“Where are Americans finding meaning in their lives? How are they marking the passing of sacred time? Where are they building pockets of vibrant communities?
In the Northern hemisphere, we are in the season of Fall and harvest. It is also the time when a number of cultures and traditions encourage communion with our benevolent ancestors, saints, and spiritual teachers.
Recently, I was in consultation with a colleague who is First Nation Cree. Throughout the conversation, there was a steady stream of confidence, curiosity, and hope. Really smiling at one point, my colleague said, “I’m an eternal optimist who comes from a history of despair.”
There is so much humility, discipline, curiosity and vitality in what the Creator asks of us – anything but monotonous! In the Abrahamic origin story, there are some similarities as it centers Creation first and begins in a garden.
The most ancient path I know is the ecological one. Creation is an intricate living system that honors life, death and rebirth within Earth’s natural cycles; where reciprocity is honorable, and all life is sacred. We humans, who happen to be mammals (but also a bit of a virus), have trouble remembering the path of Creation.
In Her 4.5 billion years of being a planet, Earth has known great drama illustrated in superfluous gestures of creativity and supreme acts of destruction. If we used only this as our backdrop for religion what would our religion consist of?
Why, in all of this relatedness, do we feel so disconnected? Depleted? Empty? Because we mistakenly turn that which is divinely relational, into something inhumanely transactional. And, to make this sin livable, we turn our heads and forget our neoteny. Children don’t allow this sort of behavior. We are born into relatedness and unity.
There are 3 parts of Jesus’s birth story that we want to open here, like gifts. There are many parts of this story that, once unwrapped, hold great truth and importance including dreams, angels and what was going on for Joseph.
We could describe the pain we’re in right now as the colonial anesthesia wearing off. In epic fashion, events of the past many months have connected all the threads of the story: white supremacy and racism, detention centers and prisons, militarism and policing, the wealth of a few at the expense of essential workers, broken healthcare, hurricanes, derechos, and wildfires, and certainly others.
Since early March, a poem[i] by Kristin Flyntz has been circulating widely wherein she imagines what the Covid-19 virus might be saying. More than once it says, “Just stop. Be still. Listen. Ask us what we might teach you about illness and healing, about what might be required so that all may be well. We will help you, if you listen.”