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Social service groups and food banks need for help now greater than ever

Giving a little means a lot

Photo: Ross Freake

Don Evers has stood beside a Red Kettle for 60 Christmases, and finds that the need has grown since he started in the cold of Saskatoon winters when he was a teen. "One of the Salvation Army's mottos is 'Giving hope today' and that's why I do this. It's a little cold out here but it's well worth it for the end result," he said

Canada is hungry and growing hungrier.

The empty, rumbling collective stomach is contracting in hunger pains and the growling is getting louder.

Many would argue we are approaching a redux that John Steinbeck wrote about in The Winter of Our Discontent. He titled the book from a line Shakespeare put into the mouth of Richard III.

“We can shoot rockets into space, but we can't cure anger or discontent,” he wrote. Steinbeck, that is, not Shakespeare.

We can add hunger to the list of things we can’t cure despite our collective wealth and technology. The rich are indeed getting richer. But if they want to make it through the eye of a needle and into heaven, the richest people might consider helping solve poverty and homelessness.

If Elon Musk, the $400-billion man, had used $250 million to reduce poverty instead of currying favour with (U.S. president-elect) Donald Trump, many poor Americans would be having a better Christmas.

The moral imperative dictates that if we can alleviate suffering, we should. A society, a civilization should be judged by the way it treats its weakest, a point Jesus made emphatically in the parable of the sheep and the goats.

“For I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me,” he is quoted in Matthew 25. “Most certainly I tell you, because you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

A more modern, and less poetic version was mouthed by former U.S. vice-president Hubert Humphrey in 1977 at the dedication of the building in Washington D.C. that bears his name.

“The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”

Unfortunately, when many politicians think about the less unfortunate, it’s how to use them for political advantage, to score points or votes.

That leaves us, we, the people, the ones who have enough that we can share with the ones who don’t, and if we can’t do it during Christmas, this season of generosity and compassion, when will we?

The local Salvation Army is trying to raise $1 million in its annual Christmas campaign, but that is not just for gifts, the money helps fund services year round.

The Central Okanagan Food Bank is also on the front line helping the less fortunate. The first Canadian food bank that started in 1981 in Edmonton — and in Kelowna three years later — and was meant to be temporary.

Since then, it has spawned a multitude of offspring, and they have been sewn into the fabric of society but the thread is being stretched to the breaking point.

Without food banks — and organizations like the Salvation Army — the dystopian future often predicted in science future movies would be here now for many Canadians of whom one in four can’t survive without help. It isn’t just the homeless or people without jobs. It’s also the working poor who face an uncertain future.

The cracks in the system are showing. The demand on the Central Okanagan Food Bank is up 38% this Christmas and demands on the Salvation Army are growing every year too.

Food Banks Canada says it recorded more than two million visits in March, nearly double the monthly visits five years ago in March 2019, and 6% above last year's record-breaking figure. According to HungerCount and the Poverty Report, things are expected to get worse next year, and much worse if Trump enacts his promised 25% tariffs. We aren’t quite there yet but without the food bank, the Salvation Army and many other wonderful charities, we might be.

Unfortunately, in contrast to the people who have been served by progress and technology, the poor are not only still with us, but their numbers are growing.

It is the worse that Don Evers, a Salvation Army bell ringer for 60 years, has ever seen it.

“I don’t think I’ve seen more of a need. Everything from homelessness to poverty to people who just can’t make ends meet,” he said.

All of us can do a little bit, which will add up to a big bit. Those little bits just might prevent things from getting worse even if it is just for now, this Christmas, this moment. If we don’t, how bad will be in three years, or 60 years? Problems don’t get better by ignoring them or pretending they don’t exist.

While not everyone can afford to donate to the Salvation Army or the food bank, they can volunteer. If they can’t give money, they can give time. Until we find a solution, we can use the elephant-eating method. But instead of one bite at a time, one dollar at a time or one hour at a time.

When you see a Red Kettle or receive a solicitation from the food bank, pretend it is the light and walk toward it. It’s not too late to help, it’s never too late. The need is always there.

For many holding the line, there is also hope.

“We’re crazy enough to believe that humanity will show up for each other,” said Jennifer Henson, co-pastor of the Central Okanagan Salvation Army. “It’s like during the fires, we saw the most devastating things happen, but, then, we also saw the best part of humanity. And it continues to happen and that’s what keeps us going.”

In his great poem, Ulysses, Tennyson wrote, “It’s not too late to seek a newer world.”

While we might lack Tennyson’s vision and facility with words, we can help create a newer, better world for the 24% of Canadians who need our help.

Merry Christmas.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.

'Search' stories help us find the way

Zen and art of searching

Photo: Contributed

Tending The Ox, one of the 10 Oxherding Pictures.

Zen has a wonderful, 900-year-old pictorial story, which, in modern terminology, would be called "no bull."

It’s actually called the Oxherding Pictures, and since Zen essentially teaches without words, it’s appropriate to depict man’s search for himself in illustrations.

The ox is a metaphor for the mind, which refuses to conform to any discipline and the oxherd is the Zen practitioner trying to find his true self.

The mind was compared with a wild ox because it had to be captured, tethered and broken, a long, slow process. Following the example, the Zen student is encouraged to directly experience his own mind through meditation, subdue anxieties and desires, experience oneness with all, and find peace.

But it isn’t just in Zen, all literature is rife with search stories, variations of the oxherding story: Prometheus, Odysseus, Jason and the Argonauts, the Knights of the Round Table or a native American on a vision quest; it’s about anyone who confronts adversity, is changed in the process and then brings back something to his community. Fairy tales are a variation of the search motif.

“The call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration — a rite, or moment, of spiritual passage, which, when complete, amounts to a dying and a birth,” mythologist Joseph Campbell writes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. “The familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for a passing of a threshold is at hand.”

The process is always the same: departure, initiation and return.

All the stories are really the story of all of us, on a personal search for fire, the Golden Fleece, the Holy Grail, or the bull. Once we start on the path of self-discovery, there’s no going back. We might never discover who we are, but we’ll never be content with who we were.

“The journey begins as an exhausting search for an elusive quarry,” Timothy Freke writes in Zen Wisdom. “The seeker is pictured in search of himself, but all he can find is rustling leaves and singing cicadas and he does not yet realize that these are the very clues he seeks. During this stage, the student is often confused and discouraged. He doesn’t really know what it is he is looking for.”

The ultimate irony is, of course, that the bull only appears lost because the oxherd thinks he is alone, separate from others, from the world, which both religion and science argue is an illusion.

So the oxherd, the searcher — us — seeks, reaching crossroads, uncertain which one to take, going one way, doubling back, taking another until he discovers a teaching, a method that works and he sees the bull’s footprints everywhere. He sees through the illusion and realizes everything is a reflection of himself.

“Better keep yourself clean and bright,” wrote George Bernard Shaw. “You are the window through which you must see the world.”

While the seeker accepts that point intellectually, he still has trouble living it; he has found the path, but has not yet passed through what Zen calls the “gateless gate.”

The oxherd captures the bull, but it refuses to be tamed, just like our restless, monkey mind. After a lifetime thinking what it likes, it doesn’t want to submit — just as we find excuses not to meditate, go on a diet, exercise or spend more time with our kids, our spouse or our parents.

The student must train his mind so it doesn’t conjure fantasies or watch movies in his head and begins Zen training until the mind is tamed and he accepts that it is not other people who cause his anger and angst, but himself.

With practice, vigilance and discipline, the mind is calmed and the oxherd is no longer concerned with success or failure, or what the world thinks or demands.

“He realizes that the bull has only been a temporary subject of his quest,” Freke writes. “His search has led to the realization that the separate self, that he previously took himself to be, is not his true self. The seeker knows his Buddha-nature — his deeper identity.”

With that comes the realization all is one, that everyone and everything is but a reflection of a deeper reality, the Absolute.

“Although the vision that the seeker has been seeking has finally been attained, there is no self to glory in this achievement. Mind, clear of all limitations. Confusion is replaced by serenity. Ideas of holiness are irrelevant,” writes Freke.

That brings joy, which encompasses sadness and happiness, but is greater than both. With joy comes acceptance of the self and the world.

The search is often portrayed as something outside ourselves, a heroic quest that summons physical courage and mental strength, but essentially is a journey inward. The searcher goes “into depths where obscure resistances are overcome and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world,” writes Campbell.

“The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. He is the “king’s son” who has come to know who he is and therewith has entered into the exercise of his proper power.

“From this point of view, the hero is symbolical of the divine creative and redemptive image, which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life.”

The final word goes to Zen: “Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.”

Even the enlightened have to pay the hydro and cell phone bills.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.

Looking at ourselves through our dark sides

The shadow knows

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

We will never be completely whole until we accept the invitation that Darth Vader extended to Luke Skywalker. “Come to the dark side.”

Star Wars director George Lucas learned his mythology from Joseph Campbell, the world’s foremost authority on the subject.

“The self is the totality, and if you think of it as a circle, the centre of the circle would be the centre of the self,” Campbell wrote in Myth and the Self.

“But your plane of consciousness is above the centre and your ego’s up there above the plane of consciousness, so there’s a subliminal aspect of the self which you do not know. And this is in play constantly with the ego.”

Campbell’s circle metaphor comes from Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychologist who used the word shadow to describe those dark parts of ourselves we don’t like and refuse to acknowledge.

“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate,” said Jung. “That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”

We are controlled by beliefs and urges we don’t know and until we shine a light down into our own abyss, we’re doomed to dance to a tune we might not recognize. When we were young, we assimilated just about everything our parents, priests and peers told us. Because we wanted, needed, to be part of the tribe, we accepted societal norms and dictates. The qualities that didn’t fit were thrown into the dungeon of ourselves.

As children, we were told not to lie, not to steal, not to be selfish. But what child doesn’t, so we were punished or ostracized when those “bad qualities” emerged. Even now as adults, when they climb up from the psychic basement like an unloved relative, we lock the door and ignore the knocking.

We project those aspects onto other people. The jealousy, anger, greed, fear, envy, sloth, lust, laziness we don’t like and/or don’t acknowledge in ourselves we see in other people.

The show-off in the weight room, the know-it-all in the classroom, the inconsiderate driver on the highway, the nosy neighbour wouldn’t annoy or upset us if they weren’t exhibiting repressed parts of ourselves.

When we react — over-react — to something our children or co-worker did, we’re responding to some unheeded part of ourselves.

The world really is a reflection of us. We look in a mirror darkly and see the monsters and then project them onto other people. That which we fear will, like Job, come upon us unless we bring it into consciousness.

“If one sees only unloveliness in others, it is because unloveliness is a strong element in himself,” Ernest Holmes wrote in Science of Mind.

“The light he throws on others is generated in his own soul and he sees them as he chooses to see them, He holds constantly in his mind a mental equivalent of unloveliness and creates unlovely reactions toward himself.”

If we are to fuse our splinter parts, we have to acknowledge that they exist. Pretending they aren’t there causes us problems and embarrassment because they’ll show up like a broke brother-in-law or a tiresome school mate.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves,” Jung said.

Poet Robert Bly wrote that we all drag a long, black bag behind us into which we stuffed the aspects of ourselves our friends and family didn’t like. By the time we reach middle age, the bag is long and heavy and some people start thinking about lightening the load.

“Your shadow self includes emotional and psychological patterns that come from repressed feelings that you do not wish to deal with consciously for the fear of the consequences.” Caroline Myss writes in Sacred Contracts.

“Your shadow also contains the secret reasons why you would sabotage the opportunities that come your way.”

It requires great fortitude and resolve to admit that we are what we vilified and abhorred, but now’s the time to reclaim our rejected majesty. If we don’t, we stay in the wasteland, adhering to the dictates of the tribe, forever reciting the mantra of don’t.

“It takes a tremendous act of courage to admit to yourself that you are not defective in any way whatsoever,” Zen master Cheri Huber said.

It isn’t just the negative trait we deny and project onto others. When we tell people what we think about them, when we think they are bright and funny we’re seeing positive aspects of ourselves in them.

“If you admire greatness in another human being, it is your own greatness you are seeing,” Debbie Ford writes in The Dark Side of the Light Chasers. “You may manifest it in a different way, but if you didn’t have greatness within you, you wouldn’t be able to recognize that quality in another person.”

Yet if we own our positive traits, we don’t have any more excuses for not realizing our potential, for being as good as the people we admire. So we prefer to exercise what Abraham Maslow called the Jonah Complex, setting low standards and evading our potential growth with an ah-shucks mentality. Oddly, it’s much less fearful than aspiring to greatness.

“Within our ourselves, we possess every trait and its polar opposite, every human emotion and impulse,” Ford writes. “We have to uncover, own, and embrace all of who we are, the good and bad, dark and light, strong and weak, and honest and dishonest.

“It is your birthright to be whole: to have it all. It only takes a shift in your perception, an opening of your heart.”

The shadow knows.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.

Learning to slow down on the road of life

Lesson learned...wait!

Photo: Contributed

From the moment of my birth,

To the instant of my death,

There are patterns I must follow,

Just as I must breathe each breath.

Like a rat in a maze,

The path before me lies,

And the pattern never alters,

Until the rat dies.

— Paul Simon, Patterns

The tread marks of my stupidity, my pattern, are visible on a street near my home.

Those events are so common, I’ve even turned them into an equation
— I + I = S. Impatience plus impulsivity equals stupid.

In the latest incident, the skid marks were laid down on a pleasant, sunny day. I had just finished a cool-off drip in Okanagan Lake after a hot workout at the gym.

I was chill, and a little chilled, while driving the two kilometres home when I saw a pick-up with its left blinker on. As I got closer, the blinker kept blinking, the truck moving glacially along. It was still blinking when I accelerated pass and absently noted the driver’s arm waving as if to say, WTF. Maybe that was why I didn’t immediately notice the tractor turning left in front of the truck.

Fortunately, my brain turned off as my body took over. The brake pedal hit the floor as tires screeched 20 metres along the pavement; the steering wheel was yanked left so that if the car hit the tractor, it would be sideways. But the Universe, the Lady and her armada of angels, was ready. The Lady expects stupid things from me; she has been watching me do them for 68 of my 72 years; OK, 69.

The tractor driver, who was older, and probably a lot smarter, cranked his steering wheel to the right while the pickup driver hit the brakes, leaving tread marks in stereo.

If I were bigger, psychologically not physically, I would have stopped, apologized and suffered the wrath of both drivers. Instead, stoical and still quite chill, I waved and drove on. Just another stupid event in the life of Ross. The remorse set in later. In spite of my efforts to be more mature, I am, to paraphrase the Eagles, still the same old boy I used to be.

Eric Butterworth, a former Unity minister in New York City and prolific author, wrote that people don’t change, they just change the way they see themselves.

The writers of the first John Wick movie appear to agree.

“People don’t change,” Viggo, the bad guy, tells a tussled and tied-up John Wick. “Times, they do.

“You’re still very much the John Wick of old. You’re lying to yourself that the past had no sway over the future. This life fills you, clings to you.”

The vengeful John Wick was guided and controlled by patterns laid down in his past.

My patterns don’t involve killing people, but I am governed by old ones, by impatience and impulsivity, which often lead to stupid things. Thus, the equation I + I = S. Its effect on my world has been as far-reaching as Einstein’s equation, E = MC squared, has on the larger world — mine in a negative way and his, positive.

Impulsivity and poor judgment are hallmarks of bi-polar (I was diagnosed with the mildest form). Like the tread marks on my street, my poor judgment is also in stereo — it’s a side effect or consequence of a childhood brain leaping, falling and hitting a big rock.

The lesson in all this? Of course, there is a lesson I want to share; otherwise it would just be another dumb action of a guy attempting to escape his patterns.

The lesson is Wait! (I’ll toss in look and listen for free.) I know, I know. You expected more, something profound, something insightful and all I have is fortune-cookie wisdom.

Wait is not even the world’s favourite four-letter word, but imagine how our lives, and those around us, would be better if it were. If all of us, not just the impatient and impulsive, used it as much as we use the other four letters.

The world and its best teachers have been preaching that wait philosophy since our ancestors fell out of the trees in Africa.

“Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?” Lao Tzu wrote in the Tao Te Ching.

That’s my work: to wait, to slow the hammering drumbeat that compels me to hurry when logic says wait. I’m working on it.

Every time I get in my car, I say wait. When I come to a Stop sign, wait. When I am fuming at a roundabout or a merge lane, and the people ahead think it’s a Stop sign, I remind myself to wait. And, of course, in the line-up at Tim Horton’s with the slow, but friendly, service.

As my impatience and impulsivity rise from my tightening stomach and chest, I watch it and say, wait. And loosen my jaw. It’s akin to training a puppy, which is done with care, attention and patience. Full disclosure here: I’m a cat guy, which might explain the impatience and my inability to learn, and why the patterns repeat.

Jungian analyst James Hollis has written books about these repeating patterns, which Freud called the repetition compulsion.

“Only when we recognize this reflexive claim upon us from the past can we access the resolve to break though into the growth the soul is asking of us,” Hollis wrote in The Broken Mirror: Refracted Visions of Ourselves.

“Start with your patterns, especially those you find troubling, perhaps self-defeating, injurious to self as others. We do not do crazy things; we always act logically if we understand the intrapsychic premise or ‘idea’ that has been activated.”

Hollis said we don’t look in the mirror every morning and tell ourselves we’re going to make the same stupid mistakes today that we did yesterday, the day before and the day before that…

I don’t know about you, but that seems to be my pattern; I don’t tell myself I will make the same mistakes, but I do, unless I can stop the pattern before it possesses me.

In the final verse of the song, Patterns, Paul Simon sings:

And the pattern still remains,

On the wall where darkness fell,

And it’s fitting that it should,

For in darkness I must dwell.

Like the colour of my skin,

Or the day that I grow old,

My life is made of patterns,

That can scarcely be controlled.

The important word is scarcely, which offers a sliver of hope in the darkness. While patterns can’t be undone or erased, they can be controlled — if we have the patience and discipline to figure out what they are and interrupt them before they cause us, well, me, to do stupid things.

“The reading of our life patterns tells us much about the formative stories to which our lives have been in service, brings them to consciousness and proves an opportunity for larger, better stories to enhance our journey,” Hollis wrote in Living Between Worlds. In other words, know thyself. Socrates told us that 2,300 years ago.

It was also inscribed near the entrance of the temple of Apollo at Delphi where the oracle had been dispensing cryptic wisdom for hundreds of years before she set the father of moral philosophy on his path.

It’s a path former U.S. first lady Michelle Obama walks. “I tell my mentees, I tell my daughters that our first job in life as women, I think, is to get to know ourselves,” she told Oprah Winfrey. “I know who I am.”

“Knowing who you are is the journey,” Winfrey agreed.

It is equally true for men, for everyone. In order to grow, to learn, we must become scientists of the self (SOS), astronomers predicting the unknown from the known, finding unseen planets from their effect on the objects around them.

Someone is reputed to have asked Socrates how to get to Delphi.

“Let every step you take be in that direction,” was his reply.

Let every step we take be in the direction of finding out who we are, and the first step might be knowing our patterns, and the triggers that fire them.

If nothing else, it might prevent us from writing our signature in rubber on a city street.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.