It may not seem politically correct these days to think of God as an old man in the sky with a long gray beard. Good thing our personal prayer, and that of the saints, doesn’t have to fit the limits of what is politically correct.
This month we commemorate the anniversary of Nicholas Black Elk’s death and, while there are so many things to laud and reflect on about his fascinating and important life, there is one thing in particular that has been meaningful to me. Black Elk believed that God is very old. And while God is not white, nor does God have a beard or live only in the sky, or is even necessarily a “he,” God is definitely old.
In one of Black Elk’s prayers, prayed atop the highest peak of He Sapa, the Black Hills, he says of God, “You are older than all need. Older than all pain and prayer.” Coming from a man who lived through truly epochal changes, significant pain and need, these words are instructive. Black Elk was a mystic and, like so many of the mystics, he was able to stand firmly in reality, in his material circumstances, while also acknowledging the spiritual circumstances and perspective of eternity. This is a balance that is hard to strike.
In the material context of his world, Black Elk saw the devastation of his people. He saw the massacre of his people at Wounded Knee and the U.S. Government’s efforts at assimilation almost destroy their way of life. Black Elk, however, saw these things through the vision he was given as a young boy. He knew that at the center of all things, even amid horrendous pain, was a Great Sacred Mystery, Wakan Tanka, who looked upon us all.
This understanding helped him to live in reality. He could help his people adapt to a new world instead of shrinking away from it in defeat. He was a person of deep hope, which no doubt sprang from the wisdom received as a man of intense prayer.
Black Elk was known as a medicine man, a pejutawichasa, and also a holy man, a wichasawakan. Perhaps what is more significant though, is that he was also revered as a wochekiye wichasa, a prayer man. He was a man who spent so much time in prayer, first devoted fully to the sacred rites of the Lakota and then also to the sacred rites of Catholicism, that he was well acquainted with Wakan Tanka. After his conversion to Catholicism, he maintained both of these devotions, practicing and sharing each of them with his people.
He was a close collaborator of the Jesuits and became an influential catechist. He would travel long stretches of the Pine Ridge reservation to pray with anyone as soon as he heard they were asking for it. This included braving South Dakota blizzards on horseback to pray with his people.
That God is older than all need, older than all pain and prayer, could almost seem defeating. God has heard and seen it all. Do any of our problems or pain really amount to much in the grand old scheme of things? On the contrary, Black Elk knew that God’s enormity, his “oldness” could both envelop and be attentive to our particularities. In this same prayer, he asked of God, “Look upon your children with children in their arms, that they may face the winds and walk the good road to the day of quiet.”
While God may be older than all need, he is still able to look intently upon his children, bearing the needs of their own children. Considering Black Elk’s context, the task of feeding and caring for children in the midst of such economic and cultural oppression would have been enormous. This plight would not be ignored, even by Wakan Tanka, the great holiness that is older than all things.
We should invoke Black Elk’s intercession because, like all the saints, he was both intimately familiar with the struggles and the beauty of our human life, and the great, mysterious attention of God upon us. In the lives of all of us, we are confronted daily with need, with pain and with prayer. Even unconsciously, we are so often praying because, how could we not be? We are creatures of need; it is our nature to pray, to need.
Black Elk also had the insight and humility to hold two spiritualities together. His Catholicism was only enriched by the depth of spirit he had received, and was formed in, through Lakota spirituality. His understanding of God as “older than all need” reflected the ancient wisdom of his people.
Here is Black Elk’s prayer recorded originally in the book Black Elk Speaks, written by John G. Neihardt:
Grandfather, Great Sacred One,
You have been always and before You nothing has been.
There is nothing to pray to but You.
The star nations all over the universe are Yours,
And Yours are the grasses of the earth.
Day in and day out You are the life of things.
You are older than all need,
Older than all pain and prayer.
Grandfather, all over the world the faces of the living ones are alike.
In tenderness they have come up out of the ground.
Look upon Your children with children in their arms,
That they may face the winds,
And walk the good road to the day of quiet.
Teach me to walk the soft earth,
A relative to all that live.
Sweeten my heart and fill me with light,
And give me the strength to understand and the eyes to see.
Help me, for without You I am nothing.
Let us ask Black Elk to pray for us. When we do so, let us be bold in what we ask through his intercession as we await his canonization. Among other favors, let us seek to know God’s immense presence, even in the midst of our deepest pain and need, personally or collectively. Through Black Elk’s wisdom, we can take heart in a God who is older and bigger than all of our need, yet loving enough to respond.
Correction, Aug. 22, 11:11 a.m.: This article has been updated to include the correct Lakota name for the Black Hills. It is He Sapa, not Hehaka Sapa.
