“Revitalization Movements and Castles Made of Sand”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
April 29, 2007
READINGS: ANCIENT AND MODERN
Our first reading is from the Tao Te Ching by the ancient Chinese Taoist founder Lao Tsu. From Chapter 54:
What is firmly established cannot be uprooted.
What is firmly grasped cannot slip away.
It will be honored from generation to generation.
Cultivate Virtue in your self, And Virtue will be real.
Cultivate it in the family, And Virtue will abound.
Cultivate it in the village, And Virtue will grow.
Cultivate it in the nation, And Virtue will be abundant.
Cultivate it in the universe, And Virtue will be everywhere.
Our second reading is is by Anthropologist Merwyn S. Garbarino, who in his book, “Native American Heritage,” wrote in a section titled, The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee:
Living a cramped and meaningless life on rations allotted by the federal government, the once free and proud Plains Indians turned to mystical comfort. Wovoka, a Paiute, claimed to have received a vision that directed him to journey from tribe to tribe and teach a new way of life, a new doctrine. His message was to give up European ways, to return to old customs that had been practiced before the Europeans arrived, to go back to the simple life, with no guns, no alcohol, no trade goods. Give all that up, and dance. Dance, and the Europeans would depart, leaving the land once more to the Indian peoples. Dance, and the great warriors of old – all the departed Indians – would return.
Some tribes took this as a message to return to the simple life; others saw it as aggressively anti-white; but everywhere the people believed that the dancing would bring back the Indian dead. For that reason, this religious or revitalization movement [emphasis mine] came to be known as the Ghost Dance. Throughout the West, even into California, tribes laid down their arms. Wearily they turned away from conflict, and they danced. A slow hypnotic dance it was, not anything wild and frenzied. Some groups wore shirts, called Ghost shirts, which were supposed to give magic protection against bullets.
SERMON: “Revitalization Movements and Castles Made of Sand”
I remember, as a college undergraduate, coming across the piece by anthropologist Merwyn Garbarino that we just heard in our reading. Garbarino articulated a thought that has stuck with me, even haunted me, ever since I first read it. It was the idea that waning cultures engage in what he called, “revitalization movements.” For the Native American culture such movements were an attempt to go back to the “simple life, before the European invasion.” In other, more egocentric or empire cultures, such movements are an attempt to hearken back to what one might think of as the “glory days.”
Garbarino just sort of mentions the thought in passing, by way of his introduction to the practice of the Ghost Dance, a Pan-Indian ritual of the late 19th Century that was outlawed by the U.S. Government. Eventually, response to practice of the ritual led to the brutal massacre we know as Wounded Knee. The idea of the ceremony was that if Native Americans would simply deny the reality brought on by the European invaders who all around them, and dance with the ghosts of, and even as though they were the ghosts of their ancestors, they would become impervious to the onslaught and the bullets, they could reverse the passage of time and custom and the newly evolving culture. In this way, they could once again live as in earlier times, within the balance and harmonies of nature. This revitalization movement was a response to the loss and the fear of more loss of a way of life that was precious and meaningful. Their view was that their life had been stripped away, not by a people of greater spiritual or moral virtue, but of more powerful technology, and that they could prevail with spiritual superiority.
Throughout the history of civilizations, as nations and cultures have risen and fallen, there have been revitalization movements, which have occurred during it culture’s decline. Just as waves on the ocean rise and then fall, just as day gives way to night, and summer gives way to autumn, so do civilizations ebb and then flow. On the way up, there’s lots of expansion and energy and creativity. Frontiers are approached and surpassed. Challenges are met and mastered. Hope is not an agent of survival, but one of new possibilities. Life itself is an expression of hope and potential and promise.
Beyond the zenith of a culture though, the downslide is not so exhilarating. Expansion gives way to retraction. Creative energy is replaced with efforts at maintenance. Hope does indeed become a yearning for survival, and life a test of endurance.
We can easily trace these patterns throughout the history of Western Civilization from the pharaohs of Egypt through the Ancient Greek civilizations, to Ancient Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, and even into the Third Reich as a revitalization movement of the Holy Roman Empire. And we can trace them throughout the mid-Eastern and Eastern cultures, too. When a civilization ceases to grow, it begins to die. Very often, when it begins to recognize that such a shift has occurred, there are these efforts – revitalization efforts – which attempt to impose attributes existent, or imagined to have been existent in the expanding era of the culture. Great pains are made in attempt to regain the power and the glory that once was, or that was at least imagined.
In the case of Native Americans, the threat that stemmed the tide of growth came from without. The same has been true of many civilizations. In the case of the Roman Empire though, the empire began to rot from within. Once it was dead at its core, it was fairly easy pickings on the periphery. Castles, once made of stone, turned to sand. And despite all efforts to maintain them, without a creative, vital spirit at the center, they were destined to be washed away in the tides of time.
The haunting part of all of this for me is that even way back, the first time I read Garbarino’s piece on revitalization movements, I could recognize telltale signs of revitalization efforts in our own American culture. As the decades have passed since then, I’m afraid that I’ve come to recognize them more and more. I’m not here this morning as an agent of doom, but I pray as a bearer of hope. To deny the reality we live in may provide false hope, and false hope provides little nourishment for the soul. At the beginning of our worship services each week we say that we are welcoming of all seekers after truth, beauty, justice and compassion. Perhaps, if we are willing to face truth with faith, it will help lead us to beauty, justice and compassion. Perhaps if we are willing to give up on cultivating or re-cultivating the past – what once was – we will be better able to cultivate a sustainable future or what Lao Tsu referred to as true virtue: in ourselves, our families, our villages, our nation and beyond.
And so, in an effort to gain perspective on this world we live in, one that might help us to look at it in a new way, so that we might invent a new approach to living in it, I’d like to take some time this morning to look at how elements of a revitalization movement seem to have become a part of our own cultural landscape. Perhaps we’ll be able to see how these elements are attempting to replace creativity within our culture, and then how we might counter those fatal tendencies with more life-affirming ones. And then perhaps we can take a few minutes to notice how these same dynamics might come to play in the course of a human lifetime. In the course of our own lifetime there is also both ebb and flow, and there are the possibilities of our responses to them.
There are so many areas of our national life that fit into the patterns of revitalization movements that it really is alarming. I’ve thought of several and I imagine you could think of a lot more. There are the shifting sands around abortion rights and the debate over family values. There are the embattled sands around the institutions of oil, education and prisons. We have increasing numbers of laws proposed to impose and enforce patriotism, issues of church and state – God and Godlessness. Even the welfare state can be seen in this light.
In the madness of what’s going on in our country and in what this country is doing abroad, I’m truly afraid that we are heading into something like the Ghost Dance, where we have totally lost touch with what’s going on around us. And it’s not as though we’re being done in by some outside force, no matter what our officials in Washington might be selling. Our decay has begun from within.
There was a time in our history when there were no abortion laws, but there was never a time when there was no abortion. The values that were present before legislation existed didn’t likely have much to do with questions regarding the ethics of right to life. The values stemmed from questions of necessity. Just as is the case today, there have never been great numbers of proponents for abortion. Even in earlier times, folks didn’t think it was a great idea – simply a need. But actually abortion laws began to appear in the early 19th Century; New York was one of the first states. What’s at issue in the newly recurring abortion rights debate, according to many constitutional law scholars though, is more of a battle over whether women need protection from themselves, and implicitly an assumption that they have a propensity to make the wrong decisions in regard to their own bodies. Sounds more like misogyny than anything else.
The lines that we might draw here to connect the dots hearken to a more clearly patriarchal family structure. After all, our rise to power as a nation was led by families where father was the head of the household. Never mind that we’ve doubled our work force and the possibility of productiveness. Never mind that women have been able to master the roles formerly ascribed to both women and men, while very few men have been able to straddle that chasm. Father knows best, and once again, women need to toe the line. Don’t they?
The current debate over other family values is similar. Family values are often code for heterosexism. No single-mother households allowed; no gay or lesbian households allowed. This is the way it was when we achieved greatness, wasn’t it?
The truth of the matter is that in our expanding years, we were not as mobile a society as today. Family values came out of extended families where individuals had plenty of opportunity to talk with others and to have economic and emotional needs met by a much wider family network. There were significantly fewer divorces because there was considerably more support for each family unit. There were Boston Marriages and special friendships – a far cry from equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians, but a much further cry still, from a constitutional ban against gay marriage.
If we want to stop shrinking our potential as a thriving and growing nation, we’ll need to figure out a way to develop wider networks of support, so that families need not live in such isolation. We’ll have to be serious about really valuing the family, by way of supporting all families where love and nurturance serve as building blocks for a society that is still building its future. And when it comes to difficult, personal issues, we’ll need to have faith in our citizenry, faith that appropriate decisions will be made. Less effort in regulating other people’s behavior will provide more energy and creativity for the truly challenging questions that lie before us.
I would be remiss in such a review to fail to at least mention the role of slavery in the rise of our American Empire. The implications here are staggering when we note the continuing presence of racism, ghettoization and poverty as those dynamics continue to limit the experience of huge numbers of African-Americans, and as they continue to diminish the character of our entire nation. But there is perhaps nothing more emblematic of America’s rise to prominence as the development of the automobile and the subsequent automotive and oil industries and the highway system.
The automobile is to the American psyche, part and parcel with mom and apple pie. There are many other industries that also represent American expansion, but none more illustrative. The automobile and its subsequent industries represent individualism, sassiness and know-how. Every citizen in the republic has the opportunity to wield the power of nearly three tons of steel, capable of traveling over 100mph. The car is not only a symbol of our culture’s strength, but often of each individual’s worth within it.
It just happens, (who’d have guessed 100 years ago) that the fossil fuels necessary for stoking our auto mania would poison our air and that they would eventually become so scarce. Who’d have guessed that the acreage paved over with concrete for roadways and parking lots would cause frequent occurrences of epic flooding? Who’d have guessed that the auto industry would become such a liability?
Our response to these particular realities has been perhaps most like the classical revitalization movements of ages past. Our cultural denial is incredible and at a phenomenal cost. Private automobiles are bigger than ever; the federal government even gives special tax incentives for the biggest ones. Global warming continues to rise as a result, and with it a staggering number of cataclysmic weather events. As the world runs short of oil, our response is to create the need for a war so that we might better protect our oil supplies.
For me, this is probably the most Ghost Dance-like activity of our age. We are sending our young men and women into harms way, with the delusion of the braves at Wounded Knee. We assure them that they are impervious to the bullets and onslaught directed at them. Why? Perhaps only to maintain our investment in an icon of an earlier era, an unfortunate icon because of its total lack of sustainability.
If we, as a people, were willing to let go of this iconoclastic relic, there would not only be better hope for our own future, but for that of all the world. There are an infinite number of creative and sustainable means for energy and transportation that can carry us into a future of possibilities and endless potential. How long will we participate in this dance of death, before we replace it with a vision that is life giving, that is in reverence to this interdependent web of existence of which we are a part? Embracing that we are not the whole thing, but merely a part of the whole?
By this time I have to imagine that some of you are beginning to wonder, “Okay, I get it. We need to change our approach to doing things. I already understand that and I’m waiting for others to understand it too, so we can get on with it.”
The thing is, I’m afraid, we really don’t understand it, not as a culture or we would change it. Its continuation and our complicity in it should assure us of that. Revitalization movements require complicity. We need to find the places where our footprints cover territory that goes beyond our intentions. We need to find ways that are beyond compliance, beyond pleasant civility, to reassert vigor – an authentic and reality based energy – in the creation of an ever burgeoning culture, expanding to incorporate the sustainability, not just of our country, but our world. And we can’t afford to wait for anyone else to get it. We need to get it. We need to act.
Even as I have these thoughts I’m struck by words attributed to Jesus in the book of Matthew: “Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; if it is the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”
Letting go of what has been, letting go of what we have been, allows us to go on toward what we yet might become. Preserving our fantasy of what once was does not prepare us for the certainty of our eventual deaths. It does not encourage life. It only hastens death. And now I am switching the focus from our national lives to our personal ones; they are not so very different. How do we do our part to reconcile such a massive movement of denial and the imposition of strictures intended to coerce cultural compliance? Clearly there is no simple answer, but we do it as best we can, by paying attention to and responding to the cultural issues, to be sure.
But even more, when we recognize that when an individual ceases to grow, he or she begins to die. We move beyond revitalization and into living by living our lives in ways that connect us to the reality of our lives, in ways that allow us to live them more fully and meaningfully. We do it by recognizing that each moment is a gift, whether it is a moment experienced in deep pain or in great bliss. We do it by recognizing that we are part of the interdependent web of existence. We do it by recognizing that we are a part of this great mystery that holds us in being, that somehow wanted and still wants us to be. We do it by standing in this great mystery and responding to it with awe and gratitude and service. We do it by recognizing that we are not standing alone but with others and with an entire planet, that are likewise a part of that same mystery that continues to give us breath and the capacity to love.
We do it by growing our faith in the unity of all things and then by living a life that is an expression of that faith. We do it by letting go of our pasts, so that we might move into our futures, in a way that allows us to be newly born into them, redeeming our old wineskin sarcophagus for the possibility of renewal and sustainability and even joy. We can do this, knowing that we will one day no longer be here, by being kind to ourselves, kind to one another, and kind to our planet.
In the life of our nation and in our own lives there are so many influences that encourage us to hold onto what has been, or even to what we might think has been. To be willing participants in attempts at re-creating visions of the past is a frightening prospect. But to be aware of our compliance in them allows us to choose differently. And the choice, of course, is always ours to make. Let us choose life.
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