Yesterday was Transfiguration Sunday in the United Church of Canada and it was my turn, as it is once a month, to lead worship at our little church on Bowen Island. This is the sermon I gave. Tl;dr this is about seeing and listening and honouring people, especially trans people, queer people and those in recovery who are living examples to us all and teachers of how to see.
The Transfiguration
17 And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain apart. 2 And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light. 3 And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Eli?jah, talking with him. 4 And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is well that we are here; if you wish, I will make three booths here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Eli?jah.” 5 He was still speaking, when lo, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” 6 When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces, and were filled with awe. 7 But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and have no fear.” 8 And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only.
9 And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Tell no one the vision, until the Son of man is raised from the dead.”
I was once working in South Africa. We were hosting a workshop on participatory leadership on a small safari west of Johannesburg and the participants were a mix of community organizers from Midvaal, a township south of the city, and mostly white, middle class professors from the University of South Africa who were working together to put together online programs. This was back in 2010.
It was Ian interesting mix of people and we had initially thought of doing to separate workshops with them, but decided that the learning and conversations would be richer if we did the work together.
The safari was more set up for leisure and relaxation – these are resorts basically – and it had decent meeting spaces for us but they didn’t have great audio visual support. We were a group of 40 or so people and some people had quiet voices which made it hard for everyone to hear. At one point one of the University professors called out impatiently “Can you PLEASE speak up?” To a Black woman who was trying to find her thoughts on a sensitive topic.
Now of course it can be kind to ask a person to speak up, or it could be the kind of thing that is delivered with a little frustration and perhaps some passive aggressiveness, and that was definitely the tenor of this exchange. And there were layers upon layers of context to that little outburst. It was delivered by a white man with no physical hearing issue sitting very far away from the speaker to a black woman who was in an incredibly vulnerable moment. One of the Midvaal organizers immediately stood up and very kindly said something like this “Hello. I would like to make a suggestion. I would like to suggest that instead of asking our sister to speak more loudly, that we make the effort to listen lmore oudly. Come a little closer and let’s make our ears bigger so that she can continue her thought and we can open her heart to her.” Those weren’t his exact words, but that was the feeling and the expression “Listen Loudly” has stayed with me ever since.
Today we are given the story of the Transfiguration. What do we know about this story? I want to suggest that this story is not about Jesus changing in any way, but rather it is a story about the disciples seeing Jesus in a different way. Like that sister in Midvaal, Jesus is just doing his thing, being himself, and he had something he wanted to tell these disciples, specifically these ones, the ones who would witness his suffering and carry his story afterwards. He was revealing what was going to happen to him, in a space that required trust and vulnerability and privacy. And so this year I am reading this story as a story about how to act in this moment. Imagine if you were one of the three chose to go with Jesus to the top of the mountain. You might think you were privileged, or about to be told something special. You might think that the experience will validate a story you have about yourself being the MOST trusted disciples.
In other words, probably all of us would initially make it about ourselves. Or, let me be most honest, I would probably first make it about myself. I know I would. I would be like Peter trying to figure how I could help, what could I do? And then God interrupts and says “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”
Just listen. Just be a loving witness. Shut up and listen loudly to this humble carpenter who is sharing something incredible about his brilliance. It’s not about me at all. In fact, making about me means that it is no longer about Jesus.
I want to call us to witness today. I have a theory that the angels in Bible who are revealed are just regular people who are made into angels by how they are received. The angels that appear all through the Bible whether they appear to Lot or Mary or Abraham and Sarah or Gideon, they all come as regular people. And it only through an act of hospitality or an act of being open to reciprocity and relationship do they suddenly become revealed as angels. Paul – who is not always my friend! – has my back here as he writes in the letter to the Hebrews: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” That was probably the quote that turned my on to this theory. Host strangers, and let them be their brilliant selves. On their terms. In their own way.
This is not easy. It requires us to de-centre our own experience first and to centre the person we are with. It requires us to be calm and collected and hold space for what is happening. The angels always say “Do not be afraid.” God says it in this transfiguration story. It’s an invitation and a request. If you are afraid when someone is revealing themselves to you, the air is charged with anxiety. You will not be able to receive them with compassion and joy and support. You will still be the centre of the situation, deflecting your honest feelings of confusion and worry and channelling them into busy work. As Peter does. As Martha does. As we all do.
Sitting with the strange-to-us and the stranger-to-us is not easy work. And sitting with a person in the midst of change, of complete transfiguration, when their brilliance is coming to the front and their form is changing, when they are shedding our images of who we think they are, when they are living in truth ever more deeply, this can be unsettling. And yet, there is no greater gift than the love and friendship of a person who has changed to reveal more of their deepest and honest self and who has trusted you with that transformation and invited you to witness and stay in relationship with them.
When I realized last week that this was Transfiguration Sunday and I got to share some reflections, I got excited because I wanted to honour my friends who are gay and lesbian, who are in recovery from drugs and alcohol and especially those who are trans. My trans friends are like superheroes. As they move through their journey, as we stay in relationship, I get to see people who are more of who they really are. They are beautiful, loving, brilliant, aware, alive and full of care for a world that inflicts pain and cruelty indiscriminately. I feel the deepest honour to know these friends, to love them and be loved by them. They humble me, they lift me up, they enrich my world, they make our communities a better place to be. I know some bad-ass warriors of joy and courage and I am proud to call them my friends.
And I get it. It’s hard. I have friends who are parents of trans kids who grieve the little girl or boy they raised. Who love their children with all their hearts and still get their pronouns wrong. Who worry for the journey their child is going on. But those friends are the example, because they love unconditionally and their love is returned to them reciprocally. You can make mistakes. You can be worried for a person’s future. You can be uncomfortable with change. That’s fine. That’s natural;
We few who are gathered here, we call ourselves Christians. We follow the teachings and the example of a divine man of deep spiritual power, who took three of his closest friends into his most intimate confidence and STILL needed a safe space to reveal himself. When we sign on to this religion I believe we are called to love, witness, and support others as deeply as we can. Not perfectly, not as an example to others, but as best we can. To meet our friends and neighbours and strangers with love and curiosity and respect and most of all to “not be afraid.”
And I think we need to declare that this is a Christian thing to do. This is what we train for, because there are also people who call themselves Christians who use this religion as cover – or even a justification – for their fear. Xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia. To me, the fear of the other is a direct violation of the invitation of angels, and the most sacred teaching about how to love our neighbours. God says “Do not be afraid.” Jesus says “Rise and have no fear.”
If you know a person in recovery you know that it is a blessing for them to tell you not to be afraid. If you know a person who is coming out to you, or who is transitioning in this world and in this time, where they will face persecution and hatred and cruel generalizations and contempt, and THAT person tells YOU not to be afraid, you are receiving a blessing. These are people who should anchor your idea of what courage looks like..
Friends, I don’t think I don’t get to have a relationship with the teachings of Christ if I am not making progress on listening loudly to the cries of suffering and pain in this world; if we are not witnessing the cracking of eggs as people we love become even MORE of the people we love. We are the ones who host the stranger because we know every stranger is just an angel that we haven’t met yet.
Our job is to be authentically ourselves and then act not out of fear, but out of love. Out of togetherness. Out of knowing that each of us is a beloved child of God, doing our best and needing our friends and family to hold us up and love us in our transitions through life. None of us leave the world the way we came. We are all transfigured at some point. How do we want to be witnessed in those moments of deep transformation? How should we witness and love the other?
Listen loudly. Witness deeply. Do not be afraid. Rise and have no fear.
The other day I wrote a post looking at religion as an emergent container of meaning making that is both difficult to define and important in civic life. I’m writing this as a person who is religious to the extent that I practice within and belong to a 100 year old mainline Christian tradition with a mixed history in civic affairs, the United Church of Canada. It was involved in the establishment of both residential schools and public health care. It has championed and supported global solidarity and peace work and no doubt has left people feeling hurt by actions of its leadership. It was the first church in Canada to ordain gay and lesbian ministers and an early adopter of same-sex marriage. In many ways my life has been shaped by this tradition, even the two decades or when I wasn’t an active practitioner in a congregation.
As I have worked with many churches and faith communities of all kinds, I am acutely aware of the influence that religion can have on civic life. I am acutely aware that that is often “not a good thing” especially in this day and age. In the post I wrote the other day I was trying to explore how religion functions as an emergent product of a set of constraints. My basic idea is that religion itself is difficult to define and therefore difficult to either adopt or throw out in terms of its influence on civic affairs. Those of us that belong to religions have very different conversations about the role of religion in civic life than those who do not. Very few of my friends are religious, but with those that are, critical conversations about the role of religion in society are very different with them than with those who simply reject religion at all or say it should be a private matter.
Today I awoke to a beautiful Christmas present (yes this is the liturgical season of Christmas). My friend AKMA, an Anglican priest, Biblical scholar, and critical thinker, read and reflected on my post and offered some beautiful responses offered with grounded and gentle assertions from the perspective of one who inhabits a religion. He shared some sources which inform his thinking (knowing that I will chase these down for further reading!). Most importantly, he shared from a place of deep lived truth, with his characteristic humility and respect:
” I should own up that I take my faith and the sorts of congruent Christian discourse as true and real in a more than merely notional way. That applies even in a way that excludes other ‘religious’ claims. That’s just part of what I take believing to mean, and I’m keenly aware of the risks and presumption baked into that. At the same time, I know and recognise that other profound, admirable, illuminating people do nothold to what I believe, and some believe things that my faith contradicts. Since I have no specific reason to think I’m cleverer or more pious or more receptive to divine revelation than these among my neighbours, I must hold to my faith with a humility that obliges me to treat people’s divergent faiths with the respect that I’d wish them to show mine. I have more to learn than one lifetime…so I can’t by any means rule out the possibility that my Muslim neighbour has arrived at the true, real way of faith and I am wrong about many particulars.
All of which is to say that where Christian nationalists take their faith as a warrant to oppress others because they can’t imagine that they’re wrong, I take my faith as an obligation to honour others’ faith up to the point where our claims conflict, and there to handle that conflict as gently and respectfully as circumstances permit.”
His whole post is worth multiple reads, because what I think he is saying in response to what I am writing is that he isn’t necessarily interested in my framing and exploration of religion-as-container, but instead in sharing the way in which his participation in his religion guides his participation in civic life. And he does so in such a nuanced and expansive manner that it validates the point I was trying to clumsily make in my original post.
Viz:
The tricky task set before us entails finding a modus vivendi by which we who hold to particular exclusive claims about human flourishing can honour and respect people who take a different view, but who still want to live in a civic community with us, and how we can work together to minimise the damage done by fascist-nihilists who will contentedly imprison, torture, kill anybody who gets in the way of their implementing their will.
This is what I mean by religion as a powerful dialogic container. It is a bounded space of shared identity and meaning-making. Inside it, you see these conversations with contemporaries and with ancestors who have carried a deep questions about how we live together. AKMA’s distillation of such is an example for me about the role that religion plays in both personal and civic life. It feels brave to say it aloud. Thanks AKMA.
Light up the Cove celebrations earlier this month here on Nexwlelexwm/Bowen Island.
It has been dark and rainy on Nexlelexwm/Bowen Island these past few weeks. The Pacific storms have rolled through with rain and wind from the southeasterlies which we call the Pineapple Express, an atmospheric river that brings warm temperatures and heavy rain. We’ve had the westerlies blow in their usually unpredictable ways, sometimes bringing rain and sometimes clearing, but this time toppling trees and kicking the power out for my neighbours on the west side of the island. And we have the frontal systems of low pressure travelling down from Alaska and sending cold fronts and waves of rain through our region. It has been dark and stormy and blustery. And I love it.
The darkness here around the winter solstice is the combination of low northern sunlight and thick cloud. When the day is over, it descends inky and thick over the island. If it isn’t storming, it gets deeply silent, with only the sounds of the sea lions in the bay reverberating along the shoreline. The darkness has an expectancy to it. The expectation of longer days, of warmth and dry spring days, and the knowledge that those days lie only a few weeks away around the beginning of February, spurs the expectation to life.
Here on Bowen there are many traditions that mark this time of year. Light up the Cove, on the first Saturday in December is celebration of the Christmas season. Thousands of lights doll up Snug Cove in almost random and beautifully gaudy ways. There is a parade of lanterns and lights and elves and Santa makes a visit, arriving at the Union Steam ship company to the delight of hundreds, this year in a golf cart. I sang Christmas carols along with a small diorama of wise men this year. Down in the Cove, local businesses set up little Christmas trees.
Following that there are craft fairs and book sales during the month, at Collins Hall, at the School, and al around the island. Artists open their studios, the Galleries all turn their walls over to local artists and artisans. This year Kingbaby Theatre mounted Mad Mabel’s Christmas for only the fourth time since 1999. It is a local story of a homeless woman who witnesses and enables the magic of the season through the transformation of the people around her. It’s a beautiful story about love and friendship and the beauty and awe of light in the darkness, made by our neighbours, featuring our neighbours.
Today, on the solstice itself, my friends Aubin and David van Berkel hosted a pagan solstice party during which participants dipped bread in apple wassail and threw it at the apple trees in their orchard to inspire the trees to return to life and produce their fruit again this year. Tonight I played with a little ensemble of Celtic musicians accompanying Tina Overbury in her production of Dagda’s Harp, her retelling of the story of the Tuatha De Danaan, the mythical Irish warriors. It is about how they recovered the stolen harp of their Dagda and in so doing restored the world to light and rhythm and music. It is a story delivered in a near sacred manner at sunset on the solstice.
Last night the Jewish community on Bowen celebrated the sixth night of Hanukkah with a lighting of the menorah candle in the Cove. 60 or 70 people took part. In the United Church today, on the last Sunday of Advent, the Sunday of Love, we felt the beginning of the release of darkness and the anticipation of the return of the sun and the birthing of the light into the world as Emmanuel, the God who takes form as a human. On Christmas Eve we will gather in the Little Red Church again to sing carols and hear the story of the birth of Jesus, an outsider and refugee, whose rumoured birth sent the dictator of his day into a paranoid frenzy that saw thousands rounded up and hundreds of children killed. We celebrated the thin thread of love that conquers all, that weaves itself through the very fabric of the universe. Unconquerable, unrestrained, unconditional. Soon it will be Christmas. Not yet, not for another four days, not until we can be sure the light is really coming back. These are the days of faith.
The time is pregnant with intense feelings and sentiments. The land and sea and atmosphere brings us to quiet and anticipation and reflection. We are invited indoors and encouraged to join together with others, friends new and old, sharing music and poetry and food and drink. Sharing stories about how this year seems darker than previous ones. We remember those we have lost, those who are struggling. Those who have fallen ill or who are recovering. We hold them in our hearts, bring them round our hearths.
And we wait. We wait in trust and faith and hope and love, prepared for the moments of joy that are coming, that are long anticipated, that are desperately needed. The solstice is a turning of time and attention.
From here, the light.
No, not a a post about facilitation tactics, just some notes on questions in different contexts: business, football and life hacks. Like these job interview questions from readers of The Economist. Some of these are truly anodyne, but some are interesting. And it gives you some insight into what an elite level job interview looks like (washing dishes at the CEO’s cabin?). I’m slightly disappointed there weren’t 42 questions. I’ve gifted you the link. Read it to find out why.
World Cup qualification all but wrapped up yesterday for most of the remaining spots in the 2026 Men’s World Cup. There was drama all around but perhaps the most incredible match of the night happened in Edinburgh where Scotland qualified for the first time since 1974 in a match for the ages. In our region, North and Central America and the Caribbean, there was late drama as Curaçao qualified for their first World Cup after Jamaica hit the woodwork 3 times and was denied a 95th minute from a VAR review. With 155,000 people, If Curacao was a city in Metropolitan Vancouver, it would be the fifth or sixth biggest municipality in our region. They are the smallest country ever to qualify for a World Cup, in a year in which 47 other countries will also take part. I hope they get to play Cabo Verde for some kind of small island trophy.
Canada, for the record, played their last game of 2025 and broke a three game goalless streak with a sometimes-feisty, sometimes-anemic performance agains Venezuela. Becasue we qualify by being co-hosts, we have had a dearth of competitive fixtures since a disappointing quarter final loss in the Gold Cup in the summer, where we also drew with Curaçao. Impressive friendlies against Wales and Romania in September failed to build momentum. Last night’s win was good, but with only two windows in March and June, we have only 4 warm up matches to prepare for the World Cup.
I like soulcruzer. I found him on Mastodon, and his approach to life is to use his brain and his sense of ritual and magic to hack reality. Here are a few of his Chaos Magik practices. Have a read. Some of these are really fun little games and rituals you can play using the tools of obliquity and complex cognition.
Yesterday Rowen Simonsen and I filmed a little conversation about AI in facilitation practice and perhaps inspired a bit by soulcruzer’s reality hacking, I suggested that AI, specifically LLMs can be a fabulous obliquity engine to help individuals and groups crack their pattern entrainment, much the way we can use art, poetry and music to create surprising associations in our mind. Use LLMs to stimulate your brain’s own meaning-making capabilities. Perhaps we can use LLMs as a way to introduce obliquity into deliberations (give me ten questions about this subject that might be asked by a river watching us work). This is the kind of thing that LLM AI might be best for in the world of sense-making and dialogue: generating nonsense that stimulates human brains to make unlikely connections. We could also use card decks, I Ching divination, coin flips and the like to introduce randomness that forces brains to get to work. Like all “oracles” though, if you believe that the tool has an answer informed by some kind of intelligence, you are more culpable for hallucinations that your LLM partner. Oracles are best used to force your own eyes to see what is really going on with you. The interview is part of a series that are being used for Beehive Productions’ current course on Hosting at the Edge of our Humanity.
The above is a photo of a great campfire that happened on Saturday night in the forest by a lake in Eastern Ontario. You had to be there. But if you want to do an interesting exercise, take a moment before reading on and make a list of things that you should do to create a great campfire experience.
I’m working away writing a book on dialogic containers and reflecting on the remarkable phenomenon of stability in the midst of change. I remember years ago Dave Snowden sharing a pithy description of the the difference between robust and resilient structures. Using the examples of a sea wall and a salt marsh, he says, essentially, that a robust system is one that survives by not being changed and a resilient system is one that survives by being changed. That description has always stuck with me and as I look at the nature of dialogic containers, ephemeral spaces which produce meaning between people, it’s interesting to me to think about what contributes to their relative stability in the face of change.
This was brought home to me again today while listening to a talk by Gil Fronsdel on the Buddhist practice of “Right View,” (he calls is “Wholesome View”) the first discipline of the Noble Eightfold Path. Fronsdel uses the example of standing in a rive to discuss what mental and spiritual stability looks like, even as a current flow all around you, carry the river over a waterfall. The way to address your fear of floating over a waterfall is to stand up and take a stable stance:
I’ve been in somewhat shallow rivers, maybe that the river was up to my mid?thigh, and I could lay down flat on the surface of the river, and it had a nice current that carried me beautifully down the river.And it was kind of fun and nice to be floating along. It feels really nice until you realize that the river is going right over a waterfall, a big waterfall. So then it’s not so nice anymore.
And so… you turn around, try to swim upstream, but…the river is pulling you down the stream faster than you can swim up. The waterfall is coming, you can hear the roar. And so all you have to do, though, is stand up in the river. Because it’s shallow… it’s just courage, it’s only up to your mid?thigh. And if you stand there, then the current of the river continues. It flows right by you. But you’re still.
You’re not separated from the current, but now you’re free of the current because you have the stability, the strength of standing there, and you’re far from any danger of going over the waterfall. It’s relatively easy now to walk to the shore or walk up river. And so we get swept away sometimes by our thoughts, swept away by our emotions, swept away by the world and concerns that are going on. And we don’t realize how much we’re being carried along, swept away by the current of this momentum of thoughts, momentum of desires, momentum of aversion. We don’t even see the waterfalls that’s going to take us over sometimes. But what mindfulness teaches us is that we could always have the ability to stand up in the current and kind of wake up and kind of be stable and strong.
In dialogue, containers offer a kind of stability to hold emotions and thoughts. Human beings thrive when there is a container in which we can fully participate, be fully human, and be. And they require us to have that overview of process and context, to see that we are in something that is meaningful, or not, and to notice what is contributing to that state of affairs. From there, we might even be able to catch ourselves and offering a slight shift, a slight move, a slight contribution that might catalyze more or less stability. It is a subtle art.
The way a conversation unfolds around a table and deepens and becomes sticky – you don;t want to leave it – is a kind of stability. When it breaks it’s hard to get it back again, and nif you weren’t a part of it “you had to be there” to understand what it is like. Other forms of stability for dialogue are held through rigid physical or protocol constraints so that deliberative chambers like court rooms and legislatures are designed for rational, non-emotional discourse. When feelings erupt in those chambers, the integrity of container fails, and chaos ensues, because those who are responsible for this spaces have no way to cope with the events of the moment but to shut it all down (don’t perform a haka in the New Zealand Parliament!). That can be a form of liberation, but in the end some form of stable container needs to arise in order for human relationships and conversations to unfold. Places like Parliaments and court rooms are structured to assert a particular kind of power relationship, so the physical and procedural stability of those containers is designed to re-establish that state of affairs “once every one has calmed down” and the dour business at hand can be considered again in the desired modality of the system, in these cases, predicated on notions of reason and civility.
But even in highly structured and constrained places, dialogic containers are emergent. You cannot force meaningful dialogue. You can only set some initial conditions and monitor what unfolds. Even though a room may have robust physical restrictions, adjustments to the constraints of the container can still offer a chance at something meaningful happening. I bristle from the idea that a dialogue facilitator’s role is “to create and hold the container.” I prefer instead to think of that role as one of using constraints to increase the probability that a a dialogic container will emerge. The way I have learned to practice facilitation is to be a witness to the capacity of a group to self-organize and manage itself with minimal intervention from a “facilitator.” Instead we work hard to design initial conditions, and pay attention to threshold practices like beginnings and endings to invite human beings into a place in which meaningful work gets done.
For my whole career I’ve been consumed with the mystery of the emergence and stability of dialogic containers, how something so ephemeral can create deeply meaningful experiences, and how we might find the ways to work with containers – through constraints of connection, exchange, attractors and boundaries – to increase the chances for powerful dialogue and meaning making. Everywhere I look, there are examples and lessons to be learned about this.
So, back to that campfire that is pictured above. If you took the time to make the list, think about whether that list will guarantee a great campfire every single time, from the get go. If not, what do you think you will have to do to make that more likely to happen? The answer to that question might be a good way to think about your approach to facilitation.