Changing of the Guard

Presently, there is more than 65 billion in Canadian private equity. Obama will spend that in the U.S. during one year of health care. The World Bank and IMF are feeling it. There is a big correction coming with a big appetite amidst the changing of the guard: which includes BP; the U.K; the World Bank; the EU (including Hungary and Franco-Germany)... and amidst it all the U.S. is slipping while China is on the hunt and India is shifting.

5767 and Hurin

Yesterday morning, in between office emails, phone calls and meetings I found some time to listen to my favorite teacher Dr. James Houston lecture on heartkeeping at Regent Radio. As James got into subjectivity, atheism and theological anthropology's narcissistic religion I meandered around online doing a brief study (don't ask me why... It had nothing to do with his lecture) of the Jewish calendar:

The Economist: Israel's wasted victory
Wikipedia: Hebrew numerals
Wikipedia: Hebrew calendar
Wikipedia: Jewish Holidays 2000-2050
Wikipedia: Shavuot
Jerusalem Post: Jerusalem Day 5767

I stopped reading Hebrew and listened to Dr. Houston, "...a kind of narcissistic religion... all self-reflection... looking into the mirror of the word... and seeing it's nonsense because I am a 20th Century narcissist... like God is a projection of my need... a symbol of my dependence... theological existentiallism... theological anthropology from below, from humanity..." and I smiled and thanked God for brilliant humble men like James as he spoke his way into Von Balthasar's Trinitarian prayer...

That was yesterday. Today I sit here listening to Tim Hughes single Everything on repeat, "Be my everything... Christ in me the hope of glory... You are everything." I will listen to this one song all afternoon! Dar is at work. Nate is sleeping. Bree and Luke are playing. Our friend Shelley, visiting from Ontario is out hiking. I sit here at our dining room table with 19 books and a view of Spring Creek flowing beautifully in our backyard. The sun is shining, birds singing and the snow is melting off the peaks of the Rockies.

From The Children of Hurin,

But as Thingol turned the hilt of Anglachel toward Beleg, Melian looked at the blade; and she said, 'There is malice in this sword. The heart of the smith still dwells in it, and that heart was dark. It will not love the hand that it serves; neither will it abide with you long.'

'Nonetheless I will wield it while I may,' said Beleg; and thanking the king he took the sword and departed. Far across Beleriand he sought in vain for tidings of Turin, through many perils; and that winter passed away, and the spring after.

And Tim Hughes keeps singing "everything" in my ears! If Jesus really is my everything then I can't turn intercession into a religion. I can't go beyond what is written. I constantly must submit all things to Him. I must submit to him amidst all things: my self, my family, my mind, my heart, my actions, my intentions to raise up 10 000 master cadets, my willingness to raise up millions in business, my desire to build neo-cistercian abbeys globally, my desire to give the keys of the bank to the widows and orphans of the world, my everything....

In the bending of the bow; in the changing of the guard; in the acceleration of the flow... Christ Jesus still remains the hope of glory... my hope of glory! I willingly find myself in Him as He finds Himself in me. I constantly lay all things within me at His feet - truly the God of my everything enthroned - both within me and beyond me - as I am humbly dethroned beneath Him, within Him. May I never be found declaring some other throne than His.

Yes, tomorrow is the Global Day of Prayer and by a certain way of measuring time, it is Pentecost Sunday. Some of us will be hiking up mountains to "meet" with God and "stand" in solidarity with brothers and sisters around the world... But, tomorrow is just another day! And as long as we have "todays" Jesus remains everything to everyone everyday.

Any"thing" less than every"one's" full submission to the "person" of Jesus Christ is ideology and idolatry.

Our prayers for you are always spilling over into thanksgivings. We can't quit thanking God our Father and Jesus our Messiah for you! We keep getting reports on your steady faith in Christ, our Jesus, and the love you continuously extend to all Christians. The lines of purpose in your lives never grow slack, tightly tied as they are to your future in heaven, kept taut by hope.
Colossians 1:3 (The Message)

Architectural Gateways

Lately, I have been captivated by Cistercian/Templar architecture in European history and have been considering an early July visit to Clairvaux Abbey in France. I stumbled upon the Claravallis architectural project La Chapelle Saint Bernard de Clairvaux of CDMB ARCHITECTS of Berlin. I was so excited I immediately printed off French and English pdf's from the website and emailed Christophe (the architect) about the present status of the Clairvaux project and also asked his permission to post the above picture entitled Light on Earth. The description from CDBM:

The above model depicts the light of the heavens cast onto the Earth's surface. A map originating from the Cambridge Star Atlas 2000 was abstracted into constellations and magnitudes to reduce the vast quantities of information.

Most maps of the heavens are constructed using spherical projections making it difficult to read the relationships between objects as everything appears distorted. The task was to make a Mercator type map with a Cartesian order.

The new map expresses the observable universe in extremely simple terms. One can clearly distinguish the Milky Way, the Earth's Ecliptic and the North Pole - South Pole of our galaxy located within the system.

The Earth is envisioned as a "Dent de Lion" (when one blows on the Dent de Lion the seeds scatter ensuring the future of the plant). The light cast onto the Earth is broken into zones defining the relationships within the universal context. As solar winds blow the Earth apart, fragments containing the code and origin of our planet are scattered throughout space. The hope is that someday the code may regenerate life.

I love it when an artist can distill vast amounts of data into a fresh perspective. That's what I'm up to with words. After all the saturation, incubation and conception... something beautiful might be born.

A close friend and I are planning on being in the City of London at the end of June to do deeper research into his family of origin, including his grandfather who was the chairman of a bank there and his father who was an RAF pilot. After that trip to London, if all goes according to plan I'll meet my wife Dar in Paris and hopefully we will walk together on the land of Clairvaux amidst the ruins of Bernard's Abbey there. Dar's Acadian French sure will be useful.

We're just in the dreaming scheming planning stages - It'll be a big adventure if we can pull it off. After France, we will detour to Malta to visit praying friends there... and then back to the mountains of Western Canada (and our kids :)

Since being in Honduras twice this year and potentially being in England, France and Malta soon I am studying more. My copy of The World Bank's world development report for 2007 "Development and the Next Generation" arrived at my office this week...


I sit here and open up this scholastic, world class, well researched 300 page doc focusing on global youth aged 12-24 years old and read:

Youth is a period of intense learning, when people can acquire the human capital they need to move themselves and their families out of poverty. Not confined to the skills needed to become an economically productive adult, learning extends to other aspects of life such as navigating health risks and becoming a responsible spouse or parent or citizen. It can happen in several ways, often through the formal school system, but also through learning from parents, peers, family, community and work experience. Because the capacity for learning is so great relative to older ages, missed opportunities - to acquire skills in school or on the job, or good health habits, or the desire to engage in community and society - can be extremely difficult to reverse.

This is fuel for the fire of my mandate: discovering, developing and deploying 10 000 master cadets, leaders of leaders of young people globally - discovering them internationally; developing them locally and deploying them globally... It'll take an army and a fortune to pull this off. But the time is now! One master cadet may turn around and lead 10 or 100 or 1000 or a whole tribe or nation.

And the most fun in all of this will be finding these brilliant kids all over the planet and funding them and sending them all over the world on pilgrimage learning adventures... as they become world-class leaders of their own peoples.

Early this morning, in the pouring rain, with this global vision burning in my mind and heart, I hiked for hours all over Stewart Creek and Three Sisters Mountain Village here in Canmore. I prayed and wept over all the newly developing and recently deforested lands hunting for a place, a big place, for such a vast international vision to unfold. I've been praying over this land since we first placed an altar "in the gate" there on our anniversary on May 1 last year. Today I spent a lot of time off the roads and pathways. I was deep into the forests and streams hidden in Shaddai's shadow. One moment I will never forget: I was standing quietly on a freshly cut tree stump in a clearing and the earth groaned so heavily around me that every one of my bones shook. I couldn't tell if it was the earth under me or a huge lion right over my shoulder growling in my ear. It wasn't a lion, and I'm not sure it was the earth... but a deep growling groan rattled my bones! And I told the creation all around me that I understood it's groaning:

From Romans 8:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with God's will.

Amidst this deeper international groaning - I'm reading more books:

Nelson Mandela: In His Own Words
God's Soldiers: Adventure, Politics, Intrigue, and Power - A History of the Jesuits
From Chivalry to Terrorism - War the the Changing Nature of Masculinity
Turning the Hiram Key - Rituals of Freemasonry Revealed
Honey And Salt: Selected Spiritual Writings of Bernard of Clairvaux
The Maltese Cross: A Strategic History Of Malta
The Fortifications of Malta 1530-1945

Back to work tomorrow.
This is not "either/or"
- it's "both/and" -
two tracks, one train:

G8 2007

I took this picture from the empty water reservoir above these beautiful Honduran kids who were praying over their land with fists full of salt!

G8 official site
UofT links
Junior 8
Caritas/Reuters
Make Poverty History
Bono Idol One

Obedience and Sacrifice (revised)

Jesus submitted willingly because he knew the intent of the Father. That is the key: to be assured of God's intent. We may forget the details as long as we accept the Person who is inaugurating the changes. To haggle over details, to fuss over delays, and to sulk when God seemingly changes His tactics is really an unconscious defamation of God's character.
W. Glyn Evans - Daily With the King



Trick question: Which Jesus would you rather follow?
(notice the same characters present in both sketches)



What more do I ask of you than yourself? I do not care at all for anything else that you may give me. I do not seek your gift. I seek you. Just as it would not satisfy you to have anything but me, so it does not please me to have anything you may give, if you do not give yourself.

Offer yourself to me and give your entire self for God. Such an offering will be accepted. Look, I offered all of myself to the Father for you. I gave my entire Body and Blood for your food so that I might be all yours and you might be all mine.

If you hold back and will not resign yourself to my will without having second thoughts, then your offering is not perfect nor will we become perfectly at one.
The Imitation of Chirst - Thomas a Kempis

To the prophet, no matter how noble the King's sacrifice seemed, Samuel retorted Saul's self-defense with "to obey God is better than sacrifice". In Hebrews, we are taught that Jesus, in reverent submission, "learned obedience from what he suffered". God learned !?

Like a child undergoing discipline, I must want to learn obedience. I must want to obey that Other. In The Inner Voice of Love Henri Nouwen teaches:

Developing your identity as a child of God in no way means giving up your responsibilities. Likewise, claiming your adult self in no way means that you cannot become increasingly a child of God. In fact, the opposite is true. The more you feel safe as a child of God, the freer you will be to claim your mission in the world as a responsible human being. And the more you claim that you have a unique task to fulfill for God, the more open you will be to letting your deepest need be met.

The kingdom of peace that Jesus came to establish begins when your lion and your lamb can freely and fearlessly lie down together.

There is some kind of paradox about obedience to the Father (being the focus of the will of Jesus) and sacrifice (being the crux of Christ's infinite resignation) to the will of His Father. This willing obedience and willed sacrfice were ultimately manifested and realized in the power of resurrection, where the Father and the Spirit willingly raised the Son from the dead. All of this willing between willing Persons tied into Jesus' own authority, given to Him by His Father, to lay His life down, only to take it up again. There is a lot of "willingness" in God.

A paradox is like a prism - it captures truth (light) and reveals its deeply mysterious properties.

In obedience Joshua willingly devoted all of Jericho and its riches to God. Achan and Saul fell into the same trap of not being willing to devote everything to God in the way God willed and commanded such devotion. It was not simply that Achan and Saul were wishy-washy in their disobedience: They willed disobedience! God called it rebellion and arrogance - which are planted, conceived, and birthed in the deadly manipulative acts of divination and idolatry. Achan and his family were put to death. Saul was rejected as King, mortally wounded in battle, and ultimately committed suicide (with the aid of an Amalekite) beside the bodies of his three sons.

Wealth and power have always tempted God's people away from obiedence. The oppressive wealth and powers of Jericho, Amalek, Babylon, Jerusalem and Rome are some of the very demons God attacked with fierce determination on the cross. All for the freedom of many sons and daughters. One becoming poor making many rich.

Amidst the rubble of Jericho, Joshua pronounced this solemn shadow:

Cursed before the Lord is the man who underakes to rebuild this city, Jericho.At the cost of his firstborn son will he lay its foundations; at the cost of his youngest will he set up its gates.

And now I'm thinking about Jesus speaking about counting the cost before building a tower, and warning his apprentices about the deceptive hollow grandure of the templar monolith. And back in the prophets, how Zechariah saw Jerusalem as a city without walls and the presence of God as a blazing super-nova circle of fire all around it. How God's glory was Israel's rear guard to Isaiah. How Moses was led by God's fire, was prepared to see God's glory, and overheard God's name proclaimed in a fierce wild landscape. The name and character of God echoing off every boulder and canyon wall.

Egypt and Babylon were schools of humility for a people without lands, kings without countries, prophetic authors without any claims. They only had a hope! Because, God had sacrificed everything on their behalf. God gave up their land for them. God gave up their cities for them. God gave up their kings for them... For a certain Person's namesake God left them with absolutely nothing.

Why? It may have had something to do with helping them discover their own dark hearts. And if they ever repented and found their hearts again, at a time when they had nothing, they may become obedient with hands full of sacrifice when they are given back everything... by the giver of all good things.

Taking a lesson from St. Paul:

Having nothing - find your heart.
With everything - keep your heart.

...known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything. We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians, and opened wide our hearts to you.

14 Years!

Yesterday, Dar and I celebrated 14 years of marriage. Last year I wrote this post entiteled Anniversaries and Altars after we built this altar in Three Sisters on our 13th.

After a whole year, our altar still stands there exactly as it did when it was created one year ago. What is most interesting is that our altar has stood there even though large piles of dirt and stone have been emassed right beside it... Literally, within a couple of feet, tons and tons of soil trucked in and piled up and fenced in by "Phoenix fence" company. Yet our altar stands there stalwart and strong... despite the thundering of trucks and tons of earth.

Yesterday morning, we took the kids to the altar and poured olive oil over it and prayed again. Luke wanted to build another altar, so he gathered 12 stones and built his altar just to the left of this one. On the right of the original altar, just outside the above picture is a stack of three stones representing Luke, Bree and Nate. Dar and the kids built that little three stone altar a year ago. Yesterday, we put olive oil on those stones as well. With fresh oil on those three rocks Nate was the first adventurous one to step on the rocks with his boots. As he did that I said, "How lovely are the feet of those who bring good news!" Then Luke and Bree both got their feet onto the rocks. Three little saints with oily boots! We took the three little saints with oily boots all through the woods where our altar was made. We walked all over the land. We discovered animal bones and beautiful mossy places all around our altar. Big adventures...

After all that, we got Nate and Bree home. I dropped Luke off at school and then hiked up Mt. Lady MacDonald. Here are a couple of pics I took with my phone:




Two and a half hours up. Some time at the summit for contemplation. Ran down the mountain in 45 minutes (my legs are killing me)... Even ran down through the snow at the summit. Nothing like jogging down a triple black diamond :)

Got home and showered. Then took Dar out for our anniversary dinner at The Quarry. Afterwards we meandered downtown Canmore arm in arm eventually wandering into a funky shop and walking out with earrings and a braclet for Dar. All in all, a wonderful day of celebration.