Billy, the missionary, and me--ii

I told you, starting out, that this story's got a bit of a stretch. If you haven't quit yet, there's more to come. Stay in the saddle.

Just about every great Western yarn's got a horse, as does this one. Now this John Miller, who shoulda' been dead because he was, once upon a time, the legendary Billy the Kid, and was, at the time of this story, living incognito not all that far away from the Zuni pueblo of western New Mexico, not a codger either, at best or worst, middle-aged--this John Miller, like any cattleman, loved horses.

This one--the horse in this yarn--was, out there in New Mexico, a thing of beauty and legends. His name was John the Flyer, and he was, by most people's standards, the quickest thing on hooves. John Miller, the outlaw, the cattle rustler, had eyes for John the Flyer and let it be known among the white guys who met at the Zuni pueblo to spin yarns that someday he'd have it, by hook or by crook, so to speak.

The guy who broke and owned John the Flyer bought him and another feisty mount from a missionary a couple days' ride away, but then lost one of those fine horses when he took off and ran somewhere into eternity--which is an expression the owner wouldn't have used because he was a preacher himself, also a missionary, although it's not recorded anywhere what he did say when that horse lit out.

No matter. The parson broke John the Flyer and was, ever after, the envy of the neighborhood when he rode that beautiful thing, swift as lightening, admired by everyone, including John Miller/Billy the Kid, who told a couple of his buckaroos he wanted it himself and was going to get it.

Now just a word about the parson/missionary. He'd come to New Mexico from Chicago, where he'd tended horses at a track, so he knew good ones when he'd spot 'em, and John the Flyer was just that. This man of the cloth was rounder as a preacher, a missionary who descended on whoever would listen (and many who wouldn't) with clear-throated admonitions to quit their wicked ways and turn to Jesus. Indefatigable, he was, and no respecter of persons because everybody, red and white, got sermons.

That didn't mean people listened. When he and his wife, Effy, finally settled across the river from the Zuni pueblo, most Sabbaths the two of them were just about the only living things who'd show up for worship. Empty rooms sucked the life out of him, and he got depressed.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

One day right about then, John Miller, alias Billy, stood beside the preacher's corral, admiring John the Flyer. Now the Parson had got wind of Billy's designs, and, like Peter the disciple, he wasn't a man to back away from confrontation, spiritual or otherwise. 

"What you want here, fella?" he might have said, something akin.

Miller probably told him he loved the horse. And then he looked at the preacher. "I was fixin' to steal him," John Miller said, right out front, "but then I realized he belonged to a preacher of the Word and that wouldn't be a right thing to do to a man of God." 

If you're thinking this horse story is going to end up at OK Corral, put it out of your mind. It's a story about a man people claimed was Billy the Kid; but it's also a story of a man of the cloth. Right about then and there, at the corral, the two of them shook hands. The missionary and the murderer became, well, good buddies, relatively speaking.

There's still more to the tale, but you'll have to wait until Monday.

Billy, the Missionary, and Me-- i

The only known picture of  Billy the Kid

Okay, it's a stretch, but what the heck. I'm lovin' it. 

Once upon a time, in true Western lore, Sheriff Pat Garrett plugged Billy the Kid, a notorious outlaw/gunfighter, after hunting him down in Fort Sumner, NM. Billy'd been tried and convicted for the murder of a man (his sixth, I think) and was sentenced to hang when he escaped from jail and killed two more men--lawmen--on his way out the door. The night he died, the Kid was just a kid--only 21 years ago.

He carried the burden of a perfectly awful childhood, as you can imagine. That he went bad couldn't have been entirely unpredictable. He was born and baptized as Henry McCarty in New York City in 1859, where he was orphaned at 13. He was 16 when he was arrested for the first time--for stealing food. Then, just ten days later, he robbed a Chinese laundry, was tossed in jail but escaped two days later. 

Out west, he ran with cattle rustlers, killed a blacksmith, and became a wanted man, a fugitive, a man regarded by the law as a dangerous criminal. Consider him the quintessential Western tough guy, even bad tough guy. The problem is, somehow we like tough guys, maybe especially if they're just tough kids, like Billy was. 

Here's part of the stretch I'm talking about. Billy didn't really die. He went on to live in the Western lore of dime novels. Just exactly how many people today know the Billy the Kid story is a good question, but just about everybody has heard the name. Billy's yet another Wyatt Earp or Will Bill, one of those, something of an icon. Human beings can keel over right quick, but icons don't die so easily.

What's more, some of that icon's fans didn't really want him to be gone either. Reports of his death were, so people argued, both premature and exaggerated. The day after Garrett shot him, they put his kid body in the ground. What's more, Billy was shot and killed in a room so dark Sheriff Garrett recognized him only by his voice, filled the Kid with lead before he even had a good look at who'd just then walked through the door. 

The myth of the Kid lived on, but so did the mythical Billy, two or three or four of them, in fact. One of his postmortem manifestations lived around Zuni, NM, a great place to hide out since hardly anyone other than the Zuni themselves ever visited in the late 19th century. Just down the road sits a little Mormon town name Ramah, a place full of religious ranchers who stuck to themselves, as Mormons did back then. If you had to choose a place to go incognito in the earliest years of the 20th century, out there in the New Mexico desert between Zuni and Ramah wouldn't have been a bad choice.

(To be continued.)

Corn Mountain, Zuni, NM

For Mom--Birthday Greetings

I'm repeating this post from a couple of years ago in tribute to my mother, who had she continued to live (for the record, she would not have chosen to)would be, today, 100 years old.

Our son's absence couldn't be avoided. He's got a new job, and taking off for a couple days simply wasn't a possibility. Still, he and his wife were missed. There was a bit of a hole in our holiday.

Otherwise, it was all just about perfect. My wife, who ritually takes on the turkey singlehandedly, did it up wonderfully once again. Starting, well, Monday or so, she sweats about the menu, then works like a coal-miner all by her lonesome for 48 hours straight to come up with a meal that defines the holiday. 

This year her first-grade son mentioned to his mother that he hoped Mema (their name) would have cranberries. Wish morphed immediately into mandate. Two varieties, including something called, "Pink Stuff," were on the table on Thursday, even though "pink stuff" is at least 98% marshmallow and therefor not her cup of tea. If the Thanksgiving table is a book store, Pink Stuff is a silly romance novel. But, voila! there it was. 

My mother died three years ago already. She was 95, and her leave-taking, honestly, was just about as sweet as anyone could wish or imagine. Some kind of snarling cancer was discovered on Friday, and Monday morning she walked away quietly, as if she didn't want to bother her loved ones. That wasn't like her. For most of her years she loved bothering people, her loved ones especially.

Particularly me maybe, about politics especially. Once upon a time, she set her life's compass by way of the words of Dr. Joel Nederhood or Rev. H. J. Kuiper, or whoever edited the denominational magazine. She grew up in an era when the sturdy walls of her Christian Reformed culture was all she needed for guidance. What the preachers thought, she simply determined to think herself. 

By the end of her life, those walls had largely disappeared; her newfound dominies were a glossy array of TV preachers, her truth-tellers talk show radio hosts like Michael Savage. As she aged, the world she saw from her window in the Home got much smaller, and what got left behind became less understandable and therefore more to be feared. She was convinced that the Lord would come sometime before next Tuesday, if not sooner, given the rampaging evil right there on doorstep of Pine Haven Home.

That her son didn't share her politics or her fears was of great concern, because Mom was born and reared in a world were there were only two paths to the celestial, only one of them the straight-and-narrow. The other led to Las Vegas or the Democratic party. Mostly, she let Michael Savage draw up definitions of who was and who wasn't on the right one.

Every visit home, she'd bait me for a political inquisition, set me up with some "when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife?" question. "So, honey, you still like Obama?" That one, she used more than once because she knew it would open the door. 

She liked to fight, my mother did. Loved it. 

But I missed her too this Thanksgiving. She wasn't here and I wasn't there. 

Today is her birthday, which meant that for years and years a trip back to Wisconsin covered two bases, two holidays in one fell swoop. All I really had to remember was Mother's Day, which always falls on a Sunday and therefore "shouldn't be Mother's Day at all because it's really the Lord's Day." That having been said, she expected you'd remember and told you if you didn't.

This weekend I found myself missing the long trip home for the holiday, something we did most of our married lives. I found myself missing the lakeshore, missing the woodlands all around, missing family who stayed in the place that for some remarkable reason I still find myself calling "home."

And Mom and I made our peace, in case you're wondering. Not long before she died, I told her in no uncertain terms that she didn't have to worry about her son's salvation, that she could go to her eternal rest unsettled, all that Obama stuff notwithstanding.

The last time I visited, I was alone. I took her to Culver's, where we drove through and picked up a couple of butter burgers on a gorgeous Indian summer afternoon. Then we stopped at a south side park. I got out the wheelchair and pushed her up close enough to the lake to pick up just a little sand in that burger as we munched away. 

People quite naturally address old people in wheelchairs. They condescend sweetly, just like they might do to little kids. They're not afraid, and Mom loved attention as much as she loved to preach, loved to attribute all that lakeshore beauty to the Lord, or so she'd say to whatever strangers said hello as they walked by.

It took her a while to finish that burger, but when she did we went back to the Home, and for the first time in my life--and the last--we sang together, just the two of us, "Blessed Assurance," Dad's old favorite. A month later or so she was gone.

Some instinct in me is pigeon-like, I guess. Truth is, on Thursday I had a terrific, a blessed Thanksgiving. I'm not complaining. But this morning, her birthday, I just can't help feeling that somehow we missed something this holiday, something back home.

For better or for worse, I think it was Mom. She'd smile about that, I'm sure. 

Good night, she could drive me crazy. No matter. This morning I'm thankful for her.

Italy xvi--Bernini's David

If I say I never quite pictured him this way, it would be half truth because I don't know that I ever pictured him in any pose whatsoever, save with his foot up on Goliath's severed head--this kid, the youngest of Jesse's band of brothers, a shepherd boy with a harp, a singer and a poet, someone so feminine he seemed to fall in love with a friend of his named Jonathan.

But look at him, at Benini's David, gritting his teeth, his body in a curl of tightly wound muscle, a moment away from hurling one deadly stone to bring that giant to his knees and worse. I never thought of him this way because I didn't think of biblical characters like the shepherd/king as human at all. Mostly they were one-dimensional characters in a divine drama of which I was myself a part. They played roles in my faith journey. Young David, the kid with the slingshot, taught me to look upon every foe as someone capable of falling dead at my feet as long as I knew the Creator of heaven and earth was on my side. David was as much a part of me as a mustard seed.

But Bernini's David isn't a concept and he's not a sermon. Neither is he a kid, really. Look at body. 

He may not look like some Grecian god--like Michaelangelo's David--but neither does he appear the weakling I believed him to be, picked on by older brothers, an also-ran, the nominee his own father couldn't believe might be considered some future king of Israel. There's strength in this kid's arms, in his wound torso. He's about to slay a giant, and every last sinew is wound up to deliver the telling blow. You stand anywhere around this guy, and you're simply in the action. You're there. 

Listen to the roar. Look again at that face.

He may well be assured that God in his side. He's said as much. But there's not an inch of him that isn't devoted to the act, to killing the giant Goliath. He actually believes he can, but he knows it won't be easy.

I never studied art, never knew what the word baroque actually meant. It took a trip to Italy and a slow walk through the Galleria Borghese (boar-gay'-see) to understand. Here's how I might have pictured David:

Something of a cartoon figure, a kid in leggings on a flannel-graph, an odd-sort of adult-ish kid, totally innocent and under the spell of his own indefatigable faith. He's not at all a joke, but he's very much a symbol of what he can do for me if I but believe myself to be as faith-equipped as he certainly was.

Michaelangelo's David is almost as one-dimensional. This David is, well, perfect. Look at him. He is grace. It's virtually impossible to find a real, live human being as perfectly toned as he is. He is almost something akin to worship. To see him in the buff is to observe the ideal, to see God, in a way.

Bernini's David is more of an action figure. Everything in him aims at bringing down a beast so awesome an entire army was poised to run. Not this kid. He steps up and puts every sinew into bringing down a monster.

Bernini's David isn't just to look at. When you share the room with this guy, you know you're in a battle because Bernini wanted you to feel the story. Renegade Lutherans were giving the church a real run for its money. Something had to be done. You couldn't just observe the Bible's stories anymore. You couldn't just idealize biblical characters. The people had to feel them. Bernini's David defines baroque. 

It took me seventy years to understand that, but it's a lesson you can't miss when Bernini's David fills the room and you ready yourself for the bloody demise of a monster. 

It won't be long now and that stone in his sling will find its mark. 

Immigrants, Then

My emigrant ancestors were all safe and sound in the new land's Dutch hamlets by the turn of the twentieth century, but my wife's great-grandparents were just then arriving, as were many thousands of others in a wave of European immigration that started after the Civil War and ended when European soldiers dug the trenches of the Great War. 

Many came then, most all of them were "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Someone or two may have been well-heeled, but the vast majority were beautiful only in an immigrant sense. 

Germans, like this family, were most numerous. Some six million came here between 1820 and 1938. But many of those Lewis Hine photographed were a bit more exotic, like these Slavic folks coming in what our President calls "chain migration."

It's helpful to remember that many thousands who came were not thought of as being "American," nor did they look like it. 

Nor were they. In almost every case, including those who came from the Netherlands, an entire emigrant generation would pass on before their descendants would begin to think of themselves as Americans or act or speak like those almost those these ethnics even called "Americans." 

Maybe it's helpful to have a look at the faces of people we admitted to this country more than a century ago, even though, back then, we didn't necessarily welcome them. 

These people are who we are today. These are us.

A man named Lewis Hine played photographer and social commentator with these photographs back in the earliest years of the 20th century. He spent time at Ellis Island, where, like others (there was a gallery for those Americans who wanted to watch) Hine observed the patchwork ethnics like these were creating. 

Lewis Hine got famous when he went on to do a memorable portfolio of portraits of children employed in New York City sweatshops. Meanwhile these photographs sat unseen until they were found a couple of decades ago. The Washington Post ran some just yesterday.

They have real currency right now or so it seems to me. These are men and women and children America adopted outright 110 years ago. 

Marvelous, priceless photographs. Unless your people were carried over the water in shackles or lived here for centuries before any of these, it's good to remember that today, a century later, these folks are us. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Lord, have mercy

Answer me when I call to you,

    my righteous God.

Give me relief from my distress;

    have mercy on me and hear my prayer.

Psalm 4:1

It is impossible to know exactly when King David might have written Psalm 4, but it’s not difficult to come up with possibilities because no biblical story, save the gospels, is as complete, as much a great novel, as the story of King David.  No Old Testament story has so complete a record of triumphs—but then, no OT story includes so many tales of woe.

No one will ever know, but it could have been sometime around the story of the curse of Shimei, son of Gera  (II Samuel 16).  Shimei came from King Saul’s tribe, the people of the King whom David had replaced.  There remained in him, and probably others, more than a little animosity.

           

To say that King David is on the skids at the time of Shimei’s cursing is a royal understatement.  Running away the way he is, David seems more a buffoon than a king.  His rule has turned into disrule because of a flashy charismatic politico with looks to die for.  For years, this national idol has stood just outside the palace and pandered to the people, promising them the justice he claimed they’d never get from the dirty rotten King.  The Bible says this demi-god wouldn’t let people bow before him; instead, he’d kiss them.  “He stole the hearts of the men of Israel”—that’s the Word of God.

Human beings are drawn to beauty like flies to honey.  Some things don’t change.

But David is on the run, literally, at the time of Shimei’s curse, hoping simply to save his own hide. It’s not a pretty time in the history of King David’s kingship.

Enter this man Shimei, a bit player really, a loudmouth who becomes the voice of King David’s own horror.  Instead of bowing to the King, Shimei hurls insults.  “The Lord has repaid you for all the blood you shed in the household of Saul,” he screams. “You have come to ruin because you are a man of blood.”

Must have stood the royal court on edge.

           

David listens to the tirade, and when one of his aids begs permission to lop off Shimei’s head, he won’t hear of it.  “Leave him alone,” he says; “let him curse, for the Lord has told him to.”

           

Now the charismatic rebel attempting to usurp the throne is, as you know, the King’s own son, Absalom. Everyone knows it. David says that if his own son hates him as much as he does, how much more should this man of the tribe of the former king? 

           

King David worrying can make Hamlet’s dilly-dallying seem impetuous.  He’s a world-class brooder. He’s capable of remarkable bravery, as well a species of intense, selfless faith some might almost call blind. Some modern analysts believe him to be bi-polar because his emotional valleys run fully as deep as his almost perilous highs (remember that wild strip tease when he led the Ark back to Jerusalem?).  But right here, with Shimei’s stinging public rebuke still echoing down the walls of the castle, he’s in as dark a place as he’s ever been found. Somewhere reverberating in his soul are the words of Nathan, too—the curse on his house after Uriah and Bathsheba.

I’m speculating, about all of this. Shimei’s screed may not be the point in time when David’s sleeplessness prompted him to write Psalm 4. Lord knows there were other such moments too.

But if you want to feel the dislocation so much the pattern of this psalm, think about David, a victim of his own beloved son’s treachery. 

“Have mercy on me, Lord,” he says.

That’s no cliché.

 

Lord, have mercy.

Thanksgiving--it's all true

Somewhere among the short stories of Stanley Elkin, who's now long gone and knows the truth about what he's found, there's a fabulous little yarn with a sharp turn I've never forgotten, even though anything else I've read of his is part of those unkempt memories that are as much a sorry mess as my desk.

There's this guy sauntering through life like the rest of us, when suddenly he falls into some kind of death chute or something, and turns up at what amounts to a literary pearly gates. He's dead, and right there at a point where Saint Peter directs him down a path he shan't like. 

He isn't greatly taken with the appointed direction and, in fine Jewish fashion, bellyaches. "What's the deal?" the guy says (Elkin dealt in sassy satire). 

Whoever is standing at the gate rubs his beard, blows his nose maybe, and then, almost without regard, tells the pilgrim, "The Sabbath," he says, looking down at the manifest, "--you didn't keep the Sabbath." And then, looking up, "Next."

I've never forgotten that moment because as a child of devout parents I'm always wondering if, well, perhaps they were right about all things religious. Perhaps it was naughty to swim on Sunday or to dance. Perhaps gambling will toss you to eternal perdition. What if women-in-ecclesiastical office or being a member of the Democratic party is actually enough to land you in the fire and brimstone? What if all those little rules are the big ones? 

Sometimes, of course, they are. I hate to "prooftext," and in this case I don't think I have to. But how about this: "That my glory may sing your praise and not be silent. O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever" (Psalm 30:12). Need I go on? I don't think so.

But one more. This one from Garrison Keillor, that defrocked story-teller whose single line has graced the top of a blog I've kept for ten years, a line from a Christian Century interview I'm 25 years ago: "we'd all be better off it we all started the day by giving thanks for just one thing."  

I have two things to say about that Prairie Home proverb: 1) It's true; and 2) It's hard.

A year before I began blogging, I determined to take the Keillor challenge: every morning, type up a paragraph that determinedly "gave thanks" for something--anything, soup to nuts, memorable events, my beloved(s).  So I did. And (here's where I need a notary public), I honestly think it worked--it made smile more, made me a better person. 

As my Richard Foster would say, you made good faith a discipline in your life, Jim--that's why it worked. You were blessed by making real Godly virtue a practice. 

Ten years later, in the blog that developed out of that practice, I only occasionally go back to willful thanksgiving. Sometimes, "my Morning Thanks" just fits, sometimes I begin by telling myself it's time to get back to where all of this began. Sometimes Mr. Keillor's words are a stringing reminder to get back to virtue.

I'd like to say I lost my way when the bully Trump came along, but in truth the Prince of Orange makes a convenient scapegoat.

This morning is Thanksgiving. Our Oklahoma children are here, and they've taken with them that almost divine granddaughter who, everyone admits, is quite honestly the most beautiful child anywhere south of here. North too maybe. No, for sure. 

And our Iowa kids will be here, too, soon enough. The turkey's done. So are the sweet potatoes and the beans and cranberries, so my wife only has to worry about the gravy, which is the province of her daughter. Pies are coming. Table's spread. Fireplace is on. Soft music is coming up from down here in the basement. 

We're ready for thanksgiving. Today, for sure, we'll practice it. Tomorrow maybe too. Even Saturday.

But next week, we'll have to work at it, try, once more, to make it a Richard Foster-like discipline, to keep it up, as the Bible commands.

I don't know about women-in-ecclesiastical office, or dancing, or gambling, or being a Democrat. But I believe this: it's all true about Thanksgiving. All of it. All of this:  "The Lord is my strength and my shield; My heart trusts in Him, and I am helped; Therefore my heart exults, And with my song I shall thank Him" (Psalm 30:12).

What I'm thinking and saying is, it's all true--that's the good news. But the tough stuff is, I've got to work at it to make it so.

This "public hanging" thing

I have no memories of a short speech given by a stocky African-American woman named Fannie Lou Hamer, a woman who was pleading the case of a delegation of Mississippians, most of them black, asking for voting credentials at the 1964 Democratic convention. Our family television wouldn’t have been on. We were, after all, Republicans.

Hamer had a sixth-grade education and no more because her little hands were needed in the cottonfields, where her family tried to make a life from sharecropping. She started picking cotton when she was six years old.

When Fannie Lou Hamer told the 1964 Democratic Convention what she'd suffered--a horrible beating while jailed in Winona, Mississippi on some ridiculous charge--delegates were stunned. Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had been President for less than a year and who, down the road, distinguished himself boldly and wonderfully for the cause of civil rights in this country, was scared to death he'd lose the votes of the Dixiecrats to the Republicans if they heard Hamer's go on and on about racism down South.

Johnson was so scared he called the networks to interrupt the Ms. Hamer's testimony to tell them he was having an unscheduled news conference. So they simply turned out the lights on Fannie Lou Hamer and started broadcasting from the Oval Office, where LBJ told the nation it was, at that moment, nine months since the death of President Kennedy. That's all he said because there was no news, only subterfuge.

Johnson kept Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony from a national audience. That happened. That actually happened.

I never knew any of that until I read James H. Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, a reprimand, an indictment against "Christian" America. Cone's book is a Jeremiad that's wilting in every way possible--culturally, morally, spiritually--to the white folks at whom he aims, most specifically those who confess the name of Jesus. 

Cone makes you weep, makes you wonder where you were in 1964, where you were for a half-century or more of terrifying bloodletting when white racists, church-going folks, pulled out ropes from their sheds and hung black men--and some black women to keep n______s in their place.

If you're a white and Christian, The Cross and the Lynching Tree will teach you things you didn't know, things you can't help but wonder how you missed. It will make you wonder where you've been. 

Doubtless, Cone made me more sensitive to the effects of the strange line Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith used in describing her appreciation of a donor: "If he invited me to a public hanging," Hyde Smith said to the supporter, "I'd be on the front row."

No mention of race in that word picture, right? It’s just the Senator and that donor, front and center of a crowd gathered before a dead man hanging in front of them.

But what she knows only too well is that such things happened in her neighborhood with some horrifying regularity. Mississippi had the highest number of lynchings from 1882-1968 with 581. Almost 80 per cent of the 4373 lynching happened in the South; of them, 3446 victims were black.

I don’t consider myself a foot soldier in the PC army, but Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree has made this old, white Yankee sensitive enough to understand the furor over what I might have otherwise considered Ms. Hyde-Smith’s casual, off-hand aside.

You can’t conjure an image of a public hanging in Mississippi without blackening the face of the victim. The idea of that donor and the Senator in the front row prompts too much of a horror story that’s not been forgotten--and shouldn't be.

Whether Mississippians vote for Cindy Hyde-Smith or Mike Espy, her African-American opponent, isn’t my call. But without a doubt, she did the right thing by apologizing. It's the least she could do.

Italy xv--The Immaculate Conception

When it came time to play them, we couldn't help wonder what the Catholics were thinking when they named the school "Immaculate Conception." Weird. If you're a sixth grade boy just about everything has something to do with sex. That Catholic school's weird name, whatever it meant, was about something good Christian boys had no business thinking about out loud, and the kids from that school plastered it on their uniforms? Seriously?

But we played 'em, weird name or not. As far as I remember, no teacher or coach from our school ever said much about the name. "Okay, guys, tomorrow we'll line up against "Immaculate Conception.'" I don't think we giggled. It's just that when you thought about it a little--well, you know: it was something like foreskins and circumcision and all of that biblical embarrassing stuff. When you're twelve, it's just weird that you'd say those words out loud.


When you leave the Raphael Rooms of the Vatican Museums, massive frescos that fill every square centimeter of your consciousness, you follow the flow into another space so laden with life-sized art you don't know where to look first because you're sure you'll miss something. And you will. 

Anyway, there she was, the Mary, mother of Jesus, Virgin Mary, in a bigger-than-life statue and surrounded by massive frescoes featuring dozens, even hundreds of human figures, some with addresses in this world, some, clearly, very much at home in the next.

It's the Room of the Immaculate Conception, and while I'd long ago come to understand the phrase in a 7th grade-boy way, I never took the time to think much, really, about the adoration of Mary, except in a very Protestant way as silly. In this immense room, everything was the Immaculate Conception, not the divine act itself (although a score of artists have taken a shot at that), but the act's honored and historic place in Roman Catholic dogma and culture. 

In the huge wall behind the statue features two worlds. The world below is Rome--the Vatican, Pope and Cardinals all aligned for the celebration of the formal acceptance of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The world above features heaven (far left) and that other brimstone place (far right, where the sinners are, at this moment, falling from grace). Fig-leafed Adam and Eve are on the cloud, upper right, Adam seemingly protecting his shy and probably guilty mate. 

But at the heart of the Heaven is the Trinity. There's a dove (the Holy Spirit) above Mary's head (she's in blue, traditionally), and she stands (while Christ and the Father sit) just a bit lower in foreground. Telling placements.

For centuries, the Roman Catholic church had accepted the belief that Mary was not only a virgin, but also, alone of all mankind, sinless. Not until 1854 did her divinity become defined as Catholic dogma, an act signed into canon law by Pope Pius IX. That moment is prominently featured in the center of the fresco, the Pope standing before his throne, surrounded by Cardinals, all of which makes this particular room, the Room of the Immaculate Conception, of far more recent vintage (1860s) than the Rafael Rooms next door (300 years older). Seems the paint is still wet. 

Rome didn't make me any more Roman Catholic than I ever was, but for two weeks is was most definitely more of a disciple of that whole world than I'd ever been. Somehow the visual grace, art that attracts millions annually, helped me understand far more than I ever had about the historic church, even has me smiling in a whole new way at those grade school kids with that weird name printed so on their basketball uniforms. 

It really, really was a big deal. That big, in fact. 

James River Sabbath

It has to be one of the slowest rivers in North America. I'm told South Dakota's James River drops somewhere near about five inches per mile, which is so inconsequential that there are places on the river where, when the water gets high, the flow actually reverses direction. 

Plodding, lazy, indifferent, apathetic--call the Jim what you will, I happened on this little rapids yesterday at a moment when the sun was splashing everything with incandescence. I figured I had to get a couple of shots of this anomaly--the woeful, sleepy James making a splash with an icy crown.

And there's this too. When the waters recede ever so slightly, they leave art work in ice,  stunning landscapes in the dirt and leaves. 

Overhead thousands of geese checked the thermometer and determined their course south.

Even the Jim was beginning to look as if it was time to pull on a coat.

All of this Sabbath glory and a sweet speaking gig in Freeman, where the day closed in prairie reverie, the kind of Dakota sunset people elsewhere just can't believe.

This morning it's a memory for which I'm thankful because you could do a whole lot worse on the Sabbath than a quiet jaunt on the Jim.

Sunday Morning Meds--"In His Feathers"

“. . .in the shadow of your wings 

until the disaster has passed.”  Psalm 57:2

The quotes in the title designate that the title of this meditation is a book, not just a few words hung atop a meditation—and this is not a marketing ploy.

A decade ago or more I published a collection of a woman’s letters and notes and journal entries, a book titled, on the basis of this verse, In His Feathers. It was published in very low numbers because, try as I might, I couldn’t find a big publisher—well, let’s broaden that a bit: I couldn’t find an editor or an agent even willing to read the manuscript.

Why wouldn’t anyone look? It’s the story of a woman’s battle with cancer, ovarian cancer. Sharon Wagonaar Bomgaars died in 2003, just a few years after diagnosis, which means In His Feathers is, I suppose, to big publishers just another memoir by a nobody. If Sharon was a celebrity—if she’d been featured on Good Morning America, or Oprah, we would have had no trouble finding a publisher.

Sharon was a loving wife and mother, a thoughtful, honest, committed Christian, an inveterate journal-keeper who recorded every last sorrow and joy. Listen to her thoughts as she sat at the keyboard for the very last time:

This morning [my husband] brought me a half-cup of pear juice with ice. I took a sip and a tiny piece of pear had slipped through the sieve. I caught it on my tongue. I squeezed that little gritty fragment lovingly. It smoothed into nothingness and it was so good! I squeezed each lovely sip and rolled it around on my tongue. Then I let it slide slowly down my throat. Pear juice, delicious pear juice, squeezed from pears grown on some tree in dusty California, and now bringing me all its sun-warmed sweetness. What a gift!

God is so good to give us such pleasures in this sin- sick world. I love God's gifts! I love his peaches, and pears, and grapes, and strawberries, and apples! I love his wet, sweet, juicy creations! What an awesome God!

Twenty-one days later, she left all the sweet, juicy creations behind.
Forgive my bitterness and even my jealousy, because I do wish the book would be featured on Oprah. But its failure to find a big publisher may well be itself a reason to praise God. Thousands upon thousands of stories like Sharon’s exist, stories of real people who took or take abiding refuge beneath the wings of God almighty.

Somehow, I think Sharon would like me to say what’s in my heart—that the glory and power of this single line from Psalm 57 is that it is true, true until the day we die, and then on into eternity. And the proof is in the numbers: there are so many similar stories.

The truth of Sharon’s story is in this plaintive song of the poet/king. Divine refuge, as David knew, even as he sang this line, is under his wings, where all of us, Sharon too, can always find a safe place "in his feathers."