Giving up those valued things that connect me to my roots? to find YOU!!!

August 11, 2008

Today I was reading in Genesis 22 where is found the Bible’s first use of the words “LOVE, OBEY, WORSHIP” – which turn up there in the context of when God tested Abraham in the matter of the command to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God…

I realized… God has been calling me to separate from – to sacrifice to Him – all else that I love: yes, my children/ family (which I have done repeatedly over the past few years) – but now also things that are less tangible, less concrete – and yet to which I have still had a deep, deep-down tie (more than just a connection)…

It started with gradually giving up (but maybe I need also to give over??) my “dreams” and “visions” … and in the past couple years it has involved (without me really even realizing/ seeing what it was) giving up my parents – physically, of course, as they have passed away… but I think also giving up that deep emotional, intellectual, even spiritual tie…

And also – now I see – giving up my “traditions,” my “culture,” my “philosophies of life,” even my desires for my kids to have “valuable” culture/ tradition/ life philosophy – those things that “I value,” that “I believe in,” that “give me a connection” to the past , to roots (to the values of man?) – give them up – and give them over, trade them, once and for all – turn my back on them, repudiate them (oh how can I say that? it sounds so crass!... yes, surely give up my “love” for those things, my “attachment” to them… but, if need be, give “them” up too) – in exchange for ONE – ONE ONLY – value, connection, worth, roots, belief in, OBEDIENCE TO, LOVE FOR, WORSHIP OF – YOU, LORD GOD!

For so many years I’ve felt “left out” as I watch native people reach out to regain, embrace, and live for and in their culture and traditions (and even as a child, I felt that way about my friends with their distinct cultural traditions and backgrounds – Italian, Greek,etc).

A wise Haida man once told me there is value – and much to have pride in – about my culture, too – but I could not see it, because being the “majority culture” it didn’t seem to have anything distinctive or special – and at the same time, living so closely with native people, my eyes were opened so wide to the destructiveness of “my culture” (which didn’t really seem like a culture at all to me…) in the past to the people it conquered in its madness of “manifest destiny” and “civilizing” and “Christianizing”… and then I began to see how it has at the same time, and even before, and continuing to this moment, been gobbling up and spitting out the majority of its “own” citizens/ people… and then I realized that, more often than not, it even does that to its own privileged classes…

And at the same time my eyes have been being opened wider and wider to my culture’s “great institutions”- my belief in the “virtues” of “democracy” (or even of its actual existence, of which I am highly skeptical about whether it ever actually existed… and if it did, whose “remains” even now seem to be like bits of dead, yellowed grasses being licked up in the flames of wildfire, crumbling, and disintegrating completely, its barely visible ashes simply disappearing in the blast-furnace winds of the storm, no chance even for a moment of meditation or burial or anything!)… and of “capitalism” – the “Christian/ Godly” economic system – what a cruel, cold, harsh, ironic joke! Yes, those things I lost faith in long ago…

And little things – good manners, dressing “nicely,” respecting the police man because he is your friend…

And the loss of so much of the “good old ways”- handcrafted anything, community (knowing your neighbors, barn raisings, quilting bees, long connection to land and place – well, did that ever really exist? I wonder? Not for most of us… at least not for a very long time..??)

And I never could claim for my culture unique and interesting food, costumes, dances (well in my upbringing, there was always that sense that dances – and jewelry and make-up and movies and alcohol – and anything else possibly enjoyable, was (ooh! cover your mouth and eyes and ears with your dainty white-gloved hands!) EVIL!...

But finally, in the past few days, it seems to have come to a head for me, as I went to the Aboriginal opening ceremonies at our community's summer festival – and as I have been reading that series of articles, “From Conquest to Freedom,” and those meditations, “Thoughts from the Creator,” both from the “Tribes of Christ” e-list… and I have felt sick to the depths of my being, lost, alone, in a no-man’s-land, in which “my culture” not only has no value, but is destructive and decaying… and I have no other culture to which to return (or even turn to… as a “white man” I am not wanted by my husband's people…even though I have given birth to five children of their descent – and now there are grandchildren too – of native descent)…

And I have quit my school teaching job because (well, yes, we will be moving, but the fact is…) I don’t “believe in education” anymore – at least in its “formalized” western methodologies and systems … or even the “alternatives” that still smack so clearly of those “traditions” – how does one unwrap all that garbage (that structure that man has used to build it up – to prop it up???) – to prop up what?? What does “education” have to do with life, anyway – yes, there is life-long learning… but about what? About WHO???

(WHO is the basic value, the foundation… We have totally lost sight of YOU in all the scaffolding and big walls we’ve erected around YOU – until, well, until what? Until maybe what we are serving, striving for – loving, obeying, yes worshiping! – is in actuality mostly – if not all – a vast, empty, hollow, honey-combed infinitely multi-celled abandoned wasp’s nest of our own making… from which the life-source has gone, left – oh dear! – driven out! by us in our mad efforts to build, improve – and all that remains is a rice-paper-thin structure that, with one touch of YOUR breath, one spark of YOUR flame, YOUR life, YOUR Spirit, will burn up in a moment, even its ashes so fine that they too will disappear…

Oh, I hear the apocalyptic voice of the prophet crying out, wailing in the wilderness, those words, “Babylon, Babylon the great is fallen…” – and a million, billion wailing voices echo the cry, as everything they lived for, loved, built upon, worked for, trusted in, is suddenly, instantly, in a moment, gone… a wisp in the wind..

I’ve had that sense, a picture growing in me for a very long time… and I’ve honestly searched out, tried out the forms of education that claim to be better, more real, whatever – and it seems like they are not true alternatives, but most often only alternative forms, lean-tos propped up against the same old structure, with the same basic flaw – that YOU, the foundation of Life, the Creator, the Light, the Source, the Being – YOU have been lost, forced out, forsaken, or at best, clung to precariously, somehow, along the way…

Even in “home school,” “Christian school,” “un-school” – the very scary part for me was to see that the systems which most stridently claimed to be right, to be holy, to be Christian! – clung most tenaciously to the accepted “western” (ummm. Greek, Egyptian, Roman… “pagan!” ) methods and structures and “foundations” of learning/ education (learning and education themselves are two different things, but we’ve lost sight of that too…) as we’ve lost sight of absolute Truth… of the Being who is perfect Knowledge…with our eyes and ears and hearts closed to Wisdom herself, as she cries out in the streets…

And while I have been going through all these “tearings away” – I have, in the most recent past, been going through a tearing-away from what, for me at least, is perhaps the most difficult of all, because it has called into question everything that, from the day of my birth – even from my conception, perhaps, as we discover that our learning happens even there, in the womb – perhaps from countless generations past, as it has been “passed down” – everything that has been held up to me as right and holy and sacred and Godly!

This isn’t to say that I’ve lost my “faith in God”… oh no indeed! The fact is, through this process of losing my trust and confidence and utter acceptance and (gasp!) belief and faith in the structures and systems we call “church” and “Christianity” and “theology” and “religion” and “Sunday services” and "our culture" – including the PC monikers we’ve given them lately, like “Celebration services” – and “worship teams” and church buildings, and governing boards, and programs, and denominational structures, and mission and vision statements, and catechisms, and “membership” lists of “beliefs” … somehow, in losing those things (and yes, it has been a “tearing” and it has had its painful moments… and some glorious ones, too, moments of freedom and dancing and laughing and JOY!)… in losing those things… in the end....

I’ve FOUND YOU! You, shining in all YOUR amazing, eternal, perfect majesty and perfect power and LOVE – for me, messed up as I am! I have heard YOUR voice, seen YOUR face, walked with and talked with and been loved by and am learning to love in return (oh how slow and seemingly hopeless I am – and how patient and encouraging and never-failing YOU ARE!) – YOU! – my God, my Creator, the one and only Lover of my soul, Source of my – of all – being…

The Foundation Stone, upon which we’ve tried to build – with all our structures, our ways, our dreams and desires – to build that which is YOURS ALONE to build – “I will build MY church – and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” Truly, all that we build is but straw, blown away with a huff-and-a-puff, like the little pig’s straw house, and burned up, crumbled, dissipated, disappeared by the mere breath, the mere touch of the smallest “tongue of fire” from YOU, from YOUR SPIRIT…

I do believe, as my friend and I were saying just a couple days ago, that people are losing faith in “the church”… and why not? Their hearts – all human hearts – long for relationship with our Creator and God. Relationship that only YOU, our Father, can provide – YOUR love which YOU provided in, by, through YOUR Son and through YOUR Holy Spirit.

And as long as we are wrapped up – tied up, trussed up, tangled up, imprisoned by – these systems of our own making… then our love, our obedience, and our worship seem inevitably to be drawn away from YOU and pointed to them – to these straw houses…

And YOU! LORD – thank You, oh thank YOU! – have been – all my life, slowly but surely pulling them away from me, blowing by the breath of Your Spirit, burning up completely by Your tongues of flame, the straw houses of my existence, the things to which I have – often without even any real recognition or understanding of their existence or their power over me – been clinging to and depending on and seeking meaning and value and comfort from –seeking to find in them the longing of my heart…

When all along YOU have been here, beside me, within me, patiently building on YOUR foundation…

And not only with and in me, but with and in others, many, many others… and so You have been doing, all along, what all of us, with all our best intentions and efforts, could never do… drawing us into the relationship with YOU which YOU created us for… and into the relationship with each other, and together, and YOU our head … building YOUR pure, free, holy body… YOUR church… against which all the efforts of man (including our efforts to build “church”!)… and the efforts of the enemy and his forces… and the very gates of Hell.. cannot prevail!

Thank You, LORD, Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit – my Creator and God! Amen!

(I don’t know what all this means about “my future” – or the future of “the church” or “the school-system” or anything else I’ve been a part of as I’ve searched for the “desire of my heart” – but oh – I am free!!! in YOU!!! to love, obey and worship YOU ALONE!!! And to walk in YOUR purposes and work and will – wherever YOU take me – always with YOU. Day by day, moment by moment. Knowing that YOU are perfectly taking care of all the knots in the great tapestry of life – that YOU see always – YOU are creating always – the beautiful, perfect, whole, completed picture (though so often we see mostly just a tangled mess!). Oh dear God, please keep my eyes and ears and heart and soul focused on YOU alone at all times. Forever! Thank You!). Amen.