Category: Faith

Good Friday

I’ve been lying low lately. I’m reading and thinking and applying for jobs. Today is Good Friday, the harshest day of the Christian calendar.

There is a green hill far away
Outside a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.

We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.

-Cecil Alexander (1818-1895)

A strange Good Friday service today, with a chilling announcement that due to SARS, the clergy wouldn’t be shaking hands anymore with the congregation, as well as a reassurance that the elements for our Communion service “have been prepared with the utmost care.”

We also watched Wit (2001) last night, which is about a fiercely intelligent (but emotionally chilly) professor of literature who is dying from ovarian cancer. Emma Thompson, who also co-wrote the screenplay, gives a heart-wrenching performance, and there is a strong current of Christian faith throughout the film, making it oddly appropriate for our Easter. Her character had made the study of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets her life work, but it took her a long time to understand this:

One short sleep past, we wake eternally
and death shall be no more, death thou shalt die.

Much crying ensued in our household at the inevitable conclusion, but it was cathartic. I was choked up the same way today when we were singing, both the above hymn as well as my perennial favourite, “When I Survey The Wondrous Cross.”

Cops and Church

Our church was swarming with police this morning. No, they weren’t there to bust the pastor or anything. Because of Remembrance Day, we had the Toronto Police War Veterans’ Association taking part in the service. The two readings were read by Norm Gardner, chair of the Police Services Board, and Julian Fantino, the Chief of Police. I found the whole thing sort of disturbing. I’m not comfortable with the church cosying up to the civil authorities too much. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing Jesus would do. In addition, our church has a sort of mystifying love for the British Empire, and the service ended with a rousing rendition of “God Save the Queen,” which I refuse to sing, for a number of reasons. The irony was that today’s sermon was a quite passionate plea for peace. The power of the message was somewhat deflated by the Empire worship, I thought. There’s a lot of blood on those hands.

We spent the afternoon at a play with our friends Philip and Ian. Swollen Tongues was a completely over-the-top Restoration-style comedy of cross-dressing, poetic competition, and Sapphic love. Oh, and it’s all in rhyming couplets. It was quite hilarious, since some of the rhymes are deliberately bad, and the actors delivered them as broad farce.

As it turns out, we’re having some of the same problems with our new Mac as we had with the old one. Since we transferred so many of our old files, we’ve obviously copied something corrupt. So now, I’m busily copying everything to CD-R before I have to restore the whole machine. There’s probably no way to figure out which file(s) are bad, but if anyone has a clue, could you share it?

An Apology of Sorts

I think I’ve been too hard on the American contingent at World Youth Day. Since my last entry, I’ve paid particular attention to the groups of participants, and I’ve seen flags for Chile, Germany, Poland, Mexico, and Sweden. I suppose the environment is a bit like the Olympics and people are representing their countries. I overreacted. Being next door to the U.S. has given us Canadians a certain sensitivity to American patriotism at its worst, but I do feel that the Americans have as much right as anyone else in Toronto this week to show us where they’re from.

Jesus Music

Thanks to AudioGalaxy and some nostalgia, I’ve been enjoying some formative music from an important period of my life. My spiritual pilgrimage began in earnest in 1982, and for better or worse, I was introduced to the evangelical subculture with which I’ve had such a complicated relationship. My musical taste around this time was clearly punk and new wave, but there was a lot of compelling music being made by Christians that fell way outside my usual genre boundaries. Luckily for me, this music broke through my snobbery and became very important to me. A lot of these recordings are out of print now, or at least hard to find on CD. Thank God for file sharing!

  • Daniel Amos are still making music today. Not the name of a person, but a group, DA were one of the most influential bands from this period. Able to span genres effortlessly (they began as a country band and became celebrated as an alternative band!), they produced three albums (The “Alarma” Chronicles) that still hold up today. Satirizing everything, these songs still move me because they are honest, humble, and always looking for truth, which makes a pretty good creed to live by. Good songs: Faces to the Window, Through the Speakers.
  • Larry Norman was one of the original “Jesus freaks” from the 60s, although he made most of his music in the 70s. Hippy music like his was still alive in the church in the 80s, along with other discredited 70s pastimes like roller-skating, but I always liked the combination of apocalypse and hope in his songs. Good songs: Six-Sixty-Six (covered recently by Frank Black), I Love You.
  • Andrae Crouch is a man who combined traditional Gospel music with funk and R&B and made it appeal to both white and black listeners. If it weren’t for Andrae, I might not be listening to Prince and Stevie Wonder today. Good songs: All the Way, Finally.

The whole “Contemporary Christian Music” thing is a bit silly to me, but despite that, these musicians were trying to do much more than just entertain Christians. Their music helps me remember who I was, who I am, and who I want to become.