The Road We Must Take:
Passover, Paschal Mystery, and Land Justice Futures
by Sarah Jane Bradley
“I just I'm so jazzed,” started Sr. Chistin Tomy, a Dominican sister of Sinsinawa, at the end of a Land Justice Futures session. “That’s the best word I can use to describe the intersections and connections that are being made in this series.”
I couldn’t agree more. Just over a month ago, a new project within the Nuns & Nones community kicked off with the launch of Land Justice Futures, an online course about the call to land justice — the act of engaging in land legacies with the goal of ecological, racial, and economic healing and repair. I, along with the rest of the Land Justice team, was amazed when over 600 sisters, associates, co-members and community staff joined us in this exploration, amidst what feels like a historic backdrop of rupture, reckoning, and change.
I grew up Catholic, but throughout my adulthood I’ve found my spiritual home in other traditions, namely earth-based/animist and Jewish practices and communities. Given that mix of lineage by birth and choice, Passover and the Easter season is an especially poignant time to reflect on and mobilize around the call to land justice. If we are on a collective journey of evolution and liberation, struggling toward truth, solidarity, and new life, how do we see ourselves in our stories?
The Pesach and Easter season begs me to question: How am I, or my people and lineage, connected to the suffering of the world? Have we been the pharaohs or the freedom fighters? What is the narrow place we are walking through — the ‘mitzrayim’ of Exodus — as we move away from a culture of empire and towards a culture of kinship and liberation? And as institutions crumble around us, how are we supporting new life?
It was in that soup of the season, and at our halfway point in the course, when I had the opportunity to reflect with a few participants. Together with Sr. Corinne Sanders, a Dominican sister of Adrian, MI, and Sr. Eileen McKenzie, a Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration in La Crosse, WI, we listened for how this holy time of year might illuminate our own journeys toward land justice. Here’s what I’ll be carrying with me.
This moment of real possibility comes with a reckoning.
In order to open up more creative, collaborative, and just possibilities for property planning and a climate-resilient future, we must first examine the roots of land injustice and our climate crisis itself – that is to say, the history and present-day impacts of land dispossession, colonization, capitalism, and systemic racism.
As we know through the study of the Doctrine of Discovery, Manifest Destiny, chattel slavery, missions, boarding schools, and many other colonial violences that white governments, churches, and settlers inflicted upon generations of Black and Indigenous people, as well as other communities of color, the harms of those histories are inextricably connected to the histories of the Catholic Church and Christianity on this continent.
In investigating the history of their Indian boarding school, St. Mary’s in Odanah, Wisconsin (1883-1969), Sr. Eileen recalls having no awareness of the violence and harm it caused. “It was a huge blindside for me; and I don't think I'm the only one in my congregation,” she reflects. “I wasn't even aware that this was a controversial area in history.”
It was only when they began learning the local histories from Indigenous authors and speakers, organizing a Truth & Healing team to investigate further, and building in-person relationships with survivors of their boarding school, that the truth began to really be understood and felt. “We need to learn the histories that we didn't write and the histories we didn’t teach.”
Learning those histories extends beyond congregational histories, and includes our personal, family histories as well. This was the focus of the book club on Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization — another offering of the Land Justice Project earlier this spring. For Sr. Corinne Sanders, beginning to learn the congregational and family histories, and seeing how intertwined they were in the early days of colonization and land dispossession, was a critical combination. Shocked by her learning, she also felt newly grounded, as if she’d found “the fourth leg of a stool” she sits on.
“In my congregation, we talk about the land where we are as ‘our ancestral land’ — and we came here in 1884. I'm like, ‘1884 — our ancestral?’” she asked with some incredulity. “It was not until I was engaged in [the course and the book club], that all of a sudden, I thought to myself, ‘Okay, this was someone else's ancestral land; there was a history here before we came.’ I remember just being, at first, dumbstruck that it had never occurred to me.”
Corinne remarked that with such learning, the common “moves to innocence”— that is, the ways that descendents of settlers excuse or distance themselves from the violence or present-day implications of history — no longer hold up. (Hat tip to Eve Tuck & Wayne Yang for the concept, which is further explored in Healing Haunted Histories).
As Sr. Christin Tomy put it, “Wherever our convents are, wherever our land is, it’s native land.” The same is true of any non-native settler family, community, or institution on this continent.
2. While these realizations are painful, they can also be a chance for healing and wholeness.
The reckoning is a small death of its own: in a way, we must die to our own images of ourselves or what we thought ‘the truth’ was, in order to let something deeper, clearer, and more honest emerge. Sometimes these are smaller deaths — adjusting to the truth behind a last name, or coming to terms with a family secret — and sometimes they’re much larger deaths, like a false, or incomplete, identity that one used to cherish. But what is possible beyond these deaths? What can bring new life?
This is something Sr. Eileen thinks about often. Her community’s long-held motto, ‘modern lives, sacred traditions’ now rings differently for some in the community. “Now, we’re saying, ‘well, turns out not all of our traditions were sacred. How are we going to address that?’”
And in asking the question and confronting the pain of it, there is yet a blessing found: this work has created an opportunity for her community to be more honest, transparent, and intimate. “[It allows] a courageous reconciliation,” Sr. Eileen continued, “amongst ourselves, and hopefully, the people we have shared histories with.”
Sr. Corinne shared similar sentiments. “I think we'll find a new wholeness — for myself and for our congregation — as we engage more,” she said, “Opening myself up to the Indigenous peoples who lived here, and allowing that to work me however it will work inside me, will bring wholeness. It will bring a whole new way of being and seeing that I did not have before.”
For Sr. Corinne, this learning is deepened by the themes of the Lenten and Easter Seasons.
“For me, Lent has always been a time of turning back toward God, turning back toward the holy — the heart that is broken open in order to find wholeness. The dying and the resurrection into new life — it runs through all of this! The point of coming into this different awareness is not to lie crushed in it, but the new life and the whole fullness that comes, based on how one holds it.”
3. Perhaps this moment — of Paschal possibility, of an Exodus from worldviews of domination — is all about surrendering to the path that must be walked, without knowing how it will all end.
For Sr. Eileen, “not knowing how it will turn out” is what makes it a Paschal moment for religious life itself.
“This story is us coming to know ourselves,” Sr. Eileen reflected, “We’re entering into a Paschal experience that we cannot deny anymore. We know this is part of what we’re coming into: coming to know the truth and confronting that truth.”
For some sisters, learning these truths feels like “a betrayal of who we are and who we could have been.” Others are in deep pain, suddenly grappling with histories formerly thought of as ‘good,’ now re-understood as problematic or harmful. For others yet, the call to greater integrity can feel liberating; clearing a “say-do gap” between spiritual values and what is done in the material world.
Sr. Eileen connected the myriad responses to the confusion that surrounded Jesus’ walk to Jerusalem, when “all of the apostles were all over the place” as she described. “Some were trying to stop Jesus from going, [and some] were following him as best they could.”
The spectra of reactions echoes what we see in society writ large — factions, fragility, mistrust, evasion, and knee-jerk polarization pervade all realms of justice. Sticking one’s neck out for ‘what’s right’ can feel like it’s just as likely to be met with condemnation, ridicule, and threats as it is to be met with support, solidarity, and praise. Even being connected to someone sticking their neck out is a risk. But the pain and uncertainty of the road is the price we pay for responding to the G!d of justice.
“It’s going down a road where your eyes are wide open. You don’t know what is at the end of it. You know it’s going to be hard, painful,” shared Sr. Eileen, “And you know you gotta go — it’s ‘the Way’ with a capital W. It's hard, and it takes effort, and there’s suffering involved, and there’s support, but you just know this is the way you gotta go. There’s little glory in it too: you have ‘Hosannah in the Highest’ going into Jerusalem and that changes really quickly. That’s a really important point in our faith journey. It’s not the lauds, adulation, the ‘great job,’ praise. People change on that road, in how they see you, and you still have to go down it.”
In opening ourselves up to that journey, we can better embrace the ways that Spirit is at work in us, doing something new.
“You know, this is certainly ‘something new’ that is happening,” reflected Sr. Corinne, referencing the Isaiah 43:19 passage that had been read during Holy Week.
“‘Reimagining land justice’ is just that: Behold! I am doing something new. Do you not see it? Sometimes we don't see it because we find ourselves inside a frame, and we can't see beyond that frame,” shared Corinne, “I think it's God's invitation to put that frame down and reimagine it… I think we're finding ourselves coming into and understanding ourselves in a whole different way, in relationship with Earth and with all who dwell upon her.”
4. Walking the road together makes walking it at all more possible.
How do we hold the harms of the Catholic — of my — lineage, while honoring its graces and wisdom? How do religious communities reckon with “haunted histories,” while also facing existential questions about the future? Perhaps the answer lies here in the present moment: the here-and-now choice to engage with paradox rather than run; to shuffle our way forward to truth, one step at a time.
Recently in the course, Sr. Christin Tomy shared that walking that road might mean paying closer attention to the present than skipping ahead to the future.
“In a lot of our congregation gatherings, we have conversations about the future of religious life,” she began. “I'm less interested in a conversation about what religious life is going to look like, than I am about this conversation of what are we called to now? That's going to shape the future.
“How are we called, in this moment, to move from stewardship to solidarity? How are we called to be about the concrete work of healing and repair? How can we start to see things that might feel like burdens, like buildings and land, not as problems but opportunities? And how can we dream together?”
Sr. Christin raises the question for me, what does faith ask of us now? What is the risk I must take in the journey of collective liberation? How can we surrender to the road that must be taken?
Regardless of what that road is like, we can be braver (and safer!) on the journey by moving together, in relationships of solidarity and cooperation. Community makes land justice more possible.
As Sr. Christin posed her questions, the zoom chat lit up with energy:
“Let's do this!”
“We can do this together!”
“Put our name on the ‘collective power of religious’ list!!”
“I am excited to consider doing something real, not merely ‘symbolic.’”
Some sisters lingered longer, naming that we are in a breakthrough moment of Spirit, and that a unified effort among women religious could spark a whole new wave of support in the national movements for reparations and land return.
And in that moment of what felt like collective energy unleashed, it strikes me that walking this road together might be the only way we walk it at all.
This rings true for me personally. Just the other week, our Land Justice team was recognizing how we make each other feel safer and braver in the work. This encouragement and sense of solidarity is sourced from the relationships within our team, with religious communities, and with movement partners that buoy us and show us the way. Strength of faith and relationship is both how and why we continue to walk and take risks.
“There's a certain energy and power, knowing that many women religious have come together over this and are talking about it.” remarked Sr. Corinne afterward, “It’s just pretty awesome that we're all connected in this big conversation.”
Whether we are in a maze of reactions in Jerusalem or the harrowing journey of Exodus, the truth is, we can’t come to liberation alone.
Her words bring back a song I learned in 2019 during my residency with the Sisters of Mercy in Burlingame, CA. At that time, I could never have imagined what was in store for this work. Standing in this present moment, the words feel much deeper to me now:
“Sacred is the call.
Awesome indeed the entrustment.
Tending the holy, tending the holy.”
May we tend the holy and our greater wholeness. May we courageously take to the uncertain path of love and justice. And may we never walk alone.