Comfort to Spare (XV)

Aunt Gertie Dirkse

From the beginning, Rev. J. K. Van Baalen makes clear that his intended readers are the grieving parents who have lost sons in the war. Aunt Gertie was not a veteran. Her death came in an accident at a foggy intersection. But writer and reader share miseries nonetheless. He has a bond with them but references it sparingly, hinting at his grief in an early meditation, then talking openly about his son's death seven meditations in. Their mutual suffering had to have helped. They knew he knew.

The consolation he brings is is mostly conventional. It's hard to imagine any parent, no matter how stout in faith, simply accepting the death of a child. Faith always suffers when parents bury their children. He knows that.

He tells them to trust in the truth of the eternal future they've always foreseen. The Lord does not punish us with calamity, he says, but chastens us, not to distance Himself from us, but to bring us ever closer. Despite the sadness, he directs people like my grandparents to remember the great I AM is not only in control of all of our lives, but his love always, always, always triumphs. Much of what Van Baalen offers is consolation centuries old.

But occasionally, he steps away, and when he does I can't help but think--and feel-- that my grandparents would have stayed there with him, even drawn closer.

In the seventh meditation, he tells the story of Dan Crawford, a Scottish missionary, whose return to his African mission station was threatened by a swollen river they had to cross. "The missionaries camped and prayed," Van Baalen says. Then, a miracle: "A tall tree which had battled with the river for a century, perhaps, began to totter, and then fell--clear across the stream. 'The Royal Engineers of Heaven,' Mr. Crawford had said somewhere, 'had laid a pontoon bridge for God's servants.'"

It's a sweet story for a TV preacher, but Van Baalen isn't buying.  "Well, perhaps they did," he says, wryly, of "the Royal Engineers of Heaven." Then he adds, "I doubt it though."

Grandma, adept at rolling her eyes, had to love that take. Comfort to Spare, she might have thought just then, had exactly what it promised.

Van Baalen nods to Grandpa's darkened piety by imagining what Crawford and his party might have thought as they approached the Lord in prayer just before the tree fell. While it's clear he appreciates their reliance on God, he can't help but believe that what prompted their prayers was self-assessment: "The evidence is there that God has sent a serious handicap, a genuine frustration of all of our plans." He switches pronouns mid-stream to become one of the missionaries, then stays there and wields more than a little sarcasm, unusual in devotions designed to bringing a measure of consolation. The fault, he suggests, may be ours.

Maybe we are at fault. Perhaps God does not approve of us. Let's see. Oh yes, someone in the party forgot his morning devotions  yesterday; and day before yesterday another member spoke harshly. It was hot, but he should not have gotten cross anyway. There you have it: it's all off, boys! God is sending hard luck to punish us. 

He goes on this way: "That, be it observed, is exactly the way some folks react. They may be Christians, but they have little faith." 

Both of my grandparents could have found themselves right there--Grandpa's resolute sinfulness, and Grandma's pragmatic skepticism. J. K. Van Baalen is speaking the language and the rhetoric of their faith.

The attack grows even more withering. He appears to become angry. "I care not just what the nature of your present difficulty is." Amazing!--their "present difficulty" is the shocking death of their daughter, and he "cares not"? "The greater the obstacle, the better," he says, so seemingly unfeeling. "In that way you won't be able to take any credit yourself for its solution." He's telling my grandparents that it's flat wrong of them--for my grandfather especially--to "take credit" for the death of their daughter because of what he did or didn't do. It wasn't somehow their sin, his sin, that drew up all that fog, not their sin at all. 

Elsewhere, he tells the story rescuers steering their vessels up close to homes where men and women sat crouched on the roofs to escape high waters during a flood in the Netherlands. The deeply pious wouldn't get in the boats. They refuse the help, claiming that if God has given them this flood, their task is to suffer his wrath. Van Baalen warns Grandpa and Grandma not to "take any credit yourself for its solution."

And then, as he does elsewhere, he puts a prayer of his own composition directly into their hearts and mouths. He forcefeeds them really in a manner that is very moving. "Now go down on your knees," he demands, and he tells them exactly what to say:

Dear Lord, I am at a loss. I do not know which way to turn. But Thou never art at a loss. I open my heart to Thee. Please, show me which way to go. Point out the next step to me. Guide me, Thou great Jehovah. I need Thy help, but there is none other. Help me then, Father, for Christ's sake. Amen.

I have been imagining a great deal for a couple of weeks now, trying to read a gift book from a preacher to grieving parents, trying to read consolations through their eyes. My grandma Dirkse was kind and loving to me, but a couple of generations separated us. She was old, and I was just a kid who didn't really think much about her. I was busy growing up. 

All of this is guess work, pure and simple. To try to read this book through the eyes of my grandparents is not difficult, but it's impossible to get right because I don't know. 

All of that being said, it's difficult, even impossible for me think that the kind of instruction this Rev. J. K. Van Baalen offered them in a slim book of meditations for grieving Christians found a beloved place in the hearts of my grandparents. 

When I read that prayer and the whole of the passage that precedes it, I tear up. I have something of my grandparents in me, I suppose, something anyway.

__________________ 

Tomorrow, second-to-last installment.