Hammerin' Hank on MLK Day

 

He was just 23 years old when, in 1957, he won the MVP award. I was in third grade, and hard as it might be to believe, I don't think I thought of him as black. He'd come up from the Negro league, in fact, the very last player from there to arrive in the Bigs, at a time when African-Americans were just beginning to get a place in MLB dugouts. 

Seems to me that Billy Bruton played next to him in centerfield, so he wasn't alone on the roster. But he was early. Those old pics of that 1957 team--World Champ Milwaukee Braves!--have four or five more. There were others.

No matter. All I know was that when I was a kid, on many a night I fell asleep with the Braves game still playing on that little radio up above my bed, it's soft yellow light over the dial. I loved going to bed with the Braves on, loved it so much that there were nights when I didn't even nod off.  

Coming into the ninth, the Braves may have trailed, but if the heart of the lineup was on its way to the plate, there was always a chance. Hank Aaron was there, batting in the third position, followed by Matthews, the third basement, at cleanup. Those two guys could hit. And did. That's what I remember thinking about Hammerin' Henry Aaron--the guy could hit. 

Really, he was a little guy. Eddie Matthews was beefy; he looked like he could jack the long ball out of County Park Stadium. But Henry was a wiry six-footer who weighed in at a good deal less than 200 pounds. Muscle-y? --sure. But Aaron had great wrists, my father used to say, great wrists that snapped that bat with so much torque the stadium walls came tumbling down. 

The biggest story of his professional life was how he finally outdid the Babe and ended his career with 755 round trippers. That was two decades later, in 1976, the year of the American Bicentennial, the year our daughter came into the world. By that time I was well aware of his being African-American, as was the nation, because hate mail and death threats arrived in his mail daily as he climbed ever closer to Babe Ruth's otherwise untouchable record. All that hate on its 200th birthday made the country look menacing.

"You are not going to break this record established by the great Babe Ruth if I can help it," some guy told him in a letter. "Whites are far more superior than jungle bunnies. My gun is watching your every black move."

Generations of kids today can't imagine any human being capable of such wicked hate, but it was in the air in 1976. The man who wrote those lines wasn't alone. An African-American was threatening a great man's home-run record, a great hitter who was white. Such things weren't supposed to happen.

The Postal Service gave him an award that year for getting mail, nearly a million letters (long before email), thousands and thousands in that massive bag full greatly supportive and loving. But America's finest racists couldn't go down without threatening a noose from the old days. 

But they couldn't stop him. He was just too good. Hammerin' Hank still owns a shoebox full of major league records: most career runs batted in at 2,297, total bases at 6,856, and extra base hits at 1477. 

There's more--lots more, but I thought of him when we visited at Atlanta, couldn't help it really when I saw his name on a stone beneath my feet. Here it is.

His footprints are there on the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame at the Martin Luther King National Monument in Atlanta. He's in good company--Thurgood Marshall, Dr. Ralph Abernathy, Senator Edward Brooke, Rosa Parks, President Jimmy Carter, and more than a dozen others. Some things tells me Hammerin' Hank is fully as proud of being here as he is in Cooperstown.

Breaking that record wasn't easy, not at his age. He played in 3300 ball games, third place all-time. But neither was it easy to live as long as he did in the eye of a racial storm that will likely never fully pass somehow off the cost and out to sea.  

When Barry Bonds broke Hammerin' Hank's record in 2007, Aaron didn't make a big deal out of it because, he told a reporter, baseball isn't about records. It's about playing to one's own greatest potential. 

That day in Atlanta, he hit number 715, one more than the Babe, that day when some people were actually scared of what could happen, the image I like best is that when Henry Aaron came around third, there at the plate stood his parents. Isn't that just the greatest? 

It was nice seeing him again Dr. King's memorial. I'm thankful for that sidewalk, those footprints, and the tracks he left in my own life.

SUnday Morning Meds--Babes and sucklings

Woolarak Museum, Oklahoma

“Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings

hast thou ordained strength. . .” Psalm 8:2

It’s amazing how much can be mined from a single line of words, especially when those words are considered “the Word of God.” When a book has been poured over by as many people for as many years as the Bible has, interpretations abound. What exactly did David mean by verse two anyway?

First, a musical answer—a sound bite. Anyone who has ever watched a dozen kindergartners wail away on “Jesus Loves Me” knows something of what this verse intends. A bunch of kids can preach a momentous sermon without once consulting a concordance or even a pitch pipe; all they have to do is look earnest and beller, and we all get blessed.

Art Linkletter made a career out a television show that’s been off the air for decades, a show that can be described by its title—“Kids Say the Darndest Things.” Ask any available grandparent, and you’ll likely get a half-dozen stories recounting the shockingly insightful off-the-cuff comments of ordinary pre-schoolers.

Surely, there’s some of all of that in verse two of Psalm 8.

Christ himself more than occasionally admonished his followers that, when it came to faith, they should all be like kids—simple, uncritical, accepting. Childlike faith has to be somewhere at the heart of David’s intent.

John Calvin thought there was something else at work here in this line, an appreciation of the miracle of life itself as it is given to us from the hand of the Creator. What he wanted us to notice is that babies, the moment they are born, are already sucking; they don’t need to be taught because they already doing the only thing they need to do to get the only thing they need, another miracle—breast milk. In the broadest sense, that is providence—and that, Calvin claimed, is simply miraculous. A nursing child is proof of a loving God, a Creator/Father of incredible magnificence, power, and love.

Sounds right too.

A while ago, in church, a woman stood up before we prayed, and told us that her granddaughter, her only grandchild, had been taken off the continuous IV she’d been on since being born six weeks premature at just two pounds. She was not much more than a handful of precarious life. This darling child, the woman said, was now way up to three pounds, and—can you believe it?—taking a bottle for the first time.

The poet/king had no notion of the United States, nor any dream of a little prairie place called the Sioux County, Iowa. He could not have imagined the church we worshipped in yesterday or clothes people wore. He would have been astounded by the child’s life, her coming as premature as she did; that beloved granddaughter wouldn’t be alive if we were Israel, B.C.

But when I heard that young grandma boldly announce her joy to all the rest of us, I told myself that that woman understood Psalm 8:2 in a way that’s entirely her own: “From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise.”

That Sunday, in our church, no one understood what that verse means better than she did, I’m sure.

7) Keep the Sabbath

If I tried, I couldn't not.

Does that make sense?

"Keep the Sabbath," says Trillia Newbell. “The Bible instructs us to rest and ultimately rest in Jesus. So, for 2022 I intend to keep the Sabbath.. . .I need the rest.”

Sorry if I was a little curt yesterday with the mighty John Newton and the saintly Tim Keller, but I just didn't buy into all those spiritual gymnastics. Felt too much like Ben Franklin in the Autobiography.

But Trillia Newbell? If I tried, I couldn't not. The Sabbath is in my DNA.

"The Sabbath is an organizing principle. 

It is a socially reinforced temporal structure."

Them's fighting words for folks like my mother, who had powerful instincts when it comes to what we used to call "sabbath observance." The Sabbath is certainly "not for man," not if you read the Bible.

But her son can't help feeling that maybe it is. Judith Schulevitz's The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order is fascinating and thoughtful. By her reckoning, the Sabbath, as we know it, is, in fact, a "reinforced, temporal structure"--and she's Jewish, not Dutch Reformed. By way of my wooden-shoed perspective, the Sabbath (upper-case) is really more of all of that--more "reinforced" and "temporal" because the Ten Commandments, interpreted with an OT spin, the perspective in which they were delivered, would have pointed sharply, militantly, at the seventh day, or Saturday. Not Sunday.

I know, I know--somewhere along the line (Schulevitz tells the story, by the way) Christians simply determined that we could red-pencil that commandment and edit in a new specified day, Sunday, the first day, and still live under the mandate of the divine directive. But it's impossible, really--rationally, at least--to argue that that determination wasn't made by someone outside the circle of Christ's disciples or apostles. Some other guy hundreds of years later first thought that idea through, some guy to whom we don't impute Holy Spirit-generated writing power, the divine vision of "scripture." It wasn't Jesus who edited the commandment; we did.

Here's Schulevitz: "Either you want to be organized in this way or your don't," she says, and I think she's right, just like Trillia Newbell. But then she goes on, "or, if you're like me, you do and you don't." Yeah, okay--she's speaking for me there too. "But if you're like me you can't quite forget what it feels like to have a Sabbath" (I have to remind myself that her name is Schulevitz and not, well Schaap or Schuller), "you can tell when it's missing, even if you don't necessarily miss it." 

Yup. That's how deep. DNA-level. 

What I'd like to know is how on earth did this Jewish woman worm her way so successfully into my Calvinist psyche?

I don't shop on Sunday. I'm not militant about it, but I just don't head down to Wal-Mart--often, at least--even though I could, and even though I have done it when my ox falls in a ditch. To get a plunger, for instance--when by chance, I met my son-in-law, who was just as guilty about being there as I was. Fortunately, I had that plunger in my hand. Can you think of a better symbol for sheer necessity?

I attend church, twice, in fact, for most of my 70 years. My old Arizona friends used to think I was in a cult.

Two weeks ago I took a long walk with my grandson on the Sabbath and the two of us missed the evening service. As righteous as such bonding moments might be, it's in me to feel a bite of guilt anyway. That's how deeply "reinforced" Sabbath observance is in me.

And I'm okay with that, Ms. Newbell. I'm a good enough Calvinist to say that a little guilt can be a blessing. Besides, the next Sunday I was there at worship, twice. This week too--well, once at least (we live a ways away). A little hiccup in the ritual ain't going to despoil me or violate the commandment, methinks.

I remember playing ball just a block away from home on Sabbath afternoons when I was a kid and sweating up a shirt full. What I had to do back then was stop somewhere between court and home, in a stand of trees where no one could see me, sit quietly and dry myself off before going home, lest my sin of Sunday basketbalol be made known. 

Back then, I couldn't watch TV either--until Vince Lombardi came along and ruined the Schaap family Sabbath. Today, my mother, who would have wondered where her son had gone wrong years ago, can likely list last year Packers' draft picks. She wouldn't miss a game for anything. I'm spotten when I say it, I know, but some might even say that, come Sunday afternoon, she watches the Packers religiously. Sorry, Mom.

There are lots of reasons why I find Schulevitz a joy, but finally there's this--even though she claims "the Sabbath" is a "reinforced, temporal structure," she'd just as soon live with its strictures, and even a spot or two of guilt, which I guess isn't the sole province of Calvinists. A few Jews must have it too.

I like that, living in between. I think she's right. I sound like the last of the existentialists maybe, but it seems to me that we've got to find our own way on such things. The dangers are clear: on one side, the parable of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," people so driven by a tradition that they're incapable of thinking about it rationally; and on the other, life without rest and peace and, most importantly, devotion.

Somewhere in between lies the path--or paths--most all of us walk, day to day, and in this new year.

And for the record--Go Pack. It's looking good this season.

See you in church.

6) Take stock of your life every week

You know, when I read this piece of Tish Warren's in the New York Times last Sunday, I couldn't help thinking that her ten meaty New Year's resolutions, fished out from her friends, were worth due consideration. Today, six days in, I can't help thinking I'm a bit over the line--too much of a good thing.

With all due respect to Tim Keller, who has a shining light ministry in the Big Apple and may be the most respected preacher among the professionals in the denomination I'm a part of, the ideas he offers, taking stock, weekly, of how you're doing, is a bit over-the-line. In this case, whether or not Tim Keller does what Tim Keller preaches is a good question because he's not describing his own weekly moral workout, but instead quoting John Newton, an 18th century slave ship captain who suffered a wonderful moral turn-about on the high seas and righted his own ship toward a far more righteous eternal harbor.

Newton, Keller says in Warren's article (we're three deep in piety here) determined he needed to undergo a three-part examination every week. First (and second?), make two lists: "all the mercies, blessings and good things to be thankful for that had happened to him that week. And second, a list of sins — of omission and commission — he had committed against others and God."

Whoa. I can't help thinking that idea is almost demonically Calvinistic because humanly impossible. Seriously, both dang lists could go on forever, right? You're serious about this? 

But there's more: "“The second part was to reflect on the discrepancy between God’s goodness to him and his behavior. This helped him get a refreshed joy in God’s free, undeserved grace."

All of that seems to add up all right, but I don't mind coming clean: I don't know that I'm made of that kind of rigid self-inspection. Cotton Mather used to spend prayers days, all day long on his face on the floor. Impressive, eh? But it's not for me. 

Still, there's more: “The third part was a rededication of life, a refreshing and deepening of our commitment to God and God’s promises.”

Holy smokes. Every week--that kind of intense introspection? Keller's serious? Warren's serious? WOW. 

Others do it. St. Francis probably, any of a thousand monkish pietists. In my own way, I suppose I do something related simply by getting up every morning and trying to tally what's in my mind and heart and soul. But the kind of regimented, no-holes-barred self-evaluation Keller says Bunyan did strikes me as more than a little tedious and even risking some serious self-indulgence. Pardon me for saying I think there are better things to do than spend an hour a week--or whatever--combing through the iniquities of the week gone by.

So I'll pass on John Newton, and I hope that Tim Keller does too. Strikes me that we all have better things to do than ponder our inner moral selves. But then, Keller is a Calvinist, maybe the most popular one in the entire country. More power to him.

I'll pass. 

Luther's most famous line, "Love God and sin boldly," can be easily misunderstood. It's not an invitation to Las Vegas. Still, after reading Tish Warren on Tim Keller on John Newton, I'll channel Luther.

A break--a quick one--from Tish Warren

Because I heard Linda Pasten read her poetry forty years ag0 already, I've got a better-than-ballpark figure of her age in mind when, in my imagination, I see her today, reading this one, "Imaginary Conversation." I'll whisper the truth: "she's not young."

The character of the poem suggests her age--she's "numbering her days," a task undertaken by seniors with some regularity--but so do the poem's incidentals. The last word in this first stanza is a giveaway--"doctors."

You tell me to live each day
as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen
where before coffee I complain
of the day ahead—that obstacle race
of minutes and hours,
grocery stores and doctors.

The two of them are not going off to work; instead, they're measuring their day in coffee spoons, organizing the next 12 hours. Their lives are not flush with meetings or classroom madness, but "grocery stores and doctors."

I hear her. Neither my partner (the word wife has some baggage, I'm told) nor I have severe medical problems. We are, however, getting old, which means things are quite regularly giving out, which, in turn, means more visits to various iterations of the medical profession--foot doctor, eye doctor, dentist. If I needed proof of this poem being about aging/aged people, "doctors" makes the case.

Suddenly the normal morning conversation makes an abrupt change.

But why the last? I ask. Why not
live each day as if it were the first—
all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing
her eyes awake that first morning,
the sun coming up
like an ingénue in the east?

A perfectly logical rejoinder to Psalm 90. Why number our days as if this one--it's just now six o'clock--could be our very last? Something about that exercise seems morbid. These two old farts are readying their morning coffee, the fireplace is on, of course. They're about to start reading op-eds from the NYTimes, when it strikes poet Pastan that imagining the day before them as if it were their own very first day is vastly more exciting--and it is. Think of Eve's first morning, dawn rising out east, she says. 

You grind the coffee
with the small roar of a mind
trying to clear itself. I set
the table, glance out the window
where dew has baptized every
living surface.

Viola!--this "first-day idea" works. Just for a moment, just for the time it takes to grind the coffee, the idea of this day being the very first appears to yield dividends because just outside "the dew has baptized every/living surface."

There, see? Gorgeous. Makes life a wonder, which is a good thing when you're way, way over on the other side. That coffee done yet?

I'm not sure I buy the whole wonderful transformation, but it's a good thought, a nice one, a sweet one, the kind of exercise that has some promise. . .

. . .when you're young.

Linda Pastan is not, and neither am I. 

So let's get serious: who's going to which doctor this morning?

__________________________ 

Linda Pastan's "Imaginary Conversation" appeared in yesterday's Writers Almanac.

5) Engage with the offscreen world first

Old barn, 2002

For maybe fifteen years, I spent an abundance of Saturday mornings out taking photographs of our landscape, a space where, most will say, there ain't exactly a harvest of beauty--you know, "good luck with that." The thing is, if you head out at dawn, Old Sol does this Midas thing, so that sunrise turns just about everything into gold--not long, but I swear it happens.

Broken Kettle Grassland Preserve, 2004

[Okay, maybe not hog confinements, but if you leave Sioux County, at least they're not everywhere, like they are here.]

My Saturday mornings out in the country were therapy, not that I was catatonic or even mildly depressed. They were good for me, good for my soul, as Tish Warren might say, because beauty is soul nourishment. What I discovered, Saturday after Saturday, is the awesome beauty of creation at its most glorious dawning moment.

Rock River, north of Hudson, SD, 2006

Had the Lakota sent missionaries to us, at least one of the doctrines we would have had to memorize is the resolution Andy Crouch offered Tish Warren in that NYTimes op-ed I've been riffing on. He says he makes a point out of going out into the world every morning, specifically before looking at a screen. "Often I go outside just for a few moments," he says. "But as soon as I step outside, I not only find my senses coming alive, I also find myself feeling smaller — a creature in the midst of creation, rather than the god of a tiny glowing world."

I like that.

Plains Indians made a habit of pitching their tipis toward the east so their first step out of bed was into dawn (and, get this: we insisted on bringing them the gospel!). 

Big Sioux River, west of Hawarden, 2008

Andre Crouch says four years practicing devotions that way has been "ridiculously transformative" and has resulted in an Andy Crouch he says is "far more grateful, far less anxious and far less interested in whatever my screens have to tell me that day."

I believe him.

South of Hawarden, 2010

There's nothing outside these sprawling windows beside me right now but inky darkness. A half-dozen deer or a pack of wolves could be spectators, or some fat raccoons could be eyeing me just outside the window--I wouldn't see anything. Dawn comes late right now, as we slowly escape winter solstice's death-like clutches.

But by the time I quit my own early morning screen rituals--what I'm doing right now--it'll be close to the moment dawn spreads its glorious, divine raiment over the land. Some mornings it's blushes from the kind of orange sky from which no one ever can look away (no matter how late they are for work).

Lake Michigan, 2012

You may have noticed I've scattered some pix throughout the post, precisely to do some homage to what Andy Crouch says. He's right. He's so, so right.

Southwest of Hawarden, 2014

This screen's world is mammoth, but what's just outside my door, even in the darkness, is forever bigger.

Just wait. 

Big Sioux River, Hawarden, 2016

Little Sioux River, 2018

Hospers, 2020

4) "Think about the third person"

It's a perfectly blessed idea, and I'm more than a little bamboozled that it seems new to me--and I'm about to celebrate yet another birthday. I should have heard of it before: "Think about the third person."

Tish Harrison Warren's gallery of New Years resolutions in the NY Times last week includes this fourth one, from Rev. Jonathan Mitchican, who cites what he says is a centerpiece of Catholic social teaching, "recognizing that we are all connected as human beings and that our own well-being is tied up with the well-being of others."

If that feels rather Ralph Waldo Emersonian, a bit over the top, "over-soul-ish" transcendental tripe, maybe a little loopy liberal, he adds this: "One small way to live that out is to pause before taking a particular action to think about the third person who will be affected by it." In other words, Father Mitchican says it's not a bad idea to widen your consideration a bit in what you say or do to include not just the person with whom you're communicating, but also some third person who's an earshot away because there are always bystanders. Hence, "think about the third person," that other person.

Makes life more complicated. But then, that's the point.

I don't remember the exact occasion, but once upon a time, Saint Teresa was speaking to some folks, remembering specifically the laggard behavior of the disciplines on the night in which Christ was betrayed. He had pointedly asked them to stay with him during this dark night of his soul, to be there for him should he need them. But, entirely pooped I suppose, they'd all nodded off, leaving the Savior perfectly alone. You'll remember the story, I'm sure, a sad one, the first of many that world-altering weekend.

Mother Teresa described the scene once more, then asked her charges not to fall asleep on the job, not to check out, not to throw in the towel on doing the Lord's work: "Be the one," she told them, "be the one" who is awake.

I remember thinking right then that I should have a cardinal red t-shirt with that line, that demand in bold white print: "Be the one." That's all, just "Be the one."

Saint Teresa didn't mean that little meditation for me. She likely never heard of Iowa. I've spent many hours with Saint Teresa in the last decade or so, and, alas, I've forgotten a ton of what I've learned. But for reasons I'll never quite understand, that one phrase stays with me on an imaginary t-shirt: "Be the one."

Just googled it. Guess what I found?--this:

If they've got it in XL, I'm in. 

Silence

“Praise awaits you, O God, in Zion; 

to you our vows will be fulfilled.” Psalm 65:1

An old, country editor friend of mine, who unreservedly loved the small town in which he’d always lived, once described to me how the great joy of his Sabbath began the moment he parked himself inside the church.

“I love my church,” he told me. “I sometimes sit and look over my people there and my heart fills right up.” It’s the silence before the worship that he claimed to enjoy, the peace, the sense of being there with people he’d known for as long as he could remember, all of them quiet before the Lord. He loved those quiet short moments, he told me.

There’s more to the story. You shouldn’t think he sat down and immediately reached for the Kleenex. “But then,” he said, “sometimes I dislike the whole business bad.”

His preferences remind me of that tireless optimist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who felt some related sensation once he once heard a preacher begin to hold forth, someone who “sorely tempted me to say I would go to church no more.” Around the walls of the place, snow was falling, a gorgeous spectacle Emerson would have called “divine”; the preacher, however, was oblivious. “The snow storm was real, the preacher merely spectral,” Emerson wrote, “and the eye felt the sad contrast in looking at him, and then out of the window behind him into the beautiful meteor of snow.”

Exactly what David means with the first verse of Psalm 65 isn’t clear, I guess, “awaits” being as good a choice as any for a Hebrew word whose literal translation, according to commentators, seems otherwise lost. The NIV footnotes the verb and suggests “befits” may be another possible translation. You choose. Either word offers a unique intent, or so it seems to me. What exactly the scripture means exactly here is probably not at all clear.

In The Treasury of David, Spurgeon throws in some possibilities he’s collected over the years, and lists them with their sources: “God is most exalted with fewest words” (Alexander Carmichael), “Thy praise, O Lord, consists in silence” (Abraham Wright), “Praise without any tumult” (Andrew A. Bonar), all of which make the country editor’s blessed perceptions of an assembled, silent fellowship understandable.

People in our church are generously blessed and do wonderful things, often at the drop of a hat. But our story begins in a break from excessive formalism; and sometimes, to my notions, it tossed the baby with the bathwater. There is no old-fashioned pre-worship silence because we’re progressive so we chat, we fellowship. Silence is over-rated, hence banished.

I’d like to think that David knew what Thomas Carlyle did—and lots of Native people: “Under all speech there lies a silence that is better,” he wrote. “Silence is deep as eternity.”

But then, to take that to heart, me and the country editor better stop writing all these words, words, words.

When we do, when all of us do, we may well be camped in the neighborhood of David’s real intent in this beautiful psalm’s rather untranslatable opening line, which I’d like to think, in one way or another, begs us simply to “be still and know that I am God.” Or something like that.

(And now I’ll stop talking.)

Elegy

We watched him shave–at least I did. I mean, I didn’t stand there gawking like some silly ten-year-old idiot, but when he was up beside the mirror in the crisp morning air, when he’d spread a palm-full of shaving cream, grab his razor from his bag and draw it across his chin, I couldn’t help but wish the years away. I didn’t want to be a kid. I wanted to be his age. Shoot, I wanted to be him at his age. 

Never more so than when he was out on the diamond playing short. He had as much range as I’d ever seen and a wonderful arm. He was a natural–that’s what I remember thinking–fluid covering second on a double play, a smart hitter who didn’t need to broadcast the power he’d already knew he had.

In the cabin at night, he didn’t push God. Young staff thought they could remake a kid with a couple nights of weepy devotions, turn us all into Jesus freaks. Wasn’t going to happen, and we knew that when we took the first step on the bus to Bible camp. I mean, there was the lake and the girls. I looked forward to camp, but not the whole testimony thing. No way. I was no chump. 

But this guy–Bill, his name was–was different. He was in our cabin every night for devotions, and you never once felt as if he was the dentist, looking to fill spiritual cavities. Mostly he talked about himself, not in an proud way, but in a serious way that still had him smiling. Devotions were no pain.

When he pulled on that Calvin College letter jacket and talked about playing ball, he won my heart. I wanted to be what he was–good and kind and not pushy, a guy who could turn a double play and make the kid playing second as much an all-star as he was.

That’s what I remembered from 1960. Name was Bill.

During the summer of 1978, my wife and I rode herd on a bus full of kids from Siouxland, trucked them down to Cary, Mississippi, where most of them taught at a summer Bible school out in the country, while the rest of us did odd jobs. I’ve never been particularly handy, so someone–I don’t know who–sent me into the Center’s library to make sense of the place.

Cary was a CRC Goodwill store. Every last thing was marked with church names: Oskaloosa, Hudsonville, Sioux Center Bethel, Lucas, Boston Square, Third Kalamazoo. Stepladders, cups and saucers, folding chairs (both wooden and steel), pots and pans, and, of course, library books, all hand-me-downs. Promise not to tell, but I stole a few books. I didn’t think Black folks from the Mississippi Delta would be all that anxious to read Rooftops Over Strawtown. Still up stairs in our library. I could return it, I suppose.

We brought maybe 25 kids. A church group from Kalamazoo was there too. One night their pastor led in devotions. The preacher standing beside his table–it slowly dawned on me–was the college kid, Bill, counselor from Bible camp, now pushing forty. I’m not making this up. 

I had enough of a preacher in me to know the Bishop of all our fellowships doesn’t drop in-the-flesh sermons into your lap every day; but right there in Cary, Mississippi, He’d staked out a homily for one or both of us that just needed a little grooming.

I’m the one who told his church members and our kids a night later that their Pastor Bill had been a quiet but significant influence in my life one long-ago summer at Bible camp. “He really was,” I told those kids and those volunteer workers, and “right now your pastor has no idea himself that any of that ever happened.”

Seriously. He didn’t.

I’m not making that up either.

A decade or more later, shortstop Bill Huyser made it into Romey’s Place, a novel of mine, as pretty much the character he’d been, to me at least, during that week at Bible camp.

Calvin Simmons [the name I’d given him in the novel], a college guy on his way to the ministry and a shortstop with the best range I’d ever seen, played counselor for us in the barracks. . .On cool nights, he’d wear his maroon and gold college jacket when he patrolled the grounds, and he looked like just about everything I wanted to be–lean, athletic, sincere and moral.

Some years later–Pastor Bill was likely in his sixties by then–I ran into him somewhere and told him about the novel, told him he didn’t have a starring role but didn’t do badly with the cameo I gave him. I didn’t need to say right then that he’d played a thoughtful role in my life–he already knew that.

And years later, when we’d see each other somewhere in Michigan, he’d be sure to come up and chat a bit. I could tell he was proud of that whole story, the story I’m telling you now, a story I’m unwinding here this morning because I was just told that the Rev. Bill Huyser, 97 years old, died last Tuesday, 70 years of service behind him in the church. Seventy years.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of people can and should eulogize him and do a far better job. I’ve traced through what little I know. To me, once upon a time, he was a cool college jock with a Calvin letter jacket, a shortstop who knew how to talk to kids, a man I watched shave, watched place-hit like a pro, and watched love his guys even when, that year, we got in hot trouble in the girls’ cabins.

I’ll gladly step back and allow those hundreds who knew him better, those whose lives he touched, to tell the stories they remember; but I can’t help thinking there are precious moments when the Bishop of all our fellowships does, in fact, drop sermons and stories, fully fleshed out, into our laps.

I can’t help thinking this long story about a sovereign God’s acute timing is a story Rev. Bill Huyser, the old Calvinist preacher, would be more than happy to hear me tell you this morning. See that smile?

3) Care for the earth in small ways

Ms. Warren's third authority is Kathryn Freeman, a free-lance writer and the co-host of a podcast I know absolutely nothing about: "Melanated Faith." But that Tish Harrison Warren asks for Ms. Freeman's opinion on good, substantial New Year's resolutions commends her greatly.

M. Freeman's suggestion goes like this:

Find one or two small ways to care more faithfully for creation — between last January’s winter storm and the hurricanes in November, climate change continues to disrupt and destroy lives. I want to love my neighbor by being conscious about my use and consumption of the planet. If everyone does something, those small things add up to big things.

I'll soon be 74. I don't think of myself as one of earth's great spoilers, but I can't say that taking good care of the environment has ever been my first priority. I like our new used Tacoma pickup, but it doesn't get anywhere near the mileage I thought it would. I should have checked. But then I don't put on a lot of miles either. That little Tacoma is more of a gas hog than I ever guessed, but, doggone it, I'm not.

Last night I made supper--not a great success, btw--burritos in a sauce I bought in a can, which I opened. Once I did, I tossed the cover in the garbage rather than walk that dinky little thing into the next room just to drop it in the recyclable bin. On the sly, I slipped that little tiny cover into the garbage because I didn't want her to take note of my sin--not that I would have suffered her wrath. She's doesn't harp or carp.

But I know she would have made sure that stupid little top ended up a room away with the recyclables. Not only that, but she wouldn't have been surprised that I tried to slicky-slicky it into the garbage.

Okay, Ms. Warren and Ms. Freeman, you got me here. I don't think of myself as a pig when it comes to the perils of climate change, but I'll come clean: I could, sure as heck, do better.

This year, 2022, I should try.

2) Plant seeds of humility

Paul Lim, a historian of Christianity at Vanderbilt, offered Tish Harrison Warren this resolution for the new year in her New Years NY Times op-ed: Plant seeds of humility by "engaging in a conversation with one who is not part of your political, religious or cultural community" but then added this: "with the intention of learning something from them."

Easy for him to say--maybe even easy for him to do. But if you've put down roots in a small town in Iowa, the garden out back offers limited harvest.

Someone asked me lately about my interest in Native America--where did that originate? I could list a half-dozen answers to that question, but my go-to has been that throughout my adult life, I've been fascinated by the phenomenon of belief. How is it, for example, that millions of people can believe Hillary Clinton runs a sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza joint basement? Why did my father, a lovely Christian man, so determinedly despise Roman Catholics? What prompts any of us to believe in, say, "the virgin birth," or, simply stated, to hang tenaciously on whatever creedal foundations shall not be removed from our confessions? How do we get there, and, once there, why on earth do we stay?

Throughout the west of the late 19th century, something called, "the Ghost Dance," what white folks called, "The Messiah Craze," swept through reservations like a prairie fire. When it did, it scared the bejeebees out of white folks--maybe even my own immigrant great-grandparents, who high-tailed it out of South Dakota in 1890 or so. The Ghost Dance gathered First Nations in huge masses to dance and dance and dance for days and nights on end until, as individuals, they would fall into a swoon or trance and delight in very similar visions, resplendent visions of much- loved old folks returning on a cloud of dust raised from the hooves of buffalo also descending from the sky, returning to emptied prairie. White people would be gone. The Ghost Dance was a perfectly beatific vision of their own dreams. Their worlds were being trampled beneath masses of white folks hell bent on their land, something my own ancestors considered their "manifest destiny." 

In an essay, I once called "the Ghost Dance" a "false religion." When I passed that essay along to a friend, a Cherokee writer named Diane Glancy, a lifelong Christian--Pentecostal, in fact--she told me she admired the work but couldn't help asking what right I had to call the Messiah Craze "a false religion."

Something about all of that--the history and the question itself--leaves me humbled and in awe.

I'm not sure why, but the introduction our preacher gave to the Lord's Supper last Sunday was flat-out stunning. I wasn't the only one so moved. There was simply something astounding about how intimately he brought us to the table. I have taken communion a thousand times or more, but something about how he made the bread turn to the body of Christ more mysteriously, more magically, than it ever, ever had before.

He said a number of things, but what stuck with me immediately was the idea that as we lined up before the table and awaited the elements, there was, behind us, a cloud of witnesses, not only those who that Sunday partook, but also millions of others who had taken communion for 2000 years. Just for a moment, I saw the heavens open for the old ones and felt once more the deep reach of my friend's criticism--"what right do you have to call the Ghost Dance is a false religion?"

For a moment, I could feel the desire that fed the faith of Native people throughout the west. For a moment, I'd become a Ghost dancer, a precious, beautiful moment I trust I will treasure deeply and not quickly forget.

I don't know if this year I'll be able to "plant seeds of humility" the way that Paul Lim advises, but I know for sure how to be humbled. What I need to do here, in the place where I live, is simply to drive west. 

Trust me, that's a new year's resolution in safe-keeping.

___________________ 

The Del Iron Cloud Ghost Dance drawing (above) pictures Wovoka, the Paiute, who envisioned the Ghost Dance. The dancers are wearing their ghost shirts and dresses. To the left are the old ones, returning from the Spirit World to their loved ones, as are, of course, the buffalo in the center. 

1) "Take Time to Reflect"

"I accomplished zero percent of my New Year’s resolutions last year," says Tish Harrison Warren in yesterday's NY Times. "I’m obviously no sage of discipline."

I had to smile--it's an inviting first line. I don't know that I've ever sat down and written out bona fide New Years Resolutions, which means, of course, that I've never kept them or broke them but doesn't mean I'm guilt-free. But that opening line got me grinning, and my life partner (I'm trying to be politically correct) is a big Tish Warren fan, so I read the piece and came away with an idea.

What Tish Warren does in her New Year's op-ed is gather ideas from people she likes and respects, as if to say, "here's a list even a woman who's no "sage of discipline" might use to harness her ambitions in the year of our Lord 2022.

Here's what she picked up:

1) Take time to reflect

Jen Pollock Michel, author of “A Habit Called Faith” and “Surprised by Paradox” (no, I haven't read them) claims she's been noting a daily reflection in what she calls a "pandemic journal," and loves the exercise: "It's the single best thing I've done over the last two years." That, my friends, is high praise.

Somewhere behind me in the cupboard is a disk labeled "Letters to Mom." Every once in a while, when I'm searching for something else, I run across it and am reminded that for the last fifteen years of her (and Dad's) life, I wrote them--and eventually just her--most every Sunday morning.

This blog has been chugging along since 2006, when I stopped doing a daily Thanksgiving journal (that was really good for me, but you do run a little thin after while), and took a running shot at a blog.

Honestly, I'm not about to read weekly notes to my mom nor a couple thousand blog posts. Furthermore, when I'm dead and gone I don't expect my kids  will be interested either. 

What I will say is this: I don't regret doing any of it. I'm not about to suggest you and yours should take up blogging or journaling or even keeping track of lame New Year's Resolutions, but when I look back on my life (sounds foreboding, but it comes easily to someone my age), I can't and won't say that all the time I dedicated to daily blogging/journaling was a big mistake. In so many ways it was good for me, and, the old guy says hesitatingly, still is.

I do think often about quitting. I regularly run up close to shutting things down, and then I hear from someone somewhere who says they appreciated the blog post about whatever, and I tell myself that even if I'm nothing but a selfish blogger--doing this journaling only for myself--for me at least it ain't entirely a waste of time.

So, Tish Harrison Warren and Jen Pollock Michel, that's my two cents' worth on journaling.

But here's an authentic New York prediction: in 2022, somewhere along the line, I'll give up the daily grind. Not today or tomorrow, but sometime.

Maybe.

[Tomorrow: Plant Sees of Humility]

______________

And if you're asking yourself what on earth the picture up top has to do with anything, you've got a right. I had to take some pics for the local museum last night, and decided I just love this one. She's a mannikin, of course, so my love is on the up and up; but the whacko Dutch hat, and the old sailor sort of fuzzily composing a background--I just like it. This year I should get out more with the camera! There's a resolution.

What's ahead in the classroom?

Let me admit before I begin that even though I spent forty years behind a podium in a classroom, I don't have a clue about the headline issues  in education right now. Covid has altered most everything. It's made on-line teaching vastly more do-able, but at the same time it's made everyone see and experience its limitations. While it may offer benefits to some students, with good teaching what goes on in a classroom is impossible to duplicate on line.

With that caveat out of the way--I honestly don't know what I'm talking about--let peer into my crystal ball and forward some predictions about education in the year of our Lord 2022. Here's my take on what I don't know much about.

1) School boards will continue to be "nationalized." It would be lovely if Covid simply disappeared after the latest mutant, but it's not likely to die any time soon, which means that the madness surrounding masks and vaccinations will continue. The sides are so deeply entrenched and heavily armed that barring bodies being burned in the streets, things are not going to change until Trump disappears. Don't look for that to happen either. To mask or not to mask? Good luck with that one. We're dealing with fanaticism. Draw up your sword and buckler.

2) Teacher shortages will become--if they're not already--deadly. There will be more early retirements and the national average for young teachers staying in the business will continue to shrink. I'm not sure what's in store for educational programs in colleges because it's almost inconceivable that school boards look for qualified teachers under the old guidelines. More untrained teachers will have to be hired simply to fill classrooms. There's a silver lining to all of this, of course: just as wages for teaching substitutes, now, has skyrocketed, salaries, for those who stay in, will increase substantially. They'll have to.

3) Right wing crazies will continue to scream and swear about Critical Race Theory (CRT), even though there really hasn't been nor will be some clear definition of what's as evil Tucker Carlson claims it is. After the Republican win in Virginia's governor's race, the whackos will, like some mad chihuahua, sink their teeth into the issue and fight like heck. To Kill a Mockingbird was recently voted the best novel of the last 100 years. If the intent of all that horror about CRT is to keep white kids from feeling guilt, then some teachers, at least, will think twice about assigning literature like that novel. Can white kids read To Kill a Mockingbird and not reflect on what white folks have done--and continue to do--to people of color? I don't think so. 

4) Race resentment will, sadly enough, continue, as more and more white people begin to fear a future in which this country will be home to more people of color. A recent Iowa lottery features a mixed race couple. It's just not that long ago that miscegenation was a crime. As long as big-time commentators on FOX continue to bang that drum, racial resentment, insidious as it is, will continue to surface, making teaching about race--like teaching about LGBTQ--a mine field.

5) As they have for a century now, experts will create conference agendas that tout sparkling new innovations in classroom strategies. Something new will roll in as if it were tidal, and administrators will find a way to surf on it, only to discover what we've always known, that the most successful classrooms will be run by the most successful teachers. 

6) And then this, blessedly. In every school in every community under the sun really magical moments will occur, moments so wonderful that they take the words out of a teachers' mouths, moments so life-changing that few kids leave the classroom untouched. Isn't it wonderful to know that despite Covid and CRT and angry, snotty parents, moments of sheer beauty will happen, not because those moments were outlined a page of objectives, but because what happens in a classroom is a live thing that rarely goes exactly where it's supposed to but sometimes--just sometimes--goes where no man or woman has gone before.

You're a parent? Pray, really, that such things happen in your son or daughter's classroom. In 2022, they do and they will, thank the Lord.  

Sunday Morning Meds--Mockers

January, Lake Michigan

“Blessed is the man. . .who does not. . .

sit in the seat of mockers.” Psalm 1:1

Somewhere in his work, the novelist John Gardner tells a story about his being the first to come on an accident, somewhere a long ways from anywhere. The driver, a woman, was alive but incapable of getting out of what was left of her pick-up.

The story he tells is not about the heroic efforts of the ambulance squad or the final dramatic moments of the woman’s life. The sad story he tells is about himself. What he confesses to is a certain species of intellectualism pandemic among people who, like me, write. He tells the story because he can’t forget his own pathetic realization, right then and there, that, for a moment at least, he found himself more interested in the details of the bloody scene—as material for his own writing—than he was in the woman’s own condition.

His heartlessness was a sin not of the flesh but of the head.

As a writer, I know his sin; but I also know that sin because I’m aging, and the older I become, the less “involved” I feel. I may feel more pain from people’s problems, but today I am far less driven by a sense of community than I once was. But then, it seems clear to me that I’m needed far less than I once was.

And I’m simply less passionate. Today, what excites me more than principles is trying to understand why people choose them—and who does. I feel more and more like John Gardner at the scene of that accident, a bystander, a rubberneck. Life is happening all around me, and I’m just fine on a Lay-Z-Boy. Maybe it’s safer—who knows? I even walk more cautiously, afraid of falling.

But I know this, too—that because it’s easier for me to sit back and watch other people’s windy passions, it’s also far easier to ridicule them. Snipers never march; they hide. I’m an armchair quarterback who knows all the right plays to call.

I would be more comfortable if Psalm 1:1 described the sinners we shouldn’t be seated beside as scoundrels rather than scoffers (KJV), or murderers rather than mockers (NIV)? I mean, here in the small town where I live, fleeing the company of serial killers is not hard work. Gangsters are, for me at least, far easier to avoid than scoffers, especially when I am one.

I’m a college prof and a writer, and I’m getting old, and that lethal combination—trumped by my own fallenness—makes scoffing far too easy, even in church, where it doesn’t take much for me to ascend some lonely point on the wings of own estimable wisdom and sneer at the silliness.

I wince to hear King David pick out scoffers and mockers as most unfit for the company of the righteous. Wish it weren’t so. I rather like poking fun of other people and their silly passions.

But then, maybe that’s the point.