Locating an Indigenous Spirituality

The spiritual life I had spent many years trying to locate within the walls of churches and on my knees in earnest prayer, was primarily one of the other world—the beyond. The spirit that I have found is not located beyond, but in the soil right beneath my feet. The new life it calls me to does not beckon from beyond my body, but is that call of liberation that I feel deep in my bones. It calls me to search it out and find it in the land and in all that flows from the holy source of life. It calls me to locate an indigenous spirituality.

The civilized world as I see it, holds nothing in creation as sacred. I don’t mean to say that civilization has no Gods. On the contrary, it has many: the god of Property, the god of Markets, Physical Beauty and Sexual Allure, Individuality, Technological Advancement, and the list goes on. Many within civilization will even claim YHWH, the God of creation, as their one true God, while simultaneously worshipping all of these other powerful gods. I confess that I too have held other Gods than the one true creator. I desire to repent and turn away from these other gods. I confess too that my worship of these other gods is part and parcel of the brokenness of creation. In Romans 8:19 Paul says that “the whole creation groans for liberation.” It is true, the civilized world has truly possessed creation and held it in bondage ever since its dawning. Its appetite seems insatiable. Civilization could possess and consume in an endless cycle until it has utterly devoured creation and nothing remains. I confess complicity in this avarice. I confess that Civilization’s appetite to possess is my own appetite. I confess that this has caused me to be a perpetrator of oppression, a slaveowner, money hungry, never satisfied with my own daily bread. I am infected with this culture of sin that treats creation as something to be possessed. Despite my ravenous hunger, I can still hear something calling from the wilderness “come and find me, I am the Source of Life” it whispers. “I belong to no one, but you have been mine since the dawning of time.”

It was characteristic of the indigenous tribes of this continent as well as others that in their first contact with the civilized world, their people had no concept of property, or possession of the land from which they drew their life. That is they considered themselves to belong to the land, not the other way around. Creation was something held in reverence. Life was a gift and that which sustained it was something to give thanks to. An indigenous hunter of buffalo in the plains, would give a prayer of thanks at the animal’s death for its gift of life. Agricultural societies gave prayers of thanks during the cultivation of plants for their gift. Some cultures would scatter tobacco on the ground at the rising of the sun to honor each new day and give thanks for the bountiful provisions of creation. This is a drastically different picture than the life we know where, for most of us, our food is bought and sold just like the rest of the gifts of creation. It is difficult to give thanks for life when it must be bought at every turn.

Or maybe, for me, it is easy to give thanks as a USAmerican, white, heterosexual, male—the dominant class in every sense—afforded all of the privileges that come with it. So I have to pay someone for my food. Well that’s not that bad right? I’ve never been short of money to the extent that I’ve gone hungry. If I were short of money, I have a mother who would never let me starve. In fact, more often than not, I have enough money that I can afford not only to put a roof over my head and food in my belly, but can also purchase all kinds of other good things, like the computer I’m typing this on right now—an Apple iMac, manufactured in China by some poor soul who spends more than 60 hours a week working in a factory for a meager wage in conditions, that in my own sweet country would be deemed illegal. Recently conditions led a number of these factory hands to commit suicide—I wonder if my computer was assembled by one of the recently deceased and if I bought his or her death.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on the exploitation and slavery and death that make my life possible. It is true that my life is full of all kinds of privileges, possessions, and comforts which to the untrained eye come across as obvious blessings. Partially, the place in time that we occupy holds more challenges to really being able to see the “blessings” for what they are than any other in human history. With the rise of globalization and a world economy, the exploitation that delivers my computer to my hands occurs on the opposite side of the globe from me. Our slaves live in places we will never visit and don’t usually care to visit. In the modern era the oppressor never has to look the oppressed in the eye and thus will never need to know the oppressed exists. We need no longer establish elaborate rationalizations characterizing our oppressed as lower beings than ourselves; the oppressed simply do not exist to the majority of people living within their own ivory cages of wealth and affluence.

I’m not so sure we want to see them either. I’ve long been aware of the slave trade that is wrapped up in the chocolate industry, yet my love for chocolate more often than not trumps my consciousness of the young boys forced into labor in the cocoa fields that puts the chocolate in my hand. Even knowing all about the toil and suffering of these children, I continue to be an avid consumer of chocolate. I can not keep my hands off of it. The same goes for coffee, sugar, even much of the beef that is imported into our country. Yet I continue to pay for and consume the products of slave labor and when I am sinking my teeth into these delights, when my tongue is reveling in the pleasures they offer, my mind’s eye never looks upon the famished child whose blood and sweat were sacrificed. “Thank God for chocolate,” I think to myself.

The question then is clear: do I have a love for life? Am I thankful for and held in awe by the gift of life on this planet, or rather am I swimming in a sea of delusion that life is made up merely of its pleasures and am I so doped up on these pleasures that I have forsaken what is the law of life in totality: “love the Lord your God . . . and love your neighbor as yourself”? If I am willing to forget my neighbors suffering in Cote d’Ivoire for the sake of a nice flavor on my tongue, I am not in accord with the law of life. If I do not have love enough for my neighbor to even think of his suffering as I consume the product of his labor, much less refuse to participate in the trade which equals the possession of his body, then I also do not love God, the source of his life. If I do not treat life in all of its variations of diversity as sacred and something to be thankful for and to be held in awe, then I must be worshiping something other than its source.

I look and urge my brothers and sisters to look also towards repentance and movement away from a life of sin, of not revering and being thankful for life, and look towards the location of an indigenous spirituality. I want to see what sustains my life grow up from seed to fruit and be caught up in the marvel of its complexity. When I pluck the fruit with my own hands, I want to be overcome with thanksgiving. When I awake each new morning, I want to dance with the joy of another rising sun. I want to know intimately the source which flows into all things.