The Hogan

I spent this past weekend in Navajoland.  I was there as part of what the Bishop there calls the “economic development team” to meet with the council of the Episcopal Church in Navajoland.  Our goal is to secure the very important ministry of the Episcopal Church’s only all-indigenous mission.  We have a lot to do.  Things are in a precarious state and whether or not we are able to continue our ministry among the Navajo has a lot to do with what both the Navajo people and the rest of the Church are willing to do together to make new life possible.  It takes a lot of courage to choose life. 

It is for that reasons that our time in Navajoland began with a rare invitation to participate in a traditional Navajo blessing ceremony at the sheep camp of one of the key Navajo leaders in the family’s hogan, the traditional Navajo dwelling and location of medicine ceremonies.  Our host calls the hogan the universal home. 

The blessing was conducted by a medicine man.  Although the medicine man invoked the name of Jesus with great passion and sincerity, the ceremony itself was certainly not a church ritual. 

Part of the ceremony involved smoking together.  I watched this with great interest.  A pipe of herbs was passed to the primary participants, the medicine man, his assistant, our host, the bishop, and some of the key church leaders, all women considered elders.  I observed how they drew in the smoke and then puffed it out in each of the four directions and then symbolically covered themselves with it, directing it toward all the parts of their bodies and finally over their heads.  Eventually, the pipe was passed around the room.

Eventually it got to me.  Now, confession time.  I had never smoked anything in my life.  Nothing.  Not a cigarette, cigar, or pipe.  And certainly not anything else, inhale or not.  I was not at all sure I knew what to do.  I was afraid I would cough uncontrollably and disrupt the whole event.

Fortunately, I managed.  I took in the smoke and blew it out in imitation of what I had seen my hosts do.  I let the smoke roll over me.  I directed it with my cupped hand over my head. And then I passed the pipe on to the person next to me.

As I did, the Native man next to me who had handed me the pipe in the first place, reached out his hand to me.  He took my hand, and grasped it quietly but firmly.  It was a profoundly important moment to me.  I can’t tell you I know at all what it means.  It has something to do, though, with a very basic shared humanity. 

I read the lesson from Acts (11:1-18) for this Sunday in the context of the hogan, the universal home.  Peter, a devoutly observant Jew, had returned to Jerusalem from a trip to Joppa, where he had been invited into the home of some Gentiles.  There he had eaten with the uncircumcised and received a vision about clean and unclean foods.  He heard the voice of the Lord inviting him, indeed commanding him, to eat of foods previously forbidden.  He protested, “By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.”

The voice of the Lord answered, “”What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

Animals used for food, described by Acts as “four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air,” find their purity in their common creator so that none is unclean.  Can it possibly be otherwise with human beings, all the children of the same God, known to them or not, that any could be unclean?  And if it is true of all human beings, could it possibly be otherwise with the human response to the innate drive in all of us that draws us to their creator?  Surely whatever that is, as basically human as it must be, is made by God not only clean but beloved.

The Navajo people have brought me to a new understanding of what it is to be human by teaching me something of what it means to be Diné, the name by which they know themselves.  The hogan is the universal home.  Another name for the universal home is the catholic church.  And catholic, in the truest sense, must be defined by what we share in common—our common humanity, our common origin in God, not only that we are made clean, but that we are made in the image of God.  What is catholic, I have learned, is defined by what is universally true and not by what is exclusively true.

Peace,
+Stacy