A couple of decades ago

 

What was I learning, twenty years ago? I haven't really noted it plainly or definitively, but I'm coming to understand that photographs taken in a certain slant of sun are blessed with a Midas touch. When dawn burnishes everything, it makes anything and everything lovely. Look, this picture wouldn't be worth a thing if it weren't for the golden touch of an early morning sun on a blanket of fresh snow. Is this a beautiful shot? There's no accounting for taste, so my answer may suit me but no one else. 

But twenty years ago, after a blizzard, I went out to on an abandoned farm just a couple miles north of Lebanon, getting there early enough (these were shot December 15, 2005) to grab a bit of that gilded look that, in this place especially--an abandoned place--gives old junk a richness that's almost angelic. 

That's what I was learning twenty years ago after a morning outing with my precious camera and enough of a blizzard to bestow quilts all around.

Have a look. 

Are any of these pictures spectacular? Nope, but all of them are comely, made so by the gracious reach of an early morning sun. 

This week, a chunk of land some place close to Orange City brought (take a breath) 30K an acre. You read that right--$30,000. Made headlines around the state. 

I bring that up because these shots are hard to find these days; the land is so expensive that abandoned farms are all but gone.

That's sad if you fool around with a camera. 

Here's the most interesting shot I took that morning long ago. Takes a while to "read" it, but it's my favorite at least, mostly because it's fun.  

p.s. I don't think these files have ever been out of my hard drive before. It's kind of fun giving them an audience they've never had.

The Great Evangelical President

He may be right. He's lied so often that it's hard to trust anything he's saying. But let's just say he's right about the way he and his Secretary of War are running operations in Central America, picking off boats along the shore like fish in a barrel. Let's just say that each of these blasted boats were loaded to the gills with drugs. Let's just say that their pay for their grunt work in the drug trade is being picked up by someone or another in these United States. . . let's just say it's all true and Hegseth isn't the creep he presents himself to be. Let's just call them all saints.

I don't care. There's still every reason to believe that Donald E. Trump has been the most heinous American President in the whole line of succession. We've never, ever had someone in the Oval Office who's even hinted at outright hate the way the Orange man has and does. Yesterday, it was the Somalians, especially those from Minnesota: “We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” 

We've never had a Chief of State who called an entire ethnic group of people "garbage." But as long as he'd delivered that madness, he figured, well, katy, bar the door. He went after Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali American congresswoman, duly elected, a “fraud” who “shouldn’t be allowed to be a congresswoman.”

All of this just yesterday from evangelical Christianity's President, a jerk who called the mayor of Minneapolis "a fool" for being proud of the state's considerable Somali population. 

Great guy. 

Oh, yeah--and on another track, Trump decided, for reasons all his own, to pardon the former President of Honduras, who was in prison here having been convicted of running drugs--cocaine--from his own oval office. Convicted. Tried and convicted--and Trump frees him when he spends a quarter-million every time he blows up a boat in the Caribbean for doing--if we believe our President--what former President Juan Orlando Hernández was not just accused, but convicted of doing out of his own back door. 

Does that make any sense?

And then there's this--a note from JoAnne Van Engen, who's lived in Honduras for the last 25 years of her life, and, with the ASJ makes it a habit to run in the face of political corruption. 

Trusted poling showed Honduras's Liberal party with a ten-point lead over the National party candidate, with the government candidate a distant third. 

Here's part of her report on that nation's Presidential election, held a week or so ago:

That lead was erased when President Trump tweeted his support of Asfura last Wednesday, warning Hondurans that the US would withdraw all support if Asfura did not win. Many worried Hondurans decided to switch their vote to Asfura. Twenty-four hours later, President Trump tweeted that he would pardon Honduras’ ex-president, Juan Orlando Hernandez who had been convicted of drug trafficking in the US and was serving a long sentence in a US federal prison. (Juan Orlando was released from prison today).

Aside from the kind of meddling that has created "the ugly American," Trump pardons a convicted, crooked pol who dealt in cocaine smuggling in a fashion that makes those little boats look like a computer game. 

Does that make any sense? Only in Trump's orbit, which is--thank goodness--growing smaller every week. 

Train Dreams

It doesn't take long into Train Dreams to realize that you've found your way into something that isn't what it seems.  You're thinking maybe a "western"?--after all, the cinematography moves lazily through settings that are respected, even loved by whoever is holding the camera. But Train Dreams is not a "western," if by the term we mean something mean and snarly about cowboys and/or Indians. 

It's not just local color, a regional piece, either, although it stops and stays with a mountain community in the mountain-range Idaho or Montana maybe. Train Dreams isn't political, as such--it doesn't try to wrack up points for rugged individualism or some bygone patriotic spirit. Trump wouldn't like it--it's not MAGA, but then it's not anti-MAGA either. It doesn't fuss with politics.

Train Dreams is one man's story. He happens to depend upon the construction of the western railroad to gain a living, to gain a life, although his heart is quite blessedly hundreds of miles away with a loving wife and baby.

Tragedy strikes, as it was almost bound to. It's a story, after all, and it has a conflict--nothing less than death itself; and when death happens the movie is all about anguish and sadness and an endless world of grief. 

But there's no woman-in-waiting, no substitute for a woman he loved and the child the two of them brought into the world. There's only loneliness and the struggle this wilderness man puts up to do little more than hope for some magical return that never happens. 

Train Dreams is about him, but it's also about us, not some cartoon version of us but us, inside and out. It doesn't move like movies, so don't expect it to. It's only secondarily about a man who suffers; it's primarily about what it means to be human. It's about grief and hope and life itself, and all of that doesn't come nicely packaged for Christmas. It can be hard to watch, but it's also mesmerizing because we want to know about him and we want to know about us.

It's a beautiful film and, right now at least, its unlike anything else you'll see on the screen in the family room.

It's beautiful, and you can watch it sometime soon on Netflix. Just look for Train Dreams. Right now, there's nothing else like it. It's just beautiful.

Resort and Country Club

Let me be out with it--I know I risk a really bad joke by saying it this way, but I'm going to do it anyway. Getting from the stone monument beside the road (from Litchfield, MN, go east on Hwy. 12 to 9 south to County Road 18, then east for three miles where you'll find the monument on the south side of the road.) --like I say, getting from the monument where Little Crow was killed from, say, Spicer, MN, the gateway to "up-north" Minnesota, wouldn't take all that long, as the crow flies, as they say. I know, I know!--that's an impossibly bad  joke because neither of us is a crow. What I'm saying is, getting to the monument is something of a chore, especially if you're accustomed to life on the square, as it exists through most of the rural Upper Midwest. "As the crow flies" it wouldn't take long, but neither of us is a crow.

Nor  was Little Crow. What I'm saying is, getting to that lonesome monument from just north of Spicer is a trick, believe me. It's not easy getting around all those lakes--county trunks like pick-up sticks trying desperately to stay out of the water. It's not close. Not at all close--maybe an hour, even as the crow flies.

But we're not talking about crows here, we're talking about a Native headman whose people looked to him for leadership when they really needed him, when they were starving, when they were helpless victims of crooked government agents who knew darn well that taking a job with an Indian agency meant making a fairly cushy living. 

If you're thinking war paint and tom-toms, don't. When Little Crow went to church with the missionaries, he wore a suit-and-tie, as if he were a good Presbyterian, which, after a fashion, he was. And when his starving people asked him to general their uprising against the endless swarm of immigrants moving into the lakes region, Little Crow, to his credit, told his people they didn't stand a chance in hell of stopping the flow because there were so many more of them--and more a'coming--than there were Dakota warriors.

But he'd do it, he told them, even though it was a fool's errand, which it was. For about a month, the Dakota War of 1862 was sheer horror, hundreds of newly-arrived homesteaders blindly attacked and slaughtered unmercifully. But soon enough, just as Little Crow had prophesied, the whites were simply too many and too strong, even though legions of Minnesotans were somewhere down South fighting to preserve the Union. 

When it was over, hundreds on both sides were dead and the cause of peace in the brand new state of Minnesota was ruptured, not to be repaired for hateful decades. 

Little Crow lit out north to Canada, but then, just a year later, he'd returned to the  homeland and was out picking raspberries with his son when a white farmer and his son spotted the two of them, then tangled a bit before Little Crow, headman of the Wahpakute Dakota, was felled by a bullet right there at said highway marker, where you can read the story for yourself. It's not pretty.

What was left of Little Crow was prize booty for a time, in the throes of the blood lust created by what-seemed senseless killing of so many homesteaders. Parts of his body, literally, were celebrated in town picnics. 

What little remains of it is buried respectfully in the Riverview Cemetery, Flandreau, South Dakota, where his gravestone stands with dignity in a circle of his people. 

I'm bringing all of that up because just a month ago or so we stayed at a place just north of Spicer, a well-kept resort on a golf course that prides itself in being a joy, a place called--I'm not making this up--Little Crow Resort and Country Club. I'm serious. 

You can always tell something of the age of a motel by the bathroom fixtures. Little Crow Resort is no longer brand new, but the course looked fastidiously groomed. It's a pretty place. Friendly staff, too, believe me, small-town folks. 

I asked the  woman behind the desk if she had any idea where the name of the place came from--"Little Crow Resort and Country Club." Was it a nearby lake maybe?--there are, after all, dozens of them.

"Oh, shoot," she said, searching the room behind me and over my shoulder. "The boss isn't here right now--he knows about stuff like that."

I smiled and thanked her for an especially good breakfast. 

Like I say, as the crow flies, maybe a half hour away from the place the old chief died. A good bit longer if you drive. 

Sunday Morning Meds -- Forgiveness

“. . .and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

                                                        Reinhold Neibuhr

 

            Perhaps the Scarlet Letter is the American classic it is because its central characters—the seemingly fallen Hester and her partner in crime, the seemingly self-righteous Arthur Dimmesdale—are so, well, seemingly complex.  Invariably, it seems, first-time readers in my college classrooms, early on, come to love Hester as much as they hate her guilt-wracked lover, a spineless phony.  But I’m not sure Hawthorne intended my students’ sentiments to move so incontestably in those directions.

            I side with those who claim that the trajectories of those two characters, in the novel, appear to move in totally opposite directions.  Hester is clearly central in the early chapters; Hawthorne seems to have fallen in love with her himself, in part because she gains so much heroic strength by accepting her red badge of shame.

            The Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale, on the other hand, is a sham, a man who receives the accolades of the community in spite of his secret sin, a man who, by refusing what Hester openly accepts, loses our sympathy as quickly and surely as she gains it.

            But slowly on, Hawthorne allows Dimmesdale to take over the novel, giving him greater billing—or so it seems to me. 

            The climactic scene, when he finally and torturously bears his sin to the community and dies, forgiven, rarely engages my students, despite the fact that they are almost all believers themselves.  It’s too little, too late—even though good Christian readers probably should see the eternity of what just occurred:  his sin, like David’s, has been forgiven. 

            I’m really not sure Hawthorne could have done better. It seems to me that while stories—the ones we read or the ones we hear—can map out what it is that happens in forgiveness, those stories cannot give us the experience. No one’s testimony of forgiveness—David’s or Dimmesdale’s or your neighbor’s or mine, can do that. By way of what some call “felt life,” stories bring us as close as anything can to experience.  But there is, finally, an experiential—an existential—character to forgiveness and faith itself that is beyond my words or Hawthorne’s or even the word of the scriptures.

            We can talk and we can share and we can testify. We can read the Scarlet Letter or Crime and Punishment or the 32^nd Psalm. We can hear the story time and time again.  We can know how forgiveness operates; we can theorize and theologize.

            But, finally we know forgiveness in our hearts and souls only when we, like King David, know it’s been done to us, within us.  

You have to have been there to know.  In that sense, the 32^nd Psalm is our song, even if I can’t explain it or even describe it, as no one can. 

We really know what David knows only when we too have been forgiven.

 

Mom's birthday

 

Our son's absence couldn't be avoided. He's got a new job, and taking off for a couple days simply wasn't a possibility. Still, he and his wife were missed. There was a bit of a hole in our holiday.

Otherwise, it was all just about perfect. My wife, who ritually takes on the turkey singlehandedly, did it up wonderfully once again. Starting, well, Monday or so, she sweats about the menu, then works like a coal-miner all by her lonesome for 48 hours straight to come up with a meal that defines the holiday. 

This year her first-grade son mentioned to his mother that he hoped Mema (their name) would have cranberries. Wish morphed immediately into mandate. Two varieties, including something called, "Pink Stuff," were on the table on Thursday, even though "pink stuff" is at least 98% marshmallow and therefor not her cup of tea. If the Thanksgiving table is a book store, Pink Stuff is a silly romance novel. But, voila! there it was. 

My mother died three years ago already. She was 95, and her leave-taking, honestly, was just about as sweet as anyone could wish or imagine. Some kind of snarling cancer was discovered on Friday, and Monday morning she walked away quietly, as if she didn't want to bother her loved ones. That wasn't like her. For most of her years she loved bothering people, her loved ones especially.

Particularly me maybe, about politics especially. Once upon a time, she set her life's compass by way of the words of Dr. Joel Nederhood or Rev. H. J. Kuiper, or whoever edited the denominational magazine. She grew up in an era when the sturdy walls of her Christian Reformed culture was all she needed for guidance. What the preachers thought, she simply determined to think herself. 

By the end of her life, those walls had largely disappeared; her newfound dominies were a glossy array of TV preachers, her truth-tellers talk show radio hosts like Michael Savage. As she aged, the world she saw from her window in the Home got much smaller, and what got left behind became less understandable and therefore more to be feared. She was convinced that the Lord would come sometime before next Tuesday, if not sooner, given the rampaging evil right there on doorstep of Pine Haven Home.

That her son didn't share her politics or her fears was of great concern, because Mom was born and reared in a world were there were only two paths to the celestial, only one of them the straight-and-narrow. The other led to Las Vegas or the Democratic party. Mostly, she let Michael Savage draw up definitions of who was and who wasn't on the right one.

Every visit home, she'd bait me for a political inquisition, set me up with some "when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife?" question. "So, honey, you still like Obama?" That one, she used more than once because she knew it would open the door. 

She liked to fight, my mother did. Loved it. 

But I missed her too this Thanksgiving. She wasn't here and I wasn't there. 

Today is her birthday, which meant that for years and years a trip back to Wisconsin covered two bases, two holidays in one fell swoop. All I really had to remember was Mother's Day, which always falls on a Sunday and therefore "shouldn't be Mother's Day at all because it's really the Lord's Day." That having been said, she expected you'd remember and told you if you didn't.

This weekend I found myself missing the long trip home for the holiday, something we did most of our married lives. I found myself missing the lakeshore, missing the woodlands all around, missing family who stayed in the place that for some remarkable reason I still find myself calling "home."

And Mom and I made our peace, in case you're wondering. Not long before she died, I told her in no uncertain terms that she didn't have to worry about her son's salvation, that she could go to her eternal rest unsettled, all that Obama stuff notwithstanding.

The last time I visited, I was alone. I took her to Culver's, where we drove through and picked up a couple of butter burgers on a gorgeous Indian summer afternoon. Then we stopped at a south side park. I got out the wheelchair and pushed her up close enough to the lake to pick up just a little sand in that burger as we munched away. 

People quite naturally address old people in wheelchairs. They condescend sweetly, just like they might do to little kids. They're not afraid, and Mom loved attention as much as she loved to preach, loved to attribute all that lakeshore beauty to the Lord, or so she'd say to whatever strangers said hello as they walked by.

It took her a while to finish that burger, but when she did we went back to the Home, and for the first time in my life--and the last--we sang together, just the two of us, "Blessed Assurance," Dad's old favorite. A month later or so she was gone.

Some instinct in me is pigeon-like, I guess. Truth is, on Thursday I had a terrific, a blessed Thanksgiving. I'm not complaining. But this morning, her birthday, I just can't help feeling that somehow we missed something this holiday, something back home.

For better or for worse, I think it was Mom. She'd smile at that, I'm sure. 

Good night, she could drive me nuts, but this morning I'm thankful for her.

Now Thank We All

The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), like most, was obscenely messy. What's worse, like most horrendous conflicts of our day and years gone by, it was, quite frankly, religious, fought by antagonists perfectly confident that their enemies belonged to the army of Satan.The Thirty Years War wasn't among Christianity's finest hours.

Want to see for yourself? This excerpt from Cicely Wedgewood's history of that war may be all you wish to read. 

At Calw the pastor saw a woman gnawing the raw flesh off a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding. . . .In Rhineland [city magistrates] watched the graveyards against marauders who sold the flesh of the newly buried for food. . . .Acorns, goats' skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms.

People suffered. Political and religious hatred teamed up in a particularly rowdy fashion to create a war in which the Austrians and Swedes and just about anyone else looking for a fight on the continent took turns thrashing the very life out of the German people and countryside. 

To those who lived through it, the steel wheels of that war must have seemed to grind on endlessly. Thousands deserted their farms and homes for protection in old walled-in European cities. Soon enough, there was no room. At Strassburg, Ms. Wedgwood says, the living shut their windows to death groans just outside the walls of their homes. In winter, people stepped over dead bodies all over the streets.  Finally, when the city knew it could do no more, the magistrates simply threw out 35,000 refugees into the terror and death outside the the walls.

Spring came in long days of warm rains that kept the earth moist and rich for disease that flourished in the hot summer sun that followed. Plagues wound through the streets in gusts of warm wind., Outside the gates, law and order crumbled into chaos as men formed marauding, outlaw gangs that killed men, women, and children for food.

Sometime toward the end of the Thirty Years War, picture a man named Martin Rinkert, a servant of God, a preacher in his own hometown of Eilenburg, Saxony. In 1637, at the height of all the horror, Rinkert, the only clergyman left in the city, held funerals for up to fifty people per day. Even his wife died of the disease.

But sometime during those years--during the groaning persistence of war's evil--Martin Rinkert sat and wrote a magnificent, stately tribute thank you to God, the ruler of a world that must have seemed crumbling or burning all around.

Imagine. Thanksgiving in the middle of that unthinkable carnage.

"Now thank we all our God," he wrote and many of us will sing today. His nostrils may have been filled with the stench of war, but his soul seems to have been overflowing with confidence. 

Eilenburg, Saxony, 1637. The Thirty Years War.

Thanksgiving.  

Amazing.

If you've got four minutes, listen in to the Mormons. 

 https://youtu.be/K7gMDXylzW8?si=bIjZjRm24aSUs6uQ