Sunday Morning Meds--Blessings of the seasons

“You drench its furrows and level its ridges; 

you soften it with showers and bless its crops.” Psalm 65:10

In Texas last weekend, the temperature edged up to ninety degrees, the air light and dry, the sun almost piercing. Although our winter has been almost as extraordinary as last year’s summer—remarkably warmer than normal—adjusting to the heat of the Hill Country took some doing, although we didn’t work all that hard at enjoying it.

Before we left, we’d heard predictions that some scrappy storms were heading to the upper Midwest, so when our plane came down in the Twin Cities, the chilly tunnel to the gate area was a frosty reminder being back home. Snow had come down heavily throughout Minnesota, and swept down into Iowa, northwest Iowa, building considerable drifts along the highways, where there had been none when we left.

Someone shoveled our sidewalks, which was a blessing. But that was Tuesday. Today, out my basement window, the snow is falling again, piling up into its second inch this morning already, more on the way. Last night the weather guy suggested, grimacing, that what we’ll get today will only prime the pump for what will alight come Monday, when, he claimed, we’ll likely get a blizzardy foot.

The thing is, it’s already late March—well, mid-March anyway; and we’ve had such a long stretch of sweet balminess through January and February that it now seems a kind of double curse to get hit so hard when, really, we might be looking for a crocus or two where the sun beats down on the south side of the house. But that’s life on the plains, I guess, where as I’ve said a thousand times, weather always comes in spades.

We’re probably a month away from that in-between time when seed corn starts a rustling in the bag, as my father-in-law used to say, anxious to get settled in warm, moist earth. But that time is a’comin’, and we’ll just have to grab the shovels a few more times before the white stuff is, once again, history, and the air begins to take on the ambience of the fecund earth all around.

Most of us would have felt, well, less than deserving had we simply slouched into tulips and daffodils. One of the great joys of living in a place where annual temperatures have a 100-degree variance is the sheer bliss of seasonal deliverance. Spring just isn’t Spring! if it doesn’t march in like a liberator at the end of the war. All this snow we have, the snow we’re getting, and the mess we’ll come heir to in the next week will turn the grace of our eventual, April deliverance feel like a corn belt Mardi Gras.

And sometime in July, when the temps soar to 100+, the land will be thankful for March snowstorms and the sallow mantle of life our snow bestows on farmland that never gets quite enough to drink. When we’re wearing sandals and tank tops, the land will remember.

If King David is right—and I think he is—it’s comforting, even here in the basement, sitting in a thermal black turtleneck I pulled from a stack of cold-weather clothes that hadn’t been touched all winter, it’s comforting to know that the snow falling gently now (the wind is coming later) is God-ordained, his gift to us and his land.

Outside my window, the snowfall is really kind of beautiful. Maybe I’ll go out with the camera. Really, it’s that pretty.

And soon enough, it will be gone. That too is a blessed thought.    

March, 2004

Morning Thanks--Stories from an old man

Yesterday afternoon I sat with a old man who, once upon a time, shot at surfacing German subs in the North Atlantic, tried to pick off the crews who were aiming their anti-aircraft guns at the Navy depth charge bombers whose buzzing explosive cargo could blow those subs out of the water.

In the spring of 1942 he'd gone into flight school after graduation from a small Iowa college, spent a year in series of special schools, then took orders to Norfolk for duty in the North Atlantic. During his years keeping Nazi U-boats away from Allied shipping lanes, his unit of fighter pilots knocked off nine subs. "They didn't give you credit unless there was a heckuva oil stain on the water," he told me, a bowl of soup set on a couple of towels draped over his lap--lime chicken from his daughter in North Carolina. He says they know how to cook in North Carolina.

He should know. He married a North Carolina girl himself.

He's 94 years old, and everything you say has to be heavily amplified. We took a bad turn when we determined ear horns were ridiculous. All afternoon I could have used one, which is to say he could have. Honestly, I didn't say much at all for two hours while he told me about his life, but when I left I was pooped just from yelling the very few questions I did.

But what a joy it was to hear a story he probably doesn't tell all that often anymore, if in fact he ever did.

Twice while I sat there beside him, he cried. Once, when he remembered coming back to Norfolk aboard that cheap aircraft carrier he was aboard for most of the war. It was a merchant marine ship worked over into an aircraft carrier with barely enough space to land fighters. Held just nine, in fact. Made take-offs difficult too, but that was home.

What brewed the tears was his remembering how that carrier sailed into the harbor and how right there on the pier in front of him coming closer and closer and closer was his brand new wife standing there among the others gathered there. That happened 72 years ago. Just seeing her there in his memory still brought tears.

When the Nazis began to recharge their batteries at night on the North Atlantic, he and his fighter plane buddies had to learn whole new technologies for going after subs in the dark. Where there was once a bomb in the hold, the Navy now installed a flood light. To learn the new flying tricks, the whole bunch of them were sent to Florida. He told his sweetheart to take a train down with the other women. "But, honey," she told him, "we're not married."

"Then that'll have to change," he told her.

And it did. They left Florida a few days later, married.

The next time that carrier and its nine planes and crews turned away from combat on the high seas and returned to port for resupply was the time he spotted her on the pier waiting for him--that's the moment he'll never forget. He's 94, and he doesn't walk well, but the memory of seeing her waiting on the pier brought tears from someplace so deep inside we all probably wish we held such a treasure.

That's them in the picture. He'd met her at a dance in Norfolk, asked her to dance three times in a row, then asked her if next time he was in port he could date her. She said yes. He wrote her address on his sharp white cuff.

Look at that picture. It's just about the most beautiful thing, isn't it?

But he broke just enough for me to see an edge of tears in his eyes one other time too when he told me about his life. Land prices skyrocketed in 70s and early 80s; and when they did, farmers loaded up on everything--on land, on machinery, on cattle. As long as their paper worth was out of sight, so was reason.

But the market didn't hold, and when land prices fell off the table the whole works buckled like a house of cards. Good people, hard-working people, people who prayed to the Almighty, suddenly found themselves so far gone in debt there was no way out except to somehow cut losses and dreams.

"That was a bad time, wasn't it?" I asked him.

That's when he cried again.

He'd become a banker, a good one, a man of prayer. "The Board met everyday at six in the morning and we'd go over loans," he told me, his lips shivering in the overheated apartment.

Twice he cried this afternoon, this precious old man who, once upon a time in the inky dark over a cold ocean operated a joystick with a trigger that wasn't a game at all.

Twice he cried. I saw it. Once in joy and once in misery. All in life.

I couldn't have said much, couldn't have been heard. But why talk when there's so much to hear.

So go ahead and ask me about my day yesterday. I'll be happy to tell you.

It couldn't have been richer. I'm thankful for being there.

The strange phenomenon of white people dying (II)

In trouble

We've lost our story, lost the narrative that once upon a time strung together our lives and our purpose and vision. So says Princeton economist and researcher Angus Deaton, who just won the Nobel Prize. It's an amazing story about startling findings, and all of it bears repeating (I posted about the same research two days ago).

The same Sunday that Russ Douthat, the New York Times politically conservative op-ed columnist, held forth on the extraordinary findings of Deaton and Case, so did Paul Krugman. Opinion pieces on the same subject in the same edition of the Times is not particularly unusual, but two columnists who traditionally represent polar opposite viewpoints writing on such a formidable topic and essentially agreeing--that's news. 

Let's review. What this Deaton and Case study shows is that the death rate among white, uneducated American citizens is increasing steadily; more and more white, uneducated men and women in this country are dying young, mostly notably because of suicide (you read that right) and various diseases arising from drug and alcohol abuse. While death rates for people of color are most definitely going up, white people are dying younger than they were a decade ago--and really, get this!--often at their own hands.

Not blacks. Not Hispanics. White folks. White folks without education. They're not dying earlier in sunny California or the northeast, traditional bastions of progressive (which is to say, "liberal") thinking. 

Where then are they dying? Low or stagnant or declining life expectancy is concentrated, the study says, in the Bible Belt. 

In. The. Bible. Belt.

Does this study help us to understand American politics? 

Maybe it's still too early to judge, but most political observers claim this season's scorecard can't really be understood traditionally. Donald Trump for POTUS? Really? A madcap billionaire with three wives and a portfolio is full of casinos? Say, what?

Or Dr. Ben Carson, whose understanding of a ton of important issues facing this country is sketchy at best, but whose demeanor and soft-spoken humility draw disciples in a fashion unlike anything anyone has ever seen. Neither have ever held public office. Any. Nor have they run. Never. Now, they want the White House, and a hearty chunk of the electorate is seemingly ready to lay down the red carpet.

Something strange is going on.

Or this: Just this morning, The Hill reports that the latest McClatchy-Marist poll has Bernie Sanders, who refuses to delete the word "socialist" from the way he's introduced, absolutely trouncing Donald Trump in an Presidential election, were it held today. Landslide.

Something's off the rails here; something is in the wind.

So what does Paul Krugman say about the research of Deaton and Case?

"At this point you probably expect me to offer a solution," he says, and we do. Krugman is not shy about his opinions and they're almost always significantly left of center. "The truth is," he writes, "we don't really know why despair appears to be spreading across middle America. But clearly it is, with troubling consequences for our society as a whole."

Something significant seems to be afoot, but no one from either side of the aisle seems to know exactly why.

Amazing. 

A story of war and peace

For Veteran's Day, a story from Bert Witvoet in The Christian Courier. There are no rifles in it, no smoke of battle, no glorious acts of heroism. But the story draws out clearly the deepest battles lines the human soul can manifest. 

In the depth of the German occupation of the Netherlands, Dominie Francois Guillaume was arrested by the Nazis because someone from his church reported that he had prayed for the Dutch Queen, who'd left for England shortly after Hitler Luftwaffe had flattened Rotterdam. That prayer offered up before his congregants, all of them Dutch, was considered a crime by the Reich because the preacher's sympathies for their beloved Queen Wilhelmina made clear he was an enemy of Hitler.

Francois Guillaume, the preacher, was imprisoned for praying and sent off, eventually, to Dachau. Somehow he managed to survive and returned to Holland when the war ended, almost unrecognizable. You've seen the pictures. "Hollowed out and emaciated," Witvoet says. 

It took some time, but the man's strength returned and he regained his profession, started preaching again, started over, as did so much of Holland.

One day a man came to visit to tell him that a certain someone from his war-time church was on his death bed and wanted to speak to him. The man who'd reported his dominie to the Nazi authorities, the man who single-handedly determined that Guillaume would spend years in the concentration camp at Dachau--that man wanted his preacher's forgiveness before he died. 

Dominie Guillaume did not want to go. Throughout those  years, Witvoet says, he'd never known who it was who had turned him in. After all those years simply to know was itself a trial. 

"But the Lord told him he had to go," Witvoet writes. So he did.

When he did, that man reached out his hand and asked the man who was once his preacher for forgiveness. 

Guillaume took it and said, "I am offering you the Lord's hand of forgiveness" because he could not offer his own, simply could not. Witvoet tells the story this way:

Francois felt the power of God flowing from his body, through his hand, to the dying man. And then he knew that he also could forgive the man for all the pain he had caused him and his family.

A man undoubtedly precious to Rev. Francois Guillaume, Abraham Kuyper, says in one of the meditations in Near Unto God that we come closest to our Father in heaven when we act as we know he acts, when we do what we know he does--when, for instance, we forgive. Life holds nothing more precious than those moments we know we are doing what he does. 

I can think of no more vivid example of that truth than the war story of Dominie Francois Guillaume, himself a life-long believer, who learned as he'd probably never learned before who God really was the moment God gave him the strength and clarity of soul to take that man's hand and forgive him. 

It's a World War II story, but there's no soldier in it. It's a story I just read just yesterday, a war story that is, more importantly, all about peace. 

The strange phenomenon of white people dying (I)

In trouble

Anna Case and August Deaton, a pair of famous researchers from Princeton, have crunched some remarkable numbers and come up with shocking conclusions. What they've determined is that rates of mortality and morbidity have increased substantially among white people in later middle-age. 

You read that right. Not blacks, not Hispanics. Among minority populations, morbidity and mortality continues, in fact, to decrease. If Case and Deaton are right, then what we're experiencing is, amazingly enough, more sadness and earlier deaths among white people than among people of color. Not only that, but this trend appears to be gaining speed. 

"This change reversed decades of progress in mortality and was unique to the United States; no other rich country saw a similar turnaround," Case and Deaton reported. Amazing, isn't it? Those significantly increasing death rates are "largely accounted for. . .from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis."

Ugly stuff. 

"Self-reported declines in health, mental health, and ability to conduct activities of daily living, and increases in chronic pain and inability to work, as well as clinically measured deteriorations in liver function," their research says, "all point to growing distress in this population."

Why? What's happened in the last 15 years to make so many die earlier? That's a good question.

Last Sunday, Russ Douthat, a conservative columnist for the NY Times, pointed out that such grim figures answer to a conservative view of things. What any of the Republican candidates for President could trumpet is that moral permissiveness and the welfare state has created the dramatic change. Bu if that were true, Douthat says, other permissive, socialist states should be suffering similar horrors--and that's not so. These startling death rates are American's alone.

Liberals could also say "I told you so." Greater despondency and death among older white people in this country, they might well argue, is a result of false religion of trickle-down economics that actually trickles up to the rich and powerful, leaving a wasteland in its wake.

But if that were true, Douthat says, the shocking findings would be the true in our other demographic categories, among African-Americans and Hispanics. But it's not. In fact, death rates among people of color continue to decrease dramatically. 

How else can we explain these sad and awful numbers?

Douthat says that perhaps "working-class white America needs to adapt culturally, in various ways, to this era of relative stagnation, and learn from the resilience of communities that are used to struggling in the shadow of elite neglect."

If you're white, like I am, that sounds particularly draconian. Douthat regularly suffers all kinds of abuse from NY Times readers for being too conservative, but this line seems preposterous for white America, doesn't it?

But think about it. 

When PBS did a historical series of Native America a decade ago, they titled their work, "We Shall Remain." That title resonated with me because in Native American literature and cultural analysis and even in my interviewing I'd begun to hear a testimony from Native people that struck me as unique to them. And it went like this: Given what we've suffered since Europeans came, it's a wonder and a miracle and an indication of our strength that we have survived. "We shall remain."

When white people evaluate their lives, we think and talk about success often in economic terms. A good life achieves something. My father made it clear that I had to go to college because he couldn't. The ethic he bought into was that his children would have a better life--economically speaking--than he did.  

Today, amid our cultural affluence, that ethic is seems a little silly, and largely dead.

What Douthat is suggesting on this very difficult subject is that white folks may have to alter the nature of their dreams and look to other visions to secure happiness, visions that have sustained others.

He may be right.

Success may simply be recorded in survival.

That sounds heretical; but it's not hard to argue that some old myths may well be dying.

Faith in Port au Prince

I may be wrong, but I don't believe I've ever heard a sermon on that particular OT passage, something out of II Kings, a visitation King Jehoash makes to a wheezing Elisha. But there's nothing tender about this bedside visit because the King is scared silly. The Aramites visit and kill and maim at will.

Elisha tells the King to pick up a bow and shoot an arrow out the window. More than passing strange but harmless enough. When Jehoash does, Elisha says, “The Lord’s arrow of victory, the arrow of victory over Aram!” Something of a sacrament.

So much for that.

“Now take the arrows,” Elisha tells the King, and "strike the ground.” Obligingly, the King does so, then looks up wonders what the old geezer's next absurdity will be.

The old man throws a tantrum. "What?--just three times?" the prophet says. "You should have done it much more because now you're only safe for a few attacks." I think that's the gist of it.

Then, in the very next verse, Elisha up and dies.

The forty lashes result from the King's lack of faith. He's plainly lackadaisical, as I would be, I'm sure, if some spooky octogenarian muttered, between staggered breaths, that I should whack the ground with a handful of arrows. 

And that's exactly where the preacher wanted to take us in the sermon. Lack of passion. Lack of faith.

But right there, at the moment of moral application, I was airlifted to the crowded city streets of Port au Prince, Haiti.

I remembered a night, outside, riding through barely navigable streets overflowing with men and women and children. In a climate as equatorial is Haiti's, whole families live outside, hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people on the street, all the time. I'd never seen anything like it.

Just outside my window, several miles-worth of Iowa farmland stretches to the horizon. It's early morning, no sign yet of dawn. Hwy 60 is right out there, a four-lane thoroughfare that slashes diagonally through four-cornered farmland between the Twin Cities and Omaha. But at this moment, no lights appear down the highway. Right now, I live as if totally alone here.
If economists want to be kind, they call Haiti "a developing nation"; others simply say it is "a failed state." There's little government, and what there is is shady. And the city, as you can imagine, is a mess. Just down the road, people celebrate ethnicity by taking buckets and brushes to city streets.

In Port au Prince, hundreds of thousands of people walk the overcrowded streets at all hours, all of them descendants of African slaves. I could spend the rest of my days right here in front of these big windows and never once see an African-American walk through our back yard on his or her way to somewhere else. 

What I'm saying is the world I live in and the streets of Port au Prince, Haiti, could not be more different. But that night in the city what swept into my mind was an absurdity: that God hears their prayers just like he hears mine and ours out here among the street scrubbers, just as he hears men and women and children around the world in suburbs and inner cities, small towns and farmsteads. He hears all of them--all of us--at the very same moment. He's paying attention in Port au Prince and Pittsburgh and Princeton and Peewaukee, for heaven sake. Even Orange City. Even Alton.

In the middle of yesterday's sermon I found myself back in a world unimaginably unlike my own, but just as populated with pray-ers who were and are not a bit unlike myself.

God hears all of us simultaneously. Millions and millions?

Get serious. That's what I thought. Someone's got a bridge to sell.

How can any being listen to a gadzillion prayers muttered at the very same moment all over the planet and know--get that? know--what's good for every last one of the earnest petitioners? Pardon me while I go out and whack the ground three times.

Poor Jehoash, standing there like a stooge with a handful of domesticated arrows. I'm sure he meant well. The dying prophet tells him to strike the ground and he listens. He's not a fool. He follows orders. Three times--and then gets thrashed by a prophet who dies just one verse later.

It's crazy, isn't it? Faith, I mean. It's flat out easier not to believe.

But still we do. I do anyway, most of the time and probably not by choice.

I don't know that preacher ever thought he'd take me to Haiti yesterday, but he did. Amazing.

Sunday Morning Meds--the awesome back forty

“You care for the land and water it; you enrich it abundantly. 

The streams of God are filled with water to provide the people with grain, . . .”

Psalm 65

It may just be that I’m getting old, but by the end of my teaching career I started to see the Fight Club phenomenon all around me every day.  Not that my students vaulted into a makeshift rings and pummeled each other unmercifully, not that they were even particularly hostile. Blood was never shed in any class of mine that I know of.

It’s the phenomenon I’m talking about.  What that film offered, prophetically, was a view of the quiet desperation of overindulged young people in a world that appears to them to offer very little real experience. The end of too much money--or so it seems to me--is a kind of psychic boredom, a flabbiness that leaves people immune to both joy and pain. What The Fight Club offered was a vision of the effects of so much affluence. Nothing seems real.

The guys in that movie fight because they want and need to feel and taste their own blood to know they’re alive. They need spectacle. They need to feel vital. They simiply have to much that they need to pummel away the boredom that muffles experience.

I doubt the dorms were full of fisticuffs, but I know—because I dealt with their tastes (I was a writing teacher)—that they craved experience, especially spiritual experience.  Psychological realism, as a fictional genre, is a drag to them because anything less than Battlestar Galactica is boring. Genre literature got all the attention; but then, the most memorable experiences of their youth were what drama they could discover in Harry Potter.  They’re easily bored; they crave cartoon worlds.

And I sound like an old fart.

I wanted to show them that the greatest stories don’t need to lie to tell the truth, that silence is preferable to surround-sound, that once they would become parents and bring life into the world, a good deal of the fantasy would end. I wanted to tell them that in life there’s almost always blood flowing from some orifice or another—no need to supplement. I wanted to tell them to be still, and know, etc., that vital spirituality begins in the heart, yours and mine, that they didn't need a mission trip to Timbuktu when the world opened up before them just outside the door.

It seems to me that that’s what the poet/King is saying in Psalm 65. He chants God’s awesome deeds, an opening-day creative pageant more stupendous than a hundred blockbusters.

But he doesn’t stop with creation, the first grand and awesome epic story. He moves backstage, out to Iowa, to fly-over country, spending a healthy chunk of its time in the back 40, treasuring nothing more than April showers and a harvest moon.

 

Sometimes I used to think my students would prefer God’s “awesome deeds” to be Star Wars, the triumphant saga of some sad soul spectacularly plucked from a whirligig at Seven Flags. If only the world were an amusement park and their spirituality epic. Maybe we all do.

But here in the final verses of Psalm 65, David’s recitation of wind and water and earth and sky—dawn and dusk—is little more than what transpires every day of every year in our own back yards. It takes a real—not virtual—believer to see plain old April showers as God’s awesome deeds, spiritual joy in a sparrow.

That’s just as true for Fight Clubbers as it is for old farts.  

Saturday Morning Catch--First Frost, Little Sioux valley

A stark dawn, bright sun, first frost of the season--at least the first that was visible. A beautiful morning, really. Deer hunters all over. I just pointed the camera.

Seven deadlies in Fox Lake

An emotional Fox Lake Mayor Donny Schmit described the slain officer as a personal friend, a three-decade member of the department and a father of four sons. 

"We lost a family member," Schmit said of the 52-year-old officer known around town as "GI Joe." ''His commitment to the people of this community has been unmatched and will be dearly missed." 

"This particular officer is a pillar in my community and definitely going to be missed, and (he) touched so many lives," said Gina Maria, a 40-year-old teacher who lives in the community.

So it turns out that on this one, they were all wrong--the mayor, the teacher, the whole community, his wife, his sons, and just about everyone. What G. I. Joe called in as a traffic stop gone mad was really a suicide meticulously choreographed.

Lt. Charles Joseph "Joe" Gliniewicz, 52, had told dispatchers that he was out of his squad car chasing three men down, on foot, just outside Fox Lake, Illinois, a town of about 10,000. He lied. Multiple times. About a lot of things. Lied viciously and cruelly. When the prickly nest of falsehood he'd spun for himself threatened to unravel, he took his own life. 

He's the villain here--no one else. But the man got used royally in the political teapot America has become. Everybody played the race card. Conservatives couldn't help but blame Obama for G. I. Joe's death because Obama is so utterly demonic that he's responsible for every evil in these United States since about 2008 and maybe before. His racism--he's for African-Americans and against our men in blue--opened the door for level of warfare of which G. I. Joe was a victim. The blue nation went into mourning.

So now it turns out G. I. Joe was a more hardened criminal than anyone he'd ever arrested in a thirty-year career in Fox Lake. Officials claim he plotted the death of a councilwoman whose probes into a non-profit fund he juiced threatened to expose him for the lying cheat that he was. There's more, too--lots more.

Now that the whole sorry tale has taken an unimaginable turn, progressives can't help but play gotcha with the Fox News types who got the whole story so impossibly wrong. Yesterday, Charles Blow of the NY Times couldn't help but throw the whole mess in the face of those who were crowing that Black Lives Matter was guilty of G.I. Joe's death. 

But if you can step back from the politics, the whole sorry mess is proof of one of my favorites lines from ancient folk wisdom: "he who sups with the Devil had best use a long spoon." 

Maybe it's just me, but I find it impossible to imagine the cold rationality of the Gliniewicz's sheer madness. He thoughtfully created a story to cover his suicide, took two shots to his body, then struggled along for some time before putting his service revolver to his temple. He killed himself as a lie to hold the reputation the teacher claimed for him, "a pillar in my community." He wanted the blessing of a send-off that would bring thousands of lawmen together in mourning, and it worked.

For a couple of weeks.

The story is not about Obama or Black Lives Matter or our beleaguered men in blue. It's about evil, real indisputable evil by way of pride and envy, lust and greed. It's about sin, all seven of the deadlies in one horrific story. They're all here, in spades, in a small Illinois town that's got be dying itself right now.

See this picture? See the kid in the tie and blue shirt? In truth, there's the story.

Me and Stoner

If you stand in just the right place, what you can still make out in the middle of things is the kind of fortress the mission once saw itself to be, a kind of town square around which life was lived. Mission work on reservations like the Rosebud aren't what they were fifty years ago, or a century, or certainly when St. Francis began in 1886. The sepia-tone image of a white-faced Black Robe standing up in front of a gathering of little Tontos has long passed away.

I was there several years ago, in the museum right next door to the church. I don't remember what kind of information I was looking for, but the museum guide, a high school girl, smiled nicely and told me that I should ask Father So-and-so, who, she said was still around somewhere. She told me he was in his eighties or nineties, and then said, "He's been here his whole life."

The name had a distinctly foreign flavor, Father So-and-so likely Polish or Italian or something, in all likelihood foreign-born, which is not unusual among the Roman Catholic mission old-timers.

I remember thinking right then and there that I should have heard of the man, a man of God who, like many others devotedly gave his whole lives to places like St. Francis Mission. He'd spent sixty or seventy years creating, if nothing else, a ministry of presence that had to be a blessing.

Today, his remains are likely down in the dirt of the church cemetery. I should have talked to him back then, as that young lady recommended. He'd lived an incredible but almost totally obscure life in a difficult place residents of modern America don't even know exists.

A couple years ago, for reasons I don't remember, I bought Stoner as an Audible book and listened to it for weeks when I walked country roads or worked out in the gym. Oddly enough, I remember walking up the driveway to the farm house where we lived back then, listening to the almost unremittingly sad story of a man who went to college when few farm boys like himself did, then somehow fell in love with literature and never left the university. 

Perhaps he should have. His marriage was a sham from the very first night of the honeymoon. He lost his only daughter when his wife determined he could have no more access to her. A torrid affair with a much younger woman lit some fires for a time, but, as most of those affairs do, this one burned itself out and left him charred and weak.

In his career at the University, he published one obscure book that collected dust on a few library shelves but is likely never read; much of his professional life was darkened by the kind of petulant rivalry academic departments often inflict.

The truth is, I loved the novel, even though I would not have recommended it to a soul--and didn't. It's unsparing realism is the characteristic style of its age, and the world it creates no longer exists in higher education anyway. 

In other words, I loved the novel for reasons I don't think I understood myself.

And now I discover that Stoner is a cult novel with an immensely fashionable following among what Garrison Keillor might call "English majors," its author, John Williams, himself an obscure writer, thought of as "a writer's writer." Tim Kreider, in the New Yorker a couple of years ago, called Stoner "the greatest novel you never heard of."

But I never really sat down to think about why until I read Maggie Daugherty's "The Vanished World of Stoner," in the New Republic. Daugherty makes clear why the story's age seems so preposterous today; after all, in the era of adjuncts, tenure-track professors are themselves banished to a university's rare book section. What she documents is a sea change no one in higher education could have predicted. 

But that's not it either. When I listened to that novel on country roads all around, its peculiar and old-fashioned academic world didn't move me. What moved me was what moved thousands of others like me--English profs all, I suppose--the almost divine event of Stoner's "conversion" to literature, a sudden and growing conviction that a whole world existed in a line of words on a page, a world so rich that I had no option but to honor it. 

Stoner dies in obscurity, just like that Jesuit priest who gave 80 years to the St. Francis Mission. He's barely even remembered. He is by no means an America hero.

But he loved what he did. He honestly did. He loved what he did. 

Don't read the novel. You wouldn't like it. 

But I did.  And so, apparently, do a lot of folks just like me.

Angels unaware

On one of those first cold days--not January-cold, just cold as in "not summer"--I wore a sweatshirt when I worked outside. Came in, hung it up, and didn't put it on again for another week or so when it got cold down here in the basement. I was sitting in the chair right here in front of the keyboard when something got irritating down in the lower lumbar. I moved. It stopped. Then returned. I swiped the pocket of the hoodie to adjust the fabric. The itchy-ness stopped. Then returned.

What the heck? I thought. I reached back and found three of these little guys in a heaping clump--hitchhikers, we used to call them, a cute word; but then even the name they go by in real life is a scream--"cocklebur." Sounds like baby-talk almost, doesn't it? That's a cocklebur. 

You know the story. You and and the retriever walk by, you get hitchhikers, even though you never once saw anyone with a thumb out. What's more, they're freeloaders, All they really care about is riding along. Don't even care where you take 'em. Annoying too--"Hey, mind if I ride along?"

But they don't even ask.

Their passports are huge. You might think they're a plague only in your backyard, these guys have cousins all over the world. They get around.

Don't be fooled. They've got an agenda. Each of them carries two seeds, so while you may think them innocent, they're actually hellbent on mastering the universe. They want you think they're harmless so you'll shuck 'em like I did, and let them fall to wherever they can find a lot that's not already theirs. Then they'll produce hundreds more little freeloaders to catch on the next dupe. To them, you're just mass transit. They use us shamelessly.

I'm being too harsh. God loves 'em, I'm sure, but then sometimes he's embarrassingly promiscuous. Still, next time you find a clump on your cuffs, think on this. The two seeds wrapped in that torturous garb stay healthy enough to germinate for years on end. You were thinking that once snow flies these guys are finished?--no way. They're hot to trot for years.

If you think that this one doesn't look like yours, you're probably right. Because they travel all over the world--I'm not making this up--they're often victims of what biologists call "genetic drift," which means, basically, that their newer colonies, wherever they bloom and mature, don't necessarily retain the genetic map of the ancestors. They're not prissy about purity. I've never yet met a Parisian cocklebur, if you know what I mean.

They're sneaky too. They grow only when the nights are long and dark. Seriously. Cockleburs, no matter what the genetic code, are "short-day" plants. They're not big on heat, but without darkness they're Popeye without spinach. Night owls. Just creepy.

If you really want to know, they're just plain old sunflowers, and the world has somewhere in the region of 24,000 species of sunflowers. Don't let 'em get uppity on you; they're just plain common folks.


One more thing. Check this out. It's an old rug from the Southwest. What's this family heirloom have to do with the hitchhikers on my sweatshirt? 

Down here in the basement that rug is on the wall down and in that gorgeous frame with nary a hook or nail, almost like magic. People who know things about ancient rugs say it's not a good idea to hang rugs from a series of tacks or nails, no matter how brassy or showy. The way to do justice to such old and fine works of art is to hang them like this, with Velcro. 

Cockleburs are the inspiration for Velcro. I'm not making this up. Some Thoreau-type in Switzerland, a man named George de Mestral, decided to haul out his microscope to try to determine why he and his dog were peppered with hitchhikers when they returned from a tramp in the meadow. He took one look at all those hooks and determined to create an adhesive of hooks and fasteners based on the clumpy mess he pulled off his hiking buddy.

It happened. Cocklebur inspiration.

All of which leads to this lesson from Sunday School: you just never know when you're picking up angels unaware. 

Ben Carson, the Adventists, and denominationalism

Personally, I've always thought it interesting that Christians can repeat the Ten Commandments so earnestly and still believe Sunday is the Sabbath. Sunday certainly isn't the day Moses had in mind when he carted the tablet down from the mountain, his face still beaming with God's presence. Last time I checked, Saturday was still the Jewish Sabbath.

Saturday is also the Sabbath for the Seventh-Day Adventists, of whom Dr. Ben Carson is one, perhaps their most famous. People could well make a case for his orthodoxy on the basis of which day he declares the day God demands our rest. True fundamentalists would have to admit that he's the faithful one and the rest of us are apostate. 

But traditionally, the Adventists hold some rather bizarre notions that aren't so easy to pass on and certainly aren't--as Carson himself seems so fond of saying--politically correct. Seventh Day Adventist eschatology is unique; they believe--or so claims their foundational theology--that end times are a'comin' and will be signaled when an unholy alliance between the Roman Catholic Church--who is (as it once was) "the whore of Babylon--joins forces with the evil American government. 

If Dr. Ben Carson was a true-blue Adventist, it would be prudent for us to take a second look at traditional Adventist theology, because if he believed that the government he would run, should he win the Presidency, was going to team up with Pope Francis and somehow incite the Armageddon and the Second Coming, the American public would do well to go with another candidate, don't you think?

Nobody really knows whether he really believes all that stuff. No one apparently has asked. What we do know is that, as a boy, he was twice-baptized in the Adventist church because he wasn't sure that he'd really understood what baptism meant the first time around. So he went after it again and got it. 

Those two baptisms may well be something the rest of us should consider because no one--no Republican or Democrat--doubts Dr. Ben Carson's faith. He was, long ago, a champion among home-schoolers apparently, and he is not in the least afraid of letting his light shine among men (and women), no matter who might be listening.

Carson is ahead here in Iowa, the poles say, for two reasons: first, he's not a politician. If at this point the entire Republican campaign has a theme, it's the blessed need for a fresh face. Bush, of the royal family, is history. Fiorina has somehow fallen from grace right now, but for a while when the three outsiders ruled the roost, there was no question that career politicians need not apply. 

The second reason is the big crowd of evangelicals in the Tall Corn State. Iowa Republican activists love true believers. Huckabee won here, Santorum won here, and Michelle Bachmann actually swept the now defunct Iowa Straw Poll. Iowans love the pious, especially when they promise to end abortion. As of the First of November, three months shy of the nation's first caucus, it's Dr. Ben Carson, the Adventist, out front and gaining on everyone including the casino king.

But there's more to the story. Iowa theologians long ago widened their tent. Famously, Mitt Romney was and still is a Mormon, whose theology includes the belief that Jesus came to the Americas and ministered to some South American tribe. Mormon scripture is taken from buried plates no one's ever found, plates that were inscribed in a language no one ever spoke. Just a little spooky. But no matter. 

Besides, did Romney really believe all of that? Doubtful.

We know Dr. Ben Carson doesn't really believe everything the Adventists claim to. He says he doesn't go to Adventist churches every Saturday, often heads out on the first day of the week for other fellowships. Hey, can't we all get along, right?

In that way, Dr. Carson is the perfect American candidate for American's most religious electorate. He's warmly pious, clearly and visibly loves his neighbor (did you hear the story about the time he was mistaken for an orderly and simply did what was asked?). He doesn't rip on other people like a big mouth with bigger hair, speaks softly in other words, and even turns away wrath. 

He's a living, breathing example of why denominations seem to be dying throughout America: we don't care about theology like we once did. All of us. Across the board, we're all more like Dr. Ben Carson. We're Adventists, sort of. We're Presbyterians, sort of. We're Baptists, sort of. We're even Catholic, at least when Francis comes to the East Coast. 

The most crucial means 21st century American Christians have in defining what it means to be a faithful believer today is by way of politics, not theology. Dr. Ben Carson, whose judgment can sometimes be questioned, but whose faith really cannot, is truly one of us.

Think of him next time you repeat the Commandments. He and the Adventists may well be right.

Book Report--Laughing Boy

There is no way of knowing whether he ever picked up the book, but because Casey Kuipers, a CRC missionary at the Zuni pueblo for many years, was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico in the early 1930s, it's not unlikely he would have seen or heard about or even read Laughing Boy, a New Mexico novel by Oliver LaFarge that won the Pulitzer in 1930, the first novel about Native people so honored.

You can't help but wonder whether Laughing Boy didn't contribute to Kuipers's own literary dreams. After all, he wrote three novels himself a year or two later.

Oliver LaFarge was an Anglo graduate student when he traveled to Southwest almost a century ago. What he knew about Navajos was what he picked up when he studied archaeology and observed the culture.

Kuipers could well have determined that his years of experience with the Zunis gave him enough similar experience to write his own novel showcasing Native life.

But Casey Kuipers' novels never won a Pulitzer. In fact, I'm quite certain he didn't sell many books. By choice and creed Kuipers, a schoolteacher and a missionary, carried a wholly different agenda into the novels he wrote about New Mexico's indigenous people. There are no schoolteachers or missionaries in Laughing Boy, but their effects loom over everything that happens in this touching old love story because mission schools essentially create the tragedy at the heart of the story. 

Laughing Boy is a darlingly naive young Navajo blessed with abundant skills in traditional arts from horsemanship to leather work to silversmithing. His naivete arises from his character, as well as his lack of contact with a world outside of his clan and their neighborhood. In 1915, when the novel is set, much of the Navajo reservation was composed of clans and communities left largely unaffected by Anglo cultures surrounding them. They'd suffered horribly through warfare and mass displacement, just as many Native American tribes had; but by the time the first automobile showed up on the reservation, many young Navajos likely knew very little about life just a state away in California. 

Laughing Boy falls in love with Slim Girl, who has been away to boarding school in California. And there lies the tale. She's a full-blooded Navajo, but her school experience has turned her into something of a prostitute. When the two of them marry, she finds the old ways of Laughing Boy's people quite repellent.

But attractive too, because Slim Girl knows she has no identity, no heritage, no one who loves her. Missionaries brought her the gospel, then banished her when she became pregnant by a white man.

She marries Laughing Boy believing he will help her regain what she's lost. From the first time Laughing Boy sees her, he simply adores her; she thinks he'll do. Slim Girl is a schemer and a liar, a woman without a country, but someone who is motivated to her deception by hate and desire for revenge against white people. 

The narrative line of the novel is how she learns to love Laughing Boy and his sweet sincerity. The tale is that story, the story of their love growing toward a tragic end created when Laughing Boy discovers Slim Girl's deception. The two of them are as star-crossed as any couple in Shakespeare. What happens is textbook tragedy that simply wouldn't have happened if Slim Girl hadn't been, years before, hauled off to boarding school. 

Loss of life, but triumph of love--that's the story.

Did it happen? No. Could it have? Yes. Did boarding schools rob their students of heritage and identity. Yes. Were they evil? Ay, there's the rub. 

What I'd love to know is what a thoughtful, loving missionary/teacher in New Mexico in 1930 would have thought of Oliver LaFarge's Laughing Boy, especially when that novel won the Pulitzer Prize. 

I wish I could ask Casey Kuipers, born right here in Orange City, Iowa, because he had to have had an opinion. After all, it was his work in the school and his Christian faith at the dark heart of all the sadness in this prize of a novel. What did Kuipers think?

Sunday Morning Meds--Where Morning Dawns

“Those living far away fear your wonders; 

where morning dawns and evening fades

you call forth songs of joy.” Psalm 65:8

A verse like this makes me think of the opening chapters of the Institutes. I’m serious.

“Wherever you cast your eyes,” Calvin says, “there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory. You cannot in one glance survey this most vast and beautiful system of the universe, in its wide expanse, without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless force of his brightness (52).” 

There is, he says a few lines later, “more than enough of God’s workmanship in his Creation” to lead human beings across the wide earth “to break forth in admiration of the Artificer.”

 Some Christians find that awestruck Calvin hard to believe because his reputation is rooted in telling the rest of us how to live on the straight-and-narrow, and to punish us when we wander.

But Calvin can also create a spacious tent. It’s there in the Institutes, just as is David’s very similar compass reading here: “where morning dawns and evening fades you call forth songs of joy.” King David the singer knows his own big-hearted praise is but one voice in a concert, dedicated daily to the Creator, and it blows him away.

That silly old Coke commercial wasn’t all wrong. Assemble the multitudes from every tribe and nation, put ‘em up on a hill, on a wide hill before a broad, flat plain, and let ‘em be, let ‘em see, let ‘em sing. Because they will.

They will. Even those far away.

Good night, no cheap soft drink will ever turn them into a choir, but maybe a dawn will.  Maybe a sunset. Maybe a glimpse of something so much bigger than they are will bring them to their knees, as it does so many of us when we allow the possibilities.

So Calvin would say.  As do I.

Morning Thanks--the music of the spheres

Just a couple of weeks ago, a gymnasium full of grandparents, ourselves among 'em, were serenaded by seventy-some kindergartners who stood up in front and told us in song, rather shamelessly I might add, how terribly much they loved us. Okay, when it comes to such buttering up, consider me a sweet roll. Emotionally, I'm a pushover. They were darling. I'm speaking of my grandson, of course. 

His class of five-year-olds were put up to it by teachers who know very well how their bread is buttered.

I've attended Grandparents Days for years, school holidays where we're encouraged to sit beside grandchildren on plastic chairs I'm sure have a weight limit I wholesomely surpass. But it's fun, and I take my little seat, and there we sit doing math problems or word games and listening to them sing. We are loved. They are too. It's all charming.

I confess to have missed a few. My wife can probably tell you when and how many. But those days are a joy and a PR bonanza for the school. If you don't roll up early, you park somewhere across town.

The oldest of our grandkids is now in high school. I don't know if there is a Grandparents Day for her this year, but I sort of hope not because any time kids do anything in public already there's already an SRO crowd. You want to fill an auditorium, put people's kids on a stage or a court and we'll drop everything. I sound like an old man, which I am.

So we went, last night, to my granddaughter's very first high school music concert. The place was jammed. Started with the high school band, which would have been far better had my granddaughter kept up with her flute, but she didn't so the performance was close but not a ringer. 

Then a troupe of underclasswomen sang, including our Joce. They were fine. My wife says every high school girl today has long, straight hair. If they're almost all thin, tall Dutch-Americans, finding your own can be a problem. 

Then the fledgling choir, hers. Nice, fine, but the foggy voices of adolescent boys generally aren't ready for prime time music. Give 'em a year or two, voices will deepen, and they'll be fine.

Then the traveling singers, the real musicians, who were not just good, but incredibly good. Amazingly good, I thought, but I'm not a musician.

Then the concert choir, upper class upperclassmen.  Totally awesome (I'm trying to be hip) Listen, they were terrific on music that seemed incredibly challenging.

Finally, half the school, a mass choir accompanied by a quartet of instrumentalists on "Holy, Holy, Holy," an arrangement the director introduced with a testimony that left the packed house ready and willing to be utterly moved.

We were.

I don't know how to describe that anthem. But after years of Grandparents Days and a calendar full of grade school concerts where our fancies were tickled in ways embarrassing to admit, this concert was something from a different planet altogether because I didn't watch my granddaughter, didn't focus on the way she looked around or didn't. I didn't fawn over progeny.

This time it was music that filled my soul, music that brought tears, music that filled that auditorium with love and worship. This time it was the sheer magic of nothing more or less than art that glorifies God and thrilled me, music as praise, music as worship, because where words stop, some old sage once said, music begins, a different language, but a language we all understand somewhere deep within. 

It wasn't "charming." A stage full of first-graders singing "This Little Light of Mine" is charming--especially if one of them's yours. 

That concert last night spoke the language of the spirit, human and divine. From where we sat, I could hardly see my high school granddaughter, but that's okay. I didn't need to because I could hear her music. I just hope she was listening too.

Last night, after that incredible concert, we drove back home straight into the big bright face of a Hunter's Moon, lighting the earth like none other.

This morning's thanks is for the night, the music of the concert, the music of the spheres.