Yesterday's visit to Project Horseshoe Farm in Greensboro and Marion manifested just this promise. In a pair of small Alabama towns, a remarkable community project incorporates heath care, neighborliness, youth support and individualized encouragement in ways that enhance both the individual and the village, both the spirit and the body, both the present and the future. There are all kinds of names for this kind of thing--the "wrap around" approach, etc--but seeing it work, witnessing the sense of pride and wellbeing permeating two small Alabama towns, is deeply moving and rich with a profound quality of hope.
I'm struck by Dr. John Dorsey's commitment to this project, and by his enthusiasm for its unfolding--not as an idea drawn out of text book and imposed on a frail community, but as a practice attentive to a vibrant people's gifts and hopes, and willing to collaborate, listen, develop and improvise in service to that people's values and aspirations. There's something decidedly genuine about him, and his project, and a practice that resists colonialism and fixed expectations. "We are all of us, all the time coming together AND falling apart," John O'Donohue once wrote. And Project Horseshoe Farm lives in the creases, between "coming together" AND "falling apart." AND--it's a holy place to live and work. A sweet conjunction, if there ever was one!
Again, in these visits, I'm moved by the faith of practitioners, whose faith is a daily walk alongside elders seeking companionship and children learning to read and hope. It's not the transactional faith that offers "eternal" salvation in return for word or two, or even a tear of two. It's not the memorized faith that promises certainty for repetition. It is, instead, the faith of a community, in which and for which we journey through feast and through famine, across the seasons of our lives, together. And in loving one another, learning (slowly) to care for one another well, we are healed and made safe together. Even the word "salvation" doesn't much work...it's something more dynamic, something to do with wholeness and holiness and shalom and salaam. Not mine to own or command, but ours to share.
Birmingham, AL
This morning we traveled north to Birmingham, and spent a provocative, inspiring, unsettling and memorable day with musician Ron Warren, an Echota Cherokee teacher, composer and storyteller. Ron played four different flutes, crafted by friends, colleagues and cherished collaborators. He invited us to follow his lead into reflection, meditation, journeys of the mind and heart.
And then, narrating his own recent experience, he challenged us to consider the stereotypes we often bring to conversations with First Nations neighbors and indigenous friends. Along the way, he was especially clear about the damage done by European Christian missionaries over many generations--damage that's ongoing in its impact on indigenous lives, culture, lands and wellbeing. That particular mindset--a kind of settler colonialism or White Christian Nationalism--"will not survive here," he insisted. It may take years and years and generations and centuries, he said; but it is (even now) engineering everyday the means of its own destruction. He added, "Of course, our (indigenous) ways cultivated over thousands and thousand of years here will continue to shape life on Turtle Island. We will continue to receive life and bless life and incorporate what's good and beautiful, and integrate the light of other cultures...so that when the missionary mindset has run its course...we will remain..."
I experienced Ron's testimony in my own flesh, chills, goosebumps, a sense of prophecy received. When he'd finished, he gently cradled one of his four instruments, as a lover with the beloved, and played a song. This song, he noted, may be an African American hymn, or it may have come out of the Civil Rights Movement, "but my people often think of it as the song we sung on the Trail of Tears." And he played. And we listened. Imagining a world beyond hate. And dreaming of King's beloved community. And eager to dismantle White Christian Nationalism as an idea, a governing strategy and any part of our American future.
