A Year of Morning Thanks

Jesus Saves

So the guy comes up to me afterward. A lot of them do. Part of the reason they want to talk, I'm sure, is that they're not all that hot on going back to their cells.

"So you spend some time in New Mexico?" he says, because I'd said as much in my introduction.

His face is scarred and crooked. He's squat and well-built, looks for all the world like a fighter. I have no idea why he's in prison, but he's the kind of man whose face offers sufficient inspiration to imagine the worst.

"Beautiful place--New Mexico," I say.

"Where at?" he says, still holding my hand.

"West--Gallup," I tell him.

"I grew up there." A smile runs all the way across that face, big as a horizon.

"What?--you're Navajo?" I say.

"Lakota," he says. "From here." He means South Dakota. "But my dad was a teacher--Wingate, Tec Nos Pas--from the fifties to the seventies."

His dad was a teacher, and all the way home last night, I'm haunted by broken dreams: a Lakota college grad becomes a teacher on the Navajo reservation. Maybe it's racist of me, but I'm thinking how terrific it must have been, not only for this guy's father but for the BIA or whoever did the hiring out there in New Mexico, once upon a time, to snag a Native guy, a Lakota, to teach Native kids, Navajos. What a good thing. What a role model.

Today, that man's son is behind bars--that's what I keep thinking. How did that happen? His father pulled himself out of the cycles of poverty and alcoholism that plague reservations. All that hope and joy, and then his kid--already forty-ish, pockmarked by his problems--his kid is spending his life in prison. That's not the way things are supposed to go.

It's depressing--like this final paragraph from a recent NY Times review of the latest Louise Erdrich novel.

"In A Plague of Doves, Erdrich has created an often gorgeous, sometimes maddeningly opaque portrait of a community strangled by its own history. Pluto is one of those places we read about now and then when big-city papers run features about the death of small-town America. When you grow up in such a place, people know that your mother was a wild child back in high school. They know why your uncle talks to himself in the grocery store. What Erdrich knows is that this history, built up over generations, yields a kind of claustrophobia that has only one cure: Leave."

Now I'm a big Erdrich fan, an Ojibwe writer who's told wonderfully imaginative tales about the seams between Native and Euro cultures on the Great Plains. But I don't know that I want to read this new novel--just more depressing stuff--more losers, more unforgiven sin.

Last night I tried to cajole a bunch of cons into taking a shot at writing a couple of devotionals based on passages from the psalms. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication--I told them; the psalms are like prayers. Take a shot at doing one of each.

They're not getting a grade or winning a prize if they do. I'm guessing most of them won't. But already last night, some of them did. One Lakota stood up and read a meditation of confession on "The Lord is my Shepherd" that took my breath away. It was sheer beauty.

And this teacher's son--we'll see whether he comes through. Right now, I could cry that he's here. Right now, I'm thinking he shouldn't be.

The thing is, there's always hope. There has to be, and there is. That's what the shepherd's song is all about. It's the whole gospel of Jesus. There's hope. I don't care how many pockmarks, that's what it all comes down to.

Jesus saves. That's what I believe, and that, simple enough, is what I'm thankful for this morning.