Today is the last day of the first half of the year 2021 (when measured in months)
Six months have passed. Six months await the arrival of next year.
We move into the next six months with expectations of society ‘opening up’ again.
By ‘opening up again’ we mean that we will again be able to visit with other people in our homes, we will be able to dine at restaurants, not have to line up to get into stores, attend sporting events…
When do we experience ‘opening up’? We open a book, we open a door, a window, a drawer. We open our eyes, our ears, our hearts…
When we open a book, we engage with the words, the story, the data on a page. What is on those pages enters into us, but we also enter into the words – interpreting them, visualizing them, allowing them to awaken feelings and opinions.
When we open a door, we may allow someone to enter; we may allow ourselves to exit – to move from one place, one space, one environment, to another. When we open a window we let new air enter the room, and we become aware of a world outside of the room we inhabit.
When we open our eyes, we see what is beyond us, and what is beyond us enters our consciousness to begin shaping our actions and activities…
Perhaps we can approach ‘opening up’ as an opportunity to engage with another story, another space, another way to live, to relate and to be human in this world. Perhaps we can open up to being a global community of respect; a global community that more justly and equitably shares resources; a global community that lives environmentally more responsibly and respectfully.
Tomorrow is a day for Canadians to be open. Tomorrow is Canada Day. Numerous communities have announced that they are cancelling their planned Canada Day celebrations in response to the discovery of unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools.
Cancelling Canada Day celebrations is not an act of disrespect for Canada’s history, but an acknowledgment of our need to open ourselves to the grief and pain being experienced by Indigenous people, our need to open ourselves to experience a painful and shocking part of our history that has largely been absent from the Canadian history many of us thought we knew. We cannot shape a different tomorrow unless we seek healing of the historical wounds, grief and trauma that continue to shape and confine lives today.
Perhaps Canada Day can be a day for remembering, lamenting and praying ourselves into a new history of just relations.
There will NOT be a TMUC Zoom check-in and chat this week because of the Canada Day holiday. The Thursday morning Zoom will resume next week, on July 8, at 9 a.m.
We keep you in our prayers,
Carol and Jeff