This last weekend the leaves were reaching spectacular colors, the days were shortening, and we were being assured that fall is finally upon us. I looked at a particularly beautiful tree, and the artist in me delighted at the incredible variety of colors and the depths of textures that one tree can contain. It reminded me of a lesson about leaves from my college days: an art professor held up a leaf and invited us to talk about its symmetry. Leaves are perfectly balanced from one side to the other but are never perfectly symmetrical. The lesson then moved on to people, the two sides of our face, our bodies, our hands, or feet, are typically balanced but never identical. That tree and the lesson it recalled. reminded me that the gift and beauty of diversity and balance are important lessons for us to learn from creation itself.
Last Monday was celebrated as Indigenous Peoples’ Day and/or Columbus Day. We live in a world that seems to see only the possibility of one story negating the other instead of helping to balance the other. Extremism has made much of beauty and insight that comes of difference and balance indiscernible. As a child I was fascinated by the story of Christopher Columbus and his spirit of adventure and commitment to challenging unpopular theories of his day to prove the world was round. It was only years later that I would learn that lots of people in Columbus’ day already thought that the world was round, and even had a sense of its scale. His motivation was power and wealth as he sought a more efficient route for the spice trade which ended up with him lost in Central America. It was still later that I would learn of the horrors of how he treated the Indigenous peoples of the island “Hispaniola” (what would become Haiti and the Dominican Republic) and the peoples of the newly conquered Americas. I cannot forget the image from murals in the Haitian National Museum of people holding the stumps of their arms after having had their hands chopped off at the command of Columbus for having not embraced Jesus Christ. It was unclear if they’d even understood what they were being asked. Some have tried to excuse the atrocities against Indigenous peoples as the product of thinking from a different age when Indigenous peoples (and later Africans) were not even seen as being human. This idea was further supported by the Doctrine of Discovery which was embraced by much of the church. Sadly, there are lots of texts from the age of discovery and conquest which make it quite clear that there were also many within the church and the science of the day who did not hold to the convenient truth that some people were human and others lesser animals. We keep learning only if we’re willing to see and grow. Recently someone shared a quote from social media that is attributed to Cherokee Elder Stan Rushworth. “The difference between a Western settler mindset of, I have rights and an Indigenous mindset of I have an obligation… Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I was born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.” The quote points to a different way of living than that held by the age of discovery and conquest. It actually points to the very lessons that many within the church would have been trying to teach Columbus as well- that we are inheritors of the blessings of God and all of creation, and we are called to be stewards of all. These are lessons that our thanksgiving story imagines weaving into one another. The idea that exploration and curiosity, that seeking a better future for oneself and one’s family might intersect with learning to care for past, present, and future generations, as well as the planet, is something worth considering. Two sides of a leaf, two sides of our faces, or our hearts… And both sides of any story only become richer and stronger when we are also able to critique the things that are not blessings, that were not faithful.
We are entering a season of Thanksgiving as well as the perpetual season of political campaigning – not to mention the steady encouragement to unbridled consumerism. How do we learn to stop, to celebrate the diversity, the depth of color and texture, the wonder of balance with which God has crafted the universe… How do we learn to open our hearts to see beyond our certainties to knowledge which may give us the opportunity for growth?
Our journey of faith is always one of learning and growing, looking for new opportunities and age-old wisdom and how one might help to support the other. Perhaps we do well to respond more often with curiosity than certainty, with awe rather than ambivalence, and above all to keep trying to grow in our capacity to love like Jesus in all matters.
Shalom, Pastor Eric