Month: October 2015

Hiding Our Ugliness – Redskins

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Lately I have been spectating social media commentary on the use of one word in our community – Redskin.

It has become a little like watching a horrible accident in slow-motion where the perpetrator, in this instance a city councilor and friend, is being verbally run over by offended members of the community again and again (and sometimes backed over for good measure).

Why, might you ask, is this person being vilified? Why all for having the despicable gall of suggesting city council might request the local hockey team in our 97% non-Aboriginal community consider changing their name from the Morden Redskins to something potentially less offensive.

The responses have been quick and loud and VERY negative (there has been much support too but the hurtful words are always louder).

A sampling of opinion on the matter:

  • Stop stirring the pot (aka nobody move and nobody gets hurt or don’t ask, don’t tell)
  • We haven’t had any complaints from First Nations people therefore this is not an offensive name (aka – because you are white you are not allowed to have an opinion on what might be offensive to a person of a different heritage so shut up)
  • This is embarrassing to our city and makes us look racist and therefore you are a shameful representative (aka we know its a racial slur but who cares if no one is complaining. Let’s keep our skeletons properly stored in the closet)
  • Shame on you for not focusing your efforts on more important things like our economic development or easing First Nations poverty (aka I don’t know you so I am going to assume you are a glory seeking person who cares only for themselves or maybe you are just a silly person who can’t tell serious issues from non-issues like labeling an entire and complex mix of cultures by one word based on the colour of their skin. After all how could our being unconcerned with the use of a racial slur against a minority possibly have anything to do with their treatment, subjugation and subsequent impoverishment?)
  • Bunch of politically correct crap…offended people should get thicker skins (aka why can’t a freaking conquered people just stay conquered and give up? We won. We will call you whatever the hell we want. Shut up.)
  • I have a First Nations friend/ am a First Nations person who thinks the term is fine/loves it (aka one First Nation friend trumps the fact that large numbers of First Nations and American Indians, scholars, leaders etc. that have gone on record as stating the word Redskin is racist and hurtful; that several dictionaries say the same thing; that an entire US state (California) just BANNED the word Redskin as a team/mascot name; that a complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission by the First Nation’s band A Tribe Called Red succeeded in having a Redskins team in Ottawa have to drop its name; that the United States department responsible for Copyright just removed the Washington Redskin’s copyright stating that you cannot copyright a racial slur…aka Shut up.)
  • It’s not offensive because we didn’t mean it to be offensive (aka we don’t care if you think its offensive and if many others are offended by it because we don’t mean it to be therefore you really aren’t actually offended therefore shut up.)
  • It’s our team’s proud six decade history (aka your heritage stretching back thousands of years does not matter when faced with our awesome hockey jersey and winning record)
  • It honours First Nations people when a team of almost entirely white guys calls themselves Redskins (aka as an honour it would be no big deal if we all just started call every First Nations person we know “Redskin” – “Hey hows it going Redskin?” because we want to “honour” them.)
  • What about the 100 other teams named after First Nation’s tribes and/or skin colour? (aka since everybody else is racist why can’t we be too?)
  • It didn’t start out as offensive (Neither did the horribly offensive word Nigger which started out as a neutral term referencing skin colour (sound familiar) but there aren’t a lot of teams called The Niggers around…why? Because language changes.)

There’s a lot more but I’m tired and so are you (if you made it past the title).

To offer grace, compassion and empathy first, is the sign of a courageous leader. To sit back and hide and force a people to come with hands out like beggars looking for these things while you consider whether you will dispense it at all is simple, lazy cowardice.

the canon in D

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the canon –

it is as though
every great and every good thing,
every bright and sunny warm thing
that ever was and is and ever will be
burst forth from inside of me,
to sing as though it had been born
and knew that it was so,

like some great breathed miracle
pouring from some new sprung well
struck open by a staff, and damn the consequences,
so that we might drink our fill and live –

if only for a moment

to the east

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everything is grey –
when I turn and look behind
those once bright fields,
they’re covered in a fog
that follows ever so close

so I keep my eyes
fixed and forward
to the east,
to the east
in search of a rising sun

church

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we go expecting God
and instead we get
a bunch of lousy, good fer’ nuthins
no better than us
rotten, stinking cheats and liars
wearing the same damn masks we do

so we run…we run and we hunt
looking for this damned God
but we keep finding more people

JUST

LIKE

US

till we want to weep and scream
and finally maybe just give up
because we can’t see
that God’s in the patience we show,
the forgiveness we offer,
the tolerance of our own filthy shit
that we see covering our neighbour…

God’s unseen between the lines
because we don’t like looking there –
it’s too much like looking in a mirror

squirrel

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I squirrel thoughts away
like nuts
to be consumed sometime later
that I might eat my fill
and enjoy the past in time

The Failure of Fear

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The breakdown of many societal boundaries that appears to be happening in the west today and also to be accelerating, is not society falling into chaos as so many believe – rather it is a collapse of fear as a result of growing freedom and human rights.

Increasingly loud voices from historically oppressed groups such as LGBTQ+, people of faiths other than Christianity, women, people of non-white heritage, along with societal groups like the poor, and sub-cultures of varying types are logical outcomes of the west’s move to enshrine and define human rights from the very early days of the suffragette movement, unions and more.

This could be traced back to the Romantic era and the philosophy of that time which owes a lot to the Renaissance which in turn owes a lot to classical Greek and Roman philosophy – aka – these are not new ideas.

What am I saying?

That kid in your high school advocating for a gender neutral bathroom is not doing so because “kids are idiots these days and in my day this could have all been stopped by simply letting us spank them again and praying in school“…blahblahblah…

It is happening because, despite serious obstacles, we have fostered an environment in our society that makes people feel safe in expressing their opinions and needs in a way they have never been able to before. Fear is diminishing. This is a good thing.

The rise of courage is not, as so many would have you think, a rise of odd and threatening new ideas that wish to tear apart our culture like so many invading Huns and Vandals. These thoughts, feelings, sub-cultures, ideas, etc. have always been there in some archetypal form or another, they were simply being hidden and/or repressed as a result of fear.

Therefore one should be able to say that if you live in a society where many and numerous (and sometimes confusing) ideas and people and sub-cultures flourish you live in a very free society – one that values and defends human rights and seeks to eliminate fear (inasmuch as it can).

If however you live in a society that is monolithic and seeks to repress and control ideas to the point that we all think and act, look and speak, relatively the same – you can be sure that fear is the chosen tool of this society’s leaders and freedom is defined as absence of threat rather than ability to express.

I know which society I want to live in.

The Faithless Church (A Call to Remember Easter)

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When I write about the church I do so as both part of the church and apart from the church.

The church is a living organism and as such it is a complex thing, difficult to generalize because it is made up of almost 2 billion individuals representing various and myriad facets and attributes.

It doesn’t help that these differing aspects of the church often doubt that their brothers and sisters are even part of the same body and often publicly call one another out.

That being said there is a place for introspection and criticism because the church is an important part of the world.

When I write about the church I am writing about the western church as I see it and have been a part of it. I am not writing about the South American church, the African or Asian church…these are not part of my experience.

I do think that writing about the western church can affect the other parts of the global organization – if only to act as a warning to avoid some of our pitfalls.

Even then as I may write critically I cannot hope to capture the intricacies. There are individuals who in no way reflect the church that I see – whole congregations and communities likely. Still the church that the world sees is that Christ that the world sees and so the visible and loud parts of the church need critiquing.

Unsurprisingly the church, being made up of people, often acts like people in various circumstances. The church can be defensive and immature, the church can be violent, the church can advocate for evil…because its members do…regardless of its headship.

In the face of persecution, in the face of irrelevance, in the face death – the church is afraid and has turned to fight. The very Christ of the world, as it is being led to the cross, would rather turn and kill its enemies than trust in the resurrection – this is the church today.

I wrote the above paragraph as a Facebook post the other day mostly to remind myself to write about this subject.

The church is constantly walking a tightrope between the character of the ones who make it up and the character of the one whom the church is supposed to reflect, that one being Christ.

On the one hand you have the church that is confronted by hostility from all sides – humanism, secularism, other faiths, atheism and from within. In response to this threat the church has many possible responses that fall into one of two camps – either the human response, which is to defend and attack back in order to assure survival, or the response of Christ.

There are churches in the United States that advocate for arming pastors in the face of violence. There are churches today that advocate to keep the stranger out of our land. There are churches today that struggle to give sacrificially.

When confronted by the poor the church as an institution and its leaders will conveniently remind the congregation’s individuals that “you are the church and you must give sacrificially” all the while bringing in enormous sums of tithes to shore up salaries, benefits, buildings, furniture, technology, musical instruments and programs. I have been party to this. I have seen this. I have done this.

Take a look at your church’s budget – I would shocked if more than 10 percent of its funds have been dedicated purely to the poor.

Our churches are institutions accumulating wealth out of a belief that the institution can do more in the world as a result of infrastructure and investment – and this feels right. Always remember our churches are reflections of us…they are supposed to be reflections of Christ but they will be only inasmuch as we are.

There is a temptation at this point to blame pastors for the state of things but the reality is your pastors are merely members of the church, the same as you.

When we look to Christ we encounter the Son of Man who has no place to lay his head and we wonder why God’s style of ministry was so different from our own? Is it a cultural difference? Maybe – although even today no modern organization can match the structure and organization of Rome and the Roman Empire. Christ had examples of structured and well-funded evangelism but still he chose the path of a homeless, poor, beggar. It makes us wonder perhaps about our own strategies.

Then there is the enemy.

There are some who clearly feel the church should pick up the crusader sword against the “infidel” at our doors; that we need to act with God-ordained violence and make war upon our enemies – be they individuals, groups or whole cultures.

If we believe that Christ is the ultimate expression of God on Earth than there is no use appealing to Old Testament texts that might make us feel better about advocating violence against our enemies etc.

We look only to his example as expressed in the New Testament and we see the response to the perceived or real enemy in his parables and in his own responses. We look to the parable of the Good Samaritan and we cannot misunderstand what our response is supposed to be. We look to Christ’s own responses and ultimately to the cross and we cannot mistake what our own should be no matter how hard we try.

There is Christ in the Garden at Gethsemene praying and agonizing over his upcoming arrest and execution. There is Christ very aware of the enemy at the door…begging for God to let it pass. There is Christ, whom we believe to be the embodiment of God, resisting the urge to remove the threat.

Christ who is arrested. Christ who stays his follower’s own urge to violent defense. Christ who is whipped, beaten and ultimately nailed to a cross. This Christ who could, at any moment, step off the cross and respond in kind. Instead this Christ stays put to the point where he lifts up his voice in agonizing wails screaming his own doubts that are like our own – “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?”

Where are you? Are you even there?

Christ, our self-same God, doubting even his own existence in a case of modern existential angst that we can all identify with still resists the temptation to reach for the power he has, by faith that even at the most darkest of hours, a darkness unto even death – somehow God knows what is best and will work toward this – against every fiber of human instinct.

Why? There is resurrection.

The church has forgotten about the resurrection and what it means. We have forgotten about this most important aspect of our faith which the apostle Paul spoke so clearly of in 1 Corinthians 15:14 when he said “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”

This is where we find ourselves. We find ourselves at a place where our preaching is useless and so is our faith because, by our thoughts, our words and our actions it is clear that we believe Christ has not been raised. Even if we act this way we make it so and the power of the resurrection vanishes.

Our actions and words betray our deepest innermost insecurity – that Christ was never raised and that God is not really there. As long as we live in this place we will be the violent, selfish, faithless and fearful beings that we are…because the resurrection is lost to us.

The resurrection is still and always there at the centre of our history to be recaptured should we only have faith. But we must stay on the cross in the face of any perceived enemy. We must be willing to let our church die even, if we are to confess and witness a faith that believes in the promise of resurrection – it is the only way; it is the hardest of possible ways because we must go willingly to the cross – whoever leads us there.