Fast for Copenhagen
by Sheryl Johnson
Co-Chair, SCM Canada
Growing up, my mom always said “a change is as good as a rest.” It’s an interesting nugget of wisdom and perhaps useful in some cases. But it’s also problematic not to get that experience of emptiness that can come from stopping without putting something else in its place.
Late one night this week, after Monday when SCMers across Canada launched SCM’s climate justice statement, and many of us stood on street corners collecting petition signatures for Canada to take a strong role at the Copenhagen talks, after I had gone to a lecture on climate change, I got a phone call late one night. A woman I’ve barely met excitedly asked if I would get SCM’s support a fast for Copenhagen. “Right,” I thought – in the background of everything else in my life – that was still going on. She was very excited that she had just gotten an e-mail back from Bill Phipps (former United Church moderator) supporting her idea to join him in a fast this week. (the Bill Phipps story from the Toronto Star: http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/735504).
Her enthusiasm and sense of connection to Phipps’ fast was contagious, so I knew I had to say I’d try to get something going and of course participate myself. But it was also funny, as having grown up with my mother’s wisdom, and in a context where fasting was often criticized, it wasn’t my usual immediate course of action. I grew up with altera-fasting in Lent (take something up rather than give something up!), where 30 hour famines were criticized and we would “add” alternative activities instead. Even in my own work style, I rarely just take a break and let myself feel emptiness. As the end of term is fast approaching, I’ve begun on books for next semester to fill the time from coursework now finished.
So the emptiness from fasting was odd, and it was constant. Even when I wasn’t doing or learning or connecting in an active way to something climate-justice related, I felt my connection to the issue in my body. It was interesting to go about normal activities but also, secretly, have this connection going on in me. Sometimes I talked about it, sometimes I didn’t.
My phone-call friend thought of having a common mantra that those of us fasting could use. She suggested these two: Oh Christ come — into this space — here and everywhere in creation that is groaning for renewal – Oh Christ come // To be divine change in all of our sacred creation we wait and wait and call for justice. Space…waiting…these are calls of advent. These are words of taking out and let the space just sit as a gaping hole, so that the filling isn’t just the first thought that comes to mind, still bearing, in many ways, the form of the old. This cultivated formless unknown out of which a true revolution might be born.
