Curt's Ponderings From The Bioshelter

Dear friends of the Presbytery, Those of you who attended the presbytery meeting in Fairbanks this month know that our denomination voted to reject the Doctrine of Discovery, and to offer an apology to the indigenous peoples in the United States. The apology acknowledges the way Presbyterians participated in practices that has left Native people hurting to this day, pledging repentance and seeking forgiveness.  To see the actual text of the apology approved by General Assembly, I pasted it in the first comment, below, for you to see. Social science has documented the way that the trauma suffered by one generation is often passed on to later generations if that trauma is not fully grieved. We certainly see the symptoms of this generational trauma among Alaska Natives as e view the high incidence of substance abuse, addiction, depression, domestic violence, homicide and suicide.  The General Assembly knows the power of confession and the way such confession often open...

Twenty-five years ago I met a woman, who changed my life and my ministry. I was leading a training on How to be a Real Friend or Visitor for People in Crisis. The training was originally for church deacons, who visit church members and others in crisis, but we decided to open it up to anyone on Wrangell, who wanted some training or coaching for helping people they knew. For some reason I decided the opening devotion for the first training would be from Genesis 2:4b-25, which includes the passage where God takes the rib from the first human and creates the woman. I knew that at least one of our deacons had been victimized by sexual abuse, so I worked my way through the Hebrew version to translate the passage very carefully. In Hebrew, atham (we usually pronounce it adam) simply means the human creature. So that is how I translated that passage. The first time that terms for male or female occur is after God has changed the human creature into a male and female. At that point the man ...