What does it look like for you to walk on water in this time?
For me, walking on water feels like doing something that seems physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually impossible. Everything would need to align perfectly for such an event to be possible. You would first need to be born in the right place at the right time. You would also need to be born a man. Then, you would need to find a way to make a living in the Roman Empire, like fishing or tax collecting. Then you would need to meet Jesus of Nazareth and be called to be a disciple. Then Jesus would need to change your name from Simon to Peter. Then you would need to be in a boat to cross a lake to get away from the crowds, wondering why Jesus decided to go his own way. Then a storm would need to threaten the lives of the people in that boat. Then someone would need to notice someone walking on the water. You would need to recognize that person as Jesus. You would need to be the kind of person who does crazy, impulsive things like following a homeless Rabbi and attempting to walk on water.
So, for me, many of these things are true. I was born into a large extended family whose ancestors survived the Taiping Rebellion in China, one of the longest and bloodiest wars in human history.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (1851–1864) was a Chinese Christian theocratic absolute monarchy which sought to overthrow the Qing dynasty. The Heavenly Kingdom or Heavenly Dynasty, was led by King Hong Xiuquan and his followers. Its capital was at Tianjing (present-day Nanjing). The unsuccessful war it waged against the Qing is known as the Taiping Rebellion.
My father grew up in Hong Kong and lived through the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, moved to Mauritius to avoid the possibility of a communist take over of Hong Kong, because my grandfather’s brother was a high-ranking official in the Communist Party in China. My father went to boarding school in Australia (because his parents thought he was less likely to hook up with a white girl amidst the racism in Australia), earned a medical degree at the University of Sydney, found a job at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver and married my mother, a white woman, who was training to be a nurse at St. Paul’s Hospital, in the winter of 1967. I was born in Vancouver nine months later on September 1, 1968. My mother gave birth to three children in three-and-a-half years. My two younger brothers were born while my father was working in a research fellowship at Sick Children’s Hospital in Toronto. When we moved back to Vancouver after living a couple years in Toronto, our family became part of the Jesus movement at St. Margaret’s Church in Vancouver.
A Legacy: The Influence of Women
By the way, a distant cousin, Kevin Kwan, wrote the book, Crazy Rich Asians, which was made into a film of the same name. My grandmother’s maiden name is Kwan.
Learning the Language of Empire
Christianity, racism, white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, genocide, and ecocide have been major factors in my history as a human being. I find myself at the intersection of East and West, Buddhism and Christianity, Communism and Capitalism, Chinese and English, art and commerce, design and science, mental health and dementia, saved and damned, life and death. Aspiring to be an artist, I found my living as a designer, learning the language of empire.
In Sunday School, we were taught, “Be a Daniel.” What I learned about Daniel and how he survived multiple successive empires was to avoid being at the top of the hierarchy. Those men are usually self-centred narcissists and are disposable, the first to go when empires inevitably fall. So, I wondered how to survive in the midst of empire. I became a designer, an administrator for the empire, living in the Bible Belt, versed in media and communications technologies, engaged in the dissemination of the propaganda designed to build, maintain, and perpetuate Christian nationalism and capitalism in CANADA, the Corporation for Apartheid Nationalism and Aboriginal Dispossession and Assimilation.
Twenty-four years ago, at the age of exactly twenty-nine-and-a-half years, my middle brother jumped from Deception Pass Bridge on 24 April 1999. He survived. Still, I lost my brother that day. My parents convinced him that he was saved by God that day. He became like my parents, someone I could not communicate with.
He did not have faith. He did not walk on water that day. His first words when he woke up in Harbour View Medical Centre after days in coma was weak laughter, “I’m still alive?” He suffered a compression fracture and had to have his spine rebuilt.
Ten days ago, I wrote a letter to my father that I will never deliver. He has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. My mother called me a few days ago in a state of emotional distress about her inability to cope mentally, physically, and emotionally with her role as caretaker for my father and my brother.
Yesterday, we drove out to Tsawwassen to celebrate her birth 82 years ago. She was asking for help to clean out the hoard of stuff that they have accumulated over 55 years of marriage. My father has started many things, many of which he has never finished. He started a paediatric medical practice, a day care, a Christian book store, a charismatic spiritual revival at the local Anglican Church, and an evangelical event centre and children’s camp in Nanoose Bay. He left the job to my mother to clean up his messes. I resolved that I would never be in that situation. In response, my father and mother and youngest brother have excluded me from participation in the family corporation. My youngest brother has assumed ownership of all my father’s assets, effectively stealing my birthright as the eldest of the three siblings. My youngest brother manages the corporation, with my mother, father, and youngest brother as directors. Neither I nor my middle brother signed to become directors of the family corporation.
Now, it seems unavoidable to somehow get involved in cleaning up my father’s mess. My mother has power-of-attorney, since my father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis in October, but her husband has denied her of power and agency throughout their marriage and she has admitted that she does not have the mental, physical, and emotional capacity to assume that position of power and authority.
A related thing creatives do to avoid being creative is to involve themselves with crazymakers. Crazymakers are those personalities that create storm centers. They are often charismatic, frequently charming, highly inventive, and powerfully persuasive. And, for the creative person in their vicinity, they are enormously destructive. You know the type: charismatic but out of control, long on problems and short on solutions.
Crazymakers are the kind of people who can take over your whole life. To fixer-uppers, they are irresistible: so much to change, so many distractions. . . .
— Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
I have had enough of this patriarchal society that is built around the domination of men over nature in the name of God and country. That is the definition of using God’s name in vain. “Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain.” Our family is a microcosm of the tendency toward chaos, entropy, self-destruction, and death built into this social architecture of neo-liberal capitalism, otherwise known as the manufacture of consent (Noam Chomsky) and organized abandonment (Ruth Wilson Gilmore).
Rematriation
For me, the relationship with my father is rife with difficulties, insensitivities, miscommunications, misunderstandings, conflict, manipulation, domination, accusation, exclusion, isolation, pain, and shame. The patriarchy is abhorrent to me. Praying to a Heavenly Father is not an option for me.
I am drawn to the Indigenous practice of regarding everything as alive, of regarding the living being in whom we dwell as Mother Earth. In Genesis 1, the image of God is both male and female. In Proverbs 8, Wisdom is personified as a woman. In John 3, Nicodemus is invited to be born again, a maternal process. It is a woman at a well who finds living water welling up inside her. In John 17, the Spirit is the helper, the counsellor, the comforter. In Romans 8, Creation is personified as a woman giving birth. In the Revelation, a woman is giving birth to a child and attempting to protect the child from a dragon.
In a human family, there is mother, father, and child. It is the interaction between male and female that is an act of procreation, to create the possibility of new life. New forms of life come into being on the third day of each of the two iterations: vegetation on the third day and human beings on the sixth day. There is a pattern to each iteration: light, water, land (earth).
Spirit hovers over the waters. Adam means earth.
Birth is connected to water. When a woman’s water breaks, the time for birth is imminent. In this cosmology, light is giving birth through the medium of water to a living earth.
The image of God is figurative language. Image is metaphor. God is metaphysical, beyond physical form. The physical, male and female, is the metaphor for the metaphysical.
For the longest time, I was mystified by the concept of the Trinity, because the word is never mentioned in the Bible. It just felt like an idea someone made up based on some very strange leaps of imagination and conjecture. However, the more I looked into the concept, the more I saw the pattern everywhere.
For me, Spirit is Metaphysical Mother, the intimate presence in contrast to the universal omnipresent mind of the Metaphysical Father. The Metaphysical Child is the incarnate divine, God in the flesh, in this meat (carne, carnis) bag of human existence.
Yes, I am still stuck in this very Christian concept of the Trinitarian God. However, in my conversations with a Buddhist, it is a much more expansive concept of the Christian concepts that leads to my desire to see the Holy Roman Church and its Protestant Reformation children—as the unholy union of an oppressed spiritual movement with a military-industrial complex—be dissolved. Five hundred years of colonization, genocide, ecocide, slavery, oppression, industrialization, capitalization, nationalization, weaponization, and global subjugation is enough to see this whole enterprise as a failed experiment. Be a Daniel, they said. That Daniel saw empires come and go and predicted that empires would continue to come and go.
I am drawn to the story of the interplay of oppositives that leads to evolutionary emergence, the dawning of a new day, the birth of new life. This is maternal, matriarchal language. We are living through a rematriatriation as we witness the last gasps of the empires of patriarchal domination. I cannot wait to see the last breath of this age of empires. I have been actively undermining the white Christian men who have co-opted, dominated, and monopolized the creative industries in the Bible Belt of so-called British Columbia.
In the search for my soul, I purposely sought the wisdom of the matriarchs, those connected to the struggle for the Earth, for life, and for love. I found them in a place that I did not expect, those living in the vision of a man, Richard Buckminster Fuller, in the Design Science Studio, a movement initiated and led by women to reconnect to the Earth and focused on the healing and regeneration of the Earth and all living beings.
The Rhythms of Life
By reconnecting to Mother Earth, to The Rhythms of Life, I am reparenting my inner children because I was emotionally abandoned by emotionally unavailable parents in the name of God and country, a national system of organized abandonment, designed for genocide and ecocide as a profit centre for human, anthropocentric domination over nature: human-centred design. “The world is working exactly as we designed it.” I am reintegrating light and dark, male and female to bring about new life. That is how I walk on water.
To walk on water would be to live authentically as an artist in the midst of empire.
WeMakeStuff
I am engaged in a dialogue with a community of Christian artists, WeMakeStuff, in which we are invited to explore prompts about our relationship as artists to God and Spirit and Jesus. Here is how I have answered these prompts.
What does it look like for you to walk on water in this time?
To walk on water would be to live authentically as an artist in the midst of empire.
I see myself as an artist and cartographer mapping the heart to help us navigate metaphysical gravity. We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.
Working professionally as a designer since 1988, I attempted to keep up with the changes in technology from manual, analog, and photographic to digital production processes, and I found a need to be in a constant learning process. I witnessed the evolution of design from physical artifacts to social systems, from physics to metaphysics. Now, I am in the process of decolonizing design from the inside out. Part of that reinvention has been to reclaim my senses of agency, possibility, and creativity as an artist and a cartographer who maps the heart to help us navigate metaphysical gravity.
Where is the pleasure of God drawing you?
Spirit is drawing me into Trinity as a way of life. Synchronicities lead me to notice patterns in life that are about integrating mind, heart, body, and senses to walk as love, which I describe as a way of navigating metaphysical gravity. I am learning in real time how being mind, heart, and body in the midst of time, energy, and matter is an experience of living within the synchronicities, synergies, synarchies, and synthesis that leads to syntropy: the interplay of opposites that leads to the evolutionary emergence of new forms of life and creativity.
How is this different than what fear is saying to you?
Fear says success is measured by celebrity, wealth, and power, and we build systems to measure these quantities and optimize for their endless proliferation and acceleration and domination over all living organisms. However, the quanta overlooks the qualia, the experience of being alive.
Walk on Water
This beautifully written inter generational account of emancipation & trajectory into a new realm of existence is fraught with challenges & potentiality of a Tolstoy novel. Stephen’s brilliance in rising up out of the old world fundamental Christian rhetoric of his family lineage and manifesting a life of service & systems that are In congruence with Mother Nature is truly a testament of ascending into a metaphorical place of “walking on water” as a comet that flys above the family constellation! Blessings on your journey, Dear Brother, keep flying! 🙏
In Synergetics, which I know you are a fan of, 'Trinity' is found everywhere such as 'In, Out and Around' rather than Up and Down and "Action, Re-action AND Resultant vector". Bucky made a point of it. I see the 'Holy Ghost' as almost comical in its repressed exclusion of the Female, like "Well she was here but just vanished!"
I am reminded of Robert Graves work on the Greek Myths many of which he conjectures are confused re-telling of older Goddess culture myths with reversals that seem obvious when the iconography is examined such as Orpheus being led into Tartarus rather than he leading Eurydice out of Hades. Can the kings of old be forgiven if they sought to rewrite these myths however since they required the king be sacrificed upon the end of his symbolic reign? It seems we are moving culturally into an era of cooperation or cease-fire in the battle of the sexes.