Hopewit

Shekinah Timber Lodge Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God. (John 3:20-21, NIV) Light and dark make powerful metaphors for all kinds of human experience. The prophets and the gospels are full of their illustrative power. The passage from John must have come to mind to many who watched and sought to understand the meaning of the Ford/Kavanaugh hearing on Thursday.  As an attempt to bring Ford's accusation and Kavanaugh's defence into the light, the process failed, the only clue to where light and dark might lie rested in the demeanour of the two witnesses. Judging the veracity of Ford's accusation and Kavanaugh's defence came down to groping in the darkness of bias, prejudices and personal interest.  People perpetrating crimes—includi...

The Vanishing Point A pastor in the Southern USA started her own church because, as a Lesbian, she had begun to feel that whatever her graces, however strong her faith, her acceptance in her Protestant congregation would always hinge around her sexual orientation. I heard an interview with her as I drove home from a meeting in Langham, and I'm still pondering an intriguing point she made. Our sacred texts—The Bible, The Quoran—should never have had back covers put on them, meaning that if these texts are inspired by God—as she believes—does it follow that their contents were all God had to say? “I'm not represented in scriptures,” she said, “and there are any number of life situations people face that simply didn't exist or were ignored when the scriptures were declared complete.” She has a point; how often have we debated moral issues by extrapolating from scriptures what we think they would say if written in our time? We call it discernment , but that ex...

The Molecularity of Thought Granted, we need words to communicate our thoughts. And the history of English Literature has proven to me that the words of our language can do amazingly at communicating ideas, images, even sensory impressions. Take even a snippet from Bernice Friesen's The Book of Beasts: “. . . when Paddy walked to school with him, walked him into the Mother Superior's office, had her dial his father's number and they both left him alone with his father's voice, all he could do was cry, cry for his father to take him home. His father's promises to do just that, his father's sobs blurred into his own shaking relief.” Where would we be without words? Grunting and pointing, I imagine. But confusion, chaos and deceit are also sown with words. There's much more to our communication than can be unlocked with a dictionary or thesaurus; words are the tools of humans, and humans are complex beings, often unpredictable, often manipulatin...

Parkland Pond - East on 312 Turn my heart toward your statutes, and not toward selfish gain. (Psalm 119:35, |NIV) I am your servant; give me discernment, that I may understand your statutes. (Psalm 119:125, NIV) Psalm 119 is the longest Psalm. Commentary says it's an acrostic poem, which has each stanza begin with one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet in sequence. As in English poetry, the writer has chosen to marry his themes with a familiar form: in English literature, the sonnet, the haiku, free verse, blank verse, couplet, etc. are forms (along with others) that marry recognizable style with content. Rhyme schemes, rhythm, and a host of rhetorical devices have been meat for English studies in high schools and universities for centuries. Our hymns provide us with good examples of marrying content to form. In order to be sung, the words and phrases of the content must be written so that they can fit into a musical whole. Th...