Sep 29 | Jesus Loves the Little Children

This is the last entry in the three I wrote during the week the TRC met in Vancouver. I participated in the walk two days later on Sunday, September 22nd, and it was a triumphant if soggy completion to the Vancouver events. Our work is by no means finished, but we’ve begun it and have added our own accomplishments to the work of a nation’s lifetime. God was with us the whole time. I could see Her in the faces of all who were there.

One of my earliest memories is of lying in my bed in the dark listening to my mum recite the Lord’s Prayer. I treasure this memory because it is the earliest conscious memory I have of my mother’s voice. When I think of it, I feel warm, safe, and protected. I know who God is and who I am: loved, worthy of love, and worthy of instruction in a faith tradition that has existed in my family for generations.

Years later, when I learn that First Nations children were stolen from their parents, beaten for speaking their mother tongues, and separated from their cultures and traditions, my heart breaks a little at this memory. I try to imagine what it must have felt like to have only the memory of my mother’s voice as I lie alone in a cold bed far from home with the sounds of weeping children around me in the dark.

I heard twelve testimonies from survivors today, six in the Forum and six in the Church’s Listening Area. I was especially moved and disturbed by a man who stood in the middle of the listening circle, turned restlessly, and called out for “the Catholics.”

A seated nun, her face crumpled with tears, raised her hand. He addressed her directly and pointed at her. Later, he said, “She didn’t do it. I know who did it. But she’s from the same group. She’s with them.” I saw her nod, and wept along with her.

As he left the circle, she took his hand, and they stood there for a moment, looking at each other.

I was reminded of the words in Amos 5, “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.” My mind unravels the words and re-knits them:

“I hate, I despise your commissions, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your apologies and your blankets, I will not accept them; and the offerings of well-being of your cheques and settlements I will not look upon…But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

It is hard to teach harp later that day. As I sit in the studio beside my student – a shy 8-year-old Asian kid – I imagine her brought in pretty new clothes with her twin sister into a cold grey brick building. I imagine her led to a chair and her long black hair cut short and institutional like the little girls I saw in photos. I imagine her separated from her family. I imagine her little hand strapped for asking someone where her sister is in the only language she knows. I imagine, when she makes a simple mistake during the lesson, that instead of saying, “Oh, not quite like that – watch my hands, I’ll show you again,” I say, “You’ll never learn. Stupid Indian.”

When she gets up to leave I want to hug her and tell her how precious she is. I thank God that if I did that she would probably say, “Uh…yeah. Now let go of me,” instead of crying or covering her face to hide the shame written into her by hard leather straps and harder angry voices.

Later that night, as I read Psalm 74 during Evening Prayer, I weep:

“Your foes have roared within your holy place;
they set up their emblems there.
^  At the upper entrance they hacked
the wooden trellis with axes.
And then, with hatchets and hammers,
they smashed all its carved work.
They set your sanctuary on fire;
they desecrated the dwelling-place of your name,
bringing it to the ground.
They said to themselves, ‘We will utterly subdue them’;
they burned all the meeting-places of God in the land.”

This is the voice of every First Nations person that came home to a village with no children, that found totem poles torn down and the sacred Potlatch outlawed.

We have been the foes. We have desecrated their faith, their offerings to the Creator, different from ours but no doubt accepted as the same if we truly believe in a loving God. We, like those we have wronged, have been made sick from what we have perpetrated. We, the oppressors, also need to heal, but we need to heal from who we once were, who our history often still tells us to be.

Could there possibly be forgiveness for us?

Thankfully, we know the answer. I found it in the reading that followed, which happened to be Matthew’s Beatitudes. We are given the lessons that can change us, and the fact that most of the white faces I recognized that day belonged to church people and people from VST tells me that, however many difficult steps there are left to walk, we are committed to walking them.

I know I can’t change what has happened in the past, just as I can’t change the colour of my skin, or the fact that my own family has directly or indirectly profited from this shameful past for generations.

But I can teach my own child in my own language to respect all children from all languages, and rewrite the language of shame into a language of love for all children – young and old.