Morning Thanks--St. Paul's smiles

"It's all because I read a story about Crazy Horse when I was in eighth grade," she tells people. For a couple of years, she read everything she could get her hands on--about Indians. That's the story she tells.

I've heard it more than once, a showstopper of a line, in part because she's not complaining, not at all. That line of introduction, just like everything else she says, comes out in a smile because she loves to tell people about St. Paul's and the community she serves. She loves the people too. She loves her dog hugely, loves the church grounds. It's very peaceful. Loves a lot of things. 

You can't help but smile.

Oh, and she teaches too, in the branch of the Native college that meets on the campus of St. Paul's. She loves that too, she says, and smiles some more. 

Sister Pat is 76 years old. She's been at St. Paul's for just about all of her life. She was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and when she came she'd had never been to the Yankton Reservation--or the plains of South Dakota for that matter. She was just 17, she'll tell you, and when she left her folks she cried like a baby but never thought--not for a minute--about not coming. She doesn't say it, doesn't have to; but in an old-fashioned way, you might say she was sure in her calling. And that was just a few years after she read that book about Crazy Horse.

She's small and stocky, and her naturally curly hair is a kind of bush that doesn't require much fuss, but then she's a religious and has never aspired for beauty. What she aspired to is to be here, to serve, ever since eighth grade, since Crazy Horse.

Up front of St. Paul's, the wall behind the altar is full of people, some of whom, Sister Pat says, she doesn't know. Many are distinguishable saints, but some are just people. "See those prairie animals down below," she says, smiling, and pointing at the rabbits and the pheasants.

Way down below on the right is a sister in an old-fashioned regalia. "Did you used to wear a habit?" I asked her.

"I sure did," she said. "That band over your forehead starts to bind after while, and the collar gets dirty really quick because you sweat, you know. . ."  She looks down at herself. "I should have dressed up a little," she says. "I knew you were coming." She was wearing jeans and a tent-sized t-shirt from a fun run for cancer victims. 

When one of her guests asks about numbers, she says the real problem is priests. There's only two anywhere close, so they can't make it regularly, and then one of them's blind in one eye and doesn't travel well. And that's when she says something I've never heard her say before, something that shocks me. "Things have to change," she says, smiling, "and they will." 

There isn't a Jeremiah in that statement, just plain and simple facts, all of delivered in that same smile. "Not in my lifetime anymore," she says, "but the church will change. We'll have women priests."

More smiles.

There used to be many more around St. Paul's, but there's only three left now, and one I've never seen. There's Sister Pat and Sister Miriam--Oblate Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament "who desire to grow daily in our knowledge and love of God."

When you leave St. Paul's you can't miss the old convent right across the road. It's half-gone, burned down about a year ago now. No one has cleaned up the mess. "It's very sad," she tells us--the only time her smile fades. "I used to live there, third floor, east side, really close to where the Native American church used to worship." For a moment, we almost loose her in a memory. "Some nights I'd hear those drums," she says. "They were so beautiful."

More smiles. 

When we left, I told the group that I was surprised a woman like Sister Pat would tell us what she did--that the church would soon enough have women priests. I would have thought someone way out there in the middle of nowhere would most certainly be a bare-knuckle conservative.

One of the bunch I was with, an 80 year-old woman, a world traveler who professes no faith but was raised Roman Catholic, demurred. "I'm not surprised at all," she said. 

All around us was prairie, here and there a mobile home with an open door or window, four or five cars in no particular order. This is the world she chose sixty years ago or more, after reading the story of Crazy Horse. All those smiles make clear that this is the world she loves.

This morning, I'm thankful for what I witnessed just a few days ago in huge church in the middle of nowhere. I'm smiling just to remember. 

What can and can't be known*

I hope my wife disagrees, but I'm not about to ask her, even though forty years have run by. The truth is that the moment that I felt myself among the Absolute Worst Husbands Ever was a moment I should have felt the greatest glory--at the birth of our children. Well, let me restate that: at the moment my wife gave birth to our children. 

Some husbands record every savory moment with a camera. I've listened to countless tales of heartwarming spousal piety--how meaningful it was for Jake or Ed or Kyle to experience those precious birthing moments with their wives. 

I wish it warn't so, but it warn't that way for me. The truth is, I probably never, ever felt so useless as when I stood there, holding my wife's hand through all that pain, her pain.

We'd lugged pillows to classes where real earth mother-types reviewed every last glorious anatomical detail of the birth process, details I tried to tell myself I really wanted to know. I know what I supposed to feel--true exaltation; but, truthfully, I didn't.  While my wife was in the throes of pain I'll never feel, the doctor who sat at the receiving end at my son's birth talked about having read something I'd written in a church magaziine, even expressed some tepid disapproval. Seriously, that happened.

But the moment those pink bundles arrived and arrived in tact, both of us experienced miraculous recovery. A novelist friend of mine once said he thought the very best finish to a novel had to be birth because nothing else we'll ever experience under the sun is so affirming as birth, as new life. Pick up a copy of Touches the Sky, and you'll see that I once took that advice to heart.

Even though I felt as useless as I did, it's fair to say that watching my wife take those babies in her arms just a few moments after those births will forever rank among the most beautiful portraits I have in the album of greatest treasures in my memory. We have no video, but I do have unforgettable images.)

That joy was something I was surprised not to find on this young mother's face at a clinic in west Africa. She'd just borne her first child--we'd arrived at the clinic a short time after her delivery. The baby looked healthy and was, or so said the midwife, a tiny bundle of life wrapped up in a blanket, almost Christ-like. But, this young mother's face, her whole countenance (to use an old word), seemed joyless, almost abject.

Not sad really, and there was no real fear or anger. What was on her face seemed roughly akin to boredom, as if what she'd been through meant no more to her, perhaps, than spreading washed clothing out to dry on the roof of her hut.

Not that life itself was drudgery--that's not what I saw on her face and still do when I see her above. What I saw was a species of passive acceptance at a moment one might expect at least a sparkle of, well, ecstasy. She'd just had a baby, a son, and that sweetheart child was healthy and strong, her first.

But she looked as if what she'd just gone through--how can I say this best?--really didn't matter much at all.

Maybe by her estimation it didn't. Perhaps in her world, having children is less a joy than obligation. Perhaps she had no reason not to expect another dozen such moments in her life, some less successful. When she'd walk back to her village, there'd be no balloons, no streamers hanging from the ceiling of the hut, no cake, no cards, no hugs. The father hadn't even come with her to the clinic. Perhaps whatever gratification she could take from having just given birth was the simple fact that she'd done what she was supposed to. She could have been, after all, one of his several wives.

Some who know far more than I do claim that animism, the old religion of many in rural west Africa, creates passivity by teaching that one's life is blessed or cursed, willy-nilly, by strong spirits so vastly beyond our power that believing in human choice is nothing less than silly. 

Maybe I'm overthinking all of this. Maybe this young, young mom is just plain worn out. She's just a kid, and she just had a baby.

My wife witnessed a birth at another rural clinic in another African country, and was greatly thankful for the experience. But she said she was surprised the new mom didn't seem more excited at what had just happened, more pleased, more thrilled.

Some things one witnesses in other worlds, in other cultures, are almost immediately translatable by judgement created by our mutual humanness: women laughing together around the village well some mornings. There is no village well in Alton, Iowa, but their laughing and spoofing?--that happens anywhere in countless coffee shops.  A half-dozen guys sit around a tiny fire heating tea; I don't have to translate what they're saying when they're joshing around.

But other images hold mystery that's beguiling, and this is one I have in my camera--the taciturn face of a beautiful young mom holding her beautiful young baby; and the passivity, the strange joylessness that seemed so clearly written all over her. This grandpa simply couldn't read what it was and why it was there.

I don't know how to understand it, how to translate it.  I wish I did.  I'd like to know.

________________________ 

*Previously published in With the Luke Society in Africa.

Massacre at Slaughter Slough

That it's romanticized is almost beyond question, don't you think? The fancy white horses, the chariot behind, the top hats, the ladies' Sunday-go-to-meetin' dresses--the whole thing suggests something almost courtly, Downton Abbey in Murray County. There are no smiles, and the woman driving is obviously pulling every bit of speed she can from the steeds. The dog is running, as are the gentlemen beside the fancy wagon.

Pardon my doubts. In 1862, I wasn't among them, but then neither was John Stephens, who committed this dark moment of Siouxland history to canvas. It's called The Flight, and its intent, no doubt, was to illustrate the drama and tragedy of the massacre--for a massacre is what it was--of the white settlers who had only recently put down roots in a string of homesteads around Lake Shetek, Minnesota.

What's remarkable, when you go to there yourself, is just how far it is from the string of log cabins that once stood along the lake shore, to the place where so many people died, a place still referred to as "Slaughter Slough," the place the survivors--a couple dozen pioneers--took what refuge they could from the bloody killing they wanted to badly to escape. 

"On the morning of August 20th, I arose and prepared breakfast as usual for my family, which consisted of my husband, myself, Mr. Rhodes, who boarded with us, and our five children." So wrote Mrs. John Eastlick, who lived to describe what she went through that day. In a matter of hours, no family was spared loss. Those who hadn't been killed took flight by way of the road east to New Ulm, fifty miles away. 

With the Dakota warriors in pursuit and gaining ground, they determined to hide as best they could in a slough, a low spot in the land with big blue stem tall enough to conceal them, a place that afforded little cover from the rifle fire that soon enough rained down from here, a high spot in the rolling plain. 

Fifteen white settlers--three children from the same family--were murdered in the fight that followed. Eight women and children were captured somewhere down the hill beneath the commemorative rock. 

In 1925, a monument was constructed over the mass grave of fourteen victims of the massacre at Lake Shetek. Visit the park sometime. You can't miss it.

Not so, however, with Slaughter Slough. Take the gravel--it's the only way, and you'll have to hunt to find it. When you get there, almost certainly you'll be alone. That's okay. Just stand out there above the slough and look over open miles of country, acres of it kept that way by the National Wildlife Refuge System, who maintains the restored prairie wetlands to benefit the waterfowl in the region. The silence all around is only fitting.

I honestly don't know what to do with our Slaughter Sloughs. Is there a statute of limitations on tragedy? How long should the county leave the makeshift monuments people erect along the roads to mark the places where loved ones died? What's the proper season for grieving? Shouldn't we finally forget the Holocaust? Who really cares anymore about the bloody murders of white homesteaders--or the thievery that characterized our own "Manifest Destiny"? So what if my ancestors took virgin land from those who lived there, believing those people weren't really human at all? That's almost 200 years ago. Ancient history.

Maybe we can't do better than visit once in a while, stop by Slaughter Slough and stand quietly in the company of sunflowers waving in incessant winds--and here and there hard-working shorebirds. Maybe standing out there some time and listening to the voices who still tell the story all around is what we all need to do, just get out there and listen. They're there. I swear it--they are. 

Morning Thanks--Louis of the Parsonage

The thing about George is, he's just about perfect from page one. He's one of those naughty boys you can't help but love because he's not really naughty but curious--curious and devout, devout beyond belief actually, but that's what little books like this are all about, in 1938 and yet today. George of the Parsonage is just another day at Sunday School--"kiddie lit for Jesus."

The story itself is kind of dorky. George of the Parsonage long ago lost its edge, if, in fact, it ever had it. It's a cute little story about a cute little boy in a cute little world that never existed, nor ever will, a world created for yet another cute little kid to enjoy.

It came to me from a third party, someone asked to clean out a retired professor's library because the retired professor and his wife were moving and needed to do slimming down. "You can have all of Lou's library," the professor's wife told my friend. "All" included slim, little George of the Parsonage, a gift from someone whose name isn't quite legible, Christmas, 1938: Marie Green, I think.

Back to the story. George's father is a preacher, who's just moved to a new church in a new place. Their adjustment is a little thorny, but not a horror. George, the baby of the family, innocently wanders down to a shady part of town to find new friends--worrisome maybe, but then you haven't met George or his brand of piety (not a dime's worth of self-righteousness). He's a perfect kid--not necessarily a good kid, but a perfect kid.

[Spoiler alert.] Mom and Dad don't know where he is exactly, and he's missing church--what will the people say? But George is out on his own, winning over a crowd of street toughs from across the tracks, creating his own Sunday School. When Mom and Dad find him over there on the bad side of town preaching to really naughty boys, they're overjoyed as they all together march off to church. It's that kind of story.

The charm of all of this is the story created by the book's inscriptions. The one above, front cover pages, was written twice--first in pencil, then in pen, as if to make sure the story stays alive. 

Who was Marie Green? I suspect we might discover her on the membership pages of the church where Louis Van Dyke's pastor/father held forth in 1938. Furthermore, I suspect--I'm guessing no one knows such things anymore--that this Marie Green (maybe with an e on the end) is a sweetheart mom herself--or grandma--who decided George of the Parsonage was a perfect fit for Louis of the parsonage down the street, a 10-year-old boy who had the misfortune of, once again, having to meet new friends in a new surrounding in a new church. I'm guessing Marie Green saw a little boy in need and thought maybe he'd enjoy the story of another little PK boy in need. 

Louis was ten. He makes that clear twice, once again at the end of George's story. Same handwriting, or so it seems to me.

So here's the storyteller's joy of George of the Parsonage (I have no clue if it's true). Once upon a time, Mrs. Greene, who attended a small-town church with a new pastor, ran across a darling little book about a preacher's kid, who'd just moved to a new town. Poor kid didn't know anyone, had to build up a whole new batch of buddies. A light bulb went on. She bought it, and gave it to the cute little PK as a Christmas gift. 

Little Louis liked it. His mother made sure he'd remember when he got it--and from whom. Books were a real luxury, late Depression. She told her little boy to write all that in the book, which Louis was happy to do, twice in fact, inside both covers. It was his book, not only because it was a gift either: Louis knew this George kid. They traveled some similar roads.

All of that was 80 years ago. 

These days the story is old and out of tune, the book's thick, yellow pages testify to its age. Susan McKinnon Miller, I'm guessing, hasn't picked up any fan letters for a long, long time, although if she's reading this right now from some home far away, I'm sure she's delighted.

No matter. There's grace here in George of the Parsonage, don't you think? This morning, I say thanks to Marie Green and the sheer delight of her very special Christmas gift so long, long ago.

The strangers in our gates

Thus did the Des Moines Register lead with a front-pager yesterday, the Sunday paper, a follow-up to Mollie Tibbetts' horrifying death, at the hands, allegedly, of an undocumented worker. 

Except the man who confessed wasn't, by definition, "undocumented." He had "documents," but they were falsified. He'd worked in Brooklyn, Iowa--and basically for the same employer--for several years. He was not a member of MS-13, nor was he unknown to others in the community. He was a murderer, a man who took the life of another human being, a young woman jogging along a road. 

Ironically, he'e worked for people who were politically involved and connected Republicans, a long-time Iowa farm family who run a dairy, not some kind of sanctuary city, people who dole out considerable financial support to the very Republican politicians who love to argue "law-and-order" when talking about the emigrants among us (even when they employ them). 

What the Register's article does is pinpoint Sioux County, Iowa, "an agricultural powerhouse," for its employment record with undocumented workers, the same Sioux County who in 2016 voted overwhelmingly (83.5 per cent) for Rep. Steve King, a virulently anti-immigration Representative who regularly mouths lines most Americans find not only tasteless, but bigoted, and racist. 

That kind of majority vote is monstrous, really. Consider the remarks attributed to Kent Pruisman, a Sioux County cattleman and former President of the Iowa Cattlefielders in the Register article: "If all of Sioux County's immigrant labor left tomorrow, we'd have a huge problem. . .We don't have the people to replace them. .  .Agriculture wouldn't be possible, because of the amount of immigrant labor needed in the dairy industry, in the hog industry, in the cattle industry."

Two thousand immigrant farm workers hold down jobs in Sioux County, Iowa. Take those workers away, send ICE in after them, put them on buses, and the county's economic heart goes into cardiac arrest. An old friend who is in charge of finding workers for a significant employer in the county says it's nigh unto impossible to get enough people to fill the jobs his company needs fill. Unemployment here is just 1.8 percent.

Years ago, an undocumented local resident, a good friend, described her first job at a local meat packer, where she jerked the brains out of bloody hogs killed just moments before. As Darrin Dykstra, of Dykstra Dairy, says later in the Register article, mothers don't raise their kids to work the kind of dirty jobs the agricultural industry requires. I wouldn't have wanted either of my children to get a job on a kill floor. 

Fixing immigration laws isn't as easy as Donald Trump and Rep. Steve King like to say it is--and they know it. Building a wall is not the answer to our problems, even if Mexico pays for it. Comprehensive immigration reform has to include some means by which a county such as the powerhouse we've become can hold on to its huge illegal workforce because without it, as Pruisman says, without them, "agriculture wouldn't be possible."

That's the simple truth.

Sunday Morning Meds--Deliverance

They spread a net for my feet—

I was bowed down in distress.  

They dug a pit in my path—

but they have fallen into it themselves. Psalm 57

A couple of thugs walk into a convenience store.  They threaten the attendant, and while one of them, the guy, is helping himself to the bucks in the till, his sidekick—probably girlfriend—spots a contest entry blank form, fills it out, dreaming of winning.  They leave, but the form she leaves behind lists her name, address and phone number.  Didn’t take cops long to get to their apartment.

A bank robber out east created a standard M.O.  He’d lug a bag into the bank, claim it was a bomb, clean out cash drawers, then leave the bag—telling the cashiers it was going to go off.  The bags he used were often filled with books—I don’t know if one of mine was among them. His undoing came when he left a phone book in one of those bags, a book he’d been mailed, complete with his address.  Jig was up.

Whether David might have been chuckling a bit when he thought of the cartoon irony he’s drawing here isn’t recorded, probably not.  The first half of verse six recounts his deep distress—“I was bowed down.”  But there is a kind of keystone cops act to what he describes—those enemies plotting and scheming, only, like dunces, to fall victim to their own nastiness.  What happens when evil turns inside out can be a hoot.

When things like that happen, people occasionally utter profound theological truths:  “Aha, there is a God.”  When sinners get theirs, especially when the “getting” is done at their own hands, all seems right with the world. Chaos is flouted, righteousness reigns.  The tunes we hear in the air is the music of the spheres.

Psalm 57 could hardly have been written in the middle of the drama. It feels like a camp testimony, really.  David’s opening-line distress—“have mercy, have mercy”—is short-lived, it seems. In verse four he documents the evil character of King’s posse, but the utter anguish of that first line soon seems not to have been utter at all. 

Here in verse six we get the whole story, which means the heart-felt cries of the first verse are already behind us. What happened that day tested him, he says—or sings—but that anguish soared into triumph when the dolts became the victims of their own dingy treacherousness.

We feel a peculiar joy when providence simply takes control. David’s deliverance isn’t as hard-fought here as it sometimes is.  This time, he barely had to lift a hand—or that’s what he tells us.

King Saul’s boys dug a pit into which they fell, headlong. What a riot.

God did it.  The whole thing.  It’s worth a chuckle to be attendant to his antic choreography. 

May his name be praised—and that’s David’s testimony.

Guy with a shotgun comes after the owner of a Chev Camaro, wanting the vehicle.  The owner gets out, scared, and the car thief gets in, grabs the keys, then realizes he can’t drive a stick shift. 

Feels so good when all is right in the world.  Bless His name.

Morning Thanks--Hoof'd in cup plants

They're a little heady, you might say, more than a little arrogant. They're capable of reaching great heights and then crowning themselves with an bouquet of sunflower-like beauty, a regular Fourth-of-July outburst thereof, a dozen flashy yellow blossoms that form a crown so ungainly it threatens itself and the whole show.

Look. Two plants on the right, less given to ego, stand perfectly erect, while the one in the foreground, on an ego trip, is well on his way to being lost.

For the record, they're named silphium perfoliatum, which is barely readable but sure to assure you some professional standing if you drop that phrase in any company of botanists. Philistines like me just call them "cup plants," which is far more homely, but quite fittingly to the point. 

And the point of all this is that I am this morning announcing that I've got 'em. Five years ago, one of my learned friends who knows his greenery, pointed out the genius of the silphium perfoliatum, and the darlingly self-descriptive reason for some genius calling them "cup plants." Look closely at that tall guy on the right. His leaves are fused to the stem. There's no little branch-like thing attaching those leaves. The basin-like leaves are simply part of the stem. (BTW, the stem is square--I don't know how to explain that other than to rely on the old bromide, "God just decided to order up square stems.")

I was talking about names. The Cup Plant (now upper case for stature) is called what it's called because its fused leaves become a series of bathroom sinks. A good healthy shower fills the sinks that grow up and down and out from the stem, husky storage containers for the water the cup plant needs to gain its substantial stature and that showy profusion up top.

That's all genius, don't you think? And it would all work out just perfectly if the plant didn't get all high-and-mighty, so tall and resplendent that even that square stem, a powerhouse, can't help but cave beneath that burdensome crown of flowers. In other words, were they abide by ye olde biblical principal--"everything in moderation"--they'd stand a better chance of standing. There's a month's worth of sermons in every plant, I think. 

On the other hand, the ones with most self-importance are the first to come back down to earth and replant themselves. While some keep their bouqueted noses in the air, the ones with the biggest you-know-whats get bedded first (I'm going to abandon the possibilites of this shameful metaphor. A Calvinist like me should be chasing down those sermons.)

The point of this is simple: I'm happy to announce that we've got them in the backyard prairie--three of them, two still upstanding, one fallen. But we've got 'em. They're just about in the middle of the prairie, and everything's tall this year so they're not easy to find; but they're there. I swear. 

Friends of ours gave us seeds last year, told me to take them out back and stamp those seeds into the ground in late winter, hoof 'em in as if I were a buffalo. So I did. 

Don't worry--no one saw me.

I must admit I stuck more than three into the earth, but only have, well, blossomed. If I know prairie, next year there will be more.

They really are ingenious plants, and showy too. I'm so glad to have them. Here's a healthy bunch along the Puddle Jumper Trail, trying to restrain themselves. I wish they were mine.

 

But then, Envy, I know, is one of the Seven Deadlies.

This morning, if I can rein in my pride, I'm thankful for silphium perfoliatum, the cup plant, and all the lessons they teach. . .and well, our plants especially, the three in our backyard prairie. Did I tell you I've got 'em? I'll try to snap a picture.

Precious in his sight

It's an odd title, Mystery Having Eight Mothers, and she didn't have an editor. You can't help but smile at an occasional misspelling, and often there's little rhyme nor reason why one section follows another, although the book is roughly chronological. Stuck between its hundreds of pages are aphorisms and occasional poems she really liked. In Mystery Having Eight Mothers, the writer--let's just call her "Tina"--made her life a miscellany.

The book is thick and wire-bound, the only color throughout is on a homemade cover featuring butterflies that otherwise fail to appear. She wanted me to read it--a real writer, she said. She blushed about the errors, but she brought it along anyway, proud because she'd done it herself. "You want to read it?" she said one Sunday.

Wasn't really a question.

But I'm a sucker for wire-bound memoirs old folks write for their grandchildren, memoirs that don't aspire to any New York Times list or even the local newspaper. Something about a life story is greatly compelling: we all want to make some sense of things, lament the sadness and honor the blessings.

That's what Tina had in mind. She wasn't asking for a blurb, just proud of Mystery Having Eight Mothers, and liked me enough to think I might enjoy it. About that, she was right.

Tina was born in Michigan sometime in the 1920s to a machinist and his wife, a woman who left him for good just a couple of months after she was born and took her kids back to her native northwest Iowa, then died in childbirth just a few years later, at which time all her children were moved to Grandma's. Grandma is Mother #2.

When both Grandma and her husband died not long after, Aunt Bert--her birth mother's sister--took them (Mother #3). Bert (let's call her) was just 18 years old. When her parents died, Bert took care of Tina, as well as two of her own brothers, still at home. Tina is still a tiny; she's lost two moms, and the third is eighteen, running a home with four kids. 

Aunt Bert fell in love with Tina's step-father, who, together, mid-Depression, soon had their own family. Tina's step-father, she says, "was the town drunk." The two of them couldn't handle the family she'd inherited, so they put Tina up for adoption.

The preacher arranged an adoption because he knew a couple who were miserable because they couldn't have children. Tina claims that once Mother #4 saw her, "they fell in love and could not leave without me." She was adopted formally and baptized in 1934.

Mother #4 was a delight, but she took seriously ill, went to Rochester, only to discover she had a severe brain tumor. When surgeons there attempted to cut it out, Mother #4 died. "She never came back home to us and I never said Goodby to her," so says Tina's wire-bound memoir.

Mother #5 was yet another grandma, 89 years old, who didn't only Dutch. Mother #6 was a sister of Mother #4, daughter of Mother #5, who moved back home to take care of their mother and this little adopted girl. When things didn't work so well, Tina was shuffled off to another nearby farm with her second step-father's sister, who became Mother #7, who had a daughter five years older than Tina. Great times they had playing with old clothes in the attic, she says. It was a sweet place, that farm home of Mother #7.

Meanwhile, her step-step father began seeing a widow nearby. When the two of them decided to marry, Tina says she knew Mother #8 didn't care much for her. Besides, Tina loved living on the farm with Mother #7. She was just five years old. Mother #8 and her second step-father gave her the choice. "Yes: I said I would love to live on the farm," Tina told them, she writes. She returned happily to Mother #7.

That's Mystery Having Eight Mothers. I think I got the order right. She could have used an editor.

And then she says this--her words, her punctuation, but not a separate paragraph:

"Psalms 27 verse 10 When my father and my mother forsake me. Then the Lord will take care of me. It was the Lords plan all through my adolescenced years."

It's a life--a real life. What we all want so badly is to make sense of things, order out of chaos.

In case you're wondering, that wire-bound memoir has lots about the wonderful years Tina lived with her husband--62 years of marriage to a loving man on a good Iowa farm. There's pictures, too--black and white. Lots of precious pictures. The kids too, and grandkids.

One of the books former President Obama placed on his well-publicized summer reading list is Tara Westhover's memoir Educated, a searing testimony to a treacherous life within the tyrannical obsessions of a survivalist father convinced the final trumpet is sounding soon and very soon. For a tangle of reasons, that memoir is a very tough read, a world away from Mystery Having Eight Mothers.

I told Tina I'd bring Mystery to the college archives down the road. She couldn't believe someone "at the college" would actually want it. I assured her they would.

I don't know if Sunday School kids still sing "Red and yellow, black and white,/They are precious in his sight," but it's a line that now and then sneaks out of the vault of my memory, a old mission hymn we today file in the "multi-cultural" section of the hymnal.

When I dropped off Mystery Having Eight Mothers at the college, that old mission lyric played again somewhere in my memory because the song's blessed multi-cultural character comes up secondary to the fact that, from Tara Westover to my friend Tina, we all have stories to tell, because all of us, every last one, as that old hymn will never let me forget, "is precious in his sight."

Someone's Singing, Lord--Pilgrims

Another 30-year-old meditation written specifically for high school kids (I wouldn't dare attempt that today). Like Monday's post, it's age is showing. But the hymn in question, "Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer" inspires, even if the meditation totters a little. Just don't miss the Welsh rendition of the hymn many people think of as a favorite. It's at the bottom. 

_____________________________________  

"Pilgrim in a barren land. . ."

Okay, vocabulary quiz. Which of the following is the best definition of a sextant?

a. a mutant species of bog fly called mungus phobus;

b. an instrument used for measuring angles in stars;

c. the church custodian;

d. a criminal convicted of naughty things.

No matter how appealing the rest of these definitions are, the answer, as the wizards among you already know, is b. For centuries, a sextant was an essential tool for bearded sea captains ready to ship out on the high seas. A sextant measures angles between the stars and the horizon and thus helps pinpoint exactly where a ship is.

A compass is another tool that travelers use to find their way. If you've backpacked out in the High Sierras or the Rocky Mountains, you've likely used this small device with a tippy magnetized needle that always points north. Compass in hand, one at least knows north from south.

High tech has put both the compass and the sextant in museums­ not because these old instruments don't work, but because today we have faster and more accurate ways of finding out where we are.

The people of Israel had no high tech-and no sextants or compasses either. When Pharaoh gave them the green light to leave Egypt and Moses tiptoed them across the Jordan, they had no way of determining which direction was which. They became pilgrims, wanderers, followers of a promise that Moses relayed to them from God-that somewhere out there lay a promised land, a home.

But, as "Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer" says, God gave his people guidance, a pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire. When they were hungry, he laid the ground white with manna.

I don't know a soul today who is out in the wilderness trying to fig­ure out his or her position. There may be open space at the North and South Poles, but for the most part the world's wildernesses are pretty well mapped.

But a lot of folks need guidance, even Christians.

That's what makes this hymn the prayer of so many--we all want a sure sense of footing down paths that lie before us, the kind of sure-thing guidance God gave the people of Israel. We want to know which school to go to, which friends to hang around with, what courses to choose, which job to take, what to do with the rest of our lives, who to date, how to deal with parents (or children!).

But today God doesn't work in fiery pillars. So sometimes it's dif­ficult to figure out which way he's guiding us. Sometimes God's will for our lives is mysterious. If it weren't, this hymn wouldn't be a favorite. If we could just call up God's will on a computer screen, we wouldn't be asking him to guide us.

But the great thing is, even when we're unsure, we know that God listens to us. We can always call on God, and there's no long-distance charge. He listens. He delivers.

This song is not the cry of the lost--it's a pilgrim's prayer.

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Here's yet another rendition, by a single church in Wales, where "Guide Me" is, I'm told, almost a national anthem. At the end of the English setting, these folks sing a line in their native tongue. Just to watch them is an inspiration.

Harmony--Yet another setting

Gall

This post is only a year-and-a-half old, and it's the kind of story that story-tellers love, instantly memorable and historically questionable. Anyway, because it's so good, and after yesterday's celebration of Welch musciality, I couldn't help posting it again. Same old hymn. . .wholly different setting.


Gall was no giant, but he had to have been built like grand piano, broad chest, sturdy muscular arms, and impressive, toned body. Custer's wife, Libby, once gushed that she had never "dreamed there could be in all the tribes so fine a specimen of a warrior as Gall."

When Gall stood up in front of the generals and diplomats at Ft. Laramie in 1868, at a time when the U. S. Government was offering the Indian people of the region their most beloved prize, the Black Hills, he wasn't in the buying mood, even though Red Cloud and his southern Lakota neighbors were ready to trade. Gall was recalcitrant and as angry as he'd ever been. When he stood up, he showed the white folks the museum of scars he'd picked up in countless fights with the white people streaming over Indian land, a testimony to his spirit, a warning.

At Ft. Laramie, Gall made clear he wanted no part of a settlement that would make the proud Indian people wards of the state. He wanted no reparations. He wanted freedom. He wouldn't sign the Treaty of Ft. Laramie.

His reputation as a fighter only grew. In 1872, he and his band took on a military escort for the surveyors plotting out the path of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Gen. David Stanley had come prepared with gattling guns that routed Gall's Hunkpapas so fiercely that some hack at the Sioux City Journal wrote, "If Mr. Big Gaul [sic] ever again attacks any party crossing the plains, he will…first look sharply to see if they got any Gatlins [sic] with them."

But, just four years later, along with this friend Sitting Bull, Gall had a place along the banks of the Little Big Horn. While Sitting Bull, a spiritual leader, never got his hands dirty during that famous battle, Gall rode fiercely in the middle of the bloodletting, as an Indian, but also to avenge the deaths of two of his wives and children.

For much of his life he'd determined that the only way to keep freedom alive on the American frontier was to fight the white masses threatening the Lakota way of life. The U. S. Cavalry knew him by the distinctive red blanket he always wore in battle. They called him "the fighting cock of the Sioux." 

After Little Big Horn, Gall and his people left north to Canada, where they stayed for four years until conflicts with other Native tribes arose, much of it attributable to the growing scarcity of buffalo. His people were weary and homesick, so they left Canada in 1881 and surrendered in Montana to Gen. Guido Ilges, who triggered a fight that killed eight members of Gall's band and then ordered them all to go to Ft. Buford, in North Dakota, even though a blizzard raged in temperatures that reached 28 degrees below zero. Gall's fighting days were behind him and them.

He and his Hunkpapas were relocated at the Standing Rock Reservations, where Gall met and learned to like Agent Major James McLaughlin, who was married to a Sioux. 

Something astounding happened to "the fighting cock of the Sioux." Rather quickly he adopted white ways. One summary of his life says it this way: "He believed in rapidly assimilating Indians into the nation’s economy as small farmers; Christianizing them was also a goal he shared with many advocates of Indian reform back East."

What exactly happened to change him, no one will ever know. Was that radical change attributable to his friendship with McLaughlin? Was it caused by utter physical and emotional exhaustion? Did he simply recognize that the waves of white people were a tumult his people could no longer battle?

There's another story I can't help but love. It may well be myth. It's difficult to separate truth from myth in the life of a man like Gall.

One Sunday, on his horse, he was riding slowly by St. Elizabeth's, the mother church of all the Episcopal churches on the Standing Rock Reservation, when from inside came the distinctive and beautiful sound of a hymn, music he'd never heard before. He stopped, listened, was moved deeply; and that moment, some say, became was the first step on the road to his conversion to the Christian faith.

From outside, what he heard through that open door of the church was "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah."

I don't know that I'll ever hear that hymn again without thinking of Gall.

Is the story true? Finally, I suppose, we believe what we want to, don't we?--what God gives us ears to hear.

Memorial at the spot of Chief Gall's church, where he heard the music.

Someone's Singing--Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah

We sang this song in church yesterday, and when we did I was reminded of a time when I spent a ton of time with the lyrics. I was doing a book of meditations for teenagers, something eventually titled Someone's Singing, Lord, thirty years ago. So this morning I went to the library and hunted that little book up--and found it. I looked at the first little meditation and still liked it. Hope you do too. 

If you've got three minutes, have a listen to a couple of thousand Welsh folks. Don't miss it. It's down at the bottom of the page. 

Be blessed.
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Turning a double play is an art.

A runner's on first when a ground ball is hit to second. The shortstop has to make split-second decisions--how to get to the bag at the exact moment the throw does, which side of the bag to hit, and how to get his own throw over or around the runner.

But that's not all. To work smoothly, the second basemen has to know what decisions the shortstop is making. The two need to work in harmony. That's the art of the double play: two players thinking--playing--as if they were one.

Dancers need to work in harmony too. A long time ago, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced their way through a shelf full of movies. Together though a moonlit garden, their bodies moved in perfect harmony.

Our word harmony comes from the old Greek word harmos, mean­ing "a joining or a fitting." Whether you see it or hear it in singing or dancing or making double plays, harmony happens when two or more things fit together, agree.

A woman I know who grew up in a church where the people sang psalms without an organ claims that sometimes today she misses the old way of singing because, she says, in her old church people learned to harmonize, to fit together.

There is something great about harmony, something haunting. You can feel it when you sing a round in church, each side's notes turning and spinning through each other to make the sound deeper and richer, transforming it into something almost alive.

My mother's family used to sit around our living room and sing together--sometimes happy little verses and silly songs. But the songs you couldn't laugh about were the ones I remember best,­ songs such as my grandpa's favorite, "Beautiful Savior." My family would sing those special songs in harmony. After the last note drifted away, no one would speak. They they'd sit there for a second in silence, as if there were no words at all.

The Welsh have the grandest tradition of harmony I know. Sometimes ten thousand Welsh people get together to make music, to harmonize, in a gathering they call a Cymanfu Ganu. Even in North America great armies of Welsh still gather to sing.

"Guide Me, 0 My Great Redeemer" was written by a Welshman for a Cymanfu Ganu. Its melody, a tune called CWM RHONDDA, is named after the the Rhondda river valley in the coal­ mining district of Wales--a place where a great singing festival took place in the early part of 20th century.

In two thousand years of Christendom, people have created lots of dreams of heaven--streets paved with gold, fat little angels winging around with harps and flutes, all kinds of folks in white robes singing, hours on end. Maybe there will be more than that. Maybe not. Maybe there will be dancing. Maybe some ballplayers will be turning double plays.

My guess is, one way or another, we'll harmonize, fit together like we've never fit before.

Sunday Morning Meds--Dominion

"You put everything under his feet." Psalm 8

When I took my first steps over native prairie—good, rich Iowa earth that has never been cut by the plow—I was amazed at how soft it was, spongy, in fact. The rich accumulation of centuries of perennials creates vast root systems, not to mention a mushy mattress of mulch. The cushion-y earth beneath your feet makes you feel as if you’re walking on a cloud.

Which is not to say walking is easy. There are places on the Oregon Trail, that mid-nineteenth century freeway west, where even today, a century later, wagon tracks distinguish themselves. After walking on native prairie, I understand why people kept to the trail--the prairie was not easy walking. The earth is not flattened; it’s humped and bumped beneath the heavy grasses. It's tough on the ankles.

At one time, on this ground where I live, there was many years of life underfoot. Today, that’s no longer so. If you want to hike on native prairie, you’ve got to hunt to find it because of all the states in the Union, Iowa, where I live, looks least like it once did. Fertile soil created by centuries of native grasses is, today, almost completely under till. Row crops run like power lines as far as the eye can see so that today, out here on the edge of the Great Plains, there is much, much less underfoot.

Some time ago I showed a tour group around the region where I live, offered them a little local history. Most of them, like me, were Dutch-American. I told them what I just told you—how spongy and rich the Iowa land was when it was untouched. I told them how awed Lewis and Clark at the vast tall-grass prairie that existed all around.

The thought occurred to me, right then and there, how the story I was telling might be different if we’d been touring fifty years ago. I’ll bet the back forty that I would have been bragging about how hard work and buckets of sweat had subdued the earth, turning all that dense prairie grass into endless money-making rows of corn and soybeans. To people whose ethnic past includes turning the sea into farmland, the row crops all around us would be proof of how hard we'd worked to tame the prairie.

Today, we’ve so completely altered our tall-grass prairie landscape that 99 percent of it looks nothing at all like what it did. Today, I wish my grandchildren could see at least something of the great sea of grass that left the Lewis and Clark speechless. I wish they could slog through verdant prairie grasses. I wish it was possible for them to get a sense of what this world was before the plow.

Dominion, David says, is what God gave us—what a blessing. We rule. Over the works of his hands, over God’s own creation, he gave us rule. What’s at the heart of things here in Psalm 8 is sheer awe. Humankind rules over a vast range of flora and fauna. Why on earth should God almighty care so much for lowly us?—that’s the question that makes David's mind spin.

What an immense blessing—this dominion we’ve been given. What admirable authority he’s given us. He’s put so incredibly much under our feet. In a way, he’s signed over the works of his hands and blessed us therefore with his own treasured abundance.

Lord God Almighty, thank you for your love and your kindness and your regard, your faith in us.

Now help us, please. Guide our hearts and hands and minds to help us know best how to rule.

             

Small Wonder(s)--St. John's Bible

Creation

He's the Queen's scribe, the man--the artist--responsible for the creating England's most important state documents. He's the royal calligrapher, an artist, a past chair of the Society of Scribes and Illuminators, a word so rare my spellcheck red-lines it.

He's a Brit of course, and he carries levels of sophistication capable of leaving Yanks like me stuttering in envy, despite our 250-year-old revolutionary history. 

Oddly, however, the story he relishes telling is of a morning walk to a place where the St. John's campus map told him there once was an Indian burial ground. There, in the quiet of pre-dawn, a fawn stepped out of the woods, simply stood and looked at him until her mother came along and unhurriedly drew her back into cover. 

Just then, a shadow moved across the ground beneath his feet. He looked up to see a crow passing over. Describing spiritual experience is as difficult as documenting it, as it has been since human beings began seeing visions; but right then the Queen's scribe, Donald Jackson, says he felt, in Collegeville, Minnesota, perfectly at one with nature.

He claims he carried that transcendent moment into the meeting for which he'd come to Minnesota, a meeting to determine how this grand idea of his--and others--would come to pass. The highest art for a true calligrapher, he'd long thought, would be an illuminated holy scripture. In a newly fashioned but old-fashioned way, he wanted to create a new Holy Bible, just as Benedictine monks had done for centuries. 

That bible, the St. John's Bible, is something unlike anything you've ever seen. Today, it has its own museum on the St. John's campus. As the monks at the abbey like to say, that Bible "ignites the spiritual imagination."

With the same dynamic relationship that existed between medieval Benedictine houses and the scribes whose talents they engaged, Saint John's Abbey and University and calligrapher Donald Jackson, in collaboration with many from the wider community, produced a Bible, a work of art, which serves to ignite the spiritual imagination of believers throughout the world.

Yes it does. 

It's not quick and easy, and it's huge--two feet tall and three-feet wide. You can't carry it in a sport coat or slip it into a motel drawer. It has 1100 pages of paper thicker than anything in your or my library. Each page is 24 ½” x 15 7/8”. You can't just whip it out of a rucksack at a campfire.

But then, consider this: the only place in the world you'll find its particular lettering is in its pages. Donald Jackson designed its lettering for this volume alone. It has 160 illustrations--and illustrations pitiably understates what's there because those each of those illustrations is a work of art. 

Dinner at the Pharisee's Home

Everything about the St. John's Bible is stunning. It is to the making of books what the Sistine Chapel is to architecture. Protestantism has worked hard to destroy images, but often mistaken grace for idolatry. To a world who seeks it, the St. John's Bible preaches nothing less than beauty.

If you're in the neighborhood, stop by and see for yourself. It's worth a pilgrimage.

Still, the Queen's own scribe can't help but smile when he remembers how, once upon a time on a pre-dawn walk through an Indian burial ground in Minnesota, he felt himself totally alive in the eyes of a fawn, the flight of a crow, and the face of a rising sun. That transcendent moment was itself a birthplace, he says.

Word became flesh