Covid slaughter

We weren't good enough for mink, I guess. Never caught one anyway. We'd dream of finding one right there in one of our sets, but all that fancy never dawned into reality. Muskrat pelts were worth a couple of bucks back then--I don't remember how much, because money wasn't the object of all those early mornings. Getting up and out there amid the cold October dawns was the reason we put down a trap line, why we stole out of bed before anyone else in the family. We must have sold the pelts we'd taken, a couple of dozen maybe, once the freeze came. I don't remember getting paid real money. But we never got a mink. They were mythic, still are.

They were, I was sure, a great deal smarter than we were could have hoped to be. They stalked the river banks we'd walk every morning, giggling as they'd pass one of our traps. We were just kids to them--and the fact is, we were, sixth or seventh graders maybe. There were mink out there along the river and in the culverts and wherever else we carefully set and staked our traps, and every night we'd close our eyes and every morning we'd be out there, some glossy mink was forever the dream. We'd have arrived--boys turned finally into men--if some frost-bespeckled morning we'd come up on a set and find, right there before our eyes, a perfectly lovely mink. Never happened.

Then again, I don't know that I could have handled the thrill.

They're killers. There's nothing about the bloody vocation to which they are called that endears them to anyone, but the Creator blessed them with marvelous, soft fur, a shiny coat that, way back then sewn into a collar or stole or coat, would have far way beyond our families' means. Only the gaudy rich dressed in mink, and we certainly weren't among them. High fashion put a price on their heads, and, I suppose, made them something like deity right there on Onion River.

Twice, as of late, I've seen one loll through our back yard, look around warily, then climb the rocks on the retaining walls like some sleek mountain goat. One of them scurried up the thin trunk of one of our quaking aspens with the liquid grace of a cat. I had no idea they were such practiced climbers. 

Just exactly how researchers uncover such things I don't know, but it has become clear and even tragic that mink are the only animal species so far discoverable who are capable of catching Covid-19, passing the virus along to each other, and even passing it on, once again, back to human beings. Other mammals have picked up the virus from us, but none, so far, have been capable of passing it along, specifically back to us.

That makes them dangerous, which is why Denmark has determined that its giant population of "farmed" mink--mink bred and reared in cages, mink who never see a day of freedom, must be slaughtered en masse. I could say "euthanized," but slaughtered somehow fits. Nineteen million of them--the Danes are really into mink--are being killed as we speak, a victim of the coronavirus.  All the ranch mink must die.

You don't have to travel far from the Onion River today to find massive mink farms. Most of my family is buried in a little rural cemetery near the lakeshore where the silver roofs of a huge mink farm seem to creep ever closer. Good people make their livings breeding and selling mink for the kind of fur coats significant numbers of people now despise because of the way we've already industrialized their slaughter. Now, in Denmark, 19 million are going to be killed. You have to look deeply to find a sense of calling in farming ranch mink. But I should talk--right now, behind me, the highway is full of cattle trucks.

I don't like to think about what Denmark finds necessary. Even though sixty years have passed since those glorious mornings on the Onion River, pursuing the almost mythical mink we never caught or even saw, I can't help but feel the endless slaughter so deep within me that it touches my soul. 

Morning Thanks--Smokey

I wish it weren't so, but it's not always easy to be thankful. Now and then you have to work at it--often, in fact. Meet Smokey, who we love, even when we're not at all sure we like him.

When he leaves deposits in corners where he shouldn't, for instance. When he refuses to use the two sandboxes--not just one, but two, which we conveniently and lovingly leave for him. When he decides the best place to sleep is cheek-to-cheek with my wife, literally. That's for starters.

Or when some flying leap puts him on my chest, no, on my belly, just about knocking me out of wind (he is not a little kitty). Smokey is gifted, as all cats are, with a stealthiness borne by the strict silence of his hefty pads. Even though he and his ancestry left off hunting back in the primeval forest, he's capable of perfectly executed sneak attacks and takes vile pleasure in his successes. 

I yell a lot, but, like a fool, let him sit, thereby guaranteeing he'll do it again, which he does, despite my whooping. 

Just like every morning, he's out in the garage right now looking for mice or doing whatever it is he does out there. But when I go upstairs, he'll bellyache about injustice, threaten to the take me to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. He won't look at me, even acknowledge my presence or my giving him precious liberty; like a barbarian, he'll go instead directly to his food dish. After a few noisy mouthfuls he'll look for some warmth against his mistress's cheek. You can set your clock by his rituals. He could be a monk if he wasn't so faithless.

He's a Russian blue, we're told, but he's been with us for five or so years and has shown no penchant for communist ways. He despises socialism like a redneck republican, and voted for Trump because he so admires the man's cat-like selfishness. He wanted a real Trump flag in the garage, but that's where we drew the line.

This morning I'm thankful for Smokey, even if he's living proof it's not always easy to to be thankful. 

Protestant Church apologizes for treatment of the Jews

Thirty years ago, we invited hundreds of people to come to Dordt College to talk about the Second World War, especially to talk about what that war had done in the Netherlands. At that time, the college enrolled hundreds of students who were the children or grandchildren of Dutch immigrants who'd come to Canada and America after the war's carnage left their homeland in tatters. 

What we knew was that the vast majority of those students came from families who had taken a role in the Dutch Resistance. Some Dutch people, like Corrie Ten Boom, hid Jews from the Nazis. Some hid Dutch men who refused to be arrested and taken to Germany to work in munitions plants in support of the Nazi war effort--so called onderdykers, who disappeared under the cover of sympathetic friends and family. Some Resistance fighters pulled off armed robberies, securing ration cards to support the thousands of Jews hidden all over the country. All of them did that work at great, great risk. Preachers who maintained that what was happening to the Jews ran powerfully contrary to God's law could be--and were--arrested, often taken off to infamous concentration camps from which they never returned.

The hundred or so visitors to our campus might be somewhat surprised to read that the Dutch Protestant church last week officially acknowledged its guilt in allowing so many of its Jewish citizenry to die during the war. Of the 140,000 Jews in Holland in 1940, 100,00 were systematically eliminated by Hitler's madness. Our students parents and grandparents would have been surprised, I'm guessing, because so many of them risked their own and their families' lives the Underground.

Historians have determined that most active force to resist the Nazis were, first of all, the Marxists, who were bitterly opposed to national socialism. Dutch Marxists fought the Nazi occupation more frequently and more violently than any other group in the Netherlands. 

But the second most dedicated group were what researchers call "the orthodox Protestants," a designation which includes the church from which my own denomination has descended. Dutch men and women with "orthodox Protestant" roots operated in the Resistance in numbers that came up a close second to the Marxists and significantly exceeded Roman Catholics and less orthodox Protestants.

Why? Just exactly who will dare to risk his or her life for another human being, men and women they didn't know and may not have liked at all--is impossible to answer definitively. Historians claim that an examination of religious motives generally reveals that those Christian believers who took the Old Testament seriously were most likely to risk their lives for Dutch Jews. Those who believed that the Old Testament's tenacious regard for "the children of Israel" wasn't simply some odd tribal myth, an interesting but irrelevant biblical theme. Orthodox Protestants were among the most likely to risk their lives in defense of others, particularly Jews.

I'm saying that those who came to Sioux Center, Iowa, in 1991 a conference we titled "Suffering and Survival," would have been surprised to hear the Dutch Protestant church now admits its failure to do more. 

While many of our constituent immigrant Dutch parents and grandparents participated in the Resistance, no European country that suffered German occupation lost more of its Jewish citizens than the Netherlands.

There's nuance. There's always nuance. Some who helped the Nazis also helped the Resistance. Some resisted in private. No one ever knew. When the war ended, some who did important things were black-balled because most of the populace assumed they were collaborators and acted, sometimes brutally, upon that assumption.

The conference was, I believe, a smashing success. Lots of those who had resisted had never talked much about those experiences, especially those who suffered greatly. For almost a year Diet Eman told me she didn't want a book about her life because what she had done in the Dutch Resistance was something anyone would have done and so many had. She didn't believe she should be somehow singled out for taking a moral stand that anyone would act upon. 

One of the speakers at that conference was Diet Eman. She was a stand-in for a Resistance fighter from California the Dutch government had found for us, a woman who took sick a week before that fall's conference. Diet was a sub.

Some still small voice in me makes the claim that confession is good for the soul. I can't help think that things needed to be said, even though it's now 75 years since the Nazi horror, and so much of what happened way back then seems ancient history.  

No one else in Europe so freely gave up so many of its own.

You can read the account here. 

Reading Mother Teresa--Nothing is Little

 

Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth 

and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying: 

“To him who sits on the throne 

and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, 

for ever and ever!” Revelation 5:13

To the good God nothing is little. . . . (34) 

You know? – I really ought to print that line on a t-shirt: “To the good God nothing is little.” It’s hers – Mother Teresa’s – and it’s just plain beautiful.

But then, maybe I think so just because I’m getting old.

How is it that retired people get such a kick out of gardening? Why, for pity sake, does the appearance of that gorgeous cardinal or her lovely husband just outside our window just light up our day? Last night, my wife and I ate some pumpkin muffins she made, and it felt something like what I little I know of heaven. What’s that about anyway?

The world simply shrinks the older you get. That’s what I’m thinking.

Yesterday, I got a card from a man I don’t know. He says he’s been reading a book of my meditations over and over again, and they’re good, words I ground up down here in this basement. It was that kind of letter. Just a card. That’s it. Just a little homemade card. Made my day. Shoot, made my week. Little things.

A kid says something on his way out the classroom. Maybe it was an okay class that day, and as he’s walking out, he says, “Have a good afternoon, Professor.” I feel like I’m somebody. Little things.

A sunset. A windless, warm February afternoon. The faint whisper of spring. A raucous orchestra of birds in the morning sun once again, or the long glowing promise of an orange dawn.

Bad knees, leaky plumbing, sore feet, a testy stomach – there’s no end to the tribulations of aging. And yet, sometimes it just seems that I find myself, these days, a joyful victim of a transformed aesthetic. Instead of looking past life’s seeming givens, its otherwise incidentals, you take joy in ’em – a plain old bowl of cereal starts to taste like a feast, I swear it.

Maybe that’s what theologians mean by sanctification. Maybe the death of the old, young man begets the quickening of the new, old one. Count the paradox in that line. Okay, maybe it’s silly, but, dang it! – it’s cute.

Mother Theresa used to tell her sisters that to God everything is small, and therefore everything is beautiful because everything is divine. Isn’t that wonderful? “Because he makes them,” she’d say, “they are very great. He cannot make anything small; they are infinite” (34).

Rain on parched soil. Newbie buds on the maples out front. An old hymn you thought you’d forgotten.

At the funeral of a man I never knew, one little photograph of he and his wife just after the war, totally in love – I remember that darling snapshot, so full of life, far better than the shape of his face as he lay in the open coffin. I still see it. I wish I could show you.

Or how about this? Just beside me now, the last three segments of an orange I’ve been eating slowly ever since I sat down at this computer. I pull ’em apart, one at a time because of the juicy blessing I get with each little tart explosion of lovely taste.

Now there are two.

“Be faithful in little practices of love, of little sacrifices,” Mother Teresa used to say (34). Such things make you Christ-like.

Could it be possible that aging makes that easier?

Don’t ask me tomorrow. This may just be a good morning.

Besides, the orange is gone.

But then maybe that cardinal will show up. I should be so blessed.

Will and pride and what not else in us

 

Way back in March, I was asked to have a look at the story of the Spanish Flu that ravaged the world at the end of the First World War. "Find out some things about it so we can use it for a news show," some friends at the station asked. I did. 

I looked through local papers from that era, small-town newspapers whose obituaries often revealed, sometimes rather unfeelingly, the cause of death. That's where I found this little item, in a newspaper from Maurice, Iowa--it's hard to imagine that a burg like Maurice ever had its own newspaper, but the papers were a far bigger item before radio, then TV, then Google. 

I used this snippet because what the editor said seemed so incredibly callous that I thought he might have been run out of town for saying it. The Spanish Flu was horrible, a plague. Army camps--and there were 32 of them--were breeding grounds for a contagion that no one saw coming and ended with a death toll that seems unimaginable--50 million deaths worldwide. Here, in the U. S., 675,000 died out of a population of 100 million, as if all of Nebraska and South Dakota, today, were to be wiped out, in the U.S. over two million of us, gone.  

And the editor makes a joke: "Read the two-column article on another page sent out by the government," he says. "Don't get excited about it." Sound familiar? And then the really snarky joke: "It is like being hanged, it is not so bad after you get used to it. . ." 

In March, eight months ago, that line seemed completely tasteless. 

Now, not. 

Somewhere in the region of 70,000,000 Americans might well have said the same thing, and may still be. Maybe 30 mill of those, Trumpsters all, likely thought, as he liked to say, that Covid was "fake news," that, come November 4th, "the coronavirus" will disappear from cable news and lame-stream media. The whole Covid thing was a ploy to make him lose the election. 

For the record, yesterday there were 143,408 new cases and 1,479 new deaths.

Still, ever since I read that Maurice newspaper column, I couldn't help wonder about the editor's tastelessness--how could he possibly say something like that when all over the country, thousands were dying?

One reason now seems clear--because others were. He likely wasn't tarred-and-feathered because he wasn't alone is determining the hoopla was hype-la. "Read the two-column article on another page sent out by the government," he says, petulantly.

We're in the middle of something big here, right now. The estimates of fatalities (and most estimates have been right so far) are beyond imagination. Still, life goes on. 

Forget politics. How is it that all of us look past the carnage? What powers do we have that keep us afloat in the middle of the death toll Covid-19 reaches? 

Todd Billings' The End of the Christian Life includes a quote from a commencement speech given by the novelist David Foster Wallace:

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. . . . It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our [circuit] boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Striking passage because it seems to me to be so right. We're hard-wired to think and feel only out of our own consciousness. We are always at the heart of our own worlds. Always. It's hard work, it's pure self-denial to want to know others' experience. Our default gear is only self.

If that sounds like sin, like Adam-and-Eve-grade pride, you're not wrong. But built-in self-regard is also responsible for the sheer blessings of action and agency. Every word I'm typing is my choice. I believe that the meaning those words form will make sense and are worth my time and yours. I may be wrong, but if I don't believe that, my fingers will stop dancing over the keys. We are immensely self-centered and while that self-centeredness morphs easily into sin, it's just as often an absolute blessing.

We're getting neighbors where we've never had them. Somebody is building a house right next door. On Monday, heavy equipment will lumber around just outside our windows because someone is going to dig a scoop into black soil because someone else believes, heart, soul, and mind, that they'll be a home for them to live here, next door. 

Christianity tries its best to tamper with all that drive. It would really prefer God-consciousness to self-consciousness: "Oh, be careful little eyes what you see." But even becoming a confessing Christian requires will, requires self-regard, the firm assurance that our lives will be better off if we follow Jesus. Passivity is neither normal nor healthy nor fun. 

As long as we don't have Covid, as long as we haven't suffered, it takes an act of God to make us selfless enough to care. That's who we are. That's why the editor of the Maurice paper in 1918 wasn't run-out-of-town on a rail. We come from the factory guided along by selfishness, and even though it has to be kept in check, it's often as not a blessing.

Amazing. We're in what Todd Billings calls "the discomfort of paradox."

Life and Death -- iv

continued from yesterday

I had a window seat, I remember, and probably because I’d been reading some Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, I remember thinking about what she says somewhere in On Death and Dying, how children have trouble distinguishing between a wish and a deed and how, therefore, they can feel guilt about someone close to them dying, if along the road somewhere they’d secretly wished that person to be no longer part of their lives.

What if, aboard that commuter jet, the wish would become deed, I asked myself. What if, as Emerson says somewhere, all our wishes are really prayers? What happens if this little plane goes down somewhere south, the Vermont mountains disappearing as we slipped up and away from the runway? What if, for Deborah’s sake, the commuter jet crashes?

Not in my life before or since have I done such an assessment of my own life, my own living as I did just then. I remember thinking that, should I die, my own two children—just five and three—would probably do just fine, not really knowing all that much about their father. My wife would grieve—losing her husband would be a painful loss; but our community of believers would take care of her, and she’d be young enough to find some other man to care for my children and for her. Life would go on.

And what of me? Think of me sitting there aboard that plane, as if the human skull in my hands was a gift just given. 

If I were gone, if I were no longer aboard mother earth, I wouldn't see my kids’ growing up. I wouldn't witness their being teenage years; I’d miss their marriages, and the entire calendar of life’s ritual joys and sorrows. I'd miss caring for them and watching my wife give them so much love. I found that very sad.

And more? 

Okay, I would have loved someday to write a novel. I would have loved to write more, to teach more, to do those things that brought me joy. I would certainly have missed love of all kinds. I would have missed life’s joys, although I knew little, back then, of its woes. 

And what of God? There I sat aboard a plane on its way down. What about facing my Creator? 

Somehow, I found myself unafraid. I’ve never been afraid, I guess; I'd never been into "the wailing and gnashing of teeth." But I’d never thought about actually dying in the intense way I did on a plane marked eerily for a crash. I’d never stood as close as I could to the darkness, as well as to some splendid, imaginary, divine throne. I'd never repeated to myself with as deep a conviction that, yes, I believed that I am not my own; I believed God loved me. 

Perhaps the assurance, the conviction I felt in my soul that day, high above New England, is a gift from my father, who never doubted his faith either. Perhaps, like Thoreau, I really was never aware of having quarreled with God. We’d always simply got along.

All of that is forty years behind me now, but nothing that has happened since that time has been as immense a life and death challenge as a regretful poet's death wish confessed on a stairway into a small plane ready to leave Burlington, Vermont, and the profound assessment that perverse wish of hers created in my soul.

I've never felt so much like Hamlet with Yorick's dusty skull, never measured my life in the way that I did that morning over Vermont's Green Mountains.

Todd Billings' The End of the Christian Life put me back on that plane once more, helped me remember a moment of life I'd honestly never forgotten. 

Life and Death: a memoir -- iii

continued from yesterday--

On the only Sunday morning, I walked out into a meadow, away from people, where I found an Adirondack chair and sat for an hour. There was no Sunday worship anywhere, but the Sabbatarian in me made it clear that I needed to do something for worship—not for God’s sake but for my own. So I went out alone and tried to imagine what the soft arm of my son—just three years old--would feel like in my fingers if I were back home. I concentrated on that touch, at the same time I recited, over and over again, the poem I knew best, the 23rd psalm.

I remember a beautiful mountain stream, but there were no still waters at Bread Loaf Writers Conference the summer of 1980. If there were, I didn’t see them. But that Sabbath’s very personal worship, right there in the middle of the madness, was a meditation I’ve never forgotten, maybe the only true meditation I’ve ever done, a few verses from Psalm 23, a hybrid mantra in an Adirondack chair.

Toward the end of our stay, another friend, also a waiter, a man who had also shown me a snapshot of his young family, another poet, simply decided that when opportunity presented itself, he wanted to act. He too climbed into bed with another conferee. I don’t even remember his name, but what I remember was that when the waiters had their reading one night, he read from his work without once looking down at a text, all of his work memorized. 

We’d been friends from the beginning, so I asked him about his unfaithfulness. “I don’t get it,” I said to him. “Why?”

A writer had to experience absolutely everything he could in order to be the best he can, he said. A writer has to know, to know by having lived.

I didn’t laugh, and I still don’t. I was, after all, something of an innocent, even though I’d never considered myself such before. And I wondered, really, if he wasn’t right, in a way. Should he ever want to write about how being unfaithful feels, he had a better shot at authority.

When we boarded a plane to leave Bread Loaf, I happened to line up just behind Deborah Digges as the two of us stood on the stairway to our commuter jet. We hadn’t spoken much in the last week; she’d been otherwise occupied. We hadn’t sat together at the gate either, but when we got on board I happened to be just behind her. I don’t know if she had thought of me the way I did of her, as someone who understood her better, perhaps, than others; but when that line balked for a minute, she looked at me and shook her head. “Jim, I hope this plane crashes,” she said.

She’d been wooed by a celebrity poet, and she’d fallen. On the dance floor, the two of them looked like smarmy high school lovers, which would have seemed embarrassing if it hadn’t happened to so many others. But right then, as we boarded, I knew her pain, even though I knew nothing about her relationship to the husband she’d seemingly forgotten.

If I said anything to her at all at that moment, it’s gone from my memory. We found our seats. I didn’t sit beside her.

Life and Death: a memoir -- ii

Pieteer Claesz, Still Life with Violin and Glass Ball, 1628

(continued from yesterday)

Soon enough, the conference made clear what a "waiter" was. We were designated to wait on tables at the dining hall, the requisite training having brought us in a day early. We were told where to place the knives and forks and spoons and napkins, lessons in etiquette I'd never been taught.

But I had more to learn at Bread Loaf because the place served guests unlike any I’d ever known in the rural Midwest, in Oostburg or Sioux Center. I’d never been around so many blue-blooded Easterners with pedigrees from Yale, Brown, Harvard, and so many New Yorkers. I never felt quite so flatbush, without even knowing what the word meant; and, for a time, at least, I thought my own parochialism imminently visible, the old man in American Gothic, even though I didn’t own bibs. I do own a pitchfork.

For a while at least, I had this new friend, Deborah. Together with another dozen aspiring writers, we waited on tables, forming a delightful gang among America’s glowing literati.

But it wasn’t long and friendships turned into something more; adventuresome folks started wandering into each other’s affections, quite publicly. Then beds. I’d never been in the neighborhood of flat-out public adultery; and soon enough, this new friend of mine with the Dutch Reformed heritage was swept off her feet an older poet with a head of hair to die for. I shouldn’t point fingers—I really don’t know who bedded whom, and it’s fair to say that in their liaison there were no real victims. I don’t know that my friend Deborah was powerless, and it certainly seemed clear that her passions were fierce.

But I had thought of her as an innocent back then; after all, our paths seemed so approximate that I couldn’t have guessed her hooking up with the famous poet was not her first tumble. A memoir she wrote just a few years later tells the tales; she was not as innocent as I thought her to be in those first few days at Bread Loaf.

The atmosphere up on the mountain among a host of brilliant people was electrifying. I roomed with another poet, a Vietnam vet from LA, who ritually set his buzzing alarm early because, as waiters, we had to be at the dining hall early for breakfast. Each morning he’d slam down that alarm, pull himself out of the bed across from mine, and say, “Showtime, Schaap.”

We were wired, every one of us. Aspiration was as palpable as respiration. We all wanted endorsement, wanted favor, even a smile from the aristocracy—John Gardner, Tim O’Brien, Stanley Plumly, Linda Pasten—and some did anything to get it. Having been there, I understand the impulse to succeed in a way I never would have had I not been a part of crowd.  It was in me—I too had my own dreams, and at Bread Loaf they felt so close.

Once, out with the waiters, we walked to a pond not all that far away from the conference grounds, where a young woman whose name I’ve long ago forgotten shed every bit of her clothing without a thought and took a buck-naked dip in the cold mountain water. Once upon a time at an anti-war protest in Washington D.C., I’d seen a whole gallery of nakedness in the wading pools, but I never knew anyone who would simply strip down so unabashedly and jump in simply because that water was, like the mountain, there. I wouldn’t have told a soul back home that I was, for two weeks, so intimately a part of that society. And, to be honest—call me a sinner—I rather liked it. Some of it, at least.

One night the John Gardner reading was the evening’s feature. Not long before, he’d written On Moral Fiction, and it was clear that some of his colleagues at the top of the Breadloaf hierarchy were not taken with the book. Or him.

No matter. He read a something later published in The Atlantic, “Come on Back,” the story of a sad, small-town bachelor who loved music more than life and found it difficult to get along with those who didn’t share his exquisite sensibilities, even though many of those were kin. When he eventually takes his own life, his friends and family, the Welch folk from whom Gardner himself had descended, simply didn’t know what to say to each other; the paucity of their conversation at his wake made clear that no one knew exactly how to measure the man’s life—or death. But then, the silence of those good Welch folks rather mysteriously turns into song, an old Welch hymn they sing together--Gardner’s magical story ends with a comforting hymn.

As Gardner read that story, I found myself seated in one of the steel chairs around that coffin, even though I wasn’t the singer and I wasn’t family; but I was in the room as they broke into song, their only way of measuring the mystery of his life. What they sang could just as well have been “Old Hundredth.”

After his reading, Gardner was standing by himself, no friend to many of those in attendance for the way stark way he’d laid out principle in On Moral Fiction. But I had loved the story so much that I put away my own reluctance, walked over, and told him in what he’d read I’d found myself so much more clearly than I did in so much of the frenetic atmosphere of Bread Loaf.

“Just want to thank you for that story,” I told him, or something to that effect. “That could have been home.”

“Where are you from?” Gardner asked me.

“Iowa,” I said. “My background is Dutch, Dutch Calvinist.”

“You and I,” he said, smoking his pipe, “are the lucky ones.”

That was another blessing, and I have no second thoughts about calling what he said exactly that.

Where Gardner read "Come on Back"

Tomorrow: Meditation--and homeward bound.

Life and Death: a memoir

Pieter Claeusz, Still Life with Violin and Glass Ball, 1628

The argument of Todd Billings's The End of the Christian Life is forever true, even if it seems a little morbid to bring up associated issues. Billings goes in a particularly "Christian" direction, but never leaves the path of long-established moral truth.

For Christians. . .coming to terms with this open wound [the reality of death] actually teaches us how to properly live and hope as creatures. Only those who know they are dying can properly trust in God’s promise of eternal life.

I finished the book yesterday, loved some parts more than others, but found it rich and fertile in springing memories from a thousand sites on a detailed map of my life. I doubt Todd Billings would mind me saying The End of the Christian Life is a meditation. It is. And I meditated, in the best sense of the word, just as the Claeusz's painting, above, is meant to.

If you're interested, read on. Some of what I'll say--like what's coming today--is already written and published, this piece already a decade ago, one of a bundle of stories I couldn't help but remember when I meditated on and in The End of the Christian Life. 

It's weird to have a skull on your desk. For the record, I don't. But I get it--and, morbid or not, I can't help liking the idea. 

___________________________________________  

The house where we lived at that time is long gone, as is the tiny kitchen where I stood, phone in hand, listening. The call had come in the middle of the day, in the middle of a lunch, our two kids were sitting beside us. It’s now 40 years later, but I haven't forgotten standing there because I was shocked, yet confident that my being chosen for a waiter’s scholarship—whatever that was—to Bread Loaf, the granddaddy of all writers conferences, was a sign that my own literary success lay just down the road.

If I had been both more sure and more vocal about my faith, I would have heard that news as the voice of the Lord, telling me, by way of acceptance, to go into all the world and be a writer. I’ve never been that style of believer: “the Lord told me not to take that job,” “the Lord told me I had to write that book,” or, standing there beside the dinner table, “the Lord told me to go to Bread Loaf.” I didn’t translate the scholarship offer that way; instead, I heard that voice as the revelation of another god altogether.  As a writer, I was on a roll. I'd just published a book, my first. Now, a year later, Bread Loaf Writers Conference offered a handful of cash.

Maybe I was bowing towards different gods right then; maybe I still am. That question, another legacy of my faith, is rooted in my never being altogether sure of such things as motives or outcomes especially when they’re my own, which is surely not to say I’m the descendent of that gloomy Young Goodman Brown. I don’t envy other believer’s blessed convictions. The Lord may well talk to other people in ways he doesn’t talk to me. I’m not being silly or self-righteous, and I’m too old to lie. What I know is, if it hadn’t been for that scholarship, I wouldn’t have gone to Bread Loaf--ever. What strings God pulled, if in fact he had his fingers in the decision, is beyond my ken.

When I flew into Burlington, Vermont, for the conference—early, because I was a waiter—I met a woman, my age, married with two children, who told me with a gorgeous smile that she was an aspiring poet. Her name was Deborah Digges, and she’d also be a waiter; that’s what brought us together. Someone from Bread Loaf picked us up, and together we took the hour-long drive into the mountains in the back seat of a Middlebury College car.

It must have been Deborah who first introduced into our conversation that she was as Dutch-American as I was because I wouldn’t have recognized her birthright by her name. We shared pics of our respective families, and somewhere that conversation opened into ethnicity, perhaps my own distinguishable Dutch name. "No kidding," she said, because her parents were Dutch. Holland, Michigan was part of the story, although she’d grown up in a suburb of St. Louis, her father a doctor.

Knowing she was Dutch-American brought was something of a blessing for me. We shared religious heritage we joked about, but meeting her—the first of the Breadloafers--was comforting: we were both Dutch, we had families back home, two children we’d miss—and we were both waiters.

Tomorrow: We were waiters and John Gardner.

Reading Mother Teresa--Cheerfulness

Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed – 

not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence – 

continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. . . . 

Philippians 2:12 

I don’t buy it totally. It strikes me as half-truth, which is, at times, even more deceptive than a lie. I understand what she says, I even have some sympathies with the idea, but finally I think she was wrong. Well, half wrong.

“Cheerfulness is a sign of a generous and mortified person who, forgetting all things, even herself, tries to please her God in all she does for souls” (33).

A mortified person is someone whose “old man [or woman] of sin” is dead as doornail. It has nothing to do with being absolutely “mortified” by what stupidity came out of your cousin Ezra’s mouth last Sunday. When your sin is, so to speak, behind you, she’s saying, cheerfulness becomes a habit.

That’s very sweet, but I’m not convinced.

“Cheerfulness is often a cloak which hides a life of sacrifice, continual union with God, fervor and generosity” (33). I don’t know that I believe that totally either, but I like it. Run into an ever-cheerful person, she says, and you’ll be with someone whose deep devotion to God is a constant.

I’m still listening, but she’s starting to sound tinny--“don’t worry, be happy.”

“A person who has this gift of cheerfulness very often reaches a great height of perfection” (33).

Warning lights are still going off. Even the apostle Paul would draw an eyebrow here, so I am not alone, nor am I too much a Calvinist to go there. In my book, “the perfect is [often] the enemy of the good.”

But I’m still listening. After all, this is Mother Teresa.

“For God loves a cheerful giver and He takes close to His heart the religious He loves” (33).

She’s far more sure about such things than I am, but okay--then how do you reconcile that idea with the treasures that darkness and sheer doubt have given us? Much of our music arises from thwarted human aspiration, from the dead opposite of Disney-level cheerfulness. America’s finest gift to the arts is the blues, doleful music drawn from the sad lives of African-American folk musicians. The blues are beautiful, even inspiring, but Lord knows they’re not cheerful. And neither are some psalms, come to think of it.

And then this: “When I see someone sad, I always think, she is refusing something to Jesus” (33).

I’ve known too much depression to buy that one. It’s something you might whisper in your own ear, but telling someone else that his or her sorrow comes from lack of faith can be deadly when persistent darkness isn’t just inflamed moodiness. Believe me. “Your problem, kid, is you’re just not right with God.” While that idea may not be all wrong, as therapy it can kill.

Mother Teresa may well have believed what she says about cheerfulness. She may have used that sentiment to scold herself – that’s understandable. But if her own confessions are true, if her diaries and letters reveal someone who fought off the darkness – and such is the record! – then she could not have really believed it herself. She wasn’t always cheerful because she wasn’t always something beautiful for Jesus. Even Mother Teresa wasn’t perfect, wasn’t ever cheerful. And she knew it. And she tells us as much.

“Therefore, my dear friends,” says the letter to the Philippians, “as you have always obeyed – not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence – continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

“With fear and trembling.” Those are tough words.

She’s not the gospel on cheerfulness, but she’s not totally wrong either.

It’s good to know I’m not alone.

That's the headline I just read.

Could be a hiccup. The Orange Man may well triumph when the whole mess is finally in the book. Maybe it's little more than a head fake. The real story may well be that the madman we saw and heard last night will be with us for another four years. Eight and a half out of every ten of my neighbors want more of him, after all. He's their man.

But just for a moment, let me savor this impossibly delicious irony. The man who did more than any other to claim we're "rounding the curve," even though yesterday's positivity rates soared higher than ever before; the man who pooh-poohed Covid, who told his massive tightly-packed rallies that, come November 4th, the whole blasted thing would simply disappear because from day one it was fabrication of "Fake News"; the man who was far too macho to wear a dang mask; the man who ridiculed, then promised to fire the world's leading expert on the virus; the man who listened to a radiologist's scam on Fox News and hired him on the spot to be his official medical authority; the man who drew thousands together in macho mask-lessness and zilch social distancing; the man who had the virus, kicked it, then acted as if anybody could do the same if they didn't let it "dominate them"; that man, Donald J. Trump, the President of these United States, may well topple off the throne at the hands of the very same disease he claimed didn't matter. 

The hundreds of thousands, even millions of voters whose mailed-in ballots now threaten to bring him down, were sent in before November so that they could avoid, at all costs, the danger of contracting the virus he claimed--and perhaps still does--is little more than a runny nose, "as long as we don't let it dominate us."

Yesterday I interviewed a Navajo woman who lost both her mom and her dad in just a few short days, close enough for there to be a single funeral. She says she knows Covid-19 is real.

Should Biden pull this thing out, the Donald and all his faithful minions may finally have to admit so themselves. 

That's one rich irony. I can't let it pass.

Consider me bananas

And so we're sentenced to live in limbo for the time being, to inhabit a purgatory that stretches wide between two polar opposites--in one world, number 45 is history; in the other he continues to man the bully pulpit and tweet zingers like that one, and worse. It's entirely possible we've had other Presidents who have hated large segments of the American populace, but we've never another who came anywhere close to the vitriol he's spewed in the last four years. The man has a very special gift for making enemies.

The New York Times claims Donald J. Trump continues to drive elites (like me, presumably) wildly bananas, and it's true. It's beyond the reaches of whatever intellect this fourscore-and-ten retiree has left to grasp his worshipful appeal. Yesterday, the nation set a record for new cases of the coronavirus--100,000 American citizens--and the President of the United States, as always, would have us pretend it isn't there--"we're rounding the curve." He promised a crowd last week that he'd fire the nation's leading immunological expert once we're past November 3rd. He could, today, carry out that promise, and no one would be surprised.

I don't understand how 84% of my neighbors could cast their votes for a man whose lies are a legend, a crook who promised to clear the swamp but instead created his own, a bully whose behavior they would not tolerate in their own children. I don't understand, and never will.

If it's abortion, then the man delivered, didn't he? By God's own divine hand, you might say, the President was blessed with the three wide-open opportunities to replace Supreme Court justices; and he followed up on his pledge and delivered three nominations with shiny bright conservative credentials. I thought maybe half of that 84% would abandon him, given that their motivation for voting for him in was now history. No. Instead, more of my neighbors voted for him. 

I don't understand. It's altogether possible he'll go to jail when he leaves office. He still hasn't released his taxes, but then he doesn't pay 'em. We may well have had other Presidents who were so promiscuous in crime, but not in my lifetime. 

I'll disappoint his maddening crowd in the county for saying this, but I for one, a voice calling in the wilderness, hope Sleepy Joe brings Nevada home today and finishes off what's left in Arizona or Pennsylvania or Georgia. I know his Sleepiness could lose, but it's a tougher slog for Prince of Orange to once again take the oath of office. 

I never did admire Trump, never liked him at all. I've got Trump Derangement Syndrome. Why? He gained his political foothold on the damnable racist lie that Barack Hussein Obama was born in Africa and therefore ineligible to be President of these United States, a principle, by the way, nearly half of his devoted still cling to. When #45 descended on his golden elevator, he called Mexicans rapists, then banned all Muslims until he could figure "what the hell was going on." But then, not since Lincoln has there been a President who's done more for African-Americans. File that one up there with "birtherism."

Most pundits claim that as a President he's losing the election. Most believe Donald Trump will not be returning to the White House. He'll continue to make noise, of course. Right now he's probably tweeting. His 84% locally will likely cower in fear because rather than their king in the Oval Office, the nation's President will be a senile baby-killing communist.  

Besides, Trump's been really good for agriculture, hasn't he?

As we say out here in evangelical-dom, the Lord moves in mysteries ways, his wonders to perform. 

Have another look at that tweet up top. He fired that one off late on the 3rd or maybe early on the 4th. It makes no sense, none at all, which is why Twitter blocked it, claimed it was at best misleading. Them's the words of our dearly beloved POTUS, our man on the job.

If the New York Times is right, I'm certainly among the elite. Lord knows I have no way of understanding either the man or those who so passionately admire his majestic madness. 

Looking for beauty--Looking hard

 

It's a dusky, tawny world out there these days, the entire landscape in khaki. It's not colorless exactly. You've got to do what you can to find a little "something other"--like these lost, yellowing leaves caught in a thin glaze of ice. 

Otherwise, as far as you can see in every direction, the world earth-toned, faded and flat and gray. Not much to light up a page. The world's an old softball field.

So you look for something, anything to break the endless monotony. 

What grabs your is the goldenrod, color long gone but what it brings to naked prairie is something almost pet-like, tall and furry. 

Spindly goldenrod walks out of the landscape, a subject you can toy with anyway.

It's always there--beauty, I mean. But some days you simply have to work to find it. Yesterday, the skies were luscious, the wisps of snow long gone. Still, through a lens right now, the world outside my window requires more than just a quick look. It's a basic rule of life, I suppose: honestly and truly, you have to look for beauty. You have to work hard to find it in the autumn prairie.

Maybe this morning especially, the big election still a puzzle, I have to look for beauty, search for grace.

 

Sgt. Gerald Bosch

It's all so understandable. From the vantage point of 75-plus years, the war seems ancient history. Besides, so many of those who fought had no desire to bundle up memories and lug them home in a service bag. Many wanted simply to forget the whole unimaginable experience.

Some who didn't often found it impossible to explain the fog of war. What had happened to them was so all-encompassing, so unlike anything those who didn't go could begin to imagine, that it was beyond words.

I called a man my age last night, looking for facts and figures to describe his father's war-time experience. I needed the info for a museum display that will feature local World War II veterans. He didn't know much. When I outlined what his father had told me before he died, he sort of giggled, told me he thought that I had it about right. "Don't know much more than that." He told me to call his older sister in Oregon. She might, he said.

For all kinds of reasons, I suppose, his not knowing the story is understandable.

So I dropped down to another name on my list--someone named Gerald Bosch, who was on his way to Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, just two days after graduating from Northwestern Academy on May 23, 1943. His father was a preacher in Maurice. 

Gerald Bosch was shuffled around like a chess piece. First Leavenworth, then Stillwater, Oklahoma, then Columbia, Missouri--six months for engineering training--then finally Ft. Rucker, Alabama, for infantry, before leaving New York and arriving in southern England on November 30, 1944, part of the 66th Infantry Division, U. S. Army. 

Just one of the reasons Hitler was as successful as he was when he decided to risk it all and push the Allies back toward the port at Antwerp was that, for the Allies, the war had been going so very, very well. After the D-Day carnage and the first bloody weeks in the French countryside, the Allies had the Krauts on the run. When winter came to France and Belgium, it started to look as if the war would be over in just a few weeks. There was time to let out some breath.

In England, November of 1944, Gerald Bosch almost certainly knew very, very little about the lay of the land just across the English Channel. He  couldn't have known a thing about Hitler's gargantuan surprise attack, which began December 17. When Gerald Bosch departed from England, it was Christmas Eve. Everything--everything he and the 66th Infantry bound to France experienced that Christmas--was sort of lax. Hey, it was Christmas, and the war--well, it had been going so well. 

The trip took 18 hours. It was cold, of course, but some men figured out how to catch some winks regardless by stretching out hammocks where they could. The 66th Infantry Division, 2200 strong, had been assigned responsibility for taking out what German defenses still remained throughout the French countryside. It was Christmas Eve.

Stalking the English Channel were a number of German U-boats, looking to pick off Allied ships, especially those full of troops like the SS Leopoldville, a Belgian passenger liner reconditioned for use as a troopship. The Leopoldville, that Christmas Eve, was loaded with U. S. combat troops, including a preacher's son from Maurice, Iowa, Sgt. Gerald Bosch.

German U-boat 486 lurked beneath the waves and escaped detection by the Leopoldville's escorts long enough to fire a torpedo that hit horrifically starboard aft. Rescue attempts were, for many reasons, as tardy as they were clumsy, and when the numbers were tallied, 786 GIs were dead from the effects of that torpedo, among them Sgt. Gerald Bosch. You don't stay alive long in 48-degree water.

The sinking of the Leopoldville was immediately hush-hushed. The horrible losses could have had staggering effects on the war effort, Hitler was on the move, and it was Christmas. Those of the 66th who survived were told to say nothing of what had happened, and what came after the tragedy five miles out in the English Channel was the bloody winter carnage of the Battle of the Bulge. 

So the Leopoldville story of the deaths of 786 American troops that Christmas slipped away until slowly, decades later, researchers began to question the gaps in the numbers. 

Rev. Gerald Bosch and his wife were told their son was missing in action; then, finally, they were told he had drowned in the English Channel, his body never recovered. 

A handsome memorial towers before a cluster of tongue-shaped white markers, each of them with the name of fallen local veteran. That large stone lists them all, but, peculiarly, the name Gerald Bosch is listed last, far out of the alphabetical order that marks the others, almost as if, at one time or another, it had been forgotten.

This Veteran's Day, he and his story should be remembered.

Heeding poor Yorick

Snapped this guy in the Netherlands somewhere, on a trip to Holland some years ago. I'm quite sure he's on guard just outside a cathedral, and I'm guessing it's in the city of Dordtrecht--but I may be wrong. I didn't take the picture to identify the cathedral; I thought it wonderful because of what this guy says about life and death.

It may seem disarmingly out of place just outside the door of a church, but there's logic to him lounging there--it may be a woman. Why on earth sign up some wonderfully talented sculptor to festoon the archway with a dead man, a skeleton? 

There's a great moral admonition right here in marble, the same heavyweight moral of a thousand renditions of that famous moment in Hamlet, when the young prince visits the gravesite where Ophelia will be buried. Once there, he overhears a pair of goofy gravediggers philosophize on admissions to heaven and hell. One of them identifies a skull--the dead were buried with the dead long ago. Hamlet knows the bloke, or knew him alive, a court jester named Yorick.

What follows, I've always wanted to believe, is exactly what this skeleton was once meant (and still is, I suppose) to point out to worshippers, a very simple truth, that death is real, and life needs to be lived in the reality of its shadow. Here's Hamlet:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar. My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. 

Here's the moment, in an old rendition:

Or here it is, amid the darkness of night, by Antoine Delacroix:

Or here, with a band of bunnies with banjos:

Go figure. 

Turning the image into farce is easier than taking the image--and Shakespeare's Act V version of it--seriously. What everything on this post thus far is meant to say is quite simply that what Hamlet takes to heart is that living without regard to life's own end is so frightfully easy to do that it's best to take some momento of death along with us always. A skull maybe.  Or, turning the whole thing around, what Yorick's skull means to Hamlet and to me is that living well means remembering that life is fleeting. Having learned it, he's ready for whatever may befall him shortly.

Let's just slip into the gallery for a while, just to admire how significantly universal these skulls are in the history of art and culture. Here's French Baroque artist George de la Tour's 1640 study, Magdaline with the Smoky Flame. See what she has in her lap. Alas, poor Yorick. 

Gorgeous and seductive, Mary Magdalene was, biblically speaking, one of Christ's most devoted followers, ever present, even to his death on the cross. Thought to have been a prostitute, this Mary was almost deified by the church and, given her repentance, she was thought to be a symbol of the Sacrament of Penance. That she holds that skull on her lap verifies her piety.

One more. St. Jerome, the Bible translator, is the subject here, a portrait by another Baroque artist, Caravaggio, just exquisite, isn't it? There, once again, is the skull, used as a bizarre paper weight, just a reminder. If St. Jerome himself seems somehow heedless in the devotion he has to his work, Caravaggio isn't--just look at that sweet light by which the artist himself tends St. Jerome's own Yorick.

Yorick is Shakespeare's take on the moral featured in every one of these and a thousand more art pieces: those who consider seriously the end of life will live with greater care and devotion. Don't forget, you're going to die. Ouch.

I've been reading The End of the Christian Life, a fascinating book by Todd Billings, a book whose moral heft is in these paintings and right there at the end of Hamlet's final act. The theme pressed in The End of the Christian Life is not at all new, but I can't help thinking--maybe especially today, just before a treacherous week--just how very forgettable Yorick is and how it is that we need to be reminded of what he's saying, which is exactly what Magdalene and St. Jerome knew themselves, only too well. 

I don't know that it will make the drama of this week any less tense, but heeding poor Yorick is never a bad idea.

Reading Mother Teresa--"In the Silence of the Heart"

When he opened the seventh seal, 

there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. Revelation 8:1 

Walking home from school for me has always meant walking west into what is, this daylight-shortened time of year, the first warm glow of sunset. For years I’ve told myself – especially during frenetic seasons like this one, exam time – that someday I’m just going to keep walking into all that buttery glory, going to head west like Huck Finn and millions of others who hear the siren song of a dreamy new life. Someday, instead of stopping, I’ll just keep walking. Like an old bull bison, I’ll leave the herd forever, wander out somewhere into the hills along the river, and hunker down.

Sounds good right now. Well, maybe a little cold. Ah, big deal – I’ve got a down jacket.

I’ve got eleventy-seven papers to read, more pouring in daily. Today, I’m off to speak at a high school chapel, I’ve got two big speeches to write, an exam to give (36 more papers) this afternoon, and a junk drawer full of little complexities too mean to mention. But then I’m but a semester away from being able to just keep walking. Just a semester.

I’m sure I’m not as busy as Mother Teresa. I’m sure that those Calcutta streets full of poor folks made demands on her and her time that may well have prompted her to look up wistfully toward beaming sunsets too. The dogged vow she took – the promise of utter loyalty to the Lord’s will – created a listening ear in her that probably never shut down because she wanted, above all else, to hear the voice of God obediently, never to miss even his most indistinct whispers.

Which is why, I suppose, she loved to tell herself and others that “in the silence of the heart God speaks” (32).

The idea strikes me as medieval because I really ought to be connected – always. I ought to have all the gizmos. Last week our grandson stayed around after dinner and begged to watch Ninja Pandas or some such thing. Begged. I know why, because it was difficult for him – as it is for any of us who are tuned in 24/7 – to entertain silence. He has to be entertained. Me too. My iPad keeps me connected and silence at bay, even though it doesn’t speak unless spoken too--maybe it does, I just don't know. I read the Huffington Post far more than the gospels, Drudge more than King David. I’m serious. 

I know Mother Teresa is right, and so does anyone else who listens. “In the silence of the heart, God speaks.” Maybe that’s why I’m addicted to getting up early every morning.

But then maybe not. I know well and good that every little whisper in my ear isn’t the voice of God.

Still, we all know she’s right: Listen again: “In the silence of the heart God speaks.”

Some of my ethnic and religious ancestors stuck a copy of Abraham Kuyper’s To Be Near Unto God into the pockets of their barn jackets a century ago or more, so special were those meditations to them. The focus of Kuyper’s meds is achieving moments of eternal bliss, just moments. “To be near unto God,” for Abraham Kuyper, meant maintaining a daily walk within whispering distance of God’s own voice. No residents of this world can possibly live near unto God 24/7, Kuyper might have said, but we can come blessedly close for occasional divine moments.

I don’t doubt that Prime Minister Kuyper would have heartily assented to Mother Teresa: “In the silence of the heart God speaks.”

Which is only to say, I suppose, be still and know.

It’s just before six. I’ve said enough.