the final chapters was from Annie Dillard's book, The Writing Life.  She says "write like you're dying."  In many ways, that is the truth of all living, that we live as if we are dying-- because we are.  However, with regards to the task of writing something as inconsequential as literature, it means not taking shortcuts and mustering the strength to write the best you can instead of tossing off a chapter you know will please those who are reading for the plot and not for the subtle notes of characterizations, metaphors, or allegories.  It's the latter that interests me the most.  Probably has something to do with having had a little training in biblical studies-- you never read stories the same after you understand that part of the art of the biblical narrative is not in the plain sense of the text, but in the folds and wrinkles that show through the foibles and sin of a thousand years of human existence.  It's in these folds and wrinkles that God shows Himself.

  Writing is something I know I will persevere in, though some days it makes me feel like a convict stamping out license plates.  I am compelled by a flow of language through me, if that makes any sense.  My friends who speak in tongues say that it is almost like dipping your mind into a constant stream of background music.  Writing-- or, at least the compulsion to do something as absurd and impractical as writing-- is a bit like that.  What use are tongues except for the one who speaks them?  And what use is writing except for the author to have stepped away in the end and said "glad I got that out of me."  Oh, there are a few who genuinely enjoy what I write, and for them I am very grateful-- but writing to change the heart is about as immediately rewarding as pastoral ministry.  You never really get to see the bloom of your hope for others.  You simply put your head down, enter into the world of other people, and work with what's there, trusting all the while that God is doing something in spite of your hamhandedness.  In the case of writing, you enter into the world of a people who only exist in your head. 

  Yet as difficult and insane as the task of writing is-- it bears mentioning that all the published writers I know are slightly mad, and would smile and laugh if I told them so-- I wouldn't have it any other way.

  As I stood in the shower one morning, I realized with a jolt that although the exact circumstances of my life are not as I had hoped they would be, the general shape and rhythm of it is exactly as I had hoped for.  It is, for those who understand, a Hobbit's life-- a quiet life in a green part of town, punctuated by long walks (in my case, runs), good food, and generally speaking, the life of an English country squire.  Perhaps that is too idyllic for what it means to be me at the moment, but I appreciate all the opportunities I have and have been given, because how they were given to me-- through years of bitterness-- was not exactly how I imagined it to be granted. 

  It is not as though I don't fight battles anymore, it is just that the battles I fight are the right ones.  A man from my congregation tried to bully me the other day, but I rebuffed him by simply pointing out "you're a bully."  I didn't mean it to be hurtful in the sense that playground taunts are often meant, it was the simple truth of the matter, and by pointing it out, I was also telling him that I would not let him bully me.  I am his servant, but I am not his slave.  It was a difficult battle to fight, but it was the right one, not only for him to hear and feel flustered and ashamed over, but for me to take the stand and speak the truth.  I even and especially welcome the opportunities to disciple others-- though, for the moment, much of that discipleship comes in the form of simple teaching and much patience. (much patience!)  It means walking with other people, a slow and agonizing process-- not merely dropping sermonic bombs and getting the hell out of Dodge.

  I have so much of what I need at the moment.  I live in a truly blessed little apartment that looks out over a quiet walkway and trees and shrubs of many kinds.  (At this moment, I am looking out on oak, maple, willow, ash, rhododendron, honeysuckle, elder, lilac, apple, pine, fir, and others whose names escape me.)  I am paid well enough that rent is not a problem, nor is buying the frivolous things like General Tao's Chicken chips from the Superstore beyond my means.  And though I might often be lonely, I am surrounded by a community of friends and people who do love me.  Yes, I am that content with being single, though there are moments-- long moments-- when I do wish that there was someone to share all this beauty with. 

  The life I wanted-- the quiet life I wanted-- has been dropped into my lap.  My loving aunt wrote me from Hong Kong, saying "since life is quiet for you right now, maybe you should come back and visit."  Perhaps there was a note of wistfulness in my previous email to her about how quiet my life is (and therefore, from some perspectives, boring), but this is where I ought to be and where I am called.  Princeton?  Hong Kong?  Still maybe, but for now, this is where I am led and where I have been blessed.  Now, maybe, I will have the chance to pass this blessing onto others.




 

  Though I sort of doubt it.

  The last few weeks have been tumultuous-- not only with regards to personal stakes, but over the last week, my spirituality has been greatly challenged.  In particular, the way I write and what I write for has come so sharply into question that I am going to leave it for a while-- and leave this blog entirely.  No more even infrequent updates-- just nothing for a while after I write these scant few words.  Ah!  I'd better make them count.

  Am I scared?  Yes.  Though I still believe that the power of self-expression is one I have received from God, the places I go to and the powers I draw on when I write may not be.  Now that is a hard thing to hear, especially when one believes all along that one has been labouring for the glory of the Lord and the furtherance of His Kingdom.  Yet I am frightened more because I have relied so heavily on knowing myself and being known as a budding writer that to see myself as valuable and significant outside of what I do and have done is a leap I cannot, at this moment, make.  The question of "who am I" is answered easily enough by "you are God's beloved son", but there is no feeling in me to answer it thus.  I might as well be saying "4 is the sum of 2 and 2", a mathematical fact that has no emotive value except to say that God is rational and constant.

  The promise of all of this is that I should know myself as God's Beloved, something I admit that I am not always capable of seeing.  The last time I remember feeling such love was when I returned from a run one Friday afternoon and, walking in through the door, suddenly felt the closeness of God and something of a divine embrace.  I choked back a sob.  In that little moment, every nagging worry that I carry with me evaporated in the blaze of such immense gentleness. 

  This goes further, deeper than just writing-- though writing is how it often gets in.  It touches on painful memories I have yet to be healed from, glances across betrayal and nakedness of many kinds, and works tendrils and runners into what I do now.  There is, I am told, a taint to my writing and to my preaching that reaches the people.  Hearing this makes me not want to preach anymore-- what preacher worth his or her salt wants to be known for poisoned lips?  Yet I will still preach.  Only now, I must be more careful where I draw from when I do.

  Those of you who can pray, I would ask to pray-- though I am somewhat tired of people laying hands on me over the last couple of weeks.  There are things operating around me and in me that I am only now becoming aware of, so pray that these things be dispelled and cast away.  I'll not do them anymore honour than to mention them in briefest terms for now, but pray that I might be delivered.

  Until I write again,

ed

  Oh, I'll keep blogging-- but it won't be nearly as frequent as I used to do it. 

  Only when I have a mental clog. 

  Things I Sing When I'm Alone:

  Bon Iver - The Park (see vid below-- it takes a while to get to the song, but it's worth it.)

  Great Is Thy Faithfulness (Incongruous, I know.  But sometimes you just gotta sing it.)

  That is all.

 

 

  It's snowing in Edmonton.  In the middle of May.  But strangely enough, it doesn't bother me half as much as it bothers everyone else.  I suppose the Vancouverite in me shrugged off inclement weather as being part of the price to pay for living in such a beautiful city, but then I stopped and realized that this is Edmonton, not Vancouver.

  It is not as though Edmonton is without charm.  It has a genuine small-town feel that reminds me of Saskatoon, except perhaps with a great deal more sprawl.  I borrowed my sister's car and drove down to South Edmonton Common today to look for a sweater and possibly a suit.  It was not the snow that bothered me as I stepped out of the car and surveyed the stores placed so far apart that the thought of walking from outlet to outlet was somehwat unpalatable.  No, what unsettled me was how unnatural the entire thing seemed-- as though the buildings were more machinations against the way of nature, a distinctly fallen attempt to "civilize" things when things needed no such "civilizing."  Even though the facades of these stores were done up in cultured stone, I could not help but feel the cognitive dissonance of urban life, something that has been on my mind a lot lately since finishing Jacques Ellul's The Meaning of The City, one of the better books I have read so far in 2009. 

  I can't live without the city.  None of us can.  The way the world is set up is that we will inevitably urbanize the face of the earth because this is the simple truth of living in an industrialized society.  And as a shepherd, I go where the people go.  Though I sometimes fantasize about having a mountain retreat (or a Fortress of Solitude) to sit and write in, the truth is that we Kingdom folk aren't called out of the city, but because of what Christ does and the hope we live in, to engage in the city.

  And no, I'm not actually a fan of that Chris Tomlin song.  I actually can't stand it.  Maybe Tomlin has read Jacques Ellul, but for the hundreds of thousands who sing it, I am afraid that it might be a misinterpreted invitation to participate in pre-millenial self-justification by works.  But that's just me.  I'm sure everyone else just sings it and thinks "what a pretty song."

  Edmonton is built for snow.  It felt somewhat Christmas-y as I sat in Second Cup reading John Stott.  The raisin scone and americano helped with that feeling too.  Things seem more compact in the snow, or else maybe driving these interminable distances to some distant Prairie horizon has led to a shrinking of the city that seems so vast and yet so small at the same time.

  Every time I visit a place I find myself wondering "could I live here?"  Lately, this has also meant asking the question "could I minister here?"  The answer for many places has been "yes".  Vancouver, Hong Kong and Singapore are all places I could easily see myself living and working.  Edmonton has crept into my conscience over the last several days, and as I talk with people who live here, what strikes me is the lack of alternatives for those seeking something more than Sunday morning solipsism.  Thus the question I have been asking myself has now evolved into general feelings of meeting people and feeling them to be "sheep without a shepherd."  I wonder if Christ did not go to Rome because he would have been overwhelmed with the teeming multitudes and would have been so busy with healing the sick that he never would have had the opportunity to die.

  This is completely unrelated, but I was struck by a song on a CD in my sister's car:  Rufus Wainwright's rendition of Shakespeare's Sonnet 29.  As I waited to turn left on Whyte Ave., I found myself thinking about the characters I have written and how this song might be a perfect complement to many of the things I have written.  There is something deeply moving about the way the cello reverberates a steady river of dusky tones.  It put me in the mind of Adam, not dressed to run but running anyway-- with a smile on his face and dashing down the broad sidewalks in lower Central outside the glass and steel Cheung Kong building with the daylight fading and the streetlights just shyly coming in.  It was a strange image, but a pleasurable one nonetheless. 

  There was another image too, of when Adam sees Persie near the end of the book and he can't do anything but feel his heart rupture for her.  When Wainwright sings

"Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;"

  This is Adam staring up at Persie.  Though those of you who are reading my book and reading this blog (all, what, two of you?) might have now realized the contrasts between Persie and April, there is something in me, the author, that is inspired by relentless and terrifying beauty.  I suppose this is why artists sometimes find themselves muses.  Me?  I have strange revelations while waiting to turn left from Whyte onto 109.

 

  I'm not sure what to write about these days.  Shall I write about how typing the last words of my first ever novel made me feel?  Shall I write about how, in the shower one morning, I suddenly felt incredibly content with my life?  Why not both?

  Thirty-four chapters later, and the book is done.  Well, perhaps not done, but drafted and given bone and bits of flesh.  What remains is for me to polish the manuscript and tighten things up or loosen others, a bit like how I imagine Mario and Luigi go around directing water flows in Mushroom World.  As I keep saying, it may never get published, but having written something now of great length (somewhere around 210,000 words), it feels as though I have finally given birth.  The question is, now that I have this precious thing in my care, what am I to do with it?  Why, raise it of course-- mold it and shape it according to the pleasure of God.  That will take some time and effort of a different kind, but it will be easier in one way at least:  I won't have to generate pages upon pages of brand-new material.  A snip here, a slash there, a new conversation here, a silence there-- now we're onto the finishing strokes that make a sketch into a painting.

  It took so much more out of me than I imagined it would.  Part of me still thinks writing must be like those cut scenes from Finding Forrester where you see the kid blazing away at a typewriter to some Miles Davis tune.  Sure, there are moments like that, but they last about thirty seconds before you're gritting your teeth and trying not to use verb-adverb constructions and listening as you write for echoes in the text.  Damn, it's hard.  Yet the best piece of advice I got as I finished off the final chapters was from Annie Dillard's book, The Writing Life.  She says "write like you're dying."  In many ways, that is the truth of all living, that we live as if we are dying-- because we are.  However, with regards to the task of writing something as inconsequential as literature, it means not taking shortcuts and mustering the strength to write the best you can instead of tossing off a chapter you know will please those who are reading for the plot and not for the subtle notes of characterizations, metaphors, or allegories.  It's the latter that interests me the most.  Probably has something to do with having had a little training in biblical studies-- you never read stories the same after you understand that part of the art of the biblical narrative is not in the plain sense of the text, but in the folds and wrinkles that show through the foibles and sin of a thousand years of human existence.  It's in these folds and wrinkles that God shows Himself.

  Writing is something I know I will persevere in, though some days it makes me feel like a convict stamping out license plates.  I am compelled by a flow of language through me, if that makes any sense.  My friends who speak in tongues say that it is almost like dipping your mind into a constant stream of background music.  Writing-- or, at least the compulsion to do something as absurd and impractical as writing-- is a bit like that.  What use are tongues except for the one who speaks them?  And what use is writing except for the author to have stepped away in the end and said "glad I got that out of me."  Oh, there are a few who genuinely enjoy what I write, and for them I am very grateful-- but writing to change the heart is about as immediately rewarding as pastoral ministry.  You never really get to see the bloom of your hope for others.  You simply put your head down, enter into the world of other people, and work with what's there, trusting all the while that God is doing something in spite of your hamhandedness.  In the case of writing, you enter into the world of a people who only exist in your head. 

  Yet as difficult and insane as the task of writing is-- it bears mentioning that all the published writers I know are slightly mad, and would smile and laugh if I told them so-- I wouldn't have it any other way.

  As I stood in the shower one morning, I realized with a jolt that although the exact circumstances of my life are not as I had hoped they would be, the general shape and rhythm of it is exactly as I had hoped for.  It is, for those who understand, a Hobbit's life-- a quiet life in a green part of town, punctuated by long walks (in my case, runs), good food, and generally speaking, the life of an English country squire.  Perhaps that is too idyllic for what it means to be me at the moment, but I appreciate all the opportunities I have and have been given, because how they were given to me-- through years of bitterness-- was not exactly how I imagined it to be granted. 

  It is not as though I don't fight battles anymore, it is just that the battles I fight are the right ones.  A man from my congregation tried to bully me the other day, but I rebuffed him by simply pointing out "you're a bully."  I didn't mean it to be hurtful in the sense that playground taunts are often meant, it was the simple truth of the matter, and by pointing it out, I was also telling him that I would not let him bully me.  I am his servant, but I am not his slave.  It was a difficult battle to fight, but it was the right one, not only for him to hear and feel flustered and ashamed over, but for me to take the stand and speak the truth.  I even and especially welcome the opportunities to disciple others-- though, for the moment, much of that discipleship comes in the form of simple teaching and much patience. (much patience!)  It means walking with other people, a slow and agonizing process-- not merely dropping sermonic bombs and getting the hell out of Dodge.

  I have so much of what I need at the moment.  I live in a truly blessed little apartment that looks out over a quiet walkway and trees and shrubs of many kinds.  (At this moment, I am looking out on oak, maple, willow, ash, rhododendron, honeysuckle, elder, lilac, apple, pine, fir, and others whose names escape me.)  I am paid well enough that rent is not a problem, nor is buying the frivolous things like General Tao's Chicken chips from the Superstore beyond my means.  And though I might often be lonely, I am surrounded by a community of friends and people who do love me.  Yes, I am that content with being single, though there are moments-- long moments-- when I do wish that there was someone to share all this beauty with. 

  The life I wanted-- the quiet life I wanted-- has been dropped into my lap.  My loving aunt wrote me from Hong Kong, saying "since life is quiet for you right now, maybe you should come back and visit."  Perhaps there was a note of wistfulness in my previous email to her about how quiet my life is (and therefore, from some perspectives, boring), but this is where I ought to be and where I am called.  Princeton?  Hong Kong?  Still maybe, but for now, this is where I am led and where I have been blessed.  Now, maybe, I will have the chance to pass this blessing onto others.