October 12, 2025 Essay: Faith in Action
We encounter Jesus’ teachings about faith, cleansing, gratitude, and reconciliation in the readings this Sunday. Jesus embraced all people, no matter where they came from. In the Gospel, we see that it was the foreigner who went to Jesus personally to give thanks and praise to him and God.
After spending a week on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota with five St. Ignatius Loyola parishioners and volunteers from across our vast country, I saw faith, cleansing, gratitude, and reconciliation in action. For the past three years, we have volunteered, and this September, we spent the final week of the Y Alumni National Service Project, where we built four tiny homes on the Lakota reservation.
Here, we were the foreigners, embraced by the Lakota people who shared their history, culture, song, dance, and cleansing ceremonies with us. This last week culminated in “putting the icing on the cake,” which was George Painter, the construction manager’s mantra all week long!
Everyone found their niche and organically formed into teams to touch up each home with sanding, painting indoors and outdoors, and installing plumbing. Outdoor work consisted of staining panels for outdoor utilities, raking, seeding, putting hay down over the seeds to help the grass to grow and keep the mud, aka, “gumbo” at bay when it rained. And did it rain for two days which created unrelenting mud! The medicine wheel was outlined and will need further work to create a labyrinth. Benches painted yellow, red, white, and black depicting the Lakota medicine wheel colors will surround the medicine wheel for meditation and conversation. This will connect each Morningstar Village home and create their Tiny Home community.
By Sunday, the “punch list” was 98% finished and the entire village of Dupree was invited along with many Lakota dignitaries to the opening ceremony. Jackie Bird sang and danced while her son played the drum, Lakota drummers engaged the crowd with their Lakota songs and Ohani lead us all in a Lakota circle dance around the medicine wheel.
To witness the progress, the care from the community, the comradery of each volunteer Wave and the culmination of four houses where homeless families will now have a home reminded me that we are all the hands and feet of Jesus. I saw faith in action, we were cleansed by the holy spirit through the smudging of sage upon ourselves and the homes, the gratitude from the community and the bridge-building of reconciliation with the Lakota people was palpable. It was an emotional experience to realize we were finished with the project and it was time to leave our Lakota families.
The Lakota believe that everything in this world contains a spirit. Every rock, every tree, and every animal contained a spirit. The Lakota believe in Wakan Tanka, the supreme god often translated to the Great Spirit. One of the most important traditions in Lakota religion is the Seven Sacred Rites. These rites for the basis of their religion practices are meant to impart the seven Lakota values, prayer, respect, compassion, honesty, generosity, humility, and wisdom, on those who participate in the rights. Lakota spirituality is akin to our Jesuit values of “Finding God in All Things” and the Catholic value of the seven sacraments.
As we encounter the teachings from Jesus of faith, cleansing, gratitude, and reconciliation, so too, do the Lakota. They live in gratitude to the land that sustains them and have faith in the Creator Spirit who blesses them. They don’t hold grudges against the people who committed atrocities upon their people, they are reconciled to God and keep the sacred tradition of smudging with sage to keep the evil spirit away.
Mitakuye Oyasin– we are all related!
— Jean Santopatre, Pastoral Associate