Repentance

Haiti, I mourn your loss. I grieve your pain.

My television shows me the scars on your body but it can not convey the deadly toll this takes on your emotional, and mental well-being. Haiti, your fatherless daughters and motherless sons are wailing in my ears but I can conveniently shut them off with click from my remote in my well-worn chair. Haiti, your broken bones and amputated bodies are a fabulous spectacle that keeps me wrapped in undivided attention till I find some other distraction. There is nothing I can do to conjure up how your amputated spirit must be writhing in pain – without anaesthetic!

Yet I see you dancing and singing in the streets – foolish resilience it would seem. I have heard some say that you deserved the devastation brought upon you – for your Godlessness. God’s judgement they claim. Yet you sing and praise this God in ways few expected. Please forgive those arrogant remarks for we in our own Godlessness should have summoned the unleashed gates of hell itself upon us compared to your contrite heart.

A man said today that earthquakes do not kill but buildings do. The buildings you built were the best you could afford but they weren’t the best that could have been built. Haiti, your international debt was so staggering that your government was powerless to enforce the proper building codes. It was a puppet of the ‘global’ interests of large multi-national corporations. These corporations came in to your country and demanded cheap labour from you because you were so deeply indebted to them and their ‘monetary fund’. So you worked for them for less than $2 a day.

You worked cheap for them so that I could buy a $10 T-shirt at Walmart to cover my obesity. You worked cheap to harvest bananas so that I could eat ripe ones on any day of the week in January. In fact the bananas that you wanted to buy from your own farms were more expensive than the ones from Delmonte. So you bought their bananas instead of the ones your neighbour grew. You even cleaned up your beaches to let my countrymen come and play on them. You cleaned up your women so that they could sleep with them as well – for cheap. You let these big companies build extravagant resorts so that my fellow countrymen could play there – indulge there. You got to go to these hotels as well to clean up after our indulgences. And then you got stuck there. Barely able to eek out a living you fought your friends for the ‘best’ jobs. And your life became dependant on our desire to visit your beautiful island. Your good fortune was married to our whim.

So you did not have the money to build the kind of houses they build in LA that can withstand the shaking of the ground. No one even suggested that a better way to build your homes, your country and your nation might be available. Now you scramble to find a tent to live in under the blazing sun and unrelenting rain.

I am your disaster. I am the cause of your demise. The earth shook but I was the one responsible for your pain. My greed. My consumption. My ignorance. My indifference. My oversight. My quest for pleasure. I am the force that crushed your mother. I am the reason your sons are gone.

Please forgive me.

I repent of my gluttony and I confess my obsession with consuming. I look down the long list of things that mark the entries of my Mastercard bill and I am ashamed to tell you that last week I spent $4 on two hamburgers for myself. I see how corrupt I have become and the pain I have caused you without even really intending to. I swear to you and the God we plead to for help that I will change. I will root out the spectre of consumption in my life. My monthly statements will be different.

Please, Haiti, do not hold hatred in your heart for me or my fellow countrymen. We did not intend harm to you. And we are starting to see our own hearts in the light of your tragedy and in the light of the great Master who once said, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness! No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.”

I pray someday your nation will be restored.

Ghosts in the mist…

There are capsules of memory that exist where people used to dwell. They have gone and we play in the haunted caves of their mannerisms and personalities. We’re convinced that they left some unfinished business that we determine to reclaim in our recollective spelunking. So we play with their ghosts in the dark caverns of memory – we dance with them, we chase them furiously, wrestle and pin them to the ground (we finally can pin them to the ground – take that), we smile at them furtively and pretend not to notice. All the while we play the game that seems to appease our conscience – recovering what they have left undone. If we can discover and fulfill their discarded destinies than perhaps the reality that we are alive and they are not is somehow justified.

He would have wanted it this way…

She always kept a rose garden in the back…

He was always telling jokes…

We hang on to them by giving them some incompletion. We drag them with us through our own insufficiencies. Ghosts on a leash. So then goodbye seems cruel and disrespectful. Move on – let go – they tell us. Impossible.

Tonight I walk in this rare Alberta fog with my ghosts and the mist on my face is enough…

Tonight the ghosts are easily recognized…

Friends with shining faces so clear in this dark cave…

Greetings are warm and familiar…

But the cave is crowded tonight…

Tonight I take up a mantel that has slid low on my shoulders…

Tonight life is heavier and more determined…

Tonight thousands of faceless unfinished lives are scurrying around in the cave…

Religious Discourse of Disaster

The story goes like this: A Christian couple landed in Port au Prince just hours before the earthquake. They were delayed at the airport and did not reach their hotel before the devastation began. This was a good thing for them – the hotel was destroyed in the quake. Had they been in the hotel at the time they would have surely been dead along with everyone else in the hotel. So what do you say about this? A case for God’s intervention in their lives?

There have been a number of times that I have heard these sort of comments made about these type of events. Had events carried out as they should have circumstances would have indicated a much more disagreeable result. But because events occurred in the manner that they did – there is an attribution to God’s intervention in the situation to produce a different result than should have occurred. Terms like miraculous are attached to these type of situations.

It occurred to me that when we speak of events like this using this type of language we accept a particular discourse about the nature of God and the privilege that is experienced by certain kinds of people – in this case Christians.

Take in account that in the same earthquake a prison holding over 4000 rapists, murders, and thieves was struck. the quake killed some of the inmates but most found the destruction the perfect opportunity to escape the prison. So did God intervene here as well? Was this not also a miracle?

Haiti Earthquake News: Main Prison Destroyed, 4,000 Prisoners Escape - Crimesider - CBS News

Now I have no particular contention with idea that God might be in the business of picking certain people to benefit from avoiding disaster or calamity. There is ample scriptural evidence that could support such a claim – especially if one is interested in using the classic proof-texting methodology. There are other verses similarly isolated which tell us that rain and sunshine fall on the just and unjust equally. If we put claims God’s specific intervention in particular cases, what does that tell us about who we believe God to be? But as interesting as that question might be to debate it is not nearly as revealing as the questions that arise around our use of terminology like miracle, or intervention in these types of cases.

Setting aside the debates about the nature of God, it occurs to me that our use of this terminology tell us something important about how we construct notions of privilege. I contend that we are engaging in a powerful discursive exercise (often without really being aware of it).

It is interesting that we would not refer to the new found freedom of the inmates to be the hand of God at work while we would attach that provision to the Christian couple whose airport delay was their greatest fortune. The discourse paints one group as able to access the benefit from God’s hand while the other group does not have that same access. Consider that the held belief is that none should perish and that by sparing these inmates from destruction God gave them an extension on their opportunity to avoid damnation. Salvation was offered to them. Is that also not a miracle? That is tricky business…

The couple on the other hand receives by our judgement the mercy of God on their lives with an easy and natural assessment. Their story of good fortune is God at work but the prisoners do not get that label – at least not so easily.

I wonder if this does not actually reveal some of the more dangerous parts of religious arrogance that we all too easily fall into. Do statements like these actually belie some unspoken assumptions about the deserving nature of the type of people who might be awarded God’s favour? Do we actually think – for instance – that Christians in this disaster had more of an advantage of being spared than those who did not follow Christ? And that is only the surface, I suspect if we were courageous enough we might reveal some of the same power laden colonial attitudes that characterize our Western sense of privilege but that might not be very comfortable for us to swallow.

So let’s open up our wallets and dump some cash to ease our guilt and sympathy – but keep enough to go see that latest animated flick that has really cool religious overtones…