A Red Sea moment

Here's what House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a speech Tuesday night at a National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL) banquet. When he took the stage, he lauded NACL for not letting the news media in. 

The Lord impressed upon my heart a few weeks before this happened that something was going to occur. And the Lord very specifically told me in my prayers to prepare, but to wait. . .I had this sense that we were going to come to a Red Sea moment in our Republican conference and in the county at large.

Look, I'm a Southern Baptist. I don't wanna get too spooky on you. But you know, the Lord speaks to your heart. He had been speaking to me about this, and the Lord told me very clearly to prepare and be ready. Be ready for what? I don't know. We're coming to a Red Sea moment. What does that mean, Lord?

When the speaker's race happened and Kevin McCarthy, who's a dear friend of mine, was deposed and vacated from the chair. Oh, wow! Well this is what the Lord may have been preparing us for. I started praying more. Lord began to wake me up through the three-week process we're in, in the middle of the night, and to speak to me and write things down. Plans,  procedures and ideas of how to bring this conference together.

At the time, I assumed the Lord is going to choose a new Moses, and Thank you Lord, you're going to allow me to be Aaron to Moses. 

According to the record, Johnson then recalled  the 13 failed bids of those who came before him, during which time the Lord "kept telling me to, 'Wait, wait, wait.'" Eventually, Johnson reported, God told him, "Now, step forward."

"Me? I'm supposed to be Aaron," he told the Lord. But the Lord said, "No, step forward." 

The question is, what am I to make of this?

1) The man is bonkers.

2) Many people hear voices in the night. Just be thankful his voice is the voice of the King of Heaven and Earth.

3) His brand of Christian nationalism is a direct threat to American democracy.

4) Someone who has attained the position of Speaker of the House, third in-line for the Presidency?--that he's a true believer is a national blessing. 

5) He must continue to report everything the Lord tells him to do what the voices tell him in the odd hours of the night because what he hears he believes and will act upon.

6) If the revelations of a candidate for office originate in the peyote he or she has been smoking, what criteria should we use to determine whose voices are legit? 

7) Mr. Johnson also believes that ex-President Trump won the 2020 election. Did the Lord tell him that too?

8) Buckle up! This ought to be a ride.

9) What do our creeds say about individual revelation--does the Lord speak to us, does he write us notes in the way Rep. Johnson swears  happened?

10) Johnson is a good man. Let him have his fantasies. We could have someone who listens the voice of Satan.

11) what have I missed? Add your own response . . .

The Story in Pawhuska

[Just happened on to this old blog post from four years ago. Killers of the Flower Moon is a stunner. See it. But we spent a long weekend in Pawhuska (on the Osage Reservation) when the excitement over the movie was just beginning. It's just as stunning as I hoped it would be.]

"What places do I absolutely have to see when I'm here?" I asked her. 

"You have to see our church," she told me from behind the desk at the Osage visitor's center. She was clearly herself at least part Osage. I liked the way she had pushed the church at me, as if it was simply not to be missed--"our church," she said. She was speaking as a proud tribal person. 

"Our church," is Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a red-brick cruciform built in 1910 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

When I got there, all doors were locked. A sign on the office door posted a number I called. A woman with a pleasant voice told me it was closed for the holiday weekend, but she'd meet me anyway. That was nice of her, and I told her so. 

By the time we got inside the church, a half-dozen others had joined us on the tour, a family from Colorado on their way to a college football game. Thought they'd stop, they said. So there we stood in the middle of the church ready to begin. 

Our silver-haired docent introduced herself by saying she was linked to the region by blood, by DNA. She was part Osage herself, she said, but born and reared in Dallas because her grandma had left Osage County a couple generations earlier, scared to death of being murdered. 

I knew at least something of what she meant. 

"You know the story?" she asked the folks in football jerseys. 

They shook their heads. She turned to me. I'd met her only five minutes earlier. "You tell them," she said. Not a question, a command. She wasn't kidding. "You tell them," she said.

Blew me away. "Me?" I said. Made no sense. She was the guide. 

She nodded at me, then smiled endearingly, as if to let me know to trust her. 

The truth was, I did know the story--so I told them. 

For the record, this February, Pawhuska, Oklahoma, right there in Osage County on Osage tribal land, will welcome Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DiNiro, Martin Scorsese, and a score of other Hollywood headliners, who will be filming the story told in David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon, the complicated story of a grisly rash of unsolved murders in the early 1920s, multiple deaths of Osage men and women who had suddenly become unimaginably wealthy when oil gushed from wells drilled into their land. In 1925, Pawhuska, Oklahoma had a Rolls Royce dealership, but it also had dozens of dead Indians. The story she wanted me the Colorado visitors who didn't know is horrifying.

When I finished, she told me with yet another smile that she thought I'd done well. 

Immaculate Conception's claim to fame is a colorful stained glass rendition of a Dutch-born priest named Father John Shoenmakers as he brings the divine light of Christ to the Osage, who were, back then, in southern Kansas. The story she loved to tell herself was that the Osage needed the special approval of Rome for that particular window because it featured Native men and women who were still alive and were therefore, by some papal edict, not supposed to be so gloriously honored in stained glass. The Osage won that fight; so today, if you visit, someone will point at the north window with great pride.

The Colorado bunch had to get to the ball game, they said, so they left, thanking her for the tour; but she had more to show me, she said, and I was more than anxious to listen. We went up in the balcony where she showed me the window celebrating the Immaculate Conception itself. 

And then she showed me this.

A dedication at the bottom of one of those gorgeous German-made wonders indicated this particular window honored the memory of a woman named Sybil Bolton. "She was one of them," she told me. What she meant, I knew, was that Sybil Bolton was one of the murdered Osage women.

Then we walked out back to the new chapel built to honor Tekakwitha, a Mohawk, the very first and only Native American saint.

My tour guide was gracious and animated. Clearly, she loved her church--and her people.

Sybil Bolton, I read later, was a young Osage woman who learned to play the harp at an exclusive East Coast boarding school. Then back home, at the age of just 21 years old she died mysteriously with her baby at her side and was buried here in an ermine coat. 

The silver-haired docent had said very little of that, only "She was among those who died." 

The undying horror of the Osage "reign of terror," is that the community still lives with it. The great-grandchildren of killers attend school with the great-grandchildren of victims. In the 20s, when the FBI began to work the case, they were foiled in every way by white and red alike. Fear and shame kept mouths shut. 

That's at least part of the story Martin Scorsese will soon be telling. That's the story she asked me to tell.

Immaculate Conception is still there, welcoming guests like myself. "Our church," the woman at the visitors desk had explained. "You have to see our church."

Pawhaska is a touristy place today, home of Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman. You can shop at all kinds of specialty stores in the old downtown and buy all kinds of nice things you didn't think you needed. But like the woman in the visitor's center said, don't miss Immaculate Conception Church. That guide I had was terrific, gave a wonderful tour.  

But she seemed to appreciate it if I handled the bad stuff. I can't help but think the burden is still, a century later, almost too heavy to carry. For her, the whole tour was less of a load if I was the one who told the story.

The novelist William Faulkner lived a half a continent away, but in Pawhuska at least, "the past isn't dead," he memorably said. "It isn't even the past."

A failure of imagination

Just exactly why Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his men all died on a hill above a river named the Little Big Horn may never be known. His flamboyant personality has long ago given rise to the theory that, in taking the 7th Calvary where he did, when he did, he was, at worst, looking for headlines, or, at best, simply making a disastrous military mistake. Whatever causes there were, what resulted was a famous last stand at a place where all his men, all of them, were killed by Native warriors from several different tribes, who shared the intense anger created by an endless stream of white men and women and children who just wouldn't stop coming into their worlds. 

Among the theories is one advanced by the behavior of his officers, Capts. Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen, both distinguished Civil War vets, who somehow failed to come to Custer's rescue. Neither were afraid of a fight. At the moment "Custer's Last Stand" took place, Reno and his men were battle weary, having run into fierce opposition as they attempted to attack the United Nations of Native people just up the river. They'd been overwhelmed, in fact, suffered casualties, forty or more, that would have seemed catastrophic if it hadn't been for the 210 men who went to their deaths with Custer. 

Whatever the case, Reno chose not to chase after Custer, even though once the guns were silenced in his own venue of the battle, several survivors claimed that the ruckus a couple of miles north of Reno's ill-fated battlefield was not only audible but visible. Clearly, some claimed, something was happening where Gen. Custer attacked the hostiles. Some fighting was going on. 

But Reno didn't go. Why not? Good question. His uniform was blood-spattered from the death of a Crow scout who took a bullet to the head right beside him. Maybe he'd simply had enough.

What some argue, however, is that Reno didn't go to his superior's aid because he simply couldn't believe that his famous boss could lose to a madcap gang of unruly savages. It was beyond his imagination. Some theorize that Reno didn't go because it never dawned  on him that the First Nations would batter Custer and his men, kill them all.

I couldn't help but think of that story when another broke in the NY Times just last week, the alarming story that the Israeli defense forces were told some months back that HAMAS was planning an attack by strategies unlike any attempted before, that they'd use glider planes and motorcycles and whatever they could to carry out a surprise raid over neighboring regions of Israeli-occupied land, that they would do exactly what they did.

Which few believed because it was, well, unfathomable, just as unfathomable as the idea that George Armstrong Custer would go down at the hands of savages.

Yet another approximation in the weeds here needs to be called out. Part of the inability to imagine outcomes is built on jaundiced perceptions of the enemy's strengths, created almost certainly by bigotry. If you think the enemy are savages, you can be savaged by your own bigotry. 

The IDF didn't believe HAMAS could do what they did. Capt. Reno didn't believe a bunch of scraggly warriors could do what they did. Why not? Because the people who defeated them were idiots and savages.

I couldn't help thinking that similar weaknesses played a role in similar outcomes.

The Alberta witness

It's not that the mystery has been left unexplained. You can find, on any library shelf, dozens of books that try to peer into the madness of contemporary evangelicalism, most specifically, the not-to-be-believed dalliance of Bible-believers with a man whose great gift to American culture, pre-Presidency, was posh golf courses, luxury hotels, and gambling dens. The salient political fact of our time is that President Donald J. Trump would never, ever have succeeded without the fervor of Christians who would not like their own children and grandchildren to say aloud or even think the things Trump says and does.

How on earth is it that "people of the book" have become Trump's most dedicated warriors? That question many have attempted to answer, the latest of whom is a terrific journalist named Tim Alberta, who grew up in eastern Michigan, attended Michigan State University, has a bona fide background in evangelicalism himself, and wrote one of the first go-to books, Carnage, on the early Trump years. This new one--THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, out today, in fact.

I love what he's doing, love his energy and his acumen. He's a professional, a journalist committed the facts, the truth. He deserves my support--and I'm giving it to him right now.

Just don't ask me to read the book. I'd druther not--I honestly don't care to know what I already know too well--that good, Christian people, American evangelicals, have sold their souls to a man who uses them like a concubine. I'm not likely to read Alberta's book because I don't need to know the truth that already darkens my days. Last time around, the county I live in, bursting with church-going traffic every last Sunday morning, voted for Trump, 80/20.

I know it because my rep in Washington, a good, good man named Feenstra, who voted to accept the electoral college results of the election, remains purposefully silent about Trump's apparent descent deeper and deeper in into madness, channeling the old Nazi bigots last month by calling anyone who doesn't believe in him "vermin." Trump's danger to American democracy will not be understood or battled when good men and women, like Feenstra, say nothing. Feenstra is saying nothing.

Even though I may be scared to read it, I deeply appreciate the fact that during his rounds on the talk shows yesterday, Tim Alberta admitted freely and openly that he was and is and likely will remain an evangelical Christian. His father was a preacher; he's a veteran of youth groups, camps, and all kinds of evangelical mainstay traditions. And if you hear him speak almost any time in the next few days, you'll hear him own his birthright religion as his own. He professes his faith, not in Trump, but in his Lord and Savior.

In his interviews yesterday, what often comes up is a concept Alberta claims originated with his boss at the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who, in an ordinary conversation was quizzing Alberta about his findings. Goldberg suggested that Trump's relationship to American evangelicals was almost "mercenary." Donald J. Trump is like a hired gun for Bible-thumpers who believe that, as Christians, they are totally under siege from the evils of secularists and secularism, that ever since Roe v Wade or the Monkey Trial or banished prayers in public schools, American culture--God-denying American culture--is out to get them. A desperate people, Alberta says, got so desperate they married a despot, a liar, a womanizer. They hired him to do their dirty work.

Because he will. He manicured the Supreme Court and got rid of Roe. They may not love Trump, but they love that he'll do their dirty work as long as they vote for him. They take him, he takes power, a mercenary relationship.

At the core is the belief that American culture has no use for American evangelicals. What I love about the book--I didn't read it, but that's not germane here--is the fact that it's written by a man who's raising his children in an evangelical church, a man who is unafraid of saying that he too is an evangelical, a man who is in no clear sense outside the fence because he's an orthodox Christian.

Tim Alberta is himself a walking, talking, writing evangelical, and he's saying what he is from the top of the NY Times Bestseller list. If Christians were under siege in American culture, there would be no Tim Alberta.

That's story is worth telling, too.

The 1888 Blizzard among the Natives

In 1888, throughout Siouxland countryside, what habitation existed for homesteaders was all relatively new and, well, in its very own way, primitive. The northwestern counties of Iowa, for any number of reasons, were the last region of the state to be "colonized" by white folks, at least in part because of the lack of woods and forests. People used what they could use to create a home, and what was immensely available--and amazingly cheap--was sod. There were no trees, except a few along the rivers. Some felt exposed, even lost their wits in a world where the horizon seemed always forever away. 

Wait a minute. You're thinking that insulation in the soddies couldn't have been better. Walls a foot thick kept folks balmy in January and refreshed in August. But in wintery gales could pull a chorus of tea kettles from a soddy's walls. With some luck, you could keep zero temps at bay, but keeping the wind outside was another story altogether.

Those who remembered the 1888 blizzard often compared the snow behind the front like flour. It had been feathery early in the morning, but once that black cloud people couldn't help but notice swept over them, what came down was icy flour, sharp as cut glass and capable of finding every last mousehole in whatever "out of the storm" place people took shelter. Lots of families awoke to drifts that lay before them like sleeping pets. Snow and ice spread quickly over the windows outside and frosted up completely inside. If some curious grandpa wanted to see what was going on outside and cracked open a door, the snow the barrage thus welcomed made closing that door a two or three-person job.

Schools--some of them made of sod, some not--weren't much better. Don't think "air tight." No ma'am. Sometimes older kids were assigned the job of trying to stay ahead of the snow that constantly drifted in.

There's no record of what Siouxland's Native populations thought of all those white folks building soddies up on the flat, treeless eastern plains, but they must have chuckled. Of course, they didn't know any better.  Come winter, the Winnebagos found their way to straps of trees along the Missouri River, for good reason--wood, lots of it, for fuel, but also for fortification from the fearful winds in the flat land. 

In late November, most western Sioux bands headed off to the Black Hills for nature's own protection. Somehow, with temps far lower than any basement could be dug, life was simply better in the nest created by the savannahs of the Paha Sapa. Wigwams created downright cozy shelters, some of them big enough to hold as many as four fires. Sometimes they built bark cabins around the tipis, for even better insulation. The truth is, some more modern Native clans built frame homes, but some of those families walked away from cabins in January and went back to blankets and bark and the Black Hills. 

Among the Santees, those who remembered the blizzard couldn't recall any deaths, with the exception of a half-dozen horses who were simply--hard as it may seem to believe--buried beneath a drift, some of which were twenty feet tall, so tall they didn't disappear until mid-May. 

It's hard to imagine that some of the First Nations didn't shake their heads and giggle a little at what seemed the madness of making a go of winter on nothing but flat land. It might have been helpful for all those immigrant people, many of them squatters, to observe those who had lived through the trials and tribulations of many Siouxland winters. But then, they were savages, weren't they?

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 37

“. . .and their inheritance will endure forever”

I’m told that one of the all-too-human urges behind a desire to write something with some heft is an unconscious wish to create something timeless. We want to be a Hemingway or a Dickinson, a Milton or a Shakespeare. We want to speak, long after our voice box has been dusted away from whence it has come.

Maybe. When as an undergraduate I stumbled on a love of literature I never knew I had, I’ll admit believing that one of the perks of the writing life was the possibility of being included in those fat lit anthologies. That was before I knew the word “remaindered,” and long before I realized how many millions sit here, like me, fingers curled over the keys.

A friend of mine, the book editor of a major American newspaper, gets 100 books a day to review. There’s lots of competition to get inside to get a place in those fat lit anthologies.

Some time ago, I corresponded with two antiquarian book sellers in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Years ago, I stumbled on a moldy cardboard box of old Dutch books in an antique store. The woman up front told me she’d just as soon get rid of them. “Five bucks,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

Inside, I found ancient theological tomes, literally hundreds of years old. Simply to hold one is a thrill. But they have no vital relationship to me, even though my own DNA wears wooden shoes on both sides of the family. My great-grandfather came from Holland to teach theology in the 1870s; I’ve got many of his books too. Those I wouldn’t sell.

When, finally, those booksellers got back to me, I was amazed at how little those books are worth. The cost to ship them to Holland would, on its own, devour what they’re worth. They’re back on my shelf.

What little real value they have derives from their age, not their authors. The most ancient was published in 1655. It’s a bit smaller than a paperback, has an abundance of bronze, liver-spotted pages, and is some kind of theological study—De Yverigan, Christen, den Hemel door Heyligh Gevvelt:innemende. I have only the faintest idea of what that means. I’m not even sure there is an author listed.

Most books published today won’t endure like Christen, den Hemel—it’s a matter of physics, of the quality of ink and paper. Okay, I admit it—that’s a bit unsettling. Somewhere in me I must have this jaded wish to live forever by way of the words now appearing on my screen. However, read ‘em and weep, because even these ancients say, “Don’t count on it, Jahmas.”

And then there’s David, whose words are animating every last key stroke I’m making right now, thousands and thousands of years later. But the promise he’s giving us in this verse of Psalm 37 has nothing to do with his poetry or his music, even those softly plaintive tones from the harp, the ones that calmed King’s Saul’s soul.

The enduring inheritance David promises in this line is nothing more or less than eternity itself, life forever, the gift of God to those the psalm calls “blameless,” recipients of God’s own grace. We will live forever.

And that, I’ve long been convinced, is mine. Even if these words slip away from the cloud after a decade or two, even if nothing I ever say lasts any longer than an hour or two after lunch, eternity, by grace, is mine.

That, no matter what I say or write, is an inheritance that endures. 

Caroline Boa Henderson and the Dust Bowl*

Caroline and Will Henderson, Eva, Oklahoma

She and her husband went to the revival because the church was their church too, sort of. She and her husband hadn't been shy about telling their neighbors that they liked the United Brethren fellowship but weren't all that hot on the doctrine, all that thrilled, for instance, about hell.

"Hell, What it is. Where it is. Who Goes There." Maybe they should have known not to go in the door that last night.

Here's the way she described what happened. 

Even if I  could write every word, I could scarcely suggest the unloving tone and manner of presentation, the vulgarity and crude materialism of the whole thing. The geological location, the names of people now there, the vile denunciation of others, the stickiness of melted brimstone, the red flames of burning sulphur--it was all but intolerable. 

Then, the test. In "a large, challenging voice," the preacher asked "whether there was anyone before them who did not believe in hell." 

Caroline Boa Henderson, who with her husband, Will, worked a plot of grassland that would nearly blow away in the Dust Bowl a few years later, did not believe in hell and weren't particularly shaken by some fire-breathing evangelist flinging brimstone all over the church.

Caroline Henderson raised her hand. Those around her were not shocked, but surprised.

The pastor marched right up the aisle, took a match from his vest, told Caroline to hold out her hand, lit the match, held it beneath her skin. "You don't think your body can burn?" he asked, holding that match there. 

Caroline said it wasn't fire she doubted, it was the place he delighted to call hell.

Her hand blistered, or so she told her readers when she described the revival; but what really burned her up was how the fire-breather told her neighbors it was unbelievers such as they'd just seen who were going to burn in hell.

That was it. The Hendersons never darkened the church door again, the only congregation within miles of the windswept grassland where they lived, the land so many abandoned when it dried up into powder that swept into the lungs of man and beast. The Hendersons grew more and more alone.

People in Eva, Oklahoma, thought of prickly Caroline Henderson as hard to get along with. True believers sometimes are, and Caroline Boa Henderson certainly was. She may not have believed in some other world of fire, but she was champion of faith in this one.

Caroline Henderson believed a man or woman who had a love for the land he or she worked created a harvest of virtue, plenitude, and grace. If you loved, truly, the ground you worked, she believed you would be blessed.

Today, the idea sounds cockamamie, even here in Siouxland, where the abundance of our good land keeps us here. But Mrs. Henderson's faith had roots in Thomas Jefferson, who liked to believe--and did--that "those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." That's what she believed.

But she lived in No Man's Land on the Oklahoma Panhandle, where between 1933 and 1938 she and Will suffered through 301 dust storms, many of which lasted for as long as four days. Think John Steinbeck or a buggy-like truck with dining-room chairs spilling off of a pile of junk sputtering along anywhere west.

Not Caroline. She and Will weren't about to give up the faith that had taken root in her soul. They didn't turn their backs on Thomas Jefferson, even when blinding dust drifted endlessly into the house her husband, an ex-cowboy, had built with his own hands. She never stopped writing, never stopped singing.

"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." Where did that faith come from? Carrie Boa was born in Wisconsin in 1877, but moved here, with her family, to Plymouth County, to a Union township farm between Remsen and Kingsley, a farm her father managed and ran successfully, working northwest Iowa ground, the kind of place Jefferson claimed made promises to those who did.

She left Siouxland for Mt. Holyoke College in 1897, at a time when very few farm girls even went to high school, much less a college out east. She must not have been shy about her dreams because the 1901 Mt. Holyoke class prophecy boldly declares that Carrie Boa, class of 1901, will soon be living "somewhere on a western ranch."

In her commencement gown and mortarboard, her soft cheeks make her look girlish, her seriousness something of a sham. There's innocence in her endearing eyes, but no fear. It's a face that will win by grace, by sweetness you might well expect of an Iowa farm girl in 1901.

Soon enough, she would know hard times. She moved to Eva, Oklahoma, because she wanted to be a pioneer, as her parents had been, part of the epic western movement. 

But life was no bowl of cherries. Sometimes the three of them--they had a daughter--lived hand-to-mouth, years when there were no cattle in the gates, no fruit on the vine, nothing.

She may well have given up on hell because she'd seen enough on earth. But she never stopped believing in the land, even though it neither promised nor delivered rose gardens. 

Caroline Henderson wrote about her life in No Man's Land in a series of letters and essays in the Atlantic Monthly, depictions that do as fine a job as there is of documenting life in the epicenter of most significant agricultural disaster of the century. Letters from the Dust Bowl tells her story. And part of ours too.

It wasn't easy. Often enough, she and Will were alone, as they were when they walked out of that revival. But unlike others, Caroline Boa Henderson, who grew up just down the road, never stopped believing in the land she loved.

___________________ 

*First appeared here 02/27/2018.  

Mysteries

The church was packed. Mom would have liked that. And all five "first ladies" were in attendance--she would have liked that too. She would have appreciated that Melania came, even though her husband couldn't--and that wouldn't have surprised her either. 

Wonderful things were spoken. All kinds of people gave Rosalynn Carter unending homage for her zeal in caring for "the least of these." Mom would have noted that was something we're all called to do.

Today, Mom would appreciated President Carter's startling move of including Rosalynn in cabinet meetings. Mrs. Carter insisted on it, but then so did he. Jimmy, the President, always claimed that any successes he'd ever achieved came his way because of his able and attentive spouse, who was more than happy--insistent even--on offering her opinion on matters of politics and state. 

Mom appreciated the way Rosalynn and Jimmy filled their pockets with nails, picked up a hammer and saw, and helped out on Habitat homes, a former President and his first lady sweating in the noonday sun--imagine that! And she would have appreciated the little stories people told yesterday, like her son's story of how his mother had pulled out a Tupperware tub right there on the plane and started making sandwiches. The people on board "couldn't believe it," her son told the mourners. "But she loved people."

I think Mom might have been surprised to realize, as some claimed, that Rosalynn Carter, throughout her life, had a special regard for the down-and-out, those disadvantaged by life itself, and for her unending work on the part of care-givers. Mrs. Carter was a global humanitarian who worked for nothing less than peace, even in the Middle East.

Mom might have even shed a tear when she heard Rosalynn's longtime aide and friend describe her thusly: "Wife, mother, business manager, political strategist, diplomat, advocate, author. Yet what I remember most about her was her tireless dedication to taking care of others." 

Yesterday, November 28, was Mom's birthday. She's been gone for just about exactly a decade. One November Friday of 2013, an oncologist told her she had inoperable cancer. On Monday next, she died, her quiet leave-taking a very special gift.

I thought of Mom during Rosalynn's tribute service in Atlanta yesterday, remembered it was her birthday, and couldn't help imagining what she would have thought of the whole event. She walked into my memory when that packed Atlanta audience rose to sing "Blessed Assurance! Jesus is Mine." If I know my mother, I can't imagine she wouldn't have shed a tear just then--'oh, what a foretaste of glory divine." My parents' headstone is engraved with the opening line of that fine old hymn.

Right then, I'm sure my mother's knees would have buckled, her breath would have staggered, and her lip would have curled. She would have had to reach for a hanky from that little TV table that, by the end, held just about all she needed to get along. "Blessed Assurance" would have brought Mom to Mrs. Carter's Atlanta celebration, despite the dark reality she could not forget: Rosalynn Carter was a Democrat.

Just exactly how someone like my mother--so much more like Rosalynn Carter than Melanie Trump--could end her life as a torch-bearer for the Orange Jesus is a question I'd love to hear her answer today, a decade later, in realms of glory. 

Should Mom be somewhere today where a massive big-screen TV stretches across a heavenly sky, and should she have watched Mrs. Carter's Atlanta tribute, I'd like to think she would have loved every minute of it, every last thing. 

Who knows? Maybe the two of them would have watched it together. Why not? In the new heavens and the new earth, lions and lambs snuggle. "This is my story/this is my song. . ."

You know the words.

The 1888 Blizzard--Willie Holst

Snow fell that morning, early, even before children left for the schoolhouse, two miles away for some, occasionally more. Kids loved the morning's fleecy stuff, coming down over their shoulders like feathers, crashing, even splashing against caps and jackets or just sitting there like some crystalline pin until before it slowly melted away. They were accustomed to the sharp stuff that rode in on a bitter northwest wind and threatened to remove your face if you didn't turn away from its sting. The morning of the great 1888 blizzard, "the Children's Blizzard," was warm and lovely and unlike anything the children had ever seen.

In a rural school near Hartington, Nebraska, the teacher and the older kids met quietly up front to map out a strategy for the monster howling away just outside the door. Together, they decided it was too dangerous to send the anyone home, that, instead, they should just simply focus on keeping them all at school until the snow would finally abate, which meant until the next morning. That meant--an overnight in the schoolhouse.

By noon, the snowfall was no longer pretty or delicate. Whatever fell before the temperature did, laid a sloppy blanket over everything, a mat that froze solid on sopping wet caps and gloves and winter coats. By late morning, the snow was fine as flour, people said later, so Willie Holst, who lived no more than a stone's throw from school, suddenly realized his eyelashes were frozen shut.  

He hadn't figured on frozen eyelashes. What had sent him out on a heroic relief mission just before were bawling children who missed their moms and dads, claimed they were hungry, and just did their own kind of howling for no particular reason. Willie Holst told Miss McNeal he would brave the monster outside, run home, and pick up some victuals for the little ones. But when he realized he was blinded by the blizzard's barrage, he stopped, then simply turned around--going anywhere was just too big a risk. Not a one of those children was going to die of hunger, not in just one night, he told himself. You best not chance it. 

Like so many others right then throughout the plains just then, he grabbed a line fence to guide him slowly back to the schoolhouse, hand over hand. Try as he might, Willie Holst didn't find the schoolhouse, just couldn't see it in the wind and snow. He kept his wits about him, measured ten wide steps to the left of the fence and found nothing, switched to other side, measured ten more to the right, but still found nothing. With that guiding wire back in his hand, he tried those same fifteen steps forward. "I had taken just a few steps," he says, "when I smashed against the schoolhouse with such force that I was knocked backward and got a bad bump on my head."

He never saw it. He was that close and that far away. Blinding snow fell so thick that what seemed across the section was an arm's length from him, and he still couldn't see. The blizzard of 1888 endangered the lives of hundreds, even thousands of children. Hundreds died, some of the bodies weren't found until spring. There would not be another Blizzard of 1888. 

Willie Holst, just kid himself, saved his own life by making the right choice, turning around and going back to Miss McNeal. By the time the storm had broken early the next morning, not a one kid had suffered from hunger; but all around, late that afternoon and early evening, hundreds hadn't reached home and never would.

So what happened to the big kids?--what happened to Willie Holst? "That was my last day of school," he says at the end of his memories of January 12, 1888.

The Schoolhouse Blizzard of 1888*

 

A January thaw is what all of us look forward to right now, a breath of warmth that reopens our hope that someday soon April will return. Two cold-of-winter days, maybe three, of forty degrees. No wind.

Heaven comes to Siouxland.

That’s the relief people felt early on January 12, 1888, when most of those who’d put down homesteads had just arrived.

Here’s how David Laskin describes that morning:

Everyone who wrote about January 12 noticed something different about the quality of that morning—the strange color and texture of the sky, the preternatural balminess, the haze, the fog, the softness of the south wind, the thrilling smell of thaw, the “great waves” of snow on the prairie that gleamed in the winter sun.

And then this: “The one aspect they all agreed on was the sudden, welcome rise of temperature.” A January thaw, a morning to remember, but a balmy prelude to horror.

Laskin’s book, The Children’s Blizzard, tells the story. When that strange warmth suddenly lifted, hundreds of people, most of them children, perished in a blizzard that made prairie skies dark as night and created massive drifts in winds that drove crystallized snow into your face so ferociously it filled up what flesh it didn’t tear away.

Seven miles east of Freeman, South Dakota, five boys died, lost in the unremitting blast of snow. Three of them were Kaufmanns--Johann, Heinrich, and Elias. What they and two other boys intended was simply to get to safety at the Graber house, a quarter mile east of the school, Ratzlaff #66. The wall they hit was a zero-visibility blizzard.

The victims’ families were all “Schweizers,” German-speaking Mennonites booted from Russia, who’d come to the Dakota Territory with fifty other families seeking the religious freedom they’d looked to find for 200 years--and the opportunity to live a good and safe life. None of them had it easy; sometimes their children would alternate attending school because families didn’t have shoes enough to go around.

But there was promise here in Dakota.

Then came “the Children’s Blizzard.”

Those five Freeman boys just disappeared; and even though search parties went out the next morning in the swirling remnants, no one found them until three days later, on the Sabbath, when a man spotted an arm jutting from a snowbank, an arm belonging to the eldest Kaufmann, Johann, who was likely holding up a coat to shield the younger boys from the killer.

They ended up two-and-one-half miles southeast of Ratzlaff #66, buried by the blizzard, just forty feet from the farm house of the man who found them.

The story goes that man went to church with the news that Sunday. I don’t know if he interrupted worship. I don’t know what they might have been singing, but I can guess how hard they prayed.

No one knows precisely how many people perished in that massive blizzard. Most estimate the grim death toll at somewhere near 250.

It all began with a sweet January thaw that quick as a fox descended into madness. At Valentine, Nebraska, the temperature was 30 degrees at 6 a.m., six degrees at two in the afternoon. and 14 below at nine that night.

Somewhere out in south central Nebraska you’ll find a highway marker that tells that neighborhood’s chapter of the story, but there’s nothing up at all east of Freeman, where five boys died. There’s no sign, no story, only endless rows of corn and soybeans. Even the farms are gone.

All the way from Russia, those Schweizers carried with them an old Mennonite hymn, something with a first line that went like this: “Wherlos und verlassen sehnt sich oft mein Herz nach stiller Ruh”—“When I’m lonely and defenseless,/my heart longs for rest and peace.”

Maybe that Sunday, that old favorite was the one they went back to, all of them. If not that Sunday, surely the next.

_________________ 

*Published first on January 13, 2017. I'd like to tell a few more stories drawn from that famous blizzard, an event which had to be the biggest story in the neighborhood for many years. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

“But their swords will pierce their own hearts, 

and their bows will be broken.”

 

To his credit, Saul didn’t want the job.  In fact, he even hid when chosen. He was a local farmer, a head taller than most people, remarkably handsome. But he wanted no part of being Israel’s first king. In a way, that’s good. It speaks humility. 

 

What’s more, he changed his mind only because Israel faced a crisis. No one bribed him; he took the job to which he was divinely appointed only because his people needed him. Nabash the Ammonite, threatening the city of Jabesh with vastly superior forces, told the people he would accept their surrender only if each male would give the Ammonites his right eye, a sure way to ensure continuing victories.

 

To counter, Saul played a card from a similar deck. He hacked up his oxen, and his men delivered the chunks to the people of Israel, telling them that unless they acted all their livestock would meet a similar fate. Soon enough, he had an army. Soon enough the city of Jabesh was spared. Saul was a hero—and he was King.

 

It didn’t take long for his reign to spiral into disobedience and decay, and the cause was understandable: he began to trust himself more than the Lord. Excuse my saying it, but that’s well, to be expected of most all of us.

 

Specifically, when he saw his army dissipate before battle with the Philistines, he took upon himself the task of religious sacrifice, thereby disobeying God, who had commanded that only Samuel, his anointed prophet, could undertake the ritual sacrifice. 

 

Samuel was furious. He told the King that God would replace him with someone God himself would choose, a man, Samuel told him, who had a heart like God’s own. 

 

Not long after, King Saul won an impressive victory over the Amalekites, but rather than destroy the entire army as God had commanded, Saul took their King, Agag, alive, a kind of trophy. Likewise, his soldiers kept Amalekite livestock, such plunder traditionally a conquering army’s wages. But both acts were disobedient.

 

Samuel grieved deeply over Saul’s flagrant arrogance, and God commanded his prophet to anoint another king. Enter David, a 16-year-old shepherd boy with no military experience, little gravitas, and absolutely no name recognition. 

 

After a miraculous one-on-one defeat of the giant Goliath however, David needed no one to market his importance. Soon he was the champion of the masses, a fact that did not go unnoticed by the still reigning King. King Saul grew frightfully paranoid about the would-be king, even mad. Several times, he tried to kill him.  Amazingly, David stayed loyal. The King no longer ruled but was ruled by a fanatical obsession to kill the boy who’d never been disloyal.

 

With the nation in disarray, the Philistines mounted another assault, and Saul, seeing defeat, killed himself rather than suffer the humiliation of capture and torture—he purposefully fell on his sword. 

 

The moral lesson of all of this could hardly be missed by the shepherd boy, Saul’s reluctant successor, a man after God’s own heart. Is the story of King Saul the precise derivation of this line from the song of Psalm 37? It seems impossible not to believe that it couldn’t be. 

 

But the reason it’s here is assurance—ours. In the long run, the wicked, whoever they might be, won’t prosper. That’s the simple truth David wants to offer for our comfort.  He knew—perhaps like no one else—how true it was and is.

Morning Thanks--Innocence

On a winter day that could well have passed for May just a couple of years ago, my wife and four-year-old granddaughter went for a walk, along with half the rest of the town. The weather was perfect, and a blessing.

“So, Joce,” my wife asked, “what do you think you’d like to be when you grow up.” She was soon to be five and very sophisticated.

“I’d like to put on make up,” she said, “or else I’d like to be a doctor, or maybe work in a grocery store.”

Okay. That answer makes perfectly clear why Jesus Christ put so much stock in little kids. And it’s no wonder, really, why innocence-to-experience stories are the soul of so much of the world’s great fiction. Innocence is such a treasure to leave behind.

It’s a blessing when you have it and even to remember it when it’s long, long gone.

I’m thankful for it, for innocence, that is, this morning.

___________________ 

Morning Thanks--Thanksgiving

 My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast; 

I will sing and make music.  Psalm 57

I need to thank Garrison Keillor for drawing my attention to this verse of Psalm 57—not in so many words, but in spirit. I need to thank him for reminding me in an interview in Christian Century that the Christian life begins in gratitude. The source of faith itself is certainly elsewhere and mysterious beyond my ken, but gratitude is the starting block for what ye olde’ theologians called sanctification.  “I will sing and make music” is David’s brash pledge, his testimony of how he will live. He says it because he knows God’s promises are sure, his faithfulness will ooze into all generations, and beyond, upward and forever outward into eternity itself.

Here’s what Garrison Keilor said:

Thank you, Lord, for this amazing and bountiful life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for this laptop computer and for this yellow kitchen table and for the clock on the wall and the cup of coffee and the glasses on my nose and for these black slacks and this black T-shirt. . . .Thank you for the odd delight of being 60, part of which is the sheer relief of not being 50.

And then he said, “One should enumerate one's blessings and set them before the Lord. Begin every day with this exercise.”That’s the idea that birthed this blog 2500 posts ago, trying to begin each day with gratitude, making a discipline of thanksgiving. Sometimes thanks comes easy as breath itself; sometimes, come the wee hours of the morning, it’s just plain hard work.

What he said in that Christian Century interview grabbed me because I sometimes feel too much the curmudgeon as I creep into those supposedly blessed, therefore golden years.  A friend of mine once made the claim that the doctrine of sanctification—that believers, as they age, inch closer and closer to the Lord, to godliness—is really a myth. “Most old guys I know,” he says, “are crotchety.” 

And they are. It’s an itch I’ve been scratching too much myself.   

It all starts with praise, Keillor says:  “Gratitude is where the Christian life begins.”  We all ought to work at it, he reminds us.  “Begin every day with this exercise. . .”  That idea struck me as priceless, so that’s what I’ve been trying to do for years already--there's the quote up top of the page.

Maintaining a discipline of gratitude with dawn’s early light hasn’t morphed me into some kind of saint.  You can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.   

But neither has not been, for me, a waste of time.  Not at all. I’m not a great a singer, but I make my own kind of music here in front of a screen in the basement. And for that—for my music and the source of its energy and Garrison Keillor’s sweet reminder of something I’ve always known—for all of that, I’m thankful. 

Hear my song. 

__________________  

Morning Thanks -- Doing Dishes

Okay, maybe I was not thrilled. It's my job to clean up after Sunday dinner,
but just because I know what I have to do doesn't mean I relish doing it. My
wife cooked it all, so she ran off to play with her grandson. I do the clean-up.

I was scraping dishes all by my lonesome, when I realized my father-in-law,
who's 97, was standing close by. Age has troubled his physical movements. He
was at the controls of a walker. He needs a wheelchair, but understands that he
will be sentenced to one all too soon. There he was, a couple arm reaches away,
dreaming he could help.

He used to do everything for his invalid wife. When she died, he helped with
dishes here, carting dirty glasses and dishes from table to kitchen counter. He
used to do what he could. No more. There's very little he can.

There he stood, in silence, tap water running in the sink in front of me when it
dawned on me how much he would have loved being able to do what I was
doing, how much he would have wanted walk down our stairs and get down
on the floor with his daughter and great-grandson. All of a sudden I knew he
would have done anything to help--done dishes alone, spent all afternoon in
the kitchen, if he could somehow make himself useful.

With him beside me, that walker between us, in my soapy hands just for a
moment those dirty dishes turned into a blessing. And that's why this morning I'm thankful for washing dinner dishes, even humbled by so much I can do.

___________________

Barbara's dad died on Wednesday, August 14, 2019. at Prairie Ridge Home, Orange City, Iowa, having outlived all his nine siblings. He was 100 years old. 

Morning Thanks--A child of the King

Most Reverend and Rightly Honorable Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has an impressive resume. After taking degrees from Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, and before entering the ministry, he spent several years in international business, living in Paris and doing extensive development work in African countries, especially Kenya and Nigeria.

Although he and his wife Carol are the parents of two sons and three daughters, those who know him claim a major influence in his life was the tragic death of another of his daughters in a car crash. That accident didn't precipitate his determination to become a man of the cloth; he'd been an active lay leader in churches wherever their family lived since he and his wife were married.

When he left international business for the ministry, he entered St. John's College, Durham, and focused his attention on business ethics. But since taking religious office he has worked more extensively as a peacemaker, both at home in England and abroad, especially in Africa where he has both training and experience. A number of his parishes have become revitalized after his ministry there. He was, to many, a blessed choice for the office of Archbishop of Canterbury, succeeding Dr. Rowan Williams.

All of that is wonderful, but so is a peculiarly startling discovery. Rev. Welby's mother drank hard, even though now, blessedly, she's been sober for 45 years. When her son was born, she lived what you might call a profligate life. There are other ways of describing it, but I'm sure the British would appreciate some restraint.

His father was Gavin Welby, a man who peddled whiskey. "His father’s family," says the pastor's web page, "were German Jewish immigrants who moved to England to escape antisemitism in the late 19th century and integrated quickly."

DNA proved otherwise. The Archbishop of Canterbury is the illegitimate son of Anthony Montague Brown, Winston Churchill's personal secretary. His mother acknowledges the affair but had always believed the man she'd married (and eventually divorced) was her son's father. Paternity tests say otherwise.

All of that unfaithfulness is no fault of the pastor's own, of course. He had no choice. In a sense, the truth made everyone free.

You're reading the story right now because of what the Most Reverend Justin Welby told the press. "There is no existential crisis, and no resentment against anyone," he said proudly. "My identity is founded in who I am in Christ."

Always thankful for the story of a child of the King.

___________________

In July of this year, Lady Jane Williams, the Most Reverend Justin Welby's mother, passed away, peacefully. She was 93 years old, having had a remarkable life, working for Winston Churchill and Professor Sir Ernst Chain, a Nobel Prize winner.

Her son Justin claimed his mother's life was "full of grace, laughter and joy." His official testimony of his mother's life began this way: "It's with prfound sadness that I mourn the loss of my mother. I loved her very deeply and it has been a privilege to be her son." 

"Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints."

Morning Thanks--a room of my own*

There is one little basement window above my head and to the right. On mid­winter days, the sun rides so low in the southern sky that for a time in early afternoon it shines directly in my face, which means I can't work here--at least not on the computer. Any other time of day or year, this little corner of my basement is a sweet place to sit--warm in winter, cool in summer.

There is, after all, comforting silence all around, the opportunity to be very much alone. Virginia Woolf forever linked the phrase to the plight of women artists, but she'll forgive me, I think, if a male such as I abscond with her line right now because I think the necessity of what she points out--that we all need our own space--transcends the gender wars. Everybody may know your name in your neighborhood Cheers, but solitude is a blessing, a joy, even a requirement for the work I do.

So, this morning, here, in this corner of my basement, early in the morning, I'm thankful for a room of my own. And yes, it is a bit of a mess.

_____________________ 

*When I started to blog--2006 or 07 maybe--everything originated from my basement study in the old Jongewaard house, where we lived for 25 years or more, where we raised our children. That old clunky desktop has long-ago been replaced (more than once for sure); that printer is far better than the cheapie I have beside me now; the desk is the same, although it's dark gray today, painted when we moved, 12 years ago. The chair's the same--Aeron from Zeeland, MI, bought it, factory second, right from the back door of Herman Miller years and years ago. Wouldn't change it for the world. The stereo is now a smart speaker. If this were a better picture, you'd find much the same clutter as you'll find on the shelves full of books--more here actually--that now surround me.

This week, Thanksgiving week, I'll just pull out some old "morning thanks," blog posts from thousands of posts through the years. The old Garrison Keillor line, as if it were scripture itself, is still up top, even though I failed miserably. The kind of commitment I started with was too indomitable a target. This was going to be a gratitude journal, but giving daily thanks every morning for something different is a task for a better man than I am. 

Anyway, all week this week, some old "Morning Thanks" posts.

And, oh yeah, there's new "stuff in the basement." I was a late-minute stand in for Jonis Agee, a Nebraska novelist just last Sunday night in Omaha; the stand-in got the prize: the 2023 Word Sender Award, this great sculpture. It's new down here. Just a week old.

 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 37

“. . .but the Lord laughs at the wicked,

 for he knows their day is coming.”

I don’t remember things like this happening when I was younger, but more and more these days it seems that the victims of violent crime are given opportunity in court, once the verdict is set, to speak to the guilty. It’s not an exercise I enjoy watching. No matter how despicable the crimes, those frequently emotional diatribes don’t offer much joy. Venting may feel good, but most often, it’s not pretty because vengeance in the human spirit, no matter how understandable, is almost always unbecoming. Witness the war in Gaza.

Maybe if it was my daughter or grandson who was murdered, I would see it differently. Maybe if I’d suffered as some have, I’d want to take a few shots myself.

I hope and pray I never find myself in that position.

It’s anthropomorphic—this line in David’s psalm. One can’t help but get the impression that a smirking God is exactly the kind of deity David would like to believe in because, he is himself snickering at the plight of the wicked. The whole movement of this part of this psalm is to assert dramatically and unforgettably just exactly how far the righteous stand apart from the wicked: the meek get joy and bounty; the evil get hell. That’s why God laughs, David says. He knows what it’s going to be like when he turns up the heat.

I like the image of God laughing, but I’m uneasy at why, in David’s description he is in full guffaw, in part because God seems, well, almost disinterested—as if the drama unfolding in front of him is theater, as if he’s even entertained by what goes on in his creation, a season-ticket holder at the pageant of this world’s ordinary life.

It’s impossible to say that God doesn’t do what David says he does in this verse, and therefore wrong to assume that this is simply poetic license. I know enough of God to know that I'm nowhere near to knowing everythhing. I rather like the Lakota idea of Wakan Tanka as “the Great Mystery.”

And I am quite sure—because I’m human—that I could feel just like those murder victim’s mothers and fathers and husbands and wives, standing up there in front of the victim’s killer, wailing away. I know I could feel exactly what David does.

When the Allied liberators stumbled on the concentration camp at Dachau, what happened wasn’t pretty. The skeletal prisoners—the living and the dead—were such a horrifying shock to the liberators that ordinary soldiers became cold-blooded killers. There are reports of GIs giving prisoners their machine guns and simply allowing them to kill the hated Nazi guards. All of that—especially if you’ve seen boxcars loaded with corpses—is somehow perfectly understandable. But was it right?

Does God giggle at evil men and women? I honestly don’t know. Maybe he does.

David’s giving him that human characteristic offers us—me too—some human joy, but I wonder if we’re not finding out more about King David, God’s beloved, than we are the nature of the Lord of Hosts, because I hope that my God doesn’t snicker at sinners.