Norman Wirzba writes in Living the Sabbath of “the principle that was well-known in ancient or traditional cultures: bodily health includes the health of many bodies, human and non-human, we necessarily live with.” He echoes the teachings of Canada's First Nations that everything around us, animate and inanimate, is “all my relations.”
The Presbyterian Church in Canada has endorsed Healing and Reconciliation to transform society for the better by helping Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people develop a new understanding and build a new relationship founded on mutual respect and love. In 2006, The Church of St. Andrew and St Paul, Montreal, signed a twinning covenant with the Saskatoon Native Circle Ministry, confirming a five-year relationship. Friendships have formed, tears and laughter have been shared, but understanding ultimately touches the spiritual. The intersection of Christian and Aboriginal faith is a challenging crossroads.
“We say there are four learnings,” says Vern Douglas, an Ojibway and cultural advisor at Trent University, Peterborough, Ont. “Awareness is first. There's no learning without awareness, but next is understanding which leads to knowledge which leads to wisdom.”
Let us, then, seek awareness.
“There's only one Creator, Ghi-mndo [pronounced Zhay-m'ndo] in Ojibway, the rest are relations,” he explains. “There's a spiritual life in everything Ghi-mndo created. We give thanks and acknowledge our humility and relationship in the grand scheme of things.”
Colin Scott, associate professor of anthropology at McGill University, has spent 30 years working with Cree hunters in Wemindji on the James Bay coast. He talks about comfort in plurality.
“I work mainly with people who never lost a deep, rich continuity in their relationship with a world in which, frankly, Christianity is a non-starter. In the bush, dealing with a multiplicity of experience, depths, variety and nuance, there is a whole cultural legacy supporting that experience that allows you to find meaning and practical direction.”
Scott thinks a common misconception that Native people worshipped multiple gods, spirits and totems grew out of a na?e transfer of European attitudes.
“What's much more productive is the idea of ubiquitous connection, an attitude of respect and of cultivating relationships with multiple others in the world, which is not quite the same thing as worshipping multiple gods.”
Everyone's welcome at this conversation. Even 773-year-old Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, endorsing a commentary on Gentiles following the Law, may offer a key. “Although they have no written law, yet they have the natural law, whereby each one knows, and is conscious of, what is good and what is evil,” Aquinas wrote.
Perhaps we're all united in consciousness, however expressed.
“If my faith is the Nishnawbe, or Ojibway, creation story and the spiritual relationship to things in this territory, how does my faith become your myth?” asks Vern Douglas. “And is your faith my myth? Values of humanity are universal. Sharing, caring, respect and the basic laws in the Ten Commandments, the Koran, the Talmud, Torah or the medicine wheel are common to human beings. It's how you manifest and bring those to life.”
Rev. Stewart Folster of Saskatoon, Canada's only active Native Presbyterian minister, understands.
“I think even non-Natives know that there is a spirit world of angels and saints and powerful faith healing by prayer to our one and only God,” he wrote in a recent e-mail. “So, why is it so difficult to give those same elements the face of an eagle or a bear or a wolf? I have never prayed to a tree or a rock, not even to a cross. God is more than that. There is no easy way to explain something spiritual meant to be experienced in the sweat lodge or pipe ceremony, no thoughts about who can help you except the One you pray to.”
Bevan Skerratt is a Celtic-Cree, founder of the Urban Aboriginal Medicine Fellowship, singer, writer, holistic psychotherapist and Christian, who has also integrated beliefs from two traditions. “It's not something you can convey through language that evokes an old paradigm,” he says of his faith journey. “If one has an experience of expanded consciousness, I think that new linguistic symbols would be part of the creative process of integrating and sharing the experience.”
That makes it tough for a writer. Could it be, though, that a glimmer of awareness may lead to some understanding, that insights of another's faith may illuminate my own in the saving grace of Jesus Christ? Wisdom remains distant, but at least we've ventured into the intersection.
