The Long Memory and the Work of Healing

All Saints Anglican Church in Waterloo
Burns Night · Mental Health Week · Bell Let’s Talk
January 25, 2026

Thank you, Marty — for your courage, your clarity, and for naming what so many people are forced to live with quietly.

And thank you to this community — for making space during Mental Health Week, and on Burns Night — a night that remembers something deeper than poetry.

This is my first time speaking in an Anglican church since I was deprived of ministry.

I am not here to revisit that history.

I am here to speak about what memory does when it is met with courage instead of fear.

Tonight is about memory.

Not nostalgia.

Not grievance.

But memory — the kind that refuses to disappear simply because it makes others uncomfortable.

Robert Burns belonged to a people who understood this well.

The Scots learned early that power often asks the vulnerable to forget — their language, their stories, their pain — in order to survive.

And yet the songs endured.

The poems endured.

The truth endured.

That shared endurance — between peoples, across borders — is what the Auld Alliance was really about.

Not politics.

But solidarity.

And solidarity, at its core, is simply this:

We will remember you — when others would prefer you disappear.

Mental health struggles do not begin in weakness.

They begin in unheld truth.

In things that happened too early.

Too quietly.

Too often.

In families, churches, and institutions — places meant to protect — where harm was minimized, misnamed, or spiritualized away.

I know this not only as a former priest or a mental health advocate.

I know it as someone who has lived through trauma — and then lived through the long aftermath of trying to tell the truth about it.

What we often call mental illness is not a failure of faith.

It is very often the body and soul refusing to cooperate with silence any longer.

Anxiety is memory knocking.

Depression is grief with nowhere to go.

Anger is pain that was never allowed to speak safely.

And when institutions respond to that pain with control instead of care, the wound does not close.

It deepens.

I once wrote a book called Redemptive Trauma.

Some people misunderstood the title.

So let me be precise — theologically precise.

Trauma is not redemptive by nature.

Violence does not become holy because it happens.

Suffering is not a spiritual requirement.

God does not need trauma in order to bring about redemption.

But — and this matters —

When trauma has already occurred,

When harm has already been done,

Redemption refuses to leave the wounded behind.

In the Christian story, God does not stand at a distance from suffering — explaining it, justifying it, or demanding gratitude for it.

God enters it.

Not to baptize violence —

But to refuse its final word.

The Cross does not make suffering good.

It makes abandonment impossible.

When Bonhoeffer said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die,” he was not glorifying pain.

He was naming the cost of truth.

The death he spoke of was the death of false innocence.

The death of cheap grace.

The death of belonging purchased by silence.

Redemptive trauma is not about finding meaning in pain.

It is about discovering that pain does not get to decide who we are — or whether we remain worthy of love, dignity, and belonging.

Redemption is not forgetting what happened.

Redemption is being believed.

It is the slow restoration of agency.

The reclaiming of voice.

The moment when a person realizes they are no longer required to protect the reputation of the thing that harmed them.

This is why truth-telling is so threatening.

Because it shifts power.

There is a phrase used by theologians and liberation movements:

“The long memory of the oppressed.”

It does not mean people hold grudges.

It means they remember what the world asked them to carry alone.

That memory is often treated as a problem to be managed.

But scripture tells a different story.

God is not allergic to memory.

God remembers Hagar in the wilderness.

God hears the cry of enslaved Israel.

God listens — again and again — to the lament of the Psalms.

The prophets were not punished for lying.

They were punished for remembering out loud.

The Church does not lose credibility because people tell the truth about harm.

The Church loses credibility when it asks people to stay silent for the sake of order.

I want to be clear tonight.

I am not here to accuse.

I am not here to litigate.

I am not here to rehearse details.

I am here to witness.

Witness that people survive things they were never meant to survive alone.

Witness that silence harms more than truth ever could.

Witness that healing begins when memory is met with care instead of fear.

Martin Luther King Jr. warned us that the greatest danger to justice is not open hostility, but the silence of those who prefer order to truth.

Desmond Tutu taught us that reconciliation without truth is not healing — it is merely the postponement of violence.

I have been written about.

I have spoken publicly.

I have been misunderstood.

And still — I am here.

Because the opposite of trauma is not happiness.

It is connection.

So tonight — on Burns Night, during Mental Health Week, on a day when our culture is finally learning how to speak about mental health out loud, in a church that has chosen to listen — I want to say this plainly:

People do not need to be fixed nearly as much as they need to be remembered.

Remembered as whole.

Remembered as truthful.

Remembered as worthy of care — not because they are strong, but because they are human.

Mental health begins to heal when people are no longer asked to disappear parts of themselves in order to belong.

Faith becomes credible when it can hold memory without fear.

And redemption — real redemption — begins when we stop asking people to forget what shaped them,

and start walking with them as they tell the truth.

The long memory of the oppressed is not a problem to be solved.

It is a gift to the Church.

If — and only if — we are brave enough to receive it.

Thank you.