All cemeteries tell stories, one way or another, stories of significant heft too, death being what it is. Some do it more plainly, some more artfully, some more memorably. The Pioneer Cemetery at the Mormon Trail Center in Omaha includes this huge sculpture, a work of art not easily forgotten because what it memorializes is not easy to look at anytime, anywhere.
It's cold weather, even though, in truth, it may not be. The man's huge left hand clutches his coat and what appears to be a blanket or rain slicker around his shoulder and around the woman, whose face is deeply shadowed beneath her hood. She too holds something around her, and to her face; while her husband's right hand--around her--keeps hold of a shovel.
It's windy and cold and maybe even rainy. Perhaps there's snow. Nothing about the sculpture, save this couple's mutual concern and love, is sweet or darling. Heroic in stature and strength, their grief is beyond human measure. Their grief and that shovel suggests they've buried a child.
The death of children happened often on all the trails moving west. That hundreds of thousands of white folks like these were trespassing on Native lands doesn't mean their stories of hardship and perseverance aren't epic. I'm sure this massive sculpture is nowhere near the top ten places to visit on TravelAdvisor, but I can't help it thinking it should be.
The fifth sermon in The Beauty of the Lord, a century-old collection of sermons written by a man named Rev. D.R. Drukker, a book that somehow ended up in our library--I don't know how--the fifth sermon is titled "The Secret Things of God." To be honest, this sermon has, like that massive sculpture in Pioneer Cemetery, stayed with me because it asks what most people consider the unanswerable questions that separate our faith in a loving God and the horrors that occur in all of our lives, the pain we all suffer. "Our World Belongs to God," people in my church say in unison; then how do we account for Auschwitz?
"God Himself is a great mystery," Rev. Drukker told his congregants a hundred years ago. I can't help but notice the proximity of that judgment to definitions forwarded by the Lakota people this couple might well have encountered somewhere along the trail. In a way, that truth is the core doctrine, the centerpiece of Drukker's sermon and his understanding of both good and evil--"God is a mystery."
Rhetorically, the old preacher won't let his people pass over the truth. He lists a dozen questions that beg profound and understandable human doubt from all of us, even those who pledge hearty allegiance to the Creator of Heaven and Earth.
Why do so many of our fellowmen suffer poverty, sorrow and pain? why does God take away so many of his saintly and useful workers who have just begun to labor for their Lord and who beginnings promised so much? Why are so many of His daughters widows, and why are so many of His sons widowers? why does the worldly man enjoy the riches and comforts of earth when others who endeavor to walk in the ways of the Lord have so little? . . .Why must God's own, too tired to live, ready to die, yes, even longing to lay down their burdens and go to the "Land of Pure Delight," continue here?
He ends this roster of grief with a prayer that gathers all those questions into one petition: "'Father, why dost Thou lead Thine own through deep waters where our thoughts are drowned?'"
The answer the old preacher gives is a single petition from Christ's own prayer--"Thy will be done": "We must be satisfied with God's grace."
That's wisdom is fully as difficult as the story of that Pioneer Cemetery sculpture.
But then this: "Man must not allow his curiosity to exceed his service." I can't help thinking that's a beautiful line: Don't ask more than you give.
Every teacher starting school this week wants curious students, students who want to learn. Rev. Drukker doesn't say curiosity is wrong; he simply maintains that as long as we live we do more than we question.
Don't ask more than you give.
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