Becoming Kin Again

Over the weekend, I was able to participate with a few other Spiritus members in a program called the Witness to Injustice Experience which the organizers describe as an “interactive group teaching tool…[that] uses participatory education to share the disturbing history of what Indigenous Peoples have experienced through colonization.” The experience – narrated from the vantage point of Indigenous People – details just a fragment of what Indigenous communities endured and is both a testament to the cruelty of the European settlers (and later the United States government) and the resistance and resilience of Indigenous people.

The experience was very emotionally moving and stirred a lot of feelings and thoughts in the participants (most of us were of settler ancestry but some people – including facilitators – were of indigenous ancestry). Part of what came up for me (and often does) was how closely tied colonialism was to Christianity.  Most of what was done to Indigenous People was done in the name of God and with the full blessing of the church. (For more on this, be sure to explore the Doctrine of Discovery).

If you are a person of faith, just breathe that in for a minute.

As I read today’s gospel from John 15, Jesus is telling his followers, “They will expel you from the synagogues; in fact, the hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think [they are] offering worship to God. They will do this because they have not known either the Father or me.”

I know that growing up Catholic/Christian, I was almost always encouraged to read the scriptures from the “inside” perspective (meaning that WE were aligned with Jesus and his inside group). So in this example from John 15, I would read Jesus’ “they” as being people who are doing things to me or my group. But is very important to read scriptures from an “outsider” perspective as well. In fact it may be MORE important to read it this way given how aligned Christianity has been with colonialism, empire, capitalism, war, etc.

So a re-reading of John 15 would have us read ourselves as the “they” who throw people out of holy spaces and as the people who kill others “offering worship to God.” And from this perspective, we are the ones who do this, “because [we] have not known” either God or Jesus.

This passage lands VERY differently when we take on the position of “they” and opens up a whole new set of questions for us (if we dare to ask them) that, I think, are directly related to the destruction that Christians have perpetrated throughout history.

Who or what is the God that we have not known?

How did we not come to know that God?

What have we been taught instead?

Who have we harmed in the course of not knowing this God or Jesus?

What is required of us to repair this harm?

Marcy DeJesus-Rueff – who is part of the Indigenous Solidary group at Spiritus – recently put me onto a book called Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future by Patty Krawec. It is a powerful book that takes us back to when some of the fractures of the world we’re living in happened – the times when European settlers and Christians came to this land.

They were a people who had forgotten that all beings are related and they invaded this land. They did not see the people living here as kin. They did not see the trees as kin. Or the waters. Or the mountains. Or the animals. Or the plants.

Obviously no one who is alive today was alive when these atrocities happened. But many of us can trace our identities to the settlers and colonizers, and the responsibility for that legacy lies with us. And for those of us who grew up in and were educated by the settler ways, that fundamental fracture persists. It persists in our economic systems, our courts, our schools, our families and our faith communities. It was toxic and harmful back then and it remains so now. Krawec’s book tries to offer the readers a path towards becoming kin again. But this can only happen when we as settlers re-place ourselves in this story – not unlike what I invited you to do with today’s gospel and not unlike what the Witness to Injustice Experience invited us to do.

There is no quick fix for this, and no blog post, book or experience is going to “fix” the harm that has happened.

But perhaps for today (and I am borrowing from the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer here), try to address everything as “kin” and as beloved family that you are grateful for and blessed by. When you drink water, call it kin. If you see a squirrel, call it kin. When the wind hits your face, call it kin. When you eat, know that kin died for you that you may live. When you see a person, acknowledge them as kin.

Be grateful today for all the gifts that this earth continues to bestow on us. And maybe, this will be another move towards the dismantling of the fractures that have so badly scarred our world and relationships and give us, as Christians, a chance to know God – maybe for the first time – and to relearn what it means to be kin in our world.