"They love me"

I can't help but wonder how she'd look in the old habit, a wardrobe she dropped decades ago already, some solidly starched cap-and-gown that would have made her--and her fellow "religious" look like penguins to a bunch of Protestant boys more than a half century ago. I wonder how she'd look in a wide-brimmed sail of a hat and flowing black robe. Truth be told, I'd like to see it--I really would. 

I don't doubt that she retains something of that gear in the house where she and the only other two members of the Oblate Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (there are only three at St. Pauls). Wouldn't be impossible, and she might just be game to pull on the old gear and be so traditionally attired next time I bring a group around. 

Greenwood, SD, holds more stories than I could hope to uncover or, most certainly, tell, and it's a ghost town. Strictly speaking, that's a call that's not really mine to make. People still live in Greenwood--not many, but a few. That there was once was a bigger, more populace little burg is almost immediately visible. There are open lots where it seems clear houses, maybe barns, used to be. Two churches--Episcopal and Presbyterian--both of them barred and shuttered these days, one of them barely upright, are visual, painful proof that, once upon a time more people lived here.

A treaty monument stands proudly atop a hill an eighth of a mile off the road. If you take the time to read the thing, you'll find the names of those Yanktons who, in 1858, signed the treaty giving them 1.8 million dollars over the next 50 years if they'd give up their land--11 million acres of it--to be homesteaded by millions of white folks, including my own great-grandparents, men and women hungrily lured west by the promise of free land.

One of the signers, a headman named Struck by the Ree, may well have done more than any of the other Yanktons to bring about the reservation. There's a myth that he was baptized into that peace-making position by none other than Lewis and Clark, when they came up the river looking for the west coast of the nation. If you stop by the cemetery just a bit up the road, you can't miss Struck by the Ree's stone--it's huge.

Sister Pat, who'll greet you in jeans and a sweatshirt, came to South Dakota as a devout young girl who'd read a biography of Crazy Horse and determined that she'd give her heart and soul to Christian mission to Native people. Today, she's 80+ years old. She likes to travel, but she's been here ever since she left Youngstown, Ohio, on a train for Marty, South Dakota. 

I love bringing people to St. Paul's Church, love the building for what it says about those who brought it here and put it here and sustain it out here on the reservation. But the real reason a visit to St. Paul's works is because Sister Pat, whose been here forever, loves to talk to the guests I bring around, most of whom are stunned--as I was--with this massive cathedral, honestly, in the middle of an endless backdrop of nothing more than empty Great Plains.

Last week, she had a little portable PA, with a mike that hangs around her neck and runs to a speaker--a great improvement. Sister Pat's voice box is nowhere near as stout as her heart and soul.

Last week, when I was at St. Paul's, she told the group of her devotion to the people of the community, pure as the driven snow--really! "I've had a wonderful life here," she told us, then supplied some specifics and ended with a line that I'll not forget soon: "They love me," she told us.

What she said could easily have been taken wrong, were Sister Pat, one of only three Oblate Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, anyone else under the sun. She didn't mean to say that others don't love her. Nor did she most suddenly put on a show. She meant that line to say what she might have said about precious Jesus--"He loves me." 

Even after all those years and all those tears. Long, long ago, her parents were bawling just as heavily as she was when the train left the station. But it was her calling to go. Her Jesus wanted his devout on the reservation, an Oblate Sister of the Blessed Sacrament. Turning back was not a question.

It was something of a lesson from catechism really, those three words. I wasn't surprised, and I can't imagine any of the guests I brought along for even a moment thought less of her for saying what she did. "They love me," she told us. 

This visit, those are the words she left us with. Honestly, I think she could have worn the old habit--might have been fun. But I don't think the old way would have made a bit of a difference when, through that little portable PA,  she offered her testimony. "They love me," she said. Case closed.

What a blessing.