Where I spent my Saturday morning

This is how Lewis and Clark saw it--well, recorded it anyway. It's their map. That huge snaking presence that begins in the corner, bottom right, and squiggles all the way into the center, where it breaks into two, is the country's longest river, the Missouri, or the Mud, which finally flows into the Mississippi at St. Louis, the granddaddy of American rivers, although the Mississippi, for good reason, gets all the good press. 

Let me bring this up a bit.

Right there in the center is "Floyd's grave," the place where the Corps of Discovery left Sgt. Floyd's body after his agonizing death from what people these days assume was a ruptured appendix. Today--Sioux City, Iowa. The river just north of that spot is the river L and C named "The Floyd." For the record, what there is of it right now--it's very low--is about 150 yards north of where I'm sitting.

You've got to go all the way to the top left hand corner to see what they called "The Sioux River," which today we call "the Big Sioux," as opposed to "the Little Sioux," which you'll find flowing out of Spirit Lake (center right) and into the Missouri just east of the biggest bend in that almost intestinal Mud.

Since, digitally, the files (the photographs themselves) are each permanently stamped with location, let me usher you even closer. I was just off the little river road (4) at a place where the river decided, years ago (some people claim rivers have minds), to cut a big bend--a mile west of Hawarden and just a little south.

Even closer maybe.

See that felled tree just off the west bank of the river? Here it is as of Saturday morning.

Just huge, but a series of floods, almost endless high water last year, eventually ate away the bank until this monster came down. No more than a couple years ago, it stood right here where I'm standing; now it's out in the water, an ungainly mess.

For the record, here it is from the other side. The photo isn't taken for documentation. I snapped it and about a hundred others (many already gone to whatever oblivion digital files are sent into when deleted) simply for beauty. I know, I know--beauty is most definitely in the eye of the beholder. But I've been on the lookout for beauty and its blessings for 15 years--or more. Here's a shot from the same place, pre-dawn, 2006, a darkly mournful sky  out east.

    

So, Saturday morning, did I find any beauty? No accounting for taste, I know. Here's another of that same fallen tree, closer.

Stunning? I don't know, but I liked the way the light of the dawn caught something almost in the womb of that far branch (I can hardly call it a branch, it's so immense). And, if you can call the bark of an old cottonwood beautiful--I certainly can--then you might be able to call this shot beautiful. 

What's amazing about a natural place like this Big Sioux river bank, in the middle of nowhere, is that in the radiance of dawn there's just so much of it, of beauty, I mean, that it's there wherever you and the lens look.

Amazing really, isn't it? Not all dawns break open the bounty this one did. But the sun is always an artist second only to the Creator. 

This morning, I just thought I'd show you, on Saturday morning, where I went looking for a blessing.

And got it. 

Reading Mother Teresa--The School at Motijhil

“If you have faith as small as a mustard seed,

 you can say to this mulberry tree, 

‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ 

and it will obey you.” Luke 17:6 

After 20-some years of with the Sisters of Lorato at the Entally Convent, after two years of waiting, sometimes impatiently, on the will of her superiors, after just a four long months of medical instruction at Patna, Mother Teresa, dressed in what might well be considered a shoddy sari, the wardrobe of the poor, walked out into the streets of Motijhil, a place whose name translates “Pearl Lake,” but, in 1948 at least, was anything but.

Today, guidebooks say, Motijhil is an almost middle-class suburb; but back then it was a bustee, a slum, a desolate place full of refugees from the starving countryside. India – and Calcutta specifically – was suffering through the after-effects of World War II, immense poverty and starvation, and a glut of country folks looking merely to stay alive in India’s cities. People lived in shacks, had little food, and lacked the wherewithal to send their children to school. Motijhil was no “pearl lake,”; the only source of water something putrid and sewage-filled. In 1948, Motijhil was infested with “the holes of the poor.”

But ministering to the poor in those holes is what Mother Teresa claimed Jesus himself had called her to do, and, once ready and able, she walked into the world of hunger and sickness and starvation as if charmed by none other than the Holy Spirit. From the local priest, she obtained the names of several families who made their often windowless homes in the neighborhood and told parents that she was about to start a school for refugee children right there within reach. Starting a school seemed without question the right alternative for her, having been a teacher herself for so long.

“Tomorrow,” she must have told them. “Tomorrow, I will begin teaching.”

That she had nothing – no blackboard or chalk, no slates, no pencils, no tablets, no books – seemed of little importance it seems. “Tomorrow,” she must have said, “have your children there ready to learn.”

That night, she returned to an old folk’s’ residence maintained by the Little Sisters of the Poor. Likely as not, she lay awake for hours, dreaming of what was to come.

What was to come was peculiarly her dream, not the dream of most of us. Right there beside a stinking pool, right where she had directed those parents, the next morning, bright and early, she found five little children waiting for her.

So she started beneath a tree, this odd European woman in a third-rate sari and dusty sandals. “I took a stick and used it as a marker on the ground where the children sat,” she told her biographer. “We began right on the ground” {34}.

Mother Teresa was no first-year teacher, and the children who showed up that day, on the first day of a school with a dirt floor, were not part of her first class. But somehow I can’t help but think that, if she were still alive today, she could remember each of those five faces, each of the children who’d found their way to the school beneath the tree from the holes of the poor.

Somehow, I can’t help thinking that that afternoon, after school, when Mother Teresa spent an hour or so walking back to the old folks’ home where she was staying, she was praising God, praising God on high.

Mom McCartney and the Annunciation

It's hard to know who may be most humble here--Mary or the Angel Gabriel. But humility here, for certain, is a great virtue. The Angel Gabriel portrays heavenly-being humility because he/she has been chosen for a mission unlike any other. God almighty, whose hand can be seen at the top in the center, has sent him to the virgin Mary with the news that she, of all women of all time, has been chosen to be the mother of the son of God.

I don't know if I've seen them all, but you could file through a thousand renderings of "the annunciation" (this one belongs to Fra Lippo Lippi, National Gallery of London) and not see a haughty Mary. That's impossible. The biblical record says Mary, betrothed to Joseph, didn't make a big deal out of the really big deal she found herself in as Mother of God. The lilies in the pot on the stand between them have been a symbol of her purity, her virginity. Here they are, front and center. 

This young woman hadn't a shred of pride. Soon after the visit, she sang a hymn of her own composition, as beautiful a poem as any King David ever penned.

Two lines from the story have always been my favorites. The first is a kind of summary of the whole story: "Mary pondered these things in her heart." (Luke 2:19). Pondered is somewhat out of fashion these days; lots of translations say "treasured." Surely she did treasure this visit and so much that followed it in her life, but I think I'll stick with pondered because it suggests a weighing of events which treasured doesn't. Pondered makes the incarnation itself, in her mind and heart, more of mystery. I'd like to think that even Mary didn't always catch on to the immensity that she was so intimate a part of. She tried hard and for certain understood more than any other human being. She was, after all, the subject of this very famous interview. But I like pondered. 

The other line undeniably belongs to the Mother of the King of Heaven and Earth. When Gabriel begins to take leave, Mary says, “May it happen to me according to your word.” The beauty of her acquiescence is what makes her so faithful, so faith-filled. "May it be as you have said" offers total compliance, a blessing immense faith.

Last night we read a meditation by Father John Neuhaus, who reminds us that Luke says Mary was troubled when the angel arrived and the moment above began: "she was greatly troubled," the Bible says. But then, "to be anxious is to be human," Neuhaus says.

In a moment, Mary sheds it. "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word." Neuhaus says it's Mary's greatest fiat--"Let it be." And then, "Faith is not blind faith, but trust with eyes wide open."

"Let it be." I'd never thought about those particular words in exactly that way, and, strangely enough, I couldn't stop an old Beatles tune from playing in my ear. Paul McCartney wrote "Let it Be," with specific reference to his mother's death, his mother, who was named Mary.

That the Mother Mary of "Let it Be" is the mother of the man who wrote the "Let it Be" is okay, but I can't help but appreciate that the lyric work when we ponder the annuciation too, the faith of yet another Mary, who told the angel at the news of her chosenness that she would believe what he was saying was true--"let it be." 

I just can't help but smile to know that the great old Beatles tune works beautifully every Advent season.

Listen in, one more time--

Book Report--Unsettled Ground

 

Marcus and Narcissa Whitman were of unquestionably heroic stock. Both came to their deep piety by way of the Second Great Awakening, and both, hearty abolitionists, shared a spiritual commitment to social action. The Whitmans were married, quite literally, by their mutual call to do mission work among the nation's indigenous, moreso than love for each other. They barely knew each other, although what was there between them grew bountifully.

Narcissa Whitman would be a feminist icon if it weren’t for the tragic way her story ends. She was, boldly, the very first white woman to cross the Great Plains. Her inspiring journey opened the Oregon Trail to women, who up until her crossing in 1846 were simply assumed not to be strong enough for the rigors required. She and Marcus tagged along with a fur company all the way out to Washington. She did it. She made it, not by staying aboard a covered wagon either but by riding (side-saddle) and often enough going off to explore this new world all by herself.

The story goes—there is ample proof—that Narcissa soured on the Cayuse people she’d come to serve, and found it more agreeable instead to deal with white folks streaming through along the Oregon Trail. Her letters make clear her increasing intolerance. Some say she became disagreeable, that she came to the point of disliking the Native people she’d come to evangelize.

Marcus, her husband, like others, took on great authority among the Cayuse. He knew white-man’s medicine and practiced it well, but factors out of his control came to determine his fate. When wagon trains arrived at Waiilatpu, Whitmans’ mission station, they left the measles behind, a disease that burned through Native communities. To the Cayuse Dr. Whitman seemed far more successful at treating white kids—who carried immunities—than Native kids, who died in horrifying numbers.

Death came mercilessly to the Whitmans. The Cayuse grew furious and eventually murdered the Whitmans in a massacre that took several others at Waiilatpu as well.

For years, history held up the Whitmans as saintly martyrs. They were. But their having been martyred meant the Cayuse were bloodthirsty savages. “The Whitman Massacre” was quickly established as foundational in the progressive history of the Pacific Northwest. Children learned the story in elementary school.

No more.

Cassandra Tate’s Unsettled Ground: The Whitman Massacre and its Shifting Legacy in the American West is a thoughtful and thorough retelling of a very sad story that’s worth telling time and time again. Tate fleshes out detail that’s extraordinary in richness. That a Christianized culture in search of heroes would find Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, despite their weaknesses, to be verifiable Western heroes is completely understandable. But today, when colonialism is seen as horrifying, the Whitmans’ story is being revisited.

What Professor Tate attempts in Unsettled Ground is a reexamination of the Whitman Massacre in light of contemporary perceptions of relationships between the dominant culture and First Nations. She points out, for instance, that the actual bloody brutality of the massacre may well be exaggerated because, often enough, the ugly realities tend to grow in successive retellings. What she's suggesting is that the murders themselves may not have been as bloody awful as we’ve come to believe.

Neither of the Whitmans, of course, were saints. Tate claims Cayuse morality held that evil behavior resulted from evil spirits having taken up residence in the mind. Both Whitmans were slain by hatchet blows to the skull. Perhaps the violence was understandable.

It takes more rigor than Cassandra Tate can muster—or anyone else, for that matter--to sympathize a massacre, to believe those warriors guilty of no crime. But Professor Tate’s in-depth study of the Whitman story does what today’s moral positioning might well expect it to accomplish: it tries, thoughtfully and extensively, to heal deep racial wounds.

A year or so ago a life-sized painting of Narcissa Whitman was defaced with red paint at Whitman College, a place with a distinguished list of alumni and a fine academic reputation, a highly reputable institution of learning named after the Whitmans. These days, attempts at addressing issues of justice often leads to toppled monuments or defaced portraits that feature men and women once upon a time considered great but today morally questionable.

Extremes on both sides fail to examine the particulars and, by choice, avoid the discomfort of paradox. How do we view Thomas Jefferson, the third President of these United States? Is he the thoughtful scholar who created much of the Declaration of Independence, or is he a master who during his adult life owned as many as 600 slaves?

I grew up in an era when the most wonderful church day of the year was the annual Mission Fest, an all-day affair that included games and singing, hamburgers, brats, and cold pop from a stock tank, as well as a presentation by a furloughed missionary with slides and stories of God’s love for strange-looking people a world away. To those of us who grew up singing “every knee shall bow,” coming to know that bringing souls to Jesus doesn’t happen all that easily or swiftly. Coming to grips with that fact can disenthrall. But then, we need the truth--difficult questions require careful examination.

In Unsettled Ground: The Whitman Massacre and its Shifting Legacy in the American West, Professor Cassandra Tate attempts—successfully, I think—to help us discover a good deal more about the the Whitmans and the Cayuses, and a story that once held a sacred place at the heart of a much broader American story.

A setting for a Savior

 

She's lying on a perfectly luminous Tahitian bedspread in a book of Advent devotions that is just plain, thoughtful devotionals amid some of the world's great masterpieces, this first week's meditations by Father John Neuhaus. 

Yesterday, I wanted to say how much I liked Gauguin's take on the Bethlehem story, a birthday that has given birth to more creative work, I'd say, than almost any event in the last two millennia. I wanted to say how refreshed this alluring painting felt, how Gauguin had put a new face on an old, old story. His Madonna is in awe of what has just happened here, having contributed to humankind in ways no one, save her, would even begin to understand. 

Behind her a midwife handles the baby, as Joseph looks down at the child, who is not his own. The cat beside Mary is a thoughtful aside. There in the background is the stable, a manger where soon enough the baby will lie. Nativity refreshes the old images from Luke 2. 

So yesterday morning I thought I'd read up on Paul Gauguin, maybe uncover something of interest in the story of this painting, something worth retelling. From a career as a stockbroker--and a successful one at that--Gauguin drifted into the world of art, where he chose his mediums carefully and eventually settled on a kind of primitivism he'd come to enjoy in the clearly defined lines of the world's most accomplished but unlearned artists. 

And colors--he and his friend Vincent loved to experiment with color. Look at the radiance of the spread. You could turn off the lights and still see it illumined. 

But Gauguin himself was not a nice man. He rarely saw a fight he didn't like and probably start. The prototype for this Madonna of his was one of several very young women he took into his favors--thirteen, fourteen, fifteen-year olds. Today, he'd be serving time for sex abuse. Some question whether or not he died from syphilis; what seems perfectly evident is that late in life he suffered from every possible symptom of that disease. 

He had five children with a wife named Mette-Sophie Gad, who he simply left behind in Denmark when he decided he would be, from that time forward, an artist. The two wrote each other occasionally, but once he'd left--Mette told him that he'd no longer believed what he'd believed when they were married--he really never returned. He was too busy with, too driven by his art.

He had some limited successes during his lifetime, but Paul Gauguin was one of those artists whose work didn't really capture an audience until his life ended, with morphine, amid the pains that resulted from a life too long lived out of control.

As I said, I discovered Nativity in the opening pages of a beautiful book of Advent reflections, where it seemed so very refreshing; but the back story, I discovered, isn't pretty. The identity of the girl on the bed and the man who brushed all that drama on the canvas is such that I thought maybe I'd leave the whole thing alone. Just about everything in the story of Gauguin's Nativity is repugnant, except the work itself. Except the work itself. 

His unique Madonna and child is still a blessing in bright Tahitian color. And, in every possible way, it's is very much a setting for a Savior of the world, isn't it?  

Gauguin's Nativity

 

Spotted it yesterday in a precious book of Advent meditations that includes some of the world's great Christian art. It's titled, simply enough, Nativity. In the right background, is a manger scene, meant, I suppose, to link what is happening here with traditional Christmas imagery.

What's clearly stated is the halo around the head of the baby Jesus, but what's also visible--if you look closely--is a similar effect around this particular Mary's head, a halo takes on the color of this Mary's bold Tahitian bedspread, bright yellow. 

If that bright yellow puts you in mind of Vincent Van Gogh, you're won't be surprised to know that Paul Gauguin and Van Gogh were, for a time at least, good friends, fellow artists, and even fellow entrepreneurs--"for a time," however. Their friendship included the time of Vincent's mad self-mutilation, the day he cut off his ear as a bizarre souvenir for a lady of the evening. Both men, like many in the 19th century, were devoted to crackpot lives and therefore didn't make for good friends. Their relationship broke down, as did so many others in the life of Paul Gauguin. 

I suppose this Nativity, showing up where it did in a book of Advent meditations drew me in, in large part because for many years I'd thought of the Incarnation as a divine phenomenon, so not-of-this-world that somehow can--but couldn't or shouldn't--lose its humanness. Christ Jesus, the Word made flesh, is the blessed one because he was, at once (as impossible as it may seem) human and divine. That's the great mystery. This particular Nativity brings us back to earth at Christmas by featuring a Mary unlike any I'd ever seen, a Tahitian girl in a Tahitian bed with a Tahitian midwife attending. 

I was a boy, I believe, when someone mentioned that "no crying he makes" was romantic silliness, because if Christ was a once a child, an infant, he must have shed tears. Babies cry. They just do. They have to. That's the way they grow. Maybe at Christmas more than any other time of year, we'd like our Jesus to be only and wholly divine. 

The history of Western art contains ten thousand Nativities, I'm sure, but the creative context here is a reminder of the once-and-forever arrival, here among us, of the Creator of the Universe, God become man, amazing as that may be. 

Review--Jesus and John Wayne

A couple of decades ago, I suggested a few negative things about Billy Graham in a piece I wrote for the Banner, the denominational magazine of the church in which I was reared, the Christian Reformed Church of North America. My folks, proud of their son's writing appearing there, were more than a little disappointed and even annoyed. How could their son besmirch the great evangelist's name with such cheap-shot criticisms? I was their son, but who was I to say bad things about a living saint? 

What they'd seemingly forgotten was that they once did so themselves. When I was a little shaver, not yet participating in theological discussions around the dinner table, I remember my father being, well, skeptical of the all that frothy grace--"cheap grace"--front and center at Billy Graham's immodest extravaganzas, thousands and thousands of repentant sinners marching forward, in tears, to confess their troubled need for "Jeee'zus." Really, all of that in a football stadium? 

The whole revival business was foreign to them, not as all-American as Kristin Kobes Du Mez makes it in her fascinating and fine book Jesus and John Wayne. The title line is a blessing, but this book's goods are in the subtitle: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. The truth is, or so it seems to me, my parents were, back then, the foreigners. Eventually, they too became American.

And, if I've got my ears on, I'm guessing Kristin Kobes Du Mez would say so too. If my parents were more than a little leery about the whole Graham phenomenon, that attitude would put them outside the boundaries of what might then have been considered "American evangelicalism." They were Dutch Reformed, emphasis on were.

Because they didn't stay there. Truth be told, they had good reason not to distrust Billy Graham; their own beloved sister-in-law knew him well, rode back and forth to Wheaton College with the guy when he was just a rugged, handsome kid, and she was a Southern belle. They didn't know Billy Graham, but, Lord 'a'mighty, they knew someone who did. 

Just one of the basic arguments of Jesus and John Wayne is that, whatever definition you want to give it, "white evangelicalism" is far more of a cultural phenom than a theological position. I suppose it's always a conundrum: does one's theology determine one's culture?--or does one culture determine one's theology? They're Siamese twins. Kobes's book trades almost exclusively--and convincingly--in the cultural nature of what we reference when we give the word "evangelical" its political meaning.

In just about every way, my parents became more politically and culturally "conservative" when they got old (I don't think that's unusual), but more theologically conservative too (I don't know that that's unusual either). Once upon a time, they were inheritors of a worldview deeply distrustful of what they would have called "Arminianism," the idea that somehow we--and not God--determine or choose our personal salvation. 

As the years rolled by, the old-time religion--all that Calvinist theology--got tiresome, I suppose, when some of those TV preachers became their daily fare--"they're just sooooo good, Jim--do you watch 'em?--you should." Of the Reverend Billy Graham they would have said, "Just look once at the good that man has done for the Lord in this world." When Graham got charmed by President Richard Nixon, they did too. By 1968, given the antiwar movement and racial violence all over the country, my parents could not have been more proud of having a Bible-believing Christian man like Billy Graham right there in the Oval Office with the President of the United States.

My parents--good people, sweet people--became orthodox "American Evangelicals." I have no doubt that last month my mother would have voted for Donald Trump. She had grown up Dutch Reformed, but become a Christian Nationalist. 

I am still dumbfounded by the realization that in the county where I live, where there are ten people gathered, eight of them voted for Donald J. Trump, a man whose lies--yesterday again on Fox--are somehow less evil then than they are idiotic and just plain baffling. Kristin Kobes Du Mez's book makes my astonishment less mystifying. The Trump phenomenon was a long time coming, for years in the works.

Often, it's not pretty, but Jesus and John Wayne, a thoughtful and convincing travel guide through the religious landscape of the better part of an American century, highlights the story of "white evangelicals" like my parents. 

And me too. 

Reading Mother Teresa--Holy Fools

VanderWagen, second from left, teaching

The Lord is my strength and my shield; 

my heart trusts in him, and he helps me. 

My heart leaps for joy, 

and with my song I praise him. Psalm 28:7 

When he left Grand Rapids, Michigan, on a mission, he promised the powers-that-be, the reigning potentates of the denomination he served, that he would not only faithfully carry out the office of missionary, he’d also continue to study so that he could – as he certainly should, they said – eventually become a preacher.

That was a promise he broke. It would be interesting to know if he ever intended to continue his bookwork. What happened when he came to New Mexico to bring the Word of Christ to the Navajo and Zuni Indians became too all-consuming, and he never again opened a schoolbook, which irritated – no, angered, even infuriated – the mission board back East.

He was, after all, an unlikely missionary anyway. He knew Dutch, of course, his native tongue – and Frisian, a whole different language from his native Holland. And English, sort of. And the day he came to Ft. Defiance, Arizona, he must have realized that doing mission work among the nNative people required learning their languages too.

He wasn’t dumb. One of the first things he did was buy the fastest horse he could, in part because he understood that a fast horse would be a wonder to the natives – a white man preacher on the fastest horse in the territory was really not to be believed.

He never studied a day of anthropology, knew nothing about the Navajo’s horror-filled “Long Walk,” had no clue about the Zunis hiding up on the mesa from the Spanish Conquistadors when they searched, in vain, for the Seven Cities of Gold. He knew absolutely nothing about those he was about to serve.

But today there’s a spot on the highway between Gallup and the Zuni pueblo named VanderWagen, New Mexico. He and his wife, Effa, left a lasting mark on the whole region, even though as a young missionary he knew next to nothing about the world he was entering.

On August 17, 1948, Mother Teresa must have slipped out of the nun’s habit she’d worn for decades, must have primped her hair slightly, and put on a sari with a blue border and taken to the streets of the city. She had this at least – she knew the world she was entering; after all, she’d served the Lord in Calcutta for more than a decade. She knew where she was and what her task consisted of.

But still, think of it this way: a deeply committed Albanian nun, more European than Indian, a woman sworn to follow Jesus, a woman with the voice of Christ still ringing in her ear, steps out of the habit and out of the convent that had been her only world since childhood, shuts the door behind her, dressed like an Indian, sworn to poverty, and begins a brand new life.

In the many mansions of God’s own house, there are thousands of “holy fools,” I’m sure, millions of true believers who weren’t interested in listening to what was possible, but instead simply got up off their couches and stepped into commitments that may well have cost them their lives.

It is amazing what abiding faith can inspire.

Here’s the whole truth: holy fools are not necessarily smart; but when they’re authentic – when they’re not wolves in sheep’s clothing, my word! – they certainly are holy.

What I learned at Oahe

 

I've got this thing about dawns. That's why I was out there. It was forbiddingly cold, but if you want a stunning picture, pros say you've got to be there; so me and my camera went out early, a half hour straight west of a town named Gettysburg, to stand on the frozen banks of Lake Oahe, looking east into the dawn, looking for beauty. 

I was there because I wanted to see if I could get something of a glorious dawn into the lens of my camera. I wanted to see the landscape decked out most beautifully, at sunrise. I drove out to the region to look closely because I'd never been there and I was working on a novel that was on the cusp of a reservation, where relationships between Euro- and Native Americans is a given. Setting would play a role in this novel because, quite simply, on the Great Plains it does.

It was dead of night when I left the motel, but I figured if there was a great place to view the dawn, it would be there, across the bridge, looking east on the morning sun over what was once the Missouri River but now is Lake Oahe, an immense reservoir of 370 thousand acres, fourth largest man-made lake in the country.

But it's January. Really cold. Really, really cold. 

I was alone. Not surprising. No cars passed. It was just me and the camera and the sun coming up across the water. Cold?--maybe thirty seconds and you lose your fingers. 

I take a few shots, like the one above. The morning is beautiful, worth the trip, worth the cold.

The warm car's a haven when I get back inside. I stay a while. Sunrise lays its Midas-touch over everything, so even leafless trees in the prairie grass take on a patina of heavenly grace.

Two years later, the novel is finished, titled appropriately, Looking for Dawn. Oddly enough, I happen to be back here, same place, on the reservation side of Oahe. It's mid-afternoon and I'm accompanied by a 100-year-old WWII army nurse, who is telling me her story. She's Lakota, Cheyenne River Sioux. The reservation is hers.

I'm helping her write her story, and I've asked her to take me to places rich in importance in her life--what we can see and document of her childhood, for instance, where her parents are buried, her ancestors: show me where you grew up, where you went to school. I didn't tell her that, oddly enough, I'd been right here before, but I recognize the place clearly, even though this time around we'd come from the west, and a water-skier is out on the lake cutting waves in some fancy ballet, here and there a fishing boat in a drift a long ways off. 

"You want to see where I went to boarding school, Jim?" she's said. "You want to see where I worked as a nurse when I got home from the war?" We got in the car earlier and went east to a a slip of land surrounded by Oahe. I'd been here before. We're looking west. She points at the water, says nothing. It's a beautiful day, shimmering azure, sky and sea, and what she is saying in silence didn't register right away. "There," she said. 

All of that life, all of that history, years of her story and her people's story, was under the water of a huge man-made lake. All of her history was gone, her tribal history drowned. 

"There it is," she said. 

The old Cheyenne River Agency, the school, the hospital, the town itself--there it lies. Look for yourself. It's gone.

Forty per cent of the state's "angler use" occurs here. Half of all licensed South Dakota anglers fish Lake Oahe. Ranchers have abundant water these days, a scarcity in drought years that come along regularly "west river," as South Dakotans say.  The brochures say, "If you want a big lake experience, you’ll find it along the Missouri River. Four large reservoirs were created along the length of the 'Big Mo,' thanks to dams near Pierre, Fort Thompson, Pickstown and Yankton. All four lakes offer an abundance of fishing and hunting along with recreational boating, jet skiing, sailing and fun."

That's all true.

But there's another story beneath sparkling water, a story that has nothing to do with championship walleyes. 

That's my friend at a memorial right there at the water's edge. "Four Bear," listed in the fourth column, is her grandfather, who signed the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty, a man who became a "Fool Soldier," who rescued three women and eight children taken hostage when a Dakota war party attacked a white settlement at Lake Shetek, Minnesota Territory in 1862. 

"The Pick-Sloan Plan was, without doubt, the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States," says Vine DeLoria, in his introduction to Michael L. Lawson's Dammed Indians. "A natural environment was completely wiped out without any consideration of what was there and was replaced by a mechanical electric grid system and large holding dams.. . .This is a moral violation of ourselves as human beings."

Pike-Sloan has been a giant blessing to most Dakotans, but when we walked away from the edge of Oahe that summer afternoon, I wasn't the same person who'd stopped with a camera two years before in January cold. 

In some places, today, November 27, isn't just Black Friday, it's also Native American Heritage Day. Research says that 40 per cent of the American public believes Native Americans are gone. They aren't, even though lots and lots of us have tried to make it so.

That January morning I was out there was as cold as it was beautiful, but I had so much to learn about looking for beauty. I took this picture that morning from the west side--no idea about what was in front of me that simply wasn't there.

Thanks for the milkweed

"Walking beans" was never a joy, but it was tolerable when my father-in-law would talk about farming way back when he was a kid. Truth?--I didn't mind the job. It didn't tax the intellect, which was why he trusted me doing it in the first place. In a field of soybeans, weeds are, well, obvious; all you had to do was knock 'em down, whack 'em, or take 'em out any way you can. Any fool could do that. Even a professor.

Waterweed, dogbane, and milkweed--everything had to go. Milkweed was particularly pernicious because it has a lateral root, my father-in-law said, meaning that taking one plant out was only going to invigorate another down the line, turning the action, over time, into some madcap midway game. You can kill what shows up, but some descendant just down the row is only going to come up giggling soon enough.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, famously, that a weed was really a plant whose virtues had never been discovered. I have no idea which weeds he had in mind with that quip--Thoreau, after all, did most of Emerson's gardening; but Waldo could have been thinking about milkweed because while milkweed was an indefatigable enemy in my father-in-law's soy beans, it can be a rare beauty in late fall, when there's not much else on a rural landscape to beg our attention.

The one up top was one of a tribe on the slope of a hill beside a bridge and above the river. Catch the light right and its feathery floss seems like angel's wings. I'd been trying to get the perfect shot at another stand, using a fir tree as a backdrop; but I knew the moment I saw this torch in the shadows that if I played my cards right, I'd get something gorgeous. Even as it stood there, it was perfectly beguiling.

I'm not old enough to have been a kid during World War II, but I had friends who gathered milkweed floss for the war effort, going hither and yon in rural areas, picking pods at exactly the right time, just before they opened.

All that milkweed fuzz went into life jackets for Allied pilots, tagged "Mae West vests" because they. . .well, guess. 

I'm not sure ten-year-olds were told the Mae West stuff, and I probably shouldn't have flashed those famous bosoms either. Then again, maybe they'll boost ratings. 

Those war-time kids got paid for their efforts too. In Illinois, they got 15 cents for every onion bag they filled, a nickel more if the pods were dry. Two bags of pods contained sufficient floss for one life jacket. Amazingly, in 1944 two million pounds of milkweed floss were gathered, enough, the Army said, to pack 1.2 million Mae West vests.

I wonder if that one up top, the one I spotted at the bridge, had a famous ancestor.

Makes me want to repent for hoeing 'em down years ago.

Anyway, sixty years after all those schoolkids took to the fields, a whole family of milkweed flirted with the wind not more than twenty feet or so from the highway 10, some in shadow, some in bright sun, and I caught 'em at it. Isn't that beauty something? This time of year they don't need Mae West. They're pinups themselves.

This Thanksgiving morning's thanks is, oddly enough, for an endless supply of milkweed, whose glory can't be bested in early November and whose wartime history will always been worth retelling. Small things really, but I can't help but think that's what Thanksgiving is all about. How did Mother Teresa say it?--"to the good God, nothing is little."

Even milkweed.

Happy thanksgiving, even if, this year, it's a small one. Be safe.

In the dark on Thanksgiving Eve

 

"Pride" from Brueghel's Seven Deadly Sins

There's no electricity this a.m. A car slid off the road and took out a pole that carried all our energy. It's been dark, completely, for an hour. I'm trying to type on a tablet, and it's not going well.

Thanksgiving can be spontaneous and often is. It doesn’t always require practice or dogged devotion. Hard times in our family are somewhat safely behind us, thank the Lord, but all I have to do is stumble over an image or walk along a familiar road somewhere, and the dark days find a way to sneak back in, my personal PTSD.

In days of old, I smoked a couple of cigarettes a day out in the barn. Standing there in the frozen cold, I remember the smoke drifting down, dissipating slowly in air so motionless that it seemed I was exhaling ghosts.  But what I also remember is that the spirit-like shapes of the smoke drew me back to an earlier time standing out there, a time when my nerves felt torn to pieces by bloody warfare in church. Just like that, total recall, blindingly uninvited.

I have no trouble saying I'm thankful all of that is ancient history, even if I wouldn’t mind a smoke. When I remember that mess, I give thanks it's finished.

Still, thanksgiving doesn't come naturally for me. I have to work at it. I have to discipline myself to do it because I’m hopelessly “Emersonian,” buoyed by good old, rugged self-reliance.

That pride is the first of the Seven Deadly Sins seems perfectly obvious. There's some gluttony in me—especially this holiday weekend; a pinch of lechery I don’t like admitting; some greed, I imagine, but not a whole lot; lots of sloth, but, hey!—I’m retired. I'll admit to some envy too--a really great lens, for instance; and okay, I get angry, or did, before the elections. But none of those, in me, are really capital offenses.

But pride? That’s huge. I don't think I walk around with my nose in the air, but me-first-ness beclouds everything I do. Not arrogance--that’s a whole different line of work; but the driving determination that what matters most about my life and my times and my fortunes are my life and my times and my fortune. That I got. In spades.

Most of us thusly cursed come off the factory line that way; it takes rugged fight to bridle it, to love God above all and your neighbor as yourself. Far easier to say than to do. Such selfless regard is not human after all, it’s Godly, so much so that we know selflessness when we see it. And we remember it too.

That's why, speaking for myself at least, Thanksgiving turkey is medicine for the soul, a celebration of the discipline some of us sinner must be reminded to do--to give thanks. Gluttony may well be a sin this weekend, but tomorrow, I say, the end justifies the means.

Meanwhile, this morning I'm still swallowed by darkness, tapping away at the iPad. The refrigerator isn’t running, the freezer isn’t either. Green lights from a dozen appliances are doused, and the darkness is appalling. Cold is creeping up my back as I sit here at the kitchen counter.

I’ve not panicked yet, although the power’s been out for close to an hour.  What on earth does one do when there is no power? You get out the flashlights and light candles, and in the curse of darkness you almost certainly give thanks for what you have when you don't, as I am now. 

I conceded there's always cause for thanksgiving, and the list is eternal. Tomorrow, right after dinner, we could go around the table and go on forever. 

I just need a nudge, like Thanksgiving.  You too?  You got my permission to take an extra helping of stuffing tomorrow--if I've got yours.

This morning's thanks is for tomorrow's turkey or ham or spinach salad or those shocking cranberries. And once-a-year pie. This morning's thanks is simple enough: it's for Thanksgiving.

And light. Because it's back. The energy's on. Thanks, Lord, for that lineman in the hard hat just down the road, the one who spent a couple of cold hours up in the cherry-picker hitching up wires in the blowing snow. 

Make me good at it, Lord. Make it a discipline.

Potluck

 

It was wicked of me, but I like him and the guy is just plain interesting. He's as old as any autistic person I know, nearly 50, blessed somehow with a unique warmth. But because he is driven by his schedule, his own well-plotted labyrinth of rituals, any opportunity which threatens the march of events he's already charted in his head is troublesome.

"Is there church tonight?" is the first thing he says when I pick him up on Sunday morning. And when I say yes, he'll say, "And will you pick me up?"

 Okay, that's a lock.

So I told him he should come along to a potluck we were having at church next week--after the worship. The guy loves to eat. He's slippery as an eel if, after church, someone brings cookies. By edict, he's supposed to eat only one, but he'll slicky-slicky as many as he can get if no one calls him on it. His paunch makes seat belts a chore. Besides, he's told me a thousand times--literally--that he has a TV dinner for Sunday lunch.

I told him about tomato-y lasagna, barbequed chicken, a dozen cheesy hot dishes, and a whole cafeteria of deserts, muffins too, muffins galore. 

"I like TV dinners," he told me again, but I knew I had his heart wrenched. Coming to dinner with us meant departing from ritual, but the forbidden apple was dripping with sweetness.

"How long will it take?" he asked me. Sunday afternoon he does his laundry. I knew that too. He's told me fifty times. I told him the potluck would take an hour.

"How long is an hour?" he asked.

"About as long as church," I told him. "From the moment we sit down until Pastor Herman says 'amen'--that's an hour. That's it," I said.

"I do not know how long an hour is," he said.

"From the time a TV show starts until the next one does," I told him.

"I do not know how long an hour is," he said again.

"It's not all that long, Stuart," I told him. "Great food, too--cakes. Chocolate cakes."

"I do not know how long an hour is," he said again and again and again and again, until it was clear that he'd already bulldozed the potluck, no matter how chocolate-y.

 It was evil of me, the tempter, so I retreated. "Besides," I said, "you like TV dinners, don't you?"

"Do you like TV dinners?" he said.

I could not resist. "I'd much rather have church potluck," I told him, devilishly.

He started again: "I do not know how long an hour is," he said, at which point the sentence became a solace, a mantra, not only to him but even to me. "I do not know how long an hour is," he said again, and so did I, and that blasted line stuck with me all day, as well it should have--a man whose impatience overflows regularly, who wishes all too frequently for the end of this, the end of that--"I am anxious to retire," "I can't wait for spring break," if I can only make it to the end of the week. . ."

"I do not know what an hour is. I do not know what an hour is."

One of the most beautiful psalms of all doesn't belong to King David, but to Moses, a man whose impatience kept him from the promised land after 40 years of wandering the desert with a multitude of whiners. In Psalm 90, Moses begs God to teach him to number his days, his hours, as if they were precious.

Because they are.

It was Psalm 90 that dropped from the sky just then, when the words of Brother Stuart, the oracle, started making sense in my soul. I wish it weren't true, but far too often, just like Brother Stuart, I too do not know what an hour is.

Morning Thanks -- Infinitudes

 

You thought the universe was already huge? A few year back already, a Dutchman at Yale named Van Dokkum, Dr. Pieter van Dokkum, aided by powerful optics at W. H. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, located a gadzillion more stars out there somewhere so far away that miles are totally irrelevant. Literally billions of additional stars raise the greater possibility of life somewhere out there, of course, this menacing yet eerily seductive idea that--eerie fantasy movie music!--we are not alone.

Van Dokkum's discovery has its detractors, one of whom claims that the discovery of another gadzillion stars a gadzillion light years away is, well, ho hum, since we don't stand a chance of ever getting close anyway, crippled as we are by cement boots of time and space.

But the sheer numbers and the vast expanse of what's really above us, what's really out there, is, to me at least, dizzying. The reach of the human imagination comes nowhere close. I can't think my way out there, no matter that I live on a landscape where almost every day the sky goes on forever. If there's a heaven, is it on some unnamed planet somewhere--out there in van Dokkum's new territories? What is heaven anyway? Is it a place? Where's my father right now, really--I mean, literally? I know where his mortal coil lies, but where's his spirit? Or is heaven nothing but spirit? Is heaven simply another dimension, some place even more unimaginable than a million new galaxies? Or are there really streets of gold?

What van Dokkum claims is that we have been woefully short-sighted in our estimates of the length and breadth of the heavens because some new optics have, by their reach, tripled the number of stars--and planets too--in our universe. I don't know if you can get this on your computer, but that means we may well have "roughly 100 sextillion stars, with an approximate margin of error of about 10 times fewer or 10 times more." Go ahead and tap that out on your calculator.

It's dizzying. Not long ago, up north, we stood out amid the trees in an opening spacious enough to give us a view of a gadzillion stars. Took your breath away, even though from our deck on a good, cold night we can rack up a couple million too. That silly verse from Psalm 8 sneaks into the soul with ever more meaning, those spacious heavens being trifle-like, "the work of your fingers," all of that universe to God almighty little more than, say, a set of car keys or a fingernail clipper.

It wasn't Hamlet who said it first or even made it famous. The line was older than Shakespeare, and the Bard knew it was--and that's why he gave a bit of Psalm 8 to the feverish Danish prince: "What is man that thou art mindful of him?"

Seems to me that van Dokkum's new eyes and the even broader universe he claimed to find makes us, at once, both less significant--Earth being but a teardrop in an ocean--and much, much more: for some blame reason, out of all that space, he loves both us and this world.

Don't know Prof. van Dokkum, but I can't help thinking of marvels ever-so-close at hand. Think of the moments of marvelous infinitude that happen outside your window every day.

There's no end to astonishment in the world, so much opportunity to dance with the stars.

This morning's thanks is for that last quiet utterance (I think of it as humbled, quiet) of Psalm 8: "how majestic is your name."

Springfield, June 16, 1858

Watched a little Lou Dobbs last night because it's always good to see how the other half lives. If you don't watch him all the time (and you don't have a place in his court), what he's up to, night after night, can seem bloody horrifying. Some agencies of the federal government, backed up by the evil George Soros, the mainstream media, and the tech giants, have engineered an assault on the beaches of the Trump presidency with such force and numbers that anything from World War II seems like kids in a sandbox.

It's a coup, really, an outright rebellion against the law and the Constitution, and by agents of discord and division, liberal dems. The Russia thing was a hoax, the impeachment sheer nonsense. Now, this treacherous cabal of treasonous, commies and their hosts of Antifa buddies have jimmied the computers enlisted to tally vote counts, just to make sure that "this President" would be denied the second-term he so righteously deserves.

In Covid news, Dobbs' version lauded Trump's devotion to the American people via Project Warp Speed, which is now readying an astonishing national program of 350 million Americans with any one of two or three wonder drugs the President's determined energy has conjured.

We don't spend much time with sweet Lou or Hannity, with Tucker or Laura, just crack the door of the church once in a while to see or hear what's happening in the sanctuary. In the church down the block, where we normally attend, the congregation was singing from an altogether different hymnal.

To be sure, there was just as much praise for the scientists who've created possible antidotes for Covid, but no one sang the President's praise. CNN and MSNBC put a lot of numbers up on the screen--a record number of positives yesterdays, of hospitalizations, and deaths--a string of incredible numbers that Dobbs didn't bother bringing up. You could say we're rounding the curve if you have absolutely no idea how huge the curve is.

Yesterday's other big story was Rudy G's hair-coloring running down both sides of his face during a press conference at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, a news conference which, oddly enough, featured zero party officials. Dobbs didn't mention Rudy or his bizarre performance. Anderson Cooper called the whole thing "a clown show," then apologized to clowns. Cooper didn't have to say much really; yesterday was one of those news days when a picture was worth a thousand words.

What President Trump is up to with this his own two-week self-imposed lock down is either a determined quest for justice against the formidable powers of hell (Dobbs) or a dingbat hissy fit (most anyone from opposing networks). Seems Americans are either are greatly taken with the man's stubborn strength of character or have decided a week ago already that the man should have been stuck in a corner with a dunce hat. Trump is either the Angel Gabriel or a Brigadier General in Satan's minions.

Just for the record, Abraham Lincoln didn't pull the famous phrase out of his hat. He found it in the Bible, but he could have jotted it down from other sources as well, including Saint Augustine. When he stepped up to the podium at Springfield, Illinois, on June 16, 1858, he did so to accept the Illinois Republican Party's nomination for a U. S. Senate seat. He wasn't blind to what he and everyone else were seeing: slavery was threatening the Union in ways the century-old government had never experienced. Kansas was aflame. The raised fists of Southern states were unmistakably threatening.

"I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," he said. "I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided," he claimed, because "it will become all one thing or all the other."

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

That was the context of a speech whose central line is sewn into just about everyone's sense of the American story, and that single line, or so it seems to me, has, sadly enough, sharp and immediate relevance.

"A house divided against itself cannot stand."

I have no idea how we get beyond this. No idea.

First pooches

He's sitting in my lap now, purring as if I'm the best thing since a great night with the mice out in the garage. I should appreciate his attention--and I do; but, doggone it, he makes it difficult for me to hit the keys. In a minute--there!--he'll get tired of my moving, then leave, survey a place close by, and lie down, snooze a little. 

I, for one, am happy to know that dogs are coming back to the White House. I know, I know--a pair of rangy German shepherds, Major and Champ, doesn't guarantee Pax Americana, but it's reassuring to know this particular Presidential couple like having pets around. Good night, they can aggravate us, but far more often than not they're worthy subjects for our love because, dang it, they give lots of it back. Mostly.

In The End of the Christian Life, Todd Billings tells a story as sweet as dark chocolate. "Max," Billings says, "was a furry, red-and-white Welsh corgi, one of the friendliest creatures on planet Earth." Alas, like every other breathing thing, he began to show symptoms of mortality. The vet said it was dementia actually--Max had started bumping into things. When the vet put him to sleep, as they say, Billings was holding Max as lovingly as he'd ever done.

Then, marvelously, the vet, who knew Billings was a believer, asked, simply, "Can I pray right now?" and he did, "a blessing," Billings says, "a benediction."

There's more to the story of the death of Max, but that particular moment is immensely rich, in part because it reminds me of a thousand stories from Native life, stories of the old ones praying over buffalo, simply giving thanks for the four-leggeds--rabbits, squirrels, even dogs-- who give life itself to the people. 

I know a kid, a big-time hunter who told me about a time he went hunting with a Native buddy he'd known for a lifetime, went to school together--a Christian school--and church. They were believers, both of them. When the Native kid downed a nice buck, he was thrilled. But his buddy, a white guy, was shocked, he told me, when his friend reached into his pocket for a animal fetish he'd carried with, and carefully--even prayerfully--dipped it in the blood of that big buck. Seemed to the white kid so, well, heathenish.

I'll let a real theologian determine whether it was or wasn't heathenish, but I couldn't help thinking of that odd sacrament, out in the field, when Billings told that story of the vet's benediction for Max.  

I suppose it isn't a bit "Christian evangelical" to say it, but I'm happy Major and Champ are moving into the White House, family pets in a long line of First Pets. They're not just "animals."

You're wondering about Smokey? He's behind me, fast asleep on a wooden chair, of all things. He's close. That's the way he likes it. 

Me too.