After all, practicing Catholic families seek more sane forms of re-creation than our artificial video game culture.
We like taking little road trips a few times a year to small towns in eastern Oklahoma, to check out their local churches, museums. restaurants, and sites of attraction. We’ve probably done about 20 of these outings in the last 5 years, each one proving to be a fruitful and frugal adventure. So this one was no different, marking pretty high up the list. I had some work to do in the morning, so we got a later start. We packed tuna fish sandwiches, chips, cheese, and seltzer water for a picnic lunch once we arrived in downtown Pawhuska. As you leave Tulsa going north on Interstate 75, the land already starts to open up into plainly beautiful rolling ranch land, preparing you for the wide desert-like landscape that surrounds this town.
There is a spiritual solace in that kind of environment devoid of urban materialism.
Our first destination—The Prairie Woman Mercantile, which is Drummond's own creative business injecting life into the town. A mercantile-style store featuring her signature kitchenware, a restaurant showcasing her famous Southern cooking recipes, a bakery, and hotel. The place was a combination of simplicity, high quality, warmth, and authenticity. Tightening our belts as of late, we opted after our parking lot picnic for pecan cinnamon rolls in the second floor bakery cafe. The Amish couldn’t have made it better. There is something to be said for the value of producing things that have high quality, to nourish the spirit. Even from a cinnamon roll made with bourbon, brown sugar, and molasses.
I love quality over quantity.
After a stroll through shops selling cowboy apparel and art, and stopping to pet a horse used to give carriage rides, we took advantage of the free vouture given at the Mercantile to tour the Drummond ranch and guest Lodge west of town. It was a surreal experience. 100,000 acres, 9,000 head of cattle, as far as the eye could see. I remarked to the tour guide (a retired cowboy gentleman) at their hill side Lodge, which Drummond uses to film her cooking shows and as a family guest house, that looking across their land it reminds me of a vast desert. He responded "It's funny you say that. The Osage Indian tribe that has lived here since before it was a state called this land 'The Great Desert."
This same cowboy also related how the local Osage tribe converted more to Catholicism than Protestantism. I found that interesting as an Okie Catholic.
The panoramic view, and the Lodge itself, was really surreal. An ultra-plain, rugged kind of beauty, but absolutely realist environment. At a distance you could see the Drummond homestead, very modest considering my estimate her husband's land alone is worth at least $200,000,000, and her reported assets around $8,000,000.
Their life and livelihood then is a good example of maintaining authenticity in our commercialized society.
So we needed to get back to town quickly to see Immaculate Conception church's famed stained glass windows before the sun started going down. Entering the church I could see why it had the nickname "Cathedral of the Osage." Stunningly beautiful stained glass depictions of the life of Christ, with an amazing natural brightness. And this was around 5:30 pm on a cloudy day, which made me wonder what it must look like at noon on a sunny day. The church itself was built in the traditional American gothic style -- high vaulted ceilings, large statuesque stations of the cross, a majestic marble high altar, and two similar smaller side altars on either side, large statues of the Sacred Heart and the Virgin Mary, and a huge, dark-wood confessional in the back (which I took advantage of, the priest hearing confessions).
Incidentally, this was the church where just last Fall the young pastor hosted the Fraternity of St. Peter parish to celebrate their parish's anniversary by offering there the Traditional Latin Mass, followed by a pizza dinner catered by none other than the Prairie Woman's wood oven pizzeria. This little six hour excursion was definitely rejuvenating and something I recommend for all Okie locals. In the end we were able to contemplate God's truth and goodness in His creation and in the simplicity of rural life.
Deo gracias.
