February 3, 2014
I’m on to my second of three gatherings in five days. One is grounded in the wellbeing of the landscape. Another is engaged in mending creation. And the last one seeks to understand hurting creation.
Yesterday I enter the space of Sacred Hoop, a congregational ministry, as folk blessed their place of meeting. This is a blessing of great significance. For the undertaking of Sacred Hoop is not easy. Sacred Hoop arises from the Native voice of the local landscape and brings with it a landscape theology rooted in an equitable relationship of reciprocity with Creation. In other words, that which makes up Sacred Hoop (the congregation you might say) encompasses the whole of Creation. Not an easy place to exist when your structural roots lie in the soil of an anthropocentric denomination, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), who struggles with biocentric theologies of harmony. Yet, if these roots of familial creation become the first to survive then the soil will begin to mend. That is worth a blessing!
Winter Talk begins today. The next three days is a birthing as well. For the first time, folk in the denomination of Sacred Hoops origin will come together to begin a conversation of what it might mean to become accountable to the land and the people of the Americas. With indigenous voices at the forefront Winter Talk folk will explore how accountability to Creation might lead to a mending of the American landscape.
The last gathering is on Thursday as the anthropocentric soil of Sacred Hoops origin has a conversation at to why American indigenous people have been held at the margins since conception. Not an easy conversation when marginalization has been normalized for generations. Yet, the richness is in the conversation. And conversation has the ability to lead to landscape mending and an end of Creational suffering.
It should be a number of days of incredible conversation. I look forward to talking about it in the near future!
Chewing the Cud 