Where Can You Stand When the World is on Fire?

The woman began to cry as she told the story.  She had once been so proud of her American pioneer family.  You could see it in her eyes.  She seemed to stand taller on the shoulders of these ancestors.  “But,” she said between the tears, “I’ve now learned about how much harm they created.”  The weight of that statement sat in the centre of our small circle in the midst of a storytelling workshop.  No one tried to sweep it away or deny its veracity.  It was true for all of us there.  Our ancestors have caused so much harm.

Pádraig Ó Tuama

The next evening, I was listening to a podcast suggested by a neighbour. One of the people being interviewed was Pádraig Ó Tuama who is an Irish poet, theologian and conflict mediator.  The interviewer read something that he had written and it felt important to me.  She read,  “These are the kind of things we need for the tired spaces of our world. This is the way we need to move forward in a world that is so interested in being comforted by the damp blanket of bad stories. We need stories of belonging that move us towards each other, not from each other; ways of being human that open up the possibilities of being alive together; ways of navigating our differences that deepen our curiosity, that deepen our friendship, that deepen our capacity to disagree, that deepen the argument of being alive. This is what we need. This is what will save us. This is the work of peace. This is the work of imagination.”

Ó Tuama responded to this by talking about how, when we look at our history, we feel shame.  And then we don’t want to look at it.  We want to cover it up, we want to protect ourselves.  He went on saying, “ When we can look to our shameful pasts — and in national contexts, we all have shameful pasts. The Irish, we love to talk about: “Aren’t we all against the British?” However, then, when you look at the history of the Irish in Jamaica and Australia, we went there and did everything that was done to us. We didn’t learn very well from our hunger that drove us from the land. I find that there is shame to be discovered in so many narratives and that some way of thinking: “To whom can I turn to find my place of standing when it feels like the world is on fire?” And for me, that’s the invitation of a painful history, is to do that together. And that is always difficult, but it is always true. Anything else fails us.”

I hear more and more Canadians starting to do just this.  There is no shortage of written materials in a variety of formats as well as art installations, plays and events created by Indigenous Peoples to help us understand our own history.  As we uncover and absorb the truth that was hidden from us, our narrative of innocence falls away.  The story that we told ourselves about ourselves must change.  As one story crumbles, there will be grief for many.  Perhaps they stood on the shoulders of those early settlers and now are looking for a place to stand.  Some feel that their ancestors have disappointed them.  Perhaps the stories told were based on the values of a culture that is now seen as destructive.  I am hearing fewer stories that deny what we now know happened on this land we call Canada so perhaps we are slowly changing our collective story.

Ó Tuama feels that a possible counterpoint for shame is trust.  He translates an Irish phrase about trust as ““You are the place where I stand on the day when my feet are sore.”  You can probably hear that phrase being spoken with an Irish lilt.  Hearing Ó Tuama  speak these words got me thinking about how we can bring trust into our conversations as an antidote to shame.  Trust, in a world which seems full of lies, fake news, polarized politics and yet another revealed horror from the past.  How can we be places for each other to stand when our feet are sore, when our hearts are world weary?  If Ó Tuama is correct, that we can only do this together, then what would that look like, what would that sound like?

Perhaps, it would be the silence and presence of listening to each other tell our old stories and gradually find new ones.  Perhaps, it would be learning from Indigenous Elders about how to be on the Earth together.  Perhaps, it would be sharing books, information and invitations to learn from those who have been silenced and made invisible.  Perhaps, in our brokenness, we can find the pieces to change the systems that we are ashamed of, together.  Perhaps, it is holding the space for one courageous woman who trusted us enough to speak her truth, acknowledge her tears and feel the shame of our past, together.