Chris Sundby: Steven, who do you think would win in a fight, you or me?
Steven Gomez: You. Hands down.
Chris Sundby: Oh. Okay.

On Becoming Nothing

By Jolene Nolte

Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.—Abba Moses

This Lent, we’ve all been involuntarily plunged into a rather monastic way of life.

Confined to our own homes, like individual arks afloat on this pandemic flood, we’re confronted with ourselves, with our finitude and vulnerability. A microbe has ground our human world to a halt.

I filed my taxes yesterday, and as a result, I discovered that last year I made the least amount I ever have in my adult life. I felt financial stress as every frugal student does, but I also felt more grounded and alive.

It’s difficult to be alive. This is my last semester at Regent. I don’t regret for a second that I came, but the way has been steep. Since moving here for January 2017, I’ve been successively stripped of any external measure of success or significance. I moved into a basement without a kitchen and which gives me new appreciation for the aptness of the phrase “water closet.” When I arrived, I was still working part-time for a magazine publishing company. Though I was increasingly restless and dissatisfied with the content of that work, I must admit that—despite the existential chagrin—being able to call myself a magazine editor gave me a sense of accomplishment. Then in January 2018, I was laid off. I’d moved hoping that perhaps I could find work in Vancouver after graduating, but the post grad visa was revoked during my first year here. Like many of you, I was also laid off from one of my jobs when Regent closed its doors. My other jobs, being a student and working at the Writing Centre, will also end with a layoff that goes by the name of graduation.

Also like many of you, I had moved to Vancouver with fresh hope of finding a partner—or, at the very least, going on some dates. My first semester, a Regent student I was interested in stood on my bus near the rear exit doors. When I passed him to get off at the next stop, I made eye contact and smiled. His eyes widened in terror; his face remained deliberately stony. (He went on to marry a woman my physical opposite, a fair-skinned, tall, slender red-head.) Last summer, the man I was in love with met my confession of admiration with silence. The last time I saw him, he kept his back turned to me, the sharp contour of his shoulder blade visible through his cotton blue t-shirt.

Even my success in other realms feels empty because now it’s over. My creative writing has flowered, but can it survive being transplanted? I’ve not gotten into any of the creative writing programs I applied to. I don’t know what’s next, or even where or with whom. I feel desolate and alone.

My body is emptying itself right now, knowing only that there is no new life to house. I feel physically weak, hollow, like my whole body—even my arms and toes—throbs with emptiness.

…

These areas of grief are deaths of dreams, hopes, opportunities. They are practice for and unwelcome reminders of one of life’s few certainties, which our culture and what Brueggemann terms “the royal consciousness,” conspire to push from view—our own deaths. “Death warns us that we are not gods,” Simone Weil writes. This recognition of our mortality, our realization that we are not God, is the void. No one naturally wants to be in the void confronting her own nothingness.

But here in the void is where I know I can do nothing, that God is the only source of life in me. Weil (an activist) writes that God comes to each of us, and “If we consent, God puts a little seed in us and he goes away again. From that moment God has no more to do; neither have we, except to wait. We only have not to regret the consent we gave him, the nuptial yes.” We receive; it is God who bridges the infinite distance between him and us, a distance he himself enters through the Incarnation.

By facing the void, we also learn to love our neighbour. We can see sufferers without our primary response being one of revulsion for fear of becoming like them. We already know we are destitute, desperately dependent upon the mercy of God.

Christ emptied himself, gave himself up to death, betrayed and abandoned by his friends in his hour of need, reviled as a criminal. His messianic vocation looked to be a complete failure.

In a sense, Christ suffered in our place. Nevertheless, we are united to him in his death. His way leads through the cross. Though we are assured of deliverance into life, we are not promised that we can bypass the void. We are baptized into it, dependent exclusively on God to raise us up.

I am in my 30s, and my life is not what I’d imagined it would be by now. I may never marry or have children of my own or make it as a poet or feel like my life has some clear and unique significance. In my COVID-19-induced cell, these are the illusory footholds I grasp after in the void. But on my bed in the early morning dark, I know that these desires, while natural and good, must die. If they alone are what I seek, I won’t find what I’m truly looking for. Marriage, children, a clear and obviously fruitful vocation are not ultimate ends. Catherine of Siena and other mystics I’ve been reading have me thinking that our desire is infinite because its ultimate object, God, is infinite. Finite ends will never satisfy infinite desire.

This Holy Week, I am thinking of Jesus and Simone Weil, both singles who died in their early 30s. They loved recklessly and embraced suffering for the sake of others—entrusting themselves, and the results of this offering, to God.

Yet even as I write this, I’m aware of a temptation for self-aggrandizing saintly greatness. The truth is, though, most of us live rather unassuming lives. That very obscurity and anonymity, I think, is part of the void. If we aim to become martyrs hoping to make a saintly name for ourselves, we are not martyrs at all.

“Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” I’m slowly, painfully learning that my life cannot be its own aim. I have to instead entrust myself to the God who works in subterranean darkness.

My Personal Bog

By Maria Bitterli

There is a bog on my balcony,

a stinking, stagnant, slippery

mess, and I confess

it has been thus a month or so.

You see, I had not cared to drill

some holes in it before I filled

the pot, and thought

it would be fine. It’s not.

I left the mezzanine lily pond

because a local bird was fond

of it, to rid

me of it would not do!

Alas,

there was a bog on my balcony.

A stenching goop of fertility

gone bad. I had

to clean eventually.

I did. And had a pungent whiskey afterward.

You Do It To Me

The Gospel as an Indigenous, Transcendent Window to God

By Steven Gomez

On the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb planted by members of the Ku Klux Klan ripped through 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls. The church had been a hub of civil rights activity, so while the attack was not entirely surprising, it nevertheless shocked the community, sparking riots and further deaths.

The impact of the atrocity reached far beyond Birmingham. Welsh artist John Petts was immediately moved, by both the murders and the destruction of the church’s architecture, to respond with the gift of a stained glass window, designed by himself and fundraised by the people of Wales.

Though not strictly crucified, both the figure’s pose and the subtle shape of the cross behind Him make it clear that this is meant to be the suffering Jesus Christ. But what is most striking about Him, especially considering the time and place, is that He is black. Across the bottom of the image runs the words “You Do It To Me”, an allusion to Matthew 25:40.

Art is a preeminent feature of cross-cultural Christian studies. Jesus has been depicted across the globe as belonging to various ethnicities, which is remarkable considering the doctrine of the Incarnation: the eternal and transcendent God entered a specific place and time as a single person in temporal history.

Andrew Walls has identified two distinct impulses of the gospel as it moves across the world: the indigenizing principle, by which God accepts us as we have been shaped by our culture, and the pilgrim principle, by which we are reshaped by God to be His people.

Without ceasing to be eternal, Jesus indigenizes to a culture in time and space. Without ceasing to be historical, the gospels turn His life into a universal, true-for-all myth. The myth then moves into every culture and language, weaving itself into the history of the whole world. And by this, Jesus the Jew is allowed to be imagined as belonging to any race and culture. Because He is transcendent, He can be spoken of as immanent in any context. Because of the pilgrim principle, the indigenizing is made legitimate.

The pathos of crucifixion and the hope of resurrection makes the gospel particularly resonant with those who suffer oppression. By way of the indigenizing gospel, Jesus enters their particular horror and through the pilgrim myth, they themselves are brought into the new identity of the saved.

John Petts’ stained glass window is a work of art that embodies the gospel breaking barriers on two distinct levels. First is the gesture of love from one culture to another. Rev. Andre Reynolds is quoted as saying, “I think it’s wonderful that people halfway around the world should choose to affiliate with both the accomplishments and the disappointments of African Americans…It just reminds us that the world is smaller than we think, and that there are brothers and sisters somewhere else who thought about us.”

But on a deeper and more profound level, the image speaks of Jesus entering into the African-American context not only by the colour of His skin, but by the story of His suffering. He too has been subject to monstrous injustice. He too was a man of dark skin murdered by white oppressors. He too was hung in humiliation on a tree. “What the slave ship captains and the plantation overseers and the segregationists have done to you,” Jesus seems to say, “they do also to me.” Light pours into the church through the stained glass, illuminating the space and all within it under the cross’ consolation.

Notice how we often speak of Jesus’ great act. It did not happen on simply a cross, but on the cross. Those particular, historical, long-decayed pieces of wood have themselves become mythical, transmuted to an immortal universality, as if there were never any cross but Christ’s. The cross no longer belongs solely on a hill outside Jerusalem, but is the heritage of anyone who obeys Jesus’ command: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Jesus will walk with us in our suffering, and we as Christians are called to walk with Him in His. The heart of the gospel is both indigenizing and pilgrim, simultaneously meeting us in our own context and bringing us into its own.

Embodied in coloured glass and a coloured Jesus, designed by a Welsh artist as a gift to an African-American church, is the truth of the mytho-historical gospel. It is the myth that became reality which became myth again in our hands. It is indigenous everywhere because it is a pilgrim. And wherever it goes, it offers a unique and particular window onto the transcendent God who belongs to the world.

Image source: https://hyweljohn.com/The-Wales-Window

La Corona (III)

By John Donne

This sequence of seven sonnets by John Donne on the life of Christ was sent to Mrs. Magdalen Herbert (the mother of poet-priest George Herbert) in July 1607. Each sonnet is linked by their first and last lines, and the last line of the last sonnet brings us back to the first line of the first sonnet, creating an unbroken circular pattern. ‘Corona’ in Latin means ‘crown’ or ‘wreath’. See Winter Issue 9 for the first two sonnets and Winter Issue 10 for the previous two.

V. Crucifying
By miracles exceeding power of man,
He faith in some, envy in some begat,
For, what weak spirits admire, ambitious hate :
In both affections many to Him ran.
But O ! the worst are most, they will and can,
Alas ! and do, unto th' Immaculate,
Whose creature Fate is, now prescribe a fate,
Measuring self-life's infinity to span,
Nay to an inch.   Lo ! where condemned He
Bears His own cross, with pain, yet by and by
When it bears him, He must bear more and die.
Now Thou art lifted up, draw me to Thee,
And at Thy death giving such liberal dole,
Moist with one drop of Thy blood my dry soul.

Ogden Point

By Blythe Kingcroft

Jenny threw a stone to the water

but a wave of thistles carried it back.

We sat beneath a red lighthouse and watched

the tide froth against our feet.

Talked about our five-year plans. We were

nineteen: straight blonde hair. All giggle,

earnest things, and so in love with everyone.

Whatever perched within my friend stole into me,

laid secret bricks for my own soft-spoken hope.

Now Jenny lives in snowed-in birch trees.

They hem her mom’s long driveway.

Flat span of roads in Thunder Bay.

In five years, she’ll have a seven-year-old.

A good marriage, a dog.

She’ll still like country music, still fret

about her too-short waist, still miss

the way an ocean spills into the sky.

Wherever we moved, something else spun.

Me, unwinding in before casting out.

This poem is from Blythe Kingcroft's IPIAT chapbook, "Lapis Lazuli" (2020). Blythe's poems playfully explore the colour blue, Augustinian language theory, and sacramental theology.

Double Cross

By Embolus

Cryptic Clues

Across:

3. Security starts from feeling assurance in the heart (5)

4. Covert institution Americans initiated for security (3)

10. Remove security as Etcetera and NT pour out (9)

11. We find a secure hope without cop arranging farewell (3,11)

13. Double secure ending after new Chinese theologian (3)

14. Prisons so secure sure lost orderly departures (11)

15. Semi-secure after Total Recall began remix is more accurate (5)

16. Radio security captured farewell speech (5)

18. Farewell speech died secure in evil action movie (11)

21. Low theologian detailed emotional state (3)

22. Mischief after protocol secured degenerate art (14)

25. Beaten in torture securely diminished (5,4)

26. Leave the French to God (5)

27. Heavy heart of stone (3)

Down:

1. Sailor’s behind a heartless fleet (3)

2. Crazy times! Nutcracker is very small (8)

3. Italian says farewell to Chinese food (4)

4. Gold clergyman returns to Port Said on departure (2,6)

5. Field in which disorientated shepherd lost high definition (6)

6. Chattel's demonic activity? (10)

7. Joshua eventually thought his reasons offered leaders good advice (6)

8. As don floats about he is unapproachable (6,5)

12. Not guilty, but without principle convinced movement (11)

14. Seizure of valuables left under in movie category (10)

16. A child secures the French well until later (1,7)

17. Manic set composed adjective of meaning (8)

19. Dimension for effort (6)

20. Worker excluded from agreements black meetings (6)

23. I organised Ayatollah’s home (4)

24. Very large but incomplete embrace (3)

Non-Cryptic Clues

Across:

3. Langley’s spies (3)

9. Belief (5)

10. Expose (9)

11. German farewell (3,11)

13. Maiden name (3)

14. Marches (11)

15. More accurate (5)

16. Spanish farewell (5)

18. Farewell (11)

21. Bovine noise (3)

22. Misbehaviour (14)

25. Partially consumed (5,4)

26. French farewell (5)

27. Heavyweight (3)

Down:

1. Naval behind (3)

2. Very small (8)

3. Chinese food (4)

4. French farewell (2,6)

5. Orb (6)

6. Belonging (10)

7. Moses’ father-in-law (6)

8. Be unapproachable (6,5)

12. Not found guilty (11)

14. Shameless theft (10)

16. French farewell (1,7)

17. Adjective of meaning (8)

19. Partner of breadth (6)

20. Hags’ meetings (6)

23. Persia (4)

24. Embrace (3)

Winter Issue 11