One of the first things that my Sufi teacher Murshid Jim recommended to me when we first came in contact in the late 1990s was a musical entitled “Spirit: A Journey in Dance, Drums, and Song” which has been updated to “Spirit: The Seventh Fire.” (Peter Buffett, see http://www.spirit7thfire.com). It was playing at the National Theatre in Washington, DC at the time. The performance expressed the loss of Native American wisdom and life in contemporary experience, and that in the face of the genocide and racism that built our country, we have the opportunity to retrieve this way of life to let it and its people (including the people of the natural world) lead the way forward. The website describes the vision behind the performance so much better than I:
“During the time of the seventh fire, a new people will emerge to retrace the footsteps of their ancestors in search of new ways to live in harmony with one another.
“During this time of rebirth, humanity will find itself at a crossroads and will be given an opportunity to live a spiritual life rather than continue to be distracted by technologies.
“It is believed that we are now living in the time of the seventh fire, and few would deny that we are indeed at a crossroads. To make it possible to light the eighth and final fire of peace and harmony
“The time to act is now.
“The responsibility is ours.”
I wept throughout the performance; tears of joy and tears of shame, outrage, and pain; not unlike the tears I have shed these past weeks for my own country, Catholic church, sufi community, and myself. The clear theme of rebirth in the performance expressed my own aspiration as an artist and scholar and teacher, which is why my studio is called “Reunion Studios.” The drums, music, dancing, prayers, and poetry moved me in a way that I will never forget.
I can see now that Spirit has deep resonances with a liturgy that our Sufi tradition calls a “sama” a “listening” (after the Perfect Master Rumi) that reaches the heart through music, dance, poetry, and ecstatic discourses by the illumined Master. A sama is a way to just be with the Master, to have her or his “sahavas” as Meher Baba says, his “intimate company.” A sama supports a potential transformation, a union with the True Self so that this encounter can be brought back into the world in service to the Earth. While watching Spirit, the Native American sama, I understood clearly that this was our story, our American story that we long to tell and more importantly, to live; however, I did not realize the connection to my own personal story. I did not know what I have since discovered through DNA testing in 2016 that my father was half Native American with a mixture of European that included Italian DNA.
Growing up, I mainly identified with my mother’s family who is 100% Italian on both sides. I had a difficult time identifying with my dad’s side since it was fraught with toxic dysfunction. Not that there wasn’t dysfunction on the Italian side, it was just more manageable; ya know, tempered with pasta and music and Mass. Lots of sacrament of confession too. My uncle Bobby Ferraro used to go to confession every day. People would ask him why and he said “Well, how often do you eat food and need to take a shit? That’s how often I try, fail, and need to repent.” He had a way of making it plain and I loved him for it.
But I face the reality: The Italian side was less dysfunctional because it did not live with the ravages of white supremacy in nearly the same way as my dad’s side, so it felt that it did not have to bear the pain of that sin and certainly not confess that shit. Instead, if the topic of “colored” people came up when watching the Denver Broncos or the Colorado Rockies, my Colorado Italian relatives could sometimes demonstrate just as much unbidden vitriol as a racist white Southern Baptist we saw on TV. I went along to get along until I became a teenager, and more so as a college student. When I pushed back against this racist language, the more enlightened members of my Italian family would obfuscate the issue of white supremacy by making weak comparisons with the Black experience; as if the Italian experience of discrimination by white Protestants was just as awful when we first arrived on this land in the early 1900s! Such comparisons are completely weak, of course, because they ignore the history of chattel slavery, lynching, psychological domination in all its forms, incarceration and policing, vigilante racism, etc. They are weak because they ignore how all races join the club of “whiteness,” which is by explicitly or implicitly, loudly or tacitly supporting Black and Native American subjugation. Signore Gesù Cristo, Figlio di Dio, abbi pietà di me, peccatore!
Like my dad, I contain the colonizing Italian heritage of Cristoforo Columbo and the heritage of the colonized Native American Indian. Around the time that my maternal great grandfather Turano arrived in Colorado to find purpose in the New World by building the railroad across the Rockies, the Ute Tribes were pushed out of their lands to reservations in southwestern Colorado and Utah. I am part of a people and a culture who have sought to erase another, doing such a good job that I am also part of the people that have been so expunged from the land of America that it is pushed out of my memory, my father’s memory, and his mother’s before him, Mary Pacheco, who was the Native American descendant in our family. The fractures of this reality within led to the fractures of dysfunction without. She died when I was ten, and I loved her more than I can say. She did the best she could to hold the family together as the Matriarch. She taught me to pray, to really surrender to the Our Lady when she would pray the Rosary before Mass.
She always refused to acknowledge her race, however, angrily defending her view that we are Spanish if confronted, since that was the first language she knew. She maintained her position no matter the evidence to the contrary: that we ate food native to Mexico not Spain, for instance, or that her side of the family looked like native peoples from the Americas. My father repeated the same denials with equal ferocity. I eventually understood the wounds they carried that made such a disavowal the best coping mechanism in a white supremacist context. I learned to simply ignore the cognitive dissonances when they surfaced about this issue, but they surfaced in all kinds of other ways, splitting reality arbitrarily when my dad would identify with white culture and when he didn’t; when he felt proud of his lower class and when he didn’t, when he identified with the Catholic Church and when he didn’t. This dissonance was made more explicit and uncomfortable after we moved in 1978 to the South, to Greensboro, North Carolina. As Catholics from Colorado, there was no fooling anyone in the Bible Belt that we were not respectable white Protestants. Our neighbors would ask, “Are ya’ll A-Rab?” “No. Italian.” “Oh!! I-Talian!” Do ya’ll worship Mary or believe in the Bible?” Welcome to a new world where the color-line changed!
The shame of our race, the trauma of that erasure haunts me now. The recent mainstream recognition of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as the Poor People’s Campaign has provided a space for me to see another layer of how white privilege has done its work in my own psyche, colonizing it and that of my Native American family to willfully forget our identity so that we could become a version of “whiteness” that is “Spanish” and “Italian” in our case; and importantly, the attendant pressure to make a deal with the devil to abuse Black people in thought, feeling, or action to demonstrate that whiteness if necessary (See Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me and Anish Nandy’s book Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, though I have serious grievances against Nandy’s characterization of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo). The erasure worked and the constructed Spanish overlay took root on my father’s side. I do not have a clue what tribe I come from, though my hunger for a reunion consumes my consciousness; the void in my memory is filled with a longing “to light the eighth and final fire of peace and harmony.”
It is Father’s Day, a day to celebrate and remember those human beings who do the best they can with the love they received and the divine love that they have discovered in their hearts. For some of us, our fathers tried to give more love to their children that they ever got from their fathers. My dad died last July, so this is our first Father’s Day without his physical presence; a very small taste of what people experience who never had a dad or whose dad was not at all available for whatever reason. My father is one of those who tried to give more than he received. His father, his European father, died when he was about eight with complications related to alcoholism as far as I can tell, so my Pops grew up in poverty. As the oldest, he went to work to take on responsibilities that are best handled by adults but too often among the poor fall to the young. He also grew up to try and be the father he never had. I recognize his efforts and in the beautiful lives of his children and grandchildren, and I have no words for my gratitude.
I now think of all those men of color forced off their land, enslaved, lynched, abandoned, incarcerated, and policed by white supremacy, made poor, leaving fatherless families behind, either psychologically or physically. I also think of European American fathers who could not be an example of the inclusive love their sons and daughters needed to trust the light within themselves, to trust that all of Creation in its glorious diversity is a safe place to breathe with others. I don’t know his story, but I would guess that is partially the case with Derek Chauvin, George Floyd’s murderer. There was no father’s love in his eyes as he smugly kneeled into George’s neck, hands in his pockets, back straight with crooked pride.
In the last few years, the Italian singer Andrea Boccelli and his son Matteo have been singing beautifully together. They performed a duet about the relationship between a father and son that has been on my mind lately called “"Fall On Me.” It paints a more ideal picture than my relationship with my dad, and in the video it expresses a polish that is really only applicable to wealthy contexts. Further, the words don't entirely match my experience, but there is, however, a powerful kernel of love that I recognize in the song that I had for my dad and wish for him and his father, and that I wish for all sons and daughters and their parents. May the Father of all, embodied by real illumined Masters, reveal Himself in our hearts. May we be His hands and feet, His inclusive and humble love in this world. May we kneel with humility––with the soil of Mother Earth, asking for Her forgiveness. O Signore, abbi pietà di noi.
Enjoy Andrea and Matteo Boccelli’s song embedded below. The lyrics with my attempt at a translation of the Italian bits are the following:
“Fall On Me”
I thought sooner or later
The lights up above
Will come down in circles and guide me to love
But I don't know what's right for me
I cannot see straight
I've been here too long and I don't want to wait for it
Fly like a cannonball, straight to my soul
Tear me to pieces
And make me feel whole
I'm willing to fight for it and carry this weight
But with every step
I keep questioning what it's true
Fall on me
With open arms
Fall on me
From where you are
Fall on me
With all your light
With all your light
With all your light
Presto una luce ti illuminerà [Soon a Light will illumine you]
Seguila sempre, guidarti saprà [Always follow it; it will know how to guide you]
Tu non arrenderti, attento a non perderti [Don’t give in, be careful not to get lost]
E il tuo passato avrà senso per te [And your past will make sense to you]
Vorrei che credessi in te stesso, ma sì [I would want you to believe in yourself]
In ogni passo che muoverai qui [In every step you take here]
È un viaggio infinito [it is an infinite journey]
Sorriderò se [I will smile if]
Nel tempo che fugge mi porti con te [you take me with you when we part]
Fall on me
Ascoltami [Listen to me]
Fall on me
Abbracciami [Hug me]
Fall on me
Finché vorrai [As long as you want]
Finché vorrai
Finché vorrai
Finché vorrai
I close my eyes
And I'm seeing you everywhere
I step outside
It's like I'm breathing you in the air
I can feel you're there
Fall on me
Ascoltami
Fall on me
Abbracciami
Fall on me
With all your light
With all your light
With all your light
Spirit
CD Cover
