The Main Wycliffe Blog

Where I grew up, in southern Pennsylvania, Groundhog Day was a big thing. For weeks before February 2, the papers, the broadcasters asked: would the groundhog—who had a name, Punxatawny Phil, from Punxatawny, Penn.—see his shadow? Were we in for another six weeks of winter, or was Spring, and light and life, around the corner? (That was a question of course that only made sense in southern Pennsylvania, and in Germany whence came the settlers in the 1700s who brought Groundhog Day with them, where winter could conceivably be over by March. Not so much here in the great white north).

C. Douglas Jay, the founding director of the Toronto School of Theology, died peacefully on January 1st, at the age of 95. When he accepted the challenge to be TST’s first director in 1969, neither he nor anyone else could know whether TST would ever be more than an interesting but passing ecumenical experiment. Probably few would have dared to hope that it would become one of the world’s pre-eminent theological consortia—which it did. That the horse didn’t stumble out of the gate was due in large part to Doug Jay’s leadership.

Have you ever seen so many people so anxious to put something behind them? “Good riddance!” we exclaim to a year that saw 80 million people infected by a lethal virus that was the cause of widespread unemployment, isolation, and unprecedented governmental largesse. “Don’t come back!” we holler to months of natural disaster, to fires in the west, and tropical storms in the east. “Never again!” we chant to reports of racism and police brutality.

One of my goals in college was to get the grades necessary to apply to a top law school. I happened to take a course in Old Testament and the Professor asked me to stay on and be a teaching assistant. In my junior year, he was preaching in Charlotte NC and had a heart attack (he was mid-sixties). I went to the funeral and afterward his widow asked me to pick out three books from his library. I did. She then added a big book to my pile. A Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew Lexicon. It must have had a voice of its own, as I ditched the idea of law school and instead went to Virginia Seminary.

Early African American women dared to preach and call for personal and societal change. These heroes of faith inspire us and need to be remembered. We stand on their shoulders as we continue to battle over questions of gender, race, and biblical interpretation. African American abolitionist, moral reformer, and educator Maria W. Stewart (1803-1879) is one of those heroes. Stewart dared to heed God’s voice in calling for individual and collective transformation. Her inspiring Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W.

People, look east! The time is near

Of the crowning of the year.

Make your house fair as you are able

Trim the hearth and set the table.

People, look east and sing today

Love, the guest, is on the way. (Common Praise, 91)

It has become my family’s favourite Advent carol. Every year we look forward to singing it; always we have to sing it on the first Sunday of Advent because we can’t wait any longer. People look east! There is joy coming. There is a dawn.

I am in the middle of reading St. Benedict’s Rule with my 30 students in the first year MDiv course at Wycliffe called, “Life Together: Living the Christian Faith in Community.” We have come to the fun part of this portion of the class. First, students read the Rule straight through and shared their impressions. Many are skeptical. It’s really old, written for monks and nuns (not evangelical Protestants) and it has way too much detail about everything from how to pray to how to wash the dishes.

The term “the Canadian model” has been thrown around in recent weeks as British Government negotiators seek the best “divorce settlement” deal they can get, in preparation for the UK to leave the European union. The EU has been criticised for not being ready to treat the UK as “just like Canada” with whom the EU has a preferential tariff-light trade arrangement. Are we not closer to Europe than Canada, yet we are being offered far worse terms? Yes, and that’s just the point.

The ventilator may well come to be one of the sorrowful symbols of the time of the Virus. We will associate it, as even now we do, with intense suffering, loss, and even death. The root of “ventilator” is the Latin ventus, which means “wind” or “breath.” When our breath is under threat, we are filled with enormous fear. As a child I suffered from asthma, and on more than one occasion as a young adult I needed emergency medical intervention. I still remember both the deep apprehension when my breathing was troubled, and the exhausted yet thankful relief once treated.