Huliau - The Return Voyage

The Return Voyage has slowed to a crawl.

In our lives on Earth, it is absolutely required that we honor the pauses.  That we stop in our tracks–permit at times, what feels like a loss of momentum.  Within our industrial world, there is that addiction to motion–and a consequent avoidance of  “Still.”

‘Iokepa’s mother died yesterday.

And the only way we know to honor that momentous passage is a reprieve from “Doing”–a seizing of  “Still.”

If it feels unnatural, that is because it is unrewarded in our addicted-to-activity modern world:  To stop, to do nothing, to stand still and breathe.  But we hearken to another world, another time, another culture–and it holds lessons for every one of us.

‘Iokepa’s mother–my mother in law–was the rock solid foundation of her son’s  life.  Not another person came close to that–not another one was needed.   She attended every high school football game.   Maybe she winced; perhaps she covered her eyes–but she attended.  She supported his passions.

She was in the bleachers for every wrestling match.  She never missed a motorcycle race.  It wasn’t easy to watch her favorite skirt at harms edge.  But in her eyes,  he could do no wrong.  

My guess is that the best of our mothers convince each of their children that they are her favorite.  I know that  ‘Iokepa never doubted it.

And at the end of his dangerous youth, his mother handed over still another gift.  She presented him with a beautifully wrapped box.  Inside:  She offered her carefully detached apron strings.

This woman knew how to hold on–and she knew how to let go.  That was her wisdom.

She was challenged again, twelve years ago now–when her successful, businessman son left her side to undertake his part in the ancient Hawaiian prophecy that required him to relinquish, “Everything I worked for all my life.”

Relinquishing, cars and homes and things material was relatively easy.  Walking away from his mother in Washington state to return to Hawai’i and fulfill his destiny was very hard indeed.  She kept track of the days, months, and ultimately, years since that day in 1997 when,  he’d left her side to take his place among his people–in their service, and at the service of  their Creator.

She was  proud, and she never let him forget it.  He was the apple of this woman’s eye.  She listened to him in a way that few parents  are able to listen to their adult sons and daughters.  He spoke honestly to her mind and he spoke gently to her heart–until the very end.

Now it will be ‘Iokepa’s turn to let go.  And it won’t come to him in a neatly gift-wrapped box.  He’ll have to dig deep into his soul to find the place she left for him.  But he will find it, as his wise Native Hawaiian ancestors  have found it–in the still, quiet breath.

The Return Voyage slows to allow just that.

We have been driving down the road of civil disobedience.

The place names flash up at me with the increasing vagueness of an aging memory:   Birmingham, Alabama; Meridian and Hattiesburg, Mississippi.  For ‘Iokepa and me, these are fleeting interstate highway signs–a quick stop for gas or food on our way to Baton Rouge.  But they tickle memory, and memory is nothing if not the instructor of this present moment.

“Past is Prologue” sits across the facade of the U.S. National Archives.  And, of course, it is.

So we have, only yesterday, a prominent theologian who denied the German Holocaust ever happened.  (Six million of my people speak otherwise.)  We have  couples divorcing on the brink of their 25th anniversary saying, “I never loved you.”  (Denying their glorious days hitchhiking around Europe, or the moment of their child’s birth, or their candlelit anniversaries.)

We forget.  And when we forget, we can not learn.

Human beings (and governments freely-elected by human beings) make mistakes–often.  We  learn more from President Obama’s, “I screwed up”  than by his choice of Senator Tom Daschle for a Cabinet post.

‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani  said about forgiveness:  “It is meaningless to forgive or ask forgiveness, if we don’t know what we’re asking forgiveness for.”   When a policeman on Kaua’i  slapped handcuffs on ‘Iokepa simply because he was a visible, proud, native Hawaiian and, in the same breath, the officer said:  “I’m sorry,”  ‘Iokepa responded, “Don’t say that to me–it’s an incorrect use of the word.”

The words, “Civil Rights,” have taken, over these years, such a specific meaning, that, I believe, we’ve lost the larger one.  We have treated in the past–and continue to treat one another in the present–with the greatest absence of civility.   That has got to change. If our new president speaks to our hearts around one single common denominator–Republican or Democrat, atheist or believer–it is this:  We must learn to treat one another with civility.

An attorney friend from Louisville, Kentucky used to say:  “You do not have to like me.  You do not have to agree with me.  But there is no excuse to abandon good manners.”

Return Voyage travels the map of our “Uncivil” history.   The “Trail of Tears:  We slaughtered the very folks who fed us Thanksgiving dinner.  Indentured Slavery: The economic and labor needs of large plantation owners trumped Thomas Jefferson’s idealistic rhetoric.  Return Voyage adds the grievances of the kanaka maoli , the native Hawaiians, to that list:  An independent nation taken at gunpoint, to feed the greed of  sugar cane barons–against the powerful objection of the native people.

I was not alive when the Hawaiian nation was colonized by foreign occupation.  I was not alive when the Native Americans were forced to abandon their lands by a brutal militia.  I was not alive when shiploads of Africans were stolen from their homeland and planted in this one.  I can accurately say, I bear no responsibility for any of these injustices.

I even have bragging rights that we’ve recently elected an African American president.

But if I close my eyes or my memory to all that led to now–I’ve learned nothing.  I am doomed to repeat these and other gross acts of incivility.  And, in fact, the kanaka maoli , and  the Native American, and the African American are locked still into heartbreaking cultural impoverishment.  We removed from each of these peoples many things, but none more grievous than the  memory of their cultural wisdom.

But it is we (neither native, nor descendent of  slaves) who have lost the most.  We’ve lost the memory of the mistakes.  Hence, we’ve lost the ability to make them right.  And we’ve lost the human necessity of civil dialogue.  That is the change we herald.