By Mark Azzara
Dear Friend,
The New York Times is running a series of articles on the effects of the decision by thousands of individual Canadians to shell out big money to bring Syrian refugee families to their country. But from the get-go, the series also is investigating the huge price being paid by the refugees.
This series reminds me of the many online articles written by Scott Gilmore for Maclean’s (Canada’s version of Time or Newsweek) that report the horrendous, cruel disregard that Canadians have shown to their own native peoples for generations. Their plight has taken on deeper meaning as a new acronym has taken root in the Canadian vocabulary: MMIW, which stands for murdered and missing indigenous women.
My interest in Canadian indigenous people has deep roots. I first took note of their plight in the early 1990s when I listened to short-wave radio news reports of hopeless children trying to commit suicide in frightening numbers via inhalants at the remote Labrador coastal village of Davis Inlet. You want to cry? Just Google it.
“Government after government has sworn this must end,” Gilmore wrote in one article. “For decades, prime ministers have promised policies that will stop the suffering. Every minister of Indigenous and northern affairs has charged forward with the same mandate to make ‘real progress.’ And yet, one, two, three generations later, here we are.”
I respect Gilmore’s reporting but his solution is the same as that of his fellow citizens who are rescuing Syrians – bring them to Canada’s cities. “Over half of Indigenous Canadians have already moved from the reserves to cities, where every measurable indicator of their health and well-being doubles,” he wrote.
But there is a frightening similarity between the rescue of refugees and Gilmore’s idea for rescuing native people: The price that must be paid by those who are being “rescued.” That price is the undermining and finally erasing of their cultural, social, economic and religious identity – their values, opinions, practices and beliefs.
Perhaps most disconcerting, the effort by Canadians to rescue refugees blinds them, or perhaps justifies their blindness, toward those who are in desperate need in their own country – the indigenous population. And how can that be a demonstration of goodness?
I raise this issue on the last week before Christmas because this is the time of year when we want to do something good for others. This is the time when we are most generous, not only to our families but to those in need. I volunteer at a soup kitchen and I see that charity in the daily parade of people bearing edible gifts for our guests in November and December.
But while we want to do good for people, our ideas of what constitutes goodness sometimes conflict with the ideas of those to whom our offer of goodness is made. Is it good to rob someone of his or her identity or beliefs? For example, I learned that efforts to create housing for the homeless in my town are being resisted – by the homeless themselves, who say that closeting them in one room would separate them from their fellow homeless friends. They would be safe, warm and dry but extremely lonely.
The basic definition of love, from the Christian perspective, is devotion to doing what is truly good for a person. But who defines what is good? Do we, the givers? Or do they, the recipients?
Neither, because Jesus said, “God alone is good.”
If we don’t let God define “goodness” then our attempts to demonstrate it are presumptuous, and even dangerous. For example, Canada’s cities cannot hold all the refugees and native peoples who need to experience goodness. The proof lies in modern-day Europe, which is overwhelmed with refugees.
We cannot import all the people in the world who need compassion. We must find some way to export compassion to all the people in the world who need it, which would have the added effect of maintaining the identity of those we help.
Perhaps this year, as we wrap our gifts and drop off turkeys and cookies at those soup kitchens, we should take a moment to ask God if we are really doing what is good as he defines it? And if we sense that his answer is “No,” we should ask him to reveal what really is good – for ourselves as well as for others.
All God’s blessings to you this Christmas – Mark
