Hearts filled with gladness

Just in case you missed it, here's a poem from Writer's Almanac of last week, a poem I found absolutely joyful. 

An Apology for Using the Word 'Heart' in Too Many Poems
by Hayden Carruth

What does it mean? Lord knows; least of all I.
        Faced with it, schoolboys are shy,
And grown-ups speak it at moments of excess
        Which later seem more or less
Unfeasible. It is equivocal, sentimental,
        Debatable, really a sort of lentil—
Neither pea nor bean. Sometimes it’s a muscle,
        Sometimes courage or at least hustle,
Sometimes a core or center, but mostly it’s
        A sound that slushily fits
The meters of popular songwriters without
        Meaning anything. It is stout,
Leonine, chicken, great, hot, warm, cold,
        Broken, whole, tender, bold,
Stony, soft, green, blue, red, white,
        Faint, true, heavy, light,
Open, down, shallow, etc. No wonder
        Our superiors thunder
Against it. And yet in spite of a million abuses
        The word survives; its uses
Are such that it remains virtually indispensable
        And, I think, defensible.
The Freudian terminology is awkward or worse,
        And suggests so many perverse
Etiologies that it is useless; but “heart” covers
        The whole business, lovers
To monks, i.e., the capacity to love in the fullest
        Sense. Not even the dullest
Reader misapprehends it, although locating
        It is a matter awaiting
Someone more ingenious than I. But given
        This definition, driven
Though it is out of a poet’s necessity, isn’t
        The word needed at present
As much as ever, if it is well written and said,
        With the heart and the head?

Changing seasons

Just one of the great joys of E.B. White's classic personal narrative, "Once more to the Woods," is this sense he feels, returning to his childhood haunts at the cabin, that no time has passed. It's overwhelming with him, and nearly blinds him, until that last famous line, to the sobering (that's understatement) fact that time hasn't stood still and that his own mortality is very real.  

I felt something of that this morning, when, lying awake in bed in a familiar cabin, I looked up at the window curtain and seemed to remember so vividly being here before (and before and before and before) and was struck by the illusion that I hadn't left this place 12 months ago now, hadn't started a new school year, hadn't traveled to New Mexico to scout out options, hadn't played with my grandchildren, hadn't visited our folks, hadn't witnessed a new football team at a school I've been at for more than thirty years.

I'm sitting at a table where, to my left, a gorgeous northern Minnesota lake is rippling with a soft wind and growing more silvery since the sun has now finally determined to move up. It's like no time has past.

But it has.

My mother watched her car drive away yesterday. My niece, who retrieved it from the home where Mom lives, told us that Mom had to come outside to watch, partially because that car carries some memories of her life with the man who bought it, several years ago, memories that didn't leave with the Buick, but somehow were as much a part of that car as its engine, its transmission.

But there's more. That Buick is a symbol, whether it's in her parking spot at the home or in our driveway--where it will be soon--500 miles west. That car is a symbol of her ever-shrinking mobility, of the ever-decreasing size of the radius of her own life. She can't get in and go anymore--and she shouldn't. 

It was the right decision, getting rid of it--all her children agreed and even she did. But that doesn't mean that she doesn't understand painfully that when it left the oval driveway in front of the Home, when it went down the street and left her vision, that it wouldn't be back. The tether that keeps her there, at the Home, is now far shorter than it was, even though she didn't take that Buick any farther than a half mile to a grocery store.

The car is gone. She's more dependent on others now for some things she considers necessities, and her world has grown infinitely smaller.

Somehow, her son, I can feel at least some of that pain; and I feel it the same way E. B. White felt it when he watched his son pull on those wet shorts and felt nothing less than mortality tightening its grip on his own vital self.

The fact is, sadly, time has passed since the last early, dark morning I woke up here in a sweet little cabin in northern Minnesota. My perceptions lied to me, as did White's. Life itself has stretched itself between those early mornings.

And I am as mortal as he was.

All of that may well amount to an even greater reason for me to enjoy the morning, the fall colors all around, the lake, which now has a chop in a wind that's picked up.

The oaks, I discovered this morning, have already shed most of their bright red leaves. But the ones that I see, still clinging or there on the floor of the woods--I'll try to treasure, I promise, this morning, even more.

_________________ 

Fifteen years old, this one. Mom's been gone for a half-dozen years. But this morning, 15 years later, just thought I'd say we're off to northern Minnesota. Again. 

Some of Narcissa's story

The haven't changed, of course. it would take behomoth earth-movers to rid the landscape of these great chunks of mountains, not that we wouldn't do just that if some bloke discovered gold in them thar' hills, in which case we'd carve them up like Thanksgiving turkey. 

Most of the Nebraska, alas, is fly-over country, even if you're in a mini-van. I can't count the times I've heard people talk about the place as "so endlessly boooooring." Because the landscape is featureless, coming up on these petrified beasts still invests the traveler with the kind of hope that the pioneers wrote about feeling when, here, they took to their diaries and journals. 

They're really something. Still are. They're sandstone and hard clay, and they're changing, even as we speak, wearing away actually. But when you're coming up the trail, east to west, you can't help feeling, when they appear, still miles and miles away, that you're actually getting somewhere. 

It was somewhere out here, those gargantuan monuments on the horizon, that I discovered Narcissa Whitman, wife of Marcus, the doctor, a couple most every Washington kid discovered in their fifth grade state history courses long ago. Marcus Whitman may well have been the first white man who who aimed his wagon at the west coast, believing--just believing--that he could bring a wagon full of whatever across the mountains--and then did it! 

And his wife. Yes, he brought a woman with him. Can you imagine?  In the early decades of the 19th century, the frontier, most American thought, was absolutely no place for a woman, at least no place for a lady. The very idea of a female in all that vastness was almost obscene, worse, inconceivable. It was wrong, not just thoughtless but abomination. No right-thinking man would be so thoughtless, so uncouth. 

Marcus Whitman did, and Narcissa, who was his wife of one day when they left upstate New York for St. Louis, loved it, loved every rough-and-tumble minute of it. Not only did she make it through the plains, she tore through the mountains to arrive at the Oregon Territory, which then belonged, in great part, to the Great Brits. Not only did she make it, but she loved it, and told her family so in journals and letters that were published back east. She loved every minute of it.

My health was never better than since I have been on the river. I was weighed last week, and came up     to 136 pounds. I think I shall endure the journey well - perhaps better than any of the rest of us.

Consider it a honeymoon--Marcus and Narcissa were newlyweds, after all, a man and a woman toggled together to fulfill a requirement of the missionary agency who sent them west--missionaries, after all, had to be married. Both of them wanted to be missionaries, both of them were on their way to a single life, both needed a spouse to answer what they considered to be God's call. So they got married. And, wonders upon wonders, it worked, ah, passionately. There were sparks. There was fire. Yup.

I have such a good place to shelter - under my husband's wings. He is so excellent. I love to confide in his judgment, and act under him, for it gives me a chance to improve. Jane, if you want to be happy get as good a husband as I have got, and be a missionary. Mary, I wish you were with us. You would be happy, as I am. The way looks pleasant, notwithstanding we are so near encountering the difficulties of an unheard-of journey for females.

Not only did she make it to Oregon aboard the wagon, she insisted--can you imagine such a thing?--she insisted on riding horseback whenever she could, and loved it. Side-saddled, of course. After all, no lady would ride astride (it's a sin even to think of such a thing). She even wandered away from the wagon train now and then, because what she was seeing, she seemed to understand, was magnificence no white woman had ever seen before.

Not only that, but Narcissa Whitman, a newlywed in what one might well call an arranged marriage--I hardly dare to say it--got pregnant on the trip. That's right, got herself "in the family way," which means, well, I don't have to spell it out, but I will anyway: it means she and her husband were sporting out there in the all that wild country. Can you believe it? 

I first met Narcissa Whitman's story out near Ash Hollow, Nebraska, on the way up to Chimney Rock and all those welcoming monuments, where a highway sign tells her story--well some of it.

But this morning I don't want to go to the sad-and-sorry, heartbreaking stuff. I want to stay here at a place where Narcissa and Marcus and their traveling companions all saw the sights for the very first time, where they pulled their wagon along a trail she told her readers was just as comfortable as any road back east. 

I like to imagine of her, sidesaddle, on one of the horses she rode to do her own precious brand of touring, out here, riding right up to Chimney Rock herself, just to see it up-close and personal. I like to think of her romping around this country, but girding her loins right then for what she had to know was coming now--the virtually impassable Rockies. 

She made it. They all did. As did the wagon. They did something no one had ever accomplished before, right here on a path you can still follow without any more crowds than they ever saw. Amazing. Imagine her here, wearing the boots she bought before she left, men's boots. Imagine her here, in love, her own imagination firing with the wonders of what she knew in her soul was God's own creation. Just imagine.

Yes, there is more to the story, epic failure and sadness; but I found her here along the way in Nebraska, along the Oregon Trail, riding through the prairie grass, and for now, at least, that's where I want her to keep her.  

Masks and kids

 

According to The Christian Century, Axios reports that despite the images of college kids partying away, not wearing masks or social distancing, their behavior appears to be far less callous than it might seem. Polling indicates that Generation Z is working to get their friends to take the warnings seriously. They are "willing to make short-term sacrifices so that we can get back to something resembling prepandemic life."

The doubters, it seems, are elsewhere. Like here. Last week, the Orange City Christian School determined that students would not be required to wear masks, even though at most schools in the area, masks are required at least for some students (in my grandson's elementary Christian school, masks are required for fifth through eighth grade students). The OCCS board's determination, which garnered them a story in the Des Moines Register--it's news, after all--was occasioned by a public warning from area hospitals that argued for more vigilance. 

For a week or so, Sioux County sat at the number one position in the state for the number of cases per 100,000 population. Today--I just checked--were #2.  A Friday ago already, local hospitals gathered public and private school administrators and made it clear that something had to be done. OCCS's sudden notoriety might well have been averted had they not argued that, in the board's opinion, masks do more harm than good.

That argument made OCCS an outlier. They argued that masks make communication difficult, which it does, and they said masks create a false sense of security, which may also be true. But when they went on to argue that improper mask use can lead to further spread of the coronavirus, an uncommon argument, they went out on a limb.

And then, almost impossibly, the board claimed they highly recommended masks anyway, despite all that horror, just wouldn't require them. Does that make sense?

The unavoidable conclusion is that, at least from a distance, it seems there are more Trump supporters on the board than not. I don't have to remind you that he doesn't--or didn't. 

Alas, all of this went down before the POTUS and his circle caught fevers, before what looks for all the world like a super-spreader happened right there on the White House lawn, where neither Trump nor most the other Republican crowd had donned masks. 

I don't know what my grandson thinks about having to wear his mask in fifth grade. He was here yesterday for Sunday dinner, and when we talked about it, he didn't complain. But then, really, who likes wearing masks? I don't. I don't like seat belts either. But today significantly more than 200,000 Americans have left empty spaces at family tables because of the reach of an evil virus. 

I don't know that it's fathomable yet, but the immense hit evangelical Christians (OCCS made headlines in great part because the word "Christian" is in their name) are taking from their bizarre political dalliance with our President appears to me, right now, to be almost beyond measure. 

Reading Mother Teresa--Ambassador of Joy

“Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion, 

for great is the Holy One of Israel among you.” Isaiah 12:6 

There’s something so elemental about Mother Teresa’s success that when you witness it, you’re shocked at its simplicity. “Every Sunday I visit the poor in Calcutta’s slums,” she wrote in letter. “I cannot help them, because I do not have anything, but I go to give them joy” (27).

Ambassador of Joy.

Because she had nothing in her pockets, she didn’t have to refuse beggars. Quite simply, she had nothing to give them except joy, which is, of course, a marvelous gift – and very, very expensive.

Great cheerleaders don’t win ball games, and everyone knows you can’t reverse malnutrition with a smile, fight disease with sheer happiness, nor deliver people from hapless poverty by a winning personality.

Some significant criticism of Mother Teresa and her work begins with that knowledge, the assessment that just being nice isn’t enough. That criticism is understandable.

But it can’t deny her gift.

What Mother Teresa brought to the poorest of the poor, and gave away freely, was essential for life: she brought them joy – joy as a synonym for love. In the same letter, she tells the story of a mother whose family suffered immensely, a woman who “did not utter even a word of complaint about her poverty,” a woman who begged Mother Teresa to return: “Oh, Ma, come again! Your smile brought sun into this house” (27). 

Mother Teresa brought that family the sun.

I don’t have neighbors so deeply impoverished. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know from whence his or her next meal will come. Those sad children with extended bellies – you’ve seen them in a ton of photographs – live somewhere in a world other than my own. I’m a long ways from Sudan and all the way around the world from Calcutta.

But then, I suppose, darkness has a thousand faces.

And I can, just as nimbly as she did, lug in the sun, even as she did.

Or could, if I wanted.

Up North

We're going again--up north, next week. After a hiatus of a half-dozen years--we now live sort of "out in the country already," even think of our new place as a kind of vacation home"--we're motoring north next week, where, we hope, the seasonal colors are good and ripe. 

When you're retired, the absolute joy of "getting away" just isn't quite as blessed, but we're both looking forward to waking up in the morning in a whole different world, this one.

All these shots are from this week, up north, fifteen years ago.

 

Small Wonders--Visit the Castles

On a single visit to Lemmon, South Dakota, you can see the whole world. Seriously.

You want joy? Once a summer they put a tent up in Lemmon—a beer tent—for a town festival. A whole lot of people celebrate with a whole lot of beer, so many people and so much beer the town sells a souvenir t-shirt with “I got bent in the tent,” across your chest.

You can buy that t-shirt any time of year, too. It’ll stop traffic. Even if people don’t ask, they’ll wonder, may even dream. “I got bent in the tent.”

But there’s more to the world. Right downtown Lemmon, an entire city block is petrified wood that's sculpted into shapes and figures so strange they’ll make you believe you spent far too much time in that tent, even in January.



Mid-Depression, a dreamer named Ole S. Quammen hired thirty or forty unemployed working stiffs to scour the land 25 miles around, land of a long-ago forest whose trees ever-so-slowly had turned into stone. Haul that petrified wood to town, he told them, and we’ll shape it into wishing wells, waterfalls, and pyramids.

Three-quarters of a century later, all that ancientness hasn’t aged much, and, quite frankly, the whole city block looks just as goofy as it ever did. All that being said, you can’t drive by. Just can’t. It’s a Twilight Zone of petrification. Lemmon’s got odd, all right. 

Up the road at a place called Slim Buttes, a cavalry attack on a Lakota camp turned into a bloody rout when 150 troops came up on a band of Lakotas the army called "hostile," even though most of the Natives wanted only to get on with the life they’d always led.

It was September, 1876, a few months after Little Big Horn. Captain Anson Mills had his men out scouting for food when they ran into a camp and attacked, even though their orders were to avoid engagement.

But after Little Big Horn, no U.S. troops were in much of a mood for peace. Some Sioux escaped the surprise attack by running up into the hills and taking refuge in a gully. Twenty troops volunteered to go get them. You can imagine what happened. When it was over, Mills’ troops cleaned out the Lakota larger and had their first big meal in weeks.

Compared to the battle at Little Big Horn, Slim Buttes was little more than bloody and ugly. Those Lakota who made it out alive went hungry. 

Let me tell you, today Slim Buttes--people call them "The Castles"--is just as gorgeous as it was in 1876. Their alabaster cliffs rise like a fleet of winged ships from a Dakota prairie where "the deer and the antelope play"--and pronghorn. Wildflowers carpet the grasses, while tall clouds sail like a tribute over the buttes.

We’re up in the far, far corner of South Dakota. There are no crowds. If you know the stories, the silence all around makes the whole world seem like a theater.

Thirty years before the battle, right here the famous Lakota warrior Crazy Horse spent a night or two amid the castles with a lovely woman who was a wife to someone else--let’s just call it a little camping trip. When her husband showed up at the tipi, Crazy Horse looked up the barrel of the man’s rifle and took a bullet in his face that left him with a permanent snarl. The woman he’d loved out here left with her husband. 

Crazy Horse, the man astride a mountain in the Black Hills--you can visit the monument, see if from miles away--that Crazy Horse lost face here because among the Lakota there was nothing noble about taking another man’s wife. He had to earn honor back again—which he did at Little Big Horn.

Likely as not, you’ll be alone at Slim Buttes' wonderful castles. You can sit and watch and listen out there all by your lonesome. I stopped by on a worshipful Sunday morning. Place was dead quiet. I hiked around a bit, found a stocking cap just off a path—camo outside, fluorescent orange inside. Nice. I took it home—a souvenir. I didn’t didn’t get a t-shirt, nor did I get bent in the tent. Not really. Still got the cap.

It was just something to be there amid the Castles that morning because I swear, just outside of Lemmon, South Dakota, amid all that petrified wood, if you know the stories and stand up high enough amid those magnificent buttes, you can see most all of the world right there, all around. 

Sad

I turned it off. 

I cringed at the outset, when it was clear that Trump brought a despicable strategy to the game, something called chaos. It took five minutes, no more, and the whole thing veered into the ditch, where it stayed, muddy and broken and burning. 

Anyone who votes for this man, who backs the madness on stage last night is as perfectly out of balance as he is. We--America--has never, ever had a President anywhere near as demented. I cringed for twenty minutes and then had enough. I turned it off. It was painful, as everyone says this morning. Prime time was outfitted in sheer agony. 

Last night, someone made the point that Donald Trump is the abuser some of us always believed him to be. Last night, he wasn't abusing women, he was abusing Joe Biden. What's worse--what's far worse--is that he was abusing Chris Wallace. He hunted--and subsequently abused the whole idea of a debate. That wasn't a debate. It was jungle ball. Last night, the President of the United States abused the United States, abused a system of government we call democracy. He abused us. He abused the nation.

It's impossible to overstate what was painfully obvious: the man proved himself to be what everyone, even Republicans, said was true on the march up to the 2016 election. Donald J. Trump is unfit to be President. Period. End. Of. Sentence.

Honestly, if I were on the Biden team, I'd advise simply saying that the debates are over. This was not a debate. A debate is two people with contrary views wielding them as well as they can in an effort to make them stick, to make them grow, in order to make the country, the nation, the culture grow. Donald Trump had no interest in a debate. All he cared about was himself.

He must go. Our way of life is at stake. 

Acknowledgements

"Before we begin, I'd just like to begin with a land acknowledgement," she said, "acknowledging the indigenous people who lived in this area." 

Truth be told, there weren't all that many people around. I was a little disappointed in the size of the crowd--three or four dozen people, most of them, like me, decidedly on the far side of their forties. A pandemic is raging in this corner of the state, I told myself. Don't be critical. It was something of a risk being out at all, even if this dedication was occurring outside, on a downtown street of a small town.

I'm not Luxembourgian, but, strangely enough, I've been around Luxembourgian-American strongholds for most of my life, so they've always been on my radar screen. The official Luxembourgian-American museum is just down the road from my still heavily Dutch-American hometown of Oostburg, Wisconsin. The Luxembourgers of northwest Iowa came to this corner of the state--the only region at the time not yet homesteaded by Euro-Americans--in 1870, the same year the region's Dutch unloaded their wagons just a few miles away.

By 1880 or so, Alton, Iowa, like Remsen, just south, was greatly Roman Catholic. Orange City and Sioux Center were not, to say the least. Live embers of the 16th century Reformation were still generating heat in souls of both persuasions--as they may yet be today in the tightest corners of the nearby Dutch Calvinist world.

I'd come--we'd all come--to dedicate a mural, a big, beautiful colorful thing right across from the Veterans Memorial in downtown Alton. It's not particularly easy to get a mural in a camera, so forgive me for missing something of the far end, but this is it.

It's a glorious flutter of butterflies across a darkened prairie landscape. Some ghostly ancestral four-leggeds haunt the place--the buffalo are long gone, of course--and those magical little yellow bubbles, the artist told us, are--I should have thought of it--are fireflies. Let me bring something of it closer.

Iowa is outlined there between it's two mighty rivers--the Mississippi out east, and the Missouri out west. That light jet trail across the state, from Dubuque (a village called St. Donatus actually) to the Siouxland villages of Alton, Marcus, Remsen, Hospers, and LeMars, is the long trek the Siouxland Luxembourger pioneers put down to get here and claim some of Iowa's very best black dirt.

The creative genius, behind all of this, Prof. Amber Hansen, was there for the dedication. She teaches art at the University of South Dakota, but hails from Alton and stoutly claims her own Luxembourgian heritage, even visited "the old country" recently to see the land her ancestors left behind. She calls the mural "a community project," because it was, and is. See those butterfly wings--they're unfinished. She and her crew will fill them in eventually, she promised. Alton, she said, has a lot of good artists.

But the way she started the whole dedication was, to me, stunning, not so much because of what she said, but because she said it at all. "I'd like to begin with a land acknowledgement." I had no idea what a "land acknowledgement" was. Today, I know. 

She said she took this "land acknowledgement" from the U. S. Department of Arts and Culture. This is what she read to begin the program, a dedication of her own big, colorful mural on the wall of a business in downtown Alton, Iowa. 

Every community owes its existence and vitality to generations from around the world, who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that led to this moment. Some were brought here against their will, some were drawn in hopes of making a better life, and some have lived on this land for more generations than can be counted. 

She was acknowledging that the land where her ancestors and mine settled was not so much their own as it was a land with a long history, a legacy that needed to be openly and publicly acknowledged. Human beings lived here and loved here before any of our great-grandparents made homestead claims. 

Truth and acknowledgement are critical to building respect and connection across all barriers of heritage and difference. Today we are standing on the ancestral lands of many indigenous tribes, but most recently of  . . .

. . .and here she named two tribal peoples whose names few in the crowd, if any, had ever heard of, even though many of us, I'm sure, live in Sioux County, in a state, Iowa, named after a tribal people who've been gone for far more than 150 years. I didn't know tribes she listed, nor certainly how to spell their names; and it isn't pleasant right now admitting as much.

We pay respect to their elders, past and present. Please take a moment to consider the many legacies of violence, displacement, migration and settlement that brings us together here today; and please join us in acknowledging these truths in any and all public events.

She was calling us to repentance, something both Catholics and Calvinists have understood for generations, for centuries. 

Have a look again at Prof. Hanson's beautiful mural. Big, colorful butterflies wing their way through the scene, but behind them there are others, shadowy butterfly figures, ghosts of the past, reminders that what's here is only what's here now, not what once was. 

I was perfectly stunned by the "land acknowledgement," stunned and gratified. It was a blessed reminder that this isn't our land at all. It happens to be where we live, but no one should think of it as being ours.

When Prof. Amber Hansen, the artist, read those words, she was teaching us the only really substantive genre of authentic "patriotic history."

This morning, I'm thankful for what she taught me on Sunday morning--and, well, us.

Refuse on the journey

Be careful you do not start 

with any unnecessary baggage. 

The road at present is strewed with nearly everything

 from a steam kettle to a child's cradle.

So wrote George Keller in 1851 in a guidebook for travelers on the Oregon Trail. It's difficult to imagine what things must have looked like, and yet it's understandable that travelers would have to dump things--treasures, heirlooms, precious bulky items--hither and yon along the trail, things like this spinning wheel, on display in a museum at Chimney Rock. 

At an odd little museum that stretches over I-80 at North Platte, NE, the display just below features a piano and books abandoned along the trail. Some remembrances claim so many books left behind created a free-loan library. Pick one up, take it with for a couple days, read it, then drop it off somewhere else farther west. Books and pianos and spinning wheels turned the trail--sometimes four or five miles wide--into a national flea market full of abandoned treasures.

A letter Narcissa Whitman wrote to a friend tells the story fetchingly. She sweetly apologizes to a trunk that, achingly, had to be left behind. (Keep Kleenex handy.) 

Dear Harriet, the little trunk you gave me has come with me so far, and now I must leave it here alone. Poor little trunk, I am sorry to leave thee; thou must abide here alone, and no more by thy presence remind me of my dear Harriet. Twenty miles below the falls on Snake river this shall be thy place of rest. Farewell, little trunk, I thank thee for thy faithful services, and that I have been cheered by thy presence so long. 

The passage doesn't require a picture. That little trunk makes a sad appearance in the imagination without your or my having the slightest idea what it looked like. But, broken-hearted, she can't not blame someone or something for what she must abandon. She points her loving husband's way. "Husband," she calls him.

Thus we scatter as we go along. The hills are so steep and rocky that husband thought it best to lighten the wagon as much as possible and take nothing but the wheels, leaving the box with my trunk. I regret leaving anything that came from home, especially that trunk, but it is best. 

What became especially difficult was having to lug every last item by hand and arm and back and hook and crook over water and through impassable creek beds. 

It would have been better for me not to have attempted to bring any baggage whatever, only what was necessary to use on the way. It costs so much labor, besides the expense of animals. If I were to make the journey again I would make quite different preparations. To pack and unpack so many times, and cross so many streams where the packs frequently get wet, requires no small amount of labor, besides the injury of the articles. Our books, what few we have, have been wet several times. In going from Elmira to Williamsport this trunk fell into the creek and wet all my books, and Richard's, too, several times. The sleigh box came off and all of us came near a wetting likewise. The custom of the country is to possess nothing, and then you will lose nothing while traveling. Farewell for the present.

 And thus, that little trunk full of all those memories is (sniff, sniff) left behind.

Woe and woe and woe.

___________________________ 

P.S. The next day's journal entry begins this way: 

"Dear Harriet, Mr. McKay has asked the privilege of taking the little trunk along, so that my soliloquy about it last night was for naught."

Lost, but not abandoned. 

Relax.

Sabbath on the Trail--from the letters of Narcissa Whitman

Sabbath; came fifteen miles and camped at a fine place, with plenty of good grass for our weary animals. 

It is August 6th, 1836, and the note is the work of Narcissa Whitman, the very first woman to cross the American frontier--Independence, Missouri, to Walla Walla, Washington. She is, in every way, a pioneer, an explorer, although she and her husband and the wagon train with which they're traveling followed a map of the way. Their path will soon become The Oregon Trail, a 19th century superhighway that brought the widely separate edges of a continent together, a continent whose immensity few could even imagine. 

August 6th is the Sabbath, and the Whitmans and their traveling companions, very strict Sabbitarians, generally closed down operations on Sunday to create open space for meditation and worship. Not this Sunday. They're traveling, breaking the order of what should be. That may sharpen her desire for personal devotions. 

This Sunday morning, we'll leave Mother Teresa in Calcutta, and spend a Sunday morning in the Oregon Territory with Mrs. Whitman and her husband (they're newlyweds, by the way). 

On this August morning, they know they're soon to arrive at the place the Society has designated for them. This Sabbath they didn't stop; they kept moving. But Narcissa remembered to praise the Lord.

Thus are blessings so mingled that it seems as if there was nothing else but mercy and blessings all the way. Was there ever a journey like this performed where the sustaining hand of God has been so manifest every morning. 

They've traveled long and hard and far; and the truth is, she's loved every minute of it. They would be ministering to the heathens, the Cayuse Indians, and, like all missionaries, they felt the sustaining prayers of those who, back east, prayerfully supported their mission work.

Nor are we forgotten by our beloved churches, at home in the prayers of the Sanctuary, we are too sensible of its blessed effects to believe otherwise; and oh! how comforting is this thought to heart of the missionary.

What was still a fledgling nation was shocked to hear a woman taking passage across the continent. Who knew what dangers laid in store--and for a woman! The frontier was home to wild men and wilder savages, not to mention all manner of flesh-devouring beasts--it was no place for a woman. But Narcissa Whitman loved it, emboldened by a rich sense of calling that sustained her. The hand of God, she says, had led them on their remarkable journey.

Surely the children of Israel could not have been more sensible of the pillar of fire by night than we have been of that hand that has led us thus safely on. God had heard prayer in our behalf, and even now while I am writing on this holy day is the sweet incense of prayer ascending before the throne of Heavenly grace. 

They're young and idealistic and tough. . .but neither have they forgotten home.

We love to think and talk of home with such feelings as these. It warms our hearts and strengthens and encourages us in the work of our beloved Master, and make our journeyings easy.

It's August 6, 1836, on the Oregon Trail. But somehow all of that works today too, this morning, wherever you are.

Thinking about teaching lit

In 15 years of blogging I don't know that I've ever done what I did yesterday--put up the url of an essay I'd read, no comments and no rationale. The reason I did that, I'm here this morning to say, was rather simple. Yesterday I faced an early appointment with a doctor, and I'd just read the essay on Facebook. It struck me as thoughtful and on the money, and I didn't have time to explain why.

If you didn't read it, let me summarize. What Erik Miller argues is that today Christian colleges are bearing the fruit of having danced with the devil, mammon to put a name on it. In the noble effort to stay alive, they've pursued the American dream instead of a Kingdom vision. Just down the road, for good sound economic reasons, a college dumped their English and philosophy departments and pruned back history and theater. That's the kind of move Erik Miller despises. 

Old fogies like me want to believe that those humanities courses and programs, what most call "the liberal arts," are the heart and soul of every institution of higher learning, Christian or secular. If you can't help feeling that way, in all likelihood you're as old as I am. 

Erik Miller's claims that good Christian academics have gone a-whoring after filthy lucre and thereby walked away from all that is good and right. They're in danger for clearly spiritual reasons. Playing on a line from American streets, Miller claims that " Our minds matter. The Christian mind matters. It’s time we—parents, pastors, presidents, philanthropists—take the sacrificial action required to show it. A silenced Christ, after all, is no Christ at all."

That's heady, Old Testament stuff, and he's not all wrong--that's why I put the essay up. But neither is he all right. Financial solvency is a good, good thing. It's silly to wish a college didn't have to stay afloat financially. Seems to me that college admins have to be wily as foxes--doesn't it say that somewhere in the Gospels?

Mark Edmundson's "Teach What You Love," in a recent American Scholar, is actually a similar essay, an insider's indictment of yet another angle of the phenomenon Erik Miller outlines, but without Miller's "Christian" context. Edmundson looks at a similarly destroyed landscape and laments all over the page. With good reason.

First, he reviews the exciting role that critical theory took throughout English Departments in the last years of the 20th century. He's right. If you didn't do lit crit back then, you weren't listening to the right music. He claims much of literary criticism was negative--Derrida, Foucalt and other philosophers bearing down on the notion that lit'-chwa-chure didn't do what people said it did. Like Miller, Edmundson sees desolation all over the landscape, but he admirably points the finger at himself as the guilty party. The demise of the English department, he says, derives from a self-inflicted wound.

But the essay doesn't stop there. Instead, as the title indicates, it redirects an English department to do what he claims it did long before the nay-saying crowd appeared from the darkness of the lit crit forest: "Teach literature. Teach the literature you love."

Taken at face value, Edmundson might be thought of abandoning critical theory all together and, in the process, critical thinking itself, perhaps the most important "behavioral objective" of traditional higher education. That's not the point. Oddly enough, his point is spiritual--English professors have too quickly abandoned what they love.

Both essays begin with the same sad assessment: liberal arts education is in lousy shape. Miller blames the soul; primarily, Edmundson blames the mind. They're both at least partially right about cause, and, sadly enough, and fully right about effect: the role of the humanities in higher education is in deep, deep trouble.

My grandfather graduated from Parkersburg (IA) High School in 1897. His diploma hangs on the wall in our library. It lists the courses he took at Parkersburg, courses no one teaches anyone anymore--Cicero and Latin Grammar. That diploma has always served to remind me that things change. They do.

And while dealing with change remains a problem, especially with people who reach their three-score and ten years, the inevitability to avoid it requires all of us to adjust, to change. 

I love both essays. I ate 'em up, in part because I share their points of view. 

But the truth is even still more difficult.

 

https://mereorthodoxy.com/market-made-scandal-evangelical-college/?fbclid=IwAR0J6b8RDn6USdA0beUcS0H8_NOjBtEWW0_x8oM6afcVoLa3jGek_YOerfs

The Story of Emma Cogler

She made a scene, all right? She didn't have to--she could have simply got up and left when told to, but she didn't. She refused. She made a scene, such a scandalous thing to do. She should have known better.

Her name was Emma Coger, and we might just say that the reason you've never heard of her is that her story is so old hat that it can't or shouldn't be news at all. But it is. It's a story about will, about dignity, and, first and foremost, about justice.

Start here. Emma was just 19 years old and a teacher--middle school, sixth grade, maybe seventh, not much older than her students. History doesn't say much about her classroom successes, whether she was on the road to becoming a master teacher. What we know--what's essential background material--is her age, her occupation, and her race.

She was Black. Sort of. She was what people called, 150 years ago, "a quadroon"--1/4 African-American, which meant, pigment-wise, she was mostly white. The court records of the time describe her color as "yellow."

"What happened?" you're saying. "Tell the story."

Emma Coger purchased a first-class breakfast ticket on a Mississippi River steamer, the S. S. Merrill, bound for Keokuk, Iowa to visit friends. She was just getting away for the weekend. The clerk gave her her ticket, scribbled with special instructions. Emma was to take her food and eat in one of the designated places blacks were appointed to eat, along the railing or in the back with the help. The clerk kindly returned a half-dollar.

That upset Emma Coger. She'd never been denied the dining room before, so she asked a white man, a fellow passenger, to buy her a ticket for lunch. He did. No problem, no scribbled writing. 

Thus, when dinner was served, Emma Coger took a chair in the elegant dining room, at which time two white women sitting at the table put up a fuss. When Emma wouldn't move, the two snarled at the indignity they were suffering with Emma's sitting right there with the real ladies. They left in a huff.

Footnote:  two women stayed at the table. Isn't that wonderful? Two stayed.

Anyway, one of the appalled women happened to be the captain's wife. Sooner rather than later, the captain himself heard of the foul disgrace and came to the aid of the clerk who'd also failed by that time to get Emma Coger to remove herself from the dining room. She was, you know, making a scene. 

Things took a bad turn. The captain and his clerk demanded and she refused. Often. Not surprisingly, tempers rose. The captain grabbed Emma Coger, and Emma Coger grabbed the table cloth so that she took with her most of the plates and silverware when the captain jerked her away. The mess went spilling to the floor. It was a scene, of course. Emma Coger made a scene right there in beneath the chandeliers. In first-class dining, you just can't have that kind of scene.

When she got home, Emma Coger was determined to sue. But no lawyer in the city would take her case, so she had to return to Keokuk to get one--and did. So the case was brought to the courts in Iowa in February of 1873, just eight year after the Civil War.

The S. S. Merrill's company lawyer, claimed Emma Coger had cut loose at them, swore like a drunken sailor and even used that very bad language right there before the Iowa Supreme Court. Can you imagine? Look it up. You'll see. 

She claimed it never happened. ""I never, never use bad language," she told the court in her defense, "and do not recollect of doing it on that occasion. I was angry because I was refused, and the way I was spoken to."

And she won, won big. Swearing was immaterial, the court said; "the sole question was, and I quote: "Had the defendant as a common carrier of passengers the authority to establish and enforce regulations denying individuals of color of the privileges and rights of white persons?"

And the answer, the court said, was no. And more.

It cannot be doubted that she was excluded from the table and cabin, not because others would have been degraded and she elevated in society, but because of prejudice entertained against her race, growing out of its former condition of servitude, a prejudice, be it proclaimed to the honor of our people, that is fast giving way to nobler sentiments, and, it is hoped, will soon be entombed with its parent, slavery.

Thus saith the Supreme Court of Iowa, February of 1873, in Emma Cogler vs. North Western Union Packet Company.

Emma Cogler was awarded $250, which she gave to her lawyer. She wasn't after money, she told people; she set about to suit the company "to vindicate the rights of my race, and my character of womanhood."

Emma Cogler wouldn't take it, so she made a scene. Praise be.

That's a story to start your day. 

Prof. John C. VanderStelt

The story goes that when the Hulsts came to Dordt College in the early Sixties, they couldn't help be awed by the tight-corset of pietism then in power, a Sabbatarianism, for instance, drawn so tight that on Saturday nights dorm counselors stuck Scotch tape over the coin slots on the Coke machines. Sounds cartoonish, but it wasn't.

By the time I arrived a few years later, the behavioral codes hadn't loosened a whole lot. I remember getting sent back to the dorm by the Dean for wearing jeans to supper. No TV--no football--on Sunday. Women had a curfew--10:30. Men never did. The powers-that-be determined that herding the mares into the corral would leave the stallions with nothing to do. 

For women, slacks were questionable, too "whatever" for the formality of class--except when the temperature, as announced on college radio(!), was -10 degrees below zero, in which case allowances could be made, all of this in spite of the fact that in the mid-Sixties, short skirts flirting above the knees were all the rage. 

No dancing, of course. Definitely, no firewater. An non-traditional student, coming up on thirty years old, already hairless, was seen by a constituent drinking a glass of wine with his dinner at a steak house a half hour away from campus. That constituent reported the transgression to the Dean, who called the man's parents to report their son's offence. The word was, that student's immigrant father had to be told four or five times what all the hoopla was about. When he put down the phone, he still didn't understand.

To live among the Dutch-Americans in northwest Iowa in the early Sixties was to be herded down rigorous paths of righteousness. To be comfortably Dutch Reformed meant adopting codes that prescribed the means-to-grace in strict detail.

When Rev. John C. Vander Stelt began teach philosophy at Dordt College, he was, to be sure, more Dutch than almost anyone in Siouxland. Born and raised and educated in the Netherlands, he'd come to Canada too late to shake the brogue he'd carry for the rest of his years. His childhood--as others like him--was marked by the desperation the German occupation of the Netherlands created for so families, and a moral framework created by a world that justified armed resistance, even murder. Good Christians in the Resistance often as not prayed before their armed robberies.

What's more, in the Netherlands Prof. John Vander Stelt had absorbed a religious vision that was far wider than the pietist views that undergird Dutch northwest Iowa and Dordt College, then barely ten years old. His was a vision shaped by a preacher who became the Dutch Prime Minister, Abraham Kuyper, who believed, as did his contemporary theologian friends, that the Christian life required two "conversions," first a conversion to the Savior, but second--and a like unto it--a return to the world. Prof. Vander Stelt believed Christianity wasn't about keeping the ship from sinking but moving it out and away from harbor.

When I was a boy, "worldliness" was among the vilest of sins. Those faithful who fell away, like the prodigal son, gave their souls over to the pig sty that was the world. Prof. Vander Stelt put a new spin on John 3:16--"that God so loved the world" meant He loved all of life. God almighty wanted to his own to see beauty even when it wasn't in rectitude. 

Prof. Vander Stelt freed me to read John Updike instead of The Sugar Creek Gang, freed me to believe that all of life is religion, that the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath, that to understand how the world operates, how art glorifies, how vision shapes life, we had to be "in but not of" in a wholly different way than making sure coin slots were taped on the Sabbath. 

That's why Dordt College went to war with itself soon after Prof. Vander Stelt, and others like him, arrived on campus. Two visions of the Christian life walked on to the battle field. Only one view of things would or could prevail. The vision of Prof. Vander Stelt, battered and scarred, somehow prevailed.

In the late Sixties, Prof. Vander Stelt asked tough questions about prejudice when race riots burned through America's cities; the pietists maintained that the Bible commanded to honor those leaders God appoints, like Nixon. When protestors questioned America's role in the Vietnam War, Prof. Vander Stelt dared to ask whether the hippies weren't morally right. Prof. Vander Stelt set us out into a world the pietists denied. Prof. Vander Stelt played a monumental role in my life, as a teacher--a professor--and, later, for so many years as colleague and friend, his fiery passion so readily ample, so divine.

He wouldn't like me saying that, of course--"divine," but John C. Vander Stelt, my friend and colleague, reshaped the course of my faith by pushing me--and so many others--into a world so much bigger and even blessed than that which we meant by "worldliness."

Last Saturday, in the middle of a precious family gathering, my friend John died of a massive heart attack. He went home with his Savior and Lord.

But he has not left us. Not at all.

Morning Thanks--just a poem

 I don't know that I've ever been to the Lower Chesapeake Bay, and I never was a lifeguard, so no one ever told me the different ways to save someone who was drowning. That having been said, I've sure as anything been where Maxine Kumin takes us in this memorable poem that's all about the richness of memory.

The Lower Chesapeake Bay

by Maxine Kumin

Whatever happened to the cross-chest carry,
the head carry, the hair carry,

the tired-swimmer-put-your-hands-on-my-shoulders-
and-look-in-my-eyes retrieval, and what

became of the stride jump when you leap
from impossible heights and land with your head

above water so that you never lose sight
of your drowning person, or if he is close enough, where

is the lifesaver ring attached to a rope
you can hurl at your quarry, then haul

him to safety, or as a last resort
where is the dock onto which you tug

the unconscious soul, place him facedown,
clear his mouth, straddle his legs and press

with your hands on both sides of his rib cage
to the rhythm of out goes the bad air in

comes the good and pray he will breathe,
hallowed methods we practiced over and over

the summer I turned eighteen to win
my Water Safety Instructor’s badge

and where is the boy from Ephrata, PA
I made out with night after night in the lee

of the rotting boathouse at a small dank camp

on the lower Chesapeake Bay?

During my life as a teacher, I used to tease out a little assignment: "Write a 100-word sentence. Go ahead. Take a shot." It was nothing I ever graded, just an exercise to fool around with. "See if you can control the language well enough to create a monster." 

Like me, you probably didn't realize it while reading through, but this behemoth weighs in at a little less than 200 words, all of a piece, just one sentence. 

I'm guessing withholding end punctuation was not something Ms. Kumin planned on when she started into this little memory text. It's just the way she experienced what we all do--how it is that long-forgotten memories unfold from a something tightly wrapped into a tapestry you can hang on your wall. 

That's how this one goes, isn't it?--how things grow from life-and-death lessons taught as a lifeguard, to a situational context--"the summer I turned eighteen," to a real kid from Ephrata appearing--bang!--out of nowhere, in "a rotting boathouse at a small dank camp/on the lower Chesapeake Bay," all of it documenting a memory that sounds like yucch but oh-my-word isn't, not in the least.

And you're shocked that it's still there because it's been gone, long gone, for most of a lifetime; but there it is, unbidden, recreating itself with little bits of your heart and soul. The joy of this poem is its blossoming exuberance.  

We're factory-built with zip files in some file drawer synopsis, mostly unmarked memories, but, almost shockingly, still there. Lord knows there are bad ones too, but "this rotting boathouse is anything but." 

Ice-skating came up in conversation a couple nights ago. Hadn't thought about it for years, but in an instant I was back in seventh grade at a pond the fire department created with fire hoses in the village park. Someone hauled in a little fishing shack with benches, a place for kids to put on and take off skates on January nights I didn't know I hadn't forgotten, cold nights in a steamy shack in Oostburg, Wisconsin, right there beside a summer camp on the lower Chesapeake.

That's what's cool about poetry. This morning I'm thankful for poetry. 

Reading Mother Teresa--Suffering

 

To this you were called, 

because Christ suffered for you, 

leaving you an example, 

that you should follow in his steps. 1 Peter 2:21 

A handsome crucifix hangs on the wall across the room, traditionally a Roman Catholic icon in that it includes, in molded pewter, the image of a suffering Jesus. I like it.

My sister gave it to me after it was given to her from one of the old folks she once visited weekly, a Roman Catholic woman who had an apartment full of traditional iconography, a woman who thought it would be nice if my sister had this one from her collection.

To refuse the gift would have been shameful, she said, so she took it; but she had some trouble knowing exactly what to do with it because she was convinced that it really wasn’t, well, for her, a lifelong Protestant. There’s nothing unbiblical about a suffering Jesus hanging from the cross, but somehow she had the uncomfortable feeling that a crucifix wasn’t exactly a part of her faith tradition. We worship a risen savior, she might have said – the doctrinal answer for why Protestants prefer a cross to a crucifix.

It’s not small, and somehow, understandably, its presence made her uncomfortable.

She thought about tossing it, she said, but she simply couldn’t. How do you drop a crucifix in a garbage can with banana peels and apple cores? An old flag you fold and give to the Boy Scouts. What on earth does someone do with a crucifix?

As an act of mercy, I told her I’d take it off her hands, and now it’s here, even though it’s fair to say I may have spent a good deal more time in Calvin’s Institutes than my sister has or cares to.

Christ’s suffering, celebrated here with my crucifix, isn’t a pleasant thought, nor should it be. If he hadn’t suffered, if he hadn’t been nailed to that cross, his side sliced open, if he hadn’t died there, in mockery – if all of that hadn’t gone on, he could not have buried our sins with him nor, come Sunday morn, could he have stepped from behind that monster stone as if it were a paper weight. Had he not died, he could not have risen triumphant.

I must admit that Mother Teresa’s desire to suffer – desire is the right word, by the way – is, at least to me, difficult for me, both as a human being, and as a Protestant believer. For a time, when her new life in a sari on Calcutta’s streets began, she wondered aloud and to her superiors whether she was actually suffering enough.

“I want to become a real slave of Our Lady [Mary, the mother of Jesus] – to drink only from His chalice of pain and to give Mother Church real saints,” she once wrote to the archbishop (141); and then this: “. . . there is one part still left and that is that I would have to suffer much. – In spite of everything that has happened . . . there has always been perfect peace & joy in my heart” (142). For that she feels the strange need to repent.

Traditionally, I think, that true desire to suffer – actual physical suffering, self-denial – is far more a staple of Roman Catholic piety than it is a part of the Protestant Christian life. And it’s here, above me, in what is now my crucifix. It is not an empty cross.

Am I envious of Mother Teresa’s penchant for suffering? Maybe. How can a Christian not be envious of her, really, of the way she envisioned her world and reality of Jesus Christ, the word made flesh.

I’m envious, even if I'm somewhat uncomfortable.

Maybe that’s why that crucifix will stay with this old Calvinist wherever he goes.