Sibling Rivalry

The ‘Glorious Twelfth’ wasn’t, this year. Few of us had even noticed the 188th annual Orange Parade yesterday, from the Moss Park Armouries across to University, up to College, and back. There was no press coverage, Many of our older members forgot, and younger ones had never heard, of the ‘Glorious Twelfth’, or of the Loyal Orange Lodge, or of the Loyal Orange Benevolent Association, of the Apprentice Boys, or of the True Blues, except for that grand building up on Yonge in Richmond Hill.

I refreshed our memories for awhile today, despite our popular culture of amnesia. At the end of the 16th century, Catholic King James faced Protestant William of Orange for the crown. James brought French troops to sweep through much of Ireland and replace unpopular Protestant landlords imposed by the English. But when he reached the north in December 1688, the gates of Londonderry were closed to him, and the Siege of Derry began. By the time William arrived with the English and Dutch troops midsummer of 1689, half the city’s people were dead, but they had not yielded to James. By midsummer the next year, at the Battle of the Boyne, William had vanquished James, and the English and Protestant rule of Ireland was back in place.

Halfway between then and now, in the 19th century, people in Ireland retold the stories. The legends of the Apprentice Boys closing the gates, and chants of ‘No Surrender’, and the images of King Billy on his white horse, date from this retelling. The Orange Lodge was established and annual marches begun to celebrate the ‘Glorious Twelfth’. July 12 marks the Boyne, and August 12th marks the relief of Derry, though neither event happened on the 12th, but closer to the beginning of each respective month, since corrections had been made based on Julian and Gregorian calendars in the 1750’s. The new holidays of the ‘marching seasons’ were celebrated by Ulster Scots dispossessed by the English enclosures of the Highlands after the original events, and used to populate the ’Ulster Plantations’ and bolster the ‘Ascendancy’ of English Protestant imperial claims over Ireland’s Catholic majority, in the 19th century as in the 17th.

This Orange movement had a huge impact on Canada, through Scots and Irish immigrants, non-conformists in the emergent British and Victorian empire. Imagine our Fathers of Confederation walking the red sandy soil of Charlottetown Prince Edward Island: John A MacDonald was an Orangeman, making deals with George Etienne Cartier the French Catholic leader, and including in their first cabinet Thomas D’Arcy McGee, convicted Irish nationalist ultimately assassinated by Fenians supporting an independent Irish Catholic state. They brought their blood feuds from Europe, and tried to build new coalitions with their former ethnic opponents. But they did not deny or forget their roots and loyalties. Every mayor of Toronto until 1955 was an Orangeman – till Nathan Philips broke that tradition. The United Church, God help us, was Orange Lodge.

After worship, you confirmed my sense that most of our elders remember the Orange Lodge as part of their family and community histories. We are vaguely embarrassed by the popular modern consensus that these were religious bigots, anti-Catholic maniacs, to whom Canada has bid ‘good riddance to bad garbage’. I’d rather reflect on our ‘white trash’ roots, and claim them.

How do you tell a story of such strife, when you’re actually not the good guys, but the villains? Ask Gunter Grass, or Modris Eksteins, or any survivors of 20th century ‘ethnic cleansing’ warfare. Germans, or those rooted in former Baltic or Balkan states, have had to retell their own stories of pride and prejudice. Why have we ignored our own prophets, the Kurt Vonnegut's tales of Dresden’s firebombing, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, or Romeo Dallaire’s Shaking Hands With the Devil account of Rwanda? We do not have clean hands. Who does?

Can we admit that we are or were the Orange, the lodge, the bigots, the militants, as our popular culture would frame us? Must we forget, and deny our role? Our worldview demonizes, criminalizes, and dehumanizes those who participated in ethnic and cultural warfare. We offer diagnosis of the pathology of a tyrant like Hitler or Stalin. We avoid the shadow of suspicion of the complicity of whole peoples who are more than victims of monsters. We continue to hound aging war criminals, based on an image of religious and ideological fanatics. Those villains are hard too find – but we’d rather not pursue the complicity good folks, who simply did nothing

The ancients had better memories than we have. We have forgotten the Orange in one lifetime, the ascendancy of the British Empire over Irish, Scots, and non-conformist minorities in two centuries. We imagine that each individual is a blank slate, an autonomous consumer who can choose each element of her identity like groceries in a store. We deny our roots and loyalties to family and community and tradition even when the family embarrasses us. The ancients told legends and etiological tales, stories about people standing for peoples. We’re not beyond that: ‘fathers of confederation’ is not a claim of biology. What if I said to you that Victoria gave birth to Regina and Alberta? Would that be a claim about a woman’s womb, or our nation’s birth?

I teased you for awhile about stereotypes of red-neck and roughneck Albertans with oil fields, or of granola eating, Birkenstock-wearing Vancouverites controlling Pacific Rim access. We can’t take those regional characteristics any more seriously than that of repressed uptight Upper Canadians rushing about in bank towers, or lazy Maritimers fishing just long enough to qualify for federal benefits. We’ve still got to many relatives and friends in each region to feel the potential power of such generalizations. However, our federal government is busy apologizing for our prejudices toward Ukrainians interned in WWI, and Japanese in camps in WWII. How easy is it to slide into dehumanizing, criminalizing, and losing empathy for these others?

Our religious tradition, and particularly the ‘toledot’ or generations of Genesis, deny us the comfort of demonizing opponents. Surrounded by other nations and cultures, in conflict and competition for economic survival, our tradition always told a story of common humanity sprung from the same ancestors. Adam is the common origin of all humans. Noah’s 3 sons are the roots of all ethnic groups, and Babel generated all the languages from one original legendary city. This is a powerful alternative to myths that named opponents as creatures of another species, created by competing gods, from other soils. Our tradition says we are simply cousins once removed.

Closer to home than the ‘kissing cousins’, who seem quaintly strange to us, are our sibling rivalries with those peoples most like us. Scots, Irish, Welsh, English peoples were locked in deadly competition. We lost little love for one another, unless against a common enemy. Some cartoons suggested that Irish were subhuman apes, but generally the biblical traditions held, and our self-understandings were in terms of sibling rivalries, not alien warfare. Of course, who makes you crazier than your own sister or brother, whose faults in character you know too well?

One of our members, David Rawcliffe, teaches high school students that we all come from common human roots in Africa, 30 or 40 centuries ago. We spread out, through Mesopotamia and the Tigris Euphrates valley, and South Asia and the Indus valley, and on through Europe and Asia to our current ethnicities and cultures. But he invites polyglot Toronto teens to say to each other: “So, what has your branch of the family been up to for the past 35,000 years?”

With that introduction, we rehearsed the story again, on this our summer tour through Genesis. We began with slides of satellite views of Africa and the Mediterranean, and the crucial location of the Holy Land on the trade routes between empires and continents. Then we shifted to maps of political, economic and social patterns in the region. One trade route running directly south from the land of Jacob/Israel, through Petra or Jordan, over mountain passes to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea, shows the flow of trade from Africa and South Asia by sea or desert caravan. That trade route runs through the land of Edom, the red rock and red soil of Esau.

We traced our myths and legends of human origins in Genesis 1-11, of Adam’s generations and Noah’s sons and Babel’s scattering. We reviewed that our father Abraham was a wandering Aramean, coming up out of Ur, the Tigris Euphrates and Iraq into Haran or Syria, and that he sent back to Haran for a wife for his son Isaac. We recalled Sarah’s infertility, and Abraham’s first child Ishmael by Hagar, the origins of the Arabic people, and now Rebekah’s infertility is relieved by the conception of twins, two nations struggling even in the womb. I told you some jokes to recall that we don’t always love our siblings, and that mothers often despair of their children and the price they pay in maternal love and apparent futility.

How do we talk about centuries and millennia of conflict or competition with neighbour nations? Esau is the figure and character of Edom: hairy, red, a hunter and a man’s man, perhaps a bit shortsighted and short-tempered. Jacob is to become Israel: smooth, heal-grabbing trickster, schemer, cook, farmer, settled at home, and a shrewd bargainer: Mom always liked him best. They struggled in the womb, struggled at birth, as young men and through their offspring, the redneck roughnecks, and the effete cultural commercial workers . Esau takes the immediate gratification, and underdog Jacob keeps an eye on the longer game. People are like that – and peoples are like that – but remember, we’re all human, and all siblings in one family.

I love these stories. The most parochial of us are the most cosmopolitan, for they know who and whose they are, and recognize that others are siblings, in one extended family. ‘The thistle, shamrock, rose entwine’ in Canada, as our parochial politicians partnered across their traditional rivalries: MacDonald, Cartier, McGee and the others. When our lodge ancestors went off to march for the ‘Glorious Twelfth’, their Catholic neighbours milked their cows. Don’t worry about those religious partisans, who can offer mutual respect. Fear their secularist successors, who conduct genocidal wars for ‘freedom’ and economic creeds of capitalism or communism.

The Orange movement in Toronto still includes a Guiseppe Garibaldi lodge rooted in the Italian United Church. We WASPs used to remember that we were really an unholy alliance of former sibling rivals. Our denomination bridged gulfs between those of accents and attitudes rooted in genocidal ethnic and imperial warfare. Those who reduce us to propositional truths of universal values and individual choice just don’t remember who we are and whose we have been. Those who try to be all things to all people end up being nothing to anybody. So we might benefit from reclaiming our parochial roots, and our patriarchal and ancestral legends and myths.

The ‘Glorious Twelfth’ wasn’t, this year. Few of us had even noticed, others had never heard. We spent these few minutes reclaiming a story that demands that we recognize the humanity of any opponent and refuses us the lazy luxury of demonizing, dehumanizing, criminalizing them as tyrants with victims, religious fanatics and maniacs opposed o reasonable tolerance. Scripture offers us a subtler, sounder account of our communities and traditions, with common ancestry, familiar human foibles of complicity, vanity, and foolishness. So we prayed:


God, ground of our being, who knit us in our mothers’ wombs, and knows our frame and our mortal limits, remind us once more who and whose we are, of our common humanity with all, and our particular humanity, in families and communities and traditions. Give shape and sense to our living, and purpose and meaning to our dying. Remind us to tell our own stories with truth, our own sin of pride and self-serving choices, of shrewd calculations, and of impulsive appetites, lest like Esau we despise our birthright and true identity: children of God. Amen.

Genesis 25: 19-34

These are the descendants of Isaac, Abraham's son: Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah, daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan-aram, sister of Laban the Aramean. Isaac prayed to the LORD for his wife, because she was barren; and the LORD granted his prayer, and his wife Rebekah conceived.

The children struggled together within her; and she said, "If it is to be this way, why do I live?" So she went to inquire of the LORD. And the LORD said to her, "Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples born of you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other. the elder shall serve the younger."

When her time to give birth was at hand, there were twins in her womb. The first came out red, all his body like a hairy mantle; so they named him Esau. Afterward his brother came out, with his hand gripping Esau's heel; so he was named Jacob. Isaac was sixty years old when she bore them.

When the boys grew up, Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a quiet man, living in tents. Isaac loved Esau, because he was fond of game; but Rebekah loved Jacob.

Once when Jacob was cooking a stew, Esau came in from the field, and he was famished. Esau said to Jacob, "Let me eat some of that red stuff, for I am famished!" (Therefore he was called Edom.) Jacob said, "First sell me your birthright." Esau said, "I am about to die; of what use is a birthright to me?" Jacob said, "Swear to me first."

So he swore to him, and sold his birthright to Jacob. Then Jacob gave Esau bread and lentil stew, and he ate and drank, and rose and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright.