Mississippi Pilgrimage

 

What do I remember? The place was close enough to Vicksburg for us to visit the battlefield, which was primarily a siege of that Mississippi citadel Grant wanted--which is to say, needed--to take to control Mississippi river traffic. And did. I'd never been that close to "the War of Northern Aggression."

But mostly what I remember was that it was a "service trip," service, as in "Christian service." We were a couple of dozen earnest members large, most of the crew high school-age girls recruited to staff children's bible schools in area churches, churches that stood out in the country, in the cotton fields where the kids' parents worked. 

The quality of these old pictures isn't good, but then they're all just about fifty years old. It was 1977, and my wife and I were also recruited to come along and help--doing exactly what, back then, wasn't always clear. Two weeks, as I remember, enough time to create maybe a half-dozen week-long Bible schools like this one. 

Back then, "service trips" really weren't intended to be history classes. Prep work, to me, seemed scanty and more than a little overdone. The KKK was alive and well in the region, and was capable and often did raise its ugly head, we were told. (I was doubtful, but they were right.) The people lived in tiny houses like this, right in the middle of the cotton, as if those tar paper shacks had grown up with the crop. 

Me? I spent at least a week working in the Center's library, an odd place with more CRC Publishing House work than I'd ever seen in one place--books like Rooftops over Strawtown, a biography of the privileged life of Dominie Scholte's wife--Scholte of Pella; two novels from the desk of Casey Kuipers, a CRC missionary in Zuni, NM, and a number of others, all of them cast-offs from church libraries from across the country because Cary Christian Center had become one of the most needy centers of relief for CRC "service groups" like ours--mission barrel books nobody in Cary would be likely to read.

I could go on and on with the oddity of the enterprise--how stark raving strange it was to believe that the whole lot of us were doing great work by bringing the natives Bible stories or painting walls in the Center (an abandoned school for "coloreds"). I could rage at what manners of racism were actually perpetuated by our belief that we were doing the Lord's work, God's own hands in his world. 

Once, needing something from a hardware store, a couple of us went into town, where a woman with an ungainly Dutch name (Alvinah Spoelstra?) ran a school for the handicapped (and, yes, I know that's brutal wording).

I can't help but remember my own enthusiasm for the enterprise, the "service" we were offering, not to mention the life experience all those young white women were accruing in the cotton fields. 

I'm not at all sure that Cary Christian Center operates anymore, whether it still offers succor to the poor that populate the area, where there are still remnants of all that work lying about, remnants like this:

Was the entire enterprise a waste of time? Of course not. Did it do any good? Undoubtedly, yes. If nothing else, none of those young women (today, they're of retirement age) ever really forgot their time on the Mississippi delta region. 

Did it only deepen racism? In some cases, perhaps the experience had the effect of making ourselves out to be "more than conquerors" and the delta people themselves as ever needy recipients. Just exactly how many of that school bus full of do-gooders are MAGA Republicans today in the most politically conservative corner of a state almost preposterously red? I don't want to know.

And, yes, we took a school bus all the way, a fifteen-hour trip, to Cary, Mississippi in 1977, where that yellow monster shuffled country kids to and from Bible school and didn't get a proper rest in swampy heat that exceeded anything I'd ever felt in my life (and we'd just moved to Iowa from Arizona). 

Maybe twenty years ago, returning from Jackson, Mississippi, I went out of my way to go through Cary, Mississippi, just to make sure that what I remembered was real. I wanted to see Cary, even though I was pretty sure no one I knew would be there, Black or white. 

I stopped for gas in town, in Rolling Fork where Ms. Spoelstra had her school, pulled over at a gas station and proceeded to lock my keys in my car when I got out to pump gas. There I was, lilly-white guy in an Delta world where I was one of few. I had a problem. No way to get in the car.

The clerk in the convenience store shook her head when I asked about cops, and then somebody sitting there over coffee volunteered that the clerk ought to call "Buzz." Everybody giggled. I had a notion why.

Anyway, she did, told the man on the other end of the phone how this customer of hers locked himself out of his car and if they were wondering if he might come over and, you know, help out; and he did. He slicky-slicked his way into that Skylark as if he'd done it before often enough.

All this comes back to me now because a tiny little burg right there on the Mississippi Delta is no more. The town where Elvinah had a school for the physically challenged is gone now, torn up and spread halfway over the parrish, I'm sure, by tornadoes that killed dozens of people and left the whole area little more than a trash dump. Eighty percent of the population is African American, about a quarter live beneath poverty level.

It's a horror. You can google the pics.

It's pretty much where we went, June of 1977, 46 years ago in a yellow school bus on a "service trip."

You know what?--if I was younger, I'd call the whole bunch--those who are still alive and kicking--and do it again because the people we met years and years ago?--good Lord, they really need help. 

Sunday Morning Meds--"We Fly Away"

 

Gone away again

 Off to Georgia today, just south of Chattanooga, where the locals are a little stubborn about just exactly what was fought there, 150 years ago, and still call it "The War of Northern Aggression."

Grant's troops, behind General Joseph Hooker, scaled the rugged edges of Lookout Mountain to score a victory by breaking the lock on the river in the "battle above the clouds."

But we're not going for the war. We're off to reconnoiter with the siblings, the first bivouac since Mom died. 

 This bunch, 75 years later.

Be back Friday. Do us a favor and warm up the weather while we're gone.

Sunday Morning Meds -- Psalm 90

“All our days pass away under your wrath; 

we finish our years with a moan.”

I received a poem from a friend of mine, who’s been thinking about Rahab the harlot, loved by men—many of them, presumably—and God. The voice of the poem feels to be woman, who asks if all Rahab’s men used her, or if maybe there were some who did not: “did not some/come to love/her?”

The answer to me was obvious: of course some did. Didn’t she know that? She had to. I did, after all.

My very first sexual experience happened when I was 13 or 14 and seemed to me—I may be wrong—delightfully mutual. We didn't fornicate; we played. It was the Fourth of July--I haven't forgotten.

I was attracted to her that night, her tank top —a triangular shift of cloth, orange, pulled across her chest and fastened with two pair of cottony strings over a naked back-- was, well, appealing.

By the end of the night, a certain inevitability led our flirting to a featureless, darkened backyard, where we lay together in the grass. Soon enough, she let me slide my hand beneath that tank top, where it stayed for a half hour maybe.

That was it. Later on, we went to the same high school but ran in different circles. I didn't lust or chase after her. It was an adolescent one-night stand.

With a short second act. A couple years later, in college and alone, I went back to her, even made our relationship public enough to make my older sisters take me aside to tell me the word on the street was that their little brother was getting seamy, seeing that girl the way I was. Soon enough, I went back to college.

What I remember about our relationship is that it was blessedly physical. She loved making out as much as I did. Mostly, we just played. I don't believe I ever tried much more.

Today she's probably a church-going grandma who has suffered her kids' woes just as deeply I ever did. Amazingly, she's 70+ years old, probably not a Rahab, nor has ever been. She's loved by God. I wish I could tell her that, in the words of my friend’s poem, I was one who, can I say it?-- loved her.

Then again, maybe I think of her so fondly because I feel the pressures of this verse from Psalm 90. I feel my age: indigestion has been a plague all week; I don’t sleep well; my back kills me in the morning; I fade by 10:30, out like a light. Lately, I'm losing friends--the forever way of losing friends. My life as yet is not a moan, but more often than I care to admit, I feel something like a bellar welling up within me.

Maybe this girl, this memory, is a fantasy that offers me some lost innocence, the sheer thrill of old summer nights, of conquest and love. Maybe. Maybe my remembrance of things past is only an escape, a gleeful, adolescent daydream, a return to joy.

I think I know exactly what this verse means, inside and out: “All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan.” I know it all too well.

Maybe I’d rather not go gently into that good night. I’m not ready to finish my years with a moan. What I’d like to do is tell that grandma, wherever she is, that, yes, some loved her, I'm sure, me among them. Some have never forgotten, and the memory right now, in these days passing away, is a sweet blessing.

A Trip West (in summary)

It was all their idea, but I wasn't in a position to decline the invitation. Few things in life are as compelling as a trip out west, even if you already know the stories and are in charge of telling them. And, truth be told, there's so little most of us really know about our Native neighbors and their stories. So, "Yes, I'll do it," I told them, when they asked.

"What about weather?" they said. 

"Maybe you ought to think about waiting until fall," I told them. Farch is farch, and, if nothing, unpredictable. 

"This is the only time we can make the trip," they said, "so let's."

It was cold, winter cold--15 degrees or so. Some wind, but any wind at all when the temps are baseline is not going to be comfy. So when I took them down 20 miles of gravel to a spot high above the Santee Reservation, it wasn't fun to be so thusly exposed. We couldn't get into the Santee Museum (out of season), so things had to be explained outside. We made it. 

Then down to the river and out to a Mormon monument, set there by the LDS to preserve the memory of the Saints who'd wintered there and some who died, that number drastically reduced by the salvation the Ponca offered them--food and supplies to keep them alive.

Then, the Ponka cemetery, like all others, offers its own stories. It was bitterly cold out there, but lots of our Saints even ascended the hill to read the graves.

On to Greenwood, mostly a ghost town, where Lewis and Clark, the story goes, wrapped a brand new Yankton baby in an American flag and declared him a man who would bring peace to his people, which he was and did, after a fashion. Then Marty, St. Paul's cathedral an amazing dream in an otherwise nearly empty prairie landscape.

A stop at New Holland CRC, a museum of its own, then finally a long, cold day ended in Platte, at a motel with a pizza place conveniently next door. 

The most amazing thing happened the next day when, unannounced, spring arrived. Chamberlain's Akta Lakota Museum was a wonder, as it always is, as was a tour of St. Joseph's Indian School (a first for me). We ate at Al's Oasis, then pointed the van west, drove for an hour, got out at a rest stop, and were blessed--seriously blessed--by windless 65-degree temperatures. It was, if I dare say it, a touch of heaven, almost unbelievable, almost miraculous. We'd climbed 50 degrees up the thermometer. Stayed, that night, in Wall--where else, of course?--and experienced a unique phenomenon, unknown to the millions who journey west--Wall, South Dakota with zero tourists, Main Street all but barren, if you can believe it.

After taking the Badlands loop the afternoon before, we followed the southwest range of the Badlands, all of it dressed in garlands of snow, and even ran into buffalo--well, avoided them, but stopped for some portraits. For most of the morning we were pretty much alone in miles and miles of reservation, until we came to a much hoped-for convenience corner, where it became apparent immediately that masking was, if nothing else, obligatory--thus saith the tribe. Later, we wore them again in a Subway in Pine Ridge, a joy.

Drove on to Wounded Knee, always an experience for those who've never been there. Spring had lingered graciously for another day, so if we sidestepped the mud we could climb up to the place where the chapel once stood (during the 1973 takeover), the place where the 7th Cavalry set up their Hotchkiss gun to reign terror on Big Foot's people.

A couple of artists stopped by and sold a few souvenirs of the visit, the kind of footnote that makes the text come alive.

We stopped by several cemeteries in four days, but Wounded Knee--a killing field--stops your breath like no other. 

Got back in the bus, headed west to Ft. Robinson, from whence the cavalry had come in 1890, before Wounded Knee, heard some Ft. Rob stories, then stayed overnight in Chadron in a fine motel with yet another restaurant right next door--and, oh yes, spring had somewhat coldly departed.

What most of the travelers won't forget is brutal wind and cold and snow that attacked all the way back to Yankton. Had our fearless driver not engineered trips out of the ditch, we'd likely be there still. Twisters of snow in monster winds created a ground blizzard unlike anything the pilgrims had ever seen and hope never to experience again.

But all's well that ends well, and this weary traveler had his feet up at home in Alton, when a couple of emails came in indicating everything post-South Dakota was a piece of cake for the others. Pella must have looked beautiful when it appeared at sunset.

That's where I was this week with some joyous adventurers from Pella's 2nd Reformed Church, a few pioneers who wanted to know more about Native American history. They got an earful--and more--in a bit of winter, two days of spring, and a monster ground blizzard, four days of Farch in Nebraska and South Dakota. 

I loved it, as I believe they seemed to also. 

The journey West - iii

Badlands: A Badlands Story

https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2021-02-15/big-bones-in-the-badlands-lies-and-a-promise-kept

Wounded Knee

https://www.kwit.org/post/oscar-howes-truth-power

A Journey West - ii

Mostly, Chamberlain SD -- Akta Lakota Museum -- and west to Wall

Pioneer Woman, Homesteading in SD

https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2021-03-15/the-epic-of-anne-rubin-boermann-in-a-time-of-broader-understanding

Honoring the Turtle Effigy

https://www.kwit.org/post/oahe-dam-turtle-effigy-and-honoring-thy-enemy

 

A Journey West - i

Don't look for anything new for the next couple of days. I'll be on the road with a crew from Second Reformed Church, Pella, Iowa, visiting sites that will help us understand some Native American history.

Tell you what--day by day I'll post a number of old "Small Wonders" that somehow explain and describe our trip.

Today--Santee Reservation, Standing Bear/Ponca story, and St. Paul's on the Yankton Reservation.

A Santee Story

http://www.kwit.org/post/akimbo-cross

The Home of Standing Bear, of the Poncas.

.http://kwit.org/post/home-standing-bear

Here's a few, starting Greenwood, SD, on the Yankton Reservation (the monument has been repaired, by the way).

https://www.kwit.org/post/broken-monument-our-past

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 90

 

“You have set our iniquities before you, 

our secret sins in the light of your presence.”

I don’t know why, but I’ve always thought of Edgar Allen Poe as “junior high-ish.” Even though I’ve taught American literature for thirty years, I’ve never understood what to do with him. He fits on the standard curriculum like an elegant barnacle. Is “The Fall of the House of Usher” a study in unremitting madness, or, simply, as some critics have often claimed, “an elaborate way to say ‘boo’”? Don’t know.

“The Tell-tale Heart” may well be his most famous yarn. A delusional man-servant murders his boss and covers the crime perfectly. Yet, he’s so wretchedly haunted by what he’s done that he confesses, as a means by which to end the horrifying echo of the old man’s heart in his demented mind.

Remove the 17th century details from Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and you’ve got the same story. Set it in 19th century Russia, and title it Crime and Punishment. Tell the story in apartheid South Africa, and you have To Late the Phalarope. I’m sure I’m missing a dozen or more cousins. Same story—right? Maybe. Maybe not.

Years ago, I judged a junior high forensics contest in which kids gave memorized readings; one of them did “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The performer did well but scared no one. Mostly, he got giggles. Nobody used Hawthorne or Dostoevsky or Alan Paton that day; but if someone had, I’m betting no one would have giggled. That’s why I can’t help but think there is something somewhat “junior high” about Edgar Allen Poe.

Just as there is something somewhat junior high about a verse like this one—at least, in the way an idea like this has been manipulated by believers throughout history. “Beware—your secret sins will find you out.”

Fear has always been an effective, if temporary, motivator. Somewhere I read that adolescent boys have fleshy sexual fancies about dozen times per hour, on average. I don’t doubt it. I was such a character once myself. Tell a junior high boy that Jesus knows his secret sins, and you’ll get his attention.

But some of us don’t have as much steamy seamy-ness at our leisure, nor much of a criminal record—and I’m not bragging. My testimony wouldn’t inspire anyone around a campfire, certainly not a TV producer. Any memoir I’d write would be woefully short on narrative drive. I’m an old man now: the burden of my sins would be filed under “Spirit,” not “Flesh.” From Hollywood’s perspective, that’s not going to spin turnstiles.

And yet this verse holds some fear for me—especially if I think about it in a, well, fleshy way. To be buck naked before God almighty gives me the bejeebees. To imagine him seeing me, inside and out, 24/7, claws at my guilt. I’m not haunted by the heartbeat of my latest, sorry victim, but when I imagine myself splayed before the God of love, I can feel the jagged edges of my pride. After all, I know very well what I want. I know where number one ranks in my daily to-do list. What’s worse, when I think about it, as I am doing now, I remember all that arrogance is hugely set already in his perfect presence.

And that scares me. Which it should. And I’m long, long past junior high.

Historically, the sins of the spirit have always been considered deeper and more vile than sins of the flesh, probably because they’re not front-page material. Even I don’t bother to read that kind of story, maybe because it’s my own.

Locals Make Good -- Blackbird and War Eagle

Charles Bodmer--the tiny monument on the grassy hill marks Blackbird's grave

They're not an odd couple really. They’re much alike, greatly influential once upon a time, and monumentally heralded yet today. It's hard to imagine any two historic Native leaders better known to those of us who live here than the Omaha headman Blackbird--a casino is named in his honor!--and War Eagle, the Yankton/Santee who to this day proffers a peace pipe from a hill above the Missouri.

This oddly matched pair share a history of cooperation with the white colonizers whose sheer numbers altered Native life forever. Both worked with the fur traders who ran a lucrative business on the rivers back then. 

Everybody wanted furs, in great part because European gentlemen wouldn't step outside without beaver hats. French Canadians were here, and the Spanish--they built a fort near Homer. Throw in upstart Americans too in numbers eventually beyond tallying, Yankees who thought they owned the place once Lewis and Clark drew them a map. 

Honestly, it's hard to imagine our river hub as the United Nations, but in 1800 it was greatly multi-cultural--and that's not counting the Santee, Pawnee, the Omaha or the Dakota, Nakota, and Lakota, all of them immensely mobile, given to hunt buffalo with the entire family in tow, hundreds of miles from home. If you threw up a cabin and parked at the mouth of the Floyd back then, you had no idea who might show up--all kinds of people speaking in tongues.

For better or worse, both War Eagle and Blackbird decided early on that their skills and experience here on the rivers could slip some money and strength and power in the bank. 

War Eagle Monument

War Eagle was a kind of scout, a pilot on the wily Missouri River, after having served as one of the region's first mailmen, running messages up and down on both sides. He knew the ins and outs of Big Muddy. It's a good thing War Eagle looks over the Missouri right now because if he didn't, his toughened spirit would have found a way to turn that whole steel statue around.

What’s more, two of his daughters married Theophile Bruguier, the three of them becoming the first permanent residents of what we now call Sioux City. 

Blackbird, an Omaha headman, learned to play along with the Yankees, just as War Eagle had. By the time smallpox took him, he was among the richest men up and down the river, a kind of Native Don Corleone, a man who sought, gained, and then controlled what went into whose deep pockets--and what didn't.

Neither of them feared the white man. Blackbird grabbed what he could when he could and had a thing about tribal rivals for his power—men who tended, strangely enough, to vanish. On the other hand, Blackbird's own wily character found ways to let whites know that, unlike the Omaha, the Yankees were the guests here. He cooperated with the colonizers but no farther than the reach of his long arm. 

When smallpox took him and so many members of his tribe (estimates vary, but losses were in the hundreds) the ceremonies surrounding his death became legendary. The story goes that he wanted to be astride his horse, looking over the river. Four years later, the mound above his grave was still of such prominence that Lewis and Clark saw it and pulled the pirogues over to investigate. 

If you'd like to know where there's an interpretive shelter marking the spot, just off Highway 75. Can't miss it. George Catlin, on an 1830s sojourn up the river, even did a painting. Way up there on the grassy hills, there's something high and mighty, enough to make a handful of the Corps get off the river to investigate.

Big names: War Eagle and Blackbird. Celebrated, both of them.  Heroes? Good question. The story of Blackbird's burial, some say, was created by white folks. The first time my grandson saw the War Eagle monument, he thought that peace pipe was an AK-47. 

The most we can say, I suppose, is that sometimes our heroes are shaped by our politics. Even today, that seems to be the truth about them--and the truth about us:  we make them what we wish them to be.

Me and Huck and the Theory of Ham

My mother loved me--didn't hate me. My mother rewarded me, especially when I practiced piano. She spanked me once, although years later, when I wrote about that summer morning, she denied it (one of us was dreaming). I didn't grow up with a witch of a mother like Philip Yancey's, although I don't know that spiritually the two of them were much different. Had they ever met, their conversations would have joyfully carried references to the Lord's great love and their great love for Him.

Yancey's Where the Light Fell is his personal memoir of growing up, and it's rife with his mother's abuse of the boys she raised alone after the early death of her husband. The recitation is a horror, really, her behavior so vicious at times that you can't help but wonder how that woman could have raised a child who would become the world's most prominent advocate of grace. My mother--and maybe his--would stake out a claim for the Holy Spirit.

Yancey's story has givens that made me smile--like a reference to Watchman Nee. I remember something of the story from Christian school a hundred years ago. Nee, a Christian preacher, was imprisoned in his native China. He suffered for his faith, a martyr for our time. Philip and I, Christian kids on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, heard the same Sunday School lessons.

And those lessons included a now soundly rejected takeaway from the Old Testament, the story of Noah's sons, who pulled a fast one on him when he passed out from the Devil's brew. One of those sons, the Bible says--or so both Yancey and I were taught--was Ham, who was sentenced to Africa and a lifetime of servitude. Down South, where Yancey grew up, the theory of Ham was, for many, a biblical warrant for institutional slavery. How could you deny it?--the Bible said black people were sentenced to servitude. Can there be any doubt?

If I can go back to my own fifth or sixth grade--as well as nightly family devotions--"the theory of Ham" wasn't used to rescue slavery as an institution but as a means of understanding how poverty came to show itself in "colored" neighborhoods. Noah's son Ham--he's the one to blame, the guy who made it happen.

It's lost some steam now because of the frequent use of the n-word, but Mark Twain's great novel, Huck Finn, ends (or at least reaches a climax) when Huck tries to figure out what he's supposed to do with the runaway slave, Jim, someone he's grown to love. Should he turn Jim in to the sheriff or just keep moving on the river toward his freedom. What Huck's rugged, innocent soul is battling is a biblical injunction he picked up somewhere in "civilization," to wit, that obeying the law was somehow the same as obeying God. Somewhere down there in his soul was "the theory of Ham." Helping Jim run away was taking on the Bible itself, God Himself.

And that's why the most precious line in 19th century American literature is belongs to Huckleberry Finn: "All right, then, I'll go to hell."

One of the grandest moments of my college teaching career happened during my first two years, when I taught American Literature and had the class read Huck Finn. The class was huge back then, when it was required. I scrambled to find a copy of Catharine Vos's The Children's Story Bible, the one my parents used for family devotions, the one my teachers in Christian school used throughout those years. 

And found it. There it was. The theory of Ham. Right there on the page. I made copies, handed them out--everybody got one--because I was sure that my students (late '70s) didn't understand the meaning of the blistering critique Huck lays on the society all along the river. "Well, then, I'll go to hell," is very much a theological declaration, a statement of faith and damnation of bigotry, racism.

I was just plain thrilled that I'd found it. I remember handing it out and going through the explanation I've just now been writing. 

I don't know what I expected. What I remember of the moment, more than anything, was a sea of faces that showed little of my fascination, my joy. It was just, well, school--"is-this-going-to-be-on- the-test?" 

I don't know that my mother would have been proud of what I did in class that day, breaking into student's psyches and souls to establish a beachhead for toleration they would have had trouble creating in themselves. I don't know that I was reflecting my parents' values that day; they might well have been, well, concerned.  I'm sure Philip Yancey's mother wouldn't have bought in.

I have no idea if any of my students, so long ago, remember "the theory of Ham" from that a survey course in American Lit. The Children's Story Bible is still published, but no longer distinguishes the reference, thank goodness. 

Right now, as the words appear on the screen before me, I can't help thinking my joy that day rises from my own pilgrimage as a very sweet epiphany. 

"Want to understand what might be the most memorable line in 19th century American literature?--let me tell you a story from the time when I was a boy."

It was, I think, the kind of moment lots of righteous Republican legislatures these days think shouldn't occur in our schools because what happens in the classroom should reflect their students' parents' values. 

Well, maybe--but then again, maybe not.

Maybe, maybe, maybe

    “We are very very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I             truly can’t wait.”

    “I hate him passionately, . . .I can’t handle much more of this.”

For the record, those memorable lines belong to the man who, for the last two nights, has been passing off the January 6th events at the capital as little more than an ordinary tourism, in defense of the man he claims--hear him?-- to hate passionately. He's a blistering liar, as well as the most listened-to talking-head on TV. People love him because they love Trump. Thusly, if Trump loses, so does Tucker Carlson, and  he knows it, so he'll fabricate the truth to keep his ratings up, keep cash flowing in, and the country at odds with itself.

Ever since Trump announced right here, years ago, that he could gun down people in cold blood and not lose admirers, he's done just that. "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump remarked at a campaign stop at Dordt. "It's, like, incredible."

Yes, it is--and demonic is another word for it. He's cast a spell. 

The BIG LIE has further fractured this country, our culture, our families, our churches. No single idea in our recent past has done so much injury to the nation or its common good. Not socialism, or wokism or CRT, whatever the heck they are.

For those of us who've been wary of Donald Trump from those early days, waiting for his forces to have some Damascus-road experience has been wearying. Maybe it'll happen when he claims John McCain was not a patriot; or maybe when he says he trusts Putin more than anybody on his team; or how about this?--maybe when he blackmails Ukraine in order to get some mud on Hunter Biden; for sure when he deliberately fosters anger sufficient to create an insurrection.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. Nope, nope, nope. Drip after drip, his numbers are decreasing, but the devotion among those who stay in his orbit seems indomitable--and they've got an all-time best cheerleader in Tucker. 

But I was thrilled to hear, yesterday, that Mitch McConnell came out against Carlson's treatment of the January 6th riot. Made no bones about it because to anyone who was there, he (and several other Republican legislators) said, January 6 was not a normal tourist day.

Behind McConnell stood two senators who seconded his criticism of Tucker "I-hate-him-passionately" Carlson. One was Iowa's own Joni Ernst, the Iowa senator I've always believed was made of better stuff than she shows when she jumps up on the Trump bandwagon; also behind McConnell was South Dakota's John Thune. I've always wanted to think he was made of the right stuff too. Maybe those three--and others--will deconstruct the Trump madness.

Unlikely, I suppose. Trump's 30 percent-sized disciples may well pack more AK-47s than any other political faction, but they cannot and will not EVER win his reelection. Too many American voters know him for the demented nihilist he is. Too many people understand Trump wouldn't know truth if it shaved his orange hair. Too many people know how he led people to violence at the nation's capital because he lost the election. Too many people have known for a long time that he has a narcissistic personality disorder.

In an article in the Reformed Journal, Keith Mannes, who left his pastorate in the CRC, detailed the changes in his life and the life of the denomination to which he once belonged. "Donald Trump awakened something deeply wrong in the soul of the CRC," Mannes wrote, and he's right.

Have a look for yourself.

See that deep maroon in the far northwest corner. It designates the region most Trumpian of any area of the state--90 to 100 per cent voting for Donald of Orange. No part of the state has a higher percentage of residents of Dutch and Reformed ancestry. What's the link, really? I honestly don't know.

Maybe now--maybe with McConnell, Ernst, and Thune--maybe Tucker's false flag will break the log jam. 

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

The Des Moines Register's lead story this morning declares that Trump's chances for re-election may well hinge on what he does in the Iowa caucuses. Color me joyfully doubtful on that one. 

But you can bet the whole bunch will be streaming through here with all those dedicated Republican votes to be gathered. It'll be interesting, very interesting, to see if Trump continues to sweep up the neighborhood.

Morning Thanks--those bonkers honkers

You may have heard it on the street, but apparently it's true. Those Canada geese you see these days almost everywhere?--they mate for life. Seriously. Divorce?--non-existent. Just about this time of year, couples break off from those massive v's and look for a place for the kids. Anyone who lives around them knows it's not unusual for them to choose a place brazenly out in the open. Sometimes, year after year, they do the whole family thing in the exact same place.

They're here now and in abundance. Yesterday, they seemed quiet--it was the Sabbath--but there were hundreds of them in the stubble corn behind our house--hundreds, really. 

Around our place at least, they keep their distance. Even if they're all the way out along the river, they poke up their heads and grouse a bit about that lousy humanoid across the field.

It's great to have around again, but I don't mind them keeping their distance. They litter with abandon, and their waste is more than droppings. Who hasn't walked among them in some city park and not tippy-toed through the muddy mess? 

They're unerringly old-fashioned. When the eggs appear, Mom keeps the nest while Dad guards the operation, but he never changes a diaper. They're fastidious. Bald eagles have been known to kick kids out of the nest if they show no resolve to leave; geese keep the kids around for a year, as if parting is, in fact, sweet sorrow.

I think they're Democrats, not just because they're messy and awkward. They're Democrats because they abide by Hillary's notion that "it takes a village." When goslings get to early adolescence, families often become flocks.

"Why are they called Canada geese?" our third-grade grandson asked us some years ago. It seems nobody really knows; after all, they show up in every state of the union and don't necessarily make annual pilgrimages up north to watch hockey. They just are "Canada Geese" and have been since (so saith the OED) the early 18th century. 

If, at your peril, you don't count the abundance of their fecal matter, they make good neighbors. Out back of our house, they meal on what remains from last fall's harvest. They harm no one nor anything, and only rarely get in the way. 

But they're known to be crabby, even hostile. I don't know anyone who's ever petted one, whether or not they're out with their children. My Oklahoma granddaughter tried last week, but to no avail. Sometimes, it seems, they're just plain mean.

In case you're wondering, they used to migrate more and farther than many do today. Even as far north as our own Floyd River, some families decide to homestead. Experts aren't why that's true, but it's meant an increase in population. Today, they number between four and six million--a ton of do-do. 

I hate to bring it up, but they're not particularly good singers. Right now, I'm reminded again of what manner of blessing it is that human voices are not designed to honk. Can you imagine what a church council would sound like? They're hundreds of yards away, but sometimes you'd still swear they were just a step or two off the deck.

It's nice to have them around, on the ground or in the air in their remarkable triangles. As long as I don't have to clean up their dirt, they're a blessing, a wonder. I'm thankful they're here.

Still, "good fences make good neighbors." Call me a bigot, but I'd just as soon not have them light on my lawn. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 90

“We are consumed by your anger and terrified by your indignation.”

I loved it when the preacher held forth on one of the finest stories in the Old Testament, Elijah’s hands-down victory over 450 prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel (I Kings 18). Nothing in the OT comes even close in shock and awe.

Elijah set the whole contest up, nose-to-nose, the World Cup of deities—two gods having at it for the respect and worship of an entire nation. Baal’s team had first raps. The objective was to consume a sacrificial bull, already butchered for the altar. For hours, Baal’s team pleaded and cajoled. Nothing. Not a spark.

At noon, Elijah gave the bad guys the what-for. “Maybe your god is visiting the toilet,” he jeered. Still nothing.

Some significant blood-letting followed, as those 450 Baal prophets slashed away at themselves. Bull-wise, however, there was still bloody nothing—all day long.

Come evening, Elijah yawns maybe, then asks the people to edge up a little closer. Then he incites a little crowd participation when he has them douse his bull with buckets-full of water, the old man chortling a bit, methinks, as he’s very plainly stretching the odds. No self-mutilation, no conjuring, no wailing, however; because once the scene was set, Elijah prayerfully suggested that the God of Israel make it clear that he was, in fact, God.

Whoosh. Barbeque.

And all of this in a crowd of hundreds of seekers. We could scour the Bible, not to mention human history, and not find a more spectacular display of sovereignty than the searing Mount Carmel conquest God ignited before his people.

The young preacher focused on the choice Elijah lays out in verse 21 to the idolatrous Israelites: "How long will you waver between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him." The sermon was about choices, tough ones, the kind we all make day-to-day, even moment-to-moment. There is the straight-and-narrow, or the wide open interstate. On which path are you? That sort of thing.

Psalm 90:6 is one of those verses that makes you shake when you think about it, not at all unlike what happened at the very end of this most impressive grudge match, a part of the story the young pastor didn’t touch. Once the match ends, Elijah tells the just-now-pious Israelites to grab all 450 prophets of Baal and drag them down to the river and slay them, all of them. Turn the beach into a slaughter house.

Which they do.

That’s scary. A whole host of people hacked to death, righteously. Seems so out-of-character for the God I think I know and love.

A verse like today’s rings somewhat hollow in modern life—or post-modern life. It’s not easy to see God almighty as terrifying, which may be why the young preacher didn’t touch the massacre right there in the story. Today, God doesn’t scare us much—or at least he doesn’t scare me. He scares some TV preachers who believe they know why God sent a flood to New Orleans; but for me and my house, being consumed by God’s anger and terrified by his indignation seems, well, more than a little “Old Testament,” rather gauche, in fact, something that doesn’t really need to be said if you’re looking to hook the unchurched. Even that young preacher wasn’t buying it totally or he would have mentioned the holocaust at the river.

Seriously, what scares me is hate. What scares me is fanaticism—the ideology of Islamic terrorism and/or the bloody anger of the religious right. What scares me is what we all too easily do to each other and ourselves because we believe God wants the bloody work done. What scares me is what we chase, what we dream, what we so righteously desire.

Today, quite honestly, the Old Testament God of the Mt. Carmel saga doesn’t scare me as much as I do.

The First Q and A

Khamko Baccam, 1990

Once the car carrying him and his friends stopped rolling, it was upside down in the middle of the road, not hidden in the bottom of a ditch or out in a stubbled cornfield where it might have been missed by carloads of his friends returning to campus, as he had been, from a hockey game.

When other cars came upon the accident scene, some of his friends, frantic with the realization that their buddy was still inside, tried madly to right that car and get him out, but it didn't work. There were no miracles.

By the time the rescue squad arrived, dozens of kids saw them remove his body.

His name was Khamko, an Asian-American student, a soccer star, a good, good kid. He died that night in an accident made even more horrible by the fact that it was all so very public.

An hour later, more than fifty of his friends stood in the waiting room the local hospital, praying and hoping they wouldn't hear the words every last one of them feared they would, the words they eventually heard anyway in the darkness of a November night.

He was a local kid, born in Laos but reared here so his funeral, bilingual, was held in a local church and attended by hundreds of students.

Had he been from somewhere far away, maybe the ordeal would have been out of sight and out of mind earlier. But the funeral was here, and his body and the casket were lowered into the ground of the local cemetery, whitened that morning by an early winter snow,

Event after event after event happened right here--his public death, the hospital waiting room, the blanket of sadness that spread like a plague over the campus on Saturday morning, the flow of grief in a totally unscheduled gathering in the chapel, Sunday worship together, Monday's funeral, Tuesday's final memorial chapel on campus—all of it happened right here, as if nothing else was happening anywhere else in the world.

For several days the whole campus walked slowly, face to the ground, hand in hand, many wiping their faces. On the wide prairie landscape where I live, there was no hiding from Khamko's death.

On Saturday night, two hundred kids held each other and cried while sitting up on the stage of the auditorium in an impromptu gathering of the wounded. Some of them read Bible passages they’d picked out. Some prayed. All of them sat together, more public tears than I’d ever seen.

They sang “When Peace Like a River” in a way that at any other time you would have considered to be very much less than full effort. One of them played piano, and really, no one sang—not if singing means raising voices. As music, it was totally unspectacular. But I’ll never forget their song because it was the most moving rendition of that old hymn I’d ever heard. “It is well, it is well with my soul. . . .” It was sung with inner voices that never really reached throats parched from a night and a day of grief none of them will ever forget.

Again on Tuesday, at Khamko’s memorial chapel, grief brooded over everything. Some professors talked about Khamko. A history prof every knew spoke a few words, then took off his glasses up in front of the biggest chapel crowd I’d ever seen, stepped back from the mike, and wiped his eyes. Another told the crowd how he’d written in his grade book that Khamko had withdrawn from class and transferred to heaven.

At the end of that memorial chapel, one of Khamko’s roommates stood behind the podium and told us how his roommates had gone out for supper together after the funeral on Monday, and how one of them had just mentioned that reading the first Q and A of the Heidelberg Catechism would be comforting, and how they did, and it was.

So, he said, they thought it would be good to do the same thing at that chapel service with all of their friends, with all who knew Khamko—how it would be fitting if the whole bunch of us, a chapel full of students and faculty and staff, would stand and repeat the answer. “You can find it in the hymnal,” he said, pointing at his, “page 861.”

And we did. Everyone turned to that page, Khamko’s roommate read the question, and, just as he said, we all responded with the answer about comfort. “I am not my own. . .I belong to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. . .”

That recitation ended the memorial chapel—but not the grief and sadness. We left quietly and walked out into soft snow that fell over the campus and the cemetery not far away, where many of the students had stood beside an open grave just an afternoon before.

I don’t know about the rest of them in the chapel that day, but I will never forget that recitation of the first Q and A of the catechism.

That whole story came back to me last night, decades later, when, at a choral concert, two choirs dedicated pieces they sang to the family and friends of a freshman student, a young woman who was killed in a crash just north of town, a day before second semester began.

“Come, Ye Disconsolate” a woman’s chorus sang, a hymn created any of a number of psalms where David opens a vain and bleeds his deep sadness before the Lord. It was sung, the director said, in memory of the young woman who had been a member of that choir.

*

Most of the what you just read is more than 20 years old, a kind of coda to a devotional book I wrote back then for high-schoolers.

But those dedications last night, same auditorium so many years later, brought back dark, but greatly blessed memories that were and still are
borne along on grief—and hope.

A Visit to Ft. Atkinson

Just plan on an hour and a half. It'll likely take you that long and then some to get there. You can take 1-29, but if you've got the time, just cross over to Nebraska and go south on hwy 75--more scenery, less hustle. Do your soul a favor. Either way, you have to get to Blair to cross the river. When you do, hold on to that GPS because while finding the First Council Monument doesn't require what it must have for Lewis and Clark to get there, Ft. Atkinson is not Wall Drug.

One way or another, get to 75 in the middle of town and follow it to Fort Calhoun, even though you're looking for Fort Atkinson. Trust me. They're close. Turn left on Madison Street and watch the signs. 

Soon enough, you're there--the real Council Bluffs--not that the hillside city of Council Bluffs is not. In 1804, neither Ft. Calhoun or Ft. Atkinson or even Omaha existed, but you're where you should be right now, standing on holy ground, the very place where L and C finally, for the first time, met up with delegation of honest-to-goodness Native people, Otoes and Missourias, together, people say, because both tribes had taken horrible losses from smallpox.

That meeting was a big deal and goes a long way toward determining why this facsimile fort--it is, a facsimile--is here. The meeting between the Corps of Discovery and their first bona fide Louisiana Purchase Natives is not the only big deal because Lewis and Clark had their wits about them as they moved up the Missouri, and what the found at this "council bluffs" was a promontory of such renown and reign that it would be perfect for a fort.

That's why there as and is a Ft. Atkinson. Jefferson listened to them, and if you followed directions, right now you're standing at an assembly of stiff metallic figures--some in uniforms, some in blankets, and all very commemorative, sturdy enough to stand out there in prairie extremes, but, yes, facsimiles. 

There's very little--if anything--left of the original Ft. Atkinson, but the place once buzzed with life, full of buffalo hides and beaver pelts, the bounty of the prospering fur trade up and down the Missouri, north to Canada, west to the Rockies. Lots of what you see around you looks like it was just erected--because it was. The real Ft. Atkinson was only here for seven years, barely an adolescent when it was abandoned in 1827.

It would have been little more than a mirage these days if locals hadn't been proud enough of its history to keep its memory alive. 

There's plenty of reasons for this wonderful facsimile fort. Here's one you just might know. Once upon a time, an old trapper with a snowy beard got eaten alive by a she-grizzly up north of the Black Hills. The mountain men he was with thought he was gone and so abandoned him because the Rees were looking for scalps. 

Amazing thing happened. Old White Beard somehow pulled himself along through a couple hundred miles of dangerous, mostly treeless country, kept himself alive by eating bugs and grass and an occasional mouse, his strength slowly building once again, fueled by an understandable human emotion he absolutely could not forget--anger. Old White Beard lived and breathed revenge. Hate was his lifeblood.

Listen to this--when that old man got here, to Ft. Atkinson, he met up with the kid named Fitz, the one he was hunting, one of the two who'd left him out there alone to die, even taken his rifle and knife. For months, or so the story goes, he'd fed himself on an exquisite dream: to kill the two campaneros who'd left him to die, his grave already dug beside him.

And when he got here, right here, to the ground beneath your feet, something happened, something no story of this guy gets particularly clear. Old White Beard, a old mountain man named Hugh Glass, did not kill Fitz, did not carry out the dream that fueled his unearthly crawl. 

Hugh Glass did something nigh unto impossible for most of us. He forgave Fizt. He let him live. He did. I'm not pulling you leg. He forgave Fitz right here at Ft. Atkinson, and we've been telling his unbelievable story ever since, a story of strength, courage and indomitable human will, but also, right here at the Fort, an even better story, a story of forgiveness.

It's worth your time to visit. Seriously. It's holy ground.

Hugh Glass, The Revenant, and Frederick Manfred*

I hope you’ll agree there is some beauty in this image, an elegance to what Emerson called snow’s “frolic architecture,” something dazzling or graceful in its loveliness. That having been said, no one would really want to be standing here. It’s ten below. Even a buffalo would move south.

The Revenant is a film-making masterpiece that’s both beautiful and just plain awful to watch. It’s sheer violence is matched only by the frightful deprivation Hugh Glass endures when he drags his bloody, broken self out of pure wilderness, a place, by the way, the word Disney has absolutely no meaning. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant is not for the faint of heart. Brace yourself. It’s magnificence is as compelling as it is repellent.

Like Shakespeare, Iñárritu is working with materials long ago established,, in this case among the great sagas of the American west, the story of Hugh Glass, a dying trapper left on his own by companions who understand their own lives are in jeopardy if they wait to watch, mercifully, for their companion to die. They leave.

It’s pure rags-to-riches Americana in a way, because Hugh Glass is not dead, nor will he die. It’s revenge that he breaths, revenge that gives him life. The story goes that Hugh Glass pulled himself up and away from death itself even though he had no bootstraps. Slowly, with pain that’s just as unendurable to imagine as it is to witness, he returns to the fort in search of Fitzgerald, the man who left him behind.

In origin, the myth belongs to South Dakota. Glass was mauled by a she-bear somewhere near Lemmon, but eventually fought the elements, hand over hand, all the way back to Ft. Kiowa, near Chamberlain, a 200-mile trek. Iñárritu chooses to set it in the Canadian Rockies, which only makes the suffering more profound–and without a doubt more profoundly beautiful.

That’s the material Iñárritu is bending and shaping in The Revenant, the myth many have repeated, retold, rewritten.

The power of the story–of the myth itself–is that at its climax it refuses to deliver what it promises all along. Call it what you will–retribution, spite, anger, hate–what gives Hugh Glass life is not simply a refusal to die but a gorging thirst for revenge that never happens. When he finds Fitzgerald, he doesn’t kill him. That unforgettable end is what keeps the story alive.

If Hugh Glass murdered the man who left him for dead, storytellers of the American West would not have retold the story that created the myth. Had Hugh Glass simply put a gun to Fitzgerald’s temple, no one would have been surprised and the story wouldn’t have been mythologized. That he doesn’t is the shock that lifts the story into the level of what’s unimaginable.

Frederick Manfred took a shot himself at the Hugh Glass story and wrote Lord Grizzily, his rendition of the tale, published in 1954 and nominated for a National Book Award. Lord Grizzly has probably outsold all of the other Manfred novels combined. It’s one of five he called his “Buckskin Man Tales,” stories of the Northern Plains where he lived, the place he loved.

Fred Manfred’s real name was Feike Feikema. He was born somewhere around Doon, Iowa. He loved his father but worshiped his mother, Alice Van Engen**, a deeply religious woman born and reared in the Christian Reformed Church, who made sure her precocious oldest son got a good Christian education. That’s why, in the 1920s, she sent him off to Calvin College.

It is fair to say that his people, his tribe, “received him not,” a rejection that sometimes pained him. Once upon a time, Manfred told me that he couldn’t understand why it was that the men and women he grew up with had such faint toleration for his work, when the most famous novel he’d ever written was really all about forgiveness, the central thrust of orthodox Christianity. Manfred’s problems with the community of his youth and childhood is a fascinating topic, but what’s interesting about that statement in the shadow of The Revenant is his assessment of the Hugh Glass story–“it’s all about forgiveness.”

Iñárritu thinks so too, but he changes motivations, even hypes the revenge by giving Glass a son, Hawk, by way of a Native wife, a son who is with him because Glass’s dearly beloved wife was murdered in a massacre. Iñárritu plays with the myth the way Shakespeare played with the story of Hamlet, King of Denmark.

Before the trek that made Glass famous, Fitzgerald murders Hawk in this new telling, which makes Glass’s motivation in The Revenant something greater than revenge. His son’s death reshapes the cause into a desire for justice in the American frontier, where there are no courts of law. If the score that needs to be settled is a matter of justice, then forgiveness is really of little importance, which makes Manfred’s assessment of the shape of the Hugh Glass story irrelevant.

That’s a shame. Whether or not Manfred is right isn’t the point. We’re all free to alter the shape of the Hugh Glass story because it belongs to American mythology. But I think it’s fair to point out that the reshaping which Iñárritu has given us in this simply incredible film does make the story more Hollywood and, if Manfred was right, less, well, divine.

There are distractions in this film, a film that will create untold dissertations in film schools, I’m sure. Iñárritu risks melodrama now and then. It’s as if he can’t stop himself. The horror and deprivation is so painfully acute that he would like to think he has no limits. At some moments near the end, the story gets a little heavy-handed, even preposterous. The horror of the story doesn’t need embellishment.

Another distraction is the amazement an audience can’t help but feel about how on earth the movie was shot. Iñárritu was committed to natural light; therefore, frequently the crew could shoot only when the light was there–and there, in this case, is wilderness areas so remote you wonder if any other human beings have ever been even close. Reportedly, crew members quit in droves when they were forced to live in those conditions. When you watch this film, you have to stop once in a while and just shake your head at how it was done.

And then there is the myth itself. One of the reasons Shakespeare’s audience found his Hamlet so interesting, or so say the scholars, is that they already knew the story; what interested them was how the playwright would tell it. I really loved watching this telling of the Hugh Glass story unfold, loved watching it play the myth itself.

My wife didn’t go, wouldn’t, and I don’t blame her. The Revenant spares nothing, soft-pedals nothing, refuses to restrain itself. It is a magnificent film. Its already taken home a number of big awards, including Best Picture from the Golden Globes. There will be more, I’m sure. Watch for it to overpower the competition next week in the Oscars.

But The Revenant is not easy to watch. It’s brutal and unceasing, it revels in beauty that’s difficult to see. It’s a brutal masterpiece, an amazing rendition of a grueling, bloody story we’ve enjoyed hearing for more than a century, but is really difficult to see.

____________________________ 

*This is a piece I wrote in 2016, when The Revenant was playing all over the continent. 

**For those of you who were in attendance at last night's book discussion of Lord Grizzly, I intended to say that Fred's mother, Aaltje (Alice) Van Engen, was from Orange City. She passed away when he was 17. He worshipped her. She's buried here, in the Orange City Cemetery.