A song of praise to a place we called home

 Some skies and a couple of birds as we leave.

When?

 

“My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.  

When can I go and meet with God?”

 

The Ghost Dance, one of the saddest religions of all time, was a frenetic hobgoblin of Christianity, mysticism, Native ritual, and sheer desperation that swept Native life throughout the American west in the final years of the 19^th century. 

 Wovoka, a Piute holy man, saw the original vision, then designed the ritual from his own revelation. Erect a sapling in an open area, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, which was, back then, outlawed by reservation agents.  Purge yourselves—enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious, to witness to your humility. Often warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness to their selflessness. 

 Then dance—women and men together—dance around that sapling, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude.  Dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges.  Dance into frenzy.  Dance into religious ecstasy.

 If they would dance, Wovoka claimed Christ would return because he’d heard their prayers and felt their suffering.  When he’d come, he’d bring the old ones with him, hence, “the Ghost Dance.”  The buffalo would return, and once again the people could take up their beloved way of life.  If they would dance, the dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, the white people.  If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, their thirst assuaged, their sadness comforted. 

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.”  

It was that simple and that compelling a vision. 

 As a white Christian, I am ashamed to admit that in the summer of 1890, the desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the near death of a culture, created a religion that played a disturbing role in the massacre at Wounded Knee.

 It’s not hard to read the opening two verses of Psalm 42 if we’ve never felt the thirst David is talking about. But it’s helpful for me, a white Christian, to know the story of the Ghost Dance, to understand how thirstily Native people looked to a God who had seemingly left them behind. They were dying, spiritually and physically. 

That’s why the thirsty four-leggeds here would make sense to Native people—why, back then, they would have understood the opening bars of David’s song. 

 What’s at the bottom of this lament is nothing less than God’s apparent absence. 

Trev and Trump

So today is the opening of March Madness. May the best bunch of guys--and women--dangle the nets from around their necks come the glorious end. Lots of good tv a'comin'.

I'm reminded of a story from my coaching days, long, long ago. Once upon a time I was a freshman team coach at Greenway High School, Phoenix, Arizona, during a long winter season that coached me to see that my joy was in the classroom, not on a gym floor. 

Freshman basketball at Greenway meant two teams--A and B. It was never said publicly, but the truth is that the A team contained most of the kids the head coach thought had a future as a varsity Demon (nickname, of course), which left the B coach--me--with the others, which would have been unfair had not all the rest of the schools in the district done something similar. 

Thus, when we'd play Thunderbird High School, just down the road, we'd travel together, one team taking the court before the other. We lost--a lot too, but then the A team wasn't a whole lot better. 

Trev was Trumpian in arrogance, a real cookie who had to be ridden like a ill-tempered mule. He was talented on the floor, as long as he was out there, but often as not he was beside me on the bench because he had issues, as they say.

I once called his father to enlist him in the quest to temper the tantrums, but he backed off. "I haven't been able to handle Trev for the last several years," he said. "Good luck."

Something about the kid drove me nuts; something about him was charming--and a challenge. 

But here's the deal. We were playing away from home one afternoon, some other high school, when the squirrelly ref blew his whistle, stopped things on the floor and threw up his hand. "On 44," he said, or whatever and pushed his hands out as if it were pass interference. Trev blew up, claimed he'd never touched the guy, screamed bloody murder, which drew a technical.

I called the ref over. Now you've got to see us--it's a freshman team, late afternoon in the city. Maybe a half-dozen people in the stands. What I'm saying is there's no big crowd protest.

I call the ref over, tell him my Trev didn't push theirs.

"I don't care," the ref says. "I don't like his looks."

"You can't slap a foul on the kid because you don't like his looks," I said.

That went nowhere.  Trev had a foul and a tech, and I don't remember if  he stayed long in the game.

March madness wasn't what got me to thinking about Trev, Trump did. On the sly, his government thugs rounded up a ton of Venezuelans--does anyone know they are--wrestles them to the ground, shaves their heads, clothes them in t-shirts, and hustles them off to El Salvador, where Trump has assurances that the crook in charge of the government there says they'll be taken care of, then points at  some kind of hellish penetentiary. The government has nothing on these men. They just didn't like their looks.

These Venezuelan hombres may well have been gang members, may well have required deportation, but in this country, just like on  the basketball floor, there has to be cause.

As the judge told the administration, "Prove it."

That's the American way.   

A Song of Praise to a Place (4)

 A neighbor had an extra lot. Neither Barbara or I were ever the kind of people who fashioned a dream home, but suddenly we building it, out in the country.

JOIN THE RESISTANCE!

A friend of mine, Dave Schelhaas, got pummeled by MAGA troops in the neighborhood--they're the majority, by far--when he published an essay that took on the king. The newspaper stepped in to edit out gross responses.

That's what many in the minority don't want to happen--they don't want to get incinerated by the royal right, the MAGA crowd, who will stop at almost nothing to protect their investment in a man who doesn't deserve their favor.

I put a note up on Facebook to JOIN THE RESISTANCE, urging readers to buy and wear Canada t-shirts. 

No single mess that the King of Messes has begun is more horrifying than his saber-rattling at our northern neighbors. Are there MAGA supporters who think, really, that what he's doing with regard to Canada is just or sane?

Here in the states and maybe especially here in  Siouxland, wearing Canada's maple leaf unequivocally identifies you with the loyal opposition, the American Resistance. 

A Song of Praise (3)

 

We were in the country all right, with a real live river for a neighbor, a famous one, named after the only member of the Corps of Discovery to die, the Floyd.

A river with its own  inhabitants.

Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 42

“As the deer pants for streams of water,

so my soul pants for you, O God.”

I’m not sure what I’m about to say is instructive or merely sensational, but one can die from thirst in four days, even if all you’re doing is praying.

At the end of my career, classrooms were strewn with water jugs in all shapes and sizes, some monstrous. Students toted them everywhere. Even in church, in the middle of a sermon, millennials of all ages take out bottle and grab a swig as if the numbers on their internal clocks tick dangerously close to 92 hours. I just don’t get it—but I’m not of their generation.

I’m guessing none of us—the heavy drinkers included—know the extremity of the opening line of Psalm 42, but then neither do I. I can’t remember a time in my life when. . .

Wait a minute. I used to bale hay. Just about every memory haying is in the barn, where, by noon, temperatures would soar in dusty, cob-webbed corners of ancient hay mows.

Today, close to sixty years later, I start buying lemonade come June. Often, I chug it, even though I haven’t bucked a bale in half a century. I remember baling hay whenever I drink lemonade. I remember slipping wet quart jars out of insulated paper bags, screeching off lids, and chugging cold lemonade right through a dozen ice cubes.

Still, only a few of us know the extremity of the simile here—of thirst that rages into outright panting. And I’m not among them. I’ll never forget pouring down ice cold lemonade in a hay mow, but I was nowhere near dying, even though at twelve I may have thought so and probably acted like it.

We don’t know that David wrote Psalm 42, but some believe he did; what’s more, some like to think he wrote it when his son, Absalom, was threatening his father’s life. Whether or not that’s true, the heft of the psalm’s opening simile has little to do with our not packing a thermos. Water jugs have nothing to do with Psalm 42.

What David is saying—if indeed he is the author—is that he passionately thirsts after God because God seems nowhere to be found. That’s the kind of thirst at issue.

On a particularly dark day for us not all that long ago, we took a walk around town. When we passed some houses of people we knew, I couldn’t help but recount the troubles each of those families were going through too. Maybe it was my problems that made me calculate tribulations—I don’t know. But I did, sadly. Racked up other people’s problems as if to take the edge off mine perhaps.

I’d just read a little from Calvin, specifically a line in Book I of the Institutes: “Without certainty of God’s providence life would be unbearable.”

Certainty is one fine blessing, but not everyone gets it. That night, I was a lot less confident than Calvin.

Psalm 42, long a favorite of many, is all about chugging certainty even in desperation, about knowing God is there, even when we’re sure as heck he’s not. That wonderful passage from Isaiah is a heavenly promise; the story from Acts does nothing but bring smiles. But Psalm 42 is the gut-wrenching plea of a man who finds himself without.

The thirst here is for nothing in a jug, for something a whole lot more than lemonade. The thirst here is for living water in the parched soul of someone who’s wandering in a desert where there’s nothing more than hot sand.

A lot of folks know that thirst, even David the King, David the poet, David the man closest to God’s own heart. Even he knew what it meant to pant.

It’s always nice to remember we aren’t alone, isn’t it? It seems to me that’s the blessing of Psalm 42.

Song of Praise to a Place (2)

We'd come to reside in the country, where the bountiful skies spread themselves out for miles in all directions. 

Backyard dawns, 2012