What is the Air You Breathe?

Stelco on Hamilton Bay, Hamilton, Ontario

What is the air you breathe?  I grew up in the steel mill district of Hamilton, Ontario.  Our own factory, Mohawk Mills: Botany and Dry Spun Yarns,  was in the middle of the industrial sprawl on the edge of Hamilton Bay along with the steel companies Dofasco and Stelco.  Down by Mohawk Mills the air was foetid, summer or winter, or in between.  It rasped at the back of the throat and had a marked chemical smell.  Sixty years ago there wasn’t much in the way of pollution controls.

            We lived in a increasingly Polish – Italian neighbourhood.  Each small red brick two story house was separated from the next by narrow driveway just large enough for your Dodge Coronet.  Even there, in our neighbourhood the air was fusty and when the wind was blowing from the mills, fine particles of dust settled on the houses, automobiles, and on the streets leaving an impression of general grubbiness. 

            What was the air we breathed?  Our neighbours were hard working, cheerful, generous people.  Our next door neighbours, Felice and Rosina Martinello had immigrated to Canada in the 1920s.  Felice had a job in a meat packing company.  Occasionally he would give our family a marvellous ham.  I still remember that the ham had knife slits in it that were stuffed with spices.  The Martinellos took a shine to my curly haired younger brother and would send over for him big bowls of Ziti with meatballs and homemade marinara.  The bowls were so big that it would feed our entire family.

            Our family was a cultural mismatch living in a European ethnic Roman Catholic neighbourhood.  We were Scotch Presbyterians solidly settled in the residue of a faded Edwardian Culture.  We belonged to The Royal Canadian Officer’s Club, to the Thistle curling club, and attended Central Presbyterian where we had our name on the pew. 

Central Presbyterian was one of those churches where the ushers wore a formal morning suit, you know, striped trousers and tails.  It was grandmother who took us to church.  Grandfather didn’t attend.  When I questioned him about that he said rather huffily that God had let him down with the crash in 1929.   We were church people, not necessarily conscious Christians.  There is a difference.  We knew about John Knox and John Calvin.  We knew about predestination, and about the shenanigans of the Old Testament kings.  We knew about ethics and morality and about keeping quiet about the stupider things that people do; and nobody we knew used the “F” word.  After all good decorum is a virtue, even if it isn’t the highest one. 

All of that, the mills, the neighbours, the clubs, the church, that was the air that we breathed.

            What is the air that we breathe today?  In the suburban neighbourhood that we moved to a year ago we actually know about as many of our neighbours as we did when I was a child.  That comes as a surprise.  Not many of them seem to be churched.  The Frenchman who lives next door, whom I like, tells my wife that I am a Holy Man, which is a little frightening.  When he is away I feed his cat. He also uses “Jesus Christ” as a punctuation mark about every other sentence.  That reminds me of a survey on religion undertaken at mines and factories some years ago in France.  “Do you know who Jesus Christ is?” “I think  he works on the third shift.”  

Moral standards have changed along with the changes in religion.  What C. S. Lewis was worrying over in ‘The Abolition of Man’ has become sadly prophetic.  Those universal ethical and moral standards accepted as Truth have been replaced by a subjective standard individual for each person.  What is the standard?  If it feels right it must be right, or, everybody does is it must be right.  The word ‘right’ is problematical; it might  indicate an objective standard outside of ourselves, or perhaps even outside of human society.

A tremendous moral shift took place in the 1960s.  Instead of leading, the church began to accommodate to the world hopping on every new wave that swept over American culture. In a struggle for its lost identity, the causes of society became the church’s reason for being.  Wave after wave of the new secular christianity rolled over us.  We were anti-Vietnam, and when that faded we seized on the liberation of blacks, then on the liberation of women, then on the liberation of Homosexuals and Lesbians, and now it’s no longer fashionable to use those words, gay is much more acceptable, although they don’t seem gay at all.   

Now the Presiding Bishop tells us that the mission of the Church is the Millennium Goals.  I mentioned that to one of my friends in Uganda who laughed, and said, “The mission of the Church is to bring people to Christ, the  Millennium Goals should be the fruit of our mission, not the mission itself.”  The purpose of the Church is the Good News that Jesus Christ was born to save the world which is quite different than the purpose of the Church is accommodation to the world.

In the theology of the sixties Professor Joseph Fletcher proclaimed that all ethics are situational.  Professors Altizer and Hamilton proclaimed that God is Dead, although by the end of their book they didn’t manage to kill Him off.  The Beatles sang that Lucy was in the Sky with Diamonds, and Professor Timothy Leary proclaimed, “I see her!  I see her! You gotta see her too,”  and the Hippie generation wore flowers in their hair.

There was a major shift in news media reporting with the original reality show as we watched a Vietnamese officer execute a kneeling prisoner by shooting him in the head with a pistol.  Now that’s a reality show!  Gone were the days of “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” now we have the days when we are on the verge of interviewing not only peoples relatives, but even their dogs about the “newsworthy” thing that happened to them.

We live in the aftermath of that huge cultural and religious shift.  We are the Generation of the Abolition of Man.  It is not that there are no absolute standards, but that there is no Word of God.  God herself is wearing flowers in her hair and smiles benignly on our accommodation to the world.

And what of the true Church with in the church?  We are the biblical Sardis,

And to the angel of the church in Sardis write: 'The words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. "'I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead.  Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God.  Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you.  Yet you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy”  (Revelation 3:1-4).  

This is the air we breath.  Marana Tha.  Our Lord come!