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By Maura Hanrahan There seems to be a great longing for stillness and silence these days. People go to obscure monasteries and retreat houses, hoping to capture something they feel they have lost or perhaps never had. They want quiet, or feel that they need quiet. They’re looking for an escape from busy lives. Fair enough. But there is the implication that quiet and withdrawal are pre-requisites for spiritual health. Many people have bought the notion that it is only in silence and solitude that we can connect to the spiritual, to God. Consequently, there are people who sincerely believe that they have to disconnect from their real lives to connect with God. But this is not so. Recently I’ve found God in the busyness of life. The irony is that I haven’t gone looking for her there. She came looking for me. She kept popping up, in a very in-your-face kind of way, so much so that I couldn’t ignore her. I’ve been in non-stop motion, “living on a plane.” I started in Northern Labrador. That trip was followed by stays in Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa and Quebec City, as well as jaunts back to Labrador between times. I met Indigenous women from all over Canada in Winnipeg. In Ottawa, I saw up close how national Indigenous policy gets made and how messy, cumbersome, collaborative and even beautiful that process can be. In Québec, my understanding of respect (an overused but not well enough understood word) deepened considerably. Back in Labrador, I shared moose stew with an old friend and, in the communities, witnessed resilience and strength that still awe me. I was juggling several projects for different clients in two provinces and another at the national level. For some reason, they all needed to be done at once. All the projects centered on issues in Indigenous communities: health, land claims, neglected and denied Aboriginal rights. Sometimes I felt despair; other times, I was elated. I have almost never felt so alive. I felt God as my head crashed onto the hotel pillows, through my husband’s supportive voice on the phone, in the wind that pushed the planes over Quebec farms, Manitoba prairie and Labrador barrens. I saw God in the face of an Elder from the Yukon and heard him in the prayers we said to open our meetings. I met God in the bubbly Turkish man who drove me to the Ottawa airport and in the Mexican professor-taxi driver, a refugee from the institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) long hard rule, a man empty of bitterness. God is in our difficult, often heart-breaking work. Through our good will and optimism, he is at every meeting, in every document, on the side of the angels. She is there at six in the evening when we are just getting to the meat of the issue after sitting in a windowless room since before 9 a.m. She keeps us going. There is no other way to explain the ceaseless effort and dedication of Indigenous leaders, their staff, their lawyers and academic advisors. When your schedule is crazy, it’s tempting to say to yourself, “When it calms down, when this is all over, I’ll.…” But this – the busyness, the chaos – is life, too. It’s part of the script, the story; it’s more than something you have to get through while you’re waiting for cherished quiet time or that retreat you booked months ago. Through my Indigenous work, I have learned that God is absolutely everywhere. Indigenous people have always seen God in everything and that is just where God is. Contrary to some religious thinking, there is no need to withdraw from the world to meet God. God will come to you because God is all around. Dr. Maura Hanrahan is a writer, anthropologist and painter who lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Original content by: http://www.inwardoutward.org/?p=228.
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