Oh Canada

With Canada Day getting closer I expect we'll see more posts like the recent one about an American study that showed 23% of eighth graders in the U.S. think Canada is a dictatorship. CBC TV recently featured it. The national pride that gets displayed every July 1 always seems to be mixed with an insecurity about our American neighbors with whom we are joined at the hip. Canadians love to highlight American ignorance of things uniquely Canadian as a way of dealing with our national inferiority complex.

In late April of 2001, when Rick Mercer's "Talking to Americans" show was a brief but big hit on CBC TV, I was the producer of a radio talk show. Just for fun one day, I wrote out a bunch of questions for the host to ask our listeners what they knew about things American. This was in response to the Mercer gag-fest on Americans who thought Canada got FM radio for the first time in 2001 and is a country that has high-rise igloos. After all, it's Canadian to be fair, right? Here are some of the results of "Talking to Canadians". As it turned out, we weren't - and maybe still aren't - much better.

The show was two hours long and in the first hour it took four calls before someone could tell us the correct number of stars on the American flag. An American expatriate who phoned in didn't know that the stripes on Old Glory depicted the original 13 colonies and thought for sure Richard Nixon was impeached (Nixon quit before that happened). It took a while before someone guessed which century the War of Independence occurred in and a former local politician thought the colors of the American flag were blue and gold. Really. I'm not making this up.

The second hour featured questions about Canada. Oh boy. One caller thought our first Prime Minister was William Lyon Mackenzie King and our first (and only) woman Prime Minister was "Somebody Crosbie". Very few people knew about the new Canadian territory of Nunavut, which had already been around for two years, and one caller thought that Saint John (as in New Brunswick) was the capital city of Halifax (as in Nova Scotia). I remember the host sitting in somewhat stunned silence.

In the weeks leading up to this Canada Day, let's be careful about what stones we throw.

Being and Somethingness - A Rejoinder to Jean-Paul Sartre

In his defining philosophical essay Being and Nothingness, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) established this work as the standard for modern-day existentialism. Existentialists believe that the people and things of this world have no meaning unless we give them meaning. The existentialist maxim is, "Existence comes before essence", that people exist first and then give themselves meaning by acting in some way. For the record, Sartre was also an atheist and a Marxist. Today's humanism and moral relativism are outgrowths of existentialism and these viewpoints permeate our society.

The problem I have with existentialism, i.e. with humanism, is that it rejects any idea of the intrinsic worth of people. It states that there is no inherent purpose for our lives, that there is nothing in us that needs fulfilling but that we should live life anyway because to not do so would be boring. Since we create our causes for our own sakes, there's no moral obligation to act on behalf of anything higher than ourselves. In other words, life is all about us and morality itself is ultimately by consensus. A lot of trees have died needlessly over the years so people could write book after book trying to justify this philosophy. It all came to naught in Russia. The political entity of humanism, communism, eventually blew away under its own weight of nothingness.

The thirst for meaning in life is unquenchable in the human heart, even in those hearts that are horribly distorted by sin. Why is there a desire, then, for meaning and purpose if there is no meaning and purpose to life? For this reason, I would argue that essence comes before existence and the only view that addresses our desire for purpose is that we were created for one. That purpose may be fulfilled in one way or in many different ways but there are few things more satisfying than seeing and coming into that thing you feel you were born to do.

The great paradox of life is that it is for God's glory when we come into our life's purpose. To be who He made us to be is to honor Him and His creation. It is true that we have to seek and work things out for ourselves but that's all part of the excitement of life's journey. Ask Him who you are then step out of the boat, as it were, and walk toward Him and He will guide you. There will be storms but in them there will also be the deep contentment of knowing that we are His.

St. Augustine said it best when he wrote, "You have made us for Yourself, oh God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You." Because of our fallen natures, we won't come into the fullness of who we are and are meant to be in this life. However, there's a great and mysterious promise written down by the Apostle John. 1 John 3:2-3 reads, "Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not been manifested as yet what we will be. We know that when He is manifested, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure."

Truly, there is a "somethingness" to our lives and the best is yet to come.