Review--Jesus and John Wayne

A couple of decades ago, I suggested a few negative things about Billy Graham in a piece I wrote for the Banner, the denominational magazine of the church in which I was reared, the Christian Reformed Church of North America. My folks, proud of their son's writing appearing there, were more than a little disappointed and even annoyed. How could their son besmirch the great evangelist's name with such cheap-shot criticisms? I was their son, but who was I to say bad things about a living saint? 

What they'd seemingly forgotten was that they once did so themselves. When I was a little shaver, not yet participating in theological discussions around the dinner table, I remember my father being, well, skeptical of the all that frothy grace--"cheap grace"--front and center at Billy Graham's immodest extravaganzas, thousands and thousands of repentant sinners marching forward, in tears, to confess their troubled need for "Jeee'zus." Really, all of that in a football stadium? 

The whole revival business was foreign to them, not as all-American as Kristin Kobes Du Mez makes it in her fascinating and fine book Jesus and John Wayne. The title line is a blessing, but this book's goods are in the subtitle: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. The truth is, or so it seems to me, my parents were, back then, the foreigners. Eventually, they too became American.

And, if I've got my ears on, I'm guessing Kristin Kobes Du Mez would say so too. If my parents were more than a little leery about the whole Graham phenomenon, that attitude would put them outside the boundaries of what might then have been considered "American evangelicalism." They were Dutch Reformed, emphasis on were.

Because they didn't stay there. Truth be told, they had good reason not to distrust Billy Graham; their own beloved sister-in-law knew him well, rode back and forth to Wheaton College with the guy when he was just a rugged, handsome kid, and she was a Southern belle. They didn't know Billy Graham, but, Lord 'a'mighty, they knew someone who did. 

Just one of the basic arguments of Jesus and John Wayne is that, whatever definition you want to give it, "white evangelicalism" is far more of a cultural phenom than a theological position. I suppose it's always a conundrum: does one's theology determine one's culture?--or does one culture determine one's theology? They're Siamese twins. Kobes's book trades almost exclusively--and convincingly--in the cultural nature of what we reference when we give the word "evangelical" its political meaning.

In just about every way, my parents became more politically and culturally "conservative" when they got old (I don't think that's unusual), but more theologically conservative too (I don't know that that's unusual either). Once upon a time, they were inheritors of a worldview deeply distrustful of what they would have called "Arminianism," the idea that somehow we--and not God--determine or choose our personal salvation. 

As the years rolled by, the old-time religion--all that Calvinist theology--got tiresome, I suppose, when some of those TV preachers became their daily fare--"they're just sooooo good, Jim--do you watch 'em?--you should." Of the Reverend Billy Graham they would have said, "Just look once at the good that man has done for the Lord in this world." When Graham got charmed by President Richard Nixon, they did too. By 1968, given the antiwar movement and racial violence all over the country, my parents could not have been more proud of having a Bible-believing Christian man like Billy Graham right there in the Oval Office with the President of the United States.

My parents--good people, sweet people--became orthodox "American Evangelicals." I have no doubt that last month my mother would have voted for Donald Trump. She had grown up Dutch Reformed, but become a Christian Nationalist. 

I am still dumbfounded by the realization that in the county where I live, where there are ten people gathered, eight of them voted for Donald J. Trump, a man whose lies--yesterday again on Fox--are somehow less evil then than they are idiotic and just plain baffling. Kristin Kobes Du Mez's book makes my astonishment less mystifying. The Trump phenomenon was a long time coming, for years in the works.

Often, it's not pretty, but Jesus and John Wayne, a thoughtful and convincing travel guide through the religious landscape of the better part of an American century, highlights the story of "white evangelicals" like my parents. 

And me too. 

Reading Mother Teresa--Holy Fools

VanderWagen, second from left, teaching

The Lord is my strength and my shield; 

my heart trusts in him, and he helps me. 

My heart leaps for joy, 

and with my song I praise him. Psalm 28:7 

When he left Grand Rapids, Michigan, on a mission, he promised the powers-that-be, the reigning potentates of the denomination he served, that he would not only faithfully carry out the office of missionary, he’d also continue to study so that he could – as he certainly should, they said – eventually become a preacher.

That was a promise he broke. It would be interesting to know if he ever intended to continue his bookwork. What happened when he came to New Mexico to bring the Word of Christ to the Navajo and Zuni Indians became too all-consuming, and he never again opened a schoolbook, which irritated – no, angered, even infuriated – the mission board back East.

He was, after all, an unlikely missionary anyway. He knew Dutch, of course, his native tongue – and Frisian, a whole different language from his native Holland. And English, sort of. And the day he came to Ft. Defiance, Arizona, he must have realized that doing mission work among the nNative people required learning their languages too.

He wasn’t dumb. One of the first things he did was buy the fastest horse he could, in part because he understood that a fast horse would be a wonder to the natives – a white man preacher on the fastest horse in the territory was really not to be believed.

He never studied a day of anthropology, knew nothing about the Navajo’s horror-filled “Long Walk,” had no clue about the Zunis hiding up on the mesa from the Spanish Conquistadors when they searched, in vain, for the Seven Cities of Gold. He knew absolutely nothing about those he was about to serve.

But today there’s a spot on the highway between Gallup and the Zuni pueblo named VanderWagen, New Mexico. He and his wife, Effa, left a lasting mark on the whole region, even though as a young missionary he knew next to nothing about the world he was entering.

On August 17, 1948, Mother Teresa must have slipped out of the nun’s habit she’d worn for decades, must have primped her hair slightly, and put on a sari with a blue border and taken to the streets of the city. She had this at least – she knew the world she was entering; after all, she’d served the Lord in Calcutta for more than a decade. She knew where she was and what her task consisted of.

But still, think of it this way: a deeply committed Albanian nun, more European than Indian, a woman sworn to follow Jesus, a woman with the voice of Christ still ringing in her ear, steps out of the habit and out of the convent that had been her only world since childhood, shuts the door behind her, dressed like an Indian, sworn to poverty, and begins a brand new life.

In the many mansions of God’s own house, there are thousands of “holy fools,” I’m sure, millions of true believers who weren’t interested in listening to what was possible, but instead simply got up off their couches and stepped into commitments that may well have cost them their lives.

It is amazing what abiding faith can inspire.

Here’s the whole truth: holy fools are not necessarily smart; but when they’re authentic – when they’re not wolves in sheep’s clothing, my word! – they certainly are holy.

What I learned at Oahe

 

I've got this thing about dawns. That's why I was out there. It was forbiddingly cold, but if you want a stunning picture, pros say you've got to be there; so me and my camera went out early, a half hour straight west of a town named Gettysburg, to stand on the frozen banks of Lake Oahe, looking east into the dawn, looking for beauty. 

I was there because I wanted to see if I could get something of a glorious dawn into the lens of my camera. I wanted to see the landscape decked out most beautifully, at sunrise. I drove out to the region to look closely because I'd never been there and I was working on a novel that was on the cusp of a reservation, where relationships between Euro- and Native Americans is a given. Setting would play a role in this novel because, quite simply, on the Great Plains it does.

It was dead of night when I left the motel, but I figured if there was a great place to view the dawn, it would be there, across the bridge, looking east on the morning sun over what was once the Missouri River but now is Lake Oahe, an immense reservoir of 370 thousand acres, fourth largest man-made lake in the country.

But it's January. Really cold. Really, really cold. 

I was alone. Not surprising. No cars passed. It was just me and the camera and the sun coming up across the water. Cold?--maybe thirty seconds and you lose your fingers. 

I take a few shots, like the one above. The morning is beautiful, worth the trip, worth the cold.

The warm car's a haven when I get back inside. I stay a while. Sunrise lays its Midas-touch over everything, so even leafless trees in the prairie grass take on a patina of heavenly grace.

Two years later, the novel is finished, titled appropriately, Looking for Dawn. Oddly enough, I happen to be back here, same place, on the reservation side of Oahe. It's mid-afternoon and I'm accompanied by a 100-year-old WWII army nurse, who is telling me her story. She's Lakota, Cheyenne River Sioux. The reservation is hers.

I'm helping her write her story, and I've asked her to take me to places rich in importance in her life--what we can see and document of her childhood, for instance, where her parents are buried, her ancestors: show me where you grew up, where you went to school. I didn't tell her that, oddly enough, I'd been right here before, but I recognize the place clearly, even though this time around we'd come from the west, and a water-skier is out on the lake cutting waves in some fancy ballet, here and there a fishing boat in a drift a long ways off. 

"You want to see where I went to boarding school, Jim?" she's said. "You want to see where I worked as a nurse when I got home from the war?" We got in the car earlier and went east to a a slip of land surrounded by Oahe. I'd been here before. We're looking west. She points at the water, says nothing. It's a beautiful day, shimmering azure, sky and sea, and what she is saying in silence didn't register right away. "There," she said. 

All of that life, all of that history, years of her story and her people's story, was under the water of a huge man-made lake. All of her history was gone, her tribal history drowned. 

"There it is," she said. 

The old Cheyenne River Agency, the school, the hospital, the town itself--there it lies. Look for yourself. It's gone.

Forty per cent of the state's "angler use" occurs here. Half of all licensed South Dakota anglers fish Lake Oahe. Ranchers have abundant water these days, a scarcity in drought years that come along regularly "west river," as South Dakotans say.  The brochures say, "If you want a big lake experience, you’ll find it along the Missouri River. Four large reservoirs were created along the length of the 'Big Mo,' thanks to dams near Pierre, Fort Thompson, Pickstown and Yankton. All four lakes offer an abundance of fishing and hunting along with recreational boating, jet skiing, sailing and fun."

That's all true.

But there's another story beneath sparkling water, a story that has nothing to do with championship walleyes. 

That's my friend at a memorial right there at the water's edge. "Four Bear," listed in the fourth column, is her grandfather, who signed the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty, a man who became a "Fool Soldier," who rescued three women and eight children taken hostage when a Dakota war party attacked a white settlement at Lake Shetek, Minnesota Territory in 1862. 

"The Pick-Sloan Plan was, without doubt, the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States," says Vine DeLoria, in his introduction to Michael L. Lawson's Dammed Indians. "A natural environment was completely wiped out without any consideration of what was there and was replaced by a mechanical electric grid system and large holding dams.. . .This is a moral violation of ourselves as human beings."

Pike-Sloan has been a giant blessing to most Dakotans, but when we walked away from the edge of Oahe that summer afternoon, I wasn't the same person who'd stopped with a camera two years before in January cold. 

In some places, today, November 27, isn't just Black Friday, it's also Native American Heritage Day. Research says that 40 per cent of the American public believes Native Americans are gone. They aren't, even though lots and lots of us have tried to make it so.

That January morning I was out there was as cold as it was beautiful, but I had so much to learn about looking for beauty. I took this picture that morning from the west side--no idea about what was in front of me that simply wasn't there.

Thanks for the milkweed

"Walking beans" was never a joy, but it was tolerable when my father-in-law would talk about farming way back when he was a kid. Truth?--I didn't mind the job. It didn't tax the intellect, which was why he trusted me doing it in the first place. In a field of soybeans, weeds are, well, obvious; all you had to do was knock 'em down, whack 'em, or take 'em out any way you can. Any fool could do that. Even a professor.

Waterweed, dogbane, and milkweed--everything had to go. Milkweed was particularly pernicious because it has a lateral root, my father-in-law said, meaning that taking one plant out was only going to invigorate another down the line, turning the action, over time, into some madcap midway game. You can kill what shows up, but some descendant just down the row is only going to come up giggling soon enough.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, famously, that a weed was really a plant whose virtues had never been discovered. I have no idea which weeds he had in mind with that quip--Thoreau, after all, did most of Emerson's gardening; but Waldo could have been thinking about milkweed because while milkweed was an indefatigable enemy in my father-in-law's soy beans, it can be a rare beauty in late fall, when there's not much else on a rural landscape to beg our attention.

The one up top was one of a tribe on the slope of a hill beside a bridge and above the river. Catch the light right and its feathery floss seems like angel's wings. I'd been trying to get the perfect shot at another stand, using a fir tree as a backdrop; but I knew the moment I saw this torch in the shadows that if I played my cards right, I'd get something gorgeous. Even as it stood there, it was perfectly beguiling.

I'm not old enough to have been a kid during World War II, but I had friends who gathered milkweed floss for the war effort, going hither and yon in rural areas, picking pods at exactly the right time, just before they opened.

All that milkweed fuzz went into life jackets for Allied pilots, tagged "Mae West vests" because they. . .well, guess. 

I'm not sure ten-year-olds were told the Mae West stuff, and I probably shouldn't have flashed those famous bosoms either. Then again, maybe they'll boost ratings. 

Those war-time kids got paid for their efforts too. In Illinois, they got 15 cents for every onion bag they filled, a nickel more if the pods were dry. Two bags of pods contained sufficient floss for one life jacket. Amazingly, in 1944 two million pounds of milkweed floss were gathered, enough, the Army said, to pack 1.2 million Mae West vests.

I wonder if that one up top, the one I spotted at the bridge, had a famous ancestor.

Makes me want to repent for hoeing 'em down years ago.

Anyway, sixty years after all those schoolkids took to the fields, a whole family of milkweed flirted with the wind not more than twenty feet or so from the highway 10, some in shadow, some in bright sun, and I caught 'em at it. Isn't that beauty something? This time of year they don't need Mae West. They're pinups themselves.

This Thanksgiving morning's thanks is, oddly enough, for an endless supply of milkweed, whose glory can't be bested in early November and whose wartime history will always been worth retelling. Small things really, but I can't help but think that's what Thanksgiving is all about. How did Mother Teresa say it?--"to the good God, nothing is little."

Even milkweed.

Happy thanksgiving, even if, this year, it's a small one. Be safe.

In the dark on Thanksgiving Eve

 

"Pride" from Brueghel's Seven Deadly Sins

There's no electricity this a.m. A car slid off the road and took out a pole that carried all our energy. It's been dark, completely, for an hour. I'm trying to type on a tablet, and it's not going well.

Thanksgiving can be spontaneous and often is. It doesn’t always require practice or dogged devotion. Hard times in our family are somewhat safely behind us, thank the Lord, but all I have to do is stumble over an image or walk along a familiar road somewhere, and the dark days find a way to sneak back in, my personal PTSD.

In days of old, I smoked a couple of cigarettes a day out in the barn. Standing there in the frozen cold, I remember the smoke drifting down, dissipating slowly in air so motionless that it seemed I was exhaling ghosts.  But what I also remember is that the spirit-like shapes of the smoke drew me back to an earlier time standing out there, a time when my nerves felt torn to pieces by bloody warfare in church. Just like that, total recall, blindingly uninvited.

I have no trouble saying I'm thankful all of that is ancient history, even if I wouldn’t mind a smoke. When I remember that mess, I give thanks it's finished.

Still, thanksgiving doesn't come naturally for me. I have to work at it. I have to discipline myself to do it because I’m hopelessly “Emersonian,” buoyed by good old, rugged self-reliance.

That pride is the first of the Seven Deadly Sins seems perfectly obvious. There's some gluttony in me—especially this holiday weekend; a pinch of lechery I don’t like admitting; some greed, I imagine, but not a whole lot; lots of sloth, but, hey!—I’m retired. I'll admit to some envy too--a really great lens, for instance; and okay, I get angry, or did, before the elections. But none of those, in me, are really capital offenses.

But pride? That’s huge. I don't think I walk around with my nose in the air, but me-first-ness beclouds everything I do. Not arrogance--that’s a whole different line of work; but the driving determination that what matters most about my life and my times and my fortunes are my life and my times and my fortune. That I got. In spades.

Most of us thusly cursed come off the factory line that way; it takes rugged fight to bridle it, to love God above all and your neighbor as yourself. Far easier to say than to do. Such selfless regard is not human after all, it’s Godly, so much so that we know selflessness when we see it. And we remember it too.

That's why, speaking for myself at least, Thanksgiving turkey is medicine for the soul, a celebration of the discipline some of us sinner must be reminded to do--to give thanks. Gluttony may well be a sin this weekend, but tomorrow, I say, the end justifies the means.

Meanwhile, this morning I'm still swallowed by darkness, tapping away at the iPad. The refrigerator isn’t running, the freezer isn’t either. Green lights from a dozen appliances are doused, and the darkness is appalling. Cold is creeping up my back as I sit here at the kitchen counter.

I’ve not panicked yet, although the power’s been out for close to an hour.  What on earth does one do when there is no power? You get out the flashlights and light candles, and in the curse of darkness you almost certainly give thanks for what you have when you don't, as I am now. 

I conceded there's always cause for thanksgiving, and the list is eternal. Tomorrow, right after dinner, we could go around the table and go on forever. 

I just need a nudge, like Thanksgiving.  You too?  You got my permission to take an extra helping of stuffing tomorrow--if I've got yours.

This morning's thanks is for tomorrow's turkey or ham or spinach salad or those shocking cranberries. And once-a-year pie. This morning's thanks is simple enough: it's for Thanksgiving.

And light. Because it's back. The energy's on. Thanks, Lord, for that lineman in the hard hat just down the road, the one who spent a couple of cold hours up in the cherry-picker hitching up wires in the blowing snow. 

Make me good at it, Lord. Make it a discipline.

Potluck

 

It was wicked of me, but I like him and the guy is just plain interesting. He's as old as any autistic person I know, nearly 50, blessed somehow with a unique warmth. But because he is driven by his schedule, his own well-plotted labyrinth of rituals, any opportunity which threatens the march of events he's already charted in his head is troublesome.

"Is there church tonight?" is the first thing he says when I pick him up on Sunday morning. And when I say yes, he'll say, "And will you pick me up?"

 Okay, that's a lock.

So I told him he should come along to a potluck we were having at church next week--after the worship. The guy loves to eat. He's slippery as an eel if, after church, someone brings cookies. By edict, he's supposed to eat only one, but he'll slicky-slicky as many as he can get if no one calls him on it. His paunch makes seat belts a chore. Besides, he's told me a thousand times--literally--that he has a TV dinner for Sunday lunch.

I told him about tomato-y lasagna, barbequed chicken, a dozen cheesy hot dishes, and a whole cafeteria of deserts, muffins too, muffins galore. 

"I like TV dinners," he told me again, but I knew I had his heart wrenched. Coming to dinner with us meant departing from ritual, but the forbidden apple was dripping with sweetness.

"How long will it take?" he asked me. Sunday afternoon he does his laundry. I knew that too. He's told me fifty times. I told him the potluck would take an hour.

"How long is an hour?" he asked.

"About as long as church," I told him. "From the moment we sit down until Pastor Herman says 'amen'--that's an hour. That's it," I said.

"I do not know how long an hour is," he said.

"From the time a TV show starts until the next one does," I told him.

"I do not know how long an hour is," he said again.

"It's not all that long, Stuart," I told him. "Great food, too--cakes. Chocolate cakes."

"I do not know how long an hour is," he said again and again and again and again, until it was clear that he'd already bulldozed the potluck, no matter how chocolate-y.

 It was evil of me, the tempter, so I retreated. "Besides," I said, "you like TV dinners, don't you?"

"Do you like TV dinners?" he said.

I could not resist. "I'd much rather have church potluck," I told him, devilishly.

He started again: "I do not know how long an hour is," he said, at which point the sentence became a solace, a mantra, not only to him but even to me. "I do not know how long an hour is," he said again, and so did I, and that blasted line stuck with me all day, as well it should have--a man whose impatience overflows regularly, who wishes all too frequently for the end of this, the end of that--"I am anxious to retire," "I can't wait for spring break," if I can only make it to the end of the week. . ."

"I do not know what an hour is. I do not know what an hour is."

One of the most beautiful psalms of all doesn't belong to King David, but to Moses, a man whose impatience kept him from the promised land after 40 years of wandering the desert with a multitude of whiners. In Psalm 90, Moses begs God to teach him to number his days, his hours, as if they were precious.

Because they are.

It was Psalm 90 that dropped from the sky just then, when the words of Brother Stuart, the oracle, started making sense in my soul. I wish it weren't true, but far too often, just like Brother Stuart, I too do not know what an hour is.

Morning Thanks -- Infinitudes

 

You thought the universe was already huge? A few year back already, a Dutchman at Yale named Van Dokkum, Dr. Pieter van Dokkum, aided by powerful optics at W. H. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, located a gadzillion more stars out there somewhere so far away that miles are totally irrelevant. Literally billions of additional stars raise the greater possibility of life somewhere out there, of course, this menacing yet eerily seductive idea that--eerie fantasy movie music!--we are not alone.

Van Dokkum's discovery has its detractors, one of whom claims that the discovery of another gadzillion stars a gadzillion light years away is, well, ho hum, since we don't stand a chance of ever getting close anyway, crippled as we are by cement boots of time and space.

But the sheer numbers and the vast expanse of what's really above us, what's really out there, is, to me at least, dizzying. The reach of the human imagination comes nowhere close. I can't think my way out there, no matter that I live on a landscape where almost every day the sky goes on forever. If there's a heaven, is it on some unnamed planet somewhere--out there in van Dokkum's new territories? What is heaven anyway? Is it a place? Where's my father right now, really--I mean, literally? I know where his mortal coil lies, but where's his spirit? Or is heaven nothing but spirit? Is heaven simply another dimension, some place even more unimaginable than a million new galaxies? Or are there really streets of gold?

What van Dokkum claims is that we have been woefully short-sighted in our estimates of the length and breadth of the heavens because some new optics have, by their reach, tripled the number of stars--and planets too--in our universe. I don't know if you can get this on your computer, but that means we may well have "roughly 100 sextillion stars, with an approximate margin of error of about 10 times fewer or 10 times more." Go ahead and tap that out on your calculator.

It's dizzying. Not long ago, up north, we stood out amid the trees in an opening spacious enough to give us a view of a gadzillion stars. Took your breath away, even though from our deck on a good, cold night we can rack up a couple million too. That silly verse from Psalm 8 sneaks into the soul with ever more meaning, those spacious heavens being trifle-like, "the work of your fingers," all of that universe to God almighty little more than, say, a set of car keys or a fingernail clipper.

It wasn't Hamlet who said it first or even made it famous. The line was older than Shakespeare, and the Bard knew it was--and that's why he gave a bit of Psalm 8 to the feverish Danish prince: "What is man that thou art mindful of him?"

Seems to me that van Dokkum's new eyes and the even broader universe he claimed to find makes us, at once, both less significant--Earth being but a teardrop in an ocean--and much, much more: for some blame reason, out of all that space, he loves both us and this world.

Don't know Prof. van Dokkum, but I can't help thinking of marvels ever-so-close at hand. Think of the moments of marvelous infinitude that happen outside your window every day.

There's no end to astonishment in the world, so much opportunity to dance with the stars.

This morning's thanks is for that last quiet utterance (I think of it as humbled, quiet) of Psalm 8: "how majestic is your name."

Springfield, June 16, 1858

Watched a little Lou Dobbs last night because it's always good to see how the other half lives. If you don't watch him all the time (and you don't have a place in his court), what he's up to, night after night, can seem bloody horrifying. Some agencies of the federal government, backed up by the evil George Soros, the mainstream media, and the tech giants, have engineered an assault on the beaches of the Trump presidency with such force and numbers that anything from World War II seems like kids in a sandbox.

It's a coup, really, an outright rebellion against the law and the Constitution, and by agents of discord and division, liberal dems. The Russia thing was a hoax, the impeachment sheer nonsense. Now, this treacherous cabal of treasonous, commies and their hosts of Antifa buddies have jimmied the computers enlisted to tally vote counts, just to make sure that "this President" would be denied the second-term he so righteously deserves.

In Covid news, Dobbs' version lauded Trump's devotion to the American people via Project Warp Speed, which is now readying an astonishing national program of 350 million Americans with any one of two or three wonder drugs the President's determined energy has conjured.

We don't spend much time with sweet Lou or Hannity, with Tucker or Laura, just crack the door of the church once in a while to see or hear what's happening in the sanctuary. In the church down the block, where we normally attend, the congregation was singing from an altogether different hymnal.

To be sure, there was just as much praise for the scientists who've created possible antidotes for Covid, but no one sang the President's praise. CNN and MSNBC put a lot of numbers up on the screen--a record number of positives yesterdays, of hospitalizations, and deaths--a string of incredible numbers that Dobbs didn't bother bringing up. You could say we're rounding the curve if you have absolutely no idea how huge the curve is.

Yesterday's other big story was Rudy G's hair-coloring running down both sides of his face during a press conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, a news conference which, oddly enough, featured zero party officials. Dobbs didn't mention Rudy or his bizarre performance. Anderson Cooper called the whole thing "a clown show," then apologized to clowns. Cooper didn't have to say much really; yesterday was one of those news days when a picture was worth a thousand words.

What President Trump is up to with this his own two-week self-imposed lock down is either a determined quest for justice against the formidable powers of hell (Dobbs) or a dingbat hissy fit (most anyone from opposing networks). Seems Americans are either are greatly taken with the man's stubborn strength of character or have decided a week ago already that the man should have been stuck in a corner with a dunce hat. Trump is either the Angel Gabriel or a Brigadier General in Satan's minions.

Just for the record, Abraham Lincoln didn't pull the famous phrase out of his hat. He found it in the Bible, but he could have jotted it down from other sources as well, including Saint Augustine. When he stepped up to the podium at Springfield, Illinois, on June 16, 1858, he did so to accept the Illinois Republican Party's nomination for a U. S. Senate seat. He wasn't blind to what he and everyone else were seeing: slavery was threatening the Union in ways the century-old government had never experienced. Kansas was aflame. The raised fists of Southern states were unmistakably threatening.

"I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," he said. "I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided," he claimed, because "it will become all one thing or all the other."

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

That was the context of a speech whose central line is sewn into just about everyone's sense of the American story, and that single line, or so it seems to me, has, sadly enough, sharp and immediate relevance.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand."

I have no idea how we get beyond this. No idea.

First pooches

He's sitting in my lap now, purring as if I'm the best thing since a great night with the mice out in the garage. I should appreciate his attention--and I do; but, doggone it, he makes it difficult for me to hit the keys. In a minute--there!--he'll get tired of my moving, then leave, survey a place close by, and lie down, snooze a little. 

I, for one, am happy to know that dogs are coming back to the White House. I know, I know--a pair of rangy German shepherds, Major and Champ, doesn't guarantee Pax Americana, but it's reassuring to know this particular Presidential couple like having pets around. Good night, they can aggravate us, but far more often than not they're worthy subjects for our love because, dang it, they give lots of it back. Mostly.

In The End of the Christian Life, Todd Billings tells a story as sweet as dark chocolate. "Max," Billings says, "was a furry, red-and-white Welsh corgi, one of the friendliest creatures on planet Earth." Alas, like every other breathing thing, he began to show symptoms of mortality. The vet said it was dementia actually--Max had started bumping into things. When the vet put him to sleep, as they say, Billings was holding Max as lovingly as he'd ever done.

Then, marvelously, the vet, who knew Billings was a believer, asked, simply, "Can I pray right now?" and he did, "a blessing," Billings says, "a benediction."

There's more to the story of the death of Max, but that particular moment is immensely rich, in part because it reminds me of a thousand stories from Native life, stories of the old ones praying over buffalo, simply giving thanks for the four-leggeds--rabbits, squirrels, even dogs-- who give life itself to the people. 

I know a kid, a big-time hunter who told me about a time he went hunting with a Native buddy he'd known for a lifetime, went to school together--a Christian school--and church. They were believers, both of them. When the Native kid downed a nice buck, he was thrilled. But his buddy, a white guy, was shocked, he told me, when his friend reached into his pocket for a animal fetish he'd carried with, and carefully--even prayerfully--dipped it in the blood of that big buck. Seemed to the white kid so, well, heathenish.

I'll let a real theologian determine whether it was or wasn't heathenish, but I couldn't help thinking of that odd sacrament, out in the field, when Billings told that story of the vet's benediction for Max.  

I suppose it isn't a bit "Christian evangelical" to say it, but I'm happy Major and Champ are moving into the White House, family pets in a long line of First Pets. They're not just "animals."

You're wondering about Smokey? He's behind me, fast asleep on a wooden chair, of all things. He's close. That's the way he likes it. 

Me too. 

Covid slaughter

We weren't good enough for mink, I guess. Never caught one anyway. We'd dream of finding one right there in one of our sets, but all that fancy never dawned into reality. Muskrat pelts were worth a couple of bucks back then--I don't remember how much, because money wasn't the object of all those early mornings. Getting up and out there amid the cold October dawns was the reason we put down a trap line, why we stole out of bed before anyone else in the family. We must have sold the pelts we'd taken, a couple of dozen maybe, once the freeze came. I don't remember getting paid real money. But we never got a mink. They were mythic, still are.

They were, I was sure, a great deal smarter than we were could have hoped to be. They stalked the river banks we'd walk every morning, giggling as they'd pass one of our traps. We were just kids to them--and the fact is, we were, sixth or seventh graders maybe. There were mink out there along the river and in the culverts and wherever else we carefully set and staked our traps, and every night we'd close our eyes and every morning we'd be out there, some glossy mink was forever the dream. We'd have arrived--boys turned finally into men--if some frost-bespeckled morning we'd come up on a set and find, right there before our eyes, a perfectly lovely mink. Never happened.

Then again, I don't know that I could have handled the thrill.

They're killers. There's nothing about the bloody vocation to which they are called that endears them to anyone, but the Creator blessed them with marvelous, soft fur, a shiny coat that, way back then sewn into a collar or stole or coat, would have far way beyond our families' means. Only the gaudy rich dressed in mink, and we certainly weren't among them. High fashion put a price on their heads, and, I suppose, made them something like deity right there on Onion River.

Twice, as of late, I've seen one loll through our back yard, look around warily, then climb the rocks on the retaining walls like some sleek mountain goat. One of them scurried up the thin trunk of one of our quaking aspens with the liquid grace of a cat. I had no idea they were such practiced climbers. 

Just exactly how researchers uncover such things I don't know, but it has become clear and even tragic that mink are the only animal species so far discoverable who are capable of catching Covid-19, passing the virus along to each other, and even passing it on, once again, back to human beings. Other mammals have picked up the virus from us, but none, so far, have been capable of passing it along, specifically back to us.

That makes them dangerous, which is why Denmark has determined that its giant population of "farmed" mink--mink bred and reared in cages, mink who never see a day of freedom, must be slaughtered en masse. I could say "euthanized," but slaughtered somehow fits. Nineteen million of them--the Danes are really into mink--are being killed as we speak, a victim of the coronavirus.  All the ranch mink must die.

You don't have to travel far from the Onion River today to find massive mink farms. Most of my family is buried in a little rural cemetery near the lakeshore where the silver roofs of a huge mink farm seem to creep ever closer. Good people make their livings breeding and selling mink for the kind of fur coats significant numbers of people now despise because of the way we've already industrialized their slaughter. Now, in Denmark, 19 million are going to be killed. You have to look deeply to find a sense of calling in farming ranch mink. But I should talk--right now, behind me, the highway is full of cattle trucks.

I don't like to think about what Denmark finds necessary. Even though sixty years have passed since those glorious mornings on the Onion River, pursuing the almost mythical mink we never caught or even saw, I can't help but feel the endless slaughter so deep within me that it touches my soul. 

Morning Thanks--Smokey

I wish it weren't so, but it's not always easy to be thankful. Now and then you have to work at it--often, in fact. Meet Smokey, who we love, even when we're not at all sure we like him.

When he leaves deposits in corners where he shouldn't, for instance. When he refuses to use the two sandboxes--not just one, but two, which we conveniently and lovingly leave for him. When he decides the best place to sleep is cheek-to-cheek with my wife, literally. That's for starters.

Or when some flying leap puts him on my chest, no, on my belly, just about knocking me out of wind (he is not a little kitty). Smokey is gifted, as all cats are, with a stealthiness borne by the strict silence of his hefty pads. Even though he and his ancestry left off hunting back in the primeval forest, he's capable of perfectly executed sneak attacks and takes vile pleasure in his successes. 

I yell a lot, but, like a fool, let him sit, thereby guaranteeing he'll do it again, which he does, despite my whooping. 

Just like every morning, he's out in the garage right now looking for mice or doing whatever it is he does out there. But when I go upstairs, he'll bellyache about injustice, threaten to the take me to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. He won't look at me, even acknowledge my presence or my giving him precious liberty; like a barbarian, he'll go instead directly to his food dish. After a few noisy mouthfuls he'll look for some warmth against his mistress's cheek. You can set your clock by his rituals. He could be a monk if he wasn't so faithless.

He's a Russian blue, we're told, but he's been with us for five or so years and has shown no penchant for communist ways. He despises socialism like a redneck republican, and voted for Trump because he so admires the man's cat-like selfishness. He wanted a real Trump flag in the garage, but that's where we drew the line.

This morning I'm thankful for Smokey, even if he's living proof it's not always easy to to be thankful. 

Protestant Church apologizes for treatment of the Jews

Thirty years ago, we invited hundreds of people to come to Dordt College to talk about the Second World War, especially to talk about what that war had done in the Netherlands. At that time, the college enrolled hundreds of students who were the children or grandchildren of Dutch immigrants who'd come to Canada and America after the war's carnage left their homeland in tatters. 

What we knew was that the vast majority of those students came from families who had taken a role in the Dutch Resistance. Some Dutch people, like Corrie Ten Boom, hid Jews from the Nazis. Some hid Dutch men who refused to be arrested and taken to Germany to work in munitions plants in support of the Nazi war effort--so called onderdykers, who disappeared under the cover of sympathetic friends and family. Some Resistance fighters pulled off armed robberies, securing ration cards to support the thousands of Jews hidden all over the country. All of them did that work at great, great risk. Preachers who maintained that what was happening to the Jews ran powerfully contrary to God's law could be--and were--arrested, often taken off to infamous concentration camps from which they never returned.

The hundred or so visitors to our campus might be somewhat surprised to read that the Dutch Protestant church last week officially acknowledged its guilt in allowing so many of its Jewish citizenry to die during the war. Of the 140,000 Jews in Holland in 1940, 100,00 were systematically eliminated by Hitler's madness. Our students parents and grandparents would have been surprised, I'm guessing, because so many of them risked their own and their families' lives the Underground.

Historians have determined that most active force to resist the Nazis were, first of all, the Marxists, who were bitterly opposed to national socialism. Dutch Marxists fought the Nazi occupation more frequently and more violently than any other group in the Netherlands. 

But the second most dedicated group were what researchers call "the orthodox Protestants," a designation which includes the church from which my own denomination has descended. Dutch men and women with "orthodox Protestant" roots operated in the Resistance in numbers that came up a close second to the Marxists and significantly exceeded Roman Catholics and less orthodox Protestants.

Why? Just exactly who will dare to risk his or her life for another human being, men and women they didn't know and may not have liked at all--is impossible to answer definitively. Historians claim that an examination of religious motives generally reveals that those Christian believers who took the Old Testament seriously were most likely to risk their lives for Dutch Jews. Those who believed that the Old Testament's tenacious regard for "the children of Israel" wasn't simply some odd tribal myth, an interesting but irrelevant biblical theme. Orthodox Protestants were among the most likely to risk their lives in defense of others, particularly Jews.

I'm saying that those who came to Sioux Center, Iowa, in 1991 a conference we titled "Suffering and Survival," would have been surprised to hear the Dutch Protestant church now admits its failure to do more. 

While many of our constituent immigrant Dutch parents and grandparents participated in the Resistance, no European country that suffered German occupation lost more of its Jewish citizens than the Netherlands.

There's nuance. There's always nuance. Some who helped the Nazis also helped the Resistance. Some resisted in private. No one ever knew. When the war ended, some who did important things were black-balled because most of the populace assumed they were collaborators and acted, sometimes brutally, upon that assumption.

The conference was, I believe, a smashing success. Lots of those who had resisted had never talked much about those experiences, especially those who suffered greatly. For almost a year Diet Eman told me she didn't want a book about her life because what she had done in the Dutch Resistance was something anyone would have done and so many had. She didn't believe she should be somehow singled out for taking a moral stand that anyone would act upon. 

One of the speakers at that conference was Diet Eman. She was a stand-in for a Resistance fighter from California the Dutch government had found for us, a woman who took sick a week before that fall's conference. Diet was a sub.

Some still small voice in me makes the claim that confession is good for the soul. I can't help think that things needed to be said, even though it's now 75 years since the Nazi horror, and so much of what happened way back then seems ancient history.  

No one else in Europe so freely gave up so many of its own.

You can read the account here. 

Reading Mother Teresa--Nothing is Little

 

Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth 

and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying: 

“To him who sits on the throne 

and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, 

for ever and ever!” Revelation 5:13

To the good God nothing is little. . . . (34) 

You know? – I really ought to print that line on a t-shirt: “To the good God nothing is little.” It’s hers – Mother Teresa’s – and it’s just plain beautiful.

But then, maybe I think so just because I’m getting old.

How is it that retired people get such a kick out of gardening? Why, for pity sake, does the appearance of that gorgeous cardinal or her lovely husband just outside our window just light up our day? Last night, my wife and I ate some pumpkin muffins she made, and it felt something like what I little I know of heaven. What’s that about anyway?

The world simply shrinks the older you get. That’s what I’m thinking.

Yesterday, I got a card from a man I don’t know. He says he’s been reading a book of my meditations over and over again, and they’re good, words I ground up down here in this basement. It was that kind of letter. Just a card. That’s it. Just a little homemade card. Made my day. Shoot, made my week. Little things.

A kid says something on his way out the classroom. Maybe it was an okay class that day, and as he’s walking out, he says, “Have a good afternoon, Professor.” I feel like I’m somebody. Little things.

A sunset. A windless, warm February afternoon. The faint whisper of spring. A raucous orchestra of birds in the morning sun once again, or the long glowing promise of an orange dawn.

Bad knees, leaky plumbing, sore feet, a testy stomach – there’s no end to the tribulations of aging. And yet, sometimes it just seems that I find myself, these days, a joyful victim of a transformed aesthetic. Instead of looking past life’s seeming givens, its otherwise incidentals, you take joy in ’em – a plain old bowl of cereal starts to taste like a feast, I swear it.

Maybe that’s what theologians mean by sanctification. Maybe the death of the old, young man begets the quickening of the new, old one. Count the paradox in that line. Okay, maybe it’s silly, but, dang it! – it’s cute.

Mother Theresa used to tell her sisters that to God everything is small, and therefore everything is beautiful because everything is divine. Isn’t that wonderful? “Because he makes them,” she’d say, “they are very great. He cannot make anything small; they are infinite” (34).

Rain on parched soil. Newbie buds on the maples out front. An old hymn you thought you’d forgotten.

At the funeral of a man I never knew, one little photograph of he and his wife just after the war, totally in love – I remember that darling snapshot, so full of life, far better than the shape of his face as he lay in the open coffin. I still see it. I wish I could show you.

Or how about this? Just beside me now, the last three segments of an orange I’ve been eating slowly ever since I sat down at this computer. I pull ’em apart, one at a time because of the juicy blessing I get with each little tart explosion of lovely taste.

Now there are two.

“Be faithful in little practices of love, of little sacrifices,” Mother Teresa used to say (34). Such things make you Christ-like.

Could it be possible that aging makes that easier?

Don’t ask me tomorrow. This may just be a good morning.

Besides, the orange is gone.

But then maybe that cardinal will show up. I should be so blessed.

Will and pride and what not else in us

 

Way back in March, I was asked to have a look at the story of the Spanish Flu that ravaged the world at the end of the First World War. "Find out some things about it so we can use it for a news show," some friends at the station asked. I did. 

I looked through local papers from that era, small-town newspapers whose obituaries often revealed, sometimes rather unfeelingly, the cause of death. That's where I found this little item, in a newspaper from Maurice, Iowa--it's hard to imagine that a burg like Maurice ever had its own newspaper, but the papers were a far bigger item before radio, then TV, then Google. 

I used this snippet because what the editor said seemed so incredibly callous that I thought he might have been run out of town for saying it. The Spanish Flu was horrible, a plague. Army camps--and there were 32 of them--were breeding grounds for a contagion that no one saw coming and ended with a death toll that seems unimaginable--50 million deaths worldwide. Here, in the U. S., 675,000 died out of a population of 100 million, as if all of Nebraska and South Dakota, today, were to be wiped out, in the U.S. over two million of us, gone.  

And the editor makes a joke: "Read the two-column article on another page sent out by the government," he says. "Don't get excited about it." Sound familiar? And then the really snarky joke: "It is like being hanged, it is not so bad after you get used to it. . ." 

In March, eight months ago, that line seemed completely tasteless. 

Now, not. 

Somewhere in the region of 70,000,000 Americans might well have said the same thing, and may still be. Maybe 30 mill of those, Trumpsters all, likely thought, as he liked to say, that Covid was "fake news," that, come November 4th, "the coronavirus" will disappear from cable news and lame-stream media. The whole Covid thing was a ploy to make him lose the election. 

For the record, yesterday there were 143,408 new cases and 1,479 new deaths.

Still, ever since I read that Maurice newspaper column, I couldn't help wonder about the editor's tastelessness--how could he possibly say something like that when all over the country, thousands were dying?

One reason now seems clear--because others were. He likely wasn't tarred-and-feathered because he wasn't alone is determining the hoopla was hype-la. "Read the two-column article on another page sent out by the government," he says, petulantly.

We're in the middle of something big here, right now. The estimates of fatalities (and most estimates have been right so far) are beyond imagination. Still, life goes on. 

Forget politics. How is it that all of us look past the carnage? What powers do we have that keep us afloat in the middle of the death toll Covid-19 reaches? 

Todd Billings' The End of the Christian Life includes a quote from a commencement speech given by the novelist David Foster Wallace:

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. . . . It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our [circuit] boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Striking passage because it seems to me to be so right. We're hard-wired to think and feel only out of our own consciousness. We are always at the heart of our own worlds. Always. It's hard work, it's pure self-denial to want to know others' experience. Our default gear is only self.

If that sounds like sin, like Adam-and-Eve-grade pride, you're not wrong. But built-in self-regard is also responsible for the sheer blessings of action and agency. Every word I'm typing is my choice. I believe that the meaning those words form will make sense and are worth my time and yours. I may be wrong, but if I don't believe that, my fingers will stop dancing over the keys. We are immensely self-centered and while that self-centeredness morphs easily into sin, it's just as often an absolute blessing.

We're getting neighbors where we've never had them. Somebody is building a house right next door. On Monday, heavy equipment will lumber around just outside our windows because someone is going to dig a scoop into black soil because someone else believes, heart, soul, and mind, that they'll be a home for them to live here, next door. 

Christianity tries its best to tamper with all that drive. It would really prefer God-consciousness to self-consciousness: "Oh, be careful little eyes what you see." But even becoming a confessing Christian requires will, requires self-regard, the firm assurance that our lives will be better off if we follow Jesus. Passivity is neither normal nor healthy nor fun. 

As long as we don't have Covid, as long as we haven't suffered, it takes an act of God to make us selfless enough to care. That's who we are. That's why the editor of the Maurice paper in 1918 wasn't run-out-of-town on a rail. We come from the factory guided along by selfishness, and even though it has to be kept in check, it's often as not a blessing.

Amazing. We're in what Todd Billings calls "the discomfort of paradox."

Life and Death -- iv

continued from yesterday

I had a window seat, I remember, and probably because I’d been reading some Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, I remember thinking about what she says somewhere in On Death and Dying, how children have trouble distinguishing between a wish and a deed and how, therefore, they can feel guilt about someone close to them dying, if along the road somewhere they’d secretly wished that person to be no longer part of their lives.

What if, aboard that commuter jet, the wish would become deed, I asked myself. What if, as Emerson says somewhere, all our wishes are really prayers? What happens if this little plane goes down somewhere south, the Vermont mountains disappearing as we slipped up and away from the runway? What if, for Deborah’s sake, the commuter jet crashes?

Not in my life before or since have I done such an assessment of my own life, my own living as I did just then. I remember thinking that, should I die, my own two children—just five and three—would probably do just fine, not really knowing all that much about their father. My wife would grieve—losing her husband would be a painful loss; but our community of believers would take care of her, and she’d be young enough to find some other man to care for my children and for her. Life would go on.

And what of me? Think of me sitting there aboard that plane, as if the human skull in my hands was a gift just given. 

If I were gone, if I were no longer aboard mother earth, I wouldn't see my kids’ growing up. I wouldn't witness their being teenage years; I’d miss their marriages, and the entire calendar of life’s ritual joys and sorrows. I'd miss caring for them and watching my wife give them so much love. I found that very sad.

And more? 

Okay, I would have loved someday to write a novel. I would have loved to write more, to teach more, to do those things that brought me joy. I would certainly have missed love of all kinds. I would have missed life’s joys, although I knew little, back then, of its woes. 

And what of God? There I sat aboard a plane on its way down. What about facing my Creator? 

Somehow, I found myself unafraid. I’ve never been afraid, I guess; I'd never been into "the wailing and gnashing of teeth." But I’d never thought about actually dying in the intense way I did on a plane marked eerily for a crash. I’d never stood as close as I could to the darkness, as well as to some splendid, imaginary, divine throne. I'd never repeated to myself with as deep a conviction that, yes, I believed that I am not my own; I believed God loved me. 

Perhaps the assurance, the conviction I felt in my soul that day, high above New England, is a gift from my father, who never doubted his faith either. Perhaps, like Thoreau, I really was never aware of having quarreled with God. We’d always simply got along.

All of that is forty years behind me now, but nothing that has happened since that time has been as immense a life and death challenge as a regretful poet's death wish confessed on a stairway into a small plane ready to leave Burlington, Vermont, and the profound assessment that perverse wish of hers created in my soul.

I've never felt so much like Hamlet with Yorick's dusty skull, never measured my life in the way that I did that morning over Vermont's Green Mountains.

Todd Billings' The End of the Christian Life put me back on that plane once more, helped me remember a moment of life I'd honestly never forgotten. 

Life and Death: a memoir -- iii

continued from yesterday--

On the only Sunday morning, I walked out into a meadow, away from people, where I found an Adirondack chair and sat for an hour. There was no Sunday worship anywhere, but the Sabbatarian in me made it clear that I needed to do something for worship—not for God’s sake but for my own. So I went out alone and tried to imagine what the soft arm of my son—just three years old--would feel like in my fingers if I were back home. I concentrated on that touch, at the same time I recited, over and over again, the poem I knew best, the 23rd psalm.

I remember a beautiful mountain stream, but there were no still waters at Bread Loaf Writers Conference the summer of 1980. If there were, I didn’t see them. But that Sabbath’s very personal worship, right there in the middle of the madness, was a meditation I’ve never forgotten, maybe the only true meditation I’ve ever done, a few verses from Psalm 23, a hybrid mantra in an Adirondack chair.

Toward the end of our stay, another friend, also a waiter, a man who had also shown me a snapshot of his young family, another poet, simply decided that when opportunity presented itself, he wanted to act. He too climbed into bed with another conferee. I don’t even remember his name, but what I remember was that when the waiters had their reading one night, he read from his work without once looking down at a text, all of his work memorized. 

We’d been friends from the beginning, so I asked him about his unfaithfulness. “I don’t get it,” I said to him. “Why?”

A writer had to experience absolutely everything he could in order to be the best he can, he said. A writer has to know, to know by having lived.

I didn’t laugh, and I still don’t. I was, after all, something of an innocent, even though I’d never considered myself such before. And I wondered, really, if he wasn’t right, in a way. Should he ever want to write about how being unfaithful feels, he had a better shot at authority.

When we boarded a plane to leave Bread Loaf, I happened to line up just behind Deborah Digges as the two of us stood on the stairway to our commuter jet. We hadn’t spoken much in the last week; she’d been otherwise occupied. We hadn’t sat together at the gate either, but when we got on board I happened to be just behind her. I don’t know if she had thought of me the way I did of her, as someone who understood her better, perhaps, than others; but when that line balked for a minute, she looked at me and shook her head. “Jim, I hope this plane crashes,” she said.

She’d been wooed by a celebrity poet, and she’d fallen. On the dance floor, the two of them looked like smarmy high school lovers, which would have seemed embarrassing if it hadn’t happened to so many others. But right then, as we boarded, I knew her pain, even though I knew nothing about her relationship to the husband she’d seemingly forgotten.

If I said anything to her at all at that moment, it’s gone from my memory. We found our seats. I didn’t sit beside her.