"There is a season"

“. . .that brings forth fruit in its season. . .” Psalm 1:3

If I hear nothing more than a phrase from Ecclesiastes 3 (“For everything there is a season. . .”), my mind spins an old record by The Byrds, a late ‘60s rock group, and I hear those famous verses set to the music of the a Pete Seeger tune titled “Turn, Turn, Turn.”

Correction. Maybe I should say, my heart plays that tune because the energy that spins that vinyl originates deeper in my psyche than my mind. My heart remembers; my heart weds “Turn, Turn, Turn” to flower children and the anti-war movement. In a second, I feel a joyful, lilting nostalgia—my music, my history, my past. Peace signs, bell-bottoms, and flower power bring back the whole era. I feel free at last, thank God a’mighty.

That particular song continues to thrill me, I think, because in the tightly Christian world of my own teenage years, “Turn, Turn, Turn” was the closest thing I knew to a hymn from the music of my world. It used a biblical text after all, and therefore reminded the rebel I was that the Bible itself says there’s a time for war and a time for peace.

And maybe this is a time for peace, I told my parents back then, who were hawks. You’re wrong about rock music, wrong about Nixon, and wrong about Vietnam.

That’s where the conversation ended, time and time again, and I went up to my room, turned up the volume, and played that song once more.

It really is nuts. I get goosebumps from “Turn, Turn, Turn.”

But I’m older now, and I understand there’s more to that series of verses in Ecclesiastes than some anti-war rant. That memorable chapter isn’t just hippie doctrine, the Bible’s own manifesto that everything is cool—how did that other song go?—"everything is beautiful in its own way."
  Ecclesiastes is counter-cultural, but it’s not just for bell-bottoms.

This single clause from Psalm 1:3 is a reminder that, sure, everything is legit, but only within its time. “There is a season,” after all, just as there is not a season. There’s good timing and there’s bad timing.

That man or woman who is blessed, the poet/king says here, will—and you can count on this—bring forth fruit in his season—which is to say, at the right time, when it’s right for him or her to bear exactly the kind of fruit he or she should. I don’t think I was ever arguing for propriety back then, more like “fruit-basket-upset.”

Order is somehow blessed, it seems, if we believe Ecclesiastes 3 and Psalm 1. Chaos is anathema; even though when I say that, in the context of the late ‘60s, I sound as schoolmarm-ish as my parents did to me. It’s worth noting that the Byrds’ only other hit was “Eight Miles High,” a celebration of hallucinogenic drug use.

But then again, maybe what the Bible says about propriety here resonates a bit more harmonically in the mind of a man who is as old as I am, someone who, several years ago already, began to really like staying home at night. Maybe blessedness-as-order is as comfortable as bedroom slippers to a man who looks forward to the long breath one blessedly takes when those absolutely darling grandchildren finally go home.

For everything, after all, there is a season. Like fruit that way, I guess.

But I got it here somewhere yet—that old album. I really ought to spin it again. It’s a joy. And there’s a time for that too.

Stow Neck Road

Okay, to find the place is something else altogether. You get off a plane at the Philly airport and take I-95 south to the Commodore Barry Bridge, cross it, then head south again on I-295 to Hook Road. You take Hook to Route 49, maybe ten miles or so to Salem. You're in South Jersey now, in the Delaware River tidal basin. Ponds and swamps and creeds and puddles abound. Street signs warn of goose crossings.

That's how I started the story. It was a trip just to find their place, an old, old square, brick home, old as any family home I'd ever been in. It stood out in the country, no one else around anywhere close. "To get here," Jana Carman had said, "you just go to the end of the world and turn left."

Sage advice. John was a Baptist preacher; Jana, a teacher. Nice, nice people. I'd met her at some writing conference in upstate New York, where she'd mentioned somehow--or in some correspondence later--that she and her husband were regular listeners to the Back to God Hour. I was doing a book for that radio ministry, stories of people who were friends of the broadcast. 

The place was a dream, something right out of Washington Irving. But their story is all pretty much gone except for something of no importance at all to the visit. 

There was this phone call. The phone was in the kitchen, a room away. John left the living room and picked it up. I kept talking with Jana, but I couldn't help overhearing John because the pace of his responses made clear he was carrying a load just staying on line. His preacherly tone was thoughtful, but the conversation was tedious.

He told Jana when the conversation finally ended who it was, but I think she already knew. Wasn't the first. "Now what?" Jana said.

The woman on the other end told her pastor they were coming for her again, someone from the government, a gang of criminals out to get her. It was all pretty extreme paranoia--little green men or something. They were after her or her money or something, and he was her pastor, and he had to be nice, but it was a burden. 

"But, you know," they said, "something so interesting happened a while back." The caller too had been a teacher, so they decided to get her into a Sunday School class via some pretext, put her up in front of kids, the place she'd been for years--"a good teacher too," they told me. It was a marvel of a story. When they got her up in front of all those kids, something in her reverted to what she'd been. All of sudden, the paranoia was gone, the anxiety had disappeared. She was what she'd always been. She did a great job.

Something about the place, they'd figured, something about being up in front of kids--at that moment, something in her was reborn for that moment. They shook their heads. 

I don't remember much about John and Jana's story, the one I wrote. I remember the house, a great place, a museum piece; and I've never forgotten the woman I never met, the woman on the other end of the phone.

It's been ten years now since I was in a classroom, the place I spent forty years of my life. But last week I was asked to come in and talk about writing a bit, help kids formulate how they were going to tackle some essay assignment the teacher had given.

I told myself before I left that I was 74 years old now, not 64 or 46 or 35, and--goodness knows!--I wasn't 22 like the day I stepped into my own first classroom. I told myself I should be quieter than I used to be, more grandfatherly, less stand-up comedian. I'm not that quick anyway. I told myself to listen to their silence, to bear with it, not try to fill it with endless stories, not try to entertain, not fall back into the old schtick. 

But time and place did a job on me, and the old rhetoric took over, the machine-gun rhetoric: fill the air with stories. I was who I'd always been. I couldn't help myself, and it made me tired and ornery. I stepped into a pair rhetorical slippers I honestly didn't want to wear. 

Once upon a time in a wonderfully ancient colonial brick home on Stone Neck Road, a thousand miles away, a woman I never saw left an pattern on my psyche that never that time itself never wore away, a warning. 

The sun is coming up again right now. The sky is clear. It's ten degrees of cold out there, wind chill -4. Soon enough, I'm sure, things will warm. Yesterday, I'm almost sure I heard a robin. I want you to know there are no little green men coming to get me or my wife. I don't think my wife worries about her aging husband going bonzo. I hope not.

But on Monday of this week, part of me became a ghost from an old farmhouse on Stow Neck Road in South Jersey, a place at the end of the world, then turn left. I couldn't help but wish that weren't so. I couldn't help but be--or try to be--who I was. 

Morning Thanks--for good stories in the cold

 

More than a few years ago now, we attended the funeral of an aunt on a day that was as cold as any that winter, so cold the graveside service was not held. The crowd of folks attending the funeral at the church was predominantly elderly, so the funeral director, the preacher, the children (I'm not sure who makes a decision like that) decided simply to forgo the litany over the grave.

Most of the funeral's attendees drove out to the cemetery anyway, led traditionally by the hearse, and the pallbearers nearly froze carrying the casket to the gravesite. The rest of us stayed in the phlanx of cars that had cracked along slowly on snowy streets all the way out to the west edge of town. 

A sister of the deceased decided she simply wouldn't sit there in a warm car, so she walked out to the casket and took a flower from a bouquet that must have been rapidly wilting in the sub-zero temperatures, an undertaking that was accomplished only with the help of one of her children. She took a flower from the bundle, stood there for one treasured moment, then was kindly helped back to her car. She simply had to say goodbye.

That picture was one of the most precious I saw during all 0f that year, or even the last decade, a memory that comes back to me unbidden whenever wind-chilled temperatures flatten out at the bottom of the thermometer. Even the deathly cold wouldn't stop that her from gathering a flower, from saying goodbye to her sister. 

Fifteen years ago that happened, but any winter day at the cemetery reminds me of that woman's loving pilgrimage.

It's March 10, that time in the calendar year when it's greatly human of us to imagine warm temps on sunny days that promise the end of winter. But invariably it happens--winter won't go down without a tussle. Down here in the basement, the furnace is running heavily this morning, reminding me that we're not done paying to heat the place. It hasn't felt like an awful winter, but our heating bills suggest otherwise. 

Everything we do, every last event, every passing day and night, is colored right now by the abject suffering in the Ukraine and the impossibilities that insanity has carried into our lives. Even a junkie like me has trouble turning on the news. It's all so cold, so dark. In eastern Europe it's winter too.

There's no snow outside my windows, but the cold is persistent enough to remind me, this morning, of a grief-stricken sister who braved frigid temps one morning and walked out through the cold in a small town cemetery, just to be sure that she honored the memory of a sister she greatly loved. 

She took a flower, stood for a moment, and was helped back to her car.

On cold days especially, I can't help but give thanks for the good and blessed stories.

"By heresies oppressed"

It's hard to know whether or not to take it seriously, because the whole business is serious--and isn't. No one believes the priest's foul-up matters for eternity, but it was broad enough in theological scope to lead to his resignation from the parish.

You heard the story? A priest in Phoenix hung up his robes for a mistake he made in the administration of baptism in his church. It seems--my word! who researches such things?--he misspoke with significant theological implications. When he baptized babies, he'd say "We baptize you" and not "I baptize you."

What!--you say? Listen.

The fundamental error was that in saying "we baptize you" he was deferring the power that was his as a holy priest "in the line of Melchizedek," or God's own ordained hands and fingers. He was, in other words, neglecting or rejecting or simply not asserting an absolutely fundamental Roman Catholic doctrine, in a sacrament priests can practice. Only they represent the Almighty. 

However, Fr. Andres Arango, his superiors maintained, "intended no harm," nor had he dastardly determined to sabotage the sacrament for the babies he'd baptized. He'd just used the wrong pronoun. 

So he resigned. 

Whoa. 

It's kind of a mess, but what it does is help us all to think theologically by asking questions very few ask, questions like "what is baptism"? Is it just some arid ritual the church created, something we video, like a kid's first swing in T-Ball? Was it so bad for Arango to say "we"? Isn't that, in great part, true? "We" baptize our children. Those who don't believe in Christ don't, right? We do. Therefore, we wasn't, like, all wrong.

And besides, it seems decidedly Roman Catholic to say "I," if the meaning is that the priest alone stands "in the order of Melchizedek." Since the Reformation, those of us on who side with the Protestants have maintained what we call "the priesthood of all believers." Where people construct a level theological playing field, "we" would, in fact, be right. "We're doing it"--all of us--in God's name, right?

But Fr. Arango resigned. That was a little extreme. Besides, his confessing what he did created an opportunity for the rest of us, for once, to think seriously about a question that's thoroughly theological. No masks, no needles--so nobody really cares what Donald Trump thinks. You can't "nationalize" the question, and, as far as I know, no one in Phoenix is running for town council on a Arango platform. It's refreshing actually, just one of those how-many-angels-can-dance-on-a-needle questions. 

Nor is it a hair-on-fire thing like gay marriage. In fact, you can't help but enjoy the whole discussion because it's not burning anything down. Nobody's fighting. Nobody's starting new denominations. Nobody's calling themselves or others "the liberal [or ultra conservative] Arangoes." Nobody's accusing anybody else of not reading the Bible. Nobody villainizes the other side.

It's substantial and even nice, a question about the nature of sacrament, the nature of baptism--and who we are in the process. 

So by all means talk amongst yourselves. Just don't mention LBGTQ and whatever other letters people stack on that unpronounceable construction. Just let the question be what it is. No one gets mad. 

Isn't that wonderful? We really ought to make Father Arango a saint.

The Bulge - ii

He was a rookie, and he was not alone. Allied efforts throughout Italy had baked the dangers of combat into a few of those who followed the bloody landing on Normandy's beaches, but Alvin Gray Wolf* was wholly untested when the First Army followed up the beachhead and headed inland from coastal France. 

He had no idea at the time, but the German Wehrmacht had suffered dreadful losses during the Allied invasion on June 6, and in Russia, on an immense front where thousands died. Hitler was micro-managing the war effort, in part because he'd lost trust in many of his generals after the ill-fated assassination attempt. The whole Western front appeared undermanned, so he simply took some of his decimated Eastern front companies out of Russia and realigned them along the coast in France to strengthen his defenses. 

By the time Alvin's company was moved into position, he found himself in an area unlike anything he'd ever seen on the reservation. Mile after mile of the French countryside's open fields were knitted by steep and heavy lines of brush and trees that stood, one after another, like successive walls. Fighting with so much cover was, for him at least, impossible to imagine.

He was told the French called it bocage, but the brass called those steep barriers "hedgerows." They lay over the French fields that lay between the front and the road to Germany. Such oddly fragmented topography would make fighting difficult--that was clear to all of them. The battle for St. Lo, not far at all from the Utah beach, became the site of a fight that rivaled June 6 in ferocity. 

And he was a rookie. But he told himself, in confidence, that he was warrior, a soldier, an infantryman, a Lakota. Still, like so many others of the First Army, he hadn't looked down the barrel of enemy artillery or faced Panzer tanks. He was a kid, just 19, fearful, sure, but he was a warrior, ready for battle he hadn't yet tasted. 

General Bradley's mission was to work the army's painful way through the hedgerows to St. Lo, a French village directly in harm's way, break down German defenses all around, create a means by which to establish power and presence sufficient to provide a base for advances that would take the Allies all the way to Berlin, the enemy's heart, and thereby end a war that had already killed thousands of American boys, and millions throughout eastern and western Europe.

It was that simple.

When he woke up he was in bed, a pillow behind his head. It took him some time to recognize that his legs were gone, that what there was protruding from the lines beneath the lay of his blankets stopped at abruptly his knees. An hour maybe it took before his memory offered him fleeting images, before he had memory of a kid from a ranch in Wyoming, a white kid, his buddy. They'd been together, dug into a row of trees, waiting for a signal to advance, when that tank--when they heard it, they'd simply assumed it one of theirs--when that tank came up over a hedgerow as if it had been hunting the two of them only and alone. 

He didn't even remember the sound or see the fire from the barrell. What came to him, slowly as if his eyes required focusing, was that Wyoming kid--they were buddies really--dead, is body simply destroyed beside him like nothing he'd ever seen. And then he remembered that his own legs were gone. He remembered having to tell himself that he wasn't dead, that he was alive and that his life blood was leaving him. Almost instinctively, he stanched the bleeding with the dirt thrown up from their digging and the blast the two of them had taken. He remembered he felt no pain and wondered if he was dying, if he was already in passage to the spirit world.

To say he remembered all of that is to only poorly describe the fragmentary images passing into and through his consciousness. None of what he remembered came in anything but random order. What he knew, what slowly registered in his mind and memory, was that he was still alive, he was in a tent, a hospital, and there were nurses, that he wasn't alone either, but there were other guys, many others. 

And what he knew for sure was that he had no legs. There'd been a tank coming up and over the hedgerows and his friend wasn't here, wasn't even there anymore. He knew that his friend was dead.

"Well," the nurse said, "it's so nice to have you with us." She sat on the bed beside him, adjusted the pillow behind his head. "We knew it would just be a matter of time. You'd lost a lot of blood, but the surgeon said he knew you'd make it."

He didn't know her. She was talking to him with a familiarity that made him uncomfortable. 

"I can get you something to eat," she said. "I don't know if you're hungry or if you feel like eating, but I can get you something to eat."

By instinct and tradition, he didn't look at her either. He didn't speak, and he didn't look at her. He heard every word, felt her hand on his shoulder, behind his head, but he didn't speak. 

"It's okay," she said. "I'll be around. When you need me, I'll be here--someone will." Then she stood--he watched her from below her waist. "I'll be back. We'll get you strong again, strong enough to get you out of here because you're going home, you know," she said. And then, "Where's home anyway?"

He kept silent. He wouldn't speak, not because he was angry or embarrassed or without words. He kept silent because it was his way.

___________________ 

I'm weaving together an essay/story here that will offer me the opportunity to share with readers the growing understanding of significant historical events that you can't help feel when you read and hear personal stories about those events. I'm going to try to do that weaving here on the blog. 

The first section appeared about a week ago, a nurse, a Lakota woman from South Dakota, who told me her story in great detail. The second character, above, is also Lakota, whose family knows very little about his army experience.

*I've changed his name. 

Complexity isn't simple

Love this story from the life of the Reverend John Todd, whose inelegant house on the square in Tabor, Iowa, became a full-fledged armory during the bloody years Kansas was the first battleground of the Civil War just a few years away.

In the 1850s, slavery was under attack, and Rev. John Todd was a soldier in God’s army. Truth is, he got into trouble before there even was a Tabor. A discussion about slavery aboard the steamer he came up on became heated. Once other passengers detected an abolitionist, they wanted his scalp. "Shoot him," someone yelled. "Kill him." One idiot told him if it was his choice, he’d straight-up trade the pastor for a mongrel dog and shoot the dog. Reverend Todd says he learned later that man was "a minister of the gospel from Missouri."

I don't know the facts about the good Reverend Todd particularly, but I'm going to bet that his being an abolitionist in those difficult days, while blessedly redemptive when perused from a distance of a century and a half, did not necessarily mean that he believed in racial equality, allowing African-Americans--slaves, in most people's minds--to vote. Most abolitionists, no matter how hard and violent their opposition to slavery was, did not believe that Black Americans should enjoy the rights and privileges given to Euro-Americans.

John Brown's ill-fated heroics at Harper's Ferry were the manifestation of a mind uniquely honed on the issue. John Brown truly and fully believed that all those slaves he'd liberate should move into American society as full-fledged citizenry. The violent takeover he believed would incite a slave revolution wasn't the only earmark of his uniqueness.

That John Brown believed Blacks to be as "human" as anyone else in America was a view very few shared in 1855, including the Great Emancipator himself, President Abraham Lincoln, who had his doubts on the issue until he saw the way freed slaves went to war in the battles they entered. Lincoln's views changed drastically with his experience of their commitments in "the war to free the slaves."

Some, even most, of the missionaries who felt called to minister to Native tribes across the continent, located their mission in the same impulse as their deep and abiding belief that slavery was evil. Lots of early missionaries were thorough-going abolitionists, even though their methodology and their purposes among the Indigenous have, since that time, been widely condemned--robbing Native people of their language and culture in an effort to turn them into lily-white American farmers.

"What is the right approach to historical contradiction?" is a question that Michael Walzer asks in a recent edition of Persuasion magazine. "If American history can no longer be a narrative of uninterrupted virtue, neither is it an entirely sordid tale," he says. "We have to embrace its complexity."

The trouble is, complexity isn't simple. Wouldn't it be nice if it were? Wouldn't it be nice if we could simply lasso something like Critical Race Theory--whatever that is--and keep it out of the corral, if we could make a law that made sure nobody ever felt bad about their race, their color, or their history? Wouldn't it be nice if education was merely a matter of learning a few principles of the cause of freedom, adoring your t-shirt with what you could of the American gospel, and tossing the mortar board and grabbing a diploma.

Embracing complexity means thinking, and thinking isn't going to be happen if the material is simple. Teaching kids to read Dick and Jane is a good thing, but not when kids aren't kids.

Which is why so much of what passes for parents' rights these days is flat-out stupid. It's not wrong for any parent to think that he or she should have a say in how their children are educated, but when those parents propose to make what happens in a classroom simple or one-dimensional, just a matter of pushing kids to understand the platitudes they believe they live by, then something idiotic is happening, and that's exactly what's happening all around us today.

Today--this morning--we're dealing with a humanitarian tragedy of unimagined proportions. Millions of Ukrainians are in danger and moving to nearby countries simply to be out of the way of a madman's lackluster army, who happened to be armed with weapons of danger to the entire planet. We've already crippled Russia's economy, but we seem powerless to stop the bleeding. Why? Because the issues are complex.

Don't trust anyone who says they are not. They are, as they always are.

Understanding complexity doesn't mean embracing stasis, simply doing nothing. What's happening in the Ukraine demands action-- but acknowledging what and how much are the tough questions.

The Meek

“But the meek will inherit the land 

and enjoy great peace.” Psalm 37:11

Christian piety is, by the standards of traditional orthodoxy, never good enough. “Give all that you have to the poor and follow me,” Jesus told a rich young CEO. The guy, Harvard-trained, returned to his laptop.

The injunction to righteousness can be crippling because the heart-felt desire to do good is, in plain fact, never good enough anyway, as Luther himself observed, knees bloodied. We’re saved by grace, not works, and the combined good deeds of all the Boy Scouts on the planet won’t make a difference. Thus saith the good news.

I find lines like the 11th verse of Psalm 37 disconcerting, declarations of the glories of a piety that’s unattainable. Maybe it’s all the fault of my Aunt Meek.

Physically, she was, like all the Schaaps, small and square. Like most of my father’s brothers and sisters, she had an adolescent giggle, a little warble that eventually rose into an off-key falsetto so that sitting in a room of Schaaps was like being surrounded by seagulls. Her name was Marie, but everyone called her “Meek.” As a child I knew her before the biblical word meek, so I thought of her as it—“blessed are the meek.”.

My father’s family were all good, good people. A cousin of mine told me that a marriage counselor once told her the problems she felt in her marriage was caused by having too good of a father—my uncle. What a blessing.

Aunt Meek’s children—and they are themselves retired today—can likely recount moments when she fumed or flashed hot bolts of anger. She could not have been always as soft and gentle as I knew her. But 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 had to be among the kindest of human souls. An elementary school teacher—that makes sense too, doesn’t it?

Not long ago, frustrated by the honchos at work, I stood up in a faculty meeting and accused the brass of lack of leadership. Some lauded the speech; others disliked it a ton. But what’s clear to me is that I wasn’t acting like Aunt Meek. I was clearly abrasive and, some might judge, more than a little arrogant in my desire to slap up my superiors.

When it comes to inheriting the land, I’m out of the will.

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

If rising temperatures and volcanic behavior is created by pride—my desire, my will, my personal sense of injury—then I’ll be a renter and never inherit God’s land or its bountiful blessings.

The $64,000 question: was it? That’s for me—prayerfully—to determine, I guess. Perhaps I should say too, that’s for me, meekly, to determine. Strange as it may seem, it has to be possible to fight injustice meekly, and that phrase is not oxymoronic. It can’t be. How do I know? The Bible tells me so.

Pride, however, always goeth before the fall. That truth I need to bring home into my heart--meekly, methinks.

Small Wonders--Satchel Paige

Just a few days after his twelfth birthday, the kid got sent up to reform school because all too often things that were there a minute-or-so ago were gone once the door closed behind him, if you know what I mean. So Satchell Paige had a record when he was eighteen years old, before he'd pitched at all; but in reform school the good Lord blessed him with a coach and a teacher, Rev. Moses Davis, who that same good Lord conscripted to teach Satchell Paige (his father stuck that i in their last name to get a little uppity) to be a chucker.

Seriously, all he'd ever played before the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Law-Breakers, the honest-to-God name of the place, was a silly game with sticks and bottle caps. Preacher Davis taught baseball as if he were teaching those boys how to breathe, made a team of 'em, if you can believe it, even got a local store to kick in fancy shirts.

That Reform School was in a place called Mount Meggs, Alabama, I mean the place Rev. Moses Davis taught his very special student everything he knew. "I traded five years of freedom to learn how to pitch," he used to say. "At least I started my real learning on the Mount."

The truth? Satchel Paige was not to be believed. When he was touring with an all-black cast of fielders behind him, there were times Paige smiled at 'em and told 'em all to just sit down and take life easy while he turned batters into window fans. Sometimes he'd bet locals he'd strike out the first nine hitters, then proceed to do just that and walk away a winner.

The mythology is endless. On April 29 he struck out 17 Cuban Stars; six days later, eighteen Nashville Elite Giants went down to that blind-man fastball. Things were a little loosie-goosy back then in the Negro leagues, so teams would come knocking to rent Satchel out, because it didn't take long for fans to come out to the ball park just to see this chucker pitch.

His arm had nuclear power. Hack Wilson told reporters that Satchel Paige was so fast the ball looked like a pill when it got to the plate. Bob Feller, the famous Bob Feller, from Van Meter, Iowa, said Satchel Paige was so fast he made Feller's own fastball look like a change-up.

A scout from the Chattanooga White Sox of the Southern Negro Baseball League spotted him in 1926, when he was somewhere between 26 or 34, depending on when he told you he was born. Fans knew right away that Paige was a phenom, a globetrotter before there was a team: eventually he played in Cuba, in Mexico, in the Dominican, and throughout the States, New York to LA. When he was 42 years old--best estimate at least--Satchel Paige signed his very first major league contract. The Cleveland Indians put him on the field for two innings, the oldest rookie ever to tie up his spikes in what had been the white majors.

On June 8, 1982, 80 years old, give or take a few, Satchel Paige, in his home in Kansas City, died of a heart attack. He's buried right there, in the city where, in 1920, the Negro Baseball League was charted, drawn up in an YMCA just up the block from 14th and Vine and the National Negro League Baseball Museum.

Go ahead and visit, say hello to old Satch. You'll find him there--well, a statue of him anyway. He's on the mound in a little ball park in the middle of the museum, surrounded by all-stars, every one, guys like Josh Gibson, a burly catcher who once hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium with only one arm. Get this! Some folks watched Babe Ruth hit, shook their heads, and said, "Oh, my, there goes a white Josh Gibson." 

Stop by sometime, the museum is anything but a graveyard. You'll see that odd duck wind up and watch him deliver fast balls. You'll read about dozens of ball players who came out of an impossibly segregated world to become Jackie Robinson and Henry Aaron and change the course of American history in the process. 

You ought to visit. It's not that far. The place--I swear--will make you smile.

Stay Away

My God-fearing grandpa was so intensely religious he could shed tears over the length and breadth of his sinful heart. He loved Jesus and hated Blacks, but he called them the n-word. It never dawned on him that his prejudices may have been sin, even though he claimed--out loud and in public--that he knew very well what sin was. He thought he lived biblically--after all, didn't the Bible make direct reference to the Negro race when God condemned Ham, Noah's son, to forever servitude?

My mother told me about Grandpa's love for the Phillies. I was five years old when the Boston Braves changed baseball forever by grabbing the franchise and moving west to Milwaukee, so I grew up with the Milwaukee Braves, listening every night of the season to an old radio with a dim yellow face tucked in a cabinet built into a space above my bed. No one I knew didn't love the Braves, except maybe for a few Cubs fans. Otherwise, no one.

Except Grandpa, the blacksmith turned grease monkey, who followed the Philadelphia Phillies, Mom said, because they were the last team to integrate. The Braves had Billy Bruton, Wes Covington, and a wiry kid named Henry Aaron. Grandpa took his allegiance and left the state. On principal.

The fear-mongering the Fox News crowd is doing about "critical race theory" seems inexplicable to me. How can any teacher in any classroom talk in any way about race in America and not make white kids feel bad? Those old Jim Crow signs pointing out which drinking fountains were accessible for Black people?--lock 'em in a drawer. To Kill a Mockingbird?--most famous novel of the 20th century?--put it way up in the library stacks so no one can reach it. Explain Little Big Horn without saying a thing about broken treaties?--sure, play John Wayne movies and reference savagery liberally. The Civil War--"the war of Northern Aggression."

For heaven's sake, don't bring white kids to Kansas City. Don't let them anywhere near the Negro Baseball League Museum because white kids are going to see is something very few will be able to imagine. Two leagues, two worlds in a country divided violently by custom and law.

For sixty years America had two distinct major leagues--one white, one black. How many high school kids, how many sports fans, have any idea that, not all that many years ago, Henry Aaron played professional baseball for the Mobile Black Bears? Not so far away. Not so long ago.

For sixty years, the Negro Baseball Leagues operated in a segregated world, and did so successfully, so well, that when Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers he created a shock wave that altered the face of the country into which he was born, but also undercut an enterprise that had been both thoroughly Black, owners to players to fans.

One year, 400,000 people attended Negro league ball games and regularly outdrew attendance in the lily-white Bigs. Black-owned businesses blossomed around ball parks. How high was the caliber of play in those segregated leagues? If you're white, don't ask. Once Jackie Robinson moved to Brooklyn, all-white teams changed forever.

Rube Foster

The man sometimes called "the Father of Negro League Baseball," Rube Foster, actually played the game himself, but realized eventually that an enterprise was waiting to be born from turnstiles teams like the Kansas City Monarchs, the Chicago American Giants, the Indianapolis ABCs, and Dayton Marcos were turning. It was 1920; it would take another forty years before Jackie Robinson.

What Foster did for Negro Baseball is give it the structure it so badly needed. With a few others in a meeting that took place just a few blocks away from the Negro League Baseball Museum (NLBM), Rube Foster put some legs under the enterprise, gave it a system and a name, and set it out for fans who were already excited about a brand of baseball they could not only support and love.

There are sad stories at the NLBM, the saddest, of course, is the racial divide that once upon a time kept America cut in pieces--white here, black there in the back of the bus. But another, one you almost certainly didn't know is that Jackie Robinson's ascension into American history as the man who, more than any other, broke the color barrier, his success as the Dodgers' shortstop meant the end of an incredibly successful enterprise that belonged completely to Black Americans.

Of course, if it's going to hurt you, don't go to the NLBM. By all means, stay away. Go to the Zoo or something, and for heaven's sake don't go next door to the NLBM either, where another fine museum teaches the history of jazz, another story that can't be told without the pain of exclusion, of prejudice, and racial hatred.

By all means, stay away from 14th and Vine. Stay clean and untouched by the tragic rooms of the American mansion. Stay away from the servants' quarters, the empty Native villages. We don't want anyone hurt, after all. We don't want anyone sad.

Great places, great museums, great stories--14th and Vine, Kansas City. Not so far away at all.

Roosted faith

  

"Cathedrals," Anne Pierson Wiese says in "Everything but God," can be seen, can be noticed, rising above the townscapes of many European--and American--communities long before you make out anything, "roosted," she says, on the land, an odd word, suggesting hens. 

Everything but God
by Anne Pierson Wiese

In Europe you can see cathedrals
from far away. As you drive toward them
across the country they are visible—stony
and roosted on the land—even before the towns
that surround them. 

Then again, in cities, like New York, where she grew up, she claims cathedrals sneak up on you, surrounded as they are by other outsized buildings. 

In New York you come
upon them with no warning, turn a corner
and there one is: on 5th Avenue St. Patrick's,
spiny and white as a shell in a gift shop; 

And there are more, she says, then names them for readers who know their way around New York, and others, like me, who don't--

                                                                        dark
St. Agnes lost near a canal and some housing
projects in Brooklyn; or St. John the Divine,
listed in every guidebook yet seeming always
like a momentary vision on Amsterdam
Avenue, with its ragged halo of trees, wide stone
steps ascending directly out of traffic.

That cathedrals are notable, whether or not they rise above the landscape, is clear simply by her familiarity and references. Anne Pierson Wiese notices them anyway. Cathedrals aren't just any other monster building. In her mind and soul, cathedrals distinguish themselves even if and when they don't.  

By the time a second stanza begins in "Everything but God," I'm in, walking along with her. I love cathedrals. I could return to Rome in a heartbeat, cathedrals everywhere, spacious houses of heavenly worship so rich and evocative in silence that they make some museums feel like dime stores. 

She can't pass them by "lately," she says, in part because they're full of "anonymous wishes" that "waver and flame" with votive candles.

Lately I have found myself unable

to pass by. The candles' anonymous
wishes waver and flame near the entrance, bright
numerous, transitory and eternal
as a migration: the birds that fly away
are never exactly the same as those that return.

Havens for doves, like one in Honduras we couldn't pass by.

The gray, flowering arches' ribs rise

until they fade, the bones so large and old
they belong to an undetected time
on earth. 

That, methinks, is as beautiful an image as there is in the poem, an image cathedral-worthy. She's right: cathedrals in all sizes and shapes, churches too, not just the magnificent cathedrals, but every place of worship documents faith that's forever present in the human condition, as real as sin, as redemptive as grace. Wherever humankind has roosts, a place of worship likewise roosts. 

"Here and there people's small backs/in prayer," she says. 

And then the difficult end of the poem, requiring the kind of contemplation cathedrals seem to elicit from most everyone I know.

                     the windowed saints' robes' orchid
glow, the shadows—ghosts of a long nocturnal
snow from a sky below when we did not yet
exist, with our questions tender as burns.

Stained glass saints color the silent world within, ghosts, she says, of "a long nocturnal snow," a difficult phrase that suggests paradox (dark and light) of a "sky below," yet another suggestion of paradox.  But then, the grim necessity of faith seems forever paradoxical--to continue to believe when all else makes claims against belief, to beg attention from a God of love when the world suggests there's no reason to confess it's true. 

When I took the picture of that man praying, I was trespassing whatever grief or heartache he brought in, or the darkness of whatever sin he might have been confessing. That sense of violation is still in me--I'm embarrassed by the photograph. I caught him at his most vulnerable. I had or have no sense of what brought him, no recognition of his burden. I know nothing about whether or not he found whatever solitary grace he might have thought he could secure at the kneeling bench. 

I don't know anything about him, but I know--we all do--something of his heartache because human frailty empties us of spirit and makes us all reach for spirits more holy than anything we can possibly raise on our own. We all know emptiness we yearn to fill. We all have questions "tender as burns." We've all been he has. 

Yesterday--you may have heard her--a woman broke into tears when translating the words of President of Ukraine.  A professional, I'm sure, she was at a mike somewhere far away from wherever Zelensky was speaking, probably in no danger whatsoever, not close to that 40-mile line of armaments creeping up the highway to the nation's capital. 

But when she heard Zelensky's pleading, tears were rung from her heart. She isn't even Ukrainian. She's German. You could hear her on the kneeling bench.

What Anne Pierson Wiese suggests--no, what she claims--is a love for cathedrals that's almost instinctive, not for their embellishments, their richness of the images all around, but because they're as ancient as they are familiar to all of us, no matter what our system of belief. At one time or another, we've all been hunched over like the man in the picture I should not have taken. We've all been "small backs/in prayer."

"Everything but God" by Anne Pierson Wiese, from Floating City. © Louisiana State University Press, 2007. 

40-miles of death and destruction

This is evil.

This is the forty-mile convoy of Russian military equipment still on the road to Kyiv, capital of the Ukraine. These are the armements that will reign more than terror down on the old and beautiful city and bring death and destruction to thousands, maybe even millions. 

The Ukrainians have will. Armed with their own indefatigable determination to be free, they will, ultimately, prevail; but prevailing will come by way of the deaths of thousands. 

This forty-mile caravan is a military target so obvious and inviting that it's a wonder some other world power hasn't already strafed it with air power. Within minutes, I'm thinking, forty-miles of death could be forty-miles of burned-out wreckage. American jets are not the only ones who could do it, but the caravan or horror won't stop rolling along. Instead, this evil serpent will continue to writhe along to Kyiv until, battle ready, the carnage will begin. It may already have.

And why won't NATO or the US destroy kill the snake? Because sorties would risk an escalation prompting Putin to deploy nuclear arms. If he does, the entire planet is at risk.

Everybody knows it, and thus the world kneels before Satanic madness. Putin, who couldn't care less about human suffering, has his finger on a trigger more horrifying than can be imagined. 

Ukraine is bleeding out its life right now because a madman has the entire world at his feet.

Isn't there someway of taking him out and ending this hellish madness? 

An offering

Some TV advertisements should simply disappear these days. What's happening in Ukraine right now makes them obscene--dream vacations on vast, empty beaches, romance in crystalline waters, exotic eateries, hideaways for lovemaking. I'm 100% brow-furrowed Calvinist on mammoth luxury liners, too. Just clear the decks. No more. 

Saturday Night Live has a long history of irreverence, but last week's opening stopped the show when a chorus of Ukrainian singers began a doleful "Prayer for Ukraine" that was absolutely stunning.  That table in front of the singers, you may have noticed, is set with votive candles spelling out Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital; but on either side stand bouquets of sunflowers, the national flower. SNL had it right. First things first.

Last night, thumbing through old files, I stumbled on a Saturday morning catch along the Little Sioux River in September of 2015, a dawn when sunflowers overflowed in an abundance I didn't know how to capture, too many maybe.

This morning there cannot be too many. I wish I'd taken the time to capture the best images I could, but what stopped my meandering last night was the sudden abundance of sunflowers, a harvest of hope. There can't possibly be too many. 

The lines of good and evil are only rarely so stark and plain. Putin is evil. He is the aggressor, and his reasoning is insane. Millions of perfectly innocent women and children have left their homes, and their husbands and uncles and brothers who are staying behind to fight a vastly out-weaponed enemy with no right to invade. 

For Ukraine, to begin the week, I offer these sunflowers, fresh-cut this morning in sunshine and hope. In the free world, we're all on our knees. 

The Lord bless you and keep you, 

make his face to shine upon you, 

and give you peace.

Sunday Morning Meds--Each and Every One*

“He determines the number of the stars 

and calls them each by name.” Psalm 147:4

Yesterday, as I was walking up the grand stairway at the college where I teach, some kid came racing out of the offices upstairs and literally flew, right past me, down the stairs and out the door, his feet a whirr. The way he took that staircase on was a show, I swear, incredibly artful, even shocking.

I stood there, halfway up, and realized not only that once upon a time I could do that too, but also that I can’t anymore. I stood there stunned, realizing that I felt the way my grandpa must have sometime in his life. But now, my grandpa is long gone and I am he.

I have a cold, and it’s nothing to shake a hanky at. It started way down in my lungs about a week ago, fetching a cough I’ve been battling since. Yesterday, enemy forces climbed up my windpipe and took my sinuses hostage. This morning I awoke with a mouthful of fine, dry sand.

We haven’t heard from our son in more than a week. We hope he’s doing well, all alone so far away. We pray he’ll find some friends, some folks with whom he can be at home. We want him in church. We’re not sure of much, and haven’t been for several years.

This, my 36th year of teaching, hasn’t started out with joy. For the first time in all those years, I believe I’d move if the right opportunity came up. But I’m nearly 60 so who on earth will invest in someone who’s barely going to be get into the parking lot before leaving for retirement? Makes me feel dismal.

I’m facing a ton of student papers today, but I have to get them read. I’ve had them far too long. My students have every right to roll their eyes when I come into class without them.

My wife’s cholesterol spiked. She never knew she had a problem until the good doctor called a week ago after reading her test. “You better start some pills,” he told her, wrote out the prescription. She’s been on them since.

Her mother’s life is precarious, and in many ways she’d rather be gone. She’s not morbid about it, nor deeply depressed, but has little sense of her own use on this wintering earth. She thinks she’s a burden. Last week there was a bout with an ambulance. She vows, never again.

There are probably more laments, if I would listen to the dark voices.

To imagine that God knows that whole laundry list is beyond belief. To believe he loves me despite my curmudgeonliness, my insistent listing of my own problems as first and foremost in the universe, is absurd. To imagine that somewhere in that computer mind of his he’s drawn a divine bead on just me is incomprehensible, not only because of long list my ills but even more so because millions and billions of mes populate this world of his.

But out here in the country, I’m sure I see the night sky better than most Americans. I know how countless many stars there are above—at least I know better than most city-dwellers.

The comfort of Psalm 147:4 is that he knows them all, every one, knows what’s happening in their air space. Our great joy is that “he calls them each by name.”

He knows our aches and pains—so many of them too.

That’s really unbelievable, isn’t it? Only by faith do I know I’m not just baying at the moon or whistling in the dark.

~*~*~*~*~

*from Sixty at Sixty.

The Bulge -- i

For a couple of days at least, I'd like to tell some tales I've picked up of WWII vets who were close but never touched at the Battle of the Bulge. Knowing their stories has helped me understand more about that battle and more about war. Right now, it seems that kind of war is not so very far away. 

                                                           ~  *  ~  *  ~  *  ~

She gone to war on a whim, really, joined the corps because a doctor told her that she and her friend were young and unattached, and she'd never really been off the reservation--well, to Rapid City to nursing school, but not much farther. He told her she should go out there and see the world, so she enlisted because she got sick-and-tired of having to catch a ride with the mail man if she wanted to go anywhere other than the reservation hospital where she'd found a job after nursing school. She went to war, honestly, for adventure. "What did we know about war?" she asked rhetorically.

The fact is, she knew nothing. She was a Lakota woman, something she knew very well even if her friends didn't. It was clear to her that she was, well, unique among the other nurses shipped to Europe before D-Day, the only nurse in her bunch who could claim Native blood. Sometimes her friends--and they were friends, good friends--called her a princess because they liked thinking about her as an Indian princess. She felt no discrimination during the war. None. 

In late 1944, Hitler decided to gamble everything on a last-ditch effort to break the Allied lines sweeping through toward Berlin. Germany needed the port at Antwerp, so he sent tens of thousands of troops--some just boys--into the Argonne Forest in a frighteningly bloody military action the world would soon call "The Battle of the Bulge."

At a field hospital bigger than a football field, a series of tents, a fully equipped hospital that eventually served thousands of casualties, American GIs, her assignment was the very first tent, A-1. It was war, and together with her nurse friends they did nothing at all but work and sleep, tend the thousands who showed up from the battle lines.

Who knows for sure whether or not the Germans actually aimed a buzz bomb at that field hospital? Anything is possible in the fog of war, and Hitler did things that most of us would rank as far more malevolent, more atrocious. Whatever happened that night, a 25 wounded GIs were killed right there in the hospital, red crosses all around, when a German buzz bomb stopped its horrifying buzz and fell near a tent where the patients were sleeping. Buzz bombs whizzed by quite regularly, when Hitler flung them in a blitz at London and then at Antwerp.

Patients looking for buzz bombs

She wasn't right there. She was on duty, but the field hospital was big and rangy, and she didn't see the horror with her own eyes. On her way back to her tent, she met a friend, another nurse, who did, who was there, who literally picked up the pieces. "Don't go," her friend told her. "Just go get some sleep, Marcella," her friend said. It was a warning Marcella understood for what it was.

When she was 100 years old, Marcella still wondered whether she did the right thing by listening to that friend and not witnessing what her friend had said she was better off not seeing. 

~  *  ~  *  ~  *  ~

Monday: more stories from the Bulge

War

At a moment like this, it's not a crime to think the worst. What Vladimir Putin has in mind with respect to the Ukraine, no one knows, not anyone in Washington and, in all likelihood, very, very few in Moscow. The grievance that gives him cause is entirely in his soul--he wants a Russia in size and power approximating the Soviet Union of decades ago. 

The only way to get there is to kill people, to take back the Ukraine, whose men and women and children want no part of his Soviet leadership. And so we wait, as we've waited for the last month or so, for something to drop, as it has with his pseudo-invasion of what he seems to determine is rightfully his, those areas of the Ukraine that are "Russian-speaking." He doesn't need a lie; he simply makes them up as he goes, as he has and as he will. His troops, remember, are "peacemakers."

I ran across some war sketches of Harvey Dunn this morning, the handsome chap at the top of the page, the South Dakota illustrator/artist, specifically chosen by the War Department during World War I to bring a sketch book to France and show the war to America. He did, sketched out hundreds of quickly drawn images and determined that, when he'd return, he'd turn them into real portraits of the horror he saw in war.

That dream didn't work out. Many remained unfinished. The good news is that they exist and can be celebrated; the bad news is they're awful--because war is. Who would possibly want one of these hanging from the walls of your home--no one. But then, who wants war? Putin and a few sidekicks.

Here are some of Harvey Dunn's war sketches. Right now, it just seems right to drag them out for study because this is where Putin is bringing all of us right now.

These sketches and paintings are a century old, but that doesn't mean they don't speak to this dark moment.

This is war. And if Putin has his way, this is us, even if a shot is never sounded on these shores.