Stuff in the Basement

Ex Libris I -- Shirer

2012-01-27T06:18:00.002-06:00

This one has been on a shelf of my life ever since its publication in 1960. I think I'm right here, but something tells me that my oldest sister joined a book club just about then, and either ordered or was sent William L.Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It's always been here.

The copy in my library is much younger, but it looks roughly the same as the original, a copy I believe my sister still has. There, emblazoned on a fat black spine is a swastika that obviously drew me to the book, years ago, when I was just a kid in sixth or seventh grade.

Shirer's massive study had pictures too, and when I think about them now, I swear I still see them, even though I doubt my memory's accuracy--shots of multitudes of German people, stadiums full of them, saluting in that awful, phallic way to their demented high priest, Hitler, the demonic clown in a mutant mustache no one has grown ever since. Then there were photos of Auschwitz and Dachau, naked bodies like cord wood aboard flatcars, tortured limbs falling shamelessly from the layers of rotting flesh.

In high school I pulled my sister's copy of Rise and Fall from the library more than once, maybe to read things for some history class, maybe just to be reminded of what I'd missed, born as I was in 1948. A huge book, a book full of sin.

I know people whose Jewish parents simply would not talk about the Holocaust, some of them because they honestly didn't want their children to know they had Jewish blood lest some other fiend come along with an agenda of similar madness. And there were others--lots of them, Jew and Gentile--who determined that the only way to live with the legacy of horror and death was to bury it, never to speak of it again.

It's quite amazing that Shirer's huge and thoughtful study of Nazi Germany appeared as quickly as it did--only fifteen years later. That book simply wouldn't let humanity forget, which is in itself a hard and terrible lesson about what it means to be human.

I haven't looked at Shirer in years, and in the great winnowing that will happen in the next few months as we plan to leave this old house, I'll likely try to sell it or give it away. You want it? It's been on a shelf around me since I was 12 years old, I guess, but this copy has sat, untouched, in our main floor library for a quarter century at least.

But Shirer--bless his soul!--has been with me long enough, and even though that thoughtful history, that treasured history, is now being reissued a half-century later, when the time comes to cull my library, I'm guessing he'll go.

In 1995, I taught a course titled "The Literature of the Holocaust." It was then, of course, 50 years since the liberation of the camps, and I thought such a course was fitting. I've always been fascinated by Holocaust studies, and I'd even contributed a book to the library myself--Things We Couldn't Say.

But eight or ten weeks into that course, I hit some kind of odd emotional barrier that made it almost impossible to read anything more from that era, especially from the camps--I mean to really read, to take it in. I could not pour any more horror into my soul, if that makes any sense. I couldn't. We'd read a book a week, and I hope I finished the semester strong; but my ability to read anything about "the Final Solution"--even Shirer, I suppose--had simply disappeared. Emotionally, I couldn't.

That may well be part of the reason I'll sell Shirer or give him away. I don't need that book. I'm no longer fascinated. I've seen more and read more than my share. I will forever be taken by stories that feature commitment to moral action in the middle of sheer bloody madness--that's why I loved Of Gods and Men.

But I think maybe I know enough about the Holocaust, maybe even more than I should. It'll be hard, but I don't think I need Mr. Shirer anymore.

That too is a kind of blessing.

Of Gods and Men, literally

2012-01-26T06:21:00.001-06:00

"The 150 evangelical leaders who met behind closed doors onJanuary 14 to anoint a Republican candidate for President were wise not to haveinvited me.” So wrote David Neff ofChristianity Today in what I thought was a brave overview of Christianity and politics in this country, and, daringly, a clearrepudiation of the shining stars of the religious right in the muddled messthis country is in.

What he’s talking about is the Texas confab of prayerwarriors who got together to choose a candidate for the Republicannomination. Most of the heavyweightswere there. Sadly enough—or maybe providentially—theycouldn’t agree; so what emerged from the meeting was a fractured decision—some ofthe Christians like Mitt the Mormon, some wanted Newt the repentant prodigal,others Rick Santorum, the Roman Catholic home-schooler. No candidate came out of that powerhousemeeting “the chosen,” making some pundits claim the famed religious right is indecline, having lost its juice, its own power. They failed to anoint a king.

“I believe that Christians have an urgent duty to engage thesocial, economic, and moral threats to a healthy society,” Neff wrote in anon-line editorial. “That requires a widevariety of political action. However,one thing it doesn’t call for is playing kingmaker or powerbroker.”

I can’t help but think of ye old childhood hymn, “Dare to bea Daniel.” It’s really difficult for meto believe that someone like David Neff would dare take on James Dobson, et al,but he did. He may well get burned, too;but what Neff is criticizing is the will to be seduced by power, politicalpower, something he says should never be the goal of Christian politicalaction. He quotes James DavisonHunter: “Whenever Christian churches andorganizations partake in the will to power, they partake in the very thing theydecry in society.”

I’m no political scientist, and I don’t claim to stake outthe absolute here. But after watching CT’sown choice for the numero uno film of 2011, Of Gods and Men, I have greatsympathy for Neff’s argument. A handfulof Trappist monks, belovedly integrated into their Muslim neighborhood—in fact,a village has grown up around the mission because of its gifts to the people—findthemselves in deep danger when a bloody civil war breaks out around them. On one hand, they fear the radical Muslims;on the other, the government—both sides seething for power.

In the middle sit and stand and pray eight monks whoseaverage age is maybe 70. The questionthey face is vividly clear: with ourlives in jeopardy, should we stay?

The grace of this story, of this film, is that it avoidsdopey sentimentality that’s so easy to conjure in a story like this: these old monks as idiots or angels or holyfools. The incredible strength of themovie is that these old men are totally human—they’re scared to death, they’rereally not sure of their role or calling, and for most of the story they’re notof one mind. After all, both options—lifeand death—make sense.

Leaving means reneging on their calling, abandoning the defenseless people, the poor they’ve come to love and serve. But then, staying means putting their ownlives and cause in jeopardy. As some ofthem admit, they didn’t join the order to die. What’s more, there’s nothing saintly in seeking one’s ownmartyrdom.

A decision doesn’t come easily because the right answer isnot easy to come by; but right there, in the means by which they formulatetheir own determined response to the horrors of the war around them, Of Gods and Men takes the Christian faith withdeadly seriousness, in a fashion that’s as rare as true commitment. I thought the film to be absolutelywonderful.

I don’t know what might have happened in Texas on January14, had all those saints watched Of Gods and Men before their righteouscaucus. Don’t know what might have occurredif they’d read David Neff or James Davison Hunter before attempting to anoint acandidate. Probably nothing. We’re notall alike, as they painfully discovered that night themselves.

What seems clear to me, however, is those Trappist monks in Algeria in Of Gods and Menhave a decidedly different view of the definition of power than did theSaturday night gathering of saints in Texas.

Praise the Lord.

Morning Thanks--"Grace and Truth"

2012-01-25T06:02:00.000-06:00

Confession time. Once, years ago, when I was a college student home for a break, my mother, who taught piano for most of her life, declared that she would bestow upon her son a ten-dollar bill if he would only sit down at the piano in the den and pound out a hymn, any hymn at all.

I was poor and not an idiot. I opened the old red Psalter to number 50, "Grace and Truth Shall Mark the Way," a rendition of Psalm 25 in a setting that never wandered far from its opening chord. Piece of cake. Inside of a half hour, I'd made ten bucks and probably smirked once she handed over the loot.

I'm probably a couple of decades older than she was back then, but today I think I understand more of why she made such an silly offer. Sure, there was all those years of piano lessons I'd had, years that dissipated far faster than lakeshore fog once I walked away from the bench. And, yes, there probably was some faint hope that if I'd sit there again I'd come back to that bench more often. I was her only boy, for heaven's sake, and my hair was too long, and what she heard out of my bedroom back then was the Beatles. Ten bucks was a pittance.

But there's this too--the music itself, not that "Grace and Truth" sat atop her Psalter Hymnal hall of fame. What her son played--not well--held her soul lovingly, almost as if she were a child, its child. What I played was, after all, a psalm; and my mother's people, for generations, had sung them, often only them. It wasn't just a hymn, it was a psalm. Sure, she was happy she stuck me there on the bench. Yes, I was being a me she might have loved seeing more of. But I think it was the music too, a psalm.

The Synod of Dort, way back in the early 17th century, made it clear to Dutch Calvinist churches that, in worship, only psalms were permissible, just another measure of that miserable Calvinist penchant for being wary of beauty--after all, we're depraved, remember, and totally too, and never forget that. The only legal fare for congregational singing was God's own songs, the poems collected in the book of psalms.

Last night, and this weekend, I listened to two lively musical experts, two men who love the psalms, explain the richness of the old texts and then put those psalms on musical display, not only adorned in their Genevan robes, but dressed up in a wardrobe of different styles and settings, some of them very contemporary; and it was--both last night and this weekend--great joy and pure blessing. Maybe, just maybe, those hard-core, 17th century Calvinists in their fashionable beaver hats at the Synod of Dort were on the money.

But then, look what Geneva had to work with, look what a hundred-thousand song-writers still do. The psalms-r-us. They're holy writ, but, God be praised, they're human writ too. They open their arms to us, to our stories--to our pain and our joy, to our desolation and our unfettered praise. They are made of the very same stuff we are. They're God's book of poems, but they're ours too. What a combo.

This morning's thanks are cheap praise, really, just my few words for musical literature that has opened itself to generations of believers, poems that welcome the human spirit, prayers that have taught gadzillions of faithful just how to talk to, and with, God almighty.

"Grace and Truth Shall Mark the Way" at a little piano in the den. Ten bucks pay. I feel like Judas, and I'm sorry.

But this morning I think I know more of what mother heard that day forty years ago; what she heard, despite the ingrate mercenary at the keys, was "Grace and Truth" that's nothing less than Grace and Truth.

This vale of tears

2012-01-24T05:50:00.000-06:00

It could be just about anyone, but it's not--it's someone, a very real family; and what I know about them--they're not relatives--makes this early family portrait monstrously more telling. In a way, it breaks my heart.

There are four children, two boys and a pair of twins. The oldest, the one in the sailor suit, will be smart and thoughtful. It's probably somewhere in the early 20s here. He will never marry. He will fall in love, deeply. He and his girlfriend will have what I know will be a wonderful, loving relationship. But they will never marry.

There will be almost a dozen other children born to this young Dutch family, so many that Mom, here holding one of the twins, will, like her oldest boy, die young. That one, the one at her side, will come to resent his father deeply for what he will believe is going to eventually kill his beloved mother, her incessant child-bearing. The father, a great bush of hair over his forehead, will be a Christian school teacher, a headmaster, a man I think of as a strict, quintessential Calvinist, a man who probably won't smile as much as he should have smiled by the time his life is spent. They won't be good friends, this oldest boy and his stern father. They will fight. That happens sometimes.

The younger boy moored at his father's knee will suffer greatly, but he will live to a ripe old age. Both he and his older brother will join the Dutch Resistance as young men and carry out very dangerous clandestine work against the Nazis, work that includes almost every kind of underground activity. I don't think either of them will ever kill a German, but between the two of them they may well be responsible for death.

They will both be heroes, but only the younger one will live. Both will suffer greatly. And, in the summer of 1945, after the Liberation, the younger brother will claim some fame for the Resistance work he accomplished. He will speak about that for years to come--to school children, for instance. But what few will ever know is that his older brother, who won't come back from a German concentration camp, will have had to cut his brother out from much of the Resistance activity they were in mutually, because that little boy in the cap couldn't keep his mouth shut and therefore became a liability. These two boys will not be good friends when the oldest dies.

But when the big brother doesn't come back, few will remember that the boy in the hat, the one clinging to his father's leg, was once shunned by the others--by his friends--because his silence could not be trusted.

But then that story will come back and haunt the boy in the hat years and years later, after his reputation as a freedom fighter is sturdily established. He will become very angry when a story is told that offers a different view, one long before held only in silence.

It's probably 1925 or so in the picture. This young Dutch couple--Frisian actually--has four darling children. They sit together in a garden somewhere in Friesland, sit for a picture, what would be today, a Christmas card maybe. They could be any other family. They could be ours.

And yet I know that all of that is ahead of them.

A picture with a thousand words, as most all of ours are.

The father's own wider family will have a reunion soon, hundreds of them coming together from places around the world; and I think it a wonderful blessing of life itself--don't you?-- that those hundreds of people won't know any of that, nothing at all. They'll renew acquaintances, meet new family, eat wonderful food, sing songs maybe, tell stories, remember good times and bad. But this particular ancestral family's story will be only a footnote--

"Oom Leen's oldest children were in the Resistance, you know--and one of them died in Dachau."

"Is that right?"

"Yes--it was very sad."

"It was a horrible time--the war."

"It must have been."

"Pass the dessert, Wim. I really shouldn't have another."

Yesterday, an old friend of mine sent me a little personal essay in which he explained that he was suffering with the first fruits of Alzheimers.

"Sometimes even going for breakfast in our community dining room is a challenge these days," he wrote, "because I forget. I might hear 'scrambled eggs' yet cannot remember what that is."

If I let myself, I could have cried.

And yet, when I look at this picture and see this family in the crystal ball that I own, I can't help but think how wonderful it is, in a way, that no one on this earth remembers everything.

Sometimes it's a blessing to forget, a blessing not to know.

This world is, after all, a vale of tears.

But I swear, that it is, doesn't mean there isn't a time for Christmas cards or one more dessert.

Das Bier

2012-01-20T05:59:00.000-06:00

He was a German, a German-American, and fiercely proud. He stood up in front of our tour bus and sang the praises of his own German heritage as he showed us around his town, New Ulm, Minnesota. He could just as well have been outfitted in lederhosen; after all, the whole town is.

One of our people was an immigrant Dutchman with a wooden leg from a biking accident, a man with a thick accent even though he'd come to Albertan flatlands a half-century before. Sitting in the back of that bus and just listening to that fiercely proud German story-teller made him hot as pan of bacon. He could not hear that tone of voice without remembering four long years of German occupation, including a winter when people burned books to stay warm and ate cats to put something, anything in their stomachs.

We pulled the bus over in a spot where the German man, a historian, told the story of the 1862 Dakota War, especially how--twice!!--fierce Dakota warriors tried to burn down the settlement of the people they called "the Dutch" because they couldn't say "Deutsch." Think of an old Western, half-naked savages screaming and yelling and launching fiery arrows toward a couple hundred German folks holed up together to try to stay alive. Twice, the white folks fought off the rampage. Twice, against significant odds, they survived.

What that German historian didn't tell our visitors was how white folks had lied, had cheated, had not delivered the goods they promised in a treaty that wasn't worth the parchment it was printed on. What that German didn't tell our visitors is that those German immigrants, back in 1862, were vastly more hostile to the Dakota people who lived in the Minnesota River valley than the American pioneers who were putting down homesteads in the hardwood forests and the sweet green meadows all around. What that German historian didn't recount is that there are two sides to the story.

I don't know that our Dutch immigrant friend knew that we weren't getting the whole story, but somehow I knew that our host's uniquely German manner, a manner that carried some pride, was going to just make the Dutchman sizzle--and it did. When he finished the story and we pulled up in front of Martin Luther College's new chapel for a tour, our Dutch tourist didn't get off the bus because he was bromming. No, there's not enough oompah in that Dutch word--he wasn't just bromming, he was burning. And he was alone.

He wasn't proud of himself either. After all, this German historian's family was in Minnesota for almost a hundred years when the Dutchman was kid. To be angry with him about the Nazi Occupation wasn't right either--it's just that his manner, that arrogant German carriage, was unmistakable. He sat for a while alone in the back of the bus, and prayed.

And then he left the back seat, walked out the door and into the chapel.

The rest of us had been blessed. It's a beautiful chapel, and it just so happened--a kiss of joy--that the chapel's organist happened to show up to practice. Once our host had talked about the chapel, we sang hymns, something we like to do on our tours, especially when we're in old churches--or, in this case, new chapels. And this time, when we did, that organist, parked somewhere out of sight, heard the melodies and decided, graciously, to play along--even "A Mighty Fortress," Luther's own.

It was absolutely gorgeous, took my breath away, made me weep. I'm serious. And that's when I saw the old Dutchman come limping up from the back alone and rejoin the group. Honestly, I thought I knew the story.

But I didn't hear it from the man himself until he sat beside me a few hours later in the basement of the August Schell Brewery, a place that didn't get destroyed when the Dakota freedom fighters attacked way back in 1862, and still pumps out great beer. We'd toured the place--wasn't long--and ended up in a basement tasting room, where our very gracious hosts didn't spare the samples.

That's when he told me the whole story--of how insanely angry he became sitting in that bus, how that German's arrogance evoked wrath he hardly knew he still had, wrath that had brewed in him for sixty years; but how he'd also told himself it wasn't right for him to be that mad, how he'd ushered himself out of the bus and into that chapel, and how, when he'd walked in, he'd heard this music, people singing hymns in a way that reminded him of the angels on high, it was that beautiful. "And God told me I was wrong," he said, deadly serious, in his own thick Dutch accent, a cold August Schell beer in his hand.

And that's why a couple of weeks ago, when I spotted this half-case of August Schell beer in Wal-Mart, a sampler, I didn't hesitate for a moment. I bought it. I was born in Wisconsin, the nation's beer-brewing capitol. It's not the first 12-pack of beer I bought in my life.

But I've never come home with one that has any better story.

Prost!

Politics

2012-01-19T06:18:00.000-06:00

"Breaks my heart to see that--don't you think?"

"Some people just don't have the smarts to get in out of the rain."

"You're a jackass."

"He's an idiot, and you're a dreamer."

"I don't know why I married you."

"Pass the wine."

"Really!--have you no heart?"

"Okay, he's cute, all right? But what are you going to do, build him a teepee?"

"It's our anniversary, sweetheart."

Silence.

"What is it, anyway? what kind of bird, I mean?"

"He's suffering."

"He'll dry out--that's what feathers are for."

"I swear--you have no heart."

"Okay, he's cute."

"I think he's a she, dear."

"I might have known."

Silence.

"35 years is a long time."

"Not long enough."

He reached for her hand.

Swan Song XXVIX--Ms. Flannery O'Connor

2012-01-18T06:06:00.000-06:00

I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world as its relation to that.

Those words aren't cheap, but there are umpteen thousands, even millions of people, of Americans, who would willing volunteer them in testimony. Shoot, count me among 'em. The way I see the world is forever altered because of my deep-seeded belief--sometimes strong, sometimes not--that once upon a time a hippy Galilean suffered and died and then, Good Lord, rose again.

But it takes someone special to do something about it, to live by it, to make his or her life's work into that kind of testimony.

Two generations ago, my colleagues stuck an lit book in my hand when I came to Dordt College to teach, an anthology put together by someone named Perrine. Wasn't all the big really, two-toned, and I remember the first day's assignment: two short stories, one of them really gamey, plot-driven, a fast read, a story titled "The Most Dangerous Game"; and the other a Faulkner, "That Evening Sun." Both were about fear.

The trick was to get students to read both and then talk about which is best--the genre of lit or the genre of adventure. Brilliant idea, but a miserable failure because every time I tried it, I had to pin the entire class to the floor to make them think Faulkner was "art" and therefore "better." Never once worked.

But I liked the class, "Responding to Lit," and I liked the stories in Perrine too. Teaching was fun. I remember walking home with my friend, Hugh Cook--we lived in the same neighborhood. We'd yak about what had happened that day in class, a feast of joy, honestly. "Just think," Hugh said one day as we reached his place, "and we get paid for this too." Such heady joy was ours--young and charged with love for Faulkner and Fitzgerald, and a woman I knew only faintly back then, a woman named Flannery O'Connor.

She was in Perrine too, a story titled "Greenleaf," a story that contains the n-word and therefore doesn't appear in many anthologies anymore. Last semester I took it out of mothballs because I waxed nostalgic--I remembered it from 35 years ago. I ran off copies and assigned it once again for old time's sake, but we didn't talk about it in class because it became the basis of an assignment.

Today, this morning, we do. Today, I've got to talk about "Greenleaf" again, 35 years later. I wanted to come back to that story, n-word or not, because all really good stories end somewhere in the neighborhood of where they began.

Truth is, there's things about O'Connor that bug me. What I hate most is being an English teacher about it, the know-it-all up in front of the room to students who are stunned to learn, for instance, that the woman who wrote "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," with its brutal mass-murder shoot-'em-up ending, is really an orthodox Christian believer. What I hate is this "I'm-a-genius-and-you-aren't thing" that happens automatically when I say, "But wait!--there's this whole substrata of symbols--and if you play the story backwards at a slow speed or look at it with 3-D glasses or something--you'll see the REAL meaning." Aren't I a smarty-pants? You can be brilliant too if you majored in English.

Hate that, really.

But I love the story. It's such a joy to read, even though that dang bull gets Mrs. May right in the heart, just kills her in the end. I read "Greenleaf" again last night and was floored again by that woman's art. Dang it. It is all there--this meticulously choreographed dance of hints and images beneath the action, something Ms. O'Connor herself would call, I suppose, the movement of the spirit--and be not mistaken, we're talking about the Holy one. In "Greenleaf," Jesus himself is a scrub bull who's been eating away at the hedge of spiritual pride that Mrs. May surrounds herself with, a woman so blasted sure of herself and so blind that her salvation requires divine intervention by the lethal horns of one butt-ugly bull. Only then can she come to understand her damned self.

I read "Greenleaf" again last night--maybe for the last time--and when I did I know dang well why it is that I've loved teaching for lo, these many years. The students are fun, if you don't take yourself too seriously; but what I get to work with, day after day, is the beauty of God's world. Good night, sometimes that beauty is treacherously ugly--because life is. But everyday there's more testimony, everyday there's more life.

And then there's Flannery O'Connor, a fiction writer who saw the innocent face of her Savior like a divine watermark over every last page of the world in front of her--always there, always searching, always wanting his own--even if sometimes he comes along in the leathery hide of a scrub bull.

And I got paid for it too. For the last 35 years, I got paid for it. Isn't that something?

This morning's thanks--this morning's humble thanks--are for a woman's brilliant achievement in story-telling, work that's inspired me for 35 years, that's made it worth being a teacher, even if, one more time this morning, I'll have to act like some kind of weird magician English teacher. "Ah, class, but what you didn't see was the way that bull wears a wreath like a crown." For years, I've seen engineers roll their eyes.

No matter. She's worth it--Ms. O'Connor is. Trust me. I've been doing this for a lifetime.

Swan Song XXVIII--MLK Day

2012-01-17T05:46:00.000-06:00

Not until I came home from school yesterday, walked to the front of the house, pulled back the brass door of the mail box, and discovered it empty did I realize that it was a holiday, Martin Luther King Day. Not until then.

We don't celebrate MLK Day at this Christian college for a good reason--because the semester began just a week ago, and if we were to give the students their first Monday off, a ton of them would simply stay home for the first half week or so, some of them for good reasons, others for bad. Furthermore, if the college would shut down on MLK Day, boat loads of students would head up to the Twin Cities or west to Denver or wherever, putting literally hundreds on the roads, mid-winter. Students would spend all sorts of cash goofing off, and risk their lives in what could well be horrible travel weather. They could be killed.

What's more, our non-compliance isn't really racist since we don't celebrate Labor Day either. School always starts before summer's last fling, so for thirty-some years I haven't had a Labor Day when I wasn't laboring. I teach on Labor Day. I teach on MLK Day. It just makes good sense not to shut things down, good economic sense.

When I was a college sophomore, four of us went to Florida over spring break to catch some sun. We pulled into Ft. Lauderdale late at night, had made no reservations, so ended up looking for a place to stay at an hour--and a time of year--when finding a room wasn't exactly a breeze.

I don't know how on earth we ended up where we did, but I remember the place very clearly--it seemed to me then to be an abandoned military barracks, at least that's what it looked like, rafters for ceilings. We went into the office. We were third in line. I remember being anxious and we sure weren't picky, believe me.

The group in front was from Notre Dame--I remember that. Four guys. The seedy old man behind the desk gave them a key. But then, horror!--the couple in front of us got turned down. "Sorry," the guy said. "You saw it--that was the last room."

That meant, of course, we had to look elsewhere. Once the couple left, there we stood, bereft. We too started to walk out.

"Where you going?" the guy said. "I still got a room." Wink and a smile. "We don't take their kind here."

That young couple in front of us were black.

I'd never experienced anything close to that before. I'd heard about it, read about it, wondered about it--but it had happened right in front of me. Besides, my father had believed that MLK was an agitator who people claimed had buddied up with known communists. I grew up in Wisconsin in the early Sixties, when the shadow of Joseph McCarthy still loomed over politics. I'm sure that my wonderful, God-fearing father--one of the sweetest men I ever knew, honestly--probably believed that Joe McCarthy was a far better man than this Martin Luther King.

Were he alive, my father would probably still have all kinds of trouble celebrating MLK Day. It would bug him no end. He might well appreciate the fact that we don't celebrate. No one I know would doubt my father's deep and abiding Christian faith.

There are good reasons why this Christian college doesn't celebrate the holiday, and I understand them. But I also know that historically for my people, who surely do like to watch the dollars, it's much, much easier to work on MLK Day than it is to remember the man or his vision because what there is to remember of King's time for many, many white evangelical Christians isn't pretty at all, it's racist.

David Brooks is in South Carolina now, and yesterday, on Martin Luther King Day, in the New York Times, he speculated about the folks he'd been meeting, especially the mood of their rallies, like last night's debate. He says that the audiences want "a restoration" because they're sure that American once had strong values, "but we have gone astray." They believe we need to return to the values we once had, Brooks says.

Brooks doesn't disagree with that assessment, but he also says he wonders if the people he's been visiting have become "the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return."

There are many good, good reasons for our not celebrating Martin Luther King Day, but at this mostly white Christian college, it behooves us, every year, to rethink our motives because there are also many, many good reasons--moral reasons--to remember both who he was and who we were and maybe still are.

Not Sure

2012-01-16T06:33:00.000-06:00

If you are absolutely, perfectly sure that once upon a time there were, in fact, two beautiful naked people tending the greenest garden of flowery delights ever imagined, and that those two sweethearts got themselves and all of mankind bamboozled by an upright, chattering snake who conned them into eating forbidden fruit; if you truly believe that Adam and Eve, the only belly-buttonless human beings in history, were literally our first opa and oma; if you're absolutely convinced that the world was begat in just exactly the way Genesis says it was, then John Suk's new book is going to upset you. Maybe you shouldn't read it.

But if you sometimes have doubts about a six-day creation, if you're not exactly sure that gay marriage is the most frightful abomination ever to curse American culture--vastly worse than, say, racism; or that, in some few circumstances, removing something we call a fetus--for good reason--from the womb of a woman isn't exactly the same thing as killing a baby; if there are times in your life--say when you visit Dachau or Auschwitz--or when you consider the woman next door, scared to death and praying her eyes out for relief of her mother's cancer, and then find yourself wondering whether or not God almighty has left the room, then you'll find Not Sure something akin to breath of fresh air.

If you think Tim Tebow's flashy gridiron testimony is more than slightly over-the-top, you'll like the book. If Mother Teresa's long and difficult battles with profound spiritual doubt doesn't surprise you, you will too. If you don't really think you have the kind of "personal relationship with Jesus" that some smilers do, you'll find Not Sure refreshing. If sometimes you get really tired of contemporary American evangelicalism, you'll love it. If you didn't go to Promise Keepers with your grandson or your father or your favorite uncle, even though every other guy in church did and came back be-speckled with spiritual hickies, you'll know exactly what Suk is talking about in Not Sure--and you'll thank him.

I really, really, really enjoyed Not Sure because there are times, Lord save me, I'm not either.

I have my quibbles with Brother John. It's not holy writ, after all. Like many Canadian, post-World War II Dutch immigrants and their kids, he doesn't get the old line CRC people, one of whom I am. He doesn't understand the pietism of the afscheiding, the separation people; but that's not a sin. However, using Stan Wiersma's parents as an example of how all pre-Kuyperian CRC people looked or thought is like using Amos 'n Andy to define African-Americans, or any of a thousand absent-minded professors to critique American higher education. There was a time when most everyone in northwest Iowa planted their corn on the square; but thousands--Catholics and Methodists and Lutherans--did it because that's the way they were taught, not because it somehow patterned predestination. Give me a break, John.

His discussion of the Half-way Covenant and the early American pilgrims and puritans might well be stronger had he read Perry Miller, and I tend to think he's a little over-enamored with communication theory. We change, but there wouldn't be a Hamlet if we evolved as radically as I sometimes guess Suk believes we have or are. What we read and how we read changes dramatically; human nature doesn't.

Most embarrassingly, he trashes his two-year stint here at Dordt College because of what he seems to believe was a ideological straight-jacket, DC's too vigorous espousal of the neo-Kuyperian way. I think we make, for him, a too convenient punching bag; but then he was 18 years old and here during DC's own tumultuous, un-civil war years. Big deal.

Truth be told, I found his confession of doubt far less thorny than I thought it would be. Honestly, I expected something more Christopher Hitchens. Most of the time, I know pretty much exactly what he feels. Last night in church, we sang "Abide with Me," and I told myself that my memory contains childhood moments when singing that great old hymn was vastly more sweetly satisfying to me than it was last night. The Holden Caulfield in me wanted to return at that moment to my childhood because as I've grown older my own doubt has grown, but then so has my understanding of the world we live in and just who I am. These days I think I know my sin more fully than I care to say, and that's why I find also find grace vastly more amazing than I ever could have as a kid. The sweet old hymn sounds much different today, beautiful but different. Sometimes I wish I could go back.

A Laotian woman told me her story in great detail once upon a time. She told me how she'd crossed the Mekong in what she described as a little homemade dugout, her children inside. She was aware of soldiers ready to shoot her and her kids out right of the water, which they often did. It was night. The water was cold. But she wanted to get to the other side, to freedom. She described herself, chest-deep, in the waters of the Mekong. "I prayed and prayed and prayed," she told me, almost crying to remember.

That was years before she'd ever heard of Jesus--or if she had, it was but the slightest mention. And I remember wondering who exactly was she praying too? And would God--who I believe had to hear it--simply shrug it off because it didn't come in the name of Jesus. Would he say, "Well, sorry, but you're on your own, lady." Really?

John Suk's Not Sure lays out the nature of the faith a lot of us struggle to hold to at times, me among 'em. When I got to the end, however, the only thing I really believed about him was that he was even doubtful about doubt because Not Sure does not end like Psalm 88. It ends more like 13--with faith. At least what I'd call faith. It ends with honesty and aspiration and the kind of trembling trust that lots of have, even though the Tebows get the headlines.

Would Suk's views on gay marriage and human evolution and other hot button items keep him out of the pulpit at my church? (We're looking, by the way.) Yes, it would.

And there lies the problem, maybe the most difficult problem the book creates.

He's got an approach to that problem. He's asking for a church that doesn't judge, a church that only loves, a church without doctrinal walls. In the history of Christianity, those kinds of places generally don't do well, and that too is a problem.

But most of the time I found Not Sure to be thoughtful, earnest, and, finally, faithful.

And I found the book encouraging. Some won't. But King David would, and so would Mother Teresa. They've been there themselves--not always perfectly sure, that is.

Sunday Morning Meds--Spacious Skies

2012-01-15T06:33:00.001-06:00

“thou hast enlarged me”

It was always a little tough for us, having to return from week-longtreks we took annually through the big-shouldered Missouri River Valley,following the two-hundred year-old route of Lewis and Clark through SouthDakota.

We means an ecologist friend of mine and me, as wellas a delightful tour hostess for the nearly fifty souls who, with us, filled upa bus. The first Great Plains pilgrimage,I remember, was a rip-roaring successes for three stooges like us, who’d neverpulled off a stunt like that before. People on the bus loved it, really.

And all three of us live in awe of the country weexplored. It’s so big and sobeautiful.

But the Great Plains continues to hemorrhage its populace,something it’s done since the late 19^th century, when European immigrantsand restless Eastern palefaces flooded the place, cock-sure that a few newlyplanted cottonwoods, some elbow grease, and a good mule would create a home anda way of life on 160-acres. Simply put,that was a lie.

Homesteaders discovered that the Great Plains weredespairingly fickle. While we were in Pierre, South Dakota, the whole region was almost flooded. Four inches of rain fell in one night. The prairie looked royal in an emeraldrobe. Next year, the place could have beena dust bowl.

But sparse population in a landscape that immense isn’t necessarilya bad thing. Today, the whole placeseems an open-air museum; if you come anywhere close to the Missouri River,even the imaginatively-challenged can hear the sounds of the Corps of Discoverymaking their way north and west. Almostanywhere on the Missouri’s big glacial banks, you can stand in the yawningopenness and watch your dog run away for three days, nary a Burger King insight. That’s nice.

That first trip didn’t go exactly as planned. We had three days of rain, and the wholeevent was much more, well, meditative, sweetly meditative, than I’d guessed itwas going to be. I’d like to tell you that the devotions we had together eachmorning were greatly appreciated because they were so meticulously planned, butthat would be as big a fib as fertility of the land.

Our devotions were memorable because of the sheer grandeurthat surrounded us every day, the immensity of a land where it’s as hard to bearrogant and as it is easy to be on your knees.

For centuries, translators have changed what’s really therein verse one of Psalm 4, and I think it’s a mistake. “Thou hast enlarged me” really says somethingto this effect: “thou hast set me in alarge place.” What David is asking Godto remember are the times when He delivered the shepherd/king by bringing himout to the Great Plains.

Not literally, of course. King David didn’t know the South Dakota from Schnectady.

But I understand what he means. You’ve done it before, Lord, he says; you’vebrought me out to the glorious openness of the spacious skies.

“Do it again,” he’s going to say. “Please, Lord, do it one more time.”

I get that. Really, Ido.

Morning Thanks--her powder

2012-01-13T06:00:00.001-06:00

It's brand new and perfectly clean, but perhaps the most distinguishing thing about my mother's studio apartment in the old folks home is her brightly lit bathroom; it's totally unlike most others because it's big, really spacious. The apartment itself isn't tiny--the cathedral ceiling helps a little; but the bathroom is roomy enough for a few donuts in her wheelchair.

It's got a roll-in shower that's immediately accessible, maybe twice as big as the little unit we just put in in our basement. Chrome handlebars are on the wall, enough apparatus to remind you of a gym maybe--that may be stretching it. And there's the safety cord, a string that, when pulled, will bring the nurse. When most old people fall, they do so in the bathroom, I'm told.

The place is full of medicines, tons of them--ointments and pills and a volley of over-the-counter remedies for just about everything but old age.

On Christmas eve, both my father-in-law and my mother, 500 miles apart, both of them in their early 90s, fell. When people that old fall, it's normally not much more than a crumple, but even a crumple can shatter ancient bones. Sometimes even a slow-motion fall is the beginning of the end. Bones break and never heal. My father died a month after a fall.

But today they're both improving. Nothing got broken. Our grandson plays hockey and goes down on the ice a hundred times an hour, I swear; but when he takes off his skates, he's just fine. With my mother, it 's not that easy. On Christmas Eve she crumpled, and she's still being punished.

I walked into that spacious bathroom when we visited her a couple of weeks ago. There's an extension on her toilet so she doesn't have to bend her knees as far as most of us do, and there's just so much stuff all over, so much bathroom stuff. Depends, too. Lots of them.

And there on a table between the sink and the stool I saw this round box of powder, talc, foundation--I don't know what it is, really, but it's called "Evening in Paris."

It's getting really hard for Mom to get out these days, even though she likes to. You've got to figure on an afternoon of extra time for her to get in and out of the apartment, the car, and, say, a restaurant. I don't think she cares to go out of town anymore--maybe just a sandwich at the restaurant downtown. Otherwise, she's there, in that studio apartment in the home. And that seems to be just fine.

"An Evening in Paris" really isn't even a dream. "An Evening in Paris" is absurd. It's black humor. Her life--I thought as I stood there in her heavily armed bathroom--is just about the polar opposite of the kind of billowing romance suggested by that phrase. It's a bad joke.

But then, I thought, maybe my mother needs her Evening in Paris. Maybe an Evening in Paris is just as important as those shiny safety bars or that single string on the wall beside that ultra-tall toilet.

We all do, don't we? We all need that Evening in Paris.

I do, and that's why, this morning, I'm thankful for Mom's Evening in Paris.

What I witnessed this morning

2012-01-12T05:50:00.000-06:00

We used to shoot them for fun when I was a kid. Squirrel hunting was its own kind of joy too, not that I gloried in the killing, even then.

What I remember best about it was sitting and waiting in thelakeshore woods. What I never knewbefore I did that—just sat quietly amid the trees—is that things come alive inremarkable ways if you sit in stony silence.

I hail from Wisconsin, where hunting is the state pastime. Come deer opener, we’d regularly have half aclass in the high school where I once taught. It’s hard for me to say anything negative about hunting because huntersI know who hunt are great naturalists who most love and honor theoutdoors.

Still, I’m with Thoreau, who says every boy (call himsexist) should hunt, but once hegrows up he should put the gun away. It’s not something I’d carp about, but it’s true for me. But once upon a time, I actually shotsquirrels out of trees, thoughtlessly. Itwas, as Thoreau would say, a rite of passage.

This morning on my way to school, a car came steaming along,going too fast, I thought, and I heard a clunk and saw a red squirrel draghimself off until he reached the neighbor’s porch. He scrambled quickly enough to make me to hopehe wouldn’t die, but the sound argued otherwise.

Squirrels have entertained us in this house for years withtheir jaw-dropping gymnastics. Lately,they’ve been chasing each around the lindens so fast they create orange stripesup the bark. Chubby ballerinas, they’llrisk life and limb in our ornamental crabs, determined to get every last berry,no matter how thin the twig.

When I heard that thump and saw that squirrel drag its hindend up the lawn and beneath the porch, it just about took me out at the knees,I swear. I was actually shaking.

How it is that a young me once shot them out of treeswithout a conscience. How is it that thismorning, 60 years later, that awful sound nearly did me in? Do we soften in old age? Does our heart somehow get outsized? What else gets lost when there’s less testosterone?

Nathan Englander’s “Free Fruit for Young Widows” appears inthis year’s Best American Short Stories,and tomorrow we’ll talk about it in class—or I will if they don’t. It’s a gem, really, and, like all Holocauststories, its power is in its ideas or theme because the Holocaust can’t simplybe a setting. No car chase or buddingromance can outreach demonic treachery.

An Israeli vet named Shimmy offers kindness to a man, acomrade who nearly killed him quite unjustly during the 1956 Sinai campaign. That vet, now a father, runs a fruit stand inJerusalem. There’s a coming-of-age storytoo in “Free Fruit,” the story of a boy named Etgar who only slowly begins tounderstand why his father dispenses grace in the volume he does, even to thosewho are, to the boy’s mind, totally undeserving.

When Etgar is a kid, Shimmy simply tries to tell his boythat nothing in life is easy, simply black and white—there’s only shades of gray,he says.

One day, they watch a fish market next door, where the bossis taking care of business, the catch of the day flopping around on a blockbefore getting killed with a mallet. Shimmytells Etgar that his son doesn’t understand suffering: “God forbid you should have to live with theconsequences of decisions, permanent, eternal, that will chase you in your head,turning you from this side to that,” he says, “tossing between wrong andright.” They’re watching those fish.

But Etgar still couldn’t grasp what his father was tellinghim, “couldn’t comprehend how his father saw the story to be that of a fishflip-flopping,” Englander writes, “when it was, in his eyes, only ever aboutthat mallet coming down.”

Still a kid, Etgar doesn’t understand suffering.

Sometimes literature helps us see—helps me anyway. Once upon a time I was Etgar.

But this morning I was Shimmy, even though I’ve never come anywhere near Treblinka or Dachau.

I saw—and I felt, I guess—that fish flip-flopping, and Iwasn’t thinking about that mallet like I was in those days, as a boy, when Iheld the rifle myself.

"who changest not"

2012-01-11T06:01:00.000-06:00

The hardest work I ever did was a three-week stint--that's all--with a road crew cutting sod and laying it down along the new interstate highway, I-43, that would come to link Milwaukee and Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was backbreaking work. Cutting sod wasn't all that bad--I was blessed to do that occasionally; but laying those sod balls just about killed me because hauling them up or down the steeply inclined overpasses in loose dirt was simply backbreaking.

But it offered, in my hometown, the best money that could be made by someone like me that summer. I was a college grad without a full-time job; and the work was constant--six to six every day. I was just a hired hand, local help, a strong body drawn from the neighborhood when the crew was prettifying that new highway with fresh grass in Sheboygan County. When they were through, the outfit asked me if I wanted to stay with them as they worked their way north, which pleased me as much as any request I'd ever had. It meant they knew I could work. That was July, 1970.

Nothing changed life in my hometown, Oostburg, Wisconsin, like that new highway. What used to be a two-lane road on a snaking path cut originally into the lakeside forests by Sauk Indians was suddenly transformed into an interstate that brought the city of Milwaukee fifteen minutes closer. The old highway was a killer; the new one was a dream. I had a hand in it myself.

In essence, it transformed Oostburg into suburbia at a time when the old way of life--agriculture--was becoming a business instead of a family thing. That new highway brought hundreds of job to the community, many of whose residents became building contractors--plumbers, dry-wallers, carpenters, excavators. The highway brought more than traffic; it brought people and people needed houses.

For some reason, I remember that the sign on the way up the hill into town used to say "Population 897." We were Hollanders, almost all of us anyway, as we had been since the 1850s, when my great-great grandparents immigrated from the Netherlands and whacked down some of the forest to make room for a lakeshore farm. For more than a century, if you weren't Dutch, you weren't much.

The highway changed all of that. Today, even though my home town is significantly bigger and much more diverse, its peculiar charm is still unique. It is, like most of rural America, deeply religious and gracious in the loving care it extends to its own.

For the most part, I haven't lived there since that summer, the summer I laid sod down on the new highway overpasses, so it's been a joy to watch the town change, transform itself. When we pulled into town just after Christmas this year, we couldn't miss a ice-skating pond right downtown, under lights, right there where my own grandfather's blacksmith shop used to be, and later his Mobilgas station. I thought it was a grand idea, befitting the best Oostburg ever offered its own.

Out along the old highway, maybe three miles north of town, in a brick building that I remember falling apart in the late 60s, a country school stands, a place that was probably built late in the game for all such enterprises, school consolidation going on already for years. I remember it as the Town of Wilson school, but I'm not old enough to remember seeing any kids there. By the time I was growing up, farm kids in the neighborhood were already being bussed off to town; and the place was, as I remember, falling apart.

It's had lots of owners since then, I guess, although I don't remember any of them. But today the place is exceptionally well-kept, clean and tidy, immaculate--almost Dutch-like. Dutch Bibles are the only ones, I guess, that actually contain the verse "cleanliness is next to Godliness."

Just across the road is the farmstead I remember as belonging to the VerVeldes, a quiet and unassuming couple who went to our church and had a string of kids who all went to the Christian school in town when I did. We're talking agriculture circa 1950, of course, when Old McDonald farming was simply the way everyone did it--20 cows maybe, a hen house, and, at best, 160 acres and a big red barn with a loft stuffed with hay.

That's long gone, as are the Les and Inez, I imagine, although they have kids in the area. Things have changed.

Today the old Town of Wilson school is an Islamic Center, of all things--an Islamic Center. It wasn't an easy transition for the locals, which I can understand. They made national news at just about the time another Islamic Center created all kinds of ill will right there close to the spot where once the Twin Towers stood. Oostburg folks are just about as devout as they were when my great-grandparents, staunch Dutch Calvinists, shooed the Sauk and Kickapoo out of the neighborhood. 9/11 was horrifying, and it happened in New York, a long ways away. But it's always hard to know who's one of us and who's not when the battle lines, world-wide, seem so deep and bloody.

There was some opposition, but today that Islamic Center is there, amazingly. If you stand in the parking lot, you can see the new highway a half-mile east, including an overpass whose grasses descend from sod I laid there myself.

I really do love going home. Something less a mile away from that new Islamic Center, in a cemetery named after my own great-uncle, in fact, lie the mortal remains of just about every ancestor of mine on both sides. I bet you can see the place from the graveyard. My grandpa's there, a preacher. I wonder what he thinks.

We live in a different world than the one I grew up in--all of us do. But then nothing ever really stays the same, and nobody knows the future really. Not even Harold Camping. What we do know is that it's somehow going to be different than it was because it always is.

Our preacher says those angels who appeared out of nowhere in the Judean hills, a strange heavenly choir, told that gang of dusty shepherds something eternally profound. "Don't be afraid," they said, although you must have been able to hear teeth chattering a half-dozen hilltops away. "Don't be scared."

Our preacher says that of all the memorable commands in scripture, that's the one most repeated.

Even so, it's just terribly easy to forget.

Swan Songs XXVII--The last first day

2012-01-10T05:26:00.000-06:00

It wasn't that many years ago--no more than five, I swear--that I wondered, honestly, whether I'd ever not get nervous the night before meeting students the very first day of term. The truth is, I'd never slept all that well the night before the first class, and I'd never stepped into a classroom that first day without an XXL case of the jitters.

Last night, honestly, no sweat. Last night, the origin of the sleeplessness I suffered was the near-terminal snuffiness of a 640-acre head cold. Once I went over my notes before ten, I never gave those soon-to-be newly populated classrooms a second thought. This morning is my very last first day.

A ton of first-year images still have a place in my otherwise leaky memory; and the night before my very first day of teaching will never, ever leave. The apartment I rented--an old house trailer--was still occupied and would be until September 1; so I took up residence at an ancient, red brick hotel, the building farthest to the left on the picture, the southwest corner of the town square in Monroe, Wisconsin--second floor, I remember, with a window that looked out over street.

It was August hot, and there was no air--after all, this was Wisconsin. My window--a huge one--was wide open as I remember. No screen. I had my roll sheets in my hand. Must have been dittos because it was 1970, 42 years ago, and nobody at Black Hawk High School or almost anywhere else outside of fancy tech labs had ever heard the word computer. I was four months out of college, completely alone--no girlfriend, no attachments, no nothing. It was just me, just me and those roll sheets--one journalism class (I'd never taken a course in journalism in my life), two junior English classes (American lit--I had a shot at that one), and two senior classes (English lit--the way things went all over in the olden days)--plus a study hall. I was on my own, accountable to no one else, and that, I remember, felt very good. I didn't feel anymore like a kid.

For some reason, I didn't doubt for a moment that I'd be just fine once things got started. I didn't sit there questioning whether or not I'd done the right thing taking the job when it was offered, late July. I wasn't worried about whether or not I'd do a good job--I was just worried about those names, those kids, those human beings in my hands. I read through the names time after time, trying to imagine them and their lives.

They were Swiss-American names, many of them anyway, as foreign to my ear and tongue as if they'd been Korean, raised as I was in a Dutch Calvinist ghetto. There I sat on the bed in my underwear; it was very hot in that old, upstairs hotel room and there was no desk. Time after time after time, I read through all those strange names, wondering what on earth those kids would be like.

Voices arose from beneath me on the street. Some kids were hanging out downtown. Their words were indistinguishable, but their banter carried the loose hilarity kids create anywhere. I couldn't help wonder whether one or two of them might have names right there on the lists, but I also knew the cold, sad truth: they weren't thinking about me right then, not like I was doting on them. Tomorrow, I'd be an asterisk, simply the new guy. If I'd ever be anybody in their lives, I'd have to become what I could totally on my own. To them, I'd be a human being without a history, without a name, and something about that equation was scary and perfectly exhilarating.

Honestly, today, 42 years later, I'd have more trouble remembering my students' names from last semester than I would the names on those class lists. If you'd read 'em to me now, I could tell you exactly where those kids sat in the rows my classroom. Some of those students I'd still recognize by their handwriting--I swear it. All of that exists clearly in my memory, although what I see today is still their 17-year-old selves.

When I think about it now, I imagine I must have been somewhat scary to them, too. After all, I was still their age, really, just four years older. I was just a kid, even though that night maybe, for the first time, I didn't think I was. Today, those students are all approaching 60 themselves.

This morning, it's very early, but it's the head cold that got me up--cottonmouth, not nerves. Last night, I looked over my computer lists, complete with color pics and turned on the Daily Show.

This morning, it's the last first time for me, and I'm ready. Finally, I'm ready.

And thankful. In so many ways, I'm just thankful.

It's been a good life.

American Gothic

2012-01-09T05:26:00.000-06:00

It's an American icon. Like the gospel, it's as simple as a cupcake, yet as complex as the face of the moon. Nothing--not even politicians at the State Fair or endlessly unfurled rows of corn--says "Iowa" more definitively than Grant Wood's American Gothic, and that's why, I guess, I thought we had to have one once we moved here, years and years ago. What Hawkeye home would really be complete without one?

It's prompted a thousand parodies. Google it sometime, and you'll find dozens and dozens of spoofs, made hilarious by the instant recognition the image creates.

The thing is, he didn't mean it as a joke--or did he? Sometime in the 1930s, Grant Wood got himself enthralled by Flemish portrait artists and figured he could try their peculiar style himself. So he got his dentist and his sister to stand in front of a house whose arching upstairs bedroom window offered its own kind of gothic shape, and, viola!--he had a telling portrait.

American Gothic says different things to different people, however. Some Iowans were mortified that he so deviously rendered up Iowa's barnyard puritans. They may be right--it's hard for Iowans not to feel a little mocked by the painting, really--and rather brutally exposed. If you're progressive especially, you sort of want to yell out that we're not all like that! What Grant Wood has captured here is the very soul of 21st century Iowa Christian conservatives. If you're one of them, I'm not sure what you think because I'm not and because they aren't among the champions of irony.

There are those who think it is satire, Mr. Wood, who wore bibs himself, making fun of his own people. And there are those who think it isn't, Mr. Wood, who wore bibs himself, deeply appreciative of the arduous work ethic, the rugged simplicity of the people of the tall corn. It's a mark of the painting's excellence that we can read just about anything we want into the portrait, and--for better or for worse--I love it. It's on our wall, but upstairs.

Years ago, when Grandpa took down an old shed, we saved a couple of weathered boards and had American Gothic framed in sweetly weathered Van Gelder barn wood. We've still not started sifting seriously through Schaap "stuff" for the sale of our house, but I was thinking that wouldn't toss American Gothic, nor would I sell it. It's us, after all. That's what I always thought.

But last week our darling grandson, just two years old and only now beginning to make sense when he jabbers, took one look at Grant Wood's masterpiece hanging on an upstairs wall, pointed one perfectly sinless little fat finger, and said, "Papa and Mima." Meaning us.

He thought it was us.

I'll admit it--I gulped a little. After all, I don't look like the old dentist--I'm much heavier. And Barbara hasn't worn a kitchen smock like that for as long as I've known her. We're really not them. I mean he was factually wrong.

But then I got to thinking. I suppose that finally the little guy is right, isn't he? We are them, even though I don't own a pitchfork and my wife only recently started to wear her hair pinned back like that.

It's amazing. I've decided that ahead of our smart little grandson lies, undoubtedly, a distinguished career as a famous art critic. He understands the ambiguity of Grant Wood--at just two years old, he gets American Gothic. He's brilliant.

Besides, we don't have a gothic window either. And I don't have a collarless shirt like that, and Barbara has nothing even close to that black dress--no medallion or whatever it is. And good night, we're not that dour. Look at those faces.

I mean, we're not really them. No way. That little grandson of ours, he really meant that appraisal iconically. That's what he really meant. That's what he meant to say.

Anyway, when it comes time for us move out, I'm thinking of getting rid of it actually.

Sunday Morning Meds--"God of my righteousness"

2012-01-08T04:07:00.000-06:00

“Answer me when I call, O God of my righteousness” Psalm 4:1

Charles Spurgeon says this particular descriptive phrase (“God of my righteousness”) doesn’t appear anywhere else in the Psalms, or in the Bible itself, for that matter. The KJV has it, of course, as do plenty of contemporary translations, but the NIV translates the phrase into a single adjective and then gives it to God (“righteous God”), a rendition that seems to me to suggest a significantly different idea.

I was born and reared in the Calvinist tradition of the Christian faith, and for better or for worse I’ve stayed—stubbornly, perhaps—within that fold. Maybe that’s why I like the KJV’s phrasing better. The psalmist isn’t mincing words; instead, he’s giving total credit for his righteousness to the author thereof. I’m not interested in polemics, but it seems to me he’s doing the Calvinist thing.

I once knew an old man named Harry, perfectly bald, only a quarter of a lung left in his ribs. He’d lost the rest to cancer, been a smoker all his life. He was very much alone in Arizona. His wife was gone, but then she hadn’t been at his side since he’d treated her in the same, sad way he’d treated anything else in his life of real value, including his kids.

He wore a beret and drove an ancient VW beetle, looked for all the world like the eccentric he was. In his spare time, which he had plenty of after his retirement, he loved to spin poems, little aphoristic lines that rose in his mind and soul from all kinds of varied sources—some of them devotional, some of them sexy. Sort of like John Donne. Maybe that’s a stretch.

I’ll never forget him crying, something he used to do at the drop of a hat—well, beret. In a restaurant, outside of church, inside church, just about anywhere, if he was given to consider the shadowy mistakes of his eighty-some years, he’d shed tears profusely. I used to worry about his being able to get his breath, in fact.

And then he’d look at me, a young man at the time, and raise a crooked finger. “Jim,” he’d say, “if I had one lousy thing to do with my salvation, I’d burn in hell.” Amazing line.

The poet in Psalm 4 is not pointing. He’s not trying to convince you and me to curb our appetites or line up back on the straight and narrow. Neither is he driven half-mad by the sin of his early life. I’m not sure he’s crying at all.

But the intent of the line—“God of my righteousness”—seems pretty much the same as my old friend Harry’s appraisal of his life’s destiny. It seems to me that what the Psalmist is suggesting is that without God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, he’d be at ground zero when it comes to righteousness and salvation.

It’s difficult for me to understand how any believing earthling could say anything different. But then, I’m a Calvinist, I guess. And closing in on retirement the way I am, looking back over a life that has some miles on it, I find it impossible not to say, with the poet of Psalm 4, that this God I worship, this God who loves me, is anything less than the “God of my righteousness.”

Swan Song XXVI--faculty meetings

2012-01-06T06:36:00.000-06:00

I suppose I will always remember them generically. Basically, they're all alike, heavy laden with info, some of which is important, some of which is frivolous. Faculty meetings happen, always, at appropriate times, I suppose--the beginning of a semester, the end of a semester; but most faculty members are distracted, in January by the scramble before the first day of classes, in May by sheer fatigue. Few of us ever really want to go.

Administrators aren't dumb. They understand, so they do what they can to make them sweet. Donuts from Casey's Bakery. Often, there's a pep talk, but then most faculty "get" sweet-talking. Admin will shake your hand sumptuously while peeing on your foot--that kind of thing. Happens all the time. Trust me, I've lived through more than a hundred faculty meetings in forty years of teaching.

When the institutional climate was poisonous, I remember them for rancor--mine, especially. I wasn't always a good foot soldier, and I don't doubt I've inflicted my share of wounds. But the issues are largely gone now, even though I'm sure they had to do with my perception of their (administrative) incompetence.

Only one stands forever in the faculty meeting Hall of Fame, and that one happened years ago at a date I can almost pinpoint--it had to be early to mid-80's. South African apartheid hadn't failed yet. The President of the college, Rev. B. J. Haan, had been offered an honorary doctorate from an Afrikaner university, a gracious gesture on their part. No one doubted Haan was worthy--that wasn't the question. What was on the table that night was whether he should take it.

The forces on either side were daunting. On the left stood those who believed that his accepting the honorary doctorate would give the granting institution--and the apartheid system--a kind of "Christian" legitimacy that they did not deserve. To stand with those Afrikaners, in some ways the authors of apartheid, segregationist apartheid, would be to get into bed with the forces of Satan, argued faculty on the left.

On the the right stood those who saw those Afrikaners as fellow children of the Lord, laborers in the vineyard, men and women with whom we could pray, people who needed our help finding their way, not the back of our hand. You didn't have to stop hating apartheid to love them, to respect them.

Dr. James Skillen, a man who went on the devote his life to the interface of politics and the Christian faith, spoke for those who were asking Haan not to accept the doctorate. Of the two spokesman, he was the less passionate, but most convincing. Any dalliance with the Afrikaners was a dance of death, he argued, because those offering the President this honorary doctorate were only looking for political goodwill. He told the President that, should he take the honor, he'd be a pawn in the terrible racial struggle being waged in South Africa. Even little Dordt College would be scratched up on the wall of those who were fighting for apartheid.

On the other side stood Rev. Dr. E. L. Hebden Taylor, an Englishman, an Anglican priest who was just about as foreign to Siouxland prairie as those first wooden-shoed, paleface pioneers from Pella. He was an eccentric scholar no alum will ever forget. The son of South African missionaries, he'd grown up there and knew South Africans like no one else. That familial relationship was the foundation for his argument--you don't slap confessional brothers and sisters in the face when they're offering respect and love. The President simply had to go. Of the two, Taylor spoke most passionately. South Africa was, to him, something of a homeland.

There was no rancor, despite the fact that the sides were deeply divided. Both men laid out arguments plainly and powerfully, even personally; but neither condemned the other. What went to war that night was two very plausible arguments, neither of which was evil, both of which had inherent righteousness.

When it was over, President Haan stood up, thanked Skillen and Taylor, acknowledged the difficulty of the question, even railed on the horrors of apartheid; but then said he'd made up his mind before the debate already. He'd decided not to go to apartheid South Africa, that the possibility of being used at this particular moment in history was just too great.

But then he spoke sharply, to those who sided with Skillen. To them--to us, I guess-- he said that in no way should his decision make them feel that he was desirous of dancing with a liberal or progressive agenda, that he didn't want the institution to veer left as he said so many once-Christian institutions had. Neither did he want the college he established to veer right. He wanted somehow a third way, a way he would have described as a "Reformed Christian way."

Yesterday, I walked out of my last faculty meeting at Dordt College into January temperatures that were almost sinful--low 60s--for January. It was gorgeous. I was already munching on the fattest long john I could find, jelly-filled, vanilla frosting. I left early. I'd had enough. I'd gone only because my wife--sometimes my conscience--determined that I really should. I'd heard enough reports, suffered enough cheerleading. It was time to go, and I was happy. I haven't had a frosted long john like that for years a decade--I was kicking out the jams Calvinistically.

I walked up to my office and worked on my very last syllabus.

Only one faculty meeting stays with me--that moving debate on a topic totally relevant to the world in which we lived, a topic to which some were very personally tied, a topic that, at that moment, could have easily gone either way. In that debate, this young prof learned that sometimes the most heated arguments are not waged by fools--they're weighty because both sides have merit. I came out smarter than I went in at that faculty meeting. Maybe that's why it will always be part of my memory.

Nothing that happened before or since in a Dordt College faculty meeting comes anywhere near to what happened that night, early 80s, in S-101. I don't think we had donuts.

Reading Mother Teresa XXIV

2012-01-05T05:46:00.000-06:00

I don't buy it totally. It strikes me as half-truth, which is, at times, even more deceptive than a lie. I understand what she says, I even have some sympathies with the idea, but finally I think she was wrong. Well, half wrong.

"Cheerfulness is a sign of a generous and mortified person who, forgetting all things, even herself, tries to please her God in all she does for souls."

A mortified person is someone whose old man (or woman) of sin is dead as doornail. It has nothing to do with being absolutely mortified by what stupidity came out of your cousin Ezra's mouth last Sunday. When your sin is, so to speak, behind you, she's saying, cheerfulness becomes a habit. That's sweet.

I'm listening.

"Cheerfulness is often a cloak which hides a life of sacrifice, continual union with God, fervor and generosity."

I don't know that I believe that totally, but I still like it. Run into an ever-cheerful person, she says, and you'll be with someone whose deep devotion to God is a constant.

I'm still listening, but she's starting to sound tinny as a cheerleader--"don't worry, be happy."

"A person who has this gift of cheerfulness very often reaches a great height of perfection."

Warning lights are going off. Even the apostle Paul would draw an eyebrow here, so I am not alone, nor am I too much a Calvinist to scale that perfection mountain. In my book, the perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good.

But I'm still listening. After all, this is Mother Teresa.

"For God loves a cheerful giver and He takes close to His heart the religious He loves."

She's more sure about such things than I am, but okay. But then how do you reconcile that idea with the treasures that darkness and sheer doubt have given us? Much of our music arises from thwarted human aspiration, from the dead opposite of Disney-like cheerfulness. America's finest gift to the arts is the blues, doleful music drawn from the sad lives of African-American folk musicians in the 19th century. The blues are beautiful, even inspiring. But Lord knows they're not cheerful. And neither are some psalms, come to think of it

And then this: "When I see someone sad, I always think, she is refusing something to Jesus."

I've just known too much depression to buy that one. It's something you might whisper in your own ear; but telling someone else that his sorrow comes from lack of faith can be deadly when persistent darkness isn't just inflamed moodiness. Believe me. "Your problem, kid, is you're just not right with God." While that idea may not be all wrong, as therapy it can kill.

Mother Teresa may well have believed what she says about cheerfulness. She may have used that sentiment to scold herself--that's understandable. But if her own confessions are true, if her diaries and letters reveal someone who fought off the darkness--and they do!--then she honestly couldn't have believed it herself. She wasn't always cheerful because she wasn't always something beautiful for Jesus. Even Mother Teresa wasn't perfect, wasn't ever cheerful. And she knew it. And she tells us as much.

"Therefore, my dear friends," says the letter to the Philippians, "as you have always obeyed--not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence--continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling."

"With fear and trembling." Those are tougher words.

Mother Teresa knew that line too--she had to. Maybe that's why she insists on what she does about cheerfulness. It's a reminder to seek after God, a to nudge her doubtful self toward holiness

I'm thinking that we're all on that same road--often full of fear and trembling, but sometimes adorned with smiley faces too.

She's not all right, but she's not totally wrong either.

It's good to know I'm not alone.

Newt--WWJD?

2012-01-04T06:03:00.000-06:00

It's all splendid theater, isn't it? Just what exactly is the biggest story last night here in Iowa?--the fact that Romney, who's about to be blessed by McCain's endorsement, still can't pack away a victory? Or is it Santorum's extraordinary rocket-blast to front-runner? How about this?--the fizzle of Michelle, who wooed Iowans in the Straw Poll but got left out in the barn in the caucuses? Or maybe it's the impending end of another swaggering Texan, who is going south, he says, instead of east, to assess how to remove his tail from between his legs.

Or is it Dr. Paul's continuing success, even though every last pol in the system knows the old guy is not going to get anywhere near the White House? Maybe it's this: Iowa's vaunted Christian right flexed its muscle last night big-time and gave Santorum a blessing--or is it a curse? After all, they also so blessed Huckabee and Pat Robertson, whose fortunes fizzled.

There's something almost Chaucer-like about the whole Iowa pageant, such a range of wonderful characters. But my favorite story last night is Newt's. He peaks about a month or so too early, then gets machine-gunned by Romney's billionaire buddies for a personal and professional past that makes just about everybody, even his supporters, wince. I mean, Mitt didn't have to look far for ammunition. Still, bloody and beaten, Newt lashes out at Romney last night and then as much as endorses Santorum, at least recommends him for sainthood.

Sarah Palin was the original Mama Grizzily, but hell hath no fury like a wounded Newt. He's the enraged mother bear right now. Bloodied as he is, he makes Palin look like a possum. If I were Mitt, I'd line up an assassin before the next debate or Newt will make him sound, standing up there before the whole world, like yet another stuttering Texan. This whole thing has become something epic out of the World Wrestling Federation. Really.

Mitt, at best, is a handgun. Newt's a howitzer, and what's worse, he doesn't care. He knows his campaign is through. It seems from the speech he gave last night that the only thing that he cares about now is settling the score, as if he were Bugsy Moran. I'd be scared to death if I was Mitt Romney.

A month ago, the new Newt said he wouldn't go negative. The new Newt, the forgiven Newt, the new Roman Catholic stayed saintly, out of the fray; but the Mormon squashed him like a bug--that's the way he sees it now. So much for forgiveness. So much for peace-making. In Iowa he was Neville Chamberlain, offering emptiness. He was unmanned.

And now I can't help but ask this question: what should this newly-minted Christian do, a man who says he's put his evil past behind him? Should he come out guns blazing as if the next debate were at OK Corral? Or should he wave a palm branch, take the high moral road, and turn the other cheek? WWJD?

Good, good question.

Here's what I think. Come out firing. The biggest evil of all, or so it seems to me, is the Supreme Court's notion that when it comes to political elections liberty trumps justice. When they ruled in favor of faceless, nameless super-pacs, they created what happened this year in Iowa, when millionaires and billionaires stunk up Gingrich by vomiting negative ads all over the Hawkeye State.

To me it's interesting and fitting that the Republicans are the first to experience the injustice of way, way too much money in politics. They were happy when the Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, that people like the Koch brothers could put up duck blinds and fire their millions at whoever they pleased because, after all, freedom is the American way.

If Newt picks up a palm branch or puts a rose in the muzzle of that flintlock--if he turns the other cheek and blesses those who curse him, he'd be Christ-like. On the other hand, it's another Jesus altogether who upset the tables of those temple money-changers, another Jesus who went on a rampage where he found desecration. WWJD?

Stay-tuned. It's been anything but the gospel so far, so all bets are off. All we know is it will be human and not divine.

Swan Songs XXV--What I didn't know

2012-01-03T06:35:00.001-06:00

The man told me a story I never knew a thing about. He said he lost his first wife just a short time after their baby was born, their first. He said that was years and years ago already, this man I was talking to, a man probably in his early 80s. We were at a funeral--I hadn't seen this guy for something close to a half-century, and I had no idea he could be in any way related to the deceased.

He said he was a graduate student at the time it happened, staying in an apartment near the university, a couple hours or so away from home. His wife was alone back in their duplex, when she suffered had a medical problem no one could have predicted, some kind of blockage in the heart's main artery, a blockage that simply killed her, right then and there, took her away from him and the new baby and the life that no one guessed she was anywhere close to leaving behind. He wasn't much more than a kid, this old man I once knew. The woman he'd married wasn't any older, a young mom, first child.

We were standing not all that far from an open casket where lay the body of man that was, once upon a time, his brother-in-law. There we stood, both of us just beyond the intimacy of the close family. Her death--his first wife's death--a half century old.

I'm not sure he knew me or even knew of me, although he acted like he did when I introduced myself. I wondered if he remembered me from the baseball team he coached forever ago, the freshman kid from Wisconsin, the tough kid maybe. Who knows what he thought or whether or not he even remembered me at all?

So he told me he was a couple of hours away from her when it happened, this altogether horrible and surprising death. Surprising isn't a weighty enough word. If that new baby smiled early--that would have been surprising. The baby's mother--his young, young wife--just falling over dead?--there's no word jagged enough to describe what it must have been like to go through what he did. His wife, the mother of their new, first child. Dead.

"How did you find out?" I asked him.

He didn't look at me when he talked. He looked away. There were lots of people around.

He said Rev. Koops told him, said it as if I must have known this Rev. Koops. He said Rev. Koops was the campus pastor at the university. Someone from home had called the preacher, whose job it became to bring the news. News?--I don't know that there are any words at all to tell the story well.

He was in the university library, studying, he told me. This Rev. Koops had to hunt him down in the library. Middle of the day.

Your wife is dead.

I can't imagine it.

People were milling around us when he was telling me the story, but it wasn't hard to get from him, although I don't think he had been planning on telling anyone yesterday at his former brother-in-law's funeral. But once that story started coming, it didn't stop. It didn't pour out exactly, but neither did it stop--in part, I suppose, because I wouldn't let it. I had no idea.

"So he's the one who told you?" I asked him. "That must have been horrible."

He nodded. Didn't comment. Just nodded. And then, finally, him staring off into the distance, this: "You know that wasn't the best time of my life." No smile. That's exactly what he said.

There we stood at a funeral. It was time for us to go in, to sit in the sanctuary.

Sometimes I think I'm really blessed, somehow privileged to hear stories. Take that one, for instance. It's haunted me since yesterday because somehow I can see it so clearly--this tall kid, a young teacher going after his masters in a summer session that takes him away a couple days a week from his young wife and their new baby. There he sits in the library, totally dedicated to his work because, after all, it's a sacrifice on everyone's part for him to go to school and to be away. He's working hard, I'm sure.

He looks up from the carrel and sees Rev. Koops. He sees this warm, loving pastor friend come walking over, middle of the day, and then he notices the look in the man's eyes is like nothing he's ever, ever seen before.

I can see the story, but I can't imagine the conversation. Maybe the only way to tell the story is to acknowledge its sheer horror by irony, by comforting understatement--"that wasn't the best day of my life," he told me. No smile.

The man was my baseball coach years ago, and we thought him bookish. We thought him gimmicky. We thought him, in fact, distracted. We used to mock him behind his back, for instance, when he brought out four baseballs splashed with four different colors, and instead of our swinging at 'em in batting practice, we had to yell out what color they were to teach us to watch the ball or something. Somewhere he must have read it was a good skill exercise. We thought it was flat-out dumb.

We thought his heart wasn't in it really. Once in a cold spring day at some double-header in Nebraska, he took his cook stove along, and we thought it hilarious that he spent more time keeping that thing lit for his blessed coffee than he did watching the game. We giggled. He was nice guy, but we giggled. But maybe it was just me, the cocky freshman. I don't think he liked me. He probably had good reason.

I wonder if I would have known that story back then--if I'd have known what he went through, I wonder if I would have been a better person around him. If he'd have told us somehow how that campus pastor came to him in the library that day so blindly, out of the cold, put his hand on his shoulder, and told him the woman he loved was dead--I wonder if I wouldn't have mocked him, as many of us did. I wonder if the story would have changed me.

I don't know. But today, almost fifty years later, I honestly wish I'd have known.

He's a tall man. We stood there together in the narthex of the church, and I had to look up at him--maybe 6'6" or so, a big man. Yesterday, in his eighties, stooped, silver-haired, he only got bigger in my eyes.

I wish I'd have known all of that in 1966 when I was a kid, 45 years ago. I wish I'd have known.

Morning Thanks--Cough medicine

2012-01-02T06:08:00.000-06:00

I'm neither a preacher or a student of scripture, but I'll hazard an assertion here that's likely to sell: if you want an elegant summary of the entire Bible, you can't find a much better place than the first ten verses of Ephesians 2. Look it up yourself. It's all grace, every bit of it.

Yesterday, in a marvelous meditation on the passage--I'd even say awesome, if the word hadn't lost its glory--our pastor opened up that chunk of eternal truth with his own earthly brand of quiet grace and power, explained how the root word of handiwork or workmanship, in verse 10, is, in the Greek, a word that also serves as ancestor to our word poem, a wonderful idea--and new to me--that suggests that we are His poems. Let me say that again--that we are God's poems, all of us. That makes us somewhat memorable, in fact, like good poetry--and maybe even sometimes puzzling and, at times, frustrating too, if not downright inaccessible. We're songs, each of us. We're made for beauty and truth. Or how about this?--if poems are really little more than fancy mnemonic devices, then we're designed, right from the factory, to be remembered. We're made not to be forgotten. Isn't that beautiful?

You could unpack that wonderful idea for hours and hours and never exhaust the possibilities. We're poems. His. Amazing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne had this dark theory about laughter. He thought there was nothing more chilling than inappropriate hilarity, and he insisted on showing off that theory in lots of his stories and novels. When things get tense, a laugh--some jittery, high-pitched thing out of Edgar Allen Poe--can be simply horrible, demonic even. It happens all the time in Hawthorne's fiction, as in "Ethan Brand," when Bartram the lime-burner stands on the hill and bellers out a hideous laugh sharp enough to cut throats.

He--that is, Hawthorne--even talks about it in that story:

Laughter, when out of place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered state of feeling, maybe be the most terrible modulation of the human voice. The laughter of one asleep, even if it be a little child,--the madman's laugh,--the wild, screaming laugh of a born idiot,--are sounds that we sometimes tremble to hear, and would always willing forget.

I couldn't help thinking of Hawthorne yesterday in church, because in the middle of what was one of the finest sermons I'd ever heard, there came, intermittently, the rasping cough of an elderly woman sitting in the front of the church. It was a terrible cough, just awful, and, if I dare say so, as seemingly out of place amid all that beauty as one of those cutting laughs that Hawthorne uses frequently to punctuate his tales. They were, in a way, one in the same.

I once sat at the bedside of a man I deeply respected, even loved, who coughed just so unforgettably. I'd come up to visit him that afternoon with a good friend of both of ours, who proceeded to tell me, when we left, that our friend's disturbing cough was what people call "the death rattle." And then he told me that it was a clear signal that our friend didn't have long to stay on this earth.

I'd never heard of a "death rattle," but I swear I heard it yesterday in church again, several times, in another rasping cough that, like Hawthorne's laughs, seemed wretchedly mistimed because horribly disturbing.

I didn't want to hear a death rattle yesterday in church; and I hope that the sweet elderly woman isn't near the grave. But she was powerless to stop, so that cough attacked the soaring sermon like an ice pick and wouldn't let me soar with the gorgeous ideas. It kept me here, in this vale of tears.

But it taught me once again--I'm an awful, slow learner--that grace is ever bigger than our finest human perceptions of it. I was enthralled by the company of thousand walking, talking poems. I was amazed by grace, thrilled to the soul by the joy it simply gives away. And a half-dozen times, at least, I kept being brought back down to earth by a death rattle that felt like a stiletto.

Faith never does release us totally from our mortal coils, I guess, much as we'd like it to. We are his creations, body and soul, in life and in death.

And while I'd be pushing it a long, long ways to say that even that death rattle in the middle of a sermon about God's own eternal love was beautiful--it wasn't!--that fearful, hacking cough is also an unmistakable part of the human pageant. It's part of the sin that's covered, fully, by his love, by his own broken body and shed blood.

The death rattle is part of the story too, part of the unshakable malady for which grace alone is the blessed, awesome cure.

All of that is my morning's thanks.

Sunday Morning Meds--Answer me!

2012-01-01T06:26:00.000-06:00

“Hear me when I call” Psalm 4:1

The impatience of the command form in the English language(we might even say its “nerve”) is on display in the very form of thesentence. When we tell others what todo, we deliberately address them last, if at all; subject takes second place toverb, as in “brush your teeth.” Immediate action is demanded.

“Shut the door,” cares nothing for feelings, simply insistson action. Add a name and things softena bit, but not much: “Shut the door,Alphonse.” In fact, if we attempt totake the edge off a command and add something endearing, we come up with truephoniness: “shut the door, sweetheart.”

The command form happens so often in the Psalms that I thinkwe simply become accustomed to hearing it and forget its lousy manners. My goodness, the Psalmist is talking to theLord God Almighty here, not some forgetful kid; yet, he’s ordering him aroundas if he were a valet. “Hear my cry, OLord,” says the King James. The NIV has“Answer me when I call to you,” which seems, if you ask me, to bring petulanceto another level all together.

If the truth be known, most parents scold their children forusing the command form too easily. “Giveme the toys,” one kid screams, and loving parents do what they can to curb aninsolent tongue.

“Insolent,” “impatient,” “petulant”—I’ve used someunpleasant words here so far, but it seems to me that they all fit. The arrogance—we can call it that, I think—ofthe writer is unmistakable. Simplystated, he’s telling the Lord what to do. “Answer me” doesn’t make thespeaker sound like a supplicant.

Of course, grammar be hanged when you’re calling 911. And that’s what appears to be going on here,and elsewhere in the psalms. The writerhas arrived at his wit’s end. He can’tcope. He doesn’t have a clue. He’s wasted the last of his best ideas, andthere’s nowhere else to turn. Frantic,he forgets his manners and bellers. Howelse do we explain God’s tolerating this rhetorical blast? Poor guy doesn’t know what the heck to do!

You wonder sometimes whether God Almighty doesn’t actuallyappreciate being the last port in the storm. Most of us wouldn’t because most of our egos aren’t all that thrilled being the end of the line. But Godseems to like it. Apparently, hisfeelings aren’t hurt one bit.

I think he likes us emptied. I think he likes us bereft of our own wiles. I think he likes us without resources,nowhere to go, on our knees.

And I don’t know if that’s so much a characteristic of ourCreator and Sustainer, as it is simply the story of our lives. We need foxholes to realize there is nothingwe can do. We all need to hitbottom. At some time or another, we all cowerin a corner, nowhere to turn.

The Psalms are songs of praise to the Lord, but they emergefrom what’s human in all of us. Theypraise His holy name, but I’m really thankful that they also serve to help usunderstand the mysteries—and even the darkness—of our own lives.

Swan Song XXIV--St. John's

2011-12-30T06:25:00.002-06:00

If you're on the road from Milwaukee to Madison, you can't miss it. These days, it's almost suburbia. The last exit before Delafield holds a four-corner-wide shopping center, the last one you'll hit, so if you need a Wal-Mart, the next one on I-94 will likely be in Madison.

Truth be known, I've never stepped a foot in Delafield, Wisconsin--Delavan, often enough, even gave a speech there once upon a time, wrote a story about a wonderful, and much beloved old woman. But I've never been in Delafield, even though those looming, green highway signs beckon, as they always have.

Years ago, on my way to Monroe, Wisconsin, where I took my first teaching job, I used to pass the town quite often in a kind of awe, really. These days, forty years later, I don't see those signs so often anymore; but I did on Wednesday, when we came back from my eastern Wisconsin homeland. "Delafield"--those signs say, and no matter how long I live I'll think of what never happened there.

I think I would have been a bad fit at St. Johns Military Academy. I'd just graduated from college, jobless, had just returned from a anti-war march on Washington, and had, not long before, failed my draft physical. I had no experience with a military school. Even though my father spent four years jockeying destroyers around the South Pacific during World War II, he never brayed much about the military, never went to Legion meetings, or walked in Veteran's Day parades. Military service was no rite of passage in our family, and I honestly couldn't imagine what life at a military school would be like.

But once I'd flunked that draft physical, I had no job prospects. None. My recommendations as a student weren't that hot, I knew--by community standards, I wasn't a poster boy for the Christian faith. Besides, I wasn't sure I wanted to hang around "my people" any longer. I'd had more than enough of their rigid self-righteousness and putrid political conservatism. I was brash and cocky. I wanted to stamp the dust off my feet and trash the wooden shoes forever.

So I read the Milwaukee Journal's want-ads every Sunday, looking for teaching jobs, and I spotted an opening for an English teacher at St. John's Military Academy, Delafield, WI. I applied, as I did at two other schools, one somewhere up north--I don't remember the town anymore--and the other way down on the state line, southwest Wisconsin, South Wayne, Black Hawk High School. It was already July, 1970.

I wasn't desperate, but after two or three weeks of laying sod on the steep open soil of the exit ramps of the new highway--I-43--I knew I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. It was, without question, the worst work of my entire life. I read the want ads religiously.

I swear I remember the letter. I may even have it yet. On fancy school stationary, they said no, sweetly. They'd looked through their applications and decided on some other schmo. Rejection is rejection, and I can't say theirs didn't hurt. But I did wonder, right then, smack in middle of the horrors of the Vietnam War, whether I was cut out to teach in a military academy.

That question will never be answered, even though it's 40-years old. But it steps front and center into my consciousness whenever I-94 takes me past Delafield, Wisconsin, as it did Wednesday.

"God has a plan for your life" is the kind of spiritual cliche that has all the heft of Hallmark card, or so it seems to me. Yet, every time I pass that town, I wonder what I would have become had some administrator not tossed my letter of application on the pile of losers. If they'd said yes, I would have taken the job. I didn't have one, after all. I would have gone. I would have become a teacher at St. John's Military Academy.

And then what? My whole world would have changed. I would have had different friends, met different kids, found different joys. I would have bellied up to a whole set of different conflicts. I wouldn't be who I am. Somebody on that campus once dumped my application letter and that simple act has made all the difference. I wonder who he was. He's likely dead.

There are ways to chart all of this out. One is to say, simply, God didn't want me there. That seems somehow simplistic and even wearying. When Col. Gordon or Lieut. Ralph or Sgt. Mike or whoever reviewed those applications, was God almighty right there over his shoulder, directing his hand toward some other flimsy sheet listing some other applicant's many wholesome features? Did God tell some butch-cut administrator to file that one from Oostburg in the also-rans?

I don't know. I'm a Calvinist. To most who recognize the word, the designation means I believe in something called "predestination." It's an odd word and a weird doctrine really, something I remember fighting about in catechism, as a matter of fact, because it seemed so preposterous in such a willy-nilly world.

I still I buy it, I guess, but only in a rearview mirror. Predestination is near madness, or so it seems, unless you're looking behind you. Only then does it make sense. How did C. S. Lewis put it?--I was dragged, kicking and screaming, before the throne. That's what happened. When I look back, that's what I see. Something like that.

God has a plan for my life all right, but just exactly how that plan unfolds from day to day isn't something I'm privy to until day-to-day is well behind me. Then, when I'm on I-94 and I pass signs for Delafield, Wisconsin--then, and only then does it make any sense at all that some guy in a uniform tossed that application from the kid with two As in his last name. And what on earth was the weird name of the college he attended again? Dirt?

I don't know where God was that night, whether he was on campus at St. John's or south and west in South Wayne, but I know what's back there in my life and what isn't. Even yet, I'm a traveler on a road map that's forever taken me past Delafield, Wisconsin--but I've never been there.

Never. Not once.

*Two roads diverged in a Wisconsin woods. . .

And I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere forty years down the pike:

because somehow I--I got myself directed south
to the swiss cheese capital of Badgerland,

And somehow, willy-nilly as it seems--

that has made all the difference.

Maybe. Of course, I'm still on the road.

__________________________________

*Heartfelt apologies to Robert Frost.

Wounded Knee

2011-12-28T21:57:00.002-06:00

It was Ian Frazier’s Great Plains that taught me something about the Ghost Dance. I’d never heard of it before; but then, most white Americans haven’t. The stories surrounding slavery are well-known to most, but the stories of Native America somehow escapes most palefaces like me. In that book, Frazier tells great stories of the Plains Indians, who were, by and large, a fierce bunch, maybe the quintessential Native American—feathered headdress, breechcloth, body paint, spear and shield and bow and arrow, all of that regalia on a chiseled male mounted on a paint pony.

Frazier nearly deifies Crazy Horse, as many do. Crazy Horse, a Lakota hero at Little Big Horn, was the battle leader who simply would not bow to the flood of white folks who, time after time, found all kinds of crooked ways to put the Lakota (Sioux) people off traditional lands. In The Great Plains, Frazier creates a miscellany of 19^th century Native American life, including a description of what he calls the first truly American religion, the Ghost Dance.

The sources of this strange, Indian Great Awakening are multiple—a little Protestantism, a little Mormonism, a little Catholicism, all grafted to spiritual roots that are soundly Native American in character.

The Ghost Dance swept most tribes in the American west. It was worship really, a ritual dance created to summon the old world back, the ancestors and the buffalo and the traditional way of life that had just about completely disappeared by 1890. It was, I think, a vision of heaven to a starving, beaten people, robbed of heritage. The Ghost Dance gave them a vision of what they wanted so badly to see, instead of the annihilation that was actually there.

Out here—or a couple hours west—the Lakota variation on the Ghost Dance included the mistaken belief that wearing a ghost shirt or dress meant the wearer could not be harmed by white man’s bullets. And that belief, Ian Frazier claims, scared white people badly and played a significant role in what happened 121 years ago today on a broad and open expanse of indistinguishable prairie along a creek whose name is Wounded Knee. You might say, that's how I came to Wounded Knee.

What started in 1862 with the Dakota War in Minnesota ended on December 29, 1890, when the largest military encampment in America since the Civil War got into a fight with 50 or so of Big Foot's Lakota braves. Big Foot himself was suffering horribly with pneumonia after leading his people on an unthinkably long walk from the very top of what is now South Dakota, to the bottom—and in late December, remember.

What exactly happened to begin what became a massacre is disputed today, but the outcome is not. There were sparks of anger aplenty, and one of them ignited a conflagration. The Seventh Calvary (itself decimated at Little Big Horn and, some say, just aching for a fight) and others in that huge cavalry encampment simply gunned down Big Foot’s band—men, women, and children—often in cold blood.

No one really knows how many Lakota died. Estimates range as high as 300. But what happened at Wounded Knee ended the Great Sioux Wars. To say what happened out there in the middle of winter is a blot on American history is obscene understatement. What happened there was evil, as all massacres are.

One of the dreams I’ve had for years is some kind of worship service on December 28 or 29, dates that mark two horrific massacres—King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents after Jesus’s birth, and the Wounded Knee Massacre. Those two events are not analogous, but in both cases those who wielded great power simply butchered innocent human beings

Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, is in pure fly-over country. It’s well off the beaten path, and a long ways from most anything that would attract a tourist. If you want to go there, you have to want to go there.

And really, who would?--what white guy, at least? It's a horrible story.

Maybe that’s why what happened there 121 years ago today is so invisible to millions of white Americans. Maybe so.

And maybe not. Maybe whites like me would rather not know, not remember. Maybe we prefer politicians who say, unequivocally, they’ll never, ever apologize for America.

Maybe so.

Six or seven hours west of here, this morning, on December 29, 1890, 300 or more Lakota people were massacred. That’s what happened.

But I think we can say this too: that right there, along a creek called Wounded Knee, 121 years ago, we were all there, every last one of us.

Morning Thanks--Christmas

2011-12-26T06:32:00.000-06:00

And suddenly, with a few strokes of the second hand, the colored lights look as kitschy as they do absurd, the music--Nat King Cole's "Chestnuts roasting" for the 400th time--is a bad joke repeated endlessly. The day after Christmas means a titanic hangover, especially when you realize that all we have to look forward to now, mid-winter, is called January. On December 26, the magic lifts, and what's left is a return line.

For most of us at least, that dull pain has nothing to do with faith. No follower of Jesus I know is any less of a believer this morning; but just about all of us above the age of, say, nine, can't help but fall from faith this morning in the "holiday season" that surrounds it, in Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and the clap-trap commercialism the Pope so heartily decried. I admit it--yesterday, to me at least, he sounded rather unadoringly like the Grinch, Scrooge in an odd pointed hat and a German accent. This morning, surrounded as we are by crumpled wrapping paper, his words sound a bit more to the point.

"Today Christmas has become a commercial celebration," he said at Christmas Eve mass at the Vatican, "whose bright lights hide the mystery of God's humility, which in turn calls us to humility and simplicity."

Maybe I got duped again.

This year, at our house, Pandora created a classic Christmas channel that piped perfectly tuned music all through the house, music that created a sweet backdrop for the whole season. Our Christmas Eve worship seemed grandly joyous, the final candle-lit "Silent Night," circled up as we were around the sanctuary, almost enough to make us think we were somewhere on the Judean hills and not in pork country. This year, like Keillor's Minnesota Lutherans, my wife and I dared to tell each that, yeah, we had a pretty good Christmas, if we had to say so ourselves.

But this morning, the lurching post-Christmas hangover has returned, and I can't help wonder how I got swept away by the excess--again. But I did. This morning, it's not hard to see how it is that suicides rise, that depression deepens, that some people drink way too much during the holidays. Christmas--not Jesus's birth, but the Christmas holiday as advertised--can never quite live up to its own billing.

Besides, here's the headline: in Nigeria, 39 dead and dozens wounded when some hellish Islamic radical group laid waste to two Christian churches. Nothing's changed while we were charmed.

But the facts remain: He was born in a barn not a palace, laid in a manger so that, as our preacher reminded us, even a gang of smelly shepherds could walk right in and inch up close. The imperial Lord had no trumpet fanfare, no twenty-gun salute--the only ballyhoo was some barnyard braying.

Them's the facts, and while I may well need to recite them to myself time and time again this morning, they're enough to make me thankful, this morning, once again, for the moment in time when the image of a child laid lovingly on a rough straw bed seems enough to enthrall--for better or for worse--so many millions of this world's inhabitants.

This morning, sin still grows stubbornly in the hearts of men and women, not to mention my own; but then, a baby came once upon a time, and because he did grace still abounds. It still abounds.

This morning, my morning thanks are for what else?--Christmas.

Christmas Morning Med--Two ways

2011-12-25T04:00:00.000-06:00

“For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous,

but the way of the wickedshall perish.” Psalm 1:8

I suppose there are umpteen other references throughout theBible to the Lord knowing saints and sinners personally, but I can’t help butbe struck by the repetition and thus the emphasis given here, at the very endof the first Psalm, to the idea of there being two separate “ways” or culturesof sin and righteousness. Theimplication seems clear enough: if it’sblessedness you’re after, avoid “the way” of the sinner for that “way” willperish. It’s not sinners themselves whoare earmarked for destruction in Psalm 1, it’s their way of doing things.

Mortal flesh demonizes as if by instinct—mine too. We create enemies to build ourselves up anddiminish those who hold contrary views. If we absolutely loved President George W. Bush, we likely hatePresident Obama. If we like the Yankees,we hate the Red Sox. Out here where I live, people who love a John Deere oftenhate a Farmall. It’s even that way withsnowmobiles, I hear—and motorcycles, and, to be sure, muscle-boundpickups. Maybe you’ve seen thoseindecorous window decals of little kids peeing on Ford trademarks.

Of course, the shepherd/king is not talking about Pepsi/Cokein the opening song of the Psalter. He’stalking about “the wicked,” not somebody wearing the wrong brand of designerjeans. But just exactly who those peopleare—the wicked—isn’t always so easy to ascertain, at least for me. And, of course, what’s of greatest moment inthe verse six is not that we carry some kind of pocket guide to who’s wickedand who’s not, but simply that God does because he knows. The psalm doesn’t say we do.

But what can we read on our own here? There is, after all, a really deep divide inthe psalm. People sure enough wear whitehats and black hats in this poem, I’ll tell you. But it’s not “the wicked” themselves that arefingered in this verse; it’s their “way.” “The way” of the wicked will perish.

I may be wrong, but that line pushes me back to thecharacterization we’ve seen blow away earlier: “the wicked are like chaff.” Heretoday, gone tomorrow. What characterizestheir “way of life,” their culture, is its shallowness, its transience, its veneer,the world not unlike Andy Warhol once promised, where everyone gets his or herfifteen minutes of fame. Like chaff,that way of life blows away and will perish—that’s the heartfelt promise, or soit seems to me, of this verse. Livingfor the moment may well be exciting, but in the long run—and that’s what we’retalking about here—it’s not going bring the blessedness of a soul’s prosperity.

As I’ve said before, there is likely other biblical passageswhich threaten the wicked with eons of weeping and gnashing teeth, but Psalm 1seems more interested in saving than damning, in laying out a view of what itmeans to be blessed and how all of us might go about understanding the“way” to become a recipient of that joy.

Like a tree planted. That’s the story, or so it seems to me. See it? That’s the picture inPsalm 1. Blessedness means being rooted,deeply, in something life-giving. Avoidwhat blows away, no matter how promising. All of that will perish. Takedelight in God’s way, which is, of course, today especially, the way of amanger.

A Suitable Church (part III)

2011-12-24T04:00:00.000-06:00

When she awoke, she heard thekids stirring at the tree, opening presents, arguing, in fact. She brushed back her hair, pulled on herhousecoat and slippers, and opened the door. It wasn’t quite fully morning, but the kids had all the wrappings off ofdozens of presents. Too many. It wasn’t pleasant.

She walked into the spaciousliving room, the blinds over all those windows to the east still closed.

“What’s the deal?” she said.

Tosha said Edmund had takenher Beanie Baby and hid it somewhere and she was mad and she was going to getback at him somehow because it just wasn’t fair and he was a jerk too and healways was. It was Christmas morning. Edmund looked at his sister as if she were adishrag.

She had enough. “Maybe we ought to go to church,” she toldthem, out of nowhere at all. “You andme–maybe the three of us should go to church together this morning.”

“Why?” Tosha said.

“Because it’s Christmas,” shetold her. “Because it’s Christmas andwe’re going to celebrate the birth of our Savior.”

“I’m not going,” Edmundsaid. “I got these great toys.”

“You’ve got a great Savior,”she told her grandson.

His eyes, blank as clay, hurther more than a fist because she knew she was speaking a language he didn’tbegin to understand. Their own grandsonlooked at her as if Jesus were a nobody. That Jack didn’t see it himself was a blessing.

Edmund shoved his glasses upon his nose. “Some other time, allright?” he said. “Look at this, Grandma–NimbusRacer.” He held up a electronicgame.

She wanted to pray, rightthere in front of them, but right then, even though the condo was top floor,she was sure there was nothing but thick cement between her and the Lord. The children didn’t know a thing. They hadn’t found anything, allright–they hadn’t even looked.

“I think we ought to go,” shesaid.

“It’s Christmas,” Edmundchirped. “Why do we got to go tochurch?”

Her insides felt like thatscreen saver, turning inside and out again and again, and she realized justthen that if she were to open her mouth, there would be no words, onlytears–tears that would confuse them. Soshe walked to the kitchen, fiddled with the coffee maker, got it going, thenwent to the west windows.

It was Christmas morning, shereminded herself, and she couldn’t help herself but she wished just then thatshe were with Jack and the Lord. Therewas too much for her to do here, too much hard work and too much sadness, andshe couldn’t do it alone.

She took hold of the stringsof the blinds and opened them with a few rapid jerks. Sunlight, Christmas morning sunlight, spilledin like a waterfall, dousing the lights on the tree. Deliberately, she looked away from Christmasin the condo and over the street beneath them, the past the trees, then acrossthe glaze of water west; and when she raised her eyes to the mountains, in aflash, in a moment, the whole fancy condo seemed to disappear–the Christmastree behind her, the kitchen, the brewing coffee, everything behind her seemedto vanish, the children’s voices dimmed, her own sharp fears muted in the sheermajesty of what she’d suddenly, almost magically, become witness to; becauseeven though the neighborhood beneath the condo was in shadows, the sun, comingup far behind them, stretched its brilliant glory through the crystal morningair all the way across the Sound to hold those monstrous snow-capped Olympicsin its own astonishing splendor. Therethey stood–those glorifying mountains–as if forever. There they stood like might and power. There they stood, a landscape divinelypainted across the darkened world, beaming holiness and majesty in thecrystalline dawn of a perfect Christmas morning.

“Oh, my God,” she said,because what she saw was far more than mountain beauty. He was here, all right, she toldherself. He’s here sure enough.

“What, Grandma?” Tosha said,coming up behind her. “What do you see?”

She wrapped her arm aroundher granddaughter.

“Who’s out there?” Toshasaid, on tiptoes.

What could she say? “Jesus,” her grandma told her. “He’s always there.”

“Where?” Tosha asked.

She picked up hergranddaughter. “Look at thosemountains,” she said. “Just look atthem.”

Tosha leaned her face closerto the window. “Is he a ghost?” shesaid.

“No,” she told her, “he’salive.”

“I don’t see him,” shesaid. “I see the mountains and I see theSound, and there’s a boat out there, but where is Jesus?” She looked at her grandmother almostpainfully. “Grandma, I want to seeJesus.”

She already had her granddaughterin her arms, so the hug she gave her wasn’t difficult or awkward. “Amen,” she said, biting her lip, because aprayer she’d never finished were coming to a close maybe, even if it were justfor a moment.

“Let’s just you and me go,Tosha, honey,” Jan said. “This time,this morning, just let’s you and me go. I want you to see him too.”

__________________________________

Concluding segment from an old J. C. Schaap Christmas story.

A Suitable Church (part II)

2011-12-23T06:12:00.000-06:00

And now Jan couldn’t sleep.She lay in a roll-out bed in her daughter’s office, the light from some fancyscreen-saver bouncing off the walls because Ellen didn’t have the grace to shutthe stupid computer off. That machine ismore important than I am, she told herself when she tried keep out theglimmers. But she knew Jack would havebeen proud of her. In all those years oftheir daughter’s unfaithfulness to God and the church, Jan had been the one whoconstantly begged him to give Ellen space. But Jack was gone now. Just herbringing it up–going to church–was something he’d have been proud of.

But the screen kept shiftingimages like something that wouldn’t die. She hated it, the lit screen that devoured everything good and right inthe lives of her own children. The roomwas dark, the blinds pulled, and that fiend machine kept turning multi-colored3-D shapes inside out in some never-ending pattern that seemed to her demonic. The clock said almost three o’clock whenfinally she got up, hunted for the plug, and then jerked it. Didn’t hesitate a minute. Just jerked it. Tomorrow she’d plead ignorance, since thatwas what they thought of her anyway. Jack would have loved it.

The death of the computerdidn’t help. Ellen would be more upset,she told herself. Pushing church on themwas one thing, but killing computers was a whole new level of sin. She’d be lucky if they didn’t stick her backon the jet. At least it was dark in theroom, she thought. At least the wallsdidn’t jump. Fanciest condo she’d everseen in her life, too. All sorts ofpottery things in shapes she didn’t begin to understand.

It was August when she andJack had prayed, as they did every night at supper–“bless Ellen and Frank and thekids” and usually something else about helping them find the way because, afterall they just hadn’t found anything, had they? It was August, and hot, and Jack had insistedon digging up the concrete around the pole he’d put in so their son Tony could shootbaskets when he was a boy, years ago. Itwas too hot, and it was too much work, but Jack loved sweat, considered himselfmore of a man if he could soak a t-shirt. They’d prayed for Ellen and Frank after supper, then he’d gone at itagain out back, where she saw him an hour later, on his side, not moving. Their last prayer together, like so manybefore, had been about Frank and Ellen, had featured them, in fact. It was as if they’d never stopped praying.

“Lord,” she said, her neckstrained from such a huge pillow beneath her head, “Lord, help me findsomething for them.” That seemed aboutright. “Lord,” she said, but she didn’tknow how to put it better. “Lord,” shesaid once again, “crack their skulls, okay?–I don’t mean it really, but stopthem in their tracks. Sink the boatmaybe–sink Microsoft, okay? Becausethere’s nothing here, I’m afraid. There’s just nothing here. Something’s got to break–I love them too much, and I love mygrandchildren.” In the middle of thatprayer, she imagined those kids in a darling Christmas Eve pageant, two sweetkids saying things like “Mary pondered all these things in her heart,” Toshawith a little skirt, Edmund in a sweater over a white shirt or something. There were churches all over Seattle–hundredsof them just waiting for families just like theirs. Thousands of churches. “You can lead a horse to water, Lord, butshow them you’re here, okay? Make it sothat everywhere they look they see Jesus.”

She hadn’t even thought ofsaying that, but when the words ran back through her mind, she liked it–theidea of seeing Jesus in everything, as if the world was a canvas holding theoutline of Jesus’ face, as if the whole world was the Shroud of Turin. “Make them see you, Lord,” she said, “becausein this palace of theirs--” she said, “well, I just don’t know if you’re here.”

She didn’t end theprayer. The petitions just sort of fellinto silence, like they always did, to be picked up again next time–samechapter and verse. Pray without ceasingthe Bible said. That’s what it was allright, she thought.

_____________________________

Part II of a three-part story originally published in Reformed Worship, then again in Startling Joy, both times under different titles.

A Suitable Church (part 1)

2011-12-22T06:21:00.000-06:00

“We’ve not found anything, Mom.”

That’s what Ellen had told her, and how many times hadn’t her daughter said exactly that when she had asked the question? “We’ve not found anything, Mom”–a reply which Jan might have felt hopeful if the words weren’t twisted in the same way every time Ellen said them. “We’ve not found anything, Mom.” Emphasis on found, as if to say, “end of discussion.” That answer always came packaged in a deadbeat tone that carried too much finality, and Jan knew–aren’t mothers supposed to know?–that Ellen wasn’t really looking at all.

So she’d tried once again, Christmas Eve. “Have you found a suitable church?”

The two of them were about to go to bed. She’d come for the holidays. She’d not looked forward to a long plane ride to Seattle, alone, now that Jack had gone. She’d not looked forward to the trip itself, but she’d crossed the days off the calendar because she wanted so badly to see her kids, her smart kids who were making so much money in computers–Microsoft this, Microsoft that. She’d never been to their new place, a flashy condo with windows for walls. But she couldn’t help asking again, as if the topic had never come up before–“Have you found a suitable church?”

“We’ve not found anything, Mom,” her daughter said, in a computer voice. And then Ellen gave her a smile Jan knew was condescending because, after all, she was “Grandma” and the two of them, her son-in-law and daughter, were big shots–corporate jet, power lunch, lots of travel. Ellen and Frank were cutting edge, and her mother was an old oak buffet from Iowa.

She wanted to tell her daughter that the two of them weren’t going to find a church if they sat on their hams or slept in to catch up from work weeks that had them gone more than home, their kids hostage to some pre-school with a big cheery sign with multi-colored balloons.

“Have you been looking, Ellen?” she’d asked her daughter.

They were wrapping presents. It was Christmas Eve, mind you, and they were still wrapping the kids’ Christmas presents. Frank was in his office–they each had one in the big condo–and the kids were off to bed.

“We’ve looked,” she said, fitting a corner on a whole box of electronic games. “We keep telling ourselves we’ve got to slow down,” Ellen told her. “We got to smell the roses, you know? Last summer we were out on the boat only once.”

“Whose fault is that?” Jan said.

“Ours, of course,” Ellen told her.

“Are you still in love?” Jan said.

“Mom!” Ellen scolded.

“I’m serious,” she’d said, curling the ribbons across the top of Tosha’s new Barbie.

“Look, Mom–we’re all right, okay? I’ve never stopped thinking that there’s a God–I’m no infidel.” After that first insipid smile, Ellen never once looked up, which Jan had read as a good sign, since there was some guilt there anyway.

“Maybe we ought to go tomorrow,” she said.

Ellen dropped her shoulders.

“I’m just suggesting–“

“I’m 34 years old, Mom,” Ellen told her.

“I brought you into this world,” she said. “I know exactly how old you are.” She flitted with the ribbons, put the gift under the tree, and sat back on her haunches. “I’m serious. I saw this church–“

”You just got here–“

”I saw this church on the way in–not big either. ‘10:45' it said, ‘Christmas Service.’” She looked directly at her rich daughter. “You and me and the kids? Frank is your responsibility, not mine.”

Ellen rolled her eyes, threw her bangs back out of her face. She looked down at her fingers, pushed back her cuticles, breathed audibly. “Let me think about it, okay?” she said, grudgingly. “If that’s the way you have to have it, let me think about it.”
________________________
Part one of a three-part story for Christmas. This story first appeared in Reformed Worship many moons ago, and then again in Startling Joy: Stories for Christmas (Baker, 2003), both times by different titles.

Endorsement

2011-12-21T06:18:00.000-06:00

Case closed. I'm an Iowan, once upon a time a Republican, and I am at this moment endorsing a candidate. (Now please stop calling.) I'd be walking across the floor at the caucus meeting when Ron Paul's name is announced, were I attending, were I walking across the floor. I've decided that of the rat pack the Republicans are forwarding to me and other bib-overaled hayseeds, Ron Paul's the man.

According to Politico, lots of Iowans don't want him to win, even though thousands do. Those who do are True Believers in Paul's idyllic libertarian gospel. Those who aren't Paul-struck worry like mad lest he does win--and their worries are well-founded. He may. Should the Texas senator pull off an upset, it would be another argument in the arsenal of those who are sick and tired of the Tall Corn state. Our first-in-the-nation caucuses may well go south fast. And the reason is simple, Ron Paul has zero chance of beating Obama. It's that simple. We Iowans, Republicans especially, are adept at picking losers.

Of course, the rest of the field isn't doing much better, if you believe yesterday's new polling data. Obama's on the rise, while anything Republican is not--this despite the fact that those who believe "it's the economy, stupid" see the nation's woes weighing heavily against this incumbent president.

In Iowa, a vote for Ron Paul is a vote to send the whole magical mystery tour somewhere else next election cycle. Tons of Republican and Democratic operatives would just as soon put Shenandoah and Keokuk in their rear view mirrors anyway. If you're going to stage the nation's first primary or caucus anywhere, why not in Florida, for instance, under the palms, or Arizona, where populations are vastly more multi-chromatic and you don't have to slow down for tractors.

Paul wins here on January 3, and the Hawkeye record is as bad as its basketball team. Huckabee last time--remember him? Pat Robertson?????????? Shoot, Dole even beat Reagan before Reagan was granted sainthood. Iowa Republicans are not winners; they're true believers.

We grow more social conservatives than we do corn. Here, the religious right has immense clout, vastly more than they have anywhere in the nation, it seems. Shoot, Bob Vander Plaats has been on all the news shows this year, got courted more lavishly than the Pork Queen, all because what he directs is the state's religious right in a johnny-come-lately assembly whose name focuses in on their cute little deliberate punctuation error--FAMiLY LEADER.

Politico claims Vander Plaats called one of the candidates, Michelle Bachmann, last week--get this!--got on the phone and asked her to pull out of the race and support Rick Santorum because, after all, wouldn't it be neat if all the good Christian Iowans could support just one good Christian candidate? The leader of the FAMiLY LEADER has become such a powerful broker that he thinks he can call a candidate and, piously I'm sure, direct her toward the back door.

Bachmann said no, thank goodness.

So Vander Plaats endorsed Santorum, even though his FAMiLY LEADER couldn't nail down a single candidate. Undoubtedly, some of the righteous brass wanted Gingrich, whose personal record as a family leader isn't particularly impressive.

I like Ron Paul, not only because he's the only really believable candidate in the pack, but because, if he wins, maybe the whole shooting match will go elsewhere--all the robocalls, all the ad men, all the rental busses and cars. They all go south, and we're left up here in earmuffs.

I'm not just being Scrooge this yuletide either. I think sharpened politics has been disastrous on church communities, especially with the bloated reputations of the religious right. People can't talk about politics anymore without reputations being smirched, without someone assuming that those who don't buy the company line are as sad as the sad cases who don't stand up and testify around the campfire.

I never, ever want another kindergarten grandchild of mine to climb into my lap and tell me that Obama is a baby-killer. I'm tired of the firewall politics builds between people who believe in the same God and the same savior, the same kid in the manger. I'm sick unto death of the divisiveness that arises in the blessed name of Jesus. And I don't understand how a mob of well-meaning, flag-draped Christians can actually believe that freedom is more biblical than justice.

Maybe if the caucuses leave, the uncivil wars will beget little but coffee table skirmishes. Maybe if someone else gets first-in-the-nation status, my phone will go silent.

I don't own a TV station or a rental car outfit or a restaurant or a bar, nor the Des Moines LaQuinta. But that doesn't mean I don't have a stake in this mess. I say, vote Ron Paul. When his name is called, walk across the gym floor. Make him a winner and leave our church alone.

Good riddance. Send Bob Vander Plaats back to Sioux City. He's not as important as he believes God almighty thinks he is. On January 4, they'll all be gone, the spinmeisters, the ad men, the pundits, the party operatives, and most of the phone bank--on to greener pastures. Vander Plaats and his righteous crew will have had their ten minutes of glory and the rest of us can get on with life.

Vote Ron Paul.

The rebel kid

2011-12-20T06:48:00.000-06:00

Our pastor--from the pulpit!--says we all ought to read the book of Mark again, as a book I guess. Not that we do everything our pastor says, but we do take advice well. So we started, put away our usual devotional fare, and went with Holy Writ this Christmas.

I wish we hadn't.

We get no more than three chapters in, and we run into trouble, a trouble-maker in fact. That's right--Jesus himself.

Another time, Jesus went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of the them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, "Stand up in front of everyone."

I'm sorry, but that demand wasn't particularly conciliatory. We all know Jesus is about to do this unlawful Sabbath healing thing knowing those big-brother Pharisees will bleed at the teeth when he does. Here's what I think: Jesus could have healed this guy in a closet--isn't that that the way he told us to pray? When you do the pious stuff, don't flaunt it. He didn't have to be all Tim Tebow about it. But he tells the shrived-hand man deliberately--yes, deliberately!--to stand up in front of everyone. Talk about in-your-face.

There's more.

Then Jesus asked them, "Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?" But they remained silent.

He's not even talking to the handicapped guy. What Jesus wanted was to put this sad case on stage before the fascists, the power elite who want his head. He's talking to them, for pity sake. The guy with the gimpy hand is little more than a prop. He's only there for the demonstration. What's really going on is a battle between the upstart prophet and the religious establishment.

He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.

Okay, I'll give you this--he's deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts; but just the same, it's impossible to say that this entire show is meant to heal the handicapped. What's going on here is Jesus's wanting to stick a sharp stick in the eyes of the Pharisees.

And what happens?--things get worse. The church Nazis cozy up to the state Nazis, draw them into diabolical partnership. Why? Because they hated this rude, young medicine man, sure--but also because he deliberately twisted their theological cranks. He took 'em on. He rankled their righteousness. He taunted them, yodeled at their power.

And he did so while he amassed his own following, because what happens thereafter is more little people start flocking to him, like sheep, especially those with withered whatevers. They'd seen what he'd done to their buddy. He healed them too, but then--for whatever reason--he tells them that mum's the word. Imagine that--you've had a club foot forever, Jesus heals it, and then whispers, smilingly, "Promise me you won't tell a soul." Is he crazy?

Well, yes, or so his parents thought. All this Christmasy-Mary-and-the-babe stuff? all that pondering in her heart and singing beautiful hymns in the barn? Her kid gets to be a teenager, and she's all, "the kid is, like, out of control."

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him for they said, "He is out of his mind."

Can you blame them? That's Mary, the virgin, remember--or else Joseph the selfless, right? On the night of the bright stars, that child in the manger was gorgeously divine; but lo, these few years later, the whole dysfunctional family needs Dr. Phil. He's out of his mind," Mom told a Galilean newspaper. "Seriously."

"Forget them!" Jesus tells his discplines when he reads the account. "Who is my father and mother anyway?" That's what he says. Something to the effect of "I could care less."

Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."

Gingrich-sized ego. You'd think his mom and dad were Pharisees. The kid deserves in a smack down.

I don't know. Sometimes when you read the Bible, you wonder what on earth is going on.

But then you get to know that you don't know.

Sometimes, I suppose, that's where faith begins.

Swan Songs XXIII--an old cemetery

2011-12-19T06:50:00.000-06:00

Back then, our only friends here in Iowa were Mom and Dad. We were just 30 years old and they were 50. We had one daughter, a baby, and we'd just moved to Iowa from Arizona. Humidity wasn't surprising to us, native Midwesterners ourselves, but it was wearying. Somewhere, my father got a window-sized air-conditioner that we put into action on the far north end of the house we'd rented, in the baby's room. For some time, that little bedroom became a family room.

We had no friends but relatives, and that's why we were with them one evening somewhere south of Ireton. I don't remember why we were out there, but I'd guess it was because I wanted to know where Dad Van Gelder had grown up--or where his father had before him--and that farm was somewhere around a little burg named McNally. Maybe we were simply on a ride in the country, something people used to do.

But there it was--suddenly, a patch of yellow weeds amid long lines of row crops, a patch of weeds with a couple of headstones, like remnant teeth, jagged and tipped drunkenly, just enough stones to make clear that what we'd stumbled on was a cemetery no one cared much about.

I suppose I've always been a graveyard wanderer, and I was then too. So we got out of the car, baby in arms, and walked through the brush and brome, checking names on what stones could still be read, kicking up others embedded in the ground.

A ton of kids were buried there, children, a lot of them dying sometime early in the 20th century, a cemetery for kids, it seemed.

We could only speculate--some kind of flu epidemic sweeping through the region? something contagious and murderous that swept away the lives of so many kids? What happened? My in-laws didn't know, both of them born after the deaths of all those kids.

What happened? I didn't know, and I wished I did.

Here's what I wrote in the preface to my first book:

Two years ago I stumbled on an old unkept cemetery, miles from any main road, surrounded by Iowa corn. Few stones remained upright, many were gone. But the stones that were there and still readable told an incredible story of children and tragic death, and I knew at that moment that a significant, unrecorded human drama had once occurred there, far from the cities, at this isolated spot in the garden of America.

It wasn't just the cemetery really. In 1976, the American Bicentennial, a nation paused to observe its history, and looking back for any paleface like me meant Ellis Island and the teeming nation of immigrants that washed ashore from Europe. I'm Dutch, or was four and five generations back; and some of my own roots, I knew, were here in Sioux County, where my Schaap ancestors lived for a time--and, finally, where they died.

Back then, Alex Haley made an entire nation conscious of its own slave-holding history with a book titled Roots, a book that became an absolutely mesmorizing mini-series that just about everyone watched. Lots of people wanted to know who they were, what they'd come from--and I wanted to understand this odd heritage/legacy I'd been given by no choice of my own: I wasn't just Dutch, after all, I was Dutch Calvinist or Dutch Reformed, a legacy I'd left, more than willingly, even joyfully, a heritage to which I was now returning, however, with a teaching job at Dordt College.

But I knew also that just as the stones themselves had been lost, many of the old stories would not last the passing of a generation, unless someone tried to give them the life they deserved, not only as interesting tales, but also for the strength they illustrated and the wisdom they carried.

That's but half-truth. The other part of the urgency to prompt me to write stories was that I knew that a job in college--rather than high school--would give me more time to write. I loved teaching high school kids--rural kids in Wisconsin, city kids in Phoenix--but high school sucked every bit of creativity out of my soul. You could assume not a kid in your class was going to care a whit about Emerson; so every night the question was the same--how on earth am I going to make this stuff comely? Every night.

I'd wanted to write ever since I'd left Sioux County. I wanted to write when I'd read Frederick Manfred. I wanted to write ever since I had a freshman English teacher who used to scribble on the bottom of my essay, "You have to write a novel someday." I wanted to write ever since I got whacked by teeming masses of Dordt students who supported the Vietnam War when I didn't. And said as much. And wrote it. In the school newspaper.

Somehow, that graveyard birthed my literary ambition. After all, what did I know about writing stories? Nothing really. I'd never taken a class. I didn't know what a story was except when I read one--and there it was, just south of Ireton somewhere, on a gravel road, a deserted cemetery full of the graves of children, a story.

I never did find out what happened there. In fact, in numerous trips back through the years, I could never even find that old graveyard back. I tried to find it more than once, going up and back and up and back through the row crops and square-cut gravel roads. I started to wonder whether it existed only in my imagination.

And then, Saturday morning, chasing an rosy dawn, I stopped along the road, pointed my camera out the window at a stately cottonwood up against the painted sky, when I looked back behind me and saw a guy in a pickup. I was blocking the road.

Embarrassed, I shifted the Tracker and took off, swung right so he could pass. He didn't go far or fast, just up the road a bit before he turned into a confinement. I watched him, wondering what he thought of the idiot taking pictures of the dawn.

I followed. And then, totally without warning, there it was, that old cemetery. Someone had cut down the brome, but what few stones remained still swayed recklessly hither and yon, like an old man's bad teeth. It was the same cemetery we'd come on in August of 1976, in the heat of summer, the cemetery that made me think I could learn to write stories if I found them, if I stumbled on them somehow, good stories, covered by brome or dust or age or just plain neglect. I could learn to write fiction if I lifted good stories out of disuse and figured out how to write them. I could write the way I'd always wanted if my apprenticeship started with the mystery of an old unkept cemetery full of kids.

Truth be known, I still don't know that story, but stumbling on that ragged graveyard again on Saturday morning at dawn brought me back, around and around and around and finally back--very much like a story, a good one, that always has its end somewhere close to where it began. I found it back, stumbled on it again, years and years later.

This morning, my morning thanks is for that old discovery years ago--and the new one just Saturday morning. And, I suppose, for roots. After all, it's been a blessing to be back again.

Sunday Morning Meds: He knows

2011-12-18T06:28:00.005-06:00

“But the Lord knows the way of the righteous”

I know one q and a from the catechism I was raised with (I know more than one actually, but don’t press me), and that is the very first—“What is your only comfort in life and death?” The answer begins this way: “That I am not my own, but belong. . .” I’ll spare you the entire answer, but one of the reasons this particular q and a sticks to the Teflon in my memory is the answer’s texture, it’s emotional color. The word of the moment here is comfort: What is your only comfort? What makes you feel good? What settles your nerves? What offers some peace? What helps you sleep? What gets you over the blues?

And the answer is, that I am not my own but I belong to God.

Likewise, the first psalm’s final verse begins with a phrase you can pull up to your chin on a cold winter night: God knows the way of the righteous. He knows. He’s got it down. It’s no mystery. For the Lord God Almighty, right and wrong and good and ill is all part of a day’s work. He knows. It’s that simple, really.

I find that immensely comforting.

Because life isn’t.

When you add up the whole works it amounts to nothing more or less than a sidewalk, eighty years long maybe, that leads to the grave. I still have a plaque my father received after twenty-some faithful years at the bank where he worked. Not expensive. His employers got it from a place that turns out trophies for longest putt at company golf tournaments. On its own, that plaque isn’t worth a dime. My father died several years ago now. That plaque is in the backroom of my basement because while there is no use anywhere, anyhow for that plaque, I can’t toss it.

Last week, in church, a man stood up and asked for prayers for a woman in Chicago, half a continent away. She is dying of inoperable cancer, and the diagnosis was in just a week ago: she’ll be gone in six months.

I could have wept, honestly, even though I haven’t seen her for years and barely know her. It seems that as I grow older I am more affected by such stories. When I was young and the trajectory of my life seemed to on an arc capable of transcending almost anything and everything, I don’t think I was as affected by such stories. Maybe that’s good. But today, they just depress me.

Psalm 1 begins with a word that’s hard to define—blessed; and it ends with a pretty strong hint at that what blessedness means. In the junky mess our lives become—traduced by sinners and sin itself—you’re not going to want to forget this singular truth: God knows. The Bible tells me so. God knows. He’s not perplexed or weary or tied to a silly ritual or overweight with bureaucracy. He gets it.

And it’s not just an idea. Be assured, the shepherd/king says, God knows the way of the righteous. He knows. He understands. He was, once, one of us, after all.

To be blessed is to know, in life and in death, in sickness and in health, that God does—that he knows. To him, it’s all perfectly clear. That’s blessed assurance.

Saturday Morning Catch

2011-12-17T12:32:00.000-06:00

Character took second place to setting this morning; the story was sky and sky and more sky. If the heavens declare the glory of the Creator, then this morning's sermon was not to be missed. It even brightened an old cemetery I stumbled upon, south of Ireton, a place I hadn't seen for thirty-some years.

Swan Song XXII--antique

2011-12-16T06:38:00.000-06:00

There's a pile of papers slowly accumulating on the desk beside me, growing every minute as students are finishing the exam. Beside that pile sits a tiny stapler I brought along from my desk drawer so that students could bring all the pages of the test together and seal up the mess.

"Whoa," one kid says when he brings his test up. He grabs the stapler as if it were something he'd just found in the tomb of Tutenkhamun, twirls it adoringly in his fingers, smashes the papers together, and makes that little red thing do its work on his exam. "Is this an antique?" he says.

I was stunned. That little Swingline is, was, and forever shall be little more than a little stapler. An antique? "I don't know," I told him. "It's just a little stapler."

He put it down gently, a museum piece.

When he left, I picked it up myself. I'd never thought of that thing as an antique. I'd hauled it out of my office desk drawer just as I'd done countless times before at exam time, made sure it was loaded with miniature staples from a little box I bought on e-bay a decade ago or so, and went off, armed, to class.

I'd never thought of it as an antique, whatever that is, never even valued it all that much. When finally I'd run out of staples, I remember having to hunt longer than I wanted to; but it never really dawned on me to toss that little red stapler, even though I could have picked up some replacement at Wal-Mart for something less than three bucks, I bet. In fact, when I found the staples on e-bay, they came with three more little Swinglines--obviously descendents--in a package deal. So my desk drunk drawer had all sorts of little Swinglines, this one--the one that stopped the kid in his tracks--the obvious grandpappy, its inscription balding on the housing.

An antique? Sure, I told myself. I suppose it is an antique.

I don't remember buying it, but I know very well, somehow, that it's been with me for, lo, these many years. I had it in my desk drawer when I lived in the dorm, in fact. The more I think about it even now, the more I think it may well be the only thing--the only something--that's been in my possession for what now amounts to something close to a half century.

I mean, I've got no antique underwear. No old sportcoat would fit, I'm sure. Socks, shoes, sweaters, jeans?--long gone, out of style. Books?--I've got an ancient brick-like thesaurus, but when I moved into the dorm, the jock from Wisconsin would have thought a thesaurus was a dinosaur. I bought it here. Luggage has been replaced decades ago. Girlfriends are history. Even my hair is gone. All I got is DNA and a little red Swingline.

"You can't take it with you" makes all kinds of sense when it comes to death and dying, but I guess its proverbial half-life extends to our own four-score and ten as well. We just don't take many things along on the pilgrimage, really--or if we do, eventually we toss 'em. Stuff wears out or gets tossed or loses its calling, like those lumbering threshers stuck forever in fields along gravel roads out here in farm country.

Really, things don't fall apart all that much either; they just get replaced. I honestly don't remember anything else I took with me when I came to Sioux Center, Iowa, in September of 1966. Even my baseball glove--a Rawlings, Eddie Matthews signature--is landfill. The stereo--big winged speakers, all turntable--a monster so portable it took up an entire shelf, was gone only four years later. I remember fondly the one I bought when I got my first teaching job--flashy round speakers. I was really living.

What of my possessions has really stayed with me? Only a stapler, a Swingline, a little red thing that's done its dutiful, blessed work without complaining for almost fifty years, only rarely rescued from its dark home in whatever desk drawer I swing my legs beneath. Only a stapler has come along.

Truth be known, I used it yesterday again, stapled a couple of things in my office. But I haven't taken it along to class since the day it was lavishly honored. I lugged along one of those cheap descendents instead, a little pinkish imp constructed of plastic you can almost see through.

Not like my old, little Swingline.

It's an antique, and it won't get tossed when I empty that office drawer in six months. No way.

But it will eventually, when I'm gone. My daughter will take the contents of whatever junk drawer it's tucked in then, empty the mess into a Wal-Mart bag, and toss it.

Maybe. Maybe she'll spot this old thing herself and look at it closely.

Maybe she'll look at it like that kid. "Wow," she'll tell herself. "That's an antique."

Wouldn't that be sweet?

Who won?

2011-12-15T06:39:00.000-06:00

When the Vietnam War ended, I was driving a school bus for a little Christian school in Phoenix, Arizona, out into the desert actually, where some dairy families had their kids spiffied up at the appointed time for the long run back into the city. I'd heard the news on the radio that morning on the way out, news that seemed to have come from some other planet. After all, Vietnam had been a staple in our lives for years, more than a decade. Thousands and thousands had died, my generation. Now--that morning--it was over, not with a bang but a whimper.

There I was, on the burgeoning edge of suburbia, Phoenix, Arizona, an NPR station blaring from the radio in the van saying, officially, the Vietnam War was over. Surreal.

I announced it to a kid, a second-grader, a little toehead named Stevie Haak, who sat beside me. "Hey," I said, "you want to know something big? The Vietnam War is over."

He cheered, as if Arizona State University had just won a big football game. Then, in all innocence, he looked at me quizzically. "Who won?" he asked.

There was no good answer.

This morning the news says the Iraqi war is officially over, and I can't help but remember little Stevie's question.

Well, Saddam Hussein is no more. He was a ruthless maniac who murdered his own people with poison gas and squelched dissenters as if they were vermin. He supported terrorists around the world with his phenomenal wealth, and he was--let's be clear--just more combustible gas in the ever-burning cauldron that is the Middle East.

The Iraqi people control their own destiny these days, relatively speaking. To say we've brought democracy to the region is a little Gingrich-like in its reach, but the tinpot crackpot has been toppled, the wicked witch is dead. This year, Iraq had no "arab spring"; they'd already been through an eight-year treacherous season.

Three years ago, I used a book about the Iraqi War in a writing class, Martha Raddatz's The Long Road Home, as an example of fine writing, powerful journalism. I'll admit a secondary motive: I thought it important that my 20-year-olds knew that halfway around the world, dozens of their generation were actually fighting a war, many of them dying. Several male students were angry with me because the book's replication of the violence--it argued neither for nor against the war, simply told the story--made the our efforts there seem to their FOX-trained eyes something less than glorious.

Here's the lead in the Huffington Post this morning: "After nearly nine years, 4500 American dead, 32,000 wounded and more than $800 billion, U.S. officials formally shut down the war in Iraq--a conflict that U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said was worth the price in blood and money, as it set Iraq on a path to democracy."

If I were Leon Panetta, that's what I'd say too.

But it's Stevie Haak whose words come back to me this morning. Innocent as the child he was, he looked up at me and asked, "Who won?"

New Newt

2011-12-14T06:38:00.000-06:00

Newt Gingrich's astounding ascendancy has taken over the box office in the national political theater. Just a few months ago, who on earth would have believed it? It's just another bizarre subplot in a Republican nomination epic whose unimaginable plot twists have surprised just about everyone and will, in another week or two, almost inevitably move in another as yet unforeseen direction. How about a Trump/Palin ticket from some as yet unnamed Independent Party? You like it not? Okay, how about a Palin/Trump card? Now that's a tandem with a ring.

You hardly dare to sleep, the drama is so intense.

Forgiveness--apparently that's the good word with Newt, at least among the Christian conservatives in my neighborhood, even women. Serial adulterer?--well sure, but that's the old Newt, the unrepentant. Given to blubbering braggadocio?--yeah, but no more; he's grown up now. Purveyor of bizarre social commentary?--sure he said some weird things, but someone has to make noise once in a while. The man is fearless.

Fearless all right--even of himself.

I'm guessing that the rule of thumb among Iowa Republican Christians--or at least so it appears to me--is that you can and should support Newt because, well, think of it this way: Newt is really not Newt. Well, he's still Newt because he's sharp as a stiletto and he can slay any Obama-looking dragon on stage with a thousand fancy cuts. He takes on Goliaths, like the Soviet Union, and decks 'em. Rotund as he is, he can out dance anyone, while skinning his opponents out as if they were muskrats. All of that he can still do. So listen--Newt is still Newt. He's just not the old Newt. He's the new Newt. That's it--vote for the new Newt.

He's 68 years old. That blond he's with these days doesn't have to worry all that much about his catting around. Those days are over. Today, the new Newt loves his country more moderately than he did in the days when he needed another woman just to temper his patriotism. That heavy-breathing stuff is behind him. Callista is married to the new Newt, who today is, of course, the old Newt, but in age only of course because in every other way, you might say the old Newt is really the new Newt. I think that's the way it goes. Try to stay with me.

Here's the real questions, of course: can humans being change? Can we become what we've never been? Can character be refurbished? Is it adjustable or repairable or transformable?--or are we stuck with what we are right from the factory? Can the old Newt really become the new Newt? Can any of us become something other than that which we've always been? There's the question.

Put me on forever on the side of those who believe we can be made new. Humanoids such as we are, really have to believe we can change--that, given the right circumstances, a pinto can become a zebra. Not to believe we can change is not to have faith, and not to have faith is its own kind of death.

So I believe, seriously, the old Newt can be the new Newt.

That doesn't mean I don't harbor some serious doubt. Belief without doubt is blindness.

"With all the power that a President has, the most important thing to bear in mind is this: You must not give power to a man unless, above everything else, he has character." So said a very famous former American President. "Character is the most important qualification the President of the United States can have."

There. Couldn't have said it better myself--the words of Richard Nixon.

Reading Mother Teresa--XXII

2011-12-13T06:20:00.001-06:00

Walking home from school for me means walking west into what is, this daylight-shortened time of year, the first warm glow of sunset. For years I've told myself--especially during frenetic seasons like this one, exam time--that some day I'm just going to keep walking into all that buttery glory. I'm going to head west like Huck Finn and millions of others who hear the siren song of a dreamy new life. Someday, instead of stopping at 347 Third Avenue, I'll just keep walking. Like an old bull bison, I'll leave the herd forever, wander out somewhere into the hills along the river, and hunker down.

Sounds good right now. Well, maybe a little cold. Ah, big deal--I got a down jacket.

I've got eleventy-seven papers to read, more pouring in daily. Today, I'm off to speak at a high school chapel, I've got two big speeches to write, an exam to give (36 more papers) this afternoon, and a junk drawer full of little complexities too mean to mention. But then I'm but a semester away from being able to just keep walking. Just a semester.

I'm sure I'm not as busy as Mother Teresa. I'm sure that those Calcutta streets full of poor folks made demands on her and her time that may well have prompted her to look up wistfully toward beaming sunsets herself, maybe even more than occasionally. The dogged vow she took upon herself--the promise of utter loyalty to the Lord's will--created a listening ear in her that probably never shut down because she wanted, above all else, to hear the voice of God obediently, never to miss even his most indistinct whispers.

Which is why, I suppose, she loved to tell herself and others that "in the silence of the heart God speaks."

Strikes me as vividly anti-American because I ought to be connected--always. I ought to have all the gizmos. Last week our grandson stayed around after dinner and begged, to watch Ninja Pandas or some such thing. Begged. I know why, because it was difficult for him--as it is for any of us who are tuned in 24/7--to entertain silence. He has to be entertained. Me too. My little iPod touch keeps me connected, keeps silence at bay, even though it doesn't speak unless spoken too. I read the Huffington Post far more often than the gospels, Drudge more than King David. I'm serious.

I know Mother Teresa's right, and so does anyone else who listens. "In the silence of the heart, God speaks." Maybe that's why I'm addicted to getting up early every morning.

But then maybe not. I know well and good that every little whisper in my ear isn't the voice of God.

Still, we all know she's right: "In the silence of the heart God speaks."

Some of my ethnic and religious ancestors stuck a copy of Abraham Kuyper's To Be Near Unto God into the pockets of their barn jackets when they immigrated a century ago or more, so special were those meditations to them. The focus of that book is on achieving moments of eternal bliss, just moments. "To be near unto God," for Abraham Kuyper, meant maintaining a daily walk that kept humanoids within whispering distance of God's own voice. No residents of this world can possibly live near unto God 24/7, Kuyper might have said, but we can all come blessedly close for occasional divine moments.

I don't doubt that ye olde neo-Calvinist, Father Abraham, would have heartily assented to Mother Teresa: "In the silence of the heart God speaks."

Which is to say, I suppose, be still and know.

It's just before six. I've said enough.

Morning Thanks--Tim Tebow

2011-12-12T06:29:00.001-06:00

The fact is, I much prefer the religiosity of Aaron Rodgers, of Packer fame, who is substantially no different from Tim Tebow in fervor and commitment to his Christian faith, but doesn't make such a big deal out of it. Dozens and dozens of NFL greats pray as unceasingly as he does, just not as publicly. Tebow probably prays in his closet, as Jesus himself directed his disciples; but he also takes a knee, unceasingly, in front of hundreds of thousands--no, millions--of viewers. About his faith, he's not shy.

But what's more amazing about him is that he really means it, that he isn't phony, that he's not just creating a brand or out looking for more ink. We're in a political season right now, when campaigning blowhards will say just about anything to garner voters, as if they could turn themselves into magnets in a field of metal filings. But this guy--this Tebow--is real.

And what's most astounding at this very moment--after yet another truly miraculous win for the Broncos yesterday at Soldier Field--is that all that determined spirituality seems to pay off. The "mile-high Messiah" they call him, the guy who experts say shouldn't really be all that good as pro quarterback. But is. But wins games, one after another, almost, we might say, religiously. When Tebow walks on water, he doesn't even get his feet wet, some folks say. The story of Tebow right now, flimsy as it might be, is that faith delivers. Try it for yourself.

But failure is inevitable. In most of the games he's won for the Broncos, he's also had some pitiably bad moments, just not at the end. The fourth quarter, his fans say, is TebowTime.

I don't think anyone really believes he's a pigskin messiah, but right now he's charmed, he's blessed, he's adorned with--of all things in this culture!--the thick purple robe of Godliness. It's almost impossible to write that sentence, and here's another: Tim Tebow makes righteousness cool. Believe it. After all, he's winning. Amazing grace--he's winning.

When it's over, when he starts to lose--as he inevitably will--I think he'll deliver his greatest blessing because, just as he did when he won the Heisman, he'll say--I'm sure of it--just as he always has: it was a great ride, but playing football was nowhere near the greatest thing in my life. He will. Mark me.

And that'll be a lesson in grace for those thousands who took to the streets the night Paterno got axed at Penn State. That'll be an inspiration for those fans who are truly fanatics. That'll be lesson for all of us, a sermon America may well understand better than successive punchy homilies by Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson and Rick Warren and Rick Perry.

I prefer my Christians a little less in-your-face, but this morning, after another incredible Denver Bronco victory, I am thankful for a man who is, impossible as it may seem, a true paragon of virtue, Tim Tebow, a kid somehow blessed by the grace of some god or another, a rookie who wins NFL games when nobody but himself and his teammates think he should.

And never stops giving thanks.

Sunday Morning Meds

2011-12-11T07:51:00.001-06:00

“nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous” Psalm 1:5

Not so long ago, I ran across some scattered notes of anancient preacher who died some time ago at the age of 102 years old. He was reared in a rural church on the edgeof what was then the frontier, the son of devout Christian parents, deeplycommitted to their faith.

One of the stories he tells concerns a newly elected deaconin the tiny country church he attended. It seems that somewhere close to the Sunday the new elders and deaconswere to take office, this young deacon’s wife decided to primp up a bit and gother hair bobbed, a “do” that, as they say, just wasn’t done around thoseparts. The authorities hastened ameeting, talked about the situation, and ruled, confident of theirrighteousness, that the new deacon could not take office until his wife coiffedher hair in a less worldly way.

Even though I live in a rural area some might still considerto be the frontier, it is impossible for me to imagine that kind of exactingjudgment in any church I know of. I’msure those kinds of congregations still exist, but I don’t know of any in theneighborhood. And that’s why I thinkthat, really, no self-respecting Christian in the early 21^st centurycan really buy into the sentiment of this verse.

But then, maybe it’s just hyperbole, poetic license. Maybe we should give David some leashhere: he let his enthusiasm get awaywith him, just as he did in that very public sacred strip tease his wife Michelgot so burned at him about. You know howwriters are—once they get going, the words just fly. It’s just, well, poetry.

Here’s what Charles Spurgeon says: “Every church has one devil in it. The tares grow in the same furrow as thewheat. There is no floor that is notthoroughly purged of chaff. Sinners mixwith saints as dross mixes with gold.”

Among devout, seeker-sensitive evangelical preachers today,who would dare say sinners won’t stand in this congregation? Yet, more than a century ago now, thousandsthronged to Spurgeon.

Go figure. What’schanged is contemporary church practice. What’s changed is rhetoric. What’s truly sinful today is prejudice—broadly speaking, the idea thatsome are not good enough for “the congregation of the righteous.” What’s truly righteous today—or so it seemsto me—is tolerance. Anybody can stand upin our church.

Who’s right? God onlyknows. Count on this, however, in lifeitself the only constant is change, and fifty years from now today’s politicalor ecclesiastical correctness won’t wear the same livery.

What won’t change is Psalm 1.

Now that’s interesting.

Saturday Morning Catch

2011-12-10T11:52:00.001-06:00

First snow--not fresh snow, just enough to texture the countryside, give it layer atop its otherwise tawny hide. Dawn came brightly over a big bend in the river. On the way home, just enough momento mori to remember.

92,000,000 = 6

2011-12-09T05:26:00.001-06:00

The man sitting at the front door of Wal-Mart last night was someone I once knew. As an elder in our church, years ago, I visited over there when the family was in deep distress and losing their farm. It was mid-80s, and this family wasn't the only one forced to leave.

Last night he sat in motor cart with a wide front basket, a vehicle made for navigating the store. Inside that basket stood an oxygen tank to which he was hooked up. There he sat, greeting customers, and I told myself that Wal-Mart was a wonderful place because that man--now well into his 70s--would have trouble finding employment anywhere else in town, and here he was. "Night, Jim," he said, kindly.

This is not about Wal-Mart. I was there last night. I likely stop in three times a week or so--they've got wonderful day-old bread, cheap cashews, and printer ink. Most everything else too. Maybe too often, I count on Wal-Mart.

But a news story this morning makes clear what's happening in this country. Sam Walton's six children own as much wealth in the United States of America as 30% of the entire population. There are no typos there, no misprints.

Let's do the math. Google tells me that this morning, the population of the United States of America is right at 307 million. I'm no math hot shot, but it seems to me that we're talking about roughly 92 million people. Let's just get this straight--the six Walton heirs own as much capital as the lowest 30%, or the lowest 92 million Americans. Here: 6 = 92,000,000 Yes, it does.

Let's be graphic about it. The six Walton heirs own as much money, geographically (you might say) as the entire populations of the five most populace states--California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois. We're just counting heads here, but let's say it again--those six Walton kids have as much wealth as the total population of this country's five most populace states.

Or this way. Those six kids have more wealth than the numbers of people in Arkansas, Kansas, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virgina, Nebraska, Idaho, Hawaii, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, and, oh yeah, Washington DC--combined!!!

I don't want to be misunderstood. I'm not saying those six kids have more money than those states, only that those six kids own as much wealth as a number approximate to the entire populations of approximately 18 states of the Union.

Sylvia Algretto, who's a labor economist--and therefore almost certainly a socialist or communist, right?--makes the case here. Read it for yourself.

I just don't understand the Christian right. That kind of income inequality isn't a sin? Do good righteous people simply avoid reflecting at all about the gospels?

Okay, let's play ball with Mitch McConnell. These Waltons--they're the job-creators, right? Let's stay out of the way of the super-rich and let them do their noble work. This is America, land of the bootstraps. Freedom means freedom from government. Liberty means the pursuit of happiness, my happiness. Oh, beautiful for spacious skies. . .

"The share of wealth held by the top fifth [of Americans] is about 87.2 percent while the bottom four-fifths share the remaining 12.8 percent of wealth," or so says Ms. Algretto. But there's more. "The riches of those in the top 1 percent are about 225 times greater than that held by the typical family--it was 125 times in 1962. . ."

That's an arc that looks alarmingly like the dorsal fin of a great white shark.

Somewhere along the line we'll reach a tipping point, don't you think? While good Christian patriots may fly the glorious flag of freedom, income equality is not only growing more and more unimaginable, it has to, eventually, spell real trouble in this country, trouble as in violence.

I'm sitting in a warm basement on a cold December morning. I'm overweight, I'm not suffering, and I'm more than comfortable. Last night, at a local church, I served up a free dinner to tons of folks much, much more poor than I am. But it seems very, very clear that this nation can't go on peaceably the way it is. It just can't.

Perhaps the sky isn't falling yet, but if you look up, you've got to be blind not to see more than a few cracks in the ceiling.

Sioux County History VI--what they found

2011-12-08T05:20:00.001-06:00

Long, long ago, my father-in-law talked me into helping him walk beans. Armed with a half of a hoe, we'd march up and back through his fields looking for milkweed or buttonweed or lambs quarters, whacking out iniquity wherever we'd find it.

Walking beans wasn't the best job I ever had, but neither was it the worst, in part because my father-in-law was inspiring. On those warm summer days, I felt in him great pride. When he looked up and down those cleaned-up rose, he felt blessed somehow, as if he'd kept non other than sin at bay. Through his eyes, I learned to look at endless rows of corn and beans and something awe-inspiring, a million tasseled garment spread luxuriantly over the verdant earth all around.

We live in Emerald City here come July, endless sections of land vastly more green than millions of the earth's inhabitants could ever imagine. An acre of Sioux County, Iowa, land is worth more these days than an acre almost anywhere else in the tall-corn state, and with good reason.

My people came here, Dutch people, including my own immigrant great-grandparents; and the legacy of those who broke the soil is abundantly witnessable all around. Sioux County, Iowa, has reason to crow--we produce more hogs, more beef, more milk, more eggs than almost anyone in the state.

Right now, things are booming. The rolling hills sport new houses, and atop every rise yet another confinement. America's economy may well be in the doldrums, but here in the corner of the state of Iowa things are booming. Fluctuating corn prices may be hazardous and annoying, but nobody is suffering, and land prices stretch ever closer to 20 thousand dollars an acre. You read that right.

The business of agriculture built the college where I have taught for the last 35 years. Corn and hogs and cattle brought a veterinarian to Sioux Center, Iowa, a century ago, a man who built a big old house on a corner lot, the place we've lived in for a quarter century. I'm sitting in the basement of that house right now because the business of agriculture created a culture and a way of life here.

Still, listen to this, a postcard from pre-historic Sioux County. This is Charley Dyke on what this world looked like before row crops:

It was in the middle of June, the month of brides and roses, and no bride was ever more beautifully arrayed than Virgin Prairie Sioux was arrayed when she was wooed by [those earliest of pioneers]. The lush grass glistened and reflected the sunlight and was sprinkled with millions upon millions of flowers. Roses were everywhere; they hung in garlands along the river banks and crowned the badger mounds with flaming reds, pinks and whites. The tall vividly green saw grass in the sloughs was banked with masses of white anemones, pink phlox and yellow buttercups. In the low places along the river the violets formed a solid blue and their delicious perfume arose to heaven. In other low places the pink oxalis thickly covered the ground. The uplands were splotched and spangled with clumps of fire and others of almost every known shade, tinge and color, whose names the men from Pella did not know.

That kind of world, here, is virtually unimaginable. In 1870, those pioneering Hollanders found here a land so rich with bounty they couldn't help but break into hymns.

The prairie swarmed with old and young prairie chickens, quails, kildeer, larks, plovers, curlews, native sparrows, song sparrows, cranes and many others and the trees along the river were musical with nesting song birds. The sloughs were alive with ducks of different kind and jingled with the song of a boblink. Yellow headed blackbirds hovered over the tall grass and redwing blackbirds swung and ukelelied on the reeds. A brilliant sun made everything shimmer and glimmer and glisten.

So it was and is no more.

When first those men unsheathed their plows and laid open this rich soil, they were preparing a place for me to sit and type these words. I'm here only because they were.

But sometimes the land we live on here in a faraway corner of God's green earth can be even more awe-inspiring if we think about what it must have been before the plow, how festooned with color and wildlife, and how forever unending.

Long, long, long before white men were ever here this was great land, beautiful, bountiful land; and that's humbling to know, humbling to remember.

___________________________________

Don't I wish this last photo were mine, but it belongs to Bruce Harrison, who does absolutely wonderful work and who loves tall-grass prairie.

Swan songs XXI--Awe

2011-12-07T04:42:00.001-06:00

I've got another round with Hamlet, since he comes up next semester again in a couple of classes, and the college theater arts people will actually be putting him on stage sometime in the spring. I don't have to file him away yet, so this wasn't--yesterday's final class--the last hurrah, my last trip through the ill-fated story of a sweet prince and his painstakingly well-ruminated revenge.

But I couldn't help thinking, yesterday, how futile it is to try to "teach" Hamlet, how impossible, really, how absolutely ridiculous in this day and age of "professional" higher ed; because the fact is, I don't "get" him. I don't understand him, I don't know if he's mad, I don't know why he so coldly offs Rosecrantz and Guildenstern, I don't begin to get why he's obsessed with his mother's sex life, and I don't know--I really don't--why he doesn't do what every last patron of the Elizabethan stage expected him to do once the ghost told him the story: why he doesn't forthwith kill Claudius the murderer. I don't understand Hamlet--the prince or the play. I really don't.

But I love it. What a show. What an incredible character, what a brilliant, quick-witted, wonderful madman. What a piece of work he is, "how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving--how express and admirable." Really. What an incredible play.

I've been through it a dozen times at least, probably more. On my desk at school lies a library copy of John Dover Wilson's What Happens in Hamlet, a book I walked out of a city library with forty years ago when, in college, I had to read the play for the first time in my life and found it absolutely beyond me. I've read that stolen book over and over again--in college, in graduate school, and a dozen times at least as a prof. But the fact is, even that book doesn't help. I didn't "get" him as an undergraduate, and I don't "get" him now, even though today I know and love that massive, five-hour piece of stagecraft inside and out. I know the play. I love the play. I just don't know him.

And here's my horror yesterday, in front of my students. I told them that "getting Hamlet," understanding him, isn't the point at all. His greatness is his confounding mystery. The point of the play's genius isn't what "Shakespeare is trying to say," as students like to characterize literature. The point is that Shakespeare has given us every last bit of felt life he can in the character of Hamlet, but when it comes right down to it there's nothing we can do but stand back in awe at this young prince and his hasty death. He's just too human.

Look--who can doubt that Mr. Jerry Sandusky did a ton of good with this charity he set up? Who can doubt that there weren't dozens, maybe hundreds of needy kids who were blessed by the work of his hands? And yet, demonically, he preyed on some of them, used them for his own damned ends. How do you understand that?

How do we appreciate the complexities of our own humanity? How do we understand our own motivations, our best behavior, our worst? Do any of us "get" who we are?

It's futile, really--teaching Hamlet, if the best I can do is tell students they're blessed if they understand that they'll never understand. After all, how is such mystery going to help them get a frickin' job?

And yet, every time I go over that play, every time I work my way through it, every time I hear that ill-fated prince rant or rhapsodize, I'm even more taken by the genius, the sheer beauty, the express humanity that's there on the page in front of me.

A couple years ago, some Christian school teachers asked me to talk about the nature of Christian education, an endeavor I've been in for just about my whole teaching life. What is it, really? they said.

I could give a ton of textbook answers. I come from from parents who sometimes tacitly assumed that not putting your children into a Christian school was renegging on perfectly sacred baptismal vows.

But I wanted to know for myself--and here's what I came up with. Christian teaching--Christians teachers, Christian schools--must somehow teach awe, must somehow teach humility before the radiant face of the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, must somehow help students see that they aren't much more than cold hard clay in the massive, loving hands of the Potter.

But how do you teach awe? How do you teach grace? Can't be done, can it? Can we shape a curriculum for humility?

I don't know. But I know I felt it yesterday when, once more--but not for the last time--I tried once again to show my students what a piece of work Hamlet really is.

Honestly, I don't know if I can do better, really, than to have them walk out of class going "wow." I don't know if any did yesterday--I certainly didn't forty years ago.

Maybe I was a miserable failure. Maybe.

But he wasn't--Hamlet, I mean. Good night, what a character, what a story, what a play. What a genius Shakespeare was. Amazing.

Wow.

Principles

2011-12-06T05:08:00.001-06:00

It was years ago, but I once went to a Republican party Presidential caucus right here in town, considering myself, after all, a Republican. I left and never returned because I realized very quickly that I didn't share much at all with some of the doomsday loudmouths who ran the show. You might say I didn't believe the world was flat.

I've been to only one Democratic caucus here. I went in 2008 because I believed in Obama. At that event I felt more at home, but I don't know that I'll ever go back. I like my independence, quite frankly.

It's caucus time in Iowa, although the bus traffic through town seems to have waned dramatically. This year lots of front-runners aren't pressing the flesh like they used to when we nearly had to put up additional traffic signs. No more. We're no less Republican up here in the northwest corner of Iowa, and the scramble for votes is more wild and zany than it's ever been. You'd think there'd be a revolving door on the town, but the hot shots rarely show.

Rick Santorum was here last night, but otherwise it's been awhile since we've had a candidate pay a visit. I think the 24/7 news channels have made old-fashioned retail politics, well, old-fashioned. Newt's ahead in Iowa even though he hasn't been in all that many church basements.  The only two old-fashioned baby-kissing stompers are Santorum and Bachmann, both of whom barely register single digits these days.

About the only signs I see around town herald the candidacy of Ron Paul, whose loyal troops have kept him in the teens since long before the Ames straw poll.  I'm not sure how good Christian folks can so heartily support a die-hard libertarian when the gospel of libertarianism is, at its core, almost Darwinian--only the strong survive. Rugged individualism has a glorious past in this country, of course, starting with Ben Franklin's alter ego, Poor Richard. Bootstraps ideology has its own viral attraction, but I just can't square much of the libertarian creed with the New Testament. I'm not one to make claims about WWJD, but I have a ton of trouble believing Jesus, given everything he said about the poor, would slap a Ron Paul sticker on his SUV. But what do I know?--there are probably many more good Christians on Ron Paul's side than mine. Or so it seems.

But I like him--Ron Paul, that is. The man heartily stands for something. In a field that now includes a gentleman incapable of seeing his own two-faces, as well as another who's a serial adulterer, Ron Paul stands immoveable in the silliness, an actual true believer, the Statue of Liberty in the harbor of madness.

What's more, he pulled out the fanciest, juiciest berry pie he could yesterday and tossed it directly into the fat face of a man Newt called "an American icon." Iconic Donald Trump is throwing his own little caucus party, it seems, where he's planning to strong-arm the questions at his own private presidential debate. All the candidates are expected to genuflect, of course. I'm sorry, but in my book, this particular job-creator is the original All-American horse's ass.

Ron Paul says he's busy that night, not coming. Yahoo! "The selection of a reality television personality to host a presidential debate that voters nationwide will be watching is beneath the office of the Presidency," his office said yesterday, "and flies in the face of that office's history and dignity."

Won't somebody here say AMEN?

If Ron Paul dares to take on America's chief fat-cat buffoon, he'll do just fine with Iran's hate-mongering mullahs.  And there's more: "Mr. Trump's participation as moderator will distract from questions and answers concerning important issues. . ."

I'm liking this guy.

And then this: "Mr. Trump's participation will contribute to an unwanted circus-like atmosphere."

Nailed it. Just plain nailed it.

I might just look for a yard sign myself, one of those neat Ron Paul banners. I wouldn't vote for him, but, my word, you got to like him. He's a man of principle.

The weekend's headline

2011-12-05T05:13:00.001-06:00

The magnitude of what happened cannot be overstated. It started with a fenderbender, an ordinary fenderbender, really, if the driver in question hadn't been 92 years old. He was minding his own business down Main Street when he sideswiped a truck and ripped out much of the plastic side of his '92 Olds, left it naked as his First Parents, no available leaves to hide the sin. The Olds ran, but it looked perfectly awful. Do people buy new cars at 92?

Ten days later, after nine sleepless nights, he drove home a new (used) 2000 Ford Explorer, 120,000 miles on her, his first new (used) car in years.

Now a new gallery of dashboard bells and whistles made that Explorer seem to him like the NASA Challenger, so he studied the handbook to make he understood every switch until, without knowing it, he hit the alarm button on the keys. The Explorer went suddenly berserk--lights flashing, horn honking, right there in the garage of the old folks home where he lives. He was sure the whole place was going livid, but he had no clue how the madness started or, five minutes later, why it ended. It just did.

Later, totally frazzled, he went out to garage once more, just to make sure that new Explorer was bedded down peacefully, and not kicking up such a horrible fuss again.

All of that meant yet another sleepless night.

For a couple days he just stayed away, kept his distance, as if that new white SUV had a dangerous mind of its own.

A letter arrived. That traffic ticket made some government official wonder about his driving abilities and ask questions that could be answered simply by his passing the standard driving tests--written and road. Come in on Friday, the letter commanded.

More sleepless nights. "There are mountains and molehills," he was quoted as saying,"but when you're 92 there aren't any more molehills." Should he just throw in the keys and quit driving, thereby sentencing himself even greater isolation? Self-reliance is, after all, a great American principle. All his old folks buddies shook their heads in sadness--no one wanted to give up their wheels, but all of them knew they'd have to sometime, if the grave didn't get them first. What to do? What to do?

His son-in-law thought he should take the test but told him I didn't think he'd have much of a chance. After all, at 92, he'd never taken a drivers test, bought his first licence from the county court house for a couple of bucks. He'd never gone to high school, which meant the man had never really taken a test since the Depression, except for one day in 1942 when some First Lieu-y determined this Iowa farm boy was a real catch for the Army motor pool. Look, I'll be honest--I didn't think he had a ghost of a chance. He'd never used a keyboard, never filled in a balloon with a #2 pencil. How on earth was he going to pass? No way.

More angst. Should he even try? Maybe it was time to read the handwriting on the wall and just quit driving, rather than go through the humiliation. He asked a friend of his, a retired cop, who told him simply to give it up, new Explorer or no new Explorer.

We honestly didn't know what he'd do or what to advise him.

He went in on Friday as told, called first to tell us he was going to take the test. He'd been studying that drivers book, and he figured he take his best shot. I would have bet most of what's down here in the basement against him.

By mid-afternoon, he called again. He was perfectly legal. He'd passed. Everything. Flying colors. Both tests--written and road. I'm not making this up.

Just one question wrong--in that whole test, he had just one question wrong! I couldn't have done that if I were locked in the courthouse alone with the answer book.

My father-in-law is legal. He can drive. Like I said, the magnitude of this weekend's events cannot be overstated. He passed. He had only one wrong.

"Now I can read something else for once," he said, when he told us.

Yes, you can, Dad. Yes, you can. Besides, check out the garage--you got a brand new used Explorer. Just don't hit that red button.

It's a story for the ages.

Sunday Morning Meds--"Shall not stand"

2011-12-04T05:27:00.001-06:00

“the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment”

We’ve been here before. That’s the immediate sense of this line, at least to me. A bit of de je’ vu. Of course, there’s good reason for this senseof having visited this site recently; verse two lists various assembles andcouncils, then insists that the righteous will having nothing of any of them.

The table is turned in verse five. Now it’s the ungodly who won’t stand in theassembly—in this case, in “the judgment.” There’s a rough kind of rationality in these verses, a justice thatbegins with a very logical “therefore” and then points specifically at a forumwhere the righteous will neither walk nor stand nor sit.

Comeuppance, maybe, a sharp sneer, shot full of barelydisguised just deserts.

It may seem derisive to try to pull such pettiness out ofGod’s word, but it seems to me that one of the blessings of the psalms is theirsimple humanity. These are God’s songs,but they tug at the heartstrings because the human heart is always the sourceof the music—and, lest we be deceived, the human heart isn’t always pure.

Here’s what seems to be going on. Therefore, given the fact that theunrighteous, the ungodly, are little more than chaff in a prairie wind, thepsalmist insists, they will not stand in the judgment. That’s the truth. Because they’ve not been planted by thewater’s side, they’ll eventually bend and break. You can count on it because really, there’snothing there. They will not stand.

To my ears, there’s a little righteous braying here, some“told-you-so” joy, a somewhat unholy laughter, the kind we feel when somehotshot takes a fall.

One of Oklahoma City bombers escaped the death penalty, andwhen some victims’ families were interviewed after the jury handed down thereprieve, what happened on the screen wasn’t pretty. Quite simply, they wanted the man skinned anddressed out for immediate slaughter. They wanted his hide.

And why not? Many ofthem have spent years mourning the horrible deaths of their loved ones in a madterrorist bombing. In too many OklahomaCity homes, ghosts still linger and the pain hasn’t been stanched from woundstoo deep for me to imagine. Who wouldn’twant a blood sacrifice?

Is that kind of revenge “right”? Is it “Christian”? Is it “moral”?

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I know this—theburning third for vengeance displayed by the families of those who perished inOklahoma City is sure as anything, altogether human.

And so is the sense of this verse. And so, the psalmist says, the ungodly will not stand. For the writer, I can’t help butthink—because I feel it in myself—that that line may have been written with aquill but was prompted by a crooked smile.

It’s not pretty, but it’s who we are. And he’s not wrong--God will judge.

But God alone.

Sioux County History V--the first sweet Fourth

2011-12-03T06:50:00.001-06:00

Even though they spoke nothing but Dutch, the original settlers of eastern Sioux County had actually been in this country for almost twenty years, having come to America with Dominie Scholte, who put down roots--with them--in Pella, south-central Iowa. They were American enough, at least, to take a day off from whatever settling work they were doing just to celebrate the Fourth of July, or so saith Charlie Dyke--and no other witnesses have come forward.

There couldn't have been more than a hundred people around at the time. Orange City itself was never orange, but in 1870 it was hardly a city either. But what Dyke so beautifically remembers is how a ripe gang of young people got themselves together for the holiday and created their own heart-thumping celebration. He doesn't say he was part of the gang himself, but he had to be--all you need to do is listen to his rhapsody and you just know he was there. He's writing some 60 years later or so, but there's still some steam in the engine.

Anyway, these kids hitched up some oxen and were off, bound to a swimming hole along the Floyd River, I'd guess. The prairie was bumpy back then, before breaking under the plow, and apparently the rumbly ride forced the gentlemen to hold the young ladies tightly so as to ensure their safety. Here's the way Charley Dyke says it: "Each girl seemed to appreciate this protection and felt much safer and protected in the arm of her hero and protector."

Snicker, snicker. I'm not sure there's some hint of submarine races here, but one can only imagine how precarious public messing around must have been in what could have seemed the straight-jacket of a Dutch Calvinist world, circa 1870, on the American frontier. Mr. Dyke has to measure his words righteously.

When this little party of cuddling patriots got to their appointed destination, they cut down saplings and created a teepee, Lakota style maybe, and then proceeded, Dyke says (reporting all of this as if it were a gossip column), to read aloud the great Declaration of Independence (someone lugged along a school book) and to sing "Marching Across Georgia" (the Civil War was just over, of course) and "America." See 'em?--nothing around but a sea of grass.

I think it's just darling, like a bunch of college kids on road trip--four or five couples on a bank above the Floyd River, singing "America." It's a cartoon, really, something out of Disney, a swill of patriotism in wooden shoes.

But Mr. Dyke says there's more--fishing and swimming and lunching on whatever delights they could pull from the languid flow of the Floyd.

And now listen, for old Charley, in the throes of his memory of this precious getaway, waxes most eloquent with the romance of the holiday. ". . .Still more delicious [than the fried fish!] was the communing of human spirits, with love as the minister, while breathing the perfume of wild roses that lined the banks, and violets that matted the low places, and listening to the music of birds in the trees." Look, in 1870, "love as the minister" was the next thing to heresy.

Not once does he admit he was among those kids, but I tell you, he had to have been there. Listen: "Cupid must have been concealed among the trees and the willows for unknown to them he shot at and so wounded several hearts that day that they refused to heal until another heart would beat in unison." That's both triumph and confession--it has to be. He had to have been one so struck. The man was there along the Floyd. He won't admit it, but we believe the teller, not the tale.

And more--something one might find in Willa Cather actually, had Willa ever been struck by one of cupid's arrow somewhere close to her beloved Republican River. Listen to Charley go on and on here: "And they played and lolled around until the setting sun cast great shadow bands across the sky and the whippoorwill began to call." And then this--he just can't stop himself because the reminiscence, some 60 years later, is just plain too perfect. He can hardly end the sentence--listen:

Then the oxen were again yoked to the wagon and a load of joyful young people drawn by the swaying oxen was seen coming over the hills with the full moon seeming as big as a wagon wheel hanging low in the sky behind it.

Charley Dyke had to be one of the revelers. He left a part of his heart there.

All of this was the very first Sioux County Fourth of July celebration--a little singing, a little patriotism, some fresh fried fish, and a good deal of cuddling, some of it at least around a teepee.

Here's what I think. The fireworks that very first Fourth never quite ended for Mr. Charley Dyke, Sioux County's first historian. You heard him. He had to have been there. His blessed wounded heart never forgot.
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All the anecdotes from "Sioux County History" have their origin in The Story of Sioux County (1942), by Mr. Charles L. Dyke, who--or so my mother-in-law used to say--more than occasionally played a little slippery with the facts. Maybe so.