Author: david cl driedger

Visions of spring III

So Vision of spring I was a sort of depressing joke.  Signs of spring was a bit of a reminder and wake-up.  Visions of spring III is shaping up to be a lousy series.  It started when I pulled in to my back lane to find an SUV that I’m pretty sure was in better shape the day before.

damn

I did not notice the pink Hanna Montana skateboard in the foreground as I nervously snapped this.  ‘Fuck IP’ on the side is in reference to Indian Posse, one of the most prominent street gangs in Winnipeg.  Just a few houses down from this scene I saw a young girl (around 7 maybe) standing alone.  I got out in front of my garage and asked where her mom was (stupid question?).  She pointed in one direction when I talked about ‘home’ and the opposite direction when she talked about where she should be going.  I tried to tell her I would walk with her to get wherever she should be but I could never get any definite direction out of her.  I was going to invite her in but I did not know if that was a good idea (implicating myself in . . . what?).  I ended up calling the police non-emergency line (probably a bad choice . . . I don’t know) and then when I went back out she was gone.  The reality is that if she would have been wondering around on street or sidewalk I probably would not have thought anything of it.  The scene unnerved me as it came a day after a conversation I had regarding the statistics on women being sexually assaulted as children.

So, fine, some pretty shitty scenes.  Then I needed to go pick up my son and as I drive down to other end of the back I alley I come across this,

burn

Yes that’s right . . . its a house . . . on fire.

burn2

So on my way back I thought I would tour by and get a closer look.  The police however had the back lane closed off so as I turned down another street I got a glimpse of two teens getting the shakedown.

i wasn't me

I don’t know.  I don’t have much to add at this point.  All this comes as I have been thinking of the drastically different lives people would live if one or maybe two crucial resources were removed (financial security, family stability, mental and physical health, etc.).  This neighbourhood is a gathering (confining, corralling, funneling, ?) of such individuals.

Lazarus in two parts: Part II – Was it Lazarus slumped in the closet?

I did not mention in Part that I have been to Lazarus’ cave.  It is actually quite close to where I live now.  Lazarus’ cave is an apartment one floor directly below where I used to live on Wellington Ave.  Chantal and I were caretakers for that apartment block.  I did not know Lazarus well having only passed him on the stairs a few times.  But I came to realize that something was happening in his life, that he was falling ill.  Things were not good and people were coming by and asking about him out of concern.  One day myself and the superintendent for the apartments (our block was part of a larger church housing project) stopped to talk with him.  After our meeting we became concerned about what he might do to himself.  The superintendent went back and talked with him and then she left.  About four days later around midnight I received a knock on my door asking if I had keys to Lazarus’ apartment.  It was the police.  I did not have keys so I called the superintendent and she came.  We gathered in front of Lazarus’ cave.  The apartment building was small and so there was no real hallway only a square space where four apartment doors were located on each floor.  Gathered in that space was Chantal and I and the superintendent, two police officers, Lazarus’ brother-in-law and Lazarus’ daughter.  At this point my memory becomes hazy in detail but almost infinitely pronounced in impression.  As the door was opened I remember only two things and they filled the physical space and they filled all of my own humanity.  I remember the smell.  And I remember the scream of Lazarus’ daughter as she collapsed on the ground.  Both the smell and the scream were utterly and profoundly devastating.

If this was Lazarus’ cave, as I believe it was, then where was Jesus?  Was it Lazarus’ daughter who screamed in pure agony over the loss of her father?  Was it Lazarus’ brother-in-law who went into the stench of death to identify Lazarus?  Was it Lazarus himself slumped in the closet who may have whispered the words, my God, my God why have you forsaken me, before the towel tightened around his neck?  Was I Jesus in the way I lived almost indifferently to Lazarus in those four days knowing later that perhaps I could have done something differently?  Or was Jesus simply not there?  I don’t know.  All of the answers are perhaps true and terrible in their own way.  What I know is that this experience, especially Lazarus’ daughter, helped me to understand what that polite and passive phrase ‘deeply moved’ means when it comes to Jesus’ experience.  What I also know is that there was no voice calling Lazarus out of his tomb.

Lazarus in two parts: Part I – Jesus you don’t need to do this

Lent began with temptation in the wilderness.  The temptation was to resolve the tension of good and evil; the tension to gain control over the circumstances of suffering without entering into the lives of those who suffer.  Jesus was tempted to bypass the work of being truly human and, instead, move directly into the position of Pharoah or Ceasar, that is, a human who thinks he is god as opposed to God who lives fully human.  It is the temptation to be a false god or an idol that Jesus rejects at the beginning of Lent.  This means that Jesus cannot move into an earthly enthronement, Jesus is now set on a course in which the love of neighbour and love of God are truly and fully integrated.

Continue reading “Lazarus in two parts: Part I – Jesus you don’t need to do this” →

It will come to me

Yesterday I visited a woman with severe dementia.  Typically people with Alzheimer’s or dementia are quite enjoyable to visit.  Enjoyable in the sense that there is no awkardness or certainly no need for it.  No pressure for small-talk, no need to fill in an silences, etc.  Conversations just sort of ramble for the part.  Of course there is always some sadness in these encounters.  I mean I can’t help but have some sympathy for a sweet old lady who kept trying to remember something.  In one instance she finally said, without any real frustration, if its important it will come to me.  I’m still trying to process that one.

Signs of spring . . .

. . . . in my neighbourhood.

slobz die here

(fortunately there was no blood under the arrow) This is the first tag on our garage door (showed up yesterday).  We have always lived in apartments and things somehow feel different now.

I forgot what it was like to go through winter and enter spring in a ‘bad’ Canadian neighbourhood (we moved back to Winnipeg after a three year stint in ‘rural’ Ontario).  Winter puts general traffic on ice.  There was a murder and one incident of having cop cars line the streets (false alarm I heard).  But the general movement is stilled and quiet.  No random screams or scuffles in the back alley (generally).  With the first few comfortable days of spring here (yes we are in April) I noticed stir.  Part of it is wonderful.  Kids tearing around on bikes.  Youth walking around able to look badass again without having to wear layers of clothing (though sky-masks can look really badass in winter).  But I also remember now that a certain level of vulnerability seeps out in the neighbourhood.  The vulnerability was of course always there but it was more concentrated around domestic incidents and targeted internal gang violence.  Now I can expect to encounter more threatening language and can expect to hear unpleasant things out on the street and hear more activity in the alley.

My wife was troubled by our recent tag.  Prior to this I had been thinking about intentionally tagging dumpsters with images and text that would someone get people thinking about power structures beyond the typical engagement I see happening in these neighbourhoods.  Hopefully I will post some further thoughts on that.

I do not dance

I just finished Philosophical Fragments (PF).  I wanted to get a few observations down while they are fresh in my mind.

First, while I get Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship this is the first one where it makes real sense to me.  Either/Or is also blatantly clear but it strikes me as too much of an abstract experiment.   PF still comes as an experiment.  The experiment being whether it is possible to go beyond Socrates and what that might look like in philosophical discourse.  However, Kierkegaard comes off as more invested in this venture, more curious about how this will actually play out.

Second, it is important to note that these are fragments.  In his original manuscripts they were actually called ‘pamphlets’ which he also refers to them as within the book.  The significance of this is brought fully to bear in the final section.  Here he talks about the possibility of a ‘second pamphlet’.  He writes,

If I ever do write a second section – because a pamphlet writer such as I am has no seriousness, as you presumably will hear about me – why, then, should I now in conclusion pretend to seriousness in order to please people by making a rather big promise?  In other words, to write a pamphlet is frivolity – but to promise the system, that is seriousness and has made many a man a supremely serious man both in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. (109)

The ‘system’ of course is Hegelianism.  What I find intriguing about this passage is  the notion that perhaps the more ‘serious’, thoroughgoing, complete even social and political approach can actually end up being the most individualistic and self-serving.  This is partially a critique of academia as well as what could now be termed an ideological centralizing of power by ‘men who talk about important stuff’ as I have heard it put.  This final section really bookends well the intro to PF, which did not make a great deal of sense to me originally.  The preface begins,

What is offered here is only a pamphlet, by one’s own hand, on one’s own behalf, at one’s own expense, without any claim to being a part of the scientific-scholarly endeavor in which one acquires legitimacy. (5).

Kierkegaard goes on in the Preface to consider what it might mean to have social (world-historical as he puts it) significance.  No one would consider a pamphlet to have such significance.  So what is Kierkegaard’s opinion on the matter?

Do not ask me about that.  Next to the question of whether or not I have an opinion, nothing can be of less interest to someone else than what my opinion is.  To have an opinion is to me both too much and too little; it presupposes a security and well-being in existence akin to having a wife and children in this mortal life, something not granted to a person who has to be up and about night and day and yet has no fixed income. (7)

There is a certain tone of liberation thought in the Preface and conclusion to PF (which hardly alludes to the book’s actual content in many ways!).  The critique is of those wielding socially constructed and maintained forms of power who believe that they can function as the benefactors of truth.  The framing of this book, which has just dawned on me, is making me rethink how I interpreted the bulk of the work.  Hopefully I can post a reading of PF that reflects its preface and conclusion.  Here are the final words of the preface.  I thought they were pretty.

I can stake my own life, I can in all earnestness trifle with my own life – not with another’s.  I am capable of this, the only thing I am able to do for thought, I who have no learning to offer it, ‘scarcely enough for the one-drachma course, to say nothing of the big fifty-drachma course’ (Cratylus).  All I have is my life, which I promptly stake every time a difficulty appears.  Then it is easy to dance, for the thought of death is a good dancing partner, my dancing partner.  Every human being is too heavy for me, and there I plead per deos obsecro [I swear by the gods]: Let no one invite me, for I do not dance. (9).

Job and the thunderstorm in Kierkegaard’s Repetition

Well I just caught up with my (rough) Kierkegaard reading schedule having finished Fear and Trembling and Repetition.  Both were re-reads and I found Repetition a much more illuminating re-read.  I think Fear and Trembling has had so much press that despite how arresting it can be it may need another form in order to achieve ‘repetition’ which leads me to Repetition.

Continue reading “Job and the thunderstorm in Kierkegaard’s Repetition” →

Is this heaven? No . . . its the 44.

A few weeks ago in the first Sunday of Lent I challenged our congregation to fast from the fruits of privilege.  One minor act on my part has been to ride the bus as often as possible.  As a country-boy the bus has always been a source of fascination for me and this spiritual exercise paid dividends this last week as my experience ended comprising about half the sermon.

Continue reading “Is this heaven? No . . . its the 44.” →