permission pending from Steve Coffey

1.  Describe your own personal East of Eden.

I think I have told most of you about the gym I was part of for about six years from 2011 to early 2018. It was more than a place to work out. I would have two or three classes scheduled a week, always come early and always stay late visiting with people. 

I grew particularly close with two people, a friend and a coach. It turned into meeting up for races on the weekends, potlucks, people attending my workshops, and various social outings. The focus was on health and wellness and although my coach is a Christian we would mostly just enjoy each other's company and were involved in each others lives. It felt like community to me. 

I still don't quite know fully what happened but the owner and my friend had a falling out which meant my faithful coach and leader was gone. Myself and a few of the people I was closest with also decided to leave. It was my choice but it felt like things had changed and so it was the right decision. 

I felt naïvely hopeful. I thought, surely we will start up a new health and wellness community and the connections that I have made will carry-on, but things did not go that way. Along with another event, it was one of the darker moments of my 40s. I remember one night sitting home alone and feeling like I had lost everything. The natural thing that connected my community was gone and we were trying to figure out a new way to stay in touch as well as trying to find a new way to stay active and heathy. It did not come easy.

As far as being surprised for new joy, it did not come quickly or as expected. It wasn't about switching one gym for another or switching one relationship for another. But it did free me up to be seeking something deeper which led me to get more invested in Watershed. I can say now looking back I am so grateful and thankful. The regular meetings, smaller gatherings, and spontaneous connections within the community have been life giving.

— Mel

The experience of blandness and thirst are repetitive features in life. Fortunately, these obstructions are punctuated with breathing space for joy and spiritual fruitfulness; nevertheless, they are emotionally depleting. The church has favoured us by designating two regular liturgical times to enter into this experiential desert - Advent and Lent. This seasonal practice readies and vaccinates us against the run-of-the-mill times when tedium will strike out of the blue. The dark night of Lenten convention prepares us for what the church called “ordinary time.”

We need to examine our parched times and respond in faith. This Lent, we have shared our dearth of liveliness, our barrage of friends going through various forms of diminishment, both health-wise and relationally. I notice that tribulations can be endured when accompanied, first of all by God’s Spirit and secondly by our brothers and sisters. This seems to be the only solution but one that we can not conjure out of the blue. We may be desperately in need of grace, but grace is a gift, not an outcome of our efforts. Sometimes an aphorism can adjust our thinking about our situations. I return to the phrase that we have to “stand in the way of grace.”

We can no more create spiritual joy or life than we can create ourselves. We are reliant, dependent. Recognizing and expressing this places us where we ought to be, that is, on our knees in dependent prayer. God heard the desperate, dependent prayers of his people from Egypt to Babylon and beyond. Revival starts with emotional lament in prayer. Open-handed, we approach our Liberator; even when God thinks it best to allow us to go through not around our problems, we often discover God’s presence in his absence. It is definitely true that absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Attending our desperation, we recall those like Mother Teresa who have faithfully endured God’s apparent absence and still remained faithful to their vocation. When we stick with our lifework, our vocations, we often feel that accompaniment in our yearning for God’s presence. That yearning in the desert is essential to receiving the grace that carries us through. Grace undulates as we go from Lent to Advent and back. Life comes as a gift from God, and it leaves similarly as a gift from God. Whether we perceive it or not, God is here ready to answer the prayers of his suffering people: in Isaiah’s time and at Lent.   

— Paul

I haven’t thought a lot about COVID for a few months. I wondered where all my former anxiety around it had gone. But it was hiding under the couch. ;) When Penny invited Cal and I to their sun room for our Tuesday evening book study, suddenly all my dormant fears re-surfaced. They weren’t rational; I know I’m low risk and low exposure and so are they. But rational didn’t seem to cut it, these fears were tenacious. I realized how irrational they were when talking to Cal. But after that I mused on them and I saw the layers: fear of random contagion, fear of chaos, fear of losing what and who I love, until the bedrock...fear of my own death. Non-existence actually. The whole shebang out like a wink. I had a sensation of falling, and a shortness of breath. Weirdly when I saw this was the root, I found myself kind of observing. Oh yeah, I’m afraid of unbecoming, and I’m not sure God is there. At the same time as acknowledging this fear, another part of me gently tapped my shoulder and whispered how many times Christ had actually been there and come through and taken me or others through dire straits. I sat there holding in my imagination both my doubt and faith, both my irrational fear, and a gentle almost undetectable reassurance. It wasn’t an argument, it was as if both sides were just there, present to me. 

Maybe because both sides were in equal focus, I noticed my breathing had slowed. And I knew I wanted to lean into the uncertainty, that somehow forward was through. I know that sounds kinda cheesy. But existentially it was like still feeling my anxieties but at a deeper level wanting to enter life. Not in spite of the anxiety, but with it. We ended up going over to Penny & Wade’s and had a good discussion and visit. 

I don’t quite know what this means. All I know is acknowledging both the deep seated fears and my own historical experiences opened up something in me and I am grateful for that manna.

— Linda

For some reason this question brought me back to my seemingly aimless 20’s. Lydia and I had just come back from an extraordinary bicycle trip cycling 1500 miles through 5 western European countries, and we had begun to live in a small community house experiment with 4 others. I was flung outside of my Edenic adventure into no-man’s-land. Jobless, feeling unhinged relationally in my particularly Enneagram ‘5-ish’ way that holds others at bay and then wonders why friendships are so thin feeling, I wandered through our large Wolseley house wondering what my life was about. How does one get kick-started into adulthood? I had no idea, so loneliness and depression crept in. I had become devoid of life energy, particularly as winter dragged on. Our community experiment seemed like a half-baked idea, with not enough ‘buy-in’, so I just resorted to typing up some of Paul’s Cornerstone sermons on a very ordinary typewriter. They would go into a file folder, which, who knows, may never see the light of day. 

Oddly, what gave me the most joy that winter was listening to Bruce Cockburn’s ‘Going to the Country’ song, on one of those crappy 80’s cassette players. His lovely sense of journey despite uncertainty carved a small patch of hope in my heart. So while everybody else was toiling away at their vocations, I played the little song, over and over, hoping some of its optimism would rub off on me. Not long afterward, I received a call out of the blue. A friend of my sister’s said he had a job for me. I could be a freelance writer for the Free Press, which I eagerly accepted. And although that didn’t give me much work, he found another job for me, this one with more hours. And Cornerstone more and more became the community and teaching-centered place I found my spiritual home in. Looking back, that green shoot of Cockburn’s inspired song played an integral role in my growth in an East of Eden-like time, perhaps more importantly than I have ever given it credit. Manna.

 Cockburn: “Going to the Country”

— Lyle

Lent this year (2021) has felt a bit like a dust bowl at times. Maybe it’s the ongoing pandemic, but there’s been a feeling of finding it hard to pray, and of feeling kind of flat towards God. And I’ve had a few sleepless nights, last night being one of them. It starts with pain in my neck but begins to feel torturous as I struggle to pray, but can’t, and feel lifeless. You know how those hours just drag on. And I sometimes don’t know how not to over-carry other people’s burdens, like my friend Margaret whose husband just died suddenly, or Wade whose brother has cancer, or my cousin whose only son just died in his sleep at 21. Friends whose marriage is ending. There’s too much suffering. I remember during our Ash Wednesday Zoom meeting, I’d said “Lent finds us,” and it has! There is also good stuff going on in my life, but those sleepless nights knock me off my feet. 

This morning’s zoom call with Paul and Bev and Lyle was helpful in guiding my thoughts. I wondered if I was doing something wrong, and Paul reminded me that it all sounds pretty normal. This is what people go through, and I’m human like everyone. I’ve been re-reading my own Lent e-book and it’s funny how very apt the entries sometimes are, like I could have written them yesterday. Today’s word was “forgetting”. I feel like I’m forgetting and letting God down, but God in his grace looks past all that and doesn’t forget me. I don’t have to try to be God for God. I’ll just have to trust that God means it when he says he remembers me in his mercy. Joy will find a way. Here’s last year’s haiku:

Whate'er this day brings
I will never forget you
Tattooed on God's heart

— Lydia

4.  If you were on Yahweh’s legal team, how would you refute this pessimistic harsh truth that seems all too true? Feel free to put yourself in either context: ancient or modern.

I have been musing on this question as I am getting ready for my presentation next week. It seems whenever God delivers Israel they go into some sort of difficult time. It’s like the saying :”going from the frying pan to the fire.” When Israel is delivered from Egypt they end up wandering in the desert for 40 years. When Israel is delivered from Babylon they have to go back to a broken down Jerusalem with years of difficult reconstruction. It happens even in Jesus’s life. At his baptism he hears God tell him he is his beloved Son and then he is sent out to be tested for 40 days in the desert. 

It made me ask if God has a different idea of comfort than we do. I see comfort as deliverance from oppression into some sort of joy. There is that here in Isaiah as well but I wonder if Gods “agenda” is for the deepening of his people. If God desires the evolution of our consciousness then it seems that we are delivered from our external oppression and then given the opportunity to be delivered from our internal oppression. I can’t remember where but I recall someone saying that Israel needed the wilderness to help them be delivered from their inner Egypt. That is what is needed for us to have a truly flourishing life, for us to enter into Eden. 

To change the metaphor a bit I have been thinking this Lent about needing a new operating system. The old one is no long working. But for me to enter into the new system I need to dismantle the old one, or maybe, just consent to having the old one dismantled. This seems to be the same process Israel was involved in. Being delivered from outer and inner oppression to enter more fully into the joy of the Lord. 

— Cal

It is true, the grand and sweeping promises of God to Israel while in exile did not come to fruition. The liberation spoken of in 2nd Isaiah was going to be a game-changer on a sweeping scale. In reality, their return was fraught with squabbles, impure alliances, and disappointments.  So do these promises hold any merit?

I wonder whether ‘the point’ of the scriptures isn’t ‘literal’ in that way - headed towards a concrete ‘happy ending’. Life is always throwing us challenges - we need texts like this to help guide us along; texts to chew and ponder to foster a deeper listening ear (shema). Isn’t that what we would want to pass on to our children, if we could? Words that would provide some light through the inevitable rough times, and lead them to a deeper trust, and love for their close ones and the wider world. Those metaphors of exile and new life speak to us still. 

— Verda

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