Morning Thanks--Commencements

I don't remember who delivered the commencement address at Dordt College in 1970. It was someone from the Reformed faith, I'm quite sure, since the only really distinguished visiting scholars were men (an occasional woman) with recognizably Dutch last names. 

I don't remember enrobing, or donning the cap or fixing the tassel--that's all gone. In some file drawer down here there's a diploma that documents the fact that in May, 1970, I graduated from college.

I'm sure there were faculty in the parade who were thankful for my leaving. In a way, so was I. The country seemed coming apart, maybe more dangerously even than today. The Vietnam War was raging. On campuses all around the country, there were no grad parties because there were no grads. Many universities shut down because of the very real possibility of violent confrontations. At Dordt, the vast majority of kids were Nixonian.

At Kent State, not even a month before, four students were shot when National Guard troops opened fire on an anti-war protest that had grown out of hand. I'd been to Washington to protest those deaths, even though I'd just recently officially flunked my draft physical for a heart condition I barely knew I had.

My relationship with a young woman had ended a few months before, and I had no job. It seemed to me then that I was retreating to Wisconsin, the country from whence I'd come four years before, and I'd be carrying with me nothing more than that diploma. I hadn't done any kind of job hunt--I had a teaching degree--the specter of the draft kept me from looking. Truth be told, I didn't know what I wanted.  

All of that may explain how it is that the single image I remember from a Dordt College graduation in 1970 is a late night stroll through a women's dorm to bring some female friends back from a little party we had in Sioux City--a few drinks, a dance, just a handful of kids, some grads, some not. 

The only lights were dim in a hallway that seemed haunted. Burly bundles were strewn before every door, where students, as directed, had left their sheets and pillow cases. In the darkness, in my imagination those bundles somehow resembled bodies.

The only real haunted-ness is what I felt in my heart just then. I'd been at this place for four years, doing the standard college kid stuff and then some. I'd be graduating the next morning, leaving yet that afternoon; and I had very little to show for it, or so it seemed in the graveyard hallway of  shadowy corpses. 

Oddly enough, I'm thankful for that memory. At the time, it was painful, but when I think of that moment now it appears as a torturous moment of vital growth. What I knew the next day, going home, was that, wherever I'd been, whatever I'd done, I now had to start something brand new. I was no longer welcome at the college I'd attended for four years. I'd graduated. I was handed a diploma at my own "commencement." I had to start over, and I'd be alone doing it--it would be my job, my office, my calling (I had a Calvinistic education) to determine where this life of mine was bound. That hallway cemetery was scary, but essential.

Today, I'll march down the aisle at another Dordt graduation, this one 53 years later. I've done it often before, of course; but it's been ten years since I retired as a faculty member of the institution where I had matriculated so many years ago. But, 53 years later, I've got good reason to "join the throng." After all, two of my grandchildren are graduating. I'm deeply and sincerely thankful. 

I hope their memories of graduation are as long-lasting as mine. I hope their memories will be sweeter, but no less significant. Today, the two of them will set out to determine that character of the lives they will live in the presence of God and a loving family. Maybe painful, but finally crucial to "calling."

This morning I'll don a robe, pull on one of those goofy hats with a tassel, and march one more time with a faculty full of men and women I don't know. 

But I know two of grads very well, and love them both. For them, on this important morning of their lives, I'm greatly thankful.

A Model of Christian Charity (and Scholarship)

I owe an apology to literally hundreds of students, not because I somehow shipwrecked their lives or clouded their futures, but because I sold them a line on American history that was somehow blessedly wrong. In my case, the mistake was a kind of blessing because that error in thinking allowed an important investigation into theology and its effects on a society and nation, no mean commodity in Christian higher education. 

Answer me this: where does "American" history begin?  1620--Plymouth Rock, you say, the pilgrims. . .you know, Thanksgiving and all of that. American history begins in multiple dreams of freedoms--freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom to start anew, to begin a life without prejudice. 

Could be. It's as good an answer as any other, but why not say it begins with Jamestown, a Virginia colony in the new country, an enterprise that predates Plymouth? Or better yet, why don't we say that American history begins with what was here long before 1608 or 1620? Why don't we begin to teach an American history or the history of American literature that begins with the First Nations? Why has American education so steadfastly created a story that begins with New England Calvinists? Why, through forty years of teaching early American literature, did I?

There are several answers, good answers, to that question. For instance, there were vastly more educated men in New England by the end of the 17th century than there were anywhere else. Educated men write. There's more literature in New England than Virginia. Jamestown didn't grow as abundantly, and never really demonstrated a dedicated mission other than to make its economic sponsors money. If there's a story there, it's mostly about good, old-fashioned capitalism.

Native America? Just about every one of those early colonizers saw the Natives as "in the way," a sad and savage people who didn't know how to farm, how to work, how to make money, people who were, therefore expendable. Start the story with Indians? Don't be silly. 

Abram Van Engen's City on a Hill is its own kind of detective novel. Van Engen, who holds the Stanley Elkins Chair at Washington University in St. Louis, has written a richly researched study of origins, most specifically, the origins of America's story. 

Van Engen's title isn't at all unfamiliar. When I hear "a city on a hill," I think of President Ronald Reagan; but then, you might think of President Barack Obama. That single, famous phrase has gained as much currency in discussions of American progress as any. Van Engen, obviously, agrees.

But what he does in City on a Hill is examine not only the source of the line (from a long "sermon" once preached by a Puritan layman named John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony), but also the line itself in a book that has literary character--it examines a text closely--in a backdrop of pertinent but largely unnoted American history. It's an incredible study--readable and wise, with a plot that, just a few pages in, come to own your attention.

What Van Engen's meticulous scholarship has done is unpack that famous Winthrop line. But it also reveals, shockingly, how recently that almighty phrase has come to reign in the kingdom of American exceptionalism. Very, very few Americans had even read that sermon in the nation's first 150 years. Today, a single line from that sermon has built its own fortress in American politics.

Furthermore, when Van Engen examines the entire sermon--a read few take on, despite the popularity of that single phrase--what he finds is a "Model of Christian Charity" a vast number of contemporary readers would find embarrassingly socialistic, Winthrop hammering away at the importance, in a Christian society, of dispensing every form of justice--even economic--equally. Of course, no one talks much about the Winthrop's economic sermon.

There's so much in Van Engen's study that I've not mentioned, but I can't help ending with a long quote that addresses the topic he's been playing with throughout this fascinating study, a personal assessment of how that famous phrase, "a city on the hill," operates today, in the Trump era.

In the age of Donald Trump. . .A Model of Christian Charity [the text in question] seems to have moved into a new phase. Whereas it once served as the opening text in a tale of American exceptionalism embraced by the Right and adapted by the Left, it now (as of early 2019) serves primarily as a wedge text between two types of conservatives. It separates the Reagan remnant from the tribe of Trump. More than any other document, it seems, Winthrop's sermon isolates the striking differences between American exceptionalism and America first. 

But you shouldn't think of Abram Van Engen as starkly political. He goes on to say this:

In one form of rhetoric, an American story beginning in Puritan New England made the United States the leading player in a divinely guided history of liberty, leading the world to redemption by modeling and spreading any number of national values. In the other form of rhetoric, the United States has the same two values as every other nation: sovereignty and self-interest, which aim at nothing other than what everyone everywhere is presumed to want--material wealth.

The City on a Hill is itself a grad school course created out of a single line we've drawn from a long sermon by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a Puritan in mind, soul, and body. But, don't be mistaken. By revealing the history of that line and the sermon, and in defining and describing the myriad uses we have made of it, Abram Van Engen's book is really talking about us as a nation, and us, the people, individual citizens and human beings, within it.   

Morning Thanks--for the season

 

I'd say "they're back," but in truth they've never left, just taken on some darker fashion choices for the winter. "They just seem especially bright this spring," someone said last night. 

I doubt it. I'm guessing they're no more kin-to-the-sun as they've ever been; it's just that with their return--they're the Iowa State Bird after all--we've all now entered something approximating summer. I know, I know--it's in June, at least another month officially. No matter, if you live in the region, you can't help but think that happy days are here, after three or four absolute blessings in a row, now and then a sweet interval of rain, too yet.

Makes me happy to be an Iowan. Look at this guy! You can't help but be tickled it's spring. 

And this guy too, although for him Siouxland isn't home. Won't be long and that bright orange plumages will grace someone else's backyard feeder. Still, that he gives us a week or so, is a sure sign of grace.

And the backyard's shaping up under a sunshine quilt. In the city down the road, the tulips up and down the streets are promising to be breath-taking for festival time next week. 

It's almost summer, and the what's outside my window has reopened to the big colorful world all around. It's wonderful, and I'm thankful. 

Fanny Crosby and Slim Buttes

It's that season again when, out back, whacking weeds almost daily, I'm accosted by Sunday School songs seeping into my consciousness from some deep corner of my memory, ne'er forgotten ditties we sang every morning of those eight years I spent in the little Christian school a block from home.

They sneak out in all shapes and sizes, often in full regalia--"Give me oil in my lamp," "The Ninety and Nine." "Dare to be a Daniel." I don't conjure any of them. They're just there. Some old tune ambles along, unbidden as dreams, full of rhyme. I'm not transported to some long-gone grade school classroom. There are no visuals, really. For no odd reason, suddenly I'm singing something ancient.

Last week's featured selection came from post-WWII era--"Onward Christian Soldiers" or "Stand Up for Jesus," old faves that Sunday School kids like me adored, kids whose dads were just home from war. This morning's has an ungainly title--"Conquering Now and Still to Conquer." It's all about combat troops and advancing battle lines. (Feel free to sing along.)

Conquering now and still to conquer,
Rideth a King in His might;
Leading the host of all the faithful
Into the midst of the fight;

The idea that the Christian life is a fight isn't old hat, but most Sunday School teachers today wouldn't choose that old hymn right about now--Lord knows we've already got too many guns.

Anyway, that old hymn emerged from some primal ooze in my memory, an old Fanny Crosby tune, whose flighty arpeggios--two of them each in the first and third lines--must have made "Conquering" a favorite of old piano teachers like my mom. It just appeared, no cause or reason. For a time, unconsciously, I sang along--

See them with courage advancing,
Clad in their brilliant array,
Shouting the Name of their Leader,
Hear them exultingly say:

--and then the chorus, first time in years:

Not to the strong is the battle,
Not to the swift is the race,
Yet to the true and the faithful
Vict’ry is promised through grace.

My muscles flex. Youth returns. I'm suddenly capable of another half-hour on my knees in the hot sun. Fanny Crosby plays, and I'm caught in the march just as I once upon a time must have been.

What came to mind, strangely enough, was a hide drawing in the local museum, a story some Lakota storyteller once told in paint--a surprise cavalry attack on a Native village. Many died--the unsparing pictures are grisly, women and children bleeding and dying.

"Who won?" some kid asked me on a tour a year or so ago.

The fight the hide painting commemorates "the Battle of Slim Buttes," first engagement after Little Big Horn. Took place in far, far northwest South Dakota. I told the kid battle was not a Lakota victory.

He pointed to the bottom of the painting. "All these ones are winning," he said. In four pictures of hand-to-hand combat, Lakota warriors are most definitely handling the attacking cavalry.

The fight as pictured on the hide features horrific carnage, bloody death in a cavalry unit's surprise attack. Still, individually at least, defiant warriors show their mettle. In those hand-t0-hand struggles, the white men are bloodied, dying. The kid was right.

Why show the Native guys winning? Because who's telling the story makes a ton of difference.  The cavalry would assess what happened by numbers of fatalities, but the Lakota, a warrior society, placed emphasis on valor and courage and dignity. Victory was not assessed by comparing the numbers of casualties, but by the fortitude of those who fought the good fight.

Not to the strong is the battle,
Not to the swift is the race;
But to the true and the faithful
Victory is promised through grace.

Amazing, or so it seemed as I was out there picking weeds. The old Fanny Crosby hymn that arose out of nowhere bespeaks a spiritual victory, a moral that is, strangely enough, as Native as it is Christian: to the true and the faithful victory is promised through grace.

Heresy? I suppose. But I couldn't help thinking the comparison was worth noting. You want to understand the obvious discrepancies in that hide painting's storytelling? --think "Conquering Now and Still to Conquer." Think Fanny Crosby.

That's reason enough to smile, even when you're out picking weeds.

An apology and a footnote to Kuyper

You can call them my words, and they likely are; but the ideas belong to Abraham Kuyper, around whose writing many of my ancestors organized their lives. Kuyper was an ordained pastor, but he wasn't afraid of leaving the pulpit to enter the political fracas of his time in turn-of-the-century Holland, not at all shy, so forward, in fact, that he served the Netherlands as its Prime Minister. 

Here's the passage we just read last night, my words, kind of--

Today, in the public square, faith is frequently shunned. Many people believe faith in God is barbaric, a remnant silliness of the dark ages. There may have been a time when belief could more easily prosper in the marketplace, but in today's world, faith is scorned. 

It's embarrassing to read that. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Kuyper was right in 1906, and, after a fashion, I wasn't wrong almost a century later. But these days we inhabit a different world, a world where faith is no longer silly.

Congressman Keith Self, who represents the suburbs north of Dallas where the latest mass shooting occurred, was asked on Saturday what he felt about doing something to stop the blood-bath, specifically of the criticism of people like himself, who only offer "thoughts and prayers." He ripped on such pols from his own religious point of view. "Those are people who don't believe in an almighty God who is absolutely in control of our lives." Then he added, "I'm a Christian--I believe that He is."

That his Pharisaic claim is dead wrong doesn't need to be said. Fervent believers line every division in the land. The congressman may well believe in "thoughts and prayers," but what he cannot do is impugn the faith of those of us who say that, given the madness today, "thoughts and prayers" are not enough. Can we talk about some form of political action?

When Kuyper wrote the meditations that became Nabij God te Zijn (To Be Near Unto God) in 1908, he was writing during what some call "the modern age," a time when questions of faith were often thought "remnant silliness of the dark ages," when human reason was advanced to help humanity escape "barbaric" clutches of the old-time religion. 

When we read that passage last night, I couldn't help feeling I needed to apologize. The world around us has changed immensely. These days, nothing could be farther from the truth, and the proof is clear: Congressman Keith Self wasn't risking anything but laying claim to his own deep Christian faith, and in what he assesses as the faithlessness of those who don't share his politics. With his conservative voting public, he had much to gain by saying what he did.

I paraphrased Near Unto God because I came heir to my grandfather's copy in a translation stilted with an old-fashioned, dominie-like, style, hardly readable today. If I were to paraphrase those meditations, I told myself, there might well be  believers who would not only appreciate them but grow from what Abraham Kuyper had to say in a book that lots of Dutch immigrants took with them when they came to America.

The general revulsion at faith of any kind, what Kuyper saw around him and what I didn't question when I paraphrased his work, was that just a few years down the line the selection of Donald Trump as a candidate for President of these United States--two, maybe three times--would be a result of outspoken "religious" people like Rep. Keith Self and Sen. Ted Cruz, people who call themselves "evangelicals." As long as ex-President Donald Trump draws breath, those evangelicals are in power.

Do some believe those Christians to be barbaric? Yes. But are they thought to be so because they believe in God? No.  

Religious faith itself is not scorned or shunned in our world today. It would be good for evangelicals to accept that truth. Congressman Self hasn't. Today faith isn't derided or disdained. It's often greatly lauded--the congressman knew very well he would stand to gain ground with his own constituency by saying what he did. 

The movement, some say, is from "the Modern Age" into "the Post-Modern Age." 

Whatever it is, that passage in the very first meditation requires a footnote.

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 90

“May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us;. . .”

One of my grandmother’s older sister, I’m told, had had a very difficult life in the early years of the 20th century. She’d had two children, one of whom died as a child—I don’t know why, and neither does anyone else, now, a century later. Grandma’s sister’s name was Cora Formsma, and her husband was a salesman in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One day, without explanation or seeming cause, Cora’s husband, handsome and dynamic, simply walked away and never returned, left his wife and only child.

That child, a daughter, went off to college—unusual for the early years of the century, but then Cora’s father had been a professor. At college she met a bright young man with a distinguished academic future. They fell in love, and when he was in graduate school at the University of Michigan and getting himself financially stable, the two of them planned marriage. Unexpectedly, Cora Formsma’s daughter, soon to be a bride, came down with a strange disease and died soon after, leaving Cora, wife and mother, alone.

I heard that story from an aunt, who remembered being told as a child.

There’s more. Some time later, Cora herself died. And when her relatives looked through her belongings—there were no heirs and no spouse—they found a letter in her desk addressed to the man who had abandoned her, a letter Cora had written, knowing that someday she would die and hoping that maybe something of her would find its way to him. That letter, my aunt told me, explained to him that she loved him so much that, after he left, every night she’d stay awake until she’d heard the wheels of the last Wealthy Street trolley move slowly away into the night.

That sound of those steel wheels—a screaming I never heard—stays with me nonetheless, carrying the portrait of a wife who buried her only two children, but still waited, every night, for the last trolley, hoping to hear her husband’s footfalls coming up the sidewalk to the door of her oh-so-empty home.

My aunt told that story for another reason—she wanted to describe my grandmother, a woman I never knew.

 Because there is still more. On the walls of my grandmother’s bedroom, she kept a collection of pictures of her family, including a snapshot of her sister, Cora Formsma, and her two small children. When Grandma was dying, and suffering—according to the aunt who told me this—she looked across the room and saw that picture, then asked if someone would please turn it away from her because the sight of her sister brought back the pain and sadness of a story that broke her heart even on her death bed.

Most translations offer verse 17 of Psalm 90 this way—“may the beauty of the Lord shine upon us.” I don’t doubt for a moment that’s what my grandmother wanted, only the beauty of the Lord. Clearly, it’s what Moses wanted, not only for himself, but for his people. This poem, Psalm 90, arises in his parched soul from far too many Aunt Cora stories out there in the desert. The beauty of the Lord is what Grandma wanted, and what Moses wanted—the beauty of the Lord shining all around.

Don’t we all? Some of that beauty is here in the almost forbidding darkness of this great Psalm from the soul of Moses, some of the radiance of God’s divine beauty is here in the poem.

It’s here. Read it for yourself.

The Land of Standing Bear

There's a bridge out there, barely visible from here. It's far right, half way up the picture. "The bridge to nowhere" some call it because it is, very little population on either side. It's given name is The Standing Bear Bridge.

What's before you is the Missouri River, at a place I've grown to love, where the Niobrara River runs into Big Muddy. Right here, in the vicinity of Niobrara, Nebraska, the longest river in North America looks more like it did before the dams than it does anywhere on its course to St. Louis today. This is the Missouri of Lewis and Clark.

That's an Episcopal church down there at the river's edge, the Church of Our Most Merciful Savior, built here in 1884, when a significantly bigger mission enterprise burned down. 

It's in remarkably good shape, although showing its age. The Santee people who live on the reservation consider it theirs--and it is. It's been here since the Santees left Crow Creek and moved here, a hundred miles south to the river's edge, leaving little but suffering and death behind. The Santees gained most-hated status in Minnesota after their own "uprising" in a bloody month-long war, "the Dakota War of 1862." Many of the Santees ended up here, where those gorgeous sandstone cliffs along the Missouri greeted them with every dawn. 

This is the land of Spotted Tail, the Ponca chief who went to court to argue for the right to be a human being under the law, and that's Spotted Tail, standing in the Statuary of the Capital in D. C.

In The River and I, John Neihardt narrates his long trek down the Missouri in a canoe, accompanied by his brother. He cannot help but note what he sees when h e comes by a place not unlike Running Water, South Dakota, where these proud sandstone bluffs stand royally along the river.

In the lazy heat of the mounting sun, tempered by the cool river draught, the yellow sandstone bluffs, whimsically decorated with sparse patches of greenery seemed to waver, as if seen through shimmering silken gauze. 

I stopped reading right there and told myself that while I hadn't seen what Neihardt did from the river's edge, I've been blessed with the imagination to see it as he did. I know what the river looks when it gathers offers anyone who cares to look little more than sheer awe. I know. 

"Reconciliation"

Native activist Mark Charles likes to say that the word reconciliation doesn't really apply in movements or attempts to bring Indigenous people together with the those who, even long ago, colonized land that simply wasn't theirs, land that belonged to First Nations. After all, there can't be re-conciliation where there never was cooperation or conciliation; you can't rebuild something never constructed. Therefore the two peoples--colonials and the those they displaced--need to work at conciliation, bringing people together who have never been.

Start where you will--Jamestown or Plymouth Rock--relations between Native tribes and Europeans pouring into "the new world" were never all that loving, despite our turkey-and-gravy Thanksgiving fantasies. White folks took land that wasn't theirs to take, and did so with religious intensity. "Manifest Destiny," the belief that "the new world," in its entirety simply belonged to those who would farm it, nurture it to its own full economic potential, made unmistakably clear that this land belonged to the able-bodied immigrant peoples "yearning to be free."  Ours was a destiny that was clearly manifest, quite simply, in this new nation's land mass--"of course it's ours, it's there for the taking."

Call it what you will: when it seems that something good and lasting can be redeemed from the dark corners of this nation's history, it's always worth noting. And not long ago that's what happened just outside of Philadelphia, when  Mennonite land-owners, whose families had been there for hundreds of years, hosted an Oklahoma tribe, the Delawares, who are looking to bury their ancestors in a homeland once theirs.

The 1990, the Native American Graves and Protection and Repatriation Act created a problem somewhat unforeseen. After the law's passage, museums and universities were required to give back the human remains and funerary items they held to the tribes to whom they rightfully belonged. Tribes greatly appreciated the return, but had to determine what to do with what they were given. For the Delaware (who prefer to be called the Lenape) most of those honored dead likely never lived in Oklahoma.

Discussions began when a noted Mennonite historian, John Ruth, met a Lenape couple, John and Faye Thomas, and began to talk about the dilemma the Oklahoma descendants of Pennsylvania tribal elders faced. To them, space in a Mennonite cemetery wouldn't be satisfactory. The burial ground had to be a place that didn't have meaning to other people.

Just a month ago, on April 12, The Mennonite Heritage Center in Harleysville, Pa., hosted the visit from representatives of the Lenape tribe, and the talks officially began. After a potluck supper with local Mennonites, Chief Brad KillsCrow, tribal elder John Thomas, and tribal historic preservation officer Susan Bachor presented their request: land to bury their ancestors.

“Our ancestors helped you," Mr. Thomas told the crowd of over 100 Mennonites. "Your ancestors helped us. I humbly ask if there is anything you can do.”

And so, the talk has begun. When the public meeting concluded, those who had gathered broke into song, an old favorite. You guessed it--"Blest Be the Tie That Binds."

I'm not sure if Mark Charles would call that reconciliation or conciliation; but even though a month has passed, right now, I'm can't help but think I can still hear that old beloved hymn all these many miles away.

 Lenape meeting with Pennsylvania Mennonite community

"Better Together"

Look--let's be honest. What the denomination I've always been a part of is facing is an issue that has torn just about every other denomination apart. For a number of reasons, the issues raised are immensely difficult. The only faith communities left untouched/unscathed are those whose walls are largely impenetrable by anyone other than the chosen, churches where only sworn members know the right words.

The questions raised by same-sex marriage rise from centuries of denial, centuries of oppression, of gay people hidden away under any convenient bush, no matter how thorny, decades of telling ourselves that being gay is an unfortunate choice some sinners make, that same-sex attraction is as much a sin as drunkenness or infidelity, theft or murder, simply another iniquity that cannot and will not be tolerated in a church whose members swear allegiance to the love of Jesus--and years on end of reading the Bible as a rule book. 

It is that, of course, but it is so very much more.

I hope no one questions my loyalty to the Christian Reformed Church of North America. I am the author of its last published history, and I toured the continent with a staged show that told the denomination's story. For years, members of the church read meditations I wrote for their kids. I taught at a denominationally-affiliated institution of higher learning for decades, almost four. Ever since 1972, I written articles and stories for The Banner, the official magazine of the CRCNA, as well as a number of others. 

Today, however, my politics set me apart from many members. I believe the Trump Presidency ranks as among the most dangerous chapters in the life of the nation. Throughout Covid, I wore a mask when so advised, watched church on-line, and got shots and boosters as recommended. I'm progressive about things politic, a bona fide liberal. I believe in red flags and gun registration. I'm woke. Mostly these days, I vote Democratic. Not always.

I recently joined a new organization of CRC members, an organization calling itself "Better Together: A Third Way." I signed up because I believe in what that fledgling organization is working at building a union that allows for disagreement on issues that will not determine salvation, issues like same-sex marriage.

Just a couple weeks ago I took a number of friends out west to Indigenous reservations; they wanted to know more about Native American history. While we were out and about in South Dakota, I took a few backroads to show them the church where my great-grandparents, immigrant Schaaps, worshipped in the 1890s. That church, Harrison (SD) CRC, is in good shape, but, in size, vastly smaller than it was when many more people set roots on any section of ground. Today Harrison CRC has merged with the local Reformed (RCA) church which, for more than a century, stood just as proudly, and separately, a few blocks away. Decreasing memberships made consolidation the only means of survival. Today they worship together.

I know good people from that church, but I know good people at the church in Michigan too, where a woman living with another woman was voted into the office of deacon. I went to college with Larry Louters, and a member of the council is my daughter's college roommate. 

I know good people throughout the entire denomination, but I fail to understand why the prayerful choice that Michigan church made, standing in a wholly different culture and for their own particular reasons, has to split whatever it is or was that kept those two churches, so unlike each other, together. I can't help but believe we're "better together." There has to be "a third way."

"A Third Way" ran that cover ad (above) on last week's Banner, one of two. This week, "Better Together" was told that the second would not run: "based on the negative reactions we received for the May ad," the Banner editor explained, "it seems that we might have misconstrued the public’s perception of the group."

Presumably, serious and significant numbers of the CRC contacted the Banner office to tell them that working toward peace was somehow perpetuating war. It's very difficult for me to believe, but I do. 

A couple years ago, an aging Lakota tribal elder told me the story of a lesbian girl, a friend, who deliberately lived with the boys in a government boarding school because she wanted to protect her little brother who was also enrolled. This friend of mine spoke of her queer old friend as a hero.

"We honor those people among us," she told me, with clear reference to the differences she understood between my culture and the Two Kettle Lakota to which she belonged. "With good reason, too," she said. "We say those people are specially blessed with a double consciousness." 

Arguing the merits of her assertions isn't my intent here. What is, is that she made clear with the story that her culture, her world, even her faith assessed gay people as with respect, not scorn.

What I can't help thinking this morning is that significant numbers of CRC members, many of whom I know, truly and righteously believe that another group of members devoted to peace-making, "Better Together," really doesn't want peace but something of its opposite. Really?

A church that claims to follow Christ has no room for peace?

T-U-L-I-P Festival

For a half century I've been up in front of people, reading things aloud--stories, essays, meditations. In fact, I've got a thing going right now--I'm recording all the stories from the pen of Ruth Suckow (1892-1960). I'm twelve in, lots more to go. 

So, before yesterday's unique assignment began, it seemed a breeze: just recite a couple of things in front of the screen, send what you record along to us, and we'll use a line or so for one of those compilation videos, a dozen people reciting the Lord's Prayer in bite-sized chunks. You've seen 'em. Just remember, when you do the Lord's Prayer, keep your eyes shut. Sit there in front of your screen and make a video. We'll cut and paste. 

No sweat. 

Then do the same with the first Q and A of the Heidelberg Catechism--everyone's fave--and The Apostles Creed; but for those, go ahead and keep your eyes open. They're not prayers.

Gotcha.

I must have repeated the Lord's Prayer thousands and thousands of times in my 75 years, but, video running, I turned into a nervous Christmas program pre-schooler. I could not get through it. I could not recite it. I'd forget lines, forget where I was, flick off the camera, kick myself around the desk, and go at it again. What comes after "daily bread'? Doggone it!--start over. I even looked the Lord's Prayer up on line, printed it up, and read it over. I'm not making this up. No help. I botched it again. And again. And again. No one to blame but myself.

Finally, I made it through.

Apostles' Creed. Thousands of times I've been over it, written meditations about every line, every phrase. No matter. Soon enough I'd have given away half my fortune for a teleprompter. Time and time again, I looked at my wretched mug on the screen in front of me and simply forgot the next line.

My goodly inheritance includes a predilection for things theological, especially when it comes to Calvinism, that hybrid set of ancient principles often most efficiently explained by the acronym T-U-L-I-P, which I won't unpack now. Message me (just kidding). Each letter represents a principle intimately related to the next. When you play all five, they harmonize--sort of, in a dark way.

I've been around theologians of Calvinistic ilk for my whole life. TULIP was, long ago, sewn into my underwear for sorting and identification, and the first principle, the T, an abbreviation for "Total Depravity," not only begins the hand but looms over all the rest because the two core principles of Calvinism are 1) the sovereignty of God; and 2) the depravity of man. When mixed thoroughly, those two reveal a  self-portrait you won't get from any other camera: it goes like this--without grace, I'm toast. 

(It'll be on the test. You're taking notes, right?).

So cued up within my heart and mind is this ancestral Dutch Calvinist that reminded me, one more time, of the immense legacy of what some describe as "total depravity." Oh, yeah?--you say. Listen to this. I was more than ready to punch the computer, but my ridiculous bumbling wasn't technology's fault. I couldn't recite the Lord's Prayer because I was thinking about me--how I looked, how I sounded, how I was going to play in the compilation. I was listening for the competence of my elocution, one might say in standard highbrow. 

Comes down to this. Yesterday I couldn't pray because I was too concerned about me.

There. Confession, even non-Calvinists would say, is good for the soul. 

You'll be happy to hear that I'm 2/3 finished with this assignment. What remains is the first Q and A of the Heidelberg Catechism, which I couldn't recite even if I wasn't on camera. I'll need comfort, I'm sure.

Stay tuned. 

Conference High Fashion

They're not all alike, thank goodness. There are differences, trust me, but I've just spent an inordinate amount of time among old men in tennis shoes. They come in different colors--the old men and the shoes--but there's a vital consistency among them in the footwear. Call them what you like--keds, sneakers, gym shoes--they adorn the old crooked feet of old crooked men, one of whom I am, and I wear 'em too for obvious reasons--tennis shoes are comfortable, dang it. 

In history conferences 150 miles or so away from each other, in different states, on successive days, I sat (and sometimes spoke) in gatherings that were 90% elderly, men, often enough in sport coats and tennis shoes, and their female counterparts dressed, on the whole, less therapeutically, but some of them in gym shoes too. Do old women not have sore feet? Maybe so; for years, men--many of the xxls--hoisted more weight around town; they're the ones with museum feet.

My experience at two history conferences last weekend is that it's now clearly official--for old retired educators, wearing tennis shoes, even with a tie and sport coat, may not be high fashion, but is perfectly acceptable.

Last weekend I spent some wonderful time lumbering around with old folks at the Center for Western Studies in Sioux Falls and John Neihardt Center, in Bancroft, Nebraska. I may be the only attendee at both, but the crowds who gathered, like their shoes, looked remarkably similar. If the average age of conferees was four score years, then the handwriting is on the wall. The crowd was unmistakably elderly; we could have just as easily avoided the traffic and met at the Home.

It's sad, and it doesn't get said publicly. Neither conference hosted a speaker who outlined the problem, and no one wants to bring it up because simply talking about it is, well, embarrassing and, to be sure, smells like agism. But the truth is that an entire generation of amateur historians, people who love the stories that still rise from the region, people who have read and remembered the epic drama of homesteading, the epic desolation of the Dust Bowl, the epic confrontation of two cultures--one white, one red--with impossibly different definitions of home, those people are tottering. Won't be long and they'll be gone.

Edgar Allen Poe got a lot of mileage out of the concept of a premature burial, in part, because in the earlier years of the 19th century premature burial wasn't all that rare. Such things actually happened. 

But it's not a premature burial they fear. What chills them to the bone--and they'll talk about it over lunch maybe--is what seems the dearth of interest from younger folks and, even more, the sense that higher education has lost its moorings and become so impossibly expensive that it has to, it must, assure graduates of a profession. What scares them is that no one cares about American history or American literature, no one reads Willa Cather or Marie Sandoz, Frederick Manfred or Herbert Krause, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau. There's just no time. What scares them is the sense, in other words, that no one cares about things they care greatly about.

Gym shoes don't do much to help that ache. "Used to be 150 people every Spring Conference," the emcee told me at the Neihardt Center. By the end of the afternoon, there were maybe thirty. "What do ya' do?" he said (we weren't up front). 

I told him I had no easy answers but to keep plugging, keep emceeing, keep up the steep admiration to know more about how in the world people lived in a place where, in twenty minutes, a prairie fire could lay waste to an entire county, where Winnebago warriors successfully held off the powerful Brule Sioux, where an old man in a white beard crawled 200 miles to get revenge on the kid who'd left him to die, only to forgive. 

I told him maybe the answer, if there was one, was there in the air at both delightful conferences: you keep telling stories and you keep having fun doing it. 

I could have said, "And you wear comfortable shoes."

I didn't have to. He had 'em on.  

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 90

Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,

for as many years as we have seen trouble.

 

For three days, the child bled profusely from the nose. She was six years old, and doctors had no idea what was causing the bleeding. What’s more, they understood that if the bleeding didn’t stop, her life was in grave danger.

 

It was 1913. The doctors knew very little about transfusions, but they’d started to believe in the importance of somehow getting good new blood back into the little girl’s system, so they asked her father to give his daughter some of his. He complied, one of the first blood transfusions in the state of Michigan.

 

The yellowed newspaper story is titled, “Minister Saves the Life of Daughter By Giving Blood,” and the story it tells ends by explaining how the father “was considerably improved and was able to dress.” Then it adds, “The child was also considerably better and hopes are entertained for her recovery.”

 

Two weeks later she was dead. Little Agnes Gertrude, my grandparents’ child, succumbed once the hemorrhaging returned. For a time, her father’s blood had brightened her face as well as her possibilities, but his gift—as odd to the newspaper readers as it must have seemed to him—would not and did not save her life.

 

Family lore says, at the time, the doctors knew nothing about blood-typing. Her father, my relatives speculate, was as good a choice as the doctors could have made, but he was not a match. Agnes Gertrude, my great aunt, died two weeks after that strange new procedure the doctors called “a transfusion.”

 

I have no newspaper accounts of my grandparents’ grief, but I know some oral history. Agnes’s little sister told me how her father lay face down on the rug of the living room for almost a week after Agnes’s death, as if unable to move. She told me my grandfather was lethargic, depressed, his whole countenance darkened by the mysterious and horrible death of his child.

 

Nothing changed, she said, until he accepted a call to another congregation, a small country church up north. She told me how she remembered riding on a wagon up to that country church, all their possessions packed up behind them, then being greeted by the entire church right there on the lawn, all of them waiting for the new preacher and his family.

 

“And then it was over,” my aunt told me. The darkness ended.

 

I can’t imagine all of the sadness was gone. If my grandparents were still alive today, I’d love to ask them about that loss, to know if even today they could talk about it. But in the eyes of their five-year-old daughter, the one who told me the story, the darkness ended on a summer day on the lawn of a country church full of welcome.

 

I wonder how someone like my grandfather, the preacher, read a verse like this one from Psalm 90. He probably read it a hundred times, at a hundred funerals. I wonder what he thought of its modest petition: “Lord, give us as many days as you do nights, as much joy as sorrow, as many smiles as tears. That’s all we’re asking.”

 

Charles Spurgeon says the request is dear because it’s so childlike. Maybe he’s right. What it is—and thank God almighty for it—is human. It’s so understandable, so obviously wrenched from a mournful human heart.

 

Once in a while, just let us laugh, Lord—we’re not asking for much.

 

Is it any wonder why people love this psalm?

Greenway Hollanders

His name was identifiably Dutch—Tilstra, maybe. . .Kevin Tilstra. Out of two thousand students in the Phoenix high school where I taught, he was, to my knowledge, the only kid blessed, as I am, with a recognizably Dutch surname.

He was thin, I remember, his face, long and pallid, almost emaciated, and his hair, a dry clump of erratic, colorless brush that was always too long. He will never slip from my memory, even though I never poured over his essays, like I did so many other kids’ work that year.

That I knew him at all was an accident of educational theory. Our English Department had its own building, eight classroom areas separated only (if desired) by curtains.

We “team taught” quite a bit, and Kevin belonged to Helene, my colleague. But during class, he sat at the far edge of her class, adjacent to my students.

One day I stumbled on his name on Helene’s rolls. "He's Dutch," I told her, pointing to the name. "The kid is Dutch."

She wasn't moved, barely found the fact amusing.

The next day, when I saw him, I walked over and nudged him. “Hey, Tilstra,” I said. "I’m Dutch." He looked at me strangely. "Schaap—it’s Dutch. You know?--Hollander?"

I could have been speaking another language.

"You’re Dutch too," I told him. "You know that? You’re Dutch—I’m Dutch," I said. "We’re the only Hollanders around here. We got to stick together, see?—a couple of wooden shoes."

He smiled, shrugged his shoulders.

I never knew much more about Kevin Tilstra. Occasionally, I’d bump into him, nudge him like I had that first day, call him a "Hollander." And he’d smile, laugh. He seemed to have few friends.

He had a brother, a freshman I never knew or saw, a brother who was overweight and depressed. One day, I remember, I heard horrible news. “Kevin, you know?—your Kevin?” Helene said. “Did you hear about his brother?”

I had no idea.

“He hung himself—Miller told me this morning," she said, referring to a counselor. “Kevin's not going to be back for awhile—maybe a week.”

Suicide is always shocking, but that day I wasn't haunted by the boy's death. I didn't know Kevin's little brother at all. Even Kevin wasn't my student.

A week later, that long, gangly kid came walking in through the door on my side of the building and headed straight for my desk, coming to me for wisdom or comfort or whatever his shattered soul needed, something he evidently felt I could give him.

He never said a word. He just stood there and waited for understanding from the man who'd told him a half dozen times that the only Hollanders in this school had to stick together. I’ll never forget his silence, nor will I forget mine.

Today, when I think of how a few gentle nudges and a dime’s worth of attention prompted that kid to seek me out for comfort, I can’t help but marvel at how fragile we are, how deeply we all stand in need of love and dignity.

The Stories of Old Ignace -- ii

When the two remaining pilgrims began the return trip from St. Louis, what they faced was yet another arduous journey, this time back north and west, similar dangers all around. Years passed. Back in the Bitterroots, time staggered along among the Flatheads, who waited anxiously for their very own teacher of this stunning new medicine. They grew restless--no news, they thought, was bad news.

In 1835, Old Ignace himself began to think the tribe's emissaries had, somewhere along the way, succumbed to warring bands or wild animals or some unforeseen threats on a trip for which they were vastly less prepared than Lewis and Clark had been thirty years earlier. With every passing month, Old Ignace had become ever more celebrated, like a warm-hearted old Sunday school teacher. A hybrid, Native Christianity spread over the region, so much so that when white colonizers began showing up, they were simply non-plussed when the Nez Perce refused to hunt on the Sabbath--no missionaries could be found anywhere. 

Old Ignace wasn't a solo voice. Other Iroquois believers practiced the old-time religion, as did a growing chorus of others they converted to the certain rituals of 17th century European Catholicism. When the warriors the Flatheads had sent to St. Louis didn't return, Old Ignace grabbed two of his own sons to go to St. Louis with him. The people wanted so badly to have their own Black Robe tell them of this new medicine. Old Ignace grew up in French-speaking Quebec; he knew the language of those St. Louis priests. 

When he and his sons arrived, their reception must have once again had the priests totally dumbfounded. Immediately, Old Iroquois insisted his sons be baptized. They were. In his best French, once again Old Iroquois demanded the church give them a Black Robe to take back to Montana, where a people were starved for the gospel. 

The Jesuits were poor and ragged and struggling. There's was simply no way any of them could raise up a mission out at a place none of them had ever seen, weeks and weeks away. Once again, the emissaries, returning empty-handed, knew the people would feel rejected, defeated.

In 1837, the old Iroquois trapper simply could no longer live with himself, so once again he and, this time, a Nez Perce chief and three Flathead warriors embarked on that same long path to St. Louis, this time in the company of white men, trappers and traders. This time, however, the entire party was attacked by Brule Sioux when they reached a place named Ash Hollow, a place that would, in less than a decade, become a traffic stop for thousands on the Oregon Trail. The Brule Sioux attacked the company, and Old Ignace was killed, along with all his companions. The third expedition had failed.

Even with their leader's passing, the thirst of the Flathead people for Black Robe medicine didn't die or even diminish, and soon--in another year--a fourth delegation departed the valley, just as determined, prayerfully, to return with a priest. 

Stop for a moment and imagine the passions stirred up in a Native tribe or two in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, passions created by an old French-speaking Iroquois trapper from way out east, a man who'd never forgotten the Bible songs of his boyhood, songs about Jesus. By the 1840s, white missionaries, Protestant and Catholic, were moving west by the score. You can be sure not one of them could have dreamed of a mission field so readied for the gospel that the people (they might well have called them "savages") begged for blessings long before anyone in the church had even whispered the gospel they somehow already understood. 

And so it was that at just this time, a 38-year old Flemish Jesuit named DeSmet, Pierre-Jean DeSmet, had taken a mission outpost among the Potawatomi, who'd been pushed west from the Great Lakes, stuck on a reservation in eastern Kansas, and weren't happy. That unhappiness they made clear to Father DeSmet. Neither the Potawatomi nor the Jesuit were prospering. 

Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet

The fourth collection of Bitterroot Valley emissaries, six years after the first, found a man named Fr. DeSmet among the Potawatomi, put on a great sell, and were told that this young priest, taken by their determination, would accompany them to St. Louis and plead their case. One of the party was so taken with the news that he started out immediately for home and walked, through the winter, all of the 1600 miles to spread the great news.

That's how it was that when DeSmet and company eventually reached to Grand Tetons, they it was they were met by more than a thousand Native people from several different tribes of the region, all of whom had camped there, awaiting the arrival of their very own priest. Soon there were 2000 who accompanied the new priest through the mountains to the valley and, day by day, listened to his instruction in the gospel. The biggest Bible school on the continent was taking place in a space that had barely been seen by white people.

Although it was off to a glorious start, DeSmet's ministry in the Bitterroot Valley wasn't the dream it must have seemed to him when thousands of Native people met him. Trials awaited them not that far down the road.

But Consider Old Ignace, whose blessed Catholic childhood formed a firm commitment to a gospel he knew only slightly, a man with several wives and many children, who only rarely went to mass, and was almost totally uneducated in the world of the church. Dare anyone doubt his salvation?

The gospel's immense elasticity always seems  a wonder, a miracle, even a dream. That elasticity has a life of its own, spread far and wide by no other agent than the Holy Spirit him (or her) self. It never really stops, although, in our humanness, we appear to take joy in erecting stops and building fortresses we believe make our lives in His world more firm, secure, and under control. 

By most any theological standard, Old Ignace peddled a grotesque gospel, a medicine, his people would call it, composed of an odd arrangement of ingredients--a heavy dose of medieval Catholic ecclesiastical practice, more than a pinch of Native emotion, and a cup or more of what must have been his own brand of sanctified stubbornness. Whatever it was, his particular faith and its startling effects couldn't be replicated and has, by this day and age, even in the Bitterroots, likely entirely disappeared.

But his story is worth the glorious light it sheds on all of our lives. Just the same, his endless enthusiasm and persistence make me wonder whether, today, I'd like to have him in my church. He wasn't taken by boundaries.

What the scriptures make clear is the Almighty doesn't care. He takes his own where and when He will. We draw lines to say no. We have a long history of taking in keeping undesirables away from what is so precious it could be offered only to us.

Consider Old Ignace. Consider him a saint. God does.

The Stories of Old Ignace

Flathead chief and family, 1855--George Catlin

Consider Old Ignace, a trapper, born somewhere near Montreal, who, in the early 19th century migrated west with others so inclined to make a living in the fur trade. This man, Ignace La Mouse, was his name, plied his trade and his faith when he and 23 good friends from out east joined forces with the Flathead people in Montana and Idaho.

Two centuries before, not all had gone smoothly with the Jesuits who left France bound for the New World. There'd been some difficulties, some martyrs in fact when they attempted to bring Christianity to eastern tribes, Mohawks and Iroquois. Old Ignace was Iroquois, but he was also, through two centuries, Roman Catholic through the through. 

Any missionary society in the New World would have loved to count Ignace La Mouse among their own. After he and others found their way to the Flatheads most of a continent away, and once they started in with some serious trapping, he began telling the locals about the blessings of Christianity, specifically, the specific flavor of Christianity the Jesuits had taught him by way of songs and rituals and, as an example, a determination to keep the Sabbath day holy. 

Old Ignace was no slouch. His heart was big; he commanded respect and trust sufficient to make him a grand exemplar of the Christian faith in this newly adopted faraway country. The stories he told the Flatheads of this white man's faith were so charming, so fundamental, that the Flatheads soon made it clear that they should have their own black robe, someone to come and live with them and be their friend and tell them the good news of the gospel. Soon enough, a quartet of locals--Flatheads and Nez Perce--were duly commissioned with some firelit ritual to travel all the way down river and secure for the people at Flathead Black Robe.  

The destination was obvious. Whenever they bound up their furs and loaded them on canoes, they were off to a place called St. Louis, a French-speaking village where, among the fur-traders, a dozen or more Black Robes were said to live. Old Ignace knew something of Lewis and Clark and believed Mr. Clark, the governor, might be of aid. 

It's difficult to imagine their trip--no rest stops, no fast food, no convenience stores, nary a motel down any stretch of river between the Montana frontier and far away St. Louis. Not only that, but the chosen four were not unaware of the prickly bands of First Nations who called the country home--the Sioux, the Blackfeet, and others--none of whom were known for hospitality. If the four frontiersmen were to keep their scalps all the way to St. Louis, they'd have to know when and where to take cover to avoid, well, slaughter.

The trip took months, but, miraculously, they made it, got down to St. Louis and met with the governor, Mr. William Clark, who pointed them toward the church. Incredibly, that first meeting turned into a Babel thing as no one in the seminary could understand a word the Flatheads said. What's worse, two of them became gravely ill. What then transpired can only be imagined. When those St. Louis Jesuits cared for their guests, they witnessed very strange things, behavior that seemed a miracle. These unintelligible Indigenous from some place far, far away up river were somehow, some way already Roman Catholic. 'T'was true. When the sacrament of baptism was given, they rejoiced. They knew. They understood signs and rituals. When presented with a small cross, they kissed it. They somehow understood, even when their language didn't bring them to understanding.

Sadly, however, two of that Catholic corps of discovery died in St. Louis. When the remaining two pilgrims left, homeward bound, they were alone, no black robe of to return to the people. Their experience had been extraordinary, but by the standars of the people back home, the mission had failed.

But there is more to the story. . .

Tucker's doubtful demise

All the way out here, halfway across the country, over hill and dale of the Alleghenies, through cities like Akron, Chicago, Davenport and Cedar Rapids, then across the fertile Iowa prairie, all the way to the far northwest corner of the state, I swear, this morning, I hear east coast libs partying. "Ding, dong--the witch is dead," they're singing, in chorus, "Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead.

Tucker is out. The biggest of the bigs, the headliner, the talking head King, is gone.

In an amazing turn of events that left the media world in shock, not a single investigative journalist saw the man's demise coming, and everyone--most everyone--was thrilled and overjoyed. MSNBC folks gathered like birds of pray, and the minor leagues of right-wing journalism started sensing a swelling audience and overflowing coffers. 

I can't help thinking, nationally and culturally, Tucker getting dumped is a good, good thing. His determination to blame the full load of all our nation's problems on George Soros and the libs-behind-every-bush got old and tedious and ridiculous  when he looked through the thousands of hours of video (given to him by his buddy Kevin McCarthy) and produced his own summary/interpretation of what happened on January 6--just another day at the office. 

He lived on lies and knew it and did 'em anyway night after night. The Dominion tapes hammered together a coffin Rupert Murdoch laid him in when it became evident Tucker didn't believe what he was saying to his millions of slack-jawed listeners. 

Good riddance. Let me join my voice with the song.

Any number of voices last night made it clear that Rupert Murdoch has no problem sending his own headliners down the road. He did in Glen Beck, the scary Mormon prophet, then Bill O'Reilly, the hate-monger, knocked them both down like bowling pins, instantly shrinking their audience. In their places he set up Tucker, who, in all likelihood, said some unbecoming things about the bosses at Fox, who canned him. 

Bret Stephens, a NY Times columnist, a conservative registered his sadness, not at the death of Tucker but at the death of a dream of a truly conservative network, a line-up of shows in the tradition of William F. Buckley, not would-be bullies like Donald.

Tucker may be gone, or at least dehorned, but his absence won't go unfilled, I'm sure, because someone else will come along and make millions on the fears of white folks in a nation where they're soon to be outnumbered and replaced ("replacement theory," Tucker maintained). Some new voice is out there already sharpening his politics and getting ready to trade on grievances in the hearts of men and women. 

Once upon a time, Herman Melville's "The Lightning-Rod Man" was a kind of best-seller. It was just short story, something of a fable, really, but it somehow found a readership that, during his lifetime, may well have surpassed anything else Melville wrote, including most certainly Moby Dick. I can't help but think it's still not only readable but pertinent. 

In a violent storm that shakes everything in the house, a rain-soaked lightning-rod salesman comes to the door peddling his wears, having long ago realized that he best turns a dollar when he uses a thunderstorm as a backdrop. 

Melville's narrator listens to the man's smooth schtick, then boots him and his wares back out into the storm. The last line of the story is perfectly prescient: "But spite of my treatment, and spite of my dissuasive talk of him to my neighbors, the Lightning−rod man still dwells in the land; still travels in storm−time, and drives a brave trade with the fears of man."

There'll be another Tucker soon, if it isn't Tucker. There's ample room for fear amid the darkness of the human heart. 

The Old Rugged Cross

An Auxiliary robe

 Maybe it was the music. I'd like to think it could have been. After all, some old preachers claim that when Satan was cast out of heaven, he fell directly into the choir loft. I'd like to think it was the music.

Imagine it this way, you're sitting behind the pulpit in a big church in rural Iowa in the 1920s. One hyper member has suggested a new version of  "The Old Rugged Cross," as a way to make room for the fittest symbol of the fancy new patriotic organization you and maybe half the town didn't join, even though a whole lot of the town's muck-a-mucks did. You didn't sign on, even though joining up cost only $24, and, shoot! the hood and the robe and the whole ball of wax come with a membership. And it's become clear why people are with them: this new bunch of righteous men and women want like nothing else to keep America Christian. 

You're skeptical. 

But you're pastor of this fair-to-middlin' church, and you want to tell your congregation that things you've read about the organization aren't exactly endearing. In the South, you know it's African-Americans they're after, and blood's been spilled. But here in town, way up north of the Mason-Dickson, there is only one Black man around and he's, well, special--he just polishes shoes at the hotel downtown. 

And Jews? a couple, not near enough for a temple, a couple of businessmen who came ashore at the turn of the century when a bunch of Russians arrived in northwest Iowa--Sioux City.

Catholics are here though, lots of them, and you know what people say about Catholics--they're the ones peddlin' all the hootch even though the good Christian people of this country finally made a law--Prohibition, you know. They're the ones taking over our jobs.

Could have been any number of things that made him do it, I suppose. But I'd like to think it was the music that got to him, those new lyrics to the old favorite. And even though he probably wasn't the old-fashioned hard-nosed Dutch Reformed dominie of the era, no angry pulpit pounding for him, he can't help turning his face away from those lyrics because they just plain stink. 

What's more, membership is getting to be a thing throughout the whole region--shoot, throughout the entire state of Iowa. More than 40,000 registered Klan members claimed membership in Iowa cities and towns, east to west, north to south. In 1924, 25,000, they say, showed up right here in Sheldon, Iowa--25,000 Klan members right here. This is just a part of it.

"Oh, my, what a wholesome gathering," so many people said, because they wanted to believe that the men and women of the Klan truly love America (yes, women, there's even an auxiliary). They do. They just plain love America. They're patriots. Like the others, people in your church can't help but believe that the dump of immigrants on our shores is soon to destroy our beloved way of life. Shoot, they LOVE America, even say it all the time, won't let you forget it. They do. They love the flag.

Here's what they claim!

 

And you're the Dominie in a good-sized church that, thank the Lord, isn't yet overrun with Klansmen and women. But there's been this request for "The Bright Fiery Cross, and you've got to deal with it so you determine, prayerfully, to take it head on. On the next Sabbath morning, you stand up before them and tell your congregation, from the pulpit, that, in their own best interests, it's good and pleasing in the sight of the Lord to stay more an arm's length away, if not more, from those people who hate, even though some of the town's most outstanding citizens have signed up because they claim that all of this is borne from their immense love of America. "You best stay away," you tell your congregation, quietly and sincerely, from the pulpit of First Reformed Church, Sheldon, Iowa, before you point at the hymnal and tell the people to sing the old hymn, the old way. 

He warned them. He told them, from the pulpit, to be very wary--that's what he said, that's what he told his congregation.

And just a night or two later, a bright fiery cross burned on the church lawn.

______________________ 

I'm greatly thankful for the help of Millie Vos, at the Sheldon (IA) Prairie Museum for the story, the pictures, and the anecdotes. 40,000 Iowans were members of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.