We're out

If you're so perfectly sure that same-sex marriage is an abomination before the eyes of God, then what went down at the synod of the church to which I have belonged for my entire life, the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC), makes sense, I suppose.

What happened, or so it seems, was that the CRC Synod of 2026 decided to leave a worldwide association of Reformed churches, an association the CRC had a significant role in creating just ten years ago on the campus of Calvin University (MI). There is some irony there, of course; the CRC played a major role in creating the union of churches that, a decade after its birth, we have now walked out of.

The reason for our hasty departure, as you might guess, is the "liberal" positions taken by the organization we played such an important role in founding--read "same-sex" marriage and associated issues below the belt. "Delegates to synod expressed concern over some of the organization’s statements on moral, theological, and social justice issues," the denominational magazine said.

Feels a bit like understatement.

So, we're out. We'll quit the group we started because we can't be associated with sinners who don't condemn abortion or make unholy allowances for same-sex marriage.

The CRC has been on a tear in recent years, trying its Sunday best to remain clean and pure in the face of the abominations a culture all-too willing to transgress any and all attempts at remaining pure in a sinful world.

Thank you, but we'll have none of that. Even talking with such sinners is an abomination. No more. "They (the worldwide association we quit) have had a corrupting influence on us," one delegate, arguing for severing the bonds said on the floor of the recently concluded denominational synod. "We have not had a preservative influence on them.”

I suppose that's one way to judge our lives--on the basis of what we're not; but for some time now we (CRCNA) have been flirting with the worst of the ancient and negative presentments associated with the word "Calvinist." This summer we've proven ourselves to have earned anew such associations: "We're Calvinists! Just ask us, the truly righteous, if you want to know the truth about God."

That some people leave that kind of fellowship is understandable. That others take joy in such positions, to me seems much less so.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

 

“The LORD will keep you from all harm—

he will watch over your life;. . .”

 

My father was an elder in the church, a watcher, a keeper, although I knew very little about what happened when he walked off to meetings on Tuesday nights.  Most of what went on, I know, he was sworn not to tell, and some of it—I know this is true—he didn’t because my knowing it would have hurt me.  I was, after all, a child.

 

One part of his job was tallying after communion.  He had to meet with the other elders after the Lord’s Supper to tally who was there, who wasn’t, and who was purposefully not taking the elements, or—even worse, I’m sure—who might have been taking the body and blood even though they’d been barred. I have no idea what the elders called that little gum shoe reconnaissance meeting, but I know that they met.

 

What those elders were watching for were stories, the people who were coming to the table with a checkered past—or in process of checkering their presents. When I became an elder, nobody watched the sacrament that closely. Maybe I remember what went on back then because I knew that behind the effort lay stories I would have liked to know, what lies beneath the ceremony. I still do. Whatever the reason, I remember that he’d come back home late from communion Sunday worship.

 

That post-communion tallying—as well as my father’s own righteousness—may be responsible for the deeply-rooted sense I have that church elders should be Godly statesmen and women, dutiful, virtuous, and devout. And that conviction may be the reason why, more than any other elder-ly task, I always loved distributing elements myself when I held the office, giving away the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It’s a big job meant for the kind of person who grows into the office having raised good kids and having been the spouse of only one mate, no messes in the scrapbook. An elder was someone not subject to the sins our mutual flesh is heir to.

 

Some years ago I was served the sacrament by two men who were once thugs, criminals—two men who, for many years, valued only their own skin. I took the bread and wine from thugs who, with impunity, cheated others, stole what they could to line their pockets, used drugs, and lived promiscuously. At about the time I began to understand why my father got home late after the Lords Supper, the two of them were leaving behind a childhood they never had in a Southeast Asian war zone.

 

I knew them. I’d walked into their lives, year by year, even written their stories; and I knew that those men—the men carrying the bread and the wine last—were once so far gone in treachery that not a soul in the church where we sat could probably imagine some species of the evil they’d perpetuated.  Who’d have ever thought that some Sabbath morning they’d be in the northwest corner of a state called Iowa doling out the body and blood of Christ? Amazing.

 

But the promise of scripture, and the Word of the Lord, here in Psalm 121 is that “the LORD will keep you from harm—he will watch over your life.” And all during those bloody years in war-torn Laos, where those two men grew up, God Almighty, who loves us, had his eye on them as if they were fletching sparrows, even when they were lousy thugs, and probably especially then. 

 

He knew them.  He was watching them, keeping them from harm, when they—and we, all of us—were yet sinners. Those two guys fed me the body and blood of Jesus.

 

Amazing grace.  

Ubi Sunt

For one semester--and for reasons I've long ago forgotten--I lived in college housing in a basement apartment beneath a brick apartment building, downtown Sioux Center, Iowa. First semester, junior year it was, I believe, right downtown, just an alley between us and the offices of the mayor of the village. 

I don't know that I ever met him personally, although I'm quite sure had I run into him on the street, he would have smiled to acknowledge me. The town mayor lived an odd life for a resident of this cow town on the prairie. Most of his life--we were sure--was lived in his next-door office, not around a fireplace at his home. He was the mayor, very highly respected, acknowledged to be the major mover-and-shaker in his town. Most histories would agree that he hustled the town into becoming thriving little burg it has become.

His strange, off-hour comings-and-goings from that downtown office only increased our estimation of his character--and his mystery: that the man lived to lead Sioux Center seemed perfectly obvious. To the college guys who lived next door, downstairs in those basement rooms, the Mayor seemed town royalty.

But back then he wasn't the only potentate. There was another too, the man who had quite single-handedly chosen Sioux Center, Iowa, as the home of a new college to be created by people from the same tiny denomination, the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) as he and his congregation. That college was and is Dordt College (now "university"). Together, the Pres and the Mayor were the town royalty--they shared the throne and, at least to our 20-year old perceptions, got along royally.

The Mayor's Office is now a laundromat, but the apartment building looks just about exactly as it looked fifty years ago. Sioux Center is probably twice as big as it was in the late Sixties, and the college the Pres carved into existence now enrolls twice as many students, a majority of whom are not members of the CRC. Things change.

Yesterday was the funeral of a daughter of the Pres, not the oldest child but the first of what was once the royal family to pass away. But today most people around town don't remember anything of  her regal birth, or of the royal family from which she came. What ordinary folks know is that she was a long-time elementary school teacher, that her husband is a fine man, a good father. They  may also know that the two of them had three children, each of whom is married, the oldest of which has reached "middle-age."

A small crowd will be gathering, I'm sure. Whatever royal status her father (and her mother) had achieved a half-century ago won't be visible at the ceremony. People are sad, friends and relatives are mourning, but the funeral itself will not be royal. 

Cancer took her. Death, not a respecter of persons, came too early, as it often does. 

It's an old, old story, retold in every town and village on Planet Earth, isn't it? Crowns tarnish, storied lives turn to dust--after all, life is fleeting, memory is all we have, all achievements are temporary. It's one of the oldest songs we sing.

Sometimes when I go past that brick apartment building, I wonder whether anyone still lives in that basement apartment. I wonder if I'd be really polite, I could bargain my way in sometime just to look around, just to remember. 

It's a bargain with truth, isn't it?--because try as we might, we can't go home again. The only rest is eternity. "I am not my  own," the creeds beg us to promise. Death is the final seal.

An old friend, daughter of a preacher, once told me her father used to say that when he did a funeral he learned to just get out of the way. "Just read a psalm," he used to remind himself, she said, "just Psalm 90, no more: "Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

I don't know that I'd really like to see that basement apartment where, just about sixty years ago, we used to live. It can't possibly be the same. Nothing is.

Ubi sunt--one of the oldest themes in human literature, comes up effortlessly on days like today, one of mankind's oldest lamentations--"where have all the flowers gone?" 

Morning Thanks: A Kooser poem to relive

 

[This is an oldie, with its own history, posted here originally in August of 2000, just a few months shy of the height of the Covid plague.]

At the Cancer Clinic
by Ted Kooser

She is being helped toward the open door
that leads to the examining rooms
by two young women I take to be her sisters.
Each bends to the weight of an arm
and steps with the straight, tough bearing
of courage. At what must seem to be
a great distance, a nurse holds the door,
smiling and calling encouragement.
How patient she is in the crisp white sails
of her clothes. The sick woman
peers from under her funny knit cap
to watch each foot swing scuffing forward
and take its turn under her weight.
There is no restlessness or impatience
or anger anywhere in sight. Grace
fills the clean mold of this moment
and all the shuffling magazines grow still.

She is not elderly. The young woman on stage in this Ted Kooser poem is being helped along by her sisters, both of them young, he says, suggesting she is too. That she is not elderly sharpens the sadness. Cancer seems most villainous when it chooses the young. 

I'd like to think that she may recover, but nothing in the poem suggests it. For her, it's a "great distance" to the examining room. She's slumped; her sisters  bend "to the weight of an arm," while that nurse in her white smock calls "encouragement." Her life is in danger.

The miracle of very real situation is that "There is no restlessness or impatience/or anger anywhere in sight," so decidedly different is what we're seeing from what we witness so regularly in the rest of the world. What's here in the waiting room is grace, Kooser says, gifts flowing from all directions--nothing less hard to find than love itself.

"Blessed are the pure in spirit," Jesus said, the first of the beatitudes, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Her case looks dire. I don't think Kooser sees this young cancer patient recovering. The woman in "her funny knit cap" is anything but arrogant.

But that doesn't mean that what Mr. Koozer witnessed one day "at the cancer clinic" is horror. What he sees is a testimony of grace so visible that the waiting room, just for a moment, is stunned by the rare beauty of sheer selflessness.

Today, we're in the middle of an epidemic ravishing families around the world, tens of thousands of ERs crowded with pestilence, so many--too many--people dying alone. Here in the U. S. daily deaths are right now, once again, exceeding a thousand a week.

But this too. Every day, every hour, every minute--someone with "the straight, tough bearing of courage" is helping someone, even those of us who are cancer free, towards the open door of the kingdom of heaven. 

Giving is one of those rare gifts that gives on giving. Ted Koozer's poem takes note of grace, and that's a blessing for which I'm thankful this morning.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

 

“. . .the sun will not harm you by day, 

nor the moon by night.”

It may be hard to believe but that old kid’s classic Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, has been around now for almost sixty years. My grandson, who wasn’t the easiest chap to get off to sleep, absolutely loved it. Goodnight Moon is a sweet old mood-enhancer whose magic somehow prompts delightful sleepiness.

For years, our grandson would search the dark sky. “Way da moon?” he’d say, as if he has to be sure that it’s up there watching over us.

Maybe it’s that book that makes me wonder about this line from psalm 121. Goodnight Moon such a meditative story that just thinking about it makes me want to yawn. It’s difficult for me to remember moments in my life, or even in story, when the moon, as the psalmist here seems to suggest, actually made me scared.

Darkness, surely. I was never quite as scared as I was one night on the shore of Lake Michigan, when, with a couple of other boys, we, 75 years ago, were lost in what seemed endless rolling sand dunes. Truth be known, we weren’t—we couldn’t have been more than a quarter mile from the lake. But we were out somewhere in the dunes—I have no idea why—when, in the darkness, we realized we had no idea where to go to get out. I was scared witless and spitless, even though I’m sure I never admitted it.

But I don’t remember the moon playing any role whatsoever in that fear. Darkness lit up our nerves, sheer darkness. The moon would have been a blessing.

To some Hindus, the moon is full of soma, an elixir of immortality only gods can drink. For the Fon of Abomey, in the Republic of Benin, Africa, Mawu, the goddess of the Moon, is an old mother who lives in the West and brings with her cool temps amid torrid summers, the goddess of night and joy and motherhood. As those t-shirts used to proclaim: “No fear.”

One night years ago up above Chamberlain, South Dakota, a number of us laid in the grass and watched the stars appear, the moon lighting the world bountifully overhead. An astronomer friend explained ancient mythologies as their stories appeared above us—it was pure joy. On our way down the steep hill we’d climbed to get there, the footing was treacherous because sheer darkness had arrived, even though we hadn’t noticed it. Once, a guy fell and rolled down a ways. That was a little scary. Thank goodness for the moon. Would have been much tougher without it.

Werewolves wail at it, and coyotes and real wolves, for that matter, which reminds me of an oil painting that inspired Willa Cather, in My Antonia, to tell a horrible tale about a wedding party entirely devoured by ravenous wolves—at night, of course. But I don’t remember moonlight in that painting. Even as a sliver, it’s hard for me to see the moon as anything but beautiful, sleek.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been afraid of the moon, but we all know fear, as did the psalmist. We all know the paralysis fear creates in us, even if it arrives only in our dreams.

And we all know the terrors of the darkness, the times when no matter what we try, we simply can’t find our way. At one time or another in our lives, everyone knows what it’s like to wander around with no light, with no direction, with no way home.

To those of us who know that kind of loss, this psalm, Psalm 121, is special gift, truly a blessing. God is watching us always, even in the dark, even in scant and scary light of the moon. So, well, "goodnight moon."

Highland, July 2013

There are a ton of these shots in my bank of old pics--a stratified prairie sky showing off its fanciest colors out east , a stage for awaiting the soon-to-arrive dawn. Sometimes you find treasures at places you could not have imagined. One has to learn to allow the scene to do its own work.

Long ago I stumbled on this chunk of ground without knowing a thing--or even imagining--the treasures it held. That weather-beaten tree stands, mostly alone, against untold acres of wide-brimmed farmland. Once there was a town here, but all that is left these days is a cemetery of only a few stones, an immigrant Norwegian-American cemetery (the names notably not Dutch). Those who might remember the place--it was determined to live here in this new country--have long ago departed.

Should you  spot this from the blacktop, you would see nothing particular; but out there in the middle of the section there's just something about the place that calls me back again and again because a constellation of its ordinary images make the place a scene that almost always delivers (not simply because it is a cemetery!)

Those faraway lights are Sioux Center's. 

Lebanon/Highland captured my attention for years. These shots were a visit on June 16, 2013, just a year after I retired from a lifetime of teaching.

Happiness

It's a gem I found six years ago, put up here for all kinds of people to see, then, sadly, never hit the publish. Thus, while it appears forever in my list of posts, no one else, save Joyce Sutphen readers, ever saw it. 

But it's hers, a Joyce Sutphen poem, a woman I never met. I've never heard from her read several collections of poems, even though she lives not so far away, regionally that is. She is an emeritus professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus University in St. Peter, MN, lives and works in Lutheran Minnesota. Every once in a while I have spent time with her poems and always found her world both recognizable and blessedly worthy. 

I intended sometime back in 2001 to create a post out of this poem--and never did. Just happened to turn it up this morning, six years after leaving it in the blog. I don't know why I never hit the Publish button, but the poem is as worthy today as it was then. So, a little late maybe, but just as healthy as ever--this Joyce Sutphen poem titled something hugely impossible to define and therefore compelling to try:

Happiness
by Joyce Sutphen

This was when my daughters were just children
playing on the rocky shore of the lake,

their hair in braids, their bright-colored jackets
tied around their waists. It was afternoon,

the shadows falling away, their faces
glowing with light. Whatever we said then

(and it must have been happy; it must have
been hopeful) is lost as I am now lost

from that life I lived. This was when nothing
that I wanted mattered, though all I wanted

was happiness, pure happiness, simple
as strawberries and cream in a saucer,

as curtains floating from a window sill,
as small pairs of shoes arranged in a row.

What's  unmistakable is the insistence of its regret, a conceit in poetry as old as any stanzas you might consider; the confession in the poem is as far from happiness as you might imagine ("Whatever we said then (and must have been happy; it must have/been hopeful") is lost as I am now lost"--a sad dark and soul-full confession. even though the list of unforgotten images prompt a fleeting smile.  

If I say this Sutphen is very "Lutheran," I might just as well say it's very Calvinist; there a mixture of "strawberries and cream in a saucer" set out as if to sweeten a dogged unsweetened reality: ". . .This is when nothing/that I wanted mattered, though all I wanted/was happiness," she says in a confession not to be missed. 

Simply to awaken our senses to her wistful moments is a gift.

Hegseth holds forth

Here's how AI describes D-Day, June 6, 1944: "D‑Day was a 50‑mile‑wide, multi‑national assault involving 156,000 troops, 7,000 ships, 12,000 aircraft, and 23,000 airborne soldiers, opening the door to the liberation of Europe."

That's a terrifying description, but a very helpful summary of an event that altered the world we live in yet today. The Allied invasion on June 6, 1944, was massive--just imagine how much sky is required for 12,000 aircraft, how much English channel it requires to float 7000 ships. 

D-Day remembrance celebrations are held worldwide, of course, since so much of the world was tightly wound in to the war-time fantasies of Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. The presence of the U.S. of A. was unmistakable, and while, in judgement, it's altogether possible for this "sweet land of liberty" to look past the immense contributions of other Allied nations, it's impossible not to acknowledge the heft of American gifts, including much of the action on Utah Beach (most fiercely defended by the Axis powers) and the entire paratrooper fleet dropped into enemy territory before dawn on June 6.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a decorated war veteran himself, spoke last week at the D-Day Commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery, and used the occasion to warn celebrants that the problems created by immigration were just as threatening as the Axis powers' taking over Europe during the early years of World War II.

The speech--and especially that comparison--was roundly criticized, as it well should have been. 

The very real problems created by significant immigration--especially illegal immigration--have no contemporary corollary, especially illegal immigration, which is undertaken only by those who would like to find freedom somewhere far away from a culture where they live, a culture in which liberty has literal meaning.

Where does the Secretary get such errant comparisons?

Easy. From his boss.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

  “The Mighty One, God, the LORD, 

speaks and summons the earth 

from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets.”

 As far as I know, the county in which I live, Sioux County, Iowa, has no citizens of Sioux descent. What’s more, the town in which I lived for forty years—Sioux Center—is in no way a "center for the Sioux."  For most of 150 years now, it’s been a center for the Dutch, who were and are of no close relation to the Sioux. There lies a tale, of course, one that everyone knows: here and elsewhere across the plains, we won and they lost.

 A friend of mine, a congenial soul who loved repairing bridges we built with our prejudices, once asked a Sioux religious man to visit the college where I taught, asked him to speak in chapel.  Because chapel was a religious event, our guest took with him a sacred pipe.  Before he spoke, he lit the pipe, then turned to the four directions and led paleface kids through a ceremony meant to evoke God’s presence.

The symbolism, Black Elk says, works something like this:  the south brings warmth and new life in spring; the east, peace and light; the north is the source of cold, and thereby strength of character; and the from the west comes thunder and rain.  By raising the pipe to the four directions, the Lakota traditionally believe the spirits of the directions—all part of the God of the universe, Wakan Tanka—were being invoked for aid and comfort and trust throughout the ceremony.

 Such things simply aren’t done in the center for the Dutch. Some kids hit the warpath. What on earth was a pagan doing with holy smoke, bowing to the four winds or whatever?  The whole thing was, to some of them—and their parents--off-the-map heathen.

The opening lines of the mighty song of Psalm 50 make me wonder if the psalmist—whoever he was—would mind beginning worship with some sense of God’s hugeness, some kind of ritual meant to point towards a deity who is forever outside of time and space.      

 Honestly, I hear more Lakota in verse one than in a lot of evangelical Christianity.  Interesting, isn’t it, that the psalmist actually begins with three names—“the mighty one, God, the Lord”—each of which, in ancient Hebrew defined slightly different dimensions.  It’s as if the poet really wants to get all of this deity covered.  He doesn’t want to miss a characteristic.  He knows he can’t get all of God in focus, but, in humility, he wants to do the best he can, so he invokes with every possible name.

The second half of verse one moves east to west, not unlike the Sioux ritual.  There’s no sacred pipe here, but it doesn’t take all that much imagination for us to picture the possibility that some ancient Hebrew may have gestured just as broadly as that Native guy in our chapel.  To me, the line just feels Native.

One pair of seemingly irreconcilable characteristics of our God is that he is, at once, both imminent—right here beside us—and transcendent—forever somewhere beyond us.  The opening lines of Psalm 50 force us to consider his transcendence. Most of us, I think, would prefer a teddy bear.

 In fact, it’s not all that difficult to make verse one sound, well, primitive.  Give me a pipe, or an eagle feather and a smudge pot, I bet I could recite it in our college chapel this week and set some sweetly self-righteous kids on a heresy hunt. 

 But then, there’s not a Lakota in the neighborhood.  

June 6

June 7 will forever be "June 7," but to me June 6 will forever be something different, not because someone I knew was there on a beach in Normandy, but because of what went down there. Everyone connected with the secrecy of the operation on D-Day knew that the invasion would cost the Allied powers thousands of lives and it did--over 4000, with an equal number on the German side, if not more, considerably more. 

I don't know what goes on today, but the Memorial Day celebrations in my hometown, way back when, used to include--feature, in fact--the hometown vets from World War II. There were dozens of them when I was a boy, the wars in Europe and the South Pacific only a decade behind us.

But one of those vets always lit my childhood imagination more than others because my dad gave that man special honors, not because of memorable bouts of unquestionable heroism but because of where that WWII vet served--he was there, at Normandy, on June 6. Honestly, I don't know if my own perception is right--whether a man named "Linky" was there on the beach or not--but I know his face will forever be the face of D-Day in my mind because I'm quite sure my dad told me, long ago, that he was, and my boyhood imagination placed him there, on those killing beaches. 

"Linky" made it, even though 4000 of his buddies did not. He and his family lived just outside of town in a big corner house where he pulled on his khakis every Memorial Day for the parade. To my mind, he wasn't just a vet--lots of men my dad's age were vets; he was special because he was in one of those barge-like landing crafts, the LCVPs, as they were called; he was among those emptied onto Omaha Beach with thousands of others, many hundreds of whom would never move another step. Linky made it. When he'd march by on Memorial Day, I used to dream of the stories he could tell--if he chose to, and not every vet did. He was there.

My dad spent D-Day in the South Pacific aboard the kind of tugboat whose job it was to move battleships around foreign harbors. I don't know this for certain, but I can't help but believe that he never pulled on his Coast Guard uniform after the war because he believed in his heart that because he'd never seen action, spent his years of service on a tugboat, Memorial Day was meant for the Linkys, not the guys who never heard a bullet slash the air. 

Today is Linky's day--that's what I can't help feeling. Last weekend we went to Pressure, a finely crafted movie whose heart is in the Normandy invasion, June 6, 1944. 

My mother-in-law lost her fiancé this morning, 82 years ago, June 6, 1944. His name was TerHorst, and he was trained as an engineer. His job that morning to demolish the "hedgehogs," as they were called, the sharp obstructions meant to keep the Allies off the beaches. I don't think he got out of his LCVP. 

In this country, that June 6 is not a holiday doesn't mean it's not somehow remembered, even by those who wouldn't be born until after the end of the Second World War.

I wasn't born until 1948, but that doesn't mean I don't remember. Lots of us haven't and won't. 

And that, I'd like to think, is as it should be.

This morning I'm thankful for an abundance of gifts on this June 6.

Kit Carson and Singing Grass

 

 Christopher Carson, people said, would expose himself to the full light of the campfire only when he lit a pipe. His closest companions were his pistols and the rifle he kept beside him even when he slept.

Daniel Boone stood no taller than 5'8"--not a peewee, but by no standards was he physically formidable. For the record, Davy Crockett, coonskin cap and all, was no bigger; in fact, Crockett would have measured up equally had the two of them ever stood toe to toe. The real Kit Carson, who ranks with Boone and Crockett in legendary prominence as American frontiersman, was even smaller--5'6" in stocking feet, wiry and by no means muscle-bound. Mythically, however, Kit Carson was a giant.

For a man who lacked any formal education, Carson was smart, even cagey, a quick learner who determined in a hurry how to get along in the American frontier of the early 1800s.  As a trapper and frontiersman, he could converse--I'm serious!--in Navajo, Apache, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Blackfoot, Shoshone, Piute and Ute, and he knew the sign language used by mountain men throughout the West.

I don't need to say that the diminutive Carson was a tough cookie, but he was, even though he was never, ever so full of himself that he'd tell you he was. He just was. 

He must have looked like a wimp to a French-Canadian trapper named Joseph Chouinard. Seems an Arapaho woman named Singing Grass, quite the looker, people say, got courted by both of them at a "Rendezvous" somewhere around what would become Fort Laramie, in what would become southern Wyoming. The event--for the record--would be the last annual "Rendezvouz" on the Upper Plains, an annual event when the entire congregation of mountain men went sort of nuts, binging for a week or so, drinking and gambling, swapping stories and then doing more drinking and gambling. Was, for certain, a high, old time.

Oh yes, and "womaning." In other words, a little of everything, and not a Sunday School picnic.  The sharp edge between Kit Carson and this  French trapper named Chouinard was put there by an Arapaho woman named Singing Grass, who found herself the subject of both men's attention because neither of them could take their eyes off her.

Guns were drawn, shots were fired, and in what must have been an unusual duel--it was on horseback. Chouinard's shots struck nothing of any danger on Kit Carson, but Carson's shots ripped the man's thumb off his hand. Singing Grass left the shooting match with Kit Carson, who, by all accounts, had been already her chosen victor.

Together, Carson and his French wife had two girls; the complications of the second birth took the life of Singing Grass and sent Carson into deep grief.

Kit Carson was a hero to thousands of 19th century readers, who ate up the Carson stories regardless of the stories' authenticity. 

And he was, you better believe, at best a part-time hero. Ask any Navajo about Kit Carson and the Long Walk, and be ready to field some authentic anger, a wild west guy whose famous pistols, even at night, were always half-cocked.

At least we know he's no commie

  

   "Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION! President DONALD J. TRUMP.” 

Sleep well tonight. The Nightwatchman is awake, tweeting old fears. 

A poisoned candidacy

Feenstra, with glasses, behind the President

He is, by any definition save one, my brother. He is kindred, not family but closer to me than anyone else making national news this morning. He is--or was--a leading Republican candidate to become Governor of Iowa, his home state. He is--and will forever be--a child of Sioux County, Iowa, a man whose birthright is "Dutch Reformed," by birthright, if not by choice.

He grew up here, went to private, Christian schools, Dordt College (now University), where, several years later, (as did I) he taught. In the doctrinal language of the heritage he and I share, he's a "covenant child," born and baptized in a tradition whose history and character I've wandered through for most of my life.

I should, one would think, support his candidacy to be the next Governor of the state of Iowa (he is running, or was, until last night). Not only was he running, he was also the favorite, given his husky endorsement by the President just last week. Trump was for Randy Feenstra for Gov. "He's in," people thought.

Sorry. Yesterday, despite that hefty, prized endorsement, he lost. He has conceded.

Every news network used his loss as one of its headlines after yesterday's series of primary elections. He wasn't alone on the ballot; he was one of three candidates for gov, only two of which were positioned to grab the nomination. He came in second, lost the race by just 1500 votes. His loss was a huge story, a national headline because of someone else: he held the golden support of a man who's shown himself once again, recently, to be the ticket to victory. This time it may have been the kiss of death; Trump's support didn't do the job--his hand-picked boy and Dordt's most famous graduate went down to defeat.

And I voted against him. I didn't campaign against him, didn't say a word or write a sentence saying mean things or disparaging his candidacy; but neither did I vote for him, a fine man, a brother Hollander. I didn't vote against him; I voted in the Democratic primary for the man who did win his party's nomination--Josh Turek, a relative newcomer who opposes most everything our President, and Randy Feenstra, stands for. 

And there lies the difference. I don't know if it occurred by choice or request, but President Trump's endorsement of Randy Feenstra soured me. I wasn't registered to vote Republican anyway, but even if I had been, Trump's endorsement would have sunk anyone else's candidacy in my estimation too.

What the headlines missed is the significant issue of private education. Recently, in the state, more funding has found its way into private (in this case, Christian) education. Trump supports it, so did Randy Feenstra, with his family, his politics, and his contributions. 

That commitment was likely sufficient--even here-- to bring down his candidacy. He did well, just not good enough to win, and the difference, last night, between winning and losing, in his case, could well have been the voters, even here in Sioux County, his home, many of whom have opposed increased state aid for private education. Somewhere in the neighborhood, I'm sure, some people who love Trump don't like state funding of private education. No national news sources I saw this morning mentioned that in their analysis.

I'm sad about it, but, truthfully, I feel more sad that a man with his moral framework (which is to say, a moral framework I understand) would covet the endorsement of a man like Donald Trump (28 tweets in the last 24 hours). 

For me, Trump's support--and Feenstra's whole-hearted acceptance thereof--was cause enough to avoid him and his poisoned candidacy.

What didn't happen on 6/5/44

Truth be known, we didn't go to Pressure, the movie, because I'm a history buff. We didn't go because my father-in-law walked over D-Day beaches two weeks after the first wave of Allies, nor did we go because a Lakota woman I knew took precious amounts of her time to tell me her story, a nurse, right there in the middle of action that took place two weeks or so after the invasion. Nor did we go because my mother-in-law lost a fiancé on Omaha Beach just after he walked into the channel and departed the landing craft. 

We went for a pretty crappy reason, really--because we were bored. The local theater was offering Pressure, a movie I'd seen advertised featuring a portly Eisenhower (who wasn't skinny) in full uniform at a beach all too reminiscent of a half dozen truly memorable beaches, stories about D-Day, this one, strangely enough, about the weather. I'd like to say we went for some truly noble reason--after all, I'm a registered WWII buff. One of the major motivators was sheer boredom on a holiday weekend--and Pressure, strangely named, was on the big screen right here in town. 

We looked, we found, we went, and we loved it. Number me among those who find it hard to say what I just did--how can anybody love a war movie? Okay, talk among yourselves, but I did.

Let me take the edge off that claim, I really liked it, okay?  It's hard to say you "loved" D-Day or anything connected with the carnage on Normandy's beaches. But I remember what the theater looked like where I sat through D-Day, the first of the really big shows. Band of Brothers has a permanent place in my memory, and, of course, Saving Private Ryan is wholly unforgettable.

It's hard to know where I'd put Pressure (the pun is adorable, but silly--absolutely nothing about D-Day is "adorable") in the list; what I'll say unequivocally is that what we saw on Saturday night earned a place in the best of the D-Day films. I was captivated the entire time, even though there's far less blood than there could have been, far less carnage, far less battlefield ugliness than anyone human would like to see. 

Pressure doesn't glorify action, it sets up heroism where it dwells most abundantly, with decisions that have to be made in every battle and almost always determine at least something of ultimate battle outcome. In Pressure, it's the decision of the weatherman: is the ocean going to be on the side of the Allies, or is it going to arise in defense  of the defenders already set up and in place for a battle just about everyone had to know would determine the outcome of what Hitler jump-started in Poland.

Does it glorify the carnage? War movies can do that, but Pressure doesn't. The battle itself is horrifying and bloody, as was the invasion; but the conflict between one man's determined vision of the weather--what it might be--on June 5, the day plotted for the invasion against the immense pressure created by months of American troops in England. 

One man says no, and that one man's refusal to reshape his forecast makes all the difference. He's the protagonist of the story, but the movie doesn't cast him as hero. Instead, it's the paunchy Allied Supreme Commander with the sad comb-over, a warrior America chose to call Ike, who chose to believe the scorned forecaster who told him to wait.

Which he did. It's likely, the movie claims, that the Allies waiting on June 5 made all the difference.

The praise for Pressure hasn't been all that glorious, but I say seeing it on the big screen is worth shelling out the bucks for a ticket or two. In my estimation, Pressure is really a great story, very much worth getting up off the couch and back in the theater.

We did. It was terrific!