Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Mountain Mentors - Poem by Ron Dart

Mountain Mentors

Delores LaChapelle (d. January 22 2007)    

Edward LaChapelle (d. February 1 2007)                   

I was young in those days, 
keen to learn mountain lore, to take to glaciers and snow packed slopes,
could ski better than walk, left school before finishing, against my elders’ advice, to live the mountain life, to be far from the madding crowd, early 1970s with mountain sami in northern Norway,

Arnae Naess a north star, Swiss guides my guides.

There were, of course, dangers on peaks, places to be alert and alive to when off piste, when in deep powder.

It was Edward who pioneered avalanche safety in those unsure, untried years, research from Alta Utah our north star, The ABCs of Avalanche Safety (1961) our primer and sacred text on the subject.

Alpine touring in those years was still in its infancy, and it was Edward again that did much of the early work on transceivers when most of us used antiquated means to find a buried friend.

It was in the late 1960s, I was one winter never a day not on skis, traveling the slopes like a mountain gypsy, high ridges and peaks my meccas and New Jerusalem. Was there more to mountain life than skill finesse and the rush of a challenging and steep descent between rocks on all sides? 

Dolores, you walked me yet deeper and further, taught me much of the real reasons for mountain life and soul sanity.

Your many books were tender, probing, informed, D. H. Lawrence and Martin Heidegger, deep ecology and mountain soul knit affectionately with soft powder Tai Chi spirituality, the new society and a deeper way of being ever before you.

It was all about future primitive, wisdom of the earth and a return to the mountains.

You parted paths for reasons oft-stated, a sadness I felt, but understood the reasons for—mentors are rare in our time, mountain mentors that remain together rarer still.

You took different trails, took to different peaks, far, far from one another—Edward to a one-room log cabin in Alaska, Dolores in Silverton,

You left us Delores in January 2007. It was kind of you Edward to make the long journey south to attend the funeral to bid adieu to Delores.

Did you realize how the trip would end?

The funeral over and done, you decided, at 80, to do a final deep powder descent. Why? What were you feeling at the time? You died on the mountain Dolores called home.

The thick ropes of mountain memories are not easily shredded or ripped apart.

montani semper liberi

Ron Dart

Greg Boyd's "Crucifixion of the Warrior God" - Review (1/3) by Rob Grayson

Today I have the privilege of beginning to review the long-awaited new book by Greg Boyd, titled The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, officially released on 1 April 2017.

Weighing in at some 1,400 pages, with no less than ten appendices, an extensive bibliography and copious footnotes throughout, this truly gargantuan work took Boyd around ten years to write: no surprise when you consider that, as well as being a prolific author (with over fifteen books to his name), Boyd pastors a large church in St Paul, Minnesota (USA) and is also an adjunct professor of theology.

To make my review as accessible as possible, I had originally planned to write it in a single post. However, given the size and scope of the book, I’ve decided to break my review down into three parts. In the first two parts, I will attempt to provide a concise overview of the structure and content of the book; in the third part, I will share  some thoughts on the book’s strengths and weaknesses as I see them. (I hope to post parts 2 and 3 over the next few days.)

On Fearing God - Rob Grayson

Today I’d like to talk a little bit about God and fear. Specifically, about how the two are often deeply intertwined in our thinking.

It seems to me that fear is closely associated with our default understanding of God. Indeed, we might even say that for many people, fear is the instinctive emotional response to thoughts of God. Long-established expressions like “to put the fear of God into someone” illustrate just how intimately the emotion of fear is connected with the idea of God.

And, of course, those wishing to draw on the Bible to support the notion that fear is an appropriate response to God can do so with ease. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, we are told in Proverbs 9:10. And there’s no shortage of accounts throughout the text of scripture where God or his angels appear to strike fear into people’s hearts.

So, fear is typically quite ingrained in our psyche as a response to God, and many assume that the Bible validates its appropriateness.

And yet…

The writer of the first epistle of John, shortly after telling us that God is love, has this to say:

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.” (1 John 4:18)

And so we have a seeming paradox: on the one hand, fear of God is something appropriate and even valuable and necessary; but on the other hand, God is love, and as such, there is no place or reason for fear in him.

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Experiencing Brokenness - Rob Grayson

Last week I wrote about how it is in our collective brokenness that we find our true humanity. Today I’d like to continue exploring the idea of brokenness a little further.

First, it might be useful to unpack what we mean by “brokenness” (or, at least, what I understand it to mean).

We often think of brokenness as a place we come to either when we’re faced with the consequences of our own actions or when the actions of others, or events beyond our control, leave us wounded and in pain. This is, I think, an entirely valid and appropriate use of the word “brokenness”: sometimes we are broken by the disastrous consequences of our own poor choices, by the actions of other people, or by a host of other seemingly random causes collectively known as “life”.

However, there is also another sense of the word “brokenness”, and it is simply this: that we are all wounded, and so we are all broken in various ways.

Some of the wounds we carry we are well aware of, maybe because we sustained them in some terrible experience that we will never forget, or perhaps simply because the pain of them is so great that it continues to dominate our world. Other wounds are buried under many layers of self-protective armour. Either way, and however well we might appear to mask it, there is brokenness in all of us, deep down.

So, all of us are or have been broken in some way. The only difference is that some of us know it and others don’t.

Often, it takes an experience of the first kind of brokenness to bring us to a place where we can acknowledge the second kind. In other words, it often takes an intensely painful crisis to bring us to a place where we become aware of – or are prepared to recognise – the underlying low-level brokenness we’ve been carrying around like heavy baggage for years. For me, it took the painful and humiliating admission that I had developed a drink problem to drag me to a place where I was open enough, and my defences were lowered far enough, for me to begin to be able to see and name the wounds I’d been nursing, some of them since childhood.

This brings us to two more things I think we can say about brokenness.

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It's Time to Evolve - Rob Grayson

It is time for the human species to evolve.

According to the theory of evolution, when a species encounters a crisis that threatens its very existence (for example, some kind of significant change in its physical environment), it must either adapt or risk extinction.

I believe the human species is facing a crisis that threatens its very existence. I’m not talking about a crisis arising from a change in the physical environment (though, of course, manmade climate change may well present such a crisis). I’m talking about the crisis that arises from a lethal combination of two factors: first, our ongoing inability or unwillingness to tolerate difference, and second, the increasingly easy availability of deadly technology.

Simply put, if we as a species do not learn to get along, sooner or later some group or nation is going to unleash destruction on an unprecedented scale. It’s a question of when, not if. If that happens, the best case scenario is that we will move (or rather regress) into an era of harsh authoritarianism in which the freedoms we cherish will be removed from us in an effort to enforce some kind of artificial “peace”. The worst case scenario is that it will be game over for the human race. Perhaps small pockets of humanity will survive here and there, but as a civilisation we will be back to the drawing board. Maybe that’s what it’s going to take for us to finally learn to live together.

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Review of Brad Jersak's 'A More Christlike God' - by Rob Grayson

Today I have the honour of reviewing Brad Jersak’s soon-to-be-released new book A More Christlike God: A More Beautiful Gospel.

“God is like Jesus.”

There has been an increasing chorus of voices making this proclamation in recent times. In my opinion, it’s been a very welcome chorus, because it’s a most necessary message.

But… for all its increasing popularity, if this message is not to become a mere soundbite, it needs to be explained, nuanced, understood in all its myriad implications, and generally shown to be the premier way of understanding what God is like.

Enter Brad Jersak.

I hold Brad in high esteem for two reasons. First, it was listening to him speak about the atonement that spurred me on to the earth-shattering realisation that God did not in any way, shape or form kill Jesus – a seminal moment in my theological journey. And second, I had the privilege of meeting him last year. The opportunity to put a name and a story to a face is worth more than many printed words on pages.

Brad is a Canadian author and teacher based in Abbotsford, British Columbia. His active, ongoing experience in the evangelical and charismatic streams and his interest in the Orthodox Church, in which he is a confirmed Reader, give him a unique perspective on what it means to live out an ancient faith in a modern, fast-changing world. Brad has solid theological credentials and is currently part of the core faculty of Westminster Theological Centre (UK).

One of Brad’s gifts, then, is to take profound and complex theological truths and translate them into language that the rest of us can understand.

So… what are the implications of the statement “God is like Jesus”? Brad basically spends three hundred pages answering this question.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, “What is God? Competing Images of Will and Love”, Brad surveys predominant images of God that have held sway through the ages, drawing a distinction between those understandings of God based on sheer, omnipotent will and those earthed in pure love. He concludes this part by pointing to the fullest revelation of God we have: “Word Made Flesh: The Christlike God”.

The second part is titled “The Cruciform God”. Such terminology may be nothing new to readers of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Jürgen Moltmann or assorted other recent theologians. But Brad goes a long way in exploring what it means in practical, twenty-first terms to say that God is most perfectly revealed in Christ upon the cross. For me, the real heart of his book is here, in chapters 7 and 8, “The Cross as Divine Consent” and “The Cross as Divine Participation”. Drawing on sources old and new, he dares to reconcile the idea of the God who is Love with the reality of pain and suffering that we observe all around us day to day. In my experience, such honesty is rare in a Christian book written for a “popular” audience. Yet, even as he confronts head on the brutal reality in which we live, Brad refuses to let go of his core thesis that God really is like Jesus – that is, he is not only sympathetic to our plight, but is deeply and personally involved in it alongside us.

In the title of third and final part of the book, Brad coins a new and delightful word that I hadn’t previously come across: “Unwrathing God”. The prevalence of the notion of God’s wrath throughout both testaments of scripture is deeply problematic to many Christians who would sincerely like to believe that God is as compassionate and forgiving as Jesus on the cross, but who can’t ignore the frequency with which this word is mentioned. Well, there’s no need to ignore it: the author sets himself the seemingly impossible task of keeping hold of the perceptible fact of wrath as referenced throughout scripture, while at the same time remaining utterly committed to the truth of the Christlike God who chose to submit to humanity’s wrath, at the cost of his own lifeblood, rather than exercise any proactive wrath of his own.

A More Christlike God is that rarest of things: a deeply theological book that an average reader can comfortably absorb without feeling at all intimated. The combination of theological sources old and new and Brad’s own exegesis and pastoral experience makes this a book that is easy to relate to, wherever you happen to be on the theological spectrum. The use of in-page callouts to define important and potentially problematic terms is a particularly nice touch. And, as I said in my review of Brad’s book Her Gates Will Never Be Shut, Brad has a gift for making compelling, hard-to-ignore points without once slipping into dogmatism. You will come away from this book with the feeling not that you have been lectured, but rather that you have just finished a richly engaging and personal conversation.

A More Christlike God is due to be released in early May. It is available to order here, and will be available via Amazon on or around 7 May.

Book Review of Brad Jersak's 'Her Gates Will Never Be Shut' - by Rob Grayson

Today I’m delighted to be reviewing Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem by Brad Jersak, published in 2009 by Wipf & Stock.

Hell is a subject which, in my experience at least, is not often openly spoken about in churches and among believers, but which nevertheless plays a vitally important role in the doctrinal apparatus of many Christians.

If I speak of a “hellfire and damnation” preacher, most people will immediately have a good idea of what I’m talking about and be able to form an associated mental picture. The thought of such a preacher might make many Christians squirm, but in the majority of cases, if those same Christians would stop and consider their most fundamental beliefs, they would have to admit that they and the hellfire preacher have much in common. The way they express those beliefs might differ drastically, but the basic message is the same: give your life to Jesus or burn in hell forever.

In fact, the belief in a hell of eternal, conscious torment for unbelievers is so deeply ingrained in the contemporary Christian psyche that to question its necessity is to run the risk of being seen as a doubter at best and a renegade or a heretic at worst. But is such a belief actually necessary to authentic Christian faith?

For those keen to explore the subject, there’s no shortage of books on hell, both old and more recent. Most either present and defend a clear pro- or anti-hell stance, while the occasional volume includes a range of differing views, usually set out by different scholars, and leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. Her Gates Will Never Be Shut doesn’t really fall into either of those categories.

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