"Where the tree falleth. . ." -- i

I'm still hurt, 17 years later, by my kids'--adult children and their adult cousins-- indifference. They'd gone off together to see the performance of a musical, Stanley Wiersma's Purpaleanie, entirely created and staged by people who'd created and staged it 15 years before that. 

It never dawned on me that they wouldn't be taken by the show. I sang its praises from the heavens. I bragged on it, told them they'd love it; but when they returned. . . you know--"eh" and a shrug of their mutual shoulders. I was shocked; worse, I was heartbroken, stunned that they too didn't sing its praises. "Ah, so-so." The flat of a hand.

It took me some time to realize that what they watched happening on stage simply wasn't their lived experience. The lives they saw and heard up there--the lives Stanley Wiersma creates--weren't theirs. In a sense, they didn't get it. 

Tomorrow night, a book club that meets at the museum will be discussing Purpaleanie, so I've been reading through those darling folk tales again, poems that capture life among the theologically-fortified citizenry of Sioux County, Iowa, church members all, citizens of the 40s and 50s, Dutch Reformed rural folk who are, I admit, far closer to my people than my children's.

Last night I came to "'Where the Tree Falleth, There Let it Lie," a heart-felt battle of wits between a God-fearing father and his loving wife, whose soul is torn
up by the news that Abe, the Fuller Brush man, had "blown his brains out" with a 12-gauge. It's a simple request really: grieving deeply, she asks her husband to pray for Abe, even though she knows, theologically, that Reformed Christians don't, like the Roman Catholics and the Mormons, pray for the dead. There's no reason, after all, to supplicate for a man whose soul has already been properly assigned.

What's not written in the poem is an ancient theological argument that the despair Abe had to feel to end his life means he was a man living without hope. Since true believers can never be hopeless, Abe is damned. "Where the tree falleth, there let it lie," Dad says, allowing that single Old Testament passage to do the heavy lifting.

Wiersma, who wrote with the pen name "Sietze Buning," speaks most lovingly of his mother in the poem. To begin, Sietze tells her he remembers the one moment she dared to tangle theologically with her pious husband: "How could she keep up with you, Dad?" What we're about to hear, her son says, is the only time she tried. All she wanted was for Dad to pray for poor Abe. 

When he repeats the line from Ecclesiastes, he tell her plainly that we don't pray for the dead because in God's plan what Abe did to himself and those he loved is what he was appointed to do, a horrifying argument. "Don't mess with God's plans," he might have said. "I'm not praying for Abe. Case closed."

"Ecclesiastes 11." That's what we read [present tense] in the Bible, woman, ja?

Let there be no doubt she understood her husband's refusal. She's not interested in arguing theology, but she is interested in saying something to God about the horror of what just happened. A day before, when Abe was there pedaling his wares, the two of them had sung together some of the old psalm faves--42, 68, 84. "Knew them as well as you or I, mind you," she tells her stone-faced husband, "and knew some, like seventy-two, that I didn't even know."

That argument is meant to clean up that blasted tree that's felled. There's a character witness here; after all, "by their fruits shall you know them." How could a man sing the psalms as richly as he had and then, the next day, reject hope entirely? Abe's story simply can't be colored within the theological lines she's supposed to use as a template over all of our lives. 

Once more, agonizingly, her husband repeats the divine bromide. That's all.

Even though she's never taken him on, Ecclesiastes 11:3 doesn't stanch the blood. Then pray for Abe for my sake, she says, her second argument. Pray for him to relieve my guilt, she says, for not talking with Abe about his salvation when he was right here in my kitchen. 

                                I never said, 'Abe

though you walk through trouble sore/God

will restore/your fainting spirit.'

If only I had said it, Abe might

be alive now."

Pray for him, but do it for me, she says. For my sake, pray for Abe who's gone.

"'Where the tree falleth," he says, no pause, "there let it lie.'" 

The argument they wage isn't a squabble that pinch-hits for some ongoing battle in their relationship. It's an argument about the nature of God himself, a theological argument mounted between two great forces--the relative importance of both grace and truth. Dad chooses biblical truth drawn from a single passage of scripture: "Where the tree falleth, there let it lie." Mom won't have truth stand in for grace and mercy.

There's more to the story. More tomorrow.