Reading Mother Teresa--Bringing Him and Meeting Him

Rev. Casey Kuipers and family

Whatever you did 

for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, 

you did for me.’” Matthew 25:40 

In Chant of the Night, Cornelius Kuipers’ 1930s novel about mission work in the Zuni pueblo of New Mexico, a young Zuni named Ametolan agrees to take three Anglo missionaries for a day-long hike up Zuni Mountain, a deeply sacred place to his people. As they climb, they learn some things about the Zunis’ history of great suffering, first at the hands of the Spanish, then at the hands of missionaries from the south, from Mexico, stories amply illustrated by hand and footholds carved into the sheer sides of the mountain so the people could escape death.

The white folks love the stories, but they joke around; they don’t revere the place, as does Ametolan. When one of the Anglos says she’d like to meet the god of the Zuni mountain because “he must be some guy,” “the party laughed,” says Kuipers, “but not Ametolan.”

Kuipers was himself an Anglo missionary who spent decades in the Zuni pueblo. That he would criticize his colleagues and fellow Christians’ nonchalance is noteworthy and, in its own way, lovely. He breaks the stereotype of Christian missionaries who were often what Native people determined them to be – piously disguised scouts for a cultural cavalry, men who sought, as did the U.S. Army, the demise of all indigenous people.

I don’t claim to know anything about missiology. I’ve never been a missionary, and I don’t know how missionaries are trained. But I do know something about how Christian mission has often blundered with Native people, killing them and their spirit with their own Godly intentions. Almost a century ago, a missionary named Cornelius Kuipers seemed to understand that too – and he used his novels to try to explain what he’d discovered on the mission field, tried to explain, not to the Zunis, who needed no explanation, but to his own people, Anglo Christians.

How did he come to understand that banter like the hikers in Chant of the Night was crass and unfeeling, especially when it was done in holy places, even pagan holy places. How did he learn that, on the mission field, mockery is always off-key? The title of his only nonfiction book is Zuni Also Prays, which is to say, "Don’t demean people." Pride is the first of seven deadlies, spiritual pride the most hideous. Just remember, he likely wanted to tell his own people, Zuni also prays.

This morning Mother Teresa taught me something Cornelius Kuipers would have liked. Mother Teresa took to heart that absolutely central passage of the gospel recorded in Matthew 25: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” While she dedicated her entire life to bringing Christ to the poor on the streets of Calcutta, she was equally sure, strange as this may sound, that when she met the poor, she met Jesus. She not only brought Christ, she met him in wasted streets. She looked into the faces of the poor and, quite literally, saw her Lord.

When I read the novels of Cornelius Kuipers, novels meant for his people, I can’t help thinking that he too saw Jesus there in the Zuni, a vision he knew very well might be difficult to relate to people back home.

Really, all of this isn’t just about missiology; it’s about more than that. It's about the very character of the Christian life, don’t you think?

Reading Mother Teresa--Workmanship

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.
Ephesians 2:10

“I was only twelve years old then. It was then that I first knew I had a vocation to the poor. . .in 1922. I wanted to be a missionary, I wanted to go out and give the life of Christ to the people in the missionary countries. . .” Mother Teresa

Wow. Twelve.

When I was twelve, I lived across the street from a school playground where one of the three fields of dreams offered all the joy and thrills I needed: a blacktopped basketball court, hoops sometimes even netted; a sandlot baseball field, scraps of cardboard for bases; and a broad, open space for football, come September. Wasn't an adult in sight. No uniforms, no score books, no instruction. Just play. Oh, yeah--and golf midsummer with ancient wooden clubs we rescued from a neighbor's trash.

When I was twelve, I went to catechism and church and Christian school. I played piano, not well, and sang in choirs. I heard the Bible read every time we ate, and listened to my own parents talk about faith openly and lovingly. When I was twelve, I had every advantage Mother Teresa did spiritually. 

When I was twelve, with buddies, I grabbed cigarettes from a grocery store. That's another story.

When I was twelve, I wrote a letter to Elizabeth Eliot after reading Through Gates of Splendor, the story of those missionaries murdered by Auca Indians somewhere in South America; and I remember getting a letter back from her, too, a sweet one. The letter was a school assignment. I was twelve.

What I don't remember is ever aching to become, someday, a missionary. I just wanted to play ball, and, for a while at least, smoke cigarettes.

I don't think of my childhood as being spiritually or materially impoverished. Not in the least. In fact, I tend to judge it as almost idyllic. Does that make sense?

At twelve I don't think I felt much at all of Mother Teresa's immense conviction of God. It was something I had to learn. Maybe, at twelve, Mother Teresa didn’t feel as if life had a learning curve. I did. Maybe, as a child, she was already capable of what Christ extols when he talks, as he often did, about child-like faith. I don't believe I was.

But honestly, I don’t regret much about my childhood, not even the smokes. Each of us is built of different stuff. She was somehow blessed with a huge head start. But I was blessed too, greatly so. We are, from womb to grave, His workmanship. 

What the two of us share, I’m sure—Mother Teresa and me—is the knowledge that his hand is ever opened lovingly in our lives.

Sunday Morning Meds--Musing

“I mused, and my spirit grew faint.” Psalm 77

It’s a 19^th century line, something lifted from old novel with a frontispiece portrait of an anxious woman sitting in an English garden.  It’s the kind of line I sometimes get from young women writers, even today, who imitate the old mannered styles they once loved—as in “’Oh, Santana,’” she mused, sighing.”  That kind of thing.

“I mused, and my spirit grew faint,” Asaph says—back of hand quickly to forehead, roll eyes slightly.  When lifted on its own from the text of Psalm 77, it’s hard to take seriously.

I used to cross such usage out of my students’ stories, mark them “Yucch.”  In our post-modernity, when most anything goes, I simply ask the students if they really want to invoke such old-fashioned sentimentality. Used to because eventually I became a kinder, gentler teacher.

If etymology serves us well, muse has an interesting history, its French ancestral usage was related to a dog’s muzzle, a source which prompts word historians to speculate that muse might have to do with the way a dog raises its snoot in the air when it wants to determine direction or difficulty.  Plus, there’s the proximity of the word muse to amused, which Asaph, abed in misery here, it seems, certainly is not.  But nothing in either image helps us with the emotional heft of Asaph’s musing.

Experts say 48 percent of the American public do well nightly; a majority of us, however, do not. If the polling is accurate, more than half of us are up late, most of us musing, maybe, like Asaph, unable to sleep because, like the mythical princess, we bothered by some proverbial pea.

Edgar Allen Poe used to claim his strange visions emerged in that somnambulant state between sleep and consciousness, if we can believe him. But I’m sure that it’s not ghastly visions that kept Asaph awake, nor the fact that he took too much work home. As far as we know, he didn’t have a bad marriage, lousy cash flow, or troubled kids. All we know is, oddly enough, he mused; and that musing felt like too much hot salsa in his soul.

Like old age, Psalm 77 is not for sissies. It’s dark; and I’m not doing Asaph or the song credit by being silly about it—dog snoots, mattress peas, and Poe’s guillotine visions. Asaph claims he sat on his bed all night long, hands raised as if to receive a blessing that never came—nothing funny about that.  But then, perhaps if you can’t sleep, one way of steeling yourself against anxiety may well be laughter, the best medicine. 

By the time he’s finished, Asaph will turn Psalm 77 into a praise song, but before we stumble into the light we’ve got to wander a bit through the dark night of the soul, where sleep is a blessing that simply doesn’t arrive. 

I know I’ve said it before, but here once again—this time in Asaph’s psalm of sleeplessness: the blessing of holy scripture arrives is its story of God’s love; but yet another marvelous feature is that we aren’t alone in our restlessness. Even psalmists were anxious. Even saints couldn’t sleep.

Too many of us likely spend too much anxious time musing, or so says the surveys. Psalm 77 is a reminder that we’re not alone.   

Sunday Morning Meds--"Not so"

“the ungodly are not so. . ." Psalm 1

While it’s never particularly difficult for believers to remember that scripture is holy writ—“the word of God”—it’s often much tougher to remember that at some point in time thousands of years ago, someone—likely a man—was sitting over a scratchy parchment with a quill or sharp stick or whatever passed for a Bic, trying to get this little poem of his just right.  I doubt that divine inspiration ever turned writers into dreamy mediums, but, of course, I may be wrong.

If I’m not, then the struggles common to all writers once certainly plagued the psalmist.  Should I say “in his law,” or is “on his law” really more to the point?  I’d like to know how much time he spent on such prepositions.

 

But if the poet/singer here was really just one of us, someone trying hard to get it right, then it’s fair to say that at some moments, maybe not as many as he’d like, the process just flat-out worked, the right words appeared as if by magic, ideas unpacked themselves, and he discovered exactly what it was he was thinking.  Every writer—and most human beings—know the sheer glory of those shining music-of-the-spheres moments when all of us seem to be mediums.

 

I dare say one of those moments occurred right here in verse 4.  I don’t know if King David wrestled with the agrarian metaphors that fill the psalm so far, or if he merely looked around and started, as all of us do, by writing what he knew.  But once he’s covered the ground of the blessed, he moves into the dark side with a blunt verdict that seemingly could give a rip about lyrical beauty.  This line came out as if the ink simply wouldn’t stay in the pen, accessorized with an exclamation point:  “the ungodly are not so.”

 

On this point, David is not given to splitting hairs or parsing complex arguments.  Let me try to describe what it means to be blessed, he says, and then he works hard at it.  As for the wicked, he says, raising a finger, “nope.”

If you can feel the pulse of the man anywhere in this poem, I’m saying it’s right here at the pivotal moment where sits the heart of comparison/contrast, and you can see it in the thick line he scratched in beneath “the wicked are not so.”

I envy the confidence with which he wrote the line.  The king’s world had inky blacks and virginal whites, and the line in the sand was a Royal Gorge, where saints and sinners were as obvious as they are in vintage movie Westerns.

But then some of the greatest truths of scripture can dazzle us with their simplicity.  When asked by a reporter to summarize what he’d spent a lifetime writing, Karl Barth, the brilliant 20^th century theologian said, simply, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

Blessedness is a by-product of a life deeply planted beside the water of life, this little psalm asserts.  But it’s just not that way for those who aren’t.  Period.

The message of Psalm 1, or so it seems to me, is that the truth is just that simple.  

Sunday Morning Meds--Thirsting and Panting

“As the deer pants for streams of water, 

so my soul pants for you, O God.” Psalm 42 

I used to bale hay. Just about every memory haying is in the barn, where, by noon, temperatures would soar in dusty, cob-webbed corners of ancient hay mows.

Today, years later, I start buying lemonade come June. Often, I chug it, even though I haven’t bucked a bale in half a century. I remember baling hay whenever I drink lemonade. I remember slipping wet quart jars out of insulated paper bags, screeching off lids, and chugging cold lemonade right through a dozen ice cubes.

Still, I’m guessing only a few of us know the extremity of the simile—a level of thirst that rages into full-throated panting. I’m certainly not among them. I’ll never forget chugging ice cold lemonade in a hay mow, but I was nowhere near dying, even though at twelve I may have thought so and probably acted like it.

We don’t know that David wrote Psalm 42, but some believe he did; what’s more, some think he wrote it when his son Absalom was threatening his father’s life. Whether or not that’s true, the heft of the psalm’s opening simile has little to do with hot days in the hay mow.

What David is saying—if indeed he is the author—is that he passionately thirsts after God because God seems nowhere to be found. That’s a different kind of thirst at issue.

On a particularly dark day for us, we took a walk around town. When we passed some houses of people we knew, I couldn’t help but recount the troubles each of those families were going through too. Maybe it was my own problems that made me calculate tribulations—I don’t know. But I did, sadly. I racked up other people’s problems as if to take the edge off mine perhaps.

I’d just read a little from Calvin, specifically a line in Book I of the Institutes: “Without certainty of God’s providence life would be unbearable.”

I’m sure he’s right; certainty is one fine blessing; but I’m not sure every last believer gets the gift of certainty. That night, I was a lot less confident than Calvin.

Psalm 42, long a favorite of many, is all about chugging certainty even in desperation, about knowing for absolute sure that God is there, even when we’re torn apart and sure as heck he’s not. Psalm 42 is the gut-wrenching plea of a man who finds himself without.

That thirst is for nothing with ice cubes, for something a whole lot more substantial than lemonade. The thirst is for living water to refresh the parched soul of someone wandering in a desert where there’s nothing more before him than a horizon of hot sand.

I dare say that lots of folks know that thirst, even David the King, David the poet, David the man closest to God’s own heart. Even he knew what it meant to pant.

It’s always nice to remember we aren’t alone, isn’t it? It seems to me just one blessing of this wonderful line of scripture—and all of Psalm 42--is knowing even David got that thirsty.

Sunday Morning Meds--Cedars of Lebanon

“The trees of the LORD are well watered, 

the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.” Psalm 104:16

Up and down the broad shoulders of the Missouri River, thousands of dead cedars lie akimbo, puffs of bronze against the prairie grasses. Ranchers fight a losing battle with the cedars because they grow like weeds in the hills. Eventually, if someone weren’t there to cut them down, they’d turn the valley into mighty forest.  A forested Missouri River neighborhood might be beautiful—and remarkable amid miles of grassland; but ranchers are cattlemen, not lumberjacks.

The cedars of Lebanon, I’m told, face a wholly different problem.  Those famed broad forests simply are no more, or are but a shadow of their former selves. They’re gone.

And who is to blame?  Not us, thankfully—well, not us if we define ourselves by time and place.  But if we define us by species, denuding the forested hills of Lebanon began thousands of years ago, when more populated areas of the desert Middle East needed the lumber.

When their supplies went scarce, wars erupted. Deprivation creates conflict—who’s going to get what all of us want? Then, later, the cedars of Lebanon became the building materials of the great Phoenician ships. Supplies waned. 

While the cedars of Lebanon may have been well watered in the Psalmist’s day, today they are no more. They’re the stuff of legends because we did ‘em in.  God may have planted them, but human enterprise felled them.  It’s just that simple.

So why not let the cedars of the Missouri River grow into brand new forests?  Human enterprise uproots them; why not just let them grow back?

There really never was a forest of cedars along the Missouri because they were continuously wiped out by raging prairie fires. A forest of river valley cedars would be a new thing.   

I don’t claim to understand a great deal about “the balance of nature” or the scientific field of ecology.  But you don’t need a degree in ecology to know that our interaction with the forces of nature changes the landscapes around us. I happen to live in in the county that leads the entire state in “altered” acres; here and there, on some forgotten hillside there may be a corner of actual native prairie. What’s more, the state of Iowa leads the nation is altered land. We have less wilderness here than anywhere in these United States. In Sioux County, Iowa, change is evident in every direction.

Right now, if you want to see the blessed cedars of Lebanon, the trees that thrill the poet, you can’t. . .they’re gone. 

Psalm 104 is a pageant of God’s glory. The psalmist is awed by a landscape that blossoms. That, today, the “cedars of Lebanon” inspire no music, no poetry, and no awe suggests is sort of sad; I’d like to see what made the psalmist sing.

Psalm 104:16 is its own reminder to care about our world.

Sunday Morning Meds--What is man?

“What is man that you are mindful of him?” Psalm 9

Few people would list Charles Mix County, South Dakota, as an American vacation paradise.  There’s just not much happenin’.  Like much of the Great Plains, it has a museum-like quality because the landscape of abandoned farms on its hills suggests a far livelier past than present.

 

Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark were there, following the Missouri River that is western border of its 110-mile expanse.  Should you happen to follow the trail, you may something of a ghost town, a nearly abandoned settlement named, simply, Academy.

One day in 1892, a pioneer preacher named Rev. L. E. Camfield and a friend were out among the sod-busters of Charles Mix, collecting donations for the education of black children down South.  When they tallied the purse at the end of the day, they were thrilled:  they had $20. 

Here’s what they thought.  If a couple hundred dirt poor prairie farmers and ranchers could come up with that kind of money for needy kids hundreds of miles away, shouldn’t it be possible to create, right there in Charles Mix, an academic institution which would serve their own children in the best possible way? 

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 enrolled. 

The Rev. Mr. Camfield was a Christian, a dreamer, and deeply committed to the cause of Christian higher education.  For a time, this educational jewel on the Great Plains of South Dakota must have seemed, in its hustle and bustle, an answer to prayer.

Today all that school has is a relatively good paint job.  It old chapel is big and sits up high on a knoll as if still proclaiming the absolute importance of education.  But it hasn’t seen a student in years.  It’s a sepia-tone tintype of itself.

Out front is a stone memorial to the Rev. Mr. Camfield, to his diligence, his vision, and his commitment.  Behind that memorial is a building that, quite honestly, looks ready to be torched.  It’s Shelley’s “Ozymandius” come to South Dakota—with this significant difference:  Camfield was no swaggering despot. He was, instead, a firm believer and a tireless advocate of Christian education. 

To me, someone who’s spent his whole life in Christian higher education, there’s something chilling about Academy, South Dakota.  So much good was there at its birth, and it likely served its students well.  I think I would have liked Camfield, a firebrand for quality education in the Christian tradition.

But Academy, South Dakota, reminds me that even when we believe we’re in His service, our best may not amount to a hill of beans.  Academy is no more.  What’s left is little more than a ghost town.  In the cosmic scheme of things, we are just what the singer says we are in Psalm 8—not much.

But once again, here’s the miracle.  He loves us.  That’s the essence of this great old Psalm.  Even though our best is sometimes bountifully silly, He loves us.  That’s the realization that knocks David’s sandy socks right from out of his sandals. 

Think of the heavens, then think of us—just so many field mice.  But he loves us.  He honestly does.  And that makes all the difference for time and eternity.

Sunday Morning Meds--the big fires

 “He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants.”

Psalm 104

The story, in Chadron, Nebraska, that summer, 13 years ago, was what the fire didn’t take. It didn’t take the town, even though it consumed huge tracks of land just south. It didn’t take a life, although hundreds of firefighters, many of them volunteers, battled it through 60,000 acres of pine forests and grasslands. It didn’t take the spirit of the place, even though it blackened and charred some of the most beautiful landscape of northwest Nebraska.

“The fire” is something of a misnomer, because “the fire” was really five separate blazes, each of them ignited by lightning in a Wednesday night storm. No careless smokers, no untended campfire, no looney pyromaniac, no disgruntled camper—all five started by lightning in a tinder box of 100-degree temps, bone-dry air, and robust winds. For a time, the largest, the Spotted Tail fire, was roaring along towards town at thirty feet per second.

By Friday night and Saturday, half the city of Chadron had evacuated, and everyone was frightened. It took three houses, but miraculously sidestepped several others before stopping on a dime behind the football field of Chadron State College—but after consuming the landmark “C” hill that overlooks the town.

The fires moved so quickly and so voraciously that the curator of the town’s Fur Trade Museum could do little but watch as firefighters stood guard. It was impossible for her to gather all the one-of-a-kind artifacts, but she was fortunate—as was the town itself, when the raging fire spared the place.

Three families—and three families only—looked at the charred remains of their country homes when it was over, nothing left but foundations. I’m sure those families find little comfort in a verse like this—praise to God for messenger winds and servant fires.

Hundreds, I’m sure, offered thanks that more wasn’t destroyed. Half a town, evacuated, probably bowed their heads in joy and relief when the raging flames backed off at the football field. For almost 72 hours in Chadron, Nebraska, who was on the Lord’s side seemed clear—it was the firefighters, battalions of them, including dozens of local construction units manning bulldozers. I’m guessing nobody prayed for the fire; nobody sided with the flames. No one saw those five fires as servants of the Most High.

Were they?

That’s the toughest question of all. Does God author our calamity?

I know this. The near catastrophe drew the people of Chadron together as loving neighbors; it humbled them and made them thankful. For months, signs around town still sing the praises of the firefighters. For three days in Chadron everything stopped, and people prayed. In just four seasons, the “C” hill was emerald, brimming with blooming new life. It’s not hard to make a case for that fire, like many others, as servant.

But three families lost everything. There is a time for everything, the preacher says, a time for silence too. And now is the not the time to put up a banner downtown Chadron that broadcasts this proud verse of praise.

It is amazing how broad and wide the Bible is, how unending, how amazing—not unlike the yawning Great Plains landscapes all around Chadron, Nebraska.

Only bigger. Much bigger. It holds all of our voices, and it has His. That big. Huge.

Sunday Morning Meds--Remembrances

“. . .you thought I was altogether like you.” Psalm 50

When I was a kid, my uncle—a most distinguished uncle—came to visit. I was in high school, and he took me golfing. I’d swung golf clubs since a neighbor put his old set in the junk; but my family was not the country club set. Going to a course would have been, well, out of the question—spendy and even a bit frivolous, I suppose.

After nine holes, he wanted to ride out in the countryside around town where I was then growing up and he had, maybe three decades before. His career had led him afar from town, and it was great joy for him to reminiscence while touring the haunts he’d probably never forgotten but hadn’t visited for years.

“Now go out west of town,” he told me, and I did. He wanted to follow the river, the Onion River, because he said he and his friends used to have so much fun out there. “There,” he said. “See that path through the field?—if you follow that road, you’ll come to our swimming hole.” He was overflowing with memory. “Great place—we used to have so much fun.” He was lost in memory.

Right then I was the same age kid he was remembering, and I remember thinking it odd that he could be so emotionally attached to a bend in the river I’d never even seen, even though we’d both grown up in the same neighborhood and I’d walked parts of that river myself, trapping and duck hunting.

Years before I was alive, there’d been spectacular fun at that spot I’d never seen, a spot no one I knew ever frequented. He knew the world I’d grown up in, knew it intimately; but the place he knew was seemed to me to be a different country altogether.

Sometime ago already, a friend of mine who also grew up in the same little burg, came back here on the edge of the Great Plains where both of us lived. He was depressed because his elderly parents had decided to move. He was afraid his last “home” might well be his last.

I know that feeling. When my parents left the house in which I grew up, a similar emptiness descended, even though they were simply moving to an apartment across town. Years before already my distinguished uncle had prepared me for that leave-taking when I couldn’t help witnessing his reverence for a river I knew, but a spot I’d never visited.

The town my uncle knew wasn’t the place I was growing up back then, nor is it the town this friend of mine doesn’t want to forget. We’re all part of the diaspora, which means none of those burgs is the one that exists in the here and now. The gulf which divides reality and perception is sometimes unfathomable.

I suppose we fashion a whole host of worlds within our own perceptions. I suppose—and this is scary--the God we fashion isn’t necessarily the one who exists through time and eternity. In Psalm 50, a psalm that’s really shocking in places, here’s yet another line to make us sweat a bit: “you thought I was altogether like you.”

He's not. He's forever more.

Sunday Morning Med--Burning Questions

“My tears have been my food day and night, 

while men say to me all day long, "Where is your God?"

Almost fifty years ago, when my alma mater called to ask if I’d be interested in leaving Arizona and coming back to Iowa, I never really considered not going. I loved high school teaching because I loved high school kids; but I understood that if I were ever going to write, I’d have to teach in college, where there simply is more time.

When I taught there, Greenway High School was brand new, on the edge of a northern suburb of Phoenix. I’d been hired precisely because I was a Christian. I was also male, experienced, and newly outfitted with a masters degree--those were also factors. But, illegal or not, I got the job on the basis of my faith. The district interviewer, a man named Bill Sterrett, was a Christian too. That’s another story.

           

Only two years later, with a college teaching offer in my hand, I decided to leave. When I told Mr. Sterrett, I got scorched. He looked up from behind his desk and shook his head. “Why would you want to go there?” he said. “Everybody there is just like you.” He slapped that desk lightly with his hand. “Here, you’re really different.”

           

Mr. Sterrett died several years ago, but that line lives in echo chamber that is my soul because he was right. We’re not talking about the difference between Vanity Fair and the Celestial City—there’s far too much manure in the air to make any heavenly claims about up here in Siouxland.

But living out my allotted years in a burgeoning new suburb of a huge metropolitan area would have made me a different person than my spending those years in what was, back then, an ethnic conclave huddled against the winds on the edge of the Great Plains. I chose a wooden-shoed monastic life, and, as Frost would say, that choice has made all the difference.

I say all of that because in my many years here I’ve never been anywhere near someone who might say to me, sardonically, in my distress, “So, Jim, where the heck is your God?”  Hasn’t happened—and likely won’t. I am surrounded by a cloud of believing witnesses. All of my friends go to church.

Had I stayed in urban, public education and American suburbia, I’d know people who might well ask me the very question that burns in David's soul. Some of them are still friends. Last summer I got an email from an old Greenway buddy, a “jack” Mormon, who wouldn’t let the silliness of my faith rest, in fact, because he’s quite adamant about having lost his long, long ago.

But I’ve been cloistered for almost five decades, and those few voices who might mock my faith are accessible only on-line. That doesn’t mean I don’t hear those burning questions. They rise, instead, from inside me somewhere. 

But what I’m wondering this morning is this:  if I’d have stayed in a more diverse neighborhood, would the voices I would have heard supplant the ones I now do, the ones from inside? What would be the pitch of my own personal faith had I spent my entire working life in the Valley of the Sun?

           

Questions like "Where is your God?" are here too, even in the cloister, packaged in the same taunting voice David heard, just not spoken aloud. That voice, that burning question, is here too, even in a cloud of witnesses.

But I’m thankful, very thankful, that God almighty has given me, as he did David, a faith that won’t let me take those voices to heart, even though I hear ‘em. Only by grace, can I come anywhere near to holding a faith equal to that task.  

Sunday Morning Meds--Abundance

“You crown the year with your bounty, 

and your carts overflow with abundance.” Psalm 65

If I’m near water, I eat fish.  Lobster in New England, crab cakes in Seattle, smoked salmon on Lake Michigan, grouper in Florida. In northern Minnesota, nothing tastes better than walleye right from the lake. Well, maybe perch.

Out East, I’m sure, one can get a really good leg of lamb; but if you want it done right, you may have to visit Australia or South Africa or New Mexico, where sheep are taken seriously.

But if you’re on the hunt for a pork chop or a chunk of filet mignon that melts in your mouth, then visit my corner of the world. I live in a red meat country whose bounty will take second place to nobody’s Angus. Our cattle are corn-fed, not half-starved in mesquite groves or pastured out so the meat is grizzled as leather chaps. We pamper our beef here in Siouxland, and our hogs grow up in confinements so climate-controlled the residents never see a cloud. My old friends in southern Wisconsin call their prime Swiss cheese Green County Gold; well, our stock in trade is glorious red marble.

But it’s just about all we do, agriculturally. There are some dairies around, but mile after endless mile of farmland where I live is perfectly lined with just two crops, corn and beans. And all that bounty—and tons of grain are produced here annually—all of that bounty goes to livestock, to cattle and hogs, to the red meat on your quarter-pounder and the sirloin you buy anywhere in America and even around the world.

I should be proud—and part of me is. But our bounty, and our success, is more and more attributable to just a few good men and women. With every passing year, farming—agriculture—agribusiness—is less and less a family affair, as fewer and fewer landowners work more and more ground. The distance between producer and customer has lengthened exponentially since the days of what was—a century ago—subsistence farming. What that means in terms of Psalm 65 is that fewer and fewer of us, even here in the heartland, really rejoice at the climactic phenomena David finds so blessed.

Across the region this year, way too much water this spring kept farmers out of now barren fields that would be otherwise ripening with corn. But just outside my window, corn that got a very late start is finally shoulder high, big and bright green. I'm guessing, in a couple of months, a couple blocks south of here the elevator will host endless boxcars waiting to haul that which isn’t fed here down the tracks to markets near and far. Even this wet, wet year, here there’ll surplus.

A friend of mine told me once that people who don’t put seed in the ground in don’t know God. That may be a hair judgmental, but I know what he means, even though I’ve never lived on a farm. Once upon a time, it's hard not to think that there were millions more farmers and gardeners than there are today. Even in “the Tall Corn State” it’s hard not to believe that fewer and fewer people delight in David’s particular species of joy: “You crown the year with your bounty, and your carts overflow with abundance.”

David's is a harvest song, and right now we're not there yet. But the blessing of Psalm 65, whether you work the land or work a desktop Dell like the one in front of me, is the inspiration one receives from David’s attribution of joy to God’s abundant blessing, the reminder his blessings—all of them-- come from the God who made the heavens and the earth around us, around all of us. 

Just one from Psalm 65 is the reminder that not a dime’s worth of our immense abundance, our joy, comes our way without the showers of God’s eternal goodness, God’s never-ending love.

Sunday Morning Meds--Still Waters

“He leads me beside still waters” Psalm 23

I was 32 years old when someone at Bread Loaf Writers Conference called to tell me that my application for a scholarship had been accepted and they were offering me a position as a waiter. I had no idea what that meant, but I understood clearly from the conversation that the offer was a good, good thing.

The house where we lived at that time is long gone, as is the tiny kitchen where I stood, phone in hand, listening. The call had come in the middle of the day, in the middle of a meal. Our two little kids were sitting beside us.

It’s now a quarter century later, but I will never forget receiving that call because I had the distinct feeling that my being chosen for a waiter’s scholarship to the granddaddy of all writers conferences, Bread Loaf, was a signal that fame and fortune lay just down the road before me. I had just published a book, my first, with a tiny, local press; now, Bread Loaf beckoned. The New York Times Book Review was a just a few years away.

When I flew into Burlington, Vermont, for the Conference—early, because I was a waiter—I met a beautiful woman, my age, married with two children, who said she was an aspiring poet. She’d also be a waiter. Someone from the Conference picked us up, but we took the hour-long drive together into Vermont’s Green Mountains.

Ten days later, when we boarded a plane to leave, she and I stood on the stairway to a small jet, waiting to enter the cabin. She looked at me and shook her head. “I hope this plane crashes,” she said, and she meant it.

She’d been wooed by a celebrity poet, and she’d fallen. On the dance floor at night, the two of them looked like smarmy high school lovers, which might have seemed embarrassing if it hadn’t happened to so many others. Another waiter—also married with kids, two of them—told me it was important for him to have an affair because, after all, as an artist he needed to experience everything in order to write with authority.

I am thankful to God for sending me to Bread Loaf, but it wasn’t an easy place to be, for a waiter or anyone else, I’d guess. I’d lived most of my life in small, conservative communities who prided themselves on their church-going. Adultery was real, but something of a scandal; it wasn’t commonplace.

The atmosphere in that mountaintop retreat was electric. Aspiring writers like me flirted daily with National Book Award winners, editors, agents, and publishers. Life—dawn ‘till dawn—was always on stage.

I am thankful to God for sending me to Bread Loaf because I learned a great deal about writing, but much more about life itself and my place in it. In the middle of that frenetic atmosphere, on a Sunday morning, I walked, alone, out into a meadow, away from people, where I found a green Adirondack chair and sat for an hour, meditating. I tried to imagine what the soft arm of my little boy would feel like in my fingers; at the same time I recited, over and over again, these very words. The 23rd psalm.

I remember a beautiful mountain stream, but there were no still waters at Bread Loaf Writers Conference the summer of 1980. If there were, I didn’t see them. But that Sabbath’s very personal worship, right there in the middle of the madness, brought me—body and soul—to the very place David has in mind in verse two.

In my own way, I know still waters, as all of us do at some time or another. He led me there.

Sunday Morning Meds--The Legs of a Man

“His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, 

nor his delight in the legs of a man;. . .” Psalm 147

The athlete in me is well into the fourth quarter, clock ticking down. The game has slowed dramatically. Rarely, do we miss a day at the gym. Once the last tomatoes are out, we get our exercise inside, sadly—or else walk outside somewhere, if the wind isn’t brutal, which, these days, it often is.

Inside, I get on a couple of machines and work up a heavy sweat, the blessed livery of a gym rat at any age. I lift weights, even though “buff” is a pipe dream. Basically, that’s what’s left for an aging four-sport jock, once the high school’s “Athlete of the Year.”  Years ago, I lost the gold cuff-links that came with that great honor. 

Years ago, I met a nice, young kid, a senior in high school, who expressed an interest in majoring in English when he gets to college next year. He was thinking about enrolling at the college where I taught, and my job was to sweet talk. Turned out his passion was basketball—that’s what he told me. English was okay for a major, but history or math would do the job too, he told me. What he really wanted was to coach.

Could have been me a half century ago. 

Great kid, sweet kid—I’d love to have him enroll, whether or not he ever pulls on a jersey or majors in English. His passion is basketball, he says, eyes ablaze.

He wanted to play ball in college, but he knew making the team would no cakewalk.  He told me a hot shot from his small, Indiana high school came here a few years ago and didn’t even make the team—so he said he was prepared. He didn’t.

           

I told him I’d seen guys emotionally hamstrung when suddenly they didn’t have to turn up for practice every afternoon of their lives, ex-jocks who said they felt as if bright lights had gone out of their lives without the steady rhythms of after-school practices.  I went through that myself—delirium tantrums from lugging no more gym bags. For thousands of kids every year, not making the team means losing some valuable component of identity.

He said he knew all of that.  He said he thought he was prepared.

But wow! —does he want to play. Basketball, he told me a half dozen times, is his passion.

Verse ten of Psalm 147 is a gift for highly-juiced jocks, a reminder to a million wannabee all-stars that there’s more to life than being MVP. Much more. I tried to tell him as much, but some lessons get learned only by experience.

That morning, when I left the gym myself, I spotted a lanky grade-school kid shooting free throws.  When he went after the ball, his long legs arched a bit like a pair of fine parenthesis, the sure sign of speed and wholesale athletic gifts.

But God doesn’t care. The psalmist says He takes no delight in the legs of man, whether or not they’re as sharply defined as a thoroughbred’s.

That’s good to hear, especially when my knees sometimes feel like a nest of hooks. Neither the size of our engines nor the thrust of our calves means anything at all. We’re loved, even when we’ve no more horsepower than a VW bus. 

Met a kid once who told me basketball was his passion. Someday, like all of us, this little verse will bring him comfort, as it does me, an old man who long ago lost his prized cufflinks.

It’s good to be reminded—at 18 or 71—that God doesn’t much care about all of that.  Some people might, but he doesn’t. Bless his holy name. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Furrows

“Plowmen have plowed my back 

and made their furrows long.” Psalm 129:3

            There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share--black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.   Willa Cather, My Antonia

           

If you drive south from Red Cloud, Nebraska, the hometown of Willa Cather, and look up along the hill to your left as you enter Kansas, you’ll spot an ancient walk-behind plow thoughtfully set along a fence row. I’ve never been on that road at dawn; but at a certain time of year, you likely see the vision Jim Burton notes in My Antonia, which is likely why that old plow stands there. After all, very little in the neighborhood of slowly dying Red Cloud, Nebraska, is unrelated, today, to its famous native novelist, Willa Cather.

On any of the blue highways that line the rural Upper Midwest today, you’re likely to find a half-dozen old plow lawn ornaments on any hour’s drive.  And rightly so.  Nothing within human memory changed the landscape of great America prairies more fully than the moment that rich layer of centuries-old top soil was opened to furrows, to wheat, barley, corn, soybeans and what not else. 

           

I wouldn’t be sitting here had someone, 150 years ago or so, not drawn that first blade through virgin prairie.  All around me, the landscape looks nothing at all like it did when tall-grass prairie swayed in the wind.  When Jim, Cather’s narrator, sees the plough, “heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun,” he knows no single weapon was more instrumental in bringing him to the place he loved, as did Cather, than that valiant agricultural tool.

Some might call it rape, what happened when that blade was thrust into virgin prairie.  Some do, in fact. Today, the ecological world of tall-grass prairie is almost as extinct as the do-do bird, altered forever into a immense garden of commodities.

           

There may be no more profoundly painful metaphor in all of the psalms than this one, in Psalm 129.  The plowman enemy, scourge in hand, still dripping, has left furrows across his back, the poet says.  Thousands of years later, we still grimace, the image of that weapon slashing through flesh and muscle, leaving furrows welling with blood.

           

“Persecution is the heirloom of the church,” Spurgeon says, in reference to 129.  He’s not wrong, but it seems to me that he’s only half right.  Persecution is an heirloom, but not the only display in the museum.  Like the plow, the historic suffering of the Christian people can be manipulated and misused all too easily.  Much of Fox’s Book of Martyrs is the story of Christians torturing other Christians, after all. 

But that’s not the lesson of the psalm. The lesson is one of perseverance, of steadfastness.  The lesson is all about moving on, holding on, knowing our only comfort, even when our backs are flush with blood. 

The lesson is simple:  here as it is so often in scripture, the lesson of the whole passage is “fear not.”

Sunday Morning Meds--Envy

“Refrain from anger and turn from wrath; 

do not fret—it leads only to evil.” Psalm 37:8

“Of the seven deadly sins,” so writes Joe Epstein, “only envy is no fun at all.” Sloth may not be a party animal, but certain it is that some of us, at least, on some mornings, would choose the pillow to morning coffee.

But envy, Epstein says in his book titled, simply enough, Envy, is neither pleasurable nor fashionable—and probably never has been. Envy is the principle sin of someone who is, as he says, small-hearted, or petty. If you’re guilty of serial envy, you’re a whiner, and nobody likes a whiner.

Epstein claims that there is a word for envy in every human language, which suggests that the sin—and it is a sin—is perhaps most universal of any of the Seven Deadlies. We all know people without much pride; lots of people aren’t tempted by food or drink (I’m not one of them); some lust mightily, others not at all. Epstein may be right—very, very few could say innocently than they never envied anyone anything.

Why all this chatter about envy? The origins of the word fret are in eating, not so much as in “eating something,” as in “being eaten.” My mother’s fretting, on which I’ve already said too much, was more worry than envy; but there is something similar in both conditions because what used to bother me about her worrying is that she can be eaten up by it and thereby fail to rejoice in the joys of this life. Similarly, envy—like jealousy—feeds upon itself, as Othello knew only too well—and as did King David.

This single verse may suggest why David wasn’t allowed to build the temple, the job he wanted more than any other. The prophet Nathan told him, after all, that constructing the house of the Lord was a blessing reserved for his son, Solomon, but not for him because David’s hands were bloody. The cause/effect sequence of this line seems clear: in a verse that has much to do with anger and wrath, David is warning us, in song, that envy has much to do with sin. The implication is that those who do envy compound their sin by getting burned about it first--and then acting. I don’t think I do, but David must have—and likely did.

While envy may be nearly universal, acting in wrath as a result of envy is not. David may be warning us about some weakness he darned well needed warning about; but his weaknesses may not be ours. At least they’re not mine. I certainly envy writers who sell a ton of books and photographers who take month-long expeditions to some African veld. But I don’t think I’ve ever become angry at them. David’s envy might have.

My sins—like his—are, I admit, more than I can count; but my righteousness and his sinfulness isn’t at issue here. What may be, however, is King David himself.

I wonder whether this particular line of scripture doesn’t describe David more fully than it does the rest of us. I think it does. Yet, I think the psalm is actually more inspired because it offers us the poet himself. He was human, like us.

Even though I may not have fallen victim to King David’s weaknesses, scripture, in telling us about him, gives us a portrait of ourselves as human beings. And that’s always a gift, and a blessing because it’s the truth, a significant component in the story which comprises the whole gospel truth.

He’s not just a figure on a flannelgraph or a cartoon king. He’s authentically human, a real live person.

Because I know David better by way of this line of poetry, I know myself better—and understand grace more fully than I could have without him.

That’s the good news.

Sunday Morning Meds--The Sun

“For the LORD God is a sun. . .” Psalm 84:11 

It’s difficult, at least for me, to think of the sun as an inanimate object—like a stone or brick. It gives us life, after all. Without the sun, there’d be no energy to run this computer, no warmth in which to breath, no light with which to see. Without the sun, we wouldn’t be here. “Let there be light,” God said so many years ago no one remembers. Suddenly a new world was animated.

One of the most pleasing landscapes I took this year is a shot no one else would find lovely. I was out on some public land south of a county park. It was mid-April. My fingers were stiff with cold. I’d been trying to frame a bush on a landscape shot that just wasn’t working, in part because the sky—which can be so bold here—was, that morning, wispy and pale. There wasn’t much backdrop to shoot against.

Dawn was behind me by a half hour, so I quit and started walking back to the car by way of a rutted lane between a stand of poplars, a country path occasionally traveled by deer hunters, I’d guess. As far as I could see in any direction, nothing but open land. The sun was rising gently, already flattening shadows. The air was moist.

That stand of trees was the closest thing you’ll find to a woods on the open plains, probably an old homestead. But trees take a beating out here. They’re not at all native. Farmers still plant them for windbreaks; but deciduous trees, like most of us, soon start looking as if they’ve battled too many incessant prairie seasons.

Try to imagine a little lane through trees littered with dead branches, some broken off, splayed over the road, others hanging precariously by a thrusting stump of twisted wood, as they had been—some of them—for years. Many are bleached and gray.

The floor is brush, last year’s mantle of brome grass, plus whatever else held its shape through winter. If my beard gets too long, it looks like what I was walking on—a scroungy, colorless mess.

I was walking east, into the sun, when I noticed the haze of emerald from what probably were, not a week before, jagged, skeletal branches. The morning light caught those tiny poplar leaves just right and turned them into a glittering song. And then I looked down, and there beneath the old whiskery brome grass, nothing less than jade was emerging from the dusky land.

If you sat and watched that old road all year, I suppose you could pinpoint the exact moment that spring came to the grove. I swear I had to be close.

And it’s all the sun, its warmth penetrating the earth, igniting chemical equations.

I took some pictures. What you see is no gaudy dawn, no out of this world landscape, no fiery sky. What you see is a shoddy old path through a stand of trees barely capable of holding its own through another gusty spring.

But spring it was, and the whole place was and all things were being transformed.

If photography is an art whose materials are time and light, then I swear I caught a masterpiece right there on a dingy landscape in the middle of nowhere. With the morning sun in my face, I told myself that all things were starting anew, one more time.

“For the Lord God is a sun,” the psalmist says, and a whole lot more.

Sunday Morning Meds--He knows

“But the Lord knows the way of the righteous” Psalm 1

One q and a from the catechism I was raised with will stay forever in me, the first: “What is your only comfort in life and death?”

The answer begins this way: “That I am not my own, but belong to my faithful savior. . .”

It sticks to my Teflon memory because of its texture, it’s emotional color. The word of the moment here is comfort: What is your only comfort? What makes you feel in sync? What settles your nerves? offers some peace? helps you sleep? gets you over the blues?

That I am not my own but I belong to God.

Similarly, 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. To Him, we’re no mystery. Right and wrong and good and ill is all part of a day’s work. He knows. It’s that simple, really.

That’s 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 a cemetery.

My father was given a nice plaque 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 wasn’t worth a dime. For years after his death, I had it in the backroom. I can’t toss it.

Then we moved. Twice. Now it’s gone. Twenty-five faithful years no one remembers.

Psalm One begins with a word that’s hard to define—blessed; and it ends with a strong hint at that what blessedness actually means. Through the warp and woof of our lives it’s sweet comfort to know that God does. The Bible tells me so.

God knows. He’s not stunned or sad at anything. He gets it.

Be assured, David says, God knows the way of the righteous. He understands. Once upon a time, he was one of us, after all.

The psalm says that to be blessed is to know, in life and in death, in sickness and in health, that God knows. He knows us, knows our needs, actually knows our lives.

That’s blessed assurance.