Posts filed under 'Peace'
June 13th, 2008
As a follow-up to the Federal apology to aboriginals, here’s a link to an article in the Surrey Leader that you’ll find insightful, realistic, and hopeful. The article contains an interview with Ernie Crey, author and Sto:lo activist. (…also my sister-in-law’s brother.)
But it was economic policies “designed to keep aboriginal people in poverty” that hit hardest and deepest, Crey says, virtually imprisoning aboriginal people on reserves in living conditions most non-aboriginal Canadians would never accept.
June 11th, 2008
Dear Prime Minister Harper, In light of the apology you will offer our First Nations people today, I thought it might be fitting for you to say these words:
Thank you to Wendy Morton, for sending me this picture/poem, and for permission to post it. (click on the picture to open)
This is one of 20 evocative poems that Wendy wrote, now on exhibit at the Alberni Valley Museum in B.C. She was given journals and archival photos to help her write the poems, many, like this one, where put onto the archival photos.
June 10th, 2008
Tomorrow our Prime Minister will offer an apology to Canada’s First Nations people. We can only hope he doesn’t embarrass Canadians by qualifying, in an way, what was an egregious, even genocidal-type crime, against an entire people. Chuck Strahl, Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs, is saying that won’t happen. He says Stephen Harper will spare no detail.
(Above: Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan Indian Industrial School, ca. 1885. Parents of Indian children had to camp outside the gates of the residential schools in order to visit their children.)
However, Rev. Kevin Annett is unimpressed with the apology, calling it a deception. Annett call’s what happened to Canada’s aboriginals, among other things, a “Canadian Holocaust.”
Far less clamorous is National Chief Phil Fontaine, who was himself a victim of physical and sexual abuse in the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School. Mr. Fontaine takes an optimistic view of the apology:
“Canada is now coming to terms with its dark past, a past that’s been covered up and hidden from its own citizens.”
“For first nations, it will restore our dignity because it will say we were unjustly wronged as a people over generations simply because of who we were.”
“The apology will affirm that we are as good as anyone.” (Globe&Mail)
I do appreciate Mr. Fontaine”s view and yet his words (and the context it brings to mind) strike me as infinitely sad.
I would encourage everyone to tune in to CBC or CPAC tomorrow afternoon at 3PM (EST) to hear the apology and be reminded of our collective past–be reminded, in fact, of our culpability. I pray that in some small way this process can cultivate dignity and perpetuate healing and grow mercy.
April 17th, 2008
Sadness comes in and recedes like the tide. Happiness on the other hand, catches you like a gleam from a lighthouse you didn’t know was out there.
Happiness comes in glimmers…as when listening to a melancholy Burt Jansch while cooking Basmati rice. While at a stop light, talking about the weather with a bottle picker on a bike. At seeing a name beside an e-mail. During a long silence. While walking across an empty lot, the morning sun low and at your back, and watching a thin 30 foot shadow meet the future ahead of you. While giving away a few dollars to a street-survivor you’ve known for years. While shopping for cheese in Safeway. While reading an offer, over coffee, of shedding a burden, taking up a yoke that’s easy. At the prospect of finding rest. For no reason at all.
April 12th, 2008
The Imam is tall, slender, academic but in a wholly engaging way. The Pastor has a boxer’s build and is as fiery and passionate as a Pentecostal can be. The Imam’s eyes light up with experience and intelligence as he speaks of his Islamic faith. The pastor, reflecting on Christianity’s teaching on peace, radiates an urgent and hard won love. The Imam looks at the pastor with the tenderness of a mother and says he likes him even though he’s a Christian. The pastor returns the gaze and then looking back at the camera, says, “I love him because my faith teaches me to love my brothers. He is my brother, we are husband and wife, for the sake of ourselves and of our children we must stay together, we must not separate.”
This exchange of humanity goes on even as they speak of the teachings of their diverse faiths. A diversity says the pastor–without any note of paradox–that allows them to live together. And they have been living and traveling together for the past 12 years.
This dialogue and human exchange is rare enough. Now consider that the contextual experience, the immediate history of each man is one of having personal and community property burned and looted, and as having lost family members to a raging violence endorsed and perpetrated by each of these men upon the other and upon their perspective religious communities.
I had the opportunity to view this remarkable documentary the other evening at All Saints. It’s a film of reconciliation–of how perpetrators of violence become instigators of peace–and it should be required viewing in mosques and churches across the country.
When you consider the pressure upon these men to take revenge, to keep the cycle of reciprocal violence going, when you consider the slender thread of trust that had to hold all the these opposites and the oppositions together, that had to overcome the welling up of unbidden hate…as for example–in the early stages of their relationship, the very real temptation the pastor had to smother the sleeping Imam with his own pillow–you understand you are in the presence of something like a modern miracle.
You understand that in some deeper sense both are Imams, and both are pastors. They have become brothers. Not because either has given up their faith. In fact, we come to see that it’s precisely a closely practised faith that allows each man a connecting point beyond their situations.
March 21st, 2008
The conjunction of Good Friday and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is appropriate. Racism, like discrimination of all kinds, is a symptom of the soul-sickness that was finally and forever uncovered by Good Friday. This “original sin,” our primal brokenness, has to do with our distorted desire (Girard) and our deeply sensed existential lack (Kierkegaard). A lack we attempt to slake through acquisition and self-elevation (twisted desire). That’s the abstract.
Here’s the personal: Good Friday is not about a vicarious substitution that saves me from a wrathful God. (The only wrath going on in the Easter story is ours.) It’s about a shot to the heart that cracks open my habit of trying to fill my “lack of peace,” my lack of self, by stepping on someone else. And concordantly, it’s about my willingness to be co-opted by any movement, club, church, campaign, crowd, that defines itself on the basis of being not like some other group, and so lifts me, by virtue of my belonging to it, to a status above the fray and field. A status that I cling to through violence, if necessary. Violence of any form that I’ll always have a way of justifying, “redeeming.”
This day, designated by the UN to focus on the problem of racism, I just discovered, marks a horrendous event that took place on March 21, 1960 in Sharpeville, South Africa, where 69 peaceful demonstrators were killed during a protest against apartheid.
Here was a case where societal disintegration–the fomentation inherent in apartheid–was resolved through the identification and killing of a chosen victim, (the group of peaceful protesters). Beyond instilling fear through a show of force it was hoped that the killing would reinforce and re-form the social unanimity and cohesion of the National Party and the white populace. In fact it was the beginning of the end of apartheid.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, the reason this kind of scapegoating no longer works is because of the Easter event. The redemptive violence on Good Friday is of the same order as that of racism. But because of Easter the justifications for racism and discrimination of any form fail. The “victim” is now visible.
And if the victim can no longer be hidden through justification we are without excuse if we refuse to do nothing. And so Good Friday also exposes our refusal to grow, or our acquiescence to immaturity within the shelter of a non-growing group–the same group that also shields us from the knowledge of our immaturity.
Good Friday invites us to grow. The Easter event asks us discard our notion that creation is a completed event in the distant past and instead see creation as an ongoing event in the present where we are continually being called into a great forgiving and creative love.
March 15th, 2008
Two stories from the Reuters news service, reprinted in today’s Edmonton Journal, should bring a measure of hope to our tattered world. (These are Grow Mercy news stories.)
The first story is about Senegal’s president, Abdoulaye Wade. His county is hosting the world’s biggest Islamic conference, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). And in Abdoulaye Wade’s address to the Islamic organization he said believed the past antagonism between Islam and Christianity should be consigned to history, and not be allowed to trigger a clash of civilizations. “The era of crusades and jihads is over and Muslims and Christians should strive to coexist and not allow extremists to drag the world into a war of religions.” Senegal practises a tolerant brand of Islam and Wade publicly opposes those who wage war in the name of Islam. It’s moderate leaders like Abdoulaye Wade that desperately need to be heard, and it’s a news story like this that needs airing on networks like CNN.
The second story is about “atheist China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs issuing a licence to the Taiwan Buddhist charity group Tzu Chi.The Buddhist group has been quietly conducting charity work in China for almost two decades. This is the stuff of history because Tzu Chi is the first foundation in China in which a non-mainland resident serves as the legal representative.
Of further interest to me is that the main reason China’s “atheist Communist rulers” have made the “landmark concession,” is so they can “use Buddhism to help curb rising social unrest and help fill an ideological vacuum which has spawned corruption and eroded ethics in the post-Mao era.”
Is this a recognition that atheism, without something like a humanist manifesto, without something that points beyond itself, without something like a transcendent view–something which according to Richard Dawkin’s et al, is not atheism–is in the end impoverished and socially debilitating? Or is this just China’s experience of imposed atheism?
But the real story remains the work of the Tzu Chi Foundation. For those of us who used to think Buddhist philosophy always mitigated against any real efforts of social compassion and practical relief, the Tzu Chi foundation should put us straight.
(Above: Tzu Chi relief team caring for maimed Palestinian refugee children.)
February 7th, 2008
For my kick off to Lent I read Sam Harris’, "Letter to a Christian Nation." It’s the new edition released just last month with an afterword–where he reiterates his disdain for moderate religion and gives some thought to the origin of religion…which he was just coming to at the end of the previous edition.
And it’s here, on his ruminations on religion and blood sacrifice, that I want to call Sam up and say, please, please, read Rene Girard …and by the way, it’s okay, he’s not a theologian, he’s an historian, ethnologist, and an anthropologist.
Harris says, "Some researchers have speculated that religion itself may have played an important role in getting large groups of prehistoric humans to socially cohere." Well, Girard, has done peerless research in this exact area, but he has done so much more. He has taken his discoveries and worked forward, showing how the expulsion of a victim, and the resultant "peace," enforces both the belief of the guilt of the victim and the victim’s paradoxical power to bring peace. Social unity is restored over the divinized surrogate victim and a ritual of remembrance (more sacrifices, prohibitions, myths) is encoded into the culture. This is how religion got every ancient human culture off the ground.
Of course to Harris the purpose of religion has long past. And in this important but incomplete understanding of religion he is exactly right. Now if only he could take this research he seems to agree with and stay with it a little longer…begin to sit with the theory that scapegoating, sacrifice of the one for the sake of the all, is everywhere transcribed in antiquity as myth, and that scripture itself in this sense, is also mythological (justifies violence), but is finally revelatory. Revelatory in that we are confronted with the fact that scapegoating is still indelibly inscribed in us. Here’s James Alison:
Professor Girard had assumed that the Jewish and Christian sacred texts would show exactly the same thing as all other ancient texts and myths – the threat of collapsing social unity leading to violence and the emergence of a new peace around the cadaver of the victim. To his amazement he found that although they did exactly that – they really are structured around sacralised violence – there was a unique and astonishing difference: the Jewish texts, starting with Cain and Abel – gradually dissociate the divinity from participation in the violence until, in the New Testament, God is entirely set free from participation in our violence – the victim is entirely innocent, and hated without cause – and indeed God is revealed not as the one who expels us, but the One whom we expel, and who allowed himself to be expelled so as to make of his expulsion a revelation of what he is really like, and of what we really, typically do to each other, so that we can begin to learn to get beyond this.
The forms of Religion railed against by Harris are indeed in need of deconstruction. And if God is a capricious God of wrath and blood sacrifice, then I am an atheist. But a move to the logical positivistic philosophy of Harris will not get at the root of violence. In my thinking, the key for this is in being confronted with our ways of vicitmizing and the acquisitive desire that spawns it. This is the revelation found in the gospel, through which we can see our way free of hatred, abuse, torture, and all forms of violence.
January 31st, 2008
I’m in LA, away from the cold. Away from the bone cracking temperatures that disallow airplanes to take off because it’s too frigid for the de-icing machine to take the frost off the wings. The magic degree for that to happen is minus 37. That temp was fortunately reached; but only after the sun rose and began its climb to the late January zenith. A few hours later the natives were telling me, "It’s cold here in LA.
From climate to culture, relativities abound. And what I mean when I use the word relative is not that everything is reducible to essentially the same thing, but that my everyday experience of life is relative to my cultural and geographical context. So while the measurement of temperature is not a relative concept, what is, is our experiences of what is hot and cold. But of course, herein–my relative experience–lies the seeds of another’s incomprehension. An incomprehension that can only be overcome through a shared experience.
I was confronted with my own incomprehension at the Russ Reid conference I’m attending. And it exposed within me a nervous protectionism regarding my job and Hope Mission that I won’t go into, but only say that I needed to recall the Californian who thought he was experiencing cold; because, of course he was. In this small act of recalling, I was, I realized, beginning to enact a shared experience.
How is it possible to have a shared experience of faith, of culture, of tradition? (These are the biggies.) Or how is it possible to have a shared experience of poverty, abuse, ill-health, emotional manipulation, addiction, mental breakdown, and on and on? Frankly, how is it possible to feel the viewpoint of the one in front of you?
Isn’t this why we’ve been given an imagination? Because we can’t live inside the hearts and minds, or even the shoes, of our acquaintances, neighbours, or co-workers, or even our friends and relatives. But we can imagine what it might be like, if we care to take the time to ask…and listen. Perhaps a good measure of our fear, our protectionism, our combativeness, is both birthed and nursed by lazy imaginations.
And so, my recipe…of sorts. Take a poultice of creative imagination, mixed with the essence of empathy–about a cup–and apply it to the welt of incomprehension. (A caveat, cooking, baking, whatever, has everything to do with timing and context.)
This acknowledged, know this: if the incomprehension exists both ways–which is often the case–the use of this poultice, should you be the one to make the overture, will make you vulnerable. This is however, the vulnerability practiced by Jesus and the long line of peace-making saints.
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January 17th, 2008
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
and righteousness will look down from the sky. (Psalm 85)
Moishe the Beadle said to a young Elie Wiesel that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer. (Night, Elie Wiesel)
If this is right, then, as the Beadle knew, it is our questions that draw us close to God, not our answers. And not even God’s answers. Because God’s answers–when they are not merely our own answers thrown up against the sky–dwell in mystery and misapprehension at the depths of our hearts until at some tear in time, or at the end of our life, or in the next, they bloom, and seem to have always been understood. On that soil questions and answers are indivisible.
But if this is true about questions, well, then our search must not be for the grand answer(s) but for the right questions. Because questions make a path to the garden of mystical truth where love and faithfulness spring up from the ground and where righteousness and peace kiss.
Now, this is of course a mystical move but how else can I "understand" things I can’t understand? How else can one endure the brutish side of humans and still have faith? For Wiesel, who witnessed and suffered the unspeakable, God was killed in Birkenau, and Auschwitz. And even though I believe what the young Wiesel held true, how can I argue with his giving it up? And while I believe that the life of Christ holds the key to the questions of suffering and violence, in the presence of Wiesel I could not speak a word, but only listen and grieve.
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The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
