A Circle of Grace

Chapel Meditation – February 3, 2014

My thanks to Pastor Karen Rupp, Director of the Pine Ridge Retreat Center in Pine Ridge, SD for her leadership of our J-term cross-cultural experience. I am grateful also for my Wartburg Seminary colleagues who accompanied me on this trip. 

¹³But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. ¹⁴For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.  Ephesians 2:13-14 NRSV

I have used this Edwin Markham poem several times in the past 4 years to illustrate how we can either exclude or include people:

            He drew a circle to shut me out,

            heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

            But Love and I had the wit to win,

            we drew a circle that took him in.

My guess is that everyone can identify with the hurt of finding him or herself on the outside at least once. I know I can. However, our time on Pine Ridge Reservation showed me places where I had drawn my own circle of exclusion.

Beginning with hearing a heart-wrenching account of the Massacre at Wounded Knee from a Lakota perspective, I became aware of a division between Indians and whites that was higher than I had realized. And so it was, while carrying the knowledge of that deep pain, that our group attended the funeral of a Lakota woman.

There, something unexpected happened. That small, white circle I had located myself within was received into a larger one through the act of traditional gift-giving that takes place at the conclusion of a Lakota funeral. To be given a handmade quilt top was for me a tangible experience of unity created by the power of grace. That gift became an embodiment of the Lakota expression, mitakuye oyasin, (mee-tah-koo-yay oy-yah-seen), “we are all related.” 

Amen. May it be so.