The Beast of Seumus Farquarson: A Halloween Tale

In the Scots highlands there are malignant brownies said to inhabit the crags of my clan's district. These small beasties are nothin' in comparison to what I saw that night. I passed out after slippin' and gashin' my head on a rock. It was not an enormous gash but enough of a bruiser to give my reveled body a reprieve from guzzling. I wanted to sleep anyway, but this was not the place I should have snoozed. I awoke to a sloshing floppy sound, wet upon the rocks. Accompanying the sound was a smell, a stench, pardon the expression,

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Ask The Popcorn Man

REMEMBER WHEN ON social occasions you responded with lightning quick accuracy to the question “What do you do?" You sat easily with family and friends in a circle of equality. That was then. Things have changed. Imagine. You are either unemployed or underemployed but you have memories of "gainful employment." Now you are increasingly angered by the embarrassing question, "...and what do you do?" The circle of equality now seems distorted by your presence. You feel unproductive and unacceptable. "All they need are good jobs," a friend of mine once bellowed. “Work projects - that would improve their images, get them

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Ripping The Roof Off

YEARS AGO, I read with admiration and excitement about a Christian philosopher who "ripped the roof" off his theological system, examined what was there, and started over again from scratch. Becoming as agnostic as humanly possible, he read broadly in Christian and philosophical thought for two years. He quit all his teaching and associations with the church. When I read the results of his experiment, I was unimpressed by his conclusions but had to admit that I admired his approach and the courage it took to undergo such a vulnerable evaluation. I'd like to say that I voluntarily followed

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Fear of the Lord

IF PERFECT LOVE casts out all fear, how can fear of the Lord be the beginning of knowledge, understanding and wisdom? My experience confirms the returns of love but adamantly denies fear's benefit.

While trapped in circumstances self-constructed or brought on by misfortune, the assurance of being loved has calmed and focused my guilty, anxious mind. Love experienced as an unexpected gift has turned meaningless tragedies into moments of contemplation, gratitude and even 

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Who Do You Say I Am

"WHAT ARE THEY saying about me? What do you think about me?" Everybody has asked these questions but when Jesus of Nazareth posed them to his friends at Caesarea-Philippi, an ancient Roman cosmopolitan city on the edge of the Sea of Galilee, he started a discussion that continues to baffle, enrage and inspire people two millennia later. I have always wondered if these were real or trick questions. Was Jesus cornering Peter into giving the right dogmatic answer, later to be included in sacred writings, or was this an open question addressed to all people? I don't want

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Standing Alone Together

THERE IS A mind-boggling connection between creation and chaos. This unexpected synergy applies not only to creation's emergence from the primordial chaos but is mysteriously operational when people's spiritual foundations have crumbled. It is revealing that the Genesis creation accounts were woven together, as the poetry of the dispossessed, during a time of the exile and crisis of faith. Disorientation in communities and in individuals has a peculiar way of resulting in an inspired movement toward creativity and re-orientation. When we at Watershed were flailing around, wrestling God, shadowboxing in the post ‘91 period, many of us felt on the

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Ash Wednesday

My first encounter of Ash Wednesday was while I had a job at St. Joseph's Vocational School in Winnipeg. Being the only Protestant working there, I was shocked, even somewhat horrified, and leery to ask why every student and our teacher Irene Coulter had a black, cross-like smudge on their foreheads as they entered room. Choosing not to see it as a weird hallucination, I decided to ask what those smudges were about. Irene, a none-too-observant Catholic, gave me the formal answer, "Ash Wednesday is the day that kicks off Lent, a run up to Easter for Catholics." "Okay," I

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