Sep 29 | “I need angels,” (St. Michael and All Angels Sermon, September 29th 2019)

All week since learning we were celebrating St. Michael and All Angels, I’ve had the same refrain stuck in my head:

“I need angels, I need angels

I lost my wings, can’t fly

Save me with grace

I need angels, I need angels

I lost my wings, can’t fly

Give me some faith.”

This is from a song by the all-Indigenous roots-rock band, Midnight Shine. The singer, Adrian Sutherland of the Attawapiskat First Nation, wrote the song “I Need Angels” after returning home after his annual spring hunt and discovering there had been a rash of suicides and suicide attempts among the children and young people in the village – almost one per day in the month he had been gone. This is a familiar story in Indigenous communities that exists alongside other manifestations of intergenerational trauma. Suicide rates for Indigenous youth are 5 to 7 times higher than non-Indigenous youth. Among the Inuit, one of the northernmost Indigenous groups in Canada, they are some of the highest in the world at 11 times the national average.

Adrian is candid about his mixed feelings about the song, saying that talking about the issue in the wake of the song’s release is incredibly draining. But then, he says, he will receive a note from someone who talks about how much the song has touched them, or saved them, and it helps him keep going.

He sings, “There’s a sadness inside of me no one can see / I don’t know how to run away or break these chains / It’s a darkness I don’t want taking my light / it won’t leave me alone like a dark shadow / I need angels, I need angels.”

I mention all of this because newly consecrated Archbishop Mark Macdonald of the self-determining Indigenous Anglican Church and the Anglican Church of Canada put out a call on September 24^th for the church to observe four days of prayer, from September 27^th to September 30^th, which is Orange Shirt Day. On Orange Shirt Day, we remember the children who never came home from residential schools because they died there, or, like 12-year-old Chanie Wenjack, died trying to escape. Tomorrow, at 10am EST, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Ottawa will read the first known names of children lost to the schools at the Canadian Museum of History, for the first time. All Anglican churches across Canada have been asked to remember these children in prayer at their Sunday service today.

A message from the church to the children who didn’t return home runs as follows,

“Our dear brothers and sisters: We have missed you being with us, so very much and for so long. There have been times when we have cried in loneliness for you.  We have felt hurt and pain, thinking of your suffering. There have been times when we cried to God for you and for justice. Now, we join together to surround you with our very best thoughts and prayers, praying for you and for the very best for you.  We also pray for ourselves, who miss you so, and for the Land, that needs God’s healing. We pray that you would be at rest and peace. We remember you now. We will always remember you.”

There is, of course, a link between these lost children and those lost to suicide. While it is so important to remember the church and state’s sins of the past, we must not believe that the work is done. Indigenous children are also twice as likely to be apprehended by the Ministry of Children and Family Development as non-indigenous children. In one notable case from earlier this year, a newborn infant was seized by family services from the hospital in which it was born. The officers claimed neglect, because the mother was not present with the baby. This was because she was recovering from the anaesthetic from her C-section. There are so many Indigenous children in care that the government cannot even find housing for all of them, and so sometimes teenagers have been housed in hotel rooms alone for months at a time. The work of reconciliation will be the work of many generations, for the damage done was done over many generations.

So what does all of this have to do with angels and Jacob’s ladder?

Most of you may know that the word “angel” means “messenger.” We get our English word from the Greek word “angelos.” The word the Hebrew Bible uses is “malak,” the same word used for human messengers, but we know that angels are different because of the reactions people have to them in the text. The first thing most angels say upon seeing a person is, “Do not be afraid,” which suggests they must be rather frightful, but sometimes they are simply described as “men,” like the three guests who approached Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre, or the visitors hosted by Lot at Sodom. Again, we only know they are more than men by the reactions of those who see them: in those cases, extreme hospitality, suggesting that both Lot and Abraham recognized they were more than mortal.

Midnight Shine singer Adrian calls on angels to save him from the dark shadow of depression. Their connection to the divine as messengers of God’s favour makes them a fair candidate for this role. Gabriel is a herald of God’s incarnation among us, and angels are also heralds of Jesus’ resurrection, surely the best news creation has ever received. They bring hope for the future. In this way, we can see how the Indigenous children we remember today have become angels, in that they call us from beyond death to create a Kingdom on earth where no child from any language, people, tribe, or nation, will ever be unloved.

But perhaps the greatest news about angels is that they can exist among us without being seen – until we do see them, and like Jacob and Nathanael are filled with awe. Surely all of us have experienced one of those moments when a person suddenly made us turn our head quickly to search for a halo, or when our heart caught within our ribcage because we thought we heard the ruffle of unseen feathers in a holy place.

It’s one thing to discover angels among us. It’s something else entirely to actively search for Bethel.

Adrian in his vulnerability called out his need for angels…but in doing so, surely for some people he became an angel, speaking his own truth to provide a holy space for others to seek peace.

What would it look like for each of us to go forth from this place today on the hunt for Bethel? And what would it look like to consider that sometimes, perhaps without our knowing, Bethel is within us? Maybe within us there is a stone waiting to be consecrated in an early dusk, a stone which is really more like the foot of a ladder, upon which angels ascend and descend, using us to run wild over the earth?

I’ll close with a prayer for the children who didn’t return home, angels calling out that the Creator is love, has always been love, and wants the world to be charged with love for all children, in all places.

“Almighty God, we remember before you all of the children – our dear relatives – who did not return home from the Residential Schools.  May you remember their suffering and pain. May you grant them rest in the Land of Peace. May you surround them with beautiful and sacred love and joy. We pray to you also for ourselves and our children.  At a time like this we remember we need your Spirit so very much.  We pray to you, your Spirit prays through us, in the Name of Jesus, who suffered with us but raised us and will raise us with our departed loved ones. Amen.”

Sep 19 | Gifts from our mothers, gifts from our Mother (Letters from the Coast)

All I could find were a few paper cups, so I decided they would have to do. I zipped up my raincoat and went outside into the downpour, one cup in hand and the others in my pocket, toward the laurel bushes near the church where I work.

It didn’t even occur to me to wear gloves, which was pretty silly, but I managed to pick three cups worth of the bushes’ small black berries without any ill effects. I didn’t know how I’d get them home until I found a round glass vase in my office, which I rinsed out and filled nearly to the brim. On the bus ride home, I often covered the top of the vase with my hand, irrationally worried that someone would reach out and take one and just pop it in their mouth. Of course that didn’t happen, but I didn’t want to risk it.

Later the next day, in similar weather, I did the same thing – again, very recklessly, without gloves – at a stand of yew bushes.

I feel very silly not researching more before doing these things. Both laurel and yew bushes are toxic, including branches and leaves. Nothing happened, but clearly what I still need to learn is greater respect.

I decided to pick the laurel berries first after another plant walk I did with the inimitable Lori Snyder, a Métis herbalist who has offered her knowledge of plant life, particularly indigenous West Coast plants, to various communities in my Diocese for the last few years. I like to joke that with Lori, you can walk fifty feet and it will take an hour – so knowledgeable is she about plants, and so gracious and generous our Creator in the wildly abundant giving of medicines under our feet.

Within the last five years, I’ve become more interested in gardening, probably because we now live in an apartment which has a balcony that gets a bit of sun. With my own research and my few hours with Lori, I’ve become more adept at identifying local plants and their properties.

The last time I was with her, she was standing in a bit of shade on the lawn of St. Anselm’s Anglican Church, pointing out first a blackberry bush (“Blackberries have more iron in them than any other fruit – and look how she wants us to know that she has good things for us! See how she sends out her branches saying, ‘Heeeyyy here I am! Can’t see me? I’ll go over here! Do you see me? Here I am!”) and then a stand of laurel bushes.

“These are not native,” she said, “and they’re quite invasive. The berries are toxic, so we can’t eat them. BUT,” she added, smiling, “don’t let that stop you from finding a use for something! Berries which we can’t eat can be used for dyes!”

I had never considered that before.

Later, heading to work, I noticed two laurel hedges bordering one of the stone walkways on the building’s front lawn. They were chock full of little black berries.

My mind whirred. What if I collected these for dye?

Why not? Even animals wouldn’t eat them. They were just sitting there.

And what a wonderful gift for the friends I have who love this church – a scarf knitted from wool dyed with laurel berries from these very bushes!

I wanted it to be a surprise, which is why I harvested on the day I did, while my boss is on study leave and I would be alone.

The yew berries were to be more of an experiment, and I quickly thought that maybe I would avoid doing this in future, as gathering and preparing them was quite a chore and could be dangerous unless a great deal of care was taken. The berries themselves – which are not really berries but a fleshy type of  pine cone – are edible, but the seeds are incredibly poisonous and must be worked gently out of the flesh through crushing the berry or manipulated out with the tongue if eating. You can technically pass a seed through your system unharmed, but if it’s cracked, you’re cooked.

Why do all of this?

Some of it was just the delight of attempting a new skill.

But some of it is tied to another journey I’ve taken up, which is the journey of discovering my Gaelic roots.

My family is Scotch-Gaelic and English on both sides. Of course we’ve been Protestants for years, but go back far enough and obviously things were different. My English ancestors were zealous in their desire to unify their burgeoning empire, working to eradicate traditional languages such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and Cornish, and many ancient polytheistic traditions were swept up by Mother Church. But unlike the Indigenous peoples of the Coast Salish region, whose entire cultural identity was targeted for complete erasure, many of the traditional practices of my ancestors peoples were simply forgotten or suppressed out of embarrassment.

The Gaelic tradition of keening is a case in point – once a deeply important part of the death ritual, over time it fell out of favour due to church persecution of keeners (the fact that they were almost always women surely contributed to that), but also due to it finally being seen as “primitive” and “old-fashioned” and even “too sad.” Honestly I think a lot was lost in that letting go.

I began to study Celtic Reconstructionism, often a subset of Gaelic polytheism and other reclamations of ancient Celtic religion and rites, not long after moving into the place I live in now. I was most of all interested in learning about my own people in order to fully live into a life of reconciliation. When we are only given the categories of “white” and “other” to give us a narrative, we are doomed to constantly sacrifice nuance for power. Those whose histories and stories are stolen from them have less agency to do this – but I can very easily access the memories of my ancestors and the pieces of my ethnicity that were left behind in our scramble to embrace whiteness and the power within it. By breaking down this monoculture, I can embrace something that is mine, and not only approach non-white people in a more respectful manner, but better avoid appropriation.

I also wanted to challenge the notion that Christianity is an all-or-nothing kind of faith which, like whiteness, is not coloured by culture. The history of my faith with regards to traditional polytheism and Neo-Paganism is a thorny one (pardon the pun), but in my own heart it is not so simple; there are roses within. (Ask me about the moon – this ex-Wiccan has a weird and wonderful relationship with it!)

And so I began learning about not only local plants – the things that grow in the place where I did and do my growing – but the sacred plants of my ancestors, which include yarrow, rosemary, sage, thyme…and yew.

In dyeing my own fabric, I can also reclaim an ancient practice that deserves a revisiting, particularly as I reflect on how much more accessible and cheap it is than I ever thought possible. I only need berries (all of which I got for free), vinegar (which is cheap), and water, which I am most blessed to also receive easily (I know that is not the case for so many).

What a gift our ancestors give us – if only we would all choose to receive it.

Sep 15 | “A lynched God,” (Sermon, September 15th)

Some of you might know that yesterday was Holy Cross Day, a feast commemorating the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which was built on the spot where Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, apparently found a relic of the True Cross.

It’s a strange day, about as strange as wearing a cross, an instrument of torture and humiliating death. It’s easy to forget the truly radical and world-breaking truth at the heart of Christianity: that, as African-American theologian James H. Cone writes, the cross was the lynching tree of Jesus’ day.

What does it mean to worship a lynched God?

And what the heck does that have to do with the infinitely more accessible and mundane image of lost sheep and coins?

Well, part of this thread comes from a sort of personal drought, as I thought, “What can I possibly say about this passage, which Christianity loves so very much, to St. Margaret’s Cedar Cottage, a parish I feel truly understands, and does its best to practice the lessons within – St. Margaret’s Cedar Cottage, which maintains Hineni House, a place of banqueting and refuge for searching hearts from (now we can say) all over the world, within which I am so, so privileged to serve?”

Clearly, this required a fresh look at the parable.

Back to James H. Cone.

In 2011, Cone wrote The Cross and the Lynching Tree, which expanded on the notion that Jesus, a brown man living in occupied territory, was not necessarily killed via Satanic supernatural intervention in order to accomplish a catch-all forgiveness blast for personal sins. Instead, Cone says, a direct parallel between crucifixion and the lynching of black people in the 20^th century United States (and beyond) can be drawn. Although lynching was usually extra-judicial – that, is outside the legal system – Jesus’ execution was legally sketchy enough that it’s still a fair comparison. And perhaps the most important parallel to be made is that both crucifixion and lynching are used by domination systems as “correctives” for oppressed peoples. They say, “This is what will happen if you disobey the order which the powerful have set in place.” Punishment is applied whether the victim misbehaved or not. The facts of the case don’t matter, because the purpose is social regulation.

Good Friday is and has always been the way of the world, and will continue to be as long as hierarchy exists.

The Way of Jesus survived Good Friday because there was an Easter Sunday afterward – but there was also something else that kept that lovely weed growing, and that was the way Jesus’ disciples responded to the whole painful, wonderful saga of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

What’s so remarkable about our faith is that the disciples not only managed to find a redeeming purpose to the lynching of their teacher and friend, but that indeed, they began to say that it was God who had been lynched.

We know this because contemporary Roman detractors like Emperor Julian, Roman orator Marcus Cornelius Fronto, and several others all mocked Christians for worshiping an executed criminal and his cross. What’s most interesting about Christianity’s early detractors is that the one common thread among them is elitism: all refer to Christians as a gang of misfits, losers, and poorly educated ruffians.

Right on.

So it could be said, then, that the disciples, in their grief and awe, did what Jesus had taught them, and went searching for God.

Where was God among the ruins of their former family of itinerants and prodigals? Where was God in their abandoning of their beloved? Where was God in the horror of Good Friday?

The answer, they discovered, was that God was here, on the lynching tree.

God was in the most unlikely place imaginable – and not just once, but for all time, present to us and suffering beside us.

Okay, so what about the sheep and coins?

Well, how we usually interpret this parable is to say that God or Jesus is the shepherd, and later the woman (awesome), searching diligently for lost things, and receiving them with joy. And that’s wonderful and so worth remembering, whether we ourselves are lost or whether we are annoyed at being passed over for the ones who were lost.

Earlier this week, Jesus even said that wewere to become lost, for him. We were to leave everything behind – including the ones we love most – for his mission.

And what is that mission?

No less than what he himself does for us: searching.

Perhaps, as Jesus teaches these religious scholars and elites who criticize his ragged family of sinners, he is not only teaching them that God seeks out the lost. He is trying to tell them that we too must seek out the lost.

We are the shepherd who must seek out the lost sheep of the world by hacking through treacherous brush and thick night to bring them home.

We are the woman who must sweep the house and light the lamp to make sure every speck of silver is discovered and polished.

And friends, see how discovery merits celebration in these parables. See how the bringing home of the lost ones, in a sense, brings a heavenly banquet to us – better than that, instils in us such joy that we instigate the banquet.

You might say that in finding the lost and bringing them home, we not only enter into but create the Kingdom of God.

You might even say that in finding the lost and bringing them home, we have actually found God Herself.

For the God of the lynching tree, the scourged, detested, desaparecido God strung up on the byways of the world for all to pass by with horror and derision is surely the most lost thing of all.

And so we are called to seek out the lost, knowing that when we do, we ourselves find God and, in our joy, create God’s Kingdom.

What does any of this look like here, today?

Who is lost in the world we live in? And who beyond God is looking for them?

Who is missing from among us? Who is alone and afraid? Who is perhaps a little unseemly or awkward? Who is the one who calls to us without knowing she calls?

Sometimes they look like us. Those who struggle with all of the everyday struggles of a human life: grief, poverty, illness, loneliness, social isolation, disability.

Sometimes they look less like us.

The Indigenous woman whose children are taken from her by the state.

The black transwoman who can’t find love without contemplating the possibility of violence.

The queer kid kicked out of his house and living on the street.

The hard-to-house, the elders with dementia, the nonverbal, the angry and abandoned, the disaffected and forsaken.

It’s about showing that there is an alternative to a world that seeks to divide us: a world where each one is held in the arms of a loving heart, a world where generosity is the order of the day, a world where reckless love is taken for granted, a world where kindness and compassion are spent freely rather than hoarded for those we love – knowing, of course, that we are human and we’ll fail sometimes and it’s okay.

Most of the time, when we read this parable, we see ourselves, or others, as lost sheep and coins awaiting discovery by a loving, rejoicing God.

So let’s contemplate what it would be like to step into God’s shoes, and be the ones who search. Let’s risk the frustration and struggle of walking up hill and down dale, calling out for that lost sheep. Let’s risk the necessary annoyance of getting down on our hands and knees in cramped places, shining a lamp for the glint of that lost coin.

In the hard moments of that journey, we may cheer ourselves by remembering that the one we seek is not merely a child of God, but our beloved, the God who is lost, or maybe just playing hide and seek, who will rejoice at being found, and whose discovery will fill us up with such delight that we ourselves will make manifest the Kingdom, right here, right now.

Sep 12 | “And there’s another country” (Letters from the Coast)

St. Jude’s Anglican Home. The lunch table, with senior staff.

We all sit around, discussing our lives and the day. All of us are women/femmes.

The conversation suddenly shifts: “Hey…can you believe it’s been eighteen years since September 11^th?”

“No,” we all said, in a daze.

The stories came out – where we were, what we were doing, what we remember.

Only memories. No political commentary.

Sometimes I find it difficult to sit with these women because I’m so much younger than they are. My priorities and views are so, so different.

I would like to talk about how much I have changed since that day, politically.

But I don’t.

Today, images from childhood run through my head as I read through the replies to a tweet posted by Karen González, a Latina Mujerista theologian and author of The God Who Sees:

There were many responses, and a lot of diversity, but definitely a few themes emerged, and a few categories of folks.

First, there were folks who were unabashedly and uncritically patriotic, and saw their faith as an extension of their patriotism, an especially common attitude among a certain subset of American Christians.

Second, there were folks who were more critically patriotic, but did not see patriotism as antithetical to their own faith, or anyone’s. These folks would often use the language of, “I sing these songs in the hope that one day they will be true.”

Third, there were folks who had once sung these songs, but no longer did, and most of them said this had been a fairly recent change, due to the current political climate. They often mentioned the uneasy mixing of patriotism and faith, or “civil religion.” Some of them said there were certain songs they would sing and others they would not. “This Land is Your Land,” complete with the more ‘prophetic’ verses, was cited many times as acceptable.

Finally, there were a few folks that said they never had, or made a change quite a while ago. One of them was a Mennonite, who said they would only profess allegiance to the Kingdom of God.

Another one was me.

I stopped singing the national anthem for the first time around 2011.

I wouldn’t say I had been a dedicated flag waver my whole life, but I spent quite a bit of it proud to be Canadian. I have scattered memories of singing the national anthem in both French and English – in fact, for the longest time, I didn’t even know the entire thing in one language or the other, but only a mishmash of both, with the first three lines in English and the next four in French. (It took me quite a while to realize how very VERY different the two sets of lyrics are). I seem to also remember singing both the anthem and “God Save the Queen” every morning in school when I lived in Ottawa, with accompanying music played over a loudspeaker as a precursor to morning announcements.

Ottawa was definitely a place where I felt encouraged to embrace my national identity: Canada Day on Parliament Hill, Laura Secord ice cream, learning French every day, Girl Guide trips into the woods to feast on pure maple syrup. When I came back to Vancouver, it didn’t feel quite the same, but I was still proud. I began to reclaim my identity as a West Coaster, somewhat disconnected and stone in love with nature.

In high school, we had a semester or two on “Canadian History” in Social Studies. I remember thinking it was the most boring subject I’d ever studied. I didn’t envy Americans their history (my ever-so-Canadian anti-American sentiments were really starting to bubble once I hit puberty and became more politically aware), but I did feel that surely more interesting things than fur trading and building forts had happened in the formation of Canada.

Probably the most interesting story we learned was about Louis Riel, so there was that.

So far as I know we didn’t really learn anything about pre-contact Turtle Island. And we did not learn anything whatsoever about residential schools.

I often tell people I learned about residential schools in church, because I did. When the referendum on the Nisga’a Treaty occurred in ’98 or ’99, I specifically remembering hearing in church that we should vote in favour of the Nisga’a, because we had done them wrong as a church and as a nation. I learned that the Nisga’a people had ties to the Anglican Church because our missionaries reached them first, and that we therefore today had a responsibility to advocate for them.

This was only five years after the Anglican Church of Canada offered its official apology to Indigenous peoples for its role in residential schools in 1993.

I also remember Bishop Jim Cruickshank, who had been present at my baptism, becoming Bishop of the Diocese of Cariboo, in which St. George’s Lytton residential school was located, and his work among the survivors there. Lawsuits and settlements eventually led the diocese to declare bankruptcy before it became first The Anglican Parishes of the Central Interior and then The Territory of the People. When I interviewed him for an ethics paper in seminary, he told me he had been glad that the diocese had declared insolvency. This was the work of the Kingdom, he said, dying so that others might live.

I do not remember ever thinking Indigenous Peoples were entitled or lazy or stupid or drunk, even though I’m sure I heard people say it off and on. I don’t say that to aggrandize myself; it’s just true. I had arguments with friends who would say racist stuff against them from an early age. My great sin was assuming that they were outliers, that truly reasonable people knew that white people had done wrong to Indigenous Peoples and that we had a responsibility to build a better relationship today.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered this was a minority view, and often still is. Again, I don’t say this to aggrandize myself. It was my privilege that led me to believe most people shared my views. It took me time to realize how bad things still were.

In 2010 or 2011, I took a mandatory class at seminary on Canadian History. It mostly focused on the church’s presence and activities during the formation of Canada, but of course we had a hefty chunk of time dedicated to learning about the residential schools.

About forced separation from families by the RCMP, on pain of incarceration.

About hunger experiments and malnutrition driven by simple apathy.

About dental surgery occurring on cafeteria tables without anesthetic.

About rampant tuberculosis and other diseases.

About abuse: physical, emotional, and sexual.

About children beaten for speaking the only languages they knew.

About the Bryce report, and how the government knew exactly how bad it was, and didn’t care.

About how the last one closed in 1996, when I was twelve years old.

I stopped singing the national anthem for about a year.

My husband asked why.

I said, “I can’t. I can’t support this country when I know what we’ve done. We’re not even a legitimate nation. We came uninvited and built ourselves on greed and violence, and we continue to perpetuate it.”

He couldn’t understand it. We argued about it for a long time.

Finally, one day at a soccer game, I relented, and told him I supposed I could sing in hope for the things in the song.

He gave me a side hug and said, “That’s it.”

I sang it again a few times after that.

But around the time of the Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine acquittals, I stopped singing again.

And today, I flat refuse.

I’ll stand, because if I don’t, in the current political climate, I’ll likely experience harassment and violence.

But I won’t sing.

God is the owner of my voice and my heart. Not the state, which murders and rapes and oppresses and crucifies.

I refuse to glorify a nation founded in blood that continues to violate and destroy and lie and steal.

I refuse to make professions of unity and “standing on guard” when I know they are empty.

I refuse to pledge citizenship to any country other than the Kingdom of God, which is beyond nationality or borders. Sure, it has its own baggage, but that’s only because of the incapacity of the colonial mind to imagine such a glorious, wonderful thing as a nation born through love rather than hate and greed.

I don’t judge other people for doing what their conscience thinks is right. But I can no longer reconcile my own faith with any act of earthly patriotism. To me, patriotism is antithetical to Christianity. The Anabaptists got it right.

Around the same time I stopped singing a couple of years ago, my husband and I revisited the conversation.

I remember he looked so weary.

I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think he sings anymore either.

Sep 05 | A Blank Cassette, Part 3 (Letters from the Coast)

This is the last in a three-part series on the death of my father.

I’d love to end the story there, but it doesn’t end there.

I brought the tape home. It felt so momentous that I didn’t just want to listen to it offhand. I told several people the story, but put off listening to it.

Finally, I brought down the dusty old boombox from on top of the living room shelving unit.

I put the tape in.

The reels turned so, so slowly. I found that odd.

Nothing.

Just silence.

I fast-forwarded.

Nothing.

Rewound.

Nothing.

I was crestfallen for a moment, but thought the slow turning of the reels might mean the boombox was too old to play properly. I would buy another tape player, one of the small ones.

I kept meaning to, and didn’t, for a long time. There was lots of other stuff going on, and the symbolism of the tape meant more to me than its contents.

At least, that’s what I thought.

Finally, I bought a cassette player which could convert tapes to mp3.

I got home, and again, put it off briefly. I wanted it to be momentous.

But again, nothing.

Fast-forward. Rewind. Flip to Side B.

Nothing.

I took it out of the player and put it back in the case.

And hugged it.

And cried.

Silence.

And it will never end.

Not in the way I want it to.

As I tried to digest what was happening in my heart, I felt so weary, because I knew that this was a part of growing up.

I would never receive the simple answers that I wanted. I would never be able to make this mean, conclusively, that my dad had loved me and was now haunting me, literally or figuratively.

I’ve often told people that I believe human beings are meaning-makers. We are allowed to make meaning of our lives, even if it’s illogical or ridiculous to other people. It’s how we stay grounded in a world that never makes sense.

And yet here, meaning feels constantly refused.

So I started listening to “This too shall pass” by Danny Schmidt, and once again his somber, mournful voice reminds me of truths that I would rather not contemplate too often, and stopped my tears for the moment.

We are given such fragile, changeable lives. “And this is meant to be a gift?” we shriek at a universe that feels apathetic but is perhaps distracted with the multitude of life blazing forth microsecond by microsecond.

And the one who made it says softly, “Yes. Because only those who change can truly love in the way I have called you to love. Because love that transcends death, in all its pain and spiritual bloodiness, is the closest humanity can come to me without being burned away by glory.”

So I’ll put the tape back on the shelf, and hold onto the meaning of those neat liner notes on days where I don’t care that the tape itself is blank, and on days where the silence is in my lungs and heart and head.

I hurt because I loved him.

I hurt because I love him.

Aug 29 | A Blank Cassette, Part 2 (Letters from the Coast)

This is the second in a three-part series on the death of my father.

 

Years later, around Christmastime, I was visiting my stepmother. We went to a solstice party. It was fun for most of the night, and then I got drunk and tried to jam with her friends, many of whom had been his friends as well.

I had one of his guitars. It didn’t have a strap, and it felt so different from his Martin, the one I used at home.

I couldn’t keep up.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so embarrassed.

I choked out, “Can someone please…um…please take this?” and handed it off and walked away.

I sat in the living room and cried silently. My husband tried to comfort me.

Eventually, my stepmother joined me.

“What’s wrong? Why aren’t you playing?”

“I can’t,” I rasped. “I’m no good at it. I’m just embarrassing everyone.”

“No you’re not,” she said. “C’mon, go join them.”

I wouldn’t. And after a few more awkward minutes, it finally came out, as I was hoping it never would:

“You had a whole life together that I will never be a part of. You tell me that he haunts you, haunts the house. He has never haunted me. All I feel is silence. All I feel is never being able to fully know if he loved me.”

She was appalled. “Of course he loved you. He loved you more than anything.”

“You’re secure in your love, in your story. I will never be.”

She tried to insist, and I know that she’s right. Everyone has always told me how much he loved me.

But it was because he told them.

Not me.

Never me.

 

We went home that night and I fell into bed. As usual, my stepmother stayed up late, listening to music. Some of it was probably his.

This was something my husband often complained about, that the music would go on and on no matter how late it was and no matter whether there were already other people asleep.

It was hard for me too. It felt like the lack of silence between my dad and his beloved of twenty-five years was being flaunted.

I know it wasn’t.

But it felt that way sometimes.

 

In the morning, I woke up blearily. There was so much snow on the ground, and more was falling. Snow and cold are silent too.

For some reason, I wandered into Dad’s old study. His old computer was there, and bits and bobs scattered about. I remembered going into that room a few days after he had died and finding his reading glasses, and how they had torn me in half, how I wailed over them. How could he be gone? His glasses are right here. Surely there’s been some mistake.

Now on the desk was a cassette tape.

I frowned, picked it up.

My eyes widened.

Neatly written on the liner paper was a set of songs that I had not seen together since 1994.

I brought it into the kitchen, where my stepmother was starting on breakfast.

“Where did you find this?” I asked.

She looked at it. “In the basement somewhere. Is that our wedding mix-tape?”

“No. This is a tape Dad made for me when I was…like, two years old,” I babbled. “He was afraid that I would forget his voice because he was away so much, so he made this for me. I listened to it until it fell apart. I thought that was the only copy in the world. I never thought I’d see it again.”

She smiled and continued prepping. “Heh. He gave you a Christmas present.”

It was so casual for her.

For me it was earth-shattering.

“He’s haunted me after all,” I sobbed to my husband.

Aug 25 | “Come out,” (Sermon, August 25th, 2019)

On Thursday of last week, I was privileged to join people from our Diocese and a few other churches at St. Anselm’s near UBC for Queerest and Dearest day camp.

Queerest and Dearest is a camp for LGBTQIA2S+ people and their family members: birth, chosen, found, immediate, extended, church, or otherwise. Last year, campers were fortunate enough to have five days and four nights at Camp Artaban on Gambier Island, which were taken up with arts and crafts, outdoor games, time in nature, and queer and trans-positive worship and programming.

This year, camp could only be one day – but what a day!

There were so many things that struck me, but two of them stand out in particular.

The first was an activity we did at evening worship. The Rev. Carolina Glauster of Mount Olivet Lutheran Church, our chaplain for the day, led us in a reading of the raising of Lazarus.

Carolina instructed us to pair up. Then, we were told to say two things to our partner, using their name and proper pronouns.

The first, of course, was “Person’s name, come out.”

It wasn’t just an ordinary command – we were to imagine that this was God’s command to emerge into daylight, fully ourselves; a personal command, encompassing our entire being – that’s why we had to use the name.

I turned to my partner and said, “You should know, I’m probably going to have feelings.”

He said, “Me too.”

We were so nervous we did rock-paper-scissors to decide who would go first.

I think I had the deep honour of speaking God’s word first. Then he spoke God’s word to me.

“Clare, come out.”

I thought his voice might come full of weight, full of depth and meaning. But it was almost conversational. No need to make this a big deal.

Because it’s not.

I don’t mean that in a negative, minimizing way. I mean that raising someone and calling them out of the tomb others have erected around them is not a monumental task that requires all of God’s elbow grease. That might imply there was something beyond salvation within that person; that their state of being was more complicated for God to manage than a so-called normal person.

It’s not.

It might be hard for other people to accept and welcome, but never God.

Never God.

Which leads me to the next part of the exercise, a command for the symbolic crowd gathered around the tomb.

Jesus’ command in the story is, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

Again, we turned to each other. We had to use the correct pronouns.

My partner’s were he/his. I identify as nonbinary – neither male nor female, kinda in the middle. This is something that is relatively new. Many of you might understand what I’m talking about. I’m thirty-four now, but I had no vocabulary for how I have always felt until I was about twenty-seven. That was when I first heard the term genderqueer. I remember using it for myself because it felt so right, before I even really knew what it meant. All I knew was that it was me.

I’m still struggling to live into this identity that has always felt like mine, still struggling to claim pronouns, still struggling against the narrowness of how nonbinary is “supposed” to look and present

I call myself a pronoun avoider because I mostly prefer to use my own name as a pronoun. In this terrifying new wilderness of possibility, they/them felt too impersonal. But as I gain more and more friends who use it, it feels less impersonal. It’s become part of the fabric of the people I love.

So when it was my turn, I asked for they/them.

“Unbind them, and let them go.”

There were definitely feelings.

That activity was the first thing that struck me about the day.

On the Sabbath day, into the synagogue, comes a woman, bent over for eighteen years. Eighteen years spent only looking at the earth, only looking at her feet, or the feet of others. In English we sometimes talk about people being “bent double,” and when I think of this woman, “bent double” seems appropriate, because this woman isn’t just physically bent. This lady is also carrying all the weight of the patriarchy and ableism! No wonder she can’t stand up straight, girl is bent triple!

But that doesn’t stop her.

That says something about her, don’t you think?

She just shows up – the text says she “appears.” Jesus is teaching – was she already in the congregation, or did she hear him from outside and come in? It doesn’t say. What matters is that Jesus first proclaims her freedom, and then lays on hands.

He names her and performs a public action – both for her personally, but also so that others may witness his acceptance.

And of course, like the raising of Lazarus, this brings trouble.

The established hierarchy never likes to be unsettled. If this woman is determined enough to bring herself to the healer even with all of this weight piled on her back, just imagine what she’ll be able to do when she’s standing up straight.

The first thing she does is start praising God. That might seem innocuous, but it isn’t.

Which brings me to the second thing that struck me at Queerest and Dearest.

We came to the end of our time together, and I was standing outside, waiting for my ride to come.

At the end of a full day like the one I had experienced, I’m usually pretty tapped out, energetically.

But I was so, so full, that I talked at length with an old Indian couple walking by. Later a bat fluttered wildly above my head, catching bugs, and I couldn’t help but tell it how clever it must be to fly so well.

I’m not normally the kind of person to be so genuinely open and cheerful like that. I wanted to hug everything I saw. I was drunk on the Spirit.

It occurred to me that if I had had Queerest and Dearest when I was young, I might have grown into a totally different person.

No hiding, no hanging back, no fear of sharing myself.

I thought, “Wow. If we engineered a place like this for every person on the planet, where they could be fully themselves – what kind of human family would we have today?”

The world we have would certainly be totally turned upside down.

And that’s scary for the people at the top.

Just imagine the leader of the synagogue looking at this woman praising God with her whole heart, and perhaps understanding better than some of Jesus’ other detractors what people do when they feel like God has freed them to be themselves.

Freedom and joy are an invasive species. They upset carefully manicured lawns of hierarchy like dandelions. Funnily enough, dandelions are actually packed full of beneficial things like potassium and other vitamins. But a lot of people hate them, because they pop up uninvited and can’t be contained.

The weeds of God’s liberation likewise cannot be contained. And Jesus proclaims that, in front of everyone. For ancient peoples, ailments were seen as connected to malevolent spiritual forces, but it doesn’t take much mental gymnastics for us to see Satan as not the disability itself but all that extra weight I talked about earlier.

At least the leader has the decency to feel shame when Jesus points this out.

Friends, I invite you today, and in the days to come, to consider what weight you might be carrying on your back – and indeed, the weight that others carry. Jesus is not only committed to pulling you upright and letting it roll off your back. Jesus’s intent has always been to extend the power of healing to everyone. You may yet be called, once upright, to speak those words to others bent double under the weight of oppression and self-hatred: “Come out.” “Stand up.”

Don’t forget that that might bring you into trouble sometimes, and that you may yet be called to speak to the crowd: “Unbind the children of God, and let them go.”

Aug 22 | A Blank Cassette, Part 1 (Letters from the Coast)

This is another multi-part entry, on the death of my dad.

 

PART I: THE SILENCE BETWEEN US

Tomorrow is my dad’s birthday. He would have been 70.

I’ve written about him and his sudden death on here a few times. Grieving him has been long and complicated. He was a very taciturn person whose love always felt a bit…theoretical.

I have trouble with Jesus’s use of the word “Father” for God for exactly this reason. I imagine that, for many people, the relationship I had with my dad would feel quite similar to the postmodern relationship to God: mostly built on silence and rather inscrutable. It took a very long time for me to be able to listen to the love hanging unspoken in that silence.

I decided when I was about twenty-five or so that I was going to change the relationship. I wanted to risk breaking that silence. I wanted to speak the love that hung unspoken.

Part of it was that I realized that I had spent a few years wishing my relationship with my dad was more communicative, more open. And I had learned about my dad’s very difficult and rather sad childhood, and it made me feel more sympathy for him.

I thought, “You know, it’s probably a lot easier for a 25-year-old to risk change than it is for a 60-year-old.”

And, “I’m an adult now. I have the ability to make my own choices. I can’t just expect this without putting in my own work.”

It started so small. I ended a phone call with, “Okay, Dad – love you!”

I remember thinking, It has to start with this. What if he dies tomorrow and I never remember saying ‘I love you’?

I could tell he was taken aback. When I tell people the story verbally they always laugh when I impersonate his reaction. “Oh… (cough) I…br…love you too.”

I made other small movements toward him. All seemed successful. It was hard to tell. But Dad was in a good place anyway. He had moved and was really fitting well into the community. Everyone loved him. He had a band. He was writing his own songs for the first time.

I felt myself working up to a big moment. I wanted it to be on my thirtieth birthday.

I have a strong feeling that I actually talked to him about it the last time I saw him alive, about two months before he died.

I wanted to go fishing. I hadn’t been fishing with him since I was about twelve. And I wanted to end the day with laying down some tracks in his basement. We had done a couple the Christmas before, just with his iPhone, and I was impressed with the sound quality.

He seemed almost excited about it.

It never happened.

Instead of fishing, I went to a funeral.

Instead of laying down tracks in the basement, we spread his ashes at the top of the Sea to Sky gondola. They blew away and I forgot what Alleluia meant for a long time.

The silence between us became so, so deep.

Aug 18 | “What love looks like,” (Sermon, August 18th, 2019)

Some time ago, a journalist and writer named Luke O’Neil started a blog called “Hell World,” where he shares his own private musings, mostly about politics. In April of this year, he wrote a post called “I hate what they’ve done to almost everyone in my family.” In it, he first chronicles the changes in his relationship with his family as they became, for lack of a better word, radicalized by Fox News.  He then shares, with permission, stories from other young people who had had the same experience. Some of them are heartbreaking. One young man writes, “When I found my dad dead in his armchair…Fox News was on the TV. It’s likely the last thing he saw. I hate what that channel and conservative talk radio did to my funny, compassionate dad. He spent the last years of his life increasingly angry, bigoted, and paranoid.”

There are a lot of folks in our world calling for increased dialogue, civility, and kindness. An article like this, in which so many people admit that they have had to sever contact with family members; in which so many admit that they don’t leave their children alone with their grandparents, makes the work of mending fences seem impossible.

In some cases, we should absolutely seek to find common ground, to try to weave together a new bridge between our hearts. But in others, maybe, as Jesus says, we might be called to cut our losses for the greater work of compassion, and for our own health.

I think this is especially hard in Canada where we joke about how our favourite subjects for conversation are mundane things like the weather. The real joke is that now even that might lead us into an argument, depending on one’s conversation partner’s beliefs about climate change. What a strange world we live in.

On the other hand, we might say that never before has it been so easy to defend our faith. For we know that Jesus would not approve of much of the rhetoric that calls itself Christian in North America. We know he calls us to have open hearts and minds and hands. If we choose, we progressives can actually make the argument that “the Bible is very clear”! For, in the case of how to treat refugees or victims of violence, or how to conduct oneself in a position of power, the Bible actually is clear – and it does not call us to exclude and abuse and slander.

Of course there is always danger in making in-groups and out-groups. But there are two things to remember which Luke was kind enough to include bracketing today’s text. One is that we must not be afraid. The other is that we are called to love our neighbours as ourselves. So perhaps the danger does not come in standing firm in our convictions, or calling someone on their toxic behaviour. The danger comes from us forgetting that they too are people loved by God.

Sometimes reminding them of that love looks like giving them a good shake, and sometimes it look like gathering them up in their loneliness, and proving that the world is not so frightful and cruel as to excuse frightful and cruel behaviour.

Let me be clear that I don’t think we are always called to throw ourselves into debates and battles. Emotional labour and the fatigue that comes with it is a thing, and we all need time to handle it. But we can stand firm. That’s bigger than saying, “When they go low, we go high.” That sentiment so often presumes the aggressor is acting in good faith and will be shamed by our goodness, and all too often they are not. Instead they will claim that we are as insincere as they are, that we are merely “virtue-signalling,” overflowing with self-righteousness while simultaneously just as duplicitous and scheming as our detractors. That’s when humour as a response is most helpful – like Elijah doing battle on Mount Carmel with the prophets of Baal, cheekily suggesting that perhaps their god is not answering their prayers because he had to go to the bathroom; or like God and the hilarious living parable of the prophet Jonah and his doomed bush. Some people punch Nazis, and some people just cover them in silly string, or like the unnamed teen who, in one delightful story out of Scotland, drowned out a racist’s venomous street corner ramblings by standing next to him while playing the bagpipes, and subsequently followed him wherever he tried to spread his hate that day.

Jesus was never merely a gentle pastoral figure – the white, blue-eyed hippie with a guitar, or even the nondescript kindergarten sage many of us grew up with who told us to be nice, share, and work hard. This regularly happens to our heroes as the culture tries to sanitize them. Folks who call upon more activists to be “like Martin Luther King” forget how deeply unpopular he was in his time, particularly among white moderates, many of whom said he went “too far.” Not because being kind to others is too far, but because King named uncomfortable truths, like the fact that 11am on Sunday mornings was the most segregated hour of the week, or that the war in Vietnam was exploitative and ill-advised, or that sometimes rioting and property damage were justified because they provided a way to bring to light the anger of the oppressed against a deeper injustice.

The same thing happened with Rosa Parks, who tends to be painted as a genteel model of spontaneous nonviolent resistance, or at least that was the way her story was framed when I learned it in school as a kid. In real life, she had been an activist for years before the bus incident in Montgomery, and had even been arrested for other acts of civil disobedience prior to that action. It was also anything but spontaneous. She was chosen by the NAACP to perform the sit-in because of her prominence in the community.

Likewise, no-one killed Jesus for teaching us preschool ethics. He was killed because he stood up against an abusive system and challenged its narrative. He insisted that God had no use for hollow acts of servitude to the state, that God wanted more for us than knuckling under until we could realize some metaphysical reward in heaven. God wanted healing, community, and liberation. God wanted us to risk everything for the kingdom.

Sanding off the sharp edges of one who, now dead, accepted that they would sow division in life, is a way for the system who killed that one to dull the power of their message. Sometimes, taking a stand means taking a stand, and it will set us apart from the ones we care about. Sometimes controversy erupts out of the smallest acts of resistance, and it reminds you of how shaky the system really is. It runs the way it does because at some point we all agreed that it should, or were pushed to believe it was the only possible way.

Jesus was only one person, but he inspired a movement that changed the course of history – admittedly not always for the better, but the very fact that he could do that should be a testament to who he was. To sow such division in a world far less individualistic than ours, where the family was the central unit and had the final say in many people’s lives, proves to us that his presence was so utterly compelling that it upset the entire social order of his time. For him to claim that blood families had less of a right to a person’s body and soul than God’s family, a chosen family, was deeply radical.

We may find that in our own circles our faith doesn’t cause much trouble, and that’s nothing to feel guilty about. But we are called to allow it to deeply influence how we move through the world, and not to count the cost when it means we have to take a stand on behalf of a liberating, boundary-breaking God.

So take a stand for that God, whatever that might look like. Know that when you do it, if you encounter anger or oppression, you’re never alone.

Jesus is with you, and so is this church.

Aug 15 | God’s Heartbeat (Letters from the Coast)

August 5^th found me once again decked out in red with my bodhrán on the bus, Skytrain, and a second bus, headed to Westridge Marine Terminal. The last time was almost exactly a year ago. I wore the same Tshirt (“Defend the Sacred,” from NTVS), the same “Janie” clergy shirt underneath, the same white stole gifted to me by a friend that I now think of as my “protest stole” (it’s covered in buttons and ribbons, souvenirs from other actions and important events like the TRC), and the same red kerchief on my head to keep the sun off.

The event was “Drums, Not Drills,” and I was ready.

My bodhrán and I had been specifically invited by my friend L, who is a warrior, having been arrested for blocking the gates of the tank farm and the terminal, and for chaining herself to a tree with her priest, my other friend the Rev. Laurel Dykstra. I feel strangely comforted bringing the drum with me. I had brought it to a gathering for the first time in April of 2018, and I can’t quite remember why. I don’t know that anyone told me to. Perhaps there was a call to bring instruments and it was the one that was easiest to transport. The day had been rainy, and I had brought a plastic bag just big enough for it. It had been given to me by my father, and I had only taken three or four lessons with it. For the most part I had only ever used it on the little albums I record for Lent and Advent. But it seemed appropriate especially as a white settler, as it is an instrument of my own people, and for the fact that I rather think my father would not approve of me participating in such actions, having been in the resource industry for most of his life (he was a lumber salesman). I like to think I am turning the river of history by using it for this purpose.

There is always an inevitable moment where one recognizes the kindred spirits nearby, and I saw some of these as I wove my way through the crowds at each new station. Some of them remembered me from other events, and asked me if I knew where the stop was. We didn’t sit together, but everyone knew we were together.

We arrived at the stop to find a helpfully placed banner (“Respect UNDRIP” #protectheinlet #stopkindermorgan) three drumming folks at the brow of the hill leading down to the oil tanks looking over the inlet. I drummed with them for a bit before heading down to the grassy patch near the road, which had tents and tables piled with food. Elders, middle-aged people, young people, little kids, dogs – everyone was represented. Folks I remembered from other days of action were there. Politicians, including Svend Robinson, were there. Taiko drummers grinned from under a tent. Later they would play for us, stances wide and powerful.

L stood with her Salal and Cedar banner. Her smile is like the first sun of the morning – gentle, filling you up. We stood together for a time and met some new people. One of them, a young teacher, stared at my clerical collar.

“Can you tell me what that’s about?” she said.

L and I laughed. “Well, I’m not sure what – it’s real, if that’s what you mean!” I said.

She laughed too. “Oh yeah! I didn’t know if it was like…a political statement, or – ”

“Yes,” L said, and I laughed some more.

There was a moment just before we began where I stood in the shadow of the Taiko tent, and I didn’t figure out who began it, but someone started to drum, just a simple stroke. There was no call, no invitation. Only the rhythm. Slowly, it grew louder and louder as more and more of us joined in. No one spoke. One woman tried to add extra beats, to get fancy, but it didn’t go anywhere and I saw her calmly return to that heartbeat.

The energy of the gathering shifted perceptively for me. The force of combined intent, of human hearts in sync, was breathtaking. When it ended, it ended, and the schedule continued. But I never forgot those long moments when it seemed our flesh, our brains, our hearts became permeable, and our blood rolled out invisibly to coat the skins of our drums, and it gave me hope for the future.

One Indigenous woman who I had seen at many of the actions spoke with such conviction and power, her voice almost a growl, weaving poetry into the air from the depth of her heart.

“I stood before that Kinder-Morgan gate and I knocked once for the children of the North,” she intoned, and several of the people around her cheered and beat their drums.

“I knocked twice for the children of the East!” she continued, and more of us cheered.

“I knocked three times for the children of the South! I knocked four times for the children of the West!” she roared. “I knocked to tell them, ‘We are coming for you!’”

There were songs. At times my arm got tired, so I stood behind one of the large stones littering the grassy patch and hoisted my foot up to rest on the one in front of me. I imagined it looked powerful, and giggled that it was really so I could rest my elbow on my thigh.

We drummed in the four directions, turning and touching the earth. Another Indigenous elder spoke fondly of the two large orca balloons three men held up with sticks. “Last time I saw those you made them dance when I sang the whale song,” she said, smiling. “I wanna see that again.” She got her wish; the men walked back and forth, bouncing their sticks, making the whales bob and weave. I wept and didn’t really know why. It was probably the delight in her voice.

Finally, we went on a sort of pilgrimage down a footpath through the woods around the outer boundary of the tank farm, drumming and singing. Hikers paused to stare. There was some hollering back and forth between elders and workers. All of it seemed fairly good-natured, at least on our side. We were told a story of a 70-year-old man who scaled a tree to remove the metal plate which kept eagles from nesting there.

I was bushed when we came back, but so glad I went.

I couldn’t say why I feel compelled to attend some of these actions. To many folks, this one in particular, in which we participated in no direct action, may have looked frivolous. Folks told stories, and we sang some songs and ate, and made signs. But no-one got arrested.

I ask myself sometimes, What good will this do? The government has made it abundantly clear that it doesn’t care about our actions, our stories, our demands, or our pleading. It will go on being addicted to oil. The earth is burning and no-one who can really do anything about it will.

And yet can I really say that nothing will occur when God’s people of all colours, creeds, languages, and nations come together to drum as one?

Could that have been God’s heartbeat I heard in the shadow of those tents?