My sense of justice and my sensitivity to trash came from the same place. These two qualities were not the typical product extracted from that source. The norm was limestone. Behind my childhood home yawned the giant cavity of Steetley quarry, one of the largest aggregate operations in Ontario at the time. Every day Steetley's activities sent shudders up and down the wooden frame of our house....
The first time I met Bill Clarke was back in 1998 when I was preparing a documentary for Tapestry on CBC Radio One. I spent a week at the Ignatian Farm in Guelph, Ontario. Tapestry's then host, Marguerite MacDonald explained the focus of the piece in her introduction: ''Just outside Guelph, about an hour west of Toronto, there is an experiment in community life where everyone is made to feel welcome. Founded over 20 years ago by a Jesuit priest, the Ignatian Farm Community continues to open its doors to needy people. Needy because of their mental, or physical and other challenges."...
When you arrive from Paris at the railway station in Compiégne in Picardy, across from the arrival platform and on the way to the main exit, you pass two old boxcars on a short piece of track, surrounded by a stone pathway on all fours sides. It's a memorial to those members of France's Jewish population whose deportation to the French concentration camp at Drancy - and for many, a final destination in a Nazi extermination camp – began here....
All of us have a relationship with food. We need to in order to sustain ourselves, let alone to preserve a measure of longevity. Nothing is more basic than that. It is true that once a child is born his first stage of growing starts with water, liquid milk, later with mashed veggies and fruit, and gradually solid food. It is interesting though that this relationship, like any other, develops in different stages of life. Watching a teen ager hammering his burger or a young lady galloping her dessert while mid-age people prefers a more balanced diet and the elderly takes only what their body can take. But age is not the only factor; sick people versus the healthy active ones relate to food in different strides and reasons. However, let me add another factor – inculturation....
My first day at prison didn't go so well. According to Google maps, there were two entrances to Springhill Institution. The rear entrance was much closer to where I was living, so it seemed the natural one to use. All the more so given that I was on my bicycle, and to use the front entrance I would have had to go down a big hill and then climb right back up again. Approaching the Institution, I was undeterred by the locked gate across the road, which clearly barred motor vehicles, but which was easy to get around on my bike. There were no signs indicating that use of this entrance was prohibited, so I figured there was no problem....
In September and October of 2013, a number of Jesuits and their lay collaborators attended media training workshops in Toronto and Regina offered by Mr. Ian Hanna. The purpose of the workshops? To familiarize the participants with ways of best dealing with the media to present our message in today's mass mediated world....
From time to time, over the next few months, as part of the "Our Culture" section, igNation will post poetry written by Jesuits. Poems from Gerard Manley Hopkins and St. Robert Southwell will appear as well as poems by contemporary Jesuits. Today's poem is by Eric Jensen, SJ, who works in the Spiritual Exercises ministry at Loyola House, Guelph....
Jordan Sinder is a Grade 12 students at St. Pul's a Jesuit HIgh School in Winnipeg. Manitoba. He writes about his experience of the school as community enriching his life in so many different ways....
When I finished walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostella in late May 2013 I soon resumed the regular busy routine and rhythm of a Jesuit priest - my work at the Jesuit Novitiate, attending an important meeting of the social apostolate of the Jesuits in English and French Canada, getting reconnected with people who come for spiritual direction, working with a committee that plans courses for novices from various religious orders based in Montreal, spending a month in Denver, Colorado on a program for Jesuit novices, celebrating the first vows of a newly vowed Jesuit and at the moment getting to know new group of six novices that joined us in the late summer....
Vancouver is among the most beautiful of cities. It is especially attractive to us eastern Canadians during our long winter months. Of course, it rains a lot there, yet in my judgement that is better than the piles and piles of snow and dangerous icy patches lurking about everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains. Perhaps I'd change my mind were I to live there, but at present it is the closest we have to a civil climate between December and late March. Autumn can be lovely there. With that in mind, I once went for a brief rest and to visit a long-standing friend....
