When Socrates opined in the Republic that "justice is the right ordering of the parts" he was in part saying that justice is frequently complex, with many parts that need to be balanced and given their due. One of the first tests of human maturity, for instance, is the ability to weigh the question of whether a person too poor to pay for food is really stealing if they take food without paying in order to live. Below a certain age (often well into our teens) we are unable to get past having been taught that stealing is wrong. Period. We sometimes forget that point, perhaps because there are so many parts to order correctly. Where human motives are involved, justice is rarely simple, but it must be done and be seen to be done.
"And what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God," says the prophet Micah.
This issue of the Record has several stories where doing justice is an underlying theme. First, there is our story about justice in the corporate and investment world. It seems simple enough to say that companies or investors ought to operate or invest justly, but what does it mean in the church where investments fund not only ministry but the legal obligations of an employer to pensioners? On the one hand is the church's fiduciary responsibility to employees and the need to fund ministry. But as Art Van Seters points out, followed to its utilitarian conclusion, how the church invests its money would no longer be part of its ministry—surely both a logical and theological problem. Right ordering of the parts is not easy.
We also have an update on the residential schools story. Even finding the language to talk about the relationship between native Canadians on reserves and other Canadians is a challenge (some people object to the appellation "Canadian" for aboriginal peoples). The church is intimately caught up in this issue. It is involved in healing and reconciliation projects designed to help restore the relationship between native and non-native. Christianity was intrinsic to the culture of the Europeans who took over North America. We may decry the invaders ways, but we forget many settlers were escaping as bad or worse treatment in Europe.
Residential schools were themselves complex. They were created in part at the request of native leaders and in part by the government to both educate and Europeanize aboriginals. In some circles, this is now considered a crime, but was it? Aboriginal life has been Disneyfied to the extent facts are forgotten: living a hunter-gatherer existence is not romantic. It's not so much living in harmony with nature as trying to survive nature's brutality.
Physical and sexual abuse are utterly indefensible and wrong. There is no question that they happened frequently and with terrible results. As a nation, for permitting those crimes to take place, we have to hang our heads in shame: the lives of many were irreversibly damaged, sometimes wholly wrecked.
On top of that, the reserve system is a disaster. It is impossible to provide a community of a few hundred people living in some remote part of the country the same services those of us in the highly populated south are able to have. In partial compensation, we have treaties enshrining native people with certain rights to live in certain places and in a certain lifestyle. But given how most people on reserves live, this is clearly no just solution.
Complicating this is that we (southern Canadians) often speak as if our native brothers and sisters were not in the same room. They may not be, but they are in the same house looking in on our affluent culture via television and Internet. What is the right ordering of all these complex parts? What might justice for natives look like?
Finally, we can report that sexual assault charges against Dr. Bob Fourney have been dropped. Dr. Fourney not only graciously endured the publicity and the inability to function in the church for a year but, as soon as the charges were dismissed, he was immediately promoting the new Leading with Care protocol as strategy in preventing possible abuse and future injustices. Sometimes the right ordering of the parts comes with a high cost.
