The Rake Magazine

Tag: religion

  • Who Are the American Muslims?

    A Saturday night in late summer and downtown Rochester was completely dark except for an exceedingly lively block of First Avenue Northwest. At one end, a tall Somali man leaned into the window of a black Chevy Cavalier and spoke with a woman wearing a red silk hijab, or headscarf. Behind the Cavalier, three Somali teenagers, one in a UNC basketball jersey, clustered around a Jeep Cherokee, inadvertently blocking cars trying to emerge from a parking lot. Meanwhile, men in their twenties chattered loudly in the lot while older men conversed on the corner of Broadway.

    Around nine o’clock, the street-side conversations began moving toward the entrance of the Rochester Islamic Center, a nondescript former VFW hall distinguished now only by the sweep of Arabic across a sign over the door. In the tiled entryway, the thin face of a Somali woman in a purple hijab peeked down from over the rail on the second floor. Inside are cubbyholes filled with footwear, and then a long, open space defined by a large window, several support columns, and strips of red carpeting angled in the direction of Mecca.

    A Somali man sat up front, a copy of the Koran propped between two worn blue velvet cushions in front of him. A dozen other Somalis in various states of repose listened intently to his lecture. Other men arrived and arranged themselves in line with the carpet strips. Some stood and prayed, hands clasped over their stomachs; others sat silently or chatted. Shortly after 9:30, a young Somali in a Fubu basketball jersey stepped to a microphone at the front of the room and turned toward Mecca. “Allahu akbar,” he began, chanting the call to prayer.

    When the call was finished, Sheikh Elsayed Mahmoud, a thickly bearded, light-skinned thirty-six-year-old in an emerald green thobe (an ankle-length cotton garment), entered. He took a seat on a rolling office chair and looked out at the congregation. Three older Somali men approached him, and they chatted amiably. Around 9:50 they drifted away, and Mahmoud rose and turned toward Mecca.

    Approximately a hundred and fifty men rose with him, standing in straight lines along the carpet. Young boys stood next to their fathers; teenagers stood with their friends. At the front, older Somalis in skirts and turbans held dark wooden prayer beads, next to robed, stately Arab men whose faces were weathered in ways mostly unknown in Minnesota.

    Islam is America’s fastest growing religion, and it seems especially apparent in Rochester. In the early 1990s there were fewer than fifty observant Muslims living in the city, most of whom were South Asian; organized prayers were held only on Fridays, in makeshift accommodations. Today approximately five thousand Muslims live in the city, the vast majority of whom are Somali; they have the option of praying five times daily in a mosque owned by their community, presided over by an esteemed imam trained in Islam’s most distinguished university.

    Yet aside from the now-commonplace sight of Muslim women in hijabs and other coverings in Rochester’s public spaces, Islamic practice and tradition has largely been invisible to non-Muslims in Rochester, hidden behind converted spaces with distinctly American contexts such as the old VFW hall.

    That will soon change. Next year, the Rochester Islamic Center will be demolished to make way for a four-million-dollar mosque designed to hold eighteen hundred worshippers. Funded by a Saudi Arabian visitor to the Mayo Clinic and designed by a Syrian architect, the three-story building will be topped by a large dome and flanked by minarets that, at 180 feet tall, will rise prominently on Rochester’s skyline. Inside, ample and desperately needed classrooms, a library, and meeting areas are planned, along with a two-story prayer hall. When complete, it will be the first new mosque ever constructed in Minnesota.

    The Rochester Islamic Center is already unique due to the international community of Muslims who worship there. “Other Islamic communities will have national mosques,” explained Zaid Khalid, the president of the Rochester Islamic Center’s board. “In the Twin Cities, for example, there are Somali mosques.” That is largely a result of demographics: The Twin Cities are home to more than a hundred thousand Muslims. “But we only have enough Muslims for one mosque in Rochester,” said Khalid. An equally important factor is that the Somali population of Rochester fluctuates on the basis of job opportunities; as a result, educated professionals from South Asia and the Middle East, like the Pakistani-born Khalid, have largely assumed the leadership of the center. “But even with so many different cultures, we are quite unified,” Khalid concluded.

    Since 1994 the Rochester Islamic Center has been a religious institution concerned exclusively with spiritual matters. Though it has been asked, on occasion, to help assimilate immigrants, its leaders have neither the desire nor the means to do so. “That is something for the social services,” Khalid said. “And one-on-one contact.” Yet immigrant Muslims have quickly become an important and permanent part of Rochester’s cultural and civic life. And while many Americans question whether Muslims can ever truly assimilate, Rochester’s Muslims have spent the last ten years developing specifically Islamic approaches to being Americans.

    Thus, as the new Middle Eastern-style mosque rises over Rochester’s staid downtown, the city’s Muslims hope that the structure—like them—will not be viewed as something to be feared or avoided, but approached as a resource. “We hope that it will attract people to learn more about us,” said Shareef Alshinnawi, a spokesman for the Rochester Islamic Center. “We hope it means guests, speeches, classes, and understanding. We’re part of this community, and this new building in the middle of downtown will be one symbol of that fact.”

    Sheikh Elsayed Mahmoud swept into the library of the Rochester Islamic Center in his green thobe and handed me a Diet Pepsi. “Please,” he said, and gestured for me to sit. At first we spoke a bit of English, which he is studying, but while being interviewed he preferred his native Arabic, and a translator soon arrived. “From the beginning, there is one thing that I would like to explain a little deeper,” he said. “The word ‘imam’ can fit anybody who memorizes the Koran and can lead the prayers. But that person doesn’t need to understand the Koran.” As Mahmoud explained it, an imam differs from a scholar. “The scholar is the person to be asked if you have something to know about Islam, its texts and laws.” He paused and chuckled, his dark eyes offset by a high brow and a wry, cocked smile. “Actually, the first time that I was called an imam was in America.”

    Mahmoud was born in Cairo, the oldest of six children, and grew up in a religiously observant family. “It was one of my father’s wishes that I become a scholar,” he recalled. “He used to invite scholars to the house, befriend my teachers, buy books for me. But in the end it was God’s will.” Mahmoud received an intensive religious education, in addition to a secular one, before entering Al-Azhar, the world’s oldest university and still the most distinguished source of scholarship in Islam. There he excelled in studying fiqh, or Islamic law. He graduated with a degree in High Islamic Studies and began serving at a Cairo mosque. “I wanted to continue with my studies at some point,” he recalled. “But circumstances prevented it.”

    Soon after, Mahmoud met an Egyptian physician who was then in the midst of a Mayo Clinic fellowship. At the time, the Rochester Islamic Center was looking for an imam to lead its prayers and serve as a scholar to guide the mostly Somali congregation. And so, upon returning to Rochester, the physician apprised the board of the young scholar’s qualifications. An invitation was soon extended. “At first, I decided not to come,” Mahmoud admitted. But then he was praying with one of his teachers and mentioned it. “Do you think that they can profit from me? That I can give them something?” His teacher, a renowned scholar, answered: “Definitely, with all assurance.” Mahmoud smiled bashfully as he recounted this. “So that made the decision.” He arrived in Rochester in January 2001.

    Fortuitously for his followers in Rochester, one of Mahmoud’s scholarly interests is a branch of fiqh concerned with applying Islam to the particular place and circumstances in which a Muslim lives. “The main point is not to have rigidity in religion, to remain flexible enough to be practical for everyone,” he explained. “So long as it doesn’t distort or alter or suggest improper interpretations of the Arabic text.” The caveat is a sensitive one, particularly in light of the extreme political interpretations to which Koranic verses have been subjected in recent years. But Mahmoud, as a graduate of Islam’s greatest university, has the standing and credential to make those judgments. In his modesty, Mahmoud waves off the suggestion that he has achieved the status of scholar, but the reality is that his congregants in Rochester treat him as one, bringing him questions of religious importance. “To an extent, I also serve as what would be called an Islamic judge back home,” he explained. “Performing marriages and also resolving conflicts and disputes.”

    Unlike an Islamic leader in the Middle East, Mahmoud has the added responsibility of teaching his followers how to reconcile their religion with aspects of American culture with which it is incompatible. In general, Mahmoud tends to discuss assimilation more in terms of cultural assimilation—for example, the incompatibility of certain Somali social mores with American ones. And on the particulars of how American culture interacts with Islam, he tends to emphasize the commonalities: “If something is prohibited in Christianity, then it is prohibited in Islam, too, with only a few exceptions of law.” Mahmoud’s ecumenicism has its limits, though, particularly when Islam disagrees with what is allowed in Christianity, or in American culture. “For example, yesterday an Egyptian asked to me to authenticate his wedding to an American woman,” Mahmoud recalled. “It was a new situation for me, because most of the marriages that occur in the mosque are Somali.” He attended the wedding, “but the moment I saw the champagne bottle, I immediately said, ‘Thank you’ and left.” He sighed with exasperation at the overt transgression of Islam’s prohibition of alcohol. “It is their tradition, it is a free society, and it is up to them. But by Islamic law I had to leave the moment I saw the champagne.”

    Twice a week, Mahmoud is tutored in English by an elderly Franciscan nun at the Assisi Heights convent. “We don’t speak much about religion,” he said. “Mostly we study English.” His four-year-old son, meanwhile, has entered Rochester’s public schools “so that he can learn English better and become assimilated.” Mahmoud has reservations about the American public school system—“there is no religious teaching, and a lot of times there is no moral or even ethical teaching”—but he is adamant that the best way to teach Islam to his children is by example. “If you tell them to do things, maybe they’ll do it,” he says with a father’s knowing smile. “But if they see you doing it, they’ll follow your example.”

    The call to prayer was suddenly audible through the wall that separates the library from the prayer hall. “Of course, we cannot really live Islam completely or to the fullest except in a Muslim society. And we will never be able to fully enjoy the mercy and the fruits of Islam except in a Muslim society.” There is a long pause and he smiles broadly before continuing. “Although that’s the case, we can also live in a non-Muslim society and by the will and grace of God still remain on the straight path and practice our religion to the fullest extent possible.” He paused to check his watch. “I do not believe that there is a perfect society in this world,” he concluded. “You always have good and bad people in every society. And you must always try to get the good part.”

    Rana Mikati answered the door of her split-level home on the north side of Rochester in a flowing black abaya. Her eyes were nearly as dark as its silk, contrasting with her red lipstick. She is forty-one years old, the mother of three children, but her fine skin and charm suggested a much younger woman. “Come in, come in,” she said, gesturing into her living room.

    Mikati served Turkish coffee spiked with cardamom. “I was born in Tripoli to an Islamic family,” she recounted in lightly accented English. “We were conservative, but not fanatic. We respected the rules of the religion.” They were also distinctly modern. Like other women in her family, Mikati wore the hijab primarily when she entered the mosque.

    Yet today, in America, Mikati welcomes strangers to her home wearing a garment that covers everything but her face, hands, and the exquisite jewelry on her wrists and fingers. “It is true,” she said with a nod. “I came to America and became more Islamic. It is how I remained connected to my culture.” Then a young girl strode into the family room in her pajamas. She glanced at her mother, yawned, and left. Mikati laughed, shook her head, and continued. “When I took the oath of citizenship the judge told me, and everyone at the ceremony, something very important,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Assimilate, but never forget your heritage. Because that is what makes this country rich.’ ” She sipped her coffee. “This is what we call jihad,” she said, her accent softly melodic as it glided over the Arabic word. “The real jihad. To find your identity. And to fight for that identity.”

    Mikati’s experience as an American and a Muslim is not uncommon. In many ways, in fact, it is distinctly American: Generations of immigrants to America have strengthened their faith as a means of maintaining a connection with their native culture. “When people ask me how I accommodate my life to America …” Mikati shrugged with a bewildered smile. “I don’t know how to answer. Islam is just a way of life. And I don’t see it as incompatible.”

    Mikati left Lebanon in 1993 when her husband, Amer, a pharmacist educated in the United States, was offered a job in Ohio. Like others before them, the Mikatis formed some of their first social bonds around an immigrant religious community. “We attended a mosque that had a very international following,” Mikati recalled. “And that was interesting because I always thought of Islam as being Middle Eastern.” The mosque was not just faith, but also social connections and, for Mikati, a place to maintain her “native Arabic tongue.” It was a catalyst for her evolving sense of her ethnic and religious identity, and she began to consider wearing the hijab. “The most important thing is to have the courage,” she explained. “Especially in a culture where it is not common.” Her husband encouraged her, but with two caveats: “He said, ‘Don’t change the way we live, and don’t cocoon yourself.’ ”

    On the first day of Ramadan in 1998, Mikati dressed in an abaya and went to the mall. “I felt more exposed than if I was naked,” she said. But whatever defensiveness she felt soon gave way to a distinctly Islamic female identity. “I avoid fashion entirely—how much more liberated and feminist can I be?” Indeed, for Mikati, the hijab is hardly a symbol of separateness or isolation. “Look, there is much more to being American than wearing cowboy boots,” she said archly. “And Hawaiian shirts.” She retrieved an issue of Rochester Women magazine that featured her on the cover in a black abaya, and Arij, her sixteen-year-old daughter, dressed as an American teenager. “When I was sixteen, I was not covered, so the choice is hers,” Mikati said. “And I pray for her.”

    When Arij Mikati enters a room she walks with a smooth confidence, even if she is stepping on the cuffs of her extra-long jeans. Her hennaed hair falls to her shoulders; in bearing and features, she is her mother’s twin. For her, the decision to cover herself is a matter of timing and courage. “You know, there’s already so much drama in high school,” she said, rolling her eyes. “And I don’t know that I’m really ready to add this drama, too.” Yet Arij hopes to cover herself before she begins college. She will do so mainly because it is a requirement of her religion; yet, in a uniquely American way, Arij also says that it is partly a matter of principle. “I really like being respected for who I am, not for how I look,” she said, sounding like any other irritated, individualistic American teenager. “So if I’m covered I know people will judge me for who I am.” Nonetheless, Arij is keenly aware that the hijab alters how a Muslim woman is perceived in her adopted culture. “It won’t make a difference for the people who knew me before,” she said. “But others are probably different.”

    The Mikatis moved to Rochester in 1998, when Amer accepted a job at the Mayo Clinic. Rana soon took a part-time job as a translator at the clinic and also became deeply involved in Rochester’s public schools. “Muslims in Rochester will tell you that raising their children in the way that they want is their number one concern,” she explained. “It is a constant challenge.” In meeting that challenge, she has what she calls “my red lines”—rules restricting her daughters’ participation in certain rites of American adolescence. Though Arij’s friendships with both females and males are not restricted, the teenager is prohibited from having a boyfriend or dating. “It is not our way,” Rana Mikati said. “And it must be very hard upon her.” The conflicts between her daughter’s faith and events like prom can be especially trying. “This year she was invited by three different boys,” Mikati said with just a trace of pride. “But she was not allowed to go.” She took a deep breath. “And it was just heartbreaking.”

    There are approximately a thousand Muslim children in Rochester, and by force of their numbers they have transformed aspects of the city’s public school system. According to Mikati, most of teachers are at least aware of the cultural needs associated with Muslim students, including dietary restrictions, space and time for prayer, and staying home on Muslim holidays. In those instances where understanding does not exist, Mikati has become adept at finding solutions. “There are Muslim families who don’t want anything to do with America because they think the American kids are ‘too loose,’ ” she explained. “But if you think that they are too loose, I say, ‘Don’t isolate yourself. Go to the school board.’ ”

    At six o’clock on a weekday evening, the second floor of the Rochester Islamic Center rang with the voices of fifty Somali children dashing around the room. Boys occupied the far end, clustered in small, loud groups mostly unconcerned with study; at the opposite end, girls dressed in a rich palette of abayas sat in study circles with a few older, willowy Somali women.

    Siyad Lohos sat in his beige thobe at an old card table in the middle of the room, where the students formed two lines—one for boys, one for girls. As they waited, some chatted and played, while others practiced reciting whatever they were asked to memorize for the day. When they reached Lohos, they handed over their notebooks and recited for him, often two at a time. Even though Lohos seemed focused on a group of roughhousing boys, he corrected the errors of the students as they recited, almost automatically.

    “I had memorized the Koran by the time I was fourteen or fifteen,” he recalled as he reclined on the floor after class. “I started when I was six.” A native of Somalia, the wiry twenty-nine-year-old received his high school education and two years of college in Egypt and then joined his family in Rochester in 2000. Since then, Lohos has taught Koran to the children of Rochester’s Somali immigrants. When I asked him the difference between teaching in Somalia and Rochester, he shrugged and looked around the room. “They are different.” When pressed him, he smiled broadly, stretching the goatee on his chin. “Look, in Somalia they are more serious because there are not so many distractions. They will learn Koran nearly full-time.” In Rochester, however, Lohos might see the students twice per week for a couple of hours during the school year. He is well aware that their public school education is a priority. “In Somalia, they might memorize a page per day,” he explained. “But here, if I teach them one aya [verse] today, they’ll maybe forget it tomorrow.” He shrugged. “When they grow up, maybe they will lose the Koran.”

    Across the street in a Somali cafe, Mahmoud Hamud, a board member of the Islamic Center, nodded when I mentioned the less intensive Islamic educations received in Rochester. “Back home, kindergarten was Koranic,” he acknowledged with crossed arms. “But here you want the kids to be ready for school because this is where they will live.” According to Hamud, it’s necessary to find a balance. “If your kid becomes too American, you might say, ‘What happens to me when I’m old?’ ” His eyes widened and the fifty-one-year-old shook a finger at me. “In Somalia we don’t put people in nursing homes. So the older people worry what will happen to them if the kids walk away from their culture.” From Hamud’s perspective, this is not necessarily an issue of religion so much as culture. He acknowledges that many Somali Muslims feel uncomfortable with aspects of American culture that they perceive as incompatible with Islam and Somali standards of social modesty—but then again, according to Hamud, they also keep in mind who provided them with refuge during and after their Civil War. “What is closer to Somalia: America or the Middle East?” he asked rhetorically. “Well, the Somalis remember that it was the United States who helped them, and not the Middle East.”

    Hamud’s story is not that of a typical Somali immigrant. After moving to the United States in 1974 to attend Cornell University, he spent most of his early career running relief and development operations in Somalia. In the early 1990s, however, the civil war that drove refugees to the United States resulted in Hamud suspending his work in Africa and focusing his efforts on social services in Rochester. In that capacity, he was deeply involved in nearly every aspect of assimilating Somalis, including efforts to find them homes and jobs and reduce tensions in the public schools. “Things are much better than they used to be,” he said. “But still there are language issues and cultural issues, and the school district isn’t addressing them.” In September, 120 Somali youths in Rochester began to attend a Somali charter school. “Isolation is a concern,” he acknowledged. “But the alternative is worse. The reason these families moved to the United States is for a better life, and if the children are dropouts they won’t get a chance for that better life.”

    Significantly, Hamud and other Somali leaders in Rochester do not view religion as a serious impediment to assimilation. “Islam covers a lot of cultures,” Hamud explained. “Each has its own baggage, and often the baggage is the issue.” He stares across the room at a dozen mostly elderly men drinking tea and having animated conversations in Somali. “It’s really no different than if they were sitting in Mogadishu. Nine guys, and only one, the one who works for the clinic, knows English.” In a corner, a pretty Sudanese teenager with a bright red kerchief around her head rose from a prayer mat. Hamud turned and spoke to her in Somali. “I don’t speak Somali,” she answered in perfect English spoken with long, Minnesotan vowels.

    For Sheikh Elsayed Mahmoud, the new mosque is not a momentous religious event. “From a spiritual point of view it has no significance,” he said, smiling, seated in the Rochester Islamic Center’s library. “The importance is that it will last longer than the current building.” He laughed loudly and glanced around the cramped library before continuing in a more serious mode. “The new building will draw more attention to the Muslims than it will to the structure itself,” he added. “So it will be more important to exemplify the proper teachings for our children, and to exhibit the correct attitudes to other people.” As the spiritual leader of the mosque, Mahmoud appeared perfectly comfortable with his role in shaping that more public face of Islam in Rochester.

    “Whether we like it or not, accept it or not, we are a part of American society,” said Mahmoud. “We work in American society. We pay taxes in American society. All of the American laws apply to us.” A Somali man walked in unannounced, but when he saw the sheikh was engaged, he quickly backed out. “But the Somalis—and all of the Muslims—they are trying to keep the cultural background that they came with.” He became animated. “So they have these groups of Somalis, or Southeast Asians, just as you—if you are a fourth- or fifth-generation Minnesotans—might have a German or Scandinavian group.” He raised his brow. “The difference is that a Scandinavian does not have all the restrictions that a Muslim has in the way that we get to know, and get close to, people.”

    Mahmoud is explicit that those restrictions are primarily related to interpersonal contact, and do not extend to civic engagement. When asked whether he believes that members of his community should be active in Rochester’s civic life, including serving as elected officials, he answers immediately: “We live here, so we should be involved and integrated,” he said. “It is important for us.”

    In January, Rochester Mayor Ardell Brede asked the City Council to consider beginning its sessions with a prayer offered by rotating members of Rochester area religious communities. The proposal was not adopted, but Brede plans to introduce it again, and if and when it is adopted, he intends to invite Sheikh Elsayed Mahmoud.

    When asked whether he would accept, Mahmoud tilted his head skeptically: “There is a big cultural and religious difference in what we consider to be prayer,” he explained. “In general, we Muslims we start our prayers with ‘Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem’ [“in the name of Allah the most merciful, the most gracious”]. That is how we are ordered to commence everything, every event. What we do is formal, and a heavily religious prayer.” There is a long pause and then he continues with renewed enthusiasm: “I’m ready to make any prayer that would be of benefit to Muslims, Christians, whoever! Humanity in general!” He opened his hands wide and smiled. “We are members of this community.”

  • The Ruin

    If you were seeking God, you probably wouldn’t think to look in Inver Grove Heights. The fast-growing St. Paul suburb is a good place to buy a fleet of used Cessnas, or a truckload of corn chips, potash, or mechanical heart valves. At the town’s center stands a massive petroleum refinery—a strange, stippled city of smokestacks, steel cauldrons, and tangled pipes. Nearby vacant land is zoned for industrial use, with special tax breaks and cut-rate financing. Places like this exist all over the Midwest, at the ragged edges of our cities, where bulldozers and chainsaws reign and industry and sprawl inscribe the landscape. Yet in spite of its dismal aspect, the town was once a place where a person could come to find God.

    Near the refinery, in a forgotten field passed over by bulldozers, there stood for decades an unusual sacred monument—or at any rate, its ruin. There was never much to it: a pair of stone arches connected by a low wall, half overgrown in summer by thistles, asters, and prairie grass. Its rough stones were set in uneven ranks; its arches rose to points. Around it, swallows swooped and wind bent the grasses. It was a scene out of time, with the ruin at its center like the ancient gate to a decayed abbey. In an average month, nearly half a million autos rolled past it on U.S. Highway 52 on the circuit from Rochester to the Twin Cities. Among those drivers who glanced up from the road, the ruin must have been something of a puzzle.

    Two years ago, highway crews finally bulldozed the stone structure. The destruction put me in low spirits. Though my way hadn’t often taken me in that direction, I missed the old pile. I’ve always liked such places, where our sense of order is ruptured and out come feelings both strange and powerful. And I had spent some time getting to know this place in particular. Who, I had to wonder, would have built so far from water, miles from any town—and with pointed arches? And when? Finally one day, I had called the local historical society. The woman who answered the phone knew the ruin and told me it had been a billboard sign. She put me on hold and pulled the file, which contained a newspaper clipping that described the dedication of the sign in 1940.

    A few days later, I held the clip in my hand. A religious organization, the Outdoor Scripture Sign Crusade, had erected the shrine. Between the two arches and affixed to the stone base had been a wooden sign that was sixteen feet high and sixty-five feet long. It read, in huge letters trimmed with Persian orange paint, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”

    History can seem like nothing more than a collection of questions that take hold of you and won’t let go. Answer one, and two more grow in its place. I’m especially susceptible to such mysteries. And in this case, the strange confluence of symbols—the Gothic arches, overtones of the Resurrection, and echoes of Percy Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”—appealed to my sense of the dramatic. I resolved to learn all I could about this ruin at the edge of the city, the men who built it, and the forces that destroyed it.

    The charismatic personality behind the Outdoor Scripture Sign Crusade was Marius Marvin Schlief. In 1940, he was a boyish twenty-two, with fleshy cheeks and a ready, thin-lipped grin. An itinerant salesman, he traveled from town to town selling meat for the Swift Company. It was in this capacity, perhaps, that he discovered the power of what he called “eye advertising.”

    Marius was born in Berthold, North Dakota, a dusty railroad town not far from Minot. His family farmed, and they harvested their share of troubles. His mother had married at sixteen, then quickly bore four children. At twenty-five, she became pregnant with another man’s child and left her husband and their kids to marry her new love, James Baah. Then came four more children. Marius was the youngest, born on October 30, 1918. He came into a tumultuous world of war and disease. Soldiers had brought influenza home from Europe, and a few months after Marius’ first birthday, the disease killed his mother. She had been “highly esteemed among neighbors and friends,” according to her obituary, “for her many commendable characteristics and Christian fortitude.” James Baah was less fondly remembered after he impregnated the fourteen-year-old girl he’d hired to mind the children. He was sent away to Canada, and Marius and his siblings were placed for adoption.

    Distant relatives, Adolf and Francis Schlief, adopted the children. The Schliefs were in their early thirties, with no kids of their own and an aging mother for whom they cared. Adolf, a butcher, rose early for his shift at a meatpacking plant in the South St. Paul stockyards. Francis stayed home to raise her four new wards. The Schliefs ran a strict, joyless home. Francis, inexperienced and sometimes frantic, was given to bursts of temper. According to family legend, she once beat one of Marius’ brothers with a cast iron skillet.

    Adolf and Francis were deeply religious. They worshipped in the Brethren Church—a breakaway Protestant group nicknamed the “dunkers” for their full-body baptisms. As new members of the family, Marius and his siblings also became Brethren and were initiated into the rites of the church. The Brethren advocate fealty to the Scriptures. Jesus washed feet; the Brethren wash feet. Jesus had communion in the evening; so do the Brethren. Marius absorbed this early immersion in evangelism. It defined him as a child, and by the time he reached his teens, he was possessed by religious fervor. He joined Christian Endeavor, an evangelical youth group, and with his brother Vernon began publishing a religious newspaper. Marius played the violin, Vernon the guitar, other friends the cornet and accordion, and they all played together at religious gatherings. At street meetings, the brothers preached by bullhorn to anyone who would listen. Marius always was at the center of these events, a frequent speaker who liked to sermonize. He took his Bible study seriously, memorizing passages using mnemonic systems (each finger, for example, represented a memorized Bible verse). He kept a running tally of the souls he’d saved.

    It was a time of evangelical awakening all across the country, and also a time when Christianity developed a mean streak. One famous radio preacher, Father Coughlin, praised the Nazis to his thirty million listeners. Luke Rader, from the radio booth in his Minneapolis Tabernacle, raged against “Satan’s Synagogue.” Billy Sunday’s convulsive fire-and-brimstone sermons drew crowds of thousands to fields and tents in every state. It was as if the sheer helplessness of the Depression years wrung families hard until a sour trickle seeped out. If Christianity’s paranoid fringe affected Marius, however, the notes and documents of his life don’t show it. His was a cheerful disposition. He was a practical joker, and in the same notebook where he tallied his saved souls, he kept a list of jokes for handy reference.

    According to a short history of the organization, apparently penned by Marius, the idea for the Outdoor Scripture Sign Crusade (the name was later shortened to Gospel Signs Inc.) came to Marius and Vernon “during one of the periods of prayer, to which they constantly resorted for comfort and guidance.” The brothers had noted the new, commercial “outdoor posters” along local highways, and they were entranced by this means of spreading the word. “It is our conviction that Christians should not ignore this valuable instrument,” Marius wrote. Their first sign went up in 1938 just south of the St. Paul city limits, a small wooden placard that read, “Whosever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be saved.” Marius and his friends quickly erected five more signs. Supporters donated land, materials, and labor, “making possible both low cost, and appearance whose modern design is colorful and attractive.”

    Around this time, Marius met Elinor Olson, a young pianist recruited to accompany his violin performance at a church service. It wasn’t love at first sight, but Elinor soon joined the Schlief brothers and their friends in frenetic rounds of church meetings, music sessions, and parties. For his part, Marius found in Elinor’s family some of the tenderness that he missed in his own. He was soon a fixture at the Olson home.

    “He was a delight,” Elinor’s sister Shirley recalls now from her house in Okalahoma. “He loved our whole family. We’d do all kinds of things. For entertainment, it was always with the church group. Marius would bring his friends over to my mother’s house. She’d make a hot dish and rolls. We had skating parties, parties where they played games. They were outstanding young people. They had good jobs, a lot of them. We really had a good life with him. I can’t remember that we ever fought.”

    Like Marius, Elinor had suffered a troubled childhood. Her mother and father had separated when she was five. Her father moved into a residence hotel. For years, the family took pains to keep up appearances. “We never admitted to anyone that our dad did not live with us,” Elinor wrote in a brief autobiography she left when she died a few years ago. “When we had unexpected company from the church at night we had to call Daddy at the Jackson Hotel, and he would come out for the evening and then return to the hotel after they left.”

    Elinor was twelve when her family became born again at a Luke Rader revival meeting. After that, they were regulars at evangelical gatherings, including Billy Sunday’s traveling show and faith healings orchestrated by a local preacher. Elinor took these meetings to heart. “We had been preached to about the end of the world coming September 9, 1934,” she wrote. “I decided that I wanted my mother to have a new bread box, so I took my earnings and bought it for her that summer so she would have it before the end of the world.”

    Within six months of their meeting, Marius proposed to Elinor. “He did not believe in diamond rings,” Elinor wrote, “but he gave me a gold watch with diamonds around it.” Their wedding, long delayed for lack of money, was a simple affair. “We just had the family in the living room, then went downstairs to take pictures, and then our Gospel Signs friends came over for a simple reception.”

    All this time, the crusaders had continued their work of posting the highways with billboards: “Jesus Christ Said: I am the way, the truth and the life; no man cometh unto the father but by me.” “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” “Prepare to meet thy God.” “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

    With each new sign, the group received letters—many containing a dollar, some with sizeable checks. The idea of building the massive stone edifice on Highway 52 came in late 1939. The other signs were modest structures of plywood and steel. The new one would be different: imposing, permanent, an enduring monument to Christ. An artist in the crusade sketched a plan for the sign, and even printed stationery featuring the drawing. Everyone prayed for guidance. If Marius suffered any doubts about the project, worries of idolatry or pride, he didn’t show it. It’s more likely that the project’s ease—the donated land, the stone hauled for free from a nearby quarry—justified the work, for why would God bless the project if it were not in his plan?

    The dedication ceremony took place a few days shy of Marius’ twenty-second birthday. The day dawned clear and bright, and slowly the cars came rolling to a stop along the highway. A few surviving photographs show a large crowd gathered on what was, at the time, flat farmland. The men wore suits, their hair slicked back or combed over. Young women in tailored jackets tugged their children across the grass. A farmhouse and barn stood in the distance.

    Marius presided as the master of ceremonies. He said, “It is the will of God that this stone is erected here.” Another speaker predicted that, “the time was not far distant when provision would be made for signs in the air for those who are flying.” Robert Olson, a mainstay of the crusade, played a cornet solo. Everyone sang “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name.”

    One afternoon, before the ruin was knocked down, I decided to view the arches up close, in order to see and touch the stones. I was curious, but I also felt possessed by a force I couldn’t quite put into words. I pulled to the side of the highway and stepped out of my car, feeling displaced and out of scale with my surroundings. Semis shook away from the nearby stoplight, snorting through their gearboxes. A skunky stench came from the refinery. I entered the waist-high grass, where I found tire tracks to follow to the ruin. And then I was beside it. The sign was built from gray slabs and brown runty stones, all mortared together in uneven rows, not a solid foundation, but a mosaic. It looked homemade, the product of artistic vision. I found no trace of the wooden sign. My guess is that it rotted away long ago. Standing there, I had the sense that the ruin was speaking to me, but I couldn’t decipher the message.

    Such ambiguity is endemic to ruins. Their symbolic meanings are as unstable as their structures. Celebrated in poems, songs, and paintings since the dawn of recorded history, ruins have been said to signify everything from triumph over enemies to sublime nature to the shadow of our own mortality. Something about a ruin makes a person feel frail and inferior in the presence of a higher, destructive force. It makes no difference if we call that force nature, time, mortality, or God. The fact of our inferiority remains. The ruin is its proof.

    The issue is considerably confused, in this case, by the ruin’s history as a religious object. The Bible is full of ruins that signify God’s wrath. “Do not place a carved stone in your land to bow down before it,” God warns the Israelites in Leviticus, or, “I will turn your cities into ruins and lay waste your sanctuaries, and I will take no delight in the pleasing aroma of your offerings.” If erected in God’s honor, was Marius Schlief’s ruined billboard a symbol of God’s rebuff? And the erasure of its remains his final word?

    Then again, in the shadow of the great refinery, the ruin seemed a delightful monument to folly and romanticism, a challenge to our prevailing notions of progress and competence. It is our misfortune to live in an age that honors efficiency above all other qualities. Truth and honor are sacrificed to it. What makes this an especially bad bargain is that, despite its trappings of scientific rationality, efficiency is a fiction—as immeasurable as hope, which is far more useful. All those automobiles speeding past the ruin, for instance, were efficient only if you discounted the thousands of men who extracted ore from the earth; made it into steel; and bent, burned, and riveted it into shape. To say nothing of the great machines—the cement mixers and rock-chewers—that were employed to make the highway. Efficiency is a bedtime story we tell ourselves to shut out black chaos. A ruin, on the other hand, is a gateway into that chaos.

    For a good while, I stood before the ruin. Then I snapped some photographs and tramped back along the highway toward my car, which I noticed had been flanked by a pair of shiny jeeps with darkened windows. Two men clothed in paramilitary gear—black shirts tucked into black trousers, tucked into black boots—eyed me as I approached. The younger one pointed toward my camera and asked if I had been taking photographs. I nodded. Then he pulled a small card from a plastic dog tag that hung around his neck, and read that it was his duty to inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation of any suspicious activity in the area unless I surrendered my film.

    I said I would take my chances with the FBI, and then we fell to talking.

    “I always wondered about that thing,” said the older man a little wistfully, when I mentioned my interest in the ruin.

    I asked why all the fuss about the FBI. He told me the ruin, along with the nearby refinery, stood in a “level-one security zone,” protected from terrorists night and day. The idea of a ruin under guard, or, for that matter, under attack, only heightened the prevailing sense of unreality. How could a pair of armed security guards hope to fight off the forces of decay and entropy?

    It seems reasonable that Marius Schlief, with his winning smile, his lists of jokes, and his charismatic demeanor, was on his way to becoming an evangelical force—another of his era’s booming voices. But, as he might have said, God had other plans. A few months after his marriage, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He resigned as president of Gospel Signs, quit his job delivering meat, and enlisted in the military. He graduated from basic training in 1943, and then shipped out on the submarine USS Batfish.

    During his tour, he kept a small notebook, which his daughter has saved. In it, he jotted updates of his works as a lay minister: “Met two Christians on forecastle, Feb. 23, first Bible class same night; two fellows accepted Christ, five in all—praise Him!” He also typed, or wrote out in his careful script, the notes for his Bible study sessions. Most of them are concerned with matters of doctrine and bear such titles as “The Nature of GRACE” and “Things that Pleased God.”

    One entry, though, stands out. Titled “Christians Fighting,” it consists of a rationale for his own service. Unlike the other entries, which are little more than notes with Bible references, this one is composed in full sentences. In it, Marius lines up several arguments in favor of war. He cites instances of “Most Victorious battles” from the Old Testament. He argues that the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” refers only to murder, not to capital punishment or war. “In discussing the question as to whether a Christian should go to war, we never should quote this command as having anything to do with it,” he concludes. He concedes that early Christians refused military service—not because killing ran counter to Christ’s teachings, but because soldiers were required to “bow and worship” an image of an emperor. “This the Christians could not do, and would not do.” Finally, he proposes a separation between the “Spiritual Kingdom” of Christ, which “does not accomplish its advancement by carnal weapons” and the “material kingdom of the world, which needs to be judiciously ordered by material means.”

    Judging from the passage, Marius was a man at war with himself, wrestling with the age-old problem of moral action. Crouched over his typewriter in the belly of the Batfish, Marius wrote this sermon, one senses, to convince not his fellow gunners, but himself. There’s something vulnerable and deeply moving in Marius’ arguments—especially his comparison of killing (such an unambiguous moral prohibition) to the compulsion to bow to a graven image (which, I suspect, Christ would be willing to forgive). In any case, his submarine was highly decorated and sank a total of nine Japanese ships, including three vessels in the space of four days in early February 1945.

    World War II ended the work of the Outdoor Scripture Sign Crusade. And by all accounts, Marius came home a changed man. He maintained his strict doctrine, but no longer channeled it into evangelism. If this were fiction, I could pretend to know exactly what happened in the bowels of that submarine, between the praying and the killing. But Marius never spoke of the war. As it is, all I can say is that he returned to his wife, started a printing business, had children, and never re-formed the crusade.

    Marius died in 1973, but I met his daughter, Sandy, and spent an afternoon poring over photographs and family trees in her dining room. It was clear after a few minutes that she still cares for him in that fierce, absolute way that some daughters do for their fathers.

    “He was wonderful,” she said, and her eyes got misty and lost. “He spent, I would say, sixteen to eighteen hours a day working, but he always had time for us. He never made us feel unwanted. But there were rules. It seems like most of my childhood was sitting in church. He was very strict with us. There is a nerve in the knee, and if we misbehaved, he would squeeze it. He never believed that children should play during church. You sit during the service. And we did.

    “My dad had a big ego,” she continued, her impressions coming in bursts. “He wasn’t obnoxious, but he needed to be in the limelight. My dad was in the front; my mom tagged behind. She said she never got tired of holding his hand. She would always say, ‘The best isn’t good enough for Marius Schlief.’ Everything he did was absolutely perfect. It was his spirit. He never preached hellfire and brimstone. It was all in the way he treated people. ”

    Sometimes he would drive Sandy to the edge of town and show her the stone billboard sign. But with no one to maintain it, the paint had begun to peel and fade, the signboard to rot, the mortar to flake. Little by little, the sign fell apart.

    One of Marius’ confidants after the war was his brother Cledis, which is surprising in that Cledis never took to religion. In fact, while Marius forbade his children to dance, Cledis ran a dance hall on Highway 55, not far from the billboard sign. Schlief’s Little City was an old-fashioned roadhouse that drew crowds from all the surrounding towns, friends who brought their own liquor and danced. They danced the waltz, the fox-trot, swing, mixers, the chicken dance, the polka, all to the accompaniment of an accordion, a clarinet, and a stand-up bass.

    Marius and his family often stopped by on Sunday afternoons, when the dancing was over. And Sandy and her sister would sneak into the ballroom, with its stale smoke and dim lights, and they would spin together on the wooden floor.

    The last surviving member of the Outdoor Scripture Sign Crusade is Bob Olson, the man who played the cornet at the billboard’s dedication. He lives with his wife in a Twin Cities senior housing project. I paid him a visit to find out what he remembered about the sign, and while we were talking, it occurred to me that he hadn’t seen it in some time and had no idea that it had fallen into ruin and been destroyed. I explained the situation. I said it seemed that the forces of man—industry, commerce, and so on—had displaced the seeds of godliness that, as I understood it, his organization had hoped to plant. At that, he chuckled and shrugged.

    “Satan is just working harder,” he said. “A lot harder. That’s all I can see.”

    I asked him why a bunch of young guys would set out to build such a monument. The question seemed to take him by surprise.

    “We were interested in souls,” he said, as if explaining something to a particularly slow child. “That’s the reason—absolutely the only reason we would go to all that trouble. We were interested in seeing people accept the Lord.”

    Turns out, that’s still his preoccupation. It didn’t take him long to question the condition of my soul.

    “How long have you been saved?” he asked.

    “Well, I don’t know that I am,” I hedged. “I suppose I was baptized.”

    “But have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”

    I hadn’t. But I hated to let him down. The truth is that my religious training was patchy at best. The child of a Catholic and a Jew, both lapsed, I slipped between the cracks. I went to a few Bible study sessions in grade school. I listened to a lot of old-timers’ stories about Nanabouzou and the Great Spirit on the Indian reservation where I grew up. I drank wine from a homemade chalice at hippie Sabbath celebrations. Today, the extent of my spirituality is a kind of rueful respect for the great mysteries of life and death and for my minuscule place in the scheme of things. Over the years, I have decided not to care what name is given to these mysteries. No, that’s not right. I have come to believe it necessary not to name them. Because as soon as they are named, they cease to be mysteries and become human interpretations, steeped in all our folly and hubris.

    But how could I explain this to Bob Olson? “Last night I prayed about you coming here,” he said, “and I want to read something to you.” He opened his Bible and read aloud the verses in John that are the cornerstone of the born-again philosophy. In the text, Jesus tells a rabbi that to see the kingdom of God, he must be “born again.”

    “How can a man be born when he is old?” the man asks. “Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”

    Jesus answers: “That which is born of flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and wither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.”

    To Bob Olson, stammering over the verses, the key point was that “you must be born again!” But as I listened, I was captured by Jesus’s metaphor: the Spirit is the wind, its source and destination a mystery. There is only its touch upon your cheek. And yet here we are, Bob Olson too, struggling to catch the wind, explain it, pin it between the pages of a million Bibles. Suddenly, I felt lighter than I had in a long time.

    Recently, I drove past the spot along Highway 52 where the ruin had stood. Not only were the stones gone, but so was the grassy meadow. It had been replaced by dirt, gravel, and sawdust. The oaks that once provided shade lay in a tangled heap. I thought I caught a glimpse of the ruin’s stones at the far edge of the construction site, scattered like rubble from a beaten city. Where the sign had stood, highway crews erected a concrete buttress. Steel beams lay stacked next to it, the future understructure of a freeway overpass.

    All of this I saw in a flash. Then the traffic hurtled me forward. I drove on, a little heartbroken, a little stunned, a little weary. But as I considered the situation, I thought to myself that it was not so surprising that the ruin should be replaced by a new freeway. What was surprising was that it had stood in the first place.

  • Church and State

    Every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. during the legislative session, Chaplain Dan Hall hosts a two-hour prayer meeting. It is held around a long wooden table in Room 118 of the State Capitol building, just around the corner from the governor’s office. Attendance varies, averaging about twenty people who know Hall from his work as a voluntary chaplain to state legislators and staff. “Welcome, welcome,” he said one recent Wednesday, gesturing to the overstuffed chairs that surrounded the table.


    Among the attendees were four middle-aged women from a Cannon Falls prayer group, a handicapped man who said he had “left the gay lifestyle” twenty-six years ago, and Myrna Howes, the wife of Republican Representative Larry Howes. It was the group from Cannon Falls, however, that commanded Hall’s attention. They were intercessors—individuals who pray for specific goals or people, sometimes for years. “We’re praying for the churches and the union,” said a puckish member in a pink sweater.

    “Good,” Hall said, nodding, his wide smile casting sincere and fatherly approval on the older woman. “Good!” In his mid-fifties, Hall is a powerfully built man, with wide shoulders and a broad chest. Yet his toothy enthusiasm for faith and the faithful softens that potentially intimidating physical presence into warm charisma. “That’s just great,” he exclaimed.

    “We’ve also prayed for some barren women and had some success,” the woman in the pink sweater continued. “My forty-year-old daughter had a baby.”

    “I remember praying in the early eighties for the Berlin Wall to fall,” said Charlotte Herzog, the group’s leader. “Thinking that maybe it would happen in our children’s lifetime. But it only took six years!”

    Hall checked his Palm Pilot and then announced the order of business. “We’re going to have some legislators stop by and talk about their passions. Then we’ll pray for them.”

    Chaplain Dan Hall is not a state official, nor does he serve in any official capacity. Nevertheless, his voluntary ministry at the state Capitol, which is funded by tax-exempt contributions, is enormously influential with legislators motivated by conservative Christian theologies and teachings on social issues such as abortion and gay rights. According to Lonnie Titus, the full-time official chaplain to Minnesota’s House of Representatives, who was elected by its members, “Dan serves as an issues person on the Christian side at the Legislature. He has been a rallying force for the conservative Christians, and he’s done a great job at it, too.” Titus added, carefully, “I can’t do that because I’m a chaplain to the entire House. But I’m glad Dan is here because it’s a growing need.” Indeed. According to Titus, fully one-third of Minnesota’s legislators “allow religion to play the important role in their life—Jesus in particular,” and their numbers grow with each election.

    Steve Sviggum, the speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, entered Room 118 with long steps and an enthusiastic smile. Hall greeted him with a handshake. Though shorter than the lanky Sviggum, Hall has a gregarious presence that gives up nothing in stature next to power. “Mister Speaker, I was hoping that you could tell us about your passions.”

    Sviggum crossed his arms and stood at the head of the table. “First of all, I want to thank you for your thoughts and prayers,” he enthused. “You are so important to legislators.” For the next several minutes he delivered an innocuous lecture on the role of the speaker. When he was nearly finished, a striking blond woman entered the room. “Hi, Jackie,” Sviggum said. “I bet you’re here to talk about Fetal Pain, the Taxpayer’s Protection Act, and Positive Alternatives.”

    Jackie laughed. “Why don’t you do it, Mister Speaker?”

    Sviggum winked at the group and explained, “Jackie and I see each other almost every day.”

    Dan Hall paused to introduce her as Jackie Moen, legislative associate and occasional spokeswoman for Minnesotan Citizens Concerned for Life, the state’s leading anti-abortion organization. “Anyway, the speaker’s time is very limited.” Hall said. “Are there any questions?”

    The man who identified himself as formerly gay raised his hand. “I know we lost some seats this year,” he began. “So what can we pray to get more Republicans in the House and Senate?”

    “I’m not one to be so bold as to say my party’s always right, and God is always on my side,” Sviggum answered. “But I fight to be on his side!” There were approving nods around the table and Sviggum continued with renewed enthusiasm. “I think we should pray for wisdom, principles, and ideas. Of course, we want like-minded people to stand with us.” Slowly, he warmed to the question, and finally ended with the hard numbers: “If you look at demographics, we should probably have seventy-four, seventy-five seats in the House.”

    With that, Hall stood again. “Who wants to pray for the speaker?” Two women from the Cannon Falls group reached out and grasped Sviggum’s hands. Hall maneuvered behind him and rested a hand on Sviggum’s shoulder. All closed their eyes. “Lord, anoint Steve’s words with your wisdom,” the woman on his right prayed. “Anoint him with strength to make your will known and real.” In response, the room was filled with spontaneous whispers. “Yes, yes, yessss!” The prayer lasted five minutes, and included blessings for the speaker, his family, his issues, and the Republican agenda. After the final “amen,” Sviggum smiled broadly. “I—I feel stronger,” he said breathlessly. “And more comforted.”

    Hall stepped forward to get Sviggum on his way. “I know the speaker has a busy schedule,” he said again.

    Sviggum nodded. “I sure wish I could spend my whole day with you,” he said. As he departed, he gave the room a big thumbs-up.

    ***

    The Town Talk Cafe and Coffee Bar is located around the corner from Main Street in the central Minnesota town of Willmar. It is a crowded, stifling place, where the coffee tastes like burnt water, the ceiling is yellowed from smoke, and dice tumble across Formica. The Town Talk is also where, for the last thirty-one years, Dean Johnson, the Democratic majority leader of the Minnesota Senate, has enjoyed his Saturday morning breakfast with friends that range from a bison farmer to the guy who plows his driveway (the latter refers to Johnson as “numb nuts” to visiting reporters). On a Saturday in March, the mood is jovial and a little raw. Everyone is the subject of a joke, and Johnson usually joins with a giggle totally at odds with his otherwise rich, stentorian voice and his fifty-seven years. Yet despite Johnson’s obvious affection for the venue and its patrons, he is not entirely present. In between ribbings about, say, some guy named Taco Olson, he surreptitiously checks his cell phone beneath the table. Nobody seems to mind, though, because it’s a wonder that Johnson has time for the Town Talk at all. In addition to being the majority leader of the Minnesota Senate, Dean Johnson is a pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, a brigadier general in the United States National Guard, and the National Guard’s top-ranking chaplain.

    Yet there is an ironic twist to Johnson’s accomplished career as a minister. In the Minnesota Legislature, his moderate Lutheranism, which he defines as “a religion of devotion and tolerance,” is the exception among religiously motivated Christian legislators. And so Senator Dean Johnson, once a self-described “Eisenhower Republican” and a long-serving Senate Republican leader, is now the most unlikely of Democratic leaders: a rural pro-life minister with an esteemed military career.

    “The divisions really started in 1993 with the gay rights amendment to the state’s Human Rights Act,” Speaker Steve Sviggum told me. “I think what happened was that Johnson had told his Senate [Republican] caucus one thing, and then proceeded to the Senate floor and did another.” In 1993, Johnson was in his eleventh year as a state senator, but only a year into his tenure as the Senate Republican leader, a post he obtained as a moderate, consensus candidate. Meanwhile, Minnesota’s Republican Party had just elected a number of social conservatives to the Legislature, including current Senator Steve Dille and Senator Linda Runbeck (since retired). The clash was not long in coming. Early in the session that year, Democrats in the House and Senate introduced legislation amending Minnesota’s Human Rights Act to include gays and lesbians as a class protected from discrimination in housing and employment. As the Republican Senate leader, Johnson was widely expected to oppose it.

    “At the time, I really didn’t know what I’d do,” Johnson recalls as he drives through Willmar after breakfast. “But I kept hearing from people who were saying things like,”—here, Johnson’s voice drops—“‘My daughter … y’know?’” So, just before the speech, he jotted some notes based on personal experience onto a napkin. “As a Norwegian Lutheran,” he began, directly addressing the gay and lesbian community, “I simply do not understand what you do in your quiet times, in your moments of privacy.” Then, very quickly he shifted to a reflection on his role as a National Guard chaplain, and the 180 religious denominations recognized by the U.S. military. “I will tell you that some of these denominations I do not understand. I do not begin to understand their theology,” he continued. “But the fact remains that I took an oath of office that, as a member of the Chaplain Corps, it is my job and responsibility to ensure everyone—Protestant, Catholic, Jew, atheist—the free exercise of religion.” Concluding, Johnson returned to his service as a senator. “Even though I don’t fully understand the … homosexual lifestyle, I think it is prudent … that we vote as a majority to give rights to the minority.”

    The last frustrated minute of Johnson’s speech presaged the course of his split, seven years later, with the Republicans. As Republican leader, he found himself catering to a caucus whose agenda increasingly was devoted to social conservative issues, rather than the practical and pragmatic quality-of-life issues—such as transportation, housing, and education—that Johnson found more pressing. “We deal more with moral issues in the Senate than I did as a full-time parish pastor in Willmar,” he concluded. “I want you to think about that. I want the people of Minnesota to think about that.” Then, as now, he blamed some legislators for obsessing over social issues, distracting Minnesotans from more urgent needs.

    Johnson managed to remain the Republican Senate leader for most of the 1990s, but his unwillingness to legislate conservative social issues placed him at odds with the growing influence of social conservatives in the Republican Party. “Eventually, Dean wasn’t even welcome to walk in the parade with the [Kandiyohi County] Republican party unit,” recalled Democratic Representative Al Juhnke of Willmar. “They wouldn’t even hang his banners.” As the 2000 election approached, Johnson and other political observers in Willmar thought it likely that he would be challenged in the Republican primary. “And I just wasn’t going to subject myself to that,” Johnson told me.

    Even five years after his party switch, the bitterness toward Johnson has persisted among social conservatives. They view him as a traitor not only to his party, but also to the Lutheran church. In 2004, when Johnson single-handedly prevented legislation prohibiting gay marriage from reaching the floor of the Minnesota Senate, the sense of betrayal again became personal. “What’s so amazing is that Senator Dean Johnson, an ordained Lutheran minister, would actually be leading the charge against protecting the civil institution of marriage,” proclaimed Tom Prichard, president of the influential and conservative Minnesota Family Council. “What Lutheran and other Christian traditions say about the importance of marriage to society would lead one to think he’d be leading the charge to protect marriage from attacks.” Prichard’s comments are representative of the feelings that many legislators on the right have for Johnson. However, of twenty Republican legislators contacted for this article, only one—Speaker Steve Sviggum—would comment on Johnson for the record.

    Chaplain Dan Hall’s Wednesday prayer meeting attracts a range of high-powered guests, including lobbyists, but the group is most animated when legislators stop in to visit and pray. Thus, when Republican Representative Larry Howes of Walker was introduced, everyone straightened in their seats. “What you’re doing makes a difference here at the Capitol,” Howes began. “It may not always seem that way, but I can assure you that your prayers are heard.”

    “What’s your passion?” Hall asked.

    “Politics,” Howes answered, before transitioning into a detailed policy discussion about what’s really on his mind—namely, a nursing home in his district that is in danger of losing its state funding. “It’s a big payroll, and the loss of that would devastate our local economy,” he said.

    The formerly gay man raised his hand. “Should we pray that the governor will sign the bill for the nursing home?”

    “Sure,” Howes replied. “Yeah.”

    He then launched into another passion, concerning a letter someone had sent to Republican Representative Paul Gazelka, which disapproved of his support for a measure that would ban gay marriage. According to Howes, the author works for the Crow Wing County Human Services Department. “And I want you to know that I’ve already looked into de-funding that agency,” he announced with a pointed look at Hall.

    According to an online resume, Dan Hall has no formal religious training nor even a formal ordination, despite serving as an assistant pastor, administrative pastor, associate pastor, and senior pastor to four congregations dating back to 1982. This is not unusual. Among some Pentecostals and members of other independent, evangelical denominations, there is an institutional suspicion of formal religious training, and many of their church leaders are not ordained, at least not in accredited seminaries or divinity schools. Instead, they are accepted as spiritual leaders on the basis of their faith, leadership, and charisma. Hall, a married father of eight, seems to have established himself in that tradition and done quite well. In addition to being founder and executive director of Midwest Chaplains and its Capitol Prayer Network, he is city chaplain of Burnsville, where he ministers to police and emergency services personnel.

    Hall claims his voluntary ministry at the Capitol began after House Chaplain Lonnie Titus told him “he couldn’t handle it all on his own.” In contrast, Titus claims that Hall approached him about getting involved at the Capitol. Regardless of whose idea it was, nobody disputes that Hall’s Capitol ministry began in the fall of 2001, when he stationed himself outside the Senate chambers and introduced himself to members. Four years later, his routine hasn’t changed much. “I come down to the Capitol after the traffic,” Hall explains. “And I begin my route.” He starts on the top floor of the State Office Building. “I peek my head into offices, say hello to staff and legislators and just see where that goes. I see what I can do to help, and I always try to bring God into it.” When he is not busy with the individual needs of legislators and staff, Hall conducts “prayer tours” of the Capitol for groups interested in praying at the usual tour stops, such as the Senate chambers.

    Hall also maintains an email list of “Capitol intercessors” whom he contacts with specific prayer requests when a “moral or spiritual issue” such as abortion, gay rights, or methamphetamine use arises. “I’ve been told that because I’m a chaplain I must be a Republican,” Hall admitted. “I’m more conservative, yes, but really what I’m doing is based on Biblical truth. I call it ‘political evangelism,’ but it’s not politics.”

    Lonnie Titus disputes Hall’s depiction of his ministry. “I serve as a chaplain to all of the people [at the House of Representatives],” Titus explained. “But Dan, he’s the front guy if you’re pro-life, pro-marriage.” The distinction is important and legal. For Dan Hall’s ministry to be granted federal 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status as a nonprofit organization it must meet several criteria, one of the most important being that it “may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities”—even, presumably, if that means influencing God to influence legislation. Bluntly, the regulations prohibiting religious organizations from explicit political advocacy do not allow for much interpretation, and Hall—otherwise a literalist in Scriptural matters—knows it. “A lot of pastors don’t stand up for issues and that’s how we got into the mess that we’re in today,” Hall said. “They’re all worried about losing their ‘tax-exempt.’” Intentionally or not, Chaplain Dan Hall and his supporters at the Legislature may be redefining the boundaries of religious political advocacy in Minnesota.

    ***

    Calvary Lutheran Church in Willmar is a yellow brick building topped by a rounded copper roof and a single spire. For thirty-one years Dean Johnson has served as a pastor to its congregants. “It’s really been a sanctuary for me,” he explains as he opens the church’s back door, which has a fallout shelter sign posted on it. “From politics and the military.” Inside, a narrow, short corridor ends with doors that offer a glimpse into the church’s sanctuary. On the left, an American flag poster with “God Bless America” printed across the bottom is taped to a wooden door, which also bears an engraved plastic nameplate reading “Pastor Dean E. Johnson.”

    The walls of Johnson’s office are covered with certificates, awards, news clippings, and photos of Johnson with a range of political luminaries. A highboy is piled with Bibles, prayer books, condolence cards, and a board game called The Amen Game! Opposite, two desks are crammed with paperwork, more Bibles, more prayer books, photos from confirmation classes, an open can of Mountain Dew, and an unopened bag of Fritos. “In the spirit of the separation of church and state, I maintain two phones,” Johnson says. “One for the business of the state, and one for the business of the Lord.” They sit on the edge of a desk, one black, one white.

    Dean Johnson was born in Lanesboro, Minnesota, and grew up on the Johnson family farm, homesteaded in 1858. “You worked hard,” Johnson recalls, “from five a.m. until eight at night.” For grades one through six, he went to a one-room schoolhouse, and then graduated from Lanesboro’s public high school. Along with education and work, religion played a central role in Johnson family life. “I wouldn’t say we wore our faith on our sleeve,” Johnson explains. “We attended church every Sunday, and as children we’d have evening devotional time.” Johnson vividly remembers his mother hanging plaques with religious verses on the walls. “The religion was one of devotion and not of judgment,” he says. “It was one of grace, one of forgiveness.”

    After earning a business degree from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, in 1969, Johnson attended Luther Theological Seminary in St. Paul and graduated with a Master of Divinity degree in 1973. During an internship at a parish in Seattle, he was seriously thinking about military life, particularly due to the Vietnam War. Fortuitously, he met a former Army chaplain who introduced him to the Chaplain Candidate Program. The requirements were straightforward: good grades, a successful physical, a background check, and the endorsement of a denomination (in Johnson’s case, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America). The duties of a chaplain, meanwhile, were complicated: “First and foremost, you ensure the free exercise of religion for all men and women in uniform,” he explains. “As a practical matter, you console members of the military and their families, officiate at memorials and funerals, officiate at weddings, teach courses.”
    Today, Johnson is a brigadier general in charge of all 752 National Guard chaplains. He reports directly to Major General David Hicks, chief of chaplains to the United States Army. “I work on doctrine, deployments, strategies,” Johnson explains. “I also work on reunion issues for returning soldiers, and chemical dependency issues, too.” Above all, Johnson is responsible for ensuring that every National Guard soldier has access to a spiritual advisor of his or her creed. “It’s our role to be accessible to every religious group,” explains Hicks in a phone call from Fort Jackson, South Carolina. “Dean’s a Protestant, not a Muslim, but he would doggedly pursue the Muslim chaplain if the circumstances demanded it.”

    Johnson spent more than one hundred days on military business in 2004; in addition, he spent five months in St. Paul fulfilling his duties as a state senator. Yet he still relishes his part-time role at Calvary Church, where he performs a range of duties, including baptisms, pre-nuptial counseling, weddings, and occasionally serving as preacher and liturgist. “Also, I speak to the Adult Education Forum,” he says.

    The forum is held after services in a large basement meeting room. On one end is a darkened chapel; on the other is a room where elderly congregants receive blood pressure checks. In the middle, about fifty elderly congregants are seated with coffee, bread, and jam. Pastor Johnson steps to the pulpit. Today’s topic is the grieving process, something Johnson has come to know intimately, all too recently. Avonelle, his wife of twenty-one years, died just three weeks before the forum, after a five-year struggle with breast cancer. Johnson stands with his hands crossed on the lectern and talks to the congregants—his congregants of thirty-one years—without notes. He speaks with a steady, riveting cadence. The cooks in the kitchen emerge and stand against door posts; the blood pressure technician emerges and takes a seat at a corner table. Johnson talks of “bringing emotions into sync with thoughts,” and then he opens Janis Amatuzio’s book, Forever Yours, and reads an account of a woman’s near-death ascent to the “dazzling light” of heaven. As he does, tears slip down his otherwise implacable face.

    “Now, the hard part.”

    Avonelle Johnson spent her last days in a hospice across the street from Calvary Lutheran Church. Eight days before she died, her husband was seated beside her bed when she suddenly told him, “It’ll be OK.”

    “‘What’ll be OK?’ I asked,” Johnson recalls. “And Avonelle said to me, ‘You know.’”

    Johnson didn’t, and so Avonelle continued. “I saw the bright lights. I saw my mom and dad.”

    Johnson, looking out at his congregants through tears, admits, “About that time, I start to look around. I’d only been drinking coffee!” He pauses, his posture rigid. “I start to look around and outside the white snow is soft and gentle. I looked outside and everything was OK.” He takes a deep breath and credits Amatuzio’s book with giving him the courage to talk about his conversation with Avonelle. Then his voice chokes, but he says with determination, “One day we will see the face of God and we will be reunited with our loved ones. That is the faith we live with.”

    Bishop Jon Anderson oversees the Southwestern Regional Synod for the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, including Calvary Lutheran Church. “I personally have found Dean’s journey—this journey of losing his wife—to be inspiring as I’ve walked it with him,” Anderson said to me. “Lutherans like to talk about callings. Well, I saw a man caring for his wife at a very difficult time and carrying on his other vocations.”

    After the forum, Johnson returns to his office and gathers his belongings. “You’ll never hear a political opinion from me on Sunday morning,” he says. “That’s for Monday morning.” Likewise, it is rare that Johnson will invoke faith at the Capitol; there, as a legislator, his primary passion is transportation funding. When I ask him to describe what he believes is the proper role of religion in public life, he lays out his priorities without a moment’s hesitation: “OK, first, what is in the best interests of the people of Minnesota? Second, what is in the best interest of my district? And thirdly, and most difficult, what do you or I think about it, in regard to policy, policy change, and what are the moral and ethical considerations that surround it?” He smiles and reverts to politics. “If you can justify to your bosses—namely, your constituents—why you think the way you do, and vote the way you do, you’ll be all right.” He has no further thoughts on the subject.

    I ask Johnson if he knows Chaplain Dan Hall, and his answer is a clipped, two-syllable slap: “Oh, yeah.” Though Johnson is not aware of Hall’s prayer meetings, he does know of a weekly Bible study gathering attended by roughly twenty conservative legislators, staff, and Hall in a third-floor State Office Building committee room. I mention to Johnson that I’d attended two of those meetings. In both cases, it included the reading of two New Testament chapters and a discussion that very much took it as given that the Scriptures were literally the word of God. “I went once,” Johnson says. “And the room was filled with judgment and an errant interpretation of the Scriptures.” When I suggest that the people in the room wouldn’t exactly agree with such sentiments, Johnson shrugs. “No one person, no one theologian, no one pastor has the corner on the market to suggest that they are all right and everybody else is a bunch of sinful suckers. I just don’t see theology and religion playing out that way, as evidenced by the 180 denominations I deal with in the military.” Johnson espouses tolerance as a philosophy, but he has a difficult time extending it in this instance. “I try to be accepting and respectful of those folks, but it’s when they cross the line and portray that they’re better than the rest of us, that their little corner of religious practice is better than the rest of us, that’s when I become—” Johnson catches himself. “Well, we’re going to live in a pluralistic society, and we do have freedoms and the Constitution.”

    ***

    The last guest at Chaplain Dan Hall’s Wednesday prayer meeting was Duane Coleman, vice president for Development at the Colin Powell Youth Leadership Center in South Minneapolis. Supported by organizations like Best Buy, ADC, and General Mills, the center is a $12.6 million South Minneapolis project designed to help inner-city youth acquire secondary-school educations. Duane Coleman has been a repeat guest at Dan Hall’s prayer gatherings, and when he arrived on this day, Hall encouraged him to describe the results of the prayers he’d received the week before.

    Coleman said that, before last week, only the Senate version of the new bonding bill included cash for the Colin Powell Youth Leadership Center. “So I came last week and we prayed over this,” Coleman explained. “And somehow, through divine favor, the money ended up in the House bill, too.”
    A late arrival, a woman in the back of the room, raised her hand. “Is your group Christian?”

    Coleman nodded vigorously. “Yes.”

    “So what are we praying for today?”

    “Success in conference committee!” Coleman replied.

    Like many before him, Coleman stood before the group with his eyes closed as the Cannon Falls ladies and Myrna Howes prayed for him. “Lord, my husband is a legislator and I know he received a lot of letters on behalf of this saying it won’t do anything,” Howes intoned. “Well, I hope those letters to turn to dust.”
    With that, the meeting was over. The group quickly dispersed into dimly lit Capitol hallways filled with legislators on their way to lunch. Charlotte Herzog, however, stopped to tell me how much she appreciates Dan Hall’s ministry at the Capitol. “You know,” she said. “Prayer is just so much more effective than all those committee hearings and meetings.”

     

  • A Higher Power

    In America today, Jesus is pop culture’s King of Kings, a force in politics, film, music, and books. In the world of contemporary art, though, his presence is less established. While modern curators always seems to make room for dung-smeared Madonnas and crucifixes in urine, where are the works of genuine, unironic reverence? Not in Manhattan’s most influential galleries. Not in Artforum.

    But one Sunday last fall, at least, one such work made the cover of the New York Times Magazine. To illustrate a story about religion in the workplace, it featured an Alec Soth photo of an office in Riverview Community Bank, the Christ-centered financial institution in Otsego, Minnesota. The photo showed a curvilinear desk, a burgundy armchair, and—most prominently—a spectacular painting hanging on the plain white wall.

    The Senior Partner depicts a stately downtown office, where two clean-cut executives confer with Jesus over a laptop. Dressed in business casual robes, the Good Shepherd looks completely at home in this environment: confident, resolved, a rainmaker, ready to close the deal in enthusiastically ethical fashion. It is twilight in the picture, and the lights from nearby skyscrapers pour through a picture window to bathe him in a golden halo of big-city commerce.

    Even reprinted in godless fish wrap, The Senior Partner is instantly memorable. Remarkably, the Times didn’t even bother to mention the artist’s name. It was an oversight that might have driven a lesser man to despair, but Nathan Greene, the artist who painted The Senior Partner, doesn’t seem particularly interested in personal glory. Instead, the forty-four-year-old Seventh Day Adventist, who lives with his wife and children in rural Michigan, is mostly focused on spreading his vision of Christ as a compassionate, accessible presence in people’s everyday lives.

    Besides, Greene’s vision is becoming increasingly popular even without the acknowledgement of the Times. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the Tennessee Republican, has a lithograph of a Greene painting in his office. So does the Senate’s chaplain, Barry Black. The evangelical television show, It Is Written, uses a Greene portrait of Jesus in its opening credits.

    For years, Greene painted in the basement of his house, but recently he bought thirteen acres of land and built a seventeen-hundred-square-foot artist’s studio on it. Today, a Greene original goes for $25,000 to $50,000, and there’s a two-year waiting list to get one. Greene is a painstaking craftsman. While composing The Introduction, which shows Jesus playing matchmaker to Adam and Eve, Greene painted and repainted Jesus’ face eight times. “He’s just passionate about every little detail,” said his agent, Dan Houghton. “In that particular case, he could not have the face of his creator less perfect than his creations.”

    Typically, Greene finishes only four or five new paintings each year. To make his work available to all who want it, Houghton runs a publishing venture called Hart Classic Editions, which reproduces selected paintings as lithographs. Sometimes, Greene depicts Jesus in traditional biblical scenes, but the definitive works in his oeuvre are those like The Senior Partner, in which Jesus appears in contemporary settings: offices, operating rooms, suburban homes.

    In depicting Jesus this way, Greene continues the tradition of one of his artistic heroes, Harry Anderson, a fellow Seventh Day Adventist and a popular mid-century artist whose illustrations used to appear in magazines like Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post. In 1945, an art director asked Anderson to paint something that showed Jesus in the contemporary world. He responded with What Happened to Your Hand?, which showed Jesus explaining his stigmata to a trio of curious, forties-era kids. Some found it blasphemous to portray Christ in this modern manner. Others reacted more favorably, and Anderson went on to create paintings like The Consultation (Jesus provides a second opinion at a patient’s bedside) and Christ in the City (a spectral, Godzilla-size Jesus hovers outside the U.N. Building in Manhattan).

    In 1977, while Greene was in high school, his art teacher introduced him to Anderson; the art teacher thought Greene would make a good assistant to the older painter. The apprenticeship never materialized, but in 1990, when an Adventist hospital asked the retired Anderson to create two portraits of Christ in contemporary settings, Anderson encouraged it to commission Greene instead. A freelance illustrator at the time, Greene jumped at the chance to create work of a more permanent nature.

    The first painting he completed, Chief of the Medical Staff, is one of his signature canvases. In a dramatic, tightly cropped composition that evokes the luminescent palette of Maxfield Parrish, Christ steadies a surgeon’s hand as he makes his initial incision. “We’ve taken that image and printed it on business cards and bookmarks,” said Todd Chobotar, director of mission development at Florida Hospital, where the original hangs in the main lobby. “We give one to every patient who goes through a procedure here. When they go into the operating room and are put under by the anesthesiologist, many are still holding their cards.”

    Greene’s work has obvious populist appeal, but is it truly important art? Or just evangelical kitsch, a technically superior version of those cheap plastic figurines of the Son of God playing football with schoolkids? “I really want to avoid anything that could be perceived as corny when I depict Christ,” Greene said. And even at its most sentimental, his work is never mere décor: While millions of Americans profess to have a close personal relationship with Jesus now, few artists working in any medium have documented this phenomenon as tellingly as Greene has.

    Also, Greene perfectly conjures the upbeat, have-it-all ethos of today’s evangelicals. Consider one of his most striking works, The Introduction, which depicts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Chaperoned by Jesus, the pair stare at each other like lovers on the cover of a romance novel. The surprisingly metrosexual Adam wears razor-cut sideburns, and bares a smoothly waxed chest. Eve has the serious, no-nonsense beauty of a female contestant on The Apprentice; she may be wearing just a touch of lipstick.

    Like many artists, Greene paints from live models (or more specifically, he takes photos of live models, then refers to those photos throughout the many months it takes him to finish a canvas). In real life, Adam is a fashion model from Miami, Eve a model from New York. So it’s possible the anachronistic facets are accidental. But whatever Greene’s intent, the end result is a brilliant synthesis of reverence and pop culture. Indeed, compare The Introduction to Michelangelo’s Temptation and Fall. In the latter, Adam and Eve are being chased out of Paradise by an angel with a sword, their faces contorted with fear and shame. In Greene’s painting, Eden looks like a fun, sexy place to spend eternity. There’s no serpent in sight, and no forbidden fruit, either. A placid tiger and a curious giraffe observe history’s first blind date. In the distance, there are leafy green palm trees, cascading waterfalls, a couple of flamingos. It looks like Hawaii, if Hawaii were a casino in Las Vegas.—Greg Beato

  • Force of Habit

    The bells have been ringing for thirty minutes, but it is the sound of a cane rattling through the empty, cavernous church that suggests prayer. It is held by an old man, his stooped body covered in the flowing black habit of a Benedictine monk. He enters from the sacristy, clicking, clacking, up a barely perceptible incline. When he reaches the altar, he pauses and bows, then turns to the left and clicks and clacks his way upward to a lonely seat in the dark wooden choir.

    The early morning light is meager, cast from a stained-glass skylight above, through clear windows that run the length of the nave, and from the massive stained glass abstraction that dominates the back of the church at St. John’s Abbey. Other men in habits arrive, bow, and then take seats in the austere straight-backed choir slots. They arrange prayer books and hymnals on the stands in front of them and wait, casting their eyes on the simple wooden crucifix that hangs from the levitating white baldachin. At seven a.m. sharp, a white-haired monk rises from his seat in the choir. “Lord open my lips…”

    “And my mouth shall proclaim your praise,” follow the accumulated voices of the Benedictine monks, a soft morning thunder rolling out from the choir over the empty pews.

    A single note echoes from the pipe organ. The monks on the choir’s left side sing a verse from Psalms, their voices resonant and nearly undivided. After a pause, the monks on the right side sing a verse. The song continues, shifting back and forth across the choir in a sort of divine stereophonic effect, brothers singing to brothers singing, occasionally joining together on a verse, offering their voices to each other and to God.

    When the psalm ends, after the last organ note fades into an ethereal echo, there is a full minute of silence, a contemplation of the prayer just sung, the moment interrupted only by a sneeze, or the occasionally audible grumbling of a stomach. Then the psalms continue, the canticle comes, the responsorial rumbles. Morning Prayer lasts for roughly thirty minutes, depending on the day’s demands, before the monks shuffle silently from the church.

    They walk from the sacristy into the cloister, and then turn right into a wide hallway with tile floors and mostly bare walls, passing a lounge where several copies of the day’s Star Tribune have already been pulled apart. The procession continues, still silent, down a flight of stairs, into a darker hallway, past more lounges, past a massive floor-to-ceiling bulletin board covered with sign-up sheets for prayers, readings, haircuts, and kitchen duties, and then through two wooden doors into the abbey dining room. Pastel-colored religious paintings and stained-glass images of foliage hang from the wood-paneled walls. A beautifully carved wood podium stands ceremoniously in the middle of the space; a massive china cabinet dominates a far wall. Eggs, sausages and other dishes are served in chafing dishes on stout wooden tables. It is a very much an old room in style, and yet certain details—the harsh lights, the plastic dishes and trays, the Wheaties and other boxed cereals—suggest that practical updates and conveniences have been integrated. The brothers eat breakfast in silence.

    This has more or less been the morning routine since 1856, when a group of Benedictine monks from Pennsylvania arrived in St. Cloud to tend to the German Catholic population. In the 150 years since its establishment, St. John’s Abbey, located on 2,500 acres in Collegeville, ninety miles north of the Twin Cities, has exerted a profound influence on both the Catholic Church and the history of Minnesota. The liturgical reform movement responsible for English and other non-Latin masses received some of its most influential and eloquent support from monks at St. John’s, which is also home to a university and prep school. Minnesota Public Radio was launched within the Abbey’s cloisters (and Garrison Keillor’s first radio performances took place here). The abbey’s Liturgical Press remains one of the most important religious publishing houses in the world, printing journals and books that continue to influence both the scholarly and popular understanding of religion and spirituality. The community has counted among its ranks prominent historians, theologians, liturgists, artists, and philosophers.

    Nevertheless, St. John’s Abbey is undergoing the most dramatic changes in its history. For decades, it was the world’s largest Benedictine monastery, with more than four hundred monks living there at its peak in 1963. Today, it has 175, and their average age is sixty-five. The abbey’s traditional role as a provider of parish priests to Minnesota’s churches has become largely obsolete, its monks neither youthful enough nor sufficient in numbers to do the job. The large central Minnesota farm families that once provided the abbey with its most plentiful source of novitiates have been lost to changing rural demographics, leaving the abbey to compete with the temptations of big cities and non-religious careers. Most serious, the sexual-abuse scandals that erupted in America’s parishes also shook St. John’s, altering its culture, its image, and its relationship to Minnesota. Yet even through its darkest hour, the abbey has continued to find novices and retain members, who in turn find relevance in a Minnesota prayer community based on the writings of a sixth-century monk.

  • First Born

    My great-aunt lived in three centuries. She remembered seeing her first automobile. “It was such a novelty. I never thought I’d actually get a ride in one,” she said. She lived through ten popes and twenty presidents.

    Born in St. Paul, in 1894, Sister Esther was the oldest of eight girls. Her parents moved to Madelia, where she spent most of her childhood. At 107, she was the oldest of more than four thousand School Sisters of Notre Dame worldwide. She died in Mankato on September 22, 2002. Her youngest sisters, twins, are the only siblings still alive: Olivia Nelson of St. James and Otillia Erber of Austin, Minnesota.

    Back in the sixties, when I was growing up, I remember my entire family going to the convent in Pipestone to visit my dad’s aunt. We must have been quite a sight: Mom, Dad, and five kids—seven of us dropping by to say hello. All the other nuns would come and see us, too. And Sister Esther always made sure that we got cookies and milk.

    It had been years since I had the opportunity to visit Sister Esther. Last summer, I went to see her with my sister and brother. Five minutes after we checked in at the convent, Sister Esther came strolling in with her walker on wheels, which everyone called “the Cadillac.” Attached was a basket, where she kept her Bible and a few other items. Sister Esther still pedaled an exercise bicycle and enjoyed doing crafts. She kept busy reading, solving crossword puzzles, and writing letters.

    We explained that we were Margaret’s grandchildren. Margaret was her sister, and my dad’s mother. I told her I’d been reading about her in national publications and more recently in the book Aging With Grace. Sister Esther was part of an ongoing project known as the Nun Study, started in 1986 and headed by Dr. David Snowdon, author of Aging With Grace. She’s one of 678 nuns donating their brains to a long-term study of Alzheimer’s disease, as scientists explore why some people get the disease and others don’t.

    In his book, Dr. Snowdon mentions that when he started his research, Sister Esther was 92 and told him she was too busy to be in a study about old people. Someone asked her when she was going to retire and she said, “I retire every night.” My cousin exchanged letters with Sister Esther over the years. She said, “In one of her letters from Montana, she told me that she was going to retire and move back to the convent in Mankato so that she could take care of the old people. She was 98 at that time.”

    In recent years, the family would gather to celebrate her three-figure birthdays. Just before the turn of the millennium, on December 29, 1999, Sister Esther celebrated her 105th. There was a large turnout of family and friends. The twins, then 89, were wearing matching outfits. “You two look so cute,” my sister Beth said to them. “Sister Esther gets upset if we don’t dress alike,” Olivia said.

    On September 26, 2002, in the chapel on Good Counsel Hill in Mankato, the nuns sang like angels as they put Sister Esther to rest. Her twin sisters were there, perfectly matched with soft teal jackets and pants and white embroidered knit shirts.

    Dr. Snowdon was there too. My sister chatted with him. “So what’s the key to a long life?” she asked. “Exercise, fruits and vegetables, and keeping active,” he said. In the next two or three years, he would be studying Sister Esther’s brain, and would probably publish the results in another book. It would include his findings from more than a dozen other nuns who became centenarians and have passed away in recent years. Olivia, now 91, has her own theories about longevity. She told me she kidded Sister Esther that she lived so long because “she didn’t have a man to worry about.”

    Fortunately, Sister Esther didn’t suffer from Alzheimer’s. Still, her memory in the past couple of years wasn’t as good as it used to be. As we left the convent that afternoon last summer, she asked us again how we were related to her. “Margaret’s grandchildren,” we repeated. “You’ll have to come back another day,” she laughed, “and see if I remember who you are.”

  • Something About Mary

    If Christmas marks the birth of Jesus, then you know who deserves most of the credit. As interest in Mary increases among the unwashed masses, the Church has more trouble trying to manage her image, her meaning, and her legacy.

    Anne and Joe were a typical couple. They married young and drove hard for success, and Joe’s career in animal husbandry eventually made them wealthy. After two decades of marriage they were still so in love that friends could only envy them. All but for one thing: Their marriage was infertile, and they ached for a child. There were no effective medical interventions, so they had little more than a hope and a prayer of parenthood. When Joe overheard a client’s off-color joke about his sterility, he finally hit the breaking point, and instead of returning home from work that night, he took off toward the outskirts of town and collapsed on a dusty hillside. He lay there for days, broken and wild with grief, blaming himself.

    Meanwhile Anne grew frantic. Joe often traveled for work, but she’d been expecting him home days ago. She stared outside at the birds building their spring nests and felt numb with sorrow. It was in that moment of utter despair that she was seized by a sort of paranormal vision that left her with hope for motherhood and a desperate urge to go looking for her husband. Joe had a similar experience on the hillside, and he immediately sped home. The two met up at the city limits, where they were stunned by each other’s accounts of what they could only describe as a divine message. Flushed with the heat of hope and desire, they raced home. The next morning, Anne was pregnant.

    Nine months later she had a healthy baby girl who proved to be exceptional. She could walk seven steps by six months of age, and when she was three, Anne and Joe presented her to their priest. He predicted big things for the girl.

    Sometime between her 12th and 14th birthdays, the girl was ready to follow in her mother’s footsteps toward an early marriage. The priest summoned a handful of eligible bachelors. One of them was a carpenter named Joseph, an older man and a widower. As the group convened, a dove somehow emerged miraculously from Joseph’s staff, and perched on his head. The priest pronounced Joseph to be the one God had chosen to be the husband of the young woman.

    Unfortunately, Joseph had doubts about the marriage. He worried that friends and family would ridicule him about his youthful bride. Furthermore, he already had two sons of his own. But he took her in, reluctantly, and then left for a neighboring town to go about his trade. Months later, when his wife told him about her unexpected pregnancy, Joseph was unhappy and incredulous, and she cried bitter tears. It took a visit from an angel to declare Mary’s virginity and the immaculate conception of Jesus.

    The rest of the story is well worn. Mary’s name is now known the world over—despite the fact that accepted scripture actually makes very little mention of her, and apocryphal texts and legends fill in only a few more blanks. Regardless of this spotty historical knowledge, public interest in Mary—on the popular and scholarly level in Catholic, Protestant, and even secular circles—has existed ever since Jesus was born and died. And after several decades of increasing popularity, attention to Mary is reaching a crescendo and igniting this question: To whom, precisely, does Mary belong? Of and for the people, Mary is attractive to the masses specifically because of her humanity, and because there is so little concrete information about her. She can be whoever you need her to be.

    Yet certain institutions, most notably the Catholic Church, have a fervent interest in defining and protecting Mary and her likeness. If religious scholars riff on whether Mary’s mantle should be red or blue—and they do—then it’s easy to see why they’d recoil at the collection of irreverent plastic Mary memorabilia at places like Sister Fun, the oddball gift shop on Lake Street. There, on any given day, you’ll find the image of the Virgin emblazoned on everything from key chains to ashtrays—displayed right alongside the fart powder and hairy soap bars. But taste is a matter of opinion, and the gap between one person’s and another’s is really all that divides the merchandise at Sister Fun from the “relics” at the Marian Library, a service of the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton. The library’s collection includes “nearly 100,000 cards depicting Mary in the art of all ages and numerous Marian shrines, attractive collections of statues from around the world, Marian postage stamps, recordings of Marian music, Marian medals, and rosaries.”

    Legally and poetically, Mary sits squarely in the public domain, where people are free to make what they will of her, including a profit. As much as the Church may want to be the primary beneficiary of Marian interest, the reality is that more and more people are wanting a piece of Mary for themselves.

  • Father, Forgive Them

    Palm Sunday
    6:00 a.m.
    My clock radio goes off. It is set to a local news station. The spiritual maxim is this: Upon awaking in the morning, give your first thoughts to God. I am beginning to learn that clock radios don’t always enable this practice. Before I can give my thoughts to anything in particular, the radio announcer says, “In the headlines: crisis in the Catholic Church over priest pedophiles.” The announcer sounds very concerned as she reads a script cut and pasted from the Boston Globe and New York Times. She even refers to the Supreme Pontiff, whom she calls “Pope Paul II.” I wonder whether she really meant to refer to Pietro Barbo, who reigned as Pope Paul II from 1464 to 1471. Then again, she is a professional journalist and I am not, so this is best left to her. This is going to be a long week.

    Monday of Holy Week
    It is a beautiful afternoon and I go for a walk. Heading back toward the center of town, the idea of a cup of coffee starts to seem better and better. I pause to look at a cafe, trying to decide whether it is priest-friendly. Most people who work in coffee bars are very friendly and polite in a kind of T-shirted and steel-studded way. But some of them look askance at priests. A young man and his wife come out of the cafe. The man smiles at me and says, “Hello, Father. How are you today?” The answer is fantastic. Why? Because the man was glad to see a priest. Bear in mind that he has no idea what my name is or where I am from or whether I am intelligent or a dolt, kind or mean. He sees the collar and knows I am a priest, and it makes him glad, and this means he has the Faith, and so he smiles and says, “Hello, Father.” Not, “G’way, you pervert” or “Stay away from my kids.” It’s a simple story and I will cut it short because I am getting sentimental, but not before I say, “Hey, New York Times and Boston Globe: Catholics still love their priests.”

    Tuesday of Holy Week
    I find myself thinking of a memory long suppressed. Something that happened 10 years ago, during my first year of priesthood. I was the parochial vicar (assistant priest) at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church. Around noon, someone phoned the rectory and said, “Father, have you seen the commercial they’re running on Channel Zero?” (I have changed the name of the TV station to protect the guilty, thus showing them more consideration than they showed me and other priests). I turned on the TV and, after a few minutes of soap opera, the commercial came on. It showed the silhouette of a young man wearing a cassock, holding rosary beads, while the announcer said something like, “They care for our souls and hear our deepest secrets, but can they be trusted?” Then the screen showed the front of a church. I recognized it at once. You could even read the letters on the facade: Our Lady of Perpetual Help church. I remember exactly what was said then. “What is the shocking secret that the diocese does not want you to know about its priests?” I felt sick. I had no idea what was going on. The announcer told me I wouldn’t find out until 11 p.m.

    It was a sad story, of course. An old priest, now retired out of state, had been accused by a long-ago altar boy of having interfered with minors. The private detective trying to dig up dirt had contacted the TV station. Allegedly the diocese had been told about these allegations 30 years previously, but had simply transferred the man from one parish to another. And one of the parishes just happened to be Our Lady of Perpetual Help. And this is why I was being defamed—why we were being defamed.

    Naturally, parishioners continued to ring the phone into the afternoon, intent on finding out whether one or both of the parish priests was about to be arrested. This was intolerable. I phoned my attorney. I explained the whole matter. “Are you sure you want to do something about this?” he asked. “It could backfire.” I told him to go ahead. This simply wasn’t right.

    Now, some critics of the Church will maintain that Catholic priests hold sway over the faithful simply by the perceived power of the sacred words that only priests can speak. If they believe that, they should look to the awesome powers of the attorney. Armed only with a telephone and some magic legalese, my lawyer went to work. First he identified himself as a member of a sacred order. “Hello, this is Attorney Charlie Michaels. I need to speak to whoever is responsible for the commerical being run to promote your 11 p.m. news program.” This brought about a fairly rapid response. Charlie let loose a lawyerly spell, explaining that he was calling on behalf of his client, that this phone call was an official legal communication, relating that his client was in great distress over the commercial. The TV professional protested that my name had never been mentioned. Charlie explained that damage had already been done, that his client’s reputation had already been caused serious harm. The TV professional said, “Well, we had a meeting and we’ve decided we’re not going to run that commercial any more.” Now Charlie spoke the word of power. “That’s good,” he said. “Because if you run that commercial one more time…you will be sued. Do you understand me?” They did not run the commercial again.

    Wednesday of Holy Week
    Father H. asks, “Have you seen the latest issue of Time?” The cover screams, “CAN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH SAVE ITSELF?” I note the cover date: April 1.

    Holy Thursday
    A day to commemorate the Last Supper, at which the Lord gave his disciples two commandments: (1) Do this in remembrance of me; (2) wash each other’s feet. Holy Thursday gives priest their identity. For priests, it is a day to renew their commitment, to celebrate together their common identity. The present Pope has written a Holy Thursday letter to priests each year since his election. It is a wonderful thing to be a priest, to be able to say, “The Pope writes me a letter every year.” Of course the letter comes out a few days early, and is released to the press. North American journalists in particular were amazed and annoyed that this year’s Holy Thursday letter did not say what they wanted it to say. They hate that. This gave journalists such as Janet Bagnall of the Montreal Gazette the opportunity to criticize the Pope’s Holy Thursday letter in an article published on Holy Thursday itself. I doubt Bagnall went through the exercise of reading the whole letter. Rather, she was more exercised about what the Pope did not say in it. She complains, “The pope did not pronounce the words sexual abuse or pedophilia. He did not name the evil that traumatized so many innocent young lives.” Now, the Pope did speak of mysterium iniquitatis—the mystery of evil—which you figure embraces pretty much everything that could traumatize innocent young lives. But Bagnall ain’t buyin’. When Vatican official Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos spoke of “today’s culture of pansexualism and libertinism,” she scoffed. “Is he saying there’s something in the air? Is this an actual theory?”