Sunday Morning Meds--He speaks

There is no voice or language where that voice is not heard. Psalm 19

“Israel’s singer of songs”—that’s what old King David called himself just a chapter or two before he died. If it wouldn’t be for the medley of great tunes rising from every Bible printed on earth, we might think the old monarch a bit forward about his abilities. But the Psalms speak for themselves. As do the heavens, the triumphant subject of Psalm 19.

You can feel it here, I think, David’s own poetic soul, that which made him Israel’s greatest singer. It’s just not enough for him to say that the heavens preach God’s glory. For David’s rhapsodic sensibility, it’s just not enough to sing out the joy of knowing that heavenly sermon is aired, literally, day after day. He’s on to a truly divine idea here, and the poet in him is not about to let go.

What he might have said in verse three is that there is no nation or tribe where the voice of the heavens is not heard. He might have said there is no city or town, no country or habitation where the sky can’t sing praise. But Israel’s best singer lovingly tweaks that savored metaphor one more time and says that there is no speech or language where God’s heavenly word isn’t there just for the listening. God’s heavens speak universally.

There’s no Babel of languages here, no multi-culturalism, no quilt of ethnics. The sky creates a divine melting pot all over the world because everyday, on every square inch of the globe, people can hear God’s glory preached in a language that transcends verbs and nouns and retained objects. That’s what astounds the poet. That’s what makes him sing it again and again.

What the psalm offers is immensely radical for any limiting theology. What David is saying is that God speaks to us in Orion, the Big Dipper, and a harvest moon. His voice is the dawn, the dusk, and searing heat of midday. He’s there over us, every minute of our lives, telling us about himself, a language we might simply call azure.

What is at once most scary and most triumphant here is God’s democratic disposition, the fact that this speech of his, that which literally surrounds us every day out here beneath the open skies of the prairie, is as accessible anywhere, to all tribes and all nations—even to our enemies.

Not long ago I listened to a woman from Laos tell a frightening story of her escape across the Mekong River. Five adults swam alongside a boat barely bigger than my desk, a leaky little skiff that filled with river water just about as fast as the children inside could bale it out. She prayed and prayed and prayed for deliverance, she said.

Only recently did she become a Christian. When I asked her who she was praying to in those years before she knew the Lord, she told me that she didn’t really know—not even then, up to her neck in the waters of Mekong. She says she didn’t know who was listening.

Now she does, she told me. Now she knows Jesus Christ.

On that scary night on the river, I’m guessing that she was praying to whoever it was she’d heard in the sermons preached by the sky. And I’m thinking—and I want to believe—that He was listening.

           

"What a Man Would Do" (iii)

Mom and son talk.

__________________ 

"We'll talk about it later," Mom says, opening the dishwasher. "You go practice piano. "We got things to talk about--me and your brother."

"What things?" Steph says.

"Things you don't have to hear."

"That's not fair--"

"We got things, too," she'd tells her, "your brother and me. You and I aren't the only ones with personal stuff."

She'd known everything, his mother had--who was at the party, what and how much there was to drink, what time people left--the whole sorry mess. Somebody came into her office, she'd told him, some teary girl, and spilled her guts.

"I want you to know that I know," she says. "But I want you to know this too--I'm breaking every law in the book by talking to you like this. It's unprofessional, but I'm doing it because you're my son," she says. And then, "A girl came to see me--"

Had to be the one called Adrie.

"She told me about this party with Mallard guys. At Sumner's house. She said it was at Angie Sumner's house on Apple River Road--Friday night."

He carried their glasses to the cupboard.

"Don't run away," she says. "I know very well somebody is getting by with it, and it's not right, Darren. It's not right and you know it, because you know what happened."

What did he know?--I mean, really. That he shouldn't have been there--sure. That he'd been with this chick he shouldn't have been with, not with Kristine out of town--he knew that too. That some guys had too much to drink--yeah. That things happened--okay, things happened. But if those women didn't want they heat, they shouldn't play with fire. He flipped open the dishwasher and started pulling out dishes.

"You were there," she says. "I'm sure you were. Kris was out of town. You didn't have a date. You were out with the boys, right?

Out with the boys, she says.

Adrie has got to be the one spilling the whole mess. No dream date either. Got hips like a sow. "Guys want a party?" she says when they saw them in the square. What did she expect--church?

"You were there," his mother says again. "What happened?"

He put the glasses in the washer, slipped the plates like a deck of discs into the bottom rack.

"What happened, Darren?" she says again.

"You already know," he told her. "What'd she tell you--this girl?"

"I want your side," she says. "I've breaking confidence just mentioning it."

Who gives a crap about confidence when the three of them are living in Andy's Mayberry podunk town because everything in their lives fell apart when the old man left? Who gives two bits about some promise to some big party girl animal cruisin' for guys anyway? Who gives a shit?

"This girl came to me," she says, "because she didn't have anybody else--couldn't tell her parents--you know how people are around here, how strict." He can feel the way she's talking at his back, and she's mad. "This girl doesn't want anybody to know what happened--because of the beer, Darren." And then she says, "Dammit, look at me. Come back into this room and sit down. I mean it."

He could have told her to back off, but he would have killed her. He could have sworn at her, but he would have broken her back. She was double-barrel mad. But he hadn't done anything except cheat on Kristine, and that wasn't the big deal because it wasn't anything to speak of. That wasn't what his mother was after either.

"What a Man Would Do" -- (ii)

Mom and the kids left Shorewood when her husband did, left for small-town America, where she hoped maybe all three of them could get back on their feet. The kid--Van Baren--is mad, at her, at him, at the whole world. They'd left suburban Milwaukee for the sticks, and he doesn't like it, doesn't like anything really. 

_________________________________ 
So he and Steph went to Mallard High School and his mother taught at Dickinson, and they were forever away from Shorewood, where he would have been on an ace track team if it wouldn't have been for his whoring father, who never gave them diddly except for money, really. Plenty of that. "Need this?--sure." That kind of thing. 

That was the bottom line with the old man, he told himself. Bastard took some hot-pants accountant or something to the cottage, their cottage, and planked her right there where his own family had spent what people called "quality time." Found himself a brand new sweetie, something with sparkle to haul around on his arm. Burned his mother but bad with a hot time in the old family cottage. Isn't that the American way? And he was doing it for more than a year already when his mother finally caught on to what the old man was doing at the family cottage. Family cottage--sure.

The kid from Dickinson let out a throw that got out to maybe 130 feet, but he spun out and flopped in front of the circle. The judge didn't yell "foul" because he didn't need to.

"Van Baron, Dickinson--up," the judge yelled.

Dickinson--his mother's school. Guidance counselor. Divorced woman she was--"tell your problems to somebody who's already seen it all." That's the way he had it figured.

Last night--Monday--she'd cooked up something special. Soup mix over chicken and rice, something with onion in it, and peas, a hot dish, something different he'd recognized right away as either a treat or a guilt trip or something weird. Most of the time she'd come back from school dead tired and stick something frozen in the microwave. Not last night. Hot dish in a casserole. Fancy rolls he and Steph liked--those big, flaky round things. Some kind of special night--he'd recognized it right away, but she didn't say a thing right off. That's what made him think it was guilt. "We don't eat well. Don't eat the right kinds of foods," she'd say sometimes, punishing herself, and then start on a crusade of pot roasts, stuff like that.

You couldn't really tell about her since the old man left. His mom was different. They all were--he was too, and so was Steph, his sister. The whole world belly-flopped when the old man picked up the bunny and burned them all. His mother was tougher in a way, but sometimes not. More scared probably, sometimes soft as a girl. Maybe that was to be expected. She got her bell rung. She's running down the field, doing her thing, and out of nowhere the old man blindsides her. That's the way it seemed, although maybe he didn't know everything either--maybe she'd known a whole lot more than she ever put on before the whole mess blew up. Maybe she had something figured about the old man--something she smelled. Mom wasn't dumb. And in a way they got closer too, the two of them--him and her. Probably had to, really. All she had left was him and Steph.

Steph was too young to get the whole picture. Last night, his mom had this whole banquet thing cooked up, but Steph didn't know how to read her, didn't figure the fancy catering and the silence was covering something. So the whole time they were eating, Steph kept up this silly seventh grade jabber. All during the meal and even after, when they're cleaning up. "Leslie's parents let her go out with Paul," she says. That wasn't news, it was a gripe. "You know?--Leslie Friedley?--the one with the hair, Mom? She can go out on weekends and she's not even thirteen."

What she meant was, why can't I?

"We'll talk about it later," Mom says, opening the dishwasher. "You go practice piano. "We got things to talk about--me and your brother."

"What a Man Would Do" -- (i)

Long ago, I threw the discus. For a kid in a little high school, I wasn't half bad--went twice to state, once got sixth. Other than that, this isn't my story, even though I wrote it.  There's no prototype really, even though early in my profession I was a high school teacher. The only bit of story I picked up won't occur until the last day--maybe second--of this series, this story. 

"What a Man Would Do" is one of the last short stories I wrote. I know it was published somewhere, but I haven't a clue where anymore, probably as many as a dozen years ago. 

It's not nice. It's about rape--or attempted rape or something; but I thought I'd put it up for as long as it runs for two reasons: 1) my wife and I will be gone for two weeks, looking around Italy at some of the world's most beautiful and celebrated art. I won't be able to keep up this blog.

And 2) because the issues this story raises are about as old as any--the conflicts between genders and among 'em. Accusations of rape are sounded in this story, and problems are pretty much left unresolved, as they almost are when there is he said/she said. This one take a bit of a different tack, however, in that the opposing parties and son and mom--and the behavior of a dad who left them both behind. 

If you can stick with it, I do hope you like it. 

His head wasn't in it, and he knew it. Not until he stepped into the circle and pulled himself into a crouch did he realize the wind was gusting from the west, perfect for a record. Any other day he would have felt it first thing in the morning. But the meet was the last thing on his mind.

He pumped three or four more times, carrying the disc behind him, then, in three quick turns in the circle spun every bit of anger and frustration into his hand, his fingers, and the disc, heaved it out and up with a grunt he had to fake. The big wind picked it up, but turned it over way too fast and it dropped dead, ten feet inside the chalk line.

"Good throw," the judge said.

Like hell. He stepped out of the ring from behind and saw his coach leaning up against the fence, showing him thumbs up, a big smile on his face as if the throw were major league. "Don't forget that 200," Coach mouthed, pointing behind at the track.

Darren nodded and turned back. Some kid was poking a metal pin in the ground where his disc had sliced the turf. At best 153, he thought. The difference between big time and playground stuff was having his head together. And his wasn't.

And he knew why. He knew very well why. Saturday night was why. It hadn't been his party and it hadn't been his booze. The whole business of going over to that girl's place wasn't his idea of a good time. He didn't like it the moment the guys he was with decided they were going. Didn't like it because of Kristine being out of town--sure, but his girlfriend wasn't the whole reason it was a bad deal either. There was more to it. The whole idea of some big-time party with some women from some other school--it was trouble, right from the start. But he hadn't said a thing. That was his fault.

"Hensley, Dickinson," the judge yelled, and a tall kid with glasses stepped into the ring.

It was a dual meet, and nobody expected him to lose. He could have taken first place simply by standing at the edge of the circle and grunting out one humungous reverse. That's what he felt like doing--perfect wind or not. Just grunt one out, win this thing, and get the heck out of there.

"Dickinson" it said on the guy's jersey--his mother's school.

And moving--moving out of Shorewood wasn't his idea either, wasn't his fault. It was his mother's idea, picking up the pieces and coming to a town nobody'd ever heard of, just down the road from the school where she'd taken a new job to start all over again. "I don't want to live in a glass house, a single mom in a small town--new and everything," she'd told them. "I don't want to live in the same little town where I teach." She'd looked at him, the oldest. "You don't mind, do you, Darren?" she'd said. "What's the difference?--I'm the one who's got to commute."

What did he know about small towns? The only place he'd ever lived was Shorewood. What could he say? Besides, he'd seen her broken, his own mom coming apart at the seams when his father left her behind like dried-up bait. And he'd been the one to hold her up. He'd held his mother in place himself for more than a couple months or she would have tucked away in some loony bin.

Our world, just about now, nine years ago

Just about ten years ago, I was out southwest of town with the camera. In preparation for a trip to Italy, I thought I'd try to quickly learn how to put together a video in this kind of system.

Sweet morning, as I remember. Then again, if I'd forgotten, I'd have a record, I guess. 

Morning Thanks--our Monarchs

It's a girl.

And, no, she's not being manhandled. She can take it, the naturalist says. Not to worry. For this little demonstration, she plucked one from a branch, pinched it delicately to open its wings and to reveal that this little beauty is lady. Men have spots down there on the bottom of the wings, and women have stronger lines, so this one's a girl. 

Who knew? Not me. 

They're unlikely rulers, these monarchs, so feathery fragile that they appear to be wholly unable to govern; but gorgeous they are, maybe like the royal family. If they qualify for their name at all, they do so only because they're the fairest of nature's fair, at least out back of our place. The truth is, they flit drunkenly from flower to flower, alight when there's bounty, then feast on whatever nectar they locate, nature's most delicate royalty.

For years, my father-in-law walked his bean fields, corn knife in hand, to knock down the blasted, persistent milkweed. He knew where it sprouted amidst those soy beans, because he knew very well he never got 'em all. They'd come back like a plague whenever and wherever you knocked 'em down. 

Once upon a time, those surgical swipes we took when walking beans was the only way to stop them. "They've got lateral roots," I remember him telling me when I came along, similarly armed. "If you knock 'em down here, they'll only come back there." 

Made the job feel like an endlessly frustrating county fair midway game until herbicides came along. Milkweed started getting, well, rare, so rare that crowds of these flighty little beauties seemed to thin, milkweed being their all-time favorite feast. It depends, I suppose, on how you measure your losses, but fewer monarchs seemed to leave the world a whole lot less beautiful, at least to me. 

It may well have been an off day, but a half-dozen years ago or so, I took my grandson to Oak Grove Park to tag monarchs. We got a wonderful lesson in butterfly lives, then took to the woods in search of these beauties, but found none. Not one. It was a beautiful day, the naturalist did a great job, but we saw no monarchs. None.

That didn't mean there weren't any. It's just that right then, they were probably all at a rock concert or a ball game. Maybe a swarm had stumbled on a warehouse of nectar. I don't know what happened, but that day they weren't to be found.

Saturday morning, a half-dozen years later, same place, same time of year, they were all over. All's right with the world.

Even so, they're packing right now, I guess, because some of them--the ones mysteriously chosen to be outfitted with the strength of wing a 3000-mile trip requires--will soon catch wind currents to southwestern Mexico. If any specimen of Noah's Ark collection seem ill-fitted for such a trek, these darlings, with their paper-thin wings, do so seem. What they do, year after year, is truly epic.

This young lady won't make it back to Oak Grove Park, but her descendants just might, and her people will. 

And that's just wonderful because out here on the prairie, as slender and slight as royalty could ever be, these fragile miracles, in all their tangerine glory, beauty to behold, still earn their name--they're monarchs. 

And this morning, they're blessedly deserving of my morning thanks.

Sunday Morning Meds--"The God of glory thunders"

The voice of the Lord is over the waters; 

the God of glory thunders, 

the Lord thunders over the mighty waters. Psalm 29:3

I was born and reared not all that far from Lake Michigan’s cold, western shore, close enough at least, to be able to hear the way a fierce west wind made it anxious to flood its beaches and angry about being confined. Once upon a time, a neighbor of mine went out after king salmon with his son, but they found themselves in the middle of a storm that flipped their fishing boat as if it were cardboard. They had to be fished out of the lake themselves, and for some time they lost their taste for salmon.

           

Last summer on a sweet little northern Minnesota lake, I slipped out of our dark and silent cabin while my wife was asleep, climbed in a little aluminum Lund, and took off about a half mile or so east, never all that far from shore, hoping for a walleye or two. A wind and a chop and even a little breaker or two came up, so I high-tailed it back. That weightless little boat, heavy-laden with overweight me back there with the engine, threatened to come right back up over my head more than once in that wind, and I got scared—I mean, scared.

           

What’s most horrific about storms on water—or, in water, as we learned again this week--is the sheer powerlessness one feels. Stephen Crane’s old classic “The Open Boat,” is a study in human powerlessness.

Because I am a “can do” person, maybe too much so, nothing is more fearful or more humbling for me than to be confronted with something I can’t do.  Maybe a month ago, hail rode along with gigantic winds and had the two of us cowering, scared to death it was going to take out windows. Most any time of year, the wind’s howling can paralyze you; there’s no on/off switch to hit. 

Maybe that’s especially so for the high-and-mighty, the potentates David addresses in this psalm. When your every wish is a command, the only voice you can’t shush is a monsoon. So much the worse if you’re on a ship.

           

I can’t blame those scaredy-cat sailors for dumping Paul into the stormy sea. In the grip of that monster storm, they tried every last weapon in the arsenal to get relief. “Here, take Paul,” they prayed, scape-goating, hoping for the god of the roiling waters would be appeased.  People do almost unforgivable things when they’re desperate. We all do.

           

Verse three begins a ten-verse litany of extolling “the voice of the Lord,” specifically his awesome power in nature. Native people who lived with volcanic eruptions almost always identified some rapscallion deity in the bowels of the mountain because it’s hard not to when all we can do is cower.

           

Think about this, Presidents and Prime Ministers, he says: think about the way a tsunami shrugs off ostentation. Think about being shaken down by 8.3 on the Richter scale. Consider, o high-and-mighty, an F-5.

           

In a minute, in the twinkling of an eye, God almighty has erased entire kingdoms. We all live in little aluminum fishing boats. Sometimes the best we can do is silent prayer.

Lake Floyd returns

Let's just start here.

There are hundreds, no thousands of people in the Carolinas who can do nothing but watch trillions of gallons of water from Hurricane Florence slowly move east to the sea, in its path, little but destruction. Rivers have turned to seas. Half the counties in the state of South Carolina are under flood warnings. In many places, rebuilding will actually be starting over.

Just yesterday, the biggest wildfire in California state history, the Mendocino Complex was contained, 100 per cent contained. It's entirely possible you've forgotten the destruction; just for the record, the Mendocino Complex burned California for two months--hundreds of homes, 500,000 acres. The Mendocino National Forest won't really reopen until December. Some people lost everything. Everything.

Just for the record, it's been a good year for tornadoes, one of the best, in fact. Not one  touched down during the first half of the year. But, also for the record, almost 800 were reported, and of that almost 600 were verified. You can't tell victims it was a good year.

What I'm saying is, I once cried out because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.

In Sioux County, Iowa, lots of folks are shop-vac-ing this morning, trying to stay ahead of water oozing in from wonderful northwest Iowa ground that's saturated from endless rains (in September!). My neighbors had it bad yesterday, when the river rose into a sea, and for them it's not over yet.

My feet down here in the basement are still dry, for which I'm thankful. We have no water in the house, but yesterday Lake Floyd broke records it set just a few months ago. Flooding shut down the road to the bridge for the first time and crept--sometimes slowly, sometimes not--all the way up to our rock garden, maybe twenty feet farther than it had ever crept before. 

Sometime around 5:00 the heavens determined to send one final typhoon, so much rain in raging wind that outside our windows it seemed a blizzard. Sideways rain, maybe five minutes worth, and all of it at the very time when the monster out back was coming up ever closer to the house than it had ever done. 

When, earlier, it poured in over the field behind us, I was more than anxious. Barbara claims that when I called her, my voice was shaking. Truth be told, the last two floods didn't scare me, in part because I truly believed we'd already had our one-hundred-year flood, the flood to which nothing could compare. Wrong. The neighbors said we were nowhere near the crest. I didn't need my wife to tell me my voice was shaking.   

Here's what I'm thinking the morning after. First, it's no darn fun to be powerless. It's strange to sit here and realize that nothing can be done to stanch what simply will happen. We picked things up off the basement floor, and could have, I guess, called someone with a dump truck to bring in sand for a makeshift dike (a guy offered), but powerlessness is a  malaise, something I swear you feel in the stomach, even though it's affects the soul.

Second, it's not that difficult to understand why, on Black Sunday, in 1935, some fine religious folks were sure the end of the world was upon them. No, I wasn't that petrified, but the stark realization that what's coming is so much bigger than you are combines with our instinctual urge to understand what's happening--all of that helped me to understand need. 

At the worst of times, I didn't feel somehow as if this was the apocalypse.  But I was reminded of something an old preacher told me long ago, when he said that during the really bad times, some believers, out here, used to hang their hats on Habakkuk 3:

Though the fig tree does not bud
    and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
    and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
    and no cattle in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
    I will be joyful in God my Savior.

How incredible that commitment really was, and how difficult.

Impossible Thanks

At Calw, the pastor saw a woman gnawing the raw flesh off a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding...In Rhineland [the city magistrates] watched the graveyards against marauders who sold the flesh of the newly buried for food ....Acorns, goats' skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms....

Cicely Veronica Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War is loaded with passages equally repugnant. She found it difficult, I'm sure, to describe the scene without documenting the bloody horrors all around.

Between 1618 and 1648, political and religious hatred teamed up to create a war in which the Austrians and Swedes and just about anyone else looking for power on the continent took turns thrashing the very life out of the German people and countryside.

To those who lived through it, the steel wheels of that war must have seemed to grind on endlessly. So many thousands deserted farms and homes for protection in the old walled-in cities that, soon enough, there was no room.

At Strassburg, Ms. Wedgwood says, the living shut their windows to death groans just outside. In winter, people stepped over the dead bodies all over the streets. Finally, when the city knew it could do no more, the magistrates threw out 35,000 refugees to terror and death outside the walls.

Spring came in long days of warm rains that kept the earth moist and rich for disease that flourished in the hot summer sun that followed. Plagues swarmed through the streets in gusts of warm wind. Outside the gates, law and order crumbled into dystopian chaos as men formed marauding, outlaw gangs who murdered each other for food.

Sometime during the final years of that war, Martin Rinkert, a preacher in his hometown of Ellenberg, Saxony, found himself, not by choice I’m sure, in the heart of all that horror, thick in the swamp of life-draining disease. Rinkert, the only clergyman left in Ellenberg, held funerals for up to fifty people per day. One day, that number came to include his own wife.

But sometime during those years—during the groaning persistence of the Thirty Years War’s evil, Martin Rinkert sat down and wrote a hymn that a thousand churches in a hundred different countries will sing sometime before Thanksgiving, a stately, magnificent tribute to the God he loved and worshiped, even though the world around him had seemingly descended into madness.

Thanksgiving—imagine that. Thanksgiving in the middle of all of that death.

“Now thank we all our God,” Rinkert wrote, his own nostrils full of the stench all around. In spite of the horror, the man was still counting his blessings and offering thanks.

Some stories have to be told and retold and retold again. Then again, some simply have to be sung.

In never-never land

I'm not altogether sure if it's good or bad to be out-of-it, so completely out-of-it that just about anything I read on a subject seems astonishing. I mean, I knew Bill Gates was mega-rich, that his philanthropy is astounding--giving 30 million for Alzheimer's research just lately; but the whole culture of Silicon Valley is something I know far less about than even the technology with which my new/used car is blessed, about which I seem to know very little.

If I were shopping for a guru, I might just choose Alan Jacobs, who formerly taught at Wheaton and is now at Baylor. In a review in the Weekly Standard, Jacobs reviews Valley of Genius, a book he claims fawns pathetically over the world of Silicon Valley by lauding the sheer genius of its miracles. Jacobs, who writes with his own thoughtful Christian perspective, finds that fawning distasteful. 

Many, perhaps most, of the readers of Valley of Genius will share this belief in the inevitable victory of our genius technocratic overlords. Some of them even welcome it. As for me, when I got to the end of the book, I thought, “Well, that was fascinating! Now let me just go take a long soak in a big tub of disinfectant.”

There at which he sneers is the vainglorious atmosphere borne out of the place's own rags-to-riches stories--and they are legion. That photo above accompanies the review and probably says it all. Those two kids, if like me you wouldn't recognize them, are Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniac, co-founders of Apple, Inc., presently the richest corporation in the world. You read that right. 

That picture is the Silicon Valley story, or so says Alan Jacobs of Valley of Genius, a book whose time may well have come and gone at the moment it appeared. Critiques go beyond the obvious: has Twitter made the world a better place? Hmmmmm. 

The line I found most interesting is the comparison Jacobs draws between the failures of Silicon Valley with decadence of ancient Rome. What Jacobs insists is that the outline of the Silicon Valley story is as old as the hills: yet another rise-and-fall saga, this time of the nerds, the filthy rich nerds. Except for Silicon Valley there's a twist:  

Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is the progenitor of the genre, had a simpler tale to tell, because he could show Rome declining in power as its ethical foundations crumbled. The moralistic among us can take comfort in such a narrative. It is harder to find satisfaction in reading about people whose moral decline is accompanied by ever-rising bank balances, whether you think the wealth caused the moral collapse or vice versa.

Moralists like me expect that ethical decline means economic decline; we feel comfort in such failures. But Silicon Valley's decline cannot be measured in dollar signs. The wealth, at least for the rest of us, remains unimaginable--and growing. As it will, says Alan Jacobs.

But then, two decades ago, the words borne by that cursor slowly moving across the bottom of the screen right now wouldn't be there, would they? And, if you're eyes are following them right now, you wouldn't be here either. My grandfather closed his blacksmith shop when technology made farm tractors affordable for just about anyone working the land. He must have wondered where the world was going.

I won't speak for Alan Jacobs, but I can't help but think that the old man in me is making his fully-expected appearance right about now (I am 70 years old) when I say "amen" to Jacobs' overall appraisal, especially when he says that after reading this glorified testimony to the grace of Silicon Valley, he'll feel refreshed only after a long bath in disinfectant. 

I know the feeling. That much I do. 

What hath God wrought? 

Book Review--Girls and Boys

Trust me--it's not my cup of tea.

But the recording was a giveaway from my Audible library, and it looked interesting because it wasn't simply fiction but a piece of writing meant for the stage. Audio books have a theatrical aspect to them; professional readers have to animate. But Dennis Kelley's Girls and Boys was, first of all, a theater production, a one-hour narrative drama, a one-person show. I didn't know a thing about Dennis Kelley, but I've always liked one-man shows myself. Besides, you couldn't beat the price.

The story? In a sentence, she married a whack job and there was hell to pay: that's the story line. But the guy bowled her over the first time they met. She didn't know him; they were standing in line for something; I've forgotten what; and when he kissed her. . .well, you know. That she fell for him when he wrestled her into submission is so politically incorrect that it's impossible not to note Mr. Kelley wrote Girls and Boys before Me, Too. 

Just before actually, no more than three years ago. He admits the script is dated. No thoughtful writer (no male writer for sure) would or should create that scene in the present climate of gender relations, even though every last form of imaginative literature used the trope for centuries. Leading men made a career out of stifling kisses. Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, Clark Gable all thus swept women off their feet, so to speak.

Despite that anachronistic start, Girls and Boys preaches a contemporary sermon. It's a male-basher. The woman who tells her story--she's unnamed--becomes a victim of the latent brutality her husband was, for a time, able to hide. What happens in the play--off-stage, of course--is the very worst that could. 

When it does, she can't help but wonder if what some sociologist claimed isn't true, that society itself is a construct created fundamentally to control aggression quintessentially male. Untethered by law, men would not only not use seat belts, they'd turn country roads into Autobahns. In a discussion of Girls and Boys at the end of the recording, Dennis Kelley says he doesn't like to think it's true, but he can't help wonder as much himself.

Nor can I. 

If he wasn't in the news constantly for the last month or more, I would never have heard of Drew Kavanaugh. Although my Democratic friends can't abide his taking Justice Kennedy's swing position on the court, fearing the right's total domination, he seemed to me as highly qualified as any nominee could be. What's more, the political theatrics that accompanied his nomination--the theatrics that accompany every nomination hearing these days, libs or cons--is itself frighteningly embarrassing and often obscene. 

I have no idea if this psychology professor from California is writing her own one-woman show. I doubt it greatly, but she may well be. Our capacity for making up stories is legion. What actually happens in life doesn't always follow rules. If what we're about to hear on Monday is a classic "he said/she said," the outcome, like the process, will be disaster. 

And the cons have so much to lose. White males may well love the Donald, but every other segment of society despises him--and, increasingly, them. Five white men going after Kavanaugh's accuser may well look brave or courageous or even considerate, but it will only to other white men, and women in MAGA caps.

Did he do what she says he did? I'd love to believe he didn't. But like Dennis Kelley, a white male himself, says, there are moments when he wonders, like the widow in Girls and Boys, and me too, if society hasn't been created simply to control male aggression. 

Morning Thanks--the lakeshore

Lots of heat this summer, and the whole lakeshore region was more dry than normal--so I was told. And then came buckets of rain--eight to ten inches in a week or so. Then a return to heat, so vivid it birthed gadzillions of mosquitoes that kept people indoors. Seriously, it was an angry mob. They were everywhere.

I went, as always, to the lakeshore at sunrise, an exercise which normally nurtures the soul. Saturday, mostly what I did was bat mosquitoes. Inside of a couple of minutes I swear I'd taken on at least a half dozen bites up top, where a bald head get mushroomy when the swells arrive.

The lake, mostly asleep, was unbothered and traditionally gorgeous, a pastel quilt seamless as far as I could see. But I conceded to the mosquitoes, turned around to return to the car, then noticed the sun rising and couldn't leave.

The sun's generosity crowns everything in early morning. There's gold everywhere. 

I think I could deftly slip the shot below into a collection of frames from Siouxland, and nobody would know the difference--a single tree against a wide open sky. This one reminds me of the old line about the prairie as a sea of grass, moving in the wind like waves. I could have grabbed this picture anywhere in South Dakota. 

Maybe. Maybe it's got to be lakeshore. Whatever its identity, it's just plain beautiful, and I knew it when I shot it. Some, you just know are going to be stunners. 

This one I couldn't snap on the Great Plains. It's all lakeshore. 

Stunning is what's always there at big dawn. This morning, a couple of days later, I'm still thankful for that Saturday morning blessing, busy as it was with those lousy mosquitoes. 

Here's what Calvin says: "When we behold the heavens, we cannot help but be elevated, by what we see, to him who is their great Creator, and find in those marvelous heavens, evident proof of his providence."

Sunday Morning Meds--to be blessed

1 Answer me when I call to you,

my righteous God.

Give me relief from my distress;

have mercy on me and hear my prayer.

2 How long will you people turn my glory into shame?

How long will you love delusions and seek false gods[b]?[c]

3 Know that the Lord has set apart his faithful servant for himself;

the Lord hears when I call to him.

4 Tremble and[d] do not sin;

when you are on your beds,

search your hearts and be silent.

5 Offer the sacrifices of the righteous

and trust in the Lord.

6 Many, Lord, are asking, “Who will bring us prosperity?”

Let the light of your face shine on us. Psalm 4

The very first word of the very first Psalm is the life’s wish of every last human being who has inhabited or is or still will inhabit this earth. 

What every last breathing soul wants is to be blessed, everyone—red and yellow, black and white; rich and poor; urban or rural cowboy; all genders; all creeds (and none); mass murderers and untrammeled saints—all of us want to be happy.

David’s characterization of the cry of “the many” here in verse 6 of Psalm 4 is thus perfectly understandable. He’s right. The questions we’re all asking are “Who can bring some joy into my life? Who can turn my mourning into dancing? How can I be blessed?”

Relative degrees of prosperity mean nothing. Those of us who live in the affluent West often suffer more emotional woes than those whose lives are at or below the poverty level. Which is not to say, of course, that the poor don’t plead the same question--which is, really, “who will help us?”

Even though the question David brings to our consideration is the question we all know, what he mean seems up for grabs. Spurgeon sees in David’s characterization an implied criticism of the wicked; they’re rapaciously sinful appetites are constantly a-whoring, chasing ill-fated images of happiness. But Spurgeon was "of his time," and his propensity for drawing lines between us and them is legendary. Years later, at least to me, drawing those deep lines is a tougher job than he ever found it to be.

I’m not sure David is lambasting the wayward in verse six. What we’ve just come from in this very strange little psalm is a promise sympathetically offered to sinners. “Here are the things you all should do,” David says, and then lays out his own 1000 BC 12-step program. He’s concerned. He wants their blessedness.

Furthermore, at the end of verse six he uses the collective pronoun us; it seems to me that what David is saying about people is meant to be about us, not just them. We all want somebody or something to "show us good." 

I may be wrong, but I’d like to read this verse as penitence, not preaching. That kind of reading at least brings some greater unity to the song. This odd little psalm began with a short but deeply felt request to God to be heard (vs. 1). Then, it turns to sinners and howls (“how long. . .”), but that tone subsides into a warmly offered how-to, a description of the means by which those far, far away from God can draw themselves closer.

In verse six—like verse one—David once again talks to the Lord, and I’d like to think he’s pointing at those who’ve listened to his little sermon. As he’s pointing, he’s asking God for the blessed warmth of his face on them, and on us, on all of us, asking to be blessed with blessedness.

I’d like to think that this isn’t a Psalm that shoves unbelievers into the fires of hell, but puts in a good word for those folk, who are just as affected as we all are with wanting to be blessed.

Shine your love on us, Lord, he seems to me to be saying. We’re all lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.

Morning Thanks--Oostburg CRC

The church where I grew up had no altar, no altar boys, and no priests. It had no wall-size portrait of Jesus Christ either, and certainly no images of Mother Mary. It didn't look at all like this. But the hymn these folks are about to sing (you can hear it at the bottom) is, in my mind, divine because with me at least, it's eternal. 

Wherever its sung, it conjures divine memories. We were steadfast and pious attenders. My parents loved church. They were active. They gave of themselves. My mother sang in the choir--she was a soloist. My dad was an elder, blessed with enough tinkering talent to fix the organ. If the organist called to say something was out of tune, by Sunday he'd have it humming. He was, as church people might say, a pillar. So was Mom.

They were devout. They believed what the church said and taught and believed itself. "My dad used to say that if you had doubts, it meant your salvation was assured because wrestling with God meant you knew He was real" --those were my dad's words, and his dad's before him. Once upon a time, Grandpa Schaap was the preacher in that church, a soft-spoken Dominie whose seminary diploma, 1903, in the Dutch language, is rolled up somewhere in this house. Lots of books in our library once belonged to him. I have his old beat-up King James. 

He opened the Word at Oostburg Christian Reformed Church from mid-Depression until just a few years after the Second World War, a long time. I remember him only faintly. I was just a child when he died, but he remains a presence. My dad used to quote him, in reverence, too.

"'I'll be able to tell what kind of father I was by looking at my grandchildren'"--that's what Dad used to say his father would tell him, a haunting line that'll always be a part of me. That it will, itself signifies his legacy--as well as my father's. 

Other hymns too--many of them Psalms--conjure my boyhood church bountifully, but none do it as completely as "Savior, Again to Thy Dear Name We Raise." It was the end of the Sunday worship, the end of evening service. We'd stand for the Benediction, then sing two verses of "Savior, Again. . ." in harmony that will always sound more gracious and beautiful than they might have been. 

All of that comes back, not because Sunday worship was finally over. I don't remember ever telling my parents that I wouldn't or even didn't want to go to church. Honestly, I don't remember even thinking it. I wouldn't have dared to say it, not because it would have meant a fight but because with words like that, I would have broken their hearts because they loved worship, and I knew it, even then, even when I knew no different. Every Sunday, "Savior, Again. . ." somehow sealed worship in my soul, and if I hear that old hymn I know it's never left.

Oostburg (WI) Christian Reformed Church

Tomorrow night, the church I grew up in, my home church, Oostburg Christian Reformed Church, will celebrate its 150th birthday. What began with a thrown-together meeting of a dozen or so contrarians--they were leaving another fellowship behind, after all--has lasted for seven or eight generations. Judged by the numbers, they may be as strong today as they've ever been.  

I feel honored to talk to them about all of that tomorrow night. The speech is written. It's not a sermon, it's a history, a personal history because after all I know best the church where I grew up, in the chapters of my own experience, in stories that include my mother, my father, their parents, and theirs before them, all the way back to the first wooden-shoed white men to come to Town of Holland, Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, a dozen years or more before the Civil War.

It's where I grew up, the church that nurtured me, a church my parents loved.

I hope that if family drops by somehow from the cemetery north of town, they leave proud on Saturday night. I hope that if old Rev. Schaap listens, he tells himself that, judging by his grandson, he wasn't all that bad a dad. 

I asked if the church if they wanted me to suggest music, but it was already chosen, I was told. 

And that's okay. But I know what we would have sung. Maybe we still will. 

Prairie Chic

Take bibs, for instance. They've never really gone out of style. Google 'em, and you'll find thousands, on hip models, too. And it's no wonder. If you've ever owned them, you know dang well they're like wearing nothing at all. It's no wonder they're the go-to in your basic prairie wardrobe, even if they're not Sunday-go-to-meeting. I've had 'em for years, more than one pair along the way, even though my wife, who's from the prairie herself, says she'll leave me if I ever wear them anywhere but the back forty. There sort of mostly for home.

No matter. What I'm saying is, bibs are always in. On the right people.

That's why I wasn't blown away when I noticed the Style section of yesterday's New York Times trumpet out the latest fashion sensation, what they call "prairie chic." Love it. "What’s behind a recent rage for designer ruffles, calicos, gingham and high collars?" the Times asked. "It’s a whole new breed of Pioneer Woman. Call her the Urban Prairie Girl (U.P.G.?)."

Love it. The prairie is finally in. For the first time since the dark days of the early 20th century, the Middle West, hemorrhaging population for more than a century now, may well become, well, chic. Mostly lily white--only occasionally not--hard-working, well-educated, conservative, stay-at-home folks (we gave you Trump, after all) might just become well, all the rage.

"The prints are Laura Ashley-esque micro-florals, calicos and gingham," the Times claims. "The necklines are high, sometimes there is a bib or apron, there is usually at least one ruffle."

It's happening on the streets of New York. Just read it yesterday. Try not to gasp aloud.
Here, look for yourself. 

Can county fairs, pot luck suppers, vintage John Deeres be far behind? "My Antonia has become Our Antonia, the Times quipped. Wonderful. 

Soon enough, I figure, we'll host waves of tourists, millions of iPhones snapping shots of corn and soybeans and us--at church, Friday night football, stopping for a cone at the Dairy Queen, checking out the chicks at Bomgaars. 

Got tattoos or rings in your nose? Time to let go of that silliness. Crochet yourself a scarf or mittens. Maybe a pair of potholders. Grow tomatoes. Join a Bible study. Slap on a seed cap. Stay home. 

Read a book. I got one. Set in South Dakota. A rarity for sure. I can make you a deal. Thousands will soon enough be ripping out their ear buds to read Ruth Suckow novels. The Music Man will be back on Broadway. There'll be ten thousand productions of anything with Laura Ingalls Wilder. 

Listen, if it's in the Times, it's soon to be sweeping the nation. Not just some hula hoop fad either. We're looking at the real thing happening, a miracle of a turn around.  We're in fashion. We're actually getting cool. 

It's settled, I figure. Wait till my wife sees it.  Soon enough, me and my UPG will be going to town in our bibs. Sure. 

Jonathan Edwards on 9/11

Not until I wrapped up my morning blogging ritual did I look down at the corner of the screen in front of me and see the numbers that will forever carry specific reference for all of us--9/11. . .

I think yesterday was the first time I didn't wake up with those numbers in mind. When, at that moment, I saw them, I felt as if I'd somehow erred in not remembering. But the post was finished, so I shut down Google Chrome, got up from my chair, and went upstairs to greet the morning. I wasn't so much bothered as surprised I'd forgotten. But then, maybe forgetting was a good thing.

The truth is, I haven't forgotten that morning, will always remember, oddly enough, that it started with firetrucks just down the block toward school. When I walked to work, smoke was still visible upstairs in the big garage on the corner. I never heard what happened, but I'll never forget walking by and seeing a fire that was of very little consequence, a fire I remember probably because it happened the day the Twin Towers fell.

By inclination and habit, I went to school early, never felt quite prepared if I didn't put myself in teaching mode an hour or so before class. That day--September 11, 2001, a van was waiting to bring my class--classes, actually, two of them--out to Highland, a kind of ghost town, 15 minutes west of school, the only field trip I ever took with that writing class. I've told that story dozens of times, I think, retold it here again just last year.

But this morning, September 12, 2018, a day late, I'm remembering at least something of the rest of the day. I had three classes that Tuesday--two sections of the writing class that got ushered out to the ghost town. When we left, the first class knew nothing about what had happened way out east; by the time we'd returned, the second knew only the strange story of a jet crashing into a New York skyscraper. 

"Dr. Schaap, did you hear what happened?" 

I hadn't. 

The radio told the story all the way out there, but I still believe the silence all around us on the prairie that morning was a blessing, a meditative retreat, the morning of 9/11.

TVs were on all over school by the time we returned. For a few hours, I'm sure, I watched. I don't remember much else of that day except my last class, American Literature I. I'd thought long and hard about whether to call it off. When it began, I told students they could leave if they wanted, such was the gravity we all understood by early afternoon. But I also told them that the warning for America not to be deterred had made me believe that going on was the best way to fight back. So, we had class.

The Puritans--Edwards maybe, "Sinners in the Hands of Angry God." I don't remember exactly, but I know it was a particular lesson plan I enjoyed teaching every year when we came to it. I think it might have been Edwards. What I do remember is that it felt odd to be up there talking about 18th century New England, the Great Awakening, about justification and sanctification. It felt odd, yet good not to talk or even think about those two giant buildings collapsing on themselves, killing so very, very many people in New York City.

It felt right. That's what I remember. 

When I first started teaching at Dordt College, we lived straight west of the campus. Most nights, I'd walk home late afternoon with a friend who lived a block short of our place. We used to glory in the classroom, really. We were both young and full of enthusiasm. I remember once when he looked at me and said, "Just think, we get paid to do this." We both giggled because even though teaching wasn't always fun, it was always a joy. 

That particular class, American Literature I, on 9/11, a class I almost ended before it had even begun, was a joy, an especially good one, even though around us a nation was stunned and grieving. 

There's a ghost town in my memory of 9/11, but, just as strangely, Jonathan Edwards was there too.