Care for a Courageous Conversation?

This week I had the opportunity to attend a Healing of Memories International workshop led by Father Michael Lapsley, an amazing man who knows a lot about pain and healing. It was a rich experience -- an opportunity to share in the sorrows and struggles we all face as human beings and take a step forward in my own journey. We can tend to minimize our own pain when faced with horrific tragedies like the one recently experienced by brothers and sisters from James Smith Cree Nation who attended this week's workshop. But we all learned that pain is pain, and healing is possible when we are able to face it and eventually let it go. Of course, that is the work of a lifetime.

Please don't forget to keep James Smith Cree Nation, Weldon, and their community members both in and out of hospital in your prayers as they continue on the road to healing.

Father Lapsley is here for a few more days, and will lead a special event tomorrow evening at St. Faith's Anglican Church (11725 93 Street) from 6-9 pm here in Edmonton. Edmonton and area friends truly interested in healing, truth, and reconciliation, please consider coming. Father Michael's work in South Africa and around the world can help us here on Turtle Island... recent events show us how much healing is needed in our world and in the lives of all who live in this land.

All are welcome.

The most recent suffering

Last night I listened to the voices of the parents of the young man who killed 11 people on James Smith Cree Nation, and cried along with them.

It's a parent's deepest suffering to lose a beloved child, never mind two children.

And to have to watch as children make choices that lead to destruction not only for themselves, but for others too, is gut-wrenching. You could hear it in the apologies and sobs of Myles and Damien's parents.

A friend of mine tells me that he has reached "saturation point" with all these Indigenous issues, and wonders what happened that sets their suffering on a higher rung of the existential ladder than anyone else's. Suffering is universal, he says, so how is theirs worse? 

It's a mindset that's easy to fall into if we live in a world of white privilege. 

While it's true that we all have our heartaches and sorrows because suffering is universal, what makes the trauma of Indigenous peoples so much worse is that they have been treated as less than human and ignored for generations by settler peoples (our ancestors included) who, knowingly or unknowingly, saw Indigenous lands and livelihoods as free for the taking. 

It's centuries -- not weeks or months or years of injustice -- that has led to the gangs, drugs, addictions, and violence that took 12 people down, including two sons of the couple whose hearts are forever broken. 

Our hearts need to break with theirs before we can really understand and true healing can begin. 

If suffering is universal, I pray that healing can be, too.

A new neighbour shows up

Pope Francis arrives in his Fiat

He's just a few blocks from here. His cortege arrived yesterday at about 1 p.m., a long line of about two dozen vehicles -- suburbans, Prestige sprinter vans, and two ambulances -- surrounding his little white fiat with the papal flag. 

For three days before he arrived, we heard a couple dozen RCMP and Edmonton Police on motor bikes practicing their motorcade skills, sirens blaring. I actually called the Catholic Pastoral Centre and suggested that Pope Francis probably didn't want to sound like a fifteen-alarm fire.

This morning my mom and I watched from her front window as he and his cortege left for Maskwacis to begin his "pilgrimage of penance" among Indigenous People here. Then I went home and watched the ceremonies online, beginning with a time of prayer at the Ermineskin Cemetery, and a simple apology to the residential school survivors gathered there. The emotion reflected in the faces of the elders listening to the Pope's speech made me cry.

His presence here on Turtle Island (North America) is a continuation of the fulfillment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Call to Action #58, asking for the Pope to apologize for the Church's complicity in the devastation caused by Residential Schools. But as the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, RoseAnne Archibald, said, apologies are only as good as the actions that follow.

Still, we can be hopeful that, as this week's papal visit progresses, Pope Francis will speak more and more boldly about the steps the Catholic Church must take to make amends for centuries of injustices. It was the Church's Papal Bulls that led to Terra Nullius, the belief that non-European lands were empty and available for exploitation, allowing for the colonization of Indigenous lands and the subjugation of peoples and their cultures not just in Canada, but around the globe. 

If Pope Francis can open the Vatican Records related to the experience of Indigenous peoples and clearly admit to centuries of church disrespect, neglect, and injustice toward them, he will, in my books, live up to the radical example of the humble little saint from which he takes his papal name. Even better would be if he would liquidate some of the Church's many financial assets to actually finance programs that help suffering Indigenous people to heal physically, mentally, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. 

St. Francis of Assisi stood up against all forms of violence in his day -- he understood that all of creation is beloved of God, and he walked away from wealth and prestige to stand with the people of his time who were ignored by those who held power.

Dear neighbour for three days, Pope Francis, please do what is most needed. There are so many praying for you. Indigenous people and me included.

Growing like the garden on Canada Day

I do love living in Canada... but I am only too aware of the way our country is divided right now between those who want to fight for the freedoms they feel have been trampled because of past health mandates and the collapsing economy, and those who wish the freedom convoy folks would go to Ukraine and come to an understanding of how free we Canadians actually are. 

I am also very mindful of how the establishment of Confederation 155 years ago was a trampling of the rights of our First Peoples, and the centuries of pain inflicted on them by colonists (European settlers and everyone who came after) make it hard to feel like celebrating.

So I am having a low-key Canada Day, putzing around in my garden between rain showers, and moodling in my mind about this beautiful stolen land we call home, and ways to live in appreciation of the freedom many of us enjoy as Treaty People. We have much to be grateful for, but also many reparations to make. There's much to ponder as we try to heal the divides among us, to welcome truth and work for reconciliation, and to be open to newcomers fleeing places of conflict. 

Happy Canada Day. May we all open our hearts to listen to one another, and create cooperation and healing in our country.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share two videos that show how much things can grow in one month. Can we grow bigger hearts as Canadians the way my fava beans grow? I think so.