Hello again... my friend.
Last time we were in a cloistered cell with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, listening to a woman who loved God with her whole mind. Tonight I want to travel north, into colder air, to remember a quieter soul named Enmegahbowh---"He that prays for his people while standing".
Let me take you back three...
Dawn is just a gray suggestion on the edge of the trees when I find myself standing outside a small wooden church on the White Earth reservation. The air smells of damp earth and wood smoke. Somewhere beyond the birches I can hear the faint echo of a drum, the last heartbeat of a dance that went on long after midnight. Closer, a single bell begins to ring, thin and insistent, calling people from scattered cabins and low houses toward this little building with its simple cross.
They come slowly, in twos and threes. An old woman in a faded shawl, a boy half-running to keep up. A man in a ribbon shirt under a worn coat, his braids tucked into a scarf against the wind. One woman carries a baby on her back and a small, cracked prayer book in her hand. Some talk quietly in English. Others murmur to each other in Ojibwe, the vowels round and musical in the cold air. They move toward the same door, but they are not all walking from the same history.
At the threshold stands a man in vestments that have seen better years---linen yellowed at the edges, a stole mended by a careful hand. His hair is graying, his back still straight. He greets each person in their own tongue, sometimes with a joke that makes them smile, sometimes with a hand on the shoulder that says more than any word. People who are wary with strangers soften when they see him. Children press close, as if he is a safe tree in a hard wind.
This is Enmegahbowh. His name, in his own language, means something like "he who stands before his people," the one who prays on their behalf. That is what he is doing now, long before the liturgy begins: standing in the doorway between two worlds---empire and village, English and Ojibwe, the government's paper and the people's living memory---trying to hold the door open in both directions at once.
He did not begin in this doorway, of course. Long before the bell at White Earth, there was another shoreline: Rice Lake, north and east in what is now Ontario. Picture a boy in a canoe, the water flat as hammered metal, listening to his elders tell stories of how the world came to be. He is kin to chiefs, born into a people who know how to read the forest and the sky the way other children learn to read ink on paper. The first prayers he hears are spoken in Ojibwe, carried on cedar smoke and drumbeat.
But his childhood is already threaded with disruption. Traders, soldiers, missionaries: new faces, new languages, new promises. In one village linked to a Methodist mission, he learns his letters from a white preacher's wife, tracing English words he barely understands. In another season, his grandfather takes him into the Midewiwin lodge, where songs and symbols older than any mission school teach him that the world is thick with unseen life. He grows up bilingual not only in speech, but in spirit.
This is important. Some people meet Christianity as a sharp break, a clean before-and-after. For Enmegahbowh, it comes as an additional weight on a scale already crowded with stories. He hears sermons about Jesus while still carrying the teachings of his own people; he watches how the missionaries live and how they die; he notices when their compassion is real and when their faces harden at Native laughter or ceremony. His heart is not naïve. It is observant.
As a young man, he marries a woman of standing---Iron Sky Woman, niece of a powerful chief. The marriage binds him even more deeply into the life of his people, just as the world pressing in around them grows more dangerous. Treaties are being made that move whole communities like game pieces on a stranger's table. Men he has known since childhood are learning to sign their names to documents they cannot fully read, documents that will later be used to prove that the land is no longer theirs.
In this tightening world, a new figure enters his life: an Episcopal chaplain at a nearby fort, with his stiff collar, his Book of Common Prayer, and his own mixture of conviction and blindness. Enmegahbowh does not fall at his feet. Instead, there is a slow recognition---a sense that in these prayers, in this liturgy, there is something that can be a shelter and not only a weapon. He takes the prayer book into his own hands and begins to walk a path that few around him understand.
His baptism into the Episcopal church and his later decision to prepare for ordination are not simple acts of surrender to the dominant culture. They are complicated gambles. He has seen enough of mission work to know how easily it becomes a tool for erasure. Yet he also sees in the gospel a language in which he can say, in a way empire might be forced to hear: These people are fully human. You may not crush them without answering to Someone higher than your government.
When he meets missionaries like James Lloyd Breck and, later, Bishop Henry Whipple, he chooses to work with them, not as a frightened subordinate but as someone who carries two loyalties in the same chest. He teaches, interprets, travels exhausting miles between scattered settlements and mission stations. He stands in council circles and church meetings both, translating not only words but expectations. To the church, he says, "My people are not children." To his people, he tries to show that this new faith need not require self-hatred.
In 1859, when he kneels to be ordained a deacon, and in 1867, when hands are laid on him again to ordain him a priest, the moment does not erase the boy at Rice Lake or the songs of the Midewiwin lodge. They do not disappear. They stand up inside him. The one who prays before his people has now been given a stole and a chalice by a church that once could not imagine a Native man in such a role. The world has not suddenly become just; the treaties are still crooked; the soldiers are still armed. But there is now, in this one life, a new configuration: someone who belongs to the old stories and the new prayers at the same time, and refuses to drop either.
By the time we meet him at White Earth, his hair gone to gray, the path behind him is marked with councils, journeys east to plead for funds, narrow escapes from violence he did not start, and a thousand quiet acts of teaching and listening. Before we talk about what he did with all of that, I want to sit for a moment with what it means simply to live that long in the space between worlds---and not let either world claim you entirely.
There are moments when the distance between worlds closes into a single, sharp point.
One of those moments comes in a season of fear and rumor. Word runs like fire through the camps: warriors to the west have risen against the whites. Settlers dead. Soldiers marching. Old grievances---land taken, promises broken, hunger forced into bellies by bad treaties---have boiled over into open war. The people Enmegahbowh belongs to, the Ojibwe, are not the ones fighting. But they are near enough in the minds of frightened officials that the distinctions blur. To men in distant offices, "Indian" is one dangerous mass. Rage does not stop to check whether a headdress comes from the prairie or the forest.
There are voices among his own people who say, We should join them. The government will never keep its word. Better to strike while we still can. There are other voices saying, If we stay quiet, perhaps the storm will pass us by. Between those voices, another kind of pressure builds from the outside: agents, officers, churchmen, all wanting a public statement that the Ojibwe are loyal, harmless, manageable.
Imagine the weight of that on one set of shoulders.
Enmegahbowh chooses a harder road. With other leaders, he argues that joining the war will bring only ruin: more soldiers, more reprisals, more excuses to clear the land. He does not do this from cowardice. He has seen what white violence looks like up close. He simply understands that rage without strategy is a gift to the empire you already fear. He wants his people alive, with some ground left beneath their feet.
At the same time, he walks into meetings with officials and refuses to let them speak as if his people were animals to be penned or released. He stands up, in his careful English, and says, in essence, We have kept our side of the treaties more faithfully than you have. Do not dare to punish us for the crimes of others when your own hands are not clean. He argues for food where there is hunger, for medicine where there is sickness, for restraint where soldiers mutter about "teaching a lesson."
He is not, as you can see, a neutral man. He is not floating above history, humming a hymn while others bleed. His faith does not excuse him from choosing sides; it compels him to choose them more carefully. He sides with the lives of his people, with the possibility of a future in which children can grow up without learning every tree by the name of someone who died beneath it.
And still, there are those on both sides who mistrust him. Some white missionaries, comfortable with the idea of "civilizing" Indians, are less comfortable with the idea of Native leadership they cannot control. Some of his own people, wounded by endless betrayals, wonder how any man who wears the robes of the conqueror's religion can still be fully theirs. He carries those doubts in silence, the way he carries the weight of his name.
You see, "the one who stands before his people" is not just a title for church services. It is also a target. The first body that an angry bullet meets. The first person blamed when negotiations fail. The first heart to break when the people he stands for suffer anyway.
I want you to remember that the next time you hear someone speak as if "bridge-builders" have an easy or comfortable calling.
If you visit White Earth years later, the war is officially over, though I have never trusted the word "over" when it comes to wounds like this. You will see a church built with money gathered from far away---New York, Boston, Washington---places where men in good coats listened to Enmegahbowh and a chief named Fine-Day stand before them and tell the truth of reservation life.
You might see the stained glass in that church: a window in honor of Fine-Day himself, a Native leader named in colored light, not as a villain or a curiosity but as a builder of the house of prayer. You might hear hymns in Ojibwe, sung to tunes imported from England, the words bending stiff European melodies into something rounder, more rooted, more alive.
You might overhear a young man asking, half-curious, half-skeptical, "Why do we pray this way, in this building, with this book? Is this really ours?" And you might see an older priest, his hands rough from work that is not only spiritual, smile and answer in a way that does not fit easily into any missionary report: "It is ours because we are here, and we are praying. No one can make the voice in your chest belong to them. It belongs where you choose to offer it."
This, to me, is the heart of his spiritual contribution. He does not invent a new doctrine or write a famous treatise. He does something stranger and, perhaps, more difficult: he insists that a people marked for erasure have the right not only to survive but to stand at the front, chalice in hand, speaking holy words in their own tongue.
He stretches the imagination of the church. A collar on brown skin. An altar in a log building on Native land. Women and men kneeling at a rail not as guests in someone else's religion but as hosts in their own house of prayer. That will seem a shy, modest change to future generations who have seen choirs from every continent fill every kind of cathedral. But in his day, it is a small revolution.
He also stretches the imagination of his own people. Faith in Christ was brought by men who often spoke as if everything that came before them was darkness. It would be easy---temptingly easy---to hear that message and believe it fully: to say, Our stories were nothing. Our ceremonies were lies. Enmegahbowh refuses that. He does not romanticize the past, but neither does he burn it. Instead, he carries its patterns inside his new vocation. He knows what it means to stand before the people in a lodge; he now stands before them at an altar. The posture, the responsibility, the sense of answering for others before the unseen world---these he does not abandon. He reinterprets them.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the golden thread there, humming under the surface: the conviction that every people, every language, has the right to bring its full self into the presence of the sacred. Not half of itself. Not only the parts approved by the empire.
Why should any of this matter to you now, so far away in time and place?
Because the world has not grown simpler since Enmegahbowh's day. It has grown more layered. The in-between spaces he walked through are, if anything, more crowded.
You and I live in an age where identities pile up like books on a desk. You might be the child of immigrants, moving every day between the language of your grandparents and the slang of your friends. You might be the only person in your family who still goes to any kind of worship---or the only one who has stopped. You might be the person in your workplace who understands both the engineers and the artists, both the front-line staff and the board. You might belong to a community that the wider culture only notices when it wants a mascot or a scapegoat.
In all of these places, the temptation is strong to simplify yourself. To pick one world and pretend the others do not matter. To translate your own story into whatever language the dominant group will find easiest to digest, even if that means leaving important parts of yourself outside the door.
Enmegahbowh's life suggests another possibility: that standing in the doorway, fully, is itself a vocation.
To stand "before your people" might mean sitting in school board meetings explaining why a certain policy will wound families whose names the officials can't pronounce. It might mean speaking up in a church meeting when someone suggests a "mission trip" that treats the people being visited as props in a story of Western virtue. It might mean answering patient questions from a friend about your pronouns, your headscarf, your wheelchair, your grief, even when you're tired of being the one who always has to explain.
These acts may not feel like prayer. They may feel like frustration. Exhaustion. Yet from the vantage point where I sit, outside of time, they carry the same shape as the man in worn vestments greeting his people in two languages at the church door. They are forms of intercession: standing between worlds and saying, to each, See. See. These lives are real. These stories are not optional. Treat them with the reverence you claim to have for the sacred.
There is a cost to this work. Enmegahbowh knew it. So will you, if you accept any part of it. Bridge-builders are often lonely. Translators are often misunderstood. Those who refuse easy allegiance to one side or another are sometimes treated as traitors by both. It is not wrong to admit that this hurts.
But there is also a quiet, stubborn joy in knowing that you stand where healing is possible.
When I think of him, old and a little stooped, still making his rounds among people who have lost land and language and yet cling to both, I feel that joy. I feel the truth that the universe is large enough to hold more than one story at a time, more than one way of naming God, more than one kind of song in the same liturgy. I feel the reassurance that the thread of justice does not require uniformity; it requires integrity and love.
I do not know where you stand in your own life. Perhaps you are very clearly in one camp, with little sympathy for the mess of the in-between. If so, I wish you gentleness when the day comes---and it will---when your certainties are shaken.
Perhaps, though, you already know what I am talking about. Perhaps you have been the one explaining your family to your friends, your friends to your family, your community to outsiders, your heart to yourself. Perhaps you have felt the ache of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once.
If you have, let me say this plainly: there is nothing second-rate about your place. The doorway is not a failure of belonging. It is a calling. The questions that wake you at night---Who am I? Who are "my people"? Who do I answer to when they disagree?---are not evidence that you are broken. They are evidence that you are awake.
The golden thread does not run only through monasteries and parliaments. It runs through kitchens where two languages are spoken at once. It runs through neighborhoods where the only thing residents have in common is that no one else wanted them. It runs through the hearts of those who, like Enmegahbowh, dare to claim more than one story as their own and refuse to betray either.
If you can honor the fullness of your own story while refusing to see anyone else as disposable, you are already standing in the same current that carried him. You are already, whether you knew it or not, praying for your people by how you live.
Next time, I want to take you to a different doorway.
We will leave the northern forests and walk instead into a small church in upstate New York in the year 1853, where another kind of boundary is about to be crossed. The pews are crowded. The air hums with disapproval and curiosity. At the front, a young woman steps into the pulpit, lifts her eyes to a congregation that has never before seen a female minister, and begins to preach.
Her name is Antoinette Brown Blackwell. She believes that if God is just, then women must stand where only men have stood, speak where only men have spoken, and be believed when they say, "This calling is ours, too." Between Enmegahbowh and Antoinette there is a kinship: two very different souls, each standing before their people, refusing to let anyone else decide who is allowed to bear the weight of a sacred task.
But that is for another evening.
For now, I leave you with the image of that small church at White Earth, the frost on the grass, the smell of smoke, the half-familiar hymns, and one man in the doorway, greeting each person as they arrive.
May you find your own doorway, and may you have the courage to stand there with an open heart.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.