Slaying Genocide
by Rev. Cory Bradford-Watts
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Readings
Deuteronomy 20:16-18
However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.
Read the written message below with music videos
Today we continue to be called to face the West’s and others’ tragic past of genocide, mass abuse, and horror – particularly as many of our Western cultures forced these tragedies onto Indigenous Peoples and minorities, including in Canada and the United States. The hundreds of Indigenous children found buried at residential schools in Canada recently are a stark reminder of this and a sharp blow to the heart of many Indigenous Peoples and Canadians. We often fail to realize how our current attitudes of apathy and dismissal continue the legacy of oppressive control, distorted socioeconomic structures, and destructive hate if only because we refuse to shine light from within ourselves onto these real, lasting issues – and so may we find compassion for others as ourselves today. Scriptures themselves can also have a tragic history rooted in genocide, as we read in the Jewish and Christian Bibles, and so, during these few days when we typically celebrate both Canada Day and the U.S. Independence Day, let’s not shy away from facing these deeply ingrained veins of hurt in order for us all to finally find reconciliation, freedom, and healing.
Our hearts go out to Indigenous Peoples for the continued revelation of evidence of the many tragedies they have faced since Europeans started to colonize the “American” shores. Unfortunately, most of us have little impetus or opportunity to reflect and address the legacy of hate and control leveled at the Indigenous except in times of reminder, like this. Despite our blinders, Indigenous Peoples and other minorities continue to face systemic oppression, judgment, and abuse at society’s hands – one reason for the need to empower them and transform our system. Another reason to empower Indigenous Peoples is to learn from their ancestral approaches to community and connection, both with each other and the Divinity within all things.
Throughout my life, my mother has always been deeply involved in Indigenous spirituality and stories. Reading about and celebrating various Native American cultures, my mom would wear moccasins and paint Native scenes on our walls – telling us Indigenous stories as kids. Believing that their grandmother was Indigenous, she and her sister have frequented area powwows, sometimes with my brother and me in tow. What a shock it was for her, I imagine, and the rest of us when in recent years she sent her DNA to 23andMe and was told that her ancestors were only African and European!
Although not entirely reliable, this news served to undermine my own understanding of myself and my history – as I’m sure it did my mother’s. We always have had deep ties to the rest of our Black American family and attended mixed-race protestant churches (partly due to my white Southern Baptist preacher grandfather on my father’s side and our deep dive into the Salvation Army church down the street from us), but our perceived Indigenous roots supplied much of the grounded spirituality in our three-person household. And although Indigenous friends and acquaintances have strived to reassure me of our interconnectedness and place in that community, I tend to feel that a valuable part of my culture has been stripped from me.
That being said, genocide and the loss of valuable living-culture can come in many forms, and the genocide of Native Peoples in our Western cultures goes from mass murder to cultural estrangement due to the unyielding nature of much of Western socioeconomic pressures. Often in our churches, schools, and systems, there’s no place for Indigenous voices, ways, and spaces – to the detriment of us all. The residential school system was a tool to stamp out Indigenous cultures where they stood, sometimes allowing the kidnapped child to live but without the “stain” of their ancestral knowledge and connections. And as we saw, often our spirit of oppression resorted to malnutrition, further malfeasance, and other forms of (unimaginable) murderous abuse to get the job done.
We have an opportunity today to turn the page on such monstrosity, but only if we are willing to see its roots in all of our divisive and selfish mindsets and thoughts, as well as its expressions in our class system today (which ultimately acts like a giant pyramid scheme for billionaires, CEOs, and some politicians). Instead, we should learn from the morality tales of our Indigenous Peoples, including the ancient Israelites, and the compassion often uplifted therein. Indigenous cultures tend to centre on community health and shared prosperity, as well as reconnecting with the peace of nature and the Great Spirit within all things.
That brings us to the unfortunate reality of the genocide literally uplifted in the Jewish and Christian Bibles, where God commands the Israelites to murder all of the seemingly Indigenous Peoples in certain areas, including the Canaanites and the Amalekites. We should first note the horrific violence that this tacitly endorses on the literal level of its meaning, avoiding the tendency to use metaphor to avoid acknowledging the issues in the text. If nothing else, in comparison to the light of God’s compassion and love expressed throughout many other parts of these scriptures, this serves as a reminder of how destructive we can become when we use the force of our spiritual and religious convictions to persecute and destroy others due to selfish ambition and our perceived needs.
Carrying such tragedy in our sacred texts should continuously remind us of the genocidal tendencies deep-rooted in our mindsets, even as we leverage God’s compassionate wisdom to uproot those mindsets that have often been attributed to God. It can be hard to fathom why something called sacred can have such seeming dichotomy and hypocrisy within it, but instead of ignoring the friction that this causes we should allow our wrestling with the text to enable a wresting with ourselves; perhaps in the vein of Jacob wrestling with the angel, we should let our deep, intrinsically angelic core to help better inform and reform our minds.
We also shouldn’t ignore the idea espoused by many, from Kabbalists to Swedenborg, that these sacred texts are rooted in community metaphor and deep meaning as well as cultural context – much like the stories and parables of the Indigenous Peoples in what we call the Americas (named after the Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci). In this mystical vein, we approach the entirety of the text as metaphorical or correspondential to spiritual truths, uplifting love at their core, while also keeping an eye on the literal context as its support. Like when reading Christ’s parables, we approach the entirety of scripture as having interconnected symbols and deeply metaphorical meanings for our lives, particularly because the text itself encourages that.
In these examples, from that vantage point, we note that the entirety of the text (as well as from Genesis to Revelation) should be read as a personal allegory – with all characters playing a part of ourselves, with the purpose of empowering love and humaneness. Or, in other words, each nation, person, and thing in these parables represent an aspect of our own mind and life. In the genocidal stories, we note that the people to be destroyed are considered destructive and unholy, and sometimes are described as having lustful, murderous, or human-sacrificial spiritual practices. With awareness of the unfortunate literal issues at play here, we can further relate this to the more personal destructive and unwholesome issues that these allude to, including selfishness (or delusions of a self, leading to lust and other cravings), hard heartedness, greed, murderousness, religious superiority, and fear. Thus, these stories act as a call to each of us to be rid of all of our divisive and hurtful feelings, thoughts, and resulting actions (including genocidal ones!), all of which ultimately speaks to our continuing need and unknown desire to more fully reconnect with our True Self or the compassionate God(dess) shared by all people at the core of all beings.
From an awareness of the mystical heart of these shared communal tales, we can also reverse our understanding of these parables in light of their unfortunate literal leanings – noting that they show us the ramifications of our selfishness even under the flag of God: the desire for genocide and murder rooted in our internal desire to suffocate the expressions of those that don’t fit within our selfish delusions and need to control. Today I think we should use the current stories of Indigenous genocide as a similar type of momentous and cautionary tale, pointing toward the great urgency to transform our hearts and minds in order to change our practices and find reconciliation. Change starts in the home, as they say, and we must take these lessons home within in order to see any fruitful change around us.
Moreover, reconnecting and further connecting with our Indigenous roots and neighbors open the door to new voices of healing and harmony in our lives, grounding us in spiritualities and communities with vast compassion and deep wisdom. Our own healthy, meditative spiritual practices can help ready us for this and help us to reconnect with our shared cosmic awareness, naturally allowing us to let go of our hard-heartedness and open up to the diverse voices of Divinity in others. This openness and anti-oppressive stance can only further encourage us to disconnect from our deluded and selfish thinking, slaying our tendency towards genocide, and find the everlasting life and peace indigenous within.
Peace and care to you,
Cory