Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Emerald Coast
“The Oak, the Tent, the Circle”
Rev. Rod Debs
October 19, 2003
READING: The Walking People, by Paula Underwood (1993):
“NOW AS THE WINTERS TURNED… / And those too young / to remember… / grew in stature, / IT CAME TO BE / that they asked and were allowed / a special responsibility / for Circles to the South / and this came to be understood / as the Circle of Growth.
“AND YET THERE WERE OTHER CIRCLES. / CIRCLE TO THE NORTH / became Wisdom’s Way, / the way the People had come, / the way the oldest among them remembered. / CIRCLE TO THE EAST / became the Dawn Greeting Circle, / the New Day Coming Circle, / it was dark and now I see Circle. / This Circle, too, / was seen as having a great value. / CIRCLE TO THE WEST / became the Quest for Understanding Circle, / even as the Two Strong Brothers / had circled West, expecting to return, / so others circled now / in celebration of such wisdom, / the need to learn and to understand.
“NOW IT CAME TO BE / That these circles, too, / were added to the Circle of the People, / which became the Center Circle / of these other four. / AND THE PEOPLE SAW / THAT THIS WAS GOOD.
“NOW / It came to be part of the Great Celebration… / so that this one or that / would choose the circle to walk / which was most appropriate / for their learning that year. / As the People saw the value / of this circle of circles… / IT CAME TO BE / that the center circle was understood / as that which contained / the learning and resident Wisdom / of the Whole People, / WHEREAS / those four circles dancing at the edge / became the personal circles / of each of those / who together constitute that People. /AND IT WAS SEEN AND UNDERSTOOD / THAT THE CENTER CIRCLE / NOURISHED THE WHOLE PEOPLE… / WHEREAS / FOUR-CIRCLES-AROUND / NOURISHED INDIVIDUAL GROWTH / WHICH — RETURNING TO THE CENTER CIRCLE — / NOURISHED, IN TURN, THE WHOLE PEOPLE….
“AND FOR A LONG TIME / The People kept this Pattern on the Earth / as a recognition of their understanding… / The needs of each, / The needs of all, / are appropriately walked / in a continuous direction, / each circle leading to the other / so that all and each / may continuously dance / the Circle of the People / and the Circle of Growth Within….
“AS IT IS SO… / SO LET IT CONTINUE… / SO THAT THE CHILDREN’S CHILDREN / MAY LEARN THIS WISDOM.”
Story for All Ages:
What do you call that circle of people whom you love? (your family)
Who can be in your Family Circle? (adults? kids?)
Who else? (animals? best friends? Your parent’s best friends?
Grandparents? Cousins? Aunts and uncles?)
My family had a student every year from a different country in the world who lived with us as part of our family. They were called Exchange Students from Germany and Holland, Russia, Ukraine, Thailand, Japan, Brazil and Tajikistan.
Can your family circle include people from another religion? From around the world?
Can trees and garden flowers be part of your family? Is nature part of your family circle?
What links you into a family? Being blood-relation? They look like you?
Think like you? Like what you like?
What is it that holds you together as a family circle? (love!)
Your family is made up of everyone and everything that shares love with you!
I think that the bigger my family circle, the more members there are in my circle of love, the happier I am. What do you think?
So it’s a good idea to try to add another person (or thing) into your Circle of Love every day and make that circle bigger and bigger.
I want to end our storytime with a poem by Edwin Markham:
He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle that took him in.
Message: I would like to share a few words from a truly American document, the Iroquois Constitution, dating somewhere between 1000-1450 CE:
“I am Dekanawida and with the Five Nations’ (sachems) I plant the Tree of the Great Peace…. Roots have spread out from the Tree of the Great Peace…. If any (one) or any nation outside of the Five Nations shall show a desire to obey the laws of the Great Peace… they may trace the roots to their source… and they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree….” (Peace Prayers, 1992)
This morning I wish to look at two ancient tribal traditions that have shaped both our nation and our religion. The United States and the Unitarian Universalist Association are both shaped by participatory principles that can be traced to these sources: The Oak and The Tent, two traditions of inclusion and participation in a circle.
Before Europeans came to the American continent, the League of Iroquois nations, Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca, Oneida, Cayuga and later the Tuscaroras, stretched from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River. The laws or practices by which the Iroquois nations planted and nurtured a Great Peace were spoken of as a Great Oak with roots extending in the four directions and branches spreading wide to shelter all who wished to circle around.
The laws of The Great Peace were not taken as constraints, as chains restricting personal freedom, nor as chain-link fences to keep others out. The Great Peace was a broad, sheltering oak tree with roots individualized in four directions of personal growth. Our reading from a Native American Oral History explained the social structure of the Oak of the Great Peace. In the oral history we visualized four-circles-round: Growth in the south, New-Day-Coming in the east, Quest for Understanding in the west, and Wisdom in the north, circles dancing at the edge of a center circle, the Circle of the People. The circles promoted individual nourishment as well as nourishment of the whole: each and all. The Oak of the Great Peace was actually realized as the nations of the Iroquois League circled round the central fire in their longhouse councils.
How did it happen that Iroquois traditions influenced our Euro-American institutions so many years ago? Well, Benjamin Franklin, who later became a member of Joseph Priestley’s Unitarian congregation in England—Franklin first learned of the Iroquois League in his capacity as official printer for the Pennsylvania Colony, printing accounts of Indian assemblies and treaty negotiations. Then he became Indian Commissioner for the Pennsylvania Colony in the 1750’s. (Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers, 1988).
In 1754, at the colonial Congress in Albany, Benjamin Franklin recommended that the colonists unite like the Iroquois League of nations. Ten years earlier, before Franklin had become an Indian Commissioner, the Iroquois sachem Canassatego who was struggling to negotiate with the many Indian Commissioners of the separate Colonies—Canassatego first proposed the federal model to the Indian-British assembly in Pennsylvania, July, 1744.
For all the talk of European democracy, no such representative council system existed in 18th century Europe: England was a monarchy and aristocracy. France had not yet begun its experiments with democracy. Without any European model of democracy, it took the Euro-Americans thirty years to adopt the example of the Iroquois League, the council of sachems. Let me flesh out the uniqueness of this new United States of America based on the Iroquois model.
In Europe, whether in the so-called “democratic” Greek slave-states or in the British monarchy, power and authority were held by individuals rather than by the community. But in the Iroquois long house, authority lay in the people who named delegates and in the council of delegates as a whole. Delegates or sachems (to whom the British misapplied the French term `chiefs’) had no personal authority. Chosen by women of the tribe, they could be removed by women of the tribe—impeachment, a process unknown in Europe. The American colonists adopted the concepts of delegates and impeachment from the Iroquois League.
The Iroquois addressed their council delegates or sachems without personal names, by title alone, a sign that they did not hold office by virtue of personal power or authority. The fledgling U.S. Congress adopted this novel practice, for example, addressing the Senior Senator from Massachusetts, Mr. Speaker, or Mr. President. Unlike the British Parliament where everyone speaks at the same time, after the example of the Iroquois, in the U.S. Congress, only one speaker may hold the floor at a time. Unfortunately, Congress did not adopt the Iroquois practice of a moment of silence after each sachem has spoken!
The council concept, where delegates gathered in a circle to decide issues by educating, persuading, listening, and by compromise ran counter to European traditions of adversarial party politics. Our Euro-American forebears also adopted the unheard-of practice of Indian caucus, informal discussion of topics without a vote either for or against.
A friend of Benjamin Franklin, the Dr. Benjamin Rush was a Universalist and signer of the Declaration of Independence who traveled throughout Pennsylvania to exchange medical knowledge with the Indians. Thomas Jefferson who privately identified himself as a Unitarian also studied the Iroquois and wrote numerous articles and essays on the Indians, promoting ethnological study in order “to collect their traditions, laws, customs, languages and other circumstances.” (Notes on the State of Virginia, 1955)
Despite our Puritan, authoritarian roots of American Unitarianism, Franklin, Rush and Jefferson, our Unitarian and Universalist forebears, studied and promoted Iroquois practices. As a result, both the United States of America and our Unitarian Universalist Association of (independent, self-governing) Congregations display a radically American social structure. Authority and power lay in the circle of our community rather than in any authoritative or charismatic individuals.
When followers of main-stream religions—all of which have authoritarian if not centralized power structures—ask us what Unitarian Universalists believe, we have absolutely no reason for shame. Our Unitarian Universalist forebears are the same founders of this country who sought to maximize personal and religious freedom through government of the people, by the people and for the people, rather than letting the strongest, most successful rule by force or charisma. I know of only two religious traditions whose governing principles commit them to such universal empowerment and democratic participation: Unitarian Universalists and Quakers (formally known as The Society of Friends)..
I have spoken of the circle traditions of The Sacred Oak of the Iroquois League. The second tradition of social organization which I believe has greatly influenced Unitarian Universalism, is the Tent of Meeting of the earliest Hebrew people, the semi-nomadic Habiru. I want to trace the Tent tradition and show the difference between it and the competing Royal Davidic tradition that was modeled on Egyptian cosmology. (Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, Vol.1, 1962)
Unlike the Bedouin Midianites who owned camels, the early Hebrew clans (Habiru) tended flocks and herds, and also farmed on a modest scale. Before they were united in the worship of Jahweh, they had various gods of their ancestors: the god of Abraham, the Fear of Isaac, the Strong One of Jacob. What was unique about the gods of the Habiru ancestors was that none had any attachment to fixed holy places of worship and sacrifice.
The Canaanite gods of Mt. Tabor, Bethel, Shechem, and Beersheba, were fixed to their holy sites, just as the Canaanite people were connected to the land they farmed. But the Habiru gods of their ancestors were in special relationship not with a place, but with a clan; the gods moved when the clan pulled up stakes for better grazing. The gods of the ancestors, no matter which wandering clan, were present in the Tent of Meeting where the elders of the clan met in mutual loyalty. The Tent of Meeting was the place of that liberating phenomenon, the presence of The Holy. But change took place.
Habiru clans began to “settle” among the Canaanites as time passed. The Leah group who worshiped the god of Abraham settled early around Shechem; the Rachel group, settled later after certain dramatic wilderness experiences; the tribe of Simeon settled around Beersheba; the tribe of Ephraim who worshiped the god of Jacob settled near Bethel; the tribe of Levi which included Egyptian names such as Moses settled after experiences in Egypt and in the Kadesh oasis or the Red Sea; the tribe of Joseph who worshiped Jahweh were the last to settle in Canaan.
As an aside, it is probable that the worship of Jahweh originated in the distant Midianite Bedouin land of Sinai, which included the Kenites. Moses’ father-in-law Jethro, was a Kenite priest who did not just attend, but who led the offering of sacrifices to Jahweh in Exodus 18:12. (Nabatean inscriptions in Sinai seem to support this conclusion).
This Habiru worship of ancestral gods changed as the clans settled in the land of Canaan. They started to worship in local sanctuaries rather than in the Tent of Meeting, sanctuaries where fertility gods were also worshiped: Baal, Bethel, El Olam, El Roi of the pantheon of the great god El. Jahweh was also worshiped in the local sanctuaries, taking on an identity like El, as being the greatest of the pantheon of gods.
About 1000 BCE, King David’s scribes compiled the oral traditions of the clans into one integrated history. Jahweh was identified with all the gods of the various tribal ancestors who themselves became relatives by being written into one common family tree, the Israelites. By creating a common history, David, succeeded in organizing the unrelated Habiru tribes into an Israelite confederacy that was able to surround and dominate all the Canaanite lands, thanks to the waning of Egyptian influence in the region. And David made himself a King in all the glory of the Egyptians.
Here is the major point of this whole story. Jahweh changed in the Habiru move from being semi-nomads to being an established, ruling power. Jahweh changed from the divine presence in the Tent of Meeting, to the cosmic Father of savior kings—like the Egyptians’ cosmic deities.
The common religious element among various tribes of wandering nomads was the Tent of Meeting where elders of the people gathered in loyal solidarity and experienced their god as a sheltering cloud. The Tent was lost as Jahweh became connected to a sanctuary rather than to the loyal solidarity of the people. Jahweh became connected to Bethel, then Shechem, Shiloh, and Gilgal, no matter who came to worship, no matter whether they were loyal or self-serving, whether just in their relationships or greedy and exploitive.
King David and Solomon designed Jerusalem and The Temple after the Egyptian model. The Tent of Meeting was transformed into the Tabernacle of the Covenant storing the law code. Gone was the meeting place where the divine presence was made manifest. Like Egyptian cosmology, the King was called the Son of God, the Savior of the People who ruled on behalf of Jahweh. The divine presence was supposedly in the savior-king rather than among the people in the Tent.
Today we are confused by competing Hebrew and Christian traditions, the Hebrew Tent of Meeting all mixed up with the Royal Davidic tradition. The earlier Tent of Meeting promised a saving presence on condition of loyal, righteous behavior among those who gathered; the later Royal Davidic tradition promised supernatural salvation in exchange for obedience and cultic sacrifices. The Tent tradition was an earthly, historical promise, while the Royal tradition was a cosmic, supernatural promise.
We read in the Hebrew Scriptures of the corruption of the Davidic Kings and how Hebrew prophets arose who condemned those who trusted in royal salvation more than in justice. Historic crises, helplessness revived the Hebrew dream of a Messiah, the return of a Royal Davidic savior who would come down from the heaven to rescue the chosen people.
In the first century CE, Jesus was in the Tent tradition, the prophetic tradition, calling for righteous loyalty and justice and love among people here on earth. But Jesus’ followers, and perhaps he himself in the latter days, considered him to be that Royal Davidic savior, the Messiah come to save a helpless people.
And so today, Judaic and Christian traditions suffer the unfathomable intermingling of, on the one hand, the Tent/prophet/Jesus tradition of mutual solidarity, justice and universal love, and, on the other hand, the Royal/Messianic/Christ tradition of human helplessness and supernatural salvation.
Today there are both a rising tide of secular indifference to traditional religion, and a threatening growth of religious fundamentalism, growth in both numbers and extremism. The rabid believer and the secularist who hides religious skeletons away in the closet of denial, both suffer from religious abuse, caught in choosing between fear and fanaticism.
How often are you and I asked, how often are our children asked what we Unitarian Universalists believe? Anything we want? Are we shamed because we cannot claim a dogmatic theology or a divine guru guaranteeing salvation for submission?
We have nothing of which to be ashamed. Unitarian Universalism is more than a nice alternative to traditional religions or to secular individualism. Ours is a uniquely American religion of radical reformers. Remember the world-shaking compassion of Unitarians Charles Dickens and Albert Schweitzer. Remember the kindergartens of Elizabeth Peabody and the public schools of Horace Mann, both Unitarians. Remember the American Red Cross of Clara Barton and the asylums of Dorothea Dix, Unitarians. Remember the National Urban League of Whitney Young and the American Peace movement of Linus Pauling, Unitarians. Remember the radical humility of Universalist Benjamin Rush, and Unitarians Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who dared to learn from Native Americans called “ignorant savages” and even promoted those new ideas in the halls of Congress! Our faith is an American treasure.
Unitarian Universalism is an historic tradition of radical reform and continues to be a courageous movement into the future. Our UU tradition of universal democratic participation was not only the faith of our American founders and their Iroquois mentors, but the heart of the Hebrew, prophetic and Jesus traditions of loyalty, justice and love.
Instead of embarrassment, may we be confident in offering the curious an invitation to visit and to experience our warm and nurturing Circle of “mutual trust and support,” our Tent of caring community, our sheltering Oak.