Within the walls of the historic part of the Middle Tennessee Medical Center, down a long hall lined with outdated portraits of important people of the past, and beyond the welcome desk where a majority of the office doors were closed. I found one open door; I peeked in and found a young man dressed in scrubs sitting at a computer with the floor plans of the hospital on his screen. I asked, “Could you please tell me where to find the Chaplain?” He replied, “He isn’t here.” I said, “Oh, well, actually I am looking for Peggy Meade; she is also a chaplain here.” He then proceeded to escort me down the empty corridor to yet another office, “Pastoral Services,” and it was there where I met Peggy Meade.
Meade comes from a diverse ethnic background, including her maternal grandmother who is full-blooded Cherokee. An enigma of sorts, Meade possesses a Master of Divinity from Vanderbilt University and is a Jungian scholar, ordained United Methodist minister, chaplain at the MTMC and a college instructor. Additionally, she is a prison minister and the director for Rosa’s Children, a nonprofit organization aiding children whose parent(s) are incarcerated and surprisingly has time to serve as a publicist for the heavy metal band F.U.C.T.
There are several unique aspects to Meade’s religious and spiritual philosophy, but what is most important is that as a self-proclaimed Christian, she is all-inclusive in her beliefs and that is evident by how heritage affected her life’s path. One might conclude Meade’s multi-ethnic background influenced her both religiously as well as spiritually thus allowing for an open-minded approach to self-determined truth.
“I have a deeply intuitive empathic sense but I also pay great attention to detail and I think that it’s in the details and the analysis of individual people and individual acts and behaviors that we pull together the truth from what we know,” she says. “We can observe the truth but it usually happens in reverse order. Feel the truth then we observe where it came from.”
This emphasis on “feeling” truth correlates well with both her Native American heritage and her Christian faith through the acknowledgment of the feminine role in both. Meade not only recognizes the maternal in the form of the Cherokee Great Grandmother Spirit but also the Holy Spirit representing Wisdom as the feminine attribute to the triune Christian God. In addition, she embraces her role as a female minister, which still to this day is not accepted among many denominations.
Such a broad acceptance of the many ways in which she experiences the divine draws focus away from the unavoidable ethnocentric behavior we all exhibit at one time or another. She explains, “I think, spiritually speaking, that we have ?ethno-spiritualism’ that precludes a lot of things. I think it is a cosmic block that keeps us from opening up to other cultures, other ethnicities, and other spiritualities and belief systems. Because we tend to believe as human beings that ?my belief, what I believe is the only thing that counts’.”
People who are not Christian and who may consider themselves agnostic or atheist will sometimes associate negative events with what the Christian religion represents. For some individuals, the fact that the Native American culture was unscathed until colonial contact that consequently caused massive disease, death and ultimately forced assimilation creates yet another reason to have judgment for the Christian religion. For others, when the term Christian is mentioned, they may recall what the latest scandal was in the media. Furthermore, there continues to be division even among Christians today, just as it initially divided into three major movements the Gnostics, Jewish Christians and Pauline Christians in the beginning.
Continued negativity revolves around perceived judgment of damnation if you are not “born again,” or attend service regularly or for that matter are members of a church. These stereotypes are experiences that people may have had but are not defining characteristics of what true Christianity is about and that is of unconditional love, i.e., Agape. However, experience and conditioning shape our perspective and how we relate to people who may be considered in alliance with a legalistic religious group.
There are people who truly represent the essence and love of who Christ is. Remember that the religious entities are defined as many things, but an individual who is associated with such institutions cannot be limited to such definitions that are inherently faulty due to human construct. Again, there are those who may not even claim to be Christian yet walk humbly in the Spirit of Christ, people who are guided by the spirit of light and lead by example not solely by words.
“Judge not, that you be not judged. 2 For with what judgment you judge, you will be judged; and with the measure you use, it will be measured back to you. 3 And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? 4 Or how can you say to your brother, ?Let me remove the speck from your eye’; and look, a plank is in your own eye? 5 Hypocrite! First remove the plank from your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” ? Matthew 7:1-5 (NKJV)
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