CPT Aboriginal Justice Delegation Day 2: Church

10 Aug 2014

Note: these are my own observations/reactions/musings, not Christian Peacemaker Teams’ official communications. Please also follow Caitlin’s delegation blog, Peace Pigeon, and the official CPT Aboriginal Justice tumblr!

Personal ethnographic note: I am white, Jewish descent, and from San Francisco, California, Turtle Island.

##Church This Morning

Today is a slow day, without a great deal planned. It began with a shower (Yay! First in three days!), for which I have a lot of gratitude to one of the priests for letting us shower in her home.

After enough coffee to kill a small horse, we went to the church services at the church that’s been graciously putting us up, St. Alban’s Cathedral Church in Kenora. Though the service was much higher-churchy than I’m really happy with, there was a lot of good-will in evidence and we felt very welcomed. The Dean even pointed us out as Christian Peacemakers to the congregation, a lovely gesture. I didn’t take communion, though, in keeping with the Quaker testimony against outward sacraments.

One of the readings was the story in Matthew of Jesus and Peter leaving the boat to walk on water. I was struck by the part where Peter begins to worry about the wind and the size of the waves, and then immediately begins to sink. He’s rebuked by Jesus, “You of little faith”.

I’m not sure I took from this story what most people seem to take from it; I don’t feel it has much to do with the divinity of Jesus, for instance. To me, the faith that Peter seemed to be lacking with faith in God in general, or faith in the flow of events in the universe, and faith that he can find his own peaceful place in that flow without fighting events as they arise. Peter finds himself in a strange, new situation, but it’s working for him and clearly a time to simply go with the flow. But instead, he accidentally falls back on his attachment to his rational mind (a definition of “ego”, according to Eckhart Tolle), and tries to analyze the situation and control it with his own resources, tries to sure up his own self-preservation, and to impose his self-will on the situation.

At that point, Peter experiences the paradox of trying to assert his self-will on a situation which has been going fine without his interference: he loses control of it immediately, rather than gaining control. This feels like the major spiritual challenge of my life at the moment: to not “push the stream”, as Richard Rohr says; when I can accept events as they come, and find my most peaceful path in them, applying myself where I am needed, things go well (even if I don’t understand why – I don’t need to!). As soon as I analyze overmuch, and assert my control, I often accidentally disrupt the flow of events in such a way as to cause pain, at least to myself. It’s rather a Buddhist concept, actually: attachment (to rationality, to events, to control) leads to suffering.

Last note: there was only 1 aboriginal (Anishinaabe) person in church this morning, as far as I could tell. I thought there would be more, but that expectation is only based on a vague sense that the Anglican Church in Canada seems to be sensitive to aboriginal concerns, at least in some places. I was told later by our delegation leader that she often used the Anishinaabe word meegwitch (“thanks”) instead of “Amen” as a prayer-response. I like that.

##A Rude Awakening

Later in the day, I took a walk around a corner of the stunning Lake of the Woods. On a hill beside the lake, next to the train tracks, there is a small wooded area where I noticed a policeman riding a four-wheel all-terrain-vehicle over the hill. I turned my head away for a moment towards the lake, but then heard some yelling and looked back at the hill. The policeman was chasing two men out of the wooded area down the hill, and followed them into a road on his ATV. The two men, both of them Anishinaabe, walked over the road (and were yelled at from a passing truck as they did).

They headed in my direction, and as they got close to me, I heard one say to a friend, “But at least they weren’t the real asshole-type”. Because I overheard them, I asked the men what had happened. They told me they were napping under the trees, and the policeman ran them off. I asked if this sort of thing happened often, police harrassing them for no reason, and one man said, “Oh yeah, you have no idea…wait, you’re not from here, are you?!” I said no. “Yeah, police in Kenora are the worst.” While we chatted, one of the other men walked by and said, “well, at least I got a little nap”.

Given how nasty and racist the police incident looked to me, I shudder to think what the “real asshole-type” of police would have done.