Deborah and I spent our National 4th of July holiday visiting Cahokia, an early community that emerged from this land. To visit there is to hear a cautionary tale about the capacity of a people for greatness, and the pitfalls of prosperity. From before the birth of Christ, a band of hunter/gatherers, had been moving southward through the land we know as Canada, until in the year 700 AD, they arrived in the Mississippi River valley, just east of present day St. Louis, attracted by rich bottom land, streams teeming with fish, and woods abundant with game and fuel. The people learned how grow crops and as food stocks increased, the health of the people improved and greater numbers survived. Greater numbers of healthier people produced even more food and more people in turn. Word of their prosperity spread and others came to join them. Homesteads became villages. Corn became the most useful, reliable staple crop.

With a more mouths to feed, family plots became community gardens, then common fields, increasingly dedicated to large-scale corn production. Villages linked together by systems of roads combined into towns and roads became streets. In a mere 300 years, the community had become the largest population center in North America. Survival in the wilderness was no longer a concern. Now the question became; how to survive in an overcrowded urban environment, adapting to an evolving economic and social system, designed to manage mass population.

The fields of Cahokia now produced so much corn that, in most years, there was a surplus. And that’s where the trouble began. In chronic surplus, corn ceased to be merely a reliable staple, a hedge against starvation. Corn became a commodity, a source of wealth, not something to be shared as members of a community, but hoarded for personal advantage. Corn could be stockpiled, weighed, recorded and given over to those in authority. And so, the corn they grew no longer passed from field to cooking pot, but moved upward as a form of tribute, passing through the hands of village chiefs and clan leaders, up through a hierarchy of bureaucrats and priests and rulers, each taking an increasingly bigger cut.

In the end, under the new system, all corn belonged to the Chief of all chiefs, the head of the hierarchy, the one who was called “The Great Sun”. He was called this because he was believed to embody on earth the divine fire of the sun in the heavens. This being so, he was in a position to mediate blessings to the people or to execute judgment. In that light, it just made sense to give him all the corn and hope that he would be fair and just and generous. And to some degree, he was, dispensing corn to his ruling elite, who kept another share before passing it back downward again, through the levels of the power structure, in ever smaller allotments. Eventually, the poor received back a measure of the corn they had raised, if not enough to prosper, at least enough to remain alive…and inescapably poor.

The Great Sun lived in a big house on a hill in the very center of Cahokia, an un-natural hill built with the sweat of other poor men. For you see, there were by then more than 10,000 people in the city, many more than were needed in the fields. Suddenly, The Great Sun had not only a surplus of corn, but also a surplus of people - thousands and thousands of extra people who needed to be kept busy (and under control). And so he began a great public work. Thousands of poor laborers dug huge pits and carried heavy baskets of earth on their backs, like pack mules, 14 million baskets full, slowly raising a great mound of a hill where The Great Sun to could live and govern and receive tribute. And once the great mound hill was finished, the poor laborers built a long staircase, so that still more poor men could make their baskets heavy with corn, climb the 100 foot man-made hill and give The Great Sun what belonged to him.

Thus, The Great Sun became the wealthiest and most powerful man in the city and the city became the wealthiest and most powerful of all settlements up and down the length of the Mississippi valley. Others hungered for the corn of Cahokia and to have it, they were willing to enter alliances and do The Great Sun’s bidding. And they gave him things in trade, made of metal and shell and hide and bone, fine beautiful things that increased his wealth, prestige and power, like the ornamental arrowheads that would never bring down game, but would someday lie with him in great number under his burial mound.

And these fine things he also dispensed as favors to his priests and rulers, and from them they trickled down to the bureaucrats and clan chiefs. Not all the way down, mind you. They never reached the poor farmers whose toil created all this wealth in the first place, those who saved the seed, tilled the soil, planted and weeded, those who patrolled the fields at night, that deer and raccoon might take away not one kernel of The Great Sun’s corn, those who gathered the harvest, stored it in clay pots, poured it into baskets or carried it up the full height of the mound and laid this golden wealth at The Great Sun’s feet.

The great wealth of Cahokia made the city the object of envy and conquest. Whole forests were felled to build an enormous stockade enclosing the city. Meanwhile, within the walls, growing disparities of fortune and status led to social disintegration, as well as corruption and abuse. The poor soon tired of creating the wealth of The Great Sun, building his mounds and leveling his plazas, dancing in his festivals and competing in his games. They tired of giving him their sons to guard his wealth from them, enforce his laws against them and carry off their daughters to lie with him under his mound when he passed into the next world. Meanwhile, growing corn for wealth (and not subsistence) led to over-production, accelerating the depletion of the soil. In time, the corn crops began to fail and the population and the power of Cahokia declined. In 300 years, the city was abandoned. 300 more years passed. The area was resettled by new wandering tribes. When the first European explorers arrived, none of the new inhabitants could tell them anything at all about the city of Cahokia, about The Great Sun, or his mounds.

In his Letter to the Galatians, The Apostle Paul writes, “God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit.” The original settlers of Cahokia sowed their seeds humbly and simply, for the nourishment of their families and their neighbors. In faith that the earth would provide for their needs, they offered prayers for the planting and for the harvest. There was harmony and balance in their world. When they began to sow their seeds for wealth, power and status, to satisfy other appetites, the corruption and disintegration of their agriculture, their religion and their empire soon followed.

In 1964, three men set out from a small monastic community in Elmira, NY, and wandered the wilderness of the desert southwest, until they arrived at another river valley with its own lush bottomland. Like the people of Cahokia, they set about making a new home, going hungry at times, as they learned to grow their food or trade for what they needed. They prayed that God might sustain them materially, so that they might continue to grow spiritually. Slowly, the hardest times passed and they began to prosper, in their own way, and others were drawn to join them. This time, as the community grew, it continued to live by a simple rule of life. Those in authority were not set aside for special privilege, but for special service to the community. The fruits of their fields and other labors were shared equally as they continued to live and eat together. No ornaments testified to wealth or status, but rather a common monastic “habit” reminded them of their equality before God. Whatever prosperity they have achieved has been used to welcome others to their simple way of life. They build no stockades. The monks of Christ in the Desert offer us a different model – sowing to the Spirit, they reap a kind of eternal life, a life where God’s blessing makes material wealth unimportant. And where such distinctions are irrelevant, genuine community endures. As we pause to reflect on our great nation and ponder its future, I wonder which path we will choose. AMEN