Lily of the Mohawks

It was a silver morning. The breath of god was circling the low plains, trying to find the best place to settle. Kahenta sat up, dressed, and poked her nose through the tent’s double lapped doorway. The mist shut her eyes. She crawled out into the middle of the campsite. She had to trust that it was the moon that made the morning so silky because she was blinded, unable to see beyond her fingertips. She barely heard the rumbling of horses’ hooves, much less saw the horde trampling the dirt road that led up to the camp.

The crashing sound got louder in the fog until it was too late. Five men riding bareback, their spears held high, broke the silence with their terrifying shrill cries. A raid! She scrambled to her feet. Not again. Kahenta did not want to be stolen from her second “home.” She turned back to the teepee and shouted in her second language, “wake up! They are here! The Mohawks!”

There was a sleepy grunt and the slow connection of her howl, repeating the message. “Raid! Wake up!” The slumber switched to a shout and a rustling of men reaching for weapons.

“Raid…” Her voice shattered as the first of the Mohawks thumped her on the shoulder with a blunt mallet. She was recently baptized. She called out to Christ, but her prayers ended voicelessly as the second horse man looped his arm under her swelling shoulder and snatched her from the earth. She was slung across the back of a stunning roan. Her white-girl sleeping gown tore as she struggled to get free of her captor. But it was useless. Freedom meant death as the team of horses and warriors were beating the earth to bruises. She held on to the rider. She saw her latest family caught with all of their sins still sitting on their foreheads. It was too late for prayers. The last thing she remembered was her “brother” with a spear through his chest. As his body fell, he slowly slid down the shaft of the spear like a fat deer cooking on a charred spit. That was when everything went black.

My mother was stolen twice.

Thank God. I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for those wild Mohawks. It was the second raid that brought her to my father, a Mohawk chief. Her second family led her to the river for baptism, my mother found marriage and motherhood. My sister, my brother, and me.

I am Kateri Tekakwitha. My mother was once a proud daughter of Algonquin people from what the whites call east Canada. The first raid led her to Jesus, but the last raid slid a burlap sack over her head until finally she sucked in the cool clean air of her last tribe. Kahenta married Chief Kenneronkwa. There was no shame in it. If anything it was the acknowledgement of how valuable my mother was. For the Christian god and the Mohawk chief to each want her badly enough that it took wild horses and savage cries to finally capture her and plant her, it showed just what an amazing mother I had.

She raised me with Jesus as my savior. She did her best to proselytize the tribe, but only a few would attend her weekly sermons. Even my younger sister and brother found meaningful work to do before the sun sat up to watch our mother recount the stories of the flood and the flight from Pharaoh and the one resurrection.

I was thrilled with her stories.

She taught me the Algonquin language, Omàmiwininìmowin, but she would polish and highlight her words with the handful of French ones she knew. Words of God. Communion. Confession. Eucharist. Sin. I knew about Eve’s punishment of childbirth and Noah’s sacrifice. I loved the covenant of the rainbow. Christ died for me. My mother’s trials were all a part of His plan. These were the stories she told to me with all of the breath she had in her body until there wasn’t any more air or blood or words. She must have known her time with me would be short because she taught me the whole bible as quickly and as painstakingly as she could. When I was ten, the angels came for her (and my siblings and my father). Death was the raider who came for me. Death threw me onto the back of a disappearing roan and rode me off into life alone.

Small pox left scars on my face and my heart. They were my reminders of all that I had lost, but like the rainbow, they were also God’s promise: “follow me for their sake, Kateri Tekakwitha. Go with me and spread the word. My word.” I took a deep breath, and I wrapped my face in scarves. The scars might be God’s word to me, but they weren’t shouted for everyone to pity me. No. God’s word would not be my shame. I wrapped my face as my own covenant with my mother and lost family. One of my eyes was turned pointless from the disease that took everyone but me, but I could see through my mother’s spirit-eyes as she was with me always. I would finish her work and baptize the world not with my ugly face but with a word. His word.

It hadn’t been unusual for my Mohawk family to raid other camps and bring back transplants with their roots kicking and trembling until they were planted here in our camp. It was a good and fair place to experience childhood. All of the hostages (like my own mother) were induced from their former lives to the simple one sitting here like our leader, cross-legged in the forests, praying to his gods. Prayers for the old and young and the new members.I was glad this might be my first home and my mother’s last. A transforming clan that was slowly absorbing the love of Christ.

This is why I was well-prepared for the three strangers who came to our village, skin as pale as the ivory crosses they wore over their brown robes. White Jesuits, fighting for souls. I was 13. I was ready for womanhood, but I knew my heavenly husband would have his own scars. A man who died of suffocation long before the pain of the nine-inch nails could consume him.

The white men of God took advantage of the French whose language my mother had coached me, teaching from the tower of babel to the terrible mound at Calvary.

My uncle is my home, but he is just a house. What is a house? A separation from the wind and rain and lightning. But God found me there, too. My uncle and his family didn’t approve of my conversion, but I prayed that God would find them through me and my example. I was young, but those Jesuits treated me like an ageless believer. I followed their ways and read the bible and sat and listened. My voice was a slow, steady rubbing of flint and steel. Two sticks like a cross, working hard together to make a spark and light the soft pale skin of a naked tree. I was a matchstick. Verses churned inside of me like a kiln, pulling art from my eye and through the hole of my mouth. The word. The words. They all came out of me like air.

I made a promise to myself and to the rocks a rivers and clouds that I would live chaste. I would never know the burden of a man. Not one whose heels are pinned to the earth. I am now thirteen, and I have banished the “marriage” from my conversations with my once removed family. "I can have no spouse but Jesus." I repeated it until it became a dirge for the idea of being married was dead outside the flaps of my tent. The place that was my mother’s home, but now we live in cabins. I took off the idea of marriage like my relatives shed the shoes that the Jesuits brought them. Civilized they could never be, but I joined the silent civilization of Christ. I was modest with my body to match the scarves that covered my poxed face, and I would let no man linger long on his desire for me to be a wife. Only one man could peel those white-man’s shoes from my feet, and he was lording over all us…full shoes and the shoeless… from heaven.

The French were persistent in their drive for us. They burnt our villages and upset the people who wanted no part of them. We finally rebuilt our community on the banks of the Caughnawaga river. Our Mohican enemies attacked us, but God was great that day. I tended to the injured and the dying along side the Jesuit priest they called Jean Pierron. You can best appreciate God’s sacrifice when you find a dying man in your arms, coughing up his last bit of life. I could see Christ in their anguish. Suffering takes time. It is the lonely walk of time that stretches out the suffering like the long arms of Christ on the cross.

Our rituals were questioned by the Jesuits. The Feast of the Dead would be let go like a burning canoe floating empty down the river. We saw the flames of our pagan rituals drift farther and farther away. Christ moved into the village even if it was only to visit me. I would be enough, the Jesuits told me. I would be a vital conversion.

My aunts, however, had little respect for my newfound love of Jesus. They wanted me to find a man of Earth to marry. I ran from the cabin and found a chorus of flowers where I hid and listened to the gospel of spring. No man would ever touch me. As if my disfigured face weren’t enough, the steel cage around my poor Christian heart would never allow my good eye to look upon a human man as anything more than a would be believer, just waiting for conversion. Vital I was, as the Jesuits foretold.

I once felt the weight of my tribe. They would all come to bury me in their anger at and discomfort with my Catholic teachings. Violence was the word of many different days. They found it should be simple to keep me from my God, but they underestimated the memory of my mother who lived inside of me and peered out at them from my only eye. She was like a child finding a hole in a wooden fence. She saw them coming for me and helped me find my feet to run from them. God had blessed her when she was nothing more than stolen property, and he never left her even when the smallpox erupted inside of her. Together, we followed the mental path up to Golgotha. It was a sacred place inside of our hearts. Jesus wasn’t crucified just once on that mound. We saw his death daily, and it strengthened us. My mother’s spirit found the spirit in me. We made our home in the verses that we learned to read, once when she was my age and I was just a tiny star in her belly. And now we read them through my eye and my tongue and my fingertips. I share my body with her. I share our soul with God alone.

My people threw stones and hurled insults and threats, chasing us out of Caughnawauga. You see, I had been baptized at 18, and that simple sweet act of devotion was enough to terrify my tribe. Forgive them, Father. They know not what they have done.

I fled to St. Francis Xavier, a Christian Indian mission in Sault Saint-Louis. I found brothers and sisters whose hair was long but still wet from their baptisms. I was home in the circle of the Lord, just two hands holding other hands who all sang and prayed in a new language of love and loyalty.

It was almost enough, but my happiness scared me and I sewed thorns from roses into my sleeping mat. Each night I would stretch out onto this pain, thoughtfully reminding myself that suffering is nothing when you tell time by the Lord. The sun setting and rising was all. The thorns were nothing. I had known pain, both physical and emotional. I had lost my parents and my brother, and those losses lived on as scars to my face. The Archbishop, Thomas Becket, pressed the thick thorns into his tender skin each and every day as he robed himself in an ill-fitting hairshirt. His slaughter sewed his body back together as he found great power in the kingdom of heaven. A nothing…a nobody like me… would turn those thorns into my nighttime dreams of sacrifice and absolution. Pain for my sins only reassured me that God was real. Pain was fixed and crossed from minutes to years in the flash of an eye. I could see Becket nod to me when I woke up in a lake of my own blood each morning.

While my new spiritual and catholic family turned to me and expressed their concern about my sleeping torture, I told them, "I will willingly abandon this miserable body to hunger and suffering, provided that my soul may have its ordinary nourishment." I fed on God’s mercy even when my earthly husk was in danger of infection. My corn was inedible to any mortal, but I knew that God would swallow me whole one day.

That day came sooner than my neighbors could have guessed. In two years with these gentle souls, I was unloosened from my pain and lifted straight up into the arms of Heaven. My death was sudden. I lived as a virgin, but the church did not consecrate me. Not while I lived. They were still bound by their biases against my dark skin, my straight black hair, and my white smile. But my bond wasn’t with earthly arms and legs; my vow was with the glowing heart of Christ. Could there be a better way to die? Could there be another journey like mine?

I prayed each day that another sinner would step into my footprints and follow me from baptism to death and endless life. Death and life in death. I live on for my lost family. I will pull us all into the forest of heaven where the deer are fat with life and the crops grow endlessly from one edge of my home in the sky all the way to the endlessness of God’s mercy. And what mercy it is. What a good God we have. In the language of my people, I pray. God accepts my prayer in any language. He lifts the scarves from my face, and closes my good eye, and I can see for the first time since I was a child. I see Him. And he sees me. I ascend to take my place with the saints. I open both eyes and look down to my native brothers and sisters. I will watch over them, listening for the hooves that come to steal another. My mother’s abduction led to my annunciation. Now, that is a crossing for any believer. Ride to me, my people. Lift up your eyes to God and I will heal the earth around you. I will be your saint. Catherine Tekawitha. Kateri Tekakwitha, daughter of Kahenta and Chief Kenneronkwa of the Mohawk tribe. Mother of 10 million native hearts. Wife to no one but Christ himself. They made me into statues for worship, but they must know that as they pile flowers at my stone feet, the scent of those dead flowers will lift the giver not the saint. The gifts you give me widen your heart to the point that the benefactor is able to see with two good eyes that my scars are still there. Scars of love. Scars of earthly living. I was once among you, and now I am with you always and forever.

The earth of my tomb trembles with my nightly slumber. I miss the feeling of danger piercing my skin, but I am satisfied that my only sacrifice now is all of me. That’s enough. Death has a million needles to break my skin. The scars rise and sink until there are new sores, bleeding from thousands of tiny open mouths. The pain is endless, and I am grateful that my place in heaven doesn’t end the pain. It just makes it sweeter and endless. This is what God can do. This is heaven, and I am right at home.

-Kateri Tekakwitha, baptized as Catherine , Lily of the Mohawks and Protectress of Canada, Geneviève of New France, Geneviève of Canada