Life Is Good
With humour and grace, Calvin Neufeld shares with us his experience living with a label – female to male post-operative transsexual. While we tend (or are raised) to think of gender, identity and sexuality in simple categories, Calvin quickly surveys many ways in which our bodies (and minds) are anything but simple. He challenges us to imagine what it would be like to wake up every day inside a body that is at odds with our understanding of who we are. The resulting dysphoria, fear of coming out, feelings of isolation – all of these experiences contribute to the significant prevalence of suicidality among the transgendered. Yet this does not have to be the case. Calvin concludes by widening the circle beyond concerns of gender, identity and sexuality. Our embrace of diversity ends up springing from the one category that is simple: life. On the affirmation that life is good, we can ground a call to reach across difference.
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The Evolution of Love
This week we mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. It also happens to be our annual Pajama Day for all the kids in Sunday Club, which explains why Gretta delivers her meditation in more comfortable attire than usual.
One of the things we acknowledge is the courage which Darwin must have possessed to present an account of life that undercut the prevailing world view of his day. Even today, resistance to his descriptions of evolutionary biology continue to be misunderstood and misrepresented. Perhaps the most dangerous of these misunderstandings is the notion of social Darwinism, which analogizes to an evolutionary model in order to justify social, economic and political aggression.
But what about love? Is it possible to think about love in evolutionary terms? Is the capacity to care a development that makes us a more successful species? Can we take the impulse to care for those closest to us and extend it in widening circles to embrace the whole world? Gretta challenges us to extend our care beyond our comfortable limits.
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Reverence For Life
Gretta Vosper opens with Albert Schweitzer’s ethic grounded in the notion of “Reverence for Life”. Today, however, we live in a disenchanted world, one which has reduced most living things to marketable commodities. But Gretta grafts onto Schweitzer’s “naïve” thinking the suggestion of Catholic theologian, David Tracy, who believes we have moved beyond the disenchantment of the natural world. We have become disenchanted with disenchantment.
How do we facilitate this new approach to the natural world so that we can recover a reverence for life that we can use to heal our planet? Gretta revisits her idea of the Wileau tool which can be used to look at life simultaneously from micro and macro perspectives.
Gretta concludes by reading a story by Anne Spurgeon called Parable of the Naked Lady. It speaks to healing and wholeness and reverence for life.
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Response to UCC Ad Campaign
After the Freethought Association of Canada announced a Canadian version of the atheist bus ad campaign, the United Church of Canada announced a rebuttal campaign: “There’s probably a God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” In a pastoral letter distributed to all United Church of Canada clergy, moderator David Giuliano explains why the UCC has entered into this dialogue. In the course of his letter, he states: “Clearly, as Christians, we most definitely believe there is a God.” Gretta Vosper has prepared a press release as a response to the UCC ad campaign, questioning the value of such a dialogue when more pressing matters deserve our attention, and questioning the value of an ethic as trivial as “stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
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Be sure to view today’s meditation on the religion of Superbowl.