Jun 15th: Standing in Our Whole Story, with Rev. Sharon Edwards.
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Rev. Sharon Edwards
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Standing in Our Whole Story with Rev. Sharon Edwards. Series: Holy Troublemakers A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon.
Curious about untold stories and healing? Join us this Sunday as we explore Kaitlyn Curtice’s powerful journey of identity, resistance, and hope. Discover how truth-telling can transform our understanding of faith, culture, and connection. In-person or online – all are welcome!
Transcript:
[Rev. Sharon Edwards]: Hi. My name is Sharon Elizabeth. I am the daughter of a Wyoming cowboy turned mountain Bell Telephone business employee who played trumpet in a big band and still loves the Denver Broncos. I am the daughter of a New York valed Victorian whose father told her, girls do not go to college. So she became a stewardess on Eastern Airlines and a secretary at Mobil Oil, who most of her life lived with a rare eye disease that did not prevent her from writing letters to people even when she was legally blind, and that’s just part of the story. If someone were to ask you about your origins, where would you begin? If someone were to ask you for the story of your life, what would your story include? And what would you choose to exclude? And why? Let’s do a quick exercise. Say out loud, or to yourself, the phrase I am from. Then I will give you a prompt to fill in the blank with one word. I’ll give you an example. I am from a food my answer would be, I am from home baked bread. Now don’t worry, you won’t be graded, and I’ll only be giving you three questions, and it isn’t really that hard and it may actually be fun. So let’s start with that one. I am from a food, I am from a landscape, I am from a family characteristic, how was that I am from homemade bread, I am from the Rocky Mountains, and I am from anxiety. More than likely, all of our stories have chapters that sit well with us and make us smile, while there are other, probably other chapters we wish weren’t ours, parts that cause us to cringe or frown or even cry, but they are still a part of our stories, nevertheless, the holy troublemaker we are exploring this week is Caitlyn Curtis. Caitlin is an award winning author, poet, storyteller and public speaker. Caitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity, and how that shifts throughout our lives. She also speaks on these topics to diverse audiences who are interested in truth, telling and healing. I wonder what you will hear in her story. Caitlin was born on Potawatomi land in Oklahoma, the daughter of a Potawatomi father and a mother of European heritage. Her parents divorced when she was nine, and her mother married a Baptist preacher. She grew up in the church knowing scripture and what was right and what was wrong and believing in Jesus. She grew up knowing nothing about her Potawatomi culture, stories or language. In spite of living for quite a while where generations of her native american relatives lived, later, she would know this was the effect of forced assimilation over time, her relatives needed to become less native in order to survive. It really wasn’t until after she married and had children of her own, where she experienced a profound revelation from God. She was hiking beside a river with her family while she walked. She was nursing her second born son, and suddenly time stood still, she felt transported back in time, walking with her ancestors who walked the trail of death, forced at gunpoint from their lands in the Great Lakes region in eight. 738 so many died along the way. She was aware with each step of their suffering. And then this God told me I was Potawatomi growing up, I knew that, but it was head knowledge. In that moment, while hiking next to a giant River, God sent what was head knowledge into heart knowledge. It became a different type of knowledge all together, Caitlin felt a new freedom and commitment to dive deep into her full heritage, learning the culture and language and teaching her sons along the way. One of the words she taught her children was a greeting to begin the day with as the sun rises once again with a new day, they say. Menmoaben, it is good when things become visible in the light. Potawatomi words all have actions and ideas embedded into them. Menmoaben, it is good when the light shines on things. This is a phrase that reflects her work and her holy trouble making. She is passionate about truth telling and its importance in healing within her own life and body. Caitlyn carries these truths. She is Potawatomi. She is a Christian. The church is responsible for horrific harm done to her people. Some of you may know this, and some of you may not, the behavior of the church was justified by the Doctrine of Discovery, a Christian papal decree in the late 1400s that use theology and scripture to justify seizing of land and killing or enslaving people who did not convert to Christianity. In our own country, it was embedded in our government and in the 1800s it continued to influence the Monroe Doctrine and Supreme Court rulings. It is estimated that the Native American population was decreased by 90 to 96% between late 15th and late 17th century alone, in her award winning book, native identity, belonging and rediscovering God, Caitlin talks about the boarding schools, the government and the church came alongside each other to make the children in the schools both more westernized and more Christian, because America itself was built on the premise of a colonizing Christian empire, one of the most essential ways to kill the Indian was to strip children of their language, thus destroying a lifeline to their culture in the days, months and years following, teachers indoctrinated the children with white culture, with ideas of Christian salvation And with the most important white supremacist ideal of all that who they were and where they came from was an abomination that must be put to death for good in the Gospel of Luke Jesus says this about the religious leaders, and it could be said of us all, nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing In secret that will not become known. Min Noah bin wahpen, in the book holy troublemakers, author dannine anchors writes, As soon as Caitlin began speaking and writing about her identity as both a Jesus follower and a Potawatomi woman, she. Began to have a harder time, especially in the church. Many Christians preferred her to be silent about her identity as a native person. Caitlin shared, it’s time for us as a collective to acknowledge what’s been done to native peoples at the hand of the church. It’s time to remember that everyone belongs as long as the church only wants what is white in me and not what is native in me. There’s still more work to be done. Caitlin is asking the American church to move beyond book reading and land acknowledgements into honest relationships. We are encouraged to remember and speak the truth about our legacy of harm to bring the fullness of our past into the light. I also hear her asking us to have conversations with each other and our indigenous kin, and to keep asking with honesty, who have we been and who do we want to be? Let us be aware that succumbing to feelings of guilt is a defense. We must allow ourselves to hurt and heal without knowing what comes next. Caitlin says humbleness and honesty are the path. She invites us to move from security to curiosity. This is where healing, at the very least, begins friends, many of us believe we are in a time, if I may borrow the words of our Potawatomi kin, a time of min mowabin, of bringing what has been hidden into the light that which remains hidden cannot be healed. That goes for us as individuals and communities. This is also a time of heightened resistance. Hatred is on full display, and we are called to push against the unraveling of compassion and justice and love.
Again, we are all being challenged to become holy troublemakers in our own way. In her newer book, Living resistance, an indigenous vision for seeking wholeness every day. Caitlin offers some helpful thoughts for us to consider in her own words, at the core of the human soul, we are called to be liberators and resisters. We are called to fight systems of oppression that make life harder for our human and non human kin. This is not about a shallow hobby. Resistance is the way that we use our everyday lives to exert energy against the dangerous status quo of our time. But resistance cannot just be what we are pushing against. We are also choosing something else on the other side of that, perhaps we are choosing the radical idea of self love. Caitlin believes all that we do flows from that. Perhaps we are choosing inclusive love or a more kind society. It’s an every day rhythm, lifelong embodiments that last no matter who you are or what you do in the world. In closing, I would like to suggest a practice for us that has been recommended by Caitlin with my own little addition. I think it will be helpful as we face these challenging times. I would recommend placing your feet solidly on. The ground. As you do this, imagine you are standing in your whole story and the fullness of all of you. Imagine a ribbon that is attached to your heart, and that ribbon reaches out of you and is attached to all creation, to two legged and four legged, to rocks and water and air, and our ancestors take deep breaths and we are connected and held and empowered by love. We.
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