Anybody with a smidgeon of mature faith in anything connected to our spiritual side is filled with doubts, and wonders what is fairy tale, what is myth with a message, and what is just plain “horse pucky”.  What the hell is all of that stuff about those so called last days and an afterlife?  Can I take any of it seriously? Or it is that I dare not reject it totally, just in case it might be true?   

 If you read James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist….”, and the baroque images of hell called up by the Jesuit Mission preacher, you will remember sitting in the Basilica in Lent listening to similar frightening imagery.  Our religious upbringing was built on the spiritual cornerstones of sin, purgatory and hell and we were indeed a generation overly focused on the afterlife.  As a very young boy I remember being scarred of the idea of being consumed by ‘eternal fire’, knowing all too well what it felt like having once burned by arm on a hot stove.  Now as a man in his sixties, I am once again wondering what I really believe as I continue to fight the fight I have fought all my life: how to synthesize a pietistic and authoritarian Catholic upbringing with an intellect and an imagination with no time for deception and manipulation.

 One of life’s  most profound questions is  our mortality—and by extension,  its connection to immorality.  Ancient animist spirit cults, Egyptian mummification, late Hebrew  theories of  resurrection, Hindu reincarnation, Christian eternal salvation, Muslim belief in hell and with the supposed paradise for men of a 1000 virgins, Mormon planets and Scientologists other wordly places,  all spring from a remarkably consistent impulse to tie a triumph over death to  our how we behave  in life.

For those among you with a desire to take a walk through the evolution and history of all of these afterlife concepts and  theories I refer you to a book by a man named John Casey, a Fellow at Caius College Cambridge [Pronounced Keys], and a man like many of us, educated by the Irish Christian Brothers and preached at by the Jesuits, Redemptorists and other hell fire and brimstone types. Allow me to quote a review:

“In After Lives, British scholar John Casey provides a rich historical and philosophical exploration of the world beyond, from the ancient Egyptians to St. Thomas Aquinas, from Martin Luther to modern Mormons. In a lively, wide-ranging discussion, he examines such topics as predestination, purgatory, Spiritualism, the Rapture, Armageddon and current Muslim apocalyptics, as well as the impact of such influences as the New Testament, St. Augustine, Dante, and the Second Vatican Council. Ideas of heaven and hell, Casey argues, illuminate how we understand the ultimate nature of sin, justice, punishment, and our moral sense itself. The concepts of eternal bliss and eternal punishment express–and test–our ideas of good and evil…”

By the by, 47 years ago this evening my Mother died.  I can no longer always remember what she looked like, but I remember being told by my then Jesuit Superior that she was no more; I remember the long flight to St.John’s on the old TCA Vanguard; and I remember a burial in a then new Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in a howling snow storm.  RIP-Mom.   If I have achieved anything at all, the credit goes to you.

Let’s be honest, we don’t know. All of us question whether there really is an afterlife, we wonder about resurrection from the dead, and if we are Christian what is this Trinity all about ?  is it three gods, and does god have gender?

This is a good article.

The Way of the Agnostic

By GARY GUTTING

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

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CHRISTIANS AND CHRISTIANITY, PHILOSOPHY,RELIGION AND BELIEF

Two of Simon Critchley’s recent Stone columns, “Why I Love Mormonism” and “The Freedom of Faith,” offer much-needed reflections, sympathetic but critical, on particular religions.  Such reflections are important because religions occupy an ambivalent position in our world.

Even if it falls short of knowledge, religion can be an important source of understanding.

On the one hand, religions express perennial human impulses and aspirations that cannot plausibly be rejected out of hand as foolish or delusional.  The idea that there is simply nothing worthwhile in religion is as unlikely as the idea that there is nothing worthwhile in poetry, art, philosophy or science.  On the other hand, taken at their literal word, many religious claims are at best unjustified and at worst absurd or repugnant.  There may be deep truths in religions, but these may well not be the truths that the religions themselves officially proclaim.  To borrow a term Jürgen Habermas employs in a different context, religions may suffer from a “self-misunderstanding” of their own significance.

I read Critchley’s discussions of Mormonism and Catholic Christianity as good examples of how to think through the ambivalent nature of a given religion.  Here I want to suggest a general framework for this sort of thinking.

To evaluate a religion, we need to distinguish the three great human needs religions typically claim to satisfy: love, understanding, and knowledge.  Doing so lets us appreciate religious love and understanding, even if we remain agnostic regarding religious knowledge.  (For those with concerns about talking of knowledge here:  I’m using “knowledge” to mean believing, with appropriate justification, what is true.  Knowledge in this sense may be highly probable but not certain; and faith—e.g., belief on reliable testimony—may provide appropriate justification.)

A religion offers a community in which we are loved by others and in turn learn to love them.  Often this love is understood, at least partly, in terms of a moral code that guides all aspects of a believer’s life. Religious understanding offers a way of making sense of the world as a whole and our lives in particular.  Among other things, it typically helps believers make sense of the group’s moral code.  Religious knowledge offers a metaphysical and/or historical account of supernatural realities that, if true, shows the operation of a benevolent power in the universe.  The account is thought to provide a causal explanation of how the religion came to exist and, at the same time, a foundation for its morality and system of understanding.

Leif Parsons

There are serious moral objections to aspects of some religions.  But many believers rightly judge that their religion has great moral value for them, that it gives them access to a rich and fulfilling life of love.  What is not justified is an exclusivist or infallibilist reading of this belief, implying that the life of a given religion is the only or the best way toward moral fulfillment for everyone, or that there is no room for criticism of the religion’s moral stances.

Critics of a religion — and of religion in general — usually focus on knowledge claims.  This is understandable since the claims are often quite extraordinary, of a sort for which we naturally require a great deal of evidence — which is seldom forthcoming. They are not entirely without evidential support.  But the evidence for religious claims — metaphysical arguments from plausible but disputable premises, intermittent and often vague experiences of the divine, historical arguments from limited data, even the moral and intellectual fruitfulness of a religious life — typically does not meet ordinary (common-sense or scientific) standards for postulating an explanatory cause.  Believers often say that their religious life gives them a special access (the insight of “faith”) to religious knowledge.  But believers in very different religions can claim such access, and it’s hard to see what believers in one religion can, in general, say against the contradictory claims of believers in others.

Contemporary atheists often assert that there is no need for them to provide arguments showing that religious claims are false.  Rather, they say, the very lack of good arguments for religious claims provides a solid basis for rejecting them.   The case against God is, as they frequently put it, the same as the case against Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy.  This is what we might call the “no-arguments” argument for atheism.

But the no-arguments view ignores the role of evidence and argument behind the religious beliefs of many informed and intelligent people.  (For some powerful contemporary examples, see the essays in “Philosophers Who Believe” and “God and the Philosophers.”)  Believers have not made an intellectually compelling case for their claims: they do not show that any rational person should accept them.  But  believers such as Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne and Peter van Inwagen, to cite just a few examples, have well-thought-out reasons for their belief that call for serious discussion.  Their belief cannot be dismissed as on a par with children’s beliefs in Santa and the Easter Bunny.  We may well not find their reasons decisive, but it would be very difficult to show that no rational person could believe for the reasons that they do.

The cases intellectually sophisticated religious believers make are in fact similar to those that intellectually sophisticated thinkers (believers or not) make for their views about controversial political policies, ethical decisions or even speculative scientific theories.  Here, as in religion, opposing sides have arguments that they find plausible but the other side rejects.  Atheism may be intellectually viable, but it requires its own arguments and can’t merely cite the lack of decisive evidence for religion.  Further, unless atheists themselves have a clearly superior case for their denial of theistic religion, then agnosticism (doubting both religion and atheism) remains a viable alternative.  The no-arguments argument for atheism fails.

There remains much more to be said about the status of religious knowledge, looking in detail at the cases for and against various religious claims.  My own view is that agnosticism will often be the best stance regarding religious knowledge claims (both religious and atheistic).  But my present concern is to emphasize that, even if it falls short of knowledge, religion can be an important source of understanding.

Non-believers — and many believers themselves — assume that, without a grounding in religious knowledge, there is no foothold for fruitful religious understanding.  But is this really so?  Is it perhaps possible to have understanding without knowledge?  Here some reflections on the limits of science, our paradigm of knowledge, will be helpful.

It may well be that physical science will ultimately give us a complete account of reality. It may, that is, give us causal laws that allow us to predict (up to the limits of any quantum or similar uncertainty) everything that happens in the universe.   This would allow us to entirely explain the universe as a causal system.  But there are aspects of our experience (consciousness, personality, moral obligation, beauty) that may not be merely parts of the causal system.  They may, for example, have meanings that are not reducible to causal interactions.

This is obvious for moral and aesthetic meanings: even a complete account of the causal production of an action will not tell us that it is good or beautiful.  The same is true of semantic meaning.  We might be able to predict the exact physical configuration of the writing in a text that will be composed a million years from now in a language entirely unknown to us.  Looking at this configuration, we would still not be able to understand the text.

Similarly, although we do not presently have anything like a complete causal account of consciousness, we have a fairly good idea of what such an account would look like from a third-person objective perspective, looking at the brain as just another physical system.  But we have almost no idea of how to incorporate into such an account the first-person subjective perspective of our concrete experience: what it is like (from the inside) to see a color, hear a symphony, love a friend or hate an enemy.

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It doesn’t, however, follow that we have no ways of understanding these experiences.  Not only our everyday life but also our art, literature, history and philosophy contribute to such understanding.  To say that, apart from the best current results of, say, neuroscience, we have no understanding of our first-person experiences is simply absurd.

Every mode of understanding has its own ontology, a world of entities in terms of which it expresses its understanding.   We can understand sexuality through Don Giovanni, Emma Bovary and Molly Bloom; the horror of war through the images of “Guernica”; our neurotic behavior through Freudian drives and complexes; or self-deception through Sartre’s being-for-itself, even if we are convinced that none of these entities will find a place in science’s final causal account of reality.   Similarly, it is possible to understand our experiences of evil in the language of the Book of Job, of love in the language of the Gospel of John, and of sin and redemption in the language of Paul’s epistles.

The fault of many who reject religious ontologies out of hand is to think that they have no value if they don’t express knowledge of the world’s causal mechanisms.  The fault of many believers is to think that the understanding these ontologies bring must be due to the fact that they express such knowledge.

As in the case of morality, there is no exclusive or infallible mode of understanding, religious or otherwise.  Religions should, and increasingly do, accept other modes of understanding and try to integrate them with their own.   Expressions of religion in art and poetry (Fra Angelico, John Donne), have always implicitly done just this.

I suggest that “non-believers” like Simon Critchley, who express serious interest in and appreciation of religions, are thinking of them as modes of living and of understanding.  Both they, and the believers who welcome their attention, should keep in mind that this says nothing at all about claims to religious knowledge.

Knowledge, if it exists, adds a major dimension to religious commitment.  But love and understanding, even without knowledge, are tremendous gifts; and religious knowledge claims are hard to support. We should, then, make room for those who embrace a religion as a source of love and understanding but remain agnostic about the religion’s knowledge claims.  We should, for example, countenance those who are Christians while doubting the literal truth of, say, the Trinity and the Resurrection.  I wager, in fact, that many professed Christians are not at all sure about the truth of these doctrines —and other believers have similar doubts.  They are, quite properly, religious agnostics.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone. He was recently interviewed in 3am magazine.

Mine, like some of yours, was a maternally dominated family, and I will always  believe that our island culture was and is quintessentially matriarchal, with all the good and bad that entails. The English Penal Laws which  limited what Catholic men could and could not do may offer some partial explanation, but perhaps also Roman ecclesiastical authoritarianism played more of a role that we yet understand.  I was but twenty years old when my Mother died, but she was and is  the dominant female figure in my life. Even in death I could not escape her long reach.   It is no surprise then that during my many University years, I willing sat at the feet of  brilliant women academics. One of my great personal anomalies, however, is that I initially committed to an way of life and an institution that is so evidently misogynistic.   Alas, Catholicism is not alone in its primitive, limited and indeed destructive  attitudes towards women, it is pervasive across multiple belief systems.

I have been reflecting about the recent rapes, and the not so recent dowry murders and acid attacks, against women in India.  At first it all seemed very distant and primitive; and remnants of an old colonial mind set rose to the surface of my consciousness.  Then intelligence triumphed over an initial emotional reaction, and I reminded myself that violence against women is not limited to India, but rather is a universal phenomenon across all cultures. Reflecting further as is my wont, and given the centrality of religion in my life, I concluded that much of the blame for perverted attitudes towards women falls squarely on the shoulders of the major world religions.  Indeed, I am prompted at times to have more than one Bill Maher moment, but further  thought usually  takes me beyond his religious nihilism.

Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam are equally deficient in their attitudes toward women. Orthodox Jewish women wear expensive wigs lest they show  much less attractive hair. They may not walk on the street less they disturb the religious purity of ultra-orthodox men.  I sat on the Board of CMHC with a wonderful Hassidic businessman who refused to shake hands with Brenda when he was introduced to her because he did not want to be contaminated. He was gentle, generous and totally good, but Neolithic in his attitude toward women. Anglicans are struggling with the problem of admitting women as Bishops, and Catholics are not permitted to even think about the ordination of women.  The Taliban murders girls for even wanting a basic education, and the Hindu caste system places women among the lowest of the low, notwithstanding they elected one as Prime Minister.  Indeed in certain sects of Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam a woman’s action can bring dishonour to the family and lead to so called honour killings.

I have long believed that the problem is not women, it is men.  The God I believe in is not male, why would we confine the awesome otherness that is God to human gender?   Go back to the old Baltimore apologist, review the definition of God, and know that the word ‘Him’ is an anthropomorphism.  The best Biblical scholars will tell you that there is nothing in the New Testament writings that says women could not and did not preside at the Eucharist. Religion, like men, needs to change.  We really are all still so primitive!

I am and will forever remain Catholic, I could be no other. I accept the basics, the existence of God, the Trinity, the revelation through Scripture, and a non corporal Resurrection and transformation.   However I am not likely to pass any doctrinal examination on orthodoxy, as I reject outright much of the Church’s outdated mythology.  Like Hans Kung, I am not likely to find a job teaching in a Catholic theological faculty, even though qualified, as I am not onside with its understanding of life and the world, its social and moral stance, with the role of authority, and the position of women.  In short, I am not a Catholic fundamentalist.  I do value the spiritual heritage I imbibed with my mother’s milk, the sense of the otherness of God, and the rich Celtic mystical tradition.  But looking back, I find way too much that is embarrassing, intellectually limited, and indeed offensive. But nevertheless, I still pray, and I still believe in Jesus the Christ. 

The Newfoundland where I grew up had to be one of the most ethnically Irish areas of the world, and Irish community life cantered on the Church.  There was ‘us’, and there were the ‘others’. The Irish brothers trained us to be Catholic gladiators, and our arenas were hockey rink and soccer pitch.  Strong on obedience to doctrine and on forms of observance but intellectual torpid, the Newfoundland Church concentrated its energies on ensuring that every Catholic child received Catholic schooling.  There was an undue emphasis on ritual and form, and less on substance and understanding. There was little in our common education through those early years that inspired us to question. The ‘sacred deposit of faith’ was the answer left to fill in the gaps. Scrupulousness was an abiding inheritance passed on, a psychological bias that as one matured would inevitably led to either blind acceptance or outright rejection. No one ever bothered to tell us that there was nothing in the world more prone to illusion and self-deception than religion. Consequently our inheritance was an abiding belief in another world, and deeply ingrained feelings of personal sinfulness.  It was belief in that other world that prompted many to consider priesthood and religious life, and it was rejection of that mythology that prompted many of those same people to give up all religious observance for good.  Is there any wonder?  Of course the “other world” focus is not good theology, as it implicitly denies the sacredness of creation, and the deification of matter through the incarnation of the divinity.  The world to come is also a palliative, an opiate in the language of Marx, given to people to make them compliant.   After all we were an English Colony, repressed, puritanical and suspicious of open minded enquiry, and indeed also of foreigners. We came of age in a community within a community that was suspicious of all social sciences, but most especially psychology and psychiatry. Individual Brother Teachers in their love of literature and poetry helped us to transcend a little, but honesty demands that we admit it was meagre and limited.  Ours was an anti-scientific environment as if to embrace science was someone to reject God.

We also inherited a puritanical gene, that abiding sense of sin, and in many ways we are not all that different from those ‘crazies’ [ read about Cotton Mather] who were terrorized in  New England in the 17^th century. Of course many of you will laugh at my assertion that you are puritanical to the core; hell, you will scoff, we rejected all that stuff.  However dig deep inside yourselves and reflect, then ask your kids if they consider you a little rigid and puritanical.  How open are you to their atheism or agnosticism? Do you know what they really think? Enough of me and that for today!

In the language of Robert Heinlein, I have just ‘folded space’ from St. John’s. I went there for a funeral, but my real joy came from getting together with many of you.   Thirty plus of you showed up for a wonderful evening, and some stayed on till almost midnight. John ODea, Ed Walsh, Bill Collins, and Joe Murphy sent their regrets, and I certainly missed Joe Woodrow and Ed Shortall, but we had an ‘altogether grand evening’. Fifteen showed up for the Memorial Mass in honour of Gerry White, and the ten others of us who have now died.  My old friend Wayne Bolton, S.J. did a good job for us, and offered his services again if we should ever so wish. John Byrne spoke warmly of his old friend Gerry White, who left us when he was but 24, and according to his sister has never been so remembered by anyone other than his immediate family. His brother Ron also attended.   Derm Penny, John Breen, Brian Shortall and myself went over to see Jim Prowse after the Mass. I will not mince words, I was shocked, and  happy to have others with me. In fact, I recommend that the best way to see Jim is to come with at least one other.  Then you can have a conversation, and Jim, who is present but cannot speak, will lighten up, and his emotions will become apparent.

In coming together you have given me a great Christmas gift, thank you all for taking the time!

Gary

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO CONVOCATION ADDRESS 13 NOVEMBER 2012

Good Afternoon

Chancellor Wilson, a special greeting to our our newly minted 133rd Chancellor, we are indeed honoured, President David Naylor, whose seminal vision is transforming our collegial community, Principal deep Saini, of my beloved UTM, the illuminati from the Academy duly robed and assembled, fellow Governors, and most especially “graduands of the class of 2012, your families   and significant others.

As a proud resident of Mississauga, I am happy to be with you and to bring special greetings and congratulations from our venerable, but feisty, Mayor. Ours is wonderfully diverse and multicultural mosaic in the City by the Credit, and in the spirit of the inclusiveness we live by, and also as a man of faith, allow me to greet all of you: “Na Mes te”, Salam aliqui, Shalom, Pax Christi, Gruss Gott, Sat Sri Akaal, Peace and Greetings to everyone. Congratulations and well done UTM 2012. Give yourselves a round of applause.

I have anguished over what to share with you today. I am now one of the grey beards, and I do not want to drown you in clichés and platitudes, or burden you with an old man`s egocentric reflections. My desire is to share something truly personal and authentic about my own sometimes tortured, but exciting pilgrimage through life in the hope that in my mistakes and struggles you may find both encouragement and solace.

I read many commencement speeches in preparation for today, and some were truly inspiring.  Speaking in anticipation of his own death, Steve Jobs noted, “Our time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” Oprah`s lecture, God love her, was a tsunami of positive thinking, platitudes and clichés. On the opposite end of the spectrum was a Professor Wheelan from Chicago and he would want to remind you that “The world is not your oyster, and you likely will not change the universe, but you can persist and there is honour in that.”

My own theme is as simple as it is challenging. It is ok to be worried about your future, about what’s next for you; It’s ok not to know, especially at this stage.   You do well to expect the unexpected from life, and know in advance that most of the successes you will enjoy will be grounded in multiple false starts and failures. Just never ever, ever,ever give up

I have sat out there with you many times, so often in fact that my father once labelled me a slow learner.   My compulsion, read obsession, both then and even now has been – where do I go from here,  `what’s next in my life.  Please don’t look to me as someone who knows how to pause and live in the moment, I never have and likely never will.  Neither have I ever lived a balanced life, so I dare not lecture you on that classical Greek ideal. The truth is that more often than not I missed much of the present while focusing on the future. Will I get into this or that Graduate school, will I get scholarship money, then what professional school will admit me, and who is going to hire me, can I even get a job, is it what I want and will I like it? I was also forever plagued by the nagging questing – what is it that you really want to do. I know I am easily very bored; I was born and will surely die a restless spirit.

For those of you who have you lives mathematically charted, be ready for a lot of surprises; and for those of you who like me are still bewildered, take some consolation from the fact that it was not until I was in my late forties that I was ever very clear about what I wanted to do with my life, and not even then. So don’t worry too much if you have little clarity today. Life will find you.

Over the years, I chased  different career squirrels up multiple trees. I survived, not always well, but I did keep searching, and I always did it with great but sometimes blind passion. I began my university career – all 15 years of it – thinking I wanted to be a lawyer, then in a moment of passionate idealism, decided to become RC Jesuit priest, and during that I also decided to become an academic. I then spent multiple years in Graduate schools here and all over the world in many different disciplines. In the early 1980s and after much soul searching I decided that I might not want to be a priest after all, and so I moved on. I had originally been mandated to return here to teach, but with my leaving, that door was closed. Luckily I had the good fortune to be offered a teaching job at Concordia in Montreal, but no, such a path would be too rationale for my restless soul.  I wanted to spread my wings and break with my past entirely. I was determined to march to the beat of my own drum, and so I decided instead to return to Toronto and go to law school.

I entered law school as a mature student, albeit the only mature student who had really never been anything but a student. My first year in Law School was horrific, and I was plagued with the sense that this time I had really made a big mistake. My transition was a tough one, and I was scared to death about failing. However I did persist, and I did finish, but it was a slog and it took me two years to begin to like what I was doing. I did get called to the bar, but then my job interviews with several of the larger Toronto law firms left me cold and bewildered.

Two firms rejected me right away, something I was not used to at all, hell I always saw myself as this really smart guy, and here I am being told, sorry we have no place for you; it was a first, but a first of many such rejections and latterly failures. At the end of the process, I had yet another identity crisis, and to the great dismay of all my family and friends, I decided to take a year off, work at something part time, and write. Inside in my heart, I worried that I would make nothing of myself, and would fulfill the prophecy of my new father-in-law, who at one low point confided to my wife, “He has never had a real job in his life and likely never will.”

It was about this same time that my own father took me aside and over lunch very gentle felled me with the following question: “Do you know yet what you want to be when you grow up?”  It was a low moment and one I will never forget.

At the end of that very depressing year, a job opportunity arose with an entrepreneur lawyer businessman, and perhaps a little out of desperation, my wife being pregnant with our first child, I decided I better just begin something. Thereafter, slowly but surely I reignited my passion and creativity. In the next year, I struck out on my own and purchased a 100 year old small west end Toronto law firm for 10k payable, installments over two years. I was off and running. I had found a potential niche.

I also unearthed a new challenge and, yes, mission. Law is riddled with outdated and inefficient nineteenth century processes and mores, and it is sometimes easier to herd cats than it is to coral lawyers. I was determined to try.

Now it is 25 years later. If you had told me back then   that I would end up becoming a change agent, that I would end up crating new work forms and processes for simple legal services, if you had told me I would spend my life working for financial institutions and becoming CEO of a title insurance company, if you had told me I would become enthralled with technology driven work flow processes, data mining and analytics and risk theories — I would either have laughed nervously or seriously considered suicide at the mention of a career in insurance. If you had told me I would end up building a national corporate entity and selling it to a Fortune 500 company, I would have told you that you had lost your mind. If you had told the long haired idealist who took a vow of poverty that he would end up in the corporate world and buy a Rolls Royce, it would not have been conceivable.  But all of that unfolded and through that heuristic process I learned to be surprised by life. Be prepared for your own surprises, and know your success will not be a matter of fortune or good luck, but rather a marriage of arduous preparation linked to opportunity and just a modicum of risk.

Through this pilgrimage, when I was not depressed and confused, my message to myself has always been a simple one — and it is not novel.  Be more patient with yourself,[I never was.] Pick yourself up when you fail, don’t believe them when they tell you how bad you are and how terrible your ideas are, but also, don’t believe them when they start telling you how wonderful you are and how great your ideas are. Just keep believing in yourself.

Over the years I have also learned to have a high threshold for frustration. Remember I worked for 2 years creating a new template  for the simple task of  centrally processing residential mortgages in Canada, and then on the day of the proposed national launch, my client, one of our major Canadian banks, shut it and me  down out of fear of a backlash from the legal community.

But by that time I was really stubborn and not easily deterred, and so I persisted, and thankfully the program launched 12 months later.  Today, two data companies do all that mortgage work, which used to be the purview of 20,000 lawyers across the country.  The lesson, to quote another,  “You must knock on doors until your knuckles bleed. Those same doors will slam in your face. But you must pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and knock again. It’s the only way.”  And by the by, I have just begun a new venture in another area that invites transformation, once again all the doors are slamming in my face,  my knuckles are bleeding , and the legal community is again up in arms protesting changes that are inevitable.

I have tried to share a little of my journey, and I hope I have not bored you. Yours will be your own path. Be patient with yourself as you try to find it or as it finds you. Your road will also have many unexpected turns, don’t be surprised or deterred.  Look at President Naylor, do you think he had any idea when he entered medical school that he would end up as President of our University or that he will go on to lead a massive international entity?  I think not.

So go find your bliss. Always Make it one of your imperatives to help the less fortune. And do stay in touch with us, your university family. And for those who end up being as unbalanced as me, forgive yourself and take comfort, it will be a great ride.

Like it or not, protest it or accept it, age brings limitations, and if one has any brain left at all, one sees that among other things, limitations impose humility. It may not come from within, but it is surely imposed from without.  My big, and all too often, unrestrained ego gets knocked about a lot these days, and so it should.     Because I grow more and more insignificant in that world where I still spend too much time and energy, I am forced to reflect more, and I am also compelled to make way for others.   My time is passing, if not already past, and I still protest by going about pretending at least to myself that I am really younger than I in fact am.  Why is it that I refuse to move on gracefully? Why do I keep going?  Am I afraid to face the questions that come with one’s end of days?  Is my significance tied up so much not with who I am but with what I do?    Answer, all of the above and more.

What did I give my life to and for: Career, education, sport, hobby, fame, wealth?    Do any of these have any lasting significance?  I know they do not, but I am still on their treadmill. I find joy in working for my “causes”, in trying to give back, in making things a little better for others, but I fear I do not do enough, and I know I am not evolving gracefully enough.  I lashed out at my Druggist the other day in abject frustration. I may have been right, but I was totally ashamed of myself.  

Take away all the degrees, the money, the achievement, and what is left?  The boy from 20 Howley Avenue Extension taking his final lap around the track, a final lap that may take 10 to 15 years, but a final lap nonetheless.  When I reflect on the fact that it is an end of game lap, I wonder how I want to run it, and know I have not yet figured it out.  So I go back to focusing on opening up those offices in Calgary and Vancouver, attending those useless meetings, and building that new business that will most assuredly out live me.   Why?

Thankfully I have  my two boys, and through them I occasionally catch a glimpse of eternal life!

Forgiveness necessitates letting go of the past, turning the page, and moving on in equanimity.  It also means taking responsibility for oneself, and for one’s often not inconsiderable role inside any disordered relationship. We live in a world where over two thirds of all marriages/partnerships flounder, and I am often surprised by how often what former spouses/partners  despise about one another is so apparent in themselves. I am also surprised by how often people refuse to understand that we are all separate and responsible, and continue to ponder why ’the other’ did not  make them happy.  It is always painful to see old friends who once had a special relationship, who co-created together, be consumed by aberration, and be unable to  even catch a glimpse of  what they once meant to one another. Hurts and betrayals can run deep, but without forgiveness there can be no growth, and all too many of my friends do not want to grow, and prefer to be consumed by old wounds.  They never get beyond that oft repeated question ‘why did he/she do that to me?’, ‘why was I abandoned?’, as if they were only observers and not participants in life’s passing parade. If forgiveness is about the past and the present, trust is about the future, and all too often I have encountered good people who having lost trust once, can never trust a relationship again. These are sad tales, and make me wonder where are the great coaches to teach us first about forgiving ourselves and then forgiving others.  How do we help these friends have some sort of a face-to-face five years after separation not to reconnect, but to emotionally remember what was good, to forgive, and to let go.

Emotional memory is one of life’s great mysteries and gifts.  We all experience it, and it surely touches the timelessness that is eternal life. Yesterday I ran into a close friend I had not seen in 25 years. We hugged and then just picked up as if we had last spoken yesterday.   It was a special moment, and as with so many other areas of life, I was only truly grateful when I reflected after the event. I hope the same for those former spouses and partners who harbor dislike, I pray that along with the bad, they remember the good things, the diverse experiences and the love which brought them together in the first place. They have moved on, but they can forgive, reconcile and ‘remember’.

Why does it take so long  to grow up?  Why do we have to learn life’s lessons over and over and indeed over again?  Why do some problems keep recurring, and we think, not again, haven’t I already learned that lesson?   How does one explain why a bright fellow like oneself  all too regularly  behaves like an idiot? I for one can only conclude that in many important areas of life I am a very very slow learner, even after forty and fifty repeats, I still don’t  get it.  We are told that truth  sets you free, but no one mentions how miserable such truths can make you feel when you are forced to face them.  It is so much more comfortable to live in the prison of denial, to put aside one’s selfishness and  character defects for another day and another hour. I also recognize  that what and who I am today did not develop overnight, and that after six decades I’ve got a lot to unlearn, and contrary to the spewing of the feel good artists, there is no pill, prayer or principle which can  undo what I have left untended for many years.

The seers remind us that there is no growth without change, there is no change without fear or loss, and there is no loss without pain. It is understandable then that so many of us build our identity  around our personal limitations, “its just the way I am”.  What a gigantic cop out that is.  The phrase covers such a multitude of denials, arrogance, blindness, self-absorption.  Surely there has to be some recognition that it is impossible to relate to anyone whose only measure is him or herself?  Ours is a narcissistic age, and we do well to reflect on our own narcissism.  But it is also important to be patient with oneself and with others.  We grow through these struggles and storms, and these times of suffering. I love  the theology of reincarnation.  We are on a journey to enlightenment, a journey back to God, and yes, some of us are very slow learners, and so we come back again and again and again so that we can get it right.  I believe that in the end we all do finally arrive, even those  who are  self-absorbed in the prison of  ego.

Science fiction writers often reference a super race of enlightened ones whom somehow we lost touch with over time. Scientologists have their Thetans, Mormon their lost tribe, and Stargate fans just call them The Ancients.   But there are Ancients who are more available to all of us  if we care to look.  Our ‘still on the shelf Ancients’ dispense their own wisdom and they include Epictetus, Seneca,  Epicurus, the Stoics, Sceptics and Cynics. Try not to be put off by their handles, they tend to be more profound and honest than the uber positive self help drug dealers of today.   Greek and Roman thinkers of  the last three centuries BCE and the first two afterwards were simple and surgically logical.  They held that life, nature and the universe are ruled by immutable laws unconcerned and unaffected by our existence. We are just biological creatures.There is no transcendent purpose to our existence, we are simply born, live, and die. Admittedly we are creatures of reason, and  have the ability to control emotional excess.  We are instructed  to have no hope or fear, and to find courage in the face of helplessness, insignificance and uncertainty.Pretty bleak, don’t you think?  They coined a term for all of this, “apatheia”, a passionless equanimity in the face of everything. I suppose there is a certain Spockian nobility in all of this, but it is undeniably terribly inhuman. Don’t get too attached to anyone or anything, and spare yourself the pain of loss; don’t be afraid to die, because as Epicurus put it, when we are here,death is not, and when death is here, we are not; remember that the worse that can happen is not that bad.  In case you were unaware, there is lots of this type of thinking in certain types of Christian asceticism. Attach yourself to nothing other than God.

I was never inspired by these philosophies. I admire some of the stoicism, but I am not risk adverse either in business or in the personal sphere, and that means there are times when I live on the edge. In fact I am a living breathing  antithesis of  apatheia. I believe in attachment rather than detachment, and I am moved by the exuberance and vulnerability that is love in all its forms. I believe in self control, but not at the expense of opening oneself up to others.  Human life cannot be about keeping others at a distance and forever playing it safe.

There is another Way, a path which sees us as more than predetermined  biological organisms, where the universe  is more than matter in motion. It is an ecology of love where people can face the future and be afraid, but have no fear, where there is no need to play it safe, where we can take unknowing and uncertainty in our stride.

Remember William Blake:” Mercy has a human heart and pity a human face. And love, the human form divine. And peace the human dress. ….. where mercy, love and pity dwell, there God is dwelling too. The Stoics would have none of that. It is too high risk, makes you vulnerable to betrayal, ridicule, misunderstanding and indeed abuse.  Alas, as Jonathan Sacks, a great Chief Rabbi is wont to point out, I can do no other.