Morning Thanks--what he left us

It's what we inherited, part of the inheritance, a tiny part of it anyway. But yesterday it was sheer blessing.

Ten years ago, I built (!) and put in garden boxes out back. I'm not in the slightest bit handy. Dad Schaap was, as was Dad Van Gelder; but I inherited none of that.

 Here's what happened--

Three sides of one of the boxes rotted, leaving me (and our back yard) in shambles. I had to build another (ten years later), and certain parties in our house really wanted something taller, requiring less bending. 

I won't humiliate myself by telling how long it took for me to do what had to be done, but when you don't know a 2x4 from a 2x8, and nothing is what you say it is anyway (2x4s are really 1 3/4 bv 3 3/4--0r something like that), just walking into a lumber yard where men sport arms like Goodyear tires, it's, well, intimidating because I just know that the only retired prof in the place is sure to say or do something ridiculously stupid. 

Years ago, I took a temp job at a lumber yard that happened to employ a guy I grew up with, a perfectly mindless job, sticking a load of lumber into bins marked by their dimensions. At one point he looked at me, "You like working with wood?" he said. I was totally unaware anyone would.  

Anyway, we've got a backyard mess, and I've got to do something about it. Bite the frickin' bullet, I told myself. Besides, Barbara would be bringing home tomato plants from her weekly visit to the market. 

I measured the rotting 2x10s one more time--four feet by ten feet. Checked the basement for the right nails/screws (they're hybrids--I don't know what to call them), grabbed the case my father-in-law's drill inhabits, put it all out there, and took to the streets, to the lumber yard. 

Went remarkably well. If I acted stupid, the help were kind enough not to howl until I left. They put the lumber in the pickup. I drove home, carried the lumber around back, laid it out, and went back to retrieve the goods, opened up the case, grabbed the drill, and realized the thing was loaded with the same bit I'd used ten years ago--same drill bit. I hadn't used that blessed drill for an entire decade.

This morning (trumpet fanfare please), out back, there stands a brand new plant box, ready for our tomatoes, and taller than the old one--not tall enough, but taller. I can't help thinking I'm a man.

When finally the thing was finished, I grabbed Dad's drill and returned it to its case, same old bit still there in its teeth. Dad Van Gelder died a bit on the far side of 100 years old, and he left behind a quiet lifetime dedicated to family, farm, church, and once in a while a game of snooker or a stringer of sunnies. He left my wife a unique DNA and much, much more, including, to us, a battery-operated drill I rarely use. But yesterday I couldn't have done what needed to be done without that drill. Battery still had juice too, but I wouldn't have been in trouble had it run dry. He left us a charger too.

There's a whole world of things we inherited from him, including, I can't help but mention, a quiet faith. He let others play Jeremiah. 

But this morning's thanks are for that drill and what it represents, so very much more he left behind with us and for us. Oh, yeah, the bit. That too. 

Tulip Festival again!

In case you're wondering (and just down the road hundreds are--and praying too), right now, this morning, the sky is gray, not threatening-gray, just gray. While Orange City would greatly prefer something cloudless, they know well-and-good not to expect it. Some years are blessed, some are near-disasters.

It's Tulip Festival time again, and even to me these days, that title takes on the upper case. For decades we lived twenty minutes away in Sioux Center, where business acumen long ago learned to turn a dollar. Compared to Orange City (and most residents do) Sioux Center has the bucks, if for no other reason than they have the Wal-Mart. All things being otherwise being equal, Wal-Mart long ago established Sioux Center as the financial hub of Sioux County capitalism. Last week's guest, by the by, was Ron De Sanctimonious (as the Orange Man calls him) who visited Pizza Ranch. For a moment or so, he is reported to have looked in the direction of Orange City, but even the pose was political. 

Orange City spends its energy and spirit of its citizenry, Dutch or not, on its Tulip Festival. If the sky clears there'll be thousands of visitors this year, just like last--tens of thousands.  

The weather? Lookin' pretty good, really. So happy you asked.

Maybe a thundershower out of the blocks, Friday maybe grab a sweatshirt, but Saturday, the biggie, just about perfect, almost exactly what the Chamber of Commerce ordered up. Ought to be good. Ought to be fun. 

I spent most of life in Sioux Center being downright haughty, nose in the air, about OC's Tulip Festival--a bunch of grown men and women square skipping in wooden shoes down Main Street, as if our grands' grands ever even thought of such things silliness. Dancing was verboten until the 1950s, for pity sake. All that TF goofiness for what?--for money. Talk about selling your birthright!

Having moved much closer to the festival, I've been born again when it comes to tulips. What OC wants to foster for itself is a personality drawn from any of hundreds of old world villages. It's far less concerned with making money and pouring concrete (not that it doesn't). The vision of the community's movers-and-shakers is to be something akin to a European village, a place where you can sit in the park and maybe have a glass of wine with friends (well, maybe not wine). Sioux Center has a state highway through the heart of town--it's good business. Orange City's heart is a park overflowing with heavenly manicured tulips. (Some just a bit over the hill, but there's no end to the color!)

I've seen, even become part of, the herculean effort required to bring in tens of thousands of people, then host them--keep their hunger abated, their senses raptured, and, more than anything, keep them smiling, as if Orange City is, well, a dandy, happy place, even if none of them ever hanker to wear wooden shoes. Orange City has civic pride Sioux Center would die for, and the Festival generates it in abundance. To channel Hillary, it takes a village--hundreds of volunteers--to do the Festival.

Still, the whole thing is mostly silly. What long ago made towns like Orange City and Sioux Center hum and tick and prosper was rich, rich land drawn and quartered by incredibly hard-working people with an ethic that grew out of something very few of them could identify anymore, but still operates--something I'd shamelessly call Dutch Calvinism. 

That theological heart is something mostly bypassed amid the tulips and the street scrubbing--mostly bypassed and mostly forgotten. At worst, Tulip Festival tinkers around with the trivial. But what I've also seen is that the tulips create a mind that deliberately does what it can to evoke the past in a manner that keeps the past alive--and that's noble. 

So, yup, I'm going. Even though most of my Sioux County past was in Sioux Center and I live in Alton, I'll be in OC. If you'd like to tell me I'm wrong, I'll be on duty at the museum, a place named--guess what?--The Dutch American Heritage Museum. We call it the DAHM.

Have a great time. Remember, Friday, you may need a sweatshirt.

Morning Thanks--an old hymn

Horatius Bonar (1808-1889)

Old songs--old hymns--sling me back to my childhood like nothing else. Sometimes I find myself going over lines from the oldies without having called up titles or first lines--they're just there and I'm singing them. It's as if they've actually got their own channel or station or url, where they play 24/7, while I spend most of my time at other websites. They surprise me, as if I'm forever in a musical game of hide-and-seek.

Last week it was "Conquering Now and Still to Conquer" rising from back yard prairie grass. All of a sudden I'm singing "Not to the strong is the battle, not to the swift is the race" and thinking about a Lakota hide painting. Very strange--another mark of old age? Maybe I shouldn't be admitting these things publicly.

Sunday's transcendent moment was the shocking appearance of another oldie, this one in our worship service, "Not What My Hands Have Done." The moment the organist started in (we very rarely sing it anymore), some element of memory sang along. To say I remembered the text understates the experience. That old hymn put me into a state of mind I remembered. It wasn't as if I remembered a certain Sunday morning. I remembered the old hymn because I remembered something I thought I'd forgotten--how long ago I thought about the lyrics.

Not what my hands have done
can save my guilty soul,
not what my toiling flesh has borne
can make my spirit whole.
Not what I feel or do
can give me peace with God,
not all my prayers and sighs and tears
can bear my awful load.

The bare-bones confession of the first line suggests we're going straight to the confession booth: "now what these hands have done." I'll admit it today--there were sins aplenty in my early years, and the first line does a lot more than suggest that me and Lady Macbeth had some bloody hands in common.

But that's not the focus of the hymn. It's more than what I did wrong; it's what I can't do right. "Can save my guilty soul" blindsides you if you're expecting bald-faced confession. The line is confession, but it's not a confession of sin as it is an abject confession of helplessness, which is a good deal worse. What these hands have done is absolutely nothing, because there's nothing these hands can do to "bring me peace with God." Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

So I'm standing in church, and singing the old hymn, and suddenly I'm telling myself I was born and reared as an unrelenting Calvinist. The sorrow Horatius Bonar headlines in this old hymn is rather typical, I've read, of the man's "pensive reflection," of his pessimism. "Not What My Hands" is a praise song, but it's hardly jubilant, even though those opening lines are aimed at nothing less the beauty of grace. 

For me at least, something in the brooding darkness of the words was sad, wistful maybe. They brought me back to a time when I'd thought about them in exactly that way, fearfully: there's just nothing I can do to bring me peace with God, "not all my prayers and sighs and tears can bear my awful load." Yup. Amen to that.

And yet--I'm sitting there in church last Sunday, singing--I told myself I wouldn't trade my childhood for anyone's. Not that it was all peachy pleasant; I had good reason to believe I too, back then, carried an "awful load." 

But I couldn't help being thankful for picking up adult ideas from the lyrics of an old 19th century hymn: it's all about grace and "not what my hands have done"--or didn't do. 

I'm not sure I'm still fully capable of the promise of the last verse. At 75, I still haven't developed an "unfalt'ring lip and heart to call this Savior mine." That lip of mine is still faltering.

But I can't help but believe (a Calvinist phrase really, don't you think?) that I'm getting there, thanks, in no small part, to childhood hymns that pushed me to be an adult about what amounts to the central questions of our existence here on earth and in what the Lakota call "the Spirit world" to come.

I don't know how to put a handle on all of that other than to say this morning I'm thankful for having, once again, sung an old hymn I wouldn't call my favorite, but would claim to have formed me, maybe more than I can even explain.

L and C and me -- Cruzatte

If you've ever seen the President, you've seen the Secret Service--they're the deadly serious guys with big shoulders, men and women whose eyes Hoover-up whatever scene the Pres is walking into.  They look like Marines, and it's likely some of them are. Think of the Corps of Discover as the Secret Service, or a couple dozen first-team, All-American linebackers, gifted at reading what's going to happen with the next snap up river, a 19th century burly gang of Eagle Scouts. 

William Lewis gave Meriweather Clark the recruiting job, and Clark did most of the drafting at St. Louis during the winter of 1803. He didn't pick up just anybody from the applicants. Guys he wanted had to know their way around-and-through a wilderness. They had to be single--no hitched-up husbands need apply. Good health was required of course, and if you wanted a job going where few white men ever had, you had to handle firearms as if they were appendages. 

Those St. Louis recruits were the heart of the Corps of Discovery, but once in a while Lewis and Clark picked up a ringer out from the transfer portal--men like Pierre Cruzatte, a one-eyed trapper, big and rangy, and blessedly multi-lingual. The man knew more languages than you're average CEO today--fluent in English, French, and Omaha, as well as the lingua franca of the whole Louisiana Purchase, sign language. 

It seems in poor taste to call Cruzatte a "half-breed," but let me just open up that designation. Pierre Cruzatte's father was a Frenchman. We may be talking about our world here, but before 1803 that world, for the most part, belonged the French. His mother was an original non-hyphenated. She was Omaha. Such couplings weren't at all rare among the fur traders, and to Lewis and Clark Cruzatte's mixed-blood lineage undoubtedly seemed an unforeseen blessing, as he turned out to be.

Maybe the best way to imagine the 1804 Missouri River is to head out to Springfield, South Dakota sometime--it's not that far. Go south too the river, where you'll find a little city park. Go on and get out of the car then and stand as close as you can to the wide Missouri. It's a long way to the west bank, and there's more than one path through the grasses in the shallows. Sometimes people, yet today, call the river "braided," right there, because it is. All you have to do is stand there to realize how tough it must have been to determine which braid you want to follow, upstream or down.

Pierre Cruzatte, the one-eyed, rangy half-breed, knew his way around and through the Missouri. He'd been up river often, knew the currents, knew the landmarks, knew the way to get where Lewis and Clark wanted to go. And when he got there, Cruzatte knew how the heck to talk to the people who'd long ago been there. He could read the river the way an apt woodsman reads trees. And, it goes without saying that he knew how to get off a boat, head out into the trees or grassland and come back with a fat deer slung over his back--or whatever else the whole bunch of them could eat that night. 

Cruzatte was a free agent Lewis and Clark picked up for a song. Didn't take long and they named him a private, stuck him, right then and there, in "The Army of the Missouri."

Oh, yes, there's this too. Pierre Cruzatte, the beefy, half-breed linguist, a water man par excellance, came with a fiddle too. Lewis and Clark got him for a song, and you know what else--he gave them one or two himself. That's right. On top of everything else, Cruzatte was a musician, after a fashion any way. Don't know exactly how he'd have done with Vivaldi in Venice . 

But there were times on the river, moments when the whole bunch of them--all those rangy secret service guys, tanned and hot and beating off mosquitoes, got up on their feet and danced--yes, danced--to what their man Cruzatte fiddled up for them. I'm not making this up. There were times when the Native people all around, absolutely loved seeing all those paleface, uniformed linebackers shake a tail feather.

They were all interesting guys, the whole bunch; but you got to love the multi-lingual, one-eyed, river man who knew how to get what needed to be got out of a musket and third-rate fiddle.  

SUnday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 90

“…establish the work of our hands for us—

yes, establish the work of our hands.”

 

The bike path east of town cuts diagonally through tall fields of corn that sometimes buffer prairie winds and sometimes channel it. In July, when the temperature is at 100 degrees, that narrow corridor is a wind tunnel. Back when I used it daily, I fought prairie winds all the way down, then sailed along when I came back to town.

 

Really dry corn makes all kinds of noise. Its leaves get stiff and curl up lengthwise, then crack against each when they get bullied by wind. I’ve never been a farmer, but I’ve lived beside 12-foot corn most of my life, and I know when to get worried. Back then we hadn’t had rain for far too long. Weeks before already, I stopped mowing when our lawn turned to toast. From a distance that section of corn along the bike path still looked emerald, but up close it was smacking and cracking.

 

The man who planted those particular acres of tall corn died that summer. My wife told me about his death weeks after it occurred. I’d missed it myself. Had I known, I would have gone to the funeral. Once, years ago, that man told me I ought to write a book about his life. I should have, but never did.

 

Cantankerous and quarrelsome, he deserved his story told. We’ll call him LeRoy and protect his memory, not because he was ever an innocent. His wife left him after a couple decades of what must have been horror. For a time, fistfights with his son were public spectacles. Once, a neighbor’s sow wandered on his yard, and LeRoy shot it dead, then called the neighbor to pick it up. That afternoon, the neighbor called the radio station to nominate LeRoy for “Good Neighbor of the Day.” The whole town laughed when he awarded the distinction.

 

For a time, LeRoy went to the same church we did. A friend of mine told his buddy, a Lutheran, that our church would pay for their new building project if the Lutherans would take LeRoy off our hands.

 

Thanks but no thanks, the Lutheran said.

 

There’s more. Lots more. There should have been a book. He was never a saint. Some considered him a crackpot. Worse.

 

Later in his life, he mellowed, thank the Lord. I’m sure there were moments when he wished he hadn’t been what he far too often was.

 

The day I heard that Leroy died I took that bike path east of town in withering heat and felt his absence because it bothered me, strangely enough, that there was no one around to worry about his toasted corn. LeRoy would have, but he couldn’t, and he wasn’t.

 

I felt somehow responsible, if that makes sense. LeRoy always liked me; I’m not sure why. He didn’t like a lot of people, and he wasn’t shy about preferences. When I rode my bike through that tunnel of tall corn and heard its leaves cracking, I felt sad because I told myself he ought to be there to worry, a farmer’s right and privilege.

 

As all of us worry—about a bunch of things. When it comes to worry, most of us have fields of too-dry corn. 

 

I’ve got no crops to worry about, no cattle to feed. But I’ve got my concerns.

 

Like Moses, and like LeRoy, I’m sure, I often pray that God almighty will establish the works of my hands—establish these very words I’m typing. Don’t let ‘em dry in the hot sun. Keep ‘em growing and keep ‘em green, even in the heat. Make ‘em better than they are.

 

Moses’s agonizing concern arises from a heart estranged, someone whose thirsty soul has been languishing in the eerie darkness of an eclipse, God himself hidden away as if totally absent. What Moses is asking for is what he does with his hands in that wilderness where his people are serving a sentence, what he does from day-to-day, his work, his toil, his care—that all of that be blessed. That’s all he wants, as do most of us. Bless it, Lord. Bless it all. Bless it, please.

 

What he wants is good corn for a hungry world, something of his to flower gloriously even  though it’s in a cracked pot. “Establish the work of our hands,” he says. “Please, establish the work of our hands.”

 

Morning Thanks--Commencements

I don't remember who delivered the commencement address at Dordt College in 1970. It was someone from the Reformed faith, I'm quite sure, since the only really distinguished visiting scholars were men (an occasional woman) with recognizably Dutch last names. 

I don't remember enrobing, or donning the cap or fixing the tassel--that's all gone. In some file drawer down here there's a diploma that documents the fact that in May, 1970, I graduated from college.

I'm sure there were faculty in the parade who were thankful for my leaving. In a way, so was I. The country seemed coming apart, maybe more dangerously even than today. The Vietnam War was raging. On campuses all around the country, there were no grad parties because there were no grads. Many universities shut down because of the very real possibility of violent confrontations. At Dordt, the vast majority of kids were Nixonian.

At Kent State, not even a month before, four students were shot when National Guard troops opened fire on an anti-war protest that had grown out of hand. I'd been to Washington to protest those deaths, even though I'd just recently officially flunked my draft physical for a heart condition I barely knew I had.

My relationship with a young woman had ended a few months before, and I had no job. It seemed to me then that I was retreating to Wisconsin, the country from whence I'd come four years before, and I'd be carrying with me nothing more than that diploma. I hadn't done any kind of job hunt--I had a teaching degree--the specter of the draft kept me from looking. Truth be told, I didn't know what I wanted.  

All of that may explain how it is that the single image I remember from a Dordt College graduation in 1970 is a late night stroll through a women's dorm to bring some female friends back from a little party we had in Sioux City--a few drinks, a dance, just a handful of kids, some grads, some not. 

The only lights were dim in a hallway that seemed haunted. Burly bundles were strewn before every door, where students, as directed, had left their sheets and pillow cases. In the darkness, in my imagination those bundles somehow resembled bodies.

The only real haunted-ness is what I felt in my heart just then. I'd been at this place for four years, doing the standard college kid stuff and then some. I'd be graduating the next morning, leaving yet that afternoon; and I had very little to show for it, or so it seemed in the graveyard hallway of  shadowy corpses. 

Oddly enough, I'm thankful for that memory. At the time, it was painful, but when I think of that moment now it appears as a torturous moment of vital growth. What I knew the next day, going home, was that, wherever I'd been, whatever I'd done, I now had to start something brand new. I was no longer welcome at the college I'd attended for four years. I'd graduated. I was handed a diploma at my own "commencement." I had to start over, and I'd be alone doing it--it would be my job, my office, my calling (I had a Calvinistic education) to determine where this life of mine was bound. That hallway cemetery was scary, but essential.

Today, I'll march down the aisle at another Dordt graduation, this one 53 years later. I've done it often before, of course; but it's been ten years since I retired as a faculty member of the institution where I had matriculated so many years ago. But, 53 years later, I've got good reason to "join the throng." After all, two of my grandchildren are graduating. I'm deeply and sincerely thankful. 

I hope their memories of graduation are as long-lasting as mine. I hope their memories will be sweeter, but no less significant. Today, the two of them will set out to determine that character of the lives they will live in the presence of God and a loving family. Maybe painful, but finally crucial to "calling."

This morning I'll don a robe, pull on one of those goofy hats with a tassel, and march one more time with a faculty full of men and women I don't know. 

But I know two of grads very well, and love them both. For them, on this important morning of their lives, I'm greatly thankful.

A Model of Christian Charity (and Scholarship)

I owe an apology to literally hundreds of students, not because I somehow shipwrecked their lives or clouded their futures, but because I sold them a line on American history that was somehow blessedly wrong. In my case, the mistake was a kind of blessing because that error in thinking allowed an important investigation into theology and its effects on a society and nation, no mean commodity in Christian higher education. 

Answer me this: where does "American" history begin?  1620--Plymouth Rock, you say, the pilgrims. . .you know, Thanksgiving and all of that. American history begins in multiple dreams of freedoms--freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom to start anew, to begin a life without prejudice. 

Could be. It's as good an answer as any other, but why not say it begins with Jamestown, a Virginia colony in the new country, an enterprise that predates Plymouth? Or better yet, why don't we say that American history begins with what was here long before 1608 or 1620? Why don't we begin to teach an American history or the history of American literature that begins with the First Nations? Why has American education so steadfastly created a story that begins with New England Calvinists? Why, through forty years of teaching early American literature, did I?

There are several answers, good answers, to that question. For instance, there were vastly more educated men in New England by the end of the 17th century than there were anywhere else. Educated men write. There's more literature in New England than Virginia. Jamestown didn't grow as abundantly, and never really demonstrated a dedicated mission other than to make its economic sponsors money. If there's a story there, it's mostly about good, old-fashioned capitalism.

Native America? Just about every one of those early colonizers saw the Natives as "in the way," a sad and savage people who didn't know how to farm, how to work, how to make money, people who were, therefore expendable. Start the story with Indians? Don't be silly. 

Abram Van Engen's City on a Hill is its own kind of detective novel. Van Engen, who holds the Stanley Elkins Chair at Washington University in St. Louis, has written a richly researched study of origins, most specifically, the origins of America's story. 

Van Engen's title isn't at all unfamiliar. When I hear "a city on a hill," I think of President Ronald Reagan; but then, you might think of President Barack Obama. That single, famous phrase has gained as much currency in discussions of American progress as any. Van Engen, obviously, agrees.

But what he does in City on a Hill is examine not only the source of the line (from a long "sermon" once preached by a Puritan layman named John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony), but also the line itself in a book that has literary character--it examines a text closely--in a backdrop of pertinent but largely unnoted American history. It's an incredible study--readable and wise, with a plot that, just a few pages in, come to own your attention.

What Van Engen's meticulous scholarship has done is unpack that famous Winthrop line. But it also reveals, shockingly, how recently that almighty phrase has come to reign in the kingdom of American exceptionalism. Very, very few Americans had even read that sermon in the nation's first 150 years. Today, a single line from that sermon has built its own fortress in American politics.

Furthermore, when Van Engen examines the entire sermon--a read few take on, despite the popularity of that single phrase--what he finds is a "Model of Christian Charity" a vast number of contemporary readers would find embarrassingly socialistic, Winthrop hammering away at the importance, in a Christian society, of dispensing every form of justice--even economic--equally. Of course, no one talks much about the Winthrop's economic sermon.

There's so much in Van Engen's study that I've not mentioned, but I can't help ending with a long quote that addresses the topic he's been playing with throughout this fascinating study, a personal assessment of how that famous phrase, "a city on the hill," operates today, in the Trump era.

In the age of Donald Trump. . .A Model of Christian Charity [the text in question] seems to have moved into a new phase. Whereas it once served as the opening text in a tale of American exceptionalism embraced by the Right and adapted by the Left, it now (as of early 2019) serves primarily as a wedge text between two types of conservatives. It separates the Reagan remnant from the tribe of Trump. More than any other document, it seems, Winthrop's sermon isolates the striking differences between American exceptionalism and America first. 

But you shouldn't think of Abram Van Engen as starkly political. He goes on to say this:

In one form of rhetoric, an American story beginning in Puritan New England made the United States the leading player in a divinely guided history of liberty, leading the world to redemption by modeling and spreading any number of national values. In the other form of rhetoric, the United States has the same two values as every other nation: sovereignty and self-interest, which aim at nothing other than what everyone everywhere is presumed to want--material wealth.

The City on a Hill is itself a grad school course created out of a single line we've drawn from a long sermon by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a Puritan in mind, soul, and body. But, don't be mistaken. By revealing the history of that line and the sermon, and in defining and describing the myriad uses we have made of it, Abram Van Engen's book is really talking about us as a nation, and us, the people, individual citizens and human beings, within it.   

Morning Thanks--for the season

 

I'd say "they're back," but in truth they've never left, just taken on some darker fashion choices for the winter. "They just seem especially bright this spring," someone said last night. 

I doubt it. I'm guessing they're no more kin-to-the-sun as they've ever been; it's just that with their return--they're the Iowa State Bird after all--we've all now entered something approximating summer. I know, I know--it's in June, at least another month officially. No matter, if you live in the region, you can't help but think that happy days are here, after three or four absolute blessings in a row, now and then a sweet interval of rain, too yet.

Makes me happy to be an Iowan. Look at this guy! You can't help but be tickled it's spring. 

And this guy too, although for him Siouxland isn't home. Won't be long and that bright orange plumages will grace someone else's backyard feeder. Still, that he gives us a week or so, is a sure sign of grace.

And the backyard's shaping up under a sunshine quilt. In the city down the road, the tulips up and down the streets are promising to be breath-taking for festival time next week. 

It's almost summer, and the what's outside my window has reopened to the big colorful world all around. It's wonderful, and I'm thankful. 

Fanny Crosby and Slim Buttes

It's that season again when, out back, whacking weeds almost daily, I'm accosted by Sunday School songs seeping into my consciousness from some deep corner of my memory, ne'er forgotten ditties we sang every morning of those eight years I spent in the little Christian school a block from home.

They sneak out in all shapes and sizes, often in full regalia--"Give me oil in my lamp," "The Ninety and Nine." "Dare to be a Daniel." I don't conjure any of them. They're just there. Some old tune ambles along, unbidden as dreams, full of rhyme. I'm not transported to some long-gone grade school classroom. There are no visuals, really. For no odd reason, suddenly I'm singing something ancient.

Last week's featured selection came from post-WWII era--"Onward Christian Soldiers" or "Stand Up for Jesus," old faves that Sunday School kids like me adored, kids whose dads were just home from war. This morning's has an ungainly title--"Conquering Now and Still to Conquer." It's all about combat troops and advancing battle lines. (Feel free to sing along.)

Conquering now and still to conquer,
Rideth a King in His might;
Leading the host of all the faithful
Into the midst of the fight;

The idea that the Christian life is a fight isn't old hat, but most Sunday School teachers today wouldn't choose that old hymn right about now--Lord knows we've already got too many guns.

Anyway, that old hymn emerged from some primal ooze in my memory, an old Fanny Crosby tune, whose flighty arpeggios--two of them each in the first and third lines--must have made "Conquering" a favorite of old piano teachers like my mom. It just appeared, no cause or reason. For a time, unconsciously, I sang along--

See them with courage advancing,
Clad in their brilliant array,
Shouting the Name of their Leader,
Hear them exultingly say:

--and then the chorus, first time in years:

Not to the strong is the battle,
Not to the swift is the race,
Yet to the true and the faithful
Vict’ry is promised through grace.

My muscles flex. Youth returns. I'm suddenly capable of another half-hour on my knees in the hot sun. Fanny Crosby plays, and I'm caught in the march just as I once upon a time must have been.

What came to mind, strangely enough, was a hide drawing in the local museum, a story some Lakota storyteller once told in paint--a surprise cavalry attack on a Native village. Many died--the unsparing pictures are grisly, women and children bleeding and dying.

"Who won?" some kid asked me on a tour a year or so ago.

The fight the hide painting commemorates "the Battle of Slim Buttes," first engagement after Little Big Horn. Took place in far, far northwest South Dakota. I told the kid battle was not a Lakota victory.

He pointed to the bottom of the painting. "All these ones are winning," he said. In four pictures of hand-to-hand combat, Lakota warriors are most definitely handling the attacking cavalry.

The fight as pictured on the hide features horrific carnage, bloody death in a cavalry unit's surprise attack. Still, individually at least, defiant warriors show their mettle. In those hand-t0-hand struggles, the white men are bloodied, dying. The kid was right.

Why show the Native guys winning? Because who's telling the story makes a ton of difference.  The cavalry would assess what happened by numbers of fatalities, but the Lakota, a warrior society, placed emphasis on valor and courage and dignity. Victory was not assessed by comparing the numbers of casualties, but by the fortitude of those who fought the good fight.

Not to the strong is the battle,
Not to the swift is the race;
But to the true and the faithful
Victory is promised through grace.

Amazing, or so it seemed as I was out there picking weeds. The old Fanny Crosby hymn that arose out of nowhere bespeaks a spiritual victory, a moral that is, strangely enough, as Native as it is Christian: to the true and the faithful victory is promised through grace.

Heresy? I suppose. But I couldn't help thinking the comparison was worth noting. You want to understand the obvious discrepancies in that hide painting's storytelling? --think "Conquering Now and Still to Conquer." Think Fanny Crosby.

That's reason enough to smile, even when you're out picking weeds.

An apology and a footnote to Kuyper

You can call them my words, and they likely are; but the ideas belong to Abraham Kuyper, around whose writing many of my ancestors organized their lives. Kuyper was an ordained pastor, but he wasn't afraid of leaving the pulpit to enter the political fracas of his time in turn-of-the-century Holland, not at all shy, so forward, in fact, that he served the Netherlands as its Prime Minister. 

Here's the passage we just read last night, my words, kind of--

Today, in the public square, faith is frequently shunned. Many people believe faith in God is barbaric, a remnant silliness of the dark ages. There may have been a time when belief could more easily prosper in the marketplace, but in today's world, faith is scorned. 

It's embarrassing to read that. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Kuyper was right in 1906, and, after a fashion, I wasn't wrong almost a century later. But these days we inhabit a different world, a world where faith is no longer silly.

Congressman Keith Self, who represents the suburbs north of Dallas where the latest mass shooting occurred, was asked on Saturday what he felt about doing something to stop the blood-bath, specifically of the criticism of people like himself, who only offer "thoughts and prayers." He ripped on such pols from his own religious point of view. "Those are people who don't believe in an almighty God who is absolutely in control of our lives." Then he added, "I'm a Christian--I believe that He is."

That his Pharisaic claim is dead wrong doesn't need to be said. Fervent believers line every division in the land. The congressman may well believe in "thoughts and prayers," but what he cannot do is impugn the faith of those of us who say that, given the madness today, "thoughts and prayers" are not enough. Can we talk about some form of political action?

When Kuyper wrote the meditations that became Nabij God te Zijn (To Be Near Unto God) in 1908, he was writing during what some call "the modern age," a time when questions of faith were often thought "remnant silliness of the dark ages," when human reason was advanced to help humanity escape "barbaric" clutches of the old-time religion. 

When we read that passage last night, I couldn't help feeling I needed to apologize. The world around us has changed immensely. These days, nothing could be farther from the truth, and the proof is clear: Congressman Keith Self wasn't risking anything but laying claim to his own deep Christian faith, and in what he assesses as the faithlessness of those who don't share his politics. With his conservative voting public, he had much to gain by saying what he did.

I paraphrased Near Unto God because I came heir to my grandfather's copy in a translation stilted with an old-fashioned, dominie-like, style, hardly readable today. If I were to paraphrase those meditations, I told myself, there might well be  believers who would not only appreciate them but grow from what Abraham Kuyper had to say in a book that lots of Dutch immigrants took with them when they came to America.

The general revulsion at faith of any kind, what Kuyper saw around him and what I didn't question when I paraphrased his work, was that just a few years down the line the selection of Donald Trump as a candidate for President of these United States--two, maybe three times--would be a result of outspoken "religious" people like Rep. Keith Self and Sen. Ted Cruz, people who call themselves "evangelicals." As long as ex-President Donald Trump draws breath, those evangelicals are in power.

Do some believe those Christians to be barbaric? Yes. But are they thought to be so because they believe in God? No.  

Religious faith itself is not scorned or shunned in our world today. It would be good for evangelicals to accept that truth. Congressman Self hasn't. Today faith isn't derided or disdained. It's often greatly lauded--the congressman knew very well he would stand to gain ground with his own constituency by saying what he did. 

The movement, some say, is from "the Modern Age" into "the Post-Modern Age." 

Whatever it is, that passage in the very first meditation requires a footnote.

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 90

“May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us;. . .”

One of my grandmother’s older sister, I’m told, had had a very difficult life in the early years of the 20th century. She’d had two children, one of whom died as a child—I don’t know why, and neither does anyone else, now, a century later. Grandma’s sister’s name was Cora Formsma, and her husband was a salesman in Grand Rapids, Michigan. One day, without explanation or seeming cause, Cora’s husband, handsome and dynamic, simply walked away and never returned, left his wife and only child.

That child, a daughter, went off to college—unusual for the early years of the century, but then Cora’s father had been a professor. At college she met a bright young man with a distinguished academic future. They fell in love, and when he was in graduate school at the University of Michigan and getting himself financially stable, the two of them planned marriage. Unexpectedly, Cora Formsma’s daughter, soon to be a bride, came down with a strange disease and died soon after, leaving Cora, wife and mother, alone.

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

There’s more. Some time later, Cora herself died. And when her relatives looked through her belongings—there were no heirs and no spouse—they found a letter in her desk addressed to the man who had abandoned her, a letter Cora had written, knowing that someday she would die and hoping that maybe something of her would find its way to him. That letter, my aunt told me, explained to him that she loved him so much that, after he left, every night she’d stay awake until she’d heard the wheels of the last Wealthy Street trolley move slowly away into the night.

That sound of those steel wheels—a screaming I never heard—stays with me nonetheless, carrying the portrait of a wife who buried her only two children, but still waited, every night, for the last trolley, hoping to hear her husband’s footfalls coming up the sidewalk to the door of her oh-so-empty home.

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

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

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

Don’t we all? Some of that beauty is here in the almost forbidding darkness of this great Psalm from the soul of Moses, some of the radiance of God’s divine beauty is here in the poem.

It’s here. Read it for yourself.

The Land of Standing Bear

There's a bridge out there, barely visible from here. It's far right, half way up the picture. "The bridge to nowhere" some call it because it is, very little population on either side. It's given name is The Standing Bear Bridge.

What's before you is the Missouri River, at a place I've grown to love, where the Niobrara River runs into Big Muddy. Right here, in the vicinity of Niobrara, Nebraska, the longest river in North America looks more like it did before the dams than it does anywhere on its course to St. Louis today. This is the Missouri of Lewis and Clark.

That's an Episcopal church down there at the river's edge, the Church of Our Most Merciful Savior, built here in 1884, when a significantly bigger mission enterprise burned down. 

It's in remarkably good shape, although showing its age. The Santee people who live on the reservation consider it theirs--and it is. It's been here since the Santees left Crow Creek and moved here, a hundred miles south to the river's edge, leaving little but suffering and death behind. The Santees gained most-hated status in Minnesota after their own "uprising" in a bloody month-long war, "the Dakota War of 1862." Many of the Santees ended up here, where those gorgeous sandstone cliffs along the Missouri greeted them with every dawn. 

This is the land of Spotted Tail, the Ponca chief who went to court to argue for the right to be a human being under the law, and that's Spotted Tail, standing in the Statuary of the Capital in D. C.

In The River and I, John Neihardt narrates his long trek down the Missouri in a canoe, accompanied by his brother. He cannot help but note what he sees when h e comes by a place not unlike Running Water, South Dakota, where these proud sandstone bluffs stand royally along the river.

In the lazy heat of the mounting sun, tempered by the cool river draught, the yellow sandstone bluffs, whimsically decorated with sparse patches of greenery seemed to waver, as if seen through shimmering silken gauze. 

I stopped reading right there and told myself that while I hadn't seen what Neihardt did from the river's edge, I've been blessed with the imagination to see it as he did. I know what the river looks when it gathers offers anyone who cares to look little more than sheer awe. I know. 

"Reconciliation"

Native activist Mark Charles likes to say that the word reconciliation doesn't really apply in movements or attempts to bring Indigenous people together with the those who, even long ago, colonized land that simply wasn't theirs, land that belonged to First Nations. After all, there can't be re-conciliation where there never was cooperation or conciliation; you can't rebuild something never constructed. Therefore the two peoples--colonials and the those they displaced--need to work at conciliation, bringing people together who have never been.

Start where you will--Jamestown or Plymouth Rock--relations between Native tribes and Europeans pouring into "the new world" were never all that loving, despite our turkey-and-gravy Thanksgiving fantasies. White folks took land that wasn't theirs to take, and did so with religious intensity. "Manifest Destiny," the belief that "the new world," in its entirety simply belonged to those who would farm it, nurture it to its own full economic potential, made unmistakably clear that this land belonged to the able-bodied immigrant peoples "yearning to be free."  Ours was a destiny that was clearly manifest, quite simply, in this new nation's land mass--"of course it's ours, it's there for the taking."

Call it what you will: when it seems that something good and lasting can be redeemed from the dark corners of this nation's history, it's always worth noting. And not long ago that's what happened just outside of Philadelphia, when  Mennonite land-owners, whose families had been there for hundreds of years, hosted an Oklahoma tribe, the Delawares, who are looking to bury their ancestors in a homeland once theirs.

The 1990, the Native American Graves and Protection and Repatriation Act created a problem somewhat unforeseen. After the law's passage, museums and universities were required to give back the human remains and funerary items they held to the tribes to whom they rightfully belonged. Tribes greatly appreciated the return, but had to determine what to do with what they were given. For the Delaware (who prefer to be called the Lenape) most of those honored dead likely never lived in Oklahoma.

Discussions began when a noted Mennonite historian, John Ruth, met a Lenape couple, John and Faye Thomas, and began to talk about the dilemma the Oklahoma descendants of Pennsylvania tribal elders faced. To them, space in a Mennonite cemetery wouldn't be satisfactory. The burial ground had to be a place that didn't have meaning to other people.

Just a month ago, on April 12, The Mennonite Heritage Center in Harleysville, Pa., hosted the visit from representatives of the Lenape tribe, and the talks officially began. After a potluck supper with local Mennonites, Chief Brad KillsCrow, tribal elder John Thomas, and tribal historic preservation officer Susan Bachor presented their request: land to bury their ancestors.

“Our ancestors helped you," Mr. Thomas told the crowd of over 100 Mennonites. "Your ancestors helped us. I humbly ask if there is anything you can do.”

And so, the talk has begun. When the public meeting concluded, those who had gathered broke into song, an old favorite. You guessed it--"Blest Be the Tie That Binds."

I'm not sure if Mark Charles would call that reconciliation or conciliation; but even though a month has passed, right now, I'm can't help but think I can still hear that old beloved hymn all these many miles away.

 Lenape meeting with Pennsylvania Mennonite community

"Better Together"

Look--let's be honest. What the denomination I've always been a part of is facing is an issue that has torn just about every other denomination apart. For a number of reasons, the issues raised are immensely difficult. The only faith communities left untouched/unscathed are those whose walls are largely impenetrable by anyone other than the chosen, churches where only sworn members know the right words.

The questions raised by same-sex marriage rise from centuries of denial, centuries of oppression, of gay people hidden away under any convenient bush, no matter how thorny, decades of telling ourselves that being gay is an unfortunate choice some sinners make, that same-sex attraction is as much a sin as drunkenness or infidelity, theft or murder, simply another iniquity that cannot and will not be tolerated in a church whose members swear allegiance to the love of Jesus--and years on end of reading the Bible as a rule book. 

It is that, of course, but it is so very much more.

I hope no one questions my loyalty to the Christian Reformed Church of North America. I am the author of its last published history, and I toured the continent with a staged show that told the denomination's story. For years, members of the church read meditations I wrote for their kids. I taught at a denominationally-affiliated institution of higher learning for decades, almost four. Ever since 1972, I written articles and stories for The Banner, the official magazine of the CRCNA, as well as a number of others. 

Today, however, my politics set me apart from many members. I believe the Trump Presidency ranks as among the most dangerous chapters in the life of the nation. Throughout Covid, I wore a mask when so advised, watched church on-line, and got shots and boosters as recommended. I'm progressive about things politic, a bona fide liberal. I believe in red flags and gun registration. I'm woke. Mostly these days, I vote Democratic. Not always.

I recently joined a new organization of CRC members, an organization calling itself "Better Together: A Third Way." I signed up because I believe in what that fledgling organization is working at building a union that allows for disagreement on issues that will not determine salvation, issues like same-sex marriage.

Just a couple weeks ago I took a number of friends out west to Indigenous reservations; they wanted to know more about Native American history. While we were out and about in South Dakota, I took a few backroads to show them the church where my great-grandparents, immigrant Schaaps, worshipped in the 1890s. That church, Harrison (SD) CRC, is in good shape, but, in size, vastly smaller than it was when many more people set roots on any section of ground. Today Harrison CRC has merged with the local Reformed (RCA) church which, for more than a century, stood just as proudly, and separately, a few blocks away. Decreasing memberships made consolidation the only means of survival. Today they worship together.

I know good people from that church, but I know good people at the church in Michigan too, where a woman living with another woman was voted into the office of deacon. I went to college with Larry Louters, and a member of the council is my daughter's college roommate. 

I know good people throughout the entire denomination, but I fail to understand why the prayerful choice that Michigan church made, standing in a wholly different culture and for their own particular reasons, has to split whatever it is or was that kept those two churches, so unlike each other, together. I can't help but believe we're "better together." There has to be "a third way."

"A Third Way" ran that cover ad (above) on last week's Banner, one of two. This week, "Better Together" was told that the second would not run: "based on the negative reactions we received for the May ad," the Banner editor explained, "it seems that we might have misconstrued the public’s perception of the group."

Presumably, serious and significant numbers of the CRC contacted the Banner office to tell them that working toward peace was somehow perpetuating war. It's very difficult for me to believe, but I do. 

A couple years ago, an aging Lakota tribal elder told me the story of a lesbian girl, a friend, who deliberately lived with the boys in a government boarding school because she wanted to protect her little brother who was also enrolled. This friend of mine spoke of her queer old friend as a hero.

"We honor those people among us," she told me, with clear reference to the differences she understood between my culture and the Two Kettle Lakota to which she belonged. "With good reason, too," she said. "We say those people are specially blessed with a double consciousness." 

Arguing the merits of her assertions isn't my intent here. What is, is that she made clear with the story that her culture, her world, even her faith assessed gay people as with respect, not scorn.

What I can't help thinking this morning is that significant numbers of CRC members, many of whom I know, truly and righteously believe that another group of members devoted to peace-making, "Better Together," really doesn't want peace but something of its opposite. Really?

A church that claims to follow Christ has no room for peace?

T-U-L-I-P Festival

For a half century I've been up in front of people, reading things aloud--stories, essays, meditations. In fact, I've got a thing going right now--I'm recording all the stories from the pen of Ruth Suckow (1892-1960). I'm twelve in, lots more to go. 

So, before yesterday's unique assignment began, it seemed a breeze: just recite a couple of things in front of the screen, send what you record along to us, and we'll use a line or so for one of those compilation videos, a dozen people reciting the Lord's Prayer in bite-sized chunks. You've seen 'em. Just remember, when you do the Lord's Prayer, keep your eyes shut. Sit there in front of your screen and make a video. We'll cut and paste. 

No sweat. 

Then do the same with the first Q and A of the Heidelberg Catechism--everyone's fave--and The Apostles Creed; but for those, go ahead and keep your eyes open. They're not prayers.

Gotcha.

I must have repeated the Lord's Prayer thousands and thousands of times in my 75 years, but, video running, I turned into a nervous Christmas program pre-schooler. I could not get through it. I could not recite it. I'd forget lines, forget where I was, flick off the camera, kick myself around the desk, and go at it again. What comes after "daily bread'? Doggone it!--start over. I even looked the Lord's Prayer up on line, printed it up, and read it over. I'm not making this up. No help. I botched it again. And again. And again. No one to blame but myself.

Finally, I made it through.

Apostles' Creed. Thousands of times I've been over it, written meditations about every line, every phrase. No matter. Soon enough I'd have given away half my fortune for a teleprompter. Time and time again, I looked at my wretched mug on the screen in front of me and simply forgot the next line.

My goodly inheritance includes a predilection for things theological, especially when it comes to Calvinism, that hybrid set of ancient principles often most efficiently explained by the acronym T-U-L-I-P, which I won't unpack now. Message me (just kidding). Each letter represents a principle intimately related to the next. When you play all five, they harmonize--sort of, in a dark way.

I've been around theologians of Calvinistic ilk for my whole life. TULIP was, long ago, sewn into my underwear for sorting and identification, and the first principle, the T, an abbreviation for "Total Depravity," not only begins the hand but looms over all the rest because the two core principles of Calvinism are 1) the sovereignty of God; and 2) the depravity of man. When mixed thoroughly, those two reveal a  self-portrait you won't get from any other camera: it goes like this--without grace, I'm toast. 

(It'll be on the test. You're taking notes, right?).

So cued up within my heart and mind is this ancestral Dutch Calvinist that reminded me, one more time, of the immense legacy of what some describe as "total depravity." Oh, yeah?--you say. Listen to this. I was more than ready to punch the computer, but my ridiculous bumbling wasn't technology's fault. I couldn't recite the Lord's Prayer because I was thinking about me--how I looked, how I sounded, how I was going to play in the compilation. I was listening for the competence of my elocution, one might say in standard highbrow. 

Comes down to this. Yesterday I couldn't pray because I was too concerned about me.

There. Confession, even non-Calvinists would say, is good for the soul. 

You'll be happy to hear that I'm 2/3 finished with this assignment. What remains is the first Q and A of the Heidelberg Catechism, which I couldn't recite even if I wasn't on camera. I'll need comfort, I'm sure.

Stay tuned. 

Conference High Fashion

They're not all alike, thank goodness. There are differences, trust me, but I've just spent an inordinate amount of time among old men in tennis shoes. They come in different colors--the old men and the shoes--but there's a vital consistency among them in the footwear. Call them what you like--keds, sneakers, gym shoes--they adorn the old crooked feet of old crooked men, one of whom I am, and I wear 'em too for obvious reasons--tennis shoes are comfortable, dang it. 

In history conferences 150 miles or so away from each other, in different states, on successive days, I sat (and sometimes spoke) in gatherings that were 90% elderly, men, often enough in sport coats and tennis shoes, and their female counterparts dressed, on the whole, less therapeutically, but some of them in gym shoes too. Do old women not have sore feet? Maybe so; for years, men--many of the xxls--hoisted more weight around town; they're the ones with museum feet.

My experience at two history conferences last weekend is that it's now clearly official--for old retired educators, wearing tennis shoes, even with a tie and sport coat, may not be high fashion, but is perfectly acceptable.

Last weekend I spent some wonderful time lumbering around with old folks at the Center for Western Studies in Sioux Falls and John Neihardt Center, in Bancroft, Nebraska. I may be the only attendee at both, but the crowds who gathered, like their shoes, looked remarkably similar. If the average age of conferees was four score years, then the handwriting is on the wall. The crowd was unmistakably elderly; we could have just as easily avoided the traffic and met at the Home.

It's sad, and it doesn't get said publicly. Neither conference hosted a speaker who outlined the problem, and no one wants to bring it up because simply talking about it is, well, embarrassing and, to be sure, smells like agism. But the truth is that an entire generation of amateur historians, people who love the stories that still rise from the region, people who have read and remembered the epic drama of homesteading, the epic desolation of the Dust Bowl, the epic confrontation of two cultures--one white, one red--with impossibly different definitions of home, those people are tottering. Won't be long and they'll be gone.

Edgar Allen Poe got a lot of mileage out of the concept of a premature burial, in part, because in the earlier years of the 19th century premature burial wasn't all that rare. Such things actually happened. 

But it's not a premature burial they fear. What chills them to the bone--and they'll talk about it over lunch maybe--is what seems the dearth of interest from younger folks and, even more, the sense that higher education has lost its moorings and become so impossibly expensive that it has to, it must, assure graduates of a profession. What scares them is that no one cares about American history or American literature, no one reads Willa Cather or Marie Sandoz, Frederick Manfred or Herbert Krause, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau. There's just no time. What scares them is the sense, in other words, that no one cares about things they care greatly about.

Gym shoes don't do much to help that ache. "Used to be 150 people every Spring Conference," the emcee told me at the Neihardt Center. By the end of the afternoon, there were maybe thirty. "What do ya' do?" he said (we weren't up front). 

I told him I had no easy answers but to keep plugging, keep emceeing, keep up the steep admiration to know more about how in the world people lived in a place where, in twenty minutes, a prairie fire could lay waste to an entire county, where Winnebago warriors successfully held off the powerful Brule Sioux, where an old man in a white beard crawled 200 miles to get revenge on the kid who'd left him to die, only to forgive. 

I told him maybe the answer, if there was one, was there in the air at both delightful conferences: you keep telling stories and you keep having fun doing it. 

I could have said, "And you wear comfortable shoes."

I didn't have to. He had 'em on.