Glacial Erratics

It's hard to estimate, given Covid, but it wouldn't be much of a risk to guess that this summer more than three million visitors to Yellowstone National Park will stop by this behomoth. It's not as great a favorite as Old Faithful, but this mighty thing sits in state like a great big gray relic between the trees, as if, like Gulliver, imprisoned by matchsticks. Yellowstone calls it a Glacial Boulder. It's huge, and it shall not be moved, nor has it since it got washed along--that's right, washed along--by some receding glacier, impossible as that is to imagine.

They're everywhere really. Yellowstone is full of the big guy's cousins. Down the road you'll find a field full of detritus, scattered around willy-nilly like a handful of glacial gravel. They could be moved, should someone want to rearrange furniture, but in all no one is going to pick up this mess without a dozen sticks of dynamite.

The glacier that left these mammoth stone is so long gone that its memory is preserved, for the most part, only by all this litter. Seriously, when you consider the mess you can't help think what kind of a lousy citizens glaciers turned out to be--no mind to clean up after, no mind at all, as if littering wasn't a sin but a joy.

The most celebrated glacial litter in the neighborhood belongs to Cherokee, where Pilot Rock, a quartzite monster so huge that once upon a time it pointed clear directions for aboriginal peoples, as well as a few pioneers who wandered out by way of the Little Sioux. It's just about impossible to imagine a 20-feet high, 40-feet wide mountain, 60-feet long--floating along anywhere, but that's what happened. An ocean swept Pilot Rock south and east from its moorings on the outcropping of Gitche Manitou or Pipestone, picked it up and left it behind.

An ocean here in northwest Iowa? Hard to believe. Impossible to believe. And I might just choose not to if it weren't for Pilot Rock.

Or a less hefty bit of glacial trash, a big fat hunk of granite along the trail to the top of Spirit Mound. There it sits, just off the path, as if someone simply rolled it away, which no one did. It's nothing like Yellowstone's or Cherokee's but its just plain weird to stumble on this brute in the middle of nothing but tall-grass prairie.

It just shouldn't be there, but go ahead and try to clean up.

We've likely all got 'em somewhere, so old a part of the prairie landscape that half the time we don't even notice they're there in places they've been for so long no one--nor no one's ancestry--remembers (or could) when they weren't here.

We've got one south of town, sitting out on a promontory into the south pond, dug there to get dirt for Highway 60 just north. The conservation board keeps a great trail all the way around the pond, but if you care to get to the water, this huge quartzite sofa is welcoming, although hardly comfy.



You just can't help but love the name, can you?--"glacial erratics" because they're so much unlike their surroundings. They're outsiders, outliers. They don't fit in but don't seem to be bothered in the least by their own uniqueness. 

They take their name from Latin errara, which means to wander. Go ahead and laugh. To call these boulders--even the baby one on Spirit Mound--a "wanderer" is a heckuva stretch because today they shall not be moved.

The English poet Wordsworth, as far as I know, was never anywhere close to Siouxland, but that doesn't mean he didn't have something to say about glacial erratics. Listen:

As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence;
Wonder to all who do the same espy,
By what means it could thither come and whence;
So that it seems a thing endued with sese:
Like a Sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.

That's a grand thought, isn't it? For thousands of years now, even millions, the wandering days of these brutes have been over. They're retired. Today, they're reposing, catching some rays. Next time you run through Cherokee, stop by at Pilot Rock. It'll be there. Hasn't much to do anymore, but rest.

You got to love 'em. The only word these heavyweight itinerant preachers have offered in hundreds of thousands, even millions of years, right here in the neighborhood--and in silence--is the blessed gospel of rest. 

An Easter blessing

He says he was born in what we now call, without prejudice, "the black church," a fellowship where Easter Sunday meant best of the "Sunday best," every last worshipper outfitted in whatever regalia they could pull together from the closet. Even though Easter never quite reached the soaring blessing-level of Christmas on the list of church holidays, it was, he says, a time for joy--and show.

In last Friday's New York Times, Esau McCaulley, who teaches history at Wheaton College, took readers, giggling, through boyhood memories, only to stop some believers cold in our Easter bonnets (believers like me), with the startling reminder that the women who went to the tomb that day weren't carrying trumpets or palm branches or singing the Hallelujah Chorus. They went off to the tomb to grieve not cheer.

The Bible is far stranger book than most of those who honor it want to believe--and it's big, it contains a cosmos. From the first day of creation to John's technicolor dreams, it's a superstore of stories and ideas, some of which get easily lost or simply left behind. In my life, I've written more devotionals, I'd guess, than your average Christian Joe, but Esau McCaulley, in the New York Times (of all places) showed me something yesterday I'd never really considered before, and that is this: the gospel of Mark ends very strangely. It concludes with a resurrection that doesn't send the disciples out canvassing but, he says, they leave instead in fear:

8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Last line. End of story. 

McCaulley says it's scary for them and for us to think of Jesus as resurrected from the dead because if that's true, then, as the Misfit says in Flannery O'Conner's "A Good Man. . ." if He did, it changes "everythaang." Absolutely nothing is the same as it was just a startling three days before. 

"Mark’s ending points to a truth that often gets lost in the celebration: Easter is a frightening prospect," McCaulley says. "For the women, the only thing more terrifying than a world with Jesus dead was one in which he was alive."

That's news, and it's the gospel.

He then asserts in no uncertain terms that he himself believes in "the open tomb" as a place where he can put all his fears and sadness--his George Floyd disillusionment, his disgust at attacks on Asian-Americans, at never-ending mass shootings, constant trouble at the border, and the overwhelming grieving we're doing from Covid 19, everything finally, the totality of the darkness around and within him. He can put it all in the empty tomb. It's a testimony.

I read McCaulley's essay early Sunday morning, Easter morning, and was moved. And I wasn't alone. At Easter worship yesterday, it was the centerpiece of the sermon. If you've not read it, please do.

I have never quite understood the tribulation America-first people claim with regard to, say, Christmas, that somehow the evil culture denies Christianity the esteem it expects or deserves. If you don't have cable, go to Facebook any Sunday morning and you'll find yet another superstore--just about any kind of worship you desire. If you get bored with Pentecostalism, dial up a mass. Religion and porn rule more of the world-wide web than any other content.

Ezra McCaulley teaches at Wheaton, where, not long ago, a faculty member resigned rather than face the music for divorcing his wife--it's a place with standards, a college where you can't get a job without testifying your love for Jesus, a place known, at least in part, for observant Christianity, the citadel of evangelicalism; and there were McCaulley's words, right before Easter, about the power of the open tomb, his own testimony to an entire nation from the pages of the New York Times--not fake news either, but good news from the gospel of Mark.

It was an Easter sunrise blessing.

Reading Mother Teresa--Selflessness

For it is by grace you have been saved, 

through faith – and this is not from yourselves, 

it is the gift of God. . . . Ephesians 2:8

I was neither crushed nor heartbroken. It hadn’t worked out, this long-distance relationship she thought essential in defining our relationship. You’ll go to one college, and I’ll go to another, she’d explained when we were in our last year of high school. It was the kind of test she wanted – if we could last through a 500-mile separation, then viola! – we’d be a real thing, maybe even marry, although at 19 we were a long way from that kind of talk.

We failed, although it’s fair to say that she was the one who turned away. I was the faithful one – I kept troth, a word I’m sure I didn’t know back then, but makes me sound severely saintly. She didn’t, and, come summer, she broke it off, whatever it was we had, as they say. This isn’t spin.

Anyway, my grandma held down a seat on a bench full of neighborhood widows who, over coffee, likely held court on a variety of characters and issues, including, obviously, her grandson and his love life. She was trying to be sweet, I’m sure, when she told me what she did once the relationship was history. “Well, you know what the ladies say,” she told me, lovingly, “– maybe it’s better it’s over because she would have been the one who wore the pants.”

Makes me giggle yet today, all these years later.

And I can’t help thinking about what she said with respect – strangely enough! – to Mother Teresa because what she wanted more than anything, it seems, is to be selfless, not to wear the pants, ever. She wanted to be nothing for her Lord. She wanted him to be her’s. “I want to be at his disposal,” she wrote, often. Disposal, she said. I want to be rid of me.

I don’t have any doubt that the reason my grandmother’s double-edged comfort stays with me is because the image she created isn’t necessarily sympathetic of her grandson – Jimmy Milquetoast, a pushover, a patsy.

But then, in any relationship – even a marriage – selflessness is a virtue, right? – the polar opposite of pride, which is, remember, the first of the Seven Deadlies. But I didn’t read the implication of grandma’s assessment as positive. I didn’t want to be spineless. Who does?

That Jesus Christ wants us to live for him goes without saying. That he wants all of us, every bit of us, is a doctrine of scripture that no one can deny – heart, soul, and strength all for him. That Mother Teresa would want to be selfless in the divine presence of her Savior is not only understandable but saintly. “All to thee, my blessed Savior – I surrender all.”

Few believers in the history of the 20th century have come to epitomize so clearly true Christian service as Mother Teresa. Few believers could – and yet fewer believers have – so devoutly wished to be “disposed” of by Jesus Christ.

But the hard-core Calvinist in me can’t help but wonder if her life-long passion to be at “the disposal” of her Lord didn’t create something inverse, a rich and revealing self-abnegation that, psychologically speaking, made her feel totally unworthy of the very attention and love she so passionately craved. Perhaps, her fervent desire to be nothing left her, oddly enough, somehow believing she was far beyond the reach of his love.

Is there a limit to selflessness? What God wants, as orthodoxy would have it, is the death of “the old man of sin,” but not our death, nor our disposal. Does ardent selflessness somehow require the doubt, the darkness that Mother Teresa lived with for so many years?

That her suffering brought her closer to the suffering Christ is understandable, but we do – don’t we? – worship a risen Lord. That's the real story this Easter morning, just as much as any. Mother Teresa’s life is the very model of love, of Christian charity, of service devoutly to be praised. She is, even in this Calvinist’s sense, a saint.

But that her despair in his absence needs to be understood as necessary to her saintliness on the streets of Calcutta seems somehow wrong-headed.

Even in the royal robes of her righteousness, or so it seems to me, this saint remains one of us, a human being and, as such, she stands, as all of us do, in need of grace, in need of what only Christ could do this blessed Easter morning.

On that score, I think she would agree.

Good Friday at Zion Pres

Somewhere in Nebraska. . .somewhere south of here. . . somewhere in the eastern part of the state--that's about it. I don't remember where exactly, not that it's the kind of attraction that would bring in tourists. 

That's where I found it, standing just off the road, on gravel, across from a cemetery, all the ingredients of a dead church once upon a time named Zion Pres. Out here, not all of such ruins are Presbyterian. Many are Lutheran, some on the reservation are Episcopal. They come in all flavors, although size is fairly standard on the edge of the Plains: not big.

They remember a time when more people lived out here, when every two or four miles a school with a bell stood in a corner of cropland, with an outhouse and kids--maybe twenty--because far more families were around back then, families with oodles of kids. You needed kids to farm, to make it. 

Finally, even all those kids weren't enough. Nor was 160 acres. Nor were the horses. And so, for more than a century already, Zion Presbyterian and churches like it withered away, not because of some dalliance with modernity or women preachers or death-like conservatism. Churches died because people left the neighborhood. They died because kids left, and what's an institution to do when it has no kids? They died because people did, a couple hundred across the road.

Birds flew in, weeds grew through the cracks in the sidewalks, and vandals did what vandals do. Whoever owns the place got told by an insurance man that the only way to protect themselves from the court would be to make sure nobody got inside the place anymore. "I don't care what you do really, but you've got to protect your interests--put some 2x12s up over the front door--do something anyway, or you’ll lose your shirt," that insurance guy must have said.

You can cry for the church, but as long as you're at it, let a few tears fall for the whole neighborhood--for the school, long gone, I'm sure. Life and death on the Plains.

As it was even before its demise, this forsaken country church is a startling image. For believers, it's even a little scary. those demanding planks barring the door look like and feel a little thou-shalt-not, what’s left of fire and brimstone.

But that’s not the story at Zion Pres. No one is afraid of the pulpit. No one is scarlet-lettered. The sadness--although it's not profound--is not that Zion Pres did the gospel wrong, but that the only residents in the area these days are the ones across the street beneath granite stones that could use some cleaning. Truth be known, they're gone too. No one wants in at Zion Pres. 

I can't help thinking this week that these barred doors, way out in the country, suggest what the followers of Jesus felt late Thursday night, and all day Friday and Saturday. Think of it. “It's over,” they might have thought, even said. “The whole five-loaves-and-two-fishes thing, the 'blessed are the peacemakers,'' the flipped temple table, that batch of suicidal pigs, Lazarus in a winding sheet, dinners with harlots and crooked pols, and that kid thing, too--you remember? "Go on and let them come sit in my lap," he said, "and see if you can learn something for once." And then that wry smile.

They had to believe it was done. Finished. Over. Time to go back to boats and nets and H and R Block. It had been fun for a while, a real kick. Sometimes they thought the whole thing just might upset the whole Roman apple cart, you know? 

And then Golgatha. Good Friday.

It's over. The good times are behind us, the people long gone. 

It had to be something like that before Easter, something like Zion Pres, somewhere out on some lonesome gravel road, dying.

__________________

This Good Friday essay also appears, today, on In All Things, an on-line magazine from Dordt University. 

On Maunday Thursday

Because our pastor would like to celebrate the sacrament every Sunday, there are some questions about why. In our church, the tradition has been that the elements appear once a month or so, and then also on a holy day like Maunday Thursday. That's it.

No one is waging war; no one is even angry that I know of, but there is some resistance because, well, "we've never done it that way." Messing with rituals--and there may be no ritual quite as sacrosanct as how we do holy communion--is risky because, well, the holy supper is important, very important. You might even say it's holy.

In the Protestant tradition, more or less everything is holy--the nubbins trying to grow out back in today's frosty morning, the blurr of scarlet the cardinal makes when he flutters through the bushes just outside my window, the crisp morning air, the promise of summer. Everything is holy. 

But the human problem of a righteousness so broadly-based is a perfectly understandable paradox: when everything is holy, it's altogether too easy to look out at a world where nothing seems to be. 

I've been to St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican. Loved it. We were there early enough to beat the crowds, and were met at the door by Michaelangelo's Pieta. 

For  years now, I've pursued the dawn, but only just now, when I pulled up the pictures of St. Peters, did I realize how blessed we were to get there exactly when we did, to be there at sunrise.

I envy Roman Catholics who can and do point clearly at what is and what isn't sacred. I'm not about to join the mother church, but I know what kind of blessing lies in store if I just walk up the street and into Alton's St. Mary's, up at the top of highest hill in the county, and sit for a moment in blessed peace.

It's sad, but humanly possible, I know, to be given blessings in such abundance that the abundance no longer seems a blessing. Up the street, how many will take mass this morning? If there is an argument for a not-every-Sunday celebration of Holy Communion, that seems to be that's it, a twist on "absence makes the heart grow fonder." It will become commonplace.

I know--it's weak.

In the church where I grew up (a dangerous introductory phrase when wielded by a man my age), we celebrated communion four times a year. That's it. Today, our pastor would shake his head, not at our foolishness, but at how much holiness we've missed by way of all those empty Sundays.

Maybe he's right. I'm not willing to fight, but what I remember as a boy was my dad, at evening devotions, telling all of us--even the kids who couldn't partake--that on Sunday-next the church would be celebrating the Lord's Supper. What that meant, he'd say, is that we needed to prepare by evaluating ourselves, remembering our sin and guilt so that we'd better appreciate the blessed cleansing we've received from Jesus' blood and righteousness.

For me, that little homily at supper devotions, a week before the sacrament, did much to make the practice of communion holy, even when it was offered only four times a year.

Maunday Thursday is all about remembering--manna in the wilderness, the exodus itself, the passover meal, and, of course, the suffering and death of our Lord. Maunday Thursday celebrates the blessed gift of memory by pushing us to use it, not to forget, not to forget but remember, thoughtfully, reverently.

This Maunday Thursday, I also remember my dad's living faith as he told us around the family table that this week especially each of us needed to consider the blessed gifts we've been given, the body and blood of Jesus Christ, who died for all of our sins.

"Awe" by Frederick Buechner

I remember seeing a forest of giant redwoods for the first time. There were some small children nearby, giggling and chattering and pushing each other around. Nobody had to tell them to quiet down as we entered. They quieted down all by themselves. Everybody did. You couldn't hear a sound of any kind. It was like coming into a vast, empty room.

Two or three hundred feet high the redwoods stood. You had to crane your neck back as far as it would go to se the leaves at the trop. The trees made their own twilight out of the bright California day. There was a stillness and stateliness about them that seemed to become part of you as you stood there stunned by the sight of them. They had been growing in that place for going on two thousands years. With infinite care, they were growing even now. You could feel them doing it. They made you realize that all your life you had been mistaken. Oaks and ashes, maples and chestnuts and elms  you had seen for as long as you could remember, but never until this moment had you so much as dreamed what a Tree really was.

"Behold the man," Pilate said when he led Jesus out where everybody could see him. He can't have been much to look at after what they'd done to him by then, but my guess is that, even so, there suddenly fell over that mob a silence as awed as ours in the forest when for the first time in their lives they found themselves looking at a Human Being.

______________

from Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABCs of Faith.

Why I can't watch

I find it hard--too hard--to watch the George Floyd trial, so I don't. I turn it off. I have no doubt that Derek Chauvin killed Mr. Floyd, although I'm far less sure that he meant to. All that time--nine minutes and 29 seconds--and all that talk--the crowd insisting on Floyd's distress--make Chauvin's guilt all-too-evident.

The civil case has already made clear where this trial is headed. When a jury awarded Floyd's family more than 20 million dollars, that jury established Chauvin's guilt. 

As one African-American commentator said last night on MSNBC, he won't be surprised if Chauvin is freed: white cops are always exonerated in the deaths of black people.

I get that. Sadly, his generalization is right on the money: white cops do walk away from dead black bodies. But this particular white man thinks that the white cop--Derek Chauvin--killed a black man named George Floyd, and just as what he did was judged as a crime in the civil court, it will be in this nationally televised criminal court as well.

I just wish it was over. "Why can't we all just get along?" to quote another black man victimized by white cops. Racism has existed since 1619 in this country; Trump didn't create the immense fracture that now separates us, but neither did he do anything to heal it. In the process, he only opened it even farther. 

I am greatly thankful that split is not solely a racial divide. What happened last summer in American cities wasn't just a Black protest. Millions of white Americans took to the streets as well. What we're suffering through is a racial divide that is no longer specifically a racial divide because millions of white people have seen what Derek Chauvin did, what black people have suffered at the hands of white cops, and the plain fact that blue lives matter only when they practice justice, only when Black lives matter. Derek Chauvin is looking at serious jail time.

And then there's this. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, by February of this year, "state lawmakers have carried over, prefiled, or introduced 253 bills with provisions that restrict voting access in 43 states, and 704 bills with provisions that expand voting access in a different set of 43 states." That was six weeks ago. How many since?

Why? Because confusion gone rampant in the 2020 Presidential Election, because some people are convinced--and were for months already before the election--that President Trump's loss meant the election was rigged. Trump preached that doctrine like a tub-thumper, started it before 2016 even. He created the mob that took over the Capital. He nurtured the crooked truth that he couldn't lose. He set his base up for what happened, and when it did--when he lost--millions saw fraud.

What libs like me call "voter suppression" is layered atop the animosity created by Derek Chauvin, Black Lives Matter, and racial discrimination that just won't quit, especially when we are, as a nation, amid dynamic demographic change. "Voter suppression" is yet another issue that's an open wound. Once again, ex-President Donald Trump, who is certainly not responsible for American racism, continues to do what he can to throw gas all over the flames.

Think of this: he could, this morning, call a news conference, gather air time all over the media, and speak to the entire nation. He could have the bully pulpit once again, even though he lost it in the election. He could dominate the news today, tomorrow, and well into next month, if he'd simply stand up and accept the truth that he lost.

Sixty-some courts of law made it clear he did. One of his most active defense lawyers now claims in her own defense that no thoughtful person could have believed the preposterous things she said about voter fraud. Voting machine companies, vilified by Rudy and others and Trump himself, are taking his soothsayers--including Fox News--to court for willful deception.

The ex-President could do more for racial justice and reconciliation in America this very morning, right now, by standing before the American people and just admitting that he lost the Presidential race to Joe Biden. He'd pre-empt the trial.

Don't hold your breath. He won't because he can't. He truly believes he won "in a landslide."

And that's why I can't watch the Twin Cities' trial of Derek Chauvin, who is charged for the death of George Floyd, because it's hard not to feel that the divisions so painful in this country are growing ever wider and will continue to, no matter what the outcome.

Donald Trump could do something. Yet this morning, ex-President Trump could help us all take a giant step toward healing this nation. He could.

He won't, and his base, including millions of prayerful evangelicals, will continue to follow his deceit.

I just can't watch.