Morning Thanks--Sioux County Oratorio

Please don't ask me to tell you the titles of what they sang Saturday night, because pronouncing the offerings is, for me at least, a couple of continents off. I can write out the words, copy them from the program: Joseph Haydn's Missa in tempora belli (Paukenmesse), plus a short selection from Sergei Rachmaninoff, Borgoroditse Devo (from All-Night Vigil). I don't even know how to punctuate it.

Turn on your radio on the way to work this morning, and you're not likely to hear any of it; but then "Paukenmesse" (take my word) streaming from your car radio doesn't seem a fitting venue. 

What the choir sang and the orchestra played on Saturday night needed to be performed in a place like Christ's Chapel at Northwestern College, just down the road, a place as grand as the music.

And it was. And the night was spectacular, an offering of riveting, perfectly gorgeous music. I could stack more adjectives, but that would be in-artful for a musical menu so rich in art.

There's more this week, I'm sure. Both nearby colleges offer end-of-year choral programs. Crowds in both schools will be moved, I'm sure, by the virtuosity of musical ensembles at both schools. 

We've been blessed by astounding musical offerings in the last several months, and, as they say, the hits just keep on coming. Several of those concerts have originated from afar--a string quartet from the Netherlands, an orchestra ensemble from New York--but this one was just about all local: The Sioux County Oratorio Chorus and Orchestra, men and women with very familiar names filling the stage and the place with artistry.

Once, years ago, when the B. J. Haan was being built, I took the Siouxland novelist Frederick Manfred inside for a tour of what was in the offing. There were no pews, and the place was a mess. But the proscenium was in place, so we walked all the way up to the front, then stood center stage. He was a towering figure, 6'9" tall; but that afternoon, he seemed almost diminished--and he knew it himself. He was awestruck. With painters and electricians running around all over the place, he stood up front as if about to speak to a hushed crowd.

"You know," he told me, "if you would have told me when I was a kid that someday my people would build a place like this, something this beautiful, I wouldn't have believed it." 

He wasn't talking about a building and didn't mean to praise Dordt College only. What he meant was bigger than that. What he meant was that he would have never imagined his people, ordinary people from some rural counties in far northwest Iowa, a place far away from the madding crowds, that his people would actually have opportunity to sit and listen to music as grand, as majestic, as royal as we heard on Saturday night. That's what he meant when he stood, center-stage, in a mess in Dordt's as yet unfinished chapel.

And then there's this. Saturday night, the musicians themselves, the choir and orchestra who created the musical treasure up on stage at Christ Chapel, were not from afar, not from New York or Amsterdam; they were local. 

For all of that I'm greatly thankful this Monday morning.

Sunday Morning Meds--the Word of the Lord

“He sends from heaven and saves me, rebuking those who hotly pursue me; 

God sends his love and his faithfulness.” Psalm 57:3

“He who, struggling with his own weakness, presses toward faith in his moments of anxiety is already in large part victorious.” 

That line may not seem like John Calvin, at least the caricature John Calvin, but it is—from Book III, chapter II of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, a section in which he is discussing “Faith in the struggle against temptation.” 

I’m just not sure there is a way of understanding the frenetic modulation of emotions David not only lives through but sings about, and of, in Psalm 57—and elsewhere—without understanding the character Calvin ascribes to believers in this section of the Institutes. David has, after all, every reason to be deathly scared. It’s the King, King Saul, who’s hot on his trail, who has threatened his life, whose poison envy is more terrifying because it is so immeasurably beyond reason. 

David sits in a cave, surrounded by his closest friends and family, nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. I like to imagine him composing, singing, alone, maybe at the mouth of this craggy spot, nothing to be seen over the land before him but eerie shadows created by the doubtful light of the moon. 

Outside the cave lies the madness of the world in which he's living, but he knows he can’t hide forever. He has a mission. 

Deliberately, benevolently, he has given Saul grace and allowed him to live when, with good cause, he could have killed him with his own hands. Instead, he took a shard of his robe. But Saul, who David refuses to see as anything other than God’s own anointed, won’t purge the envy that has poisoned his soul; instead, he gorges on it. 

That’s why David cries the way he does: “Have mercy,” and then again, “have mercy.” There is nowhere else to turn. 

“And yet—and this is something marvelous,” says Calvin, “amidst all these assaults, faith sustains the hearts of the godly, and truly, in its effect, resembles a palm tree: for it strives against every burden and raises itself upward.” 

Verses two and three—amid the harrowing fear—is heart-felt testimony: you offer your wings as a refuge, Lord; you use me for your purposes, you hold back my enemies, you send love and faithfulness. David is still sitting there where he was, the moonlit landscape’s eerie outlines still terrifying, but he’s saying that he knows the whole story. 

Maybe it’s a kind of mantra he’s offering, in part to God, in part to his own anguished soul. Maybe he’s remembering the chapters of his own story, when, his blessing, his good fortune, his deliverance came not by his strength but by his God’s own hand. Whatever the reason, faith, like that palm tree, is growing, right there out of the stone on which he sits. 

Faith, Calvin says, means a sure knowledge of God’s will, of his faithfulness, something which arises from a knowledge and assurance of his Word. Faith is a sure confidence in God’s will of love. “Unless you hold to be beyond doubt that whatever proceeds from him is sacred and inviolable truth,” as David does, Calvin says that the terror of those shadows, like the voracious appetite of Saul’s insane envy, will overwhelm you. 

Seems to me that David’s song—his fears and his testimony—at the mouth of a quiet, silent cave is the Word of the Lord.

Small Wonder(s)--The Woodbury County Courthouse

It’s difficult to imagine that a few of the County Supervisors wouldn’t have gotten more than a little hot under the collar. It had to happen. Who was this easterner anyway, this artiste named William Steele, Architect, and who did he think we are, a bunch of rubes?

And what on earth did he mean to do in bringing in a brand new design, and so outlandish, a really strange looking thing, when the original, the one he brought in and we passed on, would have done us all--and the county to boot--just fine? Weird, too, strange-looking building, nothing at all like we expected. Gutsy of him. Pushy. Downright rrogant and radical, too. Seriously, you ever hear of such a thing? 

The Supervisors had to be rattled, some at least—and some even more than rattled. Some raised a stink until a couple of others calmed the waters and claimed they rather liked the new idea, appreciated that this courthouse wasn’t going to look like every other courthouse in the state—or the world, for that matter. “Ours is going to be great, boys,” Steele’s side must have argued.

What’s more, once local industries looked over the plans and saw some real dollar signs, they lined up for the new “radical” design Mr. Steele had brought to the board. After all, this strange-looking building would require some significant tonnage of local brick. The masons liked the new plans, liked it a lot. 

But then, on top of everything else, Mr. William L. Steele, architect, recruited a couple of hot shot buddies from St. Paul, old friends from some Chicago school known for its strange ideas. Man named George Grant Elmslie showed up, along with another gent who insisted on three names, William Gray Purcell. This thing was going to cost a fortune.

And it did. The Supervisors set down a budget with a bottom line of a half-million dollars, which translates into 12 million today. No, William L. Steele’s Woodbury County Courthouse, a prairie masterpiece, didn’t come in under budget. When the last bill was paid, the total was 850 thousand or somewhere close to 21 million today. Oops.

But what did we get? The Woodbury County Courthouse is the largest structure of Mr. Louis Sullivan’s “prairie school” architecture in the state or the country, a homemade American Midwest design idea to create buildings intended to slip into the structure’s own environs. All those flat lines, inside and outside the building, are meant to match the world of tall-grass prairie’s own long, flat lines, the shape of the land just outside of town. The Woodbury County Courthouse is an American beauty, unlike any other anywhere.

William L. Steele, architect, eventually left Woodbury County for greener pastures down in Omaha, where he continued his work. He didn’t stay with us here, or stay with his Woodbury County Courthouse, the building architectural experts, to a person, consider by far Steele’s greatest work, his masterpiece. 

From the buffalo up high on the east wall, to the eagle taking flight west; from jaw-dropping frieze sculptures, inside and out, masterwork that leaves you speechless; from the jaunty murals above the rotunda; from the fish tank to the multi-level jail, to that incredible dome with its gorgeous shower of multi-hued light—the Woodbury County Courthouse is still here, still ours, one hundred years later, still downtown, still breathtaking, still beautiful. 

Woodbury County has a unique home, a wonderfully serviceable courthouse that is also a breathtaking work of art. On top of that, right now, as we speak, it’s an entire century old—or young. 

Doubtless, there are not-so-nice reasons to visit to the Courthouse, but the first week of May, try something different. Head downtown, park somewhere on 7th or Douglas, stick a couple quarters into the meters, and look up, check out the great sculptures on the outer walls. Then walk in through the entrance on the north side and look around. Listen to the story. Take a tour—they’re available. Stop, look, and listen. Your courthouse, thanks to an artiste named William L. Steele, a few progressive supervisors, and an army of local workers, is a century old and still an amazing place.

David Wagoner's "Lost"*

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

~ David Wagoner

What Mr. Wagoner suggests in this little fable is that no matter how sure you are that you’ve lost your way, you haven’t--not really, because the world around knows very well where it is and what it is and even where you are within it. The world may feel entirely out of whack, but your dislocation is quite personal, he says. You may think yourself lost, but rest assured the trees around you are not.

And if you listen, you’ll hear as much. After all, those birds know very well which of a thousand branches is theirs. The forest knows where it is and what it is, Wagoner says, so just stay tuned. Listen. Watch. Look around until you get it because “If what a tree or bush does is lost on you,/you are surely lost.”

Isn’t that a sweet line? Confused? Wagoner says. Then “stand still” because surely the real world around you knows where it is and where you are.

The only thing I understood about landscape difference when, 40 years ago, I moved to Siouxland, was that there was an east here. I’d grown up a mile or so west of Lake Michigan, which meant there was no east. “Go east ‘till your hat floats,” people used to say, a quip that had this faint hint of nothing less than death.

Siouxland had an east, which, at first, seemed odd. It also had very few trees, leafy smudges on a long yawning landscape like nothing I’d seen.  I remember reading, once upon a time, that the literature of the Great Plains was frequented by mad women, wives and mothers who, in the days of sod houses, sometimes went crazy in the endless openness with no place to hide, no place to nest. On the Great Plains in those early treeless days, some felt continually exposed, forever naked.

I grew up on a lakeshore. The richest moments of my childhood probably happened in and around woods, trees, like the ones that stand so knowingly in David Wagoner’s poem. The only real painting I own is of those very woods, a painting that’ll get thrown out when our children sift through our things someday; after all, I’m the one who knows what grace is in the lakeshore.

If I’d waited for trees to tell me where I was when I got to Siouxland, I’d have been lost. Five minutes in any direction from where I live and I’m a wanderer in a treeless world. I’ve got to drive about a half hour west to take a walk in a woods, and what’s there doesn’t sprawl far enough to allow me or anyone else, for that matter, to get lost.

But Wagoner’s poem isn’t about trees, even the cartoon trees who give directions when you’ve lost yours. It’s about finding a place. About listening to the sounds of the place you’re in, hearing the place the wind, being still and small enough to let the place find you.

I think that may have happened in my life; but I also know that, as Wagoner says, it’s something one has to work at: one has to listen, to see, to hear. With regards to the world around me, I think I’ve become, in a way, as much of a Siouxland native as I ever will. I found myself and found my way, but not without help.

There's a commemorative medal hanging from a tree stump behind me. It was a gift when I retired from teaching just down the road for 37 years. Add four more years for the time I spent here as a student, and the tally amounts to most of a lifetime in a place with few trees.
It's the fifth year of my retirement. Just down the road from where we live, there's a woods and a river, rarities in the region. We feel blessed to be here.

I'm happy to say I'm not a stranger out here on the emerald edge of the Great Plains. I’ve become, landscape-wise, a native. That's what I think, David Wagoner. It seems to me that endless landscapes all around have found me.
______________________ 

*First appeared here on April 12, 2012.

Small Wonder(s)--a cross-cultural mess

Old Elizabeth--she picked up a white woman's name--never heard of Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony. Couldn't have. She didn't know English, knew nothing about a right to vote; but that didn't mean she wasn't a feminist. No sir and no ma'am.

She had little to do with men, but a lot to say. Outspoken? Yes, on all things gender-related. Opinionated?--maybe to a fault. She just flat out didn't like men.

Could be argued that she had cause. Corabelle Fellows says old Elizabeth had "merry eyes and many chins." Miss Fellows is kind, but it doesn't take a sleuth to catch the hints. Old Elizabeth may well not have been an American Beauty rose. The Cheyenne River Reservation had many more comely females. She was, Miss Fellows says, an "old-maid Indian." Thus, she was left out by her people, who had, Miss Fellows says, the unpleasant tradition of putting women of forty winters out of the village if they'd never married.

This feminist Lakota woman was, however, Miss Fellows' host when Miss Fellows came to Cheyenne River to teach school, her boarder, you might say. Old Elizabeth offered her log cabin, nicely furnished, lacking little--well, running water you had to run for, but on the reservation in the 1880s, who knew about faucets? 

Elizabeth held strong opinions about men, which must have made Miss Fellows' English night school for men--they met at Elizabeth's place--something of a trial. No matter. In the one-room cabin, Elizabeth lay right there beside them sleeping. Well, snoring. 

Three men--Miss Fellows calls them "boys"--brought along a friend one night, who carried the most amazing, white doeskin blanket. The three who'd asked her to teach them were eager learners, she says, but this companion said nothing that night. He was stone silent. But she couldn't take her eyes off that "pure white gleaming doeskin, entirely unornamented," she says. 

Now old Elizabeth had warned Miss Fellows repeatedly not to go out by herself after dark. But that night, with her hostess apparently sawing wood, she stepped out and was, in a flash, "seized by strong arms, wrapped tightly in a white doeskin blanket, and borne swiftly away by noiseless feet." She could not move as much as a little toe, she says, before her captor dropped her in a snowbank. 

Corabelle Fellow had spent a couple of years teaching at the Santee Reservation before being reassigned. But being grabbed in the darkness was terrifying. Her nerves weren't frozen, they were fried.

Oh, my word, did old Elizabeth get mad. It took no more than a few minutes for the old woman to chug down the same path towards the river in the dark, where she found Miss Fellows. Then she half-dragged, half-carried her back up, mad like you wouldn't believe, boiling like stew over an open fire. When they got back, Miss Fellows nose about quit functioning in the stink put up by the horrid concoction brewing on the stove, a kind of insect repellent to keep men away, she was told. 

Two hours it took before either of them could settle down--Corabelle from bone-chilling terror, old Elizabeth from flat-out rage. 

At her. That's right. Old Elizabeth blew a gasket because Miss Fellows had left the cabin alone and thereby just about given herself away to the guy with the handsome duds. She'd done everything that silent visitor hoped she would: she'd asked him to speak, looked at him fondly, then left the cabin alone just after he did. 

Old Elizabeth told Miss Fellows she was acting like some cheap hussy. Out there on the  Cheyenne River Reservation that night, two women--one young and white, the other old and Lakota--got it all decidedly wrong, the blind leading the blind. Nobody understood a thing about the other's world. 

That's the story Corabelle Fellows tells in her memoir, Blue Star. 

And, yes, in that log cabin, the whole cultural mess finally got straightened out. Miss Fellows knew no more about Lakota marriage customs than old Elizabeth knew about white folks' courting rituals, so both proved idiots. Once they got things straightened out, the old feminist quit stirring that horrid herb charm, and the two of them laughed. And laughed. And laughed. 

Which is where all such stories should end, don't you think? The two of them came to understand each other's ways--isn't that sweet? Corabelle even kissed old Elizabeth, something that just wasn't done on the reservation.

One more thing. If you're male, don't go feeling sorry for the poor guy with pretty white doeskin. He may have gone home empty-handed that cold night, but he didn't go back to an empty tipi. He already had several wives. 

All's well that ends well.

Seriously, how do you fight a bully?

"Donald Trump is contagious. He turns everyone he touches into Donald Trump. Now he has done it to James B. Comey."

So saith Karen Tumulty in a Washington Post column recently, but so have tons of others--many of them card-carrying liberals. They all look a little askance at Comey's getting down-and-dirty with the Duke of Down-and-Dirty. They all wish he'd taken the high road--you know, Michelle Obama's old campaign slogan: "They take the low road, we take the high road."

They wish Comey had done without references to a pee tape and the size of the man's hands, not to mention his talking about Trump's weird hair, his pink saddlebags, and strange orange aura. Let it alone, lots of libs have been saying. It would be a better book without the mud.

Sure. Tell that to Jeb Bush. Tell that to 18 Republican primary candidates the wild man wiped out last year in a tempest of trash talk. Tell that to Hillary, who once claimed Trump's kids were really nice people. Tell you what--tell that to your kids when they get flattened every other recess by some fat schoolyard bully. Just turn the other cheek. Sure. Let him run all over you.

Here's Frank Bruni, from the New York Times, a couple days ago:

James Comey’s book is titled “A Higher Loyalty,” but it surrenders the higher ground, at least partly. To watch him promote it is to see him descend.

Not to President Donald Trump’s level — that’s a long way down. But Comey is playing Trump’s game, on Trump’s terms. And in that sense, he has let the president get the better of him. 

How, pray tell, do you grab a pig? Do you wear fine deerskin gloves, or do you hop into the pen? Even the man's loyalists know he's a bully. How does anyone deal with bullies?

Liberal criticism of James Comey has roots. The splendid October surprise he gave Trump just two weeks before the November election was like none other in American history. We're reopening the case against Hillary Clinton, he told the country, at the same time the Russkies were Facebooking her demise (two of my FB friends re-sent stories about Hillary's pizza palace child porn ring.) Comey told the American people the FBI found a thousand Hillary emails on the laptop of Anthony Weiner (it's  difficult to keep your chin on the curb these days, isn't it?). BTW, that's Anthony Weiner whose wife is a known terrorist.

Twice last weekend, Trump called Comey a "sleaze ball," even tweeting that Comey should be in jail (who can forget "lock her up!"). How do you fight fire out here on the open prairie? You light your own.

But all of those anti-Trump voices may be right. Maybe Comey shouldn't have mentioned the pee tape at all, not even brought it up.

Maybe fighting Trump requires people who, like the President, hung out at places like the Playboy mansion with his old buddy Hefner, people who make a good living by turning out porn, people who get paid top dollar to be fix up the rich guy's messes. Maybe they're the best ones to take on the bully.

Last week, ex-bunny Karen McDougal won her day in court. Look for her story to appear somewhere soon--and what she scored with the billionaire President is a whole lot more than the one-night fling the Donald had with Stormy the porn queen. Not that we need more sleaze.

What it takes to fight a bully may well be another one, or two, or fifteen--in this case, all of them women. "Liars," he calls them--everyone of them. What everyone knows is that not all of them are. 

We'd all be smart to keep your hats and boots on through the next three years because far more mud will be flung. Just look what he's done to the word evangelical. 

We've got both feet in the Trump era now, and it's only just begun.

Silence is golden

For someone like me, an evangelical born and reared with the words of the Great Commission ringing in my ears and soul, the whole scenario was perfectly understandable. A man/woman, a "trans" as people say, rather pointedly dressed as such, is sitting in a park somewhere when a few Christians interrupt her/him, and ask, politely, if he/she will allow them to pray with her.

It's call witnessing, and it's almost a sacrament among evangelicals, who believe (as I was reminded thrice yesterday in sermons in separate churches of separate denominations) that witnessing is our mutual calling, something we do out of love. I get that. I even believe it. As recipients of His grace, it's our joy to bring others into His love. There's something sort of automatic about it--we can't stop.

I get all of that, and, ironically, so did the trans woman sitting in the park. She'd spent her entire childhood in an evangelical church, and is still a Christian, although not a Mike Pence-type. She says she understood very well what those sweet Christians were doing: they'd determined, on the basis of what she looked like, that she needed their prayers.

"These people did not want to know more about me," so says Charlotte Clymer in yesterday's Washington Post. "They wanted to talk at me and pray at me."

As they likely would have at anyone sitting in the park yesterday. The whole mission of that species of cold evangelism is to "bring the good news," under the twin assumptions that those we pray with don't know what the good news is and, thank goodness, we do. So, let us tell you. 

What's more, the prophets in the park receive the added benefit of fulfilling, personally, the Great Commission. They're doing what Jesus--and preachers--tell them to do. And if you get rebuffed, so what? Christians suffer indeed for His sake, you know; so you win that way too. Welcome to the surely blessed.

To many evangelicals, Charlotte Clymer looked for all the world like someone whose obvious brokenness meant he/she was standing in need of prayer. But, this Charlotte Clymer is a Christian, and someone who knows very well what the Bible says about prayer. When she referred them to the book of Matthew, they seemed stunned. Then she tells them, "Yes, a prayer would be nice. Let me begin"--or something to that effect.

She says she started in, being "wholly honest with God about how I hoped She would bless my new friends, encouraging them to affirm, and be inclusive, of others. I was hopeful that their community would honor all as God made them and value the strength of diversity."

That wasn't exactly the prayer they'd rehearsed. Once the amen was sounded, she says, they scurried off.

On Saturday, at a conference, I listened to a Lakota woman detail the wisdom of her uncle's life in a memoir he'd written. One of the attributes of wisdom, he explained in that memoir, was the discipline of earnest listening--not preaching, but simply listening. Silence is, we like to say, golden.

Seems to me that the Great Commission is spacious enough, divine enough, eternal enough, to hold a place for listening, don't you think? 

Occasionally, the Washington Post can put together a pretty good sermon.

Sunday Morning Meds--Amazing

“I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens,

for every animal of the forest is mine,

and the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know every bird in the mountains,

and the insects in the fields are mine.

If I were hungry I would not tell you,

for the world is mine, and all that is in it.

Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?

Sacrifice thank offerings to God, 

fulfill your vows to the Most High, 

and call upon me in the day of trouble; 

I will deliver you, and you will honor me." Psalm 50

It’s nowhere near an about-face, but the abrupt change in tone from verse 13 to 14 of Psalm 50 stops you in your tracks. The razor-sharp sarcasm has died—it’s  just plain gone—and the God of the psalmist’s vision moves on to lay out once again the way back to his graces, as he has a thousand times before.

It's like divine exhaustion: “Go ahead and sacrifice your best, do what you’ve promised me you would do, and, when you need me, call”—that’s what he’s saying. You know the way, he says, now do it right for once.  Don’t phony it up with spiritual pretensions or try to out-muscle each other in righteousness. Worship me and not yourselves. Be done with your snake-oil posturing. Get it right, okay?

Once upon a time--only once that I remember--I chewed out students in class. Two of them were chatting—as they’d done before, too often—and I just plain blew up, went ballistic, as they say. I reamed them a new orifice or two in language unbecoming of a Christian teacher.

And I knew it right away.  It’s a wonder I made it through a long class discussion afterwards, a wonder that anyone did; but the class kept going, on Hawthorne, a short story. Later, I apologized—not for telling them to be quiet, but for the sarcasm, the venom in the rebuke.

There’s no apology in this psalm, but I swear, on the basis of my own behavior, I can hear a God I recognize in these verses. Listen again to the angry rhetoric of the preceding verse: “Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?”  That’s no sweet, small voice. 

But that anger falls away, the smart-lipped sarcasm disappears.  Honestly, it’s a weary God one hears in this verse, a God whose probably dispensed these same words a thousand times before, but knows, darn well, that there’s nothing new he can say or do. 

“Just do it,” he seems to be advising, “but do it right, okay?”  I swear I can feel the guilt in the way this verse opens up, the same guilt I felt after lashing out at a couple of students who shouldn’t have been talking. 

Is this really God? Does the creator of heaven and earth sometimes feel guilty? Of course not. It’s an artist’s conception.

Does that mean God would not act that way—so, well, humanly?  The answer to that question is, nobody knows. 

What is undeniably true about this whole passage is that we get things wrong—time after time after time, we get things wrong.  We do it wrong, too.  We often do it wrong. No, we always do it wrong.

But here’s the stupendous miracle of the Psalm, the whole blessed story, and gospel itself—here’s the whole truth and nothing but:  he still loves us. 

That’s the story he tells us at Christmas and Easter and every day of our bloomin’ lives, time and time again. Here’s the gospel truth: even though we mess up all the time.  He loves us.  Even if our worship is sham-ish, our promises soon forgotten, he loves us. 

He loves us.  He loves us.  Amazing.  

More snow again

The old man kept a diary, she told herself, so she thought she might try writing in one herself. Dust was just about choking them, had for a couple of years already. Sure, there were good days, but the dusters kept coming so often she thought she ought to keep track of things because the old man remembered a lot about the bad years, just from having written it all down.

So she started:

April 11. Everything covered from last night, and still blowing. But we have at least a peel of daylight through the dirt. 9:30. Still dirty. 10:00 Little lighter. 11:00 Still too dirty to start cleaning. We ate some potato soup standing up, too dirty to sit. Looks favorable to dust to keep up. 7:00 Cleaned up at last. We will sleep better tonight.

April 12: What a day! Sun out bright. No one could ever believe it was such a week. Must start in moving furniture and cleaning out. Milt shovels dirty up, takes it out in buckets. He's going to wash clothes while I clean. We can't lose a good day.

April 13: Dirty again and blowing. Sifting in all over my clean house. The last few years of dust are about more than people can stand but this year is just awful.

April 14: Dad found Bossy dying this morning. We all did everything we could think of but she was wheezing hard and choking and finally died. We had to tie the horses out till we go ther out and skinned. The horses sniffed and rolled their eyes. They are frightened by death same as we are, poor things. Dad says he is going to sleep in the barn and spray the air at night. If we had a better barn it might help, but nothing would keep this dust out. The kids cried about Bossy, then we all did. The animals are like persons to us. I feel worried that the kids won't have milk now. 

She is Julia Dunne, a character in Sanora Babb's novel Whose Names are Unknown, a novel scheduled for publication when Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath came out. Bennett Cerf held Whose Names back right then because he thought America couldn't handle two books about the Dust Bowl, one after another. Years later, it finally came out.

It's fiction, sort of. Significant digressions run in and out and through the narrative, in part because Ms. Babb, who was herself born and reared in the Oklahoma panhandle, was holding down a writing job for FDR's Farm Security Administration. Her assignment was to write about the suffering. She was living in California among the uprooted Oky ex-pats who knew she was one of them and therefore dared tell her their stories. There's more.

April 17: Kids just left for school. It's so clear I can see the others walking from their homes. 9:30. Kinda hazy. 10:30. Teacher sent the kids home before it gets bad. They got here just in time but the dust is thin this time.

April 18. Blew all night but clear this morning. School today.

April 19. Rained a little last night and showered this morning. Myra came home from school saying the little Long girl died. Poor Mrs. Long.

April 20. Well, today is one of the worst we ever had. A black duster. Just when we thought it was better. I don't know where this dirt is coming from but not here. We listen to the radio and know we are not the only ones to suffer. it is just terrible for everyone. The drought years are bad enough but this is almost more than people can stand on top of being so poor from the depression and all.
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So here's what I'm thinking, all these years later, about yesterday: 

April 18. Eight inches of really wet snow. School called off again. Third major snowfall in ten days. Last year at this time, temp was 80 degrees. Cabin fever anyone? This afternoon, read Whose Names are Unknown. Wow. I think we'll make it. Spring is coming. It always does. 

Morning Thanks--Phil

Fifty years after it went out of style, he still wore his hair--great hair, by the way--in a duck tail. Had he let it grow only a little more, he might have passed for Sikh and never worn a turban. He was the quintessential fifties guy, loved cars, and never really stopping lovin' cruisin'. 

He could spend hours in his own garage, stoking a pipe maybe, tinkering, keeping the dust off his buggy, cleaning up. Quiet, meticulous to a fault, he arranged his life the way he did his shop, not a thing left carelessly where it shouldn't have been.

He had opinions, I suppose, but he certainly didn't air them all over creation. You had to work to get them out of him, if they ever made it off the rack at all. That he wasn't particularly opinionated may well help explain how it was he was pretty much satisfied with the way life had worked itself. He never wanted much more than he had. We should all be so blessed.

I lived in his basement for a couple of months when I was a college kid, did so because he was gone, in the military. It was 1968, and there were others from the small town who were gone, some of them called up with the National Guard. There were women living upstairs in his house back then, some GIs' wives, including his. We got along well, sometimes flirted a little.

He was a townie who, early Sixties, managed to pick up a college girl, got her into his buggy somehow--maybe it was that duck tail--and she never left. In the Iowa village where he'd been born and reared, the two of them had three kids and no huge problems. Sweet and wonderful grandkids too. Life is good, he might have said, if he'd say much at all. Mostly, he just smiled.

His communications specialty in his Army years translated into a job with the phone company when he returned to his wife and the house with the rental basement. He fixed phones every day of his working life--yours, mine, and the neighbor's. Had his own truck, rigged up thoughtfully with the tools he was going to need to get the job done, all of them in perfect order. Of that you can be sure.

He hung around the college where I taught because he was the phone guy for the entire institutional system. Phones were big and mechanical then--rotary dial, the kind you have to go to a museum to see. Then push buttons replaced the old ones, got sleek and had memory. Technology took a jump into the next century. Just about then, he retired. 

The truth is, he had more health problems than most of us will ever see. That hefty tool belt he will always wear in my memory circled a girth so slight that you couldn't help wonder where he found belts that small. He was our phone guy. Got a problem, call Phil. Won't slay you with gabbing either. He'll just get the job done. Big smile. In the twilight of his phone company job, he was always around. 

You don't think much about people like him until they're gone, and you start to remember how it was they were there when you needed them. Some knew him as a father, a brother, a grandpa. Some knew him from work. Some knew him because, like him, they loved cars, preferably old ones, one of those from American Graffiti. And some of us, like me, knew him only because he was a servant, which is, biblically speaking, a noble calling, even if we often forget as much.

This morning, once again, snow is falling, as it is in the cemetery where his mortal coil has now been laid to rest, same town he was born in. If he'd been Native, he'd be wearing his tool belt right now. 

This morning, the morning after his funeral, I'm thankful for him and his quiet life, and for so many others whose service is epic, whose servanthood--what a biblical word that is--we still too easily take for granted.  

Morning Thanks--Hope and faith when it's all you got

Residents of the Home claim that when judged by the winter of '36, or that monster of '75, the storm we had Saturday night and Sunday was little more than a frisky pup. It snowed, sure. And it blew. For sure.  And what was left when finally the whole thing blew away covered the ground. Again. 

Still, I'm not ready to call what we got last weekend a blizzard, even though I'll concede it came close. When it was over, our  backyard was embellished by ornamentation left behind, as Emerson said, by "the great artificer," which is transcendentalese for "the Creator of heaven and earth." Was it beautiful? Okay, yes. Gorgeous? No. Had all that fancy alabaster adorned the backyard in late November, it would have truly been "astonished art" (Emerson again). But in mid-April, for the second weekend in a row, ain't nobody ready to ooh and aah at eight spanking new inches of snow.

Friends of ours stopped over late afternoon when the gusts were still blowing themselves out. We sat upstairs, surrounded by winter, and one of them looked out the window, "Hey, the snow's going sideways," he said. He wasn't seeing things. What fell didn't fall. We didn't have much snow at all on the front lawn, but a three-foot drift snaked, west to east, the entire width of the house and garage. Interesting maybe, but in mid-April, no longer "astonishing."

Here's this morning's weather news. Read it and weep.

We're in the throes of "the endless winter." It's not a horror, and I don't think it yet deserves some dystopian screenplay, but it's driving people plain crazy.

Three to six inches tomorrow; temps in the forties--at best!--all week. Woe and woe.

It's a chore not to despair. 

But change will come. A week and a half from now, forecasters say, the temps will scratch themselves up to the low seventies. But then you can't trust a weatherman any more than you can a politician. 

Change will come--keep saying it. Someday soon, we'll walk out back and start chopping off last year's shrunken stalks and seeing precious little green nubbins poking their way up and out of all that death. It'll happen. Have faith. This too shall pass.

This morning's thanks are for the very real promise that winter will finally someday soon actually end. It will. Call him or her what you will--the fierce artificer or Mother Nature or Wankan Tanka or the Creator of Heaven and Earth. He'll come through.

Every morning, I'm thankful for faith, maybe especially today, with six inches coming again.

Remembering "Voice of the Body"

It came back to me in class one afternoon. I was at the blackboard, writing something down in front of class--ENG 200, Responding to Literature, maybe my favorite class through all those years of college teaching. I remember the room. What I don't remember is whether I stood there and told the story. Chances are, I did. Suddenly, it came back to me.

A van full of black kids from Milwaukee, early morning, tugging a trailer hung with canoes, a hippy guy driving, the social worker, kids in the back.

I knew it wasn't smart to take canoes into Lake Michigan. And there was wind, I remember. I actually remember a strong west wind, and I remember thinking maybe I ought to say something. But I didn't--who wants to be a pointer finger, you know? I figured that hippy social worker wouldn't be stupid. I sold the guy the sticker, and they went to the beach.

Four drowned. All day I stayed in the booth, so I wasn't part of what happened on the beach; but the part of the story about the boss, a great guy actually named Cecil, wasn't made up. He chewed me out. In three summers at the State Park, I never caught his wrath as sharply before or after. I should have told them not to put a canoe in rough surf, he said.  I was born here. I should have known. I should have told them.

A kid named Rammer got the job, I remember: take the old gray Ford and go up and down the beach to look for the body. I didn't do it, Rammer did; but that trip along the water, early morning, searching for death--just the thought of it was stunning. So when I first put the pen to paper, it was that trip I was aiming for, those trips I wanted to take in my imagination. Rammer didn't find the body. I didn't know if my character would. I just wanted to get to a tractor ride up the beach.

I suppose I became the father in the story because I was already worried, as most of us are, about being a good father to my son, who was not yet in high school. I chose the father's narrative voice for no reason I can remember except that it wasn't a difficult choice. Who's going to tell the story? Dad's going to. 

Even though Brad is more me than Dad was. 

Writers love to talk about how their characters tell them what to write, how their stories finish themselves, Zen-like. It had happened to me before I was writing "Voice of the Body," a terrible title by the way, but only infrequently. But I sat there at my desk being Brad's father, and it just hit me like heavy surf--"he's going to jam the bread in his son's mouth. Oh my word! He's going to make the kid eat Christ's body! 'Remember and believe. . .'" 

There's no accounting for taste. You may not like that ending, but it fits over everything. The dad forcing his son to eat the communion bread carries the father's faith, his anger, his frustration, even his love, all at once. 

And he knows Brad, at his age, knows all of that too. 

Take it, even as Jesus said it. It's good for you. When the kid lollygags, Dad takes the law into his own hands. The story is at least a quarter-century old, but it still moves me.

And it's fiction. The drownings are very real, but there was no moment in church when my dad forced a sacrament. 

If you go back to the morning I started the story running on the blog, the intro says a former student asked about it. I was wrong. She never went to Dordt College. She'd read it somewhere and never forgot it.

That's the story.

Sunday Morning Meds--My people

"Gather to me my consecrated ones, 

who made a covenant with me by sacrifice." Psalm 50

One of my favorite people of all time, the Rev. Bernard J. Haan, founding president of the college where I’ve taught for thirty years, was a remarkable man, one of those folks who could fill a room just be walking in.

A decade ago, when he was dying, my wife and I went to the hospital to see him.  A book of mine had just come out, a book I’d dedicated to him, and I wanted to show him because I respected him greatly—in part, because he’d always respected me, even when a ton of folks didn’t.  But that’s another story.

That day, he seemed almost cadaverous, his long face thin and gaunt; but when we came close to his bed, he looked up and recognized us, greeted us warmly. 

His eyes blinked a bit when he looked up at the open book I held in front of him with my hands.  I don’t know whether he could read the dedication or not, but I read them to him—“To B. J. Haan, who understands.” 

“Oh, Jim,” he said, “that’s wonderful—that’s just wonderful.”  Then his head fell back to the pillow a bit, as if simply to read was a strain.  “You know,” he said, cutting a grin, “I’ll remember that as long as I live.”

And we laughed.  A thousand people have a thousand stories about B. J. Haan, but no one can tell that one but me.

It would be wrong to say that Haan never really sought power; he did.  He had his causes, chief among them a college two blocks from our house.  But he never sought wider power than what he might use, lovingly, for causes he believed righteous.  He was a mover and a shaker, but, chances are, very few people reading these words ever heard of him.  He was a leader of his people, of whom there really weren’t very many.

It’s an odd phrase in this age—“his people.”  But Haan himself used that phrase frequently in her sermons and his radio commentaries.  “Our people have to talk about this,” he’d say about some theological flare up.  “God’s people have to think about what the Sabbath means,” he’d say from the pulpit.

What B. J. meant by that phrase was a thin fraction of God’s people, the descendent generations of Dutch Calvinist immigrant stock in an area we call Siouxland—and members of a particular denomination, the Christian Reformed Church. 

Today, that phrase is almost meaningless, even here, where he used it most effectively.   No preacher in the county would use it.  Today, in our multi-cultural world, that phrase, no matter how biblical, sounds inherently discriminatory because it reminds us all that some people aren’t “God’s people” or even “our people.”

When I hear God’s first line in Psalm 50, I hear Haan.  “Gather to me my people,” it might read, or, even closer, “Gather our people together.”  That’s the command.

It seems worth noting that the sermon about to be delivered isn’t going to be proclaimed in a seeker-sensitive worship experience.  What God almighty is about to say isn’t aimed at unbelievers but disciples, “the consecrated ones,” which is not to say it isn’t meant to save souls.  It is.  Read on.

I wonder if old B. J. is smiling right now at my saying what I just have, nodding his own consecrated head as energetically he might have years and years ago.

I like to think so.

The Voice of the Body--a story (finis)

That morning, the sacrament.

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We've never had a day's worry with our Mary. This summer she's working in a student ministry in Sequoia National Park. During the week, she scoops ice cream in a fancy concession in a tourist trap, and on Sundays she helps out in a little park ministry that meets in the forest, logs for pews.

But Brad has always been another story. Mary professed her faith and took communion when she was fourteen, stood up in front of the church all alone and answered the questions. I remember how the preacher gave her this little hug up front once it was over, and neither Ann nor I will ever forget her smile.

Brad is already four years older than Mary was when she told the whole church that she loved Jesus. Some Sunday mornings we almost have to dress him to get him there. I'd rather not know, sometimes, how he spends his Saturday nights. When he goes to college next year, I'm sure Ann and I will spend more time praying for that boy than we have for Mary in all of her years.

Brad's never said a thing about faith to me, not one thing. We haven't forced him. He's never professed his faith. I don't think he's any kind of agnostic; he just lets it go somehow because it's part of the baggage of his parents' values---it's what he's rebelling from, I suppose, part of the world he thinks he has to leave in order to become who he will be.

I've asked the Lord to make this sullenness of his, this rebellion, this dark kind of brooding, strengthen him someday, so that in some future time his sneering, like Paul's, would make him a saint. But I haven't seen a thing yet to assure me I've been heard.

We had communion this morning. Sometimes I wish I were a Catholic so that I could say that this bread and wine is more than just a symbol, more than just grape juice and a dry cube of bread that points at a higher reality. In our church, that's all it is--a token remembrance of Christ's shed blood and broken body. You eat it and drink it to prompt a memory some don't have. At times, I wish it were the real flesh and blood.

So I'm sitting there this morning waiting for the bread and the wine, Brad right there beside me, chewing his fingernails, his knee up against the pew in front of us. But I knew it was different for him this time, because I knew that the blue face of a boy drowned for almost three days hung in his mind, a face he claimed he really hadn't seen that Friday morning in the back of the van, a face he'd seen for the first startling time that very Sunday dawn.

When the sun rises over the lake, it gilds everything with a sheen that's heavenly gold. But I knew that morning that nothing the sun could do could wipe away death from the face of a boy who could have known that taking out a canoe in surf swept up by a rough east wind was dangerous--if only he'd known, if someone who knew had told him as much. No gold lay over that face in the lakeshore dawn.

So I grabbed Brad's hand once the bread had been passed. I grabbed it and I opened those fingers stained with state park green paint. I opened it to callouses and a width that long ago surpassed my pink banker's hands, and I shoved that bread there in his palm, even though he's not supposed to partake, not having professed. I force-fed my son the body of Christ.

"Take eat, remember and believe," the preacher said, and an entire church--all except me-- raised the body to lips waiting for the relief of our own guilt, sin washed forever out to sea in the blood of Christ's death.

And Brad looked at me as a child might have, as he might have himself before he'd become the problem we'd prayed about for so long. With my thumb I pointed at my mouth.

His eyes glazed almost, not in tears but in fear.

"Take it," I said. "Go on--you know what it is."

And I grabbed his hand again and raised it, held it up to his face until he took the bread into his mouth, held it there until it turned, as the Catholic in me prayed it would--just today--into the body I know he needed so badly to find.

"Remember and believe that the body of our Lord was broken for all our sins," the preacher said.

And I pulled his hand back down from his lips and held it the way I used to, the way, years ago, he once wanted me to.

And I'm the one who cried.

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"the Voice of the Body"--a story (iv)

The news the next morning, Sunday morning.

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Sunday morning came as perfect as a storybook Easter. Ann stayed in bed and I brought her coffee, along with the front page of the Journal. I read all of the sports before Jeremy got up to grab the funnies and Sarah came down asking about Brad.

"He isn't in his room?" I said.

Ann must have heard Sarah's announcement.

"Maybe he stayed overnight someplace," Sarah said. Ann came up behind her and shrugged her shoulders.

When I went out back to the boat shed, I saw the Farmall was gone and I wondered how on earth he could start that thing without either of us hearing it. I saw the tracks through the pine needles out back, and watched the gouges run west down the lake road instead of east past the side of the house. He didn't want me along.

I walked out to the water and looked both ways along the shore. A single track ran north up the beach towards the park. A man in a brown hunting coat walked his collie my way, maybe fifty yards up, just past Vandiver's, so I waited.

"You didn't see a tractor, did you," I said, "Farmall, an old orange one?"

"Nobody out here but me and Pepper," he said.

A blue-green choppy mask broke into rippling waves just off shore, little waves, as if the hand of God were somewhere just beneath the whole lake rocking it gently.

"He's still looking?" Ann said when I got back to the house.

"Where is he?" Sarah said. "Is he fishing or what?"

In a way, I guess, he was.

* 

Church starts at ten, and he goes with us every Sunday whether or not he wants to. It's a rule we have. As long as he lives with us, he lives by our rules--and our rules include church. I'm a believer, always have been. Not that I don't have doubts, but so did King David sometimes.

We were all dressed up and ready by the time I heard the Farmall roll up the beach. I didn't say a thing when he came in the front door and left the tractor stand out front.

His face--his eyes--seemed vacant, and there was a hollowness in his voice. "I found it," he said. "It was only about a mile up from the park. Can you believe that?"

Ann looked at me from across the table as if he'd just said something really profane.

"You leave it there?" I said. It was a stupid question, but I didn't know what to say.

"I called from a cottage. It's already picked up--"

"What'd you find?" Sarah said out of nowhere.

I waited for him to answer that question because I wanted to know what he'd say. But he looked at me as if I were the only one with the voice.

"He found the body of the boy who drowned Friday," I told her, gently pushing the company tag down into the back of the neck of her summer dress.

"Wow," she said, and she pulled a hand up to her face.

It was Jeremy who said it, even though I wondered myself at that very moment, and I'm sure Ann did too.

"What'd it look like?" he said.

I've seen Brad speechless for the last four years, but I never saw him so robbed of words. He ripped open the clasps of his jacket and stripped it off his shoulders, all the while looking down at the want ads on the table.

"Was it all blue or what?" Jeremy said.

He's ten, and he's seen his share of TV death.

"Sometimes sand rubs off all the hair," Jeremy said to all of us, as if we really wanted to know.

I kept waiting for Brad.

He threw the coat over the love seat and looked right into his little brother's eyes. "He was dead," he said. "Nothing spectacular or nothing. He was just plain dead."

And then he looked at me, as if I had a sermon.

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Tomorrow: church.