Morning Thanks--Requiem

I don't think the pews were in yet, and the clouds--those v-shaped echo reducers way up at the ceiling--were still down on the floor being painted and awaiting their hanging. The place was very much under construction, a grand mess; but you couldn't help see what it was going to be, and what it was going to be was nice, really nice.

It would be called the B. J. Haan Auditorium, and it would eventually boast a massive organ, a gift from a wealthy Iowa widow. It was, right then, going up on the east edge of the campus where I taught, and I was giving an esteemed visitor a tour because I thought he'd want to see it for himself.

We walked up from the back of the auditorium in silence, took the unfinished steps up to the unfinished stage, turned around, and looked over what workers likely might have considered a huge and holy mess. 

He was a picture of sheer awe. "You know," my guest said, "if you would have said when I was a kid that someday my people would have a place like this, I wouldn't have believed you." Frederick Manfred--Feike Feikema--a Siouxland native and American novelist, was talking about Siouxlanders, among whom he counted himself, a prodigal maybe, but one of them nonetheless.

And he was very proud.

I thought of him on Saturday night, thought of that moment in time, not because I was seated in one of the pews of the B. J. Haan, but because of the awe and even some of the pride I witnessed in his face that day so long ago. Manfred is long gone, and Saturday night I was in a different pew and wholly different space--St. Mary's Catholic Church, just down the road in Alton. 

Once upon a time, the eastern residents of the county were almost exclusively German and Luxembourgian, all of them Roman Catholic. The difficulty of making a new life on virgin prairie and the extremes of what can be a very trying environment ("maybe ten good days a year," an old resident once surmised) probably took the edge off the differences the region's separate ethnic and religious groups carried with them from their "old counties." I don't think any of them ever went to war out here on this verdant soil.

But it's fair to say they lived their own style of cloistered lives. Likely as not, they met in the Coops and coffee shops, but their separate existences kept them out of their separate houses of worship, save a funeral now and then, a marriage perhaps.

St. Mary's Catholic church, built largely with volunteer hands and offerings, cost $60,000 when it went up in 1908. Bishop Garrigan, from Sioux City, laid the cornerstone. From the outside, its Romanesque style is unlike anything in the region. It stands head and shoulders above most everything at the highest spot in the entire county. Inside, however, it's all High Gothic, pillars and arches reaching heavenward in architectural aspiration that's meant to be just about divine. When you're seated inside St. Mary's, it's hard to believe that just outside farmers are feeding 3,000,000 hogs. It's remarkably beautiful. Around the nave, the Stations of the Cross, imported from Germany, feel like monuments.

On Saturday night it was the right place for Mozart's Requiem, not simply because a requiem, by definition, is so profoundly Roman Catholic, a kind of prayer for the dead, but also because that arching ceiling created sound from a choir and chamber orchestra unlike anything to be heard anywhere in the neighborhood--including Dordt's B. J. Haan Auditorium and Northwestern's gorgeous Christ Chapel. 

I've been reading old novels about the region--Josephine Donovan's Black Soil (1930) and Walter J. Muilenburg's Prairie (1925), both of which tell stories of 1870s, when the last of the Yanktons moved west and white folks started arriving, in droves. Both novels offer central conflict quite unknown in contemporary fiction: man and woman and child vs. nature itself. In both novels, the abiding question is nothing more or less than "will they make it?"

On Saturday night The Sioux County Oratorio offered Mozart's Requiem in a setting that couldn't have done the work any greater honor, St. Mary's, Alton, full of people, many of whom--probably most of whom--weren't Roman Catholic. The event was not just a concert, it was a meditation, a wonder, a blessing.

In that incredible Catholic church, this old Calvinist offered his own kind of prayers for the dead. With that glorious music filling the air with beauty, I couldn't help thinking of Fred Manfred and how amazed he would have been and how much he would have loved to be there. 

Maybe he was.  He and B. J. Haan. And Bishop Garrigan. And maybe Dominie Bolks from the local Reformed church too.

Who knows? It was that perfectly beautiful.