Lawrence Raab's "A Friend's Umbrella"

 A Friend’s Umbrella by Lawrence Raab Ralph Waldo Emerson, toward the end of his life, found the names of familiar objects escaping him. He wanted to say something about a window, or a table, or a book on a table. But the word wasn't there, although other words could still suggest the shape of what he meant. Then someone, his wife perhaps, would understand: "Yes, window! I'm sorry, is there a draft?" He'd nod. She'd rise. Once a friend dropped by to visit, shook out his umbrella in the hall, remarked upon the rain. Later the word umbrella vanished and became the thing that strangers take away. Paper, pen, table, book: was it possible for a man to think without them? To know that he was thinking? We remember that we forget, he'd written once, before he started to forget. Three times he was told that Longfellow had died. Without the past, the present lay around him like the sea. Or like a ship, becalmed, upon the sea. He smiled to think he was the captain then, gazing off into whiteness, waiting for the wind to rise. From The History of Forgetting. © 2009 Lawrence Raab published by Penguin Poets .  I'd met Uncle George only once or twice before. A quiet, modest man, he struck me as about perfectly outfitted to be a good high school guidance counselor, which is how he'd spent all his working days. After the Second World War, he'd headed out to Nebraska, married, then left with his bride for sunny California. I'd anticipated our visit. I remembered him as someone with whom I could hold a conversation without either getting in trouble for sounding off or dying inside for keeping the vitriol in. Uncle George abided in safe territory. But there were no politics that morning because there was no talk at all. Tall and thin as always, he stood beside his wife like a unlikely lap dog, paid attention, it seemed, only to her. His smile was not occasioned by either me or his niece from Arizona, but it was there just about all the time. He was entirely at home with our being there, whoever we were. He smiled frequently, more widely when some passing fancy animated his consciousness. He was a victim of Alzheimer's, the first such victim I'd ever been around; and it was eerie, scary even because he was not who he'd been. He'd not been the kind of person who has to be at the very heart of things, or a man whose sheer presence fills the room. But neither had ever been the puppy he'd become, like a child waiting for his wife to tell him to get into the car or to come out again. What was obvious was that some routine functioning simply wasn't. Lawrence Robb's "A Friend's Umbrella" is a portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the 19th century's most famous philosopher/poet/abolitionist, at a time when he was no longer capable of arriving anywhere near to what he once was. His forgetfulness slowly but surely took aim on the entirety of his consciousness, and he forgets just about everything he isn't considering in what's left of his psyche.  There's this at least. What I remember most of Uncle George on that last visit is what appeared to be his peace of mind. He showed no discomfort whatsoever with having to be instructed into just about every move. If he was no longer captain of his own ship, he was at least comfortable standing on the deck and taking note of the lovely waters all around "gazing off into the whiteness, waiting for the wind to rise." I've been an Emerson loyalist for all of my professional life. Somehow, to think of him that way, at that time, like Uncle George, offers some relief.   

Me and the bloody moon

 

Don't I wish. 

Nope. Not mine. Do so wish it was.

The night was cool and gorgeous, and the Blood Moon was to be witnessed at a respectable time--not 3:00 a.m., but, well, bedtime.

I don't fault the camera, but the user's a loser who doesn't take the time to know how to do what the camera can. Like my computer. My guess is I know about 5% of what this desktop can do. I'm happy with what I have, and I don't want to confuse myself to any worse degree than I am already confused. So, just don't go there. The result is, I don't have any shots like the one above.

Here's what I have.

Looks yellow, gold maybe--almost orange--that'd be fitting for the little city down the road. But here's our friend just up from the horizon (see the wires, the streetlight, and the vague form of some construction stuff across the tracks from our place. For a rank amateur, not bad, but no sight of blood.

Cleared of all earthly attachments, this one. Kinda' cool. Yellow moon, not red. 

Some of the homage to Orange City fading as Mr. Moon ascends into a sky that's ever-darkening. 

Here's where the rank amateur shows up. What's recorded here is the first assault of the earth's shadow, like an acid wash over the left bottom flank. A good shooter would finagle things so that the moon's flora and fauna wouldn't be washed out--a good shooter. 

Better, but at this point I'm almost ready to throw in the towel, go in the house, and, tomorrow morning, look for beauties like the one at the top of the page.  And then--I don't know why--things began looking up (bad unintended pun). 

As the shadow mounts, the camera seems, almost totally on its own, to want to show me the whole picture. Some of the moon's detail reappears, and we're little more than half way through the eclipse. And now we're well into this, but, as yet, no blood. 

And yet, but a sliver.

And then, finally, failure. When the moon turned (almost) beet red, I got nothing, except this--the only shot that even suggests a red moon.

And it's from my phone. 

Maybe next time. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Forever

 

“the Lord is enthroned as King forever” Psalm 29:10

Yesterday, in an airport, a friend of mine and I were charmed by the members of a high school choir returning from a tour in San Francisco, where they’d sung at a number of places, ate fortune cookies and sourdough bread, and did, they said, all kinds of other fun things. Coming home, those kids were both tired and pumped, as only high school kids can be.

And they were remarkably talkative. We asked some young women if the whole bunch had behaved. They said yes, except for some boys—“but you know how guys are.” We asked them if there were any tour romances. Only one.

“Maybe that’s okay,” I quipped. “After all, it’s probably good not too many of you left your hearts in San Francisco.”

They half-smiled at the old guy. Okay, it wasn’t a line that would land me a job writing comedy, but I was trying to be catchy. Trying. At that moment, my friend, a guy half my age, looked at me and winced. “I don’t think they got that one,” he said.

I felt like donating myself to a museum.

Once I reach, say, 69 instead of 59, I’ll be better adjusted to the thud my jokes create. It never dawned on me that those kids might not know a song I thought imprinted on the American psyche. I simply assumed we shared a world. We don’t.

I remember exactly the last time I played basketball. I was pushing thirty. That night, I took a pass from a guard, came across the lane as pumped as those high school kids, and jumped up off my left foot to take a kind of baby hook. But something strange happened. My body, like a sandbag, didn’t respond. My mind had me swooping through the air. My body had no notion of the same, and I never stepped on the court again.

That’s the way I felt yesterday at the gate. The quip never got off the ground, even though it never dawned on me that I wouldn’t score.

Finiteness is something I’m coming to understand far better as I get older. I know it physically, and have for a long time. I know it mentally: words don’t come as easily. I know it culturally: my jokes are starting to land as flat as my grandfather’s. I know it generationally: my college students say things I simply don’t understand, the way my own parents once didn’t understand me.

I don’t have the power to bend my mind around the word “forever.” But I know what David aims to tell us in this verse: that God’s knees don’t buckle. He doesn’t forget where he parked his car and hasn’t nodded off when he shouldn’t have.

He was—and he is—King of creation. He is infinite. He is forever.

Last night that high school choir offered a couple hundred fellow passengers something of their estimable repertoire as we sat on the tarmac and waited for a thundershower to pass, as God almighty held us in his hands, as he has, and does, and will.

The Lord is enthroned as King forever. His kingdom was, and is, and forever shall be—world without end. Without fade, without end, and no bad jokes.

That’s a place to leave your heart. Not to be forgotten, ever, in sunshine or rain.

Small Wonders--Anthemn from the Mud

LDS Grand Encampment--Council Bluffs, IA

Lest you wonder, no, I'm not LDS, nor have I ever been, despite the protestations of some of my high school students a half-century ago who would have liked to get me in. But I am something of a fan, at least some aspects of the Mormon story. (Mountain Meadows Massacre, not so.)

Yesterday, I was told, was the birthday of William Clayton, who essentially invented the modern odometer on the long Mormon trek from Illinois to Utah. He did so by actually numbering the revolutions the old wagon took in one mile, then created a gadget to count the miles, thereby making life easier on him.

It's a sweet story, but William Clayton deserves to be remembered for more than numbering his miles, as if they were days. He also  wrote one of the most beloved hymns in the LDS repertoire, "Come, Come Ye Saints." Some years ago, I wrote that story. You can hear it if you click on the url below. 

But in case you would rather read it, here it is. Honestly, it's one my favorites.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Let’s get the objectionable stuff out on the table, okay? William Clayton had nine wives. Not nine lives, like the Tom catting around out back, but nine wives. William Clayton was a Mormon, baptized in his native Great Britain, a man of some rank among the saints, a man who worked alongside none other than Joseph Smith the Prophet.

Some folks like to say that it was Brigham Young who pressed William Clayton’s poetic talents into service, proposing that Clayton, a man well-versed in verse, pen a new hymn the pilgrims on their long, hard trek to the Great Salt Lake could sing in renewed dedication to their arduous task. Some folks like to say that, but fact-checking Mormon historians say it’s likely not true.

What’s more likely is that William Clayton got the news one night right here in Iowa, that back in Illinois, his wife—that would be his fourth wife, history tells us—had given birth back to a healthy, bouncing baby boy. Eventually, he would father—hold on to your chair—43.  

He didn’t take nine wives because he was any more randy than any other mid-19^th saints—Mormons called themselves saints so I’m not being sarcastic; he took nine wives because he listened to the Prophet, who, back then, okayed polygamy and practiced it heartily himself. Clayton was a “recorder,” a church administrator, who lived by every word the prophet ordered.

That’s the objectionable stuff. If, like me, you’re not Mormon, try, as I will, to put it behind you.

Imagine, for a moment, what Omaha, a pioneer village in 1846, must have thought when, as if overnight, a suburb of 800 frame homes went up, an incredible project large enough to house 2500 Mormon pilgrims. There’s nothing there to mark the spot anymore, but a temple and a museum still grace the western hills above the Missouri River, where you can hear the incredible story and pick up a Book of the Mormon at the same time—no charge.

Seriously, this Winter Camp was not to be believed.

But William Clayton sits at the heart of things here, the church Recorder. The Iowa spring in 1846 was anything but—cloudy, rainy, cold, constant wintry mix falling all around as a couple thousand pilgrims, en masse, moved across those rolling prairie hills on their way to the Missour. Mud like you wouldn’t believe. Wagons slipped and slid when they weren’t stuck fast. Handcarts turned the men and women lugging them into beasts of burden for six or seven miles a day at best. Spring blizzards swept discouragement into the entire woebegone enterprise. It’s impossible to imagine the hardship.

Brigham Young had cause to ask Clayton to put his pen to work. The saints were suffering, dying, and Utah was an unimaginable half continent away. Clayton himself was ill with discouragement: "I have been sick again all day especially towards night,” the recorder scribbled in his diary. “I was so distressed with pain it seemed as though I could not live."

But then, this:

This morning Ellen Kimball came to me and wishes me much joy. She said Diantha has a son. I told her I was afraid it was not so, but she said Brother Pond had received a letter. . .he read that she had a fine fat boy on the 30th,. . . but she was very sick with ague and mumps. Truly I feel to rejoice at this intelligence but feel sorry to hear of her sickness. . . .

And then this: “This morning I composed a new song—'All is well.' I feel to thank my heavenly father for my boy and pray that he will spare and preserve his life and that of his mother and so order it so that we may soon meet again.”

Look, I’m not nominating William Clayton to dethrone Meredith Wilson as the Hawkeye Music Man. But anyone who’s ever listened to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir go through “Come, Come Ye Saints,” in all its regal glory can’t help but believe that what William Clayton created—“recorded”—his boots thick with sticky Iowa mud, can’t help but believe that hymn a miracle and a triumph.

And it was penned in dismal weather and profound discouragement, not all that far from here. Not all that far at all.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Here's the url, if you'd rather listen:

 https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2017-07-26/anthem-from-the-mud 

And should you wish to hear this hymn from the mud, here's the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's "illustrated" version. It's really something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ia3gYSvG8M 

Mr. Republican, Charley Hoeven

Sits out there rather comfortably, not in the least ostentatious or showy, not a bit of arrogance in style or positioning or size. I can't help thinking the stone--and even where it stands--purposefully fits and suits the old guy it remembers, a true, old-fashioned pol. U. S. Representative Charles Hoeven, from Sioux County, represented what was then the Eighth District of the state with very little showmanship. Seems to me showmanship held no quarter in his character.

In today's splashy political climate, he wouldn't stand a chance, unless, perhaps, he'd take on the school board for a library book about lesbian parents. That would notch up fan appeal. But Charley wouldn't. Charley was school board president. 

Born in 1895, he was the child of a mixed marriage. His father's people were immigrant Dutch, his mother's immigrant German. He spent his boyhood in Hospers, a village on the seam. When he served, he did so in a fashion that suitably represented all, I'm sure. For forty years he held elective office, in D. C. from 1942-1965. Eleven times he was voted back into the House of Representatives in our nation's capital. Eleven times. Just about made him an institution. He had to have been trusted. Some did call him "Mr. Republican."

That stone up top is his. You have to look close to see the small print below the name. Let me bring it up a bit.

The truth is, you could miss that bottom line. It's light and small and positioned as if it were a footnote. Who knows? For Charlie Hoeven, maybe all those years of service in Washington were little more.

Here's his record, straight from government files. Take a deep breath.

HOEVEN, Charles Bernard, a Representative from Iowa; born in Hospers, Sioux County, Iowa, March 30, 1895; attended the public schools and Alton (Iowa) High School; State University of Iowa at Iowa City, B.A., in 1920 and from its law department, LL.B., 1922; was admitted to the bar in 1922 and commenced practice in Alton, Iowa; during the First World War served as a sergeant, Company D, Three Hundred and Fiftieth Infantry, Eighty-eighth Division, and with the Intelligence Service, First Battalion, in England and France; county attorney of Sioux County, Iowa, 1925-1937; member of the State senate 1937-1941, serving as president pro tempore 1939-1941; temporary and permanent chairman of Iowa Republican State Judicial convention in 1942; delegate to each Iowa State Republican convention from 1925 to 1970 and chairman in 1940; delegate to Republican National Convention, 1964; elected as a Republican to the Seventy-eighth and to the ten succeeding Congresses (January 3, 1943-January 3, 1965); chairman, Republican Conference (Eighty-ninth Congress); was not a candidate for renomination in 1964 to the Eighty-ninth Congress; vice president of savings bank; resided in Orange City, Iowa, where he died November 9, 1980; interment in Nassau Township Cemetery, Alton, Iowa.

Character is more than a string of name plates. Once, in December of 1917, Cpl. Charley Hoeven came home on leave. The Alton Democrat wrote up the story this way:

Corporal Charley Hoeven spent a few days at home here during the week. He is a stalwart looking soldier. He put on twenty pounds weight at Camp Dodge and says the boys have every thing they need in the line of eats. He gave an interesting talk at C. E. meeting Sunday evening in the Presbyterian church.

From a distance, that note may well say as much about Charley Hoeven as his string of political offices.

His days in Washington ended abruptly. Mr. Republican got blind-sided by a gang of young turks who were bound and determined to usher in a new, much-loved, ex-Big Ten footballer named Gerald R. Ford to top leadership, where he'd lead the young guys and not the old fogies. In total secrecy, those young turks pulled off a coup that must have had old Charley's head a-spinning. He was a veteran all right; he was 67 years old. The voters kept him in office, but his party gave him a first-class ticket into retirement. 

A Sioux City thoroughfare is named after him--you'd have to see his name on the signs to know it. That street follows the channel of the Floyd River, which is only right for good old Charley, who probably always thought of home as close by.

His papers leave a historical record, lots of pictures of him with the muck-a-mucks of his day; but if you'd like to visit him anytime soon, you need to pedal down a country road a mile south of Orange City, then go east to Nassau Township's little patch of cemetery. Take the east path in and look for his grave on your right. You'll find it, I'm sure, even though, like Charley, the stone is unassuming.

Charley Hoeven didn't make headlines, like Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Green, but that's okay. Today, you can't help but think that a little hard-working reserve sounds like a very good thing, in Hospers, Alton, and D. C. 

For Shirley and Rudy

The Risk of Returning came out several years ago, and when it did I sent out a review of the novel to Goodreads, this review. I'm bringing it back because last week I received word from Rudy that Shirley, his wife for more than half a century had passed away. They were mightily inseparable. It's difficult for me to think of Rudy alone, just as it would have been hard to imagine Shirley by herself at some of the old writers parleys the Nelsons and I attended annually.

Together--impossible as that may sound--the two of them wrote and published The Risk of Returning some years ago now. I really loved it and said so. It's a story about mission work that seemed to me--and still does--fair and truthful. Cross-cultural mission work is neither as draconian and some progressives would love to maintain, nor as glorious and pure as doctrinaire evangelicals would have us believe. 

I'm bringing back the old review today in her honor. 

She was a wonderful Christian woman, a greatly-beloved wife to Rudy, and a fine, fine writer.

~  * ~ * ~ * ~

Just a short chapter into Rudy and Shirley Nelson's richly furnished international thriller, The Risk of Returning, Ted Peterson, who calls himself a "lost child," is on the streets of Guatemala City, having undertaken a trip "home" to the place where he was born and reared. He's gawking, a typical tourist maybe, when he spots a young kid, "walking quickly, close to the buildings, head down, shoulders heaving, as if he had been running."

A moment later the kid is gone, disappeared, simply not there. The incident, hardly remarkable, begins and ends in half a page. That kid's appearance and disappearance is a key to the wherewithal of this complicated novel, an event that seems a trifle but will, for certain, come back to haunt us. People disappear in The Risk of Returning; they're gone suddenly, almost as if they weren't there at all, and the effect is eerie.

But the Nelson's new novel is, first of all, a search for father. Teddy's parents were missionaries who sent him back to the States for boarding school once he became old enough to begin to understand what was going on around him, once his own life became threatened by forces he never understood or even recognized. He barely remembers his father, who never returned from Guatamala, died there a short time after Teddy himself was sent away.

He undertakes this age-old quest not simply because he doesn't know much about his father, but also because he's run afoul of meaning in his own life. His marriage is whimpering to a sad close, his career is in a stall, his life seems purposeless. He returns to Guatemala, hoping, most pointedly, to locate his father's grave. He has no suspicions, no designs on discovering what lies behind mysteries or what happened. He's not sleuthing, but he is looking for some kind of cure to whatever it is that ails him.

Halfway through the novel he finds his father's grave, the substantial purpose of the trip. What's left of the story opens up to much greater value, even though he wasn't looking for it. What remains of the novel is the untangling his father's life.

But there's more. The Risk of Returning is also a love story. Teddy takes a week-long language-immersion course once he arrives, where he meets his teacher, a tough, tall widow who was born in Milwaukee, but became a Guatemalan when she married a native, a good man. Catharine O'Brien, even more deeply bruised than he is, isn't on the lookout for another mate--and neither is Teddy; but the two of them find each other inescapably and intimately linked by the horrors of a civil war whose battle lines can't be traced on a map.

A secret war, a wicked war, is being waged all around them. All too frequently, men and women the government doesn't trust disappear from busy streets or are murdered in out-of-the-way rural villages. Many are tortured and then killed, sometimes in car wrecks that aren't accidents at all. Amid the bloodshed, Teddy and Catharine, almost against their will, fall in love. Returning is a love story.

But it's also an international thriller that takes surprisingly little background to enter. Not long into the novel a reader feels the maze all around, even though it's set meticulously a quarter century ago in a Central American country few of us know much about. We're there in a moment because the plot's own generosity creates a setting so fraught with danger.

Strangely enough, it's also a novel about mission work, about Christians, about work in and for the Kingdom. On the plane to Guatemala, Ted Peterson is accosted by a pushy, well-meaning American kid in a t-shirt that proclaims "Gringo for Jesus." The kid asks him where his soul is bound if the jet they're in should crash--you know, one of those kids and one of those questions. Still, that moment keys a major theme, not because Ted is determined himself to bring Guatemalan souls to Christ, but because he is himself a lost soul who needs badly to find his way in the darkness.

I like Ted Peterson because he's neither the true believer nor the the angry soul whose mother and father loved the Lord so deeply that they had nothing left to give their children. He is not a tortured MK, but he is an MK, have no doubt. He is not searching for God or looking to bury him; he simply wants to know what he missed when his father died a thousand miles away. What he discovers is father's martyred selflessness, the greatest gift he or anyone could offer those he loved and served, the Mayan people.

Really, in its own subtle way, The Risk of Returning defines mission work in a way that's a blessed antidote to the poison of The Poisonwood Bible. Like Bo Caldwell's City of Tranquil Light, it commends mission work by redefining it in its broadest, its most comprehensive and most dangerous way.

A warning: only attentive readers need apply. I'm not kidding: the Nelson's have created a page-turner in Returning, but you turn pages quickly at your peril. Read too fast and you'll miss the labyrinth they meticulously create. In addition to everything else, Returning is a murder mystery so intricately engineered it should come packaged with its own GPS.

And don't miss this either. The Risk of Returning is a political novel, not at its base because at its foundation it's so much else. But don't miss the fact that the political right and left play roles here, that Godless communism often seems a straw man and the Christian right, linked inexorably with fervent patriotism, is anything but heavenly.

Guatemala has long been a passion for Rudy and Shirley Nelson, who years ago funded and accomplished their own documentary on politics and anthropology in the region. Writers might well ask themselves an obvious question: how on earth could the two of them write a novel together--and stay married? The answer to that question may well be that they've been married for over sixty years.

What the two of them have created together is, first of all, a terrific read, but--and I say this as a believer--more importantly, a story of grace, given and received. I really loved The Risk of Returning. 

No easy answers

As harrowing as it has been to be a Democrat in Sioux County, Iowa, things got worse last week with the leak of a Supreme Court document by Samuel Alito and underwritten by a Trump-heavy majority of that court, a document that essentially tosses Roe v. Wade under the bus. If there is one political issue that most garners evangelical "amens" here (and elsewhere), it's abortion. How can anyone be "pro-abortion?" people ask. It's a rhetorical question. 

The simple answer is, no one is--or at best, very few are. 

My own views of the abortion horrors are created in large part by an incident in 2008, during the Presidential campaign of Barack Obama, when my grandson, a first-grader, climbed up into my lap as I was typing downstairs and announced, as if out of nowhere that Obama was a baby-killer. 

I have an idea where he got that from, but I don't think it wasn't his parents. It almost certainly wasn't his teachers, so the line likely came from kids--you know, they're talking on the playground and one of them pipes up the line he carried into my basement office, the line he repeated, categorically, while sitting in my lap. It's really easy to say.

I don't blame him or anyone for telling him that. I haven't been harboring political hatred for all these years either. I can't forget that moment because what he told me that morning, in a pint-sized fit of self-righteousness, is that Presidential candidate Obama killed babies, rung their necks, threw them in a some foul pit, purposefully and without remorse ended the lives of little tiny babies. That had to be the way his five-year-old mind saw the problem.

He was being prophetic, carrying along the most sordid sense of what is and what has been one of the most singularly difficult moments of any woman's life--the realization that she has begun to carry life into the world that she hasn't chosen to bear. 

"Obama is a baby killer" is a quick and simple answer to a problem that has none. It makes the pro-choicer evil, a murderer, a beast, and all who oppose him, thereby, lovely, God-fearing saints. 

As a nation and a culture, we have to find a way to deal with the problem. If a fetus is a human being and abortion is murder, then, throughout history, many more young mothers should have been locked up in prison for murder. Even in today's bogey-man climate, the most ardent pro-lifers don't advocate putting mothers in jail. But why not? They are just as guilty, if not more, than any evil abortionist. Extremes are ever-present in a problem this complex.

Seems to me that in our bifurcated politics, both sides have to give. Progressives can't allow viable babies to be aborted, even though "a woman's right to choose," without limitations, seems sacred to some. 

On the other hand, pro-lifers have to stop claiming that a three-minute-old fetus has all the rights and privileges of an American citizen, or that Obama, or any other pro-choicer (during his presidency, by the way, the rate of abortions in America actually dropped) is the baby-killer my grandson's first-grade understanding colored him to be.

How can that sort of compromise happen? I don't know, but I doubt any good will come from Alito's manifesto, hyperbolic writing that quotes a Puritan judge from Salem as a source, a man who sentenced women accused of witchcraft to the gallows.

If we're going to figure out a way to live with the rights of babies and the rights of women, cooler heads will need to prevail. 

I don't look for that to happen soon. In places like Sioux County, Iowa, my grandson's answer to the dilemma will prevail, because calling people baby-killers is the easiest, the most efficient way to deal with a question that has no easy answers. 

 

The prayer in the snow

It's not that Patton was a good man--that's not why his troops loved him. He wasn't. It's not that he was even all that successful. By the time of the Bulge, he'd lost tanks and half-tracks and all kinds of military equipment. As Generals went in the war effort, Patton was, well, expensive.

And, Lord knows, he wasn't nice. Ike railed at him for slapping troops for being war weary. He fully believed he had only to slap them out of their doldrums and they'd pick up rifles and start humming "America the Beautiful." Ike even set him aside for a while for being so unfeeling. 

But the Germans feared him more than any other Allied general, and his troops loved him. By the time Hitler launched the offensive that would begin the largest and bloodiest battle in American military history, The Battle of the Bulge, the German Wehrmacht was well aware that it was Patton leading his troops on the northern end of the huge offensive they created in almost perfect silence. 

Patton was ready--he was always ready, but there was a problem, a problem Hitler loved and Patton hated. Thick, overcast skies dumped rain and snow all over the hundred-mile front, pea-soup fog nullifying vastly superior Allied air power. As long as skies were quilted, Hitler's madcap plan to take back Antwerp moved west as planned.

Now, the word is--and I'm not sure it's true--a man I once knew and had for a professor of theology, a little man with a powerful body, was once asked by Patton's entourage if he'd act as the general's own personal chaplain, which would have been, or so it's said, a real honor and would have kept him out of harm's way in the middle of the war. The story goes that this CRC preacher turned down General Patton, and the reason was, according to legend, that Patton cussed and swore in such decibels that the CRC guy knew he couldn't live with that level of profanity. Turned him down. Turned down General George Patton.

Now Chaplain O'Neill didn't share the horrors, so Patton, sure that his men would require divine help to wipe up the skies, asked Chaplain O'Neill to get God on their side. Reportedly, O'Neill told him it was going to take a pretty thick rug for that level of petitioning. Patton told him he didn't care if it took a damned flying carpet-- in those words, people say.

O'Neill reminded him gently that chaplains weren't in the business of praying so other human beings would die. Patton told him there were other jobs available should he want them. And then, "I want a prayer," he said. The man spoke only in commands.

O'Neill obliged thusly, creating this simple prayer: 

Almighty and merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for battle.

That's it--that's the prayer the chaplain scratched out. 

The great General Patton loved it and--I'm serious--ordered thousands of copies to be printed and passed out to troops who were then ordered to pray O'Neill's fair weather beseeching; they were commanded to do so in fact, and they did, the next morning, in a driving snowstorm. 

The battle had just begun. One million Allied troops (150 thousand Canadians and 500,000 Americans) would fight in the very snow and cold Hitler needed and got for his last mad offensive gasp. 

Theologically, I don't know what to make of those prayers. Historically, I have to admit I'm not surprised the CRC chaplain turned down the big job. Militarily, I can't help but think that good-weather prayer was a great move. Spiritually, I'd like to believe that the General knew just a little Calvin: "True faith is ever connected with hope."

I don't know what the Lord God almighty thought of a couple thousand mimeo'd prayers that snowy morning, but I know He's a whole lot bigger about such questions than you or I or even the General. What He did with those prayers only He knows. 

But you can't help but chuckling. One early mid-winter morning, a bit north of the Argonne forest, the Creator of Heaven and Earth gets supplicated by a thousand perfectly similar prayers from cold, wet soldiers, some rookies, some war-weary. Patton's Seventh Army, all together, stormed the gates of heaven, some of them, I'm sure, with considerably less piety than others.

The war wasn't over and neither was the battle. 

Honestly, I don't know what to think about all of that. But I'll tell you this: I can't help but love the story. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Restoration*

“He restores my soul” Psalm 23:3

My wife claims she inadvertently got some laughs a week or so ago, when, at a Bible study on Revelation, she told the faithful, in all honesty, that when she thought of heaven, she imagined a lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota—preferably not in January.

I know exactly why she said that.

A friend of mine told me a week ago about his daughter, who lives all the way across the state. She and her family have had more than their share of problems—a child with a chronic illness, some long-term unemployment, some scrambling for jobs. This daughter, carting her kids to school one day, called her dad from the shoulder of a freeway, frantic. The van had simply died. My friend is a mechanic, but he was also 300 miles away.

I could never have guessed how much time and energy parents expend worrying about adult kids, probably because, even as twenty-somethings, we’re all pretty much oblivious to how much worry we can generate ourselves—or at least I was. Our children have also run into their share of problems—unemployment, physical and emotional strain, scrambling for jobs. And we worry. Good night, do we worry.

Meanwhile, to say the least, we’re busy with our own lives—jobs, responsibilities. I’m a church elder; don’t ask me if I’m keeping up. I’m on the road too often, and I’ve always got student papers to read, papers that I should have handed back sometime last week.

I really should visit my mother more often—she’s alone—but she’s 500 miles away. My wife’s parents aren’t well. Like many others, my wife and I often feel as sandwiched as cheap cheese and salami.

For the first time in thirty years, my wife and I took a bit of a mid-year vacation and slipped silently away to a rented cabin in Minnesota, spent five days—we’re not talking summer vacation here—in a north woods resplendent in fall colors. The weather was perfect, the leisure was divine (forgive me for using that word).

I was—we were—restored.

For believers, Psalm 23, I’m convinced, is about maintenance. Shepherd that he is, my Lord leads me beside still waters, he makes me lie down, he takes care of me.

Television and politics lie—life itself is not easy. Endless tasks have to be done, and far too often we stub our toes and get paper cuts. We start sagging and parts of us fall out. My back hurts every morning. Bladders weaken. It ain’t pretty.

But God gives us these glorious cabin-in-Minnesota moments. He restores us, inside and out. The Lord God almighty blesses us with a cupped hand that holds our lives better than any fancy executive chair. He restores our very soul.

___________________

from Sixty at Sixty.

The New Holland Church

Like St. Mary's, right here in Alton, it's a magnificent house of worship that is far more than just that--not as if that isn't much. The place is a testimony to God all right, but also a testimony to the immense spiritual commitment of the people, most of whom were poor, the ordinary folks who built it so long ago. That they poured so much of what so-little they had into a house of worship is a testimony to the sincere faith they took with them from afar, a particular kind of Calvinist theology that grew exponentially through the wearying trials creating a community required in a neighborhood where no white men had lived before.

Here, in Alton, and there, in New Holland, South Dakota, people spent time and money and whatever wherewithal the task required to build a church, a beautiful church as bold and tall on the open plains as their own vision and hope for a new life. It's God's House, they would have said, even though theologically they were aware no such single place existed, because they reckoned that all of it, all of the world around them was God's world, even though the land could turn its back on them, send fires and floods, grasshoppers, and week-long winter storms, blazing heat, frightful cold, and altogether too much drought. The church made clear that God was there, even when He seemed not to be.

That was years ago. Sadly enough, the church itself, the building, is weary. For years its been the people's church; for generations it's maintained a place at the heart of a community that grew only through the hard work that stubborn perseverance required. 

That particular community is far smaller today. Rural areas of the whole Upper Midwest have shed populace because to make a living on the land requires hundreds more acres, more land than sweat and heavy labor. Big agriculture requires big farms. Big farms mean fewer families. Fewer families mean less business, smaller schools, smaller churches. 

Meanwhile, floor to ceiling, the old New Holland church is showing its age. You don't even have to look close. The nature of the community that built it isn't the same either, and it isn't prospering. People are still leaving. Kids don't choose to stay on the home place. This wonderful building isn't the kind of home to new residents as it was to the pioneers. Besides the new ones often come from wholly different religious fellowships and traditions.

The old place, no matter how beautiful, doesn't create or carry the regard it once did. While the congregation who worships there is still vital to the community, their choices aren't easy--to invest hundreds of thousands into a creaking old beauty, or to raze the old one completely and start afresh. 

Most certainly, a church is not a museum, but then a people without a history is not a community. To buttress or to build--that's the question people who worship there have to answer. Both demand significant donations. It's not at all easy.

I don't have a vote. My great-grandparents left, like so many others, when the great dome of sky brought no rain for too many years.  The land couldn't hold all those people back then, through the last decades of the 19th century. That was the beginning of the exodus. 

But if I did have a vote, I know where I'd come down. 

It's a beautiful old irreplaceable place.  There's only one like it. It's stood through endless trials, ten thousand baptisms and marriages, as many funerals, some of them unforgettable, I'm sure. 

I say, shore it up. As much as it ever was, it's still a House of the Lord. 

The Secret Place -- iii

Once upon a time just outside of Doon, Iowa, a large sign stood proudly along Hwy 75, heralding the town and bellowing proudly, “Home of the novelist, Frederick Manfred.”

Time was, of course, when Manfred came a whisper away from the National Book Award with a novel he titled Lord Grizzily, his version of an old trapper tale that took place out in the northwest of South Dakota, long before white men figured the land out there was worth more than the Natives on it. Lord Grizzily carried home some significant prominence, made the town proud, it seems. 

When The Secret Place came out, the sign came down, brutally. Someone did it in with a chain saw, middle of the night, a kind of literary vigilantism. Someone didn't like it.

I assumed, back then, my own self-righteous people were the culprits. Manfred didn’t write dirty books, but he did write at the advent of a time when open portrayal of sexuality began to be not only allowed but even encouraged. When the Doon town sign came down, I figured it was the work of Calvinists who ran the place, the same people who made sure Manfred's novels weren’t on the shelf of the college library.

That was a conclusion I carried for most of the next 40 years—vengeful, self-righteous Calvinists hated all that close-up sex. However strong that sentiment may have been, I was wrong about assigning blame. 

I was in Doon, years later, helping the sister of a friend of mine who’d died. She asked if I’d come over and help her determine what to do with her brother’s treasured library, which was extensive.

We were talking about Frederick Manfred because her brother owned a complete collection, all of them signed, a shelf of volumes she was going to keep, she told me. Manfred was long gone by that time. We were talking about my friend’s deep and solid appreciation for him when the story of the sawed-off town sign on HWY 75 came up. I mentioned it because to me dropping that sign seemed an act infused with equal portions of pitiable sadness, cartoon humor, and, for a Dutch Calvinist like myself, cultural shame.

She stopped sorting and looked at me. “Well, you know who sawed it down, don’t you?” she asked.

To me, it was “the town.”

“You never heard about that?"

I shook my head.

She seemed dumbfounded. She squinted at me. “Why, it was the family,” she said, shaking her head, as if cause/effect was in clear operation.

“The family?” I said.

“Of the girl—her family. They’re the ones who sawed it down.”

Some years later, there I stood, camera in hand, between two graves, one of them Frederick Manfred’s, at the northwest edge of graveyard, the other one belonging to someone named Jennie Van Engen, 1899-1920, a young bride who died, the novel claimed and the stone suggested, tragically, in childbirth.

The family felled that highway sign. Who knows?--they may well have been offended by the way Manfred described the sexuality; but what deeply offended them--I'm not sure we have a name for it--was the odd sense that their sister or their aunt or their whatever got used, used like as if she were nothing more than a cardboard doll, used, almost as if she'd been raped. Used, then tossed. Used, in a story Manfred wrote to try to win some lit prize he'd not been able to with Lord Grizzily. Used, which is to say abused.

And if the two of them were there, if the two of them would sometime that night simply step out of their graves, wander over to where each other was and talk, I couldn't help wondering what Jennie would say. 

That’s what the writer in me thought that day, looking for long shadows of the dawn on a winter morning in the graveyard on the hill west of town.

The Secret Place -- ii

The Secret Place is only partially about Jennie Van Engen (in all his books, "Engleking"). It's all about the wild boy she married, a man who I knew Fred himself admired, even held up as a hero. Gerrit Van Engen, in Manfred's mind, was a kid who could have played in the majors if he hadn't been born into a brood of dour Calvinists who couldn't play ball on Sunday. He was hot, a rebel with a cunning irrefutable smile and splendid grace for a farm boy from rural Iowa. At least that's the way Gerrit's little cousin saw him as the two of them, Gerrit--a decade older--and Feike, growing up through a madcap Doon boyhood in the earliest years of the 20th century. 

The first time I’d ever heard of this novelist named Fred Manfred was in a dorm room, when some local guys were talking about this long, tall novelist from just down the road, a man who wrote dirty books. I could not have been more interested, nor skeptical.

But when I went home to Sheboygan, Wisconsin, there, front and center in a bookstore I frequented stood The Secret Place, a novel by a name I remembered from that dorm room session. They weren’t making things up.

I was home for Thanksgiving, my first semester of college. I bought that novel. After all, how many dirty books from Dutch Reformed writers existed in the mid-60s?

Reading that novel changed my life. The Secret Place became the subject of my very first literature term paper, even though Manfred’s novels were behind the desk at the Dordt College library and you could get them only by asking, the kind of request that meant some kind of guilt bath. For the first time in my life, I studied that little novel in the way that English majors, trying to excavate motives, its moral compass or core. 

What did I know about such things? Very little. What I did know was that I wanted to understand this tall man, this novelist from just down the road--I wanted to understand him--to wit, how and why he told the story he did, the story of Gerrit Engleking.   

When I say reading that novel changed my life, what I mean is that reading The Secret Place made me an English major, which, subsequently, made me a teacher. I’d never tangled with a text like I did with the yarn of that novel, never attempted a survey of major themes in anything. Studying a third-rate novel by a local novelist honestly gave me a profession and a passion. 

Just as significantly, The Secret Place made me want to write. What I recognized in that novel was characters I knew, characters who made it clear to me that I didn’t have to have a New York address to write novels. A tall guy from Siouxland could write about people and things you knew and still be a writer.

What's more, a believer didn't have to be a Sunday School teacher, a writer whose soul passion was bringing others to Jesus. Amazingly, I was taught--hold your breath!--that the truth about us, about our lives, about our dreams and nightmares was the territory of story, of fiction. 

Doon, Iowa, wasn’t forever changed by the publication of The Secret Place, even though Fred pulled quite a catch out of his boyhood neighborhood to write it. What people couldn't help but recognize was a sad story that, back then, no one talked much about but just about everyone knew—how a community hot shot got two young ladies pregnant (not at the same time) and then lost, big-time. Jennie, the one he married, is the one I speculated was buried beneath that grave--that Jennie Engleking died in childbirth.

________________________ 

There's a little more to say here about all of this. I hope you'll bear with me. Tomorrow, the story of the town sign.

The Secret Place -- i

That Saturday morning what I wanted to get was a couple of fine shots of gravestones adorned in long, early morning shadows. I headed out to the Doon cemetery, where the stones hug a rolling hill above the Rock River, a setting that offers a cemetery more silent gravitas than graveyards ordinarily have.

Frederick Manfred, a prolific American novelist, wanted to be buried up there on the hill above town, as if he could look down at Doon, the beloved village of his birth, and across fields of corn and beans to the north, fields that even in winter don’t shed their spacious grandeur. That’s where his grave stone stands today.

But it was cold that morning, and I was looking for a particular image, something visually stunning—the long shadow of a new sun over an old grave.

That’s what I was looking for when I bumped into the stone of a woman whose name I recognized immediately. It was eerie, oddly mystical. I hadn't expected to know anyone out there, after all. I never had family in Doon, and I certainly wasn't looking for her. That I knew her at all was itself an epiphany because I wondered whether anyone else did. She was someone whose life I would not have known at all had I never read an obscure Frederick Manfred novel called The Secret Place.  I turned around and there she was, as if I knew her, and she died already in 1920.

I had read The Secret Place when I was 18 years old, and like nothing else in my life, that slim old yarn made me think I’d like to write stories someday. Honestly, that novel--and, in part, her life--changed mine altogether. Of course, I knew her. Maybe she was looking for me.

But The Secret Place wasn’t a great hit right there in his own hometown. I'd heard the story from a bona fide Doon resident, the sole newspaper man in the village. But back then I only partially understood why that novel wasn't all that popular among the townspeople. It took me most of a lifetime--and years of writing myself--to come to understand that the good people--not to mention the bad--from Manfred’s own hometown felt used by his telling the world Gerrit's--and Jennie's--story.

Some of it, and its sadness, is true. Frederick Manfred used prototypes, used characters from the streets of town to make the novel come to life. Even though Jennie Van Engen was forty years in the grave when The Secret Place was published (titled, then, The Man Who Looked Like the Prince of Wales) that novel was based, in part, on her sad, short life, more particularly, on the sad story of her husband, Gerrit.

When Jennie Van Engen died, she was just 21 years old, or so the stone says, a century ago. Still, the morning I stumbled upon that stone, I couldn't help feeling I knew her, or at least of her. I couldn’t help wondering how many people on the face of the earth, even among her own descendant family, had even an inkling of who she was or the dimensions of her tragedy.

“Till we meet again” the stone says above her name, in lichened text.

I stood there beside that grave, sorry that she’d died so young, and sorry too that Fred Manfred, Feik Feikema, caught all the anger he did from the town he loved when he was just trying to tell a good story, part of it hers.

The story was not even really about her. It was about the wild boy she married, a man who I knew Fred himself admired, even held up as a hero. Gerrit Van Engen, at least in Manfred's mind, was a kid who could have played majors if he hadn't been born into a brood of Calvinists who couldn't play ball on Sunday. He was hot, a rebel with a cunning smile that couldn't be refused. At least that's the way his younger cousin saw him as the two of them, Gerrit--a decade older--and Feike grew up through a rambunctious Doon childhood. 

___________________ 

Tomorrow: Me and The Secret Place

The joke of Spirit Mound

Poor guy. To this day, I don't know what it was, but a tiny mound of flesh, a fat little chimney maybe sat up there atop Abe's bald head.  His comb-over didn't help. Whatever it was, to me, a boy in church, that strange little growth was a thing of wonder, a real curiosity. 

Not unlike Spirit Mound really, save in size. Drive a couple miles north from Vermillion, and there it is, growing as if out of nowhere, towering above an endless stretches of crop land in all directions, a sweetly climbable hump of earth with no reason whatsoever to be there, there stands Spirit Mound as if the entire grade school decided to build a massive model volcano.

It is, honestly, a most wonderful curiosity, as it was to the Corps of Discovery, who'd been told, one scorching August day in 1803, that there was, not far distant, a most unusual little hill in the grassland, "Concluded to visit a High Hill Situated in an emence Plain three Leagues N. 20° W. from the mouth of White Stone river, this hill appear to be of a Conic form," so thus recorded Capt. Meriweather Lewis. 

It was devilishly hot, and they were a long way from the Oregon coast, but you can hardly blame Lewis and Clark for taking a day to check out the story because what they'd heard from the locals was far too fascinating. 

"Supposed to be a place of Deavels or that they are in human form with remarkable large heads and about 18 inches high," Lewis wrote. And, after all, one of the purposes of the trip was to record every last thing they found along the way, including, to be sure, any 18-inch killer devils. The Natives claimed those odd beings to be "very watchfull and. . .armed with Sharp arrows with which they can kill at a great distance." And more, 

they are said to kill all persons who are so hardy as to attemp to approach the hill; they state the tradition informs them than many indians have suffered by these little people and among others that three Mahas Souix Ottoes and other neibghouring nations believe this fable that no consideration is suffiecient to induce them to approach this hill.

Seaman, their huge Newfoundland with all that heavy fur, was the only smart one. In the nine-mile hike the Corps took that hot afternoon, Seaman threw in the towel before anyone else, turned around, and went back to the pirogues at the river. You can't help thinking his good animal sense was telling him this whole hot escapade just wasn't worth the effort. 

Yet today, packed in with all this history, the hike up Spirit Mound is a great joy. If anyone, anywhere, has been torn up by those sharp arrows flying from the top, they've not recorded their bloody injuries anywhere along the trail. I've looked. I've been up and down a dozen times or more and never yet encountered a corpse. Big heads? 18-inches? Sure.

I met a man on the trail a couple of years ago, and the two of us got to talking. He was bountifully informed about Spirit Mound. He said he and his dog made the trip up and down quite often, in fact. I asked him about those all those little devils with their tiny bows and arrows.

"I'll tell you what I think," he said, halfway up and halfway down. "I'm thinking some Omahas spent that hot day under a tree somewhere along the river, and I'm thinking that when they thought of those white men chasing out to the mound in all that heat, they could hardly stop from laughing. That's what I think."

I loved it. 

It's not what you read, of course, and this man and his dog didn't put a footnote on his spin of the yarn. He might have been launching his own little arrows. Whatever you do, don't assume what he told me to be capital-T TRUTH. 

Spirit Mound is a wonderful curiosity, a joy and a blessing. A hike up and down is worth a morning or afternoon almost any time of year.  And if you ask me, the story of the place is only more wonder-laden if you put up a tipi in your mind and just imagine a bunch of Otoes in the quiet shade somewhere along the Vermillion River, a whole band who, try as they might, just can't stop giggling.

Go ahead and visit tomorrow. Just the thought of that kind of tomfoolery will make you smile, up and down.

Sunday Morning Meds--The Legs of a Man

“His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse,

nor his delight in the legs of a man;. . .” Psalm 147:10

The athlete in me is well into the fourth quarter, time winding down, and the game has slowed dramatically. This morning, I’m typing in my athletic shorts, t-shirt, and gym shoes. When my desktop says 5:41, I’ll leave for the rec center, where the same folks show up, like me, early every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning.

I’ll lift weights, get on the steps, then row across a torturous imaginary river before heading home, soaked in sweat, the blessed livery of a workout vet. Tonight, if it’s nice, I’ll take a walk with my wife—almost three miles. Basically, that’s what’s left for an aging jock once named his high school’s “Athlete of the Year.” Years ago, I lost the gold cuff-links.

On Friday, I met a sweet kid, a senior in high school, who is interested in majoring in English when he gets to college next fall. My job was to sweet talk. Turns out his passion is basketball—that’s what he told me. English is okay for a major, but history or math would do the job too, he said. The kid wants to coach.

Could have been me forty years ago.

Great kid, sweet kid—I’d love to have him enroll, whether or not he ever pulls on a jersey. But his passion is basketball, he says, eyes ablaze.

He wants to play ball in college, but he knows making the team is no cakewalk. He says a hot shot from his small, Indiana high school came here a few years ago and didn’t make the team—so he’s says he’s prepared.

I told him I’ve seen guys hamstrung when suddenly they didn’t have to turn up for practice every afternoon of their lives, ex-jocks who said they felt as if bright lights had gone out without the rhythm of after-school practice. I went through that myself—delirium tantrums from no more heavy-laden gym bags. It’s identity loss for thousands, millions. Females too.

He said he knew all of that. He said he thought he was prepared. But good night!—does he want to play. Basketball, he told me, more than once, is his passion.

Verse ten of Psalm 147 is a gift for juiced-up jocks, a reminder to a million wannabee all-stars that there’s more to life than being mvp or even Charlie Hustle. I tried to tell him as much, but some lessons get learned only by way of experience.

This morning, when I left the gym, some lanky grade-school kid was shooting free throws. When he went after the ball, his long legs arched a bit like a pair of fine parenthesis, the sure sign of speed, athletic gifts. Couldn’t help but admire.

But God doesn’t care really. The psalmist says God takes no delight in the legs of man, whether or not they’re as sharply defined as a thoroughbred’s.

That’s good to hear, especially when mine are all but gone, my knees a foul nest of hooks. We’re not loved for the size of our engines or the thrust of our buggy springs We’re loved, even when we’ve no more horsepower than a old VW bus.

Met a kid last week who told me basketball was his passion. Someday, like all of us, this little verse will bring him comfort, as it does me, an old man who long ago lost his prized cufflinks. It’s good to be reminded—at 18 or 58—that really, God doesn’t much care about all of that. Some might, but he doesn’t.

Bless his holy name.