Morning Thanks--On circles

Okay, I feel a little embarrassed about admitting it because it's such a "retired guy" thing to do, thumb through a shoebox of old pictures. But there I was a couple of days ago, digging through scads of blurry photos in search of a snapshot or two of my sister.

That's her, along the sidewalk. You can barely make her out, and I wouldn't have known who it was if my mother hadn't written her name and mine on the back. That's me on the other side of the church steps. I'm ten. Feel free to doubt. I could blow it up on our flat screen TV and still not identify either of us.

But I know I was there, and I remember a trip to California when we stopped at Rehoboth, our mission in New Mexico, emphasis on our, a gospel mission among the Navajo people that my father was sure belonged to us, members of the Christian Reformed Church. It was summer. No throng of kids were around, but I have blurry memories of stopping there--of the high desert landscape, of round bread ovens at Zuni, of a boxy dining hall just across the compound from this old church. 

Still, finding this picture was pure joy, a revelation. There we are. There I am, close to sixty years ago.

Just a half-dozen years ago I tramped around that very region on assignment, writing a book about families--Native and Anglo--who, for generations, had been connected, one way or another, with Rehoboth mission, a pointedly "Reformed" idea that had its origins in what we used to call "covenant theology."

But the book wasn't supposed to be about theology. My assignment was to interview people, to ask them about their lives and their feelings about this very church and the whole concept of missions and mission schools. Let people tell their stories. Listen to them. Record. Help us remember.

That assignment changed my life, altered its course, simply but certainly brought me into a world I'd known very little about. All those hefty phrases are accurate, even though they feel heavier than they might seem. I didn't come away from New Mexico any more sinless than I ever was, but listening to all those people made me look out the world around me, around us, in a different way.

A couple decades earlier, and probably twenty years after this family picture was taken, I was seated in a pew at a worship service in that church in the old picture. I was listening to a preacher named James Lont hold forth on a hearty Reformed theme--the providence of God. He was speaking to kids, high school kids, the kids from my suburban Phoenix church among 'em. 

I'll grant you that his topic sounds like a heavy load for high school kids, but it wasn't. Lont told them that although God's designs include mysteries none of us are quick or smart enough to determine, they are there. You may not believe this, he said, but there's a reason you're here in this chapel today. That's faith.

I can't speak for any of the kids we took along for the retreat, but Lont was on the money when it came to me. 

I've spun a thousand stories in my life, most of them as real as this one. What I've come to understand is that one of the characteristics we love about good stories, even if and when we don't take the time to chart them out or think them through, is a strange, boomerang quality: stories often return to where they came from--or at least we like them to. They are somehow pleasing if they carry some rough-hewn unity, if they double-back on themselves, return to places they once touched. 

We like those stories because we like to feel there's reason and cause and unity in the chaos of our lives. We like to think things have shape and meaning. Like most Native folks, we like our stories shaped in a circle. Like this one: that's me in the picture, almost 60 years ago.

I'm a long way from New Mexico this morning, way up here in cold Iowa mid-winter. But a couple of nights ago I stumbled across this fuzzy photograph no one else could possibly value. 

No one but me, but then I'm the kid beside the steps of the Rehoboth church. Even though I'm nowhere close to that old creaky place and spent most all of my life elsewhere, I never really left. That's the circle. That's the story.

And for that circle of meaning, good Lord, I couldn't be more thankful this cold morning.

Gov. Haley and the State of the Union

On the night of Barack Obama's last hurrah, he got upstaged, big-time, and no one saw it coming.

It should have been his night, love him or hate him. It was, after a fashion, his swan song. You can argue the point, but there is, on the political calendar, few if any similar opportunities for saying what a president wants said than the annual State of the Union speech/sermon; and all but the most stiff-necked Obama haters will admit the man is good at making speeches.

And he had game on Tuesday night. Loads of supporters claim his final State of the Union was one of very best speeches, and he's had a ton of stemwinders. The time to lay out his agenda is over; no one expected a shopping list of must-have legislation. What he attempted instead was to do what Republican presidential candidates are not doing, not because they can't, but because they've been so good at surveying the foul mood among this nation's conservatives. 

Mostly it's woe that's being peddled by Trump and the Red State Gang. It's woe and woe and woe--how America is listing in a sea of tumult created by the incompetent Muslim. How the only way to make America strong again is to put up walls at home and make the desert glow. To speak harshly, carry a big stick, and use it, dammit. 

"The United States is the most powerful nation on earth. Period," Obama said Tuesday night, in a fashion that makes very clear the terms are not uncertain. He wanted to preach hope that night, belief in country, something GOP faves claim to be in short supply. 

And he was good. He was Obama-good. Only Obama haters--and they are legion--will claim otherwise.

But, if not in rhetoric, in substance, Gov. Nikki Haley outdid him, shocking listeners by actually taking on Donald Trump, the far-and-away leading candidate for the Republican nomination, like it or not. Trump is a bully, and he doesn't like pushback. But on the night of the State of the Union, he got it in spades from not only the exiting, greatly hated President Barack Obama, but also the woman chosen as the spokesperson of his own party (if he has one), South Carolina's Gov. Nikki Haley.

Now Ms. Haley was swept into office on the basis of her orthodox conservative credentials. She was--but probably is no more--a tea-partier. And let's be clear: her rebuttal to the President's speech didn't slight Obama's faults. She laid into him as viciously as one might expect. 

But the real story was this line: “Today, we live in a time of threats like few others in recent memory. During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation,”

And if anyone doubted she was talking about Donald Trump, she pulled a play out his own playbook the next day when she doubled-down on what she'd said on the Today show and elsewhere that, yes, America, I was talking about the Donald.

That's the line that zinged all over the world, that had wing-nuts from the right fuming, that prompted some Trump disciples to call for sending Ms. Haley back to India, where her parents came from.

Look, in recent history, Republican rebuttals have been shipwrecks. The only thing America remembers of Marco Rubio's was his pitiable reach for bottled water. Bobby Jindel looked like little Lord Fauntleroy. Along comes Nikki Haley, and the whole world listens.

Here's the news. Trump and all those who preach fear and hate got nailed twice on Tuesday night. They expected some body blows from Obama--everyone did. But they didn't expect getting slapped around by their own. And they did.

It was an amazing moment in this amazing political year. 

Will it make a difference?  Probably not. If you honestly and truly want to believe in shock and awe, then you're not going to let an Indian woman--even one toting an assault rifle--talk you out of it. To most of his people, Trump is still the savior.

Period.

Book Report--Mystery and mysteries

I took one look and asked myself, "What's not to like?" The novel is regional--set proudly in Minnesota. It's central character is taking a college writing class, for pete's sake, doing an assignment that required him to interview someone for a life story. We're on familiar ground here. The Life We Bury is a mystery with a love story too, and the cover is a photograph I could have taken myself, would have, in fact, had I been standing there in the downy snow at that old barn.

So I bought The Life We Bury--on tape, and listened for a couple of weeks' worth of workouts. Easy listening too. Allen Eskens' first novel (okay, I'm also green with envy) is everything the buzz says it is--a perfectly suspenseful whodunit that grabs your attention and won't let go. 

I'll admit it. I got soured when The Life We Bury introduced the evangelical Christian, because I knew, long before it was clearly manifest, that the Christian was deranged. If there's going to be a Bible believer in a murder mystery--and a male--he's going to be a nut case.

Doggone it, I'm not always happy to be one myself, but one really gets tired of "same-old, same-old" characters spouting Jesus and hate, Jesus and violence, Jesus and spite. All Allen Eskens has to do is put a Bible verse on the lips of an old man, and, voila!--we got a villain. From the first mention of his Christian faith, I was sure the old man would be an incestuous insane killer. Poor guy didn't have a chance. There I stood on the exercise machine, sweating away, ready to rip out the earbuds because once the insane guy spouting scripture showed up, I knew where this novel was headed.

Well, I was wrong. And that's good.

He may not have done the deed, but the old man with the Bible is still certifiably loony and doubtlessly dangerous. Novels like The Life We Bury simply assume that bible believers are moonstruck, lecherous crazies--like Bill Gothard. You can't be a Christian and not be crazy. 

But The Life We Bury does not explore but exploits the human condition. It's genre, and genre at its best. Its forte is not character but plot. If what people might be like seems manufactured in a murder mystery, it is.

I'm glad I picked up The Life We Bury, glad to have read it. I'd love to write a novel like it. But if we compare the murder at the heart of the story to the murder at the heart of the Netflex series The Making of a Murderer, we're comparing apples to junkyard dogs. Both stories involve at-risk families, feature a purposeful search for truth, and show you the blood of an unsolved murder. But they're different as day and night.

Sometime in the 80's, when the incidence of incest seem everywhere, when horrific accusations were being tossed about all over the landscape, when even a Pulitzer Prize winning novel like A Thousand Acres used "recovered memory" as if it were commonplace, I told a friend of mine, a social worker, that I'd like to meet someone who committed incest as so many fathers appeared to have done. 

He shook his head. "No, you wouldn't," he said. "He'd probably seem a whole lot like you and me."

What makes The Making of a Murderer so greatly more fascinating is its exploration of the sheer mystery of human nature. In The Life We Bury, there's no doubt where the horror lives. In The Making of a Murderer, after ten hours of documentary, we honestly don't know where the evil lies. Seriously, when you get past the last page of The Life We Bury, the story has no mystery at all.

They're completely different genres, and we tend to read novels like The Life We Bury to get away from stories like The Making of a Murderer.

That's human too. 

Men and women and ideas--The Making of a Murderer

The whole world is watching The Making of a Murderer, an entirely captivating ten hours of new television that tells the story of Steven Avery, a man with far more hair than brains, a man twelve jurors and a judge claim killed Teresa Halbach, a young woman, for no other reason than some perverse and horrible fun. All this happens in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, a good half hour from where I was born.

That's one reason we watched The Making of a Murderer. The place I still call home isn't far away.

As millions have discovered, the film is unendingly perplexing. If Steven Avery murdered Teresa Halbach, he is a horrible monster who deserves to spend the rest of his life in the tightest cell the state can find. If he didn't kill her however, he's a horrible victim of law enforcement's rush to judgment, not once but twice in his life. The film-makers, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, claim they don't know themselves whether Avery murdered Teresa Halbach, which means that after ten hours of riveting film-making, we don't either. And that's horribly frustrating.

And, the horror isn't over--not for the family of Teresa Halbach or the family of Steven Avery. "He whos sups with the Devil," an ancient proverb used to say, "had best use a long spoon." After ten hours, we still don't know who the "he" is.

More than 300,000 people have signed on-line petitions to set Avery and his nephew, Brenden Dassy, free. Both were found guilty, both are doing hard time--Steven without possibility of parole. Dassy, who was just 16 at the time and wasn't blessed with great clarity of mind, could be paroled in another 33 years. It's a sad, sad story--and a vicious one--in dozens and dozens of ways. 

If you're a resident of Manitowoc County, and you, like millions of others, believe Avery was framed, then some demented killer is still out there on the loose, hunting for another Teresa Halbach. That too is horrifying.

We watched Making of Murderer because our kids had, and we wanted to see what they were talking about. And I know the territory, understand the thick accents the Averys use. I know the seagulls, the geese, the hard Wisconsin cold just off the big lake. About the only symbol you don't see is Packer paraphernalia, not even a hoodie. These people are strange.

It's not a joke, and I shouldn't be making light of the Averys. They're right out of William Faulkner, only cheeseheads, a band of rough-hewn pseudo-criminals, badgers in bibs and camo, who live hard and play hard. They know the inside of a jail cell, and not because they're committed to Matthew 25. They're not at  all comely. One of graces of the series is that the filmmakers didn't make the Averys into a freak show--and they could have.  

But that's not the story Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi want to tell. The story they want to tell is in the title--"The Making of a Murderer." What they arrange through selective film-making is a story about how the Averys could have been railroaded. The police and legal system of Manitowoc County provide them ample resources to do just that.

The interrogation of Brenden Dassy seems a travesty. The only truth it proves is the kid has minimal abilities when it comes to clear thought. The way the investigators stimulate his confession is blood-curdling. 

And it makes law-enforcement look evil. They're not framing the Averys--that's not the point. They're only trying to make the case air-tight. The cops and the county attorney are convinced the Averys are guilty, and what the film implies is that law is willing to bend the truth to get that verdict. They want conviction, in every sense of the word.

They get it in court, but not in the minds of viewers. We don't know, but then, as they've been confessing in interviews, neither do Demos and Ricciardi.

They claim it's not a story about the Averys; it's a story about an idea--how the legal system works to create murderers. Sure. But can anyone really tell a story about people and want it to be about an idea? We don't feel pain or sympathy or sadness for ideas. Ideas don't suffer. We don't see their tears. We don't walk with them to a massive prison gate. We don't feel the chains an idea's children lug into courtrooms.

It's not an idea that makes 300,000 viewers sign petitions, it's the people who embody those ideas; it's the word justice made flesh. 

It may well be cold calculation on the part of the filmmakers to say this film is about an idea, but for better or for worse a million viewers are thinking The Making of a Murderer is all about the Averys.

(a little more tomorrow)

The Revenant--a brutal masterpiece

I hope you'll agree that there is some beauty in this image, an elegance to what Emerson called "the frolic architecture" of snow, something dazzling in its loveliness. That having been said, no one would really want to be here. It's twenty below. Even a buffalo would move south.

The Revenant is a film-making masterpiece that's both beautiful and just plain awful to watch. It's sheer violence is matched only by the frightful deprivation Hugh Glass endures when he drags his bloody, broken self out of pure wilderness, a place, by the way, the word Disney has absolutely no meaning. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant is not for the faint of heart. Brace yourself. It's magnificence is as compelling as it is repellent.

Like Shakespeare, Iñárritu is working with materials long ago established,, in this case among the great sagas of the American west, the story of Hugh Glass, a dying trapper left on his own by companions who understand their own lives are in jeopardy if they wait to watch, mercifully, for their companion to die. They leave.

It's pure rags-to-riches Americana in a way, because Hugh Glass is not dead, nor will he die. It's revenge that he breaths, revenge that gives him life. The story goes that Hugh Glass pulled himself up and away from death itself even though he had no bootstraps. Slowly, with pain that's just as unendurable to imagine as it is to witness, he returns to the fort in search of Fitzgerald, the man who left him behind.

In origin, the myth belongs to South Dakota. Glass was mauled by a she-bear somewhere near Lemmon, but eventually fought the elements, hand over hand, all the way back to Ft. Kiowa, near Chamberlain, a 200-mile trek. Iñárritu chooses to set it in the Canadian Rockies, which only makes the suffering more profound--and without a doubt more profoundly beautiful.

That's the material Iñárritu is bending and shaping in The Revenant, the myth many have repeated, retold, rewritten.

The power of the story--of the myth itself--is that at its climax it refuses to deliver what it promises all along. Call it what you will--retribution, spite, anger, hate--what gives Hugh Glass life is not simply a refusal to die but a gorging thirst for revenge that never happens. When he finds Fitzgerald, he doesn't kill him. That unforgettable end is what keeps the story alive.

If Hugh Glass murdered the man who left him for dead, storytellers of the American West would not have retold the story that created the myth. Had Hugh Glass simply put a gun to Fitzgerald's temple, no one would have been surprised and the story wouldn't have been mythologized. That he doesn't is the shock that lifts the story into the level of what's unimaginable.

Frederick Manfred took a shot himself at the Hugh Glass story and wrote Lord Grizzily, his rendition of the tale, published in 1954 and nominated for a National Book Award. Lord Grizzly has probably outsold all of the other Manfred novels combined. It's one of five he called his "Buckskin Man Tales," stories of the Northern Plains where he lived, the place he loved.

Fred Manfred's real name was Feike Feikema. He was born somewhere around Doon, Iowa. He loved his father but worshiped his mother, Alice Van Engen, a deeply religious woman born and reared in the Christian Reformed Church, who made sure her precocious oldest son got a good Christian education.

It is fair to say that his people, his tribe, "received him not," a rejection that sometimes pained him. Once upon a time, Manfred told me that he couldn't understand why it was that the men and women he grew up with had such faint toleration for his work, when the most famous novel he'd ever written was really all about forgiveness, the central thrust of orthodox Christianity. Manfred's problems with the community of his youth and childhood is a fascinating topic, but what's interesting about that statement in the shadow of The Revenant is his assessment of the Hugh Glass story--"it's all about forgiveness."

Iñárritu thinks so too, but he changes motivations, even hypes the revenge by giving Glass a son, Hawk, by way of a Native wife, a son who is with him because Glass's dearly beloved wife was murdered in a massacre. Iñárritu plays with the myth the way Shakespeare played with the story of Hamlet, King of Denmark. 

Before the trek that made Glass famous, Fitzgerald murders Hawk in this new telling, which makes Glass's motivation in The Revenant something greater than revenge. His son's death reshapes the cause into a desire for justice in the American frontier, where there are no courts of law. If the score that needs to be settled is a matter of justice, then forgiveness is really of little importance, which makes Manfred's assessment of the shape of the Hugh Glass story irrelevant.

That's a shame. Whether or not Manfred is right isn't the point. We're all free to alter the shape of the Hugh Glass story because it belongs to American mythology. But I think it's fair to point out that the reshaping which Iñárritu has given us in this simply incredible film does make the story more Hollywood and, if Manfred was right, less, well, divine.

There are distractions in this film, a film that will create untold dissertations in film schools, I'm sure. Iñárritu risks melodrama now and then. It's as if he can't stop himself. The horror and deprivation is so painfully acute that he would like to think he has no limits. At some moments near the end, the story gets a little heavy-handed, even preposterous. The horror of the story doesn't need embellishment.

Another distraction is the amazement an audience can't help but feel about how on earth the movie was shot. Iñárritu was committed to natural light; therefore, frequently the crew could shoot only when the light was there--and there, in this case, is wilderness areas so remote you wonder if any other human beings have ever been even close. Reportedly, crew members quit in droves when they were forced to live in those conditions. When you watch this film, you have to stop once in a while and just shake your head at how it was done.

And then there is the myth itself. One of the reasons Shakespeare's audience found his Hamlet so interesting, or so say the scholars, is that they already knew the story; what interested them was how the playwright would tell it. I really loved watching this telling of the Hugh Glass story unfold, loved watching it play the myth itself.

My wife didn't go, wouldn't, and I don't blame her. The Revenant spares nothing, soft-pedals nothing, refuses to restrain itself. It is a magnificent film. Last night it took home a number of big awards from the Golden Globes. There will be more, I'm sure.

But The Revenant is not easy to watch. It's brutal and unceasing, it revels in beauty that's difficult to see. It's a brutal masterpiece, an amazing rendition of a grueling, bloody story we've enjoyed hearing for more than a century, but is really difficult to see.

Sunday Morning Meds--No, never alone

“I mused and my spirit grew faint.” Psalm 77:3

Why some books or plays or movies stay with you is a mystery. Take Flowers for Algernon—I’ve seen it as a movie (Charly, 1968, starring Cliff Robertson, who won an Academy Award for Best Actor), it’s been performed as a play by thousands of high schools; and I read the book, as have millions of others. It once was required reading all over the place. Still is, I'm sure.

The unmistakable takeaway of that story is that Charly Gordon, the mentally challenged bakery assistant, was better off—more happy, more secure, more resilient, and vastly less troubled when he couldn't think. For him, becoming normal, which is to say thoughtful, was a horror. Unlike Asaph, he had never mused; once he started thinking, he was in trouble.

I spent my working life as a college professor. I studied literature because of Emerson and Thoreau and a whole host of thinkers. I believe in ideas, trumpet their efficacy and their startling joy. I could sit most of the day and think. Some days, now that I’m retired, I do.

But I know what my wife is thinking when she tells me when she wishes she were a cat, nothing to do but eat and sleep and hold that constant, emotionless cat look. Sometimes she wishes she didn’t muse. I get that. I know the feeling too. The spirit doesn't appear to go faint.

Several people are here with me this morning. There’s Charly Gordon—I’ve conjured him myself. There’s Asaph, the poet, meticulously recounting what seems insomnia at best, or depression, at worst. His voice speaks Psalm 77.

There’s more. Stepping from the open book beside me is Charles H. Spurgeon, who’s walking through the Psalms with me; and what he says about Psalm 77:3 is stunningly personal: “Alas, my God, the writer of this exposition [which is to say Spurgeon himself] well knows what thy servant Asaph meant, for his soul is familiar with the way of grief. Deep glens and lonely caves of soul depressions, my spirit knows full well your awful glooms!”

In case you missed it, Spurgeon just opened a vein on the page.

So, who’s all here? Charly Gordon, eating a donut, feeling fine. He doesn’t think much about Asaph’s story. But Spurgeon winces when he reads this verse and so do I because we’ve been there, done that.

Right now, down here in the basement, a number of us are musing. Not Charly, who’s just now getting home from a bakery, and the cat, asleep across the room on the couch.

So answer me this: who’s most blessed? Charly is wiping the last spot of cream from the donut he snitched right before he left work, smiling to beat the band. The cat is out cold, never once raises his head.

Asaph is musing, his spirit’s growing faint. Spurgeon is remembering his own life soberly, wishing he could forget. And me?--it’s cloudy again outside, and I’m worried about. . .very real worries.

And you’re here too, if you’re reading these words.

But my job is to try to make sense of things, to try to make music out of all these discordant melodies. A whole pageant of shimmering holograms dances on my computer screen. I’m one of them—and I’m the choreographer.

This Sunday morning these very words are my musing, my ideas. Let me tell you, my spirit would indeed be faint—yea, it would unravel me, send me forever adrift were it not for the cat and the good musing company all around.

“It’s just good to know you’re not alone,” he mused. Me, that is.

Thank the God of the Scripture for Asaph.  We're not alone--no, never alone.     

A gumshoe God

Look, it's a mark of the efficacy of what he's up to that I'm writing these words. The fact is, I'm thinking about those silly aphorisms he hangs on his company's sign along the street. I can't help but see them every last trip into town. And they're not silly. I'm sorry for having said that, but not sorry enough to edit out the word. 

Aphorisms are inherently irritating, like an itch. When they carry a spiritual kick, they're like a full-blown case of the hives. Maybe it's just me. 

Not long ago, there was a spelling error up there on his sign, a common error that drove me crazy. I don't remember the sentiment anymore, but for a month at least he used advise where he should have said advice. I didn't want to be Aunt Clara the Grammar Nazi, so I didn't call him or write a note. Eventually someone did. Made a trip town less painful.

What's up there now gets under my skin, in part, because I break out easily. My parents did it, both of them: if someone wants to preach, they would gladly critique. Then, as an English teacher I spent 40 years in a desert of student papers. I can't help myself.

I've prated long enough. Here's the silly spiritual maxim he has up this month. 

"The world sees what you do, 

but God sees why you do it." 

It's a variation on "Be careful little eyes what you see," and it's likely theologically sound. "His eye is on the sparrow," after all, right? I read those words everyday, two or three times. If I had the wherewithal to look somewhere else at that spot on the street, I'd be happy. But I don't, okay? Woe is me.

Enough. This armchair theologian and ex-English teacher has decided how I'd treat the irritant. 

I'd change "God sees" to "God knows." This tormenting little maxim still holds its sting that way, but I can live more peaceably with the image. That God knows the heart is somehow God-like. Scary? Sure, and for me, a sinner, it always will be. 

But at least he's not somewhere on high with a pair of binoculars or a video camera hidden in a fountain pen. He's not furtive about it, not back there in the madding crowd tailing me like some divine gumshoe. He just knows. Knows makes him bigger than we are, and he is God. He forever is.

The guy who owns the business means to have us clean up our acts--I get that. And that's okay, even if I don't take kindly to him (the owner) looking over my shoulder and making judgments. "Puritanism," Mencken said quite famously," is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time." Puritanism is in the aphorism, don't you think? Maybe I'm just too much a Puritan myself.

Anyway, I'm tempted to buy my own set of letters, to get out there in the darkness some night and do some editing. I bet no one would notice. I could just take the whole line down some night, but I'm no terrorist.

And I'm wise to the fact that all of this makes it embarrassingly clear that the guy who puts up those signs is winning. He got me, all right? I'm doing exactly what he wanted people to do--I'm thinking. And, if you're reading this, so are you. Oh, be careful little eyes what you see.

That silly aphorism may be driving me nuts, but I'm thinking.

God sees that too, doesn't he? I hope so.

One way or another, I think it's been up there long enough. It's time the boss changes the message, thank goodness.

Lord of the Flies

I'll grant you this guy doesn't look like royalty, but we were honored, a few days ago, when he decided to stop in our backyard. Only occasionally had we seen bald eagles out back before, mostly from a distance; although earlier in the week, I caught a glimpse of one sailing effortlessly over our house in true bald eagle grandeur. This member of the royal family came in low, landed effortlessly, and honored us with his presence. Acted like a king, I suppose--didn't do a thing, just sat there and ruled.

And then, behold, there was another, this one unhooded. Somewhere along the line I remember hearing they don't get bald--which is to say they don't get that perfectly regal white head--for five years. Took me longer, but that's not the story. This one was a prince.

Or princess. I didn't ask about gender. Perhaps someone else knows. But if they behaved like king and queen, it was Henry the Eighth and Ann Boleyn, the backyard no peaceable kingdom. Didn't take long, and they were at each other.

Rather adamantly, in fact. Downright hostile they were. Look at 'em. It wasn't pretty. Such American royalty may take your breath away, but they're not one bit nice.

Then, suddenly, there were three. Another bald one showed up--all of this in our backyard, mind you, the two of us observing and shooting pictures from our dining room, the out back hosting a royal rumble.

No peace pipes, no parleys, no niceties. It was every man (or woman) for him or herself, social Darwinism in the court right there in our backyard. Disappointing really. I'd have preferred to think that the U. S. of A's great national symbols could behave better than Presidential candidates. Nope.

I had the biggest beast of a lens I own on my camera, and I was shooting away when finally the royal family all took off to the river's edge. All told, I snapped a couple dozen shots, so I start pulling them up on the back of the camera, when--viola!--I discovered the source of all the fuss. 

One less bunny to raid our garden next summer.  It was nothing more than a food fight.

I don't know who ended up with it in his or her stomach, but there it is, or was, in the mighty talons of one huge bird.

Nothing majestic about it. When they sail on unseen winds above, they're majestic. When they're bickering they're junkyard dogs in feathers and fancy white hoods. Just another Lord of the Flies, this one in our backyard.

When all the pomp and circumstance was over, my wife and I lectured our sleepy cat, told him if he didn't behave we'd throw him out behind the house. 

He just look up and yawned. He too thinks he's royalty.

What does Jesus remember about us?

The cartoonish angel up at the top of the Rev. Edward Taylor's gravestone isn't the only oddity in the life of one of America's first accomplished poets. Taylor nurtured a penchant for eccentric lines in poems he never intended anyone else to read. When Christ's attributes are deliberately described via earthy earthliness, the results can be startling. As here, a couple of lines from the first stanza of Preparatory Meditation 38:

And judge him [man] wilt thereby too in Thy time.
A court of justice Thou in heaven holdst
To try his case while he's here housed on mold.

Mold? The whole idea of Judgment Day isn't news, but I never saw this world as a house of mold coming. Wow.

I couldn't get Meditation 38 out of my mind during Sunday morning worship last week. I remembered it when the preacher talked a bit about the Judgement. I thought about #38 because it offers an idea I'd never considered in the bizarre fashion Taylor does in that poem: the idea of Christ as a public defender. 

And not just anyone's but ours.

Taylor's "Preparatory Meditations" are spiritual calisthenics. Because nothing he ever wrote was intended for publication, this odd series of poems allows us a view of Puritan piety that isn't, like some others, meant for display in downtown store windows. What the old preacher does is tease out his own thoughts, in #38 reminding himself that divine justice has none of the "blemishes" that mar our court system in this "house of mold." Thusly, he says, he shouldn't equate God's court with our own. 

Soft; blemish not this golden bench, or place.
Here is no bribe, nor colorings to hide,
Nor pettifogger to befog the case,
But justice hath her glory here well tried.
Her spotless law all spotted cases tends;
Without respect or disrespect them ends.

Taylor is literally preparing himself for Holy Communion by considering God's divine love for us sinners. In #38, his joy rises from his conviction that in that court of divine law, get this!--we have the most high-powered attorney in the cosmos because Jesus Christ himself is our lawyer.

Is Christ thy advocate to plead thy cause?
Art thou His client? Such shall never slide.
He never lost His case: He pleads such laws
As carry do the same, nor doth refuse
The vilest sinner's case that doth Him choose.

But, pray tell, what kind of Calvinist would The Reverend Mr. Taylor be if there were no grovelling? At the end of the poem, he just can't help himself, literally, poetically, and, of course, spiritually. He's a sinner, after all. Watch the way he does his summation.

My case is bad. Lord, be my advocate.
My sin is red: I'm under God's arrest.
Thou hast the hint of pleading; plead my state.
Although it's bad, Thy plea will make it best.
If Thou wilt plead my case before the king,
I'll wagon-loads of love and glory bring.

Wagon-loads is just priceless, isn't it? I certainly didn't see that coming either.

But then Taylor wasn't finishing an MFA. All he was doing was thinking long and hard about sin and redemption--his own particularly. Like all the others, #38 is a personal meditation.

Here's what I was thinking in church last week. If Jesus Christ is our lawyer, what does he "get" about us? what does he understand, having stood on the same ground we do? What bits of his own humanness did he carry with him back to glory? Does he have a scrapbook? PTSD? Seriously, what does he know that he didn't before he pulled on human flesh?  

There he is today on the right hand of God. There he reigns, right?

But what does he remember about being human? what can't he forget? what makes him shutter? what makes him smile? What part of his character was shaped by that 30-year pilgrimage onto this house of mold?

Did he learn anything in Galilee, in a woodshop, out there in the desert, on the cross, shouldering away that stone?

I wonder.  That's what I was thinking in church last Sunday.

Chief Gall--An amazing story

Gall

Gall was no giant, but he had to have been built like grand piano, broad chest, sturdy muscular arms, and impressive, toned body. Custer's wife, Libby, once gushed that she had never "dreamed there could be in all the tribes so fine a specimen of a warrior as Gall."

When Gall stood up in front of the generals and diplomats at Ft. Laramie in 1868, at a time when the U. S. Government was offering the Indian people of the region their most beloved prize, the Black Hills, he wasn't in the buying mood, even though Red Cloud and his southern Lakota neighbors were ready to trade. Gall was recalcitrant and as angry as he'd ever been. When he stood up, he showed the white folks the museum of scars he'd picked up in countless fights with the white people streaming over Indian land, a testimony to his spirit, a warning.

At Ft. Laramie, Gall made clear he wanted no part of a settlement that would make the proud Indian people wards of the state. He wanted no reparations. He wanted freedom. He wouldn't sign the Treaty of Ft. Laramie.

His reputation as a fighter only grew. In 1872, he and his band took on a military escort for the surveyors plotting out the path of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Gen. David Stanley had come prepared with gattling guns that routed Gall's Hunkpapas so fiercely that some hack at the Sioux City Journal wrote, "If Mr. Big Gaul [sic] ever again attacks any party crossing the plains, he will…first look sharply to see if they got any Gatlins [sic] with them."

But, just four years later, along with this friend Sitting Bull, Gall had a place along the banks of the Little Big Horn. While Sitting Bull, a spiritual leader, never got his hands dirty during that famous battle, Gall rode fiercely in the middle of the bloodletting, as an Indian, but also to avenge the deaths of two of his wives and children.

For much of his life he'd determined that the only way to keep freedom alive on the American frontier was to fight the white masses threatening the Lakota way of life. The U. S. Cavalry knew him by the distinctive red blanket he always wore in battle. They called him "the fighting cock of the Sioux." 

After Little Big Horn, Gall and his people left north to Canada, where they stayed for four years until conflicts with other Native tribes arose, much of it attributable to the growing scarcity of buffalo. His people were weary and homesick, so they left Canada in 1881 and surrendered in Montana to Gen. Guido Ilges, who triggered a fight that killed eight members of Gall's band and then ordered them all to go to Ft. Buford, in North Dakota, even though a blizzard raged in temperatures that reached 28 degrees below zero. Gall's fighting days were behind him and them.

He and his Hunkpapas were relocated at the Standing Rock Reservations, where Gall met and learned to like Agent Major James McLaughlin, who was married to a Sioux. 

Something astounding happened to "the fighting cock of the Sioux." Rather quickly he adopted white ways. One summary of his life says it this way: "He believed in rapidly assimilating Indians into the nation’s economy as small farmers; Christianizing them was also a goal he shared with many advocates of Indian reform back East."

What exactly happened to change him, no one will ever know. Was that radical change attributable to his friendship with McLaughlin? Was it caused by utter physical and emotional exhaustion? Did he simply recognize that the waves of white people were a tumult his people could no longer battle?

There's another story I can't help but love. It may well be myth. It's difficult to separate truth from myth in the life of a man like Gall.

One Sunday, on his horse, he was riding slowly by St. Elizabeth's, the mother church of all the Episcopal churches on the Standing Rock Reservation, when from inside came the distinctive and beautiful sound of a hymn, music he'd never heard before. He stopped, listened, was moved deeply; and that moment, some say, became was the first step on the road to his conversion to the Christian faith.

From outside, what he heard through that open door of the church was "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah."

I don't know that I'll ever hear that hymn again without thinking of Gall.

Is the story true? Finally, I suppose, we believe what we want to, don't we?--what God gives us ears to hear.

Faith and culture for Muslim America

Among the formidable roster of New York Times columnists, no one is more despised than Russ Douthat--for his conservative views. Following almost every column he writes, vitriolic responses spill down the page. Most Times readers don't read that newspaper because of him; they read the Times because elsewhere there's too much of him. On the opinion page, Douthat is a minority.

I read him every time he sets down a line (how do you say that digitally--"I read  his every keystroke"?). Anyway, I enjoy him greatly. He has his point of view and he does his best to communicate his determinations--and they are decidedly conservative. 

Just before Christmas he brought up the difficulties the American people when they think about their Islamic neighbors, the women in the hijabs, believers who pray with their foreheads on the floor. Most Americans don't want to dislike them or distrust them. If we aren't First Nations in heritage, we're all immigrants. My Dutch immigrant great-grandparents had to learn to get along, too, right? So should Muslims.

But what exactly does "get along" mean for believers, especially for "true believers"? At the very least, it means reshaping their faith to fit more imperceptibly into the American context, right? Take off the sharp edges, whittle away at the whatever might create offense, go soft, back pedal, ease up, chill--you know. Don't make a production of your faith for goodness sake, for the sake of your neighbors. Douthat claims that most Americans simply assume that for Muslims to get along in this country, faith has to be tempered.

It should come as no surprise to any Christian believer that many Muslims consider such a path as a road to extinction. To believe that Muslims have to become less Muslim--and more American--is to spell an end to the Muslim faith in America. Here's how he puts it:  ". . .Modernized Islam would be Unitarianism with prayer rugs and Middle Eastern kitsch – . . .one more office in the multicultural student center, one more client group in the left-wing coalition." (Also the kind of dig that liberals love to hate).

Douthat's really interesting point however is that American Christians should understand the dilemma faced by American Muslims because they face it too. If faith exists only in our closets, does it exist at all? If it's invisible, won't it disappear? He says what's true of Christianity is true of Islam, and I think he's right. Can Christians who are totally acculturated and assimilated into mainstream "American" culture claim Christianity at all? That seems to me to be a good question.

Muslim America's best models for living in the kind of freedom America affords may well be American evangelicals, he says, by which I'm sure he means, conservative Christian evangelicals. "In this landscape of options," he writes, "the clearest model for Islam’s transition to modernity might lie in American evangelicalism — like Islam a missionary faith, like Islam decentralized and intensely scripture-oriented, and like Islam a tradition that often assumes an organic link between the theological and political."

But then, or so it seems, no one seems more alarmed these days about Islam in America than those same Christian conservatives. I suppose that makes sense.

Long ago, I did an interview with an Dutch-born engineer who spent several years in Saudi Arabia, working for an American oil company. I did the story in Canada, where he and his family were living at the time. He enjoyed talking about his experience in the Middle East, and told me it was easier for him to understand Islam than it was for most of his North American counterparts because he grew up with a Kuyperian view of government, a government that required the influence of Christians determined to adopt legislation that adhered to the principles of the faith whose dynamism they used to form those principles.

He said he understood Islam better than others, he told me, because he was a Christian who was deeply influenced by that species of Kuyperian Calvinism.

It just may be that a fit model for all of is, Christian and Muslim, is Russ Douthat, a man who takes a beating with every column, but who keeps talking, keeps writing the best columns he can, keeps communicating the outlines of what he considers the truth as drawn from his own Catholic faith.

It may well be the most difficult question facing the West--can Muslims adapt to Western culture? As a first step, certainly, Douthat says, Muslims have "to set aside the sword."

Sunday Morning Meds--Musing

“I mused, and my spirit grew faint.”

Psalm 77:3

It’s a 19^th century line, something lifted from old novel with a frontispiece portrait of an anxious woman sitting in an English garden.  It’s the kind of line I sometimes get from young women writers, even today, who imitate the old mannered styles they once loved—as in “’Oh, Santana,’ she mused, sighing.”  You know--that kind of thing.

“I mused, and my spirit grew faint,” Asaph says (place back of hand quickly to forehead, roll eyes slightly).  When lifted on its own from the text of Psalm 77, it’s hard to take seriously.

I used to cross such usage out of my students’ stories, mark them “Yucch.”  In our post-modernity, when most anything goes, I simply ask the students if they really want to invoke such old-fashioned sentimentality. Used to because eventually I became a kinder, gentler teacher.

If etymology serves us well, muse has an interesting history, its French ancestral usage was related to a dog’s muzzle, a source which prompts word historians to speculate that muse might have to do with the way a dog raises its snoot in the air when it wants to determine direction or difficulty.  Plus, there’s the proximity of the word muse to amused, which Asaph, abed in misery, certainly is not.  But nothing in either image helps us with the gravity of Asaph’s musing.

The National Sleep Foundation sponsors the National Sleep Awareness Week to coincides with the country’s return to Daylight Saving Time.  Clocks all “spring forward,” and the entire country loses an hour of sleep.

Good timing, you might say. 

According to their most recent survey, 48% of the American public do well nightly; a majority of us, however, do not.  If the poll is accurate, more than half of us are up late, most of us musing, maybe, like Asaph, unable to sleep because, like the mythical princess, we bothered by some proverbial pea.

Edgar Allen Poe used to claim his strange visions emerged in that somnambulant state between sleep and consciousness, if we can believe him. But I’m sure that it’s not ghastly visions that kept Asaph awake, nor the fact that he took too much work home. As far as we know, he didn’t have a bad marriage, lousy cash flow, or troubled kids. All we know is, oddly enough, he mused; and that musing felt like too much hot salsa in his soul.

Psalm 77 is not for sissies, as they say. It’s really very dark; and I’m not doing him or the song credit by being silly about it—dog snoots, mattress peas, and Poe’s guillotine visions. Asaph claims he sat on his bed all night long, hands raised as if to receive a blessing that never came—nothing funny about that.  But then, perhaps if you can’t sleep, one way of steeling yourself against anxiety is laughter, the best medicine. 

Before he’s finished, Asaph will turn Psalm 77 into a praise song, but before we stumble into the light we’ve got to traverse the dark night of the soul, where sleep is a blessing that simply doesn’t arrive. 

I know I’ve said it before, but here once again—this time in Asaph’s sleeplessness—the blessing of holy scripture arrives as fully from God’s grace as it does in the conviction we get from reading the poor guy, the determination, thank goodness, that we aren’t alone in our restlessness. Even psalmists couldn’t sleep.

As the survey says, too many of us likely spend too much anxious time, like Asaph, musing.

At least we know that we are not alone.         

Morning Thanks--New Year's Dawn

It's been, thus far, a very odd winter--perhaps I should say a very odd December, for winter, heavenly body-wise, has only just begun. 

For starters, those in the know say we've never had a wetter final month of the calendar year--never. We've had three and half snowstorms already, not one of them blizzard-y, each of them quite gentlemanly, two of them simply disappearing thereafter in unseasonably warm temps. Honestly, such favors make you think this ain't Iowa 't'all.

So the land on New Years' morning seemed almost marshmellow-y, puffy white and so bright my camera was wincing. Look for yourself. It just doesn't happen often that farmland in windy Siouxland wears a fine, alabaster robe.

By the time I left, the wind had come up a bit--look at the bottom of this shot; but for the most part the whole world seemed to rest most comfortable beneath a quilt of snow that had fallen already a couple of days ago, then just stayed as if resting. Very peculiar, but really pretty.

Corn stubble protrudes, but the constancy of its impeccable order creates its own kind of beauty.

If the temps come back up above freezing, the rivers will stay open; but yesterday, three or four days into a freeze, the Big Sioux was getting close to pulling its own icy quilt up and over itself for a winter's nap that's already going to be shorter than most. 

Here and there along its banks, tufts of dried out weeds stuck in overhanging branches are a reminder of spring floods that seem, in January, unimaginable. 

Here's a bow-tie reminder of a not-so-rare weather event that likely rushed through the whole river valley at couple years ago already. 

The untrammeled snow leaves stories wherever anyone or anything disturbs it. Some winters snowmobiles never get out of the shed, but this year is a paradise. Their tracks are everywhere, but not as ubiquitous as the lines deer leave behind. Those in the know claim there are far more deer here now than were here in the days of the Yankton Sioux. They do well in Siouxland these days, where there's no end to corn. 

Never got up close to these tracks, but from a distance I couldn't help thinking it was an old buck. The trail looks tired, cut by an old man who had to work hard to catch his breath up this long hill.

I don't need encouragement to get out early with a camera. Yesterday, once again, I was disappointed when I sat here at the screen and looked over the catch--I always am. What I saw out there was so much richer than what I could get into the camera. 

You'll have to trust me on that.

Not all mornings are created equal, but all of them are unique. This cottonwood on the Big Sioux will never take this pose again. It'll be there, just as will the river behind it. But it will never look quite like this again, the ingredients of this particular still life unique within the first few moments of the first day of the new year.

New Years morning worship services are pretty much gone from church calendars, even in Siouxland, where just about everyone is a churchgoer.  I drove out to the Big Sioux in the morning of the first day of 2016. 

Even if nothing I came home with catches the beauty of the world I was in, I was blessed to have been there. My morning thanks are for the dawn of a new year.