At the Games

“Good things come in threes” – Joel Plaskett, Nova Scotia pop singer.

Joel wasn’t talking about theology in that lyric, but he could have been, and he certainly sent me into a Lenten reflection.

I heard Joel singing on CBC radio, a few days after I was back from the Winter Olympics, where the worshiped trio were gold, silver and bronze, in descending order.

Christianity also has its triplet, God, Son and Holy Spirit, and they are not in any simple order.

They are interwoven in time and space.

Their complexity and mystery is a large portion of why I am Christian.

During Lent, I feel the mysticism of Christian life more intensely, as God’s involvement with humanity deepens with his Son’s final journey, and the Spirit settles upon us as inheritors of faith that emerges.  

At the Olympics, much was about triumph. Nobody surrenders willingly. People finish races with broken bones; they fly recklessly over jumps on the final turn _ risking all _ and crashing in a glorious attempt to convert a mere 3rd into a 1st or 2nd.

Lent is a stark contrast. It is the story of letting go, of deliberate surrender. There was one moment at the Olympics, after Joannie Rochette finished her skate program and blew a heavenly kiss to her dead mother, that there was that sense of surrender. She seemed to have skated as a tribute, an offering of love.

As I rode a bus back from Whistler Mountain to Vancouver, the driver went perilously fast around steep corners with precipitous drops, and I felt a what-the-heck, I’m-not-going-to-worry fatalism.It was mixed with relief at Sidney’s goal, announced with unabashed joy by the lead-footed driver to the uninterested busload of Austrian and German journalists.

I watched the mountains that fell into the ocean and felt relief at being immeasurably small and insignificant, and I felt a relief at going home to my family and more regular religious practice. After immersion in the fury of the Olympics, there was a beginning of a surrender to the Trinitarian God, again.

In the book Things Seen and Unseen, Nora Gallagher documents a year lived in faith.

During Epiphany, a friend who is uneasy with Gallagher’s faith asks her why she would believe Jesus is God’s son, and “what about people who believe other things, who follow other faiths?”

 “Because the story is compelling to me,” she responds. “And because I believe in the Incarnation. I want to believe that God intervenes.”

The story becomes a lens to see the world. It is mystical and it also flows logically, day in  and day out.

God, the Holy Spirit and Jesus’s presence are sometimes hard to see in the materialism of the Games. But they are everywhere, flowing into and within one another.

At times, I managed to escape work in Whistler and go to the Squamish Lil’wat cultural centre, where the cultures of the Squamish and Lil’wat aboriginal people are portrayed and celebrated.

“These mountains are gifts. Gifts from the good creator to our people,” said Lil’wat chief Leonard Andrew in a film shown at the centre.

The mountains all had names eons before settlers came here and built ski hills and then sprawling resorts. The People have stories of a flood that  “came over the land and transformed humans into mountains.” (Shades of Noah, but with higher peaks.)

Where we see volcanic peaks and granite cliffs emerging through the clouds, the aboriginal people see God’s Creation.

The women have ventured into the coastal rainforests, at the foot of the mountains, for some thousands of years to take away the cedar bark for baskets. “The forests we gather from are the same ones where our great grandmothers gathered too,” said Charlene Williams, an elder who spoke in the film. In the film, a woman chants a prayer of thanks as the bark is stripped.

The Squamish and Lil’wat used the wool of mountain goats for weaving, the bull rushes for mats, the blueberries for nourishment. Life was closely tied to Creation.

During these days, I was reading the latest novel by Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I sat down and wept. It is a novel of “forgiveness,” telling a young woman’s struggle to go forward into love despite the pain it creates and the risks it entails.

The young man she falls in love with is studying theology, and he says, “Every day, God gives us the sun _ and also one moment in which we have the ability to change everything that makes us unhappy.”
One day at the cultural centre, I heard a Lil'wat group called Kalan Wi singing (http://www.slcc.ca/whistler-2010/cultural-performances/kalan), and in particular noticed a song, almost a chant, where the lyrics, “Celebrate, your Life” were repeated frequently in the ancient language.

Here, the Spirit was alive. In that “one moment,” when we have the intuition of God’s presence, the Spirit arises, the day is transformed. It was that one moment to be grateful for my life and those present in it, to celebrate.

To speak of Jesus a moment. The Son.

 “All that Jesus said is to love God, love others, and forgive yourself and your enemies. If you do these things, you’ll have eternal life. Eternal life is not a reward in heaven for being good; it’s what you experience when you really love. People of other faiths who practice loving certainly must experience the same thing,” Gallagher told her friend.

The Son is the role model and companion, the route to letting go and surrender. “What is asked of Jesus is what is asked of us: that we give up illusion _ it’s false promises and its addicting inertia _ and come to our senses,” wrote Gallagher.

In those days in the desert that were a prelude to all of the Lenten experience, we read that Jesus was offered false illusions: power, wealth, magical abilities. He turns his back on them. Live in reality, live with the people you are with, don’t seek the magical new lover around the next corner. 

In Church, three days after returning home, many people greeted me with smiles and asked if  I had fun at the Games. I didn’t quite know what to say.

In choir we sang “Slow me Down,” one of my favourite communion hymns, where the men and women break into parts. The lyrics are simple.

Slow me down/ still my restless mind / Quell my fears / Quench my thirsty soul / Fill me with your love / God of truth / God of love.

As we sang, a family leaned on one another in grief, a child in nearby pew played, an old man pushed his body upwards with his cane, beginning the walk to communion.

The rings seemed far away. This was Jesus’ reality, God’s creation, the Spirit’s presence, all three discovered in another moment of another day.