Aboriginal Justice – Last Rites
By Victor Epp
Whatever they say about not talking religion or politics with company that you want to keep is probably true. Sooner or later though, somebody's got to say it out loud. Might as well come from one who's not all that popular with them clerics anyway - makes for a better mutual admiration atmosphere. There's a time when that whole brew that's boiling and bubbling in the cauldron is bound to spill over the top anyway. This is one of them I guess. When that happens, you might as well pour out the whole mess.
Wellsir, before you go getting all excited about speaking out against this church or that religion or the other sect, you might as well know that equal opportunity's at work here. Once you start on one you've got to provide the same service for them all. Heck, there's enough ammunition to go around for the whole dang bunch. Mind, you can see they're doing a good enough job themselves without outside help if you're a little observant.
No, all I'm trying to do is to figure it all out. See, you never think of these things until something happens to trigger your curiosity. Then one thing leads to another - and another - and another. First thing you know you've got a whole mess of questions on your hands.
It all started to unravel at a funeral I attended recently. As impressive a funeral as I ever was at. It was a traditional Ojibway ceremony held for one of their most respected Elders - truly a fine and fitting tribute. But while all this was going on, an Anglican priest was officially conducting the service. The strangest thing I ever saw, this dual dispensing of the last rites. Each culture numbly responded to the other while carrying out it's own ritual simultaneously. You got the eerie feeling that two ghost ships were passing in the night, headed to the same destination but unable to collide and meld in to one.
Well, that aside, Father Joseph was doing his level best to tend to his flock in this time of bereavement. Sizing up his audience as folks with plain, no nonsense kind of taste, he launched right into his sermon with evangelistic zeal. With a captive audience of this size, he could hardly resist the chance to make some new believers. In his big booming Jamaican voice, why, he even read out the lines of 'Amazing Grace' during the singing, just like you'd expect at a good old-fashioned revival meeting. I was half expecting him to shift into high gear and let fly with some hellfire and brimstone.
Where it started to come unglued was during the Aboriginal drum songs. Well I don't care how much theology anybody might have studied there just isn't enough to of it counteract genetic instincts. There is something very compelling about the music that flows from these drummers and singers. It inspires a definite connection to spirituality, so to speak. But the good Lord seems to have played a trick on Jamaicans in particular. It's like an invisible string connects their feet to any drumstick within their hearing. It doesn't matter what the occasion, when a drum starts to beat, the feet have got to move. From where I was sitting I couldn't help but notice the inner struggle going on under Father Joseph's robes. All I can say is that he must be one heck of a priest to be able to contain himself so admirably - well, everything but his toes. You could easily see that there was a battle of the titans going on in his head and it went on for two hours and a half.
But that wasn't the greatest trial for poor old Father Joseph. See, after the interment, everybody comes back to the hall for a big feast. Well in order to finance a feast for six hundred people, it's customary to pitch in - only natural. So what they do is take four people, one on each corner of one of them big star blankets, and go through the whole crowd taking up a collection. Wellsir, no words can describe the look on Father Joseph's face when he saw the size of that makeshift collection plate but I could have sworn he was thinking about changing religion right then and there.
By this time there wasn't much he could do about anything. It was another hour or so that he had to stand there looking reverend while everybody stopped to pay their respects to each member of a very large family and say one last good bye to the dear departed. In one last-ditch attempt to preserve the dignity of the church Father Joseph decided to invoke the Apostles Creed and the Benediction, not that anybody was particularly interested.
Well now, you'd think a person would have the decency at such a time to keep his mind on the gravity of the occasion. To a degree I did too, but the incongruity of it all got me started. Maybe if you'd known the kind of man my late friend was you'd understand, but I'm coming to that.
It was the Apostles Creed that was the trigger for me. How does that go again? Oh yeah - the last part which says ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic Church -’ The holy WHAT? What's that coming out of an Anglican's mouth? - The holy CATHOLIC church? Can you imagine what good old King Henry the Eighth would do if he ever caught one of his own saying something like that? I looked around at the assembled gathering. Nobody even so much as raised an eyebrow. They were all pretty well focused on getting back from the cemetery and diving into the feast. To tell the truth, I wouldn't have paid any mind either except that I'd been down this road before myself.
A number of years ago I was at a United Church baptism where the self-same creed was recited by all and sundry. One of the grandmothers who was a Mennonite lady said after the service, ‘What was that catholic nonsense the minister was saying.’ Well, I didn’t know so I asked him. He said catholic really meant ‘universal’- that there was no connection with the Catholic Church. Well now, think about it for a minute. You can profess to believe in the holy Catholic Church without having any connection with the holy Catholic Church. How could that be? To tell the truth, I didn't believe him for one minute, so I looked it up in the dictionary. You could have knocked me over with a feather when there it was, staring me right in the face – ‘universal’. Well, I'll be -.
Now there's a stroke of marketing genius - the holy catholic Church! Wow! The guy who started up that organization sure knew his onions. He was right up there with them Xerox people, or the Kleenex makers. He knew darn well that some day there'd be competition, so he chose the name carefully. Even the most radical reformers pledge allegiance to the holy catholic Church. Only, they think they're talking about some generic universal church - even the Anglicans. In the meantime, the Catholics are smiling reverently all the way to the bank. And it's no accident that all their services and business was always conducted in Latin. Who the heck would ever know what they're talking about anyway? So long as there's a fair bit of Gregorian chanting going on, it must be more or less sacred.
Well now, it's not that some of them reformers didn't know they were being bamboozled. Heck, most of them had been part of that organization at one time or another themselves. They just cashed in their chips and tried to build a better mousetrap. Some of them did a pretty good job too. You take that Martin Luther guy - he did all right for himself. There's a whole whack of Lutherans around these days. Anglicans - well that doesn't count. I mean - if you got this king that's liable to put a broad axe in the back of your neck unless you're an Anglican, what's a person to do?
Of course there were others with other approaches. The Swiss and the Dutch had kind of a down home attitude. Fed up with the mysticism and double-dealing of the Catholics, they figured if they could get right neighborly and personal, they might get somewhere. They started to call their religions after their own first names. The Anabaptists were a particularly rancorous bunch. There was so much infighting over market share that they were splitting off left, right and center.
Probably the best known was Menno Simons' outfit - the Mennonites. See what I mean - first name religion. Old Menno was the guy who was particularly annoyed with infant baptism. He figured you should be old enough to make up your own mind just who it was that would stick your head in the river to be baptised. It turns out that he had a whole lot of other opinions too while he was at it. Well, one thing led to another and soon you had more splitting off going on. There was the Davidians for instance. Some dude named Dave didn't happen to agree with old Menno so he started his own outfit. That's the bunch that came to a fiery end in Waco, Texas a while back.
Then there was a new movement called the Pietists. Now that was a confusing name. See I was still in the mindset of first name religion. Now if you know any Dutch, you'll know that the way they spell the name Peter there is Pietr - Piet for short. So naturally you would assume that Piet (or Pete) was ticked off at something and went his own way. Not so. No, this was a new trend. It was named after a way of thinking. It had to do with piety or piousness. Who would have thought it? It had to do with being as pious if not more so than your neighbor. Pretty soon it turned into a contest like something out of a Monty Python skit - you know – ‘You think you're pious? Well I'm so pious that -’. It turns out I'm not the only one that saw this as a big mistake - the name, I mean. Oh, they're still around. These days though, they call themselves Evangelists. They're a pretty successful bunch too. I guess all that energy and hype gets them all cranked up so they can go about the business of screwing everybody who isn't one. Well, it's a natural progression anyway since they're already busy watching to see who's not Evangelical; they might as well make a few more observations while they're at it.
Do you see yet what all this is about? Everybody is busy espousing one thing at the top of their lungs while in the background they're even busier doing something else. Thing is, they're all so preoccupied with their own agendas, they don't even notice when somebody puts one over on them.
Wellsir, my good friend who lay serenely in his coffin right under Father Joseph's nose wasn't quite finished yet. See, he had been one of the people in the residential school system who'd been jacked around by the church. Instead of making a federal case out of the whole affair, he just bided his time like the hunter he was. This was his moment and he made the most of it, knowing full well that his own people would give him a proper send off no matter what. It went off like clockwork too, slick as you could want, at the expense of poor old Father Joseph who was way out of his league anyway. I kind of felt sorry for him in a way. He's probably a fine upstanding guy. But the way the Anglicans looked that day reminded me of the king's new clothes. Now that's Aboriginal justice!
Well, there's just a little footnote to the whole affair. At the end of it all, I went outdoors to get a perspective on the events of the day. It's a habit for me to park myself out on the balcony of our apartment and mull things over while I'm having a smoke. There's a favorite spot out there where I can look out over the northern sky. This was kind of a cool fall evening and the northern lights were unusually active on this particular night. The way they danced was something to behold. Suddenly, they all gathered together to form a single huge crescent, just hanging there, not moving. Slowly, another group gathered together in a moon-shaped circle just below the crescent, smiling. It was like a halo over a friendly face. I knew in a moment that it was my friend, smiling down at me. He seemed to be saying ‘Now that was a party.’
Yep, Aboriginal justice.
