I taught a kindergarten-first grade Sunday School class this year alongside two master teachers. With our students we have been thinking about and praying with and hearing the stories of saints. That class has inspired me to visit the shrine of the first Native American saint, Kateri Tekakwitha. And this caused me to consider my unfortunate history with St. Kateri, or, in truth, not with her, but with the ways in which I have seen her honored. My first experience occurred around the time she was declared Blessed by Pope John Paul II. I was in graduate school (the place of so many confusing experiences) and some well meaning folks decided to celebrate her. That day deserves its own entry in the multi-volume work I keep intending to write (working title: Grim Moments in Christian Worship.) Sometime later I wrote about what I described as never having "much luck with Kateri Tekakwitha." This time around, I just want to be still at her shrine. For a woman who bumbles as much as I, "She-Who-Bumps-Into-Things" seems like someone I should get to know.
I’ve never had much luck with Saint Kateri Tekakwitha. The first time I ever kept her day, I was in theology graduate school with a bunch of people who should have known better. That some of us didn’t know better became clear when I walked into an empty classroom and found, under an invitation to remember Kateri Tekakwitha in prayer, directions to proceed to "the great oak” chalked on the board.
Though I didn’t know which of the many oaks on campus was "the great one,” it was fairly easy to pick out the tree with the black boom box at its roots and a bright orange industrial extension cord snaking from the tape player through the grass, up the wall and over the sill into the window of the women’s bathroom.
My classmates appeared, all of us walking toward the tree like freshmen walking into the gym at the homecoming dance, looking for a familiar face and hoping we wouldn’t have to do anything “weird.” And, like freshmen at the homecoming dance, our hopes would be dashed.
From the boom box came a hesitant woman’s voice, backed by hesitant drums, singing a song about amphibians and holy women and the wind and the cardinal points of the compass.
We joined hands and began a circle dance, doing the “grapevine” step familiar to anyone who ever attended camp. Cross hands, right over left or left over right, and clasp the hands of the person next to you. (I now think the crossed hands is less an esthetic choice than a matter of engineering: the crossed hands form a kind of bulwark against the stumbling which usually ensues when adults more accustomed to sitting at desks attempt to form a rhythmic collective.) Then the feet get going, crossing over again and again as the circle moves — at least, in theory — now left, now right, while a voice sings about the Mohawk Lily of the Sister Turtle Clan. Our dancing slowed and ground to a halt when the tape stopped, mid-song, unplugged, perhaps, or just badly recorded.
We blessed the North Wind — and the South, East, and West Winds. We inhaled burning sage. We heard a reading from Chief Seattle.
We competed, unintentionally, I’m sure, with a group of Cub Scouts bivouacked on a nearby field. They were yelling, “Boom-shocka-locka-locka,” and “U-G-L-Y, you ain’t got no alibi, you ugly.” And they were singing, to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” that song beloved of American children for generations, “Glory, glory, hallelujah/glory, glory, what’s it to ya?”
It’s a sad story, I know, but the ersatz Turtle Clan proved to be no match for the Cub Clan.
I have filed this embarrassing ritual incident along with the time I wet my pants just before walking down the aisle in urine-stained taffeta to strew rose petals before Sue Harris at her wedding. And, just as I have never wet my pants at another wedding, so, too, have I avoided (being in) circle dances and burning sage and Kateri Tekakwitha-themed gatherings.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I arrived in Detroit for a National Pastoral Musicians’ Convention and realized Mass would be celebrated with the Cardinal Archbishop of Detroit on Kateri Tekakwitha’s feast day.
Yes, I thought about hiding out in my hotel room and watching “Top Chef.” But I didn’t want to miss the chance to sing with so many talented musicians, the chance to stand surrounded by the glorious sound of people praising God in song. That was the delight of the NPM. Besides, I had heard the gospel choir from Sacred Heart Parish in downtown Detroit just a few nights before, and that choir made me want to SING.
Dear reader, I went.
And found myself nonplussed when the cantor sang the Kyrie in Lakota. Now, Kateri Tekakwitha wasn’t from a Plains tribe. She wasn’t Lakota. She was a Mohawk-Algonquin woman from the Hudson River Valley area of what is now northern New York State.
The Lakota language comes from the tribes who migrated in the 17th century from the upper Mississippi River region to the plains of what are now the Dakotas. Lakota speakers come from the westernmost regions of the great Sioux nation.
It would be, I thought, as I stood there, a bit like singing the Kyrie in Urdu for a Dari-speaking Afghani saint. I mean Pakistan and Afghanistan; they’re close, right? They’re both `Stans, after all.
When it comes to the story of the Native Americans and the Christians who came to their shores, our wedding garment as the Bride of Christ is stained in embarrassing places. It is good to hold the stains up to the light. It is good to do what we can to cleanse them and restore our garment’s luster. And it is not surprising that we stumble along the way.
I’m told the name “Tekakwitha” comes from a childhood taunt towards the young Kateri, who had been marked and nearly blinded by smallpox. Tekakwitha means “she who bumps into things.”
Heaven knows, “she who bumps into things” is a good name for a Christian, since stumbling is, so often, what we do.
The Church is right to honor Kateri Tekakwitha. She followed Christ at the cost of everything. Like the first disciples, Kateri Tekakwitha left her paternal family and the faith of her tribe, ways she knew and loved, to serve the Lord she loved even more. Her conversion brought neither honor, nor acclaim, nor power. There must have been times of such loneliness after she left familial ways and beliefs. There must have been harsh words from relatives who saw only her abandonment and not her belonging.
Some of the Europeans among whom she settled must have viewed her with suspicion and mistrust, must have seen her as less than human because of her dark skin and strange tongue.
Kateri’s pain must have been much like Mary’s, a young girl whose call she alone heard and whose call must have confounded many who raised her and loved her.
The Church is right to honor Kateri Tekakwitha and other saints whose names and tribes remain foreign to us. Honoring those we have dishonored is one way to get up when we fall, one way to get back on the way. But we have to be careful, I think, that we don’t slip into “playing Indians,” that pastime of those of us who grew up on westerns and got the words “Calvary” and “cavalry” mixed up in more ways than one.
Is there a Mohawk or Algonquin speaker among us? If not, perhaps, when we honor Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, we should just stick with the Greek, “Kyrie Eleison.” The Greek in the Mass is, after all, a remnant, a reminder of an earlier time before the Latin language overtook the liturgy. Understood in that way, the Kyrie, just as it is, honors both Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, and us, who in our blindness bump into things. May the good saint, through the mercy of God, help us to rise. And to see aright.
Comments