The State of their Union

    I fear for the United States of America. I’m sure that there are many possible reasons that come to your head as you read that first sentence, and I may share some of them, but I have a singular fear that in my mind poses the greatest threat to the livelihood of what is still, for now, the greatest nation on earth. I believe it is the same fear that Abraham Lincoln shared when he proclaimed (quoting another notable historical figure) “A house divided against itself cannot stand”.

    I fear for the Unity of those United States. As I’ve followed the recent battle for health-care reform I’ve been surprised again and again (even though I know I shouldn’t be) by the eagerness of people to divide over political interests rather than even attempt to unite for human interests. Whether you agree with the bill put forth or not, the bigger issue is that something needed to be done. For decades now fully one-tenth of America’s people have been crippled by lack of affordable access to health care. To say that the Obama administration’s solutions aren’t ideal is fine, but to effectively walk away from the table and attempt to negate the nations’ best chance in decades of putting forth an imperfect but drastically improved approach at caring for its own citizens is to my mind a moral wrong on the part of Republican and many Democrat politicians. But this is not my main point. It is only a recent illustration of the growing concern I have for the well-being and future of our influential neighbors to the south. Watchers of American (or Canadian, or just about any other nation’s) politics will simply say that this happens all the time, and I’m aware and appropriately discouraged by that fact; but it’s the polarity of it in this current American setting- the extremity- that gives me pause.

    As the left was mobilized by a grassroots movement that brought a relatively young, idealistic, un-connected, (and in my opinion excellent) man to the Whitehouse, the right was caught stunned- staring agape at their nation being swept away from them by social networking and feel-good hype. As the first year in Mr. Obama’s presidency rolls over, the Right is now mirroring the tools and tactics used by the left and creating its own wave of momentum and support for change. Many cells of this movement are equal to the Left in their idealism but not in their ideals.

    I’ve recently come to understand a little bit of what is creating this backlash. There is a huge segment of the population, largely stereotyped (and to some extent accurately) as being located between the coasts and towards the south, who feel that the nation is slipping away from them, out of their grasp. Many see a nation drifting steadily away from the core values on which it was founded. Now the cynic (and lefty) in me wants to say to these people “How can you complain when it was your own guy who started the ball rolling? It was Dubya who greatly expanded the scope and powers of the government and treated your own rights as currency to be spent towards the “War on Terror”. Now you get to take your lumps!” but of course, while there might be truth to that, it doesn’t exactly get us anywhere, does it? The fact is that the nation is steadily polarizing, and the ever-increasing access to information is creating and increasing fringe groups at an unprecedented rate. I will give an example:

If I was dismayed by the Tea Party movement, I am downright fearful of the implications of a group like the Oath Keepers. This is a group committed to protecting and restoring the constitutional foundation of America. Sounds reasonable, right? The problem is that this group caters not so much to genuinely concerned citizens, but to that fringe who easily equate expressing displeasure with armed struggle. Welcomed are the conspiracy theorists and armed militias, the 9/11 “truthers” and the firearms lobbyists. Oath Keepers is made up to a large degree by people in uniform: military, police, veterans, many of whom have strong values of commitment to their country, and many of whom feel to have been cast aside by their country (many Iraqi war vets, for example). They feel that the government is moving towards a Totalitarian state in which they will be forced to surrender their guns, their God, and their rights, and many in this group are ready to take violent action against this. These fears are fanned by fantastic conspiracies of Obama being foreign-born, a Muslim, having a secret Socialist agenda, etc etc. The problem is not so much that there are people who actually believe this stuff- there has always been that population- but that there is well-organized leadership that is willing to connect and exploit these people in a deliberate attempt to undermine an elected government. More moderate Conservative Republicans meanwhile, do nothing to discourage this fringe because they know that their votes may count on it. For now they can only watch and wait for the right time to either adopt or denounce this movement.

    I don’t have fears that a second American revolution is on its way (as some within the movement are hoping), but I think that what we could see is a nation completely immobilized by polarity. My main concern is that the rising level of rhetoric, misinformation, and hysteria could trap the country in a fearful paralysis, resulting in an inability to make any economic or legislative progress. And there are people and groups that are deliberately trying to achieve this for their own personal interests, which is why you’re still hearing about Sarah Palin. There is no reason I can think of why she would have any seat at any political table except that she has the populist backing of this disenfranchised group. She is the ill-advised and overconfident spokesperson for millions of Americans who, up until now felt that they had no voice in a world that was changing much too quickly for them. But it’s not healthy for me to think too much about Sarah Palin. To me the most culpable are not those caught up in the theories, or genuinely scared by a growing government, but those who, being in a position of power, choose to manipulate this; willing to deepen division rather than work towards the good of the nation. I hope for the sake of my friends down south that they are able to experience some economic prosperity (which often serves to relieve tensions), some honesty from their politicians on both sides, and a rediscovery of that great Kindergarten teaching- co-operation. That, and maybe Bin Laden. Nothing unifies like destroying an enemy! Okay, maybe that’s pushing it, but the first three would be nice. The consequences will be steep if unity doesn’t happen; not for one side or the other, but for both.

Rapid Exit Graduation

I was asked to share about a little graduation ceremony we had for the people in our program. Here it is:

For the past two months Hope Mission staff have been gathering for weekly Wednesday lunches. Each week a different department has led the event, with each adding their own particular flavour. From Todd & Todd singing U2 to Marybelle and the gang taking us to Hawaii, each week has brought surprises for the staff who have taken time out from their hectic schedules to spend an hour with their fellow employees.

A couple of weeks ago the staff lunch included an unusual twist, as it became a graduation ceremony for the first group of people to have completed the Rapid Exit Program. The Rapid Exit Program is Hope Mission’s Housing First Program, which means that the objective is to house people quickly and immediately wrap the necessary supports around the person to keep them housed. It is a year-long program, and the goal is that by the end of the year the individual is at a place of self- sufficiency and positive integration into their community.

The program has been in existence for just over a year and that is why we are now seeing our first group of graduates from the program. Five such people were in attendance on Wednesday and received a certificate and handshake as a small token of congratulation for their hard work and successful completion of the year-long program. Some of them have maintained the same housing since day one of the program, while others have occupied two or three places, for various reasons. Each journey is different, and for some the process of being evicted served to become an integral part of their progress; a teachable moment in which, with the team’s help, they were able to identify causes and break the cycle that has for so many years led them back to the streets.

So what the staff were able to see at this graduation was not a collection of perfectly adjusted, “fixed” individuals, but rather a group of growing, learning, often stumbling, but now overcoming survivors. The difference is not that they now have no problems, but that they now have the tools, confidence, and encouragement to overcome problems when they do occur. These five have come to a new and quite surprising place in their lives. For most of the group the role of “inspiration” is a new one, but they are serving as an inspiration to the staff of Hope Mission, many of whom toil for days, weeks, or months without visible fruits for their labor. Occasions like this are special because they offer a visible representation of the investment that the many different staff have put in.

Our five graduates: Larry, Dean, Louise, Larry, and Ron. All have survived much and overcome much, and each one expressed thankfulness at being honored by our staff. It is my suspicion however, that it was the staff who were honored by the presence and witness of these resilient and deeply joyful survivors.

Into the Woods, into the unknown

 

If, in the darkness, you see something in the distance stir,

Don’t shine a light, don’t run away, Don’t

squint your eyes.

 

Allow.

Allow the stirring to form, the creature to move

Allow the unknown inhabitant

To displace the darkness as it pleases

To reveal itself, or not, as it sees fit.

 

It will show you,

The mysteries of the universe or,

Nothing at all.

But it will act of its own accord, and you,

You will watch, will wait, with bated breath.

(though your breath here is better un-bated)

 

It will unveil itself quickly, or

Make you wait, until

Suspense crescendos or,

Boredom drives out intention

 

But it will not be coerced.

Engage it and you will make it

Something other than it is.

Maybe you will catch a glimpse,

Maybe you will define a piece,

But you will never then comprehend it

In its natural form.

In the true Reality of its existence.

 

It has something to reveal to you

Far beyond identifiable details,

Dissectible entrails.

Something,

Beyond you and beyond itself.

 

You must allow it to come to you.

Or not.

A Letter to Myself

Six months ago I was in Africa. While there, our team was given the assignment of writing a letter to ourselves six months from now. I received the letter in the mail yesterday, and thought I would share it here. It’s kind of fun to get a letter from yourself and to hear you talk to yourself affectionately (that doesn’t always happen, does it?) It’s good exercise. For those wondering, Paula was pregnant when I wrote this, but we didn’t know it yet.

Dear Ryan,

    You are an amazing creature.

    Remember today to tread lightly and have sympathy for your fellow creature. Show grace, compassion, and forgiveness as often as the opportunities afford themselves.

    Work hard. But work with a lightness and a joy so that others can be lifted and carried along by it rather than being dragged down when they come by you.

    Keep pursuing your faith. Be diligent in cultivating and nurturing your spiritual life. Take the time you need, but don’t become bitter when it doesn’t happen. Keep learning too Ryan. This is how you are put together to grow. But remember that if you’ve arrived at all the answers you’ve probably arrived at a dead end.

    Be gentle with your incredible wife. Don’t ever sell yourself out just to make peace, but don’t become too obsessed with your own “needs”, or ever take her for granted.

    Let go of your need to control things, namely your image. There’s a lot packed into this one little word, but you know what I mean.

    Remember the many different ‘callings’ you have received from God. Don’t let your uncertainty transform into immobility. God wants you to go where you’re going for some reason.

    Remember different times in your life. Think about what was important and why it is or isn’t now. Spend time with nature and let it bring back memories.

    Let other people laugh at you in a good way, and if they laugh at you in a bad way, know that this does not decrease your value. They are not the ones holding the scales.

    Write. Do it regularly. Set a time for it, even if it hurts sometimes.

    Get enough sleep, but don’t value sleep above people. Don’t value anything above people. Don’t be afraid to love them, but don’t be too devastated by any fallout from that. After all, we are all just renting space here for a time before moving on.

    Send my love to your family. Don’t ever devalue them either. They’ll be gone before you know it.

    If you are going to be having a child any time in the near future the only advice I give you is: Go for it! Dive entirely in and absolutely immerse yourself in love for this completely undeserved gift to you and Paula. If it’s not in the near future for you and Paula then don’t worry too much about these words.

    Take care of yourself. Ryan in a healthy place can be a great thing for people to be around.

    Hang on, because winter will end. Think of new and creative ways to make this season worth living in.

    Let your true self have room to move and let it cause trouble for you every once in a while. Don’t worry about how to find your true self. When you forget or lose yourself that’s usually when it steps forward.

 

    Take care.

Sincerely,

Ryan McCormick

Carpe Diem

In a comment Joseph shared on one of my recent posts he said something about sharing how you get through each day. I thought about that: How DO I get through each day? The fact is that it has changed, and the truth is that my reasons for living have changed. I used to live my days with an orientation to trying to fulfill almost infinite obligations as a response to tenets I held about who God is, what God has done for me, and what God wants from me. This last one was the impetus for a lot of my action.

Not all of it has changed, but quite a bit; enough to drastically affect how I engage each day, what my motivations are, what my goals are, and what sustains me. I might go into more details about those things at another time, but I want to keep this somewhat short, and I wanted to focus on thinking about that first question. So, what is it? What gets me through? Well first of all I’ll say a bit about what my day consists of. I work for a not-for-profit organization that does most of the emergency shelter accomodation in Edmonton. I run a program called Rapid Exit, which is a “Housing First”" program, meaning that we assist homeless individuals by housing them in their own homes, helping them to get set up, and wrapping support around them in an attempt to help them deal with and overcome the issues that have prevented them from sustaining housing in the past. We have been doing this for just over a year and are still growing and learning each day. I oversee the program, as well as another related program called the Ministry Van, which does a few things: it assists EMS by taking intoxicated people to shelters, does street (and bush-camp) ministry, and does home visits with the clients we have housed through our program. I still have a small caseload of people that I’m working directly with, and I have always before me the daunting and often mystifying task of leading our department into the future; providing vision and leadership to bring us where we need to be as a whole in the service we provide to our clients and community. In addition to my job, I’m also currently preparing for the birth of our first child, with my wife going in her sixth month and sporting a cute little belly. This prospect of life-altering change brings another dimension to my thinking of what gets one through the day and the larger question which encloses that one: WHY get through each day? That is; what are we living for?

Okay, so here’s where I would give my succinct, conclusive answer. Unfortunately, at this point I don’t have one. My reality at this moment is that my reasons are often piecemeal and can change from one day to the next. I am continually reworking and refiguring what it is I’m living for, and so I’m often finding myself with different motivations and goals for getting through each day. Some of these are as follows:

-a sense of adventure and zeal for life experiences

-a vague sense of duty: as to a King I have only a hazy recollection of, and yet have an intuitive awareness of both his demands and punishments for disobedience (and yes, the biblical allusion is duly noted)

-a passion to be a witness to this one dark corner of the world and make some difference inside of it

-obligation and responsibility to the clients, co-workers and organization I am working with

-the longing for peace within myself

-the need to please and satisfy superiors

-investment: the belief that putting in my time should result in a payoff of money, experience and free time in the future

-a sense of something more: of there being some greater reality and that my actions at work, at their best, are a participation in it.

These are my reasons when I’ve gone for a while without stepping back and thinking about the reasons. The exercise is kind of like counting the cockroaches that one sees when catching them off guard by shining a flashlight in a dark room, before they scurry away into darkness. I’m sure there are some that I’ve missed. But doing this helps me to re-evaluate; to take joy in my good motivations and rethink some of the bad motivations I’ve let slip in. Also, to think about some notable absences. I think that even those of us who are currently acting without a sense of clear, external precepts to follow should take the time to stop and re-evaluate what we are doing in life and why. Asking yourself “How did I get here?” and, “What the hell am I doing?” can be funny and revealing questions to ask yourself.

Thinking about how I get through each day has shown me that I’ve really just been surviving each day, and I want to be thriving. I want to lead each day, not be dragged along by it. Lately I’ve felt like the guy in those old Westerns that gets pulled along by a rope tied to horses that are going just a bit too fast for him to get his feet beneath him. And then I arrive at the end of the Day and it unties me, kicks me in the ass, and says “See ya tomorrow”. What I’m saying is, maybe I need to wake up early tomorrow morning, sneak up on the Day when it’s still dark and give IT a good kick in the ass. Or maybe I should just seize it, as they say. Either way, I want to own it. “Let’s get moving!” I’ll say, “We’ve got work to do”.

When are iPods good?

iPods are good when Sufjan Stevens and his sad-but-merry marching band follow me home from the bustop, their horns and harmonies bouncing off the frost covered trees. iPods are good when Bon Iver’s falsetto turns the corner with me down the ally behind Whyte Ave. asking, “Who will fall far behind?”, his sad “woo hoo” echoing in the space around me. iPods are good when Bono tells me that he has a Brother when he’s a brother in need, and the Edge’s haunting progression lays itself beneath my feet as I walk, supporting my steps along with the snow just freshly fallen.

That is when iPods are good.

On the Job

                I’ve been thinking about the biblical book of Job lately, as I’m reading a book called “How to Read the Bible” (I just finished reading another book called “How to Believe in God”, so you’d think after this I’d pretty much have it covered- except I don’t know if I would recommend either of them).  It seems to me that much of the story is at odds with the usual interpretation given to it. The overwhelming theme as I can see it is that God often does things that are inexplicable to us and that there is much more going on in this universe than we have the ability to see from our very limited perspective; so how we respond is very important. The book is more of a dialogue and debate on the nature of suffering than a treatise on how God rewards a faithful life.

                The other main point that I picked up from it is that people who try to comfort those who are suffering often end up giving pretty terrible advice. When we who are outside of the situation come at those who are suffering with any sort of conclusive answer or reasoning it usually comes off as hollow, trite, and is often straight-out wrong. The irony of the book of Job is that at the end God blasts Job’s stupid friends for misrepresenting Him by telling Job that it’s because of his sin that God punished him (which was a pretty common idea of the nature of suffering), and then the moral that we often take from the story is that God rewards those who are righteous and faithful (which is simply the inverse of the same theology). I’m not saying that this doesn’t ever happen; it obviously happened in this specific story, but arching over all that is what I think is a bigger theme: that God is grand, mysterious, and largely unknowable. We grasp only certain small fragments of this Reality that is far more vast than any of the theologies we try to build around it.

                I love the line from Job 7:20 where Job says to God, “Why have you made me your target?” I think that almost every one of us, if we are honest, has felt this. We don’t see everything and sometimes, from our vantage point, it looks exactly like God has taken specific notice of us- only to harm us. The beauty of this book is that the person who is feeling this and is enduring the trials becomes greater through it, and those who watch from life’s sidelines and only know how to hand down the answers that they’ve had handed down to them are shown to have been causing some of the most harm. I’m not saying that we should never dispense advice, or that the things handed down to us are all wrong, but we need to resist the temptation to try to know someone else’s reality and experience, and use our abstract education to help them walk through an experience that we’ve never walked through ourselves.

                I like Job a lot. It’s a brilliant story. And it’s the fact that even within itself it gives several different answers and ideas about some of the big questions of life that makes it mean so much. The book is more about honest searching and struggle than simple and broad- sweeping answers. This seems to be similar to the other “wisdom” book in the bible (i.e. Proverbs & Ecclesiastes), in that they give diverse, sometimes opposing viewpoints within the same book. It shows the big questions of life to be nuanced and complex which is something I think we should take heed of. Sometimes just getting to the questions is more important than getting to the answers.