Thanksgiving Mourning Prayer for Red Road Pilgrims of the First Light

3:17 AM Saturday.

Blessings Duffy, my contemplative Catholic accountability partner in Vermont.

I hope this update finds you well. Our conversation on the phone earlier this Sunday was deeply meaningful, as always, and I look forward to our follow-up this Sunday or Monday as we embark on our first discussion of Advent and Christmas with the Church Fathers: A Seven-Week Retreat on the Mystery and Meaning of the Incarnation. I've read the introduction to our guided retreat and want to share some initial thoughts about it a day or two ahead of our telephone conversation, but before I can properly do that, I feel the Creator is challenging me to unburden my heart of everything I have been working on since my last major post on Tuesday evening. It's complex, so I will try to break it into three separate blog entries. Sorry if it ends up being an email overload. Maybe we should think about finding me an agent and/or an editor. As an aspiring hermit I don't know that I want to go down that route. Remaining undiscovered and unpromoted except within a very small circle could be the better way to go. 

 

The first thing I want to talk with you about is a prayer that I began to compose on Thursday morning. I am embarrassed to share it because I didn't finish it before falling asleep in a bout of a depression. It felt like I failed to get the Creator's message out. But now I am feeling up to it again, and it strikes me the prayer might not be such a bad start after all. I can share what I was inspired to plant in prayer this time around, say a few words of explanation to you about it, and then I can come back to it next Thanksgiving and see if it grows into something helpful - see if it grows into corn.

Here's what I wrote:    

Thanksgiving Mourning Prayer for Red Road Pilgrims of the First Light

Thank you, Creator, for all that you have taught our American tribes, territories, and states since our last Thanksgiving Mourning.

We who are Red Road Pilgrims of the First Light - who have sustainable millennium development, world religion, and world federalism in our hearts - solemnly repent of all the ways we have fallen short of your blueprint for our collective security, health, and prosperity. Despite our sins and shortcomings, you have blessed us in many ways over these last twelve months. We tremble in awe at your mercy. We pledge to persevere on our journey of truth and reconciliation, the way of Harmony and Wisdom.

We give thanks to you, Creator, for the peoples of Kiribati and Samoa, among the first places on Earth to see the light of the new day. We mourn all past, present, and future hardships that threaten the Small Island Developing states, and we pray for the success of the Samoa Pathway.

We give thanks to you, Creator, for the Pilgrims, who established the first permanent English settlement in New England, and for the Wampanoag, the people of the First Light in eastern Massachusetts. We treasure the Articles of Peace that endured between Massasoit Ousamequin of the Wampanoag and Governor Bradford of the Pilgrims. We grieve all that went wrong in the generations that followed, and we pray for the success of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

Nourish us, Creator, with another twelve months of lessons and blessings on the Way of Beauty. We beseech you. Amen.

Since Columbus Day, which is now also Indigenous Peoples' Day, I have been thinking a lot about Thanksgiving as a celebration of American exceptionalism and as a National Day of Mourning from a Native American point of view. It's not easy to hold both of these perspectives in our bodies, hearts, and minds at the same time, but the capacity and call to do so feels like part of what becoming a healthy straight white Judeo-Christian American man means these days. The challenge for us is not allowing our centrist independent values to get steamrolled by ungrateful extremists on the far left or sexist neo-Nazis on the far right.

I embarked on this long Thanksgiving 2025 weekend holiday without much of a plan beyond finishing up reading Robert McKenzie's The First Thanksgiving and National Geographic's 1621; talking on the phone with my brother in Kentucky and my sister in Florida; and eating corn, squash, and vegan chili for my main meal at the dining room table with my mom (usually we eat separately).

Then came the tragic news of the shooting of two National Guards in DC by an Afghan immigrant. Within blocks of the White House. President Trump was clearly upset when he announced that one of them had died. Upset on many levels. Along with every American patriot who heard the news. Our heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of Sarah Beckstrom:

This added to my depression on Thanksgiving morning. Then later, against this backdrop, I saw a short video on Instagram that further disturbed my peace. You have to see the video and read the accompanying text for yourself to understand exactly what I mean. It's not the message I was wanting to hear from a representative of the Native American community this Thanksgiving, but I am deep enough along in my non-dual contemplative journey to see it as a lesson from the Creator just the same. On one hand, I think this Instagram post is profoundly unfair, hateful, inaccurate and offensive. On the other hand, I am not a homophobic white settler colonist, nor am I an Iranian theocrat who lacks our American appreciation of free speech and indigenous irony. You won't hear me calling for the censorship of this Instagram post. I will, however, appeal for calm condemnation of its misplaced comparison. Hopefully I am speaking only with love and empathy from a more mature place on the Red Road.

Ultimately, Duffy, I do think we need to find a way to allow the First Nations of North America to speak and vote with their own voice at the United Nations General Assembly, or the entire Assembly will be guilty of genocide. It's a complicated situation that will take a long while to figure out, because it implies the recognition by the United Nations of at least one sovereign indigenous North American state - like the Haudenosaunee, for example - and then somehow all of the rest of the people who qualify to have a say at the UN as indigenous Turtle Islanders would need to come under the Great Law of Peace in some kind of online voting capacity. The Haudenosaunee or whatever other tribe is selected to be the center of the circle will need a long-term grant from the US government to figure the whole thing out. But this is just the rough sketch of an idea. I am sure there are better proposals out there for securing an indigenous Turtle Island vote at the UN.

The agonizing reality is that most of the indigenous in North America have aligned more closely with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad than they have with the Israeli Defense Forces. Why is the left in North America more determined to bring another Muslim state into the UN General Assembly than it is to give indigenous North Americans their first voting voice in the same body? Why does the right in North America not understand the relationship between Israel and the Lost Tribes of Turtle Island? The right knows that Zionism is not racist apartheid settler colonialism. The right knows that Zionism - and the Judeo-Christian tradition from which it springs - is a repudiation of racism, slavery and genocide at its very core. The right knows that Zionism is about living in harmony with nature, with God, and with all the other nations of the Earth. But so far, the right has not yet understood that Zionism is also a call to give the Lost Tribes of Turtle Island a seat at the UN General Assembly table.

(I guess I should clarify that I don't mean the indigenous peoples of North America are the literal lost tribes of Israel. I mean that they are lost from a voting voice at the United Nations General Assembly, and in this sense, they are Lost Tribes of Turtle Island. Their restoration could be part of a messianic process at the core of Zionism.)

Let me see if I can bring this first Thanksgiving weekend message to a close with a reflection on the phrase "Red Road Pilgrims of the First Light." On a superficial level, the Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony were anti-Catholic separatists from the Church of England. On what I believe is a deeper level, all Catholics are pilgrim, and all Pilgrims are catholic. This is how I read Lumen Gentium from Vatican II. 

Along the same lines, I think that Wampanoag and Christians are both people of the First Light - the first light of dawn to shine on eastern Massachusetts, and the first light of the divine Logos to dawn on Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. 

Our job on this Thanksgiving Mourning stretch of the Red Road is to see the Advent Logos in everyone and to work for truth and reconciliation between the Jewish Messianic Idea and its mirroring in the heart-mind of Turtle Islanders.

Should we be willing to forgive and see the Logos even in Hamas? I have a hunch, deep down, that President Trump probably already has. It's implied in his peace plan. But Hamas members eventually need to surrender their weapons to the International Stabilization Force and commit to a two-state solution, or they may end up even more completely in a Hell of their own choosing.

Please understand, Duffy, that I am still afraid of Hell myself. I don't wish it on anyone. I had a flare up of holy fear as I was beginning to write this entry to you. It was a moment of awareness that my feet are still in the fire from a Catholic point of view. Maybe from God's point of view. Is it God, is it the Creator, who is calling me to escape the fires of Hell through baptism, or is it the Empire of men? If it is truly the Creator, as I think it probably is, then what formula should I use to seal my baptism? "I believe in the Incarnation of the Jewish Messianic Idea in light, in Israel, and in the lived example of the Jewish and Christian sages as they lovingly interpret the sacred texts in true friendship with humanity?"

Okay, this is enough for my first letter. Let me post this, send it off to you by email, and start work on my second message in today's Thanksgiving trilogy.

Thanks for reading.

Peace.

End 10:27 AM.