FRIGID, EH!

Hanns F Skoutajan  

“But, baby it’s cold outside,” is the oft repeated refrain of this winter song. The lover tries to persuade the beloved to stay a little longer since its cold outside - sentiments we are very much able to appreciate. Yes, its been frigid outside, unfortunately that word is not very musical, “cold” will have to do.

The song was written by Frank Loesser in 1944 for his wife and became an instant Christmas favourite. But in fact it is a winter song which is especially appropriate for this cold season.

Each time I walk into this brick wall of cold air, now known as the  “polar vortex,”  I am reminded of my first winter in Canada. It was 1939 - 40 and we were ensconced in our wretched log cabin in the wilds north of North Battleford, Saskatchewan, fifteen miles from the nearest village. 

On that first frigid morning we discovered that every drop of water in the house had become solid including the contents of the potty. Father scurried about setting a roaring fire in our potbellied stove that turned the pipes red hot and raised fears that we would burn down the place. 

Next was to rush out to the barn to feed the two cows and the team of horses. They 

welcomed us with moos and whinnies. To our surprise we found that their bodies had  made their accommodation more comfortable than our own quarters. Then it was back to the cabin with  pails of warm milk donated by the cows. Most of the rest of the day was spent indoors except for a brief workout with the axe at the chopping block. 

We had no idea how cold it was. Only when we visited the general store did we discover that the temperature differential between celsius and fahrenheit made no difference. “Wind chill” hadn’t been heard of then.

“Baby, it was cold outside,” but we were well equipped with warm hats, coats, combination underwear and felt boots etc.

Most memorable of those three years in the True North was the winter that my mother and I spent alone, father having gone east to be retrained to get a more compatible job in the growing war industry, and certainly better living accommodation. Mother and I were left with disposing of our livestock and other goods. 

We headed for the sack as early as possible accompanied by our dogs and cats into whose fur we were able to stick our toes. They didn’t seem to mind the occasional twitch. We slept well after telling each other bedtime stories which we made up each night.

It was one of those very cold days in mid February when our neighbour hauled us and  our remaining possessions to the train station on our week long trek to  Toronto.

These day it is not unusual to hear someone opine that we could use some “global warming” right now. Statistics tell us that indeed the climate has changed under the influence of ever growing Co2 accumulation bringing not just periods of cold but generally unseasonal weather. Think of the floods of Calgary and High River as well as the Elbe breaching its banks at Dresden, Germany,  the hurricanes that have devastated areas of the mid west, the typhoons that have churned the seas and sent high waves ashore. And we are warned that there is worse to come. When my son visited Florida at Christmas and heard people complaining about the cold from the north he just told them it was all part of free trade.

We have an inordinate confidence that science and technology can solve all problems, but our profligate ways have given evil times a head start that is  hard to beat. There are no quick fixes to our climate problems. Economics trumps everything else, so it seems. Sustainable development is even questionable at our stage. A whole change in lifestyle of the residents of this planet earth is in order.

In this my first blog of the year 2014 I ought to be a bit more optimistic about the future. And indeed there is much to be optimistic about. My hope rests with the coming generation. My son, an elementary school teacher who has developed new methods of teaching that involves what is called “the greening of schools” finds the “kids” really turned  on to learning about nature and its preservation, and so are their parents. In the 

publication, “ A Natural  Curiosity” for which he writes, holds out the following hope:

“As ecologist and scholar David Orr emphasizes, our ability to restore planet Earth rests primarily on the decisions we make about education. The kind of education which has given us  the “skills, aptitudes, and attitudes necessary to industrialize the earth” is no longer practical given the state of our vulnerable natural world. Resource depletion, loss of species, and climate change threaten the sustainability of the planet.  Orr suggests that we need a fundamental shift in the way we think and behave, a shift made possible  by a fundamentally different approach to teaching and learning: Education that nurtures children’s innate curiosity about the natural world, that fosters their understanding  of the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things, and instills in them an abiding sense of care and responsibility for the well-being of their communities and planet Earth.”  

   

We can only hope that our older generation will not throw too many roadblocks to this new form of education. 

Yes, baby, it’s cold outside , but it might get hotter and dryer and wetter and more turbulent unless we heed the signs of our time. A New Year is upon us. Let us use it wisely.

SQ 10/01/2014  

ALL ABOARD!

Hanns F Skoutajan

“Air Canada Flight 251 is in its final boarding process. All passengers should now be on board.” The line-up at the gate had dwindled to a mere trickle as one after the other passengers pass by the check-in desk and enter the passageway to the aircraft.

Then a loud shout could be heard. Racing down the hall trundling their carry-on cases two more passengers wildly waving their boarding passes and passports rush for the gate  - just in the last moment. Behind them the door closes and the flight is ready for departure.

I mentioned to my oncologist that I suspected that I am in my “final boarding process.”

He chuckled but  didn’t want to make any rash predictions about my date of departure. He did, however, remind me that  people of my tender years  are all in their final boarding process. Departure might not be imminent. It isn’t in my case.

As we approach the end of the year there are also speculations about the future. We live in a turbulent world, armed to the teeth, some of them weapons of mass destruction. Wars, as in Syria and South Sudan, are devastating the people and country. There are serious questions as to how we shall feed the billions that are crowding this planet.  How much time have we left  -  has civilization left, - has this planet Earth left?

There are those religious fanatics who take pleasure in end time conjectures, who like to remind everyone of those biblical visions of the end, in the Old Testament in Joel 2 : 10, but also in the New Testament in Matthew 2 : 24 - 29, about the sun being darkened and the moon losing light, the stars falling from heaven being shaken by the last turbulence.  Among them is Harold Camping, a broadcaster in the United States who stirred consternation , ecstasy and complaints to the U.S. Federal Communications  Commission. He predicted twice in 2011 that the end of the world is nigh. But he beat the world to its demise as he died on Dec. 15th in California, of course. He is just one of a host of other prophets of doom. 

Astrophyisicists also speculate about the end  as they do about the beginning, the Big Bang and the Big Crunch and perhaps another Big Bang and “deja vu all over again.” Hans Küng, the noted Tübingen (Germany) theologian, writes in his book, The Beginning of All Things : Science and Religion,  that “in around 5 billion years from now the Andromeda Galaxy  will collide with the Milky Way and billions of stars will be hurled around the universe. At the same time, the sun will swell into a red giant. Then all life  on our Earth will die out.”

5 billion years seems like a lot of time for a final boarding process.  Rather than being obsessed with End Times, biblical or astrophysical, the dwellers on this planet need to be concerned about the quality of life of all its inhabitants.

My oncologist and I discussed what therapies we should take to preserve quality rather than quantity of life. We all love life, I do, and want to have as much of it as possible , but what kind of life?

Thus as we stand at the portal of another year I cannot help but wonder what is to come  not just for my earthly body but for the world that our bodies inhabit.

Unfortunately many of those dwellers of time and space are desperately avaricious. We are determined to mine the earth’s resources ignoring the havoc caused as can be seen at Fort McMurray and surroundings. Quality of life, it seems, is constituted by the bottom line. Living responsibly  and sustainably is trumped by accumulation. We like to forget that we are indeed in a final boarding process.     

For me quality of life has everything to do with my family, just as humankind needs to think about its human family, about living in peace and harmony with one another and with this God-given environment. The final boarding process is not meant to be a time when we hoard up what’s left. Our carry-ons can hold  just so much.

Whether you believe that there is something beyond the boarding gate is not the point. 

Testifying to his faith, Küng, does not believe in the “dying of the light” but entering fully into the light of God’s love. He has wagered his life on that belief  but admits that he is aware of the abiding risk of this wager.  “But I am convinced, “ he affirms, “ that even if I lose this wager in death, I will in all events have lived a better, happier, more meaningful life than if I had not had hope.”

It is with this conviction that we need to approach the departure gate whether that be in the new year or in some time to come.  The final boarding process is nevertheless upon us . Be not afraid. Live lovingly.

Happy New Year!

SQ 27/ 12/ 2013

WISHING YOU A BLESSD CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

S P E C I A L   C H R I S T M A S   B L O G 

Its the Gospel Truth!

When the time came for her to be delivered, Joseph and Mary, great with child, set out for Bethlehem because they were of the house and lineage of David. 

At the outskirts of Jerusalem they were stopped at a security wall because they had the wrong papers, expired papers or no papers at all. The youthful guards snickered about a “virgin birth.” Thus they waited by the roadside for some Good Samaritan to come along. And she did.

Meanwhile Wise Men from the East set out to follow their unlucky star. They had no problem getting to Bethlehem because they had Israeli government tourist visas for Holy Land visitors.

When they got to manger square there was some confusion. The stable was empty. A cow was contentedly finishing the hay in the manger. Sheep baaed disconcertingly, Goats brayed annoyingly. Shepherds looked sheepish. Angels fluttered about singing hallelujahs off-key. And finally the star blinked out.

When nothing happened the royal trio cashed in their gold and myrrh and frankincense at the nearest Western Union office in Jerusalem and booked rooms at the King David Hotel. They laid in a supply of trinkets, mostly sandalwood carvings of the manger scene as it was supposed to have been, to prove to friends that they had been there and done that.  Then they headed home “by another route ”

Mary had her baby at a home for unwed mothers run by UNWRRA in Ramalla. When they were fit to travel they took the donkey express to Nazareth, and the rest is history.

“The baby grew in wisdom, stature, in favour with God and man.” And isn’t that how it ought be.

Written and misinterpreted by Hanns F Skoutajan

SQ 20/12/2013

Other writings may be found at  MYQUEST

NB new address: fj735@ncf.ca

“MADIBA” 

HANNS F SKOUTAJAN

The tumult and the shouting dies,

The captains and the kings depart,

Still stands thine ancient sacrifice,

A humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of hosts be with us yet, 

Lest we forget, lest we forget.

 Recessional by Rudyard Kipling

On a beautiful day in October 1998 I stood on the tarmac in front of the main building of the infamous Dachau concentration camp. Even at the tender age of 8 I had known the meaning of KZ,  the German initials for Konzentrazionslager or concentration camp.  That word even looks like barbed wire . Dachau did not conjure up for me a pleasant brewery town a few kilometres north of Munich but sent shudders down my spine in those difficult prewar days. 

I was part of a small delegation of Canadians all of whom knew someone who had spent time in this prison camp. We somberly  toured the museum and then assembled in front of the memorial to a lay a wreath in silence. 

As I stood there I was very much aware that my own father, an ardent antifascist activist in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, a marked man, might have been among the  inmates lined up to be counted, tortured and starved. Had it not been for Doreen Warriner,  a British Quaker and her compatriots raising money, putting pressure on the British government to issue visas and make travel arrangements for as many of the most endangered such as my father he would have been apprehended and marched under the arch bearing the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei, (Work Liberates). Mother and I would also have been caught behind the lines. Life for me would have been entirely different than it is today. I think about it often.

Concentration camps did not originate in the twisted mind of Adolf Hitler. History has assigned that honour to Britain who in the Boer Wars (1899 - 1902) set up camps not just for men. 35,000 women and children perished largely of starvation in these camps. 

A British journalist, W T Stead, wrote:

"Every one of these children who died as a result of the halving of their rations, thereby exerting pressure onto their family still on the battle-field, was purposefully murdered. The system of half rations stands exposed, stark and unashamedly as a cold-blooded deed of state policy employed with the purpose of ensuring the surrender of men whom we were not able to defeat on the field.”

See their pictures on Google and you will be reminded of what the US GIs saw when they liberated Dachau in 1945. 

A few days ago the people of South Africa joined by many others throughout the world mourned and celebrated the life of Nelson Mandela, their beloved Madeba. He had experienced first hand, life, if one may call it such, in the prison on Robbin Island. He was incarcerated for 27 years and lost a goodly portion of his life and health.

Leaders from all over the world including Canada gathered in South Africa to pay tribute to this truly remarkable person who, although scathed in body, remained unscathed in mind and spirit by this ordeal. 

It is only too easy to point fingers and play the numbers game, to plead innocence or to maintain that our atrocities were much less than those of Iran, Israel, China or North Korea to name just a few countries that hold political prisoners. Blood is on the hands of all wherever vested power is threatened.

Guantanamo stands as a black mark against the United States who prides itself as the home of the free and the brave. Nor is Canada lily white, indeed, one may say that our residential schools were a type of concentration camp for aboriginal children.

The name Nelson Mandela has gone down in history and will be a memorial for those who have survived hardship at the hand of oppressive regimes. After more than two and a half decades he walked out free to lead his country out of Apartheid into a better future. True his country has a long way to go before poverty, a persistent apartheid, is removed. 

Shortly after his liberation he came to Canada where he was received with great acclaim. I saw his entourage in Toronto. He was made an honourary citizen of Canada. The vote in parliament would have been unanimous had it not been for one MP who like the former US vice president Dick Cheney continues to insist that he was a communist and terrorist.

It is my hope that as our Prime Minister stood by his bier he will have had second thoughts about continuing to insist on the incarceration of Omar Khadr, a child soldier cajoled by his father to join the Afghan terrorists and then further cajoled to confess to killing one American soldier. 

It is my hope that as Jean Chretien stood with the other dignitaries he will have borne in mind that it was under his watch as PM that Maher Arar underwent extraordinary rendition and sent to Syria to be interrogated under extreme duress.  How many more languish in our prisons with charges held in secrecy?

It is my hope that Mandela’s name shall never be trivialized but continue to be a reminder of man’s inhumanity to man, to persuade people to work to  bring freedom and to stand for peace and justice.”

Nelson Mandela is dead: Long live Madiba

SQ 12/12/2013

Other writings may be found at MYQUEST

NB new e mail address is: fj735@ncf.c 

WRITING, PREACHING AND ORGANIZING FROM THE LEFT 

   

Hanns F Skoutajan

    

It was a relatively uneventful crossing from North Sydney to Port aux Basque, Newfoundland.  On one occasion I saw what resembled a piece of flotsam  a short distance from our ship. And then it blew a blast of spray and I knew  that I had sighted my first whale. There were many more to come.

What amused Marlene and I most was the entertainment in the lounge,  a small band accompanied a singer who often repeated the chorus line: “ Ah knows it, ah knows it!” It was our introduction to Newfoundland culture and lingo. Later we enjoyed Emil Benoit and the Figgy Duff in a pub in St Johns. 

After we docked we made our  way to a nearby campground. It was the first of July and water was rushing down the gutters. Some workers came by to clear the flow. Pointing to one of the hills where there was a remnant of white stuff I asked one of the men whether that was snow. He replied, “ Yup, she be thar till she come again.” For me it was quintessential  Newfoundland.

Over the next two weeks we travelled the length and breadth of the province and  fell heavily in love with this “ come by lately” province and its people. At St. Anthony Marlene bought a beautiful parka trimmed with fur. We toured L’Anse aux Meadows, an early Norse settlement. We climbed Gros Morne with almost disastrous  results. Visited Twillingate and enjoyed their partrige berry pie and other home made goodies. Of course we had to drop in at Harbour Grace and Carbonear ( Oh Take I dar, Oh take I dar!) where we had to have our muffler fixed, a victim of St. Anthony’s roads. Finally we ran out of  land, well rock to be honest , and stood at Signal Hill.

Of course, I had met lots of Newfoundlanders before  One of them was Herb Pottle who had worked with Joey Smallwood and then split with him over Smallwood’s decertification of the woodworkers union. He became the director of communication for the United Church of Canada while I was director of the refugee resettlement program during World Refugee Year, 1960. Herb was very well educated and enjoyed speaking German with me. He could have done the same in Latin - well he, not I.

I recall all this after having attended  the book launch  by Ed Finn of his recently published book called Ed Finn: A Journalist from the Left. It was a rich evening where I met lots of other writers and activists “ from the left” such as Murray Dobbin and Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians. 

In his book, this leftist journalist who had his beginning on the west coast of Newfoundland ,  tells the story of the struggle of the working people, the loggers, the railway workers, the fisher folks on the outports and the labourers in the paper industry. Their battle was against great odds, particularly the stranglehold that corporate power or individual oligarchs had on information. Ed’s writing, his editorials in the Cornerbrook’s Western Star challenged this onesidedness and of course in time left him unemployed. He became deeply involved with labour unions across the country. He also worked with Tommy Douglas to bring Medicare to Saskatchewan and even served as “the cat among the pigeons”, or as he put it  “ the pigeon among the cats” at the Bank of Canada for a term. His final crown was, of course, editor of the Monitor, the organ of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Concerned and activist Canadians ought to subscribe and read the CCPA Monitor. I can’t see how I could do without. 

Throughout my ministry it has been hinted from time to time that I should to stick to the gospel. Well, what’s that? I have been made aware of this by some of my congregations. One Sunday while I was well into my sermon I noticed a well dressed parishioner making his way out of the pew. He did not look happy as he left the sanctuary. I don’t think I ever saw him back nor was he open to discuss the subject. 

I can’t remember what it was that I had preached about. It could have been a number of issues, Canadian corporate support of Apartheid in South Africa, the war in Vietnam, the farm workers in Mexico and California or the plight of First Nation Fishermen on Georgian Bay.

I was always careful to couch my political views in biblical/theological terms. My sermons were not meant to be political speeches. I stuck to the gospel and its implication for life in the world.

Jesus was a man of the people. He noted that these people were exploited not only by Romans but by the Jewish elite. Long before his time there had been prophets such as Amos and Hosea who denounced greed and violence. They advocated turning swords into ploughshares.  Can the church in our day ignore those spiritual initiatives?

Of course, the churches have had their prophets, such as Dorothy Day and the editors of Catholic Worker, evangelicals such as Jim Wallis. In my own denomination , the United Church of Canada, I supported church leaders such as Clarke MacDonald who grew up with the coal miners in Cape Breton. I could go on. But my advocacy  was never left unchallenged from the right   both in the church and from without. 

As I look back on my ministry I regret that I was at times a bit too cautious in my  call for peace and social justice. However,I do have some evidence that my sermons  and prayers did not go unheard and I rejoice.

My ministry as such is over  and I am pleased to be able to express my thoughts and convictions through the Internet. Many of you have responded most positively. Thank you!

I believe strongly that there is a spirit that calls for peace, love and justice. It has frequently found a voice from the left.  “ Ah knows it, ah knows it!”

SQ 4/12/2013

Other writing may be found at MYQUEST 

             

AS BROAD AS ALL OF LIFE

A recently published Spirit Quest set in motion a discussion/debate/dialogue, you name it, with a highly respected friend of mine. He challenged some of my religious  beliefs/assumption that I expressed in that story. Our letters have crisscrossed and may continue to do so for some time.

What this controversy has revealed to me is the breadth of faith understandings among religious denominations. There are of  course a variety of opinions in almost all faiths. Certainly that is the case in the three monotheistic  religions. In Judaism there are all sorts of gradations and shades of understanding or misunderstandings among the Hassidim and the Reformed and everyone in between.  It may seem less so in Islam, but that is probably  because the fundamentalists have stolen the headlines while there are other such as Irshad Manji, a woman, an outspoken Canadian author, professor, and advocate of a reform and progressive interpretation of Islam.

In the Christian faith there is a vast difference of opinion from those of the Unitarian faith, some of whom prefer not to be called Christian and those who inhabit the Bible Belt of our neighbour to the south. Within the Catholic Church there are significant differences, indeed it was among catholic scholars that biblical criticism developed in the 19th century - but very quietly.  

My own upbringing was not in the Christian church as I have explained in other columns. My parents who had been Catholic and Lutheran in their youth left  their respective churches to become politically active. Social democracy, human rights and economic justice was their spiritual motivation. 

Somehow or other I made my way into the church, probably through the ministrations of a Czech expat who ministered at the Church of All Nations in Toronto. Henry Vaclavic became a kind of  role model and mentor for me.

I decided to become a minister of the United Church  whose activism I and my parents admired. Soon after becoming a candidate for the ministry  I had occasion to visit the church headquarters on Queen Street West in Toronto. While there I had a conversation with one of the church leaders who sent me to the book store to buy a book by Lewis Dunnington called Something To Stand On. He probably sensed that my religious foundation was a bit wobbly.    

Dunnington was a Methodist minister in a college town in Iowa. In those days, the forties, students flocked to churches on Sundays to hear interesting and uplifting sermons and meet some nice young ladies and gentlemen. Dunnigton put a question box in the lobby and invited students to put their queries into it which he would attempt to preach about.  He later turned these sermons into the book with chapters such as  Hell: A Place or State of Mind, The Fall of Man: Fiction or Fact? and Miracles and Universal Law. He did not believe in a corporeal resurrection of Jesus. I would love to have been in his pews.

I devoured the book. A light went on in my mind: did I really not have to believe in the Sunday School stories I had heard? Later I showed the book to a fellow student who was appalled by it. Questioning anything in the bible left it open to doubting all of it, he told me.

But for me it was a faith saver.  Dunnington “believed that the simple, loveable, dynamic personality of Jesus has almost been buried beneath a load of theological dogma.”  He felt that, “ the evidence should be examined with an open mind  so that Christians may return to Him.” It was time that the boulder be removed from his tomb. 

I suppose the same may be said for other faiths, Jews and Muslims, who seek to probe deeper into their religious beliefs rather than memorize verses, leading them to dispute what had been held as sacrosanct. 

I can recognize something of this in the recent declarations of Pope Francis that have made the  news. He wants his church to change, to become a servant church as was the founder, willing to get its hands dirty as it seeks to help the poor  and downtrodden. He questioned the “trickle-down” theory of economics so dear to corporate fundamentalists. For too long the church has stood on the side of the rich and powerful unlike his namesake Saint Francis. A change is imperative if the church is to be faithful. 

I am getting old and within me are the seeds of my demise. For me, however, death is not the extinguishing of the light, nor is it a transmigration to another realm of time and space. I am faced with a mystery as big as all of life.

Bishop Spong, whom I have both met, read and quoted and whom I much admire, has written the following in his latest book: Eternal Life: A New Vision. “The goal of all religion is not to prepare us to enter the next life, it is a call to live now, to love now, to be now and in that way to taste what it means to be part of life  that is eternal, a love that is barrier-free.”

It is the joy of living that is inspired by such freedom that I aspire to even in my dying days

Hanns F Skoutajan

SQ 28/ 11/ 2013.

LORD I BELIEVE, HELP THOU MY UNBELIEF

Hanns F Skoutajan

“Scientists prove God exists? Two scientists say they have.” So announced the headline  in the Science and Beyond section of the Epoch Times. I pick up this interesting weekly publication at my local coffee emporium. 

“The theory says,” The Times quotes two German scientists, “that God, or a supreme being, is that for which no greater can be conceived. God exists in the understanding.  If God exists in the understanding, we could imagine God to be greater by existing in reality. Therefore God must exist.”

Hmm!?

It reminded me of the occasion when I visited my cousin Gerhard, an international tax lawyer who lives in Germany. One evening we were sitting on his balcony enjoying a glass or two of Rhine wine (Bad Durkheim Feuerberg). Pleasant music was emanating from the spa down in the valley. It created a stimulating background for this evening of reminiscing and conversation. Much of it had to do with our lives before war separated us.

Suddenly my cousin eyed me seriously and he almost spat out the question as if it had been waiting on his tongue for a long time, “ Hanns, do you believe in God?” I was shocked, to say the least, at this turn of our conversation. Gerhard, if not an atheist is certainly an agnostic, not unusual for a revenue attorney, I suppose. 

Gerhard had experienced a hard life, had been conscripted into the German forces, the medical corps for he had had plans of becoming a doctor. He thus managed to avoid active service working in a naval hospital. After returning home to Czechoslovakia  at the end of the war he was forced to work in a coal mine where he became quite ill. Subsequently he and his parents were among the 3.5 million ethnic Germans being expelled from their Czech homeland. By freight train they and a few possessions were taken to a war devastated Germany, the US sector, and temporarily put up in an  empty school building. The Red Cross had set up a soup kitchen and provided sustenance for these many expellees. At wars end 14 million ethnic Germans, mostly women, children and old people, men were either imprisoned or dead,  were on the move in the largest voelkerwanderung in all history. In time Gerhard managed to go to university where he excelled. Instead of medicine, the faculty was full, he studied law which suits his intelligence and temperament perfectly.

I relate all this to give you some sense that my cousin had experienced life at its worst and now at its best. He has a beautiful home on a hill overlooking the spa town of Bad Durkheim and travels the world a great deal.

We are very close and we hold each other in high esteem. His query about my belief was not facetious although he is quite capable of that.  For my first nine years of life we virtually grew up together.  Twenty year after our parting we met again. I had finished my theological studies and been ordained a minister and now was doing post grad studies in Germany. What difference had our life experiences made in our beliefs, is a good question.

I parried his verbal assault, “ Before I can answer your question I must know your definition of God.” But Gerd persisted in true courtroom interrogation style, “ Hanns, yes or no, do you believe in God?”

Because we are good friends the vigour of his cross examination soon abated and I admitted that I believed in a God but not the kind that Goedl and Benzmueller, the two German scientists who believed they had proved the existence of God wrote about. God is not dead, they insisted as Nietsche their fellow countryman  had averred many years  earlier, but is  “a being  for which no greater can be conceived.”

Their argument had some similarity to that of Paul Tillich, the German American theologian, who called God the Ground of All Being. John Shelby Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop in the United States, who is my mentor, agrees with Tillich but goes beyond. He grew up in an evangelical family and church and then through hard biblical and theological studies reached a new enlightenment. By his many books and lectures in the United States and Canada and elsewhere this theologian became the voice of progressive Christianity. To many he seems to have gone too far, but not for me, he makes perfect sense.

In a recent article in the United Church Observer, (November ’13) Ken Gallinger, a well known minister and personal friend, announced that he had left the ministry and indeed the United Church of Canada.  He quotes from a conversation he had with a member of one of his congregations. Roy had challenged him, “ Why have you lied to me all my life? You ministers knew this stuff ( biblical criticism). Why haven’t the ministers of this church had the courage to go into the pulpit and share what you knew with us dumb lay people?” Gallinger thought long and agonizingly about this challenge and wrote, “ So like many others, I lost my church. But lost my faith?  Not so much.

On the previous pages of this excellent magazine, Rev. Gretta Vosper,  minister of West Hill United Church and Rev. Connie denBok of Alderwood United Church in Toronto dialogued about their beliefs. Vosper who calls herself a Christian atheist, scarcely uses the word God in her worship while denBok is much more traditional in her worship, indeed I would call her an evangelical. Both are highly intelligent and honest people of faith, though their faith differs significantly. Vosper is a great admirer of Bishop Spong and I can only imagine that denBok disagrees with his radical theology. All this points to a lively debate within the denomination.

In his book Why Christianity Must Change or Die ( Harper Collins 1998) Spong concludes: “I am first and always a believer. I define myself as a believer in exile. I have lived and worshipped as a believer. I shall continue to do so and to be so until the day I die. When that moment comes, I expect to enter even more deeply into the reality of the God in whom I have lived and moved and had my being.” In these words he expresses my own radical/progressive faith.

His God is a mystery but also very personal. God is within, not above or beyond creation. It is not a God that science can prove or disprove. Nor can I affirm this God with a yes or no  as my cousin had demanded. God is to be lived. 

SQ  15/ 11/ 2013

More writings can be found at MYQUEST