"Nativity" painting by Jackson Beardy
In reply to my question about how he enjoyed dinner, Father Charlie, a retired priest who lives here in the residence said, “It was good, but we didn’t have fish, we had salmon.”
This response makes perfect sense to me because, like Fr Charlie, we were born and raised in rural Newfoundland where there is only one thing in the ocean called ‘fish’ that that is ‘cod’. There are of course, halibut, flounder and salmon to list just a few, but there is only one ‘fish’ – the mighty cod.
As the expression goes, “In cod we trust.”
Cod fueled an economy, fed a people, and formed a culture. There was a deep respect for the sea and a deep reverence for God. Respect, reverence and fear are all intimately interwoven with one another, bringing the true sense of awe to that part of the brain which seems to be directly connected to the heart.
The lives of the people in my community depended on cod.
Communities were formed around cod. A people came to know who they were because of cod.
The great ideas of the ages, in my little community, were worked out through times of plenty and scarcity, by the grit, determination, hard-work and faith of the generations that came before. That houses were built in the lee of a hill that protects them from a violence of a nor-easter, near a beach and a wharf cannot be reduced to the utilitarian as much as it is a witness to an expression of an identity. Rugged, determined and humble, clinging to the rock in the face of its dependence on the sea.
The cod is inseparable from the culture.
A few years ago, I visited a friend of mine who worked in Old Crow, Yukon among the Gwitchin people. On the plane ride from Whitehorse to Old Crow, the man sitting next to me said the caribou herd was nearby. In the airport another man suggested I go up the mountain to get a look at the caribou herd. In the elementary school I was asked if I had seen the caribou.
The caribou herd that everyone was talking about was the great Porcupine Caribou herd of over 200,000 animals that calve inside Alaska and annually migrate over 2400km. It’s the longest migration route of any mammal on earth.
The lives of the Gwitchin people depended on the caribou herd.
The caribou are inseparable from their culture.
Communities migrated because of the caribou.
A people came to know who they were because of the caribou.
My friends and I went to school and learned the beauty of my culture and its people.
Gwitchin children were taken from their family, forced to speak a foreigner’s language as they underwent a dehumanizing process of having the ‘savage beaten out of the child.’
They were not the savages.
The image that comes to mind is Jesus standing between Pilate and the High Priests. It’s as if He stands in the place that can become the ugly conflation of the brutality of state power and a religious legalism that has lost its way. It is a recipe for death. Such a conflation doesn’t represent the heart of God who is standing in their midst, in defiance of the coercion of state power and in defiance of religious legalism.
A conflation of the two, as history bears out, leads to a swath of death and destruction and broken lives in its wake.
I used to work in the prison system. I remember a conversation I had one day in a parole officer’s office, in the community. The parole officer was an indigenous man raised in Manitoba. As we were meeting in his office a number of police cars gathered across the street with lights flashing due to an incident in a nearby building. He asked to pause our meeting. He asked me not the leave as he broke down in tears. After he collected himself, he told me about being taken away from his family in what is now known as the Sixties Scoop. He lived a rough life. He has so many horrific run-ins with police. He told me that even when stopped at a red light and he sees a police car he gets agitated, sweaty and afraid. His trauma is deep.
An indigenous person is eleven times more likely to be in prison that a Caucasian. African Nova Scotians are four times more likely to go to prison that a Caucasian from Nova Scotia. The rates for women are even higher.
This is a systemic problem that we must confront.
In 1992, Bishop Burke who was then the Bishop of Halifax, visited the Miq’Mac people in Indian Brook and said this, “It is the way of the Lord we are to make straight, not what we don’t like or understand in other people. The God who came to us at Bethlehem, came as a human being, and each human being is tied to a language, a land, a culture, a tradition and a long history. That is what the incarnation is!”
He went on to explain stories about fiddles being broken in Cape Breton because they were forbidden in churches. It is not what was intended by make straight the way of the Lord.
Then he said, “You tell the stories of the residential school. You were not allowed to speak your language, to wear your clothes, or to play your musical instruments…we can see now that this was wrong. The good news is about the God who created us in infinite variety, with a great number of beautiful languages. We are made with a marvelous capacity for sharing the beauty of creation through our music and our art and our storytelling. Our family and our tradition are part of God’s great gift to us. We are not to be separated from our roots.”
He continued, “I cannot change the past. I cannot erase the damage that has been done. I can express my sorrow, and the sorrow of your brothers and sisters in our Church of Halifax, for your suffering. I apologize for whatever pain the Church itself may have been responsible for causing in the residential school. The Church is not meant to hurt, but to heal – and I must say that I am truly sorry… Healing comes with honesty and truth, experienced in dialogues of mutuality.”
A few months later, in 1993, Bishop Burke spoke to the people in Millbrook and offered the same sincere words of apology.
More recently, at the Treaty Day celebration on October 1, 2018, Archbishop Mancini, then Bishop of Halifax-Yarmouth, and Bishop Dunn, then the Bishop of Antigonish, knelt before the Mi’kmaq chiefs and people gathered and expressed regret, sorrow and apology for the hurts, violence and abuse experienced in the Residential School of Shubenacadie.
In 1991 the Canadian Catholic Bishops and leaders of men and women’s religious communities issued a statement that said, “We are sorry and deeply regret the pain, suffering and alienation that so many experienced” at the Residential Schools.
I know my brother priests and I, as well as our bishop, are horrified by this legacy, among other sins of the Church in the past. It is not the Church I know, but I acknowledge it is the Church others know. Other bears the scars of it and it breaks my heart. I am sorry for these horrible transgressions and I ask for forgiveness.
The sacred mysteries we are about to celebrate, on this great feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, is supposed to be a communal act of thanksgiving to God for reconciling ourselves to God as we deepen in our need to reconcile ourselves to one another. Everything we are here for, is supposed to revolve around reconciliation.
Fr James and I have discussed this often. In fact, we were intending to have week two of a three week preaching series on stewardship this weekend, but we deferred it because of the recent events that have followed the horrific new out of Kamloops. We hear you, our parishioners, and we share in your abhorrence at this past. We further acknowledge that it is a past we must continue to confront. We are sorry. We join you in our collective act of repentance and your desire to seek healing for the pain and suffering our beloved church has caused so many.
Professor David Deane, a parishioner of our parish, said recently that the danger of apologies is that it creates the impression that the issues are in the past. This is not a past issue.” He went on to explain the systemic nature of the issue that is before us as we confront our colonial past. The survivors need a firm commitment from us to today, to assist in the long journey of healing for future generations. It’s a journey that we must be committed to walking.
He said of the general sense in Canada that, “We have a tremendous desire to absolve ourselves of the ongoing guilt of the fact that the child mortality rate is currently far higher in first nations communities and life expectancy is far lower. Those are real, live issues in 2021. And, one of the real dangers we have, is seeing this conducted by monstrous figures from the past, both inside and outside the Church, is that it absolves us of the responsibility of the here and the now… the injustice needs to stop now!”
Fr James and the entire Parish Leadership Team takes this very seriously. Here’s what we want to do about it:
a. We recommend that each one of us read the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation’s report. It’s easily found online.
b. Today, the parish will send out a Frequently Asked Questions letter that was written by Archbishop Dunn. Please read it for a more detailed discussion concerning the Church’s response.
c. Fr. James and I are committed to a fall or winter gathering, where we host a panel discussion, open to all parishioners, to help us learn about Indigenous issues. Through this process we seek help in how to discern how we as a parish can participate, in tangible ways, to the healing that is needed.
So, what’s our way through this. Be true to who we say we are.
Do we represent a religion that has lost its way?
Do we represent state power?
Do we represent a religion that can’t wait to get in bed with state power so as to get closer to the levers of worldly power?
Or, do we represent Jesus Christ standing in the middle refusing that which is to his left and that which is to his right, as he leads us in the way, the truth and the life.
On a day when the Church celebrates the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, when we can’t be here together, to receive the Body and Blood of Christ, let us commit ourselves to acts of repentance and healing, in truth and reconciliation.
Here's a link to me delivering this homily:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSFlTJ6V-tQ&t=11s
