"a vast expanse of moving, plunging, rolling, rush­ing life"

Maybe gas prices will open up Yellowstone this summer. Otherwise, it's as busy as a downtown intersection. Lots of attractions, of course, but one of the majors is the buffalo. Every year some clown gets mashed by some angry bull, but it doesn't stop dozens of others from getting out of the car and risking the ire of these wonderful mammoth beasts, of whom all of us can be proud.

This is part of the herd belonging to the Yankton Sioux, on their reservation land. They're a wonder to see because, rare as they are, they remind all of us of our world once was. 

They bestow a reverence that downright spiritual.

This passage from Warren Angus Ferris' Life in the Rocky Mountains (1843), describes a scene thousands witnessed 200 years ago but is almost unimaginable today. 

But, go ahead and imagine--

On the fourteenth, hurrah, boys! we saw a buffalo; a solitary, stately old chap, who did not wait an invitation to dinner, but toddled off with his tail in the air. We saw on the sixteenth a small herd of ten or twelve, and had the luck to kill one of them. It was a patriarchal allow, poor and tough, but what of that? we had a roast presently, and hamped the gristle with a zest. Hunger is said to be a capital sauce, and if so our meal was well seasoned, for we had been living for some days on boiled corn alone, and had the grace to thank heaven for meat of any quality. Our hunters killed also several antelopes, but they were equally poor, and on the whole we rather preferred the balance of the buffalo for supper. 

People soon learn to be dainty, when they have a choice of viands. Next day, oh, there they were, thousands and thou­sands of them! Far as the eye could reach the prairie was literally cov­ered, and not only covered but crowded with them. 

In very sooth it was a gallant show; a vast expanse of moving, plunging, rolling, rush­ing life--a literal sea of dark forms, with still pools, sweeping currents, and heaving billows, and all the grades of movement from calm repose to wild agitation. 

The air was filled with dust and bellowings, the prairie was alive with animation. I never realized before the majesty and power of the mighty tides of life that heave and surge in all great gatherings of human or brute creation. 

The scene had here a wild sublimity of aspect, that charmed the eye with a spell of power, while the natural sympathy of life with life made the pulse bound and almost madden with excitement. Jove but it was glorious! and the next day too, the dense masses pressed on in such vast numbers, that we were compelled to halt, and let them pass to avoid being overrun by them in a literal sense. 

On the following day also, the number seemed if possible more countless than before, surpassing even the prairie-black­ening accounts of those who had been here before us, and whose strange tales it had been our wont to believe the natural extravagance of a mere travelers' turn for romancing, but they must have been true, for such a scene as this our language wants words to describe, much less to exaggerate. On, on, still on, the black masses come and thicken--an ebless deluge of life is moving and swelling around us!

Buffalo rank high on vacation destinations because somehow even a couple of hundred create visions of what once was the world where we live.

Sunday Morning Meds (Psalm 121)

 

“The LORD watches over you—

the LORD is your shade at your right hand. . .”

 

            What he told the world is that since 1895, American news sources have alternated warnings about our changing climate.  For almost forty years prior to the Great Depression, most opinion-makers touted the present danger of a returning ice age.

            And that’s not all.  What he said is that arch-political scientists and their friends in the news media have beating the drum about global warming for years now, when there is no such phenomena—or, if there is, it’s nothing more than a temporary shift, our climate and planet far more dynamic than some would think.

            What he claimed has been proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that the so-called “hockey stick,” the heavily reported spike in climate temperatures throughout the 20^th century after thousands of years of constancy, has been proven totally false by Canadian researchers who simply tore it apart.  That spike is phony baloney. 

            What he told all of us is that the National Academy of Science has shown conclusively that humanity has suffered through minor climate changes before, that what is called “the Medieval Warm Period” (900 A.D. to 1500 A.D.) and “the Little Ice Age” (1500 to 1850) are bona fide proof of natural and sustainable climate variations—and that therefore the propaganda about “global warming” today is just hype and hooey.

            What he said is that the Arctic isn’t warming but cooling.  He’s reminded us all that sixty prominent Canadian scientists sent a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister, saying that “'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes occur all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise.'"

            He claimed that restraining so-called greenhouse gases has real economic costs, stifling business activity and a bustling economy, and therefore hindering progress in dealing with world poor.  He quoted this headline, "Climate Changes Endanger World's Food Output," called alarmist and dangerous, and then pointed out that it ran in the New York Times in 1975, thirty years ago.

            He is a senator, and the speech he delivered, years ago already, is much longer, full of facts and documented anecdotes and references to studies.

            I have neither the time nor the competence to study the issue of global warming thoroughly, and whether the Senator is even partially right, scientists themselves appear to disagree.  So the nature of the question changes in my circumstance:  it’s not “what do you believe about global warming?”  Instead, it’s “who do you believe?”

            And I choose not to believe the Senator. I choose to believe instead a list as long as my arm of people who radically disagree with his claims. I may be wrong.

            But I also choose to believe the psalmist when he says—with nary a hint of global warming—that this God of his (who’s apparently at his right hand armed with a parasol) is watching over all of us—polar meltdown or coming ice age, and that this God, my God, is my shade from all kinds of heat. That truth is transcendent. 

            He is my only comfort—in both deathly cold January and the dog days of mid-July. He is my only comfort. That I know by faith.

A Missing Week

They call it a TAVR, and it's a blessing. Trust me, I know. I just had one. 

Tuesday had to be one of the most memorable of my life. What a couple of Polish MDs did was recondition an aortic valve in my chest, not by open-heart surgery (the old way) but via a vein in the groin (mine), a procedure called a TAVR. Both sides of the groin are attacked by first-time-ever intrusions, one of those intrusions carries a tiny new piece of technology that will strengthen the weak valve; the other is a temp pacemaker, which won't be used unless it has to be. In my case--which is to say in my procedure, it didn't. That's good. Anyway, that temp needs to be there until it's clear it's not needed, but it has to come out some hours later. 

The first step in healing is an overnight in the hospital, ON YOUR BACK, which is a form of nearly lethal torment to keep things in place. It was perfectly awful. I didn't sleep, watched the clock from 11:00 am on Tuesday to 9:30 am on Wednesday. I took as many pain-killers as they would give me. When we got home, but I could not write a sentence. (I hope I'm doing better). That having been said, I'm greatly thankful that everything went well and that the procedure worked. 

Ostensibly, my heart has been made stronger by the TAVR, and it's been done--my seriously delinquent aortic valve got a big-time boost.

But I say all this to explain the long pause in posts. I started a blog so many years ago I can't begin to remember when exactly, and I've been doing it ever since. If I miss for a few days--as I have twice now in the last few year (for medical reasons) this good old Calvinist starts to feel guilty. 

Thusly, this explanation. That's where I've been.

Long ago, my friend Dave Schelhaas asked me if I'd like to do a "reading" with him last night, and, of course, I said yes. Then, this faulty aortic valve got noticed and I was given the opportunity to have the procedure done "like, next week." So the question was, can you come in on April 7? 

Why put it off, I thought. 

So when I got to the hospital that morning, I said to one of the gallery of nurses, "I'm a writer. Will I be able to do a reading on Thursday night?"

"Of course," she said, fluffing a pillow (or doing something).

I think she thought I was talking about my sitting in my grandpa's chair and reading a book, because when I woke up yesterday, I could tell quickly that my "reading" warn't in the offing. 

Fortunately, I'd thought a ton about what I was going to read and decided on a story from what might be my last book, a selection of short stories from the last forty years. That story, it's in Paternity, concerns a marriage undertaken only to get passage to Canada after the war. It stuck me that I could, quite easily, change the story into a readers theater presentation. So the givens were in place. I had only to bow out and let my characters do what I'd asked them to do.

And, lo, it was very good. I made it over there, and the ringers I recruited did marvelously well, as I knew they would.

Anyway, I'm back.

Some thoughts on Easter morning

Hard as it is to admit, I've become something of a shut-in. Yesterday, once again, the wind blew so horribly that I cared not a fig to go out in it. This winter--and when will it be over, please?--we've had a half-dozen snowstorms (nothing near blizzard-level, however), but what's most wearing finally is the interminable wind, takes your face off, I used to say. 

We're in process of selling our house out in the country this week, and it hurts a little because we're solidly in senior housing right now, a pretty little condo that's less than half the size of the home we left behind. Honestly, out there, with a corner to the northwest, we were subject to prairie winds far more than we are here, in a covey of condos. Still, I can't help but believe we've suffered more wind here than there.

So this shut-in has more time on his hands, time to do things. . .like read. I spent my Holy Saturday reading, and I enjoyed what I read--I really did. I don't know that I'd call Ruth Suckow my all-time favorite-st writer, but I've grown a real affinity for her work, even though its oh-so provincial in subject matter--rural Iowa, early 20th century, almost exclusively farm folk of German stock doing what they did, being who they were.

Suckow, a preacher's kid who grew up here in northwest Iowa, is a sworn realist. She'll never make your favorite writer list if your a devotee of Harry Potter. In a Suckow story, you have to expect an unflinching look at setting and character. Plot isn't all that exacting. Spending an afternoon with Suckow means not wandering far at all from these windswept plains, just no cell phones.

After two long stories, I moved on, but the stories stuck with me. One of them, "Renters," featured a Steinbeck-like family who simply couldn't shake being "renters," the economic place thereby implied, as well as the stigma--"they're just renters," as if they'll never be anything but.

A friend from Parkersburg, Iowa, once did some research about my ancestral family who lived there sometime around the turn of the 20th century. He found my great-grandfather's name on a patch of scrubby river bottom land and told me, rather sweetly, that that patch of land did more than suggest he wasn't wealthy. 

In Suckow's story, the couple hits hard times harder and longer than most families do; they're not in the least lucky--in fact, good times so regularly escape them than they can't help wonder whether there are good times at all. But they're sympathetic. The husband is a hard worker who does his landlord's right. They're fine people really, but they just find it impossible to keep their heads above water. 

It's sad. "Renters" is a sad story. It's well-done, but it's just plain sad.

And then there's "Uprooted," a story made more painful by reciting the lot in life when accrues to people our age. Adult children of an old couple meet at their parents' farm to talk about what's to be done with their parents, who are little more than potted plants. For very understandable reasons, none of the children (and their spouses) really want their ever-more elderly parents to live with them. In point of fact, those elderly parents don't want to close down the old ramshackle house and move in with their childrens' families either. 

Suckow's characters inhabit a community and time in which there are no old folks' homes, which means there are no good options. Plus, Ma and Pa absolutely don't want to move either. My grandfather Schaap was the pastor of the church I grew up in before I was around. My only memories of him are as a sourpuss I wanted to stay in his room and out of my life. Grim stuff.

The story ends with the rich son heading back to his home in Omaha, anxious to shake off all the residue of a visit to Ma and Pa. He's looking forward to sitting in his own chair. Thus do we all make nests of our domiciles; thus, would we all rather not be "Uprooted."

I enjoyed reading both stories, really did, more than I enjoyed the stories--if that makes sense. But I couldn't help wonder why Ruth Suckow chose the kind of determinism she did--why are both stories so sad. She could have turned the lives of the renters around and given them blessed landlords. She could have changed the attitudes of one of Ma and Pa's kids, made them more sympathetic to their elderly parents' cares and needs.

But she didn't.  If I'd written the story, I don't know that I would have either. Life is like that, right?

Two stories, well-written, close to the bone, but both of them given gray and cloudy skies. No wind really, but no sun either. Both negative. 

So we wait--like Holy Saturday. We wait, the meditation we read last night at supper maintained. So, on Holy Saturday, we wait.

The morning has come. Just now--felt like the first time--I woke up to birds singing. No wind either.

It's Easter morning. 

The eternal is once again very real.  

Good Friday

A country churchyard in northeast Iowa.

Just a couple weeks ago I passed a country church and saw this crucifix through the trees, stopped, and tried to put it in the camera and take it with. Somehow I was moved by an ordinary crucifix in a little country churchyard. I told myself on Good Friday I'd put it up, so here it is.

I'm a child of the Reformation, so the crucifix seemed to me--and still does, I suppose--a peculiarly Roman Catholic thing, almost contraband; but I've taken a shot at more than a little of Christ's suffering through the years. Here's a number of them, for Good Friday, from a host of places of worship. They are what we try to know, to feel, to understand of this particular day, a day when we're all catholic.

California Mission

Florence, Italy

Hoven, South Dakota

Marty, South Dakota

Hospers, Iowa

Rome, Italy

St. Paul, MN

Marty, SD

St. Peters Basilica, Rome

A California Mission

Cathedral of Sioux Falls

Peter Kreeft, Jersey born and reared, went to Eastern Christian High School and, thereafter, to Calvin College, before switching fellowships and becoming Roman Catholic. I don't know his work well, but I've been reading his memoir, From Calvinist to Catholic, where he says that one of the first inkling he felt with respect to the change was a simple desire to see, bodily, Christ.

To the Catholic faith, the 

physical dimension is not an addition to the essence but as essential as the spiritual. Christ saved us not merely or even mainly by giving us His mind, as all the great saints, sages, and philosophers did, but by giving us His Body. I intuitively knew and felt this "Catholic thing" even before I ever considered becoming a Catholic.

Just a thought on Good Friday. 

Holy Week--Maunday Thursday

When it comes right down to it, I'm pretty much of a stick-in-the-mud conservative. In my book, Obama isn't the malefactor he is on Fox News; and, quite frankly, watching Governor Mike Pence tap dance this week hasn't been all that painful. I mean, politically I'm probably not. 

But psychically, give me a ritual and I'm happy. I'm more-than-okay with what's ordinary. Innovation? Give me a break. What on earth is new under the sun? Not much. As far as I'm concerned, we'd get along better if we'd all go home with the one who brought us to the dance, you know? 

I've never been big on praise teams. Some people find them a turn-on because they can see how much the singers care about Jesus and that's thrilling, I guess. Me? I'd rather have a choir, and I'd rather they sang from the back of the church, as an offering. I'm too sinful for praise teams. They stand up there, mouthing mikes, and I'm wondering if what's-her-name is putting on weight, or why the bald guy playing the bass insists on wearing cargo shorts. You know. I'm distracted.

I'm a conservative. What the heck was wrong with the old-time religion anyway?

And I get scared on Maunday Thursday because churches in small towns like the ones I've lived in are always on the look out to out-hip their neighbors. They're always looking for something new, something that hasn't been done, something the church down the block isn't doing. "Ya' hear what New Church is doing this year? Why can't we do stuff like that? Sheesh."

Let's not and say we did, okay?

See what I mean? Basically, I'm conservative.

I get scared on Maunday Thursday because the whole Maunday Thursday business is new to me. I don't even know what Maunday means. I know churches practice the Lord's Supper on Maunday Thursday, but what is a Maunday anyway? 

When I was a kid, Main Street closed up tight from 12 to 3 on Good Friday, just flat shut down during the hours of Jesus's suffering. That I remember. I don't remember Maunday Thursday. 

And what I fear is foot-washing. Really, there are only a couple of reasons for Maunday Thursday services; one of them is the commemoration of the Last Supper. That's fine.

But these days, you just know someone's going to get out five-gallon buckets and ask men and women and their kids to come up and get their feet washed. Drop shoes and socks and plop in the water, then wrap wet toes with a towel from a stack yeah-high, you know? Somebody's going to do it tonight. Just watch. What I want to know is how do you choose whose feet get washed?--lottery? Do people say, "here, wash mine?" and who does it? the preacher? the elders? just anybody? We all wash each other's? Is that it? It's going to be a mess, see? 

It's chaos, and conservatives like me hate chaos. Not only that, it's another church fad, a gimmick, even though it's a couple thousand years old.

Besides, it's just not the same in a land where people don't wear sandals 24/7. You want to replicate everything that happened Easter weekend, why not make the whole congregation wear a crown of thorns or drink hyssop?

Makes me a disciple, I guess, thinking about someone else washing my feet. Makes me a disciple because they didn't like it either, found it repulsive, found it, well, theologically and culturally chaotic, out of whack, even disturbing, and that was 2000 years ago.

"Seriously, Lord?  You. Wash. My. Feet?" 

It was unthinkable. It was gross. It was obscene. It was perfectly ridiculous.

And He told them--get this!--if you don't get this, you honestly and truly don't get me. If you don't understand, you missed the whole program of the last thirty years. I came to this mucked-up world to wash feet--that's been the mission since day 1.

It is a big deal, no question. It's huge. It's bigger than anything we or the disciples can handle. God almighty bending down to wash dirty feet.

It's the whole story. That's what he told them from down there on the floor as he pulled the bowl up closer to the stool. This is what I'm here for, he said.

I don't care what you say, it's not something I'm comfortable with--that's all there is to it. And neither were they, those disciples who not all that much later fell asleep.

Neither were they.

_____________________ 

Second round for this one, the original written 11 years ago. I'm not so up tight as this anymore--if I ever was. You'll be happy to know that tonight's Maunday Thursday service was quite inspiring. 

Icarus, South Dakota style

We're barely a state away out here in northwest Iowa, but it seems to me that the Kristi Noem story had madness written all through it for a long time already. Her treatment of the state's significant Native populations was perfectly nutty. During Covid, when several of the tribes shut down access, the then-governor threw a fit and ended up alienating herself from a significant region of the governor's domain. 

Her memoire badly required a sane editor, someone to tell her that the way she handled her pup's lack of hunting skill or initiative or whatever, did not need to be shared with the world. How any story from her younger years could be more memorably insane than that one--the way she simply shot him to apparently put him out of his misery; she said she had it figured that he'd never be what she wanted him to be. Yikes.

Nonetheless, with her stunning good looks, she kept moving up Trump's ladder, maybe because he rather liked someone--a beautiful woman!--who'd just shoot her dog if  he didn't hunt, or at least he liked a woman who seeming understood how to draw attention to herself far from the madding crowd--he liked a looker who reminded him of himself.

But Governor Noem was a small-town girl with some small-town values, an ardent anti-abortion voice, who seemed to want to take those values with her in Washington or wherever the ICE job took her. Scary. Seemed to me she was way out of her league.

Perhaps the most horrific moment was created by her determination not to tell at least something of the truth about the two anti-ICErs who were killed in the Twin Cities during the ICE messes. She insisted they were the enemy, agitators who, apparently got their just reward, death, for getting in the way of the ICE jam the whole region became. In the style of her benefactor, she simply would not show empathy or sadness. She was Trump-tough. They were agitators.

The rumors of her having an affair with one of her boss's favored attack dogs only made things worse. Some people know the truth about Noem and Lewandowski, but whether or not there were trysts--many or few--she got painted with a scarlet letter early on, a badge she must have regretted, wherever the heat of passion may have taken her. 

And now, it turns out her handsome high-school sweetheart husband is hanging around shadowy websites that specialize in cross-dressing and other whacko fetishes that make him look as over-the-top as his gorgeous, madcap spouse. Life wasn't like this in good old Castlewood, SD. 

I think they should go home. My guess is that the people who knew them both before Kristi's wild ascent to power might just be most willing to forgive--and maybe even forget. 

We don't share political persuasions, of course, but I can't help thinking they should go back to the insurance business he ran and she should go on long rides with those horses she loves and stay away from hunting with dogs. 

There's an Icarus-level tragedy here, or so it seems to me. She--and her hubby--got burned when they flew far too close to the Don. 

Willa's wolves

It's not hard to see how a kid like Willa Cather, 150 years ago, could have seen this painting--Sleigh with Trailing Wolves by Paul Powes--and have it and its story stick with her all the way into adulthood, especially if you know the story.  The story shows up in My Antonia, somewhat uncomfortably since the story it tells is Russian in origin and has little to do, most believe, with the story of a childhood friend of Cather's out there in the tough sod of southwest Nebraska.

Visit her hometown sometime--Red Cloud, Nebraska--and you'll find that painting in all its gory darkness hanging in the Cather museum. It's scary. It features a pack of hungry wolves soon to devour just about all of a wedding party, a legend worth retelling, maybe, on snowy nights before a roaring fire.

Two slashes rip through the old painting from sheer old age. The canvas grew so taut it pulled itself apart. But those rips don't blunt the horror of the story and the danger in the scene, even if you find it difficult, like I did, to imagine a pack of man-eating wolves devouring bride and groom and a few others.

I have no idea of the size of the Russian wolfpack, whether or not, as they did here,  the sheer number of animals nearly fell off a cliff decades ago. They did here--wolves, like bison, went nearly extinct until aggressive wildlife management pulled off the kind of magic that replenished the bald eagle. 

While I haven't forgotten the Powes painting nor Willa Cather's storytelling, that painting never kept me up at night like it must have her because I've never been any where near a pack of wolves, never heard their snarls. My Wisconsin boyhood barely mentioned them. What few there was of them were in residence a civilization away, "up north." It's likely, however, they weren't strangers around Red Cloud. Willa knew.

A little history here. The horse was introduced to America's First Nations in the 17th century, and like the Apple computer and indoor plumbing, a horse changed everything, made Indians better hunters, and increased their standard of living making trade easier and making things like pans and guns and liquor lots cheaper. 

Horses made hunting easier, a slam dunk in fact. Europe's rich and famous signed up for wagon trains or railroad trips into buffalo country. Think of it--old country gentlemen blasting away at bison while sitting in fancy English saddles or in plush passenger car luxury, never even getting their hands dirty.

Those millions of buffalo changed the way of life among wolves like those lusty killers in the Red Cloud painting. For years, white big-game hunters and Native entrepreneurs went hunting, if you call that hunting: shooting bison by the dozens then leaving meaty carcasses in the sun all over the Great Plains. Wolves went plum loco over the mountains of spoils left there to rot. Imagine, all of a sudden, filthy rich wolfpacks, fat and silly.

"Yep, Junior, those were the days," some wolf historians might tell the youngins', "--gold necklaces and dream cars, vacation homes on the Missouri, and universal health care. We had it made."

But when the buffalo went the way of the do-do bird, the good life for the American wolf went south so fast that whole packs suddenly went hungry enough to try to knock off wedding parties as if it were snowy northern Russia. 

It didn't happen, not out there in western Nebraska at least, but it could have  because out there on the Republican River, sometime earlier lived the biggest bison herds in the west. Who knows how scary those fat and ugly wolves might have grown?--and all of it, right about the time Willa Cather was a girl on the plains. 

All of that makes the story even scarier. 

Rooted music

What she told me--and what I have never forgotten--was how what she was taught affected what she was. Her parents were pure Zuni, in thought and culture and religious practice. Therefore, her going to a "Christian" school meant she had to forcibly unlearn what her Christian teachers taught her.

And that was difficult; it was traumatic, not because she had to shift priorities and allegiances (that too!), but because she simply loved her parents, who were widely acknowledged as leaders in the pueblo because they were just plain good people. They worshiped in traditional ways, danced the traditional dances, ran the races of her people; her parents were neither impure nor immoral. They were good, good people, and every one said so, said exactly that. She was blessed to have such good parents. But the Christian school in her life made it clear--chapter and verse--that her parents, despite their goodness, were flat wrong. 

And that criticism had an even greater eternal dimension because, or so she was taught, some day her parents would be forever cast out from the glory which is to come to those who believe in the white man's God. There's a Hell after all. Stakes were high. Stakes were forever.

She was Zuni and she was Christian when I spoke to her, but that doesn't mean that she'd forgotten what her education, a half century before, had taught her. That's why she told me the story. She wanted me to understand.

Last night I listened to a fine high school, 70+ piece symphonic band from Rehoboth Christian High, Gallup, NM, the school where she'd attended 70 years earlier. I've got a history there too. I wrote a book for them, stories about families who'd been part of that school's mission for more than a generation, stories like hers. 

But even before that, my Grandpa Schaap was a member of the denomination's "Heathen Mission Board" a century ago; in fact, a great uncle of mine, Grandpa Schaap's first cousin, was one of the place's earliest missionaries, Rev. Andrew Vander Wagon. 

The unintended shaming explained to me one night in her front room was something my people--my family, in fact--spread abroad in New Mexico to Navajo and Zuni alike. Last night, that fine group of young musicians shaped a presentation that included an open confession of sin, when an administrator from RHS made clear that the mission, close to 150 years old, had at times failed the people it had come to serve--and failed miserably.

But what the kids spread abroad in the concert was beauty, and what was spectacularly clear, at least to this concert-goer, was that the denomination of which I've always been a part could not be more proud of any blessed accomplishment it has done in its own 150-year old ministry than what has blossomed so dearly in the high desert of New Mexico, where Rehoboth, today, is a blessing to the people, both colonizers and Native, who live there. It took a long time to understand that the most effective ministry may be little more than a ministry of presence.

It was all in the music, the whole story, and it was beautiful. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

“I lift up my eyes to the hills--

where does my help come from?” Psalm 121:1

Car-makers know something about the American public that no one else does: to wit, that we all secretly long to stretch our legs in the wide-open country of the Great Plains. Why?—I don’t know, but automobile ads very frequently seem to feature “the country”—more specifically, the rural Midwest and Great Plains.

Makes sense, I suppose. According to the U. S. Census, the states with the longest average daily commutes are New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, and California. Backed-up freeways don’t sell cars. Where is commute time least? You guessed it: South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Nebraska.

What sells cars is the mythic backroads adventure—SUVs, four-wheeling, mud-defying pickups, even though very few of us ever do any off-roading. What sells cars is the perception of escaping bottlenecks, fast food, strip malls, and wearying eight-lane metro traffic. What sells cars is the siren song of getting away.

In that sense, the psalmist is just like everybody else: he lifts up his eyes to the hills. He wants to get away. A place on the lake, maybe a river—that’ll do it. Doesn’t need to be big either, just a cabin, and I’m outta’ here.

It may well be a version of the old “grass is always greener” argument, this verse. From the day-to-day grind of our lives—same faces, same cluttered desks, same blasted lunch counters and restrooms—we simply want release.

We fantasize. I remember dreaming of living near mountains. Then, we did. But grading papers is grading papers, and we never got up there, even though those mountains were close. The only times I took note of them was on my bike, riding to work, when they seemed as much a dream as they ever had been.

Fifty years later it’s still in me, this yearning to look to the hills. Spinal stenosis has kept me from a weekly pilgrimage that had been the joy of my life for the last several years, Saturday morning country wandering. I could be in one of those ads.

God doesn’t dwell in some hand-hewn log cabin in the hills. He doesn’t even weekend there. He got a place at the lake all right but no Airstream or fifth wheel. Yosemite is as gorgeous a place as you can find on earth. Jasper, the Big Horns, Yellowstone, the Canadian Rockies—even the words get me itchy. He’s there too, but he’s not just there.

The psalmist must have felt it too because the first line of this beautiful psalm of praise and joy is a confession, I think—I lift up my eyes to the hills, as if he’s there somewhere, as if God is in residence at Custer State Park. When we get tired or bored or stymied, we all want to go somewhere we’re not.

But the hills won’t do it, and I’ve got to remind myself those little Saturday trips don’t bring me home.

My help doesn’t come from the hills. My help comes from the Lord.

Barbed wire

 

Used to be iconic--maybe it still is. Used to be that wherever you look there you'd see it--barbed wire. It got brought to the Plains states in the mid-to-late 19th century, and caused at least one war (Johnson County War) when the cattleman, accustomed to unfettered drives, suddenly ran into the new resident homesteaders. Whoops. Trouble.

In most cases, the homesteaders won the day, much, I suppose, as they had won the day against the Lakota from the Missouri River--and before that from the Big Sioux--west. Good fences make good neighbors wasn't a song sung only by Robert Frost. Thusly, up went fences. And barbed wire, most all of it, today, in lousy shape.

Our fourth

 

I'm going, Saturday, and I'm not even leaving town. This will be our fourth actually, two in Sioux City, but also a real stunner right here in Sioux Center, Iowa, amidst a populace that ranks among the most Republican in the state and the country. If there are more marchers on Main on Saturday, the place to look would be the cemetery; there'll be a tsunami. 

And I'll tell you why we're going--because this morning's six o'clock rant on Truth Social takes on NATO once again, his least favorite organization--now, today, because they're not getting on the Don's bandwagon to help him with his troubles in the Straight of Homuz. Surprise, surprise. He's done nothing but bad mouth NATO since he came down the golden elevator. Besides, what we're up to is not a war, right?--it's an "excursion." It was his decision alone to start up the horror. Didn't ask the people or the people's reps in Congress. Didn't gather our long-time friends, just decided himself--along with his trusted cronies--that we'd take an excursion into Iran, annihilate whoever got in the way, pummel the heck out of their world, then leave with dozens of oil tankers in our/his back pocket--oh yeah, and on the way out leave behind a half dozen Trumpian beach resorts for the rich and famous. 

He wants to be king. 

And then there's this. Yesterday in Minnesota, the state pressed a lawsuit to force ICE to release materials pertinent to the deaths of two people who got in the way of the ICE. Why? Because Don's government has refused to do that--and refused to do the necessary investigation themselves. Why? Ask Don.

He wants to be king. Period.

And then there's publicly and brutally penning another zinger when Robert Mueller died, the man who ran the government appointed special prosecutor's office looking into Russia's involvement into the 2016 election. That the Don didn't like him is understandable, but for a man who prates about religion to say what he did ("I'm glad he's dead"), for the leader of the free world to be what he is, never stops being chilling. 

Here's David Brooks: "The selfish tyrant attaches himself to only those others who share his selfishness, who are eager to wear the mask of perpetual lying."

All of this is predicated on the lie about the 2020 election, which the Don --and his disciples--will never admit: that he lost. Sixty-some court rulings said clearly that he did.

He wants to be king. Let me count the ways.

No, I'll quit. 

It'll be our fourth--and our second in Sioux Center. 

See you at the cemetery. 

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.