Reading Mother Teresa--Prayer Warriors

 

“Ask and it will be given to you. . . .” Matthew 7:7 

At the beginning of his book A Public Faith*, Miroslav Volf describes what he calls an “active” faith, a faith that exists in a clear and vital relationship to our everyday lives, and begins by talking about the importance of “blessing,” because, he insists (and we know), we always need it. Asking for it, however, can be off-putting and seem, sometimes, silly, as in praying for a fast pitch a kid can slam into the bleachers to bring home the winning run. You know – Tebow.

“Does God really care which team wins or what grade I get?” Volf asks.

What’s worse, he says, enlisting God’s help only on rare occasions may well turn us into Lance Armstrong types, using God almighty as if he were just another “performance-enhancing drug.”

Okay, I admit it – I tend to think of Tebow-types as having a cheap view of how the Creator and sustainer of the universe relates to this world, as if God almighty were little more than a rocket booster power drink. Besides, somewhere inside of me is the voice of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who insisted that leaning on the everlasting arms suggests we can’t carry our own weight.

“The sophisticated among us sometimes dismiss such prayers,” Volf says of people who roll their eyes at such “blessings,” as if they were little more than passing fancies. Ouch. Count me among the pseudo-sophisticates. Way too often I roll my eyes.

But then Volf says – and he’s no slouch, of course –, “It is important to connect God with success in work.” If for no other reason, he says, that’s true because asking for blessing is vividly and consistently scriptural. What’s more, God delivers. He does it. He does hand out blessings – this we know.

I’m not proud of my skepticism. I understand it. I can even attempt an excuse: I’ve been privy to too many well-meant prayers from too many people who should have – from my point of view – simply pulled themselves up from with their own bootstraps. Furthermore, if public praying wasn’t fraught with the potential for hypocrisy, Christ himself wouldn’t have told us to bring it into a closet, to make it private. See, I’m smart.

But then there’s this – a note, just two days ago, from a friend, a good man in a battle with cancer, who claims that he can actually feel the mighty uplift of the prayers of his friends have prayed a continent away, me mine included.

And this: one of the first things Mother Teresa undertook as her new ministry began was to enlist a whole cadre of prayer warriors, every Sister having a “second self,” a prayer partner whose duty it was, from afar, “to pray & suffer for her” (153). What she lined up with people both from the region and eventually the world was what she might have thought of as a circle of prayer, of pray-ers, who, like a fortress, bolstered the entire loving operation by, literally, suffering with them.

Especially important to her was the suffering of those prayer warriors. As her own team of prayer warriors, she wanted, – and enlisted, – “the paralyzed, the crippled, the incurables” – those who also were also suffering wherever they were;, “second selves” specially recruited to, as she often said, “satiate the thirst of Christ.”

This battalion of eternal reinforcements gave her great joy and those she served, she says, great comfort.

And there's this: see that picture up top? That's my grandson's truck. The accident he had at the intersection of a country road whose obstructions still today beg more carnage, would likely have taken his life if it weren't for the air bag. He's fine--just a concussion he's daily getting over. Thanks be to God. I could be in an entirely different world this morning if he wasn't home healing.

I can't help but wonder if my own skepticism – my “sophistication,” as Volf says – isn’t created by way of the ease with which I’ve been blessed to live my life. In comparison with those forsaken thousands on Calcutta’s streets – and even many of my friends' burdens – my own suffering has been barely worth mentioning.

What I know is that, the day will come, as it does for each of us, the day I too will need friends, fellow sufferers, to storm the gates of heaven. 

______________________ 

* A Public Faith: How followers of Christ should serve the common good (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011), 25.

Little Big Horn

"When you get to the visitor's center, check out the blue dress--it belonged to Judy's great-grandma," she told me, referring to a maintenance worker at the school I'd just met. "Both our great-grandmas were there." 

I couldn't get in to the visitor's center--Covid. No one could. I didn't see the dress. I'd have loved to.

But what my guide through St. Lebre mission and school had told me was enough to make the trip up the road to Little Big Horn a different experience altogether. I'd just met two women who were very proud to say that their grandmothers were there just across the river, part of the largest encampment of Native people in years, if ever, June 25, 1876, just across the river from the hill where Custer and his men died.

And they're marked, the graves of the Northern Cheyenne warriors who fell that day, distinctly marked, like this one, off the road a way but signaled by a path distinguished by a light storm the night before.

Museums can be stingy about pictures. Maybe that's why it felt a little brash of me to be snapping away out there at Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument. But I was just about totally alone. Covid kept down tourism anyway, and it was the holiday season, when most people don't wander far from home anyway. 

I can't imagine a better time to be there--when no one else is and late afternoon, right after a gentle snowfall. The battlefield is a monumental place. You can see for miles in every direction.

But then, everywhere you look there are gravestones marking the places where men--white and red--died. You don't have to look hard or far. They're there.

As is the Native measure of grief and remembrance, sacred itself, so sacred that perhaps I shouldn't have taken this picture. 

At the visitor's center there's even a national cemetery.

The Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument holds that level of awe that makes silence the mode of communication. Trust me, you can be alone at Little Big Horn and still be surrounded by those who were not--Native-American and Euro-American, still be spoken to.

The visitor's center was closed, but you can listen to the whole story on your phone as you drive through. You can hear the whole story and you stop at the places where that story happened. 

But I couldn't help remember that just an hour before, when I told my mission guide where I was going, the first thing she told me was that her grandma was there--that's how important the place, the time, the event was to her. "Our grandmas were both there," she told me, somewhere beside a tipi across the river.

An immensely awesome place.

I may not have seen the blue dress in the visitor's center that day, but it was impossible not to see a great deal in the wide open valley of the Little Big Horn.

It's time to choose

Look. You got a choice. Either the Vice-President of the United States is right, or his boss is, the man we elected President in 2016. You've got only two options: did Donald Trump lose to Joe Biden last month, or was the election stolen by a hundreds of election officials in at least six states, who manipulated voters, votes, and ballots in a criminal conspiracy that included hundreds of lifelong Republicans. Either what Mike Pence said last night is the truth, or what Donald Trump said is the truth.

Either this nation's elected representatives are telling the truth, or else a shrinking minority who believe him are. Who do you believe?

A couple decades ago I served on a Christian broadcasting board. A wonderful broadcast preacher named Dr. Joel Nederhood, at more than one meeting, told board members to be sure to tell everyone that Madeline Murray O'Hare was not campaigning to rid America's airwaves of Christian programming, that no such suit is pending, that the FCC is not considering banning the proclamation of the gospel from the airways. "It makes Christians look like idiots," he told us, "because the FCC keeps getting bushels full of letters from people telling them something that has no validity at all."

If it wasn't true, why did Christians believe it? 

For the record, Madeline Murray O'Hare was not a pleasant person. She made herself titular head of the "American Atheists." It was Madeline Murray O'Hare who argued her son's victimization when discriminated against by mandatory school prayer. The court agreed. 

The whole story included Dr. James Dobson, who, it was said, claimed Ms. O'Hare was engineering the demise of Christian programming on radio and television. Dobson wasn't saying that. And neither was O'Hare. But thousands, even millions of Christians believed it. They were wrong, but they wouldn't believe it.

Why? I'm no psychologist, but good ones would likely say that the story somehow fit a fundamentalist Christian's moral profile: atheists, God-deniers, were most certainly the enemy. The atheists had already run prayer out of schools; now they were coming after TV preachers. That makes sense in the human mind because all of us really need enemies, some clear powers of darkness.  What did the Apostle Paul say in Ephesians 6? "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms." If Madeline Murray O'Hare wasn't among "the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms," who on earth was?

A campaign that had no basis and took years to peter out because the fear Ms. O'Hare created fit with perfect exactness into a pre-existing framework of faith that thousands or millions of believers already carried. In a way, they wanted to believe she was after them. They needed to believe it.

I saw four kinds of flags being flown by the gang who took over the nation's capitol yesterday. Hundreds of Trump flags were hoisted and carried along in the wind beside just as many stars-and-stripes. That was a patriotic mob. I saw at least one confederate flag, which wasn't surprising from such an all-white mob, and at least one huge Jesus banner. Trump's minions pray a ton, just like they wave the flag a ton.

Remember, more than any other single cultural group, white Protestant Christians ("white evangelicals") keep Trump in power. They're the ones who believe him. That mob yesterday was full of people who prayed, I'm sure, before they started marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. 

But that doesn't mean they're right. That doesn't mean the man who stokes them into his version of "American carnage" isn't flat-out lying.

There's only one man who can start the impossible work of trying to bring people together in this nation, and that man is Donald J. Trump, the man whose lies about election fraud instigated the whole mess. 

I'm not thinking he will any time soon. 

He may not be a criminal--that remains to be seen. But what's perfectly clear after yesterday's long speech before the mob that tried to take over the Capital, is that he's a bald-faced liar, just as he always was. Now more than ever, the man is dangerous.

His disciples have to ask themselves whether they believe Donald J. Trump or Mike Pence. It's that simple. That's the choice--and each one of us has to choose.

New Years Eve Rosebuds

 We'd started dating in January and had been married in June, a rush job, you might say, without the shotgun, both of us old enough and, well, passionate enough to know what it was we wanted. We were already married six months when we spent our very first New Years' Eve together.

And we were strangers in a strange land of cacti. I'd gone swimming on Christmas Day in the apartment complex pool just to say I'd gone swimming on Christmas, because in August we'd moved from Wisconsin to Arizona, where I had enrolled in grad school and my spouse took over a second-grade classroom. In truth, we hadn't established all that many friendships in the Valley of the Sun, so when a New Year's Eve invite came we said yes, our very first New Year's party as a couple.

 Some party. I was young, still a bit heady with rebellion against the piety of my youth, so I'm sure I had in mind some rip-snortin' bacchanalia, party hats and clear plastic glasses sloshing with the devil's brew. I'm sure I was thinking that sometime, late, my new wife, dreamy-eyed, would fall into my arms and the two of us, still newlyweds really, would engage in some memorable New Years Eve rollicking.

Ja, well, didn't happen. Oddly enough, that first New Years Eve we sat at a Formica-topped kitchen table I can still see in my mind almost 40 years later, the two of us quietly listening to our host lament a dismal marriage, a union that seemed to us destined to failure. It was just the three of us. Her husband was working, as I remember--out. The dreary story went on and on, an almost endless narration of neglect and unhappiness, nary a smile, partying the night away.

And thus began an honored tradition we've lugged along painfully for most all of our married life--undistinguished, eighth-rate New Years Eve partying. It might be difficult to find people as destined for a lousy time on New Years Eve as we are. Then again, maybe not. Maybe the whole bacchanalia thing is hype. I don't know that I've ever sung "Auld Lang Syne" with arms interlocked, friends or strangers. I don't know that I've ever had much to drink, for that matter.

For the record, our 48th was no whizz-bang either. In this season of Covid, my Calvinist conscience should have kept us home; but we strayed, went to a friend's house after pledging proper social distancing. A few glasses of wine, just a few, and some quiet conversation, some laughs beside a beautiful Christmas tree that was, just like the partiers, showing its age.

Maybe you've seen the video of Arizona Governor Doug Ducey's son partying away on New Years Eve, perfectly maskless in embarrassingly tight confines. Nothing like that. Between the four of us, the average age was maybe 74. Still, with the vaccines now on the horizon and the contagion finally slipping south, we pulled a totally Republican move for a foursome of Democrats. We went out. One other couple. We gambled. We did. We had a good time. Might even say, 48 years after that first disaster, "we deserved it." 

That was six days ago, so when the posts quit, you'll know why, my official confession. 

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. Sometimes.

The Literary Legacy of Ray Bradbury

Confession: I'm an elitist. Sometimes I wish it weren't true, but I'm not likely to change. I don't think I can. I'd like to think I had no choice in the matter, that the values I hold was foisted upon me by time and place. Somewhere along the line, I was taught to believe what I've come to value--that reading "realistic" literature was good for you, good for the soul.

I still believe that, and that belief makes me an elitist. 

Case in point--News of the World. I liked the novel a ton--you'll note I didn't say love. My feelings for the novel ran right up to the sweet edges of love. I admired it greatly, thought it wonderful, in fact. If I had any criticism, it was likely in the shape of the narrative--it was, perhaps, just a bit too sweet. Maybe. Just a bit. Not much either. Just a little. 

And maybe a bit too predictable. John Gardner used to say that the difference between great fiction and romance was razor-thin. For my tastes, News of the World didn't quite make it. Close, but no ringer.

I wouldn't have missed the movie for the world, but I got there early even though I knew I'd suffer because the previews--there were three--were all for upcoming action thrillers. You know--volume up high enough to make the floor shake, explosions about every four seconds, uninterrupted violence, not-to-be-believed car or boat or crotch rocket chases, a screen blown up with fireworks. 

Tom Hanks or no Tom Hanks, News of the World doesn't stand a chance in competition with action movies, just not enough gusto, not enough spectacle, not enough buildings destroyed. News of the World is going nowhere. Just not enough action.

All of which translates down to a conclusion I can't help but draw. I'm an elitist--and, more to the point, I'm an old elitist. 

The Los Angeles Review of Books offers some rescue work this week for someone like myself, a bit of an explanation of what I'm feeling--or at least a bit of an explanation of why I feel what I'm feeling.

An interview with Dana Gioia, the American poet and former Poet Laureate of the U. S. of A., Sam Weller talks about the place of Ray Bradbury in the story of American literature in the 20th century (you can read it here). Their contention is that Bradbury is an immensely important American writer because he wasn't an elitist. His work, they make clear, is terrific and greatly worthy of our attention, even though he is, this year, 100 years old. They claim his great achievement in writing was serving as a bridge between "literature"--and he produced it--and the masses. By using "genre literature" (i.e. fantasy, sci fi), Bradbury, a very serious writer, brought ordinary people into reading serious fiction. 

In 1972, I took a job teaching English at a brand new high school in Phoenix, Arizona, a school where the English classrooms had no walls. The reigning educational theory of the time was "open classroom," which meant class size should be immediately adjustable. "Open classroom" used "team teaching." 

My teammate couldn't have been more unlike a small-town Midwestern Dutch Calvinist like myself. She was Jewish, born and reared in New York City, a very, very strong teacher. "Team teaching" meant shared responsibilities in writing curriculum, and Helene was a sci fi buff who simply, by the power of her personality, wouldn't be denied. 

Helene insisted on a six-week curriculum of sci fi, including Bradbury's Illustrated Man and Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. She loved those novels--and others--and insisted the students would too. We were a team, Helene and me, and team members give in. I did, even though I didn't "love" the work. I thought they were lowbrow. I was an elitist. I believed in realism. 

But the students loved them, and maybe because they did, I learned to tolerate them, even to like them--especially The Illustrated Man. 

Truth be told, that whole experience didn't change me. I don't know that I've read another sci fi since, but I do remembering thinking Bradbury made teaching more fun than Thomas Hardy did. 

About halfway through this long interview, Gioia tells a terrific story about Bradbury, not so much about him but about his legacy. Bradbury was wheelchair bound, and getting him into a university classroom building required using a back door to get to a useable elevator. You should read it for yourself--you'll find it after Sam Weller's question, "Do you have a favorite memory or moment with Bradbury?" 

It's really worth your time. Take it from a repentant but hopeless elitist.

p. s. In the interest of truth, I need to say that my last collection of short stories--I'll be glad to send you one!--is titled Up the Hill: Folk Tales from the Grave. There isn't a real live human being in the book. They're all dead. 

Sigh.

With the herd at Broken Kettle

[For the record, I am listening to the angel on my right shoulder this morning, not the squire with the tail and tux and the wretched laugh on my left. He's the one saying, "Scorch Trump this morning for that perfectly damnable phone call he made Saturday to the Georgia Secretary of State." It was, but I won't. 

Nor will I lament, once more, the sorry truth about the Trump's defense, to wit, that the sole reason the man gets away with the 10,000 lies he spews is his evangelical base. There's where he plugs in his power. All those blessed Christians have, it seems, true faith in him. 

But I'm not saying that, not writing it. Like 300 million others, I've got to wean myself away from the drug that is Donald Trump. Georgia's Secretary of State didn't cave--not that it would make much difference because soon we'll have a different President.

So, on to the Loess Hills. Let me start again.]

They're Iowa's little mountains, even though we share them, however reluctantly, with Missouri. From a distance and for the first time, when you see them between Sioux City and Omaha, they're pure apparition, almost mirage. Out of place in the middle of the prairie, they're cute, the region's own sweet little mountains.

For 200 miles, the Loess Hills attend your trip south. They sit on the eastern horizon like a barrier, a dyke, a gorgeous supersized berm. In truth, they're formed and have their being by way of wind--yes, we have wind here. They're sand dunes, sans sand. "Loess," (pronounced "less") is just a fancy word for "loose" or "crumbly," words that describe the dirt that creates the hills. They're just plain darling--really, beautiful layers of loose dirt.

I know it's sexist, and my wife will kill me, but I'm going to say it anyway: the lines created by Loess Hills are fetchingly female.

And they start just here--and a bit south. Go west from LeMars to the Big Sioux, and you'll roll with them, up and down treeless stretches of open ground that will take your breath away. They're a rare and precious gift, ours to love and enjoy.

These folks are walking around in Broken Kettle Grassland, 6000 acres of Loess Hills just north and west of Sioux City.

There is no hiking path, no cement or boardwalk. When you hike in Broken Kettle, you're roughing it. And it behooves you to keep your head up because you're not alone.

The Nature Conservancy, bless their souls, keeps up a herd of 200 buffalo, which makes the task sound as if the managers are baby-sitting. They aren't. Broken Kettle's buffalo herd--there's no roller skating either, by the way--is on their own, except when they get too populace and some culling is required. Otherwise, all you can say is, "they're out there. . .somewhere."

On our way home on New Years Day, we drove around Broken Kettle, hoping to see them. For me, it's never happened. I believed they were out there; you'll find them plastered all over BK's website. But I'd never seen them, not with my own eyes. Six thousand acres of sometimes sharply rolling hills and hollows is one spacious playground.

But there they were.

No, we didn't get up close and personal, and yes, I took some of these pictures from safety of the car, even though there's a tall, sturdy fence between road and grassland. And, yes, I am blessed with a lens with a reach, so I can bring you at least a bit closer, close enough for you to see they are bison and not some rancher's rangy cattle. 

Close enough to see this guy wandering off by himself ostensibly to get even more peace and quiet. 

There they were.

You may need to be a little weird to get a thrill out of 200 buffalo at home in a spacious grassland. I mean, there's no Walmart anywhere close, no tobogganing (although I'm sure you could), no waterslide, no picnic tables, no curio shop, no Burger King. As far I know, you can't get a buffalo steak or even a hot dog anywhere close. 

I've long considered myself a Calvinist, but that doesn't stop me from saying that spotting a herd of buffalo, even a small one, in a spacious garden where they're totally on their own is, for me, a spiritual moment. Once there may have been 2000 here. Not that far away, from the top of Spirit Mound, Lewis and Clark spotted their very first endless herd. 

And there they were, happy in their own world, at dusk on New Years Day. My wife spotted them first. There they were. The first time I ever saw them at Broken Kettle. There they were.

A vision this Calvinist will gladly share.

Reading Mother Teresa--Treasure House

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.’” Matthew 25:34.

In Calcutta in the late 1940s, men and women and children were dying on the streets. Notice I said, “on” the streets, not “in” the streets. In some places and at some times, dying “in the streets” conjures images of insurrection, confrontation, and riotous civil strife. I meant to say what I did: in Calcutta, mid-century, men and women and children were dying on the streets – literally, on the streets.

They were human beings – men, women, and children – who were simply considered gone, those for whom the limited medical facilities had no room. They were dying, hopelessly alone, on the streets, corpses left at the side of the road.

Perhaps we should consider Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity the very first hospice nurses in India, maybe even Asia, maybe even the world. What she couldn’t help but see before her daily was not only death, but death without hope. Calcutta’s city government gave her a place for the dying, a place she called “Nirmal Hriday,” or “pure heart,” in celebration of “the blessed virgin”; and Nirmal Hriday soon became a hospice center, a place that offered the dying poor at least a bit of what we call today “death with dignity.”

Fifty years earlier, on the Navajo Reservation in the American southwest, Protestant missionaries from my own church found themselves besieged by death and dying. Traditionally, the Navajo people held the belief that the bodies of the dead were haunted by the evil spirits of death itself. Sometimes, if a death occurred in a hogan, the place would be burned. Navajos, traditionally, weren’t so much afraid of death as they were horrified by it.

So they would bring their dead and dying to traders and missionaries, Anglos who would, graciously, dispose of those haunted bodies. Today the cemetery behind what was once the Rehoboth mission complex is still laden with unmarked graves of thosefrom dead and dying once long ago delivered to the mission hospital.

I don’t doubt that taking up the burden of dealing frequently with the dead and dying, almost as if it were a service to the Navajo people, could be wearing and difficult, even expensive. But the missionaries did it. They took the role of peace-givers; and the case can be made, I believe, that had they not, they would never have secured the favor of the people they came to serve over the length andof breadth of the sprawling Navajo reservation

That blessed service – like Mother Teresa’s – may well have met with only limited success in “conversions,” in bringing the lost souls home to the Lord. After all, blessing the dying with comfort may well have less to do with what we call “evangelism,” than with simply giving away love. Nirmal Hriday, like those mission graves, is, or so it seems to me, what Matthew 25 is all about, the gift of love itself: when I was dying, you gave me a pillow.

Here’s the way Brian Kolodiejchuk describes it, in Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light: “[At Nirmal Hriday] she and her sisters would bring the dying off the streets and offer them accommodation, basic medical care and above all, tender love” (145).

Maybe I read Matthew 25 poorly, but it seems to me that what Christ offers us in the little story of sheep and goats, right and left, is nothing more and nothing less than tender love.

Agency stories for a new year

Maybe it was the little chapel she’d insisted on showing me, a place she thought any visit to the Northern Cheyenne mission wouldn’t be complete without a peek inside. I was tired and had miles to go, but her resolution kept me trotting along behind.

Many years ago, when the mission was run by the sisters, it was the convent chapel. The sisters are long gone, their motherhouse converted into a middle school. But the chapel remains. “You have to see it,” she told me. “Security,” her jacket said, and she was formidable. But sweet too.

The school enrolled both Northern Cheyenne and Crow kids; they live beside each other in Montana, old enemies actually. When I brought divisions up in the museum, she laughed. “Oh, all of that’s over now,” she said. “I married a Crow after all.”

In the little chapel it came up again, something about peace between the tribes these days, which prompted me to say, “That’s right—you married a Crow, didn’t you.”

“And divorced him too,” she said, right back at me. “That’s when I found out I was pregnant.” She stopped for a moment, as if doing some figuring. “That’s 18 years ago.” And then, “Seventeen years I been sober.”

The drinking thing came out of nowhere. “Oooh, tough?” I said.

She shook her head. “I just didn’t want to keep living like that.”

Other Native people have told me similar cold turkey stories. A Yankton woman, on oxygen, told me she loved her husband, the WWII vet whose story I wanted to know, a Brule Sioux who’d lost both legs above the knees in the winter cold at the Bulge. He’d been married before he spotted her. She was just a girl really, 12 years younger than he was. But that first marriage of his hadn’t work out, which is not to say he didn’t have drinking problems—bad drinking problems, she told me.

“Quit?” I said.

One day he was fixing a lawn mower. Right then and there, it ended—the drinking. He came into the house and told her he was done. End of story.

In the basement of an old church on the Navajo reservation, a middle-aged guy told me in such exacting detail how he’d rolled his truck years ago, I might have guessed it happened last week. “There I sat. I told myself right there there’d be more drinking.”

I looked at his wife. “And did you believe him?” I asked.

“No,” she said, as if the question was silly.

They’re all Natives, but I know others. A man who lives not far away told me about a binge on New Years Eve–ice box outside, snow’s whipping so hard it’ll take your face off. He flipped the van about a mile from his farm, walked home, lucky to be alive.

He woke up in the afternoon of New Years Day. His wife was standing at the back door, one child in her arms, another beside her, suitcases packed. “She couldn’t take it anymore,” he told me. He quit. Right then. Hadn’t had a drink since, he told me, his family all around, listening to his story, even the kids.

Our son called one night years ago to tell us he had a problem he’d determined he was going to end. He bought a pint of whiskey every night until the night before, when he’d bought a fifth, then told himself he didn’t want to be that man. He quit, went to AA for 100 days straight. When he got married, one of the men standing beside him was his sponsor.

I know more than a few stories of overpowering human will. I know very well that success stories can only be told in certain places at certain times, but I can’t help thinking that today, New Years, has certainly got to be one of those times.

Not in my lifetime have I sat down and written a list of New Years resolutions—it’s all silliness, I would have said. Besides, most often they’re a joke waiting for a punch line, aren’t they? “I’m going to lose forty pounds.” Okay, sure.

But even to Calvinists like me, human agency, human will, is nothing to sneeze at. That Northern Cheyenne security guard brought up her drinking–I wasn’t fishing. There we were in a tiny chapel for nuns long gone from the mission. “Seventeen years, I been sober,” she told me, looking me straight in the eye, proud as any warrior.

January 1 may be the best day to tell resolution stories, because we are always more than victims. If I sound too much like another Siouxlander, the Reverend Robert Schuller, forgive me; but nothing kills the human spirit more than despair, believing change can and will never happen, God helping us.

All of that last week from a little chapel the mission decided to keep even when the nuns were gone. All of that shining in the round and happy face of a mom who’s looking forward to her son’s high school graduation this May, that son she found out she was going to have just three months after she got sober.

Big smile. Big warm smile. Big warm, clean smile.

Happy New Year.

News of the World--my take

I came upon News of the World the old way, by reading the novel, which I liked very much, by the way, didn't quite love it, but liked it a heckuva lot. 

[It's only in theaters right now, so you've got to brave Covid. There were, I think, six of us there on Monday night, social distance wasn't a problem.)

It's a very simple story. In fact, most things about the story are simple. The devotion Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) pays to Johanna Leonberger (Helena Zengel), the child who's become his charge, is simple. He determines to bring her to her people, German immigrants somewhere near the the Texas Hill Country. No law makes him do that, no force is applied other than his conscience. He's not making a dime either. What pushes him is the sure knowledge that if he doesn't do it, no one will and the unspoken conviction that it's not just a good thing, but the right thing to do.

Despite her beach blonde hair, Johanna is a far cry more Native than she is German-American. Some years before, her parents were killed by the Kiowas who kept her, brought her up, and obviously took care to love her. She'd much prefer them to whatever awaits her at the end of a pilgrimage she neither chose nor, at least initially, desires--and knows nothing of. 

But what she slowly begins to understand--even though she speaks only Kiowa and then not much of that either--is that this odd old Civil War hero is no beast in a world where there is shortage of beasts, many of them in fact in the post-war Reconstruction era. Lawlessness on the frontier is the rule, which the movie and the book make clear from the very start. Johanna, who has no recollection of her former life, has no future worth living outside the protection of Captain Kidd. She's savvy enough to know it. 

News of the World is not complex. Through some very difficult times, the Captain brings his stoic, silent charge back to an uncle and aunt who are surprised she's alive, but are as heavy on the justice as they are short on the mercy. 

Spoiler Alert. When I say it's a simple story, I also mean to say it has few plot surprises. The Captain brings her to a home that really isn't a home and thus ends up with her, a kind of daughter, which is fitting for a man who lost a great deal in war that's just concluded. 

Let's not be shy here--News of the World is a Western, an old-fashioned Western with horses and wagons and Indians and outlaws. It's dusty and woebegone out there in the Texas no-man's land, where the man with the biggest guns wins. But it's a Western in today's cultural world: the Kiowa are a far better people than the white men, who are gravely addled by a long, bloody war they just lost.

When the two of them find their way into a camp of buffalo hunters, Johanna is distraught surrounded as she is by carcasses being stripped, by the wanton, bloody slaughter of an animal her Kiowa family taught her to respect. She is not just stunned, she's mortified, as if a statue of Mary was defiled. Quietly, in Kiowa, she sings her misery because her Native family has blessed Johanna with their ways. She's a wonder. Helena Zengel will likely never have another beautiful, starring role in which she says so very, very little. 

Tom Hanks is this Western's John Wayne, but the savages in News of the World are white men. And, truth be told, the Captain, who ranges through frontier Texas reading news from around the world, is a traveling national magazine who brings his own bit of culture to a world where what little there is is dispicable. He comes to bring peace to frontier towns, not a sword.

The weakness of the novel and the film is that it doesn't offer any surprise. All turns out for the best when the credits role. 

But I say, that's reason enough to walk through the turnstiles. 2020 was no winner. News of the World is. Goodness, truth, mercy, commitment, love--they're are the heart of the News of the World, a healthy bromide as a truly love-starved year--thank goodness!--fades into well-earned oblivion. 

Small Wonders--The story at Devil's Gulch

If the place sounds cliche-ish, you can't blame Garretson, SD, because--doggone it, not every Siouxland burg has a regular tourist trap built in. Seriously, Gerretson has a brand--Jesse James was there. He was. Not some lousy impersonator. The. Real. Jesse James. And there lies the tale.

"Devil's Gulch," someone called it long ago, like something out of John Wayne--"the dust that day in Devil's Gulch was thick as the fur on a buffalo hump." You know. 

But Garretson's not only got a star, they've also got a story, and the story's not moving any time soon. It'll be there tomorrow yet, if you've never checked it out, because it's carved treacherously into the landscape of the region; in this case, a 20-foot-wide gash in the gorgeous pink quartzite all around--Blue Mound, Palisades. It seems our hero, Jesse James, running from the biggest posse in American history, once took a look at Devil's Gulch, spurred his sweaty mount, and took a flying leap over that chasm and made it. Escaped to rob more banks and trains.

That's the mighty jump Gerritson celebrates. Go look for yourself--only a legend could make that leap, someone bigger than life. Maybe only Jesse James.

Can't help ask yourself, however, what the Sam Hell was Jesse James doing in Minnesota? It was the September, 1876. The Vikings were likely out of town, deer opener months away, and I'm guessing the walleyes weren't biting either.  

What drew him was a bank in Northfield, 500 miles north from his Missouri home. He and his brother, along the Youngers and a couple other bad boys, figured to knock off the Northfield Bank, split the loot, and high-tail it back south. Just that easy.

But why--why that far away? Why that far north? 

The answer is a better story than Devil's Gulch. Jesse wanted a piece of man with the namby-pamby name of Adelbert, Adelbert Ames, a Yankee Civil War hero, who'd left his home in the east and taken up residence in Northfield, where his father owned a mill. 

It would be difficult to line up two men as different as Jesse James and Adelbert Ames. Jesse was a criminal, even a murderer. Adelbert had served in his country in war and during that horrible time we call "Reconstruction." Adelbert Ames, the Yankee, served as Governor of the State of Louisiana. He was, by Southern standards, one of the most god-awful carpetbaggers of them all, trying to impose a Yankee justice on Rebs who'd just coughed up a surrender at Appomattox.

Adelbert won the war but lost just about ever battle thereafter. When Adelbert Ames left Louisiana, he stumbled back north, burned out mentally and emotionally because he'd taken on a task no one could have accomplished. With malice towards none, he'd defended the poor black folks of Louisiana against the KKK, who had a penchant for lynching. What he'd discovered in reconstruction years was that plain moral courage took a whipping from viscous brutality. What Adelbert Ames had in mind was a peculiar abolitionist mission: "to buckle on my armor anew," he said, "that I may better fight the battle of the poor and oppressed colored man."

And he'd lost. He'd lost big time. 

And Jesse knew all of that. He was well-read criminal. He wanted to take Adelbert Ames' money. It was that simple. To Jesse, Ames's money was worth a trip up north to Northfield. It wasn't just some ordinary bank heist. The whole deal, from conception on, was political. 

And it went bust, bloody bust. Jesse might have been well-read, but when he and gang came into town, they looked like absolutely no one else on the street. The story goes, the townspeople knew they were bank robbers long before they'd walked up to the bank--they looked like trouble. 

So when they hit the bank, it wasn't news, and what happened inside and out wasn't pretty. People were shot and people were killed. Even Governor Pillsbury weighed when he proclaimed a $5000 reward for the James gang members, dead or alive. 

That ticket created what may well have been the biggest posse in American history, and that posse was chasing Jesse James way down into a little town named Gerretson, where Jesse, on his horse, came up to a chasm named Devil's Gulch, turned around a few steps, then spurred that mount on to jump 20 feet and escape the crowd that was after him and the five grand that came with his scalp.

You can visit Devil's Gulch. You can judge for yourself whether any man and beast could ever make that mammoth leap. The jury is still out on whether or not the whole saga even happened. We create myths where we'd like to believe things true.

 There's a shop there, where you can read up 0n the story and buy a up or a pen or a Devil's Gulch t-shirt. 

But there's no mention of Adelbert Ames, and I think that's a crime. I know I'm speaking as a Yankee, but I can't help thinking Adelbert's the real hero here, not the thug, Jesse. Adelbert served his country in war and peace. Jesse blew a robbery, left blood over the streets of Northfield, and slithered back to Missouri, his gang pretty much destroyed. 

Who knows?--maybe he never leaped over Devil's Gulch. Maybe the whole thing is just another tall tale, right? 

Visit sometime. It's a heckuva leap. It is. Make your own guess.

But pick up a t-shirt because you'll want to remember the place. It just seems to me there's so much good stuff we've forgotten.

“lully, lulay, lully, lulay”

 

Coventry, England, a city of 250,00 in the West Midlands, boasted significant industrial power when the Europe went to war in 1940, industries Hitler wouldn’t and didn’t miss. When the Battle of Britain began, a specific Coventry blitz started immediately and didn’t end for three long months--198 tons of bombs killed 176 people and injured almost 700.

But the worst was yet to come. On November 14, 1940, 515 Nazi bombers unloaded, and left the city in ruins. Its own air defenses fired 67 hundred rounds, and brought down only one bomber. It was a rout.

At 8:00 that night, St. Michael’s, a fourteenth-century cathedral, was destroyed like so much else as a city turned to ruin.

In the skeletal hulk of that cathedral, the BBC recorded an ancient hymn that originated in Coventry in the 16th century, part of a series of morality plays. The BBC’s Christmas program that night was broadcast from the heart of Britain’s “darkest hour,” and perhaps because it was, from that day forward, people remembered that ancient hymn in great part because they couldn’t forget it.

Today, that hymn is called “The Coventry Carol,” and it’s unlikely any of you would find it unfamiliar. The story of that ancient hymn is told in a Christmas tale whose shuddering horror is easier not to remember. After the birth of Jesus, King Herod, determined to hold on to his own kingdom, ordered the execution of every living male child under two years old. To imagine the anguish that flowed down streets all through the region is impossible.

In the old Coventry morality plays, “The Coventry Carol” was sung by three Bethlehem women holding babies sentenced to die. Together, those mothers create a haunting melody of multiple vocal lines. If you’ve not brought the "Coventry Carol" together with its own incredible history, you’ll never listen again without hearing the horror of its setting.

Bruegel, Massacre of the Innocents

The event traditionally called “The Massacre of the Innocents,” is probably best not spoken of on Christmas Eve. It’s way too dark. That most of us sing “The Coventry Carol” right along with “Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town" may well be a blessing.

The “massacre of the innocents” shares the calendar with another historical massacre, this one a day’s travel west of here, a massacre on the open plains beside a creek with an strange name, Wounded Knee. That was exactly 127 years ago today, December 29, 1890.

For a year or more, Native people were gathering all over the West for a religious dance white men determined to be hostile, something called the Ghost Dance. Fear of and hate for Indians brought together the largest gathering of cavalry troops anywhere since the Civil War.

Exactly 130 years ago today, Big Foot, a Mineconjou chief from the Cheyenne River Reservation, known as a peacemaker, was leading his band south to the Red Cloud Agency, when they were stopped by troops from the Seventh Cavalry, who, a couple decades before, had taken a beating with Custer at the Little Big Horn. On a cold morning--this morning, December 29--in a bloody action that ran on for two agonizing hours, 300 men, women, and children, the Lakota say, were massacred in the last fight of what historians call “The Great Sioux Wars.”

To my ears at least, the haunting harmonies of “The Coventry Carol” could just as easily rise from the frozen prairies all around Wounded Knee, as do the lyrics of that ancient medieval lament. Musically at least, the carol’s spectral choral line—“lully, lulay, lully, lulay”--has nothing in common with the chorus of Lakota death songs sung that day on the plains.

But don’t be fooled. Despair speaks a universal language. The words of those Bethlehem women, “lully, lulay,” are, I'm told, an old English expression that long ago fell out of usage. Linguists say that chorus—“lully, lulay, lully, lulay”—repeats the agonizing testimony of those distraught Bethlehem moms: “I saw, I saw; I saw, I saw.” Who among the survivors would not have chanted something similar?

The Massacre of the Innocents may be folklore; some would argue so.

But Wounded Knee most certainly is not, and the determined lament of the old language holds true just the same, on the killing fields out west of here. “Lulay, lully.” I saw. I saw.

Although none of us may have been there, don't be mistaken--all of us were. 

Morning Thanks--Our Christmas

You can't help feeling sorry for Christmas (the holiday, I mean) because no matter what goes on, the day only rarely lives up to its billing. Same thing happens with The Fourth, although the July letdown doesn't end up at the bottom of the stairs, like it can at Christmas. The day itself never quite reaches the glory to which our imagination rises, hyped by a drum roll that begins on Black Friday when stores start playing "White Christmas."

This year, our church, like thousands of others, had a Blue Christmas service, which is, admittedly, appropriate, even if the very idea ratchets up anxieties. A thousand very good reasons exist for acknowledging the darkness all around; 2020 won't make a list of America's finest years. This morning, the NY Times reports 333 thousand Covid-19 deaths, unimaginable last New Years. The country is split like a ripe melon--make that over-ripe--by a soon-to-be ex-Pres who has not and will not concede an election that's two months old. Meanwhile, he flips his buddies out of jail by the carload, a mad, profane bully who stays in power because overwhelming numbers of evangelical Christians think he's a blessing. 

This year we did church by Facebook Live (again). It was fine, but. . .you know.  Someday, once again, the real thing.

Closer to home, we did just fine. Not without caution, we hosted our children and grandchildren, and the dinner ham was to-die-for--ate so much we forgot about pie. We opened presents downstairs because we bought a cheap tree this year and decided to park it in the basement instead of the beside the fireplace on the main floor. Like most everyone else, thanks to the virus, we really have no social life; so here it stands in the corner, all kinds of bald spots from old strings of lights half burned out--hey, it's an off year, right?

A good time was had by all--seriously good. Opened presents without flagrant fouls--my wife gave her son-in-law a big mug with, mistakenly, her own initial on it; her grandson and his grandpa picked out a Walmart pajama for his grandma without checking the size. Ja, well. . . Otherwise all went well. We played a board game--Clue. Barb won, even though she'd never played before. Christmas wonder. Christmas cheer. 'Twas a sweet, sweet holiday.

I missed a Christmas Eve service. Should have found one. Maybe next year, I tell myself again. That may be the cause of my slight case of the blues. On Christmas, Sunday School programs played prelude to opening presents--baseball gloves, and once-up0n-a-time a new 26" bike hidden awkwardly behind the couch on the west wall--complete, shocking surprise, and me in my pajamas and outside anyway a Wisconsin winter. No matter. What joy. What childhood joy.

Nothing will ever rank with a child's Christmas. And the distance between the then and now only serves to make the what is no more so grand and glorious. Of all our decorations, I like an ancient plastic candelabra best. We got it from an aunt's estate. I'm amazed we can still replace bulbs. It's right beside me in the window. Something in it reminds me of my own childhood. And, I suppose, no much compares with candlelit Christmas childhood memories. 

Don't be mistaken. I'm greatly, abundantly, and blessedly thankful this morning for a wonderful family Christmas. Did I mention the ham? Wow.

It was a joy, all of it, Christmas joy. 

 

Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord,

 and he will reward them for what they have done. 

Proverbs 19:17

By nature I suppose, I’m not someone given to making blanket generalizations. Life, to me at least, is too complicated, too many-cornered, too rife with paradox, seeming contradictions that in reality simply are not.

No matter. Here’s one I dare make – every Christian believer understands the absolute importance of taking care of the poor, the voiceless, the powerless. Love is the great commandment, and that love is expressed most clearly in giving one’s life for others. We all know that. No one can read the gospels – no one can read the Bible itself – and not know that Christ’s teaching about the powerless is ever at the heart of things.

But here’s the rub. How? – that’s where the difficulty arises. Enter politics.

Tonight, two Presidential candidates, both of whom confess Jesus, will spar for 90 minutes on just that question. No one expects much agreement.

On February 16, 1949, Mother Theresa wrote this entry, redolent with character, in her diary.

I went to meet the landlord of 46 Park Circus. The man never turned up. I am afraid I liked the place too much – and our Lord just wants me to be a “Free Nun”, covered with the poverty of the Cross. But today I learned a good lesson – the poverty of the poor must be often so hard for them. When I went round looking for a home, I walked and walked till my legs and arms ached. I thought how they must also ache in body and soul looking for home, food, help. Then the temptation grew strong. The palace buildings of the Loreto came rushing into my mind. All the beautiful things and comforts – in a word, everything. “You have only to say a word and all that will be yours again,” the tempter kept saying. Of free choice, My God, and out of love for you, I desire to remain and do whatever be Your Holy Will in my regard. I did not let a single tear come, even if I suffer more than now. I still want to do your Holy Will. This is the dark night of the birth of our Society. My God give me courage now, this moment, to persevere in following your Will. {47}

That entry is not short on theological perception; after all, the tempter himself makes a skulking appearance. But what I find remarkable is MT’s willingness to associate her own fears and anger that day with the perceived experience of those who daily suffer from the dishonor of broken promises, empty cupboards, and leaky roofs. Her own personal distress that day actually led her into considering anew the distress of others, those less fortunate. Instead of gathering her own spite into a fist, she reaches out for others, sees them more clearly in her own distress.

It’s a gorgeous little story, really, a story she didn’t mean to tell us, a story she simply recorded has her personal testimony after a very trying day.

Still, without a doubt, what happened that morning brought her closer to the poor and the destitute, the people she wanted to serve. Her empathy, amply demonstrated here, was the starting point for her mission, as it should be for all of ours.

 Blessings 

for a sweet and wonderful Christmas 

and a wonderful holiday season 

for all of my blogger friends!!

The Algona Nativity

I only wish it was closer. If it were, this year I'd take my whole family to see the Algona Nativity, the POW museum too, because it's fascinating, but especially the Nativity. Last year I went alone a couple of weeks before the Christmas rush so my tour was richly personal--just me and a gentleman who could not have the loved Algona's own story more. The visit was worth every minute of the trip, but my personal guide made the Nativity sing.

I could reprint what I wrote last year, but why not just listen in to the telling I gave it on KWIT.

But this year let me add just one more little story. That wonderful docent told me that once upon a time he'd taken an old preacher through, a Grandpa who brought a couple granddaughters with him, neither of whom were as taken by the whole business as Grandpa was or would have liked. They were getting giddy. Kids do. 

He said through all the tours he'd given, he'd devised a trick that sometimes worked, so he told the little girls to count sheep--there are 33. That ploy would buy Grandpa Preacher some time and maybe quell the uprising. The kids bought the plan, went in, spent the kind of time he'd hoped it would require, and came out bright-eyed.

"There's 34," one of them said. They'd done a good job, but they were wrong.

He says he wasn't hyper-critical about it, but he knew very well that those POWs had created 33 sheep. "Nope," he said, "you're wrong. I know. Let's go count them again." So the whole bunch went back into the scene, and he deliberately pointed them all out, counting as he went along. "So, there's 33," he told them.

And then, as he's telling me this, he started to tear up. 

"And you know," he told me his voice breaking just a bit, "one of those little girls looked up at me and said, 'We counted the baby Jesus too--he's the lamb of God."

I couldn't help wondering how many times he'd told that story while taking visitors through, but that little girl's wisdom still brought tears. 

That's a story I didn't tell last year, a story I've not forgotten.

Enjoy. https://www.kwit.org/post/algona-nativity 

The Devil's Tower

Look, if anything in the vast Powder River neighborhood merits the word "monumental," it's the mile-high monolith that rises out of nowhere, Devils Tower, who long ago, it seems, shook off the apostrophe that was meant to indicate ownership. With or without punctuation, this huge protuberance deserves the title. When you come up on it early, and the thing is perfectly dark even in a background of glowing morning sky, that this thing belongs to the Devil seems wholly legit.

Get this: no geologist knows for sure how it got here. Theories exist, and you can study them, perfectly reasonable theories. But no one knows. Look at this thing. It's mammoth, from miles away it looms up, bold, fist-like, scary. Honestly, scary.

Didn't help that snow fell the night before, so reaching the behemoth could only happen on isolated, winding roads, so empty that early morning that I felt tempted to stop the one or two pickups I met to say hello. That someone way back when called it "Devils Tower" (even without the apostrophe) makes perfect sense, even though the monument didn't push me to recite the opening lines of Macbeth.

That it is America's very first National Monument (designated so by Teddy Roosevelt, the patron saint of America's Western heritage parks) isn't surprising because no matter how you get there, Devils Tower is no small potatoes. You don't look past it. You can't. It was, long before T. R., a lower-case national monument like none other. Teddy just baptized it into the fellowship he was creating.

The truth? When I got up closer, I breathed more easily somehow. The area was lighter, but there was no sun. Some prairie, some fallen trees, and the beast seemed somehow less fearful.

I was worried about not seeing it in sunlight, so when I got to the gate, I asked the ranger when it would catch some, assuming that I'd been hanging around the wrong side. "Oh, I'm sure it'll get sunny out here sometime," he said.

A quarter mile up the road, I suddenly had the sense he must have thought the only customer he'd seen was some old fool.

It was still early and I didn't have time, but I tried to compose some things--but without a sun even good shots just don't pop. I kept going to the end of the road, where there was no one around and nothing open. Even the beast itself gets lost when you're in the woods beneath. So I just as slowly crept back down the icy road. The sky was blue, but from my angle, Devils tower was bedeviled by darkness. Simply didn't want to be captured.

So I left, my GPS steering me away. Devils Tower was huge and it was stirring, but it insisted on the livery of shade I wanted badly doffed.

When I was a kid, maybe ten years old, my family tented across America. I had no clue of what Devils Tower was, but when we stopped, my memory of that event is itself shrouded in fear, probably because that blessed Schaap piety made the name of the place alone strike fear. Even my parents had trouble saying, "the Devil's Tower" because the Devil was real. That I didn't know why people talked like that likely only increased the evil all around.

That was sixty years ago. Devil's Tower hasn't changed, but I'm a good deal less pious. So down the road a ways I went, that massive magma statue in my rear view mirror. The icy road demanded my attention, but when I glanced back for a moment, voila!



And I pulled over.

In a full bath of pure western sunshine, this massive thing simply seemed both far less demonic and far more magnificent. Finally, in my soul, the sun redeemed the thing. It was not only huge but gorgeous.

But nobody knows exactly how it got here. Isn't that wonderful?