Immaculate Conception, two of them, St. Helena

It's not a nice thing to say, but Ian Frazier's Great Plains makes clear, even if he doesn't state it outright, that the Great Plains is the world's biggest open-air museum. So much of what once was is still there, but is no more. 

Once upon a time in Cedar County, Nebraska, a thousand Native people lived and roamed--Pawnee, Ponca, Santee, Yankton. No more. Once upon a time hundreds of white "squatters," dreaming in a smorgasbord of languages, moved out to the good arable soil west and south of the Missouri River to build new lives for their families. Today, many of their kin are long gone. Cedar County isn't empty, but St. Helena, once the county seat, is home to something less than 100 people. 

St. Helena (NE) Immaculate Conception

Once upon a time, a thankful community invested everything they had and more into a marvelous cathedral, a European marvel in Gothic Revival, a cathedral that seems far out of place and time within a community that is no longer prospering, but a community--or so you can't deny--that still believes in its church, a place that holds the mystery, the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Immaculate Conception's steeple towers above a broad Missouri River landscape the way European cathedrals come to define towns a mile away, make them identifiable, here, within a broad land of cattle yards and center-point irrigation.

Another Immaculate Conception, a miniature without elegance or fuss, this one, pocket-sized, sits at the entrance to the top-of-the-hill Immaculate Conception cemetery. Just a few miles from town, on gravel. You'll have to hunt for it, a squat frame structure kept up lovingly, a graveyard chapel. 

Inside--Catholic churches are always open--the short nave offers six rows of benches, four more along the side walls. An alabaster altar up front stands behind a short fence, as if guarding the elements. The Holy Mother and Child dominate the right corner up front for purposes of adoration.

It was the virgin who reminded me of yet another Immaculate Conception, this one in Rome, and not a cathedral but a huge wall in the Vatican Museums, where a 19th century fresco filled with angels and human beings galore you might well yearn to know--if the tour offered you a whole day to look. My guess is it sticks with me because of its eternal busyness, before creation and ever after.

Next to the Vatican Museum, this little chapel of the same name feels like a miniature, a toy. But when you walk in the gate and then step in, time seems someow negligent. A confessional stands front and left, not much bigger than a grandfather clock. 

When you stand there alone, a woman, a farm wife, maybe in bibs but all by herself, comes in to meet the priest who's already on the other side of the black, cardboard separation. It may be a ritual for her, a good one, something done weekly or monthly. She's not here for some bloody  transgression; she's is here to receive forgiveness. It's a sacrament. She holds beads. Don't listen in. What she's saying is none of your business.

Her determination is obvious. What she wants is absolution, forgiveness. Sure, it's all in your imagination. You're in a museum within a museum. It seems impossible that the ancient telephone-booth confessional still hears transgressions. People don't stop by very much anymore. Some old folks shake their heads at what Cedar County is coming to. Still, the strange old place still speaks.

The benches that crowd the sides offer their own memories: prominent men and women, community leaders, suddenly leave the neighborhood, their mortal coils returning to land more dusty than Great-grandpa thought when he left to be closer to heaven than he'd ever been in sorry old Germany. 

Kids too. There's been no shortage of little ones mourned in this tiny place, then left behind in the cemetery outside. Epidemics--influenza, scarlet fever--and seasonal farm accidents, far too many. Take a bench for a moment. Take a seat in a little frame place hardly big enough for a John Deere mower, but don't try to count the tears. You know there were moments when every last person on these hard, wooden benches was weeping. Epic funerals people still talk about, precious old hymns in the German tongue.  

If you stay for a while, alone, the walls disappear, and a tiny old chapel feels as spacious as the prairie horizon all around. 

Local history claims the chapel stands on the spot where the very first house of worship was built, when the colonizers arrived. That structure was slapped together quickly because a place of worship simply had to be created, no matter how small, no matter how unfinished, just a shack that would be replaced soon with a log cabin, and, some decades later, a church, a real cathedral just like back home. An organ too. That's what we're working for. That's what we need.

That big one in town is an amazing testimony to the first settlers' faith. This one, nothing quite like it I've seen, remains a shelter in the time of storm, even on a day when there's nothing but blue sky. There's not much to see for a mile in any direction, but there at the door of the Immaculate Conception chapel, looking over a range of musty stones, you can't help but think nothing really ever dies.

There's a yellowing school notebook just inside the door. The pages bulge with summer humidity, but there's a pen there, a good one, for your convenience. 

Go up the list a bit--my name is there. Tell the committee who cleans the place that you stopped by, thank them for keeping it open, for keeping the place, like faith itself, alive.