Posts filed under 'Violence'
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 14th, 2008
Anger, articulate and otherwise, percolated up through the speeches at Saturday’s rally for justice at the Legislature. The anger was directed at a succession of governments and a justice system, together perceived as coddlers of young killers. The message: when it comes to youthful perpetrators of violent crime, judges and legislators are milksops, afraid of ramping up minimum penalties and ambivalent about meaningful consequences.
No one there was ready to take up a vigilante stance, but the frustration of deferred justice was great enough to wonder about this, at least as a future subtext. Was this an option discussed around the tables of homes that had lost a son, daughter, friend? If so, entirely understandable, perhaps even cathartic.
I had the feeling though, sitting there on the edge of the small crowd, that people were wrestling with a Cohenesque, “things sliding in all directions” future. Not yet apocalyptic, but close. People were asking, how did we get here and where are we going? When murderers were doing one sixth of a twenty-five year life sentence, when cutthroats were getting out on bail and allowed to roam for two years before being called back to an ineffectual trial, when punks with bats take the conscious-life of an elderly man and are hand slapped and given warnings as they head out on their parole, where then is the light of the future?
There are other forces at work of course, economic and bureaucratic, but primarily, the gradual reduction of penalties for violent crime is a consequence of our increased sensitivity to victims. It’s not that we don’t recognize that those who have been maimed or killed, or those who have lost a son or daughter, sibling or friend, to violent crime are truly victims. It’s that we have also come to see that perpetrators of violent crime may also have been victims. And we believe justice isn’t done if a crime is taken only at face value. The “story” of violence and crime, we believe, is beneath the surface. As well, because we see the indicted as at least part victim, we believe in rehabilitation. This we take as a sign of a progressive society.
But for those who have lost someone intimately close to them this is nothing but an egregious twist of logic. Evidence of a screwed-up society. And while I couldn’t agree with all that was said, neither could I disparage or ignore any of the voices.
Where and when will justice and mercy kiss? I don’t know. Until we enter an age of wisdom and peace, we will have to strive to weigh things rightly to keep from entering the alternative. From the slain to the slayer, from the injured to the inured, from grieving family to grieving family we will need to come together with our scales and balances, not mentioning forgiveness, just working on fairness as a start toward other possibilities. And fairness requires that we listen first to the voices of the aggrieved. By taking away their recourse to justice there will be nothing for them to offer back.
March 29th, 2008
Here's a link to my article in today's Edmonton Journal. The article is a reflection of my (attempted) Easter poem.
Icon of the crucifixion of Christ; of unknown origen.
March 23rd, 2008
The following poem was written in response to a friend's far more clever poem. (See Holy Hangover comments.) In the likely event that my poem fails, an upcoming article will hopefully give it some crutches.
Osiris, Isis, Horus
shrouded in sacred awe
and swollen footed Oedipus
bearing our hidden flaw
You god's of death and life
phantasmic transformation
upon the canvass of strife
once goats, now exaltation
Yet flung among antiquity
is Jesus' low-brow myth
while crude and poor symbolically
are victims revealed herewith
O Adonis, child eternal
shield us from place and time
since before myth was ritual
but first came our crime
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.
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.
February 4th, 2008
I thought of you that morning last week when we sang "Open the eyes of my heart Lord."
I saw you, as if time hadn’t passed. Saw you walking the way you did…one long step, one short, always compensating for your severe lean. You walked with your school books clasped tightly to your breast bone as if for balance, as if for protection, a shield from the brutal epithets. God, how you needed a shield.
Who were you when you were you? When you didn’t have to guard your every glance and step? When you were with your one friend, or at home, with your family? Who were you when you didn’t have to concentrate on surviving?
You were called "rooster" or "hen" or "chicken," not because you were afraid–although perhaps you were–but because of the way you were hunched over. Your one shoulder blade, like a wing standing out on its own, and all that misplaced muscle and tissue, everything horizontal, distended, throwing you forward and to the right. Your body a listing hull…and the names.
Did you survive? Did your friend stay true to you…the one who walked down the Junior High halls with you? Who was she?…I don’t remember. I know now she was brilliantly defiant and as beautiful as you. How I wish I could ask your forgiveness for my silence, my complicity.
Why now, after thirty-nine years, do you glide into my memory on the strength of a song? Your image, invoking shame, guilt and tears. All the names you were given and I didn’t know the right name and now recall I never took the time to learn it.
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.
November 19th, 2007
Saturday, at the cabin, I listened to two Blue jays argue. They broke off only to fly to a new tree and a new perch where they took up the quarrel anew. Blue jays, or Western-scrub jays, which these could have been, are territorial and so I considered their argument exactly that. Eventually, on one tree, the argument resolved itself. A bilateral agreement was birdally enacted.
I share this little patch of ground with occupants I didn’t invite but were here long before I was. I take comfort in knowing they are welcomed here. I take comfort in the growing squirrel midden under the spruce and beside the old wooden-spoked wagon wheel. I take comfort and am warmed by the circle of fire built from the Black poplar that have changed form and now lie on the floor of the woods.
The smallest of arachnids as landed on my page. Smaller than print, the brown spider fits nicely inside a lower-case “o.” I lower my book and let her float to the ground.
It’s hard to imagine from my chair by the embers that the world is bleeding over unresolved territorial quarrels. But then, perhaps not. I have blood on my own hands. How often have I peered through hooded eyes to reach out and grasp a centrepiece or a moment not meant for me?
But somewhere there is liberty. Somewhere there is a fascinating freedom. But it is not within my self. It is in another. I am only and always set free by another. Someone outside of my rivalrous self. Someone moving beyond rivalry.
The Blue jays’ migration remains a mystery. One will stay far north and another will fly. Some will stay one year and leave the next. One will migrate on que–in season, and another will arrive. I like to imagine the jays’ migration mystery an elaborate system to keep themselves free of damaging ongoing territorial disputes.
Previous Posts
The Veranda collapsed under the weight of a winter snow, so I built a Front Porch.
