This weekend I had the opportunity to spend some time in Minnesota with my mother. In the weeks preceding my visit she had been cleaning out a bedroom closet and had come across a box full of my siblings and my old school projects and report cards and so some of our time together was spent reminiscing. While I didn’t have time to go through the entire pile in detail I did leaf through a few of the documents and we had a good laugh as I read the footnotes on my report cards which consistently said, “Judy has trouble talking too much in class.”
It was also interesting to take note of our grade school world view. In response to the question, “What makes you worried?” My sister responded that she was concerned about inflation because it was increasing the cost of peanut butter and in my report about an important individual in the life of the United States I detailed the courageous journey of Christopher Columbus. The hand drawn pictures included in my report bear witness to my limited understanding of the implications of the “discovery” of the Americas. You can see my naiveté in one of my pictures where Native Americans and Pilgrims are smiling and sharing a feast with one another, both comfortable in their own clothes and both groups seemingly eager to get to know one another’s culture.
As I sat at the edge of my childhood bed and as I leafed through that construction paper project I found myself deeply saddened by the fact that my public school education taught me that Columbus’ arrival in the Americans was good news to everyone involved. There is absolutely nothing written in my newly learned cursive handwriting about the decimation of way of life, the exploitation of a culture or the dehumanization of an entire people. Instead my cursive contains words like conquer, colonize, and correct.
The Confirmation certificate from my church was also a part of that pile of papers and I wish I could tell you that in those classes I learned something entirely different from conquer and colonize, but to the great sadness of God, the church has rarely offered an alternative option when encountering people who are different from us. Instead, the church has often played a significant role in spreading the idea that the good news can be offered through conquering, colonizing and correcting. Perhaps too often we have forgotten that Jesus Christ was not afraid to clothe himself in the garments of those he loved and that he never clothed us in garments of legalism, shame, and oppression.
When Jesus birth is announced by the angels to a people group living out in the fields, it is announced in this way, “We bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people.” And so today I invite you to consider whether or not what you craft out of construction paper and what you write on the pages of history is good news for all the people. Perhaps if we are all attentive to the history that our lives are writing in the present, our children’s construction paper projects will be a bit different than our own.
