Jim Morin, Talca, Chile

I was virtually present, through live streaming, in all encounters with Pope Francis’s during his Pilgrimage of Penance to Canada. I felt at home again as the country witnessed testimonies of the living pain and hopes of our indigenous sisters and brothers. In those moments I tried to integrate what I’ve been learning from our encounter with a circle of friends, when we listen and discern together on our journey of faith. I listened attentively to the diversity of voices and what they expressed.

• During this Pilgrimage of Penance, Canadians were confronted by the cross of residential schools which separated children from their families and communities. In Francis’s home country Argentina, the same cross appeared under the 1976-83 military regime, when families suffered the detention, torture and disappearance of their children and forced adoption of grandchildren.
• I was often moved to tears from the memories of suffering which continue to afflict survivors, their families and communities, the country and the church. Two of our six grandchildren were with us during the afternoon during the week-long pilgrimage. One is eleven, the other six. Just trying to imagine the pain of them being forcibly separated from us was unbearable.
• The revindications of younger educated indigenous spokespersons resonated with the constant drum and heartbeats which accompanied the visit: that the doctrine of discovery be revoked, that the Church acknowledges its responsibility as an institution, that it recognizes the fact of sexual abuses, that records and artifacts be returned to Canada, that financial agreements be fulfilled.
• I was moved with admiration by the courage and wisdom of those elders, chiefs and knowledge keepers, who through decades of persistence struggled to recover their spiritual and cultural identities, while preparing the way to hear on their territories a heartfelt and meaningful apology from the Pope, recognizing that their people have to discover their own particular paths to healing, inviting them to be open to the possibility of forgiving and being liberated from resentment, while risking to hope for reconciliation and possibilities to create new relationships and a better future.

During the visit my critical sensibilities were constantly on alert and surfaced in me other forms of pain.

• I was disappointed by the fact that the Pope was not explicit enough on some issues indigenous communities and leaders needed to be addressed.
• The overwhelming presence in the first rows of cardinals, bishops and clergy at times obscured the fact that the visit was meant to be an encounter with survivors and indigenous communities, not them.
• The formal moments of the male dominated liturgies reinforced the perception that the official Canadian Church lacks creativity in the inculturation of indigenous spirituality. The excessive liturgical formalities and lack of audacity to innovate tends to silence expressions of the spirit which migrates to the margins in order to be heard.
• I often feel that religious authorities haven’t learned from Jesus. For they preach but they do not practice. All their works are performed to be seen. They widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels. They love places of honor at banquets, seats of honor. Matthew 23:1-12.

Nevertheless, there were moments in which I was moved profoundly by Indigenous gestures, symbols and ceremonies.

• To see Chief Marie-Anne Day Walker-Pelletier receiving back the moccasins she left Pope Francis on her visit to Rome, so he would think and pray about the children who went to residential schools and, especially, about those who never returned home. That gesture could become a permanent part of the rite of penance in Canadian liturgies.
• To see, hear and be moved by Si Pih Ko as she sang in Cree “Our creator, keep our sacred land, Canada,” to end with the powerful rebuke she translated later as: “You are hereby served spoken law. We, the daughters of the Great Spirit and our tribal sovereign members cannot be coerced into any law, any treaty that is not the Great Law.” Her voice and feelings are now within the great circle and represent the pain and thoughts of many.
• The recognition of women as healing mothers and grandmothers who pass on the language, meaning, values and faith that are constitutive of their community identities and history. I experienced that in my family with my mother, whose faith was founded upon self-giving love and, in my grandmothers, one a midwife, the other a teacher.
• The image of healing waters which flow in four directions and join the Sea of Galilee with Lac Ste. Anne in Alberta was a moving and powerful image of healing. It made me recall the eight-pointed star of the Mi’gmaq peoples of New Brunswick, I drew during my childhood, and decades later rediscovered here in Chile on the medicine drum of the Mapuche people.
• The sacred eternal fire, being tended by an Inuit woman in the home of Mary Simon, another prominent woman of the Inuit community and governor general of Canada. She told Pope Francis that healing is a journey which begins slowly and takes time, and leads us beyond powerlessness, anger, pain and trauma. She affirmed “I’ve seen healing through art, through community, through kindness, through generosity, through the revitalization of language, culture and identity.”

During this pilgrimage I learned about: the heartbeats of drums, lands with sacred waters, tending of an eternal flame, entering the circle of a medicine wheel, where the beginning is the end and the end a new beginning. In these apocalyptic times I find hope in the cosmic vision of indigenous spirituality which teaches us how to face pain and heal suffering by seeking to live in harmony with nature, the spirit and our common creator. That for me is the northern star of historical progress our elders point to.

Jim Morin, a Canadian living in Chile, is a member of a Zoom group of elders that studies and reflects regularly on progressive Catholic developments.