Hated for my "dependents".
Twenty-two years ago, on December 6th, 1994, 
I was walking with some of my relatively new seminary friends around the UofT campus, probably coming back from supper, when we noticed that something was happening in one of the courtyards of Emmanuel College, the UCC seminary that is just north of Queen's Park Circle. It was a candlelit vigil of some sort, and as we walked over we were reminded that this was the fifth anniversary of Marc Lepine's attack on the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. 14 women dead, 14 others wounded, and wound up in the rhetoric of hatred and violence directed towards "women" as a bloc of humanity. 51% of humanity, to be slightly more precise. As we got closer still, the hostility began.
It was never overt. No one stood up to me and said, "You can't be here!" But my mind remembers feeling hostile stares being directed at me, for no other reason than I was male. I have "dependent parts" of which I am, if not proud of, then certainly at least content with (yes, to use the current term, I am a "cisgendered male"). At the time, I was also growing a beard, which made me look, at least superficially, a touch like Lepine himself. My friends and I didn't stay long. Partly, we were just slightly older than most of those present - already possessing our undergraduate degrees, we were all at least 23, where most of these students were still in their undergrad studies, maybe 20, and that slight age difference tends to mark the emergence from when you think that what you know means you know everything (hello, student radicals!) to the point where what you know means you realize you actually know almost nothing.
Now, more than two decades on, I read that that particular sculpture was once the subject of a heresy trial for the once-incumbent minister of Bloor St. United (he originally commissioned it), but has now become a rallying point for demonstrations having to do with things like the murdered and missing aboriginal women of Canada. It is a place where women can come and reflect that others have felt as they have - disempowered, disenfranchised, "worth less" if not altogether worthless, etc. However, I still imagine it is a place where men are not truly "welcome" to go. For just as the sins of all mankind put Christ on His cross, it is the sins of easily-offended, over-reactionary, possessive, controlling, brutal men who have put this woman on hers, and there's not usually an easy way of telling if a given male is one of these or not.
My prayer today is for a time to come when such statues, and the statements that go with them, are unnecessary.
I was walking with some of my relatively new seminary friends around the UofT campus, probably coming back from supper, when we noticed that something was happening in one of the courtyards of Emmanuel College, the UCC seminary that is just north of Queen's Park Circle. It was a candlelit vigil of some sort, and as we walked over we were reminded that this was the fifth anniversary of Marc Lepine's attack on the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. 14 women dead, 14 others wounded, and wound up in the rhetoric of hatred and violence directed towards "women" as a bloc of humanity. 51% of humanity, to be slightly more precise. As we got closer still, the hostility began.
It was never overt. No one stood up to me and said, "You can't be here!" But my mind remembers feeling hostile stares being directed at me, for no other reason than I was male. I have "dependent parts" of which I am, if not proud of, then certainly at least content with (yes, to use the current term, I am a "cisgendered male"). At the time, I was also growing a beard, which made me look, at least superficially, a touch like Lepine himself. My friends and I didn't stay long. Partly, we were just slightly older than most of those present - already possessing our undergraduate degrees, we were all at least 23, where most of these students were still in their undergrad studies, maybe 20, and that slight age difference tends to mark the emergence from when you think that what you know means you know everything (hello, student radicals!) to the point where what you know means you realize you actually know almost nothing.
Now, more than two decades on, I read that that particular sculpture was once the subject of a heresy trial for the once-incumbent minister of Bloor St. United (he originally commissioned it), but has now become a rallying point for demonstrations having to do with things like the murdered and missing aboriginal women of Canada. It is a place where women can come and reflect that others have felt as they have - disempowered, disenfranchised, "worth less" if not altogether worthless, etc. However, I still imagine it is a place where men are not truly "welcome" to go. For just as the sins of all mankind put Christ on His cross, it is the sins of easily-offended, over-reactionary, possessive, controlling, brutal men who have put this woman on hers, and there's not usually an easy way of telling if a given male is one of these or not.
My prayer today is for a time to come when such statues, and the statements that go with them, are unnecessary.