Against itself

I don't have a dog in this fight. The whole subject, the field, the theory--whatever it was--was never something I warmed up to, but something we all acknowledged we really needed to include in our English major. We had no choice. As a department, we simply had to set aside time in the lives of our majors for at least some introduction to or beginning practice in what seemed almost the barnstorming literary science of "deconstruction."

Even today, I don't know how to define it. It was a hybrid theory of literary criticism that seemed to operate more by sleight of hand than anything ever clearly understood. Those who were good at it--and it was all the rage in graduate schools--eventually simply left the rest of us behind by adopting a language all its own and speaking--and arguing--only with each other.

What I seem to remember--and I may be wrong--is that deconstruction was nothing the reader does. Instead, it's what the literature does to itself. On the basis of the literature's own incongruities--which we discover and map out--we determine that the play or story or novel or essay really eats itself. It "deconstructs" itself.

It seemed to me that the end game of "deconstruction" was, in fact, destruction--you stand by and watch as the Scarlet Letter "deconstructs" itself, showing itself to be a victim of its chaos within, its own strangled logic or perspective.

I'm sorry. I'm not doing well in explanation, but if there's one thing about the teaching of literature that I've not kept up on since leaving the classroom, it's "deconstruction." I found it interesting because I was supposed to. I did it out of obligation--we heard, after all, that an undergraduate curriculum without deconstruction wasn't an education. So we acted. I acted. I tried. I may have even been somewhat successful, but I couldn't help thinking the whole chaotic mess was silly, even a little poisonous.

Deconstructionism was hot at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where I took my Ph.D. degree. One of its shining stars was an Egyptian-born literary critic and writer named Ihab Hassan. The English department would send notes around announcing lectures in Hassan's world of lit crit, academics coming to campus from near and far to discuss ideas that would take 500-word paragraphs to describe, paragraphs that was obliged to use language familiar to those who'd already waded, heart-deep, into the steamy waters of "deconstruction." I went once, understood nothing, and never returned. I have no regrets.

And thus, I am encouraged by an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which does not proclaim the death of deconstruction, but expresses astonishment that literary scholars went a-whoring after it. "To this day, deconstruction remains a style of thought more complained about than understood, less outrageous than deliberately elusive," says Timothy Brennan, who teaches at the University of Minnesota.

The end game, I couldn't help but think, was the actual deconstruction of literary studies. What its practitioners appeared to want to illustrate is that Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter contains enough internal conflicts to bring its own house down. When I look back on teaching English to undergraduates for forty years, I can't help but think I was always trying to do the opposite--not "deconstruct" Hamlet, but feature the very strengths that made "to be, but not to be" universally recognized, even by those who never came near the play or Shakespeare himself. Wasn't pushing students to observe the death of literature an assassination attempt all its own?

I've not been any part of that whole discussion for years now, and that's just fine, but I can't help but smile a bit at the title of Professor Brennan's review: "What Was Deconstruction?" and the death he implies therein.

Sunday Morning Meds -- Remembering

Ancient poster for a reading at Dordt

“You thought I was altogether like you.” Psalm 50:21

Years ago, when I was a teenager, my uncle—distinguished Uncle Ward—came to visit. I was in high school, and he took me golfing. I’d fooled around with golf clubs since I was ten, I’m sure, but my family was never part of the country club set back then, and actually going to a course would have been, well, out of the question—somewhat frivolous use of our money, my father would have assumed.

After nine holes, my uncle wanted to ride out in the countryside around town, the town of Oostburg, Wisconsin, where I was growing up, and he had, maybe 35 years before. His career had led him afar from his geographic roots, and I could tell that it was a joy for him to reminiscence while touring the old haunts.

“Now go out west of town,” he told me, and I did, then followed the river. “There,” he said. “See that path through the field?—if you follow that road, you’ll come to a swimming hole.” He was overflowing with memory. “Ever been there? Great place—we used to have so much fun.” And then he was gone, lost in memory.

I was likely at the very age he was remembering himself being. I remember thinking it odd that he could be so emotionally attached to a bend in the river I’d never seen, even though we’d both grown up in the same neighborhood. There’d been spectacular fun there years before, but no one I knew ever frequented that place. He knew the world in which I was growing up, but it was almost a different country.

Yesterday a friend of mine who also grew up in Oostburg, Wisconsin, came back here to his home on the edge of the plains. Even before he left, he was down because his parents had decided to move across the lake to Michigan, and he was afraid that this Oostburg visit might well be his last.

It’s a rite of passage I know. When my parents left the house in which I grew up, some kind of emptiness descended, even though they were simply moving across town. But years ago already my uncle had prepared me for that leave-taking, when I witnessed his reverence for a spot on the river I’d never visited.

The gulf which divides reality and perception is sometimes immense. The town my uncle knew wasn’t the place where I was then growing up, nor is it the place my friend doesn’t want to forget. We’re all diaspora finally; none of those Oostburgs exists today.

The worlds we imagine aren’t the ones we live in. Similarly, I suppose, the God we imagine isn’t necessarily the one who exists through time and eternity. In a psalm that’s frequently shocking, here’s yet another line to make us sweat: “you thought I was altogether like you.”

He’s not what we think—that’s what he’s reminding his listeners. Not much is, of course; but you can bet he’s not. He’s altogether divine, and if what he says throughout the Old Testament is Him talking, he is certainly no teddy bear. The fact is, we really don’t know him.

Perhaps I find that disconcerting because I’ve created an image of him in my own mind as a genial gentleman really into forgiveness.

“You thought I was altogether like you,” that God says.

Yes, I think I have. I just hope--by faith, by grace--I’m right.

Backyard revelations

How quickly winter's seige is gone when flowers start to bloom. 

But when an army of Russian thistles attacks the backyard prairie, the curse of Adam's Fall returns.

Then, suddenly, a bit of grace from solid rock, enough to make you smile, maybe even sing.

On the march with the MARs Conservatives

Brandi Love, a legit porn star, reportedly bought tickets to Turning Point, USA, a conservative youth rally of sorts, but was turned down when she attempted to attend. Ms. Love, says Nate Hochman in yesterday's NY Times, calls herself a "sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll conservative." She was angry, claiming her rejection was "the worst example of cancel culture." If the goings on at Turning Point, she said, represents the future of American conservatism, then the future is run by 'puritanical, fanatically devout Christians who will demand compliance or else.'”

Hochman's op-ed is a contribution to dialogue about politics and culture that is, to me, at least, quite new. Hochman, a bona fide Trump conservative, is a rarity in the Times' opinion pages. He's there because his analysis offers a fresh perspective. Whether he's right or just plain "out there" is yet to be decided.

Hochman uses the Brandi Love story to illustrate something he says is happening in the conservative movement. He claims the strained marriage between political conservatives and religious conservatives is ending. It was the evangelicals who wanted an end to abortion, he says, and not the new conservative voices whose enemy is "wokeness" and a public education system that teaches it. Furthermore, what he calls MARs (Middle American Radicals) believe in a kind of nationalism that evangelicals only tacitly accept (some may call it "white nationalism"). He says the "humanitarian" impulse of Christianity itself and Christians specifically is old-fashioned and of little matter to the Ron DeSantos types. DeSantos is, at best, he says, a nominal Catholic. Tucker doesn't really care about prayer in public schools.

Trump was no pillar of righteousness, but evangelicals believed they could hitch their wagon to that star, pack Supreme Court, and reverse Roe v. Wade. They were right. But their passion and Trump's conservatism always was an odd alliance.

Hochman says that particular relationship is over because the religious right is dying. It's got no power because it ain't no more. A steep decline in church attendance illustrates demise among even its major fellowships. The Southern Baptist Convention is losing members. More and more of the church are nones.

The MARs conservatives simply no longer need evangelicals; in every way, those old Puritans are old fogies, and anyway few of them are left. Hochman calls reversing Roe v Wade "the dying gasp" of the old religious right, because the new conservatives don't really care about your abortion or mine: "Instead of an explicitly biblical focus on issues like school prayer, no-fault divorce and homosexuality, the new coalition is focused on questions of national identity, social integrity and political alienation."

Although the new conservatism enjoys the support of most Republican Christians who formed the electoral backbone of the old Moral Majority, it is a social conservatism rather than a religious one, driven by issues of race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history.

That those political issues--"race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history"--have no real currency among evangelical conservatives may be the kindest thing Hochman says about evangelicals.

What's in it for the new conservatives? Hochman says those new issues make for a much bigger tent since it's clear that significant numbers of minorities believe that trans men shouldn't compete in women's sports, that a baker can choose not to bake a cake for a gay couple, and that there's entirely too much critical race theory taught by liberals in America's public schools.

The reality is a new playing field for conservatism in what Hochman calls "secular America." The new MARs conservatives have already won several battles; after all, 17 states (including Iowa in a bill championed by my own state rep) have passed legislation opposing "critical race theory, and another fourteen (including Iowa) passed legislation barring trans athletes from competition.

Is Hochman on to something? I don't know, but it's a new appraisal and, for those of us who make up the Christian church, its own kind of obituary. In a way, it's not surprising, Trump being, well, who he is, and "woke" being what it is.

But then a basic tenet of the Christian faith we carry is the necessity of being "born again." Dying shouldn't be, and isn't, an end.

My early morning, yesterday

It's an odd patch of ground, expansive corn fields all around; it's a bare naked cemetery, maybe a half-dozen trees, pine trees, something of a rarity out here, except, it seems, in graveyards. I'd been out there a couple of weeks ago to visit a Siouxland politician, Charles Hoeven, a man once on a real throne of power, a man whose many years in Washington are rarely, if ever talked about. 

Found his grave, but his is a story I've already told. What I noticed out there that morning was that if I played my cards right on some gorgeously lit dawn, I might just come away with a few good shots. So, yesterday, once I noticed the sunrise might well be memorable, I went back to the cemetery.

 Worked out just fine, thanks to a gorgeous set.

Beautiful stuff, but acknowledgements are in order--many thanks to the Lord God of Heaven and Earth. 

I was not far from home, and I had things to do; but I thought I'd look around for more beauty--I've long ago decided it's good for the soul. 

There are times where the sheer immensity of the world out here on the edge of the plains is the entire story. This shot, this shot, is all setting. Not a character on stage, yet, somehow, it sings.

And this shot is from my phone. I really didn't deserve this, but cameras in phones are so good these days that they make all of us into fair-to-middlin' landscape photographers. 

I'm looking west, away from the dawn. Sometimes beautiful pictures just show up. I'm almost inexcusably Iowan these days--you've got to be from Iowa to call that landscape beautiful? 

I stopped at Alton's South Pond just for kicks. When you're armed with a camera, moments come along when landscape photography simply happens. Some shots require very little composition because they just simply appear.

These last few aren't perfect, but I turned into the parking lot because I could see that mist was rising from the water. Not until I pointed the camera did I notice that geese had just finished their coffee and were ready to start their day. I really like these pictures.

The sharp colors had flattened into muted gold. 

Looking for beauty, even in a graveyard, is its own blessing, methinks, it's own reward. 

Small Wonders -- The Weston Boy

[An interview on the news yesterday featured two moms who lost children in earlier school shootings talking about how difficult life has become for those parents who lost a 4th grade child in Texas last week. The profound sadness that accompanies the death of a child reminded me of finding the grave of a child in a cemetery in a small town in Minnesota several years ago.

You can listen here.]

The sign out front claims a well-kept church up on a hill north of Flandreau is "The Oldest Continuously Used Church in South Dakota" (all caps because it is, for sure, a title worth coveting). That means it's been "First Presbyterian" for 143 years, "River Bend Church" when it was established along the Big Sioux River long, long ago. The name change came later.

But a church is no more or less than the people of its family, including the old ones out back in the cemetery, where a long history begins to come alive in the outlines etched on the oldest stones. You can read some of that story for yourself if walk through the stones sometime.

There is one here lying in the grass, well-weathered, but still readable in spots, some of its old lines anyway.

It may take you a minute or two, but if you look close you’ll see it’s a child, a boy, I think, although the name is not easy to read. The dates are clear enough, however--he was three years old, and his last name was Weston, and he died long ago, in 1894.

If you look closer, beneath the Weston boy’s dates, the inscription carved into the stone is a line of gospel one might expect on almost any child's grave: "Jesus said, 'Suffer little children to come unto me, . . .for of such is the kingdom of heaven. . '" 

You can still read most of that, 120 years later.

But beneath that line from the book of Luke, in letters I couldn't have read even if they'd been crisp and clear as an October morning, is another wording of the same verse, this one, a bit larger font, written out in the Dakota language. I'm guessing, of course--I can't read the words. 

Not long ago, I stood right there on a Saturday morning in dewy summer grass, and told myself that some stories are readable in every language, because here lies a child, dead for more than one hundred years, a Santee three-year-old from some home along the Big Sioux River just outside of Flandreau, SD. Looks to me as if his grieving parents were believers, maybe bilingual, but still Santee enough to want to read the comfort of Jesus's words in the warmth of their first language, which is always, for everyone, the blessed language of intimacy. 

When, after some time, the death of a child can be spoken of, the story of grief itself can be told in any language because a beloved child who is no longer among us becomes a pained absence realized in every last community around the world.

I stood there in the wet grass of a country churchyard as if no time had passed, stood there that morning as if around me were gathered all the goodly saints of Riverview Presbyterian Church, a whole crowd of witnesses of every race and creed. 

There's not much more to say than what's inscribed there in the weathered stone and lichen. That grave is lying in the grass of the cemetery of an old church up on a slow hill outside a small town in eastern South Dakota, marking the grave site of a little boy who died when he was three years old, a story on a stone tipped over by age and relentless Great Plains seasons. 

No matter what language, in a way, we've all stood there, don’t you think?

Prejudice

In September of 2009, President Barack Hussein Obama asked if schools would allow him to speak to kids from Bangor to Bellflower, all across the length and breadth of this land. It was a novel idea, although what he said in that twenty-minute speech was not. He urged kids to take advantage of what their education was offering, to work hard, to succeed, to aim at excellence in everything they would do during that school year.

Few parents would have advised anything different, I'm sure. The President spoke to them as if they were his kids--and, in a sense, they were. 

My grandkids' school chose not to pipe in the President's speech. The administration felt that what those students were learning during those twenty minutes was more important than what they might have learned from the man who had become their President several months before.

I thought then--and still do today--that not allowing the students to hear their President was bigoted, definitely anti-Democrat. Today, I can't help thinking it was even, at some level, racist. Don't get me wrong--the school principal didn't spout the n-word or speak despairingly about African-Americans.  He didn't discriminate against the few Black students who attended. He wore no hood nor did he burn crosses. But not allowing Obama, their new President, to speak to the kids was its own kind of bigotry. If I were African-American--or Native American--I'd likely be quicker to say it was, well, racist.

I thought then--and still do today--that by not allowing students to listen sidestepped fall-out from parents and constituency overwhelmingly Republican. People hated Obama with a virulence that grew out of fear. His being President was yet another indication that America was falling away from righteousness, losing its moral compass.

The political specifics were tethered to the issue of abortion, I'm sure. I've said before that in 2008, my grandson, a kindergartner, came downstairs where I was working, hiked up into my lap, and told me Obama was a baby-killer. He was in kindergarten. I'm sure he didn't hear that from a teacher or the principal; nor did he hear it at home. But neither did he did dream it up, which suggests he heard from fellow five-year-olds who didn't dream it up either. Hate and fear were in the air, hate rising from fear that Barack Hussein Obama, an African-American muslim, represented something foreign, something other than us. 

There always was and likely always be a ying and yang in our worlds, some who advocate for change and some who refuse it, progressives and conservatives, Democrat and Republican, with or without the capital letters. I'm old enough to remember the carnage of the Sixties, when a Beatles haircut was an overt political statement, when peacenik bell-bottomed kids--and I was one--found getting along with Mom and Dad to be a trial. Power to the people!

We live in a divided world again now, one side glued to Fox News, and most others watching CNN or MSNBC. Some believe anything Tucker Carlson says, others bemoan his very presence. 

Me?--I think as a country and as a people we're in more danger now than we were in 1968. Half the Republicans in the nation believe "the Big Lie" because an ex-President claims it is. As one commentator said, white nationalists don't even wear a hood these days; they carry Christian flags and pray from the Senate Rotunda after breaking in. 

Some commentators, including some Christian commentators, claim our greatest danger these days is giving in to Christian nationalism, conservatives who, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, believe they are acting in the name of the Lord God almighty, people who pray, people who quote scripture, people who operate under the delusion that the New Testament is about something other than loving your fellow man. 

I can't help but think that a decision my grandkids' principal made thirteen years ago was a vivid, early indicator of latent bigotry at the base of a great deal of political agitation then and now. Not to identify that decision for what it was--and for what it is--is far more dangerous than Obama ever was. 

On Memorial Day, 2022

On the first day of the year, January 1st, 1945, Adolf Hitler began to speak to the German people "shrilly but confidently," or so says John Toland, a historian of the Second World War. Just two weeks after the shock of what would be known as "The Battle of the Bulge," what he told Germany went like this:

Our people are resolved to fight the war to victory under any and all circumstances. . . We are going to destroy everybody who does not take part in the common effort for the country or who makes himself a tool of the enemy. . . .The world must know that this State will, therefore, never capitulate. . . .Germany will rise like a phoenix from its ruined cities and this will go down in history as the miracle of the 20th century!

About that he was dead wrong, blessedly wrong. Many of his generals disparaged the preposterous notion that the Wehrmacht, defeated at Normandy and on the run back into the homeland, could rise once more and battle its way in a surprise offensive through Belgium to Antwerp, the seaport, when Allied forces had such vastly superior air power. He'd barely escaped an assassination attempt created by Wehrmacht generals who knew very well that the Fuhrer's sanity was waning. 

Hitler went on:

I want, therefore, in this hour, as spokesman of Greater Germany, to promise solemnly to the Almighty that we shall fulfill our duty faithfully and unshakably in the New Year too, in the firm belief that the hour will strike when victory will ultimately come to him who is most worthy of it, the Greater German Reich!

He could not have been more wrong. 

Was he lying? Perhaps. But despite the advice of some his best generals, he honestly--and probably madly--believed that the Reich's troops could--if they fought selflessly, committed to the German cause--still march to triumph. He was wrong, and it's easy to say today, he was greatly deluded. 

The outcome he described would not be because it could not be. During the six-week Battle of the Bulge, U.S. forces sustained 75,000 casualties (dead, wounded, captured), but some historians estimate Germany lost 100,000 in the bloodiest battle of the Second World War's western front. In frigid temperatures and deep mist and snow, military strategies were almost non-existent, futile. Hundreds of GIs found the battle impossible and surrendered rather than be slaughtered. Hundreds more found themselves alone along a 100-mile front that shifted in and out of the combatants' hands. Beautiful little towns in Belgium, gutted and occupied one day by Germans, would be inhabited the next by Americans. 

Thousands of American boys came away victors but could not have described what happened in the Ardennes forest any better than war watchers back home. The Bulge was terrible mess, an intense, bloody, frozen fight in hundreds of locations and crossroads.

Diet Eman, a Resistance worker in the occupied Netherlands, used to talk about "the fog of war." When she would use that phrase, she would shudder. There were altogether too many hours in war when what was happening was simply chaos, so many moments when discerning right from wrong was impossible, when people on both sides talked as Hitler did on the first day of 1945. In war, truth too is almost always a victim.

Pick up a book on the Bulge someday, wade through it. The mess can't be described quickly. Eisenhower had his hands full once he determined what Hitler was up to along the western front, but he was almost equally burdened by his squabbling generals, Patton among them, who could not be in the same room as the Brit dandy, Field Marshall Montgomery. The whole lot of them were petulant as school boys, despite the war, the blood, all around.

Today is Memorial Day, the day we remember what so many, after the war, could never forget, even if they couldn't--or wouldn't--care to describe it or even remember. Today we honor those who lived and died in the cold fog of war, the deep and perilous and indescribable fog of war. 

Sunday Morning Meds -- The Keeper

 

“The LORD will keep you from all harm—

he will watch over your life;. . .” Psalm 121:8

My father was an elder in the church, but I knew very little about what happened when he walked off to meetings. Most of what went on he was sworn not to tell. Some of it—I know this is true—he didn’t tell me because the knowledge would have hurt me. I was, after all, a child.

One part of his job was tallying after communion. He’d meet with the other elders after the Lord’s Supper to determine who was there, who wasn’t, and who was purposefully not taking the elements. I have no idea what the elders called that little gum shoe reconnaissance meeting, but I know that they met. It was a whole different era. Those elders were watching for were the people coming to the table with a checkered past—or in process of checkering their presents.

When I became an elder, nobody watched the sacrament that closely. Maybe I remember what went on back then because I knew that behind the effort lay stories I would have liked to know, the stories beneath the ceremony. I still do. Whatever the reason, I remember that he’d come back home late from communion Sunday worship.

That post-communion tallying—as well as my father’s own righteousness—may be responsible for the deeply-rooted sense I have that elders really should be Godly men and women, dutiful, virtuous, and devout. And that conviction may be the reason why, more than any other elderly task, I always loved distributing elements myself when I was an elder, giving away the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It’s a big job meant for the kind of person who grows into the office of elder, having raised good kids and having been the spouse of only one mate, no messes in the scrapbook. An elder was someone not subject to the sins our mutual flesh is heir to.

Last night I was served the sacrament by two men who were once thugs, criminals—two men who, for many years, valued only their own skin. Last night I took the bread and wine from people who, with impunity, cheated others, stole what they could to line their pockets, used drugs, and lived promiscuously. At about the time I began to understand why my father got home late after the Lords Supper, they were leaving behind a childhood they never had in a Southeast Asian war zone.

I know them. I’ve walked into their lives, year by year, even written their stories; and I know that those men—the men carrying the bread and the wine last night—were once so far gone in treachery that not a soul in the church where we sat could probably imagine some of the villainy they’ve perpetuated. Who’d have ever thought that someday they’d be doling out the body and blood of Christ? Amazing.

But the promise of scripture, and the Word of the Lord, here in Psalm 121 is that “the LORD will keep you from harm—he will watch over your life.” And all during those bloody years in war-torn Laos, where those two men grew up, God Almighty, who loves us, had his eye on them as if they were fletching sparrows, even when they were lousy thugs, and probably especially then.

He knew them. He was watching them, keeping them from harm, when they—and we, all of us—were yet sinners.

Last night, those two guys fed me the body and blood of Jesus. Amazing grace. What a celebration. Hallelujah, what a savior.

Jesus of the Street*

Of its origins, I'm not quite sure--some freak shop in Old Town, Chicago, circa 1968. I remember being with my then-girlfriend on what was some kind magical mystery tour of the burgeoning counter-culture, a young Iowa Calvinist amid all the bell-bottoms in a tie-dyed world. What a trip. I have no idea what I paid for it. In fact, that I bought it at all right back then seems strange, piety never having been one of my strong suits.

For decades, this swirling portrait of the Lord has been up on my office wall. Somewhere along the line, I had it neatly framed, and there it hung over a window. No more. Now it's here in the bedroom where we're storing stuff, part of the mess in a house that's slowly being emptied.

Not long ago, a student came by and eyed the walls of my office as if he were hunting for clues. His eyes lit on that drawing above the window, and he winced, then pointed up at it--a smart kid, as I remember. The identity of the "freak" in the frame entirely escaped him. I had to tell him it was Jesus. In a way, that episode was painful, not because the kid didn't recognize Jesus--after all, I'm not sure any of us do. What made his blindness striking was that he couldn't really recognize that Jesus, the freaky Jesus, the street Jesus, the power-to-the-people Jesus, the Sixties Jesus.

And I admit it: piety hasn't kept that portrait on my wall for 30 years. That pencil drawing isn't among the images I'll keep because he is my savior. I'm too much a Calvinist for that--I don't always trust images. That sketch stayed up there for all those years because it was a Christ once upon a time I could get my mind and soul and experience around--and still do. In my mind, if he were to return today, I think he'd look a ton more like a freak than a CEO--well, like this, for example.

I think I can be forgiven for saying that the Christ on my wall is more of a symbol of my own cultural matrix than it is a source of my righteousness. For the historical record, the Jesus of my drawing is against the war. He's the one in that crowd of people, arms locked, crossing a Mississippi bridge. He's the one begging justice to roll down, the one who inspired Thoreau and Gandhi. He's the Christ the freak, the Jesus who made sense in my life almost a half-century ago when a ton of other such images had little currency whatsoever.

But he's not Jesus Christ. I don't think anybody really knows who he is. When Peter grabbed the towel out of Jesus's hands as he prepared to wash his disciples' feet, what did Jesus say? "If you don't get this, Peter, you missed the boat entirely, the whole kingdom thing."

Jesus is Lord of the street, but Lord of the board room too--or if he isn't, we're in trouble. He's a whole lot more than any of us can put on paper or on-line.

Still, this Old Town drawing of the Lord is staying with me until, sometime down the road, my kids pick it up, look at it the same strange way that student did, and then toss it, their father gone. It can't be worth much, except to me.

Last night, I took Jesus down from the wall of my office, stuck him in the front seat of my car, and took him home because we're moving. The whole event didn't really hurt all that much because the way I figure--or the way the child in me figures--he's not going anywhere he's not been before.

I'll keep him. After all, he's kept me for all these years.
________________________ 

*First appeared here almost exactly ten years ago. New digs, of course, new basement--but He's still here.

Just a post

The furor has subsided. The list of responses far to the right on my Facebook page says the last comments to my post were registered six or seven hours ago. What drew all the ire has sunk into oblivion beneath more recent posts on my friends' home pages, even though the horror that prompted what I wrote lives on, as will the incalculable grief of the victims' families. 

An 18-year-old kid, bullied as a child for his stuttering, insanely took out his frustrations with an assault rifle, first on his grandmother, then for no humanly explainable reason on a classroom of fourth graders, murdered most all of them with a gun he'd purchased, legally recently, just a few days after his 18th birthday. 

You know the story. 

In our country, such mass shootings happen weekly. Unless the victims are your kids, or the madness happens in your neighborhood, the murder and the associated reactions have taken on the aura of ritual. "Thoughts and prayers" has become a sounding gong.  

And all of this, just a week after another 18-year-old kid with another assault rifle walked into a grocery story in an African-American neighborhood of Buffalo, NY, and killed ten people, most of them elderly.

We're all repulsed and depressed, sick about it, no matter your politics. So yesterday morning--look for yourself--I felt compelled to say something, anything (check out yesterday's blog post, if you don't regularly come around), because not saying anything is simply untenable. 

I'm sick and tired of recalcitrant Republicans--that's what I was feeling, so what I posted. . .well, read it for yourself at the top of the page. 

For out-of-towners, that list of names includes all the politicians who represent me in their various places, all of them Republicans. It seemed to me--and still does-- that if Connecticut's Chris Murphey can get just one Republican to admit it's time to sit down and talk, maybe we could somehow avert having to suffer yet another bloody horror next week or next month. Just talk. That's all. Just talk.

The tally of voices that responded is miniscule when compared with things that "go viral," but the various strands of argument went on for several hours, some of it heated. 

Here's what I'm thinking.

1) Of the 1800 friends FB says I have, there are many more liberals than conservatives. That's not surprising. We all tend to hang around with like-minds. I have zero desire to read Ted Cruz's blog or watch Fox. If comments and likes and smiles were tallied, I'm sure the the ratio would suggest that dozens more want change than don't.

2) Conservative arguments are really tired, worn, and unconvincing. The old "guns don't kill people, people do" is archaic, petrified. Both horrifying mass murders of the last two weeks would not have been possible had the killers wielded Bowie knives or even handguns. People kill people, but guns--assault rifles--kill many, many more.

3) Often enough, we don't understand each other. We talk past each other--conservatives more than libs--because minds are so deeply set in stone. We can't talk because we can't hear, and we can't hear because we won't hear.

4) Some progressives ideas are inescapably true. Why should we disallow those two 18-year-olds from buying a beer, but allow them to buy arms that have no use whatsoever other than to kill other human beings--and many of them at one time?

5) For completely opposite reasons, both Republicans, on Fox, and Democrats, on MSNBC, believe the Constitution of the United States of America is in grave danger, and see voting at the heart of things. Republicans (70% ) believe that the election of Joe Biden was rigged; therefore, we face a predicament we've never faced before--an illegitimate President running a false government. Democrats believe "the Big Lie" is a huge falsehood, an attempt on the part of Republicans to subvert what really happened in the 2020 election. 

Both sides believe America is at grave risk. 

I'd go just a step farther. I can't help but think that what's really at risk is democracy itself. When I read through the dozens and dozens of comments beneath my FB post, when I see the radical differences people, my friends, register, I can't help but believe the Dems and the Trumpsters share this belief surely: Democracy is vastly more fragile than most of us ever imagined. To believe that a people can run a government is an outrageous idea. It's just crazy. 

That's my takeaway from a single Facebook posting.

Oops. I was just interrupted by a flag telling me someone else had just responded. . .

By no means is it over. By no means.

 

"Thoughts and Prayers"

And again. 

And again. 

And again. 

And again. 

And again. 

And again. 

And again.

Nothing changes but the setting.

Outlines of war

Before the war

The Saint Edouard Sanatorium, just outside Stoumant, a tiny Belgium village, was, not at all by choice, the bloody heart of intense fighting which raged through the region following Hitler's surprise offensive, the Allies biggest battle in Europe, the Battle of the Bulge.

The Sanatorium was home to old people, orphans, and sick people, and had somewhere in the area of 250 residents when the Kampfgruper Pieper and his crack SS troops came west in a roar across the Ardennes Forest. For three days amid the madness, the Sanatorium had been under the control of the Allies, then the Germans, then the Allies, then the Germans. Somehow, St. Edouard's 250 residents of had made it through the continual warfare by hiding out in the basement of the building, while the place was under never-ending bombardment. 

Pieper was no slouch. When the reinforcements he was promised never came, his situation became untenable. His early successes in the march to the Meuse had been were remarkable, but at the sanatorium he found himself cut off completely with nowhere to go but to withdraw back to a Nazi-occupied town just down the road. When he asked for permission, permission was denied. He was to stay until reinforcements arrived. Those reinforcements never came.

During the war

Major Hal McCown, who'd been captured earlier, talked with Pieper when Pieper was down to little more than 20 men. Things were not looking good for Pieper, and McCown wanted to get some sense of what was happening all around. Allied troops had been totally surprised by the sudden German offensive--by the sheer size of the Christmas operation.

McCown was somewhat taken with Pieper because despite Pieper's SS status, the man seemed human, not simply a tool of Hitler's madness. Pieper talked reasonably about plans for a unified Europe, a wonderful place with great opportunities and a standard of living unsurpassed in the world. He wasn't a devotee of der Fuhrer, but he liked the idea of a prosperous life for a modern Europe. 

But McCown was worried about the American prisoners of war. The massacre at Malmedy was writ starkly in his consciousness. He had to do everything in his power to keep them--and the 250 residents of the Sanatorium--alive, so he brought up the subject with Kampfgruper Pieper, and he did so by asking about the notorious treatment of prisoners by the Russians on the Eastern Front. 

Pieper told McCown that he'd like to take him to the Eastern Front so he could see for himself the barbarism that went on. "Then you'd see," he told McCown why we've had to violate all rules of warfare. The Russians have no idea what the Geneva Convention means."

Then he said something that felt to me at least uniquely prescient. "Someday perhaps you Americans will find out for yourselves. And you'll have to admit our behavior on the Western Front has been very correct."

Seems almost prophetic, doesn't it?--Pieper's prediction three-quarters of a century ago? Someday we too will come to understand how Russians do warfare.

Today, in Ukraine, we too have. Pieper was wrong about many things, but when I read that story I couldn't help but think that although it has taken as long as it did, today, for sure, we know much more about the abject brutality of Russian warfare.

Today

Tempests

She clerked in Mentink's IGA, a downtown grocery store where her all-over loveliness was on display. This old memory of mine has a particular setting--the downtown IGA, where one day Mom and I picked up groceries. 

We weren't right there when Mom said it. I'm quite sure we were on our way out or somewhere on our way home when she told me we'd just been waited on by an exemplary young woman, a champion of Christianity. I can't remember Mom's exact words, but what she meant to say was that Miss Churchill (no relation to the Prime Minister) had stood fast against worldliness by telling school officials that she would not attend the homecoming dance, even though she'd been elected homecoming queen. 

Dancing, in her mind and soul--and the minds and souls of lots of others in the 1950s Dutch Reformed world where I grew up--was verboten. What's more, those of us who shared her commitments weren't alone. Hundreds of bands of Protestant Christians back then warned its members against drinking and card playing, against movies and dancing. Refusing worldly amusements established a level of righteousness. 

What Mom was telling me that day, downtown, was simple: Miss Churchill was a true Christian witness, even something of a martyr, in a world in which her level of moral values was scorned. She'd turned down being Queen of the Oostburg High School Homecoming of 1957 (or so) because she believed, heart and soul, that dancing was sin.

I tell that story because all the ingredients are there for the same kind of brew that occurred here in the last few months with a committee's determination that Mama Mia! with its comic toleration of promiscuity, was, to some, inappropriate on a stage at a Christian school.  

I need to apologize. I was wrong. The Unity Christian High School Board had, I'm told, nothing to do with the decision not to allow Moma Mia! to use the facility at the school. I said they did. I'm told, in no uncertain terms, that they didn't. 

The decision belonged to a committee of eight, five of whom voted against the Tulip Festival's choice of a musical. Five determined Mama Mia! being staged in a Christian school meant a tacit acceptance of the sexual promiscuity at the core of the story. 

My take on what happened was false. I shouldn't have said what I said, and I'm sorry for talking about the Unity Board.

There's just a bit more to story of Miss Churchill, and the OHS Homecoming dance. Years later, I had to speak at a Christian school function in Denver. A woman I didn't know came up to say she too had grown up in Oostburg, that her name was Churchill, and that her father had been the preacher at the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

It all came back in a flash. Maybe I shouldn't have said what I did, but I told her I didn't know her when she and I lived just a block away. I told her that I was just a little kid back then, but that I remembered what my mother had told me just outside the door of Mentink's IGA, how she'd lauded that young lady's sparkling witness--we wouldn't have used the noun saint (that was Roman Catholic), but we could soften it: saintly, as an adjective or adverb.

Miss Churchill (not her married name) was shocked, not because I remembered that episode in her life, but because at that very time the Denver Christian school her son attended was, for the first time in its history, sponsoring a dance. She, understandably, was passionately against it. 

We both had to giggle--me, I'd imagine, a bit more than her.

The consternation the change in plans a committee's decision created here has likely subsided somewhat now, post-tulips. What's more, the remodeled downtown auditorium served the Festival well, it seems--and it's right there downtown, a far easier venue for the thousands of visitors who will come to the Festival in years to come. Life goes on. 

That some deride presumed self-righteousness is understandable. On the other hand, the five members of that committee who voted against Mama Mia! have the blessing of their own tried and tested moral convictions, the reward of believing that a few months ago now, they did the right thing. 

To call it all a tempest in a teapot is to belittle what happened. People with very strong contrary views approached what some of them believed was a significant moral question. 

But was it? I don't know if today Denver Christian has a prom or a dance, but I'm willing to bet they do.

Such cultural questions easily create twin horrors: living without a moral compass on one hand, and living with those who are sure they have them on the other. 

In communities of all kinds--even in families--those questions are questions with several answers, true multiple-choice. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Ordination

“If the LORD delights in a man's way,

he makes his steps firm;” Psalm 37:23

Thus saith the NIV.

The rough logic of verse 23 of Psalm 37 is not that difficult to understand: When—if, even—the Lord likes what he sees in me, he’ll give me a break. Sounds fair. That’s the kind of God I can deal with. He’ll love us if he determines we’re worth his investment. Fair.

Listen to this: “The steps of a man are established by the Lord,” says the New American Standard; “and he delights in his way.” Or how about the KJV: “The steps of a good man are ordained by the Lord, and he delights in his way.”

Seems a country mile different from the NIV. Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the gap that separates the translations, you could float a sea-going barge of a difference. In the NIV, something reciprocal is occurring—“you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” That kind of thing, as if God almighty, watching us, is shopping for used cars—kicking tires, checking mileage, looking for dings. If he likes what he sees, he makes an offer. It’s that simple.

In the King James, God isn’t shopping. He’s turning out human beings, setting them on a charted course, and watching them move where he’s determined they would, like spinning tops. But even that’s a lousy analogy because, once spun, the top-spinner has no idea of direction. Maybe he’s like one of those old gents who loves model trains. Get the cars out of the box, assemble the tracks, and set ‘em on down a path that won’t change unless you reassemble the set.

In the KJV and New American Standard, God seems to know where we go, when we stand, and when we stoop, our ups and downs and all arounds. What’s more, he delights in watching us ambulate. He loves to watch us circle around the tracks he’s laid.

That’s a whole different God from the one who’s looking for used cars—or so it seems.

At bottom here is a pair of contrary ideas that are not arcane, ideas that have puzzled human beings for centuries. Are we free, or is everything about us pre-conceived, foreordained, predestined? Good folks, brilliant theologians, learned scholars have and will continue to disagree, I’m sure, as do—obviously—the linguists who work as Bible translators.

Who’s right? Good question, and worth considering.

But what did the poet/King say? Where would he come down? What did he intend? Whose translation is accurate?

Those questions don’t bother me greatly because this is, first of all, a song and not a conference presentation. Psalm 37 is about security, about comfort, about feeling rest and peace in the Popeye arms of the one who made us and who never leaves.

In the very next verse David will admit he’s an old guy, a fact which may well be key to our accepting the sheer joy of this line’s thickly upholstered comfort. I’m probably about as old he was when he wrote the song or offered the meditation. And I think I know why he wouldn’t care for the whole debate. Really, all he wants us to know is that when he looks back on his life—all of it—he knows, for sure, that the God who breathed His own breath into the child who would, astoundingly, become King, that God would never really leave him alone. That God was there always, and will be, forever.

Verse 23, no matter how you read it, is far less a proposition than it is promise.

And that's just fine with me.

Special grace

You simply had to know. Most of those who traveled the two-lane highways I did across the state last weekend did know, I'm sure, and most all of them likely felt what I did, even though I never even lived on an Iowa farm. The fields from Alton to Waverly looked just like this--abundant, rich black soil the rest of the world would die for, perfectly manicured, rich ground expertly seeded, bare naked, Dutch-clean, gorgeous rich black dirt, all in place and ready to go.

Most of those who took Highway 3 across the state last weekend saw three stark colors--a spacious azure sky, thick, emerald ditches, and miles and miles of black soil, a world bedecked in black and green, nothing out there to grab the eye, just good Iowa farm land, dark and rich and freshly seeded. You didn't have to see what was there to know life abundant was just waiting to arise once again. 

Reminded me of a passage from a Jim Heynen story in The Youngest Boy. Goes like this:

The youngest boy was not big enough to drive a tractor, but he was big enough to stand at the edge of the oats stubble field to which the tractor pulling the plow through field. The oats stubble bristled like the head of a boy with a buzz cut, but the oats stubble was a dull color and definitely needed plowing over. The plot turned that dull oats stubble face-down and turned the black dirt face up. Back and forth the tractor and plow went until the entire field was a lake of fresh black earth. So much change happening right there in front of his eyes.

Some kind of wonder I couldn't help feeling.

Things won't be the same this weekend. This weekend, in all likelihood, there'll be thousands of tiny green troops in unending rows just now emerging. That'll be beautiful too, another kind of blessing. But last Friday there was none of that, nothing at all--only bare naked soil. 

I've spent most of my life in Iowa, but I'll never, ever be a real Iowan, a man who, some late winter morning hears seed corn rustling to get out of the bag and into the ground. I don't smell freshly turned earth. I don't know the ways of animals. 

But last Friday, driving across the state, I told myself that I've become enough of an Iowan to be blessed with what I witnessed through endless open fields of black soil. It was a once-a-year moment, a special blessing, maybe even something of what my father-in-law used to feel with the tractor in the shed, his feet up on the stool beside his chair because so much was behind him. He'd finished it up, all the planting, all those seeds starting to stretch their joints and muscles in freshly turned soil. 

Once upon a time, my ancestors fought about Grace (with an upper case G), differentiating two types--"common grace," of which we all are recipients, and "special grace," that ladled out only to believers. 

Such distinctions are difficult and risk being pernicious. But I'll say it anyway. Last week, with nothing to see but so much there all around, I felt as if I was the faithful recipient of an abundance of very special grace. 

All that land, just planted, was simply beautiful. 

Tulip Festival 2022

And so it begins. What the community down the road plans for all year long begins this afternoon with a parade down a tulip-lined street. The Orange City Tulip Festival is a massive undertaking that comes off only because hundreds, maybe even thousands of people don't spare volunteered energy. There are committees on committees, I'm sure. There are volunteers who not only make food, but determine who shall sell food and what kinds of food they'll sell. Scores of volunteers direct traffic, clean up after parade horses. Some wander its streets singing old folk ditties. Everywhere you look hundred-year-old Dutch costumes brighten the day. 

There's a night show that's everyone's pride-and-joy. This year Mama Mia, thought too risque for the board at Unity Christian, who wouldn't allow its wonderful theater to be used for such worldliness. 

There's an art show downtown, a flower show in the museum, street scrubbing, a high school band in white wooden shoes, little costumed kids who folk dance, all kinds of women in goofy hats.  Hungry? there's pofferjies, peppermints, and little Dutch sausages wrapped in bread--more food than you'll ever need, even cotton candy.

Once upon a time, I couldn't help thinking that a tulip festival was Walt Disney in wooden shoes. No ancestor of mine ever danced, and certainly not on down Main. What was central to the heritage of my great-grands was righteousness and holiness, sober theological reflection, all honor to God. To my ancestors, sobriety meant more than avoiding the Devil's brew; it meant making sure life was judged with pious seriousness. To them, smiling could be unseemly.

The refusal of a Christian school board to allow Mama Mia to be performed on its stage, the stage of a Christian school, may be the most authentic Tulip Festival reflection of my people in the 19th century. That decision was right out of the old days, undertaken by a school board fearful of worldliness. I'm guessing no one laughed when the vote went down; some felt, I'm sure, that they'd done the Godly thing. That entire story has more heritage in it than a whole park full of tulips. 

Once upon a time on the ship coming over, the cargo of Dutch immigrants were awakened by gun shots, a canon's roar, wild celebration on deck. It was July 4, and the ship's crew was in celebration mode. The Hollanders, unacquainted with the holiday, asked the captain to explain. He told them merrymaking was at the heart of the celebration of freedom. He told them they could contribute.

The Dutch gave celebration some thought, then asked the captain if they could sing psalms. When they could sing psalms, they told him, they were happy. 

That's the pious stock I come from. 

Maybe next year here in Orange City--and in Pella and Holland, MI--on every street corner, we should have a handful of singers offering Genevan psalms. 

That would go over big, I'm sure, like Mama Mia at the Christian school.

My wife and I have lived here for a decade now, and my view of tulip festivals has most definitely been altered. I still think of the Festival as mostly Disney, but the sheer volume of volunteerism creates a sense of community here that most small towns would covet. Today, I'm far less dour about the whole thing, less, well, unsmiling. In a way, I suppose, I'm far less of a Dutch Calvinist. 

This year, twice in fact, I'll be in a Dutch costume, riding up front in the Tulip Festival parade because the whole museum board--of which I'm part--was named Parade Marshall for the work we've been doing--all volunteer--to enhance community. 

Hard as it is for me to believe, I'll be up front, seated in a convertible, doing the wave thing, and, for sure, smiling. Can't believe it yet. 

Breng een ons bezoek   --  come on by and "pay us a visit."

Mama mia!--what an outfit.

Legacies

 It was, for all practical purposes, a perfect night for a Blood Moon. I had to pull on a jacket, but I could set up the tripod on our deck, fully armed with my camera and the biggest lens I could muster, a 400mm as big as your arm, and wait for the moon's appearance in the inky court of sky. 

It's not particularly difficult for me to imagine what it must have been like for the Yanktons just a bit up the river from me, on a high spot of ground 200 years ago now. The band has been in place for some time already, maybe out after buffalo here, maybe just taking a week off along a river where the grass is green and thick, the horses happy. Somewhere not far away, coyote pups yip, just like they did a night ago. It's quiet and as peaceful as can be in the middle of a covey of tipis.

Then, strangely, the only light other than their fire, the moon up there in the sky shrivels slowly and turns red as a beet, blood red--a blood moon. Save for a few pen prick stars, the moon's glow being strangely extinguished has to be disconcerting--the lights have gone out. 

I'm guessing Blood Moons happened with enough regularity that the band didn't suddenly go bonkers in a massive panic. In all likelihood, they tied the moon's bloodiness to something or other in their lives, probably sat out here, not far from where I'm sitting, and watched that red curtain being drawn over the moon, then watched it slowly emerge once again from its bloody costuming. 

The people who took this land from them didn't think much about how those Yanktons spent long summer days or cold winter nights. Some settlers here were Yankees, but more were Euros--the Dutch, the Low German, the Luxembourgian, all of them besotted with "the American dream," a genuine new-world opportunity to own their own land, their own lives, and their own shot at freedom and dignity. If any of them ever saw the Yanktons they dispossessed, they saw they from the rear because whether or not they were aware of it, those peoples--my great-grandparents among them--never really thought of wild Indians as being people at all, much less residents of this good earth all around. I'm sure my great-grandparents liked them only when they were leaving.

It's amazing to me that, today, those who preach this "Replacement Theory" nonsense don't stop to think that there really isn't a white man or woman anywhere in the neighborhood--yours or mine--who can call themselves "native." We're all imports, all immigrants, whether our origins lie in the eastern states or across the ocean blue. 

Tucker Carlson calls white people "legacy" families, giving them some edge on others, newer immigrants. Those who have been here, those who roots, those who have a legacy--they're the ones at risk today, Tucker says--we're the ones being replaced by a cabal of Democrats trying to destroy American freedoms. We are what America is all about. We are white people, and we are losing the most important battle of all, the battle for power.

So an 18-year-old, half-loco kid from rural New York, overflowing with this "legacy" bullshit, buys a big gun, and outfits it to shoot dead an entire police department. Then he drives 300 miles to Buffalo, New York, cases out a grocery story patronized predominantly by African-Americans, parks his car, pulls on a helmet and bullet-proof vest, and starts shooting before he ever gets into the grocery store. Ten were dead. Ten "replacements" will not "replace" any white people. There. The brain-addled kid thought himself a prophet of justice.

White supremacy is not just pernicious. It's a poison in the national bloodstream, it's rot, and it's evil. It's anti-absolutely everything in the gospel of Jesus Christ, but its embraced--Lord help us!--by those who believe they're loyal members of His body. The vast majority of white nationalists consider themselves devout followers of Jesus Christ our Lord. 

It's bullshit, and Tucker Carlson puts it out there to get richer than he already is. He living off the fear of otherwise good people, and he's not alone. There are others. But not to see that "replacement theory" is producing evil is ducking out of what's all around us right now. 

If you're a Republican and you believe in limited government, in freedom of the individual, in limited taxation, and deplore industry leaving the country--fine! Let your voice be heard. 

But if you're a Republican who buys into this "legacy" claptrap, this "Replacement Theory," please repent. You heard me--REPENT. You're dead wrong. Turn Tucker off and consider instead the gospel of love and grace and denying oneself for others. Consider Acts 10.

If there are legacy families here, they live on reservations. My great-grandparents, born in the Netherlands, are buried here in Orange City, Iowa, where I will be buried as well. But the Schaaps are not specially blessed "legacy families"; we don't somehow deserve what we took from Native people. In the broadest sense, we don't own our land. Manifest Destiny is a convenient falsehood.

A few nights ago I sat out on our deck and watched a Blood Moon, tried to get it into a camera. Long before I sat there, perhaps not all that far away either, it's not hard to imagine that in front of a tipi that opened to the eastern sky, a band of Yankton Sioux sat just as fascinated, just as entertained. 

I've got a heritage and a legacy, but I don't claim sole ownership of the land I inhabit. My people weren't always here.