Some thoughts on Easter morning

Hard as it is to admit, I've become something of a shut-in. Yesterday, once again, the wind blew so horribly that I cared not a fig to go out in it. This winter--and when will it be over, please?--we've had a half-dozen snowstorms (nothing near blizzard-level, however), but what's most wearing finally is the interminable wind, takes your face off, I used to say. 

We're in process of selling our house out in the country this week, and it hurts a little because we're solidly in senior housing right now, a pretty little condo that's less than half the size of the home we left behind. Honestly, out there, with a corner to the northwest, we were subject to prairie winds far more than we are here, in a covey of condos. Still, I can't help but believe we've suffered more wind here than there.

So this shut-in has more time on his hands, time to do things. . .like read. I spent my Holy Saturday reading, and I enjoyed what I read--I really did. I don't know that I'd call Ruth Suckow my all-time favorite-st writer, but I've grown a real affinity for her work, even though its oh-so provincial in subject matter--rural Iowa, early 20th century, almost exclusively farm folk of German stock doing what they did, being who they were.

Suckow, a preacher's kid who grew up here in northwest Iowa, is a sworn realist. She'll never make your favorite writer list if your a devotee of Harry Potter. In a Suckow story, you have to expect an unflinching look at setting and character. Plot isn't all that exacting. Spending an afternoon with Suckow means not wandering far at all from these windswept plains, just no cell phones.

After two long stories, I moved on, but the stories stuck with me. One of them, "Renters," featured a Steinbeck-like family who simply couldn't shake being "renters," the economic place thereby implied, as well as the stigma--"they're just renters," as if they'll never be anything but.

A friend from Parkersburg, Iowa, once did some research about my ancestral family who lived there sometime around the turn of the 20th century. He found my great-grandfather's name on a patch of scrubby river bottom land and told me, rather sweetly, that that patch of land did more than suggest he wasn't wealthy. 

In Suckow's story, the couple hits hard times harder and longer than most families do; they're not in the least lucky--in fact, good times so regularly escape them than they can't help wonder whether there are good times at all. But they're sympathetic. The husband is a hard worker who does his landlord's right. They're fine people really, but they just find it impossible to keep their heads above water. 

It's sad. "Renters" is a sad story. It's well-done, but it's just plain sad.

And then there's "Uprooted," a story made more painful by reciting the lot in life when accrues to people our age. Adult children of an old couple meet at their parents' farm to talk about what's to be done with their parents, who are little more than potted plants. For very understandable reasons, none of the children (and their spouses) really want their ever-more elderly parents to live with them. In point of fact, those elderly parents don't want to close down the old ramshackle house and move in with their childrens' families either. 

Suckow's characters inhabit a community and time in which there are no old folks' homes, which means there are no good options. Plus, Ma and Pa absolutely don't want to move either. My grandfather Schaap was the pastor of the church I grew up in before I was around. My only memories of him are as a sourpuss I wanted to stay in his room and out of my life. Grim stuff.

The story ends with the rich son heading back to his home in Omaha, anxious to shake off all the residue of a visit to Ma and Pa. He's looking forward to sitting in his own chair. Thus do we all make nests of our domiciles; thus, would we all rather not be "Uprooted."

I enjoyed reading both stories, really did, more than I enjoyed the stories--if that makes sense. But I couldn't help wonder why Ruth Suckow chose the kind of determinism she did--why are both stories so sad. She could have turned the lives of the renters around and given them blessed landlords. She could have changed the attitudes of one of Ma and Pa's kids, made them more sympathetic to their elderly parents' cares and needs.

But she didn't.  If I'd written the story, I don't know that I would have either. Life is like that, right?

Two stories, well-written, close to the bone, but both of them given gray and cloudy skies. No wind really, but no sun either. Both negative. 

So we wait--like Holy Saturday. We wait, the meditation we read last night at supper maintained. So, on Holy Saturday, we wait.

The morning has come. Just now--felt like the first time--I woke up to birds singing. No wind either.

It's Easter morning. 

The eternal is once again very real.  

Good Friday

A country churchyard in northeast Iowa.

Just a couple weeks ago I passed a country church and saw this crucifix through the trees, stopped, and tried to put it in the camera and take it with. Somehow I was moved by an ordinary crucifix in a little country churchyard. I told myself on Good Friday I'd put it up, so here it is.

I'm a child of the Reformation, so the crucifix seemed to me--and still does, I suppose--a peculiarly Roman Catholic thing, almost contraband; but I've taken a shot at more than a little of Christ's suffering through the years. Here's a number of them, for Good Friday, from a host of places of worship. They are what we try to know, to feel, to understand of this particular day, a day when we're all catholic.

California Mission

Florence, Italy

Hoven, South Dakota

Marty, South Dakota

Hospers, Iowa

Rome, Italy

St. Paul, MN

Marty, SD

St. Peters Basilica, Rome

A California Mission

Cathedral of Sioux Falls

Peter Kreeft, Jersey born and reared, went to Eastern Christian High School and, thereafter, to Calvin College, before switching fellowships and becoming Roman Catholic. I don't know his work well, but I've been reading his memoir, From Calvinist to Catholic, where he says that one of the first inkling he felt with respect to the change was a simple desire to see, bodily, Christ.

To the Catholic faith, the 

physical dimension is not an addition to the essence but as essential as the spiritual. Christ saved us not merely or even mainly by giving us His mind, as all the great saints, sages, and philosophers did, but by giving us His Body. I intuitively knew and felt this "Catholic thing" even before I ever considered becoming a Catholic.

Just a thought on Good Friday. 

Holy Week--Maunday Thursday

When it comes right down to it, I'm pretty much of a stick-in-the-mud conservative. In my book, Obama isn't the malefactor he is on Fox News; and, quite frankly, watching Governor Mike Pence tap dance this week hasn't been all that painful. I mean, politically I'm probably not. 

But psychically, give me a ritual and I'm happy. I'm more-than-okay with what's ordinary. Innovation? Give me a break. What on earth is new under the sun? Not much. As far as I'm concerned, we'd get along better if we'd all go home with the one who brought us to the dance, you know? 

I've never been big on praise teams. Some people find them a turn-on because they can see how much the singers care about Jesus and that's thrilling, I guess. Me? I'd rather have a choir, and I'd rather they sang from the back of the church, as an offering. I'm too sinful for praise teams. They stand up there, mouthing mikes, and I'm wondering if what's-her-name is putting on weight, or why the bald guy playing the bass insists on wearing cargo shorts. You know. I'm distracted.

I'm a conservative. What the heck was wrong with the old-time religion anyway?

And I get scared on Maunday Thursday because churches in small towns like the ones I've lived in are always on the look out to out-hip their neighbors. They're always looking for something new, something that hasn't been done, something the church down the block isn't doing. "Ya' hear what New Church is doing this year? Why can't we do stuff like that? Sheesh."

Let's not and say we did, okay?

See what I mean? Basically, I'm conservative.

I get scared on Maunday Thursday because the whole Maunday Thursday business is new to me. I don't even know what Maunday means. I know churches practice the Lord's Supper on Maunday Thursday, but what is a Maunday anyway? 

When I was a kid, Main Street closed up tight from 12 to 3 on Good Friday, just flat shut down during the hours of Jesus's suffering. That I remember. I don't remember Maunday Thursday. 

And what I fear is foot-washing. Really, there are only a couple of reasons for Maunday Thursday services; one of them is the commemoration of the Last Supper. That's fine.

But these days, you just know someone's going to get out five-gallon buckets and ask men and women and their kids to come up and get their feet washed. Drop shoes and socks and plop in the water, then wrap wet toes with a towel from a stack yeah-high, you know? Somebody's going to do it tonight. Just watch. What I want to know is how do you choose whose feet get washed?--lottery? Do people say, "here, wash mine?" and who does it? the preacher? the elders? just anybody? We all wash each other's? Is that it? It's going to be a mess, see? 

It's chaos, and conservatives like me hate chaos. Not only that, it's another church fad, a gimmick, even though it's a couple thousand years old.

Besides, it's just not the same in a land where people don't wear sandals 24/7. You want to replicate everything that happened Easter weekend, why not make the whole congregation wear a crown of thorns or drink hyssop?

Makes me a disciple, I guess, thinking about someone else washing my feet. Makes me a disciple because they didn't like it either, found it repulsive, found it, well, theologically and culturally chaotic, out of whack, even disturbing, and that was 2000 years ago.

"Seriously, Lord?  You. Wash. My. Feet?" 

It was unthinkable. It was gross. It was obscene. It was perfectly ridiculous.

And He told them--get this!--if you don't get this, you honestly and truly don't get me. If you don't understand, you missed the whole program of the last thirty years. I came to this mucked-up world to wash feet--that's been the mission since day 1.

It is a big deal, no question. It's huge. It's bigger than anything we or the disciples can handle. God almighty bending down to wash dirty feet.

It's the whole story. That's what he told them from down there on the floor as he pulled the bowl up closer to the stool. This is what I'm here for, he said.

I don't care what you say, it's not something I'm comfortable with--that's all there is to it. And neither were they, those disciples who not all that much later fell asleep.

Neither were they.

_____________________ 

Second round for this one, the original written 11 years ago. I'm not so up tight as this anymore--if I ever was. You'll be happy to know that tonight's Maunday Thursday service was quite inspiring. 

Icarus, South Dakota style

We're barely a state away out here in northwest Iowa, but it seems to me that the Kristi Noem story had madness written all through it for a long time already. Her treatment of the state's significant Native populations was perfectly nutty. During Covid, when several of the tribes shut down access, the then-governor threw a fit and ended up alienating herself from a significant region of the governor's domain. 

Her memoire badly required a sane editor, someone to tell her that the way she handled her pup's lack of hunting skill or initiative or whatever, did not need to be shared with the world. How any story from her younger years could be more memorably insane than that one--the way she simply shot him to apparently put him out of his misery; she said she had it figured that he'd never be what she wanted him to be. Yikes.

Nonetheless, with her stunning good looks, she kept moving up Trump's ladder, maybe because he rather liked someone--a beautiful woman!--who'd just shoot her dog if  he didn't hunt, or at least he liked a woman who seeming understood how to draw attention to herself far from the madding crowd--he liked a looker who reminded him of himself.

But Governor Noem was a small-town girl with some small-town values, an ardent anti-abortion voice, who seemed to want to take those values with her in Washington or wherever the ICE job took her. Scary. Seemed to me she was way out of her league.

Perhaps the most horrific moment was created by her determination not to tell at least something of the truth about the two anti-ICErs who were killed in the Twin Cities during the ICE messes. She insisted they were the enemy, agitators who, apparently got their just reward, death, for getting in the way of the ICE jam the whole region became. In the style of her benefactor, she simply would not show empathy or sadness. She was Trump-tough. They were agitators.

The rumors of her having an affair with one of her boss's favored attack dogs only made things worse. Some people know the truth about Noem and Lewandowski, but whether or not there were trysts--many or few--she got painted with a scarlet letter early on, a badge she must have regretted, wherever the heat of passion may have taken her. 

And now, it turns out her handsome high-school sweetheart husband is hanging around shadowy websites that specialize in cross-dressing and other whacko fetishes that make him look as over-the-top as his gorgeous, madcap spouse. Life wasn't like this in good old Castlewood, SD. 

I think they should go home. My guess is that the people who knew them both before Kristi's wild ascent to power might just be most willing to forgive--and maybe even forget. 

We don't share political persuasions, of course, but I can't help thinking they should go back to the insurance business he ran and she should go on long rides with those horses she loves and stay away from hunting with dogs. 

There's an Icarus-level tragedy here, or so it seems to me. She--and her hubby--got burned when they flew far too close to the Don. 

Willa's wolves

It's not hard to see how a kid like Willa Cather, 150 years ago, could have seen this painting--Sleigh with Trailing Wolves by Paul Powes--and have it and its story stick with her all the way into adulthood, especially if you know the story.  The story shows up in My Antonia, somewhat uncomfortably since the story it tells is Russian in origin and has little to do, most believe, with the story of a childhood friend of Cather's out there in the tough sod of southwest Nebraska.

Visit her hometown sometime--Red Cloud, Nebraska--and you'll find that painting in all its gory darkness hanging in the Cather museum. It's scary. It features a pack of hungry wolves soon to devour just about all of a wedding party, a legend worth retelling, maybe, on snowy nights before a roaring fire.

Two slashes rip through the old painting from sheer old age. The canvas grew so taut it pulled itself apart. But those rips don't blunt the horror of the story and the danger in the scene, even if you find it difficult, like I did, to imagine a pack of man-eating wolves devouring bride and groom and a few others.

I have no idea of the size of the Russian wolfpack, whether or not, as they did here,  the sheer number of animals nearly fell off a cliff decades ago. They did here--wolves, like bison, went nearly extinct until aggressive wildlife management pulled off the kind of magic that replenished the bald eagle. 

While I haven't forgotten the Powes painting nor Willa Cather's storytelling, that painting never kept me up at night like it must have her because I've never been any where near a pack of wolves, never heard their snarls. My Wisconsin boyhood barely mentioned them. What few there was of them were in residence a civilization away, "up north." It's likely, however, they weren't strangers around Red Cloud. Willa knew.

A little history here. The horse was introduced to America's First Nations in the 17th century, and like the Apple computer and indoor plumbing, a horse changed everything, made Indians better hunters, and increased their standard of living making trade easier and making things like pans and guns and liquor lots cheaper. 

Horses made hunting easier, a slam dunk in fact. Europe's rich and famous signed up for wagon trains or railroad trips into buffalo country. Think of it--old country gentlemen blasting away at bison while sitting in fancy English saddles or in plush passenger car luxury, never even getting their hands dirty.

Those millions of buffalo changed the way of life among wolves like those lusty killers in the Red Cloud painting. For years, white big-game hunters and Native entrepreneurs went hunting, if you call that hunting: shooting bison by the dozens then leaving meaty carcasses in the sun all over the Great Plains. Wolves went plum loco over the mountains of spoils left there to rot. Imagine, all of a sudden, filthy rich wolfpacks, fat and silly.

"Yep, Junior, those were the days," some wolf historians might tell the youngins', "--gold necklaces and dream cars, vacation homes on the Missouri, and universal health care. We had it made."

But when the buffalo went the way of the do-do bird, the good life for the American wolf went south so fast that whole packs suddenly went hungry enough to try to knock off wedding parties as if it were snowy northern Russia. 

It didn't happen, not out there in western Nebraska at least, but it could have  because out there on the Republican River, sometime earlier lived the biggest bison herds in the west. Who knows how scary those fat and ugly wolves might have grown?--and all of it, right about the time Willa Cather was a girl on the plains. 

All of that makes the story even scarier. 

Rooted music

What she told me--and what I have never forgotten--was how what she was taught affected what she was. Her parents were pure Zuni, in thought and culture and religious practice. Therefore, her going to a "Christian" school meant she had to forcibly unlearn what her Christian teachers taught her.

And that was difficult; it was traumatic, not because she had to shift priorities and allegiances (that too!), but because she simply loved her parents, who were widely acknowledged as leaders in the pueblo because they were just plain good people. They worshiped in traditional ways, danced the traditional dances, ran the races of her people; her parents were neither impure nor immoral. They were good, good people, and every one said so, said exactly that. She was blessed to have such good parents. But the Christian school in her life made it clear--chapter and verse--that her parents, despite their goodness, were flat wrong. 

And that criticism had an even greater eternal dimension because, or so she was taught, some day her parents would be forever cast out from the glory which is to come to those who believe in the white man's God. There's a Hell after all. Stakes were high. Stakes were forever.

She was Zuni and she was Christian when I spoke to her, but that doesn't mean that she'd forgotten what her education, a half century before, had taught her. That's why she told me the story. She wanted me to understand.

Last night I listened to a fine high school, 70+ piece symphonic band from Rehoboth Christian High, Gallup, NM, the school where she'd attended 70 years earlier. I've got a history there too. I wrote a book for them, stories about families who'd been part of that school's mission for more than a generation, stories like hers. 

But even before that, my Grandpa Schaap was a member of the denomination's "Heathen Mission Board" a century ago; in fact, a great uncle of mine, Grandpa Schaap's first cousin, was one of the place's earliest missionaries, Rev. Andrew Vander Wagon. 

The unintended shaming explained to me one night in her front room was something my people--my family, in fact--spread abroad in New Mexico to Navajo and Zuni alike. Last night, that fine group of young musicians shaped a presentation that included an open confession of sin, when an administrator from RHS made clear that the mission, close to 150 years old, had at times failed the people it had come to serve--and failed miserably.

But what the kids spread abroad in the concert was beauty, and what was spectacularly clear, at least to this concert-goer, was that the denomination of which I've always been a part could not be more proud of any blessed accomplishment it has done in its own 150-year old ministry than what has blossomed so dearly in the high desert of New Mexico, where Rehoboth, today, is a blessing to the people, both colonizers and Native, who live there. It took a long time to understand that the most effective ministry may be little more than a ministry of presence.

It was all in the music, the whole story, and it was beautiful. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

“I lift up my eyes to the hills--

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

Car-makers know something about the American public that no one else does: to wit, that we all secretly long to stretch our legs in the wide-open country of the Great Plains. Why?—I don’t know, but automobile ads very frequently seem to feature “the country”—more specifically, the rural Midwest and Great Plains.

Makes sense, I suppose. According to the U. S. Census, the states with the longest average daily commutes are New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, and California. Backed-up freeways don’t sell cars. Where is commute time least? You guessed it: South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Nebraska.

What sells cars is the mythic backroads adventure—SUVs, four-wheeling, mud-defying pickups, even though very few of us ever do any off-roading. What sells cars is the perception of escaping bottlenecks, fast food, strip malls, and wearying eight-lane metro traffic. What sells cars is the siren song of getting away.

In that sense, the psalmist is just like everybody else: he lifts up his eyes to the hills. He wants to get away. A place on the lake, maybe a river—that’ll do it. Doesn’t need to be big either, just a cabin, and I’m outta’ here.

It may well be a version of the old “grass is always greener” argument, this verse. From the day-to-day grind of our lives—same faces, same cluttered desks, same blasted lunch counters and restrooms—we simply want release.

We fantasize. I remember dreaming of living near mountains. Then, we did. But grading papers is grading papers, and we never got up there, even though those mountains were close. The only times I took note of them was on my bike, riding to work, when they seemed as much a dream as they ever had been.

Fifty years later it’s still in me, this yearning to look to the hills. Spinal stenosis has kept me from a weekly pilgrimage that had been the joy of my life for the last several years, Saturday morning country wandering. I could be in one of those ads.

God doesn’t dwell in some hand-hewn log cabin in the hills. He doesn’t even weekend there. He got a place at the lake all right but no Airstream or fifth wheel. Yosemite is as gorgeous a place as you can find on earth. Jasper, the Big Horns, Yellowstone, the Canadian Rockies—even the words get me itchy. He’s there too, but he’s not just there.

The psalmist must have felt it too because the first line of this beautiful psalm of praise and joy is a confession, I think—I lift up my eyes to the hills, as if he’s there somewhere, as if God is in residence at Custer State Park. When we get tired or bored or stymied, we all want to go somewhere we’re not.

But the hills won’t do it, and I’ve got to remind myself those little Saturday trips don’t bring me home.

My help doesn’t come from the hills. My help comes from the Lord.