A couple days ago I had the honour of reading with three poets, each one outside the insular advantage of my own culture. And as much as I consider myself enlightened and aware, I still came away shaken. I was again brought face to face with my ignorance, particularly my early ‘Christian missional’ ignorance. And while in my head I believe I have some understanding, what still creeps in when I’m not vigilant, is a kind of naïve, subconscious expectation that people can, with effort of course, individually or collectively get over the trauma of childhood abuse, specifically, racially motivated childhood abuse. Of course there is no ‘getting over’. Trauma of this depth is transgenerational. There may be healing, there may be emotional integration (and there are beyond inspiring stories about this), but how it happens, what is looks like, can never be on ‘my’ terms. What I can do is help make sure the memory and legacy of our nation’s residential schools is not forgotten. 

I came away shaken, but grateful, and with a renewed understanding that everyday must be Orange Shirt Day.

When I Heard the Poet Read

When I heard the poet tell about how he was thankful for being hit with a green birch switch by a woman in a black robe and a white collar, because when he grew up it made him extra tough for life on the street, and how thankful he was for another robed woman who needed to step on his five-year-old hands while he was playing, because it helped him see how he would need to hide for the rest of his life, hide too, the things he liked to do, especially his freehand drawings and his writings, and when I heard him say how thankful he was that Jesus came to visit him at night and talk to him using the voice of Father X., who always wore a big crucifix, and how Father X. made him stand and take off his pajama bottoms and then touched him and lifted his own robe too, and all the while Jesus just kept on quietly talking, saying, “God is love and God is good and see how God shows his love,” and how grateful he was because this helped him learn about relationships and about intimacy — then I understood the old man I used to sometimes talk to on my way to my job at Hope Mission, who answered me saying, “I try to never sleep inside,” who sat in front of Starbucks on Jasper, who used to ask me for a dollar, who was the same man I saw when I used to go to noon Eucharist, who sat cross-legged beside the high heavy oak doors of St Peter’s Basilica holding a cardboard sign that said, “Jesus is a liar and a cheat and a snake,” who used to thank me for the change I sometimes put in his upturned Oilers cap, and who always used to say, just before I disappeared behind those big oak doors, “Have a nice day anyway.”