Sunday Morning Meds -- My Cup Overflows

 

“You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.” Psalm 23

Not long ago on a Sunday morning, I called my mother. She lives in a retirement home—it’s beautiful and spacious, but I’m deeply struck, every time I visit, with the odd depth of its silence. At meal times people gather on the first floor, as some do each morning for exercise time; but otherwise the dark and thickly carpeted hallways are always eerily quiet. So much of our world, outside the walls of that home, is not.

Mom said she was doing as well as could be expected, the usual pains and burdens, and, occasionally, usually at night, more than a little loneliness since my father’s death. Otherwise, things were fine. The food—yeah, well, it could be better, but she has her own stove and refrigerator if the menu looks less than appealing.

Yesterday, in the morning, she said, Ed didn’t show up, and it seemed strange to be missing him at breakfast. Then another resident told her Ed had died the night before, a heart attack probably. Whoever came in to take care of his passing had deliberately avoided disturbing the silence. It was, after all, the middle of the night.

“Well,” she told me, “things like that happen in the world I live in.”

She’s right, of course, not only of her world, but all of ours. But then, few of us awaken so frequently to significantly altered breakfast tables.

“Did you hear Dr. Martin this morning?” she asks, assuming we’re as earnest as she is about TV ministries. “I just love him,” she says. “His messages always bring such a blessing—and Taylor, did you catch his sermon? What a joy that was, huh?”

I’m thankful for Pastors Martin and Taylor—I don’t remember their real names. I’m thankful the Lord uses them and a host of others to channel the Holy Spirit into a room she occupies alone. And I’m thankful—and amazed—at my mother’s joy.

It’s my granddaughter’s fourth birthday this morning. Yesterday, she and her mother made special cupcakes—white frosting—for all the kids at day care. Today, there will be presents galore. Her cup will overflow when she sits in front of her cake and blows out the candles. It’s not quite seven in the morning right now. I’m betting that, somewhere across town, she’s already up and tooling around in her pjs.

Would that we all were as easy to please as my granddaughter and her great-grandmother, as David must have been when he first sang this most famous of his songs.

For me, my granddaughter’s joy is far less difficult to understand. In the confines of her world, darling little cupcakes may well be all she needs to overflow.

My mother’s joy is more inspiring, perhaps because it’s harder to imagine. I’ve not yet come to that point in my life when friends don’t show up for breakfast.

What makes King David sing is his knowing he’s loved by God Almighty. His song echoes through the centuries because so many millions of us know it too—my granddaughter, for one, even though only faintly; and my mother, deeply, for another.

It is a special gift of God to be able to recognize grace for the journey, whether his love comes by way of white frosting or TV preachers, in the silence of a retirement home or the energy of a kid’s birthday party. To be blessed is to know how richly our cups do overflow.

Shuffling

 

Not soon enough, we'll be heading up north for an annual visit. In anticipation, this morning's post is drawn from the well, pretty deep in fact, maybe 2007, fifteen years ago, five years before my last days in the classroom. Isn't that Loon some kind of beautiful?

When I awoke this morning, I stumbled along in the thick darkness of a world without lights here at the cabin, my stiff and sore feet making a sound that suddenly reminded me of the shuffling my grandfather's feet used to make across our kitchen floor when I was a boy, an instant's memory I hadn't thought about since I was six--he died in 1954. The sound of my own slow feet evoked a chilling memory. I've become him; my granddaughter is my age.

It's an odd way to say it, but in my "spare time" up here at the cabin, I've been reading Wallace Stegner, a man I've not read before--The Collected Stories lies here on a coffee table. And while I like him, I can't escape this fatal sense that he is, like all of us, dated. When I read his stories--even though I've never read him before--I read a familiar pattern and approach: his is the kind of writing I've always wanted to do, the kind of writing I guess I do, albeit not nearly as well. 

But I also recognize that it's old-fashioned, as I suppose I am. It's the kind of psychological realism that probes us, each of us. It's nowhere near what a reviewer in the NYTimes called, recently, "Peace Corps fiction," novels about Afghanistan or Niger or Venezuela or anywhere else in the world, just not the American Midwest.

We need wilderness, someplace wild and untamed. When I read Stegner, I read a man who took the outdoors seriously because, in all likelihood, people in the 1940s were still battling it. A car goes off the road in the cold, and danger presents itself vividly. Today, the spaces we don't know are Afghanistan, Niger, or Venezuela. We got where we need to explore, perhaps. But Stegner--and me too--feel there remains a wilderness in all of us that's worth exploring. That's old-fashioned, I guess. At least, it doesn't sell.

I say that because I've received two rejections in the last week, both of them because--or so the editors and my agent says--my writing is too literary and nobody buys literary fiction. Critics and professors love literary fiction but nobody buys it; and book publishing is, first and foremost, a business. There's not much that can be done about that phenomenon, and it's not new. My agent says he's heard that gripe for all of his 25 years in the business. And, at a certain level, those rejections have to be read as rejections; the editors weren't taken with the work. 

Somehow, yesterday I got to a blog that reprinted the President's Column from the summer issue of the Newsletter of the ALSC (Association of Literary Scholars and Critics): Morris Dickstein on "The Critical Landscape Today." The blog belonged to National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors. People who read literary reviews won't be surprised, but upshot of the article was the squeezing being applied to book reviews today in newspapers and magazines. It seems there are simply fewer and fewer column inches to be shared by the literary crowd. You've got to be blind not to see that "the review" is almost exclusively reserved for movies these days, blockbusters, too, no matter how corny or wretched.

Doom and gloom comes easy to a man who just suffered two book rejections and heard the late-in-life sound of his grandfather's feet across the floor when he himself got up to use the john.

And then this. Some young lady--she's holding a darling baby on her Facebook page--decides to name me as a friend, goes to my Facebook page, spots the pictures from a class at Highland, and tells me--the "message" came early this morning--that taking that class was just terrific, a great memory. Just tells me I'm okay.

So here I sit, writing it all out, a whole story, my morning thanks by six o'clock.

Outside the window, the lake and sky are perfectly black. It's our last day up here, and leaving tomorrow won't be fun. But even if, like yesterday, the sky never clears and light rain falls most of the day, I swear I can be happy as a toad, reading what's left of my students' papers, drinking coffee and tea, and reading Wallace Stegner.

Life is good, my grandfather's footfalls notwithstanding.

Our Queens and Kings

If you're going to have a monarch, you couldn't do better than Queen Elizabeth II, who never got in the way, took the world's vicissitudes forever in stride, and offered, always, a lovely warm smile. Despite her incredible reign, she was--as King Charles III will be-- an anachronism. No really substantive reason exists for having a monarchy anymore, the royals, in point of fact, having no substantive power. Yet, even as we speak, England waits in huge lines to say goodbye to their beloved queen. It's an amazing thing.

We've been reading, slowly, through the early David stories, stories as much about his predecessor, King Saul, who was impossibly hard to understand. Some scholars of holy writ believe he carried an undiagnosed mental illness. Of course, from the get-go God almighty didn't want him--He, God almighty, was the only King his people needed. But the people wanted to be normal. They looked around at all the Amelkites and Hittites and Jebuzites and assumed they needed a king too. So the Lord God took pity on them and had Samuel (what a life he had!) do the honors of naming this tall, dark, and handsome Israelite to be the very first Jewish king. 

That didn't turn out well, but it did usher in a new monarch, a boy with a sling, the Bible says, the man closest to God's own heart, the fabled King David, poet and a musician, a man savvy enough to know when he needed top-shelf advisors like General Joab to run things he had trouble running, like wars and the military.

In our house, the television is on for news in the morning, then again at lunch and supper, and at ten. Sometimes it plays as background noise, as it was yesterday when suddenly the Queen's body was brought into Westminster Hall, where the sheer beauty of the place was royally enhanced by the stunning voices of the choir. Take a minute and listen in.   

It's all akin to King David, really, who had his most poignant moments in prayers the world will never stop praying--like Psalm 23 or 100, or the pageant of nature in 104. But, good Lord, the man suffered too--"Absalom, Absalom. . 

But then the news is full of royalty these days. When it doesn't feature something from or in Great Britain, it's down at Mara Lago or somewhere in the Ukraine, where two men fiercely want to be king. There's a war on--and, if you listen to the news at someplace other than FOX, Putin seems not to be doing well right now, which is not difficult to understand, given the odd reason he's given for Russia's being there--his romance with 19th century Russian history, a weird dream that spends lives like plugged nickels. It's mad. It's insane. Talk about anachronism.

The other would-be king, the Donald, has no sense of history, and the purposeful dignity of a bully. What he cares about is power, his. Even though there's not a thing about him that's royal, he wants to be King because people bowing to him is somehow comforting. He threw a temper tantrum when someone with a camera caught him on the golf course, zombie-like, without his royal orange makeup.

The dramatic arts include only two genres--comedy and tragedy. Well, maybe three: we should mention farce. 

What's what? Go ahead. You call it. 

Ministry of Presence at Old Dutch Fred's

Let me show you the way. Take Hwy 10 east and south out of Sutherland, dip into the river valley, then turn left at the top of the hill and follow the signs to the Prairie Center, a sweet place worth a visit. There’s a postage-stamp cemetery there, but that’s not it. Say hello to the Center's little bunch of buffalo.

We’re looking for Dutch Fred’s grave , so head back to 10, turn right, descend the hill, cross the river, then take the first left--you're on gravel, going south. When the road turns west, then south again, stay with it. Now it gets tricky.

A plush carpet of old prairie runs in and over the hills created long ago by the Little Sioux river. When you start climbing, stop the car and look east. Look hard. Keep looking until you spot a stone, the only marker in all that bushy prairie grass. That stone marks what remains of Old Dutch Fred, who wasn't Dutch, but German, a single-minded guy who left his wife and daughter in Prussia, divorced her in fact, gave her her freedom, but never gave up the dream of having the two of them join him once he grabbed his dream from a place called America.

In 1856, the trip over the brine just about killed him. It was awful, worse than that. Some passengers got together, wrote a letter, slipped it into a bottle, then tossed it into the sea. That letter listed the horrors on the ship, then offered this: "We want to deter immigration through any agent," it said. "We regret having made the decision to travel to America."

Wasn't easy, coming over, but Dutch Fred was undeterred. He arrived in New York jobless, just a few coins in his pocket. "I am a farmer, and I will find land to till and grow crops," he'd tell people. "That is all I know." Literally, that was. He couldn't read, spoke broken English, and had no idea what a map was. "I am a farmer, and I will find land to till and grow crops," he'd say.

He discovered there was a war on. He'd left Prussia to avoid one. In Philly, he worked at a brewery, got the job by stopping a fight in a bar. He became a good friend of the working girls because he refused to let them come to harm.

Inched west. In Cleveland, he watched a man nail up a poster, a man who told him out west there was free land if you lived on it for five years--place called Iowa.

"Where is Iowa?" Fred said. Man with the hammer pointed west.

The railroad ended at Cedar Falls, where Dutch Fred bought a wagon, a yoke of feisty red oxen, and supplies.

But he made it there--which is to say "here," and tilled land in the northwest quarter of section 34, Waterman Township, O'Brien County. That's what he was, a farmer.

He made no enemies, but the hoppers ruined his few first and final years on the land he always wanted.

You'll honor his memory if you take a winding road that slumbers between the hills to a place his gravestone stands mightily and alone in the prairie grass. Some wayward meadow lark may pipe out the melody old Dutch Fred used to hear, and maybe still does.




Sit there for a while--nobody's around. Give him your ministry of presence. He was a kind man who cared for his yoke of oxen no less than his neighbors, but he died alone, half the world away from the only woman and child he ever loved.

Get there early morning. When the sun puts some space between itself and the horizon, it lays a Midas touch over every thing, the whole world around Dutch Fred's grave buttery and golden. Seems to me that's when you'll see him.

__________________________


I am indebted to Carolyn Rohrbaugh's Dutch Fred: Immigrant, as well as the trip she took me on to find the old man's grave.

Passing the Unworked Field--Mary Oliver

            Passing the Unworked Field

           Queen Anne's lace

                a hardly

                    prized but

            all the same it isn't

                     idle look

                                    how it

                    stands straight on its

            thin stems how it 

                    scrubs its white faces

                        with the

            rays of the sun how it

                                makes all the

                                        loveliness

                                                it can.

Is it a poem? I don't know, but this little Mary Oliver verse joyfully honors a countryside weed, Queen Anne's Lace. The same way sunflowers and, well, dandelions brandish beauty, Queen Anne's Lace can't but help but be noticed, even when they're all over, abundantly invasive, and barely tolerated, "hardly prized," Oliver says-- deliberate understatement. 

But then, without motion or intent or our regard, the stuff prospers, even here in this "unworked field": "Look/how it/stands straight/on its thin stems. . ." Despised by some, perhaps, but firm in some mysterious inner resolve.

Three functions she celebrates: its rigor, its clean white faces, its sheer loveliness, despite its, well, weediness. Its charm is revealed in its insistence on being beautiful. Doggone it--Queen Anne's Lace is a weed, a curse, brome grass with a splashy, phony crown. As if it understands its own meagerness however, Queen Anne's Lace refuses to retreat: "look.  . .how it. . ./makes all the/loveliness/it can."

Mary Oliver isn't telling you or me to work hard at being good or gorgeous. She's allowing Queen Anne's Lace to inspire whoever cares to bother to admire what's here, even in an "unworked field." Beauty is all around us, even in our ditches. Call it a pest, call it a weed, call it somehow noxious, it stands tall and straight and bright and beautiful. "Consider the lilies," the Bible says somewhere, "they toil not, neither do they spin."

 

In this fresh, little poem of hers, Mary Oliver returns to the fields she frequently works herself by doing nothing less or more than considering the Queen Anne's Lace--and then smiling, something that really shouldn't be so hard to do. 

What's really scary

So it turns out that Doug Mastriano, the Trump-backed Republican candidate for governor in Pennsylvania, prayed specifically for a rejection of the results of the 2020 Presidential elections right before the January 6th debacle at the nation's Capital, which he and his wife attended.

"God, I ask you that you help us roll in these dark times, that we fear not the darkness," he prayed in a video just located last Friday. "I pray that we'll take responsibility — we'll seize the power that we had given to us by the Constitution, and as well by You, providentially. I pray for the leaders also in the federal government, God, on the 6th of January that they will rise up with boldness."

Mastriano may be the boldest torch-carrier for Christian nationalism these days, at a moment in time when "Christian nationalism" is soaring among white evangelicals as a foundation for political action. Behind that popularity is a presentment among believers that God speaks plainly to them and to us, and that we can and should rely on that voice, sometimes still and small, and sometime booming, for determining our actions in this world. "The Lord told me on Tuesday morning to vote for Joe Biden"--that kind of thing, although most visions, most prophets, or so it appears, are granted politically conservative visions from a politically conservative god.

To me, that's scary.

As is David Clements, a handsome professorial type who is traveling into small town America preaching the terrors of a coming apocalypse with the specific message or application that voting machines can be manipulated and that, let's be sure, Donald Trump was, unequivocally, the winner of the 2020 Presidential election, "in a landslide," as Trump loves to repeat. Clements is among those who the Washington Post calls "self-appointed election fraud evangelists," in part because they lace their presentations with incantations to God/god.

Clements' own testimony includes the story of a visitation he experienced from the Almighty when he, distraught over what seemed to him to be a Biden victory in the last election. Beaten, he ran outside of the New Mexico cabin where he and his family were staying, fell to his knees before a campfire and said, "God save us, please, please save our country," or so he told an audience in Michigan. “Something happened. My heart filled … and I heard, ‘We are going to win.’ ”

Presumably, that was God talking. 

To me, that too is scary.

At least, that's what David Clements heard. What God/god told him that night is to take the good news of evil voting machines to the people in small towns across the nation and explain to them how the manipulation of voting tallies led to a disastrous result and must be reversed to alter the outcome of the 2020 election.  

I'm not hot on those men's political views--I'll admit that. But what scares me is that they're consider themselves prophets, what scares me is the way they employ the Creator of Heaven and Earth to buttress their politics.  They consider themselves recipients of God's own directions. They receive God's wisdom through His Word, but what's there in the book isn't enough. Instead, they listen to what they hear in the echo chambers of their minds and souls. "God told me this would happen." "God told me what to say." God told me what to sing." 

To me, that's just scary. 

But then, we just finished Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven, which a ton of Christians perhaps shouldn't view or read because in Krakauer's story--as in real life--god told Utah's Lafferty brothers, fundamentalist LDS subscribers, to administer "blood atonement," according to old LDS doctrine, so they did--because god told them to. They murdered their own sister-in-law, as well as her baby, and actually did so proudly because god told them to.

That's very, very scary.

Sunday Morning Meds -- The Beauty of the Lord

“May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us;. . .” Psalm 90:17

One of my grandmother’s older sisters, I’m told, had had a very difficult life in the early years of the 20th century. She’d had but two children and one of whom died as a child—I don’t know why, and neither does anyone else, now, a century later. Grandma’s sister’s name was Cora, and her husband was a salesman. One day, Cora’s husband simply never returned from work, left his wife and only child.

Her surviving daughter went off to college—unusual for the early years of the century, but then Cora’s father was a professor. At college she fell in love with a bright young man with a distinguished academic future. The two of them planned marriage once he could get a job and they could get themselves financially stable. Then, Cora’s daughter, soon to be a bride, came down with a strange disease and died soon after, leaving Cora all alone.

I heard that story from an aunt, who remembered being told as a child.

There’s more. Some time later, Cora died. And when her relatives looked through her belongings—there were no heirs and no spouse—they found a letter in her desk addressed to the husband who had abandoned her, a letter Cora had written, knowing that someday she would die and hoping that something of hers would find its way to him, wherever he might be.

That letter, my aunt told me, explained that she loved him so much that, after he left, every night she’d stay awake until, finally, she’d hear the wheels of the last Wealthy Street trolley move slowly away into the night.

That sound of those wheels stays with me, carrying the portrait of an abandoned wife who has buried her only two children, a woman who waits, every night, hoping to hear footsteps coming up the sidewalk to the front door of her empty home.

My aunt told that story for another reason—she wanted to describe my grandmother, a woman I never knew.

Because there is still more. On the walls of my grandmother’s bedroom, she kept a collection of pictures of her family, including a snapshot of her sister, Cora, and two small children. When Grandma was dying, and suffering—according to the aunt who told me this—she looked across the room and saw that picture, then asked if someone would please turn it away from her because the very sight of her sister Cora brought back the pain of a story that, even on her own death bed, broke her heart.

Most translations offer Psalm 90:17 this way—“may the beauty of the Lord shine upon us.” I don’t doubt for a moment that’s what my grandmother wanted, especially on her deathbed—only the beauty of the Lord. Clearly, it’s what Moses wanted, not only for himself, but for his people. Psalm 90 rises in his parched soul from far too many Aunt Cora stories out there in the desert. It’s what Grandma wanted, and what Moses wanted—the beauty of the Lord shining upon us.

Don’t we all?

Some of that beauty is here, even in the almost forbidding darkness of this great Psalm, Psalm 90, from the soul of Moses. Read it for yourself and feel some of the radiance of God’s divine beauty. It’s here. Go ahead, read the whole thing.

Bison/bison/bison

It's not his fault he's cracked. That's just plain time and maybe the fickle prairie seasons all around, maybe a flaw in construction. But it seems to me that he deserves more than what he got from the Woodbury County Courthouse. I mean, that place is itself a work of art. He's aboard an actual national treasure, a duly ordained National Historic Landmark, named so in 1996. There's so many features of the Courthouse worth celebrating that this fella' almost gets lost--he's out in the alley. You want to see him, you got to look hard. What I'm saying is the buffalo, the American bison, deserves better, deserves more. 

Here's some things to consider.

 ****I'll grant you our pork and beef have no equals. It may be healthfully significant, however, to point out that the continent's biggest fur-bearing mammal get by on grass, herbs, twigs, and shrubs, and still tip the scales at a ton or more, some of them at least. American bison are vegetarians. True story, and there's this too: they can buck winters that'll shrivel icicles. 

 *****Even though we should be calling them “the American Bison,” they’re more familiarly known as "buffalo." Why? Good question, and there are several worthy answers. But listen, just avoid the conflict and call them what you’d like. Scientifically, by the way, identified by genus/species/sub-species, they're rightfully named "bison/bison/ bison." Isn’t that cute?

*****Even though the guys weigh as much as an entire defensive line, they're not turtles. They're tailbacks, 35 miles per hour. And, get this! Because their trachea are furnace ducts, they’re not just sprinters, they’re marathoners.

*****I'll grant you their vision is sub-par, but those eyes are positioned a mile apart on their massive heads to operate like a thousand-dollar wide-angle lens. They don't see better, but they sure as anything see more than you and me.

*****This just in—45,000 thousand people applied for a license to hunt buffalo in the Grand Canyon last year. Only 12 permits were issued. 

*****Jesuit missionaries, 150 years ago, understood the spiritual relationship Native America had with the Buffalo and didn't like it. The hunt was so important to the people that the preparation, the gathering, and the trek itself was heavy laden with more religious seriousness than the black robes could muster. It was almost as if they worshipped the buffalo, the frustrated clergymen thought. They weren't all wrong.

*****The obscene bloodbath of the 1870s killed millions, reducing a herd of 30 million or more to fewer than a thousand, most of those few remaining at Yellowstone. When Teddy Roosevelt, who’d hunted bison himself, got wind of their near-extinction, he created a committee of men with big bucks, dedicated to bison preservation. How about that?--it took a bunch of well-heeled city boys, to come all the way out here and save them.

 *****Trainloads of shooters used to come out on the railroad and shoot buffalo from the open windows of expensive touring cars. One of them, a man named Buffalo Jones, the first superintendent at Yellowstone Park, claimed he'd killed thousands and, he told people he'd “lived to regret it.” Teddy Roosevelt gave him the Yellowstone job, which, back then was little more than maintaining the herd. 

 *****Other than predator hunters, a buffalo's most dangerous predator is water. When Prince Maximilian came up the Missouri River in 1830, he found whole herds drowned, 1800 hundred or more. Put up a smell so putrid, he wrote in his diary, that he couldn’t handle his supper.

 *****That famous “Buffalo nickel” was created by James Earl Fraser, who used a bison named Black Diamond, who was, when he created the image, locked up in some New York zoo, all of which explains why real Buffalo people claim the beast on our nickels looks so forlorn, head bowed in abject sadness.

 *****American bison injure more people than any other wildlife species in Yellowstone--25 people from 2000 to 2015, most of them approaching the bison when attacked. Half were trying to grab a portrait. For the record, 10 were thrown into the air, 9 were head- butted, and six were gored; almost half required hospitalization.

What I'm saying is, as beautiful as the courthouse is, our buffalo deserves better. When Lewis and Clark came up the Missouri, they took a sidetrack to an odd little hill north of Vermillion, climbed to the top--it was beastly hot--and got a big look at a big world. Out there--not far from here--they spotted something they'd not seen before, something that took their breath away, their first huge herd of buffalo.

Sometime soon, head out to Broken Kettle. You might get lucky. Still, they're still an inspiration.

Tonight--a museum of stories at the museum

 

If you're around and looking for something to do, tonight, in Orange City, I'll be reading from a new collection of Small Wonders stories at the Dutch American Heritage Museum, stories like this one, aired just this week, the unbelievable story of a pioneer farm wife.

The Epic of Ann Rubin Boermann

 

Not so long ago I stumbled on the little book by a man who lived in a place where people haven’t and likely shouldn’t even try to live. It’s a memoir. Don’t look for it in bookstores. You won’t find it. Homesteading in the South Dakota Badlands, 1912, "The Last Best West," a tiny little book of deeply lodged memories put to paper by a man named Ernest G. Boermann—it’s his story.

And his mother’s. Anne Rubin Boermann was a pioneer. Anne Rubin was, her son says, a "most extraordinary woman,” a description more understated than anything, living or dead, on the wide prairie she inhabited. Listen:

She did all the dishes and dishwashing, the cleaning, the laundry, and all that housewives do--all of this without any modern conveniences. The water for drinking, cooking, laundry, and bathing had to be carried into the house and all the waste carried out. Fuel for the cookstove and heating had to brought in and ashes carried out.

It’s not difficult to imagine Ann Rubin Boermann’s life in one of the abandoned houses--broken down, broken into—still left out here to fight ravaging seasons.

In addition to these chores, she always had a large garden and canned food for the rest of the year from it. She also took care of the chickens. She and the younger boys also milked the cows, separated the milk, and then she made cheeses. Many people bought her dairy products. Moreover, she helped with the butchering and made sausages.

And more. “I cannot remember ever having a pair of bought gloves or socks,” Ernest says. “My mother carded and spun wool and then knitted these items for the whole family.” Farm work too: “She often helped round off the stacks of grain. We put the bundles into stacks before threshing.”

For the record, Mr. Boermann, Ernest’s father, was 38 years old when he married this incredible woman. She was only 16—try to imagine that without wincing. Anne Rubin was a kid when he brought her out here to eastern South Dakota.

Through the years, the Boermanns had 10 children—well, she did. Ernest’s older brother was born in the granary because they were residing in a place where a house hadn't yet been built. His father was 62 years old when the last of Ernest’s siblings--twin girls! --were born. That was 1898.

Looking back on it, I can't believe how much she did every day of her life. And she was always healthy and cheerful. I can't remember her ever saying she had a headache or had to lie down and rest.

Takes your breath away, doesn’t it? Her life, as her son describes it, feels Herculean, mythic, epic, but today almost lost and even criticized for the colonialist effects of her having lived on what once were Native lands.

At sixteen years old, Anne Rubin might well have been alone on the ground her husband worked, but hers wasn't the only difficult woman’s life on the prairie. There were hundreds, thousands. Her goal or mission, like every other prairie heroine, was simple: to build a home and, with others, a community, where, they believed, no one had before.

About that, they were wrong.

Their grand stories will always wear an asterisk, but their stories, like Ann Rubin Boermann’s, will be forever epic.

______________________

KWIT, 90.3, NPR in Sioux City, Iowa, broadcast this story on Labor Day. You can listen here.

Stories like Ann Rubin Boermann's have been aired on KWIT for about five years now. Tomorrow night--September 8, at 7:00 p.m. at the Dutch American Heritage Museum, Orange City, Iowa, the storyteller in me will be reading from a new book/collection of Small Wonders, as well as talking about writing those stories. Ought to be fun. 

Commemoration ii

And then we had communion.

I had no idea how that job was going to get done, but a couple of dozen elders--all men--handed out slick little disposable communion doo-dad cups, complete with a paper-thin, tasteless wafer layered into the first level of a foil cap that vacuum-sealed the grape juice beneath it. I'd never seen anything like it, and, if I had my choice, I hope I never see one again. Communion, convenience-packed. Not even Jesus Christ could have imagined that his Last Supper meal could become assembly line-packaged.

It was someone's wonderful idea to take communion--all 3500 of us--and it must have seemed to the committee who planned it that there was no alternative to get the job done: we had to order up those cute little, convenient packages. 

I hated them, just hated them. Honestly, we could have all gone to the front in a dozen stations, taken the bread ourselves from a split loaf, and had ordinary cups--but that would have meant more work and more time. And some of the old fashioned would have thought it wrong, I'm sure--going to the front like that. Hence, McSacrament, the ultimate in protestant packaging.

Of course, if the bread and wine are only a symbol, as our creeds claim, then who needs the real thing because it's not the real thing anyway? We're talking Reformation principle here, of course. The bread and wine isn't Christ's body and blood, an argument over which Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists have gone to war.

But yesterday's commemoration was communion reductio ad absurdum. Really. All over the packed gym, people finger-nailed their sacramental vials in unison as the preacher said "This is the body," and "This is the blood." This? Give me a break.

The sentiment here is instructive: it's more important that we do it than that we do it meaningfully, and that idea itself is a hybrid legacy of our steeply Protestant past and our indulgent American pragmatic present. It was more important that we "had communion" than that we vitally celebrated the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ--and the body we've become as a church. By my standards, we came dangerously close to profanation.

But then there's this: Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. I think of that a lot lately.

And there's this other thing. I wonder if, my aesthetic rant aside, the uniting spiritual blessing of Lord's own supper can and does transcend even our worst celebrations. If I'm right about profaning, all we really profaned was the practice, not the Supper itself. What was most mightily affected and offended was my own precious sensibilities.

And I'm not the church. We are. The church--the chosen--is always far bigger than the sum of its parts or the silly paucity of its public piety. I don't doubt for a moment that a couple thousand people were blessed, even by that vapid bread and the thimble-full of wine.

I suppose it's like the church itself. Who knows what it's future is? Who knows how it will celebrate communion a century hence? Who knows if anyone will recognize the initials CRC? Who knows if we've got another fifty years? Nobody. But some things will last, despite their evolving forms.

Every last thinking soul in that gym yesterday knows very well that God almighty will have his way with us, that he won't abandon believers, even though he may see fit to re-congregate, re-allign, re-model our most precious designs, all in his own interests. Because we are--CRC or RCA or ELCA or PCA or whatever clump of initials--we are His to a far greater extent than He is ours.

 It's Reformation week, time to sing Luther, who wasn't wrong: "If we in our own strength [or wisdom or aesthetic perception] confide,/Our striving would be losing./Were not the right man on our side,/the man of God's own choosing." Sure, I can sing that.

But I think I'm still going to have trouble with vacuum-sealed sacraments.

 

Commemoration, pt. 1

[Back home in Wisconsin this morning. This old post, at least fifteen years old, should suffice. I'll cut it up into two parts. What's absent here is some measure of my fidelity to the denomination into which I was born and have almost always been a part of because, quite frankly, it's part of me. I had a significant role in the celebrations, but here, well, I have to smile at my youthful contrariness--I was not even sixty years old!]

Yesterday, 3500 people showed up in a local gym to commemorate 150 years of history of the denomination of which I am a part--the Christian Reformed Church of North America. The size of the crowd was reassuring to the skeptic in me. I've thought long and hard about the future of the CRC--and denominationalism in general--and I'm quite sure there are many good arguments to assert its imminent demise.

 See http://www.dordt.edu/publications/pro_rege/crcpi/Pro_Rege_Sept_2007.pdf 

But there are also good reasons to believe that the CRC will continue--maybe even grow--and yesterday's packed house was just one of them. The music was very, very good and the sermon was fine, but the grace abounding yesterday afternoon was in the fellowship, not the coffee and cookies afterward but the sheer size of the crowd who chose to celebrate together on a beautiful fall Sabbath afternoon. It was good to be there together--it was very good.

An Ethiopian choir from meat-packing Worthington, MN, was the show-stopper. The beat of their music was electric. A couple dozen bulky male deacons delivered the offerings to the front of the gym, and just for a moment I thought they were infected themselves. It would have been an unforgettable moment had the deacons been transformed into a conga line. I swear it almost happened--a handful of bulky Dutch-American males just about two-stepped right in front of a couple thousand worshippers.

And then we had communion. 

[Continued, and ending, tomorrow]

Sunday Morning Meds -- The Promise

“The LORD sustains the humble 

but casts the wicked to the ground.” Psalm 147:6

It’s understandable to me how some might have felt that religion would someday fade away. Harvey Cox’s best-seller, The Secular City, once a classic, now seems ludicrous, as does Time magazine’s much ballyhooed cover story, fifty years ago, proclaiming the death of God.

Silly, all of it. In my lifetime at least, faith—and its organized work force, religion—has never played so prominent, and fearful, a role in the world we live in.

Recently, Elton John, the Brit pop star, said there would be no religion in his world. "Organized religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into really hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate,” he told a magazine reporter.

Sure. John Lennon once brayed about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus. He’s been dead and gone for forty years.

There must be a hundred reasons or more for the permanence of faith in the human psyche, but one of them, certainly, is the undeniable political force so clearly manifest in this line from Psalm 147: “The LORD sustains the humble but casts the wicked to the ground.” To the bloodied victims of oppression, that line promises to all dispossessed a glorious regime change.

In the last century, Christians in Africa rose from just under ten percent to the neighborhood of half the population, from ten to 107 million. Researchers predict that by 2025, half the Christians in the world will live in Africa and Latin America,17% more in Asia. Pentecostalism has grown astronomically to 400 million adherents, many of them south of the equator. It’s almost unimaginable, but experts predict that just 25 years there will be more Pentecostals, worldwide, than Buddhists.

It’s easy for good Christians to say that the Holy Spirit is alive and kicking throughout what we used to call “the Third World.” That simply must be true.

But some very understandable reasons for this amazing phenomenon exist, and one of them is political. Where there is poverty and injustice, the promise of Psalm 147:6 reads in a radically different than it does here in my spacious basement office in Iowa. My enemies aren’t easy to locate or to name; but if I were living in the Ukraine, I wouldn’t have to scratch my head to put a finger on “the wicked.”

And the pledge is sure: the bad guys will get theirs. They’ll go six-feet-under soon enough; but the humble—those God loves—will live forever. The spiritual fortitude of that promise is undeniable, but its political dimension is an offer, it seems, to all believers, including feminists, communists, and gays.

It’s a huge umbrella really, this pledge of happiness and the end of sorrow, bigger than I ever thought it was when I was younger, more idealistic—and more combative. People read it in a hundred different ways, and more.

I’ve never done the math, but it seems to me that no single promise is so oft repeated in the pages of holy scripture than this one—God loves the humble. He blesses those on their knees. He stoops to conquer. He will lift the lowly.

That’s the song the psalmist sings here in verse six.

And the echo is endless.

Same place. Same time.

Sixty years ago, my dad, smilingly, made it clear that to him, my being a photographer wasn't exactly what he was thinking about when considering a path for his son's life. It was clear to me--I might have been 14 or so--that to him, being a photographer wasn't really a calling. It may well have been a job, but Dad was thinking of more worthy professions--say, preaching or teaching or becoming a medical missionary, "kingdom callings," he might have labeled them.

I don't regret listening to him. Besides, I am certainly among those who would say everyone should have at least one hobby or activity that's undertaken with zero regard for compensation, something you do only because you enjoy it. For me, photography has been that passion. 

I don't do it as often I used to, and there are reasons for that; but the harvest stays here, a couple thousand digital files that record a search that got me out of the house on countless Saturday mornings to try to capture something of rare beauty. 

That's ambitious out here where I live. Northwest Iowa has some of the best dirt in North America if you're raising corn or soybeans, but it doesn't attract many agog tourists. In all the mornings I spent on gravel roads and fence lines, I never, ever ran into another camera bug. Not once. 

So this morning I thought I'd haul some files out of that auxiliary hard drive and put a few up here. These were taken right about now--note the sunflowers--in 2007, 15 years ago, on a patch of ground six or seven miles west of Sioux Center, Iowa, just off Dogwood Avenue, a place that always offered strong images. 

The shot at the top is dark, but I needed to darken it a bit to get the personality of the sky because sky is always a character in photographs taken in this corner of the world. Montana rightly calls itself "Big Sky country," but ours aren't puny and they're often dramatic, especially this time of year.  

I was reared in a deeply evangelical home, which means an image like the one below somehow takes on a religious character. That broken cottonwood may well be nothing more than a tree whose time has come and gone, but to me for some reason it morphs strangely into a cross, the cross, even in its brokenness.

This shot is not as "Iowa" as the shot at the top of the page, because its distinct features aren't at all important. Because its immediacy is less accessible, it feels more distinctly universal, and because it does, the theme or idea of the photograph becomes far more important than what it records. The viewer plays a greater role in its appreciation. 

Same day. Same place. Same time. I think it may be the way the sun catches that barn roof off in the distance that makes this shot sing, at least in my book. The composition includes that tired tree, beaten by prairie seasons, and a grey, moody sky that can't quite decide to admit the sunshine that will soon eat it up. No corn here--or no corn anywhere near, so the grass, the region's most honored historical figure, seems, for once, front and center. Finally, that shining barn roof way out in the distance demands attention and brings to the foreground, oddly enough, an Iowa farm. In our library we have a small print of this shot in an unlikely ornate frame. But there's something sort of Hudson River School about this shot, something almost 19th century. It looks wonderful in an ornate, baroque-looking frame.

I don't need to say "same time, same place." You're getting to know these characters. A different angle here, and a portrait format to catch the height of this old cottonwood. One tree is completely broken, the one in the foreground is simply beaten up, but together they tend to feature a sky whose colors are not at all extraordinary, but somehow stunning. 

Right here beside me is a 30x40 canvas print of this shot that's just plain gorgeous. You can't always tell which photographs will be great when they're enlarged to that size, but this one turned out far, far better than I would have guessed.

That day, 15 years ago, not every shot I took turned out to be memorable. Never do. Here are some others--again, same place, same day, same time.

It was a morning when the sky wanted to make its own demands.

This isn't a stunner, but it's Iowa altogether--the stream, the maturing corn, the razor's edge of horizon, the beat up trees, the long grass and the myriad sunflowers. I didn't grow up here, and I didn't grow up on a farm, but there's something about this one--maybe it's the sky but its probably the corn--that makes me feel like home.

It's late August, and you can't not try to feature those sunflowers. They're everywhere. They may well be of no greater value than a field of dandelions, but amid the row crops and the all the earth colors, they speak their own bright language. 

One of the finest bits of advice I've ever been given is practical and wise: "Turn around." All the shots you've seen above were taken looking east and north. Right before I left, I turned around. This is what I saw. It's no masterpiece, but those lines are simply beautiful.

Whether or not Dad was right theologically, I'll let others argue. But let me just say that I don't regret at all my forty years in a classroom. 

Old sermons, newly published

 

The cover is a take from the story of the Samaritan woman, someone who has more strikes against her than a bona fide harlot like Rahab. Not only does Jesus speak to her, he protects her from the putrid self-righteousness of the Pharisees by asking them a pointed question that has gathered its own legacy through the ages: "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone." 

What's not as closely remembered as that line is that Jesus then bent down and, with his finger, wrote in the dirt. Strangely enough, what he wrote is not recorded. 

The title of the book is taken from a sermon, one of twenty+ in a new book of meds by Pastor Herm Van Niejenhuis, a quiet, unassuming preacher blessed with a unique style of laying out the truths of scripture, a memorable style. If great preachers come in the thundering of Billy Graham or Billy Sunday, Pastor Herm wouldn't make the grade. Sunday after Sunday, humbly, he brought his parishioners into what he himself thought of as the revealing eccentrities of the word, stories of grace. 

During his 37-years behind the pulpit, Pastor Herm Van Niejenhuis (Nee'-en-hice) served churches in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and then, close to retirement, here, in Sioux Center, IA. If taking a call to northwest Iowa seems out of place, his coming here was something of homecoming since he and his wife Deadre (Plowman) had, many years before, gone to Dordt College, met there, fallen in love, and spent their first married year in a drafty trailer on the far reaches of the campus.

Parishioners at Covenant CRC remember him in a favorite pose, holding the Bible in one hand while unconsciously patting the text with the other, as if, like a cat, the Word needed to be loved, or as King David might say, exalted. During his last sermon, he told the congregation that an 18-inch pile of old church bulletins spanning his pastorate could be filed away under one word: grace. The sermons collected in this fine, little collection of meditations offer a very similar assessment.

Fascinating, isn't it?--that exactly what Jesus wrote with his finger in the dust beneath his feet and the feet of the Samaritan woman that memorable day isn't recorded. We don't know what he wrote. We know lots about Christ, but that word is gone.

That's exactly the kind of mystery Pastor Herm loved to open up. These meditations are art really, a warm and wonderful collection from a good friend and great pastor.

Amazon has 'em. Check it out.