THE AUTHORITY OF EARTH-CENTERED SPIRITUAL TEACHINGS Do Their Fireside Stories Speak the Truth?

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1 THE AUTHORITY OF EARTH-CENTERED SPIRITUAL TEACHINGS Do Their Fireside Stories Speak the Truth? Sermon by Rev. Jack Donovan, November 6, 2016 Unitarian Universalist Church of St Petersburg READINGS (see at end of sermon) - Thoughts for Gathering from Indians of the Americas by John Colliers - Opening: Great Spirit, Pueblo Prayer adapted by Jacob Trapp, et al - Words for Meditation: Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo - Readings Before the Sermon - from Indian Mounds You Can Visit, I. Mac Perry - Well, Oren, Who Are You? from The World s Religions by Huston Smith SERMON We can draw from many sources of understanding about life and how to live it. We ve talked about our own direct experience as a source of understanding, as well as the prophetic people in our lives. Another possible source is the spiritual teachings of Earth-Centered traditions, which for some reason feels like the source to consider in this month of November. And the place to start is to consider what degree of trust or authority we give to this source. One morning during the time that my wife was in North Carolina helping deliver a star into the universe a grandbaby named Stella I discovered a spoon in the clean dish rack that had a lot of cat food on it. My mind quickly ranged to who may have been the culprit. I calculated that there had been nobody in the house for five days except me, that I customarily wash dirty dishes promptly, and that we were very close to Halloween. Logical conclusion: ghosts - trickster ghosts. Upon further reflection, I remembered that I don t believe in ghosts -- I believe in spirits. Ancestral spirits reside in me, influencing me through inherited genes and inherited customs. They help make my spirit and through me they have influence in other lives. And I also remembered that the day had been long even before I washed the evening dishes. So, a spirit was the culprit my own tired spirit it somehow had put an unclean cat food spoon in the dish rack. Henceforth, to compensate for a tired spirit, I will have to improve my dish-washing ritual. Regarding ritual, the Wiccan priest Starhawk was once asked where modern Earth-Centered traditions get their rituals, given that most ancient sources were wiped out by persecution. As I recall, her answer was something like, Many ancient rituals survived underground so, for those, we dig into rural memories, oral traditions and folklore. Beyond that, we get them the same 1

2 way our forebears did we make them up. So I may have to make up a new dish-washing ritual or perhaps I can dig with the primal shovel of meditation as Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh recommends, and be appreciative of each beautiful earthy facet of dish washing. But how much should I trust the teachings of earthy Wicca or earthy Zen or other primal traditions, to guide me to survive, to thrive, in this world of difference and competition? Where should I search for understandings of life and living that enhance surviving and thriving when those who might have held such wisdom did not survive or have not thrived for a long time? After college, I served as a Peace Corps volunteer on a small faraway volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Late one evening I was walking home from a visit with friends at the far end of the island and emerged out of the dark woods along the shore into the small village of Saporerong, just down the shore from my village. The villagers were visiting together as usual in the open-walled thatched community pavilion, seated on pandanus mats in the dim light of a single kerosene lamp. Someone called out, Mr. Jack, is that you? Where have you come from? Yes, it s me, I answered. I ve come from visiting in Sapuk Village. A silence fell upon the customarily hospitable people. Sapuk Village was two miles away through a very long stretch of mangrove forest haunted by vengeful chicken ghosts and by the maiden witch who would attract men with her beautiful manifestation, then possess or slay them in horrific haggish transformation. Nobody ever went through there at night. Having just done so, I suddenly realized I was now suspect of being possessed by a dangerous spirit. You didn t see anyone? said a village young man, Paulus, I think it was. No, I said, thinking quickly about what was on their minds. But perhaps that s because I have protection from the harmful spirits. Protection? called out Hatau. Yes, my family leprechaun. Family leprechaun? Petra asked. Yes, my people come from an island in the Atlantic Ocean called Ireland. Each family has at least one ancestor spirit with great powers to protect that family. We call the spirit a leprechaun. They all have names, like us. They re kind but protective and very powerful. I m always safe from harmful spirits. Suddenly it was all smiles and laughter and the customary invitation to enter the meeting house for coconut milk and fresh fish raw in soy sauce and lime juice or quickly roasted on the fire. No But it s late about it. Come in, receive food, spill some out for the ancestor spirits, talk awhile, share news or 2

3 stories, appreciate everything. That is our custom, said the people day in, day out, to explain why anything was done. I ve often wondered, how long had it been custom? Over 2200 years ago, the people discovered and settled into the peaceful isolation of these tiny islands in the vast Pacific with their dependable though unbankable bounty of land and sea. How long had they worked out their ways to happiness and fulfillment? I remember my reaction when several Peace Corps women got a U.S. grant to start a Head Start program. What? Peace Corps bringing another foreign cultural imposition? But the Peace Corps women designed the program so island elders came in and taught the children all the traditional skills and all the traditional stories, so customs that worked for subsistence of body and spirit would not be lost. I was a little embarrassed to realize that but I was glad. Years later I thought to ask, Why was it the Peace Corps women who thought to do that? Had they heard from worried village women that the customary ways were being lost? Consider until fairly recently, almost all anthropologists collecting cultural data were men, plus a few women trained in male-oriented methodologies. In large part only the activities and psyches of the tribal men were observed and queried and presented as culturally definitive, even in matriarchal and matrilineal societies. At this point I wonder how much we can know of ancient whys and ways. I remember a visit to Plymouth Village, home of the pilgrims. Part of the tour was of a hamlet next to the village, home to the ambassador to the pilgrims from Massasoit, chief of the area s ruling Wampanoag people. Our guide was a thoughtful Cape Cod Native American man in his fifties or sixties, upon whose chest I could see the wounds of an honorable participant in the grueling ritual of the Sun Dance, a day long dancing, fasting sacrifice of self for the good of the people. He mentioned in passing the historical fact that in those first few winters, the pilgrims had stolen corn from the Native American corn stores perhaps saving themselves, but greatly endangering the native people. A young woman in the tour group spoke up. I don t believe that, she said. Christians would never do that. Our guide gave a slight smile and turn of his head and said only, Well. So, Earth-Centered fireside narratives - perhaps inherited from ancient times, perhaps restored or re-invented, perhaps woven on the spur of the moment whose understandings do you trust? What biases do you bring? What biases do the teachers bring? What ancient spiritual teachings can you make part of the understanding, the beliefs, you live by? And what, by the way, qualifies as an Earth-Centered tradition? 3

4 Across the street from the house we had in Gainesville, there live two biologists. Behind their house runs a stream by which they love to garden. One day one of them raked up a large stone. But they saw that it was more than a stone. They took it for identification to the natural history museum at the University. It was a large spear head, 9000 years old, when the North Florida climate was in extended drought for ages. Water was very scarce, except for a few areas with streams and sink hole pools. This is where the animals all came and so did the Paleolithic hunters until the time came when the bigger animals all had been hunted into extinction. Yes, even primal peoples have contributed to extinctions, to their great loss. Seven thousand years later, just a few decades ago, in upstate New York, an Onondaga Iroquois elder sits in a canoe on a lake and points to the surrounding elements and creatures and tells his nephew, You are all that all of that is you. A young man just back from one semester of college, which experience none of his tribe had ever had before. Who he is, is not Oren Lyons, not his uncle s nephew, not Onondagan, not human. He s everything that he can see and much that he can t. So says the spiritual teaching of his Earth-Centered people. How will Oren Lyons decide what to believe? And for you and me, if Oren Lyons is everything, aren t we? What will you decide? What authority will you give his uncle? Do you grasp what he is telling you? Does he? Esteemed scholar of world religions, Huston Smith, writing in 1991, raises a warning for disenchanted modernists. He writes, The historical religions have largely abandoned their earlier missionary designs on the heathen, as they were once disparagingly referred to. If anything, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, toward romanticizing the primal (religions). Dismayed by the relentless utilitarianism of technological society and its seeming inability to contain its power to destroy both people and planet, citified peoples have come to hope that a fundamentally different way of life is possible, and they latch onto primal peoples to support that hope. What may be hoped is that we are now ready to put both prejudice and idealization behind us. If we are (ready), perhaps we can live out our numbered years of planetary partnership in mutual respect, guided by the dream of one primal spokesman that we may be sisters and brothers after all. If we succeed in doing this, there is still time for us to learn. The shamans of my Pacific island group gathered together sometime in the mid-1950s -- after over a century of colonial and missionary incursion, after five horrific years of the Pacific War on their islands and upon their waters and in their air, after ten years of American Trust Territory administration with its modern education and modern medicine and modern government. They discussed at great length whether to keep exercising the spiritual, social, and 4

5 physical healing powers which they had inherited, but which seemed to them of little effect relative to modern powers. They voted to stop using them and passing them on and so they did stop. On what did they turn their backs? Should we? Are we sure? Oren Lyons decided to not turn his back on his people s traditions. He had a successful New York career in the fine arts and commercial art. But he also rose to become a spiritual guide and chief, entitled Faithkeeper for the Seneca Nation in the Iroquois Confederation. He taught American Studies at the University of Buffalo and was recognized by the State University of New York as a Distinguished Service Professor and Professor Emeritus. He co-founded the Traditional Circle of Indian Elders and Youth, was delegate to the First World Conference on Racism, participated in the United Nations Human Rights Commission s meeting on Indigenous Peoples, serves on the Executive Committee of the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival, and addressed the UN General Assembly to open its International Year of the World s Indigenous People. His awards and recognitions are many, including induction in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame. An outlier does not prove a case. But it makes one look more openly at previously unconsidered possibilities. So we pass through this primal Earth-Centered week of the Celtic Halloween of Samhain, with its remembrance of the universal beauty of all souls knocking at the door of our consciousness to see if we will receive it as trick or as treat. Perhaps we shall see. READINGS Thoughts for Gathering from Indians of the Americas by John Colliers They had what the world has lost: the ancient, lost reverence and passion for human personality joined with the ancient lost reverence and passion for the earth and its web of life. Since before the Stone Age they have tended that passion as a central, sacred fire. It should be our long hope to renew it in us all. Invocation - Great Spirit, Pueblo Prayer adapted by Jacob Trapp, et al LEADER: Great Spirit, whose voice is heard in the stillness, whose spirit gives life to all, we come before you as your children, needing the help of your strength and wisdom. 5

6 MEN: Great Spirit, all spirits, give us to walk in beauty, seeing the uncommon in the common, aware of the great stream of wonder in which we and all things move. WOMEN: Great Spirit, all spirits, give us to see more deeply into the great things of our heritage and the simple sublime truths hidden in every leaf and every rock. ALL: Great Spirit, may our hands treat with reverence the things you have created. May we walk with our fellow creatures as sharing with them the one life that flows from you. Words for Meditation - Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you. And know there is more That you can t see, can t hear; Can t know except in moments Steadily growing, and in languages That aren t always sound, but other Circles of motion. Like eagle that Sunday morning Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky In wind, swept our hearts clean With sacred wings. We see you, see ourselves and know That we must take the utmost care And kindness in all things. Breathe in, knowing we are made of All this, and breathe out, knowing We are truly blessed because we Were born, and die soon within a True circle of motion, Like eagle rounding out the morning Inside us. We pray that it will be done In beauty. In beauty. Readings Before the Sermon from Indian Mounds You Can Visit, I. Mac Perry Thirty thousand years ago there was an Asian people we will call the Beringians, because they had lived for millennia upon the icy land rising up 6

7 three hundred feet between Siberia and Alaska that would flood with the melting of the glaciers and become the Bering Straits. For eons the ancestors of the Beringians had been migrating slowly to the north and to the east, and for a hundred generations, as far back as oral history went, they had dwelled on the Beringian tundra. Each summer as they followed the herds they got closer and closer to the Alaskan mountains. The wide caribou trail led them through the intricate passes and corridors of the complicated mountains, until they reached a pleasant valley edged with green trees larger than any the Beringians had ever seen. A warming wind poured through the valley and there were grasses and low bushes and grazing animals. Twenty three thousand years later that is, about 7000 years ago a few miles from here over by what is now Park Street and Tyrone Boulevard on Boca Ciega Bay, the tribal elder and tool maker spoke to the young hunters. Long ago, beyond memory, he said, our ancestors, the Beringian people of the far north, followed the herds and reached a land south of a great salt lake, also far north of here. There were giant moose and beavers as large as bears; caribou and sloths the size of elephants; long-horned bison, scrub oxen, mammoth which stood fourteen feet at the shoulder, and mastodons who ate trees; horses and camels and clouds of water birds; wolves, sabre-toothed tigers, and panthers of enormous size. As the biggest animals disappeared from the land, our people followed the remaining herds south and that is why we are here. And here is what the hunters of old hunted this very large spear head that my grandfather got from his grandfather and beyond. But now the large animals are very scarce. No use for the large spear head. The old man held out a handful of smaller spear heads. You must learn a new way of life, he said. The old ways are dying. We move, and we camp, and we move again. The large game are gone. You must gather more roots, and you must learn to hunt for smaller game. There is no place else to move. The young hunters took the small points. They had been handed an inheritance. What would lie ahead? Well, Oren, Who Are You? from The World s Religions by Huston Smith Oren Lyons was the first Onondagan to enter college. When he returned to his reservation (in upstate New York) for his first vacation, his uncle proposed a fishing trip on a lake. Once he had his nephew in the middle of the lake where he wanted him, he began to interrogate him. Well, Oren, he said, you ve been to college; you must be pretty smart now from all they ve been teaching you. Let me ask you a question. Who are you? Taken aback by the question, Oren fumbled for an answer. What do you mean, who am I? 7

8 Why, I m your nephew, of course. His uncle rejected his answer and repeated his question. Successively, the nephew ventured that he was Oren Lyons, an Onondagan, a human being, a man, a young man, all to no avail. When his uncle had reduced him to silence and he asked to be informed as to who he was, his uncle said, Do you see that bluff over there? Oren, you are that bluff. And that giant pine on the other shore? Oren, you are that pine. And this water that supports our boat? You are this water. 8

test: white and gold

test: white and gold Human Timeline evidence for Primal Religion at least 40kya Historical Religions begin about 4kya Historical Religion Timeline Primal and Historical Religions I. Primal (that which