Today the Church celebrates the memorial feast of St Jerome, Venerable Alfred Pampalon, CSsR, and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. This homily on Luke 9:51–56 focuses on Truth and Reconciliation and is written in the key of Indigeneity.
When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him.
On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive Jesus, because his face was set toward Jerusalem. When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” But he turned and rebuked them. Then they went on to another village. Luke 9:51–56
“He set his face to go to Jerusalem.”
The story begins with a turning. A quiet resolve. A setting of the face toward a sacred path. Jesus does not hurry. He simply turns — and walks. Each step is a sacred act. Anyone who has walked on a pilgrimage knows the way that the land connects the pilgrim to something greater — history, spirit, and purpose. To walk it is to tread upon memory — not your own, but that of a thousand hearts that once beat the same prayer into the soil. The land speaks to those willing to listen.
To listen to the land is not simply to hear the wind move through the trees, or the rhythm of water over stone, though those are sacred sounds too. Listening to the land is to enter into relationship. It is to recognize that the earth is not simply scenery to take in or a resource to be exploited, but a relative (to be listened to).
The Gospel says Jesus passed through a Samaritan village. And they did not receive him. There are stories buried in that refusal. Old stories, stories that the land holds the memory of. Stories of broken trust and tangled kinship, of lines drawn and dignity denied. Stories of what has happened — what was spoken in truth, what was hidden in silence, what was done in both kindness and harm.
The Sons of Thunder were quick to speak. “Shall we call down fire from the sky?” But Jesus rebukes them with stillness and presence. He does not fight to be accepted. He does not force his way in. He turns again. And keeps walking. That, too, is love. It’s a love that never controls, never coerces, but always invites. It is a love that listens before it speaks.That waits, and walks alongside, and honours the freedom of the other.
That’s a kind of love our Indigenous brothers and sisters understand well. A Love that listens to our relative the land. Indigenous Elders speak of the land as a storyteller. As archive of wisdom far older than any book, and far more honest than any monument. Where trees grow twisted near old school grounds, where rivers still murmur in old tongues, where children were taken and never returned — the land remembers.
To listen to the land is to listen with more than just ears. It is to sit in humility. To let the wind speak what we do not yet understand. To let the silence unsettle us until our hearts begin to hear what our heads have long forgotten. The land teaches us slowness. Even as Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem. he walked slowly. He passed through fields and villages. He ate with strangers. He taught beside lakes and rested beneath trees. He listened to the land. And the land listened back.
For those of us walking the path of reconciliation, this is where we must begin: not with speeches, not with policies, but with presence. To walk the land with reverence. To kneel where children once played. To sit where language once danced on tongues now silenced. To honour what has been lost by learning to listen again.
Let the land be our teacher. Let it show us how to be still, how to wait, how to re-member. Let it teach us the kind of love that does not rush to fix, but stays to feel. Only then, might we hear the whisper of healing rising up from the roots.
Reconciliation is a path we walk together. Slowly. Softly. With our ears to the ground, listening for what has been silenced. We are still on that road. Still learning to speak truth without fear. Still learning to receive the stories of Residential Schools, of lost languages, lost cultures, and of surviving hearts. Reconciliation begins where Jesus begins — in the refusal to turn away from pain, in the decision to keep walking, even when we are not welcomed, even when the road asks more of us than we want to give.
There is no fire from heaven here. Only footsteps. And the sound of prayer rising like smoke drifting purposely from the smudge bowl. (This is the way of the ancestors: to walk with humility, to carry memory like medicine, to set our faces toward healing, and our hearts toward each other.)
So maybe the question is not, “Will they receive us?” but, “Can we keep walking the path of truth, together?” Let the land teach us. Let the silence speak. Let love lead.