Way too many chains (reprised)

 

[This blog is getting ancient--twenty years old and more, thousands of posts, most of which can quietly slide into oblivion with no particular sadness or pain. But once in a while I go back a ways and hunt around for something lively, like this one from 2012. I'd just retired. I have no memory of where I was, but I remember the mammoth picnic table that earned, to my mind, a few words.]

I suppose one of the sentences I'm serving in my life is being forced to look at picnic tables.  I've lifted more than my share, painted dozens, even repaired 'em by the lot; so many that when I sit at one, I can't help look. And yesterday, here's what I couldn't help seeing.

When I walked out of church, it felt like early June in Omaha--had to be 60. The congregation was going to have lunch together and then do some caroling.  Imagine Christmas caroling in weather so warm you really should be playing church-league softball.  But I couldn't stay, so I got in the car and started steering north and homeward.

I grabbed a Philly Cheese Steak sandwich at Arby's--big mistake because it was too darn big--then decided I was retired and there was no reason to chase home on such gorgeous day, perfect for most anything but caroling. So, sandwich and curly fries in hand, I pulled over at a rest stop and took the closest picnic table. Everything tastes better outside, we used to say at the state park where I worked, even too much Philly cheese steak.

That's when I noticed the heavy chain beneath the table.  See it?. Incredible. You have to notice, first off, that nobody ever has to repaint this mammoth.  The top is that unforgiving hard rubber stuff, and the base is honest-to-goodness concrete. Nobody ever repairs this thing either.

And it's chained down--that's right, chained down, presumably because otherwise some petty thief idiot would walk off with it.  I can understand people wanting one of these heavy suckers in their backyard--it'll last forever!--but I could not begin to imagine how on earth some deviant yokel could grab one, then hoist it on the bed of a pickup without some huge wench and a world-class hernia.

Seriously, someone's going to steal this table?

What kind of world do we live in anyway?

We all suffer for the damned. Starts in third grade, when some kid rips up a library book and the rest of us lose our recess until the creep 'fesses up. Thus we strip at airports and let some unsavory stranger have a look at our private selves in an x-ray lest some fanatic Islamicist tries to light up his Nikes.

Made me sad, honestly, this human condition.  Some crew has to put chains on what must be a couple of hundred state-owned, ten-ton picnic tables because out and about on the land there's a highway robber who'd otherwise grab one of these and take it home?  Oh, geez.  Woe and woe and woe.

It was a gorgeous day. Thank goodness for global warming. But there I sat, stuffing my face and, on account of a heavy metal chain, lamenting the human condition. And I'd just come from church too.  What I should have done is turned around, gone back, and done some good old-fashioned holiday caroling.

Instead, I sat there angry, finishing that cheesy-mess of a sandwich--and the curly fries, all of 'em.

Woe and woe and woe. Sometimes, Lord, I think I got a chain on me.

Farch, Dogwood

With any kind of lovely dawn, something about this tree, a mile south of the blacktop, down an eighth of a mile from Dogwood is just gorgeous. I've got dozens of pictures of it, from all kinds of angles. It's sits out there all by itself on a road the county doesn't keep up, and it foregrounds a space, a wide-open landscape that seems iconic. 

On this particular Saturday morning--February 27, 2009--it just happened to be shimmering.

I don't know if I'd call this morning subject more or less enchanting. The ice is almost a shock, but it imprisons as much as it beautifies. One more--

Once the sun gets a head of steam, it pours forth that Midas touch that is itself a reason to be out there down some gravel road.

The richness of that gold mantel turns everything heavenly.

If  you think there's any beauty here--with this shot--thank light, the gilded spell of early morning.

To be honest, I don't remember that morning, but I'm happy to be reminded by what the camera recorded, fifteen years ago.

"Farch," some people call it right now, a season two boring month roll slowly along while we wait for emerald to be born once more. But, hit it right, and even "farch" glows.

A man named Ree

 

It's there. I know it is. I saw it. Took me a while to actually notice it specifically--I mean, there are other names carved into this healthy peace of Sioux Quartzite, but it's there. I drew a light circle around it so you can pick it out--the name of Joseph Nicolet, the French Renaissance man (geographer, explorer, astronomer, and who knows what else?). It's right here at Pipestone National Monument, just up the road a couple of hours.

Here's shot I found on line. You can't miss it. 

Just plain hard to believe that Nicolet was in Minnesota before there was one, before almost any other white guy--1838. There had to be more, of course, but Joseph Nicolet, explorer extraordinaire, was there at Pipestone National Monument before you could buy a pipe.

As was George Catlin, explorer and artist, a man who left two jobs behind out east, where he'd been a barrister, a lawyer, as well as a portrait artist who turned a buck or two by putting famous people's faces on canvas, suitable for hanging.

Catlin said that one day in Philly he met some Native people and was, well, mesmerized. There's no mention of where the vision came from or when, but what he said he'd suddenly determined he'd been born to do was go west, young man, and paint portraits of every last tribe, today yet, if not yesterday. Must have been a striking vision. 

If you've ever been to the Pipestone National Monument, Catlin's portrait (circa 1838) requires a second look. No trees, just a massive outcropping of pink quartzite, rising from the grassy prairie like an ancient shipwreck amid the sea of prairie grass. 

Catlin documented the place by staying around for a spell, observing rituals, and putting them on canvas, just exactly what the Yankton Sioux warned him not to do What happened around all that red stone was none of his darn business after all. But that Philadelphia vision had to had nailed him. He stayed around anyway, left his brushes out, and he left behind was a gallery of work documenting life here almost 200 years ago.

Nicolet has his monument and you can Google dozens of Catlin's stolen drawings, but the real hero is rarely celebrated, Struck by the Ree, the lead signatory of the Yankton Sioux, who traded 11 million acres of tribal land for peace. "He's a hero?" you ask. Well, when it comes to Pipestone National Monument, yes, because what was included in that massive deal did NOT include pipestone.

A Yankton Sioux chief called Ree would not give it up and thus saved it for its use as a source of soft, pinkish stone for making pipes, which are, remember, instruments of peace. 

Struck by the Ree is buried in Greenwood cemetery, which you can visit--it's just up the road from town and just past the 1858 Treaty monument. Just drive in. His stone is huge. You can't miss it. 

He saved the place and all that soft, open-grained stone--it's called Catlinite. Isn't that just the story? But the man who deserves more credit that Nicollet or Catlin is Yankton Sioux, a man called Struck by the Ree. 

Yet another reason

We were in the Netherlands and with our kids, who were, well, just kids, big enough to understand most of what we were seeing, but just kids on the lookout for McDonalds any chance they could get.

We'd decided on the Open-Air Museum in Arnhem, another version of Iowa's Living History Farms, the kind of place where life, in many ways, hasn't changed. Men and women dressed in their era's standard wardrobes still plow with horses and chase chickens around the yard.

David and I were in what we'd call an old-fashioned "general store," where the clerk, a round and jolly big-bearded fellow wearing a broad denim apron looked up at us and said, not asked, "You're Dutch, aren't you?" 

It was his job, of course, to engage the wanderers, but it was an unexpected question and a good lead. "Yah," I said, "Dutch-American, however, five generations in."

"What's your name?" he asked.

I told him.

"Schaap???" he said, and then, quickly, "--you're Jewish."

We're not Jewish, but we'd just come from a visit to another museum, this one at Westerbork, the last stop for Dutch Jews before being shipped, by train, to Auschwitz. It was a stunning visit I've never forgotten, as was this. These Schaaps are not Jewish.

Sometimes that moment is haunting. Like yesterday, when Secretary of State Rubio gave us all the administration's fourth or fifth explanation for taking up military action against Iran. If I have this right, what he said goes something like this: We started military action because we knew that Israel was going to; we knew also that when they did start blowing things up, Iran would retaliate, not just in Israel but around the region, including our bases and people. Let's be clear, he might have said, we did not start this. We are only protecting our interests. This is not a war of aggression. It's all defense.

True? What is "true," in Trumpworld, always requires discernment. 

But Rubio's explanation comes uncomfortably close to confessing that we're Netanyahu's big, no-brained brother--or sister. We're at war in the Middle East because Netanyahu was going to be? We're his handy-dandy palace guard. We show our teeth when he says, "get em." Consider us Israel's lapdog, his hand-maiden.

It's not easy to say that these days. Harvard's student body protested the endless death in Gaza, and Trump sued them for being anti-Semitic, when the percentage of Jewish students and faculty on the Quad is as high as it is anywhere, save Columbia, who also took their licks.

It's tough to say what I just said. Do it publicly, nationally, and you're an anti-Semite, a bigot.

But if Rubio's latest explanation is the right fit, something about the arrangement really, really stinks. 

Music gives a soul to the universe,

wings to the mind,

flight to the imagination

and life to everything.” — Plato

Strangely enough, a midwife--and not his mother--baptized Antonio Vivaldi the moment he was born. Those who speculate on such things claim tiny Antonio might have been sickly, while others point to an earthquake that hit Venice just then, an event that may have traumatized the new parents. And then there are those who say that his mother rushed things along and thereby devotedly consecrated her new baby boy for the priesthood.

If that's true, she was successful because her son became a priest, a musical priest, at a small church (for Italy and Venice)--this one, Chiessa Della Pieta, a gorgeous place long ago connected to the Devout Hospital of Mercy (Ospedia del Pieta), an orphanage for abandoned street kids, where Vivaldi wrote and taught music for thirty years--and where the young women he taught performed that music. 

It seems a dream today, but we were there for a concert some years ago, right there  in the very church. It was a pure blessing to sit where his students performed, and listen to his Four Seasons, done with a sextet of strings and a harpsichord, by musicians who throughout the text appeared to speak to each other through the movements of the music, to gift each other with the beauty they created.

I think he was right about music--Plato, that is: "music gives a soul to the universe." It opens us into believing that there's reality above our own, it makes us smaller than we might want to think of ourselves and fills us with a joy that isn't our own.

That Vivaldi concert came to mind--maybe I should say came to my soul--on Saturday night at another cathedral, this one also storied, a magnificent creation pioneer Luxembourgers right here in the neighborhood built a century ago as tribute to the God they worshipped. St. Mary's stands atop the highest hill in Sioux County, where its twin towers insist on being seen from miles away. It's a church, but it's also a monument that reveals the story of a people who came to the unbroken ground of Siouxland prairie and simply insisted their God be worshipped in the kind of magnificence and beauty they remembered at home.

Saturday night St. Mary's was the setting for a candle-lit concert by a quartet of strings whose artistry and accomplishment, to my mind and my soul, was no less a pure blessing as that concert we attended in Vivaldi's Venice. The music--familiar show tunes--may well  have lacked the heft of The Four Seasons, but the concert itself, its artistry and grace, accomplished by extraordinarily good and local musicians, in an atmosphere redolent with devotion and worship, will be, at least to me, just as memorable as Vivaldi's work.

We're at war again in the Persian Gulf. The news promises more of the same.

What we heard in church on Saturday night was an alternate vision for human kind, music that "gives a soul to the universe" and out distances the world of fiery anger and brutish belligerence, a reality vastly more important than military strength--candle-lit life, not death.

 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 “Many are the woes of the wicked. . .”

 Maybe so.  Maybe not. 

Proportionally, in this world do the wicked suffer more or than the righteous?  I’m not sure.  Some forms of suffering the righteous undergo, in fact, aren’t even background music in the lives of really bad people.

 But that’s a topic for another time.  Give me a minute or so to brag up my granddaughter.

When, years ago, my son and his girlfriend came to a relatively congenial parting of the ways, it was tough on him.  My guess is that it was tough on her, too, but I know it was tough on my granddaughter, who’d come to nearly worship the ground her uncle’s girlfriend walked upon.

How does one explain a break-up to a four-year-old?  Her father told her what she had to understand was that people changed.  That seemed to help.

The next day, at day-care, she ambled up to her teacher with the news that her uncle wasn’t going with his girlfriend anymore. 

 “Oh, really,” the teacher said. 

 “Well, you know,” Jocelyn said, deadly serious, “people change.”

 Her teacher told Jocey’s mom that she had all she could do not to laugh.

 I don’t know that Jocelyn told her teacher a truth she’d totally digested, or if her mind was acting like a tape recorder; but if she understood her father’s explanation, then I’m pleased because at four years old she’s arrived at the level of wisdom that some (many?) don’t achieve until much later, if ever.

We’re talking about wisdom here, I suppose, and today’s passage brings to mind the word wisdom because I’m not so sure as David is that he’s exactly right about the claim he so brashly offers us.  In my world, the wicked aren’t always woeful; sometimes, like it or not, they prosper.

We don’t have to look all that far to find an entirely contradictory appraisal right here in the Psalms—in 73, famously, the plight of the wicked looks a great deal different:  “They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong.  They are free from the burdens common to man; they are not plagued by human ills.”  No woes there, no not one.

The Bible, it seems, is probably a whole less squeamish about contradiction than its readers are.  What seems true in one verse seems a whole lot less so just down the block.  How do we make sense of such things?

 Eugene Peterson, in his “Introduction to the Wisdom Books” in The Message, claims that “the Psalms are indiscriminate in their subject matter—complaint and thanks, doubt and anger, outcries of pain and outbursts of joy, quiet reflection and boisterous worship.”  It’s all here in this book.  “If it’s human,” he says, “it qualifies.”

 The richness of this immodest claim is not that it is forever true.  The essential joy of what David claims about the woes of the wicked is the rich human happiness he feels in forgiveness.  About the specifics, maybe he’s not to be trusted; after all, he sings a different song later in another concert. 

 But about the big picture, he’s on the money—and the big picture in Psalm 32 is the triumph of forgiveness.  About that, there’s very good reason to brag. 

Ashes at Lent

As far as I know there was no sign that begged passers-by to take a handful along and bring it home.  He says himself that he did what he did so that when he returned home he could tell the story. Maybe we should consider those ashes something of a souvenir of his visit to Buchenwald, a concentration camp as bad or worse than any of the others with memorably horrifying names. Just a week or so later, he'd visit Dachau. More horrible? How does anyone compare horrors anyway?

Buchenwald was his first visit once the war was over and cleanup had begun. It's difficult to imagine how anyone could be unaffected by what the troops found.  

In the center of the camp was the crematorium, surrounded by a high stone wall. Unwanted prisoners, the sick and the maimed, were brought to this building at night and as soon as they stepped inside the wall they slid down a chute into the basement and were killed instantly. An elevator took the dead bodies to the main floor, where they were cremated. I counted five ovens in the crematorium. Human ashes were dumped on a pile outside of the camp.

This is the way he wanted to remember in his diary. Now, here's the act: "I took a handful of human ashes out of one of the ovens and sent it home to tell the story."

Home, eventually, was here. It's an odd to think about, but I can't help but wonder whatever happened to that little pile of ashes he grabbed from the pile. He sent it home, he says. Did he include, in his letter to his wife, an explanation of what it was, or did he wait to get home to try to explain? Even eye-witnesses couldn't believe what they saw, what they'd seen, dead bodies like cord wood, fifty boxcars stacked with shrunken bodies ready to be shipped somewhere even more hideous. Where? How might he have 

The chaplain's own remains have been in residence at a local cemetery for years and years, as have those of his wife. When he died, did his children find that jar or sack or whatever he kept those ashes in? Did they know? Did he tell his children the story? How? When? Maybe some years later, he simply dispensed with them himself when he started to feel as if the story lost currency--or when he realized he no longer could muster the strength it took to tell the story? When he himself passed away, did his wife hold on to the ashes or drop them in his office wastebasket?

It's Lent. A week or so ago, many of us wore ashes across our foreheads as if to recite aloud the OT passage about "dust to dust." I couldn't help thinking about that vial of human ashes the chaplain sent on home to tell the story, in part because we use ash and not dust to adorn our foreheads. Ash, I'm told, is more adhesive. 

It's not the same really--I mean using Buchenwald ash, or ash from any other human source. It's not easy to find hope in a cupful of human ashes taken from a pile outside a crematorium. If that kind of human ash were the stuff of the forehead cross, it would bespeak the sins of others more so than my sin, than my mortality, than the brevity of my life. Wouldn't be Lent exactly, or would it?

For me at least, it's difficult not to wonder just where the ashes he sent home could be today. 

Then again, the best guess is that they've simply disappeared into the dust from which they'd come.