Becoming Native

A year ago this week I finalized the purchase of my home in the North Carolina mountains. Though I didn’t actually move until June, I’ve been thinking this week about that memorable event of a year ago. Committing myself to a new place after forty-five years in one community is significant, and I didn’t do it gradually. I couldn’t afford nor did I want to have a vacation home and an apartment in Macon. Wherever I was living, I wanted to be all in, fully committed to a place.

As if to commemorate the purchase of my home, I discovered a Catesby’s Trillium blooming near the porch! First, I love trillium (who doesn’t) and second, the place it was blooming did not seem a hospitable place for it, so near to recent construction and all the debris that the builders left lying on the ground. I was so excited to discover it, and another one, not yet blooming, nearby. Along with the serviceberry, dogwood, and flame azaleas that have been blooming this spring, I am reveling in the colors and discoveries offered by the land here.

A few years ago my word for the year was “native.” When I shared that at work in our weekly staff meeting (we were all sharing our words for the year) I got a few chuckles. Someone said something about deodorant and I had to explain why the word chose me. I won’t go into detail now about how that word shaped my year, but since moving to North Carolina and committing to plant only native plants on this land I am tending, I’ve thought about the long-lasting impact of that word in guiding my life, and in ways that were totally unknown to me in the year I was living into it.

Living on land that for centuries had been the home of the Indigenous Cherokee people, I have a strong sense of responsibility to honor this bit of earth by avoiding non-native plant species, with the exception of daffodils a friend in Macon gave me prior to my move here. As the wild places in our nation are increasingly at risk of being damaged or lost, I want to do what I can to promote habitat for plants and the creatures that depend on them. I know I am not native to this land, being of European ancestry, but I want to live as though I was native, with a strong degree of love and care for this place that is giving life to me.

I’ve been moved by reading Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is both a professor of environmental biology and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. While my ancestry does not connect me to the Indigenous people of this land, I appreciate Kimmerer’s words that “for the sake of the peoples and the land, the urgent work of the Second Man (non-native peoples) may be to set aside the ways of the colonist and become Indigenous to place.”

The Catesby’s Trillium and the flame azalea blooming now and the mountain laurel that is just about to bloom all urge me to become Indigenous to this land that more and more feels like it is adopting me as its own. I hope to bloom here in this soil, just as they are.

Harrowing of Hades

Easter! On Sunday the celebrations were widespread and enthusiastic. But Easter isn’t simply a day, it’s a season, fifty days beginning with Easter Sunday and stretching until Pentecost. We are in Eastertide longer than we were in Lent. We are in “feast mode” longer than we were fasting.

That says something to me about God’s abundance. It’s always more than we need, always more than we can even imagine. Yes, even in this season of Eastertide there are still wars, there is still corruption and injustice and terror and abuse. Cynics might say that Christ’s resurrection hasn’t fixed anything, but as someone who has gone through my own hard times (as we all do at some point in life) Easter says to me that I am never left alone, and that the worst thing is never the last thing.

My favorite icon captures this so well. Known as “The Harrowing of Hades”, it shows the risen Christ standing on the gates of Hell, pulling Adam and Eve up with him. Satan is bound and in the darkness beneath Jesus, along with the keys of death and hell. I once heard Elaine Heath speak to the way many churches have modified the Apostle’s Creed to eliminate the line that says “he descended into hell.” She said we need to remember that Jesus will go into Hell to save us. There is no where he will not go to be with us, to restore us to life. The Harrowing of Hades icon always reminds me of that truth. I always display it during Eastertide.

At the Easter Sunrise service at my church, Murphy First UMC, we shared in an Easter Proclamation from the Easter sermon of John Chrysostom, from around 400 AD. It included these words that, as they were proclaimed on Sunday, made me think of the image from the icon:

He destroyed Hell when He descended into it.

He put it into an uproar even as it tasted of His flesh…

Hell was in an uproar because it was done away with.

It was in an uproar because it is mocked.

It was in an uproar, for it is destroyed.

It is in an uproar, for it is annihilated.

It is in an uproar, for it is now made captive.

If you are walking in darkness, the Easter message tells us that evil, injustice, oppression, and grief do not get the last word. We are not alone in our dark seasons. Jesus, who descended into Hell, comes to us in our own versions of Hell, and will not let go of us ever, and will bring us out with him. If you need that hope, I encourage you to get your own Harrowing of Hades icon to remind yourself of the lengths Christ goes for you.