Morning Thanks on Labor Day--a photograph

I'm sorry to have to admit I didn't take the picture; I wish I had. For the record, however, I did write the book and did so long ago already--that's my name beneath the title. A thoughtful gentleman from the Netherlands sent the shot. Got it yesterday. I like it. This morning on Labor Day, I'll tell you why.

I am, for better or for worse, someone shaped by the work of a portly historical figure named Abraham Kuyper, a former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, a noted clergyman and theologian, and a prolific journalist, about whom I know very little more than I've just related.

So reads the first page of the book's preface, an introduction I felt important to include because in condensing and adapting the meditations I did from Dr. A. Kuyper, I didn't want anyone to think that I was either a theologian or a historian. Read on.

I've never studied Kuyper's theology, read his political treatises, or paged through much more than a chapter or two from his biography. What I know is that he was and still is central to the ethos in which I was raised, an ethos I continue to work within, the precious baggage of a diminutive American immigrant sub-culture, the Dutch Reformed, a group of folks long ago forgotten by its contemporary European siblings and slowly now disappearing, as all ethnic sub-cultures do, within the stew constantly brewing in the American melting pot.

The shelf of books I inherited from my grandfather, the preacher, includes a beat-up translation of Near Unto God, almost pocket-sized, in English. I'd never read a word of Abraham Kuyper, so, once discovered, I pulled out that fat little book and started reading. 

I shouldn't have been surprised that the meditations were wonderful and, in truth, I wasn't; after all, my grandfather wasn't the only Dutch-American to own Na Bij God Te Zijn. I remember being told, fifty years ago, that late 19th century Dutch immigrants, many of whom came here, made sure to stick a copy of Na Bij God Te Zijn in the chests of things they lugged over from the old country, along with the Bible, of course. Reading Kuyper, I wasn't on foreign soil. 

This man Kuyper is an intimate of mine, even though I never met him. Somewhere inside me he holds sway with much more authority than, say, President Teddy Roosevelt, who would have been his contemporary and was himself Dutch-American. Kuyper's mind--his ideas and vision--are a part of me that has always been there, even when I didn't know he was or they were.

To my mind, central to his legacy is what we used to call a "worldview," specifically that, in the words of a contemporary, the Christian life consisted of two conversions: one, to God, and a second, back to the world. Whether or not Kuyper ever used those very words, his life testified to that spirit. He was a noted preacher, a prolific newspaper columnist, and, for a brief spell, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. In his life there was no distinction between sacred and secular. All of life was religion. 

One's "calling," therefore, wasn't solely a spiritual event. Men and women were "called" by God to offices and positions of authority and professions because we are called in every walk of life to bring praise to our Creator. All of work is holy--every square inch, as Kuyperians like to say, perhaps too often. Those ideas animated many of my ancestors, pushed them into life and through it, doing everything to the glory of God.

So when I pulled that fat little book off the library shelf where it sat for years untouched, I told myself I was about to read things that were somehow and in some form already inside me. In noticeable ways, in me Kuyper was factory-installed.

For me, therefore, getting to know Abraham Kuyper is an exercise in getting to know myself. If the greatest knowledge, as Socrates maintained, is knowledge of self, then gaining an understanding of what we've come from is no mean accomplishment. The Nobel Prize-winning Nebraska novelist Willa Cather maintained that every major theme a writer would or even could consider in his or her work grew from questions planted within the soul long before adulthood. If that's true, then for me, knowing something about Kuyper helps me visualize more clearly what I've been considering for nearly most of my life and two [now four] decades of writing--and why and even how.

That photograph up top--it was a gift, really, don't you think? The man who took the photograph doesn't know me. He said he'd decided to take a walk and visit the cemetery, toting my adaptations of Kuyper along with. While there, he snapped a picture.

For that act of kindness and memory on this Labor Day, I'm greatly thankful.