Going to Vesterheim

This wonderfully haunting painting greets visitors at the entrance to Vesterheim: the National Norwegian Museum and Heritage Center in Decorah, Iowa. Clearly, Father is missing. Interpretations include a familiar story: he's gone on ahead to America to find a place for his family.

That table is spread with food, but obvious anxiety. No one is smiling, not even the children. The prominence of the empty chair suggests their father's absence is daunting, as is what must have seemed inevitable, a voyage across the sea to a strange country from which they'd never return.

Most 19th century American immigrants, be they Dutch or Norwegian or German or Irish, were dirt poor. Most saw America as a promise attainable otherwise only in their dreams. Most were unhappy. Who would suffer this kind of loneliness and danger emigration created if, as people say here at times, "Life is good"? It wasn't. What the American dream offered for this family had dual motivations: that they could live better in a new country because they weren't and couldn't back home.

I think we do ourselves well to remember what we came from. I've always assumed that my people on both sides of the family were potato eaters, like those in Van Gogh's celebrated early portrait. 

My people knew little of what Americans call "success." They were certainly not aristocracy, nor anything near to "middle class." My ancestors were tired and poor and yearning to be free.

And religious. Most of those who came from the Netherlands in the mid-19th century were religious separatists who'd challenged, even despised the State Church of Holland in a series of fights rooted in theology but demonstrably political: they were unwilling to suffer the oppressive reign of church leaders who considered them and their piety silly at worst, or dangerous, at best.

I never knew that similar beliefs--both religious and political--affected mid-19th century immigrants from Norway, too--or Germany. In those countries, poor people were deeply affected, heart and soul, by stirring religious movements that were highly individual, powerfully strong, and, according their respective governments and appointed church hierarchies, clearly rebellious. 

"The sloopers," those very first Norwegian immigrants, carried with them a religious identity that created immense confidence that they were especially chosen of God, a belief my own people shared. That double-fisted faith emboldened them, not because they were arrogant--they weren't. But it simply would not have dawned on them that God's hand wasn't there beneath every last move they made. They believed they were that close (and that others weren't.)

In Holland they were "afscheiding," the break-aways, because they'd defiantly walked out of the Dutch Reformed Church. In Norway many of those earliest immigrants were Haugeans, disciples of Hans Nielson Hauge, who one day sang a hymn out in the open air of the country and underwent a mystical experience: "My mind became so exalted that I was not myself aware of, nor can I express, what took place in my soul. For I was beside myself." That moment changed his life and turned him into an itinerant preacher who traveled through rural neighborhoods talking about the absolute importance of "the living faith," something akin to what we might call "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ."

That individuality was seen as a threat to church powers, because it was, politically as well as religiously; it created an idea as radical as "the priesthood of all believers," emphasis on all. 

Not one cell in my body is Norwegian, at least nothing that I know of; but last Sunday we walked through a really fine ethnic museum that could well have been telling my family's own immigrant story, ours, however, in wooden shoes, the story of a people just as hopeful and just as confident that the Lord God almighty, creator of heaven and earth, was there with them in the ship that crossed the sea and there too in the new land.

For better and for worse, that faith is still there.

Ken Burns, the Donald, and hairdressers

Honestly, I hesitate to say anything about Donald Trump because there's no end to the words that have been said and written. When he began his campaign, people considered it some kind of joke. But soon enough commentators and pundits from both political sides described what he'd done to the campaign as "taking the oxygen out of the room." He so dominated news cycles that no one else could breathe. At taking over the news, he was flat-out brilliant.

Nobody uses that phrase anymore, even though the man's orange doo is on every screen in the nation. He's still doing it, just continually ramping it up. 

His reaction to the horrible Pulse massacre in Orlando was textbook Trump. He started by extolling his own virtues, an arrogance his disciples love, for some strange reason. He told America that thousands of people were writing him to say he was a prophet on terrorism. "I don't care about being right," he said, a lie; and then he took on Obama, the Devil incarnate. 

The carnage in Orlando was Obama's fault because Obama won't call what's going on "Islamic terrorism." Presumably, if Obama would, suicide bombers would drop their vests. Now when he ascends the throne, he will use that phrase--and terrorism will cease. ISIS will lay down their arms and concede.

Donald Trump is not the only one to say those things. He knows he's got to go farther to create news, to take the oxygen out of the room. So he did. He's not stupid--you can believe him when he says that. He's a bigot and a bully. He's a chiseler. He's a liar and a fraud, but he's not dumb. He's a whole heckuva lot worse than dumb. 

So once again he suggested something that made him politically famous years ago. He repackaged his suggestion that Obama may have something to do with terrorism's madness and butchery. He cracked the window for those who already hate Obama, and their numbers are legion; he gave them leave to wonder whether or not the President of the United States sneaks out of the White House to meet with terrorists or else perhaps sneaks them in. Trump left open to suggestion that Omar Mateen and Barack Obama are teammates--after all, they're both Muslims.

All of that is pure idiocy and utterly reprehensible. What it strengthens is paranoia and hate. But he's the master at dealing out fear. 

The scary thing is not that people don't call him out for his evil--they do. Thousands do. The scary thing is that people like Paul Ryan let him ply his horrifying trade. The scary thing is that when people like filmmaker Ken Burns say, as he did in a commencement speech at Stanford, that Trump is “a person who easily lies" and "who creates an environment where the truth doesn’t seem to matter," people--thousands of them, millions, don't listen. Trump, Burns said, "has never demonstrated any interest in anyone or anything but himself and his own enrichment.”

Ken Burns is just a pinko leftie, I guess.  

Burns called the Republican candidate for President “an infantile, bullying man, who depending on his mood is willing to discard old and established alliances, treaties and long-standing relationships." And then he said, “This is not a liberal or conservative issue--this is an American issue.”

What's really scary is that upwards of forty per cent of the American public believe Trump. Ken Burns is just another liberal demonizer. Instead, they believe Donald Trump. The really, really scary part of all of this is not that nothing musses the man's hair, but that his loyalist millions are willing hairdressers.

That's what scares me.

Anton Dvorak out in the corn

[Want my advice on reading this?--go to the bottom and start the music, then read through the post]

Could have been different. Could have been a whole lot different. Anton Dvorak wasn't just the neighbor's distant cousin house guest. He'd already spent a year as the head of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, where he taught composition and led the choir and orchestra. The year was 1892, and the conservatory was celebrating four hundred years of European/American history with a true European at its head.

Dvorak was sophisticated, celebrated, and mightily accomplished, and his sojourn in rural Iowa might well have been totally different. He could well have been snobbish and petulant, a pain in the Czech butt. But one of his most trusted devotees, a man who'd spent time at the Prague Conservatory, then accompanied Dvorak to New York and acted as his interpreter, Jan Joseph Kovarik, recommended that he spend a summer in tiny Spillville, Iowa, where he spent a summer in a community of 400 or so Czech Bohemian immigrant farmers, his people, you might say. 

By habit and inclination, Dvorak set and maintained a daily schedule to which the Spillville-ites could set their old-country clocks. The maestro arose at four, walked around town and along the Turkey River for an hour, then returned home, had some breakfast, did a little composition, and headed off for St. Wenceslaus Church (you can stop by yourself today) to play the organ for morning mass at seven. 

The word on the street in Spillville is that the old Czech women who gathered there daily for mass were shocked when the old organ began to play, but in no time they grew to love his music so greatly that he was asked to play for their weddings. . .and their funerals.

Often enough, he'd play cards and drink beer with the locals at the local pub. He loved listening to old folks talk about the trials of homesteading--Czech immigrants had come to rural, northeast Iowa in the late 1860s and 70s. And the people of Spillville loved him, although his Czech maid used to get angry at the composer for taking notes for his music on the six-inch cuffs of his white shirts, scribbling notes in ink she found it almost impossible to clean up. 

He'd just finished the New World Symphony when he came to town, but his sojourn among so slight a place resulted in new compositions, including the "String Quartet in F" (in just thirteen days) and the "String Quartet in E-flat." Even though it was Iowa Czechs that drew him to Spillville, even though he specifically wanted to be among his people after a wild year in New York, his time in the northeast corner of the state made him more sure that American composers needed to lend an ear to their own native sounds--both African-American musical traditions and Native American syncopation. 

Northeast Iowa has much to commend itself, including a rolling, wooded countryside one simply doesn't associate with Iowa prairies, not to mention towns like Spillville and Decorah that may, in twilight or warm summer mornings, feel oddly European right here in "the tall corn state." 

There's an old story about Dvorak and Spillville that's probably myth, but it goes like this. On one of his early morning walks along the Turkey River, he rounded a bend to find a rural woman bathing. Clothed or unclothed? Think the worst--or the best. Regardless of her attire or lack of it, that morning's delight resulted in his Rusalka, the story of a water nymph, one of the Czech composers few lyric operas. 

The truth is, you can't believe everything the descendants of those Czech folk in Spillville will tell you when you visit. There's a sure quantity of myth about it all, you can bet on that. What's indisputable is that such mythology grew out of love.

It could have gone the other way--"world renowned artist comes to town, his nose in the air." But it didn't. Not at all. It's as sweet a story as you can hear anywhere in rural Iowa.

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 desktop, 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, and suddenly a new world was animated.

One of the most pleasing landscapes I took this year is a picture no one else would find lovely, I’m sure. I was out on some public land just south of a county park. It was mid-April and 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 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 non-descript country path occasionally traveled by deer hunters, I’d guess. Otherwise, as far as I could see in any direction, there was 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 soon enough it seems 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 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.

"That kid knows how to work" (i)

All of this starts with an ancient mansion on the edge of town, three floors huge, tall doric pillars perfectly stationed over an elegant overhang way up top. Rumor has it that the entire third floor is a dance hall--"dance hall" sounds cheap. Amend it to ballroom. Seriously, the entire third floor. 

That old mansion was moved here. No one in their right minds would build anything like it today. No Dutch Calvinist would have built it long ago, sinfully ostentatious.  Picture some 150-year old hotel on the Main Street of some upper Midwestern town--that's what the place looks like.

Yesterday, when it had already begun to feel as if the day was going to be as hot as promised, I drove by that monster and noticed two kids--they looked like kids, but they may have been late teens--scraping the paint off the siding in the front. I am aware that some people do more tedious jobs everyday throughout the world, but scraping paint is hardly the work of kings. It wasn't hot yet yesterday morning, when I saw them; but the temps finally reached up into the 90s here yesterday, and we're in Iowa, not Arizona, where the 90s is not only livable but pleasant. I didn't envy those kids.

Just seeing them there, taking on that spekkled monster, reminded me of baling hay when I was in my early teens. Upstairs in bed, I'd hear the phone ring downstairs, then listen as my mother spoke only once or twice during a short-lived conversation that would tell her when I needed to be where that morning, at what farm in the Town of Holland, Sheboygan County, Wisconsin.

For reasons I secretly treasured as being my own bulk and strength, I was almost always assigned to pack bales in fly-infested dust bins where, by early afternoon, the temps rose higher than the stupid decorative cupolas on the roof. I spent hours and hours and hours in a succession of hay mows, packing them full of bales ripe with a pungency I will never, ever forget.

But, oh my, I learned how to work. I did. I disliked everything but the lemonade, but honestly wish my grandson could have a similar opportunity today. I really do. I suppose I think of baling hay as vets talk about the military--a million dollar experience I wouldn't give a nickel for.

There those two young guys, kids, stood in front of that formidable monster of a house. Blessedly, they had a cherry-picker. At least they wouldn't have to spend energy going up and down ladders to reach those awful flaky gutters. But what faced them in all that heat was a whole long day of scraping paint. Could there be a worse fate?

If I had a nickel for every time I heard this line, we could have a great night at the casino: "that guy [substitute boy, girl, kid, woman, man] knows how to work." Among the children of the Dutch Reformed, to be described in that way is a blessing because, dang it, we're good at work. Works for women too. Loose some women in the church kitchen, and when the dust is gone, someone ringing out a dishrag will say it.

I just finished working on a book for Sioux Center's 125th birthday, and the most impressive takeaway is the realization that success is in fact achieved by those who work. And work. And work; and then, when the rest of the crew is home watching the Twins, work some more. Successful people don't work because they have to, but because they want to. Doesn't matter what at, they simply love to work. 

Today at my church, a bunch of guys are getting together to put on a new roof. I won't be among them. I'm too old--that's not an excuse, it's plain fact. 

But I can guarantee that among those who do show up, some will earn the description--"that guy knows how to work." I've been on a hundred such jobs. I know very well that there will be some blood sport among the true men, some significant testosterone spent in the battle to work even harder than the next guy.

Work is like righteousness. You can't get enough, really, ever.

I grew up among whole crowds of people who knew how to work, entire churches full of them. Whether or not my ancestors ever did it is irrelevant, I guess, but nothing about Tulip Festivals seems more characteristically Dutch than all those long-handled brooms and milk cans full of bubbly water--the perfectly absurd job of street-scrubbing. It's nuts. It really is. But let me tell you: just stand there and watch them for a while, and you'll say it too--"good night, those people know how to work."

They do. Good Lord, they do.

[More to come--]

So much for the Death of the Religious Right?

Much has been made this campaign season of what some pundits call "the death of the religious right." Here's how the story is goes: a) Conservative Christians embrace only those who sing their tunes; b) Donald Trump really doesn't sing their tunes (or if he does, he can't hold a tune); c) Christian conservatives love Donald Trump. 

That syllogism makes no sense. Something doesn't hold. Lots of people who love to speculate on such things claim that "the Christian right" has, like lousy salt, simply lost its savor. In power politics, they're dead. As Sarah Posner said last month in the NY Times, 

For a constituency that has made conservative religious values, sexual purity and Bible-driven policy the cornerstone of its politics, Mr. Trump — the twice-divorced, foul-mouthed businessman who praised Planned Parenthood’s health services and nonchalantly gave Caitlyn Jenner permission to use the women’s room in Trump Tower — seems an odd choice.

Odd, and perhaps fatal--but not to Trump, who has now notched the Republican nomination, but fatal to the CCs or RR, or so the argument goes. What Ms. Posner didn't list among the sins attributed to Mr. Trump is his outrageous claim that he's never asked forgiveness for anything from anybody. Apparently, he is without sin, which makes the Apostle Paul a liar, but what the heck? When the political opposition is a handmaiden from hell named Hillary, The Donald must be the will of the Lord.

Me? I'd happily attend the funeral of the CCs. Their literalist view of holy writ makes the Bible some kind of rule book, which it is--and isn't and never will be. Try this on for size: "Thou shalt not kill." True for all time? Well, sort of; but surely that doesn't mean I can't kill the goon who comes into my house by unloading the .44 I keep under my pillow. "Stand Your Ground"--now there's really righteous legislation, say the really red-blooded CCs. Besides, you can't not agree with Trump on ISIS, right? What we ought to do in the Middle East is bomb the hell out of 'em. True believers rise to applaud.

The Religious Right has inflicted nearly fatal blows on people who once considered themselves "Reformed." Their simplistic answers, their fear-mongering, their self-righteous bigotry, and their all-around inflexibility create walls higher than anything Trump's foul dreams design. They know nothing about inclusion or compromise; diversity and pluralism are almost Satanic. Grace is amazing to sing about, but if you want a definition, only theirs will do.

Well, I got news. CCs not dead, but alive and well in northwest Iowa, where a 23-year old kid who doesn't even have a profession, a true-blue RR who's only lived here four years just won the Republican primary for this area's state rep. Steve King, of "calves like muskmelons" fame won overwhelmingly once again on Tuesday, but he took with him a kid named Skyler Wheeler, who had, among his many CC endorsements, a preacher who sounds for all the world like a theonomist, someone given to believe America should look to Deuteronomy for our law. 

And Wheeler won. Here. 

Maybe somewhere in the U.S. of A., the RRs are giving up the ghost. The marriage between CCs and the Republican party may well be in jeopardy elsewhere; Trump may well break it up as he's done to two of his own. 

But here in northwest Iowa, there'll be no funeral because the CCs won, big-time, when Skyler Wheeler took it to candidates his followers tarred and feather by calling them, of all things, (excuse the language please) "moderates." Can you imagine?--a moderate representing Sioux County? Down went a professor of political science and a small-town mayor, both twice Wheeler's age, both Siouxlanders, both undeniably conservative, just not righteous enough. 

Elsewhere, the CCs are dying. Maybe. But here, RRs rule. 

On to Des Moines. Make America great again.

Morning Thanks--from Sacagawea to Hillary

The knickered man in this old photo looks sheepish, as well he should. On the other hand, the two women, out front, look more than a little saucy, as well as they should, standing where they are at the feet of one of America's earliest female heroes, an Shoshone woman named Sacagawea. 

Without Sacagawea (spellings differ, to say the least), Lewis and Clark would have never made it up the Missouri and across America. She acted as a translator and a guide through rugged areas of the American west no Corps of Discovery super hero had ever known or seen before. Without her, the whole bunch of burly white Easterners might have hightailed it back to St. Louis.

And she was just a kid--sixteen years old, although no one knows when or where she was born. In fact, where she died and what of remain mysteries too. From a white person's point of view, she came out of nowhere and, once Lewis and Clark were back on the Missouri, moving south with the flow, she simply disappeared. 

That baby over her back, a little boy named Pomp, was hers, despite her being only a little older than my granddaughter. Through the whole trek in what a half century later became North Dakota, she carried her little boy along, dutifully.  He belonged to her husband, a French wilderness man, a trapper, named Toussaint Charbonneau, who also acted as a guide.

It's very much worth remembering--and never forgetting--that this young American hero was married only because Charbonneau won her in a card game. The only rights she had of her own were what she could gain from carrying out her appointed role of mother and wife, which is to say, not much. She had no say in government; she was, for heaven sake, a Native American and Indians weren't really people. And, of course, she was a woman. It would take more than a century before women had the vote. Double jeopardy.

It's good to remember Sacagawea, her story, her heroism, and her non-personhood, especially after last night, when the prsumptive nominee for President of the Democratic Party is Hillary Clinton. Sometime this year we will be retiring America's first African-American President; if things go as many pundits guess, we will, January next, inaugurate our first woman President. For the record, should Trump triumph, he would not be our first white, male President, of course, nor would be our first racist President.

During her long political career, Hillary Rodham Clinton has accumulated millions of people who hate her, despise her, voters are so full of vitriol they're willing to side with a man who claims he's never once asked forgiveness of anybody or anyone for anything, God included. But I hope that, at least for this moment in time, every last American can take a deep breath and know that what happened last night was a milestone in American history. 

What exactly happens in the  Democratic Convention coming up in Philadelphia is still up for grabs, but if the "presumptive" candidate turns into the Democratic candidate, it'll be official. If she wins, it'll be, again, historic. 

I'm not a progressive; I don't think we as a people are getting better, but then neither am I sure we're somehow going down the rubes. I'm a Calvinist, convinced of the fact that, post-Eden, our predilections are, first of all, toward what we can make or get or earn--"what's in it for me." Human beings have to fight not to think of themselves first in every instant of our lives, a fight that requires help from God. That doesn't change.

But last night something significant happened, something above politics. We've come a long ways from being led by a teenage Native girl, a kid herself, hoisting a baby through the cold wilderness of the northern plains, a girl who was one of several wives of a fur trapper who won her in a card game.

We've come a long way. Have a look at those women at the foot of statue and the man in knickers who doesn't know quite how to stand. 

We live in a different world. 

And my morning thanks is that we do.

Political Insanity

Rep. Katie Elmers (R-NC) is in great trouble apparently. The titanium-ribbed conservative Tea Party favorite came into Congress vowing to blaze a trail through government waste, determined to return power to states and localities while carrying a banner emblazoned with the old Thoreauvian proverb--"that government is best that governs least." She was a favorite of the right, one of Sarah Palin's own "mama Grizzlies." And, through three terms as one of her state's reps, she's done what she came for.

Except, not everything her right-wing constituency deemed truly righteous. 

As Jamielle Bouie writes in Slate, she didn't position herself far enough to the right in their meticulous scorebooks:

A close ally to former House Speaker John Boehner, she backed both debt ceiling increases (in 2011 and 2013) and was a skeptic of the 2013 shutdown, eventually supporting the deal that reopened the government, preserving the Affordable Care Act against right-wing demands. Aligning herself with constituents and Republican leadership, she backed a limited immigration proposal that gave “earned legal work status” to some number of unauthorized immigrants. She voted to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank, which supports thousands of jobs in her district (and is opposed by conservative libertarians), and removed a provision from an anti-abortion bill that would have required rape survivors to report a rape to police in order to get an abortion after 20 weeks.

And that kind of behavior is enough to draw the truly believers out of the weeds once more and seek her skin for being, well, if not a leftie, sure as anything a supporter thereof. Fear often does wildly unconventional things, but whatever it does accomplishes rarely calms the fearful soul. That the Tea Partiers would hang a target on one of their own seems totally understandable when sheer-cliffed principal is touted as the only way to govern. 

Add to that, the tendency of some of those on the right to play the God card as if they alone had Him in their hand.

Locally, a Republican primary poses something of a choice, even though, heaven and Sioux County (sometimes mistaken for each other) know all three are conservatives. One is just more so. One is the only true God-fearing man in the bunch because only he holds the God cards.

Check this out:

 

The "Sioux County Conservatives" claim Jeff Vander Werff isn't one of them and therefore all other Sioux County conservatives (their numbers are legion) should certainly not vote for him. These particular "Sioux County Conservatives" don't tell voters who to vote for, but they are making a campaign out of making sure that one of the candidates, at least, Jeff Vander Werff, is not one of them, but instead "one of them," meaning a wolf in sheep's clothing, a (pardon the language) moderate. 

It's insane. It really is. It's absolutely insane.

What 150 years of life in Sioux County, Iowa, should have proven to everyone who lives here is that, often as not, especially here among the children of Dutch Calvinists, the perfect is the enemy of good. 

Here's how Bouie says it:  

This relentless drive for ideological purity, itself tied to a broad prohibition against compromise with anyone outside a narrowly defined tribe of fellow travelers, has done nothing but paralyze the Republican Party’s ability to accomplish anything from the routine maintenance of government to larger policy goals. 

And he's right--in South Carolina, in Sioux County, and in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. What's happening here too is perfectly insane. (Note the adverb.)

Morning Thanks--Muhammad Ali (1942-2016)

Amazing, isn't it, that the entire phenomena began with some kid from Louisville stealing a bike and the bike-less kid getting so mad he signed up for boxing lessons because he never, ever wanted to be a victim again. That's the story. Some fight club manager promised to make little Cassius Clay into the kind of tough guy who could make people pay. 

And he did. And how.

I've never been a boxing fan. I've probably seen him fight only on newsreels, but I know "rope-a-dope." I know the style of boxing that made him as famous as he was frustrating, dancing around the ring until he knew good and well the opponent was wheezing enough to get himself decked by an uppercut or some random roundhouse.

Anyone my age can't help but know Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali. Lots of new sources call his the most recognizable face in all the world. They may be right. He's in a class with Mother Teresa and very, very few others. In 2012, most of the world and me watched when, something of a superhero, shaken as he was, Muhammed Ali lit the Olympic flame in Atlanta with a torch he was physically unable to carry. That one moment was a victory for millions, even billions of people.

I remember his brashness, his in-your-face attitude, his outright arrogance, his third-rate poetry, his ceaseless bullying. I was a boy, a kid, and a white kid. I remember thinking he was out of his tree when he converted to Islam and changed his name. I remember the whole thing was an embarrassment. I remember resenting his brash uppity-ness. I remember being afraid of him, afraid in ways my dad helped me greatly to understand. After all, this Cassius Clay was an "agitator," someone who couldn't let well enough alone, someone looking to destroy an entire way of life, even in rural Wisconsin.

I've been reading Jim Wallis's America's Original Sin. Honestly, very little he says is news to me at this time in my life. For a variety of reasons, most of what Wallis maintains is old news; but that doesn't mean that the express purpose of the book doesn't hit like an Ali uppercut. It does. American racism is our "original sin. 

Because what I don't remember about Cassius Clay is that when he came home to Louisville, a gold medal from the 1968 Olympics on his chest, the champ could not get served in some restaurants in his own home town. He was black. What I don't remember about Muhammed Ali is the dog whistle lots and lots of African-Americans heard when the world champion heavyweight told all of us that he was so darn pretty. What I heard was stupid, swaggering arrogance.

African-Americans heard something else all together, things white folks like myself wouldn't let them feel from the very start of the American experience. When Ali said he was pretty as a picture, they heard him say they were too. I had no idea that's what they heard from Ali because when I was 16. I was cock-sure Barry Goldwater was going to save America. After all, "extremism in defense of liberty is no vice," and extremism was exactly what we America needed to protect us from our own Muhammed Alis.

Ali died this weekend. You couldn't have missed it. The news is full of tributes and endless sound bites most politicians would die for. Ali could make headlines just as heedlessly as Donald Trump can. He was, years ago, forever in the news, sparring, rope-a-doping with journalists. He knew how to sting and smile at the very same time.

In 1966, the greatest boxer in the world refused to fight in Vietnam, refused to fight with people with whom he had no quarrel, he said, when his real enemies were here, were those who wouldn't let him eat in a downtown restaurant. That was something I didn't understand back then, a truth about America my father tolerated and never told me. In 1966, I wrote an essay I can still find somewhere in my files, an essay titled "Why We Are in Vietnam." 

He was, back then, much bigger than I thought he was, far bigger, a much greater fighter.

Soon enough, perhaps, Mother Teresa will become a saint, although millions across the face of the globe would call her that already. Ali, a man with a face as recognizable as hers, will never be. 

But Muhammed Ali will be not soon forgotten, forever the champ and, despite his sins, very much a hero. 

This morning, I'm thankful for Muhammed Ali and what he taught so many around the world. 

And what he taught me. 

Sunday Morning Meds--These Elysian Fields

“Better is one day in your courts 

than a thousand elsewhere;. . .”

Psalm 84:10

In Los Angeles, more than a century ago, when a black preacher/candidate named William Seymour, son of a slave, announced to a committee seeking a pastor for a Holiness church that he’d become convinced speaking in tongues was the true mark the Holy Spirit’s presence, he was at that moment dismissed from candidacy. So he went down the street and starting preaching to a small inter-racial group that soon started growing—and didn’t quit. Today, we call Seymour began “the Azusa Street Revival.”

To say Pentecostalism was born on the streets of LA is silly. Pentecost, when men walked around with little tongues of fire on their heads, was the beginning, the promised outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But those who know more about such things than I do claim Seymour’s enthusiastic preaching on Azusa Street launched the meteoric rise of Pentecostalism, a fellowship that is now a half a billion strong throughout the world.

Pentecostalism—unlike other more traditional forms of Christianity—isn’t so much a system of thought as it is an experience. It’s always dangerous to be so reductionistic, but it’s fair to say that one can’t talk about Lutheranism very long without someone lugging the phrase “justification by faith” into the discussion. Calvinism will always be equated with predestination, I fear.

Just as generally, Pentecostals are all about the experience of the Holy Spirit, the manifestation of his presence, in speaking-in-tongues, in healing, in being baptized anew in the Spirit’s life. There’s no rigid system of thought to Pentecostalism, no doctrinal foundation. Shared spiritual experience creates the community.

For most of her life, my mother sort of envied Pentecostals and was often been anxious about why God almighty didn’t bless her with the gift of tongues. She once told me how a friend of hers, a pastor’s wife, explained that speaking in tongues was really no problem, how if my mother would simply let her mouth fall open, the words—whatever words there were—would simply tumble out. I’ll never forget her telling me that story in intimate detail: her open mouth, her stuttering, her distress—emotional and spiritual—when the gift of tongues simply didn’t arrive.

Most believers long for spiritual experience—me too. I don’t envy the gift of tongues, but we all desire the selflessness at the heart of ecstatic vision. I feel that very desire in the psalmist’s words: “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere.” Every believer wants to be near unto God.

Regardless of my energy on Sunday mornings, the passion (or lack thereof) of my anticipation for worship, I recognize the thrill that resides in the utterance in this verse from Psalm 84, the writer’s memory of intimacy with God, and how that moment relieved him of the heavy baggage of this life as he was lifted up by the Holy Spirit into the very presence of the Lord.

The heart of this verse—and probably the whole psalm—is rich and abiding religious experience. One comes closest to God only the vivid experience of his presence, by losing oneself in the all-consuming comfort of divine grace.

It’s all any of us know of heaven, I’d say. All we need to, I suppose; and in this vale of tears, all we’ll ever get.

People experience faith in a thousand different ways. It’s patently silly to assign a specific behavior or time or place.

I’m told LA has at least a hundred different ethnic restaurants. That sounds great. But I don’t think I’d find the comfort of grace on Azusa Street.

For me, right now, this morning, grace is what turns the fields around me perfectly Elysian. Right here his courts of praise stand open to experience.

Saturday Morning Catch--in the neighborhood

Pity Sioux Center. The party for their long-awaited 125th birthday celebration was thoughtlessly crashed by early summer storms whose very presence blew everything else off the stage last night, a truly awesome sky. Pictures are everywhere. How does anybody compete with this? (photo by Cindy Cleveringa)

The big show last night was the big sky. 

But this morning's dawn arrived gloriously, even though it was without excessive pageantry, just a few long thin battleship clouds on the eastern horizon. 

When the sun decided to make an appearance, it did so in a blaze from which you really had to hide.  

Still, on a morning like this one, grace abounds in the dawn's holy radiance.
,

A bright morning sun like this one turns ordinary, into extra-. Even the sheep seem luminescent.

Even the dirt's made proud.

Morning Thanks--It's done. Well.

Seriously, it was a real team effort. 

People use that phrase all the time, mostly because they mean it, and so do I. This magazine/book is out, the product of oh-so-many hours of work by a bunch of folks I have to thank for delivering the final product. First, Sally Jongsma, who took raw material and shaped into what's there on the page. When city officials asked if I'd take the project on, I knew if I could get Sally, a ton of my worries could end.  

Thanks, too, to a handful of writers willing to do some feature journalism "on the side," all of them taking time from busy lives. We tried to pay well, but I don't think any of them were in it for the bucks. What they love to do is create. They all have the unquenchable desire to make sense of things, to listen to someone or a group of someones, and find a way to tell that story, make it clear and plain, make the content jump off the page, to take something of chaos and shape it into bright sense. They're a great bunch.

When one member of the city council wondered aloud whether having a publication for the town's 125th birthday  was worth it, when he said, "Why? Nobody reads those things anyway," I made readability a priority. I wanted people to pick this up and read it. 

I love history, spend most of my time reading history, it fact. I'm not for a moment pooh-poohing a history text; but a 125th birthday is not a major event and therefore allows some elbow room. Besides, Sioux Center suffers no shortage of history texts for those who'd like to study the place and its history. Those books are there, on the shelf, if you need to look things up.

But this job was going to result, I told myself, in something people would not only put on their coffee tables, but also actually pick up and read. I wanted something that felt almost like a book but looked for all the world like a magazine. It had to be a good read.

How? Human interest. I told myself human interest would make the project irresistible, lively stories about interesting people. We needed to cover some significant community events--the coming of Wal-Mart, the new downtown mall, a sprawling Pella Windows factory, the incredible diversity that's come to a village that not long ago wore wooden shoes. We'd write all that, but we'd do it by character, by people, by warm hearts. Cold, hard facts have their place, but I wanted to muscle that town councilman into picking up and reading the magazine.

In that cause, I had great help.

One day, months ago, a Farmers Coop Society mailing caught my eye. I went in to the FSC office and asked who did their design. "Agency 212," the woman said as if I should have known. I had no idea who Agency 212 was. She told me, even pointed. A professional whose opinion I regard highly told me to go with a business, a business who takes on the whole project--from text to publication. We did some flirting with free-lancers, but I'm grateful for the advice because Agency 212 took the content off our hands, listened to our hankering, even took our criticism, and turned out something totally delightful. I'm so pleased.

Took a ton of work. I spent more time going from business to business in town pedaling ads, more time raising money than I did in my whole working life. I tried to shape a magazine that felt like book, a book that read like a magazine.

And today for the very first time, people can pick one up and discover for themselves if we accomplished what we wanted to do.

I think we did. I'm thrilled with We Call Sioux Center Home. When it comes to punctuating that title, I want you to know I've got choices and I'm italicizing as if it were a book because it's not just a magazine. I think it's a whole lot more.

I'm proud of it, dang it. I'm proud of the teamwork, the efficiency, the look and feel of the thing. Go ahead. Call me vain. I don't care. We Call Sioux Center Home turned out just as fine as I ever imagined.

Maybe better. 

I'm happy.

And, this morning, thankful. 

Human stories set right here

I shouldn't be surprised, I guess, that the world just outside my window plays such a major role in each of the three novels I (and others) have been reading in the last year, all three set close by and written fifty years or so after the homsteading each of them describe. "Major role" actually misses the mark; in all three the region where I live isn't just another character; it is the primal force with which each novel's protagonist has to find atonement. In one way or another the prairie is the antagonist in each of the novels.

Really everything goes wrong for Nell O'Connor, in Josephine Donovan's Black Soil, a novel set just a bit west of here among the region's early Yankee settlers. She remembers the fine life of Amherst, Massachusetts, where she and her family lived before her husband began to dream of a new life out west. She sees herself as a pilgrim out here beyond civilization, someone who will, who must eventually return. On the prairie, even her most compassionate work--adopting a forsaken child--turns to grief when that young lady runs off--even farther west!--with an Indian boy. 

What saves Nell O'Connor is her seemingly invincible dedication to the notion that God's will for her, for her husband and her family--no matter what that will may bring--is fashioned from his stedfast love for his own. Of those, she is convinced she is one. The prairie throws everything it has at her, but she continues to stand in the might afforded her faith. 

It's a more complex force in Walter J. Muilenburg's Prairie. The world Elias Vaughn is committed to conquer has similar weapons--hail, heat, cold. It's a landscape that won't be broken easily. On the other hand, this wide and yawning world outside my window casts a remarkable sublimity that Vaughn finds mysteriously seductive. It's incredible beauty, despite its bad behavior, creates so profound an awe in Vaughn that he seems to forget those around him, those he should love, had he any love left. Elias Vaughn wrenches a livable space out of a prairie world that somehow steals his humanity and leaves him as alone and loveless his father ever was. 

O. E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth has two pioneer protagonists, both giants really, whose love for each other is tested by the new world of the American prairie. One of them, Per Hansa, finds this new world an adventure, a test of his manhood. Out here, the other, Beret, his wife, feels bereft of everything that has given her life meaning. She is as ardent a believer as Nell O'Connor, but Nell's faith gives her life. Beret's inflicts guilt that eventually breaks her.

Rolvaag's interest is a study of emigration itself, of the way European immigrants learn to live in a world that offers nothing of the tradition or mythology that gave real meaning and purpose in the old world. Emigration, Rolvaag suggests, is not only perilous but potentially fatal. 

The prairie is a different kind of antagonist in Giants in the Earth. It's danger is only partially the wind and hail and fire it can so callously create. What endangers the settlers is their removal from the wellsprings of meaning that gave them life in the old country. In the emptiness of the prairie they go hungry with it comes to spiritual sustenance. 

All that history is behind us, really. Down river from here, the Floyd has been managed by flood control plans that bulldozed an expansive channel wide and deep enough to weather the kinds of floods the river once mustered almost annually. Most all weather comes in spades out here--cold is deadly, winds are constant, heat is unbearable, storms are preposterous. But life is pretty much under control. The power of the plains seems managed, the world outside my window domesticated, like the river. Where once there was poverty, wealth is more than abundant.

We've come and we've conquered. I should be thrilled.

This morning three or four dozen Canadian geese are trekking across the open field between me and river. I have no idea why they've undertaken the pilgrimage that's come all the way across the field, west to east. They're a stumbling herd, the moms and pops shepherding children who not yet old enough to fly. None of them are particularly good at walking.

But right now they remind me of what life might have looked like 150 years ago, what the Yanktons must have seen happening all around, masses of strange-looking people, heads down, bound and determined to find something somewhere they could call a world of their own. 

It is a great story, and a sad one too, a story told in part in three novels, each of them written fifty years after the homesteading each of them document.

In all its elements, with all its variations, its separate triumphs and tragedies, it's the human story set here, right outside my window. 

Me and T. S. Eliot--R. I. P.

T. S. Eliot

The study of T. S. Eliot is now decades behind me, fifty or sixty years, most of a lifetime, and I'm not at all bothered by that confession. Not that I didn't appreciate mining his oh-so-formidable poetry way back when; but for me at least, understanding him was like climbing hand over hand up a stone wall without the use of one's legs--which is to say, just about impossible. Eliot himself famously maintained that poetry had to be difficult, and for me, his was, desperately so.

Apparently there is a brand new two-volume study of Eliot. A review by Marjorie Perloff in the Weekly Standard put me in mind of the trials I had with Eliot's "The Wasteland," as well as other poems of his, poems equally impossible to understand and therefore far more difficult to appreciate than the professor (I don't remember who taught me my Eliot in grad school) thought proper and fitting for an English major. Two new volumes of critical work. I'm not in line for copies.

The real problem back then was that I knew I was supposed to like him. You weren't really part of the English major family if you didn't. I had to climb the Eliot Parnassus or be forever relegated to literary peon-dom. So I did. I tried. And tried. And tried. 

But all the while I couldn't help thinking that any poem packaged with its own footnotes was cheating, wasn't a poem at all, wasn't music but scholarship in verse, if the lines could be called verse at all--and totally arcane scholarship at that.

For years I taught "The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock" with relative success, at least by English prof standards. Since no student in the class understood anything at all about what was right there before them in the text, I could sound brilliant by opening up so many impossible lines. 

"Do I dare to eat a peach?" The famous last line of that poem offers English majors grand opportunity to unpack meaning like true academics. As a prof--I'll admit it now--it was fun to be smart and to make the students feel smart too, to offer them membership in the club. 

I know that Eliot's "The Wasteland" helped me understand the deadly moral fatigue felt in the Western psyche after the madness of World War I. I know that "The Four Quartets" offered me a look into an empty soul, and that "Ash Wednesday" began an answer which does more than suggest Eliot's own transformation/conversion to Anglicanism.

I know all of that, but I don't "like" the poetry. 

So I couldn't help feel a little liberated by Perloff's evaluation that "when Eliot was good he was very, very good but when he was bad he could be quite horrid," although I might have turned down the volume of the first bald assertion in that sentence.

What seems clear to me now is that I was blessed to be an English prof in what might be considered the Golden Era of English teaching, a time when people--in the club and not so--actually believed that what the poetry of T. S. Eliot said carried more wisdom than almost anything else dressed up in words. I started my college teaching career when all college students in this country had to take American literature, every one of them, hard as that is to believe today. I taught literature when wise men and women believed that every college student should know the work of Ezra Pound.

That era is over. 

Sigh.

But I don't know that we didn't do the right thing in making sure the only the people who have to read T. S. Eliot today are those who really want to. Eliot was, without a doubt, the kind of elitist who's hard to love and hence hard to believe. I'll grant you that he deserves the long Wikipedia page he's got. I won't fault him there. But our worship?--nah.

No part of my dalliance with Thomas Stearns Eliot do I remember fondly. May he rest in peace. I just hope I'm still a member of the club--emeritus status.