Pop 89: Apostle of Yes

By Madonna Hamel

It took me a week to drive from Val Marie to Cortes Island, off the coast of BC. In one week, I travelled the Trans-Canada Highway through open prairie space at a sane pace, into the Rocky Mountains, where giant machinery continues to carve into mountainsides to make travel not only safer but also faster.

The “safer” part I get, the “faster”, I don’t. We all seem to be rushing to our ends. And new technologies rush us even more. But what’s the big hurry to get it all over with? I prefer the designated speed limit of Banff National Park: 90 km/hr. It feels habitable. Every highway should be 90 km/hr, but after Kelowna, the crazy Coquihalla Highway, from the Okanagan to Hope, clocks at 120km/hr. Colloquially referred to as the Coq, it is pronounced Coke, because, I quip, everyone who drives it ten km over the speed limit is on cocaine.

I’ve driven back and forth across Canada a few times. I’ve traversed most of the States with my bluesman ex; I love to drive and can’t imagine why there’s even such an invention as a “driverless vehicle”. But, I resent the ways we are forced to fly along at breakneck speeds, especially during rush-hour, huddled close to each other, assuming everyone else is prudent. No doubt the tailgaters behind me are triggered by a Saskatchewan plate - assuming I am white-knuckling through every curve in the road. I know I question their manic zipping between lanes.

After driving through Vancouver’s bedroom communities of Coquitlam, Langley, Abbotsford and Delta, I eased into a two-ferry wait line-up at Tsawwassen Terminal that would get me on a ferry to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. From there, I would drive to Campbell River, take another ferry to Quadra Island, then cross the island to another ferry to take me to Cortes Island, where my brother lives.

Island life is a lot like prairie village life: the pace is slow, the services sparse, and the internet sporadic. You have to be friendly to the few people you find yourself surrounded by because they are all you have, and they will show up at 4 am if you do the same for them. They also have extra zucchinis, tomatoes and crabapples, and if you make them a pie, they will give you a hunk of meat next time they hunt or butcher. Above all, they will commiserate with you about the weather.

But when serious health concerns hit - which they invariably do, and sooner than you’d expect (because who pencils in “serious health problem” on their calendar?) there’s only so much a neighbour can do. Then family must take over, and that is always a tricky proposition because the timing is never right and the good intention can look a little like a road sign pointing to hell. Nobody wants to leave the land they worked all their adult life to acquire, and everybody would prefer to believe that the little bout of health troubles is a minor setback, not a call to change gears.

I find the best way to help someone going through an enormous life change requiring selling everything and moving lock, stock and barrel is to just be present. Just listen. This is not an easy task - we all have opinions and suggestions and ideas about how things should proceed. And so many people, uncomfortable with my brother’s situation - living in a kind of void where he feels like he’s floating in space, discombobulated and hopeless - rush him into being positive. “You shouldn’t feel that way,” they say. As if they, if they should suffer so unfortunate a blow, would rise to the occasion jovial and carefree. Best just to listen without thinking you have to provide a solution. Listen with ears and heart open. It’s not easy; it’s nigh impossible. But it must be done. It is how we bear witness.

These were my thoughts when I woke early this morning in my brother’s cabin and crept into the front room to watch Pope Leo celebrate the Mass of the Feast of the Assumption on my computer. I didn’t want to wake my brother because he gets so little peace from his “beehive of a brain” that has no place to land and make sense of things. 

But also, I didn’t want to explain that once again, I am turning to this consoling yet engaging new Pope for words of consolation and direction. It’s a source of amusement for my family that I have turned the Pope’s words into a form of Lectio Divina - divine reading. That they give me both solace and insight and hope. “What’s your new boyfriend got to say?” said my brother the last time he saw me watching the Pope’s general audience.

But, here’s what he said, what I needed to hear: The witnesses of tenderness and forgiveness in places of conflict, and the peacemakers and bridge-builders in a broken world, are the joy of the world. And many of them are women, like Mary and her cousin Elizabeth and the other women who stayed at the feet of the dying Christ. And who were there on Easter morning. They are our “Apostles of resurrection. Let us be converted by their witness.”

Every cross has its resurrection - will I stay around long enough to witness the resurrection to come for my brother in the form of a new home, a new job, a new life? Mary, when she said yes to the angel, became a wondrous “union of grace and freedom, which urges each of us to have trust, courage and participation” in our life…So, “let us not be afraid to choose life! It may seem risky and imprudent. Many voices whisper: Why bother? Let it go. Think of your own interests. But, these are voices of death,” says Pope Leo. They are the voices of No! And I choose to be an Apostle of Yes!