Hopewit

“Wow,” he exclaimed, “that’s a snazzy watch. What’s it worth?” I know what he means by worth ; he wants to know how much I paid for it. “It was a gift from my students. I’ve no idea what they paid for it.” “I’d guess about twenty-five hundred dollars,” he said seizing my wrist and bringing the watch up to his face for a closer look. I’d be depressed if my watch happened to be lost or stolen. Not because of its dollar value, but because of the reminder that I have been a person whose presence among my fellow humans was noted and appreciated. Also, the face is large, clear, and easy for my tired eyes to read. There are obviously more measures of worth than the amount of cash that’s exchanged. Perhaps we could better visualize worth if we defined it as: “the amount and kind of assets (money, comfort, reputation, freedom, time, leisure, etc.) that must be given up in order to acquire what’s desired or needed.” lf vaccination were to be made mandatory in a time of pandemic, thos...

  ... and for everything which is natural “On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days, you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 1:4&5 NIV) We talked about the possible meaning of “being baptized with the Holy Spirit,” and what it had meant to us when as Mennonite-raised youth we were challenged at camp to accept the Spirit’s baptism. We went through the Pentecostalist “evidence” of being spirit-gifted: the tongue speaking, the ecstatic utterance, the sense of being touched by a divine presence, the expectations of the miraculous; and some of us acknowledged that we’d lived our entire lives with faith in God’s providence, but had no ecstatic, life-altering, watershed experience to witness to.   I thought of Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman at the well, “Yet a time is coming a...

  In a town where the majority of citizens self-declare as adherents of a Christian faith, elections would logically result in a municipal council reflecting that. I can understand that given the onerous responsibility of running the community’s civic affairs, some council member might suggest that they begin each council meeting with a prayer for divine guidance. The deity addressed, of course, would be the Holy Trinity of Christian faith, not the Creator/Mother Earth of indigenous spirituality, not Buddha, Mohammed or Jehovah, and definitely not the humanist spirit of some agnostic/atheistic, not-Christian conviction. Protests were inevitable when a municipal council in Fundy Albert, New Brunswick added a mandatory opening prayer to its deliberations. As predictable was its subsequent withdrawal of the prayer protocol in favour of a five-minute period of quiet contemplation before meetings. You just can’t get away with mixing church and civic affairs anymore, unless you live in...