Blue Sunday

I'm not sure any church under the sun can effectively create what our church--like many others--calls a "Blue Sunday." It's a noble idea, but the whole enterprise is overhung with the normal conventions of Sunday worship, meaning, specifically, the unwritten resolution that you can't leave parishioners hanging or gasping at the end of a service--you just can't. If you do, you're not being true to your contract or the gospel. 

You can use, as your text, Psalm 88, the darkest hymn of the scripture, a psalm in which there is, quite literally, total darkness. You can try, of course, but most pastors, like our own, feel it's mission failure if they just read the Psalm or play BB King or Muddy Waters and don't lift souls from despair. 

Still, I came away from worship last night with embarrassing tears in my eyes, not because the sermon wrenched my soul. I don't think thoughtful, rational discourse can do that job. 

And let me just interject here that the Schaap family has every reason to take to heart a "blue Sunday." In June, we lost half our house to a flood when the measly Floyd River, a third of a mile north of us, surpassed it's own blame flood record by five feet!--that's right, five feet, not five inches--and gorged its tremendous appetite on our lower floor. Our neighbors had it worse, much worse.

That's not the end of things either. Sometime a year ago, I started losing my legs. I can't get to church without a committee wedging me into and out of a wheelchair my wife needs recruits to lift out of and into our trunk. I've been a cripple for a long time. As the flood waters rose last June, I could do absolutely nothing but sit on my butt because my quads were already torque-less. I just finished a three-month tour of duty at a local manor where elderly and infirm comingle with residents like me--those in need of daily rehab. Let me be clear, I am not the man I was a year ago, when I don't think I attended Blue Sunday in our church. 

And then there's this: we lost all our Christmas trimmings--lights and such--and this Christmas we'll be alone, which isn't wonderful. We've got no lights and no available family. What I'm saying is, if anyone was owed a luxurious Blue Sunday baptism, it's the Schaaps. Good Lord, we bin' blue. Yes, we have. Let me count the ways. 

But let me confess something I don't begin to understand--for the last year, I've been teary more than I've been in any era of my life. I honestly don't think I'm suffering a heavy case of self-pity. But certain unforeseen images, as well as old stories, make me cry like a baby.

At Heartland Home, my wife called just a couple days into my stay to tell me that our granddaughter was holding her brand new baby, our great-grandchild. I couldn't help it--something threw the switch on my waterworks for reasons that had nothing to do with the blues. They were tears of joy.  Nurses walked in while I was trying to turn off the faucet, but instead of helping, they bawled too. Just the thought. There we were, all tears, when I was there for healing. 

I fear they're hair-trigger too. Last night--I could have guessed it would happen--whoosh!--once again the tears flowed. Music did it mostly--I'm a sucker for "Silent Night," while a church full of people are each holding a candle. That'll do it all by its lonesome, if I let it.

But last night it was more. Two widows stood on either side of our pastor, the whole bunch front and center--maybe a little too much flood light on them. For me, last night, they were the story.

One of them wasn't singing, which doesn't mean the music wasn't in her soul. She just wasn't singing, and I couldn't help but guess at cause-and-effect. She had a birthday--90 years old--and just that afternoon had celebrated with a full range of her progeny enough to fill up a whole row of chairs at morning worship. She's been a widow for decades--sometimes she likely forgets what it was like to sleep with a healthy husband. For years and years, she's made it her calling to help people with steep emotional problems, has probably heard more sad stories than anyone in our church. At 90, she just this week gave up the leadership of an organization she founded and led for forty years. To her, I'm guessing "Silent Night" just suggested silence. If she just wanted to listen, so be it, I thought, wiping tears.

And on the opposite side of the pastor stood another widow, a woman who, a half-dozen years ago, lost her a handsome, much beloved husband, although she told me once at the time that she had lost him a half-dozen years earlier when Alzheimer's helped itself to what there was of a mind once devoted to her, to his family, to teaching, to local history, to poetry--my own colleague for years.

Unlike the widow with the candle on the other side, this one sang like a robin in spring, face wondrously, even thrillingly uplifted. Sorry, it was beautiful. Those two stood right beside the preacher, ministering the way out of a blue Sunday.

I had no Kleenex. I could only use my fingers--you know.

I don't know what some people might want out of Blue Sunday, but this morning, after a good sleep, I think I left worship with what was there offered. 

And now it's Christmas, after all, so there's always reason for joy--this morning too, a cold and windless dawn, "all is calm, all is bright."

Sunday Morning Meds--Solstice

People I know have tipi rings on their South Dakota ranch, circles of stones visible only in summer, and then, only when cattle keep the grass down. But they're there, broad circles of half-submerged stones that mark the spots where, years ago our indigenous ancestors pitched tents, footprints of a different time.

Those friends claim there’s a long, straight line of stones in that pasture they believe points to the exact spot on the horizon where the sun rises on summer solstice. I haven't seen it, but I believe such things exist--ancient clocks to remind people that the times, they were 'a'changin’. Once the sun aligns with those rocks, people knew, regretfully, that winter was just over the hill.

Frederick Manfred, the Siouxland novelist, used to claim he knew where to find a similar straight line of rocks on Blue Mound, up the road in Minnesota. I never saw it, and you can’t always think a writer; but I’d like to believe it’s there too.

Who knows?--maybe there are more. Out here on the edge of the plains, we still unpack our thick robes once we know winter is on its way.

The Lakota kept their history on buffalo hides. Maybe you’ve seen ‘em. Somebody—the appointed artist, I suppose—kept track of calendar years by a single picture: a mule maybe, because that was the year some feisty donkey wandered into camp. “Winter Counts,” the Lakota people call those sprawling history book hides “winter counts” because the Lakota once counted their years by the winters they endured. Winter Counts. For the record, I have lived 70 winters. Now you know.

Out here, winter is the only season we can’t wait to end the day it starts. No area Chamber of Commerce cheerleader tells tourists that people die here in sub-zero temps, but they can—and do. Thousands escape south, but most of us live with ice cube cars, frostbit ears, and a drop of clear liquid on the end of our noses. When it gets cold enough, you don’t go out at all.

Long lines of solstice stones remind the people that it’s soon to be winter. It’s coming. Pull that buffalo robe up.

And then, right in the middle of all that miserable cold, comes Christmas. Right in the middle of all that wretched cold comes Hannukah, and right in the middle of all that hopeless cold hope itself rides up, the winter solstice, the flipside of the sun’s annual pilgrimage.

In the Netherlands, Sinter Klaas arrives; in Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, St. Stephen. And Santa Lucia, candles in her hair and sweets in her open arms, comes to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

In the middle of all that cold comes all that grace, all that blessed warmth.

The angels on high appeared to low-life shepherds in the Galilean hills

at the very best possible time, a night of endless dark and awful cold, even in Israel. “Glory, glory,” they sang, and the music couldn’t have come at a better moment because those shepherds had to be sick to death of winter.

And thus Jesus comes to those who follow him, just when we need him most, in the cold nights of our winter counts.


Not all of us believe in the Virgin Birth, cattle speaking in tongues, or a King in a manger. Not all of us spend our nights lighting menorahs for a rededicated temple. Not many of us dance madly on winter solstice.

But out here where the wind blows out of some unseen northwest icebox, my goodness! do we need the joy of Christmas. We’d be groundhogs without the blessing of that first sweet “Noel.”

Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men and women and children and all living things.

Every winter, just when a frozen world seems hopeless, hope itself arrives to wipe that bead from your nose and mine.

Happy holidays.

An ancient Christmas card

 

It could be just about anyone, but it's not--it's someone, a very real family; and what I know about them--they're not relatives--makes this early family portrait monstrously more telling.  In a way, this old Christmas card pose breaks my heart.

There are four children, two boys and a pair of twins.  The oldest, the one in the sailor suit, will be smart and thoughtful.  It's probably somewhere in the early 20s here.  He will never marry.  He will fall in love, deeply.  He and his girlfriend will have what I know will be a wonderful, loving relationship.  But they will never marry.

There will be almost a dozen other children born to this young Dutch family, so many that Mom, here holding one of the twins, will, like her oldest boy, die young.  That one, the one at her side, will come to resent his father deeply for what he will believe is going to eventually kill his beloved mother, her incessant child-bearing.  The father, a great bush of hair over his forehead, will be a Christian school teacher, a headmaster, a man I think of as a strict, quintessential Calvinist, a man who probably won't smile as much as he should have smiled by the time his life is spent.  They won't be good friends, this oldest boy and his stern father.  They will fight.  That happens sometimes.

The younger boy moored at his father's knee will suffer greatly, but he will live to a ripe old age.  Both he and his older brother will join the Dutch Resistance as young men and carry out very dangerous clandestine work against the Nazis, work that includes almost every kind of underground activity.  I don't think either of them will ever kill a German, but between the two of them they may well be responsible for death.  

They will both be heroes, but only the younger one will live.  Both will suffer greatly.  And, in the summer of 1945, after the Liberation, the younger brother will claim some fame for the Resistance work he accomplished.  He will speak about that for years to come--to school children, for instance.  But what few will ever know is that his older brother, who won't come back from a German concentration camp, will have had to cut his brother out from much of the Resistance activity they were in mutually, because that little boy in the cap couldn't keep his mouth shut and therefore became a liability.  These two boys will not be good friends when the oldest dies.

But when the big brother doesn't come back, few will remember that the boy in the hat, the one clinging to his father's leg, was once shunned by the others--by his friends--because his silence could not be trusted.

But then that story will come back and haunt the boy in the hat years and years later, after his reputation as a freedom fighter is sturdily established.  He will become very angry when a story is told that offers a different view, one long before held only in silence.

It's probably 1925 or so in the picture.  This young Dutch couple--Frisian actually--has four darling children.  They sit together in a garden somewhere in Friesland, sit for a picture, what would be today, a Christmas card maybe.  They could be any other family.  They could be ours.  

And yet I know that all of that is ahead of them.  

A picture with a thousand words, as most all of ours are.

The father's own wider family will have a reunion soon, hundreds of them coming together from places around the world; and I think it a wonderful blessing of life itself--don't you?-- that those hundreds of people won't know any of that, nothing at all.  They'll renew acquaintances, meet new family, eat wonderful food, sing songs maybe, tell stories, remember good times and bad.  But this particular ancestral family's story will be only a footnote--

"Oom Leen's oldest children were in the Resistance, you know--and one of them died in Dachau."

"Is that right?"

"Yes--it was very sad."

"It was a horrible time--the war."

"It must have been."

"Pass the dessert, Wim.  I really shouldn't have another bite."

Yesterday, an old friend of mine sent me a little personal essay in which he explained that he was suffering with the first fruits of Alzheimers.  

"Sometimes even going for breakfast in our community dining room is a challenge these days," he wrote, "because I forget. I might hear 'scrambled eggs' yet cannot remember what that is."

If I let myself, I could have cried. 

And yet, when I look at this picture and see this family in the crystal ball that I own, I can't help but think how wonderful it is, in a way, that no one on this earth remembers everything.  

Sometimes it's a blessing to forget, a blessing not to know.

This world is, after all, a vale of tears.

But I swear, that it is, doesn't mean there isn't a time for Christmas cards or one more bite of another dessert.

The Algona Nativity

The first one was twelve feet wide, still quite a production because Jesus, Mary, and the babe were mud-sculptured, then baked, then painstakingly painted. Back in Germany, Eduard Kaib had been an architect. That’s not to say his hand-made Nativity–all of twelve feet wide–required architectural expertise. It was Christmas, 1944, and Kaib was a long, long way from home. Things just got to him; so he decided to create this most famous barnyard scene, a fully manned–and animal-ed–nativity.

Eduard Kaib was an ocean away from home that Christmas and fairly comfortable, if prison can ever be. He was in a German prisoner of war camp somewhere amid endless Iowa cornfields. Kaib and most a couple thousand others had been captured in North Africa and Italy. By early 1944, other Allied powers–England mostly, but others too–were overwhelmed with captured Gerries, or Huns, or whatever other names with which Allied forces blessed the blitzkrieg-ing enemy.

The U. S. of A. stepped up. Eventually, 425,000 captured prisoners–many German, some Japanese, some few Italian–were shipped to this country and imprisoned in as many as 400 camps, several of them–like the one at Algona, Iowa–“base camps,” home places from which gangs of prisoners could be sent out into the heartland and elsewhere, where necessary work wasn’t getting done. Eleven percent of all Americans–every color, every gender, every last hometown–were gone serving the nation during World War II, 16 million Americans out of the work force.

Across the land, agriculture alone required perspiration that wasn’t being spent. Emergency cleanups from tornadoes to earthquakes, from fires and to floods, kept thousands of German prisoners busy throughout the country. This side of the Atlantic, POWs got work done that otherwise wouldn’t have been.

Eduard Kaib was an officer and therefore had special privileges that allowed him time to create that creche. In all likelihood, Kaib knew that were he not in Iowa, he would have spent the winter in Belgium, carrying out Hitler’s last daring offensive, the Battle of the Bulge. Worse, he could have been frozen stiff or dead on the Eastern Front, where two million Germans were killed, thirty million people in all. In December of ’44, Algona was a warm blessing.

The Camp Commander, Lt Col Arthur Lobdell, took one look at Kaib’s twelve-foot nativity arrangement, smiled, and told Kaib that what he should do next was create was something a good deal bigger.

Most American homes this holiday season will have at least one nativity set. Some are beautifully hand-carved; some are tall silhouettes; some, set on music boxes, pipe their own beloved carols. Some are African or Hispanic or Native American. Some feature leprechauns. Some are tiny. Many are huge, life size, some bigger; some are accented in 24-carat gold. Check out Wal-mart sometime–they likely stock a dozen or more. These days, some churches do them live.

Pardon my insistence, but Algona’s POW Nativity is somehow something else altogether. It’s not just the concrete on chicken wire, not just the hand-painted-ness. Algona’s Nativity is not the biggest or the most expensive or even the most lifelike. I’m not at all sure anyone would call it art.

But unlike any other creche I know of, the love story so divinely celebrated in this monumental barnyard moment begins, as impossible as it may seem, with hate and death. This nativity was sculpted from a whole world war of destruction, sadness, and grief. That’s its amazing genesis.

What the Algona Nativity so conspicuously displays, even in its story, is the beloved mystery of the Christmas miracle, a story of hope drawn by a single line of the visions of a prophet named Isaiah–“a little child will lead them.” It’s that mad and that beautiful and still that simple.

Sunday Meds from Psalm 4

Psalm 4 is “the evening hymn,” not because of the demands it makes for God’s ear in the first verse, or because of the 12-step program it outlines for those of us who don’t know the Lord (in vs. 3, 4, and 5).  Psalm 4 is “the evening hymn” because of this last line, because of David’s enviable drowsiness.  Surely, one mark of the “blessedness,” which is at the heart of Psalm 1, is the ability to turn out the lights, shut one’s eyes, and, without a ripple of anxiety, fall off to sleep.

But there is too much spilled blood in the David’s OT stories for me to assume that what he is claiming here is what he felt every last night of his life.  I’ll bet the back forty that he wrote this song on one of his good days.  In fact, Psalm 6, just two more down, sounds like some other guy altogether. . .”all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears,” vs. 6).

 Last weekend, my son-in-law suffered something he called a migraine.  Whether or not it was remains to be seen, but the doctor he saw for the headache calmly suggested that he cut down on stress. We giggled when he told us what the doctor had offered, as if cutting down on stress is as easy as trimming toe nails. Sure, Doc, and just exactly how do you suggest any of us do that?

 There is an answer here, of course. What David tells us in this song isn’t a lie or even a half-truth. He doesn’t just say, “Get some rest and call me in the morning.”  That’s not what’s going on here.

In truth, sleep is a precarious time because we give ourselves up to something we can’t control. No one wants to snore. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who wishes to have nightmares or suffer bizarre, buck naked hikes through public places. No one would choose to do their hair in the style we daily wake up with. I wouldn’t wish insomnia on anyone; but all of us, at one time or another, have trouble sleeping in part because when we’re out cold, we’re simply not in control; and if there’s one thing all of us want in life, it’s control. You don’t have to be a control freak to fear chaos. We all do.

 Here—on the night of this particular song—David claims he nods off easily. You alone, Lord, he says, allow me to check out in ease.

 That out-of-control-ness that we give ourselves to every night is, in David’s mind and heart and soul, a piece of cake because he knows (and that’s a word we employ in the biblical sense) God’s hand is beneath him, gently rocking.Does he always know that? No such luck. But tonight, all praise to Him, he does!

For those of us who know the Lord, sleeplessness shouldn’t be a problem—and we know it. We should be able to hit the sack and fall like a rag doll into the arms of the Father.  We should be able. . .we should.  And saying that is itself a recipe for even more anxiety.

 But it’s the goal. That’s the blessedness we all want and ask for in those furtive moments when, in bed, we feel the shakiness we so much wish we didn’t have.

 For that malady, David says what we all know but need to hear time and time again.  In his testimony there is the brace of faith God himself tells us: “Be still and now that I am God.”

 Be still, then go ahead and turn out the light.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 4

“You have filled my heart with greater joy 

than when their grain and new wine abound.

Years ago already, my father-in-law, as if out of nowhere, took me out to the barn one Sunday afternoon and told me he was going to leave the farm.  My wife and I had often wondered what her parents would do when the time came for them to retire, but neither of them had ever whispered anything about leaving.  In fact, we’d wondered whether her father ever could really quit.  The farm—and the land it stood upon and the work it required—was the only home he’d ever known.  And he’d loved everything about it.

I must have looked shocked that day because I was.

 “I just don’t want to go through another harvest,” he told me, and that was about all he said by way of explanation.

 But my wife had told me about the noticeable tension her father always carried come fall, when the crops had to get in and everything had to go smoothly, when rain and snow had to hold off until the corn and beans were safely in the bins.  I didn’t grow up on a farm, and I had no idea of the tension that can build in someone whose family’s livelihood depends on finally putting up a whole crop and doing it safely.

 That tension—the tension my father didn’t want to fight anymore—is my way of understanding the burgeoning emotion embedded in the allusion of verse 7 of Psalm 4, because it seems to me that the tension my father-in-law felt at harvest is probably directly proportional to abundant joy he felt once, in years gone by, when the barn doors finally swung shut in the first howl of a winter wind.

But it’s not just farmers who can relate to the joy David speaks of in his heart.  Not long ago, a niece of mine was married in a gala celebration that, all tolled, took several days.  The wedding ceremony itself was accomplished in a quaint country church, but the reception had more significant proportions: the downtown Yacht Club.  You choose:  stir fry, roast beef, pasta—all the trimmings.  Open bar.  It was a feast of biblical proportions, and a grand time was had by all.

 When, a month later in a supermarket, I bumped into my niece’s proud grandma from the other side of the family, a woman significantly into her eighties, she was still all smiles.  “Wasn’t that something?” she said of the wedding, raising a hand to her mouth, as if feigning embarrassment. “I tell you, that will be enough joy for me for a year.”

It strikes me that that’s exactly what David is saying here in this comparison. My overflowing joy, Lord, is greater even than what others feel at their daughters’ weddings, when food and drink abound.  It’s more than that blessed last look back on shorn fields once ripe with corn.  It’s better than the best that this world can offer.

David still got his mind on those unbelievers he’s been thinking about in Psalm 4, and what he’s telling the Lord is that he is flat-out bursting with joy, greater than those losers even in their best-of-times.

He’s crowing, really, but not at unbelievers. Instead, he is just braying out his joy at a God who, the Bible says, rather likes being so lavishly praised by those who love him.

 A full heart always trumps a full belly, David says—which is not to say that a full belly is something to sneeze at.

What the Lord has given him is just that good. Lord God, he says, it doesn’t get any better than this.

           

Cemetery--kind of. . .

Just found this wonderful picture in a hidden corner of my computer. Haven't a clue who might be in it, but it's old--1910, which means not one of those standing outside of school is alive today to remember. Grim thought. Here's something worse: That they're all gone makes the school picture a cemetery of sorts. 

Then again, not. Click on the pic, get those small-town students up close, and look for your own face. Lots of us are here, after a fashion. Maybe all of us. In that way, it's very much alive.

That's what I'm thinking, a day or two ahead of my release from Heartland Manor. I'll be going home soon, my legs a shamble. I couldn't even do any slow dancing. I've been away from a keyboard for some time, even though my spouse saw to it that I'd have this computer right here in the room--working, as she was, on another variety of rehabilitation.

This morning, sitting here with nothing to say, I saw this old picture. Never bothered to note anything at all about who, what, when, and where, only scanned the old shot something ago when I couldn't take my eyes off the whole perfectly lined up student body. 115 years later, all of them are unable to point out that naughty boy or the teacher all of  them loved. They're all gone.

 

Here's why I'm encouraged. Writing demands vision, the kind of vision which found its way into my noggin when I looked sidewise at this old dateless, nameless shot and saw more than just that. 

For a long time my bum legs stood like Ft. Randall Dam between me and vision. It was as if I couldn't see, or, better, it was as if I could see nothing but what was right in front of me. 

Maybe Ft. Randall is breaking apart. That'd be nice.

Meanwhile, see if you can find your own face in that old schoolyard.