Mean

The dozen or so distinct lines crossing his face looked good on him, made him seem legendary. He smoked a lot--most men did back then--but all those Chesterfields or Luckies lowered his gravely voice, made him sound like a man who could have spent his life in film. A trimmed goatee gave him the look of a seasoned artist.

He wasn't. Honestly, I don't remember what he'd done pre-retirement, but he was, back then, a man who was not only capable of, but willing to impart stories of the past. He had them, and he was more than willing to share with a young prof, someone who wanted to be a writer. He talked, and I listened eagerly to Montana stories, where he spent his childhood, as well as stories of Calvin College in the 1920s, of going to the denominational school when every last kid who enrolled still spoke Dutch or at  least understood it. 

He knew Fred Manfred, the prairie novelist who grew up in northwest Iowa and made the whole region, first, proud--and then ashamed when he swung his attention to his people's dirty laundry. This Montana-born story-teller remembered the day that Fred Manfred, then Feike Feikema, walked on campus at Calvin, a sky-high sodbuster whose height was as memorable as his farm boy ways.

Feikema was the only 6'9" kid on campus so the basketball coach dragged him to the gym where he was building up a team. Now this Montana story-teller explained that he was himself the coach's assistant. What the coach couldn't help but observe was the giant farmer had just plain zero timing, so he assigned his assistant coach to run with him on the court and jab him in the back at the exact time he should expect a rebound, to teach him when to jump. 

Montana got off the kitchen chair to demonstrate. It was a moment I'll never forget because I worshipped Feikema/Manfred and couldn't help but love the story.

Montana's rendition of coaching Fred Manfred happened fifty years ago. Montana is long gone. His story of teaching the giant to jump happened fifty years before that, so I'm retelling a story that's a century old and totally forgotten. And that's okay.

But there's more it. Montana was a wicked conservative, a man who believed that the church--our church--had long ago lost its bearing and was veering far off the track of what he thought to be doctrinal purity. His son, my friend, tried to argue with him. Invariably the volume grew heavily.

After Montana's couple of visits to Iowa, I couldn't miss his name beneath cantankerous letters to the Banner editor, some of which I couldn't help think the editor didn't really need to let see the light of day. Montana had a side that was a monster.

A half-century ago I was writing things for The Banner frequently enough to get to know the editor, Rev. Andrew Kuyvenhoven, yet another character in this museum I'm remembering this morning. In the doctrinal wars of the time, Andy tended left--not radically, mind you, but his voice was a progressive's. He tore up the denomination with a Banner cover that featured burning wooden shoes.

I'm not at all sure how Montana came up between us, but one day I mentioned I'd met Montana in Iowa and couldn't help but note his Banner letters, so fretfully full invective.

"That's nothing," Andy said, or something to that effect. "You should read the ones we don't publish."

Kuyvenhoven was reared in the occupied Netherlands, like many CRC members back then. Once upon a time his people had fought Hitler. Andy was not a man who feared a fight, but Montana's letters made him shake his head shamefully.

I say all of that because there's mean streak in the people from whom I come, the people I've served, really, as a teacher of their covenant children for most of the last fifty years. And that mean streak is never quite as proud as when it can hang on some doctrinal principle that legitimizes its existence.

I read a summary of the 2025 Synod yesterday, and in its repeated declarations of no, it reminded me of Montana and his letters to the Banner editor, and the commitment he'd made to a doctrinal line that wasn't all his own--he had compatriots, of course. That 2025 summary--maybe it was biased--made it very clear to me that Montana's mean streak is alive and well.

A century later, I still find that preening righteousness repellant. We're no longer a bunch of quarrelsome immigrants struggling to know when to jump in a brave new world. We don't have to be mean as we have been. 

Judging by the very nature of our faith, we shouldn't be.