The Trail of Tears Association
Posted on | March 13, 2010 | No Comments
In 2003 Sylvia and I retraced, by car, the main overland route of the Trail of Tears, starting northeast of Chattanooga and proceeding across Tennessee, western Kentucky, into southern Illinois, across the Mississippi into Missouri, the northwestern tip of Arkansas and into Oklahoma. We drove in the comfort of a car and stayed in pleasant motels. They walked and bumped along in wagons in a brutal winter, camping out in fields and dying by the thousands. The bombs started falling in Baghdad the first night we were in Tahlequah. Oklahoma. All the churches we passed said on their signboards “Pray for our Troops.” Not a one mentioned the innocent Iraqis.
It was a journey of remembrance in search of reconciliation, something I have been reflecting on for some ten years now. I was only vaguely aware at the time that behind the Trail of Tears signs that led us on our way stood an organization, The Trail of Tears Association, that has worked for some years to make visible this tragic piece of our history, now woven into more and more memories because of their work.
Journeys produce powerful memories and shape our understanding of what reconciliation is about. American memories are full of them: the Exodus from Europe (rooted in another memory), the wagon train west, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and, yes, the Bataan Death March in the Philippines. In other cultures we have South Africa’s Great Trek and China’s “Long March” under Mao. Our three major religious traditions are rooted in journey stories – the Exodus and wandering, the Hejira, and Jesus’s journey from the Galilee to Jerusalem. They produce longings for homecoming, for a promised land, for purification in exile, for possession of a Holy Grail. Each manifests a different kind of reconciliation – with ourselves, with God, with others, and the land. They also produce conflicts, as people with very different generative journey stories seek to exclude others to achieve their journey’s end. Witness what is happening in Israel/Palestine even today.
The Trail of Tears Association is one effort in our country not only to remember but to try to make sense out of what happened. Anyone can join. You just have to want to go on this journey to the reconciliations it might make possible.
Like a Russian Doll
Posted on | March 13, 2010 | 1 Comment
Like a Russian doll
she wears each passage of her life in polymorphous coats.
She is the wise companion, etched by years of circling suns,
the woman burnished silver with accomplishment,
the mate with auburn hair and radiant eyes,
the holder of the household lamp,
the mother of the squirming baby nestling at her breast,
the college ingénue with voice of lark and witty tongue,
the pigtail girl in the taffeta dress,
the urchin hanging from her knees and laughing at her dad.
They hide,
a manifold of nesting forms
around the holy light within,
each one the doll,
each one the woman that I love.
Memory and Reconciliation
Posted on | March 6, 2010 | No Comments
I have been thinking a lot about memory and reconciliation lately. It’s nothing new, since Red Clay, Blood River is an exercise in memory that leads to new forms of reconciliation. Many other people have labored hard to show the many ways that reconciliation cannot occur without lively memory. We need to remember the past events that traumatized us “rightly” and we must seek a common memory if we are to covenant ourselves to live together differently in the future. I am reminded here especially of the work of Fr. Michael Lapsley and the Institute for the Healing of Memories (South Africa), where active re-surfacing of painful memories leads people into a new self-acceptance that can empower them to seek wider circles of reconciliation.
Some memory is driven by pain, fear, and anger. We have memories that we seek to flee, avenge, or obliterate. Memories of slavery, holocaust, genocide, and earthquake come to mind. Other memories are driven by love – memories of joyous events in our personal and collective past, Edens of new beginnings, of children, spouse, and friend. Here we seek to make them permanent states of our present being, living memories that energize us to love, compassion, embrace, and hope.
In both cases, we are led to reconstruct the past so that we can reconcile ourselves with it, integrate it into our lives, even create fantasies of might-have-beens that are more dominant truths than the actual happenings of the past. We create myths more powerful that history. Myths can be very destructive, especially if they are driven by pain and fear. They can also be very positive when they are driven by love that can expand our lives and open them up to compassion for others. I think this is the more hopeful path to memories that lead to reconciliation rather than mere survival – in the words of an old hymn, a “stony road” indeed, but one worth traveling.
Between
Posted on | March 1, 2010 | 1 Comment
This is a poem about transitions in life. It may speak to you if you are facing transition, whether due to age, loss, or radical change in circumstance.
There is a space between chapters, a crack in the spine, an empty space where two pages meet and disappear into a hidden abyss where things are sewn invisibly together.
About William J. Everett
In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to a poetically written novel to probe the issues of ecological and human reconciliation.
When I am not writing, I create furniture for worship settings. For more about my work, go to www.WisdomsTable.net, where you will also find galleries of artwork by my wife Sylvia, whose ancestors were the original inspiration for Red Clay, Blood River. Click to read my complete bio...
About Red Clay Blood River
Red Clay, Blood River
is a story told by Earth about two brothers from Germany and an enslaved
South African woman whose lives bind together America’s “Trail of
Tears” and South Africa’s simultaneous “Great Trek” of 1838.
Memories of their journeys through oppression, estrangement and reconciliation
reverberate in the lives of three contemporary students brought together
by their interests in ecology. Through their often difficult friendship
and a surprising discovery they begin to unravel the mystery of their
estrangements, struggles, and deep connections to each other and to
the earth.
Click to read more...