April 25, 2020

the Rev. Joshua Paetkau

A Lament to the Heart of Nova Scotia:

Searching for the Strength and Substance of Love.

 

As the people of Nova Scotia mourn, and all of this country keep vigil with them, my own troubled heart laments the senseless loss of the women and men of Portapique, Wentworth, Shubenacadie, and Enfield. Together with the rest of Canada, I want to add my humble words of comfort. Words which cannot come close to addressing the pain and confusion people are going through, but which we offer, nevertheless, as tokens of our love and care. We want to say, I want to say – to you who are in sorrow, to you who grieve desperately, to you whose world has been shattered – you are not alone.

 

Our voices of lament are united with yours; we cry with you, and our hearts reach out to yours. We are a nation covered in a blanket of sorrow; we grieve deeply and our spirits are disturbed within us. We will have kept a vigil – and we will continue to keep it in our hearts - for the bonds of affection and care that unite us are strong. We will share the pain of your hearts, and we will stand by your side against all those whose hearts have grown brutal from feeding on fantasies of violence and cruelty. At this moment we are reminded of our common frail humanity, and we reach out to offer the hand of human kindness.

 

We have been wounded, but our love is fierce. Our sense of justice has been awakened and, I believe, that we have been called – as individuals, as communities, and as a country – to greater heights of compassion and greater depths of trust and honesty within our communities. Shallow obsessions, festering jealousies, and the cruel fantasies of resentment have no right to destroy our communities. They have no right to cut short friendship, nor to attempt to sow the seeds of distrust in our communities and in our country. We have been wounded, but we will not be cowed. We will not be intimidated by those who have turned their lawless hearts over to disgraceful acts of cruelty. Acts of hatred are weak, stupid, and shameful. Those who commit them merit our scorn and our pity, but never our fear. “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul.” (Matthew 10: 28 NIV) Bodies have been killed, and our hearts wounded; our souls must, therefore, awaken to the deep abiding reality of love, justice, and courage. My prayer, at this time, echoes the words of the hymn I, The Lord of Sea and Sky:

I, The Lord of Snow and Rain

I have borne my people’s pain

I have wept for love of them, they turn away.

I will break their hearts of stone,

Give them hearts for love alone.

I will speak my Word to them,

Whom Shall I send?

 

Here I am, Lord, is it I, Lord?

I have heard you calling in the night.

I will go, Lord, if you lead me.

I will hold your People in my heart.

(I, The Lord of Sea and Sky, Dan Schutte)

 

Our hearts have been broken, and in this brokenhearted state love rises to the surface. It is, and must be, made palpable and present; affection and care must be made incarnate in word, action, and prayer. What happened in Nova Scotia last week reinforces the desperate need our world has for what Pope Francis has called a “revolution of tenderness.” “And what is tenderness?” asked Francis.

 

“It is the love that comes close and becomes real. It is a movement that starts from our heart and reaches the eyes, the ears and the hands. Tenderness means to use our eyes to see the other,our ears to hear the other,to listen to the children, the poor, those who are afraid of the future. To listen also to the silent cry of our common home, of our sick and polluted earth. Tenderness means to use our hands and our heart to comfort the other, to

take care of those in need... Yes, tenderness is the path of choice for the strongest, most courageous men and women. Tenderness is not weakness; it is fortitude. It is the path of solidarity, the path of humility.” (Pope Francis, Why the Only Future Worth Building Includes Everyone.)

 

Tenderness is strength; it is solidarity, sensitivity, and the concrete manifestation of love. It is the way of true strength, and it is the way forward into a future filled with hope. It starts in our heart and reaches the eyes, the ears and the hands. This is why, though it feels woefully insufficient, we must speak words to honour the fallen, comfort the afflicted, and bind up the brokenhearted. We must hold the people of Nova Scotia in our love-filled hearts. We must reach out – I must reach out – to the people of Canada, for this the path upon which the Lord is calling me to walk. The Lord is leading us in the way of tenderness and great compassion. The way of love, Saint Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians, is the most excellent of ways. Indeed, there is no other way.

 

The Most Excellent Way: Keeping Faith with the Martyrs of the 20th Century.

 

The way of love is straightforward, but it is not easy. A revolution of tenderness will require creativity and courage, and it will require that we nourish our hearts and minds with habits of gratitude and practices of simple kindness. The Irish poet W. B. Yeats, in his series of poems Meditations in Time of Civil War, lamented that there was “more substance in our enmities than in our love.” Yeats wrote this poem from the isolation of a tower, during the Irish civil war of 1922. It was a time of profound loneliness for the aging poet and, at the end of that particular section of the poem he appeals to an image from nature as a source of hope: “O honey-bees, Come build in the empty house of the stare.”

 

Honey-bees work together instinctively, and their collective wisdom is productive. They produce something of substance – namely, honey- is sweet and life-giving. Honey has been used as a metaphor for romantic love, but also for the study of God’s holy word. “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey in the mouth.” In Yeats’ poem the productive sweetness of honey is contrasted with the bitterness of solitary human fantasies. It is as if to say that, like the honey-bees, we need one another. We need one another in order to build a world that is sweet and kind; in order to endow the love that is in our hearts with substance and solid form.

 

In the liturgical calendar of the church April 24 is marked as the commemoration for the Martyrs of the 20th Century, and so the vigil kept in Nova Scotia on Friday coincided with an occasion of the memory of deep suffering within Christian faith communities around the world. An occasion which remembers deep suffering, but commemorates the humble, steadfast faithfulness of men and women. Men and women who found the words of God’s eternal love to be sweeter than their own lives. Women and men who stood against the forces of hatred and injustice, and so lost their lives. They lost their lives, but their souls shine on in the eternal light of faith. An Anglican liturgy for this day opens with a sentence from 1 Peter: “ If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.” (1 Peter 4.14)

Statues of ten of these modern martyrs can be found above the Great Door of Westminster Abbey. These ten are: Maximilian Kolbe, Manche Masemola, Janani Luwum, Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, Martin Luther King, Óscar Romero, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Esther John, Lucian Tapiedi, and Wang Zhiming. Each in their own way, and in their own place, stood defiantly against the powers and principalities of darkness and hatred.

 

Nor were they alone in their witness. It has been said that more Christians lost their lives for their faith in the 20th century than in the 19 previous centuries combined. (George Weigel“Rediscovering the Martyrology” First Things.) Nor have Christians been alone among the world’s faith communities in experiencing the mobilization and institutionalization of hatred, fear, and ignorance into manifestations of violence against them. The many instances of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia stand among the uglier reminders of human cruelty. The 20th century has been a time of often intense hatreds, seeming to confirm Yeats’ sentiment that there is “more substance in our enmities than in our love.” The twenty-first century has inherited this heavy mantle of bitterness.

 

At the same time as these martyrs were losing their lives for their faith, the church was losing its language of lament. We forgot how to cry out. We forgot how to wail loudly and declare the evil and dread in the world. And we forgot how to extol the glorious, holy virtue of the saints who shone so brightly in the darkness. Somehow, we had neglected to savour the sweetness of their faith. Overwhelmed with bitterness, we steeled our hearts and lost the flavour of faith. We failed to craft words that plunged to the depths of sorrow; we failed to proclaim with passionate ecstatic intensity the sweet joy of losing ourselves in our love for Christ. Our language became stuffy, sanctimonious, and sentimental. Somehow, we have neglected the gift of giving voice to the incredible sorrow and wonderful, rapturous delight that it is to be human.

 

In lamenting the loss of the lives of those people in Nova Scotia, I can only offer what I have drawn from my tradition of faith. There is a note of lament, a note of bitter sorrow in Jesus Christ’s sacrificial love for us. Jesus, the Son of God, laments with the voice of our groaning, weeping humanity - “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”

 

Yet, with this same Christ I can proclaim Love’s great victory over death. “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:55-57 KJV) The wounds do not disappear, but the sting of death has been removed, for Christ has won the victory over fear and hatred. It is this victory that constitutes the basis of the sweet, sweet faith of the saints and martyrs – all those who have tasted that God is good.

 

It pains me that I cannot find the words that will do justice to the great sorrow that has come upon our country. I do not know how words and actions that come from a place of deep anger and fierce love will bear the fruit of tender strength, but I believe that they will. The Word – the Word of God’s eternal, burning, compassionate, faithful, tender love – became flesh and dwelt among us. It is love, in the end, that is substantial, solid, and strong. Hatred is weak, and cannot last.

 

Love is real. We are not alone. Let the God’s sweet word of eternal life – sweeter than honey - be your comfort in this time, and always.