Everyone complains now about the indignities of air travel, the lengthy lineups and the stripped down service. I can take all that, but what continuously offends upon arrival at the airport is that the whole safety and security arrangement seems to be grounded on the premise that the passenger is a complete idiot. I feel sorry for the security personnel and flight attendants, all of whom are required by the constantly invoked “federal regulations” to treat me as if I were so stupid that, well, I could not master the seat belt.

Anyone who is licensed to drive is expected to be able, while operating the vehicle at high speed in traffic, to respond to the various bits of information on the instrument panel, all the while loading compact discs, scanning for traffic reports on the radio, talking on the (hands-free, of course) phone and keeping a cold beverage at the ready in the cup-holder. Hundreds of millions of people manage this with ease.

Why, then, it is necessary for the flight attendants to make special announcements to advise passengers that the captain has turned on the seat belt sign? It’s a sign, after all. It’s designed to be noticed. It has an accompanying chime. What kind of passenger is so dim that he needs to be told that the sign is on? The superfluous announcements — in multiple languages no less — annoyingly interrupt the entertainment system, whose operation contrariwise assumes quite a high-level of technological sophistication and fine motor skills to begin with.

I had in July the misfortune of being caught in one of those horrific delays I had only previously read about: more than six hours on the tarmac at Frankfurt airport while mechanical repairs were unsuccessfully attempted. The captain advised that a request had been made to allow us to return to the terminal during the delay instead of sitting on the plane. The airport administration denied the request on the stated grounds that there was no room for us inside. Given that Frankfurt airport — evident to any bedraggled passenger forced to walk from one terminal to another — is cavernous enough to allow most passengers to camp overnight, let alone merely sit for a few hours, the official response was credible only to imbeciles.

Or perhaps small children who enjoy being told tales. Yet even children can figure out that the emperor is stark naked. As are one’s toiletries after being put in the all-powerful clear plastic bag, which has unexplained powers to render an otherwise dangerous shampoo into a safe airborne liquid. The greatest magician at the height of his powers never presumed his audience to be so dense as to be fooled by the mysterious and transformative powers of the clear plastic bag. Perhaps the emperor himself, rather than commissioning work from his charlatan tailors, should have simply popped himself into one of those re-sealable plastic bags, so great is their effect.

We live in an age blessed by air travel so cheap that it falls into the grasp of the ordinary man to see more of the world than even the imperial majesties of old could have imagined. And yet this most impressive scientific, technological and commercial achievement has been reduced to an infantilizing experience. We are treated like slow-witted children and so behave accordingly, furtively hiding our mobile phones from the stewardess, or slipping on the non-ear-bud type headphones while she is ensuring that another passenger’s cabin baggage is safely stowed.

At the end of it all, we are advised to be careful opening the overhead bins, as articles may have shifted in flight — a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has used the trunk of a car. How many different ways are there to open an overhead bin? Cautious? Reckless? Dangerous? We also are admonished to take our personal belongings with us. Of course. At that stage, our belongings are all we have — our dignity and our intelligence having long since been taken away.

On Aug. 26, 1910, Agnes Gonxha Bojakhiu was born of Albanian parents in the town of Skopje, Macedonia.

“By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus,” is how she would describe herself.

Mother Teresa, as the world came to know her, is being honoured by millions today on the centenary of her birth. Not just by the Catholic Church, which already has declared her to be in heaven, and honoured with the title “blessed.” The Peace Bridge between Buffalo, N.Y. and Fort Erie, Ont., will be illuminated in blue and white, the colours of the order of religious sisters she founded, the Missionaries of Charity. More than 4,000 strong upon Mother Teresa’s death 13 years ago, they already had become the largest missionary order of women in the Church — and this at a time when religious orders were collapsing the world over.

It would be hard to imagine a place farther from the glamour capitals of the world than the slums of Calcutta, where Mother Teresa began her care for the “poorest of the poor.” Amongst the wretched of the Earth, she taught her sisters to see “Christ in the distressing disguise of the poor.”

In 1952, Mother Teresa found a woman dying in the streets, half-eaten by rats and ants, with no one to care for her. She picked her up and took her to the hospital, but nothing could be done. Realizing that there were many others dying alone in the streets, Mother Teresa opened within days Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart), a home for the dying. In the first 20 years alone, over 20,000 people were brought there, half of whom died knowing the love of the Missionaries of Charity. Nirmal Hriday is where one dying man, lying in the arms of Mother Teresa after being plucked from the gutters and bathed and clothed and fed, told her, “I have lived like an animal, but now I am dying like an angel.”

Nirmal Hriday was the focus of the 1969 British television documentary, Something Beautiful for God, produced by the late Malcolm Muggeridge. It made Mother Teresa famous, though by then she had already spent 23 years in the slums, living off alms and toiling in obscurity.

She then came to be feted in the glamour capitals, receiving dozens of awards. In 1979, she received the Nobel Peace Prize, at that time still a prestigious award. When given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1985, the plaque described her as the “saint of the gutters.” There have been others who have risen from the gutters to receive such awards, but she was the only one who went back to the gutters to live.

Mother Teresa knew that the true good cannot be found in systems or plans, no matter how clever or efficient, but in a person. She was not against the work of welfare agencies, but remarked that welfare was for a purpose, albeit a noble one, whilst love was for a person. Mother Teresa offered love. When criticized by those who accused her of not going to the root causes of problems, she would simply remind them what the true root cause was. “The greatest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody,” she would explain. “The greatest evil is the lack of love and charity, the terrible indifference towards one’s neighbour.”

Mother Teresa never played to the crowd who wished to obscure the Gospel and reduce her to a humanitarian celebrity. She spoke out against abortion as the “greatest destroyer of peace” when in Oslo at the Nobel ceremony, and shocked the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington when she reminded them of the Christian tradition on the immorality of contraception. She insisted that she was in the gutters for one reason alone — to bring the love of Christ to each of the souls abandoned there.

The world only knew her as diminutive and wizened, with a slight stoop and gnarled hands. Yet all who met her found her beautiful, for her eyes sparkled and her smile radiated joy.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger once wrote that ultimately the Church has only two things to offer to the world for the credibility of the Gospel of Jesus Christ: the beauty of her art and the lives of her saints. Mother Teresa captivated the whole world, becoming a patron saint of a difficult century. Like a great masterpiece of sacred art, she was indeed something beautiful for God.

The narrative of the centre has more than a touch of Peter C. Newman’s Renegade in Power. Out of politeness to the Old Chief buried just outside, the centre does not exactly say that he was a erratic crank, but certainly a visitor is pointed in that direction. The small bookshop does not even carry Diefenbaker’s three volume autobiography in his own defence. Indeed, while one can find books on Charles Darwin, Louis Riel and Allan Blakeney, there is not a single title on Diefenbaker.

All of which is something of a piece with the generally poor public presentation of Canadian history before — to pick a date that Dief mourned until his death — 1965, the year of the new Canadian flag. It’s not a partisan thing; what do most Canadians know about Diefenbaker’s predecessor, Louis St. Laurent? Or even Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister?

A visit to the Diefenbaker Centre does correct the view that Canadian history began in the 1960s, with Pearson’s flag, Montreal’s Expo ‘67 and Trudeaumania in 1968. It is more relevant this month, which is the 50th anniversary of the Canadian Bill of Rights–the heart of the centre and of Diefenbaker’s premiership.

The 1960 Bill of Rights enunciated the fundamental freedoms of Canadians and the principle of equality before the law. A statutory instrument rather than a constitutional act, it lacked the imperial force of the subsequent Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but nevertheless advanced significantly the substantive content of human rights in Canada. It is oft-forgotten that Diefenbaker — still the only prime minister not to be of either Anglo/ Irish or French stock — brought a heightened sense of human rights to Canadian politics, as he was then considered an “ethnic minority” politician. It was Diefenbaker who extended full voting rights to aboriginals, appointed the first native Canadian to the Senate and the first woman to the Cabinet.

Diefenbaker died before the constitutional negotiations presided over by Pierre Trudeau, so we do not know what he would have thought of the Charter. No doubt he would have been pleased to see that human rights were at the heart of the constitution. Yet one might suspect that Dief, who had great faith in the Westminster parliamentary tradition, would have recoiled from the Americanizing influence of the Charter, with its shifting of power from the Crown-in-Parliament to the courts. The usurpation of power by the courts and an increasingly centralized Cabinet and Prime Minister’s Office meant that Diefenbaker died just in time — before he had to witness the utter irrelevancy of Parliament.

One of the exhibits allows the visitor to hear Diefenbaker in full oratorical flight in the House of Commons. It’s hard to imagine now that important speeches were once give in the Commons, crafted and delivered with the hope and expectation that what was said there would shape the national debate. That has long changed, perhaps beginning with Lester Pearson’s decision to announce the flag switch at a veterans’ conference in Winnipeg rather than in Parliament.

One shouldn’t be sentimental about the old chieftain, for his premiership was not greatly consequential. Even his slow rise to power — after being defeated in elections for federal, provincial and municipal office — has less the touch of the persevering and principled Lincoln about it than it does the sheer bloody-mindedness of a man obsessed with political office.

Still, there is something about Diefenbaker that is perhaps more easily glimpsed here on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River. Older than the province itself, Diefenbaker is its only prime minister. At a time when it seemed that Canada was the permanent plaything of the Liberal elites of Toronto and Montreal, he represented a geographically and culturally broader vision of the country. His was an uncomplicated patriotism that loved Canada as she was, not as he thought she should be remade. With his defeat in 1963, the great re-making would begin.

Senator Stevens died in a plane crash on Monday, having spent forty years in the United States Senate. He devoted himself to bringing home the bacon to Alaska, and by all accounts his pork-barrelling was prodigiously successful. Americans regarded the geriatric senator — decades in office, gaming the system for ever more extravagant dollops of federal largesse, then proudly cutting the ribbons on projects named in his honour — as something of a noble figure. They resolutely re-elect such men for tenures that make most crowned heads seem transient.

So entrenched was Stevens that when he was defeated in the 2008 election it was regarded as a career prematurely cut short. Those who marinated in the Senate even longer than he did — Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd — were at least allowed the monarch’s privilege of dying in office. But Stevens was defeated by the slimmest of margins in 2008, having been convicted in a criminal trial just days before the election.

Stevens was convicted of something relatively minor but still criminal: making false statements on his Senate financial disclosure forms in relation to renovations on his Alaska home. The federal prosecutors — from the justice department’s public integrity section — claimed that Stevens knowingly underpaid for the renovations, rendering them an illegal gift or perhaps a bribe. Stevens was convicted on all counts and lost the 2008 election a week later by a margin of less than 1.5%. A forty year career apparently had ended in disgrace.

Then in February 2009 an FBI whistle-blower revealed that prosecutors had conspired to withhold exculpatory evidence from the defence and had falsified records. In particular, the prosecutors withheld testimony that the cost of the renovations was actually less than Stevens had paid. They also knew that the star witness was likely lying at trial when he said that a friend of Stevens had told him to ignore the senator’s request for an invoice.

It was a monstrous miscarriage of justice. Prosecutors at the highest levels of the justice department had deliberately conspired to convict a man who should never have been charged. It was a wrongful conviction, done with malice aforethought. Absent the whistle-blower, the prosecutors would have gotten away with it. Once it was revealed, the attorney general, Eric Holder, withdrew the charges, vacating the conviction. The presiding judge, Emmett Sullivan, called it the worst case of prosecutorial misconduct he had seen in 25 years on the bench and initiated a criminal contempt investigation of the responsible prosecutors.

Ted Stevens was one of most influential senators in Washington. He could not have been prosecuted without the approval of the most senior and experienced lawyers in the justice department. If America’s prosecutorial state could grind him up, then no one before American courts is safe from wrongful and malicious prosecution. Throwing innocent people in jail is not an anomaly in the American criminal justice system, but routine practice. Thanks to the whistle-blower we know what was done to Stevens. Imagine what is done daily to the human debris swept off America’s streets.

Prosecutors were no doubt eager to take down the giant of Alaska politics. Such a grand prize required more than the usual abuse of state power by the prosecutors, and Ted Stevens would have died this week a convicted felon, absent one FBI agent who was sufficiently disgusted to blow the whistle on his law enforcement colleagues. Stevens’ greatest legacy ought not be his artful manipulation of the appropriations system, but rather how his case exposed the top-to-bottom corruption of American criminal justice — a scandal that ought to shake the rotten system to its foundations.

When Stevens was convicted in 2008, both presidential candidates called for him to resign, as did many of his longtime Senate colleagues. To their shame, they believed the American criminal justice system to be credible. If it wasn’t evident before, the Stevens case has made clear that no one should ever be considered guilty solely because of a verdict in an American court. The abuse of prosecutorial and police power is so rampant that a guilty verdict means nothing in itself. No doubt guilty people are indeed convicted, but a person should not be considered guilty solely by reason of his conviction.

In Canada, we should not be smug. We have our own parade of wrongful convictions. Just this week the Ontario government announced niggardly compensation for parents who were wrongfully convicted of molesting and killing their own children. Here the overzealous prosecutors employed the false testimony of an incompetent pathologist. America’s shameful justice system should be a warning to us — it can happen here too.

About a dozen years ago, the mega-selling author of vampire novels announced that she was returning to the Catholic faith of her upbringing — a faith she had emphatically rejected as a teenager. Subsequently, she abandoned her horror stories and wrote two well-received books about the life of Jesus, while engaging in gracious conversation with the many people, Christian and otherwise, who took note of her conversion.

Now, citing a rather unimaginative set of difficulties with Christian moral teaching, she has declared herself no longer Christian but committed to Christ. Is that possible?

In one sense, anyone who is truly committed to Christ is a Christian, no matter what she calls herself. But is it possible to be a Christian without being part of Christianity? No. Jesus Christ is a historical person, who does not live in 21st-century New Orleans, as Rice does. So to know anything about him means to have had an encounter with Christianity — the historical lived experience of that community of disciples we call the Church.

No Christianity, no Christians. No Church, no encounter with Christ. There is a certain attraction in choosing to separate the person of Christ from the gritty, messy reality of the Church, but by His own choice the two are inseparable. There is no way to get to Christ without the Church. From the beginning the Christian story is about the Lord fashioning a people of His own — the Christian Church and our elder brothers, the Chosen People themselves, the Jews. It is to that people that God reveals Himself, and everything we know about Him is mediated through that revelation to His people. So Christ without Christianity (and Judaism) is not possible, no matter how unappealing we Christians can be.

Christians do not share the belief of Muslims or Mormons that their holy texts appeared from God directly, without real contributions from the inspired human authors. The Christian scriptures would not exist without the Church, who produced them, determined their content, and provided their authentic interpretation. Even to be a “bible Christian” alone, in the most radical sense, is to depend utterly on the work of the Church. For anyone who wants to be committed to Christ the institutions of Christianity are essential. The alternative is not leave Christianity behind so much as it is to refashion Christianity as one would like it to be. It’s no mystery why that is an attractive option.

Those who attempt, as Rice does, to sever Christ from Christianity, are not an insignificant group. The usual formulation is “spiritual but not religious.”

The choice is for something beyond the material, but defined by no historical community or lived tradition. For those in a historically Christian culture, that means leaving aside Christianity for a “Christ” who remains undefined, ambiguous and amorphous.

To be spiritual but not religious means to be in favour of a relationship with God, but without that God or that relationship having any defined content. But everything that is real has a defined nature. One cannot have a relationship with something abstract; one has to choose a particular person. At the heart of reality is either a Father who loves us, or the Great Raven who tricks us, or a sea of being which swallows us up, or random nothingness that takes no note of us. A spiritual person can be Christian, or follow Haida theology, or be a Buddhist or sign up for scientific materialism. Yet it is not possible to be indifferent between those options, or to be in favour of all of them.

To be spiritual but not religious is akin to following sports, but without choosing any one sport in particular. It is not possible to play sports in general. Or to love music, but no particular piece of music. Or to plant a garden, but no particular flowers. Novels cannot be read in general; you are either reading an Anne Rice book or you are not.

How much easier it would be to love a family in general, and not this particular spouse, and these particular children. Yet love is always about the particular. A baby has no use for love in general, but the particular love of her own parents.

Love is a choice. The spiritual life is about choosing the God we will love, not refusing to choose.