A Story for Christmas--sort of

 

Okay, maybe this isn’t about Christmas, but Christmas is the season for sweetness, so I’m hoping you’ll let me tell a story that fits, even if it’s set so many years earlier in a land that seems ever so far away.

There’s a baby in it. It’s short a manger and a posse of shepherds; but I can’t help thinking this little story is related.

There must be a thousand stories like this—more, in fact, stories about shady first impressions suddenly turned to gold. Here goes.

A woman named Anderson, Mrs. Anderson, was the very first white woman, she says, in the neighborhood of Native people—mostly Dakota. It’s 1854. She has a husband and two darling children—a two-year-old, and a baby. They live—as you can guess—in a log cabin, pretty much all by themselves.

Mrs. Anderson claims she’d never seen an Indian (that’s her language, by the way) and was, therefore, scared to death one day when her husband was gone and she was alone, and a “hideously painted brave” (that’s her language too) dropped by for a visit, startlingly unannounced. Didn’t knock, didn’t ask to come in, just walked in, took a chair, sat down, and looked around as if he were just as amazed as she was.

A huge knife was jammed in his belt. His scary and fearful presence froze her solid, zero at the bone, “overpowered with fright” (that’s her language too).

Even though she knew her tiny precious children were close at hand, she couldn’t help fear that grabbing them and fleeing would kindle the warrior’s wrath. The only out, she determined, in a flashing second, was to go get her husband.

In this memoir of hers, she claims she ran a quarter mile or so toward the place in the field her husband was working, then stopped on a dime because she couldn’t help realize, in a flash, that leaving her children alone was a downright terrible thing to do.

Think of her, at that moment, stopping in place, her husband still out of earshot, her children alone with a man with a knife she couldn’t help but fear. Her “mother heart,” she says, made clear that she had no choice--she had to go back.

Just like that, she turned around and sprinted back to the house and her kids, likely far more fearful than she’d been when the fearful visitor walked in.

Up the path and through the trees she went, running against her own staggered breath. Not for a moment did she waiver from what her mother heart demanded. She barged through the half-open door of the cabin, mind and heart and soul aflame, and there she saw—I’m not making this up—her two-year-old, a little boy, standing beside the still-seated warrior, playing with the man’s tobacco pouch and his pipe and the two furry rabbits, dead, their heads drawn through strings, as well as a couple of prairie chickens hanging from their necks. Awed, that child was. Just. Playing.

“His expression,” she says of her visitor, “remained unchanged.”

And then this: her distressing visitor “carefully held the baby in his arms.”

Mrs. Anderson didn’t say what she felt right then, didn’t have to because what she felt at that moment is woven into the story she said she’d never forget—first shock, then a massive lifting of her hugely anxious mother heart, and a blessing of abiding peace.

“I gave him bread and milk to eat,” she says, “and ever after,” she writes, “he was our friend, oftentimes coming and bringing the children playthings and moccasins.”

Before the warrior left the Andersons that morning, he reached down to that belt and gave the Mrs. both the rabbits and the prairie chickens.

Okay, I know--there are no shepherds in this story, but there’s a baby in the arms of a blessed stranger, and a child fascinated by someone who became right then a friend.

In every small town in Siouxland, every evening, Christmas lights parade down Main in a binge of seasonal color. Andy Williams dreams of a “White Christmas” in every Hy-Vee, every Walmart, and just about every other shop and store.

I can’t help it--something there is about that picture Mrs. Anderson draws of her little boy touching the magic softness of that prairie chicken, while the baby lies silently in the man’s muscular arms—that blessed tableau suggests at least something of a nativity.

So there--Merry Christmas.

Authenticity

This one was grabbed from the scrapbook. It's seven years old, written before I'd heard much about Nadia Bolz-Weber, who has quite a strong ministry. I hereby repent for cheapening Ms. Bolz-Weber's mission. It was written also before we left the little Presbyterian church and returned to the church we've attended for decades. I thought I'd put it up here again, even with the snarky old smear, for which I need to be forgiven.  

It’s age.  Why not tell it like it is? I wouldn’t be ornery if I were 24 or even 48.  I’m not.  I’m 65, and that’s got a lot to do with being cranky about an NPR story featuring the latest tattooed and tousled dominie to do Christianity right for once. She’s got this bruising past that toughened her up enough to go to war with those vile establishment Lutherans Garrison Keillor lovingly lampoons; but up there in Seattle, where her congregation sits in cheap plastic chairs, no pews, she and her fellowship finally, after 2000 years, are doing the Christian faith right. That’s the story line.

If I had a dime for all of those stories in the last fifty years, I could cure Haiti’s ills. They’re all alike, every last one of them, sweeping the detritus of rank tradition out of the aisles or doing away with aisles all together for God’s sake, creating a contemporary worship space for authentic Christianity.

Spare me.

We just want to be authentic, she told NPR. So what am I, phony baloney?

This fellowship happens to be Lutheran, but they come in garden varieties, each of them carrying a petulant sanctimony they’d vehemently deny, a saintliness both repudiated and earned in this preacher’s nifty collection of blue-black Christian tattoos. I mean, I’ve read just about everything from Anne Lamott, but even her shtick gets old.

Here’s a Christmas story. Couldn’t be more tradition-bound, more inauthentic, I suppose.

We go, off and on, to a local Presbyterian church, where, on a good Sunday morning, there’s all of forty people, mostly fewer than all of. The singing is nothing to crow about, the preaching is fair-to-middlin’, and the liturgy is, in the language of the CRC, authentic Samuel Volbeda, circa 1928—every week we sing “Glory Be to the Father.”  You know.  No praise team up front, no power points—which means, of course, we actually hold hymnals. It’s like worshipping in a museum.

The church is close—that’s why we go.  It’s just up the road in town, but it’s also close in a way that most churches work blame hard to be: close, as in, when we greet each other as worship begins, we greet everybody. You get out of your pew. Everyone does. Then again there are only 35 souls, sometimes less.

There’s a childrens’ sermon, but only three kids, floppy-haired, pudgy brothers who sometimes wear really short ties. They live with their grandparents because their mom—well, she lost ‘em somehow.  I don’t how because I don’t know the story, and I’m glad I don’t.

What I do know is that my wife and I have often marveled at the boys’ grandparents, who got drafted to raise an entirely new family after suffering endless hurt with the first one. Honestly, at 65 years old, I don’t know how Grandpa and Grandma do it, but they do, 24/7, and the youngest grandson, it seems, qualifies as special needs.  Where on earth do they find the strength?

Anyway, when I was a boy, we went to church on Christmas Eve, in the kind of darkness where “Silent Night” makes a sanctuary feel like the Judean hills. But even in churchly Sioux County, Iowa, you’ve got to look hard and long for a fellowship that gathers on Christmas Eve.

Maybe it was nostalgia, maybe it was because we’re alone, but we decided to go up the block to the little Presbyterian church where everyone gets greeted. They were going to have a choir, for pity sake. We wondered how many ringers they’d have to draft.

It was wonderful. It was great, and those three boys who live with their grandparents sang a special number, decked out in matching white shirts and skimpy ties.  Someone in the back turned on a piped-in pop rock tune off a CCM disk, and those three boys sort of sang along.  Sort of. It was the first time I remember thanking the Lord for piped-in music.

They had some trouble remembering the words. For that matter, they had trouble with the notes. But their mother was there I think, a woman who looked like she’d known some hard times. She had a little camera up, recording everything, a trio of her own boys singing a song about what Christmas isn’t about—and, bless his holy name, what it is.

But that image wasn’t what jerked my heart strings, not the boys’ singing, although what they gave the rest of us was really “special” music because they looked greatly happy to be up there entertaining.  And it wasn’t their mom’s close attention with that pocket camera, which was touching too.

The real gift I got last night on Christmas Eve at the little Presbyterian church up the block is the way that Grandma mouthed the words, every lyric in that rockin’ number, every sentence, every last phrase, every line of chorus, because she knew ‘em and she wanted her boys to remember. She knew the words because this grandma had been been the one, all week long, doing the coaching, doing the practicing, doing it all.

Real and righteous pride was lighting her face as if she had hold herself of that big candle right square in the middle of the advent wreath. Love was in her eyes--and thanksgiving, which is, really, what Christmas is about, what the Christian life itself is all about.

Nothing’s hip at the Presbyterian church up the block. They don’t try to compete with what’s being done across town. They had no live nativity, no stringed orchestra, no theater, not a bit of hoopla, nothing to make the news. They didn’t even advertise.  I had to call the preacher.

But last night, Christmas Eve, as sure as I’m sitting here this Christmas morning, with my own eyes and ears I saw and heard a real, live chorus of angels, three pudgy boys.

And in case you’re wondering, we sang “Silent Night” in the candlelit darkness, just the way it should be sung. So there.

What’s more, I came home with a paper bag of peanuts, a half dozen or more chocolate stars, an apple, just as if I were, once more, a kid.

Go ahead, roast me for being hopeless and cranky. Go on.

I hope they were just as authentic in Seattle.

Small Wonder(s)--New Hope at Christmas

 Instead of reading, this morning, just sit back and be read to. Click on this line. Another page will come up. When it does, scroll down beneath the picture of Ms. Suckow and click on the arrow marked "Listen."

Review--Jesus and John Wayne (again)

[This isn't the first time I spotlighted Jesus and John Wayne, and neither will it be the last.] 

_______________________

Forty years ago I wrote a book for the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), a series of stories about people from all corners of the fellowship. The powers-that-be said I could choose the subjects. It was a ball. 

One of the chosen was a man named Richard Ostling, who was, at the time, Religion Editor of Time magazine--and a member of the CRC.

Time was literally ten times fatter than it is today, its circulation much broader, its cultural influence much greater. Forty years ago, a variety of media influence peddlers were around, I'm sure, but not as many and not as loud as today. These days, most of us get our news on-line. Magazines--we still get several--are artifacts.

Back then, the Ostlings lived up on a hill in New Jersey. From their front steps, you could see Manhattan's famous skyline. This prairie bumpkin was way out of his comfort zone, but the Ostlings were gracious, and great subjects. The interview was thoughtful, a blessing really.

They were immigrants, not cradle CRC. They'd come to the denomination by way of campus ministry at the University of Michigan, when Richard was in graduate school. But they'd been members of the denomination long enough to know it well. But then Richard's position at Time made the study of American religion a full-time job. 

He'd done cover stories on all the evangelical headliners--Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggert--in addition to frequent stories on the rise of "fundamentalism." He was a scholar, a real writer. He made it his business to know American religion, inside and out. Want to read him today? Go to Patheos, where he still does an always informative Q and A. 

At one point in the conversation, I told him that Dutch Reformed theology paid little attention to the most powerful movement in American religion--the rise of fundamentalism. The idea that the Bible was "inerrant," or that a belief in "the inerrancy of scripture" could be some kind of litmus test was, well, simply not our way of thinking: the implication was that we were above such silliness.

To say I got chewed out may be pushing it, but his response to what he saw as my arrogance ("we're bigger than that") felt a little Jeremiad-like. What he said stuck with me through all these years. The CRC couldn't sit on the sidelines and consider itself aloof from the struggles of American Christianity, he told me. The denomination isn't in the Netherlands, it's here--he said, and not engaging in the conflicts in American religious life only insures the CRC's eventual demise. He said our denomination will eventually go the way of all other ethnic denominations. It will lose to the forces of Americanization just as every other ethnic fellowship in this nation has. The real question is what will it become?

Forty years ago, the central battle within American Christianity was the hundred-years war between fundamentalists (like Southern Baptists and most Pentecostals) and mainline Protestants (Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians). Even forty years ago, that fight wasn't much of a battle any more. The fundamentalists were bruisers. They were mopping up.

Reading Kristin Kobes DuMez's cogently argued Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation makes me shudder at how isolated and aloof I have been, how "out of it" when it comes to the big-time movements in the fundamentalist world. Richard Ostling's strong advice notwithstanding, the truth is I don't know much about most of the individuals KKDM documents in her study--know of them, sure, but know them well, no. Several of their names I didn't even recognize.

Pretty much without my knowing it, I got drafted into the American battle Ostling told me, correctly, could not be avoided. My lack of knowledge of the powerhouse fundamentalists, the real warriors in this battle, makes clear that somewhere along the line I'd joined forces with the sinking fortunes of the mainline Protestants. 

All of which helps me to understand why I feel isolated here in the northwest corner of Iowa, where, a month ago, 80 per cent of the voting public chose President Donald Trump, the man who yesterday, finally (maybe), lost to a candidate who is the only President in the last several to attend church (Roman Catholic) every Sabbath. 

When we sat in the Ostling's house and talked forty years ago, his stinging criticism was right. The CRC would lose to the expansive powers in place all around in our own adopted American culture, just as every other ethnic church had and would. Today, as the denomination is terrified by issues surrounding tolerance for gay marriage and issues surrounding LGBTQ rights and privileges, the outline of America's long battle between fundamentalism and mainline Protestantism is clearly visible, not as a seam but a schism.

Some people claim that reading KKDM's thoughtful and convincing book is, well, sad--sad because of the pitiable fall of so many evangelical headliners. A ton of stories in Jesus and John Wayne have identically dismal trajectories. To suffer through so many messy falls in one volume is no great joy.

Still, Jesus and John Wayne a terrific book, thoughtfully and painstakingly--but convincingly--argued. It's a terrific book because like all great and wonderful books, it makes you think. 

To be continued. . .

It's always been a compromise. Right from the beginning in 1787, the Congress created it because neither alternative--popular vote or some other representative scheme--seemed right and fair. So the founders found an alternative, a gizmo they called "the Electoral College." If you don't trust the people--"what do they know, really?"--and, like nothing else, you want to avoid a king or monarch, an autocrat, then maybe it would be best to put the whole messy business of voting--yes, voting--in the hands of really responsible people and call it a college or something dignified like that, an electoral college.

Perfect.

Not. 

The thing is, the number of electors has been, right from the start, based on the number of representatives each state sends to Congress, which means, of course, that the numbers are horribly skewed in favor of Iowa, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, those states with very limited populations. If it was a sovereign nation, California (which is full of immigrants from those very states, of course) has the fourth largest economy in the world. Yet, in the all-important Senate of the United States, California gets just two "senators," same as Wyoming, where there are fewer citizens in the whole state than there are on some New York City blocks. If you're from lots-of-people place, you have ever right to scream "unfair."

Among the results of this system is whacky tallying. Biden beat Trump by 7,000,000 votes this year, nation-wide. The 2020 election--let's be clear--was no squeaker. What's more the votes in the Electoral College--if all goes according to plan (don't count on it), was just as heavy laden for VP Biden. For the record, the Democrat should, today, get 306 votes, to the present President's 232. That's not a whisker. Trump got thumped (there's a t-shirt for you--just don't wear it in Sioux County, Iowa). 

BUT, Trump, who has proven himself to be unlike any other candidate in the history of these United States, has simply refused to believe that he actually lost. He did--even the Supremes said so (his Supremes, by the way) and did so twice!  They're just stupid or scared, says the man with the mouth.

He's lying and all but the most blind and faithful--the holy fools--know it. 

So, who knows what'll happen today, when this odd bunch of duly appointed (by the states) get together and cast their votes? Everybody knows what is supposed to happen, but what will happen is anybody's guess when one of the two candidates, the out-sized one, could care less about tradition, honor, and truth--remember the record-breaking size of his "biggest ever" inauguration crowd? 

After today, it should be over.  Should be. 

But no one thinks it will. 

(to be continued, I'm sure)

Reading Mother Teresa--Discipleship

 

If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, 

I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, 

of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, 

a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, 

a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; 

as for righteousness based on the law, faultless. 

But whatever were gains to me 

I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. Philippians 3:4–7 

He’d assembled, up there at the front of the church, a museum of memorabilia, buttons and medals and trophies, honors tassels from high school grad, two diplomas and a suitably framed preaching license, a couple decades’ worth of accolades. This energetic young preacher, full of life and spirit, paraded us through his achievements with enough self-deprecation to make the trip humorous and memorable.

It was darlingly accomplished, but the whole demonstration was rhetorical because once he’d reviewed his own life’s accomplishments – “best three-point shooter in junior high,” etc. – he bashed the whole business, saying what Paul is saying in Philippians, third chapter, that all such hoopla is meaningless, that whatsoever we might achieve in life means total zero in light of the eternity of God’s eternal love for us his own.

Memorably rhetorical, I’d put it. Memorable because it was really cute – a tongue-in-cheek recital of his own greatest hits, and rhetorical because it was a set up for the real punch line – “But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.”

“How many of us could say that?” he said, or words to that effect – that what we are, what we work for, what we want, our dreams and visions and desires – that all of that is less than zilch. How many of us would really give it all up for Christ?

He’s a young kid, full of energy, capable of breaking eardrums in his spirited enthusiasm. The church loves him and that’s wonderful.

But I think I’ve heard that sermon dozens of times before. What’s more, I don’t need a preacher to tell me that I care too much about what I do, about the very words I’m typing right now, the words you’re reading – their order, their precision, their beauty. I care a ton about what happens on this page, and I care a ton about other things as well – about my kids, my grandkids.

Our attachment to this world isn’t cheap or even transient, but I’m fully capable of asking myself, right now, whether these words are really worth my time, and – even more easily – whether the Green Bay Packers sweatshirt I just bought on e-bay (used!) is really something I needed or only something I wanted. The purpose of the sermon was to tell us to shape up our values, to align them with a confession of faith that places our love for the Lord above all else.

Here’s Mother Teresa on the purpose of the new order she was creating for the poor: “The missionary must die daily, if she wants to bring souls to God. She must be ready to pay the price He paid for souls, to walk in the way He walks in search of souls” (140).

Same chapter and verse. Same sermon.

But somehow, given her story, the gospel truth bleeds from the words and the ideas those words create. Somehow, given how she lived, that “same old, same old” has currency beyond anything I could imagine or inflict on my own.

Don’t get me wrong – that young preacher is wonderful, and there was nothing amiss in his sermon. But somehow, for me at least, reading those words from Mother Teresa creates a discourse that operates at a whole different level.

Honestly, I’m not indicting the preacher. He spoke the gospel.

But Mother Teresa really and truly lived it. She experienced death daily on the streets of Calcutta. She paid the price. She walked “in the way He walked in search of souls.”

The Frio River's suggestions

 

On the second Wednesday of Advent, Scott Cairns, from Isaiah 40, tells us that the prophet discovers and then proclaims that God is beyond compare--he is unknowable. And then he determines to clear the thicket of paradox that is the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

God is, finally, unknowable. Still, while he is not to be absolutely known, he is apparently willing to reveal something of himself to us at nearly every turn. Think of it like this: he cannot be exhausted, by our ideas about him, but he is everywhere suggested.

That put me in mind of photographs I took just off the Frio River a bundle of years ago, none of which capture the size and power of the place, but instead the odd beauty in and of its intimacies. I don't know that I've ever shown anyone these shots, but I like them, particularly because I can't help thinking that even in the hill country's lonely, weedy places, as Cairns says, "he is everywhere suggested."

The Blessings of Laity Lodge

It's an unforgettable place I've visited often. The first time, maybe twenty years ago or so, I was convinced that I was almost shockingly naïve because most people I knew wouldn't believe it if I'd try to describe the placae. It was beyond the imagination of most of my friends---and me too, a spiritual retreat hostel so far out you had to drive a mile in a river to get there. Way, way out of the way.

That Frio River looked like this--not the Floyd or the Big Sioux or the Missouri, a slow mover that at times left shocking slashes through Texas hill country. 

The Frio is a little shallow thing, so perfectly clear you could spot fish easily where it was deep enough to offer sanctuary. Too much rain demonized that strange little river, created a roaring, raging monster that for a thousand years slashed through rocky hills.

Cave-like passageways were scooped out of the sides, strange, almost horrifying places unlike anything I'd ever seen, sort of horrifyingly beautiful.

Laity Lodge a retreat heart of all that rare, deserty beauty, a wild and even unforgiving landscape, a place only an armidillo could call home. 

Here the center, hidden, as it is within the trees.

Got this note from them today. H.E. Butt Foundation owns the place, a name that makes you giggle until you learn that the family owns an immense chain of stores throughout Texas and even into Mexico. The note is, well, noteworthy, one of the few times in my life I've ever received a message from a non-profit who insists you hold on to your contribution this season because in the age of Covid there are simply more needy places to send contributions. I can't help thinking that the sentiment is amazing. They're doing well, they say; others aren't. This year give those people and places the money.

Amazing.

 This morning I'm thankful for a note that warms heart and soul from a place that does too. 

"blasphemous lunacy"

That Donald J. Trump is wrong about a vast conspiracy of election fraud is abundantly and convincingly clear. He's lying. Millions are convinced otherwise, despite state election officials, the Attorney General, and, yesterday, late afternoon, the Supreme Court, a bench that includes three bona fide conservative judges he installed.

Those who remain his loyal supporters are mostly Christian evangelicals, who do a ton of praying for him. Why Christians so adore him has always been mysterious to me. That they continue to idolize him is just plain baffling. In yesterday's Washington Post, Michael Gerson, once a speech-writer for George W. Bush, pointed out what seems painfully obvious: believers are guilty of "blasphemous lunacy."

I wondered if giving the adjective the status of the noun would be more accurate--is "lunatic blasphemy" preferable to "blasphemous lunacy"? It's been years since I lugged around a heresy detector, but I couldn't help thinking I preferred reversing authority of those two words--that what all those conservative evangelicals are doing is more fittingly defined as blasphemy, even, than lunacy. What they're up to is lunacy--I'll give him that; but blasphemy, pure and simple, although to the less orthodox (yes, I consider myself orthodox), it's just plain lunacy.

Whatever. You choose. It seems the two words can be seamlessly interchanged.

Gerson, a Wheaton graduate, a lifelong Republican, a Washingtonian insider who, for a time, did Plumblines on Dordt College radio, names names in the op-ed--specifically, Eric Metaxis, who, in addition to other things, once wrote a best-selling biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Metaxis predicted that  “Trump will be inaugurated. For the high crimes of trying to throw a U.S. presidential election, many will go to jail. The swamp will be drained. And Lincoln’s prophetic words of ‘a new birth of freedom’ will be fulfilled. Pray.”

Wow. At worst, Metaxis should take some polish the crystal ball he's got in his study. Gerson goes on: 

Just to be clear, Metaxas has publicly committed his life to Donald Trump, claimed that at least two members of the Trinity favor a coup against the constitutional order, endorsed the widespread jailing of Trump’s political enemies for imaginary crimes, claimed Abraham Lincoln’s blessing for the advance of authoritarianism and urged Christians to pray to God for the effective death of American democracy.

Then, finally, Gerson goes back to flashing words: "This is both seditious and sacrilegious."

But the essay is not just a smack down. It also asks the inescapable question about "the church": specifically, whether "the church" can even be imagined whole when seams are so ripped. Gerson calls Metaxis's disease "delusion," then points out the real victim: "And this ends up feeding doubts about religion itself."

Yes, it does. In. Me. Too. 

We've got a scraggly Christmas tree this year. We still like it, but, Covid-wise, we don't plan on company this December, so the cheap little tree is down here instead of upstairs, just for the two of us, not for guests. We downscaled. But right now, it looks perfectly beautiful across the room.

If the weather's nice, maybe we'll find a church to attend on Christmas Eve, returning to our childhoods--if any are open. Lately, we've been reading through a rich collection of meditations we've been through before, long enough ago to enjoy them when we go through them again. For the next few Mondays, the local Public Radio station will be playing a few of my own. I'm no apostate.

Years ago, when I was teaching in Arizona, good, good friends who were not "into church" sat across from me one night, each of us holding a beer, I'm sure, when one of them said, "Schaap, seriously--are you in a cult?"

Just about slayed me. I couldn't help but laugh.

"You're, like, always in church," they said.

I was Christian Reformed, a fellowship I was thought could not be defined as a cult. Still am Christian Reformed. Probably will be, up to and through my own funeral.

But I am also one of those people Gerson suggests has grown more doubtful, not about God, but certainly about his praying people. 

Not for a moment do I doubt the incarnation we celebrate. But watching Christians pray so fervently for a man who makes truth a joke prompts me to wonder about truth in fellowships that can include both me and them. Gerson's right.

_____________________ 

You can read Michael Gerson's op ed, "Prominent evangelicals are directing Trump’s sinking ship. That feeds doubts about religion" here. 

Morning Thanks--the art of a little poem about dad

Silo Solo

My father climbs into the silo.
He has come, rung by rung,
up the wooden trail that scales
that tall belly of cement.

It's winter, twenty below zero,
He can hear the wind overhead.
The silage beneath his boots
is so frozen it has no smell.

My father takes up a pick-ax
and chops away a layer of silage.
He works neatly, counter-clockwise
under a yellow light,

then lifts the chunks with a pitchfork
and throws them down the chute.
They break as they fall
and rattle far below.

His breath comes out in clouds,
his fingers begin to ache, but
he skims off another layer

where the frost is forming 

and begins to sing, "You are my
sunshine, my only sunshine."

1) It's the anniversary of her father's death, and Joyce Sutphen is remembering him with the kind of honor and devotion she considers worthy of him. A moment from her childhood comes to her--her father in the frozen Minnesota cold way up top in the silo doing the thankless work that had to be done, singing a song that couldn't have been any more impossible than it was beautiful had that song come from heaven. Joyce Sutphen's poem offers blessed homage, and it's beloved testimony is just plain beautiful.

2) You're just not sure, you know?--I mean, life seems so meaningless sometimes, so just plain wearying, all of us scrambling hither and yon like the mice you scared up and out of the nest when you moved the lawn mower for the first time that spring Saturday. We all operate at a frantic, out-of-control pace that you know can't be sustained. That's the race Joyce Sutphen finds herself in when, one day, one morning, she remembers her father on a morning in the silo, long, long ago. She's can't believe it herself. She's wishing for his sense of calling, his incredible--even miraculous--assurance of peace. The poem's message is peace.

3) If you want to understand the Trump phenomenon, start here. This plain old farmer, I'm sure, flew a Trump flag. He is the hero of the American dream, a white guy so blessedly driven and blessed by this country and its opportunities that he sings in what lazy, citifield liberal dems would think of the kind of place their own grandfathers did everything they could to get  them out of--"You are My Sunshine" and frozen silage in the Minnesota cold? Sure--no sweat. But who cares about this guy? Trump, and Trump only. Trump gets it. He hates the elites too. This sweet little poem bleeds politics.

4) It's a moral lesson, something of a sermon, in the old biblical sense of "calling." This great farmer from the fifties had it in hand and heart, that elusive gift of knowing that your passion meeting God's own need. He's feeding the world, and he knows it and he loves it, no matter if he's got to stand on his head in manure. This is exactly the kind of poem our nation's schoolrooms could use more of, a poem that helps kids understand how to move into their own futures.

My guess is there are more "meanings" to the poem, more, that is, than the four options I've listed. Me?--I'd say the first fits most comfortably, although the Calvinist in me likes the fourth too. And the second. And #3 too because it seems to me that a rural, white man these days is at the heart of the Trump phenomenon--and only there. He doesn't see himself featured on TV unless he's at a Trump rally. 

All stories are C's actually, an old friend of mine used to say; they're not O's. All stories leave a gap for the reader to fill in. Poems, like stories, are not puzzles, but they can be puzzling because they require our participation. A poem or story that has no mystery is not a poem or story; it's marketing or preaching.

There may well be other options to this very simple bit of homage to a man who loves his work and his life, but that it offers all or some of what I've offered is at least part of the reason people call a darling little homey poem about frozen silage. . .art.

This morning I'm thankful for the art of this wonderful little Joyce Sutphen poem.

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.