Blessed are the Cree…
He's a quiet Cree man. During the two hours I spent in the intimate darkness of the sweat lodge at the Dr. Jessie Saulteaux Centre with Stan McKay—the first aboriginal person to lead the United Church of Canada—he spoke only a few words, carefully chosen.
When we emerged he embraced me.
"Drink lots of water," he said, and brought me a glassful.
"We're a gentle people," McKay told me later when I interviewed him for this edition's feature article. "We're peacemakers in many senses of the word… but it hasn't served us very well."
In March I listened to the words of sorrow and repentance from Canadian church leaders as they crossed the country remembering the part they played in residential schools and hearing from the survivors.
This isn't the first time church leaders have apologized to aboriginals. The United Church issued its first formal apology to Canada's First Nations people in 1986 with these poignant words:
"We tried to make you be like us and in so doing we helped to destroy the vision that made you what you were. As a result you, and we, are poorer and the image of the Creator in us is twisted, blurred, and we are not what we are meant by God to be.
"We ask you to forgive us and to walk together with us in the Spirit of Christ so that our peoples may be blessed and God's creation healed."
Ten years ago the United Church first asked for the forgiveness of residential school survivors. The Anglican, Presbyterian and Catholic churches have done the same.
When will the Church have to stop apologizing for its mistakes?
Never, I suspect. And that's a beautiful thing. Not because of all the people we have oppressed, but because that is when the grace of God is incarnated in us.
"The Church needs to move away from triumphalism—they need to own their own mistakes," says Ray Aldred, another Cree Christian with words for the Church that may be hard to swallow.
We want to disassociate ourselves from our mistakes, blame them on another denomination, forgive, forget, move on. Strike them from the record—it wouldn't be a good witness.
What if we would learn to embrace our mistakes instead, recognizing that it is in our failures that we reveal God's grace, not in our triumphs? What if we are called to bear witness to the grace of God, not to administer it?
If so we need to know our history, to recognize our church mothers and fathers with all their wisdom, ignorance and broken promises. We need to love our bloody, holy hands, and see them as they are.
"To be free is to know who we are, with all that is beautiful, all the brokenness in us," wrote Jean Vanier, who has spent his life working with and learning from severely disabled people. They are his teachers. "We can only accept this pain if we discover our true self beneath all the masks and realize that if we are broken, we are also more beautiful than we ever dared to suspect."
Maybe the Cree, Algonquin, Ojibwe and others of Canada's first peoples know something we don't—something they have learned from seeing beauty in their own brokenness. We've spent generations trying to teach First Nations people about God instead of listening to what they have to teach us about the Creator. We would do well to listen to them. They may be, after all, the ones who inherit the Earth.
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