The Floyd and the Synod of Dort

So what has this guy 

to do with these guys?

Hmmm.  The top photo features a rogue-ish beaver gathering weeds, and chewing them happily.  There he was, not all that far from my oar locks, so I sat still, let out as much lens as I could, and tried to grab a closeup.

Only once in my life have I been around an upset beaver, only once have I heard that clap of near-thunder when the flat tail they conveniently sport comes down on the water.  I sort of wished this one would do it again, but he was having breakfast. He was, however, sweet enough to pose.

The second photo, snapped at Grote Kerk in Dordtrecht, the Netherlands, is a picture of some master craftsman's meticulous rendition of a very famous ecclesiastical moment in the history of the the Dutch Reformed churches: the Synod of Dort, 1618-1619. As you can tell, it lasted for years.  

At the synod, what was at risk was nothing less than the sovereignty of God, or so argued traditional Calvinists (my people). The Synod's agenda was a consensus assessment of the theological principles of one Jacobus Arminius, a learned professor always described as sober and faithful, who maintained that the regeneration of the human soul could not be totally and unequivocally orchestrated by God alone--that there was, in other words, something to say for human agency in every moment of our lives. Arminius argued for free will.

And lost. He and his Remonstrants, as they were called, were spanked and set on their way, while one of the documents to emerge was so foundational that it became one of the "Forms of Subscription" of the denomination of which I am a part, the Christian Reformed Church--that document being, the Canons of Dort. 

The Canons of Dort created the acronym T-U-L-I-P, which has little to do with Holland's national flower.  T-U-L-I-P is a scratchpad, a mnemonic device to remember the traditional tenets of Calvinism.  (I don't care to argue, by the way.)

The Synod of Dort lent its name to the institution where I taught scholars for so many years, almost none of whom had even the slightest notion why the institution holds on to a mysteriously unpronounceable name.   

No matter.  I've wandered.  

What has a beaver to do with the Synod of Dort?  That's what I'm asking.

Look closely at the synodical delegates--each of them sports a beaver hat. Even among the uptight Calvinists, beaver hats were a must.  I don't know if the fashion began in Paris in those days, as it does today, or if John Calvin himself sported one in Geneva and thus triggered the rage. To me at least, what's most amazing about that replica synodical moment at the Grote Kerk is all those beaver hats.

Beavers who gave their lives for European fashion were themselves European in 1619, but it wouldn't be long before continental demand would grow beyond what its wetlands could supply. It was beaver hats that sent all kinds of hard-living, tough-drinking European adventurers out to North America's wide-open spaces, where they'd become frontiersman, bound and determined to fulfill a European fad.  One could argue--I just love this--that it was the portly, furry beaver, more than any other character, who triggered the white man's exploration of the far reaches of the North American frontier, places like the world where I live and the river I live close to.  

Sacajawea, the Shoshone teenage mom who saved Lewis and Clark from an unhappy fate, was married--well, the guy won her in a poker game--to a French-Canadian fur-trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau, just the kind of bloke I'm talking about.

I'm matchmaking, sort of.  If I can link this reed-chewing rodent from behind our place to the Dutch Synod of Dort, 500 years ago, then I'll rest easy, assured the world is not as overrun with chaos as some would like us to believe.  Look at all those beaver hats.

Maybe the Natives were right--it's all a circle. Life is a wheel because everything fits together. There's a divinity that shapes us all.

Rest easy.