Minimalist me

What now seems today long, long ago, a woman came up to me after I'd read a story at a teachers' convention. I didn't know her. She wanted to tell me something, she said, wanted me to know that what she did with pen-and-ink was a first cousin to what I was doing with words. If I'd give her my address, she'd send me some prints. "I think you'll agree," she said.

Her name was Natalie Boonstra. She taught art one of the schools at the convention. A few years later, I would meet her husband, Juan Boonstra, the long-time Spanish-speaking minister of a broadcast ministry named the Back to God Hour.

That image up top is an old collection of stories, and that image on the cover is a Natalie Boonstra drawing. She was right. What I was doing with stories and what she was doing on paper was governed by an aesthetic at that moment in vogue--a kind of hyper-realism that became known as "minimalism." 

I didn't know all of that at the time. I didn't dedicate myself to an artistic theory; what came out of the keys I tapped to create short stories simply was "minimalism." Let me try to explain this way--there's nothing particularly exceptional about that dining room chair, but if it is examined closely--as the drawing begs you to do--it invites you into a world of meaning--minimally, you could say. 

You have to look hard to find Michigan's Fayette State Historical Park. It's in a bay on the south shore of the Upper Peninsula, the fingernail on what amounts to an isthmus of land. It's not on the way to anything, really. It's a ghost town, although there were a hundred or so tourists there when we arrived (don't get your hopes up). 

Last week we hunted the place up, a state historical park that celebrates what remains of a "once-bustling industrial community that manufactured charcoal pig iron between 1867 and 1891," or so the guides say. What's there--a few buildings and old stone foundations remains--is all 150 years old. It's that kind of place--sort of "must-see" for museum crazies. The Jackson Iron Company created Fayette to smelt iron ore. Once upon a time it was an old-fashioned "company town," with all the sins and blessings of any 19th century village dependent on a single business owner. 

Yesterday I used an image from inside one of the buildings, a picture of a corner of a building where a window shed minimal light through an old-fashioned dainty shade behind a dining room chair in silhouette. Here 'tis again.

I like it. The image conjures a story, just as Natalie Boonstra said. You can't look at it without engagement--or at least I can't. It begs your imagination to fill in the space with a story. Here's a couple more, same late afternoon light through different windows. 

 

Maybe you see something different--perhaps Barbara and I watch too many episodes of Call the Midwife, but this one conjures a story that I can't help but think is profoundly sad. 

But all of these pictures are vintage Natalie Boonstra's; all of them covers for yet-to-be-written collections of minimalist fiction. 

Alas, in the age of fantasy, minimalism has lost even minimal appeal. Another book of minimalist short stories, no matter how imaginatively adorned, won't ring up the sales. 

But if you're looking for a ringing endorsement of a visit to Fayette Historical Park in a far corner of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, you got it. Oddly enough, amidst all that's old and useless today, it's still a wonderful place to dream. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

“I say to God my Rock, 

‘Why have you forgotten me? 

Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?’"

 

The present tense in this verse suggests the event the psalmist is describing has happened often. He’s not telling us something bizarre here, reporting on some weird epiphany gone awry. Seems to me that what he’s saying is, “Whenever I feel estranged from God, I say to him. . .” Not just once did this happen; sadly enough, I’m abandoned more often.

           

If that’s true, then what he says makes better sense. “I say to God my rock—which is to say, my fortress in times of trouble—‘why aren’t you my fortress in times of trouble?’”

 

What he feels is a hybrid pain only believers feel, because only someone who knows God as a rock can feel the terror of quicksand. Only a believer continues to talk to a God who seems to be out of state.

           

Makes no sense, really, but then neither does faith itself, often enough. The odd paradox of the psalmist’s supplication is understandable only to someone who knows, who says “been there, done that.” Like me . . . and you, probably.

           

And the question, this time at least, isn’t “how long (as it is in Psalm 13, for instance),” but “why?” “Why” is a question that also suggests significant distance. We don’t have time for “why” in the middle of battle. “Why” arises only when the battle doesn’t quit, or when we begin to look at our wounds and realize the pain.

           

In “The Wonders of the Invisible World,” Cotton Mather, the firebrand Puritan prelate, makes great claims for New England’s founders. They were “a chosen generation,” he says, “so pure as to disrelish many things which they thought wanted reformation elsewhere, and yet so peaceable that they embraced a voluntary exile in a squalid, horrid, American dessert.” They were saints.

           

But, alas, Mather says, along came their children, who like “many degenerate plants,” were altogether “otherwise inclined.” The founders were grain; their children, weeds—that’s what Mather sees and how he explains why the Devil is rampaging through New England. Everywhere he looked, after all, he saw witchcraft.

 

Why? “We have all the reason imaginable to ascribe it unto the rebuke of heaven for our manifold apostacies.” Mather, unlike David, appears to know the answer to why. It’s all our fault. Lo and behold, we’ve departed from righteousness.

           

But Mather’s explanation fed the madness that filled prisons around Salem, Massachusetts, and finally took 25 lives. Thank goodness God isn’t Cotton Mather.

All of us want to know why; all of us seek understanding for what can’t be fully understood. It’s a human thing, and it’s been a great blessing. Why is the source question of science, the foundation of education itself. Why is the beginning of knowledge.

 

But the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And some questions we ask, questions from the heart and soul of our lives, may not have easy answers, and that’s the phenomenon David is describing. Remember—it has happened more than once. Why have you left me alone?

 

And really, that’s the story of the psalm: even when he doesn’t seem to be our Rock, he is. It’s all here in this lament, in his pain and his joy. Even when there are no answers, he is.

 

Makes no sense at all unless you know it too. Praise ye the Lord.

The Apostles' Crusoe

If you look closely, you'll see a man dressed in khakis out front of the middle building in this scene from Robinson Crusoe. I'm kidding, of course. But he's just as alone as Crusoe. Well, more so--Crusoe had Friday. This guy's obligations are few--keep your domicile and its surroundings ship-shape, as they say, and occasionally, when an island ferry cruises past, make yourself visible and be friendly--wave (see his hand?) 

Otherwise, the guy is on his own. There ain't no neighbors, none at'all, and if he gets groceries or other must-haves, those items are lovingly left on the dock, which you can just see on the far right of the picture. No quick trips to town. I'm sure he gabs with the delivery man, but one of the obligations of the job--I doubt it's a paid position--is to stay there, not bounce back and forth like some lost beach ball.

Here's another shot of the Apostle's Crusoe, just a bit pre-wave. 

I witnessed all of this from a ferry taking nosy vacationers out to see the Apostle Islands in Wisconsin's far, far north. I'm ashamed to admit that this real live badger's son had never heard of the Apostle Islands. My parents weren't big vacationers, and this series of incredible outposts lie way up in Lake Superior. You can hardly get farther away from the neighborhood.

We were there last week (if you're wondering about the almost week-long vacation from blogging), and I couldn't help wondering how I might do out there if I took the job, by myself, for a couple of months. Would I go bug-eyed bananas? I don't know. Something about the isolation looked interesting, even compelling. I could blog to my heart's content--if I had something to say. Would I? Don't ask me to do it without wi-fi.

The Crusoe thing reminded me of an old story, however. Goes like this:

Some war vet gets left behind when his army unit evacuates a South Sea Island--let's just say this happens after World War II. Poor guy is all alone. When, fifty years later, an adventurer determines to visit this unmapped jungle island, he's stupefied to walk into an entire village, a small one, but a full collection of houses--and, oddly enough, only one inhabitant.

 

When he finds the islander, the traveler discovers that the man he's talking to is, in fact, all alone, and that, shockingly, he's spent the last fifty years building this entire village, piecemeal. "That's my post office," the islander tells him, pointing up Central Ave, "and that's my laundromat and next to that is my elementary school."

The bedazzled visitor points to a pleasingly designed building at the other end of the block. "And that's your church," he says, getting into the swing of things. The islander nods proudly. "But then, what's that?" the traveler asks, pointing at another fancy building at the far corner.

"Why that's the church I used to go to," the islander says, proudly.

You might just think the islander's name was Vander Poot or Flipsma. Entirely possible, of course. But I first heard the story from a gang of Jewish musicians--I'm not lying--who used the word synagogue, not church.

I don't know how I'd do if I was the khaki man. Two or three months? Wow! I'd like to think I could stay out of church fights, but, even though I'm of one mind, I rarely am. You really think Mr. Khaki never fights with himself. 

Still, you can't help but feel sorry for the poor islander--can you imagine how painful it must have been to realize that, once more, he's got to cut down more trees and carve out another fifty pews? 

I wonder if the Khaki guy argues with the people who bring him toilet paper. I bet not. No man is an island. 

CRT and me

A bit of an explanation. Not from this blog, but from another publication I received some strident criticism for being far too CRTish. You can find that publication here if you would like to read it. The letter isn't yet printed.

At first, I thought not to respond at all--it's a page from this nation's culture wars, and my critic was standing his ground and telling me to straighten up my act. 

Then I heard the Oklahoma Superintendent of Schools, a MAGA man, talk about the Tulsa Riots on 1921. I have a precious family in Oklahoma, but I drove to Tulsa for the commemoration. It's an awful story, and it's all about racism.

So I came up with this, my reaction to his accusation.

____________________________ 

What seems so clear is the cause/effect sequencing of the entire, awful story--how this led to that and that led to this and so forth and so forth and so forth, an almost inexorable chain of events. 

Begin here. I have no desire to be unkind to Oklahomans, but what needs to be said is that its white founding fathers were not Puritans. Oklahoma, once called Indian Territory, was home to more than its share of tough hombres.

After the Civil War, scores of ex-slaves left the cotton-picking South following dreams of what the West offered. In Oklahoma, those emigres were Southerners especially, many of whom had hated Lincoln, considered "emancipation" talk astutely unnatural, a foul attempt to change an entire way of life. 

By 1890, the Five Civilized Tribes who'd suffered through the Trail of Tears (1830-1850) assessed their plight in Indian Territory and signed on to the provisions of the Dawes Act (1887), which offered land ownership to Native people if they would give up their tribal governance and associations. The effect, in Oklahoma as elsewhere, was to free up land for thousands more white pioneers, many of whom were embittered Southerners not so much leaving Dixie behind as lugging losses and grievances with them.

Thus, while freed slaves moving into the region expected self-governance--freedom itself, in Indian Territory--the movers and shakers in city hall were, often as not, ex-Rebs who were not particularly interested the freedom of ex-slaves, or "equality" (whatever that meant!) for, well, the people for whom they used the n-word.

Thus, a town like Tulsa, before the oil strikes, was the very model of segregation in the late 19th century, and racism that was maybe not as blatant as it was in the Jim Crow South, but as racially divided as apartheid South Africans. There was Tulsa--the white world--and there was Greenwood--the black. It was very simple, very clearly drawn.

Segregation or not, those ex-slaves not only survived but flourished. Right there on the streets of Greenwood, their city, they did well, did better than well, in fact, so much so that some people called the place Black Wall Street.  

Then something happened. Exactly how, no one knows.

Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old African American who made his living by shining shoes, touched a white girl when the two of them were in an elevator and was, soon after, arrested for attempting to assault her. Rowland admitted he put a hand on the girl, but denied trying to harm her.

For a moment in time, old Dixie-level racism threatened the barriers already set between the races in Tulsa. To white folks, what a black boy did to a white girl was an abomination that often ended in lynchings throughout the South.

It all seems so perfectly understandable. Thus, when a couple thousand white men began milling around the courthouse where Rowland was held, dozens of African Americans in Greenwood, some of them WWI vets who'd only recently returned, determined that what seemed inevitable was, this time, not going to be. They went, single file, to the courthouse and offered their protection to the Sheriff, who waved them off. 

Tulsa became a tinderbox. On May 31, at 10:30 at night, a white man attempted to disarm an African American World War I vet. A shot rang out. Thus, it began. 

An estimated $1.5 million in damages resulted. An estimated 10,000 residents were left homeless, 6000 were interned, 1256 homes were burned, 215 looted. Almost 200 businesses were burned; almost 200 people were hospitalized. No one knows the number who perished; estimates range from 55 to 300. For a century, the whole story was locked up tight in some psychic vault, not to be spoken of.

Two years ago, Tulsa stopped willfully forgetting. The horror, created by white supremacists, arose from the kind of grave we dig for our most awful stories.

Today, Oklahoma, like many other states, has created legislation to make teaching Critical Race Theory illegal. Definitions remain vague. The letters “CRT” stand for something difficult to identify except to MAGA politicians who use it self-righteously—and often. Just this week, Ryan Walters, who ran on a campaign to eradicate CRT and “wokeness” and thereby became Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Schools, told an audience that teaching students about the 1921 Tulsa Riots wasn’t wrong, but that it had to be done in a fashion that didn’t make students feel bad. Most specifically, it had to be done in a fashion that wouldn’t make white students feel bad or in any way responsible.

There’s a kind of silly sweetness to his idiocy. But, honestly and truly, how can one teach the truly horrifying stories of our past without horror, without—in this case—the reality of the evils of Jim Crow? Without talking about who was truly guilty and who was truly innocent and why?

You can teach students about the Tulsa Riots, but you really shouldn’t mention much about race, or so said the Superintendent.

The sequence by which the Tulsa Riots developed has a clearly present cause-and-effect structure—this, then this, then this, then that. All of it, perfectly understandable. That may be Ryan Walters’ lesson plan: what happened in Greenwood in 1921 was inevitable because of the background of the individuals involved.

There’s a silly sweetness operating here. “Don’t mention race. Don’t let white kids feel bad.” I get that.

But I can’t help thinking that if I were African American, I’d call it something other than “silly sweetness.” I’d likely call it racism, and that, of course, would make me unforgivingly “woke.”

Maybe so.

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 42

By day the LORD directs his love, 

at night his song is with me— a prayer to the God of my life.

Half of all marriages fail. Why? Good question.

Some of the best researchers on the subject, professionals who’ve listened to hours and hours of conversation between ordinary married people, have come up with very interesting findings. Good lovin’, they claim, may not be at the heart of long and happy marriages, even though good lovin’ is what we’d like to believe in; a marriage drenched in passion isn’t necessarily a marriage which will last.

Okay, what then? What some researchers have come to understand is that the success of a relationship may be more dependent on the ability to fight than the ability to love. Go ahead and read that again. Marriages fail, they claim, when spouses can’t deal with inevitable conflicts. Maybe I can put it this way—couples who learn how to fight, learn how to love.

Conflict occurs even in the best of relationships. Those marriages that make it do so because spouses learn to keep those conflicts from escalating into the kind of murder that kills love and respect.

I don’t know how our fights—my wife and mine—rank with others. There have been some stiff ones, I know. Thankfully, I’ve not been around enough other couples’ tiffs and rants to judge the relative nastiness of ours. But we’ve been married now for 51 years, and I seriously doubt we’re in any kind of trouble, thank the Lord. We must have learned to manage our brawls, I guess, but don’t ask me to write the “how to.”

The fact is, it’s impossible for me to imagine myself alone now. In the give-and-take of marriage, I’ve pretty much lost the egoism that being single affords. I’m not perfect, and I still want what’s mine—and then some; but I can’t remember the last time I told myself, bitterly, that the only reason I’d done something I didn’t want to do was because, dang it, I was married, done something totally (grrrrr) for her. It’s been a long time, thank the Lord.

All of which is not to say we’re home free. I’m not too old to be shocked, even by myself.

Mostly, this great psalm, Psalm 42, is lament. Three times (vss. 5, 8, 11) when he’s almost lost in the dark night of the soul, David has to pinch himself to God’s goodness, push himself to engineer a way out of what seems pathless despair. Twice, in fact, he falls back into the darkness after trying the best he can to pull himself out.

I don’t want to be prescriptive because God’s love comes in so many shades and sizes that no one size fits all; but I’m wondering, when I feel the wild emotional amplitude of this famous, short psalm—I’m wondering whether some believers, not all, need to understand that, like a marriage, God almighty and his people—some of us at least—stay together only because we’ve learned to fight, and in so doing, how to love.

No one ever talks about that in Sunday School, but the proof is here in one of David’s roughest song, shadowed as it is with darkness. And there are others like this one, lots of them, more than we’re often willing to admit or certainly advertise.

Maybe David—or whoever wrote this great psalm—has learned how to love the Lord in all his mystery, only because he’s learned also how to fight.           

Birthday greetings

Happy Birthday to Barbara Kay Van Gelder Schaap, 

who is today. . .well, you'll simply have to get it from her.

RW -- Communion Circle (a story) iii

At a conference in Alberta, where I was the speaker, the whole crew--maybe 50 people, circled up one night after a speech or sermon and took communion from whoever was standing next to each of our left. Then, once served, we turned to our right and served the next in the circle. I'd never taken communion like that before, and I found it quite moving. That was years ago, and it's not happened since. There are rules, but some rules get left behind at retreats. That service is, as you can tell, central to the story.

______________________________  

Anna Terwain knew nothing and everything. When she saw them in the parking lot, she didn't hesitate for a moment. She went to them, the two of them bundled in each others' arms, and she took them both on, wrapped her arms around the whole bundle.

Anna Terwain is an old woman, maybe forty or fifty pounds overweight. Pete was a city bus driver for most of his life, although in the last years he worked at the Christian school, a custodian. They'd never had a lot of anything, but two of her kids were divorced--Lord only knows how many prayers she'd sent up in their behalf and still did. Pete was dead three years already, a man who never said much at all while he was alive, but whose absence created an empty silence all around her.

Marian Anderson, that black gospel singer of long ago—it was Marian Anderson whose voice always came back to Anna in the middle of her woes. "Nobody knows," Miss Anderson used to sing in a way that Anna herself used to mimic when alone, "nobody knows the trouble I've seen-nobody knows but Jesus."

Those were the only words that came to her, so those words were the ones she used on the two women bugging each other in the parking lot. "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen; nobody knows but Jesus," she told them, and she took them, both of them, back towards the sanctuary, to the celebration.

Pastor Jake de Meester missed it all, as did, by far, the majority of parishioners of Bethel Church, because the whole thing-people handing each other the grape juice and the bread-it didn't go as smoothly as de Meester would have liked. Half the congregation was finished before a quarter of the congregation had even seen the elements. He'd have to have an extra set next time and choose the spots to begin more wisely, he thought.

He didn't notice the three of them sneak back into the sanctuary, and neither did he realize how it was that Anna Terwain stood between those two women and made sure each of them dipped the bread. In fact, he didn't realize-and no one else did either-that Anna didn't partake herself because she was making very, very sure that the two of them looked straight into each other eyes and knew what it was they were doing and saying. "The body of Christ," she said to Tracy Leonard, "broken for you."

Tracy Leonard dipped the bread into the cup of grape juice and did what she thought she shouldn't-couldn't. She took it despite herself, took it because she knew, really, what it offered was so much more than her own sin, so much bigger, so much greater, so much more to be prized. And when that soggy bread was in her mouth, it tasted, as it never had before, like Christ himself. She took the cup and plate of bread from Anna, but instead of turning to the right like everyone else, she turned back to Anna Terwain and said, "The body of Christ, broken for you; the blood of Christ, shed for you."

And then Anna participated too, smiling.

Pastor Jake de Meester thought the whole celebration was something of a success, figured, with a little better planning, he could try it once again sometime when he started to think of things getting too routine.

MaryJane Amundson cried all the way home. She told her husband, who kept shoving her Kleenex, that she didn't remember ever in her life being so happy.

Tracy Leonard told Will she didn't feel like making dinner. "You know that great little Middle Eastern place we heard about on Marley Drive?" she said. "I been dying to go there-just you and me."

Anna Terwain went home to her apartment alone, praising the Lord.

And that's just one of the stories of a single Sunday's fellowship at Bethel Church.

RW -- Communion Circle (a story) ii

Once upon a time, a woman I knew came up to me, grabbed my arm, and said "You have to tell my story." Her story is Tracy Leonard's essentially--she and a good friend were both childless, were planning on a book to tell their stories when her friend, miraculously, it seemed, announced her pregnancy. The story she wanted me to tell is how that announcement affected the character who is, in the story, Tracy Leonard. What she wanted me to explain was, plain and simple, her almost unforgivable anger--at everyone and everything. "Communion Circle" carries the story of that woman who grabbed my arm.

_________________________________  

MaryJane Amundson deliberately directed her husband to the seats just behind Will and Tracy Leonard because of what she'd seen yesterday at Hubbards--no matter what words hadn't come from Tracy's lips. She knew what Tracy was feeling. She knew very well because she would have felt it herself, the two of them so close through years of insufferably negative pregnancy tests. MaryJane wanted to sit near Tracy because she had to speak to her, had to touch her.

Pastor Jake De Meester had no clue about Mary Jane’s totally unforeseen pregnancy or Tracy's God-defying jealousy. He knew his parishoners' lives, he thought. He knew that both women wanted children badly, but he also knew about Madeline's unending gossip, Mark's corporate greed, Vangie's blind arrogance, and Brett's flirtation with adultery. When he planned out the service, he knew the church, like every one he'd ever served, was full of sin. But when he planned the service, he wanted to breath new life into an old form because he wanted them all to know and know deeply that the body and blood of Christ was broken and spilled for all of their sin. So that Sunday morning, he had the members of Bethel Church stand and step back to circle the entire sanctuary, forming a ring, a human chain, to celebrate the sacrament.

It wasn't the first time Bethel Church had celebrated the sacrament that way. Not everyone liked it, of course; but then any innovation Pastor Jake had attempted at Bethel had encountered some understandable resistance. That particular Sunday morning, he was trying to be sure that everything worked smoothly, that there were no wrinkles in the celebration because he wanted the people of Bethel Church to be more comfortable with change. And the fact is, he didn't see Tracy Leonard walk away from her husband and leave the sanctuary. He was busy with the elements.

MaryJane Amundson, however, couldn't miss Tracy’s leaving, since MaryJane and her husband had taken chairs just behind the Leonards. W So when Anna saw the two of them leave the church as everyone else moved toward the outside walls of the sanctuary, she knew the entire story in a moment, and that's why she left too, unseen.

Tracy Leonard went directly to the Explorer, but found it locked, of course. Will had the keys. She couldn't participate-she was sure of that; but the circle business would have made her not participating far too public. What she'd decided not to do was a private decision between herself and God. It had involved no one else, not even Will. That's why she'd raised her hands and coughed into them. She wanted to make him think a cough was the reason she couldn't stay.

She looked back at the church and saw MaryJane coming from the front doors, thought about running, but knew it would be silly and stupid. She wasn't a child. She was a sinner all right, but she wasn't a child.

MaryJane Amundson said absolutely nothing. She stood beside Tracy for a moment, then reached for her, her arm, her shoulder. She tried to hug her, something she'd wanted to do ever since yesterday's horrible conversation, and Tracy allowed her to, holding herself, however, stiff as plaster.

Neither of them knew any words at all, so there they stood, in the hot sun, holding each other, MaryJane crying, even though she was the one who had every reason in the world to thank God for the miracle that had happened within her. 

______________________ 

Tomorrow--the conclusion.

The Reformed Worship Stories--Communion Circle (i)

For a decade or so, I wrote stories for a magazine once named Reformed Worship. The objective was to create stories that had something to do with the way we worship in our churches. "Communion Circle" is one of those stories, maybe the most touching of any in the scrapbook.  It has a genesis, but I'll wait to introduce that story until you get into it. 

___________________________ 

Tracy Leonard was planning on not taking communion, but not a soul in Bethel Church knew it. That morning, she got into the Explorer in silence, brought both hands up in front of her face, almost as if praying. Her husband drove. He didn't know a thing about her decision either, but then there were lots he didn't know.

This is the path her determination had taken. The Lord's Supper is a means of grace-the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ broken and spilled all over the earth for the sin of mankind, hers included, hers foremost maybe, because hers was the only sin she knew deep within the marrow of her bones, deep within the tangled sinews of her heart, deep within her own barren womb. She knew she could look around Bethel Church and pick out other's sins-Madeline's unending gossip, Mark's corporate greed, Vangie's blind arrogance, Brett's flirtation with adultery-but the only sinner she knew to be worthy of judgment was herself. With her heart overflowing with sin, she was in no shape to accept God's grace. She knew her jealousy. She knew her envy. She hated what she felt in her heart, but she was powerless before its rapacious appetite.

Like Othello's, her jealousy had begun to eat upon itself. The green-eyed monster grew in her like ghoulish serpent; it prayed upon her, a deviant murderer cutting her heart up into pieces. But she wasn't its victim; she was its perpetrator. She did the sinning. She envied, horribly.

The tires sung at a different pitch when they crossed the bridge. They were almost at church. She knew the body and blood would be passed that morning, as always, in complete remission for all their sin. She'd taken communion for years, understood every word of the forms, knew, from the inside out, exactly what was happening. She was 35 years old, a successful head hunter with a reputable firm, salaried far beyond her own expectations, capable of moving into new jobs by way of offers that came at least once a month. Her closets were full of clothes, she and Will had a cabin on the lake, in addition to twice-yearly vacations which had become more and more exotic-Peru, Mongolia, Tanzania. But she couldn't have children. Or at least it hadn't worked. But that wasn't her sin.

Will, still in silence, pulled into the church parking lot in that patient way he had, so as not to make the trailer hitch scrape against the pavement. There were times when she hated almost everything he did, even though he didn't deserve it.

Nothing of this was his fault. She looked up at him as he parked, third row away from the door. She spoke to no one, kept her face down as they walked to church and Will found them seats. The only thing she was ready to proclaim at this communion service, bread and wine in hand, would be her own sin. She'd flunk the self-exam, just as she had flunked countless others in the privacy of her own bathroom. She knew very well the Lord would take her repentance, but she had no will to repent. She wasn't ready. That was her sin. She knew she took great joy in her envy, because envy was all she could feel after years of trying to have children, years of countless tears at the mere sight of baby toys, of cribs, of grocery store diapers, years of wishing and hoping and worrying about every last period, years of trying, a millennium of unanswered prayers that never rose above the ceiling in that empty room they'd so long ago designated for the baby who never came.

And after all of that, her own best friend, another barren Sarah like herself had announced, in tears, that she was. . .Tracy couldn't say the word. When she couldn't be, her own best friend, the only soul on the face of the earth, the only woman who knew what she felt, Mary Jane Admundson was.

They’d met at Hubbard’s, a booth in the back, where Mary Jane had reached for Tracy’s hand. They'd done that before, the two of them, crying through mutual sadness. She didn't say the word either—Mary Jane didn't. She sat there and held her hands and said, "Jeff and 1. . ."

That's all—just enough of a hint of smile for Tracy to know what didn't need to be said, what couldn't be said.

For the first time Tracy understood the Old Testament story, how a childless woman could have wanted a baby so badly she'd take the birth mother to Solomon's court. She knew because she wanted, like nothing else, that tiny little organism clinging to MaryJane's insides.

She and Will rose for the first song. That's why she wasn't going to take communion. She wasn't deserving. She was as full of sin as she was empty of child.

___________________ 

Tomorrow--the sacrament. . .

Radiant Birth (for Christmas)

New book of Christmas readings--"Advant Readings for a Bright Season." It's from InterVarsity Press and features a number of familiar names and faces, including someone not mentioned on the cover. Hmmmm.

You might want to note that the flyer includes at 30 percent off discount with the use of the promo code OFFER23F.  (To be honest, I'm not sure what it costs.)

For many years I was a member of something called The Chrysostom Society, a group of Christian writers who met annually. Just two years ago, I resigned (yes, there are members who are older). I just thought it was time.

This collection of Christmas readings is put together by present members, who were gracious enough to includes old members in the compilation. 

Makes a good Christmas gift, I would think. . .

 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

“Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; . . .”

I first heard the line years ago from my wife’s grandmother, who I knew only for a few years as a rather elegant woman with a radiant crown of silver hair. I don’t remember the occasion, but I’ll never forget the comment because it seemed so out of character for a fine old Christian matriarch. “When bad things happen,” she said, eyes almost averted, her head shaking slightly, “they always come in threes.” She meant it.

I had no clue where she got that idea, nor why she believed it. Grandma Visser, whose people were hearty Calvinists for generations, could not have pointed anywhere in scripture for that idea, as she well could have for most of her foundational beliefs. But this ancient bit of folklore—does it have pagan roots?—never fully left her psyche, even though she probably read the Word of God every day of her life. “Bad things happen in threes.” She wasn’t—isn’t—the only one to say it or believe it. Google it sometime.

Can it be true? I don’t know that anyone could do the research. But it must have seemed a valid perception for generations of human beings caught in the kind of downward spiral that David must have been in when writing Psalm 42. And, as we all must sadly admit, and ex-President Trump daily proves, often as not perception creates its own realities.

Is it silly? Sure. If we expect it to be true, we may be silly. But the sheer age of that odd idea argues for some ageless relevance. Whether or not it’s true isn’t as important as the fact its sentiment has offered comfort and strength to human sorrowers.

True believers expect something more than they’ve already gone through, some additional misery if they have already got stung twice. By repeating the old line, Grandma was steeling herself for the next sadness, anticipating that three would mean the end of sorrows, at least for a while.

My guess is that such ancient folk wisdom finds a place in the human psyche not because it’s true, but because it’s comforting: it brings order to chaos. Sad to say, there are (or will be) three, but at least that’s it.

Interesting, I think, that Eugene Peterson uses the word chaos in his version of this verse: “chaos calls to chaos,” he says. And he’s just as right as anyone, I suppose, for it’s impossible to claim biblical inerrancy when it comes to a verse like this. The KJV says “waterspouts” where the NIV says “waterfalls,” wholly different phenomena. The fact is, nobody really knows what specifically is meant by “deep calls to deep.”

Yet everyone who’s faced a march of consecutive sadnesses knows very well. “When sorrows come, they come not as spies but in battalions,” Shakespeare says in Hamlet, an even more depressing assessment than Grandma Visser’s.

We really don’t know what David means here, but many readers of Psalm 42 somehow get it. Our lives on occasion feel like Thomas Hardy novels, when things simply seem to get worse and worse and worse, and don’t get better.

There are no vivid pictures embedded in the line “deep calls to deep,” but that doesn’t mean there isn’t meaning enough for most of us to find ourselves therein.

We can’t avoid the painful reality of the soul that’s sliced opened to us in Psalm 42: the singer who believes in the Light but sees nothing but darkness around him.

Maybe, thankfully, what’s there is the outline of a third bad thing.

Tuesday, at the DAHM

Hamlin Garland

Old Jane Ripley grew so tired of her nightly dreams that she finally decided to act on them. Ever since they’d set up homestead, she and her husband had worked themselves half to death to prove up their claim. No matter, she says, she’s going home to visit her family. It’s been a dream for way too long.

The idea of her taking a vacation on her own is plum crazy, her husband tells her. Leave the homestead and take a train all the way to New York state? —all by your lonesome? He won’t hear of it, he says. He can’t imagine such a blame foolish thing.

And so begins “Mrs. Ripley’s Trip,” a comic short story by Hamlin Garland, whose tales of rural America, mid-19th century, are classics. “Mrs. Ripley’s Trip” is a hoot—part Garrison Keiller, part cartoon, one story a collection titled Main-Traveled Roads, by Garland, who, as a boy in the 1860s, lived just outside of Osage, Iowa.

Not long ago, on a trip to the other side of the state, Jim Schaap, I stopped in Osage, where a museum docent told me I could drive by the old Garland homestead. It was still there. When I did, I got interested, once again, in Hamlin Garland.

The Garland home--Osage, IA

We do have a history. Fifty years ago, when I decided to try my hand at writing, I started with little stories I found moving in the histories that emerged from Dutch-American settlements throughout what Garland called "the middle border." To be able to talk about life in the 1870s, I needed to understand what farm life was on newly created homestead. Boy's Life on the Prairie was a great help in establishing the "givens" of the story I needed to learn, the infrastructure required to get historical fiction right.

When I read “Mrs. Ripley’s Trip” and finally stopped giggling, I figured the story would make a rollicking good readers theater piece: a gutsy old woman wanting to visit family a half a continent away, a plan her old grouch of a husband simply can’t abide.

When the Dutch American Heritage Museum Board discussed the whole crazy project, they thought enlisting Jeff and Karen Barker to read the main characters would make an unforgettable evening’s entertainment. We asked, the Barkers said yes, and you can smile your way through Garland’s story for yourself at the DAHM, Tuesday, July 11, and 6:30.

The Barkers require no Orange City introduction. Karen Bohm Barker and Jeff Barker, Emeritus Professors of Theatre, taught at Northwestern for over 30 years, impacting countless students. In their retirement, they are building a home—Barnabury—on Karen’s family farm in Illinois. Jeff is writing a book on parables, and, among other ventures, they teach a Doctor of Ministry cohort at Western Theological Seminary.

It’s wonderful to have them back for this “world premiere” performance—a classic old short story redone as readers theater and performed by masters of stage craft. Ought to be fun.

Tuesday, July 11, at 6:30, at the Dutch American Heritage Museum, located at 120 3rd St SW in Orange City.

Visitors

"What places do I really have to see when I'm here?" I asked the woman behind the desk at the Osage Visitor's Center.

“You must see our church,” she said, smiling.

Clearly, she was at least part Osage. I liked the way she’d pushed her church at me--"our church," she said. I knew she meant the tribe's. 

"Our church," is Immaculate Conception, Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a red-brick cruciform built in 1910 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

When I drove up, the doors were locked, but the office posted a number so I called. A woman with a pleasant voice told me the church was closed for the holiday weekend, but she'd meet me anyway. That was nice, and I told her so. 

By the time she arrived and we got inside, a half-dozen others had joined us, a family from Colorado on their way to a ball game. Thought they'd stop, they said. So, there we stood in the nave ready to tour. 

Our silver-haired, dark-eyed docent was linked to the region by blood, by DNA, she said. She was part Osage, but born and reared in Dallas because many years before, her grandma had left Osage County, afraid of being murdered. 

I’d read the book. I knew the story. 

"You know what happened around here a century ago?" she asked the folks in football jerseys, who shook their heads. She turned to me. I'd met her only five minutes earlier. "You tell them," she said pointing. It wasn’t a question. It was a command. 

I was stunned. The story was so much hers. It took me weeks to begin to believe that she chose not to tell it because it was so much hers.

A rash of unsolved murders in the early 1920s brought in the fledgling FBI in to investigate multiple deaths of Osage men and women who’d become unimaginably wealthy when oil gushed from wells drilled into tribal lands. In 1925, little Pawhuska, Oklahoma, had a Rolls Royce dealership--and dozens of dead Indians. White men murdered a gallery of Osage people, mostly women, for their money. The story our tour guide wanted me to tell the tourists is as unbelievable as it is horrifying, explained most recently in David Grann’s Killers of Flower Moon.

When I was finished, the tourists had trouble knowing where to look. Our tour guide thanked me with yet another smile and pointed immediately at Immaculate Conception's pride-and-joy, a stained-glass portrait of a Dutch-born priest named Father John Shoenmakers bringing the divine light of Christ to the Osage people. She was proud to say that her people needed Rome’s special approval for that window because it featured Native men and women who were still alive back then and were therefore, by some papal edict, not to be so honored in stained glass. The Osage won that tussle; so today, if you visit Immaculate Conception, your guide will most certainly point at the north window with great pride.

The Colorado bunch had to get to the game, they said, so they left.

Once I was alone, my guide walked me over to the far side of the church to show me a dedicatory note at the bottom of one of the stained-glass windows, the one endowed to honor the memory of a woman named Sybil Bolton. She pointed, stared. "She was one of them.”

Sybil Bolton was a young Osage girl who learned to play the harp at the exclusive East Coast boarding school she’d attended. Back home, at the age of 21, Ms. Bolton died mysteriously with her baby at her side. She was buried in an ermine coat.

The silver-haired docent said only that "Sybil Bolton was one of those who was killed." 

The continuing horror of the Osage "reign of terror," almost a century ago is that the whole community lives with it. Great-grandchildren of killers go to school with the great-grandchildren of victims. It’s not a story that's easy to hear, nor easy to tell.

Next week, Martin Scorsese will be there, as will Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and, most recently, Jesse Plemons. They will be making a movie. When it comes out, keep an eye out for the stained glass at Immaculate Conception.

I can't but wonder if a movie with the billing created by those stars will help the people of Pawhuska talk about what happened 100 years ago. Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

Justice, like forgiveness, is most often at the far end of a long and winding road.

 ___________________________

This post is an essay I wrote for The Twelve, a blog created by the folks who create the on-line Reformed Journal. I'm putting it up today because the trailer for Killers of the Flower Moon has been released. The film will be in theaters in October. 

George Washington Trump

Look, I sort of like this. It's silly and vainglorious--sure. It's ripe with ego, of course, but show me a politician who doesn't suffer some kind of ego problem, and I'll show you a loser. For a July 4 greeting to the nation, the meme is cute--in its own stupid way. I'd like to think it bespeaks a man with a wholesome dash of irony--"Look at me, America, I'm today's George Washington." Yuk, yuk.

The problem is, Trump is not yukking. The man believes the hype, the meme. He sees himself as leading a rebel nation to victory over a repressive and criminal "deep state." It's a bloody horror he's taking on to keep his disciples (actual disciples, mind you), the throng hungrily awaiting freedom from evil. Trump isn't putting this George Washington meme up to be cute. He wants his MAGA elites to see him as the last great American patriot, the last hope.

It's nuts. Not long at all after pleading not guilty in court, ex-President Donald J. Trump told some lame-brained admirers just outside his Bedminster, New Jersey, that Biden, “together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits and Marxists, tried to destroy American democracy.”

Biden, a Marxist? Trump is not an idiot. He wants to awaken a century-old fear of "the land of the free and the home of the brave" being destroyed by communism, by communists, as if Biden and all the Democrats in the country are closet commies. Meanwhile, in his estimation, his buddy Vlad is "a brilliant man." In Trump's madness, Putin is not a communist, Biden is.

Welcome to the upside-down world of the Republican's out-front candidate for the Presidency.

Trump's red baiting is old as the hills of the Missouri. My dad caught a good strong whiff of it 75 years ago when a Wisconsin senator named McCarthy made wild and phony accusations about all kind of people--communists, in films and in governments, who, behind closed doors, together plotted the end of American democracy. Fear works. It sells tickets and hungrily gathers contributions. Trump is our latest peddler of McCarthyism.

But the great sadness is the fact that people like Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley and Randy Feenstra don't raise a voice against Trump's evil madness. They don't want to lose. They know President Joe Biden is no commie. But they keep still, and the whole American political scene begins to stink to high heaven.

Both Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon finally lost credibility when fellow Republicans came out of hiding, when conservatives couldn't help but note the evil behind the lunacy. That as yet hasn't happened. Ernst/Grassley/Feenstra all are steadfast in their silence.

Meanwhile, yesterday, for the Fourth of July, Trump himself celebrated his glory by passing along this meme. Isn't it a beauty? Isn't he a great man?

On the Fourth with L and C

Stephen A. Ambrose says, in Undaunted Courage, that the Fourth of July on the Missouri River began with shooting off "the canon." Comes as a shock almost. Lewis and Clark, et al, packed that kind of heat?--an actual canon on board? Sheesh.

Yes and no. Simply making headway through the wily Missouri River' sandbars was enough trouble. With three or four ways of moving upstream, against the flow, the men had their choice; but none were particularly easy. Two of them--using lodge poles to pole the beast up, or else pulling the boat and pirogues upriver with ropes—were truly back-breaking. Pulling that thing against the current while marching along the river's edge had to be enough to make some of the men consider alternate professions. And then, on top all of that, they lugged along a canon?

John Ordway, as others, calls it a "Bow piece." That's a mite better than "canon" methinks. What ornamented (and that's not far from the truth) the front of "the boat," as the men described the biggest vessel of their armada, was anywhere from 18 inches to 36 inches long--not that humongous.

Still, the canon was meant as a weapon of war, should war break out. It sounds a little vainglorious to say it this way, but it's true: war was not the intention; peace was. Lewis and Clark--unless they lied their way through their own journals--were embarked on a business venture. First and foremost, they were explorers in the best 19th century definition of that word; Jefferson wanted to know everything about this unmapped chunk of land he'd bought from the French.

But L and C were also out there on business. The fur trade was big money, and the French were in it, as were the English, both big-time. They were all making money on beaver and an occasional buffalo hide, and Jefferson wanted to secure control of the business already going on out west in his new country. That might be best accomplished, he thought and thusly directed L and C, by meeting with the Indigenous and letting them know that there was a new Great Father in town, and that Great Father wanted to work with them, not against them. And by telling them that the near-constant warfare between some of the tribes wasn't good for anybody's pocketbook.

Amazing as it may seem, no matter what you call it, that cannon on the keelboat never took aim at any human being, not up or back, not for two long years. Still, even though nobody shot at anybody, lugging that "bow piece" along turned out to be immensely useful. Hunting and scouting parties went out frequently, looking for game, looking for Native people. After a day or two absences, the men couldn't help but wonder where the others might be. Voila! the canon. Boom! --a welcome call home.

It's been American military policy almost ever since: we avoid war by arming ourselves to the teeth. Sounds like idiocy, but it's worked, often.

Besides that, that "Bow piece" went off for celebration too. On July 4, "we fired our Bow piece this morning & one in the evening for Independance of the U. S." says John Ordway, and then, same sentence, no end punctuation, "we saw a nomber of Goslins half grown today." Wasn't much of a celebration, but it got a half sentence in Ordway's journal."

You can keep this information to yourself, but the men were given a double shot of whiskey that night on the occasion of the birthday of the United States of America. Prost.

I'm not at all sure if Ordway wrote this last sentence before or after that extra gill of whiskey (about four ounces), but the what he says about what he saw is sweet, whether he was a little holiday happy or not: "One of the most beautiful places I ever Saw in my life, open and beautifully Diversified with hills & vallies all presenting themselves to the River."

That extra gill of whiskey and a couple of rounds from an 24-inch cannon constituted the very first Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi. By all accounts, it was a good day.

Transparency

For six years of my forty years as a teacher, I taught in public schools--two by way of a teaching fellowship at the university, and four at public high schools, one in rural Wisconsin and another in suburban Phoenix. I graduated from a public high school, but also a private, Christian grade school.

 

Otherwise, all the rest of those years I taught college kids who'd enrolled in the private, Christian college who sent me my check at the end of the month. Our kids went to private, Christian schools for their entire lives, and three of our five grandchildren attend the same schools their mother did years ago. 

What we've contributed, money-wise, to private, Christian education would astound those who don't share commitments the two of us have held. I can say that safely because I'm quite sure it would astound me.

I am an advocate of the justice argument, the idea that choosing private, Christian education should not prohibit citizens of these United States from getting a fair share of the national educational dollar. I've always supported economic help for those who choose to send their kids to private, Christian education, and would also support it if the parents were Islamic or Jewish or Native American.

Yesterday, in its Sunday editorial, the Des Moines Register, the state's most read newspaper editorialized on Gov. Kim Reynolds' advocacy of state funded private education by loudly proclaiming that the governor and her government needed to exercise her own promised transparency on questions related to state-funded private education. The Register is right.

First, the Register insists she needs to be transparent about "How many Iowans applied for vouchers, how many were approved, and what resident school districts do they come from?" People deserve to know how their tax dollars are being spent.

Second, the Register says people need to know "How many approved applicants have actually been accepted into private education?" Private education is "private" because it does not, by law, have to accept and enroll all applicants. Public education does. It would be helpful for taxpayers to know when children are turned down for enrollment--and where and why. 

Third, the Register says that Iowa needs to know "how many students receiving vouchers are enrolling in a private school for the first time, and how many are just replacing personal tuition payments with taxpayer-funded vouchers?"

I can't help but think the Register is right. Governor Reynold's haste to pass her private education laws into service was seen, by some, as rushed. But her government's silence about the easily discernable facts the Register insists need airing is, well, stinky.

Iowa, like many state legislatures, is dominated by super-majority Republicans, who have more on their minds than justice. What makes me shivver is the whole package of Republican principles these days, the stock-in-trade of MAGA Republicans: book-banning, for example, and over-zealous management of curriculum, not to mention teacher name-calling. Some of those who trumpet private, Christian education these days do so because they are convinced, as MAGA Republicans tell them every day, that teachers are despicably WOKE or communists or fascists who hate America. Have a look at the ex-President's last speech--any of them.

The degree to which Gov. Reynolds trucks with the MAGA crowd is the degree to which I lose trust in her and her government. The Register scores some points with yesterday's editorial. Over this Fourth of July weekend, it serves us well to remember that adage from the freedom scrapbook: "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

“My soul is downcast within me; 

therefore I will remember you from the land of the Jordan, 

the heights of Hermon—from Mount Mizar.”

 

 

For a decade at least, just about every Saturday morning I could I ventured out west into the rolling hills that have formed, centuries ago, along the Big Sioux River, where the land opens broadly into a landscape that, like most of the Great Plains, ends only in what seems infinite space. Literally, there is nothing there. There’s corn and there’s beans and there’s some grasslands, but nothing is substantially present to fill the frame of a camera lens; and that’s why it’s such a challenge to try.  I do what I can to get an angle on a subject that offers very little. We live in fly-over country here, an area most Americans see only from the relative comfort of a jumbo jet. But then “I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself,” says curmudgeonly Thoreau, “than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”

 

Some time ago, the New York Times ran a story about Californians leaving the state for the Midwest.  When I sent the story to friends, the Times website told me that story was their most-emailed piece that day.  Amazing. 

 

And in some ways, terrific. It would be nice for everyone here if some companies would relocate to the rural Midwest, where wages are dismal and, often, benefits are worse. We could use a financial shot in the arm.

 

But I’m not all that interested in a flood of new residents. I am blessed—I really am—by living in a place where open land is all around, just a farm or two per gravel road. These days, from my own backdoor, I can see for miles. 

 

Some people in tall-grass prairie country lament the death of hunting, pheasant hunting specifically. The number of hunters is down, even though the headcount of pheasants, by my estimation, is up--at least I see more out here.

 

I’ve always thought Thoreau wasn’t wrong when he claimed that boys (his word) really ought to hunt when they’re young but give it up on becoming men, and that’s why I don’t lament the loss of hunters. But I’ve been one, and I still sometimes long to get out there in the silence. Just the same, I wanted to write a letter to the reporter suggesting that we’d all be better off—even the pheasants—if we all packed cameras instead of 12-gauge pumps.

 

Some Saturdays—lots of them this time of year--the sky, at dawn, is thick with clouds, so thick that I don’t bother going out. When I made a habit of it, cloudy Saturday mornings hurt because I came to need my Saturday morning’s hour-long pilgrimage into open spaces. Kathleen Norris, in Dakota, makes clear what others have said—that sometimes where there’s nothing, there’s really something.

 

And I say all of this because in the second bout of sadness which David discusses in this psalm—and it’s interesting that Psalm 42 doesn’t end with verse six—he is a bit more specific in the means by which he’ll fight the blues. He’ll return—thoughtfully if not physically—to the open land, to the “heights of Hermon.” He’ll go back to the open spaces as an antidote to his weary, downcast soul, because there he can remember God.

 

Honestly, I think I know what he’s talking about. Seems not so ago I was all by my blessed self in the snowy country just a few miles east of Glacier National Park. All by myself.  Oh, maybe a horse or gang of deer, but all by my blessed self, and it was a blessing.

 

Snow had just blew in from the far north, chilling everything and leaving an icy glaze over the world. I should learn how better to adjust my camera’s f-stop. 

 

Just the heights of Hermon---the mere memory of standing there all alone, David says, gives life to a weary soul. 

 

I think I know that one.