"Do Not Be Afraid"

My grandson, a third-grader, goes to a Christian school that's 113 years old. 

I'm going to let that sit for a moment--let you savor it. 

We live in the very last region of Iowa to be settled by Euro-Americans. The reasons for that include lack of railroads, swarms of grasshoppers, distances from waterways; but what those 113 years mean is that some highly principled Dutch Reformed folks put brick upon brick down when the town was little more than a puppy in the prairie grass. 

I'm sure not all the wooden shoe citizenry were taken with the idea of a separate Christian school. Some thought it too conservative, too, well, Dutch. "You're in America now," some pointed out;  "be American."

In 1910, no one argued about a six-day creation. No one worried about sex education, drugs in school, bullying, hate speech. Some believed a "School for Christian Instruction," as some schools in this far corner of Iowa are still named, was needed, not as some sanctified alternative to public, Godless education, but because those who laid the brick professed belief in a sovereign God who ruled every last square inch of his world, which made doing history or geography, literature or math, without acknowledging the Creator's hands was like keeping him in the janitor's room.

For most of my life, I taught in a Christian school, a Christian college. That's why. That's why the old folks in the Schaap and Van Gelder family albums wanted their kids and grandkids somewhere in a Christian school. That's why, in my family, a Christian education is worth all the bucks. 

My grandson, a third-grader, goes to a Christian school that's 113 years old. His faith-based education isn't a protest, it has been for a long time a kind of mandate.

But today--maybe more than ever--Christian believers exist in perilous times, not because we're under persecution from howling atheist mobs, but because we are ourselves engaged in an un-civil war. We fight about evolution, about sex ed, about the place of race and creed, about gay rights and immigration, and about politics and the President. 

Some parents in my grandson's school believe if the school doesn't teach kids about "white privilege," their education isn't an education at all. Others believe the if the school doesn't use every weapon in its arsenal to fight for a six-day creation, what happens in that school can't be "Christian." In this political moment, I wonder whether a 113-year-old Christian school can long endure our times and ourselves.

And then there are moments that make the soul arise, moments when doubt fades, moments when I couldn't be happier my grandson is in a Christian school that's 113 years old, or that his siblings attend a Christian high school down the road. Not long ago, a sweet high school senior named Josh went in for a check-up because things were fuzzy, so fuzzy the doctor sent him immediately to a specialist in Sioux Falls, who found a tumor and sent him, right then and there, into surgery.

The prayers of an entire community stormed the gates of heaven, and Josh somehow let his teachers know that one of the songs a choral group he was in played again and again in his memory when he lay there waiting for surgery--"Do Not Be Afraid," he said.

So that little chorale group stepped out in the hallway and sang "Do Not Be Afraid," and their music and those words echoed off the walls and ceiling and tile floors and wandered into a bundle of adjacent room. Some kids videoed the moment, then stuck it up Facebook.

The music was moving--you can listen in above--but what thrilled the quarrelsome skeptic in me was how the kids from all those classrooms spilled out into hallways for comfort, just like Josh. They were subdued into silence and prayer, a place some of them may have never been before, positioned perilously between very real fear on one side and love and faith on the other. 

What Josh faced that day was very serious, very real, more real than a ball games or a senior prom. For a moment, what happened in those hallways wasn't "high school." 

With all those kids in silence, "Do Not Be Afraid" flowed earnestly into a community profession. It was those kids standing there in fear and faith that made me overwhelmingly happy my own grandchildren were among them in a Christian school. 

kids in the hallways

Ancestry

Somewhere close at hand in my computer but as infinitely far away as technology can hide it, is the info I received after I spit into a vial and sent it in to Ancestry.com. The test kit was a gift, and a good one. After all, I've spent far more time weighing my own familial past than most people do or should. 

The truth is, I didn't believe my DNA would spot much of what I didn't already know--in places of origin anyway; and on that score, I was right. All of my ancestry originates in Holland, every last one of the forebearers, and that's a lean-to full of wooden shoes. Ancestry's revelations don't even distinguish the Netherlands. Most all of me, they would have me believe, comes from northern Europe. Well, duh. 

I know a woman who sent in a vial and discovered what has been troubling her ever since, that her father wasn't her father. She's now met the man who sired her (rough language, but in this case it sort of fits), so she's in the uncomfortable position of feeling she should let the man who falsely believes he fathered her know that he didn't. 

Her DNA was a startling revelation. Mine, not so. 

I've been reading Cruel Paradise: Life Stories of Dutch Immigrants, by a writer with the impossibly Frisian name of Hylke Speerstra, a book translated into English by an old friend, Henry Baron. I'm only half through, but that book has already told me more about my identity than Ancestry's DNA readings, even though the joys and sorrows of immigration are completely forgotten, 150 years back in my family history. 

Like so many of the Frisian immigrants Mr. Speerstra interviews in the book, Hetty Seif-Lettinga, who lives in Grand Rapids, has a family album full of dairymen. "Ten big farms, some are millionaires," she says; and then "one has an embryo-factory where they, so to speak, make cows." 

Telling the writer that fact trips a land mine. Hetty is not young, and philosophical reflection comes easily to someone so thus practiced in old-time Dutch Calvinism. 

"But what I wanted to ask you:" she says, "what do you think, will there be factories in the near future where they can make both cows and people? I don't think they should do that. They should leave that to the Creator. Though it's true that there are some strange creatures running around." 

"What do you think?" she says, nevermind the fact that he's there to interview her, she tells him she wants to know what he believes. She can't help herself because the question is not a trifle. Her guest is, after all, a perfectly thoughtful gent from the old country. Heck with small talk, Speerstra, tell me straight up what you think because I want to know. 

That quarrelsome questioning is, I believe, as sharp and tasty as a Wilhelmina peppermint. So many of the people of her vintage I know or knew delight in that genre of ponderable questions.

And now she's on a roll. "I don't think they should do that." She drops the gloves, ready at a moment's notice to have at it, but ready also with her own best answer: she tells him forthwith, "They should leave that to the Creator."  

The whole mini-debate will be framed by her principled, foundational perspective: it's God's business to decide on identity, she tells him, unabashed. The Creator should be doing that work, not us. She wants a debate, but she's not afraid of letting this guy in her kitchen know she has an opinion and, dang it, it's based firmly on the inviolable Word of the Lord. 

To me, all of that sounds perfectly familiar, right out of the Schaap family scrapbook. 

And then that absolutely perfect last line: "Though it's true that there are some strange creatures running around." 

And that line nails it. Ancestry should have located Hetty's monologue in my DNA. That final line, as much as anything in her little outburst, wears wooden shoes. Not only do the "strange creatures running around" undercut the ferocity of the doctrinal authority she just now espoused, they're a joke, an earthy one at that, something she shouldn't have said but couldn't help herself. That smirking last line is as Dutch as her principles.

Listen, it cost someone in my family $50 for me to spit in that Ancestry vial. I bought Speerstra's book used, on Amazon, for less than five bucks, only to know that, sure as anything, this woman in Michigan, Hetty Seif-Lettinga, a woman I've never met, holds down some secure position in my genetic code.

Sunday Morning Meds--Silence

The Missouri River

“. . .search your hearts and be silent.”

Psalm 4

Flannery O’Connor, I remember reading, one of the finest and most well-known writers of the 20th century was almost totally inconspicuous in her classes at Iowa Writers Workshop. I believe it. Every year I taught, I had a few silent types that knocked my socks off when they handed in an essay. Teachers love talkers, but classrooms that sound morgue-ish doesn’t necessarily mean that the minds that inhabit it are laid out cold.

Generalizations are always hazardous, but, historically at least, the annals of the American West are rife with stories about white folks—immigrant farmers, cavalry lieutenants, even French trappers—who grew awfully uncomfortable with the silence Native folks felt imperative before a discussion. Then again, the history of the West wouldn’t be as jaded if white folks had kept their mouths shut a whole lot smore than they did.

Given our politically-charged media culture’s incessant yapping, it’s probably understandable why some people would opt out and seek the enforced silence of the monastery. Just this week, a good friend told me he’s been spending time with the Benedictines at a monastery not all that far from here. Thomas Merton and Henry Nouwen have wide and devoted readership; it’s difficult to know whether, a couple decades ago, Kathleen Norris’s Cloister Walk begat a phenomenon or merely rode the wave. To many—and to me—silence often looks good, probably because it’s hard to come by.

I stopped at Mulberry Point all by lonesome on Thursday because I knew that the overview of the Missouri River right there on the Nebraska side of the river simply takes your breath away—and the words that come along. Sometimes quiet speaks.

I’ve become familiar with old folks’ homes. My mother was in one for a long time; we visit my wife’s father every Sunday afternoon. Silence often pervades those places, no matter how cheerfully they’re decorated. I suppose the silence in those homes doesn’t make life there any more moral or high-toned.

But here in Psalm 4, it’s a command. In this 12-step therapy regimen David is creating in this psalm, he raises a finger and says, simply, just be quiet.

He means me. Be still, he says. And here I am on this Sunday morning, going on and on.

Be still, David says. Just, be still.

Lord, help me.

To be or not to be (nutty)

A Russian Facebook ad from the 2016 election

Wednesday morning's Fake News headline was Maggie Haberman's claim in the NY Times (a failing newspaper, Trump says) that our former Homeland Security Chief, Kirstjen Nielson, was told by the Acting Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, that any whisper of Russian interference in American elections--not in 2016, but in the present and the future as well--is to be studiously avoided in the Oval Office, lest the President lose it, which, according to Mueller and others, is something he does quite easily. "Don't bring it up," Mulvaney told Nielson, or words to that effect.

Even though it's her job. She is the head--or was--of Homeland Security.

"I am but mad, north by northwest," Hamlet said to his old buddies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern True? Some of the facts of Shakespeare's great tragedy belie Hamlet's being truly off his rocker, or seem to, as 'tis true with our president. Has he, like Hamlet, gone mad, or does he simply, for effect, act that way when it's in his interest to do it?

What's established beyond reasonable doubt--on both sides of the political aisle--is that our President often acts in ways that, for him, are resoundingly counterproductive. How about this?--just a little thing: why did he say his father was an immigrant when everyone knows the old man was born in the U.S. of A? Of what possible benefit is such a nutty fib?

Or this. Mueller got info from ten or twelve people--one-time aids and even supporters of Donald J.--who told him they acted in the president's best interests by not carrying out his worst commands. When asked about that, President Trump simply said his people always obey him, as if that dozen hadn't testified otherwise.

Real Trump haters can make a big deal out of Mulvaney's stifling any mention of Russian interference in upcoming elections by claiming our President doesn't need to be concerned with such a trifling matter. After all, the royal son-in-law this week characterized Russia's role in the 2016 as "a couple of Facebook ads." The truth is, his many supporters might say, his underlings can handle such tomfoolery.

End of discussion.

But what Mulvaney reportedly told her is not that Russian election interference is "a couple of Facebook ads." What he told her is that for the good of all concerned, talk of Russian meddling is better left unmentioned lest the Pres huff and puff and blow the house down.

In his famous summation(s), AG Barr claimed our President was at wit's end with news reports that were, by the AG's assessment, just plain wrong. Donald the victim, Donald the innocent was hideously prayed upon by those who would do him harm--so sad, poor guy.

So which is it? Donald the bully--50 mad dog tweets in the last 24 hours; or Donald the innocent victim?

I think it's both. Trump out-and-out lies however-many times a day even when he doesn't have to, because he will not suffer injury, not because he's so wildly fearsome but because, down deep, he's so insanely touchy.

And so we live with his schizophrenic nuttiness. Some days he's capable of bragging out the lies every fifteen minutes but is far too thin-skinned to hear a whisper of Russian meddling.

Good actors can play Hamlet mad as a hatter or sweet as an angel. Unfortunately, Hamlet is theater. For us, all the world is Trump's stage.

I just hope the end of all this torrid drama doesn't require buckets of blood. For Hamlet the Prince, the story did not end particularly well. We call the genre tragedy.

Mary Oliver and Queen Anne's Lace

Passing the Unworked Field

Queen Anne's lace

     is hardly

          prized but

all the same it isn't

          idle look

                          how it

          stands straight on its

thin stems how it

          scrubs its white faces

               with the

          rags of the sun how it

                makes all of the

                         loveliness

                                it can.

       --from Swan, by Mary Oliver

Morning Thanks--a monumental work

Monumental?--yes, in spades. Beautiful?--let me think about that. Jerry Traufler's extraordinary wood sculpture of DaVinci's The Lord Supper, two tons of hard, exacting work, will take your breath away. Let me just expend some adjectives here: it's notable, it's massive, it's remarkable and striking. Go ahead and visit sometime--Trinity Heights, Sioux City. You won't come away unaffected. 

It's huge--each figure weighing in somewhere between two and three hundred pounds, the table itself incredible, quite lordly. Judas is here, of course. In some ways, he's the evil star of the show, the one who's created the shock on the faces of those, at this very moment, who were his friends. Here he is, thirty pieces of silver in a bag in his hand.

And Peter, although the knife he wields in the original is more hidden in the massive carving than it is on the wall in Milan. He's bald, the only one in the room without hair. Don't know why. Here he is, whispering into the ear of a very female-ish John, the youngest of the bunch, for whom Traufler used his wife as a model. For the record, DaVinci's John is remarkably feminine too, often thought to be, in fact, Mary Magdaline. 

Doubting Thomas is here, his finger in the air--I'm not sure why, but Leonardo has him in the same pose. That's James the Greater with the swooping mustache, pointing an accusatory finger maybe? 

And then there's Jesus, eyes mysteriously closed. On a tape that plays in the background, Traufler says closing the Savior's eyes was his choice, not DaVinci's.  Traufler deliberately wanted to close Christ's eyes. 

Not my preference. If the eyes are the mirrors of the soul, then we see nothing here. Perhaps this Jesus didn't want to be distracted from the suffering He knew was to come--that would make good sense. But those gathered in the upper room are the ones he'd called, the ones he'd loved, the ones who'd been with him through thick and thin, even though they'd abandon him soon. 

Maybe it's the balance of the paradox. Christ the King has his eyes closed; Jesus, the carpenter's son, has them open. He's both--human and divine, the mystery no one can quite get his or her mind around.

Maybe my hesitancy about beauty is created by Christ's refusal to see what's happening at his table, his deliberate blindness to evil intrigue suddenly roiling the chosen. But then, maybe what's dispelling is the greatly-heralded fact that Traufler used his buddies as models, that the disciples are just a bunch of guys from LeMars. 

Still, The Lord's Supper a colossal undertaking, a massive work of love that required great quantities of zeal and dogged dedication. Like Thomas, you really have to see it to believe it. 

It's stunning, but it's as human as all of our creations. 

That having been said, this morning I'm thankful Jerry Traufler, the woodcarver, spent so many years of his life creating it because it is, without a doubt, in every sense of the word, monumental. 

Bishop Martin Marty's ordeal in the garden

Bishop Martin Marty

To the Lakota people, they were the "black robes," the crazily-overdressed white men who, as if out of nowhere, moved in among them to teach the white man's religion. The Benedictines, led by Father Martin Marty, who would become the Vicar Apostolic of Dakota Territory and eventually the Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of St. Paul, wore black robes long before they came to America, in fact identified themselves by their thick, black robes and wore them, well, religiously.

Mostly.

If you believe the histories, Father Marty, who would eventually be known as "the Apostle of the Sioux," not by the Sioux perhaps, but by his Catholic constituency, was something of a stickler for tradition, certain aspects of tradition at least. Early on, back in his native Switzerland, he stood fast on tradition, maintaining, against significant opposition, that other Benedictines should sing absolutely nothing but ye olde blessed Gregorian chants. 

When he came to America (at age 26) to take over a failing abbey at St. Meinrad, Indiana, he ordered all the brothers to wear the black habits all the time. Some of the brothers weren't particularly thrilled and murmured a bit--and with good reason. If you worked in the fields, picking weeds, thinning carrots, doing anything in the hot sun, those huge and heavy black robes were a heckuva encumbrance. They weren't rebelling--they were Benedictines, after all. They simply wanted to make a case for having Abbot Martin lighten up a little.

Besides, they said, all that heavy sweat made the black dye run into their unholy underwear, even stained their skin. All in all, those famous black robes were an encumbrance to their piety, they claimed.

Abbot Martin listened to their complaints and in no uncertain terms told them such claims were not sufficient to warrant their mutual abandoning of the kinds of robes Benedictines wore, plain and simple. Abandoning robes would be akin to abandoning vows. No, no, he told them, thou shalt continue to don the habit identified with your vows. 

And you know what else, he said, I'll show you you're wrong.

Now his biographers claim that good Father Marty was opinionated to a fault and given to making seemingly arbitary rulings on a whim. The ancient testimonies also maintain that he was no phony. The spiritual and physical rigors he demanded of his brothers, he did himself. 

So to prove them wrong, in the heat of the day, Father Marty himself did hard labor in the Abbey's fields, honorably dressed in the robes he claimed to be at the religious heart of the brothers' spiritual identity. He picked up a hoe or a pitchfork and spent most of day--maybe even two or three--sweating like a wrestler. 

And promptly changed the rules. 

Lo and behold, when he got to his room and lifted that huge robe off his sweaty torso, he found himself bedecked in blackened underwear. One look at his stained skivvees, and the tough-guy conservative conceded to a whole new way in a new world. 

But then there's this too. When the Sacred Heart Convent picked up and left Yankton, for just a few years the academy building became a boarding school of Indian boys, whose musical repertoire, of course, included Gregorian chants.

Wouldn't you know.

Sunday Morning Meds--Hallelujah!

Seventeen years ago, on Easter, I witnessed this dawn.

“Praise the LORD, O my soul. Praise the LORD.”

Psalm 104

The truth is, I would have loved to play slo-pitch. 

A couple of years ago, a good friend, even older than I am, decided the college faculty should have an intramural softball team, the Geezers.  He organized it and now has them out on the field. Problem is, they got thumped in their first game, so he sent out an e-mail lookin’ for beefier hitters. Singles just don’t make it in slo-pitch.

Once upon a time, I slammed homers methodically, routinely—every other at bat almost.  Not a lie either. So the siren song of playing slo-pitch got even sweeter when the Geezers took it on the chin from a bunch of squirt students who pounded home runs like pop flies. 

Two reasons made my playing ball impossible. The first was, I can’t because I’m scheduled—a book club. The second was vastly more salient: I’m old. I don’t like to think about what might happen to this body of mine should I throw hard, swing hard, or even run—or try to--for that matter. This mortal coil had done nothing close to any of the above for more than a decade. Who knows what horrors I would suffer? 

No matter—if I wouldn’t have been at the book club, I would have been at the ball diamond. I would have. I swear. At least, I think I would have.

A friend of mine remembers the day his father, 70+, looked at him sardonically when this friend complained of some minor muscle ache. “Get used to it,” he said, with far more authority than sympathy. 

I'm there.

Most mornings when I wake, I walk downstairs slowly, the railing in my left hand, my right braced up against the wall, my back crooked, knees bent. My silhouette against the dim kitchen lights must resemble Notre Dame’s most famous hunchback. And it ain’t getting better. 

I wash small loads of wash lately because once a week at least a perfectly good shirt, a perfectly clean shirt, jumps off my chest to catch milk from the cereal bowl or syrup from pancakes. I get so angry, I wash them right away to destroy evidence.

But this friend of mine—the man who was warned by his father to get used to his aches and pains—right now is dying of lung cancer. He says in a note that his aches are different because now, he says, “I will never again be able to draw a full two-lungs'-worth of breath. I will ever puff at a flight of stairs. This body will nevermore be what it has been, nor can I frame my knowing it according to its ability to repair itself.”

And, he says, he’ll never get better. He’s busy “devising methods for living the diminishing life.”  And he still says, “Praise the Lord.”  He still says, “Hallelujah.” Just doesn’t have as much lung to profer that praise.

I'd like to think I could hit a ball out of the park, but I was a whole lot safer at a book club. 

Today is Easter. Yesterday, I burned up the big patch of prairie grass in our behind our house. What's out there now is scorched earth, a war zone. I burned it up, all of it, with the sure knowledge that what's there will rise again with new life, more green, more bountiful.

This morning we rise in the sure knowledge of faith that Geezers in spotless t-shirts who call upon His name will someday swat big fat pitches out of the park.

He is risen. Hallelujah!

Good Friday

A country churchyard in northeast Iowa.

Just a couple weeks ago I passed a country church and saw this crucifix through the trees, stopped, and tried to put it in the camera and take it with. Somehow I was moved by an ordinary crucifix in a little country churchyard. I told myself on Good Friday I'd put it up, so here it is.

I'm a child of the Reformation, so the crucifix seemed to me--and still does, I suppose--a peculiarly Roman Catholic thing, almost contraband; but I've taken a shot at more than a little of Christ's suffering through the years. Here's a number of them, for Good Friday, from a host of places of worship. They are what we try to know, to feel, to understand of this particular day, a day when we're all catholic.

California Mission

Florence, Italy

Hoven, South Dakota

Marty, South Dakota

Hospers, Iowa

Rome, Italy

St. Paul, MN

Marty, SD

St. Peters Basilica, Rome

A California Mission

Maundy Thursday, then and now

That it's a masterpiece is a given. If it isn't the most famous painting in the world, it is second only to the Mona Lisa. Thousands--millions, I suppose--go to Milan to see it every year. 

It's the work of Leonardo, the quintessential "Renaissance man," who could do almost anything. If he were alive today, Italy would contend for the World Cup. Art lovers fawn about the painting's "perspective"--how all of its lines point at Christ's forehead. But then Da Vinci loved math too. 

However, The Last Supper was an grand experiment that failed badly. Should Milan be in your travel plans, keep in mind that what you'll see in the convent holds few, if any, of Leonardo's brush marks. The master was far better at math than he was at mixing paint. The Last Supper is no fresco, no mix of paint and wet plaster. Leonardo worked on dry plaster, so what you see is a thousand touch ups and more than a few wholesale restorations.

And it wasn't always so highly celebrated. Once upon a time, the monks cut a chunk out and made it a door. Napoleon's army used the room as a stable, and the Nazis--horrors!--actually bombed the place, turning some adjacent walls into rubble. 

What's so famously pictured is Maundy Thursday, the night Jesus was betrayed, particularly, of course, what Christians call "the last supper," Christ's final meal with his disciples, the consecration of a sacrament. Lest you imagine Christ's actual "last supper" to be a stunning moment of blessed reverence, have a look at what Leonardo saw: half the crowd isn't even seated. It's an unruly classroom--only the three to the left of Jesus seem to be engaged with him, but they're unmistakably angry. By the looks of things, "Take, eat, remember and believe" didn't have much currency in the room, even with the most faithful. 

What's here is a very specific moment in Christian history. Jesus Christ has just explained that one of them, one of his beloved, isn't. There's a traitor in the room. What roils the twelve is who. None of them looks at Judas (third from left), even though the rat's got the money bag in his right hand. 

There's very little reverence in The Last Supper. There's far more accusation and anger. It's not pretty.

Come to think of it, that table looks a ton like the U.S. of A. today. You'd have to go back to the 1860s to picture a less peaceable Maundy Thursday in America--brother against brother (that's Peter with the weapon). In just a few hours, the Attorney General of the United States will have a news conference most Democrats swear he shouldn't, at least not before releasing the Mueller report. We're not at war here, but almost.

On the political right, Michelle Bachmann claims we've never had a President more biblical and Godly. If she could, she'd photoshop our President's mug onto Jesus's shoulder so he'd be the center point of that vaunted perspective. It's all about him, which is just the way he likes it.  

On the left, he's Judas, the one holding the money bag, a ham-fisted political bully so given to lying that he believes the litany of falsehoods he utters. 

This morning, we're like the table really, looking who to blame for the bedlam. 

History says it took only a decade or so before Leonardo's masterpiece began to flake, then drop away. What's up there on the Milan convent wall is, only in conception, the work of Da Vinci. 

But he got something right, didn't he? The paint may have thinned and long ago disappeared, but what's happening at the table needs a blessing. As we do. All of us. 

The Cathedral of the Prairie*--For Holy Week

It requires a theology to build a church like St. Anthony of Padua, in Hoven, SD. A couple of farmers don't just get together over coffee at the Coop and decide to build a place like this. It requires a vision and a shared theology that's sacramental, that's based in the nothing less than a doctrine like transubstantiation, the belief that the only thing that's bread and wine about the sacrament is its physicality. That really--nobody's kidding about this--that what you take from the priest's hands is nothing less than the real body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. And this is the place where that divine body and blood is given away to needy souls. 

Anthony Helbrecht

St. Anthony's visionary was Bavarian-born priest named Anthony Helmbrecht, a man who desired a cathedral not unlike the ones he remembered from his boyhood; so in early years of the 20th century he went door-to-door with an open hand until he collected enough to contract the artisans he wanted, then started to build this "Cathedral of the Prairie."
Never heard of Hoven, SD? Most people haven't. It's in the middle of the vast reaches of Northern-Plains nowhere, population 400 in 2013. You have to drive a long ways out of the way to get there, but you can't miss it once you do, St. Anthony's twin towers reigning 140 feet up above a landscape so flat all around you can't help think the world is.

Father Helmbrecht's vision was gargantuan, but what's just as impressive about St. Anthony's is the way Hoven folks keep it up--and there are fewer of them all the time. When a renovation was needed in 1980, one contractor suggested plastering the walls. Another said he couldn't guarantee a price, but it would likely be somewhere around half a million the congregation didn't have. 

So they did the work themselves--20,000 hours, four years' worth, scaffolding all the way up to the ceiling--did you get that?  up to the ceiling.  Three times they moved the whole structure, disassembled it and rebuilt it again. Brides walked right through it at their weddings. 

Saturday morning I was there just after eight, alone. St. Anthony's sees thousands of visitors annually, but winter on the plains isn't particularly touristy. I walked around with a camera, shooting hither and yon. The stained glass is beautiful, imported, created--can you guess?--in Bavaria.

In walked a silver-haired woman, a citizen of the Plains, the kind of woman marketing people might look for if they needed a peppery grandma. She politely served herself from the holy water in the hands of one of the two angels at the entrance, then started walking up front, and waved politely when she spotted me--I hoped I wasn't doing anything wrong. 

I'd been there a while and was ready to leave, so I walked out the back of the sanctuary and nodded at one of those angels, explained to her that I was a Calvinist, which she told me she understood, my not having taken the holy water when I came in--for which I was forgiven, I might add.

In the back, I spotted the old stairway to the balcony, highly polished oak, but of such vintage that I wondered if it was wise for a man of my considerable girth to take it. I did, because I wanted to see that almost divine sanctuary in all its splendor from on high. It is perfectly beautiful. 

Now just imagine this--all that stenciling, all the decor that festoons the succession of arches--all of it redone by locals sitting way up there on pine scaffolding only barn builders could construct. Imagine that. Almost as beautiful as the sanctuary itself.

She came up after me, this grandma in jeans and sweatshirt. She'd put up hymn numbers on the signs up front, then came up behind me, the stairway giving her approach away with the kind of groaning you'd expect from steps coming up quickly on a century old.

She had to practice. She was the organist. She had to practice, and she just assumed that I was up here because, of course, I wanted to see the St. Anthony organ. I wasn't about to tell her that that her 17-rank pipe organ wasn't the end of my rainbow exactly, but it was clear from her bold direction that whether or not it was I would have to listen to her extol that instrument's virtues in detail and see every last one of those 1100 pipes.

And then she spread her music out in front of her and took to the bench. If you're like me, you may well assume that Grandma Custodian/Musician was a master, had studied, certainly, with the great cathedral organ masters in Bavaria, probably. 

Well, no. In accomplishment, what she played wasn't stunning at all.  Well, I'll let you write the review.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGCoyrlE3Q4

She's been playing in St. Anthony of Padua Church since 1949, she says, and here's the real story: she is the very last one. Hoven's lost 20 percent of its population since 2000, and there's not a lot of call these days for organists. Guitar pickers?--sure. But organists? No line. No waiting.

So she's last, at this organ, in this church. I want you to know that standing there beside her right then, knowing that, made the short program she was offering me in the Cathedral of the Prairie something beautifully masterful. 

Here she is, proud as any grandma should be. 

On that Saturday morning, I'd just come from a sitting out along the Missouri in a perfectly glorious dawn, but just then the light up there in the choir loft of St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, the Cathedral of the Prairie, could not have been much more divine.
______________________
*First published, March 5, 2015. To say that Hoven's massive cathedral doesn't hold a candle to Paris's Notre Dame is to miss the point. It's Holy Week. 

Reliquarys and the soul

Italy has its own wonderful language, of course, but so does Catholicism. This bald man is St. Peter--well, some sculptor's impression of what Peter might have looked like. Without a doubt, every bit of his apparel has specific meaning--who are the figures on the breastplace?--but I didn't stay around and study long enough to learn what all of it was meant to teach. 

Busto Reliquiario de san Petro the little sign beside this work says and then thoughtfully translates for those of us who don't know the language--"Reliquary bust of St. Peter," which is helpful, but not totally clarifying if you don't know the language of Roman Catholicism, yet another tongue spoken throughout the country. 

If you haven't guessed, don't be alarmed. Took me forever, too. See that little hole in St. Peter's chest?--it contains something, I'm not sure what exactly, but something, something really significant, a relic. Maybe something of the robe St. Peter was wearing when he was martyred--I honestly don't know. But it's a relic, and the entire bust is called a "reliquary" because its function is to store the relic, or relics, while honoring them and him as well. What's inside the bust, in other words, is vastly more to be cherished than the bust itself. 

All of this--and more--I had to learn in Italy, in a half-dozen cathedrals and basilicas, each of which could have been studied and analyzed for a semester and more. There across the room and over St. Peter's shoulder is yet another reliquaries (I'm not sure how to spell the plural)--see the case? And here's another from the same room.

Once again, I'm not sure what's inside, but be assured it's precious. 

The thing is, even if you're a Protestant and you don't necessarily long to be Roman Catholic, when you're in the presence of reliquaries, the only mode is silence.  Nobody parties in cemeteries, after all, and anything spoken in a room full of relics like this one is done is whispers.

I've got a number of Zuni fetishes up behind me on a shelf. They're perfectly beautiful little animals. I don't worship them, but they are, in the basement, rather prominently displayed a shelf above the buffalo skull, which has very little beauty itself on its own. But the skull is a kind of "relic" too. That's blasphemy to some, I know, but stay with me. My much beloved buffalo skull is unrelated to the disciples or the apostles or the life of scripture, but obviously I honor it by its prominence in the room. If you have doubts about my faith, be sure that just across the room there's picture of a hippy Christ and a crucifix, a big one, in fact. 

My grandpa's Navajo rug up on the wall here too, and up on the top shelf behind me is a little sign from my childhood bedroom, something I'm sure my mother put there, a sign that has stayed with me for most of my own 70 years: "The Lord is My Shepherd" it says, in whitish letters that once upon a time glowed in the dark.

All of us hold tight to that we believe precious. Last night, a whole circle of French people sang something, some hymn maybe, each of them knew by heart as they watched Notre Dame burn. This morning, I'm sure if you google, you'll find dozens of breathtaking, almost unearthly pictures of the flames amid the ruins.

It's hard to estimate the loss of whatever is gone in that world treasure. To put it in monetary terms--no matter how many zeros you tally, the amount will always somehow come up short because yesterday in Paris, something of the human heart was lost, something, really, of the soul.

We--all of us really--lost something of our soul yesterday.

The good news, this Easter week, is that still there remains so much more to know, so much more to honor, so much more to worship. No matter what burned, the soul remains. Thanks be to God.

R.I.P. 3.2

I'd never heard of 3.2 beer until I got to college. Never was much of a drinker either. I had my first real beer the summer before coming to Iowa for school. Pulled one from an old refrigerator in the basement office of the state park where I worked, a fridge we kept stocked with six packs we confiscated from under-agers on the beach. If that fridge got short, we'd go on patrol some Saturday afternoon to restock.

That first beer was so cold it slid down like a dream; but then, as I remember, it'd been a hot day on the Lake Michigan shoreline. Once quitting time came, the whole crew indulged.

So I was hardly a practiced drinker when I got to college. None of guys who climbed in a car and drove all the way to South Dakota did so because we loved beer or had to to fill some need. Mostly, we crossed the river because doing so was a sin, or something similar at the Christian college I attended. Doing something because you shouldn't creates its own blessedness. 

Took a half hour to get to the border, where the Rock and the Big Sioux put a few curves in the otherwise straight road west to Hudson, fifty years ago a town moving past whatever prime it once had. 

Decline was written in empty buisinesses downtown, but Hudson had a tap, a place called "The Buckaroo," and you didn't have to be 21 to belly up to the bar, not as if anyone ever asked. We'd roll in from across the river and drink Grain Belt at what?--fifty cents a glass, 3.2 beer, I was told. I had no idea what that meant.

There was a time 3.2 beer was considered non-alcoholic. Today, it's really a refugee of American prohibition. Could have fooled us back then. We weren't interested in history or nostalgia. We'd toss back a few and turn into Dean Martin wannabees. Eventually, we'd leave with a six pack or two to road load all the way back to Sioux Center.

Who knows why some of us loved it and so many other classmates would thought our South Dakota trips transgressions. Sometimes we'd watch the Buckaroo's noisy front door, thinking the Dean of Students would take the trip west himself just to find inners. All of that made 3.2 beer even more a delight. 

We didn't go often. Once in a while on a Friday night, and nobody got hammered. You'd have to swallow a bathtub of 3.2 to get there. I remember thinking some guys seemed to need to a snoot full, because it didn't take long and they'd start singing or dancing or yammering endlessly. Some guys wanted badly to get silly, and I remember wondering why. 

The Dean never showed up, and I don't believe I ever saw the Iowa State Patrol hidden on the other side of the bridge at the place the locals claimed there sometimes would be. We never got caught. Back then, dorm counselors weren't armed with breathalyzers. As sin goes, the Buckaroo was pretty darn petty. Dante never created a level of hell for 3.2 beer.

Confession is good for the soul, you're thinking, and that's why he's telling this tale. That maybe partly true. I never got caught drinking 3.2 beer that I remember, so at 71 years old maybe it's time to come clean. 

The real reason is that ever since the Great Depression, 3.2 beer had an American presence, but just last week Kansas officially dumped the law that said grocery stores could only sell the weak-kneed little brother of ordinary brew. Nation-wide in 2019, there's no market for it, so it's the end of the road for 3.2.

No big deal really. No lament required. For the most part, 3.2 has been gone for years already. No need for ceremony.

Just thought I'd mention it. And, in case you're wondering, Main Street in Hudson, South Dakota, has fewer merchants than it did a half century ago.  Still, I can't help but smile when I tell you, just in case you're interested, that yes, there still is a Buckaroo.