Less than a month ago, Christina Dawson watched as her church in Vancouver, British Columbia burned to the ground. Three weeks later, Pope Francis visited Canada to apologize for the Catholic Church’s “physical, verbal, psychological, and spiritual abuse” in indigenous residential schools.
For Dawson, the fire and the apology have everything to do with each other. She is a member of the Nuu-chah-nulth Nations who found herself motivated by the Pope’s apology.
“I find it more urgent than ever to find a new building [for my church],” Dawson said. “What the priests and nuns at these residential schools did to us was evil. But the worst thing they did to us: They made us indigenous people hate the name of Jesus.”
Not everyone agrees with Dawson’s response to the apology. Susan McPherson Derendy, who is Nehiyaw-Swampy Cree and teaches theological education through an indigenous lens to First Nations Christians felt that a spoken apology was not fitting. Instead, she said, “we need an apology that is lived out.” Others wished the apology had come much sooner, in time for victims who have now passed away to hear it.
While the responses among Indigenous Christian women vary, they share a keen awareness that apologies do not remove the presence of grief or the need for lament. For example, Dawson, whose son was killed three years ago, wants to share her personal experience of taking her pain to Jesus with others who are hurting.
And this, perhaps, is the great point of it all: that while apologies and even prayers may not eradicate human suffering on this earth, the God who will one day wipe every tear from our eyes draws near to us while we wait for relief.
