There are lessons to be learned from toodling about in our automobiles.

Driving really impresses upon us all the importance of a good education. On the one side, people, through a habit of inattention, forget how to drive: signals, school zones and parallel parking get ignored. On the other hand, the driving-test system doesn’t really teach you how to drive: the gullible student is taught to go the posted speed limit, get in the left-hand lane at least a kilometre in advance, ignore tailgaters, slam the brakes for a yellow and otherwise drive like a paranoid geriatric. The only real driving education we get is through attentive practice.

While I am certainly a strong proponent of mental health and probably more sensitized to the issue than most – my dad is a psychologist and my mom is a teacher who works with special needs kids – I wonder about how much emphasis it is given.

It seems to me that, by and large, society as a whole equates salvation with good mental health, along with a large bank account. The high priests and priestesses of modern culture are psychologists and mental health experts. The pope is Oprah. The bible, her magazine.

Visiting your grandma’s old folks’ home is like a road trip across Canada – you do them out of honour and duty even though they both induce nausea. Sure, they seem rewarding in theory (“It’ll be such a great learning experience!”), until you’re in the middle of it, wishing you could be somewhere, anywhere, but here.

My favourite movies are the ones with a surprise turn of events that totally blindside you. The story is going on just as I expect and then –WHAMMO! – I’m completely sideswiped: a high profile actor gets killed at the very beginning, the good guy turns out to be a traitor, I realize the guy counseling the kid who sees dead people is dead himself! (yeah, I didn’t figure that one out until almost the end).
When this happens in real life, it’s not always so enjoyable. Life is going along as normal, fighting to keep up with school, working to pay the bills, finding time to spend with friends, striving for that evanescent aspiration of the university student’s life: balance.

I think you were sitting there with me a few days ago when our professor’s face turned to cherry at the sound of the word “doctrine.” The nervous glance, as though almost caught. Pause. Stop. Backtrack. Now, an allusive skirting. Relieved. The colour returns. And…continue.

I suppose it shouldn’t be that surprising that the “Doc” is avoided; after all, he was the guy in the class with all the answers. If you were short on systems as “sure and shootin’,” Doc would “put some ammo in your gun.” And everyone knows what ammo is for: it’s for shootin’ – to see how many folks you can gun down. You say, “I haven’t met him.” Think for a second, you have. These folks really stick out of the crowd; you can’t brush up against them without being pricked. And they do have their point, I mean, they “get their man,” one way or another.

Depression is a growing epidemic across the globe. In Canada alone, it affects more than one million people each year. The World Health Organization estimates that by 2020, depression will be the number two cause of “lost years of healthy living” worldwide. At the same time, the National Opinion Research Centre has found that Americans are twice as rich, with a disposable income that has doubled since the 1950s. Thus while the West is economically rich, it is spiritually starving.

On Friday, Nov. 7, nine students, including myself, from Trinity Western University’s Foreign Affairs Society embarked on a trip to Seattle to participate in the Northwest Model United Nations.

There is a new dilemma. You have a choice: embrace dualism and fall on the side defended by the greatest saints and theologians, or be holistic and move into a very murky and dangerous human understanding in the name of progress.

This dilemma comes from Emergent Theory, which is a response within science and psychology to the flaws of reductionism: it is the fancy and scientific way of acknowledging that complex things exhibit irreducible behaviours. For instance, no matter how well you dissect a frog, unless you see a live frog, you can’t know all of what, in fact, a frog is. The behaviour of an entire colony of ants isn’t connected with the behaviours of individual ants. This bridges a gap in some areas of science, and seems absurdly obvious. So far, so good?