Spiritual Perspectives

• Navajo Offering Ceremony
• Passover: The Festival of Freedom,
  The Feast of Matzoth

Navajo Offering Ceremony
By Johnson Dennison - Special to The Independent

The Navajo medicine person conducts mineral offering ceremonies to restore harmony and balance for a patient, family, or a group of people.

Such sacred offering ceremony is for better health, prosperous living, and safe journey. It is considered as a blessing ceremony. If it is for a safe journey, it is usually for a person or a group to travel a long distance.

I first observed this ceremony for a Navajo child returning back to school long ago. Back then, most of the Navajo students were gone nine months a year to attend schools far from home. The offerings ceremonies were not only done for journey, but to have a good mind to learn new things.

The process begins with a medicine person arriving at a central place such as in a hogan or a designated place. The patient or a group who are requesting the ceremony will be waiting for the medicine person's arrival. The medicine person will be informed about the purpose of the ceremony when he arrives. It is important to summarize the purpose so the medicine person will know exactly how to offer a prayer during the process.

Next, the precious chips of sacred stones are placed on a small piece of unwounded buckskin with corn pollen. The stones are turquoise, white stone, abalone shell beads, and jet stones. The medicine man or woman will sing a sacred song while the stones are being put in place for the patient.

The medicine person, patient, and family members will walk or drive over to a site where a spruce tree or a juniper tree grows. In Navajo, spruce is a sacred tree representing a total universe. The medicine person and the patient arrive at the tree and all come to sit in a semi-circle while the medicine person prepares a sacred offering. The medicine person and the patient place the offerings by the tree and the medicine person will pray for a long time. It is a prayer to the earth, sky, mountain, water and the air.

When the offering is done, the medicine person will sing a blessing song and a traveling song while all travel back to the hogan or a place where a closing song will be sung. The offering ceremony is conducted only when the patient requests. It is a beautiful simple and short ceremony.

Johnson Dennison, a Navajo medicine man, is a coordinator in the Office of Native Medicine for the Indian Health Service.

This column is the result of a desire by community members, representing different faith communities, wishing to share their ideas about bringing a spiritual perspective into our daily lives and community issues.

For information about contributing a guest column, contact Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola at the Independent: (505) 863-8611, ext. 218 or lizreligion01@yahoo.com.

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Passover: The Festival of Freedom,
The Feast of Matzoth
By Rabbi Reuel Karpov - Special to The Independent

During the month after the recent Festival of Purim (the half of the month during which the moon wanes, and then the beginning of the next month during the waning of the moon) we prepare for Passover, which is both the Festival of Freedom and the Festival of Unleavened Bread (Matzos). (The reason it is both appears to be that it derives from different historical strains one from the pre-judaic New Lamb festival in the spring and one from the Canaanite annual ridding of the old sour-dough.) "Freedom" does not mean "liberty" and we are bound, rather than by an earthly tyrant, to our sacred duties and sacred ways, and must remain ever more morally accountable for our behavior and how it affects other people and the world around us.

During this month of preparation, we rid our homes of food made of any of the grains of which bread could traditionally be made wheat, rye, barley, oats, spelt, and triticale. These are called chometz, and even food containing only a trace of it is prohibited and must be removed from our homes, as are utensils used throughout the year and not kashered ("fixed") for Passover, and certain colognes, cosmetics, and items in the medicine cabinet. It is a lot of physical and spiritual labor to prepare for this ceremony. But those who do not make Passover, or eat chometz during Passover, it is written in the Torah, the beginning of the Bible, bring upon themselves kareth they are "cut off from their people."

We completely clean the entire house and car so as to remove any possible crumbs and small pieces of food. The only exception where flour from one of these five or six forbidden species is permitted, are the Matzos the unleavened bread which are made of carefully watched flour (usually wheat) and water, the dough for which must be made into matzos within eighteen minutes so that it does not begin to rise. Only Matzos baked with Passover in mind may be used for Passover; ones used all year round are not for Passover use (and they really do taste different, since the eighteen-minute restriction is not observed). The same is true of the canned-goods, especially if you are a traditional person. In this way, so many prayers have gone into this.

These rituals are the vehicle for conveying emotional and spiritual truths, and they make the Passover and its seder ceremonial meal all the more sweet, since so many prayers have gone into its preparation.

The evening before the evening of the first Passover Seder there is a small ceremony with a feather and a candle during which the last of the chometz is ceremonially collected; the next morning is another ceremony with these objects where they are ceremonially burned. It is one of two times a year it is traditional for Jewish people to make ceremony with feathers, although this writer understands that feathers are also used in more esoteric healing ceremonies. The day before Passover, from sunrise to sunset, is a fast-day for the first-born, commemorating the deaths of first-born of Egypt and how the Hebrew first-born were spared; it is a good time to grieve that people do suffer invariably from things they or their relations brought on themselves, which makes it no less suffering and no less sad.

The seder itself is a feast of history; the prayers and the discussion and learning. There is a theme of the fast beneath the feast; the prayers begin and at first we partake ceremonially of the sacred foods on the ceremonial plate, such as the greens, the salt water, and the bitter herbs. The bitter herbs remind us of the bitterness of slavery in Egypt, which we are to see ourselves as personally having been liberated from, with Egyptian slavery being a metaphor for whatever in our own lives enslaves us, preventing us from being who we really are. There is also a fruit-paste called charoseth that is to be eaten together with the bitter herbs, of which there are various recipes from all over the world, and this rabbi has around eighteen such from several continents and is happy to provide them. It is written that "all who elaborate to tell of the going out of Egypt; behold, that one is praiseworthy;" this ceremony is a teaching vehicle and several thousand years of inner meanings and sacred intentions are attached to all of the ceremony.

During the seder, there are four cups for each person, corresponding to four expressions of freedom or deliverance mentioned in the Torah. ("Wine" in Hebrew could be either potent wine, meaning fermented grape-juice; or non-potent wine, meaning unfermented grape-juice. Knowing what we know now about people's tolerances, this rabbi uses only non-potent kosher wine kosher grape-juice for all ceremonies). These four cups also correspond to the four "worlds" of kabbalah, which is Jewish mysticism and is enjoying a renaissance.

After the ceremonial meal that is in the middle of the ceremony are more prayers, and it is considered beyond rude to eat and then leave without completing the rest of the ceremony.

With G-d's help, but only also with the help of volunteers, we will have a Passover Seder in Gallup at the First United Methodist Church, whose members are letting us use their space (and kasher the stove and utensils in advance). It will be at 6 p.m. sharp on Thursday, April 13, 2006. To help make this happen, make your reservation (by Monday, April 10) by calling the First United Methodist Church at (505) 863-4512. The requested minimum donation is five dollars. Please be generous so no one will have to be turned away for lack of funds.

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