20
A New World for Our Children
We Ojibwe tend to be sentimental about our children, who are the heart and future of the people. Greatly loved as they are, their existence has such importance to not only their families but all Anishinaabeg that they will not know until they are adults themselves just how much they mean to us and the many reasons why.
Linda LeGarde Grover, Onigamiising
MY OLDEST SON, ELIOT, once told me that his favorite stories of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament are Moses parting the Red Sea to liberate his people from slavery and Jesus using his spit and dirt to make mud so he could heal a man of blindness. Whether he realizes it or not, Eliot is tied up in stories of liberation. He is wired for seeking justice and creating a world in which that justice becomes a reality. That is the power of storytelling.
I believe that all children are liberators, and we must remember what power they hold as our future. They marvel at the stories of prophets. They long to make things right. They see the face of God, Mamogosnan, Mystery, Kche Mnedo, Yahweh. They see the power women hold, before we taint them with toxic patriarchy and lies about what it means to be masculine. Our young women will lead us, and our young men will walk with respect and kindness, but sometimes, we must get out of the way. During the week of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in 2019, my youngest son, Isaiah Desmond (named after both the prophet Isaiah and the prophet Desmond Tutu), learned about King’s legacy in his kindergarten class. On drives to and from school we talked about King, and I reminded Isaiah of the importance of speaking the truth. Eliot and Isaiah’s school is the same school that wrongfully taught about the Pilgrims and Indians living in harmony during Thanksgiving, and yet here we were, my five-year-old son telling me that King died at the hands of another man, that he was assassinated for speaking the truth. We must tell our children the whole truth, and we must begin today, or we will repeat the same lies taught in our schools, often taught in our churches and by our government, again and again.
In our Potawatomi teachings, we believe we are in the time of the seventh fire, the seventh prophecy, when the young people will return to our ways, take up our traditions, learn our language, and put things right again. It must be the young people, because they are our future. I did not grow up knowing my tribe’s history. I did not grow up knowing that we had our own language or our own stories. I grew up celebrating the daring work of Columbus, just like every other child around me. Now that I am a mother, I want to give my children a better story, so that when they come up against injustice, they know the truth. I want them to have the truth embedded in their own stories so that when they come across injustice toward others, they can connect the dots and see that oppression comes in many forms, that the oppressed must stand up for one another, and that we must use our privilege in its varying layers to make change when and where we can. I want them to understand who they come from and that their identity carries privilege, privilege that they must use for good.
Empowering our children, whether they are our children biologically or children in our community, means letting the stories of the oppressed reach them, and if they are descendants of the oppressed, letting their bodies and souls sink into their own reality, so that they become the fire that burns bright for future generations. It means that sometimes we need to let our children see our anger, and we need to let them see us channel that anger into good that transforms something, someone, somewhere.
Lately, at the dinner table and then again at bedtime, my kids ask us to tell them stories from our childhood. We don’t tell them just the great ones, because, at the end of the day, our children don’t need to see us tallying off all the ways we’ve behaved or been blessed throughout our life. They need to see that we are human. They need to hear our stories of grief and pain, our stories of celebration and our stories of loss. We need to name some of our mistakes for them. We need to tell the truth about the systems that we work with and against. Our children will take those stories with them, and they will remember that it is important to listen to the land. They will remember that it is important to pay attention to mistakes and listen to their own souls. They will remember our stories, and our stories will shape them. Our own vulnerability with the truth will teach them to be vulnerable with the truth, and with that, they will lead us all.
One afternoon as we were getting ready to move from one house to another across town, I was going through old containers of our belongings. The week before, my therapist asked me if I had any journals from when I was young, and I found them, beginning in fourth grade, right after my parents divorced. I found journals with notes on every sin I believed I’d committed, every shame that hung over my head. I told God I was sorry more than I reminded myself that I am loved and valuable and sacred. The church taught me to view my life as a series of boxes to be ticked off, every day a choice: Did you save someone’s soul from hell, or didn’t you? Did you sin, or didn’t you? Were you pure, or weren’t you?
And yet, I hope something different for my children. I hope something for their future that begins with the sacredness of who they are, that begins with the sacredness of this earth and the many gifts she pours over us day after day. Richard Rohr writes, “We’ll never solve the way to a new life in our heads; we have to live our way into a new kind of thinking.”1 This is exactly what the children around us embody for us. If my children can remember that the things they experience, including all the people and creatures around them, are sacred, maybe they won’t grow up commodifying everything and everyone. Maybe they will learn what it means to live a constantly decolonizing existence, to value what is often forgotten around us, to love people and our creature kin simply because they were created to be loved.
In 2019 one of our dear friends who is Jewish invited us to his home for a Seder dinner to commemorate Passover. This same friend has brought us into his home many times, sharing his culture with us, letting us sit in his presence and see a reality that is different from ours but that teaches us the most powerful lessons on resilience and love. That night, as my two boys sat at both ends of the table listening intently, our friend Daniel walked us through the story of the Hebrew people—slavery, liberation, and joining in the work of freedom with their friends, including Indigenous people. My children will always remember dipping parsley into salt water to remind them of the bitterness of hate and slavery, and they will always remember singing and eating with the adults in the room as we talked about what freedom might look like for all people. In the church, instead of learning to fight against injustice, particularly for Jewish people, we were taught anti-Semitic messages, such as the notion that Jews were to blame for Jesus’s death. My boys will come alongside their Jewish kin, and also their friends of other religions and cultures, to fight against injustice, just as they join with their Christian friends to create a better, more loving world. Our children must learn that to become a more complete representation of God in the world, we must learn to see the sacred value of God in one another.
This is what I hope for my children, for your children, for my neighbors next door, for the people across the ocean that I will never meet. If we can learn to believe not just that people are sacred but also that the earth is sacred, that she is our teacher, that the creatures around us are sacred, maybe our children will be able to pave the way for a better future for all of us. Maybe they will be the ones who fight climate change, who save our rainforests, who write in their journals, “I know I am beloved, I know this earth is beloved, I know my neighbor is beloved.”
We live in an era in which the young people are leading us. They are leading us on issues of gun control; they are leading us on issues of climate change; they are leading protests and marches and making phone calls to their senators. They are changing systems that must be changed. Some of them are showing up to vote because they know that they are the holders of the future. They know that they have a chance to change things, and we should give them everything they need to do it. Being a parent means participating in the active, communal work of loving and letting go of our children, of preparing and sending out to make room on the earth for more love and hope. That stretches beyond religion, beyond culture, beyond family name. It is the work of the human soul.
And it is also beyond the work of parenthood. All of our children belong to all of us, because that’s what kinship does. It’s a reminder of that dust we came from and of that dust we will return to. It’s a reminder that while we are here, we make room for the next generation to spring up from the soil and create a new landscape. So our Native children lead us. Our children of color lead us. Our daughters lead us. Our queer and gender nonbinary children lead us. Our disabled children lead us. The ones that are forgotten lead us. The ones that are told to be quiet at the dinner table lead us, and if we are smart, we will let them lead. And if we are smart, we will see that we all return to Mystery, to Kche Mnedo, and we are simply to learn what we can along the way, to embody humility, to stand up to bullies and show them the way to love and peace.
Sometimes it doesn’t take much to change a life. We give what we can and stand beside people when they need it. That’s how it works. Peace.
Richard Wagamese2
When Donald Trump became president, we had a lot of conversations about bullying with our children. We saw a man who is a bully work his way up to become the leader of our country, and he was followed by bullies who supported him along the way. So we talked about bullying in schools, on the playground, at the park, at church, in our communities. We reminded our children that the way of loving people is never to force them. We talked about consent, about what it means to honor women, and why it’s important to sit with the people that no one else pays attention to. We talked about our capacity as people to bully the earth as well.
We found that when we gave our children a little information, they knew exactly what to do. They took our words to school in how they interacted with their friends and teachers. They took our words to the market where we buy groceries from refugees who work for far too little money and are asking to be valued for who they are, not just for the work they do. They took our words to church as they watch women lead. And they had dreams. We believe that children are close to God, because their lives are still fresh from birth; God speaks through our children, so we listen. They have visions of a better world, and they create that world day by day. Whether we have a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, our children are the future. They will be our reality one day, and they will pass those realities on to the next generation. Can we trust them to know what they are doing? Can we trust them to stand up to systems built on the worship of bullying hate and to have honest conversations about what it means to choose love instead?
On Easter Sunday at a church we used to attend in Atlanta, all the kids come from their classes into the worship service with instruments. Little drums, tambourines, and shakers all celebrating that Jesus has destroyed death. While I question what they’re being taught in church and whether they are given space to ask questions, I appreciate seeing their joy, not a joy based on acquiring salvation but a joy in knowing they are sacred, they are loved, and they belong. When I don’t really know what I believe about the world, about God, about who Jesus really is in the mess we’ve made of history, I look at the kids. If we aren’t careful, they can grow up to be like Trump, people who pervert justice and hold out their hands only to those with power. But if we let them show us the world they see, a world diverse and full of the mysteries of God, even our adult lives can change, and we can learn to be better people in the process.
What if all along, the story of the turtle and Original Man, the story of the muskrat diving to the bottom of the water to pull up dirt, the story of land growing where we’d least expect it—what if that’s the whole point? What if the whole point is that growth comes when we least expect it, and we return to the same sacredness we are born from?
The point is that while we are here, Mystery asks us to set aside what disrupts our humanity and belonging for the chance to see what is good and to fix the things that have been broken by hate.
As we go, let’s pray into the world what we believe is possible.
of what could be,
what is,
the memory
of what was yesterday,
ten minutes ago,
when we last blinked and realized
that what You are
is something we cannot grasp,
but long to know
in the depths of us.
Make room,
for we are simply beginning,
the sprout that will grow
and form the landscape of tomorrow.
Breathe on us, we pray.
Iw, Amen.