We now turn our thoughts to the Creator, or Great Spirit, and send greetings and thanks for all the gifts of Creation. Everything we need to live a good life is here on Mother Earth. For all the love that is still around us, we gather our minds together as one and send our choicest words of greetings and thanks to the Creator. Now our minds are one.
—Thanksgiving Address, Haudenosaunee Confederacy
Potawatomi author Kaitlin Curtice invites us to consider how we pray in, for, and with nature:
The gifts of prayer—of sweetgrass, sage, tobacco, and cedar—are said to have been given to us to keep us connected to Segmekwe, Mother Earth, to share her good gifts and to ask Creator to hear us, to be present with us. As a Potawatomi person, I pray to remember, and I pray to keep the shkodé, the fire, lit inside of me….
Growing up in the Baptist tradition, I heard little mention of communicating with God through the earth. On Sundays, we would often hear sermons about how prayer is something we should just try harder at, instead of something we enter into. When I began to pray in Potawatomi, I understood something different about prayer—that it is a holistic act that involves all of me, and all of the creatures around me, communing with God.
If we truly believe that God surrounds us, we believe that prayer is an everyday experience of being alive…. When you step outside and engage with the world in quiet listening, prayer will happen, and it will take on its own way of being for you. Perhaps prayer is just poetry, and we are living the expressions of what it means to be human. This is why Creator gave us gifts to remember.… When I burn sage or lay tobacco down, I know that I am tethered to a love that has remained steady throughout the centuries and that always calls me back to its own sacredness. And that sacredness will always lead me back out to the world to do the work of love.
Curtice frequents a state park on land where the Muscogee Creek and Cherokee peoples lived:
I hear the trees speaking, and they remember everything. As the rocks invite me to sit, they’re asking me to take a moment to remember. And when the water stills to reflect the blue Georgia sky, I am being asked to remember, to reclaim something. So I lay my tobacco on the water’s surface and whisper, “You’re not forgotten.” I listen to the ancestors and to the created world that longs to tell its own stories. I whisper a prayer to Kche Mnedo, to Mamogosnan, Creator, who never forgets, who knows the language of every tribe…. If we listen, the land is speaking. If we listen, we are doing the active work of paying attention, not only to our own lives but also to history telling its own story again and again.
PROBLEMS ARE PART OF LIFE. They are inescapable, woven into the very fabric of this fallen world. You tend to go into problem-solving mode all too readily, acting as if you have the capacity to fix everything. This is a habitual response, so automatic that it bypasses your conscious thinking. Not only does this habit frustrate you, it also distances you from Me. Do not let fixing things be your top priority. You are ever so limited in your capacity to correct all that is wrong in the world around you. Don’t weigh yourself down with responsibilities that are not your own. Instead, make your relationship with Me your primary concern. Talk with Me about whatever is on your mind, seeking My perspective on the situation. Rather than trying to fix everything that comes to your attention, ask Me to show you what is truly important. Remember that you are en route to heaven, and let your problems fade in the Light of eternity.
PSALM 32:8; I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you
LUKE 10:41–42; “Martha, Martha,” the LORD answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, ⁴²but few things are needed-or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
PHILIPPIANS 3:20–21; But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the LORD Jesus Christ, ^21who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.
Young, Sarah. Jesus Calling Morning and Evening Devotional (Jesus Calling®) (p. 690). Thomas Nelson. Kindle Edition.
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