This is something that I need to change. I love living in Canada and am very proud to be Canadian and a child of Canadian immigrants but we have many social justice issues of our own that need to be addressed and when our focus is south rather than north, I don’t have the conviction or the sense of urgency needed to do something about these issues.
I have been reading much around the topic of Black Lives Matter in the US when in fact we have a serious challenge with First Nations Lives Matter and even a BLM-Canadian version. Not as well known as Breonna Taylor is Joyce Echaquan , an indigenous woman whose treatment in a Quebec hospital as she was dying is equally appalling. Dena’s puts this challenge out to us. “For what happens to a country when its discourse is framed more by what’s going on outside of it than inside? How do we seek justice (racial, economic and otherwise) when the voices we’re listening to are talking about the American experience, and not the Canadian one? How are we to understand what Indigenous peoples mean when they call for decolonization, when we don’t understand our own history as colonizers? And how do we hold our government and ourselves to account when our measure becomes (the false), “at least we’re ‘not as bad as’ the States”?
As we enter 2021, still in the thick of a pandemic that is testing not only our medical systems but also the resilience and unity of our local communities, one of the (many) disciplines to which we may be called is to re-focus our love more wholly on our own backyard.
Perhaps we might even think of this as a spiritual discipline. After all, Christians have always been called to love the particular places in which they find themselves. The prophet Jeremiah is often quoted on this, and for good reason: Jeremiah understood how easily people are distracted or misled, but he also knew that when we seek the peace and welfare of wherever it is that God has put us, that we – and these places – flourish.”
I think that is a great way to think about this, as a spiritual discipline, the slow, hard work we can begin today.