Comfort to Spare (XIII)

Oostburg, early 1950s. Dirkse Oil (Mobil sign) on the right; First CRC steeple on the left.

Rev. Piersma and his wife knew the Dirkses were believers. They knew the Dirkse's pain was the unique burden believers feel when they find themselves abandoned by God's love. Despite their differences, Harry and Mabel had long ago accepted a sovereign Lord. The comfort in Comfort to Spare is described, explained, and offered specifically to people who have faith in a Living God, but feel it slipping away into death's darkness.

Van Baalen's readers, he knows, are a congregation of souls not unlike those in the pews before him in churches he served at the 12th Street in Grand Rapids or Mt. Vernon in Washington, where he was serving when his son died in France. He's not writing meditations about grief; he's ministering to what he might have called himself "covenantal" believers carrying a level of grief few human beings, believers or no, can handle. 

And who was this J. K. Van Baalen? It's fair to say answer that question straightforwardly: he was a dominie in the Christian Reformed Church. That may well have been the only reference worth knowing to Grandpa and Grandma: he was one of us. What's more, he'd lost a boy in the war. He'd experienced what we have, and he believed what we do. They would not have needed to question his orthodoxy or fittingness otherwise.

What do I know about the man? Not much. Van Baalen wrote another book that still has some currency, or so google suggests, Christianity Verses the Cults, ten years after Comfort. It's a book that has never quite disappeared from booklists and obviously has done much better with a wider Christian audience. 

"It is a wonderful thing to be a Christian," he says to begin the sixth meditation of Comfort To Spare, but then he adds the kind of line that I expected more of in this little volume: "I mean, to be a true Christian, not merely one in name." That line is, in many ways, the kind of risky distinction-making I grew up with, the faith of my fathers. 

It is necessary to cite this line because--to the credit of Christianity--many people who pay scant attention to the meaning of the word, would be hurt if anyone should intimate that they are not Christians. 

So I found Comfort in our library, opened the covers, read what was scribbled in by Grandma, and realized that it may well have played a significant role in my own life. When I read the opening lines of the sixth meditation, I will admit that I wrote the book off as just another sermon about  "us" and "them." Isn't it just peachy that we've got our theology down just right, that we've captured God's constant gaze by a theological acumen that so greatly surpasses anyone else's. We can, like no one else, therefore, bask in God's richest blessings. 

I haven't touched Christianity Verses the Cults, but I imagined it as more of the same. Furthermore, what little I could gather of Rev. J. K. Van Baalen was theologically progressive but psychologically concerning. In the middle of one of the denomination's most serious theological crisis, when significant numbers of members and churches left to form another, Van Baalen, then preaching in Munster, Indiana, was writing pamphlets, lobbing grenades into fierce theological warfare going on in western Michigan in groups of churches--separate classes--that weren't his own.

Van Baaren was a young man then, a handsome young man, who was especially grieved at the way the church had dealt with a seminary prof named Henry Janssen, who bought into the idea that God's love more than occasionally blessed those who didn't believe in Him, that gentle rain falls on the believer and the unbeliever alike. 

When some didn't agree, they took their case to the powers-that-be, and Prof. Ralph Janssen was dismissed from his seminary post. 

That battle didn't end the war, however, and followers of Janssen, some say, formed a posse to go after some of those who had opposed him. 

Van Baalen was young, second charge and likely found it difficult to stay out of theological skirmishes. The opening lines of the sixth meditation belong to a fighter, a theological warrior. 

But Comfort to Spare is not about drawing lines in the sand, not a whit polemic. It's about believers dealing with profound grief. 

I can't know for sure, of course--Grandpa and Grandma Dirkse are both long gone. But I can't help but think that the gift of this book from their preacher offered bountiful blessing. 

And I'll try to explain why.