Liam Kinnon

This is a strange thing to write. It was initially going to start off as me griping about “those people” who see every little good thing that happens in their lives as a blessing from God. Maybe you know someone like that? Maybe you are someone like that? I

It occurred to me as I was busy drafting my snide commentary on the vapidity of assuming little material things are gifts that I have a massive poverty in my own view of God. He is the God who dresses lilies and feeds ravens, but I refuse to believe that he gives a crap about my day to day existence.  Even when Jesus says explicitly that he does.

Yesterday as I was particularly despairing over my (still) incomplete thesis my girlfriend told me I should pray and ask God for strength and wherewithal to finish it.  I couldn’t do it.  I finally humbled myself to it today, but why do I not see God as wanting to help me?

I think perhaps it has to do with my desperate need to believe in free will to believe God is a God of love. This belief has led me to believe that God is hands-off, even though he is so obviously not.  What is even stranger is that prayer is an act of free will. Maybe what I need to realize is that God is waiting on me to acknowledge my desperate need for his help to accomplish not just what seems impossible, but to truly accomplish anything.

All I can do is ask.

The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But Pride always means enmity—it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.

CS Lewis – Mere Christianity

Any thoughts in terms of how this relates to the financial issues we are facing? I feel like there must be but I’m not seeing them.

My band is slowly going towards the name Substance. It has been about a decade as Substance over Style, and that statement, while still something we believe in, is no longer as aggressive, as punk, as it once was.  In the past ten years we have not accomplished much except accruing a substantial body of songs. Now we have our good friend Jeff playing bass, and we are preparing to return to the gigging world. I’m pumped, because music is the only thing that has stayed consistent in my life. It is my only passion, and I’m starting, slowly, to live it.

My Band, Jeff in the Foreground, me reflected, Rylan unseen.

This pic is by my lovely sister Kaili Kinnon.

It is hard to believe that it has been a little over a month since I was in Europe.  Already it feels like the memories are slipping into dull recollections. Sensory phantasms jolted alive by a word, a picture, or a dream.

It is strange, because I traveled with someone I had met briefly, and we haven’t spoken much since.  I think the rehearsal of conversations, the “remember whens…” help make the past real.  My brother and his girlfriend traveled together this past summer.  Their stories, and the way they still fill them out for each other, come across as fully alive these six months later.  I worry that the adventure I experienced will start to feel like it belonged to someone else.

Then again, maybe not.

I was looking for another quote by Sting and found this one instead. Thank goodness for songwriting!

That sense of failure, I don’t know where people put it who don’t write songs and aren’t able to emote physically. It must go somewhere.
-Sting

The other quote said something along the lines of this: “Melodies are these little gifts that happen to you. You just have to be grateful when they happen because they aren’t really something you think up.”

I think that about hits the nail on the head. All the other parts of the songs I write I tend to “think” out.  I know what chords are available to me in the key I’m playing in.  I know what suspensions and adds I can use to increase the tension, but the melody itself just happens. Even when I’ve tried writing one on the guitar or piano it usually happens first somewhere outside of me.  A little gift I’m grateful for.

Anne Rice apparently quit Christianity today.  She claims to still be a christian, but she does not like a whole lot of Christianity.  Leaving aside that I agree with a number of her points, I disagree with the larger spirit of what she was saying.

Let me start a little earlier than I was initially going to.  My faith, my Christianity, and my love of Christ remained with me through my late teens for one reason: logic.  I was confronted by two strong desires that were hugely in conflict.  The first was for freedom, complete, uninhibited freedom.  The second was for justice.  Don’t think these two conflict? Let me explain further.

The freedom I craved was the freedom from constraints.  I wanted to be able to drink whatever I wanted, as much as I wanted.  I wanted to sleep with whomever I wanted.  I also wanted revenge on a person who nearly ruined my family, by any means necessary.  That desire for vengeance held the key to the problem I was faced with.  I knew something wrong, something inexcusable, had occurred; yet to walk away from my faith was to allow that the two worlds, the one in which this person believed he was right, and the one in which I believed he was evil, were mutually exclusive.  I could not accept that.

It was in this realization that I figured out what sin is.  Sin is the catastrophic consequence of wanting things my way, applied universally.  To acknowledge the sin in this person’s actions also meant acknowledging the sin in my desire for vengeance, my desire to pass the hurt back.  Yet this is the cost of absolutes, that standards exist, standards I may not like, but that I am constrained to.  I take up the constraints with the hope and faith that Christ will eventually make sense of what I cannot.  I just can’t say I will always like it.

After far too long journeying (thank you Delta) I have finally arrived on Orcas Island, in Washington state. I am here with my family for a conference. This morning’s session was a fascinating look at friendship through the eyes of Luci Shaw’s relationship with Madeline L’Engle. Her presentation was a beautiful reminder of the love and dirt of relationships. There were two points that stuck with me.

The first was that friendships are different from Family because they are choices. I agreed with her here. You can definitely be friends with your family, but sometimes (and sometimes often) family are also a training ground for dealing with people we would normally not associate ourselves with.

The second point was that friendships are choices, choices based on mutual interests. But they go beyond this. Friendships become a balance of similarities and differences, held in tension. This was wonderfully illustrated when Luci discussed her theological and relational differences with L’Engle.

I think these points heightened my understanding of friendship. What do you think?

Dear Harper.

Unlike 99% of the people in my age group I was kind of a fan. You were ruthless, cold, and calculating, but you got the job done and sang the beatles.

I’m starting to change my mind.

See, first you blow a billion on a ridiculous meeting in Toronto, I understand security is paramount at an event like this. But Toronto could use the cash way more than the “prestige” of hosting the G20. I was about to ask if you had ridden the TTC lately. Then I remembered your motorcade backed up the already insufficient Don Valley Parkway yesterday, so I’m thinking no.

Now you are try to make millions of Canadians crooks. I stopped downloading in January. I wanted to feel right about how I obtained music. But I’m just one, and it is almost culturally entrenched among my peers. My peers who also happen to be among the most underpaid in a very competitive job market. There isn’t a lot of disposable income to go around and now you are going to make criminals of these kids, teens, and young adults.

I don’t think it is going to win any of us over. It may have just cost you the last one you had.

In the wake of Adam Giambrone’s recent scandal in a teapot I’ve been reflecting on the deeper problem surrounding his actions. He never grew up. How else do you explain his immature actions?

It isn’t just him. I would put myself in the same category. I believe we’ll see a whole generation of men who are not wholly grown up. We have forgotten the rites of passage, the conversations with our children about what adulthood, and manhood is all about.

Mark Driscoll talks about how culture feminizes men. I would humbly beg to differ. Both Christian and secular culture have forgotten how to train children, especially boys, into adulthood. There is no education in self-control, responsibility, or faith that is strong enough to make men out of boys. I would argue that Mark Driscoll’s machismo is as much a product of a failed full entry into adulthood as my weaknesses in being a responsible young man.

I’m not sure what the solution is. I can only say that we are failing to produce men. We are making adult-shaped children.

January was a strange month. It started out in one of my favorite places with some of my favorite people Ottawa, with my friends from Augustine College. I returned to Toronto to face a few realities though.

First among these realities was that 2009 was not the best year of my life, not even close.  Somewhere in the process of coming home from school and turning a long distance relationship into a regular relationship I lost sight of the big picture.  I realized last month just how self-involved I had been, and to some extent still am.  I realized that I had not been able to see past my own nose, my own problems, and my own wants and desires to recognize the deleterious effects my self-involvement had on my relationships.

What I’m starting to realize is that when Christ told his disciples to die to themselves it was because the self is selfish.  When we live in Christ all our relationships find a new, right, ordering.  This ordering operates according to the original design for human relationships.  I have realized in the past month, as I’ve tried to incorporate disciplines of prayer, study, and fasting into my life, that the more I lean on Christ, the better my peripheral relationships become.  The more I turn inwards, the more I treat others like objects.  My prayer while attending Candlemas tonight was this: “Lord, let me love you first, so that I may love others through you.”

I can only care, and love, so much from myself, before what I want gets in the way.  I write this like I’ve got it figured out, but those who know me well know that the selfish me lurks and rears his ugly face far too quickly still.  I can only say I’m growing.