Rage and redemption

When Bert Tallman came home from residential school as a young man of 15 or 16, he was filled with rage, and lusting for revenge. That’s perfectly understandable. Rage is a powerful thing. It becomes all-consuming. You gotta get your revenge or die trying. You try to beat those feelings back with booze and drugs, and things get worse. In the CBC interview, Bert talks about a wise auntie who helped guide him through this fraught time. You want revenge. You can go to jail. You can die. How does this help you? While Bert didn’t come right out and say auntie studied the Bible, the story inferred that her influence took him to a place where he finds peace and strength in studying the Bible. The reason this triggers cognitive dissonance in so many, is because the Bible has been befouled by false prophets for so long that we forget there’s a lot of really good stuff in there. When you see public figures like Mike Pompeo and Mike Huckabee claiming to be “devout Christians,” and then look at their works, well, I don’t think the guy who delivered the Sermon on the Mount would approve of those gentlemen. We’ve come to associate Christianity with colonialism and the slave trade, while forgetting that Bible-centred faith communities were instrumental in ending both. Every other civil rights leader in mid-20th century America was a minister in the Christian church! Kids in residential schools suffered abuse at the hands of emissaries of one Christian church or another. Choir boys in Catholic countries around the world have been abused by Christian priests. None of that is endorsed in the Bible. That’s why Bert and millions of others continue to find peace and strength in the teachings of the Bible.