THE PARABLE IN THE PARABOLA

Douglas Farrow.Calgary Herald, 10 February 2008

It was reported last month in the National Post (“The ‘parabola' that saved a refugee,” 21 January) that a Chinese refugee in Canada, Pin Xian Xin, faced a deportation order based in part on the judgment that her claim to be a Christian must be false since she did not know what a “biblical parabola” is. Fortunately for Ms. Xin, a federal judge overturned the order on the grounds that a Christian need not be familiar with biblical parabolas. To assist the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) in its future inquisitions, Justice Mandamin pointed out that “a parabola is a mathematical curve and not a biblical story.”

Despite its front-page appearance in the Post , and a playful column in the Star , this embarrassing item of contemporary Canadiana did not achieve the notoriety it deserves. Imagine winding up in an organ-harvesting camp in China for not knowing what a biblical parabola is! Perhaps that is where incompetent IRB agents should end up, rather than refugees like Ms. Xin who cast themselves on the mercy of this enlightened country of ours. Come to think of it, were I entitled to use such a sanction against my first-year religion students, perhaps applicants to inquisitorial posts at the IRB would be better prepared for their work and Justice Mandamin would not have to do mine. I trust that the good judge has restored Ms. Xin's faith in Canada, and allayed any fears she may have had that the teachers in her underground Chinese church had failed to communicate to her the defining truths of the Christian faith.

But enough black humour. Behind this comedy lies a real tragedy, the tragedy of widespread persecution in China, which also warrants far more attention than it receives. Ms. Xin is here both because she was a member of an unregistered religious body, and as such subject to state persecution, and because she was pregnant with her second child, whom she feared would be murdered by state officials. She and her baby have escaped a country that, besides the unspeakable wickedness of forced abortions and of organ-harvesting, has driven millions of religious believers and other dissidents underground, detained hundreds of thousands in concentration camps, and martyred untold numbers. Would that we in Canada had the humanity to confront that more directly, and the courage to point out more publicly (Olympics or no Olympics) the bloody maw of the lion that is the Chinese state.

Ms. Xin, I expect, is very thankful that the court was more sympathetic than the IRB to her difficulty in answering the question, “What is your favourite biblical parabola?” Doubtless she is grateful to be in Canada, though her right to remain has yet to be confirmed. Here in Canada Christians and other people of conviction do not face a state with a bloody maw, but only such petty cruelties as the Human Rights Commissions can mount from time to time. But Ms. Xin has now entered a world in which it is difficult for many to tell a parabola from a parable, and therein lies a tragedy of another kind: the failure, not of conviction, but of comprehension.

That point was brought home to me by another and bigger news story that appeared at the same time – the one about a troop of science professors and students blocking the Pope's address at La Sapienza university in Rome. At first glance this may have looked to many Canadians like a principled refusal to confuse between a parable and a parabola. The university in question may have been founded by a pope the better part of a millennium ago, but the protesters insisted that there be no popery today, and no parables, in a space now wholly devoted to parabolas! But of course the Pope was not proposing to confuse parables and parabolas. What he was proposing was further collaboration between those who construct them – that is, between religion and science – in “the complex task of elaborating ‘a new humanism for the third millennium.'”

I think the Pope is right. So do many at La Sapienza and in the city of Rome, to judge by the much larger counter-protests. If we are to have a genuine humanism, one capable of distinguishing our western societies from that of the beastly technocratic one from which Ms. Xin and her baby have for now escaped, we will need this sort of collaboration. We will have to be able to tell the difference between a parable and a parabola, and learn again how to appreciate both .

Our IRB agent's inability to do that may have its own private explanation – an explanation that may have nothing to do with prejudice against Ms. Xin's religious faith – but the agent's confused references to parabolas nonetheless presents us with a public parable of our times. We are increasingly ignorant of the religious heritage upon which our own traditional respect for religious freedom and human dignity are grounded. That ignorance almost sent Ms. Xin back to China, and, if not checked, it may yet send Canada down the path China has taken.

Douglas Farrow is associate professor of Christian Thought at McGill University

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