Courtesy: Faith Today
Serious self- Introspection needed from the Church.
My late father was a man of many interests. He loved sports – he had been a fine hockey goalie in his day, backstopping both the Peterborough Petes in Junior A and the Queen’s University Golden Gaels after that. He loved books, particularly history and fiction. He loved his family and his friends and his church. But when Dad was in the hospital emergency room or operating theatre as consulting surgeon, he set aside all those interests for the main purpose – medicine. If someone is suffering a broken bone or a ruptured organ, now is not the time to chat about your favourite team or book.
I thought about the need to conduct triage – to assess the situation and then put first things first, second things second and third things third – as I listened to presentations at the recent annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Sessions at this conference of religion scholars can be abstruse, but the sessions I attended focused on vivid and immediate concerns – racism in our churches, abuse in our homes and poverty in our society. As a white man, born in a physician’s family and without much in the way of illness or injury along the way, I have found myself wondering at times – I am ashamed to admit – why so many black people (and Indigenous people, and Asian people, and…) seem preoccupied with race, so many women seem fixated on issues of gender, and so many advocates for poor people (I don’t know many actual poor people) seem focused on economics and social policy. What issues afflict members of our congregations and larger communities such that until they are addressed, it won’t matter what else we do or say There’s a whole big world out there! Why can’t we talk more about other things?
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