I acknowledge that I am writing from
the ancestral and unceded land of the Miwok and Yokuts People.
I chose to open with the story of Wesley Mitchell and drumming after attending an event put together by Native Core, an organization in Stockton last week. This is a prayer from their website that I would like to use to center us today:
Creator, open our hearts to peace and healing between all people.
Creator, open our hearts to provide and protect for all children of the earth.
Creator, open our hearts to respect the earth, and all the gifts of the earth.
Creator, open our hearts to end exclusion, violence, and fear among all.
Thank you for the gifts of this day and every day.
Mi’Kmaq Prayer
I was deeply affected by this event, especially by the drumming and by the entire ritual…the clothes, the dance, the incense, the prayer and chanting. I stood transfixed by this ritual…deeply grateful for the opportunity to witness it. There was the experience on the human level…the feel of the drums on my heart…the deep resonance with the beating of my own heart attuned to the drumbeat, as well as the beating of all hearts. Although I could not understand the literal words of the prayer, I understood it on a different level…on a human level…or the level of a living thing on our beautiful mother earth.
About ritual, a teacher of mine, Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote:
Ritual is one of the ways in which humans put their lives in perspective…
Ritual calls together the shades and specters in people’s lives,
sorts them out, puts them to rest.
Human beings need ritual, I think, to create a sort of rhythm to our existence. Without it, we may not take the time to reflect…to say “thank you”, to heal and to plan for the next days. Ritual helps us re-commit our lives to what is important…to our original instructions or to, what both Meister Eckhart and Carl Jung have called, original condition. This is a state of wholeness with the all-pervading presence that heralded our birth…the same wholeness that Wesley spoke of in our opening video.
Over the past days since I had this profoundly impactful experience, I have felt an internal resonance…a powerful attunement with all life. And this is not the first time a ritual has had this effect on me. Many of you will remember my telling of the story of a turning point in my life path, in which a part of me was awakened during a ritual by a teacher of mine, Luisah Teish. Here is a clip that gets to the heart of who Teish is.
During the ritual that she led at the University of Creation Spirituality, I stood in line ready to go forward to experience a cleansing of my Ori or what is known in Eastern philosophy as the crown chakra. This is our connection with the divine and our awareness that we are indeed all one. I was asked to have an intention as I walked forward. This was difficult for me but a voice resonated as I approached the altar…Step into Your Inheritance! It was weeks or months later that I truly began to understand the significance of this voice and of the ritual itself. It eventually led me to Fellowship Church as a minister and to many other pursuits in my life. Without the ritual, I wonder if I would have gotten the message.
So, at this point, I am grateful…profoundly grateful for that experience and the most recent experience at the Native Core gathering. That event was, in the broader sense, a community gathering… a gathering of many voices. The LGBTQ+ community was also represented, as was the healing presence of a man who was facilitating a Narcan training in the corner of the room. There was a spirit of coming together and of educating those gathered. There was a spirit of preserving the precious and powerful indigenous culture. Of course, part of me, as a white American…burdened with a horrendous past and indeed present, struggles with the idea of cultural appropriation. Am I permitted to even be present at this gathering? There was no evidence of that mindset at the event, except in my own spirit. Yet, the commemoration of Native American History Month and the upcoming celebration of Thanksgiving gives us an opportunity to acknowledge, and indeed heal, the profound wounds of colonialism, hate, cultural obliteration and horror that is an integral part of our identity as Americans. Perhaps this is the most auspicious and appropriate time…in light of the most recent election, to create a ritual of healing…a ritual that can strengthen our resolve to harness the power of our inner resources…our own heartbeat and the heartbeat of the universe.
In the spirit of a ritual, then, I would like to offer the words of Dr. Howard Thurman as a sort of meditation or as he called it a Litany:
A THANKSGIVING LITANY by Howard Thurman
In Your presence, O God, we make our Sacrament of Thanksgiving.
We begin with the simple things of our days:
Fresh air to breathe, cool water to drink,
The taste of food, the protection of houses and clothes, the comforts of home.
For all these we make an act of Thanksgiving this day!
We bring to mind all the warmth of humankind that we have known:
Our mothers’ arms, the strength of our fathers, the playmates of our childhood,
The wonderful stories brought to us
from the lives of many who talked of days gone by
When fairies and giants and diverse kinds of magic held sway;
The tears we have shed, the tears we have seen;
The excitement of laughter and the twinkle in the eye
with its reminder that life is good.
For all these we make an act of Thanksgiving this day.
We finger one by one the messages of hope that await us at the crossroads:
The smile of approval from those who held in their hands the reins of our security,
The tightening of the grip of a single handshake
when we feared the step before us in the darkness,
The whisper in our heart when the temptation was fiercest
and the claims of appetite were not to be denied,
The crucial word said, the simple sentence from an open page
when our decision hung in the balance.
For all these we make an act of Thanksgiving this day.
We passed before us the mainsprings of our heritage:
The fruits of the labors of countless generations who lived before us,
Without whom our own lives would have no meaning.
The seers who saw visions and dreamed dreams;
The prophets who sensed a truth greater than the mind could grasp,
and whose words could only find fulfillment in the years
which they would never see.
The workers whose sweat has watered the trees,
the leaves of which are for the healing of the nations.
The pilgrims who set their sails for lands beyond all horizons,
whose courage made paths into new worlds and far-off places.
The savior whose blood was shed with the recklessness that only a dream could inspire and God could command.
For all these we make an act of Thanksgiving this day.
We linger over the meaning of our own life and commitment to which we give the loyalty of our heart and mind:
The little purposes in which we have shared with our loves, our desires, our gifts.
The restlessness which bottoms all we do with its stark insistence
that we have never done our best, we have never reached for the highest.
The big hope that never quite deserts us, that we
and our kind will study war no more, that love and tenderness
and all the inner graces of Almighty affection
will cover the life of the children of God
as the waters cover the sea.
All these and more than mind can think and heart can feel, we make as our sacrament of Thanksgiving to Thee,
Our God, in humbleness of mind and simplicity of heart.
Thurman’s offering of Thanksgiving is powerful. He includes so much of what makes of our lives a worthwhile…so much of what causes us to feel a sense of belonging to life…the simple parts of life (which we can acknowledge have become more complicated), the ancestors without whom we would not be here, specifically the loving care of those who raised us…who loved us into being, our restlessness (anxieties?) and our hopes…specifically the hope that we will study war no more. And after each part of the litany, he states, we make an act of Thanksgiving this day. He says an act not a thought. Thurman is calling us to act on the horrors of the past and terrifying uncertainties of the present…to act in a way that sets the powers of healing in motion…the powers present in the natural world of which we are a part. This is the power of the ritual…of the drum and of the wisdom of our Native American brothers and sisters.
In a way to close today’s ritual, I will leave you with a shortened version of the Thanksgiving Address, subtitled Words Before All Else. They come to us from the Native people known as the Haudenossaunee of upstate New York and Canada. I encourage you to use these words as a prayer before your Thanksgiving meal as a remembrance of the painful past and present and an intention for our actions moving forward.
Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as People. Now our minds are one.
We return thanks to our Mother, the Earth, which sustains us.
We return thanks to the rivers and the streams, which supply us with water.
We return thanks to all herbs, which furnish medicines for the cure of our diseases.
We return thanks to the corn, and to her sister,
the beans and squash, which give us life.
We return thanks to the bushes and trees, which provide us with fruit.
We return thanks to the wind, which, moving the air, has banished diseases.
We return thanks to the moon and the stars,
which have given us their light when the sun was gone.
We return thanks to our grandfather He-no, who has given to us the rain.
We return thanks to the sun, that has looked upon the earth
with a beneficent eye.
Lastly, we return thanks to the Creator or Great Spirit…for all the love that is still around us, we gather our minds together as one and send our choicest words of greetings and thanks to the Creator.
We have now arrived at the place where we end our words. Of all things we named, it was not our intention to leave anything out. If something was forgotten, we leave it to each individual to send such greetings and thanks in their own way.
And now our minds are one.
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