"There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature"

Charles Eastman evokes a spiritual world in which the sacred is not confined by walls but diffused through wind, water, stone, and sky. Temples rise as mountains, shrines gleam as lakes at dawn, and the sanctum is the prairie itself. Worship becomes an orientation of the heart toward the living earth, not a schedule kept inside a building. Reverence is practiced with bare feet on soil, with breath caught by the first light, with gratitude offered to the animal that gives its life.

Such a vision dissolves the boundary between sacred and ordinary. If the earth is the sanctuary, then daily conduct is liturgy: taking only what is needed, giving back, traveling lightly, honoring cycles of growth and decay. Ceremonies unfold under the open sky; the seasons themselves officiate, and the wind carries prayers. Authority is not centralized in an altar but distributed across elders, memory, and the more-than-human world, where rivers teach patience and pines teach endurance.

The absence of built shrines does not signal emptiness but fullness. Where some traditions seek God by enclosing space, Eastman points to a presence that cannot be enclosed. The divine is immanent, immediate, and relational; no mediator stands between person and place. This carries a moral weight: to defile the land is to vandalize the temple, to poison water is to desecrate a shrine.

There is also humility in this posture. Structures proclaim ownership; landscapes remind us we are guests. Mobility and impermanence become spiritual teachers, encouraging adaptability and respect. Memory and story preserve alignment more effectively than stone.

For a modern world dense with concrete and noise, the line reads as invitation and critique. Relearning silence, attentiveness, and reciprocity could restore a sense of holiness that institutional forms alone cannot sustain. Protecting a watershed may be a truer act of devotion than gilding a dome, because the living temple needs breath, not ornament.