Thoreau on his birthday

Truth be known, I've never been a good reader. My wife is a good reader: she can and does put her life on hold when a good book has a hold on her. When it comes to reading, I'm a technician. I'm am forever sentenced to being flighty because I constantly step back and say why?--why did she say that? My wife, blessedly, goes with the flow.

That may be why I can say determinedly that epochs of my life are marked by readings of Concord's most famous (and largely silent) dissident, Henry David Thoreau, a man who determined, when he was 28 years old, to build a little house in a nearby woods, stay there as often as he could, record what he saw and felt and thought, and thereby simply remove himself from the artful society around him, to see if he could learn some things from what he might have called "real life." At two huge moments in my life, Thoreau was there.

I was somewhere into my second year of college, when one morning, on my way to American Literature, I found myself so taken by the assignment that I told myself that if I'd be a teacher of literature, I could think about such things as "transcendentalism" for an entire lifetime. Right then and there--on a sidewalk that still exists at a spot I could still mark--I set my course a profession I stayed with until the day I retired.

I was in my first year of teaching high school kids from rural southwest Wisconsin--gorgeous rolling hills and woodlands as beautiful as anything in New England--when a class of juniors looked at me one morning as if I was plain nuts for loving the gangly eccentric who wrote all this crazy stuff about "quiet desperation."  

A kid raised his hand that day and said, "If we listen to him," he paused, pointed at the clock, "we're slaves to that clock, right?" I probably nodded. "Then we don't have to leave when the bell rings."

He wasn't brown-nosing. I was convinced, at the time at least, that the question arose from my sense that he had engaged Thoreau, even channeled him, just for a moment, and he wanted all verified. He'd never before thought of a clock as an enemy. 

If that kid remembers Henry David Thoreau's aversion to clocks at all, I'm guessing there were times in his life, times we all suffer, when he felt the horror of a clock's ticking even more fretfully. 

Just exactly what he learned that day will always be a mystery, but I know what I learned: that this profession of teaching, of teaching literature, was, in fact, something I could do. 

Henry David Thoreau has a notable birthday this year, his 200th. Walden was published in 1854. For almost a century, I suppose, school kids like the ones I faced that morning in rural Wisconsin, were forcefed Thoreau's weird views sometimes after the Puritans in a required course in American Literature. Is there such a thing today? I'm not sure.

William Howarth, a Thoreauvian with impeccable credentials, wonders about that himself in a wonderful retrospective essay in The American Scholar, where he laments the fact that most of his students today yawn through the first chapter of Walden, probably gaze out the windows or down at their cell phones. I believe him.

When I began college teaching, American Literature was a graduation requirement. Today, it's barely a requirement for the major. After all, where does a love of Walden go on a resume?  Of what possible value will "transcendentalism" be to someone with a business major? When education is quite simply the best and only means of getting a good job, who really cares about what can be learned from watching the ice go out from a farm pond? 

Howarth sounds like an old man in "Reading Thoreau at 200," like a man whose time has come and gone. As our President might say, Sad. 

What's more, I don't think I'd like to do a tally of just how many of my thousand or so students would even recognize the man's name today. One kid looks up a clock that first year, and I think I'm a teacher? Seriously? 

Thoreau was rather defiantly anti-business. The world is not. 

Still, to think of him being carried off the stage these days is enough to make me weep. But then, long ago already, when this country was less than a century-old, he got himself sick unto death of the rat race and found his one and only love in a woods. Most always considered a bigger-than-life eccentric, maybe he wouldn't even care that today we're leaving him alone. After all, what's a clock to him?

Sunday Morning Meds--Help!

“I lift up my eyes to the hills—

where does my help come from?” Psalm 121:1

I wasn’t sure where my daughter’s question came from, and I was busy thinking of something else at the time.  That’s why I didn’t give her a very good answer, not a fatherly answer anyway. 

“When you were my age,” she said, sort of laughing, “did you ever think that the world was just going to come to an end?” 

My daughter was 30 at the time, the age I was when my wife and I had her. Truth be told, right then I couldn’t remember ever thinking the world was in imminent danger of coming to an end.  I smiled and said no, rolled my eyes, and turned back to the computer screen.

Later, I couldn’t sleep.

I was a kid, but I remember learning to crawl under my school desk should nuclear holocaust come to Oostburg, Wisconsin.  I grew up in the Cold War, when the Soviets were capable of pushing the wrong button or pushing the right one wrongly. 

I remember walking on a football field during the Cuban missle crisis and having a profound talk with a kid about whether or not we’d ever play a game.  We both knew football was a metaphor; we were talking about the end of the world.

I remember the comet Kahoteck and Y2K.  I remember a number of primitive eschatologies—Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, for instance—that numbered our days by manipulating ancient calendars vaguely suggested in the odd visions of minor prophets.  End-times theology does well often. Not long ago, everyone and their pet hamster wanted not to be Left Behind.

If you ask me—and she once did--I believe her generation lives in more fear than mine did. I was reared with more freedom than her kids will ever see.  When I was ten, my friends and I took our bikes down to Lake Michigan and lost ourselves and our inhibitions in endless lakeshort woods. Today all that land is private property; but today, no parent would allow a ten-year-old kid that kind of freedom. 

The change in parents’ attitudes toward their children was immense in the years I was a teacher. Loving, helicopter parents, moms and dads who ask more questions about college than their children do, visited campuses every spring for the last two decades already, lugging their children with, most of them far less interested than they were. I never visited the college where I enrolled. Come September, my parents drove me there—500 miles—then left. That was it.

As I write, the Brits have suffered several vicious attacks of terrorism. Our President uses their tragedy to urge the implementation of his orders to shut the door to immigrants from certain Muslim countries. Some object, but fear is a motivator, and a political motivator too, to be sure. Fear sells.

So, my daughter, this is a better answer than my eye-rolling:  yes, I’ve felt as if the world was about to end. I’m guessing we all have. We’ve all been afraid.  Even the psalmist. 

While the psalms tell us bountifully about God, they’re even better at telling us about ourselves. “I will lift up my eyes to the hills,” he says in verse one of this faith-heavy psalm, “—where does my help come from?” There are times we all feel there’s no one out there to hold back the horror.

You’re not alone. But that’s divinely true, isn’t it? It’s a joy to know you’re not alone.

____________________________ 

The photo at the top is this morning's early morning sky. 

Where are we going? where have we been?

Here's the score, and it's not good. From a high of about 48 to today's low of 38--and this is a composite of all major polling results--Trump's approval rating seems slowly moving downhill. That fact--and the numbers themselves--should surprise no one. Like almost every other President in history, Trump has determined his duty is to satisfy the voters who put him into office. Unlike every other, however, apparently Trump has no desire to attempt to be the President for all the people. He knows who brought him to the dance, and he's not about to hook up with anyone else.

What's more, he is, as Jim Comey said yesterday, a liar. Fox News can't possibly refute that charge. His ridiculous boasting is obscene. He's done nothing to make people other than his fan base smile. Laugh?--sure: he's a blessing to late-night comedy. But today, 140 days after he's taken office, no one who wasn't a disciple in October is proud to have Donald Trump as the Leader of the Free World.

But a look historically at his popularity right now reveals something far more disturbing than Trump himself, who, as I write,has been grabbing the phone and reining more tweets on country already split like a ripe melon.

Yesterday, an article in Five Thirty Eight compared President Trump's popularity--what there is of it--with the popularity of others in their Presidencies. That he doesn't fare well is not a surprise. His only comfort would be Clinton, whose numbers at this point compare with the Donald's. But Obama, who is still maligned almost hourly on Fox News, had a 60 percent approval rating at this point, and W came in at 55, both of them reversing Trump's ratings.   

The real shocker comes when you read numbers unlike anything we've seen in the last 30 years or more. Five Thirty Eight examines what once was, and what was is frightening. George H.W. Bush, Reagan, and even the peanut farmer from Georgia, at this point on the calendar of their Presidencies each scored popularity beyond anything we've seen recently. Only Gerald Ford, who didn't ask for the job, scored in Trump's range.

What's more shocking--at least to me--is the popularity of Presidents who served the country earlier. At this present moment, Nixon's popularity was in the lower sixties, but both Johnson, Kennedy, and Eisenhower were all in the 70's, almost twice that of Trump and Clinton. Truman, who is not particularly highly regarded as a President today and seemed destined to lose the race for a second term (but didn't) had sky-high approval ratings at this time--87 percent of the American people liked him. 

Those numbers seem impossible. Can you imagine living in a country where three out of every four people basically trust the man running the country and have, therefore, similar ideas? Seriously? 

What's amazing is not that so many loved Harry S. Truman, but how united these United States really were. Of course, we were, at that moment, extricating ourselves from a war we'd won with millions of ordinary people volunteering to be heroes. We had great reason to celebrate, and we knew--as no one knows as well today--who our enemies were: an emperor whose people considered him deity, and a stiff-armed madman with a paint-brush mustache.

"Make America Great Again" is undoubtedly an invitation to fantasize returning to the era of "the greatest generation," without mentioning all sorts of historical realities, not to mention the fact that World War II cost the world 60 million people, 418 thousand of them American. 

Still, it's disheartening to read the numbers and realize that once upon a time in fairyland America, the vast majority of us tended to think alike. We weren't the Divided States of America at all. 

My Antonia, Willa Cather's great novel of the plains, isn't particularly kind on small towns; but that doesn't mean the novel is in any way critical of America. Tony Shimerda, the earth-woman of the novel, is more Superwoman than any silly Hollywood fantasy. Her joyous commitment is itself a communtiy blessing. Old Jules, Mari Sandoz's reminiscence of her own father, brings back to life a character who would be locked up today for abusing his wife and family. But while Sandoz, who's committed to the truth, details the man's abundant sins abundantly, she also recognizes his undying and even just commitment to the world then beginning to take shape on the American frontier. Her father, despite his violence, wanted like nothing else to build community where, to his sense of things, there'd been none.

And Ruth Suckow's The John Wood Case, is set here, in Hawarden, at the turn of the century, at a time when the author felt brimming optimism as she herself grew up in a brand new village peopled with pioneers determined to build a new world for themselves and their children. 

That unbridled optimism characterizes those books and many others like them, but is now forgotten stuff. Today, divided factions of our country, our culture, look upon each other as enemies. Today, doctrine is of little worth in the identity of church. Politics is crucial. 

How has that happened? The numbers make clear that it's not all Trump's fault--nor Obama's. But determining cause-andeffect is a task for someone far smarter than I am, someone unwilling to call the problem political.

The numbers don't lie.

The Comey. . .no, the Trump Show

It's just a few hours away now. All kinds of weird things are already going on in Washington, where sports bars are opening early, turning their massive TVs on to the hearing, and creating goofy drinks named after the goofy things going on ever since Donald T. Trump's inauguration. 

Never in American history have we had a President like this one. Never. And that we haven't is exactly what his loyal 38% love. Trump ain't nobody's stooge. Doesn't matter if he's his own, as long as he doesn't tote Washington's water. No sir. He's nobody's lackey. Doesn't matter if he's an idiot either, at least he's nobody else's. 

Even his stalwarts wish he'd cut out the infernal tweeting, where he so clearly and ably shows himself to be the fool--and worse. The man lies as he breathes. "Okay," his supporters would say, "at least he lies openly." Hannity appears to think, as does Trump, that he's still running against Hillary, or in some kind of competition against the master deceiver, Barack Obama, the devil himself. You want to hear people talk about Obama and Hillary, listen in to Fox.

I won't be listening to anyone this morning. I remember all too well the famous Watergate hearings, remember my own fascination, my obsession watching the truth run down Nixon's lies. I lusted back then, wanting to see Tricky Dick fall--as I do now too. I'll confess. I could shoot the morning easily today, watch every minute.

The greatly patriotic Christians of this nation meeting in Washington today just to hear him speak probably consider my loathing of the man and my contempt to be sin. But it's really hard not to see that he is simply all about himself. His incredible arrogance bullies his every move. No one would want their children to behave like he does. 

But since avoiding sin is always a good policy, I'll not be watching. Besides, the Comey testimony is already out. Most everyone who cares about politics knows that at one crucial meeting between the two, at a moment when Trump had eerily cleared the room so he could talk to the FBI director alone, an awkward silence grew between them when Trump told Comey that he expected loyalty from his people. To that statement, Comey says all he gave the President was silence--not a nod or a wink or anything that hinted at assent. That silence lingered painfully. Right now, it's the silence heard round the world.

Donald Trump is a businessman who doesn't understand that his real work now, as President, is for us, not for a bottom line, not for his brand, but for the people he serves. That particular verb is ever troublesome to Donald Trump--"to serve."

What's going to happen? I don't think anyone knows because Trump isn't just anyone. He's far-and-away the greatest entertainer ever to occupy the Oval Office. When he was busy belittling umpteen candidates for the Republican candidacy, commentators liked to say that "Trump takes the oxygen out of the room." No one else could get a line in. Wherever he is, no one else has a chance to stand because he knows better than anyone just exactly how to dominate. 

Nothing's changed. He still takes the oxygen out of the room, but it's just a massively bigger room. Paul Ryan may think the Republicans can ride him into more conservative government, but Paul Ryan is a bit player in the high drama that is Donald Trump, the high drama that will be staged around him, no matter how long he serves--eight years, four years, four months, four days. Trump will always be the story.

That won't change until Washington is in his rear view mirror. It'll be the story this morning too. Right now, odds are, he could never win a second term. But then, as he so ably stated right here in Sioux Center, Iowa, at my alma mater--"I could shoot somebody and not lose voters." Those red-blooded devoted multitudes who sent him to Washington to build a wall and clear the swamp will never leave the stadium.

But he'll leave them--count on that. He'll leave them because he'll leave anyone because all that matters to him is him.

Stay tuned. If we're sure of anything it's this: today will be a show. Mostly his.

Relative powers of social media

For those of us who experienced one of the most horrible nights of our lives on November 8, 2016, who either tried to sleep with or woke up to the unthinkable horror that one Donald T. Trump, a loutish gas bag, was going to be President, the Women's March on Washington on January 21, 2017, just a day or two post-inauguration, was nothing less than a dream. Thousands, millions, around the country and around the world, were not one bit taken by what was just that morning beginning, "the Trump era." The women's march breathed hope into defeat--perhaps there could be life after Trump.

The dimensions were almost beyond belief. Wikipedia summarizes the size of things like this:

The Washington March drew 440,000 to 500,000 people, and worldwide participation has been estimated at five million. At least 408 marches were reported to have been planned in the U.S. and 168 in 81 other countries. After the marches, officials who organized them reported that 673 marches took place worldwide, on all seven continents, including 29 in Canada, 20 in Mexico. In Washington D.C. alone, the protests were the largest political demonstrations since the anti Vietnam war protests in the 1960s and 1970s, with both protests drawing in similar numbers. The Women's March crowds were peaceful, and no arrests were made in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and Seattle, where an estimated combined total of two million people marched.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, a new book by Zeynep Tufekci, chronicles a sad reality--to wit, that technology is a tremendous aid in spurring organized protest. It conjures crowds like nothing else. In a matter of minutes, seconds even, announcements with the right spin go viral and just like that thousands are introduced to the movement and take a place in line. Social media an ordinary telephone medieval. 

But, Tufekci and others have noted, like the Occupy Wall Street protest/movement, or even what we've come to call "Arab Spring," protests created by social media have a lousy track record because they die almost as fast as they grew, In a review of Twitter and Tear Gas in the Washington Post, Carlos Lazada summarizes Tufekci's claims this way: "The technology that helps modern movements organize high-profile protests. . .can also keep them from developing the staying power to achieve their long-term goals."

The differences between protests that affect change and social-media-generated protests are understandable: when sweat equity is not essential to drawing a crowd, sturdy organization never develops. Long ago, when movement sympathizers had to work to build a crowd, that work was elemental. The organizational power required to mount a protest meant that protest was already in shape to carry on once the crowds diminished. 

Simply put, technology--specifically social media--is both blessing and curse to protest movements. 

So what else is new? We get blessings and curses with just about any shiny object we hold in our hands for the first time. Unimaginable technological power stimulates people to action but, Tufekci says, stifles longevity, as we begin to chase the next shiny thing.  

What powers human beings have in our hands at any specific moment can change the way we live, but not who we are. 

Visiting Willa Cather-land

So it turns out, finally, that much of the tour you take around Catherland, out in south-central Nebraska where Willa Cather grew up, actually traces the life of one of her own central characters, Antonia Shimerda, from My Antonia. The grand, little tour is as much about Antonia as it is about the novelist herself.

Willa Cather left Red Cloud, NE when she went off to college, and she never really returned. If you follow the trails the Willa Cather Center sets out, what you follow is much of the life of the tireless Antonia, a prairie-earth mother who stays and bears eleventy-seven children, while working the land with her husband. That Antonia is buried there, not all that far from the desolate place her immigrant Czech family put down American roots.

If you drive out into the country, to the Divide, as Cather herself called it, you'll see where the Cathers, fresh out of the American South, lived, for a time, on the endless, unforgiving country, a plot of rolling prairie, a piece of ground so featureless that if it weren't for a half-buried sign marking the spot, you could just as well take that dirt road right on past and never notice that Willa Cather’s childhood once stood there.

Young Willa lived there only a year or so before her grandfather moved to town, having realized he wasn't the farmer he thought he could be when he grabbed that cheap land. But Antonia’s family stayed, even though her immigrant father ended his American homestead experience tragically when he shot himself in the barn on his dirt-poor homestead.

The model for the Antonia in the novel was Anna Sadilek, who left the countryside to go to town and work for a well-to-do family. The Cather tour takes you into that fancy old 19th century house a block west of the Cather's town place. There, behind the kitchen, in a back room so small you can barely turn around, sits a bed where Anna slept, a working girl off the farm and in the city, population 1500.

On a dirt road just outside of town, be sure to stop at the grave of the man who got Anna pregnant before she was married, a pregnancy that meant she had to return, for a time, to her mother's place in the country.

But Anna’s life, like Antonia’s, ends elsewhere in robust familial joy. Just up the road from where she and her husband are both buried, in nearby Bladen, NE, you can still walk around the house where she and her husband and family put down their own solid roots in the hard Nebraska earth. Out back, you can swing open the tall white doors of the storm cellar made famous in the final words of the novel, a womb-like dugout from which all those hearty farm kids emerge.

What I’m saying is that the whole tour around Cather’s Red Cloud, Nebraska, is as much about Anna Sadilek Pavelka as it is about the far more mysterious, Pulitzer Prize winning Willa Cather, Red Cloud's most famous citizen.

But if you like good stories, you won’t mind.

Once upon a time, novelist Sarah Orne Jewett told Willa Cather that Cather ought to abandon the idea trying to sound like some citified Henry James and instead write the stories she loved, the stories she'd picked up as a child on the broad land she'd been blessed to know as a girl. That advice led her to remember once more her old friend from the country, Anna Sadelik Pavelka, who was reborn in My Antonia.

That great American novel is a love song to the Plains, to the women who lived there with the quiet conviction that life, no matter where you happened to be set down, was always there to be lived.

My Antonia is a gift from a wonderful writer who left the country and never married, to an earth-mother farm wife who stayed and did. It's a novel full of love for a place and a person, a heroic woman who prospered on that red prairie grassland.

If Cather herself knew that a trip out to Red Cloud was as much about Anna Pavelka as it was about Willa Cather, I don’t think she’d mind one little bit.

What was and what is

Not all the memories are sweet. If you read the fine print, you'll discover there was a boarding school at the agency, with dormitories, several of them. For a long time, those dormitories held the reservation's kids, just about all of them; and held is maybe the right word because the children were held there, often against their will. 

No education back then--1920s and 30s--tried to be fun; and teachers, at the Cheyenne River Agency and elsewhere, didn't believe it was their job to entertain kids. It wasn't supposed to be fun because it was work. What's more, boarding schools on the reservation kept kids captive all year long, away from their parents, away from lives at home. 

Schools became homes, in a way, so much so, I'm told, that some of the little children didn't even recognize their parents when, at the end of the year, those parents came to retrieve them. 

Agency life right there at the agency wasn't always a dream.

There was a hospital there too, and what government existed governed from the Agency. If what's there on that old picture is not a city, it's a village, don't you think? Back then, 1951, what's drawn in on that poster stood straight west of Gettysburg, SD, just over the Missouri River--that's the river up above, the boundary of the Cheyenne River Reservation. 

Let's say you worked in the Agency hospital. Let's say, in the course of your time there, you delivered babies and sometimes, surely, watched good people die. Let's say some of your patients were men and women and children you couldn't help but love. Let's say that some of them, sadly, tragically, departed the world altogether too soon. Let's say when you worked in that hospital, you saw before your eyes the full spectrum of life amid the circle of your people, much to bring joy to your heart, much to prompt sadness. 

Let's say your memories of boarding school, mid-Depression, included moments that, if you could choose, you would just as soon not remember. At the same time, let's say you would just as soon not forget some of the relationships that formed in those dormitories--that big girl, you remember, that big girl who swung you and your friends around and around and around, that big girl who loved you.

Let's say you spent significant years of your life at the Agency, for better and for worse. Let's say that, for sure, not all the memories are wonderful either, but that something of you was there, something you really will never forget. 

Today, it's all gone.

Just a few nights ago, in Pierre, SD, I stayed in a motel full of walleye fisherman who filled up the parking lot with their pick-ups and boats and hefty Mercury motors. It had been windy on Lake Oahe that day. Faces looked scarred when the men came in talking about getting a ton of little ones but no lunkers. Tourism is booming these days. Cash registers no longer ring, but they still register bucks, just more of them. The Oahe Dam, like the others up and down the Missouri, have been, it seems, a godsend.

There's water now--water, water everywhere. On the long haul into what became the new Cheyenne River Agency in Eagle Butte, construction crews are laying pipe all the way back to the river to bring clean water forty miles or more into country that looks like toast by mid-August. There'll be water to drink, more of it, water for cattle, water for crops. Those dams are a blessing.

If you'd grab your scuba gear and swim out into the lake right here, you'd find some of what little remains of the old Cheyenne River Agency, what's there in the drawing above. What's left of the place is under water. Maybe there's walleyes down there, but the people are long gone--as is the boarding school, the hospital, and the government.

Progress, it's called--and it is. 

But if you left some of your life down there under the water, and if your people had already been victimized by worthless treaties for most of the century before, how might you feel when you stand there? how might you act? how would that life have shaped you?

I don't know the answers to such questions, but when I stand there today and try to imagine what once was, I can't help but ask them.

Sunday Morning Med--"To the hills"

“I lift up my eyes to the hills--

where does my help come from?” 

Psalm 121:1

Car-makers know something about the American public that no one else does:  to wit, that we all secretly long to stretch our legs in the wide-open country of the Great Plains.  Why?—I don’t know, but automobile ads very frequently seem to feature “the country”—more specifically, the rural Midwest and Great Plains. 

Makes sense, I suppose.  According to the U. S. Census, the states with the longest average daily commutes are New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, and California.  Backed-up freeways don’t sell cars.  Where is commute time least?  You guessed it:  South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Nebraska. 

What sells cars is the mythic backroads adventure—SUVs, four-wheeling, mud-defying pickups, even though very few of us ever do any off-roading.  What sells car is the perception of escaping bottlenecks, fast food, strip malls, and wearying eight-lane metro traffic. What sells cars is the siren song of getting away.

In that sense, the psalmist is just like everybody else: he lifts up his eyes to the hills.  He wants to get away. A place on the lake, maybe a river—that’ll do it. Doesn’t need to be big either, just a cabin, and I’m outta’ here. 

It may well be a version of the old “grass is always greener” argument, this verse.  From the day-to-day grind of our lives—same faces, same cluttered desks, same blasted lunch counters and restrooms—we simply want release. 

We fantasize. I remember dreaming of living near mountains. Then, we did. But grading papers is grading papers, and we never got up there, even though those mountains were close. The only times I took note of them was on my bike, riding to work, when they seemed as much a dream as they ever had been.

Forty years later it’s still in me, this yearning to look to the hills.  I’m about to grow gills.  For the last month, every Saturday, every weekend, it has rained. My forays into the rolling hills west of town ground to a halt four weeks ago, and me and my camera have been missing the gold-quilts maturing beans lay over the land. There’s been no sun on Saturdays.

Dark and dreary weather has kept me from a weekly pilgrimage that has been the joy of my life for the last several years, Saturday morning country wandering.  I could be in one of those ads. 

God doesn’t dwell in some hand-hewn log cabin in the hills. He doesn’t even weekend there. He got a place at the lake all right but no Airstream or fifth wheel. Yosemite is as gorgeous a place as you can find on earth. Jasper, the Big Horns, Yellowstone, the Canadian Rockies—even the words get me itchy. He’s there too, but he’s not just there.

The psalmist must have felt it too because the first line of this beautiful psalm of praise and joy is a confession, I think—I lift up my eyes to the hills, as if he’s there somewhere, as if God is in residence at Custer State Park. When we get tired or bored or stymied, we all want to go somewhere we’re not. 

But the hills won’t do it. Weekend rains for a month, and I’ve got to remind myself those little Saturday trips don’t bring me home.

My help doesn’t come from the hills. My help comes from the Lord.  

Overchurched--a story (ii)

Then, Sunday night, Betty and Glen canceled Fellowship Disciples, which was, as the whole group knew, supposed to meet at their place that week. When she called Sharon Blankesdyk to tell her it was off, Betty gave no reason. “We can’t–okay?” she said, and Sharon told Pastor Dobbins that if Betty hadn’t sounded so incredibly upbeat–she’d even asked about Blankesdyk’s poodle, who’d been to the vet a thousand times lately–if Betty hadn’t sounded so, well, in control, Sharon would have asked what was going on because Betty Andress simply doesn’t shrug responsibilities. It’s not like her. And then, “I think she’s a good five years from menopause,” she told Pastor Dobbins.

It was time for a visit. He planned it well. He tried to plan to pull up to her door, unannounced, just when she got home from work, just before she started into supper, and it worked. When he got there, her car was there in the driveway. No one else seemed to be home. Glen, he knew, didn’t get back from the Avery Building until six, because he could never make Afternoon Men’s Prayer Partners.

He rang the bell–twice, three times, then opened the screen and knocked on the door. Nothing happened. She had to be home. He pounded, used the back of his hand. Maybe she had the TV on. Maybe she was showering–she said she’d been working out.

Then, just for a moment, he thought the worst. Maybe she was drinking or something, having an affair. Stop it, he told himself.

He put his hand up to the window, cupped it, and looked inside but saw nothing, no lights. It seemed as if no one was home. And that’s when he heard her voice behind him.

“The last window-peeker in this neighborhood got tossed in the jug,” she said.

He turned around quickly, and saw her coming up the driveway in a wet suit, of all things, matching tank-top and pants, bare mid-riff, her hair a mess of tangles, a towel draped around her neck.

She motioned behind her. “I’ve taken up kayaking,” she said. “I know it sounds trendy, but I like it, okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

“What am I missing?” she said. “There was something on the calendar again, wasn’t there? I’m supposed to be somewhere now–or is it tonight?”

“I just thought I’d drop in,” he said.

“That’s a lie,” she told him. “I’ve been around preachers my whole life, you know–my dad was one. Preachers don’t just drop in.”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I thought I’d stop and see how you’re doing.”

“You’re concerned, aren’t you?” she said, shaking out her hair.

It was, for Pastor Dobbins, slightly disconcerting to be talking to her in that wet suit, even though she was at least a decade older than he was.

“I’ve decided to take up kayaking religiously,” she said, laughing, as if it were a joke. “Call it mid-life crisis–call it what you want. But I decided I’m not missing an hour on the lake.” She pointed behind her at Lake Burlein. “You want to know what’s wrong with me, Jack? It’s really quite simple. I haven’t stopped to smell the roses. I haven’t spent enough time in peace. I haven’t actually watched the loons, even though I’ve lived only a block away.” She picked the towel off her shoulders and rubbed at her short hair. “I haven’t even looked at that lake for far too long. I haven’t let silence come over me like a blanket, like a rich quilt. I’ve been in church forever, but I’ve almost never listened to a God of peace.”

There she stood on her driveway, still dripping, firmly placed between him and his car, like some forever obstacle.

"I’m okay,” she told him. “I’m just fine, and so is the whole family.” She peeled some thin gloves off her hands and stuck them in the edge of pants. “We love the Lord,” she said, “but sometimes–and don’t take this personally, Jack–but sometimes we just get tired of the church. Does that make any sense?”

The church, Pastor Dobbins told himself, was the bride of Christ.

“Maybe it’s just a phase,” she said. “Don’t get all creepy about it, because maybe it’ll pass–like a kidney stone,” she told him, giggling. “But right now I’m feeling no pain.”

“If there’s anything I can do,” he said.

“I’m overchurched, Jack,” she said. “Glen and I have talked about it a lot, and we’re just plain overchurched–that’s what we’re calling it.”

Pastor Dobbins had no idea what she was talking about.

“At Fellowship, we’ve got all kinds of programs for the unchurched, and we’ve got activities galore for the underchurched, but Glen and me–we’re overchurched, okay?” She pointed out at the lake. “What I need is the loons, all right?”

But that one kept zinging through Pastor Dobbins’ mind, like a golf ball in a tile bathroom–overchurched. In all the magazines he’d been reading, with all the programs he’d been going to on church growth, on Generation X, on seeker fellowships, he’d never seen that word–the overchurched. “Where’d you hear that?” he said. “Where’d you pick up that word?”

She rolled her shoulders as if she were getting stiff, then pointed at her temple. “It just came to me, like handwriting on the wall. It’s a word that belongs to us–Glen and me, but you can use it.” She smiled, turned her head slightly, and wrinkled her nose. “I got a meal to fix or else I’m going to be the one who’s in hot water,” she told him, and he got out of her way.

“I’m okay,” she told him. “I really am.”

Pastor Dobbins couldn’t sleep well that night, and the next morning when he was supposed to be thinking about the videos he’d be using in his Sunday morning presentation, he couldn’t get that word out of his mind–the overchurched.

He kept telling himself there had to be a ministry there. He kept insisting that there was something the church could do for people like Betty Andress–there had to be programs. He started making mental notes to himself, then jotted down the word on the little notebook he kept beside his computer, circled it several times, starting drawing lines that radiated out from it for ideas that might come in a brainstorm.

Would you spell it with a hyphen or not? Should the C be a capitol letter? What might the ministry look like? What could Fellowship Church do, really, to meet the needs of the overchurched.

There was a ministry here, a forgotten ministry. There were seminars waiting to happen, weeknight activities to be planned, even liturgies to be written,. They could go kayaking–of course. They were right–Glen and Betty–they were absolutely right. Unchurched, underchurched–and now the overchurched. It was an idea whose time had come.

He decided to call a meeting. He thought it might be a good idea to start a committee. After all, there were things to be done.

The Overchurched--a story (i)

Perhaps I shouldn't have written this story. I'm sure the idea arose, long ago, from my sense that the business/busyness of church life occupies far too much of our lives. It was written at a time when the word "underchurched" was used in faith circles--as in, "there are hundreds of 'underchurched' in our community," as if more people ought to spend more time in and with church. 

Just occasionally back then--and maybe yet today--something about being "underchurched" suggested a not half-bad freedom. 

"The Overchurched" appeared, long ago, in a magazine titled Reformed Worship.

It's meant to make you think a bit and smile a little.

__________________________________

Pastor Dobbins’ questions about Betty Andress began the Sunday morning he looked into the choir and didn’t see her. It’s not that she was the glue that held the harmony. She was a fairly substantial alto, a voice, he figured, Cassie Henderson would miss if Betty were to stop singing; but she was far from the star. From the front of the church, he checked the praise team–no Betty. Just behind the piano sat the drama people, but she wasn’t there either.

His eyes swept through the sanctuary. Let’s see, he asked himself, where do the Andresses normally sit? Up and down the rows, his eyes wandered. Betty’s family had no traditional spot because they were always involved in something. He didn’t think they were on vacation–certainly she would have warned him. For a moment he felt abandoned–but maybe they were only visiting family across town?

And then he saw them–Betty, Glen, their three kids, all of them left side, towards the back, eyes up at the overhead, just a row behind burly Otto Vander Ham. They looked happy, too, all of them, even Betty, who, even though she had her hands raised in praise, should have been in choir.

What’s more, that very Sunday afternoon her high school kids weren’t in youth group. He’d heard the news from Evie Donohue, who hadn’t mentioned it until Wednesday or Thursday, when she’d complained that the discussion had been a humongous flop. She’d said she wondered if Betty’s kids were at their grandma’s.

In Worship Committee the next week, Pastor Dobbins noted that Betty didn’t have her usual spark. She didn’t look angry, even though the discussion got a little fierce when the committee discussed dropping the sermon altogether in lieu of a big drama spectacular the Stage Kids had been working on forever. Betty had opinions–that much he knew. But she sat back in her chair and doodled on the minutes sheet.

And that was unlike her. She was in everything at Fellowship Church. When he’d received the call, the preacher who’d been there had told him the church was blessed with wonderfully committed people–and he mentioned Betty Andress specifically.

But two weeks later, she didn’t show up for Leadership Council. She didn’t even make an appearance, and the next time he saw her–it was the night the Retreat Committee was finishing up last minute planning–he asked her if she was all right. “You okay, Betty?” he said. “Missed you at Leadership Council a couple nights ago.”

She raised her fingers to her lips. “I knew there was something I’d forgotten,” she told him, “but I just couldn’t remember what it was.” And then she fell back into silence, the whole night long.

She was too young for Alzheimers, Pastor Dobbins thought, too old to be pregnant.

“Get-away with God” came and went, and the whole Andress family showed up but didn’t stay. Friday night they were there for Hallelujah Hootenanny, and they came again on Saturday morning–but they didn’t stay overnight in the cabins. In addition, they hadn’t come early enough for Chop-Chop Barbeque or stayed late enough for the Late-Night Live Happenin’ the kids put on on Friday night. Nor were there for Saturday’s Sunrise Supplications, nor Breakfast At Dawn. They didn’t show up that morning until well after nine, when the Glad Groups were already sharing fervently. By noon they were gone, so they missed all of Fun ‘n Fellowship. It was very unlike her–or them.

Smile-wise, she didn’t appear to miss a step. Every time Pastor Dobbins saw her and her family, they looked positively gleeful. But he had been in the business long enough to know that real sorrows often hid behind smiley faces. One afternoon, he thought he’d give her a call.

“Just checking up,” he told her.

She said she came home from work early to get some exercise.

“Sometimes we forget about the people who do most around here,” he told her. “I just want to make sure that you’re still whistlin’.”

Just like that she broke into “Singing in the Rain.”

He stumbled around a bit, told her he’d noticed she wasn’t in choir, and thought maybe she had some dreary, lingering, summer cold.

“Nothing like that,” Betty told him. “Glen’s job is sometimes a headache, but that’s nothing new. No, Pastor Jack,” she said, “nobody here’s been at the doctor for almost a year now–knock on wood.”

“Knock on wood,” he repeated.

“Kids looking forward to the ‘Lock-Up’?” he asked.

“I don’t think they’re going,” she told him.

“But they worked hard on the Potato Roast?”

“I know–but they’re busy at school, and I just gave them the choice.” And then she said something strange. “You know, Jack,” she said. “I don’t think choice is such a bad thing.”

He let that one go because he had no idea what she meant.

“I told them that if they didn’t want to go, they didn’t have to. They’re busy–they’re terribly busy. We’re all busy, aren’t we?”

Weekend Lock-Up, an all-nighter, had been planned for months–the kids would get the run of the YMCA, plus videos galore, an exercise room turned into a dance studio, so many prizes from local merchants that Jeopardy would be jealous--giveaways galore. “I thought they were all looking forward to it,” he said.

“My college son’s been reading Thoreau,” she said, giggling. “He’s convinced we’re all living lives of quiet desperation?”

“Of what?” Pastor Dobbins said.

“It’s a quote. It’s from Walden or something, you know?–ah, ‘the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation’–I don’t know how it goes exactly.”

“‘Quiet desperation’?” he asked. He wondered whether Christian kids should be reading such things. “Certainly not with faith,” he told her.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Certainly not with faith in the Lord,” he repeated. “Surely we aren’t living in ‘quiet desperation’ when we’re in Christ?” It was almost offensive. “You’re telling him that, aren’t you? Betty, tell Aaron that in the Lord there’s no desperation at all–there’s no despair.”

Once more, she giggled. “Wait till your kids get to be teenagers,” she said. “I got to go now–got to get my exercise. I’m okay–all right?”

And that was it.

_____________________ 

Tomorrow: the conclusion.

"Strawberry Fields"--forever

In the cold of January, fifty-plus years ago, I sat in a car full of guys, my cased 16-gauge double-barrel in my hands, heading out to some woodland to hunt. Rabbits? fox?--I don't remember.

I have no idea who else was in the car, but we were somewhere north and west of town—that I know. It was mid-winter, and the DJ on WOKY, Milwaukee, 920 on your am dial, was doling out fair warning that a new 45 the station was about to spin--"in just a little while," "coming up soon," "don't touch that dial"--was turning the world stark, raving mad, a tune cut by a red hot foursome called, oddly enough, “The Beatles.”

In the backseat of some guy’s car, holding a shotgun is where I heard the Beatles, a tune titled "I Want to Hold Your Hand.” It’s a memory forever alive with any replay of that old headliner, or its flip side, “She Loves Me”--yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s amazing how music carries us places, isn’t it?

I missed the Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night because we always went to church. But I was 16 in 1964, and I sure didn't miss group Brits called "the Bay-tils."

Today, fifty years ago, the Beatles released their epoch-making Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album. That birthday puts me back in some kid’s car, listening to a tune the DJ claimed was going to change the world. His promo wasn’t miles off mark. Liverpool’s pride-and-joy created a sensation I bought into, even though my collection of Beatles albums is now (let me grab a Kleenex) long gone.

Just a year later I went with my parents to a rental cabin somewhere around Shawno, Wisconsin, the last time I’d ever go along. Not that far from that cabin, some girl—I know it was a girl because my imagination created her—cranked up the volume on her hi-fi and played, “I’ll Be Back Again,” often and loud enough to make a boy in a rental place just up the beach—me! —want to be a man. While my parents and their friends poked marshmallows at a campfire and sang “Trust and Obey,” I sat in the dark on the lakeshore, listening to that lilting Lennon melody and falling in love with a girl I never saw.

Just about exactly fifty years ago, while finishing my freshman year at Dordt College, I went to Palos Heights, Illinois, on a weekend, to visit a high school girlfriend who’d gone to Trinity Christian College when I went west to Iowa. On Saturday, I walked through an art show, where some Trinity kid used “Strawberry Fields Forever” as a backdrop for her work. Amid the paintings and drawings and sculptures, that sweet, tripping tune played over and over, most of the afternoon.

I was somewhat shocked to hear it, though I wouldn’t have told anyone, certainly not my girlfriend. Something was brewing on that campus unlike anything happening on ours, some force I thought took some delight in watching the consecrated piety of my youth disappear in a rear-view mirror. That some kid at Trinity could air tunes from an album smoking with references to dope seemed amazing. After all, that kind of worldliness couldn’t have happened at Dordt in 1967, wouldn’t have, not simply because the administration would have kept a lid on it, but because most kids of parents like mine considered the whole Sgt. Pepper album some kind of sinful hippie hymnal.

I don’t remember anyone’s drawings from that Trinity art fest, but when “Strawberry Fields” plays in my memory today—or “Penny Lane” “in my ears and my eyes”—I’m brought back to an art show for reasons I’d never unpacked Sergeant Pepper's birthday.

Sometime in the 90s, the denomination of which I am a part, asked me, neither a theologian nor a historian but a writer, to tell the story of the Christian Reformed Church. When I tried, I found it helpful to talk about separate wings of the denomination, pietists and Kuyperians, species of believers who lugged distinct perspectives (a useful old word) into the world God loves, at least if you pay heed to John 3:16.

Affix other names to those two lines of thinking if you’d like; after all, we’re talking about a task at which all of us work every day. Some who love a fortress mount an impenetrable defense; others come out the huddle and go long, even when they’re playing on Strawberry Fields.

That Trinity art fest comes back today, a half-century later because Sergeant Pepper created a forever image when we negotiate the dilemma of being “in, but not of.” What blew me away that day was not a girlfriend (the relationship died not long after), but my own first sense—I was 19--of significant differences about how believers approach life in the world.

For me at least, a child of the Sixties, memories haunt replays of the Beatles all-time greats. But until last week I’d never thought about why that Trinity moment plays so magically in my memory, why that particular spring afternoon appears when those tunes arise from that goofy, flowery cover.

By the way, did you know “Strawberry Fields” was Lennon’s all-time favorite? It was. I’m sure he had his reasons.

And I know mine. 

Perilous Toilet-lessness

Okay, I joked about it. I'll admit it. When we moved out into the country, I used to tell people--only close friends--that moving out of town meant freedom because, if I so desired, I could take a leak in my own backyard. I could say that with a load of bravado an old man doesn't get to show, some downright Trumpian machismo. But it was a joke.

Sort of. Fact is, the old farm place we moved to five years ago had a small village's-worth of buildings with a hundred dark corners, not to mention massive cottonwoods any buffalo would have loved and the steep banks of an actual river. Seclusion abounded. Besides, the house stood a long driveway away from the gravel road out front, and a football field from the highway south. I mean, you could, if you needed to, take a leak in your backyard and not be seen. Believe me. 

Okay, I'll admit it. It happened, too. But then, getting old does nothing good to a person's plumbing. When you gotta go, you gotta gotta--you know? You'll be happy to know at least I was covert about it.

In Africa, not so. More than once while traveling down highways that I have to lie to call "difficult," the entire car emptied right there at the side of the road. It happened, me included. There we stood, a chorus line of tool men. And--trust me--we weren't alone. On any stretch of African highway, we passed men who weren't waiting around for the next Casey's General. There weren't any. If you gotta, you gotta. 

No country is as toilet-less as India, or so say people who count such things. In India whole populations regularly empty themselves wherever, whenever they feel the need. In response, women have taken to the streets, so to speak. Determined to make even more public what already was, they're beating drums and clanging cymbals when men gather at the side of the road to relieve themselves.  

It's just another form of discipline, something which stricken from enlightened societies, a form of discipline called "shaming." I mean, it's one thing to empty a bladder, another to be accompanied in the process by John Phillip Sousa.

The real purpose isn't to expose anyone--can I say it that way? The real purpose is to make clear that Indians have far too few toilets, period. In fact, India leads the world in toilet-less humans--500 million of them.

What Indian women want to make clear is that having few toilets just isn't healthy--especially for women and children. It's unhealthy not to pee often enough, after all. If the facilities aren't there or are only massively public, some simply hold it, a practice which, too often, imperils the plumbing, especially among women who are, for good reason, less inclined to go public. 

Anyway, a sudden attack on peeing men by women with cymbals sounds like a great gag--hilarious. But it's no joke. Women call it "Bathroom Justice," upper-case. 

In case you're wondering about me, That furtive, farm peeing is behind me. We're still out in the country, but we've got no trees. Anywhere on our acre, I'm shamefully public. So don't come around with makeshift drums and yelling untoward comments. I'm innocent.

Mostly. 

After all, I'm now five years older.

Collateral Damage

Karen Edelman Williams had never been here before, never seen unending fields of corn and soybeans amid the tawny prairie grass, never seen anything like the yawning openness all around. So when, sometime later, she wrote a letter to those people she’d met on a visit out here, she told them she’d never forget the place. “I will never forget the kindness of the people we met there,” she told them, “or the beauty of your Nebraska skies.”

In a roundabout way, what brought her here was those Nebraska skies. She was only six months old when her father became a casualty of World War II way out in the middle of America, thousands of miles from Normandy or the Philippines. Out here, her father trained for the bombing runs that would end wars in both theaters. Her father, and sixteen others with him, fell to their deaths from those same Nebraska skies.

So the only way Karen Edelman Williams knew her father was by way of her mother, who, she says, never really got past her husband’s shocking death. There wasn’t much to say because she and her husband had been together for such short a time that when, years later, Mrs. Williams thought about it, she told her daughter their relationship seemed almost like a long date.

When skies clear over the plains, barely a day goes by without a jet trail painting a cloudy swath through bright azure; but if you stand out there for a week you’ll not see what people saw day after day during World War II, skies full of B-24s, then B-29s, in perfect formation, as if Berlin was just beyond the Missouri River.

The state of Nebraska hosted eleven Army air fields during the war, requiring industry that’s almost impossible to imagine in farm country today. Thousands of workers poured concrete and built barracks and command posts, as well as a hospital of some 300 beds. Today, very little of that remains. Today, the only engines grunting on the land power tandem-wheel tractors pulling 18-bottom plows.

In 2003, Karen Edelman Williams took her mother along when she went out west on the 60th anniversary of her father’s death. Local men and women helped the family through what had always seemed mystery, the government's unwillingness to say much about what had happened. Eventually, those B-29s out of rural Nebraska became part of the squadron that delivered the atom bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But locals knew what happened, because when planes crashed into farmland, the crews died on ground those farmers worked. You can’t hide a plane crash in all that open sky and land. Descendants of those farmers showed Lt. Williams’ family where the planes had crashed, even, mercifully, described the seeming peace of the dead crew.

Four B-24s were flying in tight formation on October 23, 1943, late afternoon, when one of them moved out and another, as required, filled in. Something happened, mid-air—two of them touched, collided. They were 20,000 feet up.

Lt. James Williams was four years older than his wife. He’d been in night school, wanting to be a lawyer. When he died in these open fields, Karen’s mother was just 19—a new wife, a young mom, and an instant widow.

She says her mother always blamed herself for her husband’s death. The doctors told her taking a train all the way out to Nebraska was not good for a young mom—she’d have to wait six weeks. Her husband had begged her to come earlier, but she’d waited, listened to the doctor.

He was killed when she was on the train to Nebraska.

Sixty million people died in World War II, including 419 thousand Americans, 26 of whom died, almost secretly, on open land beneath beautiful Great Plains skies.

They’ve not been forgotten. There’s a road marker out there in Fillmore County, three of them, one for each crash.

And the families remember. Karen Edelman Williams, who grew up without a father, says, “My mother never really recovered. Train whistles made her cry.”

They’re all heroes, every one of them.

Sunday Morning Meds--Hallelujah!

“Praise the LORD, O my soul. Praise the LORD.”

Psalm 104:35

The truth is, I’d love to play slo-pitch.  A good friend, even older than I am, decided the college faculty should have an intramural softball team, "the Geezers."  He organized it and now has them out on the field. Problem is, they got thumped in their first game, so he sent out an e-mail lookin’ for beefier hitters. Singles just don’t make it in slo-pitch.

Once upon a time, I slammed homers methodically, routinely—every other at bat almost.  Not a lie either.  So the siren call of playing slo-pitch got even sweeter when the Geezers took it on the chin from a bunch of squirt students who pounded home runs like pop flies. 

Two reasons make my playing ball impossible. The first is, I can’t because I’m scheduled—a book club. The second is vastly more salient: I’m old. I don’t like to think about what might happen to this body of mine should I throw hard, swing hard, or even run—or try to--for that matter. This mortal coil has done nothing close to any of the above for more than a decade. Who knows what horrors I would suffer? 

No matter—if I wouldn’t be at the book club, I’d be at the ball diamond.  I would.  I swear. At least, I think I would.

A friend of mine remembers the day his father, 70+, looked at him sardonically when this friend complained of some minor muscle ache. “Get used to it,” he said, with far more authority than sympathy.

Most mornings when I wake, I walk downstairs slowly, the railing in my left hand, my right braced up against the wall, my back crooked, knees bent. My silhouette against the dim kitchen lights must resemble Notre Dame’s most famous hunchback. And it ain’t getting better. 

I wash small loads of wash lately because once a week at least a perfectly good shirt, a perfectly clean shirt, jumps off my chest to catch milk from the cereal bowl or syrup from pancakes. I get so angry, I wash them right away to destroy evidence.

But this friend of mine—the man who was warned by his father to get used to his aches and pains—right now is dying of lung cancer. He says in a note that his aches are different because now, he says, “I will never again be able to draw a full two-lungs'-worth of breath. I will ever puff at a flight of stairs. This body will nevermore be what it has been, nor can I frame my knowing it according to its ability to repair itself.”

And, he says, he’ll never get better. He’s busy “devising methods for living

the diminishing life.”  And he still says, “Praise the Lord.”  He still says, “Hallelujah.”  Just doesn’t have as much lung to profer that praise.

I like to think I could hit a ball out of the park, but I’m a whole lot safer at a book club—I know that. 

I just hope that, like my friend with diminishing lungs, when my time comes I can call upon an ever youthful faith, and say with the psalmist, at the very end of this museum-piece psalm, Psalm 104, “Hallelujah, Praise the Lord.”