9:05 p.m. - 2002-12-16
The Basics
I got a call from Darren from Elections Canada on Friday. Could I go over the changes he had made at his supervisor's request and respond with any revisions I wanted. No problem. Could he have that work within 12 hours? Nope. Considering everything else that was happening at that point in time, my house/family was in an uproar and the weekend was the earliest that I could attend to it. For another thing, their IT staff was about to revamp our intra-office e-mail and there was no way I could cobble everything together and redo a spreadsheet before they began their ministrations. Then unexpectedly, my number two son and his fiance arrived early Saturday for a visit and left just before the dinner hour. Quite frankly, when my guys find enough time and the inclination to spend time visiting with me, it takes priority over anything else. I'm glad I was honest about the timing with Darren.
I finally got all the housework settled on Sunday and had the time to focus on the revisions, while the boys were out doing their own things. Started at 5:30 pm and finished at about 1:00 am. Part of the reason is I had to reconfigure an entire map with the new data Darren sent, and then redraw boundaries and make certain the numbers balanced before I could make any final decisions. Some of Darren's work needed to be reconfigured, so I could make it work in a way that wouldn't conflict with the other processes lock-stepped into, or driven by, the polling district configuration. Those processes are simple if the basics are flawless and that is what this exercise was about - the basics. Midway through the work one of the other Calgary Returning Officers called, so I explained what it was Elections Canada was having me do, then I stopped for a bit to catch up with her. We talked shop for a while, caught up on the news of people we both know and then compared notes about our health (she's been very ill since the last election) and our job searches - the contract she was working on ended in October too. Went back to mapping.
I had Sister Act on as I was working - I enjoy the music and I like Whoopi Goldberg's acting. I was thinking about things spiritual as I was labouring on. Remember the scene where the nuns'choir first sings the hymns, a la Vegas, and suddenly young people are walking in off the streets to see what is going on? Up until I was about eight years old I went to church with my Mom and sisters. We girls would be allowed to sit for part of the adult service, then be sent off for Sunday School. Now it was already bothering me a great deal that what I heard were "the rules" in church was not the way adults conducted themselves once outside those walls - even less so in the broader society. Also in regular school, we were learning about the early settlement of Europeans in North America. The behavior of the Puritans really confused me. People seeking the freedom to practice their own faith travel under dangerous conditions away from everything they have ever known, arrive there, and then violently deny anyone who worships differently the same right - how come? You would think they, more than anyone else, would understand how important it is to be able to pray in the way that most helps one feel connected to the divine. I couldn't get any answers from my teachers.
One morning in Sunday School we were singing hymns. The Sunday School I went to insisted everything be sung in monotones - it was awful. My girlfriend and I were laughing at the imagery we were seeing during the song "Fishers of Men" trying to ease the dreariness of the music. The head of the Sunday School stood at the front of the room glaring at us. She said that God hated children who smiled, even moreso ones that laughed in his house. Well that was the last straw in my child's mind. I believed absolutely in the almighty, but clearly this congregation had no understanding of that divinity. No God I could believe in hated children for any reason; the minister upstairs taught that through the story about Jesus and the children. Anyway, I decided that I would finish out that year of church because one was given their own Bible for perfect attendance. I would study that and then find a Sunday School where the teachers actually knew what they were talking about.
I have always been grateful to that woman ever since. No doubt she didn't mean what she was saying - she probably had been ill, or been given bad news, or had had a dispute with her spouse or something just before church, but her comments set my feet on a journey of discovery that is still on-going to this day. I read my Bible, tried a lot of different churches, thought a lot. When I was ten I read Exodus by Leon Uris. When, at the end of it, I read the dedication and realized that it was based on a true story, it triggered many years of studying Judaism. Studying ancient history, the development of Western Europe, and the British Commonwealth between the ages of 11 to 15 triggered a need to understand the faith systems of many other people - why were there so many different ways of expressing faith, why did people choose to behave the way they did based on those principles. It was so confusing. My conclusion, eventually, was that the divine was to be found in every faith system in the same way that any number of prisms will take pure sunlight and reflect various single colours each based on it's own inherent chemical properties and it's own inherent flaws.
In Buddhism, there is an analogy that uses the example of the moon for the divine and says that religion is like a finger pointing at that moon. All faiths can direct one's attention to the general direction of understanding but none are God. In the Pirke Abbot of the Jews - one of my favorite books for stimulating a debate without having to have a sparring partner other than one's own mind - it says that God has as many faces as the number of Hebrews who crossed the desert with Moses - everyone sees something of the divine nature based on their own insight and limitations. In the Chinese Tao there is the imagery of a man dreaming he is a butterfly while his teacher asks if it is not possible that it might also be true that the dreamer is the butterfly and that the man is the dream. Certain physicists have posited the same question using examples of their own research.
I didn't send my thoughts into Elections Canada as part of my work - just as well, the basics are complicated enough. Got a note back from Darren this morning - the revisions were fine and he was happy with the other work. Even the new e-mail system is working fine. Good thing.
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