The Earth Is Our Temple

Every religion has a sacred place. For the Native American Church, that place was not built -- it was given.

The Earth is our temple. She does not require construction or consecration. She is already holy, already alive, already in relationship with every living thing she sustains. To sit in ceremony beneath an open sky, beside a fire, near running water, is not to approximate worship. It is worship, in its most original form.

Indigenous spiritual traditions across North, Central, and South America have understood the Earth as a living being -- a Mother -- for as long as those traditions have existed. The ceremonies of the Native American Church are not held in spite of nature but in harmony with it, because nature is not the backdrop for the sacred. Nature is the sacred.

Click the above image to view a presentation created by James Westwater

The four elements are not symbols in our ceremonies -- they are presences. Fire carries prayers upward. Water cleanses. The earth grounds the ceremony and connects it to every prayer ever offered on her surface. When the Sacred Pipe is lifted, the smoke that rises is an offering to the living world that surrounds and sustains us.

To regard the Earth as your temple is also to take on a responsibility. Stewardship of the Earth is not an environmental position for the Native American Church -- it is a spiritual obligation. The health of the land and the health of the people are not parallel concerns. They are the same concern.

All are welcome in this temple. What is asked is simply this: come in a good way. Come with respect for the ground beneath you, the fire before you, and the tradition that holds you.

The Earth is watching. She always has been.

Mitakuye Oyasin. All My Relations.