Morning Thanks--and blessings

A few meetings scratched. No toilet paper--we're loaded anyway if you need a roll. No hamburger, but we buy quarters. On Monday, Fareway was out of eggs, but Barb says we're stocked. Sunday, like a million others, we did church from the couch. Went fine.

The gym is closed. That's a bummer. 

I'm sentenced to hours and hours at the keyboard, but two MAJOR projects would have me here anyway, even if a certain blooming suction-cupped virus weren't roaring about like a lunatic Sherman tank. We don't live in a major urban area, so the elbow room country life affords makes social distancing a breeze. 

Retired folks like us are in the cross hairs, I'm told, but, right now at least, our time and place leaves us pretty much untouched. I miss the gym. Badly. But to be honest, I can't think of another way in which I'm inconvenienced, as long as we don't somehow catch the dang bug. 

The fact is, this morning I'm right where I normally am, in the basement. The cat is out so the house is still. There's nothing beyond the big windows to my right but darkness and pinprick farm lights. There's barely any traffic on Hwy. 60. Trains pass unnoticed. If we wouldn't watch the news, it would be hard to imagine we're under siege.

But we are. All of us. 

We live, cheek by jowl, beside two colleges where life is a wild scramble. Yesterday, a Facebook friend/prof said after two hours of home schooling that she had determined the whole quarantined arrangement was not going to be sustainable. I wish I could help.

My grandson, with a furrowed brow, told his mother he was worried about us because he heard the elderly were in big trouble. 

Really, Ian, so far, so good. These elderly, at least, are just fine. Don't know that I'm ready for two long months, but we're blessed.

This morning I'm thankful for Dr. Fauci, and thousands of others who carry the burden of getting the rest of us out there beyond the curve, the doctors and scientists who dare to tell us what we need to hear and see and do, experts who explain how we can arrive safely once again at nothing more or less than ordinary life. Oh, yes, and nurses--my word, nurses--who every hour of every day smile at those of us who aren't safe-and-sound.

Blessings for the journey. 

Morning Thanks--our inescapable needs

What Keo remembers is lines of people outside his father's door, each of them awaiting some a special blessing. His father, he says, was an animist, practiced at the art of giving people some hope in their despair. In the broadest sense, his father was a religious man, someone who dealt in faith. 

You would like to woo that beautiful young woman?--let me dish up some potion, something very special because under its influence, she's will follow you anywhere. He'd reach for a vial or prescribe a herb or root. Keo watched his father deal in faith, watched his father's art, a kind of witch doctor, and he rolled his eyes.

His mother didn't buy it either, oddly enough. She was also "religious," a devout Buddhist, who was thrilled when her son, just eight years old, went off to the temple to become a monk. There he wore the orange robe, off the shoulder, like all the others, spent four years as a monastic, four years learning his mother's Buddhist faith.

But he listened to his father when his father told him he had leave, had to cross the Mekong River, and get to safety in Laos. His father knew war. His father said it would just be a matter of time before the army would grab him, jam a gun in his hands, and send him into the jungle. To fight military conscription the witch doctor had no special potion. 

So Keo left. He was not yet 16 years old. When he did leave, his mother cried. She did more than cry, she wept. She followed him, wetting the road to the river with her tears as she begged him to stay. There's a moment in Keo's telling of his life story that stops him, the moment when, following the direction of a father, he leaves his mother weeping behind him as he sets off to another country and another world. 

His mother is gone now, but that moment he can't help remember without emotion--his mother's grief, his mother's sadness at her son's leaving.

Some wondrous moments in people's lives are alike despite the incredible reach of our vast national and cultural differences.

It would take him years to find a different religion. It would take years for him to find a story that promised the Messiah; it would take the testimony of a man who became a friend, a man who persisted in his claims about a God of love and peace, who was willing to spend hours with him, filling him with a kind of love he'd never thought existed. It would take him some time to become a Christian believer. But he got there.

Last night he told his story again. No one else in that room had a parent who practiced strange magic, no one else in that room ever donned an off-the-shoulder orange sarong and spent four years in a temple learning Buddhism. None of the Euro-Americans in attendance ever crossed the Mekong under the cover of darkness.

But strangely enough, just about everyone in that room, somewhere along the line, became convinced that there is a redeemer, and that that Messiah offers is unique--love, "the greatest of these."

This morning's thanks are for the delightful mysteries of faith, how it is we can be so incredibly different as human beings and yet, at base, so much the same in our undeniable need of deliverance.

Morning Thanks--Home

Double brat, Charcoal Inn, Sheboygan

What's cute, but futile is how some foreigners try to make hard rolls. You can buy them most anywhere, I think, even from WalMart; but if you're going to pick up a dozen from them, wait a day and buy them half-off because what you'll take home are really not hard rolls. I'm not trying to be arrogant. Arrogance is arrogance; truth is truth. Some people do simply know better, and most of them are from Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, a place I still can call home. 

Check out the video some time to see a master chef turn out crusty gold. No techie has figured out how to connect smells to video, but when they do they really ought to start with a Sheboygan County bakery--right here, in fact, where the vowels in every word spoken are dragged into dipthongs to produce that lingual mess, Sheboyganese--not lake as in lake but la-yak is in la-yak. Listen and learn.

Listen to Mr. Navis here, watch him with his precious loads of fresh bread, check out the hard rolls--available only here--and then determine when you can get in a quick trip. Great golf, great brats, once-in-a-lifetime hard rolls, colorful language and--oh, yeah, how can I forget: La-yak Michigan. 

World's best cheddar too, preferably from the factory in Gibbsville. 

Look, Florida's fine, mid-winter. But a Sheboygan brat on a Sheboygan hard roll and January cold's no bother at all.

This morning, I'm thankful for home. Got to get there again.

Morning Thanks--Baby, it's cold outside

I don't remember it ever happening before out here in the country. It must have. It's minus-12 degrees right now, maybe for the first time this winter (btw, not bad for mid-February). It didn't wake me up--I was already a works in process; and it didn't scare me like it used to in the old house, where I swear it used to happen more often.

Who knows?--maybe old roof beams freeze more quickly than new ones. That's a theory. Anyway, it used to happen more, which prompts old-man glories, the kind that begin with a harrumph and end by making old days-claims that make old farts sound heroic.

But then, who knows?--all that snowbanks-up-to-the-telephone-wires stuff may have some currency--global warning these days, you know.

Anyway, it's weird or strange, even a bit frightening when suddenly something upstairs--we have no upstairs--cracks like a gunshot. Joists aren't really supposed to make noise. There's moisture in 'em, I suppose, and when that moisture freezes, it makes 'em pop, bang, crack.

It's a winter thing, and unless it scares the women and the horses, you just put up with it.

Still. Yucch. Baby, it's cold outside.

Always puts me in mind of the band that used to make camp just up river a ways, where the Floyd twists around from an overall southerly course to flow southeast and then, after a hairpin, straight west. Right there, on the bank where the river turns on a dime, my imagination sets a half-dozen tipis straight out of yesteryear.

About them, I worry, even though they have no joists in the roof and they've been gone since the winter of 1823 or so. But how did they do it? Seriously, how did they make do in this kind of winter--and, given global warning, even far colder winters? 

Like all of us, I suppose, they hunkered down, didn't try to do much but stay under buffalo robes. Chances are, they'd be out west somewhere, if not in the Black Hills, at least in the cottonwoods along the Big Sioux, where the temps would be just as wearying, but at least the wind wouldn't take your face off. You could find a spot at Oak Grove, somewhere off one of those steep river hills. Wouldn't be pleasant exactly, but you wouldn't be in the middle of it.

But this isn't the early 19th century, and right behind me as we speak there's a furnace purring out warm air, not enough to keep the roof from sounding alarm, but far more than we need to stay comfy down here, minus-20 or whatever out there. 

Beneath me is a heated floor, too, a wonder and a blessing. And, when the sun comes up, I'll make coffee, then flick a switch to light the fireplace. Yes, it's gas.

Don't let Minnesotans fool you--there's no great joy in Upper Midwestern winters, and thirty-below really doesn't keep out the riff-raff either. 

I'm not a tinkerer, even less of a handyman. I don't know a thing about our furnace but this salient fact--it's running, thank the Lord. It's running.

Shelter is fundamental, right?--like food and clothing. You got to have it. 

But it's not a given. We got it 24/7 x 365. But this morning especially, when the joists are popping, I'm thankful--really, really thankful. 

Morning Thanks--Where is thy sting?

In another day and another time, the buildings crowded on the block made all kinds of sense. The school's own precious history makes clear that once upon a time the staff was entirely religious: "The Sisters of St. Francis of Dubuque arrived the next year [1888] and had primary responsibility for the education of parish children through the 1950's - with as many as 24 sisters serving at one time." The sisters are long gone, but an admirable convent is still there, no more than a block away. 

I'm sure that way-back-when, no one thought twice about crowding buildings. Determining that the school would occupy the very same block as the church never raised an eyebrow. Made good economic sense. Created community.

I'd never been there before--been to town but never to the church. I wanted in because I wanted to see--and photograph--an icon, a religious statue, a carving people are rightly proud of. But when I drove up--from miles away, that wonderful tower is impossible to miss--a perfect row of cars stood all the way around the church. Had to be a funeral.

It was close to noon. I had other places to go and times to get there. I thought about stopping later, on my way home, but I gambled, thinking what I thought to be a funeral would be over soon. I drove around town for ten minutes, no more, headed back and saw cars backing out onto streets. Bells tolled. Some of those cars lined up right there in front of school, lights on, in a January processional that would lead to the graveyard south of town.

That old school looks formidable, doesn't it?--so very early-20th century. I don't know it's age; the school's website, like most people I know, chooses not to bring it up. It's a proud old building with a proud tradition, I'm sure, in an old Iowa town and region chock-full of Catholics.

The thing is, that old school doesn't appear to have much for a playground but the apron of grass--and snow--that is the wide front yard of the church. When the funeral was over, the kids--lots of them and all of them little--were at recess. Once I pulled into an open parking space and waited for funeral-goers to step warily down the church's front steps, there I sat, as if at a pageant. I couldn't help thinking what I was witnessing was an unlikely juxtaposition of nothing less than life and death.

Fourth-grade boys were passing a football out there in that snow, playing some kind of keep-away, that ball squirting out of their hands time and time again, getting wet and cold in a way I remembered sixty years ago myself. All around them and even though them, old men and women made their stuttering way to parked cars and the solemn processional that would lead to the cemetery.

All those kids yelling and laughing, passing a football amid tolling bells--football and funeral. I googled the name of the funeral home. The deceased was a woman, 82 years old, who'd done the books for her husband's construction outfit. The obit makes clear what is always true--she will be missed.

What I couldn't help but see in front of me was no still life, the town around me no longer just a town but a community formed in a circle of life.

I've seen ancient faces light up an old folks home when some darling two-year-old marches by munching a cookie. I know the radiant appeal of childhood to those farthest beyond.

And I shouldn't speak for the deceased. I never knew her, but I can't help believing that if she had any sense at all of the joyful play of all those children at recess at the very moment her mortal coil was bound to mother earth, her soul couldn't help but smile.

I waited a couple minutes. Watched it happen. Then walked up those steps and into the church. It was beautiful, still decorated the Christmas.

Morning Thanks--"Siouxland"

The Sioux people before European immigration

We owe the word, I'm told, to Frederick Manfred, who claimed--in my hearing, in fact--that he was the one who came up with the name, now widely used. It always seemed to me that "Siouxland" didn't deserve the appellation because, well, as long as I lived in the area I never once ran into someone of Native Sioux extraction. 

Which is not to say there weren't any Sioux people around--just not in my circles. Therefore, when I identify with the name, I can't help feeling a little bit of a carpetbagger because this land didn't really belong to me, despite the fact that my own great-grandparents lived here (and elsewhere) and are buried in good Siouxland soil. 

We are, of course, some distance east of what once was Yankton Sioux country, but only a river away--"the Big Sioux." In fact, the Yankton Reservation (land "reserved" for Yankton tribal members) is still just a bit of jaunt west. 

But if you look at the map, the boundaries of the Sioux tribal people do not extend into Iowa or Minnesota. And while no Native peoples are sentenced to live their lives on their varied reservations, the general areas of the region are still (somewhat) in place. This is a map of the Sioux people, those who shared a language (roughly) before Euro-Americans such as my own ancestors decided somewhere in a land far away that there was opportunity here--for the asking.  . .

And often, for the taking--Charles Ingalls, for example, who, in Kansas, simply drove his family onto Osage land, threw up some sod for a wall, and refused to move, something it seems Michael Landon would have never done. So much for history.

Whether Mr. Manfred stole the title or not, we do live in a somewhat recognizable region, southwest Minnesota being nothing at all like the rest of the land of 10,000 lakes, eastern South Dakota notably more verdant than most of the rest of the place, northwest Iowa being so far from state powers out east that we often seems to DesMoines like inhabitants of some faraway and unnamed planet. 

So, regardless of whether or not we stole the name, somehow it fits, even if, by definition, what the word describes makes no sense. Somehow the region requires some kind of special mention because it is, let it be said, despite its geographical uniqueness, one of the richest agricultural regions on the continent. 

That's why I use it too--the title of Siouxland, even though I will forever tip my hat to those who were here before we were, the people whose name we've adopted. We are, really, a separate place.

This morning's thanks is for the awkward designation, despite its deception and despite the fact that my spellchecker still leaves it red-lined because unrecognizable. 

It's not. We live here, in Siouxland, a home for which I'm thankful.

Morning Thanks--Grudgingly--forgive me!

I tan easily. What can I say?

Lots of my friends with pinker skin have trotted off to the scalpel time and time again. Some make scheduled visits and come home with polka dots. Me? I tan easily.

No matter. Seven years ago I too had a forever open pimple-like thing cut out of my cheek in an operation that left me stitched and ugly for a couple of weeks. All of that's history, but yesterday, once again, I went under the knife in a two-minute operation and walked out of the office holding a Kleenex up to a schnoz that only Rudolf would like. I hate to be Scrooge-ish, but walking around with a banged-up nose during the holidays should get me the part.

No, I'm not pictured above. I used something nice because I'm not doin' a selfie. No way.

I'm 71 years old. For heaven's sake, tomorrow I could have a stroke (I've already had one) that would lay me out in some hospital bed, diapered. Today, I got a hole in my nose. Big frickin' deal, right? 

Here's how it is I pay homage to one of Calvinism's old saws--total depravity. In a thousand ways, I could look and feel much, much worse. In a matter of a couple weeks, this Rudolf schtick will be long gone. If I stop off at Prairie Ridge Home this morning, I could walk into a dozen rooms and find real live human beings, some not much older than I am, who wouldn't know me from the shaggy dog that runs around the place. What I'm saying is, I thought it bad when I had no shoes until. . .well, you know.

I know all that. I know I should be thankful, but I'm way up tight about a hole in my nose that's there, remember, because a guy with a scalpel cut away living tissue identified as. . .drum roll please. . .C-A-N-C-E-R. Granted this variety is quite docile, but the truth is there in all caps anyway--this minor, minor surgery delivered me from honest-to-goodness evil. 

And I'm thankful. Or should be. 

I am. 

Really. 

Sort of.

I didn't put a selfie up top here, not because of your pain upon seeing that bloody hole in my nose but because my pain in being seen would only bring me more pain. Somewhere in that mess is total depravity. Mine. 

"Vanity, vanity, all is vanity"--I can even quote scripture. I know what's in me, but I can't help it. I can't. (That's Paul, isn't it?)

Woe and woe and woe. 

Of the thousands of blog posts on Stuff in the Basement, hundreds end with morning thanks because all of this started with a line from Garrison Keillor you can still read up on top this page--how the world would be a better place if every last one of us would take a moment to thank the Lord for something every day. Over the years, for better or worse, I've slowly wandered from that theme, but I still return to it and will again today. Or try. Here goes. 

This morning's thanks is for the doctor who yesterday rid me of the little spot of skin cancer, right on the tip of my nose. I'm greatly thankful it's gone, but I wish I didn't have the hole.

And now, to show you just how thankful I am--consider it penance if you're Catholic--I'm going to appear out from the cover of darkness this morning. Here I am, black and white--Scrooge.

Merry Christmas. (And yes, I know my t-shirt is inside out.) 

Morning Thanks--Those who bring love

The young mom has family in our church, so when the accident happened, the seriousness of that young mom's injuries, and those of her little girl, climbed immediately to the top of the church's prayer list. After all, their injuries were burns, serious burns, third-degree burns, the kind that can take months to heal, if they do.

They have, but the healing won't be over for some time, so the rigors of therapy, begun maybe a week or so after the accident, continue. Yesterday, in church, a woman rose to say that this week the little girl was going to be visited by a social worker specially trained and experienced in doing what needs to be accomplished in the little girl's life right now.

She's four, I believe. I don't know how badly scarred she might be, but, given the seriousness of the injuries, it's impossible not to believe her life's journey won't be marked by what happened to her one day in the car. 

What is clear, or so we were told, was that at least one hand has no fingers, a fact the little girl hasn't really noticed yet because of the preponderance of bandaging she's had on her little hands and body ever since the accident. Sometime this week, maybe this morning, some of that bandaging will be removed--a good sign; but, for the first time, that little girl will note that the fire that nearly took her life did take her fingers. That trained and experienced counselor will walk into her room and into her life and, lovingly, try to explain to that child--four years old--that she can learn how to live without fingers. 

The requests for intercessory prayer is a much beloved part of worship at our church, even though there are times, like yesterday, when the stories behind the petitions can obliterate almost anything else that happens before or after. What's apparent with every word I've typed into this white space is that's exactly what happened to me yesterday: the most compelling moment of the service was a scene that hasn't yet happened, but will this week, maybe today. 

The sermon was terrific--something out of Romans. But the picture in my psyche features a social worker, man or woman, who knows how to talk to four-year-olds. Valiantly and tenderly, she accomplishes a job no one would really want to do. In my imagination it's a video, but there is no sound because I can't begin to imagine what I would say. I don't know the words. Even if I did, I don't think I'd be capable of saying them.

Down below my google page this morning, a little banner flashes symbols and thanks. Here it is, unmoving.

I snipped the line when the icon happened to be a stethoscope--it could have been a police hat or a fireman's helmet. Just so happens our son is a fireman. With him in a station, I'm more conscious of what we owe to our first responders than I'd been for most of my life.

But yesterday, and still this morning, I can't help but think about some man or woman, a kind of "first responder" in her own right, someone I don't know, who will walk into a hospital room and look at a badly burned little girl and smile, broadly, convincingly, then try to find a loving way into her four-year-old apprehension to let that child know she's very much alive and very much capable of doing just about anything.

This morning's thanks are for all our first responders, including our son, and also those nurses and aids in a million old folks homes, not to mention a host of hospice workers whose job it is to stand and sit with men and women who are leaving this life for the next. Last week, with a toughened smile, a nursing home worker told me that by her count she'd lost 77 patients. But then, no patient leaves that home alive.

But this morning especially, I'm thankful for a merciful someone who very soon will talk to a badly burned little girl about life without fingers, yet another of the servants all around us sworn to bring home nothing less than love.

Morning Thanks--Best Friends

I’m not sure where she found them, but leave it to my granddaughter to discover things in our house, things she can use or would like to. Jocelyn may well have a better sense for where my stuff is—even here in the basement—than I do.

Her mother was no different. I remember my mother-in-law, out on the farm, deliberately asking her granddaughter—then eight or nine or ten—where something was, maybe a serving plate, because, she’d say, little Andrea would know.

As does her daughter. Is that genetic?

Anyway, Jocelyn found these cards her grandmother probably lugged home purposefully, then promptly forgot to give away when the kids came. Lo and behold, she freed them from whatever junk drawer dungeon held them.

Immediately, she went to work. She once told her mother—she was no more than seven years old—that she didn’t have to clean up after her multitudinous projects because, well, she was an artist. I’m not sure that appraisal cemented any kind of bond betwixt mother and child, despite similar genetic codes.

But Jocey found ‘em, a whole ton of cards, then came up with a magic marker and began to address them, alphabetically, to her friends.

Just one of the joys of childhood is spontaneity, I guess, because once the card thing got old—maybe ten minutes later, they were abandoned, some of them dutifully addressed.

So when she and her brothers left that day and the dust had settled, I picked up after her, not being an artist myself and therefore sadly subject to Adam’s fall. Maybe a half dozen were addressed, but three even had messages. The first one—to Brianna—said, “Thank you for being my best friend.”

Now it doesn’t take much for my granddaughter to sweep me off my feet, so I thought that was just darling, even a little saintly.

Then I opened the second—to Makala—which said, “Thank you for being my best friend.”
Okay.

You can guess the third. Three sweet little cards to three best friends.

Is it any wonder why Jesus just loved kids? Sheesh. Wouldn’t I like to go back to a time when I could, in haloed innocence, repeat a single, stand-alone superlative three times over? I’ve seen sin in six-months-old kids, but I honestly don’t think that Ms. Jocey had any sense that what she’d written was duplicitous. She doesn’t even know the word. Of course, she is my only granddaughter.

She’s going into fourth grade this week*. I’ll give her this year—at best—in which she can get away with that kind of overdraft , and then, sadly enough, it’s the end of childhood, I suppose, and she becomes ineligible to sit on Jesus’s knee with the rest of the squirts.

But really--still. . .cute, eh? My goodness. When you're a kid you get three best friends.

Grandpa speaking, of course.

And that’s my morning thanks.
________________________

*Jocelyn is now a college freshman, and this little meditation is nine years old. For the record, I should mention also that she is no longer our only granddaughter. Times change :), for which we're thankful too.

Morning Thanks--Last night's performance

I know it's awkward of me to say it, but I have had far more than my share of successes as a performer in my three-score-and-ten. After helping Diet Eman tell her story in print (Things We Couldn't Say), I created a readers theater presentation out of all that courage and perseverance, a presentation that toured widely in 1995, fifty years after the liberation of the camps in World War II.

After writing Our Family Album, a book about the Christian Reformed Church, I thought I could do the same thing--and did, bringing that story to the stage, the story of the denomination of which I've been a part ever since I was born--and before, if I calculate time by one of the CRC's staid old doctrines, the doctrine of "the covenant." 

I created a show for the 50th anniversary of Dordt College (now University) that also toured widely and featured videoed stories of eight specially chosen alums. I've read my own stories time and time again, throughout the U.S. and Canada. 

If my eyes and heart can be trusted, then I'll hazard this judgement: a ton of those readings and performances were greatly successful. If I sound like I'm tooting my own horn, I guess I am. I'm sorry. At 71 years old, I don't think it's a sin to do a little self-reflection.

I say all of that for a reason. Last night before a crowd in our church, five readers and I staged an unique performance that, if my instincts can be trusted, was wonderfully received (emphasis on wonder).   

A friend of mine from Vermont told me that I'd like Benjamin Myers' book of poems, Black Sunday, a series of sonnets (all all things!) that tell stories of the Dust Bowl, right there in "no man's land," a triangle of horrors cut from Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, where that terrible Sabbath day will never be forgotten. 

I took Myers's book of poems from the package and read it, cover to cover, the only time in my life I've ever done that with any book. That recommendation was true. The stories Myers tells are heartfelt alive, brittle with the kind of electrical charge that arose from all that dust. To me, remembrances of the people who speak in that book were beautiful, but dark--very dark, as was the time. Many thousands left--Steinbeck tells their stories. 

I sent out a few emails to people I know to tell them I thought Black Sunday was an amazing work, powerfully moving, dark as a dust cloud but never quite hopeless against the wide Great Plains sky, then decided to try it, to put it up on stage for people to hear and see.

We planted an old hymn right in the middle of the performance, a hymn begun by a school teacher, who simply starts, wearily, to sing the first quiet verse of "Leaning on the Everylasting Arms." For a moment, she's all by herself, singing quietly, thoughtfully, to no one but herself. She's trying to raise some hope. On the chorus the rest of us on stage joined her, in a testimony that's also inescapably a lament. 

We'd recruited a pair of wonderful singers. When they joined in, the crowd began to understand that they too could help, all of it a capella. Something happened just then: somewhere in the back, people stood to sing with her, with us. Slowly, the rest of the crowd got to their feet as well. No one asked them to rise, no one gave any sign that we wanted them on their feet. No one up front ever thought they would, but on their own they did--they got to their feet as if helping the schoolteacher with the courage to face the deprivations of her life in "no man's land."

That moment was almost heavenly. To me at least it signified that those who attended were on a perfect pitch with the emotional heart of the poems the cast were reading. The crowd became a part of the story. I've experienced far more than my share of beautiful moments in dramatic performances, but this one was extraordinary, and pure blessing. 

On the way out, as the cast walked through the crowd, a boy, a little boy, looked at the schoolteacher, and gave her a thumbs up as if to say he'd loved it. I've had standing ovations that weren't as precious. 

We live in a culture that doesn't really value history much. The great American Dream cares not a lick for yesterday. When people lose those yesterdays, we call the condition senility. Black Sunday is a chapter in our history we forget at our jeopardy. 

The great value of history, someone said, is that it tells us what we've done and therefore what we are.

This morning I'm thankful for Benjamin Myers wonderful book, for our attempt to put it on stage, and for the blessings which understanding ourselves affords.
_________________________ 
Listen to a Small Wonder from KWIT, public radio in Sioux City, Iowa, a short essay about the Dust Bowl and Benjamin Myers's book. 

Morning Thanks--Sunday walk on a farm pond

Nothing really to commend the place. A farm pond, little more; wind--loads of it; and just a touch of fall. Some lucky folks, yesterday, hundreds of miles away, stood beside Niagara or looked up or down from the Tetons. Here, just outside of town, it was just me, an azure sky, and few dancing milkweeds around a farm pond.  

Unremitting rains have kept the world emerald, but here and there a few broken yellows suggested the cruelty of passing seasons.

The sun poured down on the open fields of grass, but no one stood still in reverence because wind laid siege to everything. Wind was the whole Sabbath story. 

Sometimes beauty parades before us; we don't need to look to find it, sit in wonder because we simply can't stand. I'll bet the red rocks of New Mexico were stunning yesterday, the woods up north exploding with color. Me?--I spent an hour or so in wind, walking around a farm pond amid wildly dancing prairie grasses doing everything they could simply to stand.

But I'm not complaining, not at all, not with Mary Oliver in my ear.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.* 

Here and there, a milkweed pod, like a Lakota chief, bravely facing the wind. 

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.** 

Also, Mary Oliver. 

For whom, this morning, I'm thankful. 
___________________________ 
*"Sometimes"
**"To Begin with, the Sweet Grass"

Morning Thanks--What's happening at Academy

Out in the middle of nowhere, the old white frame building is all that remains of a heart-felt dream that, as an answer to prayer, opened its doors in 1893 to frontier kids who wanted the kind of education not otherwise available in the Dakota Territories before the turn of the century. 

A monument stands proudly out front, a tribute to the dreamer, the Rev. Mr. Lewis E. Camfield, a relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson actually, fellow abolitionist, and almost as much a transcendental visionary. The Reverend Camfield put legs beneath that vision and determined he’d make a Christian education available to pioneer kids who, with their hopeful families, were still streaming into the open country, ex-reservation land, all around.

One day in 1892, Camfield and a friend were out among the sodbusters of Charles Mix County, collecting donations for the education of black children in the American South. At the end of the day, when they tallied the purse, they were amazed--they had twenty dollars. They were thrilled.

That’s when they came up with the idea: if a hundred dirt-poor farmers and would-be ranchers could cough up that kind of money for needy kids a thousand miles away, shouldn’t it be possible to create a preparatory school that would serve their own children right here? 

So the Reverend Mr. Camfield said he’d try, and just a year later, Ward Academy opened its doors to 23 students. In a few years, the place had admirable facilities and close to 150 students. Tuition—nine months’ worth—was nothing to sneeze at--$100. Most kids worked on the grounds and the farm the school created to pay off that daunting bill.



In 1911, when the enrollment hit an all-time high of 148 students, Warren Hall was built, an edifice three stories high—and a basement--that cost in total $20,000. Be sure, Warren Hall was, “commodius,” or so the Reverend Camfield himself described it. All the modern conveniences--a common dining hall, an assembly room, an office, and two dormitories—one for women, the other for teachers.

The broad prairie around Academy, Charles Mix County, South Dakota, is so flat and wide people like to say you can watch your dog run away for three days in any single direction. Amid that kind of land, try to imagine sky-scraping Warren Hall, a three-story monster, tall and formidable as a battleship, a fortress for Christian education amid eternal land and sky. 

For a time, Ward Academy, on the Great Plains of South Dakota, must have seemed, in its hustle and bustle, a purposefully clear and direct answer to L. E. Canfield’s fervent prayer: it was “velvet in a rugged new land of burlap green,” one old local history calls it, way out there, 27 miles from the nearest railroad.

Today, what’s left is a one old building with that sits up on a knoll as if still proclaiming the importance of higher education. Ward Academy hasn’t seen a student in years. Thirty-nine years after its energetic birth, Ward Academy shut its doors. It was 1931—the DustBbowl, the Depression, end of story.



Today, out front, a wide stone memorial commends and memorializes the diligence, the vision, and the commitment of the Camfields:  “To the memory of Dr. Lewis E. and Ella Woodman Camfield, founders of Ward Academy at this site in 1893, [who] dedicated their lives to the building of Christian character through church and school.”

The school is gone, but what's left is a church, not a mega.

Still, all of this is more than a little daunting to someone like me, who has spent most of his adult years at yet another small educational institution not all that far east. I’ve stopped at Academy every so often in the last decade or so to pay respects. To me, something about the place is richly haunted.

Stopped by again last week, wanted to get a picture of that monument. When I drove around the back, guess what's there?

That's new lumber. There's a ladder on the ground. Somebody's working. Somebody's keeping the place alive. 

That morning--and this--all that new lumber is good cause for morning thanks.

Morning Thanks--The Purple Church

It's purple. Well, these days, some twenty years of Dakota sun later, St. Charles Church may well look a little pink; but originally it was purple, an actual purple church. May well be the only one in the world, at least the only one I know of, an honest-to-goodness purple church, St. Charles on the St. Francis Mission, SD. 

Wasn't always. It was built in 1886 with funds provided, in large part, from the gift of St. Katharine Drexel of Philadelphia, heir to her father's banking fortune, who dedicated that fortune and her life to helping people and was sainted by Pope John Paul II in 1987, a century after St. Charles of St. Francis was constructed. 

If Father Pierre-Jean De Smet had worn a fitbit, his mileage would have been out of this world, so traveled was he throughout the American West of the 1840s.  Although he didn't set up an altar at St. Francis, his influence among the Lakota people was significant enough to prompt the Rosebud Lakota people to take note. Years later, their handsome, barrel-chested chief, Spotted Tail, on a visit to Washington in the 1870s, told President Rutherford B. Hayes, "My children, all of them, would like to learn how to talk English. They would like to  learn how to read and write. . . I would like to get Catholic priests. Those who wear black robes." 

In 1881, a subsequent Rosebud headman, Two Strike, asked the "black robes," the Jesuits, to start a school, so they did, dedicating a building in 1886, that first school financed by Katharine Drexel, a school the locals called Sapa Un Ti, or "where the black robes live."

St. Francis Mission's footprint on the reservation is significant. Not only did it establish education among Spotted Tail's folks, today it includes suicide prevention and alcohol and drug abuse recovery programs. But all of that has started, here, with the purple church.

Officially, the purple church is named St. Charles Borromeo Church of St. Francis, which is a mouthful. While it's a noble to hold to a name, in this case, St. Charles Borromeo's own history is so far away in time and place that it's easy to understand how that last name simply disappeared. A 16th century cardinal and Archbishop of Milan, Borromeo is officially a saint, but his clashes with Protestantism were neither saintly nor bloodless, which undoubtedly makes his story of little relevance to a people whose history includes Little Big Horn and a sea of white people moving in. Among the Lakota, there much call for knowing more about the theological terrors of the post-Reformation era in Italy and Switzerland. 

So the name is gone, mostly. And in the little Catholic Academy that's now run out of St. Francis mission, every noon lunch begins with prayer. But it also begins with a plate set with food that will not be eaten but instead left our for those not present, the old ones and others who have gone, an old Lakota ritual meant to honor the ancestors. I'm not at all sure how comfortable St. Charles Borromeo would have been with that such pagan symbolism. 

But the purple church has had to adapt, to change, to bring itself into the world it occupies on the reservation. It has had to stop telling people how to live and to start listening to what good things were all around, to speak less and listen more.

But why purple? Is there some symbolism or something? 

I'm told that it all started in a summer bible school, when one of the priests simply asked the kids a relevant question. "So we've got to paint the church," he told them. "What color do you think the church should be."

Some kid said purple. 

It's that simple. That's why today St. Charles at St. Francis is a purple church. Thanks be to God.

Morning Thanks--a Calvinist heritage

It's an age-old ritual: before worship, the consistory meets to pray for what is about to happen, to pass along whatever news is current--who needs prayer and the Lord's good mercy. My wife is an elder now, so we go to church a bit earlier than we did, maybe five minutes--they don't meet long.  

I could mill around the back of the church, but I take a seat. There's very little solemnity before worship in church these days. Few sit in silence, as most did once upon a time. Friendly chatter fill the air.

A month ago, I grabbed a book from a library outside the sanctuary--books yours for taking. This one looked noble: 365 Days with Calvin, meditations from the theology of a man whose name is baked into my life's heritage. I am a Calvinist--I fully and unequivocally accept that, for better and for worse. I'm Calvinist in predilection, and not necessarily by choice. I think and feel and perceive in ways formed unmistakably by a worldview that is, whether I like it or not, shaped by John Calvin.

I read the Institutes of the Christian Religion when I thought of myself as being as far away from its influence as I could go. In graduate school it became clear to me that I lived in the august Reformer's shadow even though I'd never read a word of his before, heard about him often but never read a page. Even though I hadn't, I came to recognize I couldn't escape the fact that I was somehow "of him."

I read The Institutes as a scholar, not an apologist. I read it to discover what all the fuss was about. I read Calvin when I couldn't help knowing that I understood Jonathan Edwards in ways the other graduate students could not--and wouldn't hope to. That was true of Melville and Dickinson too, of Thoreau and Emerson. 

So a month ago I picked up 365 Days with Calvin before taking my seat in the sanctuary. There's no librarian. The books are free--just bring 'em back when you're finished and add your own. I grabbed 365 and opened it to yet another story.


365 Days with Calvin was once a gift from Cornerstone URC consistory to someone named Kara, who, I'm guessing, "joined the church," made a public profession of faith.

I was thrilled--honestly--to think that somewhere in the neighborhood was a church who thought enough of its kids and its heritage to get Calvin's own words in their hands. 

I couldn't believe it. That Cornerstone church adds URC to its name means it willfully took itself out of the church family I'm a part of, largely for reasons that have to do with my wife being, at that moment, a woman elder in the church consistory. That church wouldn't think of ours as a friend. 

No matter. I thought both book and story wonderful.  I read the first meditation, which argues that God is light; he created light, but he was light before there was any, Calvin says. Loved it. Isn't that a great thought? I was sure we'd love 365. We'd just finished a book of meditations by Eugene Peterson, and finding good stuff isn't particularly easy. I took it home.

It didn't last a week. Listen to this, from Day 7:

Should anyone object that this passage proves that God respects works in saving men, the response is that this is not repugnant to gratuitous acceptance, since God accepts those gifts which he himself has conferred upon his servants. 

Too often the prose is really muddy yet full of sharp object; too often we simply couldn't wade through it. Didn't take a week, and we quit.

The book's binding makes it look read. I'd like to believe Kara, likely a teenager, went all the way through and have no reason to believe she didn't.  And I'm still thrilled there's a church around here who thinks enough of its own theological heritage to suggest to its kids--by way of a gift--that they need to understand something I had to walk away from in order to treasure. 

So I'm still a Calvinist, will always be, for better or worse. One of these Sundays, when my wife is praying with the elders, I'll put 365 back where someone else may pick it up. I wish it weren't so.

But I'm thankful for the book I'm returning, thankful whether or not it was the blessing I thought it would be--and thankful for elders who challenge their children and pray for them. 

This morning and every morning I'm thankful also for a legacy of Calvinist theology that is almost ritually scorned, even by devout fellow believers, a heritage I will honestly hold dear for as long as I live. 

Morning Thanks--Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

I don't know how exactly--or who--told me I had to read Beloved. I do remember having a single copy of three Toni Morrison novels--one of them was Song of Solomon--on my shelf, but I hadn't read it by 1987, when Beloved was published. My guess is that when it won the Pulitzer, I picked it up, hardcover. Beloved got amazing press right from the start.

Some time later, Christianity Today asked me to write up a list of my favorite novels, a perfectly impossible task. Listing favorite novels is like listing favorite children--it simply can't be done. What I mean is, no book I've read recently is as memorable, as Educated, the memoir by a woman born into a tormented family, a book I'd never, ever call "a favorite." I loved The Comfort Bird, the story of two Frisian families, only one of whom immigrated to America. I loved it because I felt as if I was in it. But I don't know that I'd ever call it "my favorite novel."

Toni Morrison's Beloved is a searing story about slavery, even though it's set in Ohio, north of the Mason-Dixon, some years after the Emancipation Proclamation. At the heart of things is Sethe, a runaway slave mother who seemingly left the horrors behind, but never could. She spent her years of freedom as haunted by "the schoolteacher," her slave master, as she was by the child she murdered with her own hands when she determined that death was preferable to slavery. Beloved employs the supernatural--ghosts speak from the recesses of Lethe's haunted memories and the very heart of her guilty soul.

All of that sounds perfectly awful, I'm sure. But great literature--and I'm thinking of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead here too--creates characters of such moment that they continue to haunt a reader long after the final page, as does Toni Morrison's Sethe. When a novel takes you so deeply into a character's heart and soul, into her very humanity, that character takes on a life of his or her own--and so it is with Beloved.

The character Toni Morrison names as "Beloved" seems an embodied ghost of the child Sethe had murdered rather than have her live as a slave. That character or memory or ghost is not only difficult but a powerful and a sometimes undeniably evil force.

When finally she leaves, Sethe is heartbroken. "She was my best thing," she tells Paul D, her sometimes companion who has also suffered the horrors of slavery. And then comes the most beautiful line, a final line that shines bright as eternity from the darkness of the novel, when Paul D says, "You your best thing, Sethe."

There's lots of Beloved that's no longer fresh in my memory, but that last life-affirming line I took home.

Years ago, I watched Alex Haley's Roots and therewith began to take a deliberate look at my own heritage and history. I've never read Uncle Tom's Cabin, but I'm well aware of how that novel opened eyes that had long been closed tight before. But Beloved is something else altogether, as primary to an understanding of slavery as Sophie's Choice is to the Holocaust.


To me, Morrison's Beloved is the book about slavery and its shameful horrors. If you want to understand the legacy of slavery, read it. It's not easy. Don't take it to the beach. She started her 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech saying, "Fiction has never been entertainment for me."

No matter. Beloved may well be my favorite novel of all time.

Toni Morrison died recently. She was 88 years old. The Swedish Academy said her "novels were characterized by visionary force and poetic import,” through which she “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”

That "essential aspect of American reality" makes MAGA caps ridiculous.

We'll miss her.