The morning of 9/11

On some balmy early fall days out here it’s not hard to believe that we are not where we are.  Warm southern breezes sweep all the way up from the Gulf, the sun smiles with a gentleness not seen since June, and the spacious sky reigns over everything in azure glory.

On exactly that kind of fall morning, I used to bring writing classes to what I would call a ghost town, Highland, Iowa, a place whose remnants still exist, eight miles west and two south of town, a village that was, but is no more.  Highland likely fell victim to the sad reality that far more people lived out here when the land was cut into 160-acre chunks than do now, when the portions are ten times bigger.

What’s left of the place is a stand of pines circled up around no more than twenty gravestones, and an old carved sign with hand-drawn figures detailing what was once a post-office address for some people—a Main Street composed of a couple of churches and horse barns, a blacksmith shop, and little else.  The town of Highland, Iowa, once sat atop the confluence of a pair of non-descript gravel roads that still float out in four distinct directions like dusky ribbons over the undulating prairie.

I bring students to Highland because what’s not there never fails to silence them. Maybe it’s the skeletal cemetery; maybe it’s the south wind’s low moan through that stand of pines, a sound you don’t hear often on the treeless Plains; maybe it’s some variant of culture shock—they stumble sleepily out of their cubicle dorm rooms and wake up suddenly in sprawling prairie spaciousness.

I’m lying.  I know why they fall into psychic astonishment. It’s the sheer immensity of the open land that unfurls before them, the horizon only seemingly there where earth seams effortlessly into sky, the rolling land. They open their eyes and there’s nothing here, and that’s what stuns them into silence. 

Eighteen years ago, on a morning none of them will ever forget, we stood and sat in the ditches along those gravel roads, describing what we saw.  No cars went by. We were absolutely alone—20 of us, all alone on a swell of prairie.

That’s where I was—and that’s where they were—on September 11, 2001. My class and I left for Highland at just about the moment the first World Trade Center tower was attacked. While the world watched in horror, my students and I looked over a landscape so immense only God could live there—and were silent before him.

No one can stay on a retreat forever, of course, so when we returned to the college we heard the news. Who didn’t? All over campus, TVs blared.

But I like to think that my students, that morning, were best prepared for horror, not by our having been warned, but by our having been awed.

On the Sauk Trail

This is my first book, as in, the very first book that ever belonged to me and me alone. I'm not the only one who has it, but this particular copy is mine, as it has been for 65 years. It's mine because I'm in it, part of the kindergarten class at Oostburg, Wisconsin, in 1954.

It's what we called an "annual," a book which included, back then, pictures of all the children--kindergartners through high school seniors--who attended school in my hometown. For years, the only meaning I knew of the phrase "Sauk Trail," was that it was school yearbook. If there is such a thing today, I'm guessing the Oostburg High School Flying Dutchmen still title it the same way.

Today, there's a old road, once a busy highway 141, just east of town. Today it's named the "Sauk Trail." Schoolchildren in and around Oostburg, Wisconsin, likely know the phrase because of the road too. It lays between town and the western shore of Lake Michigan.

Saturday, on my way to Michigan, I pulled over at an I-80 rest stop somewhere in western Illinois for the reason most of us pull over at rest stops. I got out of my car and walked into this sign:

Nowhere near Oostburg, Wisconsin, but near to my heart?--sure. 

Even though I know more about "the Sauk Trail" today, I had no idea the lake road from which my kindergarten picture album takes its name extended a couple hundred miles west and south. That convenient rest stop is also on "the Sauk Trail."

I'm quite sure no teacher in Oostburg, Wisconsin, ever told me much about "the Sauk Trail," even though it was lay a mile east and the words were plastered over the cover of every yearbook the school turned out, even though tons of kids--some older than I am, many more long gone--have books with that title tucked somewhere in the attic. 

Why didn't some teacher talk about what still lays just outside of town? Because standard curriculums when I was a kid didn't take time for Native American history, didn't bother, didn't, as we say, "go there." 

But why not? I was a teacher. I'm guessing teachers like me would say, "Well, we've got a lot of ground to cover in American history or literature. Just didn't have time to get to it," even though any reference to the Sauk Trail would link into the War of 1812, into the fur trade, into the press of Native peoples from the east who'd already lost their homeland to European settlers, to a mix of Native tribes who all too often killed each other off, to unimaginable treks over hundreds of miles by nomadic people who knew hundreds of miles of territory like the back of their hands. 

Imagine trapping beaver all the way out here on the river some white man would call "the Floyd," skinning 'em, fletching 'em, drying the hides, and tying them into bundles, then walking or riding on a horse all the way to Green Bay, Wisconsin--no planes, no trains, no steamships, no ATVs--all that way.

For centuries, the Sauk Trail was a highway. Part of the story, out here in Iowa, is the state's own name, derived from the Ioways, and where are they today? In Oklahoma. How'd that happen? Well, we're here. We moved 'em out, got 'em out of the way, sent them to "Indian Country." 

There really isn't a nice or an easy way to teach Native American history. No matter how you dish it up, it's not sweet story really. The First Nations lived where we wanted to, so we moved them out. It was Manifest Destiny. 

And that's a story that's neither nice nor easy--like, for instance, the Fugitive Slave Law or the Kansas-Nebraska Act or the Dawes Act. Like Manifest Destiny. Like the institution of slavery. 

My great-great-great Grandfather came up the Sauk Trail from Milwaukee and settled lakeshore land in 1846. A biography in a book of early Sheboygan County pioneers says, . "The red men were still numerous in this section, but were not troublesome to the white settlers, except as beggars." That's a beginning chapter in my story, I guess.  

"Sauk Trail" looks good, even a little exotic, on a high school annual though, doesn't it? Nice name for a road, preserves history.

But only if you care to know it. 

Iowa, Sauk, and Fox

Sunday Morning Meds--"Not so"

“the ungodly are not so. . ." Psalm 1

While it’s never particularly difficult for believers to remember that scripture is holy writ—“the word of God”—it’s often much tougher to remember that at some point in time thousands of years ago, someone—likely a man—was sitting over a scratchy parchment with a quill or sharp stick or whatever passed for a Bic, trying to get this little poem of his just right.  I doubt that divine inspiration ever turned writers into dreamy mediums, but, of course, I may be wrong.

If I’m not, then the struggles common to all writers once certainly plagued the psalmist.  Should I say “in his law,” or is “on his law” really more to the point?  I’d like to know how much time he spent on such prepositions.

 

But if the poet/singer here was really just one of us, someone trying hard to get it right, then it’s fair to say that at some moments, maybe not as many as he’d like, the process just flat-out worked, the right words appeared as if by magic, ideas unpacked themselves, and he discovered exactly what it was he was thinking.  Every writer—and most human beings—know the sheer glory of those shining music-of-the-spheres moments when all of us seem to be mediums.

 

I dare say one of those moments occurred right here in verse 4.  I don’t know if King David wrestled with the agrarian metaphors that fill the psalm so far, or if he merely looked around and started, as all of us do, by writing what he knew.  But once he’s covered the ground of the blessed, he moves into the dark side with a blunt verdict that seemingly could give a rip about lyrical beauty.  This line came out as if the ink simply wouldn’t stay in the pen, accessorized with an exclamation point:  “the ungodly are not so.”

 

On this point, David is not given to splitting hairs or parsing complex arguments.  Let me try to describe what it means to be blessed, he says, and then he works hard at it.  As for the wicked, he says, raising a finger, “nope.”

If you can feel the pulse of the man anywhere in this poem, I’m saying it’s right here at the pivotal moment where sits the heart of comparison/contrast, and you can see it in the thick line he scratched in beneath “the wicked are not so.”

I envy the confidence with which he wrote the line.  The king’s world had inky blacks and virginal whites, and the line in the sand was a Royal Gorge, where saints and sinners were as obvious as they are in vintage movie Westerns.

But then some of the greatest truths of scripture can dazzle us with their simplicity.  When asked by a reporter to summarize what he’d spent a lifetime writing, Karl Barth, the brilliant 20^th century theologian said, simply, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

Blessedness is a by-product of a life deeply planted beside the water of life, this little psalm asserts.  But it’s just not that way for those who aren’t.  Period.

The message of Psalm 1, or so it seems to me, is that the truth is just that simple.  

Joy, Mike, Diet, and God

Defining God is tricky business. Think not? Read a few pages of human history. 

Few of our forbearers or our contemporaries, clothed as they may be in animal furs or beaver hats or Superman shirts, didn't or don't have an opinion on who God (or god) is or was or forever shalt be. Classic atheists exist, to be sure, but not in significant numbers. Most of us have dreams we align with a theology of some type--and a revelation, whether it's of the Bible or the Koran or some midnight moment alive with bewonderment--or some weighty hybrid thereof. 

So I think Vice President Mike Pence had reason to be aggrieved by what Joy Behar claimed was a joke. She apologized, claimed herself a Christian ("I give my money to a church"-- apparently a substantial part of her definition). For the record, what Behar called a joke was a bit more than a tease: she said that if Pence actually thinks he hears from God, he's crazy (or something to that effect).

Which had Fox News and every conservative on the face of the earth bare-fisting both Ms. Behar and The View, the show she's part of. 

What's more Behar's snarky quip came from the report of a woman generally thought somewhat loony herself, Omarosa Manigault, who has made it to the top so successfully that, like Oprah or The Donald, she is recognizable only by her first name. Omaraosa, who worked for Trump in some as yet unknown capacity, claimed that of the two national leaders--the Pres and the VP--the really crazy one was Mike Pence, because Pence believes that God (in this case, upper case) speaks to him. That's the opening salvo.

Talk about an old fight! Here's the question:  "What is revelation?" Talk among yourselves.

My roots are in a pious culture in which people speak of the Almighty (if I use almighty, I'm defining my theology; if I capitalize it, I'm even more specific), as if he (if I use the masculine pronoun, I'm revealing my theology too) were a good buddy. I know very well how that goes. I'm a part of that world. In a way, it's the language of Mike Pence and millions of evangelicals. 

The intimacy inherent in being able to say, for instance, that "God told me to write this book," is comforting, but, as Omarosa claims (and Behar reiterated), it can also be, well, scary. Think Harold Camping, for instance. Think David Koresh. Think Warren Jeffs. Think about a thousand men and women--Ralph Waldo Emerson, for pity sake--who claimed their own individually-wrapped revelations from God or god or whatever name you'd prefer.

I listened, last week, to a recitation I'd heard innumerable times before, but not often in the last decade or so. On You Tube, I heard Diet Eman tell a story, her story, of life in occupied Holland during World War II. 

One of her favorite episodes--and one of the most memorable descriptions--occurs when her resistance group gets together to talk about what they can do. They have an immediate and huge problem, one they hadn't anticipated when they began to relocate citified Jewish people throughout the Protestant countryside: they need ration cards. Food was scarce anyway, but if a family took in two or three Jewish people--they thought the war would be over in a few months--keeping people fed became a matter of life and death.

What they decided--those good Christians, following what they believed to be God's own will in rescuing Jews--was that they had to willfully break a commandment, "Thou shalt not steal." They had to break into government offices to get more ration cards to save more Jewish people, and Allied pilots, and others in hiding from the Nazis.

When she tells the tale, the words she uses are both interesting and defining. She says the whole group went down on their knees to ask God for help, not just in doing the robberies, but in outlining for them what their calling was to be in these horrific times.

Her story about the desperate need for ration cards starts at about 17:05. Her explanation of the answer to prayer is about 17:35. Listen to how she tells it.



And "it came to us," she says when she describes what happened. She says it twice: "and it came to us" that we had to do robberies. She could have said, "God told us to do robberies," but instead she stays somehow cautious and deliberately uses a passive construction--"it came to us," she says. That too is a definition. She doesn't say, "God spoke to us" or "God told us to do robberies." She's less sure about their actions than she is about God's love.

Joy Behar wasn't all wrong. She says be wary when people say that God told them to do this or that or that the other thing. There's good reason.

But neither was Vice President Pence wrong. Every believer thinks God speaks to him or her in some way or another.  I do too.

But I must admit I like Diet Eman's choice of words. I like the hesitant way she described what she and the resistance fighters heard when on their knees during those nights they planned robberies in the name of their God.

I think she knows God is always, always, bigger than we are.
 ______________________
First published here in February of 2018.

The Diet Eman Story--Learning to listen

Diet and Hein

What did I know? Next to nothing really--next to nothing about what I was actually doing. I'd spoken to her on a whim that night in the auditorium and somehow, some time later, she'd asked me to help her; but I'd never done anything quite like this before, never tried. 

No matter. I told myself that I taught writing, for pity sake, and I was a writer--a few books to my credit, in fact.  I didn't need to tell myself I could write her story--I knew I could. 

And I was prepared. I'd thought about how I was going to do this, even figured out a great first question. "Your fiance', Hein--I need to know about him," I'd say. "With a bunch of friends, would he be the one to tell the stories, or to laugh the hardest, or to tell them only when everyone else is through?"

Brilliant question, I told myself, a way of getting at character. What I'd planned to write was another Hiding Place, a kind of historical novel that dressed richly her incredible true story of death-defying resistance work beneath the Nazi radar. I could do this--I never really questioned that. I could do it.

It was early evening when I plugged in the tape recorder, sat on the couch across from her, took a deep breath, and unearthed that so-very-thoughtful first question. "Well, tell me about Hein," I said. "In a party or something, would he be the one to tell the stories or maybe the guy to tell the best one. . ." A brilliantly plotted first question, I thought. She had to be impressed.

She looked at me, smiled, then giggled, as if what I'd asked was maybe just a bit silly. "You would like maybe to read his letters?" she asked.

I had no idea. "You have his letters?" I said. She'd said nothing about that.

"And mine too--my letters from during the war." She hunched her shoulders as if I somehow should have known. 

"You have letters you wrote to each other during all that time?" I said.

"And diaries." 

"Your own war-time diary?"

"Yes, and his too."

I had absolutely no idea. We were maybe three minutes into the interview and every thoughtful preparation I had made became entirely useless. Actual war-time letters and diaries wouldn't work with The Hiding Place. I couldn't embellish such wonderful primary materials, just wouldn't have. This was going to have to be a wholly different kind of book than the one I'd planned.

She told me she'd just been reading all those letters and diaries over--in preparation for my coming; in preparation for our going over her story, for the first time in years she'd taken out all of those things, unlocked a box of remembrances she could never open or toss, memories of a time she simply kept far out of the way of her consciousness. 

Back when the war ended, she had slowly gathered all of those things, received some from farmers and contacts where she and Hein had stayed during the time they dared not meet, put everything--letters and diaries--into a metal box, locked it with a key, and then, in 1947, stuck it out of sight and, as far as possible, out of mind.

She had started over by recredentializing her life, studying nursing, then becoming a nurse. She couldn't live in the Netherlands after the war--too painful. So she lived and worked and then fell in love in Venezuela, in a hospital created for Shell Oil workers. She'd done her best to scrub her mind and soul of a life she needed badly to put behind her. She'd married--and divorced, had two children, both grown. 

Through all that time, that metal box of war-time memories had stayed locked in various dark corners of her life, intentionally--at least--forgotten. 

That metal box she'd opened for the first time in preparation for my coming. She'd spent all day and all night reliving the events she'd always tried to forget--the intensity of their mutual fears, the madness of the suffering at the camp at Vught, the amazing thrill of liberation, the heft of finally discovering Hein would never return.  

I knew the outline of Diet Eman's life. I'd heard her tell it. It had every last earmark of an unforgettable saga--a courageous, unforgettable love story against the backdrop of the most dread villains of the 20th century, a story of love and war and death. 

I was a kid, really. I knew very little of what was before me, of the trauma of her heart and soul in all that dark and dreary fog. 

It took just a few minutes for me to determine that the only way to help her write her story was to listen. That little tape recorder whirled for hours on end that week, but just a few minutes into that story I began to understand I was going to have to listen in a way I couldn't have imagined. I was going to have to listen with my heart.

Diet Eman, 1920-2019

Diet Eman, U. S. Holocaust Museum

I find it amazing that it never dawned on me that I couldn't do it. 

I'd been so taken with the overwhelming force of the story she'd just told that, afterward, when the two of us ended up close to each other in line for some goodies, I dropped a question I hadn't really thought about at all. It was 1991, and the scene was an evening plenary session at a Dordt College conference titled "Suffering and Survival."

We had wanted to create a forum in which our students would listen to their own parents and grandparents about the suffering and the survival they themselves had gone through during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during the Second World War. So many of our students had family members who'd worked in the Resistance, in the underground, hiding Jews and onderdykers (those who went into hiding, who "dived under," to avoid being arrested and sent to Germany to support the Nazi war effort). We wanted to create a place to tell so many stories that, for a variety of reasons, hadn't been fully told.

The Dutch government sent us the name of a member of the Dutch Resistance who lived in California, someone skilled at telling her story. When, without warning, she dropped out, I remembered someone who'd already spoken at the college, at the request of a local chicken farmer who'd met her when both of them were part of a relief team somewhere in Central America. This diminutive woman had told the whole work group her story at night. The local chicken farmer had been amazed--and moved--and brought her to Sioux Center to tell that story publicly.

I hadn't attended, but I'd read about her in the local paper. When our California Resistance fighter dropped out, I brought up her name--Diet Ehrlich back then--as a sub, a fill-in. Contacts were made, she had consented, and smooth as anything, that significant gap in our programming was covered.

Anyone who has ever heard Diet Eman Ehrlich speak knows the power her story generates. It is, first and foremost, a love story, even a love triangle: a girl, a guy, and a God who won't allow them to tolerate the innocent deaths of His people. The two of them, little more than kids, risk everything, even their own beloved future, for men and women and children, most of whom they didn't even know. They did it because, well, as Diet would say, "Who wouldn't have?"

The truth is, many wouldn't. Despite the fact that during the war the Dutch Resistance was significant and sizable, no occupied country in Europe suffered the loss of a greater percent of their Jewish community. Of 140,000 Dutch Jews in 1940, 100,000 never returned from the camps.

And who rescued the ones who did? The Dutch group most active in the Resistance was the communists. Just behind them as participants were those researchers call "orthodox Protestants," many of whom left the Netherlands after the war and started life anew in North America and elsewhere. Many of them had children and grandchildren who came to study at Dordt College.

Diet Eman was a fierce little woman, who told her story in a torrent of laughter and tears. Getting her to come and speak had been my idea, and through her entire story she'd kept the auditorium breathless, an incredible event. I may have been high on the sheer power of the whole thing, so there in line for finger food I asked her if she'd ever thought of getting someone to help her write her story.

She nodded, humbly. She said she'd been asked by six writers, but then she told me that four of the writers really weren't Christian believers. What's more, she said, she didn't want the kinds of things that happened to Corrie Ten Boom, after The Hiding Place, to happen to her. Even Corrie didn't, she said--you know, every word is like scripture itself to some people. 

When I left the B. J. Haan Auditorium that night, I was thinking about the conference's next-day activities, wondering how it all would go. I was still thrilled by the story, but I wasn't thinking of writing a book.

Six months later, she called me, late on a Sunday night. 

"You have there maybe a Psalter Hymnal?" she said after introducing herself. I've forgotten the number, but she told me to open it to page number-whatever and read the second verse, as I remember. The line directed parents to "tell their children." They'd sung that hymn that night in church, she said, and she considered it an act of God's own direction, telling her that she should, in fact, tell her story in a book, and was I interested?

Without hesitation, I said yes, even though I'd never done such a thing before. 

That book, Things We Couldn't Say, is still in print, a quarter century later.  You can read for yourself what readers think of her story by going to the book's site on Amazon. 

Yesterday, September 3, 2019, Diet Eman went to glory. She was just a few months shy of 100 years old. 

"Precious unto Jehovah is the deaths of his saints."

Democracy in America

The prairie grass was tall, very tall, as far as the eye could see back then, an immense, shaggy hide over the slowly rising hills of Sioux County, Iowa.  So tall and so wide and so thick that it was a hazard for those white folks who determined to settle the county.  The only way to be sure you knew where you were going, should you want to be neighborly, was to dig trenches between the domiciles, the sod houses.  

So people did--all of them, regardless of their station in life.  And thus, like deer and muskrats and the neighborly Yankton Sioux, pioneers out here went visiting their neighbors, most of which they didn't know.

Two young ladies determined to call on some old friends four or five miles of prairie grass away, ladies who had, well, some standing, you might say, in the old country. With a neighborly visit in mind, the ladies followed the furrows until ushered to another homestead they'd not visited before, where the good wife was just then brewing up pancakes, the stove standing outside the sod house. The good wife was so overjoyed to have visitors, she begged the ladies to stay for a plateful of hot cakes. To their credit, they did.

Such a grouping would not have happened in the old country, of course, but out here the vast wilderness of grass created new rules for neighborliness. When Alexis de Toqueville traveled the country in the 1830s, he liked what he saw, and assumed that the kind of equality he'd witnessed across the length and breadth of this frontier nation was an immense blessing. He titled his travels Democracy in America.

Meanwhile, back to the sod house.

After stirring up the pancake batter, the good wife turned around to take care of something or other, and the moment she did, the family dog, Caleb, a big, happy black lab, started snorting up the pancake mix--and loving it.  When she saw--and heard--what was going on, the good wife pulled that mixing spoon out of the batter and started punishing Caleb, whapping him time and time again with that mixing spoon until he ran off a bit. Then she smiled, grumbled a little about her beloved mutt, and let well enough alone, plopped that spoon back in the mix from whence it came, gave the batter a few more turns, and poured it out on the grate.

Now these young ladies, who, back in Holland, were from a bit higher class than their gracious wilderness hot cake queen, had noted all this whapping sourly, as can be imagined. 

No matter, when the good wife served up those fat pancakes, bedecked with sugar, it was simply impossible for the ladies to refuse them, even though they took not a bite without visions of that black dog's red tongue flopping from his snout.  


Later, when those two young ladies departed along the furrow, the highway, their stomachs were full, but they were still a bit queasy, having learned a lesson in neighborliness, equality, and the American way of life. 

So, I'm thinking right then and there may have been the first use of what became a famous line in a movie about Kansas. "Well, Caleb," one of the ladies might have said as the dog trailed along for a time, "we're not in Holland anymore." 

Beavers and the Straight and Narrow

For cutting wood he has four powerful incisor teeth, two in each jaw, deeply planted, and curved in form, the upper ones being something more than a semicircle, and the lower ones something less. Powerful jaw muscles enable him to do his work, while extraordinary salivary glands provide the means of digesting his peculiarly dry and hard food. The tail. . .like a powerful sculling oar, makes him a successful and expert navigator, while it enables him, with the further aid of his peculiarly shaped hind legs, to sit bold upright when engaged in the work of cutting down trees. 

Halfway through that paragraph, you likely began to recognize the subject, a plain old beaver, a rodent, a pest, a fat and furry engineer who, experts tell us, isn't really as smart as he'd like us to think. Beavers don't, for instance, determine which trees will be most advantageous to their dam-building. They don't, alone or in small groups, draw up plans for which cottonwoods to fell. 

They just start, willy-nilly, and when the trees fall toward the river in question, the beavers' perceived expert management happens only because creek-side cottonwoods tend to lean in toward the waterway. Do not ascribe to them greater intellectual heft than they have or deserve, beaver experts claim. Not one beaver gained admission to MIT. 

But, as the description demonstrates, these chubby fur-ball amphibians, an opossum on land but a catfish in the water, are created marvelously for their work, as Hiram Martin Chittendon, the man who penned that description should know, himself an engineer, and Captain of the Core of Engineers. 

If the writing itself feels aged, it is. It's from his 1902 two-volume study, The American Fur Trade of the Far West: A History of the Pioneer Trading Posts and Early Fur Companies of the Missouri Valley and the Rocky Mountains and of the Overland Commerce with Santa Fe. The title alone requires a writer. Did I mention there are two volumes? 

What I didn't quote is the opening line of the passage I quoted at length, which goes like this: "With that wonderful adaptation which nature shows in all her works, the anatomical makeup of the beaver is admirably suited to his mode of life." 

Now I've been trained since boyhood to stick a red flag on a page that says things like that because it's hard not to sense the good Mr. Chittendon isn't "good" at all, that he's clearly a godless evolutionist, given to deifying Darwin instead of the Creator of Heaven and Earth. There are, after all, only two paths pilgrims take through life, and but one of them is The Straight and Narrow, or so I was taught.

A good friend and one of his good friends recently published a small book with the combative title: Jesus Loves You and Evolution is True. In the broader community in which he and I both live, there's some heavyweight pushback, as you can imagine, creating a fight in a ring I don't care to enter. 

What I know is I stumbled over that paragraph above while reading through Crittendon's century-old, two-volume study of the fur trade, at least something of which, went on in my own backyard--literally. Right here on the river Lewis and Clark named after their fallen comrade, Sgt. Floyd chances are some French Canadian fur-trapper and a Native wife or two tramped through on the lookout for fat and furry creatures who were here long before any trappers or even any Yankton Sioux were blessed to be here--and are still in raising cane in residence today.

Was that fur ball created with those teeth, or did they develop through the centuries? 

The answer to that question affects my sense of history, nor my respect for the neighbors, nor my belief in God; so I'll just honor both and make that honoring "The Straight and Narrow."

Sunday Morning Meds--Thirsting and Panting

“As the deer pants for streams of water, 

so my soul pants for you, O God.” Psalm 42 

I used to bale hay. Just about every memory haying is in the barn, where, by noon, temperatures would soar in dusty, cob-webbed corners of ancient hay mows.

Today, years later, I start buying lemonade come June. Often, I chug it, even though I haven’t bucked a bale in half a century. I remember baling hay whenever I drink lemonade. I remember slipping wet quart jars out of insulated paper bags, screeching off lids, and chugging cold lemonade right through a dozen ice cubes.

Still, I’m guessing only a few of us know the extremity of the simile—a level of thirst that rages into full-throated panting. I’m certainly not among them. I’ll never forget chugging ice cold lemonade in a hay mow, but I was nowhere near dying, even though at twelve I may have thought so and probably acted like it.

We don’t know that David wrote Psalm 42, but some believe he did; what’s more, some think he wrote it when his son Absalom was threatening his father’s life. Whether or not that’s true, the heft of the psalm’s opening simile has little to do with hot days in the hay mow.

What David is saying—if indeed he is the author—is that he passionately thirsts after God because God seems nowhere to be found. That’s a different kind of thirst at issue.

On a particularly dark day for us, we took a walk around town. When we passed some houses of people we knew, I couldn’t help but recount the troubles each of those families were going through too. Maybe it was my own problems that made me calculate tribulations—I don’t know. But I did, sadly. I racked up other people’s problems as if to take the edge off mine perhaps.

I’d just read a little from Calvin, specifically a line in Book I of the Institutes: “Without certainty of God’s providence life would be unbearable.”

I’m sure he’s right; certainty is one fine blessing; but I’m not sure every last believer gets the gift of certainty. That night, I was a lot less confident than Calvin.

Psalm 42, long a favorite of many, is all about chugging certainty even in desperation, about knowing for absolute sure that God is there, even when we’re torn apart and sure as heck he’s not. Psalm 42 is the gut-wrenching plea of a man who finds himself without.

That thirst is for nothing with ice cubes, for something a whole lot more substantial than lemonade. The thirst is for living water to refresh the parched soul of someone wandering in a desert where there’s nothing more before him than a horizon of hot sand.

I dare say that lots of folks know that thirst, even David the King, David the poet, David the man closest to God’s own heart. Even he knew what it meant to pant.

It’s always nice to remember we aren’t alone, isn’t it? It seems to me just one blessing of this wonderful line of scripture—and all of Psalm 42--is knowing even David got that thirsty.

In late August, pics and a poem

The pictures are from nine years ago, this time of year, a windy morning somewhere east of Canton, SD, mostly. When, about then, I posted them here, a good friend sent me a Mary Oliver poem which, he said, felt like the pictures. I'm humbled by the association, but proud enough to post the shots--and the poem--once more.

The Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflower, there the hummingbird-
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast, there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.



Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young and still not half perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,



which is standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,



which is gratitude to be given a mind and a heart
and these body clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Mary Oliver

Big Blue Stem

You got to hunt. It's tucked away a ways. It's been there for nigh unto forty years, but it's there, a big square historical marker a mile or so from land Ole Rolvaag, the novelist, used to work when he was a kid out here on wide open prairie. It's not far from Elk Point, in Union County, South Dakota, on 476th Avenue, ¼ mile north of Groethe Rd., on the right when traveling north. Got that?

Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth tells our story better than anyone, and the prairie story starts with sound, of all things, a landscape of sound. Listen:

It was late afternoon. A small caravan was pushing its way through the tall grass. The track that it left behind was like the wake of a boat--except that instead of widening out astern it closed in again. 

"Tish-ah!" said the grass. . . . "Tish-ah, tish-ah!" . . . .Never had it said anything else--never would it say anything else. It bent resiliently under the trampling feet; it did not break, but it complained aloud every time--for nothing like this had ever happened to it before. . . ."tish-ah, tish-ah! it cried, and rose up in surprise to look at this rough, hard thing that had crushed it to the ground so rudely, and then moved on.

Today, Rolvaag's opening scene needs a footnote. That swishing sound is the sound of tall grass--right up to a horse's withers, tall grass that once, in a breeze, made the world all around us wave like an ocean. What kind of grass, you ask? 

Big Blue Stem. Big Blue Stem. Used to be, there were far more of them than there are of us. Tall and spindly, it grew up every summer from a thick bundle of shorter stuff at its base, like a grass skirt, a thicket that a host of critters thought of as home. Spindly and thin up top, Big Blue Stem, the tallest of our native grasses, gets tossed around so mightily by gusty winds that not even a goldfinch can hold on. But it doesn't break, it just waves, waves hard, waves beautifully, waves like an inland sea.

You can still find it dancing here and there in restored prairie or in forgotten corners of the country too steep or crooked to take a plow. You can pick up a bunch from a garden shop and put it in your backyard. Don't worry--it'll take. It does most anywhere. It's not picky. In fact, people who know such things claim it can still get aggressive if you let it alone somewhere, if you let it be. But it doesn't make for a great pasture because people say cattle love it too darn much--some ranchers call it "ice cream for cows." Way back when, it suited our buffalo just fine, but they stopped to graze only every other year or so. Big Blue won't stand up to constant grazing.

Some call Big Blue "turkey foot" for the three-pronged head it grows like a little joke late summer. It's especially beautiful this time of year--late summer to fall--when it takes on its own royal robe: those long stems turn purple, and amber once the snow flies. But I'll admit it--beauty in native prairie is an acquired taste. It can be a real flower shop, but it'll never be a greenhouse. There are no hybrids, just a colorful bunch of old friends.

Wouldn't hurt us to remember that we'll be indebted to Big Blue Stem for a long, long time because it once stood all around and grew remarkable roots so thick and deep that it created our own rich prairie sod.

Here's the poet William Cullen Bryant the big blue stem prairie our world once was:

As o’er the verdant waste I guide my steed,
Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides
The hollow beating of his footsteps seems
A sacrilegious sound. 

Tish-ah.

Still not convinced? How about Walt Whitman, who wanted like nothing else to be "America's poet." Listen to him from "Specimen Days":

As to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling), while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape.”

Let me remind you that right here Walt Whitman is talking about home. Ours. 

Remembering Mother Teresa--Bewonderment

[Yesterday was Mother's Teresa's birthday. One early morning, maybe ten years ago, I picked up her biography from a retreat bookstore and discovered a religious life so moving that the morning I picked up the book I determined to work my way through that life devotionally. I found it remarkable how distanced from my own religious experience her life drew her, but more often than not I was simply awed, as millions were. In honor of her birthday, I'm reposting one of those meditations.]

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens;

let your glory be over all the earth. Psalm 57:11 

The basic story line by which I’ve always seen the Christian life is the outline of a narrative that rises from the handbook of doctrine with which I was reared. That outline goes like this: “sin, salvation, service.”

The story line begins with sin – our knowledge of it, as it exists within us. Calvin starts even a bit earlier, with the heavens, with our sense of God as manifest in his world: what we see and experience. Because humans can’t help but see God’s marvelous work in the heavens and the earth around us, we come to know that there is a God. With that knowledge, we feel our own limitations – that we aren’t God. And there begins our knowledge of human limits, our knowledge, finally, of sin.

That conviction draws us closer to God because we need a Savior. Sin precedes salvation, or so the story goes, through the second act.

Once we know that he loves us, in spite of our sin, he loves us, our hearts fill, our souls rejoice; we can’t help but celebrate our salvation. That celebration leads us into gratitude and service, into doing what we can to be his agents of love in the world he loves so greatly.

Sin, salvation, service – three acts of a drama that is the plot of all of our lives.

Mother Theresa’s take on a very similar tale in three different acts, was created, I suppose, by her experiences in the ghettos of Calcutta. We begin with repulsion, she says –: what we see, she says – brokenness, sadness – offends, prompts us to look away.

But we really can’t or shouldn’t or won’t; we have to look misery in its starving face, and when we do, we move from repulsion to compassion – away from rejection and toward loving acceptance. End Act II.

The final act is what she called “bewonderment,” which is sheer wonder plus a-grade admiration. Our compassion leads us to bewonderment. 

“Bewonderment” is likely one of those words few of us use but most all of us understand. Still, like reverence, it’s hard to come by in a world where our sorest needs are never more than a price tag away.

I’ll admit that bewonderment is hard to come by for me, perhaps because it isn’t so clearly one of the chapters in the story I was told as a boy, the story which that is still deeply embedded in my soul. “Service” is the end of the Christian life – or always has been – for me, not “bewonderment.”

I’m more than a little envious of David’s praise in Psalm 57. What he says to God in prayer is something I rarely tell him. I don’t think I’ve ever asked God not to hide his little light under a bushel, to display his radiant grace from pole-to-pole in my life and yours. I’m forever asking for favors, some big, some not, but am only rarely into adoration, in part, I suppose, because I’m so rarely in awe.

But bewonderment, awe, is something I’m learning, even this morning, and for that I’m thankful – for the book of songs, for David, and for the God David knew so intimately that he could speak the way he does in Psalm 57. It’s difficult for some of us to be intimate with God – to be so close to a being so great and grand and seemingly out of reach. But bewonderment is something I think we can learn, all of us, even an old man. 

Amazing things have happened to Josh Harris

Josh Harris has cameo role in my last novel, Looking for Dawn, when a dad named Scotty picks up a book his daughter is reading only to discover it's all about sex and dating--specifically, how not doing sex and dating is the Jesus way. Scotty reads just enough to be shocked, so different is the way of Jesus outlined in the book from the way Scotty himself grew up. I didn't name Josh Harris or the book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, because it seemed to me he wasn't the only advocate of this 21st version of spiritual celibacy. 

Josh Harris, a "purity expert" some call him, argued that dating is harmful since it introduces a kid--boy or girl--to a way of life that made multiple partners an accepted thing. In his opinion (he was just a kid himself when he wrote it), true love not only waits, it doesn't even date. He was an advocate of what he called "courtship," an elaborate ritual that includes parental participation.

Harris, himself the son of a celebrated preacher, soon had his own mega-church. Maybe he gave his wealth away--I don't know; but when books like his fly off the shelf, they earn significant money. With three kids and a pretty wife, he'd reached the American Evangelical Dream. He was barely thirty years old.

Then, a couple of years back, he pulled the plug on just about everything he'd once advocated, said he no longer bought the goods he'd sold to the evangelical public. He resigned his pulpit and went to seminary, he said, to understand more about the historic Christian faith.

Those who bought his purity culture were leaderless. Must have been painful. 

Now, just a month ago or so, as if to put the error of his ways into upper case, he announced that he and his wife had split, amicably, he said. They were seeking a divorce because, as most people say, they found themselves pursuing different courses or whatever.

Not only that, he went farther in an Instagram message: "The information that was left out of our announcement is that I have undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus," Harris wrote. "By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian," he added, "I am not a Christian."

What must have disillusioned, even angered conservative evangelicals even more is what he later added: that he regretted, even asked forgiveness of the LGBTQ community for believing and saying what he did as one of the fair-haired boys of the cultural conservative evangelical community. 

Christians are just as susceptible to fads as anyone, maybe more so. Faith, after all, is all about being generous, or should be. Christians who are skeptical--think Thomas the disciple--generally pay a price for questioning things. Harris was, for sure, a fad for a time. 

Here's another. I can't help but think of a really faddish way evangelicals have of talking about people, often their own children. You must have heard it. It goes like this: "I can't wait to see what amazing things God has planned for you." It's very sweet and encouraging, very "christian."

In the case of Josh Harris, whose parents might well have blessed him with the same words, is what has happened to him in the last few years "amazing"? Is his acceptance of gay marriage part of God's plan for his life, or was he on it only when he opened the word in that mega-church? 

"By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian," Josh Harris says, "I am not a Christian." That sentence does not mean God doesn't love him or he doesn't worship God. What it says is that he's discovered--right or wrong--that his old definitions no longer hold up for him. God is somehow bigger.

I don't share evangelical fear or sadness about what's happened to the faith of Josh Harris. He's forty years old now, not 23. Does anyone really doubt that where he is today will be where he is in faith when he's sixty? I don't. God doesn't change, but we certainly do.

A sovereign God does amazing things, but "amazing" can be a little slippery. I

suspect that God is not finished with Josh Harris yet. Nor he is through with you or me or anyone.

Sunday Morning Meds--Cedars of Lebanon

“The trees of the LORD are well watered, 

the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.” Psalm 104:16

Up and down the broad shoulders of the Missouri River, thousands of dead cedars lie akimbo, puffs of bronze against the prairie grasses. Ranchers fight a losing battle with the cedars because they grow like weeds in the hills. Eventually, if someone weren’t there to cut them down, they’d turn the valley into mighty forest.  A forested Missouri River neighborhood might be beautiful—and remarkable amid miles of grassland; but ranchers are cattlemen, not lumberjacks.

The cedars of Lebanon, I’m told, face a wholly different problem.  Those famed broad forests simply are no more, or are but a shadow of their former selves. They’re gone.

And who is to blame?  Not us, thankfully—well, not us if we define ourselves by time and place.  But if we define us by species, denuding the forested hills of Lebanon began thousands of years ago, when more populated areas of the desert Middle East needed the lumber.

When their supplies went scarce, wars erupted. Deprivation creates conflict—who’s going to get what all of us want? Then, later, the cedars of Lebanon became the building materials of the great Phoenician ships. Supplies waned. 

While the cedars of Lebanon may have been well watered in the Psalmist’s day, today they are no more. They’re the stuff of legends because we did ‘em in.  God may have planted them, but human enterprise felled them.  It’s just that simple.

So why not let the cedars of the Missouri River grow into brand new forests?  Human enterprise uproots them; why not just let them grow back?

There really never was a forest of cedars along the Missouri because they were continuously wiped out by raging prairie fires. A forest of river valley cedars would be a new thing.   

I don’t claim to understand a great deal about “the balance of nature” or the scientific field of ecology.  But you don’t need a degree in ecology to know that our interaction with the forces of nature changes the landscapes around us. I happen to live in in the county that leads the entire state in “altered” acres; here and there, on some forgotten hillside there may be a corner of actual native prairie. What’s more, the state of Iowa leads the nation is altered land. We have less wilderness here than anywhere in these United States. In Sioux County, Iowa, change is evident in every direction.

Right now, if you want to see the blessed cedars of Lebanon, the trees that thrill the poet, you can’t. . .they’re gone. 

Psalm 104 is a pageant of God’s glory. The psalmist is awed by a landscape that blossoms. That, today, the “cedars of Lebanon” inspire no music, no poetry, and no awe suggests is sort of sad; I’d like to see what made the psalmist sing.

Psalm 104:16 is its own reminder to care about our world.