Change

What is a university chaplain good for?

March 16, 2021 0 Comments

“Totally without hope, one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante’s hell is the inscription: ‘Leave behind all hope you who enter here.’”
Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope

I am a Christian minister serving a Baptist church in our campus community. I love Jesus and I love students so I regularly encourage ministers from a variety of faith traditions to join their local multi or interfaith chaplaincy on campus. A dynamic and thriving university chaplaincy will pursue the common good. In that pursuit and in service of the wholistic health of the person in front of them, chaplains reach into their lives and their traditions in order to offer hope to students who come to campus looking for community or who are at times being squeezed by their loneliness and angst. After serving with the Multifaith Chaplains Association for eleven years on campus at the University of British Columbia I’ve landed on four words to describe what might be one of the most important things chaplains do: Chaplains offer H.O.P.E.

Hospitality

Almost every tradition of faith and spirituality welcomes people and invites them to move from stranger to friend. Chaplains serve the university or college by offering a wide welcome to students, staff, and faculty. When students arrive on campus from home for the first time they often look for the familiar. If they are seeking to connect with their familiar communities of faith,  it might be a chaplain from their tradition, or any chaplain who is part of the chaplaincy that points the way and welcomes them into campus life. Hospitality opens the door to the hope found in friendship and community.

Orientation

Change and growth is often preceded by disorientation — a sense of not quite getting it or knowing the way. I prefer the term discombobulated! No doubt, life in university can be discombobulating! However, a chaplain can assist a student wrestling with the big questions of life by giving them language to formulate what they are feeling or ruminating on. Chaplains are able to introduce the basics of their traditions and point students to resources that will aid them in their own hopeful journey of discovery and change.

Personality

Some chaplains have BIG personalities. But most of us are regular persons without a lot of flash or hype who have had to reckon with aspects of ourselves in relation to family, the stuff of earth, and even our failure to live up to a transcendent vision of maturity. Hopefully each chaplain has some wisdom to share, a question to ask, or a story to tell that could unlock a door to growth. Universities and colleges are not just communities where some truth out there in the universe is being uncovered and manipulated for wealth. Hopefully universities and colleges can be communities where people become personable, flourishing humans, who are full of compassion and kindness.

Encouragement

After a string of bad days people lose courage. Sometimes in college or university the string of bad days becomes a week, a month, or even a term. Chaplains listen. They offer language and processes for metabolizing loss and grief. By asking questions they may help a student discern or begin discerning what they truly want. Having lived just a little longer the chaplain offers the hope that “it does get better.” We too have had to face our fears. We too have had our catastrophes. But we have learned that the catastrophe of the day is not necessarily the defining moment of our whole lives. We’ve had the experience of benefiting from counselling, from community, and from honesty. Chaplains, I’ve noticed are also pretty good at recognizing what is pretty good in another person, so they see the possibilities. Chaplains are encouragers, ready to speak an apt word that releases courage into the heart that had lost it. Chaplains can  help students name the dementor lurking in darkness and sucking away their hope; having named it they can face it.; facing it they can take their next step forward with hope. That step could be the one that makes all the difference in their university experience and blazes a path full of courageous struggle but also full of blessings.

“Even though high-hope people are goal directed, they enjoy the process of getting there as much as the actual arrival. This is one of the seeming paradoxes I initially had difficulty disentangling when talking with high-hope people. Goals certainly capture the attention of high-hope people, but this largely seems to be true because such goals offer a marker for progress or mastery occurring along the way.”
Charles Snyder, pioneer hope researcher, The Psychology of Hope.

Change, Education

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It’s Been A Year

March 6, 2021 0 Comments

My awareness of the Covid-19 virus and it’s devastating and multi-varied symptoms, started in January 2020. A member of our Origin Church congregation had traveled home to Wuhan with her son for Chinese New Year. She texted my wife and I, saying something wasn’t right. People were sick; it was hard to get information. I started looking.

Within a couple of days I read a tiny article saying that Wuhan was going to be locked down. We texted and encouraged her to make her way home to Canada if they were healthy and she could leave. She made it.

Once in Canada she went straight from the hospital and quarantined with her son in the apartment for 21 days. Yes that’s right — 21 days! She did this voluntarily and in consultation with her family doctor while the rest of us were still trying to figure out if there was really a problem. She and her son were fine, but she was stunned that there were no questions and no instructions at YVR.

Sometime in the middle of February I heard a strange alert on CBC that come from the CDC asking organizations to begin making or reviewing plans to be shut down or continuing with limited operations for several weeks. This was strange! I had never heard such an alert in my life. So I came home that night around 9 PM and asked my family, “What would you want to have in the house if we had to stay at home for two weeks?”

Wow, the looks and the incredulity. But they answered, “Chocolate and toilet paper.” So off I went right then at 9:15 PM to the Superstore and did a big shop for extras that we would want to have in the house if we were here for two weeks. Yes, I bought chocolate and toilet paper.

Then I started following a couple of people on Twitter who were providing almost hourly updates on what was happening in Italy and Iran. Wuhan, Italy and Iran were part of my regular prayer and intercession for days. The images of people dying or dead in the streets were shocking. This was no ordinary flu. Our lives were about to change.

On Sunday March 8th 2020 our congregation gathered on the UBC campus. But I felt strange. Our team of students and staff decided that we were not going to shake hands at the doors and that because we were not sure we could safely administer the Lord’s Supper we were not going to include this in our gathering. These decisions did not feel easy. We tried to work out plans for gathering safely, but we were planning in the dark. We also decided that we would not reach out and touch the shoulder of our neighbour for the blessing at the conclusion of the service. We started socially distancing on March 8th. That’s the last Sunday we gathered publicly since the beginning of the pandemic.

By the next Sunday, 15 March 2020, the UBC campus was rolling up the carpet, shutting the doors, and moving online. So did we.

It’s been a year.

Change, Church

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Prayer of the People, 29 January 2021

February 1, 2021 0 Comments

Heavenly Father,

You have been our help – an anchor through the storms wrecking our souls. Thank you for calming the storm. Thank you for carrying us through the storm. And even when the storm was of our own making you have restored our souls and given us rest. 

You made a way; You have set our feet on solid ground and have embraced us as friends. Thank you!

When shame weighed us down you have lifted us up. You put a new song in our hearts and raised our chins from the depths. You invite us to gaze on your glory and goodness. 

Who is like you?

You took our place at the Cross through Jesus Christ and have graciously poured your Spirit into us so we may enjoy life with you now and forever. This new birth delivers us from the destruction wrought by Satan, from guilt, from shame, and from fear. Now you usher us into the  peace, righteousness and joy of your Kingdom.

Thank you.

Lord you have empowered us to be neighbours to those who need one. We turn our faces with you to consider our campus, our city, and the countries of our day — give us your heart for people.

Raise up students who love you and grant them courage and wisdom to speak up with you.
Raise up men and women who will lead with loving kindness in their fields of work.
Raise us up as a generation that will follow Jesus.

Even here — we know —  powers and principalities prop themselves up against the knowledge of You. They seek to destroy people by denying their dignity and their worth as bearers of your image. 

Today as we look at our world with you: 

We lift up the Uyghurs in NorthWest China; 
we lift up to you the many people displaced by violence in Syria; 
we lift up to you friends, family, and neighbours who grieve under the pandemic.

Oh Lord, Come quickly — please orchestrate release for the captives, homes for the displaced, and enduring peace for neighbours.

Please give our leaders humility and the wisdom that comes from Heaven.

We pray today as Jesus taught us — ( Join me in the Lord’s Prayer)

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one;
for yours is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory, 
forever. 
Amen.

This prayer was part of the Origin Church Weekend Broadcast on 29 January 2021.

Change

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January

January 30, 2021 0 Comments

while grey rains embrace
cold ground cannot restrain
slender shoots of hope

Change

#BlackShirtDay

January 15, 2021 1 Comment

Last week I went on a walk with my youngest. She is thirteen years old. We chatted for a bit as we walked and then both settled into the pace and the quiet.

However, after a time, she asked me, “What are you thinking about?” It’s a favourite question. I answered and then asked her. “What are you thinking about?”

13yr old: I’m wondering if the people who made that show, Raising Dion, are going to make another season.

Me: I really enjoyed that show. I think they will. What do you like about it?

13yr old: I like his super powers.

Me: Don’t you think Dion’s mother was so stressed out? Raising kids with super powers must be something parents have to worry about.

13yr old: I have super powers.

Me: Yes?

13yrd old: I can write stories.

Me: Yes you can!

I’m asking you and I ask myself, “Should I be worried?”

I do worry. But not because of her super powers, but because her skin is black and she is growing up on a continent where white racial preferences and powers so often resist full kinship and economic inclusion with people who are black. She lives in a place where engagements with white people can become authority encounters vacated of generosity and acceptance if the expected respect and deference is not forthcoming. She lives where things turn ugly if the cultural rules of whiteness are not accepted. These kinds of encounters can happen on the street, in a school, on the playground, online, in a restaurant, in a classroom, on a protest line, in a church, at a friend’s house, in the park, at work, in a board room, on the sidewalk, in a store, at a gas station, in an auditorium, in the legislature, on the bus, in the courtroom, on the beach, over coffee…

Will she be ready? Will she be fortified in heart with the courage required to exercise her super powers and not be overcome by evil? Will she know she is beloved?

I know super powers do not protect us from the violence of hate. But I hope if my 13yr old gives voice to her stories and that she will play a part in realizing Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream. It’s his birth day, 15 January; he was born in 1929 and died in the year of my birth, 1968, assassinated while I was still in my mother’s womb. I didn’t know him, but I have been shaped by the spirit and content of his powers in speech and in leadership and in his dream.

But still, I worry.

(Here’s a shout out to Harambee Cultural Society who have encouraged us to get beyond worry and do something together. Thank you!)

Change, Society

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