Reservations Lessons ii

(Continued from yesterday--an old essay originally written for and published in the Seattle Pacific University magazine.)         

Then I asked his wife if she too was changed that morning, the morning her husband came home and cried and claimed to be. Her eyes rose just for a moment, she looked at me, and simply she shook her head. The detailed story he'd just recited led me to believe that what had happened that night was a Damascus Road thing—once and forever. It wasn’t. I simply didn't realize there would be more stories, but there were.

I liked the man; he’d led the worship upstairs not long before. His eyes were fervent and honest, full of repentance. But those eyes must have been seemed just as trustworthy before, when, certainly, he was neither fervent nor honest—nor trustworthy.

Some of those who fall--most of them, I imagine, if they know the truth--know very well what they're doing. They understand that what they do will affect those who love them. This man had been reared in the home of a wonderful mother, a faithful believer, the real subject of the interview, the woman whose story I was assigned to write—and another of the women who sat beside him that night.

She was the matriarch. Navajo people tell me their families are deeply matriarchal. If that’s so, she was every bit the queen. With eleven children of her own and dozens of grandchildren, she told me that today, nearly seventy, she spends lots of her day in prayer, prayer she’d learned from parents who’d come to know the Lord by way of a mission with its own deeply flawed past.

Abiding faith lends a visible glow to what otherwise might be plain old stoicism, a glow of hope rooted in destiny. It seems to me that men and women of real faith convey a gravitas that strengthens all of us. In that way too, she was a queen. I was privileged to sit beside her.

That night, the stories had been real, heartfelt, no pretension. The hard fought lessons of faith had been a blessing.

Still, it was dark when I left the church and its people behind. It was dark, and I felt my own foreignness, and maybe just a bit of the hurtful legacy of what my people have done to those with whom I’d just been sitting.

Just a few miles down the road, up on the ridge to the west, flashing lights streamed through the darkness, signaling something painful still a mile away. When I came closer, smoke wafted across the four-lane highway. Something was burning.

Reservation homesteads have a certain consistent appearance. The Navajos carve out homesteads somewhat distanced from each other, even though they live in extended family clusters. Often there are trailers or pre-fab homes, sometimes a kind of contemporary hogan and even

So great is our need of a Savior. All we, like the sheep of the reservation, have gone astray.

It's a painful lesson in smoke and darkness and emergency lights, a lesson once again--once again--once again, especially for those of us who are repeat offenders. It’s nothing more than a basic lesson in sin and forgiveness.

Somehow all of that, or so it seems to me now, is a story in the tight weave of a tattered Navajo blanket, my grandfather’s, that hangs here on my wall, miles from the reservation.

Reservation Lessons - i

It wasn’t terribly late, but it was dark over the reservation that night, scattered lights here and there where Navajo homesteads glitter against the vast reaches of the uncluttered desert landscape. A ridge of mountains to the west was barely visible, and, I'll admit it, for a white man somewhat unsure of himself in Indian territory, I wasn’t feeling totally at home.

I was returning from an old church basement, where I'd been sitting with a half-dozen members of a large Navajo family, listening to them--mostly Grandma--tell her story, a story rich with love and grace.  I was on assignment: write stories about elderly Navajo Christians and their relationship to a century-old mission boarding school, Rehoboth, just east of Gallup.  And I’d been listening.

What Anglo Christians like me are discovering these days is that the story of any North American Indian boarding school, no matter how righteous in intent, cannot be told in triumph or joy.  Those histories are heavily burdened with real pain.  One prominent Navajo leader, a Rehoboth graduate, told me that the attempt to teach Native people a new way of life, as all boarding schools once intended, carried an unmistakable corollary.  Indian kids learned, even if it were never stated, that their culture of origin, in this case, the Navajo way of life, had to be left behind.  Kids learned, he said, that the values with which they were reared, and the families that taught those values, were essentially worthless.  That lesson was criminal, a sin.  Today, we call it a kind of abuse, cultural abuse.

My own grandfather was on the “Heathen Mission Board” of the denomination he served and of which I am still a member, the Christian Reformed Church in North America.  For thirty years in the early 20th century, the Rev. John C. Schaap, a deeply pious man of God, supervised the operation of the Rehoboth boarding school, a school that has—as do all Indian boarding schools—a deeply troubled past.  Here in my study hangs an ancient and tattered Navajo rug, a gift to him, years ago, for his long service on that Board.  I too am part of this story.  But then, it seems to me that all of us are.

    That Sunday night, I’d worshipped in an old church, the very first my denomination had built on the reservation, almost a century ago.  With twenty people or so, we’d brought praise and thanksgiving to God, prayed and sung old gospel hymns—in English and Navajo.  Then, along with just a few of the folks, we’d retired to the cool of the basement, where for three hours or so, I asked questions and listened to stories.

I don't know that I've ever heard a man's confession of adultery before and then turned to look at his faithful wife, who, it seemed, wouldn't address me or him or even what he'd just confessed with her eyes.  It was a moment I won't forget.  He’d told me a long and tearful story about coming to terms, a few years back, with what he’d become—too much drink, too many drugs, too much unfaithfulness.  It was an immensely moving testimony. . . . .

(finish tomorrow)

 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“. . .sing, all you who are upright in heart.”

 My father once gave me the end of a novel.  I was struggling along, trying to figure out where that story was going, when he and my mother came to visit, went to church one Sunday, and sang, with the entire congregation, the old Fanny Crosby hymn “Blessed Assurance.”  The image of him, face aglow, became the last scene, the one I was looking for.

 So when he died, just a few years ago, something in me wanted that hymn sung at his funeral.  I wouldn’t have asked for it, because I was afraid that the reasons for me wanting that hymn would have been more related to my work, my writing, than who he was, even though part of the reason I was so taken by him that Sunday was his effortless joy in affirming that Jesus was, in fact, his.

 Miraculous?—I don’t know how to gauge miracles; but when I talked with my sister about the shape of Dad’s funeral, she said she’d told Mom that the hymn we ought to sing was “Blessed Assurance.”  There had to be some divine intervention there, don’t you think?

 So we did—at the memorial service for my father we sang “Blessed Assurance.”  Well, most people did.  I didn’t.  I couldn’t.  But I loved it, even though I’d never been particularly taken with the way it swings, well, tediously, through the chorus.  But you don’t have to like something to love it—and to feel heaven and earth moved.

My father had died rather quickly.  He wasn’t young, and when he fell carrying a box—he and Mom were planning on moving—a wicked series of cause-and-effects eventually took him, no more than a month later. 

But it was only then that I came to believe what my mother told me—that Dad had been in the early throes of Alzheimer’s, that his condition had manifest itself in many ways, some of which we discovered when going through his things.  He was a banker who prided himself on keeping books, but his checkbook was a disaster, corrections scratched in monthly, sometimes for outrageous amounts.  He couldn’t keep it anymore. Must have been very vexing for him, but he never mentioned a thing.

Some boxes he’d packed were a jumble.  My wife looked at one of them strangely, and said she was sure she could see he was losing it—kitchen utensils with socks and clothing items.  Made no sense.  My father was always organized.

But my mother’s stories were most convincing.  He couldn’t sing anymore, she told us.  My parents had sung together as loyally as they’d daily meditated on the Word.  When I was young, they used to face off and play table tennis, Mom usually winning.  Eventually they grew out of that and into Rummicube, but no matter what else they were doing, they always sang together, my mother at the keyboard.

That he couldn’t—that, in those last weeks of his life, he lacked the wherewithal to put word and voice together—had to be immensely painful.  Millions of people die everyday in more difficult pain, perhaps, than my father ever felt, even in dying; but I can’t imagine how he suffered, not being able to sing.

So this verse feels like my father, today.  “Sing,” David says.  Sing.

I’m not sure my father looks much different today than he did that Sabbath when he gave me the final scene of a novel.  But I’ll grant you this, there’s even more joy on a face that just won’t ever stop shining. 

 

The bottom line of this historical highway marker claims the sign was placed there in 1956. I was nine years old. As I remember, it was south and east of town, closer to Cedar Grove than it was to Oostburg, along what was once state highway 141, but what has been blessed today with a more historical name--the Sauk Trail. 

Some Sauk, some Fox, some Pottawatomi, some Ho-Chunk or Winnebago--they were all there on the lakeshore in 1847, at least remnants thereof, most of them by that time reduced to begging, indigents, according to my great-grandfather's obituary, victims of a rapacious western movement of Euro-Americans, many of them, like my ancestors, immigrants.

The first book I owned I bought from Prange's Department Store in Sheboygan. Most likely, that was close to 1956. That coffee-table sized book cost all of three dollars, I think, but it documented and described Indians, Native Americans, not just the tribes that were on Wisconsin's Lake Michigan shoreline, where I grew up, but all kinds of Indians. I loved it. Paid for it myself--I think my parents were proud really. 

I never forgot the highway sign. Mom and Dad likely piled their kids in the car--an old Mercury--and went south down the highway, maybe on our way to Milwaukee, when Dad spotted that flashy new highway marker he'd read about and decided to pull over. 

I'm almost positive no school class ever taught me anything about the Phoenix disaster. When I was a boy in the Christian school, there were only two histories that really counted much: national history (the Tea Party, Washington on the Delaware) and Reformation history (Luther, Calvin, Knox, etc.). When I was a kid, I don't know if any teacher I ever had considered Sheboygan County history to be history at all. 

All I ever knew of the Phoenix disaster was from this sign. No one talked much about it as I remember, and while there were many in local communities who could trace their ancestry back to some long-gone Phoenix disaster survivor, I couldn't, nor did I lose a relative that cold November night in 1847. 

But the story stayed with me, found a permanent place in my heart and soul, and when first I was given the assignment to write a short story--I was a sophomore in college--the very first story I wrote was something about the Phoenix disaster.

Close to 300 Dutch emigrants had left the Netherlands months before, bound for rural Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. They'd boarded the steamship Phoenix for the last leg of the journey, stopped for a time, just north at Manitowoc, then departed, middle of the night, for the Sheboygan harbor. They were within sight of the city lights--that close!--when a boiler blew and set the wooden ship aflame. Most of those on board had one last choice--to drown or burn. The lifeboats were a joke. Who on earth cared for these people, after all? They were just a bunch of lousy immigrants. 

When, a few years later, I decided to try to gather a sense of my own roots (Alex Haley, Roots), I started on my very first book project. It was 1976. I was a college teacher. My idea?--to read local histories of Dutch Reformed areas, find stories I liked, and try to write them to learn to write fiction. 

The first story I wrote with that collection of stories in mind was the story of the Phoenix disaster. In a way, ever since I was nine, ever since I read that highway sign, I couldn't help but think that somehow, for someone like me, a kid with a Dutch name, who grew up on the lakeshore, that story in some mysterious way belonged to me.

A story in yesterday's Sheboygan Press claims that a local scavenger took a State Historical Society diver along to look over what he'd considered a log when he'd earlier taken a Dutch researcher to the place, a couple miles out, north of Sheboygan, where the Phoenix was thought to have gone down. The expert now claims that the log is not a log, but a smokestack, almost assuredly from the Phoenix. It's been lying there in cold Lake Michigan waters for 175 years. Amazing!--and wonderful.

I just hope some kid in the neighborhood will take notice of all of this, do a little homework on the story, and then allow it a permanent place in the library of his or her soul, which is where you'll find mine.

The story of the Phoenix disaster is bigger and broader, deeper and wider, than even a Lake Michigan horizon at dawn. It begs unanswerable questions, critiques our prejudices, puts us into the kind of stillness that reminds us to think eternally. 

__________________________ 

The story "The Heritage of These Many Years" appears in my first book, Sign of a Promise and Other Stories, 1979.

A circle of stories

An old essay from the time I put together a book for Rehoboth, a century-old Christian mission and school in Gallup, New Mexico. I don't have a picture of the picture--wish I did!--but the story is worth telling again.

An old mission institution like Rehoboth Christian School eventually accumulates a museum of cast-offs. Upstairs in the old Mission House, in a four-by-six library, itself likely a gift, a whole shelf of books are marked "Grand Rapids Christian High." Cast-offs.

For close to a century, supporting churches and families—even schools—have given away old books, old knick-knacks, unused furniture, and what not else, to the mission, designated for years to “our Indian cousins,” the description the denominational magazine used to keep white folks like my parents and me, “back east,” in touch with the enterprise.

Not long ago, I stayed in the Mission House, where I noticed a print in my room, a painting, the only ornament on the wide wall south, across from the bed. It’s a slightly impressionistic rendition of what appeared to be a country road in England or Holland, some exotic European country villa nowhere near the gorgeous Southwest backdrop that takes your breath away when you step out any door at Rehoboth.

An odd print for this place, I thought—a strange way to decorate. A room in the old Mission House really ought to feature some breathtaking desert landscape.

When I looked up close, I realized it was not a print. Run your finger over the canvas, and you’ll notice that someone painted it.

So, for a night or two, I simply assumed the painting was some Easterner's spare bedroom wall-hanging, something someone like me couldn’t gather the wherewithal to chuck, even though it was of little value to anyone. “Send it to Rehoboth,” he told himself, years ago. “Maybe someone there can use it. It's a real painting, after all."

That’s why it’s here, on this old wall, so out of place I told myself—it’s somebody’s cast-off gift.

There's a name in the lower left-hand corner. “M. Vander Weide - 51,” it says, the number, I’m guessing, a reference to the year it was painted.
Okay, someone sent a painting to his Indian cousins, a painting his grandma had done maybe ten years before she died. Couldn’t throw it out, I told myself, so he sent it to Rehoboth. Sure—that makes sense.

*

The next morning, in Window Rock, I prayed aloud over a breakfast I shared with three others—Mr. Herbert F. White and his wife Sarah, as well as their son, Fred. And as I did, Sarah White whispered grace like a soft alto line, as if my own words, my prayer, were the melody. It was beautiful. Then we ate breakfast—and talked, about life, about Rehoboth, about the saving grace of the Lord.

Mr. White’s own father was a Navajo medicine man, a good man, a loving father, his son says, remembering, even while he was apologizing for what he considers to be his fractured English. As a little kid, he says, he didn’t know a word of English until he came to Rehoboth Mission School.

Rev. Jacob Kamps visited his hogan one day in the mid-1930s. He says he didn’t remember any white man ever having come into his place before—not one; and even though he knew no English, this Rev. Kamps, in fractured Navajo, told his father—the boy picked up a bit of it anyway—that his son, his only son, should be going to school at Rehoboth.

Six or seven years old, this boy was, soon after, trucked—well, wagon-ed—off to the mission school—and once there, was left behind. “This was something totally new,” he told me, remembering that day. “I didn’t even have an idea what a school was going to be.” He was going to get an education, an education his father wanted for him.

“I went right away to the dormitory, and Miss Van was there—she was the matron,” he told me over blue cornmeal pancakes. “And the late Miss Van—she treated me just like a mom,” the mom he’d never had. “Her welcome was so great,” he said, it was as if she was saying “come to my house. I don’t care what color your skin is, you’re my child. And from there on,” he said— “I didn’t feel any harm. I felt welcomed.”

But there’s more. Miss Van, he said, used to spread her arms out and act like a train—he made a whistling sound just as she had so many years ago, mimicking her. “And all of the students would follow her,” he told me, as if they were boxcars following the engine all around the dormitory room where the boys slept. She was putting them to sleep.

And now, if you’re still with me, you’re likely already putting the stories together.

*

That afternoon I met an elderly white man who knows almost as much about this mission as anyone still alive. I was telling him parts of this great story, when I asked him who this Miss Van was.

“Why that was Marie Vander Weide,” he told me.

“M Vander Weide,” I thought, lights going on in the dimness, the woman who painted that odd little impressionist image of some quaint European village, the one that hangs on the wall in the old Mission house, the very place where Herbert F. White remembers, with joy, his very first taste of fresh cow’s milk.

All of that history sits beside me now, right here at Rehoboth, as I attempt to tell the story, the precious history of believers, in obedience, trying their human best to love as the Lord commands, to bring his saving love to kids who were, often as not, scared to death, far from home in an incredibly strange, whole new world, bringing the gospel in outstretched arms and silly train whistle.

Marie Vander Weide’s oil painting hangs across the room, where it shines a good deal brighter today, as if it were aglow in the radiant bronze patina of a perfect New Mexico dawn. That painting is nobody’s cast-off. It’s priceless.

And I feel blessed to have been the recipient of an entire circle of stories.

Farch again

It's a mess--the weather that is. 

Sunday, it was so awful that all around town church was called off. Northwest winds swept out of Alberta as if chased by ICE, and snow fell, three to five. Now listen, we've had 70-degree weather three weeks ago. To be assaulted/insulted by yet another weekend blizzard--we've had a few this season and they're almost predictably come on Sunday (the Devil's doing it!)--was hard to take. Yesterday, Tuesday, the high never cleared freezing, and the low shouldn't be spoken of in polite society. 

Now hold on to your seat. Today--Wednesday--the thermometer will supposedly climb to 50, Friday 60, Saturday 70, Sunday 80. Seriously. Sometimes you just can't help but wonder how on earth those sodbusters made it out here. Now you know why just seeing the buffalo herd far away over the hills at Broken Kettle makes me soul sing. Through the millennia, they figured out the way to live out here where the weather always comes in spades.

There aren't a ton of photographs in my files from Farch, in part (and I hate to say this) because beauty is hard to find right about now. Give the green an inch or two in a few weeks, and the awakening will be beautiful. New snow makes the world virginal, but by March bridal gowns have become a cliche.

You do what you can. These are from March 21, 2009, fifteen years ago. Given the circumstances, I think I did okay. I'm a couple of miles out of Hawarden on the banks of the Big Sioux.

And, sure enough, here's the dawn, the Big Sioux running like liquid gold.

 Tell you what--let me just drop a small herd of buffalo in here for your and my mental health. I know, I know--it's not Farch and there are no bison west of Hawarden. But sometimes they can be so wonderful. See 'em down there on the ridge of a hill.

All's well that ends well.

In praise of Minnesotans

 

You can listen to this on a podcast:  https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2021-10-04/the-nobel-cheese-prize-sinclair-lewis-in-minnesota

The birthday of Sinclair Lewis is now a bit behind us, but in his honor, I thought I’d sing the glories of a Sinclair Lewis 1/3 pound cheeseburger, served up with pickle and fries at the Palmer House, downtown Sauk Center, an old hotel that's not changed its features for more than a half century and fronts on Sinclair Lewis Street. I'm not kidding. Just down the way a few blocks, you can find the Sinclair Lewis home and on the south side of town, the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center. All true. Google it.

The Sinclair Lewis Cheeseburger

I can’t help but think all that glory is a bit ironic. Sauk Center's somewhat favorite son didn't much care for the codgers who peopled his hometown, or any Midwestern small towns, for that matter. The book that shot the moon for him, Main Street (1921), sold phenomenally and led, eventually, to Lewis's receiving the Nobel Prize (1930), the first American to win. Nothing to sneeze at.

In high school, I was forcefed Main Street. Hated the book. Not even sure I read it. Made no sense to me, largely because the book is acidic satire I wasn’t smart enough to see. What I do remember is how much "Red" Lewis despised his own, even people I knew in my own midwestern small town. He had reason, I’m sure: small towns can be death on individuals who are individuals. Lewis was tall, gangly, unathletic, and not much to look at. People say his father, the town doctor, never understood him. Those kinds of ingredients are not a recipe for success.

With weekly visits to a place called Lake Woebegone, Garrison Keillor celebrated his own Minnesota boyhood and Minnesota culture for years, and a audience from across the nation dialed in, belovedly. His 30th anniversary celebrated with a traveling show held in a bunch of small towns, to which he invited folks to bring picnic baskets and lawn chairs. Minnesota sweetness.

Mr. Keillor sports with his people, Mr. Lewis knifed ‘em.

The very idea of lawn chairs and picnic baskets would be anathema to Sinclair Lewis, Minnesota's Nobel Prize winner. He'd rip and tear at the backward souls who showed up. 

But today, this Iowan believes Minnesota can laugh at itself and love itself, almost simultaneously; and that's why I admire the place. Anyone who can be at home with a place called “the Gopher State" has to have a sense of humor. Minnesotans all buy truly Minnesota-thick winter gear--caps, jackets, vests from Bemidji Woolen Mills.

Not only that, but they wear all that Gopher gear with pride, arrogance even, whether or not their names are Olie and Lena. In the movie Fargo, the Coen brothers, great Minnesota filmmakers, worked the archetypes lovingly with a small-town cop named Marge Gunderson, who, in a cap with earmuffs, taught the nation how to speak Minnesotan, don’t you know?

So you’re wondering about that Sinclair Lewis cheeseburger—thumbs up or thumbs down? Listen, it wasn't half bad, served up on a hard roll too yet.

What's more, I can’t help but think there's some poetic justice in the fact that Sauk Prairie, Lewis’s home town, honors its Nobel Prize-winning novelist with a fat cheeseburger.

That is so Minnesotan. Got to love ‘em.

_________________________ 

The real reason I pulled this post out of mothballs is I wanted to extol a recent op-ed in the NY Times by Tom Friedman. It's very long, but perfectly wonderful and unflinchingly moral. If you want to understand what President Trump doesn't understand (and never will, read--or listen to--this convincing essay that explains "neighboring," something the world needs to learn. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026 /03/15/opinion/columnists/minneapolis-ice-trump-neighbor.html 

Old friends

Took me years before I knew that the Luxembourgers just down the road hailed from a country so small it wasn't greatly more spacious than Plymouth County, where a whole slew of them put down roots in the 1870s. Hard to imagine. 

It would take little more than a couple of hours to chase all the way across the country if you were visiting the Netherlands these days, distances being so short-circuited. Used the be stories circulated about relatives from the old country getting here to northwest Iowa and then asking nutty questions like "We go maybe to Niagara Falls tomorrow, you think? --and then the mountain with all those Presidents?" --travel agendas beyond the imagination. The size of things in this country is what they couldn't figure or imagine, that it would take them most of the day just to get east to Dubuque.

When the pioneer Luxembourgers' wagon trains crossed the state in 1870, travel time was two to three weeks, including over-night-ers to rest their trusty oxen. One can only imagine how spellbinding endless prairie must have seemed to them, how mysterious the eternal horizon must have seemed. One pioneer liked to say that when he arrived at this far corner, there was only one tree where eventually there would be a village named Orange City. 

All of which makes a single story more memorable than it might seem at first-telling. A man named Jacob Koster put down roots in a place to be called Sioux Center--right there in what is Central Park today. Koster came from southeast Minnesota to land they believed available--as long as you weren't Yankton Sioux. 

A mammoth cottonwood in Central Park ranks as one of the biggest--and likely oldest--in the entire state. I like to believe Jacob Koster planted it, but cottonwoods don't need us to plant them. That particular monster, however, marks the spot where the Koster decided to homestead.

Koster himself, or so the story goes, spotted somewhere south a column of smoke one wind-still morning, then saw it again and again days later, all of which fired his curiosity. Neighbors? Indians? One morning his curiosity got the best of him, and he decided to have a look, make it an adventure--took the whole family with him.

Must have been a hovel like the one his family lived in, chunks of sod set against a bit of a hill, a refuge from wind and rain maybe, but a refuge for all manner of critters as well. The Kosters spotted it maybe five miles from their own sod house. 

There they sat, some distance away in the wagon, when suddenly a woman stepped out and drew back the blanket that served as a front door. She was alone. 

Cautiously, Koster brought his wagon closer until she heard a foreign sound, someone nearby, and looked up, frightened.

Both of them fell into dead silence. There they stood, Jacob and family on the wagon, the woman dropping the pail she carried into the prairie grass. 

"Jacob?" she stammered, still as stone.

Silence spread out like the open prairie.

"And you are Yentje?" Koster said. 

Maybe he stepped down from the wagon. We don't know. I don't think he hugged her, both of them non-huggers of stolid Dutch stock. But they knew each other. Miracle of miracles, they knew each other.

The history book says the two of them had immigrated to the States at different times in different groups, Yentje and her family going to southern Iowa before coming farther northwest. Jacob, who we might just call an old boyfriend of hers, had arrived in America and moved west with another group of Hollanders, where--out in the middle of endless grassland--they stumbled into each other, both of them with families of their own trying to make do in this huge new world.

True story? It's one of those that, if it isn't true, should be. Two old friends, close friends, meet serendipitously--but blessedly--on endless Siouxland grasslands.

I don't know if the Luxembourgers have their own similar story, but if they'd like to borrow this one, they should feel free. Out here on the edge of the plains, it makes everyone smile.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous. . .”

 All day long that summer day, an intermittent screech would come crashing through the open basement window of my office. A son of the man who used to live next door—before he died several years ago—was cleaning out his father’s three-stall garage, one old two by four at a time. The next day, out front, there stood a pyramid of junk, which attracted me for some shady reason, but I did my best to stay away.

 I couldn’t see him from where I sat, but I heard every last armful of trash come down on the pile whenever he’d emerge from the shadowy interior of the old garage. What made the job worse was that his father was an ace tinkerer. I’m not sure whether he was, by nature, a pack rat, but his father’s ability to fix anything meant that nothing lacked value.  It was a huge job, and my guess was that his son would be at it again on the morrow.

 I found the whole operation scary.  The detritus one accumulates throughout life is incredible. When we retired, we moved out of town and into the country where the massive prairie sky is a daily—and nightly—art museum. It was great, but moving wasn’t. And now, once again, we moved—this time back into town for --  hurts to say this – senior housing. Every move requires tossing things, determining what’s junk and what’s not..

Here in my office, I’m surrounded by stuff I wouldn’t think of tossing, stuff that will be just so much junk to my kids.  Maybe I ought to buy one of those little guns that produce lettered plastic tape and label everything—“this is a pin I got when I was asked to read an essay at a commemoration of 9/11—a year later.”  Who would ever know otherwise?  And who—well, no one—would ever care?

I’ve got two shelves of old Dutch books, some of which come from my grandfather and my great-grandfather, preachers in the old days. There are others, a dozen at least, that I bought for almost nothing at an auction. Some of those were printed before the American Revolution.  When I’m gone, will anyone care? —or will those ancient texts simply be returned to another auction, where some anxious fancier will gleefully buy them, and put them carefully on another bookshelf until she dies—an endless cycle.

That next door junk pile reminded me, all too clearly, of my own life, a thought that would never have entered my mind 25 years ago, but now, as I approach eighty, may well be all too haunting.

 By human standards, it’s impossible to deny that life is tragic; there’s no escaping the grim reaper, after all.  Everyone must die. Count on it. All things must pass. Today, I sat at a coffee table with a man who was told just this week that he has pancreatic cancer. All of us, seniors, will go; he sees it coming more clearly.

Someday, my books, my baseball trophies, my ergonomic keyboard—it all must go.  Even my wife, even my children—we all will die.

 Like so many Bible verses, it’s altogether too easy to pass over the triumph that sounds at the end of Psalm 32. “Rejoice,” King David the forgiven says. “Rejoice in the Lord and be glad.” It’s not a whimper or a whisper. It’s a shout because what needs to be routed is the despair we all come heir to as flesh weakens and spirits collapse before a rectangular hole in the ground.

 Rejoice, David says, as do all believers—“Rejoice and be glad.” Rejoice in His love because the Lord, the almighty tinkerer, makes all things new, even the junk next door—and the pile here in my heart. 

 Rejoice and be glad because God our Savior never tosses out a thing. 

On Hegseth's "sphere sovereignty"

I'm thinking I was in college before I ever heard someone with theological chops put two words together into a phrase with some chops of its own--"sphere sovereignty." I remember learning that "sphere sovereignty" was a phrase worth knowing, in part because it originated in the quite sovereign rule of a Dutch preacher/politician named Abraham Kuyper, a man who was spoken of in very high-regard-ish tones.

I wasn't the greatest student back then, never was really, so let me tell you what I remember of "sphere sovereignty": it was a good thing, a good, good thing because it set boundaries by making the claim that the institutions of society each had their own separate domain and calling, their own private property. Thus, the Christian school I attended as a boy was not run by the c0nsistory of the church, any church--it was "parental" Christian education because a stratagem of the Calvinism at the base of our faith ruled clearly--"Kuyper said it!"--that the church had its own "sphere" of influence, as did the school. While the same men (not women back then) could be members of the local Christian school board and members of the church consistory, one of those organizations should not run the other. 

Why? Because sphere sovereignty was a principle of life, or thus saith Abraham Kuyper, who, I learned, gives us Reformed-types our marching orders. When Kuyper created a university--the Free University--he named it what he did because it was free from entanglements of any political or ecclesiastical entity. In it's sphere--the sphere of education--it was sovereign--or free.

"Sphere sovereignty" might have created some heft at Dordt College midway through the 20th century, but it's never been slung around on a banner or proclaimed on a t-shirt in the U. S. of A, never, that is, until Pete Hegseth, Trump's Secretary of War (their language, not mind). 

Hegseth's form of Christian nationalism has its own take on "sphere sovereignty," and what he and his cronies say doesn't set forth the kind of liberty and diversity at the heart of the doctrine's original application. In other words, what Secretary Hegseth and other Christian nationalists (who often brandish the word "Reformed" too) are selling isn't what I heard for the first time in 1966 just a few blocks down the road from where I'm sitting.

As Justin Bailor, from Calvin University, writes in a recent column in World, 

. . .it is Christ who is sovereign over all, and not any institution or any particular Christian–whether preacher, pope, or prince. A proper regard for the origins, essence, and purpose of sphere sovereignty reveal it to be a theory of limited government, and even more than that a theory of social diversity, cultural pluriformity, and civil liberty. It is as such opposed to all forms of tyranny.

There's no room therein for Hegseth's noxious Christian nationalism. 

Thus saith sphere sovereignty. 

Updike's fortunes

 

I'll tell you, there's some astonishing familiarly to this shelf. At one time or another, I must have had just about every one of the books, or at least most. No more. My guess is that they were among the books I unloaded when I left my office at the college. I don't think they were ever home in our country place, and they certainly didn't come along to Woodbridge, the place we now call home. Where they once stood proudly, today they're gone.

In that way, I guess, their disappearance takes the same track as the work of John Updike does in the culture these days--he's simply not as hot as he once was. Critics far sharper than I am claim that some of what's there--the Rabbit foursome--won't disappear from American literary consciousness, nor will short stories still taught in Intro to Lit classes--you may remember "A & P," one of the most popular short stories in American literary history, or "Pigeon Feathers"--if I had that story anywhere here today, I could read it again and fawn embarrassingly about the Christian faith so beautifully evident at the end of that story.

Aspects of Updike's work, and his confession/profession in interviews--posited his deeply felt Christian faith. However, my mother would absolutely never considere him a "Christian writer." Nobody did sex as dreamily as he did--or as horridly. Nobody looked so closely without blushing. No world-class writers spent more time or interest in the male anatomy as did John Updike. 

And that itself may be one of the major reasons that his work has fallen out of favor with many of the mainstays of literary culture--if there are such folks.

My introduction to him came in an English class at Dordt College, when a brilliant but nutty professor named Meeter chose to bring in a copy of Couples he had been perusing and to read a hot passage--steamy and forbidden--in class, in public, standing right up in front, behind the podium. I'm not making this up. He wanted us to hear some torrid sex because he wanted his good Christian students to be as perfectly appalled as he'd been when all those gymnastics came alive on the page before him. 

Didn't work. I wasn't appalled, I was fascinated. I got interested in John Updike, out of class for sure. 

I'm no expert but it seems that Updike may have been one of the first to feature full frontal nudity in mainstream literature, as many writers broke down bedroom doors to bring us up close and personal to the act most of us crave. My literary hero at the time, Frederick Manfred, spent goodly hours watching nakedness do its thing. It was the late 60s, and lots of taboos were falling. Honestly, the only question I was asked that had real oompah when I interviewed for a job at Dordt, some years later, was "Will you teach dirty books?" a question that was so facile it answered itself. Imagine if I'd said yes!!!

Updike's disfavor today come at the hands of the "Me Too" movement as well as people tiring of white male writers. Today, some roll their eyes at some--if not all--of his fervid sexuality finding it altogether too, well, male--and too, yes, Protestant. And prurient. 

Still, I really, really admired the character Rabbit from Rabbit Run, and I'm quite sure--I hope I'm not being sexist here--that in Rabbit John Updike created a very real American character, a young man of his age, as was  John Updike himself, and, to be sure, at least one of his greatest admirers, me. 

Time changes things--that's maybe one of the best moral lessons I can pull from all of this. Thanks, Merle Meeter.

Sunday Morning Meds -- Psalm 32

 

“But the Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him.”

 Our former preacher once said that the first words that famous chorus of angels offered to the quaking shepherds on the hills of Galilee are the entire scripture in a nutshell: “Fear not!” Thar’ ‘tis--the whole Word of the Lord to those who love him: “Fear not.”

 Those two words are the heart and soul of this verse from Psalm 32 too, as well as the answer to the first question of the catechism I was reared with.  The question is, “What is your only comfort in life and in death?”  And the answer is simple:  “That I am not my own, but belong, in body and soul and in life and death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”  Same as.

 “The Lord’s unfailing love surrounds the man who trusts in him.”  Surrounds.  When my grandson and I go to the park a couple of blocks from our house, he’s a terror.  He’ll try anything.  The only way for me to keep him from scoring something purple on his forehead is to stand beside him or around him or behind him, close enough so that at any moment I can save him from his own. . .his own what?—silliness, childishness, inexperience, innocence, stupidity?  Maybe I should say, save him from being a kid.  Not unlike us.

 That’s not exactly what the verse implies, perhaps, but it’s close.  Try this—God’s love makes us all look like the Michelin Man.  In our every moment, he outfits us with rubber bumpers.  Okay, maybe it’s not the best image.  They’d get a little cumbersome, I think, and one couldn’t tap dance all that well.

 How about this?  When we trust him, we’re got airbags on all sides, like a Lexus maybe.  That’s surrounded.  But somehow it doesn’t quite ring true either—maybe because of the level of wealth the Lexus connotes. 

The first time I put on our married kid’s DVD player and heard the sound of Tora, Tora, Tora—or whatever—through speakers mounted in every corner of the room, the soundtrack took my breath away. I was in the middle of the action.  God’s love is like surround sound.  We are cocooned.  We’re swaddled in his love.  Whatever happens, we’re in his hands—always, forever.

 That still runs up short.

 If you think I’m being a little glib, you may be right.  I’m sitting here smiling, but then I’m not sure that a smile is the wrong tone of voice.  You may even call it childish, if you’d like, but the implication of this verse is soooooooooo good that it’s tough not to be a little goofy.  It’s hard to write without a smile.

Years ago, a woman told me a story of how, one night here on the prairie, her husband and young son were killed by a tornado that left her hospitalized on the edge of both death and despair.  She told me that the only thing that got her through her travail was her repetition of the answer I quoted above:  “I am not my own.  I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, to my faithful savior Jesus Christ.. . .I am not my own.”

 A Calvinist mantra, so to speak. 

 In life and in death, David says, fear not.  The love of God surrounds you unfailingly. 

Say it again and again, Michelin Man.            

Way too many chains (reprised)

 

[This blog is getting ancient--twenty years old and more, thousands of posts, most of which can quietly slide into oblivion with no particular sadness or pain. But once in a while I go back a ways and hunt around for something lively, like this one from 2012. I'd just retired. I have no memory of where I was, but I remember the mammoth picnic table that earned, to my mind, a few words.]

I suppose one of the sentences I'm serving in my life is being forced to look at picnic tables.  I've lifted more than my share, painted dozens, even repaired 'em by the lot; so many that when I sit at one, I can't help look. And yesterday, here's what I couldn't help seeing.

When I walked out of church, it felt like early June in Omaha--had to be 60. The congregation was going to have lunch together and then do some caroling.  Imagine Christmas caroling in weather so warm you really should be playing church-league softball.  But I couldn't stay, so I got in the car and started steering north and homeward.

I grabbed a Philly Cheese Steak sandwich at Arby's--big mistake because it was too darn big--then decided I was retired and there was no reason to chase home on such gorgeous day, perfect for most anything but caroling. So, sandwich and curly fries in hand, I pulled over at a rest stop and took the closest picnic table. Everything tastes better outside, we used to say at the state park where I worked, even too much Philly cheese steak.

That's when I noticed the heavy chain beneath the table.  See it?. Incredible. You have to notice, first off, that nobody ever has to repaint this mammoth.  The top is that unforgiving hard rubber stuff, and the base is honest-to-goodness concrete. Nobody ever repairs this thing either.

And it's chained down--that's right, chained down, presumably because otherwise some petty thief idiot would walk off with it.  I can understand people wanting one of these heavy suckers in their backyard--it'll last forever!--but I could not begin to imagine how on earth some deviant yokel could grab one, then hoist it on the bed of a pickup without some huge wench and a world-class hernia.

Seriously, someone's going to steal this table?

What kind of world do we live in anyway?

We all suffer for the damned. Starts in third grade, when some kid rips up a library book and the rest of us lose our recess until the creep 'fesses up. Thus we strip at airports and let some unsavory stranger have a look at our private selves in an x-ray lest some fanatic Islamicist tries to light up his Nikes.

Made me sad, honestly, this human condition.  Some crew has to put chains on what must be a couple of hundred state-owned, ten-ton picnic tables because out and about on the land there's a highway robber who'd otherwise grab one of these and take it home?  Oh, geez.  Woe and woe and woe.

It was a gorgeous day. Thank goodness for global warming. But there I sat, stuffing my face and, on account of a heavy metal chain, lamenting the human condition. And I'd just come from church too.  What I should have done is turned around, gone back, and done some good old-fashioned holiday caroling.

Instead, I sat there angry, finishing that cheesy-mess of a sandwich--and the curly fries, all of 'em.

Woe and woe and woe. Sometimes, Lord, I think I got a chain on me.

Farch, Dogwood

With any kind of lovely dawn, something about this tree, a mile south of the blacktop, down an eighth of a mile from Dogwood is just gorgeous. I've got dozens of pictures of it, from all kinds of angles. It's sits out there all by itself on a road the county doesn't keep up, and it foregrounds a space, a wide-open landscape that seems iconic. 

On this particular Saturday morning--February 27, 2009--it just happened to be shimmering.

I don't know if I'd call this morning subject more or less enchanting. The ice is almost a shock, but it imprisons as much as it beautifies. One more--

Once the sun gets a head of steam, it pours forth that Midas touch that is itself a reason to be out there down some gravel road.

The richness of that gold mantel turns everything heavenly.

If  you think there's any beauty here--with this shot--thank light, the gilded spell of early morning.

To be honest, I don't remember that morning, but I'm happy to be reminded by what the camera recorded, fifteen years ago.

"Farch," some people call it right now, a season two boring month roll slowly along while we wait for emerald to be born once more. But, hit it right, and even "farch" glows.

A man named Ree

 

It's there. I know it is. I saw it. Took me a while to actually notice it specifically--I mean, there are other names carved into this healthy peace of Sioux Quartzite, but it's there. I drew a light circle around it so you can pick it out--the name of Joseph Nicolet, the French Renaissance man (geographer, explorer, astronomer, and who knows what else?). It's right here at Pipestone National Monument, just up the road a couple of hours.

Here's shot I found on line. You can't miss it. 

Just plain hard to believe that Nicolet was in Minnesota before there was one, before almost any other white guy--1838. There had to be more, of course, but Joseph Nicolet, explorer extraordinaire, was there at Pipestone National Monument before you could buy a pipe.

As was George Catlin, explorer and artist, a man who left two jobs behind out east, where he'd been a barrister, a lawyer, as well as a portrait artist who turned a buck or two by putting famous people's faces on canvas, suitable for hanging.

Catlin said that one day in Philly he met some Native people and was, well, mesmerized. There's no mention of where the vision came from or when, but what he said he'd suddenly determined he'd been born to do was go west, young man, and paint portraits of every last tribe, today yet, if not yesterday. Must have been a striking vision. 

If you've ever been to the Pipestone National Monument, Catlin's portrait (circa 1838) requires a second look. No trees, just a massive outcropping of pink quartzite, rising from the grassy prairie like an ancient shipwreck amid the sea of prairie grass. 

Catlin documented the place by staying around for a spell, observing rituals, and putting them on canvas, just exactly what the Yankton Sioux warned him not to do What happened around all that red stone was none of his darn business after all. But that Philadelphia vision had to had nailed him. He stayed around anyway, left his brushes out, and he left behind was a gallery of work documenting life here almost 200 years ago.

Nicolet has his monument and you can Google dozens of Catlin's stolen drawings, but the real hero is rarely celebrated, Struck by the Ree, the lead signatory of the Yankton Sioux, who traded 11 million acres of tribal land for peace. "He's a hero?" you ask. Well, when it comes to Pipestone National Monument, yes, because what was included in that massive deal did NOT include pipestone.

A Yankton Sioux chief called Ree would not give it up and thus saved it for its use as a source of soft, pinkish stone for making pipes, which are, remember, instruments of peace. 

Struck by the Ree is buried in Greenwood cemetery, which you can visit--it's just up the road from town and just past the 1858 Treaty monument. Just drive in. His stone is huge. You can't miss it. 

He saved the place and all that soft, open-grained stone--it's called Catlinite. Isn't that just the story? But the man who deserves more credit that Nicollet or Catlin is Yankton Sioux, a man called Struck by the Ree.