In the Halls of Religious Institutions

An earnestness for knowing qualifies a man as being spiritually alive. The genesis of that earnestness is curiosity. People walking around hallways of religious institutions, churches, or universities ultimately dogma-centred, walking around without curiosity are contributing tinny acoustics to empty chambers. There is no holiness there, not without the presence, the continued presence and the memory of that presence of the lives of the people of earnestness for the truth, an appetite for knowing, who may then have abode in that knowing in those hallways; who challenged their teachers with a righteous fierceness and laughed with the abandon and vulnerability of windblown saplings.

Or trembled upon hearing light, trembled like a spray of new flowers in their first breeze.

Prayerfulness has nakedness, a vulnerability that insists to the personality of the infinite to act mercifully then to allow a divine intimacy.

If the halls of a religious institution have facilitated such experience, if they have been open to such occasions without oppressive dogma, then these halls may indeed be considered hallowed, having served a blessed function.

And somewhere in these halls may be the echo of songs of truth rendered spontaneously. 

Freedom of Expression Under Fire

Today, 12 journalists who worked for a satire magazine in France were slaughtered by Islamic fundamentalists. A few years ago my own life was threatened by someone in Nelson, B.C. who had read an editorial I wrote for The Nelson Village Voice, and who objected to my slamming the extremist Islamists.

In today’s news, a professor from New Brunswick, social science professor Dr Ricardo Duchesne, is being pummeled by bleeding heart types and even a Vancouver city counsellor accusing him of hate-mongering because he had the temerity to comment on the preponderance of the Chinese growth in population of Vancouver. I am wearying of yapmeisters and critics who lambaste any wondering aloud about ethnic issues affecting our sociology. The terms hate-monger and racist are being used all too often to stymie freedom of expression. As far as I’m concerned, if a visitor or newly landed immigrant misbehaves with greed or arrogant driving habits then they ought to be nudged to wake up and show some respect for their host country. I for one would not tolerate an a-hole at my dinner table. No matter what colour or ethnic background. Period.

We, as a country, really need to take a closer look at what’s happening to our sociological make-up when we put up our land and resources for sale to all comers. And we all need to continue speaking out and writing fearlessly to protect our precious freedom of speech.

'A NEW YEAR' AND NEW DIOG EXCERPT

A New Year

They pass, these years, each of them filled with details so elaborate that I forget most of what happened. And sometimes wonder if anything happened. Was I alive? Or just like a shadow caught in a breeze, ever dancing, twisting and dipping about, sometimes in a sea of morbidity but mostly in areas of fanciful dreams. A shadow easily altered in form in a society of formlessness and apprehensions. People competing to be heard in a cave of fear. All shadows intermingling for naught. Nothing in this cave grows. I entertain illusions of growth while the fluidity of knowing abandons me to its barren shores. Rivers of souls gone and going by. No one waving. Hidden voices occasionally reach me, full of promise and hinting from a distance that life may sustain that enchantment, that wonder and joy of curiosity I knew as a child. My mother knew I knew. That spontaneous joy which eludes me, lost in my cravings for acknowledgment, remains true, undeniable and for me, as usual, unattainable. Knowing can neither be given nor received in a cave so dark that words of light don’t find their target. There is no focus. No continuity, and life seeming as insubstantial as that shadow that I am. 

Little do I know. Little did I know. That each new year a new voice will again reach out to me to give my mind peace. Will I be deaf, busy darting through the corridors of that gloomy hollow in search of an illusion of grandeur. Searching blindly to fortify my corner of destiny. Mortality can be measured now. Its ticking a reality. My death mask is less pliable; the slots for eyes minor wrinkles, more slender; the blinking less as the windows close above bony shoulders and spindly arms.

Perhaps it’s time to awaken. Time being its own mean riddle, I call upon its mystery to unfold and repaint my eyes. A new year beckons me to live, challenges me to remain awake at least long enough to know. To know Creation itself. Its light gives form to innocent beings. Entities are enlivened around me. All else is immaterial. And Creation is ever generous.  This form may live. And for that I am thankful.

Excerpt from The Adventures of an Urban Wizard

Diog was beginning to see again the obvious… but this time he was putting words to it. Not always was he recording others. He scribbled furiously while Lilith slept that dark and chilly early a.m.

Moral action is predicated on the fortifying every day of one’s moral position. That inner compass needs to be tuned every day through an intimate appeal to Creation itself which is the ultimate arbiter of moral drive; the outline of moral conduct; the genesis of truly sustainable good behaviour. Only the root can replenish the stem, the flower, the growth of one’s moral body in its totality. The moral body needs its own unique revivification. Daily. Daily, until the action is expected, ordinary, fearless and fierce when necessary. No room for meekness and no excuse for obsequiousness. The action of the moral man then becomes deliberate and anticipated by his fellow men of goodness. The moral man becomes a beacon.

Re The Bernie Smith Initiative

Dear Editor:

Whistling Bernie Smith used to walk the beat in the downtown eastside swinging his baton, and smiling. He diffused innumerable incidents with reckless downtown eastsiders which may have become elevated to violent confrontations. He lived a long and peaceful life.

Now we have overarmed , trigger-happy cops killing mentally ill people who are wielding pencils or two by fours as ‘weapons’. What happened to tackling and wrestling? What happened to their “sensitivity training?”  Why shoot to kill? Why not, if absolutely necessary, shoot to wound and disable?

The Brit police force still does not carry guns. Only special squads do and they killed three last year. How many have Vancouver cops killed in 2014? And now transit cops are killing mentally ill people? My guess is that Bernie would be ashamed of this performance.

Here’s a revolutionary thought: disarm the police. Follow the Brit model and bring in the special squad if necessary. At least, we wouldn’t be sanctioning what is tantamount to murder-by-badge.  Maybe call this new approach: the Bernie Smith Initiative? 

(This letter was published on January 2nd in The Vancouver Sun)