Apr 28, 2016, from Marcus: While we are growing in familiarity...this "Beatitude for Bucket-Poopers" feels ready to share.
Apr 30, 2016, from David: I'm delighted with your beatitude. Thank you. As well as being nicely written, and well argued, it came close to me in several ways. One was that I had just been writing about Shadow Work myself, and had quoted several of the passages that you also note. Another was dismay at the recent stories from Attawapiskat, and at the widespread assumption that what such a community needs is more grief counsellors, And then there was the complaining after the last federal budget allocated only half a billion dollars for housing, without anyone seemingly even thinking to ask what prevents "unemployed" people from building their own houses. All of this you were able to write about, at least implicitly, with sympathetic tact. I found it very encouraging that you could and would do so.
May 11, 2016, from Marcus: I am sending a few more pieces of my manuscript: the prologue and introduction, as well as a chapter entitled: Sex Fiends: Jian Ghomeshi, My Rooster and Me. I am curious what you will make of my analysis of the scandal surrounding your former fellow employee at the CBC.
On a side note: what is your rule for capitalizing the words Gospel, Cross and Church? My editor uses a fairly strict rule of only capitalizing when these are part of proper names or titles. I see other writers capitalizing these also when they refer to "the big idea" for which these words stand. Is this a Catholic/Protestant divergence in spelling practice?
I grew up speaking & writing German, which capitalizes all nouns, so I tend to capitalize rather enthusiastically. Can you help me settle this difference with my editor?
May 12, 2016, from David: Thanks for these new sections of your book. I hope to begin reading them soon, as I said in my last note. I tend to capitalize weighty terms myself, so I'm with you rather than your editor. Certainly all the terms you mention I would capitalize. I don't think it's a Catholic/Protestant difference, unless Anglicans like me count as closet Catholics. I think English never followed the German practice entirely, but, if you take down a volume of Blake or Coleridge, a lot of nouns are capitalized for emphasis.
May 13, 2016, from Marcus: Thanks David for the boost to my predilection for emphatic capitalization.
I am attaching more chapters as they are completed, not assuming your reading to keep pace with my sending. I am putting in a final push to get this project off my desk before the growing season swallows me whole. Having a chapter polished up enough to feel good about sending it to you feels like as good a marker as any to consider it "finished."
I began listening today to "Beyond Institutions" on your website. Ten minutes into the program I had to interrupt the podcast to excitedly phone my friend Laurie, my collaborator in the inclusion of folks with mental disabilities in the work of our farm, described in "The Soil of Friendship." So many resonances.
Oct. 6, 2016, from Marcus: This just in from Mark MacDonald, National Indigenous Bishop for the Anglican Church of Canada.
"This is an attempt to speak to a new world, a world that many churches appear to have no capacity to recognize. Using the works of Girard and Illich as a framework, a new basis for faith and action emerges. The very personal and revealing way you demonstrate their thought is very useful. Although I might not follow you there, I found my own imagination animated and my thoughts illumined. I am happy for reading it and, as a believer in militant nonviolence, will think about your conclusions for some time."
October 5, 2016, forward from Marcus: As my computer likes to say, aw, snap! This just in from Mike Leaches of Orbis Books, a progressive Catholic publishing house in New York.
Subject: Re: One more commendation
I am so sorry, Marcus, but it is no go. Everyone saw its merits. The publisher thought it was one of the best written unsolicited manuscripts to come along in some time. But to quote Clint Eastwood who said to Gene Hackman before blowing his brains out in Unforgiven, "Deservin's got nothin' to do with it." Or in this case, "Quality's got nothin to do with it."
It is extremely difficult for a small religion book publishing house to stay in business these days and Orbis is no exception. It just cannot sell enough copies of a book, however good, on Girard and Illich, however influential, with long Canadian examples, however pertinent, to come close to breaking even. Orbis has published a ton of books over the years that lost money and gotten away with it. That time is not now. I am sorry.
The suggestion that emerged is for you to try and publish it with a Canadian publisher. The sales manager suggested Wood Lake Publishing in BC, or Copper House. That failing, there is the route so many authors are taking these days, including previously published and successful authors, and that is self-publishing.
I wish you success, and peace and joy in all you do. Thank you for sharing this wonderful work with me.
Mike
Oct 7, 2016, response to Mike from Marcus: Dear Mike, thanks for what one of my friends is calling "the most encouraging rejection I have ever seen." It was not too hard to take.
A musician friend of mine was musing about how two or three decades ago, there were 30 bars in Winnipeg where he and his mates could get regular gigs. Today there is only a small handful. People are still consuming music, but not live and local. They go to the touring mega-concerts, or they go online. My friend was decrying the parallel fate of the modest local church, disappearing as the masses go to the megachurches, or simply dissipate and wander off alone. It seems that the small religious publishing house is feeling a similar squeeze. "Never have so many people written so many words for so few readers," I heard Margaret Atwood say recently. "The math does not compute." And yet the math has to be done, and the beans have to be counted. Thanks ever so much for entertaining my pitch as seriously as you did. If nothing else, your affirmation, along with that of Alison and Cayley and others, has given me the confidence to hang out my shingle and attempt to gather a new worshipping community in the old, nearly defunct Anglican sanctuary I mention in "The Shape of the Body." I can't afford seminary, but I was afforded the time to read and write and reflect the past two winters, and I have taken your affirmation and that of other respected elders to be as close as this ecumenical love-child may come to being credentialed by any particular denominational tradition.
Oct.6, 2016, from Marcus: THANK YOU to James Alison, for opening this particular door. I remain amazed that Orbis even looked at me. And thanks and hugs to all of you for blessing and encouraging me on my way! I remain confident that my book will land with a publisher somewhere, if somewhere smaller and more local. For the sake of the thoughts I want to share widely, this is disappointing, but for the sake of my own sanity and the congruity of my life, I trust that small really is beautiful and that locality is the soil of friendship.
From Marcus to David: from the Introduction to his book [available here: https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000044304101/Marcus-Peter-Rempel-Life-at-the-End-of-Us-Versus-Them]
My pacifist Mennonite parents tell me they named me for the Gospel writer Mark. Now the Mennonites threw out some beautiful babies (art, liturgy, memory of the saints) with the high church bath water during the radical Reformation, but one thing they got right was that any serious reading of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount leads to a refusal of war. While I never had a natural disposition for loving my enemies, it was never hard for me to see that any Christian justification of war was sheer nonsense.The rest of my name comes from having a father named Peter Rempel, along with an uncle and a grandfather named Peter Rempel—both on my mother’s side. Somewhere in my family line, there are probably some non-Mennonites with more original names, but they are too far back for any of us to remember.
I’ve learned that the literal meaning of Marcus is “son of Mars,” the Roman god of war. When I look into my heart, this also feels apt. For like many peace activists, I have often taken the Christian love for the poor and the stranger as convenient grounds to hate the rich and the established—“The Man,” as we like to say.
Jan 2, 2017, from Marcus to David: I thought you might find this book review interesting. This deconstruction of early capitalism dovetails with Illich's critique of development as a war on subsistence.
http://www.filmsforaction.org/news/recovered-economic-history-everyone-but-an-idiot-knows-that-the-lower-classes-must-be-kept-poor-or-they-will-never-be-industrious/ Two quotes stand out for me:
"The possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese, naturally exalts the peasant. . . . In sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days, are imperceptibly lost. Day labour becomes disgusting; the aversion increases by indulgence. And at length the sale of a half-fed calf, or hog, furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness." (from an 18th century pro-industrial pamphlet)
“Our Forests and great Commons (make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians) being a hindrance to Industry, and are Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence.” (John Bellers)
Back to cutting some firewood out of the bush. My whole day is being imperceptibly lost. Sigh. Wishing you a happy and indolent New Year!
July 16, 2026, from Marcus to Kate,
Just One Song
I love a neighbour who loves Jesus
He's her saviour strong and kind
I love a neighbour who found Buddha
Finally taught her peace of mind
I love a brother who wants nothing
but the plain and solid facts
I love a priest who keeps performing
the sacramental act
I love two mamas who have promised
wife and wife until the end
I love a granny in my church
who rails against this trend
when we all sit down at table
breaking bread and drinking wine
what's one song that we can share
when we aren't of one mind?
O give me one song
just one song
that I can sing with all my friends
Give me one song
just one song
where we can let our voices blend
with parts for all the colours
the Living Lovelight sends
I love a neighbour with a farm
that's organic as can be
he farms and dreams and writes
for a future poison-free
I love a neighbour who's a good ol' boy
loves to hunt and fish and fly
there he goes in his crop-duster
delivering pesticide
I love a neighbour who's preparing
for the end of fossil fuel
I love a neighbour boy with a pick up truck
so big it's monster-cool
It's a strange and straining place
this checkered neighbourhood
everybody made so different
yet somehow all made good
O give me one song…
And could it be a Hallelujah, Hallelujah,
A Hallelujah Song?
I wrote that song in the early years after our move out to this rural neighbourhood, when I could still imagine, somehow, that there could be some table I could tend, some song I could find that could draw these neighbours together. Today, after various attempts at trying to organize different versions of a “community band,” each with their own relational and logistical disappointments, the longing expressed in this song feels naive, foolhardy. Since those early days, a number of polarizations have taken their toll that feel even more impossible to bridge than the ones listed in the song.
Today I host a small house church. I’ve more or less stopped inviting new people. And I’ve given up on, or at least become a lot more distant with the the neighbours who clearly are never going to come. Which makes me ask myself, was I only friends with them because I was hoping to recruit them to my project? Were these strictly instrumental friendships?
Since David’s death, I’ve been thinking about hosting a monthly potluck/singalong for whoever wants to come, with no agenda other than neighbourliness. We'll see.
August 13 2026 to Kate: David introduced me to thinkers who helped me understand the beauty and the necessary instability of a spiritual tradition that heralds the outcast as centre. A tradition that lives in awareness of a debt that it can never pay. A tradition that must face the truth of the victim again and again. A tradition that must sing "I crucified thee" each year before it can sing of Easter graces and glories……I write as a pastor whose children do not go to church….. I feel that I have failed. I love outsiders like Simone Weil, and Ivan Illich, and David Cayley, but I carry an ache in my heart that the identification with outsiders that I helped pass on to my children finally sent them outside my church and my tradition…..I must admit that over the years, I have looked with increasing envy at my more conservative Anabaptist kin, who seem to know better how to pass their tradition on from one generation to the next. I've had some wonderful conversations with Julian Waldner, a young Hutterite who interviewed David at one point. Julian's mix of intellectual openness and groundedness in his people's tradition made a deep impression on me. I suspect that if the Christian faith is still being practiced a hundred or a thousand years from now, it will be more thanks to teachers like Julian than pastors like me.
Outside now to pick tomatoes.