“You are not taking things seriously enough!” A chill: this is the last thing any student wants to hear in the final month of classes. Rather than feel ashamed, however, I raise the question: what does it mean to be serious about education, and is that what you want to be?
It’s a fact: it is only through levity in this strange process we call Undergraduate Studies that we hit upon the soul of education. Does respect for the institution and the process of accreditation require any seriousness about education? I have a friend nearing such degrees as Philosophy and Engineering, and when I, cruel soul, inadvertently asked him that horrible, horrible question all students dread – what he would do when he finally received his degree – his only reply was, “fan myself with it.”
Think about this: life can only be lived with levity, and levelling this at goal-orientation and the whole process of getting odd letters after your name proves resoundingly refreshing and hope-inspiring. To take things “seriously” in education is to get caught up in minutiae and material concerns that are a secondary reality to the real process of education. It’s all right to be in it for the GPA and the job, but your intellectual vision must be on something higher or things begin to break down in the last month of classes.
These final few weeks are when your professors conspire in jamming you in the vice-grip of assignments, responses, journals, term-papers, and the poorly-titled “second midterms,” all in a short period of time. Viewed in terms of GPA, job-preparation and other material concerns, your professors seem like evil forces out to get you, hell-bent on sundering your sanity. But around here you know that they’re inherently angels of light in professorial garb: viewed in higher terms, they’re helping you to develop as a person, materially and spiritually. The work-load makes you hardier in body and mental discipline. The bulk of ideas forced upon you gets you to grapple with great thoughts, developing your moral imagination.
Humour makes sense of the educational process itself, and the other area at which I challenge you to level humour is a specific facet of this: fitting in with the academic culture around your academic discipline. There is a serious style that must be achieved for you to be taken seriously, quite apart from the quality of your learning and thinking on your subject. You must have something to say, of course: a living idea housed in your mind. However, writing it in ‘academic’ form can be a painful thing. To me, it feels like the process of taking this beautiful butterfly of thought, choking it with chloroform and sticking a whacking great huge pin through it and mounting it on a wall. Sure, it’s still the butterfly, but it inspires tears of sorrow rather than rapture.
In the sciences, social sciences, and business, everyone has given up even attempting to be interesting, unless they’re quirky geniuses or dimly-viewed “popularizers.” But I still have great hope for the Humanities! I can live with the emphasis on linear argument, even if it makes essays bulkier and less elegant. The elimination of the first-person begins to make one feel a bit stilted. The destruction of the colloquial can be a good thing, but begins to restrict real-world expression, yo. Soft, but at the other extreme the line is verily more painful: the elimination of the older styles. Yea though it be necessary, I find myself wont to writing in archaic language. Sounding Shakespearean or Wagnerian ought not to obscure meaning, as long as healthy irreverence is achieved and the effort is for the cause of lingual beauty. So subvert the system! There is hope that you can tiptoe on the boundaries effectively, just as the great writers you study once did.
Thus, in both cases, humour makes the journey more interesting, more hopeful, and more human. As Chesterton said, “The life of man is a story; an adventure story.” Rather than be “miserable moderns and rationalists [who] do not merely love ourselves more than we love duty [but] actually love ourselves more than we love joy,” we must learn to find the joy and hilarity in these crazy times of education.

He’s the oldest person in the room. “How old are you, David Schriek?” I ask, sitting across the table from him in the Marlie Snider Collegium.
“No comment. Around 30; we’ll leave it at that,” he says. Maybe a touchy topic for someone that age who’s in his third year of university, but with a past like Schriek’s, a university education at first seems almost unnecessary. Dave has already lived a life idolized by many: he played lead guitar in a rock band.
“The only life I’d known was touring,” Schriek, former guitarist of bands Schriek, Salvation and Big Radio, says “Six nights [a week], three months at a time, sometimes without coming home. We would go to Prince George, move on to Alberta, playing all the towns, Edmonton, Calgary, through all the prairies. That was our main touring area.”
Between ’93 and ’98 Dave’s life revolved around partying every night, getting laid by beautiful women. People surrounded him, but he felt alone. “When you’re so saturated with pride, adrenaline, the party scene, you have this surface-level happiness,” Dave says, “but you have no joy.”
God called him before all that, but he ignored Him. “I hadn’t lost my salvation,” he tells me, “I had lost my fellowship.”
Then that life ended. Schriek’s band stopped touring and he had to start all over again. “After we got off the road,” he says, “I was extremely depressed. I was in denial.”
Dave moved back in with his parents and tried to get his life together, but it was hard. “I was too proud to beg,” he tells me, “too proud to get a minimum wage job pumping gas because, hey, I’m Dave Schriek, my songs have been on the radio, I’ve opened for famous bands [like 5440 and Nickelback], I’m a big deal.”
He decided he needed an education, but that on its own was going to be tough. “My high school diploma was so bad, no college would accept me,” he says. “I had to go back and take Algebra, Biology, Chemistry 11.”
Finally, he got accepted into the music program in Selkirk College, in Nelson, B.C. “First year was hell,” he says. “I had to learn how to read music, needed to learn theory. I hadn’t been in school for a long time. My mind was like rubber. I was completely broken, but God had a plan for all that.”
Things did pick up for Dave. By his third year at Selkirk, he had two diplomas, in guitar performance and audio engineering. After Selkirk, he moved to Whitehorse to teach guitar at Unitech Music Academy and play for musician Ted Moore.
He then moved to Kelowna to work in a group home, which he says was the easiest job he has ever done. “Some people think of working with crazy people and think, ‘oh, that’s hard,’ but I loved it, man. I just took guys with schizophrenia out for the day. I’d say, ‘What do you wanna do today?’ And they’d be like, ‘Uh, I want to go to Tim Horton’s and get a doughnut and a cup of coffee.’ And I’d be like, ‘Great, me too!’”
Now he’s back in school, finishing his music degree. And his relationship with God is flourishing. “I became like the prodigal son or David [with Bathsheba]. Once you’re born again you’re born again, but you can lose your fellowship. Remember the Church of Corinth. Actually,” he looks around, “do you have a Bible, I want to read that right now. I love that verse. Here it is: ‘Hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that his spirit may be saved on the Day of the Lord.” (1Corinthians 5:5).
David Schriek lived the dream, and it didn’t deliver what it had promised. “When I was living on the road I was miserable,” he says. “I was living to please the flesh.” Now, 10 years later, he’s living for someone else. And he’s smiling.

The Christian ritual of the Eucharist often remains obscured behind debates over its specific or narrower theological nature. Substance, accidents, transubstantiation, consubstantiation, virtualism, symbolism—these discussions are important in their own right. However, in focusing too narrowly on the details of this ritual, we sometimes lose sight of the bigger picture. For regardless of one’s particular theological or confessional commitment, the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper is always treated as the most solemn of events. There is indeed a powerful and beautiful reality at work in this ritual of thanksgiving.
At the Eucharist, the consciousness of the individual Christian is oriented primarily towards Christ. The bread and wine, His body and blood, make present the gravity of His love and sacrifice for the individual and for the church. This assures the Christian that s/he is one who has already been judged and redeemed by having been reconciled to God in Christ. Moreover, in the bread we see the human enterprises of agriculture, industry and work all gathered together while in the wine we see the joy and pleasure of festivity and fellowship. These elements too have been judged and reconciled to their Creator and redeemed, made into stuff of the new creation.
Moreover, the church is seen at the centre of this new creation in which the Christian participates and indwells, as s/he celebrates the Eucharist on a regular basis. In this way, the Eucharist fundamentally resituates the human person in a world that is lived from Christ and sustains its being only in Christ; a world that is complete and intact with all of its gritty human realities including work, industry, festivity, fellowship and eating.
This space opened up by the Eucharist also has a powerful social dimension. It reveals that our individual identity is bound up with the other. In the Eucharist, we receive the grace of Christ in the presence of the other. This is the negation of self-sufficiency and selfish individualistic pursuit. We have been grafted into the body of Christ and our behaviour is primarily re-oriented towards God and towards the other amidst a whole network of others. This greater whole reaches beyond our own desires and at the same time turns back upon our own self to condition and shape these desires. This is life together, life in true communion, only made possible by the body and blood of Christ.
One of the most beautiful elements of this communion is that it is precisely communion and not absorption. For we retain our unique self and all the differences from the whole that are implied therein, all the while remaining fully and faithfully a part of the whole. The communion of the church is the communion of difference; difference is intrinsic to fellowship in the body of Christ. Provided that common absolutes are guaranteed and their validity is not put into question, the diversity of the church is a rich resource that enables us to enact the love of Christ for the world in a variety of ways. Recall the way in which Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12 that the church is made up of many parts that form one body, complete with hands, feet, ears and eyes. Without each of these parts, the greater whole (the body) could not function properly. There is freedom in communion.
Fundamentally, it is this love of Christ that binds us all together in perfect unity. Without the love of Christ, the church would not be possible. And without enacting this love that we receive from Christ, true communion could not exist. This love and grace of Christ for the church, humanity and creation is the fundamental reality that is communicated to us through the enactment of the Lord’s Supper or participation in the Eucharist. The power and beauty of this reality should serve as the ground and source of our Christian existence as individuals inseparably bound together into one body, the church. It is essential that we dwell in the light of this reality—reality in and from the grace and love of Christ.

September
Upper classmen begin living in Fraser. Ceaseless fire alarms ensue almost instantaneously.

Fall census reports enrolment down another eight per cent.

October
TWU gets A+ in quality of education in annual Globe and Mail report card. In other news, Sodexo gets a ‘D’…again.

Dr. Eve Stringham becomes TWU’s third research chair in the area of genetics.

Students sleep outside to raise awareness and funds for new community homeless shelter.

November
LC, waterline certain to be finished “any day now.”

TWUSA president Brian Weir sits in on November Board of Governors meeting, a step in making student voices heard.

With: Matthew Keller,
Titans Soccer
Hometown: Forest Lake, Minnesota

MH: Which is the better of the Keller’s: Keller Graduate School of Management; the City of Keller, Texas; or Helen Adams Keller?

Matt: Helen Adams Keller. She is an inspiration to the world.

MH: Which teams will faceoff in the 2008 UEFA Champions League Final?

Matt: According to my source for everything European soccer John Kim, it’s gong to be a Barcelona - Chelsea final with Barcelona coming out on top.

MH: In a single word, explain the atmosphere at a Minnesota Wild home game.

I am with you always, even to the end of the ages.
We are reminded of these words often in times of hardship and grief: the Lord who guided His people into the Promised Land is the same Lord who promised His disciples that He would be with them always, and the same Lord who lives with His Church and world with constant care and commitment.
This assurance can seem measly in the turmoil of life; the promise that Christ is with us at every moment is easily interpreted as a simple platitude given to those who are having a hard time. Although the promise is meant for comfort, the importance placed upon this statement sometimes carries little more than a simple reassurance for those in need.
Another interpretation of this pledge can mean a guarantee of Christ’s continual material blessing to his people, which provides food, comfort and even riches to the faithful. However, as the history of Christians’ plight throughout the world teaches us, there is no guarantee of worldly blessings or comforts. In fact, being faithful to Christ usually doesn’t materially differentiate the Christian from humanity’s common fate, and perhaps leading to an even more distraught and terrifying life.
In this sense, the idea that Christ is with us seems empty. It lacks any real significance aside from flowery ideals for the despairing and lackluster promises to the faithful. Yet, in the midst of this empty promise lies one of the most genuine and beautiful mysteries of the faith.
In one sense, the promise of Christ’s continual presence is a personal reality. The holy presence of Christ, His continual transformation of our souls, and the common journey we share with Him are the revelation of Christ’s guarantee to never leave us. From the most jubilant celebrations, to the most desolate cells in Auschwitz, Christ’s presence resounds in our souls.
Not only do we live with and through Christ, but we live with and through the lives of the saints past, present and future who also share in Christ’s presence. Those who are bound by common faith in our Lord live through us, and we through them, in celebration of Christ’s resonating company.
Christian worship tells us that our souls long for this blessed union with Christ, but we know the reality of his presence is always with us. In this way, the petitions of the faithful for Christ’s mercy and grace are a reflection of our longing, constantly reminding us of our state without the presence of Christ. As some Christians say in worship, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive You, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” In turn, His answer to our petitions comes from Christ offering His true presence in the Eucharist and His continual presence in our lives.
In the promise of Christ’s presence in our lives, there is truly one of the most blessed and whole realities of the Christian faith. Unlike platitudes or material promises, the communion we share with Christ is a key to unveiling the true riches and mercies Christ offers the faithful and all creation.

Researcher links diet and academic performance

“I’ve had good and I’ve had bad – I like the good better.” Ah yes, the family “motto” that evolved from travelling to numerous places on this globe. It started as an inside joke, but the more I contemplate its meaning, the more I realize it holds true for me. I honestly can’t recall a time where I truly lacked anything. But even with everything I have, I still want more. And by more, I mean less. Confusing? Let me explain.
God has given me many opportunities over the last seven years to help with missions work in Jamaica, China, Russia, England, and Sacramento. But it wasn’t until I travelled to New Orleans with a group from Trinity Western University that I realized how God was changing me. What I once dreamed of having is slowly being replaced with a desire to be content in whatever circumstance God puts me in. In essence, God is telling me to let go of what I want for my future and trust in Him.
Almost three years have passed since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans leaving behind a broken city and many displaced families. The work of rebuilding is always ongoing, but there is still much to be done. People are struggling to survive after losing their possessions to the flooding waters that breached the levy protecting their homes. The human suffering I saw made my needs seem insignificant in comparison.
I was struck that despite their losses they displayed an attitude of graciousness and love that transcended their tragic circumstances. Their willingness to share came from a deep appreciation for those that had come to help them. I learned that while mission trips give me the opportunity to show God’s love to people, God is revealing himself to me through the love of the people I am serving.
Our team spent the week putting up sheet rock in a Baptist church. Three members of this church brought us lunch one day and I will never forget it. Homemade fried chicken and jambalaya – what a feast! They sacrificed their money and hours of their time to give what they could when they didn’t have to. It was a blessing.
This seemingly small act of generosity gave a sense of meaning to our morning devotions. When you have nothing, God is everything you need and you fully depend on Him and trust in Him. But when you have everything, there is a tendency to make God small and fit Him into your busy schedule.
I thought I had everything, but where did God fit into my life? I’ll admit that I needed an attitude adjustment and a change of perspective. Through my travels, God has been teaching me to see things through His eyes and realize that I have everything in Him. While I still like the “good” better, I am trusting God for it rather than seeking it. God has replaced my desires with His desires. And if He leads me to a mud hut in Africa, then that hut will be my castle.