Music can carry us away--up toward eternity, I think, but also quite efficiently back in time. Most of the church music I grew up with is stuck in a piano bench or available on web-sites created, it seems, by strange people. I come from folks who basically sang the psalms for hundreds of years, then finally freed themselves to hymns, many of the 19th century variety. But today, most of that canon, the church music I grew up with, is long buried.
Sunday night we sang "My God, How Wonderful Thou Art" in a worship service, and my grandfather came back, almost like that last scene in Tender Mercies, when suddenly a cloud of witnesses shows up in a country church. There he was before me, singing a hymn my grandma told me was among his great favorites. It was nice to see him again.
I honestly didn't know him all that well--he died when I was nine, of a heart attack. He was a heavy smoker. My earliest memories place him in a blacksmith shop at the very heart of his hometown, and mine, Oostburg, Wisconsin. I remember the smoky interior of that place, the darkness, the eerie light of the flickering flames, the rhythmical ringing of the hammer. All of that is in the very first short story I ever wrote, in fact.
Grandpa Dirkse was respected in town and church, the leader, in a way that 35-year-old story makes him out to be. The church, in those days, was really little more than extended family. Native folks are given to call tons of good friends their "brothers"--I think was life that in small-town churches like the one I grew up in too, an intimacy that could be immensely caring or poisonously self-righteous. Maybe both at the same time, in fact.
My grandfather was greatly spiritual in an old Calvinist sense--he simply couldn't take his own redemption all that simply. He was, instead, clamorous about his sin, had a melancholy penchant--now long gone--of obsessing about the darkness of his human heart, even to the point of tears. He was gifted at something my mother calls "talking spiritual," deeply affected, historians might say, by the 19th century romantic pietism of his immigrant roots, parents and grandparents who likely met in small passionate groups called conventicles, where they could and did almost obsess intimately about both their sin and God's abundant grace.
He was blacksmith, sturdy and stumpy, with powerful arms. My own build is Dirkse, not Schaap. Physically, I am definitely my mother's child.
When farm horses disappeared, his blacksmith business morphed into the care of the next innovation in transportation--automobiles. Right at the heart of the village stood the Dirkse Service Station, pumping Mobil gas. Down in the back, beside an absolutely filthy restroom I sometimes used as a boy, there was almost always a broad calendar featuring some young woman whose ample breasts never failed to grab my eyes, even though sometimes I thought I was risking them by looking. I remember not being able to square that sexy sweetheart with my deeply religious grandfather. Who knows?--those calendars may have been my introduction to the maze we call the human condition.
But what brought him back last Sunday night was "My God, How Wonderful Thou Art," the music. Just for a moment, he returned, and I watched him mouthing words my grandma used to say were precious to him, including the verse about penitential tears:
O how I fear thee, living God,
with deepest, tenderest fears,
and worship thee with trembling hope
and penitential tears!
Honestly, I believe my grandpa knew "trembling hope" and "tenderest fears" in ways that I don't, not at all these days. I really believe there were times in his life, times he likely loved, when he wept "penitential tears" because penitence was a passion with him--if the stories hold true.
As we sang that verse last Sunday night, I couldn't help but feel as if the two of us were not related. I swear, I felt a bit of his fervent soul in me for a moment; but he seemed to me, right then, a creature of a whole different world, even though our existence together is deeply interwoven. I carry his DNA; and somehow I know, in my heart, his particular spirituality. I still am, in very many ways, his grandson.
But he is, as is the hymn, and even that particular verse of the hymn, long gone these days. Two beautiful renditions of "My God" are available on you-tube, but neither of them have retained this verse--and I think I know why. How many fellowships talk about fear these days, or about tender fears? How many of us can gather the divergent reaches of an oxymoron like "trembling hope"? Perhaps I should, but I don't think I often worship God with "penitential tears."
Like I say, Grandpa Dirkse was there on Sunday night, way out here in Iowa, a day's travel away from the heart of the village he loved. He was there in a way in which Christians often assert spiritual presence: "where you there when they crucified my Lord?" Yeah, I was. Yeah, for a moment, Grandpa Dirkse was right there singing.
He showed up in his suit, not that sweaty gray tee I remember in the blacksmith shop, or the Mobil shirt he wore later on downtown.
It was nice to see him there. I wish I could have spoken to him, but once the music stopped, he'd departed.
But then, I suppose, he's never far away. Not really.
Sunday night we sang "My God, How Wonderful Thou Art" in a worship service, and my grandfather came back, almost like that last scene in Tender Mercies, when suddenly a cloud of witnesses shows up in a country church. There he was before me, singing a hymn my grandma told me was among his great favorites. It was nice to see him again.
I honestly didn't know him all that well--he died when I was nine, of a heart attack. He was a heavy smoker. My earliest memories place him in a blacksmith shop at the very heart of his hometown, and mine, Oostburg, Wisconsin. I remember the smoky interior of that place, the darkness, the eerie light of the flickering flames, the rhythmical ringing of the hammer. All of that is in the very first short story I ever wrote, in fact.
Grandpa Dirkse was respected in town and church, the leader, in a way that 35-year-old story makes him out to be. The church, in those days, was really little more than extended family. Native folks are given to call tons of good friends their "brothers"--I think was life that in small-town churches like the one I grew up in too, an intimacy that could be immensely caring or poisonously self-righteous. Maybe both at the same time, in fact.
My grandfather was greatly spiritual in an old Calvinist sense--he simply couldn't take his own redemption all that simply. He was, instead, clamorous about his sin, had a melancholy penchant--now long gone--of obsessing about the darkness of his human heart, even to the point of tears. He was gifted at something my mother calls "talking spiritual," deeply affected, historians might say, by the 19th century romantic pietism of his immigrant roots, parents and grandparents who likely met in small passionate groups called conventicles, where they could and did almost obsess intimately about both their sin and God's abundant grace.
He was blacksmith, sturdy and stumpy, with powerful arms. My own build is Dirkse, not Schaap. Physically, I am definitely my mother's child.
When farm horses disappeared, his blacksmith business morphed into the care of the next innovation in transportation--automobiles. Right at the heart of the village stood the Dirkse Service Station, pumping Mobil gas. Down in the back, beside an absolutely filthy restroom I sometimes used as a boy, there was almost always a broad calendar featuring some young woman whose ample breasts never failed to grab my eyes, even though sometimes I thought I was risking them by looking. I remember not being able to square that sexy sweetheart with my deeply religious grandfather. Who knows?--those calendars may have been my introduction to the maze we call the human condition.
But what brought him back last Sunday night was "My God, How Wonderful Thou Art," the music. Just for a moment, he returned, and I watched him mouthing words my grandma used to say were precious to him, including the verse about penitential tears:
O how I fear thee, living God,
with deepest, tenderest fears,
and worship thee with trembling hope
and penitential tears!
Honestly, I believe my grandpa knew "trembling hope" and "tenderest fears" in ways that I don't, not at all these days. I really believe there were times in his life, times he likely loved, when he wept "penitential tears" because penitence was a passion with him--if the stories hold true.
As we sang that verse last Sunday night, I couldn't help but feel as if the two of us were not related. I swear, I felt a bit of his fervent soul in me for a moment; but he seemed to me, right then, a creature of a whole different world, even though our existence together is deeply interwoven. I carry his DNA; and somehow I know, in my heart, his particular spirituality. I still am, in very many ways, his grandson.
But he is, as is the hymn, and even that particular verse of the hymn, long gone these days. Two beautiful renditions of "My God" are available on you-tube, but neither of them have retained this verse--and I think I know why. How many fellowships talk about fear these days, or about tender fears? How many of us can gather the divergent reaches of an oxymoron like "trembling hope"? Perhaps I should, but I don't think I often worship God with "penitential tears."
Like I say, Grandpa Dirkse was there on Sunday night, way out here in Iowa, a day's travel away from the heart of the village he loved. He was there in a way in which Christians often assert spiritual presence: "where you there when they crucified my Lord?" Yeah, I was. Yeah, for a moment, Grandpa Dirkse was right there singing.
He showed up in his suit, not that sweaty gray tee I remember in the blacksmith shop, or the Mobil shirt he wore later on downtown.
It was nice to see him there. I wish I could have spoken to him, but once the music stopped, he'd departed.
But then, I suppose, he's never far away. Not really.
This morning, I'm thankful for a hymn--and him. It was good of him to show up.
1 comment:
Well James, it is mortality I think. We boomers may have the privilege to reflect on that a little more than those "who have gone before us." It is humbling- just like the preacher in Ecclesiastes 12, "...and the sound of grinding fades; when men rise up at the sound of birds, but all their songs grow faint;..." Songs often transcend my thoughts too; but then all I need to do is watch and listen to those sturdy souls who belt out those Psalms with gusto in well worn pews that surround me...have they been given a glimpse of what is yet to come- sort of like Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens, A Christmas Carol? Perhaps we to will find out; “with trembling hope, and penitential tears…”
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