Psalm-light for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, 2021

Psalm 19

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork.
One day tells its tale to another, and one night imparts knowledge to another.
Although they have no words or language, and their voices are not heard,
Their sound has gone out into all lands, and their message to the ends of the world.”
(Psalm 19:1-4)

One of the key phrases that help frame indigenous understandings of the world around us is the idea of “all my relations”, the idea that in some mystical, and yet very real, way we are all connected at our very roots. Indeed, this is an idea that’s fundamental to most cultures and communities around the world – the idea that sun and moon, land and air, earth and heaven, humankind and animals and plants and everything else are all of the same Creation and from the same Creator.  In the Christian tradition alone, countless psalms and passages of scripture poetically try to capture this relationship, and that flows out into the thousands of years of Christian spiritual writing that came after.  The same is for the traditional knowledge and wisdom passed down in indigenous communities and families across Turtle Island since time immemorial.

This past Sunday we celebrated the National Indigenous Day of Prayer, which is a special day for me given my own indigenous heritage and ancestry. My own grandmother and her family went through the Residential School system, the result of which was a fundamental breakdown in the lived reality of “all my relations”. They were separated from their land and families, from their memories and their identity, they were deconstructed and dismantled as people and children and then never rebuilt, as if they ever could be after something like that.  The pain from that doesn’t go away very easily. Like a genetic illness it’s passed down from parent to child and I know that, even though I’ve done a lot of healing myself, if I ever end up having children of my own they will feel it too.  Perhaps “one day telling its tale to another” are not always happy tales. I only met my grandmother once, maybe twice, but even though I remember not her words, and she remembers not her language, that sound has gone out beyond even her life, beyond even mine.  She and her siblings took a lot of their knowledge to the grave and I’ll never know much about the specifics of my family’s heritage, and even now it seems like even if I did it would still be far off hypotheticals of a world unknown.

But not all relations are lost. People doing bad things may try their hardest to destroy, to tear apart, to set the world in their own image, but I know that, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus,” the one in whom all relations find their beginning, and through whose incarnation their continued unity.

Walking in the Light
Take a moment to reflect with God on the idea of “all my relations”. How have you personally built them up? How have you damaged them? What can you do, or stop doing, to make the relations in your life stronger and healthier?

 Fr. Adam +