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Dear Dolly,
I hear land acknowledgements everywhere these days. At the beginning of community meetings, at scientific meetings, at church. “We stand on the unceded land of the Lenape people, the first people on this land, etc.”
Everybody is honoring the people who were here before – the Lenape, the Algonquin, the Poqueaks, and other names I can’t pronounce. I am sure they mean well. They make me nervous when they do that. I know we did terrible things to the Native people of this land. I just don’t know what I am supposed to do about that now. Plus, I read this article, Land Acknowledgements Accomplish Little, and it sounded right to me.
What to do?
Nervous
Dear Nervous,
Does everything have to make you calm? Does everything have to be fixed? Can’t we, the inheritors of settler colonialism, walk around with some open wounds every now and then? Sorry, I know I have misplaced my empathy somewhere for your question. I think sometimes recognizing and acknowledging people is better than fixing them. Plus, if you don’t remember who came before, how are you going to be able to see and know those who will come after? Or, how about the Native and Indigenous people with us today?
Someone quipped to me the other day, “What if Adam and Eve had just said, sorry?” What would happen to the well-being of our land if someone said sorry? I know Alex Small rightly wants reparations. The return of the land. The return of goods. I also know that is unlikely to happen.
But what about this aboriginal story from Central Australia? An aboriginal couple walks into a house of a very modern and up to the minute couple, who clearly have a private decorator, and sit down. The “owners” of the house are properly dismayed and say, “can we help you?” “No,” says the visiting couple. “You can stay in our house if you want.”
Being nervous this late in the game is not going to help anyone—you, “them,” or us. What about sharing?
Dolly Mama
Dear Dolly,
Pardons were in the news. Self-pardons. Seditionist pardons. Lawyer pardons. There are at least 20 biblical texts on the matter of pardons – and all talk about how God abundantly pardons. This richness leaves some of us mightily perplexed because we are finding ourselves on the side of jailing the people who are self-pardoning. Or at least spanking them. Or if not jail or spanking, using fancy words like accountability. On the accountability side of the matters before us, the angered left is less out for blood than out for consequences. I think we are right, sort of….
And I like to be right more than just sort of right. What’s really right? Forgiveness or Judgement? Why is everything so gray?
Dear “I Beg your Pardon,”
We are right in the following ways. People shouldn’t get away with violence and its parent, meanness. Or agitation. Or riling up meanness and agitation. People, including presidents, shouldn’t be sore losers. They shouldn’t question the rules when they lose and approve them when they win. Presidents especially shouldn’t divide people. Presidents should act like all people are people and that people matter. Unity or division? Which should be pardoned? Which should be punished?
What would God do? God would abundantly pardon if the wicked would forsake their ways.
But let’s at least look at a few ways we might be wrong. It would be amazing if the incoming President pardoned the outgoing President for his mental illness. Or his unfitness. Like the people in Charleston forgave the bible study murderous intruder. That is how God behaves. Wildly. Incomprehensibly. As though God had an infinite budget for forgiveness, which God does. Now by forgiveness we don't mean pretending the wrong didn't happen, or that we're ok to let things go on as before. Accountability for actions that caused harm can be achieved, and amends for that harm can be made, without revenge being taken on the people who carried out those actions. This can happen. I've seen it happen.
Or we can think in wild and incomprehensible ways like the divinity does. We could pardon all the people who have been deported or detained under both Presidents Obama and Trump. That way we will have equal opportunity blaming and shaming – and at least some innocents will get pardoned. Or establish a calculus. For everyone pardoned by President Trump, at least one deported person gets pardoned and gets to come home to their family.
That way we say I beg your pardon and mean it.
Dolly
Who is the Dolly Mama?
The Dolly Mama is a spiritual version of Dear Abby. Her intention is to combine the irreverence of Dolly Parton with the surrender and non-attachment beloved by Buddhists. She wants to let go of what can’t be fixed – in either self or others – and fix what can by applying the balm of humor.
She is a spiritual handyperson, a soul mechanic, a repairer of broken appliances. Every now and then the combination of letting go and hanging on achieves sufficient balance for an improvement in spiritual posture, stronger spine, and personal peace. The Dolly Mama is not her day job. By day, she works as an ordained United Church of Christ and American Baptist pastor of a regular, if edgy, congregation.
