“Come and see,” said the bishop.
And so began General Synod, with a rousing opening worship in a local Roman Catholic church. The meeting, from July 4-11, is in Waterloo, Ont.
Synod is expected to deal extensively with indigenous issues, including its residential schools legacy, an update on the church’s legal troubles resulting from that history, and a healing service with native people.
Bishop Steven Charleston, the president and dean of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., and former Episcopal bishop of Alaska, said he guessed he’d been invited to give the opening sermon because he embodied cross-culturalism: a member of the Choctaw nation of Oklahoma, his mother was half Cherokee, half Irish.
That cross-cultural background, that experience of building bridges perhaps offered him a clarity to “enlighten our own eyes”, he told the Synod members. Drawing on the evening’s readings and gospel – Isaiah 43: 16-21, Revelation 21: 1-6 and John 1: 35-42 – he drew out the common theme of the faithful being asked to “come and see”.
“If I were to ask you ‘What do you see?’, what would you answer?” asked Bishop Charleston, noting that in his own church, as in the Canadian church, there are people who say ‘We’d rather not see’.
Referring to both churches’ troubled history and present with relations with indigenous people, the bishop said “there are those who prefer not to know the truth of their own colonial history”. There are still others, he said, who do not wish to look because all they see is darkness or they see no way out of a bad situation.
He commended the Canadian church. “You are not turning away from your past … but you are facing the realities of colonialism around the world.” He applauded the church for facing its problems “honestly and with dignity”.
“We often do not like to see,” he said.
He concluded his remarks with what he called a “prophecy from the Holy Spirit”. He told synod members: “Do not look back with any sense of grief, with any sense of loss. What has happened in the past is a reality. But what is about to come into your future is also a reality. And that future is resplendent with the love, with the grace and the mercy of the Jesus who died for us all … though I am a stranger in your midst, I hope I can come back some day and rejoice and celebrate with you at the rebirth of the Anglican Church of Canada.”
The congregation, some 400 people, had travelled to the service on six buses and processed into St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church behind four multicoloured flags. Various parts of the service were delivered in the languages of the diverse members and partners: acclamations in Oneida, English, Cree, Russian, Spanish, French, Inuktitut, Swampy Cree and English; readings in French and English; the Gospel proclaimed in Gwitch’in; the prayers of the people in French, Shona, Cree, Cantonese, Inuktitut and English.
The service also featured liturgical dance – four dancers brought forward the altar cloth, bread and wine for the eucharist and water for the baptismal font.
After the congregation renewed their baptismal vows, Bishop Charleston, the Primate, Archbishop Michael Peers, and host diocese of Huron bishop, Bruce Howe sprinkled those gathered with holy water shaken from juniper branches. The diocese of Huron is hosting synod.