Truth and Reconciliation Sunday

Way back when I was an undergraduate English major, I took a course on Southern literature with a brand-new assistant professor. Those brand-new assistant professors tend to lay down some brand-new truths. We were reading William Faulkner and discussing the legacy of chattel enslavement. Faulkner is famous for saying “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” So, when this assistant professor rattled on about enduring Southern and White guilt, shame, and responsibility, I dismissed it.

What did that have to do with me? I’m from the North, always was, always would be. What did any of that guilt and shame and responsibility have to do with me?

Many years later, I toured an exhibition at the History Museum in Pittsburgh on . . . the legacy of chattel enslavement. There, in a far corner I saw the full regalia of a member of the Ku Klux Klan. It was chilling. Along with the white hood and robe, there was a slip for dry cleaning. This hideous costume had been to the dry cleaners! The dry cleaner was located in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a town east of Pittsburgh where, incidentally, my mother lived as a child. And on the slip was one name, a last name, Gilliard, the last name of my mother’s mother.

I’ve never had the courage to do the research, to find out if the address on the dry cleaning slip was in the census records with my family’s name attached. But I have since learned a great deal about the legacy of chattel enslavement, about how northern industry benefited from cheap cotton, about how systems to control what kinds of people have access to what kinds of opportunities gave me privileges, as a White person, that I did not even realize I had. These were hard truths to face. And once I knew, I could not un-know. What choice did I have but to face them and learn more?

As an American, it strikes me that my story has some parallels with the efforts of non-Indigenous Canadians to reconcile with truth: that harm has been and continues to be done to the First Nations peoples. The truth is hard to admit. The truth is hard to handle. Our Unitarian Universalist faith calls us to seek the truth, but that doesn’t mean the search will be easy or that the results will be pleasing. It doesn’t mean that we will like the truth when we find it, or it hits us between the eyes. And Canadians, as a people, embarked on a route to truth and reconciliation, with the fact-finding commissions and governmental reports you all are more familiar with than I am. The truth has been laid out in front of you. Perhaps as a consequence, this congregation and all other Unitarian congregations in Canada voted an eighth principle—to address racism and oppression wherever it occurs, including in our own congregations. This congregation, you, took seriously what your government and what our denomination took to be the truth.

I believe we all know, even when it is hard to know, that admitting the truth of wrongs committed is the only way forward to creating societies free of discrimination and oppression.

Yet, as Charlotte reminded us earlier this morning, there is another truth: “The truth is that while some progress has certainly been made, 9 years later, a total of 80 of the 94 Calls to Action have remained unfulfilled – in other words, in almost a decade, only 14% percent of the Calls to action have been completed.” 1 And Charlotte reminded us that, “In a similar vein, in 2019 theNational Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released a Final Report 2 with 231 calls to action addressing 18 areas needing reform. [Yet] in 2023 CBC released a report card covering which of these calls to action had been met, were in progress, or had not been addressed and found that only 2 had been completed in the 4 years since the release of the report.” 3 And Charlotte reminded us that this country knows, too, that it  has not appropriately responded to the calls to action. From the Yellowhead Institute: “‘To our minds, the only way to breathe life back into the conversation on reconciliation would be for Canada to first accept the truth that there are too many systems still in place that actively harm Indigenous peoples, particularly the most vulnerable. [. . .] Real and meaningful transformative change to underlying systems of oppression — not just individual tinkering around the edges of a broken colonial machine — is, therefore, required.”

Data, details, actions and lack of actions. I do believe that collective action is needed to right the wrongs we are all living under, even as those wrongs have a harder and deeper impact on First Nations peoples. Collective action is the only thing that can change systems, for they are bigger than any one of us. It is one thing to know what the truth is. It is quite another to admit one’s own individual role in a situation as grave as truth and reconciliation with the First Nations, with the people, in my case, once held as slaves. Admission leads to an expectation of some kind of action, and therein lies the difficulty. But in order to become part of collective action, we must address ourselves. We must look into our own hearts, and, for a variety of reasons, we find this difficult. As Marianne Williamson says, “It takes courage … to endure the sharp pains of self- discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.” When a truth that we have lived by—all this oppression has nothing to do with me, I didn’t do it—turns out to be inadequate or just plain wrong, we feel some kind of way.

We feel stupid. We feel shame. We feel embarrassment or frustration. We feel overwhelmed by how a new truth shakes up other truths we take for granted.

Unfortunately, I believe that many of our social and cultural systems like a people divided, a people reluctant to face realities that are painful and uncomfortable. Too many of our systems encourage division and breakage. Linda Hogan says, “This is the map of the forsaken world. This is the world without end where forests have been cut away from their trees. These are thelines wolf could not pass over.” As an American, it strikes me that my story has some parallels in the efforts of non-Indigenous Canadians to reconcile with an oppressive past that might have inadvertently benefited us. As Westerners, we prize individual autonomy and action. We do so as Unitarian Universalists as well. And so, if we, as individuals are not directly oppressing others, how can we have any responsibility in the oppression? Maybe that is one way the systems maintain our divisions and our difficulty looking at the truth of the world. Maybe the systems like us detached and sad and unhappy and helpless. Maybe then we buy more things we don’t need, rather than spending our time and attention and our money on reconciling.

Charlotte spoke earlier for herself and her initial feelings about giving land acknowledgments, but I think many of us can identify. She said, “I don’t like to get things wrong in general and I particularly don’t like to be rude or offend people – and the practice felt like something where any error on part would inevitably end in offense.” And Charlotte also rightly recognized that “land acknowledgements are not really about how I feel.” Yet feeling unprepared, as she said, led to the realization that there was more, much more, for her to learn. And knowing this about herself, that was the first step to the massive shift toward the more that is. I am confident Charlotte took her steps in company with others also learning and growing into the more.

Our faith calls us to seek the truth. Our faith calls us to know the inherent worth and dignity of every person, including ourselves, especially when we are less than the best selves we can be.

And our faith calls us to remember that we are part of an interdependent web of all existence. Here is the rest of what William Faulkner said about the past: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.” That web holds us in relationship to the earth. It holds us in relationship with each other. In Hogan’s words, “the first language is not our own. There are names each thing has for itself, and beneath us the other order already moves. It is burning. It is dreaming. It is waking up.” The earth itself calls us to know our place on and in and as earth. Let’s listen. Let’s listen together, compassionately and faithfully, reducing our shame and moving together so that we might move into the action needed to dismantle the systems that hurt us all and some of us more than others.

We are here, together, to remember our oneness is more important than our fear and reluctance. Love—the force of life that thrives and generates—this calls us on to do the hard work that we must. How do we participate in this life force of love to overcome our shame and worry so we can get to the action and the work? Joy Harjo invites us to “open your whole self to sky, to earth, to sun, to moon to one whole voice that is you And know there is more that you can’t see, can’t hear can’t know except in moments steadily growing, and in languages that aren’t always sound but other Circles of motion.” And Harjo calls us to “Breathe in, knowing we are made of all this, and breathe, knowing we are truly blessed because we were born, and die soon within a true circle of motion, like eagle rounding out the morning Inside us. We pray that it will be done in beauty. In beauty.”

Our oneness is more important than our fear and reluctance. Love—the force of life that thrives and generates—this calls us on to do the hard work that we must.

So, lean into our UCM land acknowledgments, and make some acknowledgements for yourself, on days other than Sunday. And share those acts with each other as part of your learning. Our dear Tom Lebour has a UCM table at the Eagles Spirits of the Great Waters Powwow at Cawthra Park Secondary School. Take a trip down after service to show solidarity as a religious community with local First Nations peoples. Go gentle with yourself as you lean into learning the truth. Learn in good and compassionate community. And let us, as a Unitarian Universalist community continue to find ways to act for the equitable world we long for.

“I am not murdered. I am not missing, and so I will speak even to those who won’t listen. I am one part of a thread of voices, of bodies or women standing up to speak for those who are murdered, those who are missing, those whose families are missing them.” We know our earth, ancient mother of us all, overflows with laughter and with tears. We know our world is one world, a beautiful world, and we want to live fully and graciously and gratefully in it. We of all kinds and ways want to ease our own pain and the pain of others, I know we do. “Spirit of life and love, we have gathered here in search of answers to hard questions. Let this be a place not only of searching, but of discovery. Let this be a place not only of learning, but of wisdom. This is our prayer: that we may create here a circle of love, ever expanding, ever growing, as we seek to know the source of our being.” May we do this together. May it ever be so.