Is belonging a crime?
To understand the complexities of belonging in a place, we must first listen to Indigenous peoples.
In November 2024 I was involved in a public event at Toronto’s Church of the Redeemer, a historic Anglican church with beautiful stained glass and some monuments related to the First World War. Our event was called “Voices for Peace.” The organizing team represented five different organizations and networks: the Henri Nouwen Society, the International Thomas Merton Society, Citizens for Public Justice, the Canadian Council of Churches, and Catholics for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land (CJPHL). At that time I worked a few hours per week for CJPHL and had pushed for the group to be involved.
It wasn’t easy to talk about peace in November 2024, and it hasn’t become any easier, but we pulled it off. “Voices for Peace” was planned as an event to engage the whole person: through reflection, an art installation (“PeaceTalks” by Karen Tamminga-Paton, also featured in CC June 2024), music, conversation and prayer. Our speaker was Adrian Jacobs, an Indigenous elder who among other things dwelt at length on his experiences in Palestine. I might have written for Christian Courier about what we were doing, but as a co-organizer and a migrant I wasn’t sure yet how to approach it. The video recording, however, is still on YouTube – I recommend it.
CC’s theme this Advent issue is “belonging,” and to understand how complex that is, listening to Indigenous people is an excellent place to start. At “Voices for Peace,” Adrian Jacobs brought to life the contrast between a settler subdivision on the West Bank in Palestine and the precarious life of an indigenous Bedouin population who are made to live on garbage dumps and breathe the toxic fumes of highways and chemical plants. Jacobs and his Indigenous delegation recognized what was going on. “They’re doing to you what they did to us in Canada.” By the laws of settler colonialism, belonging is a crime, punishable by death.
The moral right of migrants
Being a migrant is complex too, however. I live a life of privilege, but with real ambiguities and uncertainties. What long-term home is Canada offering me and my family? Many of our fellow churchgoers certainly “belong” in spacious Canadian homes in boring neighbourhoods with nary a bike lane in sight, but I’m not sure I ever will.
I know, however, that belonging is also about being allowed to make a contribution. Working for CJPHL, a group of aged grassroots activists, was effectively my first job in Canada. Unfortunately it was almost all online, which made things difficult, and some of our initiatives may not exactly have helped my future work prospects. But it was a start.
It is not strange or wrong to want to live somewhere else; migrants deserve a chance to belong. Pope John XXIII wrote in 1963 about the moral right of migrants to seek a better place to live, not only for reasons of war and persecution but also for economic reasons such as the need to provide for their children (Pacem in Terris, # 106). Unfortunately, the Europeans who settled other continents not only brought their ambitions, technology and organizing skills, but also levels of trauma and self-delusion they themselves were hardly aware of. Their religions became ideological instruments of oppression that punished and prevented belonging in place.
By true Christian standards, belonging is no crime – but giving up on a place probably is. “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse,” says Isaiah 11. Even without the “abiding city” Isaiah describes, we can still learn and re-learn to belong, and receive it as a blessing.
