Italy xxi--Madame Butterfly

What I knew about Madame Butterfly I could have written on the back of the ticket. Puccini?--a spicy Italian sandwich maybe. We were going to the opera, in Venice, because who would go to the Black Hills and not see Mt. Rushmore? You've got to see an opera. We're in Italy, where something operatic happens every day right on the street. You want taciturn? Visit Den Haag, Munich, or 10 Downing Street. Want full-blast, two-fisted emotion? Keep your eyes open almost anywhere on the boot. 

I don't have to tell you how much we paid for those tickets. The truth is, I've deliberately forgotten. "Should we go?" we asked ourselves. Well, good night, how often are you going to be in Venice, Italy? We bought in.

And went. 

And, my goodness, was it was magnificent.

Let's be candid. The theater is like nothing we'd ever been in. I took this with my phone.

I'm telling you, places like this actually exist. We were there. Grand opera. 

What did I know about Madame Butterfly? I knew it was opera, and I knew it was Japanese because I remembered a big scrape about a white opera star playing a Japanese woman, and how wrong it would certainly be if a white woman sang "Summertime," or anything from Porgy and Bess. Madame Butterfly is a Japanese story--that's what the purists argued. Made sense, too. The love-struck tragic heroine is a 15-year-old geisha. There's no geishas in Sioux City.

But then, Puccini isn't a sandwich. He's Italian, not Japanese. He first encountered the story in London, in a play created from a story written by an American whose sister read it in a French novel. You could argue the MB is global--and in theme and emotion it is.

Still, the poison conflict at its heart is Western colonialism. Because that's true, it should be a little touchy to determine how it should be performed, ethnically speaking. I wondered.

That's the jackass American sailor, center stage, holding the teenage sweetheart with wings on her shoulders. (You're looking at contraband photos--no cameras allowed.) The whole incredible drama--so overwhelmingly operatic--was set on a bare stage, its cast dressed in modest pastels. Nothing even faintly Japanese, except the play itself. Fascinating.

Yes, it was sung in Italian, and yes I would have understood nothing without there being a line of translated libretto crawling along above the stage, a line I didn't see until fifteen minutes into the story. But with that blessed sub-title, this ugly American loved every minute of grand opera.

Loved? Well, when Puccini opened the opera the audience howled and threw stuff because they hated it that  much. It took a few revisions to make it more presentable; but then there are characters worth hating in Butterfly, including that horny American sailor. When he returns to Nagasaki, there's a white woman on his arm, his real wife. At the turn of the century, when promiscuity was more despised, the audience even hated Madame herself, a girl who was turning Japanese tricks before the Americans sailed in.

Spoiler alert--Madame Butterfly doesn't end well. First, Madame gives up her identity for a man who, in all honesty, wanted nothing more than a all-nighter. She quits family and tribe and faith, becomes a Christian, in fact, only to be horrifically double-crossed by an American who wanted little more than a good time.

What Madame does in taking care of business finally, once her own little boy is gone to America with the man who stole her heart and soul, is culturally significant. In her world, she regains nobility by the finality of her act. It's a grotesque, yet noble end to a love-sick opera that works beautifully on an Italian stage, every last human emotion playing just plain huge. 

It wouldn't play quite the same in Iowa.  

We almost had to mortgage our future to pay for the tickets, but we did. 

But it was--how can I say it?--wonderful. It was grand opera. We loved it.

Italy xx--Basilica di Santa Marco (end)

Should I ever go to Italy again, I'd work harder at taking really fine pictures. This time I had the jitters. I wasn't a bit nervous; but, for the most part, when you take a first step into a place like the Basilica di Santa Marco, you lose your wits, you're not in your right mind because you simply can't believe what you're seeing. Right then, taking aim with a camera at anything distracts you from seeing, well, "everything," which, of course, you can't see, which doesn't mean you stop trying. Next time, I'd like to walk in soberly and not be blown away.

I'd like to be able to aim carefully, balance lines, watch light closely, and look for dramatic frames. I'd like to think about what I'm doing, about how to capture what's humanly possible of all the beauty and get it into the little black box bobbing around my neck. I'd like to think about pictures when my head isn't spinning.

There's no accounting for taste,, but almost right away I told myself that the snapshot above was going to be among the finest compositions of the dozens of pictures I took. I'd like to say what's here was planned, but it wasn't. It was snapped, on my phone (I hadn't brought the camera!). It's an image I liked because of the almost divine play of light. I don't remember anything about the specific chapel--it's to the right of the nave--but when I stood there and looked at what I'd shot, I loved it. It looked really good. 

The spires point your way up toward the dome, where light is breaking. That contrast won't let your eyes not look; it demands your attention. Let me speak plainly--I think this is a gorgeous picture: the aspiration of its lines deliver at least something of the grandeur of the whole place. Of the shots I took in Italian cathedrals, this one does most to convince the viewer the place is as overwhelmingly beautiful as you say it is. 

It took a lot of lifetime for me to come to believe that at the very core of spirituality of all kinds, including the spirituality of Christianity, which is my profession, is sheer awe. To paraphrase Calvin (which seems almost sacrilegious in St. Mark's), only when we see God in the world outside or beyond us do we begin to recognize how great he is and needy we are. I've taken hundreds of prairie landscapes, trying to capture just a bit, a taste, of early morning glory, a stunning fragment of what Calvin is talking about.

Oddly enough, here in the Basilica, I was a thousand miles from that kind of landscape, a world away from a mountain lake or a chorus of burnished October hardwoods. That I'm almost forever away from those things doesn't mean I'm not feeling something in me that's as delightful as it is familiar--sheer awe. In the Basilica di Santa Marco, Venice, Italy, I can't shoot pictures because what's there makes my head spin.

And then, right there, a fancy little gold sign adorns the gate. 

This is a tighter shot, more angle, more spires; but there's some Latin on that sign on the gate: "Venite Adoremus," it says. 

Somehow, for some reason, I found that shocking in its homely familiarity because I hear those very words play in a thousand renditions of a old Christmas carol I've sung just about every last Christmas of my life. I'm standing there bathed in the awe created by the most beautiful cathedral in Venice, Italy, and I don't really have a clue what those words means; what I do recognize is that I know those words, and I actually hear them in the record of my own life.

Venite Adoremus.

So much of what you witness in Italy's vast treasures--its paintings, its sculptures, its architecture--is so exalted that it renders you not only speechless but selfless. But then, selflessness is a good place to be, or so real spiritualists of every cloth maintain. 

Those two words adorning a gate to a side chapel of St. Mark's Basilica, now nameless in my memory, brought music to my ears and to my soul, familiar and beloved music that's a part of me and a part of who I have been for lo, these three score and ten. That golden emblem message brought me home, allowed me to share--and not just as a tourist--the beauty all around. 

"Venite Adoremus"--come, let us worship.

"O come, let us adore him."

Italy xix--Basilica di San Marco (ii)

The Basilica di San Marco has three huge domes, not just one--impossible as that may seem. All of them are mosaics, if you can even begin to imagine that, all of them bent on creating a cosmic spiritual vision unlike any I'd ever seen. Forget all those icons for a moment, just try to imagine being in a vaulted expanse that seems nothing less than pure gold. I'd been in lots of monumental cathedrals in Europe and America, but there just seemed to be nothing comparable to this marvel, already a thousand years old. 

This dome--trust me, I read up on it--is St. Mark's Pentecost Cupola. Note the lines streaming from the very top, where a dove--the Holy Spirit--sits and sends out shoots of flame to the heads of the surrounding saints. Lest you believe that the events of Pentecost brought enlightenment only to the apostles, beneath them stand ordinary people, in pairs, from around the world. You and me, I'd say. Pentecost is, after all, for everyone.

I grew up in a new church. I remember the old one downtown, but the new one was home when I started to look around and see the world with my own eyes. Call me a sinner, but I remember counting knotholes in the knotty pine ceiling. When what was happening up front got stale or boring, I'd look up and count to see which stretches of blond pine were most busily peppered. 

If back then I'd gone to church in St. Mark's, Venice, I would never have heard a word of the sermon. But then, as far back as 900 A.D., congregants here didn't gather to listen to the preaching of the Word. Honestly, I don't remember seeing a pulpit in St. Mark's. I'm sure there was one, but I don't think I saw it because preaching wasn't all that important. You go to church, to mass, not to hear the Word preached but to taste God, to take his body and blood, take Him, into yourself, as he promised you would. 

So if the church was the place where you were God himself was distributed, all that fabulous excess is somehow understandable, a huge cave of gold, even to someone like me who was raised a Calvinist in a small town where a brand new church would be dang proud of its knotty pine ceilings. 

But it also helps me to understand why, at least for me, walking into the Basilica di San Marco was unlike stepping into anything else I'd ever been. If you want to understand how rich Venice was back then, how blessed the place was with wealth--lots of it pilfered--from around the world, visit the Basilica. Gaze at that ceiling, at the Pentecost Cupola, one of three, all of creating an aura of pure gold. This is the place of eucharist, of God-with-us. 

I didn't mean to have this janitor photo bomb the place, but just now, honestly, when I was looking over the pictures I took, I found her. It's not a great picture, but it's made memorable by her presence, down there, just a bit out of focus, on the bottom right. 

She's just what you need when you visit a place like St. Mark's. Down beneath the blessings documented in the Pentecost Cupola, she's a reminder of everything Psalm 90 so touchingly says. She sweeping up, dust to dust. 

I know why I took this picture. See the way the statuary above her and to her right is sun lit through the windows across the way? I couldn't help thinking that phenomenon was itself a miracle. Cathedrals are not brightly lit. But when they have windows, as St. Mark's does, the rotation of the earth creates a roving spotlight from the sun, a spotlight that, for a time at least, creeps almost eerily from one darkened corner to the next. "Have you seen this?" the light says. It's a gorgeous show. 

Photography is all about light--where it is and where it isn't. This shot is only tangentially about the basilica. It was really supposed to be about light.

And there she is, a veteran of the janitorial staff, reminding me--and now you--that all of the what's here above and around, all of this splendid art and artifice, isn't the whole story.

She comes by regularly, I'm sure, because there's dust, you know, and maybe even a little trash, refuse from the real world, the other one, the one where all of live.

In a place like the Basilica di San Marco, she's much more than janitor. She's something of a grim reaper. 

Italy xviii--Basilica di San Marco, Venice (i)

Rick Steves claims that the architectural style of St. Mark's Basilica, in Venice, is "early ransack" because so much of what that immense cathedral features is taken from other places and even other times--including, by the way, the relic bones of Saint Mark himself, St. Mark, the disciple of Christ. They were something of a heist. 

If you simply look over this shot of the incredible facade, you'll see what Steves means. What's not showing here, but what you can't miss when you walk up is the domes, the onion domes, so reminiscent of a mosque. All told, it's wild. The place seems less of a church than a carnival. (Let me borrow a shot of the exterior.)

Just plain "wow!" The immense bronze horses prancing proudly over the central front door--there are four of them--are the basilica's pride and joy, I'm told.

And, no, they're not "native." They're imports, booty from Constantinople, stolen during the Fourth Crusade, when Venice, the city/state, was flexing its powerful military muscle.

At the top of the facade is a roofline of French Gothic pinnacles that stand proudly above pillars that belong to a whole different era and differing (Roman and Greek) cultures. Honestly, to call the place eclectic does justice to neither the word or the edifice. It's one immense collage of images and styles, including some jaw-dropping mosaics, like this one over the left front door. 

I wish I could tell you what you're looking at here, but I'm not sure myself, and--here as elsewhere all over Italy--the images simply don't quit. Taking time to study any one of them means missing a huge gathering of others, all of them just as interesting. I'm guessing the man on the cot or bier is Mark the apostle. Those gathered around him, non-haloed, are perhaps church men come to pay him homage (one of them carries a staff with a cross). The gallery on the right features a group from a different era or station, looking on. I'm sure there's more, but if you stand here any longer, you won't get inside at all.

When you do, there are no words.

I'd taken only my phone. I don't know that I'm a good enough photographer to take a picture like the one above anyway, but this one I'm borrowing does give you something of a sense of what's inside. The ceiling and much of the wall space is given to ancient golden mosaics that create light that seems, well, unearthly. All of the images tell a story. Every one. Here's the Ascension Dome, high atop the basilica. (You're looking straight up.)

Jesus is at the pinnacle, his hand raised in a gesture that seems, perhaps, more Orthodox than Roman Catholic (but then, this place has history, believe me). Some angels attend him on his slight throne, while around him, in a circle, stands Mary (in blue, traditionally), accompanied by angels on either side, and the apostles. Just beneath their ring are the windows, which, I'm told are meant to separate this world from the heavenly realms. By the way, don't expect to see this unless you bring a heavyweight lens and you can stand for a considerable length of time looking straight up in the air. 

Amid all that spectacle, you feel a bit like Saul on the road to Damascus, struck suddenly dumb, or Zechariah, the priest, who wouldn't believe his wife could get pregnant. There are no words.

Then, slowly, you breath, your eyes stop wandering, you relax a bit, people jostle you (there's always a crowd), and you get some kind of sea legs back beneath you. Having looked up upon a vision the next world, you slowly return to this.

Tomorrow, that story.

Saturday morning catch--Little Sioux Hoarfrost

The idea of early mornings with a camera is to get to where you want to be somewhere around what's called "first light," often an hour or so before dawn. "First light" can be absolutely charming, but I'd have to be a much better photographer than I am to know how to shoot in a world clothed in semi-darkness.

Even in the dark, you could see that last Saturday morning was going to be the quintessential "winter wonderland." Outside our windows, it was clear that the hoarfrost--not my favorite word because it's so ill-chosen--was going to be sweet. We get that flocked effect a couple times per winter, but it looked to me that Saturday was about to offer a perfect storm of "white crystalline water vapor formed in still weather on vegetables, fences, etc.," as the dictionary says.

I went east to the Little Sioux Valley, where there was as many hunters as there was hoarfrost--and there was plenty of hoarfrost. Deer season, I guessed, although everyone was dressed in orange, as if they were hunting pheasants. Who knows?--as many as I saw, maybe they were going after fox or coyote. Looked like team sport anyway.

Hoarfrost never lasts. The wind comes up and blows the powdered sugar away. When the sun comes up, it melts. If you want the best shots you have to be there when the  sun pushes through themist--and you have to shoot fast. See that shot above, it's the first one I took in an hour of traipsing around the valley. It's dark. That's not to say there's no charm to it, or moodiness; but I can't help it: call me sentimental, I like contrast (which means sun). 

Finally, a half-hour after dawn, which I couldn't see, the quilt of clouds somehow lifted out east, enough for me to catch a foggy sun.

It was still dark, but there was hope. Then, that quilt of cloudiness started to burn, noticeable first, at least as I saw it, in a line of trees at the bottom of the valley.

There's just enough sun to turn bare naked cottonwoods into cotton candy. Seemed to me, at that point, that I was going to be okay. I'd already been there for an hour or so, I hadn't been shot for a deer, I had a couple of places to go, and the spheres around the Little Sioux could align for some real music.

Still not there, but things are brightening.

I shot this tree a half-dozen times before, I'm sure, got some sweet ones too; but I never was there when the world looked like this, almost virginal. And, yes, that's the sun, but there's tons of mist to burn off before any radiance truly arrives.

It's coming, but we're still in a b&w world. There's a square block out there in the field--see it? It's the grave of a pioneer named Old Dutch, I think, one of O'Brien County's very first settlers. It was pointed out to me by some of the Sutherland historical nerds, who were thrilled to know I'd heard of the old gent. "We'll show you where he's buried," they said. How could I resist?

Then, finally, some blue sky. 

I'd been out for quite a while, but a brighter sun really pulled the glory from the earth beneath--all of it. I called that "grace" on FB, and a theologian demurred. He's probably right, but if my use of the word means I'm a heretic, then burn me at the stake. How about this?--all that hoarfrost was perfectly glorious.

Sunday Morning Meds--The Great Meek

“But the meek will inherit the land and enjoy great peace.” 

Christian piety is, by the standards of some, never good enough. “Give all that you have to the poor and follow me,” Jesus told a rich young CEO. The guy, Harvard-trained, went back to the office. Some claim Christ was more than a bit hyperbolic. I think that’s true.

The injunction to righteousness can be crippling, because the heart-felt desire to do good is normally never good enough anyway, as Luther himself observed on bloody knees. We’re saved by grace, not works, and the combined good deeds of all the Eagle Scouts of the world won’t make a difference. Thus saith the Good News.

I find lines like this verse sort of scay, declarations of the glories of a piety that’s so grandly unattainable. Maybe it’s all the fault of my Aunt Meek.

Honestly, I knew her only silver-haired. Physically, she was, like all the Schaaps, small and square. As did most of my father’s brothers and sisters, she had an adolescent giggle, a little warble that eventually rose into an off-key falsetto. Sitting in a room of Schaaps was like being surrounded by seagulls. Her name was Marie, but everyone called her “Meek.” Even as a child I associated the biblical word with her character, so that my own aunt somehow got her own Beatitude. Wow.

One other thing about my father’s family—they were all good, good people. A cousin told me that a marriage counselor once told her that her own marital problems were caused by having too good of a father—my uncle. What a curse.

Aunt Meek’s children can probably recount moments when she fumed, when she flashed hot bolts of anger. She could not have always been as soft and gentle as I knew her to be. But the fact remains, that if Aunt Meek is the model for biblical meek, then I feel crippled by a standard I can never reach. Humble, kind, and sweet, she was among the kindest of human souls.

And what about me? There were times, I admit, when, frustrated by the administration of the college where I worked, I rose to speak in a faculty meeting and roundly accused the brass of lousy leadership. Some lauded such speech; others felt it a violation of whatever defines “community,” Christian at that. But what’s clear to me—as I remember—is that I wasn’t acting in the least like Aunt Meek. I was abrasive and, even arrogant in my desire to lay a glove on honchos. Will I not inherit the land? Are God’s blessings not mine?

Good question. Will peace be the blessing only of those who don’t rock the boat? Does “servanthood” imply servility? I know this much: those speeches of mine did not grant me peace. I spent sleepless nights wondering if I’d said too much, gone too far.

The only way I can begin to answer the questions I’m asking is by opposing meekness with its opposite—pride, the kingpin of the Seven Deadlies. If rising temperature and volcanic behavior is created by pride—my desire, my will, my personal sense of injury—then I’ll always be a renter and never fully inherit God’s roomy blessings.

Pride always goeth before the fall. That truth I need to bring into my heart. How?—well, meekly, I’m sure.

Not to remain a child

Museum display hoppers from the Homestead National Monument

The worst grasshopper visitation we had was in July, 1876. One Sunday morning father and mother and I went to town to church. The small grain had been harvested and the corn all along the way was a most beautiful, dark green. When we were about a mile from town a slight shade seemed to come over the sun; when we looked up for the cause, we saw millions of grasshoppers slowly dropping to the ground. They came down in such numbers that they clung two or three deep to every green thing. The people knew that nothing in the way of corn or gardens could escape such devastating hordes and they were very much discouraged. To add to their troubles, the Presbyterian minister announced his intention to resign. He, no doubt, thought he was justified. 

I was pretty small at that time and didn't understand what it all meant, but I do know that as we drove home that afternoon, the cornfields looked as they would in December after the cattle had fed on them--not a green shred left. The asparagus stems, too, were equally bare. The onions were eaten down to the very roots. Of the whole garden, there was, in fact, nothing left but a double petunia, which grandmother had put a tub over. So ravenous were the pests that they even ate the cotton mosquito netting that covered the windows. 

Lucy Hewitt, "Early Days in Dawson County."

So devastating were the grasshopper plagues of the 1870s that lots of people, whole families, pulled up stakes from the wonderful northwest Iowa soil on which they'd lived, and hightailed it back east to wherever they'd come from. Once the clouds of hoppers descended, for three years running, getting any kind of crop was nigh unto impossible. 

Northwest Iowa, obviously, wasn't the only world to be overrun. The plague spread far and wide over the Upper Midwest, but it did seem especially terrifying here, a possible reason why this particular area was "settled" later than almost any neighborhood in any direction of the region.

So, who cares? Grasshopper plagues are long behind us, right? With modern farming methods, hoards of hoppers is a horror of the past. 

I'm no ecologist. I don't understand how such phenomena come and go. There are those who can explain such things, I'm sure.

I do tend to side with Cicero when, every morning, I look out over the fields west and north and east from my back window: "Not to know what happened before one was born is always to remain a child." 

I'm reminded of something Fred Manfred told me years ago, how one night after milking he sat out on the back step of the Feikema home and looked out over the fields behind them. "There's got to be stories here, stories I don't know." 

There were, of course. He found some because there always is more to know. 

I'm not thankful, this morning, for grasshoppers; but I am thankful for stories that give life and breadth to the world just just off the step outside my window.

At the funeral

Literally millions of fundamentalist Christians believe the Christian faith is greatly imperiled in America, more than it's ever, ever been. I don't share that terror, but if, this morning, they still believe that's true, then they didn't witness the funeral of President George Herbert Walker Bush. At some moments, that memorial was almost embarrassingly Christian.

From Michael W. Smith to a public recitation to the Apostle's Creed, to "Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven," to his son's wonderful spiritual tribute; from readings of scripture (Isaiah 60, Revelations 21), to "O God, Our Help in Ages Past" and "The King of Love My Shepherd Is," the length and breadth of that service, broadcast on every major network, resounded with the Word, and even the Word Made Flesh. 

And it's not over. In a yet-to-come celebration of his life back in Houston, the Oak Ridge Boys will be singing "Amazing Grace," just as America's 41st President himself asked. 

Conservatives may well claim that their heartfelt opposition to same-sex marriage, for instance, or legal abortion, means they suffer derision and worse in the pervasive secular humanism of the cultural and the times.  They may well believe all that confession and profession yesterday was a sham. 

For that matter, purists on the Christian left might well complain that the ceremony exuded that potent and frequently dangerous blend of faith and politics, or faith and patriotism. I get that too. But I couldn't help feeling the recitation of the Apostles Creed, heard from Washington to LA, was a national blessing.

"What does it tell you that the feel-good events in Washington these days are funerals?" Susan Glasser asks in an opening line to a sassy response to the memorial in the New Yorker, a mild critique of the proceedings she titled, expansively: "George H. W. Bush’s Funeral Was the Corny, Feel-Good Moment That Washington Craves." To me, his funeral wasn't just a "corny, feel-good moment." Not at all. 

And unlike the earlier McCain proceedings in the very same National Cathedral, yesterday's solemn affair carried no mention of President Donald Trump. The Bushes wouldn't have it. Nothing. His name was not spoken, no one drew comparisons, he was never cited, not once. Speakers flailed the Prince of Orange during the McCain funeral; nobody said a word yesterday.

Still, the man managed to dominate--by neglecting to shake hands with anyone other than his immediate neighbors, the greatly hated Obamas, by being the only one who didn't recite the Apostles Creed or sing the hymns, by sitting in that characteristic, stifled position, his beefy arms clasped tightly about his beefy self, in not responding to anything warmly. In his very first tweet after the service he told those on his feed that his poll numbers were up to fifty per cent approval. 

The man dominates so fully that it was impossible to listen to any of the preaching or eulogizing yesterday without thinking of the man who was and is and forever shall be the polar opposite of George H. W. Bush, who was cited by all who knew him as humbly devoted to his God, his family, and his people.

Way back at the beginning of the Republican primaries in 2016, we all watched an undeniable phenomenon grow from his every movement. There were 18 men and one woman running for the Republican nomination. They could all be on stage at once, a whole squadron, even a Bush, a "low-energy" former governor. Didn't matter who or how many stood there, Donald Trump sucked the oxygen out of the room, left nothing for anyone else to breathe.

You can only love him or hate him. You simply can't be so-so. Of the Presidents and First Ladies who shared his pew, the only one he hasn't pummeled or thrashed is Rosalyn Carter. 

Yesterday, in a wonderful Christian ceremony, a service that had nothing to do with him, a Presidential funeral at which he neither spoke nor was spoken of, his massive shadow still lay over every square inch of the cathedral.

But yesterday he wasn't the big story, and for that all of us can be thankful.

Italy xvii--The Gates of Paradise

It's meant to tell a story, to make the story come alive, and it does. You can't not look.

This incredible relief sculpture is a panel from the Gates of Paradise, named such, in awe, by Michelangelo, although Michelangelo had nothing to do with the creation of this "relief" (a three-dimensional sculpture attached to a wall) or any of the others on the very famous Baptistry door at Florence. 

I'm not going to act like I know it all. It took me forever to figure out what on earth is being pictured. The nakedness is typical Renaissance, but there appears to be at least three important central scenes to the drama. For me, the key was the scene in the background, center and far left. Let me try to bring it up. 

Just in case the close-up is too fuzzy, I'll help. There's a man and a woman and an apple and a snake. Voila! Our First Parents, who, lest we forget, believed the lies of that evil serpent twisted round the tree--not just any tree either, the only one they weren't supposed to touch, under penalty of death. You know the story. 

What seems amazing is how slight the image of the moment of the Fall of all mankind appears. It's background really, almost out of the picture, as if Lorenzo Ghiberti, (1378-1455), the sculptor, didn't think it deserved a headline. Me?--I was brought up Calvinist; the fall should be front-and-center. Why does it seem so secondary in the stories of Adam and Eve? I don't know. There must be a reason.

Instead, in the foreground bottom left, vastly more prominent, is that incredible moment our Adam came to life. As you can imagine, through the centuries lots of people who knew of Michaelangelo's admiration for the Gates of Paradise couldn't help but see, in God's hand touching Adam's, a suggestion divine touch on the central panel in ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Is there, right here in the Baptistry door, a prototype? No one knows, but the touch is similar, isn't it?

The center of this panel features God the Father creating Eve from a sleeping Adam, whose head is up on his wrist as if he's trying to breath through a stuffy nose. 

Eve is attended by angels, who gracefully people the entire piece. She appears rising directly from the man who will be her husband. (Were they ever married?) Eve gets primary billing in this panel, even though her taking the apple seems of only slight importance. Why? I don't know.

They all have great hair and therefore look Italian. Eve appears much younger than her napping husband, but then, she was, wasn't she? In Eden, time was likely irrelevant.

On the right of the panel is the expulsion--the sad leave-taking as the hapless pair are tossed from the blessed garden. 

That winged monster is a creature from the fiery beyond--at least I think so, although I've never known such a being myself. He appears to be doing the dirty work, but Eve clutches her garlanded middle and, sadly, must, like Lot's wife, take one last look at how much they'd lost. 

Ten similar panels, each of them holding similar bronze sculptures, each of them 31 1/4 inches square, compose the massive door to the Baptistry. Ghibirti won a contest for his design 600 years ago. Amazing, isn't it? His original reliefs are kept safely indoors now; these panels are beautiful copies. Around them, there's always a crowd.

What's so amazing about Rome is that there's no end to the biblical story telling, but very little Sunday School. The high art of the Renaissance suggests an audience who enjoyed study. Nothing--or so it seemed to me--was dumb-downed. If you want to appreciate the incredible artistry of the Gates of Paradise, yet today, 600 years after they were created, you have to stand there outside the Baptistry, getting jostled by dozens of others with cameras. You have to want to understand, to be willing to spend some time looking closely over the immense detail because what's there on the door is not a series of flannel graphs. 

Lorenzo Ghibirti may have had a reason for placing the stories of Adam and Eve where he did when he designed and created this panel. Real art critics likely have their theories. But it takes some time to determine what's there and why. It demands some study, as so much art does in Rome, because the Gates of Paradise respect the stories they tell as well as the audience they gather.

Here's another. Go ahead--can you guess what Ghibirti might have in mind in this panel? If you ask me, it's not easy. You have to study.

But then, the older I get, the more I can't help thinking the Word of God isn't all that easy either. We just try to do our best with it. Look closely.

Chau and Greenland's Icy Mountains

"Damn, sometimes I get so pissed for what I fell for my first fifty years or so."

It's a disturbing line to start the morning. The preacher who put it up on Facebook went to college just down the road--where I did; he is someone who once held significant favor and prominence in the denomination I still belong to; and he's a thoughtful man who left that church a decade ago, "pissed," as he says.

But I get what he feels. A few years ago. before I was going to speak in a local church, I asked the worship committee to arrange to sing a song no longer in the hymnal, "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," an old rah-rah mission anthem. That old favorite was a blessing we'd blast out whenever a  real live missionary would visit our church, and a favorite we'd stand to sing at the annual Mission Fest. When I was a boy, that hymn's beautiful slide show created a species of righteous wanderlust in me that my parents loved. To be a missionary, that was a real calling for their boy. 

The young man playing the organ for that service I was planning took one look at the old fave and told the committee he wouldn't play it. It was colonialist and bigoted, he said. He understood completely. I'd chosen "Greenland" for examination, not inspiration. I wanted people to understand how much we'd changed, some of us at least. The organist obviously didn't require the lecture. 

A few weeks ago, John Allen Chau, a 26-year-old missionary was put to death by a tribe of people on a tiny and secluded Indian island--primitive, naked people who barely have a name and speak a language no one knows. Bringing the gospel of Jesus to those who'd never heard, he was murdered by their bows and arrows.

Like that organist, lots of us look at Chau's missionary enthusiasm and can't help but shiver, not simply because of the man's horrible, bloody death, but because we find it far more difficult these days to be thrilled by "Greenland's Icy Mountains" than we did fifty years ago--and for a variety of reasons. 

Christianity Today tried to help believers understand why even deeply pious Christians weren't canonizing John Allen Chau the way we bestowed sainthood on Jim Eliot or the other three missionaries murdered/martyred by the Auca Indians fifty years ago. Chau's death gave most of us pause, they claimed, but only a few bestowed martyr-hood. 

CT says the only certainty here is complexity, paradox.

In the aftermath of the missionaries’ deaths in 1956, and again, more than 60 years later, after the death of Chau, many have called missionary work a fool’s errand at best, and, at worst, a violent attempt to impose Christian beliefs on other cultures. The Great Commission means that most Christians will have to agree to disagree with those who see sharing the story of Jesus as inherently negative.

Some are brought to a firm knowledge of the saving work of Jesus Christ by way of our mission work, just as they have been for centuries. There's no grace in turning your back on the Great Commission.

On the other hand, CT says believers have to be aware of another side.

But it also means that Christians must seriously consider what the best means are not just for sharing the story, but for sharing it with respect. It is not easy to know what this looks like in practice, particularly in someone else’s cultural context. This makes thoughtful questions about our missionary attitudes essential. 

There's our dilemma, the sometimes empty space we live in, in all truth. Once again, the energy we carry to our either/or propositions almost always requires moderation because most dilemmas we face are not either/or but both/and. 

This morning, early, it hurt to read old friend's pissed confession, to know how angry he is having been hoodwinked fifty years ago by his childhood faith. I understand that, because once upon a time I too sang "From Greenland's Icy Mountains" with stars in my eyes. 

But my three-score and ten years experience is that just about always there is another side. What we'd like to think is either/or is really both/and. 

An old preacher once told me he'd come to believe that truth is always elliptical. It always has two centers, never just one. I'd like to think that little geometric sermon has served me well.