Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 50

“And the heavens proclaim his righteousness, 

for God himself is judge.” Psalm 50:1

 My uncle told me about it. I’m not at all sure my father even knew. He said that he’d once heard that his own grandparents, the immigrant Dutch Calvinist folk who came to this country in the late 1860s, were buried in the cemetery in Orange City, Iowa, just a hop, skip, and jump from where I’d just taken a job. “You ought to look once,” he said.

I don’t remember what finally tugged me out to that graveyard. At the time, I knew no one else who’d been buried there; but finally I went, dutifully determined to find that headstone. I scouted the oldest parts of that cemetery, where the ancient headstones stand like marbled tongue depressors, leaning in various degrees of sleepy repose. No Schaaps—or at least not C. C. and his wife Neeltje. Maybe my uncle, the family historian, was wrong, I thought. I kept looking.

I found it in the neighborhood of newer graves, a barrel-like, granite monument clearly carved with the family names, relevant dates, and a scripture verse, in Dutch, on each side, for each grandparent.

It’s difficult to describe what I felt right then, and likely impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced such a palpable sense of rooted-ness. Even though I’d never stepped a foot in that cemetery before, I felt, strangely enough, as if I were home. Does that make sense? There was an unmistakable sense of life in the grave at my feet.

It’s 110 years now, since C. C. Schaap died, 102 since Neeltje passed away; but once I found the spot, I felt as if I’d been somehow summoned, and those great-grandparents, who died long before my father was born, were looking me over—Grandpa nodding, Grandma turning up my collar against the cold prairie wind.

Just three days ago I went back to that cemetery, took a nephew out to visit. When we found that barrel-like monument back, there they were, smiling, as grandparents do.
I think of that this morning, as I consider this line from Psalm 50—how heavenly spectators stand there in awe before the Judge. I can’t help but imagine what that Orange City cemetery might look like, the ancient ones standing atop their monuments, a most astounding crowd of faithful.

One of the dreams of the Ghost Dancers in the late 1890s was that “the old ones” would return from the dust, would walk silently into camp and take their places around the campfires. It was a beatific and celestial Lakota vision.

And it’s here in Psalm 50. “The heavens declare the glory of God” is the central line of Psalm 19, a psalm that reverences the heavenly preaching God does each day in sermons the wide open skies proclaim. But here there’s a homily with a different blessing, a new twist, a cloud of witnesses, a ton of great-grandparents, waiting for the word of the Lord.

If I could choose a place to be when such a court is assembled, I think I might choose a cemetery, just to be there when all those ancient tongue depressors fall on cue and the righteous emerge.

Wouldn’t that be fun? There’d be lots to talk about, lots of songs, lots of stories, lots of smiles.

Memorial Day - finis

continued from yesterday. . . 

A couple  of years ago, I spotted a cross in an American war-dead cemetery far south in the Netherlands.  The name is not particularly familiar to me, but it’s recognizably Dutch, as am I.  From what I know of names and origins, I'm guessing he was from Marion County, somewhere around Pella, which means that sometime back more than a century ago before the man died--on his way to Berlin--some of his ancestors left Holland with Dominie Scholte, when that Leiden intellectual took off for the prairies of Iowa with a significant flock of followers, pious folks all.

Sgt. John Van Ooyen may well have died here, someplace close, maybe even not all that far from the neighborhoods his ancestors once left behind forever. Something got him--a bullet maybe, some anti-aircraft, maybe fire from a tank.

All I know is his rank, his company, his Dutch name, and the fact that he's one of 8000 American war dead who are commemorated here, even though what's left of his bones may well be elsewhere.

It's stunning to stand amid all those white crosses and to realize that what's there--row after row after row--is barely a decimal point to the many others who also never came back to places like Marion County, Iowa, or Mille Lacs County, Minnesota. There were thousands and thousands and thousands--and thousands more.

For what? For freedom. For righteousness. For peace. Sixty years ago, for Sgt. John Van Ooyen, an end to the thoughtless slaughter of millions the Nazis thought not good enough for their stupid master race.

My goodness, it cost a lot.

And then there's this. Beyond Van Ooyen’s cross, just a couple more back in a row to the right, is a white star of David--a Jewish guy.

I wonder if this Dutch kid from rural Iowa ever thought about the fact that he was dying for some New York Jewish kid too. I wonder whether that thought was in his head when he enlisted, or was drafted. I wonder if it was something a nice Dutch boy from Marion County, Iowa, ever thought about much at all, that his life was given for people who really were much different than he was.

I doubt it.

When I stopped back then and paid my respects to John Van Ooyen and 8000 other American boys, as we call them, I couldn’t help but thank him and them for what all of them gave up for me and my kids and my grandkids and some Jewish guy named Rudolph Nadel, a New Yorker, who died just two months later than Van Ooyen and who's remembered just a couple of yards down the row of alabaster crosses.

Maybe they knew each other.

Maybe not.

It doesn't matter, really. Jew and Gentile, New Yorker and Iowan, they both gave us what we have. They died for a ton of reasons.

And, strangely enough, I'm one of them.

So are you.

This morning of Memorial Day week, I'm thankful for my Uncle Edgar and John Van Ooyen and Rudolph Nadel, and countless others.

Amid all the celebrations, the fireworks, and John Phillip Sousa marches, it’s good for all of us to remember that so many have suffered, so many have died.

And it’s very good to remember what Job could say in his suffering. “I know that my Redeemer lives.” Finally, of course, that’s the only good news on life and death. But there’s more on this day of remembrance. Here’s what Job said, “And after my skin has been destroyed yet in my flesh I will see God.”

Even if my uncle Edgar’s scrapbook is finally destroyed, that doughboy will be made flesh once again. And not alone. Me and Edgar. Me and you.

Because there will come a day when every last knee on earth—torn cartilages, busted knee caps, —even those fallen into dust beneath the ground, beneath the waves, beneath the radar screen of all of our attention—there will come a day when every last knee shall bow before God’s rule. Everyone.

 Think of it—men and women in cemeteries like this one emerging like hearty daffodils to shake off the slumber.

So, this holiday's week, let me add this image to the Mosaic. Think of a God who can, with a wink and a nod, turn this cemetery—and all of them--into Grand Central Station.

That’s the big story, really—bigger than a Washington crossing the Delaware River, the slaughter at Gettysburg, the raid on Pearl Harbor, the withdrawal to the Imjim River Line, the Tet Offensive, Operation Desert Storm, or the messes right now in Iran.

The big story this Memorial Day is the return of millions and millions of Edgars—and those who loved him, those who loved all of them from the beginning of time.

That’s the book on Edgar Hartman, an old story that, like the other worthwhile old stories, needs to be told over and over again until each of us recognizes it as our own.

That’s my addition—and his, this Great Uncle Edgar—to the mosaic.

Memorial Day iii

(cont. from yesterday)

What exactly happened to this man, shown here with two little children, one of them my uncle, the other a cousin, Uncle Edgar standing across the street from Wykhuis Store, which is now the Pizza Ranch in Oostburg, Wisconsin?

 

Well, his story is here too, at least what one man claims is Edgar Hartman’s story. My grandmother’s documents include a two-page, hand-written note from a man named Leo B. Zastrow, who described doughboy Edgar.

    He was a member of my platoon but was in another squad about         300 yds to the left of my squad of which I had command in a                 sunken road leading to Ville-Savoy they were dug in the banks of         the road. We had just finished a barrage of 15000 rounds for a             covering of our infantry’s advance across the Vesle River. They             were fired upon by German one-pounders immediately after our         barrage and according the Corporal’s information to me he was             instantly killed.. . .I later seen the body when relief came to my             Division on my way from the front and recognized the body only         by identification tags.”

As to any last words or message, Zastrow says he has none, but he wishes to assure Mr. Hartman’s folks that “he was my most trustworthy man.. . .I can assure them that he died a ‘Hero’ (capital H). And then, strikingly, “Hoping this information will be of value to you.”

My scrapbook also includes an impressive obituary from the Sheboygan Press, June 18, presumably 1920, which tells much of the story I’ve already related, and adds this: “In the village he was regarded as one of the most prominent young men. He was of a quiet disposition and was well liked by his friends.”

 On the final page of this scrapbook is the solitary picture of a solitary cross in a sprawling military cemetery, somewhere in France, I suppose. In very light letters on the cross piece, the words “Edgar Hartman,” and the number “178.”

Edgar Hartman was one of 126,000 American doughboys who didn’t return from the French killing fields or oceanic cemeteries. He was 28 years old when he died, single, and had been employed at the local lumber yard when duty called. He left behind a girlfriend, who later married and had her own life.

It’s entirely possible that no one at Hartman-Lammers American Legion Post knows much about Edgar Hartman, so think of this: if next June some prairie monster tornado would lift Sioux Center, Iowa, off the gently rolling plains of the American midwest, scattering the household goods of the James Schaap family hither and yon, and this scrapbook of all there is to know about Edgar Hartman were to disappear from the face of the earth, then no one could ever know much at all about the man. His story would be gone, his life as indistinguishable as his body the day that one-pounder killed him in a French ditch.

To hold this scrapbook in my hands has always been a profoundly humbling experience, not only because what’s here is all there is left of this man Edgar Hartman, but also because one can’t help realize how many others–my ancestors and yours, hundreds of millions of earthlings–have vanished from this world without leaving even a trace of themselves. My Edgar Hartman scrapbook, placed on a shelf above my desk, has become my own memento mori, an memento of death’s reality; because what’s truly humbling about having everything anyone on earth knows about Edgar Hartman between two covers of a Wal-Mart scrapbook is the nearly inescapable perception that someday each one of us will also be less than a memory.

But there’s really no big news here, is there? “Dust to dust, the mortal dies,” we used to sing, “both the foolish and the wise.” Later the old song says, “Yet within their hearts they say, that their houses are for aye; that their dwelling places grand shall for generations stand.”

I need Edgar Hartman. We all do. “No young man believes he shall ever die,” wrote William Hazlitt, long ago, and I don’t think he was discriminating.

But today, Memorial Day, 2026, it’s good for me to think of the anguish in these letters, many months after the Armistice was signed at five a.m., in a railway carriage in France, November 11, 1918. It’s good for me to think of what my grandma went through, not knowing. It’s good for me to think of that anguish repeated 125,000 times in one year here in this country during and after World War I; 8,500,000 times, worldwide by the end of that war. It’s good for me to remember the cost of freedom, just in that almost forgotten war itself.

Memorial Day ii

(cont. from yesterday) 

Had I known Uncle Edgar, I suppose I would feel slightly different than I do. Had I known him, grief would certainly play a role in way I feel when I sit here, paging through the photographs. Honestly, I don’t feel the grief my grandma certainly must have when he didn’t come back from France. For years, my mother says, our family’s attendance at the Oostburg Memorial Day cemetery “doings,” as Grandma herself used to call them, was mandatory. After all, her only brother had died in “the war to end all wars.”

In fact, my grandmother’s anguish is vividly here in my Uncle Edgar scrapbook. You can feel it. You can see it in an old envelope that never got through to her brother, and the letter it holds, dated March 14, 1919 (four months after Armistice Day, November 7, 1918), and written on her husband’s stationary–“Harry H. Dirkse, Village Clerk,” it says; that note, written in a much livelier hand than the scratchings on the back of the photos, is signed “Your sister, Mabel.” That’s my grandma.

Here’s what it says: “Dearest Brother, Am making another attempt to have you hear from us. I have now had eleven of my letters returned to me but none the last month so will send another in search of you. We have been unable to find any trace of you up to now, nor received anything from you since your field service card reached us on August 7th. We are all well and have a fine baby girl 3 mos. old awaiting your return. Will write more when I learn whether or not this reaches you. With Love.”

The “fine baby girl” is my mother.

The field service card she refers to is here too, in my hands. “Y * M * C * A,” it says at the top, with the words “With American Expeditionary Force” beneath it. The message is terse: “Dear Sister M, Just arrived safely in England will write again as soon as I have an address. Edgar.” It is not difficult for me to imagine how closely my grandmother must have guarded that postcard over the ensuing months.

And there’s more. My Uncle Edgar scrapbook has a childhood picture of the two of them, brother and sister. 

There’s even a baby picture, as well what seems to be an eighth grade graduation picture taken about 1905 or so—that’s him, back row, second from the tallest.

 There are five pictures of him in his military uniform. In one, he’s saluting; in another, a fat cigar juts from the corner of his mouth, while he stands beside his brother-in-law, my grandfather, behind him Oostburg’s Main Street as it must have looked in the early years of the century, a horse rail clearly recognizable out front of my grandfather’s blacksmith shop in the very middle of town.

The scrapbook also includes other things—a stamp-less post card from Basic Training in North Carolina, which mentions having to hike fifteen miles, a number of letters, the only historical record of what was on his mind in those last years of his life–amazement at the unending length of army chow lines, news of the mumps that kept him from sailing overseas with his company in April of 1918, joy on having run into another Oostburg boy–“good to see someone from home,” he writes.

And I have here in my scrapbook the official letter from the War Department, The Adjutant General’s Office, Washington, deeply-stained and dated August 23, 1919, more than a year after his death, and almost a year after the war’s end. It’s addressed to Mrs. Harry Dirkse, Oostburg, Wisconsin, and concerns a man the army noted as “201 (Hartman, Edgar J.) CD.”

“Madam,” it begins, and then, “It is with profound regret that I confirm. . .” You can guess the news.

On the next page is another document, equally official. “Army of the United States of America,” it says in a headline that tents over the top of the page and includes the official symbol of American government, an eagle with palm leaves in one grand claw, arrows in the other. “This is to certify that Edgar J. Hartman, Private, Machine Gun Company, 58th Infantry died with honor in the service of his country on the sixth day of August, 1918.”

The date for the certificate is itself profoundly sad. “Given at Washington D. C., office of The Adjutant General of the Army, this eleventh day of June, one thousand nine hundred and twenty.”

Memorial Day i

 

I was never formally introduced to my great uncle Edgar Hartman. He was dead long before I was born, even before my mother was born, in fact. But I knew of him by way of his only sibling, my grandmother, who used to tell me the same story, over and over, whenever I, as a boy, mowed her lawn.

A single ice-cube floated around at the top of a glass of lemonade she’d always bring out when I’d finish the grass on the north side of her house. She’d set that lemonade out, wave me to the porch beside her, then push that glass at me with a warning.

“You drink that slowly now,” she’d say. “Years ago, I brought my brother Edgar a quart jar of lemonade when he was working in the canning factory–one of those hot summer nights.” Her head would rise slightly, her eyes lose focus as she’d bring back the incident. “Edgar drank it in one gulp–never even brought it down,” she’d say, not without some admiration. “When he was finished he took one look at that empty jar and passed out–right then and there, flat on the floor.” She’d point at the lemonade. “Not so fast now.”

That was just about all I knew of this great uncle Edgar. I knew he was dead, of course, and that the local American Legion Post was named after him–Hartman-Lammers Post–and that he’d died in the Great War, World War I.

I was a kid then–maybe ten–and a half a century had passed since Uncle Edgar took leave from this vale of tears. He died somewhere in France, maybe in a scene like this—I don’t know—but for years the only story I knew about him featured a bout of heavy lemonade chugging and a quick trip to the cement floor at Oostburg Canning Factory, circa 1910.

Years later, my grandma passed along fistfuls of old scrapbook stuff to me, thinking, I suppose, that of her grandchildren, I seemed most fascinated by her stories of the past. Those old pictures and documents continued to yellow in a box I’d come heir to, each dutifully described in her chicken-scratch writing so I’d remember who was who and what was what.

When Grandma died, I dug into that bundle and found a bunch of things having to do with her brother Edgar. Odd. I was 500 miles from the Oostburg Canning Company and American Legion hall, but here I was, fated to be the sole caretaker of a life most everyone else had forgotten.

Edgar Hartman was not married when he was killed instantly by what his commanding officer called a German “one-pounder.” He was just one of millions killed in the endless horror of trench warfare that came to define the military madness of World War I. My mother never knew him; she’d been born a month and a half after his death. As far as I knew, no one alive knew my uncle Edgar.

 I suppose that’s why I put all those Uncle Edgar documents, photographs, and letters my grandmother had given me into a scrapbook with “Photo Album” embossed in gold across a non-descript, tan cover. There’s no picture of him sprawled out on the floor of the Oostburg Canning Company here, but there is, quite frankly, everything else anyone on earth knows of him. I’ve got all of that here in this scrapbook, so when I hold it, as I am now, I have in my hands every last shred of the life of a real human being, a man who happened to be my great uncle. You might say, I’ve got the book on Uncle Edgar.

"Above the Clouds"

For a time at least, the fog on the mountain was so thick that literally no one knew what was going on. A goodly chunk of the Battle of Chattanooga was fought in fog so burdensome that blue and gray soldiers had to look each other in the eye before they knew whether to shoot or embrace the indistinct figures in the chilled overcast. 

Basically, the intent of the Union and  Confederate armies were simple: for the Union, break through the obvious battle lines the Rebs had set up; for the Rebs, hold those lines down. But one of the enemies of both sides was the terrain of the fighting, terrain that prompted the Battle of Chattanooga to be dubbed "the battle above the clouds."

In 2010, Covenant College, right there on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, asked to visit for a semester, to teach a writing course as a visiting professor. It was a joy to be up there on the mountain, neighboring such a historical setting. If I'd been a quicker learner, I'd have come away with a better understanding of what happened in the "batte above the clouds," but I take some comfort from knowing that books--lots of them!--have been written about what happened here in late November of 1863, military action that opened the South to General Sherman's march and, eventually, the Union successes.

Like all battlefield memorials, what's here at Chattanooga's Lookout Mountain, was well as Missionary Ridge conveys inevitable seriousness. You're surrounded by so many monuments to sacrifice that it's difficult not to evaluate your self and your motivations. There's no escaping seriousness up on the mountain, where the battle above the clouds once happened,

This week, the Supreme Court paved the way for Southern states to reverse legislation that provided for minorities to have representation in national politics because racial preference, so said the conservative majority, is just another form of racial prejudice.

Almost immediately, several of those Southern states did what they could to rewrite legislation to shut down what we've come to call "affirmative action," thereby almost certainly limiting minority representation in the Congress. 

It seems the battle above the clouds, 160 years later, isn't yet concluded.

 

"The Cross of Snow"

That Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of America's very first great--which is to say "national"-- poet/treasures did not want you or me reading this particular poem of his is manifestly obvious. Longfellow never read "The Cross of Snow" publicly nor touted it for publication. I suppose it lay innocently among his papers, his letters and notes to friends--just another scribbled sheet of paper, where someone cleaning up his life picked it up and read it, then, probably immediately, wondered why no one on the face of this green earth had seen it before. 

Longfellow was an America-sized celebrity poet at a moment when great poets were lavishly celebrated. Everyone knew Longfellow and quoted him freely; but the sad truth here is that no one saw this particular poem, nor read it, until some relative, probably post-mortem, cleaned up his office and happened to find it where the great American poet clearly intended it not to be found.

No one familiar with Longfellow's work would call him or his poetry "excessive" or "overwrought," certainly none of his contemporaries. This particular poem, "The Cross of Snow," is so brutally honest that it's not difficult to see why America's favorite poet would not want it published: it painfully reflects upon grief--his grief-- at his spouse's accidental death right there at home. 

Fanny Longfellow died a frighentingly awful death when her dress caught fire. Just one day later, her heroic attempts to save her notwithstanding, his beloved spouse passed away. It's impossible to imagine his agony, but you can stand beside his grieving by reading his tribute to her in "The Cross of Snow," a poem America's  most famous poet never intended you or me to read.

When you do, you'll feel the grieving husband and see for yourself the immense cross of snow pitched up against the mountainside. A full 150 years later, the intense aching in Longfellow's soul is still here in the lines:

There is a mountain in the distant West
  That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
  Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
  These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
  And seasons, changeless since the day she died. 

Eighteen years after he lost her, the image of that snowy cross still brings Longfellow back to grief, as if she'd not left. His heart is still shorn, jagged and bloodied.

The photographer William Henry Jackson took the immense landscape photograph that wrought such intense emotion from Longfellow's grieving soul. Jackson is best known or remembered for his remarkable photographs of compelling Western landscapes like the landscape featured here in this remarkable image.

And there's a back story: Jackson had heard of a disappearing cross in a mountain view and determined to capture the image, if that could be done, a job that required more strength than sense--a huge camera, 10 x 13 glass plates, an armful of chemicals and equipment, all of it lugged up a mountain across a valley from the snow cross when the temps were just right for that cross. to be there at that moment that day. Hundreds of pounds of equipment got toted up an adjacent mountain to a spot Jackson judged to offer the finest perspective.

The landscape photo William Henry Jackson took in that place on that August day, 1872, prompted Longfellow's very personal but memorable response. 

The cross of snow is more difficult to see these days, erosion on the mountain alters the image with each passing season. Once it offered hope, like an old favorite hymn. Even today, for some at least, the story offers. The snow on this mountain has meant much more than just snow on a mountain.