Cara Ellen Modisett was part of the Leisure Media 360 staff from 1998 until 2012, and editor of this magazine for four of those years. Her work as a teacher, writer and pianist inspired a calling in another direction; she has just finished her first year in the M.Div. program at Virginia Theological Seminary as a postulant for priesthood in the Episcopal Church.
Photo Above Courtesy of Kathryn Feldmann.
Most Sundays in my childhood, my family drove over the mountain to a small country United Church of Christ just outside Luray, Virginia. My extended family, including my grandparents and great uncle and great aunt, aunts and uncles and cousins, sat on the back two pews on the right-hand side, listening to sermons and singing the old hymns.
After church, my sister and I would play in the cemetery, among the names of our great-grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, in view of farmland and mountains. In the afternoon we’d visit the family farms, explore the barns and the attics and the fields—landscapes and places that would nudge me towards Blue Ridge Country magazine, and eventually to seminary.
In seminary, we think a lot about what is “sacred.” Sacred ground, sacred mysteries, sacraments. Places and things set apart, considered holy. The sort of places where you whisper, take off your shoes or wear something nice. Places where important things happen, or have happened.
Over the years I wrote for Blue Ridge Country, I visited a lot of sacred spaces. A West Virginia cemetery where pebbles are left on gravestones by visitors. Native American lands. The Appalachian Trail above Burkes Garden, “God’s Thumbprint.” Civil War battlefields. Country stores where folks played bluegrass on the porch. Backstage, listening to Ralph Stanley sing near Galax. Galax, for that matter.
Those places are just as holy to me as cathedrals. They’re made sacred by the human lives and stories and music they witness—beautiful, heartbreaking, memorialized, forgotten—all important, holy things. Sacred ground is the country church, the family farm. It is the fields where people fought and died and where now we hopefully learn from those conflicts and losses.
And sacred, too, are the places where we try not to impose our humanness—the mountaintops, rivers and wilderness areas in their beauty and steadfastness, places we strive to keep holy by not leaving traces behind after our pilgrimages.
In these times, sacred ground has become turned upside down. As our churches and synagogues, temples and mosques and meeting houses—our sanctuaries—have been been closed, we find sacred space online, where we gather and sing and learn and pray (yes, I might be calling Zoom holy).
Sacred ground is not always perfect, not always comfortable: We find it in hospital rooms and protests, on hiking trails and in quieted cities.
And there are moments when I see ordinary space quietly become sacred: the day two deer visited my small-city backyard, munching leaves and watching me carefully through the windows, and the stormy nights when birds sought shelter under our front porch awning.
These are the moments of grace, the promise of living.
The story above appears in our September/October 2020 issue.
