Message for Truth and Reconciliation Sunday

Message for Truth and Reconciliation Sunday—September 28, 2025

UCM—Organized by Rev. Rita Capezzi

 

Centering Our Learning—Words of a Congregant

My parents’ lives were irrevocably marred by tragedy and trauma. Their childhoods in northern Italy were disrupted by the violence of war. Italy in the 1940’s was torn apart by invasion, civil war and occupation. Fear, deprivation, hunger: these were the constant companions of my young parents. Emigrating to Canada, in the early 50’s, after the death of their second child, my brother, was an escape, a gasp of fresh air, a chance to begin anew. And as their firstborn Canadian child, I was the lucky lottery winner..

But I grew up in a hazy shifting and shadowy place, somewhere in between the two countries. I never knew or understood the history of the place that my parents left behind, and I certainly was not taught the full truth about this new place where I had been transplanted.

By the time I graduated from high school in 1974, I felt like a true scholar. An Ontario Scholar, top of my class and not even aware of how little I really knew. Like many settler Canadians, I had a big hole in the Canadian history part of my brain. I knew more about Nelson Mandela and the fight against apartheid in South Africa than I knew about the Indian Act and the reservation system. I was keenly aware of the Underground Railroad and the abolition of slavery, yet completely ignorant about residential schools, some still operating at the time. Treaties? Weren’t they something that happened a long time ago? And Indigenous People? Well, I knew about the Canadian Martyrs from my school trip to Martyrs Shrine in Midland, Ontario. They were responsible for the ritual torture and killing of French Jesuit missionaries in the mid-17th Century. And then they sort of disappeared?

In my twenties, I knew that there was something inherently wrong about the third world living conditions of northern First Nation communities but I didn’t know where or how to make a contribution to addressing these shocking inequalities. I felt profoundly illiterate and powerless. I felt ashamed of how little I knew. I felt lost for words, for suggestions, for a solution. As a natural born problem solver, that didn’t sit right. I had lived experience of intergenerational trauma and somehow I felt akin to many of the Indigenous people I worked with. But it was qualitatively different too.

To sum up, I felt like an alien from another planet. With a whole lot of baggage. That could really trip me up. And perhaps I would have been stuck there had it not been for the generosity of the residential school survivors and their gift of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

 

Our Calling for Truth and Reconciliation—Words of a Congregant

When I moved to my new home in the Kawarthas in 2008, I called my destination “Peterborough”. By the time Sil and I departed in 2021, we left “Nogojiwanong”, the Anishnaabe word for “place at the foot of the rapids”, a traditional gathering place for Indigenous peoples along the shores of the Otonabee or “Odenabe”, “river that beats like a heart”. Over our thirteen years there, we embarked on a learning journey both in our workplaces but also with beloved friends and colleagues, members of the Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough, or UFP. It changed us, our perspectives, our experience of community. It enriched our lives.

The establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a requirement of the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. Its mandate was to listen to survivors’ stories and inform all Canadians about the history and legacy of residential schools. In 2015, it published its 94 Calls to Action, along with a detailed summary report. During the 5 years in which the TRC was active, the Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough established an Indigenous Allies Working Group which allowed members, and the congregation as a whole, to engage more authentically and to forge right relationships with Indigenous members of our broader community. It was not always easy. But we began humbly, taking small steps, and focusing on our need to grow:

• We invited interested members to join the Allies working group and we met monthly to undertake the important task of educating ourselves. One of our first initiatives was to read the TRC summary report, one chapter per month, and then discuss the content. We read also the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP),which provided an international perspective to the work that is needed;
• for about 2 to 3 years, we organized two Indigenous Voices forums per year for the UFP congregation and community at large that provided shared opportunities for education and awareness raising, featuring local Elders and/or professors of Indigenous Studies at Trent University. Hundreds of attendees came to listen and learn;
• the working group worked on behalf of the UFP to sponsor relevant Indigenous films at Peterborough’s annual documentary film festival;
• we created a calendar of relevant local events and tried to attend them together, as a way to become more familiar with local Indigenous issues and at the same time, cultivate new relationships;
• With time, this then allowed the working group to engage the UFP in advocacy efforts with and on behalf of local Indigenous communities on issues such as safe drinking water and the right to cultivate wild rice, or “Minomin”, in local waterways. The working group met with local municipal staff and elected representatives to successfully advocate for the hiring of a local Indigenous Coordinator. When the local school board was constructing a new elementary school, the working group wrote letters and met with Trustees to request that the school be given an Indigenous name; and finally, as we connected with the broader community,
• the UFP allies working group helped to host, along with local First Nations, an Indigenous Allies Forum to bring together other potential allies and community members. This forum provided an opportunity to work together on common tasks, such as learning about Land Acknowledgements and the Williams Treaty. It also led to coalitions, such as the “Community Voices” efforts to support a local First Nation withstand opposition from some settler-landowners towards their cultivation and harvest of Minomin in local waters. This coalition collected 7,000 names and signatures of supporters, attended public meetings and supported the organization of a local annual Minomin festival.

Although the UFP Indigenous Allies Working Group stopped meeting during COVID, it is currently about to host a 7 week course for interested members to study together “Listening to Indigenous Voices”, a dialogue guide developed by the Jesuit Forum for Social Faith and Justice to learn more about Indigenous worldviews, Canada’s history of colonization and more about righting relationships, decolonization and indigenization. Something we may wish to consider? The UFP Allies working group continues to act as a place and a means for UFP members to journey together towards spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse community whose actions can and must dismantle Indigenous racism both within the congregation and in our local institutions and communities.

And so, beloved community, I hope that by sharing this story of one congregation’s Truth and Reconciliation journey, and how it enriched my life, I have given us something to reflect upon, learn from, and potentially build on as we, the Unitarian Congregation of Mississauga, deepen our own covenant and grow as Allies to our Indigenous relatives, neighbours, and friends. Where ever we may choose to start, we must start with the TRUTH. May we bring our hearts and our good intentions to this important task.

Thank you for allowing me to share this story with you today.

 

Incoming Minister’s Reflections

Good morning. It is so good to finally be with you. Even more so on this day memorializing the truth and reconciliation process.

That term – truth and reconciliation – is so layered. There’s that top level purpose, that which gathers us here today to continue to name, hold, and address the very real and substantial harms to the First Nations people by the government of Canada. But I’m also struck at the complexity of that process, now, as that country to the south, that place I’ve called home, conflates truth with lies, healing with harm, and reconciliation with cruelty.

And I stand here before you, an unknown to you, I wonder where to begin. I begin with seeking truth.

Right now, as a Jewish Unitarian Universalist, I find myself in that period of reflection, in the midst of the Jewish High Holy days, that time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, this time which requires me, and every other Jew, to examine the ways we have harmed others, individually and communally. To be honest with ourselves and each other.

Which is a challenging process any year. Much more so these past two years, however.

With the genocide continuing in Gaza, Jews of conscience around the world are asking ourselves how the commitment to never again has become, instead, such cruelty done in our name to the Palestinian people. How the notion of Israel has been conflated with Judaism, and how Israel and the US continue such abominations, unabated.  How truth has been so utterly subverted.

As part of the high holy days, Jews commit and recommit ourselves to a world in which our own harms, our complicity, is examined and exhumed, to make space for the possibility of a more just world. Much as we are doing here today, as part of the Truth and Reconciliation process. Naming harm, taking accountability, and then working to repair that harm.

It matters that we name, hold, and listen to these harms, whether we see them as they’re happening or whether we’re offering accountability for past evils. For all of this lives on through generations, until we stop, as we are doing today, to willingly name our part in these harms and our part in the healing, too.

Because we believe, as Unitarian Universalists, that all life as worthy, that everyone as sacred, and no one as left out. This means too, then, that when we heal, when we even move in that direction, we are doing so for all.

When we heal one part of that web of life that holds us all, it expands outward, offering healing and hope far beyond what we recognize.

That is how I understand our work as Unitarian Universalists, we gather to heal ourselves, each other, and our world. We gather in love and hope, in learning and faith, and in the enduring belief that together we can tackle even the hardest truths.

So it is not a question of whether we need to be doing this work of truth and reconciliation, but rather a deep and heartfelt thanks and gratitude for the opportunity to knit back together the harms that have been done to this web that holds us all, in our small and persistent ways, to work toward the more just world we know is possible, the world that is waiting to be born.

When we heal, when we move in that direction, then, we are doing so for all. This is not a question of whether we need to be doing this work of truth and reconciliation, but rather a thanks and gratitude for the opportunity to knit back together the harms that have been done to this web that holds us all.

That is our work as Unitarian Universalists, we gather to heal ourselves, each other, and our world. We gather in love and hope, in learning and faith, and in the enduring belief that together we can tackle even the hardest truths.

May we continue that legacy for all of our lives.

 

Interim Minister’s Reflections

In Richard Wagamese words, his teaching, “none of us can claim a right to a spiritual way. The word spiritual itself means ‘of the spirit.’ We are all spirit.” Spirit is simply human.

On days like this, in times like this, we are called to reflect on, to recognize our deepest, truest natures. We are called to our animating center—which we all possess, which knits and weaves us together—our differences providing the beautiful, varied dance steps by which we seek thriving life for us all. Our deepest spiritual natures—however you define “the spirit”—invite us to face uncomfortable and painful truths, to learn what we have not experience but know to be real, to repair the breakage that makes all of us less human that we are, to enter relationship with willingness and openness.

When we understand our own hurts, we are more ready to seek right relationship.

When we acknowledge how we have harmed or benefited from harm done, we are more ready to enter the tasks of building relationship.

When we trust the truth of experiences we have not ourselves lived, we are more ready to make new, diverse, inclusive paths for thriving life for us all.

UCM is on a path of right relationship—with each other, with First Nations peoples, with our vexed and vexing history and present. We seek stories of humility, grace, and learning. We seek examples of how we might act. We each enter the dance as we can— awkwardly, skillfully, faithfully, lovingly, together. May we dance and keep dancing, with loving kindness, awake.