Hi everyone! Kurt’s not able to write this week’s article, so he’s asked me to tag in. And I see it as a bit of providence, because I had something I’ve wanted to write about for quite some time, and was hoping for a chance to share it before October ended.
Christians typically reflect on death, judgment, heaven, and hell around this time of year. Traditionally that focus comes more around November, but where I’m from, the month of October is also a time of reflection on those things as we commemorate the anniversary of the deadliest wildfire in American history (and no, it isn’t the Chicago Fire, though it happened on the same day). So today, I wanted to tell you all the story of that fire that I heard about often growing up, and tie it into a broader question I’ve had recently.
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The Great Peshtigo Fire
In its earliest days, the small town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, was a logging town, and it was growing quickly. The first sawmills were built in Peshtigo, as well as the nearby towns of Marinette, Wisconsin, and Menominee, Michigan (my hometown), in the early 1830s, and logging was the primary industry of our area. At the time, most of Peshtigo was made of wood, from the buildings to the sidewalks. Even the roads were made of wood. At that time, and especially within the city limits, Peshtigo’s roads were what’s known as corduroy roads, made from huge logs split lengthwise and laid side-by-side, and then covered with layers of sawdust and wood chips to level them. The road leading to my parents’ house in Menominee used to be one, and even though it’s a gravel road now, you can still feel the century-old logs underneath as you drive along. Peshtigo was experiencing a major drought during the fall of 1871, and on October 8 of that year, the stage was set for the ultimate nightmare.
We still don’t know what started the fire. There are several theories I’ve heard, but a widely believed theory says that railroad workers clearing land for tracks the Sunday before started a brush fire that went out of control. Peshtigo was overtaken by a firestorm, with flames likely reaching 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and winds about 110 miles per hour or more (there really isn’t a way to fully verify those exact numbers, but based on the wreckage and what survivors said it’s a rough estimate). Some survivors reported that the firestorm generated a fire whirl, basically a flaming tornado, that even sent rail cars and houses into the sky. People thought it was the end of the world. Many of Peshtigo’s residents sought refuge in the nearby Peshtigo River, and many who did either drowned or died of hypothermia. The town was destroyed in no time at all.
There was a Canadian missionary priest serving as a pastor in Peshtigo named John Peter Pernin, who earlier in the day saw the smoke of the approaching fire as he was preparing to take the ferry into Menominee County for ministry. He rushed back to the church and began packing his horse cart, trying to save whatever he could. He got to the tabernacle, where Holy Communion is kept, to try to save the Eucharist inside. I’ve been told that, in his rush to save what he could, he lost the key and couldn’t open it. So he grabbed the whole tabernacle and put it into the cart as the fire was beginning to close in. Eventually, he turned the horse loose so it could get to safety and pushed the cart himself. He sought shelter in the river, and pushed the cart in with him as far as he could, but the tabernacle was caught in the wind and fell off. He survived the fire, but the tabernacle was not immediately recovered with him, and he lost track of it. Put a pin in that, I’ll come back to it in a second.
At the same time, the fire had made its way down to the Door Peninsula, seeming to skip across the bay and was making its way to the village of Robinsonville, which is now named Champion. About 12 years prior, a woman named Adele Brice had seen apparitions of Mary, the mother of Jesus, at the site of what is now the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion. People from the surrounding area gathered at the Shrine with Adele and her community to seek refuge. As the fire drew nearer, Adele led the people in prayer, processing around the perimeter of the property asking for God’s protection.
A heavy rainstorm finally moved in and extinguished the fire in that area. The next morning, those who sought refuge at the Shrine found themselves on an island of green in a sea of ashes. The fire had come directly up to the perimeter, scorching the outside of the fence around the property, and came not an inch closer. Everyone and everything within that perimeter was miraculously preserved.
Back in Peshtigo on the day after the fire, as survivors were looking through the debris to try to salvage what they could, one of Pernin’s parishioners approached him and asked if he knew what happened to the tabernacle. He said no. So the parishioner told him, “Come quickly then, and see. Oh! Father, it is a great miracle.” I’ll let Father Pernin describe the rest:
“I hurried with him to that part of the river into which I had pushed as far as possible my wagon containing the tabernacle. This wagon had been blown over on its side by the storm; whilst the tabernacle itself had been caught up by the wind and cast on one of the logs floating on the water. Everything in the immediate vicinity of this spot had been blackened or charred by the flames; logs, trunks, boxes, nothing had escaped, yet, strange to say, there rose the tabernacle, intact in its snowy whiteness, presenting a wonderful contrast to the grimy blackness of the surrounding objects.” – Fr. Pernin, The Great Peshtigo Fire: An Eyewitness Account
The fire hadn’t harmed it, nor had sitting in the water before its recovery. Now, just to be clear, this tabernacle is very simple compared to many others. Some amount of gold is always used in the construction, but rather than a heavy metal box, this tabernacle was lined with a small amount of gold inside, but its exterior was a delicate white wooden box veiled by a thin cloth. Pernin left it where it was found for two days so that everyone could see it and know that God had not abandoned them. It was spoken of all over the area and attracted a great deal of attention. Father Pernin wrote about this and the rest of the fire in a memoir first called The Finger of God is There, and now called The Great Peshtigo Fire: An Eyewitness Account.
As incredible as this story is, about 1500 people in the area, and 800 from Peshtigo alone, did not live to see the ending. The Peshtigo Company boarding house, which housed single laborers and mill workers and was one of the largest buildings in town, was destroyed, and no less than 75 people died with it. Many of those, we believe, are buried in the mass grave of unidentified victims at what is now the Peshtigo Fire Museum.
The Thought that Crossed My Mind
A couple of years ago, I brought my wife to the museum for the first time, and a question came to me: can we do anything for the dead?
I knew that thousands of people–my neighbors–died in a horrific event. For my whole life, we had honored their memory, even though their names had been lost to history. We had thanked God for their lives and we continue to tell their story as best we can, but isn’t there more we can do?
Can’t we pray for them?
Let’s consider something that we as Christians take for granted sometimes: God does not experience time like we do.
We experience time in a line. The past is gone, the present is happening, and the future hasn’t materialized yet. And it’s a one-way line; you can only move towards the future.
But God is not a creature. He’s not bound by the laws of space and time.
In 2 Peter 3:8, we’re told:
With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day.
And in Psalm 90:4, we read:
For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night.
These passages have different contexts from the question I’m exploring, but they still offer insight into God’s relationship with time.
Let’s also consider the Crucifixion. We believe that, first and foremost, the Crucifixion was a historical event. It happened at a particular time in history. We believe that this specific historical event is what saves us from our sins, even today. But we also believe that the saving power of Christ’s sacrifice extends to those who came before, whose earthly lives ended well before the Crucifixion took place.
Abraham did not live to see the Crucifixion. Neither did Moses or David or John the Baptist, and yet we believe that Jesus’ death on the Cross opened the way to heaven for them, too. The Crucifixion transcends time, and the salvation He won for us is open to all, across every time and place. No one is excluded from His reach simply because of where or when he lived.
Now, I don’t regard our prayers as on the same level as the Crucifixion of Our Lord. His Crucifixion paid the price for all human sin–past, present, and future. But I think we can still see that God’s providential work is not restricted to the chronological order in which we live.
God doesn’t need to wait for our prayers before He incorporates them into His providential plan. Jesus makes this point in the Gospel of Matthew:
Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Matthew 6:8)
He eternally knows our prayers. He knew them even before we came to be. And He can will that they serve as instruments through which He accomplishes the good He has in mind.
Imagine this: You’re praying for a friend who is about to undergo a dangerous operation tomorrow. Most of us, I think, have been in that position at some point, on either side of it. And we would readily accept that God would hear that prayer and take it into account. The fact that the operation isn’t happening at that moment doesn’t make the prayer for it any less coherent.
Now reverse the chronology: You’re praying for someone who you just learned underwent a dangerous operation. You don’t yet know how it went; all you know is that it happened. And so you decide to pray for your friend, and for the operation, asking God that His will be done in that moment, that the operation was successful. Now, your prayer will not alter the actual history of that event. But given God’s eternal knowledge and providence, could He not have granted grace to your friend in that moment, taking your prayer from the future into account?
Now, Hebrews 9:27 says this:
Just as it is appointed that human beings die once, and after this the judgment, so also Christ, offered once to take away the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to take away sin but to bring salvation to those who eagerly await him.
This is true. Death ends our earthly pilgrimage. But the finality of earthly life does not, by itself, answer every question about God’s providence, or whether He can grant some benefit to those who, to us in our time, have passed from this life. That question deserves to be considered on its own merits.
Remembering the dead is itself a meaningful Christian practice. In fact, many of the first Christians worshiped God and celebrated the Lord’s Supper on the burial sites of saints and martyrs. And looping back to the start, the memorial and honoring of the dead is particularly pronounced in the cases of catastrophic disasters such as the Peshtigo Fire. But what if our response was more than just recollection of the events of the day and what names we still have of those who didn’t live to the end of it? What if we prayed for them, entrusting them to God’s mercy though we cannot know the states of their souls? What if we could ask God to grant them eternal rest, and to have given them His grace and mercy at that fateful hour?
The Entrustment of the Dead to God’s Mercy
Another artifact that survived the Peshtigo Fire, though not unscathed, was a Bible. It was recovered in 1995 at a construction site near the place where the Peshtigo Company boarding house once stood. The Bible was severely burned and petrified by the heat, but it remains somewhat legible to this day if you look closely. It was found opened to Psalms 106 and 107, which both focus on themes of distress and deliverance, and begin similarly:
Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!
The mass grave in Peshtigo holds the remains of no less than 350 unidentifiable individuals, 75 of whom are thought to be workers from the boarding house that the Bible likely came from. It’s possible that someone was reading that as he died. Perhaps God, in His eternal providence, granted someone a final grace of repentance that day, knowing that a Christian would pray for that soul 155 years later.
We’ll never know for sure. Not in this life, anyway. Our prayers cannot rewrite the past, and the particular judgment each person receives at death cannot be changed afterward. But we can entrust the dead in hope to His mercy, and ask Him to have granted them every grace necessary for salvation before their lives were over.
And what a joy it would be to enter into heaven to meet those people, and to learn that our prayers for them during our lifetime some 155 years after theirs played some role in our meeting.
So here’s my encouragement to you: take a trip to Peshtigo. Go check out the museum, take a look at the tabernacle for yourself, along with the Bible and everything else they have there.
And while you’re there, pray.
Pray for Jesus to be close to them at the moment of their deaths. Pray that God granted them grace and a change of heart before their deaths. And pray that your heart may also be changed when your own time is up.
-Wes
“Eternal rest grant unto them all, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon them. Amen”
Sources:
https://www.weather.gov/grb/peshtigofire
