Butterflies and Black Hawk

This statue of Black Hawk, head man of the Sac and Fox who were residents way out east in Wisconsin (and farther east then that earlier), sits in a park I stumbled upon on my way back home from Chicago. The think about him is that he eventually got angry with the white liars and determined to fight to regain the land where the old ones, his ancestors were buried. 

Black Hawk made war while Keokuk, another Sac chief, determined the best course of action for his people, 200 years ago now, was cooperation. There were, after all, just too many whites, and Keokuk knew it. Black Hawk fought, he lost hundreds of his people, and was sentenced to life across the river in a place eventually called Iowa.. 

Somewhere near Rock Island, I got off the freeway to find the park that commemorated his life. My first teaching job out of college was spent at Blackhawk High School, South Wayne, WI. I loved it. I've long ago tried to know what I could about the man whose face adorned the front page of our student newspaper.

Like Crazy Horse, Black Hawk was a fighter, would only back down once he noticed that the Mississippi River ran too thick with his people's blood.

I wanted that picture up there, but the grounds were just full of butterflies, magnificent flying machines outfitted with so much grandeur they almost hurt the eye. These shots are all from the Black Hawk State Historic Site.

 

You can't help wondering just how it is these delicate creatures make it in the tough world they're in. Than again, I'm always thankful they do.

Right there at the Black Hawk Memorial, I just happened to show up for a show. It was June of 2009. 

Go make toilets!

Sometime midway through my sophomore year in college, I decided to quit. That was 1968, almost 60 years ago, and if I could list the reasons, I would--but it's too long ago. I know it had much to do with identity, which was forming in me right then, as it should have, given that I was almost certainly facing the draft had I walked away from a conservative little college in the northwest corner of nowhere. 

I went to the Dean, to let him know I was throwing in the towel. I knew him, and he knew me. He'd served as principal of the tiny Christian school I attended years before in Oostburg, Wisconsin, just a big south of the town he lived it, Sheboygan.  Douglas Ribbens had the personality of a coyote; his quirkiness was legendary, even then. As I remember, the conversation went like this:

Me: Dr. Ribbens, I'm dropping out.

Dr. Ribbens: Go make toilets.

That was it.  Don't slam the door behind you.

What we both knew was that if I'd go home I'd likely end up working at Kohler Company. If you've never heard of Kohler, check the lettering on your latrine. He was telling me to go home and figure out who I was--maybe that would help. It was great advice even though his behavior would get him fired today. 

I thought about it and stayed.

I've been thinking of the possibilities had I not stayed at Dordt College that year, even though my grade point was basement level. What would I have become? 

I say that because as if out of nowhere I got a call from a childhood friend, another member of the baseball team that was outstanding when we were seniors, a kid who could through junk so hard to hit that bad guy batters would twist into pretzels trying to whack the ball. 

What's worse, he'd giggle. Notably.

Great guy, who lives half a block from the Presbyterian church he's attended since he was baptized, and a half black from the house where I grew up years ago. He says he sort of keeps an eye on things nowadays, just to see what's going on at our place. 

There's so much to say about the roles he played in my life, but for now I'll just tell you that he told me the coho were hitting last week. He and his son and grandson went out the found them, "twenty feet of water--that's it!" where the temperature was luxurious. Right there they stayed and spun in their limits, three days in a row, three guys.

I'll do the math. That's fifteen wonderful coho salmon (all that eating!) times three guys plus three days in a row. I don't know about tonnage, but that's a lot of sweet pink salmon. 

This old friend of mine didn't go to college, he went to war, and when he returned he went home and stayed there, on the lakeshore, to do battle with the big fish that suddenly were just then beginning to prosper once more in Lake Michigan. He hung dry wall, and was a builder in a region that rapidly grew new housing. He worked hard all during his life, kept a boat and a tractor to bring it down to the water, had kids, watched them play ball the way he and I did long ago. And, oh yeah, every Saturday morning, Bible study with a great bunch of guys, he said. And every once in a stretch, coho.

What would I have been had I listened to the Dean's blistering response to my leaving college? The more my old buddy talked, the more I couldn't help but believe I'd have done okay. Maybe spent some time out there on the high seas when the big ones were hitting, you know?

I stayed in school. My GPA bounced up almost immediately.

But I can't help saying that on Memorial Day morning, when he called--he'd heard I was down--I couldn't help doing a little second-guessing.

Memorial Day

 

When you're a frequent cemetery wanderer, as I am, it's impossible to miss the importance of someone's having served in the military . Today, people put up all kinds of things around their loved ones' stones, lights and mirrors and even toys; but, mostly, all you know about whoever is buried beneath the stone is the years of his or her life and sometimes, maybe, a Bible verse. 

What you can't miss, today especially, is the flags or markers or whatever the Legion Auxiliary (or whoever) puts up on those sites that hold the mortal remains of men and women who served their country at war. They're everywhere. 

Spouses often share stones, but then again sometimes not. Sometime a wanderer simply has to deduce who was married to whom--and who were their children.

But service in war? It's there in red, white, and blue, often enough including rank and theater--"Sgt. Will Williams, U.S. Army, World War II, South Pacific." Having served is huge in cemeteries.

I sometimes wonder what place my father-in-law's war-time experience had in his memory today--say, a week or so before his 96th birthday. Once upon a time in the motor pool, he followed the Allied Front from Normandy to Berlin, repairing tanks and jeep and trucks, anything with a motor. He was in for years, didn't come home until The Bomb ended the war in the Pacific, where he was bound when it dropped. Hiroshima changed the course of history, but for him its blessing was more immediate--it brought him home.

I heard him talk about his war experience, nothing bloody, but a trip through a goodly chunk of Europe that a farm boy from Iowa could not have imagined he'd ever take. One Saturday, at the funeral of his sister-in-law, we went out to the cemetery along a road he said he and his little sister had walked plenty often, just about two miles into town to school. For a moment, I swear, I was back there, pavement gone, two ruts cut in the dirt, a mop-haired kid in bib overalls lugging a Karo syrup lunch bucket, mid-Depression, his little sister dallying behind.

It's impossible for me to imagine that eighth-grade farm boy just a few years later as a grease monkey in fatigues and a steel helmet, a monkey wrench in his hand as he works beneath some half-track somewhere in the dark, cold woods of a German countryside. Or in England with tens of thousands of others Yankees, just waiting for a boat trip to Normandy. 

What flashes did his memory create when all of that was far, far behind him? How much of what he remembered arose from those years so incredibly far away, when every day and night he'd be working on M4 Shermans, an unimaginable job to a kid who plowed fields with horses?

It had to be, without a doubt, the most unforgettable experience of his lifetime. What's a wedding night compared to two years across Europe through England, France, the Netherlands, and Germany.  Sometimes I wonder if his closest friends in all of life weren't the men with him under those jeeps, men he rarely saw once he was came home, but men he never forgot.

An uncle and an aunt of mine worked day and night putting soldiers back together. They were medics and saw more horror--my father used to say--than any man or woman should. How did the two of them feel the fog of war once it was over. When my uncle came home, he worked as a barber, cutting men's hair. What images of he knew and saw never washed out of his memory? 

All those cemetery markers, those little American flags, aren't just a tribute but a reminder that some memories don't evaporate and won't really be buried.

Just a couple days ago, I went up to a woman I'd interviewed for a story a decade ago. She and her husband had given me a tour of the country where they'd lived when they were married, a beautiful section of Sioux County. We drove on the yard of the house they walked into right after their wedding, in fact.

She didn't recognize me, didn't know me at all. She's well into her nineties. I asked her if she remembered showing me the home place ten years ago. 

"We were in the underground, you know. My father went out. . ." and she started in on a story cobbled together from images out of control.

"We were with the underground, you know?" she said, three or four times, as if it were something that simply had to be documented. She was a girl in occupied Holland, and for whatever reason all she could could say came in shards of a story she couldn't control. It was war, a memory of war.

Today, Memorial Day, we honor those who served, whose memories hold photo albums full of images the rest of us can not imagine. We put up flags on cemetery plots because, combat or motor pool or MASH tent, what those men and women went through, all of them, was something only they really know. 

Truth be known, in just about every situation, those men and women were unlikely to have any more formative experience. 

Walk through the cemetery down the road, amble along the gravestones, and all you'll ever know of hundreds of the deceased is when they were born, when they died, and whether they served in war.

There's always more to the story, of course, but it's all that's there above ground, all that shouldn't be forgotten.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 42

 

“My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, 

saying to me all day long, 

‘Where is your God?’"

 I am, regretfully, descended from a distinguished line of fulsome hypochondriacs.  A former minister of ours, who was once my grandfather’s preacher, once told me that a half century ago, when my grandfather was felled suddenly by a heart attack, an old friend of both of them appeared shocked. “Maybe he was sick—we should have believed him for all those years,” that friend said.        

 It’s in the genes.  Maybe I shouldn’t go that far.  Can hypochondria be in the genes?  Talk amongst yourselves.

 My mother had it too, as any of her kids will tell you.  There was always something ailing her.  The doctor could never quite find it, which meant she just saw more of them.  My mother—bless her soul and I loved her dearly—was not a good argument for nationalized medicine.

Maybe I have it too—I’d like to think not, but who knows?  When first we were married and living in Arizona, I started thinking my arrhythmia, a condition I’ve had for as long as I can remember, was developing into something awful.  It’s embarrassing to admit it, but I was under some stress at the time, newly married and unsure of myself in graduate school, problems which, today, seem all that life-threatening. 

I went to see a doctor—we’d just moved so someone I’d never seen before.  He took some tests, shrugged his shoulders, and said that I needed someone to tell me I wasn’t sick. Which he did. End of symptoms.  I am my mother’s child.

 Maybe David’s talk about pain in this verse—“bones in mortal agony”--is overstatement.  He’s trying to make a point about his spiritual anguish, drawing on his poetic license.  It’s a figure of speech.

 On the other hand, maybe his physical pain is hypochondria. The tentacles of his stress reach into his joints, his muscles, even his bones. He hurts all over. Pass the Tylenol, please.

Maybe depression—his deep sense of alienation from God—is the occasion for his physical ailments.  Maybe he’s got thyroid problems, a frequent association.  Maybe he had some chronic pain—an old war injury—before he felt “down in the dumps.” Chronic pain often accompanies or even triggers depression.

My sisters and I often shook our heads in wonder at our long-suffering father, who always appeared to believe my mother’s phantom pains were real.  He must have learned—as we had to—that denying those pains was never going to get him or her anywhere because what Mom felt in her bones—real or not—was always real.

Good doctors will admit that we are all more than the sum of our physical parts.  In hospitals all over the world, miracles still happen; and we call them that because we don’t know—nobody does—how human will intersects with our physicality. Today, I stumble around with neuropathy, looking for magic cures. I'm ready to try CBD. 

That’s why I believe David's testimony, even though I’m a life-long scoffer.  The pain he felt in being seemingly abandoned by God crept, cancer-like, into every atom of his fiber.  He could feel the presence of God’s absence in his bones, in his cartilage. 

I don’t think it’s overstatement. God seemed gone, and that pain, to him, was real—as it can be to us, hypochondriacs all.

 Can there be great pain for those who believe he’s always near? Perhaps they’re the only ones who feel it?

The man got trumped

Yesterday, President Trump's rude behavior toward the President of South Africa was worse than rude--it was despicable, AND his charges were both foul and false. Whatever materials he used to make his point were wrong--white farmers are not in any way, shape, or form are victims of racial genocide. He's just wrong about that. If it weren't so awful, it would be laughable. Yes, there is crime--and the records show levels of violent crime to be significantly higher than it is here; but those levels are vastly worse among South African Blacks than Whites or Colored (mixed race). 

What's more, our dear President's brash tongue-lashing of another country's leader shows his dreadful lack of historical understanding. He appears to know nothing of South Africa's racial history or of its apartheid past, when the law not only favored the country's white minority, it discriminated, by statute, against its own South African black majority.

South African demographics are amazing. The country's total population is just under 70 million people, 80% of whom call themselves "African" and can be judged racially as being black. White populations number far, far less--as low as five million; a third category, "Colored (mixed race) actually slightly outnumber the White population. 

Any discussion of crime in South Africa has to include some reference to race. 

Consider this: Native American populations in this country tend to have higher crime rates, higher rates of drug use, alcoholism, broken marriages. Native people in this country make up less than ten percent of the population. Now, given the history of Native populations in this country, suppose the racial levels were somehow equivalent here--80 percent of country was Native American and roughly ten percent were White, whose ancestors simply moved into the country and took it and its riches. Might we expect that there would be considerably higher crime rates in this country, not because some races simply are more criminal (racists like to believe that), but because the history of violence and repression has made the Native people, overwhelmingly bigger than the white minority, hungry for their own share of the country's riches?

Some twenty years ago, I read a novel I've never been able to forget by one of South Africa's most honored writers, J. M. Coetzee. That novel, Disgrace, painfully explores the effects the country's tangled and twisted racial history has made of its justice.  

Yesterday, the President of the United States of America proved himself to be the pig many of us believe him to be, treating his Oval Office guests as if they were themselves criminals--and using Trumped up facts to do it. 

We do South Africa best by honoring and praising statesmen like the man he hosted yesterday, President Cyril Ramaphosa. He deserves so much better than he got. 

Instead, he got Trump.

Beloit, IA--June 12, 2009

My old friend Harold Aardema used to talk about Beloit, Iowa, a tiny burg right on the Big Sioux River, where once upon a time there stood an orphanage for kids, some of whom died there, he said, and we're buried in a small local cemetery. Occasionally, on a trip to Sioux Falls, we'd pass that way just to see the most beautiful land in the whole of northwest Iowa, the gentle hills along the river. 

Then, a student told me about the place, reminded me of the stories Aardema used to tell, the hills where an immigrant family set down roots. One of the kids, a bachelor gardener, tended Sioux Center's flower beds as assiduously as he did the scholars at Sioux Center Christian School, a man, a stern principal named only A. J. Boersma. 

I have a xerox copy of his life story I still would like to publish someday, even though its potential for sales is, sadly, even lower than a book of mine I'd like to publish. It's a grand story of rags-to-riches, Dutch Reformed style. I don't know that he ever made a million, but that doesn't mean he wasn't, in his own special way, fabulously wealthy. 

Anyway, I thought I'd go out and find that cemetery, and I did. But more than that, I found myself in the middle of caramel omniscience, gently breaking morning skies in a light fog that could not have been more tastefully drawn.

So, here's the catch I made the Saturday morning, one day in early June when I hit things just right. 

Don't mind me saying it--the visit was now 14 years ago--but that early morning sky could hardly be more beautiful, so I kept shooting.

Gorgeous shots abounded, to say the least. All I had to do is hit the shutter. The composition was by an artist named the Creator of Heaven and Earth. You may have heard of him. 

And, oh, yes, there was this, a memorial to the kids  who died here.

But bigger than death was the life all around, the sheer beauty of the land awakening with the Creator's touch on a Saturday morning in June, Beloit, Iowa. That's the Big Sioux back there.

All that life on a trip to a cemetery. What a great joy to have been there.

Sunday morning meds from Psalm 42

 

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? 

Why so disturbed within me? 

Put your hope in God, 

for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

 One night late, years ago, a preacher friend of mine, over a few beers, began talking about what he went through when his wife left him, years before, an event that’s not supposed to happen, and certainly not supposed to happen to preachers. He didn’t blame her; he knew he’d had a hand in what happened himself, preacher or not.

At that late hour, with a bit of lubrication, I stayed with him when it appeared he wanted to talk. I sound as if I was using him, and maybe I was in a way; but what interested me was his use of a phrase I’d heard before: “It took me a long time to process that,” he kept saying. “I didn’t have the tools at first to process what had happened.”

I’ll admit I thought it was psychobabble, a cliché, an entirely strange word drawn from what we do to legislation or cheese or army recruits. But the emotion he carried as he told me the story made me wonder what that pat expression meant in the context of his adultery. I wanted process unpacked.

By “process,” he said, he meant becoming able to look at the wound and not cry or rage. Process, he said, meant stepping back from the immediacy of the emotions, a step that wasn’t at all easy--and it took time, he said.  And it took work.  Like forgiveness.

It seems to me that in verse five of Psalm 42, David (if he’s the writer) appears to have processed something. The unforgettable opening verses of the psalm emerge from the core of his grief; but verse five steps back from the sadness that threatens him and he begins talking to himself.  “For heaven’s sake,” he says, “what’s with me anyway? Why am I so incredibly depressed?”

Then he pulls out an old bromide and tells himself what he’d obviously known for years and even sung in a whole psalter of his own ballads, something the curtains of his despair had seemingly covered: “Put your hope in God,” he tells himself, processing his sadness. 

And then the resolution. Picture him, gritting his teeth, almost a snarl, pulling intent and dedication out of truth he knew, inside out:  “. . .for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

I may be wrong. Maybe there’s a gap in this psalm. Maybe, like the preacher without a wife, it took him some time to process the emptiness in his life. 

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to consult some standard King David biography and discover that this song was finished months after it was started, that he’s simply telling the story? 

But we don’t know that, and no one ever will. All we’re left with the psalm. And in this verse—or so it seems to me—David seems to bottom out, to take hold of the promises of God he’s relied on throughout his life, at a myriad of other moments when he stood in dire need of being rescued. “Put your hope in God,” he says, in command form.

In this verse, the story the poem tells is at its climax because the writer has stepped back to tell himself, to shout, in fact, the truth into his own ears, and now ours. “I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” [emphasis mine, but I think his too].

Sounds like a preacher friend of mine, talking to me over a beer years ago.

Sounds like Job.  Sounds like a lot of us.  

Pieter, Theologian

 

It was a while ago now, four short years, counting like a grandparent. I finished with opening prayer at a Sunday dinner, and Pieter, our then first-grade grandson, who was, back then, promiscuous with oddly bedeviling questions, suddenly asked, “Does Ian know God?”

Ian is his little brother, not even a year old at the time, as I remember, but an almost divine babbler, or so his grandpa thought. But Ian hadn’t come anywhere close to delivering a decipherable word. That would take years.

“Does Ian know God?” Pieter asked.

My first reaction was silence. After all, I’m only Grandpa, not a parent. My daughter and her husband should be the ones to answer, right?

Besides, I wasn’t sure what to say.

So I’m wondering what they’re going to answer—Mom and Dad.

Me?—I’m thinking probably yes, because Ian was their last, of any of us oldsters around the table. Not that long ago he was closer to whatever is eternity than any of us. Sure, he knows God, I’m thinking. Besides, he’s still several months away from showing a dime’s worth of original sin—maybe more. But then, Grandpa is prejudice, and I don’t change his too-often stinky diapers.

Later I asked myself whether any of us really knows God? It’s a kind of spellbinding question, even though I know all sorts of good, sweet Christians who would thunder out the joy of the little guy’s intimate proximity, I’m sure.

Some time ago, I ran across this stunning line I wish I could attribute: “The traditions of theology that speak to me undercut the assumption that the nature of divine reality is readily definable.” Woah! Me too. As I get older, more and more I’m thinking we’re on really shaky ground when we think we know it all.

Maybe I’ve found myself in too many Flannery O’Connor stories.

“Well, Pieter,” I could have said, “I suppose little Ian knows God just about as well as any of us do.”

He’d have looked up at me dizzily, I’m sure. And, truth is, I wouldn’t have liked to parse that out for him just then, not with the burgers getting cold. Just dropping that idea out in front of his questioning eyes would have been almost a form of child abuse, even if it might have been, in a way, true.

Well, Mr. Ian is now four years old, a Tot Church vet who’s graduated to Children’s Worship and other forms of Sunday School, all of which has made him quite handy at answering theological questions, even those he poses to himself.

When his mom told him his grandparents had skipped off to Wisconsin for a couple of days, he was, I suppose, a little jealous.  “But God doesn’t want them in Wisconsin,” he said.

Fortunately, he’s not a prophet—we escaped the cheese state without major damages.

Or this. His mom says it’s not time for snacks because he just had one. My grandson, budding theologian, is quite clear about divine injunctions:  “But, Mom, God says I should have a snack.”

He asserts such things more often, as God is as close him as his underwear. I figure he’s only a few years shy of becoming yet another Joseph Smith.

Welcome to the real world, I guess, where all of us swing quite blindly between certainty and doubt, between bull-headed dogmatism and paralyzing disbelief.  Rather like David. The King.  The Poet. The One with God’s own heart.

It’s our own blasted humanness that’s at fault, Pieter.  

What we know is that God almighty is both imminent—he’s here and Ian probably knows him—and he’s transcendent—he’s way, way beyond Ian at eight months or four years; and way beyond you, Pieter, and way beyond your grandfather the blogger, and even your great-great-great grandfather the erudite seminary professor. He’s way beyond every one of us.

I suppose we shouldn’t forget Karl Barth’s answer when someone asked the learned theologian which doctrine of God was most central to life. "The greatest theological insight that I have ever had is simple,” Barth said, or so the legend claims: “’Jesus loves me, this I know,/for the Bible tells me so!"

When he was a toddler, did Ian know God, Pieter? Don’t ask such tough questions.

How about now, when he’s four?--does Ian know God?

Well, he does, and he doesn’t. Like you.  Like me.

What I do know is this: God, sure as anything, knows Ian. And you, Pieter. And me too. Isn’t that a hoot?

Let’s eat.

Lott's wife

 

The land north of Des Moines is unalterably flat, or level, and, early summer especially, strikingly empty. From above, the snaking Des Moines River must seem a half-healed gash in an otherwise tightly stretched hide.  With so much wonderful land, it seems strange to see so many abandoned farms and acreages. You can’t help but wonder, where all the people farming this land requires have gone—clearly they’re not home.

The land was far emptier in the spring of 1848, when Henry Lott, his wife and two sons pulled up stakes at Red Rock, in the center of the state, and pushed west, earliest of the white colonizers to take up land in Iowa’s broad prairie. He’d been an Indian trader at Red Rock, a frontier occupation that tended to attract men of questionable moral character. Such a man, sad to say, was Henry Lott, who moved west once it was clear that the Sac and Fox were out beyond the Missouri River.

Lott wanted to pick up the trade which made him able to move west, far into western Iowa, otherwise uninhabited country. With the departure of the Sac and Fox, Lott determined he could make some money by establishing trade with the Dakota Sioux, who roamed over much of what we call Siouxland today.

Unlike the Sac and Fox, with whom Lott had traded at Red Rock, the Dakota Sioux seemed somehow predisposed to trouble. Lott undoubtedly was no peacenik, and he got into a tangle with the headman of the local Dakota bad. Tangle is likely too cute a word. The potential for graft among traders was immense—buying and selling guns and horses and contraband whiskey might well be a good way to fortune but you can, too easily, lose your neck—or your scalp.

Problems began, people say, when the Dakota headman, Si-dom-i-na-do-ta, accused Henry Lott of taking land ceded to the Indians. They gave him some time to get the heck out. And right here the stories get mixed and strained. Some say Lott ran a business in stolen horses and Indian ponies, grabbing them and delivering them all the way across the state. Some say it was plain and simple whiskey—too much, especially in the company of firearms. History is no longer clear.

The results are not. Sidominadota returned in force. When they came up to the homestead, Lott himself was across the river, hidden from what seemed to him untenable odds. Meanwhile, his son, scared stiff, ran off to find his father.

The Dakota band left without killing Lott’s wife, but the tragedy was immense.  After a week, she died in a paroxysm of distress and fear, and the son she sent to find his father never returned. Weeks later, his coatless body was found in a snowbank.

Six years later, in retaliation, Henry Lott killed the Sioux chief, along with his children. Because Sidomindota was Indian, white frontier justice looked away.

Holt went west, where, it is said, he was hanged as a horse thief.

We came down from the immense plain of bare ground last week. We curled down and down and down, until we reached the banks of the Des Moines River. I was determined to find the grave of Mrs. Lott, the first white woman to die in Webster County, Iowa. Pictures show her monument, broad and tall, standing above other stones in the ancient cemetery. Sometimes it’s a tangle of rough toad, difficult to get to. It was.

I hate to admit it, but we never did locate the grave of Lott’s wife.  It was a hazy Sunday afternoon, but at the bottom of the richly forested Des Moines River valley, the old graveyard just plain didn’t seem to be there.

There we were at the bottom of a steep, heavily forested river valley, the mist hanging like silvery gossamer against the ensuing darkness.

I generally don’t give up easily, so I swear I’ll try again, but we didn’t find it. Seeing is believing, they say, but I couldn’t help think just then, that sometimes not seeing is believing too.

_________________

Image stolen from https://destinationstratford.net/vegorscemetery.html . It exists--I just couldn't find it.

In the bottom of the box

It would just seem to me that the 17th-century French playwright, poet, and actor,Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, a man commonly called, simply, Moliere, wasn't particularly Reformed, nor did he want to be, nor was he expected to be. I'm thinking that during 19th century Dutch Reformed Holland, Moliere would be dismissed as a lightweight--the writer of comic sketches that tended to be, well, farcical, a funny bone without a body, someone probably left best unstudied simply because he was a man of "the theater," and Lord knows "the theater" was huge risk, a first step into sin.

So you can imagine my shock when I discovered this amazing twosome, Moliere and Racine, in the bottom of an old box of books, part of the library of Prof. G. K. Hemkes, a studied theologian from the early days of a tiny little denomination of nay-sayers, the Christian Reformed Church, a break-off of the much older Dutch Reformed Church.

Hemkes was my great-grandfather, long gone before I was born. Nobody I know knew him. My dad didn't and claimed he didn't know much about him either. Grandpa Schaap, who married his daughter, was gone by the time I was five or six. He died without calling me into his room to tell me stories; in fact, no uncles or aunts knew much about this Hemkes guy either. 

From what little I could glean from a few articles, he was a conservative in the wars of his time, most of which centered (as they still do) on the degree of worldliness Christians can risk by membership in any group other than their own hometown congregations. I suppose the easiest way of saying it is that Professor Hemkes tended to shun the outreach of this world. "Worldliness" was an iron hammer back then, and by all means you didn't want to be smashed by it, worldliness that is.

So, those books up there are the top of the page, seemingly unopened, were a shock when I found them. It never would have occurred to me that my conservative grandfather would have owned them, but own them he did.

I'm guessing that it's his handwriting, in his book, a collection of plays by Moliere, the jokester, that he might well be have bought from Mr. H. Bosma on October 12 of 1859. Back then, he was still in Holland, hadn't yet immigrated. 

I was non-plussed. My very conservative great-grandpa would have had on the shelves of his library the complete Moliere? There it was in my hands, along with a copy of the plays of Racine, yet another French playwright. 

Loved it. Not because it proved him a hypocrite--one could come to that conclusion; nor because it proved him a  man of this world, also possible. I loved it because Theatre complete De J. Racine and two volumes of Moliere (in French) suggested that Grandpa wasn't only someone who fought the good fight against worldliness. What I had in my hands suggested

that if he hated the theater, if he despised worldliness, at least he knew what he was talking about.

They're in the French language, of course, and published (Moliere at least) in Paris in 1858. 

 

Sunday morning meds from Psalm 42

I say to God my Rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?’"

 The present tense in this verse suggests the event the psalmist is describing has probably happened often. He’s not telling us something bizarre here, reporting on some weird epiphany-gone-awry. Seems to me that what he’s saying is, “Whenever I feel estranged from God, I say to him. . .” Not just once did this happen; sadly enough, I’m abandoned more often.

           

If that’s true, then what he says makes better sense. “I say to God my rock—which is to say, my fortress in times of trouble—‘why aren’t you my fortress in times of trouble?’”

 

What he feels is a hybrid pain only believers feel, because only someone who knows God as a rock can feel the terror of quicksand. Only a believer continues to talk to a God who seems to be out of state.

           

Makes no sense, really, but then neither does faith itself, often enough. The odd paradox of the psalmist’s supplication is understandable only to someone who knows, who says “been there, done that.” Like me . . . and you, probably.

           

And the question, this time at least, isn’t “how long (as it is in Psalm 13, for instance),” but “why?” “Why” is a question that also suggests significant distance. We don’t have time for “why” in the middle of battle. “Why” arises only when the battle doesn’t quit, or when we begin to look at our wounds and realize the pain.

           

In “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” Cotton Mather, the firebrand Puritan prelate, makes great claims for New England’s founders. They were “a chosen generation,” he says, “so pure as to disrelish many things which they thought wanted reformation elsewhere, and yet so peaceable that they embraced a voluntary exile in a squalid, horrid, American dessert.” They were saints.

           

But, alas, Mather says, along came their children, who like “many degenerate plants,” were altogether “otherwise inclined.” The founders were grain; their children, weeds—that’s what Mather sees and how he explains why the Devil is rampaging through New England. Everywhere he looked, after all, he saw witchcraft.

 

Why? “We have all the reason imaginable to ascribe it unto the rebuke of heaven for our manifold apostacies.” Mather, unlike David, appears to know the answer to why. It’s all our fault. Lo and behold, we’ve departed from righteousness.

           

But Mather’s explanation fed the madness that filled prisons around Salem, Massachusetts, and finally took 25 lives. Thank goodness God isn’t Cotton Mather.

All of us want to know why; all of us seek understanding for what can’t be fully understood. It’s a human thing, and it’s been a great blessing. Why is the source question of science, the foundation of education itself. Why is the beginning of knowledge.

 

But the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And some questions we ask, questions from the heart and soul of our lives, may not have easy answers, and that’s the phenomena David is describing. Remember—it has happened more than once. Why have you left me alone?

 

And really, that’s the story of the psalm: even when he doesn’t seem to be our Rock, he is. It’s all here in this lament, in his pain and his joy. Even when there are no answers, he is.

 

Makes no sense at all unless you know it too.

Thanks

There's a kid down the hall. He's got a baseball game--the whole team was in the motel's breakfast room not long ago, a sea of red. He's one of 'em, cap on backwards for style.

We're away from home and in a motel for the first time in a long, long time, my first trip out from home since Thanksgiving, not that last one either. We're going to see how it goes, this tag-team of me and my wife/nurse/housemaid. I'm not swift.

I've left the room before her because I couldn't be slower if I was harpooned. It's not that long ago that it took the a whole baseball team to get me out of the car, but I've graduated from the wheelchair, and then from the walker, and I'm on the cane now, slow as molasses and wobbly as a drunken sailor. 

So this kid--I swear, fifty feet down the hall--spots me coming and kindly opens the inside exit door. Two of his teammates have already exploded out, but he sees the crippled guy stumbling down the hall and he think what he really should do is hold the door open. So he does. 

Little inklings of grace.

So when I get up to him, I tell him what a wonderful thing it was for him to think of this guy with the cane way up the hallway. I want to grab him and hug him, but it wouldn't be kosher. Maybe if I was female.

Anyway, I stumble through the door and by now his brawny coach/dad has just caught up. He heard me. In a minute he knew the whole story. "That's really great, Jonathan," he says as I finally get out the door.

Inklings of grace.

And another. I'm several days off on my visit to the dentist. I thought the appointment was today. When I drive in, I'm sort of non-plussed because the parking lot is empty, but I park, stumble up the curb (got the cane again), and a dental assistant steps out. "Are you here for an appointment?" she says sweetly.

I tell her yes, and that I think I'm on time.

"Wrong date," she says, follows me in. "No appointments today--we're working on some new program.. . ."

She's very sweet, accustomed to dealing with old joes with memory issues. Then, just as I turn around, she says, "Your shoestring is open"-- and, lo and behold, it is. . .hence the photograph. 

So here's to all of those who help those of us who require more help--the kid in the baseball cap and the office manager who make my life--and the lives of countless others--just a step or two easier.  

Inklings of grace. You're a blessing. 

(I'd like to hug you, but it wouldn't be kosher.)  

Twenty years ago, Siouxland

 For years, I went out on Saturday mornings, looking for the dawn. That shot above is 20 years old, from  a Saturday morning in early May right here, probably somewhere west of town.

I never realized how much beauty could be staged just beyond our back door until I was almost sixty years. I wasn't awed by the near infinity of space, land and sky, until then, until I went out deliberately not to miss it. 

There's absolutely nothing unique about that picture above, but the shots I took that morning is clear evidence of my desire to know how to style the beauty that was all around that morning. Trying to capture that morning in a single exposure is silly, and that too is something it took me most of my life to learn--silly, but well worth the effort.

The shots I took that morning show me trying hard to find a way to tell others how gorgeous the world really showed itself to be.

Maybe silhouettes.

I don't remember the morning, but the story is in the pictures. Very few have ever treasured this particular place for its beauty. But when the immensity of land and sky lights up gorgeously, if the sun wraps the sky in a wide wardrobe of color, this world's sheer beauty can take your breath away. 

That's what I likely told myself on the drive back to town--that, and I'll be back.

Fifty years ago

Thursday, April 30 was a monumental anniversary I had to hear on the news to remember. April 30 is the date tanks rolled up to Saigon, today named Ho Chi Minh City. It's the date some of us remember U.S. helicopters frantically attempting to lift U.S. personnel and their Vietnamese friends out of the war-torn country to peace and safety. April 30, 2024, marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war [I should, I suppose, capitalize War, but it's difficult].

Today, still moving into senior housing in Sioux Center, we wouldn't have to travel far to meet up with a Vietnam vet among the 100 or so residents.

During the Vietnam War era (1964–1973), approximately 27 million American men were eligible for the draft. Out of this pool, 2.2 million were drafted into military service. Not all draftees were sent to Vietnam, however; only about 650,000 of them actually served in-country, making up roughly 25% of the total U.S. forces stationed there. 

So how many Vietnam Vets are there, in truth? It's  hard to know the exact number, but let me try to do the math. The number of Vietnam War veterans still alive today is estimated to be around 610,000 who served in land forces and 164,000 who served at sea, according to research from the American War Library. This means roughly one-third of those who served in Vietnam are still living, which means that on my morning walk, I wouldn't have to get far up the street to find someone who remembers the jungles.

Fifty years ago, I was a recently married graduate student at Arizona State University, willing--even proud--of waving my 4F draft status card should people ask. My heart was, and is, perpetually silly, enough out of cue for the medics at Sioux Falls to pass me into draft eligibility.  Let me make this clear--I missed the most important conflict of my own late 60s era.

I was driving a school bus for a little Christian school in the middle of Phoenix, Arizona in 1973. When I look back on it now, all of it seems rosy, especially going out into the desert to pick out the dairyman's kids. Everyday I got away from the central Phoenix apartment while my wife hurriedly, I'm sure, got ready to teach at the same little school. 

Here's what I remember. The radio was on, tuned to public radio, I'm sure, as the kids stepped up and in. The news included, almost as an afterthought, the fact that with the withdrawal of all U. S. personnel and the fall of Saigon, one could safely say that the Vietnam War [upper case] was over. It was over, I thought, as I was coming from Tempe toward central Phoenix along Washington Avenue. It was over, the whole fricking mess was over.

The kid in the seat behind me, a cute kid in fourth grade maybe, a kid who quite regularly had an opinion on things, was sitting  up close as if listening to the news. 

"Hey, Stevie," I said over my shoulder, "you hear that?"

He hadn't.

"The Vietnam War--it's over."

He did a kind of fourth-grade thing just then, kind of cheered, as if the Phoenix Suns had just hit a buzzer-beater.

And then, in a far more inquisitive tone, he leaned up forward, hoping for wisdom. "Who won?" he asked me.

It's much easier to say, today, "wasn't us." But back then, the kid, Stevie, the cute kid, was in fourth grade. Maybe ten minutes later I'd let all the kids off the bus at Phoenix Christian. I figured I'd let the teachers take care of answering that one, if it even came up. 

In Ho Chi Minh city, then and now, there was a real celebration. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 42

 By day the LORD directs his love, 

at night his song is with me— a prayer to the God of my life.

 Half of all marriages fail.  Why?  Good question.

 Some of the best researchers on the subject, professionals who’ve listened to hours and hours of conversation between ordinary married people, have come up with very interesting findings. Good lovin’, they claim, may not be at the heart of long and happy marriages, even though good lovin’ is what we’d like to believe in; a marriage drenched in passion isn’t necessarily a marriage which will last.

Okay, but what then?  What researchers have come to understand is that the success of a relationship may be more dependent on the ability to fight than the ability to love. Go ahead and read that again.  Marriages fail, they claim, when spouses can’t deal with inevitable conflicts.  Maybe I can put it this way—couples who learn how to fight, learn how to love.

 Conflict occurs even in the best of relationships.  Those marriages that make it, do so because spouses learn to keep those conflicts from escalating into the kind of murder that kills love and respect.   

 I don’t know how our fights—my wife and mine—rank with others.  There have been some stiff ones, I know.  Thankfully, I’ve not been around enough other couples’ tiffs and rants to judge the relative nastiness of ours.  But we’ve been married now for 52 years, and I seriously doubt we’re in any kind of trouble, thank the Lord.  We must have learned to manage our brawls, I guess, but don’t ask me to write the “how to.”

 The fact is, it’s impossible for me to imagine myself alone now.  In the give-and-take of marriage, I’ve pretty much lost the egoism that being single affords. I’m not perfect, and I still want what’s mine—and then some; but I can’t remember the last time I told myself, bitterly, that the only reason I’d done something I didn’t want to do was because, dang it, I was married, done something totally (grrrrr) for her.  It’s been a long time, thank the Lord.

 All of which is not to say we’re home free.  I’m not too old to be shocked, even by myself.

 Mostly, this great psalm, Psalm 42, is lament.  Three times (vss. 5, 8, 11) when he’s almost lost in the dark night of the soul, David has to pinch himself to God’s goodness; he has to push himself to engineer an way out of seemingly pathless despair. Twice, in fact, he falls back into the darkness after trying the best he can to pull himself out.

 I don’t want to be prescriptive because God’s love comes in so many shades and sizes that no one size fits all; but I’m wondering, when I feel the wild emotional amplitude of this famous, short psalm—I’m wondering whether some believers, not all, need to understand that, like a marriage, God almighty and his people—some of us at least—stay together only because we’ve learned to fight, and in so doing, how to love.

No one ever talks about that in Sunday School, but the proof is here in one of David’s roughest song, full as it is with darkness. And there are others like this one, lots of them, more than we’re often willing to admit or certainly advertise.

Maybe David—or whoever wrote this great psalm—has learned how to love the Lord in all his mystery, only because he’s learned also how to fight.