Hopewit

Complementing the colour blue. Community of communities “ God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning — the sixth day.” Genesis 1:31 I picture a man (likely not Moses) holding a quill and writing Hebrew words onto a papyrus scroll some 2700 years ago, words that would forever be preserved as sacred writing, translated and transliterated until I, today, experience the writer’s thoughts transferred from his brain to mine through the reading of it. I picture other men choosing among volumes and volumes of writing those that are worthy of preservation, and discarding those that are not until a package of writings we now know as The Bible is declared the completed word. That both the writers and the preservers were inspired goes without saying; a person picking up a quill and setting out on the laborious task of interpreting our world never does so without inspiration. It’s not unlike the sculptor who visualizes an o...

“ The Simple Path : Silence is Prayer Prayer is Faith Faith is Love Love is Service The Fruit of Service is Peace” -Mother Theresa  I’m leading worship at Eigenheim Mennonite Sunday morning but most of the work is being done by others, including first-hand impressions of Haiti by recent visitors to this “unpeaceful” country. The overall topic for the morning is Witnesses to God’s Peace , a somewhat enigmatic theme unless we first of all decide how God would define peace . Sometimes we define it (on God’s behalf?) quite narrowly as being the state of personal quietude coming from being reconciled to God through Christ’s life, teaching, death and resurrection. Sometimes we define it more socially, culturally as the harmony that precludes interpersonal conflict: wars, dissension, discrimination, or the multitude of “isms” to which humans are so vulnerable. Perhaps it’s a mistake to separate them. Perhaps we do the teachings of Christ a disservice when we split...

Fort Walsh Historic Site - Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan In her book, Claiming Anishinaabe: Decolonizing the Human Spirit , Lynn Gehl tackles the very basic question of how knowledge is acquired, how truth is arrived at.   There must be any number of ways of stating the question: intuitive vs. rational, factual vs. imaginative, materialist vs. superstitious, traditional vs. scientific come to mind. But most of us would understand what’s being investigated if it were put in terms of “head knowledge, heart knowledge and the search for meaning.” So let’s use that descriptor. An example: Building pipelines, drilling wells, sinking mines, damming rivers on traditional indigenous homelands has generally been defended in terms of head knowledge: economic data predominantly. The same head knowledge has excused the flooding of ancient burial grounds (what’s the problem; they’re all dead?), the sinking of a mine (there’ll be plenty of jobs for locals), the running th...