BENT HOPE: A STREET JOURNAL
Author: Tim Huff
bent Hope tells the stories of homeless and street-involved
youth and adults in Canada’s largest urban centre, Toronto.
Tim Huff weaves a tapestry of 21 true encounters with youth
and adults trapped, abandoned, abused – runaways, hideaways, castaways and throwaways, as
Huff gently describes them.
Reading this book feels like meeting
one of God’s best practitioner theologians in plain clothes. Huff’s humanity
and spirituality stand side by side in the
encounters he so very personally unfolds,
and he is true to both.
Hope is the underlying theme. Huff
writes: “And still, in spite of myself, the
hurt of hope, along with the anticipation of hope, and hope realized are all
at the centre of the lives I have been so
honoured to be a part of on the streets.”
All people, Huff points out, must live at times “with
the cruel designations others have carelessly tattooed on us.
Subjugated by what others think we are, and oppressed by
what we feel stuck doing or being, while our hearts and
minds long for release.”
In Huff’s experience, hope is the “music of the soul”
– something readers have to discover and experience for
themselves as they allow the stories of this book to enfold
them, draw them in and invoke the presence of God.
“Hidden in the cloak of daily survival and existence is
Castle Quay Books,
2008. 192 pages.
$20 (paper)
MUSIC NEWS:
CANADIANS AWARDED
The gospel music association
Canada held its annual Covenant
awards in october in Calgary. some
of the most nominated names in-
cluded downhere ( 11 categories),
matt Brouwer ( 6), Brian doerksen
( 6), starfield ( 6) and steve Bell ( 6).
in the running for album of the
year were Bell’s Devotion, down-
here’s Ending Is Beginning, doerk-
sen’s It’s Time, Carried away’s No
Compromise, Janelle’s What I Gotta
Say and Brouwer’s Where’s Our
Revolution.
details on all the winners may
be found at www.gmacanada.ca.
–BILL FLEDDERUS
where hope plays its most significant role. In the fatigue and
discouragement of all-day-ness and every-day-ness – this is
the anchor that keeps life from being swept away.”
The practitioner theologian comes alive fully in statements like: “Ultimately I believe in a God who is as relevant
in the gutter as he is in the church. As miraculous in the ditch
as he is in the chapel. And as beautiful in a rat-infested alleyway as he is in a glass cathedral. Anything else is hopeless.
And nothing else makes sense.”
Huff succeeds at drawing in readers to associate deeply
with the individuals whose lives he so masterfully unpacks.
I read the first story and wept, and could not put the
book down until I had read it all. It is that powerful, passionate, compelling, gritty, real and God-centred.
–R. WAYNE HAGERMAN
All of the western world may be experiencing a crisis of soul but this is more
pronounced in some places than in others. To visit Quebec at Christmastime,
when the specialness of the young is even
more pronounced than usual, is to peer
into a society that is, effectively, committing collective suicide. French Quebec’s
birthrate is one of the lowest in the world; its suicide rate is
among the highest in the industrialized world.
Donald Gingras, a former Québécois nationalist, sees
Quebec as a kind of orphan – a political and cultural entity
that doesn’t have a usable history to sustain it. Gingras points
out that the French connection has long been severed and, in
more recent times, closer relations with France have hardly
fed Quebec’s spirit. And Quebecers have abandoned the
Roman Catholic institutions that sustained their culture.
Nationalism has served as a quasi-religion, but the
failure of the two separatist referendums has closed the
gates to political paradise. Meantime, Gingras notes, non-French-speaking Canadians have gotten tired of Quebec’s
demands. Quebec is alone.
Gingras wrote Window of Hope, his “heart cry for
Quebec,” with the aim of helping his home province find
“authentic freedom” – the kind of freedom he has found in
a personal relationship with Christ, commitment to whom
transcends all other allegiances.
The text takes two alternating approaches. The historical sections provide well-constructed general overviews that
would be useful to, among others, home-schooled students
coming at Canadian history for the first time. The other sec-
essence publishing, 2008. 253
pages. $24.95
(paper)
WINDOW OF HOPE…
AND RECONCILIATION
Author: Donald Gingras
