Good times all around

On his own, Meriweather Lewis picked up a kid named George Shannon in Pittsburg already, among the first of the crew he and Clark chose for company to the other side of the continent. "Pup Shannon," they sometimes called him because he was the only one of the bunch still wet behind the years--just 18 years old. 

Lewis told Clark that he'd take this kid named Shannon, along with an older guy named Colter, on a trip up the river to St. Louis. Lewis laid out the deal: Colter and Shannon, he told Clark, were "taken on trial, conditionally only, though I think they will answer tolerably well." 

For the record, they did, even the kid.

On August 26th, 1804, a Sunday morning, the corps, right here in the neighborhood, set off for another day, leaving Drouillard and Shannon behind to find a couple of lost horses. They'd catch up eventually. Wasn't the first time a couple of men were  left behind for some job that needed to be done--in this case, find the blame horses. 

Drouillard came back. Alone. No Shannon. 

The diaries emit no panic. One of the Corps' qualifications was the ability to handle oneself in the wilderness they'd be in. Even though he was just a kid, George  Shannon had gained the trust of the others. Only ten days had passed since Moses Reed had deserted. When Drouillard had found Reed and brought him back to camp, Reed got himself spanked. . .well, whipped. After all, not only had he deserted, he'd grabbed a rifle and gear that wasn't his. 

But when Pup Shannon turned up missing, there appears to have been no anger. What kept the men awake at night was fear--what if the kid fell into the hands of angry Indians? what it a some she-bear tore him up? what if? what if?--

When the Corps pulled up just a bit west of what is today the Santee, Nebraska, they were relieved to find signs of both Pup and the old trapper Drouillard--signs, but not them. It was just a matter of finding him--that he was lost was obvious, but my word it was a big world out there.

Head out to Crofton, Nebraska, sometime, then take Hwy 12 west for 13 miles and take a right at the Lindy corner. Go ahead and drive into the old town. There's not much of it, but there is a healthy looking Lutheran Church and a handsome supper club that, just out front, features the story of Pup Shannon who spent some time he didn't mean to right there--or at least down towards the woods along the river.

The hills were almost certainly all grass back then, a world you could spot a lost man a mile away. But cottonwoods line the river--maybe hard woods too, enough for cover anyway, enough for the kid to think that just in case there was any trouble hovering around, for a while at least he should/oughta' keep himself hidden.

And he did. On September 11, sixteen days later, they found the kid sitting on a river bank out ahead of the troops. Good times all around. He told the others he thought he was somewhere behind them, so tried to catch up. When he couldn't, he sat and waiting for some river traffic to give him a lift back to St. Louis. 

That tourist sign in front of the Lindy Country Club? Go ahead and read it for yourself.

Then take a left out of town. Take the gravel, a road that snakes through the well-shorn hills like the river once did before leaving you at the river's edge, right there in town. 

Pull off the street for a minute and sit there. Somewhere close the lost sheep got found. Pup, hungry but unscathed, was back in the fold. He passed the test. 

You can't help but smile. Good times all around. 

Morning Thanks--Aria Mia Loberti

Aria Mia Loberti says she auditioned for the part, only because auditioning was something she'd never really done. She wanted the experience, she says, and she was convinced that her landing the part of Marie-Laure Leblanc in Netflix's adaptation of the novel All the Light We Cannot See was not a real possibility. She had zero acting experience, had never taken a class in any theater department anywhere, was just a graduate student in rhetoric at Penn State who thought it would be fun to audition. "There were thousands of people [who auditioned] and it’s a lead role," she told a reporter from Penn State. "It was such a fun audition process, and it was very empowering. That’s all I was seeking – a new experience, a challenge. I didn’t expect anything more to come of it. I think it was just pure shock when I learned.”

What she learned, as you can guess, is that, of the thousands who wanted the role, who'd sent in resumes, and of the dozens who'd auditioned, she was offered the part. Aria Mia Loberti is, of course, as blind as is Marie-Laure Leblanc, the young French woman whose life during the Nazi occupation of France is the very heart of Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Anthony Doerr. Aria Mia Loberti doesn't have to act blind; she knows how to be what she is.

An ex-grade schoolteacher called her to tell her of the major talent search and how she'd be perfect for the part. Shawn Levy, the executive producer and director of what will be a four-episode mini-series, says he was convinced of Aria the moment he saw her. “We searched the world and reviewed thousands of auditions. We never thought our path would lead to someone who has not only never acted professionally, but never auditioned before. It was a jaw-drop moment when we first saw Aria Mia Loberti, who is both a natural performer and an advocate for disability equity and representation."

There may be a reader or two who was not greatly moved by Doerr's 2014 novel, but I haven't met any. Many consider it the best novel they've ever read. The story follows the war-time experience of two young people, a blind French girl trying to stay alive during the occupation, while reading stories over a radio set to anyone who can and will listen; and a young radio operator, a German, but not a Nazi. Anthony Doerr was interested in breaking through stereotypical characters, and he does, admirably. All the Things We Cannot See is not an easy read. It's a ragged quilt of scenes and scattered events, most of them in the lives of those two characters. Even though it staggers widely, the novel is immensely gripping. The suffering of the era is profound; but there's more to the story than relentless darkness: the Nazi's last days in France are its "last days." 

All the Light We Cannot See will be a mini-series, Levy says, because the novel is as expansive as it is and simply can't be told in two hours. Netflix will air the production in early November.

There's something almost holy about Levy's unlikely casting of Aria Mia Loberti, something redemptive: a young woman with no experience, no training, no references, as least-likely as she'd determined she was. To land a part, any part, in the screen version of a Pulitzer Prize novel would be an achievement in anyone's life. Loberti had long been an advocate for the rights of men and women, boys and girls, with disabilities. This unlikely role will soon expand her advocacy on millions of TV screens.

"All beauty is gratuitous," says Richard Rohr--all beauty is blessing, all beauty is grace. Last night simply hearing the story of Ara Mia Loberti's being cast for the part of Marie-Laure Leblanc was beautiful, pure blessing. This morning her unlikely new role is my morning thanks. 

 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

“Commit your way to the LORD; 

trust in him and he will do this:”  

I suppose we can, without pause, make the claim that we’re better than the 17th century at making pictures, a gadzillion smart phones carrying cameras that outshine hundred-dollar outfits just twenty years ago. Ours is, after all, a visual age.

But one can sometimes be blown away by the manner in which ye olde English folks used ye olde English language. I ran across this paragraph of gorgeous rhetoric in Spurgeon’s Treasury. It’s all but lost today, I imagine; and yet it’s truly perfect, part of a sermon Mr. Robert Baylie preached before the English House of Commons in 1643.

When a hard piece of work is put into the hand of an apprentice for the first assay of his skill, the beholders are justly afraid of a miscarriage in his young and unexperienced hand;

[My computer red-pencils “unexperienced” and offers “inexperienced.” But what does Microsoft Word know about ye olde English language?]

But when the worker is an old master of craft, none are afraid but his cunning hand can act again what so oft it hath wrought to the contentment of the beholders.

[I love the image of God as a master craftsman—we are, after all, his workmanship.]

Were our God a novice in the great art of governing the world, and of the church in the bosom thereof; had he to this day never given any proof of his infinite wisdom, power, and goodness, in turning about the most terrible accidents to the welfare and joy of his saints; we might indeed be amazed whenever we feel ourselves sinking in the dangers wherein the practices of our enemies oft do plunge us over head and ears;. . .

[I’m already convinced, and he hasn’t yet sounded the whole argument.]

but the Lord having given in times past so many documents of his uncontroverted skill and most certain will to bring about all human affairs, as to his own glory, so to the real good of all that love him, it would be in us an impious and unexcusable uncharitableness to suspect the end of any work which he hath begun. 

I’m not sure a picture can compete with that, and I’m a photographer. Almost 400 years later, I’m speechless. Well, not totally. Four hundred years ago God almighty had a track record you could take to the bank, as we might mixed-metaphorically state. In the years since, that record has grown only more substantial. Our anxiety, our worry—and if you’re like me, you’ve got lots of it—is simply impious and unexcusable uncharitableness in light of the centuries’ long story of his gracious love.

It’s that simple.

And that beautiful.

L and C--the mysterious beast

Think Nessie, that hugely mysterious reptile thought to lurk in the dismal depths of Scotland's scariest inland sea, Loch Ness. Think Nessie, even though most authorities call her or him more myth than monster.

What I'm saying is, if you need an image of a plesiosaurus, a four-flippered behemoth incapable of moving around much out of the water, but a greatly talented swimmer--if you need to imagine what a plesiosaur might look like, think Nessie.

A plesiosaurus was not a myth but a rightful citizen of the animal world during the later Jurassic era, maybe 200 million years ago, a truly senior citizen.

Diet?--clams and anything else they might catch in the water. Their teeth were needle-like, preposterous, and plentiful, especially out front where, like unimaginable buck teeth, they fanned out wide and high enough to reach out, grab, and devour the same with a bite force of 33,000 pound-force-per-square-inch, the mightiest bite force of any known animal, some researchers claim.

In the early years of the 19th century, an English schoolgirl named Mary Anning became one of the world's most famous paleontologists by digging up all kinds wonders from the cliffs along the English Channel, County of Dorset. Just for the record, Ms. Anning grew up dirt poor; she and one brother were, of ten children, the only siblings to survive childhood. She had little or no education. But already when she was just five or six years old, her father would take her on hikes with the expressed purpose of finding fossils, and then sell them where he could. Her father died when she was still a child, but Little Mary got hooked on fossils.

Truth be told, Mary Anning's frequent fossil forays weren't all that unique. Among well-to-do English gentlemen and ladies, keeping a few fossils on display in the parlor was highly fashionable, odd as that may seem. In her haunts along the channel, Mary Anning kept digging up age-old treasures to peddle where and when she could--including, in 1823, the discovery of what most paleontologists now call the very first plesiosaur, a giant reptile-like creature that, just then, had no name.

It was huge--as was the story. Soon enough, the bones were hauled off to the London Geological Society, where a French scholar named George Cuvier, "the father of paleontology," assessed the dusty old things and called it a hoax, which it wasn't. Sometime later Professor Cuvier repented for his paleontological sins.

By the way, despite a long series of contributions to science in general and paleontology in specific, during her lifetime, Mary Anning, researcher extraordinaire, was not admitted to the Geological Society. She was, after all, a woman.

And now, you're asking yourself, why on earth is he going on endlessly about Jurrasic Park?

You're not going to believe this, but if you take a pontoon up the Missouri--go ahead, grab a beer and take your sun lotion--and you get somewhere up above Ft. Randall dam, hug the west side of Lake Francis Case, somewhere there in Gregory County, South Dakota, and have a close look around. An ocean away from the cliffs of Dover and twenty years before Mary Anning found the first one, Meriweather Lewis and George Clark and the Corps of Discovery unearthed something they had no clue how to identify or what to name.

On September 10, 1804, George Whitehouse, the only private to keep a diary, noted the Corps' impossible discovery this way: "We landed and saw lying on the banks on the South side of the River, the Bones of a monstrous large Fish, the backbone of which measured, forty-five feet long."

That's it. William Clark could spend a gallon of ink describing a prairie dog. He killed off and had stuffed several specimens of the animal world he knew would enthrall his friend Jefferson and might just end up in the President's front room. But what must be the most amazing discovery of the entire trip over more than half the continent apparently merited little more than what I've just read. A forty-five foot backbone embedded in stone.

Mary Anning wouldn't discover hers for another twenty years. 

Don't blame them. The Corps of Discovery would have had no way of identifying this "monstrous large Fish." The word plesiosaurus, as yet did not exist, not even in the most prestigious English paleontology journals.

The entire crew slack-jawed happened quite often, I'm sure. But this one--"what on earth is it?" They had no clue. Think of the entire bunch speechless right there in Gregory County, South Dakota.

If you think Nessie, it's not so hard to believe.

September's songs

The wind rose a bit yesterday, took the edge off the heat--we're into fall, like it or not. The world outside my window dresses in pastels these days--the emerald not at all so royal as it was just a week or so ago. Seasons change. There's a madness of yellow all over--the goldenrod, the sunflowers. 

Mother Nature has turned down the heat, which is, at once sweet and sour--sweet because the intensity has departed, although many had it worse; sour because. . .well, I just as soon not say the word with the W. There's understatement in the subtle shifting of fall colors. 

I thought I'd pull out some old pictures of this time of year--really, the best time of year on the edge of the plains, here its sunny and mild and gracious, quite becoming in shades of gold. 

2003

Sola Scriptura

You may have heard that a couple of judicial heavyweights teamed up to write an article for the Atlantic claiming Donald J. Trump cannot run for the American Presidency again because he was plainly guilty of fostering an insurrection against the American government and constitution. These two heavyweights maintain the constitution's 14th Amendment rules anyone who pulls off or attempts to pull off that kind of rebellion is ineligible to lead the nation. Thus, Trump, by law, may not run for the American Presidency.

Those judicial heavyweights rarely, if ever, shake hands on anything. Laurence Tribe is a Harvard Law School star known to camp left-of-center. J. Michael Luttig is just as firmly entrenched, although on the opposite side of the river. The real news is that, on this issue, they wholeheartedly agree.

That issue has yet to play itself out, but because denying Trump's candidacy threatens riots in the streets, it remains a hot issue. David Frumm, also from the Atlantic, is by nature an old-fashioned conservative, who believes in human initiative and small government. But Trump's Republicans are quick to call people like Frumm "rhinos," because they're not at all enthralled by the Orange Man. 

Frumm argues here that Luttig and Tribe are wrong, but his argument is fascinating because it reflects on a significant problem in all sorts of cultures--how do we most honor our established truths, the documents we consider fundamental to our existence--the American constitution, for example, or the Word of God? 

The 14th Amendment argument plays out in unique ways. Trump's appointment of three anti-abortion candidates was assured by his choosing justices who some consider to be "constructionists," scholars who believe that you don't or can't "interpret" the constitution. Instead, you simply adhere to what it says. Some consider the Trump appointees "fundamentalists," akin to religious fundamentalists who argue that we wander from the truth when we consider that the scriptures were written long ago for a culture long gone. The Constitution, like the Bible, has to be interpreted.

The irony here is that Trump conservatives, if they want to keep their man eligible, have to "interpret" the 14th Amendment, a behavior they believe plainly wrong in almost any other situation. But then, liberals who want Trump sidelined at any cost find themselves arguing for constitutional inerrancy--"of course, he can't run, people--just read the text."

David Frumm argues that the 14th Amendment has to be read in the context of its origins, a post-civil war statute that needed to be instituted because of the very real menace of Southerners who remained steadfastly opposed to any form of Northern aggression. Frumm says those who argue for disbarring Trump are misreading the constitution, which must be read in the context of its time.

Christendom's latest boiling point is the Queer world. Controversy threatens to tear dozens of fellowships apart. "Just read what the Bible says," say the conservatives. "You can't just adopt what the Bible says without interpretation," say the libs. Same spot on the dial.

Long, long ago, the denomination of which I was and am a part, asked me to write devotional books for middle-schoolers. Our own kids were that age at the time, so I lived in the presence of the audience I'd be serving. The denomination lined me up with a theologian, who picked out the passages and the themes, but it was my job to make ideas playful, to find ways to engage young readers or families with young readers. They kept asking for more, so I kept writing.

I enjoyed it. I don't think I would ever have applied for the job, but having been chosen made me believe that the powers-that-be thought I could do a good job.

Writing those books taught me a lot of things, including that I wasn't a fundamentalist. What was clear from the get-go was that any devotional book based on scripture passages had to "interpret" those passages. Had to. Absolutely had to. I don't know that anyone can read or write or preach the Bible without bringing a new context into what's there on the page. "Thou shalt not kill"--I know Mennonites who believe that, but not all that many born and reared in my fellowship. 

I'm on Frumm's side when it comes to the 14th Amendment. What he finally argues is that the key to wash Trump's vile imprint finally and assuredly from the American psyche is to vote the man conclusively out of office. Seven million popular votes aren't enough. It will take more. What Frumm argues is that it's going to take immense energy and shared resolution, but Trump must lose and lose big, before he can exit the culture. 

Interesting however, isn't it? What we esteem as our own very special words of wisdom don't--and sometimes can't--end debate. The answer to the 14th Amendment question has a clear corollary in the Acts of Synod: do our precious documents live and breathe or are they fundamental standards that bridge all of time.

Talk among yourselves. 

A thing of beauty

How long ago? It was back in the days of the dropkick, a move designed to surprise the defense and turn what might have looked like an ordinary running play into something wholly different.

Of course, the ball but faintly resembled a today's football, not at all as pointed, more basketball-ish, so a dropkick wasn't as tough a trick as it would be today. You dribble the ball and kick it the moment it comes popping up, preferably, of course, through the uprights. The last official drop kick was accomplished by a quarterback named Doug Flutie--remember him?--little guy with a great big heart. He pulled one off in 2006, sixty-some years after the last one ever seriously attempted. He wasn't particularly serious.

The legendary Jim Thorpe was a master of the dropkick, and so was a largely forgotten football star from even farther back in time, a sturdy tight end named Edward L. Rogers. I met him on the grounds of the Cass County Courthouse, Walker, Minnesota, where his statue is meant to immortalize the man. Ed Rogers was local, born and reared in Minnesota's Northwoods, his mama an Ojibwe, his daddy a lumberjack. In fact, he and Jim Thorpe went to the same school, a place called Carlisle, just a few years apart. You may have heard of Carlisle--it was famous, and, well, infamous.

Ed Rogers played high school football at Carlisle. When he graduated, he went to law school back home at the University of Minnesota, where he played on the legendary Gopher club that snuck a tie out of Michigan and stole home the very first Old Oaken Bucket, 1904, 

Truth be told, Ed Rogers wasn't just your ordinary college kid by that time. He was halfway through his twenties. The NCAA would have grabbed him by the strap of his leather helmet and toss him off the field--too old, a grad student anyway. Back then, college football was just a game. 

Ed Rogers, by the way, was captain, and an adept drop-kicker. But then, that wasn't particularly unusual. Dozens of other grunts drop-kicked too. 

But Ed Rogers was unusual in other ways. Born Ay-ne-way-we-dung, on Cass County's Chippewa (Ojibwe) reservation, he went to school at a place now reviled as the archetype for an education pointedly and forcibly meant to evict Native kids from their homes and culture, their language, and their heritage. That pointed educational philosophy was created, in concept, by a military man named Richard Pratt, who referred, in an 1892 speech, to a vile line uttered in defense of the kind of school he wanted to create:

A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.

When seen from afar, more than a century later, Pratt wasn't unusual; but Rogers was, not because he could dropkick a football with notable accuracy, but because the record of his life is quietly amazing, full of seasons of wins even his parents could not have foreseen. 

Law degree, U of M; practiced law in Walker, his home, for 46 years, where he also served as deputy coroner, health board member, and census enumerator on the Leech Lake reservation, also his home. Still later, Edward L. Rogers was voted in to represent ten Ojibwe tribes, a position which made him, you could say, "chief" of the Ojibwe. In 1942 he became a Minnesota state congressman and eventually Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the Hoover administration. When he was 86 years old, he was named District Attorney of the Year, still practicing law.

It is purely speculative to guess what twists the life of Edward L. Rogers would have taken had he not been sent off to receive the boarding school education he had at Carlisle, an education today much reviled for aiming at the destruction of Rogers's own Native culture. Instead, the captain of the 1903 University of Minnesota Gophers spent most of his adult life serving his communities--both white and Native. There his statue stands on the grounds of the county courthouse.

So what is there to say about men and women like Edward L. Rogers? Does his life prove Richard Pratt's educational philosophy to be true? Of course not. There were far, far too many runaways, too many burials, too much loss.

I've been reading Richard Rohr lately, who quite frankly hasn't much to say about Native American culture, but lots to say about course of all of our lives. Rohr is convinced that life's tragic arc is as irreversible as it is non-negotiable. We all are on the same bleak path, a path that leads to the same end, to death. Sounds awful, but it isn't.

In that life, in our lives, he says, "All beauty is gratuitous," a line which sounds, maybe begrudgingly affirmative. But think of it this way--all beauty is grace for the journey. All beauty is unforeseen blessing. All beauty is beauty, a gift. Seems to me that Edward L. Rogers's life is a thing of beauty, a blessing of grace.

That's what makes Ed Rogers's dropkicks worth remembering, not just in the annals of Gopher football or on the lawn at the Cass County Courthouse. All beauty, even when it's packed into the formidable body of a rugged defensive end, is gratuitous, grace for the journey.

For Labor Day--Ojibwe Family Life*

Those who pull walleyes from Minnesota's 10,000 lakes are all fishermen, says Brenda J. Child, in her fascinating study of Ojibwe life, and there's the rub. That the dominant Anglo culture didn't even have a word for her Ojibwe ancestral fisherwomen is itself an indication of the inability of white people to understand her people and heritage, the very character of Ojibwe culture. They simply didn't get it, Ms. Child might have said.

In My Grandfather's Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation, Prof. Child uses a variety of sources to assert that Ojibwe women did yeoman's work when it came to tribal fishing, a mainstay of tribal life both before the white man came to the northwoods. We're not talking about angling here, sport fishing; we're talking about fishing as an industry with employees and credit and debit sheets. We're talking about workers taking thousands of pounds of fish from lakes all through Ojibwe land, which was, once upon a time, an immense chunk of the Great Lakes Region of North America.

If the only portraits of Native people in your perceptions are Great Plains Lakota, you might have some trouble imagining the Ojibwes, who actually drove the Sioux (Lakota, Dakota, Nakota) people out of the lakes country in the 17th century, banishing them to the naked plains, to here, in fact, where Vanden Bos, Muilenburg, Vander Waa, et all, probably encountered Yanktons.

The Ojibwe may have hunted the occasional buffalo, but they weren't nomadic, which means they didn't live in teepees (thank goodness in northern Minnesota!), and generally maintained an 18th century address, which should have made them easier to, well, "tame" than the nomadic Lakota or the semi-nomadic Navajo. 

Not so, Prof. Child would argue.

Knocking Sticks tells the story of Child's own parents, Fred and Jeanette Auginash, both Ojibwe, who were nonetheless day-and-night different in almost every way, including age (whey they married, he was 40 and she was 23) and education (she went to boarding school, he had little education at all). But what Ms. Child makes clear is that despite what you and I might think, the two of them were somehow able to create a loving family circle, a nurturing home.

And that's the general mission of the book--to show beyond reasonable doubt that Ojibwe life is its own, that it hasn't been and that it won't be the step-child of the majority culture.

It's more history than memoir, more thesis-driven than a portrait of her own family circle. Prof. Brenda J. Child is an academic historian who knows how to create an argument out of materials not commonly accessible or maybe traditionally neglected. What she is interested in doing is making an argument that may not be new, but is certainly not widely known among American's dominant culture--that life went on quite well, thank you, among Native people before swarms of European immigrants (some Native people say, "illegal" immigrants) determined that land once happily inhabited by an indigenous culture really had no inhabitants and was mostly free for the taking.

What Child quite uncomfortably shows (uncomfortable for a white man like me) is that Ojibwe culture adapted to modernity on its own and had, therefore, a life of its own. What she despises is the species of white paternalism that presumes--and argues--that once white people came to the wilderness the lot of Native people was blessedly improved, once white cultural ways were adopted.

Case in point--the jingle dress, a piece of traditional clothing worn for special occasions and powwows. Child argues that its origins are go back only to the early years of the 20th century, when Ojibwe women traditionally believed music to be an integral part of the therapy required to cure the wave of influenza that killed many thousands of European-Americans and thousands of indigenous people. Today, on the powwow circuit, jingle dresses are ubiquitous. But, Child says

If we imagine a jingle dress dancer in 1918, living on a reservation in rural Minnesota or Ontario, as only following an older tradition and not part of making the modern world, we would have to ignore how creatively Ojibwe women responded to the global epidemic.

She's arguing here--as she does throughout the book--for the legitimacy, the very life of Ojibwe culture, for its relevancy and currency in the face of the overpowering, unjust force of the white, dominant culture.

That's what My Grandfather's Knocking Sticks is really all about. It's an argument for life. 

______________________ 

*Appeared here in October of 2015

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

 Commit your way to the LORD; 

trust in him and he will do this:

My kids went to Christian schools, and so did I.  So did their mother.  Christian school was—still is, for that matter—a significant part of the faith tradition in which I was reared.  I hope my children are continuing in that tradition, not because it’s a tradition but because I still think teaching children—even college students—that this world belongs to God is the foundation of the very best way to learn.

 I’m preaching.  Sorry.

 At the core of my faith tradition lies something people have called “covenant theology,” an idea that is rooted in the Old Testament covenant:  if you will be my people, I will be your God.

 Historically, I share the theological heritage of the 17^th century American puritans; our part of the Christian mosaic is historically called “Calvinistic.”  My heritage in the Christian faith isn’t Roman Catholic or Lutheran or Anabaptist; the theological principles of my heritage come from the theology of John Calvin.

 Perry Miller, the great American Puritan scholar, makes the point somewhere that covenant theology (the Puritans called it “federal theology,” but it’s the pretty much the same idea) really spelled the demise of the Puritan theocracy because it made God, well, understandable.  If one lives by the promise of covenant theology—if I’m good, he’ll be good to me—it’s almost impossible not to believe that we aren’t the architects of our own righteousness. It’s a swap, right? If I’m good, I’ll get a Christmas present.

 You may not have noticed, but today’s verse, as well as last week’s (and the promise of next week’s too), is a promise:  “if we do good things, God will do good things.”  Listen to them: trust in the Lord and you’ll live well; take joy in the Lord and he’ll take joy in you; and today—commit to the Lord and he won’t let you alone. Each is propositional—your joy is contingent on your faith. It’s up to me.

 I think Perry Miller was right.  It’s not at all that hard to get the sense here that we control our own destinies, that we devise the plot lines of our lives.  If we love him, he’ll love us.  If we do good, we’ll get the goods we need.

 But then Job comes along to foul things up. We’re reading the story right now, my wife and I.  In our world there’s no end to suffering. I know a warm family of believers who, right now, as they greet the morning, know all too well that one of the kids is gone, dead. 

I’m a hearty believer in covenant theology. I take the Lord seriously when he promises what he does. I’m thankful my grandchildren are in Christian schools. I believe that my striving for good—that my writing these words—are part of what I owe to my Lord for his inestimable gift of life eternal.

But I honestly don’t believe that my writing these words—or my grandkids going to Christian school—guarantees anything. Seems to me that the Christian life isn’t the stock market; we don’t go to the bank with our faith.

But God will bless. I know that. I know that because he does. Now. 

Right now, in fact, as I write he blesses. As I live, he blesses. As I babysit this afternoon, he’ll bless me too.  But he doesn’t bless because I’m writing these words or babysitting.  He blesses us because he loves us.

Blessed be his name. 

The difficult story of Indian Boarding Schools

Administration Building of the now defunct Pipestone Indian School

A friend of mine, who is Navajo, told me about an old army buddy--make that Marines--who, as a boy, attended a long-gone Native American boarding school in nearby Pipestone, Minnesota. This Marine so resented his treatment there that he simply could not find it within himself to repeat the name of the town, even though the school itself was just a short walk from one of the most sacred of Native places on the continent. 

As a white man, I found it difficult to believe that traditional farm folks of the upper Midwest, good Minnesota Lutherans and Catholics, could be as evil as the extent of the man's horrors suggested--good, God-fearing people? Besides, often as not, those in charge of residential Indian schools were coming in the name of the Lord. 

For me, a white man, raised in a devout Christian culture, it was altogether too easy to be skeptical of this Marine's story, but then that story came to me before I knew much about the Dakota War of 1862, which turned new white settlers in the region--no matter what their countries of origin or religious affiliation--into true Indian haters, more than willing to run every last Indian off the land.

What's more, the literature is full of stories, horrible stories of abuse--physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, levels of abuse that require generations of time to supplant. Just down the road in Canton, South Dakota, an asylum for Native people ruled insane by white authorities often ignorant of neighborhood Native cultures left a track record that is an abomination. 

Just a few years ago, via ground-penetrating radar, Indiginous Canadians discovered a mass burial site of over 200 children, all of whom died at Kamloops, the biggest boarding school in British Columbia, a discovery that triggered an outpouring of stories, long suppressed, and a nation-wide attempt to unearth the truth about those schools via truth and reconciliation ceremonies and events.   

I don't know what went on at the boarding school at Pipestone, but today it's impossible to even believe that Marine's memories are fabrication. Too much abhorrence has long ago been documented.

Can anything be said for the hundreds of residential boarding schools that once operated across the land? Were they all and always dens of terror and revulsion? The answer to that question is, today, always yes and no--yes, because it's impossible to understand the legacy of 19th century colonialism in America as anything less than a dispicable movement. A mass of broken treaties testify to the sheer blasphemy of Manifest Destiny, the determination that somehow all of this land was not only new land, but it was also our land, our meaning white Europeans.

The madness of successive gold rushes out west pushed thousands into lands once the domain of Native people, pushed colonizers in and residents out. The dream of land ownership brought millions to this country, millions who, like Charles Ingalls, kept moving west, looking for cheaper land that would support a growing family. That truth makes all residential schools institutions of oppression, and we put students into them.

Was that all evil, or just wrong-headed? Really, were all the personnel of those schools oppressors? beasts? bigots? 

And what do we make of Jim Thorpe, a graduate of the model Indian school of the 19th century, Carlisle, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Thorpe won America's first Olympic golds back in 1914, played professional baseball, basketball, and football, and was an American hero. Had he stayed on the reservation in Oklahoma, had he determined not to go to school, he would not have attained what he did? Was his schooling at Carlisle a good thing? 

But even if it was, do his unusual successes somehow obviate the horrors inflicted on hundreds of thousands of others?

There are tough questions and answers are hard to come by, but I'd like to stay here for some time. I hope you'll stay with me. 

The impetuous

I'm not at all surprised that "haste makes waste" has its origins in the Netherlands. It's such a Dutch idea, for pity sake, which doesn't mean those of us who share that heritage are good at observing its warning. 

I'd be happier if it belonged to Poor Richard, as I thought. I've never been much of a fan of Ben Franklin, after all; but I just now discovered that, in literature, no less a star than Erasmus, a humanist Hollander, first used it: "Haste makes waste."

That's me, up top, a selfie with first fruits from the muskmelon patch, a beauty too. Notice it's tannish color. I tried to abide by the first rule of picking them--if they just snap off the vine, they're ready.

It was Sunday morning, it snapped (kind of), and I came arrogantly in with this beast. It was warmed by the sun. Look at its size. Almost heavenly.

We went off to church with this beauty right there on the kitchen counter. No, I didn't pray for it --perhaps I should have. I simply determined that once home from church, I'd cut it up and put it in the fridge so, that night sometime, we could eat our first fresh, juicy cantaloupe.

It was green. It was hard and it was green, and hugely tasteless. I'd picked the monster too soon.

I cut it up anyway, gave it a proper burial in the fridge. But I was reminded, not of the humanist Erasmus, but Poor Richard, who wasn't the source but could have been. It was Erasmus the Dutch humanist who thought to teach us all the proper diligence required to make our way through life.

I'm impetuous. Always have been, and haste makes waste.

Oh, that hurts. 

I haven't picked another since--no siree. 

Gaps and music and playgrounds

There's always a gap, always a space, always an opening for us, for the reader. There has to be: art suggests; it doesn't preach. Even if the poet wants to change the world, flat straightforwardness is an enemy. "Tell all the truth," Dickinson so famously wrote, "but tell it at a slant." Art may require very little of us, but if a poem is to be artful it leaves openings for reader-participants because we are a part of it.

Case in point, “Clear and Sunny,” a little poem by my friend, Dave Schelhaas, who occasionally appears in these pages. “Clear and Sunny” is in a collection of poetry titled Final Exam: Poems About Teaching, collected and edited by J. Barry Koops. It’s a treasure, by the way, for an ex-teacher, or for many who find themselves, this week, once again up front in a classroom.

The first two lines go like this:

I heard it again this morning
the music of the playground.

Look, I know the writer. I know he lives a hop, step, and jump from a school playground, busy today, I’m sure. I'm two lines into the poem, and I see him walking along on a sidewalk just up the street. If "writing is seeing," then Schelhaas has me already because I see him and I hear "the music of the playground." I'm in.

Worried that I would not hear it,
I had listened as soon as I left the house,
and there it was,
softened by all the green leaves in the tall trees,
rich like thick jam on buttered bread,
more beautiful than church bells:
the shouts and laughter of schoolchildren,

"Green leaves," "thick jam," "church bells"--it's all embellishment. He's scoring "the music of the playground," playing a blessed recording meant for us. The notes rise mellifluously from the printed page. Great music. Just kids, little ones. No one’s singing, but what rises from the swings is great music.

Then, conflict: "Worried that I would not hear it,/I had listened as soon as I left the house.” Some darkness rises, but the heft of the poet's worry is relieved in a moment by "the shouts and laughter of school children."

I'm in this all right. I know the poet. I'm thinking I know the nature of the troubling sadness too, even his worry. I know the darkness he knows. I get it. I live here too.

The last three lines nail it--the outpouring of his relief at hearing all that music a half a block away--

bubbling through air waves still trembling
with the terrible news of
yesterday.

What happened "yesterday" is the horror, the darkness, an enemy. And because I know the poet, I tell myself I know the darkness. The poem was written in the last couple of years when the school down the block suffered horrific trauma when one of its teachers was abusing his students.

David walked out his back door one fair morning, filled with the darkness generated by what had happened at the school down the block, the school his grandchildren attend. Then, unmistakably, he heard, "the music of the playground," and in it the sheer beauty of innocence drawing back the veil of tears. He heard the splendid oratorio of kids having fun.

Sure, I had it down, this poem written by a friend.

But then--and only then--I spotted the subtitle: "September 12" and realized "Clear and Sunny" wasn't a poem about the horrors of sexual abuse, but the day the Twin Towers buckled into a cloud of poison dust at the hands of kamikaze assassins.

I'd been thinking that because I know the poet, the heart of the poem was obvious. I was wrong. It's not about the school, it's about 9/11, and the relief those children's playground voices sang the morning after the madness in Manhattan.

Now let's just say the poem didn't use the subtitle, deleted it in a final edit before he finished. If read without its datedness or my personal associations, the poem is both less specifically constructed (taking some solace in life after 9/11) and more universal (how hearing children is solace in the darkness all around).

I was ready in a moment to fill that open space I'm offered as a reader. The poem made immediate sense, until I saw the subtitle and realized I was wrong--way, way wrong.

But the gap, the space, the blank the reader has to fill, would have been even wider, its impact more well, global, because less immediate. The poem might be more "universal," to grab a literary weapon from the arsenal, had the poet not specifically dated it via its subtitle.

But would it be a better poem? It would be less specific and more vague. “Merit” might be an interesting topic for English majors--should the poet have dumped the subtitle? Talk among yourselves.

Everything I've just written, however, in the long post about a short poem attests to the joy, the human joy, of poetry and art itself. Even though his writing the poem didn't earn my friend a dime, he wasn't looking to be salaried. He just wanted us all to hear the music rising from the playground on a morning he couldn't help but feel that grief and anger had left the world without any harmony at all.

That's the music he heard and the song he wanted to sing for us and with us.

Hear it?

Morning Thanks--Simone Biles

And then there's Simone Biles. . . There's the rest, and then there's Simone Biles.

Watch her perform, and you just might think she's barely human, but human she is, even though it's fair to say that she can do things with her body that no other human being can--and few can even imagine.

To say she's America's most talented gymnast is understatement. She's incomparable. No one does what she does. She's the quintessential mighty mite, 4'8" tall in a package of sheer grit and muscle. What she can do on the horse is not to be believed. For the eighth time, just last week she won the National Championship.

When she went over to Tokyo for the Olympics in 2020, nobody was more highly celebrated. She was the poster child for America's hopes. If anyone questioned our gold medals, no one doubted Simone Biles. She would do things the other girls could only dream of.

Then, out of nowhere, she was best by a case of "the twisties" that took her right out of the action. At her moment of world dominance, suddenly she was forced to step back, to languish out of the spotlight, to come agonizingly clean about her own emotional woes, to admit failure. Nothing about her withdrawal from competition was easy. People can be mean, thoughtless. She suffered for her withdrawal, but she suffered just as severely from the open criticism of others. American culture has come a long way with respect to emotional weaknesses, but some people thought she'd let down the red, white, and blue, dropping out of the competition, save for one event.

That was 2020. This week, the country's most storied gymnast returned and swept up the mat, not to mention the Vault, Uneven Bars, Balance Beam, and Floor Exercise. She was shockingly good, as close to perfect as any human being could be. She's back. Amazingly, she's returned.

And she's stronger. Physically? maybe--who knows? But more importantly, emotionally she's stronger. She's stayed out of the limelight deliberately, plotted out her own return, and stayed away from pressures she never really needed. She still does things no one else on earth can, but maybe her greatest gift to all of us, to any of us, is the arc of her triumph, which is an age-old plot line, but always a blessing--always, always a blessing.

She's come through. She's cut her losses. She's returned. Who cares if she messes up, she's back in the game and you can mark that a win--for all of us.

This morning's thanks is for Simone Biles, whose model of strength in life is even more remarkable than the magic she creates on the balance beam. She's back, and that she is is her most significant gift to all of us.

Ubi sunt* at Juffer Fieldhouse

Okay, there's a story here, so let me unpack it. That's me. The earphones, like the sweaty neck of the shirt, suggest I've been working out, something Barbara and I do almost daily at the Rowenhorst Center, Northwestern College. 

Big deal. There's more. In the bottom left corner, barely visible, is a hero of mine, ye olde Pres of Dordt College, the Rev. B. J. Haan. Trust me, it's him. My daughter gave me the t-shirt some time ago; she knew I'd love it, more--far more--than some fancy one that says "Hawkeyes" or even "Green Bay Packers."   Here 'tis. You really have to see it. 

This isn't just "B. J. Haan"; it's B. J. Haan in front of a church. He looks like a barnstorming, circuit-riding evangelist, which he wasn't, even though the photographer--from Time magazine--thought he was. That's right--Time and Life circa 1947, when this young firebrand preached up a storm of such magnitude that it blew the movie theater right out of town, which brought him and Sioux Center some momentary fame--and some guffaws. Imagine! --this man in this pose on the cover of Life magazine!

For me at least, it's a famous portrait, if for no other reason than nothing from or about Sioux Center, Iowa, has been on the cover of a national magazine since. 

B. J. went on to establish a brand-new college amidst broad Sioux County cornfields of Iowa's northwest corner and become its first president. Some 20 years later, he hired me to teach English, a position I stayed at or in for almost forty years. 

For some time, quite reverently, I wore my daughter's thoughtful gift only around the house--I mean, how could I profane it with the kind of sweat I can still work up? But when it became clear it was getting little use, I added it to the gym-shirt closet and decided it--and he--was going to get a workout. It's just a t-shirt, nothing sacred, nothing Rome-ish.

However, to my haunted mind, the idea of wearing a BJ t-shirt to Northwestern College, Dordt's most foul rival, seemed well, profane. I told my giggling self I'd be lucky if some Raider PE guy didn't pull me off the ellipticals and hang me out to dry.   

No matter--I pulled it on for a workout.

The parking lot was full. Strange. There had to be something going on, so we parked near Juffer Fieldhouse and went in on the other side of the gym. Place was so full we had to squeeze our way through all the people, not just football players but a crowd of parents. I'd never seen so many people in the place. We had stumbled into the middle of the very first football practice. The players had just arrived. I'm guessing the coach had made sure parents were invited.

Honestly, I have no idea what they were doing, but whatever it was involved their smart phones. The grassy infield was covered with ball players, each of them looking at their phones and carrying out some kind of on-line workout ritual in a kind of reverence. Neither the kids nor their moms and dads were saying a thing. It was as if me and BJ had entered some villainous holy temple, all the earth in silence. 

And there he was on my chest. We made our way through the observant crowd toward the entrance to the gym, walked through the silence like reprobates storming out of church. Seemed deeply impious. 

But that's me, at the top of the page, in a selfie that's supposed to bear witness to our transgression, as if it were, in fact, the profanation I'm claiming it to be. 

It wasn't. Even as we picked our way through the crowd, it struck me that no one in that crowded practice facility, not one of them had any idea whose visage adorned my t-shirt. Furthermore, I told myself that at a college twenty minutes northwest of this one, had I walked through the football team assembled on their practice field, no one would have recognized the old preacher either, nor would anyone have known the story of how it was this prairie prophet had run the theater right out of Dodge City.

No one there at Juffer Fieldhouse--a hundred people at least--had a clue who this guy on my chest was, the preacher in a swallow-tail suit, holding forth on the abominations of Hollywood. 

No one knew. No one cared. I'm guessing few of them had ever heard of Life magazine.

Sometimes, no matter how hard an old guy works staying youthful, the job is downright impossible. Oh, woe and woe and woe. 

_____________________ 

*Ubi sunt is a literary trope that "expresses a sense of loss, as well as a mourning or lament for lost things," a frame of mind that frequently obsesses old men.

  

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

“Trust in the LORD and do good; 

dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture.” Psalm 37:3

Via e-mail, I asked a student I don’t know personally if she’d like to work for me during the coming semester, the kind of work-study job students receive to help them through college, a pilgrimage which is, if you don’t already know, a very expensive journey these days.

I assumed she’d say yes. The college jobs coordinator told me she had been working in the dining hall, and most students rather appreciate an opportunity to work with profs, especially when those profs are in their majors. Slam dunk, I figured.

Her e-mail said yes. “After much prayerful consideration,” she wrote, “I’ve decided to take the English work study job.”

She must have liked the dining hall more than I assumed. Well, so did I when I worked there way back when. That’s good. It commends her, in a way.

The part of her answer I’ve not been able to forget is that dependent clause: “after much prayerful consideration.” She went to the Lord with this decision, even did it muchly? Seriously? I figured that either the decision wasn’t easy or that she goes to the Lord even with her slam dunks. Maybe it’s just rhetoric, but I doubted that—not her.

Like so many students these days, this young lady was—and presumably still is--far more “spiritual” than her parents likely ever were—at least, more than some of her profs were or are. When in the presence of such radiant spirituality, my natural tendency—for better or for worse—is to wonder if I’m somehow terminally jaundiced by my own oily skepticism and whether I wouldn’t be, well, more happy if I too took upon myself the myriad tasks presented me in life with equally soulful prayerful consideration—even when the slam dunks.

“Takes all kinds” my mother-in-law would say, which is as close to grace as some rural Midwesterners ever get, I think. And I honestly don’t doubt this student’s words, her devout sentiments, or the prayer closet regimen that single dependent clause implies. I’m hip enough to say she has a right to her righteousness. But so do I.

And I read Psalm 37:3 just a bit differently, it seems, than she does. There is something of a swap here, and I recognize the inherent danger of self-righteousness, in thinking that what I’m doing is “doing good.” Nonetheless, God almighty brokers a deal, it seems, and I honestly believe, deep in my soul, that I’m the beneficiary of his offer: “trust in me (I do), do good (I try), and I’ll be there (he’s my shepherd).” It’s that simple. With true faith in God, we shall be fed—which is the way the KJV translates this verse.

A friend of mine in South Dakota says the rains there this summer have been phenomenal, a tremendous blessing. “Those pastures you walked in, you know,” he told me, “they’re really thick—the cattle are belly-deep in grass.”

Charles Spurgeon says the real meaning of the line is in the word “shepherded”: those who trust in him and try to do his will will be shepherded.” But the NIV is nice, too: “will enjoy safe pasture.”

Here’s my spin on this bountiful verse (can you see your way through a madly mixed metaphor?): I don’t have to give prayerful consideration to my slam dunks if I’m belly-deep in grass.

Does that make sense?

Anyway, you know what I mean.

"Never Surrender!"

 

When finally, his long descent from heaven ends, Satan and his minions find themselves sprawled out in a burning lake of fire. They are worn and beaten by their fall and the realization that their circumstances will never change. They've been summarily banished from the place of all Good. What they see around them is well, hellish. They know the Lord of Heaven (there is no Earth yet) will never invite them back. They're out, period, not even sure of where they are. What they know is they've been dumped in a hot swamp.

So begins Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, which is not a poem to read before bed. Oddly enough, it begins with the arch-villain, the baddest dude in the cosmos, Satan himself, who picks his busted up body and stands to deliver one of the most moving and consequential lines in all of Western literature. 

Does he throw in the towel, recommend mass suicide? Of course not, he's the Devil. Instead, he charges God with evil, rails on what's happened to him and them, vows his revenge, delivers lines that are as famous as anything on the shelf marked "world literature" --"better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." 

And with that line, he rouses the troops for the eternal battle they'll wage against the Almighty, the battle soon to begin on earth between good and evil. 

Historically, John Milton's depiction of the Devil has been interpreted as one grand mistake. Satan's determination and will, his rousing cry for freedom from tyranny, his commanding presence, his resolute battle cry can hardly help being seen as wonderful. A whole school of interpretation stubbornly claims his mighty strength and charisma make him--the Devil himself--the protagonist, the hero of the epic. People can't help but love him.

I don't know if it was John Gardner or not who created a double-take on that incredible scene, but his book on Paradise Lost is where I first became convinced that Milton didn't make some kind of error in creating the Devil as a marvelously sympathetic character because--and this is the believer in me speaking--because he is. Let me exercise my sometimes hidden orthodoxy here and say it in another way: readers can't take their eyes off Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost because most human beings--me included--rather like the guy, or at least find his deceptions greatly attractive. 

Milton knew exactly what he was doing in PL when he made the Devil such a handsome character. He made him that way because he is. Milton's Satan dupes readers because Satan dupes us. Sin, it seems, is always more interesting than righteousness.

I could say more, but this morning I'll let a mug shot do the talking.

This man returned to Twitter last night with this picture. Beneath the mug shot, he ran the line "Never Surrender."