GCCUIC

by The Rev. Dr. Stephen J. Sidorak, Jr.

Presented at the Pre-General Conference News Briefing

January 19, 2012

Tampa, FL

The 2008 General Conference assigned to the General Commission on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns the task to help lead our whole church toward a 2012 General Conference Act of Repentance on “Healing Relationships with Indigenous Persons.”  To do this with dignity and gravitas will require United Methodists to enter into an ongoing process of prayerful contemplation and spiritual preparation.  Each of us must engage in rigorous self-examination and encourage other United Methodists to do likewise.  How meaningfully we can carry out an Act of Repentance in 2012 will depend in large measure on how faithfully we discern the need for it—historically and intellectually, morally and emotionally.  The invitation is extended to every United Methodist to join in an intensive, even exhaustive, conversation about a heinous record of crimes against humanity, often perpetrated in the name of Christ Jesus, thus confirming our complicity in them.  Lest we harbor any doubts or share any misgivings about this fact, we only have to remember the words of Frantz Fanon from the opening chapter, “On Violence,” in his book, The Wretched of the Earth.  “The Church in the colonies is a white man’s Church, a foreigners’ Church.  It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor” which is “aided and abetted in the pacification of the colonized by the inescapable powers of religion."

The fundamental feature of the 2012 General Conference Act of Repentance will be the acknowledgment of the need to repent of a tragic history that resulted in what was described by George E. Tinker as the “cultural genocide” of Native Americans and indigenous peoples worldwide.  In short, The United Methodist Church is being called to confession.  It is imperative for United Methodists to grapple spiritually with the ecclesiological implications attendant to this Act of Repentance and to provide ample and compelling evidence of demonstrable denominational contrition for our collective responsibility.  

As I have crisscrossed the connection hosting listening sessions on the 2012 General Conference Act of Repentance,  I have been taken aback repeatedly by indigenous people who opened up to me in straightforward, honest ways.  I would always wonder—would I ever be that open with a complete stranger?  Such has been one of the genuine blessings of my job—to itinerate among native peoples.

What I have learned by listening to Native Americans and the indigenous peoples of the world was a new way to hear—to hear in untainted ways their stories and their histories—stories and histories—which have opened my eyes, boggled my mind and broken my heart.  The basic lesson I have learned as I have made my rounds can be summarized in the words of an old friend of mine, now of blessed memory, Bill Coffin.  “The truth will make you free, but first it makes you miserable.”  It may be that this is the beginning of repentance—to be made miserable by the truth.  At least that has been the case with me.  

In effect, unable to face the truth, we tend to allow ourselves to wallow in amnesia.  We see no need to “re-member” native peoples.  Often this unforgivable forgetting takes the form of “national amnesia,” as Martha Minow termed it her book Between Vengeance and Forgiveness.  I suspect it can take on the form of institutional amnesia, too.  Even churches can refuse to “re-member” native peoples.  One of the hopes I have is that the Act of Repentance on “Healing Relationships with Indigenous Persons” at the 2012 General Conference will enable The United Methodist Church to “re-member” its Native American membership on this continent and its indigenous membership throughout the world.

Now, I know there is heated controversy and actual conflict over whether it is desirable or feasible to carry out an “act of repentance” that does justice to both the indigenous peoples of the world and Native Americans.  We dare not dilute the unique and legitimate claims of each on the conscience of our church.  Nevertheless, I have come to the conclusion that it not only can be done, but must be done, if GCCUIC is to keep faith with the letter and the spirit of Resolution #3323 on “Healing Relationships with Indigenous Persons.”  We have been given a mandate to fulfill and we will work, by God’s grace, to fulfill it.  A U.S.-centric focus will remain unavoidable given the global hegemony of America.  But that does not mean we can ignore or neglect the issues and concerns of indigenous peoples elsewhere in the oikoumene, the whole inhabited earth.

At the listening session hosted by GCCUIC for indigenous Filipinos and their advocates in Manila, I gained a profound, new glimpse into the two types of sin of which we must repent.  Presumably, there will be sins of commission committed in the past that we will revisit or uncover.  But indigenous Filipinos enabled me understand that there were and are undoubtedly also sins of omission, when church leaders confront “the moment to decide, (i)n the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side” and shrink cowardly from such a moral, many a time, momentous decision.  As a consequence, we will have to repent both of “what we have done, and by what we have left undone.”

Vine Deloria, Jr. once answered the question of an anthropologist.  “What did the Indians call America before the white man came?”  “OURS” was Deloria’s one word answer.  No one can fail to see the humor in that.  But there is nothing humorous in the observation of Chief Red Cloud of the Oglala Sioux Nation.  “When the white man comes in my country he leaves a trail of blood behind him….”  Lamentably, this pattern repeated itself in several lands among various indigenous peoples.  It will take nothing less than a radical reorientation to the historical narrative most of us have been traditionally taught and duly learned.  Such is the challenge before us if we would help heal relationships with indigenous peoples.  

The desktop dictionary in my study defines the meaning of repent as “to turn from sin and dedicate oneself to the amendment of one’s life” and the meaning of repentance as “the action or process of repenting (especially) for misdeeds and moral shortcomings.”  The research I have done to date has sent my head spinning and my heart racing.  It forced me to turn around—the beginning of repentance.  I trust we will confront anew the raw feelings of those who have suffered, and continue to suffer, from what psychiatrists call “historical trauma.”  

The terrible reality of “historical trauma” is that it lives on in the lives of the survivors, and the descendants of the survivors, of it.  We will never get a grip on our need for repentance until we grasp the breadth and depth of the historical injuries sustained by indigenous ancestors and the lasting wounds thereby inflicted upon their descendants—“the wounds…left in the flesh of the colonized,” as Albert Memmi described them in The Colonizer and the Colonized.  Therefore, moral clarity about the historical record will be the essential antecedent condition for any “Act of Repentance” by our church.  Moral clarity about the historical record will be the singular prerequisite for what the Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, characterized as “the struggle of memory against forgetting.”  With William J. Faulkner, I believe:  “The past is never past.  It’s not even past.”  I assume you do, too.  As I have heard, really listened, to the stories told by indigenous peoples, I was haunted by the old proverb “history repeats itself.”  When I came across a passage in a book edited by Roy L. Brooks, When Sorry Isn’t Enough, that posited the plausibility that there is an “undercurrent of fear that exist among survivors of human injustices that the very same atrocity might be revisited upon them,” I was totally undone.