First ceremony .... cw

 

My cousin and I were having a phone visit recently, sharing our experience with the importance of Story when she said, “We, as the older generation are the bridge between the past and the future for those who follow.” She is in her seventies ~ I am eighty-three.

I look at the calendar and see this Sunday, Easter, is eighty years since Easter, 1941 with those early memories of my first two ceremonies. 

I don’t remember the drive from San Francisco where we had been living in a small apartment we’d lived in the four months since my third birthday and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I’m told our belongings were packed to move later that day into the flat on a quieter street near a park where we lived until war’s end. 

My father had the day off. He’d been working in the shipyard twelve-hour days, seven days a week since the war broke with early battles devastating damage to our navy’s ships. 

We’d made the trip for my brother and I were going to be baptized that day for the pastor had retired after years ~ since Daddy had been a boy.

I remember feeling a little cheated for the babies, including my toddler brother, were held, but  I “was too big” so stood with my father while the minister’s damp fingers touched my head, ~ with my parents promises, the Ceremony of  my welcome into the Christian Church.

What I most remember is how beautiful a spring day it was and how very glad I was to hold on tight to my Grandpa’s large, calloused hand as we climbed the steps going into the church. I felt safe in the shadow of his tall form!

Stepping into the old Two Rock church, filling with its Easter crowd of people Grandpa looked down at me, his deep voice telling me, “Kisspatch, everyone here is your relative!” 

The feeling his words caused as I looked around, has stayed with me all my life. There have been so many times that I have deeply doubted that I belonged ~ anywhere ~ but that memory ~ his voice, his words, has been an undercurrent, warming me, reassuring me. “Kisspatch, everyone here is your relative.” 

That Ceremony ~ a ceremony which, throughout my life, has helped to keep me whole.

Many years later I came to see how his words opened me, opened me to learning that everyone, everywhere is my relative ~ all of earth’s creation!

So, this Holy Week of 2020, I remember.

For Kristen, cw

 

Many years later in our new home, while unpacking to organize my new office, I pull out a box and read notes from a class I took one summer. They speak of the structure of English versus the structure of Native languages ~ how “the hoops bleed” in the process of translation. I remember the grief of a friend of mine, a member of the certification committee struggling to form what is now the university’s Rural Human Services program. His frustration and grieving came about because, as the committee worked on curriculum trying to put into English those important things of his culture, he realized what was being left out. English only provided snapshots, nothing of what was around it.

 

How often Peter said the same thing to me. “I can’t say it right in English. It doesn’t mean anything that way! English is no good for what I want to say.”

 

In one of my times in that village an Athabaskan tells me about the layers of meaning in their language. He tells that while many of the older people speak their language fluently, Peter, he said, is the last one who can speak the high language, the language that speaks to the deepest symbol, the most profound meaning of things. The man telling me speaks his language and can understand much but not all of the meaning when the “high” language is spoken. His sadness came from knowing there was no way for him to learn to speak from the depth of that which he calls the “high”.