On July 26

Yesterday, Sunday, was his birthday. Were he still among us, he would have been 108 years old, born as he was in 1918. He was a PK, one of ten kids in the family, his preacher/father occupying the pulpit in a Christian Reformed church in Allendale, Michigan when Dad, first of all, opened his eyes to this world. He was 85 years old when he passed away in 2003, as was his wife, my mother, who lived another ten years without him. Strangely enough, he and his only son weren't that close.

Not that we argued. Not that I went out of my way to violate whatever senses of propriety he held dear. I don't think I was ever a real "problem child." But I did run afoul of his perceptions and his politics, and, even though we never fought much, I can't help but think there were moments in his life when he prayed hard for a son whose life might well have seemed moving defiantly away from whatever safe harbors he might have hoped would be my dwelling place. 

A cousin of mine, late one night at a family reunion, told me how the marriage counseling she was getting at that time helped her understand what she'd determined were real marital problems. She suffered from having "too good a father," the therapist had told her. I wasn't a kid when she told me that, but I remember thinking, right then and there, that the problem that therapist had identified was a problem my cousin and I shared, children of Schaap brothers. 

My novel Romey's Place is spun out of what I was told at that family reunion. My father--and I knew this clearly--was a wonderful man, a man who took his Christian faith very seriously and tried to be the finest servant he could be, not for others to note but to satisfy at least something of the love he'd long ago determined was his, through grace, a gift of the Savior he worshipped. Throughout his life, the life I experienced with him, he truly and sincerely tried to do the right thing, do the thing he believed the Creator of Heaven and Earth wanted him to do. At the visitation before his funeral, dozens of people tried to wrap me in a cloud of good memories--"your dad was a wonderful man," they said, warmly. I knew they meant it because I knew he was.

Even though the two of us were never all that close, I miss him, not as some kind of fount of wisdom or moral character, but as a standard in my life, just to be here. Right now, I'd love to talk with him about getting old, about facing up into the last years. I don't know that he'd tell me anything I don't know, but just to sit beside me--I just wish he'd be here, especially now in late July, when he was born. 

Yesterday was his birthday. 

Really, I suppose, my spilling all of this out on the page this morning is a witness to what I'm wishing--he's still here somehow. He's not gone for any of his kids, even the ones who he might have thought was walking away. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Original sin (Psalm 32)

 

Honestly, I cringe when I look over the title I just typed in.  Maybe I should add a smiley face or two.  There’s just no way of dodging the darkness created by the juxtaposition of those two words. 

 The phrase has a long history of reference to a belief in the inherent sinfulness of the human heart.  For centuries theologians have maintained that we are all brimming with sin because Adam and Eve turned their back on the pleasures of the garden for a bite of the only bit of fruit denied them.  By that brazen act, we all came heir to their disobedience.  It comes with the territory, as much part of us as toenails or fingerprints.  “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all,” or so begins the New England Primer.

 And it’s not just the theological tenet that wears a black robe, it’s also the belief in that belief.  What might be the most widely read story in 19^th century American literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” is the tale of a man who becomes so convinced of the darkness of the human soul that he loses nothing less than joy itself.  “His dying hour was gloom”—or so reads the final doleful line of that sad tale.

 Herman Melville recognized that feature of Hawthorne’s writing for what it was.  When he took note of the darkness in a character like Young Goodman Brown, Melville was sure “this great power of blackness” in his sometimes friend was rooted in “the appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Inner Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is never wholly free.”  Scary.

 My grandfather, a Dutch Calvinist, was capable of taking a kind of morbid pleasure in his own depravity; when he’d consider the nature of his own sin, the darkness he perceived in his soul his soul would make him weep.  Those very tears were a kind of release. 

 What there is of him in me is, quite frankly, a haunting question.

 I have this much at least: a firm belief in original sin.   I’ve watched too much television not to have it, read too many books about the Holocaust, felt horror at what white people—my own good, Christian white people—have done to Native Americans. I’ve seen my daughter through junior high, for pity sake; I know that even little girls can be spiteful as Satan.  I’ve sat in poison rooms with two people who feel nothing but hate for each other, even though they’re married, maybe because they are. I’ve felt the grip of silence between people who haven’t spoken for decades. 

 What’s worse, I’ve felt my own original sin in every last manifestation—pride, envy, wrath, sloth, lechery, avarice, gluttony—each one of the old seven deadlies.  I own them all; at times, they own me.  I honestly believe it would be nice to have faith in the eternal goodness of the human character, but such a faith would be, to me, simple-minded.

Sin is a condition, like dandruff, only infinitely worse of course, because the end of the road it creates in our lives is perdition, hell, destruction—both here and in the hereafter. 

 What David suggests in the first two verses of Psalm 32 is that not only our transgressions—those things we commit, knowing better—but also our original sin, the factory-built condition of the human heart we inherited from Uncle Adam and Aunt Eve, our sin, “not in part, but the whole/is nailed to the cross/and I bear it no more;/Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O, my soul.”   

The "God of battles"*

 

It's a diary and it's personal, but it was also penned 265 years ago by a lieutenant in the 19th Cavalry Regiment of the Missouri State Guard, 8th Division, who was clearly writing only for his wife, Bettie. Whether or not the diary ever got to her isn't known, but it's likely it did and thereby lived/lives on, one of the most treasured Civil War memoires. 

This page was penned just a few days before Lt. Fisher's bunch of the 19th Cavalry rode into Humboldt, Kansas, and torched the place, burned it to the ground. Date? October 15, 1861, six months after Ft. Sumter. Understanding the gulf of misunderstanding that prompted the secession of slave states requires a stretch from those who unwilling to paint angels' wings on the backs of either side or admit that there was more to blame than the single, horrific issue of slavery.

. . ."we may have a hard time of it as it is reported that there is a force of 500 men with 4 pieces of Cannon at Humboldt and several detachments at LeRoy, Emporia and Cofachique," he explains to Bettie. As it turned out, Humboldt put up less of a fight than Fischer and his Reb troops eventually encountered. When the 8th Division of the 19th Cavalry left the town, they left it in ashes, burning everything in sight just as Fisher says, and exactly what Missouri Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson once famously claimed rebel forces would do, burn the whole state on their way to the Missouri River.

But then, right here on what remains as the first page of the diary, comes an admission/confession/testimony that those of us who know little about the rebel cause or mind find not only unexpected but beyond imagination--the Christian faith:

". . . if they are there they will give us 'fits,'" Fisher tells his wife, "but our cause is just and the God of battles has been with us in every fight yet and with Him on our side we are sure of success may he be with us and prosper us."

I remember learning sometime in grade school that the Civil War of these dis-United States ironically posed "brother against brother"; but this kind of testimony still gives me fits. How he can claim righteous standing with the Lord God of Hosts, while at the same time, Union troops and civilians in Humboldt, Nebraska, are scared stiff of the destruction they will suffer in the next few hours, many of them praying for protection from the same God who the seceders claim is on the side of the men in gray who can't fold their hands in prayer because one hand holds a torch?

________________________

*Lt.

No one does sweet corn like Garrison Keilor

(We had our first sweet corn of the season last night, and it was wonderful!)

When I come to the spring, the time of romance,
The season of amour
And I dig in the dirt and I set out the plants
And mix in the horse manure.
We thank you, dear Lord of power and might,
Who didst from the dust create us
Grant that your children find earthly delight
With a crop of sweet corn and tomatoes.

O the homegrown tomatoes the Lord sent down
So we know what paradise means
No grief, no tears, just tomatoes, my dears,
And sweet corn and string beans.

Oh we thank you dear Lord for this good good life
And thanks for the day we were born
And the gifts you have given, especially these heavenly
String beans, tomatoes and corn.

Sweet corn: the best thing in life. I grew up in a house 

about a hundred feet from a cornfield, 

and every evening we’d put the water on to boil, 

then pick the corn and husk it as we walked rapidly toward the house 

and chuck it in and dish up the chicken 

and say a prayer and out came the corn, 

on went the butter and salt, eight minutes flat from stalk to mouth, 

and when you ate sweet corn, life had nothing better to offer. 

You’d been to the top. That’s how it’ll be in heaven, I’m sure.

Oh we thank you dear Lord for this good good life
And thanks for the day we were born
And the gifts you have given, especially these heavenly
String beans, tomatoes and corn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AToiX451bVo

The new, old Little House -- ii

Balancing the sometimes contrary demands of the true story itself is not an easy task for a writer. Laura Ingalls Wilder was fashioning a classic for kids when she began (she was 65 years old!) to write books using her own experience and her family's pioneer saga on the way west. 

What the TV series didn't really examine was the plain fact that Charles Wilder was a squatter, someone who knew the truth but homesteaded on land he, as a white man, should have acknowledged to be Osage land. In today's language, we might say the Wilder family were "undocumented"; they'd moved on to land they weren't entitled to--they were illegals because all around them at the time were patches of land that had been the province of a variety of Native nations. They should not have been there; ICE would have moved them out.

In 1870, the Drum Creek Treaty was signed, promising the Osage nation "$1.50 an acre" for all Osage land and mandating that all would-be homesteaders (like the Wilders) had to leave before the same land would be opened up for homesteading (although the land would be for sale, not free). The new Netflix series ends with the Wilder family back in their covered wagon, bound for Minnesota, which is the historically accurate move. They're on their way to Walnut Grove, where, this Saturday, a local group will stage, outdoors, their final 2026 production of the Ingalls family story, the Wilder Pageant. 

If you're interested, you might want to look at a website that tells the story of the story and determine yourself how much of the Netflix production is accurate to history and how much is pure storytelling. 

Either way, this new version of the story is worth watching (take if from a story-teller).

The new old Little House

It's difficult to overstate just exactly how popular NBC's original Little House on the Prairie show was. Beginning in 1974, Little House ran for nine seasons at a level of TV glory that few series could even dream of. It won a list of awards as long as lodge pole, and made Michael Landon (and a handful of others) the kind of Hollywood stardom most Americans would recognize almost anywhere on the street.

 Just an hour or two north of us, Minnesota's Little House monuments features a river bank where, or so the docents claim, the Ingalls once inhabited a hole in the ground on their way west. It's not something you forget quickly, in part because seeing the Ingalls family--the TV version--crouched in a river bank hut doesn't fit exactly with the family that became the most celebrated TV family in history. 

That sweet and sentimental series captured more awards than many other really popular productions, and earned a viewership that was surprisingly universal--adults from 35-64 made up more than sixty percent of its viewing audience as late as 2024, when the original series was streamed on Peacock. The show's firm place in the American imagination was enough too make Netflix consider a reboot.

That reboot is running right now and doing very, very well. There are, of course, some major differences between the original series and the newly refashioned Little House.  One of the central conflicts of the family in the new series is their trespassing. By the time the original Ingalls family reached Kansas, they'd become squatters, living on property that, by law, belonged to the Osage tribe. It's hard to lift the kind of allegiance the whole family had in the original series when you know that they and hundreds of other white, American pioneers, were deliberately living on land that belonged to this country's original inhabitants. 

Then, too, historians claim that Pa Ingalls wasn't a whole lot like the Michael Landon version. They suggest that the records suggest that he wasn't the ace Pa who kept moving around the Great Plains, that he may not have been the nice guy the book and the series make him out to be. 

It's gutsy to make a reboot. Netflix had to know that. Any new version of the tales can't avoid the historic truth. Lets be clear here--the new Pa Ingalls is just as wonderful, just as loving, just as driven by justice (and just as handsome) as Michael Landon, but the central conflict of the new series is the fact that the Ingalls family lives on a swath of Osage tribal land, and the Osage aren't happy about it.

There are, as you can imagine, a bundle of other distinct changes, and a good deal less of the sentimentalizing so characteristic of the original series. The fact is, homesteading was probably never so sweet as it was in the old Little House. Some sweetsie stuff is unavoidable, but other major themes are more universalized--the conflicts between the Ingalls sisters, for instance, is newly adopted, and racism is more plainly evident.

No matter. I like it. It's almost impossible to think that this newly fashioned series could ever touch the massive popularity of the original, but that doesn't mean the newly minted version isn't worth your time or mine. 

Try it.

 

“Blessed is he. . .whose sins are covered”

 After far too much traveling in the last couple of years, I have come to the conclusion that motel rooms are not designed for people my age; they are decorated with entirely too many mirrors.  Wherever you look, full length panels offer views of your own sad and sagging mortality you hadn’t asked to see.

 One of the reasons English TV comedies are more fun than American sitcoms is that English audiences, it seems, don’t demand physical perfection.  English comedies regularly feature unhandsome people; but American television offers a persistent diet of perfect shapes, both male and female, so many, in fact, that one begins to believe that such pulchritude is the norm.  Given all that gorgeous flesh, suddenly seeing yourself bare naked on a six-foot wall is an epiphany of horrific proportions.  A few weeks ago I came home and told my wife I would never eat again.

 I suppose I shouldn’t be equating sin with body fat. Someone told me recently of a new study which maintains that John Calvin’s despairing views of the sins of the flesh was attributable, in part, to the revulsion he felt about the debilitating hemorrhoids he fought through most of his adult life. If that’s true, it’s something I wish I didn’t know.

But there is a link here in this verse from Psalm 32, at least in my mind.  The exuberance of the line bursts from the realization that something repulsive is wholly taken care of, covered up, covered over, out of sight and, better yet, out of mind, even out of soul.  That something isn’t nakedness, but it’s close.

Sin isn’t so much an act as it is a condition, like dandruff or flat feet. Sin is something we never stop fighting. There’s no truth, says the Apostle Paul, in those who claim they have none. 

But the blissful joy of the opening lines of Psalm 32—or so it seems to me—is not the blessed realization that our sinful condition is gone, but instead our blessed assurance that God’s forgiveness has it covered—as in, “not to worry, fella, I got you covered.” Our greed, our neglect, our thievery, our hate, our drunkenness, our adultery, our pathetic pride, our green-eyed jealousy, even our pride—sin in all its pathetic naked horror, even the ones we can’t forget, the one that haunts us, makes us sick unto death, that sin is covered because He’s got our back. 

David’s sins were legendary in the unsavory mess created when he couldn’t keep his royal hands off someone else’s wife, and then “covering” that sin by the sleazy murder of her beloved. 

All of that is gone, David himself testifies here in Psalm 32. It’s history. All that’s left is grace.

That’s the story here.  Praise the Lord.