A Whole Heap of Difference

I was up at Saint Mary's again today.  Wandering the hollow halls, imagining haunted voices and distance laments of children aching for home.  I sensed the terror, physical and palpable, felt first in the depth of the belly and burning it's way up to the the back of the eye, scalding the throat, and manifesting in tears that only beckoned , sadistically inviting more torment...those tears that still drip painfully raw all these years later.

Things happened there. Horrible things that an innocent, beautiful child should never have to experience.  Those children belonged to the Creator  and were stolen from the parents to whom He gifted them.  He designed and made each of these little ones with infinite care and immeasurable love - and men and women decreeing themselves as God's instruments, doing God's work but  filled up by the father of lies and the putrid religious pride that compels evil,  harmed them.

 Did not our Creator say "If anyone harms one of these little ones  it would be better for him that a millstone be tied around his neck and he be cast into the lake of fire?"

It is a stench what they did to the children of  First Nations.  A horrible, horrible sin.  And it has perpetuated from generation to generation because trauma and abuse can beget trauma and abuse if there is no help for it - no acknowledgement, no accountability, no justice renders no healing. 

Let me not trivialize and dishonour them when I say, I  believe I know what the adults who survived the abuse of  residential school system are feeling. I understand the bristling that occurs when they hear someone say "just get over it".  I hunch that like me, they struggle with having to discern the authencity of apology and their own acts of  forgiveness.  I get the cynicism that makes one wonder "Is that apology meant as therapy for you or healing for me?".   And  I know the pain and sometimes, still, the shame.  The palpable fear and churning in my gut are as real to me today when I remember, as they were when I was 5 and my abuser attacked me for the first time.  But even though I may have an inkling of what they experienced through what I experienced, there still remains a vast difference between us, namely, my privilege and place in the dominant culture that accorded me opportunities and resources for my healing, that many, if not most, residential school survivors have never had. 

I know the  healing, restoration and the transforming power of  finding my voice and being loved and accepted within my own family in addition to the dominant culture. I've never experienced racism or marginalization or stereotyping  on top of and in addition to the abuse, unlike residential school survivors who have had to contend with so much more than "just" the abuse and it's legacy.  I have experienced true healing and true forgiveness, most particularly for myself and this has brought me a peace beyond understanding and a deep joy that transcends mere happiness...but would this have been "so easy" had my position of privilege not created the safe spaces to do so?

Besides the fact that my privilege opened up opportunities for healing that renders a difference, it remains that what happened to me did not emerge out of some misguided, cruel intention to erase who I am. One man harmed me for whatever sick purposes served his sick self, but I seriously doubt that these had  anything to do with wiping out my identity or culture. The abuse I experienced was not the result of a concerted institutional effort, and that makes a whole heap of difference too.

Even after all these years and all this healing, I still experience triggers  that draw me back to the trauma, days that this all gets mixed up in some incongruent soup of anger, confusion and thoughts of self harm or revenge...but even those days are shortened by the easy access I have to healing resources.  This is not to take away from the fact that my healing has empowered me to make good choices; for example, on those hard days, like on my normal days, I choose to walk the path of forgiveness; I choose to allow  Creator Jesus to re-create and re-frame me as He sees fit; I choose to accept what happened to me but will not organize my life around it; rather I choose to live my life as fully and completely as I possibly can.   But I can never let those choices make me smug or think, others ought to be able to do it just as well...because others aren't necessarily privileged within the dominant culture like I am, and that makes the biggest difference of all.