Dreams in June

A few years ago, a student of mine told me I should go out to a country cemetery I'd never seen because it was interesting. Once upon a time, the adjacent farm had been an orphanage, where some children had died and were buried in this out-of-the-way place. 

She was right. But there were other rewards that morning, both for me as well as the spirits in that old cemetery. I was there at dawn, a blessing.

There was so much to see.

You never know how much life there might be in a cemetery.

Shell Shock

I was a boy in the 1950s, forty years after Armistice Day, when the carnage of the First World War ended. I knew very little about the death of my great uncle in the August of 1918, but I knew he'd been killed in the Great War. I also knew my parents had better attend Decoration Day rallies in the cemetery south of town. If we didn't, my Grandma, a woman with a jolly sense of humor otherwise, would go on a tear of silence. That doughboy who didn't return was her brother, her only sibling.

But his image in my mind was indistinct. When I was ten, what I knew of "the war to end all wars" was a man who walked up the street toward town to pick up his mail. Whenever I saw him, I couldn't help noticing because he jerked and stumbled, shook madly. I don't know that I ever saw him fall, but his impossible gate made him memorable. I still see him.

My dad explained the man's erratic walk as "shell shock," a phrase that handily delivers its own definition. My dad told me the man was a soldier during the First World War. On some battlefield somewhere, he said, he came too close to artillery shells. 

Shell shock is a catch-all term for a variety of physical maladies--loss of hearing, loss of sight, loss of coordination--effects especially evident, long ago, in World War I vets. Experts consider it a form of PTSD; but such lingering physical handicaps--the man from town who stumbled up the sidewalk had left the war behind a half-century before--were unique to what happened in those deadly trenches. 

In England, early in the war military officials were wary of the term. Some soldiers, after all, seemed incapable of returning to the front even though they showed no scars, no bleeding war wounds. "Shell shock" seemed just another excuse for sheer cowardice. 

It took little more than a year for the Brits saw to see many thousand evidences of emotional wounds. To believe "the boys" were posing became impossible.  

In the trenches, men often referred to the cause as "windage," a peculiar emotional wound created by the physical concussion of enemy shells that showed in effects totally unrelated to flesh wounds, a phenomenon they thought understandable from the way an explosive kills fish in a pond.

Last weekend, I listened to man, dressed like a doughboy, who stood behind tables he'd set up in one of the barracks at Ft. Snelling. On those tables, he displayed a range of tools and devices U. S. medical units have used from the Civil War to Afghanistan. 

There on the table sat this striking composition: a gas mask from the trenches of France in 1917, alongside skeins of pink and yellow yarn, the lion lying down with the lamb.

"Shell shock" was a psychological problem, he said, that at times could be controlled by finding means by which a vet could "forget" his problem, getting him to think about something else and thereby divert his absorbed attention from whatever battlefield trauma wouldn't stop playing in his mind. 

Knitting, he said, was used and found to be especially curative. Knitting.

The image in my imagination was striking--a room full of shaky battle veterans like my uncle, men who'd been killing Huns, a circle of them sitting around on wicker chairs or rockers, in silence, a skein of yarn on their laps, knitting needles twirling in their hands. Therapy. Getting healed. 

The lion lies down with the lamb.

Small Wonder(s)--The globetrotter from Hebron

There's just no way to make Fred E. Roper's story short.

What can be known about him requires an atlas at hand. He was born in Candor Hill, New York, but when he was three years old, his family moved to Canton, Pennsylvania, and then to Baraboo, Wisconsin, where, when he was barely old enough to leave his mother's side, he got on with a rafter on the Wisconsin River who took him all the way into the Mississippi and to St. Louis even, for a dollar a day and board. 

In 1854, even though he was just a kid, Baraboo got old so he started west from Bettendorf, Iowa, where his sister lived. She walked along with him to the edge of town, while he tugged his one-horned cow, meant to be a milk machine on his trip to California. Whether that beast made it or not, history doesn't record. 

Fred E. Roper was just 19 years old, had no formal education, but had simply determined it would take him three months. Don't know how he learned his figuring.

He got on with an ox train, 25 teams. Officers of the venture were democratically voted upon, strict military discipline adhered to. Guards were posted nightly to watch all those oxen. Blessedly, they had no trouble.

They chose the south route to Salt Lake City. They'd packed more than their share of provisions, so when they got to Salt Lake they sold some of the goods to Mormons they described as "half-starved," having just arrived at their promised land. All of this Fred R. Roper witnessed before his 20th birthday.

Are we there yet? No. There's more.

Crossing the desert, he'd stand between the cattle and water when the beasts smelled what they hadn't had for far too long. They'd have hoofed it right into the water, taking the wagons with them, if he hadn't.

Fred E. Roper picked up a gold nugget in a mine during the three months he sweat his way through underground shafts north of San Francisco, back then little more than 500 people in mud huts. That gold nugget he never sold or pawned, brought it to a jeweler instead and had it made into an engagement ring his wife wore until she died.

Mr. Roper and a couple of other 59ers worked a claim that had a crevasse, people said, that had never been "bottomed." They bought some expensive quicksilver to catch the float gold in the pan, did that for three years--he was somewhere close to 25 years old. Each made about $1500. Not bad.

Fred R. Roper loaded his cash in a buckskin belt around his waist and beneath his clothes as he got on some kind of ship going north along the coast, looking for another mine that might be more productive. When that didn't work out, he boarded a steamer en route to Panama--you read that right, Panama, where he picked up a team and crossed the isthmus to board a steamer for New York, where he got on a train to Philly to get his gold minted. 

Tired yet?

He got married in 1861, spent three years back east, then got the itch once again to go west, ended up in Beatrice, NE, where he ran a hotel called "Pat's Cabin," which wasn't quite what Mr. Wanderlust was looking for either. So he bought land northeast of Hebron on the Little Blue River and apparently, mostly, right about then got some sit in him, started to ranch.

Some. He enjoyed making trips to St. Joe and Nebraska City because, locals said, he knew every man on the trail between the Missouri and Kearney, used to stop with Bill McCandles, who died, you remember, by way of the blazing six-gun of Wild Bill Hickock.

In 1864, the Cheyenne burned down the first house up on the ranch he'd bought, then threw the charred logs into the well so that travelers along the road couldn't get water. Oddly enough, right before that raid, Fred Roper had sold his ranch to some traveler, who then deserted it when it couldn't help turning belly-up. 

Fred and his wife moved to Meridian, NE, and ran a tavern for about a year, then moved back to the old Hackney ranch once again, where the two of them resided until 1893, when they moved to Hebron.

The reminiscence titled "Fred Roper, Pioneer," ends with this unobtrusive line: "Mr. Roper was postmaster at Hebron for four years under Cleveland's last administration."

Talk about anti-climatic.

But  then, can you imagine walking into the post office and greeting Fred R. Roper behind the counter? "I need this sent to Denver," you might say, or something similar.

"Denver, you say?" Roper could well have said. "Did I ever tell you about the time. . ."

Just imagine the stories.

Huis bezoek--ii

I dropped in on a country church in south central Nebraska two years ago now, a lively bunch of Mennonites who'd come to the region 150 years ago, fresh out of Russia--German-speaking pacifist believers, men and women who lived hard lives out of sod houses and kept rigorous by hard work and prayer. Lovely people really. 

The building was a brick fortress, as well-kept as the cemetery next door. Many country churches in the upper Midwest today are handful gatherings of old folks singing along with an silver-haired organist doing her best on something by Fanny Crosby. 

Those Nebraska Mennonites were anything but: lots of families, lots of kids; lots of old people too, but a lot of life. It seemed to me that people actually loved each other. May not have always liked the guy in the next pew, but were committed deeply to each other. 

No one spoke to me at that church. I got the complimentary handshake, but no one asked me my name or where I was from. 

I was given the complimentary handshake at Baldwin CRC too, but once again little else. I may have been the only stranger in their midst Sunday morning. All tolled, not that many congregants were thronging. 

I'm not one of those who think a church should be graded solely on the basis of its friendliness. I don't doubt that a half-century ago, when those two old pastors I respected sat on these same pews, no one would have asked me my name either. 

But that no one even tried to talk to the old bald guy in the red shirt does create a perception that's hard to fend off--to wit, that the people lack the vital human trait of curiosity. The Mennonites didn't speak to me because they were speaking to each other; the place was alive, even though they seemed to miss altogether the stranger within their gates. But the church at Baldwin, significantly smaller, just didn't seem as vital. 

Country churches in the upper Midwest struggle. Once upon a time there were more families on the land surrounding Baldwin CRC, and each of those families had a dozen kids. Once upon a time, ethnicity bound life so tightly that some, I'm sure, thought wooden shoes a straight jacket. Once upon a time a vital, dynamic community of immigrant people surrounded that old country church, the community which birthed those two preachers I knew and respected. 

But where there were once six or eight families, today there are only two--maybe only one. Old McDonald's kids gave up on farming generations ago. Ethnicity withered. A way of life once thought separate from the "Americans" all around has now largely been assimilated, and that's not all bad. 

The church was half-full Sunday. Maybe members were off to their cabins, but I'm guessing it's always only half-full because it's difficult to sustain vitality when the community is wilting for reasons that have far more to do with demographics than theology or dedication. 

There's a silver Psalter in the rack, but everything's on a screen. Two young women were the praise band. Half the songs were to me unfamiliar. One man, up front, raised his arms, in celebration that was far easier for him to feel than it was for me. The visiting preacher was good and strong, I thought. There just wasn't much vitality. 

Maybe I should have stayed for coffee, for fellowship. I would have loved a tour of the neighborhood, loved to know where those two preachers grew up, know a bit more about farming amid all those woodlots. 

I didn't race to the door. I wasn't first out into the parking lot. But didn't feel much desire to join those who stayed in the fellowship hall because up until that point I'd really not felt much fellowship at all.

This Sunday, maybe it would be different. I was nothing more than a drop-in. 

Baldwin CRC sits in a low spot between slowly climbing hills on either side.  You can see the old church in the middle of the building additions the people have made through the years, and I like that, a church that keeps a hold of its history. 

I rode around for a while, thinking maybe there was a ghost or two lingering, a marker I might locate to note where Ted Wevers once combined corn. 

Life is not over by a long shot at Baldwin CRC, and I don't mean all of this to be a dirge. Good, good people care and care deeply about Baldwin CRC. I saw some of them on Sunday, I'm sure.

But I'm guessing that, from down there below, it's an uphill struggle.  

Huis bezoek*--i

I'm not sure why, but I was a bit surprised to find out it was a country church, set outside town with enough distance to seem only tangentially related--which may well be true 125 years ago, when the place was a colony of newly situated Dutch-Americans. I've always thought putting up churches out in the country is a pattern of faith more true of the Lutherans than the Dutch Reformed, but there it was, all by itself, right across the road, not surprisingly, a little Christian school.

Fifty years ago, my father, who spent most of his life among the leaders in the denomination's regional churches spoke glowingly about the Baldwin congregation. It must have been roughly of the same size and composition as the one he served all the way across the state. 

Yesterday, I went out of my way to drop by that church, probably in the fashion might parents might have long ago, when any Sunday travel they undertook had to include attending Christian worship, preferably with one's own people, a fellowship they'd dutifully find in the church yearbook. 

Rev. Bernard Van Someren

I'll admit it: I had slightly different motivations. Two men who long ago grew up in the community around that little country church played significant roles in my life. I wanted to see where they came from--I'd never been there. 

One of those men was our preacher when I was a kid, a tall and somewhat stooped man who wore his silver hair, perfectly combed in a pompadour--nothing at all like Elvis, by the way. We thought of him as 60-ish when he was likely half that age, a preacher so devoted to psalm-singing that he'd xerox off copies of his favorites and make us recite them--in addition to the Heidelburg Q and As--every week, a practice I told him, decades later, I appreciated far more as an adult than I had as a kid.

He was a man of determined piety, but someone I'd still call a sweet, not given to the kind of untoward righteousness piousness so frequently creates. By whatever standards I had in mind back then, he and his tall wife were a near perfect match. She had the kind of voice that carried through those church on those very psalms he'd loved. Maybe just a hair flat, my mother would say, nonetheless approvingly. I can still see that woman sing. 

Preachers were, at least to my family back then, men of crucial power in the community, their behavior absolutely essential to the spiritual and social health of the believers they served. This man, son of the Baldwin church, did well, I thought. He always struck me as a good, good man. I was too young to be critical.

Another pastor spent some years on a tractor in the fields between woodlands all around that old church. Sometime, out there, I'm guessing he listened to the call to ministry, when off to college and seminary as a Wisconsin farmer.  

Rev. Ted Wevers

I was a couple of decades older then, and I will never forget his quiet wisdom. He must have done a ton of thinking in those northwest Wisconsin fields, because he was thoughtful, a thinker. I'd call him bookish, even though I have no idea whether or not he spent much time in the library of his study. He was wise in the truest sense of that word, humble and endlessly thoughtful. If you like your preachers to be motivational speakers, he wouldn't have made the grade. In my book, he was really quite precious.

Years later, as an elder in my church, I called him because I wanted to know what he thought about a vexing problem in the congregation I served. He was long gone from the church where I grew up, as was I; but I trusted his thoughtfulness.

Those two sons of the Baldwin congregation were both fine, fine men. 

My father wasn't wrong about preachers, and he should have known because his father was one. In any congregation, especially a half-century ago, the preacher, the pastor, like no one else, shaped the life of the community of believers he served.

So I found a motel in Baldwin, Wisconsin last Saturday night. Paid too much too. But I wanted to worship in a place where those two men learned their catechism and listened to a call so long ago. 

I wondered what I'd find. 

Tomorrow, I'll try to put my impressions into words. 
___________________ 
*An untranslatable phrase from the Dutch language, meaning the kind of "house visit" that elders of a congregation were dutifully sent out to do, at least annually, with each of the families of a congregation. For many, many years, doing "huis bezoek" was taken very, very seriously. But then, Dutch Calvinists tended to do many things very, very seriously.

Sunday Morning Meds--". . .that has just gone by"

“For a thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by,

or like a watch in the night.”  Psalm 90:4

            When my father died, the poet Scott Cairns sent me a poem he’d written at the death of his own father.  Like no other poem I know, it offered consolation—and still does.  Countless times I’ve sent it on to others who’ve lost parents or friends.  It’s titled “Words for a Father,” and it begins with “and,” as if we’re probably overhearing some ideas that have been brewing in our heads for quite some time. 

“And this is the consolation: that the world

doesn't end, that the world one day opens up

into something better. And that we

one day open up into something far better.”

            He’s talking about afterlife, of course—our visions of the eternal, of heaven.  None of us know a thing about what the afterlife will look like, but our differing views (streets paved with gold, good fishing, no more wind) all share the same basic conviction:  there, things will be better.  That much for sure:  things will be better.

            Then he visits a vision of things, narrating carefully one possible sense of dying:

Maybe like this: one morning you finally wake

to a light you recognize as the light you've wanted

every morning that has come before. And the air

has some light thing in it that you've always hoped

the air might have. And One is there to welcome you

whose face you've looked for during all the best and worst

times of your life. He takes you to himself

and holds you close until you fully wake.

            There’s no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, only a sweet light and a single, strangely familiar face, a maternal God whose welcome is a blessed, wordless calm. 

            And then the lines that seem most memorable to me—or certainly were in those days following my father’s dying. 

And it seems you've only just awakened, but you turn

and there we are, the rest of us, arriving just behind you.

We'll go the rest of the way together.

What hurt me most at my father’s death was the sense of his being gone, alone, the rest of us seated in the church he’d attended his whole life, all of us, his entire family.  To the terror of that emptiness, Scott’s poem is sweet and grand relief, profiling eternity by promising us all—my father and his included—that a thousand years in God’s sight are like nothing at all.  Nothing.  We’ll be there soon ourselves. 

That, is comfort.

Morning Thanks--the open west*

My sister sent me some wonderful 1873 Timothy O'Sullivan sepia-tone shots of the West, which thrilled my soul not simply because of the rugged grandeur they attempt to capture, but also because less than a week ago I was there.  Not there exactly. really--I mean, there were no teepees on the floor of Canyon de Chelly that I saw last week (see them on the valley floor?), and I didn't stand at this particular spot where he did in one of earth's most awesome canyons; but I'm quite sure I was there, almost 150 years later.  Close anyway--see what I mean?

Here's El Morrow as O'Sullivan found it in 1873, a sturdy promontory where centuries of travelers stopped for water (and life) and left their names carved in the sandstone (not advised today, of course).  

O'Sullivan was amazed at what he found--inscriptions from the 18th century and earlier, when Spaniards roamed through the high deserts all around, making pueblo people Catholic while searching for cities of gold and other sundry delights.  

I wish I would have snapped the same inscription, but the one that I caught in my camera, 150 years later, is similar in age and genre.  

And here's "the white house," one of the Canyon de Chelly's most famous places, the home of the Anatasi, whose lives are understood only by the museum of goods--and these cliff dwellings--they left scattered throughout the region.  Imagine what it must have been like to be the first photographer to find a spot like this.

And here the same place today--or at least as we found it in March, when we stood quite close to where Timothy O'Sullivan must have stood many years ago.

Trump's America is stiffly anti-government, between Secretaries Pruit and Zinke and the President himself. But it's good to remember that the fact that I can take shots not at all unlike Mr. Timothy O'Sullivan's 1873 portraits of these natural wonders is attributable mostly to Teddy Roosevelt, who determined that some national treasures didn't belonged not simply to the rich, but to the people. 

Call him a socialist if you will, someone who stood in the way of the freedom of free enterprise.  Call him what you will, but this morning I'm thankful for the West's treasures and the fact that you and I can sidle up close with a Canon and take shots not at all unlike those taken by a man behind a tripod holding a ten-pound black and white camera nearly 150 years ago. 

You can still go.  You can still see.  You can still be awed.
___________________________
*first published June 12, 2012. Take a few minutes and scroll through all the O'Sullivan pictures here.

Small Wonder(s): Robin of DeSmet

It's a stretch--I admit it--to think of Robin Hood as a hero somewhere out here on the Great Plains takes some suspension of belief.  Yes, Dakota warriors could do magic with a bow and arrow, something to rival the jaw-dropping artistry of the fabled Robin of Locksley. But somehow the hero of the woodlands would be out of place without trees, on a horizon that never ends amid a sea of grass rolling in like the swells of an ocean. The plains just ain't the place for Robin Hood.

But we can try. Maybe we can think of him emerging, angel-like, from a broad field of 12-foot hybrid corn. Suddenly, there he is in green leotards, and his whole band of ruffians. He steps out of that corn like Shoeless Joe and Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams. Friar Tuck is with him, as is Little John and his entire merry band.

Okay, it's still a stretch. Perhaps we can take Sherwood Forest out of Robin Hood, but you can't take Robin Hood out of Sherwood Forest. Which is not to say it hasn't been done. Here's the story.

Robin of Locksley, our hero, was born as such in a novel by Sir Walter Scott, an Englishman--a Scot actually--who published a ton of novels in the early decades of the 19th century, at a time when a novel was, well, a very new thing. That novel, Ivanhoe, did much to make the Middle Ages popular by way of the old themes of romantic lore: adventure, love, and war, a can't miss combo--and, oh yes, seasoned with a little jousting.

What I'm saying is that once upon a time Robin Hood, of Sherwood Forest fame, was just as much a hero here in Siouxland, as he was in merry old England. 

Hark.

Years and years ago, a Norwegian bachelor farmer--or someone kin thereof--a man named Old Sheldon, knocked on the cabin door of a distressed young mom on the South Dakota prairie. Think of him as a guardian angel in bibs, a straw hat, maybe a corncob pipe or a chunk of chaw in his grizzled cheek. His nose is beet red, and when he doffs that hat he's bald as a buzzard, two handfuls of old-man hairs sprouting hither and yon. 

Old Sheldon has a bag over his shoulder, and when that distressed young mom lets him into the cabin, he shuffles in and simply dumps out the contents.

But first, a word about this young mom. Her husband just learned the affliction he's been working so hard to fight is not ever going away. When they were first married, he risked life and limb in the bitter cold to get what he and the neighbors needed, riding through a blizzard the likes of which we only rarely see hereabouts. Both hands and feet got frozen and never really regained the strength the man once had. 

And now they were told not to expect a miracle. 

What's more, she's pregnant. This young mom who already has a little one, is fighting off a bout of morning sickness not unlike the ravaging stomach she had to live with the first time around. And it wasn't convenient, this pregnancy; it wasn't something she would have chosen, not with the worry she's had to take on about how the family is going to eat. 

Think of her as miserable. You may because she herself wrote that the day Old Sheldon came with that bag over his shoulder, she was "particularly blue and unhappy"--her words. And she had reasons. She was blue--worse than blue. She was downright miserable.

Old Sheldon flips that bag from over his shoulder and--get this now--dumps out the contents right there on the floor of her cabin, an entire collection of Sir Walter Scott's Waverly novels, as popular as Harry Potter back then, throughout the English-speaking world.

Chances are, that distressed mom is someone you know. Her name was Laura Ingalls Wilder, who would have to get somewhat older before she would, like Sir Walter Scott himself, write a whole sack full of novels. But, as you know, she did.

I don't know that we think enough about guardian angels. How about a nomination for Old Sheldon? When he stuck that straw hat back on his bald head, you could have seen a halo.

Or how about this? There's a pile of novels on the floor of the cabin. Laura Ingalls Wilder forgets her morning sickness for a moment because out of the cracks between those old books, a cover or two or three open mysteriously so that, in camo leotards and a goofy little hat, the guy stands up tall as the Jolly Green Giant, a quiver over his back holding arrows for that bow over his shoulder. 

It's Robin. You bet it is. Robin of Locksley, a guardian angel right here on the Plains, a hero. 

RFK at KU--3/16/68

In the summer of 1968, I wasn't political enough to be a supporter of Robert F. Kennedy. As I mentioned yesterday, I remember thinking him something of an opportunist, entering the presidential race only after Sen. Eugene McCarthy had made clear the nation's politics might be able to make a drastic change. 

But last night on the drive home, I heard a segment of a speech he gave at the University of Kansas fifty years ago, and couldn't help but think how nice it would be if to have a baby-faced idealist like RFK running for President, promising to make American great again, not by bullying people to stand for the national anthem, but by ministering to this nation's soul.

And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year. But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. 

 Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. 

 It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. 

It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. 

It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. 

It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. 

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. 

It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. 

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Fifty years ago

The exact circumstances of my being in Grand Rapids, Michigan, right then I don't remember. What I know is that I didn't have a job; and because I didn't, I watched TV the morning after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. He'd just won the California primary, just made a victory speech when an assassin named Sirhan Sirhan put some bullets in him at close range. He was pronounced dead about 24 hours later. 

Like anyone else alive in November of 1963, I remember almost every painful moment of his brother's death in Dallas, President John F. Kennedy. I was just a kid back then. I remember exactly where I was sitting in what class when the announcement came over the squawk box hung up beside the flag at the classroom door. It was the principal. I don't remember the words exactly, but what he told us was that our President was dead.

It was terrible, but I don't think--I don't remember really--that I would have considered myself among JFK's great admirers. An uncle of mine spoke publicly about keeping Senator Kennedy from the Presidency because--my uncle minced no words--JFK was a Roman Catholic. His election, my uncle insisted, would mean America would be run by the Pope. I remember listening to all of that in an after-church program on Sunday night. I don't remember what I thought, but I do remember being sort of proud of the way my uncle held forth.

Five years later, I was in college, older and less conservative. I only faintly remember the primaries that year, but I knew that a fresh face named McCarthy, a poet from Minnesota, had come out of nowhere to challenge the likely candidates. I knew LBJ had thrown in the towel, leaving the field open for his VP, another Minnesotan named Hubert Humphrey.

But this Senator McCarthy had taken on HH and scored some significant upsets, including a handy one in New Hampshire. That's when RFK announced that he too would get into the race.

I remember thinking him something of an opportunist, a slippery figure who'd come barging into the race once McCarthy had made it clear traditional Democrats like HH were vulnerable. He was an opportunist with huge name clout, I thought, even though, back then, I'm sure I would have appreciated his anti-war stance. There was a bit of a dynasty stink to him.

But that morning, fifty years ago, RFK was dead, and I watched for hours, trying to restrain the sinking feeling that beset most all of us that year, most of the time. JFK had been murdered five years before, MLK only a couple months back. And then this--a man who'd just scored big time in California, leaving a hotel podium through the kitchen, where yet another assassin, this one named Sirhan Sirhan, gunned him down.

It's difficult to imagine the cultural partisanship we're in right now could be any worse. Thirty-some percent of the American people would likely find a reason to stick with Trump even if he did shoot Comey did on Fifth Avenue in New York. But a pretty high percentage of people would, if given the chance, shoot Trump. It's a terrifying divide with a spectrum of associated hot buttons--immigration, climate change, gun control, Black Lives Matter. There's a sharp line in the sand that's really but a disguise covering a black hole that threatens all of us.

Is that divide scarier than the one that separated us 50 years ago? 

I don't know.

What I do know is that, for whatever reasons, I really wasn't, back then, much of a supporter of the Presidential bid of Robert F. Kennedy. But as I watched television that morning, in a house not all that far from a neighborhood where race riots had already taken place, I wondered about the country in which I was born and reared, in which I lived, in which I hoped to live my adult life. 

What I remember is that, to me at least, it was all very scary.

Morning Thanks--Isaiah

It's not fun. In fact, it's anything but fun. It's rough sledding, a few joyful moments, sudden splurges of the divine, and then, once again, fire and brimstone. Pack your asbestos.

It's a mess, really a grand mess. Mostly it's one black promise after another, in chunks that seem almost unrelated to each other. Most is flat-out vituperation, a symphony of screeds from a pen wielded by a OT troll who just can't stop spitting rage at his people.

The Book of Isaiah, scholars say, may well have three different writers, at least two of whom aren't Isaiah. All three stare at a dire apocalypse among the fractious Jews, post-Exodus, including the kings who lead them, some of whom are--in a word we use only for a Broadway musical--wicked, determinedly and purposefully wicked.

More than a few, in fact, which makes the Isaiahs of the book crank up the rage.

And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty. (3:24)

It's a book of commands, of injunctions and visions, of God telling Isaiah(s) to damn the people of Israel:

Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and convert, and be healed.

Get that? He says to tell the people not to listen to their God; thus their lives will be open wounds.

It's has caverns of sheer darkness and the occasional pinhole of light: "For unto us a child is born" (thankfully, some lines that can't be read without hearing Handel's spin on the matter).

Isaiah is dark and scary, full of lurid evil, even cannibalism, and just a few scurrying moments of blessed grandeur ("He shall be called 'wonderful,' 'counselor,' 'the mighty God,' 'the everlasting father'". . .) between arduous soliloquies of woe. It holds its pleasures, but not many.

We've been going through it for a couple of weeks now, trying to take it seriously, to understand why this long book of mostly woe is in the canon and what it suggests to us, if anything, thousands of years after its shipwrecks. 

There are no easy answers. 

This much I think I've learned. Those who use it to "prooftext" had better approach in abject humility. 

"Behold I tell you a mystery--you shall all be saved."

After more than a few hours of Isaiah's tirades, this Monday morning, I'm thankful that what we call "the holy scriptures" are, just as God almighty is, far bigger than we are or certainly will ever create ourselves to be.

Sunday Morning Meds--Trust

“O LORD Almighty, blessed are those who trust in you.” Psalm 84

We first spotted the nest when a robin flew up into it, so close to our window that it was almost startling.  Up high off the ground, that nest was in no danger from neighborhood cats, it seemed, securely constructed in the crotch of a substantial branch of an ornamental crab just off our deck.  When I pointed it out to my wife, she had the same thought I did—how great it would be to show our grandchildren. 

Soon enough there were babies.  Before Memorial Day already you couldn’t miss them, rustling around whenever mom would alight, thrusting up those thin yellow beaks as if their only job was to eat—which it was.  Soon enough, you could hear them, their chirp slightly higher, more unrestrained than their mother’s, often frantic.

On Memorial Day one fell.  A gray-brown smudge of feathers simply dropped out of the nest, bounced off a smaller branch on an untoward descent, then plopped to the ground.  There she was—or he—the kid anyway or one of them, speckled and unkempt.  Crying like a baby, which, of course, he was—or she.  That song wasn’t lament, but sheer terror.  She’d lost her place.

It must be horrifying, traumatizing, for the rest of the bunch. With as many robins as there are in the neighborhood, some red-breasted shrink has to have set out a shingle, I thought. 

I wasn’t about to put her back.  We were sitting on the deck, reading, and occasionally watching her helicopter mom, who wouldn’t let her alone.

Then, suddenly, a melee of chirping.  Had to be a cat around.  I got out of my chair, stepped off the porch and into the evergreens, and sure enough, a mangy tailless tabby took off towards the garage.  That baby robin was safe. 

Tuesday, on my bike, right in front of the neighbor’s house, on my way to school, I had to swerve to avoid hitting a baby robin on the pavement, flat as a paper doll.  Car got him—or her.  No cat. 

Honestly, I shrugged my shoulders.  I’d watched that mother nurture her child for weeks.  That child had been her life, and now the cause of her life was no more.

But even as I type these words, a baby robin’s high-pitched song is starting the morning just outside my window because even though some mother’s baby didn’t make it, someone else’s has.  Maybe it’s the one we watched grow.

I’m just happy most of that story escaped my grandchildren because they’re far too young for sadness.  That flattened baby robin would have done my granddaughter in, I’m sure.  She remembered last Memorial Day only because, on a bike trip, we saw a dead squirrel—“with blood on it”—on the road, she said. I’d forgotten until she mentioned it again.  

Such is life.  Our maples dumped several hundred thousand whirlybird seeds this spring.  If I and my mower have anything to say about it, not one of them will make it.

Such is life.  There are great stories, in and out the nest—how a tabby high-tailed it out of the neighborhood, how a hungry stomach got a meal, how a robin’s song delights the dawn.

But some dreams get flattened, and eventually, of course, all the babies die.

The verifiable soul of this beauty-of-a-psalm, Psalm 84, is this last verse.  Through all the perils, all the dangers, all the grief, in those moments when we’re so blasted far from the nest that we nearly despair at ever finding our way back or escaping danger sufficient to end it all, those who can continue to trust, those who won’t forget God or let him forget them, those trusting, fallen children, in faith, somehow keep singing.

An old tract*

Just exactly where the Rev. John O. Schuring takes his readers in this old 1946 tract is not at all surprising.  What he's after is convincing his readers that that too much of American culture has been a-whoring after mammon and therefore neglecting the eternal truths of the Kingdom of Christ. Remove the specifics and the meditation's general theme could be preached almost anywhere today; but the specifics are worth a closer look.

"The gold rush is on," he says, in his opening line. It's not the gold rush of 1848, but the gold rush of 1946, "equally devastating in its results."  Why? "Skeletons of tragedy" lined the ancient trails of California's 1848 gold rush, he claims, but today things aren't much different, "school boards frantically searching for teachers, school houses deserted, classrooms empty, churches padlocked, hospitals and sanitariums understaffed, mission posts unmanned, social agencies neglected."  

Wow. What happened? "The post-war world finds men not interested in service but in salary."

If, in my lifetime, people ever look back at some "golden age" in American cultural history, it's the post-war boom, that great era when "our boys" returned from Europe and the South Pacific, had families, built homes, and created immense prosperity.  The Fifties will feel forever like Ozzie and Harriet, an innocent time when America ran on all of its cylinders, when respect and industry and goodness reigned, when America's immense losses during a long and horrifying war made peace itself heavenly. Make-America-great-again great.

But Rev. Schuring says post-war America has gone materialism mad, and he'd never even seen Mad Men. 

Someone sent me this tract, thought I'd like it for its historical value, and I do.  For years, it was stuck into the frame of my office bulletin board, something so familiar I didn't notice it until I cleaned up after all these years.

An asterisk claims this address was given over "a chain of radio stations" on July 21, 1946, just 11 months after VJ Day, part of a new broadcast ministry that called itself "The Back to God Hour." My parents listened to it religiously, as if it were there own--which it was. I don't doubt for a moment the my father, returning from the South Pacific would have agreed about all that materialism.

"Once this ideal ["seek first his Kingdom"] becomes the sole passion of our life we will insist that every part of life takes its proper place in striving for that goal."  That's the foundational ethic which stands--or stood--at the core of the faith with which I was raised.  "But all these spheres [the parts of life he talks about earlier] and those who make them must be reborn by the grace of God and then lined up for the victory march to the goal of realizing God's kingdom everywhere."

Vintage Kuyperian Calvinism. Not until I read it did I realize this yellowing tract tucked into the corner of my bulletin board was a calling card of the mission of the college where I taught. "Beg God that a new spiritual activity and power may grip us whereby one holy passion shall fill our frame, the seeking God's kingdom first, everywhere"--that's the way he preaches the line about "not one inch." 

See that line at the bottom of the cover? It urges readers to pass the sermon along, maybe even to a "local one in service" because "what is sent in love is read in eagerness."

I admire it.  It's not flowery-full of cheap grace, nor shy about the love of money dishonorable place in the register of human sin. Maybe it hectors a bit, but it knows what gospel it wants to bring to those who might, in fact, read it.  

It's rife with weakness as it is with strength, as silly, maybe, as it serious.  It speculates a ton, puts a finger in your face, but it's also full of truth.

Like us, I guess.  It tells our story and it is our story.  It's what we do--it may even be the very best of what we do, God helping us.

Sometimes it's downright amazing what kind of gold you can find an arm's length away.
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*First published May 15, 2012.