Winnipeggers Rally for Indigenous Rights
On Saturday, September 23, starting at 1 pm, a group of Indigenous peoples and settlers from Winnipeg (Treaty 1 territory) will walk 12 km from Stephen Juba Park to a public gathering at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba to urge the Canadian government to fully adopt and implement the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
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Countdown to “Walk the Talk” in Support of Reconciliation Bill C-262 (days 42 & 43 of 46)
Treaties themselves, traditionally understood, are not meant to be cold, legal agreements between competitors in a zero sum game, but rather, they are friendship agreements about how to live together in a good way….
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Countdown to “Walk the Talk” in support of Reconciliation Bill C-262 (day 45 0f 46)
In response to Article 45 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, poet Lyla June Johnston has written about her patient ache for the day when “our collective love… robs the stalk and the root from the thorns of inequity.”
Countdown to “Walk the Talk” in Support of Reconciliation Bill C-262 (day 46)
In exactly 46 days, in Winnipeg, there will be a 12k walk and gathering at the National Centre for Truth And Reconciliation in support of Reconciliation Bill C-262 which, if enacted, would ”require the Government of Canada to take all measures necessary to ensure that the laws of Canada are in harmony with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”
My Poem for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
Several weeks ago I won an award for poetry at the annual Word Guild Awards Gala in Toronto. I was not able to attend, so I'm grateful that my buddy Tim Huff was able to accept on my behalf. Tim is the illustrator and co-author with Cheryl Bear on a magnificent...
HOLY SATURDAY — THE DAY OF JOYFUL SADNESS
I remember wondering what it would have been like to be a friend of Jesus, to have experienced his vigor, his newness and the wild hope he would have aroused for a long awaited promise to be fulfilled. And then to experience his grim suffering and death, and to have no idea that the astonishing Resurrection life was about to break into history and inaugurate the new creation, eternal and ever-green. The anguish must have been crushing.
LAZARUS SATURDAY
It is no accident that church tradition celebrates the resurrection of Lazarus on a Saturday (Sabbath), the final day of creation, making it also a foretaste or signpost of re-creation. It is also poetically poignant that Lazarus Saturday falls on the eve of Palm Sunday, the day Jesus set out from Bethany on a donkey to goad the great and final confrontation by which he conquered death by death.
Spiritual Disciplines: The Backbone of Freedom
The spiritual disciplines are not magic. They are certainly no guarantee of life unsullied by suffering, error, or outright failure. This I know from experience. Neither are the disciplines a strategy to obtain brownie points from a stern God whose only joy is to suck the life out of everything that is fun to do. I suspect that the spiritual disciplines, in themselves, have little value. But they are, I think, related to Paul’s confidence that, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Gal. 5:1). And though we don’t normally assume a corollary between discipline and freedom, I hope to make the case that the two could hardly be more closely related. And to better understand my meaning, we only have to take this out of the realm of the spiritual and look for a similitude in the physical.
NEW TO THE TABLE…
..beauty almost always has a subtext of sorrow. Great beauty knows that behind God’s gladsome salvation which promises creation’s liberty, there is the heaviness of sacrifice borne by the One who absorbs our folly so that we may flourish. Beauty knows, in the end, that Love is terribly costly.
The Feast of St. Joseph — March 19th
Most of us are at least somewhat familiar with the infamous St. Patrick, whose feast day we celebrate on March 17th. Fewer folks, I suspect, have delved into the mysteries of St. Joseph, who is only mentioned briefly in the biblical text but who has been granted by the church his own feast day as well, just two days after Patrick’s. As I’ve written a blog on St. Patrick in the past, I thought this year I would highlight the life of St. Joseph in greater detail.
LENTEN SPRING
I only recently discovered that Lent means spring, and derives from the word long or lengthen. It refers to the lengthening of days when the sun releases the earth from her icy bondage…
Blog Sign Up: Win Steve Bell CDs and Concerts for Life
There is a difference between signing up for my blog, and signing up for my e-newsletter…