The land and us…In which Marianne, the ultimate settler, begins to come to grips with her lifetime of disconnection from the land

A few weeks ago in a Missiology class (Missiology=the study of Christian mission—we study it because we still have a lot to learn!) we had a visitor to class:  Ched Myers, a theologian, political activist, 5^th generation Californian, and lover of land.   By way of engaging us, Ched gave us a little pop quiz to determine how many of us knew something about the land we are in.   Some of the questions he asked:   Close your eyes and point north.   Where do storms usually come from in your region?   Name three edible, native plants to your region.   Name three species of native animals that are now extinct.  Where does your garbage go?  Where does your water come from?  Who are the first peoples of the land you are on?   And so on.   

We sat there.  A few stabs at answers--maybe one or two of us had one or two of them.   Really, we were all pathetic.   Even Ched seemed surprised.  It was embarrassing to me (of course, not knowing things for me is always embarrassing.)  But you know, it hit me:   This is not Trivial Pursuits!!   This is about relationship.   I have been in Oregon since 1988—longer than I have lived anywhere.  I adore this place, and one of the reasons I adore it is its incredible beauty and life.   When was I planning to learn something about the land I am in, and begin to make it my friend?  I began to see how this is a responsibility to me as a guest in this part of God’s beautiful creation.   As I am a good guest in someone’s house, I try to leave it as I found it; I acknowledge the gift of hospitality given to me, and I appreciate what I can learn about my host from the way she has created this beautiful dwelling place she is sharing with me.  Yet I have not done this for the land I live in—I just moved in.  As we sat in class feeling inadequate, it was not about the facts not known--we were being gently chided for being bad guests.  As Ched put it, we were being theologically disrespectful of the Creator.  Ouch. 

In the wonderful way that my studies this semester have blended into each other, processing this insight from one class has been informed by my learning in another class, about the theology and ethic of the land, particularly from the vantage point of indigenous peoples.   My cohort is mostly Native Americans and Canadians, and there are a few of us are settlers (I call myself the ultimate settler because my English ancestors settled in this country as far back as Mayflower times; my Scottish ancestors came in the early 19^th century and married into plantation families.  All of them left their native lands behind, who knows how far back.)   Friends in my cohort are teaching me something about what it means to hold place as central to a spiritual worldview, and the scales are beginning to fall from my eyes.   I have realized that we settlers are the ones who introduced disconnection from place, by moving native peoples off the places that were at the root of their identity and imbued their spiritual traditions and practices.  We are the ones who introduced the concept of land as existing for human use, of viewing nature merely as “scenery,” sort of like the physical version of the wallpaper on my Mac.   We are the ones who created an artificial separation between wilderness and those managed areas where everything natural is exploited for the use of humans, and where we live apart from other animals and our neighbors in creation.   The concept of ourselves as “in” land, dwelling alongside other creatures, adapting to the diverse particularities of the land we are in, and partnering with the rest of creation to exist together:  these are actually concepts embedded in the Bible’s stories of creation, concepts which we have lost over generations of settlement, and concepts which can be retaught to us by those peoples on the earth who always understood them, and never unlearned them.   (For a beautiful expression of the intersection between creation understood as Biblical shalom and the harmony way of indigenous peoples of North America, I recommend Randy Woodley’s book; see below under "Resources.")

The injustice of separating native peoples from their land is another issue, although by no means unrelated.  What I sense is how our dominant society’s disconnection from God’s created world is killing us, physically and spiritually.  What I sense is the generosity and love of native people’s desire to help us see this alternate way.  While I applaud the efforts of environmentalists, in some of their efforts we still see a dualism between humans and “the rest of creation.”  In native peoples there is a deep understanding that we are all in it, together.  (It is a source of some bemusement to native peoples that we Westerners are only now “discovering” this interconnectedness.)

Because our settled state spans so many generations, I find myself distrusting a group of people like me to find our way back by ourselves.  Because we have waved the Bible around for millennia and nevertheless managed to get it so, so wrong, I am not convinced the revelation of God’s shalom in the Bible is sufficient for us to heal this broken link.  I believe we must understand that there is revelation elsewhere as well:  in nature itself, and in the stories, experiences and accumulated knowledge of indigenous peoples.  We need to be retaught--we need to listen to these teachers.   

I am blessed to be in a cohort of people who can help teach me.   But I also have to act.  What else can I do?  To start with, I can start getting curious about the voice of the land as it really is.  I began to read about the first peoples of this area:  the Kalapuya Indians, who we have moved to the Grand Ronde Reservation.   Among them, bands of Tualatin (this would be the people of my own city of West Linn), the Yamhill, the Pudding River Indians.   Nearby, the Molalla.  On the coast, the Salishan, Siletz, Nestucca.  These are names I know from town names, forests, and rivers.  How different to think of these not as points on a map, but as the homes of people in which we are guests.   The next step I can take is to learn more about how the Tualatin lived.  What did they know about their land that I don’t know?  As I dig into this, once again I hear names:  Camas (a plant whose roots were a staple, and the name of a town up the Columbia River—we see its purple flowers throughout the region, and may know it as camassia), huckleberries, acorns from the oak savannahs, trapping, hunting and fishing of elk, deer, salmon and, from the Willamette Falls, eel.   The people followed the seasons and knew intimately how and where plants and animals flourished according to these cycles.  When I start to consider their lives I begin to see how constructed the life I live is in this land, and how little it has to do today with how it was originally created to be.   Ched Myers talks about this in the context of bioregion—understanding how all the pieces of each distinct bioregion are gathered together to make it a complete whole.   When we consider this, we consider the deep shalom of creation, and the disruption of the whole when any part is disrupted. 

In addition to the deep enjoyment and spiritual connection which is a great gift to us and a source of healing, Ched believes that at the root of knowing our bioregion more intimately is mission—that all of mission must include our relationship with earth itself.   He talks about this as “re-placement.”  It is the reclamation of the symbols of redemption which are indigenous to the bioregion in which we who claim to represent the church have set up shop.   It is about finding and taking to heart the songs and stories of the peoples of the land.   As he says, “these can be woven together with the symbols, stories and songs of biblical radicalism.  This will necessarily be a local, contextual and personal exercise….” 

I have begun to consider how this can imbue ministry and mission.   I will never visit anywhere again without learning something about the host peoples of the land I am in, and to try to approach the place with the respect and intimacy they had cultivated.    I have begun a modest nature walk ministry at my church, where we will consider not just the “scenery” around us, but the spiritual relationship we are meant to have with the rest of creation as we move within it.   I realize I am truly, as the saying goes, a babe in the woods.   Nevertheless, my journey begins.   Tiptoeing back into the creation, finding my own piece and my own place within the diverse cosmic mystery, the place where I was created to be.  Back to shalom.

Camassia in an oak savannah, West Linn.  Photo credit:  Kate Bryant.

Resources:

About the culture and lifeways of the tribes of the Grande Ronde.  Be sure to click through to an interactive display here on the site of the Confederated Tribes.    

About Ched Myers' ministry and ecojustice.  

Bioregional awareness quiz.   

Randy Woodley’s book, Shalom and the Community of Creation. 

    

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

I wrote this a few years ago and shared on Intersect. Reposting here. The theme of storytelling is a big one for me, for work and for exploring inwardly.

An Episcopal priest I know once said, “we are slaves to the stories we tell ourselves.” Her context was that these stories can limit us, or constrain us. But they can be salvation, too. A friend who’s a Marine once told me that a big part of training is learning the stories of Marines who have gone before you. Under duress, you call up those stories, and they remind you that others have gone through it, too. Your job is to live up to those stories.

It was only when I became an adult that I realized how much I lived by a story I told myself about losing my parents when I was 14. A story that kept me together, for better and for worse.

Here are the facts: My parents were killed, along with my brother, in a car accident on New Year’s Day in 1973. We were returning home to Ann Arbor, Michigan after a holiday trip to Atlanta to see my grandmother and cousins. About halfway home, near Covington, Ky., the tire on our packed 1970 LTD station wagon blew, and we spun out of control—into the path of a semi-truck. My father was killed instantly; my mother and 12-year-old brother lingered for a few hours. The traffic on I-75 backed up for six miles, we were told.

That left four of us—my two sisters, 17 and 10, my 16-year-old brother, and me. One of us— my older sister—had a closed head injury which has impacted her to this day. But the rest of us had only minor injuries. I suffered a few pelvic fractures, and not even a cut or scratch; my brother had a skull fracture; my little sister broke her collarbone and displaced her pelvis. We just needed a little rest and recovery. And so the focus for us was on logistics: Who would we live with? Who would take care of us?

Because, as it turned out, my parents hadn’t had a plan—not a plan that envisioned the scenario of their both dying. And so, I remember lying in my hospital bed, weighing all the possibilities; and it was at that moment that I became conscious for the first time that I could even think of my life as a narrative. There was a giant tear in the flow of my life (think of the sound of a phonograph needle ripping across an LP) and the question was: What is the next chapter? How will the story end?

In some ways, I remember thinking: Hey, this is an opportunity. I could fall apart; I could become a completely different person; I could start liking different music; I could end up not going to college; I could even lobby to move out of Ann Arbor and get new friends. Nobody knows what people do in these situations, I thought, and everyone would understand. I realized that I had power, and that much of this was up to me.

And so, I fashioned my story. It turns out it was not about getting different friends, or separating from my community. And it wasn’t like concocting an alibi, as in, making things up. But it was still a construction—a way to get the needle back down on the record, a way to make a meaningful narrative about this shattering event—a path to keep going.

And the story I developed was: “It’s not that big a deal.”

Here’s why, my narrative went. You see, if there is an ideal age to lose your parents, I was at that age. I had been raised. My parents were not perfect, but I was lucky to have them. I had their input—I knew exactly what they expected of me. And, I hadn’t started rebelling against them in a big way. At 14, I had become a first class smart-aleck, but I hadn’t really acted out—no keeping them up at night worrying, no “I hate you” fights, no serious risk-taking behavior just to freak them out. So I also didn’t have a bunch of unfinished business with them. So really, I had everything I needed.

It’s not that big a deal.

The upside of this story was that it sustained me. It amazed and impressed people. How mature I am!! How well-adjusted! And it put them at ease: No grieving orphan to manage. No flipped-out lost child. So I just finished raising myself with no visible means of support. I decided what college I would go to. The following year, in fact, that story got me out of the 2nd-year dorm requirements. I planned my own wedding. I mean, who needs parents?

It’s just not that big a deal.

The downside of this story didn’t really come to me until later. If, as my story implied, parents ended up being not THAT important anyway, for instance, then having children was a little risky: I might realize the flaw in that thinking. So, I just didn’t get around to having kids. My story caused me to seriously underestimate my issues with loss—which didn’t end up standing me in good stead when my first marriage came to an end, and the divorce was hard—WAY harder than anything I had ever gone through before. And I was constantly intellectualizing loss. When the Challenger blew up, I argued with people that this was just not that big a tragedy. Not compared to what survivors of Pol Pot went through, for instance.

At some point in my life, I was ready to realize that what I had gone through was in fact, Quite a Big Deal. I realized that loss and love are two sides of the same coin—and if you devalue the price you paid for the loss, you risk de-valuing the love at stake as well.

An alternative narrative came to me one day when, years later, I listened to a radio interview with Gloria Estefan that referenced the terrible accident that killed some members of her band. The narrative the interviewer was intimating could have been mine: that of a survivor of a harrowing ordeal. After all, I was in a car going 70 miles per hour on a freeway that got slammed into by a semi-truck. Three people were killed, but I suffered only minor fractures, and not even a cut or scratch.

Although it has occurred to me that I might spend more time in wonder over how unscathed I was physically, I don’t quite identify with that survivor narrative. Because for me the story was not actually about surviving the impact of a truck on a freeway. It was about negotiating my identity, about holding on to myself, about managing the “before” and “after” with some sense of control.

To this day, I don’t think I’m very different from who I might have been if that accident had never happened. That’s because part of the story I told myself really was true. But I’m trying to spend more time appreciating the full measure of what I lost: Parents, who I didn’t finish knowing, and who I never really took in as people in their own right. A brother, who was a very bright light even in twelve short years.

Mostly I’ve learned to listen to stories—my own, of course, but also to those of others, and to appreciate the power of the stories we tell ourselves. One aspect of my story, then, is that a very, very big deal happened to me, and that I made up a story to get through it: a story that enslaved me just a little bit, but saved me as well.

A positive midlife crisis

I begin this blog some 50 years into my life, about one year after leaving my career in the sped-up business world, and in my second semester of seminary.  I am full of doubt and uncertainty, but I am sure of the need to turn or return to myself, to soften into the gentle tug I have been feeling to move towards the infinite--towards God--and towards service and purpose. Towards good.  I have called the blog "Bending towards Good" because I am not always sure I am walking purposefully towards good all the time; I acknowledge I am looking for it, seeking it, and inclining myself towards it.

I've been needing this blog, because I've begun self-editing on Facebook and wanting a bit more freedom to explore topics in depth, and also in more safety from the eyes of my 1,000 Facebook friends.   Not that what I share here won't be for anyone to see.  But Facebook is beginning to reflect a me that I once was--spread thin, skimming the surface, approachable and liked by many, but deeply engaged with far fewer souls.  I need more room to reflect and I see this as a living room to which I will more selectively invite people, although strangers who relate to my path are welcome!!

Among the things I will explore on this blog: a spiritual view of some of the events in the world; observations about my life within the George Fox Seminary community; moments of grace, skeptical rants, cries of distress, and no doubt some self-righteous "I know better" exhortations; as well as some of my own life stories--about being a "highly successful" orphan in the world, which I want to develop for a book.

Please be gentle with me.  I don't know what I am doing!  And for now, so be it.