This was no natural phenomenon. Centuries ago people had climbed this hillside, perhaps following the very path that had led us up the hill. Finding the right spot -- one overlooking the living waters of the flowing stream -- they had cleared the space of its woodland growth, using tools fashioned of stone and bone. Then, the site prepared, they scanned the skies to determine the cardinal directions and designed an earth sculpture. Using baskets woven from reeds, they carried earth to the spot above the stream and built there a ceremonial center, a sacred place where earth and sky and fresh-flowing water were united.
Who these people were, what understanding of the world they incarnated in this place, how they used the site are subjects of scholarly speculation. But it is unmistakably clear that here they labored, and the evidence of their work and hope remains in a small grassy mound overlooking a swiftly running stream. Standing there in the warm autumn air, hearing the small sounds of birds and late-season insects, the background music of the stream rushing downhill across rocks and boulders, I ached to understand the whispered message of this place -- a message just outside my range of hearing. It was the same half-understood message we had almost heard once before, at sites like this one throughout the Ohio Valley.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Some years ago for a summer vacation, we packed our four kids -- I said it was some years, about 24, in fact -- anyway, we packed the kids in the station wagon that always seemed out of alignment and headed west toward southern Ohio. We stopped first at the state historical museum in Columbus, which gave us some background about what we were to see; then we visited a series of state parks built around mounds and other earthworks created by the prehistoric (that is, the pre-European) inhabitants of this continent.
Perhaps wandering in museums and traipsing across green lawns to look at little hills and raised circles of earth was not what the kids thought of as a vacation. As I recall, they were all four involved in repeating their little chorus of protest: When you've seen one mound, you've seen them all! But they turned a little more enthusiastic when we got to the Serpent Mound, where they could climb the steps of the fire tower-type observation platform overlooking that more than 1,300-foot-long figure built of earth. Just the same, the significance of the genius, the planning and work, the need to mark a sacred space and the cooperation to do so was lost on them.
In St. Louis, which was as far west as we went on that trip, children of the 20th century that they were, our gang had a better time observing the Arch that marks the Gateway to the West and riding a riverboat on the Mississippi. And sure enough, when we packed a picnic and crossed back over the river to visit Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois, they recalled and restated their Ohio refrain: When you've seen one mound, you've seen them all!
It seems that understanding and appreciation are not given but rather are acquired attributes of the young. However, looking at the size of what's called Monk's Mound at Cahokia, our kids evinced a little more interest when the guide told us that archeological digs have revealed the imprint of the baskets in which the dirt was carried to make that huge monument such a matchless feat of architecture in soil!
We have had occasion to go back recently -- without the kids, who are, of course, grown and scattered -- back to see the Great Serpent and the cruciform mound Dave alluded to. A return visit to Cahokia is as yet on a future itinerary, particularly since our curiosity has been sparked by the publication just this spring of a new book that outlines the work that has been done in researching that immense complex since we were there so many years ago. No longer just a state park, it has been a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site since 1982.
While the mounds we had seen in Ohio were built on specially chosen sites -- always near water, usually on a ridge or a hilltop -- most but not all were burial sites and the extra significance of effigy mounds like the Serpent continue to excite speculation. Unlike Cahokia, they do not seem to have been places of residence -- the Woodland peoples of 3,000 to 500 years ago were mainly hunter-gatherers, after all. Instead, the mound sites were places where people gathered sporadically, or at particular intervals, perhaps seasonally, to renew their sense of community with each other and to wonder at and to celebrate their involvement with the world around them.
As is true of most religious mythologies, whether we find them in written lore or in the larger graphic evidence of architecture, be it in stone or brick or soil(!), the mound builders of North America oriented their earthworks to the great calendar we call sky. As Stonehenge in England marked solar and lunar events and the great pyramids of Egypt pointed to special stars, so some mound complexes are oriented to solar and lunar calendars. And recent dating of the Great Serpent at around 1100 CE has given rise to the theory that the figure is not so much an animal effigy as a memory marker, a recapitulation in earth of an event in the heavens that occurred in 1066: namely, a pass-by of Halley's comet.
The Cahokia complex, too, reveals alignments to sun and moon, even evidence of a "woodhenge" by which to calculate celestial events. No wonder Sally Chappell titled her book CAHOKIA, Mirror of the Cosmos. Here are a few paragraphs from her introduction:
From the top of Monk's Mound the horizon of the wide world beyond forms a perfect circle. At dawn the rising sun embraces this cosmos with an arc of gold, a reminder of the past once cradled in this land on the broad shores of the Mississippi.At the beginning of the second millennium, a civilization more sophisticated and powerful than any other in the Western Hemisphere north of Mexico emerged and flourished in the Midwest. The center of communal life for these Native American "Mississippians" was in the place we now call the Cahokia Mounds, in southwestern Illinois. At the turn of the millennium, about A.D. 1050, the population of Cahokia and its environs was larger than that of London. Their technology was of the Stone Age, yet without the wheel, beasts of burden, or metallurgy, their stratified society fostered widespread commerce, refined artistic expression, and monumental architecture.
The center of this six-square-mile area, the climax of this Native American world, was a great four-tiered pyramid covering fourteen acres and rising one hundred feet into the sky -- the tallest structure in the United States until 1867.
(from CAHOKIA, Mirror of the Cosmos
by Sally A. Kitt Chappell,
University of Chicago Press, 2002)
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The earthworks scattered through the Ohio Valley are varied and distinct. Some are single mounds on a hilltop overlooking a stream. Others are vast complexes, miles across, composed of geometrical shapes and mounds of various types and earthen effigies, often connected by causeways outlined by earthen walls many feet tall. In most cases, there is little evidence of villages near these sacred sites, leading scholars to believe that many communities came together to build and maintain the structures and that the sites served as centers where divergent groups might gather and interact and share common concerns and solve common problems and sustain human community. In many cases, the earthen walls were pierced by multiple entryways for ease of access. In these places, people celebrated their relation to the living earth, the flowing streams, the shining stars, the sun and the moon, to the past out of which they emerged, to the future they would construct, and to each other across the boundaries of family and clan and tribe.
The contrast of these works with the remains of Cahokia is striking. Built just below the point where the Missouri flows into the Mississippi, across the river from St. Louis, Cahokia began as a ritual site, with that gigantic mound or pyramid built at its center -- the largest human structure north of modern Mexico. Atop the mound, archeologists say, was built a temple. At the base of the mound was a plaza and small mounds oriented to the rising of the sun and moon at important moments in the year, all created without pack animals or metal tools. Built on rich bottomland, surrounded by forests and watered by ample streams, Cahokia grew from a ceremonial center into a great city. Here was the center of a trading network that extended north into what is now Minnesota, south to the Caribbean and southwest to modern Mexico. Cahokia -- tied to the universe, sustained by the natural world, engaged with distant and diverse communities -- Cahokia became a great and wealthy city.
But then, something happened to Cahokia. At some point, the inhabitants of that great city felt a need to build a wall around its sacred center -- not an earthen wall with easy access, but a palisade made of tree trunks sunk into the earth and covered with adobe mud -- a sturdy wall gated to control access and to defend the center from those outside. Periodically the wall needed to be repaired or extended or replaced. Each time the people from Cahokia ventured into the woodland and cut down the hundreds of trees needed and carried them back to the bottomland. After a while, it became necessary to travel farther and farther from the city to find the necessary trees. Slowly the hills around the city were denuded of trees. The animals of the woods began to disappear and with them a crucial part of the Mississippian diet. Rains now eroded the hillsides and ruined crops. Water ran off into the streams rather than into the aquifers. In time, its people abandoned Cahokia. The great city had turned in upon itself, had defended itself against the world, had defended itself out of existence.
The contrast between the attitudes and assumptions built into those early earthworks and the assumptions that are incarnated in the late history of Cahokia are stark and instructive. The early mounds were cooperative efforts -- multiple tribes and clans coming together to construct a shared and open sacred space where together they might negotiate a richer relationship to each other and to the world. The earthen walls were intended to define the sacred space, give it shape and presence, but they were not intended to keep the world or others out. They were constructed with multiple openings, inviting the world in. Cahokia became rich and fearful and obsessed by the need to hoard its riches and protect itself against a hostile world. It closed its sacred space to the outside world. Only the right people would be admitted through its carefully guarded gates and only at the right time and only for the right purposes. More and more of the energy of the city was devoted to its own defense, its own survival. In the end, encysted, cut off from the world, shut up in its own narrowly defined sacred space, it lost its ability to understand the web of relationship upon which its survival depended, and with great skill and cunning it defended itself out of existence.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The lessons of the mounds have haunted us over recent months, as we have had occasion to visit several Unitarian Universalist congregations that have built new sacred space for themselves, and that seem to exhibit symptoms of the Cahokia syndrome. One church once stood, proud and visible, on a street corner in a troubled suburban community. There it engaged the challenges and the problems of the community, inviting others in, seeking together ways to make the city a sacred space for its people. Then it found the resources to build itself a new building, off in the woods, hidden from view -- a quiet retreat known primarily to those who were an accepted part of the community. And over the years, it lost its sense of mission to the larger world; became obsessed with its need to create a sacred space for its own members, where they might find sanctuary from a world that is fractious and difficult and painful, a kind of limited-membership self-help group. Closed in upon themselves, their mission became their own survival in the face of a world that was now seen as hostile. They grow smaller and more irrelevant with every passing day. They are defending themselves out of existence.
And this is only the clearest example of a process that seems to be replicating itself in place after place, as churches forget that they are not called into being to serve themselves, but to engage the world, to be open to its pain and its folly, to struggle for its redemption. Sacred spaces are viable not because of the walls that delimit and define them, but because of the doors that open and invite in the world.
After months of exile, this congregation has returned to this sacred space, created by our forebears, and cared for and enhanced by generations of women and men. It is a new, enlarged, richer space -- one we dreamed about and worked to create -- a sacred space of which we can be rightfully proud. But this we need to remember: This church is not its own reason for being. It was not built to serve the handful of people gathered in its walls at any given moment. It was built, here on this corner, to be a presence in the world, to engage the world, to invite the world in. It was built to welcome the stranger, to incarnate a tradition, to minister to the world.
Shortly after this building was built, Frank Carlton Doan invited the larger community in to participate in a series of forums discussing timely and important issues. From the pulpit of this church, he preached pacifism and outraged a community preparing for war. The board of this church used that occasion to witness to the world at large its commitment to a free pulpit and the free and open engagement with unpopular opinions. Supported by the women and men of this congregation, A. Powell Davies dreamed a dream of a new world and a new faith rooted in democracy and equity, and with his wife, Muriel, carried that dream into the world. With this congregation as a base, Jacob Trapp set about to end segregation in Summit and to create a true interfaith dialogue in the town. From this church, Deane Starr denounced an immoral war in Southeast Asia. The men and women of this church have engaged the world over issues of peace and justice and mercy and equity, entering into community-wide conversations seeking diversity and openness. From its beginnings, this congregation has been defined by its openness to the world, its concern for engaging the challenges and opportunities the world has to offer, focusing its ministry beyond these walls, and inviting the world into this sacred space.
The mound, on that hillside overlooking a small stream in Ohio, was built to mark the place where multiple clans and tribes could celebrate their intimate connection with each other, with the living earth, the flowing stream, the silent stars. The steeple that was replaced on this building a few weeks ago serves a similar function. It proclaims to all who see it that this is a sacred space -- but it is sacred not because here we defend ourselves from the world, but rather because here we engage the world. The work of this church is sacred because it is carried on in service to a vision more important than our own survival. The ministry of this church is real because while it begins here, it is completed out there; while it draws strength from the community in which it is rooted, it is validated by service to the world beyond its walls.
In the midst of our homecoming, listen to the whispered challenge from our past: Build here no defensive walls, no guarded gates, no refuge from the world. Throw open the doors and invite the tribes and clans into this place, here to dream new dreams, here to try new ways, here to build together a future in which all have a portion. And then move out into the world to make the dream a reality.
Charge to the Congregation
Take our word for it,
Churches are curious institutions.
People come to them seeking intangibles.
We come bringing all the baggage of our past
--the things we affirm
--the things we are trying to escape
--the joys and triumphs which have shaped us
--the fears and agonies we still flee
--the hurts which never cease.
We come, seeking to change our lives
--looking for help in creating new patterns
--looking for aid in developing new goals
--looking for support for new lifestyles.
And at the same time, we come seeking
affirmation of ourselves, just as we are,
with all our warts and blemishes showing.
We come because the world is in deep trouble
and we would be part of the process
by which creative solutions may be found.
But we do not want to be held responsible
for the evils we see,
and we want solutions
which will not cause deep changes
in our own lives.
We come to church seeking authority strong enough
to validate our lives,
our choices,
our dreams,
and resenting any authority strong enough
to lend our lives validity.
In churches people struggle for insight
and fight against it;
seek to be loved and cared for,
while insisting upon personal independence;
demand that the institution be responsible
while we be free to do our own things.
All the ambiguities and ambivalence of our times --
attraction-revulsion, love-hate, dependence-independence,
certainty-uncertainty, clarity-confusion
come to focus in the church.
It is the most human of all institutions;
the place where we see what we really are:
innocent, scheming, naive, hopeful, despairing,
cynical creatures
who create ourselves and our institutions
one decision at a time.
A church should be,
above all,
a place where we do not take ourselves too seriously --
where we can laugh at ourselves and each other --
not with derision, but with insight
into the peculiar qualities of this institution
which seeks to build permanence
on the shifting sands
of human perceptions.
This afternoon, you have installed Vanessa Southern as minister of the Unitarian Church in Summit. Perhaps you did not realize at the time what an impossible burden you have placed on Vanessa. Perhaps she did not realize what an impossible burden she was assuming. Because churches have been part of the landscape for so long, we sometimes fail to see what peculiar institutions they are, and what a bundle of irreconcilable dreams they represent.
We have only one real charge to give this afternoon. Remember, in good times and bad, when you are elated and hopeful and when you are frustrated and despairing, that you have asked this woman to do an impossible task, and that she will give all her energy and skill and talent to do what you have asked her to do. Along with the task, give her your support, your encouragement, your love and your compassion. Remember that she is not your employee, your hired servant. She was called to ministry before ever she knew of you and her first loyalty must be to that which called her to this impossible vocation. Together you and she share responsibility to the larger tradition which this church seeks to incarnate in this time and this place. You are called to minister together in service to that which has the power to transform us and our world as we cannot transform ourselves.
Here, in this little place, with this handful of people, the redemption of the world is to be worked out. Laugh with her at the absurdity of this undertaking, and celebrate with her the sacred imperative it represents. Work with her, and who knows, TOGETHER, YOU MAY JUST ACCOMPLISH THE IMPOSSIBLE.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
You may want to read other visitors' comments on David E. Bumbaugh, Jr., and Beverly A. Bumbaugh's "Sacred Spaces" .
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