Holy week--on a donkey

1. He's a believer today, in great part, because once upon a time a missionary, a white man, convinced this believer's father to send his little boy off to school at a Christian mission, or so this believer told me. What his father told him later, when he grew older, was that he really didn't believe in the Christian religion--he was, after all, a deeply religious man; but he came to believe after a year or so of conversations with that missionary, many of them right there in the hogan and more just outside, that what the missionary and his people were peddling was basically the same message as Native religion, something quite akin to "the beauty way." 

His reasoning went something like this: what the white men will teach you isn't necessarily right, but it's good--and those who believe it at the Rehoboth mission are good; therefore what they teach may well bring you into "the beauty way," the way of love and respect.

So, decades ago, still a boy, he went off to the school at the mission. Today, he's a believer, a Christian.

2. We're walking around the village, strangers to be sure, two of us white and American in the middle of a busy Mali village of 500 souls, maybe more, in a rural area where most villages are little more than extended family compounds. Sheep and goats, chickens and dogs wander everywhere. In rural, sub-Saharan Africa, people sleep under roofs and within walls but generally live outside. 

We're walking along a street and passing the mosque--you can't miss it because it's kept up well by Khadafi's oil billions--when out walks the imam. Go ahead and imagine him. He looks exactly like you might think, bearded, capped, shawled, long and colorful robes. He stops us. We hadn't knocked or tried to sneak into the mosque. 

Out he comes. "Let me tell you about him," the imam says, and points at our tour guide, the head of the medical clinic just outside the village. The mullah came out to meet us because he needed to be sure we knew what a tremendous blessing this man, a Christian, has been to the whole village. May Allah be praised.

3. It's the house of the senator of the region, something like that. The political position doesn't really have an equivalent here, but in Niger he's the official representative of the national government; and we're there at his house, his compound, eating his food and drinking his bottled water because he's very proud to tell us that the man we're with, the man who, with his wife, has created a medical clinic in town, is a wonderful man who is doing great work. 

It's been a holiday, the Feast of Tabaski, and everywhere there are picnics, barbeques, family reunions. People are adorned in their finery, their most outlandish jewelry and brand new colorful dresses. It's a festival of biblical proportions. Everyone in the city, save just a few, is Muslim--everyone. As is the senator, his wife, the house guests who happen to be visiting when we drop by, the servants who bring us food and drink, and the armed military parked just outside his place. But the politician makes very sure we know that this Christian medical man is a great gift, even though he is, by definition, a heathen.

4. In a Sunday op-ed, Nicholas Kristof, who is not an evangelical, offers some remarkable testimony about evangelicals: "I must say that a disproportionate share of the aid workers I’ve met in the wildest places over the years, long after anyone sensible had evacuated, have been evangelicals, nuns or priests. 

Case in point, Kristof says, Dr. Stephen Foster, 65, the son and grandson of African missionaries, who has himself spent his lifetime caring for Angolans who, in his region especially, suffer horrendous infant mortality rates. He's white, he's Christian, and he's been there forever.

It's no accident, Kristof says, that recent polling indicates that across the face of this nation, people have more respect for gays and lesbians (53%) than they do for evangelical Christians (42%). But witness Dr. Stephen Foster, he says, and claims Foster is not alone:  "The next time you hear someone at a cocktail party mock evangelicals, think of Dr. Foster and those like him," he writes. "These are folks who don’t so much proclaim the gospel as live it. They deserve better."
5. This week, this Holy Week, begins with a parade, the Lord of life, the King of Heaven and earth, coming into a town a celebrity. But long before the parade began, he determined that this triumphal entry was something he'd do on a donkey, a braying ass. That's how he came to us. 

That's what he was, a servant.

Holy week--Holy tears

You'd think after 67 years there'd be no more revelations from the Bible. I mean, I've read it so often and written about it so frequently that its dark corners would be gone and there could be no more news. The bible is a tome, and it takes years to get through; but we've done it more than once, in more than one version; so when I stumble on something I didn't think I knew in a big story, I'm just shocked.

For instance, I don't know why, but it came as news yesterday that Jesus wept over Jerusalem. 

I know the Lazarus story. The line is a giveaway in a dozen Bible games. You know, "what the shortest verse in the Bible?" Well, duh.  

But yesterday, in a Palm Sunday sermon, I saw those eyes fill with tears for what seemed the first time, real salty tears amid a ten thousand beloved palm fronds. 

Why? For himself maybe. Time was running out, Holy Week was upon him. The clock--a peculiarly earthly thing--was ticking. When he heard the crowd, he probably couldn't help thinking that the divine Him had been a miserable failure. He'd pulled dozens of tricks, done some eye-popping sleight of hand, accomplished more than a few jaw-dropping miracles--water into wine, his first, was little more than a cartoon when compared to sight-to-the-blind and death-to-life. Five loaves, two fishes--that was just sweet, even though it filled more bellies than souls. He'd done it all, really, but he'd failed. Those tears had cause.

And we didn't get it. It wouldn't have made a difference if he'd come right out and said it either because earthlings weren't going to understand that while he was one of them, at the very same time he wasn't. He was as human as any, but totally divine. Not half-human and half-divine, some grotesque mix, not either/or but both/and. And what's really hard to swallow--impossible--is that coming soon to a hill near you would be a hideous, painful death as damnable as any, but all of it only prelude to a once-in-a-lifetime Sunday dawn. He cried because we're all failures--him and us too. We didn't get it. Not only that, but it's still a mystery, still befuddling, still a humanly-impossible stretch. You got to believe, but Lord knows it ain't easy. Nope.

And then there's this. Maybe he bawled on his way into town because he loved us even though we got it all so damned wrong. Here he was, front and center on the biggest victory celebration Jerusalem had seen, people cheering, throwing down robes and shawls for a long-haired grown man riding--of all things!--a little braying ass. Jesus wept because he loved us, idiots all, well-meaning, stars in our eyes, but dreadfully, horribly deluded. He wept because he loved us as no earthling could or can.

What's the shortest verse in the Bible? "Jesus wept." There he was at the tomb of Lazarus, Mary and Martha already emotionally crumbled. People are supposed to cry in cemeteries. He wept. Wouldn't anyone?

But all around him just then there was nothing but adoration. If men and women and kids wouldn't have screamed their love, the stones would have and that could have been something right out of Disney and would have been. When it was over that afternoon, the people must have had trouble winding down the celebration--what a great day! what a holiday! what a reception! what a triumph for a king! Let's just go out for dinner, honey. I don't want all these good times to end. This is one for the books!

His own gang, every last one of the twelve, had to be just as cranked, riding high themselves, thrilled to be stars for a long and wonderful afternoon.

He was the only one who understood it. In the whole crowd that day, He alone was alone. 

Amid the shouting, the God on the donkey was the only one in tears.

Sioux County history--Lifelines

Right here where I'm sitting, Holland Township, Sioux County, Iowa, got sectioned into homesteads by a gang of Hollanders up from the Pella area, looking for cheap land and space enough for another colony of Dutch Calvinists, a new colony for tons of new wooden shoes just off the boat, ja. 

They'd set boundaries for what land they'd wanted for themselves and for a town, then they returned to Sioux City to fairly distribute that land among themselves. They did so, and left once more for Pella, having achieved exactly what they'd intended to do.

Then later, two wagon trains from Pella came up north and out west. It was October, 1868.

October may well be the most beautiful month to live in Siouxland. Summer's reach hasn't drawn back, fall colors are burnished and warm, hosts of prairie flowers are swaying in the warm sun and even winds. October must have made the place seems a paradise--birds, animals, streams full of game fish.

Here's how Charley Dyke describes it:

The prairie swarmed with old and young prairie chickens, quail, killdeer, larks, plovers, curlews, native sparrows, song sparrows, cranes and many other s and the trees along the river were musical with nesting song birds. The sloughs were alive with ducks of different kinds and jingled with the song of the bobolink. Yellow headed blackbirds hovered over the tall grass and red-wing blackbirds hovered over the tall grass and redwing blackbirds wung and ukelelied on the reeds. A brilliant sun made everything summer and glimmer and glisten.

This forever prairie, grass as far as you could see, had to be cut, opened up for habitation. Had to be. So these folks set the plow behind an ox or a horse and tried their best to outline a home, a place they'd somehow come to call their own. That was the very first step: outline our property. The Yankton must have considered them plain crazy, but most of these white folks had come from nothing or very little, so outlining what glory was theirs had to have been pure joy.

Imagine this. In October the tall-grass prairie was a forest of native glory, so high it could out-tall the horses. People literally got lost just taking a walk. For  years already, some had called the tall-grass prairie an ocean because when the constant winds blowing over the grasses made waves that turned the country as endless as the Atlantic.

So once those first white settlers outlined their homesteads and started to think about sod houses or where they'd get sufficient wood for proving up their claims, the second thing they did was turn those oxen west and north to the Floyd River and the West Branch, the only breaks, the only recognizable diversion from an endless grassland. 

Those furrows weren't highways really. Those first white settlers had far too much work to travel anywhere. Those furrows were lifelines to the safety zones because if you got to the river, at least you knew where you were. Those pioneers cut furrows into virgin ground just in case you or your spouse or your kids got head-over-heels in the lush prairie, so mixed up you lost your wits and way, nothing around but an ocean of grass. 

I'm sitting right here in the southeast corner of Holland Township, Sioux County, Iowa, 146 years later. In an awakening dawn just outside my window, the land slopes gently to the Floyd River maybe an eighth of a mile north. I could walk there in minutes. I'd like to imagine that once upon a time one of those lifelines ran right here through flowery prairie grass, a single line of unearthed dirt running to the bank of the river so we could know where we are.

We may well be the wealthiest rural county in all of Iowa's 99 these days. There are more confinements per square mile than anywhere else in the state, it seems. A friend of mine claims that the company he hauls cement for claims there's sixteen new ones going up in the neighborhood just this summer. Lots of work.

But with all that wealth, it's a crying shame we have nothing to remember how rich this world was when paleface Hollanders determined it would be their own new colony, when they put the plow to ground no one had ever farmed, drained the sloughs, and muddied the rivers. 

It'd be nice to be able to imagine more easily what this creation looked like back then, this ocean of grass with lifelines running right down the hill to the river, just in case we get lost. It'd be nice to have a section of nothing but tall-grass prairie.

It'd be nice. I don't know--I think it might also be right, a lifeline of its own.

All things being equal

All things being equal, they aren't.

Just one of the indignities of old age is the realization that some things don't stop growing--noses, people say, and ears and feet. Your biceps don't swell, and your skin doesn't firm, and what doesn't grow just sags frightfully.  It ain't fun.

I came upon this ridiculous still life a morning or two ago--my size 15s (and growing) beside my wife's cute little 8s. I don't think the pic works all that well. In real life, this still life is vastly more grotesque. I can almost put my wife' pair into one of mine. Yeah, yeah, yeah--"what a sturdy foundation," you're saying, and I'll be the last one to fall in a stiff prairie wind. Yuk. Yuk.

Let me share my pain. Bowling has been spotty. "Got 15s?" I ask some kid behind the shoe counter, and he rolls his eyes. Ice skates? forget it. In Africa not long ago, our hosts were kind enough to provide slippers if we had to use the open-air hole-in-the-ground in the middle of the night. We were in a medical compound, and they didn't want us simply stepping off the cot--we were sleeping outside--and going. . .well, you know. Sweet man handed me a pair of eights. True story. Getting there in those things in the middle of steep African darkness was its own kind of comedy.

All things being equal, they aren't.

It's taken me two whole years to figure out how to write a story I've referred to several times in these posts, the story of an immigrant woman who lost three children and a husband, a woman whose ebullient, expressive piety--"Dear Sister, how wonderful it is that we have the Lord's love to guide us"--that kind of spirituality virtually disappeared during her tough life on the prairie, a woman who, in her late years, had to quake every time she repeated the words "Thy will be done."

It's not a nice story, and, Lord knows we don't like nice stories.

"How come everybody's got to die at the end?" one of my students wrote in an on-line class yesterday. They're watching Hamlet, and when the play ends, it's a blood bath. 

Why, my dear? Because Aristotle said (and Shakespeare believed) that tragedy is good for us. It's catharitic, I told her, as if holding up a whole half pint of cod liver oil. Because sadness, deep and inescapable sadness, makes us vigilant for ourselves and those we really love. Because the unmistakable reality of death teaches how to live life. Because suffering makes us strong. Because inequality teaches us to love.

Yeah, sure. But what I want to know is why is there suffering at all?  Embarrassing feet are one thing, but how is it that "sorrows come not as spies but in battalions" for some people when others get silver spoons?  Why is sadness not dispensed equally throughout the land? 

Why do some people get a tub full of the world's tears? 

The disciples spot a blind man. "Who sinned to make that happen?" they ask Jesus. "It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him," Jesus tells them. Look it up. Gospel of John, chapter nine, verse two. 

That he expects us to believe that is a mighty tall order.

Once upon a time, at a church in Japan, I was required, like others, to take off my shoes. Members' worship sandals were neatly tucked into in what resembled a wall-size church mailbox, a few extras there for visitors. Needless to say, my shoes lay there on the floor like a pair of flatbed barges. In church, I just wore socks.

Big frickin' deal, you say. There are men and women and children without feet, without legs.

I know that's true, but what I'll never understand is why.

You know, all things being equal.

They just aren't.

Coming to a Pizza Ranch near you!

To no one's surprise, it has now officially begun. This year, the annual Presidential sweepstakes promises yet another tourist season in a corner of the state and a square inch of the world that few visit otherwise except the loving parents of college kids.

Orange City has a brand new Embassy Suites--great breakfasts; and Sioux Center's Holiday Inn stands just outside of town like a citadel. Both beckon the politicians, their staffing teams, and their own swarm of journalists. 

They'll be here. Count on it. No delusions of grandeur here--this ought to be a banner year in Siouxland, the entire region a revolving door, every last one of the candidates begging our favor. 

This is, after all, a Republican year. The Democrats seem convicted that Hillary's their woman, despite "Clinton fatigue." She's head-over-heels above all comers, whether they arise from her party or anyone else's. She is the front-runner, period. 

No matter. This year the live action is on the other side of the aisle, and it started this week when the inimitable Ted Cruz stood before 10,000 students in a required chapel and unloosed a score of "imagines"-- as in, imagine an America without taxes. 

Cruz has been to Washington no longer than Barack Obama had, which seems to be enough these days. His greatest political accomplishment was am ill-fated, one-man show filibuster. But he's banking on the party's glassy-eyed true believers, people who will--let there be no doubt--vote.

And he wants us. Ted Cruz would not run for President if he didn't believe that Christian conservatism wouldn't kick-start his prominence and bring him a win in the Iowa caucuses. After all, most Iowa Republicans are professing members of the the First Church of Christian conservatives, Bishop Vander Plaats their prelate. Cruz may have started at Liberty University, but he's got Dordt and Northwestern scribbled down in his playbook because he thinks we're his people. He thinks we hate taxes and Obamacare and those drug-toting illegal immigrants as much as he and Steve King. He believes we too imagine the U.S. of A. under the direction of Jesus Christ. He knows we want an end to abortions, want baby-killing doctors and their patients, the mothers-to-be, all locked up in the county jail.  

He knows we want what he wants, and he knows no one wants it more in Iowa than this corner of the state; and he knows that if he can win Sioux County, he might just win Iowa; and if he wins in Iowa, who knows where the game goes? That's why he has his eye on us.

If the first primary was in California, he'd be toast; but because it's in Iowa he's got a shot, if he can get all of the northwest corner. He's preaching to the choir. That's what he thinks.

I'm betting he's wrong. Even though what Ted Cruz said in that Liberty chapel resounds with thousands of Christian conservatives in northwest Iowa, Ted Cruz doesn't.

Why not? That's a good question. I really don't know, but I'll take a shot at an explanation. Ted Cruz is as much an Iowan as Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. Even though he speaks the language, even though every political chord he hits creates harmony, he doesn't sit down at the keyboard right. He's arrogant. He's a grand-stander, a know-it-all, just the kind of smart ass small-town folks smell out more quickly than black-and-white road kill.

Thank goodness, I say. 

Anyway, out here on the edge of the plains it's primary season, and sooner or later Ted Cruz will show up. He thinks our corner is in his corner. Worse yet, he thinks our corner is his.

I'd like to believe he's wrong. I hope so.  
_______________________ 
Correction: Yesterday, Ted Cruz told CNN that he's going on Obamacare. The editors of this blog left the line in the post (see above) because most pundits believe Cruz is still against it, just on it.

Toiletries

I don't have to tell this story. I could let it go untold, given the fact that right now, as we speak, our blessed, 14-year-old blue-collar feline boarder is somewhere in this house sound asleep. Our cat has not pestered me to tell the tale. He's very much above needing your or my approval for anything.

I'm no relation to the ancient Pharaohs who worshiped cats. I never posted a cat video and only written Benny up when he did something regrettable. I don't have to tell you what happened. I have no interest in making him an star because he's a miserable egotist, arrogant as a prince, impossibly one-way. But then, Benny is a cat.

He's got this thing for running water. My wife is his slave and dotes miserably, so his bowl is never brackish. But he's got this thing for running water and, yes, toilets. 

Benny and I are alone in the morning, when, like now, it's still dark as night. His braying has prompted me on occasion to consider murder, but most morning he's respectfully quiet.

From his anticipation you might think my using the toilet was the highlight of his day. He's thoughtful enough not to stand anywhere close, although his motivation cannot be respect because respect is beneath him. For whatever reason, he's not RIGHT THERE when the task is being accomplished. He waits just outside the door, like some fine footman.

Honestly--you can ask my wife--I'm not a husband who forgets. . .well you know, to flush. 

But it was dark as midnight down here, maybe quarter of five a couple of days ago. There's just one light on, the one at the foot of the stairs, and it was time for certain bodily functions. My age is showing in so many ways it hardly seems necessary to describe them, but one manifestation is that I do not, anymore, wake up quickly. My mind is considerably mushy so toiletries, you might say, get accomplished in a darkened daze. I'm not quite ready to go even if I am very much ready to go, if you catch my drift. 

So I did what needed to be done, Benny politely waiting in silence, as always, just outside the door. He listens closely to the tinkling, then waits for the tide to wash in, you might say.

Okay, here's my humiliation: I walked away and didn't flush. I left the stool behind without, I'm sure he'd say, the sound of music, all that fresh water swirling into the bowl. I'm not a clod or a headache. Go ahead and ask my wife. She'll tell you I'm not so great a sinner.

But this time, I stumbled.

On my way out, there he sat, his bedeviling green eyes upon me in that perfectly cat-like emotionlessness. And, remember, this is for him a ritual, a kind of dance. The moment I flush, he's there, even if I'm still preparing myself for the world. He approaches the bowl in eerie cat-silence, tours the circumference, then puts up his front paws from the left side to witness the delicious swirl.

But this time he didn't move. He just looked at me. That's all, he just looked at me, sat there, his paws beneath him, still as a statue, those green eyes in saying clearly, "Sir, were you born in a barn?" He could just as well spoken those words like Balaam's ass because not to I catch the revelation of his reprimand was impossible.

I didn't bow, didn't wince, didn't talk back. I pivoted, returned to the scene of the crime, and flushed. 

He could have rolled his eyes, but he didn't. Don't think him thoughtful or forgiving, for heaven's sake. He's a cat, and it's verily beneath him even to recognize my incivility. He put his paws up on the stool and never looked at me because what is always clear is that I really don't matter much at all.

This Calvinist has no need of a conscience. I've got Benny. 

"Bully pulpits and closet prayers"

In 1640, Boston had more educated people, per capita, than London, because Protestantism, Calvinism to be more exact, was all the rage. Hard to imagine, I know, but it's true. Puritanism wrote the mission statement for Harvard College. Jonathan Edwards, the most famous Calvinist preacher in American history, was once president of Yale. 

Protestantism built schools all over the world.  In Africa even today, differences between countries where England and France colonized still exist because the predominately Protestant Brits pushed universal education. Early American Protestant missionaries to this country's indigenous peoples were almost always responsible for the preservation of Native languages, not because those missionaries were anthropologists, but because they wanted, above all, to teach Native people to read the Bible. If the Reformation was about anything, it was about democratizing the Holy Scriptures, taking the Word out of the hands of the priests and placing it lovingly in the open hands of the laity. Sola Scriptura.

All of that is noble, a history I'm proud of, but it has its dark side.

Just for a moment, imagine you know Christianity in the way the Christian faith can be known in America even without participation. You love the Christmas season, and you know the Pope is rare because he gets headlines for saying things that no other pope has. You get that.

You also know that in some places three or four different churches stand inside just a couple of city blocks, that the internet has a million religious sites, and that any hour of the day or night you can find two or three TV preacher saying woe and woe and woe. Christian billboards are as ubiquitous as bumper stickers. Kids wear t-shirts with Bible verses--so do their moms and dads. And, oh yeah, someone down south somewhere is building an some big fat ark. What's that about?

So one day you ask the really nice woman you work with--she's got a bible verse on her coffee mug--that you don't get this whole Christian thing. That comment lights her up like nothing at work has in a long time, and she brings you a Bible. "Read this," she says.

So you go home, put your feet up, and open about halfway through--I mean, what do you know?--and find the book of Hosea. You start reading.

Good luck.

Hosea has a story, but that story--honestly?--is bizarre, half real and half parable. It's about a man who is ordered by God to marry a whore. He does, a spike-heeled street-walker named Gomer. She continues to make a living the hard way, but he buys her back. Seriously? Is that what happens? Anyway, the guy, Hosea, has kids by some wife--the tramp?--and gives them really bizarre names.  

That's it. All of this happens in three chapters, and what follows are eleven more of sermons from Pat Robertson on steroids. Mostly the same, too, playing on a film loop.

Say, what? 

Teaching the world to read was a noble effort, just as putting the Bible into the hands of everyone was a blessed event that, in its own way, gave birth to democracy.  

But it also created a gadzillion readings, from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, from Joseph Smith to David Koresh, from you and me and the weird guy down the street who's in sackcloth and ashes beneath that bizarre sandwich board. Isn't freedom a riot? Yes, it is.

Our little Bible study "did" Hosea this month, and I for one found this minor prophet a mystery, a scrapbook of sermons that no one took the time to edit. It rips up the Jews of the northern kingdom, but promises love anyway in a fashion that any believer--including this one--simply calls grace. I get that.

But it wouldn't work well on a flannelgraph. It requires interpretation, as does every last verse of the Bible. Listen, "Thou shalt not kill." Very true, except for police, of course, and Navy Seals and  U.S. Marines. It's a raw and difficult rule, but it seems to me to be true that you can't just believe every word the Bible says.  

Those first Calvinists knew it. That's the  Geneva Bible at the top of the page, first Bible "of the people, for the people, and by the people" you might say. Have a look at the running commentary on the sides. That's there to teach you and me how to read because you can't just "read the Bible."

If it's the Word of God--and I believe it is--then, well, "it's complicated." David Koresh had a faith that was vastly deeper and stronger than mine, but he was also out so significantly out of his tree that he believed every woman on the compound was soon to be yet another Mary mother of God by his divine insemination. 

I like what Samuel Mahaffy says in a recent post:  "It is time to put religion back in the closet where it belongs. With fewer bully pulpits and more closet prayers, we may yet find our way back to the sacred." 

He's not just talking about just Christians either. He's talking about Sikhs and Muslims and Mormons and Roman Catholics and Evangelicals and fundamentalists of all persuasions. It's time to pay attention to these words of Jesus: "But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen."

Mahaffy says we need fewer bully pulpits and more closet prayers, and he's right.

Deception Pass -- a story (i)

Just yesterday, I was reminded of a story I wrote ten years ago already, maybe more, when a magazine wanted me to write stories with themes that connected to how we worship. It had been a while since I'd thought about that story--and a ton of others thusly conceived--so I thought I'd run this one for a couple of days. This particular issue was to be devoted to how we do baptism, and in my theological world baptism is an infant thing. So, there's the assignment: write a story that has something to do with the sacrament of baptism. 

Here 'tis, from a magazine titled Reformed Worship, a story about baptism that happens to be set in the Pacific Northwest.

___________________

What is unique about Reverend Gordon Martins--and his whole congregation at Snowhomish Church recognizes it--is his penchant for doing meaningful baptisms.

Often it means a children’s sermon with all kinds of visual aids--a goldfish, a baby hamster, a meat cleaver (of all things!), five hundred-dollar bills, and the one no one would ever forget, his own wife in a bathing cap. Each baptism had its own, special music: Amy Grant done by kids, teenagers, and even in duet, one time, by a mom and dad; the three-year-olds singing “Jesus Loves Me”; and “Feed My Lambs,” that Natalie Sleeth pastoral, with flute accompaniment by the baptized child’s sixth-grade sister.

What no one at Snowhomish Church knows, however, and what few anywhere understand is why Pastor Gordon has this thing for baptism. There is, after all, a reason.

Pastor Gordon’s father was a firebrand preacher, a man driven to purity in doctrine and life, a dissenter in the denomination into which he was born, and like the pilgrims who settled Plymouth, Massachusetts, finally a separatist who left his childhood denomination to beget a new and more rigorous assembly.

His mother was the exact kind of woman his father required: she slid along in his sometimes turbulent wake without once second-guessing the surf her husband was creating. Both of them were small, hunched in appearance, stern-faced but full of the spirit; their eyes seemed to match, dark and foreboding and wary after all those years of battle.

Gordon was the oldest of four children--three boys and a girl. His brother Autrey sold carpets and taught ninth-grade Sunday School in Eugene, Oregon; while Rebecca, their sister, like her mother, had set her sights on motherhood, married a man who became a professor at a Christian college, and the father of their four children.

Then there was Jeremy, the prodigal.

*

It is August, 1985. The Martins family is camping at a park in Whidby Island, Washington, together for the first time since the death of their father two years earlier, when the children decided they should get together more often, not just wait for the next funeral.

The place is called Deception Pass, more than an hour from Snowhomish Church, a place Gordon picked for its beauty, where each day billions of gallons of tidal water from the sound rush through a thin, deeply cut crevice in the earth, back and forth, to fill and then empty the basins of the island.

Jeremy and Alexandria, his second wife, arrive in a beat-up Volvo, a pair of bikes on a rack on the trunk. The rest of the family knows that the first time he was in church for years was the funeral of his father. Alex is his wife now, but she wasn’t when their baby, Aaron, was born, just two months after the funeral--and believe me, that’s another story.

Jeremy and Alexandria are the first of the children to arrive, after Gordon, of course, who with Donna, his wife, has set everything up. And perhaps because they are alone--Gordon, the preachers, and his brother Jeremy, the prodigal--Jeremy asks Gordon a question Gordon hasn’t really anticipated.

It’s asked in a flourish of hope, Gordon thinks, when the two of them are standing alone outside the cabin where Alex is nursing the baby. Jeremy is lifting the trail bike off its hooks, when he looks at his brother, smiles, and says, “We want you to baptize Aaron--here, now, with the family.” Then he puts the bike on the gravel, lifts the front end off the ground and spins the front tire, as if to see if the long trip from Minnesota did any harm. “We think it’d be nice, with all the family around. It’s something we’ve thought a lot about,” Jeremy says. “We’d like you to do it.”

Gordon’s first reaction is his father’s: a family is not a church. But although he is a preacher, Gordon is by no means his father’s clone.

“I mean, when everybody’s here,” Jeremy says, taking hold of the second bike, the one with the baby seat.

So much within Gordon wanted to rush into a wonderful baptism in the same headlong fashion by which tidal waters pour through the steep gorge on the coast. Baptism was a step after all, a baby step, even, toward faith for his brother Jeremy, who the whole family had prayed for endlessly through what?--fifteen years of rebellion and personal problems.

“It just seems right to us,” Jeremy says. “It’s not just for Dad’s sake either, it’s for us--for Aaron.”

It was a mark of how far Jeremy had wandered from the path of his father that he would even ask such a thing--so sure Gordon was of what would have been his father’s immediate response.

“Wouldn’t it be great for Mother?” Jeremy says.

Gordon helps his brother lift the suitcases out of the trunk. What he knows, of course, is that he can give no answer so quickly, so he offers his brother the only response he can think of right off hand. “I’ll have to think about it,” he says. “It’s not just something one does, Jeremy-like nursing the baby.”

Something dies, just that fast, in his brother’s eyes, and Jeremy turns away, carrying a pair of suitcases up the worn board stairway and into the cabin. Behind him, the screen door slams, slapped shut by a long spring. Just as quickly, Jeremy reappears. “You’re so dogmatic, Gord,” he says from the doorstep. “Just like Dad, there’s no humanity in you.”

“I haven’t said no,” Gord tells him.

“But you’re thinking about it,” Jeremy says.

______________________________

Tomorrow: conclusion

Morning Thanks--Dawn's own grace

I am, for better or for worse, among those who lay claim to the the theological legacy of John Calvin, not that I care to fight about it. Count me among those who believe---gulp!--in predestination. 

There I said it. I'm out of the closet. Now let me say it again: I think Calvin was right about the inscrutable sovereignty of God. 

But before we lay bare our fists, let me say that the truth of that much maligned doctrine can be forsworn only in a rear view mirror. That God chooses us makes sense only after the fact, not before, and certainly not about you or that gent down the street or the woman he married or didn't. That God does the heavy lifting in mission work doesn't mean we don't.

I have beloved Christian friends who think I'm stark raving mad to admit that, sweet saints who've been brought up to believe that what I've just said are fightin' words. 

I get that. One of my all-time favorite wise men, a thoughtful scamp named Rev. Leonard Verduin, used to say that salvation will forever be one of God's great mysteries. To say we have no free will like the predestinators do is to deny our own functioning humanity; but to say that our free will trumps God's will is the rant of idiots. Verduin told me he liked to think of grace as an escalator (think airports) constantly going up to the next floor, always in operation (heavenly escalators here, not the ones in O'Hare), always moving, always accessible, always lugging human being into grace.

But you got to get on the dumb thing. An escalator won't grab your bag or load you. You got to take a step yourself.  

I like that.

See the picture up top?--that's yesterday's dawn.

I sat down here correcting papers until seven, got up from the chair, wandered over to the picture window right here to my right, looked out, and saw--I'm practiced at dawns--that this Greenland-sized gray cloud was aimed like a battleship at the spot where the horizon was burning and that therefore what was going on outside my window was going to turn into something that was going to knock your socks off.  

All mornings are masterpieces--don't get me wrong. Dawn is always so much more than dawn. If you don't believe me, open Walden to its back pages sometime and listen to Thoreau.

But this one, I knew was going to be special, as they say, the colors not to be believed.

I was right. I got a pair of shoes on, threw on too light of a jacket, grabbed my camera, and drove like a banshee to a place where the horizon was open to the sky, where there was enough of a silo to create some frontispiece. Then, suddenly, and only momentarily, I was in a cartoon world.

I came back home, unloaded the goods and dropped four of them on Facebook. Not once in my years on FB did I get as many "likes." More than one hundred.  These shots are show-stoppers not because I painted the heavens but because yesterday's dawn, for which I'm thankful by the way, was one of those once-a-year specials. Grace was written in the heavens.

I got a digital remembrance or two because I was there. I saw it with my own camera. But that's it. I didn't do it. I didn't spring that battleship of a cloud, I didn't paint its underbelly scarlet, didn't do a darn thing. I was just there looking through a lens.

That dawn you see there belongs to the Lord.

That's the kind of Calvinist I am. See this?  That's what he done yesterday, just outside my window. 

That's grace, or at least something like it.

Siouxland 101

No tests. No quizzes. No essays. No grades.

But some required reading.

Click here to listen. 

Ought to be fun.

Please be disturbed

There I sat in a room crowded with science profs, Christians, all of them talking about evolution. Like Republican politicians these days, I don't know much all about the subject. I can read and I can think (I think), but my inclinations don't take me deeply into the nature of nature. Just don't. "We can choose what we write," Flannery O'Connor once said, "but we can't choose what we write well" (don't ask me for chapter and verse).

For the most part, the discussion had to do with teaching approaches in a Christian college where lab tables full of students probably believe the world would be better off if Darwin had chosen to be a butcher or baker or candlestick maker. To many evangelicals, "evolution" is just another word for "revolution" against the Almighty.

I won't try to quote anyone, but it was clear--and no one should be shocked about this--that the profs (from two different Christian colleges by the way) considered themselves more open-minded about such things than at least some their students and a goodly number of parents.

A kind of consensus formed mid-stream that nothing could be finer than a student's willingness to listen, maybe even carry a dollop of doubt. "What we want to see in students is a questioning mind, a little confusion," someone said, which might translate this way: in some situations we want kids with doubt.

I understand that.

I was not a participant in all of this, just a facilitator. I didn't have to talk, and I didn't say much at all; but as I was sitting there, I couldn't helping thinking that neither college would be using a line like that on its web page any time soon. "We want only open minds"--put that on a banner up above the student union on a Friday visit day.

In an article in Tablet, Todd Gitlin says some documentary-maker came to his campus recently to show a film that featured the unspeakable violence going on in Syria. Before the presentation started, the director said, "We want to haunt your imagination. Please be disturbed."

Please be disturbed. That's not going on a poster or a t-shirt anytime soon either.

Todd Gitlin says, "Universities are not fallout shelters."

Neither are Christian colleges, nor should they be.

Which doesn't mean there are no rules. The only time I exercised censorship in my classroom was decades ago when, from a retiring colleague, I inherited a course in contemporary novels. My predecessor's curriculum looked like a good place for me to start, so I followed his leads, including the novel Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, a novel that featured frighteningly violent scenes in order to question behavioral sciences then in their heyday (think B. F. Skinner), a kind of uber-disturbing 1984 or Brave New World.

I assigned Clockwork Orange until a couple of female students told me, politely I might add, that they simply weren't going to read it. These students were not excessively prudish; their spokesperson is, today, a celebrated university prof herself. They were deeply offended by the rape scenes especially, by what the novel itself called the "ultra-violence" of the street toughs.

I quit the novel right there. It's probably important to point out that I never was taken with Clockwork Orange; as far as I was concerned, it took two steps back into barbarism in order to take one step forward into enlightenment. It's a novel with a point, with an argument, a thesis--not my cup of tea. As it turns out, it's an asterisk today, a novel (and a movie) known more for its innovation than its moral character, a story with really flashy accessories but a sermon whose time has basically come and gone.

No matter. I quit.

Did I do the right thing? I think so. I think I felt a gender block here, the sense that the novel was much easier for me to read than it was for the young women in my class. In this case, the strength and wisdom of Clockwork Orange didn't earn the difficulty the students had negotiating its brutality.

But that doesn't mean I don't think Todd Gitlin is right. "Universities are not fallout shelters."

I think "Please, be disturbed," should be a recruiting tool. But mostly I'm sure what you'll hear is, "You'll love it here."

But if education doesn't bruise something sometime, I don't know if anything is really learned.

Saturday Morning Catch--Monarchial

Their table manners are atrocious, their cuisine obscene. 

In a group, they're more bullies than birds, and their singing is anything but. 

No matter. Our bald eagles are royalty, 

and no matter where they roam--

on land, in trees, or in the skies, 

their pure majesty makes you want to bow.

Man bites dog

It won't make the news really. It's not the kind of thing everyone talks about, and it's really just an arts thing, after all; it's not going to change the world or redo whatever it is we call "the status quo." Still, it's something.

It's a tale of two cities, although they're both really just towns. It's a tale of two cities that exist somewhat less than a good cup of coffee apart, two cities who've existed in relentless competition for at least 125 years, despite the fact that most of the citizenry are, well, kin. True story.

Here's the latest. These two little burgs--hard-working, vigilant, aggressive, and, to some, oppressively Republican--are actually going to work together. I'm not making this up.

No, not on a new hospital--they've each stuck millions into their own already.  And no, not on a college--they've each had one of those too for a long time. For years, there's been talk of a shared airport, but no one is holding his or her breath because these two villages, overwhelmingly Dutch-American, are often state champions of their own independence.

Enter The Nutcracker. That's right, the greatly beloved traditional Christmas ballet. You know?--the world's largest tree and a stage overflowing with gymnastic Cossacks and tiny mice and sugar plum fairies all tripping the light fantastic. It was The Nutcracker that did it because it doesn't just take a village to mount The Nutcracker--it takes two. That's right.

So they're doing it together. It's true, and it's going to happen this Christmas, and it's going to change the course of Sioux County history.

Well, that may be more than a little hyperbolic.

Besides, when the news gets out, the skeptics will grouse. What? they'll say. Who let that happen? After all, it's competition that's kept us lively. It's the American way. One of us imports a humongous playground system and the other buys up an open space a half block long to build one of their own. One gets a Holiday Inn, the other gets an Embassy Suites. One gets a Wal-mart and the other weeps. Yes, but you have to remember that only one has the courthouse--so there! 

It must be noted that both do exceptionally well despite being planted in America's demographic graveyard, the upper Midwest, where small towns don't have to go to die because they're already here. Some barely.  People have been leaving for a century.
These two towns, loyalists say, do well because they don't work together, because they're fiercely competitive, because they each keep one eye open over their shoulders to see what the other is doing.

I say, let the fundamentalists grouse. After all, some of them thought indoor plumbing was a foul idea. 

I say it's epoch-making. Get this: Sioux Center and Orange City are going to work together. You read that right. The two of them, in tandem, working together, are going to stage The Nutcracker come yuletide, and the stage at Unity Christian High will be overflowing with sugar plum kids--all of them ours.

That's cool. And its news. It's big-time news.

Sioux County History--Pious scullduggery

To be sure, the place was not well-made but slapped together, the boards on it sides scratched with the letter R to signal ownership--Mr. Roelse, a Civil War veteran who fought with Grant at Vicksburg. Roelse came to northwest Iowa, put up what was thought of as a beautiful home along the Floyd River, west and just a bit north of Hospers, but also slapped together a flimsy shack on another chunk of good Iowa land, as per the conditions of the law.  As a Civil War vet, he was entitled to free land, but he had to stay there.

So he did, sort of.

Every once in a while, Charley Dyke says in the History of Sioux County, Roelse and a friend or two or four would meet out there and yak, talk about Vicksburg and trout fishing along the Floyd and maybe last Sunday's sermon from Dominie Bolks. Oddly enough, Roelse sold a little Johnny Barleycorn in that shack, liquor-by-the drink, by the cupful, so much so that occasionally late night singing was heard floating loftily over the prairie grass for miles around. You wouldn't call the place a tavern, wouldn't think of it as a house really; it was little more than something slapped together to meet the letter of the law. 

On the vast and beautiful prairie back then, wood was at a premium; the only cut lumber had to be hauled up north from LeMars and purchased with provender most pioneers didn't have. 

So one day that makeshift slapped-up shack simply disappeared. It was gone--Dyke doesn't say much about the barrel of hooch. Remember, 'twasn't a house really; it was little more than a lean-to. Someone had hauled off with the lumber. Wood was valuable.

Roelse the veteran did a little detective work and discovered that a man who lived closer to Orange City--think Newkirk-ish--had made off with Roelse's own man-cave in the middle of the night, his oxen pulling the load of stolen goods back past the sod house of yet another pioneer neighbor. Late night processionals were rare back then, and that neighbor, up with a colicky child, had cause to investigate.

Roelse got word, visited the thief, acted kindly, greeting the family warmly. Over a cup of coffee, they talked for awhile about the new northwest Iowa world they were in, about the war now successfully behind them, and about the sterling nature of Dominie Bolks's sermons. Mr. Van Berkenbosch, Dyke calls him (then tells the reader he's creating a name to protect the innocent) was quite the pious sort, a man "good at religion," you might say.

But Roelse had the goods on him right there in his hand, a board scratched with his initial, a smoking gun. When he made the accusation, Van Berkenbosch was smart enough not to further sup with the Devil. Immediately, Van B's wife launched into a tearful outburst of "I told you so." Van B begged for grace, supplicated for forgiveness. Roelse told him no harm would come if this little shack of his got back to its government-appointed place by sundown the next day--and it did.

Now that would be a Sunday School lesson if it were the end of the story. But Dyke says Van B's penchant for piety was topped only by his taste for nice things--and who could blame him, after all? The story is rooted in the very earliest of pioneer Sioux County days; the Yankton Sioux still wander around. It's the era of sod houses after all, open fires, snakes in the roofs, puddles on mud floors. Van B wanted some stability. Van B wanted wood.

What he wanted got the best of him. He grabbed what he thought he needed from the LeMars lumber yard one night, started the long trip back to Newkirk, and never got there because the sheriff caught him and stuck him in the clink, where he stayed for a week or so, missing church the next Sunday. Dyke doesn't say what his wife said, but if you want to imagine her in that sod house when the news came of her husband's crime, you can assume more wet floors.

Dominie Bolks minced no words, Dyke says. It was a communion Sunday too, and those days of blessed sacrament didn't come often back then. "It is with a feeling of great shame and sorrow that I have to announce to you," Bolks said before the entire congregation, "that one of the brethren who intended to sit with us at the table has disgraced himself, his family and his church, and is now behind the bars at LeMars for stealing lumber. God be merciful to him, and let it be a lesson to us. He who means to stand, see to it that he does not fall."

And there, blessedly, Charlie Dyke ends the story, still a touch of Sunday School.

Family album

It's a darn shame Barbara's eyes are closed because you can't see how perfectly robin's-egg they are. Big smiles always appear to catch her in a blink, so we have lots of pics where she looks just like this, which still, her husband says, isn't half bad.

But we aren't the feature in this shot. This image wouldn't be stuck away in our old slides if there weren't a baby in her mother's hands, our first, a tiny little girl who just two days ago celebrated a birthday. The year is 1976, America's Bicentennial, and we're on the Vander Ark's porch in Phoenix, Arizona--that much I know, that much I remember. We're already starting to pack I'm sure, because we're moving to Iowa, "back home," I would have said, all three of us. Soon enough, those two will fly, and I'll take the VW and the cat.

More than that I don't know, More than that seems so far behind me that it's hard to believe the three of us have a 2015 manifestation at all, hard to believe any of us was ever that young.

It's not a good picture of little Andrea Jane, and Lord knows I took tons that are better, so I'd better drop one of those in to ward off the inevitable criticism. Here's one. 

Because it was her birthday, I scrambled through dozens of them a couple days ago, trying to find a good one for Facebook. When I did I couldn't help but think how ridiculously innocent we were. Andrea, of course, has an excuse--she was a month or two old. But her parents were pushing 30, and getting pregnant hadn't been all that easy as a matter of fact. We were thrilled. We were blessed. But my goodness, we were pitifully young.

What did we know? The hospital was downtown. We lived on 35th Avenue and Thunderbird Road. I remember watching the clock beside the bed, timing Barb's contractions. Finally, we left, drove all the way into the heart of the city, checked in, only to have the doctor tell us we might as well go home because Andrea wasn't ready to make her debut. 

So we did. A couple hours later, we got back in the car. By this time it was rush hour, and I remember actually standing still on the freeway, Barb in what certainly seemed to me to be real labor. When we got back to the hospital, this time our little Andrea didn't dawdle.

What did we know about having a child? Really, nothing. I look at these pictures and I can't help but shake my head.

Or this one.

It's shamelessly out of focus, but it was a lot easier to mess up in the olden days. Here's Barbara and Andrea near Slide Rock, somewhere in the vicinity of Sedona, Arizona. I remember thinking it would be good for everyone to get out of the house for a while; and that's probably what I told Barbara, even though I was using the editorial we to cover the real truth: I was the one who wanted to get out. 

So this was the first time we went away with our new daughter. I remember thinking vaguely that things had changed. We're in Sedona, but I got the sense that we could just as well be at Grand Canyon or Carmel by the Sea, Diamond Head, or Las Vegas. Didn't really matter to either of them. 

Look for yourself. I got a glance in this picture, half a smile from a distance, because my young wife is blessedly preoccupied with that darling baby. This is "mother-and-child," a relationship every male on earth has to struggle to understand. This old shot is sadly out of focus. But then. so was I.

There was so much I didn't know, so much in front of both us we couldn't begin to imagine.

Last night, just a floor above me, she lay on a couch beside her grandson, a five-year-old, who had mentioned as she spread out his bed that he missed his mom and dad on this little sleepover at grandma's house. For two hours, she laid there beside him, trying to coax him into sleep. Two hours.

We're older now, but some things haven't changed.

She probably won't like me saying that, but last night's sleepover is already there somehow in the Sedona picture. 

It's just that I couldn't have known and still can't. 

That old Sedona picture is out of focus some, but it's still a beautiful portrait.

Brooks's "moral direction"

I've simply come to expect that David Brooks will write things that no one else in his league is writing and only a few other widely respected cultural commentators are saying. He's a classical conservative who is not always politically conservative. 

This morning's NY Times op-ed piece, "The Cost of Relativism," contains a paragraph that is somewhat more self-reflective than most of the content of his essays, and it goes like this:  

People sometimes wonder why I’ve taken this column in a spiritual and moral direction of late. It’s in part because we won’t have social repair unless we are more morally articulate, unless we have clearer definitions of how we should be behaving at all levels.

I am too much a Calvinist not to agree with him, as I most often do. In this morning's piece he looks at our world and sees a scary landscape attributable to an insufferable loss at the moral core of the nation. We're in sad shape, he says. [He's just read Robert Putnam's new book, Our Kids. You can read or listen to an NPR interview with Putnam here.]

Think of Brooks as a minor prophet--well, okay, maybe a major one. We're in bad shape, he says, and we'd better get better. His is the rhetoric of the religious right, even though he doesn't mention abortion or gay marriage.

He claims moral revival isn't impossible, then claims the U. S. of A. went through one in the 1930s. That's a perfectly typical Brooks argument because most of his conservative friends would probably disagree. If the 1930s are known for anything, Republicans might argue, it's for FDR's America becoming "the welfare state."

What Brooks means, I think (and Putnam would surely agree), is that these days we must learn to care for each other, not just ourselves. The title of Putnam's book is telling: Our Kids. We need to hold each other to clearly known moral standards, especially when it comes to raising our children. As Hillary once wrote, It Takes a Village.

And just exactly how do we do that? How do we hold each other to the test? Aye, there's the rub.

A couple of weeks ago, I visited a high school as a guest writer. Before I got there, I assigned the kids to read an old story of mine, something I wrote almost 40 years ago, assigned it because it happens to be set right where the kids live. The story features a father who can't forgive her daughter for getting pregnant before wedlock, a father who tells the preacher that his daughter has to confess her sin before the whole church.

I'm old enough to remember such rituals, but the high school kids I was talking to were horrified. They thought such an event was medieval torture, which it may well have been. In fact, they couldn't believe a church would do that, even though consistory minutes tucked away in their own churches' safes I'm sure include any number of similar stories.

The reason for a church's public handling of its public sinners was its belief in open confession and mutual forgiveness, in a public morality. Too often, however, public sins were simply the occasion for public shaming. But then, for the most part, public shaming probably worked.

But was it right?

It's never all that difficult to look at the world and claim that grace has departed. I don't doubt for a moment that those high school kids wouldn't believe that upstanding white Christians beat up African-Americans on a bridge just outside of Selma, Alabama, fifty years ago this week, just because they wanted to vote.  I'm sure Selma's white people that day also thought the nation was losing its moral core.

Still, I like David Brooks because he's made me think this morning, make me wonder, make me reevaluate. He's right--his own columns have taken on a "spiritual and moral tone," and we're better off for his moving in that direction.