Sunday morning meds from Psalm 42

 

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? 

Why so disturbed within me? 

Put your hope in God, 

for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

 One night late, years ago, a preacher friend of mine, over a few beers, began talking about what he went through when his wife left him, years before, an event that’s not supposed to happen, and certainly not supposed to happen to preachers. He didn’t blame her; he knew he’d had a hand in what happened himself, preacher or not.

At that late hour, with a bit of lubrication, I stayed with him when it appeared he wanted to talk. I sound as if I was using him, and maybe I was in a way; but what interested me was his use of a phrase I’d heard before: “It took me a long time to process that,” he kept saying. “I didn’t have the tools at first to process what had happened.”

I’ll admit I thought it was psychobabble, a cliché, an entirely strange word drawn from what we do to legislation or cheese or army recruits. But the emotion he carried as he told me the story made me wonder what that pat expression meant in the context of his adultery. I wanted process unpacked.

By “process,” he said, he meant becoming able to look at the wound and not cry or rage. Process, he said, meant stepping back from the immediacy of the emotions, a step that wasn’t at all easy--and it took time, he said.  And it took work.  Like forgiveness.

It seems to me that in verse five of Psalm 42, David (if he’s the writer) appears to have processed something. The unforgettable opening verses of the psalm emerge from the core of his grief; but verse five steps back from the sadness that threatens him and he begins talking to himself.  “For heaven’s sake,” he says, “what’s with me anyway? Why am I so incredibly depressed?”

Then he pulls out an old bromide and tells himself what he’d obviously known for years and even sung in a whole psalter of his own ballads, something the curtains of his despair had seemingly covered: “Put your hope in God,” he tells himself, processing his sadness. 

And then the resolution. Picture him, gritting his teeth, almost a snarl, pulling intent and dedication out of truth he knew, inside out:  “. . .for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

I may be wrong. Maybe there’s a gap in this psalm. Maybe, like the preacher without a wife, it took him some time to process the emptiness in his life. 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to consult some standard King David biography and discover that this song was finished months after it was started, that he’s simply telling the story? 

But we don’t know that, and no one ever will. All we’re left with the psalm. And in this verse—or so it seems to me—David seems to bottom out, to take hold of the promises of God he’s relied on throughout his life, at a myriad of other moments when he stood in dire need of being rescued. “Put your hope in God,” he says, in command form.

In this verse, the story the poem tells is at its climax because the writer has stepped back to tell himself, to shout, in fact, the truth into his own ears, and now ours. “I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” [emphasis mine, but I think his too].

Sounds like a preacher friend of mine, talking to me over a beer years ago.

Sounds like Job.  Sounds like a lot of us.  

Pieter, Theologian

 

It was a while ago now, four short years, counting like a grandparent. I finished with opening prayer at a Sunday dinner, and Pieter, our then first-grade grandson, who was, back then, promiscuous with oddly bedeviling questions, suddenly asked, “Does Ian know God?”

Ian is his little brother, not even a year old at the time, as I remember, but an almost divine babbler, or so his grandpa thought. But Ian hadn’t come anywhere close to delivering a decipherable word. That would take years.

“Does Ian know God?” Pieter asked.

My first reaction was silence. After all, I’m only Grandpa, not a parent. My daughter and her husband should be the ones to answer, right?

Besides, I wasn’t sure what to say.

So I’m wondering what they’re going to answer—Mom and Dad.

Me?—I’m thinking probably yes, because Ian was their last, of any of us oldsters around the table. Not that long ago he was closer to whatever is eternity than any of us. Sure, he knows God, I’m thinking. Besides, he’s still several months away from showing a dime’s worth of original sin—maybe more. But then, Grandpa is prejudice, and I don’t change his too-often stinky diapers.

Later I asked myself whether any of us really knows God? It’s a kind of spellbinding question, even though I know all sorts of good, sweet Christians who would thunder out the joy of the little guy’s intimate proximity, I’m sure.

Some time ago, I ran across this stunning line I wish I could attribute: “The traditions of theology that speak to me undercut the assumption that the nature of divine reality is readily definable.” Woah! Me too. As I get older, more and more I’m thinking we’re on really shaky ground when we think we know it all.

Maybe I’ve found myself in too many Flannery O’Connor stories.

“Well, Pieter,” I could have said, “I suppose little Ian knows God just about as well as any of us do.”

He’d have looked up at me dizzily, I’m sure. And, truth is, I wouldn’t have liked to parse that out for him just then, not with the burgers getting cold. Just dropping that idea out in front of his questioning eyes would have been almost a form of child abuse, even if it might have been, in a way, true.

Well, Mr. Ian is now four years old, a Tot Church vet who’s graduated to Children’s Worship and other forms of Sunday School, all of which has made him quite handy at answering theological questions, even those he poses to himself.

When his mom told him his grandparents had skipped off to Wisconsin for a couple of days, he was, I suppose, a little jealous.  “But God doesn’t want them in Wisconsin,” he said.

Fortunately, he’s not a prophet—we escaped the cheese state without major damages.

Or this. His mom says it’s not time for snacks because he just had one. My grandson, budding theologian, is quite clear about divine injunctions:  “But, Mom, God says I should have a snack.”

He asserts such things more often, as God is as close him as his underwear. I figure he’s only a few years shy of becoming yet another Joseph Smith.

Welcome to the real world, I guess, where all of us swing quite blindly between certainty and doubt, between bull-headed dogmatism and paralyzing disbelief.  Rather like David. The King.  The Poet. The One with God’s own heart.

It’s our own blasted humanness that’s at fault, Pieter.  

What we know is that God almighty is both imminent—he’s here and Ian probably knows him—and he’s transcendent—he’s way, way beyond Ian at eight months or four years; and way beyond you, Pieter, and way beyond your grandfather the blogger, and even your great-great-great grandfather the erudite seminary professor. He’s way beyond every one of us.

I suppose we shouldn’t forget Karl Barth’s answer when someone asked the learned theologian which doctrine of God was most central to life. "The greatest theological insight that I have ever had is simple,” Barth said, or so the legend claims: “’Jesus loves me, this I know,/for the Bible tells me so!"

When he was a toddler, did Ian know God, Pieter? Don’t ask such tough questions.

How about now, when he’s four?--does Ian know God?

Well, he does, and he doesn’t. Like you.  Like me.

What I do know is this: God, sure as anything, knows Ian. And you, Pieter. And me too. Isn’t that a hoot?

Let’s eat.

Lott's wife

 

The land north of Des Moines is unalterably flat, or level, and, early summer especially, strikingly empty. From above, the snaking Des Moines River must seem a half-healed gash in an otherwise tightly stretched hide.  With so much wonderful land, it seems strange to see so many abandoned farms and acreages. You can’t help but wonder, where all the people farming this land requires have gone—clearly they’re not home.

The land was far emptier in the spring of 1848, when Henry Lott, his wife and two sons pulled up stakes at Red Rock, in the center of the state, and pushed west, earliest of the white colonizers to take up land in Iowa’s broad prairie. He’d been an Indian trader at Red Rock, a frontier occupation that tended to attract men of questionable moral character. Such a man, sad to say, was Henry Lott, who moved west once it was clear that the Sac and Fox were out beyond the Missouri River.

Lott wanted to pick up the trade which made him able to move west, far into western Iowa, otherwise uninhabited country. With the departure of the Sac and Fox, Lott determined he could make some money by establishing trade with the Dakota Sioux, who roamed over much of what we call Siouxland today.

Unlike the Sac and Fox, with whom Lott had traded at Red Rock, the Dakota Sioux seemed somehow predisposed to trouble. Lott undoubtedly was no peacenik, and he got into a tangle with the headman of the local Dakota bad. Tangle is likely too cute a word. The potential for graft among traders was immense—buying and selling guns and horses and contraband whiskey might well be a good way to fortune but you can, too easily, lose your neck—or your scalp.

Problems began, people say, when the Dakota headman, Si-dom-i-na-do-ta, accused Henry Lott of taking land ceded to the Indians. They gave him some time to get the heck out. And right here the stories get mixed and strained. Some say Lott ran a business in stolen horses and Indian ponies, grabbing them and delivering them all the way across the state. Some say it was plain and simple whiskey—too much, especially in the company of firearms. History is no longer clear.

The results are not. Sidominadota returned in force. When they came up to the homestead, Lott himself was across the river, hidden from what seemed to him untenable odds. Meanwhile, his son, scared stiff, ran off to find his father.

The Dakota band left without killing Lott’s wife, but the tragedy was immense.  After a week, she died in a paroxysm of distress and fear, and the son she sent to find his father never returned. Weeks later, his coatless body was found in a snowbank.

Six years later, in retaliation, Henry Lott killed the Sioux chief, along with his children. Because Sidomindota was Indian, white frontier justice looked away.

Holt went west, where, it is said, he was hanged as a horse thief.

We came down from the immense plain of bare ground last week. We curled down and down and down, until we reached the banks of the Des Moines River. I was determined to find the grave of Mrs. Lott, the first white woman to die in Webster County, Iowa. Pictures show her monument, broad and tall, standing above other stones in the ancient cemetery. Sometimes it’s a tangle of rough toad, difficult to get to. It was.

I hate to admit it, but we never did locate the grave of Lott’s wife.  It was a hazy Sunday afternoon, but at the bottom of the richly forested Des Moines River valley, the old graveyard just plain didn’t seem to be there.

There we were at the bottom of a steep, heavily forested river valley, the mist hanging like silvery gossamer against the ensuing darkness.

I generally don’t give up easily, so I swear I’ll try again, but we didn’t find it. Seeing is believing, they say, but I couldn’t help think just then, that sometimes not seeing is believing too.

_________________

Image stolen from https://destinationstratford.net/vegorscemetery.html . It exists--I just couldn't find it.

In the bottom of the box

It would just seem to me that the 17th-century French playwright, poet, and actor,Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, a man commonly called, simply, Moliere, wasn't particularly Reformed, nor did he want to be, nor was he expected to be. I'm thinking that during 19th century Dutch Reformed Holland, Moliere would be dismissed as a lightweight--the writer of comic sketches that tended to be, well, farcical, a funny bone without a body, someone probably left best unstudied simply because he was a man of "the theater," and Lord knows "the theater" was huge risk, a first step into sin.

So you can imagine my shock when I discovered this amazing twosome, Moliere and Racine, in the bottom of an old box of books, part of the library of Prof. G. K. Hemkes, a studied theologian from the early days of a tiny little denomination of nay-sayers, the Christian Reformed Church, a break-off of the much older Dutch Reformed Church.

Hemkes was my great-grandfather, long gone before I was born. Nobody I know knew him. My dad didn't and claimed he didn't know much about him either. Grandpa Schaap, who married his daughter, was gone by the time I was five or six. He died without calling me into his room to tell me stories; in fact, no uncles or aunts knew much about this Hemkes guy either. 

From what little I could glean from a few articles, he was a conservative in the wars of his time, most of which centered (as they still do) on the degree of worldliness Christians can risk by membership in any group other than their own hometown congregations. I suppose the easiest way of saying it is that Professor Hemkes tended to shun the outreach of this world. "Worldliness" was an iron hammer back then, and by all means you didn't want to be smashed by it, worldliness that is.

So, those books up there are the top of the page, seemingly unopened, were a shock when I found them. It never would have occurred to me that my conservative grandfather would have owned them, but own them he did.

I'm guessing that it's his handwriting, in his book, a collection of plays by Moliere, the jokester, that he might well be have bought from Mr. H. Bosma on October 12 of 1859. Back then, he was still in Holland, hadn't yet immigrated. 

I was non-plussed. My very conservative great-grandpa would have had on the shelves of his library the complete Moliere? There it was in my hands, along with a copy of the plays of Racine, yet another French playwright. 

Loved it. Not because it proved him a hypocrite--one could come to that conclusion; nor because it proved him a  man of this world, also possible. I loved it because Theatre complete De J. Racine and two volumes of Moliere (in French) suggested that Grandpa wasn't only someone who fought the good fight against worldliness. What I had in my hands suggested

that if he hated the theater, if he despised worldliness, at least he knew what he was talking about.

They're in the French language, of course, and published (Moliere at least) in Paris in 1858. 

 

Sunday morning meds from Psalm 42

I say to God my Rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?’"

 The present tense in this verse suggests the event the psalmist is describing has probably happened often. He’s not telling us something bizarre here, reporting on some weird epiphany-gone-awry. Seems to me that what he’s saying is, “Whenever I feel estranged from God, I say to him. . .” Not just once did this happen; sadly enough, I’m abandoned more often.

           

If that’s true, then what he says makes better sense. “I say to God my rock—which is to say, my fortress in times of trouble—‘why aren’t you my fortress in times of trouble?’”

 

What he feels is a hybrid pain only believers feel, because only someone who knows God as a rock can feel the terror of quicksand. Only a believer continues to talk to a God who seems to be out of state.

           

Makes no sense, really, but then neither does faith itself, often enough. The odd paradox of the psalmist’s supplication is understandable only to someone who knows, who says “been there, done that.” Like me . . . and you, probably.

           

And the question, this time at least, isn’t “how long (as it is in Psalm 13, for instance),” but “why?” “Why” is a question that also suggests significant distance. We don’t have time for “why” in the middle of battle. “Why” arises only when the battle doesn’t quit, or when we begin to look at our wounds and realize the pain.

           

In “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” Cotton Mather, the firebrand Puritan prelate, makes great claims for New England’s founders. They were “a chosen generation,” he says, “so pure as to disrelish many things which they thought wanted reformation elsewhere, and yet so peaceable that they embraced a voluntary exile in a squalid, horrid, American dessert.” They were saints.

           

But, alas, Mather says, along came their children, who like “many degenerate plants,” were altogether “otherwise inclined.” The founders were grain; their children, weeds—that’s what Mather sees and how he explains why the Devil is rampaging through New England. Everywhere he looked, after all, he saw witchcraft.

 

Why? “We have all the reason imaginable to ascribe it unto the rebuke of heaven for our manifold apostacies.” Mather, unlike David, appears to know the answer to why. It’s all our fault. Lo and behold, we’ve departed from righteousness.

           

But Mather’s explanation fed the madness that filled prisons around Salem, Massachusetts, and finally took 25 lives. Thank goodness God isn’t Cotton Mather.

All of us want to know why; all of us seek understanding for what can’t be fully understood. It’s a human thing, and it’s been a great blessing. Why is the source question of science, the foundation of education itself. Why is the beginning of knowledge.

 

But the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And some questions we ask, questions from the heart and soul of our lives, may not have easy answers, and that’s the phenomena David is describing. Remember—it has happened more than once. Why have you left me alone?

 

And really, that’s the story of the psalm: even when he doesn’t seem to be our Rock, he is. It’s all here in this lament, in his pain and his joy. Even when there are no answers, he is.

 

Makes no sense at all unless you know it too.

Thanks

There's a kid down the hall. He's got a baseball game--the whole team was in the motel's breakfast room not long ago, a sea of red. He's one of 'em, cap on backwards for style.

We're away from home and in a motel for the first time in a long, long time, my first trip out from home since Thanksgiving, not that last one either. We're going to see how it goes, this tag-team of me and my wife/nurse/housemaid. I'm not swift.

I've left the room before her because I couldn't be slower if I was harpooned. It's not that long ago that it took the a whole baseball team to get me out of the car, but I've graduated from the wheelchair, and then from the walker, and I'm on the cane now, slow as molasses and wobbly as a drunken sailor. 

So this kid--I swear, fifty feet down the hall--spots me coming and kindly opens the inside exit door. Two of his teammates have already exploded out, but he sees the crippled guy stumbling down the hall and he think what he really should do is hold the door open. So he does. 

Little inklings of grace.

So when I get up to him, I tell him what a wonderful thing it was for him to think of this guy with the cane way up the hallway. I want to grab him and hug him, but it wouldn't be kosher. Maybe if I was female.

Anyway, I stumble through the door and by now his brawny coach/dad has just caught up. He heard me. In a minute he knew the whole story. "That's really great, Jonathan," he says as I finally get out the door.

Inklings of grace.

And another. I'm several days off on my visit to the dentist. I thought the appointment was today. When I drive in, I'm sort of non-plussed because the parking lot is empty, but I park, stumble up the curb (got the cane again), and a dental assistant steps out. "Are you here for an appointment?" she says sweetly.

I tell her yes, and that I think I'm on time.

"Wrong date," she says, follows me in. "No appointments today--we're working on some new program.. . ."

She's very sweet, accustomed to dealing with old joes with memory issues. Then, just as I turn around, she says, "Your shoestring is open"-- and, lo and behold, it is. . .hence the photograph. 

So here's to all of those who help those of us who require more help--the kid in the baseball cap and the office manager who make my life--and the lives of countless others--just a step or two easier.  

Inklings of grace. You're a blessing. 

(I'd like to hug you, but it wouldn't be kosher.)  

Twenty years ago, Siouxland

 For years, I went out on Saturday mornings, looking for the dawn. That shot above is 20 years old, from  a Saturday morning in early May right here, probably somewhere west of town.

I never realized how much beauty could be staged just beyond our back door until I was almost sixty years. I wasn't awed by the near infinity of space, land and sky, until then, until I went out deliberately not to miss it. 

There's absolutely nothing unique about that picture above, but the shots I took that morning is clear evidence of my desire to know how to style the beauty that was all around that morning. Trying to capture that morning in a single exposure is silly, and that too is something it took me most of my life to learn--silly, but well worth the effort.

The shots I took that morning show me trying hard to find a way to tell others how gorgeous the world really showed itself to be.

Maybe silhouettes.

I don't remember the morning, but the story is in the pictures. Very few have ever treasured this particular place for its beauty. But when the immensity of land and sky lights up gorgeously, if the sun wraps the sky in a wide wardrobe of color, this world's sheer beauty can take your breath away. 

That's what I likely told myself on the drive back to town--that, and I'll be back.