Abbie's Story -- iii

The Gardner cabin today

Like several other Sioux headmen, Inkpaduta refused to buy into the treaty/reservation system, the white man’s view of how “Indians” should live. He despised the enforced settlement created by treaties. The Minnesota State Historical Society describes the Treaty of 1851, signed just north of St. Peter, Minnesota, just six years previous, this way:

At Traverse des Sioux, the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands of the Dakota ceded 35 million acres. At Mendota, the Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands ceded about 14 million acres. The combined payment was about $3,075,000. Most of this money was to be paid in the form of annuities. At Traverse des Sioux, Dakota leaders signed—some later said they were tricked into signing—the infamous “Traders’ Paper.” This agreement turned over most of the Dakotas’ cash payments to their mixed-blood relatives and to traders, who had allowed debts to mount over the years in expectation of tapping into the flow of the government’s “Indian money.

Treaty at Traverse des Sioux, 1851

Signing the treaty meant being forced to live and stay within the boundaries of a territory twenty miles wide along the Minnesota River. Buffalo hunts west of the Missouri River kept people in food for some time; more than that, however, the hunt had become a ritual with cultural and religious significance. Not being able to leave the reservation meant the death of a way of life. Inkpaduta was unwilling to cede that to the Great Father in Washington or the settlers swarming into a region they’d always considered free. Moreover, annuities were frequently late; some never came. Some were disgusting.

Inkpaduta had lost a friend and blood relative who had been brutally murdered along with his wife and children, all of them killed by a white man, a much-hated liquor peddler. After the murders, that man had gone farther west to avoid prosecution. When, later, Inkpaduta attempted to get justice from white man’s courts, he came away claiming he’d received nothing but indifference.

That the Waupekutes had cause to fight the new settlers is understandable: white people had no right to take land that had always been theirs. But the Wahpakutes’ brutality left pioneer families throughout the region repulsed and fearful and therefore vigilant. For hundreds of miles in every direction, new white settlers left their farms and circled up behind quickly constructed walls to escape the carnage they assumed was coming.

Abbie's Story -- ii

When their guests returned sometime later, they demanded flour. When Abbie’s father turned to get what little they had, one of them shot him through the heart. Her mother attempted to push a rifle barrel away and was clubbed, then dragged outside and killed “in the most cruel and shocking manner,” Abbie says. Abbie was little more than a child. In a few moments, both her parents lay dead.

That left her alone with three children. Two were her brothers, the other belonged to an older married sister who happened to be away. The Wahpakutes grabbed the children, dragged them outside, and clubbed all three to death:

After ransacking the house, and taking whatever they thought might be serviceable, such as provisions, bedding, arms and ammunition; and after the bloody scalping knife had done its terrible work; I was dragged from the never-to-be-forgotten scene. No language can ever suggest, much less adequately portray, my feelings as I passed that door. 

When Inkpaduta and his warriors left, the cabin was in flames.

What happened at the Gardner cabin was the first terrible act of a string of atrocities along the lakeshore, a string that, a day later, extended into the town we know today as Jackson, Minnesota.

The night before that attack, Abbie remembers seeing the same warriors dress once again for battle, her own family’s killers. They might have murdered all the residents had there not been a warning. Even so, Inkpaduta’s men plundered what they could and killed seven more settlers, including another eight-year-old boy. To say those victims were murdered unmercifully seems redundant, but consider it understatement.

In all, Inkpaduta’s band killed as many as 40 settlers in the three-day rampage and took four women captives, including young Abbie Gardner.

Memorial at Lake Okoboji

Any telling of the story cannot deny that the Wahpekutes had cause, as their descendants will explain; the existence of the tribe and their freedom as a people were at stake. From an indigenous point of view, what Inkpaduta accomplished was what they had set out to do: clear the area of white settlers, the illegal immigrants. That, they did—for a time.

Even before the massacre, Inkpaduta, the “chief” of the Wahpekute band, was considered dark as sin itself by white settlers—and for good reason. He’d committed his band to the area of the Little Sioux River, where he had managed to make few friends among the settlers. But the level of hideous carnage the band had reached that late winter day was new and beyond imagination.

The old man in this photograph is reputed to be the Dakota headman Inkpaduta. It is the only such photograph of the man  

Abbie's Story -- i

I hate to say it but I'm busy, more busy, I can't help but think, than a man who's been retired for ten years should be. Rather than pressuring myself to come up with something new every day on this old blog, I'm vacationing from that schedule by running a story that's somewhat famous around here, in a fashion that it's rarely told, a fashion that gives the story the shape Abbie Gardner herself gave it in this memoir of her life. Her story, her way, is one of the finest stories of forgiveness and reconciliation I know. But the only way to get there is a sad and thorny path. This is the first segment of Abbie's story, the way she wanted it told.

Without the horror, the blood, the grief, the lifelong sadness, there could not have been the triumph. That’s the story line here.

Abbie Gardner was just thirteen when her family set down a perilous homestead out front of the wave of white newcomers to a region of the country few Euro-Americans had ever seen: Iowa’s northwest corner.

Years after Inkpaduta and his Wahpakute (Waa-pa-koot’-ee) band wreaked travesty on the Gardner family and the thirty-some others they also murdered, Abbie wrote a memoir about what she’d suffered at the hands of those who’d murdered her mother, her father, and her little brother, and then held her in frightful bondage for about four months.

Her memoir, The Spirit Lake Massacre and the Captivity of Miss Abbie Gardner (1885), told the story and contributed to a genre that had already gathered fascinated readers here and abroad, ever since the publication of a 17th-century predecessor, A Narrative of the Capture and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, (1682), a memoir subtitled The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. [Rowlandson’s cover]

Rowlandson’s Capture and Restoration is often considered America’s first “best-seller,” a white woman kidnapped and abused by hideous warriors in bright red war-paint. It was also the progenitor of a genre scholars refer to as “captivity narratives,” stories that attract audiences by what is often unthinkably repulsive and therefore undeniably fascinating.

Abbie Gardner Sharp (she married soon after her freedom was purchased) likely knew something of the popularity of captivity narratives. If she didn’t, someone in her acquaintance would have. That she did, however, doesn’t mean the book she wrote—and later peddled at the scene of the crimes—was just dime novel material. The Spirit Lake Massacre is an honest, heartfelt and fascinating read—of both tale and teller.

That the Spirit Lake Massacre is common knowledge among those who live in my neighborhood is probably not a valid assumption. For descendants of Iowa pioneers like the Gardners, the dark tales that rose from Manifest Destiny are easier not to remember. Most Iowans know little about the Ioways, even less about how it is the Ioway tribe has lived in Oklahoma for almost 200 years.

Some background is relevant. Be warned: it’s bloody.

In March of 1857, the Gardner family had just moved to land in a region unsettled by Euro-Americans. They were the cutting edge of a cultural wave that had begun in 1620 at the Plymouth Colony: white folks assuming the land to be free and open for settlement, even though their squatting threatened the indigenous who lived there.

Winter never departed that particular March, the temperatures as low as temperatures can dip here, deep snow sharply crusted to make walking any distance almost impossible.

For the Gardners, a band of Indians coming to their door that day was not rare. Neither was talk. When the Wahpekutes came, Abbie’s father picked up his rifle; but her mother, Abbie remembers, told him to put it down. “If we have to die,” she told him, “let us now die innocent of shedding blood.” Thus, the Gardners allowed Inkpaduta’s men into their cabin and cooked up pancakes for breakfast.

_______________________ 

For the record: Inkpaduta’s Wahpakute band were one of four distinct lingual branches of Dakota people. History suggests that the Dakotas, along with the Nakota and Lakota, once shared a common language with many other tribes (among them the Mandan, Crows, Winnebago, Omaha, and Iowa). The name “Santee” makes a broader reference to those Dakota people who lived in the eastern edges of what Euro-Americans called Dakota Territory. Inkpaduta’s band were Dakotas, but more specifically, they were Wahpakutes, and would have considered themselves as such. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Our best

“Ascribe to the Lord, mighty ones, 

ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.” Psalm 29:1

Mighty, I’m guessing, is a word like rich, a word people give to others, never themselves. Few of us would consider ourselves the “mighty ones” specifically addressed in the first verse of this thundering psalm, a song in which David the King seems to be addressing some tenth-century United Nations. But let’s eavesdrop.

Think football. The quarterback fakes a handoff to the tailback, then drops back, eyes ranging downfield. He pumps once, and the linebacker chasing him goes for the fake, allowing him a few extra seconds. The flanker is on a fly pattern, so the QB heaves the ball up with everything he’s got, and somewhere down the field his man runs under it, grabs it, holds on, shuns a tackler, and waltzes into the end zone. The crowd ignites.

Today, almost inevitably in pro football, the flanker will perform. He’ll slam dunk the football over the goalpost or high five the first dozen teammates who greet him. Or T-bow. But most of the time what follows is some bizarre chicken-like strut, a gangly prance, a knee-dipping, elbow-flapping sashay. You know what I mean.

If it’s the home team, the crowd goes nuts, not simply because they love the dance but because they too feel the juice of that big-time touchdown pass. They love the score just as much as the flanker. Fortunately, the cameras never pan the stands. I’m sure just as much ostentatious prancing goes on in the bleachers.

Give all of that to God. That’s what David is telling his fellow potentates. Take hold of all that bravado, all that bellicose swagger, and lay it where it belongs, at the throne of God. Dance in joy to him. Cavort blessedly. Prance your praise.

To me, far too often, prayer means supplication. Some of the most earnest prayers of my lifetime—I remember them—have been uttered when I’m begging Him for something I can’t get or maintain for myself: a cure for cancer, an end to war, a balm for grief, a shelter in the time of storm. We draw closest to God, it seems, when our own reservoirs are depleted, when we know we need showers of blessings.

It may well require more of us, however, to bring him our glory and our strength, to thank him for a great class, to bless his name for the end of a story or a novel that just wouldn’t come. For rain. For the music of the birds. For sweet Sunday mornings.

I don’t know about you, but for me it’s somehow easier to bring him our worst than our best.

Truth is, he’d like it all.

On 9/11--my story

On Monday, KWIT, the local NPR affiliate, ran an old essay of mine that describes where I was and what I was doing when the towers fell in Manhattan. You can listen in if you click here. 

https://www.kwit.org/post/september-11-2001-highland-iowa-lessons-ghost-town-brought-back-changed-world 

Tomorrow night at Unity

When Diet Eman died, at 99, just two years ago, both the New York Times and the Washington Post wrote long celebratory obituaries. Have a look for yourself.

Tomorrow night, Saturday, September 11, at 7:30, a readers theater presentation of Things We Couldn't Say will be presented at Unity Christian High School. Tickets will be available at the door.  All proceeds will go to the Veterans Honor Flights. 

The most powerful story of the 20th century was the story of the Second World War, but the best story of the 20th century was the stories of selfless heroism of those men and women in occupied Europe who risked their lives to save other men and women, people they didn't know, from the Holocaust. 

Diet Eman died two years ago, but her story lives on.

As it should.

As it must.

My Story of Diet's Story -- ii

 

In typical Dutch fashion, here they are, on bikes--Diet Eman and Hein Sietsma. They were little more than kids when Hitler decided, the day after he said he wouldn't, to run over the Netherlands, blitzkrieg the entire country and simply take it for his own. 

"I was furious," she told me, time and time again, because there was no cause, no reason for those Nazi jackboots to flatten Rotterdam and march through the streets of every city in the country, including Den Haag, where she worked in a bank. What right had those Germans to to take over the lives of the Dutch? No right whatsoever.

And when the Queen left for England, she was furious again. "Why would 'our mother' just leave us behind?" she told me. She couldn't help wondering why she'd abandoned them. Many wondered.

But all of that came out in her reminiscence only after that first thoughtfully considered and oh-so-professional question I'd asked her, a question meant not only to reveal character but also to try to establish my credentials as being "a writer," a title I'd hardly earned at that time in my life. I'd brought up the idea of my helping her in the afterglow of a story that had thrilled my heart and soul and mind. I'd asked her almost as if without thinking. I'd never done a book like this could be before. Never. What did I know? Really, nothing.

"What kind of guy is he?" I asked her, then offered some true-to-life options.

"Well," she said, "why don't you just read for yourself?" Matter-of-factly, she said it, as if the question was rhetorical.  "I've got his letters."

I had no idea. "You have his letters to you, letters he wrote?" I said, perfectly slack-jawed.

"And many of mine to him," she told me.

"You're serious?"

"And I have some of his diaries and all of my diaries too."

"You're not kidding?"

She looked at me as if I'd become a stranger. "No," she said, as if wondering why on earth I would doubt her.

Then the story came, the story that became the readers theater presentation. 

After she'd discovered that Hein would never return, after learning he'd died in January of 1945, just months from liberation, she'd taken all those precious notes and letters and locked them up in a metal box because, she told me, she had come to realize that it would be impossible to go on if she didn't try to become another person altogether. 

So she'd locked them in a cold, metal box because she had to stop seeing them. She had to keep them out of her memory, had to quit reliving what had happened, pull herself away from a time that would never, ever return. She couldn't burn them, but neither could she leave them around. She locked them up.

That was 1946. She'd changed professions, went to nursing school, then determined to take a job that would take her out of the Netherlands altogether. Her painful past had to be abandoned. 

By the end of the 1940s she was working at a nurse in Venezuela at a Shell Oil compound full of European workers. She'd left behind everything that had happened to her during the war, all that adventure and intrigue and grief. She did what she could to clear her life of reference to a past she had to forget but never could.

Years passed. She was fluent in Spanish and went on countless medical mission teams into faraway locales around the world, where she acted as a translator for those who came in for help to makeshift clinics created by North American doctors. Sometimes at night, in jungle compounds lit only by a fire, she and other team members would tell stories. Slowly, she started to share what had happened to her--to them, to her and Hein--during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Slowly, the story was told, in bits and pieces.

Eventually, she was asked to tell the story before hundreds of people in a place called Sioux Center, Iowa. Then again, in 1991, at a college conference, same place, before hundreds more, where a man she didn't know asked her if she'd like someone to help her write that story, put it all in a book. She told him she'd thought about it, but she told that man  that he wasn't the first to ask. But she said also that she'd always considered it somehow vainglorious or something to talk much about what she and her fiance did in the war because she was no hero. She didn't do anything that hundreds didn't. They'd done what they did because the Lord commanded it, didn't he? 

And wasn't it almost a little presumptuous to have your story out there like that, like Corrie? She knew Corrie Ten Boom, even worked for her relief organization, helping children who lost their parents during the war. Everything Corrie Ten Boom said had become scripture after The Hiding Place. Corrie was sainted. That kind of adulation was improper because hundreds--literally, hundreds--had done what Corrie did--and more. And whatever Corrie says now gets almost to be like scripture? Is that right?

But the question I asked her stuck with her, and one night after church she called me.

"I've got his letters and my letters and my journals and even his," she told me that first night I visited. I'd just then started my tape recorder. First five minutes of conversation.

I was astonished because I had absolutely no idea there were letters and journals.

"And yesterday for the first time, I opened that box and read through them again," she told me. For more than forty years those memories had been locked up in a metal box she'd just opened for the first time the day before I arrived. 

For the next week, she talked and I listened. Memories rushed up from her beaten soul as if her mind's scrapbook had no back cover, and I listened, as did my little tape recorder. I tried to shape things, to keep her memories clear and chronological. I handed her Kleenex when she cried, which she did, often. I laughed when she did--just as often. I wheedled when she seemed reluctant, when I thought there was more she wasn't telling. Not everything came out easily.

For an entire week her story came tumbling out. Some days, just for a break, we'd take walks out in the open field behind her house. But she never really stopped talking, ran through flaming emotions that made the telling an almost constant storm. And I listened.

Her story became a book, Things We Couldn't Say, and my story of her story became a readers theater presentation performed dozens and dozens of times a quarter-century ago, a 90-minute version of her incredible tale done in such a bare bones fashion that any church group could do it--that's what I wanted to create. I wanted to find a way to let this story be told a thousand times to the glory of God.

Mostly, it's been in mothballs now for a couple of decades, but Janie Van Dyke, at Unity Christian High, decided to pull it out once more and have a run at it. 

It's been a joy to hear it again, to go back to an experience unlike anything else in my writing life. I was there the night after Diet Eman opened up that box of letters and notes for the first time since the end of the war. I was there when the whole story came out for the first time since she'd learned the painful news that her Hein, her lover, would never return from Dachau. I was there when she told the whole story.

That's my story of her story, and it will be staged at the Knight Center in Orange City this weekend, where it's being done by gifted ordinary people who find it a privilege, just as I have, to tell her marvelous story. 

Saturday night, September 12, at 7:30. Tickets are five dollars at the door. 

My story of Diet's story

Really, what did I know? 

Not much. 

But I'd been thoroughly worked over by hearing her story. She'd told it, laughing and crying and celebrating while standing behind the podium of the college chapel in front of an audience of hundreds. 

It was 1991, thirty years ago. We'd planned the conference for a year. We wanted to draw people who had similar "old country" experiences during the war, people who, out of conscience and commitment to justice, had risked their lives and even the lives of their families because they felt it imperative to come to the aid of Holland's Jewish population, who'd become the targets of Nazi horrors few of them even understood in 1940 or 1941.

Among our college constituency, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of those who worked in the Dutch resistance, then immigrated to North America after the war. Research made clear that the only group of Netherlanders more dedicated to resistance work was the Marxists, sworn enemies of the fascists. Second, came those people sociologists and historians labeled "orthodox Protestants," which translated roughly into Gereformeerde or its North American first cousin, the Christian Reformed.

We'd asked her to speak because the Resistance worker the Dutch government had offered us, a woman from California, took ill at the last minute, leaving a blank space in our conference program. Diet Eman (deet a'-maan) had spoken in the chapel earlier when a local businessman had funded her speech after hearing her tell something of her story when the two of them were in some Central American country on a mission trip. The story she told had been incredible, the local paper said. I hadn't heard it myself.

Incredible is what she was that night at the conference. I'd never heard her before, but it was clear to me that her story--a tender love story against the stark horror of great human conflict--was beyond doubt one of the greatest stories I'd ever heard.

What did I know about writing such things? Nothing, really. I'd interviewed people and written their stories before, but never anything longer than a few hundred words. 

But that night at the chapel, when I ended up in the food line just behind her, I opened my big mouth because I was so deeply taken. "Did you ever think of getting a writer to help you write all of that?" I asked her after saying well-meant gracious things about what we'd all just heard. 

She shook her head with considerable decisiveness. She told me she'd already had six people ask, but she didn't want it to be a book, she said, would rather not go in that direction at all.

Six months later, after church on a Sunday night, she called me. "Turn in the Psalter Hymnal to number 345"--she said--(I don't remember the number)--and read verse two." I stood right there, pulled the book from our library, and found it. The line had to do with parents telling their children the works of the Lord. "I want to write the story and I want you to help me," she said. 

Suddenly I had a job I hadn't planned on. 

A few more months passed. Summer arrived. I bought a ticket for Grand Rapids, Michigan, rented a car, found her address, a retirement apartment in a new complex. 

And I had a plan. I'd plotted out some questions I wanted to ask. I'd considered that what the book should look like would be something in the line of The Hiding Place, the Corrie  Ten Boom story. So when we started talking that Sunday night, when my little tape recorder sat there on the table between us, the red light on, I was the first one to speak.

"Tell me what he was like," I said, or something to that effect. "In a group, would Hein be the first one to talk, or the last one, or the one with the best story?" How would I know him if he was just one of the men in the room here with us?"

What she said immediately thereafter became the readers theater version of a story that would become Things We Couldn't Say. 

In essence, the reader's theater production is my story of her story, and should you be anywhere in the vicinity of Orange City, Iowa on Saturday, it will play at the Knight Center at Unity Christian, starting at 7:30. 

What Diet Eman told me at that moment, how she answered my first question, a question I'd worked over myself time after time, trying to be professional, changed the direction of the project
completely and became itself a story.

More of that story tomorrow.

Morning Thanks--Spirit Mound

Yesterday, from the top of Spirit Mound, you could see in all directions somewhere close to thirty miles, I'm thinking, maybe more. I'm looking north here, slightly northwest. The first white man to put up shop under the 1862 Homestead Act--that man told people that when he moved in, he stood where I'm standing, looking north he'd seen nothing. Just one tree. That's it. No more.

On a clear day, like yesterday, the idea of all that nothing is just stunning. The tall grass prairie here at the emerald edge of the Great Plains was the grassy sea the trappers claimed, just endless prairie. Absolutely nothing out there. Except one tree.

What we see out back in our own prairie right now is a jumble of things almost kaleidoscopic from year to year. Things are never quite the same come June or July. Spirit Mound's vast prairie abounds in Maximillian sunflowers, tall and spindly things that gawk like a gossipy herd of giraffes, so many that the well-worn path to the top is a tunnel, a bright yellow fun house.

There's so many this year, you can't help but think if there weren't, if there were just one-hundredth of many thousands, they'd be, like dandelions could be, real show-stoppers. They're a stadium full of big, golden NBA stars.

From the top, looking south toward the Missouri, a creek bed overflows with them,  gadzillions, solid gold.

From here, on a late August day in 1804, a day so hot they sent Seaman, the big black Newfoundland, back to camp at the river, Lewis and Clark kept climbing the mound looking to find those little 18-inch devils the Yanktons claimed lived up there. The little people were out that day, as they were again yesterday; but from here, the Corp of the Discovery spotted their first herd of buffalo. It was 1804, and so much of what they'd encounter all the way to the Yellowstone was bison, bison, and more bison. But here, for the first time they saw herds that literally spread over the grassy sea in a carpet of woolly fur. 

None yesterday. Only in the imagination. 

For the millions who aren't old folks, yesterday, a holiday, was the last day of summer. For us, not. But then any trek out to and up Spirit Mound seems a holiday. Yesterday, a little hot maybe, but take-your-breath-away beautiful, as always, for which I'm greatly thankful.

Morning Thanks on Labor Day--a photograph

I'm sorry to have to admit I didn't take the picture; I wish I had. For the record, however, I did write the book and did so long ago already--that's my name beneath the title. A thoughtful gentleman from the Netherlands sent the shot. Got it yesterday. I like it. This morning on Labor Day, I'll tell you why.

I am, for better or for worse, someone shaped by the work of a portly historical figure named Abraham Kuyper, a former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, a noted clergyman and theologian, and a prolific journalist, about whom I know very little more than I've just related.

So reads the first page of the book's preface, an introduction I felt important to include because in condensing and adapting the meditations I did from Dr. A. Kuyper, I didn't want anyone to think that I was either a theologian or a historian. Read on.

I've never studied Kuyper's theology, read his political treatises, or paged through much more than a chapter or two from his biography. What I know is that he was and still is central to the ethos in which I was raised, an ethos I continue to work within, the precious baggage of a diminutive American immigrant sub-culture, the Dutch Reformed, a group of folks long ago forgotten by its contemporary European siblings and slowly now disappearing, as all ethnic sub-cultures do, within the stew constantly brewing in the American melting pot.

The shelf of books I inherited from my grandfather, the preacher, includes a beat-up translation of Near Unto God, almost pocket-sized, in English. I'd never read a word of Abraham Kuyper, so, once discovered, I pulled out that fat little book and started reading. 

I shouldn't have been surprised that the meditations were wonderful and, in truth, I wasn't; after all, my grandfather wasn't the only Dutch-American to own Na Bij God Te Zijn. I remember being told, fifty years ago, that late 19th century Dutch immigrants, many of whom came here, made sure to stick a copy of Na Bij God Te Zijn in the chests of things they lugged over from the old country, along with the Bible, of course. Reading Kuyper, I wasn't on foreign soil. 

This man Kuyper is an intimate of mine, even though I never met him. Somewhere inside me he holds sway with much more authority than, say, President Teddy Roosevelt, who would have been his contemporary and was himself Dutch-American. Kuyper's mind--his ideas and vision--are a part of me that has always been there, even when I didn't know he was or they were.

To my mind, central to his legacy is what we used to call a "worldview," specifically that, in the words of a contemporary, the Christian life consisted of two conversions: one, to God, and a second, back to the world. Whether or not Kuyper ever used those very words, his life testified to that spirit. He was a noted preacher, a prolific newspaper columnist, and, for a brief spell, the Prime Minister of the Netherlands. In his life there was no distinction between sacred and secular. All of life was religion. 

One's "calling," therefore, wasn't solely a spiritual event. Men and women were "called" by God to offices and positions of authority and professions because we are called in every walk of life to bring praise to our Creator. All of work is holy--every square inch, as Kuyperians like to say, perhaps too often. Those ideas animated many of my ancestors, pushed them into life and through it, doing everything to the glory of God.

So when I pulled that fat little book off the library shelf where it sat for years untouched, I told myself I was about to read things that were somehow and in some form already inside me. In noticeable ways, in me Kuyper was factory-installed.

For me, therefore, getting to know Abraham Kuyper is an exercise in getting to know myself. If the greatest knowledge, as Socrates maintained, is knowledge of self, then gaining an understanding of what we've come from is no mean accomplishment. The Nobel Prize-winning Nebraska novelist Willa Cather maintained that every major theme a writer would or even could consider in his or her work grew from questions planted within the soul long before adulthood. If that's true, then for me, knowing something about Kuyper helps me visualize more clearly what I've been considering for nearly most of my life and two [now four] decades of writing--and why and even how.

That photograph up top--it was a gift, really, don't you think? The man who took the photograph doesn't know me. He said he'd decided to take a walk and visit the cemetery, toting my adaptations of Kuyper along with. While there, he snapped a picture.

For that act of kindness and memory on this Labor Day, I'm greatly thankful.  

Sunday Morning Meds--What he said

 

“The LORD watches over you—

the LORD is your shade at your right hand. . .” Psalm 121

What he told the world is that since 1895, American news sources have alternated warnings about our changing climate. For almost forty years prior to the Great Depression, most opinion-makers touted the present danger of a returning ice age.

And that’s not all. What he said is that arch-political scientists and their friends in the news media have beating the drum about global warming for years now, when there is no such phenomena—or, if there is, it’s nothing more than a temporary shift, our climate and planet far more dynamic than some would think.

What he claimed has been proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that the so-called “hockey stick,” the heavily reported spike in climate temperatures throughout the 20th century after thousands of years of constancy, has been proven totally false by Canadian researchers who simply tore it apart. That spike is phony baloney.

What he told all of us is that the National Academy of Science has shown conclusively that humanity has suffered through minor climate changes before, that what is called “the Medieval Warm Period” (900 A.D. to 1500 A.D.) and “the Little Ice Age” (1500 to 1850) are bona fide proof of natural and sustainable climate variations—and that therefore the propaganda about “global warming” today is just hype and hooey.

What he said is that the Arctic isn’t warming but cooling. He’s reminded us all that sixty prominent Canadian scientists sent a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister, saying that “'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes occur all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise.'"

He claimed that restraining so-called greenhouse gases has real economic costs, stifling business activity and a bustling economy, and therefore hindering progress in dealing with world poor. He quoted this headline, "Climate Changes Endanger World's Food Output," called alarmist and dangerous, and then pointed out that it ran in the New York Times in 1975, almost fifty years ago.

He is a senator, and the speech he delivered, years ago already, is much longer, full of facts and documented anecdotes and references to studies.

I have neither the time nor the competence to study the issue of global warming thoroughly, and whether the Senator is even partially right, scientists themselves appear to disagree. So the nature of the question changes in my circumstance: it’s not “what do you believe about global warming?” Instead, it’s “who do you believe?”

And I choose not to believe the Senator. I choose to believe instead a list as long as my arm of people who radically disagree with his claims. I believe The Sixth Extinction, a book I happen to be reading right now. I believe something is happening after surviving three 100-year floods in two years. I can't help but believe that some new force is dangerously close to doing really awful things, worse than last week's hurricane or the forever fires in Oregon and California.

I may be wrong. I'm not all knowing. The senator believes he is.

But I also choose to believe the psalmist when he says—with nary a hint of global warming—that this God of his (who’s apparently at his right hand armed with a parasol) is watching over all of us—polar meltdown or coming ice age, and that this God, my God, is my shade from all kinds of heat. That truth is transcendent.

He is my only comfort—in both deathly cold January and the dog days of mid-July. He is my only comfort. That I know by faith.

A classroom revelation

"The quality of mercy is not strained."                     

I don't think I knew, back then, that "strained" is really short for "constrained," or "held back," but I did know--I was maybe 15--that what the line meant was that you simply couldn't do too much mercy. No one could. Way back then, somehow I got that.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. 

Mrs. Goehring taught sophomore English. Mostly, it seems, I was bored. She was the essential schoolmarm, a teacher we might have guessed pushed herself into a desk drawer when the rest of us left the classroom. She was a function of the school, of no greater particular interest say, than, back then, the bell.

It's fair to say I remember Portia's speech not because of the teacher but because of the teaching. Critics claim Shakespeare was retooling Deuteronomy 32:2, but I don't remember knowing that either. There was just something enriching about the idea that in this world the quality of mercy was so abundant, even eternal, that really you couldn't exhaust it, even if you tried.

It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

Amazing. When I give it away, I get as blest as the recipient. It's not only sweet, it's a bargain. I understood that. It made beautiful sense. When I see the line today, almost 60 years later, I'm in sophomore English.

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

But mercy is above this sceptered sway.

It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings;

In truth, nothing could have been farther from my mind when I was 15 than English royalty. Hey! we'd fought King George. Brit monarchs were hooligans. 

But I understood I that it behooves (a word I knew from church!) the high-and-mighty to keep mercy somewhere handy, right beside the throne, because kings and queens are actually most blessed by dispensing mercy--which is to say charity, which is to say love, which is to say forgiveness--all of that. That day in class, if only for a moment, I understood that Portia, and Shakespeare, was really talking about King Me and the blessings--and requirements--of faith. I got that.

It is an attribute to God Himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

Showing mercy, simply enough, is God-like.  When it comes to justice, you can't season it enough with mercy. It drops like gentle rain.

My thanks, this morning, are for Portia, and Shakespeare. 

And more. I'm thankful for The Merchant of Venice, thankful Mrs. Goehring assigned it way back when, thankful she took the time to talk about Portia's famous speech, thankful that somehow--despite the walking, talking chaos I was when 15--I myself took a moment to realize that God almighty was all heart in this courtroom drama, that God almighty was not telling me but showing me that cutting out a pound of flesh was not the best to live the life still stretched out farther than I could possibly see before me. That mercy was.

I was just a kid, but that morning I knew that I'd stumbled on infinite worth. God almighty, by way of Portia, by way of Shakespeare, by way of sophomore English, made crystal clear that forgiveness is an essential human quality--and that it's never really exhausted. 

Mrs. Goehring couldn't knew nothing of that. But that day in sophomore English, I really learned something; and that's why today I'm thankful for the long-ago morning when I read those blessed lines, a morning no one remembers but me in a classroom revelation I've never forgotten. 

I understood a line at a time I was only beginning to understand a life.

Professor Doebler on mercy and justice-

(Should you wish, you may

sample some Elizabethan music while reading. 

'T'would be fitting.)

I learned my Shakespeare from a lovingly eccentric professor at Arizona State University, a tall and gangly "intellectual" named John Doebler. I liked him very much. I was a brand new graduate student then, and the whole experience of university education was more than a bit scary. Intellectually, I was far from the fortress of the faith I'd inherited through the generations and experienced myself, the somewhat strange heritage of Dutch Calvinism.

For some time Shakespeare we underwent check tests every morning because, he explained clearly and almost guiltily, his students had to learn how to read The Bard, and the only way to do that properly was to pick up the little things vitally important to the story's telling. 

John Doebler

I had the undergrad education I needed to enter the university, I had the incentive to succeed at attaining an advanced degree, but I'd never read anyone or anything with the kind of minute attention I had no choice but to give to the plays we read in those first weeks of Shakespeare I. 

I loved it. These few lines from "The Merchant of Venice" appeared in yesterday's Writers Almanac. I cut and pasted them here because I'd never thought of them as a poem. It's a courtroom speech by a character named Portia, who happens, in Shakespearean fashion, to be disguised as a man, a lawyer, arguing for mercy for her client.  

I loved the speech then, in grad school, and loved it even in high school. It's nothing but beautiful, as unfeigned righteousness should be beautiful. 

The quality of mercy is not strained;

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest,—

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:

‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes

The thronèd monarch better than his crown:

His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty,

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;

But mercy is above this sceptred sway,—

It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God himself;

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s,

When mercy seasons justice.

Professor Doebler taught with great emotion, I remember, because we were, of course, forever walking on holy ground. He was an Anglican, fittingly so. For some reason I couldn't decipher, I remember a story he told in order to explain the conflict ever manifest between the strictures of justice and impulses of mercy--between head and heart.

People say Queen Elizabeth the First had learned as a child to distrust emotions, "feelings," amply displayed in a demeanor that seemed more than a bit callous. Her great strength was a stony carriage that many felt bespoke her lack of a beating heart.

At one point in her life, she ordered her distant cousin's execution by signing whatever document would bring about Mary's death--she was beheaded. Whether the story is true or not, this denouement is what Professor Doebler wanted us to understand about the delicate balancing the twin energies of justice (living by the letter of the law) and mercy (showing compassion and/or forgiveness) required. 

Amazing that I remember this, but for some reason I'll never forget it. People claimed that when "the Virgin Queen" signed the warrant to put her cousin to death, Professor Doebler said, she cried, she actually shed a tear. She didn't break out and bawl, but the court could not help but note that a single tear ran down the Queen's cheek. That tear was enough for the nation to witness the mercy verifiable in their iron-hearted queen.

Mary Queen of Scots, earlier welcomed back into England from Scotland, had been part of the plot to kill Elizabeth I. Justice, at the time, meant she be punished by public execution. Elizabeth I was carrying out the justice demanded by the treasonous behavior of her cousin. But the Queen cried when she signed the order. That tear bespoke mercy. Thus, justice and mercy shown as "an attribute to God himself."

Professor Doebler loved that story, as did I apparently. I've never forgotten it. 

Tomorrow: Portia in high school

Morning Thanks--Father De Smet

Like many a "holy man" in the west, Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, a Flemish Roman Catholic priest, a Hugh Glass in a black robe, was frequently called upon to practice medicine, what little he knew of it anyway. Because he often found himself holding coughing or fevered children, he sometimes performed surreptitious baptisms in a sacrament/procedure he described thusly:

When I find a child in danger whose parents are ill-disposed toward religion, I take out my bottles and recommend certain medicines. I begin by rubbing the child with camphor; then taking water, I baptize it before their unsuspecting eyes, and thus open heaven to the innocent soul.

Some of the early moments in the ministry of Father De Smet were so preposterously successful that he and the other early 19th century "black robes," almost all of them recent European immigrants, could hardly believe the fervent disciples they were almost effortlessly gathering. In many cases, their reputation for practicing powerful medicine far preceded their arrival in a camp. In some cases, Native people sent representatives to find them, then begged them to visit or bring them another "black robe" they could claim as their very own. 

There were reasons the "black robes" were so successful initially. They understood quickly that learning the native languages was a necessity. They used visual aids--even music and drama--extensively, gave rewards for contests, and brought the people into the religious circle by making them parts of the rituals at the heart of their ministry. 

Have a look at the picture above. Some feast days involved the entire community in ritual drama, here the procession of St. Mary on the feast of Corpus Christi in 1842. To a people, like any, who adored decoration, even extravagance, the kinds of rituals presented by the black robes were often greatly enchanting and soon beloved.

Father De Smet put on mileage like a Greyhound, and there were no paved roads, no roads at all, nothing but trails up and over mountain passes that were in themselves spiritual trials. Before the church made him an administrator in St. Louis, he traveled all through the west, back and forth, north and south, rain or shine, in the depths of mountain cold or through oppressive heat down on the plains.

And it needs to be remembered that for 19th century missionaries like Father De Smet and the stumpy little Presbyterian, Rev. Sheldon Jackson, the real enemies they encountered in their lives and their ministries weren't red but white. The frontier was an incredible place because, for the most part, there were no rules. Life wasn't so much a crap shoot as power grab--most power wins, justice practiced by on a hanging tree or whose rifle fires best or fastest.  

The powerful testimony of a man like Pierre-Jean De Smet was created by his generosity, his humility, and his curiosity. He was a great teacher because in great part he loved to learn. He believed in surreptitious baptism not because he was brushing those babies' foreheads with holy water, but because it never occurred to him that the Savior he worshipped couldn't or wouldn't love that child as much as he did.

De Smet was an impossibly good man when Native America was awash in men who weren't. Long before the white man ever showed up, one Christian Lakota said, we knew good from bad. But the white man showed us the best good--Jesus Christ the Savior--and the worst bad. 

If the real enemy out west in the 19th century was the Devil, likely as not he was the one in paleface. 

Vigil

 

My Father, Dying

by Joyce Sutphen

It was hard work, dying, harder

than anything he'd ever done.

Whatever brutal, bruising, back-

Breaking chore he'd forced himself

to endure—it was nothing

compared to this. And it took

so long. When would the job

be over? Who would call him

home for supper? And it was

hard for us (his children)—

all of our lives we'd heard

my mother telling us to go out,

help your father, but this

was work we could not do.

He was way out beyond us,

in a field we could not reach.

We tried. We asked the nurse when she thought Dad might succumb. She told us what we heard later from other nurses for other parents approaching death. "You just can't tell," she said, hunching her shoulders. "Honestly, I've seen people closer than your dad rally to spend another couple of weeks hanging around." She sort of half-smiled. "Then again. . ."

We were 500 miles east. We'd come because my sister claimed--rightly so--that Dad wasn't doing well and, well, you know. We'd come because there was that kind of tension in her voice that explained clearly where words feared to go.

How long, O, Lord," says Psalm 13, one of the most enigmatic psalms in the canon. David screams, howls (people call it "the howling psalm) at "how long" will we all have to put up with the sadness, the grief that accompanies all of life? 

She said she honestly couldn't know.

We couldn't stay. 

But before we left, I sat with dad for two days. There was no moment of clarity, no final deathbed summation of all the wisdom he wanted to give. There were no epiphanies for either of us. But I sat beside him in a vigil unlike any other before or after. I sat there beside him, just to be there. 

Mom didn't want to come--couldn't, she said; my sisters took care of her needs. That left me. I spent two full days at my father's bedside, alone, watching him pitch in his sleep and moan. I didn't know what dying looked like, but if it was any worse than what he was doing, I'd much prefer not to know. 

Still, consider yourself blessed if you're not surprised when I say I count those days as among the most radiant of my life. It's possible he knew I was there, but less likely that he did. The thing is, I knew I was there watching out for him, my father.

"It was hard work, dying," Sutphen says in that warm poem above. For Dad, it was. I was with him. I know.

We went home to Iowa. We had to. A week later or so, he died. Some odd kind of heartburn woke me that night. I sat at the side of the bed and looked at the clock.

He was 500 miles east, but somehow I know I was with him at the end.