The Heavens Cannot Contain You
Emily Dickenson wrote, “You cannot fold a Flood—/ And put it in a Drawer.” As I left Costa Rica behind and became more entrenched in South Dakota, I felt this was my task as I labored to make sense of the impressions and feelings I’d been gathering during our work in the mission field. The church in Greenwood was haunting me a bit because removing the stained glass windows had made me feel as if I had marred its historic beauty.
In her account of the Church of Holy Fellowship in That They May Have Life, Sneve states the little chapel was first built in August 1870 from logs gathered by the Native Americans who wanted a church on their reservation. In 1873, W. Hobart Hare, then Bishop of the newly created Missionary Jurisdiction of Niobrara, arrived at Yankton Mission and chose the church for his cathedral, making his home in a small room built onto its side.
The frame structure as we found it in 1989 was not the original; it wasn’t concecrated until 1886, a little over one hundred and three years prior to my setting foot within its interior. One of the things I enjoyed about the history of the Native Americans I was reading was their embracing of their own brand of mythology, something they seemed to do as naturally as any culture since the ancient Greeks. In fact, they were steeped in their version of it before the wasichu, white perople, came along and tried to snuff it out of them. In Yankton, one of the earliest bits of folklore relating to the Episcopal Church and its entrée into Sioux society was the story of the conversion of Tipi Sapa, then the chief of the Yanktonai whose name in Dakota meant Black Lodge. Once “Christianized,” Tipi Sapa had been given the name Philip Deloria, and was lauded as “the best known of all the native priests.”
Sneve tells the story of the day his interest in the church was first recorded. Tipi Sapa rode by the chapel in full war regalia when he heard the congregation singing “Guide Me Thou Great Jehovah” in Dakota, stopping for a brief time to listen to the words. He didn’t enter the chapel at that time but returned another day to hear the same hymn being sung. It is said the words of the hymn made a great impression on the young chief, a response that eventually led him to approach Bishop Hare about becoming a Christian. When the bishop told him he must give up his chief’s position, cut his hair and become a simple man, he balked, stating he was a powerful chief. He did eventually agree to be baptized, and was sent to Shattuck Military School for the beginning of the inculturation process. After completing the educational and service requirements to enter the priesthood, he was ordained a deacon at St. Stephen’s chapel on the Cheyenne River reservation, then spent forty years on the Standing Rock reservation as a priest, returning to the Yankton reservation in 1925. His story expanded beyond Native American culture when his visage was placed in the reredos of the high altar in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.—one of only three Americans among the 98 “Saints of the Ages.”
My stewing about the abandoned chapel in Greenwood was the counter opposite to how the parishioners were feeling. I could have taken a cue from my grandmother, who loved to say the more you stirred shit, the worse it smelled but I couldn’t let go of my disgust over how the church had treated Native Americans in the past. My viewpoint was not shared by the Wagner congregation whose excitement had reached a fever pitch by the day Bishop Anderson was visiting for the groundbreaking. Just before his closing comments for the ceremony that day, the Bishop read a prayer: “Oh Lord God of Israel, the heavens cannot contain you, yet you are pleased to dwell in the midst of your people, and have moved us to set apart a space on which to build a house of prayer: accept and bless the work which we have now begun, that it may be brought to completion, to the honor and glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”
He then remarked how the great spirit had waffled through the framed shell of a building we had been standing within, the studded walls surrounding a rough concrete slab foundation still fully open to the elements. “The heavens cannot contain you,” he said, raising his hands to let the wind stir the papers he held. I thought this was a fitting statement considering how the strong breezes had fluttered our clothing and programs throughout the entire service. The pages of the Bibles the lay readers had been holding danced as if in a ceremony of their own as the men tried to keep their places. Finally, the Bishop ended his closing statements by declaring the wind was indeed the spirit, or breath, of the “word,” because it had joined in the celebration of a new beginning for the Church of the Holy Spirit.
Father Hobbs, who led the congregation, had spoken of miracles during the service, his list including the $55,000 grant from the United Thank Offering, the construction knowledge Jim brought to the project, and the free labor given by all the volunteers who traveled with us from Chattanooga. “The miracle of this spirit of volunteerism will allow the church to be debt free,” he said: “a luxury, yet a necessity in the life of this small parish.”
A feeling of pride that we had brought something of value to a group of people who’d rarely caught breaks in our country was battling it out with my feelings of regret. Would our hymns sung in English have drawn Tipi Sapa in if he’d rode by on horseback today? I questioned. The only answer was the breeze stirring the skirt I’d worn, the fabric whipping into a frenzy as the Bishop walked over to shake Jim’s hand. The silence of the undulant air provided no answer as I smiled and tried to appear gracious while my emotions buffeted my heaving mind. Where would this turmoil lead me? I wondered as the Bishop embraced me in a gentle hug.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
This is a participating post in Let's Blog Off. To see how my blogging compatriots chose to answer how the preceding generations had made an impact on their lives, click here.
The Depository of Arrogance
We drove the long stretch of road cutting through miles of farmland and ranchland between Wagner and Greenwood, home to Peter Cook who often brought lovely beaded jewelry and barrettes he created to church to sell afterwards. His beadwork was as impressive as his baking abilities, as I had experienced by relishing his incredible apple pies. We were there to remove several stained glass windows from the Church of the Holy Fellowship, one of three abandoned chapels set like unpolished crystals on the ragged banks flanking the Missouri River. I walked along the moist earth wondering how much money had been spent on the reservations trying to bridge a cultural gap that couldn’t possibly be spanned with money.
The Episcopal congregations had been dwindling for a while because the seniors, who made up the bulk of the worshipers, were dying away. Maybe it had always been inevitable that these churches, monuments to a foreign deity, would become empty laboratories of coercion, their experiments doomed to fail. After all, how much clout could a religion sustain when it replaced a spirituality vitally alive each and every day with a building staying locked more often than it remained open?
With the decreased activity caused by so many defections into Wagner, the neighborhood now languished with only an occasional dog's barking to interrupt the quietude. It saddened me to add to the decline of this spot, which once saw the dockage of paddleboats as they stopped on their way along the pre-dammed Missouri during the rowdy days of the westward expansion. The new church in Wagner—soon to be consecrated the Church of the Holy Spirit or Woniya Wakan—would only sentence Holy Fellowship to further decline.
Truth be told, the church had fallen silent long before we came to build a new one. Rather than hold services embraced by the warm patina of the wooden pews and the gentle ambiance of the clapboard chapel, the parishioners of Holy Fellowship had been worshiping in a community center next to the empty lot where Woniya Wakan would stand. The center was an institutional prototype: impersonal, cold and bland. The floor was irrevocably dirty—a fact the swarming flies seemed to appreciate—and the tic-tic-tic of the overhead fan kept the silence company between liturgy, prayer and song.
I loved singing hymns in Dakota. I struggled through the breathy language, appreciating the rhythmical intonations, the nuance of sound, the inflections. But I grew to dread the Bible readings. As soon as I took my seat in one of the rickety metal folding chairs, I’d scan the handouts holding the Collect, the Psalm and the readings to see if what was printed there was disdainful given the events of the past 150 years, as it happened more often than not. We read the Collect in unison: "Remember those who are ill treated, since you also are in the body." How insulting that these Native Americans were being told to remember what we had long ignored. The prayers were no less disturbing to me: "Guide the people of this land, and of all the nations, in the ways of justice and peace, that we may honor one another and serve the common good."
I found it ironic that I had been embracing a religion which professed to bring justice to people when the rights of the Native Americans had been completely disregarded early on. I left these services in a confused daze, wanting to apologize, yet not fully understanding why I was compelled to say I was sorry. Forgive us for we surely knew not what we were doing, I silently begged. But the resigned awareness I sought would not hold. By examining a more honest account of history than the one I had been presented when I was a student in the public school system, I was now learning that those who were in power during the colonization of America did indeed know what they were doing, as cultural annihilation was sanctioned by both the government and the church.
The push to save the "heathen" souls had resulted in an evangelical frenzy which brought both the Catholics and the Episcopalians to Indian Territory. When asked to select the "official" religion on the reservations, the Native Americans chose the Episcopal faith because its priests wore white cassocks. The Catholics wore similar robes; only theirs were black. Good triumphing over evil? Cruelty is cruelty, regardless of the color in which it veils itself, I fumed as I read about the abuses these clergy members brought with them.
The mission schools, irrespective of the denomination, seemed to be the worst offenders. Stories of priests punishing Native American children for speaking their own language at school were plentiful. One man, who was caught speaking Lakota as a boy, remembered when a priest took him out of the lunch line at the mission school where he was forced to board, pulling him to a boiling pot on the stove where he held the boy's hand to the searing metal in order to “teach him a lesson.” How could I feel good about being associated with the Christian faith when stories like this left me horrified? I sat and silently pled with the Native Americans in the church services to stop dutifully listening to liturgy that had been rendered empty by these abominations but I couldn’t know what battles had been fought by them and lost, nor could I understand what comfort might have been gained by this supplication each week.
And wasn't my attitude just as arrogant as the stance of those who had come to conquer rather than to respect? Was I not simply one more white person attempting to impose my will upon them? It was certainly, at the very least, a variation on the same theme, which reared its ugly head when any of us outside their culture asked, How can we solve their problems? This one seemingly meaningful question, I believe, had done irreparable harm. Why add one more ounce of condescension to the depository of arrogance? I asked myself.
Though it was difficult not to question how things could have been righted when witnessing the level of dysfunction resulting from the collision and the haphazard amalgamation of two disparate cultures, I would have to hold myself accountable by remembering I didn’t have the answers to the unruly questions presenting themselves at every turn. I often wondered what change I could have inspired had I been able to turn back time: might I have had a positive influence on history? It was a ridiculous exercise, of course, because those days when consideration could have steered Native Americans to a more powerful position in our society were far in the past. All I could possibly do was to try and make my own peace with how things had been handled. But how?
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
This is a participating post in Let’s Blog Off, the subject today being “If I could turn back time…” To see the full roster of bloggers who are riffing on the subject, click here.
And the Book Becomes a Reality!
The Let's Blog Off topic today is "What are you looking forward to in the new year?" Hands down for me, besides adroyt being a smashing success, is a book deal for The Road to Promise. I thought I'd take this opportunity, as this is the first post of 2012, to thank everyone who has stopped or continues to stop in and read my ramble through my past. Happy New Year to all of you, and don't forget to read the other forward-thinking posts by our merry band of revelers. Today's installment follows: happy reading everyone!
Gumption
We had made our way back to Wagner to begin our work on the church, and the quirkiness of the contradictions held within the town’s boundaries were apparent from the start. We had rented a house the color of crème caramel with dark brown shutters and a perfectly manicured yard. The china hutch in the dining room held a carefully arranged collection of plates stamped with Norman Rockwell's nostalgic vignettes. By stepping out the front door, I could find any one of these twenty Rockwellean scenes superimposed on life!
Most mornings, the counter at the Spot Café on Main Street was filled with farmers and ranchers in frayed overalls. Their white tank undershirts shone through the wash-worn fabric of their faded plaid shirts, and their cleanly shaven heads nodded as they discussed unrelenting weather, unyielding land and the day's news.
These hardy men fit the stereotypical image of the American farmer, fixtures at the popular diner every morning, just as Elmo was. It seemed to me that he had been sent to teach me a lesson about stereotypes because he looked nothing like the Native American I had fixed in my mind's eye before traveling to South Dakota. In fact, he was practically indistinguishable from those stalwart men whose backs rose like stout tree trunks above the swivel stools except that his age and elderly leisure had softened his once robust build. He shuffled into the diner our first morning there, swinging his cane, which he used to oblige his rhythmical rolling gate, as he launched into a monologue about Columbus Day a few weeks away.
The fact that he had latched onto the subject proved he had a joke for every occasion. He asked me if I knew why they celebrated the holiday on the reservation. I had actually wondered why they would commemorate an event that had introduced so much turmoil into their culture and I was genuinely interested to hear where the conversation would go. He didn’t disappoint, answering, "Because it's the day the tourist trade opened in America!" I recorded snippets like these in my writers notebook, recording how he laughted heartily at the cleverness of his joke, my legs crossed on the toffee-colored sofa awash in a sea of oatmeal-hued blandness in our temporary living room as I relived my conversations with our new acquaintances. Each time I was treated to Elmo’s boyish humor, I thought about how Vine Deloria, Jr., had been so right about his treatment of even unsavory subjects, a trait Deloria claimed was common among Native Americans.
The author maintained that it’s a great disappointment to them that most experts who wrote about their lives rarely mentioned their propensity for humor. Jokes about Columbus and Custer were especially popular because these men had left indelible marks on their culture, mainly negative ones. The more desperate the subject, Deloria pointed out, the more humor was warranted.
In the southern tradition that had shaped me, we were more likely to grow maudlin when extenuating circumstances left us reeling. Far too many of us had bought into the myth that we were doomed to the inferno of God's Baptist-sized wrath, which was mirrored by our hellishly hot summer climate. How, after all, could the intense heat of purgatory be any worse than that of the deep south in August? went the refrain. Maybe the impudence displayed by the Native Americans who made fun of their oppressors could have taught me something about lightening up! And yet, I wondered whether the humor was merely scabs covering deep festering wounds.
As I was journaling about their ability to be lighthearted, I felt the need to name it and I hit upon the word “gumption.” My mother’s mother had had it, as had my father’s father on his side of the family, but it been beaten out of the next generation to come along so I inherited none of what passed for backbone. I wanted to get my gumption back—and I was trying—but it wasn’t playing very well with my husband who wasn’t accustomed to being contradicted. Elmo was worth watching, I thought to myself as Jim and I walked through the late summer sunlight in the mêlée of Wagner’s centennial celebration. Maybe I could learn how to have a voice while keeping my pluck in check. Piece of cake, right? Hardly!
An insanity had gripped the small town, transforming it from sleepy to frenetic. It was Americana run amok as I had never seen it—an arts and crafts fair had taken over the park; there was a rodeo in the afternoon; an outdoor dance went into full swing on Saturday evening; and the parade, which lasted the good part of an entire day, was a spectacle to behold. The variety of entries traversing Main Street was astonishing, including everything from covered wagons to a veterinarian in a dog suit on his four wheeler onto which he’d fashioned a mechanized dog’s leg raising and lowering as a kid in a fire hydrant costume walked beside it! Hundreds of people crouched on the curb or lounged in lawn chairs as they watched the long line of tractors, trucks and horse-and-buggy rigs move by. Participation by Native Americans was almost non-existent, with Elmo and the other representatives of the all-Indian American Legion being the largest group. Thirteen of them marched in a color guard formation while six preceded them in the bed of Elmo's battered blue truck—too frail to make the trip on foot.
Soon after they made their way past, a National Guard tank lumbered down the street. The small children ran to their parents to hide their faces from the huge, noisy machine while the older kids jumped up and down, shrieking with glee from the adrenaline rush. They supported Uncle Sam with gusto in this town as the proliferation of painted wooden replicas of the gray-haired gent, his finger pointing relentlessly from front lawns, proved. The tractor still represented a symbol of strength and continuity, and they had models from 1920 to the current one rolling down Main Street. But nothing made the kids go crazier than the tank, its articulated metal track grating on the asphalt as it chewed its way along.
I had decided to bring my buddy Sam with me for a taste of life in Wagner, and we walked him to the park to take in the arts and crafts, bumping into Edna, Elmos’s sister, and another parishioner named Rocky once there. Jim went to the bank with Rocky to meet “everyone who’s anyone in town,” as he put it, and then to get a haircut with him. I wandered around for a while, noticing how the tumult of the Midway increased after the sun set. The children’s faces were luminous in the neon-soaked air, their screams ricocheting from the buildings surrounding the square as bodies were jostled about—slung one way forcefully only to be quickly jolted in the other direction. It was difficult to walk because the kids were so excited to make their way from one ride to the next, they didn’t care whether anyone was in their way. Arms stretched forward, they simply plowed through the adults milling around without a thought to manners.
A group of Menonite girls stood in front of me as I watched the beauty contest. The uniformity of their outfits—made alike from a variety of conservatively-patterned materials—brought them stares from everyone else gathered around the stage. The black scarves covering their long curls were held in place with clips so that the wind didn’t expose them. I wondered how they felt watching the girls on stage, their bare shoulders gleaming with the lights trained on them and their high heels clicking on the planks of wood. Did it rankle them to see those teens being celebrated for their physical beauty, their prettily coifed hair blowing free in the breeze? Was there an ounce of feeling in them that life wasn’t fair? I couldn’t help but wonder. Or were they relieved to be free from the burden of adornment?
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
