Capricorn Rising

Remembering

Where do I know you from?

Holding each other in a tent on a rainy morning
This is something we've done before
I followed you here to remember that
I've missed you tremendously

You
With the glowing face and the straight back
I always recognize you
With the strong hands and soft heart
I always know

Your eyes are shaped like bubbling laughter
I get lost in the revelry
Of this joyful, playful, youthful love
Pulling me out of myself
Asking me to come away with you
I wish this life were longer

I don't feel that we are magnetized to one another
So much as our companionship is the natural rhythm of things
The sun following the moon
The sprouts following the snow
There is no other way it could be

I return here to orbit with you in pleasant synchronicity
Contextualized, potentiated, knowing and known

Waxing to your wain
Humming softly into your chest
Inhaling and exhaling in time.

Kisses

Whenever I can I try to kiss them all over
Every inch of their skin I can reach
I want my love to seep into their pores like a salve
To circulate in their bloodstream
And stretch down into their warm bones

I tell them kisses are a medicine I brought with me into this world
I want to embarrass them with my love
I kiss their face in a circle
Counter-clockwise - cheek, forehead, cheek, chin
Then their nose, then their mouth

They tell me maybe I should try kissing myself some time
And I laugh uncomfortably

I lie awake at night alone
And I kiss the back of my hand

And it feels like when my mom used to tell me to apologize, but I didn't feel sorry.

It feels like when my teacher used to make us give a Valentine to everyone, so no one got left out.

But somewhere in my skin something is blushing
Something is whispering
"I hope they really mean it"

And I hope I do too.

We often don’t know what the love of God really looks like, because we are looking to each other as examples of what love means. And those examples are often steeped in human pain, repression and trauma.

The love of God doesn’t look like the love of a disappointed parent. The love of God is not the love of an abusive spouse. The love of God is not a codependent friendship. It is not the love you feel for your dog. It is not the love of a nation. It is not spiteful or selfish or conditional.

It does not falter at your skin tone, your tattoos, the way you speak, your choice of lover. It does not ask loaded questions, it does not roll it’s eyes.

We see nothing like it, except the glimpses we can catch, in a moment of mutual understanding, a kind smile, an electric connection between strangers, the experience of being lovingly known, the feeling of singing together.

And that is but a candle to the sun of God’s love that surrounds us at all times.

In our wounded world there is no comparison, the only way to understand is it faith. To do as we are called to do, to see others as God does, we must challenge ourselves to love deeper than the love we’ve been given.

Antlers in the Fall

Went through an old journal and found this letter I wrote to my future self when I was 19, around this time 6 years ago.

I am writing this at 12:17pm on February 26, 2014, 7 days after my clavicle reconstruction surgery. I am 19 years old. I am writing this to myself.

I have no plans for you. Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, and with whom you are doing it, is fine. You could be successful or lonely or on the street and none of these things would surprise or disappoint me. Even the vague hopes I have now, I understand enough of the world to know that experience may very well render those desires irrelevant. I know that now, and I am content with that. Your life may have taken a direction I never in my wildest dreams could have foreseen, and that is great! My knowledge, my perspective is so finite, do not seek to pacify me as I am now. The moment in which I am writing this will have passed, and with it my self in this moment will be dead. Never to see, never to know another thing. But you, in the present, are so full of life lived and foods tasted that I could not have imagined! And it is the knowledge that you are not as finite as me, that you will change and grow beyond my limitations, that makes it so I have not died in vain.

So do not fixate on me. Behind you is death and in front of you is new life and infinite possibility! Already at 19 I have spent years fixated on the idea that I did not turn out as a younger me would have imagined. At 19! Do you see how ridiculous and hopeless this idea is? So this is me, trying to relieve myself by relieving you. Unfortunately I have no idea where you are or what you are doing with your life now, so I have no insight or guidance to offer you. You know yourself better than I do. I do not know you, we have never met. I am merely a piece of you, shaken off like antlers in the fall while you carry on. New ones will grow in the spring, and they will be bigger and stronger, so do not mourn for me. You will lose nothing I had, and gain so much more. My only desires for myself are to grow, and I’m sure you’ve got that covered.

Be strong. Be kind.

Yours in memory,

Lane Silas Patriquin

Migration

Primordial as the ocean tide,
Seasonal as the butterfly,
All that lives must chart through time,
Their paths to food and peace of mind.

Across the skies, waters and lands,
We move but by this one command,
That nothing stays in time or place,
These cyclical motions are maps Grace.

So who are mortals to deny,
Habits which are old as time?
Brief lines and walls may pacify,
But vines, creatures, and people,
Climb.

Drinks Over Dinner

This is a sermon that I gave for the feast of Corpus Christi on June 23, 2019 at The Church of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields in Toronto. The readings for this are Deut 8:2-3, 14-16; Ps 116:10-17; 1 Cor 10:16-17; Jn 6:51-58.

This Sunday we are celebrating the feast of Corpus Christi, a day to honour the presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist. This solemnity is the only feast which was added to the liturgical calendar by the efforts of a woman, Juliana of Liege, who, among other women in Christian communities at the time, felt a very strong devotion to the Eucharistic elements.

The historic devotion of Christian women to the Eucharist makes a lot of sense. Food and care work, the sustaining of the physical and emotional well being of others, has traditionally been considered women’s work for thousands of years. And so it makes sense that God would work through women to relay the importance of this feast.

Despite the convoluted reasoning of how exactly bread and wine can be physical body and blood, the acceptance of these realities offers a reassuring simplicity. Christ came to serve, to care for others, and each time we participate in the Eucharist we are invited to do that. This message, and this action, is quite simple, demonstrated throughout his whole life: Serve others. Feed others. Protect, heal, and care for others.

These holy tasks we are called to, are women’s work. Jesus was a man who did women’s work. He is a deacon, a role in the church for those who serve their community, which has commonly been given to women. Despite all of the ways that scripture has been abused to attack the image of God as manifested in gender-variant people, Jesus was a man who undeniably transgressed the social gender norms of his day in order to exemplify and venerate the holy work of women: to feed, to wash, to heal the sick, to care for the children.

The Eucharist reminds us that we have not been asked to look for God up in the sky, or in some transcendent realm of higher consciousness. Though God certainly exists in the cosmos as much as anywhere else, that is not the site of God’s creation of us. We were created here, on this physical Earth, specially shaped for this land, which has all we need to care for ourselves physically and spiritually. Christ’s physical presence in his vulnerable human incarnation, and his remaining physical presence in the nourishment of bread and the joy of wine, asks us to look down to the soil and to the plants and creatures, and forward into each other’s faces and open hands, to see the life of God and what is being asked of us: to be mindfully and persistently present in our physical lives and our relationships to one another.

The two parts of the Eucharist, the bread and the wine, serve different but equally important purposes. The bread is something very practical and easy to understand: it is that which fills us, it is the gift of food brought forward by the Earth, and shaped and cooked by human hands, that provides us with physical life. Without bread, without food, we could not live. Wine on the other hand, being something without significant nutritional value and certainly not a basic physical necessity of our bodies, is also recognized as a key substance that we are to partake in, in order to live in Christ.

My family, very much people of food and wine, taught me at a young age that wine is something you drink with others. By the nature of the beverage and it’s historical use, it has always been something brought out to partake in together. I remember my father jokingly referred to it as a “social lubricant.” Often in conversations about community organizing, we talk about the necessity of going to the pub with your neighbours and coworkers, because friendship and trust is built over drinks and laughter.

Like any psychoactive substance, alcohol has the potential to be used in harmful ways, and I think that the fact that alcohol is a medicine that must be treated with respect is something needs to be emphasized in our culture. Certainly the liquor companies that will be showing up on rainbow floats this afternoon, advertising an addictive substance to an already psychologically vulnerable community, are doing nothing to show respect for alcohol and it’s purpose on the Earth. But I’ve always found it very interesting that in the Christian tradition, one of our sacraments is wine: a substance whose purpose is to relieve our anxiety and make us more sociable, to make it easier to talk and laugh, to allow us to lean across the aisle to someone who may seem unfamiliar, and crack a joke. That Jesus asked us to partake in this substance, with equal importance to the bread that sustains our physical bodies, highlights the inextricably social nature of Christianity. The bread: the caring, feeding, washing, housing, and healing – and the wine: the talking, organizing, joking, scheming, and celebrating – are the two sides of the mission we must enact as followers of Christ, inextricable from one another.

Often times when we are seeking to act in solidarity with those who are more under-resourced than ourselves, to feed people just makes plain sense. We feel called to share our resources, our food, and our money, to ensure the physical well being of those less fortunate. And while these actions are definitely in alignment with that aspect of Christ’s mission, in many charity contexts this doesn’t always accompany being invited to sit at the same table.

How well can we know exactly what someone else needs, if we are not in conversation, speaking to each other as equals? How do we act in the best interests of others if we are focused only on providing a service, one that depends on one party remaining as the decision-makers and the resource-holders, without building relationships based on trust, mutual understanding, and even joy?

Bread is incredibly important, it is the gift of life on this Earth and everlasting life as embodied in Christ. But we must also remember to bring the wine. Amen.

Recovering from Radical Vulnerability

The practice of “radical vulnerability” has made it’s way into social justice communities over the past 5 years or so, and it’s something which I first encountered on Tumblr.

The premise – as I’ve seen it applied within my social context – is that candid public disclosure of trauma and other personal struggles is a radical act that fosters transparency, connection and trust within community.

I definitely think vulnerability can be a powerful thing in a therapeutic context, and that it is necessary for intimacy and emotional connections to form – which is important when we’re talking about nurturing relationships within community. But over the past few years, there’s something that’s been bothering me about how I’ve seen the concept of “radical vulnerability” applied. I’ve been thinking about how vulnerability operates within social justice spaces – who is comfortable being vulnerable, in what ways, and to what ends? In what circumstances is vulnerability healthy or appropriate, and when is it not?

I’m not sure of the original intended application of radical vulnerability, and so I don’t want this post to be a critique of the full potential of this concept. However I do want to critique how I have often seen it used in (mostly online) social justice spaces in recent years, specifically by white middleclass women and nonbinary people.

Many women of colour such as Rudy Hamad and Sherronda J. Brown have written articles within the past year about the weaponization of white feminine emotions in interactions with Black and Brown people. While this is a phenomenon that has been discussed and theorized about for years, awareness of a racialized and gendered emotional power imbalance finally seems to be making it’s way into progressive white consciousness.

These ideas about the weight of white emotion got me thinking: does the practice of radical vulnerability necessarily facilitate open and accountable discussion, or can it be another avenue for white people to center our emotions and shield ourselves from criticism?

The first thing that strikes me about acts of self-described “radical vulnerability,” is the often public nature of these disclosures. Vulnerability is generally something that happens between individuals in a form of mutual intimacy, but in a context of a broad-reaching social media post, there is a relatively low cap to the level of intimacy or reciprocity that can be had in that context.

Because of this public nature, radical vulnerability can feed into trends of obligatory disclosure, establishing an idea that those who publicly share their trauma or difficult personal realities are inherently “radical,” and “approachable,” and those who do not are not as friendly or open, have something to hide, or must not have their own traumatic experiences. This kind of thing is what lead to the 2013 Tumblr norm of (often extensively) “listing” points of privilege and oppression on one’s profile, which of course lead to many awkward interactions where someone who hadn’t listed some aspect of their identity would be assumed to be privileged by default.

We need to talk about is how the ability to disclose personal information safely can be a mark of privilege in itself. Survivors of sexual assault, for example, are not always safe or comfortable outing themselves to others, especially publicly, and have no obligation to do so. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a survivor talked over in conversations about sexual violence, because they’d never publicly disclosed their experience, and were thus assumed not to have had such an experience.

Among the white middle-class there is often a failure to appreciate the mundanity of oppression. Because many queer or disabled white people come into our experience of oppression later in life (even if that’s childhood), it often strikes us as something jarringly abnormal. We often don’t understand that for many people, the experience of violence is so commonplace that it doesn’t elicit the kind of public indignation that middle-class white queer people often demonstrate. For many low-income and racialized people, oppression is so pervasive it could not be expressed in a post, a zine, or a slam poem. Acts of self-disclosure are not inherently liberating – for many they can be emotionally draining, triggering, or the things that could be disclosed would be seen as “too much” for social media.

People avoid vulnerability for justified reasons, and we need to remember that we never really know who someone is just by what they say – or don’t say – about themselves on the internet or in public. In order to be vulnerable, there needs to be an expectation that you will be listened to, that your experience will be honoured, and that the disclosure will not negatively impact or re-traumatize you. For many people this is not the case, or they simply just don’t feel that they would get anything positive out of such a disclosure. No one owes anyone else their trauma or their life story, and likewise, the disclosure of intimate details of one’s life is not always an inherently positive thing.

It’s important to look at what exactly is being disclosed when we’re practising public vulnerability. I can recall instances over the past few years of people “vulnerably” disclosing times they enacted racism or transmisogyny, and then refusing to engage with the criticism that resulted. If potentially critical responses are not factored into the decision to disclose, then it’s not really vulnerability, so much as it is centring ones own emotions in situations where one has caused harm, and seeking to be absolved of guilt or negative emotions through performative disclosure.

Perhaps rather than vulnerability, what is really needed at times is to develop the radical ability to receive criticism, hold space for negative emotions, self-regulate and process them privately or within our close circles, so as not to rely so heavily on public validation.

Attention White Gays: Stop Using Queerness as a Band-Aid

White people can also use experiences of oppression to obfuscate our whiteness and class privilege. Marielle Devereaux points out that, “some white gays believe that their status as a ‘minority’ translates to being worse off than straight people of color, which erases the experiences and oppression that people of color face.”

In social justice spaces where we are attempting to centre the voices of the most marginalized, it’s a lot easier to feel like your opinion holds weight as a neurodivergent queer person (for example) then as a middle-class white person, even if both are true. The “radically vulnerable” disclosure of an experience of oppression can, in certain contexts, be used to distance ourselves from whiteness by centring our identities along other social lines.

True vulnerability is an important part of establishing trust in relationships, and trust is essential to building community. But when it comes to the normalization of intimate public disclosure, we have to be sure that building trust and accountability is actually what we’re trying to do. While I don’t think that this practice is always necessarily harmful, it is a tool that can be used in different ways depending on the intentions of the person using it. When those who practice radical vulnerability tend to be white middle-class people, we should be critical of whether this tool is being used to build connection, or to center the emotions of the privileged.

The Earth as God’s Witness

This is the first sermon I wrote, which I preached at the Toronto Chinese Mennonite Church on March 3, 2019.

The readings for this sermon were Genesis 4:1-11 and Matthew 5:33-38.

I am hoping to take some time this Sunday morning to contemplate the role that compassion plays in our lives , the gift of creation, and our responsibilities to each other and to the world.

Nothing that I have to say is new, in fact most of what I have to say you’ve probably heard before in one form or another.

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the phrase, “you already know everything you need to know about religion.” While this phrase may sound counter-intuitive given that we meet at church every week to learn from the bible, my interpretation of this phrase is that the goal of spiritual practice is not necessary to discover new and innovative ideas that no one’s ever thought of. Rather, faith is the practice is of remembering, of gently bringing us back, over and over, to the truths that are constantly enduring, the answers that have always been there, when we remember to look.

God is the summation of infinity. The source of all light and matter in the universe. And the picture of God as our father, resembling a wisened old man, is a useful personification, helping us engage with concepts far beyond our limited human comprehension. We have a mental image that we draw upon when we think of God, and this image may have certain similarities or differences between different people. The personification that we create allows us to relate to God in terms that are familiar and comforting to us. And to be eternally present in our lives as a source of familiarity and comfort is one of the forms of love that God provides us.

But we must be careful that we do not limit our perception of God by how we personify him. Genesis 1:27 states that God created human kind in his image. This is one of the first challenges the Bible presents to us. We are called to know the Holy Spirit as vast beyond what any single form could express, and to see it manifested in every person we encounter in our lives. However strange or difficult or unfamiliar, we are asked to see the person in front of us as a person who has been created in God’s image, and is one manifestation of his infinitely creative wisdom, equal to us in his eyes.

To dismiss the humanity of any person is to place ourselves above an aspect of God, and this is a danger to our souls and a major obstacle in our path to liberation through Christ. The path to goodness can present unique obstacles in itself, as the temptation of ego is constantly looking for ways to creep into our spiritual practice, persuading us to think of ourselves as more good, more holy, or more deserving than someone else. The world is full of suffering that riddles our hearts with insecurity, wanting so badly to feel acceptable that we will dismiss others to affirm ourselves. But there is no need. God’s love and mercy is so vast and infinite, it can envelope us completely with room left for everyone else. It is this love that we are called to enact on the Earth.

God works through human beings as his instruments, and people will challenge us so that we have opportunities to grow and to practice the endless compassion of Christ. If we found every person we encountered to be understandable, relatable, and agreeable, then our moral development would stagnate. Compassion develops like any skill, through practice, and the more severe circumstances we are able to respond to with compassion, the more skillful our hearts become, and the closer we grow in our connection to God. This world has been all but broken by greed, war, discrimination and violence, and each of us carries unhealed wounds from the life we have lived. So with every person, especially those who challenge us, we are called to see them for who they are. Not as a reflection of ourselves, but as a child of God, and a person burdened by the unique traumas of their life. By keeping in mind the universal nature of suffering, our capacity for understanding becomes infinite. We can remind ourselves that when others fail to treat us with compassion, they are acting out of their own pain, or entitlement, but we can come to understand that their biases and inability to perceive us as children of God mean nothing about our inherent worth.

The gift of life on this Earth is something so unique and spectacular that nothing we do with our lives could ever truly repay the privilege we have been given. All that is asked from us is to conduct ourselves with a responsibility and appreciation for this holy gift. Our responsibilities to God can be broken down further into our responsibilities to ourselves, to other people, and to the Earth itself: the plants, animals, water, soil, and air that God created. Especially in the context of the current state of the world, these duties of responsibility are something that we must hold in our hearts and take with us to prayer and action every day.

When God created the Earth, and all creatures upon it, he entrusted this land to us. Since we were created in God’s image, we were given the divine and serious responsibility of acting as stewards of the Earth, maintaining this environment for ourselves and for all of God’s creatures. This right to dominion has been often misinterpreted as entitlement, and for years through unsustainable industrial development, deforestation, resource extraction, and colonization, we have treated the Earth as if it is ours for the taking, with hardly a thought to the consequences for the planet, and for future generations. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Whereas the plants, and animals bare no duty towards the well-being of humanity, we as people bare sole responsibility for our impact on eachother, and on the natural world. Whatever happens to our planet, through action or inaction, only humans will be held accountable.

I chose the reading today of the story of Cain and Abel, because I think this is a particularly poignant example of our responsibilities to one another and the cost of failing to meet those responsibilities. In this story Cain, being envious of Abel, not only fails to exercise compassion towards his brother but fails to meet the most basic responsibility of not committing violence against him. Rather than celebrating Abel’s well-received gifts, and seeing him as an example of how he could please God as well, he responds to his brother’s success with self-focussed insecurity, and lashes out, killing his brother. Then, when questioned by God as to his brother’s whereabouts, he offers the dismissive reply, “am I my brother’s keeper?”

The brazenness of this response is highlighted by the obviousness of the answer. The most basic and fundamental lesson of God’s teachings being that we are to treat others as ourselves, to know ourselves and each other as part of one being in God.

In response, God tells Cain that the Earth has told him of his crime, since his brother’s blood has soaked into the Earth. I find this an interesting illustration of the interconnectedness of our actions and their consequences on our environment. In this story, the Earth is personified as a living being which bears witness on behalf of God. We often think that harms that are done in private will bear no consequences, but we can see that the Earth takes on the repercussions of every harm that is committed upon her. Every drop of blood that has ever been spilled on the Earth has absorbed into the soil, and flowed into the water. To think of it in this way, we can see that, the harm we commit against one another, and the harms we commit against the Earth itself, cannot be separated. Violence has far-reaching consequences and injures not just it’s target, but taints our whole environment.

In our world today, we can see how acts of war have become not only more violent in their human impact and more impersonal in their execution, but also have taken on a character of salting the Earth. American and Canadian military intervention in the middle east has lead to previously unheard of levels of pollution, the dumping of toxic chemicals and the use of depleted uranium rounds, which irradiate the land on which they are used. Western military forces have become one of the leading sources of pollution in the world. It seems truer now more than ever that violence harms not only people, but the ground on which is it committed, and our Earth system as a whole.

This story is also useful for illustrating the mindset that inspires violence. The murder of Abel is the first instance of violence that occurs in the Bible, and I think this story demonstrates something very universal about the nature of oppressive violence. Cain was the older brother of Abel. During the time that this story was written, the position of being the eldest son was something that held a significant amount of authority within a family, the eldest son was often regarded as second only to the father, and I think that is something that needs to be emphasized in interpreting this passage. God had no preferential regard for Cain as being the eldest brother, he saw only that Abel had given the better offering out of the two, and praised them as he felt they deserved.

When a person is born into a position of esteem, this position often causes a sense of entitlement, where we may expect ourselves naturally to achieve greater things or receive greater praise than others. This can even cause people to act in ways that are resigned or lazy, since we may feel a sense of inherent value that does not require us to prove ourselves by our actions. But God will only judge us by our actions, and pays no regard to these constructions of social heirarchy.

Without realizing it, those in positions of privilege can come to form their identity around a sense of innate superiority over others. Because of this, one can feel especially insecure or affronted when those we perceive as being beneath us surpass us in their accomplishments. When this happens, the entitled response is to suppress and deny the accomplishments of others, or be made to feel inadequate by them, which often leads to lashing out. In this way, the source of much oppressive violence is really a reactive defence of our own sense of superiority over others.

The word of Jesus, taken here from the book of Matthew, calls us to take a different path. To love those who love us, those who are similar to us and who do not challenge us, is easy. The real challenge and responsibility we must take up is to extend love beyond what comes easily to us, to regard everyone with equal compassion, as God regards us with equal compassion.

When we are able to move beyond the reflex of entitlement, we open up the possibility of a response that is based in love: to dismantle our own egos, and view ourselves as implicated in the success of others, to celebrate their success as our own and learn from them, to teach others, and to lift them up beyond ourselves.

As individuals we are all merely cells acting and interacting in different ways and taking on different roles in the formation of the body of Christ. While we have an autonomous form, our lives are constantly being created and sustained through a divine, harmonious and extremely complex network of forces, beyond our ability to comprehend. The cell works in cooperation because it understands that it’s existence is only contextualized within the body, it’s well being is dependant on the well being of the body, which is made up of other cells, and even if it was able to exist on it’s own, it would be devoid of any purpose in doing so. It is amazing that, being the complex and intellectually developed creatures that we are, we so often struggle to act with the wisdom of the smallest and simplest organisms on Earth. But these endless examples of cooperation that exist within nature surely reflect the intended design of all of God’s creations, including the higher calling of human kind.

It is always when we perceive ourselves as isolated individuals, contained of ourselves and in competition with other beings, that we become vulnerable to enacting evil and damaging others, the whole we are a part of, and ultimately ourselves. But when we can adopt the perspective of ourselves as inextricably interconnected beings, and consider carefully not only our actions, but the ripples that extend outwardly – and inwardly – from them, we will find ourselves more naturally acting out of love.

Jesus says that it is not that which goes into the body, but that which comes from the heart, that defiles a person. All sin, all violence, all entitlement and all oppression, stems from the heart, and we can see these things that come from our hearts forming our relationships with both other people and the Earth. But then by the same logic it can be said that it is not the rituals of performative charity that purifies us, but that which comes from the heart: our thoughts, words, and deeds stemming from true love for our siblings, for creation, and for God. And loving action that comes from the heart has just as much power to radically transform our relationships.

To even be a cell in the body of a plant is surely an incredible blessing, as it is a miracle to have been brought onto the Earth as a living thing in any form at all. Surely then, how many magnitudes greater of a blessing is it to be born a person? Regardless of our circumstances, appearance, abilities or any superficial qualifications, the gift to be able to live the life of a human being on this Earth is a divine gift beyond what any words could ever express. And every other beautiful, flawed, unique person who lives and struggles on this Earth has been granted that same gift.

Ultimately there is not a thing in this world that we ever deserved, or that we were owed. Every breath we take, every meal we eat, every moment of wonder at nature and the mere fact of our existence are sacred gifts which we can do nothing to repay. We can only act in the humility that signifies our understanding and appreciation for the true glory that we’ve been invited to participate in, and to act as grateful caretakers to all other people, living things, and the natural forces that sustain us in this holy project of creation. I see this as a truth that, when we bring our hearts back to it, has the power to transform us and the world in which we live.