Hopewit

I guess we all wonder from time to time how it is that a gospel whose very essence is the reconciliation of person to person, person to creator, person to cosmos so often fails to reconcile us to each other, so often fails to reconcile us to creation, so often leaves us at odds with the cosmos. The conservative vs. liberal worldview provides no really satisfying answer. Jesus—our founder and pattern—was conservative with that which needed conserving, was liberal with that which needed to change. Or we can worry away at this question choosing either the tools of Aristotle or Charles Fox Parham : syllogistic reasoning vs. charisma . Maybe a traditionalist/modernist distinction is at the core of divisions, or something even less obscure, like the question of whether the gospel approves of beards and mustaches, beards but no mustaches, or no beards or mustaches in men, head coverings (black or white?) in women. Whatever peg we hang our reason-to-quarrel on, the truth pe...

Mennonite Youth Farm Complex as seen by a falcon . . . and Mark Wurtz's drone. Thanks falcon, thanks Mark. Last week, I wrote about the image of Christ as the falconer and us as the hawks. The theme was taken from W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming; “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Yeats might say that my use of it wasn’t quite what he meant; many critics have expressed diverging interpretations of the poem. In any case, the centrality of what drives us, what “holds us together” is very much at issue in our times. In the recent Conservative leadership contest, the centre was proposed by some to be an unnamed set of “Canadian core values,” the implication being that there is a centre whose tug on us makes us true Canadians. “The widening of the gyre—in response to the pull of the world—makes us subject to losing sight of Christ, our falconer.” At least that’s a consciousness in C...

Can falcons stomp leaves? William Butler Yeats wrote a poem while the horror of WWI was still fresh in the minds of the Western World. As a high school English teacher, I had to choose what poetry I would use to “cover” that part of the curriculum and The Second Coming generally didn’t make the list; I deemed it too complex, too deep, too full of strange imagery for the high school mind to appreciate. Truth is, I’d never dealt with it in College so I wasn’t sure I could do it any justice. But recently, two images from the poem have come to haunt me: the concept of Spiritus Mundi (world spirit) and the falcon that circles ever farther from the falconer so that a time comes when he can no longer hear his master and having lost his centre , wanders farther and farther out in a spiral that leads to who-knows-what. Anarchy, possibly. We’re all familiar—to some degree—with Spiritus Mundi. When we say things like “the world is going to hell on a handcart,” or when we sing...