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