"a vast expanse of moving, plunging, rolling, rush­ing life"

Maybe gas prices will open up Yellowstone this summer. Otherwise, it's as busy as a downtown intersection. Lots of attractions, of course, but one of the majors is the buffalo. Every year some clown gets mashed by some angry bull, but it doesn't stop dozens of others from getting out of the car and risking the ire of these wonderful mammoth beasts, of whom all of us can be proud.

This is part of the herd belonging to the Yankton Sioux, on their reservation land. They're a wonder to see because, rare as they are, they remind all of us of our world once was. 

They bestow a reverence that downright spiritual.

This passage from Warren Angus Ferris' Life in the Rocky Mountains (1843), describes a scene thousands witnessed 200 years ago but is almost unimaginable today. 

But, go ahead and imagine--

On the fourteenth, hurrah, boys! we saw a buffalo; a solitary, stately old chap, who did not wait an invitation to dinner, but toddled off with his tail in the air. We saw on the sixteenth a small herd of ten or twelve, and had the luck to kill one of them. It was a patriarchal allow, poor and tough, but what of that? we had a roast presently, and hamped the gristle with a zest. Hunger is said to be a capital sauce, and if so our meal was well seasoned, for we had been living for some days on boiled corn alone, and had the grace to thank heaven for meat of any quality. Our hunters killed also several antelopes, but they were equally poor, and on the whole we rather preferred the balance of the buffalo for supper. 

People soon learn to be dainty, when they have a choice of viands. Next day, oh, there they were, thousands and thou­sands of them! Far as the eye could reach the prairie was literally cov­ered, and not only covered but crowded with them. 

In very sooth it was a gallant show; a vast expanse of moving, plunging, rolling, rush­ing life--a literal sea of dark forms, with still pools, sweeping currents, and heaving billows, and all the grades of movement from calm repose to wild agitation. 

The air was filled with dust and bellowings, the prairie was alive with animation. I never realized before the majesty and power of the mighty tides of life that heave and surge in all great gatherings of human or brute creation. 

The scene had here a wild sublimity of aspect, that charmed the eye with a spell of power, while the natural sympathy of life with life made the pulse bound and almost madden with excitement. Jove but it was glorious! and the next day too, the dense masses pressed on in such vast numbers, that we were compelled to halt, and let them pass to avoid being overrun by them in a literal sense. 

On the following day also, the number seemed if possible more countless than before, surpassing even the prairie-black­ening accounts of those who had been here before us, and whose strange tales it had been our wont to believe the natural extravagance of a mere travelers' turn for romancing, but they must have been true, for such a scene as this our language wants words to describe, much less to exaggerate. On, on, still on, the black masses come and thicken--an ebless deluge of life is moving and swelling around us!

Buffalo rank high on vacation destinations because somehow even a couple of hundred create visions of what once was the world where we live.

Sunday Morning Meds (Psalm 121)

 

“The LORD watches over you—

the LORD is your shade at your right hand. . .”

 

            What he told the world is that since 1895, American news sources have alternated warnings about our changing climate.  For almost forty years prior to the Great Depression, most opinion-makers touted the present danger of a returning ice age.

            And that’s not all.  What he said is that arch-political scientists and their friends in the news media have beating the drum about global warming for years now, when there is no such phenomena—or, if there is, it’s nothing more than a temporary shift, our climate and planet far more dynamic than some would think.

            What he claimed has been proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that the so-called “hockey stick,” the heavily reported spike in climate temperatures throughout the 20^th century after thousands of years of constancy, has been proven totally false by Canadian researchers who simply tore it apart.  That spike is phony baloney. 

            What he told all of us is that the National Academy of Science has shown conclusively that humanity has suffered through minor climate changes before, that what is called “the Medieval Warm Period” (900 A.D. to 1500 A.D.) and “the Little Ice Age” (1500 to 1850) are bona fide proof of natural and sustainable climate variations—and that therefore the propaganda about “global warming” today is just hype and hooey.

            What he said is that the Arctic isn’t warming but cooling.  He’s reminded us all that sixty prominent Canadian scientists sent a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister, saying that “'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes occur all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise.'"

            He claimed that restraining so-called greenhouse gases has real economic costs, stifling business activity and a bustling economy, and therefore hindering progress in dealing with world poor.  He quoted this headline, "Climate Changes Endanger World's Food Output," called alarmist and dangerous, and then pointed out that it ran in the New York Times in 1975, thirty years ago.

            He is a senator, and the speech he delivered, years ago already, is much longer, full of facts and documented anecdotes and references to studies.

            I have neither the time nor the competence to study the issue of global warming thoroughly, and whether the Senator is even partially right, scientists themselves appear to disagree.  So the nature of the question changes in my circumstance:  it’s not “what do you believe about global warming?”  Instead, it’s “who do you believe?”

            And I choose not to believe the Senator. I choose to believe instead a list as long as my arm of people who radically disagree with his claims. I may be wrong.

            But I also choose to believe the psalmist when he says—with nary a hint of global warming—that this God of his (who’s apparently at his right hand armed with a parasol) is watching over all of us—polar meltdown or coming ice age, and that this God, my God, is my shade from all kinds of heat. That truth is transcendent. 

            He is my only comfort—in both deathly cold January and the dog days of mid-July. He is my only comfort. That I know by faith.

A Missing Week

They call it a TAVR, and it's a blessing. Trust me, I know. I just had one. 

Tuesday had to be one of the most memorable of my life. What a couple of Polish MDs did was recondition an aortic valve in my chest, not by open-heart surgery (the old way) but via a vein in the groin (mine), a procedure called a TAVR. Both sides of the groin are attacked by first-time-ever intrusions, one of those intrusions carries a tiny new piece of technology that will strengthen the weak valve; the other is a temp pacemaker, which won't be used unless it has to be. In my case--which is to say in my procedure, it didn't. That's good. Anyway, that temp needs to be there until it's clear it's not needed, but it has to come out some hours later. 

The first step in healing is an overnight in the hospital, ON YOUR BACK, which is a form of nearly lethal torment to keep things in place. It was perfectly awful. I didn't sleep, watched the clock from 11:00 am on Tuesday to 9:30 am on Wednesday. I took as many pain-killers as they would give me. When we got home, but I could not write a sentence. (I hope I'm doing better). That having been said, I'm greatly thankful that everything went well and that the procedure worked. 

Ostensibly, my heart has been made stronger by the TAVR, and it's been done--my seriously delinquent aortic valve got a big-time boost.

But I say all this to explain the long pause in posts. I started a blog so many years ago I can't begin to remember when exactly, and I've been doing it ever since. If I miss for a few days--as I have twice now in the last few year (for medical reasons) this good old Calvinist starts to feel guilty. 

Thusly, this explanation. That's where I've been.

Long ago, my friend Dave Schelhaas asked me if I'd like to do a "reading" with him last night, and, of course, I said yes. Then, this faulty aortic valve got noticed and I was given the opportunity to have the procedure done "like, next week." So the question was, can you come in on April 7? 

Why put it off, I thought. 

So when I got to the hospital that morning, I said to one of the gallery of nurses, "I'm a writer. Will I be able to do a reading on Thursday night?"

"Of course," she said, fluffing a pillow (or doing something).

I think she thought I was talking about my sitting in my grandpa's chair and reading a book, because when I woke up yesterday, I could tell quickly that my "reading" warn't in the offing. 

Fortunately, I'd thought a ton about what I was going to read and decided on a story from what might be my last book, a selection of short stories from the last forty years. That story, it's in Paternity, concerns a marriage undertaken only to get passage to Canada after the war. It stuck me that I could, quite easily, change the story into a readers theater presentation. So the givens were in place. I had only to bow out and let my characters do what I'd asked them to do.

And, lo, it was very good. I made it over there, and the ringers I recruited did marvelously well, as I knew they would.

Anyway, I'm back.

Some thoughts on Easter morning

Hard as it is to admit, I've become something of a shut-in. Yesterday, once again, the wind blew so horribly that I cared not a fig to go out in it. This winter--and when will it be over, please?--we've had a half-dozen snowstorms (nothing near blizzard-level, however), but what's most wearing finally is the interminable wind, takes your face off, I used to say. 

We're in process of selling our house out in the country this week, and it hurts a little because we're solidly in senior housing right now, a pretty little condo that's less than half the size of the home we left behind. Honestly, out there, with a corner to the northwest, we were subject to prairie winds far more than we are here, in a covey of condos. Still, I can't help but believe we've suffered more wind here than there.

So this shut-in has more time on his hands, time to do things. . .like read. I spent my Holy Saturday reading, and I enjoyed what I read--I really did. I don't know that I'd call Ruth Suckow my all-time favorite-st writer, but I've grown a real affinity for her work, even though its oh-so provincial in subject matter--rural Iowa, early 20th century, almost exclusively farm folk of German stock doing what they did, being who they were.

Suckow, a preacher's kid who grew up here in northwest Iowa, is a sworn realist. She'll never make your favorite writer list if your a devotee of Harry Potter. In a Suckow story, you have to expect an unflinching look at setting and character. Plot isn't all that exacting. Spending an afternoon with Suckow means not wandering far at all from these windswept plains, just no cell phones.

After two long stories, I moved on, but the stories stuck with me. One of them, "Renters," featured a Steinbeck-like family who simply couldn't shake being "renters," the economic place thereby implied, as well as the stigma--"they're just renters," as if they'll never be anything but.

A friend from Parkersburg, Iowa, once did some research about my ancestral family who lived there sometime around the turn of the 20th century. He found my great-grandfather's name on a patch of scrubby river bottom land and told me, rather sweetly, that that patch of land did more than suggest he wasn't wealthy. 

In Suckow's story, the couple hits hard times harder and longer than most families do; they're not in the least lucky--in fact, good times so regularly escape them than they can't help wonder whether there are good times at all. But they're sympathetic. The husband is a hard worker who does his landlord's right. They're fine people really, but they just find it impossible to keep their heads above water. 

It's sad. "Renters" is a sad story. It's well-done, but it's just plain sad.

And then there's "Uprooted," a story made more painful by reciting the lot in life when accrues to people our age. Adult children of an old couple meet at their parents' farm to talk about what's to be done with their parents, who are little more than potted plants. For very understandable reasons, none of the children (and their spouses) really want their ever-more elderly parents to live with them. In point of fact, those elderly parents don't want to close down the old ramshackle house and move in with their childrens' families either. 

Suckow's characters inhabit a community and time in which there are no old folks' homes, which means there are no good options. Plus, Ma and Pa absolutely don't want to move either. My grandfather Schaap was the pastor of the church I grew up in before I was around. My only memories of him are as a sourpuss I wanted to stay in his room and out of my life. Grim stuff.

The story ends with the rich son heading back to his home in Omaha, anxious to shake off all the residue of a visit to Ma and Pa. He's looking forward to sitting in his own chair. Thus do we all make nests of our domiciles; thus, would we all rather not be "Uprooted."

I enjoyed reading both stories, really did, more than I enjoyed the stories--if that makes sense. But I couldn't help wonder why Ruth Suckow chose the kind of determinism she did--why are both stories so sad. She could have turned the lives of the renters around and given them blessed landlords. She could have changed the attitudes of one of Ma and Pa's kids, made them more sympathetic to their elderly parents' cares and needs.

But she didn't.  If I'd written the story, I don't know that I would have either. Life is like that, right?

Two stories, well-written, close to the bone, but both of them given gray and cloudy skies. No wind really, but no sun either. Both negative. 

So we wait--like Holy Saturday. We wait, the meditation we read last night at supper maintained. So, on Holy Saturday, we wait.

The morning has come. Just now--felt like the first time--I woke up to birds singing. No wind either.

It's Easter morning. 

The eternal is once again very real.  

Good Friday

A country churchyard in northeast Iowa.

Just a couple weeks ago I passed a country church and saw this crucifix through the trees, stopped, and tried to put it in the camera and take it with. Somehow I was moved by an ordinary crucifix in a little country churchyard. I told myself on Good Friday I'd put it up, so here it is.

I'm a child of the Reformation, so the crucifix seemed to me--and still does, I suppose--a peculiarly Roman Catholic thing, almost contraband; but I've taken a shot at more than a little of Christ's suffering through the years. Here's a number of them, for Good Friday, from a host of places of worship. They are what we try to know, to feel, to understand of this particular day, a day when we're all catholic.

California Mission

Florence, Italy

Hoven, South Dakota

Marty, South Dakota

Hospers, Iowa

Rome, Italy

St. Paul, MN

Marty, SD

St. Peters Basilica, Rome

A California Mission

Cathedral of Sioux Falls

Peter Kreeft, Jersey born and reared, went to Eastern Christian High School and, thereafter, to Calvin College, before switching fellowships and becoming Roman Catholic. I don't know his work well, but I've been reading his memoir, From Calvinist to Catholic, where he says that one of the first inkling he felt with respect to the change was a simple desire to see, bodily, Christ.

To the Catholic faith, the 

physical dimension is not an addition to the essence but as essential as the spiritual. Christ saved us not merely or even mainly by giving us His mind, as all the great saints, sages, and philosophers did, but by giving us His Body. I intuitively knew and felt this "Catholic thing" even before I ever considered becoming a Catholic.

Just a thought on Good Friday. 

Holy Week--Maunday Thursday

When it comes right down to it, I'm pretty much of a stick-in-the-mud conservative. In my book, Obama isn't the malefactor he is on Fox News; and, quite frankly, watching Governor Mike Pence tap dance this week hasn't been all that painful. I mean, politically I'm probably not. 

But psychically, give me a ritual and I'm happy. I'm more-than-okay with what's ordinary. Innovation? Give me a break. What on earth is new under the sun? Not much. As far as I'm concerned, we'd get along better if we'd all go home with the one who brought us to the dance, you know? 

I've never been big on praise teams. Some people find them a turn-on because they can see how much the singers care about Jesus and that's thrilling, I guess. Me? I'd rather have a choir, and I'd rather they sang from the back of the church, as an offering. I'm too sinful for praise teams. They stand up there, mouthing mikes, and I'm wondering if what's-her-name is putting on weight, or why the bald guy playing the bass insists on wearing cargo shorts. You know. I'm distracted.

I'm a conservative. What the heck was wrong with the old-time religion anyway?

And I get scared on Maunday Thursday because churches in small towns like the ones I've lived in are always on the look out to out-hip their neighbors. They're always looking for something new, something that hasn't been done, something the church down the block isn't doing. "Ya' hear what New Church is doing this year? Why can't we do stuff like that? Sheesh."

Let's not and say we did, okay?

See what I mean? Basically, I'm conservative.

I get scared on Maunday Thursday because the whole Maunday Thursday business is new to me. I don't even know what Maunday means. I know churches practice the Lord's Supper on Maunday Thursday, but what is a Maunday anyway? 

When I was a kid, Main Street closed up tight from 12 to 3 on Good Friday, just flat shut down during the hours of Jesus's suffering. That I remember. I don't remember Maunday Thursday. 

And what I fear is foot-washing. Really, there are only a couple of reasons for Maunday Thursday services; one of them is the commemoration of the Last Supper. That's fine.

But these days, you just know someone's going to get out five-gallon buckets and ask men and women and their kids to come up and get their feet washed. Drop shoes and socks and plop in the water, then wrap wet toes with a towel from a stack yeah-high, you know? Somebody's going to do it tonight. Just watch. What I want to know is how do you choose whose feet get washed?--lottery? Do people say, "here, wash mine?" and who does it? the preacher? the elders? just anybody? We all wash each other's? Is that it? It's going to be a mess, see? 

It's chaos, and conservatives like me hate chaos. Not only that, it's another church fad, a gimmick, even though it's a couple thousand years old.

Besides, it's just not the same in a land where people don't wear sandals 24/7. You want to replicate everything that happened Easter weekend, why not make the whole congregation wear a crown of thorns or drink hyssop?

Makes me a disciple, I guess, thinking about someone else washing my feet. Makes me a disciple because they didn't like it either, found it repulsive, found it, well, theologically and culturally chaotic, out of whack, even disturbing, and that was 2000 years ago.

"Seriously, Lord?  You. Wash. My. Feet?" 

It was unthinkable. It was gross. It was obscene. It was perfectly ridiculous.

And He told them--get this!--if you don't get this, you honestly and truly don't get me. If you don't understand, you missed the whole program of the last thirty years. I came to this mucked-up world to wash feet--that's been the mission since day 1.

It is a big deal, no question. It's huge. It's bigger than anything we or the disciples can handle. God almighty bending down to wash dirty feet.

It's the whole story. That's what he told them from down there on the floor as he pulled the bowl up closer to the stool. This is what I'm here for, he said.

I don't care what you say, it's not something I'm comfortable with--that's all there is to it. And neither were they, those disciples who not all that much later fell asleep.

Neither were they.

_____________________ 

Second round for this one, the original written 11 years ago. I'm not so up tight as this anymore--if I ever was. You'll be happy to know that tonight's Maunday Thursday service was quite inspiring. 

Icarus, South Dakota style

We're barely a state away out here in northwest Iowa, but it seems to me that the Kristi Noem story had madness written all through it for a long time already. Her treatment of the state's significant Native populations was perfectly nutty. During Covid, when several of the tribes shut down access, the then-governor threw a fit and ended up alienating herself from a significant region of the governor's domain. 

Her memoire badly required a sane editor, someone to tell her that the way she handled her pup's lack of hunting skill or initiative or whatever, did not need to be shared with the world. How any story from her younger years could be more memorably insane than that one--the way she simply shot him to apparently put him out of his misery; she said she had it figured that he'd never be what she wanted him to be. Yikes.

Nonetheless, with her stunning good looks, she kept moving up Trump's ladder, maybe because he rather liked someone--a beautiful woman!--who'd just shoot her dog if  he didn't hunt, or at least he liked a woman who seeming understood how to draw attention to herself far from the madding crowd--he liked a looker who reminded him of himself.

But Governor Noem was a small-town girl with some small-town values, an ardent anti-abortion voice, who seemed to want to take those values with her in Washington or wherever the ICE job took her. Scary. Seemed to me she was way out of her league.

Perhaps the most horrific moment was created by her determination not to tell at least something of the truth about the two anti-ICErs who were killed in the Twin Cities during the ICE messes. She insisted they were the enemy, agitators who, apparently got their just reward, death, for getting in the way of the ICE jam the whole region became. In the style of her benefactor, she simply would not show empathy or sadness. She was Trump-tough. They were agitators.

The rumors of her having an affair with one of her boss's favored attack dogs only made things worse. Some people know the truth about Noem and Lewandowski, but whether or not there were trysts--many or few--she got painted with a scarlet letter early on, a badge she must have regretted, wherever the heat of passion may have taken her. 

And now, it turns out her handsome high-school sweetheart husband is hanging around shadowy websites that specialize in cross-dressing and other whacko fetishes that make him look as over-the-top as his gorgeous, madcap spouse. Life wasn't like this in good old Castlewood, SD. 

I think they should go home. My guess is that the people who knew them both before Kristi's wild ascent to power might just be most willing to forgive--and maybe even forget. 

We don't share political persuasions, of course, but I can't help thinking they should go back to the insurance business he ran and she should go on long rides with those horses she loves and stay away from hunting with dogs. 

There's an Icarus-level tragedy here, or so it seems to me. She--and her hubby--got burned when they flew far too close to the Don.