Canada..a nation at the crossroad of shame and atonement

How can or does my native land atone for sins committed by officials in power as long as a century ago?

Each day brings word of another 215, 751, 182 unmarked graves near or adjacent to former Indian Residential Schools, most so far formerly operated by the Roman Catholic church. Other campuses, operated by other Christian churches, may yet yield similar desperate pieces of racist, hateful, despicable, deplorable and perhaps even unforgiveable horrors of similar deaths and burials. The accepted ‘cause of death’ at the time, according to reports, was tuberculosis; that clinical coroners’ report, however, may well ‘cover’ the full truth, and may have helped both to excuse and to dispose of any legal, moral or public responsibility for the manner in which these hundreds, if not thousands, of children were treated by the state.

Ripped from their homes, often at the hands of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, from parents defiantly objecting to the familial “caesarean section” of rupture and separation, unneeded and unjustified, these children were carted off to unfamiliar, effectively ‘foreign’ territory, and effective colonization under the preferred rubric of ‘civilizing’ (really through social, educational, and even penal surgical removal of their native identity), or the even more heinous motive of “evangelizing”. A most profound irony of history is that the ecclesial organ(s) that were allegedly established for the purpose of bringing the “love of God” in the form of agape, storge, to the native people, have perpetrated acts for which there may be no authentic, effective, lasting, transformative expiation.

Expiate is not a word that has even found its way into the public discourse; its closest cousins are ‘atone’, ‘to make amends’, ‘to reconcile’, ‘to make reparations’. In a public arena/theatre filled to overflowing with words, attitudes, notions, conceptions, metaphors and similes of combat, war, generalship, commandership, winning, weapons, arsenals, deceptions, deceits, even lies to confound whatever or whomever might be the perceived enemy, whether it be for financial, political, professional or even ethical superiority, often at the compete demise of the enemy, in what is commonly referred to as a “zero-sum game,” the words, metaphors, similes, concepts, notions and, actions implicit to expiation, atonement, reconciliation are almost irrelevant, if not easily and readily ignorable. Certainly, they are readily and easily disparaged, discounted, demeaned and rendered weak, vulnerable, and, in a word, unforgiveable.

Apologies, especially by public figures, are regarded, at best, as pro forma, de riguere, written by some public relations flack, for the purposes of “stanching the bleed” in some public disgrace. And ‘getting out in front’ of expected, suspected and predictable ‘bad news’ has become the modus operandi of the publicly elected fraternity/sorority, including the corporate ‘suits’ who have also hired their own army of “messenger merchants”. Acts like those of a Mennonite community, at the moment of their most tragic and criminal victimhood, in open, public and authentic forgiveness of the perpetrator(s) of those acts, are so infrequent as to be considered “other-worldly” or only possible from a community so steeped in their faith that they are regarded not merely as exceptional, but “unbelievable” in the public discourse. Similarly, acts of forgiveness, by the victims of apartheid, in and during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, chaired by Bishop Desmond Tutu, are virtually, if not also literally, unheard of in North America, as part of the historic drama of any nation, or community. And churches here are renowned, rather, for their willingness and complicity in excommunicating those they find ‘sinful’, ‘offensive to the faith’, disobedient to the will of the church’, or ‘not in conformity’ with the teachings of the church. It is not only the Roman Catholic church which “excludes” those they deem to have contravened their rules. Others may not use that word, but their facility in isolating, even by the venal vehicle of social gossip, has rendered many socially and emotionally crippled for centuries. And, all of these acts of exclusion, arrogance, superiority, absolutism, and the tragic prices on human individual lives, as well as on families and communities, are ostensibly carried out in the name of, and under the banner of the “will of God”….that is as conceived, perceived, and promulgated by the church ‘fathers’ originally, and then complied with as women merged into the hierarchies.

There is, and there can be no theological justification for the evidence that we are having to consume each day, from these reports on buried remains, in unmarked graves. There is also no social, political, cultural or especially ethical and moral justification for these acts. They are acts committed under the rubric, and under the shroud, and under the secrecy of closed doors, closed mouths, closed ears and closed eyes. And the motivating force that closed those doors, mouths, ears and eyes, and presumably public consciousness(es), was FEAR. Whether that fear was of the presiding bishop, who took his fear from the presiding Cardinal, who took his fear from the presiding Pope, who, presumable took his fear from the word of God, as represented in whatever interpretation of scripture he adopted.

Accepted and thereby acceptable behaviour, in a closed, closeted, secret, vaulted and sealed community is dictated, easily, readily, and with almost absolutely perfect conformity, by a single person charged with the administration of the four walls of the operation. Who knows what anyone else knows, and who knows what anyone else will “tell” to anyone at any time, that they see, sense, hear, smell, or even intuit, that might be “objectionable” to the powers that be? And in such an environment, anyone who has already committed to the purpose and the goals of what is essentially a mind-bending, tortuous, militaristic and punitive brain-washing experiment, again, in the name of God, albeit a white, male, Christian, and primarily Roman God.

There is not, and there cannot be, anything even evocative of a ‘noble savage’ in this regime. There is not, and there cannot be, anyone who deviates from the prescribed formula of discipline. It is discipline, after all, that will MAKE these children civil human beings, given that they come from homes and communities where that kind of existence is unknown, undesired, and undesirable. Parsimony, too, in the form of scarcity of food, scarcity of heat, scarcity of warmth, physical and emotional (and obviously spiritual) is a prescribed ingredient in the carrying out of the mandate of these institutions. On the other hand, and supportive of the scarcity (read humility, purity, trust-worthy, obedient) is an onerous burden of punishment, physical, social, emotional, sexual and psychological.

These are exaggerated schools of scandal and terror, although they masqueraded as schools of purity, of the sacred, of the civilized and of the “loving” parent. So divided was the mentality of their existence and their continued operation for over a century, that Manichean as a descriptive might qualify as an understatement. In order to preserve the appearance of perfection, in all of its desirable and prescribed forms and formulas, all evidence of imperfection had to be detected, reported, and then severely punished. The “perfection” mask of those in charge could not and would not be challenged by some insulant, uppity, presumptious, pretentious, defiant and disobedient child. A literal war of insurrection by the church/state, onto the psyches, the consciences, the consciousnesses and the spirits of these innocents. More melodramatic, perhaps were the crusades; yet the impact of these callous, sick, ‘devout’ religious officials on the lives of these innocent children, and on their children and on their childrens’ children…etc….long into the future/our now, continues.

And just as in a family paralyzed by family secrets, often with a single “symptom bearer” of the family sickness having been forced, sent, exterminated, excommunicated and alienated from the family, in order to excise the ‘demon’ within the family, the nation now faces the final uncontrovertible, unarguable, inexcuseable, shameful, heinous truth (however trickling and slowly it reaches us over the next weeks and months and years). And how we attempt to see, to frame, to diagnose, to understand, to grasp, to empathize, to come to grips with…these national atrocities will go a long way to answering the question of whether or not we even fully comprehend their impact.

It is our children and our grandchildren who depend on our embrace of the complexity, the totality, the venality, the psychology and the theology, as well as the implications for our times and our futures. It is they, just as they will be on our (mis-)handling of global warming and climate change, who will judge us, legitimately, on our shared courage, willingness and compassion to accept our responsibility for our complicity in, and especially for our complicity in keeping the secret for these many decades.

Keeping secrets is a dynamic with which every family is familiar. In my own case, on a far more muted and far less traumatic scale, the secret of the exercise of narcissistic absolutism, in the discharge of maternal responsibilities impacted our nuclear family directly, and spilled over into the neighbourhood, and beyond. Only a few months ago, six decades later, was I made aware that classmates with whom I never spoke about our family life, were “aware” of the abuse that was going on while I was in elementary and secondary school. They neither asked for, nor were given, the details of the abuse. They were likely unaware of the religious motives, and the psychological motives of the abuse. Many of my latter years have provided a more clear and more critical look at what was going on, and how I was enmeshed, emotionally stunted, and alone in the family secret, while our family “religiously” sat in the same church pew every Sunday, scrubbed and polished in our Sunday best, singing loudly to each hymn, participating in every communion, and then retreating to the secrecy of our shared emotional/psychological closet.

Just as pride, and the fear of embarrassment underpin all of our repressive acts of silence, it is the churches’ foundational teaching of the fear of God, the ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ epithet of discipline, along with the rigorous enforcement of no dancing, no movies, no Sunday meal preparation, no tolerance of Roman Catholics, that, like an air-brush in a paint-by-number religious community, erased all evidence of ‘evil’ or at least all evidence of what was considered evil, and then turfed out any who defied the code. Secrecy, ironically, is not an essential instrument of the spy world, of espionage, of cyber-war; it is also an essential tool in the arsenal of the religious community. Priests who are alcoholic-dependent, are silently dissuaded, and never publicly exposed; priests who prevail upon their spouses for an inordinate number of children are turned a blind eye and ear; priests and bishops who turn sycophant to large affluent donors are tossed off as needing the attention; wives who complain that their husbands are indifferent to their emotional needs are swatted away like an irritant mosquito off the shoulder of many male clergy who themselves have succumbed to the macho, heroic, alpha model of religious, spiritual and institutional leadership.

Our nation will express shared grief, will mourn increasingly as the evidence mounts, and will turn to shame, individually and collectively as the tide of ignorance and even denial of the full truth of this black chapter in our history unfolds in public. However, to expiate, to atone, to ask for forgiveness and to be forgiven, in a manner that is visible, authentic, trans-generational, steeped in each and every community and school in the nation…..these things are currently outside one’s reasonable and realistic imagining. Given the failure to implement more than 10 of the 94 recommendations of the Missing and Murdered Womens’ Commission, there is legitimate and lingering scepticism and doubt that our nation has the fortitude, the political will, and the ethical conscience to face the two-headed monster of the church-and-state that perpetrated and permitted these cruel and inhumane, and undoubtedly non-christian acts to shed blood on our history and our souls.

If and when the nation fully come to grips with the implications of doing nothing, the preferred modality of governments, and takes actions that exemplify empathy, agape, storge, and shame, then perhaps such a model can and will serve to ennoble mothers and fathers, daughters and sons uncles and aunts to take an inventory of their own family’s secrets, however unsettling, disturbing, embarrassing, and shameful, and their own part in both generating those events/relationships in the first place, and then, just as importantly, in covering them up to avoid the challenge/threat and the gift that can only come from a full confronting and a full accounting.

Can this moment sing the theme song of how and why the individual/family and the state/nation can reflect and reinforce the ‘better angels of both’ in a reciprocal and reconciling healing?