Afscheiden 2024

It's difficult for me not to feel rejected this morning. I know, I know--those who have rejected me and so many others would be quick to tell me that they didn't reject me--I rejected them. Because I cannot accept the possibility that some gay couples might not be going to perdition for what some consider their grievous sin, I was shown the door by the Christian Reformed Church of North America, who yesterday protected itself against mode subscribing to the world's values  by condemning homosexual sex, even love, and did a great deal more than invite those of us (maybe 25 percent) to use the door to their left and leave the family. You can't stay with the church if you accept gay marriage, no matter how long and committed its gay members are or have been.

That 25 per cent will likely include me, and I'm very sorry to say that. Elsewhere I've listed all the things I've done with and for the denomination, including revising and finishing its last real history, When I was a boy, our house was a block away from our church. Our proximity, as well as my dad's denominational loyalty, brought all kinds of visiting pastors to a place around our table. Listening in to adult conversations by visiting preachers and missionaries was a joy and a blessing. It's fair to say I was Christian Reforrmed before I knew I was Christian Reformed.

Now that's over.

Why? Because I find it impossible to adhere to the dictum that all gay couples are in such clear violation of God's law that if they do not desist and beg forgiveness, they can be no longer be counted among the righteous and will therefore be bound for the pit. For even beginning to believe otherwise put us right there among them, bound for eternal destruction.

The likelihood of my being struck from the roles is very low. My days as an elder are over, not simply by choice but also, now, by mandate: any man or woman who isn't sure about gay damnation cannot be considered for office. The razzia likely won't pick up men and women, church members, who are in their seventies, as long as we don't make a scene, I suppose.

But the two minds of the church, which showed themselves years ago already, have now clearly separated, the progressives expelled.

Me too. I'm very sad.

But then, I don't think I'll ever be able to leave the specific culture I've lived in and written about for so long. Although it may be true to say I was CRC before I knew I was CRC, it's likely just as true to say I'll be CRC long after I'm no longer CRC.

Out back last night

 It's the year of the black-eyed susans out back. They're faithful, but, like their kissing cousin daisies, make a show of it for a while and then leave their green stems behind, like weeds. I'm not complaining. I wouldn't know about such things, but they're like seeing another woman (or man). When they're in bloom they're a dream, but they do fade fast. Daisies and blackeyed susans have taken over the back yard, endless echelongs, like the mythical Chinese army. That bright sunny smile they give to just about everything is worth their shortness of breath. 

They're hot right now, and--don't get me wrong--I love 'em. But they fade fast.

But it's gorgeous out back right now, thanks to the TLC my spouse dispenses, this despite the fact that last October she swore off gardening all together and forevermore. With an infirm husband who can't bend or kneel or sit on his butt on the ground, she's the sole force behind all of this magnificence, this gorgeous extravagance I can't help but love out back.

It's hard to know what the rest of our rustic prairie looks like out back. Consistent inch-and-a -half rains turned the world pure emerald out there, makes everything grow. My gardener/wife complains that the weeds are loving all that measured  moisture, but I just don't see them--all those daisies and black-eyed susans are a carpet--and we have yet to see a coneflower, whose time it was last year. 

I risked it last night, pulled out my new riding lawn mower, hitched up the wagon, and just tootled out into the wild frontier of our out back acre. The paths were almost gone--in a decade living out here, I've never seen anything like it, the brome grass has overgrown everything, so much that my heart leaped to see this gargantuan cup plant  (a kind of sunflower) rising like a conquerer from what it left itself last summer. Cup plants are big and colorful at about the time everything else has thrown in the towel on flowering. 

I could hardly get through the monster brome, whose seed heads are so heavy they take the plants down over the path of the mower. It's impossible--I don't know that I'll see any color in our prairie. The whole prairie seems nothing but brome.

Well, almost. I finally dragged my weariness outside and into the tall grass wilderness last night, to a place where I couldn't help see a native that would be (and is) horrifying, if it didn't raise such amazing blossoms.

That's tomorrow. 

As for me? I made it back in without catastrophe :).

Remembering the good times

It had been a heckuva close election, but James K. Polk squeaked by Henry Clay, of the Whigs by less than two percent of votes cast. Polk had run on expansion, which was on everybody's mind in 1844--first, Texas, a slave-holding state, and then Oregon. That's right--Oregon, a far northwest territory owned and run by Great Britain.

Just didn't seem right, people thought, that the Brits had control over  a spot on the continent that should belong to the United States of America. Polk made it clear that, should the people vote him in, he'd see to it that Oregon would belong to its rightful owners.

That rightful owners idea is what became a kind of national doctrine, something called "Manifest Destiny," the firm belief that because God almighty had created this continent in one piece, Washington should own it all and run it all. 

Let it be never forgotten that "Manifest Destiny" was no Native American rallying cry. 

Since it had been a plank of his platform, James K. Polk set to work on his promise, recruited Stephen W. Kearney to hammer home his promises on Oregon. Kearny had been a star in the Mexican War (1846-48) and had spent most of his life on frontier duty.

The frontier was opening up during the 1840s. What seemed very clear to the Native tribes who lived on the plains was that there were more and more trespassers all the time, all of them moving west. 

Kearney had the idea to get together hundreds of Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and just talk about what was going on. His mission was populating Oregon, after all, not killing indigenous people--that would come later.

Maybe if the white man's cavalry, all spiffed up in full battle gear, would show up in Indian territory, Kearney reasoned, James K. Polk and the rest of Manifest Destiny crew could find a way through to Oregon for thousands of white folks. 

And he was right, sort of. In what may well have been the very first formal exercise in cross-cultural education, the first nations were star-struck; they had never seen a whole military outfit, cleaned up nice, shiny metal hanging off their bright blue uniforms. Those Native people were stunned. 

But then right during the confab, from somewhere just outside the circle of hundreds of  people, a pronghorn flushed. Just like that dozens of young warriors got aboard their saddle-less mounts and took after that poor creature, who took a dozen arrows from riders who didn't even have reins. All those handsome cavalrymen were gob-smocked.

There was a certain innocence to the parley that day, maybe shown most memobly when a bespectacled recruit leaned over to examine some young woman's beadwork. When she looked up, she ran, terrified, as did most of the other young women, shrieking and  hollering and pointing at the white man's glasses. 

They believed--and who could blame them--that the glasses that red-headed soldier wore enabled him to see them without their clothing.

As everyone knows, there's far more to the story, but just for a moment it does no one no harm to remember the good old days down at Ft. Laramie. 

Unconditional Surrender Grant

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Once upon a time, Ulysses S. Grant, the Union's most masterful military leader and 18th President of these Unites States, was a nobody, an ordinary nobody at that. The kids around town called him "Useless" Grant, and even his old man wasn't too keen on him. His father ran, after all, a moderately successful tannery, but "useless" didn't take to the smell of leather, and thereby caught something more than the derision of his father, so much so that Pa Grant filled out an application for his son to go to West Point without even telling the poor kid, then broke the news that's where "useless" was bound.

Ulysses enrolled, but wasn't thrilled, wasn't looking to be anybody's hero. His classmates called him "Sam," classmates, by the way, who were almost all the generals who went to battle in the War between the States. Grant scholars like to say that, while at West Point, his estimation of their characters helped him to fight both with and against them during the war to come. 

What kind of student was he? Meh, middle of the class at best, mindless most of the time in class. But, he loved horses and was outstanding in horsemanship. 

Now Grant's sometimes tyrannical father was an hot-blooded abolitionist; Grant rode a different horse. He didn't advocate for slavery, but neither did he say much when a friend from West Point, a man named Dent, told him to visit his family's farm in Missouri when Grant's first post after graduation was nearby. The Dents owned slaves.

Many say Grant's story is a real American story, and it is. Imagine this--Sam Grant, son of a fervent abolitionist, grad of West Point, visits the Dent plantation--where there are slaves--and then wow! falls in love with the gorgeous daughter of this Missouri slaveholder. 

It happened; but when the two of them were engaged, Sam Grant was sent to the Mexican War as a quartermaster, a supply clerk, a job he despises. But one bad day on the battlefield, the captain calls for volunteers to runa dangerous mission which quartermaster Grant accomplishes with his incredible horsemanship. 

We're talking about none other than General Ulysses S. Grant, who did more to seal the fate of the Confederacy than any other Northern general. 

"War seems much less horrible to persons engaged in it," he told his betrothed, when he learned that he simply wasn't afraid of battle. When he returned from Mexico, he and Julia Dent were married. Be it known-- none from his abolitionist family attended.

Meanwhile, he was sent to the Pacific Northwest, where there was nothing to do--and it's out there, bored to tears and missing his wife and family that he starts drinking. How much? That's a question no one's ever answered definitively, but it's where he gets his glowing reputation as a lush. 

Sam Grant moves back to Missouri, then, dirt-poor, to his father's leather shop in Galena, Illinois, where he meets a tall, gaunt man named Lincoln, who, oddly enough, would, unlikely as it seems, become President. The Southern cannons fire on Fort Sumter, and America lurches fitfully into war with itself.

Lincoln needed an army. Illinois needed a regiment. The right people told Sam Grant to come back, to lead the military. Useless was pretty much a failure in Galena just then--one Christmas he had to sell his watch to buy gifts for his family. But when the right men asked, he pulled on his military jacket and became a new man.

At Padukah, Kentucky, he brought in hundreds of Yankees and commanded his first fight at a place called Belmont, Missouri. In February of 1862, the very first outright victory for the Northern armies occurred at Fort Donaldson, Tennessee, when Useless Grant secured a complete and total surrender. The useless son of a tanner he was, an undistinguished West Point grad. The U. S. Grant story, people say, is an American story.

News spread quickly. The Fort Donaldson takeover was the very first secure victory the Yankees had achieved. People were thrilled. It was big news in every last newspaper in the country. Lincoln hiked up Grant's rank to Major General. It was a blessing, a huge deal.

When some news correspondent sketched out a picture of this new guy, he couldn't help but render him as he often appeared, with the stub of stogie in the corner of his lips. All over the north, people stopped what they were doing to read about the big Northern victory accomplished by this bearded bear of a guy they'd never heard of.

But they loved it, loved him so much they sent the new Major General gifts of thanksgiving--I'm serious! 5000 cigars, which provided Unconditional Surrender Grant enough. General U. S. Grant went crazy, sometimes smoking 20 a day.

But he was a winner. Useless Grant the rock star. There'd be more battles, more and more bloody death. But this Grant guy, pulled out of an office in Galena, Illinois--the guy with the stogie--he made the Yankees winners.

Alice Munro 104

"The Beggar Maid" is the title story of its own collection (1991), an interwoven set of stories about Flo (the mom) and Rose (the daughter), whose interactions are so much the stuff of ordinary life that readers feel assured, from the first lines of a tale, that Munro has been sneaking peaks at their own lives and is, deliberately, gossiping about their (the reader's) own intimate goings-on.

Munro's great appeal--or so it seems to me--is the "homeliness" of her characters. They are people we know, so real that you can't help but think they're drawn from Ms. Munro own neighbors and friends. In "Beggar Maid" we meet Rose, a clearly gifted first-year college students who is not at all sure about her own strengths. which makes her less than able to feel at home with the attentions of Patrick,  a young man we recognize immediately as a rich kid, a graduate student in history, who is as unsure as she is about her place in life.

Their relationship is the substance, really, of the story. You could say that Alice Munro's "The Beggar Maid" is a love story because it is about love--sort of, or at least enough about love that we recognize its limits in their stuttering attempts to help each other build a relationship. Of course, the way things go, it's not a love story--exactly. Its two main characters don't end up together, despite the familiar shenanigans they suffer in tryin--oh, so hard. They're kids, even Patrick, the grad student, who is as immature as Rose is about love and identity.

Central to their immediate differences is their caste: Patrick is the son of wealthy parents from Vancouver, including a father who seems disgusted with Patrick's silly notions about a profession. Rose is a duck out of water at Patrick's house, just as alien as Patrick feels in Rose's baloney sandwich world. 

Class conflict is at the heart of things in "The Beggar Maid," but it's far from Munro's major fascination. Some may well fault Munro for her excessive examination with character, an examination accomplished at the expense of keeping the story moving. She fully expects that our interests, like hers, lie with the characters, rather than plot. If you get bored with "The Beggar Maid"--it's a long, long story--it's because Munro so adores her characters that she just can't say enough about them. If you too love Munro's characters, you'll love "The Beggar Maid."

Her fascination with these two simply doesn't end, and when it doesn't, a reader unfamiliar with Munro will get a good sense of her ability to stretch a short story into a novel, not simply by amassing words, but by moving unobstructed into a character's future, years and years, to etch out one or two more anecdotes from the story, in this case, of this woebegone relationship.

Years later,  Rose, who has gone on to become a famous Canadian journalist, spots Patrick, whose taken over a position in his father's businesses, in a faraway Canadian airport. Munro can't quit on these two. Their mutual acknowledgement of each other doesn't end up in a bedroom or a fight or some muted awkwardness. It's simply a momentary look, that's all, a look that Rose can't help but think is right out of Patrick's old playbook.

 

Was it? Munro is too good a writer to bring closure, and, that she doesn't just makes the whole story more distressingly human. You can't help but smile.

"The Beggar Maid" is a great story about two masterfully created characters who don't live on the page as fully as they will in your memory and your heart.

____________________________

How about, for next time--if you're reading along--"The Moons of Jupiter"?

Sunday morning meds--from Psalm 84

“For the Lord God is a sun and a shield.”

A marriage is breaking up. It’s not pretty, but then none of them are. This one involves a good friend about whom my wife and I have worried for several years.

The note came yesterday. The marriage is one short step away from being over, a legal step. For all intents and purposes, it’s over already, and they both know it. Despite their best intentions, despite their mutual grief over its demise, what they did together one Saturday before God and friends and family is on the brink of death.

An e-mail note bore the bad tidings, the kind of note that demands a response, any response, even when there are no words. So last night, I sat here and tried to say some things that would be helpful. I told him that I didn’t have any valuable advice, that it seemed to me as if nothing I could say would change anything. I told him I’d listen, and I told him that he had tons of friends here who would welcome him with open arms. That may have been the best thing I said because I know it’s true and so does he.

He said both he and his wife are clinically depressed and taking medications to counter it. I told him I understand, but really that’s not true, not totally.

I told him that I’d been writing meditations on the Psalms for years, but in my soul I’ve never really gotten beyond the very first word of the very first psalm—“blessed.” I told him I was still trying to understand what it means to be blessed.

]I said that the closest I could come to the meaning of that word is “happy.” But that word seems cheap. My grandson is happy when he sits at our table eating an orange popsicle. To be blessed is to be more than just happy, isn’t it?

Last week I had to write another e-mail to another friend, who is dying of lung cancer, a man who, not that many years ago, buried his wife, who had herself died of cancer. I’m not good at saying nice things. I don’t know why.

What I said in both cases, however, is part and parcel of this familiar metaphor—“God is a shield.” No matter what we experience, no matter how bad or pitiable or shocking, it seems to me that believers always know that that God himself stands somehow between us and sheer, unbearable horror.

I read a story yesterday in the paper about a reporter, a columnist, who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. At the end, his muscle system in a lock down, he communicated by pointing to letters on a keyboard. One of the last notes said, “I am so blessed.”

God is a shield. He doesn’t keep us from battle—witness my friends, witness the columnist punching out his last few letters. But God is a grate over the black hole of total meaninglessness, which is itself a kind of shield. We can know him. We can trust him. We can be blessed, even in our suffering.

Whoever wrote this gorgeous psalm never heard of Jesus Christ and therefore wrote far better than he knew—a definition of holy scripture, in a way. He didn’t know Christ, who is a shield, who carried off our sins and death and damnation.

God is a shield.

I could have said that in those two letters. But in both cases, I suppose I didn’t have to. Thank the Lord—both of the men I wrote already know very well that God is their shield. I don’t know if they think themselves blessed right now, but both of them know very well that they are.

Once upon a time in a tiny little Presbyterian church in a tiny little town on the prairie, two elders (there were only two) determined that that very little congregation--at best, maybe forty people, fewer present for Sunday worship--should break ties altogether with the big denomination of which they'd been a part for more than a century because their mainline mother had curtsied up, far too close, to sin and evil by tolerating--yes, that's right tolerating, homosexuals, queers, LBGTQ or whatever as members and even office-bearers of the church.

The people in this tiny Presbyterian church were good folks, all of them, but they were convinced that such abominations had no place among the righteous; and those who admitted such sinners to their fellowship were somehow disobeying the scriptural mandates which set those people apart. 

Let's be clear here--no queer people were lined up for admission to either the table or fellowship at this little church on the prairie. In other words, none of those people the little church's membership sought to banish were anywhere near that little Presbyterian church. Nonetheless, the little church's elders wanted it known far and wide that their little church would not admit such sinners. 

Because they wanted nothing to do with the liberal churches, they brought the matter to a vote to determine how many of their little number wanted to come clean and join a more conservative Presbyterian denomination.

We'd never joined the little Presbyterian church, although we often attended and enjoyed the fellowship for more than a year. It wasn't much like the denomination we'd been a part of for all of our lives, but there was something about the members' devotion to each other that we found, frankly, lovely.

But when the little church voted to leave the mother church, we left too. There were other reasons for our leaving, but this abiding sense of self-righteousness manifest in their declaring their own purity made us wince. 

In truth, we found it hard to believe that if some gay couple had determined to visit and worship with this tiny little dying church, the vast number of its members would love to have them. It's just that making the big pitch to avoid the horrors of liberalism seemed so righteous. 

So they left, and so did we.

This week's Synod of the Christian Reformed Church finds itself amidst that same dilemma. A church in a city in Michigan had a deacon--a woman--who was in a gay relationship. She was not a kid, had been a deacon before, and came to the office by vote of the congregation.

But that deacon lit a fire in a denomination full of churches not at all unlike the little Presbyterian church we attended. As a result, the denomination I've been a part of for most of my life is facing a choice between keeping gay people out and allowing them in. 

Which is only half-truth. Literally hundreds of congregations within the denomination are not about to elect gay office-bearers because they have no gay people, or at least none that have come out. 

A majority of members of the CRC want nothing to do with gay people and consider the Bible's hatred of them to be the determining factor in their exclusion. What happened in that tiny Presbyterian church is almost sure to happen in the entire CRC denomination. Some will feel blessed by barring gay people. Some will be certain of their righteousness.

Others will not. Others will leave, as we did when we left that little Presbyterian church. Some will be excluded from what the CRC comes to determine as good and true and right. 

It seems clear a majority will vote for exclusion. 

Will the denomination survive?

Time will tell.

It's "normal"

My guess is that the op-ed David French wrote for the NY Times yesterday is old hat to most of us, but if it is, it's a shame because what happened to him--what he tells us happened to him--is far too common. What he wrote may well be "old news," but like so many other occurrences in our churches and culture today, if we consider it "normal," we've lost something precious. 

You know what I mean. Yesterday a former President of these United States met, for the first time, with his parole officer. 

We've lost something if we don't stop for a minute and remark at how shockingly sad that really is. The story Mr. French tells isn't "normal" either, but the frequency by which such stories repeat themselves makes you think, almost, as if it were "normal."

French was a member of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a denomination inhabiting a theological base not far afield from the CRC. They're often devoutly Reformed, and proud of it. "Their" college is atop a mountain just outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee, Covenant College, where I myself did a stint as a visiting writer. An upcoming issue of Pro Rege will feature a story which includes two short essays, one by me and another related piece from Ed Kellogg, who taught art at Covenant for years and years, and many years ago did a visiting artist stint at Dordt.

Maybe these stories are old hat because they only happen where two political sides in our culture have at least for a time lived in harmony. Maybe, once upon a time, being Reformed has offered more toleration than other fellowships have. Tim Alberta's roots are similarly placed in a Presbyterian denomination that long ago left the mother church (Presbyterian in the United States). The Tim Alberta story is just another David French saga. 

You can read the story Stephen French writes yourself, but let me summarize. He considered himself a good and faithful member of the PCA, but his writing (he worked for the National Review, a mainline conservative mag) where his writing, his politics were aired. When those politics began to conflict with what other church members considered doctrinally (which is to say politically) sound, they let him know in the kind of brutal abundance his family found wearying--notes and letters, social media. 

The lead of the French saga goes like this:

This week, the leaders of the PCA will gather in Richmond, VA., for their annual General Assembly. The Presbyterian Church in America is a small, theologically conservative Christian denomination that was my family's church home for more than 15 years. 

Then this: "It just canceled me."

David French was asked to be a part of a roundtable discussion at the denominational synod. The flak started rolling in--in abundance--until denominational officials deemed it prudent to simply scratch the discussion because even a discussion might inflame the hearts of people who knew going in that David French thinks very, very little of Donald Trump.

Out goes David French. In comes Donald Trump, even in the PCA. That's the story that's old news, but it's also the story we should never begin to think of as "normal."

It would be a blessing to be a fly on the wall of a room where profs drop by for coffee at Covenant College. I'd love--love!--to listen in on what might be said.

I certainly hope they would agree with me--it's sad, and certainly not "normal."  

The Merchant--and Shylock

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:

Whether Shakespeare ever wrote any more beautiful lines, whether he conjured such richness and truth elsewhere with his words is not a question I'd like to answer. But these lines from Act IV, Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice, have to rank among the most beloved.

It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

When I was a. kid, The Merchant of Venice was a high school student's first taste of Shakespeare. Whether or not that was a blessed addition to standard curriculum can be argued I'm sure and likely has been, I first read The Bard back then, 60+ years ago. Basically, I remember two things: first, something or other about justice and mercy, and how the play argued for mercy--I remember the line as blessed. And I remember the Jew, Shylock, the abomination who walked the streets of Venice making a good profit off all of those Gentile businessmen who weren't really supposed to borrow money.

And I remember that dirty rat Shylock having some powerfully pertinent lines the middle somewhere, when he was the object of hate and derision by all those hypocrite Christians. "If you prick us, doth we not bleed?" he says, angered by the hate, the bigotry of time and place--and the play.

Merchant is a comedy, but the treatment of Shylock is so unjust and so pointed, arising from deeply entrenched bigotry in the minds and hearts of the Venetian culture. It's hard to watch the racist vitriol in the context of what is a rowdy band of conniving lovers. 

Which means that should directors choose to stage The Merchant of Venice today, it's impossible not to realize is something is going to have to be altered in the text. The anti-Semitism of the play itself is impossible to look past. nor can it be somehow x-out from the text. Shylock's lines are memorable because they're powerful--and unforgettable. It's been years since I first read the Merchant, but one of the two memories I have, from that time, is the acid truth of Shylock's accusation. 

The South Dakota Shakespeare Festival staged the play over the weekend in a city park in Vermillion. I had no idea what the Festival Director would do with the text, but I was sure she'd have to do something to dull the anti-Semitism. She had to do something, and whatever she'd do, it had to affect the play itself. 

The most obvious change she made was in gender; Shylock was a woman. Gender alters things significantly--or maybe it's just me. It's somehow easier to ratchet up hatred for a slimy male money-lender than it is for a equally shady lady in a prayer shawl doing the same thing, and that may be the case because we know immediately that this Shylock, a woman, has suffered not one but two prejudices, one because she is Jewish, and two because she is a woman. Something admirable there.

South Dakota's Shylock was a fiercely convincing actor who could not be considered slimy. She knew very well not only what she was in the eyes of the Venetian hypocrites, and she wasn't afraid to tell them, even when they knew. Whether or not this production altered lines is something I don't know, but there's no doubt that this woman, this Shylock, suffered in Venice. The anti-Semitism is very real, not cute or funny.

The director redid the play's denouement as well, bringing Lady Shylock back on stage to sing Shalom Aleichem with her daughter who left the partying behind (the marriage of Portia and Bassiano). It was a very touching ending that raised the two woman's heritage to something culturally important, not a blight.

The real artistic trick is to alter what has to be altered without injuring the achievement of the play. It seems to me you want the audience to feel as sincerely blessed by whatever alterations have to be made as they once were when they simply accepted the bigotry. To do any less would be to undercut the beauty of Shakespeare's Merchant.  

In the particular case of The Merchant of Venice, plain and simple, something has to be done. If it can be and still leave the audience enthralled, then something good has been done, as it was last weekend in Vermillion.

T

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 84

“Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere;. . .”

In Los Angeles, more than a century ago, when a black preacher/candidate named William Seymour, son of a slave, announced to a committee seeking a pastor for a Holiness church that he’d become convinced speaking in tongues was the true mark the Holy Spirit’s presence, he was, at that moment, dismissed from candidacy. So he went down the street and starting preaching to a small inter-racial group that soon started growing—and didn’t quit. Today, we call Seymour began “the Azusa Street Revival.”

To say Pentecostalism was born on the streets of LA is silly. Pentecost, when men walked around with little tongues of fire on their heads, was the beginning, the promised outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But those who know more about such things than I do claim Seymour’s enthusiastic preaching on Azusa Street launched the meteoric rise of Pentecostalism, a fellowship that is now a half a billion strong throughout the world.

Pentecostalism—unlike other more traditional forms of Christianity—isn’t so much a system of thought as it is an experience. It’s always dangerous to be so reductionistic, but it’s fair to say that one can’t talk about Lutheranism very long without someone lugging the phrase “justification by faith” into the discussion. Calvinism will always be equated with predestination, I fear.

Just as generally, Pentecostals are less interested in theological formulations than in the experience of the Holy Spirit, the manifestation of his presence, in speaking in tongues, in healing, in being baptized anew in the Spirit’s life. There’s no rigid system of thought to Pentecostalism, no doctrinal foundation. Shared experience creates the community.

For most of her life, my mother sort of envied Pentecostals and was often been anxious about why God almighty didn’t bless her with the gift of tongues. She once told me how a friend of hers, a pastor’s wife, explained to her it was very easy to speak in tongues, how if my mother would simply let her mouth fall open, the words—whatever words there were—would simply tumble out. I’ll never forget my mother telling me that story in intimate detail: her open mouth, her stuttering, her distress—emotional and spiritual—when the gift of tongues didn’t arrive.

Most believers long for spiritual experience—me too. I don’t envy the gift of tongues, but we all desire the selflessness at the heart of ecstatic vision. I feel that very desire in the psalmist’s words: “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere.” Every believer wants to be near unto God.

Regardless of my energy on Sunday mornings, the passion (or lack thereof) of my anticipation for worship, I recognize the thrill that resides in the utterance in this verse from Psalm 84, the writer’s memory of intimacy with God, and how that moment relieved him of the heavy baggage of this life as he was lifted up by the Holy Spirit into the very presence of the Lord.

The heart of this verse—and probably the whole psalm—is rich and abiding religious experience. One comes closest to God only the vivid experience of his presence, by losing oneself in the all-consuming comfort of divine grace.

It’s all any of us know of heaven, I’d say. And all we need to, I suppose; and in this vale of tears, all we’ll ever get.

People experience faith in a thousand different ways. It’s patently silly not assign a specific behavior or time or place.

I’m told LA has at least a hundred different ethnic restaurants. That sounds great.

But I don’t think I’d find the comfort of grace on Azusa Street.

For me, right now, this morning, grace is what turns the fields around me perfectly Elysian.

 

Morning Thanks--a precious gift

 

It was taken by some unknown Army photographer, who snapped it and a thousand others that day, then went to the darkroom and sorted through the negatives. This one caught his eye for reasons unknown because that unknown Army photographer had no idea--well, he must have known, like everyone else, that something big was in the making; but that unknown Army photographer could not have dreamed of what exactly was to come just hours later.

He simply could not have known that the invasion at Normandy would require almost 12,000 aircraft and 7000 ships and landing craft. He could not have guessed that the troop total taken across the English channel on June 6 and a few days could number 326,000 troops. He could not have imagined that the vision for the next few days would be quite simple really--throw everything you've got at the Normandy coast in hopes of buckling Nazi strength and establishing a front that would eventually push all the way to Berlin, where some of these guys--or their buddies could take out Hitler and end the war in Europe. Throw it all. Throw everything.

There were others, of course, but the only guy in the picture that photographer shot and developed that day, the only one who honestly knew what was to come was the General, Dwight Eisenhower, who, almost as a surprise, visited his troops, the men ready for what was to come.

But the fact is, even they didn't know. The men in this picture might well have recognized that something momentous awaited them the next day. I'm sure that some of them understood that they would meet bullets that would shorten or end their lives. But the only one who knew the story ahead of time here was the boss, General Eisenhower, who had prepared a statement for the public should the whole operation fail.

That photograph, to me at least, is one of the most memorable ever taken because there's so much more that doesn't meet the eye. He knew, Eisenhower knew that most of the "boys" in this picture wouldn't see another dawn. He knew very well he was greeting a gang who would see and experience some level of hell neither they nor the world would ever forget.

It's not hard to be silent on June 6, even 80 years later. It's not particularly difficult to lose yourself in the stories of what happened that day, what all of us should never forget--that those men with painted faces willingly ran into a rain of bullets that would cut most of them down, many before they ever got to the beach. But they went, and about 4500 went down, 2500 of the men in the picture some unknown American photographer shot.

I don't care if our President seemed to falter for a moment in the middle of all the commemorative events, the idea of Donald Trump, good buddies with David Pecker, Stormy Daniels, and Michael Cohen, standing there in silence and awe and reverence is impossible to imagine. 

I'm glad Joe Biden hugged all those vets in wheelchairs, that he spoke to each of them, held their hands, listened to them pass along what wisdom they could. I can't imagine the other, speechless in the deep shadows of so much selflessness. 

This morning I'm thankful for him and the immense gift presented to us by all of those "boys," and hundreds of thousands more caught in that candid shot on June 5, 1944. 

I'm thankful for what was so selflessly given eighty years ago on the beaches of Normandy.

For June 6, 1944

 

I didn't know him--couldn't have. He was killed four years before I was born. For years I wouldn't have known his story any more fully than I might have known the stories of any other veteran who didn't return from Europe or the South Pacific, any of 16 million Americans who served our country in World War II. 

I knew my dad spent the war years aboard a tugboat, pushing destroyers hither and yon in the South Pacific. Eventually I heard my step-father talk about his long trek from Normandy to Berlin in the motor pool, where he and his gearhead buddies repaired everything that should have moved and couldn't--jeeps and tanks and dozens of deuce-and-a-halfs. Those two were the only WWII stories I knew in even modest detail.

Gerrit Ter Horst's story slowly came into focus years later. Ter Horst was an Orange City boy, a farm kid who'd be 108 years old on September 4 of this year. He went to Christian School and Northwestern Academy, where he graduated in 1935. In telling the community the news of his death, the newspaper makes claims Orange City-ites would want to hear: "He was faithful as a church member, a member of C. E. and the Sunday School of the First Reformed Church."

On January 23, 1943, in Virginia, Pvt. Ter Horst began his first fourteen weeks of military training, along with a buddy named Ken Jacobs. The two stayed together for more than a year. From Virginia, Gerrit went to a Replacement Depot in Pennsylvania, and then New York. In late May he and literally millions of other GIs, including my father-in-law, set sail for Europe, the war zone. In the entire time he served, Gerrit Ter Horst was never furloughed, never saw again the beloved he'd left behind. 

His stone in the Orange City cemetery carries the date of his death as June 6, 1944, D-day, 75 years ago today. 

Pvt. Ter Horst--one of the letters calls him "Gerry"--served in the Combat Engineer Corps. From this point on, the story I can tell is based on lore passed along through the years.

Somewhere on the English shore, Gerry likely spent the night of June 5 wide awake, conscious of something huge in the wind, something far bigger than anything he could have imagined. The skies were so full of planes you could walk on them. 

Sometime during that night, he may have been one of the troops who saw General Eisenhower come through the lines. In all likelihood, surrounded by buddies, some of them he couldn't have known, all of them friends, buddies, he was likely as ready as he could ever be, his ample gear in perfect condition. He had to be scared. Everyone was. His imagination probably wasn't broad enough to conceive the scale of Operation Overlord. No one could.

I'm guessing Gerrit Ter Horst knew his mission: to lay in whatever explosive devices he could and thereby destroy the iron works Nazis had set into the shoreline just off the beach. Get himself out of the landing craft and take out whatever mines or barriers he could find, quickly and efficiently, to make the invasion possible.

Hundreds of landing craft rolled up to the Normandy shore that day, thousands of GIs looked to secure a toehold on beaches heavily fortified by German armaments. Many in that very first wave never made it to sand, dozens--maybe hundreds--drowned. Those who stumbled and sloshed to the beach faced withering machine gun fire that shredded the front. The U. S. Army suffered 2500 casualties that morning on Omaha Beach, all of it 80 years ago today. 

Pvt. Gerrit Ter Horst was one of those who didn't make it to shore, one of those who knew the invasion only from the water. The story goes that he no more than stepped out of the landing craft and caught the bullet or bullets that killed him. That he never accomplished his mission doesn't make him any less a great hero. 

I have a stake here, telling this story. One of the beloved Gerry Ter Horst left behind was the woman to whom he was pledged to marry, a woman that newspaper story names as Bertha Visser, the 1940 Tulip Queen. On June 6, 1944, I'm sure it was impossible for her to visualize her future without Pvt. Ter Horst, without Gerry. 

But a telegram from the Army ended that dream long before it could have come true. I have no idea how Bertha Visser endured that sadness or dealt with what had to be her own immense grief. That she may not have been alone in her deep sadness didn't mean that what she'd suffered wasn't devastating to heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Just a few years later she married my father-in-law and had a daughter, who became my wife. Bertha Visser Van Gelder was my mother-in-law.

When she was alive, I couldn't help thinking it would be inappropriate to ask her how she dealt with that horrific loss. Did the man she married fill what must have been her grievous emptiness? Did his presence send the shadows away? How long did it take to forget? Did the sadness ever leave? How did you find comfort?-- all questions I never asked.

What I know is that one day a young woman once betrothed to a man who died in the shallow water off the Normandy beach took some time before she walked downtown Orange City, stepped into a jewelry store, then lifted her hand to the jeweler. It was time, finally, to remove that diamond from her finger.

So she did. 

I like to think it was the jeweler who thought it a good idea for her to exchange that ring for a beautiful desk clock she could set anywhere in the house, one of those nautical clocks that chimes at any hour if you so choose. Whether or not he did, when she left the store, that clock was in both her hands. 

That clock now is ours today. It doesn't chime; it's not plugged in. But it has a very special longer and sadder story than anything else among our most treasured possessions. 

Even though he never had a day of furlough, even though she hadn't seen him for a year and a half, even though she likely never forgot the day the telegram came or what she was doing or how short her breath must have come, all these many years later, I like to think the story that nautical clock still tells is only somewhat about D-Day or war or death itself. 

More to the point, I'd like my mother-in-law's grandchildren, and theirs after them, to know that old, otherwise indistinguishable nautical clock is really all about life, even very much about their own.

________________ 

I've posted this story every other year around June 6. You may have read it before.

The Soundtrack of the American Prairie--The Dickcissel

I'm lucky to have grabbed a shot of my neighbor last night. The dickcissels behind our place are not particularly rare, and I love having them back again when they arrive in early summer. They're no bigger than a parakeet, and the endless ratcheting they make seems to make them almost akin. To call what they do "singing" is a stretch. It's a bleat, rough and horse, nothing like the robins’ varied melodies. 

Their goofy name—dickcissel--derives from the great ceaseless noise they put up:  "dick-cissel-cissel-cissel." Something like that. Cornell Bird Lab says their hardcore bleat is the “soundtrack of the American prairies.” That’s them, and that’s us.

The one I got into my camera was a female, although calling gender with birds is as perilous as it is with human beings. The male has a golden chest and a regal, almost monarchial crest, which makes them look like miniature meadowlarks, which, by the way, we've never seen out back. Love to, but the likelihood of picking up their songs increases only as you drive west. 

Most every year we've lived out here we've been blessed by a pair, at least, of dodgy little dickcissels. They're so tiny it's impossible to believe they hoof it all the way to South America for winter. I'm not making that up. Bird lovers claim that dickcissels pick up stakes mid-August to begin their trek, usually teaming up in impossible numbers. When, finally, they arrive in South America, late September or October, they gather with a million others.

Those are some serious numbers--imagine the noise. Amazing little things really--little frequent flyers who pull on Superman suits and fly across the world. Where do they carry their passports.

When I say I'm lucky to have got a picture, I mean they come from the factory in all-over camo that makes them hard to spot even though they're gutsy little chirpers who don't spook. You've got to get up relatively close before they take wing, but then ours seem rarely to leave our outback. 

Their diet is less than desirable—most species of bugs for appetizers, grasshoppers, crickets, caterpillars, beetles as entrees. If you find that disgusting, go ahead and slap the multitudes these little fritters devour in a week.  

When they're filling a prairie landscape with that noise of theirs, the best place to look is high places. Last night this young lady staked out some territory high atop one of the quaking aspens, making all kinds of noise despite the fact that I was right there, poking around with a camera. Still, it took me five minutes to find her, but then she wasn't a dime's worth bigger than the aspen leaves all around. There she was, riding the top branches, distinguished only by occasional movements.

Just like that, she left, but kept on singing. I walked out back after her, following all that scratchy noise. Took me some time, but I spotted her again at the farthest end of the acreage riding some spiny weed whose name I don't know--again, barely visible. 

I dream of an occasional bobolink out back, but I think I need more ground to attract them. Once upon a time I saw a couple along the Big Sioux in a broad stretch of prairie at Blood Run. A bobolink would be a beauty of a blessing. So would a meadowlark. 

But having this little lady and her beau around for a chunk of summer is its own rich reward. Come late spring, I look forward to their showing up, as they must after yet another endless pilgrimage. They're the only South Americans I've got in the backyard and the fact is, I've even grown to like their ratchet-y song. They're a tiny bird with a big voice and a tongue-twisting name: dickcissel. 

Maybe today I'll see if I can get a shot of her royal beau.

Buffalo Chip and the Standing Bear story

[Yesterday's Heather Cox Richardson filing noted that a significant event in the history of the republic occurred exactly 100 years ago, when some Native people were given the right to own land, to be citizens of the U.S. of A.

I wasn't familiar with the particular story she mentioned, but I know another, a story that transpired not all that far from here, when Standing Bear, a headman of the Poncas, stood up in a court of law and tore apart contemporary legal practice in order to assert that he and his people were citizens of these United States. 

Standing Bear's willful assertion of his citizenship is yet another story in which the nation stretched anew to move past and over its earliest limitations.]

A full rack of ribs, with beans and slaw, will cost you twenty bucks at Buffalo Chip Saloon and Bar, Cave Creek, AZ. Sounds reasonable, even inviting. But seriously, who'd want to eat anything served up at a saloon named by way of ruminant excrement?

Then again, if you know anything about the Plains, you know that once upon a time buffalo chips were pearls of great price. Hard as it is to imagine, most white settlers--as well as their Native neighbors—were joyful users of what thirty million bison left plentifully behind in their wanderings. Lots of kids, all kinds of hyphenated Euro-Americans, grew up on victuals cooked up over buffalo chips. Some claimed a buffalo-chip fire created a supper that needed no pepper. I wouldn't know.

In a land so bare naked as the plains, if you wanted to survive you had to make do. If you had nothing but a potbelly stove, and if there were no trees to speak of, you sent the kids out after buffalo chips. Fill a sack and--Voila!--you stay warm and cook a meal.

Buffalo chips added to pioneer folklore. Real estate chiselers liked to say the plains were a fine place to live because "the wind draws the water and the cows cut the wood." All I know is it had to be tough for my own Dutch-American ancestors out here because where cleanliness is next to Godliness, bringing manure into the house must have seemed like sin.

So I'm out tramping around Ponca country not long ago when I come up on gravestone with a comical name. I'm not Ponca or Omaha or Yankton Sioux, and I'll admit that I can't help smile occasionally at Native names. I know a couple whose daughter-in-law was named "Kills a Hundred,” a woman who told me her proud Sioux name had a definite downside: it limited her professional choices. "Imagine the the hospital intercom suddenly blurts out, 'Calling Dr. Kills a Hundred.'" For her, she told me, medicine wasn’t an option.

The gravestone I bumped last week into belonged to an "Indian chief of the Ponca Tribe," a man named "Buffalo Chip." Cemeteries don't joke around much, but when I saw "Buffalo Chip" on that stone, I had to smile. But a man like me, a man named after a sheep, is not one to talk.

According to his stone, Buffalo Chip probably died a Christian--there's a supplicant at the foot of a cross cut into the granite, and the words "Rock of Ages" in a banner beneath the image.

What's more, the date of his death, "June 13, 1906" and his age, "80 years" and the fact that he's here beside the Missouri River means much of his story can be known because he had to be among those Poncas the government considered hostiles, even though the Poncas never lifted a finger against any cavalry. Washington determined the Ponca's future was going to be in Indian Territory. End of story.

Some Poncas, Standing Bear among them, refused. His great American story is a saga for another time.

But history tells us that, like Standing Bear, Buffalo Chip, "Indian Chief of the Poncas," refused to leave the very broad shoulders of the Missouri River he considered home. With Standing Bear, Buffalo Chip likely walked twice, back and forth, between northern Oklahoma and northern Nebraska, through weather that took a terrible toll in death and suffering on people determined only to be free and live here at home on the earth where their elders rested.

When the cavalry insisted they return, once again, to Indian Country, Buffalo Chip looked the law in the eyes and flat out told them no. This Buffalo Chip, with no malice or rancor, simply told the soldiers they'd have to shoot him right then and there because he and his folks were not going back. True story.

You can't help but smile when you know the whole incredible saga of Buffalo Chip. Here’s his stone and what’s yet there of his mortal coil, beneath an aging gang of cedars. Here he is, happily, I’d guess, more than a century later, at home.

May he rest in peace.

Here's the story

Sometime around Thanksgiving, I sat on the couch and leaned over a board game for an hour or so. I realized at the time that my position wasn’t ordinary, but I don’t remember feeling anything that gave me any pain. However, that afternoon’s board game was, I believe, the beginning.

Except that there was another beginning.

In 2000, something snapped in my lower back, causing all kinds of pain. I had surgery which, thankfully, rid me of my pain but left me with a footfall that was barely noticeable. I knew I had it, however, since my gait was clearly affected. If I walked two miles, I was taxed badly; I could work out in the gym, sweat far more profusely, lift weights, do all sorts of things that appeared to burn more calories, but didn’t leave me as sore as simply walking. I’ve always attributed that to the footfall.

 

Sometime after the Thanksgiving back ache, I went in to our doctor because the back pain was increasing and my life was beginning to be affected by that pain. He gave me drugs for the pain and sent me to physical therapy. I happily did what PT wanted me to do, and felt relief. 

I also scheduled treatment from "the pain doctor." I can’t say that I felt much relief from the shots, but at this time someone gave me the nerve drug which appeared to me to have positive effects. There were times—days, even—when I experienced no pain at all. 

Whatever happened at Thanksgiving affected the footfall, however, which became many times worse than it had been. If I didn’t use a cane, I used a walker. For some time then, in the early part of the year, most of my attention was the footfall. 

Then, for no apparent reason, the sciatica returned and increased, and when it became really difficult and painful, I contacted Dr. Jeltema’s nurse to get me an appointment in Dakota Dunes, rather than wait for Dr.  Samuelson, the back surgeon, to come to Orange City. 

Late February, I went to Dakota Dunes and met with him. He looked over the x-rays and told me if I wanted to have surgery, he’d do it—he said he was quite sure he could relieve the pain, but he doubted his ability to do anything about the footfall.

 

He did fit me for a brace that strengthens my walk and definitely does its job. I wear it whenever I leave the house and often while I’m here at home.

When I told Dr. Hansen, by email note, what the surgeon had said, he asked me how I was feeling, pain-wise, and I told him—and it was true—that I wasn’t feeling any pain and hadn’t for about a week, not because of any treatment or drug but because the difficult pain seemingly, on its own, determined to leave.

At that point, Dr. Hansen told me he’d advise that if I didn’t have pain, I should not have surgery. That was fine with me. The pain, however, came back.

I continue to take pain relievers when I need them or anticipate I will need them. Neither seem to relieve the pain well, however. I do take the yellow pills, and, right or wrong, I still attribute to them some significant relief earlier in this story. 

On May 7, I had an appointment with Dr. Hansen, who advised seeing Dr. Muilenburg and a urologist.  One Saturday morning, experiencing lots of pain, I went in and saw Dr. Faber, who was on call. I told him that most of my pain was in my left knee. He ordered x-rays and told me that if there was anything Dr. Muilenburg would see it soon, when I had an appointment with him.

Then, still early May, when very late one sleepless night I was moving slowly around the room, my left knee simply gave way, and did so unexpectedly with the result that all my weight fell directly on to my flexed left foot, the foot affected by sciatic pain.

 

Dr. Muilenburg looked at x-rays of my knee, x-rays that had been taken when I complained of (and had) lots of pain in my left knee. He told me that he’d seen knees in my condition that were replaced, but I told him that, at that time, the most intense pain was no longer in my knee but the foot I’d fallen on. He ordered x-rays of my foot that showed that I’d sprained just about every ligament in and around my foot when I’d fallen on it. 

My left foot, yet this morning, is sore, as is the region all around. The swelling has now gone down some, and most of the colors are thankfully gone, but that foot is still a real problem.

Then, on Memorial Day, something transpired in the house of horrors that is my backyard. Maybe ten carefully calculated steps out of bed, some whiplash happened back there again, but when it did it pushed every needle I could read, no matter which way I turned, into a #10. Not a picnic. I called a couple of people who have back problems who said to go into emergency, where, they said, it was likely I’d get a shot of something akin to morphine, which would at least alleviate the pain.

So off we went, 10:00 or so, to meet with Dr. Faber, who’d dealt with me before and happened to be on call in Emergency. While my suggested treatment wasn’t some form of morphine, he did assign a couple of prescriptions which we’ve picked up and started taking. 

I asked Dr.  Faber about what could be done, and his answer didn’t surprise me. I could return to Dr. Jeltema for another shot (and more perhaps), or I could let Dr. Samuelson, the surgeon, have a shot at my back—he did, after all, let me know he could get rid of pain. 

So that’s where I am right now—my back is very tender and my left leg is really weak. 

I’m writing all of this to explain what the heck is wrong with me. I’m tired of being really tired from lack of sleep from pain at night, pain that arrives unbidden and drives from the groin area down my left thigh and into the knee. My mobility is getting worse and worse. I need a cane or a walker to get around the house and into other buildings. The device the surgeon’s office in Dakota Dunes gave me is wonderful but cumbersome. I don’t go out without it and even wear it around the house. But, honestly, the footfall is the least of my problems. 

Those who read this blog closely must have noticed changes in the last six months. My physical condition has made keeping up difficult. Bear with me. I'm trying to get some strength back.

Thanks for listening to me go on and on.