A Reflection on St. Julian's 2024 Navajoland Pilgrimage by Kevin Daniel:
A Reflection on the St. Julian's 2024 Navajoland Pilgrimage by Kevin Daniel:
My prefaces, spoken or written, are famous, and oft times famously long. Context, as I see it, is every bit “the story” as the story is. The reverse might be true here, where my story prefaces the context -- a “context” best known as “NavajoLand,” and (a context) in which my thoughts and person currently dwell.
The story is as follows. While on the pilgrimage to the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico (around Farmington) my family (along with everyone with us on pilgrimage from St. Julian’s) heard the Cannon of the Ordinary — a Navajo woman and Episcopal priest named Cornelia — speak briefly about what it meant to be Navajo and Christian. She spoke on the sacred mountains of the Navajo people (each one situated in a cardinal direction and delineating the rough borders of the Navajo land). She spoke on the rites of passage performed by medicine women and elders of her Navajo community for her own daughter’s coming of age, and then another similar ceremony for the birth of her (Cornelia’s) granddaughter. Cornelia spoke of the significances to the Navajo people of the sacred mountains and the cardinal directions in relation to their story as a Navajo people, speaking as well of the different tenets of Navajo belief associated with each direction (and of the seasons associated with respective mountains and direction). She spoke of their Navajo acts of gratitude performed to the Earth Mother, thus poignantly and illuminatingly illustrating how that sense of gratitude shapes all actions and outlooks for Navajo peoples, orienting them to/with/by the compass directions figuring into each component meaning of those ceremonies. She spoke on how she and her people knew themselves as individuals and as a people entirely relative to their ancestral lands so defined by those mountains, and knew themselves, the Navajo, as a people defined both by journey, and being on a journey as a people.
This Navajo woman (who, in order to become a priest, had gone to a respected seminary far away in Virginia) expressed that there was equal footing between her Navajo spirituality and that of her Christian spirituality: neither was subservient to the other in importance to her people’s life, practices, and being. The Earth is the Earth Mother, and the Father in Heaven is the Great (Father) Spirit in Heaven. To each she bore an equally important relationship, though (from the sound of it) not an identical one.
Cornbelia spoke on how elements like corn and directions figured not only into her Navajo spiritual practices, both those of communion on Sundays, and in her personally performed ablutions in the streams of sacred mountains (undertaken in response to personally significant events). She spoke on the meanings and significance of the offerings of corn pollen from a small medicine bag, and the eating of corn cakes, and designs woven into baskets, all of which were as incorporated into Sunday service and into liturgy as they were into Navajo tradition. Incidentally, Cornelia narrativized the story of the gospel for the Navajo people in terms which revolved intertwining with Navajo spiritual beliefs and many of those symbolic elements.
However, the Father Great Spirit in Heaven was not seen as just another god among others respected by the Navajo — The Father is essentially needed (or, rather, needed essentially), and the importance of that spiritual relational need does take a centrality in her ontology, even if in some sense it didn’t take a preeminence in a manner which (as it does for some White Westerners) subsumes the importance of her Navajo spirituality. Cornelia, fully Christian, maintains a grateful relationship to the Earth Mother. The Father in Heaven, in Cornelia’s beliefs, is lord of lords, but still the Earth Mother is worthy of respect and gratitude, and the Earth Mother’s relevance and importance is not erased because of the sovereignty of the Father in Heaven. Nor is the story of Jesus the story of Jesus for the Jews, but of Jesus for the Navajo, in their culture and traditions, in their symbologies and terms.
It should be noted that these are my only cursorily made encapsulations of a brief, (only) hour long talk covering an expansive subject, and I didn’t get a chance afterwards to explore any questions I might have had concerning the accuracy of my understanding, such as it was. In other words, this barely scratches the surface of an encounter/experience which truly altered my mental landscape by bringing me into utterly new and foreign mental and emotional and spiritual environs. To be absolutely sure, in no small way it was an entirely new beautiful “place” we were brought into.
But this all is only the story of what happened, of encountering a teaching, and a teaching embodied in the life, belief system, and practices of Cornelia, Canon to the Ordinary, Navajo woman and Episcopal priest. My impression coming home from this pilgrimage (and specifically my impression centering upon and revolving around this singularly afternoon experience which stretched from St. Micheal’s Episcopal Church on the Navajo Reservation to the familiar sheep farm of Cornelia (which included the sites of the ceremonies mentioned earlier), well, that is an impression which characterizes the whole of my experience while on pilgrimage. It is an impression which paints a picture, which hues my memories of all the pilgrimage. And, well, that impression is found singularly in the notion of “lived gratitude,” as it was so witnessed in the whole life of Cornelia.
As with the various mountain peaks which are significant to the Navajo, this one notion of “living gratitude” defines a rough perimeter of the entire mental landscape traversed by my mind and heart, not merely as I was there in NavajoLand on pilgrimage, but in which I remain still, wandering and crisscrossing the land which is Life’s continual Pilgrimage, so explored as I (re)consider my experiences (then and there and now) in increasing depth. If (as I believe is the case) pilgrimage is not about the going, nor about the destination, but about what is brought back to the community from which I the pilgrim departed, brought back from the outset of going to enrich that returned to community’s growth, it's this notion of “living gratitude lived gratitude” (as seen practiced both by all the Navajo people I encountered there, and as encapsulated in the person of Cornelia).
“Lived gratitude” is more than just practicing gratitude, or having a discipline of thanksgiving. White Westerners and Texans kinda understand a notion of “lived freedom” which we encapsulate in slogans like “live free or die” -- though it is arguable how deeply we really live like we live that way. “Lived gratitude” goes beyond contemporary Christendom’s understanding of some pseudo-Pauline “religious” admonition to “give thanks in all things, whether well fed or hungry, living in plenty or in want.”
I would argue that to truly understand the Navajo nuance to that notion of lived gratitude you would, like me, have had to experience the presence of the Land, the land of high desert in which the Navajo situate their entire ontology, in which they not only define themselves by but in which they relationally encounter the spiritual presence of the Earth Mother. You would have to understand, have to experience as I did that It is not just a beautiful landscape, but also and certainly an uninviting one, a harsh and excluding one, wherein you feel Man has no place being there, no business being in that area. As a result, such a land as that Land is meant to be untouched by Man, and something entirely untouched by Man to thus thrive in or merely to live there. Something evolved specifically by those desert conditions itself -- conditions of a near mile high (above sea level) arid environment of scarcity, little shade, extreme temperature fluctuations, dehydration and desiccation, a land where thriving requires great distance and travel just to obtain the meagerest sustenance. A land where what water flows flowed from distant mountains as snowfall runoff, provided the weather the hash and dry year before saw the snows. By virtue of those specific evolutionary conditions alone only what comes from there is alone worthy of that land and of being in it. That, to me, is not the white American, and certainly not one of my particular, pasty white Welch roots.
But even this doesn’t get at the experience of that presence of the Land. Another way to try to put that experience is to say that being in the Land feels both like it has the presence of a protective father who doesn’t find you worthy of his daughter, and feels like being in the presence both of that utterly worthy, vestal daughter and that protective father simultaneously, as one singular experience. An experience of concavity and convexity, yin and yang at the same time, sorta. Doesn’t make sense, and it’s hard to articulate, even still, and I’ve tried for a long time and repeatedly to articulate it. The Navajo seem to understand when I said the land had a presence to it, but not so much when I tried to characterize that presence, so, yeah, hard to articulate even when done to those who know it.
The Navajo, as we pilgrims learned, have the story of themselves as a people springing forth from the navel of the land (of that land), and being on a journey through the life of themselves as a people. So, from such a place, with such (an inarticulable) presence, in which only that suited to living in it is meant for it, springs a journeying people who live “lived gratitude” in relationship to it as a spiritual mother (herself of no less significance in and to their lives than Christ whom they like us all are desperate for). The Navajo are of the Land, by their story and by their lifestyle and by their understanding, and they live grateful lives, and by virtue thereof thus prove themselves alone worthy of the land -- the land they see themselves beholden to, not possessing, and only traveling transient through. The only natives to the land of austere hardship and worthy of it, then, is a people who know lived gratitude to the Land, to the Earth Mother, for her abundance, even as seen in such a harsh and unaccepting place. Gratitude which manifests as lived gratitude and which even sees the land as a garden. The Navajo and the Land and a life of Lived Gratitude, all then in this way is the context of which my initial story of encountering Cornelia prefaces. A context of living gratitude itself, where only lived gratitude lived in relationship to all the abundance provided for you in a land of austere hardship. Some might apply the word “humility” here, but I think a different concept is more apt. It is the concept, maybe not readily obvious, of generosity: generosity to, from, of, and for the abundance within scarcity.
What the Navajo had was very little, but what little they had was everything, and it was sacred, and they shared it freely.
Honestly, admittedly, I could easily think that I don’t know how to do that, how to live a life of gratitude. I can barely self regulate my emotional volatility after any one of the many, daily disputes I have with my spouse or even with some stranger on the road. I don’t think I know how to look with honesty on my situation or upon my place and season in life, with all it’s hard aspects, and then give thanks therein as if it were my loving Earth Mother — especially because those hard aspects and disappointments and disillusionments all loom over and block out the scenery of anything for which to be grateful. And very certainly, even while I am ongoingly divesting myself of all past evangelical baggage of what I ought to be, and of what purpose ought to define life, I still nonetheless have a deficient ontology of my place in community and of my place within the physical world to which I might otherwise orient in gratitude, much much less than seeing the spiritual presence of the Earth Mother behind any of it. Central Texas, compared to Navajoland, is too green, too blessed, too rich, in so many ways. I have too much, and can only see what I don’t have, all while bereft of a spiritual relationship to (so rich a) place and its presence.
I could think I don’t know how even if i could, which I don’t think i can, but for one thing: I saw a Navajo woman priest joyously giving herself to living gratitude, to thankfully and trustingly dusting corn pollen and burying placentas and sharing corn cakes in places where it could otherwise be seen only how little there was there … and it was beyond fetching -- it was beautiful, and I can’t help but follow after that. It feels like following after Jesus, to be honest. In seeing her thoughts, her understanding -- an understanding she graciously shared -- I heard someone who saw generosity from the Earth Mother and Heavenly Father both. I saw how a life of lived gratitude looks for and sees generosity, everywhere and in any place. Even in scarcity like that of a brutally unapproachable landscape it sees generosity, and lives the practice of giving thanks for it, and sharing it. If I can’t see what I should be grateful for then at least I know it can be found because she found it in such a place… it can be found in seeing the generosity within the harsh “what is right now”: and of any now there is generosity of mercy, generosity of humility, generosity of justice, of peace-making, of kindness, of patience. I can see it by observing the recipients of it who are truly grateful for it. Maybe it is dying to all that I could have and really can’t have, to just be thankful for those things I do have, and for all which is given right now in what feels like austerity but is actually an abundance limited only by my lack of generosity.
Lived gratitude, living gratitude itself, is being generous with all that the living in the right now allows -- that is being fully present in this one moment, being present to being as fully generous as this moment allows. That’s my impression, my impression of the Navajo people, my impression of what they understand, and my impression of this particular pilgrimage and of pilgrimage in general. I went there to NavajoLand, and what I bring back is also more than what stays with me from having gone. What I bring back is truly what I have of where I remain still in in heart and mind. In short, I bring back a context to you, the context which is pilgrimage. The context of right now. The context of generosity and gratitude. I didn’t go to the mountain top and come back down a Moses with a message inscribed in stone. Rather, I send back a “word” of myself who remains there upon the mountain, the shine of the experience still radiating within memory upon the face in a memory, and upon the face of a land (and that land’s presence) which outlines the context of my, of our pilgrimage now.