Life As Performance Art 88

Yesterday I walked out of church (I attend St. Faith's Anglican in darkest Kerrisdale, Vancouver) just as they broke into playing the national anthem at the close of the service, this being the weekend of Canada Day. Three or four weeks ago, when we were planning the hymns for the next couple of months, it was agreed that we would skip the national anthem this time, as I gave what I thought to be a decent argument about why it is not appropriate in a place of Christian worship. Someone decided to do it anyway, which is a breach of promise, and I am expecting from those individuals a sincere apology. Now, I also happen to hate the national anthem, and not just because of the music (dreadful), or the lyrics (absolute doggerel), and not just because Canada is but a beautiful colonialist fiction whose very existence has been to exterminate the First Nations peoples in order to build its own Euro and British centric dominance. Those are reasons enough. But there are two more factors at play, here. One is, that the national anthem does not belong in places of worship. Not even on or near the national holiday. Church and state must be kept, in all ways possible, separate. For all those dear middle and upper middle class (and mostly white) Anglicans who have to get their O Canada fix, there are many other places where they can sing it. We gather in church to worship God. Not the state. Our music and singing is directed to Christ. Not to the Queen, nor to any of her representatives. It was the state of his day, Rome, with the collaboration of the Jewish authorities, that crucified Our Lord. And not even Canada, with its thin skin of democracy and human rights protections is going to be that much different in spirit or in essence. The state always is at variance with God. Incompatible kingdoms. And we purport to worship a saviour who died as a declared enemy of the state. Of course, it can be reasonably argued that when Rome co-opted Christianity as the state religion, that the Christian faith, now always and perpetually burning incense to Caesar, had ceased to exist, and thus we have the Anglican corruption, or the Anglicized version of the Roman corruption of the faith of Jesus Christ. Church and state over the centuries became so commingled, so integrated, as to become indistinguishable. The titular head of the Church of England and, by default, the Anglican Church of Canada, remains the British monarch, an institution and a hereditary spawn of individuals that could not be farther from or more incompatible with the spirit of the Gospels. And this is the inheritance of the Anglican Church of Canada, which to me represents a bogus and fraudulent version of Christianity, much as do almost all the other state-sanctioned forms of the Christian religion. So, for those barmy Anglicans in church yesterday, it would be a pleasure and an honour to sing to the country as though they are singing to God herself. Not for me. I have always maintained that the two entities are incompatible and one only has to carefully read the four Gospels in order to get a sense of where I am coming from with this. Of course, those who really love this country are also those who have benefited the most. I can't imagine a lot of First Nations people being too keen to celebrate. Nor poor white and other non-indigenous folk such as myself, who have had to live as disenfranchised refugees here in our own country. This country is not all things to all people. Especially now with our worsening crisis of income inequality, poverty and homelessness, which afflicts, not just indigenous, but an awful lot of other people here as well. And I happen to be one of those people. Even now that I have found some of the scarcely available social housing that still exists in this country, I still have to struggle to get by and cope in ways that none of those fatuous white folk in my church could ever even imagine. This country has not been very good to me, and I am not going to forgive this, and I am certainly not going to celebrate. O Canada, my ass!