Tiospaye

"Relation."  If there was one word, one idea that I could use to describe what principles guide the traditional Lakota worldview, it would be "relation."

Each morning, after working the radio station and praying with the 3rd graders of Sapa Un Academy and my housemates, I return home in order to practice and study the Lakota language.  Anyone who can remember my days of Latin at Fordham can let out a hearty chuckle, because they will remember that my language study single-handedly destroyed hopes of the Dean's list for the first 2 years of my college career.

I am happy to say, however, that I have found real joy and passion in my study of the Lakota language.      Part of this has to do with the fact that, as I study the language, I am unable to avoid (as if I would want to anyway), the philosophical worldview that drives the language itself.  It has been a challenge, not only because it is a new discipline and thing to learn, but because it requires me to completely open my mind and heart to a new way of thinking.

I'm not just talking about ordering subjects before verbs, or expressing different gender endings.  As it was explained to me by new Lakota friends and by the author of the book I use - there is a difference between speaking English in Lakota, and speaking Lakota.  In other words, to truly speak Lakota, you need to understand the worldview it developed out of, the cultural assumptions, the spiritual tenets - otherwise, you are just using Lakota words to express a Western worldview, with all of it's assumptions and baggage.  This was why, when the United States government sought to acculturate and rub out the Lakota ways of life, targeting and forbidding the use of the Lakota language was something they focused on, often through viscous beatings.

In my study thus far, I have come to understand that the idea of "relation" is absolutely key to grasping the Lakota worldview.  Everything is expressed in term of relation - greetings are not simply a "good morning" (which has been translate as 'hihanni waste', meaning 'something good has happened this morning'), but rather an addressing of a person in the proper relative term.  This was one of the very first lessons I have learned, as understanding and respecting relations to others is important.  

Something that struck me as so strikingly different from my own American culture was the types of terms used to greet one another.  Typically, when addressing someone, even a stranger, they are given one of the following terms: tanhanshi, hankashi, sic'esi, cepansi (all of which have diacritics I have not been able to locate on the computer yet).  Each of these terms has been translated as "cousin," and is used depending on whether the speaker is male or female and whether the person being spoken to is male or female.  

"Cousin," however, does not really do these terms justice.  In my experience, while my own cousins are very close to me, they are clearly a part of another family unit, not a part of my immediate "nuclear family."  In Lakota, however, this is not the case.  For me as a male, to call someone tanhanshi or hankashi is almost the equivalent of calling them a brother or sister.  It is to recognize someone as family and give them that status and the respect that necessarily comes with it.  It requires that we treat them in a certain way, that we welcome them in and take care of them to the best of our ability.  In this way, no one in the Lakota culture was to be understood as outside of the group.  Connected with this is the Lakota system of tiospaye, which at a simple and basic level means the the care and responsibility we as Americans believe should be present in the nuclear family must extend also to what we would considered extended family.  In much the same way, the Lakota prayer-phrase, "mitakuye oyasin," which can be roughly translated to mean "all of my relations," expresses strongly the sense that we are related to all people, which in the Lakota tradition, includes the earth, the four-leggeds and winged creatures, the spirits, the plants and starts - everything that is has emanated from Creator and therefore is our relative and demands the respect and honor that comes with being family.

All of this is to say that I have been thinking. Uh oh is right.  I have been thinking about this notion of family, especially in regards to my Catholics roots and Jesus.  I have been reading a lot of spiritual-social justice oriented books and they have been inspiring and challenging.  Inspiring me to say that hope for something different is possible, and challenging me to declare definitively whether I care about that something different enough to make my own life the model.  To let these seeds planted in my heart by God grow and grow until they have exploded out and helped to plant these seeds in the hearts of others.  No matter how hard, how dangerous, how difficult it may be.

See, cause the God I believe expects nothing less from me.  The God I know IS demanding, IS terrifying - not because God is a bad or negative thing, but because the love that I have experienced from this God, the faith and trust placed in my by this God, has stirred up visions of something better - for all of us.  My God is too big to limit it to only certain people.  This God commands me to get on the rooftops and shout to all the people that they are beautiful and loved.  They were made for that very purpose, and so was I - to reflect the tremendousness of the God from which we come.

See, me and Jesus have never been best friends - he has never been much more than something like a unicorn to me, something so mythologized and devalued that I couldn't even understand what it meant to speak his.  But the Jesus I am discovering, here on the Rosebud, in the second poorest county in the United States - he gives me vision.  He says another world is possible, and this is what you might want to try in bringing it about.  Order your life according to what the least of those among us need - stand in solidarity with the poorest of the poor, those shunned and rejected by society, banished to the fringes of "civilization."  By voluntarily placing myself there, maybe more people will begin to ask if that is a true way to peace.  He challenges me to see everyone as family, just like the Lakota people here - the body of Christ, perhaps, is what i see lived out in the idea of tiospaye - that each of of us are integral parts of that body, and that each of use a truly "brothers and sisters" as Paul says, demanding the dignity and respect of that title.  To look at everyone and everything with the great love that God looks at me. 

JVC has been a dangerous place for me, because it is allowing me to think.  It is allowing me to expand my heart and my mind, and it is causing me to imagine and dream bigger and bigger with this God I am encountering.  

And it is a awe-ful and terrifying thing.

Feel It

The adjustment to having Sunday be a work day has easily been the least smooth transition of my experience here in South Dakota.  I am a big lazy Sunday person, and take seriously my time to sleep in , relax around the house in sweats, and have time to prepare myself for the upcoming week.  Here, however, there is no such opportunity to do so.  I am up at 8, which isn't that early given I am up at 5 every other day of the week, but this is principle here.  My community and I drive the 20 minutes to Rosebud in order to work the 9:00 mass there at St. Bridget's parish (Jessica and I playing music, Mike coordinating the entire mass and all of volunteers).  We come right back to St. Francis, wolf down a quick breakfast, usually go over the music we messed up last mass and try our best to prepare mentally for the chaos of the next mass.  St. Charles parish mass starts at 11:30, has many more people in attendance, and thus requires significantly more preparation and stress.  Immediately after the mass, we are in the car and heading up to the radio station to run a 2 hour spiritual talk show.  All in all, not a particularly relaxing or rejuvenating day.

The last thing I do on Sunday (before our weekly community meeting takes place after dinner), is to volunteer at the Juvenile Detention Center.  It is only an hour a week commitment.  I show up with one of the Jesuits and we do an hour of spiritual reflection, teaching, etc.  We meet with the residents there, who often range in age from 14-17, both male and female, and are in for various offenses - drinking and drugging (especially coupled with driving), violence against family members or schoolmates, theft, and other similar actions.  Most of the boys are the ages of my younger brothers, and when I look hard enough, I can see some of them reflected in these kids - not because my little brothers are delinquents, but because really, they are all just kids trying to figure out what their life is about.  Though this is my least frequent experience, it is the one that has by far impacted me the most in my time here.

I have cried on my drive home every time, without fail.  It is the craziest thing.  There isn't anything particularly disturbing that I see in my time there, nothing we talk about that really rattles my cage - but I am almost guaranteed to find myself in angry tears on the drive home, pulling over to the side of the road and yelling curse words through sobs.

What I realized last time was that I just need a good sometimes.  That most of the week, I am happy.  I deal lovingly with many of the hardships and difficulties that I am surrounded with on a daily basis.  I feel very heavily - seeing others in pain results in sharp pain in my own heart.  It is hard for me to see others suffering, and it affects me deeply.  People who suffer have a claim on my heart, whether I want them to or not.

I guess subconsciously, my drive home from the JDC has become my time to really feel all of that pain and hardship, the sadness that inevitably comes with encountering those realities.  And it really is addressed to ALL of the things that weigh on me.  I cry for the longing and sadness I feel for missing friends back home, for missing my family and wishing I could be with them and experience the lives they are living.  I cry for the people I talk to during the week, ruined by alcoholism or drugs.  For the people who can't see their own self-worth and have a difficult time letting themselves be loved.  For the kids I teach, whose parents are in jail or have left them - for the fact that the majority know more people killed in drunk driving accidents than college graduates.  For all of the stories of racism and government incompetency/neglect that shapes the ability of an entire people to prosper.  For those who went through the boarding school experience, for the pain caused by a faith I find so much life in, and for entire generations of people who were forced to reject where they came from and who they were.  For my own pain at lost relationships, my own fears of being able to continue to exist lovingly in a world filled with suffering, my own longing for direction and clear purpose.

On the drive home I take a route that give a really clear and beautiful view of the horizon.  And I think that helps me to feel the sadness too, because it highlights how small I really am.  How big the pain of the world is, how out of my range to heal everything, even to heal all of myself.  Maybe that's why there are so many of us, to help each other out with that massive project.

There is a lot to be sad over.  And I think my rides home have really helped me to understand a few lines taken from one of favorite poems - it is called "The Invitation" by Oriah Mountain Dreamer, and those few lines read as such:

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.

I have found that the best way I can pray in these situations is just to sit with it.  It does the pain and sadness discredit to try and push it away.  To ignore or it suppress it would be to say that the things I feel for are not important enough to give myself fully to.  The best pray I have to offer in those situations is my pain and tears - and I think I have come to understand that those are more than enough, and speak more than my words ever could.  It helps me to recognize the beauty that is inherently present in all of that as well.

Sometimes, I just need to feel it.  To share that sadness.  And after that, I can look at the world with fresh eyes again and an open heart, ready to receive whatever I can.