The land all around, endless prairie, is so bereft of people today that coming up on St. Stephenie Church is a resounding joy, even though it's but a shell of its former self. It's impossible to imagine the neighborhood filled with Danes and Bohemians and Virginians, a melting pot, each family--eleventy-seven kids too--trying to make a go of it on 80 acres. There had to be a time out here on the plains, early June evenings maybe, when you could stand right here beside the old church and hear the music of children's voices all around because nothing stops sound on an inland sea.
The armor St. Stephenie wears these days--all metal sides and roof--preserves the place at minimum expense, right here on the property where the church has stood since 1927, the year a tornado blew away its predecessor. If, today, there's anything at all inside the old church, you'd have to ask, because its steel wardrobe appears not to have left a chink. It's testimony as a house of worship is little more than a silhouette, but then those it served are long gone too. What few agribusiness men and women remain raise much smaller families on bigger and bigger spreads, thousands and thousands of acres. But the Dane Church stays, suited up dutifully against the elements, just across the road from its own cemetery.
The old church was Lutheran, built on land owned by Yance Sorgenson, whose stone stands proudly up front, the most prominent stone in the plot and closest to the road. When I got out of the car, I couldn't help thinking I was being watched. I meant no harm.
Sorenson insisted, even though "AT REST," that the world remember, as he obviously didn't want to forget, that he was "Born in Norway," as was his bride.
We're still in Willa Cather country, and this old church--or its predecessor--plays a role in the Cather biography, the same novel whose innards we've been visiting, My Antonia. The cemetery just across the road from St. Stephanie may well have been the one whose board refused burial to Antonia Shimerda's father's family asked if their beloved father could be buried just beyond its gates. Mr. Shimerda was Roman Catholic and Czech, not Danish and Lutheran, but Cather says his origins or church affiliation were not what prompted the board to refuse.
Mr. Shimerda's prototype, Francis Sadilek, took his life, shot himself in his own barn. For him, America didn't fulfill its wondrous promise. In the old country, he'd been a musician, not a farmer; but he had believed, all the way over on the ship, that he could farm: you put seeds in the ground and then, when the harvest is ready, you eat potatoes or carrots or kale, or put up what's left of the bounty in jars for winter.
But when he got here and lived just up the road from the church, that's not the way it went exactly and, in deep despair, he ended his life with his own hand and was buried instead on his own farm, where today a crooked sign remains marking the event in the grass.
Today, clothed in alabaster, St. Stephenie Church is no more a church than a storage shed, but its shape and its proud presence high above the land of a people it once served still feels like a blessing. For years, the bell in its tower must have rung out on Sunday mornings, and must have been tolled for the deaths of its people. For years, that bell had to have been heard for miles around. For years, it created community.
And broke it.
Once upon a time St. Stephenie had windows and an altar, baptismal font and a communion table. Years ago, doubtlessly, it was a place of hope and grace.
But it was also a place of division, as are all of our St. Stephenies, and as we are ourselves, forever in need of grace.
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