This Wheel of Rocks: An Unexpected Spiritual Journey - Hardcover

Grathwohl, Sister Marya

 
9781594487309: This Wheel of Rocks: An Unexpected Spiritual Journey
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1594487308 ISBN 13: 9781594487309
Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

The memoir of a Catholic nun’s spiritual journey that explores the deep connections between faith and the natural world

Growing up in the Midwest, Judy Grathwohl never felt she belonged. “I belong out west,” she remembers telling her father. After joining the Sisters of St. Francis in the early 1960s and becoming Sister Marya, she came to realize that she craved a life beyond the traditional path of a Catholic nun. “Something other than dedicating my life to God was summoning me, some other life purpose,” she writes.

It took several years and several detours, but when Sister Marya eventually was assigned by her order to the Northwest, she felt an immediate connection to the place and to its Native people, the Crow and Northern Cheyenne. Little by little, she was invited to become part of their communities, to share their customs and rituals, and eventually was adopted into one of their families. She came to understand that the blending of Catholic teachings and Native traditions helped build within her a deeper respect for the Earth—this wheel of rocks—that she could not have built on her own. 

In this intimate, revelatory memoir, Sister Marya recounts her own spiritual journey, her settling in Montana, how she—a Catholic nun from Ohio—came to be embraced by the Crow and Northern Cheyenne, and how their traditions prompted in her an expanding devotion to the land, its resources, and its connections to faith and God.

Honest and eye-opening, funny and heartfelt, This Wheel of Rocks shows how living a spiritual life committed to preserving nature and community can be both fulfilling and productive.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marya Grathwohl has been a Sister of St. Francis since 1963 and has served African American, Crow, and Northern Cheyenne communities as a teacher, principal, and adult educator. A founding director of Earth Hope, which offers programs to assist vulnerable groups in protecting their land, she also has worked as a consultant for renewable energy and has developed a cosmology program for use in jails and prisons. A native of Cincinnati, she lives in Billings, Montana.

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Part I

THE ROAD TO PRYOR,
MONTANA

1

Inklings

Show your servants the deeds you do;
let their children enjoy your splendor!

PsalmS 90:16

They were inklings, I realize now. Flowing in the material world, they came whispering. I believe they were sent from God. The messages lodged in my soul and mind, tenacious as loss, tenacious as memories of beauty. They had the potential to shape my future.

The earliest was Mom. Jane Seiler Grathwohl often walked, carrying me, around her yard. She stopped to admire tall white lilies, held me to their wide faces to smell them. She wiped yellow pollen off my nose.

Newly wed Jane and Larry Grathwohl bought a home on a dead-end street, Laura Lane, in Norwood, Ohio. They took frequent evening walks, seeking nearby parks where they could take the children they anticipated bringing into their lives. They discovered an Indian mound a twenty-minute walk from their home. Two distinct cultures, named by archeologists Adena (800 BCE to 100 CE) and Hopewell (100 CE to 500 CE), had built hundreds of burial and ceremonial mounds throughout the Ohio valley. What the builders called themselves is unknown. Unknown to Jane and Larry was how the mound would shape my future. To me, Laura Lane was no dead end.

The mound was located on the highest point in our neighborhood. Fenced as a small park, it was one of the few mounds that had been left undisturbed. Norwood had built the town's two water towers behind it.

Whenever it was my turn to suggest the destination of a frequent family walk, I always chose the Indian mound. Its conical grassy hill was almost as high as a one-story house. Maple and oak trees had taken root on it.

It was quiet and cool at the mound, even in the humidity of summer. As we walked around it, Mom reminded us not to climb on it because it was special. "Maybe some people were buried in the mound," she said. "Let's pray for them." My sisters, Regina and Susan, and I stood close to Mom and said the usual Catholic prayer for the dead, "May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen." We knew the prayer by heart because we prayed it before every meal as Mom and Dad recalled their deceased parents and six sisters and brothers. We extended to these unknown dead the reverence we had for family members.

I realize now that my parents nurtured my sense of wonder here as they encouraged respect for the mound. I learned that mystery coupled with quiet and beauty evoked a sense of the sacred. This place wasn't "church" by any stretch, but here in nature and ancient human ritual there was a kind of holy presence and power. It appealed to me, perhaps more than church.

The mound ignited my imagination. I felt an affinity with the people who had built it and must have had their homes in what was now our neighborhood. Back on Laura Lane, walking to school and passing friends' houses, I pictured the children of the Mound people playing under the trees in yards or peeking out from behind the bushes that hedged sidewalks.

In addition, the mound and its people recalibrated my sense of history, gave me a human story here that was older than our family stories of grandparents coming to the Ohio valley from German and Alsace-Lorraine regions. It was a story older than America, older than Columbus, and closer to home than stories of the first Thanksgiving and Pocahontas.

All this was a child's small awareness, but it bestowed a respect and reverence for the original peoples of this continent. It hinted at the sacred inherent in nature. It would help guide my life and ministry among the Crow and Northern Cheyenne in their ancestral homelands we call Montana.

Grandpa, Mom's dad, also lived with us in the Laura Lane house. He had lost a leg in an accident at work. Using a cane and an artificial limb, he navigated the house slowly, and often sat out on the front porch. He had an endless supply of peanuts for the squirrel that lived in the tall oak a few feet from the porch steps. My sisters and I sat on the steps, placing a peanut as Grandpa directed at the base of the thick trunk. In a swirl of tail, the peanut disappeared.

Next peanut a few inches out from the trunk. It soon disappeared. A little closer to the steps. Gone. Then I put a peanut on the toe of my shoe. We all sat very still and silent.

Squirrel suddenly leapt from the tree to my shoe, snatched the peanut in his mouth, leapt to my knee, then my shoulder, ran across the back of my shoulders, and leapt from my other knee back to the tree. Wide-eyed, breathless, thrilled, I turned to Grandpa.

"The squirrel ran on me," I shouted to him. I ran into the house to tell Mom. I realize now the squirrel's feet left a trail of prints not only across my shoulders, but in my being. The feel of wild, of squirrel became part of me. And I felt so lucky. It was my first lesson in how to enter into the world of other beings, beings beyond our control.

Every summer, Mom and Dad scraped together enough money to take us all to the Cincinnati Zoo. Over the years, the zoo had gradually evolved from smelly buildings of caged animals to more spacious, sometimes open-air settings that sought to mimic the animals' natural habitats. Monkey Island, surrounded by a deep moat, looked like a playground, complete with hills, a maze of tunnels, trees, and hanging vine swings. Tropical birds flew in large rooms thick with greenery. An alligator lazed in a miniature swamp.

One stone building didn't fit the pattern. It was small, with an orange pagoda-style roof and heavy wooden doors we pulled open slowly. The floor was polished stone. The air was cool and hushed. Light filtered through small windows. It felt almost like a church.

In front of us were two bird exhibits and the birds were all dead. They'd been stuffed and mounted as if in a natural history museum, not a zoo.

Dad and I stood together, looking at three large, lovely birds. Softly blue-gray with rosy breasts, long tapered wings and graceful tails, they resembled mourning doves. Dad told me they were not doves but passenger pigeons and the very last one, Martha, had died in this zoo on September 1, 1914. He pointed to a painting.

"That's Martha," he said.

Dad told me that once there were more passenger pigeons than any other land bird species in the world. There were billions of them. They lived in forests throughout eastern North America and migrated in flocks so large they darkened the sun like an eclipse.

Billion meant very little to me but I could imagine huge clouds of birds obscuring the sun. I could imagine that, although it was only an imagined thought. I realized they didn't exist anymore. Not even one.

I continued to stare at dead stuffed birds. Among them was Incas, the last Carolina parakeet, who died in Martha's death cage on February 21, 1918. These bright green, yellow, and orange birds once numbered in the millions. I tried to apprehend the loss of two entire species. Especially the passenger pigeon. No more passenger pigeons, anywhere. How could this happen when there had been so many?

Alexander Wilson, the father of American ornithology, visited a passenger pigeon breeding area near Shelbyville, Kentucky, in 1806. He documented that it was several miles wide and stretched forty miles through the forest. In a single tree he counted more than one hundred nests. People in the region reported that the songs of passenger pigeons rang through the trees, sounding like hundreds of sleigh bells. In 1813 John James Audubon recorded a migrating flock that filled the sky as it flew overhead without diminishing for three full days.

The Native Peoples of Canada refused to hunt nesting passenger pigeons until the young were able to fly. They attempted to keep European settlers from disturbing the easily approached...

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Verlag
Riverhead Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1594487308
ISBN 13 
9781594487309
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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