Created by Mo Hohmann and Sarafina Landis, this project has been tended to for many years and is now in a place of culmination and birthing. We can trace its beginnings to personal, embodied experiences of caring for our own beloved dead and what was illuminated before, during, and after those experiences. They served as initiations into the vast field of deathcare that lead to weaving willow burial and ritual vessels, death doula work, deathcare advocacy and education, and being active participants in local and national movements around natural/nurturing and conservation burial. Along the way we were shaped by the confluence of our home ecology with the context of our ancestral stories, and how by tending threshold spaces we become more in a reciprocal relation and belonging with the complexities of our intersecting diasporas and ancestral ecosystems. We were drawn to create the church as a way to stitch the gaps in community death care, create a home for what is holy in life and death.
During an exploration of old southern Appalachian death rites, we learned about a tradition that when a person died a bell was rung the number of years of that person’s age. When the townspeople heard the tolls, everyone in the community would know who just died - and they would respond. So hence, The Place Where Bells Ring, bells for our dead and bells to call the spirit back to the living.
