Respecting the mystery

Rev. Schaap and Mrs. Schaap (right) in 1915, with Professor and Mrs. Hemkes (left). 

It's difficult for me to imagine that anyone interested in genealogy could trace family stories back without finding a louse or two, men or women who didn't stay with the family program, despite DNA. I've always thought myself some strange hybrid of two great-grandfathers, one of whom, a salesman couldn't pass a roadside tavern without a drink. The other was a esteemed and crusty seminary professor (see above). I'm a half-breed, a little good cop, a little bad cop.

I can't help thinking it would be hard to believe anybody with Dutch Reformed blood wouldn't have at least one Pharisaical great-grandparent, someone armed with hair-trigger judgment in unenduring self-righteousness.

I don't know that my grandpa Schaap (whose birthday was yesterday and mine is today) was anything like that. I witnessed a little fight at a family reunion once upon a time, when the children--then in their seventies--talked about their father, the preacher, and disagreed, one uncle and one aunt claiming he operated with too much rigid legalism, the others claiming they remembered no such thing. Grandpa Schaap the preacher (see above) died when I was little shaver, leaving me only three specific memories--how he told the same jokes over and over again, how his house slippers swished over the kitchen floor behind me, and how he let me have it when I wasted water by letting it run from the faucet, waiting for it to cool.

I admit it. When I read the story I told yesterday, I was embarrassed. I'd not thought of him as some kind of firebrand, but the assault her church did on their union girl, Beatrice Phillips (she was barely "of age") imputed to me, a Dutch Calvinist, a bit of a Nazi legacy. What that consistory did was reprehensible. 

There might have been extenuating circumstances. Maybe her union involvement kept her away from church, thus avoiding the bread and wine, the means of grace. Maybe she whacked a scab or two when a newsman was there to record it. Maybe she'd long ago closed the door, even though her name stayed on the books. I'd like to excuse what he did when his consistory booted Beatrice Phillips, but I won't try, won't make excuses I can only fabricate anyway. 

And I'd just as soon avoid letting Fox News accuse me of cancel culture. The fact is, Third Kalamazoo CRC, its dominie, my grandpa, and his consistory, had little tolerance for labor unions, thought them thugs, believed union bosses chased scabs and beat on 'em. I'm sure my grandpa thought their deportment an embarrassment and a sacrilege.

What's more the old Calvinists, I'm sure, were all about "good order." If what went on gave even a whiff of the French Revolution, it was evil because that was chaos, and to a church full of Dutch Calvinists, disorder was flatly intolerable. Unions turned the world of work upside down, gave power to the working stiffs instead of their bosses. Chaos was a madness worse than injustice. "Don't get enough pay you say? Vote with your feet."

Odd that I remember something my dad told me years ago, probably when he was loving our children. "Grandpa used to say," he told me--speaking of his father--"that finally you'd know what kind of father you were by the kind of grandchildren your own children rear." 

That being said, I hope Rev. John C. Schaap, Minister of the Word and sacraments at Third Kalamazoo CRC, his third charge, would be proud of me, his grandson, even if our politics are worlds apart. 

I wouldn't doubt the action of his consistory in the Beatrice Phillips matter wasn't far afield from action any other CRC would have taken at the time, but I'm embarrassed by what they did back then. I am. Showing that young woman the door was reprehensible, an evil all its own. 

Lewis Smedes once recommended that adult children who find it difficult to abide their aging parents' views should learn to hold their tongues and "respect their parents' mystery," because none of us are all-knowing, all of us learn--and how exactly we do is not the privilege of others to know or understand fully.

When Mom and Dad act the way they do, they do so out of a long story their children only know in shadowy part. Just respect their mystery, Smedes said. 

Strikes me as sage advice.