I couldn't find this on the site but it's likely there somewhere. BTW, if you good friends up north get in a pinch, we prolly got some leftover smallpox blankies we can lend/lease. ~s~
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Nov. 5, 2004
An Open Letter to Jim Sinclair, General Secretary of the United Church of Canada
Dear Jim,
It has been years since we worked together at St. Andrew's United Church in North Bay, Ontario, where I successfully interned in ministry under your supervision, and saw the birth of not only my eldest daughter Clare but my career as a United Church minister.
I remember my last Sunday at St. Andrew's, when I preached on the hard task of putting Jesus' call for justice for the poor into practice in a world, and a church, that prefers the easy way of social conformity and comfort. You approached me after the service, and embraced me, and you said to me,
"Not all of us are meant to walk the path you've chosen, Kevin, but it is the same one that Christ walked, and so he'll be beside you all the way."
In the fifteen hard and lonely years since that day, Jim, I have not wavered from that path, and on that difficult journey your words have often come back to me to comfort me through many lonely nights.
I am speaking to you in that spirit today, as I appeal to you and to the entire United Church of Canada to look at and deal with the terrible injustice and torture that has been inflicted on me, my children, and many unknown and mostly poor people by officers of your church.
I have tried on many occasions to explain my story to members of the United Church and to the world at large, only to encounter the same denial, abuse, and violent resistance to the truth that the poor themselves experience every day of their lives.
My story is not an easy one for any United Church member to accept, for it shakes the very foundation of their self-perception of belonging to what they imagine to be a religious body committed to Christ's teachings. Nevertheless, it is a story that they and you must hear and accept if the shadow of Genocide and murder that is part of our Christian heritage is finally to be named and exorcized by God's light, and love.
As I said at my "de-listing" hearing that robbed me forever of my career and calling in the United Church, I have acted always according to my conscience and my
ordination vows to serve God, which is Truth, and to do so out of a deep love for Christ's body and its people. It is for this reason that I have never sought to bring legal action against the United Church for its wrongful dismissal of me and for the untrue and libelous statements made by its officers about me.
On the contrary, I believe now, as always, that Truth is the only weapon in the hands of a just person, and that Truth alone survives the ravages of time and Official Lies, no matter how pervasive and accepted are the latter.
It is for this reason that I appeal to you as a caring and reasonable man to look past the thick veil of Official Lies that have been deliberately imposed over the eyes of United Church members regarding my story and my ministry, and to look clearly at the Truth that I have experienced.
That Truth began for me on an August morning in 1992, when I visited an elderly aboriginal man named Danny Gus at his home in Port Alberni, B.C., where I had
just been hired as the minister of St. Andrew's United Church.
After I had performed a quiet wedding service for Danny and his partner Clothilda, Danny broke down and told me of a young friend of his who had been murdered by a supervisor at the United Church Indian Residential School, not a hundred yards from where we
sat.
"They buried him in those woods out back and told us never to say anything about it" sobbed Danny. "There are a lot of our people buried in those hills. Lots of
kids who were killed at the residential school. The church people know all about it, and they don't want us in their church."
I began to hear many such stories in the poor aboriginal homes I began to visit as part of my pastoral duties. And out of a moral obligation, I began sharing what I had heard with fellow clergy and officers of the United Church.
I was not believed by my colleagues. I was even threatened by them that I would lose my job if I kept listening to stories of murders in residential schools.
All during 1993 and 1994, I was told by senior United Church officials not to believe aboriginal stories about residential schools because, according to these
men, "Those Indians just hate us for taking away their land" and "They've all got a grudge against the church". After I was fired, these very same things were later said about me by the same officials, when I wouldn't remain quiet about the horrors of the residential schools, and they claimed that my speaking about murdered children was because I had a grudge against the church for firing me and destroying my family, livelihood and reputation.
Unpleasant truths are never believed, at first. As a student of history, you know that hard truths are first denied, and then mercilessly persecuted, and finally universally accepted. This is no more true than when it comes to the hidden history of church-led Genocide of aboriginal people on this continent.
After Danny Gus and so many others had spoken their stories to me, and my United Church colleagues had not only denied these stories but threatened me for being
associated with them, I faced the kind of hard path that you warned me of that last Sunday in North Bay: I had to choose between the Truth and security - between God and the world, if you like. And I chose the Truth.
In hindsight, it wasn't an easy choice, but it was an inevitable one for me. I sensed, accurately, that choosing Truth in that instance would destroy my old life and everything I cherished. I saw my wife, mychildren, my beloved place in a pulpit vanish forever in a wave of violence and lies. But there was nothing else I could do, and retain my integrity and honour before God, and before my own children. I chose to ask the United Church of Canada to stand by its stated principles, to its supposed spirit, and to do what was just and right towards its aboriginal victims.
Your colleague Brian Thorpe, who helped to arrange my firing and delisting during 1995 and 1996, had this to say about that choice by me:
"Kevin's problem, if he has one, is that he is unwilling to compromise at times, unlike the rest of us who have managed to survive in this institution." (from an affidavit of January 22, 1996 by Rev. Bruce Gunn).
Since the United Church has never publicly stated to me or anyone else the specific reason for my professional destruction and defrocking, I must assume from this statement by one of your head officers that my life and career was destroyed on the grounds that I would not "compromise" my beliefs and actions - specifically, in relation to the proven criminal actions of the United Church towards native people.
Holding to one's principles and morals is indeed a strange basis for firing and professionally annihilating someone, especially within a church like ours which prides itself on its humanity and progressiveness. But the truth is that this is precisely why I was fired and "delisted" by the United Church, which punished me for not helping to conceal
the facts of Genocide I discovered.
That truth has revealed itself through the statements of other church officials besides Mr. Thorpe. At my delisting hearing in Vancouver on October 9, 1996, Comox-Nanaimo Presbytery official Bob Stiven said under oath,
"We had no worries about Kevin until he began talking about all those dead Indian children and the Lot 363 land deal. Then we had to do something." (Independent
Court Reporter Records)
Mr. Stiven, who helped arrange my firing, was not exaggerating when he referred to "the Lot 363 land deal" as the cause behind my immediate firing on January 23, 1995. For in the course of my work with residential school survivors while I was still a minister in Port Alberni, I stumbled over the fact that your church had engaged in the theft and speculation of aboriginal land in Ahousat, B.C., in order to profit its corporate benefactor, the logging company MacMillan-Bloedel.
I was told the story of Lot 363 by Ahousat elders themselves, like Chief Earl Maquinna George, who like me was forced from the United Church after protesting
the sale of Lot 363 by the church. The Ahousat people objected to the sale, too, but they were completely ignored by your church, which profited from the deal in the form of an $8000 gift from MacMillan-Bloedel to First United Church in Port Alberni during the same year that the deal was concluded.
When I learned about this corruption, and how it totally violated the official Indian Land Claims Policy of the United Church - which states that all native land held by the church must return to the original native nation, and not be sold to corporate donors to the church - I immediately wrote to the Comox-Nanaimo Presbytery to object to the sale of Lot 363.
That was on October 17, 1994. A week later, Presbytery officials began meeting secretly with my church board to arrange my removal as minister at St. Andrew's,
which occured three months later, without cause, notice, or any kind of review process.
By then, my ministry at St. Andrew's had flourished. Attendance on Sunday there had tripled since I arrived, and the pews were filled to capacity: an attendance level that remained that high until the day I was removed by your colleague Art Anderson - hardly the sign of a "divided and alienated" congregation, as your church officials continue to claim publicly about my work.
The inhumanity and cruelty that suddenly descended on me, my wife Anne, and our daughters Clare and Elinor, is impossible to describe. On January 23, 1995, Art
Anderson handed us a letter that removed me immediately as minister and demanded, without offering a reason, that I submit to an unpaid "psychiatric assessment" and "extensive pastoral retraining" if I was to remain in ministry.
We were told that I was to be paid for only another month, and that we had to move out of our home in the church manse within three months, in the middle of
winter, with our daughter Clare still in kindergarten. Anderson was cold and intractable, and refused to give me a cause for my dismissal when I repeatedly asked
him for one. We were not offered an ounce of compassion or support from him or anyone in the officialdom of the United Church - just unilateral, non-negotiable ultimatums.
When I asked Art Anderson and Presbytery officials to sit down and work things out with me, I was refused. Your church officials didn't even answer our phone calls until we hired a lawyer to speak with them. As with your aboriginal victims who suffered residential schools, United Church officers acquired a semblance of humanity with us only once we threatened legal action.
Throughout this terrible time, the depth of anger and potential violence inflicted on my family and I by your officers was unbelievable. The day after my firing, before anyone had mentioned lawsuits, I was awoken at one in the morning and screamed at over the phone by Presbytery official Phil Spencer,
"You had this coming, Kevin! So go ahead and try to sue us! No-one has ever won against our church!".
Instead of acting as the "collegial body" towards me that they were contractually obligated to be, Spencer and other Presbytery officials spent their days after my firing maligning me and my work to the St. Andrew's congregation, and the world at large.
My parishioners were told, for example, that I had "gone crazy" and needed to be replaced. Art Anderson insisted that a statement to this effect be read from my pulpit the Sunday after I was fired, which it was.
Even worse, the Loaves and Fishes food bank in our church that I had established, and which was feeding over three hundred mostly aboriginal families, was summarily closed a week after I was fired, denying children food and life in the middle of winter. Native parishioners who were my friends and supporters at St. Andrew's were suddenly barred from church, and subjected to racist slurs.
It was claimed by your church, at that time, that it "couldn't afford" the $1000 every month that it took to sustain our Loaves and Fishes food bank. Yet somewhere your church found the money the next year to spend over $250,000 to delist me from its ranks!
Jim, why are your lawyers more in need of your church funds than are the hungry native children of Port Alberni?
These kinds of cruelties quickly crushed my little family and our friends, and the circle of life I had laboured so hard to build at St. Andrew's. Under the stress of these attacks, my wife Anne left me and sued for divorce within a year after I was fired, and was told by Art Anderson that I would "never work in B.C. again". Incredibly, Art Anderson and Phil Spencer approached Anne in the months after I was fired, and helped her in her divorce and child custody legal action against me by providing her with confidential church documents that claimed, falsely, that I was psychologically unstable.
As a result of this cruel and unethical interference by your officers in our family life, Anne won custody of my daughters Clare and Elinor, who have since then never known me as a full-time father. I suppose Phil Spencer felt I had that coming to me, too.
I wish I could say that this insane cruelty stopped there, but it was only beginning. Two of my closest friends and co-workers in my church, Mark Angus and Krista Lynn, killed themselves out of despair for my firing and the ending of the ministry with the poor they shared with me. Krista could no longer feed her children after your church closed our food bank, and told me so days before she died.
"What's the point of trying to get the church to care about us, Kev?" she asked me in agony just before she overdosed on sleeping pills. "They tried to kill us off in their residential schools and now they're just finishing the job."
I had no answer for Krista then. Then, as now, the blind hatred and violence of the church towards its perceived "enemies" is unfathomable. But the truth is, Jim, that your church has Krista's death to answer for.
Because of my firing, my family and friends were dying. I could no longer work as a minister and feed my children. I had to explain to Clare why she had to leave all her friends in Sunday school and in Port Alberni, and why her father was not preaching any more on Sundays.
Have you ever had to struggle so with your children, Jim? Have you ever had to deal with the shame and pain forced on you by other, lesser people, while somehow
not allowing that cross to crush your self-esteem and your worth in the trusting eyes of your children, while all the time struggling to deal with a blacklisting-imposed poverty?
My kids and I might have dealt better with this grief and burden, Jim, if your church actually lived its faith, and practiced acceptance, forgiveness and love. But all my letters to United Church officials went unanswered. All my appeals to church courts were denied. And everyone I had known in the United Church began avoiding me after they were told by a well organized rumour and slander machine that "Kevin has gone crazy and wants to destroy the church" and "Kevin is making up lies about the church's treatment of Indians".
Naturally, these church-engineered smears against me destroyed any hope I had of finding employment again as a minister, and of recovering my lost dignity and calling. And that, of course, was the point of the smears.
But God was not dead, and miraculously, I did find Christ's love still at work: not in your church, but in unexpected people who came forward to share with me the deeper truth of why my family and I were being systematically destroyed by your church. These were the aboriginal survivors of your so-called "Indian residential schools".
Many of these people began suing your church at the same time that I was being expelled from it, and I began to be invited by them to their first healing circles in Vancouver, where the horrible truth began to be shared. Finding a courage I didn't think possible, these men and women who had been sterilized by your missionary doctors like George Darby in Bella Bella, and tortured unspeakably at age three or four by your church employees, somehow found the strength to speak publicly about their torture, and the deaths of so many of their friends.
And in February, 1996, the first group of these aboriginal people sued your United Church and the federal government for the crimes done to them in the name of God.
Their lawsuit was announced on February 3. Days later, on February 8, my former employer, Comox-Nanaimo Presbytery, petitioned B.C. Conference to have me permanently "de-listed" from United Church ministry. This was not a coincidence, as their own lawyer admitted on the first day of my "delisting" trial:
"Reverend Annett is not being recommended for delisting because of any actions of his before or during his ministry in Port Alberni, but because of statements he has recently made concerning the deaths of aboriginal children at the Alberni residential school." (Statement of Iain Benson to panel, August 28, 1996)
Don't you think that it is ironic, and more than unjust, Jim, that I was expelled from my livelihood in your church for saying something that your own officers are now acknowledging to the press - that Indian children died in your residential schools? That fact alone is reason enough for my delisting and expulsion from the church to be immediately revoked.
Another United Church minister and participant in these events, Rev. Bruce Gunn, commented in similar terms on the injustice of my delisting when he wrote to me in 1999,
"I'm convinced your removal was orchestrated from Toronto, from the church head office ... I think it's obvious that the national office removed you because they knew of the upcoming RCMP investigation, and of the Ahousat land deal. They were in for a rought fight and didn't want dissent from a Port Alberni pulpit." (affidavit of Bruce Gunn, March 3, 1999)
My delisting from the church was an even greater cruelty and farce than my actual firing, if such a thing is possible.
Imagine this, Jim: One day, you're fired from your job as a minister by someone who isn't delegated to do so, and who doesn't tell you the reasons for your removal. He orders you to quit your job and go to a psychiatrist of his choosing if you want to stay in the church. You have one week to do so or you face permanent expulsion from the church. This person starts spreading lies about you all over town, but you don't have the money or the means to hire a lawyer to counter his lies about you.
Finally, after two years of being without work and having your name and reputation ruined by this man and his backers, and after your wife Donna has divorced you with the help of this same persecutor, you are ordered by him to report to a trial in which your future in the church will be decided.
The judge at this trial (Jon Jessiman) is the lawyer for the very man and group who fired you. The hand picked jury is made up of his friends and associates. You are not granted any legal representation, but your persecutor has a full-time lawyer making a case against you.
You are told by the judge that there are no charges against you but that you are expected to explain why you shouldn't be expelled from your career in the church. You are not allowed to face your accusers or see the evidence against you, or to know the basis for or the rules governing your expulsion from the church. And yet somehow you are expected to mount a defense of yourself when you are already presumed to be guilty.
Finally, all the witnesses called against you are friends or associates of the judge, jury and prosecuting attorney, and are openly hostile to you. Their "evidence" is all based on hearsay, since they have never seen you work in ministry or even preach a sermon. And the judge himself has been making prejudicial remarks about you towards the jury, and continually rules your objections and calls for fair treatment to be out of order.
Jim, if you somehow endured the torture of such an inquisition, you would quite naturally ask how, and why, it was allowed to take place in a democratic nation, where citizens are normally accorded due process under the law. And you would hardly doubt what the verdict of such a kangaroo court would be concerning your fate.
And yet this is precisely what I went through between August 28, 1996 and March 7, 1997, when I was - not surprisingly - permanently expelled from United Church
ministry, with this warning from trial "chair" Mollie Williams:
"If you fail to abide by the decision of this court, Reverend Annett, you and Reverend Gunn will face dire consequences."
On that one occasion, Ms. Williams was not lying. For since that day, your church has continued to inflict torture and harrassment on me because I have spoken
publicly about what I and so many others have suffered at your church's hands.
Shall I list but some of those tortures caused by yourchurch since then?
1. Three separate Cease and Desist Orders, issued against me and my advocates, which tried to halt my freely speaking about what occured at the delisting charade;
2. A legal writ threatening me with legal action if I ever speak about the deaths of native children at the Alberni residential school;
3. The interference by church lawyers in my marriage, my Ph.D. program at the University of B.C., and in my work and job applications at the Unitarian church and
other organizations;
4. A sustained, public smear campaign against me over the internet and in United Church publications, posing as "reports" about my delisting and work with native
people, which has ruined my public reputation and employability;
5. Physical attacks made against me by persons associated with your United Church in Bella Bella, BC;
6. The theft of my belongings and documents by your colleague and church official Brian Thorpe in broad day light at a press conference;
7. The cancelling of my lectures and church services after direct intervention by your officers.
This letter does not allow me the space to list all of the indignities and assaults made by your church against me since 1995 because I chose not to remain silent about and complicit in wrongs and crimes done by your church. My children, my friends, and untold countless aboriginal people have all paid the terrible price of your church's refusal to take responsibility for its own shadow and evil.
You have a personal choice to make now, Jim. You can do what your lawyers and public relations advisors have told all of your predecessors, and that is to deny what I am saying, and counter it with a lot of expensive, cooked-up "evidence" that tries to make me look like a liar. You can even claim, in the words of your deranged colleague Phil Spencer, that "Kevin had this coming to him".
Or, you can do something far simpler and more right, which will cost you your job. You can simply know the truth, and speak it, as I have done. That truth is all around you. It is in hundreds ofsecret burial sites all across Canada, in Port Alberni, Alert Bay, Abbotsford, Thunder Bay, and elsewhere, where the children who died in your residential
schools were shoved away so the world would never know their fate.
The truth is in the bodies of the women and men who your missionary doctor George Darby forcibly sterilized because they wouldn't go to church.
The truth is in every lost soul who takes her own life because your church still hasn't admitted all of the crimes it inflicted on her. I have conducted the funerals of many such people, and the tears of their relatives have not been halted one millimetre by all of your church's psuedo "apologies" and insulting crumbs of "financial compensation".
If you have the courage and the love to look at these horrible truths, Jim, you and your church have a consequential obligation to help the survivors of your Holocaust recover the remains of their friends and relatives who never came back from your "residential schools": at least 50,000 children, according to the government's own projected death rate of at least 50% every year in the residential schools. (see: canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org and my book "Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust")
Will you help identify where these children are buried, Jim? I expect an answer from you.
As a nominally "religious" man, I expect you to be committed to the task of ensuring that every person receives a proper burial, according to their own customs - especially when your own church is responsible for their death. Since your church speaks continually of "healing" residential school crimes, isn't the re-interring of native childrens' remains a first, most basic step towards such healing?
Whether or not you agree with me, and take action to identify the secret burial sites of these children, isn't the point, in the final analysis. For here's the irony, Jim: as much as you may agree with me, your lawyers will never let you tell us where those children are all buried. For it is not God, or even your personal consciences, but lawyers, who now steer the course of the United Church of Canada. I have learned this through hard and bitter experience.
But even that isn't important, ultimately. For you and your United Church have already been found guilty under both moral and international law for Crimes against Humanity. And as such, you are not in a position to do anything now but face justice.
Let me clarify. Since May 20, 1998, when your church and its officers received a Diplomatic Summons to answer charges of having committed every crime defined
as Genocide by the United Nations, you have had the opportunity to give your answer to the claim of Genocide made against you by hundreds of aboriginal
eyewitnesses. And you have never done so.
Silence is consent under the law that binds you and I, and after more than six years of your silence in response to being charged with mass murder, it is clear that your church, and the Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and the Canadian government, are all stating by that silence that you do not dispute the allegations made against you.
That being the case, under the Nuremburg Legal Standards and every international convention on Genocide, you and your church members are considered to be part of a "rogue and criminal body" as defined by international law, because of your church's committing of deliberate Genocide on generations of aboriginal people in Canada.
Your so-called "compensation" and written "apologies" to residential school survivors are irrelevant to your criminal status, for they do not respond to, explain, or do away with the crimes committed by your church.
For example, if you, Jim Sinclair, murdered my child, and tortured, sterilized, and secretly interred many other innocents, you would not be able to elude justice simply by issuing an "apology" to your victims. Then why do you assume that your church is able to do so?
Clearly, it cannot, under any moral or legal system. And yet you are part of an institution that is trying to do so, and is succeeding, simply because you and the government do not have to answer to justice, being the very institutions that did these crimes, and then covered them up.
While you have relied on the courts and government to shield you from your victims and from justice, your church is nevertheless a pariah in the worldcommunity, and under international law can and must be actively boycotted until the day that it is made to answer for the crimes it committed.
On that day, you, Jim Sinclair, as a head officer of the United Church of Canada, may have to stand trial for complicity in Genocide before a world court.
Your church is succeeding in escaping and perverting justice, for now. But as Martin Luther King observed, "The moral arm of the universe is long and slow, but it bends towards justice. No lie can be enthroned forever."
You do remember Martin Luther King, I hope. You used to quote him all the time in your sermons. Perhaps you still do. But like the Bible and God, he witnesses
against you, not for you.
Destiny makes each of us face the truth at some point, Jim. I just had to face it sooner than you. I used to think that I was the unlucky one for having lost everything, and that people like you were somehow the winners in life, with your fanfare of official recognition and cozy jobs and pretentious religiosity. But God is turning the tables on all that. God is ending your reign of lies.
Don't believe me, if you prefer. You won't be allowed to believe me, anyway, not if you want to keep your nice job and title and self-justifications. Your own sense of things won't allow you to agree with me.
The right thing for you to do, after all, is for you to apologize personally to me and to my children - to Clare, who you held when she was a newborn baby - for the nightmare your church has put us through, and still inflicts on us, because I dared to challenge the crimes of that church, in love and truth. You must apologize to me and to Clare and Elinor, in public, and go beyond words by helping to undo the damage done to our lives.
But you probably won't do such a thing, for it will cost you your job. So don't believe me, Jim.
Believe, instead, something that we both shared one day in December, 1988, shortly after I began working as an intern at your church in North Bay. It was a terrible and heaven-sent message to us both that came in the form of the dead baby of a couple whose identity must stay unnamed, for the sake of their dignity. But you know who I mean.
You and I were called to St. Joseph's hospital one morning, where my own child was to be born the following month. We entered the emergency room, and there stood the mother and father, holding their dead two month old baby girl in their arms, all blue and still.
You and I were suddenly faced with the insane and unhealable reality of pointless death, right in our face: meaningless death, for it was of an innocent and beautiful child.
Wisely, you said nothing. You wanted to, I could see. Your training as the professional fixer kept prompting you to do so, but your heart, your humanity, suffered with the parents, who were past tears, past everything and everyone except their own agony. And in your suffering with them, you could only mourn in silence.
We held them for awhile. You tried saying a prayer, but it sounded silly and forced. Then we parted, with very little having been said.
You looked like you were going to cry as we drove back to the church, but you never did. You managed everything so competently, like you were expected to do; like you are still expected to do, but now for the entire church as its "General Secretary".
But you should have cried, Jim. You should have cried as I was doing, and screamed your anger and rage at the crime you had just witnessed, and yelled obscenities at the force that would murder children that day, yesterday, and tomorrow. Then I would have believed you when you preached the next Sunday about God.
But you didn't cry.
Jim, now is the time for you to cry, and mourn, and scream your outrage for the tens of thousands of little children like Megan who died for no reason: not because of a vague "Sudden Infant Death Syndrome" in a comfy Caucasian household, but because they were whipped to death, or sodomized, or sterilized, or starved and exposed to tuberculosis on purpose, at Indian residential schools run by your church, paid for by your church, and staffed by your people who still go to church and sleep soundly at night.
You must cry for your own complicity in these crimes.
You must cry for all of the honest souls like me who you must help to destroy and villify to protect the money and institutional liability of your church in the face of the survivors of your crimes.
You must cry for the murder that has been done, and is being done, and will be done, in your name: you, Jim Sinclair.
That is all you can do, as you stand over the corpses of those unheard and forgotten murdered children, whose spirits will never rest or stop haunting you until you mourn from your guts: mourn, in the absence of safe apologies that change nothing, of easy solutions that solve only white liberal guilt, for there are no answers to crimes done against God and her holy innocent ones.
If you trust your own heart on this, Jim, and not what you have been taught and are told to do by stuffed shirts who don't know any God but their accountant, then you will learn what I have after much loss: that salvation is possible, even for crucifiers like us.
But that saving grace will not be found in your church, or in your present life. You'll have to die to all that first to know what I mean.
A good man who you like to quote all the time said that himself. Will you listen to him, and be changed by him, at last, and not just quote him on Sundays?
It might take the pointless deaths of people like me and Megan and all those aboriginal kids to finally awaken you to what Jesus was saying about dying to be born to eternal life. But it's not theology, Jim. It's not about religion at all.
Take a step into the wilderness with us, Jim, where burning bushes show us the way. Come to the bedside of dying aboriginal victims of your religion and beg, publicly, for their forgiveness, for it is not they who need healing, but you and your church.
As formal head of the United Church of Canada, take personal responsibility for the crimes of your church. Close your church down, in mourning, and give away all that it possesses to the poor and to your aboriginal victims. Fire your lawyers and PR guys. Empty your church bank accounts to feed the hungry. If you still believe Jesus, you will be blessed, alongside the countless lives you will save.
But that won't be the real blessing. There, in the wilderness of your sudden poverty and helplessness, after "polite" church and society has abandoned and pilloried your old life, you will encounter One who has stood by me when I contemplated suicide after I lost my children; the One who has kept me walking with your victims in the face of scorn and attacks and all the filth thrown at me.
Away from the numbing lies of your world, you will meet that One in the wilderness, where you will beforever transfigured into who you really are: his child, blessed and loved and capable, finally, of bringing life to the dead, hope to the defeated, and substance to all of your nothing words that you now keep saying so pointlessly, as you quote Him from within the belly of a "church" that hates Him and has murdered Him, again and again, in His innocent ones.
You and your "church" stand under divine judgement, Jim, not in the future, but now, already. You have been judged and found covered in blood and lies. But there is still a way out. Little Megan showed us how. Remember?
I will pray tonight for you and for the ending of all that you are and know and are a part of, brother Jim. For the sake of that love which cannot be known or spoken, and which summons us to the end of the corrupt and the beginning of the incorruptible,
your friend from the wilderness,
Kevin Daniel Annett / Caoimhin Ui Niall
Nanaimo, B.C.
pager: 1-888-265-1007
kevinannett@yahoo.ca
Read my story in this book "Love and Death in the Valley" at:
www.1stbooks.com/bookview/11639
www.hiddenfromhistory.org |
