We were looking forward to the visit of Deacon Rennie Nahanee to the parish today. Deacon Rennie, a permanent deacon of our Archdiocese, is a member of the Squamish Nation and was to preach at Mass and bless the land acknowledgment plaque the parish has recently installed at the entrance to the church. Unfortunately, he fell ill last week and is now recovering at home.
The coordinator of Christ the Redeemer's reconciliation effort had the inspired idea to invite another permanent deacon to preach today so that we continue our focus on the residential schools and reconciliation . I had circulated to our committee an earlier homily given by Deacon Bruce Fraser and she thought he could readily revise it for our benefit.
Which is how Deacon Bruce came to preach at the parish this morning while we await Deacon Rennie's visit and the blessing of the plaque. His inspiring homily follows...
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is having a tough time in his hometown of Nazareth.
His family and friends can’t get over their preconceived notions of who He is.
As a result, they’re blocking His announcement of the Kingdom of God.
They can only see “Jesus, the guy we watched grow up”. They cannot see a prophet. In effect, they think that He is pretending to be something that He isn’t.
Jesus tells them as much to their faces, and they are so offended that they try to throw him off a cliff.
Jesus does not perform any public miracles at Nazareth. He recognizes that anything extraordinary He would do there would not help bring the Kingdom of God any closer to reality there.
If He were to perform a great sign, his friends and family would see it only as a show, a spectacle, not a symbol pointing to a deeper reality.
And so, unable to draw them closer to the Kingdom, Jesus chooses to do nothing.
However, Mark tells us in his version of this story that Jesus does, “lay his hands on a few sick people and cure them.” Where Jesus does find people who are receptive to the Kingdom, He does perform miracles for them, but these are quiet acts done for individual people, not public acts to inspire large crowds.
Jesus keeps his ministry in Nazareth low key because He sees that public spectacles and public speeches are not going to help.
***
This is a tough time to be a Catholic Christian in Canada.
Last year, the discovery of unmarked graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School and the later discovery of unmarked graves near the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan left a lot of people angry at the Catholic Church. And this week we heard about 93 possible burial sites around the residential school near Williams Lake.
There are some people for whom these discoveries have opened old wounds and caused old pain to resurface.
There are others who were already angry at the Catholic Church for other reasons, and these discoveries have given them new energy and new ammunition.
There are also many Catholics who are angry that their Church could have been involved in something so wrong as the Residential School system.
So how should we cope with this situation, as Canadians and as Catholics?
How do we cope personally? Looking inward, how do we stop the onslaught of distressing news from crushing our spirits?
Looking outward, how do we cope with a newly hostile world?
For my part, I have started to educate myself.
For breaking news, I stay away from the mainstream media.
I turn instead to interviews and opinions by the people closest to these events,
to see what they have to say.
The words of the people directly affected by these events are both moving and inspiring. They speak of anger, but also of reconciliation and moving forward together. They speak of pain and suffering, but also of listening, learning, and solidarity.
For example, when the Catholic Church in Penticton burned down last year, I ignored the CBC and Global News, and went straight to the Penticton Western News, which printed a brief interview with Greg Gabriel, chief of the Penticton Indian Band. Chief Gabriel said that there was a lot of anger and a lot of pain in the community over the Residential Schools, but he condemned the burning of the church. He said, “Many in our community were members and involved in services.” He added that those people are hurting because the church was where they went to grieve and pray over what had been found in Kamloops. In reading his words, I realized that what was meant to hurt the Catholic Church in general had instead hurt the very people who were already suffering. It was not just a church that some angry people burned down, but their church.
The press releases sent out by the First Nations who commissioned the ground radar surveys speak of their pain, but also of their desire to be given time: time to process what has happened, time to find answers to their questions, time to grieve.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which ended in 2015, has a website containing all of its documents. Some of them are enormous, and I’m a slow reader. Nonetheless, I am working my way through them as I am able. I’m doing this to educate myself, but also because this is one of the few things that Indigenous leaders have asked non-Indigenous people to do in solidarity with them. They have called for all Canadians to educate themselves by reading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports. That is something that we can all do.
So far, what I have read speaks of the trauma and suffering experienced by Indigenous students at the schools, but it also calls for solidarity and reconciliation so that we can move forward together—Indigenous and non-Indigenous people—in gradual, small steps, as those who carry the trauma of the Residential School system in their hearts feel ready to do so.
So, that’s educating ourselves, but how do we as Catholics deal with a newly hostile world?
This is where we can take an example from today’s Gospel. Jesus recognized that preaching the Good News of the Kingdom of God in Nazareth wasn’t going to go anywhere. He also recognized that defending His reputation by performing some flashy miracles wasn’t going to help. So, He didn’t do either.
This wasn’t an act of condemnation. It was, rather, a prudential assessment of the situation. “Wrong time, wrong place. Not now. Not yet. Maybe some other time.”
Right now, non-Christian Canadians are probably not going to be receptive to hearing about our Faith. They’re not going to be able to get past who they think we are in order to pay attention to what we are saying.
Nor is this the time to publicly correct any errors we’ve heard in the media.
If someone is truly interested in the Catholic point of view, we should be happy to share it. But if someone is angry at the Church, then correcting mistaken ideas is just going to sound defensive. It’s going to sound like all we care about is protecting the Church’s reputation and that we don’t care about what the Residential School system did to the First Nations people.
Now is not the time to talk. Now is the time to listen.
Especially and always we must listen to the people directly affected by the Residential Schools: the survivors, the children of survivors, the groups of people coping with generational trauma as a result of the Residential School system.
However, it’s also time to listen to people who are angry at the Church for other reasons.
If I have educated myself about what happened at the Schools, using the stories and materials produced by the very people who lived that experience, then I can put what people are saying to me in some sort of context. I can acknowledge their pain and their anger without letting it crush me. I can focus on what I can do to help them, if they want my help, rather than becoming defensive and reacting out of my own pain and frustration.
“Preach the Gospel at all times; when necessary, use words,” is the most famous thing that St. Francis of Assisi never said.
What this expression means is that there are times when telling people the Good News about God and His Kingdom… when telling people about the beauty and the majesty of our Catholic Faith… just comes across as noise. There are times when the people you meet, like the people of Nazareth, can’t see past their preconceived notions about who you are and what you are about in order to hear the message you have for them.
In cases like that, the best thing to do is to act like a Christian rather than making lofty speeches. In today’s climate, that means listening rather than talking.
In the second reading, St. Paul reminds us that “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful.”
St. Paul is telling us that if we speak truth, but we do it defensively or rudely, then it doesn’t matter if we have our facts straight: we still lose. Love must come first. “What is the loving thing for me to do here?” is the first and most important question, and often that loving thing is just listening.
In Mark’s version of today’s Gospel, though, Jesus does evangelize a little bit.
You may meet a few people who want to tell you about their pain and their anger, but also want to hear about your experience as a Catholic, people who are genuinely interested in your point of view.
If you meet someone like this, the first thing to do is apologize.
As Canadians, we recognize that the Residential School system was a bad idea.
As Catholics, we’re sorry that the Church ever got involved in that system.
If we could turn back the clock, knowing what we know now, we as a Church would not have cooperated in it. We’re also sorry that within the Church’s involvement in what we now know was a terrible system, some individual Catholics went beyond even that and abused the children in those schools, or turned a blind eye to their abuse at the hands of others, making their horrible experience even worse. We need to make it clear that the whole thing was a disaster and that we would never want to see it repeated.
Then, perhaps, having apologized, we can talk about how this has affected us as Catholics.
If that seems unfair, apologizing for something that you had no personal hand in doing, listening while other people rail at you for being Catholic, then remember that our discomfort is nothing compared to what many Indigenous children suffered at the Residential Schools.
In recognition of that level of pain and ongoing suffering, the Christian thing to do… the prophetic thing to do… the loving thing to do… is to listen.
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