1/5/2010
A message of Peace for the New Year:
Sing of Peace, Holy Peace
(Proverbs 3:13-17; 2 Corinthians 5:17)
Sing of peace, holy peace,
Visions of violence ceased;
As we work for peace on earth,
New creation comes to birth;
Christ-Sophia is born;
Christ-Sophia is born.
Sing of peace, holy peace;
Sing of all gifts released;
Through our justice work each day,
Wisdom comes to show the way;
Christ-Sophia is born;
Christ-Sophia is born.
Sing of peace, holy peace,
Hope and joy to increase;
Through our works of love each day,
Holy Wisdom comes to stay;
Christ-Sophia is born;
Christ-Sophia is born.
Words © 2009 Jann Aldredge Clanton; melody is "Silent Night"
Recently I read "The Orange Trees of Baghdad: In Search of My Lost
Family" by Leilah Nadir. Naomi Klein says "This is a book about what
loss really means - the theft of history and of homeland." I could
not be indifferent as I followed the effects of the wars on the daily
lives of generations of "real" Iraqis in Baghdad and in exile. Then
just before Christmas I received an email Danny Burridge's Christmas
letter, some great photos, a report on the work in El Salvador and a
moving report on the situation in Honduras, seen first hand with a
delegation. Danny is willing to send you all of this
( dannyb2012@gmail.com).
Earlier in 2009, I must have had similar feelings because I had found
my copy of Taking Sides (Albert Nolan OP) and placed it on my prayer
table. So I picked it up again. Here are two paragraphs:
"This is the sense in which we must be on the side of the poor if we
want to be on God's side. We must take an option for the poor, for
the sake of both the poor and the rich as individual people. In fact,
within this situation of structural conflict the only way to love
everyone is to side with the poor and the oppressed. Anything else is
simply a way of siding with oppression and injustice....
"In countries marked with grave injustice, joining the conflict, not
judging it from a distance, is the only effective way of bringing
about the peace that God wants. To take an example closer to home: in
countries possessing nuclear weapons, there may be no short cut
around conflict with governments if the world is to progress towards
disarmament. It is not possible to "balance" or "reconcile" the needs
of the forty million people who die from starvation each year in the
Third World [no doubt much higher today when a billion persons lack
food] with the needs of manufacturers and military strategists or
the demands of a few wealthy nations to be able to destroy any
potential attacher many times over. Decisions have to be made; one
has to 'take sides'.
Cecily
1/12/2010
"And now I make all things new." Revelation
Wednesday morning the phone rang early. That's so rare that it took
me back a decade. My first thought was "Oh, no! Substitute teaching!"
The call was from Toronto, 2 time zones earlier. My friend Sister
Anne Lemire wanted to let me know there was a death notice for
Michael Kazeil. I reached over for the Edmonton Journal. Yes, the
notice was there also. My first reaction was relief. It is so hard
when you don't know where they are, whether they are still alive. My
mother lived with those feelings until her death. Peter John, whom
she had raised and loved from age 1, had taken to the road, touring,
most often in the US, with a musical group. He phoned regularly from
each new place but one day he stopped. For several years, she paid
for masses and novenas. Then one day, there was an incomplete
communication. Even though she hadn't talked with him, she knew he
was alive. That was all. In the last year of her life she prepared a
photo album for him just as she did for the seven of us. But we
weren't able to give it to him when mom died.
In 2007, the graduating class of 1987 of Caritas, the small
alternative high school where Anne and I taught, held a 20-year
reunion. They invited everyone who had attended from 1982 to 1991.
Michael was from the class of 87 and his brother Joey of the class of
86. That's when we heard from Michael's parents, Eileen and Bill,
that Michael was having problems, that they had found him before but
that now they didn't know where he was. They were very, very sad. It
was even sadder when a little over a year later, Bill passed away
suddenly.
Michael was 40. Strange, his classmates after attending the funeral
spoke of how they felt at turning 40. The eulogist was a friend,
someone I didn't know. He talked about Michael's achievements - the
courses he took, the jobs he held. He talked about his love of life,
of travel and adventures, of cooking and being with friends, of his
generosity, of being there when there was a need. I remembered the
Halloween dance at school. I had a full-head mask of Pierre Trudeau -
they didn't like Trudeau out west, so I thought when I saw this mask
- great disguise. With a man's jacket, a red flower in the lapel, a
red tie, and careful to leave the car when no one else was in the
parking lot, I was a mystery to all in the gym when the dancing
started. I couldn't speak but gave the finger as Trudeau had done in
Calgary, to anyone who approached. Some of the grade 10 boys came
around thinking it was one of their classmates. It looked as if they
would rough me up but Michael, towering over them, came and stood by
me until I could leave discreetly and remove that mask before I
asphyxiated. That's the way he was.
The celebrant also mentioned that Michael was the youngest ever to
be on the parish pastoral committee, that he was a lector, a choir
member, could play the organ and that at age 17 he had started the
parish Christmas wish tree. This Christmas, 350 gifts were given.
Michael also served at the Boyle Street Co-op, a drop in center, and
he tutored in computer.
When I returned home from the funeral, I checked the year book.
Michael's memories: Europe 85 (a wonderful trip to France), Ministik
(the farm where grade 11 had 3 days of ecology); Expo 86 (in
Vancouver - we went by train), friends. His quote says it all: We
have the most to offer and are thus most attractive when we are
comfortable with our uniqueness. I know that he also loved the
musicals - there's a little drawing in the death notice in the
Edmonton Journal - I've looked at it closely - it looks like the
delivery carriage of The Music Man, the 87 musical. I also remember
fondly the two Ecology Family Camping trips the Kazeils participated in.
I remember a few months ago at an AGM, one of the guest speakers was
a member of parliament, a really honest, caring politician with a
strong sense of social justice. He mentioned his family of five
children. Their high academic achievements - I noticed that one was
left out. Only towards the end of his talk, he mentioned that he
always looks at street people, makes eye contact. The son not
mentioned had his struggles, his demons. I don't know what Michael's
demons were but they were real and he was alone and others were also
there for him. He died in a Toronto ICU with two of his aunts with
him. Perhaps he sensed their presence and that of all his friends.
I was touched this morning at the communion song:
Let us share the words which give freedom
Let us share the bread of hope
Let us share the salt and the light
And our lives will have the taste of joy!
1/19/2010
In Celtic spirituality there is a concept known as a 'thin place.'
This is a time, place or even in which, for a brief moment, our
humanity is embraced by the mystery of the divine and we are filled
with the wonder of God. It can happen at the most unlikely time or in
the very ordinary events of life.
I spent the last weekend with Edwina, with a large group on Thursday
evening and then a smaller group of 16 women Friday evening to Sunday
afternoon, in Victoria, Vancouver Island, at the Queenswood Retreat
Centre. It was a wonderful weekend but with the disaster in Haiti,
with the violence in the Middle East, Pakistan and Afghanistan, with
the material I am reading to prepare for a presentation on nuclear
power at International Week at the University of Alberta, "thin
places" are very briet. So I went to Edwina's A Mystical Heart:
God escaped from
all my little boxes and labels.
The more I tried to claim God,
the more God slipped away.
But if I dare
to rise from my knees
and leap in joy
at the song of the bird,
and if I dare
to stand in awe
at the mounting of the moon
in a thick-starred sky,
and if I dare to be amazed
at the constant seeding of the earth -
then, oh, see! oh, see!
I glimpse my God -
ever free, ever dancing,
ever calling out my name.
I invite you this week to stand before the moon or listen to a bird!
I also invite you to go to Edwina's website and to order her latest
book:
In God's Womb: A spiritual Memoir.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a doctor? What was his specialty?
Hearts and Minds.
Cecily
1/26/2010
For the ancients, enthusiasm meant trance, or ecstasy- a connection
with God. Enthusiasm is agape directed at a particular idea or a
specific thing. We have all experienced it. When we love and believe
from the bottom of our hearts, we feel ourselves to be stronger than
anyone in the world, and we feel a serenity that is based on the
certainty that nothing can shake our faith. This unusual strength
allows us always to make the right decision at the right time, and
when we achieve our goal, we are amazed at our own capabilities.
Because when we are involved in the good fight, nothing else is
important; enthusiasm carries us toward our goal.
Paulo Coelho. (2000).The Pilgrimage. P.121.
Since Christmas, I have been totally involved in writing the
presentation I will give on Feb. 3 at International Week at the
University of Alberta. It's entitled Nuclear Power: Not Green, Not
Carbon-Free, Not Sustainable. To prepare I reread five books and a
box full of articles, and made notes to use in the presentation. On
January 14, I left all that behind to attend a lecture and a retreat
by Edwina in Victoria on Vancouver Island. During the weekend, the
story of the "Shock and Awe" invasion of Iraq (below) came back to
haunt me. Even when I returned home and resumed my research, I
couldn't get it out of my mind and also I couldn't find it. I
seriously thought I had dreamt it. But then I found it in my notes.
It comes from Canada's Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the
Global Nuclear System by Jim Harding. This wonderful book is
frustrating to use since it uses a number of previously published
articles and lacks chronology and an index. Now that I have found
it, I want to tell you about depleted uranium.
The basis for the separation of U238 and U235 atoms in the process of
enriching uranium for use in a nuclear power reactor, is their very
slight difference in mass. One method uses gaseous diffusion; the
other, ultracentrifuge. Both are highly energetic and expose workers
to whole-body gamma radiation and other forms of radiation and toxic
exposure. One ton of enriched uranium leaves behind seven tons of
depleted uranium (DU). The discarded or depleted uranium still has
all the radioactive U238. At Paducah, Kentucky, some 38,000 cylinders
of DU await disposal. DU has contaminated ground water, forcing the
government to provide alternative drinking water for the local
residents. DU is 1.7 times denser than lead, making it the ideal
antitank weapon. At high speed it cuts through a tank like a hot
knife through butter. It is pyrophoric – it bursts into flames upon
impact and when it burns, up to 80% of it disintegrates into finely
powdered aerosol, which is distributed to the four winds. In the 1991
Gulf War invasion, the Pentagon used 360 tons of depleted uranium.
The two Gulf wars have been nuclear wars because they have scattered
nuclear material across the land. The people – particularly children
– are condemned to die of malignancy and congenital disease. U238 has
a half-life of 4.5 billion years. It enters the body via inhalation
into lungs or via ingestion into GI tract. It can cause renal failure
and kidney cancer. It is excreted in the semen, where it mutates
genes in the sperm. It is a calcium analog and can cause bone cancer
as well as leukemia. Children are ten to twenty times more
susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than adults. In
the decade after DU was first used, the rate of childhood cancer and
gross congenital abnormalities each increased sevenfold in areas
where the ordinances were used. The land is contaminated essentially
for eternity. The scale of use of DU weapons and the geographic range
of radioactive pollution are massive. Fifteen hundred bombs were
dropped on Baghdad during the first twenty-four hours of the “Shock
and Awe” invasion of Iraq in March 2003. An estimated 300,000 rounds
of weapons containing DU were fired from planes during this assault.
Seven to nine days later, the measurements of uranium aerosols in the
air at Aldermaston, England, increased four-fold, twice exceeding the
threshold that is required to inform the UK Environmental Agency.
These were the highest levels of uranium particles ever measured in
Britain. Official interpretation was local contamination from the
Aldermaston weapons plant. If this were true there would have been
fission products like plutonium in the filters, and there were none.
Wind currents and airflow during that time were actually from Iraq
towards Britain, 2,400 miles away. It's calculated that each person
in the "shock and awe" area in Iraq inhaled some 23 million uranium
particles.
I did not dream this nightmare.
Cecily
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