The Council of Associated Parishes for Liturgy and Mission met in western Canada this spring to witness first hand the crisis in the Anglican Church of Canada. In our Santa Fe meeting the previous year, we had begun to struggle with the implications of the legacy of the Residential Schools (see OPEN, Summer 2001). For over a hundred years, Canada sought to assimilate its First Nations peoples by removing children from their homes and communities to government schools which were operated with the assistance of the mainline churches. The lawsuits brought by former students, charging both church and government with responsibility for the physical and sexual abuse that took place in the schools, are threatening to bankrupt the General Synod of the Anglican Church and have already bankrupted one diocese (and threaten a few others). The broader charges of cultural abuse have yet to be heard. Meeting in the Anglican retreat center of Sorrento, just west of the Rocky Mountains, we struggled to name the assumptions, both cultural and theological, that have shaped our mission strategies in these dying years of the Constantinian era. We spent an afternoon listening to Archbishop David Crawley, metropolitan of British Columbia, as he recounted the history of the relationship between the church and the aboriginal people, and the details of the current crisis. It became clear to us that this moment of apparent calamity has become for the Canadian church a defining moment: a new and profound commitment has emerged among both aboriginal and non-aboriginal Christians to seek healing and a new partnership in the Gospel.
On Sunday, we gathered with a tiny First Nations congregation to share the eucharist, then meet informally during lunch. Following this we traveled to the town of Lytton, site of one of the residential schools and the setting of the first court case which defined the responsibility of the church in the abuses that had taken place. The local Anglican priest–herself an aboriginal person–answered our questions with patience and simplicity, as we sat in the shadow of the school chapel (all that remained of the school). She gave us a graphic impression of a traumatized community of aboriginal Christians who largely avoid the church, but are eager to share in baptism and eucharist when it is on their own turf. She helped us picture the healing work which is slowly developing, based on traditional First Nations spiritual practices.
One of the most illuminating dimensions of our exploration as a Council was our reflection on the perennial role of violence within the religious experience. Religion–not just the Christian religion, but virtually every religious tradition down though history–has been used to justify violence. Violence against the most vulnerable among us has been the pattern, time and again, for dealing with our own problems.
The most astonishing moment in this sordid history, we were reminded, was the betrayal and execution of Jesus. Astonishing because he himself had been bold in exposing the futility of such violence, urging his friends to forget about insurrection against the Romans, telling them to love their enemies and pray for those who abused them. Astonishing, too, because he showed the same attitude not only to his accusers and executioners, but to his own friends who abandoned him in his crisis and silently melted into the mob: when he appeared to them again, alive from the dead, his first words were, “Peace be with you!”
And so we were reminded that each time we gather around the Lord’s Table, we recall both his death at our hands and his forgiveness of us. We gather as the penitent persecutors around the body of this self-giving victim, whose forgiveness changes our perception of everything and prompts our resolve never to victimize another human being again.
What is the future shape of our mission, then? That is the question we must pursue, conscious in a new way that colonialism– in whatever form–is a betrayal of our mission. Dialogue must become our way of being, and the embodiment of our love and respect for those among whom we bear witness to the risen Christ.
This, then, was the context of our work on the Sorrento Statement, published in this issue.