Morning Thanks--Remembering Black Sunday

Yesterday was the anniversary of Black Sunday, the day in 1935 when a windstorm picked up a part of the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles and blew it elsewhere across the southern Plains. Tons of drought-stricken topsoil that had been plowed up (often for the first time) by thousands of mechanical tractors on the southern Plains billowed up by mighty winds, the first great day of the Dust Bowl. 

Land rush did it, and the age-old desire to get rich. No one thought much about the land, no white men anyway. Horrible, inescapable drought that turned the recently-turned topsoil into sand.

Once the cloud covered the southwestern sky, people saw it wasn’t hail or rain but dust so thick some of them got lost just a few yards from their homes. Some died, months later, when it filled up their lungs. Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time tells the story as well as any book I've ever read.

A woman from South Dakota told me she was sitting in church when a huge dust storm came to that state sometime earlier. Soon, the air even inside the sanctuary so thick with dust, all she could make out up front behind the pulpit was the shine of the pastor’s white shirt.

I’m not thankful for Black Sundays or the Dust Bowl, but I’m very thankful to know that history is capable of teaching us very specific lessons, out here on the Plains as elsewhere, moral lessons we neglect, as we do so easily, at our peril.

Braveheart for Good Friday*

Some believers consider Braveheart, the epic 13th century story of William Wallace, a proud and glorious hero to some Scots, to be a kind of quintessential Christian film. I wouldn't be so quick to render a halo, but Wallace's incredible daring, and his dedication, is powerfully inspiring. Why he remains a hero is no mystery: he befriended the lowly by waging a unrelenting guerrilla war against the occupying Brits. He showed no mercy to those who deserved none, and, most admirably, championed freedom. He was a man of principal.

All of that's in the name, really. If you've not seen the movie, you don't need to--the title says it all, Braveheart.

The two blockbusters Mel Gibson created offer completely different historical characters. On one hand, Braveheart, William Wallace, a bloody hero and freedom fighter; and on the other, his Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, who was just as principled, but very much the Prince of Peace.

I thought of Braveheart this morning, Good Friday, because of one haunting metaphor David uses in Psalm 22:14: "I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted away within me." His intimate description of vanquished body parts goes on for another verse, but the line that stops me that heart of wax. "I am poured like water?"--sure. I think I've been there, not at the level of my savior, but I know that one, thin as gruel. "My bones are out of joint?"--a whole-body ache, yep, as if the county's new road grader just leveled me for the eleventy-seventh time.

But a heart of wax? The KJV goes on to say that it's melted; that helps a little, but still the image doesn't communicate as viscerally as the others: "my heart has turned to wax."

Psalm 22 is the psalm of the day, it seems--today, Good Friday. Last Sunday, our preacher made the claim that when Jesus cries out, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" he's not only quoting Psalm 22, but he's referencing the entire poem, the whole story told therein. Anyone who knows 22 can't help feel the Twilight-Zone-ish resemblance between what David feels and Christ experienced. How on earth could David have so meticulously plotted out the Messiah's own crucifixion? I don't know, but somehow he did--some kind of vision, I assume.

William Wallace is a man whose heart never once turned to wax. Braveheart never winced, never lost courage, never stopped fighting, never doubted himself or his cause. Braveheart skinned his foes once he'd killed them. Braveheart waged war until the very last moment of his life, when he was tortured and died. Braveheart cared not a fig for personal gain and fiercely led his rebels into victories they should not have won. Braveheart died for his people.

"My heart has turned to wax" is an utterance from the dark other side of human experience, or so it seems to me. And if our pastor is right, then that's exactly what Christ felt; he was quoting the line, after all. Hanging from a tree, he had no heart at all. It had turned to wax.

The great danger of immense human suffering is probably not the fatal loss of blood but the fatal loss of faith, the decided conviction that God himself has left the building. Titanic burdens make us "lose heart," as we might say, or turn it to stone--or wax. When it's impossible to "take heart," there's no heart there anymore. Hence, no more life in me. My heart has turned to wax.

What I need to remember today, Good Friday, is that's what happened to Jesus Christ. His heart turned to wax under the burden of his immense sacrifice.

In a raw and tortured way, he became a divine Braveheart by becoming, horribly, no Braveheart at all.

For my sake, my savior's very heart turned to wax.
_________________________ 
*First published on Good Friday, 2009.

The cross

The cross was the moment when something happened as a result of which the world became a different place, inaugurating God's future plan. The revolution began then and there; Jesus's resurrection was the first sign that it was indeed under way. That is what the present book is about.

That's N. T. Wright's opening trumpet flourish in The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion. It's almost impossible to believe that any event in history has been given more ink than what transpired during that very first Holy Week. I've not waded through much of that literature, but it's clear from the rhetoric that Wright here employs that he believes much of that ink has led us somehow more or less astray.

Not astray as in "heretical," but astray as in "off course." The two crosses here at the front of our church are perfectly Protestant: the suffering of Jesus is manifest only symbolically because it's emptied of his broken body. There are no crucifixes in our church because, traditionally, we believe he is no longer crowned with thorns. He is risen. Hallelujah. The intersection between the things of this world and the next--between heaven and earth is manifest, and Jesus Christ, who died thereon, is that link, which is to say our link. That's what the cross is about. The blood is gone.

What Wright argues Revolution is that we may need to take a step back and think a bit more about the role of the crucifixion in the Holy Week story, and about the very nature of crucifixion itself:  

We in the modern West, who wear jeweled crosses around our necks, stamp them on Bibles and prayer books, and carry them in cheerful processions, need regularly to be reminded that the word "cross" was a word you would most likely not utter in polite society. The thought of it would not only put you off your dinner; it could give you sleepless nights. 

I can't help wonder, when I read N. T. Wright, whether Protestantism--me included--hasn't too assuredly walked away from the crucifixion, the suffering Lord, the bloody Savior. We've joyfully emptied it because He did, after all. He beat it. He killed it, we might say these days. Death where is thy sting? 

But what Wright wants to maintain is that we shouldn't bury the suffering Lord because in the dynamic of Holy Week, the cross is so terribly significant. Jesus Christ did not go gently into that good-night. He didn't die abed, surrounded by loving friends and all his close family. The apostles weren't singing his favorite hymns as he took sweet leave. He died on a cross.

If I'm right about Wright, then the point he's pressing in Revolution is that what happened on the cross was not some kind of pagan ritual sacrifice. It wasn't Christ's death swapped for our sin, but instead God's gift of his very self.

Beneath those lashed planks of old barn wood in front of church, a couple of railroad spikes lie on a purple cloth--shocking, horrific, a reminder of Friday's horror. But somehow the cross, even though it's old, seems left untouched by what must have happened there all day long and into the night. There's a couple of nail holes, but that's it.

And here's what I was thinking last week: if Wright is right, then shouldn't there by at least a couple of nails left there in the wood? Shouldn't that cross carry some mark, some stain of God's love? Shouldn't it look somehow less than nicely crafted?

Just a thought this Maundy Thursday.

We need $300

First time I've asked for money in ten years.

But we're 300 bucks short of the $2600 or so we need to place a full-page ad in the Sioux City Journal making very clear that some voters in Iowa's Fourth District don't appreciate the inane prejudices of our congressman, Rep. Steve King. Those of you who are not from here will remember him for claiming Hispanic illegals have cantaloupe calves from toting all those drugs over the border. Just a week or so ago, he claimed we don't need other countries' babies, then doubled down on that poison phrase with even more xenophobic invective.

An AP story claimed that here in King's stronghold, nobody really objected to his prejudices. People here simply assumed, "well, that's Steve."

Some of us don't want to be tallied in that way, so we're doing a GoFundMe to raise money for a full-page ad declaring as much in the region's biggest papers. We'll take anything right now--nickles, dimes, or quarters. 

Won't you consider contributing?

Holy week stories--Zion Pres

Somewhere in Nebraska. Somewhere south of here. Somewhere in the eastern part of the state--that's about it. I don't remember where exactly, not that it's the kind of attraction that would bring in the tourists. 

That's where I found it, standing there just off the road, on gravel, across from a cemetery, all the ingredients of a dead church once upon a time named Zion Pres. Not all of such ruins are Presbyterian out here. Many are Lutheran, some on the reservation are Episcopal; they come in all flavors, although size is fairly standard on the edge of the Plains.

They conjure a time when there were more people on the land, when every two or four miles a school with a bell stood out in a corner of cropland, a place with an outhouse and kids--maybe twenty--because far more families were around back then, far more kids in those old families. You needed kids to farm, to make it on the land. 

Finally, even all those kids weren't enough. Nor was 160 acres. Nor were the horses. And so, for more than a century already, Zion Presbyterian and churches like it withered away, not because of some dalliance with modernity or women preachers or death-like conservatism. Churches died because their people left the neighborhood. They died because the kids left, and what's an institution to do when it has no kids, no future? They died because people did, a couple hundred just across the road.

Birds flew in, and weeds grew through the cracks in the sidewalk. For a while, vandals did what vandals do. The people who own the place got told by an insurance man that the only way to protect themselves from lawsuit would be to make sure nobody got in the place anymore. "I don't care what you do really, but you've got to protect your interests--put some 2 by 12s up over the front door, you know? Do something," that friendly insurance man must have said.

You can cry for the church, but as long as you're at it, let a few tears fall for the whole neighborhood too--and the school, already long gone, I'm sure. It's life and death on the Plains.

As it was even before its demise, this old country church is a startling image. For some of us, believers, it's even a little scary. those demanding planks barring the door a symbol of repression, devout Christians who can't not choose to bake a cake for people whose marriage they cannot condone, or "Happy Holidays" taking the place of "Merry Christmas," a battle cry in the Trump crusade.

But at Zion Pres the story is different. No one is afraid. No one is persecuted. The sadness--although it's not profound--is not that Zion Pres did something wrong, but that most all of the residents of the area live across the street beneath granite stones in a graveyard that could use some cleaning up. Truth be known, they're all gone too. No one wants in anymore. 

The image is not only sad but foreboding. A locked wreck of a church makes fears grow in the hearts and souls of believers. Look again.

I can't help thinking this week that the barred doors of Zion Pres, way out in the country, suggest what the followers of Jesus felt late Thursday night, and all day Friday and Saturday: It's over. The whole five-loaves-and-two-fishes thing, the "blessed are the peacemakers,'' the flipped temple table, a bunch of suicidal pigs, Lazarus in a winding sheet, dinners with harlots and crooked pols, and that kid thing, too--you remember? "Go on and let them come sit in my lap," he said, "see if you can learn something." And then that wry smile.

It was done. Finished. Over. Time to go back to boats and nets and H and R Block. It was fun for a while, a real kick. Sometimes they thought the whole thing just might upset the whole Roman apple cart, you know? 

And then Golgatha.

It's over. The good times are behind us, the people long gone. 

It had to be something like that, something like Zion Pres, somewhere out on some lonesome gravel road, dying.

Holy Week stories

Pushing 70, as I am, I doubt I'll ever really get with the whole "Holy Week" program. I spent too many years in a Calvinist (which is to say "contrary") family. "'Holy Week?' Isn't every week holy"? That's my dad. 

It's hard for me to imagine that any family could out-pious mine when I was a boy, but he was so thoroughly steeped in old-fashioned, Reformation-era, prejudices about Roman Catholicism that a vote for John F. Kennedy in 1960 was an invitation to the Pope to become President. 

This is Holy Week, and supposedly we've been in Lenten lament for weeks already. I know that, but it neither shakes or shapes me. My sturdy religious conscience reminds me that it should these days, but my full-bore Reformation Protestantism still prompts me to roll my eyes.

That being said, I must admit to enjoying the additional Lenten cross at the front of the church, and the bevy of symbols someone scattered about beneath it. Each of them tells a story. There's no wind in the sanctuary, so the rocks aren't there to hold down the cloth; they're symbols, I'm sure. And the cloth isn't just a bed sheet, it's purple purposely--all about royalty. Those wax grapes sit atop a loaf of bread for reasons as obvious as the presence of that wide crown of thorns. I'm not quite so sure about the chain behind it, but I'm willing to bet it's meant to remind me of my Savior being forcibly removed from his all-night prayers in the garden.

The whole display is something of game, but nobody in church plays it against each other. We didn't, one Sunday, when the arrangement went up, turn it into a parlor game. It's up there to make you think--and it works, the way "holy week" is supposed to. I'm doing it right now.

The railroad spikes are horrible, terrifying. I never imagined the nails to be anything but ten-penny, at worst. Those spikes keep railroads in line. That they could be that huge is as hideous, as the thought should be. The lantern I'm not particularly sure of--maybe you know. But Christ shining out in the darkness is and forever shall be the light of the world in Christian iconography.

The colorful porcelain rooster makes me giggle, and it shouldn't. At least I'm smart enough to know not to laugh; there's absolutely nothing funny about the rooster's weird, late-night crowing.

I'm guessing the bundle of sticks behind the cross is meant to be hyssop, the conveyance Roman guards used to bring that sop of sour wine to Christ's lips. I mention it only because I remember the word itself, not because I know much about the plant. I read that hyssop is about as un-exotic as a plant as can be in the Middle East--Great Plains tumbleweed; but it has medicinal, even cleansing attributes. 

Two other mentions in the Bible come at powerfully memorable moments: 1) at the original Passover: "And ye shall take a bunch of hyssop, and dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two side posts with the blood that is in the basin; and none of you shall go out at the door of his house until the morning'; and 2) in Psalm 51, where King David, broken in pieces by the recognition of his own sin, asks for forgiveness: "Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow."

How that attribute of cleanliness translates into its use on Golgatha is something I don't know. But who said we always have to know all the answers?

Hyssop produces colorful flowers, I'm told, and, when it's mature, has woody stems, just like that bundle of sticks behind the cross. 

Last week, when it got warm, I cut back last year's ornamental grasses around the yard. We've got an acre, plenty of room to build a huge fire; but the wind was altogether too prairie-like so I stuck them, armful by armful, into the burner out back and clamped down the top once each bunch caught a spark. 

Seriously, they exploded into flame, burned hot and super fast, then died just as quickly. Some theologians associate hyssop with the fledgling faith that blows up into flame as hot as anything, but, like justification itself, can burn itself out if it doesn't mature slowly into sanctification. That's what I read. I'm not sure what that has to do with the cross, but hyssop's there in the gospel of John.

Listen to me go on and on. I'm starting to sound like a theologian. And all of that from a random collection of stuff scattered around in front of church, each item telling stories--holy week stories. 

Can't believe it myself, and me a Calvinist. 

In Memoriam*

I don't have to tell this story. I could let it go untold, given the fact that right now, as we speak, our blessed, 14-year-old blue-collar feline boarder is somewhere in this house sound asleep. Our cat has not pestered me to tell the tale. He's very much above needing your or my approval for anything.

I'm no relation to the ancient Pharaohs who worshiped cats. I never posted a cat video and only written Benny up when he did something regrettable. I don't have to tell you what happened. I have no interest in making him an star because he's a miserable egotist, arrogant as a prince, impossibly one-way. But then, Benny is a cat.

He's got this thing for running water. My wife is his slave and dotes miserably, so his bowl is never brackish. But he's got this thing for running water and, yes, toilets. 

Benny and I are alone in the morning, when, like now, it's still dark as night. His braying has prompted me on occasion to consider murder, but most morning he's respectfully quiet.

From his anticipation you might think my using the toilet was the highlight of his day. He's thoughtful enough not to stand anywhere close, although his motivation cannot be respect because respect is beneath him. For whatever reason, he's not RIGHT THERE when the task is being accomplished. He waits just outside the door, like some fine footman.

Honestly--you can ask my wife--I'm not a husband who forgets. . .well you know, to flush. 

But it was dark as midnight down here, maybe quarter of five a couple of days ago. There's just one light on, the one at the foot of the stairs, and it was time for certain bodily functions. My age is showing in so many ways it hardly seems necessary to describe them, but one manifestation is that I do not, anymore, wake up quickly. My mind is considerably mushy so toiletries, you might say, get accomplished in a darkened daze. I'm not quite ready to go even if I am very much ready to go, if you catch my drift. 

So I did what needed to be done, Benny politely waiting in silence, as always, just outside the door. He listens closely to the tinkling, then waits for the tide to wash in, you might say.

Okay, here's my humiliation: I walked away and didn't flush. I left the stool behind without, I'm sure he'd say, the sound of music, all that fresh water swirling into the bowl. I'm not a clod or a headache. Go ahead and ask my wife. She'll tell you I'm not so great a sinner.

But this time, I stumbled.

On my way out, there he sat, his bedeviling green eyes upon me in that perfectly cat-like emotionlessness. And, remember, this is for him a ritual, a kind of dance. The moment I flush, he's there, even if I'm still preparing myself for the world. He approaches the bowl in eerie cat-silence, tours the circumference, then puts up his front paws from the left side to witness the delicious swirl.

But this time he didn't move. He just looked at me. That's all, he just looked at me, sat there, his paws beneath him, still as a statue, those green eyes in saying clearly, "Sir, were you born in a barn?" He could just as well spoken those words like Balaam's ass because not to I catch the revelation of his reprimand was impossible.

I didn't bow, didn't wince, didn't talk back. I pivoted, returned to the scene of the crime, and flushed. 

He could have rolled his eyes, but he didn't. Don't think him thoughtful or forgiving, for heaven's sake. He's a cat, and it's verily beneath him even to recognize my incivility. He put his paws up on the stool and never looked at me because what is always clear is that I really don't matter much at all.

This Calvinist has no need of a conscience. I've got Benny. 
_____________________
*From March, 2015, reprinted in memory of Benny Schaap, 17, who last week suffered a quiet, peaceful death at the vet's office, after spending two long days in pain that left him barely able to walk. He is mourned by the long-time friends with whom he shared a life in his country home, Jim and Barb Schaap, especially Barb who, with undying love, kept him well-fed and his sandbox clean. Bennie has been a beloved member of the Schaap family since 2001, although, in our profound grief, we may be overstating. 

Benny was born in Quincy, IL, in 2000; lived a full and happy life in Sioux Center, IA; spent his retirement years just outside of Alton, IA; and died, April 7, 2017. He is buried in the field behind his country home.

Sunday Morning Meds--When he hides his face

“When you give it to them, they gather it up; 

when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things. 

When you hide your face, they are terrified; 

when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust.” 

Psalm 104:28-29

It’s not particularly comforting to think of a whimsical God who dispenses his favor by mood or temperament. That our God could or would simply turn his face and leave the room, for no apparent reason, absent himself from our lives, makes me shake.

Reminds me of that scary Dickinson poem—“I know that he exists,” a poem which starts with a proud affirmation, then does an about-face into bitterness:  “I know that he exists/Somewhere, in silence./He has hid his rare life/From our gross eyes.”

In Psalm 104, the psalmist’s vision of our world and his creation becomes praise a tribute to his omnipotence, in him and through him and for him all things have their being. Of all the truths of scripture, the sovereignty of God wears best, or so it seems to me. It’s an amazing comfort that there is no such thing as chaos, but that his eternal, steadfast love, true every morning, spreads over us all the time. And it does. There are times when its vividly there, and times when—or so it seems to me—we feel it far less warmly.

For my whole life, I dealt with scads of college-age kids, some of whom, at the Christian college where I taught, were immensely sure-footed in their faith, energized by it, ready to reshape the world for the Lord. It was good for me to be around them—it really was.

But they were young, very young, sometimes younger, it seemed, when I was older, younger than they were when I started to teach. I taught literature, much of it far less cheerful than they were, and in the last few years especially that task became more than occasionally difficult. At times I hesitated forcing them to read things—really great stories and poems and novels—that I knew would dampen their optimism or make them question their faith.  Made me feel like the grim reaper.

But if I listen to the Word, it seems that few greater threats to authentic righteousness exist than wealth, the bubble of arrogance bred and nurtured by affluence.  What’s more, fear is in the atmosphere today, and affluent fear builds hearty defenses. In those last years, I sometimes wondered whether Christian kids, evangelical kids especially, didn’t live in a more heavily-walled fortress than their grandparents had, growing up in the 50s. At times, they seemed farther from life’s realities than students were fifty years ago, so beloved by soccer moms and helicopter parents. 

It was my job to show them Psalm 104: 28 and 29, to help them understand that when God smiles, all’s well; but when he turns his face, the world’s roses can wither on the vine.          

Life is never a box of chocolates or bowl of cherries. But then, neither it is just plain grim.  Besides, I like to believe (that’s faith, isn’t it?) that God never ducks out of our lives, never really hides his face, but that his love is always with us, even if we experience the darkness far more often than we—or my sweet students—would like to.             

It shouldn’t hurt them to read Emily Dickinson, to know that she felt as terrified as the beasts of the field do when God hides his face. We. All. Do.

What the Psalms tell us, unequivocally, is not to fear. We've all been there, and so has He.

Morning Thanks--Easter

Is any sedum ordinary? With hundreds of varieties, it seems no single plant looks like any other, so to claim some blessed uniqueness for this particular one may be a stretch. Nonetheless, what you see here is plain old ordinary sedum. Still, it's an an absolutely extraordinary moment, don't you think?

It's April, and today the sun will grow some balmy temps. We're a week from Easter, which just happens to come at the same time as sweet reminders like this of new life unshackled. 

My father-in-law used to say that if you listen closely you can hear the seed rustling in the bag, so anxious it is to get itself out and into the ground. 

The word Easter, some say, has its roots in pagan mythology, specifically some Anglo-Saxon goddess named Eostre, who ruled the dawn and was worshiped every spring throughout the British Isles and into Northern Europe. Worshiped for this kind of activity, I'm guessing.

If that's true, then it's an abomination for some Christians, greatly uncomfortable with the notion that Jesus's triumph over the grave could be linked in any way, shape, or form to some heathen pagan ritual. Almost sinful to even consider.

Thus, some Christians like to trace the word easter to pesach, the Hebrew word for "passover," thereby scrubbing it cleam of any possible unGodly connotations. 

I'll let others fight that one out. What makes me smile on days like today is that Easter falls somewhere around the moment phenomena like this suddenly and miraculously appear in the backyard. In a couple of months, our what's out there will be full of plants more than happy to pose for my camera. Right now, this is just about all there is. 

But this ordinary sedum is gorgeous, don't you think? It's Easter.

Obits

He's not the first. There's been others--three of them whose deaths have stopped me in my tracks. In each case, they were guys I knew very well as boys long ago, men whose adult lives had passed almost without my knowledge, even though back in the Sixties we grew up together.

One was a catcher, the catcher on a baseball team I played with for almost a decade. When my college baseball coach told me he wanted me to try catching myself, I told him I would, but not without thinking that I really couldn't, because catching was always Herbie's job. He was the catcher. A couple of years ago he died, left his place behind the plate. For an entire lifetime I had rarely seen him, rarely spoken to him. But when he died, I just couldn't help feeling that something of me went with him.

Then there was Jim, who didn't play ball at all, but was part of my life when Vietnam made all of us cower. He was the first, I think, to wear bell bottom jeans, to let his hair get shaggy, and to attend to the virtues of weed. He was younger than I was, cooler, immensely quick-witted. I don't know that he taught me to be anti-war, but in his company we talked about Tricky Dick and the mess in southeast Asia. He died a few years ago, a suicide. I hadn't seen him at all in a half century; but something in me felt as if it went with him when he left.

And now Mark, who wore number 66 proudly, the number the coach always put on the back of the team's iron man, generally the middle-linebacker. We both had scooters we took to school. We went to the same church.  He was a magical personality who created the only moments of catechism I remember by pushing the preacher on ideas like predestination, using arguments that, to me at least, came out of nowhere. My family was immensely pious, but I'd never dared to say things he did--and to the preacher, who, by the way, loved it.

Cancer took Mark last week. The last time I saw him was at my mother's funeral, when the two of us stood in the back of the church and giggled. I told him there was a story connected to that massive cross at the front of the sanctuary, that my grandmother had determined to donate that cross after my grandfather died, and that, even though I was just a kid, I knew there was a story there, a story I didn't know.

"Erwie TenPas wouldn't have it," he told me, just like that.  Some ancient anti-papist argument. I hadn't thought about Erwie TenPas for fifty years. "Erwie TenPas said there'd be a cross in this church only over his dead body."

I pointed at the cross. "There it is," I said. "So what happened?"

"Erwie died," he told me, and we giggled, two grown men, two retirees, back of church, at my mother's funeral.

Mark is gone. He was that kind of story-teller. He knew a hundred magical tales about the Dirkses, a family we were both part of, cartoons about ancient ancestors, stories that would make me laugh and fill me with wonder, stories so magical they may well have originated in our own vague and pagan past.

All three died where we all grew up, 500 miles east of here. I didn't know their grieving families, didn't recognize most of the names listed in their obituaries. I knew very little about any of them through the long course of their adult lives.

They each have their own stories, I'm sure--of love and loss, of joy and sadness; their own human stories.

But each of them play roles in the consequent chapters of my life, chapters that grow less distinct and verifiable, more mythical, I suppose, now that they're gone. And it's fair to say, I suppose, that three fewer people, boys way back when I was, care. They never hung around together that I know of, but something in me feels as if it went with them.

And so it goes.

Yesterday, I stood at a little memorial park just off a major intersection in a town named Columbus, Nebraska. Just about three hundred years ago, a couple dozen Spanish troops, their commander, a Franciscan priest, a greatly heralded Black warrior, and more than a few Pueblo Indians from New Mexico, were slaughtered, en masse, at dawn, by a Pawnee war party.

There I stood, just off the road in heavy traffic.

Lieutenant Governor Pedro de Villasur had been dispatched to the Missouri River, hundreds of miles east and north, to determine the influence of the France in the Nebraska. I'm not making this up. It was 1720. Ben Franklin was fourteen years old, George Washington wouldn't be born for twelve more years, Thomas Jefferson for 23. Long, long ago.

A few of the 42 royal troops escaped, but most were slain right there at a red light in a small town, where the Loup River meets the Platte.

Back in New Mexico, when the survivors straggled in, a man named Martinez, a former governor wrote, "In the villa of Santa Fe, thirty-two widows and many orphaned children, whose tears reach the sky, mourn."

A track meet was going on in a stadium a half-block away from the killing field, spectators bundled up against a cool-ish spring wind, a meager crowd of family and friends who did remarkably little yelling.

Cars and trucks streamed by me where I stood. I had miles to go before I'd get to where I was going. It was four o'clock, I hadn't had much lunch. I thought I'd just think about that a bit, so I went across the street to a Dairy Queen and ordered a blizzard and ate it right there where dozens were murdered in the Villasur Massacre, long, long ago.

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return, but the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.”

Sure, but sometimes it's not at all easy.

The birthday of an American girl

What happened to her when she was a kid wasn't all that unusual among nomadic, war-faring Great Plains tribes. When hers--the Shoshones--got into a bloody fight with another--the Hidatsas--she got herself kidnapped, lost her home, got another, and was eventually--sad but true--sold into slavery. She was only ten years old. 

All of that sounds awful today, and it was. On the other hand, it wasn't at all unusual. What was unusual was the weird white men coming up the river, a whole number of them, in fact, dressed in ridiculous blue uniforms. It was the party of Lewis and Clark, who'd left from the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers and struggled upstream in any way they could, bound for nobody knew exactly what--to find, those Native people must have figured, whatever it was they could find at the end of the river, like the end of the rainbow maybe. Sickly-looking people--so pale.

She'd got herself won in a card game not long before, both she and her friend Otter Woman, when a French-Canadian trapper, who was hardly a prize, won both of them with a fair-to-middlin' poker hand, Otter Woman and Sacajawea, then got Sacajawea with child, this 16-year-old girl hundreds of miles from home.

So when Lewis and Clark signed that trapper to do some scouting for them--they were up in what would be North Dakota at the time--Sacajawea was pregnant, plump as a plum. That baby was born while the whole party hibernated at Fort Mandan through an icebox winter.

But it turns out that for the Corps, she wasn't baggage at all, but a bona fide unforeseen benefit. Sacajawea, 16 years old, just happened to know her way around the neighborhood when the Missouri elbowed its way west into Montana. What's more, she knew the language! Good night, what a deal.

One could argue, although white people might find it hard to do, that without this girl, this kid, this teenage, unmarried mom, this Indian(!), Lewis and Clark and their much bally-hooed Corps of Discovery would have never made it to Oregon. There would have been others who would, of course, because pale-faced folks were swarming west in numbers that seemed unending to Native people, those white folks carrying diseases that would eventually wipe out tens of thousands, including most all of the Hidatsas.

Had Lewis and Clark made it no farther than Great Falls, there certainly would have been others out to see the vast American riches.Still, what Lewis and Clark did makes quite a story, finding their way from a hamlet called St. Louis, all the way to the Oregon coast, the Pacific Ocean, then going back in just a couple of years, an amazing record they couldn't have done without little Sacajawea, who was, for weeks of that trek, carrying her newborn.

 When they were here--on Spirit Mound, in fact--they first "discovered" herd of buffalo. Tell that the the Yankton Sioux--to say they "discovered" anything is pitifully colonialist.

Anyway, as remarkable an enterprise as the Lewis and Clark adventure was, and it was--they lost only one of the company, not all that far from here either--they likely wouldn't have pulled it off without Sacajawea, that little Native girl with the tiny baby, a woman who died just a few years later, in 1812, of some kind of fever.

Today, people say, is her birthday, the Shoshone girl, Sacajawea--dare I say "the American girl," Sacajawea? I think so.

If there was justice in this country, the whole nation would celebrate.
______________________ 

Originally appeared in April of 2011.

"We sing the mighty power. . ."

We sing the mighty power of God

that made the mountains rise,

that spread the flowing seas abroad

and built the lofty skies.

We sing the wisdom that ordained

the sun to rule the day;

the moon shines full at his command,

and all the stars obey.

We sing the goodness of the Lord

that filled the earth with food;

he formed the creatures with his word

and then pronounced them good.

Lord, how your wonders are displayed,

where'er we turn our eyes,

if we survey the ground we tread

or gaze upon the skies.

There's not a plant or flower below

but makes your glories known,

and clouds arise and tempests blow

by order from your throne;

while all that borrows life from you

is ever in your care,

and everywhere that we can be,

you, God, are present there.

Sunday Morning Meds--An old cat and the fish

“. . .The earth is full of your creatures. 

 There is the sea, vast and spacious,

 teeming with creatures beyond number—

 living things both large and small.

 There the ships go to and fro,

 and the leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.

 These all look to you

 to give them their food at the proper time.” Psalm 104:25+

During my college years, the highest I ever rose on my summer job was about five feet off the ground aboard an old, army surplus caterpillar. I’m not sure why the boss made me the designated driver, but he did. So there I was, most days, at the hand levers that controlled the old beast, an ancient, faded yellow wonder whose huge engine banged, banged, banged along the beach as if it had but one mammoth cylinder.

We must have seemed quite motley bunch coming down the beach, four or five us, me aboard the cat, the others armed with rakes and shovels, cleaning up the mess of dead fish. Back then, Lake Michigan—or at least our corner of it—was a stinking mess.  Alewives by the millions washed up on the shore, some of the heftier ones bloating on the sand. 

Swimmers hated them, and so did the boss.  A couple hundred thousand little silvery no-good alewives washing up on the beach each day didn’t please him. Didn’t even please the seagulls, who considered their palettes above them and only pecked out their eyes.

So three or four guys would go out and rake ‘em up, and two of us would follow—a guy with a scoop, and me at the controls of that tank of a cat. My sense of smell isn’t acute, but I don’t remember the stench all that much, although it was the boss’s concern that we get those tiny silvery fish picked up pronto, then dumped in a hole we dug back in the dunes. During the height of their spawn, we started the morning on the beach, which always bugged us because there were no bikinis out at nine, not on Lake Michigan. Raking alewives wasn’t a bad job really; the boss could have stuck us with much worse;  but afternoons were more opportune, the beach offering so much more to see.

I think of that long-ago experience now because of the psalmist’s line “teeming with creatures beyond number.”  We thought they were “beyond number”—the alewives.  For a month at least, the waves rolled them up by the millions and turned the place into a silvery dump.  The lunkers were no more than six inches long, but most of them were no bigger than your finger and nowhere near as thick. 

The overcrowded schools of alewives were created by the lamprey eel, a hideous looking thing, who hitched itself to the lake’s precious game fish, then simply rode out their host’s long and torturous death. Horror movie stuff. The virtual disappearance of game fish in Lake Michigan in the 50s created a population boom among the alewives. 

Today, the lamprey eel is at ten percent of its peak population because, fifty years ago, researchers discovered a chemical to kill the larvae. As a result, game fish made a dramatic recovery, and that army surplus caterpillar has been long been retired, those lowly alewives devoured by teeming trout and salmon.

Psalm 104 is grand and glowing and inspiring, a cyclorama almost; but here and there it could use a footnote, and I’m not even an ecologist. 

Which is not to the psalmist is wrong. There’s a great circle in nature, and I’m no more of a Lakota than an ecologist. Something there is that links us and them—two-leggeds, four-leggeds, and even silvery alewives. 

Something there is that loves us all.  That’s what the Bible says in Psalm 104, a long and beautiful portrait of the natural world.

But occasionally, I guess, someone’s got to drive the old cat to the dump. 

Frontier multi-culturalism

Rarely has the first meeting between white folks and Native people been as richly visualized as it is in Terrance Malick's The New World (2005), when, in the middle of a tall-grass field, an Englishman named Capt. John Smith meets the Powhatan princess Pocahontas. Not only did neither know either, neither had ever seen anything quite like either. As foreign as he was to her, she was to him. They each stand and stare in awe at a human being unlike anyone either has ever seen. 

Those first meetings had to have been shocking. Black Elk claims he was ten when he saw his first Washichu. "At first I thought they all looked sick," he says, "and I was afraid they might just begin to fight us any time."

My guess is that love at first sight was impossibly unusual. Black Elk's fear may well be more standard fare.
  
Then again, some Native people didn't think much about fighting. Legend has it that War Eagle, Sioux City's Native patron saint, left his people when it became apparent that question of who would be chief was going to be determined by a fight. He walked away. War Eagle's statue stands high above the confluence of the Missouri and the Big Sioux because from the moment he met white people, he wasn't a war eagle at all.

A thousand immigrant diaries tell similar incredible stories about early meetings between Natives and white folks, neither of whom had a clue about the other. What those reminiscences describe seems utterly impossible today, but they happened and they happened often. Yanktons or Santees or Omahas simply invited themselves into the lives of pioneers, showing up uninvited, totally unaware of the value their new paleface neighbors put on private property, something totally sacred to the whites. Warriors would simply show up in silence and stare blankly through windows or walk right through doors and expect their white hosts to feed them.

Walking into other people's lives was a way of life. They didn't know to knock. 

Thousands of such meetings are written up in pioneer memoirs: a man or a a woman, maybe an entire family looks up from a cup of coffee or pot of soup to see a painted face in the window, someone familiar maybe, but just as often, someone not.

That such moments didn't end in bloodshed seems impossible in our "Stand-your-ground" climate, but very, very few of those moments ever did.

Here's my favorite. In March of 1856, Mrs. E. H. Clark came here when her husband, who'd created a log home for his wife earlier, told his wife the neighborhood was, well, civilized enough for her to live. On the boat from St. Louis she'd lost her gold watch and chain, she says; but she'd brought along an entire set of china dishes. It wasn't as if she were bereft, after all.

Her father, a doctor, came a year later, and, she says proudly, was quite plainly upstanding: "He was the first Sunday school superintendent here," she says in her memoir, "and held that office continually until 1880." Educated, exemplary, and upright.

Her reminiscence of the early days is only a few pages long, but the most memorable incident she remembers is this one. Here's her telling:

At one time I had planned a dinner party and invited all my lady friends. I prepared the best meal possible for those days, with my china set all in place and was very proud to see it all spread, when just ready to invite my guests to the table, a big Indian appeared in the doorway and said, 'Hungry" in broken accents. 

I said, "Yes, I get you some" and started to the stove, but he said, "No," and pointed to the table. I brought a generous helping in a plate but he walked out doors, gave a shrill yell which brought several others of his tribe and they all at once sat down, ate everything in sight, while the guests looked on in fear and trembling."

And then, "Having finished," she says, "they left in great glee."

And that's it. End of story. End of memoir. 

How the ladies composed themselves is not described. What they said once the gleeful Indians were gone isn't told. 

Her entire memoir ends right there, at that moment--"they left in great glee," as if she'd just said everything that needed to be said about those early years. Multi-culturalism right there on the frontier.

Life, on the rack

Look, I'd be dead wrong to ascribe some sinful motive here, some kind of crass materialism to my mother-in-law's decision, once upon a time long ago, to buy her husband this leather jacket. She wasn't trying to keep up with the Jonesmas or the Jansmas. She likely saw that men like the man she married were wearing leather jackets, took a shining to them, and then went out and bought one, brought it home.

My mother-in-law was no shopping-aisle junkie. She liked to get out to Sioux City now and then, but she was as Depression-era as anyone her age. Her father died when she was just a child, when there was no societal safety net, so his death ended her school days and put her to work. Mom knew something about poverty.

I'm sure she never maxed out a credit card or ran up bills that threatened to blow them away. She generally chose not to use the word wholesale. This jacket--a large, which means it's too small for me--was likely expensive, rich black leather, still supple and almost totally unmarked with wear because my father-in-law likely wore it only to church and the Alton Cafe. 

We moved him last week. I'm not sure we're finished yet totally, but we moved him, this time will probably be the last. No matter, we couldn't help thinking how much stuff he still had. First, years ago, there was the farm auction when they moved to town. Then, when Mom's health was failing, to the Home; then, when his was, to assisted care, and now to comprehensive . After all that winnowing, moving still took a couple days, and it's still not over. There's still stuff around.

Like this fine leather jacket, perfectly wonderful. I put it up on local Facebook sites and got nary a nibble, so it's hanging down here with nowhere to go. I can give it away--there's a Goodwill-ish place just up the street. We aren't in hard need of cash, but I'd just love to give it the kind of good home it was purchased to get. 

Besides, it would hurt to find it on a rack with a bunch of old hoodies, a piece of masking tape stuck on the collar with marked with $2, handwritten. It's a cut above that--maybe two or three.

When they moved to the Home, my folks-in-law gave the church the lion's share of their furniture, and the church held an auction right out in the parking lot. It was a perfectly horrible night. The weather was fine, but the crowd was meager and furniture she'd picked out thoughtfully went for a handful of nickles--ten bucks for a gorgeous oak dinner table--with leaves. 

My mother-in-law, who wasn't well, chose not to go at all. Smart. It would have killed her to watch the slaughter.

It's just too easy to stick on a bible verse here about the lillies of the field and how they toil not, neither do they spin, how all of this is meaningless, meaningless. My father-in-law probably wouldn't have kicked up dust if she'd had him dressed like John the Baptist or simply kept him in bibs. Truth be told, this was in all likelihood the only leather jacket she ever bought for him, and she probably didn't invest until she was sure they could afford it. They weren't profligate, and that leather jacket isn't sin.

I suppose it's just the life I can't put away or give away, the clear and painful sense that something real, something vital, something that, once together after the war, gave birth to the woman I love, that life is finally in its very last days.

Once upon a time, my mother-in-law told her husband, early evening probably, after chores, to put on a good shirt after he had a shower because she wanted him to try on a jacket. When he pulled it over his shoulders, she looked at him as if he were in a magazine, likely straightened the shoulders a little, cocked her head sideways a bit, stood straight, and said, "Well, I think it looks good--what do you think?'

The next Sunday, he wore it to church. 

That's the life that's here in this leather jacket, and I can't just put it on a pile with some old nappy blankets and haul it away.

Interested? Just let me know.