21 May 2003

Romuva & Anti-Semitism email

Alas, it is precisely words and attitudes like AT's that have besmirched the name of Lithuania. It is deeply saddening to confront such myopic and retro expression in a Romuvan forum. I am uncertain whether it was indeed the "open-mindedness of the ancient faith that has made it easy to cajole pagans into converting," as Martynas wonders, but I applaud his greatly more balanced and reasoned response as commensurate with that "open-mindedness" that many of us do indeed uphold. We are Romuvans because we are not Christians, not Jews and not Muslims - holding to a more organic understanding of deity and affirming the dimensionality of the divine as opposed to an a priori consciousness to space and time. In our case, this understanding is one that penetrates our ethnic roots as something cultural, valuable and meaningful. The "blood" connection is in some more noble sense incidental. It may be `real', we may even honour it, but the beauty of Romuva and its sacred ethos reaches beyond any and all tribal origins.

It is not a question of counting numbers. We have ALL been wronged, and at the same time we have ALL wronged. None of us is exempt from the matrix of wrongdoing. That is a given. The choice therefore before all of us is either to remain in an imbecilic mind-set and sink into a morass of tit-for-tat, tally all the wrongs that `they' have committed against us and seek to obliterate all those that we are certain have wronged us, or to endeavour to become beacons of a possible alternative that is securely confident enough in its own ancestral richness to work with others cooperatively despite our differences and negative histories. Romuva cannot be an enclave within the world we have today and will increasingly have tomorrow. The time for private bastions and even `racial purity' is over. Instead, Romuva can be - and for some of us already is - a light that connects us with our own niche in the foundation of humanity and allows us to dialogue and work with others - all others - for a world better than any we have had in our collective past and one that will be a true gift to our children and our children's children.

The ATs exist - both within our community and without and, to some extent, within each of us as well. Their's is not the voice we wish to cultivate. They will continue to rant and rave and spew uncomely venon, but let us not allow them to prevent our vision and efforts to be better than we already are. I do not know what role, if any, that our native spirituality might have played in the unsavoury doings that some Lithuanians committed during the pogroms of the second world war, but to be mature and thereby able to progress and grow we must face soberly and honestly these more unpraiseworthy actions that occurred in our homeland. If we are to change for the future, we must acknowledge the past as it was and not as we might wish it to have been. In that way, we can marginalise the ATs in our midst and surpass them. If Sue is a "genocidal apologist," I stand proudly with her, and I do this as a Romuvan and a Lithuanian.

Su diev,

Michael