Holy Spirit of God, help me not be flushed with anger, but filled with compassion…

 
 
Tobit 2:9-14 & 3:1
 
 
Tobit humbly recounts an incident of reconciliation with God as a man whose wife had called him out on his lack of consistency as a godly man.  As the mother of an Inuit family, I find many consoling parallels with Tobit’s story. Tobit was exhausted from burying the dead. In the Inuit side of our family we have just ‘buried’ the 68th suicide casualty in 20 years from our small Baffin community of about 1000. Like Tobit, because of the ‘trauma exhaustion’, we sleep deeply, at the margins of our place on earth. ‘Because of the heat’ of the constant barrage of intergenerational trauma effects on the fabric of our family, we sleep with ‘our faces uncovered’  - and like Tobit, are exposed to the droppings of the ‘sparrows’, those common Canadian folk who go about their business with nary a thought about the Indigenous folk around them, and what ‘droppings’ from their wasteful lifestyles they are leaving behind. Yes!  The combination of the droppings of others and our own exhaustion creates films on our eyes, giving us obscured vision or even blindness to God’s gifts through Grace; in Tobit’s case it was a gift goat, for us Indigenous families, it is all the ordinary perks we have available to us – food, shelter, and (sometimes) clean drinking water.  It is so easy, like Tobit, to become flushed with anger about all the atrocities and injustices, all the handouts and welfare payments that we perceive as an Inuit family to actually be ‘stolen’ money rather than gifts.  It was Tobit’s wife who speaks into the crux of the matter: Where are your acts of charity?, Where are your righteous deeds? These things are known about you! When his wife said this, Tobit said that “With much grief and anguish of heart I wept, and with groaning began to pray.”  As disciples of Jesus, we always have the freedom to turn away ‘with grief and anguish of heart’ from any rage that wells up within us, and ‘with groaning begin to pray’ so that we can speak and act out of compassion – no matter how foul the ‘droppings’ of others may be and how much they have obscured our vision. Today, will I become flushed with anger towards others, or will I live into my heritage as a beloved daughter of God, no matter how many dead I have buried? Holy Spirit of God, help me not be flushed with anger but filled with compassion.    
 
Happy are those whose hearts are just and secure, trusting in the Lord. They are not afraid of evil tidings; their hearts are firm, secure in the Lord.  (Psalm 112:6-8)
 
The road we travel is equal in importance to the destination we seek. There are no shortcuts. When it comes to truth and reconciliation, we are forced to go the distance.  
Justice Murray Sinclair, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada    
                       
Soli ad gloriam
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