THE REALITY OF EARTH-CENTERED SPIRITUAL TEACHINGS Is What You See What You Get?

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1 THE REALITY OF EARTH-CENTERED SPIRITUAL TEACHINGS Is What You See What You Get? Sermon by Rev. Jack Donovan, November 6, 2016 Unitarian Universalist Church of St Petersburg READINGS (at end of sermon) Invocation: Sacred Hoop, Hear Me from Black Elk Speaks & The Sacred Pipe Reading #550: We Belong to the Earth, from Chief Seattle to President Pierce Sermon Reading: You White People See, from Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions Closing: We Go Out, from a Chinook prayer SERMON The crows were cawing like crazy and three year old grandson Bear (that s our grandson s given name, B-E-A-R), grandson Bear wanted to know what it was all about. Alisun answered, They re saying hello. The next day Alisun and Bear were outside when a flock of crows flew overhead, crowing with all their might. Bear set himself and waved and howled across the sky, Helloooooooo!!! Now that s what he does. He loves crows, just like his grandmother. Alisun calls her painting room at home Laughing Crow Studio. The crow is her totem. In a crow you can see curiosity about everything and you can see a spirit that can soar great distances and heights, even between the dimensions of existence. Anthropologist Carlos Castaneda s perhaps fictional Toltec Native American shaman Don Juan traveled as a crow when in peyote trance. Hello is the call; Relationship, Communion, Communication is the invitation, into the sacred religious world of truth, meaning, purpose. This is the way of Earth-Centered religions seeing nature as the Being of both the divine and the divine s earthkind off-spring. In whatever way you might test the authority and validity of Earth-Centered teachings, you can consider these many religions as sources from which you might draw understanding about Reality and Morality. Earth-centered villages - relying on oral heritage, subsistence productivity, and life-guiding myths - have understood life and living well enough to have survived and thrived all around the Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, compared to around 5000 years for the vanished imperial city-states and maybe 150 years for the floundering industrial nations. This morning we ask, What understanding do the Earth-Centered religious traditions offer us about Reality. What can they teach us about what life is, about the power source of life and how this life power circulates to its off-spring. Earth Centered traditions might prefer a more provocative way to put the question: Is what you see what you get? 1

2 Drawing from practitioners and scholars* of comparative and Earth-Centered religion, here are what I would identify as ten major teachings (among many) about Reality from Earth-Centered or Primal Religions: One, the source of life, often called something like The Great Spirit, forms and sustains all things from itself as the essential form and substance of existence, of all nature. Can you imagine it? Two, in accord with this, there are no permanent boundaries dividing the off-spring of creation from one another or from the great spirit only boundaries that are transitional bridges to the unity of family. Can you see that? Three, every individual thing in the world has a spirit that somehow reveals the nature of this great spirit - its powers and its ways. Put another way, every individual thing somehow represents or can be seen as a symbol of the great spirit. Can you see? Four, by paying careful, even devout and reverent, attention to every individual thing as a representation of the great spirit, we can greatly expand our understanding of the spirit of life, its potentials, and the most effective ways for fulfilling those potentials. Get it? Five, through self-discipline, one can expand one s consciousness to commune with this great spirit for example, through deep attention to every object; through liberating, focusing ritual; through devotion, self-sacrifice and deep identity with totems or spirit animals; through extended dance, chant, prayer, fasting; through life-long retelling of the people s origin stories and identification with the ancestral founders of the people s skills and ways. Do you get that? Six, through imagination and the making of imagery, one can more deeply appreciate and participate in the wondrously elevated timeless, seamless, ever-renewing experience of life. As one scholar noted, in all the native North American languages there is no word for art, because, in this view, life is art. Do you see? Seven, because every individual thing is full of potentials for blessings empowered by the great spirit, every thing is sacred. See? Eight, because every individual thing can fulfill its potentials by following the generous way of the great spirit, every thing can become holy, fulfilled in wholesomeness. Imagine that! 2

3 Nine, every individual thing has its necessary place in the order of things, which further reinforces its status as sacred. Okay with you? Ten, remove any individual thing from being, and you risk collapsing the sacred order of things, the cycles and rhythms and relations that sustain life. Can we get that? In this sweeping era of colonialism, industrialism, and manufactured modern technology, leaders of the Earth-Centered oral tribal traditions have reiterated the value, and even the life-saving superiority, of these views of Reality and of the right behavior in response to this Reality. From Chief Seattle in the 1850s, Black Elk in the 1930s, Wounded Deer in the 1970s, Wilma Mankiller in the current generation, and from many others fighting to retain first peoples lands free from industrial destruction, we hear this view of Reality: the oneness of all being, the interdependence of all being, the dynamic vitality of all being, the sacredness of all being, the vulnerability of all being, and the necessity of seeing in symbolic and symbiotic ways to truly appreciate and sustain the fruitful Realities of life and living. These voices appeal to the moderns with the call: If this is what you see, this is what you ll get. We hear more clearly now the Earth-Centered critique of modernity s beliefs about Reality: that modernity s beliefs are individualizing, alienating, conflictual, destructive, unsustainable, lonely, and sad. Is what they see what we ve got? Or is the world actually less violent and better off, as some voices say? If our modern beliefs about Reality cannot see the merit of sustaining nature s balance, if our modern beliefs cannot stop from driving life out of balance, if modern beliefs cannot see the universality of the family of being, then the Earth-Centered tradition invites us to consider its understandings. Those understandings are not yet lost. They are not yet, I believe, beyond our ability to understand and work with. There have been such voices among the moderns for some time. French poet Gérard de Nerval back in 1854 wrote: You - free thinkers! Do you think you are the only thinkers on this earth, where life blazes in everything? The powers you have are at your free disposal; but in all your counsels, the universe is not there. 3

4 Appreciate in the beast its spirit of life, in every flower a soul opening out into nature; a mystery of love reposing in metal. "Everything is intelligent!" said Pythagoras, and everything influences you. Fear from that blind wall its watchful gaze; matter itself is bound to act. Do not make it serve some impious purpose. Often in obscure being dwells a hidden God; And, like an eye born covered by its lid, a pure spirit is growing beneath the bark of stones! Or Salvador Dali, painting symbolic images of what his imagination found to be the inner Reality generating the surface of life: he called his method creative paranoia, a way to discover the unsuspected yet suspected underlying powers that really move the world. Such visions are in line with the Earth-Centered Australian indigenous people s dynamic mythical frame of life they call The Dreaming which is a worldview that there is an original Reality in which all beings and behavior were first evolved and invented by our primal ancestors and which we need only ritually renew in order for the dynamics of life to stay in balance and for life s blessings to come to all. I had a dream earlier this week, which I d like to treat as a Dreaming or as a Vision. I was on a great plain and saw the circle of horizon all around and an endless sky and the plain like a plate. I touched the ground and the plate came up into my hands. It was glistening green and blue, fluid here, solid there, images forming on it like a crystal ball, changing at my touch, unfolding like clouds forming stories one after another for a daydreamer, walking in trance now on the plain reading the clouds, now in the clouds reading the Earth, charged to tell the stories to the listening web of being and to walk around the plain with ancestors and sisters and brothers and partners and children and talk about what each had to say. I will take that to be a Dreaming about a possible Earth-Centered Reality everything one with everything, influencing everything including the self, including the creative source, in our hands, in our conversations, in our hearts. I don t yet know how to live the Dreaming to inspire that Reality. But I believe that what we can imagine, we can get. Maybe one of us will dream an answer to how to get it this week and bring the good news. In the meantime, to the spirits of our world I say, Helloooooooo!!! 4

5 * Black Elk/Lakota, Wounded Deer/Lakota, Huston Smith/Berkeley, Jay Garfield/Smith, Charles Jones/Catholic University, Luke Buckles/Theological Union Berkeley, Ninian Smart/UCSanta Barbara, Edwin Barnhart/Maya Exploration Center, Daniel Cobb/UNorth Carolina, John Collins/US Commission Indian Affairs, Mac Perry/Florida author, et al. READINGS INVOCATION The Sacred Hoop, Hear Me Adapted from Black Elk Speaks and The Sacred Pipe WOMEN: Great spirit, I see. I stand on the highest mountain of all and round beneath me is the whole hoop of the world. And while I stand here, I see more than I can tell and I understand more than I see. MEN: I am seeing in the sacred manner the shape of all things of the spirit and the shapes as they must live together like one being. And I see that the sacred hoop of my people is one of many hoops that make one circle, wide as daylight and starlight. WOMEN: And in the center grows one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father; MEN: And in that center is the great spirit and that center is everywhere, in each of us. ALL: And I see that it is holy. Hear me, four quarters of the world a relative am I! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth. Give me the eyes to see and the mind to understand. Look upon these faces of children without number, that they may face the winds and walk the good road to the day of quiet. READING #550 (reponsive) We Belong to the Earth from Chief Seattle s Address to President Pierce This we know. The earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. We did not weave the web of life. We are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. 5

6 READING FOR SERMON from Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions You white people see a lot that you no longer notice. You could notice it if you wanted to, but you re usually too busy. We Indians live in a world of symbols and images where the spiritual and commonplace are one. What to you seems commonplace to us appears wondrous through symbolism. Words, too, are symbols, and cnvey great powers, especially names. We receive great gifts from the source of a name; it links us to nature, to the animal nations it gives power. To our way of thinking, the Indian s symbol is the circlem the hoop. Nature wants things to be round. The boides of human beings and animals have no corners. With us the circle stands for the togetherness of people who sit with one another around the campfire as a nation. The nation is in itself only part of the universe, itself circular, and made of the Earth, which is round, of the sun, which is round, of the stars, which are round. The moon, the horizon, and the rainbow circles within circles within circles, with no beginning and no end. To us, this is beautiful and fitting, symbol and reality at the same time, expressing the harmony of life and nature. Our circle is timeless, flowing, it is new life emerging from death life winning over death. White people s symbol is the square. Square is his house, his office buildings, with square walls that separate people from one another. These all have corners and sharp edges points in time, white people s time, with appointments, time clocks and rush hours that s what the corners mean to me. You become prisoners within these boxes. The bald eagle is your symbol. You see him on your money, but your money is killing him. When a people start killing off their own symbols they are in a bad way. You are spreading death, buying and selling death. But you are afraid of its reality. You don t want to face up to it. But we Indians think a lot about death. I do. Today would be a perfect day to die not too hot, not too cool - a day to leave something of yourself behind, to let it linger. But for whites, I guess, every day would be considered a bad day to die. CLOSING Blessing from the Pacific Northwest Chinook People We go out upon the earth; may we appreciate its ways. We go out upon the mountain; may we appreciate its ways. We go out into the forest; may we appreciate its ways. We go out into the field; may we appreciate its ways. We go out into the water; may we appreciate its ways. We go out among the creatures; may we appreciate their ways. We go out among the peoples; may we appreciate their ways. We go out with our great ancestors; may we appreciate their ways. We go out with the great spirit; may we appreciate its ways. May we bless the gifts of all; may we bless the gifts of all. 6