Brand new! A book you can hold in your hands!

I'm the proud owner of multiple Kindles actually. I got a pioneer way back when, and I use it when I travel because it's far more efficient then lugging books around when on a plane and in an airport. Left humanly unsatisfied by the original Kindle, I opted to buy a Kindle Fire when they came out--after all, I'm quite unable to avoid a healthy rush for new techie stuff. 

I use the Fire daily, but it's unmercifully slow and often, like a lot of conservatives, gets flummoxed by the New York Times. Still, the Kindle has become my newspaper, for better or for worse. But even though it holds a huge shelf of books, like a lot of conservatives who think God made hands for books, I prefer something with real pages. I'd rather hold a book than a Kindle.

For a decade or more, e-book sales were challenging bookstores. Some folded altogether. There's convenience, after all, and there's unlimited physical space on the cloud. Behind me is a library that wouldn't be there at all if its holdings were digitized. The whole mess, hundreds of them, would fit in a Kindle, even that ancient colorless pioneer.

But Barnes and Noble announced recently that it will close only eight of its stores this year, instead of the 13 originally slated to shut their doors--and they would add four new ones. Why? You guessed it--uptick in the sales of print books. 

Some old fogies will simply assume such news is ample proof that there is a God. But before they get all holy-roller on us, they need to know that the upsurge in hard copy print book sales has been led by the truly thunderous receipts created by adult coloring books. You read that right. Print book sales are up on the shoulders of adult coloring books. Seriously, you were thinking maybe T. S. Eliot?

You can buy Nooks really cheap right now because they're departing. E-book sales are down. That's right. Right now--I admit it, this is greatly encouraging--American readers seem to be (drum roll, please) returning to books. Digital technology looked invincible and the battle may not be over; but for right now, adult coloring books notwithstanding, print books are not only holding their own, they're kicking butt. (Hyperbole, but in a good cause.)

So, anyway, I'm happy too announce that Up the Hill: Folk Tales from the Grave, which was published as an e-book by New Rivers Press last year, is now out in hard copy. That's right, it's actually become a book you can hold in your hand. Same book, new hard (well, soft) cover. 

Available where, you're asking? You should know better. Available on line. Go ahead, try Amazon. And for those conservatives hopelessly lost in the past, the e-book is still available. 

The tales in Up the Hill are unusual for this old-fashioned writer, an old-time realist not given to flights of superheroes, warlocks, or hobbits. Let's just put it this way: real live human beings play only minor roles because the dead are very much alive in the graveyard "up the hill." 

“James Calvin Schaap has done the impossible. In Up the Hill, he has beautifully crafted a collection of stories written from the grave, and these voices are both humorous, powerfully moving, and scary. They capture the very ‘bones’ of what it means to be human—to face one's own transience. With irony and grace, this magical collection captures our attempts for both reconciliation and transcendence.” - Mary Swander, Poet Laureate of Iowa.

Morning Thanks from the file--shorter shorts

Okay, I know it's not that big of a deal, or that it's going to affect me greatly for what years the Lord in his mercy ultimately allows me, or that it will somehow alter the direction of world history; but the fact is, I'm thankful for the hottest men's fashion news upcoming this summer--to wit, that shorts are getting shorter. It  cheers my soul, in fact.

For one thing, shorter shorts will make those ancient basketball uniforms millions of males used to wear look far less goofy. In the olden days, we were men, not weird. On old men or young, those billowing artless baggies have to be less comfortable--or so it would appear to me. Not that I own any.

Take it from an old guy--the demise of baggie shorts is further proof that if you live long enough you don't have to dump skinny ties. All things must pass--only, zombie-like, to return. The only constant is change--you can quote me on that.

Still, a man like me, drawing altogether too close to 70 years old and not blessed with great legs anyway, might well cover up better in a pair of these baggies,

all that denim covering thunder thighs. Quite frankly, I don't think I'd ever get out on the street in a pair of these. I'd be arrested by some branch of fashion police if my wife didn't simply shoot me first.

At my age new fashion trends won't make me redo the closet. Still, I'm glad they're back--real shorts. Not short shorts either, just those comfy half-pants we used to call "shorts." and Furthermore, I'm happy those billowing pantaloons are on their way to the St. Vincent DePaul, where I wish them a long and satisfying shelf life.

It's the kind of fashion trend I like--won't cost me a dime.

Pew and Trump and Fear

Flatly stated, it's not been a good year for organized religion. First in May, then again in November, the Pew Research Center announced what some had long ago surmised--that the American public is getting progressively less and less religious. That's not particularly comforting. 

The summary of the research is fascinating to some, frightening to others. They begin quite reassuringly: "As of 2014, the religiously affiliated [those who actually go regularly to church, not those who only claim to be "religious"] are, by and large, as religious as they were in 2007."

Meaning?--among those who are "religiously affliated," the vast majority (97%) believe in God. That hasn't changed. Neither has the percentage who pray daily, attend weekly worship, or explain that their religion is important to them. Put plainly, the percentage of those Americans who "do" traditional" church and maintain a schedule of prayer didn't change much at all.

On to the tough stuff. Pew doesn't mince words: "But the percentage of people who describe themselves as religiously affiliated has shrunk." In other words, among the swelling American population, more people claim that they aren't "religiously affiliated," that they don't go to church. They may claim to be "religious," but they don't practice it in ways that churches identify: they don't attend worship or pray regularly. In just seven years--sounds so biblical, doesn't it--those numbers have fallen off significantly, from 83 percent to 77 percent. 

But there's more: Among those who says they're religiously affiliated, a higher percentage, in Pew's terminology, "have become more secular," which means they don't pray, don't attend church services, don't believe in God. These are the "nones" (people not affiliated in any sense with any church). Maybe most astoundingly, seven years ago 70% of unaffiliated religious people claimed to believe in God. Today, Pew found that percentage had dropped to 61%. 

Overall, says Pew, the American people are becoming less religious. It's not a waterfall--the percentage of those who say they believe in God has dropped only three percent--but things are moving downhill, no matter how you do the numbers.

And then, as if the Pew results weren't enough, enter Trump and Cruz, stage right. Ted Cruz determined that he could count on the Christian Right because he was especially outfitted for them. Huckabee was yesterday's news, Rubio was mostly Catholic, Trump was basically nothing. Cruz assumed that if he whistled some familiar Sunday School tunes, the evangelicals would line up like good Christian soldiers.

Didn't happen. Among U.S. evangelicals, what was most shocking was how many of those Christian soldiers trooped off to Trump, a man whose history was so unlike them that he may well have seemed like an anti-Christ. Nope. The thrice-married gambling mogul who didn't remember ever asking forgiveness swept the South as if Christians never got near the ballot box. But they did, and they cast their favor on Donald Trump.

That totally unexpected phenomenon has created all kinds of hand-wringing among believers. Who are we anyway? What do we believe? And if Donald is one, what on earth is an evangelical? That smoke has not cleared.

It's not hard to be Jeremiah with all of this--woe and woe woe. But I'll give my sackcloth and ashes to others.

Besides, there's always the good news.

"College chaplains at Oxford and Cambridge in England have noticed an increase in attendance at evensong, the service of evening prayer that combines contemplative music with words from the Book of Common Prayer," says Christian Century. "The trend has also been noticed at cathedrals across England, which are seeing a growing interest in midweek choral services."

Amazing. Sure it's England and not this country, but it's happening at what some might call the citadels of English secularism, its most prestigious universities. And what it is, is a return to something "the religiously affiliated" had, for the most part, themselves long abandoned--"midweek, choral services."

Is Pew wrong? I don't think so. That "nones" are more adamant in their rejection of religious practice doesn't strike me as odd. Religion, after all, may not be the opiate of the people, as Karl Marx thought; but lately it's the hallucinogenic force behind just about every form of radicalism, the sword terrorists love to wield.

Religion is an immense force for good, but also--and at the same time--an immense source of horror.

It's now been fifty years since Time magazine proclaimed in banner headlines, "God is Dead." The truth? For the most part, Time magazine is dead. 

Not long ago at the little church up the hill where we more than occasionally attend, I counted only 29 people, lots and lots of empty pews. But it was good to be there that Sunday morning, good to be with them, even though there were few, good once more to hear the good news. 

Pew and Trump and worry notwithstanding, it's also good to remember that the biblical command most often repeated throughout scripture isn't one of the Ten Commandments. It's simply "fear not."

Morning Thanks--the Red-Tailed Hawk

It's what I saw yesterday, three times, just out back, but not who. Sadly, this is not a picture I took; I wish it was. This particular monarch is not one of the royals hunting the river valley. I couldn't get a picture, and there lies the tale. 

On a sabbath afternoon, a pair of them were riding thermals as if the world was a fun park. Ostensibly, they were hunting, but I couldn't help thinking that, like everyone else, they were simply taking in the kind of spring day the likes of which you can find only in a children's book--warm, open skies, festooned with clouds thrown up in the sky by a crowd of clowns.

Three times I spotted them, even though their motionless gliding keeps them hidden. They cover ground as if there's little beneath them worth their time, swooping and climbing effortlessly. Nothing else I know covers ground so efficiently. Borne about on yesterday's strong winds, they gobble up whole townships without stirring a feather. 

Three times I spotted them--twice from the back windows and once when I was outside--and three times I was a floor away from my big lens. Three times I ran upstairs or downstairs to get what I had to, and three times, toting the camera, I came back to wide open skies, totally bereft of red-tails. 

It wasn't a game. They weren't toying with me. They're far too regal to play with the peons. I'm not sure they know I exist. What's out back is all their ranch, after all, and they have far more pressing concerns than an old bald guy toting that expensive camera. 

They're everywhere. They hunt from telephone poles in every state of the union, and they're killers. Keep that in mind. After all, the rabbits and pheasants out back certainly do. 

There were two of them yesterday, and by the playful ways they circled each other I couldn't help thinking they were in love. Hey, it's spring, right? Everybody is, or should be. They may have told each other they were hunting, but that was only an excuse. 

I don't think the Yankton Sioux were all wrong. Some of them believed that if you took their picture you'd run off with a part of their soul in that camera. I'm guessing that's something they learned from eagles and hawks. Stay up high and aloof, just be graceful, in every sense of that beautiful word. 

This morning, I'm thankful for our regal red-tailed neighbors. They're frustratingly uppity, but then the backyard is certainly more theirs than it is ours.

Still, one of these days I swear I'll get a picture.

Sunday Morning Meds--"How lovely"

“How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD Almighty!” Psalm 84:1

It’s silly to make the argument—there were countless other factors—but historians who know everything about the Sioux Indian wars often point at a Mormon cow as the cause for a half-century of horror on the Great Plains and the decimation of a once proud people. It was August, 1854, when that cow, belonging to a Mormon party moving west, wandered into a Brule Sioux camp where it was slaughtered--and eaten.

The owner demanded restitution. Lt. John L. Grattan, who had little or no experience with Native tribes, insisted on arresting the killers and led a group of 30 infantry to the Brule village. When the culprit refused to turn himself in, Grattan turned his howitzers on the people. Chief Conquering Bear was killed with the first volley, but the what had seemed the impossible happened—the Brules wiped out the entire detachment and the Sioux Indian wars began.

Nonetheless, when I read this all-time favorite psalm, strangely enough, it’s the Mormons who come to mind because when I think about their grand narrative—the long overland trek from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the basin of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, a pilgrimage that began in 1846, eight years before that wandering cow—I think I feel at least something of the exuberance that marks the first verse of this very precious psalm.

           

The story of the Mormon exodus is a purely American story, just as Mormonism may well be the first truly American religion. From 1846 to 1869, 70,000 Mormons traveled west to a place where they believed—and they were right—they could live in peace and freedom, protected from persecution they’d suffered wherever they’d lived before. Hundreds, even thousands, pulled handcarts, walking the entire 1300 miles.

But they had a goal, a destiny. They wanted a place to worship, a place to live their own pious vision. That shared goal, I’d guess, gave them the strength and dedication, the sheer will to endure every last horror the plains and mountain passes could throw. Along the way, they even improved the trail, knowing others would follow.

Daily life was strictly regimented; chaos and in-fighting would be the death of them and the enterprise. Each day they read scripture, prayed, and sang together. It was a massive, dangerous, difficult pilgrimage, and it was unbelievably successful. Once safe in Salt Lake City, their incredible journey became a story they could tell—and do--for generations.

The incredible joy that rises from Psalm 84 does so, I think, from similar long and difficult pilgrimages, exacting journeys of faithful believers to beloved places that are both “of this world” and of the next, a wagon train of worshipers on their way to a city that is, in a way, celestial.

“How lovely is your dwelling place,” the psalmist writes, almost as if he were, in effect, wordless. Sometimes I wish I could feel that kind of ecstasy about the weekly worship I attend, but I don’t believe we’re talking about similar rituals. What evokes the delight that makes this hymn ring through the ages is pilgrimage, in the oldest sense of that word’s usage, a vivid and exacting spiritual journey.

A dead cow is part of the story of that pilgrimage, an altogether too human story of religious aspiration and, finally, arrival. "How lovely is your dwelling place," they must have said when their colony was established finally. That’s why I think, somewhat enviously, of the Mormons.

If it’s difficult to find yourself in the triumphant joy of the singer in Psalm 84, consider the Mormons finding their place. Imagine their joy.

Better yet, try this. Consider this vale of tears—consider the depth of human sadness, honestly, all around--and then imagine a lovely dwelling place in a warm eternal sun. That vision too can make us sing.    

Trump the Loser?

Way back in this bizarre election cycle, I told myself that my Republican neighbors here in the county could possibly gather enough oom-pah to put a halt to the Trump phenom. What I hoped for was that my Republican neighbors, and they are legion, were God-fearing enough to realize the Donald was not their man. He wasn't, isn't, and never will be.

Iowa's first-in-the-nation's caucuses could, I hoped and wrote, end Trumpmania by not voting for him. He'd lose in Sioux County and therefore, Sioux County being the Republican stronghold it is, he'd lose in Iowa. Trump is a loser and the bubble--the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade character he is--goes poof! He goes home to his blessed casinos. Sioux County beats Trump means Iowa beats Trump, and Trump jets blessedly back to his towers.

Sioux County did beat Trump, and so did Iowa; but Trump got back his plane and started scoring win after win after win by punching out opponents, one at a time. 

Maybe. Until. Now. 

Google "Trump" and "Waterloo" and watch the opinion pieces rise from all over the media, right and left and in between. I'm proud again because this time it's "On Wisconsin" taking up the cause, the state I still can't help call home. No one talks about the thousands of Wisconsin evangelicals, even though my Badger family is full of them. No one talks about them because it's not the Christians who are turning on Trump, although they should. It's the loyal Republicans, many of whom are, I'm sure, evangelicals. 

What those who study such things claim is that Wisconsin has been at war for the last four years over issues created and championed by Gov. Scott Walker, who Trump helped destroy in Iowa. That war has made ideas and information vitally important and understood in the state. Wisconsin Republicans, my own family among them, I'm sure, can't help but be thoughtful about the issues. Their plowshares have been sharpened into swords for several years. They think. They know. And they don't think Trump. Bully for them, I say.

Conflict, real conflict, can be, paradoxically, a blessing because it sharpens minds and hearts. Wisconsin Republicans, some say, don't get bullied by Trump's bluster because the bloody wars they've fighting have taught them why they think the way they do. When discover that Trump doesn't think that way, he's toast. 

Well, that's overstatement. He's still Donald Trump and he's got his own plane, he's beholden only to his own fat bank account, and he's going to make America great again and basically step on whoever doesn't think so as if they're late night's campaign cigar stub. For some white folks, somehow The Donald is Mother Teresa.

But right now, in Wisconsin, Ted Cruz is beating him by ten points. 

The good Dr. Ben Carson, who inexplicably went over to the dark side once he dropped out of the race, excused the Donald's determination to punish women seeking abortions by saying the Trumpster wasn't prepared to answer that question. 

Neither was Ben prepared for President. But Ben is right, and that's a very good reason--there are more!--why I hope my home staters send Donald Trump back to New York--dare I say it?--a loser.

"Trump, the Loser." I can see it on campaign signs and stickers all over. "Trump the Loser."

On, Wisconsin. Get him off the ground and on his way home.
_______________________ 

Just for the record, two of the most interesting and thoughtful conservative voices are unequivocal on the candidacy of Donald Trump. You can read a whole string of Michael Gerson's columns in the Washington Post, but try yesterday's. It's impossible to call Gerson a liberal.

And then there's David Brooks, New York Times, who, on Wednesday, claimed that voters who were siding with Trump were leading the country into "a descent into darkness." Read it for yourself. 

Baby killers

Somewhere back in this blog's archives, I'm quite sure I told a story about my grandson, who was a kindergartner in 2008, a little towhead kid who climbed up into my lap as I was sitting in front of the computer in our basement and announced, smilingly, that Obama was a baby killer. 

He had no idea what a pregnancy was, may have heard the word abortion but couldn't have begun to understand it, and knew little if anything about the profound antagonism between those who favor legal abortion and those who don't in this country. He was parroting what he'd heard somewhere--I doubt at home. 

I'm not even sure he knew who Obama was. What he was willing to impart was that whoever Obama was, he killed babies. 

Far more often than not, a Christian community is a vital blessing, your sweet kids surrounded by people who pray. Sometimes it's not. 

The idea that Obama is, in fact, a baby killer is an understandable conclusion in a world in which, politically at least, legalized abortion trumps (can we still use that word?) most other crimes and misdemeanors. The attitude that Obama is or was abortion's champion is understandable too; he didn't oppose abortion as vehemently as John McCain claimed to--or certainly the former governor of Alaska did. The wisdom my five-year-old grandson imparted was a perfect shot-from-the-hip soundbite that would go well on a t-shirt.

Yesterday, Donald Trump misspoke, something he does regularly even though he doesn't believe it himself. Yesterday he misspoke and he knew it. Yesterday he told Chris Matthews that a woman who seeks an abortion needs to be punished. He didn't specify sentencing, but he said he believed that if abortion was going to be made illegal, then women who seek it must suffer the consequences of breaking the law.

The rest of the world went crazy. His Republican opponents repudiated him even more quickly than did Sens. Sanders and Clinton. Even pro-life groups rose up in outrage. Punish the women?--how unthinkable! 

I agree. I also understand how pro-life advocates would punish the doctor or whatever medical professionals provide the abortion procedure. Technically, their fingers do the killing. 

But Trump's apparent miscue stopped me because I'm not sure why so many would be so quick to call Obama (or Clinton or Sanders or Democrats in general) "baby killers," while assuming women who want and will the procedures, even pay for them, are most certainly not. 

The only possible reason can be that women who want to abort their babies are victims of some calamity or condition. If it isn't a failed marriage, it must be their hormones. When women discover they're pregnant, they're fragile and somehow not responsible for their decisions, their complicity in illegality--is that how the argument goes? If abortion is murder, are moms simply declared innocent across the board?

Many years ago I got a call from an old friend, someone who was raised Jewish but converted to Christianity when I knew him--and when an affair with a colleague led to his divorce--and hers. It's complicated and messy, but life is. His new wife was pregnant and had significant medical problems; the two of them were still burning bridges behind them--it wasn't pretty. Her pregnancy wasn't intended, and he was scared, he said.

Honestly, I think he called me because he wanted me to tell him what he already knew I would say--that even though there were loads of reasons for them to abort, they shouldn't. He knew me well enough to know what'd I'd say, and I did. 

And they didn't.

Today he's a Dean at a Catholic university, and the two of them are happily married, their kids adults and very much on their own. 

But when my old still-Jewish-but-now-Christian friend laid out the case as he did that night on the phone, I walked for just a moment in his shoes, in his tracks, in theirs; and for maybe the first time in my life, I told myself that, well, it's complicated. 

Because often enough it is.

Faith and death

“This is not a place of fear in here. The fear is out there. We know that God’s hand is in this. Whatever happens, we know that it’s going to be okay.”

So spoke Lavoy Finicum in a radio broadcast, Finicum, the Arizona rancher who'd gone up to Oregon to protest the federal government's persistent and illegal overreach, policies that affected he and his fellow Mormon cattle rancher, Cliven Bundy. The two of them--and many others--believe the federal government has no standing in their lives, and they claim the Constitution of the United States backs them up. As does God almighty.

Just exactly what happened at a road block in the middle of a Oregon forest will be debated, I'm sure, for a long time. Law enforcement officials claim Finicum reached for a gun after stepping out of a van he'd just slammed into a snowdrift. Finicum raised his hands as told, but then reached for something on his person, at which point, in the language of such warfare, he was 'taken out."

Anti-government demonstrators claim what happened was cold-blooded murder. The government says the man's death occurred because they were sure of "clear and present danger." What seems perfectly clear from what Finicum wrote and said days and even just hours and minutes before he was shot is that he believed he would be. It's speculation on my part to say it, but if you listen to him on the video made by occupants of the car, he seemed to encourage it, to wish martyrdom on  himself--and he got it. Google him, and you'll hear his people roar. 

Lavoy Finicum was no terrorist. He did not walk into some Oregon burg and start shooting. He didn't trigger a suicide vest or leave a bomb in a car parked outside a church. He took no one with him when he did what he did in the woods in Oregon. But what seems perfectly clear from everything he said and wrote is that he believed that "God's hand is in this," that "whatever happens, we know that it's going to be okay."

He was willing to die for God, freedom, and the American way. He considered himself the patriot, the rest of us conspirators and criminals, disciples of the evil scumbama.

In the days before Cliven Bundy put oak leaves on his cap and proclaimed himself the general of an army of freedom fighters in Utah, Lavoy Finicum paid taxes, even prepaid them, for his use of federal grazing land in far northwest Arizona. He and his wife had almost a dozen foster children, a major source of their income, he said. They kept up a home a long way from government of any kind, really. 

Then the Bundy conflict came along, and everything changed. Following the Bundy model, Finicum also refused to pay taxes he owed because just where in the constitution can anyone find the federal government's right to control land that should belong to the people? 

Finicum left his Arizona ranch for Oregon because he believed in the cause those dozen or so protesters were delivering in the face of the wicked federals. His cause was just. He was on the Lord's side, as sure as I am that the Lord would guide his feet down paths of righteousness.

Now he's dead, the martyr he wanted to be to the lunatic fringe Clive Bundy both represents and even, sadly, leads. And it's okay, I guess, because his death is something he believed God ordained somehow. 

"We know that God's hand is in this," Finicum said on the last morning of his life. 

"He was a fine man," Bundy said at Finicum's funeral. "He was basically crucified." LaVoy Finicum, Bundy says, was yet another Jesus Christ.

Wow.

The stone he rolled away

We built a house. Unlike a ton of people, we never really dreamed about doing that, never had a dream house, per se. I still find it hard to believe that we're here. 

I didn't build it, literally. My father built his house, most of it anyway, or so I'm told, used his own hands. But I didn't build this one: whole crews of men and women with real skills framed it, floored it, fitted its cabinets, and finished it up. Sometimes I watched, but not long. "I charge $15 an hour," one of them told me, "$30 if you watch, and $45 the minute you pick up a hammer." He smiled, but I got the message.

The only task I can say I did was muscle tons of river rocks into into retaining walls, sometimes four feet high, that run around every corner of the place and line the walk-out basement, stretching out toward the acre of grasses out back. Took me some few hours to do it. When I point those walls out and tell people I made them, they're surprised. I like that. 

I think I know a little about rocks. I'm no geologist. I know what Sioux quartzite looks like, but most of the others' names escape me. I know they're not all of similar weight--some dense ones are really heavy. But when I was putting those walls together, I had a good idea which ones I could take a shot at moving and which--I'm a retired man, you know--required my neighbor's skid loader. 

I say that because this Easter I heard something I'd never, ever heard before. Joseph of Arimathea was a rich man who could somehow make his way through an eye of a needle. On his own, dangerously too, he went to Pilate and asked for something greatly undesirable--the body of Jesus. Then he buried that body--he and Nicodemus, Jesus's late-night friend--in his own tomb. Here's how Matthew's account has it:

As evening approached, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who had himself become a disciple of Jesus. Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body, and Pilate ordered that it be given to him. Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a big stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away.

It took me an entire lifetime to hear that last line. Somewhere in my childhood I picked up the image of a stone maybe five feet tall in front of the entrance to the vault. I never thought much about how it got there, simply assumed that it took a squad of beefy Roman soldiers to man it into place, maybe a team of horses or a quartet of oxen to get the job done right. 

I never once imagined Joseph of Arimathea, all by himself, muscling it into place. Listen, I know about these things--if he did the job, what he rolled up wasn't much of a stone, and it certainly wasn't five feet around like the one in my imagination. Even if Joseph was a hulk, he couldn't have rolled up my version of that stone by himself. He would have needed a skid loader. But the Bible says he arm-wrestled that beast into place all by his lonesome. 

But in my mind the real story is rolling it away. My imagination always got the job done with a squad of angels, who simply poofed it into paper mache. Or else Jesus himself sat up, smiled, and waved a finger--whoosh, stone's gone. For all of my life, rolling the stone away required a miracle because the simple fact that the stone was gone sent those beefy soldiers high-tailing it to headquarters. 

For the first time in my life, I couldn't help wonder whether maybe Jesus himself rolled the stone away. Seriously? He could have. After all, Joseph of Arimathea rolled it into place. Maybe Jesus took a look at that thing, loosened up his shoulders a bit, spit on his hands, bent his knees properly, and did the job himself. Maybe it wasn't angels or even a miracle, some fabulous act of God.

Wait a minute. Even if he did it himself, it was an act of God, wasn't it? The miracle isn't in the stone, its heft, or some First Century B. C. skid loader behind a quartet of Jewish oxen. The miracle is that our Lord sat up, brushed himself off, stood, got his bearings for a minute. and walked out of that tomb. That he lives is the real miracle. 

The stone is only a stage prop. 

Maybe Jesus did it with his own hands, moved it himself, shouldered it gone, then bent down and stepped out of the tomb into the face of a dawn no one had ever seen before. He's alive. That's the real story.

Everything else is incidental.

This is my father's world

I'm told the male kestrel is grayish blue, even orange-looking, which means the determined hunter who entertained our whole family so royally yesterday during a wonderful Easter dinner was a woman, because, just in case you're wondering, the American kestrel is sexually dimorphic. 

Before you run off to Wikipedia, sexually dimorphic means, simply, that males and females aren't created equal. Well, they're created equal, but obvious physical differences make them look different--think ringneck pheasants, for example, who also occupy our backyard, or wood ducks or mallards. Donald Trump would say, "think human beings." He's not wrong. About most things he's not to be trusted, but human beings are sexually dimorphic too, like kestrels, sometimes called sparrow hawks.

One of which, this one, a woman, did some serious weekend hunting outside our back windows yesterday, in the middle of an Easter ham which I would be happy to admit was "to die for" if that phrase weren't inappropriate anywhere near to Holy Week. BTW, our Easter dinner was terrific; the pretty human female I live with--we're sexually dimorphic too--was on top of her game. 

But this particular kestrel, this little feathered hovercraft, had our grandkids fighting over the binoculars as she gathered her own Easter meal, probably a field mouse. She's no bigger than a robin, but that distinctive beak gives away her origins: she's a falcon, the tiniest member of the family. Try to imagine a cute falcon, and you've got a kestrel. 

Be not deceived--she's no Disney character. Kestrels know exactly what they're doing. 
They're killers. When she grabs a field mouse out of the grasses out back, she quite deftly snaps its spine. Fortunately, yesterday, we missed her dirty work. She pulled something out of the grass, toted it to the cornfield out back, and lunched bloodily out of sight among the stubble.

But her hunt was a delight to watch. She's regal and slim, weighing in at no more than four ounces; and she's blessed with a significant wingspan and a tail like a windmill rudder--well, that's stretching it. But she can tread air for as long as she needs to, the talent that had us all oohing and aahing yesterday at our dinner. Couldn't have paid for better entertainment.

And then there were these guys up on the side of a hill along the Little Sioux River, same place as last year. They're prairie crocuses, sometimes called pasque-flowers by people who prefer sounding as cultured. 

They're a provincial favorite in Manitoba, but not to be eaten, according to Wikipedia, who claims they are highly toxic because they slow the heart. Chew too many and you may be beset with "diarrhea, vomiting and convulsions, hypotension (LOW blood pressure) and coma." Listen to this: "Blackfoot Indians used it to induce abortions and childbirth." My grandson and I, who hiked up the hill to find them, didn't indulge.

I'll have you know the ditches are greening nicely right now, snow from a winter storm last week having melted sweetly into the ground. Winter's toughest blows are behind us. 

Ditch grass is nice, but the prairie crocus is the real star of early spring. Where they grow, they fight their way through to sunlight. They don't dominate like sun flowers, but they're always first on stage. They begin the show. Fragile as they seem, they punch through dead grass on a mission to remind us once again that new life already has its bags packed and is on its way. 

Call me a dreamer, but I think the prairie crocus is created especially for Easter. 

Yesterday we had a good one, a good Easter, in case you're wondering. Worship in church, at home, and out in the rustling grass, where once again, robed in his own wonders, we heard him pass. He speaks to us everywhere.

Sunday morning meds--the stories we tell

“You led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron.”

Psalm 77:20

Some years, my son and I ran into a man who asked me if I was Jewish. I had told him my surname—Schaap—which he identified as a particularly Jewish name in Holland. We were in the Netherlands.

The day before, we’d visited Westerbork, the transit station where a hundred thousand Dutch Jews bade tearful goodbyes on their way to concentration camps, never to return. The commemorative displays at Westerbork weren’t fully accessible to visitors who don’t read Dutch, but words aren’t all that important when one stands beside railroad tracks where cattle cars stuffed with starving human cargo once chugged away to death factories.

It was an eerie juxtaposition: Westerbork’s horror with the possibility that somehow I too could have been wearing that war-time yellow star. My son felt it too, I think, even though he was just a boy.

Elie Wiesel’s Night is perhaps the most famous piece of Holocaust literature. Wiesel’s time in the camps, his loss of his father specifically, but his experience of deprivation and insane inhumanity all made powerless the God he thought he knew. When a beloved boy is hung by the SS, someone asks, “where is God?” --a voice within Wiesel answers: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows. . .” What Wiesel tells God is that innocence and faith and light itself died in the camps.

Asaph tells a different story. In Psalm 77, he tells the world, in triumph, that the remembrance of things past washes out whatever torture darkens the soul, enables us always to see light behind the curtain. When Asaph remembers the exodus, God’s love reruns in his imagination, seems to return to his soul and his world. When he tells the Passover story, he is reminded once again of divine love.

The unbounded joy of the Exodus promises to heal what Elie Wiesel cannot shake--the horrified agony of the Holocaust. If my people were among the millions who died in the camps, would Psalm 77 lift the darkness? Whose story would I retell—Asaph’s or Wiesel’s?

The big windows just to my right hold nothing but darkness right now, but it’s Easter, the morning all of us learned the greatest story ever told. This morning, once and forever, death was conquered, suffering dispelled. This morning, when Mary went to the tomb, she simply couldn’t believe what was there and wasn’t: it was open after all, and he was gone.

He is risen. He’s alive. The sun rises even on the darkest moments of our lives. That’s what we believe, even in the darkest night, even when joy seems banished.

God was there when Moses lifted up his arms. Bless his holy name.

But was he at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and Trebelinka and Dachau? At Westerbork? Is he there in all our suffering?

Asaph’s testimony in Psalm 77 is glorious, absolutely glorious—as light is to darkness, as morning is to night. Lead us too by the hand, Lord, because yours is the story we have to hear, this morning especially. You’re alive.

Once for always you arose. Once, for us.

Kirstin Valdez Quade's story for Good Friday

I stepped into the world of Kirstin Valdez Quade somewhere close to the beginning of Lent. Couldn't have been a better time really, although I had no clue about what I was getting into. Ms. Quade's stories in Night at the Fiestas, her first book, create a darkened museum of suffering, which sounds--I know--awful. 

But maybe not today, not Good Friday, the setting for "The Five Wounds," a story which takes on a subject few writers would dare approach. "This year," the first sentence announces, "Amadio Padilla is Jesus." Because all of her stories in Night at the Fiestas are steeped in Mexican culture, that sentence directs a reader to some kind of passion play, a small town where Holy Week rituals are bold and scary and bloody.

Amadio is no fair-haired Jesus either, she tells us, "no silky-haired, rosy-cheeked, honey-eyed Jesus, no Jesus-of-the-children, Jesus-with-the-lambs." He's lazy, judged a good-for-nothing by those around him and for good reason. What's more, he hasn't seen Angel, his own daughter, fifteen and pregnant, for a year or more. What's more, he can't even remember the last time the two of them were alone. He's a long-shot at playing Christ, but his uncle, who runs the show, tells neighbors it might be good for Amadio because "he could use a lesson in sacrifice."

Angel isn't one. She's loud and vulgar and offensively childish. Oddly enough, her innocence is bested only by her brassy arrogance. But she's just a child, eight months pregnant.

Amadio has the lead in the kind of ritual observance Roman Catholic church hierarchy has long rejected, rituals you might expect to find in small towns where nothing ever changes. Men in black hoods bloody themselves as they stalk the Christ, who lugs the cross up a two-mile path to the town's own Golgatha. It's not pretty. As Amadio himself insists, it's something the children will never forget, but it's certainly no Rose Bowl parade.

The question that haunts Amadio is whether or not he will be strong enough to take the ritual nails through hands and feet, whether his selflessness will go that far. A former Jesus who suffered the nailing years ago still can't open his hands, but what Amadio believes is that his own worthiness will be dependent upon the extent of his willful suffering. If he can be Christ, the entire ritual will be memorable, and he will be transfigured before the village. 

What Kirsten Valdez Quade does in "The Five Wounds" is reenact the crucifixion using a man so utterly unlike Christ that the fact that she's doing it is astonishing. Amadio Padilla is the amigo Donald Trump draws up to create white disciples, but through the ritual crucifixion Amadio is not lost because he believes--he surely does--that if he can do this thing, something good can happen, both to him and for his community.  

I never saw Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, perhaps because the whole thing felt like a come-on. I know lots of believers were blessed, and I believe that in my own faith tradition--a tradition that doesn't hang crucifixes--our radiant joy at the resurrection sometimes too fully eclipses Christ's suffering on this very Good Friday. But The Passion wasn't for me. 

Then again, really, neither is this story. "The Five Wounds" takes you through suffering most of us choose not to imagine. Finally, Amadio suffers the nails. But he comes to understand that he is not "the Son," not Jesus Christ. "The sky agrees, because it doesn't darken," Quade writes. "Amadeo remembers Christ's cry--My God, why has thou forsaken me?--and he knows what is missing. It's Angel who has been forsaken."

There could be no resurrection, no Easter, without Good Friday. "This year, Amadeo Padilla is Jesus Christ," the story announces right up front. And, thank the Lord, because for the first time in his life, it made him see. 

One could do worse on this Good Friday.

Isaac Watts's "secretaries"

Because it's really tough to miss his music, just about anyone who's ever gone to church knows Isaac Watts. Those who know such things claim he wrote more than 750 hymns in his time (1674 - 1748). That's where we meet him, in his hymns; he's there somewhere in the shadow of the glory he created. 

But one meets Isaac Watts in other places as well--in his own commentary on the way in which he wrote lyrics that have become so familiar and precious to so many. He was--as he had to be--his own fiercest critic; and sometimes, he says in the intro to Hymns and Spiritual Songs, he had to restrain himself. 

"Some of the beauties of poesy are neglected and some willfully defaced," he says, speaking of what English teachers call metaphor and simile. And then, a confession: "I have thrown out the lines that were too sonorous and have given an allay to the verse lest a more exalted turn of thought or language should darken or disturb the devotion of the weakest souls." 

Okay, if you catch a whiff of condescension, it's there. Sometimes he'd like to be more "poetic" but he's a bit afraid the unwashed in the sanctuary won't get it. Restraint, he says, is something that really has to be practiced. But we'll let him explain:

But hence it comes to pass that I have been forced to lay aside many hymns after they were finished, and utterly exclude them from this volume, because of the bolder figures of speech [there's the phrase] that crowded themselves into the verse which I could not easily restrain. . .

If there's any question, Isaac Watts did not dream up his metaphors, didn't sit there, quill in hand, and work them out. They came to him almost too easily, too willingly. And now, a confession of sin:

I confess myself to have been too often tempted away from the more spiritual designs I proposed, by some gay and flowery expression that gratified the fancy; the bright images too often prevailed above the fire of divine affection and the light exceeded the heat.

At times, he says, his craft got away from him. Thrilled by the form, he nearly forgot content; and the line, he says, went over the top, devotion--the thought--left somewhere behind. 

Yet I hope in many of them the reader will find that devotion dictated the song and the head and hand were nothing but interpreters and secretaries to the heart.

He wants those who sing his hymns to see that his devotion to God created the music--and that his creative imagination--his head and hands--were but "secretaries to the heart."

Watts says he loves to dress up his lyrics in poetic finery. But it's a weakness he has to fight. Style should only serve, not rule.

If you're wondering, one of the hymns to make the cut in that first collection is "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross," a hymn that includes one of the most famous "figures of speech" in all of English hymnody: 

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!

English teachers call that metonymy, a species of metaphor that substitutes part of something for the whole of something. This famous line happens to reverse that definition, substituting whole (sorrow and love) for the part (blood). What's literally falling from the savior is blood. But Watts reminds us it's not just that--it's sorrow (for us) and love (for us). Blood flowing from the Savior's wounds is bad enough, but there's very much more to his suffering.

I could write all morning long to try to unpack what's in those two lines, but sometimes it's better simply to sing them in sheer wonder.

If you're blessed, you may just sing that old Watts hymn sometime in the next few days. If not, spend a couple minutes listening. What Watts wrought will take your breath away. Those hands of his, those secretaries to the heart, never did finer work. 

A most unlikely pregnancy

Once upon a time we had a barn in our backyard, a barn that featured an honest-to-goodness carriage stall, complete with manger. When we bought the house, it seemed like a bonus--we not only had a houses and a barn, we actually had a manger. 

I'm no farm kid. There are no milking stools in my memory, no chicken coops, machine sheds, or outdoor privies, and no mangers. That I knew the word at all resulted from a couple thousand readings of Luke 2; after all, you can't stage the Bethlehem story, even in your imagination, without a manger. It would be interesting to know how little I was when I first tried to picture Jesus in a manger. Really, really young.

I'm 68 years old today, but it never dawned on me to think about Mary, a child herself, actually getting pregnant. The act?--sure. Who hasn't wondered what she felt when suddenly the Savior of the world was miraculously there within her? There are Catholic schools named "Immaculate Conception," after all--we used to play them in basketball. 

But I don't know that I've ever given much thought to Mary, the virgin Mary, pregnant for nine long months. Did her ankles swell or her veins protrude? Was she sick a ton? Did she have to pee a lot? She probably didn't crave ice cream or tacos, but did she ever send Joseph out for a pickle?

Not until this week had I ever thought about actual gestation (can I even use that word when it comes to Christ?). Those who follow a strict liturgical calendar celebrated the Feast of the Annunciation just a few days ago, a prescribed holiday in the middle of Lent when celebrants rejoice at the news of Mary's pregnancy. In God for Us, Luci Shaw says the day comes as a shock to her because everything connected with Christ's birth seems winterized, "wreaths of holly, snow falling all around." Same with me. Somewhere in the word annunciation there has to be a manger.

But there isn't. In fact, it's almost spring, almost Easter, a strange time to think about shepherds abiding in the field suddenly gifted by a heavenly flash mob. It took me 68 years to consider a royal pregnancy, even though I probably built imaginary nativity scenes in my mind since I was three.

Why? Why did the Lord God almighty not just engineer some kind of polaroid pregnancy, let Mary off the hook. She was too young for stretch marks. Why make her carry the Savior for nine long months? Why not just spring him on the world?--which is what he did anyway. Why not bless Mary by forgoing all the stress that pregnant moms come heir to? 

Nope. For all we know, Mary carried that child just like any other mother. I don't know that first century Galileans had mirrors, but you can bet she stopped to take a look at herself once in a while, measured her swelling, held her belly in her hands. 

I just thought I'd bring all of that up. It seems so odd to think of it right now, Good Friday staring us down--and Easter just a few bright mornings away. 

It's something of shock to consider the annunciation in late March, but something of a relief too, something to prompt a smile right before the darkness dead ahead.

My Dutch Calvinist ancestors would have whispered it, I'm sure. There was, after all, something unseemly about being pregnant since it implied. . .well, dare I say it?--sex. Probably after church sometime, a couple of women would break the news, privately, shielding the conversation from the children. "Mary. . .don't you know?--Mary, is in verwachting, in "the family way."

Polite grins, tenderly offered, all around.

There's not a manger in sight right now. Three crosses on the horizon, and somewhere just over the hill a load stone rolled away. 

But Mary's with child. Amazing. 

Holy Week and His will

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.  

That's C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce. The blunt force of the either/or proposition he creates makes a great pocket reference for understanding one of the most difficult lines we confess. Either we say those words to him--"thy will be done, Lord"--or he says them to us--"very well then, your will be done." Go burn in hell. 

Ouch.

Joel Nederhood, in his book of devotions, The Forever People, claims that what Jesus himself wants in that petition of the Lord's Prayer is that we become more like the angels, simply taking God's orders without question. "The reference to heaven in the perfect prayer," Nederhood says ("Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven"), "reminds us that there is a realm where the will of God is absolutely supreme." Therefore, he says, "Those who want to live eternal life beginning now realize that God's will must be supreme."

Honestly?--I like that better.

It's hard not to think of that single petition as a concession speech, because it is. We lost. He won. We give up. What we confess in those few words is that our will is of little or no consequence, a concession that is, for most of us, a mean bullet to bite. 

A friend loses his job, gets fired. That he did seems unimaginable, given his commitment and experience. You think you know him well enough to believe he simply couldn't have been lazy or slipshod. You've seen him at work, heard him talk about it. No matter. He got canned.

You're mad as heck. You're outraged. You feel like bawling. You want to raise Cain, even though you remember that Cain was certainly no hero.

Should you get into it? Should you Lone Ranger the thing, or stay on the sidelines and tell yourself that all things must pass? 

When we beg God that his will be done are we throwing in the towel? Don't we thereby become human bean bags who lie around in dreadful passivity waiting for someone to sit on us? Doesn't saying "thy will be done" virtually insure we'll live on welfare for all of our born days? 

Is concession something you do only when failure is imminent? Christ himself, on the cross, precedes this very grand concession with one last blast of his own human rebelliousness. 
"And He went a little farther, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, “O My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt.”

Jesus Christ knows very well what has to be done. He's been told from eternity that he will die for our sins, he will die and be raised anew. He knows what's in front of him so well that he actually asks his father to call the whole gig off--the manger, the water into wine, the blind man, the woman at the well, that bottomless meal on the Mount, all that adulation on a donkey, Peter's altercation, Pilot's half-hearted sentencing, the beating, the crown of thorns, even the nails through his hands--write it off, Father, he says, "let this cup pass from Me." Jesus Christ asks the boss, his beloved father, to forget the whole thing. Was there ever a moment in his thirty-some years when he was more human? 

That's when he concedes. "Not as I will, but as Thou wilt."

Could he have done more? Could he have, as the soldiers said, simply stepped down off the cross and waltzed back into town? Couldn't he have called in flights of angels with assault rifles? Couldn't he have acted? Did he just have to hang there on nails and take it? 

Here's a take on an eternal question that has no clear answer. "Thy will be done" admits, in faith, that there was and is and always will be a better way than ours--which is to say, there's God's way. That admission--that firm belief--shouldn't stop us from going to bat in this world for things that matter. But it also insists, in faith, that our moment at the plate may very well not be his. Our faith in his will doesn't keep us from acting, but it does insist that we admit, right from the get-go, that we could be wrong. 

Jesus himself tried. With every element of his being, he tried to reverse course: "take this cup from me." That's what he begged.

But that taking was not to be, and he knew it.

Thy will be done. There's always a better way, and it's his, not ours. 

During Holy Week

Primary Renauds is a condition medical professionals say has no internal cause. It effects the extremities, primarily hands and feet, and leaves them tingling and, more often than not, hurting. The pain results from constricted blood vessels that tighten and thereby restrict blood flow for two main reasons--cold (there's little Renauds in Bermuda presumably) and stress (wouldn't you know it?) Sounds like a it could be a particularly acute problem among Lutherans and Calvinists in and around Minnesota (like here). 

Secondary Renauds is a condition medical professionals say has internal causes like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Secondary Renauds--or Renauds Phenomenon--occurs also in people who use their hands a lot, who play piano or operate jackhammers. Those who suffer from one of the many forms of carpel tunnel syndrome may also have really painful feet and toes.

By far the most prevalent cause of painful feet and toes is diabetes. High blood sugar wreaks havoc on blood vessels and, as everyone knows, diabetic neuropathy can get ugly, fast, really ugly. Can be fatal.

I am not affected by any such pain. But everyone knows at least something about aching feet and hands. If your feet hurt, people say, you just plain hurt all over. Watch old men and women walk down the street, and you can pick out hammer toes and bunions, flat feet and ingrown nails. Ever break a toe? Doesn't everyone? There ain't no cure. Just time and tenderness. It just hurts.

Three years ago on July 4, in a motel room, I got up in the early, early morning darkness and rammed my big toe against a bed frame that was not about to move. Nothing I can say or write can describe the howling I choked back because I didn't want to wake my wife. Pain you wouldn't believe, pain so strong I went blind. In a flash I knew the nail was history--and it was. 

There's not a soul alive who somewhere on their pilgrimage didn't suffer the perfectly gruesome pain of a stubbed toe. Some of the wildest dances ever performed by humankind occur in the dark of night, most often accompanied by death songs so frightful they will never and can never be repeated. 

Yesterday in church, the preacher just happened to mention that hands and feet are among the most sensitive parts of the body. It's holy week. That's why. But once he said that, I don't remember much. Hands and feet are the most sensitive parts of the body, he said. He's right. Of course, he's right. And the very thought of nails being driven. . .

Well, you know.

The Sun Dance is a Lakota ritual that demonstrates a dancer's devotion to his people by his taking on suffering so intense it can't be imagined. In Shia communities throughout the world penitents still deliberately bloody themselves with chains in ritual self-sacrifice. Among some Roman Catholics, believers known as flagellants do a kind of ritual penance with knotted whips over their shoulders.

I've never done any of those things and don't intend to this week or any other. It seems to me such practice, even well-meant, can become grotesque very easily. But when I think of those nails being driven into hands and feet. . .

I believe all of us already know at least something of the pain Christ took upon himself, his hands and feet, as he hung there on the cross. It can't be duplicated, but it can be imagined.

The pain I can't get my mind around is not what it was that ran through in his hands and feet, but the fact that we are ourselves the nails.