Sunday Morning Meds -- Psalm 121

“My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

When the ex-wrestler Jesse Ventura was Governor of Minnesota, the state of Iowa took a well-deserved rest from the endless mockery tossed our way by supposedly more sophisticated Minnesotans. After all, for a few interesting years, they had enough to laugh about up north.

Ventura was buff, built like a steel nail. I remember spotting a t-shirt in the Twin Cities Airport that said, “My governor can beat up your governor.”

Funny. But if I read this verse with an emphasis on my, it’s not hard to hear a similar kind of bravado. “My help from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. You can’t say that. My god can beat up your god.”

Because this is holy scripture, I’ll ease up on the writer: “Maker of heaven and earth” is a classic appositive, nothing more than an adjectival phrase, a one-line vitae; the poet is interested simply in making sure everyone knows that his sacred trust is not invested foolishly.

Fine. Years before Donald Trump was anything more than a real estate mogul, Rev. Jerry Falwell, who back then had more problems with hoof-and-mouth than all the feedlots in Nebraska, told a group of “his people” that a Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign would mobilize Christians to get out and vote like no one else. “If Lucifer ran,” he said, “he wouldn’t.”

Rev. Falwell meant well and prayed hard, but it’s almost impossible not to see that a similar sentiment (“I meant it tongue-in-cheek,” he told folks later) has created divisiveness in this culture, a political and social world of “us vs. them.” To many of “his people,” Lucifer would be preferable to Hillary.

It seems impossible not to see that a species of fundamentalism (what I think!) is fomenting death and destruction throughout the world, including a baseball diamond in Arlington, Virginia, where a crazed Bernie supporter carried a semi-automatic up to the infield and started firing at Republicans. Whenever and wherever people believe they have sole ownership of the truth—of whatever kind--the opposition grows horns, a pointed tail, and cloven feet. And madmen load carbines.

When praying people read a verse like this with a swelling overemphasis on my, things can get dangerous. “My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. Where do you get yours, loser?”

That it can be misread doesn’t make the Bible any less “the Word of God.” Holy Writ is full of paradox and preposterous notions, marvelous tales, bloody battlefields, beautiful poetry, and eternal wisdom. It’s as powerful as it is dangerous.

Psalm 121 is pure praise, a tested testimony to an ever-vigilant God who neither slumbers nor sleeps, whose eye is on every last sparrow and humanoid, who is his people’s shepherd.

That divine assurance needs to be bound tightly in my heart, not in my fist.

Hageman's Hadestown

 

Hadestown is a love story. Mostly. It's also a reprise of a Greek myth, the story of Eurydice and Orpheus, whose tragic tale is told on a stage packed full of singers and dancers. Hadestown is a Broadway musical with a story that's nowhere near the age of its source material. The present Broadway version of the story--more spoken lines, I'm told, and more theatrics--opened in 2019 and immediately lit the world of the Broadway musical up with fervent praise. 

Explaining the plot line would take forever and not do the show justice. If you have any kind of heart for the American musical, you should see it because, good night!, it's really, really a show.

We saw it in Omaha a couple years ago, and while I'm not a fanatic, it warmed my soul by following a sad story that nonetheless leads to understanding and wisdom. It's a tragedy. Sadly, Orpheus, who's given a deal by which to get Euridice home with him--all he has to do on the road home is not look back to see her--fails when he does what he was told he couldn't do.  He does, and the sweet success of the story is smitten. It ends in misery.

Which is then celebrated by the narrative voice of the show, Hermes, yet another Greek feature, who lets us all know that even though the story ends in sadness, by continuing to tell it, we somehow keep hope alive. It's a simple ending, but profoundly important for any and all of us. The great literature of the world may not be sweet and endearing, but it's what we have, so we tell it, over and over again--and in that act renew our own hope. It's really quite beautiful--and includes a kind of sacramental ritual when even the audience raises its cups to the story itself--and the story of the story.

We went to Sioux City to see it because Siouxland Christian High School was putting it on--and will through this weekend. The idea of a Christian high school putting on a contemporary American musical (even though this was a "teen" edition) was almost impossible to imagine--and this one. Let me remind you, the story is set in hell. 

What's more, it's a full-blown Broadway musical that requires a compact little orchestra right on stage, as well as a cast of hundreds, it seems. It just seem impossible to believe that this little Christian school could do it.

But they did. It was wonderful, a great night, even though we didn't know a single kid from the cast. We weren't watching grandchildren, we were watching a show.

But we had another reason to bear witness--the director, a young woman who'd graduated from Dordt several years ago. I wrote a story about her in Dordt's Voice, and was impressed with her as a teacher and drama coach. It's always a joy to be in the presence of people who are not only good at what they do, but also love it. In Ms. Emily Hageman's case, her love for what she's teaching and who she's teaching is just real and actual, as is her students' deep appreciation for her.

We went to Siouxland Christian High School's production of the Broadway musical Hadestown because we couldn't believe it could be done but knew, at the same time, that if anyone was going to do it, it would be Emily Hageman. And she did.

Did she ever.

_______________________

You can read the story I wrote about Ms. Hegeman here. 

Lakeview, SD

I don't remember exactly how I found this place, and if I say that I stumbled over it, that wouldn't be totally true. I knew it was there---somewhere in the vicinity, an old Christian Reformed Church set down right in the middle of the Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota. Because its street address is Valentine, NE, some dozen or so miles away, I thought Valentine, NE, was where I would find it. A wonderful old saint I once knew, a pastor named Leonard Verduin told me stories about his growing up there, how unique it was--directly on the Rosebud Reservation.

In Valentine, I looked for Dutch names in the little phone book the young lady let me use in the Casey's in town, then asked the young man who picked up the phone if he could recommend someone in the community for me to talk to in order to get some sense of history--"Mrs. Logterman," he said, unhesitatingly. Then I asked him where I might find this Mrs. Logterman, and he explained where, "from the church." 

"And where is the church again?" I asked, or something as facile, trying to hide my ignorance. 

He told me--maybe a half hour north of town, said I couldn't miss it.

He was right.  I knew I was getting close when suddenly the natural world turned green and not dusty, and where for the first time, a mailbox held a Dutch name. Suddenly, in the middle of the desolation of the reservation, there was an island of emerald where the Dutch had laid claim to reservation land.

I'm not proud to say that it would take me some years to discover the roots of this whole odd phenomenon--how it is that an entire colony of Dutch Reformed people ended up in a place named after something totally unseen--"lakeview." It would take me that long because I'd never heard of the Dawes Act, or certainly hadn't heard of it before that very first visit to the church and the neighborhood. 

The General Allotment Act or Dawes Severalty Act went into effect in 1887, when Washington decided that the best way to deal with the Indian problem--how to get them out of the way--was to give each and every one of them a plot of land, then give or sell what land remained to whatever white folks wanted it. 

The Dawes Act was a disaster for Native America. Free land was a clarion call in the late 19th century, so some Dutchman--and many others--figured it was too good a deal to pass up and took what was offered. A community grew up around it, both a CRC and a RCA, as well as a Christian school, all the rudiments of a Dutch Calvinist colony, even the infighting.

All of which means that that little church in the photograph at the top of the page remains, to this day, the heart of a community of almost totally white people, in the middle of the Rosebud Reservation, just up the road from St. Francis Mission.

There was still so much for me to learn, but I can't really easily explain how thrilled I was with discovering what I did. There I was in the parking lot of the Lakeview CRC, Lakeview, South Dakota, in the middle of American history.

There's more.

 

The Rendezvous (3) - Hugh Glass

Clear as a friend's heart, 'twas, and seeming cool--
A crystal bowl whence skyey deeps looked up.
So might a god set down his drinking cup
Charged with a distillation of haut skies.
As famished horses, thrusting to the eyes
Parched muzzles, take a long-south water-hole,
Hugh plunged his head into the brimming bowl
as though to share the joy with every sense.
And lo, the tang of that wide insolence
Of sky and plain was acrid in the draught!
How ripplingly the lying water laughed!
How like fine sentiment the mirrored sky
Won credence for a sin of alkali!
So with false friends.

Pretend this is Lit 101. Okay, what on earth is going on in what you just read?

If you know some history you might have a leg up. This parched soul is named Hugh, and he's alone and in tough shape. If you remember the violence of The Revenant (2015), your nightmares might just lead you to think "Hugh" is the bear-torn hero of that movie. He is.

But the rest of the class may need some background.

Hugh Glass has been left for dead. If you saw The Revenant or read the novel or read Lord Grizzly, by Frederick Manfred, you know the story of Hugh Glass, beaver trapper, circa 1830, left for dead after being mauled by a she-bear.

In the odd poem I just read, Hugh Glass is really thirsty; but what's with those "parched muzzles. . .thrusting"? And what kind of "lying water laughed" anyway?--and "ripplingly"? Seriously? "The sin of alkali" does a ton more than suggest that the crystal bowl so long-sought (Oh my goodness, I'm picking it up myself) turns out to be "acrid in the draught!" It ain't good--that's for sure. But isn't the whole thing a little ridiculous?

"The Song of Hugh Glass" is an ancestor to Manfred's Hugh, as well as Punke's and Leonardo DiCaprio's. What we're reading is the verse of John Neihardt, himself a legend in Nebraska, and subject of a state monument in Bancroft. Neihardt penned his version of the Hugh Glass saga in an epic poem that sounds for all the world like Shakespeare or John Milton. That sound is a long haul from Bancroft.

When Neihardt took Lit 101 right here at Wayne State, what he learned was that true literary stardom, a readership across the ages, needed to be penned in something called "epic poetry." Think Homer--The Iliad and Odyssey. Maybe Beowulf?

So right out here in our backyard, John Neihardt figured the Hugh Glass story was just as great as any ancient Greek legend—and just as central to a nation's identity.

"Why not?" Neihardt must have told himself. "What America needs is its own Epic of Gilgamesh or Divine Comedy. Why not start with a wilderness man like our own indomitable Hugh Glass?

You got to love the aspiration, don't you? John Neihardt argued for world-class heroism right here on the Plains.

Plunged deeper than the seats of hate and grief,
He gazed about for aught that might deny
Such baseness: saw the non-committal sky,
The prairie apathetic in a shroud,
The bland complacence of a vagrant cloud--
World-wide connivance.

Amazing. Amid his hunger and thirst, Glass looks to nature for sweet solace and gets "the prairie apathetic" and a "vagrant cloud” because, dang it!—it seems to him that no one cares.

Okay, let's be blunt. A full century after Neihardt wrote the Hugh Glass story in Shakespearean English, it somehow seems dead wrong, doesn't it?

Maybe. But you got to love Neihardt the bard. What he was doing was something we may well need more of--cheerleading. Neihardt believed our stories ranked with anyone's anywhere in time and space.

And he was right. A decade ago now, The Revenant was awarded three Oscars. Wasn't the same Hugh Glass saga that Neihardt loved, wasn't even set in Siouxland; but Neihardt was, without a doubt, on to something when he sang "The Song of Hugh Glass," something that began here, a story first written in Siouxland.

Catherland

It was a long, long trip, but I don't remember once thinking it wasn't worth my time. What's more, I don't remember ever feeling boredom in my students or seeing it in their faces. Once we'd get there, it seemed the topography had changed--and it had. We live, here, on the emerald edge of the Great Plains; northwest Iowa is not the Great Plains. Willa Cather's Red Cloud, Nebraska, is. At the right time of year, the grasses around the region seemed red, just as she says in My Antonia so beautifully. 

It was My Antonia that drew us out there. Maybe ten years after I'd begun teaching at Dordt, I inherited the American Novels course that had been on the books ever since I'd been a student. I don't know how I ever noticed it, but somewhere along the line Ms. Cather's Great Plains started to feel something of a cousin to what we could see around as the eastern edge of all that open space. 

When I did, I probably looked on line for a place called Red Cloud, thinking it might be worthwhile just to check. Even then--35 years ago--what's left of Red Cloud, Nebraska, was just about a full-time chamber of commerce for Nebraska's most favorit-est writer, Willa Cather. I was sure that if anyone in town could prove that young Cather had visited there house or lot, they'd get a commemorative marker to put in the ground. Back then, Red Cloud, Nebraska could have been Cathertown, maybe should have been.

We'd meet at the old Cather Center--books, coffee cups, t-shirts, you know--where we'd meet our assigned tour guide. In the old bank museum, we'd get our first-hand bio of Willa Cather. Then, it was on to the old railroad station (now redone), the Catholic church up the block, the Episcopalian church (Cather's), a little spin around town, and finally the Cather home, just off Main. 

We'd have lunch in one of the town's greasy spoons (there were only two, only one choice), making quite a show of ourselves, the old guy--me--with at least a half-dozen coeds (all blonde), and, one year, just two guys, both of whom happened to be African-American. Strange combo we figured those Red Cloud-ians up at the counter must have whispered. 

There was more, too, lots more, especially if the tour guide--always a local woman-- was good, best if she didn't just follow the straight-and-narrow. Inevitably, and with maybe a little coaxing the $64,000 question would emerge. "So, tell us--what do people in Red Cloud say?--was Willa Cather gay?"

Generally, back then, my students were squeamish about it--I doubt they would be so guarded today. Being gay--in those first years out there--was still not something to be bantered about lightly. Sometimes, our hosts would mutter some line to get the class off the subject, but once in a while our genial host would sit up in front of the van we'd be in and wind a story that would often satisfy me, at least, the guy in charge.

One year, she drew the answer from a discussion she must have had years before, with her grandfather who was old enough to remember an adult Cather, who lived in New York City, not Red Cloud, but came back home often enough for her visits to be remembered.

That guide's Grandpa had once told her that long, long ago, his father before him had told him that when he was a boy, his Red Cloud father (three generations back), had set the kids down formally. Cather went on to Lincoln, to the University of Nebraska, after graduating as valedictorian of her high school class--just three in the class; but her graduation picture caught her in the way she wanted to be seen at that time in her life--not as a girl, but short-haired as a boy who signed her name "William."

With Willa Cather, the most famous of the Great Plains novelists, there were some gender issues throughout her life. The guide's grandfather claimed that his father had told them not ever to make fun of Willa because, she said, her great-grandfather had told his kids that Willa, unlike the other kids, was very, very special.

I'll never forget that answer, that story, because it so wonderfully handled every last comment. She's not weird; she's special--small towns, early 20th century, at their best. I left, proud.

Besides, who cares, really? What we had, in hand, was a wonderful novel, a beautiful tale of life on the open prairie, always the students' semester favorite. Somewhere here I've got a brick I dug from the ground her grandparents homesteaded. 

And I've got that story. "She's 'special.'" 

Six hours out, six hours back home. Twelve hours together in a van, me driving.

Worth every minute.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

 

“I lift up my eyes to the hills—

where does my help come from?” Psalm 121:1 

I wasn’t sure where my daughter’s question came from, and I was busy thinking of something else at the time.  That’s why I didn’t give her a very good answer, not a fatherly answer anyway. 

 “When you were my age,” she said, sort of laughing, “did you ever think that the world was just going to come to an end?” 

 My daughter was 30 at the time, the age I was when my wife and I had her. Truth be told, right then I couldn’t remember ever thinking the world was in imminent danger of coming to an end.  I smiled and said no, rolled my eyes, and turned back to the computer screen.

 Later, I couldn’t sleep.

 I was a kid, but I remember learning to crawl under my school desk should nuclear holocaust come to Oostburg, Wisconsin.  I grew up in the Cold War, when the Soviets were capable of pushing the wrong button or pushing the right one wrongly. 

 I remember walking on a football field during the Cuban missle crisis and having a profound talk with a kid about whether or not we’d ever play a game.  We both knew football was a metaphor; we were talking about the end of the world.

 I remember the comet Kahoteck and Y2K.  I remember a number of primitive eschatologies—Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, for instance—that numbered our days by manipulating ancient calendars vaguely suggested in the odd visions of minor prophets.  End-times theology does well often. Not long ago, everyone and their pet hamster wanted not to be Left Behind.

 If you ask me—and she once did--I believe her generation lives in more fear than mine did. I was reared with more freedom than her kids will ever see.  When I was ten, my friends and I took our bikes down to Lake Michigan and lost ourselves and our inhibitions in endless lakeshort woods. Today all that land is private property; but today, no parent would allow a ten-year-old kid that kind of freedom. 

 The change in parents’ attitudes toward their children was immense in the years I was a teacher. Loving, helicopter parents, moms and dads who ask more questions about college than their children do, visited campuses every spring for the last two decades already, lugging their children with, most of them far less interested than they were. I never visited the college where I enrolled. Come September, my parents drove me there—500 miles—then left. That was it.

As I write, the Brits have suffered several vicious attacks of terrorism. Our President uses their tragedy to urge the implementation of his orders to shut the door to immigrants from certain Muslim countries. Some object, but fear is a motivator, and a political motivator too, to be sure. Fear sells.

 So, my daughter, this is a better answer than my eye-rolling:  yes, I’ve felt as if the world was about to end. I’m guessing we all have. We’ve all been afraid.  Even the psalmist. 

 While the psalms tell us bountifully about God, they’re even better at telling us about ourselves. “I will lift up my eyes to the hills,” he says in verse one of this faith-heavy psalm, “—where does my help come from?” There are times we all feel there’s no one out there to hold back the horror.

 You’re not alone. But that’s divinely true, isn’t it? It’s a joy to know you’re not alone.

The Rendezvous (2) -- James Beckwourth

That famous ad William Ashley in Saint Louie used to fish for recruits for his Rocky Mountain Fur Trade brought in men, even young men, who weren't choir boys or  ever would be. Hard as it is to believe in 1824,  Ashley was an equal opportunity employer. How can we know that? Because we know one of his recruits, at least, was African-American. 

James Beckwourth's father, using an old English family title, went by name of Sir Jennings Beckwith. Sir Jennings coupled with one of his slaves who gave birth to James Beckwourth, a multi-racial kid who was treated by his father, the old sources say, like a son, not a slave--which is to say educated and, in general, pampered.

Okay, but then how on earth did a Black man fare with a cast of mountain men, rough-an- tough hooligans who held less-than-charming prejudices? James the Black man didn't get drummed out of the corps. 

Why not? Sir Jennings' son James carried along a deed of emancipation that declared his freedom. He couldn't be cashed in like some runaway. So here's a word that's fallen out of use--manumission. One word, manumission, a word used to describe how freed slaves were granted, by their owners, their freedom. Once manumitted, we might say, James Beckwourth was free as a bird.

And he flew--did he ever. Once freed from his apprenticeship to an ornery  St. Louis  blacksmith, Beckwourth read the ad and signed up to be one of Ashley's rugged wilderness crew, where he spent most of the next decade as one of the original mountain men, taking a wife or two or three from the Crows, where he became the chief's adopted son and lived, quite comfortably in fact, while fighting the Crow's traditional enemies, the Blackfeet. 

There's oh-so-much more. He left the Crow people and became a commodities trader at places like Bent's Fort,  Sante Fe, and Taos, and in 1842 put up his own business at a lonesome place that would someday be named Pueblo, Colorado.

During the Gold Rush era, he went to the bank with his what he knew about the untraveled west, leading wild-eyed fortune seekers to the places they thought to make a fortune. 

And everywhere he went he fought Indians--Seminoles in Florda, renegade bands in California, and the Cheyenne and Arapaho back on the plains. When finally he grew old, he met a man named Thomas Bonner at Beckwourth's own country hotel. Bonner listened to Jim Beckwouth tales and wrote them down into a book, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth: Mountaineer, Scout and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians (1856).

Beckwourth didn't have to lie about the happenings in his life, but he did--or so say some historians. Sometimes it's hard to measure tall tales.

Late in life, he went back to the Crow, where he'd come son of the chief way back in the ancient past. No one knows how he died, or at least no one's talking about it. A rumor claims one of his ex-wives found a way to get back at him. 

Not nice, but it sort of fits, don't you think?

Was he here? Had to be. He was, in short, almost everywhere else.