I was all set to bring in the New Year with a post of my dad’s call to lightheartedness, “Laat ons Pret Hebben”, whose translation I have titled “Laugh a Little”. But then current events started splattering all over my news feed and I lost heart. It hasn’t gotten any better, so I have made good use of the intervening time (with my head in the sand) working on things over which I have some control and staying out of the public eye.

Towards the beginning of the year, my reticence was confirmed by a minor tussle that I witnessed on Facebook. One of my friends speculated (right out of the blue!) about the possibility of there being multiple universes. This struck me as a fascinating question, akin to counting how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. But a mutual friend took exception and shot back immediately with a — how can you talk about something so esoteric when our world is so precarious and people are being hurt, killed and oppressed. Oof!

So, yes, my dad’s writing about how to deal with tedious consistory and classis meetings would not be apropos to a world in real crisis. In fact, his whole focus on Dutch immigrant experience is easily dismissed as being provincial or quaint — decades out of touch with our modern reality.

I too am absorbed, preternaturally, with the past and less inclined to fret about the future. I find history’s perspective to be reassuring and uplifting, in spite of and because of its stories of adversity touched by grace. So I have been happily media-ting between the past and the future — gathering up my family’s old images and stories and plonking them down on new patches of cyberland.

Canoe Camping

One of my accomplished tasks has been to move my own memories of canoe camping expeditions over from Newmaker into Middledom. These photo galleries, begun in 2010 and now numbering eleven, have been adapted three times now to ever developing media platforms. First presented through jAlbum, then through a WordPress NextGEN Gallery, and now through WordPress Media Folder Gallery.

What is it about these galleries that compels me to keep them and share them? They do nothing to solve the problems of our precarious world. Canoe camping is geared to getting away from people — escaping the rat race, not joining the fray. And then to promote the experience — how’s that going to help humanity? Can we even make camping plans for ourselves and then encourage others to join us in vacating our wretched reality and feel good about it?

The general consensus seems to be — Yes! Regardless of privilege or posture, the appetite for vacations remains strong, even voracious. Even the staunchest defenders of the marginalized feel the need to get away from it all. Only a week after rebuking frivolous speculation, our crotchety Facebook friend posted a picture of his last summer’s vacation, as if to soothe his soul and still the waters.

Of our own canoe camping trips, the one to Wolf Lake in 2012 remains the most potent of these antidotes to the busy beaver blues. It was only a four night stay, but during that time we discovered and got to know a magnificent, still pristine outcropping of Canadian Shield. You can see and read about this in the Gallery, so I won’t go into details — it’s the nature of this experience that matters here.

The peninsula that shelters Site 301 on Wolf Lake was totally new to us, and we had it all to ourselves — to explore and enjoy. In familiar places, confirmation bias keeps us from seeing everything around us, including the good stuff. Unfamiliarity, in contrast, has the potential for breeding curiosity and delight. That’s a helpful catalyst for lifting our gaze out of the gutter into a view of the world where creation, regained, feels whole and in control.

Wolf Lake, #301 has been a well known address for millennia, though only recently by that name. It is so spectacular and hospitable that it will have long been a popular and welcome waystation for indigenous peoples and their more recent guests. Nothing remains of earlier visits, except what the park has now installed, but it is not hard to imagine ourselves there, transported through time to some other culture, but enjoying the same glorious view — this gift for the ages.

In such a place, our primary perspective shifts towards a primordial past inexorably passing into a pliable present — a beautifully balanced world in which we are just lightly touching down. Shifting weather, rising and setting suns, seasonal cycles, growing and dying plants and trees, shimmering water and shivering leaves and creatures of all sizes — these are the marks of a Creator who knew what he was doing and takes his time doing it.

Good Gifts

When the eyes of our heart open to this reality, we easily see a thousand gifts for which to be grateful. The world takes on a quality that’s hard to describe and easily lost. We feel that what we experience transcends that moment and that place — that the whole is much greater than the sum of these parts.

This quality is well known and much sought after across cultures, religions and epochs, and it has many faces, not just the naturally scenic. Music, art, architecture and literature all have this capacity to inspire. Whatever is allusive — playfully suggestive of a deeper reality — lifts us out of the doldrums, catches our breath and wafts us toward a place and a response of gratitude.

There is, of course, also a deep reality of brokenness and suffering which we cannot ignore. So we constantly face the dilemma of how to resolve this tension between the good and the bad, between the inspiring and the disheartening. Doom seems to be winning out these days, in spite of a recent call to ‘hope scrolling.’

But, I am convinced that our witness in this world must be inspiring if we are to overcome fear. To dwell on what is truly good and glorious is not an escape, but a strike against what is truly evil and banal. If we seek out and share rich blessings (transcending our more petty comforts and preoccupations), then we are pushing away from debased common spaces and can genuinely invite others to join us.

I have long been impressed with the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s first Q&A; “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.” God’s glory is inextricably linked with our enjoyment of that glory — our enjoyment glorifies God — glorifying God is to enjoy him —without this enjoyment God is not glorified. How much further from killjoy Hyper-Calvinism can you get?

The quality of creation that makes it enjoyable and glorifies God doesn’t really have its own name. So I call it ‘glorifinity’. That plays off on other words like ‘serendipity’, ‘affinity’, ‘infinity’ and of course ‘glorious’ and ‘glorified’. It’s a quality that can be felt intuitively and is accessible to all, but for Christians is most fully felt as a foretaste of an even more awesome, unfathomable Creation.

It has a counterpart, of course, one that could also be named. Slums, bombed out buildings, corruption, ugly discourse and a great deal more stirs our apprehension of a great, malign force and quickly fills us with dismay. We can’t stop fighting this, in whatever way we are able, but we must never forget that we are not just working against evil, we’re working for a greater good. Our first purpose is to is to inhabit and enjoy the good creation that God gave us and to be the very best creative creatures that God imagined us to be.

For me, that has been constructing and renovating, and now writing and publishing. But it is also a walk in the park, apple crisp and ice-cream, a toccata and fugue and a vaulted ceiling. It is the packing and portaging, the setup and the prep of canoe camping. But it is also the stillness and majesty, the sunrise and vast skies of a pristine place, feathered in on the breath of God.

So we are planning our twelfth canoe camping trip — maybe our last. Who knows where the world will be at five months from now, but the call is clear. And in the meantime, I’ll be back in our garden and shingling a roof, reading newspapers and scrolling the net, hosting a celebration, and even visiting that veritable antithesis to Algonquin Park — New York City.