TOWNER, N.D. -- It looks like the skies are going to cloud over, and we're going to get some real fall weather. But we had a string of days that make a person glad to be alive and outside in the Northern Plains with the leaves turning, the geese flying, the sun shining and the air cooling just enough to feel crisp but not frozen.
As if that kind of weather wasn't enough to bring you closer to God, I tripled down on one of those beautiful Sundays this fall and visited three saints here on the prairie. The day began with me serving as the guest pastor at two Lutheran churches in northwest North Dakota. My sermon was based on the week's lesson from the Chapter 22 of the gospel of Matthew, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's and rendering unto God what is God's.
I haven't given a lot of sermons, but I've listened to a lot of them. I actually enjoyed the spiritual exercise of thinking, contemplating and delivering a 10- or 15-minute sermon with nothing but a few notes written down on a yellow pad of paper.
Sermons done, I went to see three saints. First stop was the St. Anthony Catholic Church dinner in Donnybrook for my wife and me. Pork roast, all the fixings, church members selling tickets, serving food and bussing tables. It was all good, including the pie for dessert.
St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost articles, and I think everyone at the dinner, at the least, found their appetite, and some conversation with friends and neighbors.
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The second saint I stopped to see that day was at St. Benedict, a Catholic country church in the scenic Turtle Mountains. My 10-year-old son joined me for the church supper and bingo held there. St. Benedict is the patron saint of students, so I was glad I took my fifth-grader along for the ride, and the supper.
Third saint of the day came after the supper when I drove the car up to the base of Butte St. Paul, a point 2,201 feet above sea level in the Turtle Mountains that we know are more hills than mountains, but, nonetheless, they are beautiful.
My son and I and a friend made the hike to the top. We read the story about Father Belcourt naming the point Butte St. Paul after he spent a night burrowed into the snow there with his guides and sled dogs during a horrendous January blizzard in 1850.
He gave a mass up there after the storm subsided, erected a wooden cross and renamed the point Butte St. Paul. The Anishinabe people called the place Otaccamabawin, "place from which to see far."
The wooden cross has been replaced with a 12-foot-high stone cairn with a small cross at the top. You can still see far from there. It is still a beautiful place. It is a good place to hike with a 10-year-old boy, and it's not so steep that you can't play catch with the football as you make the hike, like we did.
St. Paul's patronage includes missionaries like Father Belcourt and writers like yours truly. The butte brought Father Belcourt through a blizzard, and it brought me through another deadline with a column topic as I visited my third saint on a picture-perfect autumn Sunday.
As St. Paul would say, "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely ... dwell on these things." Definitely lovely to look across the prairie from that butte and play catch with a 10-year-old.
