Lorenzo Herman, in Portland during training to become a Jesuit, visits a burial ground in Montana.
Oregon Province of Jesuits photo
HAYS, Mont. — Outside, the sun has set on snow-covered, rolling plains. In the domed sweat lodge, a young Jesuit-in-formation is encountering new light.
Lorenzo Herman, a 34-year-old novice for the Oregon Province of Jesuits, grew up on the pavement of inner-city Cleveland. On this winter evening at the Fort Belknap Reservation in north-central Montana, the poetry-writing Air Force veteran has come into close quarters with Peter Bigstone. The 6-foot-5, long-haired Nakoda medicine man has innate Ignatian spirituality.
“His stories were like an oral composition of place where you can imagine being in the scene where all five senses are heightened to make the imagination real,” Herman wrote in his journal that night last winter.
Pointing a flashlight, Bigstone explains Christian symbolism in the skin-covered lodge. The structure’s frame is made of 12 tree shoots, representing the apostles. The poles cross at the apex, representing Christ, who holds everything together.
The space eventually is packed with Nakoda and White Clay tribe members of every age, surrounding the awestruck Jesuit guest.
The people and things in the lodge, the medicine man concludes in melodic tones, are connected to God through Jesus.
Three young men bring rocks from the blazing fire outside and drop them into a pit. The holy man — whom Herman describes as entirely Indian and entirely Catholic — douses his flashlight and begins splashing water and tossing sweet grass on the smoldering stones. Red sparks dance, intermittently lighting up the many Native faces. The people chant sacred songs in their native language, calling on their local saints, the ancestors.
“The steam going through my nostrils and down my throat was like feeling air for the first time at birth,” Herman wrote. “God breathed life into me and I became man. Man in the sense that I was aware of my physical self and the sweat was a new covenant with God like baptism.”
Months later, back in Portland at the house of formation known as a novitiate, he sees the sweat lodge moment as “a beautiful marriage between Catholic and Native spirituality.”
At St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, at age 17, Herman and his classmates saw a video on Jesuit life. Here’s his reaction then to the possibility of joining: “What? Are you crazy?”
Backed by Jesuit scholarships as he had been at St. Ignatius, he went on to Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. Raised a Southern Baptist, he became Catholic at age 19, when his admiration for the Jesuits and their spirituality reached a tipping point.
In 1994, Herman joined the Air Force and became a boom operator on an in-flight refueling tanker. He eventually was promoted to analyst.
“It was a way to help myself from starving to death,” he says of his decision to join the military.
Stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane for six years, he at first thought God had punished him. He seemed to be the only African American in town and the forests were unfathomable and frightening.
But he soon came to admire the place and explored life in the Northwest, becoming an actor and playwright in civic theater. He sat on the human rights commission and wrote as an apprentice for the Spokesman-Review and Spokane African American Voice newspapers. On the theater scene, he met theatrical Jesuits and came to know the Gonzaga University community. He got an invitation to act in a play about the Jesuit founders.
The once-outrageous idea of religious life became a frequent notion.
In 2001 he relocated to San Diego, where he managed a clinic offering HIV prevention and care. In 2005 he co-founded and was board president of a non-profit organization that tried to correct discrimination in HIV policy. He loved the work and knew it was important.
“The suffering I saw people go through was hurtful to me,” he says. “How could people treat others that way? It just wasn’t Jesus.”
Herman is a man amazed by the ingenuity of Christ. Each year on Holy Thursday, when the priest washes the feet of worshipers, it strikes Herman what an earthshaking idea it is to be a leader who is a servant.
That insight led him to consider priesthood.
In addition to studying Jesuit spiritual tradition, and making a vital 30-day retreat, novices learn about communal life. They cook, tend the yard and clean toilets. They serve in the community. Herman taught seventh grade religion at St. Andrew Nativity School in inner-city Northeast Portland.
Experiences like his trip to Montana, called “experiments,” and the additional treks Herman will take as he progresses into his second year of novitiate, are meant to help him know the glories of meeting others in faith.
“It is primarily a time of being gifted by meeting the people and they meeting him,” says Father Joseph Retzel, who has served the Fort Belknap Reservation from St. Paul Mission here for more than 20 years. “As Jesuits, it’s our presence here we feel is a gift to us and it’s important to the people that we are present. We try to honor the gift of who they are.”
Father Retzel says that when cultures intertwine, like they did in the encounter between Herman and Peter Bigstone, the result can be a strong and lovely braid.
The Jesuits opened St. Paul Mission in 1886. Along with Dominican Sisters, Jesuit Volunteers and dozens of Native lay ministers, they serve at a 90-student K-6 day school and four mission stations. There are about 3,000 people on the reservation, made up of the two tribes who were once bitter enemies.
For the Northwest Jesuits, Native missions are such a key part of the history that leaders want everyone in formation to see them. In the 1840s, the Jesuits responded to tribes who begged for “blackrobes” to come west.
“We’re hopefully keeping their faith together, learning from them and their spirituality,” says Father Bob Erickson, who has been in Hays for about six years. “We have a lot to learn as well as teach.”
Father Erickson says the White Clay and Nakoda peoples are spiritual, resilient and generous amid the brokenness of reservation life. That means a novice can gain a lot by visiting for a month.
In addition to the sweat lodge, Herman attended drumming ceremonies. He helped bring Communion to disabled elders, taught junior-high religious education and ate vast meals offered by struggling families. He made soup on Lenten Fridays because cooking for others is one of his favorite things to do.
He sat at funerals, all for young people who died violent deaths because of drunkenness. He noted that sadness coexists with celebration for the one who is to enter the joyful world inhabited by ancestors. He marveled at the funeral dinners, when the grieving families gave gifts to scores of guests.
One point of the experiments is for novices to see Jesuits in action. It’s a reality check in discernment.
Father Tom Lamanna, novicemaster for the Oregon Province, says the trips show the young men what is needed to serve.
The experience mirrors St. Ignatius’ early stay in Jerusalem, when the Franciscan superior of the Christians sent him away because he lacked the training to be of real use to the community. Ignatius, who had hoped to spend the rest of his days in the Holy Land, then went to school and ended up founding the Jesuits.
“Ignatius had to reevaluate what to do,” Father Lamanna says. “He had to step back from his own desires and discern what was needed.”
In the same way, says the priest, novices gain some practical perspective on their trips. Herman, for example, is more intent on learning how to be an effective classroom teacher.
There are other results for him. While in Montana, he decided to seek out more information about his great-grandfather, a Cherokee drafted into service during World War I. Herman pondered his African ancestors and how they felt as the younger generations of slaves embraced Christianity.
Herman remembers vividly that the Nakoda and White Clay people pray for future generations, convinced that today’s blessings come from yesterday’s prayers. And so he often asks God to care for those who are yet to come.
