Author: Dennis A. Gray

Thank you, Kwai Chang Caine

/ Dennis A. Gray / Leave a comment

This may sound a little strange to some of you, but I am truly saddened by the passing of David Carradine.  No, I’m not morning the lost of a great action figure like some, nor did I think of him as a role model the way he is being portrayed by others.  And yet, truth be told, without him my life might have taken a very different turn.

I was 18 when Kung Fu came to television. Carradine’s charater Kwai Chang Caine fasinated me. The juxtaposition of passive demeaner and explosions of violence was something I had never considered.

At the time I was part of a Christian High school group; I didn’t really believe, I was just madly in lust with one of the female members of the group.  Kwai Chang Caine however, caused me to seriously examine the question of spirituality.  I sought out instruction in Eastern philosophy and eventually wound up learning from a Buddist instructor at the same time that I was attending a Baptist congregation.  He often commented on the teachings of Jesus and thought that the Jewish rabbi must have been exposed to Buddist teachings at some point.

His take on Jesus’ teaching was, however, somewhat different from what I was learning in the Baptist church. When I would tell him what my pastor had told me a passage meant he would often respond with, “Really? But that’s not what He said.” It was this exposure to non-Christian examination of scripture that caused me to take a serious personal look at the Bible rather than just accepting what I was told it meant.

Eventually both the girl and the Buddist moved out of my life – but Jesus remained. And so did a desire to fully understand the context of what Jesus was saying.  All of which has, of course, contributed to who I am today.

Even though he played a relatively small role in my spiritual development, I followed Carradines career with more than a passing intertest. It is said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” and Kwai Chang Caine was the motivation for that first step. And so I find myself feeling a small measure of indebtedness to the character and the  actor.

When I learned of his death however, it was not any of the King Fu scenes that came to mind.  (No I don’t buy the suicide angle, neither do I think the asian Mafia had him killed.) No, my favorite Carradine moment will always be the Superman speech from Kill Bill 2. It’s a great commentary on the nature of masks and identity.  I think it stuck in my mind because of the fact that Superman is one of the most widely distributed archetypes of Christ, which puts an interesting slant on the commentary.

(For the more sensitive among you – brief bad language advisory.)

Towards Cycling Culture

/ Dennis A. Gray / 1 Comment

As I make my way down the final stretch to the Ride to Conquer Cancer, I find myself pondering the move towards cycle culture in North America and why it isn’t more like Europe?

For the last year or so I’ve been following a blog called Copenhagenize.  Written by an ex-Calgarian now living in Copenhagen, it and it’s sister site Copenhagen Cycle Chic chronicle how Danish cycle-culture is progressing and Copenhagen in particular should be the model the rest of the world uses to shape cycling infrastructure in the big cities. To be fair, there’s a great deal I like about what Mikael has to say, and I certainly would like to see Canada follow more of the Danish example when it comes to cycling infrastructure; separated bike lanes, extensive bicycle parking at malls and public buildings, elimination of helmet laws, etc.  But there is one major difference between Europe and North America that will likely always stand in the way.

Europe moves at a much slower pace.

It’s a mindset thing. Throughout most of Europe things happen when they happen. Deadlines are largely regarded as suggestions, stress relief often involves coffee in a street cafe in the middle of the afternoon, shops will even close in the middle of the day to take in a soccer game or a concert.  The trip to the shop or office is as much an experience as being there.

Not so in North America.  Here it’s all about getting as much done as possible in as short a time as possible.  Fulfillment is found not in relishing every moment of an experience but rather in cramming as many experiences into the moment as possible.  North America has always had a quantity over quality mindset. The daily commute, the trip to the store is a means to an end and nothing more. We get from A to B is as few steps as Google Maps can lay out for us and it better not take one second longer than the estimate.

Even what passes for cycling culture reflects this.   The mainstay of the European bicycle commute is the city-bike.  Ridden by men and women alike it allows one to travel in style; long coats, skirts, pumps and even stilettos are suitable cycling fashion. For families, the bakfeit or cargo bike allows mom or dad to ferry the kids around in safety without ever having to take the eyes of the hope of the future.

In North America however, it’s all Spandex and helmets, 27 speeds and razor thin tires, beat the rush and get to the office in time to grab a shower and wash away the record setting attempt at getting to work.  Kids interrupt air-flow so tuck ’em in back or park ’em in a trailer out of sight so we can focus on the road ahead.  Slow bikes are as much an annoyance as slow drivers and cycle chic is measured in Day-Glo jerseys and the latest high-tech shoe clips.

As long as this is the case I’m afraid that cycling culture in Canada will always be at war with the cars.  Bicycles don’t mesh with North Americas high speed lifestyle. It’s hard to embrace the bicycle when you want to be everywhere 10 minutes before you left and want to take half the house with you in case you need something.

Slow Bike Movement

Slow Bike Movement

If North America is ever going to move towards a vibrant effective bicycle culture the first thing it needs to do is slow down. Not just on the roads but in the way we approach life itself.

“Slow down, you move too fast.
You got to make the morning last.”

See you in Niagara Falls —

Endings and Beginnings

/ Dennis A. Gray / 1 Comment

I’ve been putting off writing this for some time now, but I can’t put it off forever. It’s just that writing about it seems to give it so much  finality.  But then, experience has demonstrated writing about it brings acceptance as well, and since not writing about it won’t stop it from happening, I may as well get on with it.

Pastor Don McCallum is leaving KPC.

I’ve been a believer for just about 35 years now, and for the last 14 years Don McCallum has been my pastor.  Before that there was a long line of individuals in a variety of denominations starting with the Anglican minister who gave me a copy of Nietzche’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil‘ as a confirmation gift when I was 13. (Interestingly enough, a young man named Davian is sitting at the desk behind me reading that very book as I’m writing this.)

If you check out my Facebook profile under religion it reads “Anglican/ Baptist/ Pentecostal/ Presbyterian with definite Jewish sympathies ” and that’s only a list of the major influences.  I was even blessed to have a Messianic rabbi as one of the early mentors (hence the ‘Jewish sympathies’), but for sheer longevity and range of interaction no one has been as large an influence on me as has Don McCallum.  It’s been one of the most productive and enjoyable relationships which I’ve ever had the privilege of taking part. That’s what makes change so hard.

But change is what growth is all about. If nothing changes there is only stagnation and that isn’t good for anyone or anything, and so the best way for me to get through this is embrace it and pray that it is only the ending of one phase of the relationship. Indeed, I pray that it is the beginning of a whole new phase of relationship;  for Don, for me, and for Kortright Presbyterian Church.

When Don first told me he was leaving (almost a month ago–worship planning works 4 months in advance, so we needed to know) it started me thinking about when Pete, Phil and Jim left. For those of you who don’t know, Pete Olsen was our youth pastor, Phil English was our worship pastor, and Jim Klaas was our discipleship pastor.  Each one, in turn, felt that the time had come for them to move on to other things. Each one had their influence on me, on Kortright and then moved on to influence others.  Now Don is leaving as well. The paranoid side of my insecurity is starting to wonder if it was something I said!?

But then I believe God began to show me a pattern.

It started when we moved to Devere Drive on our 25th anniversary. There was a general feeling of malaise at Scotsdale Drive.  Pretty much everyone felt we were in a rut and needed something new to kick us back into high gear.  Since space was an issue we started looking for a new building. It took more than 5 seemingly fruitless years, but then one day the old University Village School just seemed to drop into our lap. We tendered an offer, it was accepted, and we moved to the promised land.

And that’s where it ramped up a notch. The promised land metaphor was bandied around quite a bit. In fact, it was bandied about a lot. There was even talk of making a ‘crossing of the Hanlon Expressway video’.  But I don’t think any of us truly appreciated how much of a wilderness experience moving here was really going to be.

As expected there was an immediate drop off in attendance. Then shortly thereafter Pete and his wife Cindi were parachuted into the Northwest territories. (Well, not literally, though I’m sure Pete would have thought it a cool idea.) Other things began to change as well. Phil led us through a paradigm shift in worship which included the establishing of a worship planning team, Jim tried a variety of discipleship ideas but found the small groups dynamic was shifting. New people started to take leadership roles and we found things like bannering, and liturgical dance working their way into our midst. One thing after another came, or went, or was replaced as we struggled to discover our new identity in this new environment.

We changed our vision statement, our mission statement and our motto. A new goals directive was adopted, by a group of elders that was much changed from the one that left Scotsdale Drive; with the addition of more new elders next month, that dynamic will change again.  As I have already mentioned, along the way Pete, Phil and Jim moved on to bigger and better things. Now Don McCallum is doing the same. We’ve gone from 4 pastors to no pastors in three and a half years.

That’s when it hit me. We had forgotten one little detail about crossing the Jordan. One aspect of moving to the promised land had completely escaped our notice.

Nobody that left Egypt ever got to the promised land!!

Well, except Joshua and Caleb; because the promised land was such a new thing that it required a new way of thinking by those who were going to inhabit it.  The old ways would have worked against the new thing that God was trying to do. (And did, as it turned out.)

Now I’m not saying that an entire generation needs to die off before KPC will get its act together, however much it may seem to be taking that long.   But I do think we failed to notice the fact that sometimes to be effective change needs to be complete, total, even massive in scope.  It may require massive change because there are massive changes happening in the world we have been called to reach.  Every generation is different than the one before it, but most sociologists agree that the scope of change from one generation to the next is increasing exponentially.

I’m beginning to believe that God wanted to do far more with Kortright than we had ever imagined.  We were plateaued and going nowhere, just rolling along maintaining the status quo. For us to move forward we needed to go someplace we’d never been before and as much as we might have great affection for some of the things we wanted to bring along, they were slowing us down, miring us in the muck at the bottom of the Red Sea. What hurts most is to think some of the things holding us back might be people we truly love and care about.  But it may well be that the status quo is holding them back as well. It may well be that if they are going to grow, they need to be somewhere else.

And so it would seem that more changes are required than we thought. For the descendants of Israel, moving into the promised land took a lot of hard work and more than a few battles had to be fought. There were many casualties along the way. But it was worth it, because in the end a new nation was born.

And I think it will be worth it for Kortright as well. God is reinventing us into something completely new.  It has occurred to me that by the time we reach our 30th anniversary in Sept of 2010 we will have spent the last 5 years bringing about a new location, a new paradigm of worship, a new mission statement, a new vision statement, and new goals directive, a new youth pastor, a new children’s ministry director, a new music director, a new technical director, a new session (board of elders), and a new senior pastor.  By our 30th anniversary God will have all but totally re-invented Kortright Presbyterian Church. It will still be the same community of people, but a new version of that community with a new vision for the future.

Which is why I have decided that, for myself anyway, I’m going to call it Kortright 3.o

I know it’s incredibly geeky, but that’s the way I find myself thinking about it. As we cross the 30 year mark it will be as if we are entering into a whole new version of Kortright – version 3.0 – still very much the same place but with a few updated features, and a few new ones, some unproductive features removed from the menu, a little debugging done along the way, resulting in an improved spiritual experience that makes Kortright a greater and more effective community than it is right now.  And that’s exciting!

And I’ll be writing about all of it here, from one gray man’s perspective. Nothing about the future is going to be very black and white I imagine, just myriad shades of gray.  But I’ll comment on it here under the tag ‘Kortright 3.0’.  And I invite you to comment on the process as well. There will need to be many conversations about what is happening at KPC; I’d like to start one of them right here.

If you’re from Kortright then please pass around the link to this article. Let’s use the comment feature to start a dialog about what is happening at KPC. If there is enough traffic I’ll transfer all of this to a blog of its own. For now I’ll archive everything to a new menu page called – you guessed it – Kortright 3.0

This is an ending, there’s no doubt about that, but it is also a beginning; I’m excited to be here as the future unfolds.  In the past I was usually the one moving on; but God has given me a home at Kortright and so this time I’m staying while others do the moving. 

A new experience – this is going to be a great adventure.

 

A Dainty Little Recording

/ Dennis A. Gray / 1 Comment

The title of this post is a nigh unto unforgivable pun; but it’s late and I wanted to post this before I forget to again. I’ve been meaning to post this since the Easter Service it was recorded during, but I seem to keep forgetting to do it when I sit down at the computer. I usually wind up listening to a meditation stream from Mangatune instead.  But I digress.

My home church is blessed to have among our number Kareena Edward,  a very talented singer/actress who professionally goes by her maiden name Kareena Dainty.  At our Easter Sunday services Kareena, accompanied by Brian Watson on piano, sang a wonderful rendition of Twila Paris’ ‘How Beautiful’.  I made on quick on-the-fly recording of the performance and so here, for you enjoyment, and the convenience of the Dainty clan, is a posting of that recording.

How Beautiful – Kareena Dainty

Roll over the link above to launch player.  Click to play the song in your browser. Right click and “Save Target/Link as…” to download.

Where Are all the People

/ Dennis A. Gray / 1 Comment

I know, I’ve been away doing other stuff. Among the things I’ve been working on is the following. It’s a poem a friend of mine wrote. I really liked it so I wanted to record it, but I didn’t want to just set it to music and have done. So after making several recordings of various women reading the poem I decided this was the best way to go.

Roll over the title to call up the player and listen to the recording and let me know what you think.
Click to launch file with plug-in or right click and ‘Save As..’ to download.

Where are the People – rtm

Where are the parents who love and comfort me?
The people who nurtured me,
The people who banished my fears like the wind,
The people who loved me no matter what?
Where have they gone?
Why aren’t they here now?
Do they still exist?
Perhaps they never did.

Where is the girlfriend?
The one who lent an ear,
The one who hugged me when my world turned upside down,
The one who was always there for me?
Why isn’t she here now?
Does she exist?
Perhaps she never did.

Where is the man who loved me beyond reason?
The man who helped me through life’s darkest hour,
The one who carried me when I couldn’t walk,
The man who would never leave me?
Why isn’t he here now?
Does he still exist?
Perhaps he never did.

Where are the people who care for me?
The ones who never leave,
The people who supported me,
The people who encouraged me,
The people who loved me unfailingly?
Why aren’t they here now?
I crawl sadly back inside myself,
That’s the only place they exist

By Rachel Tucker