Patrick Jamieson, Victoria, BC

Oh where have you been my blue eyed son
Where have you been my darling young one
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains,
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
and its a hard rain’s gonna fall.
—Bob Dylan 1965

INTRODUCTION

I had hoped to be in Edmonton for the pope’s visit there but travel was not possible and at the same time I realized that for my purposes recording the whole visit on cable television better suited things.

As I watched, studied even, the whole process, I realized the coverage was triggering not my journalistic or editorial functions but my more psychological and literary instincts.

My take on the over analyzed and criticized events in the public media fitted better into what is called a mythopoetic take on what was essentially a spiritual phenomenon.

Essentially I feel the program of the penitential pilgrimage was aimed at the actual victims of residential school experience and not at assuaging any sociopolitical analysis that seems to have taken over even the secondary and tertiary generations in how they have come to perceive what they did not directly experience.

PART ONE

Let us begin.

James Joyce’s masterpiece Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is written in a developmental style, progressing from babyhood to young adulthood, with language and concepts to match.

In its opening section, we are introduced to Aunt Dante, an Irish nationalist, and the politics of late 19th Century Ireland. The pertinent section reads from Chapter One:

“Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt, and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper. … he hid under the table. His mother said:

– O Stephen will apologize.

Dante said:

– O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes –
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize,
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes.
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize.”

For years leading up to the decision to have a papal visit to Canada, all one heard was the carping incessant focus on this magic apology which seemed a buzz word for the humiliation of the church equivalent to that which the First Nations had suffered, to bring The Monolithic Catholic Church to its knees and hopefully render it vulnerable in some legal action that would bring retribution.

A blinding did take place. The Apology litany blinded the commentary, issued at the height of Eagle flight, to such a degree it could not see the deeper rendering, the more human mundane one that Francis’s actual visit manifested.

In the Freudian psychological analysis, the root cause is rooted out for annihilation, the subject of excessive reductive analysis. In his critique of Freud, Jung felt it amounted to a mystification of the biological where every neurosis was reduced to its traumatic sexual cause.

Jung on the other hand sees the trauma as a mother lode for healing and creative development. It is the same radical difference of attitude between the pope’s purpose and the hypercritical commentators who had their bucket list of grievances that were, to use the psychoanalytical term, simply perseverating, repeating the same thing over and over mindlessly.

Now we are in for the hard rain season. If nothing moves, nothing can happen. We all need to move on to the next stage. As Michael Higgins writes (see guest editorial) the papal visit did a beautiful job of setting the stage for such a recovery, not so much of reconciliation because, as one First Nations leader explained, there never was a conciliation to start, but of a reconstruction of relationships.

The Catholic Church, as such, whether perceived as an institution or a movement, as the Body of Christ or the Vatican II People of God, due to its nature and mission, is conceded by all players as a key element of this integration.

Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
and its a hard rain’s gonna fall

PART TWO

1. On the plane home he acknowledged the word they were all insisting upon, Cultural Genocide,…there was a time in this fair land when journalists could understand language and gesture equivalencies. At one point it seemed they would rather he stayed in Rome and say the word they wanted, the other G word. They had the experience of his presence and missed the meaning. It was much more than a word.

2. On a fundamental level the whole trip seemed to me like a protracted detective story. A psychological one. The media were on a search and destroy Freudian path while just above that the pope was on a Jungian healing one. All the radical young commentators were reading from the same script, one that sounded a lot like what I heard Chief Bill Wilson spit out decades ago.

3. They have to be careful about wallowing around in that victim mentality behind it all. That seems to be catching on at a certain level of commentary. After he had gone back to the confines of the Vatican, Phil Fontaine and Murray Sinclair said that forgiveness was the key to moving beyond all that.

4. When someone incessantly begs forgiveness, it is quibbling to say they aren’t using the right language.

5. On the other hand, it is a massively traumatic issue. I would have liked to have seen much more contemporary theological commentators translating what is clearly a case of structural sin. Racism, misogyny, systemic sexual abuse and cultural genocide, and what we are doing to the planet, are all case studies in structural sin where whole systems limit our options and create an unavoidable situation of personal sin, turning against God and neighbours, and ultimately ourselves. A self-destructive self-alienation.

6. The white elephant in the room, of course, is the greatest structural sin of our time, Capitalism, where every situation can be turned to gain no matter who gets hurt. The diabolic opposite of Gospel values and the purpose of Christianity, the Kingdom of Heaven.

7. None of this colonization business would have been possible without the legitimation of greed and exploitation at the heart of all stages of burgeoning evolutionary Capitalism. The heart of colonialism. Perhaps they are right that the papal bull behind it all was a recognizable element but the real issue is this system that lies behind every stage of difficulty.

8. Small wonder that in Catholic Social Teaching, Communism, as such, was labelled a Christian heresy especially in its Official Atheism; but Capitalism has been more thoroughly decried as diabolical in its essence and nature.

And what did you hear, my blue eyed son?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warning
heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
I heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were ablazin’
heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listening
heard one person starve I heard many people laughin’

9. What the pope was offering was a symbolic approach where forgiveness was asked for so we can move forward. We can’t go back in actuality. The problem is no longer the absence of an apology, a weak word for what the pope was demonstrating. The issue today is the impossibility of forgiveness in hardened hearts who have substituted a sociological analysis for a heartfelt encounter.

10. The documents of Vatican II, and all that has transpired within the Catholic world since 1962, eschews the problem of rescinding The Doctrine of Discovery which would be a bad precedent for progressive Catholicism, as it could create a precedent for the eradication of Vatican II given the right or wrong sort of pope in the decades ahead. As Michael Higgins points out, it was abrogated centuries ago.

11. None of this is understood, because as Murray Sinclair’s son Nigan made transparently clear in his incessant CBC commentary, the church being reacted against is the pre-Vatican II church, of the 1950s. It was so much easier then when the model was a monolithic structure, even a more sinful one that was totally renovated, theoretically at least, in favour of Pope Francis’s bottom up church.

12. The church since Vatican II has adapted the model of the image of the biblical term The People of God, not an institution but a movement. The fact that most Indigenous are Catholic underlines the compatibility of Catholicism with First Nations Spirituality.

13. Religions are symbolic systems that help us render deeper meaning to our spiritual lives. The two mythologies of Indigenous spirituality and the post Vatican II mythology of Catholicism are deeply compatible. It is the main reason why my parents’ marriage worked. She as settler convent- bred girl, he a First Nations from Kamloops at the start of The Second World War. His ‘conversion’ to Catholicism (his indigenous father had been baptized) meant he could bring his First Nations radical sense of fairness, compassion and care for the little person and the other guy to bear with affordable housing projects, community service, refugee sponsorship etc etc for decades as a faith model for the upbringing of his six children.

14. Inculturation has been the norm since the Sixties when I came of age as a Catholic and it is painful to see this unacknowledged.

Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a goin’ back fore the rain starts a falling
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the dirty dark prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly where souls are forgotten
Where black is the colour where none is the number
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
and I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
— Bob Dylan, 1969
A Hard Rains Gonna Fall