Telling Stories

While there is no story at all unless it has at least two sides, when it comes to ego's narrative lines and epic paragraphs, we have great difficulty in casting ourselves as other than a one-sided protagonist story, which others might see as including too much self-indulgent glory. Winona LaDuke tells a worship story of the Anishinaabe defending their sacred home with support from the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, against further mining investments of commodifying Earth antagonists, represented by the State of Michigan. This story is about copper mining investors against people who worship Earth as sacred Habitat, Elders of one EarthTribe extending family, across species, and back across first dawn of Time. You have already guessed who is winning. Why is that? The quality of our spiritual and ecologically healthy lives depends on questions challenging competitive one-sided empowerment assumptions. But, you are right, I suspect, if you guessed that both sides often lose when we join arenas of competition. The RepublicanRuling White evangelical Christian State of Michigan ruled against the Anishinaabe and against their own sacred Scripture and spiritual experience. Water and land, they said, cannot be sacred, cannot have spiritual development significance and deep and rich and wide meaning because a protected place of worship must be inside a building. I don't have a PhD in King James Bible Studies, but I do have a Master of Divinity degree from a duly licensed and officially accredited Christian seminary in the U.S. and I'm fairly sure I remember Christian Worship takes place, rather uniquely, in human hearts and minds and bodies, wherever they might happen to be located in space and time, inside, maybe, but, for many, preferably outside. Most of the history in the Bible is worship outside history. Surely rock gardens were Eden's first cathedrals. Why would the State of Michigan pretend otherwise? Why would KingJames Bible thumpers and HellFire prophets, patriarchal evangelists and patriotic disciples of God's omnipresent Love allow their regulators and legislators and executives, acting in their HolyScriptures name, tolerate such a clear misrepresentation of worship as taught and lived by JesusChrist, pretty much outside and especially sweating blood in gardens and walking on sacred water? Why accept such an absurd misconception of worship without economic or political or personal or vulnerable question this is patently absurd one-sided stealing for money-making redistribution purposes from spiritually rich to feed toxic desecration to all residents of Michigan and Lake Superior and Turtle Island. Absurd to confine worship indoors to anyone from anywhere who has had the natural-spiritual experience of being born from any sacred matriotic womb of God's EarthTribes. Intolerable rape of Truth to any healthy Christian with opportunities to worship outdoors while reading Psalms and Proverbs and natural-spiritual Sacred Parables about harvesting grace planted in seeds of divine gratuity. What is truly healthy faith within our buildings of worship is merely a pale reflection of truly spiritual experience derived long before we built buildings as defensive shelters against sacred elements of MotherEarth. I have known authentically patriotic Christians to find more freedom worshiping God on sacred rocks born of spirited Lake Superiors as compared to claustrophobia while boxed up inside binding fear and threat constraints of evangelically booming buildings and fundamental absence of spiritual discernment constraints. Worship, like Wonder, looks for God's Healing Justice and Peace, to let go of stuckness in Retributive Vengeance is DivinePower over Lake Superior commodification issues about who and what and where is most biblically saved after God's Word has spoken first and last outdoor spiritual experiences, voices of Earth's sacred natures and divinely-inspired Great Spirits.