Sunday Morning Med--Warning: Rewards

“By them is your servant warned; 

in keeping them there is great rewards.” Psalm 19:12

When I look back on my life it seems as if I’ve been a part of three wholly different eras.

I was a child in the fifties, when, in small-town America, the church was the central institution of our lives, the bona fide authority, and life seemed simple. In America, we’d just won a war against genuine evil. Tons of ex-GIs, my father among them, returning from experiences they’d never forget, were looking for little more than sweet peace and quiet security. War’s madness gave way to the order of the fifties, everything in place.

What I remember of Jesus from that time is a visual image almost everyone has seen. A pale glow surrounds his head, mysterious light from some unseen source, some spiritual iridescence. That light is convincing. If you’d ever harbored any doubt, one look at that painting showed his divinity, the King of kings. You know the drawing—Warner Sallman, circa 1940.

I grew up in the Sixties, when authority—church, state, even family—took a beating. Somewhere I have a slide of a kid in a t-shirt, a picture I took on an anti-war march in Washington D.C.; on the back of that shirt is a fist with a raised middle finger aimed at just about everything. He’s my age.

The wall of my office bears a Sixties Jesus portrait, this one in a swirl of long hair, his beard bedraggled, the sort of guy who would have left on a chopper with Peter Fonda to find America’s soul.

I’m growing old in yet another era, one not so easy—for me at least—to understand. I have no pictures of Jesus from this era, but I see one in the attitudes of my students. “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” might well be their theme song, if it could be played on a keyboard. Jesus sits in a Starbucks, something dark and rich steaming exotically in his hand, a sweet smile over his face, chillin’, working on relationships.

Which one is accurate? Go figure. We’re all, at best, fragmentary. Jesus Christ is always bigger, always more complete than whatever fantasy we have going.

Should we, like my students, think of him as a great guy? Should we, Sixties-like, hook arms with him and break up the military/industrial complex? Perhaps the most difficult pair of questions of all: Is he someone to love? Is he someone to fear?

There’s something about the balance in the diction of this verse that’s striking. I only wish there were a colon where there’s a semi-colon now, because I’m thinking that somehow the two sides of the verse go hand-in-hand. The verse reads like a bizarre highway sign: “Warning: Rewards ahead.”

Jaroslav Pelikan says that one of the most interesting questions of the scripture, one that needs to be answered every decade or so—and maybe more often—was one posed by none other than Jesus Christ: Who do people say that I am?”

The answer to that question is always the same—and always different, isn’t it? As mysteries go, he is the greatest.

But he loves us. Go figure.

Small Wonders -- Old Satch

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 this kid named Satchell Paige had a criminal record when he was eighteen years old, before he'd pitched at all; but here’s the thing: 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 this kid named Satchell Paige 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 him and the others baseball, even made a team of 'em, if you can believe it, got a grocery store to kick in fancy shirts.

That Reform School was in Mount Meggs, Alabama, the small town where Rev. Moses Davis taught his very special student everything he knew about pitching. "I traded five years of freedom to learn how to pitch," Satchell Paige used to say. "I started my real learning on the Mount."

Trust me, this guy was not to be believed. When he was touring with an all-black cast of fielders behind him, there were times Paige smiled, told 'em all to sit down and take life easy while he turned batters into window fans. Once in a while he'd bet locals he'd strike out the first nine hitters, then proceed to do just that and walk away, cash in hand.

The stories are endless. On April 29 he struck out 17 Cuban Stars; six days later, eighteen Nashville Elite Giants. Things were loosie-goosy back then in the Negro leagues; rival ball teams would come knocking to rent out Satchel Paige and his blind-man fast ball because fans would move the turnstiles 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, the Iowan, said Satchel Paige was so fast he made Feller's heralded fastball look like a change-up.

 On July 4, 1934, Satchel fanned Buck Leonard, who demanded the ump toss out the ball because he couldn’t believe what that ball did on the way to the plate. Paige hollered at him. “You may as well thrown ‘em all ‘cause they’re all gonna jump like that.” Right he was. Satchell Paige struck out 17 that game.

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’d say he was born. Fans knew Paige was a phenom a globetrotter--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, so the Cleveland Indians put him on the field for two innings as the oldest rookie ever to lace up spikes the white major leagues. In the bigs, he pitched his last inning when he was 60 years old.

 On June 8, 1982, when he was 80 years old, give or take a few, Satchel Paige, died of a heart attack. He's buried in Kansas City, the city where, in 1920, the Negro Baseball League was charted, drawn up in an YMCA just up the block from 18th and Vine and the National Negro League Baseball Museum.

Drop in sometime and say hello to old Satch, his statue anyway. He's on the mound in a little ballpark in the middle of the museum, where he’s surrounded by guys like Josh Gibson, a burly catcher who once hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium with only one arm.

 There’s a lot of old Satch there—18^th and Vine, KC. You won’t believe what you see.

First Lessons

I was up in front of the classroom, explaining something--I've long ago forgotten what--when a story from my own past occurred to me, a story I used just then to explain something-or-0ther in whatever poem or story I was talking about. I remember the room; we could go there today. It hasn't changed, except the blackboard is a whiteboard and the chairs, the seats, are plush.

All of that came back to me just as immediately as the story itself had that day in class. It had been something I'd experienced that quite suddenly had taken on a meaning through the years. I told myself, even as I was talking about it in front of class, that it would make a story, a short story I could write somehow, I could work on.

And it did, a story I finally ineptly called "The Voice of the Body" because a dead body did the significant talking. Still feels like an awkward title, but I must admit I loved the story I wrote back then. It's still one of my favorites.

I was working at the State Park down the road, in the booth at the entrance, selling stickers for admission, a good job every once in a while, better than cleaning toilets, picking up dead fish, or painting picnic tables. But working the booth meant you worked alone, jabbered only to people driving up in cars or pickups or buses.

The kids that showed up that morning were African-American. At the park, we didn't see a lot of Black people, but these guys were being rewarded for keeping their rooms cleaned, the hippy kid in charge told me. They were getting a canoe outing at Terre Andrea State Park, up north of Milwaukee, where they all lived. The Travelall their fearless leader was driving--long haired guy--was pulling a rack of Alumacraft canoes.

I wasn't a canoe-er, but when you grow up on the lake, you just know that when Lake Michigan is kicking up its heels, it's not a good idea to take a canoe out. You're going to spill. Canoes work when the lake is still as glass. They're wonderful. But most of them time, you're far better off on some docile farm pond.

I didn't tell them that. I didn't say it, and I know why--I didn't want to spoil the party. I didn't want to be some old Aunt Carol. I didn't want to be a party-pooper.

Four kids died that day, drowned in our park, and I got chewed out royally because the boss told me I should have told them not to take those canoes off the rack when the wind was as strong as it was that morning. Four kids died. 

That night, after work, after my folks had gone to bed, I sat up, alone, and for reasons I've long ago forgotten, I pulled out a tablet and a pen, laid it out before me, and just wrote stuff. What?--I don't know. I long ago tossed whatever it was that I scribbled down in that tablet. I don't know if it was confession or some abject petition for forgiveness. What I remember is that, as if out of nowhere, I put a pen or pencil to paper, as if somehow if I wrote about all that weight on my shoulders, it would somehow be lessened.

I didn't grow up wanting to be someone who has written as much as I have. I didn't write a novel about dinosaurs when I was ten, didn't write anything really, but notes for a club we had in middle school. One story, sophomore year in high school, but that's it really. 

But that night, more than any other, I suppose, I started in on an avocation that I'm still working at right now as I press these keys, two months or so after my 74th birthday. 

Seems a stretch, I know, but when I saw the picture up top last night, when this darling piece of writing came up on my iPad, I couldn't help thinking of a night when I was 18 years old and full of guilt, the night I pulled out a notebook because something in me determined that maybe if I wrote something I could feel something huge fall from my shoulders.

What you see is my granddaughter's very first bit of writing. She's four and beautiful and totally little-girl-ish, and yesterday in pre-school, her teachers put a slate down in front of her and the other kids, wrote out each of their names in dark black letters, then asked the kids to mimic what they saw. They asked those darling tots to begin to write their names.

It's as beautiful a picture as you'll find in Stuff in the Basement. It doesn't have a dime's worth of guilt in it, carries no ponderous weight, doesn't attempt to do anything more than mimic what the teacher wrote. Yesterday, my darling granddaughter had her first lesson in writing. 

I still can't help but smile. 

"Basement" by Louis Jenkins

We can laugh at this poem yet--yet being an almost hidden but quite crucial w0rd because for now, at least, the poem is funny, not because it's a joke but because it isn't. It's us. And that's okay. Yet.  

Appeared yesterday on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, a little bit of daily poetry--April is National Poetry Month (no foolin'). So I may just roll a couple out once in a while.

Just exactly what makes this a poem is beyond me. It doesn't rhyme, but then neither did T. S. Eliot. It doesn't have any consistent rhythm--you can't scan it or call it "iambic pentameter" or something profound. It's not even all that concentrated. It reads like a joke, a long one maybe; if there's any reasoning involved in determining line length, I don't what that reasoning is.

But it's fun, and besides, if we call it a poem we can once more wear that once-coveted title of "English major." So here 'tis, "Basement," by Louis Jenkins, who was born in Oklahoma but lived most of his life in Duluth, Minnesota, a master of what we might well call "the prose poem." And, we may as well say it, he was an old buddy of Garrison Keillor. Died in 2019.

Whatever you call "Basement," it's a little gem. And, it's our story.

BASEMENT
by Louis Jenkins

There’s something about our basement that causes forgetting. I go down for something, say a roll of
paper towels, which we keep in a big box down there,
and as soon as I get to the bottom of the stairs I have forgotten what I came down there for. It happens to
my wife as well. So recently we have taken to working
in tandem like spelunkers. One of us stands at the
top of the stairs while the other descends. When the descendant has reached the bottom stair, the person
at the top calls out, “Light bulbs, 60 watt.” This
usually works unless the one in the basement lingers
too long. I blame this memory loss on all the stuff in
the basement. Too much baggage: 10 shades of blue
paint, because we could not get the right color, extra dishes, bicycles, the washer and dryer, a cider press, a piano, jars of screws, nails and bolts…. It boggles the mind. My wife blames it on radon.

Our Sunday coffee guest

 

On the Sabbath too. This fine feathered friend, an American kestral, handsome as the day is long, flew into our downstairs window when the two of us were down here sipping coffee and watching the news. Couldn't help but wonder, in fact, whether Pella's finest glass was going to hold up in the bang. The minute it happened, before I even got up from the couch to look for a body, I told my wife that someone had been killed. I had no idea it was this gentleman, pretty as a parakeet, about the size of a blue jay.

It's happened before, but never anyone quite this colorfully bedecked. But there he was, still alive, maybe gasping a little, sort of shakily standing on the deck, his feet precariously close to giving away the simple fact that he'd got his bell rung good and proper. There was no blood. He was upright, but he didn't move when I stood there on the other side of the glass not more than three feet away. I was likely nothing more than a blur.

When such events happen, we like to think a visitor, maybe especially one this distinguished, was just spoiling for a Sunday afternoon cup of coffee. It was a royal Sabbath really, but still, we can't help but believe we've got things to savor in this house, and it's not unthinkable that he'd want to drop by. 

But when this guy hit the glass, he wasn't knocking politely. He seemed intent on breaking-and-entering. I thought he'd be dead. Thank goodness, he wasn't.

Then why drop by? Apparently, I'm told, spring is the time for love, and what he saw reflected in the Pella glass was some other lookin'-for-love male scouting around for a date in a neighborhood this bro thought he owned. He was--and I know the feeling--testosterone-pissed, but he didn't take the time to ask questions. Like any other jealous chump, he lit into that reflection to keep the him-he-thought-he saw away from whatever neighborhood women he's got scouted. It was an imagined battle of a colorfully robed titans looking to secure their territory, one of which was nothing more than reflection. This guy got stung in a blind quest for control. 

All of which makes him kin to a stubby Russian with beady eyes, except this one here is maybe smarter and one heckuva lot better looking. 

(I feel like I should apologize to the this handsome American kestrel for the despicable unkindness of what I just said.)

Ten minutes, max, and he was off, flying brilliantly--maybe a bit of a headache.

Hadestown

It's an outing I gladly countenance, which is not to say my opinion is worth much in the whole matter. My daughter's passion for musicals is well-fed by trips she and her mother take to Omaha every other month to see whatever is playing at the majestic Orpheum Theater. They've got season tickets, have had them for years. Occasionally--not often--our daughter, for some punishing reason, can't go. Then, the mother/daughter thing shipwrecks, and I get the ticket.

Like Saturday. "So, this weekend, what am I seeing?" I asked my wife last week.

"Don't know exactly," she said. She's not the devotee our daughter is. My wife likes the shows, but goes along as much for the company. "It's Hades, or something."

Fine, I thought. On Saturday, I'm going to hell.

'T'wasn't. Not at all. I loved it--and it's not Hades, it's Hadestown, a change someone made, I'm sure, to sidestep the bad joke I thought I'd created.

Anyway, we're eating lunch in some sweet dive in the Old Market when I pull out my phone, type in Hadestown, and realize that the show's story-line loosely follows two Greek myths intertwined, both of them love stories--the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, which features an idealistic young man with a golden voice, who sets out to rescue his true love who has descended to the underworld. And there's Hades, ruler of the underworld, and his wife, Persephone, the goddess of spring and flowers. The conflict is right there in the description.

The thing is, Hadestown is darker than night--and yet not. When it comes down to it, there's loss all around--death and loss and even some hell; but somehow the what's up there on stage pulses with life and manages, against the odds, to be almost embarrassingly uplifting. You've got to see it to understand.

Like Hamilton, Hadestown flat-out throbs with energy. The music is an odd mix of genres, and the dancing is electric. If we could harness the energy of Hadestown and put on a couple thousand performances, I swear as a nation we'd sweep away our dependence on fossil fuels.

Don't fool yourself. There's no happy endings. Still, oddly enough enough, there's a clear and vibrant message nonetheless, and it couldn't be any more clearly stated than it is at the end, a message delivered by Hades himself, when he tells the audience plainly and passionately that the darkness of the world is unmistakable. That it's all around us doesn't mean that humankind should throw in the towel on hope. Instead, he says, we keep telling the story, time after time after time. We keep believing anyway. We keep hanging on. We keep spreading the gospel of hope because it's in us.

Hadestown is far more Greek than Christian, but that doesn't mean that the spirit isn't in it. It's an inspiration, immensely rich entertainment, a tribute to the very human insistence that life is always better with hope.

I loved it.

When we drove home, I told my wife I couldn't have drawn a better ticket or we couldn't have spent a better Saturday afternoon. 

Sunday Morning Meds--An old CA

The earth is full of your creatures.  

There is the sea, vast and spacious, 

teeming with creatures beyond number—

living things both large and small.

There the ships go to and fro, and the leviathan, 

which you formed to frolic there.  

These all look to you to give them their food at the proper time.

Psalm 104

The highest I ever arose on my summer job during college was about five feet off the ground aboard an old, war-surplus caterpillar. I’m not sure why the boss made me the designated driver, but he did. So I was, most days, at the hand levers that controlled the old beast, an ancient, faded yellow wonder whose huge engine banged, banged, banged along the beach as if it had but one mammoth cylinder.

Four or five us, me aboard the CAT, the others armed with rakes and shovels, set out to clean up dead fish. Lake Michigan—or at least our corner of it—was a mess. Alewives by the millions constantly washed up on the shore, the heftier ones left bloating on the sand. Swimmers hated them, and so did the boss. A couple hundred thousand little silvery no-good alewives washing up on the beach each day wasn’t good for business.

So three or four guys would rake ‘em up, and two of us would follow—a guy with a scoop, and me at the controls of that tank of a CAT. My sense of smell isn’t acute, but I don’t remember a stench. It was the boss’s concern that we get those tiny silvery fish picked up pronto, then dumped way back in the dunes. During the height of their spawn, we started the whole work day on the beach, which bugged us because there were no bikinis out at nine on the western shores of Lake Michigan. It wasn’t a bad job really; we just found the attractions of mid-afternoon more engaging.

I remember of that long-ago experience because of the psalmist’s line “teeming with creatures beyond number.” We thought they were—the alewives. For a month at least, the waves rolled them up continually and turned the beach into a dump full of the shards of a million mirrors. The lunkers were six inches, but most of them were no bigger than your finger. The seagulls ate only their eyes.

The lamprey eel, a hideous looking thing, was the culprit, hitching itself to game fish then riding out the host’s torturous death. Not pretty. The disappearance of game fish in Lake Michigan in the 50s created a population boom among the alewives.

Today, the lamprey eel is at ten percent of its peak population because, fifty years ago already, researchers discovered a chemical to kill the larvae. Game fish have made a dramatic recovery, and that army surplus caterpillar has been quietly retired, the descendants of those lowly alewives devoured by teeming trout and salmon.

Psalm 104 is grand and glowing and inspiring, a cyclorama almost; but here and there it could use a footnote, I think, and I’m not even an ecologist.

The psalmist is not wrong. There’s a great circle in nature, and I’m no more of a Lakota than I am a bona fide tree-hugger. But I can't help thinking that something there is that links us and them—two-leggeds, four-leggeds, and even those silvery alewive multitudes.

Something there is that loves this world so greatly he gave his son. That’s what the Bible suggests in 104, a long and stunning portrait of the natural world.

Still, occasionally, I guess, somebody’s got to drive an old cat.

Our Monuments

When the county spread blacktop on the road west of town, one farmer held out. “That cottonwood is too close to the roadbed,” the boss told him, pointing toward the one out front of his place. “We’re going to have to take it out tomorrow.”

Farmer said no way, but the country said, “Tomorrow morning, it goes.”

Road crew left. The next morning, early, that farmer was sitting in front of his cottonwood, legs crossed, arms cradling a shotgun.

That tree of his is still right there.

Stubbornly, our trees grace our lives out here in the cold and the heat and the forever wind. Like us, they’re not native--they’re immigrants, still unique on a sea of grass, never quite out of sight amid endless row crops. A single tree against an open sky may well be the most iconic image there is of the world we’d like to call our own. Our trees are monuments. They tell our stories.

 

Landscape photographs I've taken of our trees 

will be up in the Garden Café at Sioux Center Health, 

where it will stay for some time before moving to the Library.

Stop by and visit.

Holy Week*

 

1. He's a believer today, in great part, because once upon a time a missionary, a white man, convinced this believer's father to send his little boy off to school at a Christian mission, or so this believer told me. What his father told him later, when he grew older, was that he really didn't believe in the Christian religion--he was, after all, a deeply religious man; but he came to believe after a year or so of conversations with that missionary, many of them right there in the hogan and more just outside, that what the missionary and his people were peddling was basically the same message as Native religion, something quite akin to "the beauty way." 

His reasoning went something like this: what the white men will teach you isn't necessarily right, but it's good--and those who believe it at the Rehoboth mission are good; therefore what they teach may well bring you into "the beauty way," the way of love and respect.

So, decades ago, still a boy, he went off to the school at the mission. Today, he's a believer, a Christian.

2. We're walking around the village, strangers to be sure, two of us white and American in the middle of a busy Mali village of 500 souls, maybe more, in a rural area where most villages are little more than extended family compounds. Sheep and goats, chickens and dogs wander everywhere. In rural, sub-Saharan Africa, people sleep under roofs and within walls but generally live outside. 

We're walking along a street and passing the mosque--you can't miss it because it's kept up well by Khadafi's oil billions--when out walks the imam. Go ahead and imagine him. He looks exactly like you might think, bearded, capped, shawled, long and colorful robes. He stops us. We hadn't knocked or tried to sneak into the mosque. 

Out he comes. "Let me tell you about him," the imam says, and points at our tour guide, the head of the medical clinic just outside the village. The mullah came out to meet us because he needed to be sure we knew what a tremendous blessing this man, a Christian, has been to the whole village. May Allah be praised.

3. It's the house of the senator of the region, something like that. The political position doesn't really have an equivalent here, but in Niger he's the official representative of the national government; and we're there at his house, his compound, eating his food and drinking his bottled water because he's very proud to tell us that the man we're with, the man who, with his wife, has created a medical clinic in town, is a wonderful man who is doing great work. 

It's been a holiday, the Feast of Tabaski, and everywhere there are picnics, barbeques, family reunions. People are adorned in their finery, their most outlandish jewelry and brand new colorful dresses. It's a festival of biblical proportions. Everyone in the city, save just a few, is Muslim--everyone. As is the senator, his wife, the house guests who happen to be visiting when we drop by, the servants who bring us food and drink, and the armed military parked just outside his place. But the politician makes very sure we know that this Christian medical man is a great gift, even though he is, by definition, a heathen.

4. In a Sunday op-ed, Nicholas Kristof, who is not an evangelical, offers some remarkable testimony about evangelicals: "I must say that a disproportionate share of the aid workers I’ve met in the wildest places over the years, long after anyone sensible had evacuated, have been evangelicals, nuns or priests. 

Case in point, Kristof says, Dr. Stephen Foster, 65, the son and grandson of African missionaries, who has himself spent his lifetime caring for Angolans who, in his region especially, suffer horrendous infant mortality rates. He's white, he's Christian, and he's been there forever.

It's no accident, Kristof says, that recent polling indicates that across the face of this nation, people have more respect for gays and lesbians (53%) than they do for evangelical Christians (42%). But witness Dr. Stephen Foster, he says, and claims Foster is not alone:  "The next time you hear someone at a cocktail party mock evangelicals, think of Dr. Foster and those like him," he writes. "These are folks who don’t so much proclaim the gospel as live it. They deserve better."

5. Holy Week, begins with a parade, the Lord of life, the King of Heaven and earth, coming into a town a celebrity. But long before the parade began, he determined that this triumphal entry was something he'd do on a donkey, a braying ass. That's how he came to us. 

That's what he was, a servant.

___________________ 

*Appeared here seven years ago, already. The word evangelical (see #4) has fallen into far greater disfavor in that time, sad to say.

For Ukraine, sunflowers

Last weekend, at the county Democratic convention, one woman, a long-time party regular, motioned to drop one of the party's "principles," one of the foundational givens of the platform. She said she'd never thought she would be saying what she was just then, but because of the senseless carnage in the Ukraine, she said she couldn't help thinking and saying that an old Democratic saw should be dropped, if only for the time being: military spending should be cut to make room for more and better social programs. 

People talk about what's happening in the Ukraine as a giant adjustment in "the world order." I'm not altogether sure of what "world order" is, but what is clear to me is that our understanding of Putin--and Russia--is simply not what it was a year or even four years ago, nor will it ever be. 

Yesterday morning brought a welcome respite from the horrors--a Russian general announced a significant reduction in Russian troops from the region surrounding Kiyv. Great news. I announced it to my wife as such when she had coffee in hand.

I left the news pretty much alone for the rest of the day, but by afternoon it seemed just about everyone was pooh-poohing that announcement, suggesting that whatever repositioning the Russian forces were doing was nothing more or less than repositioning to get ready for creating yet a new assault. So much for good news.

You may remember Putin's denial of any attack plans, even as a hundred thousand troops were assembled on Ukraine's eastern border. "No, no, no," he said. "All of your anxiety is nothing more or less than American paranoia." Bald-faced lie. 

Last weekend, Fox News called President Biden's off-script screed as yet another pathetic gaff by an old man growing more and more senile every day. I liked it, and I'm not sorry for saying that, coming as it did on the heels of his meeting some of the hoards of refugees--more than three million now, and still coming.

'For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power.'

Today, the war and the suffering continue. It's time to commend Ukraininan resolve again. With NATO's help, they've sustained control of most of their country and made the mighty Russian army look alarmingly like Keystone cops.

But death and destruction go on. There is no counting the homeless children. 

I can't help but repeat what I said silently in a prayer in church three weeks or so ago: "Take him out, Lord--take him out."

And for you, Ukraine, as much equipment as we can give--and whole bunches of sunflowers.

Brats and blessings - ii

It's difficult to imagine any reader out there who has five minutes to listen to Psalm 32, but go ahead and click on the above--it's not required listening, and it's the original lyric. It's what I remember, and what I remembered on Sunday last.

Our preacher, Rev. Van Someren, used to hand out mimeographed legal sheets full of psalms for us to recite each week. I don't know if he thought memorizing the catechism was too simple a task, but those long sheets were full of the intense religiosity the psalms offer and I can't forget. Always the psalms, too, just the psalms, some of them even Genevan.

I don't doubt that on some week back then Psalm 32 was the required text, but what came back to me on the Sabbath was not memorization but rendition. Strangely enough, it wasn't the preacher who made a sudden, unexpected appearance, it was his wife, Mrs. Van Someren, a tall woman, lanky and strong, a woman in tin-rims--the old-fashioned kind--that set on a face whose angles were far more sharp and defined than her personality, her hair forever pinned, not loose. Were she Catholic, she might have looked like one of sisters that shouldn't be crossed, a middle-school math teacher maybe, handy with the ruler she kept on top of her desk at the front of the room.

But she wasn't that, not at all. Last Sunday, she made an appearance somewhere near me in a pew in the old church downtown, the one our congregation abandoned when we built a new one a block south of where our family lived. The clarity of the unbidden memory was amazing. I didn't just see her singing Psalm 32, I saw her heart sing. She was praising God, being carried along by the richness of an old tune and its familiar but profound lyrics. 

How blessed is he whose trespass

Has freely been forgiven,

Whose sin is wholly covered

Before the sight of heaven.

Blest he to whom Jehovah

Shall not impute his sin,

Who have a guileless spirit,

Whose heart is true within. 

My mother the soloist used to commend Mrs. Van Someren's singing voice because my mother loved to see people project, loved to see people sing the way she did, with meaning and soul and excitement; but Mom the musician couldn't help telling us that Mrs. Van Someren was, rather painfully, too regularly a half-note flat. I thought of that too in church on Sunday, when Mrs. Van Someren was singing.

Here's verse two:

While I kept guilty silence

My strength was spent with grief.

Thy hand was steady on me,

My soul found no relief. 

I was sixty-some years in my own past, transported by an unbidden memory. When I riffle through those verses now, I can't help but think that being unforgiven may well have played in a role in that whole memory. I wasn't a nice boy--is anyone? I wasn't delinquent, but I was capable of thoughts and actions I knew very well weren't cherubic, weren't on the clearly posted list of parentally approved behaviors. 

But when I owned my trespass

My sin hid not from thee,

When I confessed transgression,

Then thou forgav'st me.

Musically, the bass line in the second half of each verse reaches up to b, a stretch for me. But when it does, it somehow makes the lyrics more plaintiff, more fraught with sadness, even horror. To scrub one's way to forgiveness requires the stern cleansing that most of us--and me, too, I guess, even back then--would do anything to avoid.

Two days ago, in church, was that Psalm 32 unearthing some childhood carnality?--I was nine, I think, when we left the old church. I doubt it. Besides, although that old psalm is all about guilt and sin, that's not what I saw in the proud and even happy face of the pastor's wife. It wasn't my sin, but her joy.

 

It is the last quatrain of the final verse that I saw last Sunday morning, a firm smile that testified to the promises she believed came from the very soul of God.

Then in the Lord be joyful, 

In song lift up your voice; 

Be glad in God, ye righteous, 

Rejoice, ye saints, rejoice.

That's it. 

The Van Somerens left our church sometime before I went off to high school. On occasion I'd see them, very infrequently. I can't say her husband is some kind of spiritual mainstay in my life. I used to despise his preacher's hands, so white and thin, so sadly unused in a congregation full of farmers and carpenters. But he was a good man, warm-hearted, loving, but maybe a B- from the pulpit. The Mrs. died just last summer, I'm told.

Her presence--her witness--appearing as she did in that treasured old psalm, was not only remarkable but stirring. She wasn't trying to lead the choir or cheer the troops. What her face registered was the immensity of having been forgiven. Far more than she herself would ever admit I'm sure, she was, for a moment right there before me, a saint. 

It's difficult not to believe that the visitation of such long-lost events--both the beauty of Mrs. Van Someren's singing, and the odd memory of my dad's mimicking a neon sign on a butcher shop come more readily to us as we age, maybe because there's just plain less room for more in whatever chest of memories each of us has tucked away somewhere amid the synopses. When there's less of a future than there's ever been, and when today often seems a jumble, at least we can find some modicum of comfort in the past, both in memories that run when we want them to and those that simply appear of their own volition. 

When I think of all those children of war and how their memories will forever carry remnant acts and tribulations, I can't help but be thankful that as I move farther and farther into old age, I won't be visited by horrors. I'll have my dad's old jokes and the elegant testimony of Mrs. Van Someren's Psalm 32--okay, like all of ours, maybe a half-note flat.

Brats and blessings -- i

Sunday night's sort of loosey-goosey around here--grab what you makes you salivate, cook it up or spoon it out or spread it--no rituals, pure free agency to get the job done--all of which, for me at least, often enough means hot dogs. My low-brow tastes don't rate with some, but there's no accounting for taste and mine is hot dogs--not cheapies, but good hot dogs.

So I pulled the package out of the drawer--"Johnsonville." They weren't the original Johnsonville brats, the ones known round the world, nor were they hot dogs exactly. Sausages, okay?--little things really. Grab a bun, nuke it and the brat, and in my book you're on your way to a sumptuous Sunday night.

"John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE. John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE."

Those already cooked brats conjured that line from a memory vault that seems full of things I didn't deliberately plant there, things that rise like the nubbins out back about to resurrect again if the temps ever warm. I didn't ask for that line to return, I didn't sit and think about it, my dad's voice just leaped out of that vault unbidden but perfectly in tact, as if it were yesterday we were coming past the Johnsonville shop: "John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE. John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE."  

That odd storage unit kicked out my dad's voice, prompted by nothing more than the label on those already-cooked brats. Dad was reading the neon sign on the shop across the tracks on Indiana Avenue, Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He was driving us back from Sheboygan, the city, to Oostburg, where we lived.

When we'd pass Johnsonville Meats, the birthplace of Johsonville brats, THE Johnsonville brats, the company that today sells the quintessential Sheboygan brats to 45 countries around the world, that neon sign out front ran the three parts of the butcher shop's name consecutively: "John-son-ville, JOHNSONVILLE," which my dad would say, musically, predictably, time and time again. But it wasn't just the sign that arose from my memory, it was Dad making it funny from up there behind the wheel. Sixty years ago, a lifetime ago.

That was the second such revelation from the deep to appear spiritually in my consciousness yesterday. The first was Psalm 32, not the psalm itself, but the hymn, which I don't believe I've sung in church for decades. Well, on the Sabbath  yesterday, we did, startlingly. I grew up on church hymnody comprised mostly of the psalms. Despite the fact that I hadn't sung that old psalm for years, somewhere in the recesses of my brain--and heart--it had never left.

So let the godly seek thee
In times when thou art near;
No whelming floods shall reach them,
Nor cause their hearts to fear.
In thee, O Lord, I hide me,
Thou savest me from ill,
And songs of thy salvation
My heart with rapture thrill.

That's the third verse! I knew every word. I don't know that I could have recited it before the lyrics appeared on the screen, but they weren't in the least unfamiliar. "Whelming floods"--sure. Swept me right back to my boyhood.

An old psalm is a long haul from smoked brats, but the inspiration is somehow grounded in psychic events that occur to all of us I'm sure, when suddenly some totally forgotten memory appears in neon across the face of our perceptions and interrupts the march of time we're all on, takes us back instead to some nondescript moment we're startled to realize we've not seemed to have forgotten--something as banal as a stuttering neon sign on a butcher shop, or something as sacred as hiding in the Lord.

(more tomorrow)

Sunday Morning Meds--Day after Day

 

“Day unto day they pour forth speech; 

night after night they display knowledge.” Psalm 19:2

In Psalm 19, and in this verse particularly, David is not given to hyperbole or flashing some kind of poetic license. He’s right, and he’s not stretching things. What he’s established in the opening line is that God himself can be seen and heard in the sheer expansive beauty of the heavens. A prairie landscape is the voice of God, he says, and that voice is there all the time, day after day and night after night, music that never stops, a celebration as eternal as anything this world can deliver. And it all speaks of Him. Isn’t it glorious? That’s what David is saying.

What makes him hammer the point home in verse two may well be that he can’t seem to believe it himself. Literally, God Almighty has created a canopy of praise that is always there over our heads, soaring above us all the time. “Day after day,” he says, as if we just don’t get it. “Night after night,” he says, as if none of us are really paying attention. Stop your infernal toiling and spinning once in a while, he says, and look up, for heavens sake.

In an essay titled “Gypsies,” Anne Lamott, in her own inimitable fashion, ridicules herself for being so infernally self-possessed. If she hasn’t already arrived, she’s dreadfully close to middle-age, she says, and, when she sees herself in a mirror, she finds the tell-tale earmarks terrifying (“triangles of fat that pooch at the top of my thighs”).

Some of her friends ask her to come along to a movie about gypsies, and she does, albeit reluctantly, because she says she’s too angry about her aging body; she would have preferred “an action movie, something with some tasteful violence.”

But the movie they attend brings her joy because she sees old gypsy women dancing with a level of measured self-abandon that she knows she needs. What she sees in their eyes is a portrait of the equanimity which promises to be ours, I think, if we let it: “the beauty of having come through.” Honestly, some of us long ago stopped fearing class reunions.

The movie she watched, like the heavens, are to Ms. Lamott the very voice of God. What she sees is exactly the skin cream she needs, not to cover the wrinkles, but to bless them. Those old dancing women remind her that she is, like them, becoming sanctified. Those old dancing women make her crows feet smile. Here’s the way she puts it:

Coming out of the movie that night, I realized that I want what the crones have: time for all those long, deep breaths, time to watch more closely, time to learn to enjoy what I’ve always been afraid of—the sag and the invisibility, the ease of understanding that life is not about doing.

David the poet-king would like those words, I think, because the everyday-ness of God’s voice above us is as startling as it can be only because we don’t pay attention, because I don’t pay attention, because, like Anne Lamott, I’m still believing that life is about doing and not about being, far more about proving myself and getting things done than it is about simply watching the sky.

Someday. Someday soon, maybe, we’ll all look up more often, because He’s always there preaching. I can’t believe it, and neither can David.

The heavens are declaring right now, he says, this very instant, and they’re not about to quit, if we only stop, and look, and listen. Day after day after day. . .

A Tale of Two Guvs

This is a tale of two governors, two Republicans, two conservative Republican governors, both of them besieged by a constituency with fear in their hearts and minds, a very specific fear that boys would deliberately fake their maleness in order to compete in girls'--womens'--athletics and then swim faster and jump higher than all their female competitors, doing all of that in order to gain prestige or glory or fame or whatever.

Two governors. Two states. Same worried and grieved constituency.

One of them, Governor Kim Reynolds of Iowa, recently signed a bill that prohibits transgender females from participating in girls high school sports and women’s college athletics. Like a great politician, she turned the signing into a photo op, surrounding herself with brightly smiling young ladies. “No amount of talent, training or effort can make up for the natural physical advantages males have over females. It’s simply a reality of human biology,” so said Gov. Reynolds to all those justice-seeking young women. “Forcing females to compete against males is the opposite of inclusivity and it’s absolutely unfair.” 

A matter of justice, she called it, a matter of gender, a matter of fighting off the injustice of trans athletes competing against the plague of gender-busting boys, hungry for athletic trophies.

Her signing was a proud spectacle for Iowa conservatives, who had, with the governor's signature, successfully fought off the evil wokeness of the libs--and, in a stroke of genius, created in the minds of her immediate audience there in the office, an abiding sense of the righteousness of her--and their--position on this whole "trans" mess.

Did I mention an election coming up in a few month?

Have a look. That signing was just totally wholesome, all those young women learning justice and the American way. Look at those two little cuties just to the right of the Guv. Isn't that darling? They're learning how to keep those evil trans kids out.



Now have a look at this bald man. This is Governor Spencer Cox, of Utah. He's not signing a bill. He's not surrounded by a bevy of beautiful blonde young women, although he could have been--Utah is pretty much like Iowa, after all. Gov. Cox's constituency is just as conservative, maybe more so. For the record, in 2020,Trump won Utah with 58.1% of the vote, a margin of 20.5%. In Iowa, Trump bested Joe Biden, 53.1% to 44.9, which suggests that Utah may well be an even more conservative state than Iowa.

It might surprise you to learn that Governor Spencer Cox of Utah not only didn't surround himself by darling young women, he chose not to sign a similar bill at all. Yes, he's a Republican. Yes, he's conservative. I'm guessing, in Utah, he's also God-fearing. But he told the press he had other priorities than holding off a hoard of so-called "trans" young men looking to take state championships in women's sports.

Gov. Cox had significant concerns about the mental health of transgender kids. As he explained when he vetoed the bill, he was struck by several numbers--for instance, that 86 percent of trans youth have reported thoughts of suicide and 56 percent have reported a suicide attempt. Meanwhile, he explained that of the 75,000 high school kids who play high school sports in the Utah, only four are openly transgender, and of that four only one student plays on a girls’ team.

“Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what this is all about,” Cox wrote. “Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are part of something.”

But hold the fort. The Utah legislature swears it will override Governor Cox's veto. They simply won't have boys taking over girls sports in Utah. No way.

Utah looks a lot like Iowa, I'm thinking. When the legislature overrides his veto, they can gather a whole bunch of high school girls together--throw in a couple of kindergartners, too--to celebrate a righteous victory over the lib malaise that's threatening our freedoms.

Thank goodness.

Prairie Fire

 

They're making it. Fruit trees and bushes are growing up all over the homestead. A solid sod house stands behind them, a home to be proud of, even a spacious wooden barn out back. The family is all out front too for this portrait--Dad, Mom, a son and two daughters, all able family members. When there's work to be done on the homestead, there are enough hands to get it done and done well.

That's what they're telling the people who will receive this picture in the mail. "You were worried about us, maybe? Try not. We're doing very well out here."

Who knows where they came from? May have been New York, may have been Michigan, may have been Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands. May have been from almost anywhere, but right now they're almost literally and handsomely entrenched on 160-acres somewhere on that ocean of grass that's become, for them, a home.

They're not home free, however. Yesterday, my son sent a video of him fighting a grass fire that consumed three homes in Oklahoma, where he works as a fireman. This morning, right here--Alton, Iowa--there's a weather alert, even though we've just been kissed by two days of welcome wintery mix. We're in a "fire watch," from 4:00 this morning to 9:00 tonight: "gusty winds and low humidity will impact any fires that develop to likely spread rapidly. Outdoor burning is not recommended."

Quite frankly, it's hard to take that warning seriously, because it's difficult to imagine a a raging prairie fire. But prairie fires have a history here, where a sea of land was once nothing but grass. Prairie fires could consume entire townships, entire counties--and, terrifyingly, everything in them. . .everything, including this family's substantial start on the American dream. In twenty minutes, it could all go up in flames--and did.

I wrote this story after finding it in the history of a Holland, Nebraska, a Dutch settlements created just after the Civil War just south of Lincoln. It's a tragedy, one of the darkest stories in five years of Small Wonders; but it's part of our history here on the emerald edge of the Great Plains. 

https://www.kwit.org/post/fire-loss-and-what-cannot-be-said

Now available on Amazon (just click here).

Our Witness

Michael O'Keefe and OCU

Michael O'Keefe taught graphic design at Oklahoma Christian University for 41 years. No more. Less than a month ago, he was fired. Some students--it's unclear how many--were offended by words a guest speaker used in O'Keefe's class, words the speaker--who'd taught part-time at the Oklahoma Christian and was himself an alum--warned them he'd be using as he detailed the uniqueness of his life.

O'Keefe wanted his soon-t0-be-graduating seniors to recognize what students might encounter when they graduate, if they determine to live by a different code than others in their field. One of the speakers, the one who used graphic language to explain himself and his story, was gay. 

O'Keefe was summarily dismissed. Ostensibly, someone else is leading the class he was teaching. He's no longer welcome on campus. 

Do the math. O'Keefe couldn't have all that many years left before retirement. 

It was a tough job Christ had--I mean the sacrifice, the excruciating pain of separation from God, the pitiless humiliation of the cross. But he'd also suffered from the outrageous condemnation of the local religious authorities, the Pharisees, who had long ago determined the proper limits of an approved religious life. It was  meticulously outlined, then proclaimed, and determinedly enforced. Good religious people weren't to associate with sinners--with tax collectors, with fallen women, with--yucch!--Samaritans. That wasn't at all kosher. It was verboten. Don't even think about it.

See what's happening in this cartoon drawing from The Naked Pastor? Six of us are carefully drawing in lines that help us gain a certain righteous exclusivity. We're each outlining a fortress into which we--and we alone--can live. The lines are walls; we mark off what's exclusively ours, lines that allow us to believe that we can hold off the claims of the Devil, sin itself. 

And that guy in the middle, in the crown? That's Jesus Christ, who is unmistakably erasing the lines we draw on the concrete. 

I grew up at the end of an era, a time when stock traders were thought to be speculators and gamblers. They could be church members, but they certainly couldn't hold church office because they dealt in dealing. 

I grew up at the end of an era when public confession of sin was a thought to be the earmark of a true church. I once saw a pregnant young woman standing at the front of the church undergoing what the elders claimed was "church discipline."

I grew up at the end of an era when divorce was so evil that those who left their marriages thereby lost their place at communion. 

I grew up at the end of a time when most of the righteous people in my church did not--glory be! would not--turn on a television on the Sabbath. 

I grew up at the end of an era when the college I attended told student dorm counselors to, come the Sabbath, put tape over the coin slots on pop machines, at the end of an era when dancing was strictly verboten, when a 26-year-old student was put on probation because someone from town had seen him, in a restaurant 20 miles away, having a glass of wine with his meal. 

I grew up at the end of an era when lots of people looked exactly like the half-dozen of us in the picture above, when drawing lines meant to define what was good and proper and what wasn't seemed an admirable characteristic of most Christian fellowships, when Christians students from Wheaton were appalled by Christian students at Calvin holding cigarettes, but when Christian students at Calvin were appalled by Christian students at Wheaton who frequented restaurants on the Sabbath.

I can't help but think that the LBGTQ horrors evangelicals confront today is what's outside the boxes we're working so hard to draw in. 

Isn't it wonderful that Oklahoma Christian feels itself a bit more righteous today because it so decisively acted to keep its students pure? 

I'm saying we've seen it all before. We call O'Keefe's firing "a witness" because it is. 

Of what? That's the very difficult question that has no easy answers.

(continued from yesterday) 

It's time, she tells herself, to go theological herself, and press the pedal to the metal. "Okay," she says to her husband's stubbornness, "if all of Abe's sins were forgiven on Calvary, then that forgiveness includes all his iniquities--including his last one." If she's not arguing the truth about forgiveness, she thinks, then, well, her Calvinist husband is buying into the whole "works righteousness" argument, the heretical idea that we are ourselves responsible for our own salvation. She knows her husband can't buy "free will." It's like totally un-Calvinistic. "Nobody gets saved because of asking/or not asking," she says, "but because God is merciful."

Then she stumbles. "Though I admit," she says, "that people usually ask." That line "cost her," Sietze says, and allows her father to swing back: "Where the tree falleth, there let it lie."

To Mom, Abe in hell is still unthinkable. She adjusts her footwork by trying to argue redundancy, although Sietze senses she's on thin ice. If, by grace, our sins are forever forgiven, then we honestly don't need to ask forgiveness anyway, she says--or something to that effect. It simply can't be true that his final act with that shotgun nullifies his salvation simply because he didn't ask for forgiveness? "If asking forgiveness/ for sins already forgiven is proper, then praying/ for Abe is also proper. We shouldn't take any/ of God's mercies for granted."

The logic is strained. All three of them understand she's losing.

That's when Mom gives up the theology and goes after her husband's own struggles, his own sadness. He hasn't taken a bite of his pork chop. He's forgotten to eat. His supper is getting cold, she says, because all of this is horribly painful. "Look at you," she says, "you haven't eaten your pork chop." You're just as consumed by Abe's suicide as I am. Don't hide behind scripture.

She knows why he's just been stripped naked. Finally, the whole business of salvation is completely and undeniably unknowable. She plays the ace or the Rook card, goes to the book of Psalms, 145:2: "God greatness is unsearchable." That, she says, is the bottom line. It's not wrong to pray for Abe because, you know, we can't know everything. We aren't God, and He is. 

Here's how Sietze tells it. "Yet the unsearchableness/of God raised the debate above whether any Protestant/had ever done this before or what would the preacher say if we told him." 

His mother took the argument into the rarified air of the divine nature of God. We can't know because "God's greatness is unsearchable."  "Abe will go wherever God/ has planned," his mother says, "but is it impossible that God/has also planned that Abe will join/the other saints again in answer/to our prayer? Then how can we refuse to pray?"

End of story. 

It's Sietze who asks, in reflection, whether his father remembers the one night he prayed for the dead: "Be as gracious/to our friend Abe as your decrees/and righteousness will allow, and help/us all to enter in at the strait gate, Amen."

"Was it, you, or God who worked that miracle?" he asks his mother, before all three began to pick on their cold porkchops.

The elaborate theology of the poem brought them no comfort. The two pugilists, and their son the non-combatant, finally break bread together only when they gather beneath their mutual belief in God's unsearchable greatness, which is to say, blessedly, that their only comfort is that they all--even Abe the suicide--belong to a God who's greatness is unsearchable.

My kids didn't really get it all that much, didn't love the show, didn't really follow all that silly theology. They didn't grow up in a similar world, even though just about all their friends had monstrous Dutch names. 

The characters in Purpaleanie are drawn from a time and a place that's can't and won't be replicated. The only real constant is change. 

But me?--I hear the arguments that night in Sietze's dining room, and I can't help enjoying it. I know the territory, the expressive theology. But I also know the humanness, and, like Sietze's mother, I can't help believing that God's greatness is unsearchable.