Might. . .and Right

 “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world. . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

It's an amazing thing, really, how quickly our culture has transformed into  what it is today, under Trump, a culture that has bought into "the politics of power." That quote up there is from Stephen Miller, who is perhaps the foremost Trump advisor, a man who told CNN in an interview this week that some of us, at least, read or heard with unending chills. 

“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said, and he may be right about that. The truth is no one has said it openly for at least a century. Miller and Trump are bringing it back, in Venezuela most recently, Greenland next, then Cuba and Columbia and who knows how much more while we're at it, if their word is sound (that's questionable, of course). The entire population of Greenland, about 55,000 or so, aren't begging to come under the giant thumb of the King of the Big Macs, but that doesn't matter. Might makes right, and we've got the biggest and richest oligarchs in the world, and they'll sweep in and simply take over.

Manifest Destiny we once called an earlier version, when, post-Civil War, all that frontier land lay unoccupied from the Mississippi west. It was as if God almighty had determined it somehow impossible to imagine how the entire North American continent wasn't, well, ours because--do it yourself--just look at the continent--could it possibly not be that God intended it all to be ours?

And what could stop us from becoming what Stephen Miller would like us to be? Only an election defeat for the MAGA forces come November. And how will that change things? 

Try this: In a government in which Trump doesn't have ultimate might or weight or power, Congress will investigate whether Kristi Noem and the boss himself are right in their knee-jerk reaction to what happened yesterday in Minneapolis, that someone will bring them up for investigation for taking the life of this woman--

Renee Nicole Macklin Good, who was shot by an ICE agent as she drove her Honda Pilot down the street in front of her house. Noem--and Trump--called her "a domestic terrorist," an "agitator."

If MAGA goes down in November, someone or other will investigate the incident instead of making a snap judgment that appears to be contradicted by eye-witnesses as well as phone videos taken of the shooting, the murder. If MAGA goes down in November someone will determine what happened and whether all those little ships blasted out of the ocean were carrying fentanyl to our shores, or whether the entire Venezuelan enterprise wasn't really, from the get-go, about drugs, but oil.

Ours, Stephen Miller seems to say--our oil, and if you don't like it, I'll punch you in the face. Just remember--we got bigger guns. That's the rule of thumb now.

Nothing to do with Matthew 5. Nothing.

Where are we going?

To my knowledge, Stephanie Ruhle broke the story. 

That's silly language in the Trump era--as if anyone was needed to be the lead reporter concerning news made by our President, who makes his own news, really doesn't depend on anyone to get it from him, just spills it when and where he will.

But it was Stephanie Ruhle who was the first to get an admission from the King that he'd consulted the oil company muck-a-mucks before his Venezuelan adventure (it killed 60 or so military on loan from Cuba, I guess, but then that's not worth noting really, Cubans being commies).

He told the billionaire oil magnates among us, that he was going to pull of stunt that they needed to be ready for. Once it was over and all the troops were home and okay, he called them again. 

I don't know that there could be a more clearly outlined characterization of the Trump autocratic character. He did not talk to democracy's reps, the men and women we voted in to do the work of governing--none of them, either party; the people he talked to are the ones with the yachts, the filthy rich. 

He's not our President, he's their President. 

Why is that impossible to see?

Young Queen Victoria is a good movie, worth your time. It's set during the mid-19th century, of course, when the English aristocracy, and monarchy, was scared half to death of the bloody mess of the French Revolution, as well they should have been. The masses have every right to boil in anger when the power is not just primarily but overwhelmingly in the hands of its Elon Musks. 

True then, and true now.

Seriously, do we have to take Greenland before his cult signs off?

The Last Buffalo

Bierstadt, The Last Buffalo

[If you would prefer to listen to the podcast, click here.] 

"Now, boys, is our time for fun." That's what the hoity-toity artist said when he saw a herd of buffalo Comstock, the rancher, had spotted along the Republican River.

Albert Bierstadt was on his way back from California when he and the newspaper man traveling with him stopped at the Oak Grove Ranch and decided to try his hand--not at hunting buffalo but painting them. Comstock and his men armed themselves with rifles; Bierstadt packed brushes.

He wanted an angry bull, he said, "so mad that he'll bellow and tear up the ground," Bierstadt told Comstock.

That kind of rage would take some doing, Comstock thought, but he aimed to please the famous artist. He put Bierstadt and that easel of his up on a knoll high enough to see prairie Comstock was proud of, the land where he'd chosen to live.

Comstock said he and his son and a neighbor named Eubanks would create the scene Bierstadt wanted. He’d pick out a bull and wound him, get him hot-blooded.

All these years later, this whole business sounds beastly and wasteful; but it is, after all, 170 years later. Besides, this whole thing was being done in the cause of Art.

Eubanks shouldered his rifle from a draw near Bierstadt, should the beast decide not to sit still for the portrait. Once that bull was fierce, Comstock figured to steer him out toward that knoll where he'd attain eternal life as art. And it worked.

The buffalo spit and bellowed as predicted, and charged Comstock, who was aboard a horse so expert he could circle the bloody animal and still aim him toward the artist.

But the story goes that Comstock played it just a bit too close and got himself beside the buffalo where that bull couldn't see him. Just like that, that huge animal raised his shaggy head like a dying king and looked straight up the rise at the artist Alfred Bierstadt, then started pawing and snorting.

Bierstadt took off running faster than he ever thought he was able, and that insane bull made short work of the easel, then took off after the artist.

No one can prove this, but what Comstock claimed was that Bierstadt ran so fast his swallow-tail coat flowed out behind him so straight and hard the whole gang could have played a couple hands of euchre right there on the table that fancy coat became.

Finally, with that bull right there taking aim at that artist's behind, Eubanks’ rifle cracked and that animal fell in his tracks. For years, Comstock told people that the artist Alfred Bierstadt fell over, wiped out but saved from "a fearful death."

And that's the end of the Oak Creek Ranch part. But there's more.

In 1998, the U. S. Postal Service created commemorative stamps to celebrate American art. One featured a massive painting wide as the prairie by none other than Albert Bierstadt, The Last of the Buffalo. You may have seen the stamp.

And there's more. In 1897, that famous Bierstadt painting was put up for sale at the Chicago Exposition. It sold—now hold your breath--for $75,000.

You really ought to see it. No, it’s not Comstock riding the majestic white horse; it's something like a half-naked cigar-store Indian deliberately chosen and outfitted to make rich Easterner art buyers drool.

And if you get a chance to look close sometime, you'll see the landscape's not the prairie either. Siouxland has Spirit Mound, but otherwise nothing close to mountains like those in the background.

Now any art teacher will tell you that Albert Bierstadt knew how to paint sprawling American landscapes, and he also knew how to sell what he committed to canvas.

And what about Comstock, the rancher, you ask--that man never forgot the story, and was more than happy to tell it, the whole truth, right up to his grave. Well, maybe not the whole truth, either, you know?

That blasted January bustle

To be sure, it's not my favorite day of the year, ranks among the worst, in fact, although there are others upcoming, I'm sure, that will make me forget totally about the ratty jobs coming up soon and very soon.

When I walked past the tree just now, I couldn't help to realize that seasonal joy will once again be coming down, along with the nutcrackers on the corner table and even the baby tree I have here behind me in the office space. It's end-of-season today, now that New Years is new no more. No more Christmas carols either; our smart speaker stopped pouring out glee a week ago.

What sprang to mind just now, literally, was the first line of a much-beloved little poem from the magical mind of Emily Dickinson, who had very little to say about Christmas actually, but much to say about death. 

Goes like this:

The bustle in a house

the Morning after Death

Is solemnest of industries

Conducted upon Earth.

We bought a tree this year, from Hobby Lobby too (half-price!), so there'll be no dying in the our little retirement place once the bustle begins. In fact, the  most dreaded aspect of this year's post-yuletide clean up is where on earth we're going to put the tree--garage somewhere, I'm sure, but our new digs aren't spacious.

That the holidays themselves are over once again for another year carries its requisite sadness, but just as difficult, it seems, is this morning's concurrent realization that what lies before us and around us out here on the edge of the plains is three months, maybe even four, of winter. I feel like I should change the font on that last word or toss in a picture--all right, I will.

Of this--

If we could only control snow and ice as easily as you can with one of those darling little knick-knacks where all you do is turn the thing over and snow falls like grace, heavenly snow. But out here winter (!) doesn't work that way. Nothing comes in feathers. Snow comes sideways starting right about now and continues for a third of this new year--2026; and what I'm saying is that the bustle in this house on the day we take down Christmas is among the solemnest of industries we'll undertake all year. We ought to make it its own kind of holiday to keep the spirits up. 

Meanwhile, there's another verse worth repeating:

The Sweeping up the Heart

And putting Love away

We shall not want to use again

Until Eternity –

And that's depressing too, but eternity is pushing it, I think. Then, who am I to judge Emily Dickinson? Let's say it this way: 

The Sweeping up the Tree

And putting love away

We shall not want to use again

Until Next year, mid-December.

Maybe a day or two earlier.

It's not the same I know, but this Monday morning I can't help thinking it.

Sunday morning meds from Psalm 32

“You are my hiding place;

you will protect me from trouble.”

Edward Taylor, who lived from 1642 to 1729, was probably just an ordinary Puritan preacher. He lived about fifty miles west of Boston, in Westfield, Massachusetts, at a time when he—and many others—thought the way of life of Puritans was in immense and therefore perilous decline. Like other clergymen, he served his people’s physical needs as their physician, as well as their preacher. But I’m sure that in good Puritan fashion he railed on people for their sin.

Few would likely remember Edward Taylor at all today, but sometime in the 1930s, someone at Yale happened upon a sheaf of poems he’d written during his life in Westfield, 250 years before, the vast majority of those poems unpublished and likely unseen.

Weird, even bizarre, often shocking. That’s what students think when first they read Edward Taylor—and so did I. Let me edit a little—so do I. Taylor is given to the most outlandish metaphors—bodily parts and functions galore, just plain strange comparisons, odd ways of saying things—but always with respect to God’s amazing grace. He says divine things in sometimes outlandish ways, some of which you might rather not remember.

It’s Edward Taylor who I’m reminded of when I come to the second half of verse seven in Psalm 32, because, if we stop and think for a moment, we can’t help but be shocked at how greatly David has changed. The psalm begins in bone-chilling fear of the Lord. Just a few verses later, however, we’ve arrived safely “within his bosom,” as old preachers used to say. The Lord God almighty, once the source of horrific fear, has been, by his confession, suddenly transformed into a massive cushiony teddy-bear.

And that reminds me of Taylor’s Meditation 39 (First Series) which is a meditation on 1 John 2:1: “If any man sin, we have an advocate.” Our judge is God, the cosmic author of all law. We’re the perps, of course, and we, Taylor says, are guilty. But there’s a species of nepotism at work for us here, because Jesus Christ himself is our lawyer, and he’s our ace in the hole because he is, get this, the son of the judge.

Sounds like a set up, a divine kangaroo court. If we but ask the Lord to take our case, it’s case closed. That’s far more shocking than any Taylor metaphor, really.

“My case is bad, Lord, by my advocate,” Taylor says. “My sin is red; I’m under God’s arrest.” He asks the Lord to plead his case, then testifies what he knows from the passage in John: “Although it’s bad. thy plea will make it best.”

And then comes vintage Edward Taylor: “If thou wilt plead my case before the king,/I’ll wagon loads of love and glory bring.” I haven’t a clue what “wagon loads” has to do with the court system, but Edward Taylor wasn’t thinking about in creating great art—he simply wanted to testify to what he knew was forever true.

As does King David in Psalm 32. This shockingly blessed reversal—from mourning to dancing—is the inspiration for the poem. That which he feared now offers comfort; the Lord that scared him silly has become—viola!--a haven of peace. That’s weird, it’s bizarre, and eternally shocking. And he can’t help saying thanks.

And thanks is the reason both of them write songs—King David and Edward Taylor, each in his own peculiar fashion. And me, too. And you—or you probably wouldn’t be reading these words.

Thanksgiving is at the heart of things.

Truth be known, in my life I don't remember really raucous New Year's Eve parties. The  one I'll never forget is the very first one just six months after we were married. We were invited over to the home of a woman from a church we were attending. If I'm not mistaken, it was hardly Times Square. There were just three of us there--my wife and me and the hostess, who was only slightly older than we were at the time--maybe 30 or so. 

The transmission my memory sends me about that night has to be missing something--maybe another guest or two--but what is there in my mind is a bitching session when the hostess, after a drink our two, opened up about the lousy state of her marriage. We'd been married for only six months or so.

I wasn't thinking it was going to be some bacchanalia right there in the streets of the city. I honestly didn't imagine some hot party. I did expect some drinking, which wouldn't have been unusual, but may well have been unusual in volume. Instead, we got a sobering recitation of the woman's loveless marriage. 

We went home soon after twelve.

I should have guessed NYE was never going to be what its cooked up to be.

Number 53 is now history--no regrettable memories, but history will record one little detail that quite accurately summarizes our history of NYEs.

Barbara got the sweet idea that it might just be fun to have real champaign for once, so on NYE afternoon, she shuffled off to Wal Mart and lugged home a bottle, along with the prerequisite wine--we'd invited friends. 

Interestingly, two of the three couples who dropped by carried in their own bottle of the bubbly with the same motivations--they thought it might be fun to actually have champaign when the clock struck midnight. We giggled together because there stood three bottles of champaign on the buffet beside the wine.

One couple left before twelve, but two others made it to 2026, without much drinking, I should add. In fact, all three bottles of champaign stood right there, untouched, where they had when the party had begun. Okay, some wine was gone, but none of the true NYE fare had even been touched.

When the early-departing couple left, they took their bottle along, as did couple #2, which explains why the bottle my wife bought that afternoon is, as we speak, standing beside the milk in the fridge, still corked. 

A good time was had by all--don't get me wrong. But it warn't no blowout. 

NYE 2025 is in the books, memorable only for three graceful and untouched bottles of bubbly, who, if all goes well in 2026, may well show up again next year.

We're not getting old, we're there.

Looking back at 2025

 

You can see, I'm sure, the problem. It's vanity, I know, but were I to walk around in public with these monster shoes holding up my horribly big feet, they could not only pass for boats, but for entire piers. Ugly?--absolutely, an admission of age too. I'm confident were we to take a hike through the nearest old folks home--there's one or two  plenty close, by the way--we'd find a dozens of these leviathans on rugs in front of TVs. Can you imagine some college kid wearing these? And remember, I'm confessing something here--I'd need size 16. Huge, not boats, battleships.

But I'm sick of shoes that don't fit, or, maybe it's better to say, shoes that make my feet ache. I've got no idea if these could bring some comfort, but they're marked to do just that, not to be impress any of the guests at the opera, but to keep down complaints from my feet.

And that's a nice thought. My feet haven't smiled for years, and their aching is not getting any better. That's why I'm shopping this morning of Old Years Eve--not because I'm lookin' for pizazz--I'm just after comfort.

Old Years Eve is an officially approved day to look back, even though, at my age, it seems that I look back far more frequently than ahead; there's more subject matter back there than there is out front. I can honestly say that I didn't think much about old age until I started wearing a knee brace a year and a half ago, assuming that if I did it would somehow miraculously stop my knees from caving for no good reason.

Turns out faulty knees were a symptom of what was happening neurologically throughout my body, a condition, when professionally assessed, led to a diagnosis of spinal stenosis, a condition I'd never heard of until it determined to go to war with my body. There's a walker right beside me here, and two canes hanging from a coat rack at the back door. I don't go anywhere without, at least, one of them, a cane or the walker. I'm a public service message for the cripples among us, and, if I can and will believe every doctor and/or specialist I've seen, I ain't getting over it anytime soon.

So, from the vantage point of this Old Years Eve, what's to assess that's behind me during the year of our Lord 2025 isn't a bowl of roses. Lord knows hundreds, thousands, millions of humanoids find themselves in far worse straits, so what right do I have to complain, right?

Be happy the wheelchair is in plastic storage in the garage, long abandoned. Be thankful for a half-dozen physical therapists who not only direct my body's recovery but must have been told sometime in their degree programs that the very best therapy they can deliver may well be telling the patient that he or she is doing great.

I don't care, I love it. "Yeah, well, Jim," they'll tell me, "you did well today, don't you think?"

For all those sweet PTs, I'm greatly thankful this December 31st. For the three PTs at Heartland Home, who had the toughest job; for the half-dozen or so at Orange City Hospital; and now for the three or four here at Pro-Edge, thanks so much for putting me through the paces and then telling me, even through my pouting pride, that I'm doing just fine. 

"Just fine" is just wonderful. 

St. MTG

She's just about come to the point where her name can be invoked simply by way of her initials--MTG. She's not quite risen to the level of a woman who would have been her nemesis--AOC, or the new czar of American health, RFK. She might have, had she not had what she considers a true Damascus Road experience, at least that's how she might well characterize it, or so says Robert Draper of the NY Times in a highly discussed and long feature article earlier this week.

The intent is to help an American public understand her, someone who was the captain of the cheerleaders for Donald Trump ever since she came on the scene. She was not only an advocate, she was an accomplice. Today, she's on his hit list and was heard on her phone, in public, berating her in the savage rhetoric he's known for. What happened?

The answer that Draper gives is fascinating in an eternal sense because Draper claims--via her testimony--that MTG met that Damascus Road experience during the commemoration of the life of Charley Kirk, yet another Trump champ and conservative hero, who was gunned down a few months ago.

Draper says MTG explained it this way. Mrs. Kirk stood up and said, among other things, that she forgave her husband's killer. She did so because it was the Christian thing to do--forgive one's enemies. Next to take the podium was our beloved President who quite forthrightly told the audience that unlike Mrs. Kirk, she didn't forgive Charley's killer, but hated him--and mostly them because our dear President has rarely backed away from a friendly conspiracy theory.

When MTG heard those two diametrically opposed positions, she shuddered deeply because she knew that one of them was the "Christian" way, while the other--hate speech from the Pres--was not.

That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene wrote to me [Draper] in a text message months after the memorial service. And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.

That difference made MTG shudder because it reflected on her own faith, and her own contribution to what she and others call our "toxic political culture." She looked inward and saw her own toxicity, her own sin, to be more traditionally theological. She knew she'd been wrong and had to change. “After Charlie died," she wrote a friend, "I realized that I’m part of this toxic culture. I really started looking at my faith. I wanted to be more like Christ.”

Wow! That, my friends, is a story, in Christian terms, a testimony.

I have a bit of a better sense of what it took for the disciples to accept Saul, their fierce enemy, as Paul, servant of the Lord. It's hard to think of someone more loyal to the whole MAGA fantasy that the blond bombshell from Georgia, and suddenly I have to look to her as Mother Theresa?

That's tough sledding, even in a winter like ours.

Almost immediately, she quit the House, resigned from her political position. She also gave up her sustaining family in the MAGA movement. Almost immediately, her life was threatened, as was the life of her son, a college student.

For a ton of reasons, her story is a block-buster. Might it push other evangelicals to reconsider their intense loyalty to the Donald? Will MTG now quickly disappear, given that her ability to generate headlines is compromised? Can she be believed?--after all, it's the old "come-to-Jesus" story. Is she a harbinger of things to come?--might there be more MTGs? 

And there's this: Paul's Damascus Road experience was no dodge. It was authentic, something believers recognize. 

After all, miracles happen--just ask us.

Lully Lula

 

 Breughel, The Massacre of the Innocents

This morning, just hit the "Listen" button and don't bother reading.

https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2017-12-31/lully-lullay 

Who to believe?

First, you are to think always of God,

of Wankan-Tanka. Second, you are to

use all your powers to care for your

people and especially for the poor.

Black Moon, Hunkpapa Sioux

Long, long ago it seems, I was told--no, warned--that I should be careful around Native spirituality because it is, well, enchanting, but not as profoundly beautiful as it sometimes seems from the outside--and maybe especially by white-liberal types (meaning, someone like me).  

The "warn-er" was herself Native, a sincere Christian Cherokee, a writer named Diane Glancy, who has made it her dream to draw out the stories which delve into spirituality, both Native and Christian--and Christians in Native settings.

This morning's little reading in a book Barbara gave me for Christmas, 365 Days of Walking the Red Road, started with this quote by a man whose name I'd never seen before.   

But some approximations are too difficult to look past. For instance, those qualities of living--spirit-filled living--held up as exemplary by the "Red Road," include virtues like humility, respect, generosity, and wisdom. The kind of life sought on the Red Road is a spiritual, ethical life. For quick reference, run through the "Fruits of the Spirit" (Galatians 5): Love, Joy, Peace, Forbearance, Kindness, Goodness, Gentleness, Self-control. It's long, maybe a bit more comprehensive, but basically we're all talking the same language.

A decade ago, I did a book for Rehoboth School and Mission in New Mexico. I interviewed families who had been influenced by their experience there. One man, a retired lawyer, told me that before his father had sent him off to the mission school, his father warned him about listening too closely to talk about the white man's god, but he also told his son that he'd grown to like the people who ran the school and did the evangelical work on the reservation. He liked them not because they were Christians but because those white people believed in the same things his people did--something his own people called "the Beauty Way." If his son would go to school there, he'd learn about living spiritually, ethically--and his father greatly respected that way of life taught in the mission school.

Want a shorter catechism? How about Luke 10: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Now look up there at the top at the sermon delivered by someone named Black Moon. 

I'm not about to run out to Marty, South Dakota, try to find a Native church, and join up; but what I'm saying is that life itself, in a variety of avenues I've taken, has taught me to be far, far less sure of the Beauty Way is or has been in the tribe from whom I come.

One of the most conservative men I ever knew, Rev. Cornelius Van Schouwen, writing from the beleaguered country of France during WWII, couldn't help but feel at least something of what I'm talking about, even though the contrasting way of life is not Native--it's simply to believe where GIs worship and why.

The war teaches one to love the brotherhood of all Christians. As a chaplain, you don't ask a soldier what denomination he belongs to, but rather if he is a Christian.

Here, Van Schouwen is at his most theologically lenient. I am tempted to say it is the  moment at which he seems least sectarian through the years the diaries  present us. But a realization of the brotherhood of all Christians does not linger. 

 I can't help wishing it had.

Sunday morning meds from Psalm 32

 “. . .surely when the mighty waters rise, they will not reach him.”

I’ve been to Japan, studied Shintuism a bit, and not been seduced.  I’ve listened to ex-Buddhists describe their childhood faith but never felt much inclined to Buddhism either.  Native American religion interests me greatly, but I’m not about to jump into a breech cloth or a sweat lodge—well, maybe a sweat lodge.

 Last week, our preacher said the first commandment—to worship no other gods—is often a piece of cake if we think of Mohammed, for instance, or Buddha as God’s rivals.  He’s right. Most Christian believers aren’t tortured by their closet animism. 

 The god most of us really want to worship, our preacher said, is ourselves.  Pride is the first of the Seven Deadlies, and it has been since someone wrote up the list, since Adam and Eve wanted the apple God forbade, and since the instinct-like will to live was born in each of us.  We want what’s best for us—for better or for worse. The god God almighty doesn’t want us to worship is the glorious, omnipotent Me.

 I say that because I don’t always trust David. I trust the Word that emerges from his songs. I trust the God he trusts. I trust the truth of the scriptures themselves. But I don’t always trust him, and I don’t because, in this psalm at least, I think he’s protecting himself, like all of us do. Why shouldn’t he?  He’s human. 

 Psalm 32 starts so very well—a clear sense of intent, the thesis, proudly and yet lovingly proclaimed in the opening verses.  Then the story central to all believers, told well, convincingly, in the next four verses: he sings for joy because he’s been—hallelujah!—forgiven of his sins and miseries.

 Then things get messy. What he says next is understandable: Given what I’ve been through, he says, I hope all of you experience what I did of the glorious freedom of grace.  Fine. And then, “if you can.”  Odd sentiment, suggesting, of course, that our timing—or worse, God’s—could be off. Things may not work out. Strangely undercuts his enthusiasm, doesn’t it?  And then, “surely.” I don’t like where that word is positioned because it feels tentative—“surely you’ll not be harmed in danger.” Surely. Surely.  

 And then “you are my hiding place.”  Is David, post-Bathsheeba, post forgiveness, looking for a place to hide?  “You will protect me from trouble”???  From more Uriahs?  The great problems of the opening verses were not caused by enemies tearing down palace walls; they were created totally by destruction, pride as much as lust, David’s fierce desire to serve the great God of self—my wants, my needs, my sweet Bathsheeba.

 Even though he begins this psalm with triumph, there’s some shakiness.. He’s sure God’s forgiveness is the greatest thing that ever happened to him, he wants to sing his joy; but there’s a tentativeness in verses six and seven that has him pressing for words and even losing focus. He’s not even as sure as he’d like to sound. He’s not lying, but he sounds more like a salesman than a devout. 

 But then that very oh-so-human tenderness may be his greatest gift to believers thousands of years later, to us—that gift being that he sounds like we do.  Human.  Sometimes confident, sometimes not, sometimes wanting to be more confident than he is.  Sometimes even when we wants like mad to get it right, he gets it wrong.  So much like us. 

And—get this--still so much loved by the Lord. 

Rev. Tony Van Zanten (1935-2025)

It could be that I have no place in the commemoration, but something in me says that I do. The two of us hail from the same background, although I was never, as he was, a farm kid from northwest Iowa. But we were and are generational members of the same ethnic and religious tribe. We know and own the same culture markers--views of the Sabbath, the importance of Sunday worship, the sacraments, just two of them; we both have a Dordt diploma. Both of us have families who came to America from the 19th century Netherlands.

I honestly have no memories of him--of his reputation, yes, certainly, but of him, none. If I hadn't seen his pictures on the obits I picked up on the internet, I wouldn't have known what Rev. Tony Van Zanten looked like.

All of that having been said, I knew of him, knew, greatly, of him, knew him as a man who'd given his life for inner city ministry, mostly in Roseland, Illinois, a place largely abandoned by another band of 19th century immigrant Dutch, who found the Great Migration of African-American refugees from the American South too difficult to handle and therefore pulled up stakes and left for distant western and southern suburbs of Chicago.

Except Rev. and Mrs. Tony Van Zanten. They didn't leave. They came to Roseland precisely because of the people from the Great Migration. They came because a couple Iowa farm kids--Tony, from Rock Valley, his loving spouse Donna from Kanawha--decided somewhere in or around a stay in Harlem that inner city ministries was for them. They stayed. They put down roots. They loved and were loved.

Rev. Tony's death reminded me of a story that was, in all likelihood, vintage Tony Van Zanten. I wrote and directed a theater piece that told the history of the denomination in which both of us--all three of us, all four of us really, my wife too-- held membership, a theater piece, if I may say so, that was dearly beloved by a generation just a bit older than my own, a generation of the same tribe. Because it was so loved, the denomination determined to keep that theater piece around historically, so they found a place for a performance that could double as a stage for a video of the entire show--a high school performance hall on the west side of Chicago. 

Must have been a strange performance to witness because every few minutes the stage director would move the cameras or tell the cast to do the scene over again to get it right. 

That one-night event--staging and shooting--was very well attended, even though it was neither fish nor foul. But if you have access to a video of the show sometime, it's difficult not to notice that when the camera pans the crowd it picks up a row of four African-American men, maybe the only black faces in the crowd that night. Honestly, I didn't even notice them until I saw the video.

I got a letter from Rev. Tony Van Zanten sometime later. I may still have it, although a flood took out lots of those things from file drawers. I remember being shocked to read the return address was Rev. Tony because even though I don't think I ever met him, I most certainly knew of him. We had many mutual friends. During most of my life, few members of our tribe were as beloved as Rev. Tony for his peculiar and successful ministry.

The letter--handwritten--was maybe three pages long. It explained how he'd picked up four men from Roseland Christian Ministries, and told them he wanted them to come with him to this performance of sorts happening across town. He explained that he didn't tell them much about what they were going to see, but the five of them had hopped in the church van and made it to the performance hall in time to see the whole thing.

He wanted to see what they would think, he told me. He wanted to take four inner-city men along to the history of the very white CRC just to see what they would think. 

When it was over, he was thrilled, he said, because they loved it--not because of its spiritual content or because it offered a full gallery of music with which to sing along, although those things were part of its success. 

They were taken by the story, he said, because they never, ever presumed that the white members of the denomination that sponsored Roseland Christian Ministries were ever, ever poor. They had no idea. They only white people they knew, Pastor Tony told me in that letter, were, by their estimation, unimaginably rich. They had no idea that once upon a time they were dirt poor. 

That note stays with me, not simply because these four African-American guys really liked the show but because the show had presented an image of the white people they likely knew best as church people of limited means, almost half of whom had died in their first winter on Lake Michigan. 

He was thrilled because the story on stage had shaken them into a new and broader vision of members of Rev. Tony's church, and that's what Rev. Tony wanted me to know--that a show about Dutch immigrant ruffians, cultural inquisitors who loved nothing better than theological fencing, had made them readjust their perceptions of the white folks who came to Roseland Christian Ministries.

In all likelihood, that letter was swept away in the flood, but it's stored deeply in my heart, a story I've never told. 

Rev. Tony Van Zanten died on December 15, just a couple of weeks ago. 

There are hundreds of Rev. Tony stories. I have just one, a story I've never forgotten.

Should you care to visit his funeral service, there's a live stream available here.

Like Saints

When it came time to play them, we couldn't help wonder what the Catholics were thinking when they named the school "Immaculate Conception." Weird. If you're a sixth grade boy just about everything has something to do with sex. That Catholic school's weird name, whatever it meant, was about something good Christian boys had no business thinking about out loud, and the kids from that school plastered it on their uniforms? Seriously?

But we played 'em, weird name or not. As far as I remember, no teacher or coach from our school ever said much about the name. "Okay, guys, tomorrow we'll line up against 'Immaculate Conception.'" I don't think we giggled. It's just that when you thought about it a little--well, you know: it was something like foreskins and circumcision and all of that embarrassing stuff. When you're twelve, it's just weird that you'd say those words out loud.

When you leave the Raphael Rooms of the Vatican Museums, massive frescos that fill every square centimeter of your consciousness, you follow the flow into another space so laden with life-sized art you don't know where to look first because you're sure you'll miss something. And you will. 

Anyway, there she was, Mary mother of Jesus, Virgin Mary, in a bigger-than-life statue and surrounded by massive frescoes featuring dozens, even hundreds of human figures, some with addresses in this world, some, clearly, very much at home in the next.

It's the Room of the Immaculate Conception, and while I'd long ago come to understand the phrase in a 7th grade-boy way, I never took the time to think much, really, about the adoration of Mary, except in a very Protestant way--as silly. In this immense room, everything was the Immaculate Conception, not the divine act itself (although a score of artists have taken a shot at that), but the act's honored and historic place in Roman Catholic dogma and culture. 

In the huge wall behind the statue features two worlds. The world below is Rome--the Vatican, Pope and Cardinals all aligned for the celebration of the formal acceptance of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The world above features heaven (far left) and that other brimstone place (far right, where the sinners are, at this moment, falling from grace). Fig-leafed Adam and guilt-ridden Eve are on the cloud, upper right, Adam seemingly protecting his sinful mistress. 

But at the heart of the Heaven is the Trinity. There's a dove (the Holy Spirit) above Mary's head (she's in blue, traditionally), and she stands (while Christ and the Father sit) just a bit lower in foreground. Telling placements.

For centuries, the Roman Catholic church had accepted the belief that Mary was not only a virgin, but also, alone of all mankind, sinless. Not until 1854 did her divinity become defined as Catholic dogma, an act signed into canon law by Pope Pius IX. That moment is prominently featured in the center of the fresco, the Pope standing before his throne, surrounded by Cardinals, all of which makes this particular room, the Room of the Immaculate Conception, of far more recent vintage (1860s) than the Rafael Rooms next door (300 years older). The paint is still wet. 

Rome didn't make me any more Roman Catholic than I ever was, but for two weeks 

I was most definitely more of a disciple of that whole world than I'd ever been. Somehow the visual grace, art that attracts millions annually, helped me understand far more than I ever had about the historic church, even has me smiling in a whole new way at those grade school kids with that weird name printed on their basketball uniforms. 

It really, really was a big deal. That big, in fact.

I never had a problem with that wonderful last line of the Luke 2 story--"and Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart" (NIV), nor did i ever fume about her remarkable--"divine"--compliance to the angel's bizarre directives a chapter earlier: "May it happen to me according to your word,” she says at the angel's annunciation. She's what?--13 maybe, and she's about to be pregnant while unmarried, and, as yet, untouched in any ordinary ways.

The Lord God almighty knew what he was doing when he picked Mary out of the gallery. He wanted--and he got--someone who'd do whatever had to be done. "Of course," she could have said. "When should I write it in my calendar?"

But just last night, we listened to Rev. Andrew Kuyvenhoven point us at the strangely, and equally compliant husband-to-be, who likely understood he was going to have to fib to get this one through the ringer.

They're hardly human, those two. They get visited supernaturally--who's to say it wasn't just a bizarre dream?--and just like that, they fold, both of them. "Sure, Lord God," they say. "When does this whole thing begin?"

"How about this?" the Creator might have told them--"at the beginning of time,'"

I doubt that would have stopped them either. They just trust too much. They're like saints.

 

A Prayer for the Dead -- vi

Technically, the story is over when Bea ponders the star her mother deliberately placed beneath the linoleum cover they put on their kitchen table. At that point, Bea had begun to wonder whether she'd lived her life in the right way with respect to her missionary parents. That moment was the technical climax of the story.

The writer (that's me) has to make sure, as sure as my artistic sense will allow, that my readers come to see that, once this Christmas night is behind them, something big and basic will have changed in the way that Bea remembers her parents and sees the world. 

I've got to use that star.

_____________________  

She pulled her jacket over her shoulders, looking back at the dead baby, a gift for her blessed parents [she means that sarcastically, of course]. She stepped outside where Shorty was already waiting, and when he opened the door, she saw a bottle of beer between his legs. She pulled herself into the Pontiac and stared back at the porch light. It was the same car she would drive back from California herself a year later, alone and penniless, their little Frank, hungry, in the front seat beside her. 

What she'd done, Char had said. [She hasn't forgotten her daughter's accusation.] 

She put the cap back on the stripper and tossed the steel wool in the garbage, still holding the star. She'd had enough of refinishing for Christmas Eve. It was a holiday. There'd be more to get off and the legs to do before the dark cherry stain could reach into the old surface and pull out all the edges of the grain. 

She took Myron's flannel work-shirt off her shoulders and hung it from a nail, then used the rubber gloves to pick up the soggy steel wool and drop it in the can beside the door. She kicked clean newspapers over the clots of stripper that had dropped to the floor from the table, and rubbed the back of her hand over the clean wood. She walked over to the door and looked outside over the neighbor's fence at Christmas lights down the street where families stayed together [a bit of jealousy here]. 

She went inside and plugged in the coffee with her left hand and opened the refrigerator to a cake pan of brownies she'd made just that afternoon for Char. She slipped open the silverware drawer with her little finger and took out a paring knife, then carried the fudge back to the kitchen table, the medallion in the same hand as a paper plate she took from the counter. Behind her, the coffee maker snorted. It would be ready for Myron later. 

What would she do with the star? [That's the question I'm facing when I'm here in the writing of the story.] She sat at the table and laid it in front of her. Someone had lifted it finally from its secret place. It wasn't hidden anymore. She had to do something with it--her mother's desert star. 

She sliced through the pan of brownies in perfect squares, lifted one from the pan and ate it from the spatula, then took another piece from the pan and laid it on the edge of the dinner plate, then another and another. When she filled the plate with two circles of fudge, she reached up for wax paper to cover the bottom layer, then started in on more. 

It didn't really belong here in this house, she thought. Her mother had buried it for some reason she might never know or understand, stuck it away like a secret, and now it was unearthed. She reached in the junk drawer and found a piece of red thread, then poked the end through the weave of the star and held it up to dangle like a Christmas ornament. It needed to hang somewhere, she thought. Char already had the table. She could keep it herself, she thought--something from her mother, something from the grandma Char said she'd never had. [I'm running through some possibilities.]  

She emptied the pan, she ripped another piece of wax paper from the roll and covered the brownies completely. It was her mother's star, she thought, her mother's secret, something she would never under­stand, and her mother deserved it now, in the Indian way, part of herself, a memorial. [I've figured it out, but the mystery remains for you, I hope.] 

She left a note for Myron that said she loved him and not to wait up because she'd be back all right and she'd tell him about it in the morn­ing. Then she drove out of town, past the lights and the traffic until the city was a glowing dome in the darkness behind her and the edges of the mountains seemed a shroud thrown down at the horizon to cover stars in the dark desert sky. She knew she could find their graves in the darkness because they would be the only uncluttered stones in the cemetery, the only sites not decorated with offerings for the dead. She could find them. She had never been there before-even though she should have been, never having said good-bye, never really letting go. [She's bound for her parents' graves in a cemetery at the mission.]

Peter had said there were so many of them at the funeral, but there would be no one there at Christmas. She could leave the star with a plate full of brownies because her parents' graves should be honored for the holiday, she told herself, decorated in the Indian way to look a part of the world that they'd sacrificed so much of themselves to save, she thought, even their children.  

_____________________________ 

And that's why. Let's just step lightly through this last part of the story. 

She had never been there before-even though she should have been, never having said good-bye, never really letting go. ["Should have been," she tells herself. This self-criticism is new; the Bea at the beginning of the story would not have incriminated herself that way.]

Peter had said there were so many of them at the funeral, but there would be no one there at Christmas. [Way back when, this friend of mine told me he hadn't really stopped resenting his parents until he saw the many Native folks who came for the funeral. When he noticed specifically who his parents had given their lives for, he was overwhelmed, even thrilled. I bring it back here to suggest that Bea was equally moved by her brother's report.] She could leave the star with a plate full of brownies [this is a very Native thing to do, which is why Bea adopts the idea. If she puts the plate of brownies alongside the star, it will likely be the only decorations on her parents' graves--and her parents' graves may well be the only stones left undecorated since her parents' views of the afterlife differ clearly from Native rites and rituals. Protestant Christians don't "pray for the dead." Bea puts those things on her parents' grave on Christmas Eve because she blesses them, in all likelihood for the first time in her life.] because her parents' graves should be honored for the holiday, she told herself, decorated in the Indian way to look a part of the world that they'd sacrificed so much of themselves to save, she thought, even their children [ouch, but that she says it makes her just as human as you or I].  

A Prayer for the Dead -- v

If we were to analyze the arc of the story via traditional means, we could say, right now, that the story itself--the conflict that pushes it--is over. The story is finished because Bea has changed. She isn't who she was when the story began. For the first time in years, this Christmas Eve, Bea is allowing herself the space to think that maybe, just maybe, she had judged her mother and her mother's life too rigidly. Maybe her mother wasn't the pariah she'd built her to be in her mind, her memory, and her imagination.

But there needs to be more--the bit of story structure English teachers call the denouement, the untying or the "un-knot" of the story. Stories begin with knots, with tangled lines or messed-up conflicts. When those conflicts unravel, things get straightened out. 

Now, the writer--me--has to figure out how to artfully untie the knot--the major conflicts present in the story.

The first paragraph of this last section is rife with possibilities--she's pregnant, her parents don't know yet, and she's met at the door by a woman who brings a dead baby.

Such things happened frequently in the early days of the mission. Navajos had long nursed a deep fear of the dead, so much trauma, in fact, that they would bring dead bodies to the missionaries to take care of things; they knew that, for whatever reason, white people didn't harbor that fear. 

That's what's happening in the flashback Bea now explains.

 _____________________ 

The last prayer she'd spoken aloud she'd delivered over a dead baby brought by a Navajo woman to the mission house on a night both her parents were doing camp visits somewhere beneath the open desert sky. She'd come home herself earlier that afternoon without telling them she was on her way because she was pregnant with Frank, by Shorty Toledo. They knew about him-and she'd come home to tell them she was leaving with him, quitting the boarding school. 

It was 1946 and Shorty had come back from the war in his uniform, wild. She was seventeen, and when she'd come in the back door, bold and rebellious, she'd found the countertop stacked with empty cake pans and cookie sheets, and the Bible in its place on the table, its black covers worn away from the pages. She'd run through the house when no one answered her calls, thrown open the closet doors upstairs as if she would find her parents hiding from her, then slammed them shut behind her. 

She'd been home for an hour, maybe more, sitting on the steps, cry­ing in anger, when the bell rang. Some Navajos were afraid of evil spirits still inhabiting the dead. It had happened before. The front bell would ring and some woman would be standing there in silence, her long, pleated dress tossing softly in the breeze. If she would ask her father to come out to bury the dead, sometimes he would build a coffin in the horse barn while her mother packed extra clothes, baby clothes. 

"If Mother Van is not here," the woman had said, "then you will take him?" She nodded toward the bundle in her arms and held it out to her. "Pray now, please," the woman said. "Pray for my child. So Bea had taken the body, stiff beneath the blankets, and prayed then and there on the front steps, some chanted memory prayer that came to her in anger and remorse, pagan too, her father would have said-a prayer for the dead. She spoke only a few repeated words because she knew the woman needed only to hear supplication from the Anglo girl on the porch, Mother Van's own daughter. When she opened her eyes, the woman smiled, then started back up the road, leaving the body. 

[Bea's prayer was hardly that; yet, it's clear to her that it was just what this mourning young mother needed.]

She was seventeen, pregnant, full of silly plans. She came down off the steps and walked to the gate at the front of the yard, the weight of death in her arms, then ran a ways up the road. But the Indian woman set herself resolutely into the night, her agony gone. It would be useless to try to give the baby back, a betrayal. 

It was spring and the night's mellow warmth promised the summer that was surely to come, the dark skies embedded with stars. The wail of coyotes broke the desert darkness, and amid the snarls of Indian dogs shivering through the stillness, she stood there hoping to see her parents' headlights emerge from the horizon of darkness, still holding a dead baby. A baby-and not a baby. The child, stiff and heavy in her arms, was nothing but cold weight, host to legions of evil spirits. She opened the blankets to a face that paled even in the darkness, its eyes closed, a shock of dark hair clumped over its pointed gray forehead. 

Her parents would want to know who: maybe Eloise, or Christine, or Francy? "Did you see her face-maybe the way she wore her hair?" her mother would say. "Who was in the family way?" her father would ask, frantically. "What do you remember-something to distinguish her clothing-some jewelry maybe?-a sash?" her mother would wonder, and the moment they would hazard a guess, they would leave to find the woman, to comfort the pain. 

The night was moonless, she remembered, as dark as night can be on the desert, the cottonwoods behind the mission house full of mournful owls. She'd held the body with her left arm and gone into the house, pushed the light switches with her right hand until she got to the kitchen, where she laid it down, the blankets closed up tight around its face. When she looked out the window, she saw lights finally coming up the road. She glanced at the clock and knew it would be Shorty. 

She took a pencil from the kitchen drawer and some envelopes from between the pages of the Bible. "Mother," she scribbled in the margin, but even the word sounded wrong. She glanced again out toward the road. It had to be Shorty--he was coming too fast. How could she say what she had to? How could she explain why she was home? How could she tell them everything? "Mother," she wrote. "I was here and you two were gone." That was all.

____________________ 

One more bit to go, not much. 

"I was here and you two were gone" is a summary of what Bea believes her childhood to have been. This time, however, it's not a metaphor. She had so much to say and no one to say it to.

Prayer for the Dead — iv

There's a significant revelation in the next two paragraphs. You'll see it. Remember, what I want to do with this story is somehow bring Bea back to peace. It's an easy thing to do--just introduce the Holy Spirit. But if my writing is going to score with people who don't share my view of "revelation," I've got to make the shimmering moments glisten. I can't simply bring in the Big Guns: ". . .and there stood Jesus before her. . ."

It's Christmas Eve remember, and Bea is alone--not a night to be alone. Not only that, but she just got a tongue-lashing from her daughter. And now this little piece of homespun craft carefully sealed up beneath a layer of linoleum her parents had put there to prevent extra wear. 

___________________________________

Bea pulled her gloves up above the wrists and took two steel wool pads from the box on the shelf, balled them together for heft, then scoured a two-inch circle down to bare wood to see which direction the grain ran.

But if her mother had wanted to put the medallion out of her mind forever, she could have walked any direction from her back door and simply buried it—no one would ever have found it. She wouldn't have to slide it into an envelope and hide it beneath the surface of the
table she used every day. She wanted it there, Bea thought. She needed it there for some reason. Maybe late at night, her husband out on camp ministry, her own children miles away at the mission school, after a dozen Indian children had eaten her cake and listened to Bible stories, she could shut the door, steal a few moments alone here at the table, stretching her fingers over something like a fetish, an outline so faint she was the only one who knew it existed. Her mother the heathen. Maybe the two of them were more alike than she'd ever thought.

She stripped off the gloves, picked up the star, and studied the knots at each of the points, remembering how easily the shuttle flitted be­tween her mother's fingers as she turned out stitches so effortlessly that the whole action seemed instinct. Her shuttle was inlaid, she remembered, turquoise and something dark--maybe petrified wood. It might have been a gift, something from an Indian woman, almost certainly Indian-made.

She turned the star in her fingers. Maybe she never knew her mother at all.

She pulled a glove back on her hand and picked up the steel wool. Maybe if she were to find the tatting, she thought--that carpetbag her mother kept in the bottom drawer of the buffet--maybe there would be more. She looked up at the clock. She could still call Peter. It was early, and Myron would have lots more stops. She scoured the stripper she'd painted on the surface in firm scrapes, pushing it away from her and with the grain into globs thick with dirt and finish and scraps of the old adhesive, leaving bare wood beneath.

She found her brother's number penciled in the back of the book hanging by a shoestring from the phone. "Peter," she said when he finally picked up the receiver, "it's your sister. Listen, I know it's Christmas Eve, but I was wondering-" she stopped, trying to arrange a question she hadn't yet worded. "Mom used to do tatting."

"Bea," he said, "are you drunk?"

"No. Listen, she used to do tatting--remember?"

"Tatting," he repeated, not as a question.

"Fine little things, like doilies. She'd sit in the chair by the pole lamp-nights? You know those things she'd made to go on the arms of the sofa? Little handwork stuff, lace."

“Okay, okay,” he said.

"When you cleaned up her place, did you find that carpetbag, her sewing things--did you find a little shuttle? --she called it a shuttle. Silver ­inlaid, like Zuni stuff?"

"What's it look like?" he said.

"Thin, streamlined-like a lipstick tube, a little bigger--a spool in the middle. She'd wind the string around that spool--"

"I don't think I saw it," he said. "You want it?"

What could she say? When her father had died, Peter had asked whether there was anything of her parents she wanted, anything at all, and she had told him to give everything away, every last bit. "Dump what you can't sell," she'd told him.

"You okay, Sis? What's got into you?" he asked.

"I just wondered," she said.

"It must be worth something," he said.

"It is," she said.

"How much?"

“I just wondered if you saw it anywhere--tiny as a minnow, even shorter. Inlaid. She had it for years.”

He laughed. "How much is it worth, Bea?" he said.

"A lot."

'Tm down to one box, here--mostly little stuff. I gave away most of the sewing stuff. I could look, but if I'd have known that you wanted it--"

"Would you?" Bea asked him.

"Now?"

"Please?"

"It's Christmas Eve. How much is this gadget worth?"

"Trust me," she told him.

"Silver thing--inlaid. How big?"

"Thumb-size."

When he put down the phone, she heard the low pitch of adults laughing softly, interrupted by busy voices of children. A shuttle, it was second nature to her mother to use it. It would slip between her fingers almost as if it were alive, even while she was reading or talking. She cradled the receiver in her neck and held the star up before her eyes.

"I looked through everything I got here--you know, there's some stuff you might like, Bea. I know how you feel--"

"You don't have it?"

"There's really not much here anymore, you know. It's been three months since the funeral."

"You never saw it?"

"What're you getting for it anyway? Must be worth a mint."

"It's not that," Bea told him.

"Then what is it?"

Tell him, she thought, go on and tell him. "I want it myself, Peter," she said. "It's something of mother's, and I guess I just want it."

He was stunned, then chuckled a little. "Is that right? Christmas spirit or something?--you're sure you're not drinking?"

"I wondered if you had it," she said. "She used to work at nights sometimes, and that shuttle slipped through her fingers as if it were alive. When we were little-"

"I don't have it, sis," he said. "I wish I did, for your sake--and hers too."

''I know, I know," she said. 'Tm sorry."

"You are--really?"

'Tm sorry for not asking--"

"Oh," he said. "You wouldn't believe how much stuff I left there." There was laughter behind him. "I only wished you'd asked."

“I figured your daughter might like the table--it's an antique, you know?"

“I know—it’s here.”

"You’ll refinish it for her?"

She waited. "It's a lot of work," she told him. "I don't think I got the time."

She heard her brother breathe heavily over the phone. "Bea, you should have seen them at the funeral--all the people. They came from miles around. Seriously, hundreds of people. Remember how the folks used to spend years without seeing one new face in that little church?--years, Bea. Not one. If it was a business, they would have shut it down. But you should have seen the people. They came from all over the reservation--"

"Merry Christmas, Peter," she said.

He stopped, waited. "Same to you, sis," he told her.

She hung up the phone and looked at the star as if there were more to the mystery, more to her mother than she'd ever thought. Then she brought it up to her eyes in a fist.

_____________________ 

So this friend of mine, who was reared on the reservation, an MK (missionary kid) told me he was all of 35 before he could forgive his parents. And he knew the exact moment he could forgive them--it was at his father's funeral when literally hundreds of people showed up. He had had no idea. They were there for Rev. Van. All those people--all those Native folks--he couldn't believe it. Made him see so much of his life in a different, wider setting.

And now I have to write my way out of this story. There's already a new interest and sympathy, but there's the matter of that little embroidered thing she found buried beneath the linoleum and the hardwood beneath.

One more day.

Hope in the Longest Night

This edition of my weekly radio podcast Small Wonders (KWIT, Sioux City, IA, an NPR affiliate) has to rank as one my all-time favorites. It's seven years old, but it attempts to satisfy all kinds of people and their various ambitions for the holiday seasons we're beginning, or in, right now. 

I really do love this one.

Listen in here,

Prayer for the Dead -- iii

To say Bea Van Klay is "haunted" by memories is going too far. The memories stick with her, in part, because they feed her anger at her parents for what she thinks of as their abandonment, their deep conviction that bringing the gospel to the Navajo is a far more important task than raising their children.  Did they love their daughter?--without a doubt, they did. They were merely following conviction and convention, and I'm sure that her rebellion against them and their way of life was devastating. 

Meanwhile, it's Christmas, she's refinishing her parents' old dining room table, an antique, while her husband is out playing Santa to his work crew. Her daughter has called and unloaded on her, telling her she doesn't want her children to go through a childhood like she did--without grandparents.

Her situation prompts her memory to replay some of the ancient offenses, the ones that she relies on to fuel her very human anger. Throughout her life, Bea has lost her faith, but I want to do with the story is at least begin to bring her back. We reenter the story with a flashback.

I was refinishing a table when I wrote the story, and I remember thinking that something as old as the table I was working on held secrets, had to. Okay, what if, long ago, someone deliberately hid something beneath the linoleum covers people put on their tables back then? What might it be and why was it there. Fiction is often a matter of "what if?"

__________________


In the middle of the night her parents are awake. She hears the bed wince as they rise together, the closet doors shiver open, clothes rus­tle. They wake her, tell her they must leave. They'll be back, they tell her, her father's stark outline bathed in the light from the hallways as he stands at the foot of her bed. They leave, and she and Peter are alone.

"Just about your age," her mother told her, "and so much like you­--your height almost. Dark eyes. Esther Nez. She'd found peace, sweetheart. She's been forgiven. Isn't it wonderful?"

The table stood between them. When she wouldn't answer their question, her mother drew back from her father's arms, brought her hands up to her eyes.

"Do you know the Lord, Bea?" her father asked. "That's what we need to know," he said. "Do you know Jesus?"

She felt her father's eyes planted. They never shifted, even when she gathered her strength and stared back at him, as if cursing. "Yes, of course. Of course, I do."

The arrogance of her answer kept them from asking again.

Mutton they had for dinner that Christmas Day because everywhere you looked in those days sheep wandered the reservation. Mutton and beans. Bread and coffee.

She pulled another putty-knife from the rack, a small one, then plugged in the emery wheel on the workbench and slid the edge of the knife across the whirr, shooting sparks up toward the calendar girl Myron had pinned up on the tagboard years ago. She had to be careful because she didn't want to gouge the surface, even though she could sand away light slips easily enough.

A half dozen linoleum strips still stuck to the table. She lay the edge of the putty-knife at the point of the largest chunk, raised her wrist against the play of the blade, jammed it into the seam, lifting the linoleum, then picked up the corner once it was loose enough to grab with her fingers.

"What she'd done," Bea thought, just because Char thinks it's her job to bring peace now that she's found Reverend Van's Jesus. But it won't happen, not with both of them dead, her mother years ago already and now her father too, laid on that slope above the shacks in the little town he'd made up his mind never to leave, both of them asleep in the cemetery where food offerings for the dead littered the ground with pagan honor.

She pushed the blade beneath the biggest chunk and grabbed what she'd turned up, then jerked the knife along--like skinning an animal, the way the Indian boys used to tug the bluish pelt from a rabbit's back with a wet ripping sound. She curled the piece into her fingers, put down the knife and wrapped her other hand around her wrist, then leaned over the table to balance herself, jerked hard, and the whole diamond-shaped piece came off in her hands, wide as a book cover.

She tossed it in the shopping bag with the rest of what she'd already scraped, but it twisted as it fell, and she saw something shiny, glim­mering as if wet. She reached down into the bag and when she pulled it out again she found a star in a cellophane wrapper stuck to the back of the linoleum.

At first glance she thought it was something scissors-cut from very delicate paper, but when she tore it loose from the back of the linoleum it was thicker than paper-something fabric instead, or woven. Tatting, that's what it was--a tatted medallion star.

She looked back at the table, at the spot where it had come up, and found no trace of adhesive, the dull, unsullied grain where it had lain the only clean spot on the surface. That star had been wrapped in cellophane and laid purposely under the thick linoleum. It was small enough to fit easily in the bowl of her palm, its points done in some intricate and personal weave like some language not yet written. Years before, her mother had worked sometimes at night, in those dark even­ing hours of winter, the shuttle a glint of silver passing expertly in and out of her open fingers as she nimbly turned out a cluster of tightened stitches, doilies, edging from handkerchiefs, and sometimes antimacassars--like the linoleum, to protect the back or arms of the sofa. A star in the desert, she thought, a hidden medallion star buried beneath the tabletop. Her mother's work. She removed it from the brit­tle cellophane. Its ecru knots, small, hardened fists, were shaped into a design so fine that one could easily forget the hours it took to create its delicate edges.

But why would her mother have buried it that way, laid a little piece of lace beneath her own tabletop?--a star, she thought, a desert star like a miracle from the bottom of the table, something unexpected, a little glint of beauty like a sign, she thought. Maybe like a testimony. It didn't really matter who would eventually strip back the linoleum and find her little miracle underneath--it could be Mother Van's only daughter or any of a hundred Esthers. She'd put the star there like a Bible story, like the gospel tracts she'd always leave in the Albuquerque bus sta­tion, a testimony planted for some wayward soul lost in the wilderness. She'd put it there so she could go to her death knowing that she still had one last tatted voice pointing to Jesus. Just more of the same, Bea thought.

When she opened the stripper, the can exhaled fumes that stung her eyes. She pulled on her rubber gloves and poured it over the table sur­face, the brash smell lining her nose as she spread clumps flat over the wood, the last slivers of linoleum, and the tracks of the adhesive. It was so much like her mother she almost had to laugh, a bad joke on her daughter. The one thing of her mother's she had touched in more than forty years, and it comes up as just another sermon. The stripper soaked up the old surface and turned cold where it dirtied her gloves.

But how could she know it would be her daughter? Maybe preaching wasn't the idea. After all, only someone already a Christian could read the symbol right. It would mean little to a Navajo. Besides, if her mother wanted to bury a tract, she could have. Maybe as a young bride she buried it the way the hired man in the parable buried the one talent the master had given him--because she feared the stiffness of her hus­band's commitment, was afraid of what he might say about silly lace. Over the years, maybe her mother had taught herself to mistrust something which existed for beauty's sake alone, as if her medallion were a token of selfish pleasure. Maybe she'd buried it because it was only beauty.