A Lessom from Peter

I can summarize what we can learn from Peter’s 3 denials that he knew Jesus in 3 sentences. The first sentence is: “Life is filled with broken promises.”

The 2nd sentence is: “Even knowing of so many broken promises, most of us spend significant time & energy choosing to do good anyway.”

The 3rd sentence… well, I’ve changed my mind about giving you the 3rd sentence. I’m not going to tell you that one after all. What can I say?” Life is filled with broken promises deal with it.”

Everywhere we turn in the material world we can see broken promises. Instead of hope, we are given hurt.
Instead of love we are handed fear. Instead of community we can find ourselves in isolation.
& I know that there are many outside these walls, in our own families, our friends & coworkers & others who face broken promises in far greater magnitude than you or I do.

As a response to this reality, I’d like to tell you 4 stories.



The first story is about 2 little boys. Their father was a truck driver. He was left to care for them one evening when he had to go down to the trucking company to unload & fill out the customary paper work. While the father unloaded, the boys had fallen asleep in the cab & when he had to go into the office to complete the papers, concerned with leaving the sleeping children visible in the cab, he carried the boys to the back of the empty truck, laid them on cargo blankets, closed the door. As fate would have it, the boys woke up & found themselves alone & trapped in a strange, dark place. The younger of the 2 boys was filled with panic. He couldn’t even see his brother in the dark. “Doug, are you here?” he asked. “I’m here,” came the response.

Left alone, feeling abandoned, cast out on their own, the 4 year old turned to his 5-year-old brother & asked, “So, what do we do now?” “I guess we’ll have to find a place to live,” was the response. But they both realized that this would require money, so the talk turned to what kind of jobs they could get. “What can you do?” the younger asked. “I think I could probably cut people’s grass,” the older replied. The younger felt a new sense of dread realizing that he didn’t know how to cut grass & he couldn’t think of anything he could do to make any money at all. Sensing his little brother’s anxiety the older said ,“You can help me.”

But that was, essentially, the extent of their plan – their entire hope for the future – hung on the possibility that they could cut someone’s grass. Not the way either of them thought their life would go. “Life is filled broken promises.”

The world never did find out if they could make a living cutting grass, for immediately following their moment of resolve, the door to the back of the truck slid up & there, standing in the glow of the parking lights, was their father. An immediate sense of rage fell over that younger boy as he realized what had happened. It eventually turned to relief but he never – ever - forgot what it was like to be trapped in that dark place & what it felt like to be abandoned.

The second story involves these same 3 characters a few years later - after ‘the divorce.’ Divorced & often separated from his children the father wanted to try & build some understanding & connection & feel closer to his children.

So, he did is what a lot of parents do – when his children visited, he read to them at bedtime. But contrary to stories other parents might choose, he didn’t read Winnie the Pooh, Peter Pan or other fairy tales. Each night he read from a book by a child psychologist about divorce. Neither of the boys could decipher much from that evening ritual. Nevertheless, the routine continued for many weeks. Until, one night, towards the end of reading time, the man came across a line that he read in a different kind of way. He slowed down. The line was, “Just because a father becomes divorced it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love his children.” Then the man stopped altogether. & he read that line again, this time with his voice quivering as though he might suddenly cry.

Then he closed the book, kissed the boys goodnight, and left the room. It’s probably not necessary to tell you that neither of those boys understood a thing that was written in that book. And yet, it doesn’t take much to realize that they understood everything about their father’s faltering voice, the line that he repeated & his goodnight kiss.

The youngest boy in these stories, after a difficult realization that “life is filled with broken promises,” eventually became a Unity minister & one day in a lesson he said, “Nothing of what I have managed to accomplish in my life could have possibly happened without the ‘unmistakable truth that “Life is filled with broken promises. I became a minister because I have experienced what it was like to be trapped in a dark place. & I became a minister because I was unwilling to live in a life where deceit & disappointment is the only rule.

The next story happened in the early 1400’s. A man lived in Bohemia (what is now Czechoslovakia). His name was Jan Hus. He was a scholar & priest in the Roman Catholic Church & what we would, today, call an activist. He was very popular among both young & old people for they saw his life as a symbol of hope.

Hus deplored the corruption that riddled church practices & took great pains to change them. Two points in particular were abhorrent to him. First, the belief of the Church that only priests could participate in Holy Communion. Hus believed that everyone was entitled to share the wine of the chalice during communion & deserved a chance to hold it & pass to their neighbor the elements of their faith. Secondly, Hus believed that worship should be spoken in the common language, instead of Latin which no one understood.

For this he was tried & convicted of heresy by the church. He was offered several opportunities to recant — but he refused to do so. The punishment for such heresy was death. On his birthday, July 6, 1415, he was stripped of his vestments, taken to a field outside Prague & burned at the stake. He never rescinded his beliefs. Instead, he sang a hymn as the flames mounted around him. However, before he died, he made a prediction in the form of a joke, based on his name. In the Czech language “Hus” means “goose.” As he was being tied to the stake, he called to his tormentors, “You may roast this goose today, but one hundred years from now a swan will arise, whose singing you cannot silence.”

He was right. Less than one hundred years later, the Reformation swept Europe & the fire of religious liberty swept throughout Western Civilization.

We have come a long way from those dark times. And yet it is obvious that many of the attitudes & broken promises, which create darkness & barriers between people still exist today. The question I have for you is: “How do you handle life’s broken promises?” My choice to become a minister was the only practical response I could see to the broken promises I knew in my own life.

Let me tell you now the 4th story. A little boy found himself locked in the bathroom. His cries brought his frightened mother to the other side of the door & when he heard her he began to cry louder. She tried to explain to her son how to unlock the door but he was crying too hard to hear what she was saying.
& then to make matters worse, in a panic of jumping up & down, the little boy inadvertently hit the light switch & turned out the light. Now it was dark. Louder cries came forth & then he started pounding on the door in frustration. Finally the mother could hear him slump down against the cold bathroom tile.

Getting down on her knees the mother tried peering through the crack at the bottom of the door & she saw his cheek as he too tried to get his face low enough to see through the small space. With an idea, the mother quickly got a flashlight. She knelt down & turned the flashlight on so that it shone through the crack at the bottom of the door.

“Do you see the light, honey? Can you see it?” The boy stopped crying for a second & said, “I can see it. ”
“That’s me!” she cried. “The light is coming from me. I’m right here!” “I can see you, mommy, but I can’t get to you.”

Then the mother took her other hand and slid 3 fingers under the door & wiggled them. “Can you see my fingers?” she asked. “I can see your fingers!” he replied. “I can see them.” “Grab hold of my fingers,” she said.

And he did – for the entire hour it took for the next door
neighbor to take down the door that kept them apart.

Everywhere around us it is the same. In this community, in history and in our lives: if we want to offer a real response to life’s broken promises we must be willing to be a light.

Which brings me, finally, to the 3rd sentence I promised you & that is this: The only success we will know of building from broken promises, a new dream of hope, will be measured by how & how far we are willing to carry our own light in what is often a dark & lonely world.

In a life full of broken promises, it is always within us to choose to do good anyway. Because we know, that the hardest of all broken promises to endure is the promise we break to ourselves by not making the difference in our own lives & in our world that Jesus told us that we are capable of & through the good work that we do, the hope that is ultimately restored may, indeed, be our own.

The Promise

The promises you make in this life start you dancing with the joy of ‘that splendid torch.’ But it is the promises that you keep that will ensure that you keep dancing & stay in the flow of life. A promise is your word, whether spoken or implied, cast forth into physical reality. It is a covenant you make with the world. It says: “This shall be done.”

When you make a promise you set up an energy imbalance. For example: Let’s say you tell your best friend you’ll take him or her to dinner next Wednesday night as a birthday present. You create a tension with a promise, the expectation of something yet to be done.

When you put your word out before you like this, you create a ‘gap’ that can only be closed when you do what you said you’d do. Now, imagine that it’s Wednesday & you’re at dinner with your friend. See how the tension resolves? The energy field is now once again balanced.

The energy dance that keeps us moving on our spiritual path involves creating & resolving imbalances. When we produce a ‘gap’ we’re pulled forward to close it.


We often neglect to consider the effect of not keeping our promises. When we don’t do what we said we’d do, we’re left with the tension of incompletness. Unfulfilled promises are energy drains because we expend more energy to keep a gap open than we do when we resolve it.

Each unfulfilled promise draws energy to itself & becomes a block to the flow of God’s energy. It saps your power. You can become physically, emotionally & even spiritually so tired that you have no energy & it doesn’t matter with whom you made your promise. In fact, many of us are much better at keeping the promises we make to others than keeping the promises we make to ourselves.

The universe doesn’t care with whom you made the contract. Not keeping your word to yourself is still not keeping your word. It produces the same gap so it is just as significant as failing to keep a promise to someone else. The important thing to realize is that every broken promise we experience is a wake up call.

Order of Saint Lukes the Physician

I am reporting that I have become an associate member in the Order of Saint Luke the Physician and have been elected to a position of Co-convener. It is an international society of Healers working together and in their small groups to heal all that abodes here on Mother Earth. It's charge is A to Z in healing from the poorest to the grandiose of all creation. Right now I am engulfed in a 26 week course of study on the HEALING METHODS of THE CHRIST and how I and we can utilize the same methods to enact the same results. I find it most interesting, when I think about the healing methods I use as Native Metis Healer. My goal is to utilize both methods combined to enrich my work with the sicknesses of the Earth.

I know there is nothing that is accomplished without the invocation and help from The Creator. To truly be a Healer, I must keep myself in touch and in tune with His Will in all things. This kind of connection needs an acceptance of the role of G-d / Grand Father in my life. This is to be a grand new adventure!

news

NEWS:

The year 2007 is the 150th Anniversary of the St. Norbert Parish.

As a commemoration of this event, the St. Norbert Parish - La Barriere Council, St. Norbert Heritage and St. Norbert Knights of Columbus are planning on erecting a memorial cairn. This cairn will have all the names of the deceased from the first cemetery, from 1859 to 1905. The names will be listed on plaques and displayed on the cairn. This cairn will be at the Church or newer cemetery.

The first cemetery was established in 1859 on Church property, next to the Church building. Before then, the deceased were buried in
St. Boniface.

The first graveyard was mostly Metis people. In 1905, the old cemetery was abandoned and a new one was started. Over the years the old cemetery had little or no maintenance. Consequently, it deteriorated so much that in the late 1980's everything was cleaned up.

There were 1,207 souls buried in the old cemetery. There are approximately 270 different family names. Of all family names, the ones listed below have the most family members buried there:

Parisian (69) Delorme (52) Vermette (45)
St. Germaine (35) Vandal (28) Henry (27)
Marchand (27) Cadotte (26) Courchane (26)
Parenteau (24) Carriere (21) Pilon (19)
Forbisher (16) Campeau (15) Morand (15)

We will keep readers of this site informed on our fundraising activities for this project. Your support will be appreciated.

Merci!

Metis News

When a nation dies and never ascends from the ashes of its own destruction, one circumstance must always be present. That nation forgot where it came from. It lost sight of its roots. The struggle for identity and the fervid quest for nationhood disappeared into the mists of time. The nation gave up on the quest. Outsiders came in, and this nation denied its heritage. Vision and hope faded; customs became suppressed through assimilation and doubt. Those people, who's forefathers and mothers would hold nothing to be impossible in their vision of a nation, joined in the hopelessness and despair. They forgot where they came from. They lost sight of their heritage. And when men forget what is at the heart of their nation, they lose their identity and their past, and become one with a people foreign to them and their ways, and disappear.

Yet I can see in the Métis of today the faces of the great Riel and Dumont, and the faces of those who struggled at Batoche, and I realize that our nation yet lives. I have seen the faces of the Métis people from the prairies to the lakes. They are the faces of a nation still strong, a reflection of the past, yet with the strength of the present. We can go back to the Red River and to the fur trading routes of the north, and we can see the same faces of the men, women and children who live today, who, like their ancestors, share in the making of the Métis nation. Our forefathers passed on a legacy of backbreaking toil and the turmoil of revolution. Their faces gazed from the backs of the Red River carts, from crude huts on the traplines, from the trenches at Duck Lake. They saw change, and they saw years of despair; until now, when the Métis nation is again to take it's rightful place in this country.

I see their faces throughout the whole story of the Métis people. We have been given our heritage, this land that we honour, through the dreams and visions and struggles of our forefathers and mothers. The cost has been high, but the price that they paid has been worthy of them. To forge our nation took men and women who were willing to become a new people. And they did that. And it is up to us to tell our children and they, their children, to the seventh generation, that we remember our identity, and from this identity we will shape our nation.

The Métis nation must not be forgotten and allowed to die. We owe it to those who passed this way before us, who gave us our grand heritage, who carved our nation with their hands and their hearts, that we will carry on with the struggle, and that we will write the history of a new nation, strong in our belief in the Creator, a love of our land, and a faith in our people.

John Roberts, adapted from Carl Sandburg

New place to read our life as Me'tis

I am opening this Blog with an offer for any Mix-blood Native American without a Home People (Tribe or Clan) to come forward and become a part of The Me'tis Society. Our current address is M.N.U.S. c/o R Two Bears; 2406 N E 139th St. #29, Vancouver, WA.98686. I have the rolls opened for the next while and will respond to all inquiries.

The Me'tis Nation has been around for more that 200 years and has served the Peoples of the U S and Canada most of that time. Many fought with English or French or the Spanish. Their treatment from the respective governments has and still is less than equitable. We have lost our land, recognition by the three governments, our respect from the Indian Nations, mostly due to the pressure from the Federal Governments. Though we have fought for this Island Home in all wars, we are not in the History Books at all.

Canada is the first country to accept the Me'tis as a legal group of people and set us next to the First Nations and the Inuit as an aboriginal race. Here in the U S the Me'tis have not fared as well. We will continue to strive of the same rights and privileges as our Brothers and Sisters in Canada.

Keep coming back to see what we are doing and where.

1 comments:

The choice of any one person to be in person what they are in their heart is the first step in recognizing their true worth and value to their Family, Friends and their Tribe. Is it not all too easy to live in a fantasy world and continue to abdicate their responsibilities to their mate or church or government agency? When they find their sum worth is less than their whole contribution in living, they then have two choices. One is to continue on the same path leading to the same self destruction, or two, they try to make amends with a new focus. It is this new WAY that leads to an improvement of life for all who are part of the group affiliated with this NEW person.

As Metis, there are customs and rites we all need to be aware of. These rites and customs are what makes the fabric of being Metis. At the same time, there are costumes and rites not common to all metis. Recognizing these differences and commonalities is how becoming a great Metis Nation is made.

Look to others of like mindedness and collect with the common likes and focus on the Love that is generated by being together. Learn what is good about your group and build on that good. Soon there will be others attracted to you. We as Metis need a foundation of like minded people to meet in the new ways of communication and establish a Metis Nation that will withstand the trials and confrontations of the past. Today is the first day of a New Way, a new road to seek peaceful reconciliation with our selves, our other aboriginal brothers and sisters, as well as our federal and state governments. restoring our rights is but a small mater for those who hold them away from us. We can be as our neighbors to the north are, Recognized and dealt with on a level equal to any other citizen of this great country. What do you think.

census info.

RE: [Metis_Peoples] census info.

Kwe-kwe,
I posted it Bro!
I have sent word out about your website and your org that needs
reviving....remember me now? this is my other emaill address.
Michelle
O:nen