New (to me) Books!!

One of the challenges being here in West Africa is the lack of academic resources, especially when it comes to teaching. Down at the seminary, in Ndu, there is a decent library, but that is a long way from where I live now. I have my own library, of course, with a good selection of some of the standard reference works that I need, but in at least some respects it is seriously outdated.

So it is that going back to Canada affords me a great opportunity to stock up on some new(ish) materials (within the strictures of international flight, of course).

I took advantage of this, in the first place, by asking my son to buy me the first two volumes of Katharine Sonderegger’s Systematic Theology, covering the Doctrines of God and the Holy Trinity (published in 2015 and 2020 respectively). For my work in teaching systematic theology in our Distance Learning courses, these should prove very helpful. I have begun digging into the first book and have found it a pure delight. Sonderegger’s writing style is at once whimsical and dense; she is writing about some pretty difficult stuff, but manages to make it quite enjoyable for the reader.

Right now, I am learning about the omnipresence of God, and how God may be known in creation, even in his hiddenness and invisibility. I do not recommend this book for the average reader – it can be pretty tough slogging at times, and even the subject matter will not be to everyone’s taste – but, if one is a pastor or student with interest or questions along these lines, I highly recommend this author.

The person who recommended this author and these books to me (through his blog post: The Recapitulator), is one of my former professors, Dr. Jerry Shepherd. He himself has written a new book, just last year, on Leviticus (The Story of God Bible Commentary), and I was very happy to receive a copy from him over breakfast one morning. I eagerly delved into the introduction and so far have not been disappointed.

Like any great master, Jerry makes this stuff look easy – when I know, in fact, it is not. His book is part of a new series – The Story of God Bible Commentary – and it is geared to the thoughtful student of the Word, designed to allow laypeople “faithfully live out the Bible in their own contexts” (from the back cover). Leviticus is one of those biblical books we tend to shy away from in fear, but Dr. Shepherd will make it much more accessible to those who want to conquer their fear. I am looking forward to getting into this book further.

Finally, I was talking one morning to my (then) future son-in-law (who now, happily, is my son-in-law), about a book he was reading by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, called A Secular Age (2007). Taylor takes for granted that we live in a secular time in the west, and he is concerned to trace out how it is that we got this way. It sounded like a very interesting book, and I enjoyed chatting with my son-in-law about it.

A few days later I was at his parents’ farm, where we were rehearsing for the wedding at the church across the road, and he presented me with my own copy. Well, there was little that could please me more. Later I showed the book to one of my sons and said, “Look how the boy is trying to butter up the old man.” My son asked me, “Well, is it working?” “Heck yeah!” I replied.

I have now started in on this fat book, reading the Intro, and it has made me look forward to the rest of it. This is another one of the perks, I think, of not having a television here.

Birds, Flowers, and Mom

One of my regrets is that my parents were never able to visit us here in Africa. Due to her medical conditions (severe allergies, if memory serves), Mom was never able to travel out of continental North America. But, with some caveats, I think she really would have loved it here.

One thing I missed when we were away from Banyo this last trip, were the birds and the flowers. It is rainy season, and the flowers can be pretty spectacular. Our house has a courtyard with a myriad of flowers and whatnots on one side; on the other side, it overlooks a river valley, with a host of interesting trees all round.

The birds are what I really love. My favorite is a rarely seen blackbird with large red eyes painted on the undersides of its wings. You only notice it when it is in flight overhead, but then it is really remarkable. There are other, smaller birds with bright blue or green racing stripes all down their backs, and more with bright blue bellies in front. Really lovely are the flocks of white herons which will swing by over the river down in the valley.

In the morning the birds are especially vociferous, waking up around 5 or so, most of them. Some voices are gorgeous, trilling things; others are cawing messes, not really pleasant to listen to, but interesting as all get-out. We have one very tall palm-like tree, and there are a couple of birds that love to play around in the upper branches, chasing one another, hopping from limb to limb. I am a terrible ornithologist, and can’t tell you the names of any of them, but my enjoyment is no less real for all of that.

Still, I think what Mom would have really appreciated are the flowers. She loved flower arrangements, and was good at creating them herself. We have roses here, red and white, but also a plethora of vibrant flowers I have never seen before, and which I know my Mom would have enjoyed.

The caveat to Mom’s enjoyment of this place is the same one that applies to myself. We are not particularly fond of critters, and when you leave them alone this place seems to produce more than its fair share of creepy-crawlies: cockroaches, ants, spiders by the dozens . . . I had some of my hats on the back of my office door, and when I came home, one of them had a complete sturdy web in it, with about 5 dozen tiny red spiders partying on the top. I threw the hat, and all the partiers with it, to drown in a bucket of soapy water, and then Sonya washed it out for me.

One of my nieces saw me stomp on a bug of some type (can’t recall what) in the house back in Canada. She asked if I just killed it, as though incredulous. I replied that I had indeed. When they are in their own home, outside, in the forest, or wherever, I generally leave critters of whatever type alone. (The exception here is snakes; we will kill them wherever we find them, inside or out.) But when the critters are in my house, where they don’t belong, I am unapologetically ruthless, and have no qualms about stamping them out. Mom and I are alike in that.

Rita Kilmartin, 1932-2022

My Mom passed peacefully away on Wednesday. We had been in the Pocket Getaway, and had planned to spend an extra day there, we were enjoying it so much. However, Mom had been anxiously waiting for me to arrive and see her, so we left a day early at my sister’s urging, and were glad we did.

We got to Kelowna just after the noon hour, and found Mom in her hospital room. We had a couple of hours with her, were able to visit and pray, tell her we loved her, and say our goodbyes. That was truly a great gift for all of us.

Mom was born Rhetta Marie in 1932, in the Huallen/Peace River Country area in Alberta, but the family soon moved to Youbou on Vancouver Island, where her father – my Grandpa Janzen – built a house on the shore of Lake Cowichan, where she grew up, and where my grandparents lived until the turn of the last century. She grew up on the lake, diving off huge pilings into the water, swimming, boating, playing basketball – her small high-school team won Provincials her senior year – and growing into a beautiful young woman. At some point, too, her name was changed to the more simple “Rita.”

Graduation picture, 1951

Rita married my Dad, Robert, in 1953, and they soon started a family. I came along as the sixth of seven children when my Mom was 30 years old – they say she almost gave birth to me in a boat, as they made their way upriver to a mission hospital in Esperanza, coming up from Tahsis, in the middle of a cold winter.

My early memories of my Mom are mostly from Tahsis, a small sawmill town on the north-western side of Vancouver Island. When I was 5 or 6 she arranged a surprise birthday party for me. She dressed me up in my Sunday-go-to-meeting best (which I was not too happy about), sent me with my sister Debbie to buy candy in the village store (which I was very happy about), and when I got back home, there was my party waiting for me. I guess, having her own birthday in winter-time, Mom figured that a summer birthday would be a welcome event, which it was.

Graduation gown, 1951

Mom was not a perfect human being – no one is. She could be cross and upset as much as the next person – especially with me, as I was growing up, and not always the most compliant child – but in general, she was a gracious and kind soul. One time, she and my father were coming back from Chase to where we lived in Kamloops; the car in front of them crashed, and when they got there the people in it were in very bad shape. Mom held the driver’s head on her lap and comforted him as he died from that awful accident.

Mom on Mother’s Day, 2021

I remember her as being a beautiful woman. She used to wear Chanel #5, which I really loved. She learned to golf with my Dad, and then pretty much all the kids learned to play. Mom was a good cook, especially while having to deal with very picky eaters like me. She had a wonderful wry sense of humour, and I am pretty sure I did not get my gift of sarcasm from her, because she still had it at the end. She was a loyal friend, faithfully keeping in touch with people she had known for decades. Her deepest sorrow, I know, came when her best friend, my “Auntie” Laura, died.

Meanwhile, her greatest pride and joy – I think – lay in her seven children, and their spouses, her eighteen grandchildren, and multiple great-grandchildren (to whom she was “GG”). Dad died in 2010, and Mom lived with grace and dignity as a widow for the next 12 years. We love her and we’ll miss her.

Pocket Getaway

Since Sunday evening we have been at our son John’s Tiny House, called The Pocket Getaway Tiny House at Big Calm | Slocan Valley, British Columbia. I confess I was not too excited to come here; being confined in a small space, up high in the mountains, was not my idea of a good time. But the house is well-laid out, and is more spacious than one might think. And though it is in the mountains, it is not perched on the side of some cliff or anything like that, so my fear of heights has not come into play at all. Plus, it has the two things most calculated to make tired and grubby travellers happy – a good shower and a nice bed!

Spacious, with everything you need

My best “John” imitation

It really has been a “getaway” for us. Since arriving in Canada, I have been surrounded by family of one persuasion or another almost constantly, and while I have enjoyed it immensely, it has not been particularly restful in any real sense of the word. Here in the Slocan Valley we are finally enjoying the peace and the “big calm” of a place away from the hustle and bustle of home in Cameroon (though we did have an ursine neighbour come by our very first night here; turns out he was hungry for apples).

Our Ursine Neighbour

The advert for the Tiny House reads like this:

Reconnect with nature at this unforgettable escape. The Pocket Getaway is a new listing in the Slocan Valley and can be your home away from home, providing all the comforts you need for a vacation or work-retreat. This beautiful tiny house has a large private yard with fabulous views of the surrounding forest and hills. It is located at Big Calm, an emerging tiny homesteads community, mid-way between Winlaw and Slocan. This is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to explore tiny living!

But better you read all about it by clicking on to The Pocket Getaway Tiny House yourself. One day you may find yourself in need of it.

Post-Nup Reflections

The wedding has come and gone, as those things do, along with a whole host of emotions and reflections. One of the latter I will try to articulate here.

There seems to be a lot of reasons floating around about why marriage is outmoded, and why weddings are unnecessary. I will not try to argue with those things, except to express one thought which came out quite clearly in my daughter’s wedding this past long weekend.

As with pretty much every wedding I have attended, there were a good number of speeches at this nuptial. This round of speeches evoked possibly more than its fair share of tears and choked throats, as the speakers were evidently genuine, and were expressing true emotions. Sometimes, folks say stuff which they aspire to but are not really true; in this case, I think everyone understood that what was being said was true and sincere, with no embellishment needed.

photo by John Kilmartin

The theme of the day was “gratitude,” which is a fitting emphasis for just about any occasion, but here it seemed especially appropriate. From the officiant, to the bride and groom, and pretty much everyone else, there was thankfulness expressed.

As I have been thinking of it, most of the gratitude expressed was for very mundane stuff – for parents being good parents; for friends being good friends; for siblings being good siblings. Not particularly earth-shattering – but, when we think about it, decidedly profound.

For this is foundational stuff. Family is the bedrock of who we are as people, and to express gratitude for the people who helped to form us into the people we are (assuming we are happy about our place in the world) is a confession of a deep truth. We don’t often express this kind of gratitude – in our family, at least, it would feel rather awkward if we did.

But every once in a while, especially at milestone events, it is a helpful thing to take a look at the bedrock of our lives, and recognize it for what it truly is: the rock upon which we stand. Weddings allow us to do that, and unsentimental as I normally am, I would not have it any other way.

The Line Between

Where is the line between the secular and the religious? How can you tell?

In chatting with my future son-in-law the other day, I think I figured it out.

We want to live lives of integrity, not being one way in this place, and another way in that place. It seems, however, that sometimes our prayer lives betray us in this goal.

Think about this for a second: did you pray about what to eat for breakfast this morning? If you are like most people, you did not. Assuming we eat breakfast in the first place, we check the cupboard, or the fridge, and see what is available. Then we make a decision based on the available choices, how our bodies feel at that moment, and maybe what we anticipate doing later in the day.

Most of our decisions are like that. We don’t turn to God for help in making them; we make decisions based on wisdom and the immediate situation we are faced with.

But then there are those instances where we feel a need to turn to God, and pray and ask him what we ought to be doing. When we do that, I would argue, we have abruptly decided that that situation demands a religious approach, while the rest of our day has been quietly moving along in a secular manner.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I do not think it is particularly good; in fact, when we introduce a dividing line like that, we are bifurcating our lives, saying that this realm/situation requires God’s attention, while the rest – which normally makes up the bulk of our day – does not. I do not think this is not a healthy way to be; it lacks integrity, and is ultimately confusing.

We could put the question like this: why might we ask God about one thing, and not about another thing? Is he not interested or competent in both those areas? Or, is it that we think we are competent apart from him in some areas, and do not require his input in those areas?

All of these questions – I would submit – are really beside the point, and all of them arise because of a flawed understanding of how God works in our lives. When we recognize that after the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came to indwell the disciples, that no one ever asked God for direction or guidance (only for wisdom, according to James 1), it simplifies things immensely.

As I write in another place, the Spirit of God is at work in us, directing all of our decisions and choices, not just the ones we think are somehow God-worthy. There should be no dividing line between the secular and religious in our lives; all is one, and God is just as much a part of the breakfast we choose as he is in the spouse we choose. This is how it ought to be, I think.