I am Jean-Daniel (zhawn-danyell), like John Daniel, but en français.
I live in Montréal, Québec, Canada. I am a pastor and a playwright.
Those are independent, but interrelated. They are both ways of telling stories to tell truths bigger than the story itself, ways of exploring and expressing empathy, ways of building communities that last into the future on the foundation of ancient traditions. Less nobly, both are a lot of fun, most of the time.
For eight years now, I have asked the Anglican Diocese of Montréal to do the right thing. For eight years now, multiple leaders have lied about, obstructed, and ignored pleas from many parties, of whom I am merely the loudest and most public. I am the loudest and most public not because I am the most harmed victim. I am not. I am the loudest and most public because I have the safety and privilege to be. That very safety and privilege is to me a moral and ethical imperative to action.
The prophet Jeremiah is, anachronistically, a patron saint for the ADHD disciple. I know the weariness of “holding it in,” the exhaustion at keeping my thoughts inside. Astute scholars will note that contextually he is speaking of proclaiming God’s Word, and I, on the other hand, do not always, even usually, proclaim God’s Word.
I do understand that feeling, though, that something has to be said.
Like many Bible verses that find themselves naked and contextlessly cross-stitched onto Christian wall décor, Jeremiah 20:9 ought not to be pure positive affirmation. Only two verses prior, Jeremiah admits the social cost of his bluntness. “I have become a laughing-stock all day long; everyone mocks me.”
As a museum lover who works in the church, this anti-museum cliché irks me.
Because it fundamentally misunderstands museums.
And churches ought to have a curious empathy for misunderstood cultural institutions resisting decline. It’s in our own best interest.
Get vaccinated. Wear seatbelts and helmets and life jackets. Eat vegetables. Don’t smoke. That all simultaneously matters and guarantees nothing.
Yet I felt the midlife crisis welling up inside me on my birthday. According to my life insurance company, I am not quite half-way done. I would be past that for the average Canadian man, but a combination of physical activity and being, as many have called me, “boring,” slightly stack my odds to live longer.
Water has been a paradoxical sensory space for me my whole life. I was raised in a water-loving family, near a beach, with grandparents with a lake house, with a mother who self-identified as a fish, preferring water over land.
I had the honour of being interviewed by the Mormon Stories Podcast. You may watch here or listen on your favourite Podcast app.