What do faith and cinnamon rolls have in common? Well, if ‘life is like a box of chocolates’ why can’t faith be like a plate cinnamon rolls? Am I deep or what?

We were in Jerome Arizona. Jerome is a great town up in the mountains of Arizona. From all accounts it was once a rip-snorting, rough and ready mining town in the 1800’s, but eventually it became pretty much an empty ghost town until the 1960’s. It was then that the flower children discovered it. They soon moved in or ‘squatted,’ depending on your perspective, and started living in Jerome. Of course, as soon as the town started to fill up, those who had abandoned it remembered that they owned it, and they decided it was time to start charging rent or expecting buy-outs.

Well, to make a long story short, the creativity and the optimism of the 1960’s won out as the new residents started up small business to pay the bills and tourism went through the roof. Many of those hippies still live there and Jerome is now the third largest tourist attraction in Arizona—after the Grand Canyon and Sedona. I love this story because it has the feel of frontier risk and opportunity. But, more than that, to take something lost and give it a second chance is downright Christian, is it not? Christ is all about taking that which is lost and giving it new life, but I digress.

While we were there, we had to do the most essential thing any traveller has to do—no, not that! Remember that I am from Canada and the most essential thing for Canadian travellers is that we find GOOD coffee. We went to a place that my buddy Rick knew of, but alas it was closed. I almost started to panic, but the high altitude and lack of caffeine made panicking too difficult. Thankfully, next door and down a few steps was this little shop that you could easily walk by without noticing. This harbinger of delight is called “Gisel’s Café and Bakery.”

(more…)

There is at least one thing that rural, small town and big city type people have in common-besides the obvious things like skin and kids and bills and such. Do you want to know what that one thing is? A fire! I have been part of a crowd in rural New Brunswick at 3:00 o’clock in the morning, and I have also been part of a fire-fueled crowd here in Toronto. Fires attract people-wherever they occur!

One time, Sheila and I were out for a walk and we saw some massive, inky black plumes raising into the cloudless blue sky just a block or two from where we were. We decided to put our lunch date on hold and go check out the fire.

As we started our pilgrimage to the fire, many others joined us along the way. One man suggested that it was the rubber factory that was just over on the next block. I immediately prayed that it wasn’t! What a nasty problem that would have been! Finally, we got over onto Cawthra Road. It runs along the railroad tracks, so we had an unobstructed view of the fire a few hundred yards from us, on the other side of the tracks.

(more…)

How spiritual can a spiritual guide be if a spiritual guide doesn’t guide you to God? I realize it sounds very much like I am spiritualizing that insightful question which has confounded intellectuals for millennia, “How much wood can a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”, but I am not. My question has nowhere near the profundity of said woodchuck conundrum. To me the answer is pretty obvious. How spiritual can a spiritual guide be if the spiritual guide doesn’t guild you to God? The answer is: “not very”.

Still, that didn’t stop the Russian Orthodox Church from publishing a new spiritual guide, in association with Russia’s ruling party, that doesn’t mention God.

According to a recent Reuters article (say “recent Reuters” ten times and then continue), instead of God making it into the church’s new guide, justice, patriotism, and solidarity top the list of ‘Eternal Values.’ Gee, it sounds more like a ‘conduct guide’ published by a labour union than a ‘spiritual guide’ published by a church!

According to the daily newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the spiritual guide lists, in order of importance, in the eyes of the church and ruling party: 1. justice, 2. freedom, 3. solidarity, 4. unity, 5. self-restraint and sacrifice, 6. patriotism, 7. welfare and 8. Love. Can you believe that? It looks like they stopped at eight! If they extended the list to the ever popular ‘Top Ten’ format, God may have squeaked into the list, or, er, ah, maybe not.

(more…)