Flower Power

I was invited as a guest facilitator to a Roman Catholic separate school staff retreat. High school teachers from Francis Libermann CHS gathered on Friday November 19 at the St Francis Centre in Caledon for their annual retreat day. I was offered 45 minutes of air time, “word”, and they would have another hour for “response to word”, other program and mass, ending with lunch.

The opening powerpoint slide was titled: “Who Invited the WASP?” The acronym for ‘White, Anglo, Saxon, Protestant’ was a 20th century cultural invention which carried disproportionate power and privilege in North America. Roman Catholics would be justified in resenting their relative disadvantages in political, social and economic spheres.

I claimed to feel more like an “ICU” subculture, the acronym for ‘Intensive Care Unit’, given our degenerating status, and was reclaiming deeper parochial roots as “Irish, Celtic, United” within the broader classification of WASP. Regardless of how I feel, however, I have benefited from my demographic privileges for half a century, and appreciated my forbearing hosts.

I acknowledged that my subculture only a generation ago was ‘the lodge’, Orangemen who marched each early summer, and controlled municipal politics and excluded Catholics, claiming old enmities dating back to the Battle of the Boyne and King William of Orange. Others in the room had Fenian and nationalist relations and memories: the Red Hand vs Erin Go Bragh!



I tried to deconstruct that provocation that seeks to define all ethnic Irish folks like us in Yeats’ “Out of Ireland we have come / great hatred, little room, maimed us from the start. / I carry from my mother’s womb a fanatic heart.” After all, we Ulster Scots were simply pawns of English aristocracy, dispossessed from highlands and lowlands to displace other Celts from plantations.

After 4 centuries, we can’t ‘go home’, but only go on. My denomination is a post-colonial attempt to bridge enmities from the old country. English, Irish, Scottish, Dutch, and German protestants lost their accents, and intermarried, and built new unions: the United Church of Canada, part of the new ‘WASP’ ethnicity, including and not just excluding.

I invited the teachers to identify themselves on the ‘Power Flower’ graphic below. If the outer petal is the dominant demographic group, with the most power, or privilege, or ability to effect or resist change, then are you displaying that outer petal, or a smaller petal demographic? For instance, if ‘male’ is the bigger ‘sex’ petal, and ‘white’ the bigger ‘race’ one, and ‘heterosexual’ the bigger ‘sexual orientation petal, colour in your petals, larger or smaller.

Once we had identified our own ‘Power Flower’, few of the teachers found themselves identified only with the larger petals. We had white daisies, similar to the diagram, on each table, and I asked you to take the heads off them, and direct your attention to the far more varied mums in pots on each table, with variations of colour among the petals and flowers.

Do you deny your privilege and power, and minimize it? That’s like me claiming to be ICU, not WASP. Teachers have great privilege in education and social standing, and effect on students whose demographics are less privileged. Do you isolate your sense of power or grievance in terms of one demographic, and igmore the rest of the petals of the ‘Power Flower’?

I invited you to think instead of the one daisy head, or even the potted bunch of mums, in terms of fields of flowers. To whom to you reach out on one side and the other, to people you can connect with, but who can’t connect with each other? I invited you to assume the position of reaching out to hold onto friends on right and left – a cruciform posture?

Later, the teachers responded with their own floral imagery of themselves and their community: weeds, bouquets, calla lilies, colourful, beautiful expressions of God’s creation and redemptive revelation and presence. We showed series of slides of fields of flowers:





Psalm 103
As for mortals,
Our days are like grass;
We flourish like a flower of the field;
For the wind passes over it,
And its place knows it no more...

Luke 12:27
Consider the lilies, how they grow:
They neither toil nor spin;
Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory
Was not clothed like one of these.

Joseph Ratzinger (as he then was) wrote in Living with the Church (Synthesis Series, 1978) that our identity is built from all our identifications. Our identifications with the ‘empirical church’ (distinct from the one holy invisible catholic church) are many and comprise important parts, but not the whole of anybody’s identity. What are the identifications that shape your identity?

John Calvin, Protestant theologian of the 16th century, from whose work came my Reformed and Presbyterian tradition, understood revelation as consistent. God’s reveals in creation, repeats in Torah, echoes by the people and prophets, incarnates in Jesus Christ, manifests in the witness of the church, the same truth, goodness and beauty for those with eyes to see.

God made you, and did not make junk. God does not only make individual white daisies of equal dominant white petals, but infinite varieties of flora from lichen to rainbows of blossoms defying description and reduction, and none of them contradicts the other. Our Puritan tradition did wreck a lot of religious art – at our best, in reaction to confusing the image and the thing, the signifier and the signified, or as Augustine put it, ‘the ring and the beloved’.


This was not, of course, all about flowers, or even, as this staff knew, was it all about power (though a United Church gathering would have raged at the many injustices revealed, and petitioned for change). It was in the end a celebration of these teachers, this school community, in their context – which for a day, thanks be to God, included me and mine. What word do you have for our hearts, O God, give us ears to hear! Read more...