“If my heart can’t fall with yours into hell, if I can’t recognize and meet your suffering from my own experience of hatred and ill will, we can’t help even ourselves let alone be of some use in aiding a sick planet.  The willing, nonjudging, emphatic fall into hell can find no barrier. Wonder replacing judgment, returns to its place as the consecration of the world.” ~Susan Murphy, A Fire Runs through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis

In the West, we have a deep need for rituals and ceremonies, especially in the area of grief. We continue to destroy our Home, the Earth, and each other, and we avoid what it takes to bring healing. 

I am fortunate to have been introduced to the power of ceremonies and rituals through my time with many powerful and beautiful family, friends, and organizations.  Illuman, a men’s organization dedicated to eliminating toxic masculinity, is one of these organizations that is growing into adulthood and its power to help us heal. 

During a six-hour sit, alone in the mountains of Colorado on an Illuman Male Rite of Passage (MROP), I met the powerful mystic Harriet Tubman. This encounter led me to an abiding trust and dependence upon nature, something I’d lost in the growing-up process of our materialistic, exploitative, extractive, white, and male-dominated culture. 

During this same MROP, I had the opportunity to visit hell in the form of a ritual called the Gauntlet. In this ceremony, we announce a core or deep wound from our lives and then walk through a corridor of men as they chant out loud your core or deep wound. Walking through the corridor, you turn to each man and say, “Thank you.”

My wound took the form of a statement, “Who do you think you are, nigger boy.”

I stumbled through the corridor, turning to each man in turn. “Thank you”, I replied to their wounding, hellish words that I’d given to them. Most of the men were white. They were middle-aged like me. I could sense the pain in some of their hearts as they averted their eyes and muttered the words, “Who do you think you are, nigger boy.” I also sensed some relief when I looked them straight in the eyes with, “Thank you.”

A few times, I hesitated, encountering a man with a strong Southern accent. “Who do you think you are, nigger boy” sounded and felt different. Their patois reverberated to the core of my being. I felt weak and a little sick.  “Thank you,” as I stumbled on to the next man. 

And then, just like that, the hellishness gave way to a moment of radical belonging and acceptance that I will never forget. I fell into the wide-open embrace of a beaming and wondrous creature named Phil Rogacki. He had the biggest, warmest smile and donned a beautiful, brightly colored stole around his neck. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it was something like, “Welcome home, brother. I love you!”

Phil is one of my dearest, most loving friends to this day. 

A few months later, I visited friends living in Verona, Italy, on a business assignment. After a wonderful dinner and a visit to Juliet’s Balcony, where Romeo fictiously declared his love for her, we walked the beautifully lit, honey-colored, cobblestone streets. A drunken man stumbled through the street before us, cursing and mocking the people he passed. 

Suddenly, when he saw me, he came straight to attention and gave me a clear, crisp, and perfectly executed “Seig heil!” the Nazi salute. 

Everything slowed down. People were aghast, and my hosts stood mortified, full of fear or compassion—I don’t know what—and began profusely apologizing to me. 

“Thank you.” I stopped, bowed toward the man, and kept walking. I consoled my friends for the next few minutes and assured them no apologies were necessary. I showered them with compassion and love as they experienced some small hell in their lives. 

The Gauntlet ceremony prepared me for that moment. It symbolizes the path of descent, the Kenosis, or self-emptying, within Christianity. People in the West seek to avoid this path at all costs. We long for ascension above all things. 

Perpetual ascending destroys the world, and it’s time for us to engage in embodied practices and rituals that root us into the Earth and the soil so that we become humble and useful to the planet and ourselves. 

Have you been to hell and come back? Thank you.

 

Byron McMillan
Indigeneity and Water Resource Educator, Dr. Salamanca’s Dream, LLC