IT WAS A CLEAR and sunny spring morning in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. No one noticed the yellow Ryder rental truck as it drove up to the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building. The horrendous blast that took the lives of 168 men, women and children permanently altered the face of the city and sent shock waves around the nation and the world.
Up the hill, two blocks away, St. Paul's Cathedral was left standing, but the blast shook its foundation, lifted its roof and then set it down askew.
Its fine Aeolian-Skinner organ was destroyed. Many of its 28 splendid stained-glass windows were damaged. A stone cross on its south roof peak was shattered. No services could be held within the century-old Norman Gothic cathedral for two full years.
Nine years after the disastrous calamity, a small new chapel has been dedicated, marking basic completion of a $7.5 million restoration of St. Paul's.
"Help to restore our cathedral came from an outpouring of generosity of many, many people and organizations, far and near," said the Rev. Canon Carol Hampton, principal liturgist and master of ceremonies for the dedication service.
St. Oakerhater Chapel is dedicated to the first American Indian in the church's Calendar of Saints. Oakerhater was a valiant, lithe Cheyenne warrior in his youth, a prisoner of war in his 30s as a victim of westward expansion and a lonely deacon of the Episcopal Church from 1881-1931.
"The Episcopal Church hierarchy abandoned its work (in the late 1800s) among the 67 tribes pushed into Oklahoma, but Oakerhater did not." the late Lois Clark, a Muskogee Creek, wrote in her book, God's Warrior. She spent the last years of her life heading a successful effort to gain highest recognition for the deacon. In 1985, General Convention voted to designate Sept. 1 as Oakerhater Feast Day.
During Oakerhater's 50 year-ministry on his home reservation -- the Cheyenne-Arapaho Reservation in western Oklahoma -- the devout deacon was at times the single ordained Episcopal presence in all Indian Territory.
His second highest posthumous recognition came with dedication of the St. Oakerhater Chapel. Lois Clark's grandson, Sanger Clark, as acolyte, carried a Cheyenne-beaded cross in the procession.
The dedication was timed well. It coincided with the annual gathering of Native Americans for Winter Talk, held each year at St. Crispin's, a conference center of the Diocese of Oklahoma, located near Seminole.
Liturgical inculturation was the focus of the 16th annual Winter Talk. Instructors were the two female Indian canons – Hampton of Oklahoma and the Rev. Canon Ginny Doctor, a Mohawk, in the Diocese of Alaska.
Fifty-six indigenous people from Canada, Hawaii, Alaska, Florida, New York and some dozen other places joined cathedral parishioners to witness a veritable showcase of Native American cultural elements and traditions woven into Christian worship.
First it was the traditional Four Directions Prayer: "…Great Spirit, Life-giver ... We, who you brought up from the dust of the ground, gather in your presence…"
Diocesan Bishop Robert M. Moody carried an intricately beaded crosier as the processional moved in step with an "honor song" by Tony Tonemah, a Kiowa. The three-foot cross carried by a young Muskogee Creek acolyte was beaded by the Cheyennes from Oakerhater's home reservation.
The table altar was draped with a Pendleton blanket, the pulpit with a star quilt. The organ and St. Paul's choir burst forth with Many and Great, the Dakota chant memorialized in Hymn 385 in the present Episcopal hymnal.
"How awesome is this place, this is none other than the House of God, and this is the gateway to heaven," said homilist for the dedication service, Lawrence H. Hart, a kinsman of Oakerhater and hereditary Cheyenne peace chief, quoting from the ancient patriarch, Jacob (Gen. 28:17).
Awesome indeed is the St. Oakerhater chapel. Located to the left of the high altar in space vacated by organ pipes at renovation, the chapel's centerpoint is a blown-glass window executed by the noted Tlingit artist Preston Singletary.
The glass depicts the glyph of St. Oakerhater, whose name translates as "Making Medicine" and was also known as "Sun Dancer." The colors in the north window move from a golden center with a red "sun" outward into progressing shades of deeper red.
Other cultural objects were dedicated -- a Caddoan drum presented by Mary Ellen Meredith and a beaded cross from the Rev. Jim Knowles, a Cherokee deacon who is missioner at Oakerhater Mission at Watonga, Okla.
The chapel and blown-glass window were gifts of three Indian families – the Hamptons, Clark-Sullivans and Merediths.
In the chapel blessing, a Cherokee priest, Barney Jackson, used an eagle feather to waft incense. The bishop used a bouquet of sweet grass, sage and cedar to sprinkle water contained in a beaded bottle and brought from the sacred Pyramid Lake, Nev.
To the tune of the Navajo blessing, "Peace before us, peace behind us, peace under our feet…" came a triumphant conclusion to the liturgical showcase – which symbolized triumph not only over calamity of a heinous destructive act, but also over old ethnocentricity that had denied embodying Native American culturally relevant symbols, language, movement, color and elements into Christian worship.
"We write into our cathedral walls a new history," said Dean George Back. "We honor a great servant of God, a Native American. In doing so, we raise up a new love story in the midst of many old stories of abuse and disrespect suffered by American Indians."
