Sacred Ground

October 9, 2022

Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbia

When’s the last time you got dirty? I mean really deep into the soil? Walking through mud, digging in the garden, maybe? Remember what it’s like to get your hands and feet dirty, the precious black sticking between your toes or under your fingernails. Remember what it smelled like.

Peet and pebbles, sand and clay, humus and black decay: it’s all part of it. But have you ever just put your ear to the ground and listened? Or put both hands on the earth and felt the humming vibration? If you listened closely enough, you just might hear worms slithering and beetles scurrying. You could even imagine the faint echo of thundering herds of bison that roamed the prairies centuries ago. And if you’re like the god, Yahweh, of the Hebrew Scriptures, you may even be able to hear the blood of Abel crying out from the ground.

All of this life, and death, millennia of growth and decay, is all in there. The soil remembers, it holds our history. It tells us who we are and where we came from. The ancient tales tell us we are descended from Adam, the first human, who’s very name in Hebrew is said to mean “son of the red earth.”

This time of the Jewish high holy days is the perfect opportunity to honor this pivotal story that speaks to us of the failure of humanity, the all-too-common story of jealousy, envy, and murder — this story of sin itself, which I ultimately define as separation. I’ve always been struck by the way the spilled blood of Abel becomes a character in the story, crying out from the ground. A place that holds the history of life and death is surely sacred ground. In this tale we also see this tension between those who tend the land — Abel the shepherd — and those who possess and till the land — Cain the tiller of soil. This legend presages the countless bloody disputes over possession of land that not only followed later in the Hebrew stories but that continue right to the present day, touching our own lives.

This story asks the fundamental question that meets the moment in today’s Unitarian Universalist circles: am I my brother’s keeper? Am I my sister’s caretaker? Am I my sibling’s protector? We may sometimes be tempted to forget our deep connections to one another and our fragile hold on life that depends on the very soil beneath our feet. How can we process the bold fact of existence that our very lives are rooted in death and decay? It’s a miracle — this ability of the soil to hold the blood, sweat, and tears of generations past, and to synthesize it, to break it down into nutrients that feed new life.

Just think about how the loveliest blooming roses grow out of the lowliest cow manure.

This time of the observance of Indigenous People’s Day is the perfect opportunity to listen for the echoes of the Cain and Abel story. We hear it in the very real stories of the genocide of the native peoples of this hemisphere after the onslaught of European conquerors starting in the late 15th century. Sit quietly, close to the earth, and you — like Yahweh in the ancient story — may hear the blood of the Cherokee people, who passed through southeast Missouri in 1830. Cherokee blood and tears have merged with Missouri soil. The Cherokee people view the Trail of Tears as a thousand-mile-long cemetery as 4,000 indigenous people lost their lives and became, once again, one with the earth.

Let us also put our ears to the ground and hear the tears call out from indigenous people we know as the Osage. When we listen carefully, we hear, not the French mispronunciation that we now use, but the name they called themselves — the Wazhazhe — meaning Children of the Middle Waters. This is what I learned from scholar Ron Soodalter.* He also tells the tale of the second tribe that settled in our region, who called themselves Niutachi, which loosely translates as “People of the River Mouth.” Again, due to French ignorance, these people were mistakenly referred to as the Missouria, along with the mistaken name of the Missouri River. In honor of Indigenous people’s day, let us acknowledge the people whose land we now occupy. Let us speak their correct names in our mouths. Wazhazhe … Niutachi … and the name of the life-giving mighty river that still flows through their land, the one that’s just a few miles west from this place: the Pekitanoui. Our soil remembers these sacred names.

Scholar Soodalter speaks about our historical amnesia: He writes: “The odds have been against most present-day Missourians learning much about the first people to occupy this land. Their history classes don’t dwell on the subject. The ancestors of nearly everyone in Missouri came from someplace else and arrived relatively recently, so they had no stories to pass on about Indian life. The tribes themselves, which passed down their history orally, are long gone from here—an exodus wrought by disease, government treaties, and forced assimilation. So it has been easy for modern Missourians to overlook the legacy of the region’s earliest residents. But they were here.”

But they were here. The soil remembers.

Mary Lyons, of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, speaks so beautifully to the way that our very identities are tied to the land, especially for indigenous peoples. “When we talk about land, land is part of who we are. It’s a mixture of our blood, our past, our current, and our future. We carry our ancestors in us, and they’re around us. As you all do.”

As we all do.

Returning to our original story, and contemplating the white takeover of the lands of the Osage and Missouria, we can see the uncomfortable truth that we are the Cain of this story. God or the Grandmother Earth might be asking us now, where is your brother the Osage? Where is your sister the Missouria? What have you done with your siblings of African descent? What will we answer? Will we say, I am not my sibling’s keeper? When we pause to listen, and hear their blood and tears calling to us from beneath our feet, will we keep on walking? Or pave over their calls with yet more asphalt and cement?

Or will we say, instead, that our destinies have now been bound up together? That their presence here makes this sacred ground… that our growth and flourishing arise from the muck of history, like that rose blooming in fertile excrement. Let us pray to have the strength to hold it all — all the history, the good, the bad, the ugly. And let us answer the call of that thirsty ground which has opened its mouth to receive our sibling’s blood from our hands.

Wake now, our senses, and hear the earth call. Let us come alive with the full knowledge of our past, what we’re made of, and how things have come to be — and how things could be, with a future transformed by our care.

Coming together again in our beloved sanctuary is also the perfect opportunity to ponder the meaning of sacred ground for us… We give thanks this day for the newly refurbished sanctuary that holds our spirits, and for the green and growing patch of earth that lovingly embraces it. May this sacred ground we share here in mid-Missouri, near the fertile valley of the Pekitanoui River, be a place of memory, hope, and reverence.

We have built a thriving spiritual community in this place, which has been sanctified by our loving presence and our work for justice. Yet, it is nourished by our past. Our cherished loved ones whose names now grace our memorial garden… the decay of year after year of fallen autumn foliage that will feed green shoots in spring… the blood in the ground from the lynching of enslaved people right here in Columbia… the tears of the Wazhazhe and Niutachi who were forced from this land. All of it — all of it is calling to us from the soil beneath our feet.

As you go your way today, dear ones, tread gently on this precious patch of blooming earth. For you are walking on sacred ground.

Amen and blessed be

Source: https://missourilife.com/the-tribes-of-missouri-part-1-when-the-osage-missouria-reigned/