"October 10" by Wendell Berry

Now constantly there is the sound,
quieter than rain,
of the leaves falling.





Under their loosening bright
gold, the sycamore limbs
bleach whiter.





Now the only flowers
are beeweed and aster, spray
of their white and lavender
over the brown leaves.





The calling of a crow sounds
Loud — landmark — now
that the life of summer falls
silent, and the nights grow.



__________________________

Poem from Writers Almanac, photos from northern Minnesota, ten years ago.

Norman Ohler's Blitzed

No top ten list of the 20th century's most enduring faces would be complete without a little man from Austria-Hungary who sported a half-mustache that since his time could not be more rare, Adolf Hitler. 

Ever since the blitzkrieg drove into and through Poland in 1939--or before that, the Kristallnacht,--people have been speculated about the man's pure evil, on what it was that created both him and his fanatical following of National Socialists. Stalin may well have been just as ruthless, just as evil; but it's Hitler whose presence looms most spectacularly over the 20th century's entirety. 

Somewhere in the world this morning, some graduate student is working on a bibliography of Hitler biographies. It must be a stunning list, and I'm sure more are appearing every month because our speculation, own human imagination really, not only allows more but encourages ever more attempts at understanding the evil mystery of the man.

In Blitzed, the German writer Norman Ohler, who refers openly to his own drug-infested youth, has created a new take on der Fuhrer, one that builds a case for drug dependency. Hitler may well have been the most famous vegetarian of his time, but, if Ohler is right, he wasn't at all sheepish about shooting up amphetamines, specifically, a form of methamphetamine. 

But Ohler insists that you shouldn't think of the Third Reich's drug-addled culture in any images similar to what you might think of such a scene today. Germany's drug industry had done well during the days preceding the Reich's ascension to power, so well that when Hitler became Chancellor, he outlawed drug usage, associated the horrors of "seductive poisons" with the nation's Jews, then sent users off to prisons and finally concentration camps. Some he simply had had killed.

But that didn't mean there'd be no drug usage in Germany. In Blitzed, what Norman Ohler has brought to light, according to an article in the Guardian, is the role of Dr.  Theodor Morell, a physician as oddly reclusive as Hitler sometimes appeared. Way back in the 20s, Morell became the Fuhrer's personal physician when he treated him for belly aches. Their relationship grew famously, or so Ohler claims:

   When Hitler fell seriously ill in 1941, however, the vitamin injections that Morell had counted on no longer had any effect – and so he began to ramp things up. First, there were injections of animal hormones for this most notorious of vegetarians, and then a whole series of ever stronger medications until, at last, he began giving him a “wonder drug” called Eukodal, a designer opiate and close cousin of heroin whose chief characteristic was its potential to induce a euphoric state in the patient (today it is known as oxycodone). It wasn’t long before Hitler was receiving injections of Eukodal several times a day. Eventually he would combine it with twice daily doses of the high grade cocaine he had originally been prescribed for a problem with his ears, following an explosion in the Wolf’s Lair, his bunker on the eastern front.

All of this is well-researched speculation, but historians, even World War II historians, have been taken by Norman Ohler's work, even though Ohler is not, nor has he ever been a historian. 

Within the nation itself, a research chemist named Dr. Fritz Hauschild had realized the potential for performance-enhancing drugs after the 1936 Olympic Games in Munich, and developed something similar, a drug he named Pervatin, which became, at least to the Reich's storm troopers, as ubiquitous as breath mints, or so the story goes. Among other effects, Pervatin acted like rich caffein on steriods, kept storm troopers awake, wide awake, which prompts the quite obvious question: was the blitzkrieg actually blitzed? Ohler speculates yes.

What Ohler's doesn't do--and Ohler himself regrets it--is help us understand what made National Socialism a religion, a vision of life so ingratiating that the German people appeared to give up their very human souls for what it--and Hitler--offered. 

Norman Ohler's Blitzed builds a case for drugged-up Third Reich, but it doesn't and can't diagnose what human depravity really is. Evil is just there, like a little madman from Austria/Hungary who once considered the priesthood but eventually got into politics the world cannot forget. 

About that level of human depravity, all we can do is speculate. 

The tragedy of Billy Bush

Old Aristotle had it right about tragedy, methinks. We watch a good person fall, and we can't help feeling pity. After all the guy had a choice--he didn't have to do what he did. But it's scary too because we know only too well that it could have been us. 

Observe this man, Billy Bush. The world knew him as a handsome young star from a nice sweet show, the Today Show. But he boarded the Orange Julius bus, and when he got out he fell hard and bad and tragically for playing footsie with power and wealth. Trump started spouting bile, started what Republican candidate for President calls "locker room talk," and Billy Bush, like some panting lap dog, just kept wagging his tail. Look at him, America. He's us. He's the U. S.

For more than a year we've allowed Donald Trump to control us. We've hung on his every word from the day he descended from Trump heaven on that ridiculous escalator and started his idiot's harangue on building a Chinese wall (that Mexico will pay for) and then deporting 11 million undocumented workers. Nobody believed that, but he was and is real entertainment because he's got money. How much exactly, no one knows. But he's got money and power. He's got what we want. Lead on, MacDuff. 

Donald Trump said all kinds of idiot things simply to stay in the news and thereby build on his brand, and it worked. We listened. And watched. And listened some more. And watched, tongues wagging. 

Look at Poor Billy Bush. He took his shoes off and walked right into knee-deep excrement.

Look at Trump's face. He's in his element. He's exactly where he wants to be. Now look at Billy again. See that eagerness. That's US. Look at him. He's Barney to Sheriff Andy, if Donald Trump were Andy Griffith, which he certainly is not. Today we call what's between them "bromance." Poor Billy's brown nose is showing.

Some of us went a'whoring even farther. Forty per cent of the American public, including all kinds of people who should have known better, got into bed with Trump. Some, I'm sure, will go to their grave as true believers, absolutely confident that the system is rigged and angry that it is. After all, Donald Trump said it is. Some will hate Hillary even more than they do now because after last weekend enough of us stopped sitting in his lap with our tongues out, hoping to get attention. 

Billy Bush isn't the only one he soiled. Add Paul Ryan, add Mike Pence, who most agree Trump threw under the same bus last night. Add Steve King, Charles Grassley, Terry Branstad, and Joni Ernst, any and all who supported Trump only because they could not stomach Hillary. See that look on the Donald's face--that's what he thinks of just about anyone who backs him. Those who don't--well, yesterday he sent his attack dogs out on those, including John McCain.

He virtually destroyed whatever meaning the word "evangelical" ever carried. Yesterday, Wayne Grudem, the complementarian theologian, had a Damascus Road experience and walked back his original revelation ("he's a morally good choice") in a confession of sin of biblical proportions. “I previously called Donald Trump a ‘good candidate with flaws’ and a ‘flawed candidate,’ Grudem wrote, "but I now regret that I did not more strongly condemn his moral character. I cannot commend Trump’s moral character, and I strongly urge him to withdraw from the election.”

Economic capitalism may well be the best economic system. At its best--not always surely--but at its best it offers equal opportunity to all: work hard, play by the rules, and you can have a bit of the American dream. 

But at its worst it creates Donald Trumps, paragons of wealth and power who come to believe that because they've somehow reached the upper floors, they can grab women where ever they want to, say what they want, do what they want to make the rest of us their panting lapdogs. 

Economic capitalism grows all kinds of wild flowers, but it also grows roadsides full of poison ivy because what true capitalists--as most all of us are--forget is an ancient proverb drawn from biblical revelation: "the love of money is the root of all evil" (I Timothy 6:10).

After a weekend of flood-level muck, the kind that sticks to you, the kind that you can't get off of you, the kind you have to dig out of the basement by hand, what some of us at least have come to understand is the promise of that ancient wisdom because a'whoring after Donald Trump leaves us all, as the Bible says, "pierced through with many sorrows."

Poor Billy Bush. He's been suspended from the Today Show. Poor us. Poor US. The tragedy is, we should have known.

But Aristotle also said that tragedy is purgative. It's supposed to clean us up and out. One can only hope and pray that Aristotle was right.

Sunday Morning Meds--How Long?

“Relent, O LORD! How long will it be?

Have compassion on your servants.” Psalm 90:13

For too many years—and not always by choice—I’ve held on to a novel that wouldn’t sell. It’s gone by a couple of titles, but the verdict, whenever it’s been submitted, has always been the same: “not quite, got something else?”

I don’t obsess about it. I’ve got plenty other projects to keep me awake at night. But last week I woke up hearing a voice in my head, so I trotted downstairs, pulled the opening pages up on the screen, and started telling the story with this new voice and a slightly adjusted motivation.

Will it go? I don’t know. If it does, will I get a New York Times review? I doubt it. The narrator hasn’t changed, but suddenly I know more about him. I know where he is and why he’s telling the story the way he is telling it. And that helps. Same thing happened, years ago, with another novel, and that one did well, years after a first draft. So, here goes and here’s hoping. Sometimes what might seem a fragment of additional truth can fill out a voice, make that voice become a human being.

And so it is, I think, with this verse from Psalm 90. The very heart of the poem is “how long?” If you want to understand Psalm 90, its centuries’-old soulful appeal, then understand this about Moses, who’s singing: he has fallen deeply into the black hole of God’s absence. “Relent, O LORD! How long will it be? Have compassion on your servants.” He is estranged, as all of us are at one time or another. He’s in the mode of Mother Teresa, who spent much of her life feeling somehow estranged from God’s own presence. God is gone.

And what happens to us when we’ve arrived in that kind of black hole? What happens when we understand our days are, in fact, as numbered, that we won’t escape the sentence of death? Our values alter. Our vision seems skewed.

Every single one of the dozen verses that precede this line proclaim God’s omnipotence, testify to his eternal strength, his timeless care; but Moses isn’t sweet-talking. He’s not just a politician currying favor. He’s throwing himself before a God who he seemingly can’t help believing isn’t there, who therefore seems to have turned his back.

What this line explains is the doleful emotional color of all of the whole psalm. Moses is sure he has been rejected, forgotten; and the desperation which God’s absence creates prompts the self-less prayer of the first dozen verses. “Without you we are nothing, Lord—please return to our lives.” That’s the story.

That may well be why this old Psalm reads so rewardingly at a funeral. It isn’t just the references to sixty or seventy years; it’s more than that. With death’s imminence setting beside us—the coffin itself—grief discolors every joy. Christ may well have conquered death when he arose on Easter, but death’s sting is never insignificant. We feel left behind, the world more dismal.

The power of this old psalm is created by the despair Moses feels in thinking himself and his people abandoned, as we do when we lose someone we love. In the entire poem, he seems to be telling God what God must do, not because he fears God won’t, but because he can’t hold back his own tongue. That’s how much he hurts.

“How long?” he says in verse 13. “Have compassion on your servants.”

He’s begging, imploring, demanding. His back is to the wall.

Where there’s probably a casket. “You are our everything, Lord—please come back? Where on earth are you?”

He awaits some kind of new vision, the return of his loving Creator's hand.

A "quiet catastrophe"

What George Will calls America's "quiet catastrophe" is as striking as his recent Washington Post op-ed claims it is. 

After 88 consecutive months of economic expansion that began June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working near the end of the Great Depression in 1940, when the unemployment rate was above 14 percent. 

What that means, or so it seems to me, is that even though "unemployment," as traditionally defined, is far lower than it was when seven years ago, the percentage of American men who are not working today is greater significantly than it was at the end of the Great Depression. Thousands of American men are unemployed, not because there are no jobs, but for other reasons.

That's new and that's news.

George Will opens up a study by Nicholas Eberstadt, "Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis," which, Will says, opens up this startling phenomenon.

Startlingly--almost unbelievably--32 percent of American males simply choose not to have a job. They choose not to work. [Seriously--stop reading and think about that amazing statistic.] Almost a third of American males choose to stay home and watch TV and movies. (The study shows that their five hours every day doubles the two hours those who are unemployed and actually seeking work spend in front of the screen.) 

Who are these men? 

J.D. Vance's much-heralded new book tells the abject story of his hillbilly boyhood in scenes so unrelentingly regrettable that it's a miracle he emerged whole from the groggy miasma of his mother's multiple dependencies. Hillbilly Elegy is reality TV without commercials, worse because the story it tells is not managed. His family is the car wreck you stare at even when you'd rather not see. 

But Hillbilly Elegy made headlines and brought J. D. Vance into the national spotlight because his life story documents, after a fashion, the very phenomenon "Men Without Work" seeks to have America understand. Vance brings us face to face with people who are angry about what they believe life's handed them, but make no particular effort to relieve their own squalor.

What makes both J. D. Vance and the Eberstadt study so fascinating--and distressing--is that our tired political answers don't answer anything. We're not talking about lazy bums living off the public dole. Will would like to make it an argument against food stamps, but he knows himself that welfare isn't the evil here.

Liberals would love to view these folks romantically, somehow unable to keep three kids fed healthily and in school clothes. And, like it or not, the answer, Eberstadt concludes, is not simply more or better education: "The collapse of work for modern American's men happened despite considerable upgrades in educational attainment."  

This dilemma has no tried-and-true conservative or liberal answers. Sorry. It's altogether new. It's related, people say, to two societal trends documented elsewhere: distrust in any forms of institutional life--church or school or even family; plus what some call "the infantalization" of our culture--a people reluctant to accept traditional adult roles like husband and father.

People who can somehow get by and therefore simply choose not to work. 

Will and Vance help some of us at least understand the strange phenomenon happening all around, people clamoring to get aboard the Trump bandwagon, despite the fact that the man could well have done what he imagined right here at Dordt College, when he told America he could shoot a man dead on Broadway and his people would still love him. 

Will's conservative credentials are impeccable, but he is definitely in the "not Trump" camp. "Donald Trump," Will says in his op-ed, "is perhaps perverse evidence that some of his army of angry men are at least healthily unhappy about the loss of meaning, self-esteem and masculinity that is a consequence of chosen and protracted idleness."

Vance describes some of the men in his neighborhoods as true believers in the whole American dream, people passionately patriotic, who don't do much at all but crow about it. Vance calls the societal problem "cultural detachment," despite the fact that--and here's the paradox--that they seem entirely in love with "the red, white, and blue."

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance says a man he knew showed up at a bar one night and told him he'd quit working at his job because "he was sick of waking up early." Later, Vance writes, "I saw him complaining on Facebook about the 'Obama economy.'" Vance, who is clearly a political conservative, says, "I don't doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not one of them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he's made, and his life will improve only through better decisions."

Whether the new POTUS is Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton makes no difference. What our entire society will face is problems created by the "quiet catastrophe" of willful unemployment, by people who somehow simply choose not to work. 

Cholera on the Missouri (ii)

(continued from yesterday)

Father Christian Hoecken was called, by some, "the Kickapoo Father" because of his ministry to the Kickapoo tribe, who'd been pushed west from their homelands in Indiana, first to Missouri, and then to Kansas. Even though the word kickapoo may mean "he who moves from here to there," make no mistake: the Kickapoos in Kansas were refugees.

Father Hoecken's propensity for language was legendary. He probably knew Dutch and Flemish when he came to America; he had to learn English, and in hardly any time at all he picked up the language of the Kickapoo.

But he didn't stay. In 1838, 800 Potawatomi had been herded from the Great Lakes region to Kansas on that tribe's own "Trail of Tears." Only 650 arrived--some simply disappeared, went to Canada or returned home in hiding, and 30 men, women, and children died. Father Hoecken was assigned to minister to the needs of those who survived and was there to welcome the Potawatomi refugees to a new country. Many of those who arrived were already Roman Catholic.

Once again Hoecken learned the language quickly, with such propensity that the church determined he should continue to use those skills with tribes farther up the northern Missouri regions and as yet without a mission. That's where he was going on June 19, 1851, when he was suddenly called to the bedside of his friend Father De Smet to hear his confession and administer last rites, all of which he did, tears coursing down his cheeks, some say. De Smet wasn't the only one dying. Father Hoecken consoled many who'd contacted the cholera on board, or so history says.

On September 20, the St. Ange had stopped somewhere near Blackbird Bend to try to rid themselves of the contagion, "to take better care of the sick and to bury the dead," or so wrote the German artist Rudolf Kurz in his diary. 

Then, in just a couple of hours, the whole story reversed itself. Father De Smet seemingly recovered, at least sufficiently enough to hear Father Hoecken's confession and administer last rites to him because in a matter of two hours Father Hoecken had fallen victim to the dreaded cholera. 

Here's how Kurz describes what happened:

June 21. Father Van Hocken is dead. He died as a Christian. Had been sick only two hours. It was about 4 o'clock in the morning when I was awakened by his calling me. I found him, half-dressed, on his bed in violent convulsions. I called Father De Smet. We anchored in the evening and buried him by torchlight. 

Father Hoeken's hasty burial in a grave unmarked along the river was not the only one for passengers on the St. Ange. In fact, his body was retrieved some time later and then buried again in a cemetery in St. Louis. 

And, the story of cholera in the region is much larger. It took many, many more victims in many, many more places, thousands of Native people in horrible outbreaks of pestilence.

But this story is somehow unique, full of memorable images. One, to me, doesn't leave--a crowd of mourners, some of them ill, standing with bowed heads in prayer, only their outlines visible in the jumpy torchlight, all of them standing on the banks of the Missouri, dropping a casket rough hewn from the woods behind them into freshly dug river sand. They're burying a man some of them might well have considered a saint.

It happened not all that far away aboard a steamer coming up the river, a steamer named the "Holy Angel."

Cholera on the Missouri (i)

In 1832 in New York City, 100 people died of cholera. Of those 100, 98 were buried in a potter's field, a graveyard for the indigent. It was not at all difficult for some more wealthy and less stricken to believe cholera was carried from sinner to sinner in the very hand of God because it so frequently seemed to afflict only those the upstanding regarded as the dregs of society. 

It took a little known scientist in England, a man named John Snow, to come up with the proposition that cholera, that scourge of nations, wasn't created by God's punishment, but instead a water-born disease that struck those who lacked good sanitation or didn't practice it. His discovery didn't occur until 1854, so no one aboard the St. Ange, on June 19, 1851, just a bit south of here, had any notion of a clear relationship between cholera and bad drinking water. 

The language people still use to describe what happened aboard the St. Ange--and many other places in the early to mid-19th century--goes like this: "cholera broke out," almost as if it had a life of its own. It does. What the passengers aboard the St. Ange knew was that the storm of awful symptoms  appearing suddenly meant cholera. 

When it kills, cholera does so with astonishing quickness. From the moment symptoms appeared on board--excessive diarrhea and vomiting--until the sunken eyes in a blueish face close forever was sometimes simply a matter of hours. You knew you had it once it manifest itself. Some lived, some died, some were seemingly unaffected. 

But to speak of cholera that way diminishes its deadliness. Where it attacked, many--thousands--died and died quickly. Suddenly there were innumerable deaths all around. Once it was clear that the contagion of cholera was aboard the St. Ange, the steamer pulled over at the mouth of the Little Sioux River.

If any aboard the ship held to the theory of God's punishment on the wicked, they must have been shocked at its victims on board because they included two Roman Catholic priests of eminent stature, Belgian born but trained and dedicated to mission work among Native people. Both had notable records of selflessness, but only one would do more.

Father Pierre-Jean De Smet left footprints--both figuratively and literally--throughout the West. Missionaries like De Smet were, once upon a time, spiritual heroes. Today, what they did is not so highly esteemed, in part because while they sought to bring the gospel, they also worked in conjunction with Washington to make Indians not Indian.

No matter how we look at them today, missionaries like Father DeSmet, who often worked out hard-fought peace between warring tribes, did difficult work no one else, red or white, was doing. 

Aboard the St. Ange, Suddenly, Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet, was stricken so fiercely he determined he would die. His face had grown sunken and gray, even blue. His body was emptying all its fluids, his strength was gone. With what little he had left, he called on his friend and colleague, Father Christian Hoecken, to administer last rites, extreme unction. 

More tomorrow. . .

Hurricane madness

They're called slurries. Sounds innocuous enough, but they aren't. Not at all. Slurries can wipe out entire neighborhoods, entire towns, killing hundreds in the poorest nation in the northern hemisphere, bar none. 

At this moment, the island nation of Haiti is being devastated by a brutish storm that threatens the entire region. All of Florida and much of this nation's southeast coastline is on alert from Hurricane Matthew, a monster that has Americans worried from the Keys to Washington DC. Where he goes is as yet to be determined, but there's no question about where he is now because he's in Haiti, a country still suffering from a massive earthquake six years ago, not to mention a cholera epidemic that's killed 10,000 people and still hasn't been beaten.

Haiti is mountainous and, more importantly, largely treeless. Twenty inches of rainfall--in some places as much as forty inches--will fall on those bald slopes, then rush down in what's called a slurry, an obscene mixture of mud and rocks and whatever else the avalanche picks up on its course to the sea. What it doesn't wipe out it will fill up. Weather officials have no crystal balls, but predictions of slurries in Haiti aren't nightmares. They're worse. They're real. 

Bill Clinton is not greatly admired in Haiti, and neither is the Clinton Foundation. Clinton believed that if he could fill a bathtub with money, he could clean the place up, do something no one else had--something lasting and foundational in a country many people call, graciously, "a failed state." Did he? That question has more than one answer, but most Haitians don't think he delivered on the glory he promised. 

Want to get in a fight? Propose a solution to the Haiti's woes. Go ahead--give it a try. So far, nothing has worked. Even Clinton proved a failure. 

People try. Oh, how they try. I remember sitting in the airport at Port au Prince, waiting for the flight out with only two kinds of people--Haitians looking to visit relatives in Florida and church groups in matching colorful, bible versed t-shirts. Hundreds, thousands of stateside do-gooders flock to Haiti; some say--many say--way, way too many. 

And soon, more. More devastation is almost certain, and it's happening at this moment, as I'm typing these words. "Staggering impacts," storm experts say, from a storm that's right now the size of Arizona. Drowning rains. 

It's cloudy outside right now at this lake home where we're staying. A northwest wind is blowing hard--started yesterday late afternoon after we finished a bike ride through a northwoods trail so colorful we were enclosed in stained glass. It was--and I couldn't help thinking of it then--at peak color, the reds and russets almost cartoonish. This morning, that peak color is behind us. The clouds mean there'll be no sunrise.

It's a metaphor, but we use it, don't we? Haiti, right at this moment, is getting punished by Hurricane Matthew, whose winds will blow thatched roofs off makeshift houses, pick up tin like cardboard. The people there don't deserve what they're getting any more than we do.

Go easy, Lord almighty. There are good people in Haiti, millions of them. Hold back the slurries. Go easy, please. . .

Morning Thanks--What glorious decay

"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf's a flower," saith Albert Camus. Maybe.

Even if every leaf's a flower, there is still mutability all around everywhere you look.  The woods are breathtaking, but up close those "flowers" are deeply scarred and torn. 

Maybe Robert Browning had it right. Autumn steals your heart by its "mute appeal for sympathy for its decay," he wrote. 

You can't help but feel it. Still, even up close, decay can hardly be this beautiful. 

But let's go with Browning--to grasp all this color, you've got to figure in all the dying. How about this: yesterday, the woods "up north" were greatly "alive with death." Or else this: autumn is decay on a grand scale. 

It may well be a strange thing for a Calvinist to say, but this morning I'm thankful for fall.

Sunday Morning Meds--Numbering

“Teach us to number our days aright, 

that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

Psalm 90:12

I stopped for gas, downtown, stuck in my credit card, and the blasted pump wouldn’t work. No one was working because it was just after five a.m., the sky dark except for a swelling belly of light in the east—which meant it was time to get moving.

I tried another pump. Nothing. I was losing time. I glanced east, where the broad reach of light kept eating up sky.

Jumped back in the Tracker and headed for another gas station. Pumps worked, thank goodness. 

Just outside of town, it was clear that some of my possibilities for the morning had already faded. I’d wasted too much time trying to get gas to get me out to the hills. Where was I headed anyway—other than west? Don’t know. Okay, I figured, gamble. Don’t settle for the tried and true places—been there, done that. You can’t get out to the mother lode spots anymore because you started too late, so just scout around. Maybe you’ll get lucky. One of those crap-shoot mornings.

I crossed the river, then turned left at the edge of the hills on the west bank of the Big Sioux, down a river valley road surrounded by cottonwoods. I’d never been there before, maybe twenty miles from home. All those trees made were pretty enough and rare on the Plains, but there was no view of the dawn, and it was impossible not to notice that the world itself was brightening. In the middle of trees, I needed no headlights.

A mile and a half down, a gravel road took off west up the slope of the hill, still surrounded by trees. I knew I had to get up top somehow—that’s where the action was. A yellow sign warned about turns—a squiggly arrow.  I gunned it anyway, kept waiting for the inevitable break in the trees.

And finally I got there, no one around but a bunch of pastured cows that spooked the moment I pulled over in the Tracker. I got out, stuck the camera in the tripod, and started tromping through the wet grass to the spot I thought best.

Before me the river valley opened into a cloudless dawn, but the temperatures had dropped low enough to create mist that lay over the land like gossamer. Between those sheets of wispy fog, the banks of trees and everything else far beyond, that entire broad landscape before me—twenty or thirty miles of it —was all bronze and buttery.

My pant legs were soaked in minutes. I put down the tripod and started shooting. And then he came, that bold bridegroom of Psalm 19, rising slowly into the world at my footsteps, his livery so resplendent it was blinding. If there was more beauty somewhere between me and home at that moment, I don’t know where it would have been. Jackpot.

When I got back to my basement, I unloaded the pictures. None of them were as resplendent as I thought they should be. But that’s okay. None of them were as magnificent as the dawn, and I’d been there.

For me, “numbering our days” means treasuring beauty, being reminded, as often as I can, of a creation so immense it simply won’t fit in my camera.

For me, God almighty feels most imminent in the temple of the natural world in my neighborhood. My days are numbered, and valued, by witnessing him in his glory.  

I don’t know that anyone else understands that or could, but I do. And I know he does. And that’s all the wisdom I really need. 

"A Separate Place" (ii)

I'd like to know Mrs. Arie Franken, at least more about her than Google can discover, why she sat down and wrote this passionate poem, stuck it in an envelope, and sent it to the newspaper. What made her the kind of disciple she had to have been? Why did she map out the depth of her commitment and try to make all sing?

She was twice married. Her first husband lost his first wife and a child in a tornado that swept through Sioux County in 1895. When sickness took him, she married again, and had children with both husbands. She must have written other poems, but it's unlikely they exist. This one was filed away in the scrapbooks of an aged aunt who died a year ago. 

But there's more to Mrs. Franken's poem. We're only now arriving at its vital destination.

"Therefore," she says. We've come to the heart of things.

Therefore her covenant youth must be
In truth instructed separately.
This carnal world in which we live
Can never true instruction give.
Like home and church our schools must be
Free from all world conformity.

It's all been foundation for an argument for a Christian school--a place where "covenant children" receive a Christian education, "free from all world conformity."

The Lord commands us: 'Teach thy youth
The unvarnished truth'.
Yes, teach it, though that very Word
Strikes always as a two-edged sword.
Teach it in home and church and school
For your entire life a rule.

Mrs. Arie Franken is looking to nail down the argument for a Christian school once and for all. Her next stanza can't be contained in six lines as most of them are. It requires an extra couplet but stays steadfastly driven by the command form. Why? "Because 'tis a Divine decree."

Instruct, then, and instructed be,
Because 'tis a Divine decree.
Teach them that they may be as youth
Securely founded in the truth.
And thus learn to evaluate
All things of home, and church and state
Intelligently to take their place
Tho' in this world, a separate race.

The task of the Christian school, she claims, is to evaluate, to learn to be critical of "the world," as she herself has piously been. 

She knew what she was advocating was no calk walk. For a moment at least, she seems to acknowledge that is not so simple. She wants Christian scholars "to take their place" in the world, but be biblically sure they remain "a separate race." That has to be said. "In, but not of"--hard as balancing those two is. Maybe that's why it took her an extra two lines.

The party of the living God;
Their feet with preparation shod
Against all wickedness arrayed.
The armor of our God displayed
And thus ascend to Zion's hill,
According to his sovereign will.

"Ascend to Zion's hill." Amazing language, isn't it? I've been a graduation speaker at a dozen Christian school commencements and never once got anywhere near to telling students to "ascend to Zion's hill." 

Maybe I should have. How we once said what we used to say can seem shocking, even though it wasn't to the pioneer Mrs. Arie Franken less than a century ago. I wonder if my never using that language would have been more shocking to her.

Oh, youth, if ye be truly wise,
And keep this goal before your eyes,
The world shall give you no real name,
You will not see her halls of fame,
Nor share her culture and renown;
But you shall wear the victor's crown.

The paradigms that underlie all of this, as traditionally hefty as they are, sound museum-like, even a bit silly--"halls of fame," "victor's crown." I know very well what she's saying, but it's expressed in words and phrases so strange that it could just as well be written in Dutch.

If I were a Christian high school teacher, an English teacher, I'd give my students this assignment: read Mrs. Franken's poem and put its meaning in your own words. I wonder how tough that assignment might be. I'd love to know.

But there's one more eight-liner, the final stanza of her plea, the poem's own doxology:

Oh Lord, our Lord, enthroned above,
Look down in faithfulness and love.
Let shame and death o'erwhelm our foes
Who would Thy servant's way oppose.
Let us of all thy good partake.
We ask it, Lord, for Thy Name's sake.
To Thee all praise and glory be,
Now and to all eternity.

This expansive grasp of the Christian faith is cosmic. That she even feels the necessity of addressing the Creator of all things and bowing before him at poem's end seems, well, almost medieval, doesn't it? In a time when piety is all about "personal relationships," the sense of God as king seems ancient, even standoff-ish.  

My parents made Christian schools into litmus paper. I spent just about all of my professional life in a Christian college. My kids attended Christian schools, as do theirs today. Still, I find this old poem, probably written 75 years ago by a farm wife, amazing.

But then, I'm guessing there's probably a lot more wisdom in the attic.
_____________________ 

Thanks to a reader for pointing out yesterday that the photograph is not Mrs. Franken, but belongs to Dorthea Lange, who was shooting photographs for the government during the Great Depression. 

A Separate Place (i)

We move amidst a world today
Of unrest, clamor and dismay;
A world steeped high in guilt and sin;
That has no love or peace within;
In which iniquities increase;
That does not know the way of peace.

The only real clue as to the age of this old poem from the attic* is the newspaper that published it had a bi-lingual readership. Everything but the poem and the ads are in Dutch. Maybe 1940s, I'm guessing. Perhaps earlier.

The rhetoric, however, is ageless. Christians have been prophesying end times since Christ himself warned his disciples to keep their eyes on the skies. That's 2000 years.

A world that seeks to overthrow
All God has given his saints to know;
That cunningly with devilish sway
Seeks to entice the church away.
Against the church their boast is hurled
That man shall make a better world.

"Want proof of end times?"--the poet asks. It's God-denying humanism, the heresy that man, not God, can and shall "make a better world." It can't be a century-old. I'm thinking this Mrs. Franken, if I'm right, was born in 1878 and died in 1962.

Be not deceived, O Church, be wise.
The future that before us lies
Shall be still darker than before.
God's word foretells what lies in store.
That times of much distress shall be,
And times of great apostacy.

I'm not sure what grammatical rules Mrs. Franken is following by granting Church upper-case reference, but she probably means to be speaking of "the church universal," a designation that may well have clarified for her what that Church was. Eighty years later, I'm probably not as sure as she is or was.

But she is. And she's also forsworn to believe that in this life the primary battle is the church (Church) vs. the world. Mrs. Franken didn't dream that up. The times are changing. Woe and woe and woe. 

I'm guessing the dark spiritual vision that creates the context of the poem may well be what she thought she might see by, well, now--the turn of the 21st century, a world, to her, unimaginable. Our world. Arie Franken, her husband, came to this ground as a babe in arms in a covered wagon. First place was a sod house. By 1962, she'd seen horses disappear and cars and trucks and planes shrink time and space into a moment. 

Against these powers of sin arrayed,
Strong we must stand, and unafraid.
Dare to defy this wicked world;
And let truth's banner be unfurled.
Be ever watchful, lest their snares
Be set within us, unawares.

The world's wickedness takes no prisoners. All we can do is stand our ground in vigilance lest it somehow seize us unaware. Life's great pitched battle is between us and them. 

If this sermon was penned in the depths of the Depression, Mrs. Franken might well have seen neighbors, in tears, abandoning farms and heading west to find some way to live. Made no sense to keep livestock. Just down the road, farmers threatening judges, the law. Her Dakota cousins claimed creation itself was returning to dust.

Still, the foe she's facing is even more dangerous because it's spiritual. 

The Church on earth a pilgrim band
From every clime and tongue and land,
Redeemed by wondrous sovereign grace,
Must occupy a separate place. 
Must walk in all the do and say
Upon the straight and narrow way.

That's what she's after here--"a separate place."

More tomorrow.
___________________ 
*Mrs. Arie Franken, "A Separate People," from The Volksvriend (?), date unknown.

Where have all the flowers gone?

There is not one blade of grass.

There is not one color in the world,

That is not intended to make us rejoice.

He did well, I thought. I'll admit I wasn't expecting much. We were in a tiny country church whose doorway the deceased, an 85-year-old woman with Alzheimer's, hadn't darkened for a decade at least. The preacher didn't know the woman really, nor did I. Still, truth be told, I'd give him an A-. Not reluctantly either. Okay, A maybe. 

Having read ten thousand essays makes me forever a critic. But then sermon evaluation is way of life for any full-blood Christian Reformed kid of my era. I grew up in a loving home where sermon critiques were Sunday fare; but the only roast on the table was baked with potatoes and onions. Preachers didn't get cooked at the Schaap house; my father was PK. But sermons were pulled apart, and if found overdone, declared so. What I'm saying is that I can't help myself. When I hear a sermon I evaluate. 

Yesterday, I thought the preacher was sound and personal and comforting, which is just about all that's required at a funeral. An old friend whose father was a preacher used to tell her that funerals were lovely things because all he had to do was read Psalm 90 and he'd have rapt attention. I suppose yesterday the bar was low.

I didn't know the woman who died, my wife's aunt. She lived a ways away, and the family wasn't all that close anymore. But it's hard not to notice a casket in front of the communion table. Still, had my heart been heavy with grief, like some were, I likely wouldn't have been so critical.

The woman's obit set out how she was the one in the family, the kids said, who made sure that they got to church, that they knew what they needed to for Sunday School and catechism, that kept their spiritual lives in line. Like most farm wives of her era, her kingdom was the home, which reportedly she kept, smilingly. What she loved more than anything, the kids had told the preacher, was flowers and birds.

So that's where he started. He admitted his thumb was anything but green. The only plant he had in his study, he said--he didn't know exactly what it was--was plainly dying. The sermon--it wasn't too long at all--took aim at life's fragility, how, like most of the wild flowers in our backyard, beauty was fleeting. See them there?--well, tomorrow they're gone. 

Nothing new there. But then I've read Psalm 90 a hundred times, but I still get knee-capped by "establish the work of our hands."

The sermon was not an unfamiliar tune. In ancient poetry it's called ubi sunt, I think, if I can remember my notes from English lit. "'Where have all the flowers gone?" some hippy trio used to sing. It's lament, and it's old and staid and serious; not frivolous, not silly. He didn't try to be cute. There's nothing cute about Psalm 90. 

"Our flowers are only flowers"--that's it really. That's a line Edgar Allen Poe, but it was, for the most part, the basis of his sincere and gracious homily, and, as I've already said, it was good and right and fitting.

But I've been toying around with Calvin lately (that's not meant as oxymoron), and I've become convinced that somehow my own Calvinist education cheated me out of respect for JC's marvelous sense of the eternal beauty of this world. Sometimes, I swear, I think Calvin was Lakota or Navajo because flowers aren't just flowers in Calvin. See those lines at the top of the page?--that's him sort of, maybe a bit of a Schaap turn, but just about pure Calvin. 

Those flowers, the heavens above, the farmland all around getting ready for harvest, the hills and mountains, lakes and plains--they're not just object lessons. They're not gods, as the Yankton Sioux who once lived here beneath my feet might regard them, but neither is this world a flannelgraph. Calvin thinks they're so much God that only in their presence, only in our natural world, do we come to know, for sure, that he is God and we, for sure, are not. In flowers we come to see just exactly how much we need him.

How about this? 

Nothing is so obscure or contemptible. 

even in the smallest corners of the earth, 

that it cannot display some of the marks and the wisdom of God. 

Might have been Sitting Bull, but that's Calvin. 

What that preacher said at the funeral wasn't unbiblical (my spellcheck doesn't know what to do with that word). Not at all. "Consider the lilly," "the birds of the field. . ." You know. "Dust to dust"--it's all there. I'm saying he didn't breathe a word of heresy.

But I couldn't help wonder whether that farm woman who tended flowers out there in the yard all her life long didn't see more, even in those early-bloomin' hollyhocks, than ubi sunt. I can't imagine she thought of them as symbols.  

A rose is a rose is a rose, I wanted to tell him.

Don't get me wrong. It was a very fine funeral, and all around the front of the sanctuary stood beautiful flowers. 

This morning, my morning thanks is for having been there, at a funeral with more family than friends at a little country church in a world, by the way, radiant and gold with harvest.