Westminster Abbey Meditation, Mission Frazer Valley, BC

I often stop at the Mission returning from the west or north to Vancouver. After a weekend of camping, fishing, hunting, hot tubbing, hiking, boating or quadding, I’ll turn off the road at Mission and head up the hill to that sacred place.  Laura and I did this Sunday.  

Mission, the town was named after the historic St. Mary’s Mission of the Oblate founded in 1868. Westminster Abbey, the monster of Catholic men of the St. Benedictine Order.  “Wa are all made in the image of God."

I like to kneel and pray in silence in the light filled chapel.  This day a group of Chinese Christians with what appeared to be a ‘tour guide’ had congregated in front of the door and were reading loudly in unison rather happily and  communally, their chanting voices filling the interior of the church distracting me from my own silent prayers.  

I’d just come from the quiet serenity of Harrison Lake and was facing another week in the frenetic humdrum of Vancouver City.  This is normally where I stop and alone ‘gear up’ for another week preparing for all the toxicity and anger, threats and fear I encounter working with drug addicted patients.  

As I was leaving I interrupted their happy Christian community, disrupting their ‘dragon boat Christian loudness’ by sternly saying ‘your voices are carrying through the church, could you move to the side away from the entrance.”  I said, They were all terribly apologetic. I was judgemental of their insensitivity.  

I’d had a wonderful time in the woods.  I loved the freedom.  Now I was going back to a world where everyone was offended by everything and the government was the ‘thought police’ and ‘language police’ and ‘terror’ reigned everyone in that decidedly ‘apathetic’ rising drug addiction, consumer way that is so fundamentally Canadian.  Everyone smiling in fear , the enslaved, bowing to their masters, ever polite fore fear of offending all the ever offended social bullies backed increasingly by the government and Supreme Court.  Even comedians can’ t joke without law suits.  It’s Sharia Communism.  Journalists are rounded up in Turkey to be silenced. But in Canada the journalists have long been silences in all the mainstream.  If you don’t write what the politically correct dictators want you are out of a job.

I’m going back to an increasingly atheistic hostile world where the government demands more and more places for people to do drugs despite the exponential rise of overdose since the first of these was opened. Now as more open more deaths occur. All the while abortions go on at the billion dollar death industry.  

They were nice people.  I love my Chinese Christian friends. They have a happiness and harmony that is apostolic.  I’m Kierkegaard by comparison. One of the dessert fathers. My mentors are St. Paul and Isaiah.  I turn to Jeremiah on a good day.  

They couldn’t know their voices were carrying. They were gathered outside the church and worshiping in celebration of the risen lord. I’m watching his coming crucifixion.  Herod Justin Trudeau celebrates the persecution of Christians and brings jihadists to Canada to begin all over again the debate about whether homosexuals should be killed or ostracized.  The courts only gave struck down the laws that called for their arrest in the late sixties and early 70’s.  Now Sharia Law would have them thrown from the tops of high buildings.  Our gay priest rests on his laurels. He doesn’t exuded that ‘wealthy Christian’ good time feeling of the “health and wealth Christian’.  He probably knew those who died of Aids as I did.  I was at the bedsides.  I was terrified.  The plagues are still among us.  

It’s good to catch a moment of joy and celebration.  

I am droll.

I remember times in my life when I was positively ecstatic. I remember feeling my heart would burst with joy when I was younger. There were slices of reality that glimmered. I feel I’ve been touched by God over and over again. I’ve stood on the highest peak. I’ve known dreams and visions and walked in harmony. I’ve known sacred moments so deep and profound. I’ve been transcended. I’ve felt myself lifted on eagle’s wings.

All this comes and goes.  Today I’m ‘slouching towards Bethlehem’.  Today I have been punched in the hip. I’ve woken and my rib has been taken and I hear that shrill woman Hillary insist everyone should vote for her because she has a vagina, sexist cow. And what is worst so many will, just as they voted for Obama ‘because he was black’.  The racists and the sexists are those who say ‘me, me, me, because I’m me.”  And if you don’t accept them, they attack you . Evil.

Old testament stuff.

Fire and Brimstone.

But the Cross symbolizes the “Good News’.  God died for our sins.  The slate is clean.  There is a new accord. Jesus is my advocate.  It all boils down to our being saved, children of the one true God.

I am a crusader. I carry a sword. In WWI I would have flown a Sopwith Camel, in WWII a spit fire, in Afghanistan I’d have been a military sniper.  Always I’m a doctor. I heal. I pick up the pieces left from the industrial age. I clean up the remains after the battlefield.

I dreamed last night of cleaning up countless bodies, tiny Lilliputian women, naked white, in a sink, putting them in a plastic bag with a twist tie, hundreds like shrimp, the abortus, these fetus shaped full grown women bleached white in the sink, left over from the killing, and I was gathering them to bury in the woods and pray for all the women who could have been were it not abortion.

I still have nightmares about the abortions I did.  

I talked with a man last night whose daughter is doing so well in her young adult life that he beamed with pride.  The torch is being carried on.  

My babies were aborted too.  I am alone in life. No ‘flavour’ of immortality left to me.  We discussed last week the destruction of the Celtic Race, our place in the Bible as the Galatians.  We were ‘white’ and now the ‘white man and white women’ are the latest in a list of evils of the new revisionist historians whose arguments always ends with ‘make me king instead and give me all your money or else’.

I’m tired.  It’s the end of a week.  

I’m running late.

I’ve got to find the joy and channel hope.  It’s always there but I’ve surrounded myself with sickness and death all my life.  Others encounter it rarely and avoid it but I’m going again to hear the complaints about life and to offer pills and advice and to listen and admire.  Each of those I know have more than enough reason to homicide or suicide but we keep on. We keep on trucking. We do the next right thing. We move forward and hope that it’s up.  

We raise our faces to the stars. We lift our eyes to the sky.  We look out there and up there for a God that is within and everywhere. Be with me today. Help me do thy will. Thank you Jesus.  Forgive me for my lack of faith.  Thank you for the Abbey. It’s a place of retreat and it always touches my soul and reminds me that mercy is more than judgement and that joy comes in the morning.