We European-descended people want to drink from everyone's well except our own.
Many of us are uncomfortable with Christianity, but keep going to church because "it's the right thing to do" or because "I want the kids to have good morals." Those who leave the Church find themselves adrift. "What now?," they wonder. Some check out Buddhism, others try Wicca or Theosophy. Unitarianism is an easy out - if all paths are valid, you don't have to make a choice. Many seekers give up altogether, decide there's nothing to the cosmos except matter and energy, and become atheists.
And of course, some try Native American religion.
That's understandable. There's a lot that's appealing in Native American spirituality. We see it through the lens of our modern culture, of course. It's "natural," environmentally friendly, noble, uncontaminated by modernity. White guilt adds to the equation, and maybe we have an urge to submit to a people we have treated harshly, even a need to acknowledge them as wiser than us, our superiors. Most Eurofolk have no idea that we, too, have ancestral religions. For many of us, it is called Asatru. It includes many of the things we admire in Native American belief.
More than a few people who are now Asatru started off as members of the largest Indian tribe of all - the Wannabees. Here's the story of one of them -
In 1975, I was at a powwow on the Rosebud Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota. My girlfriend and I and another couple had been there for a couple of days enjoying the dancing, drumming, and craftwork. I had struck up a conversation earlier with a gentleman who turned out to be one of the Sioux elders who had helped organize the event.
Later on that evening, he came over to me and asked me if I had had a good time. I answered “Yes, very much so.” Then he said, “I’m glad to hear that. But you’ll have to leave now.” Afraid that I had violated some rule or committed a social faux pas of some kind, I asked why. He replied, “Because we’re about to perform a religious ceremony and it’s only for Indians.” I replied that I understood.
As we were walking away, he walked beside me. At the entrance, he put his hand on my shoulder, smiled, and said to me, “You’re not going to find what you’re looking for here. You need to drink from your own well.” I shook his hand, and left.
It would be another twenty years before I would understand what he meant by his statement. I had discovered Edred Thorsson’s A Book of Troth in a bookstore and was reading through it when the Sioux elder’s words came back to me and struck me like a thunderbolt. This was it! I was finally drinking from my own well. I had found my way home.
Home. For us, that's what it feels like to find Asatru. The cool, clear water flowing from our ancestral stream is the elixir of our spiritual life.
A very wise American Indian activist, Vine Deloria, wrote a book called God is Red in which he said
"Most probably religions do not in fact cross national and ethnic lines without losing their power and identity. It is probably more in the nature of things to have different groups with different religions."
This has nothing to do with superiority or inferiority, only with diversity...real diversity, not the pseudo-diversity of modern political correctness, which argues, incorrectly, that human groups are all the same, interchangeable,with identical spiritual needs. Differences are real, and it is in accepting and honoring those differences that we find true diversity, tolerance, and respect.
The spiritual thirst of my European-descended brothers and sisters will only be slaked when they find their people's well, and drink deeply from it.
Steve McNallen
Asatru Folk Assembly
http://runestone.org
3 comments:
True enough. But I understand that a firm link between a stong spiritual belief and its link to a particular space/place can be very important for at least some indigenous beliefs such that you destroy a landscape and you upset or kill the spirits of that land. I have heard elders say that the spirit creature has left the land where i live because their land has been disrespectfully 'developed' (i.e. roads, houses etc. for the urban masses).
Anyhow, point is yes, drink from your own well and thrive as humanity in true diversity, but we also need to recognise the link many of us have to our spiritual lands (my lands being in the north of Ireland) and make the world a place where we can freely go to these lands even if are citizens of another. And of course, respect the lands of those who through a quirk of birth we more or less are forced to share.
The implications of this idea are huge. The comment that "It is probably more in the nature of things to have different groups with different religions" would completely devastate monotheistic religions if widely accepted.
I have been studying Critical Race Theory(CRT) and White Privilege (WP). My goal is to understand them well enough to refute them. So far I would have to conclude that the narrative of these two ideas is that the history of people of European heritage is the history of thieves and parasites.
In fairness, some of what these ideas have to say is thought provoking. For example, 70% of those who use illegal drugs are white but only 10% of those serving time for drug possession are white.(Tim Wise "Speaking Treason Fluently" page 19) However, the rest of time you get the impression that the only contribution people of European heritage are allowed to offer is their willingness to confess to the crime of being born white.
There certainly are competing versions of how the role of Europeans in America and throughout the world is to be understood. I don't want the CRT/WP version to be the one that sticks. Having our own well to drink from will give us a more comfortable seat at the table of many cultures.
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