Just a little more on Doc Saville

[Just a little more on Dr. Saville, the Civil War doctor buried in Sioux City's Floyd Cemetery--see yesterday's post.]

There'd been gunshots, more than a few, buzzing bullets all around but, or so the agent argued, nothing yet to get angry about. J. J. Saville had what some thought to be an extremely high boiling point, so high no one in the neighborhood had yet seen it. Some claimed his dealing with Red Cloud and his people nothing less than cowardice; some called it weakness; others believed the new agent to be worthless as Sandhill sand, Saville himself a walking/talking example of the idiot silliness of President Grant's new Indian policy. 

Just one of the nutty changes involved was who would be sent to the reservation as the agent. Saville had never been administrated anything; he was a doctor, for heaven sakes, a Yankee medic who'd served on the far reaches of the Civil War's western front. Dr. J. J. Saville was chosen to be "Indian Agent" by President U. S. Grant. Saville hailed from Sioux City, Iowa. 

Grant chose Dr. Saville for the testy, even dangerous job of Indian Agent at the Red Cloud Agency because the the Episcopal Church had forwarded his good name. For a time in the 1860s, theory morphed into a new policy constructed on the determination that the needs of Native populations would be more humanely met if the agents were missionaries and not robber barons. 

Dr. Saville understood only too well that the job the President had asked him to do was not Sunday School superintendent. By 1870, intercontinental railroads had burst their way through traditional Native lands bringing thousands of eastern foreigners west, seeking their fortune on land they'd assumed to be unoccupied. Red Cloud and his people were not amused.

The Lakota were not alone; dozens of Native bands were not thrilled at the invasion of white folks, especially when they realized the whites weren't at all convinced all those trespassing strangers should be nice to what they considered savage redskins. A decade of conflict would still have to pass before Custer and 300 of his men would die on a hill above the Little Big Horn. During the early 1870s, the whole region was a tinder box.

Dr. Saville, who might have built a solid medical practice in Sioux City, chose otherwise and took the job offered him as administrator of the Red Cloud Agency in a region of the Great Plains where acts of violence occurred with perilous frequency. Saville leaped into a hot spot because he and the progressives believed that bringing Native people into the American family would occur most smoothly if Sioux and Comanche, Cheyenne and Arapaho would just learn to be cowboys and farmers, would herd cattle and forget the dang buffalo, who were rapidly disappearing anyway.

Easier said than done, of course. Saville was a liberal, a progressive. He tried everything  to bring real change to the Native West, including erecting a flag pole to fly the red, white, and blue, thereby proclaiming it's sovereignty. To Red Cloud's people, making that case was a stretch. 

So, at noon the day Saville had his people ready to raise the flag over what became Camp Robinson, as many as 50 mad-as-heck warriors rode up to Red Cloud Agency in blankets and waistcloths, armed to the teeth, and wasted no time in cutting that brand new flagpole down.

The flags were meant to portray what they meant to Saville and an entire brood of white American westerners--proud and youthful nationhood--let freedom ring! 

But on that October 23, before those beloved colors had cleared the ground, Lakota warriors and their hatchet-toting friends had cut those new flag posts up like firewood because to them the stars-and-stripes were a battle flag, nothing more than a symbol of white man's aggression, and in all likelihood, for them at least, a prelude to much larger war. In the autumn of 1867, Sioux City's own Dr. J. J. Saville, lasted only two years in the office of agent of the Red Cloud Agency before he was shown the door.

Fair or not, Dr. Saville was shown the door for his failure to understand the people he'd been appointed to serve. 

What we did on our 54th anniversary

Just for the record, we spent our anniversary this year in an ancient Sioux City cemetery. Seriously.

As anniversaries go, we've done well in celebrations, at least by my estimation. I think it would challenge the boundaries of good taste to count the ways, so you'll just have to take my word for it, generalize like I did, and simply say that, far more often than not, our anniversary retreats have been memorably and passionately sweet. Last week, on June 27, we celebrated our 54th. 

I'm serious--54 (!), many of them celebrating the special charm somehow given to bridal couples, some of our "celebrations" less "festive," I might say, than others, certainly more memorable.

Saturday--our anniversary--we ran off to Sioux City, no summer night of passion on our agenda, maybe just a good dinner. I've been wanting to find a Sioux City cemetery, the Floyd Cemetery, where, I've read, a man was buried way back in 1910, a man whose story attracted me when I recently ran into it. Dr. J. J. Saville was a medical doctor in the Civil War, a bloody horrible job. Somehow (the case is not clear), although he had a medical practice in Omaha and returned there after the war, he is buried in Floyd Cemetery, Sioux City.

I wanted to find his grave--it's that simple, but not easy. Finding the Floyd Cemetery was difficult enough. It's a big place where I spent a lot of time on Saturday afternoon, alone, nobody else came through. In fact, if you google it, there may be no answers to his remains' whereabouts other than the cemetery at Sioux City's Floyd Monument. I knew he wasn't buried there.

Anyway, it took me--and eventually Barbara too--most of the afternoon to find it, but we did (on our 54th wedding anniversary). You'll think I'm nuts, and maybe I am, but it was a thrill. Barbara found it--its location from AI was off--the entire section was backwards--but she found it.

Saville had to have been a strong believer because in the early 1870s his church--the Episcopal Church--recommended him for a position on one of the newly created Indian reservations, an offer Dr. Saville took. Wasn't a cakewalk either. He was assigned to the Red Cloud Agency, where all sorts of things, dangerous things, were happening both before and during his short tenure.

There can be no doubt he was qualified for the position of Agent. Not only did his Civil War experience recommend him, but that experience included advocating for better conditions for the men wounded in battle. What little I've read about his Civil War experience makes clear that his candidacy for the headman at the Red Cloud Agency had substantial grounds. He was a good man.

His candidacy, forwarded by the Episcopal Church, came at the request of President Grant, who argued, with others, that the deplorable situations (graft and violence) on newly created Indian reservations needed to be changed--graft was everywhere. If Christians were to run the agencies, not crooks--or so the argument ran--relations with the nation's Indian peoples would certainly improve.

Whether that argument holds water or not is questionable and worth pursuing. What little I know is that this Dr. J. J. was chosen to be Agent at the Red Cloud Agency in western Nebraska because he was a member of a Christian church deeply involved in Native missions.

It wouldn't be hard to argue that he failed miserably. History does more than suggest that's true, but it's a judgment I can't make--I don't know the story well enough. But only two years later, Saville got in a wagon and went back to Omaha. What he left behind would require others to put in order.

He's buried here--this man whose personal story carries with it endless stories from American history. He's buried here--that's what I knew.

I just wanted to find him, and I did--or Barbara did. It's there.

And that's the story of our 54th wedding anniversary. We spent our anniversary getting an army of chigger bites walking through the grass of a huge old Sioux City cemetery, no one else around. 

I was thrilled.

Seriously, we could have done worse.

SUnday Morning Meds--from Psalm 32

 

“Do not fret because of evil men 

or be envious of those who do wrong. . .”

 

The only fret I have is whether or not I do enough frettin’.  

 Take my mother, for instance—she’s sure that the world is slowly sinking toward a moral morass, some iniquitous black hole that will eventually suck most all of us in, until, gloriously, the Lord, in glory, comes again.  She frets about the life’s seamy appearances, and her continual frettin’ affects her mood.

 She’s old enough to deserve my respect no matter what her views or how much she frets; besides, she’s my mother.  But I’m not taken by the way she flirts with such obsessions because I don’t think she should spend the last years of her life frettin’.

 We live in strange times.  I don’t think it’s possible to locate an era in the last decade or so when spirituality in general and Christianity in particular was ever quite so popular.  The vast majority of Americans, unlike citizens of any other nation, claim to believe in God.  A significant majority go to worship frequently.  Crime is down, as is drug use, as is teen-age pregnancy.  Even abortion rates are lower than they were.

 On the campus where I teach, just about every student wears a t-shirt with a Bible verse.  Students flock to praise-n-worship gatherings voluntarily and exude a piety that existed only among the most devout just twenty years ago.  Lots of parents tell me their kids are far more spiritually mature at 18 than they were at that age. 

 Politically, the U. S. government is in the hands of Republicans, my mother’s party.  Many politicos and pundits claim the last Presidential election was a wake-up call to many opinion-leaders who never took Christians seriously.  Most major newspapers now concede that for too long they didn’t have a clue about what was going on in the hearts and heads of an huge segment of their own readership—American evangelicals. 

 It’s difficult to argue, I think, that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, although sometimes I think my mother would like to think so.  Specifically, what troubles her is that this Christian nation is becoming secular, forbidding prayer and tolerating abortion, tossing the Ten Commandments and, in its place establishing, “political correctness.” 

 I think she’s frettin’ way too much.  She thinks I’m worse—liberal. 

 When Black Sunday came to the Great Plains, when clouds of dust arose from recently plowed Oklahoma land and swept all the way up into South Dakota like a murky blizzard, lots of good people presumed the world was at end.  Not long ago, a woman told me that she had a childhood memory of looking up at the preacher in the little country church she attended and, on Black Sunday, seeing only the preacher’s white collar.

When things got dark, good people thought we’d finally come to end times.  It’s understandable, but it didn’t happen.  Most believers I know plot out the trajectory of our lives in the same direction—things are just getting worse and worse. 

 Maybe not.  But then, as I said, maybe I just don’t fret like she does.  Maybe I will in just a few years.

 But I know this—both Mom and I can take heart from verse one of Psalm 37, which says, in a nutshell, “don’t do that.”  The enemy—whoever they are—aren’t worth my time or anxiety, nor are they worth hers. 

 Next week I’ll quote that verse to her.  Maybe it will help. 

 Probably not.  She’ll probably still think I’m a liberal.     

On political parties

It's a used car, not new, but it's our new car, as distinguished from our old Subaru. This one is a cherry red Buick, and it's become Barb's car. She's the one who drives it.

And she'd warned me: "there's not much gas in the Buick." Her warning stuck. I knew. What's worse, new cars won't let you forget: signs with warnings appear all over. What I'm saying is, I knew the Buick was low on gas; I'd checked the gauge myself. But the needle hadn't sunk to no-man's land so I figured I could get up on top the hill, hardly a half mile away.

And let me just say this. I have no idea if it's still a good idea or not, but the warning is there, permanently, in my mind. "Ya' should, really, run a new car out of gas so you know where the needle means it when it points below the E." I didn't make that up. It's the kind of thing that seeps into your psyche when you're flashing your first driver's license--KNOW when and where you'd better believe the needle!"

I didn't. I ran out. Well, the Buick ran out. 

At least it was in a convenient spot, an empty parking lot beneath a housing development that's not there yet--thankfully, in no one's way. 

Let me begin by saying this. We live in senior housing, a place where everything outside the condo is managed, which means I got rid of every last lawn implement before we moved here. Hence, I've got no gas can. 

I'm out of gas--sure--but I'm also shit out of luck, as we used to say.

"Go to WalMart," I tell myself. (We've got two cars.) "Buy a new gas can, stop at Coop or Casey's or wherever, fill up that new gas can, get back here to the useless Buick at the top of the hill. No sweat, and you can always use a gas can."

My dad used to start the charcoal out back by splashing a little gas over the coals before dropping a match. Not until one of my friends saw him do it, did I think of what he was doing as risky. 

The one I grabbed off the shelf is a gas can, all red, cherry-red and round, but it's affixed with a spout that, for the life of me I can't operate. I'm an old man. I've been lighting charcoal fires for more than a half century, never with gasoline. I mean, I know there's danger; but this brand new gas can features safety apparatus which appears to be dysfunctional. I can't get the dumb thing to open the spout. It's obvious that it's there on the spout for safety sake. I get that. I can't lug a gallon of gas back to the Buick because I can't operate the gas can--are you kidding me? I can't do it.

 I put gas in the can by removing the whole spout and pumping a gallon in at the Coop, but when we get back to the Buick (now my suffering spouse of 54 years is here too), I can't get that gallon into the thirsty Buick because I can't operate the doohickey on the spout of the bright new gas can.

And neither can Barb, who's far more mechanically-inclined than her writer/husband, and neither can some other retired guy who's just arrived up on the hill to get his early afternoon walk in. I recruit him to try, offer him a kind of 'good Samaritan" thing. 

Some words were spoken that shouldn't have been--not as many as I uttered in London a decade ago when driving from the left side of the car was just as confounding as figuring out what on earth a roundabout was when you're in it. 

Frustration, sheer frustration creates a climate in which a few naughty words are tolerated, I think--or hope. 

We take the Subaru back to Coop, where Marv smiles befriendingly and lends us a great black funnel, which means we get the Buick going again.

But that blasted doohicky still pisses me off because it won. 

Now I'm normally proud to be a Democrat, even though as such I'm hen's teeth in the neighborhood. I can guess at the story of that doohickey on the gas can's spout. Some Democrats determined that a gas can without some safety mechanism risked bodily injury and even death, turning people like my dad, years ago, into a pillar of flame. "So let's just create a safety feature and make it mandatory on every gas can sold in this country," some lousy do-gooder told his lib buddies.

The whole story makes me think seriously about wandering over to the Republicans, where, rest assured, they're all as angry as I am about too many gal-durn safety regulations.

Anybody need a gas can? Used only once. . .

Missouri River, 07/06

The longest American river isn't all that far away. I've been playing around in its history for years now, developing stories from its treasured history. No matter where you go up and down its banks, it's stunning in its quiet beauty.

But all that beauty makes it difficult to photograph. No matter what you shoot, the Missouri River is bigger, and all that bigness doesn't easily fit in a camera, no matter what lens you're carrying. 

No matter how or where you shoot, what you go home with is small potatoes. I never learned my lesson, no matter how often I tripped the shutter: if there's any here, I click away.

On a day in July, a decade ago, beauty was all around, and I was arrogant enough to fire away, trying to get some of it on my memory card. Nothing here comes close to the level of stunning witnessable that day, all around.

Real actual beauty is legendary, always out of reach of the camera, but I'm thankful for what I can take home.

Sunday Brunch

Take it from an old man, it's just plain easier to look back when there is so much of it behind you, so much more than what's out front. Trust me on that point--I'm aging. Whether or not I'm "aged" is, even in my mind, in dispute. 

I've been writing for fifty years, and what's clear to me these days is that there is far more "back there" than there is out front. 

So for years already I've putting together a couple of books from things I wrote years--decades!--ago. One is a collection of short stories from back yonder; it's presently with a publisher. And another is a collection of short short stories (I mean it that way) about worship, little stories I wrote on request, stories that appeared long ago in a magazine titled Reformed Worship.   

It's been fun to go through them again, like meeting old but dear friends. 

"Brunch" is a good example. Like the others in the collection I'm putting together, it has duel aims: it intends to be a good story first of all, but the magazine's readership is sharply defined as church members who think about what we do when we worship: it has to flirt with the way we worship.

Here's "Brunch," the whole thing. It's Sunday dinner at the home of Pete and Sandy. The kids are long-ago out of the house. Pete is a member of his congregation's worship committee.

*

“So, on a scale of one to five, what’s my Sunday dinner rate, Mr. Eminent Critic?” Sandy said, leaning back in her chair.

“Three-and-a-half stars. An anemic four maybe,” Pete said, one eyebrow cocked, while spreading what Sandy considered too much margarine on the last piece of coffee cake.

“Sunday brunches are very in, sir,” she said. “I got docked because I didn’t make potatoes and gravy.” She picked the last piece of pineapple from the fruit dish and placed it daintily in her mouth, as if they were dining at the Waldorf. “I confess,” she said, holding up both hands, “I simply cannot make big Sunday dinners.”

Outside, the sun was beaming the way it’s supposed to do on a Sunday afternoon. “This may come as some surprise, but I’m not shocked at your confession,” Pete said.

She looked at him as if deeply aggrieved. “For all these years I’ve thought of it as my secret sin.”

“Why don’t you pass me the rest of that bacon?” he said. “That reminds me--did you notice anything strange about the worship this morning?”

Sandy shrugged her shoulders.

“About the confession of sin?” A hint.

“I’m sorry to say I don’t remember,” Sandy said.

Pete reached for the bulletin he’d left near the phone. “Mind wandering again, eh?” He opened the bulletin and pointed to the order of worship.

Sandy took the sheet from him and followed the lines with her fingers, read it twice, then looked up and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not supposed to like it, I take it,” she said.

“I just wondered what you thought,” he said.

She sat there, the bulletin in her fingers, waiting for him to explain. Pete sipped loudly on his coffee. “Well,” she said, “what’s the beef?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“It’s not ‘nothing,’ my dear, or you wouldn’t have asked.”

“Maybe I’m overreacting. Just forget it.”

“Pete, don’t do this to me,” she said. “What’s the gripe?”

He broke a strip of bacon with the side of his fork. “I wondered if you thought that new confession we’re using is a little--how-do-you-say-it?--maybe a little heavy, a little too ‘wretched’?--kind of ‘I’m-way-too-full-of-sin’?”

Sandy looked back at the lines: “Lord,” it read, “we have sinned. We have sought our own desires while forgetting our neighbors’ needs. We have searched for fulfillment in things and despised the promptings of the Spirit. We have gloried in our law and neglected your Word--”

“Pretty bleak?” Pete said.

Sandy spooned up the last few ounces of fruit juice. “I don’t particularly like to admit it, but all this on the list may be true.”

“Come on,” Pete said.

“Really.”

“I didn’t know you were so full of sin, you old Calvinist.”

“We all are.”

“That much?”

Sandy looked again at the words. “Yes, that much.” She picked up the kids’ silverware and laid it on their plates.

“Reading it bothered me. I just don’t feel so miserable about myself, I guess.” He pulled the sheet away from her. “Is that wrong?”

“Maybe it is--”

“Sandy--”

“No, I mean it. You know what it says in the Bible: ‘If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”

“Sandy, for pity’s sake--”

“I don’t think the Bible says ‘except for Pete Baker, who’s not a half-bad Joe’--”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not being silly. We’re all full of sin, aren’t we? Even the great dinner critic?”

Pete looked miffed. “Where does it say in the Bible that we have to walk around all day with our chins in the gutter?”

“That’s not the point, Mr. Perfect.” She poked a piece of banana and held it up to his mouth. “Here, sweeten up a bit.” Reluctantly, Pete opened up. “The point is that we have assurance that we’re forgiven. Here, read this.” She reached over and pointed at the assurance printed with the worship. “You got any more bacon?”

“Am I your slave? What do you say?” she said, dropping the worship sheet back near the phone.

“Confucius say, ‘Pretty lady no cook but sharp cookie.’”

“Talk about anemic,” Sandy said.

“Now tell me,” Pete said, cleaning out the last of the scrambled eggs. “How do you get so smart when you don’t even listen in church?”

“I’m the one who listens. You didn’t even hear the Assurance, did you?

Peter grimaced, as if he’d just taken a bite of bitter herbs. “Got me again,” he said, “but it’s a dietary problem with me. I’m not getting the right foods, and it’s affecting my mind--”

“Aha, the old ‘the woman-thou-hast-given-me’ thing. Now, that’s ‘original sin.’”

“I’m sorry,” Pete said.

“And you’re forgiven.” Sandy grabbed the rest of the dishes from the table. “By the way, you remember it’s your turn to cook tonight, don’t you?--what’re we having?”

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.