Canada Day 2021
It is a deeply problematic moment as our valley chokes in smoke from wildfires.
How to understand how to hold this reckoning of a social experiment named as a country?
Our city, within the larger story, is a tragic revelation of the destructive inertia of greed, exploitation and colonialism, and yet in the same breath, we witness a defiance and resilience to transcend this inherited narrative for what is possible.
The ongoing discovery of the remains of dead children: children that had to be found by radar years later because their brief lives were disregarded nor cherished by those who stole them from their families to destroy their identity and culture.
This smoke in ominous. The village of Lytton where I have preached is burnt to the ground. Friends have evacuated their homes in other areas. A week of record high temperatures and emerging difficulties for all life within this 'heat dome'. We are only beginning the 'fire season'.
Perhaps 'fire century' is more accurate if our forest ecologists are correct in their predictions.
Many of us have come to a clarity:
our collective actions are not the past but are our present suffering.
How we mismanage the land, forests and water ('extracting resources'), how we dump more carbon into the atmosphere in full knowledge of the insanity of it all, how we continue to perpetuate injustice and violence to sustain the power of the wealthy.
I can only grieve this Canada Day.
As a child, I was taught only pride and waving a flag.
This dense acrid smoke and my becoming more aware of our failures:
these are the sources of tears today.
Photo by Malachi Brooks