On the Back Burner

Dear Kate,

The church finds herself in a difficult position, but no more difficult than what any parent faces.

"Protesters toss statue of explorer James Cook into Victoria harbour; totem pole later burned."  And that was only yesterday.  On Canada Day alone 10 churches were vandalized, heritage tossed into the sea of human fury.  We want to bring history to its proper end, to set the world right, and we want it now.  We need to see justice burning bright, ignited with our own hands.

The only way to satisfy justice this way is to burn everything up--not just churches, but everything, literally.  If we are honest about our own lives we shall also set ourselves on fire, not only for what we have done as an individual, a community, a nation, but also for, more significantly, irreparable damages we are capable of doing in the future, irredeemable wrongs we will certainly commit by sunset against our neighbors, everything in Creation vulnerable to our fury.  The world is a better place without human beings, let's face it.

Tit for tat, that's how it works, that's how the world turns.  "Truth and reconciliation" we shall forever be denied of because we are not peaceable.  The true face of hope we don't want to know, because that would reveal the true face of our own: hopeless in sin, sick unto death beyond our own resourcefulness.  We have a thirst for facts, "information" picked and chosen to support our even stronger propensity towards action.  As long as something is being done about "the world," the wrongs of others, we can leave our own on the back burner for another day.

More, we profit from injustice.  Somehow it fuels the fire of our quest for meaning, our assertion of selfhood, a justification for our cosmology.  The sight of human falling and the world burning after a very sinister fashion give us the license to keep our style.  We are all justice warriors, freedom-fighting journalists telling on everyone but ourselves.  In the past month I've seen people in social media plagiarizing reports on the residential school and passing off the words as their own reporting, moral awakening.

If the Church has once been unfaithful in colluding with worldly powers, she is unfaithful still in being politically expedient, in true Canadian solidarity sorry about everything, wallowing in hopeless shame, offering the world nothing but burning material, shiny artifact of the past.  The Number One sin of the Church has always been to proclaim herself as the Good News.  To make God look good we must look better ourselves.  Since we don't look too good now, naturally, God must shut up too.  The real Good News, the true Gospel, never ceases to scandalize us, but we don't want it to work that way.  We have our own ideas about how to make things work.

Well, nothing is "working."  Everything deserves a degree of hellfire.

Going back to my first sentence: what if a parent can only be a parent when she has and shall never fall short of the full glory of being a parent?

Yours, Alex