Category: Uncategorized

June 26, 2018

Statement Made to Judge Affleck of the Supreme Court of British Columbia Three Months After My Arrest at the Gates of Kinder Morgan for Protesting the Tripling of the Trans Mountain Pipeline

Your Honour, I want to tell you about the day in March that I stood at the gates outside of Kinder Morgan attempting, as the evidence has accurately established, to block access to the construction of a pipeline that I oppose.

The police records and the Crown’s argument tell one side of the story. I’m grateful for your willingness to hear the other.

To be honest I had rather heroic ideas about my actions. I have a 15 year-old son, Oliver, and a 17 year-old daughter, Abigail, and they had become discouraged about their future. It seemed that every day on the news there was another development (You know the headlines): the collapse of the bee population worldwide, the demise of the Great Barrier Reef, the breaking up of the polar ice caps, extreme weather destroying homes and neighbourhoods, the anticipated extinction of orangutangs within the next 10 years. And so on.

There are many things a parent can endure, as I’m sure you can appreciate your Honour, but watching your kids lose hope is not one of them.

So, simply put, rather than sit passively by I decided I would do something to empower them to reclaim their future. I had read recently that the civil disobedience toolkit has been lost to a whole generation in the west where hard-won liberties are now so taken for granted we naively presume right will prevail. So I set out the morning of March 24 to demonstrate non-violent protest in action (though, truth be told, I hardly knew what I was doing myself.)

Yet isn’t it the way with life: just when you think you are way out in the lead you discover that there are others with a knowledge and experience base who have been there long (sometimes centuries!) before you ever appeared on the scene.

We were a big group that day (50 or 60 I believe). It was biting cold and then it started to snow: huge flakes, the size of saucers (you’ve probably seen the footage). The snow caked on our heads and soaked through our clothes to the bone. No one had come dressed for snow.

And that’s when a man by the name of Stacey, a self-identified Anishinaabe ally of the Tsleil Waututh, began walking back and forth in front of us in his toque and grey sweats and work boots, like an unlikely commander of a legion. And he started to play his drum for us and sing us the resistance songs of his people. And when our teeth began to chatter he told us jokes and laughed with us. And when we could no longer feel our fingers and toes he walked among us passing out warm soup and bread.

And the day dragged on and as our spirits began to flag, an indigenous woman, whom I believe you have met, stood up on a ledge just to the right front of where I was. She needed a cane to balance her frail frame which was wracked by a lifetime of hardship that I’m sure I can’t begin to comprehend. Yet with her free hand she held up an eagle feather high into the air above us. I can’t tell you what she meant by this gesture but I can tell you how I experienced it: as an act of protection, as though to care for us and give us the strength we would need for the stand we were taking.

And when the police arrived, they positioned themselves in a line in front of us to begin their arrests. It was at this point that an indigenous man wearing a felt bowler hat stepped out from the crowd of supporters. I learned later that he is an artist and activist who goes by the name Ostwelve. And he planted himself eye-to-eye in front of each of the officers in turn and urged them to re-consider their options: “History doesn’t have to unfold like this.” I overheard him implore. “None of us, not me, not you, has to follow the script life has handed us.”

As the hours passed I was worried about my daughter who had come to support me and as far as I knew was standing by herself lost in the crowd in the snow and the cold. And I asked for news on her and word came back to me that she had been invited by the Tseleil Waututh youth leader, Cedar George to join a group of indigenous youth for a special youth-focused ceremony in the shelter and warmth of the Watch House.

And I thought “Who ARE these people?” From what I know of the historic record all we’ve ever done is swindled, robed, bribed, and used whatever means available to us to take their land out from under them.

In the days following my arrest it became my quest to find an answer to this question. I went to the Tsleil Waututh camp by the Watch House on the soccer field to find out.

If you haven’t already done so I hope you get the chance to visit the Watch House, Your Honour. I think you’ll be surprised as I was surprised to discover that this protest-based surveillance camp, before it is anything else, is a place for spiritual grounding.

The first thing you’ll be invited to do on entering the camp is to offer prayer at the Sacred Fire. It’s an act that starts you down the road of reaffirming your connection to the Creator and to all living things (animate and inanimate alike). And the more time you spend at the camp the more you will remember what it means to put human relationships before personal acquisition and the health of the earth before material comforts.

I won’t take any more of your time, Judge Affleck. My account has come full circle. I crossed the injunction line not to bring discredit to the court but to bring hope to Abigail and Oliver.

I believe we found the hope we were looking for though not as we expected. It comes from the knowledge that at the forefront of the struggle there are indigenous leaders, not only here in our city, but across our country and around the world who understand that caring for the earth is a sacred duty and comes at a great cost.

Regardless of the penalty you have assigned me today, my actions will have cost me little more than a sliver of my white privilege. In contrast the cost to the leaders I met on the mountain that day is incalculable. They have laid everything on the line for the sake of the struggle. They are the true heroes. It has been an honour to stand with them.

Post script: I pleaded guilty on June 26, 2018 and was sentenced to 25 hours community service. The standoff on the mountain continues. Click here to volunteer at the Watch House.

Sign above the dish pit at the camp on Burnaby Mountain.

July 18, 2017

First There Is the Fall

I fell out through the bottom of my life this past year.

All the things I’m used to reaching for to buffer such a fall were gone: ideas about myself and God and the world, the props that have always sufficed to shore up my ego, even people I love who are closest to me (but only because I took them out on my way down).

Falling out of the bottom of my own life was a deadweight drop into nothingness. And nothingness, I discovered, has its own variations on pain – dull and pounding at times, razor-sharp and severing at others. But always there, ricocheting off the canyon walls of my hollow self.

I’d probably still be falling if I hadn’t been caught by a story. More specifically, a Bible story. One that I first heard with milk and cookies before bedtime when I was a child.

At the time, it seemed disconnected from any world I moved through.

After all whose father has a beard down to his waist, wears robes and sandals,and stands at the end of a gravel road day and night waiting for the return of a renegade son.

However, forty-five years later that childhood story was there for when I needed it. It came in bits and pieces. Flotsam washed up on a beach. When the grain I was feeding to calves looked more appetizing than the oatmeal I had at home. Or when I saw the turn-off on the highway and the long stretch of road that led back to my husband and kids. Or when I encountered the crossed arms and scowling brows of disapproving “older brothers”.

In a recent blog post I heroically called myself an outlier in the Christian tradition, living at an outpost on the edge off faith. I distanced myself from the centre. I claimed that it would suffice for me to dip into aesthetic treasures of my religious heritage the way one might dip into the assortment of cheeses in the fridge door.

That was then. This is now. Life is like that: then and now. Then, I thought I could go it alone in my little cabin out on the frontier. Now, I understand more clearly that a frontier only exists because a centre holds it.

When a sacred story catches you in crisis it brings you back to the triage ward of the spiritual tradition it represents like wounded soldiers brought in on stretchers from the field of battle.

For someone from the First Nations, that might mean coming back to ceremonies.
For a Jewish person it might be coming back to a Passover meal with mother lighting the first candle at the head of the table.
For me, as a Catholic of seven years, it meant being carried back to the sacraments. Most importantly to the sacrament of marriage, but there was a stop before that: the sacrament of reconciliation.

This required making a phone call to my parish priest:
“Hello, Father Gino. This is Tama.”
Father Gino hadn’t heard from me in six months. If he was surprised to hear my voice on the end of the line he didn’t show it.
“I need to make confession.”
Father Gino offered only to clear his schedule to make room for me.

Thank God. No preaching or I-told-you-sos, no explanations or gushing or chiding. No preliminary salutations even. No anything that would diminish or crowd out my quivering request.

When I arrive at the church Father Gino invites me into his office. This is a first for me. I’ve always knelt in the confessional booth off the sanctuary. However Italian mass is scheduled to start in 10 minutes and the sanctuary is abuzz with incoming over-50s.

I sit across the desk from Father Gino and don’t look up.
“Father, forgive me for I have sinned….”
An unorganized array of sorrows begin to spill out of me. Sobs trip over each other as though to get in on the action. I intentionally didn’t rehearse or even pre-think what I was going to say. I wanted my words to be as raw and close to the source as possible. I’m not sure if there is any coherence to the story I am trying to tell but I’m think Father gets the main point: I’ve made a mangled mess of my life.

Then I’m finished. And suddenly everything is quiet. Inside and out.

There is a box of Kleenex on Father Gino’s desk. Obviously I’m not the first person to sit in this chair and speak of self-inflicted wreckage. I reach for a tissue and blow.

“Tama”, Father Gino’s voice is in keeping with the stillness, “Your place at the table was always set for you. I knew you would come home.”

And there is was. The turning point in the story, in my story. The pivotal centre: a vigil kept, a welcome extended, a heart opened wide.

He continues with some prescribed wisdom on marriage and repentance and restoration. This sort of washes over me.

Silence again. Nice. Then it suddenly dawns on me that Father Gino is waiting for me to recite the prayer of contrition. Shoot. I always forget about that part and seven years on I still don’t have it memorized. I don’t even know the first line.

We are both aware that we have gone overtime and the Italian nonnas will be getting antsy.

“How about I say it on your behalf and you follow along?” Father offers.
“Does that count?” I ask ridiculously.
“Why not?” Father Gino laughs in the spirit of “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath”.

He motors through the prayer, with good Catholic pragmatism. I catch only snatches:
O my God, I am heartily sorry….I detest all of my sins….I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace….

Back out in the sanctuary Father Gino disappears into an anteroom high-five-ing some of the seniors on his way down the aisle. I slide into a pew behind a row of rosary clutching Italian grandmothers.
Mass begins in a language I don’t comprehend. That doesn’t matter. What matters is that I am back at the table. The Italian vowels, long and rounded, roll over me like one of those handheld massage rollers that you find in the mall at Christmas and wonder whether to buy the person who has everything.

I think it was the 15th century mystic, Julian of Norwich who said “First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God.”

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July 5, 2016

Outpost Spirituality

Ever felt of two minds when it comes to your religious adherence? Perhaps you recognize the limitations of your faith tradition on one hand yet can’t imagine your life without it on the other? Or maybe you are on that roller coaster of certainty one day and complete doubt the next (and the feelings of guilt for “lack of faith” or indecision that goes with it)? If this describes you then you are not alone and outpost spirituality might be a fit.

I’ve adopted “faith in the outposts” as a type of metaphor for my own spiritual location at this point in life. Here, let me explain what I mean….

As a kid I loved to read stories about people who lived in the outposts. Some were soldiers or scientists, others exiles or missionaries or explorers. In order to survive these outpost dwellers had to negotiate the remote landscapes they found themselves in. They had to learn what was over the next horizon and where to take cover during a storm. They had to learn the norms of local culture and how to navigate in foreign languages. They had to learn what crops survive in unfamiliar soil and how water distributes itself across the land. In short, they had to step well out of their comfort zones and take risks that were both exhilarating and terrifying.

Yet equally fascinating to my childhood imagination were the homes that these outliers built for themselves in the seeming “middle of nowhere”. Whether their abode was a canvas tent or a log cabin or a bamboo hut these interior worlds provided much more than shelter. They were “homes away from home” – havens containing elements of a cultural heartland faraway: a bedside table with a well-worn book of familiar prayers, a china mug from the family collection, a knotted rug made by a pioneering ancestor kept beneath a foot stool, a fiddle above the door and all the associated dance floor tunes, a book of dog-eared poetry at the hearth, a cherished painting by a favourite artist above the kitchen sink.

To my young heart, the familiar furnishings of these interior spaces made the world safe again. They provided an all-important grounding point for engaging the unknown beyond. A place to leave from and come back to.

Without these “landing pads” the world beyond would overwhelm or dissolve into some form of chaos.

Living deep inside the known and the unknown is where I find myself with regard to my own (Christian) tradition. This doesn’t mean I’ve given up on my tradition or hold it in disregard. Quite the opposite. It does mean that I’ve journeyed with it out onto horizons of the human spirit that lie beyond the comfort zone of my own religious boundary lines.

As the world shrinks and the collective human imagination grows I feel compelled to take risks engaging emerging contours that are equal parts terrifying and exhilarating :

A growing practise of mediation and mindfulness cutting across religious and even secular lines with implications for collective consciousness and human intuition.
A trend toward slowing life down and living with smaller footprints as a counter movement to the frenzied materialism and resource-guzzling lifestyles many of us take for granted.
A profound softening on the part of the scientific community toward the importance of imagination and story and art in developing new paradigms.
An increasing interest in and recovery of indigenous wisdom and earth-based spirituality.
Implications for justice and compassion with the proliferation of social media, especially in a world where greed (mine included) can so easily seem like the trump card
The network of personal friendships and business connections in real time due to technological advances no longer bounded by geographical limitations
A growing awareness around the globe of the vulnerability of the one home that all humans regardless of race or creed share in common: planet earth.

These emerging spiritual horizons don’t seem to be religion specific. They appeal to the human spirit as a whole.

I cherish my Christian tradition (I’m Protestant by birth, Catholic by choice). It’s my starting point. It’s what I know. It’s how I pray.

I’ve seen a lot of spiritual seekers suddenly abandon the faith moorings that have nurtured them for a lifetime. I understand their departure. Many are frustrated with the limitations and exclusions they were raised on. Yet with no home-away-from-home many give up and loose their way altogether. For many it’s only a matter of time before they get lost on a frontier that in the end overwhelms them.

So I’m going to take my lead from the outpost-dwellers of my childhood books. I’m not going to head out into the frontier without a cabin to come home to. Inside this simple abode are going to be elements of all the things in the tradition that I value and love: hymns about the love of Jesus, ancient prayers of the church, the stories of the Bible and of the heroics of the saints, weekly eucharist, the practice of confession, and the adopted family with whom I share this tradition.

For now this interior world is a critical place for me to leave from and to come home to. I would lose my way without it.

Yet at the same time I’m not going to hunker down here. I’m going to venture out and explore the unfamiliar landscape I find myself in. I’m not going to assume that my starting point is the only starting point or the best starting point. I will allow for other practises that nurture the human spirit no matter how different it may be from my own.

And who knows? In the end the points of connection and overlap may be far more significant than I had previously imagined.

Are you an outpost-dweller? If so I’d love to hear from you. What are your discoveries? Cautions? Fears and hopes?

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June 13, 2016

Old Lesson Horse: Learning to Ride at 50

(Look for this story in an upcoming issue of BetterAfter50)

As a 12-year old I had the usual enthral with horses typical of my peers. My horse phase was short-lived however and soon the horse poster in my bedroom was replaced with a poster of the Swedish rock band, ABBA.

It wasn’t until I had a daughter of my own that I thought of horses again. On Abigail’s 12th birthday I decided that she should learn to ride.

I called a horse farm offering western lessons about half an hour out of Vancouver. Grassroots Ranch in Maple Ridge is run by Deb Murray. At 62, with her tell-it-like-it-is, denim-wearing, boot-kicking, tough-talking manner Deb is the closest I’ve come to a flesh-and-blood cowboy this side of the Rocky Mountains.

Abigail it turned out was too dreamy to ride and soon wanted to quit. I was disappointed and pushed her to keep at it. “Why don’t you, Mom”, she suggested with savvy pre-teen attitude.

At first the idea seemed ridiculous. After all I was turning 50 that year while all the other riders at the farm were within a year or two of 12. But the possibility grew on me and one day I mustered up my courage.

“Of course you can ride”, Deb responded matter-of-factly while picking muck out of an up-turned hoof. “Your core looks strong.”

On my first lesson I was introduced to Traveller. “He’s an old lesson horse” said Deb with a fond pat on his neck. By this she meant that he had grown smart to novice riders.
“You just have to stay on him. Remind him who pays the bills.”

The first time Traveller picked up to a trot I thought my ribcage would rattle apart. My bum
was so bruised I couldn’t sit properly for days. From the start Deb wanted me to learn to ride from my legs. “All communication with your horse should come from your legs” she said.

Traveller seemed determined to ignore whatever it was my legs were trying to tell him. Whether I nudged with my heels or pressed with my calves he was defiant.

If I wanted him to walk he would stand, if I wanted him to trot he would walk. A lope was a distant dream.

“You have to get after him, Tam. (Deb shortens everyone’s name. Three letters is your allotment.) “Don’t be so accommodating.”
I bumped as hard as I could.
“Harder.” she shouted across the outdoor arena.
“I’m giving it all I’ve got.” I shouted back.
“He doesn’t even know you’re there”.

One day a heavy summer rain had us an indoor arena in town. Traveller was his obstinate self, slowing to a walk at the turns, refusing to lope from a trot. Meanwhile a 12 year-old kept sailing by me, an effortless lope on a perfect horse.

A lump began to grow in my throat. At 50 I didn’t need an old lesson horse making me feel lousy about myself. I brought Traveller to a stop and told Deb I was through with him, through with riding.

Deb had been leaning against the boards watching me. She pushed herself up.
“It’s not the horse,Tam”, she said. “It’s you.”
I fought back tears.
She reached a hand up onto my knee.
“What is it?” The compassion in her voice as wide as a prairie sky,
“Nothing” I said, then started to sob. It all came out: the job I’m leaving after 20 years, the early-stage breast cancer, my struggling marriage.

Deb helped me dismount. We led Traveller out through the rain to the horse trailer. As I untacked Traveller Deb told me stories of people whose lives were worse off than mine. Cowboy therapy, I figured.

The following Saturday out of routine I went back to the farm but didn’t ride. I asked for work and Deb suggested I cut brambles along a fence line. I noticed Traveller grazing in the field nearby and wandered over.
“I owe you an apology, buddy.”
He surveyed me with his enormous black-brown eyes.
“All this time I thought it was you”, I said.
He swished his tail across his back then buried his nose in the grass between us.

The next week when I returned to the farm something had changed. I understood now what I had to do. I pulled myself up into the saddle. I bumped with my heels, squeezed with my calves and flicked with the end of my reigns. Traveller broke into a lope.

It’s hard to describe the feeling when you know that neither you nor your horse are holding anything back. It’s then that you know the importance of core strength. Then that you know everything will be okay.

May 4, 2016

A Bridge Between: Samson, Delilah and the Unist’ot’en Resistance in British Columbia

(Look for this article in an upcoming issue of Church for Vancouver.)

This is the account of a storytelling event that brought together an Eastside Vancouver church and a First Nations community in British Columbia’s central interior. More importantly it’s the account of a ten-year old boy named Graeme who, for a moment, stood on the stage between two culturally and spiritually diverse stories and had the courage to allow each of them to speak to his own.

Graeme is a part of a grassroots performing arts initiative for children and youth in his East Vancouver neighbourhood called Eastside Story Guild. As a program of Grandview Calvary Baptist Church the Eastside Story Guild mandate is to put Bible stories to the stage in way that makes sense of faith in a post-modern world.

In the fall of 2015 the Eastside Story Guild undertook to tell the Old Testament story of Samson, the Hebrew judge of divinely-appointed strength who fell in love with his Philistine adversary, Delilah.

Meanwhile 1100 kilometres away near Smithers, BC the Unist’ot’en camp was entering their sixth winter of holding a bridge at the Morice River crossing. In 2009 Unist’ot’en leader,Freda Huson, established the blockade in response to a proposed pipeline corridor slated to cut across unceded Wet’sewet’en territory. In a second strategic move she invited native and non-Native allies from across the province and around the world to join her in building a healing centre on the GPS coordinates of the proposed pipeline.

In the fall of 2015 none of the Eastside Story Guild participants, Graeme among them, had ever heard of the Unist’ot’en. One of the script writers, however, had participated in two of the Unist’ot’en work camps and he noted some interesting parallels between their story and story of Samson:

First and foremost, both are stories of a struggle for land – Samson so that his people, the Dannites, would have a place to call their own after 40 years wandering in the wilderness, and the Unistoten so that their descendants would maintain an inherent responsibility to protect their people’s ancient territory.
Second, both are stories of a minority group taking a seemingly laughable stand against the arrogance of an otherwise powerful political, cultural and economic majority.
Third, both are stories of risk-taking in trusting “the enemy” – Samson who gave his heart (and with it the secret of his strength) to Delilah, and Freda who risks having non-natives participate in her dream of building a healing centre.
Finally, both are stories of long hair and the humiliation of having it forcibly shaved from your head – for Samson at the hands of the Philistines, and for BC First Nations people at the hand of the church and government-run residential school system.

So it was that in October, four Eastside Story Guild leaders travelled to the Unist’ot’en camp from Vancouver to meet with Freda and see the camp for themselves. Over two days they filmed her as she told the story of her people’s stand on the land.

Meanwhile back in Vancouver, the script was set into a production called The Bridge Between. The decision was made not to blend the stories as there were too many obvious cultural and theological differences between the two. Instead the stories were to be told interchangeably, with the Samson story dramatized on stage by the kids of the Eastside Story Guild and the Unist’ot’en story told by Freda herself between scenes on large screens that hung from floor to ceiling. The Philistine temple was designed as an industrial oil complex with pipelines running in every direction.

Young Graeme was cast as Shilum, a fictionalized name and character for the Philistine boy who in Judges 16:26 leads the now blind Samson to the temple pillars where revelling Philistines are celebrating his defeat. In the moments before bringing the temple down on the Philistine elite Samson tells Shilum to run and not to look back. In this way Samson saves the life of one Philistine boy even while he takes the lives of 3000 others.

When Samson pushes against the pillars, the pipelines break open and oil covers the stage. This was dramatized through video images on the giant screens together with black cloth carried across the audience by the kids.

In the final scene, the sad reality of the death and destruction settles on the stage. Shilum returns to face the audience and asks what purpose the devastation has served.

Needless-to-say the response to the story of Samson was somber. The bursting of the pipelines was a stark symbol of the powerlessness that Samson and his people felt in the face of Philistine oppression. At the same time it helped the predominantly white, middle-class church-based audience connect with the sense of powerlessness that many First Nations in their own province feel when it comes to deciding their own fate.

As the kids and audience reflected on the tragic outcome of the Samson story at the end of the season Graeme was among the first to pick up on the possibility of a different ending. The Samson story, they all recognized, was history but the Unistoten story was still unfolding.

Graeme expressed an interest in going up to the camp in the spring to help with the construction of the healing centre. He wanted to learn more of the Unistoten story. He wanted to understand the difficult confrontation of industry and the Unistoten land defence.

When pressed he insisted that he was willing to make the 16-hour journey north, to live without running water and flush toilets, to work long days with black flies and mosquitoes at his elbows, and to sit at the feet of First Nation’s guides to in order to understand a story that was so different from his own.

So it was that in the middle of May 2016 Graeme made the long journey north into Wet’sewet’en territory. For three days, together with a group of 17 from his church (aged 8-68), he laid cement and built scaffolding for Phase II of the healing centre, hauled more brush, washed endless mountains of dishes and listened to the stories of the Wetseweten elders as they spoke of their people’s life on the land.

But most of all, if only for three days, Graeme stood shoulder to shoulder with our province’s First Peoples and saw the world through a different set of eyes.