Why I am in the Earth and Spirit Mission Groups by Lucy Slater

Most of you know me as a member of the REJMT. Usually, when I come up here, it is to talk about reparations – or to call us to some action in solidarity with Apache Stronghold. You might have thought, for the sake of consistency, that I would be a member of the Eyes to See mission group.  But in actual fact, I am a member of the Earth and Spirit mission group. You might be wondering why I was called to that mission group, and to be honest, for the past few years, I have been wondering as well.

Bear with me, as I dive into a bit of personal history here to help explain that journey. I came into Seekers brand new to, and somewhat evangelical about a movement I am part of, called Breaths Together for Change. It is an anti-racism movement, based on the well understood psycho-therapeutical approach of somatic healing – in plain English, that we hold all of our traumas in our bodies, and that our bodies have the power to heal those traumas, if we allow ourselves, in safe places, to feel and process and release them.  

 

We all hold the trauma of racism in our bodies – for white people, we hold both our own personal bigotries and biases, and the much larger collective perpetrations of our ancestors and our current society. Because we all (or most of us) deep down don’t want to harm other people, our racism is a very hard thing for us to look at. We pass it by as much as we can, and our society does all it can to encourage us to look away. But until we face these hard truths about ourselves and our history, we are not going to be able to change ourselves or our futures.

Breaths Together for Change was developed by people of color, and is a year-long program of daily meditations for white people, intended to expose us to our own racial bias, to help us to feel and heal from the pain of that, and to learn to see no-one as a stranger. The meditations don’t remove the pain – they in fact require us to reckon with our own complicity and face the truths of our personal and collective histories. But they do expand our capacity to see and hold the truths of the white supremacist world we live in, so we do not freeze, or walk away in our pain, but find our natural courage to act in a new way.

So, hang on a minute, you might be thinking. You said this sermon was going to be about Earth and Spirit, and all you have talked about so far is racism. Where is the connection?

Well,  Breaths for Change strips me of my ability to look away from the truths of our history, but also leaves me looking at them – and feeling guilty, depressed, weak, and hopeless at the sight. Just as I begin to no longer see black and indigenous peoples as strangers, I also begin to feel more distant from my own mainstream (white) society. I feel my own internalized racism as a barrier to belonging. I realize that without resourcing, without faith, without connection and collectivity, I am powerless to act.

So, what is there, then, that can fill that gap – that can feed our souls with the truth of our own goodness, our own power, our own belonging, even while we hold the truths of our complicity in the racist society we live in?  For many of us, it is our Christian faith – but I have struggled with Christianity over the years: my experience as a young Catholic was that it was rules based, conservative , oppressive of women, and peoples of other faiths. This Christianity taught me that humans should consider themselves apart from the world, and that the only place we truly belong is in heaven. And that even going to heaven is contingent upon our good behavior.  It has been a life-long effort to overcome Church teachings that we are all sinful, responsible for Christ’s suffering, and never good enough. That version of Christianity, (sometimes called “empire Christianity”) is in fact just another aspect of our white supremacist culture – and it just reinforced my feelings of guilt and shame.

The ah-ha moment/ connection came for me from a follow -on program to Breaths for Change, designed by a Native American woman – Cinnamon Kills First – especially for white people. She calls it a “re-indigenization program”.  Cinnamon was using the word indigeneity with a small “I” –   basically meaning originating or occurring naturally in a particular place. It means having a sacred connection with that place or land and living in a way that honors and respects that connection.  Native Americans are indigenous to the Americas, both because they and their ancestors have lived here for millennia, and because their culture and way of life continues to be centered in this land, and place, and love for the sacredness of this earth. But when Cinnamon designed a re-indigenization program for white people, she was not trying to say we should try to become or live like Native Americans: we are not Native Americans – we are colonizers of her people, and she of all of us  knows  that that would be a horrifying appropriation of her  culture. What she is saying is that that we are ALL indigenous. We all come from somewhere – if we go back far enough we can all find our indigenous roots in some land.   We all have ancestors who lived in right relationship with the earth, and we can all draw upon our own heritage and histories to re-invent and re-discover what indigeneity means for us in this moment in time.

So, Cinnamon’s program helped us to re-discover our own indigeneity. It consists of twelve ceremonies that we were invited to participate in on a daily basis which remind us of who we are. These ceremonies are also based on somatic healing – inviting us to feel and absorb the truths of the ceremony in our bodies. The truths of indigeneity that she shared are ones that I already knew, but which our white supremacist culture has disconnected me from. That we are all made up of mind, body, heart and spirit, in equal measure. That in fact, we are all embodied Spirit. That we are all connected to our ancestors and our descendants. That we are all born from this Earth. That nothing that exists is NOT born from the Earth. And so therefore,  we are all related to all things and all peoples in and on, and around the Earth. That therefore there are no strangers in Creation.

I began to pay greater attention to the world of Nature all around me, experiencing with every sense the buzzing vibration and overflowing of life in every tree, plant, bug, bird, and animal . I began to understand that  Nature is not a static beauty, separate from the world of human beings, placed there by God to please us. God doesn’t make rain and sun happen to nurture us – God IS the rain and sun!  I began to understand that just as each of us are embodied Spirit, so too the Earth is the embodiment of the Holy Spirit. And the miracle is that I can see and experience this truth everywhere around me, any time I want!   God is right there, every time I walk the dog in Rock Creek Park, or ride my bike to work, listen to the owl outside my window at night, or lift my eyes from my computer screen to look out that same window at a tree!

For me, these ceremonies  were not an alternative to my Christian faith – rather they began to open up a whole new way of understanding of what Christianity has been saying all along. I  began to understand God’s love in a new way when I realized that everything in Nature is loved and related and needed.  Because I am born, I am an intrinsic part of Creation. I am loved. I belong, imperfect, just the way I am! I understood in a new way what it means when God says “before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born, I set you apart”.

Seeing the Holy Spirit in all living things leads me to see Jesus as the perfect expression of what God created human beings to be – perfectly open, aligned and centered in Creation.  Jesus  sees no one, and no living thing as a stranger, and is therefore free from sin – that is, free from the fear and greed, and power struggles that we have allowed to form the way we live together.   Jesus shows us the possibility of growing and healing as human beings to be in right relationship with each other and with all of Creation.

As a young Catholic, Christianity for me was an exercise of obedience – of fitting myself into something that didn’t quite seem to reflect the actual world I lived in. Now, I am beginning to uncover the deeper truths in the Christian teachings that had seemed so restrictive and confining to me in the past. These Christian teachings, deeply embedded in my history, and culture and psyche are beginning to give me the words, and images, and parameters to better understand these new insights into God and Creation.  I am beginning to understand that Christianity is a part of MY indigenous heritage. 

There are implications to this knowledge/recognition. If we truly understand our deep and intrinsic, sacred relationship to all living beings; how can we not then work to end exploitation and extraction of Earth’s resources? how then can we not work to end racism – end the dehumanization of our human brothers and sisters in Creation? How can I not be called to both REJMT and Earth and Spirit?

We know the world has gone wrong. We see how our fear, greed, and search for power has turned us into racists, and disconnected us from Creation.  If there is one silver lining to our current political situation, it is the absolute, overt, uncovering of all of this. None of us have the option now of avoiding the truth of the society in which we live. We are all experiencing this every day with ICE raids, defunding of public services, cutting of programs that support the poor, hungry, disenfranchised, the firing of people of color in leadership positions, the erasure of transgender people.  The dying of coral reefs and monarch butterflies and song birds. The increasing intensity of storms, fires, heat from climate change.

And when we see all this, we feel the truth of the terrifying prophecy in the scriptures today. It feels true to me that. “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.  There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven”. 

But we are also promised a new heaven and a new earth, and that if we stand firm, we will  have life. To me, this is not a passive waiting and seeing – it is a call to co-creation.  It is a call to action. We are being called to different ways of living– ways that don’t dehumanize and impoverish others, that don’t decimate our animal and plant relatives, and to ways that don’t treat earth’s resources as both inert and infinite. We are being called to indigeneity – to live life in the understanding that

• God is real and embodied in all Creation 
• That Earth has enough for us all if we treat her with respect
• That we respect and learn from all living beings
• That we take only what we need, and no more
• That we practice reciprocity with all our relatives, human, animal, and plant
• That we share what we have, and live collectively to support each other

I am not sure exactly how we move from awareness of the wrongness of our current world to indigeneity. I know it is about rediscovering and centering God in Creation, and that for Christians, it is about rediscovering our faith and Christian heritage that has always shown us this way; and I know that it is done collectively, drawing upon our own indigenous heritages, and learning from other indigenous peoples. I think it is part of my call to understand, explore, and act to move our society back toward indigeneity. 

So, I am going to end now with three calls for you– 
The first call is to ask you to take another look at the Earth and Spirit mission group, whose call statement says, in part,  that 

• We experience what God has to teach us through direct communion with nature.
• We recognize our interdependence with the whole web of life.
• We acknowledge pain over our broken relationship with nature and joy in its ongoing rejuvenation.
• We act for the good of God’s creation and advocate for the earth’s restoration.

The second call is to join me and Earth and Spirit in exploring what indigeneity means to us here at Seekers,  and to consider participating in an upcoming SCG class that Kolya and I will lead in a couple of months as we consider those questions. 

And finally, my third call to you is to find some time today to go outside,  open your heart, and spirit  and see and celebrate the Holy Spirit in Creation all around us.