What makes something sacred?

Sitting in the morning sunlight, standing on a ridge with students, their parents, and two colleagues 1600 feet above Ojai. We are listening to the story of Tonantzin told by a young mother with her infant snuggling in a rebozo on her chest. She is introducing the conservation project our students will work on as part of a year-long senior rite of passage that weaves in service, coming of age, Religion and Ethics curriculum, and the immeasurable. 

Tonantzin, a Nahuatl word meaning “Our Revered Mother” or “Our Venerable Mother,” is an Indigenous maternal sacred figure associated with the earth, fertility, and the sustaining forces of life. The hill of Tepeyac, near present-day Mexico City, was considered a sacred place associated with Tonantzin long before the arrival of the Spanish. According to Catholic tradition, it was on this same hill in 1531 that a sacred woman appeared to the Indigenous Nahua man Juan Diego, speaking to him in his own language, and became known to some as Our Lady of Guadalupe. For many Indigenous and Mexican people, the figure of Tonantzin-Guadalupe represents a powerful meeting of Indigenous spirituality and the later Christian tradition, carrying forward an ancient image of the sacred mother through a transformed cultural expression.

For many Indigenous and Mexican people, the figure of Tonantzin-Guadalupe represents a powerful meeting of Indigenous spirituality and the later Christian tradition.

The young mother who spoke with us shared her generational connection to Tonantzin as a Mexicana, while also naming a lineage to the Indigenous peoples of Mexico that, like so many family histories, has been obscured through colonization and the passage of generations. She spoke of Tonantzin not only as a sacred maternal figure, but as a symbol of cultural persistence and resistance: a presence that endured despite the taking of Indigenous lands, the destruction of sacred places and objects, the suppression of spiritual practices and languages, and efforts to replace Indigenous ways of knowing with those of the colonizers. Her story invited us to consider what makes something sacred, and whether the sacred can ever truly be erased when it continues to live in relationship to land, story, memory, ancestry, and people. In this way, Tonantzin carries both memory and reclamation, connecting contemporary Mexican identity to ancestral histories that were never entirely lost.

She left us with this question, “What makes something sacred?” 

On Monday, the seniors, Sydney Robertson, 12th Grade Advisor and Religion and Ethics teacher, and Mary Kelley, Director of the High School, and I were on retreat at the Topa Institute, located on the Happy Valley Land purchased by Annie Besant in 1927, after she first visited the property in 1926 with Krishnamurti. Her idea was to create a place where education, inquiry, art, relationship, and care for the whole human being could be explored freely, in service of a different kind of society. Nearly a century later, we return to this land to ask some of those same enduring questions about how we want to live and what responsibility we have to the world.

The senior parents who brought the students to the Topa Institute on Monday morning gathered in Council beneath the Grandmother Oak, engaging in their own reflection on this moment of transition in their children’s lives. They returned again on Tuesday to learn about the conservation project the students will tend throughout the year and to close the retreat together.

She left us with this question, “What makes something sacred?”.

Students will return to the Institute several times over the course of their senior year, working on the land to assist in the restoration of a Tonantzin statue and the surrounding plants, stones, and offerings, while the students continue to explore some of the larger questions woven through this experience: What does it mean to be a whole human being? What is our responsibility to a place, to one another, and to what comes after us? What makes something sacred?

In May, their parents will join them on the land for a final overnight retreat. Together, they will dedicate the conservation project and participate in a closing ceremony marking the end of their time at Oak Grove and the beginning of whatever awaits them next.

On our first day of school, a red-tailed hawk perched high above campus, quietly watching as children returned. Some children arrived for the very first time. Others began their final year. All of them, in their own way, crossing a threshold.

Perhaps this is the living movement of relationship: arriving and leaving, holding on and letting go, belonging to a place while slowly becoming ready to move beyond it. And perhaps something becomes sacred through the quality of our attention to it, through returning, caring, remembering, and allowing ourselves to be changed by our relationship with it.

The land remains beneath us, the trees grow around us, as a hawk watches from above.