Fr Robert Hendrickson

I just spent the evening in the roughly 10 feet of warmth that our outdoor heater throws off. As the night wears on you get more and more reluctant to go inside because it means getting out into the cold. So as the chill crept close and the dark set deeper I looked up at the stars in a clear sky. Usually I spend these times writing or reading — tonight I spent it catching up on podcast episodes. This evening’s listen was the Amicus podcast which brings on legal scholars and reporters to talk about issues of jurisprudence.

Tonight’s report was, in part, on a case involving the Creek (Muscogee) Nation and a case before the Supreme Court in which issues of nationhood, territory, and self-determination were being litigated. The piece of it that made me listen closely was a story about the founding of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The Creek first lived in what is now Alabama and Georgia and their central city was burned to the ground as they were forced from their lands in what would be one shameful step of the many in the Trail of Tears. Those forced out grabbed what they could and amend the precious things they grabbed were embers and cinders and charred bits of wood from their city center — from the heart of their land.

As the they made their way on the Trail each night they would put some of those charred bits, those embers, those cinders into their campfire. They’d tell stories of who they were, where they came from, and where they were going. Each day they were marched, at gun point, and each night they gathered to stoke the fires and keep warm the memory of what it meant to be a people beneath the stars, as the dark closed, and the chill crept close.
When they arrived at what was promised to be their new home they gathered. They buried the remaining embers and cinders and charred bits under a tree that marked the center of their new land. They gathered around and told the stories again as the sun rose and set on Tulsa, Oklahoma and on those brought there from so far.

I thought about the Church. With its people scattered and brought together from so many corners. Some are driven to it, some away, some find a home, and some make due with this one while longing for one they can’t go home to. Yet we gather as people passing this ember along. Maybe it’s a bit of the first spark of creation. Maybe it’s a flicker of the first fire that lit the garden as just two sat to tell a story. Maybe it’s passed from a torch lit as a quiet father checked on a blessed mother on a most holy night. Somehow the story comes to us, becomes ours, and we take it out with us from one Altar to the next we gather and share and go.

Wherever we go the fire goes with us and wherever we’re called or pushed or prodded or driven the embers of Love are carried waiting for us to plant them in so,e new place, some new time, and to know that where the spark is there we may yet know we are home. Christians are always strangers in a strange land and yet we are always right where we need to be when we carry the fire of Love.

Robert