Andre Forget

Westerns are origin stories. Myths about taming the frontier, they narrate the first encounters between colonists and indigenous peoples, the lawless feudal era of the cowboy and the cattle baron, and the arrival of law, order, and the state. A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that Shane shows how order is built on a mythic violence which sits uncomfortably between the feudal age and the age of the nation; it uses feudal means to undo the feudal order. This violence, however, is kept at arm’s length from the peaceful community that benefits from it. John Ford’s 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance takes up a lot of the same questions but ends on a significantly more cynical note.

Even the first frames of the film establish a different atmosphere: a train steams across the plains and pulls into the platform at Shinbone. A well dressed gentleman and his wife disembark, and we find out that the man, Ransom “Rance” Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), is a senator just come in from the east. We learn in the first couple of scenes that Rance and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) are returning home for the funeral of a friend, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Most of the film is a long exposition that takes the viewer back to Rance’s first arrival in Shinbone many years previous. A young, idealistic lawyer moving west, he is waylaid outside of town by the unpricipled gunslinger and general bully Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), who tears up one of Rance’s lawbooks and then horsewhips him after pronouncing with relish “I’ll teach you law…western law.”

 
Rance is found and brought to Paul’s Place, a steakhouse in Shinbone operated by Peter, Nora and their daughter Hallie, by Tom Doniphon. A cynical but noble horse rancher, Tom instructs Rance to “start packin’ a handgun” if he wants justice from Liberty. “I don’t want to kill him. I want to put him in jail.” is Rance’s only response. At this, Tom warns him that “out here a man settles his own problems” and slaps his holstered gun emphatically. Tom is apparently the only man Liberty is afraid of, but Tom operates almost purely as a feudal character – if Liberty gets in his way he roughs Liberty up, but feels no compulsion to bring Liberty to justice. Nor does the comical, weak, ineffectual Sherrif Link Appleyard (Andy Devine). The townspeople are afraid of Liberty, but have no real recourse for defending themselves against his violence.

 
The fundamental tension at the heart of the film is similar to that in Shane: how can you establish law and order in a world where only violence is respected? Rance, the perfect liberal, attempts to do so using education, egalitarian principles, non-violent social action, reason, and personal example; Tom, the feudal knight errant, through personal loyalty, social magnetism and martial ability. The order in Tom’s world is based on the force of Tom’s personality (and his abilities with a gun) – Rance’s world is based on personal weakness that manipulates rhetoric to inspire collective strength.

 
The key to this is Rance’s femininity. A casual viewer in the 21st century might disregard the fact that Rance spends a good deal of the film in an apron, but in a lot of ways it is the key to his character. Rance comes from a civilization in which dish-washing and pacifism are not understood to be gendered; when he comes west he is first criticized for these things because they are understood to be “weak.” However, as the townspeople see his reckless courage and noble idealism this femininity is recast as a bizarre kind of strength: he is powerful in a completely different way from Valance or Tom, a way that destabilizes the social order of Shinbone.

 
But though he destabilizes the social order, he cannot overturn it; a fact which is driven home when Dutton Peabody, newspaperman, local drunk, burgeoning politician and one of Rance’s best friends is brutally beaten by Liberty Valance. Rance and Peabody successfully ran to represent Shinbone in an election at the territorial capital; this election will decide whether the territory becomes a state or not. Valance, supported by the cattle barons, ran against them. It is at this decisive moment, with his friend lying almost dead, that Rance fully realizes how things stand: in the end, Valance cannot be converted, only destroyed.

 
The final shootout is a stark emasculation of the standard Western trope. Rance, wearing an apron, can barely hold his pistol properly while Valance plays with him slowly before deciding to finish the job. It seems almost miraculous when Rance takes a quick shot and Valance falls to the ground. It isn’t until later, in one of the film’s most iconoclastic scenes, that Tom Doniphon privately reveals that it was he who shot Valance from the shadows to save Rance’s life. He did not save Rance because he believed in Rance’s mission, nor did he shoot Valance because he thought Valance needed to die. Like a true knight errant, he saved Rance because Hallie (who he is in love with) loves Rance, and he wants Hallie to be happy. Curiously enough, it is only after Rance realizes that he is not the man who shot Liberty Valance but is only the man who appears to have shot Liberty Valance that he can go on to build a political career.

 
The last scene in the movie shows the older Rance and Hallie returning from Tom’s funeral on the train. Rance thanks the porter for the service, and the porter responds by saying “you think nothing of it. Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance!” The shot lingers on Rance as he pensively blows out the match he was going to light his pipe with while Hallie looks melancholically off into the distance.

 
The film meticulously presents the basic complications in the origin story of the American state; Rance explicitly embodies the ideals of law and order. He doesn’t want personal revenge on Valance, he wants institutionalized justice – he wants to see Valance in jail. He wants things done fairly, he wants people to know their rights. But he cannot shake the ghosts of feudalism. He does not have the Sherriff deputize him so he can raise a posse to go after Valance when Valance attacks his friend, as a good statist like himself should have; he goes after Valance himself. While there is an element of justice to what he is doing, because his ineptitude as a gunfighter has already been brutally established it is impossible to read the shootout as the efficient, teleological institutional justice that Rance has been preaching since he arrived in Shinbone; this is personal justice, which is why Rance must put his own body at risk to claim it despite the fact that failure is almost inevitable.

 
Rance, though he survives, is haunted by the fact that his victory came because he put aside his principles. In what surely must be one of the most bitterly ironic scenes in American cinema, we watch Peabody speak on behalf of Rance at the convention of delegates at the territorial capital. Rance, who is running against the established candidate and cattle baron Buck Langhorne, is visibly uncomfortable with Peabody’s passionately eloquent characterization of him as a man “who came to us not packing a gun but carrying instead a bag of lawbooks.” When Major Cassius Starbuckle (John Carradine, in a scene-stealing performance), Langhorne’s mouthpiece, calls Rance out as a hypocrite for running on a platform of law and order after killing Valance, Rance flees the room. It is only when Tom tells him that he is not guilty of killing Valance that he feels able to return and become the territorial delegate.

 
The whole scene is a carnival of overblown rhetoric and deep-biting cynicism. Government is shown to be nothing less than a soft glove which masks the iron-fisted realities of the frontier; the cattle barons who hired Liberty Valance as an assassin are recast as upright citizens, the drunken Peabody as a noble statesman. At one point Starbuckle paints Valance as an “honest citizen” cut down by a bloodthirsty Rance. However, the reality is that Rance’s killing of Valance has actually added to his image – the people want a man who stands for law and order, but they also want a hero, a man who can transcend law and order. They want the illusion of democracy and law but venerate the reality of founding violence. Everything is appearance, and victory goes to the one who can sell appearance most successfully.

 
The only character who remains uncompromised is Tom Doniphon, and the film is really about him. Everything he does he does for the people in his life – for him there are no abstractions, no principles that could be seen as universal or existing outside of context. He does not even claim that Rance is wrong in general, just that Rance is wrong when it comes to the west (“out here a man settles his own problems”). But Tom’s moral code leads to the destruction of his own world – because of his loyalty to Hallie, he saves Rance’s life and by doing so accepts that he will lose both Hallie and his place in the world. As he bitterly says to Rance, “Hallie’s your girl now; you taught her to read and write, now give her something to read and write about.” There is no place for Tom outside of the feudal order. Link Appleyard mentions at the beginning of the film, at Tom’s funeral, that “he didn’t carry no handgun, he didn’t for years.” By shooting Liberty Valance, he doomed himself to a life in which he would slowly become nothing.

 
Herein lies the key difference between Shane and Liberty Valance; while Shane has the gunfighter whose founding violence has allowed for the establishment of law and order ride off into the darkness at the end of the film, Liberty Valance has the gunfighter’s fame appropriated by a politician and his life emptied of meaning as the world around him changes; Ford does not let our consciences off the hook – instead we must accept that we have benefitted from this feudal violence and yet made an alien of the person who carried it out on our behalf. Moreover, while Shane gives us a gunfighter who fascinates an otherwise quite peaceful community but remains clearly outside of it (thus allowing it to remain ideologically pure), Liberty Valance shows that mythologization of originary violence is integral to the nation state; it reminds us that we glory in the remembered violence that created us.

 
I believe that the difference between these two films, divided chronologically by almost a decade, points to a deepening sense of cynicism towards the accepted American origin story, a sense of cynicism which in the later sixties would give rise to the social upheavals of feminism, civil rights, protest of the Vietnam war, etc. The next installment will take up Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly as a way of looking to the further disintegration of the American mythology.

Andre Forget is a member of St. Margaret’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He works in the admissions department at Canadian Mennonite University and is a co-editor of Catholic Commons.

So says Canadian Anglican bishop and former member of the Ontario Legislature, The Rt. Rev. Dennis Drainville, who will be presenting a lecture on February 29th, at 7:00pm, entitled “Where Have all the (Good) Leaders Gone?” It will be held at Seeley Hall, Trinity College, in Toronto, Ontario. All are welcome.

See poster here.

Andre Forget

It’s a familiar image. The screen brightens to reveal a ruggedly picturesque landscape of rolling plains, high bluffs and twisting rivers; in the distance we can see a small speck that slowly grows larger until it is identified as a lone horseman riding towards us. The origin of the horseman is unimportant. He has appeared out of the landscape, and we already know that when the film closes we will see him disappear back into the landscape: he is elemental, barely human.

It is worth noting that even those who have never seen a Western (let alone the specific one I had in mind while writing this, Shane) immediately know more or less what is coming. There will be terse masculinity, tough yet vulnerable femininity, saloons, cattle rustlers, gunfighting, and most importantly, when the dust settles, justice. The fact that we are all still familiar with the motifs and tropes of a genre that was already dying when our parent’s generation was in its youth is remarkable in this current age of instant creation and fast turnover, but I think that it owes something to the imaginative power of the Western: if we can speak of an American mythology, this is it.

As political debate heats to a fever pitch south of the border in anticipation of the coming election and the current Canadian government embarks on its own experiments in national imagination, my thoughts turn increasingly to the idea of the nation, the citizen and the significant imaginative undergirding that is needed in order to make them intelligible categories. One of the reasons I am drawn to Westerns as a means of parsing these questions is their essentially populist nature: while they can be extremely sophisticated pieces of cinema, the Western is also quintessential Americana which – at least at one time – was beloved by millions. The other major reason I am drawn to Westerns is the clear grammar developed over time of icon, trope and motif that allows for a genuine, often quite complex conversation between particular films. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, Westerns are mythic. They deal in fundamental questions of origin, change, establishment, destruction and order. In this piece and the ones that follow it, I hope to delineate the ways in which some specific Westerns engage questions of nation, individual, and social order, and in the end diagnose in some way the ideological roots of the current cultural fragmentation. Because of the magnitude of my love for Westerns and also because of my weakness for prolixity, I will sketch these questions out in several parts, each part taking as its inspiration a specific Western, starting with Shane.

As well as featuring probably the most annoying child in the history of American cinema, Shane is one of the most beloved Westerns ever made. Directed by George Stevens, the film starts with the arrival of the eponymous gunfighter Shane (Alan Ladd) at the homestead of hardworking farmer Joe Starrett (Van Heflin) his wife Marian (Jean Arthur) and son Joey (Brandon DeWilde). At the time of the film the frontier is undergoing a shift from the semi-nomadic free range life of the cowboy and rancher to the settled, agrarian life of the farmer. Unsurprisingly, this shift is fraught with violence. Both parties have a claim on the land, and the cattle baron Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer) has no qualms about asserting his claim at gunpoint. Shane destabilizes the situation; while he seems to be at the Starrett’s homestead to hang up his gun and live an honest life, it quickly becomes clear that he will have to fight or leave. The film ends with an inevitable showdown between Shane and Ryker’s hired gunman Jack Wilson (Jack Palance) that leaves Wilson and Ryker dead and Shane wounded. After cryptically explaining to Joey that “there’s no living with a killing” he rides off into the night.

At first glance, there seems to be little here of interest: the well-worn story of a good man who reluctantly takes up the sword in the name of justice on behalf of the oppressed. And, viewed outside of historical context and the grammar of the Western genre, this would be fair: it is highly conventional storytelling. But just as the rules of language allow for the transmission of meaning, the rules of convention allow for a dialogue between works of art that would be impossible without the archetypes and tropes they give us; I would like to draw out what I believe to be this films two most salient ideological points. The first relates to the relationship between the ranchers and the farmers; the second relates the farmer’s relationship with Shane.

The tension present between the farmers and the ranchers is in one sense quite straightforward: both parties want the land, and there is no realistic way for them to share it. What complicates the situation is the fact that at least on a moral level, both the ranchers and the farmers have legitimate claims. The ranchers wrested the land from the natives at a great cost and see themselves as having a moral right to it. Their world is fundamentally feudal: they are conquerors who have established their claim and their legitimacy through strength and now see what is rightfully theirs being taken from them. At one point Ryker gives an impassioned speech in which he lays out his position before Starrett:

“We made this country. Found it and we made it, with blood and empty bellies. The cattle we brought in were hazed off by Indians and rustlers. They don’t bother you much anymore because we handled ‘em. We made a safe range out of this. Some of us died doin’ it. We made it. And then people move in who’ve never had to rawhide it through the old days. They fence off my range, and fence me off from water.”

Starrett’s response is to simply say that the government sees things differently. The farmers have the law on their side. The government has given them that land for agriculture, and they are simply using it as directed. However, we see in farmer “Stonewall” Torrey’s (Elisha Cook Jr.) funeral speech (Torrey is killed by Wilson outside of a saloon) that there is more to it. The farmers understand themselves to be agents of civilization who are building towns and establishing culture where before there was only savagery. Their efforts are much greater than themselves or their own livelihoods; they are based on a sense of the American project.

The conflict played out in Shane is the movement from a feudal, pre-modern world in which society is organized around individual power and held together by a complex system of loyalties and fealty which is at once medieval and surprisingly capitalistic, to the world of the nation-state in which society is based in the rule of law, the dignity of the individual and a deeply rooted sense of the communal that invests its citizens with responsibilities as well as rights. Ryker surrounds himself by cowboys who are bound to him by his ability to give them a living through employment in his cattle empire, and when people cannot be bought he hires a killer to protect his interests – there is here no acknowledgement of a power beyond either wealth or violence. The farmers, on the other hand, led by Starrett, are rooted in notions of fairness, honesty, decency and co-operation which they understand to be transcendent of their own personal good. When dealing with the ever-more serious threats from Ryker, the farmers hold councils, speak democratically, employ diplomacy and understand farming almost as a moral calling.

And yet they remain ineffectual and entirely in Ryker’s power, despite the fact that many of them have military experience from the civil war and none lack bravery. The problem for the farmers, I believe, is that their martial experience is entirely based on a military model of violence which is predicated fundamentally on law, order and the state. When Torrey attempts to confront Wilson, the whole tragic exchange is presented as a grotesque comedy. He tries to outdraw Wilson outside of a saloon and by the time his hand is halfway out of the holster, Wilson has drawn a bead on him. Wilson sardonically lets Torrey realize precisely how inadequate he is before gunning him down. Whatever Torrey’s abilities as a soldier, the violence in Shane is feudal violence between individuals, not the orderly “legal” violence of warfare. Torrey is literally unable to fight alone.

This leads us to the interesting part – Shane himself. Shane belongs to Ryker’s world, but is trying to become a member of Starrett’s by giving up his gun and taking up farming. The problematic nature of this move becomes apparent almost immediately; everyone falls in love with him. He eclipses Starrett in the eyes of both his son and (though this is more subtly revealed) in the eyes of his wife as well. While Shane is accepted presumably because he has renounced his old ways, it is precisely the old, gunsfighting Shane who is revered, just as it is his abilities as a man of violence which are most respected. The idealistic community of farmers is obsessed with the violence which they are morally opposed to, and rightly so: it is only Shane’s violence which can save them from Ryker.

This is where the film becomes subversive. Though Starrett is willing to face Wilson, Ryker’s hired killer, it is clear that this cannot be. On a practical level, Starrett lacks the skill to survive such an encounter; but more importantly, if Starrett were to drive Ryker out of town by violence it would be absolutely impossible for him to continue living the life he has chosen. His entire being is justified by adherence to the law, and to use the feudal violence of a gunfight to defeat Ryker would be to accept the nihilism that defines Ryker’s world and become like Ryker. This is what lies at the root of Shane’s ambiguous last line – there can be no living in the place where one has killed, because to do so is to accept power over life and death. If Shane remained, he would be just as much a feudal lord as Ryker even if he never killed again simply because he would have gained his power by killing his predecessor; a magnanimous autocrat is no less above the law for being magnanimous.

If we step back from the film, then, and view it as a cultural object, a few things become clear. Though this film takes the side of the farmer’s fairly unambiguously and therefore accepts their formulation of the world as primarily mediated through law and government, it is sophisticated enough to realize that in order for the farmers to be true to themselves, there needs to be an agent of violence who is outside of their world. Note again how the film starts and ends – Shane rides out of the wilderness and returns to it. There is a fundamental dishonesty here; when the film ends the farmers have been given their land without having had to conquer it. The conquest is done for them by the shadowy and mysterious Shane, who exists outside of the established categories.

This is precisely the heart of the American myth – that one can arrive in the new world and not have to compromise one’s democratic principles in order to succeed. The hardworking, fair minded pioneers can build their civilization innocently, because the necessary violence is done by another, marginal force. While the film is not naive enough to suggest that no violence is necessary, the violence is not done by “us”, even though “our” lives would be impossible without it.

I started this post by claiming that I would try to delineate understandings of nationhood through the lens of the Western; what Shane gives us is the advent of citizen as a category. In this film, the citizen is embodied by Starrett, with all of his attendant virtues. What is important to notice is the fact that Starrett narrates a shift from feudal violence, which is between individuals and which is employed for personal reasons, to an understanding of violence which sees it and everything else mediated through law and the state. Thus, if Shane is a film about American-ness (and I believe it is) the message is ambiguous – America has an idealistic moral code which requires a significant compromise in order to be realized. America needs a scapegoat, and that scapegoat is Shane.

This film came out in 1953. In it America is imagined fundamentally as a land of principle, a land ruled by law and communal decision-making embodied by democratic government. It buys this self-image at a cost, however; the founding violence that lies at its heart is shuffled off to an outsider not part of the American project, though midwife to it. But we cannot escape the fact that there is no Starrett without Shane.

What I will try to chart next week is the fraying of this certainty that America is good and built on principle rather than violence through John Ford’s remarkable film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Andre Forget is a member of St. Margaret’s Anglican Church in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He works in the admissions department at Canadian Mennonite University and is a co-editor of Catholic Commons.

Joshua Paetkau

In “Shooting an Elephant,” an autobiographical essay published in 1936, George Orwell speaks of time spent as a police officer in a Burmese town. At close quarters with the dirty work of imperialism the young Orwell had grown deeply disillusioned with the British Empire. At the same time he was possessed of a “rage against the evil-spirited beasts who tried to make my job impossible.” Torn between hatred of Empire and resentment of the local population Orwell is a solitary and conflicted figure who, in the end, acts not out of a sense of duty but a fear of looking ridiculous. As Orwell reflects on the existential quandaries of his younger days he is able to retroactively reconcile the incoherence of this earlier experience to a lack of education and an isolation that left him unable to gain perspective. “I did not even know,” he writes, “that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.”[1]

Orwell chronicles the moral ambiguities of imperialism with keen insight and existential depth. Nearly a century later we are plagued with many of the same concerns Orwell faced. Systemic inequality and racism make us uncomfortable when we are aware of them, but our awareness often breeds guilt rather than action. Those of us who have inherited the legacy of the colonizing people are often bound in the strange admixture of pity and contempt towards indigenous people, unable or unwilling to radically identify with their concerns. And, at least in the Anglophone world, the British Empire hangs about in the background; the benign ghost of civilization`s yesteryear. If not an unambiguously good thing the sensibility that the British Empire was a lesser evil remains promised; a compromised yet legitimate authority.

Yet, if we are to move forward, this Orwellian nostalgia must be undone. Descendants of colonized and colonizing peoples, sharing the same geographical spaces, continue to live in a world shaped by history’s violent divisions. Even more disturbingly we continue to feel the effects of a history partial and biased in its telling that it continues to undermine the political will and dignity of peoples and nations across the globe.

British historian and journalist Richard Gott, in his magisterial history Britain`s Empire: Repression, Resistance and Revolt, makes the case that the partiality and one-sidedness of historical writings on the British Empire has long been in need of a corrective. Britain`s Empire, published last year by Verso, is just such a document. “A history of empire today,” says Gott in the book’s opening paragraphs, “must take account of two imperial traditions, that of the conquerors and that of the conquered. Traditionally that second tradition has been conspicuous by its absence.”[2] Gott highlights this second tradition through a detailed and articulate account of the myriad movements of resistance and revolt that met Britain’s imperial efforts at every turn.

Contrary to what Gott calls the “benign, biscuit-tin view of the past” Britain’s imperial project was not an imaginative civilizing enterprise undertaken to bring the benefits of modernity to backward peoples. Indeed the history may not even support Orwell’s more mild contention that it was somewhat better than all those other empires. Gott contends, somewhat provocatively, that Britain provided a blueprint for the genocidal horrors of twentieth-century Europe and must be judged. Gott traces these historical parallels with clarity and precision; from the extensive use of prison labour camps, first in North America then Ceylon, Australia, and elsewhere to programs of “extermination – a word used frequently by both military officials and settlers in Australia and South Africa to describe their intentions towards the native populations.

Gott is, however, too wise a historian to draw out the evils of British imperialism as the product of a sinister meticulously planned conspiracy. The reality is much more complex, though no less horrifying. Mercantile interests, land-hungry settlers, and megalomaniac military commanders all play their part in the long tale of human destruction. Gulags and genocide, while chillingly present, do not always form the order of the day. Even in this account Britain, or elements within, show something of a civilized face. One of the major strengths of the book is the way in which the emerging social consciousness of the British people and politicians are shown to be connected to the work of local resistance and revolt. Without the slave rebellion of Tacky in Jamaica in 1760, and especially without Toussaint L’Ouverture’s successful revolution in Haiti, the abolitionist currents within Britain could not have begun when they did nor, lacking the necessary awareness, have sustained any momentum. The history of those experiencing the oppression and repression of imperial forces, as Gott repeatedly stresses, is not a story of hapless victims but often, though not always, a story of courage, cunning and resourcefulness. Perhaps most importantly they are stories of political will and human agency.

Political will and human agency are not the sole property of nations with imperialist intentions and highly developed military complexes. Pity and contempt are not the only options. There is also respect. Remembering the forgotten and ignored stories of Empire – the victories as well as the failures of the conquered peoples, the atrocities of the conquerors – is one important step in building respect and beginning the long hard work of making amends for centuries of injustice. In this important task Richard Gott’s latest book is a powerful resource.

David Widdicombe

Michael Polanyi, the Hungarian-British polymath, professor of physical chemistry at the University of Manchester, was one of the most distinguished philosophers of science in the 20^th Century. He was the grandson of the Chief Rabbi of Vilnius and a convert to Roman Catholicism. This is what he said about the Scriptures:

The book of Genesis and its great pictorial illustrations, like the  frescoes of Michelangelo, remain a far more intelligent account of the nature and origin of the universe than the representations of the world as a chance collocation of atoms. For the biblical cosmology continues to express – however inadequately – the significance of the fact that the world exists and that man has emerged from it, while the scientific picture denies any meaning to the world, and indeed ignores all our most vital experience of it.^[1]

What is this intelligent account? The theme of Genesis One in a single sentence is this: The mighty God through the power of the Holy Spirit and the authority of his eternal Word creates a universe ordered to the good, the true, and the beautiful.

But that is not how we experience the world, at least not all the time, and for some of us, not often. Genesis One just doesn’t seem to describe the world we live in; this first creation account seems to move in a single inexorable majestic direction. Verse two, however, constitutes something of an exception and comes closer to what we all encounter when life goes seriously wrong. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’, is immediately followed by a powerful note of tension: ‘and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep’.

The Deacon’s role in the Church of Christ is to take the gospel of the mighty God to those whose world is neither good, nor true, nor beautiful, a world made formless by pain and fear and oppression, a world made formless by exhausting, pointless labour, poverty, and hunger. For far too many people the world seems to be devoid of goodness, meaning, and pleasure, a darkened world all heartbreak and no hope. The Deacon in the Church of mercy is to take the gospel to the sick and the dying, the prisoner, the hungry, the homeless and the forgotten, to those who live in the darkness of despair.

The world, in our experience, often threatens to fall back into the chaos of the waters. Genesis 1.2 adumbrates a moment of chaos on the way to a glorious creation. Or, for those who suffer, does it describe that last consciousness of the dissolution of all hope and meaning before the final descent into nothingness, the creation running in reverse?

This verse is the great theological creational statement of that candor of despair that runs throughout the Bible. Long before any modern cosmologist, the Book of the Prophet Isaiah had warned that the earth must one day vanish away and it ‘shall not be remembered nor brought into mind’. Tying this prediction to the promise of a new heaven and a new earth in no way lessens the stark metaphysical, vertiginous finality of that uncompromising phrase. The Psalmist also had pause for thought: ‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?’ Centuries later the great thinker, Pascal, was to write: ‘[I feel] engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.’ If the Psalmist was not terrified, it was not because he did not know what the issue was. St. Paul was profoundly aware of the groaning futility of the cosmos, not to mention the pessimism of the Book of Ecclesiastes. The point is made most hideously obvious when the Bible expresses the reality of personal suffering. In Psalm 6 alone we read: ‘I am faint.’ ‘My bones are in agony.’ ‘My soul is in anguish.’ ‘I am worn out from groaning.’ ‘All night long I flood my bed with weeping.’ ‘My eyes grow weak with sorrow.’ There are moments in the Psalms when it seems that the night’s black heart envelopes all and life is reduced to a formless chaotic torture.

Acknowledging the enormity of the difficulty posed by the finite and broken character of the cosmos the Bible, however, provides an authentic comfort that does not undermine the reality of human despair.

In its first verse the Bible declares that this is the good creation of an Almighty Creator. Life is not a meaningless accident that somehow emerged from an original watery chaos. Verse two of Genesis is the second thing that is said. The creator-God of verse one stands between the dark chaos and the nothingness to which it might, left to itself, return.

Professor Antony Flew was the author of over thirty philosophical works that set the atheist agenda for the latter half of the last century. His essay, ‘Theology and Falsification’, became the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the century and was required reading for a generation of university undergraduates. Shortly before his death, however, he changed his mind and wrote a book entitled, There Is a God. Arguing that the rationality of the universe is evidence of a divine mind, he points out that many contemporary scientists have come to just this conclusion. Among the many contemporary statements of this view, he reverts to an older, classic assertion of the case in summation:

[Reason tells me of the] impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man … as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.

The author? Charles Darwin.

But, from the point of view of the one who suffers, this does not take us very far. Contemporary atheism posits a more benign God than Christianity does. A benign God, the atheist argues, could not have created the world that we know, the kind of world that requires us to practice works of mercy; there is too much suffering, there is therefore no such god. But this overlooks a more obvious possibility. Almost thirty years ago, one of my mentors in the Christian faith held a conference in Toronto that brought together several leading physicists and theologians. What was the conclusion of the discussions? I asked him. One physicist had summarized the general view of the scientists by saying: there is a god but he does not give a damn about the sparrow. Atheism is neither original nor terribly interesting by comparison. This alternative is a view the Deacon must take seriously. For it is this view that the biblical tradition sets out to combat, a view at once more plausible, more compelling, and more tragic than the view that there was no mind involved somehow in the existence of the laws of nature.

The author of Genesis addresses this issue before he has even finished fully stating the problem. Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, with a perceptive pastoral trinitarianism, offered King James this magnificent translation: ‘Darkness was upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’ There is a word in the Hebrew that means ‘surface’ but William Tyndale had elected to leave it untranslated and many modern translators are content with ‘surface’. But Andrewes wanted something more descriptive. The waters of the deep have a face and, even as the threatening darkness lay upon them, the Spirit of God moves over them, caressing them in that mysterious night. The darkness itself neither moves nor has a face. But the waters and the Spirit have an affinity. As the face of God is perchance reflected in them so they are something to be cherished and caressed.

There is a story about a little boy who, sensing his Mother’s presence in the darkened doorway long after the lights had been turned down, called out: ‘Is your face turned toward me Mother?’

There is a god. The question is: is his face turned toward us?

In the Gospel reading this evening, in another story of beginnings, ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God’, Jesus has just been baptized in the river Jordan by John. Immediately, says St. Mark, the Spirit drives him into the wilderness. The Son of God first must go beneath the waters of chaos, the whelming flood that is the burden of human evil, and then must immediately be driven into the formless void of an almost endless suffering of temptation to deny the benevolence of God, a suffering that will only end with Mark’s searing account of the night of Gethsemane, the return of darkness from the sixth to the ninth hours on the following day, punctuated by Jesus’ final words of God-forsakenness.

In this inverted creation story, the chaos is not the second thing, it is rather the first thing and the last, baptism and temptation – Jesus comes to do battle. But in the middle of this new creation account, with its candor of despair, comes the caress upon the deep. The commanding Spirit of the wilderness first descends as the Dove so tenderly described in the story of Noah and the flood, and God declares: ‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.’ This declaration about the Son made here at the very beginning of his ministry conditions everything that is to follow; it is the taproot of the Christian faith. Soren Kierkegaard expressed it memorably. Commenting on the severity of his eccentric upbringing in the hands of a tormented and deeply religious father, Kierkegaard acknowledged how powerfully the gospel can be rooted in a child.  Whatever the evidence may otherwise suggest, and it surely does suggest otherwise, it is nonetheless for the man, as it was for the child, ‘a thing already decided, that God is love.’ Just so it was decided in the beginning, according to St. Mark, that the man of sorrows was, from the beginning, the beloved and on that fact hangs the destiny of the universe. The Holy Spirit will care for the sparrow.

In dealing with the issue of the chaos of suffering, we must also consider the fact that the created order is structured by the eternal Word of God. Ten times in the first creation account we read, ‘And God said…’ Ten is the Hebrew number of fullness, abundance, and plenitude. This is a story of grace abounding, the grace of being. We also read: ‘And the evening and the morning were the first day.’ There are seven days of creation and seven is the number of perfection. The number crops up repeatedly in the first creation account. For example, there are seven Hebrew words in the first verse and there are exactly fourteen in the second. Creation, in other words, is a plenitude of perfection, complete in every way, lacking nothing. The gift of being is replete.

The numerical repetitions in the text – and there are many more of them; the symmetry of the two matching triads of days – the first dealing with the formlessness in three days of separation and the other with the void in three days of adornment; and the painfully obvious absurdities (if taken with a non-symbolic literalism) of an otherwise stunning literary masterpiece  were enough to convince St. Augustine, as it has convinced many other theological interpreters of Genesis both before and since his great commentary, that Genesis One is a profound spiritual meditation upon the order in which the creation was made and in which it persists.

In one of the more pleasing statements of his oft repeated insistence that creation had to be an instantaneous creation of potentialities that would evolve over time, Augustine wrote: ‘scripture could divide in the time it takes to state them what God did not divide in the time it took to make them.’ Form and substance can be expressed separately, but they were not made separately, as in the mind of God they were not thought separately. For the theologians of the early church, the God who creates time did not require seven days in which to do it. Genesis One, then, is a scientific account if we mean that there can be no laws of science where there is no order. For order is the point the text wishes to make. The earth is no longer without form and void and darkness is no longer upon the face of the deep.

Why does this matter? It matters because it is not our suffering alone that terrifies us. We are afraid that that infirmity that is the loss of sensible structure and the light of meaning, the chaos threatened by our suffering, is the final word. But it is not. The Word of God is the final word; the cosmos is rational.

‘And it was very good.’ This is the promise and pronouncement of God. The Greek translation of the Hebrew makes it clear that there is an aesthetic dimension here. The creation was beautiful, superb, splendid in every way. Where there once was chaos there is now a well ordered cosmos. The forces of darkness have been pushed back before an advancing light powered by the immutable, omnipotent Word of God.

When the Deacon goes from the altar to the world in a prophetic way, bringing Christ to those for whom He gave His life, she cuts with the grain of the universe. Her ministry is never less than a practical incarnation of the presence of the man of sorrows with those who suffer the disintegration of order, and who suffer its loss precisely because they have known its presence, and have known it because it is really there but can no longer be seen or touched. Her ministry is that of the Spirit who hovers above the deep, caressing the face of the fevered waters of chaos and sorrow. It is the ministry of the Dove that descends upon the beloved one, the well pleasing one, the suffering servant. She goes because this is God’s good creation, cherished by the  Spirit, ordered by the Eternal Word. Her work is her reasonable service. She brings the good, the true, and the beautiful to those whose world is turning toward the chaos. She comes because she has a gospel, because she is a woman of hope, because it makes sense to her to be faithful. She comes because she the takes the question seriously: There is a god, but does he love the sparrow?

There is a gravestone in the burying ground on the west coast of Harris, in the Outer Hebrides, that marks the last resting place of a man thrown from a fishing boat. He was but twenty-four years old. There is an engraving of his boat on the headstone and this quotation from Psalm 77: ‘Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters: and thy footsteps are not known.’ There is an unreasoning cruelty engraved in the inscrutable, seemingly granite face of the universe, a fact the Psalmist was not inclined to hide. When asked about the accident, the boy’s father told his questioner that he should consult the Psalm from which the quotation was taken. There he read this grim lament:

Will the Lord cast off for ever? and will he be favorable no more?

Is his mercy cleane gone forever? doth his promise fail for evermore?

Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies?

And I said, this is my infirmitie …^[2]

There is hope in the Psalm but it is most surely no cheap consolation nor suppression of experience. The Psalm is harrowing in its detail – my sore ran in the night, my soul refused to be comforted, and heartbreaking in its comfort – ‘I will remember the years of the right hand of the most high’, as if to say, I have no future; memory is now all there is left to me.

This is the one to whom the deacon goes. She must take his plight and his question seriously. But the mighty God, who through the power of the Holy Spirit and the authority of his eternal Word creates a universe ordered to the good, the true, and the beautiful, cares for the sparrow. And so the deacon must place the caress of God upon the face of the deep.

Bruce Myers

The Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue of Canada turned forty years old in November. Many individuals who reach that milestone find it a felicitous occasion to look back and celebrate past accomplishments, as well as to look ahead and consider future directions. So, too, did the current members of ARC Canada.

Celebrations centred on an ecumenical service of vespers held at Saint Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal on November 13. Presiding at the liturgy together were the Right Reverend Barry Clarke, the Anglican Bishop of Montreal, and the Most Reverend Thomas Dowd, Auxiliary Bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Montreal.

All of the elements of the bilingual liturgy were intended to highlight and celebrate the fruits of the four decades of dialogue between the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in Canada, as well as internationally. Before each liturgical act, lectors read a brief preface drawn from Growing Together in Unity and Mission, the 2006 document issued by the International Anglican-Roman Catholic Commission for Unity and Mission.[2]

The liturgy began with a remembrance of baptism with aspersion, prior to which the assembly was reminded that Anglicans and Catholics “regard our common baptism as the basic bond of unity between us, even as we recognize that the fullness of eucharistic communion to which baptism should lead us is impeded by disagreement concerning some of the elements of faith and practice which we acknowledge are necessary for full, visible communion.”[3]

The proclamation of the word focused on the story of two disciples meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). This biblical account gave the celebration its theme, “Forty Years of Walking Together,” and a focus for its preacher, the Most Reverend François Lapierre, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Saint Hyancinthe and ARC Canada’s co-chair.

In his homily, Bishop Lapierre acknowledged that the past forty years of Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue have not always been easy. “Each church has made decisions that the other found difficult to understand,” he admitted. “Begun in the enthusiasm after Vatican II, the dialogue is now experiencing more difficult moments.” Like the two disciples who met the risen Christ on the Emmaus road but did not recognize him, he said neither do our two churches always see Christ clearly. Nevertheless, said Bishop Lapierre, we continue to walk, talk, and pray together.

A common profession of faith was made using the Apostles’ Creed, the creedal statement professed at baptism, a further acknowledgement that “our full recognition of one another’s baptism is itself the basis of the growing communion between us.”[4]

Prior to the singing of the Song of Mary and the censing of the altar, lectors recalled that, “Catholics and Anglicans recognize the grace and unique vocation of Mary, Mother of God Incarnate, observe her festivals and accord her honour in the communion of saints. We agree in recognizing Mary as a model of holiness, obedience, and faith for all Christians and for the Church.”[5]

There followed a litany of thanksgiving prefaced by a common expression of repentance and regret: “We have not always been open to the leadings of the Spirit. We gather today knowing that still more could have been possible. We seek pardon from God, and from each other, for not reaching out more generously in love, not listening more attentively, not imagining more creatively, not trusting the Spirit’s work in each other with greater confidence.”

Having acknowledged with regret what might have been, past and present ARC Canada members then shared in expressing thanksgiving for what Anglican-Roman Catholic relations have accomplished over the past forty years. The litany included thanks for the witness of pioneering dialogue members such as Jean-Marie Tillard and Eugene Fairweather, for inter-church families whose pastoral needs the dialogue has attempted to respond to, for the joint addressing of several social and moral issues, for shared theological faculties, and for the common lectionary and liturgical traditions the two churches share. The litany concluded with the Lord’s Prayer being prayed in each one’s own language.

The forty years of dialogue were compared in the liturgy to a “decades-long exchange of gifts between our two traditions.” As an outward expression of this, a young person from each church exchanged symbolic gifts on behalf of their respective communions. The Anglicans’ gift was a four-hundredth anniversary edition of the King James Bible, while the Catholic gift was a copy of the gospels from the illuminated Saint John’s Bible. The choice of gifts called to mind the churches’ common affirmation that “within Tradition the Scriptures occupy a unique and normative place and belong to what has been given once for all.”[6]

The liturgy’s dismissal was prefaced by Growing Together in Unity and Mission’s exhortation to give living expression to the theological agreement the two churches have achieved: “Genuine faith is more than assent: it is expressed in action. As Anglicans and Roman Catholics seek to overcome the remaining obstacles to full, visible unity, we recognize that the extent of our common faith compels us to live and witness together more fully here and now. Agreement in faith must go beyond mere affirmation.”[7]

The co-presiding bishops then led the assembly in a concluding reaffirmation of commitment in which those gathered promised, with God’s help, to “carry forward our commitment to the full, visible unity for which Christ prayed,” and “to seek to deepen our relationship with one another in life and mission, and to further build on the communion we share.”

After recommitting to these things in prayer on Sunday, the members of ARC Canada met together the following day to discuss how they might be achieved. For this discussion on future directions for Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue, they were joined by members of the Canadian Anglican-Roman Catholic bishops’ dialogue, and members of the Commission for Christian Unity of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. Such a joint meeting was without precedent.

The gathering received an update on the work of the newly inaugurated third phase of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC III). Bishop Linda Nicholls, a member of ARCIC and the ARC Canada bishops’ dialogue, and Canon Alyson Barnett-Cowan, who staffs ARCIC as the Anglican Communion’s Director of Unity, Faith, and Order, each offered reflections on ARCIC III’s first meeting last May in Bose, Italy. Both women are former members of ARC Canada.

The pair reminded the gathering of ARCIC III’s mandate to engage with the concept of the church as communion, local and universal, and the related question of how in communion the local and universal church comes to discern right ethical teaching.

They indicated that “receptive ecumenism” had been adopted as ARCIC III’s methodology. The approach invites parties in a dialogue to move beyond the question of, “What do others first need to learn from us?” to instead ask, “What do we need to learn and what can we learn, or receive with integrity, from others?”

The national ARC dialogues have in the past responded to—and contributed to—the work of the international commission, and it was suggested that this should continue to be the case with ARCIC III. It was noted that ARC Canada might be in a particularly unique position to support this current round of ARCIC, since the Canadian churches are already wrestling with some of the moral and ethical questions the international commission has been mandated to address.

More specifically, five potential areas were identified where the national ARC dialogue might support the international commission:

1. Undertaking a theological project on primacy;
2. Formulating a case study on ethical or moral discernment based on the Canadian context;
3. Encouraging the reception of the documents of ARCIC II;
4. Encouraging the reception of the recommendations found in Growing Together in Unity and Mission;
5. Undertaking a project aimed at demonstrating how the receptive ecumenism model might be adapted and lived out locally.

In this way ARC Canada could endeavour to both increase an awareness of ARCIC’s past agreed statements, as well as create an interest in the international commission’s current work.

As important as contributing to ARCIC III could be, members of the national ARC dialogue are also acutely aware of the limited degree to which their churches have received the practical recommendations to be found in Growing Together in Unity and Mission. Many around the table expressed a desire to work more intentionally to help our churches “live and witness together more fully here and now.”[8]

A recent Canadian example of such an initiative is the covenant entered into in 2011 by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Regina and the Anglican Diocese of Qu’Appelle. Signed by both diocesan bishops, the covenant commits them and their dioceses to nineteen different engagements. The commitments include ensuring regular occasions of common prayer, issuing joint episcopal statements on matters of public pastoral concern, arranging joint baptismal preparation, seeking together reconciliation with aboriginal peoples, and working together in mission.[9]

As one bishop around the table observed, “Until the fruit of Growing Together in Unity and Mission actually takes root in our communities, we remain in the realm of thought rather than practical expression. The dialogues’ discussions need to be ‘brought down’ to the local, community level.”

To this end it was agreed that the ARC Canada theological dialogue and the national bishops’ dialogue should meet together again, perhaps regularly. In doing so it is hoped that theological reflection and pastoral practice might better inform one another, so that the two dialogues’ work is not carried out in isolation.

Evangelism was identified as a possible area to begin such collaborative work between the two dialogues. How can Canadian Anglicans and Roman Catholics together engage fruitfully with the predominantly secular reality in which both churches now exist? How do we reflect on this theologically in a way that can inform our common pastoral response?

Anglicans and Roman Catholics in Canada recognize that there are still fruits to be harvested from the past forty years of dialogue, and that there still remain gifts to be exchanged between our two traditions. What November’s anniversary celebrations and discussions have revealed is an ongoing interest, steadfast willingness, and firm recommitment by both churches to continue to engage in those efforts. The road to full, visible unity may have proven longer than first thought. Nevertheless, Canadian Anglicans and Roman Catholics remain committed to journeying down that road together.

 A member of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue of Canada since 2009, Archdeacon Bruce Myers is the Anglican Church of Canada’s newly appointed Coordinator for Ecumenical Relations.

Canada, and possibly the world in general, is going downhill if you listen to Bishop Dennis Drainville. We lack good leaders, people feel demoralized and the the institution of the church is crumbling, to name a few of the ills Drainville hopes to combat with his self-published book Renewing Hope.

Written in the weeks following Jack Layton’s death, Renewing Hope is “a critique of Canadian and Western society, economies and political situations,” Drainville said. By focusing on lack of leadership, the concept of the common good, corporate concentration in media, and competency-based education he hopes to engage people as citizens and help build a better, and more just Canada.

Having worked with Layton in the 80s and 90s in Toronto, Drainville saw Layton demonstrate many leadership qualities Canada needs today, including humility and the knowledge that working together beats depending on one person. Layton knew that “if we are to do some of these great changes in society it takes many people all of whom are committed to the came task but all of whom have different talents to bring, to help it come to fruition,” Drainville said. Also noting that layton had a way of inspiriting people to work hard on the difficult, but needed changes in society. Layton’s passing inspired him to sit down and write the critique he had tried to pen for years.

Instead of going through a publisher to get his work out, Drainville put the entirety of the work up on his blog (http://thebishopsviews.wordpress.com/). It’s not that publishers turned him down, but the editing and printing process would have taken up to a year and he wanted to reach people now. “The ideas that are out there are very much ideas of right now,” he said, “and I wanted people to begin to speak about them and I don’t give a damn whether I’ve got a book.”

The theme of breakdown in our politicial and economic institutions appears throughout the book. Drainville argues that people don’t believe our institutions can close the gap between the rich and poor in Canada, and politicians exclude the poor from the governing process. “What ends up going through parliament is that which maintains the corporate structure, he said, “the economic corporate structure of Canada that is continually being dealt with in parliament, but the needs of the poor are not.”

But Drainville sees hope in the occupy movement and the other protests around the world this year. While people criticize the demonstrations for representing too many different ideas, they unite in arguing that the 99 per cent are excluded from decision making, said the former activist, once arrested for peaceful protesting. “They’re saying we are not part of making decision anymore in this country, everything is slanted away from us and into the hands of the few and we object to that and we’re not willing to allow that to continue,” Drainville said.

Part of the problem is that an understanding of the common good no longer exists at the corporate and political level. “The corporations always see the common good as whatever is good for corporations is good for the nation,” Drainville said, but he believes the needs of business directly oppose the needs of the poor. And though he has several suggestions on how to improve the political culture in our country — including a proportional representation electoral system, and the continuation of election financing to help keep smaller parties alive — he doesn’t plan to run in any future elections.

He describes his first time in office in the 90s as awful because the structure of governments and political parties limited the freedom of individuals in favour of helping the party stay in power. “The day after a government is elected immediately what goes into effect is the most important overarching policy of that government, that is how do we get reelected.” Unwilling to support the governments plan to bring casinos to Ontario, Drainville left the NDP and sat as an independent before resigning.

Drainville attributes many of the problems in the book to our educational system — based on competence instead of teaching students to think critically. Our schools are geared towards training doctors, lawyers or mechanics, he said. All useful skills, but our education neglects two important qualities, being a citizen and being a human being, “and if they don’t have those two basic elements in their lives, in fact what good are they,” he asked.

But Drainville wouldn’t pin all the responsibility on politicians and corporations. The church also has a responsibility to help create a more equal society. He cites two passages as foundational to the Christian call to help those in need: Matthew 25, where Jesus states “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me,” and when Jesus promise to release the captives and bring good news to the poor.

Despite that call, he said, the church it has made itself irrelevant by focusing on the needs of the institution rather than the poor and the marginal. Going forward, the church needs to help empower society to better care for the disadvantaged. “It just seems to me that that is the great challenge for us as Christians,” he said, “to understand that our present structures of the church do not, anymore, match either the society that we are in, nor the mission that we need to be engaged in.”

Emily Loewen is Young Voices Editor for Canadian Mennonite, and is working on her Master of Journalism at Ryerson University. She is a member of Langley Mennonite Fellowship in British Columbia.

Jeffrey Metcalfe

River Use to be a Man stands at the crux of an unfinished conversation (and perhaps unfinishable) on the nature of representation. Which stories are we permitted to tell and in what kinds of places are we entitled to tell them? These are the sorts of questions that are inevitably asked when a film is depicted in the fragmented site of colonialism – more so when one who does not find that place his home authors that representation. This is both the narrative and the metanarrative of German film maker Jan Zabeil’s feature, where functioning as both author, director, and actor (and one might be tempted to add, character), he plays a listless German youth wandering Botswana, who is forced by circumstances beyond his control to journey on a boat down a river in search of his own life. This is a tale of existential and spiritual survival, a Heart of Darkness for a postmodern generation.

The process of filming is itself a testament to this, as Jan Zabeil came to Botswana with no completed script or written dialogue, only a vague idea of what he hopped to achieve. The film does not suffer from this ambiguity; the cinematography that arises from this method is striking. As the camera lingers upon the ordinary surroundings of the river, the grass rushing past the side of the boat, the gentle but steady swell of the current, a rhythm develops, drawing the viewer into a dreamlike state, where real images blend into unreal visions. So gradual is the transformation of the ordinary into the sublime that it becomes difficult to mark when exactly the change occurred, when the images became unreal. Indeed, at times, the viewer is made aware only after the fact, as a loud crash (in an otherwise silent film) followed by a scene change jolts the film back into reality.

The same rhythm is echoed in the character and plot development, as what starts off as a real crisis threatening the safety of the protagonist, forcing him out of his lethargy and driving him down the river, slowly shifts into an unreal struggle with the spiritual. “You are on an island in the house of the animals,” the protagonist is told by his guide. In other words, he is not at home, a reality that is all too apparent in his existential attitude of ironic self-distancing from his surrounding, an attitude in stark contrast to the seamless navigation of nature witnessed in the guide. Yet it is precisely the protagonist’s ironic stance that is drawn into question as he is forced to confront the sheer otherness of the river when his guide dies: if he continues in it, the river will kill him.

This relationship moves from the existential to the spiritual, as the spirit of his guide comes to embody the otherness of the river. Drawing from the real animistic traditions of the indigenous group who call the filming location home, Jan Zabeil uses a local myth in which a man who dies without proper burial rights will transform into a crocodile and return to kill his family and those who did not burry him. Thus, whereas the existential otherness of the river threatened the protagonist with death passively, the spiritual otherness of the river seeks death actively. This leads him to consult a local shaman who sends him back down the river to put the spirit of his guide to rest by finding the body and burying it, a quest that ends the film as ambiguously as it starts. Just before the credits begin to play, the viewer hears the voice of the guide singing a hymn in his native tongue as the camera pans over the protagonist safely surveying the river from the window of a plane. He may have been able to distance himself from the river physically, but as the hymn suggests, existentially and spiritually, his ironic detachment remains broken and the river lingers with him still.

While the film succeeds in provoking the viewer’s imagination, and drawing into question a postmodern attitude of ironic detachment, it nevertheless encounters significant problems. The question remains: which stories are we permitted to tell and in what kinds of places are we entitled to tell them? The trope of an existential and spiritual journey down a river in Africa is hardly new, and the author/director/actor’s, unwillingness to situate his film and himself within this history is reminiscent of the protagonist’s own ironic detachment from his surroundings.

In what seems an effort to occlude such a critique, Zabeil explained in the Q & A session after the film how he used the real religious beliefs of the local community to build his story.[1] It took only a single query from the audience to draw this into question. When asked whether the hymn sung was from the Christian tradition, the director was unable to respond; he simply did not know the answer. What he did acknowledge however was that the hymn singer (the same actor who plays the guide) was a Christian preacher. This would seem to suggest that the local village of which that man was a part was not simply animistic, but held a multiplicity of beliefs, including stories, legends, and songs that were based in a Christian social imaginary imparted by a colonial history.

That the film failed to depict this, is indicative of both how unrecognizable the Christian tradition has become and how easy it is to fall into a colonialist gaze. For by choosing to depict only the animistic beliefs, the director made a political as well as a theological choice: he created a representation of a people and their home (both spiritually and physically) which, while perhaps being a better backdrop for a postmodern white man working out his existential angst, was not fully reflective of the people who really lived their. Instead of recognizing the complexity of their religious commitments, he paints them with a single mystical brush stroke of otherness, leaving out those things that might reframe the tale he wanted to tell. This is always the prerogative of the one who controls the camera, but given Zabeil’s claim to have consulted the local community, it seems all the more patronizing.

Nevertheless, River Use to be a Man is a compelling film that successfully illustrates the dangers of holding a postmodern ironic detachment from one’s surrounding, both for the protagonist and for the director. With stunning cinematography, it will enchant its viewers into a dreamlike state, even if in the end, it fails to wake them up.

Jeffrey Metcalfe is a postulant for ordination in the Diocese of Quebec, and is presently pursuing a master of divinity degree at Trinity College, Toronto. He is a co-editor of Catholic Commons.

“When people become more concerned with the gratification of their own appetites than with their responsibilities to society, the days of that civilization are numbered.”[1]

- Le Déclin de l’Empire Américain, Denys Arcand (1986)

In 2011, one only needs to listen to the headlines – be they international, national, provincial, or municipal – to hear the signs of imperial decay, as the signifiers that once held their identity in the polis, such as citizen, have come to be usurped by the ubiquitous taxpayer.[2] The difference between the two is striking. Whereas the signifier citizen contains within it an understanding of the responsibilities that one’s belonging to a polis entails, a taxpayer assumes no such responsibility. A taxpayer is a consumer, one who pays a fee and expects a service in return. Or, perhaps as Arcand realized several decades earlier, a taxpayer is more consumed with her own appetites, a citizen with her obligations to others.

As Christians, we must be careful not to depict this dichotomy as an easy choice of holding ourselves as citizens instead of taxpayers. It would be comforting to understand being labeled as taxpayers as an alien imposition by those political elites and ideologies we often set ourselves against. Rather, we must take up our situation by recognizing how our own spirituality is often complicit in the ways of empire that we purport to reject.

This is precisely what Marry Jo Leddy, the founder of Romero House, and the 20^th century philosopher John Macmurray can aid us in doing. For when brought into conversation, Marry Jo Leddy and John Macmurray help to identify the spirituality of empire, offering an alternative spirituality of communion founded in an encounter with the other. Leddy argues that by virtue of being formed within the borders of the American Empire, the spirituality of North American Christians takes on the empire’s fixed boundaries of identity. In turn, Macmurray identifies these boundaries as destroying the possibility for real community. By way of conclusion, I will show how Leddy’s own encounter with another reveals the logic of a spirituality that can interrupt the boundaries of empire.

In her book The Other Face of God: When the Stranger Calls us Home, Leddy claims that the defining characteristic of empire is the way in which empire places one’s identity at the centre of the world: “All eyes are on America, for as America goes, so goes the world.”[3] As subjectivity is formed within the boundaries of the empire, this imperial gaze is interiorized, both reflecting and producing a sense of the self that assumes the centrality and priority of its own being. “To put it simply, it is easier to be self-centered when you live in the Centre of the World; it is easier to think of the rest of the world as revolving around your needs and desires when you live in a place that the rest of the world is watching.”[4]

Spirituality lived through such a subjectivity becomes equally self-centered. Leddy calls this “an imperial spirituality [which] will tend to assume that my attitude to other people is shaped by my needs and desires, by my generosity and self interest.”[5] Such a spirituality effects both the advocates and critiques of empire, as both tend to assume their own people are responsible for either all that is good in the world (democracy and human rights) or all that is bad (the satanic mills of liberal capitalism).[6] Likewise, “to live in the church in North America is to assume that our critique of the church is the most important, that our problems are the most significant problems in the universal church.”[7]

As Leddy goes on to say, the insidious nature of this sense of self and its ensuing spirituality is the way in which it’s self-consciousness fails to recognize both its contingency and hegemony in its concrete relations with others. Leddy herself comes to this realization when Deequa, a Somali member of the Romero community, is given a new prostatic leg that neither the medical staff nor manufacturers had thought to match with her dark skin colour. They were unable to realize the way in which constructing the leg to be white was an assumption about what the default colour of a person was, thus, demonstrating their failure to recognize the particularity of the black woman they were attempting to help. After all, as Leddy conjectures, “who wouldn’t want a white leg? White was normal. White was the best. I realized that the color of her leg was Imperial White.”[8]

This realization – an expansion of self-consciousness – only occurred to Leddy through her proximity to the other. By witnessing the misrecognition Deequa encountered through receiving a white leg, Leddy came to understand how even those trying to help the other (including herself) are implicated in the empire’s exclusion of the other. In other words, the borders and boundaries that constitute imperial identity only revealed themselves in the presence of the other that they exclude. By encountering Deequa, Leddy encountered the way her own peoples’ sense of self excluded Deequa. Leddy argues that this exclusion was not coincidental to empire, but constitutive of it; an empire is brought into being through boundaries that are created for the purpose of exclusion.[9]

As John Macmurray argues, such boundaries are self-defeating, for an identity that is based upon the exclusion of the other destroys the possibility of community. For Macmurray, one of the mistakes of modern philosophy and sociology was the way it failed to separate the concepts of community and society. In his understanding, the concept of society in the western tradition was based upon a negative condition: a fear of the other.[10] This fear causes individuals to submit themselves to a shared law enforced by the power of the sovereign (whether that sovereign is Hobbes’ leviathan, or Rousseau’s general will).[11]

However community, Macmurray argues, cannot be sustained by this negative concept of society, for community has positive conditions. “The structure of a community is the nexus or network of the active relations of friendship between all possible pairs of its members.”[12] Said differently, community posits a positive and mutual intentionality. Whereas a society can be composed through tacit consent, community must be actively embodied. [13] For one’s membership in a community to have substance it must be taken up. “Thus the problem of community is the problem of overcoming fear and subordinating the negative to the positive in the motivation of persons in relation.”[14]

This implies that insofar as the conditions of a group’s consciousness remain negative, community will be impossible. For example, if the relation between two friends conceives of itself as a relation set against others, “its motivation in relation to others is negative; the two friends must defend themselves against the intrusion of the rest.”[15] Yet if they mount such a defense, whether existentially, physically, or both, their friendship ceases to be defined by their positive capacity, by what their friendship is for, emptying the bonds of friendship of actual substance. The same holds true for a community. As soon as it begins to define itself primarily in terms of what it is against, its substantial relations begin to decay, a process that if left unchecked, would lead to the eventual collapse of the community. “To be fully positive, therefore, the relation must be in principal inclusive, and without limits.”[16] That is to say, true positive identity whether of the person or of the community exists when for each self, “it is the other who is important, not himself. The other is the centre of value.”[17]

Yet, as Leddy demonstrated, imperial identity defines itself preciously by what it is against. America has increasingly become the negation of Nazis, communists, and terrorists,[18] which if Macmurray’s argument holds, suggests that America has increasingly become in-of-itself nothing. If it proceeds in this fashion it will inevitably collapse. Similarly, it follows that a spirituality that defines itself against the existence of others, destroys the possibility of the church. For while church structures might constitute Macmurray’s definition of a society, this does not signify that they function as a community of faith. Indeed, a community of faith will be known by the capacity of its members to “realizes [themselves] in and through the other,”[19] a realization that Macmurray calls communion.[20] Imperial spirituality as depicted by Leddy thus undermines the existence of communion.

Clearly, when they are brought into conversation, Leddy and Macmurray help to identify the spirituality of empire. Leddy shows us how an imperial spirituality attempts to secure itself through the exclusion of others and Macmurray illustrates how this destroys the possibility of communion. Nevertheless, the question remains, how are we to move beyond a spirituality of the empire towards a spirituality that fosters communion? Like the dichotomy between citizen and taxpayer, an imperial spirituality is not something we can simply choose to have or reject; it is the result of a subjective formation within the empire. This is precisely how it is able to distort acts as benevolent as creating a new prostatic leg for a victim of war.

The answer lies already in Leddy’s encounter with Deequa; not in the particular lesson that Leddy learned, but the very logic of the encounter itself. As we saw, it was only proximity to the other that revealed to Leddy how the boundaries of her own people were subtly drawn around race. Being in the presence of the other calls us to an awareness of the misrecognitions inherent to our subjectivity, of how our own spirituality sets up exclusive borders, and thereby, it expands our self-consciousness in a way that gives the opportunity to transcend those borders. Macmurray see this as a negative aspect of the self’s relation to the other, a latent possibility, but one that must always be subordinated to the positive condition of intentionality.[21]

However, Macmurray assumes that the dialectic of misrecognition that forms self-consciousness is a passive phenomenon, one that still has its basis in fear.[22] While this may be true with some versions of German Idealism, as Leddy’s encounter with Deequa demonstrates, the dialectical moment where misrecognition is corrected does not have to be based in fear; it can also be based in friendship. It was only through Leddy’s concern for the other, her wish to see a member of her community relieved of her pain, which led to her realization. It was because of the care Leddy held for Deequa that Leddy felt Deequa’s exclusion in her own person, calling Leddy to a new awareness of herself. In order to have misrecognition corrected then, one must be open and in proximity to the other, an openness and proximity that entails a positive intentionality. As Leddy suggests, such a stance can help us “find the true center, the new center of our lives,”[23] which is neither in one’s self, nor the reified other, but in the gap or border that lies in between. It is a spirituality that functions by “allowing our lives to be thrown off center and embracing the disorientation that this implies.”[24]

For those whose subjectivity was formed in the heart of the empire, this is a gospel of grace, for the other opens up the possibility that the false sense of the priority of our own being can be interrupted. We can be saved from ourselves, in a way we cannot accomplish by ourselves, for “the stranger can summon us to leave behind our imperial selves, our imperial lives,”[25] and our imperial spiritualties. And, to amend Denys Arcand’s phrase: In a fragmenting civilization where an increasing amount of people have “become more concerned with the gratification of their own appetites than with their responsibilities to society,” such a spirituality is evermore necessary, for “the days of that civilization are numbered.”[26]

Jeffrey Metcalfe is a postulant for ordination in the Diocese of Quebec, and is presently pursuing a master of divinity degree at Trinity College, Toronto. He is a co-editor of Catholic Commons.

Reviewed by Ashely Cole

“If you looked me in the eyes and challenged us both about our impossible dreams for justice and peace, I would say yes dream on for there is a little street called Wanda Road where strangers sometimes become neighbors.”

-Mary Jo Leddy

Every year the Canadian population increases by 250,000 people. Many of those newcomers arrive as refugees and spend the next year to three years navigating the sometimes treacherous seas of immigration. More often than not, the faces we see on the bus and in the work force look less and less like us. Immigration is becoming the face of Canada, and how we deal with and understand Canadian immigration is to, in essence, understand a part of Canadian identity.

If one of these newcomers showed up on your front step with nothing but their suitcase and their child, what would you do? Call the police? Send them somewhere else?  Or would you open your door and invite them in? Well this is exactly what Mary Jo Leddy did twenty years ago when she began what has become known as Romero House, a transitional housing and settlement office located in the west bend of Toronto. Not only did she open her door, she began a movement, modeled after this practice of creating space to allow a stranger to become a good neighbor.

The Other Face of God: When the Stranger Calls us Home, Mary Jo Leddy’s most recent in a long line of quality books, brings us the tales of her adventures living in this quiet little community that strives to bring peace to those who pass through its doors. Grounded in experience The Other Face of God is a compilation of stories, thoughts, and reflections that have been honed over twenty years of experience living and working with people known as refugees. In her own words the stories contained within these pages are “reflective ripples out from the foundational experience”. Leddy describes her interactions with these newcomers as “the blessing of newness, a new way of seeing the culture…and a new way of being in the church.” She calls this “the other face of God” and challenges us to see this ‘other face of God’ in those we first know as strangers, but who can become good neighbors.

In a rather prophetic voice, Leddy takes a sampling of experiences and expresses them as stories, in so doing allows us, “in the midst of the fragmentation of the clutter and fragmentation of the times”, to view, “the witness of lives that are concentrated and whole.” She weaves personal narrative into a contemporary stance and summons the reader toward deeper perception and a greater theological, social and political action that is rooted in the “particular suffering of our time and place”.  She writes, “this is to live joyfully…and it is always the surest sign of the gospel- it is pervasive, it makes sense.”

Last year I had the privilege of living and working with Mary Jo, and the people we had the fortune to call ‘good neighbors’. One of my first memories of Romero House was Mary Jo reading the introduction of this book to us- a new group of interns- at our orientation. Each of us sat silently, stunned by the prose and perception of the woman in front of us. At the time I had little sense of what it all meant, but as I began to live out my life at Romero House, the names in this book became faces and personalities that I was fortunate enough to encounter and was summoned very much in the same way Mary Jo describes in this book. It was opening myself up to this experience and these people that my own identity as a Christian and as a Canadian was challenged- summoned- to a newness, a new way of being and moving in this world.

It is this interweaving of cultural understanding, political leanings, and the kaleidoscope of languages and faces that has begun to define Canada. Multiculturalism is a gift, given us in part by those who flee their home and in time merge into an ever growing Canadian identity. They become active and creative members of society; bringing with them their own sense of knowledge, wisdom, family, and tradition.  As a church and as a country we have the opportunity to stand beside and amongst the new face of Canada and the other face of God. After all, as Mary Jo writes, “becoming a neighbor allows for a difference without indifference.”

 Ashley Cole holds a degree in International Development Studies from Canadian Mennonite University. She has recently completed an eleven month internship at Romero House. One of her favorite past times was rescuing old lady sweaters from the donation bins.