In his award-winning essay on Celtic Christianity (Presbyterian Record, April 2004), Philip Newell writes about "listening within life for the beat of God's presence." Listening is not something we do all that well in Western culture; talking and shouting is more typical. Heckling question periods in Parliament are the quintessential formalization of basketball players trashtalking.
Listening is difficult. It involves putting our own opinions to the side and taking in another's viewpoint that could be radically different than our own.
Hook, crook and luck admitted few virtues in subjugating the humans who were on the continent prior to the Europeans. There is nothing more virtuous about the people who lived here prior to the 1500s than those who arrived from Europe: good and evil were as present in their lives as in ours today. They conquered brutally before being brutally conquered. Loss of life, language and culture has accompanied every such clash of humans.
But does such history justify itself? Are we really Roman Stoics for whom this is the work of fate? Surely we recognize the treatment of the aboriginal peoples was not the way we would hope to be treated.
Such judgments about the distant past are difficult because we cannot remove the lenses through which we judge the world today. But the treatment of people within our and our grandparents' lifetime we can judge with reasonable clarity. And it fell terribly short.
In 1994, the Presbyterian Church offered an apology for its part in the running of Indian residential schools in Canada. There had been a dozen such Presbyterian schools. Following church union in 1925, there remained only two: Birtle, Manitoba, and Cecilia Jeffrey, in Kenora, Ont.
Two years ago, the church signed an agreement with Ottawa capping the church liability in lawsuits arising from the legacy of abuse in the schools at $2.1 million. Money for the settlement came largely from some undesignated trust funds, so the church as a whole escaped any financial pain.
It would be a sad commentary if such pain were required to wake people up to the problems that existed at residential schools and their contribution to the bleak life too many of Canada's aboriginal peoples face today.
This General Assembly certainly made an attempt: aboriginal issues permeated the week, whether in debates about how to help heal the wounds of abuse to three artistic aboriginal entertainers at the assembly banquet to several talking circles held one evening.
Talking circles might be more appropriately called listening circles. Used by certain natives in their government, they are closer to a Friends Meeting than the cacophony of Parliament. Only one person speaks at a time, passing a rock or stick around the circle, and there can be considerable lengths of silence. Any decisions are based on consensus.
The creation of Canada has been a mix of good and evil politics, of war, rebellion, massacre, of aboriginal nations killing and being killed, even exterminated, such as the Beothuk in Newfoundland. Yet there are also many good stories of natives and non-natives helping one another, of Christians who built schools and hospitals.
But the evils of the past live on. While most of us live well, many aboriginal people still live in isolated communities. Of those who live in our cities, many have difficulty adjusting to non-native ways. This has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with the different cultures.
As a result, there is pressure to retain certain aspects of culture, on the one hand, and join multicultural Western society. On the other hand, there is pressure from both natives and nonnatives to remain almost isolated on remote reserves.
Easy answers are those most certain to fail, but as part of the dominant culture, surely we have the greater responsibility to work on solutions. We should not paint problems into the past as if they can and should be forgotten. Treaties barely a century old are often treated as if they should be observed only in museums, not in law. Yet the laws that created this country are barely more than a century old. Should they be scrapped? Why then do we celebrate church anniversaries of 100 or 125 years? Or why do Scots remember Glencoe and Culloden as if they happened yesterday? By contrast, most treaties between Canada and aboriginal peoples date from 1850 — only 16 years before the Presbyterian Record was founded.
Perhaps we need to listen more: listen to what natives have to tell us about their lives and history and listen to God.
Besides working towards healing our relationships with natives, we might find a model for healing other divisions in the church. We are all guilty of talking too much. Few are guilty of listening too much.
