I recently attended the life celebration of an aunt who had lived to within 6 weeks of her 100th birthday. Aunt Ruth at one time was bound and determined, her daughter told me, to reach 100; but after her 105 year old husband, Brick, died she rapidly lost interest in goals involving this life. The celebration of their lives was organized by my cousins, Ruth and Brick’s daughters, in the small California town near where their parents had farmed. It was a beautiful day, perfect weather. A gathering at the farm after the celebration service allowed widely scattered family members to reconnect and establish new relationships.

During the church celebration I was able to present a few thoughts on my Aunt Ruth’s life. (And because Aunt Ruth’s journey took her from Winkler, Manitoba to California, I have included this post under the heading: Out Of Winkler.)

This first picture is a picture of Aunt Ruth and her youngest brother, Reuben, my father. This was taken in 2003, at the memorial of their older brother, Harry. Both Ruth and Reuben look very happy.

This second picture is an aerial picture of the farm in southern Manitoba where Ruth spent 10 years of her childhood. It is also the farm where my father was born, and where I was born as well!! Many family connections are associated with this farm.

If you look pretty much in the middle of the photo, leading down past the barn, is a pasture. At a Voth family reunion in 2000, as participants gathered on the yard of this farm, Ruth told the story that when she was young, she used to walk across this pasture to visit her cousin Alma, who lived with her parents on an adjoining farm yard. Alma and Ruth were friends throughout life, even though their adult lives found them thousands of miles apart.

This third photo is one taken of Ruth, Reuben, and their parents standing next to a car. A few years ago, on a visit to California, I asked Aunt Ruth to tell me the story behind this picture. She told me she had finished one year at Tabor College (a Mennonite Brethren college) in Hillsboro, Kansas, receiving her teachers certificate, and was returning to Hillsboro to teach school. This job was at a rural, one-room school about five miles outside Hillsboro. “That year was a disaster,” Ruth told me. “I couldn’t control those boys.”

Following that year she got on a train and headed to California where her two older brothers had previously settled. She spent some time as a nannie and housekeeper for several families before meeting Lawrence “Brick” Schneider and settling down to married life on a farm south of Sacramento.

The rest of her story you will hear from others, who know the California part of her story better than myself. Growing up it was always rather a mystery to me that I had these uncles, aunts and cousins in California. My parents, grandparents and myself did take one car-trip to California in 1952, when I was four years old. I have some dim memories of visiting these cousins on their farm. Other than that, I was an adult before I really got to know this part of my family. I loved my Aunt Ruth and greatly enjoyed the times I was able to visit here. She was articulate and sharp, opinionated, yes, argumentative, yes, but loving her extended family

Some more thoughts on being a bridge in the church/christianity area:

I want to make it clear that I have not turned my back on the Bible. I stated that I have not turned my back on organized religion, but this may not have been clear regarding Christianity’s holy scriptures, the Bible. I still value the ancient writings. I still go to them on occasion. But what I am saying is that the Bible is not the first place I go when I search for truth.

I believe that I am holding the biblical writings closer to the way they were intended to be viewed, not in the way the Church has proclaimed they should be viewed. They are stories, stories of people trying to make sense of the divine. They are inspired (although from a purely biblical point-of-view the inspiration can really only be applied to the Old Testament!).

Much of the way the Bible has been proclaimed by Church has been in order to strengthen Church’s hold on peoples’ lives. If “salvation” can only be gained through Church’s involvement, then Church grows in importance. If however, people come to see that knowledge and experience of the divine can be achieved without the help of Church, then Church diminishes in importance in society. Therefore we can be assured Church will fight to the bitter end the sorts of views I am espousing.

Some of the shifts in belief this has led to in my experience are as follows:

1. There is no judgement! God does not judge. And therefore we are not to judge–ourselves or others! This is huge! Especially in the conservative circles in which I have spent most of my life. Rather than judgement, the divine realm teaches. God wants us to progress in our spiritual life. “Judgement” implies failure or success. Not in heaven! Rather, there is evaluation. Did that particular decision result in growth? Or did it set you back? We incarnate in order to learn certain lessons. At the end of each life we take a look and see how we did with those lessons. Did the accomplishment of a particular task lead us to moving on to the next step in our spiritual growth? Did a not-so-successful lesson mean we will have to learn that particular lesson in another life? It is not so much a “do-over” as it is a learning environment. We are shown our past life in a completely, overwhelmingly loving way how we did. And we get to participate in the evaluation and decisions about what needs to be done next.
2. The entire question which obsesses Church and its people is that of redemption. Church teaches that Jesus “died for our sins”. His death and resurrection was for our salvation. This entire area of doctrine I leave to others to discern! I don’t know the answers. I believe that Jesus was probably an historical figure. And likely was crucified. But the whole dying for our sins bit I have serious questions about. That doctrine seems entirely too, too close to what I mentioned above–a way for Church to have power over peoples’ lives. There are exalted beings in the Spirit realm. Of that I have no doubt. I’ve met some of them. And I believe Jesus was one of these. But certainly not the only one. If he has some preeminent position above all other spirit beings, I concede could be possible; of the higher levels of heaven I have limited knowledge. But I know Jesus is up there among the most powerful and wise beings in the divine realms. He still speaks today. To many of his followers.
3. Regarding the written scriptures, one more point: whenever spiritual messages, God’s “word” if you will, get written down, it is almost impossible to continue to hear God speak. This has happened over and over again throughout history. Consider the Jewish scriptures. For several centuries, over many generations, God spoke through wise beings usually called prophets. If you read the Hebrew scriptures, these prophets were often very dynamic and interesting people. They proclaimed the messages of heaven to the people. Mostly these messages were transmitted orally through multiple retellings of the stories. When these got written down, roughly around 500 years before the time of Jesus, the dynamic, personal, exciting messages largely ceased. By the time Jesus lived on earth God’s word was largely discerned through a study of the written-down record of what he had spoken many years earlier. Then consider the Christian writings, the “new” testament. Jesus lived a few decades on earth; he gathered some followers. They told and retold the stories they had learned from Jesus and had experienced through sharing life with him. Again, as these original followers began to die off, their followers decided they needed to preserve these stories. So anywhere from 30 to 70 years after the time of Jesus, and the following two to three centuries many accounts were written down and circulated among groups of followers. There were incredibly diverse interpretations of what and who Jesus was. But at some point around 300 years following Jesus’ time on earth, Church leaders held conferences to decide which of the these writings were to be preserved as a record of the history of Church. The writings they rejected were largely destroyed, in order to present a unified picture of who Jesus was and who his followers were and were to be like. In the period following, in which we still live, nothing was permitted to be added to these writings. The Bible, as it came to be called, was complete. All of our messages from the divine were to be discerned through studying the scriptures. Do you see the pattern? They followed almost precisely the pattern of their Jewish forebears. After writing down the scriptures, direct messages from God ceased. Heaven became silent. It fell to study, discussion, proclamation, arguing, etc, to determine what God says.

In my personal journey with God I have moved beyond the need for Church and its doctrines. I will listen to God’s word wherever and through whomever I encounter it.

Years ago, when moving to a new city and connecting with a new church, a leader in that church stated, “We are not biblicists.” I had not heard that word before. I had a sense what he meant by that, but certainly not a full idea of what it meant to be a “biblicist” or to not be a “biblicist”. That concept is much clearer today than it has ever been, in my life. I most certainly am not a biblicist!

I think I was a biblicist in the past, for much of my life. Truth was determined by what the Bible said. In earlier church experiences we would spend huge amounts of time and effort in studying the scriptures and hearing God speak through them.

Just a few years back now, as I was visiting with a friend who I knew as a fairly conservative evangelical Christian, I made the statement that I no longer went to the Bible as my first source of truth. “What?” he screeched (pretty much, anyway!!!). It is inconceivable for conservative Christians (“biblicists”) to entertain such a concept. Indeed, for me, in the past, this was inconceivable.

And I have to admit, it has taken me decades to get to this point: past the point of being a biblicist. My development has been painfully slow. I do not learn quickly, I guess. I do believe, and believe very firmly, that it has been God who has gently and slowly, at my own pace, led me to this point of belief. It is God’s Spirit who has led me beyond biblicism.

I use the term “God” here, only because of my past experience. That is how I viewed the divine for most of my life, and it still feels the most natural way to refer to the Spirit dimension. But be aware that my view of “God”, of who God is, of how he/she operates, has changed radically over the years. My former, biblical, view of God is rapidly disappearing. This view is being replaced by my experiences of God, the divine, the spirit realm, the universe.

Although it is very simplistic to say it this way, my view of God has gone from being a mostly intellectual exercise in studying the scriptures to being an experience, a knowing. A few years ago my wife shared with me a video of Carl Jung being interviewed late in his life by a BBC reporter. The reporter asked him, “Dr Jung, people want to know if you still believe in God.” The wise old psychologist was quiet for a bit. His reply was something like this: “Believe. I have trouble with that word. Believe. I know that God is. I know God. I don’t have to believe.”

Wow!! I could immediately identify with that idea. I have experienced the divine; I have experienced the spirit realm. I don’t need to believe. I know!!! And that is so much more powerful and real than any intellectual exercise in understanding God through written documents. Does that make me a “gnostic” Christian? I’m not sure. It’s not a really important question to me. [If you read the “Out of Winkler” section of this blog site, you will understand a little of what I have been through in my journey to arrive at this point in my life.]

It has been an exciting journey to get here. And “arrive” is not the correct term, either. Because I am still walking the walk! I am still on the journey. And I expect I will be for the remainder of my eternal existence. In fact, this journey has me in a bit of a conundrum right now!

When looking back on my life, there were times when I thought I knew pretty much. I thought I had it together. I had answers for most of life’s difficult questions. And especially was this true in the area of faith and theology. Now, I have experienced so much more; I know so much more than I ever did back then; I have grown so much, and am so much farther ahead. And yet, I feel in a way that I know so much less. Thus the “conundrum”! Because a large part of my increasing knowledge includes a vastly increased understanding of just just how much I do not yet know! So while in the past I felt I knew a pretty large percentage of what there was to know, now, though my knowledge is greater, I am aware that what I know and have experienced is just a small percentage of what there is to know (and experience!).

So how does this make me a “bridge” in this area of my life? I feel I have moved beyond orthodox religion and am now a more spiritual person. I have moved beyond a book religion to a personal experience of the divine. I have moved from learning from predecessors (including the biblical writers) to learning first-hand who “God” is, and what the Spirit realm is all about.

I have not turned my back on organized religion. I still value my upbringing in the Church. But I no longer feel a need for Church. I occasionally attend; I am a member of a local congregation in Calgary. But not because I need Church for any sense of “salvation”. I just like the connections. I enjoy the people who are part of my local congregation. I like the pastor (who, by-the-way, knows where I stand on this issue!!).

And I do not know what my place in all this is, or will be. My transitioning to this new position is currently pretty much a private one. And I am very happy for it to be this way. I have quite dramatically switched my view of myself in relation to the divine. But I have no drive to force this view on others. I am content to live my life quietly, contemplating what Spirit might be doing in our world. I seek wisdom from various sources. I pray daily. I listen to what heaven is saying to me personally. But I do not sense any earth-shaking role in helping others make a similar transition. I do not foresee this changing in the future. But I am open to whatever comes. If my being a bridge will help others, I would be very glad and willing. But I don’t know if that will ever occur. We will see!!

It has been quite awhile since I blogged “Bridge #1”! I live a busy life: what can I say?!!!

I am on holidays this week, sitting in a fancy hotel in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico! What a life! Santa Fe is absolutely, stunningly beautiful! While I have travelled through the state of New Mexico numerous times in my life, I had never been to or through Santa Fe. What a blessing my life has been. I have experienced so many things, have been to so many places, know people in many places, and in various walks of life.

This contributes to the view of me being a bridge between classes. I grew up in a working-class family. My father was a farmer, then turned to welding as an occupation. He then became a maintenance foreman, later a maintenance electrician. He could fix anything. He had an appliance repair business for awhile. I relied heavily on him to fix things around our house whenever he would come to visit. But he never finished high-school, at least not until later in life. And I grew up with a strong identification with working-class people. People who wore hardhats, carried lunchpails to work, were often found in dirty coveralls and with dirty hands.

I myself have dabbled in various trades. I operated machines in a book-binding shop. I worked for awhile as a mechanic’s helper, doing light mechanical work. (I have done a couple motor overhauls, which is a bit above “light” mechanical, but overhauling was never a huge part of any job I had.) I helped erect a metal farm shed; I have worked at several locations in construction, helping frame houses, pour concrete, etc. I have painted houses as a job. I have driven truck for periods of time. One summer I spent on a wheat-harvest crew, driving truck and combine from southern Oklahoma to northern Montana.

And I have gone on to obtain a Master’s degree. I have worked in several professions, including assistant nurse in a hospital, residential treatment facilities, church leadership including pastoring/preaching, suicide prevention coordinator giving educational presentations to schools and various professional and corporate agencies, chaplaincy in both hospital and correctional settings.

And currently I am a city bus driver, very much a “blue-collar” job. I have been doing this for nearly twenty years, and love it!!

I especially love driving in industrial areas of the city, taking people to their jobs, then home in dirty clothes, smelling of hard labour. I can easily talk to them about the travails of working for a living, finding a job, dealing with bosses, balancing family life with work, you name it. I’ve done most of that, and can relate readily.

But I can also mix easily with professional people. Because of my education, because of my experience in various professions, I can talk to professional people on their level. Not, of course on a technical level, but at a collegial level.

What all of this past experience in various levels of working class and professional circles means to me, I am not sure!! But it has been an incredibly interesting life; I have seldom been bored!

Having jumped around at various occupations and jobs, means I have never followed one career track for very long. Which means I have not advanced nearly to the level of many of my peers. It is tempting sometimes to look at my life as not very successful. But I don’t. I have very few, if any, regrets about my past. I made decisions at stages of my life using the best knowledge I had at the time. Sure, as we can all say, if I had it to do over again I’d make different decisions. But that sort of attitude usually results in thinking that if knew then what I know now. . . Which, in the end, is futile thinking. I did not know then what I know now. But I trust that back whenever, when I was making a certain decision, I had the knowledge to make the best decision I could at the time.

So this week I am in New Mexico, mixing with colleagues of my wife, all of whom have degrees, most of them with graduate degrees, some, like my wife, with post-graduate training and education. They are all attending an academic conference of Jungian psychology. And I feel completely comfortable rubbing shoulders with them. I don’t feel inadequate or less-than. I know that whatever level in life a person achieves, whether academic, financial, occupational, etc., everyone has similar struggles. I guess that is one advantage my very varied life has given me: a perspective to view life from different angles, from different strata if you will. For while western civilization likes to pride itself on being relatively class-less, there still exist class distinctions, like it or not.

I have experience in different classes within our society. I have experienced life at various socio-economic levels. And it is all good. There is no one class which is “better” than another. Earlier today, at a lecture at the psychology conference which brought us to Santa Fe, the speaker talked about material “success” not necessarily bringing happiness and satisfaction with life. I have the latter; I don’t necessarily have the former! And I am totally okay with that!

In posts the last two months I mentioned receiving a revelation about being a bridge. This bridging has occurred in my life in several ways. Today I want to talk about how I see myself as a bridge in time, or between time periods.

I was born on a farm in southern Manitoba. In the early fifties, when I lived there, we had no indoor plumbing. We had an outhouse in the summer. In the winter we had a portable toilet in the basement. We would huddle under some of the asbestos covered heating ducts from the furnace (which in my memory were like octopus arms, weaving here, there, and everywhere!).

The house was heated with coal. A room in the basement was to store the coal. This was fed through a chute from the outside. Coal would be hauled in by truck, and then dumped into the basement. The furnace was then fed by shovelling coal into it.

We had a cistern in the basement, basically one concrete room, with no door, but open at the top. I remember peering into it a few times. It was always very dark and looked quite sinister. We as children were often warned not to play near there, and certainly were never to climb into it!! During the winter my father would drive his pickup to a lake about ten miles away where workers were busy sawing (by hand!) huge blocks of ice out of Morden Lake. These were then loaded onto wagons or trucks. My father would dump this block of ice into the cistern to slowly melt and supply us with water. During the summer my mother would walk across the yard to the barn where our well was. We would hand-pump water into pails and haul it back to the house.

In fact, this feature of our farm likely saved my life! I am not sure exactly how old I was, but quite young. I was playing in the barn, around the ladder which went up into the hayloft. This ladder was just boards nailed across two vertical studs in the outside wall. Because bales of hay were often thrown from the hayloft down to the main floor through this hole where the ladder was, a lot of loose hay would build up around this area. Somehow, climbing and playing around this ladder, I had gotten myself turned upside down and wedged between the ladder and the wall. My head was down in loose hay and my nose and mouth were getting filled with dust and hay. My mother came to the well to get water and heard my feeble cries and came to rescue me. If not for the timing of this, I probably would’ve suffocated.

When it was time for our weekly bathing, we had a tin tub which was placed in the middle of the kitchen. My mother would have water heating in the kettle on the stove. Mixing this boiling water with cooler until the temperature was right, us boys got to bathe first, oft-times more than one in the tub at a time! Then my father would bathe, adding hot water as needed. Then the tub was emptied, and my mother would bathe with fresh water.

We had a phone in the house, like you now see only in museums, mounted on the wall, with an earpiece on a cord, a mouthpiece mounted on the wood box of the phone. There was a crank on the side of this box. I am not sure exactly what this crank did, but was probably linked somehow to the power needed to operate the phone. We were on a party line of course. And I remember at least once when my parents went to the neighbours a mile down the road, leaving me home (around age eight or nine) with my two younger brothers. They left the earpiece hanging by its cord. This way I guess the party line stayed open and they could periodically listen to see if all was quiet in our house. We were supposed to be in bed, sleeping!

I grew up in the 1950’s and we always had motorized transportation of course. But I can also boast of going to school by horse-and-buggy or horse-and-sleigh! Our road was a dirt road. When rain made it impassible our neighbour would hitch up his horses and, coming by our house, I would climb aboard and ride with him as he took his daughters to the one-room country school a mile and a half from our house. In winter when snow drifts closed the road, he would come by with horse-and-sleigh. I remember wrapping up in thick blanket or robes.  In the buggy I was fascinated watching little balls of mud being flung high into the air and come dropping down beside the buggy.

While performing my current job of driving city bus people sometimes ask me how long I’ve been driving. I mischievously answer, “60 years!” I began driving truck and tractor on the farm around age eight. My father would proudly tell the stories of my helping with harvest. I would sit in the 3/4 ton pickup at the edge of the field and watch as my father pulled the combine slowly around the field. When the combine hopper filled up, my father would wave, I would put the truck into low gear and slowly drive across the field. I would pull the truck right up beside the combine and could judge very well exactly where to stop so my father could empty the grain into the truck. When the truck was full, my father and I would switch positions, he driving the truck six miles to the elevator, and I driving the tractor, pulling the combine around the field. My father told of returning to the field and seeing me up at the hopper, moving grain around with my hands to the empty corners in order to be able to keep on going until the truck returned to empty the hopper.

Another driving story: My father had left the pickup a half mile from our yard, out at the highway, with a tank of water (I guess drinking water). The dirt road was muddy and he feared getting stuck. One morning he said he was going to walk down and get the truck. I replied that I wanted to go get it! My mother did not like the idea but my father allowed me to do this. So I walked the half-mile down to the highway, started the truck up, and slowly drove it up the slight grade to our farm. I don’t think I drove fast enough to shift gears, likely just idling it slowly along. At the turn into our driveway, my father said he was watching me approach. I was going too fast for the turn and he was afraid his trust in me was misplaced. He thought I would crash into the ditch. But I wrestled that truck around the corner and into the driveway. My father said it leaned over quite severely but I was able to keep it under control. I didn’t know what all the fuss was about later!! Between my mother and father!!

Sundays we would drive the ten miles into town for church services. Often we would visit my maternal grandparents after church, and often with other cousins present. My Grandpa Janzen had a television! This was really special in those days. Sometime during Sunday afternoon the TV set would be tuned to one of only two or three channels, to receive “Lassie”. In grainy, often snowy, black-and-white we watched enraptured each week’s episode.

So, my beginnings were fairly primitive by today’s standards. But I have so many fond memories of that farm and my foundation in life. I was nine years old when we moved off the farm and into a small town. Which also was a good experience. But I am always proud to identify myself as a Manitoba farm boy!!!

Now, of course, in the span of my life, I am blogging, on an iMac with a 27″ screen. I have an iPhone. I built, owned and flew my own airplane. I travel by airlines to numerous parts of the world to visit. The world has changed drastically during my nearly-seventy years. But I can remember my simpler early years. I can understand an older generation when they talk about the “hard times”. And I can also enjoy the relatively easier lifestyle I now live. I have bridged the times from hard-scrabble Canadian prairie life to life in a modern city.