from the series Peace House Community Journal…
By MARTI MALTBY
“Community is a form of spirituality.”
Dr. Kelly Sherman-Conroy, Oglala (Sioux) Lakota, Associate Pastor at All Nations Indian Church
When Kelly made that comment, I grabbed my pen to make sure I didn’t forget her words. I wasn’t the only one.
Kelly was opening a meeting of the Metro Urban Indian Directors subcommittee on homelessness and the opioid crisis in the Native American community. In keeping with Native culture, a respected member of the community was invited to open the meeting “in a good way,” meaning that they share words that focus our attention and edify the discussion.
As I’ve learned over the seven years I have been attending the meetings, the Native American community is far more tight knit than my own culture. Those on the streets are referred to (and treated) as relatives, regardless of tribal affiliation. While my culture defaults to individual rights and freedoms, Native culture is oriented around the community. More importantly, every aspect of life has a spiritual component. Where my culture debates whether God exists, many Native Americans see Creator infusing every part of life.
I think it’s pretty clear at this point in history what happens to a society that forgets the spiritual aspect of community. Polarization and dehumanization grow whenever people are reduced to either statistics or caricatures. Finding one point of disagreement is enough to label another person as simply an “other.” Rather than looking for what binds us together, we actively seek out reasons for separating ourselves.
I think it’s also clear what happens when we abandon a spiritual worldview. When we view the world only in material terms, we forget how we affect each other. Hurting someone’s feelings becomes acceptable when we forget what it feels like to be hurt. Worse, hurting someone’s feelings is one of the smallest injuries we can inflict. A lack of spirituality can grow into hostility and terrorism without any sense of guilt if you don’t have any competing value to keep yourself in check.
During one of the subcommittee’s recent meetings, someone made the comment that street drugs bring “bad spirits” into the neighborhood. I don’t know the religious beliefs of the person who uttered those words, so I don’t know if she was speaking literally or if she happened to utter a phrase that perfectly summed up the need for a spiritual world view. We can talk endlessly about the physical effects of fentanyl and what the most effective treatment program is, but unless we see the destruction that the drugs bring to the individuals and the community around us, we have completely missed the essence of the problem. Only by maintaining a spiritual outlook can we fully grasp the destruction that drugs, political divisions, religious intolerance, and bigotry unleash on our society.
Recognizing that we are all a community, regardless of externals, will go a long way to healing our society. After all, the problems we face are not just physical or economic. They are spiritual too.
MARTI MALTBY is an avid cyclist, Director at Peace House Community, and an obnoxiously proud Canadian.
