Light Shines

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it."

― The Gospel of John

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Dear Kate,

I read in the news last week a letter written by an intergenerational residential school survivor to our first Prime Minister John A. Macdonald.  He said: "I know the suffering caused by your policies, but tearing down your statue is not going to solve our problems."

The writer, Chris Sankey, is a prominent Indigenous business leader, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a former elected Councilor for the Lax Kw’alaams Band.

In one paragraph, he implicated generations of Canadian leaders: "As I sit and ponder your legacy, I am reminded that Mackenzie King was PM for 20 years. Why isn’t anyone attacking him? Sir Wilfrid Laurier was no better. Let’s not forget Alexander Mackenzie, John Abbott, John Thompson, Mackenzie Bowell, Charles Tupper, Robert Borden, Arthur Meighen, RB Bennett, Louis St-Laurent, John Diefenbaker, Lester B. Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, John Turner, Brian Mulroney, Kim Campbell and Jean Chrétien. Let us not forget the countless members of Parliament and staff who knew what was happening. After all, staff wrote reports on the schools."

After all, it all happened under the nose of all Canadians.

Darkness, it has always been around us, never darker than how it showed itself to our fathers and mothers, people of the 20th century, with deepening despondency we now find ourselves in the next.

The 20th century has been one of devastating tragedies and unmitigated defeats; it takes a person with only a little historical knowledge, a Grade 9 Social Studies education, to be aware of that.  The 19th century, apparently full of hope, nevertheless made our disillusionment more disarming when we were confronted, very soon into the next, by the carnage and atrocities these human hands could deliver: Somme and Verdun, Gestapo and KGB, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, Iwo Jima and Hiroshima, death camps, trench warfare, totalitarianism in major cultured, "enlightened," "reasonable," "progressive" civilizations.

If we were to live in the age of our parents and grandparents, could we have done a better job to stop the darkness from spreading?  What were their concerns and worries, as they were concerned and worried about the life they tried to build for us, the life we are living now in a time that, according to some thinkers (and not without evidence), is the most peaceful period on earth ever?

Or is it?

Certainly you don't expect to die in the hand of another human being, do you?  And COVID...what is it any way, but an aberration, an abnormality in our otherwise perfectly peaceable, "ordinary" life (nothing more we ask)?  We don't aspire to kill and steal to make a life for our children, because, as far as we could see, that's already been done by our ancestors, and what's left for us now is to sustain this way of life for yet another summer, another Thanksgiving, another generation, and frankly we couldn't imagine how our good life could or should end.  "Back to normal" we say, a matter of course.

Do we kill and steal to make a life for ourselves and our children?  We hope not.  We think not.  We see not.  Darkness is not what we are used to, especially that in ourselves.  We are aware of darkness, yes, and we talk about dark issues too, even in church: climate justice, refugee crisis, global inequality, but all wrongdoings have been contracted out so many times over that it's hard to see why and how our hands should be stained.  I know for sure my kids would kill me if I am to turn the thermostat down to a "sustainable" degree during winter.

We could live happily with that, admitting darkness has been perpetuated on our behalf, at our behest, in this peaceful time, a "globalized" world, by the "invisible hand" of the market economy.  We do what we can to "offset" harms we've been told we have done.  We do what we can to clean house, but the conviction we shall never forgo is that our house can be cleaned, that we deserve to be justified in our pursuit of happiness because our intention to keep things clean is there.  Ironically, our cleanliness is predicated on our resistance to light, shining through our every nook and cranny.  We are as clean as we are blind to our darkness.

The residential school stories speak about a darkness that was merely gray, if even that, when it happened, but now, as we are feeling it, darker than any light could ever overcome.  Change of time?  Shift in perception?  Improving sensitivity?  We surely want cosmic justice to be less than being so haphazard.  We surely wish the eternal light, if there is one, would right all wrongs and make everything, everyone come alive, again, for the first time.

Yours, Alex

(The trailer I shared above is a Hungarian film about two Jewish Holocaust survivors arriving in a Hungarian village after the war, and the villager's fearful reactions, thinking that these two or maybe more Jews are coming to take back their land and properties.)