Here's a lovely tale of inspiration, a story that shows Awen comes where it will, that spirit dwells where it will, and that folk of apparently wholly different spiritualities can meet honourably and amicably - Interfaith indeed. The story is told by Jim Lawer.
The story begins with the building of a Cistercian/Trappist monastery about 90 miles outside of Madrid, Spain, in the 13th Century. All Cistercian monasteries have, as may be true of all such religious communities, a Chapter House. That building, separate from other buildings on monastery grounds, is where visitors are received and other events happen that may include persons who are not resident members of the religious community. That monastery fell into disuse.
We, of course, need to realize that "disuse" may or may not include deconsecration. It is interesting and pertinent to the discussion in Britain that the Anglican Church there has detailed articles on that distinction in considering human remains with apparent Christian burial, irrespective of how old they are (but beginning with the arrival of the Church in Britain in the 6th C. CE). And in the story here unfolding, the descendents of that religious order have, if nothing else, an historical claim which can be demonstrated. The issue here is not genetic descent, but extant religious descent, and within that a claim to the stones from that original Chapter House. This is not about human remains per se, but about human spiritual remains. The hand chiseling of the stones are still visible, and a knowledge of how the Cistercian monks treat every detail of their lives only deepens awareness of how much human sacred activity is imbued within the stones themselves. [Later, when I tell you about the compromise that was made, it is clear that an historical claim, while it may have prior claim and precedence, is not necessarily, persuasively the most ethical claim to be made.]
For example, a Cistercian monastery in central France needed its old, underground sewage and water system investigated and repaired. The workers who went underground came up with a surprising story. They said, "We can hardly imagine it! No one ever goes there. No one will ever see it. And yet, the system down there is as finished and beautiful as if people might walk through it every day." The Cistercian monks overseeing the repair remarked that for them every thing they do is done with exactly the same care as if God were totally present, even if in the making of the underground system no one else were ever to see it again.
The story leaps ahead to the 1930s. William Randolf Hearst was a man of immense financial means. One of his favorite activities was going to different places in the world and exporting artifacts back to the United States. He purchased the Chapter House and carefully had the building dissembled, marking the stones with numbers that can still be seen and creating a guide to its reassembly in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The stones were being housed in a warehouse in the Park. Unfortunately, a fire destroyed the warehouse, damaging many of the stones (the burn marks are still visible), and the reassembly guide was also lost. The stones were then either dumped in one area or were reused throughout the park. A retaining wall near the arboretum is made up almost entirely of those stones. Once I was able to recognize them, I realized that one of those stones was sitting next to a tree on the sidewalk outside my apartment house in SF.
Two years before my involvement, the city Supervisors of San Francisco had received a request from a Cistercian monastery to collect the available stones in the dump site and to transport them to their monastery in the north central valley of California (about 20 miles north of Chico), and there to incorporate the stones in the building of their own Chapter House. The Supervisors put announcements in the local newspapers to give citizens there ample time to respond. Apparently no one among the earth-based communities saw the announcement or paid much attention to it if they did. Based on their two-year history with this project, the monks began the final process of collecting the stones for transport. At that point, the news went out that the stones were going to be removed on a certain Friday. That was in 1996, eleven years ago.
Two days before that, on a Wednesday morning, I was sitting in my office as the Senior Minister of First Congregational Church of San Francisco. I had already established a relationship with the head druid of San Francisco (associated with OBOD) and had done ceremony in Golden Gate Park with him and other practicing druids. I had already become a consultant to him regarding how to lead ceremony and was sometimes reviewing the material OBOD sent out before we used it.
In the middle of the morning, I received a phone call from him. His opening words were, "Those Christians are doing it again!" After I settled him down, and after the usual heated review of Christians co-opting and building on top of pagan sacred sites, for which I had great sympathy, I began to find out the bits of story he could tell me.
The next two days I did nothing but work on this. I spoke with representatives from the Golden Gate Park Administration, from the Park and Recreation Department of SF, from the Board of Supervisors, and with the Abbot of the monastery. In addition, we sought legal counsel in an atttempt to stop the transfer of the stones. And then, as a great surprise to me, I began receiving hostile phone calls from people who had been meditating or doing ceremony with those stones for up to 30 years, blaming me as responsible for the desecration of their sacred site.
Suddenly I was educating everyone about earth-based religions, distinguishing it from sky-based religions, noting important differences and explaining why people might not notice the ongoing use of the stones, in part because they weren't creating permanent structures like church buildings. It was a sudden leap into helping leaders in the community come to awareness of spiritual practices that had been going on for decades and what that meant for citizens of San Francisco. For ecologically sensitive leaders, it was a revelation to them that people would be actively practicing a relationship to the earth without any visible signs of it. There were no remains at the end of the day. And what might be left over was immediately recyclable, like food being eaten by park animals or by homeless people who knew of the location. The Park, after all, is a totally human constructed public area. In tacet ways, administration of the Park had assumed that it wasn't "natural," and behaved as if their politically correct way of disposing of its interests was solidly within their pervue as benefactors of public trust. In my phone conversations, it became immediately necessary to step them back a bit to see how entrenched public use actually could be. Spirituality was not part of their pervue, though it came to be.
I put the Druid in touch with the Abbot, but the Druid was so consumed by his own frustration that it was I who actually wrote his letter to the Abbot to explain the position of druidry. After some minimal correspondence between them, and one phone call beween them, a resolution was agreed to.
The Abbot (along with the relevant leadership of San Francisco) realized that the stones, in the dump site, were in fact recognised as a sacred site by an on-going, diverse spiritual practice. They then acknowledged this history of spiritual practice and wanted to treat it respectfully. The Abbot and the Druid agreed to divide the stones between the two. The monastery would take some, and the Druid saw that this was a continuation of their spiritual heritage, which he could honor. The Druid would keep some, and the Abbot saw that this would create and honor a continuation of location that would support a number of earth-based spiritualities and of individual meditation.
On the day the divided stones were to be removed, I arrived as ceremonial mediator (what else to call it?). The stones had already been put on skeds and plastic wrapped for loading onto the waiting flatbed truck. It was quite a sight! I stood at the head of the row of stones. On one side of me was the Abbot. On the side was the Head Druid. They were facing each other over the stones. Or is it that the stones had called these two to face into shared history? I raised my hands over the stones and recited their history, beginning with those who had carved them, whose hands had created their shapes, and who made a place where people were honored, where they disputed, where they resolved and created, and where they may have made love over long centuries of use or disuse. (I noticed the Abbot winced a bit when I suggested people may have made love among them.) I talked about the decades of use in Golden Gate Park, honoring an on-going spiritual tradition that the stones had brought to themselves, and that they continue to bring to themselves all all who need them. I was into an ecstasy of blessing the stones, and ended with blessing these stones as a return to their origin-heritage of use, blessing their journey and the community who was now receiving them.
Up the hill from the Head Druid were other representatives of spiritual practices in San Francisco. When the ceremony was completed, the Abbot turned his attention to the men waiting to load the stones onto the truck, and the Head Druid turned up the hill to the dump site where the remaining stones were sitting.
In the succeeding months, I worked with the Head Druid to create out of the stones a new center of worship to serve the various traditions. At that moment, what had been ecologically invisible became defined. A large circle was created; a triangle was made a ways down the slope and a smaller circle was off to the side. He planted sacred trees around the perimeter of the large circle and created an entrance way into the site. The Park reps, for their part, knowing this was not within the plan of the Park, and maybe illegal, decided to ignore what was happening, rather like benign neglect.
When I left the Christian tradition as an active practitioner and professional, I also moved out of San Francisco, and thought no more of the stones. And then, in a strange twist in the year 2000, I was visiting new friends in Chico and remembered that that monastery was only 20 miles away, and made plans to visit. A monk met me and took me into the warehouse where the stones I had blessed on their way were laid out and had been computer catalogued to understand where they had been used in the original Chapter House. The monastery had hired two stonemasons, one from Italy and one from German, who were also charged with creating new stones.
In the course of conversations with the monk, he and I got to talking about entering the Void, and realized that their spiritual practice and mine had something profoundly in common. He invited me into a special program to live the life of the monks for a month, which I then did for the entire month of July in the year 2000. That was also the year I was studying with a Cherokee medicine woman, went to my first two Narayas, learned about the Yoruba tradition and made a trip into the Amazon jungle to work with an indigenous shaman there.
