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  The Church Of Father Peyote

    Carl A. Hammerschlag, M.D.

        from: The Dancing Healers, Harper & Row, San Francisco
        ©Carl A. Hammerschlag 1988.



    The first time I attended the church of Father Peyote, I got quite sick—and I was only sitting outside listening to the music. They passed some tea around. I tried it and became violently ill.
    I thought that was the end of my relationship with Father Peyote. There was no way that I would sit up all night just to get sick. On that first visit to a Native America Church meeting in 1965, I did not realize that the process it offered was not to be taken lightly. It took me ten years to make a return visit, but now the church has become a place of healing and enlightenment for me.
    To the believer, peyote constitutes a sacrament, not a drug. Peyote has absolutely no recreational aspects for the church participants. You must come to peyote as to truth, in an attitude of worship.
    Let me explain at the outset that in matters of the Peyote Church, I am a guest who has come to dinner; that does not make me an expert on the entire family. I know what I have seen, and there is much I don't know. I go as a fellow traveler. I don't bring friends to observe the colorful ritual. This is a sacred time to me and to every other participant in the service.
    The most spiritual place I know is the tipi of the Peyote Church. I used to go to synagogue on the high Jewish holidays, but I can no longer feel the presence of the spirit in a group larger than forty.
    Indians have a very different concept of where you worship. The whole Earth is the temple. Any place you stand is a church. The tipi is a nestling enclosure on the Earth Mother's breast, a place of sharing among a small group. Here each can worship at his or her own time, as the heart directs, in his or her own language.
    I sing my Jewish songs in the tipi, and I wear my father's prayer shawl, the one he wore at his bar mitzvah in Germany. My Indian friends say that it does not matter in what language you sing; there are always at least two people who understand—you and the Creator.
    The first time I sat before the coals in the tipi I saw crematorium ashes. I do not see them as such anymore. I have allowed myself to become liberated. I understand that I am flawed and imperfect, so it's okay to feel small and weak. I am freer of the domination of those fears.
    The more you work with the mind, the more you realize you can't know it. The more you seek to touch your spirit, the more you realize that you must enter some altered state of consciousness to burst free of the conventional limitations of flesh and rationality. This is what the Peyote Church is about.


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