by CCW | 23 January 2020 16:50
It is a wonderful line from the first Canadian Christmas carol (c. 1643), St. Jean de Brébeuf’s Jesous Ahatonhia. I was asked to do something in Chapel on Monday that would relate to School’s day of honouring and celebrating ‘indigenous learning and culture’ and asked if would be appropriate to sing the Huron Carol. It was and we did. This led me to look more closely into the carol largely by way of the famous Canadian folk-singer, Bruce Cockburn’s, 1993 Christmas album which highlights the Huron Carol. He performs it in the original Ouwendat or Huron language. The liner notes and other research revealed a number of intriguing features of the carol which help us to think more deeply about the intersection and interplay of cultures within the Christian concept of the Epiphany.
The Epiphany season focuses on what is manifest about God in and through the humanity of Jesus Christ. The stories of the Epiphany are all about teaching and learning both within the Christian understanding of the essential divinity of Christ and in terms of “the infinite power, wisdom and goodness” of God which belong, it seems to me, to a universal and philosophical sensibility within the cultures of the world, including the cultures of the native peoples of Canada.
As the Canadian poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky notes, our contemporary technocratic culture provides no meaning for human life; it is meaningless and in our technological obsessions there is a profound disconnect from the created order. Thinking seriously about the history and character of the indigenous cultures is very much needed in order to reclaim philosophically what we have lost, forgotten, and ignored in our technocratic culture, that is to say, a world dominated by technology which is of our making and our unmaking.
In thinking about the Magoi of Anatolia, the wise men from the East, we reflected on how they are represented over time in Christian art. They come to be symbolic of three ages of our humanity: young, middle-aged, and elderly; and, by the early sixteenth century, as representative of Europe, Asia and Africa: one as white, one as brown, one as black. The insight of Jean de Brébeuf in the early seventeenth century was to locate the story of the Magoi in a North American and native context. Brébeuf was, it seems, was one of those remarkable, intellectually curious, and learned Jesuits, and a linguist, to boot. He learned the language of the Wendat or Huron people and provided their language with a written form, creating a grammar and a dictionary along with the carol itself.
In the late 18th century another Jesuit priest translated it, I assume into French. Later in 1899, a Wendat Chief also provided another French translation that reflected much of the Christian culture which has become such a large part of the story of Canada’s native peoples, using such terms as Holy Spirit, for instance. In 1926, Jesse Edgar Middleton, a Canadian English speaking poet, provided an Anglicised version of the Carol such as we know it now. Yet it stays with the original intention of transplanting the Christmas story into the native culture, albeit with some liberties. “Mighty Gitchi-Manitou” is not really a Wendat or Huron phrase, “Great spirit,” it seems, is. A translation more faithful to Brébeuf’s original Wendat brings out wonderfully his deeper appreciation of the native culture. “Have courage, you who are human beings: Jesus, he is born.” Why? “For he comes to show us mercy.” Wonderful, and even more, “it is the will of the spirits that you love us, Jesus.” In more recent times, there has been ‘the re-indigenizing of the carol’ with it being translated into Mi’kmaw and Plains Cree. Sung to a traditional French tune, and in the twentieth century re-arranged by the celebrated organist and composer, Healey Willan, it has become a Canadian classic.
The Scripture reading in Chapel on Monday and Tuesday was one of the quintessential Epiphany stories, the wedding at Cana of Galilee where Jesus turns the water into wine. Through the figure of Mary, we have been reminded of our human vocation about paying attention to the things of God revealed to us in different ways. Mary keeps in her heart all the sayings about Jesus, all the sayings by Jesus, and now the importance of attending to what Jesus says and does. The story is “the beginning of signs” in and through which we learn the real significance of miracles. Miracles are not an article of faith, as it were, for either Jews, Christians, or Muslims but they belong very much to “the infinite power, wisdom, and goodness” of God. They are really about our relationship with God in and through our connection to the created order, something which the indignenous cultures can help us to reclaim.
This is a point which the Canadian author, Timothy Findley, makes in his classic novel The Wars which shows how the life-sustaining elements of earth, water, air, and fire are perverted by the technology of war into life-threatening and life-destroying forces. He sees the native peoples as more connected to the organic and natural world than what belongs to our idolatry of the technological. It is not by accident that the hero and role model for the protagonist of the novel is Tom Longboat, a celebrated native Canadian who won the Boston Marathon in 1907.
For some the miracles seem to contradict the natural order, violating the laws of nature. God is the author of the created order and thus the principle of its operations but God is not tied to the order which he creates. Thus the miracle stories of the Gospels do not contradict nature in its operations so much as complement nature. The things of nature are used to gather us into the life of God. To use a famous theological phrase, “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” This story shows us the real meaning of all the miracle stories of the Gospel. It points us precisely to the idea of redemption. “Mine hour has not yet come,” Jesus says, a reference to the purpose of the Incarnation. His hour is the cross and passion through which we are united to God in his love for us even in the face of the horrors and evils of our humanity in its folly and sinfulness. At issue is our attention to the things of God revealed through the created order and through the humanity of Jesus. Only so can we reclaim the truth and dignity of our humanity. “For He comes to show us mercy.”
(Rev’d) David Curry,
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy
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