Sunday morning meds from Psalm 129

 

"May all who hate Zion be turned back in shame.”

Giles Tilleman, arrested for his religious views in 16^th century Brussels, had a chance to flee prison, but stayed instead in his cell.  "I would not do the keepers so much injury, as they must have answered for my absence, had I gone away," he said.  When he stood at the stake where he would be burned and noted the mass of wood for the fire, he told the guards to distribute that fuel to the poor instead of wasting so much on his execution.  A guard offered to strangle him, to kill him before he burned, but Tilleman refused, and, as John Foxe writes in his Book of Martyrs, “he gave up the ghost with such composure amidst them, that he hardly seemed sensible of their effects.”

 

I don’t know why exactly, but I’ve been drawn back to reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs once more, a book I read as a kid.  In fact, I’m not even sure I read the book when I was a boy, but I am eerily familiar with it, a story book  Published first in 1563, the Book of Martyrs created, somehow, 400 years later, a significant impression on me, its gruesome stories carrying, unforgettably, equal measures of horror and transcendence.

 

Even though the martyrdom recounted gloriously in that book is part of the grand narrative of redemption, I doubt that elementary school teachers in Christian schools like the one I attended as a boy talk much at all about 16^th century martyrdom, as they did a half century ago.  I doubt anyone commends that old book anymore, even though it stood, for years beside only the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress in the homes of multitudes of good Christian folk.  Really, by today’s standards, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is, well, gauche, to the pluralistic temper of our age, quite tasteless therefore, and embarrassing, in a way, as are the nightmarish visions of hell of Hieronymus Bosch.

 

All of that helps me understand my own chills when approaching imprecatory psalms like this one, songs that cry longingly for revenge.  Even though the fury is muted in 129, far less distasteful here than in other psalms (no bashed heads of children as in 137, for instance), I find it difficult to empathize with the psalmist’s rage.

 

But then my back has never been plowed.  I own no scars for my profession.  My family is intact.  Giles Tilleman, John Huss, hundreds of thousands of other martyrs (their list continues to grow) are, at best, nightmarish memories from an ancient book no one reads anymore anyway. 

 

And I wonder sometime whether my own attitude toward Roman Catholics didn’t have to undergo some significant therapy in order to entertain even the possibility of acceptance as a result of an imagination overloaded with Christians burned at stakes or mauled by lions.  As a child, I wonder whether I would have had more empathy for the imprecatory psalms, simply because my imagination created, even joyfully, the mawkish smell of burning skin. 

Was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs good for me, way back when?  I’m not sure, but I’m happy I know it, happy I felt the terror and the glory of those martyrs. I’m glad those stories are a part of me; they may be my only link to imprecatory psalms like 129.

 

Reading the psalms has taught believers about God for centuries, but I continue to believe that even those that make us shutter teach us just as much, and maybe more, about ourselves, our humanness before God’s transcendent divinity. 

Loons

I lack the patience required to do wildlife photography, but every summer we went "up north," if I  had access to a boat I'd spend most of an early morning chasing the Minnesota State Bird. They were charmingly permissive about me tailing them. They'd simply be doing what they always do--going under for awhile, then coming back up a few furlongs away, sort of hide-and-seek. These all come from the summer of 2011, too many years ago.

 

I hunted them really, chasing them around the lakefront, sometimes getting close and personal while they flirted with me, even with a young'in just behind.

Of course, when you're out there early morning, you never know who else might show up.

And then the lake itself could show off in ways a flat-lander like myself couldn't help but love.

It's been too many years. . .

Monroe Elementary, Topeka

What you forget--at least I did--is that there was Supreme  Court precedent as late as the 1950s. The  law, as officially determined and declared, ruled in Plessy vs. Ferguson (in courtly language) that "separate but equal" was a wholesome and blessedly approved way of dealing with questions of racial equality. They have their schools, their water fountains, their theaters and doctor's offices, and, proudly we have ours. Never the two shall meet.

Way back in 1894, a New Orleans man named Homer Plessy took a seat on a railroad car that was, officially, off limits to him, Homer being--you guessed it-- a person of color.  When he lost, Homer Plessy not only got kicked out of the precious whites-only seat, his case also set up a long and bitterly hated argument for "separate but equal" legislation, which meant, among other things, that there would be, down south especially but not just there, separate schools for African-Americans. Separate water fountains, separate movie theaters, separate coffee shops, separate just about everything.

That's how things stood in 1896, how they stayed for fifty years--separate but equal. 

Monroe School, Topeka, Kansas, looks just about like any other school would of its vintage (1950s). It's two-stories tall and graced with an entrance that faintly suggests something both modern and Greek in pale blonde stone. Take three steps and you're inside. It's a neat place, but it should be, it's a National Historic Site.

We stopped by a couple of years ago, and the docent we met at the door began by showing us photos of two schools that looked just about the same--one officially designated African-American, he said, the other designated "white." 

"Separate but equal, right?" he asked. 

It was the kind of quizzing I hadn't signed up for. I shook my head.

"That's right," he said. "There's just no such thing."

I have no doubt he was right, Supreme Court ruling or not. There was no such thing as separate but equal.

Along came a man from a ways away, who just couldn't understand why his fourth-grade daughter couldn't just hike down the block to a neighborhood school where her friends attended, why she couldn't go there but had to, instead, go to Monroe School, this one, the school for little girls and boys of her race. 

According to all who knew her father, the man showed no particular strengths, was no child genius, was okay at boxing when he was a kid and really quite good from the pulpit, too, two ways Black boys could show some prowess.  But he was no trouble-maker.

Rev. Oliver Brown, interested in cause of  civil rights but no radical, no activist, simply couldn't understand, when it became apparent, that his daughter had to be bussed to the Black school. 

The Rev. Mr. Brown didn't shoulder the burden of legal proceedings alone. Right beside him as he approached the judge was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, arguing his cause and a handful others, a cast of first-rate civil rights lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall, who would soon after be a member of the United States Supreme Court.

The Reverend Oliver Brown was a welder with three daughters, including one, Rose, who wanted to go a block and a half away to the school where her white friends went. Instead it was Monroe Street. He took that case to the Supreme Court, won, and not only changed the way we teach history but reshaped the face of a nation. 

Were Sioux City schools "separate, but equal." No. Iowa outlawed separation of the races way back in the 1850s. 

Does that mean there was no segregation here? No, ma'am and no, sir. You might want to check to see how many communities held on to "sunset laws" that outlawed people of color from staying over night--Council Bluffs, Cherokee, Spirit Lake, and Spencer, just to name a few.

Oliver Brown's name is linked with a fulsome number of civil rights heroes. Just stop sometime at Monroe School in Topeka. You'll hear and see the whole story.

Brown vs. Board of Education, Monroe School, Topeka, Kansas. Honestly, worth a trip, worth never, ever forgetting.

Some good places to sit in silence

It does little good to lambast an earlier generation's aesthetic values. Time shapes us, makes us pull on penny loafers instead of Nikes, jeans instead of hoop skirts, Beadle haircuts instead of military cuts. Once upon a time--I hardly dare say it--the good Catholics of Sioux Falls decided to whitewash the interior of this magnificent cathedral, The Cathedral of St. John, assuming that rubbing out all the magnificent color would draw more attention to the front of the sanctuary, to the glory of the Host. 

So it took years and some kind of investment, I'm sure, to re-colorize those magnificent columns to make their marble shine so that the whole cathedral sings. Here's a couple of stations of the cross, repainted to repair something of their original look. And, yes, that's Mary, the Mary far back there dressed as she almost always is, in blue, arms raised petitioning the Father. Here Jesus takes up his cross." Imagine it whitewashed.

Or, the agony of His being nailed to the cross.

So here it is today--or, yesterday, I suppose, when we visited.

For years I've loved cathedrals--the big ones in Netherlands, as well as other places I've been in Europe, including Italy, of course. And I understand--or I believe I do--their idea--to create a wondrous sanctuary for the Jesus here regularly served up, body and blood, for the redemption of man and woman and child; to create awe in the believer, the kind of stunned silence of all great cathedrals. 

To honor this singular man, both God and man.

For Protestants like me, there are lots of reasons to visit cathedrals, be they as spacious and awesome as Cathedral of St. Joseph in Sioux Falls, SD, or as tiny as the grief chapel way out beside an old cemetery on the eastern plains of Nebraska.

Or this one in Remsen, Iowa.

  

or St. Donatus, Iowa

or this one in Pawhuska, OK.

Places to sit in silence.

Sunday Morning Meds -- Psalm 127

 

 

But the LORD is righteous;

he has cut me free from the cords of the wicked." Psalm 129:4

 

  

On his way home from his job at the packing plant, Phet had to cross the Missouri River, then travel up the freeway toward his home in Morningside.  Along the way, stood—well, floated—a huge and comely riverboat casino, the finest, fanciest gambling joint in the region.  Sometimes—often, by his recounting—he’d stop and spend the rest of the day and night amid the smoky jangling slots.  He wasn’t stressing his marriage; often as not, his wife was right there at his side.

 

Then he became a Christian, left the casino, lost his wife, and gained another.  When I asked him what it meant to be a Christian, he answered by drawing out the dimensions of his new life.  Although he was still working at the packing plant, he was living in a new house with a new wife, and he was going to church, had become a deacon.  But mostly, to Phet, being a Christian meant he no longer stopped at the riverboat. He was done with all that, done with gambling.

 

Deacon Phet got himself enabled.

         

Sasumu Nashimoto, a petty thief from Yokohama, Japan, used to listen to Christian radio while doing all kinds of late-night petty theft.  One night he was going after some stuff behind a factory when he started to think about the clear plastic that stretched over waste materials, the stuff he grabbed and sold elsewhere, putting the bucks in his own pockets.  If that plastic were black, not clear, he thought, he could really turn a profit.  But who could create a miracle like that, he thought, chuckling.  With his truck radio playing a sermon, he kept mulling over the question—who turns black to white? who can create miracles?  Why, only God can.  It came to him as a revelation, he told me.  Today, no longer a criminal, he’s a leader in his faith community.

 

Elder Nashimoto got himself enabled too.     

 

Walker Percy’s genealogy of distinguished ancestors still overflows with grim sadness--Civil War heroes, Mississippi statesmen, and two unforgettable suicides.  Both his father and his grandfather ended their lives with a shotgun.  Two years his father’s death, Percy’s mother was killed in an automobile accident.  For a profession, Walker Percy, a medical doctor, chose to be a pathologist, someone whose daily work meant working over corpses. But early on in his profession, he contacted tuberculosis, spent some years at a sanitarium, read Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, among others, then converted to Christianity in 1947.

 

Walker Percy was enabled also.

         

I don’t know everything there is to know about Walker Percy; but I believe I can guess, given the outline of his life and the themes of his novels, how Percy too might think about this line from today’s readings because he must have felt himself, in his own way, enabled.

         

A cloud of witnesses all around profess their faith through a spacious library of stories, none of them exactly the same except in divine trajectory.  What astonishes me is the sheer breadth of the experience of the Christian faith; there’s a million stories because the faith itself immensely spacious, even though all of those stories end in redemption. 

         

There is so much elbow room in how it is we come to faith, space enough for all our stories.  Nobody’s stripes are exactly the same, but somehow we all get healed—we all are enabled. 

No one does it alone.  Grace abides. Grace abounds.

Anarchists

 

He's a  geezer. Haven't seen a coat like that for years. I had one once, but eventually gave it to the college costume shop. 

Then there's the helmet. Somewhere along the line, someone claimed buckets like that do a decent job between the goal posts but not on Chicago's streets. Today, it's too "keystone cops."

And what is that shaft-like thing strapped to his belt? Seriously? A sword? A bayonet? A club? Don't ask.

Once upon the time this nine-foot tall, law-and-order guy was banged up by a street car, physically and symbolically. The driver told police he was tired of seeing this uniformed clown with his hand up in the air, so he just knocked him down. That was May 4, 1927, exactly 41 years after the 1886 Haymarket Square riot, which killed seven police, four civilians, and injured as many as 70 people. This old cop sculpture was meant to be commemorated that Haymarket Riot.

For the record, he was decorated and desecrated so often he now stands in a place where radicals and anarchists can't get him and wouldn't likely want to anyway because the public can't see him either.

When the old helmeted cop got beat up too often, some Chicagoians decided to commemorate the riot at Haymarket Square in with another statue, this one, four years later, taking what might be thought of as another side in local memories.

But there's another sculpture too, and this one picks a fight with that old helmeted cop. In 1893, just four years later, this Haymarket sculpture was parked in a Forest Lawn cemetery--8000 people attended. Dame Justice is about to place a laurel wreath on a fallen worker. That nine-foot cop celebrated law and order, one of those who swarmed the wagon from which the man on the ground here was speaking. A bomb ignited and the carnage began.

Dame Justice is borrowed from mythology--no bucket cap or long coat, just a flowing gown. Dame Justice celebrates the heroism of those who, that day in May, were fighting the coppers. She celebrates the working stiff in the war between labor and management, a war that may have abated but has never really ended.

When the old helmeted cop got beat up too often, Chicago decided to commemorate the riot at Haymarket Square in with another statue, this one (2004), far less in-your-face but a bit more unexplainable.

A union man is aboard a hay wagon, holding forth on the treachery of the bosses, surrounded by both admirers and sufferers. It's a mess, but then, so was the riot on Haymarket Square.

Chicago wanted a sculpture to commemorate an end to conflicts between labor and management. But then, most of us would say that war is never-ending.

Anarchists—dirty, rotten, red-bellied anarchists—have been blamed wherever fires rage for the cause of social justice. When the riots in Washington were happening, January 6, 2020, conservative pols and commentators went so far as to say that the madness at the Capital was ignited by the Antifa, a name given to the latest wave of anarchists, liberals sworn to break things up. 

A man I know who works for justice among South African blacks, a missionary who’s been on the field for decades and came home on leave recently to learn that one of the churches who had supported his work had unceremoniously dropped him without a word. It seems one of the men with most capital in that church claimed someone had said our friends were pedaling social justice in South Africa. "Social justice" smells like disunity, even worse, communism.

I grew up in a home where, in the early Sixties, my wonderfully warm, devotedly Christian father really distrusted Martin Luther King, thought him "communistic," an "agitator," just another word for anarchist.

I don't trust our President using that language, but then I don't trust him either. He'll be designing his own statue soon. You can bet on that.

Anniversary bliss

For an anniversary in 2017, I chose a place in northern Missouri, not far from the river. I wanted to get to Independence, where the Oregon Trail began. I found a little AirBandB in a place so impossible to find I had to call the woman three times to get there.

It was a little cottage on a swampy pond so full of fish that all I had to cast my bait upon the water. With the first cast, I pulled up a lug of a catfish so ugly it scared me. I didn't even pull it out. I quit. Didn't get a picture. 

It was a wonderful place for an anniversary celebration (said in jest btw). If there were an available bus, Barbara would have found it and bought a ticket home.

One early morning I found my way out to a reserve of some type and decided to see what I could see. There was an abundance of wildlife (of the insect variety) on plants in the kind of dappled sunlight that turns all the world a stage.

We're a world away from prairie landscapes, but where there's a bright dawn, there's usually something to shoot it.

 The "character" in this shot is that jagged bit of drama. The setting is plant leaves so wonderfully emerald that they virtually shine in the sun's wonderful light. My sense would be that cutting out that hunk of white at the very top would make the whole shot more perfect, but with my limited editing skills, any such attempt would put the insect's role far less "set," you might say.  Still, look at the almost fearful wickedness of that gash.

I'll just end with a cartoon. 

What I know of Douglas Wilson

It was somewhat unusual for him to come to me with his problems. I used to believe--and still do--that I would never make even a back seat in the Dad's Hall of Fame because I didn't take care to do what good dads did. 

Don't get me wrong. David wouldn't have abuse about which to complain, and I certainly didn't overtax him with horrific responsibilities. I didn't work him to death either. I was gone a lot, and, like my dad before me, I just didn't have time for him--or didn't take time. 

I'm saying all of this because it wasn't at all typical for him to come to me with the kind of problem he was carrying. He was--how can I say it?--perplexed, and I was surprised because I thought a lot of the girl he'd been dating. I suppose he suffered from his dad's profession--teaching--because I tended to know the young women who were in his social circle, and while I don't remember ever saying "get rid of her," I rarely told him what I thought of whoever he was seeing. In fact, this time, I was thrilled by his choice--the girl he'd been seeing was, in my grade book and whatever other book I kept, a real winner.

Let's just call her "Annie" because I'm risking injury in just bringing up the whole sorry tale, but let's just say Annie was a teacher's pet, if there could be one in a college class. Bright and comely, she was the kind of learner who walked walked out front of most of the others in class because of the energy she invested in learning. Didn't hurt, of course, that she was an English major; but had she been an engineer or a nurse and been as hungry in class than Annie was, I might well have suggested to David that the dark-eyed, dark-haired girl from Idaho was worth a second look. 

For the record, I didn't suggest he go with her, but I registered no complaints when he did.

Some weeks later, he came to me with some letters he pulled from his knapsack. They were addressed to him and from her father. Epistle-length, they were long treatises on the ground rules he was setting for David, my son, to see his daughter. He mentioned things like the church to which David belonged, said he wasn't thrilled with the denominational stance the Christian Reformed Church had taken with respect to women in ecclesiastical office, wanted David to know that, and set out a scenario that included David's having to meet Annie's family--her father, at least--before the relationship could grow or move any further. He requested, made it a prerequisite, for David to write him so that he could know the young man dating his daughter, know him and--how can I say it?--groom him personally.

It was nearly the end of the semester, as I remember, because there was some talk about his going to Idaho for the summer. But the letters made it clear that should he opt to spend the summer working in Idaho, he should not assume that he could,  on a whim, see Annie, because in her father's universe, dating was a evil kind of fantasy. David needed to meet her entire family before he could date Annie alone.

David didn't know how to take all of it. That's why he'd come to me.

I couldn't help it--I was angry, very angry because I thought Annie's father was, like some beast from another world, infringing on what I thought was Annie and David's whole relationship, throwing himself right into the middle of their days and nights together. And, he was making David's life miserable.

I started writing a letter to him, but it didn't feel right--and it was difficult to hold back the fire. About then, I was in Ontario for some speaking engagement, staying at Hugh and Judy Cook's place. Hugh was an old and trusted colleague and fellow writer, and Judy was a family counselor, so I laid out the whole story--not the letters--to them, looking for advice. Hugh bristled, Judy seemed less so.

I asked if they thought I should write Annie's father to tell him that David already had a father, that he didn't need another one, especially one with such horrid patriarchal sentiments.

Judy shook her head, told me I had to stay out, for David's sake. She told me that if I got into the mess it would only make David's problems worse because not only did he have to worry about Annie and Annie's father, my writing any kind of blistering note off to her father would create another whole angle that would almost bury him. Neither David nor Annie needed more to worry about.

So when I got back home, I deliberately disposed of the file I'd begun. Deleted the whole thing, and, following Judy's advice, stayed out of a problem that made me as angry as anything in my son's life.

I'm telling the whole story right now because it seems that a preacher named Douglas Wilson, from Moscow, Idaho, is making news these days. On August 14, David French, in a NYTimes op-ed piece, brought up Wilson and his views because the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, considers himself a member of Wilson's church and a subscriber to Wilson's views. That's why he questions the rights of women to vote. 

You read that accurately--the right to vote.

Read the article  yourself, or read what Kristin Kobes DuMez, who was a student at Dordt College at nearly the same time, thinks about Douglas Wilson's wildly patriarchal views.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/opinion/douglas-wilson-evangelical-hegseth.html 

When Annie went home for the summer that year, she learned that she wasn't coming back to Sioux Center--and she didn't. Dordt College was too liberal for her father's daughter. So, I take it, was my son. Her father simply intervened and ended the relationship.

All of this happened 23 years ago, but the movement Douglas Wilson created remains very much alive.

Christian nationalism really has much to commend it to hungry, fervent believers, maybe especially those believers in the Reformed tradition. But its dangers are legion, both theological and societal. I honestly believe it perverts the relationship between the believer and the world God loves. I honestly believe it's evil.

Big Bluestem.

Used to be, there were far more of them than there are of us. Tall and awkward, it grew up every summer from a thick bundle of shorter stuff at its base, like a grass skirt thicket that a host of critters thought of as home. Spindly and thin up top, Big Bluestem, the tallest of our native grasses, gets tossed around so mightily by gusty winds that not even a goldfinch can hold on. But the skinny stem doesn't break, it just waves, waves away, waves beautifully, waves like an inland sea. 

You can still find it dancing here and there in the restored prairie or in forgotten corners of the land, too steep or crooked to take a plow. You can pick up a bunch from a garden shop and plant it in your own backyard. Don't worry--it'll take. It does most anywhere. It's not picky. In fact, people who know such things claim it can still get aggressive if you let it alone somewhere, if you just let it be. A half acre maybe. Maybe more.

But here’s the thing: big bluestem waves out gorgeous tributes, but it doesn't make for great pasture. Those who know say cattle love it too darn much--some ranchers call it "ice cream for cows." Way back when, big bluestem suited crowds of buffalo just fine, but they were smart enough to graze only every other year or so because big bluestem won't stand up to constant grazing.

It's especially beautiful this time of year--late summer to fall--when it takes on its own royal robe: those long stems burn nicely into purple--and amber once the snow flies. But the truth is, beauty in native prairie is an acquired taste. Trust me, it can be as fancy as a flower shop, but it'll never be in a greenhouse. There are no hybrids, just a colorful bunch of old friends happy to be around together.

Wouldn't hurt us to remember that we'll be indebted to big bluestem for a long, long time because it once stood all around and grew remarkable roots four or five feet deep, deep and heavy roots that created our own rich prairie sod. 

Once upon a time, William Cullen Bryant described what was once our world like this:

As o’er the verdant waste I guide my steed,

Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides 

The hollow beating of his footsteps seems 

A sacrilegious sound.

 

Still unconvinced? How about Walt Whitman, who wanted like nothing else to be "America's poet. Listen to his regards in "Specimen Days": 

As to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling), while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape.”  

And let me remind you that right here in this passage, Walt Whitman is talking about home.

Ours.   

Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 129

 

“They have greatly oppressed me from my youth—

let Israel say—

they have greatly oppressed me from my youth 

but they have not gained the victory over me.”

 An all-too-common story in the life of imaginative writers is a rotten childhood. Perhaps they were too contemplative, too monk-like. Maybe they were marginalized for being puny, bookish.  Their parents may have been overbearing, violent, too often absent from their lives, addicted to drink or drugs.  They lacked friends. Possibilities are endless.

 In an effort to compensate, such kids fantasize, create secret gardens, life in a boxcar, alternative worlds, dungeons and dragons. In the absence of joy, they create their own interiors, a refuge from oppression.

 What they can’t attain in day-to-day life, they make up for in imagination, and propensity for story grows abundantly.  Show me a kid who doesn’t go to the prom, and I’ll show you a budding artist.  That’s the trajectory of the theory. 

 Many towering figures in 19^th century American literature lacked fathers.  Hawthorne’s died when he was a kid.  Poe was a foster child.  A ton of writers were dissolute drinkers.  In my first year of teaching, a student asked me whether you had to be an alcoholic to be a writer. 

 But why stop with writers?  The oppressed artist is a cliché—consider VanGogh with his mangled ear and awful love life. Even when he was rich and famous, Picasso, biographers claim, was impossible to live with. 

 An artists’ graveyard is littered with gnarled wreckage.

 The “they” which begins Psalm 129 is hugely vague because there is no clear antecedent.  Who were they, anyway?  The history of revelation itself would argue, I’m sure, that the oppressors the psalmist is referring to are those heathen nations surrounding the people of Israel, starting, I suppose, with the Pharoah’s Egypt—those enemies that sought, as some still do, to destroy the Jews.

 The psalmist is a cheerleader, and this opening verse of the triumphant psalm a rallying cry:  “let Israel say,. . .they have not gained the victory over me.”  Those oppressors, ever present, even from my youth, the poet says, have not won the victory, so there. Say it after me. Shout it out. Triumphant affirmation, a tribute to a steadfast believer’s soulful strength.

 I grew up in a country where tolerance of one’s faith is a foundation for civility and civics. Unlike millions, even today, I’ve never felt even a pinch of oppression.

 The family in which I was reared was intact and loving.  I went to the prom, with a date.  My athletic jacket was thick with medals, and I was chosen by my classmates to give a speech at graduation.  I never sought refuge in alternative worlds and felt no hot breath from heathen nations. As a kid, I swear I was not oppressed. Maybe I have no business typing these words.

But my cushy childhood does not inhibit my joy at the fist-raised affirmation that begins Psalm 129. “They have not gained the victory over me.”  Whoever they is or might be, whatever sin or doubt has found its way into my own sense of reality, such darkness has not settled over my life—yet.  I’ve had it good, even today, when I’m old and half a cripple.

But what happens if the tables really turn—as they always do?  What happens if, now in my dotage, darkness begins to muster oppression? Could happen, couldn’t it?

If it does, I must remember the rallying cry of Psalm 129 again: “let Israel say—they have greatly oppressed me from my youth but they have not gained the victory over me.” 

 I must. 

My first sunset

Twenty years ago--August, 2004--I was fooling around with photographs, doing things that I never did before with what was, at least for me, a whole new technological world. I'd always loved photography, loved film, and whole afternoons in a basement dark room. I loved developing photographs in fixer baths. 

When I was in high school, I told my dad that I'd really like to go somewhere and study photography. He didn't like the idea. Taking pictures wasn't the kind of vocation he'd call a "kingdom calling." To his credit, he never really considered a photographer to be anything more than the guy who showed up at weddings and told people what to do, where to stand. 

I bought a good camera for the first time in 1976, but basically left it in a closet for many years, taking pictures of kids and family and not much more. My first digital camera was a weird thing, but then so was digital photography. I paid far, far more for it than it was worth--an ebay special. 

Then, I climbed the ladder. The camera I bought and began to use regularly was a Fujifilm, a honest-to-goodness real camera that delivered pictures like the decorated one above, with corn leaves so sharp and focused that they seem to walk into the room. 

This particular trip west of town happened at sunset. I rarely went out at the end of the day, but I remember thinking that what obsessed me back then, the awesome beauty of heavenly events I'd never really stopped to see, happened at other times. There was no reason to believe that sunsets might not offer eye-fulls of equally glorious skies. 

This August sunset proved a blessing.

In the shot above, the corn is itself a character in the story of the photograph, not just a feature of the setting. But other shots in the same folder illustrate how I was weighing the possibilities of the role of all that Iowa corn.

Here, it's farther away, hardly a role at all.

Here, even less. What I've got in the camera is a wonderful sunset, not a show-stopper, but not bad at all, and a huge Iowa cornfield. I liked being closer to the corn--that's why I chose the shot at the top of the page to turn into a marquee.

Two more. What I like about this one is the placement of the tree and the clouds, as if they were sweetly sharing the lead role. I like the grasses too.

In any retrospective of my time out in the country has to include this picture, which does not include a sunset or even a breathtaking sky. This shot is all land, but it remains, even 20 years later, a photograph that lines up with what I'd  consider the best of the best. . .I don't know why.

Just north of Lebanon, Iowa, August, 2004. This one is a keeper.

Galena's Grant

You'll find it just east of the Mississippi, next door to Dubuque. The rolling hills all around hide the place, so when you drop down into Galena, Illinois, it feels like a discovery. It’s a 19th century gem where 85 per cent of the buildings are restored and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Galena, Illinois, the whole of it, is a museum.

Nine Civil War generals once called the place home--not bad for a stop on the river. Eight of them you'll have to Google, but the 18th President of these United States, 1869-1877, is a name you’ll recognize. His presidency is probably less memorable than his command of the Union Army during the Civil War. General Ulysses S. Grant fought Robert E. Lee and took sword at Appomattox, and promptly, boldly, and respectfully gave it back. As a warrior, he was a generous man.

As a commander he was indefatigable, as a strategist determined, relentless and disciplined. But when the smoke cleared, he championed charity and grace that was much harder for others to give than it seemed to be for him. He faced the horrors of war head on just as he faced peace once the war’s canons went silent. A lion and a lamb somehow co-existed in the soul of Ulysses S. Grant. Go figure.

Late in life, when he was suffering from throat cancer, President Grant became a writer when Mark Twain convinced him the world could be a better place if he’d sit down and record his memories. That was a dumb idea, but Twain wouldn't take no for an answer. When a few of Grant’s published essays brought rewards, Twain made offers he couldn't refuse. U. S. Pres number 18 put just about every bit of what strength he had left into the story of his considerable legacy. 

Not long before those memoirs were finished, the New York World published a story that claimed Grant's memoirs were entirely ghost written. While Grant's friends may be asserting that it's his work, the piece said, a nation should not be fooled by the "false idea. . .that he is a writer. He is not." 

In his massively detailed biography of U. S. Grant, American Ulysses, Ron Chernow refutes the charge by describing how hard Grant worked to finish that memoir, even though he was dying. 

Seems to me you need only to read a letter Grant wrote to the grandmother of James Birdseye McPherson, the second-highest ranking Union officer killed during the war. McPherson died at the Battle of Atlanta, and when General Grant, his boss and friend, heard the news, he fell hard into deep and reverent sadness. McPherson was beloved by his troops, a close friends. 

Our nation grieves for one so dear to our nation's cause. To know him was but to love him. It may be some consolation to you, his aged grandmother, to know that every officer and every soldier who served under your grandson felt the highest reverence for his patriotism, his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability and all the manly virtues that can adorn a commander. 

And then this: "Your bereavement is great,' he wrote, "but cannot exceed mine."

That's not just gorgeous style, that’s heart spilling hurt over the page.

Frederick Douglas, the most prominent African-American of his time, said this of our 18th President: "To him more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. . .He was accessible to all men. . .The black soldier was welcome in his tent, and the freedman in his house." 

If, like me, you thought President U. S. Grant was a hard-nosed general who never escaped the shadows of a bottle, a dim-witted President who didn't drain the swamp when he dang well should have, just drop by Galena, Illinois, sometime, a darling and remarkable old place; visit Grant’s home, spend an hour at the museum--little Galena has a thousand reasons to be proud of its most famous native son.

As do we.