Encircling Faith

Reflecting on summer ministry in Montana

By Mike Dorn, OFM Cap.

This summer, Brenton Ertel and I had the privilege of being assigned to the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Reservations in Montana. Having never set foot on a reservation, I had no clue what to expect. In hindsight, this helped me to let the experience unfold rather than evaluate it at the moment. What unfolded cannot be easily expressed. There’s far too much beauty, loss, and resilience on the reservations for this writer, (a descendant of white settler-colonists) to ever to do justice to the native souls that inhabit these lands and skies. The same goes for the complicated history of both oppression and grace, which only God knows what will come of it all. That said, I can only hope to offer an outsider’s reflection and gratitude to our Montana friars and to the Crow and Northern Cheyenne people.

Sister Death sooner or later embraces everything within the human experience. Some peoples and lands, (due to power and privilege) are veiled far more than others from this harsh reality. The Crow and Northern Cheyenne, like too many indigenous peoples in 2018, bear a disproportionate embrace of Sister Death in the areas of poverty, addiction, unemployment, etc. But in areas where she has yielded her embrace— joy, native pride, and the will to live on as Crow and Northern Cheyenne, collectively outshine societal categories of critique.

The Sun Dance in Pryor is just one example where our predominant culture’s scale of lifestyle loses its weight. A three-day prayer without food or drink, dancers are encircled by a traditional lodge built from felled cottonwood, aspen, and pine. As one community, dancers are both spiritually and physically encircled by their family, friends, and ancestors in a tour de force of sacrifice and offering to God. Brenton and I were included in helping construct the lodge and were also given a blessing within it (encircled by 62 dancers). Jonathan Pretty On Top, the Crow who gave us the blessing, prayed in an especially personal way for our vocations. He also remembered a couple of professed friars (post-novices from several years back) in the process. Through his praying over us in that sacred space, it felt clear to me from the Holy Spirit how much he valued our presence there as Capuchins and desired for us the encounter with the divine that he and his people experience. I’ll never forget that moment as it’s one of the most powerful spiritual experiences I’ve ever had.

The transcendence of the dancers may help to explain my observations of beauty, loss, and resilience on the reservations. First, there’s the natural beauty of the lodge enshrined with the touch, sight, and smell of plant life.  To me, this represents Mother Earth and points to the opposite of sprawling concrete of urban life.  Next, there’s loss— and what more can be said of loss? The dancers endure the biological effects of fasting with ceremonial, spiritual power. For the rest of the reservation, loss may appear to go on and on without remedy at times, but still, both God’s and ancestral spiritual power encircles its seemingly unanswered pain. To this end resilience struggles, but still breaks on through to the surface in the passing down of tribal culture and tradition (among a thousand other ways.) If closely identifying with the Paschal Mystery helps lead a people into greater faith, who could ever disregard the modern-day passion, death, and resurrection of the Crow and Northern Cheyenne?

To our friars in Montana— Larry, Gebre, Jim, Mark Joseph, Jerry, Tien, Bill, Dolph, and David- my sincere gratitude for your individual and communal witness. Your lives and those of friars who’ve come before you are a palpable heartbeat on the reservations and within our province. Thank you as well for your generous hospitality and fraternity that you showed us. Montana was the missing piece of the puzzle in terms of my overall experience of our province. I now have a tangible and meaningful sense of connection to our work there and this couldn’t have happened without you. My prayer is that although a thousand miles away, that all friars in our province feel encircled by God’s embrace through the Crow and Northern Cheyenne people. Amen.

Photo credits: (top) Northern Cheyenne Landscape by Mike Dorn, (middle) Brenton Ertel