Prayers for single mom

By all accounts, he was a really good guy--good father, good husband, good church-goer.  In some ways, on paper at least, he seems quintessentially CRC. While he didn't go to Redeemer, to Dordt, to Calvin, or to Trinity, he and his wife, Sharlene, and their darling two-year-old were by all accounts faithful members of an Ancaster, Ontario, CRC.

The Bosma's preacher was not in attendance at the retreat I led last week, although he certainly could have been. Many of his colleagues from around the adjacent classes were. But that pastor had a horrible problem on his hands and in his heart, the abduction of a member of his church and a woman, that man's wife, who suddenly found herself without her husband and her little girl's dad, a woman who was herself, I'm sure, scared to death.

I first heard the story at that retreat, when one of the leaders announced how this young man named Tim Bosma had left home with a couple of men who were interested in buying his truck, a vehicle they'd seen advertised somewhere on the internet.  Someone said, later on, that he'd heard Bosma himself had worried a bit, since the potential buyer had asked, strangely, if he could meet Tim somewhere--at a restaurant or something--and take the truck for a test drive from there.  Bosma had insisted they come to the house--and that he go with them on this test drive.

It was the last ride he'd ever take. Police discovered his burned body on the lot of the man who has subsequently been charged with first-degree murder.

Me? When I first heard the story, I was concerned about how the next presentation was going to go, the presentation I made directly after the Tim Bosma story was announced to the folks at the retreat center.  The story sounded too TV-scripted--a young father missing and presumably abducted just for a truck?  Can't be.

The story was true and it's awful.  Police are searching for an accomplice or two, it seems, because someone else drove the car they rode up in. Who knows how all of this will shake out?

Within the world of the CRC, the tragic story unfolds deep and committed response that is, veritably, predictable. I know the kind of care his church gave to Bosma's wife because I've seen it ten dozen times or more: hundreds of folks doing anything and everything they can--one newspaper described Bosma's Dutch Reformed world as "very tight."  A neighbor described what the Toronto Star called "their faith-based neighbourhood" as very close. 

No kidding. 

“It’s kind of like one person’s suffering," that neighbor said, "is everybody’s suffering.” A million prayers must have stormed the gates of heaven when there was still some hope; I'm sure that kind of number hasn't diminished in the least, even after the arrest. Now all those prayers all for Sharlene.  And that fatherless two-year-old.

This horrible crime strikes even me, a thousand miles and a national border away because somehow it feels close to home.  I feel as if I knew Tim Bosma, could have had him in class, could have sat in front of him or behind for years of Sunday worship.  He was a member of my tribe, and even though I never met him he couldn't have been more than one degree of separation away.  I wouldn't doubt there were those at the retreat who knew him.  The two of could have played bingo and struck home, I'm sure, in a heartbeat.  

And now he's gone, dead, and his grieving wife walks through a house that probably feels like cardboard.  Still, I know she's not alone, flights of angels, airy and earthy, there beside her and their little girl.  

It's the kind of story that makes you wonder about humankind, even if you're steeped in a theology whose two major pillars are the sovereignty of God and the depravity of man. Theology is a classroom exercise until it meets the road, as it does here, in this story. But even if that's all you've heard from the pulpit for you whole life, there's no way for the heart to imagine the horrifying malevolence of whoever murdered Tim Bosma for his 2007 black Dodge Ram. Turns out the alleged perpetrator had more than enough money to buy it.  

Makes the blood run cold, someone wrote on line.

Strikes me as exactly right, cliche or not.  There's no way to make sense of what happened to the Bosmas of Ancaster.  Simply, makes the blood run cold and puts us on our knees.

Morning Thanks--Retreat

Look, I shouldn't have gone.  Back home, it was grading season, and I bit off more than I could chew by teaching two courses during my first year of retirement.  I was busy beyond busy.  I'd overbooked myself for the last month, running off to speak about this or that, hither and yon--sometimes with my wife, sometimes not--and the last thing I should have done was fly up to Ontario for a three-day retreat for preachers and spouses. I'm not even a preacher.

But I did. I'm a sucker and a glutton for punishment and, when push comes to shove, I love to travel.  Well, let's put it this way:  I love to see new places; and I'd never been "up north" in Ontario before.  I guessed it would be something akin to the beauty of northern Minnesota, my dream world, but I'd never been there.  So, I went, but I shouldn't have. 

Still, it was a good time. 

One afternoon a bunch of retreat-ers hauled me along to Algonquin Park, a monstrosity of a park, not far down the road from the retreat center. 

Listen--when you're the speaker at a retreat, there's really no down time.  You're worried about how your shtick went last time, and you're fretting about what on earth might happen the next time you're behind that podium.  Besides, I was bushed--six trips up to the front of the room was no piece of cake (the food was wonderful, by the way). 

But I went along on a quick jaunt to Algonquin Park, where we saw a couple of moose and took a short hike around a lake.  This lake.

I like taking pictures--no, I love taking pictures.  But I like taking pictures when I'm alone, when I can sketch out something in my imagination before pointing the camera.  I like having the time to see.  I like going off by myself and hunting for beauty--I really do.  I've said it often on these pages--looking for beauty is just plain good for the soul.

 

But on this short hike around a sweet little lake, I was one of a dozen hikers footing it through the woods, and I had to keep up. So I didn't have time to size anything up, didn't have time to pour over what might be a good shot, didn't have time to plan or to meditate, couldn't even create a frame with my fingers.  Nope.  Just point and shoot and move along.  By the end, I was covered in sweat.

 



The sun wasn't out either. Taking pictures is all about light, finally, but, just then, on our little jaunt, it was in hiding behind some gray clouds that promised rain, some at least.  The sun brightens colors, deepens them.  If you don't get glare and if the images themselves don't burn, most often I prefer sun.  Nope--not this time.  Let's list things here: I'm bushed, I'm marching along, not planning, the sun isn't out, and--I forgot to mention--I came armed with my littlest camera.  I know, I know--the miraculous things camera-makers are doing with cameras these days makes everyone into a photographer, but I had neither time nor technology to take the really good shots. 

Here's the real bottom line:  I have never been in a place--anywhere, any time--where suuch gorgeous pictures literally jumped into the camera.  I wish I could say these shots are comely because the landscape photographer knows how to arrange a canvas as if it were a precious still life.  I wish I could say that these works of art are meticulously planned and executed.  I wish I could say that I was a really, really talented photographer.  But these are just plain snapshots.

 

 

The plain truth is Algonquin Park that overcast early summer afternoon--the oaks and maples only beginning to leaf--was perfectly gorgeous.  I couldn't have missed with a Brownie.

 

And that's why, this morning, I'm thankful for a retreat I really shouldn't have taken.  Beauty is its own excuse for being.



Carpe Diem

Don't remember where I heard it, but the conversation wasn't directed at me exactly.  I must have been sitting somewhere among a whole group of people when I overheard a mom telling someone else about her son, how he was really into his own music, how he was in three or four bands and had already created and produced his own CDs, how he was going to make music his career, wanted to be a singer/songwriter.

Sure, I thought.

"That's all he lives for these days," she was saying, or something to that effect, and her tone of voice made it clear she'd fashioned her own dreams for her son out of the stuff of his--either that or she was faking it.  More than likely, she had to.  She was proud of him, or so it seemed, and I couldn't help but shake my head.

In a thousand years worth of teaching--seemingly--I've seen dozens like him, young men and women, kids driven to act, to sing, to write music or poetry, to make great films. Really, hundreds.  And I spent just about all of my teaching life at a little, liberal arts college in Iowa.  Just think of how many thousands upon thousands of kids there are who follow dreams that are mirage-like. Happens so often we make reality shows out of 'em, shows so popular that millions more watch slavishly.

I'm being cynical, but I couldn't help shake my head at that overheard conversation because I've dealt with students who are death-defyingly, soul-deep in just those kinds of seductions. You're going to be a singer/songwriter?  Sure.  Hey, hang on to your day job.

And then, just yesterday, for 99 cents I picked up an old, old book by George Catlin, who was just such a dreamer, a lawyer who found himself passing time in court sketching the judge and witnesses.  Enough, Catlin told himself, so he ripped off his lawyer's collar, sold his law books, picked up an easel he could travel with, loaded up with paints, and, in good American fashion, circa 1830, lit out for the territories, where for six years among Natives and trappers, he painted over 300 portraits, landscapes, and still lifes on what white people might still call "the American frontier."

Catlin followed his dream.

And as a result, we've got all kinds of images from a quest that was no mirage at all.  

Catlin was a huckster, a salesman with a three-ring circus of his own creation, a Buffalo Bill-grade showman who, later on, toured Europe with his paintings and took along a gang of Ojibwas who reenacted battles and even scalpings for Parisians. He was Barnum and Bailey with a paintbrush.  Mark Twain would have loved him, made him a buffoon if he hadn't been one himself.

And it's not hard to read exploitation into his work. He doesn't seem to have felt any of the odd shame one can feel when pointing cameras at people you don't know.  If he did, whatever he felt didn't stop him. I'm sure I'd look at his painting today--175 years later--differently, if I were Native.

On the other hand, we've got 'em.  He documented something no one else did, and the paintings are there--look at 'em.

He died a pauper, really, not a showboat, but today you'll find his collection in the Smithsonian.  He followed his dream.

Elders of the Sioux in the region told him he shouldn't, but way back in 1836 George Catlin, painting furiously, spent 360 miles on horseback just to find a red-stone quarry in what is today southwest Minnesota, a place where Native folks went to find the soft stone they used for their sacred pipes, stuff called today "Catlinite."  That's right--he came here.

"Man feels the thrilling sensation, the force of illimitable freedom," Catlin wrote about the region.  Right there at the monument he carved his name in the rock--I'm serious, he did.  "There is poetry," he wrote, "in the very air of this place."

 He's talking about Siouxland, for pity sake--my home.  How could I not like him?

This morning's thanks are for an old vaudevillian extraordinaire, a grade B artist maybe, who followed his dreams, silly as they may have seemed, way back when.

Carpe diem. 

Morning Thanks--blushingly old hymns

It's not all that hard to miss Ascension Day, and, to be truthful, I didn't, because missing it would have been pretty much impossible with a roomful of preachers, several of whom had to get back home on Thursday for Ascension Day services yet that night. That's where I was on Thursday--in a room full of preachers.

But the little church we attended on Sunday didn't meet on Thursday night, so the heart of yesterday's liturgy was the holiday; and that meant singing some traditional Ascension Day hymns, like "Jesus Shall Reign Where'er the Sun."

Anybody who's been in church for any length of time can likely recite most of that old Isaac Watts favorite, or at least the verses people traditionally sing. But our hymnal yesterday included a verse I'd never sung before--or seen before for that matter, the second verse.

Here's the first, if you're drawing a blank:

Jesus shall reign where'er the sun
Does his successive journey run.
His kingdoms stretch from shore to shore,
Till moons shall wax and wane no more.

Now the memory bank in my head insists that the next line is this:  "To him shall endless prayers be made/And praises throng to crown his head. . ."  That's not what followed.

Instead, we got this one:

From north to south the princes meet
To pay their homage at his feet.
While western empires own their Lord,
And savage tribes attend his Word.

I sang those words, I guess, but whatever came after got lost when I swallowed my tongue.  Just the day before, I'd held forth at Pipestone, Minnesota, on early 19th century missionary work among the Dakota, so "savage tribes" was language I understood all too blushingly.

Not long ago, in fact, I had recommended that a worship leader find an old missionary hymn I used to sing as a boy, a hymn titled "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," for a worship service I had to lead in which I wanted to talk about old mission efforts. The organist politely refused to play it because, he said--and he was right--the lyrics are embarrassingly colonialist, if not racist. However, that old hymn was a staple of missionary presentations when I was a kid, and I wanted to recreate that whole atmosphere a bit, embarrassing though it may have been.  

No go.

But back to yesterday.  The attendance was spotty, but we rather like the determined unpretentiousness of the people there--they're not salesmen or hipsters or holy rollers; and they obviously--convincingly--aren't subject to whatever's cool with the evangelical crowd.  They're a liberal church that worships in an immensely conservative style, something out of, say, the fifties.  They're mainline, and, you're right, they're not growing.

All of which, I think, makes understandable that odd stanza of "Jesus Shall Reign."

Right in front of us stood a Korean family, interestingly enough. I don't know what they thought about "western empires" and "heathen tribes," but they didn't slam the hymnal or walk out, even though I suppose they could have.

Maybe I was the only soul in that Ascension Day worship who gasped.  Who takes what they sing seriously, anyway?  You could make an argument that church music isn't really about words.  There are all kinds of reasons not to sing "Faith of Our Fathers," after all, but people love that old hymn anyway, even though "dungeons, fire, and sword" are so far behind any of us that an entire congregation would have loads of trouble remembering a single name from Foxe's Book of Martyrs.  And what about the faith of our mothers--yesterday especially?

Still, this morning, a day later, I'm thankful for the old hymns, even when they're embarrassing. They're as much about faith as they are about us, both who we were and who we are--"western" or "savage."    

Gulp.  
______________________
Isaac Watts penned 14 verses of that old hymn, for worship that used to go longer than an hour, obviously.  That multitude of verses make for an interesting poem.  You can check it out here.

Sunday Morning Meds: Dwelling

 

 

. . .and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. . .

 

Last night I drove through the pick-up lane of a fast food restaurant in the neighborhood where we used to live and saw, once again, the upstairs window I used to look out of when putting our baby son to sleep. The floor plan of that home will never leave me. On the east side, upstairs, my daughter used to sleep beneath windows where dawn turned the whole world glorious, inside and out.  In the room between, my wife and I shared intimacies that seem now almost furtive, right there between our two little kids.

 

Down in the basement, south east corner, on a cement floor covered with series of second-hand rugs I continuously replaced after heavy spring rains, I wrote more than a few books. There’s a wall-sized book rack we made in the family room, and in one of my short stories there’s a description I remember, for some reason, of the way the January sun used to slant through the windows of the living room.

The woman who lives there today bought the place from us when we moved, but in a spiritual sense that house is still my home. 

 

A year ago now, our new, old house was a mess because we were leaving that one after 27 years, an old place rich with golden oak that made it look, somehow, like the kind of home that really should belong to a preacher.  It was a great place, the house our kids grew up in and finally left; but oddly enough my wife and I shed no tears leaving it, even though every square inch of it probably still holds ghosts that linger of our lives there.  I hope they bother no one.

 

It was a great place to live, really.

 

Just a quarter-mile away from where I'm sitting, studs are up from the basement to the first floor of a brand new house we never dreamed we'd build but are.  We're staying here along the river, and this new house will have windows galore to allow us see mornings and evenings we've never really seen--as well as dark and starry nights in the country.  It's become, in a way, a dream house, even though neither of us spent an hour dreaming about it.  It's the landscape we love, but we get over to the building site every day to watch this real new house grow up, just a couple of retired people too old, some tell us, to start anew.  What the heck.  We love it.

You've got to pity poor King David.  The man held a life-long passion for building the house of the Lord, a burning desire to create a space for God, a real dream house. 

 

Only trouble was, God said no. The Lord God almighty didn’t want King David’s hands on the tools. “You are a man of war and have shed blood,” God told him, and that was it.  The decison was final.  There'd have to be another builder.  No second chance. 

 

That was an incredibly sad decision for a man who loved God as much as he did, a poet/king who was loved just as deeply, a man who wanted, like nothing else, to put up the studs on God's own house.

 

His lifelong passion for building that temple, for the dream itself—and God’s rejection of him as a builder—just begs to be read into this famous last line of one of the most famous poems in all of literature. Finally, even the King couldn’t do what, more than anything, he wanted to.

 But I swear I can feel the tyranny of his resolution in this last verse--"I shall dwell"; and that determination is stronger, I believe, because he had once, here on earth, been forbidden.

David is smiling, I think, but his fist comes down hard when he testifies that he’s going to live forever in the house of the Lord, something he’d wanted for so long, even if he doesn't get to pour the concrete.  I'll be there, anyway, he says.  You can count on it, Lord.

There’s an assertion in this final verse of the psalm, an assertion with the punch of a power hammer. That’s where I’m going to be, says the rejected builder, and that’s where I’m going to live and move and have my being, praise God, for eternity. “And I shall live in the house of the Lord forever.”

See that pointer finger? And he’s smiling. Forever.  His house is going to be mine.

What a story. What a line. What a believer. What a God.

Dickinson-is-us III

One more. When first Dickinson was first published, her editor/sister decided to name this poem, fittingly, “Indian Summer.”:

These are the days when Birds come back -- 

A very few -- a Bird or two -- 
To take a backward look. 

The next stanza can be puzzling—“the old sophistries of June” is more likely, than not, the promise that every sweet summer day offers us, promises that are not worth much because all of us understand that heat will rise come July, and eventually leaves will fall and January will march in from the frozen northwest, as it always inevitably does. June’s promises, she says, are sophistry—the empty promises of, say, politicians. But remember, she’s talking about Indian summer: 

These are the days when skies resume 

The old -- old sophistries of June – 
A blue and gold mistake. 

Now she cries—listen to her voice change: 

Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee -- 

Almost thy plausibility 

Induces my belief. 

The empty promise of Indian summer—the unexpected warm air and azure sky come early November—is a lie, of course, a lie that can’t cheat a Bee but can almost make Ms. Emily believe that maybe June has returned. Achingly, she almost believes, she says. Just about. Not quite. She’s still too-filled with doubt, as well she should be. After all, no adult can truly believe the false promises of even a gorgeous Indian summer: 

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear -- 

And softly thro' the altered air 

Hurries a timid leaf. 

There. She can’t either. Think of milkweed seeds and, suddenly, falling leaves. Indian summer is, after all, a lie—a gorgeous one, even a blessed one—but a flaming falsehood. And now, once more, she sighs for what can’t be, wishing the communion it offered was real: 

Oh Sacrament of summer days, 

Oh Last Communion in the Haze -- 
Permit a child to join. 

Thy sacred emblems to partake -- 
Thy consecrated bread to take 
And thine immortal wine! 

Emily Dickinson knew her Bible, knew the Christian faith, understood, in her wondrous mind, what such faith expected of her. She moves now to the spiritual joy of the false promise of Indian summer, calls it a sacrament, a “last communion in the haze,” and then she says, “Please, let a child join.” Let me partake of your elements—your “consecrated bread” and your “immortal wine.” 

Two ways we can read this poem. In one, she’s just so exuberant again about nature—this time about the perilous joy of Indian summer—that she resorts to religious faith because there can be no greater praise for the beauty of a late October summer’s lease.

But there’s another reading, much less blissful. After all, she begs admission for “a child,” and therefore suggests that faith, like the joy of Indian summer, is something only a child can embrace. Sadly, of course, she isn’t one. She doesn’t say “me” here, she says, “Permit a child to join.”

Many readers who understand Ms. Dickinson’s perilous wrestling with God will claim that the Ms. Emily here is the one who would tell us—if she dared in prose—that she simply couldn’t believe in God, and that this poem is a confession of her overwhelming wish, really, that she could.

Those who know Dickinson and love her work believe that at least one mark of her genius as a writer, as a poet, is her ability to say so much about what it means to be human in so few words. In a stanza form she took directly from the hymns she sang in church, she churns up all the emotions human beings are capable of feeling. Miss Emily Dickinson is in her poems, but so are we, all of us—joy, faith, doubt, sadness. 

 It’s all there, and so are we.  

Dickinson-is-us II

Here’s a completely different mood from yesterday's morning glories, a poem that begins with an outlandish comparison. She says, almost comically, that on what little she had as a child, a gnat would starve. You’ll notice that she defines what it is she lacked as Food (upper case), even though it’s almost impossible to believe she means that literally. The speaker in the poem was starved as a child, barely getting by:

It would have starved a Gnat—

To live so small as I— 
And yet I was a living Child— 
With Food's necessity 

Upon me—like a Claw— 
I could no more remove 
Than I could coax a Leech away— 
Or make a Dragon—move— 

The food she didn’t have is a claw burying itself into her, sheer pain she’s incapable of escaping. Strangely enough, she chooses to describe her persecutors by two gigantically contrasting and despicable creatures—a slimy leech (often used back then medicinally, but attached, of course, inside her being) and a fire-breathing dragon. Against both she would have been as powerless, she says, as she was to her grinding poverty. 

And then, as if for emphasis and maybe a mocking kind of black humor, she returns to that gnat with which she began, a gnat that would have been more blessed than she was since she lacked the ability simply to fly away, to escape this immense hunger, and “seek a Dinner” for himself, when she could not. And thus the lament grows almost absurdly: 

How mightier He—than I—” Not like the Gnat—had I— 
The privilege to fly 
And seek a Dinner for myself— 

And then, somehow, this almost goofy little poem gets both deadly serious in its goofy play. For the third time she returns enviously to a barely visible gnat, who has the ability to unintentionally kill himself by flying recklessly, time after time, into a window, his blind instinct telling him freedom lies just outside. 

But Ms. Emily adds one word, one little possessive adjective, a word that turns her into this foil. For she could not even kill herself against the window like he could, even if she, by will, wanted to.

Is she really talking about suicide? I don’t know. But what’s important is to see the heft of the burden she claims somehow to carry, because she says she could not, finally, end it all as the gnat can and does. Instead, she says, she’s somehow sentenced, as a human being, to begin again and again and again:

Nor like Himself—the Art Upon the Window Pane 
To gad my little Being out— 
And not begin—again— 

End of poem.  Not typos--end of poem.

What are we to make of this almost silly comparison drawn horrifically into a testimony of despair? When we reach the last line, it seems that nothing at all in this poem was ever a joke—she was, in fact, deadly serious, the poem only seeming overstatement. She never tells us what “food” really was missing from her life, just that the being witout it created a horrific hunger. Dickenson was reared in one of Amherst’s most prominent family; she cannot be talking about lack of food; the hunger she says she knows is something other than physical.

Go back to yesterday's poem—sheer exuberance in nature; and now this—deep despair. In the era in which she lived, despair was one of just two unforgivable sins because despair meant, of course, the absence of hope, which is to say the absence of faith. Today, we might toy with the word despair, but Dickinson would not have.

In this poem, strangely and powerfully, Ms. Emily offers us a portrait of sheer hopelessness.

And now a confession—I’ve lived close enough to depression in my life to know that there are those among us, even believers, who understand something of that level of despair. She may not be writing for all of us here, but she is writing something accurate to the human story.

There's so much of us in these few lines, so much of her in so little of her.  If poetry is all about economy, there's so much here in so very little.