Stuff in the Basement

Sioux County History VI--A Winter's Tale

2012-02-13T05:00:00.000-06:00

Unlike many other early Sioux County immigrant families, theMennings, so says Charlie Dyke, had some significant bucks when they left theNetherlands. That relative wealth didnot mean their passage to the new country was a piece of cake. They were still in the North Sea when theirship collided with another. Both sunk,and, along with them, most all of the Menning’s worldly possessions.

Blessedly, some freighter picked them up, brought them to Grigsby,England, from which port they left again, arriving eventually in Quebec. Their next stop was Waupun, Wisconsin; buttheir true destination was Sioux County, Iowa, and a chunk of land about twomiles east and one mile north of Orange City, homestead land just inside theHolland Township line.

When the Mennings got here, like the other early settlers,their first abode was literally dug out of rich Sioux County earth. Dyke doesn’t say what the Mrs. Menningthought of mud floors, but you can guess it didn’t take a half century for themto get a frame house. Their first was a roughshodpalace—14 feet by 14 feet. Welcome tothe New World.

But soon enough they had friends, good friends—the Schuts—fromdown the road a piece. One winter’s daythe Schuts came over for a little friendly neighborliness, two families—just imagine!--packed joyfully into a domicile 14 by 14. That’s right neighborly. Butthere’s more to the story.

Neither family had weather.com on their iPad, so when a bigstorm blew up out of nowhere that afternoon, they were left out in the cold, soto speak. Now the Mennings had a kind oflean-to just big enough for their team and their two precious milk cows. The Schuts had taken a wagon over, so theyhad team as well and were more than a little wary of letting those good horsesout in the storm. Alas, there was noroom in the lean-to.

They had no choice but to make do, so Mr. Menning tookcontrol by putting the Schut’s horses into their make-shift barn. Then he grabbed more than a few armfuls ofstraw and littered the house before leading their two precious milk cows into whatwas, of course, the only shelter available, the house. Charley Dyke says that before those beefy bovinesgot in, they made sure whatever foodstuff happened to be around were safelystowed on the other side of that GreatRoom ( 14 x 14).

So there they were—two wooden-shoed families and twogracious milk cows, all warm and snuggly in a crackerbox that was, that winter’snight, the only port in the storm. OnceMrs. Menning milked those two friendly beasts and then pulled out some preciouschocolate, the whole gathering had one enjoyable evening together in a warmhouse, I’m sure, drinking chocolate milk and singing their favorite psalms, animage that is, I think, something out of early Van Gogh.

Charlie Dyke doesn’t say whether the beasts knew Dutch or the psalms,so whether or not they sung with, no one will ever know.

What is clear—what is for sure—is that those immigrant folks found a way to make do.

Just another tale of neighborliness from Sioux County’searly years.

And those were the rich ones.
_____________________________
Charles Dyke, The Story of Sioux County.

Sunday Morning Meds--Election

2012-02-12T06:35:00.001-06:00

“Know that the Lord has set apart the godly for himself;

theLord will hear me when I call.”

Not so long ago I said a few words after the wedding of afriend. I thought I’d color thereception with some Midwestern silliness since our friend’s roots grow deeplyinto Iowa soil, and he was marrying—gasp!—a bona fide Southern Cal native,deserting the Plains for LA, a move which, if it didn’t happen so darn often,would be unthinkable.

Like me, the groom’s ethno-religious pedigree is DutchCalvinist, so I made mention of that fact and then lamented his leaving theholy land for the hellish hedonism of Southern California, the only directionalcorner of the country that gets its direction upper-cased.

The woman who followed me among the speakers at the receptiontook off on the word “Calvinist” and delivered what some considered atongue-lashing. The gist of her diatribe had to do with the Calvinist doctrineof predestination, a belief that, in her estimation, turns all of us so named,ipso facto, into theological Nazis, I guess.

I’d simply been trying to make people laugh, and I got abona fide sermon based in doctrinal history, the old fracas between electionand free will. In that war, she kept noprisoners. I got pole-axed for simply(and arrogantly) assuming I’d been chosen. She was—and she made no bones about it—against the arrogant assumptionsassumed to be the character of those who honestly believed in such rot aspredestination.

Honestly, the Bible doesn’t prove a whole lotconclusively. It tells a great and truestory, but it doesn’t offer plain and simple answers. If you want that, see Oprah.

It’s almost impossible to find a verse that is as vivid anargument for election as Psalm 4:3. After a series of questions designed to upbraid the “sons of men” inverse two, David shifts his rhetorical focus and returns to the command form ofverse one, this time, however, raising his finger toward the sons of men atwhom he’d just been ranting. “You mustknow that the Lord selects his own,” he says, “and that he’ll listen to me,”implying, of course, that he (David) is among “his own.”

I’m sure I could find as strong a defense for the doctrineof election (or predestination) elsewhere in holy writ, but I’m also sure thatI could also find as strong a defense for the doctrine of free will. If the Bible were absolutely conclusive onthat ancient theological battle, the battle wouldn’t be ancient. God’s word has elbow room enough room for anawful lot of us.

But here’s the real kicker. Just two verses before, David was demanding that God answer hisprayers—in writer’s language, he was showing us that, in fact, Godhadn’t really done that. Now, with theforce of those commands still roiling the air, he puffs his chest and tells(which is never as strong as shows) those who don’t believe, “Listen,chums, he’s chosen his own, I’m one of them, and he listens my prayer.”

Say, what? He’d just shownus exactly the opposite.

I’m a Calvinist. Iconfess—I believe in election. But likeDavid, I sometimes wonder if God is listening to my prayers. I believe I’m own of his own, but sometimes,like David, I confess that I wonder if he’s out cruising.

As I’ve said, you’ve got to love the humanity of all ofthis.

Praise his name.

Swan Song XXXI--notes and stuff

2012-02-10T06:00:00.000-06:00

High school teaching is a lifetime behind me now, but I remember noticing one significant change when I moved into a college classroom--there was vastly less dependency. College kids weren't so emotionally needy, it seemed, or at least I didn't come heir to a thousand daily anxieties. "Mr. Schaap--I don't know that I trust Mark--you can't believe who he was talking to just now." That sort of thing.

And bigger stuff too--brawls with parents, love dashed dinghy-like in a storm, aspirations mauled. College kids didn't need a professor like high school kids needed a teacher.

Of course, I was younger then. When I started teaching I was four years older than kids in the chairs. Today those kids are frozen solid in my mind at 17 years old. Not long ago, one of them sent me the date of their 40th class reunion, reminding me I couldn't miss. They won't be 17 any more. They're Wisconsin kids--they'll be as porky as their ex-teacher, round and paunchy, gray and bald. I won't recognize them.

If the truth be known, some of that needy-ness I missed when I started teaching in college. Oh, it could be tedious--"so-and-so hasn't talked to me all day!" I didn't miss that, but college students were buying a commodity--your class. It was costing them money, after all. It was nice if they liked you, but what they needed was the credit, not you. Sometimes, I felt bereft.

But just a week ago, I fell back in, not because I went back to some high school classroom, but because a ex-student of mine grabbed me in the hall in a way I haven't been needed for a long, long time. In class, hers were the kind of eyes that have kept me in the teaching profession--bright, begging eyes that made it perfectly clear, morning after morning, that she was more than ready to listen if I was ready to teach. "Go on," those eyes would say, "do it. Let's explore something. I'm in."

Age creates a species of invisibility that I'm still not accustomed to. Yesterday, in the gym, on the bike, I was surrounded by ex-students, none of them even nodded toward me. I don't think they dislike me. It's just that the old guy just doesn't show up on their radar.

Anyway, about a week ago this sweet kid grabbed me in a way I haven't been grabbed in years. Gratifying, I guess, for a geezer.

"Dr. Schaap," she said, "guess what?"

She didn't, immediately, thrust her left hand into my face to show me a diamond. That happens.

I had no idea what.

"I just saw a baby being born. I was there."

And then she stood there in silence. I hadn't a clue how to react. No kid ever said that to me before, but that was big news that spilled from her soul. Her eyes were the diamonds.

Not once before did a kid rush up to me and announce as if to the world that she'd just seen life begin. Of course, I haven't had that many students in a nursing program.

I've got an old file cabinet down here, picked it up in Arizona for $10. Somewhere inside in two separate files are scribbled notes from high school kids in Wisconsin and Arizona, notes I just couldn't toss once upon a time. We're selling our house now, and the stuff's got to go. Today, there's incentive and emotional distance--it won't be hard to toss those folders, even though I'm sure I'll read every note before I do.

I'm thinking this hallway announcement, this little explosion of joy the other day, an event I was blessed to be privy to, that's the one that will stand for all the others. What this young lady witnessed that morning, the morning she couldn't not tell me, was nothing less than the very beginning of life itself.

That big, that memorable, that sweet.

That good.

Mormon Mitt

2012-02-09T05:47:00.001-06:00

Look, after Tuesday night's utter humiliation, it's painfully clear that Mitt Romney, despite his name, his money, his consensus front-runner status, simply cannot romance his own Republicans. Something in him keeps him distant.

Maybe he's too cute--that little shank of hair falling so thoughtlessly over his forehead, his leanness almost imperial. Someone that perfect walks into the room, and the rest of us feel we may have to leave.

Sheer wealth plays a role. The man makes $58,000 a day and does nothing. His carpet bombing political tactics seem unfashionably bully-ish, even to Republicans who believe the super-rich are our cultural heroes, our beloved job-creators. No matter how you cut it, Mitt will never be an underdog.

He's got a penchant for singing off-key, both literally and figuratively. A man that rich can't say he doesn't care for the poor even if that line is contextualized bountifully with unquestionable conservative orthodoxy. A couple of days ago he told a crowd that Americans were the only nationality who, when singing the national anthem, placed a hand over their heart. He was just flat wrong. Why would he even say that?

I'm independent, but it's perfectly clear, even to a blind man, that Mitt leaves even pretty much every shade of conservative shivering at the bone. He can't woo. He just can't.

I think Frank Bruni's got it right, at least partially. In last Sunday NY Times, he pitched the notion that what makes Mitt somehow weird is his Mormonism.

Now before I'm hung as a bigot, let me just say, proverbially, that once upon a time me and the Mormons were comrades. When I taught in Arizona, if the faculty went to war about some principle of education, it was often the Mormons, a couple of dedicated Irish Catholics, and the school's only Dutch Calvinist against the ordinary, run-of-the-mill secularists, my Jewish colleagues, and the "whatever" crowd. There we were, arm in arm.

Which is not to say those Mormons were my friends. They had their own world--their stake--just as I did, my church. My church attendance and mid-week meetings, back then, made my good friends on the faculty wonder about me. They actually brought it up. My identity was tied up totally with my faith, and that identity was, to them, an oddity. "Schaap, you in a cult?" they said.

Even though me and the Mormons on staff got along in principle, we weren't buddies. My friends--my good friends, my best friends, the guys I went fishing with--were secularists. They may have thought I was in a cult, but that didn't mean we didn't more than occasionally share a brotherhood beer or two or five.

What Bruni argues is that "there are valid reasons for. . .us to home in on Romney's religion, not in terms of its historical eccentricities but in terms of its cultural, psychological and emotional imprint on him." I know that assertion seems but a whisper-thin quarter-inch from bigotry, but it's also patently silly not to consider that identity in his case--and mine--isn't something considerably approximate to but not synonymous with faith.

In this world of ours, saying you're a Christian may well be vastly more inexact than saying you're a Calvinist (to those who know the word)--or, even more specific, a Dutch Calvinist. What Bruni argues--and I think he's right--is that there simply are inherent behaviors and cultural characteristics that go with being a Mormon. And let's not forget, Mitt is totally Mormon--to the tune of 7 or 8 million a year, in fact.

He claimed recently that he knows what being an immigrant is like, speaking of his grandfather having been born in Mexico. Okay. What he didn't say, Bruni recounts, is that the old guy was born down there because his very orthodox father left the country rather than give up his extra wives. That's exotic.

And, let's face it, Mormonism has its a healthy share of the exotic. Bruni says one thing Mormons learn quickly in life is to belie their own cultural exotic-ism--weird underwear, buried golden plates, their heritage of multiple wives, bans on coffee and Diet Coke. They learn, early on, what not to talk about, and dissembling becomes second nature. Look, I'm not about to call them a cult, but by just about definition, they are.

Mitt's been doing nothing but making millions for the last half-dozen years AND running for President. He's still the favorite. The White House has had him and him alone in their sights for months and months and months. Newt is too much a bozo and Ron Paul can't make enough converts; Santorum's righteousness quota is impressive, but at his best he seems little more than a Goldwater who home-schools.

But Mitt got smacked something awful on Tuesday. He can't close the deal.

Years ago, just down the block lived a sweet guy who had some kind of career--as a mechanic, I think--and then decided to come to college. He was painfully single. I liked the guy, but my female students felt chills run up their spine when he came around, as he did, way too often, longing for just about anything female. He spent way too much time in women's dorms with his shingle out, searching desperately for companionship.

Maybe that's Mitt. He's almost slavishly begging to be loved, and on top of everything else, he's perfect. Look at him! And he's got mega-bucks. For crap sake, who wouldn't want him?

America, I guess. He can't close the deal. He's running around with the biggest diamond ring in the world, and he just can't give it away.

Why not? Something about him is strange. Not all Mormons are, but count me in with Frank Bruni--I think Mitt's devout Mormonism is no small part of it. That's where his true identity lies: in the holy temple with his holy underwear.

First and foremost, Mitt isn't just American--he's Mormon-American.

And there's something about that the rest of us just don't get.

Morning Thanks--the best warm

2012-02-08T05:34:00.001-06:00

When I think about it now, I imagine my father's workday world in the early 50s was just about a replay of his military service, sans war. He was an office worker in a factory that ground out cement mixers in Oostburg, Wisconsin, the work force totally male. There was a pop machine in the back of that factory, long rows of soda locked in a prison-like well full of water--stick in a nickel, some internal bars would unlock and you could pull out at cold, wet bottle of cream soda, Springtime, brewed right down the road in Sheboygan.

Sometimes my dad would take me back there, through the foundry and the paint room. We'd wind our way through blue-collar workers with ash and grease and oil on their faces and their denim aprons. All men--a man's world. Up above the that blessed pop machine was a half-gallon jug tipped up on its head and aimed into a spout from which salt pills dropped, two or three at a time, just in case you sweat too hard during the day. That's the kind of place it was. Just about all of workers were vets. They wore the sleeves of their denim shirts rolled up high enough to see their welding scars. Trust me, they were all men. During lunch, they'd step outside, still aproned, and challenge each other at horse shoes. My dad was great.

When I imagine that world back then--I was just a little boy--it's hard for me to think of my wonderfully pious father's ears not picking up some off-color stuff more often than not, some blue jokes laced with more than uncomfortable language. He had to. He was a righteous man, but he had a heart as big the lakeshore where he lived and where I grew up. I'm sure he laughed.

Up there in the front office were a couple of other guys in white shirts, one of them heavy-set and younger than my dad, a man who'd come heir to an office job. His father was there too, and then there was another man I knew only by name. He never paid much attention to me, a man I remember with an exceptionally long face, stooped-shouldered--a man who seemed serious.

This morning it's way too early but I couldn't sleep, so here I am, out of bed before five, tempted by a screen, visited by memories that spill from a coffee-less mind only half awake. And what came to me just before rising is a odd line from that all-male world, a line my father loved to repeat.

"You know," he'd say, "Jim Daane used to say that crawling back in bed with his wife was just about the greatest thing. 'That kind of warmth,' he'd say--'there's just nothing like it.'" He loved that line.

Like I say, my guess is that they were almost all vets, and I can only imagine how joyful it was for them to slip back between the sheets once in a while and play spoons with the women they'd missed for all those years. Nothing quite like it.

There's no way to know how it is that some old stories stay with you. Maybe it's this in Jim Daane's case--in that cement mixer factory, a man's world, you might not think the sweet bliss of married life would be all that worth bragging about. You wouldn't guess those men could be so domestic as to admit that nothing more than slipping back into bed with the wife was pure heaven. Maybe that's it.

But then there's another reason why that story sticks in my memory. The march of words on this page are just about over, and in another minute or two, I'll be packing it in, going back upstairs in the pitch darkness of early morning. I know exactly where to turn, when to grab the table and the post at the steps. In the dark, I'm my own seeing-eye dog, and, trust me, I know my way back to the bedroom, where I'll slip back between the sheets into that very loving warmth Jim Daane used to tell my father was the finest warmth available to mankind.

I never went to war, but I know what he's saying. And this morning, my morning thanks is for no less a blessing than the warmth that man with the long face used to say was, without a doubt, the very best.

Immigrants

2012-02-07T05:54:00.001-06:00

The food was wonderful and the service was gracious on Friday night. The only thing worrying about this odd little East Indian restaurant was that there was no one there except us and the waitress and the chef, a husband and wife team, whose lavish wedding pictures--in India, in elaborate ethnic wardrobe--appeared on big-screen TV. Basically, it was just the six of us.

So we talked. Our young hostess told us that running this little cafe was their second job; their first was running her father's motel. They had a baby--his picture was up on the wall--and she told us she wanted to continue with her schooling. Had she stayed in India, she said, she would already have earned her Masters degree, a little hesitation in her voice. She wanted to be an accountant, if I remember right. Her husband was in computers--or at least was trained in computers, degreed in technology. "But I like to cook, too," he said in an unmistakable Indian voice when he came out of the back to join the conversation.

The food could have been mediocre, and I would have enjoyed it. To hear them talk about their lives was fascinating. When I asked about the East Indian community in Sioux City, she said it wasn't large. "And who are they?" I said. "What do they do?"

"Doctors and lawyers," she said, without hesitation or a hint of arrogance. It was simply the truth. The small community was accomplished, as were they, the couple whose day job was running her father's motel, whose night job was running the restaurant. In a way, they reminded me of every immigrant I'd ever known--unafraid of work, determined to succeed. They were onward and upward-bound on the yellow-brick road of the American dream.

Saturday, at the funeral of an old friend, a Tai Dam evangelist, the most emotional moment arose when his children--two of them at least--spoke in memory of their father. Brother and sister got through the task only by holding each other as they stood in the front of the church.

The son spoke first and through his tears told his mother how much she and their father had meant to all five kids, how they'd probably never told her that often enough, how he understood how much they'd gone through to escape Laos, then Thailand, how dangerous and life-threatening their escape had been, and how forever grateful they were that his parents made the difficult decision to leave a land that threatened their lives with its hate and its poverty. He said he knew how blessed they were in America. It was, without a doubt, the passionate recital of yet another American child of immigrant parents. Beneath his thanks lay the yellow brick road of American opportunity.

But, the night before, one thing our East Indian hostess said was startling. "We should have stayed in India," she told us, not angrily really, but in a very matter-of-fact way. Undoubtedly, her father was successful--on the side, he owned a motel. Undoubtedly, when he came to this country, he was already accomplished, educated--a doctor or a lawyer. Undoubtedly, he and his wife chose to immigrate to give them--their children--opportunities they may not have had in India.

But their daughter considered the move a mistake. Her marriage had been arranged in the traditional way, and those pictures flashing up on the screen proudly offered images of another place and time, somewhere other than Sioux City, Iowa.

Two first-generation immigrants with entirely different views of their parents' life-altering choices. One of them tearfully thanked his mother as he commemorated his father's life; the other wished they'd never come.

Our hostess was kind and sweet and gracious. When she sensed that my food wasn't going down well, she brought me some yogurt. In every way, she was a joy. But she wished they'd never left India. The Laotian's son cried from the bottom of his grateful heart.

The food was wonderful, the service was gracious, the education was worth a million; but in that East Indian restaurant on Friday night, I couldn't help but think of terrorism--not because our young hostess struck me as dangerous, but because her disenchantment with this country, given the right religious tweaking, could morph into anger, distrust, and alienation. She longed for a home she ironically knew little of. Undoubtedly, like ex-pat terrorists, her love for her homeland, for what she'd come from, was greater than her parents'--and yet far more insubstantial.

Her heart, I thought, could be radicalized.

The difference between the two?--a young East Indian woman and a Laotian man of the same age, both children of immigrants? One came wealthy; the other came a refugee. The Indian parents walked into a salary beyond the dreams of most fifth and sixth generation Americans; their Tai Dam counterparts had only the shirts on their backs.

Maybe that's it. Maybe somewhere in that mix lies the key to understanding Mohamed Atta and his ilk, the killers who took down the Twin Towers. I don't know.

On the Sunday morning after 9/11, we were ushered into a church by a friend who stopped me, seemingly non-plussed. "Jim," he said, "I don't understand why they hate us."

Few of us do, fully. I'm still trying to forge an answer.

Morning Thanks--Khay Baccam

2012-02-06T06:11:00.000-06:00

What she said, as I remember, was far less a request than a demand--"You have to write his story." She was profoundly earnest, her sincerity a gift in all things really, but especially pointed at this moment. She'd had been visiting this young Laotian couple for several years already, trying to teach English. Through those countless visits, she'd come to know him and them well, very well.

"Jim," she told me, "this guy sees the big picture."

What she meant was that this young father had the kind of wisdom few do--red or yellow, black or white--despite his years. That was a quarter-century ago. Khay was in his early thirties.

What she didn't tell me--what he eventually did--is that she loved him and them. Those countless hours of English language lessons were not a burden because it wasn't work, nor was it simply some obligation of her Christian faith. Her visits were something she loved because she began to love them. That made all the difference.

Khay was among those refugees who'd come to America after the end of the Vietnam War. Khay was Tai Dam, an ethnic tribe, friends of American forces, who'd begun to suffer greatly for their partisanship after the fall of Saigon. An American diplomat named Arthur Crisfield had written 30 state governors with a plea to help the Tai Dam, who wanted a place for to live en masse, not just individually, a place for them to live as a people.

When then Iowa Governor Robert E. Ray read the note, he responded positively because of what he called "the generous spirit of the people of Iowa." He answered by offering the Tai Dam a home on the Iowa prairies, in its cities, its towns and countryside. Not all Iowans appreciated Ray's welcoming arms--the war, after all, had left many open wounds.

Khay was among those refugees, and his story--a story I'd come to know well--wasn't all that unusual. Those who'd sided with the Americans were immensely vulnerable when we left them behind. Think "killing fields." He and his wife had escaped the horror and found less treacherous but still difficult safety in refugee camps, where they waited for months while somewhere else, someone else determined their fate.

That summary is only a fragment of the story. As a kid, as a teenager during the war, Khay had worked the black market with war munitions, whatever he could secure and sell. He'd lived without a moral compass in a war-torn world where morality seemed entirely extinct. He wasn't a nice man. He done things routinely that his pious English teacher could never have imagined.

And here he was--Sioux Center, Iowa, along with his wife and a little girl born in the camps in Thailand.

"You've got to write his story," she said, with a force of character that arose from deep in her heart, and even deeper in her soul.

So I did. I went over to their apartment for several nights, hours at a time, and tried to understand the story their still broken English and outline a tale that--his teacher wasn't wrong--was shocking in its horror, yet remarkable in its direction. After all, here he was.

And here they were--lily-white, hyper-religious Sioux Center, Iowa, a whole village of Calvinists in wooden shoes. The story I wrote was published in a series in The Banner, the denominational magazine of the Christian Reformed Church, then repeated locally here in the weekly paper. Khay himself, who made his living as an artist both in the camps and in Sioux Center, did the illustrations himself.

Little more than a week ago, Khay Baccam died, after being diagnosed with cancer only two weeks before. He was just 56 years old, left his wife and five children.

Years ago already, long before I'd been called, literally, to the story by his passionate mentor, something happened between them that I learned of only later, at another funeral, at her funeral. Once upon a time, he'd said to her, "Why do you do this?--why do you care about us like you do?"

She was speechless, so she told him the obvious truth: "I love you. I love both of you."

Khay said he realized that somehow that answer had to do with the Bible his teacher had always carried, the one with the ring permanently set in the cover from a thousand hot cups of coffee. "What's in that book?" Khay said to her that day.

That's when things changed--his life, and their lives.

At his funeral on Saturday, half the church was Tai Dam, hundreds of them from the Twin Cities, from Des Moines, from Sioux City, from the prairies, its cities, its towns and countryside, because Khay had ministered to them through the years, just as his English teacher, the one with all the passion, had ministered to him. He'd brought hope in the saving blood of Christ. Not all of them were Christians either--one of them said about half were Buddhist. Or nothing at all. But they were there for Khay and his wife and his family.

I don't know why God chose to take him. Didn't seem to me like a very smart move. After all, he was just 56 years old, and there is, I imagine, still very much to do.

I sat there in the back of the church, the hired gun, the writer, the man who'd likely heard as much or more of Khay's Laotian story as anyone there, and I told myself that Khay's teacher had blessed both of us when that stubborn love of hers simply couldn't be set aside.

So this morning, my morning thanks are manifold: for her, Adrianna Dokter, whose love proved irresistible to a Laotian couple trying to find a place to stand in a whole new world; for Khay and his decades of service to God and his people; and to God almighty for authoring the whole remarkable tale and then generously giving me a bit part in the story.

Amazing grace.

Sunday Morning Meds--My Glory

2012-02-05T07:30:00.001-06:00

“How long, O men, will you turn my glory into shame?” Psalm 4

All prayer, our preacher said, is praise. A beautiful thought that, like the gospelitself, simply begs to be given away. Even our anguish, our laments, our anger at God—it’s all praise becausewe wouldn’t be praying if we didn’t actually believe that God was God andtherefore would, as they used to say, hasten to our aid. All prayer is praise—every phrase, everygroan. We’re acknowledging Him, we’reasking him, we’re talking to him because we know we should.

And why should we? Because He’s God. We wouldn’tpray if we didn’t believe. Really, that singlefact makes all prayer is praise. Isn’tthat a great thought?

And I think it helps me to understand verse two: “How long, O men, will you turn my glory intoshame?”

I’ve got an assortment of old trophies sitting around mydesk here—a couple of little gold basketball players, three golf trophies, andone gold hitter who’s been sitting here, bat cocked, waiting for a pitch that hasn’tcome for a quarter century.

On the wall to my right is my diploma. The wall behind me holds several framed bookcovers—my books. It sounds awful to say,but I guess I must admit that I’ve decorated my study with my glory.

The egotist in me reads Psalm 4:2 all wrong, I think. When David bemoans the fact that those “sonsof men” are turning his glory into shame, he’s not ticked off because someone’sgiven his poetry a bad review or lambasted his Kingship in a letter to theeditor. I don’t think he means somethingpersonal by “my glory.”

Elsewhere in the psalms, as many have argued, phrases likethis point at the Lord. David’s “glory”is really in his salvation, in his being loved, in his knowing that the Lordlistens to his prayers. His glory is notin his accomplishments; his glory, quite simply, is the Lord.

And I think that’s crucial because, for all its emotionalmeandering, Psalm 4 is about concern, about the sadness that arises in all ofus when we know that people we really admire don’t serve our King. Maybe Psalm 4 is not about me but about love.

I am—I mean it—literally thrilled to know that an oldnovelist friend of mine prayed in the last few moments of his life. I loved the guy. He was a literary father to me, a great joy;but I honestly didn’t know about his faith. Today, however, I know this much from an unimpeachable source: on his deathbed, he and his nurse prayedtogether.

Honestly, Psalm 4 still seems to be an emotionalroller-coaster. It moves all over themap. However, David’s song may well benot as bad as it seems if we understand that this initial accusation aboutunbelievers does not arise from David’s sense of being slighted, but insteadfrom his deep regard for the rotten directions seemingly good people, peopleDavid admires, are taking.

In some ways, I think, the Psalm is about enlisting the helpof the Lord in the heartfelt attempt to bring your friends home.

All prayer is praise. My glory, really, is his glory.

Makes sense, I think, and helps us see an even more humanKing David.

The Things We Carry

2012-02-03T06:36:00.001-06:00

I met Tim O’Brien years ago—summer, 1980—at Breadloaf Writers Conference. His Going After Cacciato had just won the National Book Award, Combat Zone had been out for a while. He attracted vets with every step he took at Breadloaf, not only because he was one himself but because all of them had a similar story, a mean story, a tough story, something unforgettable and therefore haunting. Two of my good friends there were Vietnam vets; both of them, well lubricated, could tell incredible tales endlessly. That conference was the first time I realized that my escaping the draft wasn’t as glorious as I’d always thought it would be.

Not that I really wanted to go to Vietnam—or to any branch of the service, for that matter. My lottery number was 189. Had I not flunked my physical, I would have gone. Getting drafted would have prompted a decision I didn’t want to think about—Canada or Vietnam?

But that year—1980—at Breadloaf Writers Conference, I felt almost other-worldly; I’d never waded through rice patties or smelled Agent Orange. I knew nothing of severed body parts worn as jewelry. What every vet there shared was profound disillusionment in tales of madness and chaos—lieutenants making commands that grunts simply wouldn’t do, children weaponized, an enemy more magical than real, haunted jungles, hellish tunnels into the underworld.

Almost every vet I knew came back cynical, disillusioned, and drugged. As early as 1968, when 500 a week were dying, I thought the war was an awful mistake. For me to support Nixon would have meant deleting every last story I’d heard from my mind. No one spoke of patriotism. No one talked about some great cause, and most everyone hated gooks.

This morning I’m going to lug “The Things They Carried” into my Intro to Lit class, a story I never used in class before; and right now some still small voice says "don’t do it." After all, none of those sweet kids, those deeply religious kids, have a clue what was going on when I sat in those very chairs. Tim O’Brien’s war tales could well be set in the Peloponnesian Wars, for all they know. What do they know about disillusionment, about hate, about rebellion. Theirs is a wonderful life.

Some things about teaching I won’t miss at all, and one of them is lugging in stories that I revere and laying them out in a circle of cold indifference. Half of them probably won’t have read it. Most of the others won’t “get it.” Why can’t we read things we like?—they’ll be thinking. "The Things They Carried" is, like mega-bleak. Geez—can we lighten up a bit?

One night at Breadloaf, we “waiters,” the scholarshiped group given the distinction of waiting on tables in the dining hall, had our own reading, and I read something—I don’t remember what. But a friend of mine, a vet, stood up, drunk as a skunk, and read a story about some guy eating a lizard, somewhere over there on the other side of the world, eating a lizard as a badge of honor. He bawled when he read it, when he lugged it into the room. Drunk enough to fall down, this guy—a good guy, really—couldn’t finish his story. But there were multitudes of vets around that night, more than enough to take care of him. It was the most painful reading I’ve ever attended.

Really, how can I talk about “The Things They Carried”? What can I say to a class full of sweet kids? What do they know of disillusion?

Here’s O’Brien, who grew up just an hour away in Worthington. “War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”

How can I say that?

And I wasn’t even there.

I'll have to tell them it's the human story, and because it is, it's mine too--and it's theirs.

Dual Urinal

2012-02-02T06:31:00.000-06:00

Very strange.

Swan Song XXX--a song of triumph in the neighborhood

2012-02-01T06:37:00.000-06:00

I suppose even significant moments, moments of great triumph or indescribable loss, make no visible wakes in the neighborhood. They leave shadows in personal memories, shadows that never really disappear. We're all touched by such events in one way or another. At least, in this case, I was. After all, the victims--and it hurts to call them that, but they were and still are--were colleagues, neighbors, even friends and actual relatives. They lived just down at the end of our block, and I know there's nothing here to commemorate their story.

When they lost their son, the entire community quaked--after all, their oldest boy, so talented, seemed so clearly destined to continue his father's significant legacy that only God himself could have created such a set design. But then, if that promise was true, where on earth was God when their son was killed? A job interview had been set, the kid was bright, creative, all things were in order, the music of the spheres was in the air, the planets in a row.

And then death, an accident.

I have no doubt that within our neighbor and friend and cousin that immense loss banished the joy that music had always given him, both in performance and composition. Inspiration was snuffed when his son's life was. I'm not sure how people walk to work again, much less how they dream or imagine after such loss. For our neighbor, composition ceased because creativity did. After all, what is composition, really, but a human desire to create order out of chaos, to make sense of things? "People without hope don't write novels," Flannery O'Connor once wrote. People without hope don't write music either. Artists take snippets of our lives, sometimes jagged and sharp, and somehow create tapestry.

In the wake of his son's death, our neighbor's composition stopped, creativity vanished, as did desire. The death of a child, like no other event in a person's life, I'm told, kills the spirit because it reverses the order we know by instinct. We are programmed to believe that someday we'll bury our parents; no parent ever dreams she'll bury a daughter or son.

I'd never heard this part of the story until last night. So this musician, our neighbor and friend and cousin, froze solid in the grief he and his wife had entered the moment someone called and told them their son was dying half a country away. That they loved their son goes without question, their son the musician; but it probably wasn't just the loss of his life that ushered in darkness. His death--the death of children everywhere--shuts down vision itself because, especially in this story, everything had been in place, so perfectly designed and masterfully set that when he was killed, his death destroyed order, leaving only chaos. In the madness, our neighbor lost the strength and faith and vision and will to make order, to make music.

So the story goes this way: his wife finally told her husband to leave, to go to his office and write. He had to write. He had to create, she said. He had to say what it was he felt in music. He left the house just down the block from ours.

He didn't return for lunch, and he didn't return for dinner. And when, that night, he finally walked back home, just a few blocks from the campus, he stepped in the door and laid the papers, his composition, on the table in front of his wife, as if to say, "there--I did it."

What he'd written has become the best of his work, people say, "A Song of Triumph," the musical rendition of his grief and his consolation, an anthem whose richness is created, like some psalms of David, by equal portions of dissonance and harmony, despair and faith.

All of that was thirty years ago now. Thirty years. Today, that son of theirs, had he taken the teaching job that seemed inevitable here, had he moved into an office in his father's own music department, would be close to 60.

Our ex-neighbors have entered their eighties, and last year, when a special gathering was set to honor his music and their contribution to the college, at that last minute they decided they couldn't come--for health reasons. Soon enough, I suppose, they'll be gone.

I had their grandson in class last semester, and I liked him. He seemed interested, but he didn't know exactly where his grandparents had lived when they lived here, didn't know the back door his grandpa must have walked in one night thirty-some years ago, "A Song of Triumph" in hand to show his wife, the woman who threw him out and told him he had to tell the story, in music. He should.

Somehow, last night, when I heard that part of their story for the first time, when I heard a musicologist explain exactly why the richness of that anthem exceeds most anything else our neighbor had ever written and how that piece, "A Song of Triumph," is still being sung by thousands of voices, I couldn't help but think that it's some kind of shame so much of the story is no longer here in the neighborhood. Today, who knows anymore?--who remembers? Shouldn't there be a plaque on the lawn? Shouldn't we at least try to stop time's relentless march? Does what we do, finally, mean nothing at all? Do our greatest moments of joy and grief and sorrow simply disappear like sunlight? Maybe life is chaos.

But then, thank goodness, there are our songs of triumph. Thank goodness his wife told him to leave and not return until he'd written something, anything. Thank goodness, once upon a time a father, struck to the heart with grief, sat down in his office and emptied his soul in notation, in an attempt, a richly human attempt, to create harmony out of dissonance, order out of chaos.

In the neighborhood where I live, hardly anyone, I suppose, knows that story.

But thank God there is the music. There is, after all, a song of triumph. What a song. What a triumph.

Listen for yourself. Here it is.

Seams

2012-01-31T06:33:00.000-06:00

Todd Clayton, a 2011 grad of Point Loma College, says that he met mixed reactions when he came out there just last year. He was a model student, the Director of Student Life, in fact. His parents are preachers in the Nazarine Church, a small evangelical fellowship not unlike my own.

His decision to go public earned him hundreds of encouraging letters and e-mails from former students and alums whose stories paralleled his own. One of the most satisfying joys of the difficult pain of coming out, he says, on Huffington Post, is simply coming to know that you're not alone--that there are others, and there are many, men and women who understand.

One professor asked him out to lunch at the college cafeteria, then asked him whether or not he still intended, someday, to preach. When he said yes, that faculty member looked up and said, "Hell's real, you know."

Clayton says he picked up his tray and left.

I wonder how many gay students I may have had in 35 years teaching here at the same kind of small, Christian college Todd Clayton attended. I know of two or three, but I'm sure there were more, are more; I can only imagine how difficult it must be--as Clayton says it is--to be both a Christian and gay in a place like this.

If you want to toss out good red meat here in Siouxland, just repeat the phrase "gay marriage," and good Christian folks by the score will be up on their feet, absolutely sure the professor's pronouncement about hell at that Point Loma dining table was the only responsible answer a Bible-believing Christian could give, were he or she across the table from young Mr. Clayton. Voting for someone who is even willing to listen to arguments about gay marriage buys a ticket to Hades.

Two guys I graduated with, 42 years ago, were gay. Both walked away from marriages and kids, marriages that began here. There may well be more--I don't know. What I do know is that both men registered much higher on the righteousness scale when they were here than I did. They were, in fact, poster boy students, in all the right clubs because they said all the right things. One, like Todd Clayton, had his eyes on the ministry. The brightest kid in my high school class is gay. He's a preacher, has been for years. But he long ago left the denominational fellowship of his youth, where there was no place for him.

Todd Clayton is not wrong. Christian colleges like the one where I've taught for most of my professional life have a very difficult time navigating the wildly diverting streams where questions about gay people and gay life eventually lead. It's one thing to say you love them, another to allow them to hold hands.

Clayton says he has a friend, a college recruiter, at a similar college. When he asked her about accepting LGBT students, she said she would tell them to go somewhere else, "somewhere that can celebrate them and love them without condition."

When, several years ago, a candidate for a position in the English Department expressed her determination that she could not and would not condemn gay people, having had several close gay friends in grad school, she was summarily dismissed from consideration here, even though she told us she understood our world, having graduated from a small Christian college herself, and she promised not to preach or teach what she understood would be divisive at a place like Dordt. She was advancing a policy of "don't ask, don't tell." But even that wasn't good enough.

I suppose there is always seams in our theological tents, and when the wind blows hard those seams are most at risk. About all a place like this can do out here on the edge of the plains is hope and pray for calm weather, continue to play "don't ask, don't tell," and tell students like Todd Clayton to go somewhere else, "somewhere that can celebrate them and love them without condition."

Makes life hard. After all, only God can love without condition. Right?

Starting over

2012-01-30T06:12:00.000-06:00

Once upon a time, I ranged far more than I do these Saturday mornings, when I go out to try to catch the dawn. Maybe I'm less adventuruous. Maybe I'm just more conscious of three-dollar gas.

Maybe I don't go as far or hunt as well as I used to because these days ethanol has built a ton of new houses all over Siouxland, wherever you look, in fact. And confinements by the score. Sometimes I wonder if there should be a limit. They're everywhere, steaming away on cold winter mornings. If you want to leave them behind, you've got to cross the river into South Dakota. These days there are just a few spots I visit regularly, a few places where a a tree or two and an open landscape create real possibilities for a composition really worth studying.

Somewhere I read that good photographers go back to places they mark like cats--go back again and again and again simply because what appears in the lens--the corners of an old barn, the kinky knuckles of a rangy cottonwood, nothing but open land forever behind them--because those lines arrange themselves in a fashion that is as unique and artful as the music of the spheres. Maybe it's not just laziness that has made my Saturday mornings more habitual, more routine; maybe it's that I've come to recognize at least something of the composition of beauty. I'd like to think that.

Saturday morning was perfectly clear. I left when the east was just beginning to glow, its clarity itself a prophecy of what was to come, the kind of dawn when the sun is a startling wafer of brilliant incandescence. No color to speak of. No clouds. Just a huge, daunting sun.

I decided to stay close and go straight west to an abandoned farm place I've visited tons of time, just across the gravel from a huge cottonwood. If you're not toting a camera, I can't imagine why that spot would distinguish itself; but I treasure a dozen really sweet shots I've taken right there. One morning, right on top of me, a thunder storm broke up--rolling masses of colors so pungent it would have been heavenly if it wasn't so intimidating. Like this--

Saturday morning I simply decided simply to head back to a place near Lebanon, an old favorite, a place that has paid off royally in the past.

From two miles away already, I could see that the cottonwood was gone--not gone, I guess, but down. Massive chunks of trunk lay scattered around like elephant limbs, the stump itself pitifully hollow--I never knew. No one cut Goliath down either. Time itself had done the deed.

And just across the road, the neighbor had gone down too. That old barn was still there, but a total mess, its firmament gone, its walls a heap of snapped and graying barn wood, ready for a match. Right there, just a bit north and east of Lebanon, Iowa, the music of the spheres is no more. One of my favorite places to shoot the dawn is gone. My computer can show you what it was like; but I can no longer bring you there because, artfully speaking, there is no there there.

I'd love to create an enemy, some crass, grace-less capitalist farmer whose only god is efficiency and who wants every last bushel he can reap, fencerow to fencerow. Wouldn't it be nice to ascribe the destruction to some unfeeling human being. A villain is always a joy.

But neither the tree nor the barn fell by way of some human assassin. Some might say the Lord did it. I'd rather not blame him. It was age or weather or some lethal combination thereof. Today it's a mess. Sad. Nothing gold can stay. How much less, wood.

I'll have to go elsewhere now, find something new, stumble on another old cottonwood--maybe out towards Inwood somewhere. Haven't been there for years. It's time I explore again, like I used to.

Maybe I've just become too comfortable. Maybe it's time to look around again, find some new places, hunt, range, explore.

I really can't go back again.

Maybe that's the way it should be.

Sunday Morning Meds -- Factory Second

2012-01-29T05:03:00.002-06:00

“How long, O men, will you turn my glory into shame?”

Were I a writing teacher (which I am) and were I to be asked to grade Psalm 4—(which I’ve not been) I’d have to admit (maybe I shouldn’t) that in my estimation this song isn’t one of David’s greatest hits.

I like the fact that it follows Psalm 3, a psalm traditionally called “a morning Psalm.” Psalm 4 has been just as traditionally called “an evening psalm,” as we shall see. Creates a nice pattern. It’s somehow fits where it is.

But, just for a moment, let me make a case for what I see as its problems. The song begins with a demand (“Answer me”) that softens rather quickly into the heartfelt request of every human being who knows he or she has sinned (“be merciful to me’). Despite its in-your-face first line, it’s difficult to imagine that verse one could be written in any position other than on one’s knees. Read it again, if you think I’m wrong.

Suddenly, and without notice, the supplicant of verse one turns his attention totally on those who have no faith in Almighty God, seems drawn to his knees out of concern for what the KJV used to call “sons of men,” a term of respect.

Verse three uses a whole different voice. You should know, he says to those “sons of men,” that the Lord has chosen his own and, quite frankly, I’m one of them. Furthermore, he says, chin jutting, he’ll answer my prayers. Odd sentiment for a supplicant who wasn’t so sure about anything just a moment ago.

In verse 4 and 5, those pointy-fingered accusations about his enemies’ sins have melted away into a priestly blessing. Listen, he says, his tone lightening up, look into a mirror sometime. Once you’ve seen what’s really there (verse 5), offer good sacrifices to the Lord.

His enemies have disappeared altogether by verse 6, and verse 7 exudes joy at what seems to be the blessing he was demanding of the Lord at the outset. Sweetly, the psalm ends with a pledge and a testimony.

Really, the emotional life—what writers call “tone”—of Psalm 4 is all over the map. In this poem, David seems almost manic-depressive, like his predecessor, Saul. There is little continuity here, almost no unity. The major players in the drama—David and his vain enemies—are multi-faceted, and even God shifts in focus.

Ask yourself this: how many people do you know who list Psalm 4 as among their favorites?

So who reserved a place for it in the canon? Why is it in the anthology?

I’ll hazard an answer. Because, in the words of a retail chain, Psalm 4-are-us.

Who hasn’t, in times of dire distress, panted prayers that were as disheveled as this, as madcap in structure and form? Who hasn’t stuttered? Whose most deeply felt prayers honestly achieve beauty and grace?

Psalm 4, like so many other songs in this book, testifies of God’s love. Its emotions are out of control, its rhetoric all over the map. It’s the testimony of a man at wit’s end, a man who’s spent far too many nights tossing and turning. Psalm 4 is David’s way, really, of falling, graciously, to sleep.

Because it’s here, because it made the collection, it is also ours.

Ex Libris I -- Shirer

2012-01-27T06:18:00.002-06:00

This one has been on a shelf of my life ever since its publication in 1960. I think I'm right here, but something tells me that my oldest sister joined a book club just about then, and either ordered or was sent William L.Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It's always been here.

The copy in my library is much younger, but it looks roughly the same as the original, a copy I believe my sister still has. There, emblazoned on a fat black spine is a swastika that obviously drew me to the book, years ago, when I was just a kid in sixth or seventh grade.

Shirer's massive study had pictures too, and when I think about them now, I swear I still see them, even though I doubt my memory's accuracy--shots of multitudes of German people, stadiums full of them, saluting in that awful, phallic way to their demented high priest, Hitler, the demonic clown in a mutant mustache no one has grown ever since. Then there were photos of Auschwitz and Dachau, naked bodies like cord wood aboard flatcars, tortured limbs falling shamelessly from the layers of rotting flesh.

In high school I pulled my sister's copy of Rise and Fall from the library more than once, maybe to read things for some history class, maybe just to be reminded of what I'd missed, born as I was in 1948. A huge book, a book full of sin.

I know people whose Jewish parents simply would not talk about the Holocaust, some of them because they honestly didn't want their children to know they had Jewish blood lest some other fiend come along with an agenda of similar madness. And there were others--lots of them, Jew and Gentile--who determined that the only way to live with the legacy of horror and death was to bury it, never to speak of it again.

It's quite amazing that Shirer's huge and thoughtful study of Nazi Germany appeared as quickly as it did--only fifteen years later. That book simply wouldn't let humanity forget, which is in itself a hard and terrible lesson about what it means to be human.

I haven't looked at Shirer in years, and in the great winnowing that will happen in the next few months as we plan to leave this old house, I'll likely try to sell it or give it away. You want it? It's been on a shelf around me since I was 12 years old, I guess, but this copy has sat, untouched, in our main floor library for a quarter century at least.

But Shirer--bless his soul!--has been with me long enough, and even though that thoughtful history, that treasured history, is now being reissued a half-century later, when the time comes to cull my library, I'm guessing he'll go.

In 1995, I taught a course titled "The Literature of the Holocaust." It was then, of course, 50 years since the liberation of the camps, and I thought such a course was fitting. I've always been fascinated by Holocaust studies, and I'd even contributed a book to the library myself--Things We Couldn't Say.

But eight or ten weeks into that course, I hit some kind of odd emotional barrier that made it almost impossible to read anything more from that era, especially from the camps--I mean to really read, to take it in. I could not pour any more horror into my soul, if that makes any sense. I couldn't. We'd read a book a week, and I hope I finished the semester strong; but my ability to read anything about "the Final Solution"--even Shirer, I suppose--had simply disappeared. Emotionally, I couldn't.

That may well be part of the reason I'll sell Shirer or give him away. I don't need that book. I'm no longer fascinated. I've seen more and read more than my share. I will forever be taken by stories that feature commitment to moral action in the middle of sheer bloody madness--that's why I loved Of Gods and Men.

But I think maybe I know enough about the Holocaust, maybe even more than I should. It'll be hard, but I don't think I need Mr. Shirer anymore.

That too is a kind of blessing.

Of Gods and Men, literally

2012-01-26T06:21:00.001-06:00

"The 150 evangelical leaders who met behind closed doors onJanuary 14 to anoint a Republican candidate for President were wise not to haveinvited me.” So wrote David Neff ofChristianity Today in what I thought was a brave overview of Christianity and politics in this country, and, daringly, a clearrepudiation of the shining stars of the religious right in the muddled messthis country is in.

What he’s talking about is the Texas confab of prayerwarriors who got together to choose a candidate for the Republicannomination. Most of the heavyweightswere there. Sadly enough—or maybe providentially—theycouldn’t agree; so what emerged from the meeting was a fractured decision—some ofthe Christians like Mitt the Mormon, some wanted Newt the repentant prodigal,others Rick Santorum, the Roman Catholic home-schooler. No candidate came out of that powerhousemeeting “the chosen,” making some pundits claim the famed religious right is indecline, having lost its juice, its own power. They failed to anoint a king.

“I believe that Christians have an urgent duty to engage thesocial, economic, and moral threats to a healthy society,” Neff wrote in anon-line editorial. “That requires a widevariety of political action. However,one thing it doesn’t call for is playing kingmaker or powerbroker.”

I can’t help but think of ye old childhood hymn, “Dare to bea Daniel.” It’s really difficult for meto believe that someone like David Neff would dare take on James Dobson, et al,but he did. He may well get burned, too;but what Neff is criticizing is the will to be seduced by power, politicalpower, something he says should never be the goal of Christian politicalaction. He quotes James DavisonHunter: “Whenever Christian churches andorganizations partake in the will to power, they partake in the very thing theydecry in society.”

I’m no political scientist, and I don’t claim to stake outthe absolute here. But after watching CT’sown choice for the numero uno film of 2011, Of Gods and Men, I have greatsympathy for Neff’s argument. A handfulof Trappist monks, belovedly integrated into their Muslim neighborhood—in fact,a village has grown up around the mission because of its gifts to the people—findthemselves in deep danger when a bloody civil war breaks out around them. On one hand, they fear the radical Muslims;on the other, the government—both sides seething for power.

In the middle sit and stand and pray eight monks whoseaverage age is maybe 70. The questionthey face is vividly clear: with ourlives in jeopardy, should we stay?

The grace of this story, of this film, is that it avoidsdopey sentimentality that’s so easy to conjure in a story like this: these old monks as idiots or angels or holyfools. The incredible strength of themovie is that these old men are totally human—they’re scared to death, they’rereally not sure of their role or calling, and for most of the story they’re notof one mind. After all, both options—lifeand death—make sense.

Leaving means reneging on their calling, abandoning the defenseless people, the poor they’ve come to love and serve. But then, staying means putting their ownlives and cause in jeopardy. As some ofthem admit, they didn’t join the order to die. What’s more, there’s nothing saintly in seeking one’s ownmartyrdom.

A decision doesn’t come easily because the right answer isnot easy to come by; but right there, in the means by which they formulatetheir own determined response to the horrors of the war around them, Of Gods and Men takes the Christian faith withdeadly seriousness, in a fashion that’s as rare as true commitment. I thought the film to be absolutelywonderful.

I don’t know what might have happened in Texas on January14, had all those saints watched Of Gods and Men before their righteouscaucus. Don’t know what might have occurredif they’d read David Neff or James Davison Hunter before attempting to anoint acandidate. Probably nothing. We’re notall alike, as they painfully discovered that night themselves.

What seems clear to me, however, is those Trappist monks in Algeria in Of Gods and Menhave a decidedly different view of the definition of power than did theSaturday night gathering of saints in Texas.

Praise the Lord.

Morning Thanks--"Grace and Truth"

2012-01-25T06:02:00.000-06:00

Confession time. Once, years ago, when I was a college student home for a break, my mother, who taught piano for most of her life, declared that she would bestow upon her son a ten-dollar bill if he would only sit down at the piano in the den and pound out a hymn, any hymn at all.

I was poor and not an idiot. I opened the old red Psalter to number 50, "Grace and Truth Shall Mark the Way," a rendition of Psalm 25 in a setting that never wandered far from its opening chord. Piece of cake. Inside of a half hour, I'd made ten bucks and probably smirked once she handed over the loot.

I'm probably a couple of decades older than she was back then, but today I think I understand more of why she made such an silly offer. Sure, there was all those years of piano lessons I'd had, years that dissipated far faster than lakeshore fog once I walked away from the bench. And, yes, there probably was some faint hope that if I'd sit there again I'd come back to that bench more often. I was her only boy, for heaven's sake, and my hair was too long, and what she heard out of my bedroom back then was the Beatles. Ten bucks was a pittance.

But there's this too--the music itself, not that "Grace and Truth" sat atop her Psalter Hymnal hall of fame. What her son played--not well--held her soul lovingly, almost as if she were a child, its child. What I played was, after all, a psalm; and my mother's people, for generations, had sung them, often only them. It wasn't just a hymn, it was a psalm. Sure, she was happy she stuck me there on the bench. Yes, I was being a me she might have loved seeing more of. But I think it was the music too, a psalm.

The Synod of Dort, way back in the early 17th century, made it clear to Dutch Calvinist churches that, in worship, only psalms were permissible, just another measure of that miserable Calvinist penchant for being wary of beauty--after all, we're depraved, remember, and totally too, and never forget that. The only legal fare for congregational singing was God's own songs, the poems collected in the book of psalms.

Last night, and this weekend, I listened to two lively musical experts, two men who love the psalms, explain the richness of the old texts and then put those psalms on musical display, not only adorned in their Genevan robes, but dressed up in a wardrobe of different styles and settings, some of them very contemporary; and it was--both last night and this weekend--great joy and pure blessing. Maybe, just maybe, those hard-core, 17th century Calvinists in their fashionable beaver hats at the Synod of Dort were on the money.

But then, look what Geneva had to work with, look what a hundred-thousand song-writers still do. The psalms-r-us. They're holy writ, but, God be praised, they're human writ too. They open their arms to us, to our stories--to our pain and our joy, to our desolation and our unfettered praise. They are made of the very same stuff we are. They're God's book of poems, but they're ours too. What a combo.

This morning's thanks are cheap praise, really, just my few words for musical literature that has opened itself to generations of believers, poems that welcome the human spirit, prayers that have taught gadzillions of faithful just how to talk to, and with, God almighty.

"Grace and Truth Shall Mark the Way" at a little piano in the den. Ten bucks pay. I feel like Judas, and I'm sorry.

But this morning I think I know more of what mother heard that day forty years ago; what she heard, despite the ingrate mercenary at the keys, was "Grace and Truth" that's nothing less than Grace and Truth.

This vale of tears

2012-01-24T05:50:00.000-06:00

It could be just about anyone, but it's not--it's someone, a very real family; and what I know about them--they're not relatives--makes this early family portrait monstrously more telling. In a way, it breaks my heart.

There are four children, two boys and a pair of twins. The oldest, the one in the sailor suit, will be smart and thoughtful. It's probably somewhere in the early 20s here. He will never marry. He will fall in love, deeply. He and his girlfriend will have what I know will be a wonderful, loving relationship. But they will never marry.

There will be almost a dozen other children born to this young Dutch family, so many that Mom, here holding one of the twins, will, like her oldest boy, die young. That one, the one at her side, will come to resent his father deeply for what he will believe is going to eventually kill his beloved mother, her incessant child-bearing. The father, a great bush of hair over his forehead, will be a Christian school teacher, a headmaster, a man I think of as a strict, quintessential Calvinist, a man who probably won't smile as much as he should have smiled by the time his life is spent. They won't be good friends, this oldest boy and his stern father. They will fight. That happens sometimes.

The younger boy moored at his father's knee will suffer greatly, but he will live to a ripe old age. Both he and his older brother will join the Dutch Resistance as young men and carry out very dangerous clandestine work against the Nazis, work that includes almost every kind of underground activity. I don't think either of them will ever kill a German, but between the two of them they may well be responsible for death.

They will both be heroes, but only the younger one will live. Both will suffer greatly. And, in the summer of 1945, after the Liberation, the younger brother will claim some fame for the Resistance work he accomplished. He will speak about that for years to come--to school children, for instance. But what few will ever know is that his older brother, who won't come back from a German concentration camp, will have had to cut his brother out from much of the Resistance activity they were in mutually, because that little boy in the cap couldn't keep his mouth shut and therefore became a liability. These two boys will not be good friends when the oldest dies.

But when the big brother doesn't come back, few will remember that the boy in the hat, the one clinging to his father's leg, was once shunned by the others--by his friends--because his silence could not be trusted.

But then that story will come back and haunt the boy in the hat years and years later, after his reputation as a freedom fighter is sturdily established. He will become very angry when a story is told that offers a different view, one long before held only in silence.

It's probably 1925 or so in the picture. This young Dutch couple--Frisian actually--has four darling children. They sit together in a garden somewhere in Friesland, sit for a picture, what would be today, a Christmas card maybe. They could be any other family. They could be ours.

And yet I know that all of that is ahead of them.

A picture with a thousand words, as most all of ours are.

The father's own wider family will have a reunion soon, hundreds of them coming together from places around the world; and I think it a wonderful blessing of life itself--don't you?-- that those hundreds of people won't know any of that, nothing at all. They'll renew acquaintances, meet new family, eat wonderful food, sing songs maybe, tell stories, remember good times and bad. But this particular ancestral family's story will be only a footnote--

"Oom Leen's oldest children were in the Resistance, you know--and one of them died in Dachau."

"Is that right?"

"Yes--it was very sad."

"It was a horrible time--the war."

"It must have been."

"Pass the dessert, Wim. I really shouldn't have another."

Yesterday, an old friend of mine sent me a little personal essay in which he explained that he was suffering with the first fruits of Alzheimers.

"Sometimes even going for breakfast in our community dining room is a challenge these days," he wrote, "because I forget. I might hear 'scrambled eggs' yet cannot remember what that is."

If I let myself, I could have cried.

And yet, when I look at this picture and see this family in the crystal ball that I own, I can't help but think how wonderful it is, in a way, that no one on this earth remembers everything.

Sometimes it's a blessing to forget, a blessing not to know.

This world is, after all, a vale of tears.

But I swear, that it is, doesn't mean there isn't a time for Christmas cards or one more dessert.

Das Bier

2012-01-20T05:59:00.000-06:00

He was a German, a German-American, and fiercely proud. He stood up in front of our tour bus and sang the praises of his own German heritage as he showed us around his town, New Ulm, Minnesota. He could just as well have been outfitted in lederhosen; after all, the whole town is.

One of our people was an immigrant Dutchman with a wooden leg from a biking accident, a man with a thick accent even though he'd come to Albertan flatlands a half-century before. Sitting in the back of that bus and just listening to that fiercely proud German story-teller made him hot as pan of bacon. He could not hear that tone of voice without remembering four long years of German occupation, including a winter when people burned books to stay warm and ate cats to put something, anything in their stomachs.

We pulled the bus over in a spot where the German man, a historian, told the story of the 1862 Dakota War, especially how--twice!!--fierce Dakota warriors tried to burn down the settlement of the people they called "the Dutch" because they couldn't say "Deutsch." Think of an old Western, half-naked savages screaming and yelling and launching fiery arrows toward a couple hundred German folks holed up together to try to stay alive. Twice, the white folks fought off the rampage. Twice, against significant odds, they survived.

What that German historian didn't tell our visitors was how white folks had lied, had cheated, had not delivered the goods they promised in a treaty that wasn't worth the parchment it was printed on. What that German didn't tell our visitors is that those German immigrants, back in 1862, were vastly more hostile to the Dakota people who lived in the Minnesota River valley than the American pioneers who were putting down homesteads in the hardwood forests and the sweet green meadows all around. What that German historian didn't recount is that there are two sides to the story.

I don't know that our Dutch immigrant friend knew that we weren't getting the whole story, but somehow I knew that our host's uniquely German manner, a manner that carried some pride, was going to just make the Dutchman sizzle--and it did. When he finished the story and we pulled up in front of Martin Luther College's new chapel for a tour, our Dutch tourist didn't get off the bus because he was bromming. No, there's not enough oompah in that Dutch word--he wasn't just bromming, he was burning. And he was alone.

He wasn't proud of himself either. After all, this German historian's family was in Minnesota for almost a hundred years when the Dutchman was kid. To be angry with him about the Nazi Occupation wasn't right either--it's just that his manner, that arrogant German carriage, was unmistakable. He sat for a while alone in the back of the bus, and prayed.

And then he left the back seat, walked out the door and into the chapel.

The rest of us had been blessed. It's a beautiful chapel, and it just so happened--a kiss of joy--that the chapel's organist happened to show up to practice. Once our host had talked about the chapel, we sang hymns, something we like to do on our tours, especially when we're in old churches--or, in this case, new chapels. And this time, when we did, that organist, parked somewhere out of sight, heard the melodies and decided, graciously, to play along--even "A Mighty Fortress," Luther's own.

It was absolutely gorgeous, took my breath away, made me weep. I'm serious. And that's when I saw the old Dutchman come limping up from the back alone and rejoin the group. Honestly, I thought I knew the story.

But I didn't hear it from the man himself until he sat beside me a few hours later in the basement of the August Schell Brewery, a place that didn't get destroyed when the Dakota freedom fighters attacked way back in 1862, and still pumps out great beer. We'd toured the place--wasn't long--and ended up in a basement tasting room, where our very gracious hosts didn't spare the samples.

That's when he told me the whole story--of how insanely angry he became sitting in that bus, how that German's arrogance evoked wrath he hardly knew he still had, wrath that had brewed in him for sixty years; but how he'd also told himself it wasn't right for him to be that mad, how he'd ushered himself out of the bus and into that chapel, and how, when he'd walked in, he'd heard this music, people singing hymns in a way that reminded him of the angels on high, it was that beautiful. "And God told me I was wrong," he said, deadly serious, in his own thick Dutch accent, a cold August Schell beer in his hand.

And that's why a couple of weeks ago, when I spotted this half-case of August Schell beer in Wal-Mart, a sampler, I didn't hesitate for a moment. I bought it. I was born in Wisconsin, the nation's beer-brewing capitol. It's not the first 12-pack of beer I bought in my life.

But I've never come home with one that has any better story.

Prost!

Politics

2012-01-19T06:18:00.000-06:00

"Breaks my heart to see that--don't you think?"

"Some people just don't have the smarts to get in out of the rain."

"You're a jackass."

"He's an idiot, and you're a dreamer."

"I don't know why I married you."

"Pass the wine."

"Really!--have you no heart?"

"Okay, he's cute, all right? But what are you going to do, build him a teepee?"

"It's our anniversary, sweetheart."

Silence.

"What is it, anyway? what kind of bird, I mean?"

"He's suffering."

"He'll dry out--that's what feathers are for."

"I swear--you have no heart."

"Okay, he's cute."

"I think he's a she, dear."

"I might have known."

Silence.

"35 years is a long time."

"Not long enough."

He reached for her hand.

Swan Song XXVIX--Ms. Flannery O'Connor

2012-01-18T06:06:00.000-06:00

I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world as its relation to that.

Those words aren't cheap, but there are umpteen thousands, even millions of people, of Americans, who would willing volunteer them in testimony. Shoot, count me among 'em. The way I see the world is forever altered because of my deep-seeded belief--sometimes strong, sometimes not--that once upon a time a hippy Galilean suffered and died and then, Good Lord, rose again.

But it takes someone special to do something about it, to live by it, to make his or her life's work into that kind of testimony.

Two generations ago, my colleagues stuck an lit book in my hand when I came to Dordt College to teach, an anthology put together by someone named Perrine. Wasn't all the big really, two-toned, and I remember the first day's assignment: two short stories, one of them really gamey, plot-driven, a fast read, a story titled "The Most Dangerous Game"; and the other a Faulkner, "That Evening Sun." Both were about fear.

The trick was to get students to read both and then talk about which is best--the genre of lit or the genre of adventure. Brilliant idea, but a miserable failure because every time I tried it, I had to pin the entire class to the floor to make them think Faulkner was "art" and therefore "better." Never once worked.

But I liked the class, "Responding to Lit," and I liked the stories in Perrine too. Teaching was fun. I remember walking home with my friend, Hugh Cook--we lived in the same neighborhood. We'd yak about what had happened that day in class, a feast of joy, honestly. "Just think," Hugh said one day as we reached his place, "and we get paid for this too." Such heady joy was ours--young and charged with love for Faulkner and Fitzgerald, and a woman I knew only faintly back then, a woman named Flannery O'Connor.

She was in Perrine too, a story titled "Greenleaf," a story that contains the n-word and therefore doesn't appear in many anthologies anymore. Last semester I took it out of mothballs because I waxed nostalgic--I remembered it from 35 years ago. I ran off copies and assigned it once again for old time's sake, but we didn't talk about it in class because it became the basis of an assignment.

Today, this morning, we do. Today, I've got to talk about "Greenleaf" again, 35 years later. I wanted to come back to that story, n-word or not, because all really good stories end somewhere in the neighborhood of where they began.

Truth is, there's things about O'Connor that bug me. What I hate most is being an English teacher about it, the know-it-all up in front of the room to students who are stunned to learn, for instance, that the woman who wrote "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," with its brutal mass-murder shoot-'em-up ending, is really an orthodox Christian believer. What I hate is this "I'm-a-genius-and-you-aren't thing" that happens automatically when I say, "But wait!--there's this whole substrata of symbols--and if you play the story backwards at a slow speed or look at it with 3-D glasses or something--you'll see the REAL meaning." Aren't I a smarty-pants? You can be brilliant too if you majored in English.

Hate that, really.

But I love the story. It's such a joy to read, even though that dang bull gets Mrs. May right in the heart, just kills her in the end. I read "Greenleaf" again last night and was floored again by that woman's art. Dang it. It is all there--this meticulously choreographed dance of hints and images beneath the action, something Ms. O'Connor herself would call, I suppose, the movement of the spirit--and be not mistaken, we're talking about the Holy one. In "Greenleaf," Jesus himself is a scrub bull who's been eating away at the hedge of spiritual pride that Mrs. May surrounds herself with, a woman so blasted sure of herself and so blind that her salvation requires divine intervention by the lethal horns of one butt-ugly bull. Only then can she come to understand her damned self.

I read "Greenleaf" again last night--maybe for the last time--and when I did I know dang well why it is that I've loved teaching for lo, these many years. The students are fun, if you don't take yourself too seriously; but what I get to work with, day after day, is the beauty of God's world. Good night, sometimes that beauty is treacherously ugly--because life is. But everyday there's more testimony, everyday there's more life.

And then there's Flannery O'Connor, a fiction writer who saw the innocent face of her Savior like a divine watermark over every last page of the world in front of her--always there, always searching, always wanting his own--even if sometimes he comes along in the leathery hide of a scrub bull.

And I got paid for it too. For the last 35 years, I got paid for it. Isn't that something?

This morning's thanks--this morning's humble thanks--are for a woman's brilliant achievement in story-telling, work that's inspired me for 35 years, that's made it worth being a teacher, even if, one more time this morning, I'll have to act like some kind of weird magician English teacher. "Ah, class, but what you didn't see was the way that bull wears a wreath like a crown." For years, I've seen engineers roll their eyes.

No matter. She's worth it--Ms. O'Connor is. Trust me. I've been doing this for a lifetime.

Swan Song XXVIII--MLK Day

2012-01-17T05:46:00.000-06:00

Not until I came home from school yesterday, walked to the front of the house, pulled back the brass door of the mail box, and discovered it empty did I realize that it was a holiday, Martin Luther King Day. Not until then.

We don't celebrate MLK Day at this Christian college for a good reason--because the semester began just a week ago, and if we were to give the students their first Monday off, a ton of them would simply stay home for the first half week or so, some of them for good reasons, others for bad. Furthermore, if the college would shut down on MLK Day, boat loads of students would head up to the Twin Cities or west to Denver or wherever, putting literally hundreds on the roads, mid-winter. Students would spend all sorts of cash goofing off, and risk their lives in what could well be horrible travel weather. They could be killed.

What's more, our non-compliance isn't really racist since we don't celebrate Labor Day either. School always starts before summer's last fling, so for thirty-some years I haven't had a Labor Day when I wasn't laboring. I teach on Labor Day. I teach on MLK Day. It just makes good sense not to shut things down, good economic sense.

When I was a college sophomore, four of us went to Florida over spring break to catch some sun. We pulled into Ft. Lauderdale late at night, had made no reservations, so ended up looking for a place to stay at an hour--and a time of year--when finding a room wasn't exactly a breeze.

I don't know how on earth we ended up where we did, but I remember the place very clearly--it seemed to me then to be an abandoned military barracks, at least that's what it looked like, rafters for ceilings. We went into the office. We were third in line. I remember being anxious and we sure weren't picky, believe me.

The group in front was from Notre Dame--I remember that. Four guys. The seedy old man behind the desk gave them a key. But then, horror!--the couple in front of us got turned down. "Sorry," the guy said. "You saw it--that was the last room."

That meant, of course, we had to look elsewhere. Once the couple left, there we stood, bereft. We too started to walk out.

"Where you going?" the guy said. "I still got a room." Wink and a smile. "We don't take their kind here."

That young couple in front of us were black.

I'd never experienced anything close to that before. I'd heard about it, read about it, wondered about it--but it had happened right in front of me. Besides, my father had believed that MLK was an agitator who people claimed had buddied up with known communists. I grew up in Wisconsin in the early Sixties, when the shadow of Joseph McCarthy still loomed over politics. I'm sure that my wonderful, God-fearing father--one of the sweetest men I ever knew, honestly--probably believed that Joe McCarthy was a far better man than this Martin Luther King.

Were he alive, my father would probably still have all kinds of trouble celebrating MLK Day. It would bug him no end. He might well appreciate the fact that we don't celebrate. No one I know would doubt my father's deep and abiding Christian faith.

There are good reasons why this Christian college doesn't celebrate the holiday, and I understand them. But I also know that historically for my people, who surely do like to watch the dollars, it's much, much easier to work on MLK Day than it is to remember the man or his vision because what there is to remember of King's time for many, many white evangelical Christians isn't pretty at all, it's racist.

David Brooks is in South Carolina now, and yesterday, on Martin Luther King Day, in the New York Times, he speculated about the folks he'd been meeting, especially the mood of their rallies, like last night's debate. He says that the audiences want "a restoration" because they're sure that American once had strong values, "but we have gone astray." They believe we need to return to the values we once had, Brooks says.

Brooks doesn't disagree with that assessment, but he also says he wonders if the people he's been visiting have become "the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return."

There are many good, good reasons for our not celebrating Martin Luther King Day, but at this mostly white Christian college, it behooves us, every year, to rethink our motives because there are also many, many good reasons--moral reasons--to remember both who he was and who we were and maybe still are.

Not Sure

2012-01-16T06:33:00.000-06:00

If you are absolutely, perfectly sure that once upon a time there were, in fact, two beautiful naked people tending the greenest garden of flowery delights ever imagined, and that those two sweethearts got themselves and all of mankind bamboozled by an upright, chattering snake who conned them into eating forbidden fruit; if you truly believe that Adam and Eve, the only belly-buttonless human beings in history, were literally our first opa and oma; if you're absolutely convinced that the world was begat in just exactly the way Genesis says it was, then John Suk's new book is going to upset you. Maybe you shouldn't read it.

But if you sometimes have doubts about a six-day creation, if you're not exactly sure that gay marriage is the most frightful abomination ever to curse American culture--vastly worse than, say, racism; or that, in some few circumstances, removing something we call a fetus--for good reason--from the womb of a woman isn't exactly the same thing as killing a baby; if there are times in your life--say when you visit Dachau or Auschwitz--or when you consider the woman next door, scared to death and praying her eyes out for relief of her mother's cancer, and then find yourself wondering whether or not God almighty has left the room, then you'll find Not Sure something akin to breath of fresh air.

If you think Tim Tebow's flashy gridiron testimony is more than slightly over-the-top, you'll like the book. If Mother Teresa's long and difficult battles with profound spiritual doubt doesn't surprise you, you will too. If you don't really think you have the kind of "personal relationship with Jesus" that some smilers do, you'll find Not Sure refreshing. If sometimes you get really tired of contemporary American evangelicalism, you'll love it. If you didn't go to Promise Keepers with your grandson or your father or your favorite uncle, even though every other guy in church did and came back be-speckled with spiritual hickies, you'll know exactly what Suk is talking about in Not Sure--and you'll thank him.

I really, really, really enjoyed Not Sure because there are times, Lord save me, I'm not either.

I have my quibbles with Brother John. It's not holy writ, after all. Like many Canadian, post-World War II Dutch immigrants and their kids, he doesn't get the old line CRC people, one of whom I am. He doesn't understand the pietism of the afscheiding, the separation people; but that's not a sin. However, using Stan Wiersma's parents as an example of how all pre-Kuyperian CRC people looked or thought is like using Amos 'n Andy to define African-Americans, or any of a thousand absent-minded professors to critique American higher education. There was a time when most everyone in northwest Iowa planted their corn on the square; but thousands--Catholics and Methodists and Lutherans--did it because that's the way they were taught, not because it somehow patterned predestination. Give me a break, John.

His discussion of the Half-way Covenant and the early American pilgrims and puritans might well be stronger had he read Perry Miller, and I tend to think he's a little over-enamored with communication theory. We change, but there wouldn't be a Hamlet if we evolved as radically as I sometimes guess Suk believes we have or are. What we read and how we read changes dramatically; human nature doesn't.

Most embarrassingly, he trashes his two-year stint here at Dordt College because of what he seems to believe was a ideological straight-jacket, DC's too vigorous espousal of the neo-Kuyperian way. I think we make, for him, a too convenient punching bag; but then he was 18 years old and here during DC's own tumultuous, un-civil war years. Big deal.

Truth be told, I found his confession of doubt far less thorny than I thought it would be. Honestly, I expected something more Christopher Hitchens. Most of the time, I know pretty much exactly what he feels. Last night in church, we sang "Abide with Me," and I told myself that my memory contains childhood moments when singing that great old hymn was vastly more sweetly satisfying to me than it was last night. The Holden Caulfield in me wanted to return at that moment to my childhood because as I've grown older my own doubt has grown, but then so has my understanding of the world we live in and just who I am. These days I think I know my sin more fully than I care to say, and that's why I find also find grace vastly more amazing than I ever could have as a kid. The sweet old hymn sounds much different today, beautiful but different. Sometimes I wish I could go back.

A Laotian woman told me her story in great detail once upon a time. She told me how she'd crossed the Mekong in what she described as a little homemade dugout, her children inside. She was aware of soldiers ready to shoot her and her kids out right of the water, which they often did. It was night. The water was cold. But she wanted to get to the other side, to freedom. She described herself, chest-deep, in the waters of the Mekong. "I prayed and prayed and prayed," she told me, almost crying to remember.

That was years before she'd ever heard of Jesus--or if she had, it was but the slightest mention. And I remember wondering who exactly was she praying too? And would God--who I believe had to hear it--simply shrug it off because it didn't come in the name of Jesus. Would he say, "Well, sorry, but you're on your own, lady." Really?

John Suk's Not Sure lays out the nature of the faith a lot of us struggle to hold to at times, me among 'em. When I got to the end, however, the only thing I really believed about him was that he was even doubtful about doubt because Not Sure does not end like Psalm 88. It ends more like 13--with faith. At least what I'd call faith. It ends with honesty and aspiration and the kind of trembling trust that lots of have, even though the Tebows get the headlines.

Would Suk's views on gay marriage and human evolution and other hot button items keep him out of the pulpit at my church? (We're looking, by the way.) Yes, it would.

And there lies the problem, maybe the most difficult problem the book creates.

He's got an approach to that problem. He's asking for a church that doesn't judge, a church that only loves, a church without doctrinal walls. In the history of Christianity, those kinds of places generally don't do well, and that too is a problem.

But most of the time I found Not Sure to be thoughtful, earnest, and, finally, faithful.

And I found the book encouraging. Some won't. But King David would, and so would Mother Teresa. They've been there themselves--not always perfectly sure, that is.

Sunday Morning Meds--Spacious Skies

2012-01-15T06:33:00.001-06:00

“thou hast enlarged me”

It was always a little tough for us, having to return from week-longtreks we took annually through the big-shouldered Missouri River Valley,following the two-hundred year-old route of Lewis and Clark through SouthDakota.

We means an ecologist friend of mine and me, as wellas a delightful tour hostess for the nearly fifty souls who, with us, filled upa bus. The first Great Plains pilgrimage,I remember, was a rip-roaring successes for three stooges like us, who’d neverpulled off a stunt like that before. People on the bus loved it, really.

And all three of us live in awe of the country weexplored. It’s so big and sobeautiful.

But the Great Plains continues to hemorrhage its populace,something it’s done since the late 19^th century, when European immigrantsand restless Eastern palefaces flooded the place, cock-sure that a few newlyplanted cottonwoods, some elbow grease, and a good mule would create a home anda way of life on 160-acres. Simply put,that was a lie.

Homesteaders discovered that the Great Plains weredespairingly fickle. While we were in Pierre, South Dakota, the whole region was almost flooded. Four inches of rain fell in one night. The prairie looked royal in an emeraldrobe. Next year, the place could have beena dust bowl.

But sparse population in a landscape that immense isn’t necessarilya bad thing. Today, the whole placeseems an open-air museum; if you come anywhere close to the Missouri River,even the imaginatively-challenged can hear the sounds of the Corps of Discoverymaking their way north and west. Almostanywhere on the Missouri’s big glacial banks, you can stand in the yawningopenness and watch your dog run away for three days, nary a Burger King insight. That’s nice.

That first trip didn’t go exactly as planned. We had three days of rain, and the wholeevent was much more, well, meditative, sweetly meditative, than I’d guessed itwas going to be. I’d like to tell you that the devotions we had together eachmorning were greatly appreciated because they were so meticulously planned, butthat would be as big a fib as fertility of the land.

Our devotions were memorable because of the sheer grandeurthat surrounded us every day, the immensity of a land where it’s as hard to bearrogant and as it is easy to be on your knees.

For centuries, translators have changed what’s really therein verse one of Psalm 4, and I think it’s a mistake. “Thou hast enlarged me” really says somethingto this effect: “thou hast set me in alarge place.” What David is asking Godto remember are the times when He delivered the shepherd/king by bringing himout to the Great Plains.

Not literally, of course. King David didn’t know the South Dakota from Schnectady.

But I understand what he means. You’ve done it before, Lord, he says; you’vebrought me out to the glorious openness of the spacious skies.

“Do it again,” he’s going to say. “Please, Lord, do it one more time.”

I get that. Really, Ido.

Morning Thanks--her powder

2012-01-13T06:00:00.001-06:00

It's brand new and perfectly clean, but perhaps the most distinguishing thing about my mother's studio apartment in the old folks home is her brightly lit bathroom; it's totally unlike most others because it's big, really spacious. The apartment itself isn't tiny--the cathedral ceiling helps a little; but the bathroom is roomy enough for a few donuts in her wheelchair.

It's got a roll-in shower that's immediately accessible, maybe twice as big as the little unit we just put in in our basement. Chrome handlebars are on the wall, enough apparatus to remind you of a gym maybe--that may be stretching it. And there's the safety cord, a string that, when pulled, will bring the nurse. When most old people fall, they do so in the bathroom, I'm told.

The place is full of medicines, tons of them--ointments and pills and a volley of over-the-counter remedies for just about everything but old age.

On Christmas eve, both my father-in-law and my mother, 500 miles apart, both of them in their early 90s, fell. When people that old fall, it's normally not much more than a crumple, but even a crumple can shatter ancient bones. Sometimes even a slow-motion fall is the beginning of the end. Bones break and never heal. My father died a month after a fall.

But today they're both improving. Nothing got broken. Our grandson plays hockey and goes down on the ice a hundred times an hour, I swear; but when he takes off his skates, he's just fine. With my mother, it 's not that easy. On Christmas Eve she crumpled, and she's still being punished.

I walked into that spacious bathroom when we visited her a couple of weeks ago. There's an extension on her toilet so she doesn't have to bend her knees as far as most of us do, and there's just so much stuff all over, so much bathroom stuff. Depends, too. Lots of them.

And there on a table between the sink and the stool I saw this round box of powder, talc, foundation--I don't know what it is, really, but it's called "Evening in Paris."

It's getting really hard for Mom to get out these days, even though she likes to. You've got to figure on an afternoon of extra time for her to get in and out of the apartment, the car, and, say, a restaurant. I don't think she cares to go out of town anymore--maybe just a sandwich at the restaurant downtown. Otherwise, she's there, in that studio apartment in the home. And that seems to be just fine.

"An Evening in Paris" really isn't even a dream. "An Evening in Paris" is absurd. It's black humor. Her life--I thought as I stood there in her heavily armed bathroom--is just about the polar opposite of the kind of billowing romance suggested by that phrase. It's a bad joke.

But then, I thought, maybe my mother needs her Evening in Paris. Maybe an Evening in Paris is just as important as those shiny safety bars or that single string on the wall beside that ultra-tall toilet.

We all do, don't we? We all need that Evening in Paris.

I do, and that's why, this morning, I'm thankful for Mom's Evening in Paris.

What I witnessed this morning

2012-01-12T05:50:00.000-06:00

We used to shoot them for fun when I was a kid. Squirrel hunting was its own kind of joy too, not that I gloried in the killing, even then.

What I remember best about it was sitting and waiting in thelakeshore woods. What I never knewbefore I did that—just sat quietly amid the trees—is that things come alive inremarkable ways if you sit in stony silence.

I hail from Wisconsin, where hunting is the state pastime. Come deer opener, we’d regularly have half aclass in the high school where I once taught. It’s hard for me to say anything negative about hunting because huntersI know who hunt are great naturalists who most love and honor theoutdoors.

Still, I’m with Thoreau, who says every boy (call himsexist) should hunt, but once hegrows up he should put the gun away. It’s not something I’d carp about, but it’s true for me. But once upon a time, I actually shotsquirrels out of trees, thoughtlessly. Itwas, as Thoreau would say, a rite of passage.

This morning on my way to school, a car came steaming along,going too fast, I thought, and I heard a clunk and saw a red squirrel draghimself off until he reached the neighbor’s porch. He scrambled quickly enough to make me to hopehe wouldn’t die, but the sound argued otherwise.

Squirrels have entertained us in this house for years withtheir jaw-dropping gymnastics. Lately,they’ve been chasing each around the lindens so fast they create orange stripesup the bark. Chubby ballerinas, they’llrisk life and limb in our ornamental crabs, determined to get every last berry,no matter how thin the twig.

When I heard that thump and saw that squirrel drag its hindend up the lawn and beneath the porch, it just about took me out at the knees,I swear. I was actually shaking.

How it is that a young me once shot them out of treeswithout a conscience. How is it that thismorning, 60 years later, that awful sound nearly did me in? Do we soften in old age? Does our heart somehow get outsized? What else gets lost when there’s less testosterone?

Nathan Englander’s “Free Fruit for Young Widows” appears inthis year’s Best American Short Stories,and tomorrow we’ll talk about it in class—or I will if they don’t. It’s a gem, really, and, like all Holocauststories, its power is in its ideas or theme because the Holocaust can’t simplybe a setting. No car chase or buddingromance can outreach demonic treachery.

An Israeli vet named Shimmy offers kindness to a man, acomrade who nearly killed him quite unjustly during the 1956 Sinai campaign. That vet, now a father, runs a fruit stand inJerusalem. There’s a coming-of-age storytoo in “Free Fruit,” the story of a boy named Etgar who only slowly begins tounderstand why his father dispenses grace in the volume he does, even to thosewho are, to the boy’s mind, totally undeserving.

When Etgar is a kid, Shimmy simply tries to tell his boythat nothing in life is easy, simply black and white—there’s only shades of gray,he says.

One day, they watch a fish market next door, where the bossis taking care of business, the catch of the day flopping around on a blockbefore getting killed with a mallet. Shimmytells Etgar that his son doesn’t understand suffering: “God forbid you should have to live with theconsequences of decisions, permanent, eternal, that will chase you in your head,turning you from this side to that,” he says, “tossing between wrong andright.” They’re watching those fish.

But Etgar still couldn’t grasp what his father was tellinghim, “couldn’t comprehend how his father saw the story to be that of a fishflip-flopping,” Englander writes, “when it was, in his eyes, only ever aboutthat mallet coming down.”

Still a kid, Etgar doesn’t understand suffering.

Sometimes literature helps us see—helps me anyway. Once upon a time I was Etgar.

But this morning I was Shimmy, even though I’ve never come anywhere near Treblinka or Dachau.

I saw—and I felt, I guess—that fish flip-flopping, and Iwasn’t thinking about that mallet like I was in those days, as a boy, when Iheld the rifle myself.

"who changest not"

2012-01-11T06:01:00.000-06:00

The hardest work I ever did was a three-week stint--that's all--with a road crew cutting sod and laying it down along the new interstate highway, I-43, that would come to link Milwaukee and Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was backbreaking work. Cutting sod wasn't all that bad--I was blessed to do that occasionally; but laying those sod balls just about killed me because hauling them up or down the steeply inclined overpasses in loose dirt was simply backbreaking.

But it offered, in my hometown, the best money that could be made by someone like me that summer. I was a college grad without a full-time job; and the work was constant--six to six every day. I was just a hired hand, local help, a strong body drawn from the neighborhood when the crew was prettifying that new highway with fresh grass in Sheboygan County. When they were through, the outfit asked me if I wanted to stay with them as they worked their way north, which pleased me as much as any request I'd ever had. It meant they knew I could work. That was July, 1970.

Nothing changed life in my hometown, Oostburg, Wisconsin, like that new highway. What used to be a two-lane road on a snaking path cut originally into the lakeside forests by Sauk Indians was suddenly transformed into an interstate that brought the city of Milwaukee fifteen minutes closer. The old highway was a killer; the new one was a dream. I had a hand in it myself.

In essence, it transformed Oostburg into suburbia at a time when the old way of life--agriculture--was becoming a business instead of a family thing. That new highway brought hundreds of job to the community, many of whose residents became building contractors--plumbers, dry-wallers, carpenters, excavators. The highway brought more than traffic; it brought people and people needed houses.

For some reason, I remember that the sign on the way up the hill into town used to say "Population 897." We were Hollanders, almost all of us anyway, as we had been since the 1850s, when my great-great grandparents immigrated from the Netherlands and whacked down some of the forest to make room for a lakeshore farm. For more than a century, if you weren't Dutch, you weren't much.

The highway changed all of that. Today, even though my home town is significantly bigger and much more diverse, its peculiar charm is still unique. It is, like most of rural America, deeply religious and gracious in the loving care it extends to its own.

For the most part, I haven't lived there since that summer, the summer I laid sod down on the new highway overpasses, so it's been a joy to watch the town change, transform itself. When we pulled into town just after Christmas this year, we couldn't miss a ice-skating pond right downtown, under lights, right there where my own grandfather's blacksmith shop used to be, and later his Mobilgas station. I thought it was a grand idea, befitting the best Oostburg ever offered its own.

Out along the old highway, maybe three miles north of town, in a brick building that I remember falling apart in the late 60s, a country school stands, a place that was probably built late in the game for all such enterprises, school consolidation going on already for years. I remember it as the Town of Wilson school, but I'm not old enough to remember seeing any kids there. By the time I was growing up, farm kids in the neighborhood were already being bussed off to town; and the place was, as I remember, falling apart.

It's had lots of owners since then, I guess, although I don't remember any of them. But today the place is exceptionally well-kept, clean and tidy, immaculate--almost Dutch-like. Dutch Bibles are the only ones, I guess, that actually contain the verse "cleanliness is next to Godliness."

Just across the road is the farmstead I remember as belonging to the VerVeldes, a quiet and unassuming couple who went to our church and had a string of kids who all went to the Christian school in town when I did. We're talking agriculture circa 1950, of course, when Old McDonald farming was simply the way everyone did it--20 cows maybe, a hen house, and, at best, 160 acres and a big red barn with a loft stuffed with hay.

That's long gone, as are the Les and Inez, I imagine, although they have kids in the area. Things have changed.

Today the old Town of Wilson school is an Islamic Center, of all things--an Islamic Center. It wasn't an easy transition for the locals, which I can understand. They made national news at just about the time another Islamic Center created all kinds of ill will right there close to the spot where once the Twin Towers stood. Oostburg folks are just about as devout as they were when my great-grandparents, staunch Dutch Calvinists, shooed the Sauk and Kickapoo out of the neighborhood. 9/11 was horrifying, and it happened in New York, a long ways away. But it's always hard to know who's one of us and who's not when the battle lines, world-wide, seem so deep and bloody.

There was some opposition, but today that Islamic Center is there, amazingly. If you stand in the parking lot, you can see the new highway a half-mile east, including an overpass whose grasses descend from sod I laid there myself.

I really do love going home. Something less a mile away from that new Islamic Center, in a cemetery named after my own great-uncle, in fact, lie the mortal remains of just about every ancestor of mine on both sides. I bet you can see the place from the graveyard. My grandpa's there, a preacher. I wonder what he thinks.

We live in a different world than the one I grew up in--all of us do. But then nothing ever really stays the same, and nobody knows the future really. Not even Harold Camping. What we do know is that it's somehow going to be different than it was because it always is.

Our preacher says those angels who appeared out of nowhere in the Judean hills, a strange heavenly choir, told that gang of dusty shepherds something eternally profound. "Don't be afraid," they said, although you must have been able to hear teeth chattering a half-dozen hilltops away. "Don't be scared."

Our preacher says that of all the memorable commands in scripture, that's the one most repeated.

Even so, it's just terribly easy to forget.

Swan Songs XXVII--The last first day

2012-01-10T05:26:00.000-06:00

It wasn't that many years ago--no more than five, I swear--that I wondered, honestly, whether I'd ever not get nervous the night before meeting students the very first day of term. The truth is, I'd never slept all that well the night before the first class, and I'd never stepped into a classroom that first day without an XXL case of the jitters.

Last night, honestly, no sweat. Last night, the origin of the sleeplessness I suffered was the near-terminal snuffiness of a 640-acre head cold. Once I went over my notes before ten, I never gave those soon-to-be newly populated classrooms a second thought. This morning is my very last first day.

A ton of first-year images still have a place in my otherwise leaky memory; and the night before my very first day of teaching will never, ever leave. The apartment I rented--an old house trailer--was still occupied and would be until September 1; so I took up residence at an ancient, red brick hotel, the building farthest to the left on the picture, the southwest corner of the town square in Monroe, Wisconsin--second floor, I remember, with a window that looked out over street.

It was August hot, and there was no air--after all, this was Wisconsin. My window--a huge one--was wide open as I remember. No screen. I had my roll sheets in my hand. Must have been dittos because it was 1970, 42 years ago, and nobody at Black Hawk High School or almost anywhere else outside of fancy tech labs had ever heard the word computer. I was four months out of college, completely alone--no girlfriend, no attachments, no nothing. It was just me, just me and those roll sheets--one journalism class (I'd never taken a course in journalism in my life), two junior English classes (American lit--I had a shot at that one), and two senior classes (English lit--the way things went all over in the olden days)--plus a study hall. I was on my own, accountable to no one else, and that, I remember, felt very good. I didn't feel anymore like a kid.

For some reason, I didn't doubt for a moment that I'd be just fine once things got started. I didn't sit there questioning whether or not I'd done the right thing taking the job when it was offered, late July. I wasn't worried about whether or not I'd do a good job--I was just worried about those names, those kids, those human beings in my hands. I read through the names time after time, trying to imagine them and their lives.

They were Swiss-American names, many of them anyway, as foreign to my ear and tongue as if they'd been Korean, raised as I was in a Dutch Calvinist ghetto. There I sat on the bed in my underwear; it was very hot in that old, upstairs hotel room and there was no desk. Time after time after time, I read through all those strange names, wondering what on earth those kids would be like.

Voices arose from beneath me on the street. Some kids were hanging out downtown. Their words were indistinguishable, but their banter carried the loose hilarity kids create anywhere. I couldn't help wonder whether one or two of them might have names right there on the lists, but I also knew the cold, sad truth: they weren't thinking about me right then, not like I was doting on them. Tomorrow, I'd be an asterisk, simply the new guy. If I'd ever be anybody in their lives, I'd have to become what I could totally on my own. To them, I'd be a human being without a history, without a name, and something about that equation was scary and perfectly exhilarating.

Honestly, today, 42 years later, I'd have more trouble remembering my students' names from last semester than I would the names on those class lists. If you'd read 'em to me now, I could tell you exactly where those kids sat in the rows my classroom. Some of those students I'd still recognize by their handwriting--I swear it. All of that exists clearly in my memory, although what I see today is still their 17-year-old selves.

When I think about it now, I imagine I must have been somewhat scary to them, too. After all, I was still their age, really, just four years older. I was just a kid, even though that night maybe, for the first time, I didn't think I was. Today, those students are all approaching 60 themselves.

This morning, it's very early, but it's the head cold that got me up--cottonmouth, not nerves. Last night, I looked over my computer lists, complete with color pics and turned on the Daily Show.

This morning, it's the last first time for me, and I'm ready. Finally, I'm ready.

And thankful. In so many ways, I'm just thankful.

It's been a good life.

American Gothic

2012-01-09T05:26:00.000-06:00

It's an American icon. Like the gospel, it's as simple as a cupcake, yet as complex as the face of the moon. Nothing--not even politicians at the State Fair or endlessly unfurled rows of corn--says "Iowa" more definitively than Grant Wood's American Gothic, and that's why, I guess, I thought we had to have one once we moved here, years and years ago. What Hawkeye home would really be complete without one?

It's prompted a thousand parodies. Google it sometime, and you'll find dozens and dozens of spoofs, made hilarious by the instant recognition the image creates.

The thing is, he didn't mean it as a joke--or did he? Sometime in the 1930s, Grant Wood got himself enthralled by Flemish portrait artists and figured he could try their peculiar style himself. So he got his dentist and his sister to stand in front of a house whose arching upstairs bedroom window offered its own kind of gothic shape, and, viola!--he had a telling portrait.

American Gothic says different things to different people, however. Some Iowans were mortified that he so deviously rendered up Iowa's barnyard puritans. They may be right--it's hard for Iowans not to feel a little mocked by the painting, really--and rather brutally exposed. If you're progressive especially, you sort of want to yell out that we're not all like that! What Grant Wood has captured here is the very soul of 21st century Iowa Christian conservatives. If you're one of them, I'm not sure what you think because I'm not and because they aren't among the champions of irony.

There are those who think it is satire, Mr. Wood, who wore bibs himself, making fun of his own people. And there are those who think it isn't, Mr. Wood, who wore bibs himself, deeply appreciative of the arduous work ethic, the rugged simplicity of the people of the tall corn. It's a mark of the painting's excellence that we can read just about anything we want into the portrait, and--for better or for worse--I love it. It's on our wall, but upstairs.

Years ago, when Grandpa took down an old shed, we saved a couple of weathered boards and had American Gothic framed in sweetly weathered Van Gelder barn wood. We've still not started sifting seriously through Schaap "stuff" for the sale of our house, but I was thinking that wouldn't toss American Gothic, nor would I sell it. It's us, after all. That's what I always thought.

But last week our darling grandson, just two years old and only now beginning to make sense when he jabbers, took one look at Grant Wood's masterpiece hanging on an upstairs wall, pointed one perfectly sinless little fat finger, and said, "Papa and Mima." Meaning us.

He thought it was us.

I'll admit it--I gulped a little. After all, I don't look like the old dentist--I'm much heavier. And Barbara hasn't worn a kitchen smock like that for as long as I've known her. We're really not them. I mean he was factually wrong.

But then I got to thinking. I suppose that finally the little guy is right, isn't he? We are them, even though I don't own a pitchfork and my wife only recently started to wear her hair pinned back like that.

It's amazing. I've decided that ahead of our smart little grandson lies, undoubtedly, a distinguished career as a famous art critic. He understands the ambiguity of Grant Wood--at just two years old, he gets American Gothic. He's brilliant.

Besides, we don't have a gothic window either. And I don't have a collarless shirt like that, and Barbara has nothing even close to that black dress--no medallion or whatever it is. And good night, we're not that dour. Look at those faces.

I mean, we're not really them. No way. That little grandson of ours, he really meant that appraisal iconically. That's what he really meant. That's what he meant to say.

Anyway, when it comes time for us move out, I'm thinking of getting rid of it actually.

Sunday Morning Meds--"God of my righteousness"

2012-01-08T04:07:00.000-06:00

“Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness” Psalm 4:1

Charles Spurgeon says this particular descriptive phrase (“God of my righteousness”) doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Psalms, or in the Bible itself, for that matter. The KJV has it, of course, as do plenty of contemporary translations, but the NIV translates the phrase into a single adjective and then gives it to God (“righteous God”), a rendition that seems to me to suggest a significantly different idea.

I was born and reared in the Calvinist tradition of the Christian faith, and for better or for worse I’ve stayed—stubbornly, perhaps—within that fold. Maybe that’s why I like the KJV’s phrasing better. The psalmist isn’t mincing words; instead, he’s giving total credit for his righteousness to the author thereof. I’m not interested in polemics, but it seems to me he’s doing the Calvinist thing.

I once knew an old man named Harry, perfectly bald, only a quarter of a lung left in his ribs. He’d lost the rest to cancer, been a smoker all his life. He was very much alone in Arizona. His wife was gone, but then she hadn’t been at his side since he’d treated her in the same, sad way he’d treated anything else in his life of real value, including his kids.

He wore a beret and drove an ancient VW beetle, looked for all the world like the eccentric he was. In his spare time, which he had plenty of after his retirement, he loved to spin poems, little aphoristic lines that rose in his mind and soul from all kinds of varied sources—some of them devotional, some of them sexy. Sort of like John Donne. Maybe that’s a stretch.

I’ll never forget him crying, something he used to do at the drop of a hat—well, beret. In a restaurant, outside of church, inside church, just about anywhere, if he was given to consider the shadowy mistakes of his eighty-some years, he’d shed tears profusely. I used to worry about his being able to get his breath, in fact.

And then he’d look at me, a young man at the time, and raise a crooked finger. “Jim,” he’d say, “if I had one lousy thing to do with my salvation, I’d burn in hell.” Amazing line.

The poet in Psalm 4 is not pointing. He’s not trying to convince you and me to curb our appetites or line up back on the straight and narrow. Neither is he driven half-mad by the sin of his early life. I’m not sure he’s crying at all.

But the intent of the line—“God of my righteousness”—seems pretty much the same as my old friend Harry’s appraisal of his life’s destiny. It seems to me that what the Psalmist is suggesting is that without God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, he’d be at ground zero when it comes to righteousness and salvation.

It’s difficult for me to understand how any believing earthling could say anything different. But then, I’m a Calvinist, I guess. And closing in on retirement the way I am, looking back over a life that has some miles on it, I find it impossible not to say, with the poet of Psalm 4, that this God I worship, this God who loves me, is anything less than the “God of my righteousness.”

Swan Song XXVI--faculty meetings

2012-01-06T06:36:00.000-06:00

I suppose I will always remember them generically. Basically, they're all alike, heavy laden with info, some of which is important, some of which is frivolous. Faculty meetings happen, always, at appropriate times, I suppose--the beginning of a semester, the end of a semester; but most faculty members are distracted, in January by the scramble before the first day of classes, in May by sheer fatigue. Few of us ever really want to go.

Administrators aren't dumb. They understand, so they do what they can to make them sweet. Donuts from Casey's Bakery. Often, there's a pep talk, but then most faculty "get" sweet-talking. Admin will shake your hand sumptuously while peeing on your foot--that kind of thing. Happens all the time. Trust me, I've lived through more than a hundred faculty meetings in forty years of teaching.

When the institutional climate was poisonous, I remember them for rancor--mine, especially. I wasn't always a good foot soldier, and I don't doubt I've inflicted my share of wounds. But the issues are largely gone now, even though I'm sure they had to do with my perception of their (administrative) incompetence.

Only one stands forever in the faculty meeting Hall of Fame, and that one happened years ago at a date I can almost pinpoint--it had to be early to mid-80's. South African apartheid hadn't failed yet. The President of the college, Rev. B. J. Haan, had been offered an honorary doctorate from an Afrikaner university, a gracious gesture on their part. No one doubted Haan was worthy--that wasn't the question. What was on the table that night was whether he should take it.

The forces on either side were daunting. On the left stood those who believed that his accepting the honorary doctorate would give the granting institution--and the apartheid system--a kind of "Christian" legitimacy that they did not deserve. To stand with those Afrikaners, in some ways the authors of apartheid, segregationist apartheid, would be to get into bed with the forces of Satan, argued faculty on the left.

On the the right stood those who saw those Afrikaners as fellow children of the Lord, laborers in the vineyard, men and women with whom we could pray, people who needed our help finding their way, not the back of our hand. You didn't have to stop hating apartheid to love them, to respect them.

Dr. James Skillen, a man who went on the devote his life to the interface of politics and the Christian faith, spoke for those who were asking Haan not to accept the doctorate. Of the two spokesman, he was the less passionate, but most convincing. Any dalliance with the Afrikaners was a dance of death, he argued, because those offering the President this honorary doctorate were only looking for political goodwill. He told the President that, should he take the honor, he'd be a pawn in the terrible racial struggle being waged in South Africa. Even little Dordt College would be scratched up on the wall of those who were fighting for apartheid.

On the other side stood Rev. Dr. E. L. Hebden Taylor, an Englishman, an Anglican priest who was just about as foreign to Siouxland prairie as those first wooden-shoed, paleface pioneers from Pella. He was an eccentric scholar no alum will ever forget. The son of South African missionaries, he'd grown up there and knew South Africans like no one else. That familial relationship was the foundation for his argument--you don't slap confessional brothers and sisters in the face when they're offering respect and love. The President simply had to go. Of the two, Taylor spoke most passionately. South Africa was, to him, something of a homeland.

There was no rancor, despite the fact that the sides were deeply divided. Both men laid out arguments plainly and powerfully, even personally; but neither condemned the other. What went to war that night was two very plausible arguments, neither of which was evil, both of which had inherent righteousness.

When it was over, President Haan stood up, thanked Skillen and Taylor, acknowledged the difficulty of the question, even railed on the horrors of apartheid; but then said he'd made up his mind before the debate already. He'd decided not to go to apartheid South Africa, that the possibility of being used at this particular moment in history was just too great.

But then he spoke sharply, to those who sided with Skillen. To them--to us, I guess-- he said that in no way should his decision make them feel that he was desirous of dancing with a liberal or progressive agenda, that he didn't want the institution to veer left as he said so many once-Christian institutions had. Neither did he want the college he established to veer right. He wanted somehow a third way, a way he would have described as a "Reformed Christian way."

Yesterday, I walked out of my last faculty meeting at Dordt College into January temperatures that were almost sinful--low 60s--for January. It was gorgeous. I was already munching on the fattest long john I could find, jelly-filled, vanilla frosting. I left early. I'd had enough. I'd gone only because my wife--sometimes my conscience--determined that I really should. I'd heard enough reports, suffered enough cheerleading. It was time to go, and I was happy. I haven't had a frosted long john like that for years a decade--I was kicking out the jams Calvinistically.

I walked up to my office and worked on my very last syllabus.

Only one faculty meeting stays with me--that moving debate on a topic totally relevant to the world in which we lived, a topic to which some were very personally tied, a topic that, at that moment, could have easily gone either way. In that debate, this young prof learned that sometimes the most heated arguments are not waged by fools--they're weighty because both sides have merit. I came out smarter than I went in at that faculty meeting. Maybe that's why it will always be part of my memory.

Nothing that happened before or since in a Dordt College faculty meeting comes anywhere near to what happened that night, early 80s, in S-101. I don't think we had donuts.

Reading Mother Teresa XXIV

2012-01-05T05:46:00.000-06:00

I don't buy it totally. It strikes me as half-truth, which is, at times, even more deceptive than a lie. I understand what she says, I even have some sympathies with the idea, but finally I think she was wrong. Well, half wrong.

"Cheerfulness is a sign of a generous and mortified person who, forgetting all things, even herself, tries to please her God in all she does for souls."

A mortified person is someone whose old man (or woman) of sin is dead as doornail. It has nothing to do with being absolutely mortified by what stupidity came out of your cousin Ezra's mouth last Sunday. When your sin is, so to speak, behind you, she's saying, cheerfulness becomes a habit. That's sweet.

I'm listening.

"Cheerfulness is often a cloak which hides a life of sacrifice, continual union with God, fervor and generosity."

I don't know that I believe that totally, but I still like it. Run into an ever-cheerful person, she says, and you'll be with someone whose deep devotion to God is a constant.

I'm still listening, but she's starting to sound tinny as a cheerleader--"don't worry, be happy."

"A person who has this gift of cheerfulness very often reaches a great height of perfection."

Warning lights are going off. Even the apostle Paul would draw an eyebrow here, so I am not alone, nor am I too much a Calvinist to scale that perfection mountain. In my book, the perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good.

But I'm still listening. After all, this is Mother Teresa.

"For God loves a cheerful giver and He takes close to His heart the religious He loves."

She's more sure about such things than I am, but okay. But then how do you reconcile that idea with the treasures that darkness and sheer doubt have given us? Much of our music arises from thwarted human aspiration, from the dead opposite of Disney-like cheerfulness. America's finest gift to the arts is the blues, doleful music drawn from the sad lives of African-American folk musicians in the 19th century. The blues are beautiful, even inspiring. But Lord knows they're not cheerful. And neither are some psalms, come to think of it

And then this: "When I see someone sad, I always think, she is refusing something to Jesus."

I've just known too much depression to buy that one. It's something you might whisper in your own ear; but telling someone else that his sorrow comes from lack of faith can be deadly when persistent darkness isn't just inflamed moodiness. Believe me. "Your problem, kid, is you're just not right with God." While that idea may not be all wrong, as therapy it can kill.

Mother Teresa may well have believed what she says about cheerfulness. She may have used that sentiment to scold herself--that's understandable. But if her own confessions are true, if her diaries and letters reveal someone who fought off the darkness--and they do!--then she honestly couldn't have believed it herself. She wasn't always cheerful because she wasn't always something beautiful for Jesus. Even Mother Teresa wasn't perfect, wasn't ever cheerful. And she knew it. And she tells us as much.

"Therefore, my dear friends," says the letter to the Philippians, "as you have always obeyed--not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence--continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling."

"With fear and trembling." Those are tougher words.

Mother Teresa knew that line too--she had to. Maybe that's why she insists on what she does about cheerfulness. It's a reminder to seek after God, a to nudge her doubtful self toward holiness

I'm thinking that we're all on that same road--often full of fear and trembling, but sometimes adorned with smiley faces too.

She's not all right, but she's not totally wrong either.

It's good to know I'm not alone.

Newt--WWJD?

2012-01-04T06:03:00.000-06:00

It's all splendid theater, isn't it? Just what exactly is the biggest story last night here in Iowa?--the fact that Romney, who's about to be blessed by McCain's endorsement, still can't pack away a victory? Or is it Santorum's extraordinary rocket-blast to front-runner? How about this?--the fizzle of Michelle, who wooed Iowans in the Straw Poll but got left out in the barn in the caucuses? Or maybe it's the impending end of another swaggering Texan, who is going south, he says, instead of east, to assess how to remove his tail from between his legs.

Or is it Dr. Paul's continuing success, even though every last pol in the system knows the old guy is not going to get anywhere near the White House? Maybe it's this: Iowa's vaunted Christian right flexed its muscle last night big-time and gave Santorum a blessing--or is it a curse? After all, they also so blessed Huckabee and Pat Robertson, whose fortunes fizzled.

There's something almost Chaucer-like about the whole Iowa pageant, such a range of wonderful characters. But my favorite story last night is Newt's. He peaks about a month or so too early, then gets machine-gunned by Romney's billionaire buddies for a personal and professional past that makes just about everybody, even his supporters, wince. I mean, Mitt didn't have to look far for ammunition. Still, bloody and beaten, Newt lashes out at Romney last night and then as much as endorses Santorum, at least recommends him for sainthood.

Sarah Palin was the original Mama Grizzily, but hell hath no fury like a wounded Newt. He's the enraged mother bear right now. Bloodied as he is, he makes Palin look like a possum. If I were Mitt, I'd line up an assassin before the next debate or Newt will make him sound, standing up there before the whole world, like yet another stuttering Texan. This whole thing has become something epic out of the World Wrestling Federation. Really.

Mitt, at best, is a handgun. Newt's a howitzer, and what's worse, he doesn't care. He knows his campaign is through. It seems from the speech he gave last night that the only thing that he cares about now is settling the score, as if he were Bugsy Moran. I'd be scared to death if I was Mitt Romney.

A month ago, the new Newt said he wouldn't go negative. The new Newt, the forgiven Newt, the new Roman Catholic stayed saintly, out of the fray; but the Mormon squashed him like a bug--that's the way he sees it now. So much for forgiveness. So much for peace-making. In Iowa he was Neville Chamberlain, offering emptiness. He was unmanned.

And now I can't help but ask this question: what should this newly-minted Christian do, a man who says he's put his evil past behind him? Should he come out guns blazing as if the next debate were at OK Corral? Or should he wave a palm branch, take the high moral road, and turn the other cheek? WWJD?

Good, good question.

Here's what I think. Come out firing. The biggest evil of all, or so it seems to me, is the Supreme Court's notion that when it comes to political elections liberty trumps justice. When they ruled in favor of faceless, nameless super-pacs, they created what happened this year in Iowa, when millionaires and billionaires stunk up Gingrich by vomiting negative ads all over the Hawkeye State.

To me it's interesting and fitting that the Republicans are the first to experience the injustice of way, way too much money in politics. They were happy when the Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that people like the Koch brothers could put up duck blinds and fire their millions at whoever they pleased because, after all, freedom is the American way.

If Newt picks up a palm branch or puts a rose in the muzzle of that flintlock--if he turns the other cheek and blesses those who curse him, he'd be Christ-like. On the other hand, it's another Jesus altogether who upset the tables of those temple money-changers, another Jesus who went on a rampage where he found desecration. WWJD?

Stay-tuned. It's been anything but the gospel so far, so all bets are off. All we know is it will be human and not divine.

Swan Songs XXV--What I didn't know

2012-01-03T06:35:00.001-06:00

The man told me a story I never knew a thing about. He said he lost his first wife just a short time after their baby was born, their first. He said that was years and years ago already, this man I was talking to, a man probably in his early 80s. We were at a funeral--I hadn't seen this guy for something close to a half-century, and I had no idea he could be in any way related to the deceased.

He said he was a graduate student at the time it happened, staying in an apartment near the university, a couple hours or so away from home. His wife was alone back in their duplex, when she suffered had a medical problem no one could have predicted, some kind of blockage in the heart's main artery, a blockage that simply killed her, right then and there, took her away from him and the new baby and the life that no one guessed she was anywhere close to leaving behind. He wasn't much more than a kid, this old man I once knew. The woman he'd married wasn't any older, a young mom, first child.

We were standing not all that far from an open casket where lay the body of man that was, once upon a time, his brother-in-law. There we stood, both of us just beyond the intimacy of the close family. Her death--his first wife's death--a half century old.

I'm not sure he knew me or even knew of me, although he acted like he did when I introduced myself. I wondered if he remembered me from the baseball team he coached forever ago, the freshman kid from Wisconsin, the tough kid maybe. Who knows what he thought or whether or not he even remembered me at all?

So he told me he was a couple of hours away from her when it happened, this altogether horrible and surprising death. Surprising isn't a weighty enough word. If that new baby smiled early--that would have been surprising. The baby's mother--his young, young wife--just falling over dead?--there's no word jagged enough to describe what it must have been like to go through what he did. His wife, the mother of their new, first child. Dead.

"How did you find out?" I asked him.

He didn't look at me when he talked. He looked away. There were lots of people around.

He said Rev. Koops told him, said it as if I must have known this Rev. Koops. He said Rev. Koops was the campus pastor at the university. Someone from home had called the preacher, whose job it became to bring the news. News?--I don't know that there are any words at all to tell the story well.

He was in the university library, studying, he told me. This Rev. Koops had to hunt him down in the library. Middle of the day.

Your wife is dead.

I can't imagine it.

People were milling around us when he was telling me the story, but it wasn't hard to get from him, although I don't think he had been planning on telling anyone yesterday at his former brother-in-law's funeral. But once that story started coming, it didn't stop. It didn't pour out exactly, but neither did it stop--in part, I suppose, because I wouldn't let it. I had no idea.

"So he's the one who told you?" I asked him. "That must have been horrible."

He nodded. Didn't comment. Just nodded. And then, finally, him staring off into the distance, this: "You know that wasn't the best time of my life." No smile. That's exactly what he said.

There we stood at a funeral. It was time for us to go in, to sit in the sanctuary.

Sometimes I think I'm really blessed, somehow privileged to hear stories. Take that one, for instance. It's haunted me since yesterday because somehow I can see it so clearly--this tall kid, a young teacher going after his masters in a summer session that takes him away a couple days a week from his young wife and their new baby. There he sits in the library, totally dedicated to his work because, after all, it's a sacrifice on everyone's part for him to go to school and to be away. He's working hard, I'm sure.

He looks up from the carrel and sees Rev. Koops. He sees this warm, loving pastor friend come walking over, middle of the day, and then he notices the look in the man's eyes is like nothing he's ever, ever seen before.

I can see the story, but I can't imagine the conversation. Maybe the only way to tell the story is to acknowledge its sheer horror by irony, by comforting understatement--"that wasn't the best day of my life," he told me. No smile.

The man was my baseball coach years ago, and we thought him bookish. We thought him gimmicky. We thought him, in fact, distracted. We used to mock him behind his back, for instance, when he brought out four baseballs splashed with four different colors, and instead of our swinging at 'em in batting practice, we had to yell out what color they were to teach us to watch the ball or something. Somewhere he must have read it was a good skill exercise. We thought it was flat-out dumb.

We thought his heart wasn't in it really. Once in a cold spring day at some double-header in Nebraska, he took his cook stove along, and we thought it hilarious that he spent more time keeping that thing lit for his blessed coffee than he did watching the game. We giggled. He was nice guy, but we giggled. But maybe it was just me, the cocky freshman. I don't think he liked me. He probably had good reason.

I wonder if I would have known that story back then--if I'd have known what he went through, I wonder if I would have been a better person around him. If he'd have told us somehow how that campus pastor came to him in the library that day so blindly, out of the cold, put his hand on his shoulder, and told him the woman he loved was dead--I wonder if I wouldn't have mocked him, as many of us did. I wonder if the story would have changed me.

I don't know. But today, almost fifty years later, I honestly wish I'd have known.

He's a tall man. We stood there together in the narthex of the church, and I had to look up at him--maybe 6'6" or so, a big man. Yesterday, in his eighties, stooped, silver-haired, he only got bigger in my eyes.

I wish I'd have known all of that in 1966 when I was a kid, 45 years ago. I wish I'd have known.

Morning Thanks--Cough medicine

2012-01-02T06:08:00.000-06:00

I'm neither a preacher or a student of scripture, but I'll hazard an assertion here that's likely to sell: if you want an elegant summary of the entire Bible, you can't find a much better place than the first ten verses of Ephesians 2. Look it up yourself. It's all grace, every bit of it.

Yesterday, in a marvelous meditation on the passage--I'd even say awesome, if the word hadn't lost its glory--our pastor opened up that chunk of eternal truth with his own earthly brand of quiet grace and power, explained how the root word of handiwork or workmanship, in verse 10, is, in the Greek, a word that also serves as ancestor to our word poem, a wonderful idea--and new to me--that suggests that we are His poems. Let me say that again--that we are God's poems, all of us. That makes us somewhat memorable, in fact, like good poetry--and maybe even sometimes puzzling and, at times, frustrating too, if not downright inaccessible. We're songs, each of us. We're made for beauty and truth. Or how about this?--if poems are really little more than fancy mnemonic devices, then we're designed, right from the factory, to be remembered. We're made not to be forgotten. Isn't that beautiful?

You could unpack that wonderful idea for hours and hours and never exhaust the possibilities. We're poems. His. Amazing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne had this dark theory about laughter. He thought there was nothing more chilling than inappropriate hilarity, and he insisted on showing off that theory in lots of his stories and novels. When things get tense, a laugh--some jittery, high-pitched thing out of Edgar Allen Poe--can be simply horrible, demonic even. It happens all the time in Hawthorne's fiction, as in "Ethan Brand," when Bartram the lime-burner stands on the hill and bellers out a hideous laugh sharp enough to cut throats.

He--that is, Hawthorne--even talks about it in that story:

Laughter, when out of place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered state of feeling, maybe be the most terrible modulation of the human voice. The laughter of one asleep, even if it be a little child,--the madman's laugh,--the wild, screaming laugh of a born idiot,--are sounds that we sometimes tremble to hear, and would always willing forget.

I couldn't help thinking of Hawthorne yesterday in church, because in the middle of what was one of the finest sermons I'd ever heard, there came, intermittently, the rasping cough of an elderly woman sitting in the front of the church. It was a terrible cough, just awful, and, if I dare say so, as seemingly out of place amid all that beauty as one of those cutting laughs that Hawthorne uses frequently to punctuate his tales. They were, in a way, one in the same.

I once sat at the bedside of a man I deeply respected, even loved, who coughed just so unforgettably. I'd come up to visit him that afternoon with a good friend of both of ours, who proceeded to tell me, when we left, that our friend's disturbing cough was what people call "the death rattle." And then he told me that it was a clear signal that our friend didn't have long to stay on this earth.

I'd never heard of a "death rattle," but I swear I heard it yesterday in church again, several times, in another rasping cough that, like Hawthorne's laughs, seemed wretchedly mistimed because horribly disturbing.

I didn't want to hear a death rattle yesterday in church; and I hope that the sweet elderly woman isn't near the grave. But she was powerless to stop, so that cough attacked the soaring sermon like an ice pick and wouldn't let me soar with the gorgeous ideas. It kept me here, in this vale of tears.

But it taught me once again--I'm an awful, slow learner--that grace is ever bigger than our finest human perceptions of it. I was enthralled by the company of thousand walking, talking poems. I was amazed by grace, thrilled to the soul by the joy it simply gives away. And a half-dozen times, at least, I kept being brought back down to earth by a death rattle that felt like a stiletto.

Faith never does release us totally from our mortal coils, I guess, much as we'd like it to. We are his creations, body and soul, in life and in death.

And while I'd be pushing it a long, long ways to say that even that death rattle in the middle of a sermon about God's own eternal love was beautiful--it wasn't!--that fearful, hacking cough is also an unmistakable part of the human pageant. It's part of the sin that's covered, fully, by his love, by his own broken body and shed blood.

The death rattle is part of the story too, part of the unshakable malady for which grace alone is the blessed, awesome cure.

All of that is my morning's thanks.

Sunday Morning Meds--Answer me!

2012-01-01T06:26:00.000-06:00

“Hear me when I call” Psalm 4:1

The impatience of the command form in the English language(we might even say its “nerve”) is on display in the very form of thesentence. When we tell others what todo, we deliberately address them last, if at all; subject takes second place toverb, as in “brush your teeth.” Immediate action is demanded.

“Shut the door,” cares nothing for feelings, simply insistson action. Add a name and things softena bit, but not much: “Shut the door,Alphonse.” In fact, if we attempt totake the edge off a command and add something endearing, we come up with truephoniness: “shut the door, sweetheart.”

The command form happens so often in the Psalms that I thinkwe simply become accustomed to hearing it and forget its lousy manners. My goodness, the Psalmist is talking to theLord God Almighty here, not some forgetful kid; yet, he’s ordering him aroundas if he were a valet. “Hear my cry, OLord,” says the King James. The NIV has“Answer me when I call to you,” which seems, if you ask me, to bring petulanceto another level all together.

If the truth be known, most parents scold their children forusing the command form too easily. “Giveme the toys,” one kid screams, and loving parents do what they can to curb aninsolent tongue.

“Insolent,” “impatient,” “petulant”—I’ve used someunpleasant words here so far, but it seems to me that they all fit. The arrogance—we can call it that, I think—ofthe writer is unmistakable. Simplystated, he’s telling the Lord what to do. “Answer me” doesn’t make thespeaker sound like a supplicant.

Of course, grammar be hanged when you’re calling 911. And that’s what appears to be going on here,and elsewhere in the psalms. The writerhas arrived at his wit’s end. He can’tcope. He doesn’t have a clue. He’s wasted the last of his best ideas, andthere’s nowhere else to turn. Frantic,he forgets his manners and bellers. Howelse do we explain God’s tolerating this rhetorical blast? Poor guy doesn’t know what the heck to do!

You wonder sometimes whether God Almighty doesn’t actuallyappreciate being the last port in the storm. Most of us wouldn’t because most of our egos aren’t all that thrilled being the end of the line. But Godseems to like it. Apparently, hisfeelings aren’t hurt one bit.

I think he likes us emptied. I think he likes us bereft of our own wiles. I think he likes us without resources,nowhere to go, on our knees.

And I don’t know if that’s so much a characteristic of ourCreator and Sustainer, as it is simply the story of our lives. We need foxholes to realize there is nothingwe can do. We all need to hitbottom. At some time or another, we all cowerin a corner, nowhere to turn.

The Psalms are songs of praise to the Lord, but they emergefrom what’s human in all of us. Theypraise His holy name, but I’m really thankful that they also serve to help usunderstand the mysteries—and even the darkness—of our own lives.

Swan Song XXIV--St. John's

2011-12-30T06:25:00.002-06:00

If you're on the road from Milwaukee to Madison, you can't miss it. These days, it's almost suburbia. The last exit before Delafield holds a four-corner-wide shopping center, the last one you'll hit, so if you need a Wal-Mart, the next one on I-94 will likely be in Madison.

Truth be known, I've never stepped a foot in Delafield, Wisconsin--Delavan, often enough, even gave a speech there once upon a time, wrote a story about a wonderful, and much beloved old woman. But I've never been in Delafield, even though those looming, green highway signs beckon, as they always have.

Years ago, on my way to Monroe, Wisconsin, where I took my first teaching job, I used to pass the town quite often in a kind of awe, really. These days, forty years later, I don't see those signs so often anymore; but I did on Wednesday, when we came back from my eastern Wisconsin homeland. "Delafield"--those signs say, and no matter how long I live I'll think of what never happened there.

I think I would have been a bad fit at St. Johns Military Academy. I'd just graduated from college, jobless, had just returned from a anti-war march on Washington, and had, not long before, failed my draft physical. I had no experience with a military school. Even though my father spent four years jockeying destroyers around the South Pacific during World War II, he never brayed much about the military, never went to Legion meetings, or walked in Veteran's Day parades. Military service was no rite of passage in our family, and I honestly couldn't imagine what life at a military school would be like.

But once I'd flunked that draft physical, I had no job prospects. None. My recommendations as a student weren't that hot, I knew--by community standards, I wasn't a poster boy for the Christian faith. Besides, I wasn't sure I wanted to hang around "my people" any longer. I'd had more than enough of their rigid self-righteousness and putrid political conservatism. I was brash and cocky. I wanted to stamp the dust off my feet and trash the wooden shoes forever.

So I read the Milwaukee Journal's want-ads every Sunday, looking for teaching jobs, and I spotted an opening for an English teacher at St. John's Military Academy, Delafield, WI. I applied, as I did at two other schools, one somewhere up north--I don't remember the town anymore--and the other way down on the state line, southwest Wisconsin, South Wayne, Black Hawk High School. It was already July, 1970.

I wasn't desperate, but after two or three weeks of laying sod on the steep open soil of the exit ramps of the new highway--I-43--I knew I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. It was, without question, the worst work of my entire life. I read the want ads religiously.

I swear I remember the letter. I may even have it yet. On fancy school stationary, they said no, sweetly. They'd looked through their applications and decided on some other schmo. Rejection is rejection, and I can't say theirs didn't hurt. But I did wonder, right then, smack in middle of the horrors of the Vietnam War, whether I was cut out to teach in a military academy.

That question will never be answered, even though it's 40-years old. But it steps front and center into my consciousness whenever I-94 takes me past Delafield, Wisconsin, as it did Wednesday.

"God has a plan for your life" is the kind of spiritual cliche that has all the heft of Hallmark card, or so it seems to me. Yet, every time I pass that town, I wonder what I would have become had some administrator not tossed my letter of application on the pile of losers. If they'd said yes, I would have taken the job. I didn't have one, after all. I would have gone. I would have become a teacher at St. John's Military Academy.

And then what? My whole world would have changed. I would have had different friends, met different kids, found different joys. I would have bellied up to a whole set of different conflicts. I wouldn't be who I am. Somebody on that campus once dumped my application letter and that simple act has made all the difference. I wonder who he was. He's likely dead.

There are ways to chart all of this out. One is to say, simply, God didn't want me there. That seems somehow simplistic and even wearying. When Col. Gordon or Lieut. Ralph or Sgt. Mike or whoever reviewed those applications, was God almighty right there over his shoulder, directing his hand toward some other flimsy sheet listing some other applicant's many wholesome features? Did God tell some butch-cut administrator to file that one from Oostburg in the also-rans?

I don't know. I'm a Calvinist. To most who recognize the word, the designation means I believe in something called "predestination." It's an odd word and a weird doctrine really, something I remember fighting about in catechism, as a matter of fact, because it seemed so preposterous in such a willy-nilly world.

I still I buy it, I guess, but only in a rearview mirror. Predestination is near madness, or so it seems, unless you're looking behind you. Only then does it make sense. How did C. S. Lewis put it?--I was dragged, kicking and screaming, before the throne. That's what happened. When I look back, that's what I see. Something like that.

God has a plan for my life all right, but just exactly how that plan unfolds from day to day isn't something I'm privy to until day-to-day is well behind me. Then, when I'm on I-94 and I pass signs for Delafield, Wisconsin--then, and only then does it make any sense at all that some guy in a uniform tossed that application from the kid with two As in his last name. And what on earth was the weird name of the college he attended again? Dirt?

I don't know where God was that night, whether he was on campus at St. John's or south and west in South Wayne, but I know what's back there in my life and what isn't. Even yet, I'm a traveler on a road map that's forever taken me past Delafield, Wisconsin--but I've never been there.

Never. Not once.

*Two roads diverged in a Wisconsin woods. . .

And I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere forty years down the pike:

because somehow I--I got myself directed south
to the swiss cheese capital of Badgerland,

And somehow, willy-nilly as it seems--

that has made all the difference.

Maybe. Of course, I'm still on the road.

__________________________________

*Heartfelt apologies to Robert Frost.

Wounded Knee

2011-12-28T21:57:00.002-06:00

It was Ian Frazier’s Great Plains that taught me something about the Ghost Dance. I’d never heard of it before; but then, most white Americans haven’t. The stories surrounding slavery are well-known to most, but the stories of Native America somehow escapes most palefaces like me. In that book, Frazier tells great stories of the Plains Indians, who were, by and large, a fierce bunch, maybe the quintessential Native American—feathered headdress, breechcloth, body paint, spear and shield and bow and arrow, all of that regalia on a chiseled male mounted on a paint pony.

Frazier nearly deifies Crazy Horse, as many do. Crazy Horse, a Lakota hero at Little Big Horn, was the battle leader who simply would not bow to the flood of white folks who, time after time, found all kinds of crooked ways to put the Lakota (Sioux) people off traditional lands. In The Great Plains, Frazier creates a miscellany of 19^th century Native American life, including a description of what he calls the first truly American religion, the Ghost Dance.

The sources of this strange, Indian Great Awakening are multiple—a little Protestantism, a little Mormonism, a little Catholicism, all grafted to spiritual roots that are soundly Native American in character.

The Ghost Dance swept most tribes in the American west. It was worship really, a ritual dance created to summon the old world back, the ancestors and the buffalo and the traditional way of life that had just about completely disappeared by 1890. It was, I think, a vision of heaven to a starving, beaten people, robbed of heritage. The Ghost Dance gave them a vision of what they wanted so badly to see, instead of the annihilation that was actually there.

Out here—or a couple hours west—the Lakota variation on the Ghost Dance included the mistaken belief that wearing a ghost shirt or dress meant the wearer could not be harmed by white man’s bullets. And that belief, Ian Frazier claims, scared white people badly and played a significant role in what happened 121 years ago today on a broad and open expanse of indistinguishable prairie along a creek whose name is Wounded Knee. You might say, that's how I came to Wounded Knee.

What started in 1862 with the Dakota War in Minnesota ended on December 29, 1890, when the largest military encampment in America since the Civil War got into a fight with 50 or so of Big Foot's Lakota braves. Big Foot himself was suffering horribly with pneumonia after leading his people on an unthinkably long walk from the very top of what is now South Dakota, to the bottom—and in late December, remember.

What exactly happened to begin what became a massacre is disputed today, but the outcome is not. There were sparks of anger aplenty, and one of them ignited a conflagration. The Seventh Calvary (itself decimated at Little Big Horn and, some say, just aching for a fight) and others in that huge cavalry encampment simply gunned down Big Foot’s band—men, women, and children—often in cold blood.

No one really knows how many Lakota died. Estimates range as high as 300. But what happened at Wounded Knee ended the Great Sioux Wars. To say what happened out there in the middle of winter is a blot on American history is obscene understatement. What happened there was evil, as all massacres are.

One of the dreams I’ve had for years is some kind of worship service on December 28 or 29, dates that mark two horrific massacres—King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents after Jesus’s birth, and the Wounded Knee Massacre. Those two events are not analogous, but in both cases those who wielded great power simply butchered innocent human beings

Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, is in pure fly-over country. It’s well off the beaten path, and a long ways from most anything that would attract a tourist. If you want to go there, you have to want to go there.

And really, who would?--what white guy, at least? It's a horrible story.

Maybe that’s why what happened there 121 years ago today is so invisible to millions of white Americans. Maybe so.

And maybe not. Maybe whites like me would rather not know, not remember. Maybe we prefer politicians who say, unequivocally, they’ll never, ever apologize for America.

Maybe so.

Six or seven hours west of here, this morning, on December 29, 1890, 300 or more Lakota people were massacred. That’s what happened.

But I think we can say this too: that right there, along a creek called Wounded Knee, 121 years ago, we were all there, every last one of us.

Morning Thanks--Christmas

2011-12-26T06:32:00.000-06:00

And suddenly, with a few strokes of the second hand, the colored lights look as kitschy as they do absurd, the music--Nat King Cole's "Chestnuts roasting" for the 400th time--is a bad joke repeated endlessly. The day after Christmas means a titanic hangover, especially when you realize that all we have to look forward to now, mid-winter, is called January. On December 26, the magic lifts, and what's left is a return line.

For most of us at least, that dull pain has nothing to do with faith. No follower of Jesus I know is any less of a believer this morning; but just about all of us above the age of, say, nine, can't help but fall from faith this morning in the "holiday season" that surrounds it, in Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and the clap-trap commercialism the Pope so heartily decried. I admit it--yesterday, to me at least, he sounded rather unadoringly like the Grinch, Scrooge in an odd pointed hat and a German accent. This morning, surrounded as we are by crumpled wrapping paper, his words sound a bit more to the point.

"Today Christmas has become a commercial celebration," he said at Christmas Eve mass at the Vatican, "whose bright lights hide the mystery of God's humility, which in turn calls us to humility and simplicity."

Maybe I got duped again.

This year, at our house, Pandora created a classic Christmas channel that piped perfectly tuned music all through the house, music that created a sweet backdrop for the whole season. Our Christmas Eve worship seemed grandly joyous, the final candle-lit "Silent Night," circled up as we were around the sanctuary, almost enough to make us think we were somewhere on the Judean hills and not in pork country. This year, like Keillor's Minnesota Lutherans, my wife and I dared to tell each that, yeah, we had a pretty good Christmas, if we had to say so ourselves.

But this morning, the lurching post-Christmas hangover has returned, and I can't help wonder how I got swept away by the excess--again. But I did. This morning, it's not hard to see how it is that suicides rise, that depression deepens, that some people drink way too much during the holidays. Christmas--not Jesus's birth, but the Christmas holiday as advertised--can never quite live up to its own billing.

Besides, here's the headline: in Nigeria, 39 dead and dozens wounded when some hellish Islamic radical group laid waste to two Christian churches. Nothing's changed while we were charmed.

But the facts remain: He was born in a barn not a palace, laid in a manger so that, as our preacher reminded us, even a gang of smelly shepherds could walk right in and inch up close. The imperial Lord had no trumpet fanfare, no twenty-gun salute--the only ballyhoo was some barnyard braying.

Them's the facts, and while I may well need to recite them to myself time and time again this morning, they're enough to make me thankful, this morning, once again, for the moment in time when the image of a child laid lovingly on a rough straw bed seems enough to enthrall--for better or for worse--so many millions of this world's inhabitants.

This morning, sin still grows stubbornly in the hearts of men and women, not to mention my own; but then, a baby came once upon a time, and because he did grace still abounds. It still abounds.

This morning, my morning thanks are for what else?--Christmas.

Christmas Morning Med--Two ways

2011-12-25T04:00:00.000-06:00

“For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous,

but the way of the wickedshall perish.” Psalm 1:8

I suppose there are umpteen other references throughout theBible to the Lord knowing saints and sinners personally, but I can’t help butbe struck by the repetition and thus the emphasis given here, at the very endof the first Psalm, to the idea of there being two separate “ways” or culturesof sin and righteousness. Theimplication seems clear enough: if it’sblessedness you’re after, avoid “the way” of the sinner for that “way” willperish. It’s not sinners themselves whoare earmarked for destruction in Psalm 1, it’s their way of doing things.

Mortal flesh demonizes as if by instinct—mine too. We create enemies to build ourselves up anddiminish those who hold contrary views. If we absolutely loved President George W. Bush, we likely hatePresident Obama. If we like the Yankees,we hate the Red Sox. Out here where I live, people who love a John Deere oftenhate a Farmall. It’s even that way withsnowmobiles, I hear—and motorcycles, and, to be sure, muscle-boundpickups. Maybe you’ve seen thoseindecorous window decals of little kids peeing on Ford trademarks.

Of course, the shepherd/king is not talking about Pepsi/Cokein the opening song of the Psalter. He’stalking about “the wicked,” not somebody wearing the wrong brand of designerjeans. But just exactly who those peopleare—the wicked—isn’t always so easy to ascertain, at least for me. And, of course, what’s of greatest moment inthe verse six is not that we carry some kind of pocket guide to who’s wickedand who’s not, but simply that God does because he knows. The psalm doesn’t say we do.

But what can we read on our own here? There is, after all, a really deep divide inthe psalm. People sure enough wear whitehats and black hats in this poem, I’ll tell you. But it’s not “the wicked” themselves that arefingered in this verse; it’s their “way.” “The way” of the wicked will perish.

I may be wrong, but that line pushes me back to thecharacterization we’ve seen blow away earlier: “the wicked are like chaff.” Heretoday, gone tomorrow. What characterizestheir “way of life,” their culture, is its shallowness, its transience, its veneer,the world not unlike Andy Warhol once promised, where everyone gets his or herfifteen minutes of fame. Like chaff,that way of life blows away and will perish—that’s the heartfelt promise, or soit seems to me, of this verse. Livingfor the moment may well be exciting, but in the long run—and that’s what we’retalking about here—it’s not going bring the blessedness of a soul’s prosperity.

As I’ve said before, there is likely other biblical passageswhich threaten the wicked with eons of weeping and gnashing teeth, but Psalm 1seems more interested in saving than damning, in laying out a view of what itmeans to be blessed and how all of us might go about understanding the“way” to become a recipient of that joy.

Like a tree planted. That’s the story, or so it seems to me. See it? That’s the picture inPsalm 1. Blessedness means being rooted,deeply, in something life-giving. Avoidwhat blows away, no matter how promising. All of that will perish. Takedelight in God’s way, which is, of course, today especially, the way of amanger.

A Suitable Church (part III)

2011-12-24T04:00:00.000-06:00

When she awoke, she heard thekids stirring at the tree, opening presents, arguing, in fact. She brushed back her hair, pulled on herhousecoat and slippers, and opened the door. It wasn’t quite fully morning, but the kids had all the wrappings off ofdozens of presents. Too many. It wasn’t pleasant.

She walked into the spaciousliving room, the blinds over all those windows to the east still closed.

“What’s the deal?” she said.

Tosha said Edmund had takenher Beanie Baby and hid it somewhere and she was mad and she was going to getback at him somehow because it just wasn’t fair and he was a jerk too and healways was. It was Christmas morning. Edmund looked at his sister as if she were adishrag.

She had enough. “Maybe we ought to go to church,” she toldthem, out of nowhere at all. “You andme–maybe the three of us should go to church together this morning.”

“Why?” Tosha said.

“Because it’s Christmas,” shetold her. “Because it’s Christmas andwe’re going to celebrate the birth of our Savior.”

“I’m not going,” Edmundsaid. “I got these great toys.”

“You’ve got a great Savior,”she told her grandson.

His eyes, blank as clay, hurther more than a fist because she knew she was speaking a language he didn’tbegin to understand. Their own grandsonlooked at her as if Jesus were a nobody. That Jack didn’t see it himself was a blessing.

Edmund shoved his glasses upon his nose. “Some other time, allright?” he said. “Look at this, Grandma–NimbusRacer.” He held up a electronicgame.

She wanted to pray, rightthere in front of them, but right then, even though the condo was top floor,she was sure there was nothing but thick cement between her and the Lord. The children didn’t know a thing. They hadn’t found anything, allright–they hadn’t even looked.

“I think we ought to go,” shesaid.

“It’s Christmas,” Edmundchirped. “Why do we got to go tochurch?”

Her insides felt like thatscreen saver, turning inside and out again and again, and she realized justthen that if she were to open her mouth, there would be no words, onlytears–tears that would confuse them. Soshe walked to the kitchen, fiddled with the coffee maker, got it going, thenwent to the west windows.

It was Christmas morning, shereminded herself, and she couldn’t help herself but she wished just then thatshe were with Jack and the Lord. Therewas too much for her to do here, too much hard work and too much sadness, andshe couldn’t do it alone.

She took hold of the stringsof the blinds and opened them with a few rapid jerks. Sunlight, Christmas morning sunlight, spilledin like a waterfall, dousing the lights on the tree. Deliberately, she looked away from Christmasin the condo and over the street beneath them, the past the trees, then acrossthe glaze of water west; and when she raised her eyes to the mountains, in aflash, in a moment, the whole fancy condo seemed to disappear–the Christmastree behind her, the kitchen, the brewing coffee, everything behind her seemedto vanish, the children’s voices dimmed, her own sharp fears muted in the sheermajesty of what she’d suddenly, almost magically, become witness to; becauseeven though the neighborhood beneath the condo was in shadows, the sun, comingup far behind them, stretched its brilliant glory through the crystal morningair all the way across the Sound to hold those monstrous snow-capped Olympicsin its own astonishing splendor. Therethey stood–those glorifying mountains–as if forever. There they stood like might and power. There they stood, a landscape divinelypainted across the darkened world, beaming holiness and majesty in thecrystalline dawn of a perfect Christmas morning.

“Oh, my God,” she said,because what she saw was far more than mountain beauty. He was here, all right, she toldherself. He’s here sure enough.

“What, Grandma?” Tosha said,coming up behind her. “What do you see?”

She wrapped her arm aroundher granddaughter.

“Who’s out there?” Toshasaid, on tiptoes.

What could she say? “Jesus,” her grandma told her. “He’s always there.”

“Where?” Tosha asked.

She picked up hergranddaughter. “Look at thosemountains,” she said. “Just look atthem.”

Tosha leaned her face closerto the window. “Is he a ghost?” shesaid.

“No,” she told her, “he’salive.”

“I don’t see him,” shesaid. “I see the mountains and I see theSound, and there’s a boat out there, but where is Jesus?” She looked at her grandmother almostpainfully. “Grandma, I want to seeJesus.”

She already had her granddaughterin her arms, so the hug she gave her wasn’t difficult or awkward. “Amen,” she said, biting her lip, because aprayer she’d never finished were coming to a close maybe, even if it were justfor a moment.

“Let’s just you and me go,Tosha, honey,” Jan said. “This time,this morning, just let’s you and me go. I want you to see him too.”

__________________________________

Concluding segment from an old J. C. Schaap Christmas story.

A Suitable Church (part II)

2011-12-23T06:12:00.000-06:00

And now Jan couldn’t sleep.She lay in a roll-out bed in her daughter’s office, the light from some fancyscreen-saver bouncing off the walls because Ellen didn’t have the grace to shutthe stupid computer off. That machine ismore important than I am, she told herself when she tried keep out theglimmers. But she knew Jack would havebeen proud of her. In all those years oftheir daughter’s unfaithfulness to God and the church, Jan had been the one whoconstantly begged him to give Ellen space. But Jack was gone now. Just herbringing it up–going to church–was something he’d have been proud of.

But the screen kept shiftingimages like something that wouldn’t die. She hated it, the lit screen that devoured everything good and right inthe lives of her own children. The roomwas dark, the blinds pulled, and that fiend machine kept turning multi-colored3-D shapes inside out in some never-ending pattern that seemed to her demonic. The clock said almost three o’clock whenfinally she got up, hunted for the plug, and then jerked it. Didn’t hesitate a minute. Just jerked it. Tomorrow she’d plead ignorance, since thatwas what they thought of her anyway. Jack would have loved it.

The death of the computerdidn’t help. Ellen would be more upset,she told herself. Pushing church on themwas one thing, but killing computers was a whole new level of sin. She’d be lucky if they didn’t stick her backon the jet. At least it was dark in theroom, she thought. At least the wallsdidn’t jump. Fanciest condo she’d everseen in her life, too. All sorts ofpottery things in shapes she didn’t begin to understand.

It was August when she andJack had prayed, as they did every night at supper–“bless Ellen and Frank and thekids” and usually something else about helping them find the way because, afterall they just hadn’t found anything, had they? It was August, and hot, and Jack had insistedon digging up the concrete around the pole he’d put in so their son Tony could shootbaskets when he was a boy, years ago. Itwas too hot, and it was too much work, but Jack loved sweat, considered himselfmore of a man if he could soak a t-shirt. They’d prayed for Ellen and Frank after supper, then he’d gone at itagain out back, where she saw him an hour later, on his side, not moving. Their last prayer together, like so manybefore, had been about Frank and Ellen, had featured them, in fact. It was as if they’d never stopped praying.

“Lord,” she said, her neckstrained from such a huge pillow beneath her head, “Lord, help me findsomething for them.” That seemed aboutright. “Lord,” she said, but she didn’tknow how to put it better. “Lord,” shesaid once again, “crack their skulls, okay?–I don’t mean it really, but stopthem in their tracks. Sink the boatmaybe–sink Microsoft, okay? Becausethere’s nothing here, I’m afraid. There’s just nothing here. Something’s got to break–I love them too much, and I love mygrandchildren.” In the middle of thatprayer, she imagined those kids in a darling Christmas Eve pageant, two sweetkids saying things like “Mary pondered all these things in her heart,” Toshawith a little skirt, Edmund in a sweater over a white shirt or something. There were churches all over Seattle–hundredsof them just waiting for families just like theirs. Thousands of churches. “You can lead a horse to water, Lord, butshow them you’re here, okay? Make it sothat everywhere they look they see Jesus.”

She hadn’t even thought ofsaying that, but when the words ran back through her mind, she liked it–theidea of seeing Jesus in everything, as if the world was a canvas holding theoutline of Jesus’ face, as if the whole world was the Shroud of Turin. “Make them see you, Lord,” she said, “becausein this palace of theirs--” she said, “well, I just don’t know if you’re here.”

She didn’t end theprayer. The petitions just sort of fellinto silence, like they always did, to be picked up again next time–samechapter and verse. Pray without ceasingthe Bible said. That’s what it was allright, she thought.

_____________________________

Part II of a three-part story originally published in Reformed Worship, then again in Startling Joy, both times under different titles.

A Suitable Church (part 1)

2011-12-22T06:21:00.000-06:00

“We’ve not found anything, Mom.”

That’s what Ellen had told her, and how many times hadn’t her daughter said exactly that when she had asked the question? “We’ve not found anything, Mom”–a reply which Jan might have felt hopeful if the words weren’t twisted in the same way every time Ellen said them. “We’ve not found anything, Mom.” Emphasis on found, as if to say, “end of discussion.” That answer always came packaged in a deadbeat tone that carried too much finality, and Jan knew–aren’t mothers supposed to know?–that Ellen wasn’t really looking at all.

So she’d tried once again, Christmas Eve. “Have you found a suitable church?”

The two of them were about to go to bed. She’d come for the holidays. She’d not looked forward to a long plane ride to Seattle, alone, now that Jack had gone. She’d not looked forward to the trip itself, but she’d crossed the days off the calendar because she wanted so badly to see her kids, her smart kids who were making so much money in computers–Microsoft this, Microsoft that. She’d never been to their new place, a flashy condo with windows for walls. But she couldn’t help asking again, as if the topic had never come up before–“Have you found a suitable church?”

“We’ve not found anything, Mom,” her daughter said, in a computer voice. And then Ellen gave her a smile Jan knew was condescending because, after all, she was “Grandma” and the two of them, her son-in-law and daughter, were big shots–corporate jet, power lunch, lots of travel. Ellen and Frank were cutting edge, and her mother was an old oak buffet from Iowa.

She wanted to tell her daughter that the two of them weren’t going to find a church if they sat on their hams or slept in to catch up from work weeks that had them gone more than home, their kids hostage to some pre-school with a big cheery sign with multi-colored balloons.

“Have you been looking, Ellen?” she’d asked her daughter.

They were wrapping presents. It was Christmas Eve, mind you, and they were still wrapping the kids’ Christmas presents. Frank was in his office–they each had one in the big condo–and the kids were off to bed.

“We’ve looked,” she said, fitting a corner on a whole box of electronic games. “We keep telling ourselves we’ve got to slow down,” Ellen told her. “We got to smell the roses, you know? Last summer we were out on the boat only once.”

“Whose fault is that?” Jan said.

“Ours, of course,” Ellen told her.

“Are you still in love?” Jan said.

“Mom!” Ellen scolded.

“I’m serious,” she’d said, curling the ribbons across the top of Tosha’s new Barbie.

“Look, Mom–we’re all right, okay? I’ve never stopped thinking that there’s a God–I’m no infidel.” After that first insipid smile, Ellen never once looked up, which Jan had read as a good sign, since there was some guilt there anyway.

“Maybe we ought to go tomorrow,” she said.

Ellen dropped her shoulders.

“I’m just suggesting–“

“I’m 34 years old, Mom,” Ellen told her.

“I brought you into this world,” she said. “I know exactly how old you are.” She flitted with the ribbons, put the gift under the tree, and sat back on her haunches. “I’m serious. I saw this church–“

”You just got here–“

”I saw this church on the way in–not big either. ‘10:45' it said, ‘Christmas Service.’” She looked directly at her rich daughter. “You and me and the kids? Frank is your responsibility, not mine.”

Ellen rolled her eyes, threw her bangs back out of her face. She looked down at her fingers, pushed back her cuticles, breathed audibly. “Let me think about it, okay?” she said, grudgingly. “If that’s the way you have to have it, let me think about it.”
________________________
Part one of a three-part story for Christmas. This story first appeared in Reformed Worship many moons ago, and then again in Startling Joy: Stories for Christmas (Baker, 2003), both times by different titles.

Endorsement

2011-12-21T06:18:00.000-06:00

Case closed. I'm an Iowan, once upon a time a Republican, and I am at this moment endorsing a candidate. (Now please stop calling.) I'd be walking across the floor at the caucus meeting when Ron Paul's name is announced, were I attending, were I walking across the floor. I've decided that of the rat pack the Republicans are forwarding to me and other bib-overaled hayseeds, Ron Paul's the man.

According to Politico, lots of Iowans don't want him to win, even though thousands do. Those who do are True Believers in Paul's idyllic libertarian gospel. Those who aren't Paul-struck worry like mad lest he does win--and their worries are well-founded. He may. Should the Texas senator pull off an upset, it would be another argument in the arsenal of those who are sick and tired of the Tall Corn state. Our first-in-the-nation caucuses may well go south fast. And the reason is simple, Ron Paul has zero chance of beating Obama. It's that simple. We Iowans, Republicans especially, are adept at picking losers.

Of course, the rest of the field isn't doing much better, if you believe yesterday's new polling data. Obama's on the rise, while anything Republican is not--this despite the fact that those who believe "it's the economy, stupid" see the nation's woes weighing heavily against this incumbent president.

In Iowa, a vote for Ron Paul is a vote to send the whole magical mystery tour somewhere else next election cycle. Tons of Republican and Democratic operatives would just as soon put Shenandoah and Keokuk in their rear view mirrors anyway. If you're going to stage the nation's first primary or caucus anywhere, why not in Florida, for instance, under the palms, or Arizona, where populations are vastly more multi-chromatic and you don't have to slow down for tractors.

Paul wins here on January 3, and the Hawkeye record is as bad as its basketball team. Huckabee last time--remember him? Pat Robertson?????????? Shoot, Dole even beat Reagan before Reagan was granted sainthood. Iowa Republicans are not winners; they're true believers.

We grow more social conservatives than we do corn. Here, the religious right has immense clout, vastly more than they have anywhere in the nation, it seems. Shoot, Bob Vander Plaats has been on all the news shows this year, got courted more lavishly than the Pork Queen, all because what he directs is the state's religious right in a johnny-come-lately assembly whose name focuses in on their cute little deliberate punctuation error--FAMiLY LEADER.

Politico claims Vander Plaats called one of the candidates, Michelle Bachmann, last week--get this!--got on the phone and asked her to pull out of the race and support Rick Santorum because, after all, wouldn't it be neat if all the good Christian Iowans could support just one good Christian candidate? The leader of the FAMiLY LEADER has become such a powerful broker that he thinks he can call a candidate and, piously I'm sure, direct her toward the back door.

Bachmann said no, thank goodness.

So Vander Plaats endorsed Santorum, even though his FAMiLY LEADER couldn't nail down a single candidate. Undoubtedly, some of the righteous brass wanted Gingrich, whose personal record as a family leader isn't particularly impressive.

I like Ron Paul, not only because he's the only really believable candidate in the pack, but because, if he wins, maybe the whole shooting match will go elsewhere--all the robocalls, all the ad men, all the rental busses and cars. They all go south, and we're left up here in earmuffs.

I'm not just being Scrooge this yuletide either. I think sharpened politics has been disastrous on church communities, especially with the bloated reputations of the religious right. People can't talk about politics anymore without reputations being smirched, without someone assuming that those who don't buy the company line are as sad as the sad cases who don't stand up and testify around the campfire.

I never, ever want another kindergarten grandchild of mine to climb into my lap and tell me that Obama is a baby-killer. I'm tired of the firewall politics builds between people who believe in the same God and the same savior, the same kid in the manger. I'm sick unto death of the divisiveness that arises in the blessed name of Jesus. And I don't understand how a mob of well-meaning, flag-draped Christians can actually believe that freedom is more biblical than justice.

Maybe if the caucuses leave, the uncivil wars will beget little but coffee table skirmishes. Maybe if someone else gets first-in-the-nation status, my phone will go silent.

I don't own a TV station or a rental car outfit or a restaurant or a bar, nor the Des Moines LaQuinta. But that doesn't mean I don't have a stake in this mess. I say, vote Ron Paul. When his name is called, walk across the gym floor. Make him a winner and leave our church alone.

Good riddance. Send Bob Vander Plaats back to Sioux City. He's not as important as he believes God almighty thinks he is. On January 4, they'll all be gone, the spinmeisters, the ad men, the pundits, the party operatives, and most of the phone bank--on to greener pastures. Vander Plaats and his righteous crew will have had their ten minutes of glory and the rest of us can get on with life.

Vote Ron Paul.

The rebel kid

2011-12-20T06:48:00.000-06:00

Our pastor--from the pulpit!--says we all ought to read the book of Mark again, as a book I guess. Not that we do everything our pastor says, but we do take advice well. So we started, put away our usual devotional fare, and went with Holy Writ this Christmas.

I wish we hadn't.

We get no more than three chapters in, and we run into trouble, a trouble-maker in fact. That's right--Jesus himself.

Another time, Jesus went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of the them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, "Stand up in front of everyone."

I'm sorry, but that demand wasn't particularly conciliatory. We all know Jesus is about to do this unlawful Sabbath healing thing knowing those big-brother Pharisees will bleed at the teeth when he does. Here's what I think: Jesus could have healed this guy in a closet--isn't that that the way he told us to pray? When you do the pious stuff, don't flaunt it. He didn't have to be all Tim Tebow about it. But he tells the shrived-hand man deliberately--yes, deliberately!--to stand up in front of everyone. Talk about in-your-face.

There's more.

Then Jesus asked them, "Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?" But they remained silent.

He's not even talking to the handicapped guy. What Jesus wanted was to put this sad case on stage before the fascists, the power elite who want his head. He's talking to them, for pity sake. The guy with the gimpy hand is little more than a prop. He's only there for the demonstration. What's really going on is a battle between the upstart prophet and the religious establishment.

He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.

Okay, I'll give you this--he's deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts; but just the same, it's impossible to say that this entire show is meant to heal the handicapped. What's going on here is Jesus's wanting to stick a sharp stick in the eyes of the Pharisees.

And what happens?--things get worse. The church Nazis cozy up to the state Nazis, draw them into diabolical partnership. Why? Because they hated this rude, young medicine man, sure--but also because he deliberately twisted their theological cranks. He took 'em on. He rankled their righteousness. He taunted them, yodeled at their power.

And he did so while he amassed his own following, because what happens thereafter is more little people start flocking to him, like sheep, especially those with withered whatevers. They'd seen what he'd done to their buddy. He healed them too, but then--for whatever reason--he tells them that mum's the word. Imagine that--you've had a club foot forever, Jesus heals it, and then whispers, smilingly, "Promise me you won't tell a soul." Is he crazy?

Well, yes, or so his parents thought. All this Christmasy-Mary-and-the-babe stuff? all that pondering in her heart and singing beautiful hymns in the barn? Her kid gets to be a teenager, and she's all, "the kid is, like, out of control."

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him for they said, "He is out of his mind."

Can you blame them? That's Mary, the virgin, remember--or else Joseph the selfless, right? On the night of the bright stars, that child in the manger was gorgeously divine; but lo, these few years later, the whole dysfunctional family needs Dr. Phil. He's out of his mind," Mom told a Galilean newspaper. "Seriously."

"Forget them!" Jesus tells his discplines when he reads the account. "Who is my father and mother anyway?" That's what he says. Something to the effect of "I could care less."

Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."

Gingrich-sized ego. You'd think his mom and dad were Pharisees. The kid deserves in a smack down.

I don't know. Sometimes when you read the Bible, you wonder what on earth is going on.

But then you get to know that you don't know.

Sometimes, I suppose, that's where faith begins.

Swan Songs XXIII--an old cemetery

2011-12-19T06:50:00.000-06:00

Back then, our only friends here in Iowa were Mom and Dad. We were just 30 years old and they were 50. We had one daughter, a baby, and we'd just moved to Iowa from Arizona. Humidity wasn't surprising to us, native Midwesterners ourselves, but it was wearying. Somewhere, my father got a window-sized air-conditioner that we put into action on the far north end of the house we'd rented, in the baby's room. For some time, that little bedroom became a family room.

We had no friends but relatives, and that's why we were with them one evening somewhere south of Ireton. I don't remember why we were out there, but I'd guess it was because I wanted to know where Dad Van Gelder had grown up--or where his father had before him--and that farm was somewhere around a little burg named McNally. Maybe we were simply on a ride in the country, something people used to do.

But there it was--suddenly, a patch of yellow weeds amid long lines of row crops, a patch of weeds with a couple of headstones, like remnant teeth, jagged and tipped drunkenly, just enough stones to make clear that what we'd stumbled on was a cemetery no one cared much about.

I suppose I've always been a graveyard wanderer, and I was then too. So we got out of the car, baby in arms, and walked through the brush and brome, checking names on what stones could still be read, kicking up others embedded in the ground.

A ton of kids were buried there, children, a lot of them dying sometime early in the 20th century, a cemetery for kids, it seemed.

We could only speculate--some kind of flu epidemic sweeping through the region? something contagious and murderous that swept away the lives of so many kids? What happened? My in-laws didn't know, both of them born after the deaths of all those kids.

What happened? I didn't know, and I wished I did.

Here's what I wrote in the preface to my first book:

Two years ago I stumbled on an old unkept cemetery, miles from any main road, surrounded by Iowa corn. Few stones remained upright, many were gone. But the stones that were there and still readable told an incredible story of children and tragic death, and I knew at that moment that a significant, unrecorded human drama had once occurred there, far from the cities, at this isolated spot in the garden of America.

It wasn't just the cemetery really. In 1976, the American Bicentennial, a nation paused to observe its history, and looking back for any paleface like me meant Ellis Island and the teeming nation of immigrants that washed ashore from Europe. I'm Dutch, or was four and five generations back; and some of my own roots, I knew, were here in Sioux County, where my Schaap ancestors lived for a time--and, finally, where they died.

Back then, Alex Haley made an entire nation conscious of its own slave-holding history with a book titled Roots, a book that became an absolutely mesmorizing mini-series that just about everyone watched. Lots of people wanted to know who they were, what they'd come from--and I wanted to understand this odd heritage/legacy I'd been given by no choice of my own: I wasn't just Dutch, after all, I was Dutch Calvinist or Dutch Reformed, a legacy I'd left, more than willingly, even joyfully, a heritage to which I was now returning, however, with a teaching job at Dordt College.

But I knew also that just as the stones themselves had been lost, many of the old stories would not last the passing of a generation, unless someone tried to give them the life they deserved, not only as interesting tales, but also for the strength they illustrated and the wisdom they carried.

That's but half-truth. The other part of the urgency to prompt me to write stories was that I knew that a job in college--rather than high school--would give me more time to write. I loved teaching high school kids--rural kids in Wisconsin, city kids in Phoenix--but high school sucked every bit of creativity out of my soul. You could assume not a kid in your class was going to care a whit about Emerson; so every night the question was the same--how on earth am I going to make this stuff comely? Every night.

I'd wanted to write ever since I'd left Sioux County. I wanted to write when I'd read Frederick Manfred. I wanted to write ever since I had a freshman English teacher who used to scribble on the bottom of my essay, "You have to write a novel someday." I wanted to write ever since I got whacked by teeming masses of Dordt students who supported the Vietnam War when I didn't. And said as much. And wrote it. In the school newspaper.

Somehow, that graveyard birthed my literary ambition. After all, what did I know about writing stories? Nothing really. I'd never taken a class. I didn't know what a story was except when I read one--and there it was, just south of Ireton somewhere, on a gravel road, a deserted cemetery full of the graves of children, a story.

I never did find out what happened there. In fact, in numerous trips back through the years, I could never even find that old graveyard back. I tried to find it more than once, going up and back and up and back through the row crops and square-cut gravel roads. I started to wonder whether it existed only in my imagination.

And then, Saturday morning, chasing an rosy dawn, I stopped along the road, pointed my camera out the window at a stately cottonwood up against the painted sky, when I looked back behind me and saw a guy in a pickup. I was blocking the road.

Embarrassed, I shifted the Tracker and took off, swung right so he could pass. He didn't go far or fast, just up the road a bit before he turned into a confinement. I watched him, wondering what he thought of the idiot taking pictures of the dawn.

I followed. And then, totally without warning, there it was, that old cemetery. Someone had cut down the brome, but what few stones remained still swayed recklessly hither and yon, like an old man's bad teeth. It was the same cemetery we'd come on in August of 1976, in the heat of summer, the cemetery that made me think I could learn to write stories if I found them, if I stumbled on them somehow, good stories, covered by brome or dust or age or just plain neglect. I could learn to write fiction if I lifted good stories out of disuse and figured out how to write them. I could write the way I'd always wanted if my apprenticeship started with the mystery of an old unkept cemetery full of kids.

Truth be known, I still don't know that story, but stumbling on that ragged graveyard again on Saturday morning at dawn brought me back, around and around and around and finally back--very much like a story, a good one, that always has its end somewhere close to where it began. I found it back, stumbled on it again, years and years later.

This morning, my morning thanks is for that old discovery years ago--and the new one just Saturday morning. And, I suppose, for roots. After all, it's been a blessing to be back again.

Sunday Morning Meds: He knows

2011-12-18T06:28:00.005-06:00

“But the Lord knows the way of the righteous”

I know one q and a from the catechism I was raised with (I know more than one actually, but don’t press me), and that is the very first—“What is your only comfort in life and death?” The answer begins this way: “That I am not my own, but belong. . .” I’ll spare you the entire answer, but one of the reasons this particular q and a sticks to the Teflon in my memory is the answer’s texture, it’s emotional color. The word of the moment here is comfort: What is your only comfort? What makes you feel good? What settles your nerves? What offers some peace? What helps you sleep? What gets you over the blues?

And the answer is, that I am not my own but I belong to God.

Likewise, the first psalm’s final verse begins with a phrase you can pull up to your chin on a cold winter night: God knows the way of the righteous. He knows. He’s got it down. It’s no mystery. For the Lord God Almighty, right and wrong and good and ill is all part of a day’s work. He knows. It’s that simple, really.

I find that immensely comforting.

Because life isn’t.

When you add up the whole works it amounts to nothing more or less than a sidewalk, eighty years long maybe, that leads to the grave. I still have a plaque my father received after twenty-some faithful years at the bank where he worked. Not expensive. His employers got it from a place that turns out trophies for longest putt at company golf tournaments. On its own, that plaque isn’t worth a dime. My father died several years ago now. That plaque is in the backroom of my basement because while there is no use anywhere, anyhow for that plaque, I can’t toss it.

Last week, in church, a man stood up and asked for prayers for a woman in Chicago, half a continent away. She is dying of inoperable cancer, and the diagnosis was in just a week ago: she’ll be gone in six months.

I could have wept, honestly, even though I haven’t seen her for years and barely know her. It seems that as I grow older I am more affected by such stories. When I was young and the trajectory of my life seemed to on an arc capable of transcending almost anything and everything, I don’t think I was as affected by such stories. Maybe that’s good. But today, they just depress me.

Psalm 1 begins with a word that’s hard to define—blessed; and it ends with a pretty strong hint at that what blessedness means. In the junky mess our lives become—traduced by sinners and sin itself—you’re not going to want to forget this singular truth: God knows. The Bible tells me so. God knows. He’s not perplexed or weary or tied to a silly ritual or overweight with bureaucracy. He gets it.

And it’s not just an idea. Be assured, the shepherd/king says, God knows the way of the righteous. He knows. He understands. He was, once, one of us, after all.

To be blessed is to know, in life and in death, in sickness and in health, that God does—that he knows. To him, it’s all perfectly clear. That’s blessed assurance.

Saturday Morning Catch

2011-12-17T12:32:00.000-06:00

Character took second place to setting this morning; the story was sky and sky and more sky. If the heavens declare the glory of the Creator, then this morning's sermon was not to be missed. It even brightened an old cemetery I stumbled upon, south of Ireton, a place I hadn't seen for thirty-some years.