Category: Watershed Discipleship

40 Birds of Lent: Final Count

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Art as Resistance, Theological Animation, Watershed Discipleship2 Comments

Laurel1By Laurel Dykstra

While the word Lent comes from Middle English, quadragesima, the Latin word for the season means fortieth referring to the fortieth day before Easter. And while this resonates with a host of biblical wilderness forties—the 40 days of the flood, the Hebrew’s 40 year sojourn in the desert, Moses’ 40 days on Sinai, Elijah’s 40 day journey to Mt. Horeb, Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness—the actual number of days doesn’t quite add up, so different traditions have different metrics, (don’t count Sundays, Lent ends on Maundy Thursday) in order to get to 40. I love the biblical associations but the 40 Birds of Lent involved some cheating to make the numbers come out right.
Continue reading “40 Birds of Lent: Final Count” →

Wild Lectionary: Leafy Branches Sunday – Domingo de Ramos

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imagejpeg_0-5Palm Sunday, Year B
Mark 11:1-11

By Carmen Retzlaff

The Palm Sunday story in the Gospel of Mark says that

Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. (Mark 11:8)

The Greek (from Thayer’s Greek Dictionary) is:

stiba¿ß; stibas, stibados; a. a spread or layer of leaves, reeds, rushes, soft leafy twigs, straw, etc., serving for a bed; b. that which is used in making a bed of this sort, a branch full of leaves, soft faliage Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Leafy Branches Sunday – Domingo de Ramos” →

40 Birds of Lent: Nesting Season

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Nest2By Laurel Dykstra

Lente in Middle English means springtime, which means a kind of lovely irony is built into Lent, at least where I live on Coast Salish Territory. The church’s season of fasting and austerity falls during nesting season so while we smear our heads with ashes and forswear chocolate, facebook, and alcohol, our feathered friends are setting up housekeeping and getting it on. The bird songs of spring are about defending territory and announcing sexual availability. Continue reading “40 Birds of Lent: Nesting Season” →

Wild Lectionary: Purge Me with Hyssop

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Screen Shot 2018-03-04 at 8.43.44 PMLent 5B
Psalm 51:7b

By Laurel Dykstra

The psalmist says “purge me with hyssop” –clean me with a scrubby aromatic plant.

Mediterranean Hyssop— Hyssopus officinalis is a pungent-leafed bush with blue flowers that is used medicinally, mostly in teas as an expectorant, antiseptic and for cough relief. But the qualities that the bible ascribes to Hyssop: it grows in walls, can hold moisture, has a long, stiff stalk, has a purgative effect, appear in no one plant. Other suggested candidates for biblical Hyssop include caper, Syrian oregano, and za’atar a word which Palestinians use for a family of aromatic herbs (and the ubiquitous condiment made from their dried leaves). Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Purge Me with Hyssop” →

The Joke Is All We Have Left

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Free the WaterBy Jim Perkinson (right), an excerpt from “Jesters, tricksters, taggers and haints: Hipping the church to the Afro-hop, pop-‘n-lock mock-up currently rocking apocalyptic Detroit,” a November 2017 article in Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies (HTS):

In many places today, the joke is all we have left to pry open the prison gate – a jest and a belly laugh rooted in the deep past and the abandoned margins. But its truth remains absolute, despite corporate pretention otherwise. We all finally will come apart at the seams and decay into streams of composting liquid and molecules – even US drones and bankers’ computer screens, blinking with algorithms. The only question is when and for what.

In recognition of such an eventuality of equality, may we choose well where to expend our breath and exercise our push back and dreaming otherwise. May we become soldiers of the unrepentant joke, militant laughers learning our hope from the least. May we keep our jest visceral and its spear-point like a razor, ready for whatever crack of freedom the Mystery of Wild Hilarity that created this planet may open. May we do so, even if that possibility is ephemeral and uphill as a spray-painted st and a stenciled demand on a tower and the political struggle to ‘free the ow’ that follows! Indeed, may we finally be strong like water and as insurgent as a tower growing from concrete!

40 Birds of Lent: Water

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Barrows Goldeneye
Barrow’s Goldeneye

By Laurel Dykstra

I woke up this morning humming:

Water heals our bodies
Water heals our souls
When we go down, down to the water
In the water we are whole.

Wood Duck
Wood Duck

The song I learned in water ceremonies at Standing Rock, is the chorus of Coco Love Alcorn’s song The River. It’s not so surprising that these were the words in my head as I spent the better part of yesterday morning singing them outside the gates of Kinder Morgan’s Westridge Marine Terminal—the intended shoreline destination for transferring Tar Sands bitumen from the proposed Trans-mountain expansion pipeline project to ocean-going tankers. Beside the water of the Burrard Inlet on unceded Coast Salish Territory we sang as trees were limbed and cut in anticipation of a tunnel through the mountain. Continue reading “40 Birds of Lent: Water” →

Wild Lectionary: This Text Bites Back

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Mating ball of garter snakes, Lent 2017, Richmond BC

Lent 4B

Numbers 21:4-9
John 3:14-21

By Laurel Dykstra

Today’s gospel reading contains perhaps the best-known verse in the bible, certainly the New Testament passage that is known best in modern North America.

It begins like this, “For God so Loved the World… Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: This Text Bites Back” →

40 Birds of Lent: A Siege of Herons

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DoveBy Laurel Dykstra

I was beyond excited to discover that the Aberdeen Bestiary (right) has been digitized and is available online. In recent years there has been, among a certain set, a revival of Herbals—illustrated volumes for the identification and medicinal use of plants, with an emphasis on women’s and Indigenous knowledge traditions. But the faunal analog, the Bestiary has seen no parallel resurgence. Composed in medieval monasteries, these often anecdotal sometimes allegorical, encyclopedias of animals were the height of scientific

Rock Dove
Rock Dove

learning. Perhaps such “facts” as weasels giving birth through the mouth, deer eating poisonous snakes as a restorative, and the dove’s eye color indicating their maturity and discernment, dissuade modern would-be champions of the genera. Continue reading “40 Birds of Lent: A Siege of Herons” →

Wild Lectionary: Thoughts from a reluctant farmer

On By RadicalDiscipleshipIn Theological Animation, Uncategorized, Watershed Discipleship1 Comment

IMG_5855Lent 3B
Exodus 20:1-17
John 2:13-22

By Svinda Heinrichs

I recently moved from southern Ontario near Toronto to a north-ish rural community near Bancroft, Ontario – north-ish because we are really at the southern end of the north. My partner and I live most of the time in the manse in town, where she is the minister, and the rest of the time in the cabin on a 64-acre piece of mostly forested Land which has been deemed “marginal agriculture” by those who are supposed to know these things. I left my congregational ministry position to move here to live and labour on the Land and in this community. It has never been my dream to be a farmer, but I keep reminding myself that the Spirit moves in mysterious ways and that I may just bloom where I am planted. Continue reading “Wild Lectionary: Thoughts from a reluctant farmer” →

A Prayer for Migrants

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img_1226__1_
Vandalized humanitarian aid supplies. Image from: http://www.thedisappearedreport.org

By Katerina Friesen. Reposted from Watershed Discipleship blog.

Christ our Resurrection and Life,
We call to your presence
los desplazados, los desconocidos.
We call to your presence those lost in the desert,
those killed in the name of border security.
Rescue the perishing, strengthen the faltering,
and guide those finding their way tonight. Continue reading “A Prayer for Migrants” →