Me, Burton Bartels, and Dutch psalms

"Burton Bartel's Dream Ministry" was published originally in the spring 1992 issue of Reformed Worship, a quarterly created and published by CRC Publications. IThe idea for the story has roots, of course, the deepest of which, I'd guess, is our experience in an Arizona CRC, two of them actually, Scottsdale and Orangewood, neither of which any longer exist. 

Arizona was full of homeless people. When I taught in a brand new high school on the north side of the city, if I had asked my students where they were from, very few would have referred me to an Arizona address; instead, it would be Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, California. Arizona was, at least in my experience, a haven for homeless, people who followed their dreams to start a new life in a new place, a new desert place. 

And so it was in the little bands of Dutch Americans who had migrated to the Valley of the Sun. Their roots had to bend and stretch beyond their power. "The way we used to do it at home" wasn't really a valid reason to carry on some convention of church life that may, at one time, been indispensable to good strong church life. Phoenix was a whole new world. Often enough, it made no sense to carry on already decaying traditions, like singing the Psalms, when no one could understand or speak the mother tongue.

The story I ran on this blog for the last three days is 34 years old. It's entirely possible that what Mr. Bartels thinks about the psalms and his psalmsters is at all important to piety today. I dreamed up Bartels, or, rather, I dreamed up his great idea for ministry--as far as I know, no such choir ever existed, even as a dream.

But last Friday night we attended an organ concert featuring the magnificent pipe organ in the BJ Haan auditorium. Maybe 100 people showed up--really couldn't have expected more. It was grand, greatly moving even though I wasn't familiar in the least with the work. Those Dutch psalms on that organ in that wide auditorium made me think of something I'd written long, long ago: 

    That June morning the idea came to him, it floated in on the harmony of Psalm 84, the Psalm which     woke him. And he said to himself, right there in bed, that the Psalms were just the thing. What a             ministry! After all, the Filipinos have their islander chants; the Mexicans the mariachi, the                     Bolivians, the huaino. My word, he thought, Paul Simon imported South African choruses for one         album and Brazilian percussion for the next. Dutch psalms--they were just the things, exactly the         ministry Peace Church needed for visibility. So Burton Bartels, construction czar suddenly become     musical entrepreneur, explained to everyone that the Psalmsters was going to become his own kind     of ministry.

Maybe, just maybe, what I heard and felt last weekend was some otherwise untapped sense of heritage. Maybe Dutch psalms, so deeply significant to the lives, the culture, of people of my own heritage, part of Dutch Reformed character. The thunderous chords of the old psalms were full of something I found resplendent, just like Mr. Bartels, who's Californian enough to believe that if he could create a good enough handful of musicians, he could, at once, put his struggling church on the map and do so in a fashion that could grow out of their own heritage.

The question that bugs him, however, is "can I call this a ministry?" Contemporarily, of course. People call just about everything "a ministry"--rag dolls to handbells. Ministry is clearly democratic today. Certainly the Psalmsters are a ministry, right there in the Rose Bowl Parade. 

Is he right? By the end of the story, he's not as sure as he once was, not in the face of devout piety he saw evidenced at a funeral back in the Midwest somewhere, like I did at the funeral of my wife's grandmother long, long ago. 

Don't know if that makes sense or not, but I pulled up Burton Bartels from the old Reformed Worship files and ran it just to see what I was thinking back then.

Burton Bartels' Dream Ministry - iii

A woman admitted him to the church, the woman the people in town called the koster, an old Dutch lady with a protruding forehead and button-like eyes, who knew little English but was excited to know that the names on the stones in the churchyard were actually ancestors of the American with the Dutch name and the strange hat.

Burton Bartels and the koster stood in that tiny Frisian church, and he imagined what the Peace Psalmsters would sound like in such a small place, so old. The woman scrambled around him, muttering things in Dutch, pointing to this or that, and finally dragging an extension cord out from beneath a bench in the back.

“You like this?” she said to him, and she strung the orange cord all the way from the back of the church up to a little Hammond organ that stood opposite the pulpit’s saluting sounding board, an organ which produced a tinny, flat electronic tone.

She played a few chords, proudly. The organ was new. She rolled her eyes. “Ve yust haf’ dis a yheah,” she told him. “Maybe you like to play?” Her bulk twisted slightly toward him on the shaky bench.

“No,” he said, raising a hand.

“We are for ‘dis so happy,” she told him, wincing, as if it were a sin to be so proud.

She turned back to the organ and, hands poised, waited for some inspiration, as if the music had to be something apropos. She shrugged her shoulders. “‘Vat to play?” she said, embarrassed, as much to herself as to him.

She didn’t look at all like his mother. Her vigor was the opposite of his mother’s slow deliberate way, but this woman had a sense of humor not unlike the woman who’d raised him, shrewd and wily--and both of them were heavy. It seemed as if she knew him well, after what?--twenty minutes.

But his mother came back to him right there, not because what the koster played was Psalm 42 or 84 or even Old Hundredth. His mother came back to him in that old Frisian church because he saw in her something he’d not felt in himself or even the Psalmsters, something he’d only seen, but long ago forgotten in the way his mother had long ago played the organ. She came back to him because the woman did not perform at all, she only played. What she did with her hands, in that old church, was play that cheap electronic organ proudly, in the way his mother did, a way that suddenly opened his eyes to something other than ministry, other than performance, other than making a name--something he had a hard job naming, but something he knew finally he could call nothing more or less than worship.

What she played wasn’t anything from the repertoire of the Peace Psalmsters. It was, of all things, “Shall We Gather at the River”; and she played it by ear, no pedals, a few chords here and there so heartily hammered that she threatened the bench with the force of her hands, her shoulders rolling, her eyes up, her round fists pounding as if her fingers were themselves capable of volume.

But what he heard was the sound of something he’d thought he’d forgotten for so many years, something so real, so vivid, so unshowy, that he had to look away--not because it lacked virtuosity, but because it seemed to him to be too close to something he’d left behind.

“Thees thing ist new,” she told him again when she was finished, and she rubbed her hands over the top as if the organ were waiting to be stroked. “‘Ve is all so proud,” she said.

When he didn’t respond, she asked, “You haf’ maybe sometink in your eyes?”

He shook his head.

To say that Burton Bartels’ great idea died that day in Piiam, Fries land, the Netherlands, would be half-truth. The Peace Psalmsters have gone on to even greater fame and fortune, although now its members are drawn professionally, outside the church. Watch for them at a concert in your area. You’ll never forget them.

But after that midday visit to the old church where his ancestors had worshiped and left, after that impromptu recital on a four-hundred dollar Hammond, a rendition of “Shall We Gather at the River,” he never once called his own great idea, the Peace Psalmsters, a ministry again.

Burton Bartel's Dream Ministry --ii

A wealthy Californian with a Dutch name suffers a dream that he believes will put his slowly dying little church on the map. He calls it a ministry.

_____________________________
That great idea came to him in those strange images that are lolling in the mind the moment one hears a morning alarm, this one coming to him out of the memory of his mother’s funeral, a memory he’d sworn he’d packed away so deeply that it rose only in his dreams.

What he’d heard that morning was the flush chords of a Dutch Psalm. For her funeral, his mother had requested Psalm 84, in the Dutch, of course. She’d asked it of the preacher.

So Burton Bartels, the only one of his brothers and sisters dressed in suede for the funeral, sat in the front bench of the white frame church where he’d been baptized, and listened to a few old voices in the church who could still sing the Dutch, long and slow in coming, an ancient drone that seemed almost bewitching, coming from so far and deep in a forgotten past.

That June morning the idea came to him, it floated in on the harmony of Psalm 84, the Psalm which woke him. And he said to himself, right there in bed, that the Psalms were just the thing. What a ministry! After all, the Filipinos have their islander chants; the Mexicans the mariachi, the Bolivians, the huaino. My word, he thought, Paul Simon imported South African choruses for one album and Brazilian percussion for the next. Dutch psalms--they were just the things, exactly the ministry Peace Church needed for visibility. So Burton Bartels, construction czar suddenly become musical entrepreneur, explained to everyone that the Psalmsters was going to become his own kind of ministry.

And that was exactly what it became. People from all over said how much they enjoyed the unique music the Psalmsters created. Wasn’t their very fame a result of God’s blessing? Wasn’t the fact that they were singing in so many churches--Roman Catholic, even charismatic--proof of the Spirit’s work? Wasn’t this, after all, really ministry?--he told himself.

Their repertoire was drawn in its entirety from the old Dutch Psalter, authentic Genevan Psalms, in the Dutch (one can avoid too much talk of God by singing in another language, after all), but preserved in their integrity and sung without accompaniment--in the original tempos and with only occasional harmonic flourishes.

What they created was simply enchanting. What was better was that in Southern California, no one was doing it. The old Psalms, their haunting melodies and seemingly dissonant harmonies, their plodding, relentless rhythms, were, to sunny California, Christian and non-Christian alike, simply unreal. The Peace Psalmsters, a cappella, grew immensely popular.

After five years and dozens of engagements, Burton Bartels--who’d never had musical training other than the regimen of hymns and psalms he had heard his mother play on the Wurlitzer in the family room--gave up the baton to Evert Nykamp, a Dutch musicologist from UCLA, who wasn’t a Christian at all, but, my word, did he know music.

That’s when the Governor called. That’s when the ethnic festivals from San Diego to San Francisco begged their participation; that’s when Burton Bartels began spending long nights on the phone, arranging performances at community churches two and three years in advance.

And that’s when they received the request to tour in the Netherlands. Nykamp claimed that the Holland of his birth would look upon the whole enterprise with the same curiosity as North Americans, so far behind them, too, was the tradition of the Psalms.

But in a small village just off the North Sea, the great idea for ministry finally died in Burton Bartels, in a village so small one could walk it, end to end, in less than ten minutes and still meet and speak to most of the inhabitants. In the very center, he stood in the old fourteenth century church where some long-ago Bartels family had worshiped generations before.

It was a strange experience, and he was oddly moved. High-backed chairs stood arranged in a seating position that suggested a hierarchy in the worshipers. He was stunned by the fact that little more than a handful of people had worshiped within those walls for more than five hundred years--so long without growth. It was such a small place, room for maybe one hundred at most. No room for fellowship, of course, and obviously no room to grow.

____________________

more tomorrow. . .

9/11 --a quarter-century later

On some balmy early fall days out here on the edge of the plains, it’s not hard to believe that we are not where we are. Warm southern breezes sweep all the way up from the Gulf, the sun smiles with a gentleness not seen since June, and the spacious sky reigns over everything in azure glory.

On exactly that kind of fall morning, I loved bringing my writing classes to what I call a ghost town, Highland, Iowa, a place whose remnants still exist, eight miles west and two south, a village that is no more.

What's left of Highland, Iowa, is a weather-beaten sign with a map of what once stood on the corner:  a blacksmith shop, a general store, Mt. Joy Church of God, Mt. Joy's parsonage, the Rock River Lutheran Church, and its horse barn.  Two churches out of five buildings.  Must have been some power-lifting righteousness there. 

Today, one huge old cedar and a couple dozen more youthful pines create a windbreak on the west edge of Highland's only remaining feature--a cemetery. The place is Norwegian--Hemmingson, Gunderson, and Johnson on the stones. Nothing else stands on the gently sloping hilltop where Highland once bustled, just a few tipsy gravestones and that heavy, wooden sign with the drawing of the old town.

Highland fell victim to the sad reality that 150 years ago, far more people lived out here in the country. The land was cut into 160-acre chunks back then. Today, the portions are ten times bigger.

Highland, Iowa, once sat high atop the confluence of a pair of non-descript gravel roads that still float out in four distinct directions like dusky ribbons over the undulating prairie. I bring students to Highland because what’s not there never fails to silence them. Maybe it’s the skeletal cemetery; maybe it’s the south wind through that stand of pines creating a song you don’t hear often on the treeless Plains; maybe it’s some variant of culture shock—they stumble out of cubicle dorm rooms and wake up in sprawling prairie spaciousness.

I’m lying. I know why they fall into astonishment. It’s the sheer immensity of the open land that unfurls forever before them, the horizon out where earth disappears effortlessly into sky, the rolling land. They open their eyes and there’s just plain nothing here, and that’s what stuns them into silence.

In 2001, on a morning none of them will ever forget, we stood and sat in the ditches along those gravel roads doing the assignment, just describing what we saw. No cars went by. We were absolutely alone—20 of us, on a swell of prairie on open land beneath the dome of sky.

That’s where I was—and that’s where they were— on September 11, 2001. My class and I left for Highland at about the moment the first World Trade Center tower was attacked. While the world watched in horror, we sat and looked over a landscape so immense only God could live there— and were silent, beset with awe.

No one can stay on a retreat forever, so when we returned to the college, we heard the news. All over campus, TVs blared.

But I can’t help thinking that my students, that morning, were best prepared for horror, not by our having been warned, but by our having been awed.

Every year it was a joy to sit out there and watch them try to describe the character of seemingly eternal prairie, but that year our being there on September 11, I’m convinced, was a great blessing.

__________________________

I told my students back then that they all had a unique story about 9/11 because they'd been doing something no one else was doing. When people would ask them, someday, where they were on 9/11, they'd say they had a peculiar experience. . .

To hear this 25-year-old essay as a podcast, listen in here

Burton Bartels Dream Ministry

Together with about a hundred others, we sat, on Friday night, in the BJ Haan auditorium for an organ recital. It was awesome. The first time I ever heard a real Dutch psalm sung was at a funeral, my wife's grandma, who died soon after we moved to Iowa. It was a transcendent experience for me because I knew that the stock from which I'd come had once responded to the resplendent beauty of that music with grave honor and deep and spiritual respect. That funeral service featured  two Dutch psalms sung in the Dutch language because my grandma-in-law had so loved them. I found them haunting.

At the time I had been asked to contribute stories to a new publication titled Reformed Worship. Ever on the lookout for good, new material, I remembered my appreciation for the Dutch psalms sung at Grandma Visser's funeral. Thus begat this story.

What's up for a few days on this blog is the story that grew out of that funeral's menu of music, 30-some years ago, I believe, a story conjured up from this computer's memory as a result of the gorgeous organ recital we attended a few night's ago. It just seemed to me that the psalms in traditional fashion heard from a magnificent pipe organ was maybe the most significant musical gift to usher from the Dutch Reformed tradition, our peculiar gift to the American experience.

As I sat there, I couldn't help thinking of this old story about a man who also sees what I glimpsed years and years ago at Grandma's funeral in First Orange City church.

_________________________________

Burton Bartels' Dream Ministry

Burton Bartels’ incredible idea for ministry finally materialized when the church he’d attended since moving to California gave him permission to create a special ministry musical group and to sing occasionally in the services. It died ten years later, sort of, in Piiam, the Netherlands, having lived a wonderful life. Therein lies his story.

He watched his dream grow when the finest singers from Peace Church signed up to help, once they’d heard his plan; he saw the color of that dream (most dreams are in black and white, experts say) when, on the first Sunday of Lent, those same fine singers sang for the very first time, the women in long black dresses, the men in black ties and slacks, white shirts, and, of course, suspenders--costumes he’d paid for himself, so deep was his commitment to the dream.

He heard the dream awaken fully when the Peace Psalmsters first combined their voices into something that was, well, breathtaking, vivid and haunting harmonic melodies in August chant-like rhythms that, in only a few years, churches all over Southern California found enchanting, almost other-worldly. Few had ever heard the majesty of Genevan Psalms before.

The wonderful dream was of a musical group, he said, that would quite definitely put Peace Church on the map. The whole idea seemed so elemental to him, so right--a ministry that would return the congregation to its roots, many of Peace’s members having Dutch surnames.

And it worked. He was right beyond his wildest dream. The Peace Psalmsters were celebrated throughout the state only a few years after the dream came to him. The Governor asked them to entertain his guests in Sacramento; they were special guests during the Rose Bowl festivities in Pasadena; they sang Sunday after Sunday in mega-churches all over L.A., in shopping malls during the Lenten season, and in Crystal Cathedral three and sometimes four times a year--always in the authentic Dutch language.

And everywhere they went, people found their slow and rhythmic strength, unaccompanied by organ or piano, to be haunting, yet stately, dignified, almost mystic, like Gregorian chants but wider of girth in harmonic structure, deliriously beautiful. So quaint, people said, so exotic, so wonderful.

This wonderful idea came to him one dawn, several months after his mother’s funeral in Iowa. He had visited her faithfully in the forty years since he’d left. At least once a year he went back home, at first with family; but then, as his children grew and his wife’s business came to dominate more of her time, he’d gone alone. He’d tried to get his mother to move to a rest home in San Mateo, but, stubbornly and not unpredictably, she’d insisted on staying in freezing Holland Center, where she was born--and where, finally, she died.

The doctors had called the family to her bedside in late January, mid-winter, and by the time he’d arrived in Iowa, her life was already dependent on the machines that gauged the rhythm of her breathing in a series of thin orange lines. Once he saw her lying there, the only thought he had, the thought he didn’t share with anyone, not even his siblings, was his overwhelming shock at how far one could journey from his or her roots, specifically how really distant even a mother could look to a man who’d once been almost as dependent on her as she was now on the machines that kept her blood pumping.

What made him cry that weekend was not his mother’s death, but the truth his own vagrancy made vivid to him: that he really didn’t need his mother--and he hadn’t for years.

But he never told anyone what he’d felt, not even his wife, and he buried his mother there, in a country churchyard, with the memories that he thought to be already, for the most part, long gone.

The great idea of the Peace Psalmsters came to him one morning--just like all of his good ideas for marketing had, like Bible verses on the spinning barrels of his cement trucks, building churches for a discount, and enclosing the company logo in the outline of a fish. If Peace Church, like his construction business, was ever to garner its share of California’s teeming unsaved multitudes, it had to have a gimmick, after all. Everybody had puppet ministries and theater troupes--why not Psalmsters, he thought. Why couldn’t the Peace calling card be created out of its own immigrant past? Ethnics! He said--everyone was into ethnics. It was a wonderful idea, he thought, for real ministry.

____________________________

The heavy word in that last sentence is ministry. More tomorrow.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“Then I acknowledged my sin”

Once, years ago, when I was a kid, a friend of mine and I were racing down a country road, trying to get every last mph we could out of a pair of the kind of tiny motorcycles that were all the rage when I was a boy—90 ccs of sheer power. Bent over to keep down the wind resistance, we were staring into the faces of our speedometers.

Not smart.

My friend veered off the road and into the ditch. Out of nowhere, a culvert appeared; but when he and that little whizzing bike climbed back up he hit the lip of pavement and did an full somersault on his Honda—at least that’s how I remember it.

I hit both my brakes—hand and foot—and my Bridgestone stopped on a dime. But I didn’t. I got myself launched and somehow instinctively pulled my body into a ball, threw my right arm over my head, where it caught the pavement full force in the wild tumble that followed.

When I came up, my entire arm looked as if it had been savaged with a ratchet. I still bear a scar.

Later, at dinner, I kept the story, and my arm, under wraps, didn’t say a word to my parents who weren’t, from the getgo, thrilled about the motorbike.

That evening, we had a ball game. The coach took one look at the blood seeping through my sleeve and set me on the bench.

When I read this most central line of the story David tells and the psalm he writes—“then I acknowledged my sin”—I can’t help think of my bloodied arm because nobody ever told me to curl myself up into a ball if I was hurled from a motorcycle. No one had reviewed safety procedures when racing madly on a Bridgestone 90.

Something innate got called up for duty. Without the slightest coaching, the persistent instinct to live kicked in and I didn’t get badly hurt because our will to survive at any cost is powerful and robust; there is something in all of us that will do everything it can to push us beyond pain and death.

That instinct operates just as assuredly psychologically as it does physically. I wouldn’t have told my parents what happened that day on a country road if they’d boiled me in oil (they wouldn’t have). Why not? Sheer survival. Similar instinct.

Presidents Nixon and Clinton both stone-walled when they shouldn’t have—Nixon over a third-rate burglary, Clinton over a tryst. Why? Instinct. Self-protection. The will to survive. Human motivations we all share.

Confession, or so it seems to me, often runs contrary to those very impulses. Here, in this psalm, David tells the story so matter-of-factly—“then I acknowledged my sin,” as if it was no big deal to come clean.

But it is. Always. Acknowledging our sin is difficult because we fight something basic in ourselves when we do it.

The whole story of Psalm 32 is here in this single verse: “I acknowledged my sin.” It’s just that simple. But two Presidents—and all of us too at one time or another--were brutalized because they couldn’t.

I may be wrong, but I’d guess that right now whoever is reading these words is having trouble forgetting something he or she never confessed. I can see you now, nodding. Confession is good for the soul but rough on the instincts, murder on our arrogant humanity.

But David knows very well that it’s got to be done. That’s what this song of his is all about.

Ms. Gloria Steinem (1934-2026)

 

'Strange--the way an image like this one yesterday--Gloria Steinem--brought me back to a wholly (and unholy) time in my life, a time when Gloria Steinem was parked somewhere close to the office of the Enemy, a time when I was somewhere just to the right, politically, of Barry Goldwater.

Gloria Steinem was not only a left-wing cheerleader, she was that side's leading scorer, a registered American snobby Easterner, whose good looks were immensely deceiving because she didn't think much about men--despised them actually, I thought, even though I don't remember ever concluding she was lesbian. What she was was impossible for me to understand--a woman with the standing of a beauty queen who refused to be what I figured a woman needed to have, needed to be. 

She was (hold your nose!) a feminist, that's for sure, a woman who couldn't shoot down a man with a 30-06, not because she couldn't--she had the looks--but because she chose not to, all those good looks (look at those legs, that hair!) going to waste because to her, I couldn't help thinking, men were the root of all evil. I was the enemy.

In addition, she was the leading spokesperson (not spokeswoman) for abortion, which gave her an office just around the corner from the Anti-Christ. That hair and those aviator glasses yesterday brought me back to the far-right side of the political spectrum. I didn't keep track of where she went during the next decades, what causes she advocated through the years, although I can't imagine her advocating for anything to the right of what she held dear fifty years ago. It was not at all easy to imagine what she looked like at 92 years old because she was, she really was, a "looker." 

It's exactly that kind of assessment she fought to control, to end, even as she came, to me at least, to embody it. She is partially responsible for my being able to understand how "looker" makes it sound as if I'm judging livestock, which, I suppose, I was.

I understand the accolades  that came in for her yesterday. Every news show paid homage--celebrated her strength and courage while going through life on the far edge of liberalism.

 When I saw the picture, what came back (I didn't ask!) was lots of fear and hate. Ms. Steinem carried the flag for American libs--that woman in that picture was the embodiment of everything I feared in early '60s politics, feared and despised. 

She didn't teach me how to hate--I came by that on my own.

I stand in need of forgiveness, not for my political views but for remembering how easy it was for me to hate.