Love as a knock on the door

Originally published:

http://www.ilsussidiario.net/articolo.aspx?articolo=124705 (5-Nov-10)
http://www.timescolonist.com/life/Ahousaht+David+Frank+shares+healing+journey+after+abuse/3790764/story.html (7-Nov-10)

David Frank knew coming home would require attention to change. Though no world traveller, he is a man who knows what it means for the heart to shift and find its new place.

"That was my first time out of America," the community health services manager for the Ahousaht First Nation says a few weeks after his return from Rimini, Italy, and the annual Meeting of Friendship Among Peoples. "I had never really taken a vacation before."

"Over there, it was really alive, really vibrant, there was just so much. It was almost overwhelming. Coming home meant getting myself to slow down a bit."

It is the understatement of a man who has stepped off a cliff describing the need to move his arms to avoid stubbing his toe upon landing. In his mid-60s, Frank and his wife, Ginger, travelled from their reserve on the west coast of Vancouver Island across the Atlantic to the Italian Adriatic resort town of Rimini for the meeting in August.

The annual event, the largest summer cultural fair in Europe, hosts 800,000 visitors in a week. There are 1,800 people in the entire Ahousaht First Nation, which can be reached only by boat or float plane.

But Frank wasn't there this year just to observe the seven-day frenzy of political discussions, arts exhibitions and sporting events. He was there to address an audience accustomed to keynote speakers such as Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, Tony Blair and Pope John Paul II.

A man who spent most of his working life as a fisherman off the Canadian coast, he would stand alone at the front of a cavernous auditorium, speaking through a translator to at least 500 people who needed a map projected on the wall to know where he was from. And he would be talking about himself.

No—he would be talking about his capacity to forgive the Roman Catholic priest who sexually abused him as a child, something he had never spoken about in a public forum before.

"A question I still ask myself is what did happen? How did it happen?" Frank says in the voice of a man who, even as he is speaking, is also listening to an ancient, beautiful story being told in another room. "I just said my prayer and let everything go."

The combination carried him, someone might say mystically, above the gulfs of culture, language, history, geography, to the shared place in human hearts where listeners sit in silence waiting for word to follow word.

The word David Frank gave them, above all, was love.

"I remembered that when you love all people, you have no enemies," Frank said into the silence that day. "I realized I needed to ... love the person that hurt me."

In a series of quick verbal block cuts, he gave them his history: An aboriginal Canadian raised in the Catholic and Protestant faiths, as well as in the religious healing traditions of his ancestors, sent off by government to a church-run residential school as a child, abused, devastated, enraged, addicted, suicidal. Then again, love. The love of a solitary knock on the door on the night when Frank was raising his own hand against himself to end his life.

"There was a knock on the door, a priest walked in, he'd come to see me. He asked how I was. It was at that time I realized God was alive, a loving God. I heard the teachings of my mom and my dad, heard the teachings in my heart. I heard the need to love all people," he told his listeners.

But more. He did not tell them his experience of change was the necessary and sufficient ground of redemption. He did not teach them it was the essence of salvation. He thanked them for being good and generous people. He sat down.

After his speech in Rimini, after the breaking of the silence and the swarming of the crowd wanting to shake his hand, pat his shoulder, thank him for his words, his love, he and his wife got a chance to go to Rome for a few days before returning home. The frenzy of the Eternal City in August can drive even seasoned travellers mad. What chance did David and Ginger Frank, fresh from Ahousaht, really have?

"It was amazing, all that history," Frank says. "It brought me back to some of our history from home. When I was standing in the [Sistine] Chapel, looking at the ceiling, seeing all the paintings and what Michelangelo did, all of the hard work, it made me think of here, how ours was preserved in songs and dances.

"You see that in some of the beautiful songs you hear, the old, ancient songs that come out once in a while. You can feel it, too. It made me think of that."

Talking while listening. A small voice in a cavernous place. The story from the other room. Coming home.

"I was singing under my breath," David Frank says. "Yes, I was singing quietly."