Grabbing for the Holy

 https://www.magdala.org/duc-in-altum/ 

There is a piece of art in the church at Magdala in the Holy Land that shows the hemorrhaging woman reaching through a crowd to touch Jesus’ hem.  What a surprising image!  We don’t often think about how she managed to make her way through a crowd of people and how she was able to touch his hem.  I have often imagined it being more like touching the back of a suit jacket, and an easy reach that could be surreptitiously done in passing.  But down at the ankle level is a whole other challenge.  Did she get stepped on?  Did she get kicked?  Why didn’t anyone notice her?  How could you not see someone crawling on the ground, squirming through people, past their stinky toes and walking sticks, getting your hands and knees grimy from the dust in the road, wondering if she would manage to make her goal before someone noticed?  Knowing that being in public risked her very life for breaking the taboo laws around women’s blood.

And there’s the desperation of an important man who, when he isn’t busy being an official and leader of the town religious institution, finds himself simply a heartbroken father throwing himself down on the ground, begging for help. 

What kind of desperation does it take before someone is prepared to lower themselves to such a level?  Losing a child is supposed to be the greatest pain a parent can face, and it doesn’t matter whether that child is a miscarriage, a 12-year-old or a 70-year-old.  When my son fell off his motorcycle last year and I got a call from his friend telling me that he was okay but that something had happened, the world stopped for a moment, and I forgot to breathe.

How many parents have gone through this desperation and not had the good fortune to have Jesus come to their rescue?  How many women crawling in their pain to get to Jesus’ sandals didn’t find the healing they prayed for?  The numbers are legion.  This congregation has lost two beautiful people in 2021 already that we prayed hard for.  Sometimes the cure doesn’t come.  Sometimes the healing comes when the cure does not.  Sometimes the community is humbled, silenced in the face of this great mystery.  Jairus came home to chaos, grief, and noise.  He heard mocking, cynicism, and disbelief.  His friends and family told him to turn away from Jesus.  He chose not to.

Just like the storm that Jesus stilled in last week’s reading, the storm of anguish and anger stilled in this story about Jairus.  The storm of isolation that the unnamed woman had endured for years also stilled.  The storm of anger, denial and cynicism stilled.  The pain of the world was not cured, but it was healed.

What is the difference between being cured and being healed? Cured is in my mind more of a physical thing, a relief from symptoms and diseases.  It may be done through scalpels or medication; it may be temporary or permanent. 

Healing can be physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, or psychological.  It is not something that the doctor can do for the patient, or the parent for the child.  Certainly we can help support healing, and encourage healing, but doctors will be the first to say that they are facing a profound mystery when they see their patients regain health.  They will say that they don’t know why one person recovers while another one doesn’t, and that they can’t even predict which person will be which.  I have seen people thrive while very sick, building community and loving family even while failing steadily in health.  And I have seen people who are very healthy tear down their relationships without even being aware of it.

These stories are similar and yet different.  Both feature unnamed females, yet one is on the cusp of womanhood while the other is mature and married.  One female is passive, needing a male to initiate healing on her behalf, her father.  The other is actively searching in many places.  One has Jesus come to her publicly, the other goes to Jesus sneakily.  In both these stories, Jesus did not just heal the individual, he healed the community.  Jairus and his family and friends were healed from their grief and fear.  They were healed from the ridicule of the cynical crowd.  The woman was cured from her illness, but she wasn’t healed until Jesus called her sister and made it safe for her to re-enter society free from stigma, judgement and ostracization.

Where do we see ourselves?  What are we needing healing for?  How can we connect with that healing?  How do we find the courage to ask for that healing?  For those of us who relate more with the crowds, how do we make space for the folks that are traumatized, the ones who need this healing?  Who do we need to support in their search for healing?  What cynicism do we need to let go of to help their healing happen?

We might not be at the kind of desperation that throws us at Jesus’ feet.  But you and I know there are many who are.  People who burn churches down or pull out guns during a backyard birthday party for a child.  People who donate tiny shoes on display.  People who have yet to plan memorial services for loved ones.  People who are wondering just how many graves there are at residential schools.  People who are running over Muslims or stabbing women wearing hijabs. Regardless of where we find ourselves in the story, isn’t it comforting to know that Jesus reaches out to the humble, the desperate, the grieving and the proud and wants to heal us all?  Whether we crawl for it, kneel for it, or don’t even know it is available, healing is with us, we are not alone, thanks be to God.

The Children Remembered - trigger warning for residential school survivors

 

White Whale Indians visiting their children at the school

White Whale people visiting their children at Red Deer Institute: "These people travelled over a hundred miles..." Red Deer, Alberta, 1914 UCCA, 1993.049P/861N

It’s interesting the different responses people have to stormy weather.  One person loves to stand on the porch during a thunderstorm, oohing and aahing over every streak of lightening, as long as it’s not too close.  Other people find the loud booms and crashes too much for their ears and nervous systems.  Today’s scripture sounds the same; Jesus sleeps in the boat while the disciples search desperately for bailers and life jackets.

And Jesus seems arrogant when they wake him up.  He knows he can still a storm, but how were they supposed to know this?  He knows that death is not something to be afraid of, but how were they supposed to know that they should face death with faith instead of fear? 

I have been feeling rather stormy myself since the news of the residential school unmarked graves.  Mostly I feel the same kind of rage I felt three summers ago near Grand Prairie, standing by the grave of my uncle, an unnamed baby. That in itself was sad, but the enraging part was that he and another baby were hidden under a bush while at the other end of the field were tall crosses, angels and other monuments to pioneers and homesteaders.  Why were these two little babies treated like pariahs in a graveyard, excluded so starkly from the community?  They died before they were baptised, and that meant they were not allowed to be in consecrated ground; this practise continued until the mid 1950’s.

The news this month from Kamloops reminded me of that, only worse.  Those graves were not just isolated, they were undocumented.  We don’t know who they were, when they died, what their names were, and that level of neglect is stomach churning.  But it’s not a surprise.  There are thousands of children across this land who died while at residential schools, and we’ve known this for years.

Back in the 1980’s when I was studying to become a teacher, we watched a movie about residential schools.  It was from the point of view of a young, idealistic schoolteacher like us, coming to a residential school.  She had great intentions to love and care for the children, rescue them from ignorance and poverty, and assumed that she was doing God’s work.  One scene had her picking at her thanksgiving dinner of roast turkey with all the trimmings while she knew the children would be eating porridge for supper again.  The systemic underfunding, racist attitudes and hopeless anger of the children burned her out.  She left with a broken heart.  I don’t think there was a dry eye in the room when that movie finished.  In the 80’s.  We knew.

In the 90’s I took a course in Indigenous History from the U of A.  The first nations classmates couldn’t use their credit cards in stores without producing proof of identity as the clerks assumed they the cards were stolen.  They didn’t get served in restaurants.  They said we whites were uptight about being punctual, and all we thought about was time and money.  They told how horrendous the legacy of residential schools was, because their parents and grandparents had experienced abuse and cruelty.  My mother-in-law did a video project pairing music from Les Misérables with the story of an indigenous young woman coming to the city to get away from family violence back home.  The girls would arrive at the Greyhound bus station where church volunteers and pimps would wait for them.  They were easy targets for the pimps, and the children ended up often in foster homes.  In the 90’s that video was made.  We knew.

We heard the call for a national inquiry into the schools, and learned from the TRC.  I took our very first batch of prayer shawls down to Edmonton in 2013 where they joined thousands more donated by churches.  I handed out shawls all day, listened to the body language, the anger, the stoicism, the quiet hope.  That day was full of stories and pictures of children who didn’t come home, and the anguish of parents who never heard what happened to their little ones.  In 2013. We knew.

Today we can’t pretend that we don’t know any more.  We can’t deny what happened in the name of Jesus, in the name of civilization, in the name of progress.  On the United Church website, Red Deer Industrial Institute – The Children Remembered they wrote: 

When medical officer Peter Bryce penned his 1907 report on the poor health and high death rates of children who attended Indian residential schools, Red Deer IRS had the dubious distinction of reporting the most deaths during the year of his investigation… These numbers do not reflect the full extent of fatalities… because [sick] children were routinely discharged from school... Bryce estimated that the death rate at the schools was about 25 percent but rose to 40 percent when the children who were sent home were taken into account.

In 1907. We knew.

So what do we do now?  We are being tossed in a tumultuous storm in a boat built on assumptions of British superiority.  We are hearing the thunder of generations of grieving human beings who were crushed in our attempts to assimilate.  We are seeing the lightening flashes of pain and outrage of people who are learning their history for the first time. We listen, remembering Jesus who said “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones, it would be better if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.”

Generations of Christian missionaries and teachers put more than a stumbling block before children.  Our ancestors in the faith.  Founders of our church. 

The storm they started then is hitting us now.  How do we respond? Maybe it is time to turn inward and reflect on what we have known, should have known and need to know.  It is time to turn outward in humbleness and listen to what others know.  It is time to act in love, speaking what we have known all along, testifying to the truth that the system was made by people like us and it can be dismantled by people like us.  It is time to act.  In 2008, an archaeological survey at the Red Deer Industrial School, located the remains of 18 individuals and a number of wooden headstones.  In 2005, members of Sunnybrook United Church identified 12 of them, including 13-year-old David Laroque, and 14-year-old Irene Stoney, who both died of tuberculosis.  That was a good start.  And right now, we can write our MLAs and insist that the current curriculum for children in K-6, which talks about residential schools in age-appropriate ways, is protected and strengthened, not ignored and diminished.

Jesus calls us to stop having faith in ourselves and start having faith in him.  That when we are humble, we can work with those others who are in the same boat with us to build truthful, trustworthy relationships that calm the storms and heal us all.  May we have the courage to do so.

Red Deer, Alberta, 1914 or 1916

Students at the blackboard practising penmanship, Red Deer Institute.

UCCA, 1993.049P/850N