From the museum--on my birthday

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

The house where we lived at that time is long gone, as is the tiny kitchen where I stood, phone in hand, listening. The call had come in the middle of the day, in the middle of a lunch. Our two little kids were sitting beside us.

It’s now forty-some years later, but I will never forget receiving that call because I had the sure confidence that my being chosen for a waiter’s scholarship to the granddaddy of all writers conferences, Bread Loaf, was a signal that, as a writer, fame and fortune lay just down the road. I had just published a book, my first, with a tiny, local press; now, Bread Loaf beckoned. The New York Times Book Review was a year or so away.

When I flew into Burlington, Vermont, for the Conference—early, because I was a waiter—I met a beautiful woman, my age, married with two children, who said she was an aspiring poet. She’d also be a waiter. Someone from the Conference picked us up, but we took the hour-long drive together into Vermont’s Green Mountains.

Ten days later, when we boarded a plane to leave, she and I stood on the stairway to that jet, waiting to enter the cabin. She looked at me and shook her head. “I hope this plane crashes,” she said, and she meant it.

She’d been wooed by a celebrity poet, and she’d fallen. On the dance floor at night, the two of them looked like smarmy high school lovers, which might have seemed embarrassing if it hadn’t happened to so many others. Another waiter—also married with kids, two of them—told me it was important for him to have an affair because, after all, as an artist he needed to experience everything in order to write with authority.

I thought long and hard about her wish on the way home that day, whether someone’s soulful desire could ever turn, magically, into reality. And the very idea made me think, that day, about dying. What if the Lord would take that plane down, as she wished--and what if I would go too?

I remember thinking that it would be really bad, but it wouldn’t be the worst thing. After all, my wife was young and could remarry, if she wanted. My kids were just three and five; to them, in a year, I’d be little more than a picture on a wall. I knew they would all be taken care of. Life would go on.

And for me?—I’d miss it, a ton—life, I mean. I’d miss my children’s growing up, I'd miss what I could have written, I'd miss what I might have been. But, honestly, as I sat on that plane on the way to O’Hare, I told myself that, really, I could live with death.

Someday I’ll worry about it, I imagine--death, I mean. Someday, the grim reaper will look more like the monster he actually is. But ever since that day coming home from Vermont, I’ve been okay with dying.

This morning I’ve reached my 77 years—if I get ten more, I’ll be lucky. It’s my birthday. Today I’m 77.

And all this morbidity is but a personal excursion into the ars moriendi, the art of dying, a body of Christian literature that appeared in the fifteenth century and provided practical guidance for the dying, prescribed prayers, actions, and attitudes that would lead to a "good death" and thus salvation. I know, I know--heavy, heavy. But I've got too many years invested in literature not to believe that there's some good in a theme or attitude that it's impossible not to see--those who learn to die well have learned, in the process, how to live.

I’m thankful to God for sending me to Bread Loaf, if for no other reason than it gave me a moment in time, almost forty years ago, for a very personal meditation on dying on a plane to Chicago, a meditation I've never forgotten and for which I'm thankful on this birthday, my sixtieth.

But Breadloaf wasn’t an easy place to be, for a waiter or anyone else, I’d guess. I’d lived most of my life in small, conservative communities who prided themselves, maybe even excessively, on their church-going. Adultery was not commonplace, but a sin, a scandal.

The atmosphere in that mountaintop retreat was electric. Aspiring writers like me flirted daily with National Book Award winners, editors, agents, and publishers. Life—dawn ‘till dawn—was always on stage.

In the middle of that frenetic atmosphere, one Sunday morning, I walked, alone, out into a meadow, away from all the people, where I found a lone Adirondack chair and sat for an hour, meditating. I tried to imagine what the soft arm of my little boy would feel like in my fingers; at the same time I recited, over and over again, the words of the 23rd Psalm.

I remember a beautiful mountain stream, but there were no still waters at Bread Loaf Writers Conference the summer of 1980. If there were, I didn’t see them. But that Sabbath’s very personal worship, in the middle of all the madness, brought me—body and soul—to the very place David has in mind in verse two of Psalm 23.

Honestly, I know still waters. He’s led me there, and I’ve been there, mostly, for just about eighty years. And for all of that, this morning, the morning of my birth, I'm very thankful. 

Sunday afternoon meds from Psalm 29

“The Lord twists the oaks and strips the forests bare.”

   

I don’t know the original language here, but I’m not sure I need to.  What I know is that a clear difference of opinion exists on this verse’s accurate translation.  In about half the versions I’ve checked, the wording looks similar to this, the NIV.  In the other half—and most notably, I suppose, in the King James—that reference to oaks is instead to deer, the quadruped the OT frequently calls “hinds.”

Seems to me that the NIV’s idea makes literal sense because lightning twists oaks and storms ravage trees by stripping them of their leaves.  The NIV’s version is really functional; it follows what’s already been said cleanly, even—dare I say it?—redundantly.

And while there is no verb similar to “twists” in the deer version, there is some shared pain.  The KJV goes like this:  “the voice of the Lord maketh the hind to calve, and discovereth the forest.”  That wording is not particularly close to the NIV’s version.

But the KJV’s version is itself a twist.  The voice of the Lord—which has been, throughout, the lightning and thunder—pushes deer into labor and premature birth.  Furthermore, it discovers the forest.  Nothing immediately redundant there.  The KJV is not nearly as functional, but may be, as a result, far more interesting.

When I hold the Bible in my hand, I have no problem confessing that what I’m holding is “the Word of God.”  But when I set myself down somewhere in its pages, I’m far less sure of what exactly is going on.  Here too.  But let’s speculate, because it seems to me that’s what God almighty wants us to do.  If he didn’t, he would have given us a set of directions instead of a story book.

Even my sidekick and confidante Charles Spurgeon runs from this premature birth business.  In his Treasury of David, he hightails it for something akin to the NIV translation:  “In deadly fear of the tempest,” he says, those “timid creatures. . .drop their burdens in an untimely manner.”   That’s it.  And then, “Perhaps a better reading is. . .”  And he moves up close to the NIV.

For Spurgeon and all of us, there’s a Bambi factor here that’s not easy to stay clear of, just as it isn’t for most municipalities in North America today, where an immense deer herd threatens every last Burpee’s Beefsteak tomato plant.  It’s far easier for us to imagine oaks blasted by lightning, then it is for us to see pale dead fawns in the wood’s undergrowth.  God’s lightning slays fawns—that’s the truth that’s unavoidable in the KJV.  A pregnant doe aborts in the tumultuous flash of storms.  Not a pretty picture.

A dead grizzly we might tolerate, after all; a dead caneback rattler, even enjoy.  A dead possum is roadkill; a dead coon means one less masked midnight marauder.  But a dead faun?  And it’s God who slays them?  Please pass the NIV.

Our soft hearts notwithstanding, each translation isn’t inaccurate: lightning demolishes trees; blasts of thunder prompt fright and trigger premature birth.  Forest fires kill deer by the hundreds every year.

The shock and awe that David is after in this psalm of admonition is accomplished, or so it seems to me, by either translation, one of them, the NIV, is just a bit easier on the sensitivities.  Maybe it shouldn’t be.  Maybe that’s the point.  Maybe we should look more closely at dead fauns, biting our lips as we do.

"How wonderful. . ."

 

1. My God, how wonderful Thou art,
2. Thy majesty how bright,
   How beautiful Thy mercy seat,
   In depths of burning light

The verse was scribbled down in a different era, when the language of piety was monumentally more lurid, belief itself more fanciful, almost cartoonish. The Christian life as sketched in this poem is epic, far beyond anything I ever saw as a kid, or ever saw, period. But those words are forever in my memory.

When we sang that old hymn yesterday, I couldn't help but wonder how long it had been since the work of Rev. Frederick Faber was sung aloud in our sanctuary. In the late 17th century, Faber was born a Calvinist of Huguenot background; but the appeal of Catholicism drew him in to become a Catholic priest, where he was, oddly enough, obsessed with Mother Mary. He was a poet and known as one, a friend of William Wordsworth. 

Faber's church jumping notwithstanding, he and his works as a hymn writer were favorites throughout my childhood. So hen, like yesterday, we sing those old hymns, my soul drops down the walls of our church and slips me back in a pew on the right-hand side of the sanctuary of Oostburg CRC, three pews from the front, where the Schaaps sat week after week. 

1. O how I fear Thee, Living God,
   With deepest, tend’rest fears,
   And worship Thee with trembling hope,
   And penitential tears.

   Suddenly, I'm gone. There we sit, my folks and I, our "tend'rest fears" relieved by "trembling hope." It's wonderful.

    Once, long ago, a teacher in the Christian School I attended created an assignment--lit, or history, or "Bible"--by telling us that a favorite hymn we all knew mentioned "penitential tears." Our assignment was to find the hymn and define the line. 

2. I have no idea what I might have written, but I will never forget the joy with which I started the assignment because I cheated, I asked Mom and Dad, who might well have gone to the piano and duet-ed the hymn right then and there, not because it would advance their son academically, but because they were like that: at the drop of a hat they'd scoot over to the piano. Mom would play and dad would place his hands on her shoulders. After a scramble of pages, out came "My God how wonderful thou art"- and those  "penitential tears." 

3. 1. Yet I may love Thee too, O Lord,
      Almighty as Thou art;
      For Thou hast stooped to ask of me
      The love of my poor heart.

4. That old hymn, yesterday, surrounded me with my childhood, even though the organist rapped out the music much quickly than it appears in the old purple Psalter I pulled out from the library behind me. The whole page is half-notes, save two chipper quarters on the third line, the alto line sweeping down quickly from a D to a B in a tiny slide that seems almost naughty in a text that otherwise drones religiously onward.

   No matter. I loved it. In a week, I'll be 77 years old--maybe I'm just prone to wistfulness; nostalgia is not a state of mind and heart I have to cultivate. Then again, maybe I'm a good bit more dreamy than I was earlier in life. 

5. "My God, How Wonderful Thou Art" has been with me ever since I was a child in home and school and church--the whole thing: all those upper-case letters on words we wouldn't think of capitalizing, all of it in that stodgy roll of the music, the hard to see image of God, not Jesus, stooping down for "my poor heart."

6. Anyway, to me at least, it was a thrill to see my parents again, to hear them sing, Mom on the soprano line, Dad lifting the tenor. Back then, my memory took a thousand pictures because I saw it and heard it, time and time again.

7. 1. No earthly father loves like Thee,

   No mother half so mild

   Bears and forbears as Thou hast done

   With me, Thy sinful child.

8. For the record, we heard a wonderful, pointed sermon on the importance of the life of Christ as a model of behavior. I walked up to the table with my walker out in front to taste the body and blood. We sang other songs too.

9. But I "had church" barely ten minutes into the service when the organist started in to an ancient hymn that, years ago, was probably sung heartfully often, a hymn that  threw me back some sixty years. 

10. When it was over, I was happy, once again, to have visited.        

Sundday Morning Meds from Psalm 29

 

“The voice of the Lord shakes the desert; 

the Lord shakes the Desert of Kadish.”

Years ago, when our son, just a twirp, made a fuss in church, I took him out and sat on a small bench just outside the sanctuary.  The church stood alone on the edge of town, and, perched right there where we were seated, I could look out on almost ten miles of open land, here and there a farm place bundled in trees, smudges on a landscape that had already taken an emerald hue in early spring.

I don’t know why exactly, but the open land prompted some awe in me, some joy, in fact.  I remember looking out over the rippling fields and reminding myself how beautiful prairie really can be.  I know it’s an acquired taste, but once a sense for that spacious glory is in the heart somewhere, it warms into conviction.  That Sunday was a perfect spring morning, the sun shining, the land greening, my son settling down, behind me worship moving along at its own devoted pace.            

I was an elder at the time, and, in our church, holding that office meant having to deal with some of the problems that arise wherever two or three are gathered.  I remember thinking that the broad vista of that gorgeous Sunday morning was probably more beautiful than the sum of its parts.  If I would have shifted my seat a bit south, I would have seen the farm of a guy causing all kinds of headaches.  Just over a rise was a family who wasn’t doing well.  It was the broad vista that was gorgeous.  The particulars weren’t at all so awe-inspiring.

And I remember thinking right then that mortals like me needed both a wide angle lens and a zoom, a view from afar that gives some foundation for a stand right there at the very heart of things.  No inspiring landscape is ever perfect, I suppose.

Psalm 29 must have been written one afternoon atop a fire tower or some blessed promontory where David watched a rogue storm rumble from forest (vs. 5) to mountains (vs. 6) to desert (vs. 7), taking its own thundering time.  In some place fit for kings, David had to have been watching and writing and singing, surveying a yawning landscape skewered more than occasionally by bolts of lightning.

Psalm 29 isn’t interested in details, save one.  Psalm 29 is a perspective poem; it offers a place to stand and see the big picture.  Psalm 29 is kingly, not only in its scope, but its rhetoric.  Psalm 29 is a Jeremiad for potentates. 

This is the big picture, David says to his royal friends.  This is something you take note of.  This is the voice of the Lord.

 Ascribe to him glory and render him honor, he says, a warning.  All this timber-rattling, this mountain-moving, this desert flinging—it’s only part of what’s there in the sheer power of his magnificent hand. 

“You think you’re big time?” he says. “Listen to thunder.”

The big picture has one detail that’s not to be missed.  Watch lightning explode the cedars of Lebanon and don’t ever forget you’re sawdust too.  Next time you’re dealing with your people, when you’re belly-deep in problems, when you’re trying to keep your head above water, remember who flings lightning.

As the old hymn says, “Ascribe to him glory and render him honor.  In beauty and holiness worship the Lord.”

That’s the big picture.

What once was isn't all gone

 

https://www.kwit.org/podcast/small-wonders/2025-02-03/what-once-was-isnt-all-gone

Please go ahead and listen. It's a five-minute essay aired Monday on KWIT, National Public Radio in Sioux City, Iowa.

Duck huntin' with the pioneers--Small Wonders

 Buffalo far as you can see, elk by the hundreds just north of town, deer so unafraid, they walk right up to a canoe—promises of game were never-ending when the only trespassers here were Omaha and mountain men.

 But sheer abundance wasn’t enough to keep a family eating.

 John F. Glover landed in Sibley in the latter part of August, 1871, and settled on the southwest quarter of Section 4, Township 99. Glover's coming was by way of a couple of gents from Sioux City, who let him know great land was to be had—open prairie--sixty miles north.  

 Glover put up a crooked shack with lumber he purchased and picked up from Windom, Minnesota, fifty miles north, with his team of oxen. But odd little shack, comfortable as it was, was no sanctuary if he had a little-bit-of-nothing to eat. But a neighbor named McAusland told him that Rush Lake, near Ocheyedan, was full of big fat ducks.

 A lake full of ducks thrilled Glover, so the next day he and McAusland left, expecting to fill up his own empty wagon bed.

 McCausland had not overdrawn the amount of game, but the two of them had no boat so there they sat on the beach hoping some of the hundreds of birds out there would come up close and self-sacrifice.

 Didn’t happen.

 Great gangs of ducks stayed just a bit too far away, so Glover and friend tried slinking after them. Nope—too cagey. Those ducks moved just far enough to stay out of range, and when those two pioneers ran, those big fat ducks put it in overdrive until Glover and Mac flat ran out of gas.

Now those old pioneers were nothing if not handy, so Glover, whose appetite was murderous by that time, fashioned a raft out of cottonwood branches and even a tree or two, sufficient, he believed, to float himself after the ducks. Preposturously dumb idea.

 Once he got into the water, that frail craft, “like many an air castle,” the old history book that tells Glover’s story says, “fell to pieces.” Down went the hungry pioneer, soaking his dreams of fat ducks. The ardor of hunting had left him, both men tired and discouraged. They tramped twelve miles home, soaking wet.

 But on the way something big happened. Just as they were starting, McCausland shot a brant, a skinny goose, the only game they got all day. So with that scrawny bird, they started home, altogether close to nightfall. Now they’d brought with them an iron pot of beans and a loaf of bread, but when the brant was retrieved it was decided that bread and beans were nothing in comparison with roasted fowl. Hungry as they were, their appetite was reserved until they could get home.

 Soon after they got to McAusland’s, Mc had the brant stuffed and in the stove roasting, but the oily smell was such that it made Mac a sick man, so sick that Glover was left alone until another old-timer, O. M. Brooks, happened to arrive. When Brooks and Glover got the table set, the roast bird on, the two of them sat down to a feast, poor Mc moaning across the room.

 “Alas for the dreams of fancv fowl, the visions of bliss and the tempting measures of delight,” the old history book says, “delight in which we too often indulge, imagined delights at last turned into the bitterness of gall in the round up of indulgence.”

 Which is to say, too bad for those pioneers.

 Because soon enough Glover and Brooks were laid out, groaning in the agony of way too much brant. And here’s the thing: the oily condition of that fowl made them too sick to hope ever to make final proof on a government claim, the taking of which had been the leading ambition of their lives.

 That old history book doesn’t mention whether Glover packed up and went back east or hitched up the oxen and went back to Windom for lumber to cut out decoys.

 Could have been either, I suppose. Book doesn’t say.

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 29

“He makes Lebanon skip like a calf, Sirion like a young wild ox.”

 

What David the poet says in this line is not a problem.  What he means, is; unless, of course, it’s a metaphor, in which case all bets are off because he’s merely flashing his poetic license.

 

No lightning, no thunderstorm—no matter how mammoth—ever made mountains skip, at least that I know of.  In summer especially, the eastern edge of the Rockies, in Colorado at least, is festooned with storms as often as it isn’t.  They gather like groupies, then dump rain or hail or snow, late afternoon, all over the foothills.  But no storm that I know of ever made Pike’s Peak do the Shuffle—or skip, for that matter.  Nope.

 

Volcanoes forever alter the shape of some of the world’s most impressive mountains.  When they blow, nothing remains the same. But David isn’t talking volcano here.  The line has an antic tone, created by the kid-ishness of the animals and "skipping."  We don’t have to unpack much in this verse to note the joy—the mountains are skipping along to the melodies of the voice of the Lord, like my own great-granddaughter will be doing soon enough.

 

The only image I can come up with is from old TV westerns:  some tough hombre pulls out a revolver and gets some poor sucker to dance as he peppers the dust around the guy’s feet.  Is that anywhere near to what David is seeing here?  The Lord God almighty unloading bolts of lightning from some heavenly six-gun? 

 

Cute, but I don’t think so.  David knew nothing about Wyatt Earp?

 

Seems to me that there’s just too much cartoon in this line.  It just doesn’t match up all that comfortably with the shock and awe of the surrounding verses.  Mountains dancing like calves in spring?  It’s mud-luscious, really, isn’t it?  It’s darling.  It’s as if David pulled a punch all of a sudden.  After snarling away with some prophetic finger-pointing aimed at the earth’s big wigs, warning them about God’s divine power and authority, just for a moment he got sidetracked with a fleeting vision of something out of Walt Disney: mountains skipping.  An antic verse in the very heart of one terrifying Jeremiad.

 

A flaw in the poem?  

Dumb question, really.  David wasn’t thinking about taking home a Pulitzer.  He’s got an aesthetic sense, but in lots of other Psalms he doesn’t let his sense of proportion get in the way of his enthusiasm.  Psalm 23, you remember, has some delightfully mixed metaphors.  Creating the perfect poem isn’t what he’s up to.  Praising God in a way that turns the heads of the high-and-mighty is.

 

So what exactly does he mean?  Read in context, the psalm praises God’s mighty hand, a hand that shivers timbers and raises cane all through the natural world.  But, think about this—it also makes the mountains skip like antic calves.  The voice of the Lord sometimes shakes us into giggles, leaves us speechless, even sets us to slapping our knees.

 

On the day after Easter, my cousin-in-law died, his body a victim of the chemicals doctors were using, purposefully, to try to rid him of cancer that otherwise would have taken him.  Two weeks ago, he felt tired, went in for a check-up.  Now he’s gone.

 

This morning, this little verse, what seems almost a mistake in a psalm of dire warning, seems the right bromide for our mutual grief. God’s voice makes mountains skip along like a kid on the sidewalk out front the house. Like a calf.  Really.

 

I don’t blame Him for what happened.  Cancer isn’t His fault.  Death isn’t His design.

 

Still, this morning me and a ton of others need just that kind of antic God, some smiling someone to make the mountains skip.