Sorrow and Redemption - Sad News in Canada

 This week here in Canada we became aware of the remains of 215 children at a former residential school which children from our First Nations attended over many years.  The federal government and many churches were part of this system over a far too long period of time.  This discovery starkly shows that healing and redemption from such horrors can also take longer than anyone would like.  

Even though I am a Catholic priest, when I was young I had really no awareness of this situation at all, growing up in urban Toronto.  Communications really weren't what they are now and, sadly, there was an element I am quite sure of "out of sight and out of mind".  

In the starkness of the horror we might not even see that healing is something we are after.  As we draw back our breath, we have to ask, "What is next?"  Well, the world has enough sadness, so I've got to want healing.  

Finding a way to healing, however, is a subtle thing.  If you have been fortunate enough to have a life story that runs more or less in a straight line and features consistent love and appropriate support, you are blessed indeed!  Truthfully, many of us paper over our own traumas and that becomes one of the reasons we shy away from upsetting news like this.  

I did not have that experience in my early life.  I was taken from my mother, who did indeed, as I found out much later, have a very complicated life.  I spent roughly my first year in an orphanage and then one year in each of two foster homes.  I was taken from one because my foster mother was ill.  At just over 3, I was adopted.  It may seem hard to believe but I have one memory of that day -- looking out of the window of the social worker's car at the house where I was going to live.  I did settle in with my adopted parents but it took time and shadowy feelings from those days of early life continued to assert themselves.  

I didn't know what to do with them.  I was fortunate that both by temperament and from what I learned about my faith from my parents and from people in my parish that a deeper truth of love was looking to be revealed.  I am 60 now and in some ways that search has lasted a lifetime, but I can tell you that along the way have been powerful fruits by being faithful to that journey.  It has taken discipline, patience and a desire to learn to listen to myself. That has been fruitful because I asked God to help me all along the way.  

Because of this rather sideways beginning I think many people have not understood parts of me over the years.  They haven't known that I did not yet understand them myself.  

This experience, so far, has shown me that the things that have been most important in my healing are subtle, their true significance missed initially.  That is the result of all the coping that had to go on early in life, adjusting myself to radically different situations.  Getting grounded in myself was disrupted early and hard to establish later. 

Each time significant truths have been revealed, however, major steps forward have followed.  I have met natural siblings and learned the stories of my parents.  While doing that I have had to tend to my existing family and friend relationships.  

It was also important that I took steps when I was ready.  There are still some to go, but the cumulative effect has become a solid anchor in my life, even seeing the blessing of having persevered.  I hope it has been helping me to listen to others and to learn to walk with them better.  

There are going to have to be these kinds of significant steps at the social level, government, people active in the pastoral life of the Catholic Church, as well as appropriate resources to aid in the remedy.  

While we grieve now, let us not walk away from the deeply spiritual and engaging process of redemption.  Even as we want to help one another we need to learn to listen deeply and not allow our sentiments only to become a discordant noise. 

One of the helps to me along the way (as you can tell by this blog) has been music.  Today I listened again to part of Henryk Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.  I like the recording with Dawn Upshaw.  This work was originally written 30 years after the end of World War II and is both a lament and a spark of resurrection even in the midst of the worst of what human beings can do to one another.  I have always been in awe of Gorecki's testimony to sorrow and death, healing, forgiveness, resurrection and new life.  Its deep breathing sounds take me to a place where I can listen and allow the heart to be spoken to by the living God.   Let us learn how to enter into your peace O God.