Coming in from the icy parking lot, you don't really find your footing until the scent fills your nostrils. The place is the foyer of St. John Nepomucene Catholic Church, on the south side of Piesk. The scent is kraut, pungent and welcoming.
Although, that’s not what this February event is known for. It’s the annual pork and dumpling dinner, where church members work hard in preparation during the week preceding, go to Saturday night mass, and then spend Sunday serving their neighbors. That word “neighbor” I deploy here in the Biblical sense, because people drive in from distance to experience the church-basement fellowship.
This particular event was read into the Congressional Record in 2007. Parcel to his recognition of the 125th anniversary of the town of Pisek, Senator Kent Conrad declared, “Pisek’s church . . . was blessed on the feast of St. John Nepomucene on May 16, 1887, and today it continues to be a vital part of the community.
“The community’s celebration will include a church service, a parade, [and] a traditional Bohemian pork and dumpling meal.”
That congressional notice somehow failed to mention the other reason visitors filter through the old church: the Mucha of Pisek. I remember when I first heard Jason Lindell, of Park River, intone to me that phrase, the Mucha of Pisek, and ever since I have used it reverently, as I do now.
The Mucha of Pisek is, arguably, the most significant work of visual art in North Dakota. Partly because of its historical content — it depicts Ss. Cyril and Methodius, who are credited with having brought the Faith to Moravia, ancestral home for many of the Pisek congregants. Significant mainly, though, because of the artist — Alphonse Mucha, who is best known as the originator of a school of decorative arts known as Art Nouveau, but had another artistic life as a painter of epic visions from Slavic history.
I’m not sure that the pork and dumplings served in the church basement are works of art, but they are matters of tradition, longstanding enough that I haven’t learned just when the first dinner was served. Pork roast, dumplings (brought from Leo’s Potato Dumplings of Lankin), applesauce, poppyseed rolls, kolaches, plenty of coffee.
Attendance was a little down this year on account of sub-zero temperatures, but having prepared for four hundred, the parishioners served nearly all the food, much of it to drive-through customers. That’s important, because like most church suppers, this is a fundraiser.
Is it possible that a mortgage can be an agent of community? Maybe, sort of. I mean, the parishioners have to work hard, but as the old farm ballad says, the mortgage always works the hardest. The pork and dumpling dinner went dark for the better part of a decade, but it came back in the last few years. There was a mortgage, you see, incurred for roof repairs and refurbishment of the gorgeous stained glass that graces the sanctuary.
Father Jason Lefor suggested revival of the dinner to help retire the mortgage. Our brief conversation told me I want to have another one with this priest who calls himself “a geranium” — part German from Hungary, part Ukrainian — with deep Dakota roots. Meantime, we carried home a bag of kolaches.
