This Sunday, we gather to explore the concept of “rehumanization”—the process of restoring dignity, compassion, and connection wherever it may have been lost in our relationships, communities, and society. We invite you to join us in the spiritual practice of seeing each person as whole and worthy, celebrating the beauty of human diversity while affirming our common bond. Join us as we reimagine what it means to truly be human, and to create a world where every soul is honored and embraced. Music Provided by Micha Schoepe & Paul Dankers
Wisdom Story: The Great Peacemaker
For our wisdom story this morning, I credit the scholarship of Barbara Alice Mann, a professor and author from the Seneca nation, Bruce Johansen, coordinator of the Native American Studies Program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a citizen of the Potawatomi nation, and the websites of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as well as the Oneida and Onondaga Nations for source material. I include this information because it is a tricky thing to share the stories of other cultures. Much harm has been done by well meaning people who took stories out of their original context and tried to make them their own. As but one example, think of how the stories of a poor middle eastern rabbi preaching about love and humility have been used to justify the ambitions of empires, the greed of kings, and the bloodlust of warriors for over two thousand years.
So, let’s not make a similar type of mistake here. If you are at all inspired by what you hear, I encourage you to seek out the sources I mentioned and others to learn more of the incredibly rich context behind this story. They will be up on our website next week, along with today’s recording. These stories are very precious and very powerful and I’m thankful to those who shared them. Without further ado…
Long ago, in lands to the east and the south of the Great Lakes, there lived people from five great nations–the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Seneca, the Cayuga, and the Mohawk–who were embroiled in ceaseless wars. Whether these were civil wars of a single people who had once been united or whether they were wars between two contrasting lifestyles–those still committed to living by the hunt, and those committed to cultivating the land, the stories do not definitively say. Maybe it was both.
One could argue that we are in the midst of just such a conflict now. Only this time, those who once cultivated the land are fighting for their old ways, while those of us who get our food from grocery stores and restaurants are upholding an economic model in which automation, factories, and laboratories produce the majority of our sustenance.
Regardless of the cause, it is said that one of these five warring nations–the Onondaga–was under the sway of an especially brutal and powerful leader–a cannibal and sorcerer named Tadodaho. He caused his people to become cannibals as well and they terrorized all of the other nations, leaving them fragmented, frightened, and fighting among themselves.
Now, perhaps this is mythology, the talekeepers making a connection between the greatly feared human leader Tadodaho and the greatly feared malicious spirit Windigo–a creature who parents warned their children about to teach them the perils and deceptions of hunger.
In these stories, the Windigo was depicted as a wandering spirit who could never be filled. Having eaten human flesh during the deep winter when food was scarce, this creature could now never be sated and so he wandered the earth consuming everything in his path. The more he ate, the hungrier he became. Perhaps the keepers of the traditions who passed these stories along were wanting to connect the Windigo’s ceaseless greed to Tadodaho’s ceaseless war, the dehumanizing influence of hunger to the dehumanization of human-as-food. In any case, what is well remembered is that Tadodaho was a breaker of taboos and a violator of norms and decency. It was said his evil showed forth in his crooked body and in the snakes that writhed on his head where his hair should have been.
One day, a man traveled down from the north. He was not from any of the warring nations but he had a vision that moved him so powerfully he determined it was his destiny to help bring it to fruition with his sisters and brothers in the south. Unfortunately, this man–whose name I won’t use because it is discouraged as a matter of respect, he is known principally by honorifics instead–this man had a severe speech impediment that made him difficult to understand. He was also an outsider–a stranger with unclear motives.
The first group he encountered challenged him to prove that his vision was a true vision. They asked him if he believed in it enough to bet his life on it. He said that he did and so they had him climb a tree over a great falls and then they cut down the tree. When he vanished over the falls and plummeted hundreds of feet to the pools below, they figured they’d gotten rid of a troublemaker and his reckless naivete. The next morning, however, when they saw smoke rising from a fire below, they realized this man’s vision was powerful indeed.
The man traveled deeper into the country at war and found his way to a longhouse that occupied a major crossroads. The clan who occupied the longhouse maintained neutrality, feeding and sheltering warriors who passed through but claiming allegiance to none. The clan mother was a brilliant and powerful woman named Jigonsaseh whose political and leadership skills had to be quite extraordinary to maintain neutrality in such a time. When she heard the northerner’s vision and thought about all the young men who were being wounded and killed in the wars, she decided to commit herself and her people to a side. The side of peace, the side of the vision.
It was slow going at first as the northerner and Jigonsaseh tried to convince allies to free themselves from the dominion of fear and anger and instead trust in a vision of something else when all around them was chaos. Particularly with the northerner’s foreign, tangled tongue, it was challenging to build more than a fragile and uncertain coalition.
They needed another spokesman, an insider who could inspire real trust. They found him in one of Tadodaho’s fiercest lieutenants–Hiawatha. As the story goes, the northerner was walking in the woods when he saw Hiawatha returning from a hunt with his victim–a fellow man–slung over his shoulder. When Hiawatha went into his home to cook the man, the northerner climbed onto the roof and looked down through the hole in the top where the smoke went through. Hiawatha saw the northerner’s reflection in his cooking pot and mistook it for a moment as his own. Moved by the beauty in this image, Hiawatha realized that no man with such beauty could be a cannibal. Therefore, he understood that he himself could not be a cannibal. The spell that Tadodaho had cast on Hiawatha was broken. He was free.
When the northerner came down from the roof, Hiawatha realized he’d misunderstood what he was seeing in the cooking pot but the northerner assured him he had not made any mistake. The beauty he’d glimpsed was his own as much as it was the northerner’s. They were reflections of each other, each of them equally human, equally unable to eat other human flesh.
Hiawatha committed to the northerner’s vision. But where the northerner was limited by his speech defect, Hiawatha proved to be an exceptional communicator. He carried the vision of peace across the land and made it seem not only realistic but inevitable.
Unfortunately, Tadodaho grew only fiercer in the face of the resistance. Clever and cruel, he and those under his sway lured Hiawatha into traps that ended up costing the lives of Hiawatha’s most precious loved ones, including his beloved daughters.
He became despondent for a time, going deep into his grief and abandoning the cause of peace. Jigonsaseh and the northerner gave Hiawatha his space, trusting the man and his awakened humanity implicitly.
Ultimately–and some say he was aided by spirits or creatures of the earth–Hiawatha developed a ceremony of condolence that is still practiced to this day. He wove together a wampum belt of little shells, pouring his grief into art, depicting the vision of peace in an image of nations working together in harmony. He then carried this belt from clan to clan, nation to nation, preaching the northener’s vision with an authority that couldn’t be doubted. If this man could find peace, they could all find peace. And the nations rallied together.
Ultimately, the people of the now united nations surrounded Tadodaho and his fiercest warriors, outnumbering them such that no military response could possibly succeed. Tadodaho had no choice but to surrender.
How did they deal with their awful, evil, monstrous foe? This embodiment of the darkest spirit of greed and rage and murder. The northerner–who is now known as the Great Peacemaker–gave the man … a massage. Or maybe it was some chiropracting. In any case, he worked out the kinks in Tadodaho’s body so that the man was no longer crooked. And Hiawatha combed out the snakes from his hair. When they were finished, Tadodaho stood before them as a healed human being. A whole human being.
After a ceremonial burying of their weapons beneath a great sheltering White Pine on the banks of Lake Onondaga, the people began to put into practice the details of the Great Peacemaker’s vision, for what he had seen was not just peace in the land, but a means to assure it.
His vision included a new way of organizing the leadership of the nations that would keep them united in a great confederacy–one that would combine respect for the hunt and cultivation of the land. The mothers of the longhouses, like Jigonsaseh, would choose the men who would travel to grand councils where representatives from each nation would discuss and reach agreement on matters of concern to all. The mothers had the ability to withdraw support from their representatives at any time and each of the nations had proportional representation, allowing for multiple checks and balances on the power of the leaders. Tadodaho became the first speaker of the confederacy. Centuries–or possibly a millennium later–the chief speaker is still called the Tadodaho. Collectively, they are known as the Haudenosaunee, although Europeans–in one of their many confusions–dubbed them the Iroquois.
When those Europeans brought their diseases and warmaking, which annihilated 90% or more of their population, the confederacy was of course ravaged. The American Revolution tested them even further, dividing the nations against each other in their alliances, but even under these apocalyptic conditions and stark disagreements, their republic endured.
An ever increasing number of scholars today are coming to the consensus that the living, breathing example of the Haudenosaunee and their representative democracy with its checks and balances and multiple branches of government was far more influential to the formation of the United States and thus modern democracy than has been credited. If you read the writings of Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Thomas Paine–you’ll find countless references to Native American examples, showing how the innovations that flowed from the Great Law of Peace solved for the challenges of democracy that the ancient Greek and Roman republics failed to surmount. There are countless more indications–including extensive attributions in the public and private writings of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among other founders.
The fact that the original Tea Partiers dressed in Mohawk garb might have been less an attempt to hide their identities (since everyone knew who they were) and more a political statement of solidarity with a different vision of government. Indeed, you need look no further than the back of a dollar bill to see a symbolic callback to the origins of our modern state.
When the Great Law of Peace was established on the shores of Lake Onondaga, an eagle came and perched on the top of the Tree of Peace. This eagle became one of the chief symbols of the unity and strength of the new confederation. Another symbol was even more essential, and it was in fact the very essence of the Great Peacemaker’s original teaching. You’ll remember that he had a significant speech defect that made it challenging for him to communicate. So how did he share this vision of his that inspired him to come down from the north?
The Great Peacemaker would hold up an arrow and show how easy it was to snap it in half. Then, he would hold up five arrows–one for each of the nations–and he would bundle them together. These, in their union, could not be broken.
If you look in the eagle’s talon on the Great Seal of the United States, you will see 13 arrows, one for each of the original colonies. Not only is this image representative of the early confederacy, but it was one of the foremost stories told to the colonists to inspire them to hold together.
If you are wondering where true power lies in this world, look no further than this almighty dollar and remember that once upon a time, a lone immigrant with a speech impediment and a vision of humanity in harmony forever changed the course of history.
Reflection
This reflection is called “Rehumanization” but let’s start with a quick definition of terms. Rehumanization is an antidote. It is not something you define without knowing what comes before it. Rehumanization is a response to dehumanization. So what is “dehumanization?”
As far as I can tell, there are three main forms of it. The first is what may first come to mind when we hear the term “dehumanization.” One way to dehumanize a person is to demonize them. To look at them and see in them something to be ostracized or hated, to make of them a scapegoat for our own darkness that we can’t bear to see. It is what we do when we talk of a “they” who are evil and rotten and corrupt and wrong. And it can lead to some very dark places.
We sometimes think that the printing press brought with it a wave of spontaneous enlightenment as the masses embraced such concepts as Copernicus’s heliocentric universe. It is perhaps useful to remember–as Yuval Noah Harari points out in his excellent book Nexus–that Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was far from a bestseller in its day. In fact, Harari writes, “when it was first published in 1543, its initial print run of four hundred failed to sell out, and it took until 1566 for a second edition to be published in a similar-sized print run. The third edition did not appear until 1617. As Arthur Koestler quipped, it was an all-time worst seller.”
But do you know what was a best-seller? A dominican friar and inquisitor by the name of Heinrich Kramer–having been dismissed by his order for his mentally unhinged fixation on terrorizing women turned to the new technology of the printing press to tell the world about a global satanic conspiracy he had just so happened to discover. His tract The Hammer of the Witches became the first mega bestseller, leading people to pile on theory after theory, publishing their own tracts and pamphlets, launching a craze that burned for a couple hundred years and cost thousands and thousands of lives as people demonized women and men, torturing and burning and slaying in their fear, thereby creating precisely what they feared most–an actual global satanic conspiracy. Though who the true satanists were would not become clear until long after the ashes had settled.
So, demonization is one form of dehumanization, and we know its effects well–from witch hunts to pogroms to concentration camps.
But there are other forms. Another way we dehumanize is to minimize. Any time we imagine that a single characteristic of someone tells us everything we need to know about that someone, we take away their humanity and replace it with an abstraction. Whether we are looking at the individual data point of someone’s race, nationality, gender, non-gender, political party, or vote–whenever we take a single aspect as the total picture, we miss the forest for the single weed. And yet, it is hard in a world of 8 billion to do anything but that. And while it is perhaps relatively harmless to do this when we are but 1 of the 8 billion trying to make sense of who else is out there, it can be a real problem when power comes into play.
This form of dehumanization is particularly widespread in the corporate world and modern government. When executives at the top of whatever pyramid need to make decisions, they cannot help but look at either markets or workforces, populations or simply statistics to guide their decisions. Not human beings. Not individuals. To stay in place at the top of these pyramids and to be effective at what they do, there is no other way. And from this minimization flows an endless stream of decisions with unforeseen consequences. Human consequences. Ecosystem consequences.
The third way we dehumanize, is to objectify. Rather than seeing others as fellow humans with inherent worth and dignity, we see obstacles or vehicles. Whether you’re an executive battling an opponent in a boardroom or you’re simply trying to drive home or navigate a grocery check-out line, when faced with others we often see little more than facades.
Demonizing, minimizing, and objectifying–each natural and even sometimes necessary reactions to a complex world–are, I believe, at the heart of most of what we call evil in this world.
So what’s the alternative? The antidote? Dare I hope: the cure?
Jack Kornfield tells a story he heard from Ram Dass who identified it as an old Japanese Zen story. It goes as follows.
There once was a wicked general who went from town to town disemboweling monks and killing all who resisted him. He and his army were an unstoppable force. One day he made it to a village and learned that all of the monks had already fled the monastery. All but one.
One old monk had stayed behind and the general’s men whispered nervously that this monk was not afraid of the general, themselves afraid that even whispering such a thing would make them the targets of the general’s wild temper.
When the general did hear the whispers, he climbed up the hill to where the monastery sat and stormed in, filled with rage and bloodlust. He saw the monk standing peacefully in the center of the hall and the general strode up to him. “You fool,” he shouted, grabbing the hilt of his sword, “don’t you realize you are standing before a man who could run you through without blinking an eye!”
A moment passed.
“And do you realize,” the master replied calmly, “that you are standing before a man who can be run through without blinking an eye?”
The general was defeated. He bowed deeply and left.
When I went to the internet to confirm the source of this story, I found a version of it (also crediting Ram Dass) on the blog of a Vietnam veteran who still remembered–50 years later–the day that he and his platoon came upon a house filled with enemy propaganda. Their orders were clear–to burn the house. He writes: “I was just about to give the order to burn the compound, when a woman appeared. I was not sure how the troops missed her, but she walked steadily and assuredly towards me, weapons now trained on her. I can see her clearly, etched in my mind’s eye and while I have buried this story deep in the passage of time, her image remains vivid.
“She was tall and proud. Maybe in her thirties or early forties. I don’t remember her features now but I do recall she was unflinching. Completely unafraid…. She was wrapped in a red, brown cloth, the colour of the earth. She wore amulets around her neck and on her arms, and a traditional head scarf. I remember she wore ankle rings.
“Alone she faced maybe fifteen armed, enemy soldiers. Our eyes locked. I remember saying something to her… But she gave no hint of wanting to communicate. I was a trespasser in her home; the ground of her ancestors. She was mother of this earth and she was willing us to leave. She was not hostile, just determined. She was the embodiment of her place and I knew if I burned her home, I would need to kill her as well. She and this place were as one.
“I acknowledged that and the fact I could never kill her. I felt both humbled and in awe of her courage. I ordered my men to destroy the propaganda and we left, with some grumbling from them. I turned to her as we gracelessly exited. I said sorry. She stood, glaring at us, her hands on her hips and her head to one side.
“She was the monk, I, the general and yes, she knew I had the power to run her through with my sword without blinking my eye.”
This soldier–and his platoon–like the general before them were bested by…
By what? What do you think gives such power to certain human beings that they can stand clear and firm in such situations?
…
After the horrors of the last century, it would be perfectly reasonable to point out that the tools of the general–of the Windigo spirit I mentioned in our wisdom story–are more indiscriminate and powerful than ever. No matter how resolute the monk or the woman, there is no arguing with a nuclear bomb. But is that really any different? After all, the truth the general and the woman both seemed to know was that in the face of wild violence they could easily be run through.
What I suspect–or at least what inspires me most about these stories–is that when I think about what could ever grant me that kind of courage–that kind of strength of heart–it is the understanding that even if I am run through there is something absolute behind me that can never, ever be damaged. That is what I truly am and that is impermeable. It is showing that to the general that defeated him. It is showing that to the soldier and his men that turned them all away.
But what is that?
I want to call out a few of the words from the beautiful song that Micha and Paul performed for us at the start of the day:
“I’ll show you good, restore your faith
I’ll try and somehow make a meaning of the poison in this place
Convince you love, don’t breathe it in
You were written in the stars that we are swimming in
And it has no name, no guarantee
It’s just the promise of a day I know that some may never see
But that’s enough, if the bottom drops out
I hope my love was someone else’s solid ground
Don’t stop trying to find me here amidst the chaos
Though I know it’s blinding, there’s a way out
Say out loud
We will not give up on love now.”
What is more powerful than swords, than guns, than bombs? What fabric knits together a universe of such abundance that each of us is welcomed in and given space to play out our story–be it romance or comedy or tragedy or a mix of them all?
Let me tell you why I am not afraid right now–concerned, yes, preoccupied, often–but not afraid.
To breathe a breath in this world–even a single one–is grace. It is to enter into a conspiracy of love in which everything is tilted in the favor of life–even death. For is it not death that creates space for life to renew and evolve and take on the many countless expressions that give such beauty and variety to all that is?
And what is the nature of this love at the heart of this grand conspiracy?
On the one hand, it is everything. It’s the whole game. It’s gravity. It is the strong and weak nuclear forces. It is electromagnetism. It is kindness and compassion, forgiveness and far-seeing, peace and wild passion.
Love is knowing who and what we are–not just the best parts shining in some holy, silver-lit abstraction–it is the wholeness of us.
It is loving our crudeness, our baseness, our attachments, our ignorance along with our playfulness, our hopefulness, our sweetness, our gentle vulnerability.
It is loving Gollum from the Lord of the Rings, not just because we learn that he once was a happy hobbit who became corrupted when he glimpsed a glimmer of gold and thought it was the answer to all of his wanting and therefore we can feel sympathy for him as a victim of a power beyond his control. It is more than that. It is loving the gray, feral, untrustworthy, sharp-fanged beast who held the ring for years in a darkened cave–slavering over his precious. It is loving him not just because what he did for those years in the cave was exactly what kept the ring out of the hands of the evil sorceror trying to conquer the world and not just because holding it so long eventually delivered the ring into the hands of Bilbo Baggins who would eventually pass it to Frodo who would carry it all the way to Mount Doom. It is loving Gollum who, when Frodo reached the end of his ability to resist the call of the ring, stole the ring back and–because of his overreach–carried the ring the rest of the way into the fires below. Indeed, is he not in some sense the true Lord of the Rings? After all, he is the one who carried the ring that ruled them all the furthest, who kept it away from the powerful long enough to ensure that its harm never fully overwhelmed the beauty of middle earth and he is the one who ultimately destroyed it.
But it is not just loving this hideous creature for what he–perhaps inadvertently–did. Love involves loving him for all that he was–a hideous monster, a fool, a victim, and a savior. A whole being.
What must it be like to carry a wound so deep that nothing can possibly fill it?
I actually think we know.
I think we all know.
I think we are all on a fellowship quest bearing a ring of power that is hollowing us out from the inside.
I think we all are the recipients of demonization, minimization, and objectification. The process of dehumanization begins even before we are born as we are assigned abstractions–races, nationalities, genders, names–that will represent us. Once born, we are weighed and measured, and over the next many years we are sorted into countless categories and boxes. We are chastised–often quite lovingly–for the parts of us that ought not be there.
Now listen–I am not saying any of this is innately bad or wrong. It is simply what is. It is how we have found a way to manage being together in this world. But it is dehumanizing. Profoundly. It is a way to reduce, to ostracize, to objectify the wholeness of who we are and transform it into levers by which we can be managed. It is to be categorized and sorted into our places within the various pyramids stacked upon the earth and known as societies.
The pyramids are but labyrinths and each of us is granted a map to find our way free. Each of us is capable of rehumanization.
Love is the north star. Truth is the vehicle. Our humanity is the ground.
I believe there is no more powerful thing in this world than a human being who is fully settled in these three great strengths.
I believe this is precisely what the world is calling forth right now.
We can read the book of history and see its pogroms and witch hunts, its Hitler and Stalin and Mao. But when we do, let us also ask if there is anything that has ever overcome the forces of fear, of darkness, of brutality?
Do you remember what ended the reign of Joseph McCarthy and his dark apprentice Roy Kohn when those two men scourged Washington with their communist witch hunts? It was a single man, Joseph Welch, grounding himself in his full humanity and speaking the truth that everyone else was too afraid to speak to McCarthy. He simply asked, in defense of a fellow human being: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” And McCarthy was done.
Mahatma Gandhi discovered in South Africa that there was something stronger than pyramidal power. Satyagraha: a word that combines persistence and truth. Martin Luther King, Jr. picked up this power in his turn. Both men were ultimately run through by bullets but I believe each of them were waving to us all along from the ground of freedom.
I believe each of them might have sung along to these words:
“I’ll show you good, restore your faith
I’ll try and somehow make a meaning of the poison in this place
Convince you love, don’t breathe it in
You were written in the stars that we are swimming in
And it has no name, no guarantee
It’s just the promise of a day I know that some may never see
But that’s enough, if the bottom drops out
I hope my love was someone else’s solid ground
Don’t stop trying to find me here amidst the chaos
Though I know it’s blinding, there’s a way out
Say out loud
We will not give up on love now.”