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Connection
PRESBYTERIAN
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SUMMER 2018
  MESSAGE FROM THE GENERAL SECRETARY
 PRESBYTERIAN
 Seeds of Hope
 By the Rev. Ian Ross-McDonald, Life and Mission Agency
The Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann has written that “memo- ry produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair.”
Rebecca Solnit (whose experience inspired the eternally useful and ur- gently needed word “mansplaining”— how did we live so long without it?) reflects on these words in her book en- titled Hope in the Dark. She writes that Brueggemann’s “extraordinary state- ment...reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats, cruelties and injustices, or of a past that was some lovely golden age now irretrievably lost, or we can tell a more complicated and accurate story, one that has room for the best and worst, for atrocities and liberations, for grief and jubilation.”
Throughout her book, Solnit writes about how to find, keep and nurture hope—especially in times that feel desperate.
It’s easy to forget that we have the re- sources for hopefulness in the church. People of faith understand that memory defends against despair. We resist am- nesia and the accompanying despair whenever we read scripture or cel- ebrate the sacraments, both of which call us back to reality and to hope. Sin- fulness and grace, together: this messy heritage is recalled every time we retell this story of God’s redemptive hand at work in human history. This is how we seed hope in an increasingly desperate time. In these acts of worship we are instructed not just to remember but to remember rightly.
The Bible and sacraments record the reality of the biblical story and who we have really been as the people of God—the bad as well as the good. These acts of faith strengthen us to see what might be redeemed or newly born. This is brave and sometime har- rowing work, and it’s easy to falter. So often we would much rather turn away and choose the false remembrance of a perfect or a perfectly wicked past.
If amnesia is lost memory, nostalgia is distorted memory that idealizes a past that never existed. Looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses makes the present seem anemic and disastrous. Through those lenses all we can see is loss: what we believe
has been taken from us, and all the ways in which we fear we are dimin- ished. If amnesia yields despair, the inevitable consequences and signs of nostalgia are anger and resentment. And we are a church that needs to think carefully and talk honestly about nostalgia, anger and resentment in our denomination’s current incarnation.
The seeds of hope are born of a careful, difficult harvest: the union of the task of remembering the complex reality of what has been and the hard work of looking for what might yet be. And hope does require work—it’s not a passive gift. In one of the most con- founding lines in American literature, the poet Emily Dickinson wrote that “hope is a thing with feathers.” Exactly what she meant is not clear, but at least it means that hope is alive. And it has to be cared for and nurtured if it is to keep on living.
It may be more aspirational than descriptive to say that the General As- sembly is not just a business meet- ing but also an act of hope. At annual meetings the church gathers to recall the complex story of our collective ministry in the world with records and reports. We are the sum of our expe- riences and sometimes the church misses the mark and must confess. At the same time, the church must recall the bold acts of justice, kindness and risky faith it has been led to participate in. If we fail to honour this heritage of wholeness, to embrace a complicated and accurate understanding of who we are and what we can do, how we will ever become who we are called to be or play our part in the new world God desires?
General Assembly triggers hope in another way. In assembling, we recall that we are part of something larger in the same way that the piece of com- munion bread we pinch off is part of a larger loaf, our sip of wine only a taste of an overflowing cup and the water on our foreheads at baptism only drops in an endless flowing river. As Garry Wills reminds us in his book St. Augustine’s Memory, “memory is our path to others” because “commu- nity is built on associations treasured in memory.” Wills cites studies that show that people who commit violence in and against their communities have forgotten the ties that bind—the past and current relationships and friend- ship that link us to each other. Forgetful of the web of community, they do as
they please and act for themselves. For all the discipline, headaches and fric- tion that unity and assembling together requires, it’s better than the heartache, insanity, false bliss and hell of being alone.
The novelist Timothy Findley created
Just a quick note that I think is im- por tant about flags (Issue 5, “Just Wondering,” page 27). When I at- tended St. Andrew and St. Paul in Montreal, I asked about the more beaten up flags. The answer I was given is that as a regimental church (a congregation with a battalion at- tached) we flew the flags that were used by the battalion, thus some flags (WWI & WWII–era especially) were more tattered than others. Their state is a testament to the tri- als the troops went through and thus they were not something to be re- placed for aesthetic purposes.
—Chris Clarke, B.C.
characters in his books that struggled with the complex reality of the best and worst of their lives and the world they live in. In the books Findley au- tographed, below his name he would write “Against Despair.” It’s a cat- echism worth remembering.
lowing advice from Father Camillo Torres, the Latin American priest who joined the revolution to free the poor from the grasping hands of the rich. Father Torres believed that the expropriation of church proper ty for the sake of the poor was a part of fidelity to the Gospel of Jesus Christ; more recently, William Stringfellow, in his work, A Public and Private Faith, argues for the same detach- ment from church property and its sacrifice for the sake of those in need. Chalmers Presbyterian, a church here on Anishinaabeg land, is, for example, considering selling its land to an affordable-housing organization and using the bottom floor of the multi-residential unit as worship space. The Rev. Ross-Mc- Donald’s emphasis on the freedom of the life of Jesus is instructive, as is the idea of pilgrimage; people on the move travel with emptier hands, lighter than others.
—Joshua Weresch, ON
  LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
                                                         Thank you for your
particularly, your quotation of Abra- ham Joshua Heschel, whose life and work have remained inspir- ing (“Considering Church Building Strategically,” page 3). In regards to the consecration of time rather than space, I would offer the fol-
ar ticle
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