Honouring our Moms on Mother's Day-Hird

Honouring our Moms on Mother’s Day

by Rev. Ed Hird+

For nineteen Mother’s Days, I have been privileged to write articles in the Deep Cove Crier.

In my first May 1989 DCC issue, I commented that “No computer, no microchip, no hi-tech invention can ever replace that very special person in a child's life. Motherhood is one of the most demanding, time-consuming, diversified roles in our modern culture.” On Mother’s Day 1990, I prayed that “many moms may feel loved by their husbands in a way that they have never before experienced, that the mothers of our children may feel listened to and cared for not only on the 2nd Sunday of May, but all year round.” On Mother’s Day 2,000, I gave thanks for mother-in-laws, especially my own mother-in-law Vera who passed away that summer. On Mother’s Day 2003, I wrote: “Where would we be without our mothers? Mothers keep the world on track. Mothers never stop caring. Mothers never stop giving.”

Those of you who have been reading my Deep Cove Crier articles for the past two decades will know that I am a big Mother’s Day fan. God knew what he was talking about when he built the honouring of Mothers right into the 10 Commandments itself. God said in the 10 Commandments that honouring our mothers (and fathers) would actually affect how long and how well we lived out our lives.

Mothers are mentioned 226 times in the bible. The first mother, Eve, was called the mother of all living. Sarah, the wife of Abraham, was called the mother of nations. Moses’ mother gave her own child away to an Egyptian princess just to spare his life. Samuel’s mother dedicated her son to the Lord at a very young age. King Solomon reminded young people in Proverbs 4 not to forsake the law of their mother. Young Timothy’s leadership was based on the prayers of his faithful mother Eunice and grandmother Lois.

Why does God want us to honour our mothers? God knows that when we honour and love our mothers, everyone wins. God wins, our mothers win and we win. Proverbs 10:1 teaches that when we foolishly do not honour our mothers, we bring grief to them. Many mothers literally die of broken hearts because of the selfishness and waywardness of their adult children. The Good Book teaches that there is a spiritual law of reaping and sowing. As the famous movie “Gone With the Wind” reminds us, the person who brings trouble on his family will only inherit the wind. (Proverbs 11:29). Honouring our mothers is in our own best interests.

It is very easy to focus on our parent’s flaws. Proverbs 15:20 says that the foolish man despises his mother. Have you ever noticed the number of interesting swear-words that involve the use of the term ‘mother’? There is so much anger and hatred in our culture towards the feminine. Proverbs 30:17 symbolically says that those who dishonour their mothers will have their eyes pecked out by the ravens and vultures. To reject motherhood is to go blind to the things that really matter in life. I believe it is time for us to rediscover the ancient wisdom of the Ten Commandments, the very foundation of our Canadian legal and moral system. Honouring our mothers is not a multiple-choice option.

Our culture has a tendency to make fun of women when they are older, calling them disparaging names and treating them as irrelevant. It is no wonder that so many women feel afraid to admit their real age. Proverbs 23:22 says: “Do not despise your mother when she is old.” Blessing our mothers is a wonderful privilege that we should not miss. Many people sadly save all their blessings for the funeral eulogy. My challenge to you is to not wait until your mother is dead and buried. Bless her today before it is too late. Give thanks for her this week, because life is so short. And make a fuss of her this coming Mother’s Day on May 11th. She deserves it and needs it. Happy Mother’s Day.

The Reverend Ed Hird
Rector, St. Simon’s Church North Vancouver, BC
Anglican Coalition in Canada

http://www3.telus.net/st_simons/cr0705.html
-previously published in the Deep Cove Crier

Walk The Labyrinth To Find One’s Spiritual Path - Lawrence

I have just returned home from a weekend retreat at St. John’s Anglican Convent in Toronto (http://www.ssjd.ca/ )—three days of relative silence, prayer (both personal and corporate), along with four sessions led by two of the Sisters of St. John. These sessions introduced us to praying with the labyrinth and creating a mandala as another way of getting in touch with the Divine Mystery, which is God.

I have long been familiar with walking as a means of freeing the mind to go beyond itself in order that the soul may find God. When I was writing my two books of meditations I often found that walking enabled me to hear God’s word more clearly, clarifying the points I was trying to put into words. The kind of walking that I do every day is linear walking—along the driveway and onto the country road, in a shopping mall, or even on the ground floor of my house.

Labyrinth walking is along a circular path rather than a straight path. A labyrinth goes along an ever curving path towards a central space, now appearing to be close to the centre and now seemingly further away. It is like life’s path toward God—now we seem to be close to the Divine and now we appear to be further away from God, but we are ever on the road to the Sacred.

The first time I walked the labyrinth I felt, from time to time, that I was lost. Though we had been assured that we couldn’t get lost while walking the labyrinth path—unlike a maze, the path is unicursal; there is but one way in and one way out—yet it took so long for me to get to the centre and at times there was another person facing me on the same path that I felt uncertain of myself.

In the same way, when we walk along the road of life, we sometimes feel lost or uncertain as to whether we are on the right path or not. Walking the labyrinth reassured me that as long as we are walking through life under the guidance of the Holy Spirit we cannot get lost. Even though we may feel far away from the Divine, as long as we keep in prayer with God we are where we are meant to be in our spiritual life.

On my first labyrinth walk, I tried to keep myself open to God’s presence repeating the words, I open myself to you O Lord. On my second labyrinth walk as I walked slowly to the centre I repeated the words, Step by step I come to you O Lord. At the centre I felt a great peace and blessing come upon me. My walk out of the labyrinth, back out into the world so to speak, was done at a quicker pace and I repeated the words that I was given, I am sent as on a mission; here am I, send me.

In the afternoon session, we were encouraged to put God’s message from our labyrinth experience into art form by creating a mandala. God spoke to us individually and as a group over the course of our weekend retreat. We stand on the threshold of Christ, the door, and go in and out and find fresh pasture; we walk the labyrinth way through life with God, ever going where He leads, maturing in the Holy Spirit.

© Judith Lawrence

Author of Glorious Autumn Days: Meditations for the Wisdom Years; and Grapes From The Vine, Book of Mystical Poetry. Both available at http://www.lulu.com/

Author of Prayer Companion: A Treasury of Personal Meditation, available at Chapters and http://www.pathbooks.com/

Web Site: http://www.judithlawrence.ca/

Colour and Aroma - Laycock

I leaned over my friend’s shoulder as he crouched on the riverbank. Clear water swirled over the dirt and gravel and spilled over the edge of the large pan in his hands. Slowly the larger stones washed away, leaving only fine black sand. He moved the pan gently, then stopped. “There,” he said, holding it up for me to look. “See it?”

I peered at the spot where he pointed. Tiny slivers glinted in the sun. “That’s it?”

My friend nodded. “Enough colour to keep us going.”

Those tiny flecks of gold found on the creek that day resulted in a major excavation of that area. A crew of men and machinery descended and the hunt for more gold was on. Similar scenes have been played out in the gold fields of the Yukon for over a hundred years. A small sliver gleaming in a pan was all it took for men to move mountains, dam rivers and create feats of engineering to equal the Panama Canal. All it took was a tiny bit of “colour.”

In his book, The Only Necessary Thing, Henri Nouwen writes: “The spiritual life is a long and often arduous search for what you have already found...The desire for God’s unconditional love is the fruit of having been touched by that love.”

When you find a sliver of love, you seek more of it. When you find a sliver of truth you tune your ear for more. When you find a sliver of God, your whole being longs for more of Him. That longing in our hearts is not unlike sitting down to a good meal at a good restaurant. The plates put before us steam with delicious aromas. We take the utensils in hand and take the first bite. Then another and another, until the food is consumed. Momentarily satisfied, we begin planning a return trip to the same place. We have tasted and it was good. Our natural instinct is to want more.

God has put his colour all around us – signs that He is here. His aroma surrounds us – it rises from the words of His people and His Word, the Bible. There is only one catch. The miners in the Yukon had to find that first sliver of gold by testing the ground. Sitting in a restaurant surrounded by good smells won’t convince you that the food is delicious. You have to take the first bite.

In Psalm 34:8 David says – “Taste and see that the Lord is good...” He did, and found more love and forgiveness than he had a right to. We will too. We’ve seen the colour – the glories of His creation that surrounds us. All be have to do is dig – look around and see. We’ve smelled the aroma – the wisdom of His word and his people. All we have to do is take a bite – read His word often, surround ourselves with Christian friends and mentors. What we will find is far more precious than gold, far more satisfying than any gourmet meal. It will mean engaging in an adventure far more exciting than any gold rush, far more satisfying than a visit to the most expensive restaurant in the world.

Deadline - Wright

I’m facing a deadline. The manuscript for my devotional book, Down a Country Road, has to be off in the next day or two. By this time in the writing process, I’m so sick of the manuscript I would almost use it to light a bonfire in my back yard. Well, okay that’s a bit of hyperbole.

A book seems to take me forever to write. Years of writing: re-reading, re-writing, revising. Then sending it to a critique group. That itself takes a year and provokes another round, or twenty, of revising.

At last, it’s time to interest a publisher. That means working through the agony of a book proposal: preparing a dynamite query letter, writing outlines and summaries and market analyses, picking sample chapters and duplicating letters of recommendation. Every page must be perfect.

After picking six or ten prospects I launch my book proposal into the blizzard of pitches raining down on hapless publishers.

Then I wait and wait, and wait some more. Should I send a reminder? Should I call by phone or send an e-mail?

Finally, a reply arrives. "Send manuscript." Wow, a bite. I oblige.

More waiting until in early 2007 the treasured words are heard. "We love your book. We’d like to include it in our publishing schedule for the fall of 2008." Oh, that far off? More discussion ensues. The publisher asks for a few changes. A contract is signed. I breathe a sigh and move on to other things.

Ten months later the publisher asks me to reduce all chapters to a given word count. Instead of tearing out what little hair I have left, I set to work again, trimming 1200 word chapters to 960. Now that is tough.

Happily, in the process of this final revision, I recapture some of the passion that led me to write the book in the first place. I remind myself of lessons learned about God and his grace from butterflies and partridges, storms and spring.

Even though I have another long wait ahead until I will actually hold the book in my hands, I’m satisfied. I know I’ll have done the best I could to share with potential readers the wonder and glory of God along our country road.

The Wisest Fool - Austin

The thought hit me the other day, unwelcome, but not new, that the wisest man who ever lived also ranks among the greatest fools. The man who penned most of the Proverbs, the man who shared the passion of the Song of Songs, the man who agonized through Ecclesiastes and Lamentations – is the same man who turned his back on the very advice he articulated so brilliantly. The epilogue of his life must rank amongthe great tragedies of history.

Solomon prayed for wisdom when he came to the throne. God gave him wisdom and added wealth and honour in a measure never before seen. Solomon built a magnificent temple to God, yet before his life ended, took the very wealth God had blessed him with and built temples to the gods of some of his wives. He took the honour God had heaped upon him, that gave him almost unlimited power, and he drew a nation into idolatry. He uttered proverbs that warned clearly of the dangers of sexual misconduct, yet most likely never knew the names of many of his wives and concubines. He slept with them with legal sanction, yet likely never knew most of them in any sense except sexually.

The wisest man? The Bible says so, and I’ve never yet won an argument where I’ve tried to prove the Bible wrong. Yet a man who in spite of his wisdom and all God’s blessings, chose to walk a path that violated the very words he had uttered with such clarity that they still resonate thousands of years later.

An unwelcome thought – because – although I’m neither exceptionally wealthy or wise, I’m too much like him in other ways. I don’t have to look far to see the tendency to drift in my own life. I don’t have to look far to see the tendency to take God’s blessings and invest them in ways that dishonour God.

Solomon – a name to both honour and to weep for. A name to learn from and from which to take careful warning.

Will you indulge the early draft of a poem that has seemed to demand expression as I have explored this theme?

The Wisest Fool

Blessed of God, he had no peers.
The wisest of them all.
His wealth and fame reached nations broad, so strange that it should pall. . .
That he should drift away from God
and lead his land astray,
should shun the very truth he spoke;
give idolatry full sway.

The poorest rich man. The wisest fool.
What dare we say for him?
With the very riches giv’n by God
led his nation into sin.
He spoke with wisdom clear and true
and then he lived a lie.
The legacy that was his to give
smeared ere his time to die.

The poorest rich man. The wisest fool.
Yet I’m too much the same.
I soak within God’s goodness
then wallow in sin’s shame.
And desperate – oh – I cry to God
strip away the things that blind
a heart so prone to drift away,
a lazy, wayward mind.

Draw me close. Clasp me tight
like a willful, careless child.
Whisper love into my ears.
Rebuke – but gentle – mild.
Yet discipline. Do all it takes
to keep me close to you.
A pauper’s grave is priceless wealth
if so my love stays true.

© Brian Austin

Blogs vs. older media - who will win and how? - Denyse O'Leary

Let's talk a bit about blogging - that free news and views service you like so much.

Recently, old media have been paying more and more attention to bloggers, because we are stealing their readers. Here is something I wrote about recently at the Post-Darwinist:

Crocodile, crocodile, cry me some tears ...

Alan Mutter at Reflections of a Newsosaur blog reports that

While more people than ever may be visiting newspaper websites, they are sticking around less this year than they were in 2007.

That’s the troubling problem the Newspaper Association of America failed to mention this week, when it reported that the number of unique visitors at its members’ websites increased 12.3% to an all-time high of 199.1 million in the first three months of the year.

But an analysis of the first-quarter web traffic reported by the industry association determines that, by most other key measures, the relative popularity of newspaper websites has waned in the last year in spite of the industry’s professed commitment to aggressively building online products and revenues.

Anyone familiar with today's news environment won't be surprised at the fact that many people prefer to go to blogs.

Meanwhile, the New York Times, whose circulation seems to be bleeding while mine is growing, published a story recently by Matt Richtel about the Web World of 24/7 stress of "blog till they drop" types (like me?), citing two recent deaths of bloggers:

The pressure even gets to those who work for themselves — and are being well-compensated for it.
“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

“This is not sustainable,” he said.

Funny, I would have said that about The New York Times. But hey.

Well, here's one blogger's less melodramatic tale (mine):

I make a living, am still undead, and have not come anywhere near a nervous breakdown. I prefer blogging to writing for magazines because I can usually link my readers to my sources. So if they want to pursue a story in more detail, they can follow the links. Not only that, I can link to images, audio, and video.

Improvements I would like to see: If I were a techhead, I would long ago have figured out how to offer images, audio, and video myself. But I am not a techhead, there are only so many hours in a day, and I do NOT blog till I drop. Just like you, I have a life - a family, a church, a garden, a pile of mending, and all that. And every so often a publisher wants me to write a book, too.

Problems I would like to see solved: (1) bonehead governments that make laws about the Internet which don't make sense and (2) publications that charge a fortune to view their articles - which means I can't link my readers to my sources.

But I don't see how The New York Times can help me with any of that. For all I know, they would want more bonehead laws and higher fees. So go ahead, Times, cry me a river. We need rain here in Toronto.

Okay, that's what I said at the Post-Darwinist. Now here is something for Canadians to consider in particular:

Here in Canada, where the human rights commissions have turned their attention to blog posts they don’t like, a number of bloggers have been charged or sued for libel. You can find out more about that at Ezra Levant’s site, the Free Mark Steyn site, and Kathy Shaidle’s Five Feet of Fury site. All have been charged or sued or both, along with Maclean’s Magazine (charged), and many others besides. Reforming our 14 "human rights commissions" - which operate largely outside the laws that were set up centuries ago to protect persons accused of an offense - will be a long and costly battle for Canadians who love our country. But now that the "hrc's" have decided to wade into the realm of online writing, we writers have little choice.

Meanwhile, I have disabled comments at the Post-Darwinist and the Mindful Hack. I hope to restore that service someday.

But I still blog. Here are some posts you might be interested in from The Mindful Hack, on what science can tell us about our minds and spirits:

Things we know but cannot prove: Another nail in the coffin of materialism.

The fours be with you! (You will be "fours"ed to cooperate with this words/numbers game. (Hey, it's Friday night!)

Altruism: Why it can't really exist but why it does anyway

Evolutionary psychology: Eliot Spitzer is a kludgebrain!, psychologist opines (but so are we all)

Mind and medicine: The placebo effect - Did your doctor just prescribe you a quarter teaspoon of coloured sugar? Maybe ...

Materialism: When the store is on fire, hold a fire sale:
Excerpt: So this is the latest pseudo-explanation of the soul? I could do better myself! How about this: Minds that are accustomed to think in terms of a future have difficulty grasping the idea that there is no future after death.

Way simpler, to be sure, but materialists wouldn't buy it because I forgot to drag in the Paleolithic cave guys telling stories around the fireside - the staple of evolutionary psychology.

Fitna: A thoughtful Muslim's response The predicted riots largely didn't happen, but where to go from here?
Excerpt: And while we are here: Dial-a-mob/rent-a-riot behaviour is NOT copyright to Middle Eastern Muslims. I ran into the same thing among the American Ivy League elite in May 2005, when the New York Times bungled a story I broke on my other blog, The Post-Darwinist, claiming that a film about to be shown at the Smithsonian was "anti-evolution." It wasn't; it did not even address the subject. But zillions of Darwinbots, as I called them, behaved exactly as if it had. It's a good thing that no one gives them sharp objects to play with.

Rupert Sheldrake's guide to New Atheism (which makes it sound like New Coke, really)

Can a transplanted heart lead to transplanted thoughts? Well, maybe, but the mechanism might be fairly conventional.

Why science without God destroys itself: Because the alternative idea of a multiverse is a step into magic, that's why

Art produced by animals: Is it really art?

Are there really innate ideas about God?

Why can't philosophy alone kill off materialism? Why do we need evidence from science?

Civil rights protests force extinction of Olympic flame

Mayo Clinic co-sponsors Dalai Lama's 16th Mind and Life conference, on benefits of contemplation or meditation

Artificial intelligence: A look at things that neither we nor computers can discover

Attitude of Gratitude -Hird

Pecos Higgins was born on the Gulf Coast of Texas in 1883. At age 6, some of his associates got him "dog drunk". While still small, he began to work on cattle ranches up and down the Pecos River. He only had 8 months of actual schooling, but became one of the most colourful cowboy poets in the history of the Wild West. After two terms in the Texas State penitentiary, Pecos was invited by the Miller Brothers in 1907 to join their "101 Ranch Wild West Show' on a tour of North America. and Europe. There he met numerous royalty, and was personally invited to have a drink with King Edward 7th of England. Unfortunately, Pecos Higgins drank enough whisky over the next few years to, as he put it, fill up the Texas Dam. He married and divorced 5 times, bootlegged, cussed, gambled and shot his way through half a century. He even devised his own six-shooter before anyone in Texas had seen one.

At age 71 Pecos ended as a battered, hopeless drunken wreck, lying abandoned in a deserted Arizona Ranch. The Christians that found him said that he looked as if every bone in his body had been broken. Through the practical caring of his new friends, Pecos met Jesus Christ on a personal basis, and was filled up inside with a new attitude of thanksgiving and joy. Pecos never lost that new attitude of gratitude over the concluding 16 years of his life. Here is how he described this new-found joy: "I feel now like I imagine a little hound pup does -When his eyes first come open ... I'm as happy as a fed pig in the sunshine.

The 19th century Cambridge resident, Charles Simeon, once said: "What ingratitude there is in the human heart." It is so easy to end up as a complaining, grumbling person when things don't go our way. The best therapy for a complaining or fearful attitude is to switch from grumbling to thankfulness, from moaning to praising, from bellyaching to belly laughing. Dr. Patrick Dixon commented that someone who can never laugh is as emotionally imprisoned as someone who can never cry. Dr. Dixon notes that laughter alters the levels of various "stress" hormones such as cortisol, dopamine, adrenaline and growth hormone - all hormones released when we are tense, working hard, worried or afraid. In typical office stress, all the hormones are released but no exercise follows and the body suffers. We develop stomach ulcers, arteries clog up, we become irritable and develop a host of other problems - all because the body is pumping out hormones we don't need. Laughter, says Dr. Dixon, shuts down these hormone levels, keeping them low. Interestingly, endorphin levels (natural morphine-like substances) seem to remain the same following laughter.

(Dr Patrick Dixon photo)

More and more research is coming to the forefront, showing that gratitude and joyful laughter are connected with healthy living, while grumbling is connected with diseased living. Dr. E. Stanley Jones once said: "If you are unhappy at home, you should try to find out if your wife hasn't married a grouch." Worry, fear, and anger are the greatest disease causers. We need to prune from our lives all tendencies to fault, find, blame and put down others. Instead we need to daily practice the healing therapy of "counting our blessings." I would encourage you to take 10 minutes today to write down 10 gifts that you have received in your life that you are thankful for. It might be your children, your work, your sense of humour, your spouse, your parents, the trees and mountains, the country of Canada. Then practice saying thank you" for these wonderful gifts. It always helps to have someone say "thank you" to. That is where God comes in. As the source of all good gifts, it only makes sense to express appreciation to the Creator of this mysterious universe. As someone once said, happiness is seeing a sunset and knowing who to thank.

I am more convinced than ever that I was born to be thankful. Ingratitude is like putting sawdust into my car engine. Through an attitude of gratitude, I am protecting myself from countless diseases that could otherwise come my way. Our immune system is a remarkably delicate mechanism that just cannot handle acidic emotions like bitterness, rage, or malice. I challenge you therefore to find out for yourself whether an attitude of gratitude will improve your emotional and physical health. Over our kitchen table is a wall plaque with the words: "in everything, give thanks." May God give you the strength this moment to develop an attitude of gratitude.

Rev. Ed Hird, Rector, St. Simon's Church North Vancouver

Anglican Coalition in Canada

-previously published in the Deep Cove Crier

http://www3.telus.net/st_simons/cr9511.htm