The Sacred Hoop
At the CAC’s CONSPIRE 2021 conference, Pat McCabe (Weyakpa Najin Win, Woman Stands Shining) of the Diné nation described the medicine wheel as a symbol of the interconnectedness and responsibility of all beings:
In the Lakota spiritual way and teaching, I was presented with something called … the medicine wheel…. It’s a circle and it marks north to south and east to west in the center of it…. There are lots of different ways to look at that. It points to the cardinal directions; and we say that different medicines, different animals, and different spiritual entities lie in each of those four directions. Depending on which Indigenous people you talk to, they’ll name different ones, and it’s all true…. We can also talk about this hoop [or wheel] being divided into four as the four different parts of walking through your life as a human being: as a child, as a young adult, as someone who can bring forth family, and then in your elder years.
Another way that I look at it is that every single living life form has been given a seat on this sacred hoop of life … and that includes us … the five-fingered ones. We also have a seat on that sacred hoop. Every single member has a methodology for upholding its part of the sacred hoop. Every single member must uphold their part of the sacred hoop, or the integrity of the hoop begins to fail. That’s what I believe we’re witnessing right now.
Who is not upholding their part of the sacred hoop? Well, I think it’s us. Looking at it from this vantage point, the thing about this sacred hoop is that it’s really speaking to a very deep level of interrelatedness. I love Thich Nhat Hanh’s word…. interbeing. We’re interbeing and that’s exactly what this hoop is describing.
From this perspective, every member counts and every member has to be given the opportunity to uphold its part of the hoop. Every member has been given a perfect design to do that. The question is, is every member being given what they need in order to enact their perfect design for thriving life, so that they can contribute to keeping the integrity of that hoop intact?
I’m going to say “no.” When we dam rivers, we begin to prevent certain life forms from being able to enact their perfect design for thriving life…. If the salmon can’t live their way, then the whole ecology begins to unravel where they are. There’s this incredible film that shows what happens because wolves were being kept out of Yellowstone National Park here in North America…. [The film] shows what happens when they reintroduce wolves into that habitat, where they had always been. The whole ecology changes [and balances again]…. Every being has to be allowed to enact its perfect design for thriving life or the whole thing begins to unravel.
The following is from John Chaffee who sends out five thoughts on Fridays.
| 1.“All art is prayer.“– Makoto Fujimura, American ArtistI typed up a small commentary of a paragraph about this quote but chose to delete it. It speaks for itself. “All art is prayer.” 2.“God has many that the Church does not, and the Church has many that God does not.“– St. Augustine of Hippo, Catholic Mystic and TheologianWe love to draw lines concerning who is “in” and who is “out”, don’t we? Fortunately (or frustratingly) God draws different lines than we might expect. 3.“In Christ we are invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of the world at the same time, the one not without the other…But I find the reality of the world always already borne, accepted, and reconciled in the reality of God.That is the mystery of the revelation of God in the human being Jesus Christ.“– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran Pastor and Theologian(Bonhoeffer says this in his essay, “Christ, Reality, and Good. Christ, Church and World.”) In my graduate studies at Princeton, I had the opportunity to take a semester-long class devoted to the life, work, and theology of Bonhoeffer. I chose to write a paper on the middle section of the quote presented here in #3. A main idea that Bonhoeffer noticed in the New Testament was that after Christ, there was no longer a true distinction between one realm/world that was “sacred” and another realm/world that was “profane.” That dichotomy was faulty and inaccurate. There is only one reality because of Christ, and it is “reconciled.” For Bonhoeffer as a Lutheran pastor, this realization of a “reconciled world” was an important distinction. As a result, his ethics and theology were not able to call anyone or anything “sacred” or “profane” but only as “reconciled.” And, it all leads me to wonder… “What could this world look like if we approached everyone and everything as already reconciled?” 4.“A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.“– Tom Waits, American MusicianTrue story, I looked up how to play accordions on YouTube and then if I could buy one on Amazon. The next day I happened to see this quote from Tom Waits. I have since not looked at accordions again. 5.“A religion without mystics is philosophy.“– Pope FrancisThe mystical tradition/contemplative tradition of Christianity is where the mojo is for me now at this point in my journey. And, after having experienced the depth, wisdom, and vulnerability of the Christian mystics, I don’t believe I can go back. Perhaps it sounds quaint, but I still believe there can be moments of complete and utter transcendence that evade our human categories. The modern church does a good job of creating scholars, activists, and sincere devotees, and thankfully it feels as though it is learning again the need to teach people their own mystical depths. And I am all in favor of it. |
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