Small Wonder(s)--The Bloody Benders

For reasons that likely have to do with desired ends, the Oregon Trail has a more wholesome reputation than its southern sidekick, the Santa Fe. The Oregon Trail once carried the hopes and dreams of whole families. The wagon trains leaving Missouri carried hundreds of thousands of men and women and children--little girls in sun bonnets and boys in bibs walking alongside the oxen, Mom holding a little one up on the seat of the covered wagon.

The Santa Fe was more or less all about business, about commerce and trade, about money. Its travelers were draymen, truckers, men who liked their steak chicken-fried, heavy on the gravy. Nothing particularly evil about Santa Fe, just not as wholesome as the family-oriented Oregon.

That may be why the story of Bloody Benders seems more fittingly placed on the Santa Fe. The Bloody Benders were a family that weren't. Pa and Ma Bender, both German immigrants whose thick accents, people say, made communication impossible, weren't any more Pa and Ma than they were married. But then, common-law wasn't at all uncommon back then.

Their children weren't their children either. Accounts of their bloody story make the claim that the children, who weren't their children or brother and sister, were as charming and handsome as the parents were not. But then, none of the Benders were who they said they were.

Confusing?--yes. But the wild stuff is yet to come.

Wherever they came from, whoever they were, they homesteaded along the Santa Fe Trail in Kansas. The Osage Indians bought up some cheap land in Indian Territory from the Cherokees, and determined to move or else die a slow death in Kansas. That move opened up land to white settlement, and the Bloody Benders went west for fame and fortune. Fame they got, fortune escaped them, or so people think.

Their murderin' modus operandi was exposed when a man named Loncher and his infant daughter were going east, strangely enough, and not west, east to Iowa, here, having thrown in the towel on the frontier. Loncher and child simply disappeared, and when a Dr. York set out to find them, he too simply vanished. 

But York was well-connected. His brothers were determined to find him; and when they didn't, they pressed the case right there where the Osage once roamed, drew the whole township together and got permission to hunt door-to-door. 

That night, the Bloody Benders, who weren't Benders, vanished, leaving their two-room frontier abode behind, taking only some food and clothing with them. Their neighbors never saw them again.

I'm going to withhold the blood and the smell--it's beyond the pale. Suffice it to say that the Benders were perfectly methodical murderers. The Yorks found their brother, his daughter, and the bodies of seven others planted in the Benders' garden, which wasn't a garden at all either (neighbors claimed it seemed strange the place was always being plowed). 

The Benders had opened their doors to Santa Fe Trail travelers, separated their one-room house with a single curtain, behind which they were said to have their living quarters. They'd set beloved guests in a big chair right in front of the curtain, start into the vittles, when one of them--could've been any, really--would bash in the head of the victim from behind.

The Bloody Benders is a horror, told elsewhere with far more blood and gore. And it ends in a way that'll have you clammy because it doesn't; because the Benders were never seen or heard from again. Mother, father, brother, sister--all of them, whoever they were, simply disappeared, not just from Kansas but from anywhere. 

So they live on in the hearts and minds of those who know the story, America's first mass murderers, their horrific crimes unpunished. 

This bloody tale was over before 1875, so the Bloody Benders are long gone. 

Or are they? How many stories haven't been written about mass murderers? Thousands. Likely as many as the number who ever traveled the Santa Fe Trail, and then some. Maybe more than all the Conestoga wagons down the wholesome Oregon--because as you and I both know, stories like the Bloody Benders will always be prime-time.

Morning Thanks--Just a story*

The Grandpa, Baba, in Jhumpa Lahiri's "Unaccustomed Earth," a story from a collection of the same name, visits his daughter's new home in Seattle for the very first time. Two years earlier, he lost his wife--as his daughter lost her mother--in a completely unforeseen reaction to surgical medication. Both are grieving deeply in ways they don't really understand themselves.

What brings them more together than they've ever been, oddly--if they can be said to come together at all in their mutual suffering--is his daughter's little boy, the grandson, Akash, who takes to the old man in ways that his daughter never could have imagined. If change happens in this marvelous story--and I'm not so terribly sure it does--it happens because Grandpa and grandson get along so royally. Ruma, his daughter, is confused and surprised because her own relationship with her father, she judges, was never ever that playful, that intimate. It's as if she sees a father she never knew. And she may be right.

How is it that grandparents and grandchildren get along as well as they do?--or so goes an old joke. The answer?--mutual enemies.

That's a perfectly awful joke really, and yet one can't help but recognize some vagrant truth therein. When he's 70, and retired, Grandpa can be a different species of father--well, a grandfather--than he was to his own daughter when she was a child and he was 40, in the maelstrom of a busy working life. What "Baba" comes to understand during his visit in Seattle is that Akash--his daughter's little boy--is an immense gift: "Oddly, it was his grandson, who was only half-Bengali to begin with, who did not even have a Bengali surname, with whom he felt a direct biological connection, a sense of himself reconstituted in another."

Odd, but somehow understandable, like the enemies joke.

Stories function in two sometimes perfectly opposite ways. Sometimes they bring us out of our worlds for a fleeting moment or two, show us worlds we've never seen in passions and colors that are new; stories offer escape--like most of Hollywood.

But sometimes they move us in opposite directions; they bring us in, show us human beings who are so much like ourselves that we have to reach for breath. John Gardner used to say that the good literature models behavior we build our lives around. I think he was right.

I know Baba, not because I'm him. We're both grandpas, but I'm no widower, although I'm not retired, I'm not Bengali, I didn't spend my life on this country's east coast. But I understand the guy, his motivations, his joy, his fears. Somehow I feel his life. I can't help but recognize myself in him.

In my humble opinion, the great joy of the Psalms is not simply their theology or worldview. The Psalms offer human experience in every shade and color. Wake up bathed in joy this morning?--read Psalm 100. Think God almighty has deserted on us?--read Psalm 13 and howl along.

The great joy of literature--and the Bible, although in a different way--is that we come to understand, lo and behold, that we are not alone.

This morning's thanks is easy. After a long night with a single story from a marvelous collection, I know better, I think, who I am. This morning's thanks is for a story.
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Rpt. from 10/12/2010

The National Soap

The president can turn the tables and dominate the dialogue by ordering the indictment of [James] Clapper, [John] Brennan, [Susan] Rice and [former president Barack] Obama for the wholesale unconstitutional surveillance of Americans... I would seriously arrest [and] perp walk every one of these criminals, making as big a show of it as possible.

Thus saith Roger Stone, this morning, one of the President's favorite right-wing screamers, a man whose vitriol our Great Leader occasionally echoes in his own abhorrent tweets. What Stone is advising is all-out war, a strategy that makes Trump smile. Indicting Obama is sure to keep his brand big and bold in national headlines, international too. 

Ratings is his game. He watches them passionately, and gets them, day after day, night after night. Some wonder why on earth he hasn't called his people into the Oval Office and demanded each and every one create a list of the tete-a-tetes they've ever carried on with anyone having even a vaguely Russian name.  Why hasn't he had this all out? Makes no sense.

Instead, we wait for someone from that circle to rat on the others. The leakers he and the Republicans so bloody hate are, most often, members of Trump's own inner circle, who apparently love going to war as much as he does. 

We've now had 180 nights of flat-out soap opera. As my wife says, "Who needs Netflix?" 

Last night's episode threw everything the administration and its rubber-lipped spokespersons ever said about the Russian story into the wastebasket. What Donald Trump the Second's emails make painfully vivid is that Junior, at least, was salivating for whatever juicy details the Kremlin could pass along. He "loved it," he said--his words right there on the note.

Take any thousand Trump denials of collusion, take words authored or uttered by any Trumpster, and just dump 'em, every one of them. They're all bogus. They're bullshit, plain and simple. 

And what of the Trump faithful, the ever loyal 36 per cent, who would rip Trump out of jail even if he gunned down some poor sucker on Broadway--or was it Wall Street? What do his disciples say after yesterday? Do they second Roger Stone's motion for another civil war?

The lordly Republicans in the House and Senate have been "the silent majority" ever since they've taken office. Yesterday, nothing changed, even someone like South Dakota's John Thune, graduate of Biola, who knows better. Yesterday, the standard answer to the latest Trump mess was to point gingerly at those committees presently investigating the connections, which is to say "no comment." Like the monkeys, they put their hands over ears, eyes, and throat. 

What's going to happen? Figure on this--when Trump gets hit, he's  known for throwing a roundhouse, a dozen of them if need be. Figure on that. 

Maybe he'll listen to Roger Stone. Wouldn't be the first time, after all. Maybe he'll order indictments against every last player in the Obama administration on charges that will only serve to make the national mood even more explosive, divide us even more.

That would keep the ratings up. 

Nobody knows where this is going. Nobody. That's exactly the way he likes it. 

"Lay on, Macduff, and damned be him that first cries, 'Hold, enough.'"

Small Wonders--Our Good Samaritans

Okay, at least the man in the ditch in the famous New Testament parable, put upon by robbers says the gospel of Luke, wasn't alone. What passed along the road above him as he lay there was not a freeway, but at least there were passers-by, even if neither of the first two paid him the time of day in his suffering.

But the third one helped the guy out and up. What I'm saying is, at least the poor guy wasn't alone.

Now when it came to homesteading, “the neighborhood” was hardly suburban. Some people, all alone in a world of long grass, would have greatly appreciated a few rubber-necking neighbors. In isolated sod houses, loneliness swept in like contagion. Some early settlers, way out here in the middle of nowhere, could go a week or more without seeing another human face, red or white.

Take a young man named Peter Jansen, who claims to have traveled Minnesota, Dakota, and Kansas before settling outside of Beatrice, Nebraska, on the banks of the Big Blue River. Jansen set up a claim twenty miles southeast of town; when he'd drive his team in across the open prairie, he claimed he’d pass only one house.

Jansen was just a kid, and he and his brother were alone in all that open space. The truth is, they'd been warned that the land near the river was usable, but the upland stuff, where they’d laid claim, was questionable.

But Peter Jansen and his people had come from Russia, where working the prairie had become a way of life. The Jansen brothers took upland sections, and like a thousand other German-speaking Mennonites, they simply told themselves that the common wisdom was uncommonly wrong. He could make a go of a farm all right. They’d done it in Russia, after all.

He and his brother, both of them young and single, were nothing if not determined; but their oxen were rookies too, and their plow was sticky-new. Truth be told, neither knew the first thing about breaking unbroken ground or running a team. Headstrong maybe, sure, but experienced? —heavens, no.

It was, Peter Jansen says in his memoir, a very hot day on the plains, and the work was not going well. Soon enough the oxen broke contract and simply took off on him, hauling that brand new plow along all the way to a nearby slough, where they waded in belly deep, the whole kit-and-caboodle with them.

"When I reached the slough," Jansen, a very pious young man, claims he was "thoroughly disgusted." He sat down and almost started bawling, he says, wishing that for all the world he was back in Russia.

As you might have guessed, there is a Good Samaritan in this parable from the Plains, a man named Babcock, who just happened by, serendipitous, you might say, a man who lived four whole miles away.

"Trouble?" Babcock asked, when he came upon that new plow and a team of oxen going nowhere, but cooling in the slough.

Peter Jansen claims he had more trouble with the English language than he did explaining to neighbor Babcock that he was quite ready to throw in the towel on the whole, ugly business of farming out there in the middle of nowhere.

"Take off your trousers," the old man said. "Get in there and plow yourself out." And then came the magic words: "I'll help you lay off the land and get your plow a’going."

Jansen ends his tale without much fanfare, nothing but the abiding truth about his own good Samaritan: ". . .which he did, and so started me farming." Right neighborly.

Jansen kept on farming, his operation kept growing until, some years down the road, he was feeding as many as 30,000 sheep. Much later, he served in the Nebraska legislature and might well have been governor if he hadn’t turned down the nomination because his faith wouldn’t allow for capital punishment.

And farmer Babcock? —we know barely anything about him. But then, when Good Samaritans ride off Long Ranger-like, into the promising sunsets of our parables, it just makes a better story.

Sermons of D. R. Drukker -- "The Beauty of the Lord" (i)

Just exactly how it showed up is a mystery. There it lay, on the couch, dog-eared, not ancient, just old--The Beauty of the Lord, by Rev. D. R. Drukker. 

Come Sunday morning especially, my mother's relentless piety still scolds when I tell myself not to read the opinion page of the New York Times and instead read something more gifted with solace for the soul. "Read something spiritual," her voice still tells me, long after her death. "Okay," I tell her, "but nothing by Franklin Graham."  

Where on earth did The Beauty of the Lord come from? I don't know, a collection of sermons from almost a century ago, written by someone my grandfather had to know, a fellow reverend of his era. My great-grandfather likely taught him something in seminary.

The book is not heavy. The Beauty of the Lord is no tome. Won't cost you much, my mother whispers. Might just bring you closer to the Lord.

Okay. Century-old sermons from a preacher named D. R. Drukker. I'll read 'em, and you'll hear what the old Calvinist said.
__________________________

It's not an idea I've thought much about, really--"The Beauty of the Lord," the title of the book and the title of its very first sermon.  To me, God almighty is wise and divinely crafty, always a confident step ahead the best of us. He smiles, probably more than he might have in my grandpa's imagination; and he does so despite the fact that he's got the whole world in his hands, a bundle which for him is not a load.

But beautiful? Beauty just doesn't figure into the portrait on the throne in my imagination. Not that He isn't--that's not what I mean. It's just not something I'd say because I don't have a clue about God's visage. Isn't there a "thou-shalt-not" about that?

A beautiful dawn?--sure thing. Beautiful cone flowers? No kidding. Beautiful rain. Even a beautiful funeral, beautiful cemetery. I've seen them all. But a beautiful creator? I can't picture it.

The psalmist saw it, Pastor Drukker says: "the one thing I have asked of Jehovah" and "that I will seek after" is "to behold the beauty of the Lord." That he's right doesn't make it any easier.

That species of beauty, the preacher says, morphs into what the Bible calls grace when we reach the New Testament: God's beauty is his grace. To me that's a whole lot easier to picture.

In three solid points, what follows are "the characteristics of the Lord's beauty." Rev. Douwe Reinder Drukker's first point, one hundred years ago, is surprisingly contemporary: God's beauty is "multiform"--we would say, "diverse."

Second? It's "magnetic," in explanation thereof, the Dominie spins a darling illustration. Young man comes in to speak to a pastor about his love for the Lord. Pastor asks whether this parishioner has perhaps marched forward at the revival down the block. Young man shakes his head. "How then were you convicted of your sins, of your need of a Savior--how did you find Jesus Christ to be the Lord of your life?" the preacher asks.

"It was the way the foreman in our shop did his work," the kid says. "He permitted the light of his Christ to shine and I saw it."

Sweet story, as beautiful as grace always is.

Finally, Drukker says, we distinguish that beauty in its selfless character. What follows is an odd line that I understand, probably because I'm born and reared Calvinist: "It is best," the preacher says, "that we do not behold our spiritual beauty," that the foreman not really know he's glowing with the light of Christ, because from the Edenic apple on, pride goeth before the fall. The light of Christ is wholly beautiful in the faces of those who know Him, but it's always best, the pastor says, for those so blessed to avoid mirrors.

I get that--a perfectly human line in a divine reflection.

At the end of Rev. Drukker's old sermon, the pastor asks "How then can we possess this spiritual beauty?" Unsparingly, he finishes the whole sermon with all four verses of "Take time be holy, speak oft with thy Lord." And I hear my parents singing.

But my Sunday held yet another sermon, this one also all about beauty.

The preacher scheduled for the afternoon's chapel at the old folks home didn't show up yesterday, which left a nurse in charge, a woman more than a little shaky, she told us, behind the podium. So the congregation of ninety-year-olds before her just sang old hymns, one favorite after another, words they'd sung a hundred times before.

One of the old folks was someone I remembered hearing preach years ago, a sermon illustrated with his experiences on mission fields in the Middle East. Today, he and his wife live in the nursing home, where Sunday afternoons they sidle up to folding tables in their motorized wheelchairs, ready for worship.

Once upon a time that preacher would have stepped in for the no-show, and done so ably, I'm sure. Not yesterday, and no more.

During "He Lives," (feel free to hum the chorus) his wife shuddered noticeably, which prompted her loving husband, out of concern, to reach for her hand and hold it.

He looked into her eyes. She was okay--she motioned to him not to worry. "He Lives" went on.

Out of concern and love, midway through the next verse, the old pastor gently reached once again for her hand, and held her arm right below the wrist, simply held it as they sang. She looked at him, then brought her left hand over to where his rested on her right wrist, and that's the way they finished "He Lives," hand over hand over hand.

I don't know where Reverend Douwe Reinder Drukker might have used that story in his sermon a hundred years ago, or if it even fits. Maybe it doesn't. But if the Dominie is right about "the beauty of the Lord," and if the psalmist's assessment of God's beauty somehow morphs into what we call grace, then, yesterday, in the conjoined hands of a man and woman who've loved each other for what seems forever, I'm quite sure I caught a lovely Sabbath glimpse of the what somehow has to be the beauty of the Lord.

Sunday Morning Meds--Watching

“The LORD will keep you from all harm—

he will watch over your life;. . .” Psalm 121

My father was an elder in the church, a watcher, a keeper, although I knew very little about what happened when he walked off to meetings on Tuesday nights.  Most of what went on, I know, he was sworn not to tell, and some of it—I know this is true—he didn’t tell me because the knowledge would have hurt me.  I was, after all, a child.

One part of his job, I remember, was tallying after communion.  He had to meet with the other elders after the Lord’s Supper to tally who was there, who wasn’t, and who was purposefully not taking the elements, or—even worse, I’m sure—who might have been taking the body and blood even though they’d been barred. I have no idea what the elders called that little gum shoe reconnaissance meeting, but I know that they met.

What those elders were watching for were stories, the people who were coming to the table with a checkered past—or in process of checkering their presents. When I became an elder, nobody watched the sacrament that closely. Maybe I remember what went on back then because I knew that behind the effort lay stories I would have liked to know, what lies beneath the ceremony. I still do. Whatever the reason, I remember that he’d come back home late from communion Sunday worship.

That post-communion tallying—as well as my father’s own righteousness—may be responsible for the deeply-rooted sense I have that elders really should be Godly statesmen, dutiful, virtuous, and devout. And that conviction may be the reason why, more than any other elderly task, I always loved distributing elements myself when I was an elder, giving away the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It’s a big job meant for the kind of person who grows into the office of elder, having raised good kids and having been the spouse of only one mate, no messes in the scrapbook. An elder was someone not subject to the sins our mutual flesh is heir to.

Some years ago I was served the sacrament by two men who were once thugs, criminals—two men who, for many years, valued only their own skin. I took the bread and wine from people who, with impunity, cheated others, stole what they could to line their pockets, used drugs, and lived promiscuously. At about the time I began to understand why my father got home late after the Lords Supper, they were leaving behind a childhood they never had in a Southeast Asian war zone.

I know them. I’ve walked into their lives, year by year, even written their stories; and I know that those men—the men carrying the bread and the wine last night—were once so far gone in treachery that not a soul in the church where we sat could probably imagine some of the evil they’ve perpetuated.  Who’d have ever thought that someday they’d be doling out the body and blood of Christ?  Amazing.

But the promise of scripture, and the Word of the Lord, here in Psalm 121 is that “the LORD will keep you from harm—he will watch over your life.” And all during those bloody years in war-torn Laos, where those two men grew up, God Almighty, who loves us, had his eye on them as if they were fletching sparrows, even when they were lousy thugs, and probably especially then. 

He knew them.  He was watching them, keeping them from harm, when they—and we, all of us—were yet sinners. Those two guys fed me the body and blood of Jesus.

Amazing grace.  What a celebration.  Hallelujah, what a savior.  

Refreshments out back

You can't help but feel a little sorry for daisies, so much a victim of their commonness. Because there are so many, and because they are so profligate, so easy to grow, we take them for granted, even though most of us, I'm sure, can't help feel the soul brighten a little at a whole plot of 'em dancing in the sun. 

We waited until late in the day to water out back, to give everything a drink, so late the sun was spreading a quilt of gold over the world just like it always does; and I happened to be right there with the daisies, the sweet nothings, in light only Midas could create. 

All that buttery radiance shown through the drops that hung from those daisies in a way that seemed a joy--maybe because the temps during the afternoon reached too high for man or beast. 

So I'm standing there, hose in hand, and I can't help feeling refreshed myself from all those sweet daisies soaking. 

So I'm wondering what might happen if I hold the camera in one hand, hose in the other, and take a couple shots. 

You'll have to be the judge. 

I've repeated the line often enough that I really should chase down its origin: photography teaches you how to see--or at least brand new ways to see. Snapping pictures of daisies isn't particularly difficult. They're cute and sweet as busy kids on a sunny beach. 

But what's happens to me happens to all of us, I think, when we look closely. When we do, we see differently, don't you think? 

The real truth is simple. In this world, you don't have to look far to find beauty. You just have to look. What a blessing.

Things like blue curtains

The Blue Curtain by Henry Matisse

When it comes to visual art, I'm afraid I'll have to resort to the old maxim: beauty is, very definitely, in the eye of the beholder. Matisse's The Blue Curtain hangs proudly in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City. I hate to have to admit my barbarian aesthetics, but it might just as well be under a magnet sticking to the door of my refrigerator, a grandchild's first-grade artwork.

What do I know? Not much.

But a review of a Matisse exhibition in Boston ("Matisse in the Studio" at The Museum of Fine Arts) published on-line, I thought especially fascinating. What Claire Massud argues in "Matisse: the Joy of Things," is that in his lifetime, Matisse discovered nothing less than sheer delight in things, in stuff, in immediate images all around. . .say, in a blue curtain. "They delighted, inspired, or confounded him," Massud says, "in their humble ordinariness and in all that they evoked."

That kind of recognition may be simply another manifestation of age. Old people--I'm just about 70--start to look back more graciously than they look forward. And when they (we) do, we begin to treasure more fully what is there--and more specifically what's made it through the years. 

What's right behind me now and every morning I sit here is a collection of things, stuff, even junk, that isn't junk. I'm not a visual artist, so I don't paint them--a buffalo skull, a little African woodcarving, an ancient photo of a burned-out Oostburg, Wisconsin, circa 1880 or so. But I do write, and there's a story for everything back there, which is why, I suppose, they're still there.

We just returned from a quick trip out to a few reservations and included a visit to cemeteries, places where simply reading inscriptions can make you wiser than you were. No one was out there but us, but you're never really all alone in a graveyard.

But Ms. Massoud isn't necessarily talking about artifacts, or the remembrances of things past. What she's arguing is that Matisse somehow painted things as mundane as a blue curtain because one day he looked at it in a way he never had before and simply found it beautiful. Hence The Blue Curtain in the Museum of Modern Art. 

I sometimes wonder if my own religious upbringing--not just my childhood either, but the culture of evangelical Christianity into which I was born and where I lived for just about all of my life--I sometimes wonder if its particularly other-worldly spirituality didn't somehow eclipse the things of this world (that very phrase, "the things of this world," still carries hellish implications). I sometimes wonder whether Matisse's love for blue curtains, for pitchers and vases and his son's piano lessons--I sometimes wonder if keeping one's eyes on Jesus didn't keep me somehow from loving the world for which God gave his son. 

Is that possible? 

I don't think any fine art reproduction of The Blue Curtain will ever hang in our living room, and I'm probably far too much a Calvinist to put up any of his famous nudes. But I like what Claire Massoud suggests about Henri Matisse.

"Matisse’s passion for color, for light, for pattern, for flowers and the female figure; and his conviction—borne out in almost every one of his paintings and sculptures, whether a sublime nude woman’s torso small enough fit in the palm of your hand or an imposing complex oil painting such as Interior with Egyptian Curtain (1948)—that what endures is certainly matter: the flesh, the fruit, the flowers, the folds of fabric."

Once upon a time, something about that I missed. But then, for whatever reason, something of that I think I'm learning too--and loving.

"This world is not my home--I'm just a passin' through" is somehow true; but that doesn't mean we can't "just plain love" a blue curtain.

Just a bit of theology

He wasn't, you might say, thinking straight. He was foggy, even becoming a shade paranoid. 

Three times he complained about the nurses, not that they did anything wrong but that they were going to be unavailable yesterday, at least not as available if he needed them as he thought they should be. Why? Because it was Sunday, the Sabbath. We let him know that there were plenty of nurses and aides around, and that if he'd hit the red button, someone would be there quickly. But he insisted that we were wrong because it was Sunday. 

Sabbitarianism was an earmark of the faith he grew up close to a century ago now--and the faith I grew up with. Sabbitarianism is rapidly disappearing. Yesterday, my granddaughter left Sunday dinner early to lifeguard at the pool. Still, yesterday Dad was insistent. The nurses weren't working. It was Sunday.

Born and reared the way I was, I am likely more of a theologian than many are. I don't pour over journals but I do subscribe to magazines whose readers are theologians and pastors. For me at least, theology comes a heritage.

In the latest Christian Century, Amy Plantinga Pauw introduces the theology of Kathryn Tanner, who teaches at Yale. Pauw's summary of Tanner's work isn't particularly easy reading, but at least part of Tanner's contribution, as I gather it, is the manner by which it looks at human agency in the process of redemption. 

One of the most profoundly unanswerable theological questions--or so it seems to this Calvinist--is just exactly how much free will do we have in the presence of an omniscient, all-powerful God. If God is the author of salvation, just exactly what role do we play? 

Or think of it this way: to what extent are we responsible for our sin when God is the creator of all things? Such difficult questions have fractured Christians for centuries. If I'm reading all of this correctly, then Professor Tanner, who has a wide following among real contemporary theologians, answers that question with a both/and construction. She'd like us to do away with an old argument that somehow sees an equation as the answer to that question: "we do this, he does that."

When Jesus told Peter that by the time the rooster crowed three times, Peter would thrice deny him, did God, in Christ, thereby take away Peter's human agency? Did Christ's words force Peter to do what he did? 

Tanner's theology, Pauw says, is "non-competitive." It doesn't deal in debts and payments but rejects those old financial metaphors. It stresses instead "God as gift-giver," God as the source of our salvation, even though we may not be aware of his grace working in us. Rahab was, after all, a believer before she knew she was. 

I don't claim to understand all of this fully, and my theological impulses don't run deep. I'm interested, but not about to invest in any serious study.

Those who question Professor Tanner's work do so because it says very little about the church as agent in the salvation story. The transactions carried out in our our salvation happen to us through Him and by Him, she says. But when she does, the pattern appears to leave the church quite evidently out of the mix. If she's right, there really is no substantial role for the church at all--at least that's what some nay-sayers claim.

But if that's true, if the church's place is negligible, then Tanner's theology of real interest to our time really, don't you think? When my father-in-law was a boy--and when I was a boy--the church and its reach into our lives mattered far more to my people than did the state's role. After a communion Sunday like yesterday, my father--and the whole church eldership--used to meet to go over who was and wasn't in attendance.  

That's done. Over. There may well be some fellowships that still insist on dictating how its members live--whether its members can lifeguard on the Sabbath or not--but those fellowships are small and often dreadfully cult-like. Today, in many ways, the church as a force in people's lives is in decline--not just ours either. Most Protestant and Catholics my age remember a church far more vigilant about the behavior of its parishioners.

Does theology like that done by Kathryn Teller--if I have it right!--create that kind of decline or does it merely reflect it?

That too is an interesting and equally unanswerable question.

Sunday Morning Meds--Goodnight, Moon

“. . .the sun will not harm you by day, 

nor the moon by night.” Psalm 121:5

It may be hard to believe but the kid’s classic, Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, has been lying around kids' bedrooms for almost sixty years. My grandson, who wasn’t the easiest chap to get off to sleep, absolutely loved it. Goodnight Moon is a sweet old mood-enhancer whose magic somehow prompts delightful sleepiness. 

For years, if we were out in the darkness, he'd search the sky.  “Way da moon?” he’d say, as if he had to be sure it was up there watching over us.

Maybe it’s that book that makes me wonder about this line from psalm 121.  Goodnight Moon such a meditative story that just thinking about it makes me want to yawn. It’s difficult for me to remember moments in my life, or even in story, when the moon, as the psalmist here seems to suggest, actually made me scared.

Darkness, surely. I was never quite as scared as I was one night on the shore of Lake Michigan, when, with a couple of other boys, we were completely lost in rolling sand dunes. Truth be known, we weren’t completely lost—we couldn’t have been more than a quarter mile from the lake. But we were out somewhere in the dunes—I have no idea why—when, in the darkness, we realized we had no idea where to go to get out. I was scared witless and spitless, even though I’m sure I never admitted it.

But I don’t remember the moon playing any role whatsoever in that fear. Darkness lit up our nerves, sheer darkness. The moon would have been a blessing.

To some Hindus, the moon is full of soma, an elixir of immortality only gods can drink.  For the Fon of Abomey, in the Republic of Benin, Africa, Mawu, the goddess of the Moon, is an old mother who lives in the West and brings with her cool temps amid torrid summers, the goddess of night and joy and motherhood. As those t-shirts used to proclaim: “No fear.”

One night years ago up above Chamberlain, South Dakota, a number of us laid in the grass and watched the stars appear, the moon lighting the world bountifully overhead.  An astronomer friend explained ancient mythologies as their stories appeared above us—it was pure joy. On our way down the steep hill we’d climbed to get there, the footing was treacherous because sheer darkness had arrived, even though we hadn’t noticed it.  Once, a guy fell and rolled down a ways. That was a little scary. Thank goodness for the moon. Would have been much tougher without it. 

Werewolves wail at it, and coyotes and real wolves, for that matter, which reminds me of an oil painting that inspired Willa Cather, in My Antonia, to tell a horrible tale about a wedding party entirely devoured by ravenous wolves—at night, of course.  But I don’t remember moonlight in that painting. Even as a sliver, it’s hard for me to see the moon as anything but beautiful, sleek.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been afraid of the moon, but we all know fear, as did the psalmist. We all know the paralysis fear creates in us, even if it arrives only in our dreams. 

And we all know the terrors of the darkness, the times when no matter what we try, we simply can’t find our way. At one time or another in our lives, everyone knows what it’s like to wander around with no light, with no direction, with no way home.

To those of who know that kind of loss, this psalm, Psalm 121, is special gift, a blessing.  God is watching us always, even in the dark, even in light of the moon.  So, well, Goodnight Moon.

Growing up*

Writers—like artists of other mediums—often say that no novel or short story is really ever finished until it’s read. As an old novelist friend of mine used to say, great fiction is always a C, never an O—that is, it leaves some open space for readers, space for us to bring our own lives and experience into the work and make it real or whole or alive.

I finished Peter De Vries’s Blood of the Lamb last night, for the second time. I read it initially sometime in the Sixties, four or five years after it was published, at a time in my life when I loved the irreverence he wields at his tribe—the Dutch Reformed people into which he and I were both born. De Vries mocked us but good, for our silliness and the sometime idiocy of our piety.

Peter De Vries was, in his time, among the most well read and beloved of American humorists, his novels—most of them at least—knee-slapping satires of American life. Google him sometime and read a few of his finest quotes; he can be absolutely hilarious.

There is humor in Blood of the Lamb too, Don Wanderhope and his father, aboard their garbage truck, slowly sinking like the Titanic into the primordial ooze of some Chicago-land refuse pit. Scared to death, they break out with--what else?--the doxology.

But far and away, Blood of the Lamb is not a funny novel--not at all, even though forty years ago, when I first read it, I thought it was a hoot. But then, I was a kid, a rebel chafing under the strictures of De Vries’s own ethnic and religious heritage, a heritage in process of cataclysmic change. It was the Sixties, after all, and little, if any of our lives were left untouched by the seismic cultural shifts of the era. At twenty, I read Peter De Vries’s Blood of the Lamb and laughed.

Forty years later, I almost cried.

I’m a different person today—not nearly so headstrong, far less sure of my opinions and will. Forty years later, I’ve got scars, even open wounds, from the fisticuffs me and the Lord have come to. Forty years later, I read an almost entirely different book. The novel didn’t change of course. Certainly, I did.

Peter De Vries died in 1993, but I wonder if he ever guessed that of all his books, Blood of the Lamb would be the one that just won't go away. My guess is, he did. He wrote it just a year after the death of his daughter, who died at age 11 of leukemia; and much of the book, that which gives it its immense emotional heft, is the near recitation of the prolonged agony that child faced before eventually, finally, succumbing.* This novel's great lines don't come from his wit, but from his soul.

Honestly, that whole story I had nearly forgotten because that theological fight simply didn’t hit me at twenty. I think it was William Hazlett who said something to the effect of no young man thinks he shall ever die; count me among 'em. But at sixty years old, Blood of the Lamb nearly took out the knees in my soul.

The story of Carol Wanderhope’s agonizing death is the big story of the novel. Through his daughter's suffering, Don Wanderhope goes to war with a fully sovereign God, the author of our faith and our only comfort, for putting her through the horrifying paces of such inhuman suffering.

The question to which De Vries demands an answer is the same question Elie Wiesel can’t help asking in Night and elsewhere, one of the most profound and difficult questions all believers can ever face: if God almighty loves us and his love is blankets the known world, then why on earth do people suffer such great horrors? Peter De Vries’s most memorable novel is not a book for the weak of heart—or soul.

But it was a blessing to me, at sixty. It will be, I’m sure, the best thing I will read this summer.

_____________________

For a fascinating medical study of the Carol Wanderhope’s leukemia—and the story’s relationship to De Vries’s own daughter's medical story, see Dr. David Steensma’s article on the novel in the Journal of Oncology, available on-line at http://jco.ascopubs.org/cgi/content/full/27/16/2729 . Spoiler alert: if you're going to read the novel, read it first.

*First published June 29, 2009.

Hope and horror

H. Bosch, The Extraction of the Stone of Madness and Folly

The word lobotomy strikes terror in the heart of most of us today, despite the fact that the procedure was once the darling of mental health professionals--and the fact that Antonio Egas Minoz, inventor thereof, for his efforts won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949. In this country 40,000 lobotomies were performed in the two decades when the procedure was considered a godsend. Today, however, even the word sounds medieval.

It looks worse. What Minoz designed, and dozens, even hundreds of practitioners copied, was gaining entrance to the brain and then simply messing things up, disconnecting connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of the brain. Someone determined to call the procedure "ice-pick surgery" because those who performed it gained access to the brain via--gulp!--extra long nails. A couple of days ago, I saw such nails, behind glass, at St. Joseph's (MO) Glore Psychiatric Museum, in a display that included pictures and drawings I've unfortunately not forgotten. 

The whole operation, I'm told, took ten minutes, no more; and for twenty years it seemed a perfect blessing to mental health professionals. Right from the get-go, the procedure had its detractors, some registering criticism simply on the basis of the repulsive nature of procedure--poke something sharp through the eye and into the cranial cavity, then stir things up.

The truth is, success was, from the start, a mixed bag. Some patients' conditions didn't change a bit. Another third came out of the lobotomy changed--for the worse, often badly for the worse. The behavior of yet another third clearly improved. 

Lobotomy never became the miracle cure its proponents claimed it would. Worse, in a high profile cases like that of Rosemary Kennedy, sister of JFK, the failure was awful. Her father, Joseph, determined a lobotomy would cure his often petulant daughter of violent mood swings. It was November of 1941, and approximately 80 lobotomies had been performed in this country. Tragically, Rosemary Kennedy's operation was an appalling failure, leaving her in a state for which we have no words easy to use. 

Seen in context, the immense and immediate popularity of the lobodomy is somehow humanly understandable, despite the disasters. During the Depression, when money was tight, funding for mental hospitals was frequently the first government expenditure cut. Huge institutions found themselves with thousands of patients on budgets that became, with each passing year, more draconian. In the era of "insane asylums," as they were called, many Americans--and mental health professionals--advised patients' families to pack clothes proper for burial since it was simply assumed that signing family members into mental health facilities--many of those institutions cities in and of themselves--meant the patient would likely leave only in a casket. 

The lobotomy, an incredibly cheap and quick procedure, offered a miracle fix we all still search for in the face of our own intractable problems. We've come a long way in our treatment of mental health--or so museums like the Glore amply display; but as many of us sadly know, coping with significant mental and emotional distress is too often no easier today than it was before the lobotomy. Hope, the "thing with feathers," flits alluringly through all of our dreams, but it's ever fragile, easily broken.

Almost as if by chance, I've been in two mental health museums in the last few weeks, seen all kinds of hope demonstrated in a hundred historic procedures and therapies that, throughout the years, offered miracles. But even with pharmaceuticals, mental health remains a mystery. Those sprawling facilities we built long ago in places like Cherokee, Iowa, and St. Joseph, Missouri, those massive ornate structures (the distance around Cherokee's is more than a mile!) were once an alternative world where the rest of us could file away those we judged insane or lunatic, words today considered obscene.

The history of mental health treatment is full of false starts, misplaced enthusiasm, and remarkable failures. Still, walk through those old institutions sometime and it's hard not to be taken by an undercurrent of unyielding hope in people, professionals, who weren't themselves as evil as they might well seem, men and women who did their best with what they had, which wasn't much. 

The stories may well be garish, scary as ice-picks; but the hopes are as much ours as the nightmares. The stories are our stories too.

Anniversary Confessions

It had been two years since I'd lived anywhere close, but Orange City was her hometown. That we would be married there was beyond question, and that was okay with me. A few of my old friends came around, along with a few old profs, and of course my family from afar. But that hot day in late June, First CRC, Orange City, Iowa, held hosts of her family, she being the oldest cousin in a hoard of Vissers, her mother's side.

We drew a crowd, all right, most all of them seeing, for the very first time, this soon-to-be husband, not a farmer, of their drop-dead gorgeous cousin. After all, we got married in a fever. Stem-to-stern, first date-to-alter oath took six months total. We spent our first Christmas together six months after we got married. How's that for heat?

The college chaplain married us, the Rev. John B. Hulst, who wasn't always sure I was driving down along the straight-and-narrow; but I found him trustworthy, and, more importantly, he'd been my soon-to-be-wife's childhood preacher.

Truth be told, I don't remember much about the wedding itself. It was hot--that I know, late June, rural, northwest Iowa, the reception in Northwestern College, Fern Smith Hall--that I won't forget, the first time I'd been at the college itself, not in the gym or baseball diamond.

What I do remember is that I wanted it over. Two reasons--first, the whole business was a bit over-the-top for someone who regarded himself as being, well, "counter-cultural," non-traditional. We fooled around a little with the oath, I remember, but already back then I had a firm enough grasp on my abilities--or lack thereof--to determine that I wasn't about to memorize what I'd written. I suppose that marriage vow is around somewhere, but I honestly wouldn't know where to look. That day I'd decided that weddings are really for women.

The other reason was another kind of heat: I was aching for the honeymoon. Oh, not the flamboyance extravagantly charted today--Cancun, Bermuda, Hawaii, France; that would have been far too "kitch-ish," far too "traditional." Less was always more to hippie types.

The truth is, I hadn't even reserved a motel room. 'Twasn't laziness either. It was principal. Fancy-schmancy honeymoons were Nixonian or some kind of evil. The world was marching into chaos--Vietnam, cities in shambles, etc., etc., etc. You can't dance in a bonfire. Power to the people. Whatever.

So I got what came to me, a cheap little dive in Worthington, Minnesota, a motel long ago torn down, a squalid place barely more behind a flimsy door than a bed and a toilet. That's where we spent our first night. The truth can be told now, all these years later: we should have gone to Vegas. It was not a night to remember.

And it got off to a horrible start because once the festivities were over, once the guests were beginning to go home, the two of us went out the car (I'd parked it at church like an idiot), got in after wiping out mounds of shaving cream, started the engine, put it in reverse, and went nowhere. We were up on blocks. Yes, there was a crowd who thought the whole mess richly funny. Me? I couldn't get away from that church fast enough, and when we left the church I couldn't get away.

I don't remember her wedding dress--she still has it--but I do remember that clingy "going away" outfit, maroon, I think. True. I do. There I was, cranked for the honeymoon, and our orange VW was going nowhere.

I was livid.

When fifteen--maybe twenty--minutes later, we finally got off the blocks, the shaving cream wiped up, when we finally got on the road, right then in our first moments alone as man and wife, 45 years ago just last night, my gorgeous bride heard language no man just married in a church should have uttered. And lots of it too.

So it's time I apologize for that unrighteous honeymoon outburst. I'm sorry, Barbara Van Gelder Schaap, for a tantrum far worse than any I ever threw in the next 45-year marriage; and I'm oh, so thankful you didn't tell me to turn around and bring you home. I got us off to a shaky start, but you're the one, my dear. You're the only one.

Even if this morning, the morning after our anniversary, you're waking up as I write in a tiny little farmhouse in some obscure place in rural northwest Missouri, a couple dozen Angus neighbors right there in our backyard, three days of leadfoot museum trudging behind us.

Next year, Cancun :).

Jonah and the Visitor--a story (ii)

(continued from yesterday)

When finally that bat found a roost on a beam, he hung there, wings tucked, upside down, like a fat blot of tar. I was on the whale itself just then, Melville-like in my thoroughness, I might add. No matter--I could have just as well been out to sea. Once that bat stopped its swooping, every last eye was glued to the ceiling. Women pulled hankies over their heads, turned what was left of my sermon into something that resembled a funeral.

Every minute of what I’d written got lost. Jonah comes up out of the belly of that whale a changed man, but nobody in my church even heard the truth. Jonah takes the good news to the wicked people of Ninevah, and nobody heard a word.

When it was over and I was standing at the door shaking the hands, some of the people chuckled about that infernal bat; some of them, giggling, told me it was surely the Devil come in to wreak havoc.

Slim Murphy, perfectly poker-faced--excuse the expression--said to me, “Heckuva sermon, Pastor Angus.” That’s exactly what he said, “a heckuva sermon.” I could have held forth on the plague of toads, and Slim Murphy wouldn’t have stayed awake.

Some of them didn’t say a word, either, just skedaddled.

My righteous indignation stole away my better sense away when it was all over. I found my Jimmy’s old pellet gun in a corner of the basement, one of those air rifles you pump with your arm, and I marched back to church, slapped on just a few lights, even took a flashlight along to find that miserable thing--and when I did, I took aim.

Could well be I’ve lost some of the ability I once had to hit the mark with sermons the way I did when I was young and full of dreams, but I still have a steady trigger finger. So he came down in three shots--flop, like a dead bird. I picked him up in my handkerchief and deposited him just on the other side of the parking lot, where, if I’m lucky, some varmint will come along and help himself to a wicked lunch.

That’s what I did. I say you got to take the Devil down yourself if you’re going to beat him. You can’t wait for others if their out puffing on a LaPalina.

Burt the janitor said to me this afternoon, “Wonder where that bat went? I looked and looked and I couldn’t find him anywhere. Must have a secret place.”

I didn’t tell Burt I shot him. I just said, “I don’t want that bat ruining any more of my sermons, Mr. Blankenship. You find him, hear?”

So all afternoon Burt looked, neck stretched up like a goose. That’ll teach him not to skip out for a puff of his month-old cigar. That’ll fix my janitor. Dirty, cancerous things anyway, those cigars.

And a perfectly good sermon, too, just ruined. Maybe I'll just preach it again this week. Why not? 

Lord, have mercy.

Jonah and the Visitor--a story (i)

On old story from Reformed Worship, many moons ago, describing an event that lots and people remember in a lots and lots of churches. Just for fun.

________________________ 
I don’t care what anybody says, I’m mad. I’m not writing another sermon for church next week because nobody heard a word of the last one.

I’ve been holding forth for so many years I’ve lost track of time--80 or 90 or 150 years old is what it feels like. After last Sunday, maybe most all of Methuselah’s 900.

Sometimes it feels like a curse to be a preacher because you see every last sleepy eye from up front, in my years dozens more than my share. And this was a Jonah sermon, one of the great stories of the Bible, a real slacker gobbled up by the whale and spit out on shore like bad sausage.

The blame for what happened lies squarely on our frightful guest—I know that. If it wouldn’t have been for him, I would have had the people’s attention under lock and key. Last night we had one in the sanctuary--what I want to know now is how many more uncles and aunts and cousins will flit in uninvited and ruin sermons I’ve spent half my week planning. A bat--one of those black-winged, horror-story blood-suckers flew in Sunday night, uninvited, and destroyed everything.

Bats chirp, but mostly you don’t really hear them, but you see them just fine. They swoop in and turn on a dime as if they’re being dangled by one of Satan’s own evil puppeteers. I spotted him first during the hymn, saw him float around against the stained glass above the empty balcony before anyone else saw him, turning on a dime, coasting on unseen drafts. Everyone else was looking down in the hymnal at the words of a song I probably shouldn’t have picked because no one knew it. This time at least, it was half a blessing.

Burt the janitor wasn’t in his usual spot right then either. I looked for him, but he’s got a way of sneaking out once things get started. When the sanctuary temperature is just right and the speaker system’s operating the way it should, he sees things are moving and just like that he’s out for a puff on one of his fat black cigars he relites, Sundays only. He won’t admit it. If I ask him, he’ll tell me he was in the basement for a toilet running over.

So what could I do but hope that little devil with wings would find some nice warm spot to hang on and not make a run into the sanctuary.

Wishful thinking.

I read scripture, started in on the sermon, and everything looked fine. Through the story of the storm at sea, even the children were attentive. But when I came to the part where the affrighted sailors hoist Jonah overboard, I started to see those same kids looking straight up, a penguin chorus. That bat was somewhere in the peak of the ceiling, looking to perch.

Now First DeKalb is an old church, high ceilinged, with sanctuary lights suspended above the benches from long poles. This much I know about bats--like the little devils they are, they love the darkness. This one--he had wings a foot across--stayed up in the peak for most of my exposition, except for an occasional sortie towards parishoners’ heads, once right for beanpole-ish Durword Blankenship, whose bald pate always beckons lightning by pointing so way up high.

At that, the whole crowd sucked in a deep breath so deep that could have sucked the flame off votive candles, if we were Catholic. Mothers clenched their children, and little girls placed tented hymnals over their heads so the sanctuary looked like military camp. Reggie Gullikson, who’s been out of control since he was three, start flicking paper wads every time the bat made a dive.

But if you’d have seen their eyes, you’d have thought the whole assembly had lost their wits--everybody, young and old, all of them following that demonic bat’s every last dip and flip, tracing every corner he cut, every dive and swoop, a hundred whites of a hundred eyes, a chorus of rolling eyeballs.

_____________________

Tomorrow: The visitor comes to roost.

Sunday Morning Meds--Always there

“He will not let your foot slip—

he who watches over you will not slumber; 

indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” Psalm 121

About couple of decades ago, when my family and I were being shown around the old central city of Leiden, Holland, we were taken up on some kind of ancient battlement that has stood there for centuries. 

Hundreds of people were about, as they say.  Our guide, a historian, was narrating the story of the ancient city from atop from the battlements, which, as I remember it, was a huge concrete angel food cake.  Dozens of people were strolling on it, enjoying the sun and the Sabbath. 

I couldn’t help thinking about the fall one might take if one lost his or her balance or was somehow nudged off the edge.  There were no fences, no wires, no plexi-glass, and no warning signs.  If you would fall, you’d simply splat on the ground beneath it, maybe eight or ten feet, as I remember.

           

“So I’m amazed,” I told our guide at Leiden, “that there’s no wall.  What happens if people fall?  I mean, someone could sue.”

He laughed. “The court would say, ‘You’re a fool for falling off the edge.’”

I found that answer really strange because it wouldn’t happen here, and certainly wouldn’t be said. In fact, it’s possible that someone might stage a fall just to reap the dividends. We are a litigious society.

I don’t need to go back farther than fifty years or so in my own ethnic tribe to locate theological arguments that questioned the righteousness of insurance.  I mean, what God appointed to happen, happens, or so the tenet runs. Insurance, theological purists argued, weakens dependency on God by pushing the insured to take comfort instead in an financial portfolio.

Today that argument is dead in the water.  It would be impossible to live without insurance these days, a high-wire act without safety nets.

But Psalm 121 minces no words.  In its eight short verses, it insists five times—count ‘em yourself—that God watches over us, and he does so without blinking.  He neither slumbers nor sleeps.  He’s always there.

Affluence is a buffer, keeping us from need.  From when comes my help? —from my 401Ks, my retirement fund, my nest egg.  It’s probably fair to say that in terms of heat, clothing, fuel, and food, in the west at least, we’re warmly taken care of.  That God watches over us is nice, but get real and keep your eyes on the Dow Jones.

All of which would be true, if it weren’t for the tortures of the soul, the pain that come from wounds within.  Far be it from me—a citizen of one of the richest countries in the world—to say that those hurts, sorrows of the heart, are more crippling than the sorrows of the flesh.  I’m in no position to judge.  We’ve got food in our new refrigerator.

But I know something about heartache, as does everyone who’s ever lived, including the only one of us who was sinless.

Fat or thin, rich or poor, what remains the greatest comfort is not a good lawyer or a bountiful insurance payoff. What Psalm 121 won’t allow us to forget is that our God is always there, vigilant, caring, protective.

The poet can’t say it often enough. He’s there, he’s there, he’s there—and he won’t fall asleep on the job.  You can’t buy that kind of insurance. Someone, the sinless one, already did.