Booty

This story is closing in on forty years old--well, older if we're talking prototypes, because this one, most certainly, has a prototype: I lost my dad's Japanese bayonet, booty from his war-time experience, when, without asking, I took it from the closet upstairs and brought it along on our trapline--I was a seventh grader. 

Lost it. Absolutely lost it in the river on a trap line. 

A friend read this story all those years ago and said he wondered if I wasn't really flirting with a novel here. I'd written a novel just for kicks, the summer before we moved back to Iowa from Arizona, at a time when I knew nothing about writing a novel. When I finished it, I shut that cover and haven't looked at that manuscript again since--55 years ago. My novel Home Free was my doctoral dissertation.

Sometime in that time period, I thought I'd try a novel again, more teaching, more years, and more graduate education, some in fiction writing, now behind me.

So between 1982 and 1985, I started into a project that would, years later, become Romey's Place, where, somewhere close to the beginning of the story, you can find a variation on the story "Booty."

Is it true? --what happens? Yes. . .and no. 

~   *   ~   *   ~

My father has lived his entire life in the way that Switzerland exists, unmoved by conflict swarming all around. But he is not neutral, nor has he ever been. He is adamantly, passionately Christian, and I am convinced his strength derives from a faith that rides the wings of angel warriors sent him by the God he has always sought to serve.

Years ago, he spent his thirtieth birthday hostage to a mob of union workers who laid siege to the foundry where he worked as a bookkeeper. He never resented those strikers or their actions. At church back then, he sat in the same pew and prayed with the men who stopped pouring the white-hot, liquid iron, and, with threats of violence, locked him up with management for five days. When the rest of the town I grew up in went to war at the factory at its center, he turned out plowshares in the church he led for as long as I can remember.

When I was a boy my mother died, an emaciated victim of the MS that shriveled her slowly, year after painful year. There must have been times when my father cried out to God in his pain, but I never saw a fragment of doubt or anger, never heard a raised voice. The image of my father I remember as a boy is a man with his hands in dishwater, a towel thrown over his shoulder, while he hums along with whatever comes over the Moody station. He served his three children as both mother and father and never complained; he scolded us only with the unswerving force of his own righteousness. In my entire lifetime he never laid a hand on me.

Now he is retired, and he reads a lot--mostly things about faith,­ books, magazines, Bible commentaries. I don't remember him reading much when I was a boy because he was running the village, the school board, and the church. The fathers who get headlines today tie their children up to bedposts and pour scalding coffee over their boy's genitals, but sometimes I wonder if the legacy of my father's abiding sense of justice, his commitment, his own long-suffering grace aren't themselves a kind of punishment to his children, who grew up in that shadow, as dependent on him as eglets nested on some mountain precipice, pro­tected and shadowed--but daunted--by the broad wing-span of his love.

For many years I haven't been to church. He knows it, but he doesn't ask about it, and he doesn't attempt to punish me with his disappoint­ment or fear. I stopped attending church in college already, but in my years as a lawyer I've come to appreciate the way religion, especially Christianity, creates and solidifies personal morality, as it did in my father. Like him, I live well, I think. Unlike him, I feel no need of a transcendent God.

He asked me once if I had found a suitable church, but that was years ago. He does not appear anxious, but I know he prays for me. His faith has laid out a road map of life, I think, a pattern of paths he thinks drawn by none other than God Almighty. I envy that trust.

Last Saturday, at the beginning of an early fall snowstorm, my father and I sifted through the assortment of family treasures in the upstairs closets of our family home. He is moving to an apartment now, so we sat, the two of us, at the top of the stairs, and when I glanced out the back window I saw the river that runs behind my childhood home, its banks grassy and gray from sodden afternoon skies. The storm was forecast already three days before, when the temperatures were still in the sixties; but I drove the hundred miles east to help him out, and when I saw the river again from the top of the stairs and sensed the snow in the air, I remembered trapping it, years ago, a couple miles west. What unearthed the memories was the river, and the closet, the top of the stairs, and an old Japanese bayonet that wasn't there, as it should have been.

_______________

Tomorrow: the childhood story returns.

Reading Mother Teresa--A terrible longing

Do not be anxious about anything, 

but in every situation, by prayer and petition, 

with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 

And the peace of God, 

which transcends all understanding, 

will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. 

Philippians 4:6–7

Reading Jamie Quatro puts a reader like me in an extremely unfamiliar place, smack dab in the middle of the torture a woman, a young woman, knows when she determines that her affair with a man other than her husband cannot – simply cannot – continue. Despite her absolute certainty, her heartfelt conviction that it must end, his sudden absence from her life is a loss as traumatic as death itself – or so Ms. Quatro claims. Figuratively, in that woman’s mind, her heart, and in her body, the other man must die to save her marriage.

One of the highly imaginative stories from Ms. Quatro’s first collection, I Want to Show You More, – starkly places that “other man,” dead, his body decomposing, in the adulteress’s own marriage bed, her husband beside them both. It’s a striking image, a mark of her creative strengths as a writer.

What animates the story is the narrator’s “terrible longing,” terrible meaning, something so awful it’s painful. And yet, what she feels is longing. The phrase is an oxymoron, two mutually contradictory terms juxtaposed as if they’re not mutually contradictory. Some oxymorons get used so often that, they’rve morphed into cliché: sweet sorrow and living dead. But all of them are rooted in paradox, and paradox – or so it seems to me – lies forever at the heart of human experience in part because it’s so undeniably human to, for instance, want what we don’t want.

The torture that results from such inhuman humanness is the stuff of story, even of legend. Listen to Romeo:

“O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!”

Words go to war in an oxymoron, a madness that still somehow makes sense.

And, self-confessedly, it’s at the heart of Mother Theresa’s darkness. Accolades were arising from around the world, her sisterhood was being lauded for its selflessness, the poor on the streets of Calcutta were being loved, daily, but the longing that lay deepest within the heart and soul of Mother Theresa was, for years, unmet.

“My feelings are so treacherous,” she wrote to her bishop, “I feel like ‘refusing God’ and yet, the biggest and the hardest to bear – is this terrible longing for God” (245).

She had no way of understanding the darkness she found in her own soul, a darkness created by Jesus’s own absence; and the result was a “terrible longing,” all-consuming need, passion unsatisfied. What she wanted so badly, she seemed incapable of receiving – the love of Jesus, his words, his comfort. Her love was unrequited. In her heart, Jesus Christ had walked away from his bride, sentencing her to years of this torture, this terrible longing.

Confessions like this were so few and so limited – only to her superiors, and then only to some – that it’s helpful to remember that not once did this Sister of Charity stop working, not once did she falter in what she gave to the poor, not once did her witness on the killing streets of Calcutta flounder. She well may have felt Christ’s absence in her soul, but she never faltered in carrying out what, long ago, Christ had demanded of her.

She may have had “treacherous” feelings, may have had days, even weeks, when she considered simply “refusing God”; but she never did, even though, by our standards, she almost certainly had cause.

Mother Teresa is, via the exacting standards of the Roman Catholic Church, a saint. She gave her life in dedication to the plight of the poor in ghettos of unimaginable suffering. She deliberately chose to live with the poor amid their poverty and even squalor. She took on their suffering, and hers is a life of shining witness.

But when we consider this terrible longing of hers for a lover she believed, with all her heart, had left her, and when we remember that her devotion to God almighty and the least of these his children never flagged, then there is another reason to celebrate this mighty little woman – pure and simple, the enormity of her faith.

A little shameless huckstering

The background--well, even the foreground--you may recognize by its uniqueness. It's the Badlands National Park, a place I love to visit. The Badlands is not an unlikely place for meditations because, more so than a lot of settings, the Badlands are so unique--"what happened here anyway?" people ask when they see the place for the first time--that first-timers especially, generally don't say much. Even frequent visitors like me--and this guy--get awestruck, a healthy emotional state for meditation.

But Psalm 104, I keep saying, is a waterpark of a poem. Many consider it yet another version of the Bible's creation stories. Water is at a premium in the Badlands, rivers and lakes and oceans are a world away, it seems. But I thought I'd put them together and see if they didn't grow something thoughtful and inspiring.

If you frequent the Basement, you might have already have realized that there's even more personal things here as of late. Yesterday's post about the Cuban Missile Crisis is a haunting memory I'd never really explored before. If you choose to stay with me next week, you'll read a fictional story that outlines one of the most difficult childhood memories (I had a wonderful childhood!) that I have--losing my dad's war booty. 

I don't know that I'm fit as a fiddle, and I'm not sure that I'm turning out music that's better or worse as what's left behind, but I am gathering my things because I've kept up this blog for more than 15 years. In that time, there's far more content than anybody will ever both to read or view. So, not long ago, I made a photography book that featured photography from Siouxland, where I've lived for most of my life. I'm slowly piecing together a memoir from posts that explore the effects of all kinds of experiences in my life. I'd like to do a book of Small Wonders--the stories that are broadcast on KWIT, an affiliate of National Public Radio. There's more. 

But then I remember the Bible too, that line about ". . .of the making of books there is no end." I'm not trying to sell a ton, just making them so that someday, maybe, some great-grandchild may share with me a fascination with the past. I really do wish I knew more about all of my great-grandparents--two pairs of them lost three children in the early years of the 19th century. I'd love to ask them about how they made the transition--old country to new. 

So, here's the latest. I don't even have the copies yet, but they're coming. Morning Thanks--Reading Psalm 104 amid the Badlands, a 90-page book of photographs from the Badlands and meds from that gorgeous life-affirming psalm. An odd couple, I know. But when you're doing your own thing, you can spin in any way, shape, or form that seems becoming. And, like I said, in the Badlands, wherever you look is awe.

They're smaller than the first one, hence cheaper. This one will go for $35, plus postage. I'm sorry they're so expensive, but they just are.

If you're interested, in one way or another, let me know. They're coming soon.

Meanwhile, we're off to Oklahoma for a very special FIRST birthday. 

One day older

Eisenhower, reportedly, didn't like it much. He may have been okay with the development of the U-2, but he didn't like what was really intended as a spyplane project of the Central Intelligence Agency to be piloted by his own Air Force personnel. He lost that argument. So it was the U. S. military who operated the Lockheed U-2, an ultra-light, single passenger, high-altitude jet created to do nothing other than intelligence work.

The one that went down in 1960 created an international incident in the Cold War, when Nikita Khrushchev, the rotund powerhouse Soviet Premiere, told the world the Russians had shot one down as it was nosing around, an "aggressive act," he called it, then put Francis Gary Powers, who had parachuted to safety, on a show trial and tucked him away in a Soviet prison.

It was harrowing--the Cold War itself was harrowing--but an event even more scary occurred when yet another U-2 took photographs of Fidel Castro's Cuba, photographs that when examined showed unmistakably clear pictures of Soviet missile sites on an island only 90 miles from Florida.

It was October, 1962, and a friend of mine was in the belly of a troop ship just off the Cuban coast along with hundreds of his buddies, the U.S. Marines, were poised to make a beachhead.

On October 22nd, President John F. Kennedy, who would be assassinated little more than a year later, announced to the American people that he would send those Marines ashore to neutralize those missile sites if Khrushchev didn't act to remove the threat from Castro's Cuba.

It seems that Kennedy never questioned whether America could live with long-range Soviet missiles in Cuba. Khrushchev and Castro had put them there after a haywire invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The President was adamant that the missiles had to go and sought to get them gone in two steps: first, by creating a naval quarantine or blockade around the island to prevent Soviet ships from bringing more or even landing with supplies; second, by demanding their removal by way of an ultimatum.

When Soviet ships approached, they met the American forces. That moment, as I remember, was really scary. We stood at the brink of war--I did, we all did. I was 15.




That Soviet ships didn't get into Cuban ports was only the first step in Kennedy's plan. The second, the removal of those missiles, began when Krushchev and Kennedy were able to negotiate their way out of what looked like the first days of a Third World War. Russia would remove the missiles if the U.S. promised not to invade or attempt invasion again.

The nation entirely shut down when Kennedy was shot a year later in Dallas. That entire weekend everyone I knew sat glued to the television, watching every last segment of a story that when announced in the high school I attended--and, yes, I remember which room, and even the speaker up on the wall above the teacher's desk--seemed impossible.

Strange as it seems, my searing memories of the Cuban missile crisis stay with me more boldly because on October 23rd, I was walking around on an empty high school football field with another kid. There was no football practice that day. The world was frozen in time and space. Nothing mattered but what was happening just beyond our borders in Cuba. Nothing. We were a step away from nuclear destruction.

And I knew it. I remember just walking around aimlessly on that empty field, talking about lives the two of us might have liked to live, not as if our losing a war was imminent, but as if what we were about to experience would be unlike anything we could have imagined, even though, earnestly, we tried. There appeared to be no tomorrow. Later, Robert McNamara, U. S. Secretary of Defense, told a reporter that he believed that Saturday would be the last one he'd ever see. That level of doom was in me too. I was just a kid, couldn't even drive.

As I remember, I didn't cry about it. I don't remember even talking about it with my parents, although I can't imagine that we didn't. They would have spoken about it in religious terms, I'm sure, assuring me that we Christians always know there will be a heavenly tomorrow. None of that has fought for a place in my memory.

What remains is a video of two kids walking around on a football field with the clear perception that something, even here in small-town Wisconsin, would never be the same. Every little thing we'd ever dreamed was off the map.

That October, I grew up, more than a little. Seems to me that one grows up a thousand times in a single lifetime, but something profound happened in a quiet and dead serious conversation that isn't even recorded in my memory. Something happened no one could have noticed if they spotted two kids walking around an empty football field. I had to consider the very real possibility that everything in my 15-year-old world could be over if some way couldn't be found to avoid the end of things.

That friend of mine who spent those hours in the belly of a ship just off Havana harbor felt it too, I'm sure. He remembers it vividly. There he sat, surrounded by buddies, a ship full of Marines ready to take the harbor.

I might well have been among them that day, even though I was a thousand miles away. We both saw what we didn't know how to imagine. Not once in my life thereafter was the nation--was I--so clearly poised at the grave. I got older that day--much, much older.

So much I don't know

I hope my wife disagrees, but I'm not about to ask her, even though thirty-plus years have run by. The truth of the matter is that the moment that I felt myself among the Absolute Worst Husbands was when I should have felt the greatest glory--at the birth of my children. Well, let me edit that line a bit: at the moment my wife gave birth to our children. 

Some husbands stand by with cameras to record every savory moment. At times in my life I have been regaled by tales of heartwarming spousal piety--how meaningful it was for Jake or Ed or Kyle to experience those birthing moments with their wives. 

Okay. I wish it warn't so, but it warn't that way for me. I'm a Calvinist, for pity sake; I know the bite of guilt. What I'm saying is that I probably never, ever felt so useless as when I stood there, holding my wife's hand.

We'd lugged pillows to countless classes where earth mothers reviewed all the glorious anatomical details of the birth process, details I tried to tell myself I really wanted to know. I do know what I supposed to feel; but truthfully, I didn't.  While my wife was in the throes of pain I'll never feel, the doctor who sat at the receiving end at my son's birth talked about having read something I'd written in a church paper, expressed at least a bit of his disapproval, in fact. Seriously, that happened.

But the moment those pink bundles arrived and arrived in tact, we both experienced miraculous recovery. A novelist friend of mine once said he thought the finest way to finish a novel had to be birth because absolutely nothing else we'll ever experience is so affirming as birth, as bringing forth new life. Sometime pick up a copy of Touches the Sky, and you'll see I, once upon a time, took his advice to heart.

Even though I felt as useless as I did, it's fair to say that watching my wife take those babies in her arms just a few moments after those births has to rank among the most beautiful portraits I have in a treasured album that exists only in my memory. (That we have no video doesn't mean we own no unforgettable images.)

That kind of joy was something I was surprised not to find on this young mother's face. She'd just borne her first child--we arrived a short time after her delivery. The baby looked healthy and was, or so said the midwife, a tiny bundle of life wrapped up in a blanket, almost Christ-like for some reason. But, this mom's face, her whole countenance (to use an old word), seemed joyless.

I wouldn't call her sad really, and there's no real fear or any anger whatsoever. What's on her face seemed, right then, roughly akin to boredom, as if what she'd been through meant no more to her, perhaps, than spreading clean clothing out to dry on the matted roof of her hut.

Not that life was drudgery--that's not what I saw on her face and still do when I see this picture. What I saw was a kind of passive acceptance of what had just happened, at a moment when one might expect at least a sparkle of, well, ecstacy. She'd just had a baby, a son, and that sweetheart was healthy and strong, and it was her first.

Instead, she looked as if what she'd just gone through--how can I say this best?--really didn't amount to much at all.

And maybe by her estimation it didn't. Maybe in her world, having children is less a joy than obligation, Who knows?--perhaps she had no reason not to expect another dozen such episodes in her life, some of them less successful. When she'd go back to her village, there'd likely be no balloons, no streamers hanging from the ceiling of the hut, no cake, no cards, no hugs. The father hadn't even come with her to the clinic. Perhaps whatever gratification she could take from having just given birth to her baby was the simple fact that she'd done her duty. It's entirely possible she could have been one of his several wives.

Some who know far more than I do claim that animism, the old religion of many in rural west Africa, creates iron-clad passivity by teaching adherents that one's life is blessed or cursed, willy-nilly, by strong spirits so vastly beyond our control that believing in human choice is nothing less than silly. 

Then again, maybe this young, young mom is just plain worn out. She's just a kid, and she just had a baby.

My wife witnessed a birth at another rural clinic in another African country, and was immensely thankful for the experience. But she said she was surprised that the mother didn't seem more excited at what had just happened, more pleased, more thrilled.

Some things one witnesses in other worlds, in other cultures, are almost immediately translatable on the basis of our mutual humanness--women laughing together around the village well some mornings. There is no common village well in Alton, Iowa, but their laughing and spoofing?--I think one could see that happen anywhere in countless coffee shops.  A half-dozen guys sit around a tiny fire heating tea; I don't have to have an ear for their language to translate their joshing around.

But there are other images whose mystery is beguiling, and this is one I have in my camera roll--the taciturn face of a very young and beautiful mom holding her very first baby; and the passivity, the seeming joylessness that seems so clearly written all over her. What is on her face and isn't is so far from white, Western, middle-class birth experience that this grandpa simply can't read what it is and why it's there.

I don't know how to understand it, how to translate it.  I wish I did. I'd like to know.

Glacial Erratics

It's hard to estimate, given Covid, but it wouldn't be much of a risk to guess that this summer more than three million visitors to Yellowstone National Park will stop by this behomoth. It's not as great a favorite as Old Faithful, but this mighty thing sits in state like a great big gray relic between the trees, as if, like Gulliver, imprisoned by matchsticks. Yellowstone calls it a Glacial Boulder. It's huge, and it shall not be moved, nor has it since it got washed along--that's right, washed along--by some receding glacier, impossible as that is to imagine.

They're everywhere really. Yellowstone is full of the big guy's cousins. Down the road you'll find a field full of detritus, scattered around willy-nilly like a handful of glacial gravel. They could be moved, should someone want to rearrange furniture, but in all no one is going to pick up this mess without a dozen sticks of dynamite.

The glacier that left these mammoth stone is so long gone that its memory is preserved, for the most part, only by all this litter. Seriously, when you consider the mess you can't help think what kind of a lousy citizens glaciers turned out to be--no mind to clean up after, no mind at all, as if littering wasn't a sin but a joy.

The most celebrated glacial litter in the neighborhood belongs to Cherokee, where Pilot Rock, a quartzite monster so huge that once upon a time it pointed clear directions for aboriginal peoples, as well as a few pioneers who wandered out by way of the Little Sioux. It's just about impossible to imagine a 20-feet high, 40-feet wide mountain, 60-feet long--floating along anywhere, but that's what happened. An ocean swept Pilot Rock south and east from its moorings on the outcropping of Gitche Manitou or Pipestone, picked it up and left it behind.

An ocean here in northwest Iowa? Hard to believe. Impossible to believe. And I might just choose not to if it weren't for Pilot Rock.

Or a less hefty bit of glacial trash, a big fat hunk of granite along the trail to the top of Spirit Mound. There it sits, just off the path, as if someone simply rolled it away, which no one did. It's nothing like Yellowstone's or Cherokee's but its just plain weird to stumble on this brute in the middle of nothing but tall-grass prairie.

It just shouldn't be there, but go ahead and try to clean up.

We've likely all got 'em somewhere, so old a part of the prairie landscape that half the time we don't even notice they're there in places they've been for so long no one--nor no one's ancestry--remembers (or could) when they weren't here.

We've got one south of town, sitting out on a promontory into the south pond, dug there to get dirt for Highway 60 just north. The conservation board keeps a great trail all the way around the pond, but if you care to get to the water, this huge quartzite sofa is welcoming, although hardly comfy.



You just can't help but love the name, can you?--"glacial erratics" because they're so much unlike their surroundings. They're outsiders, outliers. They don't fit in but don't seem to be bothered in the least by their own uniqueness. 

They take their name from Latin errara, which means to wander. Go ahead and laugh. To call these boulders--even the baby one on Spirit Mound--a "wanderer" is a heckuva stretch because today they shall not be moved.

The English poet Wordsworth, as far as I know, was never anywhere close to Siouxland, but that doesn't mean he didn't have something to say about glacial erratics. Listen:

As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence;
Wonder to all who do the same espy,
By what means it could thither come and whence;
So that it seems a thing endued with sese:
Like a Sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.

That's a grand thought, isn't it? For thousands of years now, even millions, the wandering days of these brutes have been over. They're retired. Today, they're reposing, catching some rays. Next time you run through Cherokee, stop by at Pilot Rock. It'll be there. Hasn't much to do anymore, but rest.

You got to love 'em. The only word these heavyweight itinerant preachers have offered in hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, right here in the neighborhood--and in silence--is the blessed gospel of rest. 

An Easter blessing

He says he was born in what we now call, without prejudice, "the black church," a fellowship where Easter Sunday meant best of the "Sunday best," every last worshipper outfitted in whatever regalia they could pull together from the closet. Even though Easter never quite reached the soaring blessing-level of Christmas on the list of church holidays, it was, he says, a time for joy--and show.

In last Friday's New York Times, Esau McCaulley, who teaches history at Wheaton College, took readers, giggling, through boyhood memories, only to stop some believers cold in our Easter bonnets (believers like me), with the startling reminder that the women who went to the tomb that day weren't carrying trumpets or palm branches or singing the Hallelujah Chorus. They went off to the tomb to grieve not cheer.

The Bible is far stranger book than most of those who honor it want to believe--and it's big, it contains a cosmos. From the first day of creation to John's technicolor dreams, it's a superstore of stories and ideas, some of which get easily lost or simply left behind. In my life, I've written more devotionals, I'd guess, than your average Christian Joe, but Esau McCaulley, in the New York Times (of all places) showed me something yesterday I'd never really considered before, and that is this: the gospel of Mark ends very strangely. It concludes with a resurrection that doesn't send the disciples out canvassing but, he says, they leave instead in fear:

8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Last line. End of story. 

McCaulley says it's scary for them and for us to think of Jesus as resurrected from the dead because if that's true, then, as the Misfit says in Flannery O'Conner's "A Good Man. . ." if He did, it changes "everythaang." Absolutely nothing is the same as it was just a startling three days before. 

"Mark’s ending points to a truth that often gets lost in the celebration: Easter is a frightening prospect," McCaulley says. "For the women, the only thing more terrifying than a world with Jesus dead was one in which he was alive."

That's news, and it's the gospel.

He then asserts in no uncertain terms that he himself believes in "the open tomb" as a place where he can put all his fears and sadness--his George Floyd disillusionment, his disgust at attacks on Asian-Americans, at never-ending mass shootings, constant trouble at the border, and the overwhelming grieving we're doing from Covid 19, everything finally, the totality of the darkness around and within him. He can put it all in the empty tomb. It's a testimony.

I read McCaulley's essay early Sunday morning, Easter morning, and was moved. And I wasn't alone. At Easter worship yesterday, it was the centerpiece of the sermon. If you've not read it, please do.

I have never quite understood the tribulation America-first people claim with regard to, say, Christmas, that somehow the evil culture denies Christianity the esteem it expects or deserves. If you don't have cable, go to Facebook any Sunday morning and you'll find yet another superstore--just about any kind of worship you desire. If you get bored with Pentecostalism, dial up a mass. Religion and porn rule more of the world-wide web than any other content.

Ezra McCaulley teaches at Wheaton, where, not long ago, a faculty member resigned rather than face the music for divorcing his wife--it's a place with standards, a college where you can't get a job without testifying your love for Jesus, a place known, at least in part, for observant Christianity, the citadel of evangelicalism; and there were McCaulley's words, right before Easter, about the power of the open tomb, his own testimony to an entire nation from the pages of the New York Times--not fake news either, but good news from the gospel of Mark.

It was an Easter sunrise blessing.

Reading Mother Teresa--Selflessness

For it is by grace you have been saved, 

through faith – and this is not from yourselves, 

it is the gift of God. . . . Ephesians 2:8

I was neither crushed nor heartbroken. It hadn’t worked out, this long-distance relationship she thought essential in defining our relationship. You’ll go to one college, and I’ll go to another, she’d explained when we were in our last year of high school. It was the kind of test she wanted – if we could last through a 500-mile separation, then viola! – we’d be a real thing, maybe even marry, although at 19 we were a long way from that kind of talk.

We failed, although it’s fair to say that she was the one who turned away. I was the faithful one – I kept troth, a word I’m sure I didn’t know back then, but makes me sound severely saintly. She didn’t, and, come summer, she broke it off, whatever it was we had, as they say. This isn’t spin.

Anyway, my grandma held down a seat on a bench full of neighborhood widows who, over coffee, likely held court on a variety of characters and issues, including, obviously, her grandson and his love life. She was trying to be sweet, I’m sure, when she told me what she did once the relationship was history. “Well, you know what the ladies say,” she told me, lovingly, “– maybe it’s better it’s over because she would have been the one who wore the pants.”

Makes me giggle yet today, all these years later.

And I can’t help thinking about what she said with respect – strangely enough! – to Mother Teresa because what she wanted more than anything, it seems, is to be selfless, not to wear the pants, ever. She wanted to be nothing for her Lord. She wanted him to be her’s. “I want to be at his disposal,” she wrote, often. Disposal, she said. I want to be rid of me.

I don’t have any doubt that the reason my grandmother’s double-edged comfort stays with me is because the image she created isn’t necessarily sympathetic of her grandson – Jimmy Milquetoast, a pushover, a patsy.

But then, in any relationship – even a marriage – selflessness is a virtue, right? – the polar opposite of pride, which is, remember, the first of the Seven Deadlies. But I didn’t read the implication of grandma’s assessment as positive. I didn’t want to be spineless. Who does?

That Jesus Christ wants us to live for him goes without saying. That he wants all of us, every bit of us, is a doctrine of scripture that no one can deny – heart, soul, and strength all for him. That Mother Teresa would want to be selfless in the divine presence of her Savior is not only understandable but saintly. “All to thee, my blessed Savior – I surrender all.”

Few believers in the history of the 20th century have come to epitomize so clearly true Christian service as Mother Teresa. Few believers could – and yet fewer believers have – so devoutly wished to be “disposed” of by Jesus Christ.

But the hard-core Calvinist in me can’t help but wonder if her life-long passion to be at “the disposal” of her Lord didn’t create something inverse, a rich and revealing self-abnegation that, psychologically speaking, made her feel totally unworthy of the very attention and love she so passionately craved. Perhaps, her fervent desire to be nothing left her, oddly enough, somehow believing she was far beyond the reach of his love.

Is there a limit to selflessness? What God wants, as orthodoxy would have it, is the death of “the old man of sin,” but not our death, nor our disposal. Does ardent selflessness somehow require the doubt, the darkness that Mother Teresa lived with for so many years?

That her suffering brought her closer to the suffering Christ is understandable, but we do – don’t we? – worship a risen Lord. That's the real story this Easter morning, just as much as any. Mother Teresa’s life is the very model of love, of Christian charity, of service devoutly to be praised. She is, even in this Calvinist’s sense, a saint.

But that her despair in his absence needs to be understood as necessary to her saintliness on the streets of Calcutta seems somehow wrong-headed.

Even in the royal robes of her righteousness, or so it seems to me, this saint remains one of us, a human being and, as such, she stands, as all of us do, in need of grace, in need of what only Christ could do this blessed Easter morning.

On that score, I think she would agree.

Good Friday at Zion Pres

Somewhere in Nebraska. . .somewhere south of here. . . somewhere in the eastern part of the state--that's about it. I don't remember where exactly, not that it's the kind of attraction that would bring in tourists. 

That's where I found it, standing just off the road, on gravel, across from a cemetery, all the ingredients of a dead church once upon a time named Zion Pres. Out here, not all of such ruins are Presbyterian. Many are Lutheran, some on the reservation are Episcopal. They come in all flavors, although size is fairly standard on the edge of the Plains: not big.

They remember a time when more people lived out here, when every two or four miles a school with a bell stood in a corner of cropland, with an outhouse and kids--maybe twenty--because far more families were around back then, families with oodles of kids. You needed kids to farm, to make it. 

Finally, even all those kids weren't enough. Nor was 160 acres. Nor were the horses. And so, for more than a century already, Zion Presbyterian and churches like it withered away, not because of some dalliance with modernity or women preachers or death-like conservatism. Churches died because people left the neighborhood. They died because kids left, and what's an institution to do when it has no kids? They died because people did, a couple hundred across the road.

Birds flew in, weeds grew through the cracks in the sidewalks, and vandals did what vandals do. Whoever owns the place got told by an insurance man that the only way to protect themselves from the court would be to make sure nobody got inside the place anymore. "I don't care what you do really, but you've got to protect your interests--put some 2x12s up over the front door--do something anyway, or you’ll lose your shirt," that insurance guy must have said.

You can cry for the church, but as long as you're at it, let a few tears fall for the whole neighborhood--for the school, long gone, I'm sure. Life and death on the Plains.

As it was even before its demise, this forsaken country church is a startling image. For believers, it's even a little scary. those demanding planks barring the door look like and feel a little thou-shalt-not, what’s left of fire and brimstone.

But that’s not the story at Zion Pres. No one is afraid of the pulpit. No one is scarlet-lettered. The sadness--although it's not profound--is not that Zion Pres did the gospel wrong, but that the only residents in the area these days are the ones across the street beneath granite stones that could use some cleaning. Truth be known, they're gone too. No one wants in at Zion Pres. 

I can't help thinking this week that these barred doors, way out in the country, suggest what the followers of Jesus felt late Thursday night, and all day Friday and Saturday. Think of it. “It's over,” they might have thought, even said. “The whole five-loaves-and-two-fishes thing, the 'blessed are the peacemakers,'' the flipped temple table, that batch of suicidal pigs, Lazarus in a winding sheet, dinners with harlots and crooked pols, and that kid thing, too--you remember? "Go on and let them come sit in my lap," he said, "and see if you can learn something for once." And then that wry smile.

They had to believe it was done. Finished. Over. Time to go back to boats and nets and H and R Block. It had been fun for a while, a real kick. Sometimes they thought the whole thing just might upset the whole Roman apple cart, you know? 

And then Golgatha. Good Friday.

It's over. The good times are behind us, the people long gone. 

It had to be something like that before Easter, something like Zion Pres, somewhere out on some lonesome gravel road, dying.

__________________

This Good Friday essay also appears, today, on In All Things, an on-line magazine from Dordt University. 

On Maunday Thursday

Because our pastor would like to celebrate the sacrament every Sunday, there are some questions about why. In our church, the tradition has been that the elements appear once a month or so, and then also on a holy day like Maunday Thursday. That's it.

No one is waging war; no one is even angry that I know of, but there is some resistance because, well, "we've never done it that way." Messing with rituals--and there may be no ritual quite as sacrosanct as how we do holy communion--is risky because, well, the holy supper is important, very important. You might even say it's holy.

In the Protestant tradition, more or less everything is holy--the nubbins trying to grow out back in today's frosty morning, the blurr of scarlet the cardinal makes when he flutters through the bushes just outside my window, the crisp morning air, the promise of summer. Everything is holy. 

But the human problem of a righteousness so broadly-based is a perfectly understandable paradox: when everything is holy, it's altogether too easy to look out at a world where nothing seems to be. 

I've been to St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican. Loved it. We were there early enough to beat the crowds, and were met at the door by Michaelangelo's Pieta. 

For  years now, I've pursued the dawn, but only just now, when I pulled up the pictures of St. Peters, did I realize how blessed we were to get there exactly when we did, to be there at sunrise.

I envy Roman Catholics who can and do point clearly at what is and what isn't sacred. I'm not about to join the mother church, but I know what kind of blessing lies in store if I just walk up the street and into Alton's St. Mary's, up at the top of highest hill in the county, and sit for a moment in blessed peace.

It's sad, but humanly possible, I know, to be given blessings in such abundance that the abundance no longer seems a blessing. Up the street, how many will take mass this morning? If there is an argument for a not-every-Sunday celebration of Holy Communion, that seems to be that's it, a twist on "absence makes the heart grow fonder." It will become commonplace.

I know--it's weak.

In the church where I grew up (a dangerous introductory phrase when wielded by a man my age), we celebrated communion four times a year. That's it. Today, our pastor would shake his head, not at our foolishness, but at how much holiness we've missed by way of all those empty Sundays.

Maybe he's right. I'm not willing to fight, but what I remember as a boy was my dad, at evening devotions, telling all of us--even the kids who couldn't partake--that on Sunday-next the church would be celebrating the Lord's Supper. What that meant, he'd say, is that we needed to prepare by evaluating ourselves, remembering our sin and guilt so that we'd better appreciate the blessed cleansing we've received from Jesus' blood and righteousness.

For me, that little homily at supper devotions, a week before the sacrament, did much to make the practice of communion holy, even when it was offered only four times a year.

Maunday Thursday is all about remembering--manna in the wilderness, the exodus itself, the passover meal, and, of course, the suffering and death of our Lord. Maunday Thursday celebrates the blessed gift of memory by pushing us to use it, not to forget, not to forget but remember, thoughtfully, reverently.

This Maunday Thursday, I also remember my dad's living faith as he told us around the family table that this week especially each of us needed to consider the blessed gifts we've been given, the body and blood of Jesus Christ, who died for all of our sins.

"Awe" by Frederick Buechner

I remember seeing a forest of giant redwoods for the first time. There were some small children nearby, giggling and chattering and pushing each other around. Nobody had to tell them to quiet down as we entered. They quieted down all by themselves. Everybody did. You couldn't hear a sound of any kind. It was like coming into a vast, empty room.

Two or three hundred feet high the redwoods stood. You had to crane your neck back as far as it would go to se the leaves at the trop. The trees made their own twilight out of the bright California day. There was a stillness and stateliness about them that seemed to become part of you as you stood there stunned by the sight of them. They had been growing in that place for going on two thousands years. With infinite care, they were growing even now. You could feel them doing it. They made you realize that all your life you had been mistaken. Oaks and ashes, maples and chestnuts and elms  you had seen for as long as you could remember, but never until this moment had you so much as dreamed what a Tree really was.

"Behold the man," Pilate said when he led Jesus out where everybody could see him. He can't have been much to look at after what they'd done to him by then, but my guess is that, even so, there suddenly fell over that mob a silence as awed as ours in the forest when for the first time in their lives they found themselves looking at a Human Being.

______________

from Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith.

Why I can't watch

I find it hard--too hard--to watch the George Floyd trial, so I don't. I turn it off. I have no doubt that Derek Chauvin killed Mr. Floyd, although I'm far less sure that he meant to. All that time--nine minutes and 29 seconds--and all that talk--the crowd insisting on Floyd's distress--make Chauvin's guilt all-too-evident.

The civil case has already made clear where this trial is headed. When a jury awarded Floyd's family more than 20 million dollars, that jury established Chauvin's guilt. 

As one African-American commentator said last night on MSNBC, he won't be surprised if Chauvin is freed: white cops are always exonerated in the deaths of black people.

I get that. Sadly, his generalization is right on the money: white cops do walk away from dead black bodies. But this particular white man thinks that the white cop--Derek Chauvin--killed a black man named George Floyd, and just as what he did was judged as a crime in the civil court, it will be in this nationally televised criminal court as well.

I just wish it was over. "Why can't we all just get along?" to quote another black man victimized by white cops. Racism has existed since 1619 in this country; Trump didn't create the immense fracture that now separates us, but neither did he do anything to heal it. In the process, he only opened it even farther. 

I am greatly thankful that split is not solely a racial divide. What happened last summer in American cities wasn't just a Black protest. Millions of white Americans took to the streets as well. What we're suffering through is a racial divide that is no longer specifically a racial divide because millions of white people have seen what Derek Chauvin did, what black people have suffered at the hands of white cops, and the plain fact that blue lives matter only when they practice justice, only when Black lives matter. Derek Chauvin is looking at serious jail time.

And then there's this. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, by February of this year, "state lawmakers have carried over, prefiled, or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access in 43 states, and 704 bills with provisions that expand voting access in a different set of 43 states." That was six weeks ago. How many since?

Why? Because confusion gone rampant in the 2020 Presidential Election, because some people are convinced--and were for months already before the election--that President Trump's loss meant the election was rigged. Trump preached that doctrine like a tub-thumper, started it before 2016 even. He created the mob that took over the Capital. He nurtured the crooked truth that he couldn't lose. He set his base up for what happened, and when it did--when he lost--millions saw fraud.

What libs like me call "voter suppression" is layered atop the animosity created by Derek Chauvin, Black Lives Matter, and racial discrimination that just won't quit, especially when we are, as a nation, amid dynamic demographic change. "Voter suppression" is yet another issue that's an open wound. Once again, ex-President Donald Trump, who is certainly not responsible for American racism, continues to do what he can to throw gas all over the flames.

Think of this: he could, this morning, call a news conference, gather air time all over the media, and speak to the entire nation. He could have the bully pulpit once again, even though he lost it in the election. He could dominate the news today, tomorrow, and well into next month, if he'd simply stand up and accept the truth that he lost.

Sixty-some courts of law made it clear he did. One of his most active defense lawyers now claims in her own defense that no thoughtful person could have believed the preposterous things she said about voter fraud. Voting machine companies, vilified by Rudy and others and Trump himself, are taking his soothsayers--including Fox News--to court for willful deception.

The ex-President could do more for racial justice and reconciliation in America this very morning, right now, by standing before the American people and just admitting that he lost the Presidential race to Joe Biden. He'd pre-empt the trial.

Don't hold your breath. He won't because he can't. He truly believes he won "in a landslide."

And that's why I can't watch the Twin Cities' trial of Derek Chauvin, who is charged for the death of George Floyd, because it's hard not to feel that the divisions so painful in this country are growing ever wider and will continue to, no matter what the outcome.

Donald Trump could do something. Yet this morning, ex-President Trump could help us all take a giant step toward healing this nation. He could.

He won't, and his base, including millions of prayerful evangelicals, will continue to follow his deceit.

I just can't watch.

Church of St. Paul Apostle of the Nations

What's not to love about Italy? Wherever you go, there's a story in art and culture and some kind of pasta dressed up in fine sauces. Once the world gets vaccinated, the crowds will be back. Even Disneyland can't compete with Rome on a bad day.

There's St. Peter's, of course--go early and avoid the lines. There's the Colisseum and the Pantheon, and Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, where mass has been celebrated every morning since (wait for this now) the fourth century--you heard me right--the fourth century, which makes 1492 sound like last week.

Some fabulously wealthy Roman, or so the story goes, caught a vision of the Virgin who somehow made it clear that he should build a new cathedral on the spot where she'd make it snow the next day. It was August--who could have guessed? The next day, mid-summer, there was snow. Then a cathedral.

But even if you've not missed a celebration of mass in half a lifetime, chances are slim and none you could gain an audience with the Pope back then or anytime through the years, even today.

But on January 27, 1887, a young woman named Katharine Drexel met with Pope Leo XIII, but then Katharine Drexel, who would, later in life, officially become a saint, wasn't just your average Josephine. Her father, an investment banker from Philadelphia, was rich--mega, no other way of saying it. When he died, she and her sisters, a fine Catholic family in Philadelphia, came heir to his millions. 

But Katharine wasn't some dowdy rich girl. Her parents had taught her to respond to the poor--to give, well, endlessly. She told the pope she thought he should, without delay, send missionaries to Native people throughout the American west because they were suffering and had already suffered brutal injustices.

The story goes that Pope Leo smiled. "Why not, my child, yourself become a missionary?" he famously said, and thus began a saga that even touched Siouxland, many, many thousands of miles away.

Once the Missouri River determined to slice through South Dakota, it created a glorious scar, leaving huge grassy shoulders on both sides of a valley so breathtaking that if you're driving you have to remind yourself to keep your eyes on the road. If you follow Old Muddy northwest out of Yankton, you hug the only segment of the river that looks at all like the unruly waterway it once was.

The tiny town of Greenwood--yes, Lewis and Clark stopped there--may well be the most historic ghost town in North America. Up on a hill a monument celebrates the 1853 Treaty, which wasn't exactly a victory for the Yankton who lived there. In 1890, a ghost dance was held there along the river, just one of many throughout the west and so frightened white folks that the massacre at Wounded Knee resulted.

But keep going, past the churches and the tribe's herd of buffalos on your left. You can stop at the cemetery and see old Ree's monument some other time, but get yourself to Marty, a burg named after South Dakota's first real Bishop.

You'll spot this towering landmark from miles away, but only when you drive into town will you measure just how mammoth it is up close, the Church of St. Paul Apostle of the Nations, an immense, gorgeous limestone house of worship worthy of that long name.

Whatever you do, get yourself inside. Ask around. Get yourself a tour from one of the Sisters, who live next door. The dog won't bite.

What's behind the altar is a wall of portraits--popes and bishops, disciples and apostles, saints of all ages. Takakwitha is here, "Lily of the Mohawks, the only Native saint.

The stained glass is gorgeous, all of it done by an a St. Louis artist named Emil Frei, who learned his art from his father, a Bavarian glassmaker. The stations of the cross feature Natives in every Holy Week role, including the Savior.

Physically and spiritually, the Church of St. Paul, Apostle of the Nations, was the dream of the Eisenman brothers, one of whom, a priest, Father Sylvester, came west when three Yankton men, Thunder Horse, Zephyr, and Yellow Bird went recruiting.

The other was a builder, Father Sylvester's actual blood brother, Leonard John Eisenman. Together, ora et labora, the two Eisenman brothers directed twenty or so local workman through the years it took to build the place.

But not to be forgotten was the work and the support, in every way, of a woman of means who once held council with the Pope. Katharine Drexel, Saint Katharine, sent her own order, The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, to the new cathedral at Marty, South Dakota.

It's a huge place and a huge story, even out here near Greenwood, where Lewis and Clark made camp out of a river that still looks today as if the Corps of Discover could once again come ashore. If you don't know it's there, St. Paul's will appear as if out of nowhere. But there it is, immense.

Not until you leave, not until you keep going north or turn around and head back towards Yankton will you draw breath again. It's that kind of vision. It's just plain amazing.

Reading Mother Teresa--Ritual

May these words of my mouth 

and this meditation of my heart 

be pleasing in your sight, Lord, 

my Rock and my Redeemer. Psalm 19:14

The other day I can’t tell you how bad I felt. – There was a moment when I nearly refused to accept. – Deliberately I took the Rosary and very slowly without even meditating or thinking – I said it slowly and calmly. The moment passed. . . . (238, Letter to Bishop Picachy)

I was 32 years old when someone at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference called to tell me that my application for a scholarship had been accepted and they were offering me a position as a waiter. I had no idea what that meant, but I understood proudly that the offer was a good, good thing.

It’s now more another 32 years later, but I will never forget receiving that call because I felt that my being chosen for a scholarship to the granddaddy of all writers conferences, Bread Loaf, signaled fame and fortune.

When I flew into Burlington, Vermont, for the conference, I met another conferee, a woman my age, married with two children, an aspiring poet. Ten days later, when we boarded a plane to leave, she and I stood on the stairway to a small jet, waiting to enter the cabin. She looked at me and shook her head. “I hope this plane crashes,” she told me.

The atmosphere during that mountaintop retreat had been electric. Aspiring writers like me flirted daily with National Book Award winners, editors, agents, and publishers. Life – dawn ‘till dawn – was always on stage. She’d been wooed by a celebrity poet, and she’d fallen in every way. Now, regrettably, she had to go back to real life.

I’ll admit it – I wasn’t accustomed to either the pace or the character of life at Bread Loaf.

On a Sunday morning, I had walked away from people to a weathered Adirondack chair in a broad meadow, where I sat for an hour, feeling blessed sustenance simply from thinking deeply about my little son’s soft arm, trying to imagine what his hand would feel like in mine, all the while reciting the familiar words of the 23rd psalm.

That moment is likely the closest I ever came to meditation, and I’ll never forget it.

When the Rosary was recited over the radio when I was a boy, my parents raised an eyebrow, rolled their eyes, and turned it off – “vain repetition,” we were always told, quoting the gospel’s admonition against such tomfoolery. I never thought of the Rosary as anything else.

But when I think of Mother Teresa’s besieged soul, when I see her sitting in silence, her fingers on each separate bead while repeating those prayers over and over again, I don’t think of all those repetitions as being in any way, shape, or form, vain.

When our ritual is empty, it isn’t ritual at all. But when it’s earnest as it was at least one day in the life of Mother Teresa, when it’s undertaken in passionate desire for peace and joy, then it is, in a way even a Calvinist might acknowledge, sacramental.

That weathered Adirondack chair sits in a defined place in my soul’s memory, I swear. As does Mother Teresa, stooping, praying, meditating, beads in hand, in an impassioned ritual I may likely never share, in nearly faithless hope of a spiritual blessing, even if only for a day, peace to quell the heavy burden of her doubt.

A prairie gallery

 

I'm guessing he knew it was a big deal, but what he didn't know was how big. I can't imagine that this man, out on what he considered his land, behind his own team of oxen--I'm guessing he understood that he was transforming the world, opening up the ground, turning it productive, making a place for himself, his family, and his dreams. He couldn't be blind to changing the world.

But he's not at the heart of things. Up close, he's a fortress of a guy, broad-chested, tall and lean, huge arms. What he's doing dominates the painting, but even his plowing seems part of the setting. Dunn loves the dog. In some ways, he's the focal point, carefree, romping through the uncut prairie grass, content simply to be out in a big world of the plains. The buffalo skull is deliberately hidden, as if Dunn didn't want it to get too much attention. 

But that skull is the key to Harvey Dunn's interest, I think, because that buffalo skull testifies to what once was, to what is being transformed, both what's left behind and what's lost. That's the bigger story, the one the strapping farmer/rancher only partially understands. He knows his story, and it's big. What he doesn't see--maybe that's why Dunn partially covers the skull--is the real story--immense change, a world forever altered by a single-bottom plow and the hard-working white man behind it.

What Harvey Dunn, as well known as any American illustrator, wanted to do with his life and work after his experience in war was paint big, paint huge, paint something more appropriately scaled to the whole human enterprise. He didn't want to stylize a short story, pretty-up the cover of a magazine, or use his brushes to sell anything, not even automobiles. He kept illustrating, but the war taught him something abiding about the human character and broad drama of life itself, and when he couldn't finish all those sketches he made during the war, he turned to a world he may not even have thought of before he left for Europe. He turned for inspiration to his own epic childhood on the prairie.

He wasn't alone. No less a figure than Teddy Roosevelt found something that left him in awe in big skies and endless horizons. When Willa Cather left Red Cloud, Nebraska, she never became homesick enough to take up residence back there again, but neither could ever leave totally. When a friend and fellow writer suggested that she begin telling the stories of her childhood out in a world not unlike the one being plowed in Dunn's painting, Cather began a writing life that centered right there.

After the war, Harvey Dunn stumbled back home and spent years there, even though he only visited occasionally. His heroes, understandably, are often women. 

Here she sits, her baby on a blanket surrounded by a gallery of chickens, the sod house almost welcoming, sunflowers thoughtfully watching her, not the sun behind them. The dog stands guard. If you follow the stream of chickens all the way back, Dunn celebrates the family's successes by including a ramshackle barn to illustrate clearly how things have improved. The sky is a sea of cotton. Even the baby seems entranced by the huge sky she's only beginning to see.

This prairie Madonna sits beside her husband as a oxen rest in the background, having made it up a long hill above the river beneath. His eyes are on the horizon. He's still planning out the route to where he needs to go. She tends to a baby so young it almost certainly had to have been born aboard the schooner.

Even here, where the would-be settlers dominate the canvas, it's the land itself, the setting of the story that is the story, this wide forever-land.

Here, Dunn puts a neighbor far off in the distance, a half mile away from her place, their place, which is likely behind us--it's where she's going. But for purposes of this portrait, the homestead isn't of great interest. What is a tall and strong and beautiful woman who will never, ever be a cowboy, even when she spends her afternoon like a cowpoke. Her wrestling cattle isn't the story. What Dunn can't stop painting is her world, her new huge world. She's barely a settler.

Even here in the fearful darkness a few seconds before a storm that may well blow them all away, she may well be in the center of the canvas, but the world where she lives is the story's real protagonist.

I've always felt, well, proud of the fact that Willa Cather's best work are two novels all about the prairie world she grew up within, My Antonia and O, Pioneers! Just as I am proud of the plain and simple fact that when Harvey Dunn returned from war he looked back to the plains as a place he could do what his artistic soul had begun to tell him to do, to paint the big picture.

Harvey Dunn and the war

Illustration from "The Lord Taketh and the Lord Giveth,"
a story by Cyrus Townsend Brady in the Ladies Home Journal.

 

South Dakota's Harvey Dunn was no starving artist, no dreamy Vincent. He was, in every way, a realist. His characters, after all, were recognizably human, and he'd never considered art to be something for which he shouldn't earn a healthy living. He and his family lived sumptuously in a big, beautiful house, he courted work from America's leading magazines, and painted and drew with the same tenacity his father had mounted to plow the native prairie his son had left behind when he went off to Chicago. Harvey Dunn did well.

Today, it's increasingly hard to imagine what kind of hold magazines once had on American consciousness. Life and Look and the Saturday Evening Post were news networks, mini-libraries, that bi-weekly offered subscribers portraits of the world beyond their front porch. 

Those big magazines did so, not because they alone communicated news and culture, but because each worked hard at producing visually attractive content. A story by Ernest Hemingway required a new portrait of the writer, in addition to a story illustration, or two or three, by someone capable of creating an image as remarkable as the stories they chose for publication. 

Harvey Dunn's work ethic was as estimable as his track record turned out to be. He pleased editors because he pleased their subscribers, and he did his work on time. What's more, he did a lot of work. He and his family lived comfortably, to say the least, and he drove show-stopping automobiles in an era pre-dating the garage.

When the nation went to war in 1917, Harvey Dunn was called upon, even though his 34 years put him beyond the reach of the draft board. He and seven other artists were given the assignment of documenting the war effort, for posterity--and, yes, public relations too, a pair of sometimes conflicting ends.

Dunn loved the work and didn't shy away from the front. He lugged his equipment into dark and terrible corners, and, surprisingly, turned out fewer finished pieces than did his contemporaries, most of whom didn't court the dangers as frequently as he had. 

In 1918, the nation was singing "How you going to keep them down on the farm, now that he's Parieey" once the carnage ended. War changes things, and, more significantly, war changed the doughboys. Harvey Dunn, who produced less but did more, suffered a verifiable change of heart after experiencing what he did.

His limited production wasn't short on volume. Along the way, he created endless sketches because he determined that, once back home, he would continue to work for the government and turn those sketched memories into pieces that would come to define the war he experienced, the war America had fought through. He made offers, but the government wasn't buying, they weren't interested in more. The war was over.

That failure, his biographers claim, was the most crushing defeat of his life, not because he needed work--he never needed work--but because the war had shaped him into a someone who determined that his art was going to be more than illustration. It needed not simply to highlight good things, but be good things. The war made him want to do more on canvas, to help people see big things that stood just beyond the view from the front porch.

War, World War I, had taught him something about himself and his work. And when the government turned its back on his particular dreams, he determined to look elsewhere for inspiration to speak truth. 

Strangely enough--and thankfully--he looked homeward, home to the prairie.