On the Holy Ground of St. Augustine

Today, March 3, marks the Feast Day of St. Mother Katharine Drexel.  I'm celebrating by looking back 5 years ago to when I celebrated this feast on holy ground, at St. Augustine Mission in the Winnebago Reservation in the northeast part of Nebraska.  She was the daughter of a very wealthy family, and received a substantial amount of money as an inheritance.  She used it to start missions that served aboriginal Native Americans and African-Americans, including St. Augustine.  At a private audience with Pope Leo XIII, she pleaded with him for missionaries to help operate these missions.  He encouraged her to be one of those missionaries, and she then entered religious life to focus on this work.

At Mass on her Feast Day, Father Dave Korth, who was serving as the priest at St. Augustine at the time, indicated that while locations related to saints abound in Europe, they are much fewer in number in the United States, which made being there on that day even more special.

And it was certainly the experience of a lifetime to be there as part of a mission/service trip with a group of college students and community members at St. Teresa of Avila Roman Catholic Student Center at Valparaiso University.  Those of you who read my reflections I sent out via e-mail during my college years may remember an account I wrote of that trip shortly after it happened.  If you have not had the chance to read it, please feel free to contact me and I will send it to you.

I had been presented with service trip opportunities before this in my life, but I didn't feel they were right for me.  One idea that appealed to me was spending time in service at a place in an aboriginal Native American area.  During my senior year at ValpU, the opportunity to spend time at St. Augustine became available, since St. Teresa's had recently established a sister parish relationship with St. Augustine.  I jumped at the chance to apply to be part of the group.

After some preparation meetings over the course of a few weeks, and a couple of fundraisers, we were up quite early on the morning of Saturday, March 2, 2013, at St. Teresa's.  By 6 AM, we were in our vehicles, ready to journey west to Nebraska, departing at the same time the group of students journeying to New Orleans for service work.

We had a group of 8 students and two retired couples in the group.  I already knew the other people in the group, and this week we spent together provided so many chances to bond even more closely with everyone.  That certainly got off to a good start as we journeyed west on a nearly 10-hour car ride, mostly along I-80, once we had the chance to nap after a night of not so much sleep.  Interestingly, the only other male student in the group was a meteorology major like me, and that gave the gals so much reason to poke fun at us, like when we stopped at a rest stop in Iowa, and we were immediately taken in by the computer monitor in the shelter that gave us access to weather information from NWS webpages.

The next day, Sunday, was our first full day there.  We attended 10 AM Mass, followed by a celebration brunch.  Then we went on a tour of the Winnebago and neighboring Omaha Reservations, led by Dwight, the cultural person at the St. Augustine Mission school.

We did our service work on Monday-Friday.  On Monday, some of us helped organize the materials in a large shed.  Others of us spent time organizing materials in one of the school's auxiliary buildings, and then scrubbing the floor of the church.  On Tuesday, we spent time in the nearby town of Walthill at St. Joseph's church, revamping the space in their food pantry and others scrubbing the floor of the church.  We spent more time there on Wednesday.  On Thursday, we took some items over to the nearby town of Macy, where we spent time at the Our Lady of Fatima (Roman) Catholic Worship Center.  On Friday, our last full day there, we spent time at St. Augustine, cleaning the rooms in the lower level of the church.

My friend Lydia took this photo of my scrubbing the floor of the St. Augustine Church on Monday, our first work day.  It was staged, but pretty well accurately reflects what I actually did a few minutes before, as I threw myself into service.

In addition to service work, we also spent time engaging with the culture and learning more about the people there, which was an aspect of the trip that appealed to me and was a large part of my motivation for going.  Learning US history in school, I was aware of the mistreatment the native peoples suffered.  But spending time on these reservations made it much more real for me, especially in seeing how the people still deal with the lingering effects of the devastation they've suffered.  They still sense the pain, like in some of the stories shared with us over dinner from local community members.  There's not much opportunity in the communities on the reservations, because of the way the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency, oversees the land on the reservations.  And there are others who don't do much to support them.  They don't have abundant resources, although the Winnebago people have managed to use what resources they have to fund projects and business development in their community.

And despite efforts to stamp out their culture, it's still alive.  The liturgy at Mass incorporated so many elements of their culture, like incense from scented plants, and songs in the native Ho-Chunk language of the Winnebago people.  We also had the extraordinary opportunity to participate in the Sweat Lodge ceremony, which was such a profound experience, I will write a separate blog post about it.

Five years later, I still regard this trip as one of the most important experiences of my life.  I experienced so much personal growth as I dove into the service work, and enhanced my sense of what service is about.  After that week, I started to feel a strong sense of pride in being Roman Catholic, unlike anything I felt before in my life.  I could see that the Church is a force for good in the world, because we, as a group, took a week and devoted it to service.  In fact, I remember the day after I returned home, on Sunday, I went to Mass at my home parish.  As I walked toward my seat, I came to the spot where I sat during my Confirmation Mass that was held in that very church over seven years before.  I recalled the commitment to faith I made on October 15, 2005, and I couldn't help but think of how much I had grown in faith during the previous week by living out that commitment.

My friend Sarah took this picture of me looking at a decades-old Roman Missal in the museum at St. Augustine, while we were rearranging the space on Monday of that week.

We also experienced so much growth together as a group as we took time to have the hard discussions about the conditions we encountered on the reservations, and to embrace a deeper understanding of faith in action, which we did most nights during our group reflection time led by our student leader Lydia.  At the end of the week, one of the chaperones remarked how much adult-like maturity we had demonstrated in the way we conducted ourselves during the week.  It was an honor to spend that week with that group:  During the evening before our departure, we wrote notes of affirmation to each other, and I still keep those notes in a box, and treasure them, not only because of the kind things people wrote about me, but because they represent the powerful bonds we forged during that week, even during our work times and over meals when we just got chatting about our lives.

In many respects, it was like a microcosm of my entire ValpU college experience:  In a defined period of time, I had an intense time of activity that exposed me to realities in the broader world.  And I became close to a group of people who came together to share the experience, after which we headed into our own separate ways.  And, most of all, I was empowered in faith.

The first reading at Mass on that Sunday, March 3, for the 3rd Sunday of Lent in Cycle C, was the story of Moses's encounter with God at Mount Sinai, when God called him to lead His people out of Egypt.  God told Moses to remove his footwear because he was standing on holy ground.

During our week at St. Augustine, we were walking on holy ground, tread by St. Katharine Drexel.  As we followed her footsteps, engaging in service to others, we were on the pathway toward attaining the holiness to which we are all called.  We faced the harsh realities and messiness of the world devastated by sinfulness, and responded by being filled with God's love.  We were striving to glorify God in living our own lives, and through serving them, making His presence come alive, which is made new in every age by those who are faithful to His calling.

The Church at the St. Augustine Mission