Posting for shots

A slight haze made this both a gracious dawn and kept it from being as gracious as it  might have been. Twenty years ago, July 2005, I went west out of town to a hill I knew got close to overlooking Canton, SD, a wonderful big hill where I worked hard at trying to reach my initial goal in shooting pictures early, outside of town--I wanted to catch the sheer beauty of open land and radiant sky.

The one up there didn't quite make it, even though I was blessed to be out there to witness. I haven't gone out shooting in a long time now, but what I wanted to do was "post" for the morning sun, be at the right spot at the right time, as if I were a deer hunter who simply knew exactly where to look, where to be when the moment came. This dawn is what I saw.  

And, a few minutes later, these friends.

See those farms way out there beyond the blue--they'll clue you in to what I was after. But I wasn't about to catch the motherload that morning because what was out there just wasn't enough, that morning, to take the day.

So I had to look elsewhere. I had to compose, not just record.

That's not a helicopter readying for attack on the big cottonwood on the horizon (see him/her coming in high and from the right?) It's some kind of bird, I'm sure.

I took these pictures 20 years ago. When I look at them today, I realize I was learning something about seeing--what to look for.

This is what I came for, too see the morning sun on the valley of the Big Sioux. It'll  take your breath away if you're just standing there and looking, but no camera I know of will get this landscape in through the lens. 

Then again, sometimes grace simply walks out of the corn like Shoeless Joe and makes you forget everything. 

 

Bridge-builder resigns

 

Between warring sides on a campus rally against war in the Middle East, Shiao Chong, then a campus pastor, claimed he saw two--just two--demonstrators holding a peace flag.

“It was like a parable,” Chong explained. “God was telling me to be in the middle; this is my ministry. I’m supposed to go in the middle and proclaim God’s peace. That’s what I have tried to do ever since, to be a bridge builder.”

So said Shiao Chong, a minister of the Word and, most recently, editor of The Banner, the official magazine of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. Chong outlined his perspective toward the job he was given in 2016 and then held until just last month. The story clearly explained the ways and means of the job he held for nine years—he attempted to make peace where war was all around.

Being an advocate for peace, recent Synods have said, is simply not enough when war against the Word is raging, especially and precisely because of the issue of gay marriage. In the CRC and elsewhere, there simply is no middle ground—or, if there is, the footing is so slippery and the sides of the argument so determined, that peace is simply not possible.

Shiao Chong waited until Synod 2025 to turn in his keys to the office, when Synod 2025 voted to sustain overtures from two classes, who asked Synod to alter the mission of the magazine to what Chong considered something less than his ideas of journalism. In brief, those overtures demanded that the magazine be more reflective of church policy and politics. By Chong’s definition, the denomination wanted a denominational magazine that consistently toed the line, creating stories that deliberately avoided the difficult issues. The CRC didn't want a peace pipe, they wanted a bugler.

Those overtures won the day, and Chong stepped out of a calling he says he felt that day he was campus pastor during a politically explosive campus demonstration. Peace would not do in a church body that wants no part of it, that considers doctrinal purity as the vital character of church life.

I’m sure that the faithful remnant of the denomination will find a new editor--somewhere today potential candidates are pitching their qualifications.

Sadly, resignations generally accomplish very little, other than to allow those resigning some measure of personal dignity. A couple decades ago, I resigned from the consistory of the church we were attending. I did so because my father suggested it himself when he saw the war being waged in that church taking a toll on my family.

Resignation settles nothing. In the old days, when football teams could walk off the field with a tie, we used to say that a tie is like kissing your sister. In this case, the Banner’s new protective mandate won the day. Chong, who worked hard at trying to manage a voice from the middle, resigned because he found it impossible to be that.

I wish him well. I can’t help but think he unloaded a ton of responsibility when he resigned, as I did once long ago. He may be sleeping better right now. 

“Don’t quit the church,” my dad told me back then. "Quit the consistory but give the church the opportunity to heal itself—stay with it for a year.”

We did, then we left.

It was the right thing for me to do way back when, and I’d guess it was the right thing for Shiao Chong to do earlier this month. He may have sidestepped editorial issues, but he hasn’t sidestepped a commitment to peace; he's just lost a battle, a big battle. There's more than one definition of peace. 

He deserves our thanks and needs our prayers.

Sunday Morning Meds from the 57th psalm

“He sends from heaven and saves me, 

rebuking those who hotly pursue me. . .”

 John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, calls the error “frigidity,” and then suggests that writers who show frigidity have something wrong with them. That may be pushing things a little.

 The first stories I gathered from my students in any semester contained more than their share of icy frigidity. I don’t think there was anything wrong with the students; they were always a sweet, wonderful bunch, and they worked hard.  They just had to learn.

The problem Gardner refers to comes in spades in their first stories because young writers tend to think too much about craft and not enough about the psyches of their own characters.  I remember a cute little error in frigidity, but I’m not sure if they caught the chill or not. It normally takes a while. It was a Twilight Zone-ish story of a man who picked up a tattered young woman hitchhiking in a national forest, only to have his passenger mysteriously disappear a few moments later from his motorcycle.  It’s an old urban myth. When the guy stops to report what so strangely happened, the ranger tells him such an event occurs annually, on the anniversary of a murder which took place in the park. That kind of story.

The student did a great job of keeping us within the man’s mind.  We felt what he felt and heard what he heard. We were well into the story until she wrote something like this.  “The ranger spoke with a Southern drawl.”  No one in the story or out was thinking about the biker’s drawl at that point, no one but the author.  As Gardner might have said, with that line she “broke the dream,” pulled us right out of the scene. He calls that error “frigidity” because it seems to refuse to touch the character. 

Psalm 57, I think, has a species of frigidity in it, although not exactly the same thing.  We hear an intense cry for help, something from the depths of David’s soul:  “have mercy, have mercy.” The passion is obvious, begun even before the song begins by the story of the psalm’s biographical roots. David is in a cave, the insanely jealous King Saul determined to kill him.  Have mercy, David says, twice.

And then he says, “I will take refuge,” which David’s closest readers might well understand to be the kind of “let’s make a deal, God” the poet/King does quite often, as do we:  “save me, Lord and I’ll change.” I think it’s a bad reading, but let’s go on.

Verse three shuts the door on the potential for suspense: “He sends from heaven and saves me, rebuking those who hotly pursue me. . .”  End of story.  Before it even gets good, it ends. The rescue is here in 2 ½ verses. David the writer seems frigid--there’s something wrong with him, Gardner might say.  He jumps out of the dilemma way, way, way too fast, taking us with him, and that’s it. The END. We can hardly feel anything but cold.  Couldn’t have been all that bad.  Are you kidding?  No big deal. 

Sometimes I think the Psalms discriminate because I’m just not sure this one communicates to those who don’t believe in God.  Maybe it’s not meant to. 

Only believers can feel the absence of a God we know is there. 

 I know: that makes no sense.  But I know. 

And truth is, of course, we’re not just talking about any old ordinary story. No sir, and no ma’am.

Up north, 2005

I'm not at all sure why we didn't go "up north" when the kids were growing  up  Probably our missing real family vacations at a cottage in the northwoods is attributable to my devotion to thinking I was a writer.  

Not going was a mistake, maybe even a sin. 

The first time we went, we were just two. It was 2005, and we'd called our old friends in the Twin Cities to find out how people picked out cottages and where we might go. Our friends--Jim and Sally Heynen--said they loved a little place named "The Cry of the Loon" and told us how to get a cottage and where we'd find it.

We did, and it was beautiful, as was the world around it and us.

Up until my legs went out on me, we went "up north" every year--maybe twice, although getting away for the last dozen years wasn't the kind of big deal it was in 2005, when first we lit out up north. Living out in the country after 2012, we felt that a similar sense of  "distance" the north woods used to give us. We were already on vacation if we could see a sunrise and a sunset.

No matter. Right now, there's no place I'd rather be than Cry of the Loon (which, unfortunately, no longer exists--we checked). 

The stone in the weeds

For the record, no one keeps it up. There it stands, strong and square, I might add, just off an ordinary almost unpaved road, amid a chorus of mangy prairie grass, its own special space surrounded by a fence erected years ago. 

A new book, Remember Us, says Dutch schoolchildren, yet today, eighty years later, are still assigned to keep up the graves of fallen Allied soldiers--keep the grass cut, the weeds down, the stones themselves unsoiled by what birds. The idea is obvious--teach kids not to forget sacrifice.

No one tends this stone marker. It's not a gravestone, it's a highway marker, one of those history things that flash by when you're trying to get someplace important. To read this one, you have to look hard, pull off the road, and kick around in the long grass. 

It's obscure, but then its story is. "The BATTLE OF ROUND MOUNTAINS," the stone says, all caps. But controversy still rages about exactly where the Battle of Round Mountain occurred. I suppose here or there doesn't matter so much anymore, despite the fact that the Battle of Round Mountain, 1861,was the first Civil War battle in Indian Territory, which is to say Oklahoma. 

Let me try to pull some weeds. There were, by 1861, two bands of Creeks, Lower and Upper. Generally speaking, the Lower Creeks were assimilated to the culture of white folks moving in, the Uppers less so. The Lowers were content to acknowledge their Native-ness, but the Uppers wanted to nurture old cultural values and ways. 

Okay, think typical bitterness between brother and sister, or brother and brother. In 1861, the Uppers and the Lowers didn't hit it off at all and hadn't for decades. What's more, it was difficult for all Native tribes to know how to negotiate the war between the States. The Lowers sided with the Confederates; they hailed from the South, after all. The Uppers sided with the Union, and the Uppers had a great orator, a head man with the unpronounceable name of Opthala Yahola, who, with courage and conviction, led the Upper Creek nation for forty years. 

As if all of this isn't messy enough, let's add more weediness. Opthala Yahola owned a sprawling 2000-acre ranch in Indian Territory, much of it worked by slaves. Yahola wanted the old time tribal ways; but, in his own house, he had exchanged Native religious rites for Christianity and had even joined the Masons. 

This almost hidden monument celebrates a Civil War battle fought almost totally by Native Americans, combatants often coming from the same tribe--brother against brother.

Yahola's big ranch became the center of those Native people--Chickasaw, Seminole, freed slaves and others--who, like Yahola and his Upper Creek people, sided with Yankees.

The Battle of Round Mountain, wherever it was fought, was the first of three battles along the route Yahola and his Yankee sympathizers took in a desperate flight to what they believed would be safety in Kansas, by then a free state.

Round Mountain, wherever it happened, was the first; two weeks later the Rebel forces attacked once again at Chusto Talasah, then disastrously at Chustenahlah, where finally the Confeds whipped Yaholah's people, killing hundreds and sending those survivors who could north to Kansas, in a long, frozen trek sometimes called "The Trail of Blood on Ice." 

Yahola's survivors made it to Kansas, made it to freedom, but arrived in bitter cold without food and water. Once 1500 people were with Yahola. Only 200 made it to freedom in Kansas. Of course, all of this is after the Trail of Tears.

Sometimes stuff gets hidden away. You've got to trimming the weeds.

The Schaap house

It was never our intent to build a house. We talked often about some post-retirement cabin on a foggy north woods lake--dreamed, I should say, or fantasized.  You know--something rustic with a fireplace, made of logs maybe. Not too rough-hewn backwoodsy. Had to have a good shower, a TV, and internet, just something apart.

We'd spent almost forty years in Sioux Center. We left our first typical Sioux Center-ish place (arts-and-crafts, they call 'em) when a brand new Hardees moved in behind us. We got sick of overhearing what so-and-so ordered for a late-night snack--"two burgers and fries." 

The house we bought was a gorgeous old place that should have belonged to a preacher with a heavily starched collar. That's what a theologian friend used to tell me when he'd step in the front door and look up the open staircase. Tons of space, with a basement big enough for put up six female students in another age in the history of the college, but broad and dry enough, mostly, for the kind of desk I thought absolutely necessary for me, the writer. 

For years that old house was "the Jongewaard house," named for the town's very first big-time vet. Had a gorgeous little town barn behind the well pump, had a manger on the wagon side entry. Just pull in the horses and let them have at it. 

We were there for 30+ years, long enough that anyone who knew the place as "the Jongewaard house" had likely flown off to a space in the cemetery. I'd be hurt if someone around town didn't still refer to that place now as "the Schaap house," which it was but hasn't been for fifteen years. Some jaded guy with a can of gasoline torched the old barn with its manger and its two-holer, taking with it some wonderful town history.

I'm not sure how it was we ended up one Sunday afternoon at an old friend's farm house just outside of Alton, Iowa, but he's the guy who told us that his house, the place where he and the missus had raised all their kids--good kids, too--that he'd sold his place to a man from Denver who was a year-and-a-half away from retirement, at which time he'd move to that farm house and turn the out buildings into space where he could work on the cars he loved. "He's looking for renter--why don't you come in and look?" 

The house was old but fabulously clean. We went for it, knowing it gave us a year and a half to look at where we might go to spend this last full measure of our joy, our early retirement years. The old farm house was a wonderful place where I could go out back and drown some worms with our grandkids--they loved it too.

Two men dropped by on two different nights, each offering land if we wanted to stay out in the country. We looked over the acre lots each of them were pedaling and took the higher one, then told the builder when he asked for plans that we had none, except two: windows, tons of them, and a mud room, a big one. He drew up some plans, showed us, and suddenly we were building a house.

Six months later, we were in it--out in the country, a half-hour away from Sioux Center, and just thrilled to be where we were. 

That was a dozen years ago. It's just now--today--been listed. Sounds like a great place:

Nestled on a cul-de-sac in Alton, this property features gorgeous views, classy designs, timeless finishes, private location and functional living! Built in 2013 and situated on a spacious 1.05 acre lot, this unique property has so much to love! The spacious and open concept main floor offers over 1,800 square feet of living space; spacious living room with fireplace and custom ceiling beams, open concept dining, functional kitchen with large island and custom cabinetry, primary suite with full bath en-suite featuring tiled walk-in shower, dual vanities and walk-in closet, office/den, guest bath and laundry! The full/finished basement is newly re-finished with a large family room, 2 bedrooms and full bath, along with ample storage space! Enjoy the privacy and serene views in the spacious backyard; established lawn and landscaping, gorgeous wildflowers, garden bed space, paver patio and large wood deck perfect for entertaining! Enjoy the amenities and privacy of rural living with the convenience of being conveniently located in Alton!

That's our house, our home.

No longer.

Tonight, the realtor says, she'll be showing it. First time. First bunch to tell her they'd love to see it.  Strangers walking in looking around, chatting--who's going to sleep where, what would they put  on the walls, whether or not the sofa will fit. "Think of the fireplace in the winter snow."

We'll be nowhere around, way out here, half hour away, pretending to watch something on TV. They'll be walking around in some cavern of my heart. We're selling good ground from my soul's real estate. 

Seems a violation of sorts--I mean, their just walking in and imagining what the place might look like when the place is theirs, because it surely will be. Can't help feeling we're there too, somehow perfectly incapable of running to the shadows to hide our nakedness.

It hurts. Can't help thinking too that it would be nice if some people somewhere down the line would think of the place, at least for a while, as "the Schaap house." 

Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 57

“I cry out to God Most High, 

to God, who fulfills [his purpose] for me.”

 

The kid died.  That’s what happened—the kid died.  He was young—early twenties; he was handsome—dark eyes, dark hair in a world of blondes; he was athletic—remembered for his play on high school teams; he was rugged—an avid outdoorsman in Minnesota, a state where hunting and fishing create legends. 

But he died.  Surprisingly, because no one suspected he was sick; shockingly, because he likely had no clue himself that he was sick; tragically, because his brutally unforeseen death devastated his hometown.  People filled the high school gym for the funeral.  He was only a kid, hadn’t willed his investments into a fund to buy a new pool or anything.  Didn’t have any money.  He was just a kid, but he was well-liked and the death was momentous. His funeral filled the gym.  People were broken.

His people are God-fearing, sometimes—or so their neighbors might say—self-righteously so. The folks who filled the gym for that funeral were there out of shock and grief, I’m sure, but they were also there because such death’s surprising appearance makes most of us second-guess the trajectories of our own lives.

Because they were God-fearing folks, they wanted to know about his soul, whether or not this strapping young pheasant hunter who’d died so unexpectedly was, well, right with God.

And the fact was, he’d never really said much. But then, when you’re brought up in the middle of a stream, clear cold water isn’t particularly extraordinary. Sometimes even his parents had wondered—which is not to say this kid did things that made them question. Not so. He just never talked about faith all that much in a community where talking about God was sometimes the only currency of real value.

But when his parents went through his things—I can only imagine the pain—they found something extraordinary. Not that long before his death, oddly enough he’d made a video of himself talking, alone, into the camera about faith. 

 

Imagine their joy. 

 

He must have used a tripod.  No one was around.  No one was prompting. There he sat on his bed, telling the camera how much he loved the Lord. And then he picked up a book, paged through it a bit, and read a meditation he said he liked.

 

It was my book.  It was my meditation. It was something I’d written.

 

I never knew the kid, but for a week or so after the funeral I got letters and post cards from Minnesota, telling me about the funeral, where the kids’ parents had played the tape—"did you know he died?”—and how the kid had “sat down on his bed and filmed himself, his testimony, and then read a meditation you wrote.  Did you know that?”

 

No, I didn’t. I didn’t know the kid. Not at all.

This verse from Psalm 57 is one of the most comforting lines in the whole book of Psalms, in the whole Bible.  I don’t know why, but in some ways—like the story of the kid who died—I absolutely love being used. 

 

I never knew the kid existed, but in the story of his life I got used—not only in his own short life, but in the lives of the hundreds who packed that school gym to attend his funeral. I never asked for it, never intended it, never dreamed it would happen.

           

But I got used.  Honestly, I don’t know of a greater joy than to think that my God gave me a role in that kind of epic human drama, the life of a great kid who, sadly, all of a sudden died. 

I didn't ask for it. It was a gift. 

And what a gift it was.

Morning Thanks--Lit#

 

There we sat, totally silent over the last few lines of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, a passage where that long-bearded writer and prophet goes on and on about the near sacramental character of his prison experience, thanking the Lord for piling on the burden of suffering which, miraculously, brought him to faith that pulled him through. 

There we sat in an old classroom--after all, it wasn't yet outfitted in expensive, cutting edge technology, one of the few that isn't. There we sat in a fine enough clothes for suitably dressed middle-class kids and their profs. There we sat, each of us having just eaten lunch, replete with choices. There we sat, each of our expensive books opened on each of our desks.

There we sat--me too--in silence before an idea that's been arising so often these days that I'm starting to wonder myself whether I'm good with God. After all, I haven't, like Solzhenitsyn, been unjustly imprisoned for eight years, suffered the horrors of the Gulag, watched those who weren't strong enough die. I've had it pretty good, really; never suffered through a Dust Bowl or a Pearl Harbor, never engaged in a firefight in Khe Sanh or out in some desert plain in Afghanistan, never stalked the countryside for daily bread or walked a mile for a cup of water.

Writers who are believers--and I'm thinking especially of some I've read recently, like Solzhenitsyn, like Gina Ochsner, like Andre Dubus--hold that theme in common. Each of them in their own fictive worlds like to nudge the reader along to an acknowledgement that's very much in the air these days before Easter, the notion suffering can well be sacramental, a blessing, that makes us vastly more resilient against the darkness in the valley of the shadow.

But it's not easy to talk about in 21st century America. What do you say about it to 20-year-old kids who are worried about jobs and relationships and identity? Must we all suffer sometime like Solzhenitsyn? Is getting knocked down a prerequisite to growing up? Must some old man die so the new man rises? Really? Is all of that true?--and if it is, how do we then live?

There we sat in silence.

Literature--my chosen field for the last forty years--pulls us into questions that have no easy answers. That's what the Gulag does. The story doesn't stay on the pages of that expensive book but leaps, agile as a deer, into our hearts, into our minds, into our souls. Even though I've never been to Russia, know very little of the old Soviet system, and nothing about Siberia or work camps, when I read some thing like the Gulag, it begs me in to make it my own. I'm led to think not just about what the writer says but to think even more about what the writer says means to me. That's where the process begins, in fact.Literature does its best work when it asks questions, I think. It's not particularly good at answering them; if it were, it would be preaching. Lit makes us think about what it is we believe, how it is we act, how it is we form our lives. 

And there we sat in the kind of prickly silence that Solzhenitsyn spread over us. Maybe that's right where he wanted us, right where we should have been. 

This morning, once more, I'm thankful for literature, even though, like life, it sometimes leads us to places we'd rather not have been.

_____________________

#An old post--March 22, 2017