“Accept the possibility that there is a limitless range of awareness for which we now have no words; that awareness can expand beyond range of your ego, your self, your familiar identity, beyond everything you have learned, beyond your notions of space and time, beyond the differences which usually separate people from each other and from the world around them.”
— Walter Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of The Dead
Late last month the Vatican released a statement openly “repudiating” the Doctrine of Discovery following months (years, decades) of criticism from the global community of Indigenous peoples.
While some say this is a sign of newfound understanding and respect, others are saying this is more smoke and mirrors and the use of language that avoids any real change or accountability.
The Vatican news release stated that “In no uncertain terms, the Church’s magisterium upholds the respect due to every human being. The Catholic Church, therefore, repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political ‘doctrine of discovery’.”
What does it mean to own something? Where does ownership come from? How did Europeans conclude that they were the rightful owners of the land their descendants now occupy, still, and claim the authority to? How does it matter to us now? These are some of the questions I am hearing from journalists, writers, social critics and citizens. Some care, some don’t. Does it matter? Of course, it does, and it shouldn’t matter at all.
The basis of our democracies is founded in the strength and resiliency of the civic imagination — how we as citizens see our governing authorities interacting with us and how we are interacting with them. What messages are being sent to us from our bodies of authority and what messages are we sending back?
In their statement, the Vatican also said, “Numerous and repeated statements by the Church and the Popes uphold the rights of indigenous peoples. For example, in the 1537 Bull Sublimis Deus, Pope Paul III wrote, “We define and declare [ … ] that [, .. ] the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the Christian faith; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.”
Distraction politics, or bystander politics, mean that we are like political bystanders at the sporting event of our political lives - in the stands watching players on a field — when the very essence of democracy and origins of civic-centred governance means that we are the players on the field. But 99 per cent of us are sitting on the edge of the field gaping at a one per cent wondering why we’re constantly being sat out of the game not realizing that we could pick up the ball and start to play.
The Pope’s repudiation is a perfect example — it is reprehensible, yes, for an institution as vast, archaic and filled with good minds to think that there is innocence in the choice of these words. “Repudiation” has become the word of the day, and all the ways it falls short, all the ways one word cannot heal the thousand wounds this institution represents.
But for us to focus on one man, one institution, one gatekeeper — one word — is to worship a false god.
No man will teach us to turn away from our trauma and treat each other right. No focus on a governing body will show us how to love one another better. We can fight and criticize the language of the Pope (and we should) and we can call out the destruction of Indigenous Peoples in the name of doctrines written in foreign countries, but too much research has been done about the impacts of anger on the nervous system, and many of us know the impacts that holding anger — that hot coal — can have on our spiritual paths.
And as long as we focus more on anger than creation, on fear over possibility; while we focus our energies on believing that we will find emotional relief (salvation) or otherwise from someone mortal man making the perfect speech — we are fighting a losing battle, paddling upstream.
Let us not fall into bystander politics. Let us come together to find an understanding of what a life and world may look like where politics and leaders of the world are the hunter next door, the baker from town, the mom of three who lives two doors down from you, who works double shifts to pay the bills — these people are as holy and sacred as the Pope (blasphemy, I know), but never needed gatekeepers to Creator, to begin with — gatekeepers to finding forgiveness or seeking new understandings within ourselves.
Who do we demand understanding and absolution from and how are we choosing to focus our energies during these challenging days? Are we seeing the sacredness in one another? Would we care what one man in robes thinks over your neighbour? Your lover?
Their superiority complexes stem back to the first arrivals of these religions on our shores and how we choose to give these men and their words power, or not, is ultimately still in major part our choice.
I do not say these words are unimportant. But I also would say they are illusions at best.
This is, however, an opportunity for us to ask ourselves — what is the limit of our civic imagination in who, or what, we centre in the narratives of our political lives? Whose words matter?
Yes, this matters, but only so that we citizens can see that moving beyond blame and expectations for leadership to create real change will burn us out.
The real change comes from us, from within, from seeing these moments as opportunities to hear our clarion calls, our demands for change, and to shift, to evolve, beyond the limitations of our current narratives about representative leadership.
To transform this world into something beyond everything we’ve been told it already “is.”
For as my grandmother would say “Politics, my dear, is just a distraction from the real job of caring for one another.”