When Christopher Columbus approached the islands of North America just over half a millennium ago, he and his shipmates were received with warmth and wonder. Arawak men and women swam out from the beaches of the Bahamas, curious about this strange large craft nearing their shores. As Columbus and his sailors reached land, the Arawaks welcomed them with food and gifts. Their hospitality was immediately evident to Columbus and his crew.
Bartolome de las Casas, a contemporary of Columbus and a Spanish priest, transcribed the explorer's journal. "The Indians," observed Columbus, "have large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time....They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions....With fifty men," calculated Columbus, "we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." Las Casas proceeds to document the large-scale ravage of the Arawaks and of hundreds of Native American communities.
While Columbus' sojourn to the "new world" has been hailed by Western Europeans and European Americans as a pivotal discovery of uncharted terrain, the Arawaks and their counterparts across central North America discovered the seed of an emerging political state that has long vacillated between lifting and leveraging yokes of oppression.
The record of Las Casas comes to us through the pages of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Zinn tells the story of Columbus' arrival from the "viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees.....of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills....the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem...." He presents the narrative of our nation through voices that have been muted in the history books to which we have grown accustomed.
What does it mean to discover a country? Who discovers what? Who discovers whom? And what does it take to discover uncharted terrain?
What if.... Columbus had recognized a different kind of opportunity? What if he had observed the social behavior of the Arawaks and discerned it as alien to his previous experience but worthy of respectful consideration? What if Columbus and the legions of other European explorers had considered that they too were being discovered and could expand their vistas in extraordinary ways if they attended to this "counter-discovery?"
Communal sharing and reverence for the world of earth, sea, and sky infused the behavior of countless communities of humankind scattered across this continent long before 1492. There was respect among these early North American villagers for the fragility of what we so commonly refer to as "the lower forms of life." There was a covenantal relationship with life that preceded human life in its appearance on the earth.
To romanticize the social systems of our Native American brothers and sisters would be naive and probably patronizing. All was not love and bliss. There was conflict and aggression, revenge and warfare. There was periodic retribution for the atrocities committed by those who sought to seize and conquer. But there was, in the words of Wallace Black Elk, the capacity to "see more than they could tell and understand more than they could see." I wonder if such capacity is not always present in a community that seeks to live in harmony with the fragile of the earth and to integrate into the "sacred hoop" discoveries that catapult the status quo.
"It takes a village to raise a child" is an aphorism brought to public consciousness through the advocacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton. But its source is Africa, a continent of nations whose cultural values of harmony with the earth and social interdependence have rendered it particularly vulnerable to those who would exploit and export its rich and varied resources. "It takes a village to raise a child" are the words of villagers who seek to live in harmony with earth's new arrivals, who bring to the village the precious gift of unfettered vision and facile discovery.
There is no perfect family; there is no perfect extended family. There is ample reason not to tout the mere concept of community. But there is reason to explore the potential in any unit of community for discovery of what lies beyond it. When voice is given to every segment of a village and those voices are duly heard, that village embarks on a journey to wholeness.
Who I am and the extent of my penchant for wonder and discovery rest in my experience of community. My family, my home towns and home cities, my varied clusters of friends, my spheres of academia and church all have shaped my capacity for clear...and blurred....vision. Let me be more specific. In the small town in Iowa where I grew up, I was privileged. My family sustained my many needs. My schools esteemed my questions.....usually.... My church assured me that I belonged. But I remember Patty. My classmate Patty Paxton lived on the edge of town. Her family was poor, possibly destitute. I never connected Patty's contorted physique or vacant stare with malnutrition or minimal medical attention. But I did feel sorry for her and tried to befriend her, not realizing that such patronizing behavior was spawned in part by a community that unwittingly permitted some children to fall through the cracks.
Villages can be profoundly parochial, divisive, and marked by clefts that sustain a system of "haves" and "have-nots." Carroll, Iowa was a secure place to grow up.....for me. But my vision was impaired by my town's very own 96th Street, which was crossed with considerable reticence.
It takes a village that understands its greatest hopes for discovery of the larger vistas lie within its villagers who live at the margins of power--children, the elderly, the economically strafed, the culturally suspect. It takes a village like Reggio Emilia, in Northern Italy, where 95% of all children between the ages of three and six attend school; where the communal approach to education cultivates exploration and expression of the countless "natural languages" of childhood...."words, movement, drawing, painting, building, collage;" where the continuing commitment to its most vulnerable citizens--children--is backed by ample public support in the form of love and lire. The vision resident in Reggio Emilia has been shared and emulated worldwide. Reggio Emilia is a village of discoverers--young and old--that embodies the maxim "It takes a village....".
Each villager, whatever our community, country, or continent, is an eye that enlarges our vision of the whole. We are all engaged in a magnum opus of discovering the world within and beyond our city limits.
Village, discovery, and country are variegated beads on dual strands. The outer strand holds village as community, discovery as external vision, and country as the vista beyond our accustomed range of vision. The inner strand holds these constructs as elements of individual consciousness. It is best understood by resorting to what I call reverse dream analysis.
My understanding of the rudiments of one approach to dream analysis is to consider every figure in a dream a dimension of the dreamer. This permits me, as a dreamer, to integrate otherwise conflictive elements into a whole that I acknowledge as me. If a dream includes a friend of mine with whom I have had recent conflict, I am not dreaming about this other person, but about the part of me represented by this friend as she behaves in my dream. I never dream about "someone else" or "something else," but about what and how that entity plays out in myself. Through this approach, I usually discover a great deal about myself that is otherwise out of reach.
Now....the reverse approach is to take a non-dream episode, treat it as a dream, and consider it accordingly. As I ponder Columbus' "discovery" of America, as I regard the behavior of the Arawaks, as I muse on the source of the aphorism "It takes a village...." or observe how this plays out in Reggio Emilia. As I wonder what happened to Patty Paxton or contemplate the dynamics of "crossing 96th Street," I am ....the oppressive discoverer, the trusting greeter, the prophetic voice, the revered child. I am Patty Paxton, and I live on both sides of 96th Street. By incorporating the seemingly discordant pieces, I internalize the village and catch a glimpse of the whole. This is the inner strand of my necklace. Its complimentary beads include the internalized village, the expanded consciousness, the vistas that straddle my inner and outer worlds.
"We will grow old, and older."
says Robin Morgan, in her poem "The Ceremony",
One of us will die, and then the other.
The earth itself will be impaled on sunspokes. It doesn't matter.
We have been imprinted on the protons of energy herself, and so stand in another atmosphere,
where an undiscovered star we will never live to see casts shadows on a grove of succulents
we cannot yet imagine.
There our interchangeable features still vibrate and blur, each smile half of one circle,
each utterance spiraling like light upward in shudders along the spine
as if the moon and you and I were slivers of one mirror, gazing on herself at last."
[from Cries of the Spirit, edited by Marilyn Sewell]
"Mirror" and "prayer" share the same word in Hebrew--Tefila. The act of prayer is the act of seeing ourselves as we are. As a worshipping community, we seek to see ourselves this morning as we are and to go forth more able to act upon what we observe. We gather in what Forrest has described as "this little religious village on the Upper East Side." We carry with us the legacy of All Souls, a layered identity for a little religious village on an island purchased at a bargain price from our Native American ancestors in a nation that both sacrifices and celebrates our pluralism.
Each and together, we journey towards wholeness. The gift of our lives is to dance, if we will, in Black Elk's sacred hoop, discovering again and again the vistas beyond and within us.