(click lower right to watch full-screen)

This is the first piece of art I’ve done in several weeks - another quick oil pastel sketch of a scene from the Atlantic coast. I’m sure I chose it because staring out at the ocean and watching the waves is exactly what I’d like to do right now, both because of the heat, and because any break from the endless cycle of bad news is very welcome. I hope that the video gives you a few moments to breathe deeply too.

Artwork has been on a back burner for good reasons. I’ve been preoccupied with writing and activism to try to raise consciousness within the Anglican Church of Canada about the terrible situation in Gaza. As chair of the music committee at the cathedral, I’ve had transition events to plan to welcome our new music director, Tom Sheehan, who has come to us from the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. And we’ve been more social as the summer winds down - we had two very nice invitations to visit people in the Laurentians, and have had guests here as well. Mainly, though, I’ve been doing a lot of music: practicing my flute every day and working with my accompanist, playing for Taize services, and listening to a great deal of music and thinking about it with intention.

These activities are the personal foreground. The constant, extremely disturbing background has been watching the dismantling of democracy in my country of origin. The actions of the present government and high court, as horrendous as they are, distress me less than the capitulation of institutions, individuals, and particularly the mainstream media. It astounds me that things once thought unthinkable — like the takeover of the Washington D.C. police force and deployment of the National Guard in that city, under completely baseless pretenses — are announced one day, and then practically normalized in the media the next. That’s just a recent example among hundreds of others. If this is what we are going to be facing, the near future looks very dark indeed, and requires rethinking what resistance needs to look like — even from where I sit above the border.

Resistance, to me, means resisting normalization and acquiescence, and neither giving up, nor feeling helpless. However, the shape of that resistance has to change when one has so little power over the large picture. The elected opposition cannot do much until the midterms, and there will undoubtedly be efforts to tamper with those elections, if they are held at all. If the country descends fully into authoritarian rule, a majority of its citizens are going to have to make the extremely difficult emotional and mental switch from thinking this is a temporary nightmare to living under indefinite circumstances they could not have imagined possible.

I absolutely believe that this IS temporary, but I think it may go on far longer, with greater, longer-lasting domestic and global ramifications, than most of us want to believe. So what do people do?

Protest is still vital. It keeps hope alive, and it makes us feel solidarity with others. However, if protest is forcibly suppressed, or the risks become too great, I think the situation may come to resemble a captive population under the control of an occupier — for how long is unclear. And in that situation, people have to think more locally, take care of one another, find ways to maintain hope, health and spirit, and create joy and connection in spite of the external reality. There is also cognitive dissonance — which is happening already — because life is continuing mostly unchanged for many people (and capitalism will always try to ensure that this is so) while for others, there is fear, suffering, great loss, and anger at those who refuse to see what is happening to their neighbors.

Many populations in the world have had to exist under these circumstances, and not only in other parts of the globe. Slaves and oppressed blacks have done it, indigenous people have done it, 2SLGBTQ+ people have done it — on the same soil where many of us have lived out our privilege. Today, many ethnic and religious groups experience fear, separations, disappearances, and violent persecution and attacks while for many of us, life goes on practically as usual. How is it possible to turn our backs on this? Even here on the relatively calm streets of Montreal, a Hasidic man was seriously beaten last week in front of his young daughter in a completely unprovoked attack. Islamophobia, antisemitism, and attacks on people of non-conforming gender are all on the rise; one of the highest American cabinet officials has actually suggested that women — half of the entire population — should no longer be allowed to vote.

I think there are three areas where we can focus, in addition to doing whatever we can to work within the system and amplify our voices. One is “Radical Hospitality.” Another is “Art and Creativity.” And the third is “Belief and Practice,” by which I do not mean religious belief per se, but belief in something better and the willingness to embody that, hold onto it, and work toward it, both in our own hearts and in a larger sense. I will devote a post to each of these in the weeks to come, and look forward to hearing your thoughts.