Leaving Church - Barbara Brown Taylor [70]
After I left church, I lightened up too. No longer frightened of being found out by my congregation, no longer compelled to defend my way of approaching God, I found much to admire in the Native way. I admired the breadth of the community, which included ex-cons and elementary school teachers, firemen and fine artists, who did not identify themselves in these ways but who became known for the gifts they exercised. Some sang, some danced, some cooked, and some kept the fire going, while the Sun Dance chief served as the human tuning fork in their midst. When something was done sloppily or tempers flared, he called everyone to circle up until the way forward was clear again, since songs sung by distracted singers could hurt more people than they helped, and food cooked by an angry cook might burn the roof right off someone’s mouth. Cleto once said that his mother’s most devastating hot sauce carried a warning on the bottle: “Made while I was mad.”
I admired the absence of books, which kept the community focused on living practice instead of scriptural debate. With no central text, the community is centered in the Spirit, or at least in an oral tradition of what living in the Spirit is all about. Ask an elder what happens in a sweat lodge and he will invite you to a sweat lodge. Ask how you are supposed to pray and you will be invited to say a prayer. There are right and wrong ways to do almost everything, but if you do not ask then no one is going to tell you. The idea seems to be that letting you walk into the fire is much more educational than telling you not to walk into the fire.
When I have asked why I have to turn clockwise instead of counterclockwise to be smudged with sage smoke before entering the Sun Dance grounds, or why I am supposed to take off all of my metal jewelry and put it in my pocket, the answer I have most often received is, “Because that is how the spirits showed us to do it.” I am Catholic enough to understand this answer and Protestant enough to chafe against it, but as a guest in the Native American tradition I have also learned how practicing these traditions knits the community together in ways that discussing them would not. By valuing direct encounters with God more highly than reading about such encounters in a book, the tradition keeps primary experience alive. The secondary experience of hearing stories about those encounters and singing songs that celebrate them has great value of its own, but it is no substitute for the divine meeting. An elder’s job is to facilitate the meeting for those who seek it, not to serve as a surrogate. An elder’s job is to protect the ways and support those who walk them, so that as few people as possible get hurt.
I admired the sense of real risk, which kept the community from imagining God as a stuffed bear. For many Christians I know, the idea of divine dangerousness went out of fashion shortly after the book of second Kings was written, or the book of Amos at the very latest. In the traditional understanding, Jesus put an end to all that by volunteering to satisfy God’s wrath, and since then those who follow him have had nothing more to fear from God. God has become a great friend who would like to get to know us all better, if we can find the time. And if we cannot, then God loves us anyway. “The fear of the Lord” has become as outdated as an ephod.
This is not true for the Native Americans I know, whose divine meetings have included glimpses of the God who is as far above them on the food chain as an eagle is to a mouse. When they will talk about this at all, they do not speak like mice whose bones have been picked clean. They speak like mice who have been lifted high into the heavens where they have seen themselves, the world, and the lives they lead with a terrible new clarity. Set down again, they cannot look at anything the same way they once did, which means that they cannot live the same way either. Because their fear has proved to be the means of their