Seeing life in a storied fashion

Examining traditional medicine in Zambia

Liz, you have worked with refugees at Montreal City Mission, with copper miners in Zambia, in the non profit sector in Boston and now you are teaching theology at Boston University. What’s the most important thing those diverse experiences have taught you about the role of story telling?

Story telling goes on constantly, individually and collectively. This is the way we make sense of life. One of the big things I have learned concerns how story telling passes a sense of coherence down through generations—helps us understand why things happen, what our roles and responsibilities are and so forth.  When stories collide (as they typically do across cultural boundaries, for example) or when long-told stories disappear from memory, then we confront really big life questions. Answers to these questions are typically taken for granted but they form the bases of our ‘storied’ understanding. So when the foundations of our stories are shaken, it affects what we do and how we subsequently, though subconsciously, retell our tales.

Rev. Daniel Velez-Rivera (Latino Ministry in Salem Mass), Paula, Liz

You once wrote that in the West, the Enlightenment split the world into sacred and secular spheres and we have simply assumed ever since that’s the way things work. How can story telling create a more holistic understanding of what makes us tick?

Along with the sacred/secular split, something else the Enlightenment did for Westerners was train us to think in categories, or chunks, rather than in the more organic manner that story telling employs. Scientific methods that the Enlightenment inspired rely on breaking problems down into categories or chunks for analysis. There is nothing wrong with this. But when we approach everything this way, we miss details that cannot be quantified or measured. Trying to see life in storied fashion can help fill in some of the gaps.

In a recent talk on the future of mission work, you mentioned the importance of the narrative approach. What exactly is that approach and how can it be applied in an urban mission context?

The best brief description of the narrative approach that I have heard was given by my South African doctoral advisor. He said that everything we experience or do we place within a context that has a beginning, middle, and end.  Extending that idea to urban mission sites such as MCM, perhaps whatever happens can only be authentic when the beginnings, middles, and endings of all the stories swirling about (those of refugees, staff members, government officials, and so on) are acknowledged and appreciated even if genuine understanding is lacking.

Dona Fish - symbol of fertility

In the age of reality TV and social media, we eem to know more and more facts about everyone – instantaneously! How does this new context impact the age old art of story telling?

Current patterns do have a tremendous impact on the art of storytelling. Social media and reality TV are communicating their own stories and also training people to think in qualitatively different ways.  But, while technology may seem all pervasive to North Americans, it’s important to remember the global context.  Facebook, for example, has about 800 million active users while there are now 7 billion people on the planet. What stories animate those other 6.2 billion people? How will our disparate tales and ways of thinking interact during the 21st century? What can we learn from each other?

You recently published: What Price for Privatization? Cultural Encounter with Development Policy on the Zambian Copperbelt. What are you working on now?

My present research project is something quite different. I’m editing a series of letters written between my grandparents who were involved in starting small Christian schools throughout the American midwest and south. The letters are historically valuable for the insights they contain about education as Christian mission and about life in the nineteen-teens and twenties. It’s a labor of love and a tribute to my forebears.

What Price for Privatization?

Paula, Liz & former MCM Board chair, Renate Sutherland

Photos provided by Paula Kline & Liz Parsons

Feliz Navidad – Prospero Ano y felicidad! Woo Hoo!

Many thanks to all of our donors and supporters who went the extra mile this past holiday season to spread warmth and good cheer to the MCM community.

Votre engagement et votre amour nous aide à garder un bon moral et nous donne de l’espoir en ces temps difficiles.

A special thanks to the Cedar Park United  Men’s Group (and friends!) for their caroling, decorating and hosting at our annual Project Refuge Christmas Party.  

Thanks as well to Beaconsfield United whose lovely gifts of new hats, gloves, scarves etc were a big hit with the Project Refuge residents.

Stanley's Story - Part 1

Stanley with Uncle Harold

Our life stories are woven with many different threads – coloured by and colouring the experiences of others. No one story is ever woven on its own. The story of my nephew Stanley has taught me some of the most important things I’ll ever know: patience, kindness, courage and hope. At the age of two, Stanley developed leukemia, followed by brain damage and epilepsy. And thus began his struggle to survive, and the struggle of his family and community to ensure he belonged.

Stanley surrounded by some members of his extended family

Stanley with Aunt Paula, & Mom & Dad

My sister Nancy and her husband Steve have shed many a tear, and spent countless nights in worry and care, while bravely shepherding Stanley into young adulthood. Through it all, they have also found the energy to help others at l’Arche Halifax, the Epilepsy Association of Nova Scotia, the Community Living Center and Special Olympics, to name those few. They are modern day heroes.

Stanley with his cousin Kate

In the center of this whirlwind is one constant: Stanley Bruce Gilbert: loyal follower of Spiderman, aficionado of veggies and dip, enthusiastic worker at Prescott St. Center, boyfriend of Beth, kid brother of his beloved Jim, lover of life. When Stanley stops what he’s doing, looks up gently and says: “I love you Aunt Paula” my story has all the meaning it needs. I love you too Stan.

Stanley with Paula

Au revoir Kathleen

Kathleen Hadekel takes her leave of Montreal City Mission today after 12 months of great work at the Just Solutions Clinic. Kathleen – your calm, reassuring presence and legal expertise have made an inestimable contribution to our ‘access to justice’ mandate.  And your charm, gentleness and sense of humour have enriched our team dynamic – the lunch room won’t be the same without you!  

We wish you all the best as you set up your private practice and look forward to continuing our collaboration on a new level.

Kathleen – ce n’est pas adieu – ce n’est qu’un au revoir!

Kathleen (left) with Just Solutions Clinic coordinator Andrea Dawes

Bonne chance Mohamad

Notre danseur étoile du Ballet syrien, Mohamad Haiek, nous a récemment quitté pour Toronto où il fera partie d’une troupe de danse. Nous nous rappellerons toujours la grâce de sa prestation originale, intitulé Refuge, qui a ouvert le bal au Show pour les réfugiés : Do 1 Thing, le 25 novembre dernier. 

Prestation du 25 novembre / Photo: Inma Salcedo

Lors de la conférence de presse, au coté de Thomas Hellman / Photo: Michelle Knight

Que tout se passe bien pour toi à Toronto Mohamad – et reste en contact – tu fais partie de la famille maintenant!!

Pour d’autres belles photos du Show : Do 1 Thing

Excellent Summary of a Crucial Book

You don’t want to miss this article by MCM staffer Rick Goldman published in last week’s Gazette – an excellent summary of a crucial book  that we all need to read – and the book is free – just download it online.  

Rick Goldman: One analyst’s take on how the economic-equality gap got so large

The Canadian camps of the Occupy Wall Street movement have now been cleared, with protesters vowing to shift to other forms of civil disobedience. The U.S. movement is still hanging on, in the face of sometimes-aggressive police action. Whatever shape the movement may take in the future, it might do well to adopt the recommendations in U.S. economist Dean Baker’s new e-book The End of Loser Liberalism as its policy manifesto.

Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal Washington-based think tank, was one of the few U.S. economists to warn about the inflating housing bubble – long before it collapsed, and at a time when U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was insisting that all was well.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has brought economic inequality to the forefront of public debate. Baker argues that this inequality is the result of the neo-conservative revolution – kicked off by U.S. president Ronald Reagan in 1980 – of the rich using government intervention to funnel wealth from the vast majority to themselves.

Among the key policies of this upward redistribution of wealth have been an all-out assault on unions; free-trade agreements that put U.S. workers in competition with low-wage workers overseas and thus make it easy to move production abroad; the Federal Reserve’s obsession with maintaining low inflation even at the cost of high unemployment; and, of course, financial deregulation that led to a bloated and wasteful financial sector.

These changes put the U.S. economy on a path fundamentally different from that of the three post-Second World War decades, during which workers benefitted from gains in productivity via wage increases and could thus support a robust level of domestic demand. Companies, in turn, had a strong incentive to reinvest in productive activities and further boost productivity, the benefits of which were passed on, in part, to workers.

The neo-conservative policies, by contrast, led to stagnating wages for the majority, sagging domestic demand and, consequently, less incentive to reinvest in domestic production. The growth engine of the U.S. economy shifted instead to “bubbles” (first, the tech-stock bubble of the 1990s, and then, the housing bubble of the past decade) that propped up consumer demand with the temporary wealth this demand created – until the bubbles inevitably burst.

It is therefore wrong, in Baker’s view, to blame the current economic downturn mainly on the financial crisis. The financial meltdown made things much worse must faster, but the underlying problem was the upward redistribution of income, which began decades earlier and laid the basis for the bubble economy.

The short-term solution is not rocket science. As Baker and others, such as New York Times columnist and Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman, have argued, it has been clear since the Great Depression how to revive an economy suffering from insufficient demand: governments must increase spending (ideally on useful things like fixing bridges and hiring teachers and nurses) to stimulate the economy.

Conservatives on both sides of the border reluctantly agreed to this early in the downturn. The Obama government managed to get a mild stimulus program through Congress. However, as Baker, Krugman and others warned at the time, it was inadequate. The current U.S. unemployment rate of more than nine per cent bears them out.

In Canada, the Harper government had to backtrack on its November 2008 fiscal update (which called for spending cuts), prorogue Parliament and return with a stimulus plan. It has since gone back to the mantra of deficit reduction despite high unemployment (7.3 per cent today vs. less than six per cent in early 2008) and Canada’s enviable debt-to-gross-domestic-product level, which is about half the average of other rich nations.

Conservatives maintain that it is possible to promote economic expansion via fiscal austerity. This has been proven wrong everywhere it’s been tried – generally with disastrous human consequences. The bottom line (as they say on Wall St.) is that no one has ever got out of recession via cuts in spending.

To promote greater economic justice, Baker urges educating ourselves about the policies he discusses, some of which may get little play in the media. He offers some specific suggestions, such as a financial-speculation tax (already in effect for stock trades in Britain) and work-sharing to reduce unemployment (already being used successfully in Germany). He argues that the first step is to understand the economics of the main issues; otherwise, he says, “it is impossible to even know when progress is being made.”

Photo of Rick Goldman by Pierre Obendrauf / The Gazette

Rick Goldman lectures at the McGill University School of Social Work on poverty and inequality.

Un très beau film à voir!

Voici une suggestion pour un excellent film à voir en fin de semaine : Welcome avec Vincent Lindon, l’histoire d’un jeune réfugié kurde dans le ‘jungle’ de Calais et sa quête de survie et d’amour. Et dans le rôle des réfugiés – de vrais réfugiés du ‘jungle’. Half of the film transpires in English. A must see!