*I started writing this post after being here for a month and I have rewritten parts of it a number of times since then. Difficulty writing this post is responsible for the lack of activity on this page so I expect that I will have for to post from here on out. I am posting what was true to me when I wrote it so some of the timing will seem out of place and some facts have changed. For example I have since been lucky enough to find a place at MICS until December 5^th. It is still true to the spirit of what I wanted to post two or more months ago but didn’t have quite right yet.

Pictures and more updates forthcoming now that this gorilla is off my back.

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I have been here for nearly a month and I am startled by the fact that in two months* it will all be over. I don’t like that finality at all. I feel like I have only just met the kids and the teachers and the country and I am in no rush to leave.

 

Leaving is something a tourist does. I am at the very edge, I think, of tourism with my three month commitment. I have been a tourist elsewhere and enjoyed it. I would encourage people to be tourists whenever and wherever they can be, but here, and now, I do not want to be a tourist for the following incredibly long winded reason.

Let me tell you a story about faith and fear.

When I was a 16 year old I went on a well organized, 10 day trip to Big Trout Lake –Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation reserve in Ontario’s massive north. It was an incredible opportunity for me to get to know the way my fellow Canadians lived and help them to get to know the joy for life that I had been taught a faith in God brings. I studied and prepared with friends and raised money for the trip through my church and I was convinced I was going to be such a great help to the people there. I couldn’t wait to be a part of something so good! I had even deferred acceptance to my cherished cadet camp that summer and delayed it to the second intake, which was later in the summer so I could make the most of the time on the reserve. I felt like I was doing the right thing. It would be so amazing!

 

It wasn’t.

For me, the trip was, an incredible disaster and a turning point in my life. I lost, if not my faith in Christ, certainly my faith in my fellow Christians. I became aware of the imperfections and cruelty of western life for the first time, and I realized that there were no easy answers to any of life’s many challenges. All the discomfort with authority and my burgeoning anti-establishment feelings which had developed through my adolescence seemed at once justified and to intensify. I saw the feel-good platitudes within what we teach to kids as Christianity for what they are. Baloney. Fooey. Opium.

Until that time no one had told me that the third world exists in Canada. I’m in the third world proper now, and I would like to make clear that the only thing an isolated native reserve in Canada has that a rural Zambian community doesn’t, is a consciousness of being surrounded by a nation that is just fine to let their fellow countrymen live like they do on those concentration camps ghettos r sorry, reserves without letting it affect their lives down south. (Some reserves are better than others, I’m not talking about the good ones.)

What we were there to do was run a short Christian summer camp. That was our big contribution. Almost from the first hour I was incredibly embarrassed to be a part of it. Once I saw the state of living I was overwhelmed with remorse for my ignorance and a desire to know more about this terrible secret that had been kept from me by my church and my government. I wanted to explore and participate in the culture that I was ostensibly there to help to replace with mine; to kill.

I once tried broaching me feelings to the person in charge and was met with such lack of understanding and inability to convey my thoughts that I didn’t give them the opportunity to really understand what I was feeling before I played it off as some other issue. The next day I went swimming in the lake that we were told not to because in could be contaminated and then pretended to be sick with a lung infection for the rest of the time there just to escape the constant nonsense and my feelings of shame.

(Yes Mom, that is why I didn’t take the prescribed antibiotics. Sorry for lying.)

On the 2 day road trip home, trapped in the van with Christian kids and chaperones filled with self-righteousness and self-satisfaction, I had a revelation of sorts. It just hit me.

On the side of highway one, beside the silhouette of the sleeping giant, I got out of the van and laid in rain covered grass and let my emotions over-boil. I cried and laughed and thought red-murder. I hated Christians. I hated the institutions that let this happen and I hated what my 16 year-old self then thought of as God. When the caravan folk stopped their incessant singing and noticed me, they thought I was being odd. I was, but I stopped as soon as I could because I new I had to spend the rest of the trip home with them and empathizing with difficult emotional stories that didn’t end with the phrase: “Well, isn’t God Great?” wasn’t their strong suit. It was the moment I was unborn to Christ. It was also the moment I was re-conceived as a Christian.

It took me 3 years to be born again into what I now recognize to be a believer. I was turning 19 and going on a journey after graduating high-school. I was a pilot, the Air Cadet squadron commander in my city and I had been accepted to the universities I’d applied to. I intended to do one year of ‘civilian’ school before going to Royal Military College to chase my long held dream of piloting for the Royal Canadian Air Force. Before I did all that, I first wanted to see the world a bit on my own terms. So I went to Alberta to work for some money to go to Europe to go back-packing. I was in love with the world and the freedom that came from my first taste of independence.

I didn’t get into much trouble because I still had enough faith in myself to figure out right from wrong and as it happens, most of what the Bible teaches as morality is consistent with the laws and social norms of the western world, not only for the obvious historical reasons but also because most of those just make good sense to someone who wants to lead a healthy and safe life. Mostly.

I also never lost a fundamental belief in a God. Credit my grade 12 philosophy teacher for that.

I still have my notes on his classes in the ontological, first-cause and cosmological argument from contingency argument for the existence of God. He had our class do an assignment on the hard problem of consciousness and the definition of art. He gave me the tools to make some sense of these and alter them for myself into what I understand to be my argument for my personal faith which I feel like sharing now.

Start with the fact that there is something rather than nothing, and that, being conscious and more importantly, conscious of something, I am a part of that something, there must be a conscious something rather than a nothing nothing even if it might only be limited to myself. Furthermore, since I don’t know everything about this something and yet I am aware that that there are things that will be forever beyond my understanding, and that these things have an impact on my life that I cannot describe, and I know it will function without my knowledge of it and indeed, in spite of my utter ignorance of the vast majority of universal events, much in the same way it seems to for everyone else around me who has ever lived, and did so before I was born: Believing as I do, that in this, I am no different from other people, the consciousnesses of other people are either part of the universe and separate from me, or I am making this whole thing up including the parts I know nothing of, which must therefore exist solely in my subconscious. The beginning of my faith is that I find it very likely that this conscious something is not limited to myself and in fact, encompasses at least all other conscious beings. Since consciousness is a part of the universe and the universe is a whole thing capable of interacting with itself, both consciously and at random, as I observe it to be every day, then to me that is as close to God as I am capable of understanding. I am a whole thing capable of interacting with myself and I am made of whole cells which interact with themselves though they seem to lack consciousness. The image I see of God in myself is that I am a part of the universe that is wholly and completely the domain of this understanding I have of God.

St. Anslem asked people to define God when he made his argument. I say that it is impossible to conceive of an adequate definition of God so I have to accept my ignorance at some point I can define that more simply as; God is a being which I understand as encompassing, and causing to be, all things. By nature God must be omnipotent because God cannot be separate from that which is. St. Anslem said that God is perfect but that sound to me like an error of hubris. God is above and aloof from any human definition of perfection, but St. Anslem suggests that it is possible to know that one element of perfection is existing within the universe. Humanity is obviously not perfect with myriad examples for this fact, yet we exist. Just as his arguments were refuted then with the example of the non-existent ‘perfect island’ the opposite is also true. That evil and imperfection exist means these negative elements are also a part of the universe, which I call God. These must be a quality of God and our reaction to them must be an intended consequence of God’s will. Our opinion of God cannot be based on an understanding of good and evil because to make that distinction means that we claim the ability to separate parts of God from himself, and categorize them into arbitrary Manichean boxes. Like cutting water in the ocean. Christian theology states that our relationship with God predates our understanding of good and evil. I look at unconscious life and see what we might have been like in the garden. A flower or a cow dies in ignorance of the meal or bouquet which is the purpose of the seemingly arbitrary and perhaps cruel manner of their use. I can see evil and good but only in terms that I can understand because God has chosen to suffer humanity to think to know the difference between good and evil. Knowing there is a difference between the two is not the same as being wise enough to draw the line between them.

God simplifies all that garbage into “I AM THAT I AM” and I now believe I better understand that statement. All the other godless philosophies I’ve read have been incredibly bleak to me or, worse, unconvincing.

If there is any clarity in what I have written above that approaches the faith I have in it then I assure you I was not for that when those thoughts coalesced. I was not aware that it had for some time; but it happened while I was in Europe. I made a tour of the Vimy Ridge Memorial in France and I realized that I was loved. I was loved by the people who died there and by the God that allowed us small things to abuse his creation the way we did during that terrible war. He let’s us bring evil into the world and yet he still allows us to feel joy. That is love. That is forgiveness. It is why we need to be forgiven. It was why I could forgive the church and my government for letting down native Canadians and indeed all Canadians with their ‘religion of good intentions’. We all know where the saying says a road paved in good intentions leads. We have only to look at where the otherwise noble intentions of the residential schooling projects have led our nation and the nations dying within her to see the truth of that aphorsim.

This has everything to do with Africa by the way, to those of you who may be wondering why I’m writing about Canadian first nations and my life story. I have been here long enough to make the observation that I did above. The only difference between the result of colonial racism in Africa and in North America is that in North America its victims are relative neighbours to a still very ignorant and seemingly uncaring global upper class.

But more about me.

While digesting the realization I had in Europe, I managed to turn my newfound faith in love into an abortive first few attempts at being in love myself one of which stuck for some time in spite of the troubles that were to come. I was back in Canada and loving the university I had chosen. Nipissing was close to the north I had grown to feel connected to, and was small and personal and unpretentious; qualities I had come to value. I did love it, but I still intended to go to R.M.C. So I applied and travelled far down the path of becoming an officer Cadet until I got a letter detailing the results of a thorough medical screening for aircrew selection candidates stating I had medical flags for something wrong. Wrong enough it turns out, to preclude my admission from progressing further. Members of my family had been undergoing some tests because my brother was showing symptoms for a rare genetic nerve condition that can cause, among other things limbs to go numb under stress, an incredibly inconvenient thing to happen if, for example, one was in a high-g turn at the controls of a valuable piece of military hardware. The doctors recommended testing for my mother and her sons. We were all positive for it.

The devastation I felt is still hard to describe. My entire identity was wrapped in dreams of touching the face of heaven and fighting for the noble causes of Queen and country. The military’s door was abruptly and definitively shut to me. Not through any fault of my own, or unfairness on their part, but by an act of God. God had taken my dream away and killed it. I was betrayed and I felt completely alone because ever since I had left the Church of my upbringing I had been effectively lying to my parents about the new nature of my faith. I couldn’t feel as though I could talk to them anymore, or indeed anyone else.

Devastation is not an easy thing to handle for anyone, but my natural inclinations toward introversion and self-imposed artificial isolation made things considerably worse. I had not been in North Bay long enough to secure friendships intimate enough to talk about what I was going through. These two factors exacerbated a disease that I had struggled with in small ways for years. I became severely and dangerously depressed.

I faded through the next two years and lost nearly all motivation. A promising and engaged student at first, I eventually became a recluse emerging only to try to maintain an illusion of normalcy for my roommates. I lost friends and alienated people at home and at school. With one exception, during the summers I took menial and unexciting jobs only after much pestering from my parents. Testing my new faith in it, I tried to fall in love to see if that would make it all better, serving only to waste two people’s time rather than my only my own. I pigheadedly fed the disease and sought no aid keeping it all a secret out of an over-inflated sense of ego and pride. The result was that I hit down stick in a spiral dive at full throttle. I failed out of school and ended up in the hospital twice for attempted suicide, the affects of the second attempt with me still.

This will be the first time learning of this for many of you. I should apologize but it would be hollow because it only means that you and I never spent the amount of time together for the subject to come up or for whatever reason I didn’t trust you not to judge me or more accurately, I didn’t trust myself to suffer your judgment. I think that finally I do not fear the truth of my story. I have earned a limited understanding of the disease of depression that while certainly clouded with personal experience, is still well informed from it.

I was like a rudderless ship with a mutinous crew. I had very few points of joy in my life. Very few is not the same as none. But it becomes recognizable to people around you. Especially to those who know what it is. There was a man in a hospital bed opposite mine while I was recovering after the second attempt whose words will stay with me forever. This leathery middle aged roughneck called to me across the ward in between his temper tantrums demanding more and more powerful painkillers to feed his addiction. With a half pitying, half accusatory tone said “You have a hate on for life brother.” I hadn’t said a word to him the entire time I was there, but he knew me in that moment and I felt convicted.

He was incredibly right. I couldn’t understand suffering and I didn’t want to. For everything I saw that suffered, I thought to myself that it would be better for it to let the pain pass away by abdication. I hated the demanding nature of nature. I hated the very gift God gave me and I hated him for giving it. I hated myself for hating it too. I didn’t believe that love existed anymore or, that if it did it was only abused in the hands of people. I tried to reduce it to animal instincts and cynical ploys. I began to see a hateful God to whom I could not deny existence, but I could not see as loving.

There were two exceptions to this narrative however. One was an emerging and healthy relationship with a wonderful young girl I met at school to whom I credit saving my faith in love. The other was a mission trip I was fortunate enough to go on with John Reynolds through the meeting house. Kayaking on Lake Superior with groups of kids from the Aroland Oji-Cree First Nation not simply for one week but for three months of living and working on relationship building was a revelation in the power that selfless agape love has to change hearts and provide real non-invasive witnessing for Christ’s message. It was a reiteration to me of the suffering so close to home. I was stalled in my self-pity because of that trip and it may have provided enough of a boost to keep me from further harm.

When I finally permanently came home from North Bay I was a ghost. I know the man I wanted to be and I haunt him still. He is a part of me and I focus all my insecurities on comparing who I am now to who he could have become if only… Even though I am more solid now than I was then I am not the man I was when I left.

I lost friends and alienated people, purposefully and without meaning to. I should insert here that it was at this time only a month after I finally revealed my sickness to my parents that my close friend Felix Gagné committed suicide and it became clear that a large number of my closest friends also suffered from depression. It was an unhealthy bond we shared that was beginning to become literally life-threatening. I replaced them on the advice of my counsellor with gradually smaller groups of people until finally I admitted that I didn’t want to be sad anymore. I began to try to grow my social circles again. I took jobs and positions in political campaigns and volunteered helping elders with technology. I attended protests for causes I found engaging and spoke up at or attended relevant parliamentary hearings after the protests had faded, I rarely signed a petition I did not follow up on.

I sought help for depression and I went back to school during and after a very productive stint working for my father at his environmentally centred engineering consultancy and trying my hand at entrepreneurship (The 3D Press was ultimately not successful).

Most importantly I started paying attention at the only church that had ever made any sense to me. The Meeting House is a church for people who aren’t into church. It is the natural response to the regressive policies and repressive atmosphere that so many people justifiably associate with modern religions especially western Christianity. The Meeting House doesn’t apologize for those churches or try to fix them because in many ways it has nothing to do with them. It simply teaches about what this potent philosopher and earth shattering rebel said about the nature of man, the universe and our place in it.

The religion started by Jesus Christ and his followers can be correctly said to be responsible for many evil things in the 2000 or so years since it’s birth. None of which have anything to do with the philosophy the man in Judea actually expressed. I was finally beginning to understand the truth of the path he laid out for us.

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Side bar (sorry, skip-able)

That is not a no true Scotsman argument. For an argument to fall under that fallacy is must be possible to adequately define what the ‘Scott” is and further more, for two dissimilar entities to simultaneously fit that definition. In this case a christian is something with a known and undisputed definition but one cannot you fit in that definition while simultaneously doing something contrary to Christianity. Let’s examine that briefly because its a pet peeve of mine when people incorrectly dismiss Christian arguments by incorrectly applying the no true Scotsman fallacy.

Beginning by defining as our ‘Scotsman’ a person who follows the religion which is based on the person and teachings of Jesus Christ, or its beliefs and practices as our undisputed definition of Christianity. A Christian, is someone relating to or professing Christianity or its teachings or even more loosely defined as a person who has received Christian baptism. Well the loose definition cannot be adequate given the first definition requires agency on the part of the believer while the second looser definition is an ultimately ceremonial act unless carried out by someone who fits the first definition. Therefore the first is necessary for the second and the second is redundant. In the ‘no true Scotsman’ analogy it is the same as though one’s parents decided to move from Scotland to Canada after one’s birth, changing the nationality of the child from a Scotsman into a Canadian by citizenship, through no control of the child until one learned and chose to act on the differences between Scot and Canuck.

One of the most fundamental teachings of Jesus is that his example, while perfect, cannot be followed by man perfectly. All Christians therefore in a perpetual state of flux being at various times not Christian even though we may want to or claim to be, because while Christ never sinned, we constantly do. Any time we sin, we are not, in that moment, being Christians because we are not, in that moment relating to or professing the teachings of Jesus Christ.

An illustration – It is impossible for me to suddenly not be a Canadian if I enjoy a sport more than hockey, so it would correctly be a ‘no true Canadian’ fallacy to say ‘no true Canadian likes any sport more than hockey’ because being a Canadian is a property of my person as inseparable to me as the gender I have biologically in spite of my poor taste in sports. I takes considerable effort on my part to change that and additionally a considerable application of personal agency.

However in a very real sense I cease to be Christian whenever I do not follow the example of Christ because the definition of Christianity requires a certain behaviour on the part of the subject. I guess if you believe that Christianity is a type of race or something, that once born into it becomes inescapable, then the idea that Christ is responsible for the crusades and the various sins of the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches over the millennia could make sense, but that would show a complete lack of understanding of what faith is on an individual basis and a lack of faith in the ability of humans to control their self-determination or exercise ones agency to self determination.

Some people are that way about political parties and other factional or divisive ideologies and the results lead to war just as often as they do in the case of religion. That is a failure of mankind, not God.

Sidebar over

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When my recovery had progressed to a point where I was beginning to feel confident in the strength of my new spiritual, academic and social-life, I hit another roadblock. Throughout the hardest points of this time, I had been fortunate enough to have a partner to check some of my self-destruction and help guide me back to health. We were engaged, but her life was changing at an incredible rate and while she was on the upswing, I had plateaued. When she left me I was devastated again but this time I had better tools to repair the damage. I did feel depressed but not anymore-so than anyone might on the losing side at the end of a long-term relationship.

I am loathe to say that there is an upside to the end of that relationship because, I hold her and our time together in such high regard, but with it’s end I was free of something. I was able to imagine futures I had set aside in favour of those with her. I was looking at a larger set of infinities than I had since I had decided to become a pilot when I was twelve. Infinity is a difficult thing to parse into reasonable choices however, and so my new job became, ‘How to choose the course of my life part 2’.

I hope that in reading this far one might see a trend in my decision making when it comes to things to do with my time. I see one. I seem to be find satisfaction in giving myself to causes not of myself. Whenever I have been in a stable place I have tended to spend time either in missions or acting on behalf of what I see to be a noble cause.

Which is all to say that I am not a tourist in Zambia. I am here because circumstances have allowed me to listen when God said ‘Go!’ he gave me a mission and though it might not be permanent, (who knows?) it is clear. He gave me a deceptively simple message to take with me wherever I go.

All it is, is divine forgiveness and other centred-ness. You are forgiven by God who loves you and died for you despite your flaws and you should try to love others like that.

No proselytizing, no damnation for having a different culture, or failin gto live up to that impossible standard. Simply share who I am, and who I am trying to be like. That is my mission. That is what I am able to do here in Macha at MICS.

I do not want to be a missionary my whole life, as I think I have aspirations that I do not feel are conducive to the life of humility demanded by a mission lifestyle. I am one right now though. I am not on a tour of anything other than one of God’s paths for me.

Thank you for reading. My goal was to explain why I am here In Macba. I know this post got bloated beyond a reasonable length but I feel it is something of a turning point in my life to have finally written this all out in a way that I can be at peace with.

God Bless you.