More than any other place I lived as a child or young adult—Virginia, Illinois, Hawaii, Vermont, New York—this is my spiritual geography, the place where I’ve wrestled my story out of the circumstances of landscape and inheritance. The word geography, derives from the Greek words for earth and writing, and writing about Dakota has been my means of understanding that inheritance and reclaiming what is holy in it (2).
The city no longer appeals to me for the cultural experiences and possessions I might acquire there, but because its population is less homogenous than Plains society. Its holiness is to be found in being open to humanity in all its diversity. And the western Plains now seem bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow (3).
There are also those who are drawn here-teachers willing to take the lowest salaries in the nation; clergy with theological degrees from Princeton, Cambridge, and Zurich who want to serve small rural churches—who find that they cannot remain for long. Their professional mobility sets them apart and becomes a liability in an isolated Plains community where outsiders are treated with an uneasy mix of hospitality and rejection (7).
One of the vows a Benedictine makes is stability: commitment to a p particular community, a particular place. If this vow is countercultural by contemporary America standards, it is countercultural in the way that life on the Plains often calls us to be. Benedictines represent continuity in the boom-and-bust cycles of the Plains; they incarnate and can articulate, the reasons people want to stay (8).
Kardong writes … “If you take us somewhere else, we Jose our character, our history—maybe our soul” (9).
Had I lost my mind? But I was young, still in my twenties, an apprentice poet certain of the rightness of returning to the place where I suspected I would find my stories. As it turns out, the Plains have been essential not only for my growth as a writer, they have formed me spiritually. I would even say they have made me a human being (11).
Andy no more knew that he was on a prehistoric sea bed than he knew what le beau means in French, but some ancient wisdom in him had sensed great danger here; a terrifying but beautiful landscape in which we are at the mercy of the unexpected, and even angels proceed at their own risk (12).
I was a New Yorker for nearly six years and still love to visit my friends in the city. But now I am conscious of carrying a Plains silence within me into cities, and of carrying my city experiences back to the Plains so that they may be absorbed again back into silence, the fruitful silence that produces poems s and essays (15).
I began to see each of us as a treasure-bearer, carrying our souls like a great blessing through the world. After the relative emptiness of the Plains, partaking in such a feast of humanity was a blessing in itself (16).
In Confessions of a Guilty Bystander Thomas Merton writes of visiting Louisville on an errand for his monastery: “At the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers” (16).
Silence is the best response to mystery. “There is no way of telling people,” Merton reminds us, “that they are all walking around shining like the sun” (16).
Plains speech, while nearly devoid of “-isms” and “-ologies,” tends toward the concrete and the personal: weather, the land, other people. Good language for a poet to hear. And as my own language has become more grounded in Dakota, I’ve become a kind of evangelist for poetry, the exalted use of language. There is no ready-made audience for poetry in the western Dakotas, and I’ve delighted in discovering audiences in unlikely places: church suppers, grain elevator cooperative meetings, legislative committee sessions, political fundraisers, even a bull sale (20).
The best description I know of the Dakota sky came from a little girl at an elementary school on the Minot Air Force Base, a shy black girl who had recently moved from Louisiana and seemed overwhelmed by her new environment. She wrote: “The sky is full of blue / and full of the mind of God (21).
The constantly surprising encounters with children and the great treasure of their writing have seen me through many t dreary winter day (22).
I had stumbled onto a basic truth of asceticism: that it is not necessarily a denigration of the body, though it has often been misapplied for that purpose. Rather, it is a way of surrendering to reduced circumstances in a manner that enhances the whole person. It is a radical way of knowing exactly who, what, and where you are, in defiance of those powerful forces in society—alcohol, drugs, television, shopping malls, motels—that aim to make us forget (23).
But Dakota bravado masks an anxiety that afflicts forgotten people in a mass-market society. We boast about our isolation, and the lengths we go to overcome it … (26).
We learn not to be surprised when the Environmental Protection Agency reports that big cities want to dump their garbage in our wide-open spaces (26-27).
Like ethnic peoples all over the world, Dakotans are in danger of becoming victims of their own mythology As our towns re failing and our lives here become less viable, many Dakotans cling stubbornly to a myth of independence and local control that makes it difficult for us to come together and work for the things that might benefit us all. We’ve been slow to recognize that our traditional divisiveness (country versus town, small town versus city) makes us weak, not strong (32).
I prize the hiddenness of Dakota, and have grown protective of the silence here—the places that have become sacred to me, that in all likelihood few humans have ever walked (34).
Gertrude Stein’s remark “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is” (36).
In today’s troubled agricultural economy this translates into a death wish, and values that once served to protect and preserve the town become threats to its survival (48).
When even local families can be turned into outsiders and enemies, ministers and other professionals make easy targets. They set themselves up for attack simply by doing their jobs, organizing stress and suicide prevention workshops and support groups for bankrupt farmers. When this happened in Lemmon, some townspeople complained that the ministers were only making things worse with their negative talk (55).
The danger is professional standards will slip so far that people not only accept the mediocre but praise it, and refuse to see any outside standards as valid (55-56).
Such outsiders can unwittingly pose a threat to the existing social order, and if their newcomers’ enthusiasm doesn’t wear off, if their standards don’t fall to meet the town’s, and especially if they keep on trying to share what they know, they have to be discouraged, put down, or even cast out (56).
There is both irony and schism built into a system that uses expulsion as a means of preserving its unity (59).
If there’s anything worth calling theology, it is listening to people’s stories, listening to them and cherishing them. — MARY PELLAUER (69).
Sometimes it seems as if the whole world is fueled by gossip (71).
Gossip is theology translated into experience. In it we hear great stories of conversion, like the drunk who tums his or her life around, as well as stories of failure (76).
You make the winds your messengers. — Psalm 104 (78).
How to tell the truth in a small town, where, if a discouraging word is heard, it is not for public consumption (79)?
As one North Dakota writer says, “Here and there a woman has to step on a few toes and put her writing above other things” (80).
A more immediate Consequence of the local history mentality is the tendency to “make nice.” If we can make the past harmonious, why not the present? Why risk discussion that might cause unpleasantness (81)?
Instead, in the isolated, insular small- town and rural environment, truth itself can become an outside authority, like the economic and political forces we profess independence from, or the state and federal laws we so casually break when they don’t fit our needs (82).
He should have known that this is simply how we do things here (82).
It is impossible to exaggerate how much the unconscious, the hidden story, dictates behavior in such families (84).
I needed liturgy and a solid grounding in the practice of prayer, not a demythologizing that left me feeling starved, thinking: If this is religion, I don’t belong (92).
At that time I became a writer. I used to think that writing had substituted for religion in my life, but I’ve come to see that it has acted as a spiritual discipline, giving me the tools I needed to rediscover my religious heritage (92).
I now realize that the question was raised by the pious Protestant grandmother at my core. I had no idea she was there, and didn’t know how to listen to her. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my move in o 1974 from New York to South Dakota was an n attempt to hear her voice more clearly. It was a search for inheritance, for place (93).
Ironically, it was b the language about Jesus Christ, meant to be most inviting, that made me feel most left out (94).
I also began, slowly, to make sense of our gathering together on Sunday morning, recognizing, however dimly, that church is to be participated in and not consumed. The point is not what one gets out of it, but the worship of God; the service takes place both because of and despite the needs, strengths, and frailties of the people present. How else could it be? Now, on the occasions when I am able to actually worship o in church, I am deeply grateful (95).
Fundamentalism is about control more than grace, and in effect my grandmother implanted the seed of fundamentalism within me, a shadow in Jungian terms, that has been d difficult to overcome (95).
For most of my life, you could not have convinced me that, to quote a Quaker friend, “trust comes before belief and faith is a response to love more than an acceptance of dogma” (96).
Fortunately a Benedictine friend provided one answer: “Sin, in the New Testament,” he told me, “is the failure to do concrete acts of love” (97).
The desert monks were not moralists concerned that others behave in a proper way so much as people acutely aware of their own weaknesses who tried to see their situation clearly v without the distortions of pride, ambition, or anger. They saw sin (what they called bad thoughts) as any impulse that leads us away from paying full attention to who and what we are and what we’re doing; any thought or act that interferes with our ability to love God and neighbor. Many desert stories speak of judgment as the worst obstacle for a monk. “Abba Joseph said to Abba Pastor: Tell me how I can become a monk. The elder replied: If you want to have rest here in this life and also in the next, in every conflict with another says “Who am I.” and judge no one. (98).
Carl Jung has reminded us that to grow we must eventually stop running from our “shadow” and o turn to face it (99).
Testamonies (99)?
On aunt’s suicide: Suicides have a way of haunting the next generation, and adolescence is when most of us begin to know who we will be. I believe I became a writer in order to tell her story and possibly redeem it. This goes much deeper than anything I understand but, in part, I also joined a church because of her. I needed to find that woman sacrificed to a savage god. I needed to make sure she was forgiven and at peace (101).
Where I am is a place where Native Americans and whites live alone together, to paraphrase David Aden Evans, a South Dakota poet (108).
The naturalist Loren Eiseley once commented on the way Plains people “have been strung out at nighttime under a vast solitude rather than linked to the old-world village with its adjoining plots. We were mad to settle the West in [this] fashion,” he says. “You cannot fight the sky” (110).
A fledgling ascetic, I am learning to see loneliness as a seed that, when planted deep enough, can grow into writing that goes back out into the world (111).
I have observed that in the small town, the need to get along favors the passive aggressives, those for whom honest differences and disagreements pose such a threat that they are quickly submerged, left to fester in a complex web of resentments. This is why, when the tempests erupt in the small-town teapot, they are so violently destructive. This is why, when the comfortable fiction that we’re all the same under the skin, is exposed as a lie, those who are genuinely different so often feel ostracized and eventually leave (113).
“Living with people at dose range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt.” — Archbishop Rembert Weakland, a Benedictine (120).
The irony and wonder of all this is that it is the desert’s grimness, its stillness and isolation, that bring us back to love. Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others (121).
For one who has chosen the desert and truly embraced the forsaken ground it is not despair or fear or limitation that dictates how one lives. One finds instead an openness and hope that verges on the wild (122).
A friend, Jim Lein, has described what it’s like to walk here: “One night, I sensed not only the curvature of the earth but its size and gravitational pull. This feeling is no doubt what holds people to the prairie, what leads prairie people to feel claustrophobic in more cluttered environs, with their trees and mountains and tall buildings obscuring our view, our sense of planet” (128).
It also suggests to me the truth of what Native American writer Paula Gunn Allen said in a recent interview, that the longer Europeans remain in America, the more Indian they will become. ‘What makes an Indian an Indian,” she explains, is a deep connection to the land, built over generations, “that imbues their psychology and eventually their spirituality and makes them one with the spirit of the land” (128).
t wonder if what Allen suggests isn’t already happening. I wonder if this process is what gave me the nerve to lay claim to my spiritual geography (128).
I can long for change, for a “new earth,” as Gregory of Nyssa defines it, “a good heart, a heart like the earth, which drinks up the rain that falls on it and yields a rich harvest (131).
Such change is properly defined as conversion, a word that at its root connotes not a change of essence but of perspective, as turning round; turning back to Or returning; turning one’s attention to.
Both monasteries and the rural communities on the Plains are places where nothing much happens. Paradoxically, they are also places where being open to conversion is most necessary if community is to survive. The inner impulse toward conversion, a change of heart, may be muted in a city, where outward change is fast, noisy, ever-present. But in the small town, in the quiet arena, a refusal to grow (which is one way Gregory of Nyssa defined sin) makes any constructive change impossible. Both monasteries and small towns lose their ability to be truly hospitable to the stranger when people use them as a place to hide out, a place to escape from the demands of life (145-146).
I think of it as the quantum effect: here time flows back and forth, in and out of both past and future, and I, too, am changed (152).
The sun is setting and a nearly full, fat-faced moon is rising above the prairie. We have time on our hands here, in our hearts, and it makes us strange. I barely passed elementary algebra, but somehow the vast space before me makes perfectly comprehensible the words of a mathematician I encountered today: it is easy to “demonstrate that there are no more minutes I all of eternity than there are in say, one minute” (153).
It’s a dangerous place, this vast ocean of prairie. Something happens to us here (153).
The midwestern landscape is abstract, and our response to the geology of the region might be similar to our response to the contemporary walls of paint in museums. We are forced to live in our eye. — Michael Martone (155).
The conflict between urban and rural theologies is an old one in the Christian church. Back in fourth-century Egypt, the Bishop of Alexandria, at the urging of intellectuals is smitten with Creek philosophy, announced as church doctrine that when you pray you must not have any picture of God in your mind. rte old monk is reported to have wept, saying, “They have taken away my God, I, and I have no.one I can hold now, and know not whom to adore or to address myself” (166-167).
In the last volume of Ole Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth trilogy a country pastor, addressing Norwegian farmers in Dakota who are losing their “old country” ways, and in fact are eager to lose them in order to become good Americans, declares that “a people that has lost its traditions is doomed.” He adds:
In this process of leveling down, of making everybody alike … is allowed to continue, America is doomed to become the most impoverished land spiritually on the face of the earth; out of our highly praised melting pot will come a dull … smug complacency, barren of all creative thought … Soon we will have reached the perfect democracy of barrenness … Dead will be the hidden life of the heart which is nourished by tradition, the idioms of language, and our attitude to life. It is out of these elements that character grows (168).
I wonder if roles are now reversed, and America’s urban majority, native born or not, might be seen as immigrants to a world of asphalt and cement, and what they need more than anything is access to the old ways of being. Access to the spirits of land and of place (169).
Monks, with their conscious attempt to do the little things peaceably and well … have a lot in common with the farmers and ranchers of Hope. Both have a down-to-earth real- ism on the subject of death. Benedict, in a section of his Rule entitled “Tools for Good Works,” asks monks to “Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die,” and I Would suggest that this is not necessarily a morbid pursuit (172).
When these people ask, “Who will replace us?” the answer is, “Who knows, maybe no one,” and it’s not easy to live with that truth (174).
I am not showing due respect to religion as I was taught it: as a matter of the fine points of who’s in, who’s out, who’s what as defined by dogmatic and denominational distinctions (175).
I know the shock of hitting paved road after riding grass- track roads and walking in the country all day. The rhythm of the tires on the two-lane blacktop says to me: civilization, town, other people, and I don’t want that. As when I was a child, I want to remain in the open, becoming something other than human under the sky (178).
I recall a saying of the desert monks: “If a man settles in a certain place and does not bring forth the fruit of that place, the place itself casts him out” (182).
Coming out of the depths of silence, these talks elicited a response that could on lead back to silence (185).
I was reading one of the old ones who said, “One who keeps death before his eyes conquers despair.” The little girl calls me, holding up her paper for me I read:
When my third snail died, I said,
‘I’m through with snails.’
But I didn’t mean it (190).
True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person (197).
For the monk, even repentance is seen in terms of hospitality. For one modern Benedictine, repentance means “not primarily … a sense of regret,” but “a renunciation of narrow and sectarian human views that are not large enough for God’s mystery (197).
I discovered monasteries after moving to the Great Plains, and the most surprising thing to me about the hospitality I found is that it is powerful without being seductive; it does not lead aside or astray, but home. It won’t necessarily make you a follower or even a fan of monks; instead, it will encourage you to examine and define your own deepest commitments (198).
But the gifts kept coning, despite my doubts, and gradually I realized that their hospitality was functioning as true hospitality should, helping me to become who I wanted to be as a writer, as a wife, even as a Presbyterian, and that this was t should be (199).
It’s hard to say what monastic people mean to us. I suppose they’re a lot like poets: nice to have around until they ask to be taken seriously (200).
Ironically, it is in choosing the stability of the monastery or the Plains, places where nothing ever happens, places the world calls dull, that we discover that we can change (203).
Monks are behaving “as if” constancy were possible in this world, and as Levi observes, “at any visitor’s first entry into a monastery, time seems to stand still” (208).
Religious life, as lived experience, draws more from the well of emotions than from abstractly reasoned theologies and church structures (210).
They know, as Trappist monk Matthew Kelty reminds us, that “you do not have to be holy to love God. You have only to be human. Nor do you have to be holy to see God in all things. You have only to play as a child with an unselfish heart” (215).
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Norris, Kathleen. Dakota. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1993.
Dana Henry Martin 