Lament

 

I'm not exactly in mourning, but this picture witnesses to my sadness because I took this picture from the deck of our house, the house we used to live in, just beyond the same Floyd River that came up, a flash flood, and ate our bottom story. The fact is we saw more deer in the early years of our residency out there north of Alton, but I did catch this one against a stand of corn some people in the Third World would think not only extraordinary but impossible. But there she is. She's beautiful.

During the last year of our stay out there, I don't remember ever seeing deer out beyond our back yard. They were gone. Why? The flood maybe, or perhaps that wasting disease that took many of them. My neighbor told me some guy told him that he'd found three or four dead deer, together a couple of times, victims of that disease, some kind of wasting disease.

I'm guessing the drop of in the deer population had at least something of the markings of that gigantic flood we went through--the high-water mark five feet (that's not an error) --FIVE FEET higher than the highest flood recorded previously at Alton, an unbelievable flash flood--all of it, one day. It broke down our downstairs door to a walk out basement and rudely knocked one of the family trying to save stuff when the surf suddenly washed up and in. By six that night, it was gone, out the same door it knocked down, retreated to its banks a day or so later.

Anyway, when some program or another kicked up old photographs of mine, it showed me this one eight years ago, where we lived and who we lived with. Very sweet.

Yes, I miss 'em. Even this guy, a little tiny bit. It's hardly a fair judgement because I caught him at such a good angle. He was probably never as cute as he was the winter day he inched right up to my boot, took a good smell, and crept off, as if I was of no particular interest.

Tonight,  in the DAHM's annual Nights at the Museum program, the very heart and soul of the museum board doing her inimitable thing with old Sioux County, throwing some light on both the antagonism and and the unity of two towns just a few miles apart, vying for life and success in the last decades  of the 19th century. 

It'll be good!   

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 57

 

^“Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; 

let your glory be over all the earth.”

 The basic paradigm by which I’ve always seen the Christian life is a series of ideas that rise from the Heidelberg Catechism, the handbook of doctrine with which I was raised.  Those steps are not difficult.  They go like this:  “sin, salvation, service.”

The story line begins with sin—our knowledge of it, as it exists specifically within us.  Calvin starts even a bit earlier, with the heavens, specifically with our sense of God as manifest in his world in what we see and experience.  Because humans can’t help but see God’s marvelous work in the heavens and earth all around, we there is something, someone, larger than life itself and much, much greater than we are—there simply has to be.

When we know we aren’t God, we know something about sin.

That conviction draws us closer to him. Knowing our limitations is a prerequisite to knowing God. Sin precedes salvation, or so the story goes, through the second chapter.

There’s one more step. That he loves us in spite of our sin makes hearts fill and souls rejoice; we can’t help but celebrate, and that celebration leads us into gratitude and service, into offering his love to the world he loves so greatly. 

Sin, salvation, service—that’s the story line, the narrative by which I was raised.

Mother Theresa’s take on a very similar tale is a three-step process not totally unlike Heidelberg’s narrative line, but colored instead by her experience in the sad ghettos of Calcutta.  Our redemption begins in repulsion—what we see offends us, prompts us to look away. But we can’t or shouldn’t or won’t; we have to look misery in its starving face, and when we do, we move from repulsion to compassion—away from rejection and toward loving acceptance. 

The final chapter is what she called “bewonderment,” sheer wonder and admiration.  Compassion leads us to bewonderment.

“Bewonderment” is one of those strange words no one uses but everyone understands, probably because, like reverence, it’s simply hard to come by in a culture where our supposed needs are never more than a price tag away.

Bewonderment is hard to come by for me, perhaps because it isn’t so clearly one of the chapters in the story I was told as a boy, the story which is still deeply embedded in my soul. “Service” is the end of the Christian life—or always has been—for me, not “bewonderment.” 

Maybe that’s why I’m envious of David’s praise here. What he says to God in prayer is something I rarely tell him.  I don’t think I’ve ever asked God not to hide his little light under a bushel, to display his radiant grace from pole-to-pole. I’m forever asking for favors, but only rarely am I adoring, in part, in part, I suppose, because I’m so rarely in awe. 

Bewonderment is something I’m learning as I age, and for that I’m thankful—for the book, for the song, for David the singer, and for the God David knew so intimately that he could speak the way he does in Psalm 57. 

It’s difficult for some of us to be intimate with God—to be so close to a being so great and grandly out of reach.  But intimacy is something a song can teach—and the heavens too.  Bewonderment is something even an old man can learn, if he has eyes and ears. 

One Saturday near the Rock River

 

Went north, one Saturday morning in July, 2011, into the valleys of the Rock River, a tributary of the Big Sioux, whose valleys lack the depth and beauty of its bigger cousin's. Tougher area to get a shot that can take a viewer's breath away. But dawn is dawn, and the beauty isn't the river or the gravel roads or anything else. The beauty is in the dawn, here too.

What I came to understand fairly quickly into my journeys into early morning in the region was that the sky itself was hardly ever the whole story. Occasionally, the morning sun creates a sky full of abject beauty, enough to render  you unable to shoot pictures. There's just too much glory in the open world we live in.

But most often, what I had to learn was that a really good shot, like the one above, needs a character. The sky is a masterful setting here, but what makes the shot more memorable is the character of the story this moment on the Rock River creates, in this case, a half-gone elm (probably) reminding us somehow of our own tenuous hold on the reality of earth itself, our mortality.

So I shot and shot, in an attempt to let the space speak.

In this last, the tree up the gravel and the tiny little sign offer a little more to the story. 

Then I simply turned around to see what was behind me.

There's the Rock, and forever corn across it. It's catching, and I like it, but it's also, sadly enough, pretty much conventional Iowa--and therefore begets little more than a yawn.

Pointing the camera further south, I picked up an  unusual sight these days, cattle in an honest-to-goodness pasture (and not a confinement). Most foreigners in these parts might like to think this shot conventional, but it's rare, and that why I jumped on the shutter.

Honestly, this July morning you could take gravel roads all day long in this region and not see this--cattle in a pasture. It's a rarity.

And so, I went home. Not trophies, but blessed abundantly by simply having been out there. 

Remembrance

For years now, I've been contributing stories to KWIT, Sioux City, Iowa, 90.3,where Mark Munger produces them--edits them, adds sounds and music, then airs them, Monday mornings at 7:45, and then again at 4:45 in the afternoon. 

I don't know that I've ever slipped one into the blog, but this week's was so moving, even though I wrote it, that I can't help feeling that people who read my blog will enjoy listening. It's exactly six minutes long. It's produced just beautifully.

https://www.kwit.org/podcast/small-wonders/2025-07-14/i-will-never-forget-her-a-native-nurses-quiet-bond-with-a-wounded-soldier

And now we love them. . .

They were, not so many years ago, precious. Their country was at war, and they needed  help, needed a shield against the violence spreading across their country when Putin, who denied any such plans, determined he simply take over territory he deemed spiritually essential to reconstitute Mother Russia--or whatever. "No, I'm not going to invade Ukraine," he told everyone. And then he did.

That was about three years ago--February 24, 2022, to be exact.

So some of the refugees came here, even here to northwest Iowa, and, as immigrants have frequently done throughout history--and our own history, they took the jobs they could get here in America, despite their employment record or level of education back home. And now, the ones our church helped, appear to be doing well. 

But now they've been told they're not far from an seat on a jet taking them and a full house of others to wherever the wheels of the plane come down.

It seems, and it is, terribly, terribly wrong.

And it's not just here, of course. It's happening throughout this country because Donald E. Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do--he's reversing his predecessor's soft heart by enlisting his own, now huge, private army to grab immigrants wherever he wants and then flying them home--including Ukrainians. 

His fascist character has forever been on display, but somehow a majority of American believed him to be the only one who could carry the U. S. o A. out of strife. They voted the bigot in for a second term, and now he's doing exactly what he promised to do. A full 85% of my neighbors here in the county voted him in.

And now--wouldn't you know it?--the country doesn't think much of what he's up to. Here's the headline this morning: 

Gallup poll shows 79% of Americans favor immigrants, a significant increase from a year earlier and a high point in a nearly 25-year trend

All of a sudden, the fickle American public just love immigration. And it's perfectly understandable because at some level they know the immigrants around have become more and more essential to our way of life. They milk our cows, plaster our walls, paint our ceilings, clean our houses, build our highways, and do almost everything else good moms and dad don't bring up their children to do.

What's more, they absolutely hate the gestapo look and gestapo tactics of Trump's hooded police force. Americans don't like people being stopped on the street by hooded or masked guards. They don't like military vehicles rolling up to city parks, even though there's no one there. They don't like thugs. Except Trump.

Despite the fact that this was one of the issues that marked the presidential election and delivered the presidency to Donald Trump just eight months ago, support for immigration in the country has now reached record highs, even among Republicans. About 8-in-10 Americans, 79%, say immigration is “a good thing” for the country today, up sharply from 64% a year ago and a high point in a nearly 25-year trend. In contrast, only two in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing, down from 32% last year.

Amazing. That's the good news this Monday morning. The bad news is that we're going to have Trump's masked crusaders around for another three years. 

 And he's talking about a third term too.  Ain't we got fun?

Happy birthday!

 

Happy birthday to the love of my life, a woman who has become the arms and legs of the family, my care-giver, the person who lugs out the trash and has spent most of her life for the last year trying to keep a house or two clean and her husband human.

I won't say how many, but this morning she's my age.