EARTH TO EARTH

peter schreve

I spent a lot of my life struggling to have a coherent answer to the question, “Where are you from?” Seven towns and cities from southern California to coastal Connecticut have been my home and have each formed how I understand and inhabit the world around me. These days, I live less than fifty miles, as the crow flies, from where I was born. (And, yes, around here people actually say things like “as the crow flies.”) As much as this has become my home again, I sometimes still get a nagging feeling that calling it home isn’t quite right, that I’m somehow betraying other beloved homes or that I don’t quite fit some notion of what it means to be from here. 

While I’d always claimed this as my home, decades away meant that my relationship to the state had changed. Most of my family here had moved or died. My accent was gone. The landscape had changed and tops of beloved mountains had been cut off. I could tell you exactly how to make authentic West Virginia hotdog sauce, but would also tell you that, as delicious as that sauce might be, the best place to eat a hotdog was still at a Los Angeles Dodgers game. I could make buttermilk biscuits that would make my family matriarchs proud and cook up some ramps (wild and fragrant spring onions that grow in the surrounding mountains) like only a West Virginian can, but when I would open my mouth, my words would give me away as someone who wasn’t “from here.” Stacked modals and “y’all” were scattered throughout my speech, but the way these words rolled off my tongue was often more Midwestern than Mason-Dixon. And when my speech betrayed me, sometimes people responded, “You’re not from here, are you?”

Identity is complex and geographic and cultural identities are no different, and it’s virtually impossible to divorce different parts of our identities from one another. Even if I frame my geographic identity by where I live now, I cannot talk about my identity as a West Virginian without acknowledging the historical, cultural, and socio-economic factors that have shaped that identity: how our state was formed out of Civil War–era rebellion and how it has been colonized by outside corporations more concerned with the fossil fuels beneath our soil and their own profits than with the well-being of our people. This fraught relationship between corporations and the people of our state led to armed conflict in the Mine Wars of the 20th century, when miners dared to stand up to Big Coal. More recently, this has taken the form of environmental catastrophes, such as the chemical dumping that was at the topic of the 2019 film Dark Waters. Repeated abuse or harm at the hands of outside corporations has led many West Virginias to view those who are not “from here” with skepticism.

In my own life, this question of belonging has had spiritual and emotional consequences: feelings of detachment and isolation, a sense that my own identity and belongingness is somehow misplaced or invalid. When it’s observed that I’m not “from here,” though, it isn’t motivated by fear, an assumption about my immigration status, or by stereotypes based off of the color of my skin, as is so often the case. For those who do not have the privilege of whiteness, on the other hand, the question of who is “from here” and who is not can be not only painful but dangerous.

On the television show Parks and Recreation, there is a running gag about where the character Tom Haverford, portrayed by Indian-American actor and comedian Aziz Ansari, is from. In the first episode of the series, Leslie Knope, portrayed by Amy Poehler, says, “Tom and I work really well together. We’re both outsiders. I’m a woman and he’s a … oh, I think he’s a Libyan.”  In the next shot, Tom says to the camera, “I’m from Bennettsville, South Carolina. I’m what you might call a redneck.” Even Tom’s friend and well-meaning supervisor makes major assumptions about Tom’s heritage and identity. Although this scenario plays out as comedy on television, it is a reality faced by countless people every day. 

It’s a scene I witnessed in the grocery store shortly after the 2016 election, when a fellow shopper was accosted by a woman who told her to “go back to Mexico.” It’s an interaction I’ve seen on social media, when people take cover in the anonymity of the internet in order to excoriate others who dare to simply exist in this world while having brown skin. At a time when I turn on the news and see stories of children imprisoned in cages at our borders and read stories about white nationalism in my state, my own relationship to geographic identity has shifted. I am no longer so set on defining myself by where I am from, as I see how using those definitions has been turned into a weapon against people whose skin is darker than my own, or whose language sounds foreign to my ears. And in place of this geographic identity, I am finding my identity through a new source: the burial services in the Book of Common Prayer.

When I returned to West Virginia and started parish ministry, I quickly found myself officiating a staggering number of funerals and I began to find that the words of the Committal, recited month after month, funeral after funeral, were nurturing my soul in an unexpected way. As I cast dirt upon coffins, and prayed “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” I realized that the identity I’d built on zip codes and state lines was sand that was being washed away, replaced with a different identity, deeply rooted in the knowledge and conviction that “all of us go down to the dust.” This language gave me permission to embrace a geographic and cultural identity that doesn’t make me choose one home over another but that takes the very best from all of the places that have formed, because all of those places are part of God’s creation. Suddenly, it didn’t feel like a contradiction to be an Ohioan who always roots for West Virginia sports teams, or a West Virginian for whom New Haven–style pizza is a comfort food that tastes like home, or a Connecticuter who drops “y’all” into sentences. More importantly, this language gave me a new way of thinking and talking about why it’s important to embrace people who don’t look or talk like me. 

Our particular homes, heritages, and identities are not unimportant. Scripture itself affirms the importance of place in the lives of God’s people. And if my pastoral ministry has taught me anything, it is that there is something powerful about choosing the particular earth to which we are returned when we die, an act that is often a declaration of what place we consider our home whether it became our home by chance or by choice. There is also something beautiful about scattering rich soil into a grave, knowing the deep connections that link the one who has died with that particular place. When I proclaim the words from the burial office, “After my awaking, he will raise me up; and in my body I shall see God,” I am sharing the hope we find in Christ’s Resurrection but also the hope we have in the universal resurrection, when we will be raised to Christ together from all of these places.

Yet the moment we begin to think that the city or state or country where we are born primarily makes us who we are, we have entirely lost sight of God, who gazed upon the earth and called it good and made flesh and bone out of its dust. Our deepest identities can’t be summarized by lines on a map or pinpointed through the way we sound when we talk. The words “earth to earth” remind us that there isn’t a person who was created by God and walks on this earth who is a foreigner, for we all come from the same place and return there again when we die. Death, it is said, is a great equalizer, but a greater equalizer is God’s love poured out for us in creation.