Our kids were maybe ten years or so out of college by then, and Dordt was celebrating its fiftieth birthday by staging of a bold and endearing CRC classic. Our children and their out-of-town cousins, back then, went off to the play together--at my insistence, I'm sure.
They came back grim and unmoved. "I didn't really get it," my daughter said. She winced, as if fearing her father's displeasure.
Stan would not have been surprised, I suppose. After all, the poems in that book put evaluative questions of what is real and what is phony front-and-center and asks his readers to decide questions he may well not have wanted to answer himself, questions that probe differences between "the old way," "the new way," and "the right way," the genre of questions we still assess and likely always will.
My kids came home a bit ashamed of their boredom--and probably of their father.
It's Good Friday, but I can't help thinking today of one of those Wiersma creations, especially a long one with a cumbersome title, "That Stone on Five Easters: 1946, 1947, 1954, 1969, ????"
Sietze, the book's protagonist, takes organ lessons from a feisty woman from the American Reformed Church, where she plays "The Hallelujah Chorus" on Easter morning, followed by "Christ the Lord is Risen Today." Sietze's Middleburg CRC insists on the traditionally cumbersome Psalm 118. She tells him that when he gets to be church organist, he's got to put a stop to playing that old dreary psalm on Easter. "Your preacher is well-meaning," she says, "just not quite with it about Easter music."
A year later, Sietze's at the organ on Easter, so he does as his teacher instructed. He tells his preacher they should worship in English on Easter, just so he can play and they can sing the lively "Christ the Lord is Risen Today."
Dominie loses it in peculiarly CRC fashion: "She is an ex-Calvinist who has given up her Calvinism for provincial reasons," he says, of the teacher, at which she rages back a few days later: "You Christian Reformed people all think you're God-on-wheels." What's more, she says the preacher is "a pharisaical whited sepulcher." She tells Sietze he should get a new organ teacher. "And tell your pastor that as for him and his congregation, they can all sit on tacks." I'm sure that meme went viral.
That takes care of the first two years of the poem. The third, 1954, puts Sietze in a military uniform playing the organ for an Easter service at a chapel in still-occupied Japan. Half a world from the old dominee, he gets to play the forceful and triumphant "Christ the Lord is Risen Today," but when he looks around, he realizes that no one is singing but the choir, that a sad and shallow commitment he'd never felt before had simply brushed off seriousness in that worship service. Woefully, he admits he "felt nostalgia for Middleburg as I've never felt it, where a dwindling congregation would be singing 'De Steen Die door de tempelbouwers,'" Psalm 118.
That leaves only the last year of the title, 1969. Sietze is in the Netherlands at Easter, looking forward to singing Psalm 118 with truly traditional endearment, the way it was always sung at home in Middleburg. Instead, the opening hymn is--well, you guessed it--"Christ the Lord is Risen Today."
But that's not the end of the poem.
My parents used to think Sietze Buning's Banner poetry carried a smidgeon too much spotten, that he was too obviously making fun of the old ways. The old ways, to them, were, well, not sacred but just about, mind you. They read him faithfully, but occasionally clicked their tongues, sometimes more than once.
But Stan Wiersma sins far beyond spotten in this seven-page poem when he leaves a long final section in the Dutch language and provides, startlingly, no translation, no hint at what the Dutch preacher, a real dominee, told Sietze when Sietze lets him know that he had been looking forward to hearing Psalm 118 at Easter Service.
If you have to, run the whole speech through Google translation sometime. It's worth it. The dominee raises a finger, it seems, and, in typical Dutch fashion, gets in Sietze's face, telling him that wanting Psalm 118 at Easter is little more than nostalgia on his part. It's not principle, not at all.
If you read the Dutch, you come to understand that the dominee is missing an eye. He had been arrested, Sietze tells us, during the Nazi occupation, when he was imprisoned by the SS. In the years of his absence, with no real sense of the future, his spouse turned to drinking. That's all explained in the Dutch language. You've got to figure meaning out for yourself.
But what Sietze takes away from coffee with the dominee that morning at the Leidseplein is that, given the preacher's own experience, his deep and personal suffering during the occupation, Sietze's longing for the old ways in Middleburg was, really, as the dominee has said, not principal at all but warm-hearted nostalgia.
The last line of the entire seven-page poem, in Dutch, is the dominee's personal concession. "Personally," he says, "I like Psalm 118." It's a touching moment in what, in some moments, seems a comic-book of a poem.
Yesterday, our children sent a video of their four-year-old at day-care. They were having an easter egg hunt, and Olivia was having a ball, carrying a bag to take home all the loot, running around, like all the others, retrieving what she could. Easter eggs.
I remember Good Fridays when I was a boy. Our church was downtown back then, and what I'll never forget is the ghost sense of the day because everything was closed, noon to three--grocery stores, meat market, Knotty Pine, Grandpa's Mobil station. It was all shut down. "For the hours when Jesus was on the cross," my mom explained. The whole town shut down.
Nostalgia. Not principle. Maybe. Hence that row of "????."
I don't need to say, I suppose, that unlike my kids, I get it. Fifteen years later each of them with their own kids, my guess is they do too.
And here, for Sietze and for Easter, is three short minutes of Psalm 118.
1 comment:
Well done👍👍
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