PR This second point is no reason for you to be sad for the Baha’is. Just because we do not use this terminology, perhaps because it is archaic, does not mean that we do not benefit from the reunion with Him of which you are referring. Again, this is answered in the Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys. It is completely answered in the fullest of the full, but it does require a concentrated study. If one wants to find the purest grapes, one must traverse the hills and valleys in the pathways of search.
Back on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, and others I often visited, the Sacred Pipe Ceremony achieved as well, by means other than but similar to, the Eucharist. Typically, “white bias” denied this out of its hereditary need for dominance and control, which they could not achieve by any other means than death and destruction, starvation and instruments of oppression, even going so far as to make it illegal for Native Americans to practice their own religion.
I hesitate to say it here on this Catholic Forum, but my mother worked at Marty Mission for some years as a teacher, and the means used to gain submission were deprivation of food, corporal punishment, and incarceration of any Lakota Indian who so much as spoke in their own language. This is not to be misconstrued by you or anyone else as a blanket condemnation of the Catholic Church, as it is not intended that way. That it was common practice is well known and above any conscientious doubt. My very friends would hold their head in a posture of shame, even thirty years later, due to the complete and total annihilation of their spirits, so effective were these instruments upon them.
But let us set all that aside and return to the Pipe as an instrument for union with God, the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka, within the cultural context of religious rites brought to the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples by the White Buffalo Calf Woman, the Moses of the Oyate (the people of God).
The red clay of which the Pipe was carved came from Minnesota, and symbolically represents the sacred blood of the people (think blood of Christ), so often spilled in recent times by the white “Christians” whose genocidal policies and many Treaties (all broken), which were signed “In the year of our Lord, 1868”, etc…
The pipe stem represents all vegetative life given by the Creator, with sacred symbols of animals, gifts of the Great Spirit to sustain life, honoring them. The tobacco smoked comes from the earth, and as the smoke rises, so do the prayers, to the Spotted Eagle circling above, which takes them to Wakan Tanka.
This is the Lakota Eucharist, in its simple pure form.
For a comparison and appreciation of the Pipe and the Bible similarities and symbolism, take a few minutes to read this extract from The Sacred Pipe. If, after this reading, you do not understand the essential oneness of purpose of these two culturally distinct methods of worship, I really cannot help you further on this topic.
lookingbackwoman.ca/book/1.pdf
( “Honke” Chevrolet - I’m not kidding! 
