What was there beneath the ooze

Sure. Who could guess it? An ordinary little pond a mile off the Missouri, for sure part of an old ox-bow. Undistinguished. Forgettable. Who could have imagined that buried somewhere under sedimentary layers of mud and goop there existed, well-preserved too, a 161-foot steamship, loaded to the gills with 250 tons of goods?

March 18, 1865, a week after Abraham Lincoln was elected to a second term and a week General Robert E. Lee's mounted one last offensive in Virginia; on March 18, 1865, the steamboat Bertrand departed St. Louis on a treacherous trek, as all of them were, up the wide Missouri, the country's longest river, stem to stern, from St. Louie to Fort Benton, Montana Territory, where, rumor had it, gold, all kinds of it, was waiting to be rescued like shimmering damsel in distress.

The Missouri River was a hornet's nest of tipped cottonwoods that created river swirls so deep and frothy they sunk steamships like the Bertrand, no matter how long or how grand. Think I'm kidding?--the average lifespan of a steamer in the era was three short years. Going up or down made no difference, navigating the Missouri took luck and pluck and more than a little grace. But gold fields--just the sound of that phrase--made taking on all those cottonwoods and wily river the kind of gamble lots of folks wanted a hand in. 

At Omaha the Bertrand beefed up its already abundant cargo, then sat there waiting for the river to rise. When it did, they left, north once again but got just 25 miles upstream before some monster cottonwood snagged the monster and crumpled it up like cardboard. In ten minutes the Bertrand went down. Fifty or sixty passengers scampered off, no lives lost; but the Bertrand, just a year old, got itself retired right then and there.

Down and lost right there before a century of mud and dirt oozed over it while the fickle river grew good and sick of the old channel, and, with a flood or two to move elsewhere, without the Bertrand. So the wreck stayed there until two Omaha salvagers, Sam Corbino and Jesse Pursell, tried to determine its location, put down feelers into the ooze that sealed it, and, voila, found it--200,000 artifacts, leftover cargo impossibly well-preserved in all that ooze, 150 tons of salvageable goods.

No gold, of course, but a buried treasure nonetheless. The story all that cargo told was a story otherwise told only on the printed page. What did gold-seekers need to strike it rich, beside the gold that is? How did they outfit all those fortune-hunters on their mighty enterprise? 

Well, weights and measures and ledger books to keep track of the winnings, and mortar and pestles and mercury flasks, but only a few--salvagers long ago must have taken the bulk of them. Powder kegs and a host of mining shovels, enough for a crowd and more. And boots, buffalo boots for cold Montana winters. And, maybe you can make it out back there--bottles of ketchup and ink and ale-- 

and medicinal (of course) bitters, 

and corkscrews to get at all that good stuff.

Oh, and cannon balls for some distant war.

and cowbells--oh, essentials of the good life.

What Corbina and Pursell discovered when they washed away all that mud was nothing more or less than an mirror of what we were--and are, too, a museum of goods that tells us a story, our story.

Nice of Big Muddy to hold all those treasures in store, don't you think? She could be a beast sometimes, I guess, but then just occasionally she showed a heart of gold.

For sure, go to De Soto Bend to see the wildlife, thousands of migratory birds; but while you're there, don't miss stopping by the Bertrand display, where you can't help but think you won't simply see something of the gold rush, but also--look closely!--something of yourself. 

Breathing again

So, in case you missed the latest, yesterday a judge formally denied a Trump request that notes and emails concerning the January 6th "whatever-you-call-it" will be opened up for the world to see. Ex-President Trump, always concerned for the wherewithal of others, had sought to keep documents from the press, lest some future Pres be victimized by the fake-news crowd. 

He has such a big heart, always concerned about the other guy. 

No, said Judge Tanya Hicks (a woman, so how can Trump get a fair hearing from a woman?). "Presidents are not kings," she wrote, and then, "And Plaintiff is not President." Only the President, who is not Trump, can determine privilege claims. 

All of that is yesterday's news. Today, there will be more. During the primaries that ran up to the 2016 election, Trump had a habit of sucking up all the oxygen in the room. He might have shared the stage with 99 others, but the Orange Man would get all the ink.

Not much has changed. Didn't change during his Presidency--he still commanded all the news networks, regardless of their particular bent on his crookedness. He dominated the news, all of it, even the "fake news."

And today he still sucks up all the oxygen, even though he's retired at a resort in Florida. Every day, an abundant surf of news breaks over him. He bathes in it. Always has.

(By the way, he and his lawyers have already filed an appeal to the Hicks ruling. It ain't over.)

Those of us who never liked him get weary. Every day news breaks about how far umpteen legal troubles have gone. Some famous people needed only 12 disciples. Trump has fifty lawyers. Maybe more.

Eleven months ago, on a beautiful day in Georgia, the soon-to-be ex called Ben Raffensburger (who's written a book and become a celebrity!). Trump told guy, Georgia's Secretary of State, to "find" the 11 thousand votes it would take his majesty to bring him over the top in Georgia, thus giving him the Peach State's electoral college votes. 

It's. On. Tape. Listen in the comfort of your favorite rocker. It's likely you have.

The man is guilty of a thousand crimes. He's a mob-boss, a divider, a bully, a meglo-maniac narcissist who almost single-handedly shut the door on democracy in a country whose laws he swore to uphold.

I don't care about punishment. I don't believe in a noose or a chair or some evil cocktail of drugs. I don't even care if he ever goes to jail. I just want him to be judged guilty for what he did. I want the Supreme Court, his Supreme Court, to deny his 10,000th appeal, just as they denied whatever evidence his cronies gave for massive voter fraud. I just want some judge to say, "Mr. Donald J. Trump, you're guilty."

No more breaking news. No more tax fraud, Hatch Act, Georgia vote tampering, or instigating a coup on January 6th. Any one of the dozen or more will do. 

Justice delayed is justice denied, some say. Others claims true justice is, sadly enough, agonizingly slow. I don't know who or what to believe. All I want is a chorus of judges to tell the man plainly and finally that he's guilty as sin. 

Then at least some of us can breathe again.

Stone-Catchers

One gaffe came to dominate analysis of the Republican win in the Virginia gubernatorial election. Terry McAuliffe, one heavily favored, misspoke badly on the issue of parental rights in education when he said that parents had no right when it came to curriculum. "No rights" is more idiotic than it is plain wrong. Of course, parents have rights. Of course, they have choices. But plain old common sense tells you that designing a curriculum is not every parent's right. It couldn't be. That is just as idiotic.

His failing campaign went limp after that, and the Republican candidate looked--and was--unstoppable. Glenn Youngkin rode McAuliffe's blip every time he spoke, and angry parents flocked to his side. McAuliffe got the heave-ho.

People chose Youngkin as their favorite for reasons only tangentially related to the words McAuliffe uttered. Angry parents came over to the businessman's side because what lay beneath McAuliffe's regrettable line was hot coals from what "CRT" has come to mean in the culture wars. The real horror to white parents--to white people--these days isn't being shut out of history department meetings but having their children, white children, feel white guilt, the fear that too much emphasis on this country's history of racial horrors will make them somehow regret their own racial identity, their being white.

Whether or not that's racism I'll let others decide. Even whether or not what they're afraid of is a legitimate fear is a good question. What isn't hard to see is that Republicans love culture wars. Boogey men arise all over because cultural wars issues are rooted in the heart, not in the head.

Me? I want to go to Montgomery, Alabama, to a place where America's racial history is commemorated in a museum whose story-telling its creators borrowed from the layout of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D. C. What's memorialized at The Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration is the sheer evil that grew from racial hatred in this country, our country. I'm not sure what CRT is, but let me clear here: any white parent who wouldn't allow his or her appropriate-age child to visit the Legacy Museum, that parent is racist.

The Legacy Museum features 800 steel memorials honoring African-American people who were lynched and 800 weathered steel columns suspended from the roof. The research team discovered more than 4400 such victims.

Bryan Stevenson is the Executive Director--and Founder really--of the Equal Justice Initiative, the organization that created and runs The Legacy Museum. Stevenson was the guest on Krista Tipett's On Being last Sunday, and as I listened in I couldn't help thinking that hundreds, thousands, of churches could well have simply given their pastors the day off and tuned in to On Being and let it play throughout the sanctuary. It was marvelous.

Stevenson, who has notched two decades and more as an advocate for unjustly treated inmates throughout the nation, explained his belief in the image of God in all men and women with one unforgettable line: "none of us is defined by our worst thing." 

The reckoning that has to happen in this country has to be rooted in a moral awareness, a moral awakening; a consciousness that evolves in a way that we begin to do the things that we must do if we’re going to not only save the country, but save ourselves. And this is where, for me, faith traditions become so important, because in the faith tradition I grew up in, you can’t come into the church and say, “Oh, I want salvation and redemption and all the good stuff, but I don’t want to admit to anything bad. I don’t want to have to talk about anything bad that I’ve done. 

And this: "We have to be stone-catchers," he said, a wonderful line taken from the gospel  story of the Samaritan woman, who is plainly guilty of what Jesus knows of her life. There's no question about her innocence; clearly she is receiving punishment for her prodigality. No one says, "she didn't do it." She did. 

But, famously, Christ says, "Let he of you who is without sin cast the first stone."

That story, Bryan Stevenson says, makes all of us "stone-catchers." That's our job.

That's justly and beautifully said. This morning's thanks is for Bryan Stevenson and his work in Montgomery, all of it. 

Got to get there myself.

______________________________

You can read a transcript of Bryan Stephenson's On Being interview here. Or, if you prefer, you can listen to the entire interview here. 

Something mysteriously other

It's a question I'd never really faced before my spouse was given the job, an odd but inescapable job whose detritus sits on our counter once a week these days: what do you do with left-over communion bread? My wife was assigned the blessed task of gathering the bread, cutting it up, putting it on plates on the table at the front of the church. And, she picks what's left up and takes it along home. So here 'tis.

But what do you do with left-over elements that, for an instant at least, were the body of our Lord?

Just try to imagine any particular physical thing that carries as much relevant reverence, that has such a glorious Galilean history, that has, in its clear innocence, created such immense conflict. This bread changed the world, and that was long before the Reformation. When it's touched by one of God's servants, some say it becomes--it actually becomes--the body of Christ. It's no longer bread; it's the body of our Lord, broken for us.

To be clear, that's not a sacrament that's all that strange. Tons of communities throughout history believed religiously in similar bloody transformations. The Pawnees, right next door in Nebraska, once upon a time carried out human sacrifice, not because they enjoyed taking note of some enemy girl's agony, but because they believed her blood would nurture their husbandry and bless them thereby with good fortunes. 

The Protestant Reformation blew up the church for more than theological reasons. More than a few German land barons were thrilled with this loose canon named Luther, not because they were attuned to his justification-by-faith theology, but because he threatened the omnipotence of the Roman Catholic oligarchy. 

Still, people--my people too--fought hard to say that the bread and wine was not the actual body and blood of Christ, but a symbol thereof, the belief with which I was born and reared (which doesn't mean it was right). If this bread, when it stood in the plate, is just a symbol, then I can toss this bag full of leftovers beneath the bird feeder, right? 

Somehow I can't help thinking that's sacrilege. 

It sounds scriptural to give what's left to the poor, but that would be a gesture far more persuasive in theory than practice. I mean, it's less than a quarter of a loaf.

Okay, I'm not a total Catholic, but let's just say it's not just bread but something mysteriously other. If that's true, is it true only when the little cubes are in church, only when the preacher says it is, only when people come up and take one of these in their fingers and, on command, eat it? Is that what I should be thinking? Once the last chords of the doxology have ended, at that moment, I'm to believe that what has been magically transformed is no longer the astute mystery it's just been? What's changed?

And if that's true, then haven't we really finally--after 500 long and bloody years--simply returned to the Mother Church we left when Luther took up hammer and nail? If the only force that can make this bread into something mysteriously other is the preacher, in the church, in worship, then haven't we left the Reformation's roots? All this "sola" stuff from last week's reformation service, that's just old hat, right? 

I don't know what my wife is going to do, and it's her problem. She's the elder. I don't think she's been throwing it out. I'm quite sure we have some in our freezer from previous sacraments. 

Me?--I just don't know. It's all a mystery.

Bread pudding maybe? She loves it. I didn't know what it was until she made some not long ago. Sweeten it up nice, and it makes a darling Depression-era dessert. Besides, it's already been blessed. I know. I was there.

Bread pudding. Maybe that's it. 

I'll bring it up. 

Understanding

“Great is our Lord and mighty in power; 

his understanding has no limit.” Psalm 147:5

I just emptied my trash. There were 300 old e-mails packed therein, and, with nothing more than a key-stroke, they’re history, the words simply gone, as if they’d never existed.

Where do they go?—that’s what I’m wondering. Isn’t there some law of physics that matter simply doesn’t disappear? I suppose those 300 email notes had no matter; they were nothing but electronic impulses of some kind. But even if they had no matter, they held matter. I’m sure that sometime in the next few days I’ll remember something I should have done, go to the trash file to find some tossed note, and discover it and the horse it rode in on, gone. At one time, they mattered.

But now they’ve vanished, never to be seen again. Strange.

An old friend called last night. He said his wife, who’s been fighting depression for years, has switched meds. “A scary time,” he told us, and I understand. What I don’t understand is how a pill can actually change character, alter personality, replace the dynamo of whatever it is that makes us each who we are. That’s scary. But it happens, and it happens all the time.

And why is it that I feel so much, of late, that I’d rather be alone than in the blessed company of other people? Once we were social. Once we looked forward to weekends because they meant games and gatherings. I still look forward to weekends, but the only frivolity I seek is peace and quiet and solitude. If the skies are clear, the dawn compels on Saturday morning. I go alone. That’s the way I like it. Why?

Or this. Yesterday in a crowded shopping mall I read a short story from a new collection, read it almost straight though. I was sitting on a bench near the food court, at the very heart of things. Thousands of people passed me by. I saw few. It was a great story. I loved it. But I told myself that something had changed in me. Ten years ago—certainly twenty—I could not have sat there amid the thronging shoppers and focused so intensely on a single short story. What has changed in me, and why?

There’s so much I don’t understand.

Why do we suffer—honestly? The older I become, the more Job appears, just off my shoulder, one hand raised to heaven in a fist. Three of my friends are dying of cancer; all of them would love to live. None of them are ancient. Yet, all over North America people are building nursing homes to tend the millions who would, any day of the week, volunteer tomorrow for a long-sought trip to glory.

I was born after the Second World War, but I’ve spent more time reading the literature of the Holocaust than perhaps I should have. Arbeit Macht Frei—there’s a sign in my mind that will never leave. I know where Dr. Mengele stood right there at the platform as the trains rolled into Auschwitz. I can see his hand determining. This way, showers—that way, labor. And even though I wasn’t there, I can hear millions of bootless cries to heaven.

I don’t understand about life and about death, about suffering and joy. So much mystery.

And the greatest mystery of all is a gift, a sumptuous gift. I don’t know why his grace comes to me, but I believe that even though I don’t get it, even though this flesh will corrupt and I will die, in mystery about what it is we go through, he knows. His understanding has no limit. Bless his unfathomable
holy name.

Hey, she's from here--sort of. . .

In the last month, Sen. Krysten Sinema couldn't make more news if she would romp into the Senate Chamber topless, which, given her style, is not out of the question.

But some of us, at least, may have noted more than her strange senatorial ways and her megaphone wardrobe. If you're like me, you've noticed the oddity of that last name, Sinema, seems, well, sort of Dutch.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema does triathalons and claims to be bi-sexual, is a graduate of Brigham Young University, and calls herself an atheist, has pioneer roots right here, just down the road. You might even say her family is from Orange City--well, Carnes to be specific.

It’s a stretch, but stay with me.

In 1867, Kyrsten’s great-great-great grandparents, Jacob and Trijntje Sinnema, along with three children, emigrated from Friesland to Pella, Iowa. Just three years later, the Sinnemas were among the original Dutch settlers who left Pella for the new Hollandische settlement at Orange City, part of the second group to arrive by wagon under the leadership of Jelle Pelmulder.

The Sinnema family erected a sod house on an 80-acre homestead in Nassau Township, five miles south of OC and a mile-and-a-half west of Carnes, expanding the farm eventually to 240 acres. In May of 1871, Jacob became a charter member of the OC First Reformed Church.

In 1875, the Sinnemas lost their whole harvest to a summer hailstorm, and were granted tax relief by Sioux County. The Sinnemas eventually had six children who survived childhood. Their second son, Lieuwe (Levi) Sinnema, is Kyrsten’s great-great grandfather. He was born in 1863 and worked a 160-acre farm southeast of Carnes.

When Trijntje Sinnema died in 1882, Jacob remarried to Grietje van Klompenburg, a widow who immigrated from the Netherlands to Orange City with four children in 1881. In 1890, out there near Carnes, Jacob built a new windmill and rigged it up to provide water in the house for his wife.

Jacob and Grietje moved to town in 1892, where Jacob died in 1903. He and both his wives are buried in West Lawn Cemetery. Jacob’s obituary claims he was a godly man, respected by all.

In 1889 Levi Sinnema married his stepsister, Dirkje van Klompenburg. They had three children, the oldest son, Jacob Sinnema, born in 1892, being Kyrsten’s great-grandfather.

In 1896, Levi Sinnema pulled up stakes from northwest Iowa and moved to a new Dutch settlement in Oak Harbor, WA. Three years later, the Sinnemas moved to North Yakima, WA, where he operated a grocery store, before moving yet again, in 1906, to Twin Falls, Idaho, where Sen. Sinema's grandfather became a storekeeper in a new Dutch settlement there.

While in Idaho, Levi Sinema dropped an n from his name and, get this!--threw in the Heidelberger to become a Mormon, along with his family. Their son Jacob married Irene Visser at Twin Falls in 1922, and the couple had two children, one of whom was Gerald, born in 1929. Gerald is Kyrsten’s grandfather. (Hey, we're getting there.)

Now Gerald Sinema is the father of Dan Sinema, Kyrsten’s father. In 1959, Gerald, tired of the cold, moved his family from Idaho to Arizona, where son Dan went to law school, married, and had a daughter, Kyrsten, born in 1976, in Tucson.

Sadly, things fell apart for the Arizona Sinemas when Kyrsten was eight years old. The marriage broke up and her father lost his job and home. When Kyrsten’s mother remarried, the family moved to the Florida Panhandle and became homeless when her stepfather failed to get a job. They lived in an abandoned gas station outside a place named DeFuniak Springs—no electricity, bathroom, or running water.

They lived on welfare, relying on food stamps and the help of relatives, as well as the food pantry of their local Mormon church.

Still, Kyrsten excelled in school and received scholarships to Brigham Young, where she married, then divorced and declared herself bi-sexual. When she graduated—in just two years at the age of 18--she left the Mormon faith and, as she claimed, all others.

She returned to Arizona, did social work, then took several degrees from Arizona State University, practiced criminal defense law, and joined the Arizona Green Party, protesting American involvement in the Middle East (while wearing a pink tutu).

The Tucson Democrat was elected to the Arizona State House in 2004, where she successfully worked across party lines to forge bipartisan coalitions. In 2012, she went to Washington as a State Rep, and served three terms.

As her standing to applaud some of the President Trump’s accomplishments (the only Democrat to do so) illustrated, Sen. Sinema has been devotedly independent, emphasizing both the need for hard work and a government safety net when needed. In case you’re wondering, Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), voted in favor of the President’s impeachment.

One way or another, you can’t miss her, even you try. She’s a wow of a dresser.

____________________________________________ 

The hard work on all this research, I need to say, comes from a Dordt grad, and Trinity Christian College prof, Dr. Don Sinnema (two n's), a distant (!) cousin. 

Preparations at Preparation Canyon

If you're a prairie kind of person, some ordinary flat-lander, and if you consider Iowa's rolling landscape as the very definition of normal, then you can't help but think of the Loess Hills as totally bonkers. I might be mistaken, but the Hills' Preparation Canyon--yes, canyon, may well be the only really royal gorge between the far end of the state and the mighty Mississippi way out east. 

It's no gulch, and no gully either. If you ask me, canyon is pushing it a bit, but not much. 

A couple of days ago, I sat right here, engine running, and told myself I didn't want to go down this road because getting back up to the gravel I was on seemed too much to risk. Preparation Canyon State Park is not plain-old Iowa. It's an anomaly, an aberration, an abnormality. Topographically speaking, it's, well, as eccentric as Charles B. Johnson, the whacky pioneer who named it what he did, long before the ointment existed (well, you know).

To be fair, in the 1830s just about everything and everyone who came out of the neighborhood of Rochester, New York was more than a little religiously whacky, some more appreciably bizarre than others. The Second Great Awakening hit the place like a robust meteor and pushed everything out of whack, so much so that even today the region surrounding the Erie Canal is still thought of as "the burned- over district," a place so wracked by religious enthusiasm, few men or women in the neighborhood could keep their feet down on a square foot of good earth. 

The "burned-over district" is the place Charles B. Johnson called home until he got out here, western Iowa, to the canyon where he and his own fanatic Mormon cult put down roots, a group he called "Jehovah's Presbytery of Zion." Preparation Canyon got its name from Johnson, a nutty prophet who determined that his people--maybe fifty or sixty families' worth--would live right here in "preparation" for Zion, which Johnson declared, would be even more beautiful. 

And the idea worked. . .for a while. Johnson declared in no uncertain terms that true righteousness would require total selflessness, that being part of the community of God required every last member to give all they had, put everything into a royal pot deep as the canyon itself. God told Johnson, he told them, that he was himself a kind of reincarnation of Ephraim, from the Bible, proclaimed by God to be determine the righteous use of all that money.

If you wondering how that turned out for them, consider this: Preparation, the town Johnson/Ephraim named and ran, is no more. It's become a ghost town because absolutely nothing or no one is left. What's here is a canyon and above a spread of prairie, and hills that'll will, as the landscape always has, still take your breath away. 

During the 1850s, when most of the Mormon nation was going west to another Zion, as yet undetermined, Johnson's disciples were one of many subgroups who went out and into the great untrammeled wilderness of the west totally on their own. It was a kind of shotgun start to what would become "the Great Trek." When Joseph Smith and his brother were killed in Illinois, the Latter Day Saints were leaderless. Brigham Young tried hard to wrest control from a whole scattering of loose canons like Charles B. Johnson. Wasn't easy either.

But Johnson didn't trust polygamous Brigham, and he rather liked the canyon he'd named and the town he'd built. For several years the whole of Preparation prospered, included a skating rink. But time--and greed forever part of the human soul--worked against Johnson's loony Zion dreaminess. When a few years passed, people didn't sit still beneath the thumb of a self-proclaimed prophet, even if he claimed God was regularly whispering in his ear. Eventually, even a prophet has to earn his keep by action, not simply by claiming divine friends.

So today, Preparation, Iowa, is long gone, even though the name remains. 

But let me tell you, you can be there even on a day that isn't a bedlam of fall colors and still be transfixed. The place is that gorgeous. Where the creation all around is as stunning as it is in Preparation Canyon State Park, where the views are so breath-takingly monumental, you can't help but think that Ephraim, Mr. Charles B. Johnson, the mad Mormon of Monona County, wasn't a total lunatic. 

I may be pushing it, but on an late October day with just enough puffy cloudiness lolling in from the west, even a prairie-person like me can't help but think that any place this beautiful on the face of the earth has to be preparation for something divine, something really, really blessed.

Where the Little Sioux flows into the Missouri

 

The mission was simple: go on out there and gather some shots of the longest river in America, the Missouri. What I'm working on is a chronicle of tales, all of which have at least something to do with the river somewhat affectionately and aptly called "the Mud."

Once upon a time, the Missouri was a wily rebel that would flood, sometimes violently, almost every year, sometimes more than once. For the most part, a series of hydroelectric dams hog-tied the river (although it flooded badly two years ago now). The picture above doesn't really fit the bill or finish the mission because it's the wispy steam of an ox-bow, a narrow little lake the river left behind when, willy-nilly, it chose yet another path one forgotten spring. 

I got there just in time to catch a bit of that steamy pond and a couple hundred mud hens, who were far too busy to be concerned about that hooded guy up there on the bank. 

For the record, here some of them are. It was a gorgeous spot, and I was there all by my lonesome, which is always the way to celebrate the dawn. Cold?--yes. First time the mercury dived beneath 20 degrees this fall. I had left my gloves in the truck. My fingers complained. 

Clouds had begun to form when I headed south to a place I hoped I'd find river access. Google Earth suggested there was a boat ramp down from a town called Little Sioux, but I'd have to find my way there. Thankfully, I did.

The sun was up high enough that it lit up the far shore of the Missouri, as well as the ground beneath my feet. But it did so only when that cloud bank--isn't it beautiful?--separated enough to let the sun muscle through. Right here where the Little Sioux River empties into the Missouri--that's the spot I wanted to see. Because the sun was so dodgy, I took a ton of shots, trying to get one where the morning sun bathed the whole scene, or else didn't at all, which isn't bad either.

You can't help but feel a little carpet-bagger-ish with a camera in hand. Here you are, trying to snatch away a bit of beauty from a place and a time that's almost sacred in its dappled silence. But then, it's not that there isn't more beauty to be had. If I was on my way there right now, I know I'd be welcomed, offered, once more, the elements of worship.

It was a gorgeous day, but I'd come to visit at this spot for a reason. I'm not saying it's holy ground--the whole boat ramp area is a rutted mess. It's likely that I'm the only soul who's visited all year long who knows the story. There's no historical marker, although I've seen them at less significant places so honored in the region. 

Right here, at this place, Father Christian Jacob Adriaan Hoeken, a Dutch Jesuit, was once buried, with others, after malaria struck a steamboat named the St. Ange, the angel, as it came up the Missouri from St. Louis. His good, good friend, Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, yet another Jesuit missionary, gave him last rites and was part of the burial detail. Father Hoeken, church historians like to say, was the first missionary to baptize a Native child west of the Mississippi. De Smet was as great as the legends that grew in his wake declare him to be. Father Hoeken was 43 years old.

You can listen to the story here. 

Couldn't get enough of the place, really, and I was there at moment the whole landscape could not have been more nicely, more reverently, dressed. 

There's a statue of Father Hoeken in Pierre, South Dakota, but you'll have to hunt for it. His remains eventually found a more permanent home when they were taken from here and brought, honorably I'm sure, to Saint Stanislaus Jesuit Seminary, in St. Louis. When the grounds of that seminary were sold, those remains were reinterred again at the city's Calvary Cemetery.

I can't help but think that De Smet and Hoeken would sit silently through this early morning pilgrimage of mine, silently and smilingly. It's okay, they might well say, for me to honor this spot, as long as I remembered, with them, that this world was not their home.

Father Hoeken, Pierre, SD

Small Wonders--Brother Frank

Francis La Flesche


Click here to hear the recording.

The indigenous singers in this bit of song were born at the time of the Civil War. I'm not making this up. Their voices come to us miraculously from a "wax cylinder," an invention created for both recording and play back, and marketed just a few years before Frank La Flesche, son of Joseph Iron Eye La Flesche, had it spinning among his people, the Omahas.  Today, those wax cylinders are kept in the Library of Congress.

Imagine yourself among the elderly singers who performed it for the young man who asked for them. Then, astonishingly, imagine yourself listening to your own voices rise from that huge black horn. 

That we have that recording--you heard it yourself!--is flat-out dumbfounding, as is the life story of Frank La Flesche, the Omaha anthropologist who recorded it in 1895. As a boy, he never quite got over killing his first buffalo on a summer hunt with the tribe. He told himself--he was just a kid--that he could never do any better than to be a great buffalo hunter for his people.

All of that changed. When the white man came, the buffalo disappeared, and Frank La Flesche, a young man, traveled out east on a long trip with his sister Susette and a very famous cousin, the Ponca headman Standing Bear, to argue for the Ponca's return to their homeland. During those six months, Francis met Alice Fletcher, a Harvard anthropologist whose professional interests were in preserving Native cultures in danger of disappearing as so many were.  

Soon after, Frank left Nebraska for Washington D. C., to become a clerk in the Office of Indian Affairs, and so began a long professional relationship with Professor Fletcher. Her scholarly expertise teamed with his own beloved experience among the Omaha people. He knew the men and women she wanted to understand. He was versed in the unique culture she wanted to document. He knew what she needed to. 

So when, one sunny afternoon, somewhere on the Omaha reservation, Frank La Flesche had set up his recording machine, when those elderly singers were finally persuaded to offer him songs they'd known since they were kids, Prof. Fletcher was there too.

In his book, The Middle Five: Indian Schoolboys of the Omaha Tribe, a collection of stories from his boarding school experience on the Omaha reservation, Francis La Flesche remembers the day school officials came to measure student learning. "Do your people like to sing?" one of them asks the boys. Yes, they tell him, and he asks them to do so. Here's what happens. 

A loud clear voice closer to me broke into a Victory song; before a bar was sung another voice took up the song from the beginning, as is the custom among the Indians, then the whole school fell in, and we made the room ring. We understood the song, and knew the motion of which it was the expression. We felt, as we sang, the patriotic thrill of a victorious  people who had vanquished their enemies.

But the school officials, white men, heard something different. "That's savage," they said, "that's savage." They turned to the teacher. "They must be taught music."

So every afternoon, Francis says, with some resignation, they were taught, well, music.

Francis La Flesche accumulated graduate degrees himself later on, and picked up more than his share of honorary doctorates elsewhere, including one from the University of Nebraska. Francis La Flesche, who once wanted to be the greatest Omaha buffalo hunter ever, became instead the Omaha's greatest historian.

You can't help but wonder whether during a music lesson one morning in school, little Francis LaFlesche, maybe ten years old, didn't pick up the scent of a trail he wanted to follow and began to see, in outline, what he wanted to be and what he wanted to do for his people. 

Really, that story too is what's recorded on the wax cylinders still there at the Library of Congress. Listen to them yourself sometime. They're on-line. For them and so much more, we have Francis to thank.

Reformation Day

Mary and Joseph present Jesus at the temple.

From the Stations of the Cross

in a Native context

in St. Paul's Catholic Church, Marty, SD.

To say I wasn't allowed to go trick-or-treating when I was a kid creates a picture of me--long, long ago--standing at the door in a Superman outfit, shopping bag in hand, bawling, being told that leaving the house would mean not coming back. It was nothing that draconian.

My not going trick-or-treating was a given: it didn't have to be said. I knew the day should have been given--and it was in our house--to commemorating the great Reformation, to Luther hurling ink at Satan, to Calvin, the mayor of Geneva, to Zwingli, Beza, and Tyndale and a whole host of rebellious Catholics determined to bring the Bible to the people.

I was in graduate school when I read about English canon law that mandated churches taking the huge Bible on the table in front of the pulpit and turning it around so it faced the people, not prelate. No single event of the Reformation was so strikingly symbolic. The Reformation made the Word of God available to ordinary people. It was epoch-making, a sea-change theologically, but also politically. If the Reformation of the Christian church didn't give birth to democracy, it was most certainly midwife. 

Much of the animus against Roman Catholicism when I was a boy--including Uncle Jay literally preaching the horror of rule-by-Pope should Kennedy become President--had to do with church doctrine: their sad adoration of Mary, mother of Christ; their idiotic fish on Fridays; praying to idols madness; their immoderate drinking; their priests' impossible chastity. I don't remember my parents ever maintaining that the Pope was the anti-Christ, but it was somehow clear that my people had such a claim not all that long ago. And, well, who knows. It Zwingli said it, after all. . .

What I'm saying is that I didn't go trick-or-treating on Halloween because I grew up closer to the effects--for good or ill--of the Reformation. I distrusted Catholics for the pretentions of their macabre faith--all those tall, vaulted ceilings in those scary, silent churches surrounded by an array of sculptured saints. 

We were children of the Reformation. We were not minnow-munchers. I didn't go trick-or-treating because, as a boy, I knew it was wrong even to believe I could. "Here I stand," Luther said when accused. "I can do no other."

That's what October 31st was all about.

True? Yes. But excessive? Yes, again.

Last night our church worshipped with three others in an annual celebration of the Reformation of the Christian church. It was glorious, perfectly glorious. Nobody canonized Luther or Calvin, nobody said a thing about those wretched Roman Catholics, nobody gloried in the great revolution. We sang "A Mighty Fortress" and participated in a litany that featured the four "solas." The sermon, about God being with us on stormy seas, had very little to do with the Reformation. 

Just getting along in life requires maintaining balances, many of them, or so it seems to me. Mutual contradictions abound amid life's paradoxes. Truth is elliptical, an old preacher once told me. It always has two centers, not just one. We need to maintain balances.

The Reformation tore the Christian faith apart. True. It's a crime--a sin--what Christian people do to themselves and their fellow Christians and has been as long as people have worshipped, no matter how they do it. Yes. 

But that doesn't mean the church didn't need reforming, or that the Reformation didn't do wonderful things, like deliver democracy by insisting everyone--every man and woman and child--had the right to read the Bible.

Last night people got together in commemoration of the Reformation of the Christian church, and it was lovely. It was good. It was beautiful. 

It was blessed.

Goosebumps

 

“Praise the LORD. How good it is to sing praises to our God,

how pleasant and fitting to praise him!” Psalm 147:1

I remember a certain species of goosebumps, my first. I was twelve years old maybe, part of a choir festival a half century ago in a small town in Wisconsin, dozens of kids drawn from a dozen Christian schools. The music was Bach—“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” For almost fifty years I’ve not been able to hear that piece without remembering that day. My entire self—heart, soul, mind, and strength—reacted to the beauty.

Those goosebumps arrived in an afternoon rehearsal before the big concert that night. I remember what that gym looked like, which step I occupied on the bleachers, and some of the kids who stood around me; and I remember being embarrassed because this unmanly tearful impulse, this odd soul tremor was a threat that required whatever testosterone I had to stifle. Something weird in me made tears arise.

The music was gorgeous. I didn't know Bach from Beethoven, but I knew what we were singing was glorious. But my girlfriend was there, and I haven’t forgotten that either. She stood a row or two beneath me in the choir, and her being there was part of this odd emotional seizure. The music alone would not have raised such a visceral reaction. My seeing her, a row or two beneath me was part of the moment too.

And faith played a role too—we were singing about Jesus, of course, and we were all kids from Christian schools; and then there was the beautiful music—we couldn’t do much better than Bach; and my girlfriend—well, I suppose most of us experience love long before we can define it. Being part of something so much bigger than myself had to play a role too—all these kids were making a beautiful, joyful noise.

Psalm 147 says, first thing out of the box, how pleasant it is praise him—how pleasant. It’s an amazingly human assertion: "Sheesh, praising God feels good." The first declaration of this psalm has nothing to do with duty (“we should praise him”) or his wanting our praise. Instead, the psalm starts with all of us from the Me Generation: hey, praising God just plain feels good. And, oh yeah, it’s fitting too.

I wonder whether my skin turned inside out and my tears ducts threatened because, maybe for the first time, my “self” disappeared. I got lost in the music, lost in affection, lost in the joyful affirmation of group love that is choral music, lost in all those things, lost in plain beauty, just flat-out lost, lost in praise.

Just about every great religion maintains that self-lessness is a good, good thing. Love is selfless. Heroism is selfless. Vivid spiritual experience is always selfless. When Mariane Pearl heard of her husband Danny’s brutal execution at the hands of terrorists some years ago, she said she was able to handle it because she’d been chanting. She’s Hindu. “The real benefit of having practiced and chanted was that at that moment was that I was so clear on what was going on. This is a time when I didn’t think about myself at all,” she says. And that was a gift.

Sometimes it’s just good to lose yourself. It’s good to praise, to give yourself to God. It’s good to love, to give yourself away. Praise—whether it’s evoked by a Bach chorale or bright new dawn—gives us a chance to empty ourselves.

And that’s good, and it’s pleasant,
and it’s fitting before the King—our King, the joy of man’s desiring.

"By schisms rent asunder, by heresies distressed"

No one mentioned it, but the truth is that the meeting was definitely historic. As few as a couple of decades ago, a get-together between churches of the two denominations would have been almost unthinkable.

 

I can't complain about my parents. They were pious but thoughtful, capable of long and involved discussions about politics or theology, conversations they enjoyed and I enjoyed hearing when I was old enough to understand the fundamental issues being discussed. The stock images of dour, nay-saying Dutch Calvinists was nowhere close to applicable. My parents loved the Lord, they'd say, and practiced a piety that was as palpable at home as prayer itself.

But when my sister fell in love with a boy from the Reformed Church (RCA), they weren't happy, largely because, traditionally at least, members of the RCA not only didn't support but actually opposed Christian education, which is to say the Christian school I attended and they supported (my father was board president, my mother a frequent substitute teacher), the Oostburg Christian School just a block--maybe less--from 714 Superior, where I grew up. 

When my sister determined she would marry the RCA boy, things were said that were never totally forgotten. I believe they learned to love him, but in some ways the damage was done, as it was in many homes of the Dutch Reformed people in whose close circles I grew up, people who considered what my sister entered into something of a "mixed marriage."

The meeting, just one night ago, as far as I know, was locally the first of its kind: members of two denominations meeting in one room to discuss their mutual concerns in light of theological questions surrounding gay marriage. Today, it seems, both groups can consolidate their missions by a perverse looming enemy, what conservatives used to call "the gay agenda." What's brought the RCA and CRC together after 164 years (the CRC officially left in 1857) was gay marriage; both denominations have suffered bitter dissension about how to deal with homosexuality.

A mutual struggle brought them together--not because of gay marriage, the participants maintained, but because of radically different views of scripture. Those who would close the door on the LGBTQ issue claim those who wouldn't quite simply do not read the Bible right. The division is a matter of orthodoxy, specifically whose orthodoxy is the verifiable orthodoxy.

Late in the meeting, a well-meaning man stood to say he was 76 years old, and he just wanted to say that his grandfather feared the Lord and read the Bible as if it were the Word of God. It wasn't an unfamiliar comment, nor was it off the track of the conversations that went on. "Give me that old-time religion," he might have said, a comforting idea that resonated with lots of people who'd gathered. 

But it's also silly. I'm sorry. No one in or around Sioux Center, Iowa, practices a way of life the man's grandfather did in the Siouxland of the 1930s and 40s, when some congregations still used the Dutch language and would (and did) fight to save it. 

We no longer live in his grandpa and grandma's era. If you would like to know the difference, read the imaginative writers of the era or visit a local museum. Still, that comment energizes many who want to walk away from those with whom they disagree and animated the discussion even before he said what he did.

I know exactly where to look in the book I wrote about the history of the Christian Reformed Church to find a list of the reasons why the CRC broke away from the RCA in 1857. In less than a minute, I could find a handy listing of those reasons, but don't ask me to recite them. I'm guessing very, very few of those who gathered in that church sanctuary, a word we once used, could list any one of the five reasons I listed and discussed in that book. Any. Of. The. Reasons.

I'd love to go back to Alaska and know more about the life and work of the Rev. Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian missionary who traveled unceasingly throughout the west, establishing churches, doing wonderful work among a people dispossessed by waves of white people who wanted their land. There's a museum there, all about his work. 

If you'd like to read exciting stories about Native America, pick up a biography of Father DeSmit, a legendary Jesuit "black robe," who left a legacy you can see in innumerable stained glass tributes throughout the west. I share DNA with the Rev. Andrew VanderWagen, a CRC pastor, who learned to love the Zuni people in New Mexico, gave his life to them, and is buried there among them, as is his wife and children.

But I can also point you at books written by Native people who describe Christian missionaries whose palpable enmity was sourced in their differing denominational backgrounds, men whose hate and spite Indigenous people saw as hopelessly confusing and was, as they describe it, a blot on their Christian witness.

I can't help but wonder at the righteousness of yet another split, another faction, another denomination. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity says there are already 200 denominations in these United States and 45,000 in the world. 

It seems some among us believe there should be yet another, this one home of the truly orthodox.

Required Reading

It's hard to believe it's gone, but I'll bet it is. For generations, American high school students read Stephen Crane' Red Badge of Courage, a true Civil War novel that wasn't "true" in any way. One of the onerous tasks of teaching the novel was having to admit, at one time or another, that Stephen Crane was a kid when he wrote it (24 years old) and that, if you do the math, there's no way he ever fought in the American Civil War. In fact, he never spent an hour in battle.

He made up the whole story. He may well have read accounts of a battle, but Stephen Crane imagined himself carrying the flag of the United States of America into battle. Can't help feeling a little cheated about that.

But, like it or not, The Red Badge of Courage was, for decades (it was published in 1895), the Civil War novel, and, truth be told, I'm willing to bet that it was read that way, as a kind of historical record, more than it was for its epoch-making "worldview," a vision of life that required some smarts both to teach and to understand. 

What it offered, lots of English teachers celebrated (as did I), was something called "literary naturalism," baggage that was heavier than simply literary. It was a "world view," a way of looking at reality, its own pair of spectacles. The Red Badge of Courage featured a kid (Crane was just 24 when he wrote it) who ran from the battlefield and suffers for it, although he suffers far more internally than he does from some officer's reprimand or military imprisonment. 

The great story is the not the story of the war, but the story of the disillusion he suffers, not because of war but because he has, seemingly, failed.  In RBC, Crane takes a kind of morbid delight in the kid's psychic misery and asks us all to do the same. All of which means that America's greatest Civil War novel isn't about the Civil War at all--it's about how our minds and hearts function. It's about us--Crane's view of us.

But, who cares? RBC is long-gone from American high school classrooms, I'm sure, just as The Merchant of Venice is long gone from required reading for high school sophomores, and I'll bet even in Minnesota kids don't read Sinclair Lewis. Today, it's hard to believe that what we used to call "the canon" is pretty much non-existent. 

In college American lit classes, any study of Stephen Crane would likely expand to include "The Open Boat," a wild tale about a storm at sea, and, if a student really wanted to wade into literary naturalism, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a little novel that feels like more of a character-study than a finished imaginative work. Maggie never works its way in your heart. You read it and weep. Maggie's sad fortunes bring her down to the shady side of town, and won't allow her escape. 

Such is life, Crane says.

When I was in college and beginning to imagine a life as a high school English teacher, Stephen Crane was something of hero. After all, as an author he was just a kid himself--and he loved baseball. What's not to like?

Read a review of a new biography of Stephen Crane this morning, a bio that the reviewer says includes more pages than the whole collected works of the man whose work he's studying.

For years I taught Early American Literature, Am lit up to the Civil War, so Stephen Crane was not part of the curriculum for which I was responsible. It's been years since I read Maggie, even RBC. Truth be told, I hadn't thought much about Stephen Crane himself, an old hero, oddly enough, until this morning when I read the review. 

It's odd to remember how much I admired him, once upon a time long ago, but I didn't have to refresh my memory. It's all there yet in my head, even though his peculiar world view is not in my heart.

It's like wading through old photographs and suddenly coming upon one that instantly flashes memories you don't remember you had. A lifetime ago, Stephen Crane, even his life, offered me a path through life.  

Even though I was really never a disciple, I'm glad that sometime, years ago, I met him through his work and came away blessed--yes, blessed. 

Today, I wish the same for my grandchildren. Red Badge of Courage isn't required reading, but I want them to have the kind of education that dutifully and artfully explores what's really in the human mind and soul. 

I want their required reading to be just as important.

Dirty Stories

No, it's not an easy read. Like the Book of Job, the novel is dark and often dreary and depressing. But then, so is its world, the world of institutional slavery. When Toni Morrison wrote Beloved, she deliberately and defiantly chose to take on what many historians of culture call America's "original sin." Beloved is the story of a woman who did the unthinkable because the unthinkable was worse than the unimaginable.

Morrison based her story on a horrific event recorded in a religious magazine in 1856, the account of a woman so determined that her children would not return to slavery that she decided to kill them rather than have them submit treachery she herself had experienced. It's the story of Sethe, the mom who murdered a daughter when the Fugitive Slave Law was just outside her door ready to drag all of them back to chains. Denver, a second daughter, escaped death only because Sethe had time to kill only one of her children. 

Morrison's story is complex and moves in strange directions. The Civil War is over now, but the child Sethe murdered haunts their house and their lives, and most people in the community know it and avoid them. What happens isn't pleasant, but then, to say the least, neither was slavery. When, eventually, the ghost, Beloved, disappears, Sethe is heartbroken, because ghost or not, Beloved was her deceased child after all.

At the end, Denver, Sethe's living daughter, sits with her mother and her mother's grief and insists, in a moment I've always felt triumphant, that Beloved wasn't her mother's "best thing," as her mother's tears insist, but that she herself is her "best thing."

Sophie's Choice, a Holocaust novel by William Styron, left a permanent record in my soul. It's a difficult novel I'd love to take a shot at editing myself. It's the work of a mind I don't always understand, but nothing I've ever read about the Holocaust has left the mark Sophie's Choice has in a horrific moment when a woman stands on the platform, having just arrived at Auschwitz, and is told by Mengele that one of her two children will go to the gas chamber. It is her job to determine which of her children will live and which will die. 

No moment in anything I've ever read detailed as excruciatingly the horror of death camp suffering than the moment Styron created right there on the platform. 

For me at least, Morrison's Beloved, has a place in my soul as permanent as Styron's Sophie's Choice. If someone wanted to understand the horrific legacy of the institutional slavery, I'd recommend Toni Morrison's Beloved. And I am not the only reader so taken. In 1988, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 

So this weekend the Republican candidate for the office of governor in Virginia released an ad that featured a brave woman--that's her up top--who took on the evil liberals of her son's high school English department when she picked up Beloved and found, well, bad stuff. She complained to the school's board, told them her son was being forced to read really bad things. 

I'm a liberal. I'll confess. I hope the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe wins the gubernatorial race in Virginia; but the issue that new ad prompts is bigger than an election because it has to do with how we understand and value our own past.

That woman, the Republican candidate suggests, is a hero for policing her son's assignments and clearing him from having to read Beloved for an advance placement class during his senior year in high school. 

I can't help but think she's wrong. She doesn't want her 18-year-old son, who's taking an advance placement--which is to say "college" class--reading the filth millions of her countrymen and women say is one of America's all-time greatest novels, a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Twenty years ago maybe, Christianity Today asked me to participate in a story they were doing on writers' favorite works. I've never been fond of answering questions like that because they force judgments I can't make. But I agreed to participate. I don't remember the whole list, but I do remember telling CT that my all-time favorite novel was Toni Morrison's Beloved.

One of us wrong. Sorry, lady, but in my mind and heart and soul, it's you.

Some few more thoughts about the B of J

I'm guessing it was forty years ago now that Chaim Potok, a Jewish novelist who'd acquired quite a reputation among American evangelicals (we were a different bunch back then), paid a visit to Dordt College. I know, that statement sounds as fictional as Book of Job, but he did. He was here. I know. I was there.

At the home of the President of the college, the English department and our guest, Mr. Potok, were invited for dinner one evening. Whether it was over dinner or after is immaterial. I have no idea how it was we were chatting about scripture, nor do I remember anything of what was said other than one darlingly devilish remark he made about the Book of Job. 

He wore a wry smile all the way through the line. "You can't help but wonder," he said, "whether the writer created the ending just so he could get his story into the canon." 

We all giggled. I still do. It was a level of spotten that would have been impossible to get away with as a Dordt prof, but Mr. Potok meant it in good fun, even if it landed well outside of the boundaries of orthodoxy. But, Potok was Jewish, we reasoned, and Jewish folks have a whole different view of scripture. 

What he meant, jokingly, was that whoever wrote the fiction that is the Book of Job understood very well that all that bickering and belly-aching required an ending that would please the editor--the Almighty, and that what's there--Job gets chewed out for the preposterous notion that he can understand God--is something that simply had to be. What the statement suggests is that the ending is tacked on in order to get some wholesome sales. That assessment was shocking, like the ending itself, which is far more scary than nice. Job was minding his own business and doing it with a credible righteousness when God almighty hung him out for Satan to do his dirty thing.

After endless theological bickering, the writer finally brought in the voice of God to say that if you think you can have a personal relationship with the cosmic power that He is, you're sadly, tragically, mistaken. Be still and know--that sort of thing.

I've never forgotten that assessment, I suppose because something about it sounded as accurate as it may have been errant. Scripture was divinely inspired, I'd always been taught, as if God himself were narrating the text. Way back in grade school, I used to think that God turned himself into ink and flowed right into and out of those feather pens the ancients used. To think that some mortal writer was doing the story-telling, fashioning the book to his own ends, was heretical. But cool.

But I liked it and still do, especially after, once again, reading most of the book aloud, in chunks, and listening to a month of Job sermons. I can't help but wonder whether scripture doesn't do a better job of helping us understand ourselves than it does of truly "understanding" God. 

I can swear to his reality, know he loves me, treasure his morning canvases, the sophisticated beauty of his creative work all around. I can believe He sent his son to this earth to fashion a way of living in accordance with all he wants of us and for us, but I'll never understand him. I'll never know it all. 

And if that's true, then, like Job, I'd better just keep my mouth shut--or at least learn when and how to complain. 

All of which makes me more comfortable with the notion that, like the Book of Job, Holy Writ is really a record of what man thought about God. It seems impossible to believe that the lamentable story of Job actually happened. It has to be some writer's concoction. Some anonymous writer created a story to help him (and us, finally) know something important about God. 

There are times in our lives--don't I wish this weren't true?--when we can't help but think we're in Job-level quandaries. When we are and when we do, this strange fiction is a model, not even necessarily the model, maybe not even a good model, just a model. The Bible tells us repeatedly, "Been there, done that."

Butchered the enemy, even their women and children, oxen and mules? Sure. Been there, done that. But a massacre certainly is not the model. Banned women from speaking in church? Sure. Been there, done that. But that's not the model.

At times, it seems the psalms contradict themselves, but those contradictions don't prompt us to dismiss them as scripture, as Holy Writ. They merely offer us means by which to try to do our express human work: to live in His rule. 

The Book of Job is what one writer wanted to say, his view of things. Is it Right (upper case R)? That's a question not worth asking. The book is there. It's in the canon. It made the cut. It's less "Right" than it is "Good." It's a bad story that's good for us, even if we throw in the towel little more than halfway through, even if we know how it ends only because we cheated or the preacher told us. 

It's Holy Writ and human writ (not upper case), sometimes far more the latter than the former. 

I dare say loads--if not all--of our endless theological bickering is attributable to our varied understanding of the nature of scripture. On that score, I'm hardly an expert. Want one? You can find them by the dozen in varied hues. 

"Consider my servant Job," God says, as does the writer. After my own due consideration, I'm just saying what I can't help but think about what's in the Book of Job,  even if I cheated and skipped to the end.