"Touch the Earth" (The Native American Spiritual Tradition)

During the past several decades, there has been a growing interest in Native American culture and, in particular, there has been interest in their religious experience and spirituality. Why this is so is complex, but probably one of the key reasons is that there is a crisis of spirit in American religious life. Aside from the ever-popular hellfire and brimstone religions of the religious right, mainstream religions have lost their meaning to many Americans.

As I have suggested to you many times, nearly every human being has a spiritual dimension that is a key part of their very existence. There is a hunger within us (particularly as we grow older) to find that spiritual side: to nourish it and to understand it. If the religion of a person’s youth does not speak to their spiritual side, then something else will fill the void. In all too many cases there is an attempt to fill this void with material things so prevalent and available in our modern society. Unfortunately, material things cannot satisfy spiritual needs and when we try to make this happen, the result is greater greed, depression, unhappiness, and even illness. It is the Buddhist notion of suffering caused by desire and impermanence.

Add to this, the explosion of social media in the past few decades and the problem is even greater – particularly among the younger generations who simply cannot put their phones down.

In some cases, people attempt to broaden their spirituality by seeking new and different sources of spiritual knowledge. This explains the tremendous growth of “alternative religions” in America during the past many years. From this phenomenon, there has emerged a new interest in Native American spirituality. As a denomination that embraces (at least in word if not deed) an appreciation and acceptance of diverse religious experiences, Unitarian Universalism has incorporated Native American religious rituals and practices into our spiritual heritage.

We officially recognize “earth-centered religions” in our Principles and Purposes as a source of our total Unitarian Universalist spirituality. This was not done without a lot of controversy in the denomination in the 1980s, but recognition of earth-centered spirituality broadens and enriches our denomination’s religious experience.

For those of you visiting today - what we call our “Living Tradition” draws from many sources as noted in the first few pages of our hymnal.

These include:

• Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;

• Words and deeds of prophetic people which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.

• Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life.

• Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves.

• Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.

• Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

These sources pretty much cover most of the religions and philosophies developed in human history. It is up to each person to determine which of these sources speaks to them.

I believe that we all can learn a lot from the Native American tradition, but we must be careful – we must be very careful - not to create an illusion or a new mythology surrounding Native American religion and culture. This was done in the past during the European Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.

At that time, it was quite in vogue among the wealthy to display hapless Native Americans in the drawing rooms and dining rooms of the late eighteenth century London and Paris elite. The whole myth of the “noble savage” arose. This concept inferred that the American Indians paraded around Europe were innocent “children of God” who had been plucked from the very heart of the garden paradise in America and corrupted by evil European influences. *(This same sentiment came forth during the quincentennial celebrations for Columbus.) (Berkeley in 1992).

Incidentally, many modern Native Americans prefer the term “Indian” and do not care for the term – Native American.” It depends upon the individual.

While today we considerate it insensitive if not outrageous to treat Native Americans as simple people, there are those in our society who are doing the same thing naively and perhaps unintentionally.

The Native American tribes of North America were vastly different in culture, language, values, religion, and occupation. They spoke differently, lived in different ways, dressed differently, ate differently, and had very different religious practices and rituals. At the time when Europeans first came to the Americas in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, it is believed there were some ten million Native Americans in all of North America, but there were over 1000 different languages!

Unfortunately, there is a current tendency to portray Native Americans as innocent gentle people who were and are ultra environmentalists and morally pure. This view is racist and untrue, and it serves to ignore the human diversity and the struggle to survive that existed among individuals, clans, and nations in pre-European America. By our western values and standards of the 21^st century, there were and are Native American values and ways of living that can certainly be aspired to. But there were also customs and rituals that we would consider cruel, brutal, and savage by the standards of our time.

Some people today like to paint a picture of a Pan-Indian harmony in the days before the Europeans came to America. This is the notion that the peoples of North America lived in harmony with each other before the arrival of Europeans. The truth is, however, that many of the peoples of North America were constantly at war with each other. Senseless murder and rape were a way of life among some of the tribes just as they have historically been prevalent among human beings around the world throughout all of human history.

To ignore the bad practices of Native Americans and to create illusions about the good is to dishonor the history, heritage, and culture of Native American peoples and to turn a blind eye on practices which were savage and cruel by more enlightened standards.

During our more than five centuries of development, America has adopted values, attitudes, and actions that are far more compassionate than some Native American customs and rituals of the past. This aside, there is much to learn from the Native American religious experience. Modern people would be well-served to study and embrace many of the core values of Native American people.

The cultural and religious diversity among Native Americans was and is vast so at best, broad descriptions of Native American religions can only be generalizations but there are certain common similarities.

Joseph Epes Brown, a renowned Native American scholar noted that what we refer to as religion cannot, in the case of the American Indian, be separated from the activities of their everyday life, nor can it be separated from the phenomena of the natural environment. As primal peoples, Native Americans lived every minute in contact with the natural environment. As such their religious experience was also part of their environment. Their religious values and concepts were given substance by always referencing the forms, forces, and voices of nature.

As Professor Brown noted when he was interviewing the Indian Chief, Black Elk, just after World War II, he said, “In my first contact with Black Elk almost all that he said was phrased in terms involving animals and natural phenomena. I naively wished that he would begin to talk about religious matters, until I finally realized that he was, in fact, explaining his religion. The values I sought were to be found precisely in his stories and accounts of the bison, eagle, flowers, mountains, and winds.”

I think it is noteworthy to realize that Native Americas did not see anything as “supernatural.” Everything in their world, including their beliefs in spirits and gods was all natural.

In Western culture and “the so-called “God religions” of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there is a marked difference between that which is considered sacred and that which is considered profane. In all three religions, God is “other than this world” – in other words, supernatural. “He” may be the creator of the universe, but he stands apart from his creation. This distinction is made quite clear in the Book of Genesis and the Qur’an, the stories of which are an integral part of all three of the God religions.

In fact, not only is God separate from the creation in the God religions, but in some sects of conservative Protestant Christianity, the creation itself – the profane - is viewed as “the workshop of the devil.” That which is of this world is inherently evil and to be avoided lest one find oneself on the slippery road to hellfire. By the way, Native American religions did not have a belief in hell.

In primal religions and in the Native American experience, the sacred and the profane are one. There is no distinction between the two and the sacred manifests itself in the acts of Nature. There is no supernatural.

As such, all the happenings of nature are considered acts of the sacred. The changing seasons, events such as earthquakes, floods, storms, tornadoes, and draughts – all are viewed as sacred events. Most Native American peoples also view their food sources in sacred terms. For hunting tribes, the bear, the buffalo, or the fish all become sacred entities. By consuming the animal, one consumes the sacred and the balance of nature is kept in harmony. Disharmony can occur when the sacredness of the food-source – the animal – is not honored.

Similarly, in tribes that were and are primarily agriculturally based, the plant food-source – such as corn or wheat – is similarly honored.

Native American people were not environmentalists as we understand the term today. They had little impact on the environment because there were simply too few of them to cause major problems. The Anasazi cliff dwellers of the southwest, for example, lived over a thousand years ago. We understand a lot about their lives, because they threw their trash at the base on their cliff dwellings and archeologists have been able to piece together their living patterns as a result.

The Mayan culture in Central America disappeared completely and quickly for mysterious reasons which some archeologists believe was over farming of the soil.

This said, Native Americans were keenly aware of the balance of nature. They were also quite aware that actions that created imbalance were likely to create an impact that could affect the very survival of the tribe. As a result of this understanding and because of their close association with nature on a day-to-day basis, Native Americans possessed a respect for nature and the environment which has most often been lost by modern human beings.

I believe that the great spiritual lesson that Native American people offer us today is the inherent belief in the interdependent and interconnected web of all existence – something we humans are integrally a part of. This, of course, has long been part of our Unitarian Universalist heritage.

As Black Elk once said: “Hear me four quarters of the world – a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand that I may be like you………Great Spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather, all over the earth, the faces of living things are all alike. With tenderness have these come up out of the ground. Look upon these faces of children without number and with children in their arms, that they may face the winds and walk the good road to the day of quiet.”

Beginning somewhere around 1830, a radical side of the Unitarian movement began to describe God as nature itself. This movement, known later in American literature as the “Transcendental Movement” manifested itself in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (a Unitarian minister) and Henry David Thoreau. In the words of Emerson:

“Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God.”

I find this curiously reminiscent of writings by the 13^th century Islamic Sufi-mystic Jellaladin Rumi when he said, “For thousands and thousands of years I existed as a rock. Then I died and became a plant. For thousands and thousands of years I existed as a plant. Then I died and became a fish. For thousands and thousands of years I was a fish. Then I died and became an animal. For thousands and thousands of years I existed as an animal. Then I died and became a human being. Tell me, what have I ever lost by dying?”

The point is that the Native American tradition views the sacred in a much different way than most Western religions - and so we are offered an alternative way to consider what I often refer to as the “God Event.”

When someone asks me if I believe in God, my general response- Well I do not believe in the god as described in the Bible – the passages of which were written by iron age people. However, I do see a sacred, call it a divine, presence in the universe – perhaps a universal consciousness embedded in all things. A presence that is natural – not supernatural.

As the great Unitarian architect Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “I believe in God only I spell it nature.” And as a Sioux medicine man (Pete Catches) once wrote, “As I get older, I burrow more and more into the hills. The Great Spirit made them for us, for me. I want to blend with them, shrink into them, and finally disappear in them…. All nature is in us, all of us are in nature. That is as it should be.”

This is the lesson of the Native American experience, and it is a lesson shared by primal peoples from around the world – those who live closely in the midst of nature and whose very survival is an everyday affair. They see the sacred and the profane as one unified experience.

The Senegalese writer Birago Diop wrote: “Listen more often to things than to beings; the fire’s voice is heard, hear the voice of water. Hear in the wind, the bush sob; it is the voice of the sacred. It is the ancestor’s breath. Those who died have never left, they are in the brightening shadow and in the thickening shadow; the dead are not under earth; they are in the rustling trees, they are in the groaning woods, they are in the flowing water, they are in the still water, they are in the hut, they are in the crowd. The dead are not dead. They are in the rustling tree, they are in the groaning woods, they are in the flowing water, they are in the still water, they are in the hut, they are in the crowd. The dead are not dead.”

Native American peoples perceived each action of every day as a miracle – as a special event – as an experience that weaved the fabric of life together in one grand harmonious design. Their spiritual traditions involved actions, rituals, and myths designed to perpetuate the cycle so that life itself could continue.

Unlike western culture, the Native American experience did not attempt to incorporate a scientific method of analysis, deduction, and reasoning designed to prove or disprove anything or to assign a particular value to it. Rather, Native American spirituality perceived life and the universe – the nature that surrounded them in more holistic terms and in the context of the sacredness of all creation.

The Native American experience offers each of us an alternative way to perceive and experience the sacred. I encourage each of you to consider the possibilities thus offered. If the depiction and experience of an angry and vengeful creator God- intent on continually testing you to see whether you deserve salvation or damnation does not make sense to you - consider that there are alternative ways to see and understand the sacred and to find a connection to it.

Rather than seek the Cathedral – seek the spring day. Find a beautiful place on a beautiful day and walk in that place alone. We all have the gift of Cape Cod to do this. Be aware of each of your senses and what they tell you. If you do this with intention, you will understand the nature of the Native American experience – and you just might find a special way to connect to the sacred source of all life and creation.

As the Ogala Sioux, Luther Standing Bear, once said, “the man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things was infusing into his being the true essence of the spiritual.”

Reverend Christopher McMahon

UU Chatham

April 19, 2026