"Thanksgiving Celebration of Life"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 21^st of November, 1999

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
as a sign that we are glad deep inside
to be alive right now. This is called Thanksgiving.
Today we offer thanks by saying three things
one, that we are family with all living things on earth,
two, that we can agree to live together in peace,
and three, that sharing food with everyone
is a way to make thanksgiving and Love real.

The First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from the book Buffalo Woman Comes Singing by Brooke Medicine Eagle, written in 1991.

So, from California to New York, from Mt. Rainier to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, we answered the cry for spirit. Young white people of serious spiritual intent were finding Spirit alive and well through the Native teachings. When I stood back to look at the larger picture, the cross cultural event was quite astounding, not only across the lines that had divided Indians from whites, but across and among the tribes as well.

However, some Native people were very angry at the crossing of these lines. They felt that their oppressors had taken everything away in a material sense, and that they were now trying to rob them of their spiritual ways as well. This was easy to understand in a logical sense. But spiritually, it made no sense at all. Some groups seemed to want to hang onto Spirit as if they owned it, and could keep it safe by containing it. My teaching has always been that Spirit is strengthened for all of us the more we share it.

Still, all of us who shared with students across cultural and all the old boundaries felt tremendous pressure from such groups. People who have taken advantage of Native culture have made it exceedingly difficult not only for me but for other teachers of Native culture. Medicine Wheel Gatherings led by some Natives have been picketed by the American Indian Movement.

And yet, despite the fighting, Spirit has been moving forward powerfully in making the dream of peace real.

The Second Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from the Gospelbook of Mark written c. 71 of the Common Era.

Suppose someone scatters seed on the earth. After scattering the seed, the farmer then lives a regular life, going to sleep and getting up every day, day after day. The seed begins to grow, and grows into a bigger and bigger plant every day, although the farmer is not aware of it. The earth produces fruit all by itself, first a shoot, and then a stalk, and then the full ear of grain. When harvest time comes, the farmer sends for the sickle to reap the wheat.

Sermon: "Thanksgiving Celebration of Life" [back to top]

At Thanksgiving time each year, many American school children hear about a famous supper hundreds of years ago when Native Americans and colonists from Europe met and shared a meal of boiled corn, lima beans and roasted duck, in the open air, at harvest time. As far as we know, this supper happened only once.

Thanksgiving was not an American holiday for many years after that first supper. Sometimes the President of the United States would ask people to thank God for some military victory in the middle of July, and call it Thanksgiving Day

But our religious ancestors, like Thomas Jefferson, for example, protested against such a terrible use of the word "Thanksgiving." It was not until President Lincoln's day that the holiday of feasting we now know as Thanksgiving Day was established.

Even though it was a couple hundred years between that first supper and Lincoln's establishment of the Thanksgiving Day Holiday, we still seem to remember the Native Americans, often still called "Indians," on this holiday by eating the foods that they themselves used to eat… cranberries, for example, and corn, and even potatoes, foods which did not exist in Europe. Many of us have forgotten that these foods were once cultivated and perfected by Native American farmers, and that corn once used to look like wheat, very small, until the Native Americans in Peru bred the plant over a thousand years to the size we know today.

In fact, when the Pilgrims landed, they really didn't know how to farm very well. The Indians they met were much more advanced than they were about farming. The Pilgrims used to scatter seed on the ground, and the birds ate half of it. But the Native Americans poked holes into the earth with a stick, and buried the seed, and they had a much higher yield for their crops.

But, unfortunately, we have mostly forgotten all that. Not long after that first supper, and for a very long time, the children of the children of the Pilgrims grew more and more cruel in their relationships to the Natives.

Oh, sometimes they didn't mean to…like when they brought germs from Europe that made the Native American people sick and die. But also, the European settlers wanted the land on which Native American villages stood, and so they murdered many of them quite deliberately, and declared war against them.

Even in our 20th century, on papers used by the very Congress of the United States, the Natives of this land were commonly called "savages," which I think you may agree is not a very kind word.

Movies and television shows made the Natives of this land sound strange and violent and cruel. They were portrayed as crafty, wild, and blood thirsty warriors, living in strange huts made of animal skins instead of paved cites. They were always shown dancing half-naked around fires singing odd music. I know at least that when I was in school I was never taught about their great cities, like Cahokia in Illinois, and Aztalan in Wisconsin, cities with walls around them, and great pyramids made of tamped earth, one of them even greater in size than the greatest Pyramid in Egypt. At the height of its glory, in the year 1200, Cahokia was bigger than London or Paris in that same year. Unfortunately, I meet very few who have even heard of Cahokia, or visited its site near St. Louis.

No, Native American culture was largely destroyed; it was lied about and twisted out of shape for 300 years. It was only in this century that Native Americans began to recover bits and pieces of their culture and religion, with folks like Black Elk leading the way. Some of the culture and religion was recreated, or made up fresh from very thin stories. More than 3/4 of the cultures and many of the religions were lost for good.

But I have to be clear. The Native Americans had as many religions as the European settlers did. They did not have one, single religion. Many of their religions, as Black Elk suggested, spoke of the earth, and lifted up what we call "the natural world…" the circle of the seasons, the circle of the sky.

But, that imagery came largely from the religions of the Plains Indians, like the Lakota, which I have studied a great deal over the years. And even the Lakota had a theology as complex and often as hard to understand as any found in Europe.

When Non-Indians talk about Indian religion as being all "earth centered," I confess I am a little suspicious. I am suspicious because it makes it sound as if all the other religions of the world simply left out all reverence for earth, and only the Indians loved the earth.

This is not true. The Hebrew word "Adam" for example, means "earthling" and is gender neutral. It does not mean a male human being, "a man," no matter what some churches say. Adam was a creature made of earth. That is exactly what many Indians said in their religious language as well. And it's what modern science says too, when it proclaims that we are made of the same elements as the earth beneath our feet.

And famous Jesus was a peasant, part of the am ha-eretz, or "people who live off the earth." He told stories about how things grow from the earth, "all by themselves" he said.

Whereas the farmer works to plant and harvest at the beginning and end of the process, the earth, Jesus said, works for months to make the wheat grow "all by itself." Any Native American I can think of could have told the same story, using their own language, and speaking of corn instead of wheat.

And the Native American theological words "orenda" and "manitou" and "wakan-tanka"  have as many subtle and rich meanings as the most complex European philosophy of Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas.

So I am suspicious when non-Native Americans try to simplify Native American religion by saying it was all nature and earth centered, and that they were incapable of very complex and subtle philosophy no less amazing than some of the best of the Europeans. It's only another way of robbing them of their full heritage. That's what I say. And I don't know about you, but I do not want to be a robber.

On the other hand, I am equally suspicious when the modern sons and daughters of the Pilgrims reduce Christian and Jewish wisdom to violence, superstition, stupidity and cruelty. This is a way of robbing Jews and Christians of their heritage as well, and if I will not rob the Indians of their wisdom heritage, neither will I rob Jews and Christians of theirs.

From our Jewish and Christian roots, I gain great wisdom too:

1. That saving the world is just as important as savoring it.
2. That one person can make all the difference, and
3. That shared meals can be sacred and community building events.

But I bet many Indians could say that too…

I think of the Iroquois Nation who thought enough about saving human community to organize humane structure and government.

I think of the various Native American prophets and teachers, like Hehaka Sapa (or Black Elk) who have had an impact far greater than one might expect from just a single person.

And I think of the famous potlatch of the North West Native nations as one of the greatest Sacred Meals in all of the world of religion, the equal in every way of the Jewish Seder and Christian Eucharist.

Of course, if you take things literally, if you look to the surface and not the depth, and if you only pay attention to noisy people, the Jewish and Christian traditions do not share much with each other, or with Native American religions.

But if you take seriously the depth traditions of these religion, what we commonly call the Spirit of things, they share a great deal. Those who go for the Spirit of things instead of for the things themselves, can actually communicate and love another. People who do not catch the Spirit of things, who are literal and dogmatic, who want to be in charge, who want to be right and orthodox, can only argue and fight, belittle and look down.

They think the Spirit of things can be put in a bottle, and that they own the bottle.

They think the Spirit of things can be put in a box, and that they own the box.

They think that some things can be kept pure, and clean, without ever mixing things or blending things.

Brooke Medicine Eagle would agree, as she said in her reading. She realized that some non-Indians do not treat either the Native Americans or their traditions with respect. But she does not think that the wisdom of the Indians needs therefore to be packed away and hidden and kept pure and not shared with European Americans.

One day, years ago, when I watched the woman who wrote our first reading, Brooke Medicine Eagle call the Directions at a conference once, creating what Native Americans sometimes call "a Medicine Wheel," I knew she did not think that the Spirit of things could be put in a box. I knew she did not think she could control the way other people might grow and become deeper. She didn't lecture us on the one and only truth. She didn't even tell us, "You say that, but I say this." She did not draw lines or build walls. She was not going to fight with anyone about the literal meaning of a Wheel or Medicine. She was not going to denounce God, or condemn those who did not believe in God, or enter into an argument about Allah, or Jesus or Humanism. She and I were at a conference with Hindus and Muslims and Christians and Unitarian Universalists and Buddhists and Humanists and Native Americans, and she reminded me and all of us that day that all of us are brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of the earth, creatures exactly like every other living thing on the Medicine Wheel of the world, the Circle of all Life, made of the earth. And I for one think she is right.

Like the farmer in Jesus' parable, she knew that people are like seeds of grain…they grow automatically if you connect them to the earth, the ground on which we live. They grow without us forcing them to grow. They grow whenever the sun of reason and the rain of experience and the gift of time itself do their work. Then, in the end, Jesus said, when the harvest comes, you will have food to share with others, bread and corn like the Pilgrims and Naragansett Indians had to share. And it is only shared bread, shared corn, which nourishes the Spirit of things as well as the body. Horded bread or corn may satisfy the body, but never the Spirit.

Together the two groups, Indian and European, shared a meal, and gave thanks for being together. They helped to make the world, for that day at least, a place of peace and safety and love. They made a Medicine Wheel, or a Healing Circle, or Communion of Love, call it what you will, but they did it.

Today, we can still do the same thing. And please don't say "Oh, it's just a ritual."  Of course it is. But, as the poet Marge Piercy says, "rituals of unity do, in the end, something of what they pretend."

Together, as individuals, let us make signs of our communion in the Medicine Wheel of the World.

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