outWORD by Matte Downey

Tintoretto's Cain and Abel This past week I have been reading Miroslav Volf's excellent book,  Exclusion & Embrace . Volf, a Croatian theologian (now working in the USA) who has seen the terrible things that neighbours can do to each other, brings a very personal and challenging perspective to the topic of how we live with others. One of the stories he includes in the book is the familiar tale of Cain and Abel, the brothers who didn't get along (see Genesis 4). Let me paraphrase his observations. At first glance the two brothers appear to be equals: born of the same parents, both engaging in respectable occupations (one a tiller of the ground and the other a keeper of sheep), both offering appropriate sacrifices to God, and neither of them taking centre stage in the story (a literary device is used whereby the names are mentioned alternately). However, there is an undercurrent of inequality in the story. At the birth of her first son, the mother issues a proud ...

Some years ago I worked as a receptionist at a window factory. My very first day at work I attended a seminar for receptionists. In this room surrounded by a hundred or so women who spent their days being the first point of encounter for various companies, I learned the magic of the word "moment." We were taught never to use phrases that referred to seconds or minutes because these measurements were too exact, and we would invariably disappoint some impatient customers who would take the phrase "just a minute" literally. Instead, we mouthed the magic, indefinite word "moment" together, savouring its immeasurable limbo. The thing about a moment is that while it is a brief but undefined period of time, it usually carries a defining quality. We all remember moments in our lives when things changed. When we changed. I came across two such moments this week that have remained on my mind. One was the unfortunate hit that a player from the Vancouver Ca...

I am not a morning person. This simply means that, as a general rule, I do not usually function at peak capacity during the first few hours after I wake up. On the contrary, some of my most productive and creative times are between 10 pm and 2 am. And being a student with a fairly flexible schedule, I have been known to keep those kinds of hours. This makes for some interesting scenarios when interacting with the rest of the mostly 9-5 world. Yes, people have called me at 10:30 am and woken me up. When I hear that familiar ringing and it rudely snatches me out of my unconscious state, demanding immediate attention, I leap out of bed. I say some practice 'hellos' just to get the kinks out of the vocal chords and try to sound sane and coherent when I press the talk button on the phone. It doesn't work all that well. People can just tell if you've been sleeping. I used to get embarrassed about it, but then I realised that if I called them back at 1:30 am when I was wide aw...

I love friends. I hate friends. One of the people who knows me best said some things to me a few days ago that were difficult to hear. She told me that I have very little patience for certain people. I swing between "I'm here for you, totally," to "Forget it! You're not worth my time and effort!" My first internal reaction to her words went like this: What? That's not me! I would never do that! The second reaction quickly followed: Well, she's obviously having a bad day so I'll just chalk up any stinging remarks to her foul mood. She didn't mean it. Three days later the third reaction finally kicked in: Okay, God, was there anything to what she said? The short answer is: yes. I have an angry side to me. People who, in my opinion, have proven themselves unfaithful, undependable, and less committed to something than I am...well, I think they deserve my anger. Another one of my friends, when I confessed this anger thing, suggested that it migh...