Native American woman blessed us with her prayerful life and love of nature
When I checked lectionary readings for this week, I was surprised to see a familiar name. Wednesday, July 14 is the feast day of Kateri Tekakwitha, daughter of a Mohawk chief and an Algonquian mother who had converted to Christianity before being taken prisoner by the victorious Iroquois. My first encounter with Kateri Tekakwitha, sometimes called “Lily of the Mohawk,” came when I was a Girl Scout working to earn badges to sew onto the dark green sash of our uniform. Besides badges, we could earn two medals. One was the Marian Award and the other the Kateri Tekakwitha award.
We read about the young Native American who, at four years of age, lost her parents and brother when smallpox ravaged their village and left her body scarred and her vision impaired. I loved learning about this adventurous teenager who not only followed many ways of her people but also remained true to her inner desire to learn more about the Jesus she had heard of from her mother. She eventually embraced Christianity despite the objections of her uncle, a chief of the Turtle clan who had taken her into his family and raised her as his own.
Kateri lived a life on the fringes of her society, taunted by others and threatened with torture as a result of her Christian faith. Young men pursued her not because they cared for her or her virtue, but because they desired the political position that came with a chief’s daughter. The young woman was not interested in marriage, and while her people’s tradition included acceptance of the choice of virginity, Kateri had the additional motivation of remaining unmarried to give herself more completely to prayer and to the Jesus she had grown to love above all else.
Eventually unable to bear her treatment by members of her clan, she fled to Canada where she lived out the rest of her short life. Born in 1656 in New York State, she died twenty-four years later at an Indian mission in Caughnawaga, Quebec near Montreal. She was known for her kindness, prayerful life, and love of meeting God in nature. A number of sources mention that her favorite devotion was fashioning small crosses from twigs and placing them randomly in the woods where she would find them and be reminded to stop for a moment of prayer.
Her deep respect for nature is not surprising. She was a Native American who spent much of her girlhood growing corn, gathering berries and other wild foods in the forests. She shared their love of creation and saw it as a reflection of the one who made all things. When she was ridiculed for her faith in a strange God, she insisted that the God she worshiped was the God of all, and loved all, Indian and White’s alike.
She is the first Native American to be named blessed (by Pope John Paul II in 1980) and to be put forward for canonization. Along with Saint Francis of Assisi, Kateri Tekakwitha is a patron of the environment, ecology, and those who work to preserve it.
I thought of them both as I took a walk in the rain today. I began by opening the front door to see if the downpour was cooling the temperature, and then decided to take a few photos of a summer rain for use in future blogs. If you visit my blog you will see some of them. I ended up taking a long walk and enjoying the beauty of the wet day. Francis and Kateri both spent a lot of time outdoors and encountered God in its abundance.
As we pray for an end to the travesty in the Gulf of Mexico and for healing of its fragile ecosystems, we might ask for their intercession. With stormy seas and the hurricane season ahead, our earth and the people who make their living from the sea face an uncertain future. Scientists, engineers, tankers, and our best efforts will need the added strength of prayer.