"Shine on the Catholic Church" -- Joni Mitchell

After years out of the limelight, Canadian singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell (64) has emerged from the shadows to present a new album with the uplifting title Shine. Mitchell’s title track attacks the Catholic Church. What else is new! It’s fashionable again to be anti-Catholic and Mitchell has always gravitated quickly to fashionable agendas.

She may be getting long in the tooth but her melodic lyrics flow into the seduction of anti-Christian 21 Century:

"Shine on the Catholic Church,
And the prisons that it owns,” Her lyrical vitriol continues,
“Shine on all the Churches/that love less and less."

Shine a light of examination
What light will JM shine on the Catholic Church? Shine the brightest and most intense light on the Catholic Church, Joni. You focus on its mistakes and frail humanity? Look deeper. You will find Jesus Christ at its center and the light of His truth will make your human examination pale then turn inward to self-examination.[1]

Christ is, after all, the light of the world. He made the Brazilian rain forests Joni sang to benefit and the environment she championed.

The Bible tells us this about Jesus Christ:

“All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.   In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” (John 1.3-5. Also see Colossians 1.15-16, NKJV)

Prisons of flesh and minds

What are the prisons that Mitchell thinks the Catholic Church owns? Christ came to set humanity free.

“Happy is he who has the God of Jacob for his help, Whose hope is in the Lord his God, Who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; Who keeps truth forever,Who executes justice for the oppressed, Who gives food to the hungry. The Lord gives freedom to the prisoners." (Psalm 146.5-7)

Don’t sing to me about figurative or illusions of prisons, Joni; there are people who really are imprisoned -- whether by crippling fears and phobias, or broken bodies, broken hearts, or addictions or sin. The worst prisons are not made of concrete, bars and locked metal doors, they are found in human hearts and minds.

My prison is a body that is slowly turning into unresponsive dead weight and physical paralysis of neurological dysfunction.

Good news
The good news is that no matter what makes up a person’s prison, the truth and liberation of Christ’s light and truth can penetrate through their walls and darkness. Christ’s truth can (and does) set people free, even today.

Catholicism, and the truth it holds in Christ, has helped my heart and spirit soar despite a body that weighs me down.

The truth will set you free
Jesus said,

“If you hold to my teachings, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8.31b-32. Also see Galatians 5.1)

And so it is. The Catholic Church owns no prisons, Joni. It is the repository of truth. But then perhaps you can't see it. For forty years you sang,

I’ve looked at life from both sides now,
From up and down,
And still somehow,
Its life’s illusions I recall,
I really don’t know life at all. [2]

You may live with illusions, Joni, but Christ is the truth and He is life’s final reality. You need a new light to shine on the Catholic Church. Keep searching Joni, keep searching. You may find the truth in Christ, and the truth will set you free indeed.

Mark Pickup

[1] John 8.12
[2] Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now, 1967.

The gentle art of interdependence

There is an African proverb made famous by Hillary Clinton that says It Takes a Village to raise a child. The proverb means, of course, that the entire community has a stake in the proper nurture and raising of a child, not just its parents. It also involves grandparents, teachers, pastors, neighbors. We all have a stake in the raising of our community’s children. It speaks to the concept of human connectedness and interdependence. It’s the villagers who make a village.

Individuals investing themselves in their neighbors or neighborhoods – now that's what really makes life better in a community! Human relationships are what makes life rich. People who give and not just take. This touches on the interconnectedness that binds people together in a community.

Human interdependence accepts others as having equal natural dignity. When people accept this concept, it sparks the beginning of the universality of human dignity.

Christ said, “Give to everyone who asks of you. And from him who takes away your goods do not ask them back. And just as you want men to do to you, you also do to them likewise.” (Luke 6.31, also Matthew 5.46.)

Golden rule
We commonly call this the Golden rule. There’s something universal about it. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Isn’t the Golden Rule really an extension of the Hebrew Old Testament concept to love your neighbor as yourself? In ancient China, Confucius said, “Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.”[1] In Hindu writings you will find this quote “One should not behave towards others in a way which is disagreeable to oneself. This is the essence of morality.”[2]

Do unto others
How would you like to be treated? That’s how you should respond to other people. How would you like others to treat your children or grandchildren? Treat your neighbors children or grandchildren that way. Treat them with the lovingkindness and understanding you would want your own children to receive in your neighbor’s company.

Treat the old people you meet with the same courtesy and deference you would want your parents to receive from people. The senior you meet may be somebody’s parent and they were certainly somebody’s child. They were, at one time, an infant sleeping in a mother’s arms and that mother hoped and prayed for her child who is the old person you meet on the street. If that is not true, and that old person you meet was never cradled or prayed for … then they are in special need of your kindness and friendship.

That is the essence of concern for the common good our communities should reflect at their best.

The Common Good

The common good of any community concerns itself with all its citizens and embraces the natural human dignity of every human life in their midst. The common good can be understood as the sum total of social conditions that allow people – as groups or individuals – to reach their potential and flourish. The common good of a community is always concerned with the progress of all its people, and recognizes the leadership of public authorities.

Human interdependence accepts others as having equal natural dignity. That is the beginning of the universality of human dignity.

Most of us will make our marks for equal, natural human dignity in the places where we live. Our legacy will occur in our communities. It will happen through what we give to enrich the lives our neighbors and communities, not what we take.

Make no mistake, your children and grandchildren watch the respect and dignity you show to your fellowman in your daily life. Be one of those citizen who holds up human dignity. Commit yourselves to furthering the common good within our community. Whether it’s through your church, community organizations, or service clubs … there are many vehicles to volunteer your time to make community life richer.

Give more than you take. Be other-centered in your community life rather than self-centered. Saint Paul said: “Let each of you look out not only for your own interests, but also the interests of others.” (Philippians 2.4.)

A community where people are equally concerned for the development, dignity and rights of others, as in their own interests is truly a community.

It is the villagers who make a village.

Mark Pickup
[1] C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1978) . Appendix, P.50.)

[2] Hinduism. Mahabharata, Anusasana Parva 113.8.(See http://www.unification.net/ws/theme015.htm#6)

Reflections on sorrow and fear

Acquired disability is a lonesome journey. At the deepest point of grieving, life can seem like an endless a series of disappointments, accommodations and compromises, lost opportunities, and inexpressible sorrow. One can feel totally alone even in a crowded room. It’s not that friends are unkind—just hard to find.

Then there are those dreaded moments at the end of each evening when one must make his way to the terror of the bedroom. It’s in there that the darkness awaits to engulf a grieving person in fitful sleep-wake torture. A chorus of despair, self-doubts and fear whisper, “You are alone. Nobody understands.” It is there, in the middle of an endless night, lying wide-awake staring into darkness, that a bed can become a rack. The horrible truth of life’s misfortune can seem too great to bear. A human soul lays open like a gaping wound. Whimpers break into sobs of raw, pulsating grief.

No endless night

Grievers beware! Emotions are unreliable, they are apt intensify the feelings of isolation out of all proportion. Tears obscure vision and grief distorts perceptions of reality. There is no such thing as an endless night. It only seems that way. The longest night must eventually give way to dawn. It is only fear and grief that tell us otherwise. Even the pitch black of arctic winter days will, in due course, transform into a peculiar summer midnight sun.

Victors not victims

Many people with profound disabilities have risen above their predicaments and the abyss of intense grief to incredible spiritual heights and human achievements—sometimes in spite their disabilities and sometimes because of them.

Perhaps the most famous example is Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827). Most of his vast contribution to the world of music was written in either partial or complete deafness. George Frederic Handel (1685-1759) suffered from manic depression. His beloved Messiah was written at the end of a depressive bout. John Milton (1608-74) was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost (1667). Paradise Lost is generally considered to be the greatest epic in the English language. (Remember that John Milton also wrote Paradise Regained!) Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an “invalid and a recluse” to use the phrasing of one biographer. There was nothing invalid about her!—her gift for lyric poetry is with us to this day. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was physically crippled from polio at the age of thirty-nine, yet as America’s 32nd President he led an entire nation through most of the Great Depression and Second World War.

Everybody is afraid

Grief, sorrow and fear are not unique to people with disabilities: they are common to the human experience. Everybody is acquainted with sorrow. Everyone is afraid. The ‘No Fear’ T-shirt isn’t true. With the exception of babies and small children, everyone has fears from the past and fears of the future.

Most people are afraid of serious self-examination lest they come face to face with inner demons, character flaws and emotional handicaps. They might be challenged to go through a difficult process of change. Some people fear being forgotten while others fear being remembered.

Some people may be afraid of committing themselves wholly to love yet afraid of being unloved. Many people are afraid of committing themselves to lives with purpose—yet despise those who do.

Others are afraid of dying outside God’s grace yet they are afraid to truly live within it. They may be afraid of being seen as extreme yet afraid to venture outside mediocrity.

Great family of the heavy-hearted
Helen Keller (1880-1968) went deaf and blind before she was two years of age. In an era when society restricted the lives of people with disabilities (not to mention women), Helen Keller overcame monumental obstacles to rise to an international stature advocating world peace, women’s suffrage, human dignity and civil rights for other people with disabilities. She said:

“When it seems that our sorrow is too great to be borne, let us think of the great family of the heavy hearted into which our grief has given us entrance. Inevitably, we feel about us their arms, their sympathy, and their understanding.”

That’s my point! All humanity longs for affinity and the understanding of others. All humanity is longing for belonging. A young man grieving his paralysis from a recent spinal cord injury may not yet know it but his grief has given him entrance into the “great family of the heavy hearted.” Those of us who are full-fledged members of that “great family” have the Passion and cross of Christ as our chief example and inspiration.

Affirmation in Christ

It is to Christ we can ultimately turn with the knowledge his sufferings dwarfed all human pain and sorrows. There is no grief Jesus does not understand! Christ is the ultimate affirmation. He is the ultimate over-comer. He can change us, if we allow it, from victims to victors.

Mark Pickup

For my latest blog "Pro-Choice Cathoics?" go to http://humanlifematters.blogspot.com/

Mark

Remembering a Canadian paradise

For nine months in 1981, I was employed as Director of Family and Community Services for the Canadian mountain community of Jasper, Alberta. Located in the midst of 10,000 square kilometers of a national park bearing the same name, Jasper was the perfect blend of nature and community. It was, for me, life at its best and my most peaceful and happy time.

Canadian beauty

I was a relatively new Christian. The community welcomed my family with open arms. My family was young (daughter aged four and son aged two). Life in Jasper was like a cowichan sweater, jeans and hiking boots on a brisk Saturday morning. My wife LaRee and I spent countless hours with our small children in some of the most picturesque scenery Canada has to offer.

In was common to see elk or dear wandering mainstreet of Jasper. Each morning we were greeted by fresh alpine air. We swam in clear aqua-marine lakes and bathed regularly in Miette Hot Springs. If it had been left to me I would never have left my remote Canadian paradise.

It was from that remote paradise that I heard about world affairs on radio, or by television shipped in to town a day late. I remember hearing about the assassination attempts on President Reagan and Pope John Paul II.

A paradise lost
Despite the near-perfect blend of natural settings, one felt cut off from the world in Jasper. It was an eight hour drive to Vancouver and five hours to Edmonton. While I was as happy as a bird, my wife was miserable. She’s a city girl. And so we felt Jasper after less than a year and went back to the city.

In hindsight, I think it was providential. God gave me a quiet time before the storm of multiple sclerosis hit. Within a few years I developed MS. Jasper would not have been a good place to be diagnosed with a disease with catastrophic physical effects. The nearest neurologist is hours away in Edmonton.

We have not lived in Jasper for more than 25 five years. It seems like another lifetime. My world is now one of chronic illness, disability, accommodation, accessible house and transportation, and continually adjusting to new levels of physical degeneration.

Learning to be content
The majestic of the Canadian Rocky mountains must be viewed from a distance and as a spectator, from my wheelchair, on occasional visits to the mountains. Sitting in a canoe on a clear, pristine aqua-marine lake, is just a memory. Granted, it saddens me but my consolation is that I have drawn closer to the Creator of it all. He is teaching me to be content in whatever state I am.

Saint Paul spoke about being content: “Not that I speak in regard to need, for I have learned in whatever state I am,  to be content” (Philippians 4:11). The author of Hebrews tells us, “Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.” [1]

I’ve been such a slow learner throughout my disability journey. But I am sure of one thing: Throughout even the darkest moments, God has not abandoned me.
He has not delivered me from suffering: He is with me in my suffering. Just as the Scriptures promised, God has not abandoned me or forsaken me!

Granted, I can not venture into the wilderness anymore, but I have His presence and my memories that come to life during the long Canadian winters, when I gaze into the glowing embers of my fireplace.

If I close my eyes I can hear an elk bugle.

Mark Pickup

[1] Cf. Genesis 28.15, Deut 31.6,8, Josh. 1.5, 9.