Judith Weiss wrote:
(snip)
> Any attempt to take spirituality into the workplace (or schoolplace) will
> cause many to feel that their particularities are being threatened, and
> there has been enough cultural genocide in this world that these fears
> cannot be dismissed. (snip
Judith,
Happy Holidays, that was a great post. For those who are not
interested in a personal story, you may skip this but Judith's post
moved me to honestly sit down and try to put in raw terms my own
experience with the problems and blessings that we have been
discussing. This is a long post because I worked all day on it. My
feelings will not be hurt if you choose to go on, but for those who are
interested in the journeys behind the conflicts that we experience on
this issue from time to time. Maybe this will be of use.
I liked very much the term "particularities." It is a very strange
place for me having grown up on a reservation where our religion had to
be placed inside the Baptist religion in order to survive. The
Baptists shared many of our particularities at the time although they
have, as witnessed by the current SBC's* resolutions, evolved to a more
traditional orthodox Christian stance.
For example, we were against religious schools because we felt that
spirituality was an individual issue between the Creator and the person
who had to seek their own vision for their life. Teaching a dogma was
anathema to that thought. The SBs taught that the Bible was the
ultimate guide and that each person had to arrive at their own
interpretation through prayer, meditation and personal revelation. We
agreed in that each person was to seek out their own vision, they said
"calling" from the Creator.
We were also against prayer in the public schools for much the same
reason although at one point a Non-Indian revival preacher put the
squeeze on my Father and forced him to let the "minister" preach a
proselytizing sermon in the public school. This pretty well set us
against having prayer or any other official religious act in the school,
other than the prayers to open public events. These were considered an
imitation of the Congressional rituals and were impotent. After 1978
when it was legal for us to practice our religion, the local medicine
priest was and still is included in this rotation.
We were against any form of hierarchy of public religious practice
including majority rule. A minister was a professional "calling" just
like any other and the role of "individual spiritual responsibility"
was personal. All official actions that were taken were done by
unanimous consent. Something that was the same in the old Cherokee
council structures. If it wasn't unanimous it wasn't done until
unanimous consent could be reached.
We were against anything that would break the community within the
church, so even though there were strong convictions about politics (a
kind of game practiced once every four years) those feelings were never
brought into the church. There was strict separation of the political
from the spiritual. It was very "bad form" to argue politics in the
"safe haven" of the reservation church.
We were also against any thing that polluted the body of the individual.
No alcohol, and cigarettes were considered an abuse officially of the
body and unofficially of a sacred herb. Personal modesty around
sexuality and public dignity were also enforced within a strong loving
community structure. (In the movies, this has been degraded into a
popular movie myth about the roles of the "Puritans and the Indians" and
has been thoroughly confused.)
There are many more elements to this. It constituted a comfortable life
and a secure feeling of family within a reasonably caring community
structure.
What was strange was to find, when I left the reservation, that the
off-reservation churches did not feel the same way. In fact, the many
elements that I had been taught about spirituality were not generally
shared by the off-reservation churches where I built their choir
programs. I continued to direct music in churches for thirteen years
but I finally came to the conclusion that these simply were not my
people. They had their ways and I had been given my own. I also came
to realize that the values that I admired in certain individuals seemed
to have less to do with their Messianic religion and more with their
individual integrity on the part of these wonderful Christian friends
that I had in each of the congregations.
What an incredible moment it was when I finally "heard" what those
elders singing on the reservation all along. "Give me that old time
religion" with the chorus of "it was good enough for my grandmother,
then grandfather, then mother, then father etc. and it's good enough for
me." It related to something older than the local Christian situation.
I do not mean to make the Christians and certainly not the Baptist
Christians "wrong" in how they handled me personally. I found refuge
from a terrible political situation where the "official" stance was that
we were an anachronism in the world and had to be assimilated as quickly
and violently as possible into the future "White"** world.
The history of Protestant type Christians with the Cherokee Nation was
filled with instances of great personal courage and sacrifice on the
part of Ministers who went to jail for us and walked to Oklahoma on the
"Trail of Tears" with our people. So I certainly do not mean to make
their personal lives wrong.
What I am saying, is that they formed a buffer between our people and a
basically predatory society that showed little personal humanity when
dealing with the people that they saw as standing in the way. The way
of their "God Given Inheritance" as proven by the way Indian people
succumbed to their diseases wherever they went. As they never tired of
saying and writing: "Surely we were meant by God Almighty to replace
these fragile souls."*** This sentiment is not one that the Ministers
that I have known would disagree with. At least spiritually if not
physically.
The Southern Baptist Christians were both loving and sincere in their
treatment of me and our people during the 1950S and 1960s. In some ways
our spirituality was not so far from the Jewish and Christian heritage
that came to this country. As has been pointed out, our fall ceremonies
parallel the Jewish Holidays and the Christian Fall Revivals. In the
Spring, Easter often falls on our Spring New Year with the same theme of
rebirth while the Winter Solstice renewal of the Sun is not far in
process from the Christian birth of Jesus.
This is a good thing. But as I explored my own path built into the
genes and history of both my physical, psychological and spiritual
being, I found that my path was with my ancestors. The exploration of
that path has been like teasing the knots out of a profoundly tangled
ball of twine.
It was an unusual but familiar resonance for me, sitting "shiva" with a
Jewish family in NYCity originally from Europe in the late 1930s and
early forties. It began with a grandmother in Holland and Spain
escaping to America, two parents sent to the camps to die, the children
left with a Protestant Christian couple in Holland. Just as my own
great grandfather ( a newborn) and his 11 brothers and 3 sisters were
hidden by a Doctor in Mississippi as their parents left, herded like
cattle under the guns of the U.S. Army, on the great walk "where they
cried" never to arrive in Oklahoma or to return to their children.
To feel the parallel with their stories of fear and harassment. Of the
rediscovery of their families and traditions even forty years after WW
II when an old woman died in NYCIty and the children, now in their late
forties, discovered in her belongings, the books and an old movie film
made by their parents. The babies had been left with the Christian
family to save their lives. When the elegant grandmother had returned
to collect the children after the war, she insisted on their keeping the
Christianity just in case. At Shiva they told the tales of their
separation from their Christian rescuers, who were their only known
parents and going with this strangely bitter woman. She hid their life
from them all of those years and now in their grief they discovered
their birthright and the movie of their father and mother and themselves
as babies in a carriage.
All of their life, until this passing, their spirituality had been a
mix. A story of the separation and confusion, of going back to a
Grandmother they had never known and a spirituality that was both oddly
familiar and unconscious, difficult and scarring even at its best. Their
confusion was not assuaged by the attitudes towards Jews that they had
received in the literature during their years of Christian upbringing.
Then to discover the roots of their deep physical memories in some old
books, a scrap of movie film taken by a Father or relative. It was like
peeling back scars over a rotten wound that had never healed inside.
I don't mean to say that America is like Nazi Germany but wounds are
wounds and even today the stench spreads from the poverty of the
reservations. This problem of "binary literality" (its either right or
wrong period!) is inherent within a large part of the American cultural
world view.
Today with the rise of the Christian K-12 schools, the politicized
Christians, the pushing for "prayer in the public schools," and the
"democratic" over the unanimous community form of church polity, there
is little left of what was once on the reservation. This coincided with
the U.S. Congress in 1978 making it legal for we Native Americans to
practice our spirituality in the light of day. The seal was set in this
year's Southern Baptist Convention when they came out against the film
Pocahontas for its encouragement of Pagan earth religions.
I'm not fooled by this, nor do I have trouble with the people in my
family who still follow the Christian path. I am grateful for the help
that I received when I needed it from them. The Baptists in Oklahoma
are largely embarrassed by the SBC's actions. What this does however
point out, is that the discussion of spiritual issues within a
historical context for LOs is a very difficult one at best. It takes
great courage and stubbornness not to go with the feeling of betrayal
and cynicism. It will take a much more mature society then we have at
the present to be able to deal with these issues from a place other than
the old zero/sum, I win and the loser must either be killed or give up
everything and join the "winning" culture as a second class citizen that
is somehow genetically "wrong."
To bring to a close this long post, I would like to share with you a
story that is a part of every Americans heritage to practice the
freedom of religion without a State Church authority in this country.
The story is very old so I don't remember all of the names but I do
remember the Adams family of Massachusetts.
John was running for public office to write the Constitution of the new
United States of America. The Adams family was devoutly committed to
the idea of a State Church and I believe was supporting the Anglican
Church as the candidate.
There was another candidate, a Baptist minister who was running against
Adams and was in danger of pulling enough votes away from him as to make
him lose the election. Adams was told to make his peace with the
minister or lose the election.
They met under an Oak tree in the forest away from the eyes of the press
and their adversaries. Adams asked the minister what he wanted and why
he was running when all he could do was be a "spoiler." The minister
told Adams that he was "for him" but that he could not abide the idea of
a State Church when he and his relatives had suffered at the hands of
such in England. That was the reason for their exile to America, the
reason they had separated from families and heritage in a new hard land.
Adams said that he was committed to the new country having a State
Church. It is said that the minister told him, "Then Mr. Adams, I must
try to keep you from succeeding, even though I believe that God has put
something special within you. Something that will not be realized
should I succeed."
Adams was so moved that he relented and agreed to take the minister's
position to the Constitutional Convention as his own. The Baptist
minister removed himself from the race and threw his support to Adams.
As we hear the hyperbole from all of the different corners both liberal,
conservative, religious and otherwise, it is good to remember that we
owe this Baptist minister for the religious freedom that we all share in
this place. And when we have to push a person, who seems overly
aggressive in their zeal, away from our conversation, it is good to
remember that it is the contribution of each that has given us the
present and that we all need to be reminded of that at various times.
That without that aggressive stubborn zeal we could very well be in the
hands of a tyrant. It is also good for those of "stubborn zeal" to
remember that they need the "John Adamss" of the world as well. That
is why we all need to keep this dialogue going, no matter what are the
"particularities." This is a profoundly important thing that we do on
this web and this site.
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York, Inc.
mcore@idt.net
* SBC: Southern Baptist Convention
**NOTE 1: (I do not use the term "white" to designate a race or any
European culture. We use the term "yoneg" in Cherokee and it specifies
a "particularly chauvinistic attitude" rather than a race or group of
people. It is an insult, so I use it sparingly.)
***NOTE 2 There is a modern resonance in the way that the preachers and
politicians held back the money on AIDs research in the early 1980s
because of who AIDs was helping get rid of, but that is another dark
story for another time.
--Ray Evans Harrell <mcore@IDT.NET>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>