Winter Issue 2
For the Love of God
By Rachel Hart
Do you remember why you came to Regent? If this is your first year, I’m sure those reasons are still quite fresh. Whether it was a clear calling from God, or a leap of faith counting on His provision, you acted in obedience to begin your education under the green roof. If it’s been more than a year, however, maybe the reason you came to Regent has become a little fuzzy. Between the weekly assignments of DQs and Exegesis, the intensity of Iain’s Hermeneutics or the gobbets spanning so much history, that part hasn’t been the focus in a while. Yes, you still followed God in coming here, but after months of not finding a church, trying to build community and friendships, and maybe a bit of academic burnout, you’re in the middle of a degree speeding towards its completion without a clue of what comes next.
Might I suggest, that in addition to why you came to Regent, you were brought here to become a better lover?
We all know that we are called to love. Jesus has summarized the whole law and prophets in these two commands: that we “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…and the second is like it: Love your neighbour as yourself.” (Matt. 22:38-39). The Apostle John also emphasizes the significant place of love in the life of believers. 1 John exhorts believers to love one another, and that obedience to God is made manifest in our love for God and for each other. “If anyone obeys His word, love for God is made truly complete in them.” (1 John 2:5. But seriously, read the whole of 1 John—it’s beautiful and should be read regularly). The Apostle Paul, too, is known for his chapter on love in 1 Corinthians, ending with that of the heavenly virtues, faith, hope, and love, “the greatest of these is love.” (1 Cor 13:13). Looking at the narrative across scripture from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament, it’s not just the one that recognizes the place of love for those who follow God. Hosea 6:6 is a classic short example of this big theme: “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” (NRSV). I’m being reductionistic, but you get my point. This is an Et Cetera article, not an exegesis paper.
So if love is to occupy such a significant place in the life of the people of God, what does that actually look like on the ground? Well, I think that’s part of the reason why we’ve come to Regent—to explore what it looks like to love God and love our neighbours. This isn’t to say we didn’t know how to do that before. Rather, it’s asking how even our NT midterm can help us learn to love better.
I discovered this quote by St. Bernard of Clairvaux (and not because I was reading him. I’m ashamed to say this was discovered in isolation on Goodreads). St. Bernard writes:
There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is Curiosity.
There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is Vanity.
There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love.
We all approach school with a different goal, a different focus, in the famous words of rapper Ice Cube, “So come on and chickity check yo self before you wreck yo self.” Why are you studying? Is it to earn a degree? Is it for a job? Is it to prove your worth? Is it to train you for ministry but only after you’re done with your studies? Is it because you’re curious? Or is it because you’re in love with our Creator God, and are desperate to know him better? Is it because you love your fellow students, the people in your neighbourhood, your church, your city, your country, so much, that you are committed to loving them better?
If you’ve been at Regent for a while, how has your time here made you a more loving person, and thus more like Christ? If this space is new to you, how can your posture towards your schoolwork, lectures, employment, etc., help orient you towards becoming a more loving person? May your pursuit of knowledge here at Regent be for service, saints. May your school work, the Hebrew vocab, the unending dates of history, the thousandth word of an essay, be done not just in love, but as an act of love, worshiping our Lord.
What I Know For Sure
Gramma at Pacific Theatre
By Steven Gomez
“What makes us human?” asks Maki Yi somewhere in the second half of her one-woman show Gramma. The question is both complex and basic, always frustrating our efforts to find the straightforward answer. Gramma wisely never tries to simplify the search but with an appropriate nuance suggests that what we look for might lie somewhere outside ourselves.
Gramma looks and feels like a traditional piece of theatre, but it is actually a dramaturgical memoir of Maki Yi’s time living in Regina, Saskatchewan, in the basement of a lady we know only as “Gramma” for whom she also does housework in lieu of rent. Gramma is absent-minded, stubborn, and a terror when things don’t go her way. The clashes between the young Korean student and the elderly Canadian woman are vividly narrated by this winsome and engaging storyteller.
Stories are fundamental to humanity. It gets said a lot, but it bears repeating. We are more stories than we are DNA. DNA makes us organisms. Stories make us people. We drag our stories around with us, both the ones we make and the ones we’ve been given by the world we grew up in; the fables and myths like the tale of Simcheong, which Maki has woven into her own. They are suitcases packed with identity and we have little say in the matter; they are your stories whether you like them or not and they make you who you are—whether you like that or not.
Which means that taking the time to listen to another person’s stories is how we connect to the other thing that makes us human: humans who are not us. People make us who we are as much as stories and as much as our own choices, especially when they are family and you cannot choose who they are. We love them, we hate them, we hurt them, we hug them. In a multitude of ways we react to them and they to us, and in so doing we make more stories and make our world. Gramma’s set design, striking but at first puzzling, beautifully symbolizes both the chasm that separates the characters and the river that can be forded to make connection.
Sometimes, as Maki finds with Gramma, it’s only when people are gone that we realize who they have made us to be, and what we can no longer be when they aren’t there. So ironically listening to someone else’s story may end up telling you more about yourself than it does about them. I found that I learned less about Korean culture than I did about what makes us human, which then of course makes me think about what makes me.
I end with the simple exhortation: go see Gramma. Listen to someone’s story. You will learn something or other. That’s what I know for sure.
Gramma runs at Pacific Theatre until February 1. Tickets are available at pacifictheatre.org
Confession to the Tormentor
By Patrick Doerksen
The tips of my thumbs turn cold
outside the glove
these truncated days of December.
I look around and can’t tell
what matters, or what
in one year I’ll remember.
People in the park
dragging shadows like histories,
feeding on things
grown a hundred miles from center.
New York full of them.
Like arms stretching out
from a splendor
but not ending anywhere.
They just stretch and stretch,
a vast loneliness monster.
Torture me for the meaning
of my life, tormentor,
and can I give an answer?
I’ve forgotten, who knows when.
Then last night, my brother said
something I once believed,
and now I believe again.
The Darkling Thrush
By Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.