Remembering Our Responsibility: Reffections on upon David Kato

     It was with heavy and angry hearts this that we began this month of February when we read of the murder of David Kato Kinsuule, a human rights advocate brutally beaten to death in his home, most likely, by someone he knew. Such is the state of viciousness that surrounds the advocacy of homosexual rights in Uganda.
      In Christ Church Cathedral some of us gathered to pay homage to a man who left the safety of South Africa, where his sexuality was not a danger to him, and returned home to his native Uganda where his work was, and still is, desperately needed. Founding the group Sexual Minorities of Uganda, Mr. Kinsuule put himself in harm’s ways, and there he remained up until his death.
      Upon his death, this member of our Church, was not buried by a priest but by a lay reader. During his funeral service, the reader began to make inappropriate remarks condemning homosexuality and stated the Church of Uganda's position, that homosexuality is a sin and goes against the Bible. In the midst of this diatribe a member of Sexual Minorities of Uganda seized the microphone from the reader and began to defend Mr. Kinsuule’s life and work in what had become an anti-gay rally.
      These are difficult times to be an Anglican, difficult times to belong to a Church that has such colonial baggage. I call this colonial because when the British Empire spread its commonwealth across the globe, it also spread its anti-sodomy laws with it, thus the same laws the imprisoned Oscar Wilde in 19th century Britain are the lineage of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill pending in the Uganda parliament.
     That is part of the history, but it would be a lie to call it the whole picture. Whereas the American Christian right has lost so much ground on homosexual issues on this continent, they have been strategically pooling their efforts into twisting other countries domestic policy. Kapya Kaoma, an Anglican priest from Zambia, has clearly documented connections between the far right funding, to Holocaust revisionist Scott Lively, to Ugandan politicians. In his report Globalizing the Culture Wars: US Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia he ties these connects together and does justice to the complexity to the hornets nest our communion is being sucked into.
     I wish only to allude to these issues to in this article and to present some of this complexity, as I fear that the polemics of the same-sex marriage debates within our Church gives the illusion that are easy answers on how we, as a globe communion, address the murder of David Kinsuule. I hold that it would be an added insult to his death to not see it as a result of a very complex mess. Let us do justice to his memory, let us embrace the complexity of this madness with the cutting light that we have been given by the example of Christ. For no matter where we stand in the maelstrom of homosexual issues, Jesus is quite clear what we are to do with stones and sinners.
     Our God is a God of reconciliation, a God that wishes for us to be as one, and I believe that our Church has been consistent in advocating tolerance and mutual respect. As Rowan Williams said to the African Bishops Conference 6 months ago: “We have a have the responsibility brothers and sisters of showing the world how precious a thing is a human being – and a special responsibility to show the world the preciousness of those who are hated or neglected by others or by society at large.”
     Let us live up to this responsibility. Let us not risk deepening the divides in a world already so fragmented. Our faith is about meeting the other, encountering the reject of society as Jesus would greet a leaper. Surely if we are so devout in our fight for the politics of the Church, we can be sincere in our approach to each other.

Beyond Guilt

   What does it mean to be forgiven? To be absolved? We, the great white Americans, struggle with these questions because we sit on the top. Engulfed in the technological society that we are born into, that rests upon the labour of people we will never meet, we are supremely alienated from those who fund our lives. It is a rare and challenging
thing to confront that privilege and to repent of it.
       There are those who repel against this society, but their rebellion plays to the stage of it, falling into the trap of identity, of self-definition that is just another form of alienation that prevents coming to know “the other,” the one beyond the self. Jacque Ellul, the French theological, has written of how Columbus’ voyage to America has now had such enormous impact across the globe that no one can claim neutrality in the continuing story of colonialism.
       We know this. We know we are not neutral in the World and we yearn for some way in which to passover our guilt for being so intertwined with the collective acts of destruction that our society, day and night, engineers. So paralyzed is the individual in this society that apathy is his only refuge, all holiness becomes profane through the vehicles of South Park and Family Guy; nihilism reigns supreme and we are safe in a meaningless world bent on its destruction.
       The Church feels this heaviness upon itself, and it too is paralyzed in the atmosphere of apathy where our morality is defined negatively, where you are a good person so far as you don’t hurt anybody else and let the guy in the seat next to you listen to his i-thing and remain undisturbed. If you have the good will to take your blue box out to the curb, you’ve broken mold; sainthood is around the corner. Such are our present day standards; the bar is around our knees.
       In Canada where we feel a special burden of guilt is around the residential schools. A collective shame hangs around us. It has become the drunken relative that we refuse to speak of, or when the subject arises it is as projection: something that was done by intuitions that we have no connection or control over and hence bare no responsibility. We are absolved by our non-membership.
       Thus it is with a mixed sense of pride and dread that I can tell you I am proud to belong to a Church that is repenting of its mistakes in the Residential Schools. At the beginning of December I attended one of the Truth and Reconciliation Council meetings that have been ongoing in Canada this past year. At these meetings Residential School survivors, Church folk, and government folk share what they know of the history of residential schools.
       It was a weekend that was spent in the confessional booth; the intimacy and dread hung in the air as we tried to unburden ourselves of past misdoings. It is an exhausting thing to hear confession, to listen with your whole being and allow the other person’s soul to be lightened, but it is part of the joy of service that comes after such trail. And so we heard the stories of men who, in their fifties, were finally able to speak of shame of having been abused by the same pedophile, of a granddaughter who was an alcoholic and who’s brother sexuality assaulted her, inheriting the abuse their father endured at the school, but never spoke off. I saw church men break under the weight of repentance, and glimpses of rage in-between the tears.
       To me the whole gathering was a lesson on the nature of sin, and I say that meaning to go beyond the “naughty list” mentality we carry around us and speaking more towards the other side of sin: that it can be cured by its repentance. Jesus is a rehab councilor: He gives us the knowledge of salvation for the remission of our sins. Now this is not the blank slate mistake where we come out the other side of the confessional and are good for another weekend of debauchery, but rather we are free to go forth and “sin no more,” confident in our forgiveness to do God’s work in the world.
       And what work needs to be done! So much healing needs to take place, and so much needs to be given back. That was one great gift I did get from the weekend: permission to move beyond guilt. To be part of a Church that is working towards its own salvation, engaged in the work of healing drinking from the wellspring of salvation, rather than performing an act of obligation out of W.A.S.P. guilt.
       Let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation, confident of God’s forgiveness for our mistakes, and moving towards the pain that shall lead us to heal