In late August, pics and a poem

The pictures are from nine years ago, this time of year, a windy morning somewhere east of Canton, SD, mostly. When, about then, I posted them here, a good friend sent me a Mary Oliver poem which, he said, felt like the pictures. I'm humbled by the association, but proud enough to post the shots--and the poem--once more.

The Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflower, there the hummingbird-
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast, there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.



Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young and still not half perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,



which is standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,



which is gratitude to be given a mind and a heart
and these body clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Mary Oliver

Big Blue Stem

You got to hunt. It's tucked away a ways. It's been there for nigh unto forty years, but it's there, a big square historical marker a mile or so from land Ole Rolvaag, the novelist, used to work when he was a kid out here on wide open prairie. It's not far from Elk Point, in Union County, South Dakota, on 476th Avenue, ¼ mile north of Groethe Rd., on the right when traveling north. Got that?

Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth tells our story better than anyone, and the prairie story starts with sound, of all things, a landscape of sound. Listen:

It was late afternoon. A small caravan was pushing its way through the tall grass. The track that it left behind was like the wake of a boat--except that instead of widening out astern it closed in again. 

"Tish-ah!" said the grass. . . . "Tish-ah, tish-ah!" . . . .Never had it said anything else--never would it say anything else. It bent resiliently under the trampling feet; it did not break, but it complained aloud every time--for nothing like this had ever happened to it before. . . ."tish-ah, tish-ah! it cried, and rose up in surprise to look at this rough, hard thing that had crushed it to the ground so rudely, and then moved on.

Today, Rolvaag's opening scene needs a footnote. That swishing sound is the sound of tall grass--right up to a horse's withers, tall grass that once, in a breeze, made the world all around us wave like an ocean. What kind of grass, you ask? 

Big Blue Stem. Big Blue Stem. Used to be, there were far more of them than there are of us. Tall and spindly, it grew up every summer from a thick bundle of shorter stuff at its base, like a grass skirt, a thicket that a host of critters thought of as home. Spindly and thin up top, Big Blue Stem, the tallest of our native grasses, gets tossed around so mightily by gusty winds that not even a goldfinch can hold on. But it doesn't break, it just waves, waves hard, waves beautifully, waves like an inland sea.

You can still find it dancing here and there in restored prairie or in forgotten corners of the country too steep or crooked to take a plow. You can pick up a bunch from a garden shop and put it in your backyard. Don't worry--it'll take. It does most anywhere. It's not picky. In fact, people who know such things claim it can still get aggressive if you let it alone somewhere, if you let it be. But it doesn't make for a great pasture because people say cattle love it too darn much--some ranchers call it "ice cream for cows." Way back when, it suited our buffalo just fine, but they stopped to graze only every other year or so. Big Blue won't stand up to constant grazing.

Some call Big Blue "turkey foot" for the three-pronged head it grows like a little joke late summer. It's especially beautiful this time of year--late summer to fall--when it takes on its own royal robe: those long stems turn purple, and amber once the snow flies. But I'll admit it--beauty in native prairie is an acquired taste. It can be a real flower shop, but it'll never be a greenhouse. There are no hybrids, just a colorful bunch of old friends.

Wouldn't hurt us to remember that we'll be indebted to Big Blue Stem for a long, long time because it once stood all around and grew remarkable roots so thick and deep that it created our own rich prairie sod.

Here's the poet William Cullen Bryant the big blue stem prairie our world once was:

As o’er the verdant waste I guide my steed,
Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides
The hollow beating of his footsteps seems
A sacrilegious sound. 

Tish-ah.

Still not convinced? How about Walt Whitman, who wanted like nothing else to be "America's poet." Listen to him from "Specimen Days":

As to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling), while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape.”

Let me remind you that right here Walt Whitman is talking about home. Ours. 

Remembering Mother Teresa--Bewonderment

[Yesterday was Mother's Teresa's birthday. One early morning, maybe ten years ago, I picked up her biography from a retreat bookstore and discovered a religious life so moving that the morning I picked up the book I determined to work my way through that life devotionally. I found it remarkable how distanced from my own religious experience her life drew her, but more often than not I was simply awed, as millions were. In honor of her birthday, I'm reposting one of those meditations.]

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens;

let your glory be over all the earth. Psalm 57:11 

The basic story line by which I’ve always seen the Christian life is the outline of a narrative that rises from the handbook of doctrine with which I was reared. That outline goes like this: “sin, salvation, service.”

The story line begins with sin – our knowledge of it, as it exists within us. Calvin starts even a bit earlier, with the heavens, with our sense of God as manifest in his world: what we see and experience. Because humans can’t help but see God’s marvelous work in the heavens and the earth around us, we come to know that there is a God. With that knowledge, we feel our own limitations – that we aren’t God. And there begins our knowledge of human limits, our knowledge, finally, of sin.

That conviction draws us closer to God because we need a Savior. Sin precedes salvation, or so the story goes, through the second act.

Once we know that he loves us, in spite of our sin, he loves us, our hearts fill, our souls rejoice; we can’t help but celebrate our salvation. That celebration leads us into gratitude and service, into doing what we can to be his agents of love in the world he loves so greatly.

Sin, salvation, service – three acts of a drama that is the plot of all of our lives.

Mother Theresa’s take on a very similar tale in three different acts, was created, I suppose, by her experiences in the ghettos of Calcutta. We begin with repulsion, she says –: what we see, she says – brokenness, sadness – offends, prompts us to look away.

But we really can’t or shouldn’t or won’t; we have to look misery in its starving face, and when we do, we move from repulsion to compassion – away from rejection and toward loving acceptance. End Act II.

The final act is what she called “bewonderment,” which is sheer wonder plus a-grade admiration. Our compassion leads us to bewonderment. 

“Bewonderment” is likely one of those words few of us use but most all of us understand. Still, like reverence, it’s hard to come by in a world where our sorest needs are never more than a price tag away.

I’ll admit that bewonderment is hard to come by for me, perhaps because it isn’t so clearly one of the chapters in the story I was told as a boy, the story which that is still deeply embedded in my soul. “Service” is the end of the Christian life – or always has been – for me, not “bewonderment.”

I’m more than a little envious of David’s praise in Psalm 57. What he says to God in prayer is something I rarely tell him. I don’t think I’ve ever asked God not to hide his little light under a bushel, to display his radiant grace from pole-to-pole in my life and yours. I’m forever asking for favors, some big, some not, but am only rarely into adoration, in part, I suppose, because I’m so rarely in awe.

But bewonderment, awe, is something I’m learning, even this morning, and for that I’m thankful – for the book of songs, for David, and for the God David knew so intimately that he could speak the way he does in Psalm 57. It’s difficult for some of us to be intimate with God – to be so close to a being so great and grand and seemingly out of reach. But bewonderment is something I think we can learn, all of us, even an old man. 

Amazing things have happened to Josh Harris

Josh Harris has cameo role in my last novel, Looking for Dawn, when a dad named Scotty picks up a book his daughter is reading only to discover it's all about sex and dating--specifically, how not doing sex and dating is the Jesus way. Scotty reads just enough to be shocked, so different is the way of Jesus outlined in the book from the way Scotty himself grew up. I didn't name Josh Harris or the book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, because it seemed to me he wasn't the only advocate of this 21st version of spiritual celibacy. 

Josh Harris, a "purity expert" some call him, argued that dating is harmful since it introduces a kid--boy or girl--to a way of life that made multiple partners an accepted thing. In his opinion (he was just a kid himself when he wrote it), true love not only waits, it doesn't even date. He was an advocate of what he called "courtship," an elaborate ritual that includes parental participation.

Harris, himself the son of a celebrated preacher, soon had his own mega-church. Maybe he gave his wealth away--I don't know; but when books like his fly off the shelf, they earn significant money. With three kids and a pretty wife, he'd reached the American Evangelical Dream. He was barely thirty years old.

Then, a couple of years back, he pulled the plug on just about everything he'd once advocated, said he no longer bought the goods he'd sold to the evangelical public. He resigned his pulpit and went to seminary, he said, to understand more about the historic Christian faith.

Those who bought his purity culture were leaderless. Must have been painful. 

Now, just a month ago or so, as if to put the error of his ways into upper case, he announced that he and his wife had split, amicably, he said. They were seeking a divorce because, as most people say, they found themselves pursuing different courses or whatever.

Not only that, he went farther in an Instagram message: "The information that was left out of our announcement is that I have undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus," Harris wrote. "By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian," he added, "I am not a Christian."

What must have disillusioned, even angered conservative evangelicals even more is what he later added: that he regretted, even asked forgiveness of the LGBTQ community for believing and saying what he did as one of the fair-haired boys of the cultural conservative evangelical community. 

Christians are just as susceptible to fads as anyone, maybe more so. Faith, after all, is all about being generous, or should be. Christians who are skeptical--think Thomas the disciple--generally pay a price for questioning things. Harris was, for sure, a fad for a time. 

Here's another. I can't help but think of a really faddish way evangelicals have of talking about people, often their own children. You must have heard it. It goes like this: "I can't wait to see what amazing things God has planned for you." It's very sweet and encouraging, very "christian."

In the case of Josh Harris, whose parents might well have blessed him with the same words, is what has happened to him in the last few years "amazing"? Is his acceptance of gay marriage part of God's plan for his life, or was he on it only when he opened the word in that mega-church? 

"By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian," Josh Harris says, "I am not a Christian." That sentence does not mean God doesn't love him or he doesn't worship God. What it says is that he's discovered--right or wrong--that his old definitions no longer hold up for him. God is somehow bigger.

I don't share evangelical fear or sadness about what's happened to the faith of Josh Harris. He's forty years old now, not 23. Does anyone really doubt that where he is today will be where he is in faith when he's sixty? I don't. God doesn't change, but we certainly do.

A sovereign God does amazing things, but "amazing" can be a little slippery. I

suspect that God is not finished with Josh Harris yet. Nor he is through with you or me or anyone.

Sunday Morning Meds--Cedars of Lebanon

“The trees of the LORD are well watered, 

the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.” Psalm 104:16

Up and down the broad shoulders of the Missouri River, thousands of dead cedars lie akimbo, puffs of bronze against the prairie grasses. Ranchers fight a losing battle with the cedars because they grow like weeds in the hills. Eventually, if someone weren’t there to cut them down, they’d turn the valley into mighty forest.  A forested Missouri River neighborhood might be beautiful—and remarkable amid miles of grassland; but ranchers are cattlemen, not lumberjacks.

The cedars of Lebanon, I’m told, face a wholly different problem.  Those famed broad forests simply are no more, or are but a shadow of their former selves. They’re gone.

And who is to blame?  Not us, thankfully—well, not us if we define ourselves by time and place.  But if we define us by species, denuding the forested hills of Lebanon began thousands of years ago, when more populated areas of the desert Middle East needed the lumber.

When their supplies went scarce, wars erupted. Deprivation creates conflict—who’s going to get what all of us want? Then, later, the cedars of Lebanon became the building materials of the great Phoenician ships. Supplies waned. 

While the cedars of Lebanon may have been well watered in the Psalmist’s day, today they are no more. They’re the stuff of legends because we did ‘em in.  God may have planted them, but human enterprise felled them.  It’s just that simple.

So why not let the cedars of the Missouri River grow into brand new forests?  Human enterprise uproots them; why not just let them grow back?

There really never was a forest of cedars along the Missouri because they were continuously wiped out by raging prairie fires. A forest of river valley cedars would be a new thing.   

I don’t claim to understand a great deal about “the balance of nature” or the scientific field of ecology.  But you don’t need a degree in ecology to know that our interaction with the forces of nature changes the landscapes around us. I happen to live in in the county that leads the entire state in “altered” acres; here and there, on some forgotten hillside there may be a corner of actual native prairie. What’s more, the state of Iowa leads the nation is altered land. We have less wilderness here than anywhere in these United States. In Sioux County, Iowa, change is evident in every direction.

Right now, if you want to see the blessed cedars of Lebanon, the trees that thrill the poet, you can’t. . .they’re gone. 

Psalm 104 is a pageant of God’s glory. The psalmist is awed by a landscape that blossoms. That, today, the “cedars of Lebanon” inspire no music, no poetry, and no awe suggests is sort of sad; I’d like to see what made the psalmist sing.

Psalm 104:16 is its own reminder to care about our world.

It's a jungle out there

It's not a particularly good picture, but it'll have to do. That's our house up there at the top, maybe fifty yards or so away from where I'm standing. What's between us is five years' worth of sweat and toil and the glorious result of more rain than we normally get, thanks (right now) to global warming. It's prairie, revisited. 

We've got an acre out here, too much to mow, so we decided to take a chunk of it--about a third--and do it up with native grasses and flowers--actually sew it, like Boaz, tossing out the precious seed (it's not cheap) with saw dust to make the job easier. Then, under the tutelage of a friend who really knows what he's doing, we raked the seed into the soil just a bit and let it grow. 

The first year, as per my instructions, I set my mower up as high as it would go and simply mowed the entire plot, as if it were the lawn we determined not to have. Second year, same, although I let up earlier. The idea was to let those native plants grow roots because, good night! they do. Holy coneflower, they do. This pic from the land institute gives you a sense of perennial native roots.

The third year I let the whole mess grow and battled the Russians all year, thistle that is, which is not to say I didn't the year before or once again this year. Adam undoubtedly had native prairie, but, post-fall, he also had weeds, scores of 'em. There's a ton of sweat in that plot of prairie. 

The fourth year things started popping, but an August hailstorm took out our garden and left the prairie sadly drab. Bit then this year, five years after casting that seed out almost biblically, we've got color galore and heft and density that's plainly remarkable--and wonderfully beautiful.

And one reason it's especially lovely is the way our little quarter-acre of renewed prairie reminds us of what this eco-system, now almost entirely gone, once looked like. It was an ocean of grass so many witnesses said and wrote, but at the right time of summer, glory hallelujah, it had more color and depth than any sea. No wonder people could get lost in it. It's a jungle out there.

No eco-system in North America is as gone as tall-grass prairie--what reigned here. And no county in Iowa is as devastated as this one--Sioux. It's almost impossible to imagine that once upon time, kids, this is what the world looked like out back.

It's an exotic jungle that isn't exotic at all. It's a painting as new as dawn every morning. It's an artwork that features nothing more or less than the way things were. It's what God looked down upon for eons before we decided to row crop endless acres of corn and soybeans.

Look, I can't say it better than show you: it's just plain beautiful.

Morning Thanks--In Sweet Communion

In sweet communion, Lord, with Thee
I constantly abide;
My hand Thou holdest in Thy own
To keep me near Thy side.

To say my mother valued spiritual talk is gross understatement. It's probably fair to say she made some weighty judgments on the basis of the length and intensity of that kind of confessional conversation. My dad wasn't as spiritually hungry as his beloved, but he lived with her and for her, really, for so many years that he couldn't help becoming her spiritual consort. 

My father-in-law wasn't given to my mother's need of soulful reassurance. As far as I know, he didn't ever push spirituality into what my mother presumed to be otherwise spiritually empty conversation. Their respective "family altars" were largely similar--Sabbath worship, twice; a daily regimen of prayer and scripture at meal times; prayer and maybe some devotional reading before bed. But their expressions of spirituality were day-and-night really.

Thy counsel through my earthly way
Shall guide me and control,
And then to glory afterward
Thou wilt receive my soul.

I shouldn't have been surprised as I was to find "In Sweet Communion, Lord, with Thee," scribbled in on that half sheet of lined paper we found stuck in one of his four Bibles, some handwritten suggestions for his funeral. "Sweet Communion" should have been one of my mother's top choices, but there that old hymn was in his notes.

His preacher smiled when we showed him the requests Dad had written out. "Oh, we never sing that one anymore--and I always loved it," he said, looking over at my wife. 

I felt exactly the same.

Whom have I, Lord, in heaven but Thee,
To Whom my thoughts aspire?
And, having Thee, on earth is nought
That I can yet desire.

Oddly enough, I don't think of either of my parents when I hear that old melody, but, like his pastor, I am drawn back to my childhood church, where the preacher's wife, a stately woman, tall and maybe a bit gaunt, sang out those lyrics in her inimitable alto voice as fully spirited as any preacher's wife could, every last psalm and hymn and spiritual song, always a half-note flat, my mother used to say. She judged such things more closely than I did.

That woman, the preacher's wife, the juffrouw, looked as stern as any caricature Calvinist ever did or could, but she wasn't: she was tall and square-shouldered, but soft and sweet and, in my memory, always smiling. When she sang in church--at least in my estimation--she was loving every musical minute.

Though flesh and heart should faint and fail,
The Lord will ever be
The strength and portion of my heart,
My God eternally.

We'll never know who Dad might have thought of when he heard that verse, whether or not he even had someone visualized in mind or memory. What verse four says is all I need to read because with him at 100 years and two months, flesh certainly did "faint and fail," and, even though he never said so, I've absolutely no doubt that his "God eternally" was "the strength and portion" of his heart.

Whether he chose that old hymn for its words or its melody, or for his memories, is a question we'll never answer. But when we sang it at his funeral, at his request, I swear he was there, as was my mom, my dad, and the juffrouw, all richly blessed by singing through that old number once again with us and the preacher.  They were all there too. My mother undoubtedly happy to hear me singing about all that "sweet communion."

To live apart from God is death,
'Tis good His face to seek;
My refuge is the living God,
His praise I long to speak.

For my father-in-law, it was a surprising choice, but a good one, a marvelously good one, for which, this morning, in bringing us all together, I am greatly thankful. 

"One's own hearth"

My wife and I … have purchased a little land upon which we can raise enough food — and we have built a house upon it. We are going to live by ourselves. I can work that land myself. Our Johan and Arend Jan and Jenneken are paying for that land from their earnings. Now they say we have our own home, and my wife and I are happy to have it. There is nothing better than having one’s own hearth — isn’t that true? … My wife is very happy.

I don't know the woman, but I know the story that's somewhere behind this note from an old letter--or some variant thereof. The woman who posted this on her blog got interested in family when someone, somewhere, asked her if she knew how an ancient grandmother of hers once learned how to bead from the Sioux neighbors she had when she was a girl way out in South Dakota long, long ago. Or maybe this: someone told her how a 19th century, great uncle lost a wife and two children to the Spanish Flu in 1918. The woman who posted that paragraph was amazed--more than that, she was shocked--that she didn't know. So she started reading whatever she could get her hands on.

Maybe an 80-year-old aunt or grandmother told her that her sister in Indiana had some letters that a great-great-great grandpa wrote back to family in the old country. Maybe that's where it started. That old aunt told this woman that she herself had never read those letters but had once heard they were kind of fun, if you're interested in that kind of thing. She'd never been, she'd said.

That's how the woman who stumbled on this paragraph found it, then posted it, just one paragraph of many that left her stunned with the knowledge of what she had never known about herself. All of a sudden, unpredictably, she was fascinated by an unraveling story that was uniquely hers, a strange and varied chain of events that had somehow led to be her being who she was, and where and how. 

Most everyone who reads these words and that paragraph at the top of the page have similar stories--blood relatives 150 years ago or so who lived the American Dream as innocently as the man who wrote those words back to his old country relatives: "There is nothing better than having one's own hearth."

The truth is, this old-country granddad, now at home in a new world, never really wanted much more than he had once he was self-sufficient in a house of his own on land of his own, at the foot of his own hearth. 

"Such humble beginnings," she must have told herself when she read that paragraph, "such incredibly humble beginnings."

"History," Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, "is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again." 

That kind of knowledge is humbling, as is faith itself, instruction for the soul. 

Here's Joyce Sutphen from this morning's Writer's Almanac.

Grandma Clara
By Joyce Sutphen

About noon she arrived in her blue-and-
white Bel Air by Chevrolet, in which she
did not see the USA but only

the road from her house in town to the farm
she built with her husband, who died as soon
as they retired, and that is why she came

each day—just to have something to do, to
help us with the work we had inherited
from her: the strawberry fields, gardens,

apple orchards, and grapevines, rhubarb stalks,
potato patch, rows of sweet corn; wild plums,
and gooseberries—and all those fields of com

and oats and hay, pastures too, above the
house and woods or down by the meadow where
the green grass grew. Who would not return to

such a place? I see her walking across
the lawn in her straw hat, hoe in hand,
ready to chop away whatever weeds

dared grow between the perfectly mounded
hills of potatoes, those rows that would feed
us all through the cold white winter when she

would come less often though we would see her
every morning in the back of church—
praying, no doubt, for the whole crop of us.

Obituary

Randall Van Gelder was born on June 9, 1919, the second child and first son of John and Anna (De Vries) Van Gelder, who lived at that time a mile east of Ireton, Iowa. He attended Ireton Christian School as a boy, and, with some fondness, remembered those long walks back and forth to town.

In the late 1920s, his father determined to relocate the family to a farm north of Orange City. To get his family there, father and son drove two horse-drawn wagons loaded up with farm tools and household goods, a highly responsible job for a ten-year-old boy, but a task he enjoyed remembering.

Moving to Orange City meant changing schools, which he did, graduating from eighth grade at Orange City Christian. It was the height of the Depression, but it wasn’t poverty that kept him from going on to get an education; the family’s farm was, back then, a way of life, maybe especially for the oldest boy. That Randall Van Gelder loved farming goes without saying, but throughout his life he couldn’t keep himself from wondering what his life may have been like if he’d been able to keep going to school, to learn more about the world he found himself in as a young man.

Along with two of his brothers and millions of other Americans, he went to war after Pearl Harbor. One of those brothers, Charles, would not return. Before going overseas, Randall, the farm kid, went to mechanic’s school, where the International Harvester Company taught him and others how to service tanks and tank engines specifically.

In England, like so many others, he awaited the massive invasion that would be unleashed on the beaches of Normandy, France. Two months after June 6, 1944, he and the 555th Ordinance Tank Maintenance Company crossed the English Channel and set up the motor pool in France, just behind the lines of warfare. That’s where he and his buddies stayed, following the front all the way to Germany.

His military experience meant a great deal to him. For many years after the war, he kept in touch with several army buddies.

On July 5, 1946, he married Bertha Visser in Orange City, Iowa, less than a year after he was discharged. Together, they moved to a farm just down the road from his father’s place, put in a crop, and began their lives together. A sudden freakish hail storm virtually destroyed what they’d planted so hopefully that spring, forcing him to find work in town, where for two years he took a job as a mechanic to stay afloat.

Two years later, Randall and Bertha welcomed their first and only child, Barbara Kay.

When he returned to the farm, Randall ran a standard operation for the time: he milked some cows, raised some hogs, harvested some row crops and kept a big garden. Barbara’s first memory is of her dad hoisting her up on the back of one of the big work horses he used until he could afford a first tractor.

Randall and Bertha began their life together at First CRC, Orange City, but, later in life, became charter members of Immanuel CRC. For him, church wasn’t just a brick and mortar place, it was a family. He believed in the covenantal family of faith, treasured his relationship to Immanuel, felt loved.

Randall and Bertha moved to Orange City in 1983, some time after he told himself and those he loved that he simply did not want or need the stress of another harvest. Bertha was greatly pleased to move to town.

Randall was “handy,” could fix anything—or, if he couldn’t, he’d devise and build some alternative way to get the job done. He worked for farmers and apartment owners, and with Bertha did occasional volunteer work for church relief organizations. But he also took some well-earned time to fish with neighbors and friends, and always had time for kids and grandkids. He even worked for Bertha, rebuilding the chairs she’d been asked to upholster. For a time, they were a team.

In 2001, always having to be busy, Randall began volunteering his days to Hope Haven where, for almost fifteen years, he loved the rebuilding wheelchairs. They were a far cry from tractors and Sherman tanks, but needy folks thousands of miles across the globe got new mobility because of what went on in that volunteer shop. He enjoyed paging through photos of overseas recipients blessed by a wheelchair he’d repaired or reconditioned.

After moving to Landsmeer in 2003, he devotedly tended Bertha’s needs as her caregiver through a progressive, rare nerve disease. She died in May of 2009, but Randall lived on, alone, to reach 100 years old—and two months. His death was unhurried and quiet, as peaceful as death can be.

He is survived by his daughter, Barbara, and her husband, James Schaap, both of Alton; by two grandchildren, Andrea and her husband Piet Westerbeek IV, of Sioux Center; and David Schaap, and his wife Kristina Davis, of Perkins, Oklahoma, as well as four grandchildren: Jocelyn Westerbeek, Pieter Westerbeek V, Ian Westerbeek, and Olivia Schaap.

Randall Van Gelder was the second oldest of the children of John and Anna Van Gelder, but the last of his ten siblings to pass away: sisters Jennie Schalekamp, Margaret Reinders, Johanna Hofland, Agnes Van Gelder, and Mary Vlieger; and brothers George, Charles, Gary, and Ken Van Gelder.

His pastor says Randall, in these last years, was interested greatly in what heaven might be. Today, we’re greatly thankful that he knows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-kGSDdV1vE

Sunday Morning Meds--What is man?

“What is man that you are mindful of him?” Psalm 9

Few people would list Charles Mix County, South Dakota, as an American vacation paradise.  There’s just not much happenin’.  Like much of the Great Plains, it has a museum-like quality because the landscape of abandoned farms on its hills suggests a far livelier past than present.

 

Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark were there, following the Missouri River that is western border of its 110-mile expanse.  Should you happen to follow the trail, you may something of a ghost town, a nearly abandoned settlement named, simply, Academy.

One day in 1892, a pioneer preacher named Rev. L. E. Camfield and a friend were out among the sod-busters of Charles Mix, collecting donations for the education of black children down South.  When they tallied the purse at the end of the day, they were thrilled:  they had $20. 

Here’s what they thought.  If a couple hundred dirt poor prairie farmers and ranchers could come up with that kind of money for needy kids hundreds of miles away, shouldn’t it be possible to create, right there in Charles Mix, an academic institution which would serve their own children in the best possible way? 

Camfield said he’d try, and just a year later, Ward Academy opened its doors to 23 students.  In a few years, the place had admirable facilities and close to 150 enrolled. 

The Rev. Mr. Camfield was a Christian, a dreamer, and deeply committed to the cause of Christian higher education.  For a time, this educational jewel on the Great Plains of South Dakota must have seemed, in its hustle and bustle, an answer to prayer.

Today all that school has is a relatively good paint job.  It old chapel is big and sits up high on a knoll as if still proclaiming the absolute importance of education.  But it hasn’t seen a student in years.  It’s a sepia-tone tintype of itself.

Out front is a stone memorial to the Rev. Mr. Camfield, to his diligence, his vision, and his commitment.  Behind that memorial is a building that, quite honestly, looks ready to be torched.  It’s Shelley’s “Ozymandius” come to South Dakota—with this significant difference:  Camfield was no swaggering despot. He was, instead, a firm believer and a tireless advocate of Christian education. 

To me, someone who’s spent his whole life in Christian higher education, there’s something chilling about Academy, South Dakota.  So much good was there at its birth, and it likely served its students well.  I think I would have liked Camfield, a firebrand for quality education in the Christian tradition.

But Academy, South Dakota, reminds me that even when we believe we’re in His service, our best may not amount to a hill of beans.  Academy is no more.  What’s left is little more than a ghost town.  In the cosmic scheme of things, we are just what the singer says we are in Psalm 8—not much.

But once again, here’s the miracle.  He loves us.  That’s the essence of this great old Psalm.  Even though our best is sometimes bountifully silly, He loves us.  That’s the realization that knocks David’s sandy socks right from out of his sandals. 

Think of the heavens, then think of us—just so many field mice.  But he loves us.  He honestly does.  And that makes all the difference for time and eternity.

Words for a Father

Words for a Father

And this is the consolation:
that the world doesn't end,
that the world one day
opens up into something better.
And that we one day
open up into something far better.
Maybe like this:
one morning you finally wake to a light
you recognize as the light you've wanted
every morning that has come before.
And the air has some light thing in it
that you've always hoped the air might have.
And One is there to welcome you
whose face you've looked for
during all the best and worst times of your life.
He takes you to himself and holds you close
until you fully wake. And it seems you've
only just awakened, but you turn and
there we are, the rest of us,
arriving just behind you.
We'll go the rest of the way together.

Scott Cairns

Randall Van Gelder--1919-2019

It must have been stressful. What did I know?--a son-in-law who didn't know a thing about farrowing or markets, combines or rotary hoes? He was leaving, even though neither his daughter nor I guessed he ever could. He was having a sale, a farm sale, everything in the machine shed, three old tractors, Nipco heaters, air pumps, whatnot--it was all going.

It must have been stressful, but I don't remember it being so, in part because I knew the decision to leave the farm and go to town had been made. There was no looking back. One Sunday afternoon, he and I had gone out to the barn, just as he must have since the day he and his wife moved out there decades before. "I'm retiring," he said. Not much more. He wasn't a man who liked to talk. In his life, he never jabbered. 

I was shocked. I'm guessing I looked it and likely said it. 

His reason was right there when I wondered why: "I don't care to go through another harvest." 

Harvest stressed him, so he was putting it behind him, having a sale, a farm sale. 

A ton of people showed up. All men. Lots of farm caps. Lots of coveralls. It was a cold, gray day on ground that got slippery and wet, a muddy mess. 

And there was a lot of the kind of seriousness on that face in that picture on top, lots of worry, lots of his life going up on the auction block for prices that got nowhere near to matching what that old Allis meant to him through all those years. 

But whole deal had to be done. They were moving to town. His wife would be happy finally--she never really liked hogs in the back yard, or the farm itself for that matter. He comforted his stress by telling himself, I imagine, that there'd be no more harvests any more. That he'd be done with all that stress. They were moving to town, and--he didn't know it then--they'd have many years together off the farm, as many as on.

My father-in-law died last night, as quietly as he'd ever lived. He'd been in decline for weeks already. When, two months ago, we celebrated his 100th birthday, he was only sometimes with us--and not often. But the nurses claimed that right up until an end no one witnessed, he wasn't particularly restless. They did what the could to keep it that way, so that his passing went easily. He was alone, Who knows but he might have preferred leaving that way. His wife did.

This morning he's gone. He's delivered. No one knows exactly what's to come, what Glory really looks like. Me?--I'd like to think his soul soared a bit last night when he left, that once he got above the trees he thought it would be good to check the crops. It was a late spring. Things didn't get in until late. 

If he did soar through the clouds and look down at a bright, moonlit earth, he would have seen his acres full of a good crops--tall corn, handsome beans all around. He would have looked down and smiled, I think. After all, he would have said to himself--and maybe to God too--there was, after all, so much good to remember. There was Bertha and Barbara and the grandkids and great-grandkids. There was church and wheelchair and those years in town and fishing with Arie and working with the Haarsmas. 

I'd like to think as he soared to wherever Glory is, he'd have looked down and remembered those he'd loved, and told the Lord, once again, maybe with a giggle, that there certainly was so very much good to remember, so very, very much.

Morning Thanks--a Calvinist heritage

It's an age-old ritual: before worship, the consistory meets to pray for what is about to happen, to pass along whatever news is current--who needs prayer and the Lord's good mercy. My wife is an elder now, so we go to church a bit earlier than we did, maybe five minutes--they don't meet long.  

I could mill around the back of the church, but I take a seat. There's very little solemnity before worship in church these days. Few sit in silence, as most did once upon a time. Friendly chatter fill the air.

A month ago, I grabbed a book from a library outside the sanctuary--books yours for taking. This one looked noble: 365 Days with Calvin, meditations from the theology of a man whose name is baked into my life's heritage. I am a Calvinist--I fully and unequivocally accept that, for better and for worse. I'm Calvinist in predilection, and not necessarily by choice. I think and feel and perceive in ways formed unmistakably by a worldview that is, whether I like it or not, shaped by John Calvin.

I read the Institutes of the Christian Religion when I thought of myself as being as far away from its influence as I could go. In graduate school it became clear to me that I lived in the august Reformer's shadow even though I'd never read a word of his before, heard about him often but never read a page. Even though I hadn't, I came to recognize I couldn't escape the fact that I was somehow "of him."

I read The Institutes as a scholar, not an apologist. I read it to discover what all the fuss was about. I read Calvin when I couldn't help knowing that I understood Jonathan Edwards in ways the other graduate students could not--and wouldn't hope to. That was true of Melville and Dickinson too, of Thoreau and Emerson. 

So a month ago I picked up 365 Days with Calvin before taking my seat in the sanctuary. There's no librarian. The books are free--just bring 'em back when you're finished and add your own. I grabbed 365 and opened it to yet another story.


365 Days with Calvin was once a gift from Cornerstone URC consistory to someone named Kara, who, I'm guessing, "joined the church," made a public profession of faith.

I was thrilled--honestly--to think that somewhere in the neighborhood was a church who thought enough of its kids and its heritage to get Calvin's own words in their hands. 

I couldn't believe it. That Cornerstone church adds URC to its name means it willfully took itself out of the church family I'm a part of, largely for reasons that have to do with my wife being, at that moment, a woman elder in the church consistory. That church wouldn't think of ours as a friend. 

No matter. I thought both book and story wonderful.  I read the first meditation, which argues that God is light; he created light, but he was light before there was any, Calvin says. Loved it. Isn't that a great thought? I was sure we'd love 365. We'd just finished a book of meditations by Eugene Peterson, and finding good stuff isn't particularly easy. I took it home.

It didn't last a week. Listen to this, from Day 7:

Should anyone object that this passage proves that God respects works in saving men, the response is that this is not repugnant to gratuitous acceptance, since God accepts those gifts which he himself has conferred upon his servants. 

Too often the prose is really muddy yet full of sharp object; too often we simply couldn't wade through it. Didn't take a week, and we quit.

The book's binding makes it look read. I'd like to believe Kara, likely a teenager, went all the way through and have no reason to believe she didn't.  And I'm still thrilled there's a church around here who thinks enough of its own theological heritage to suggest to its kids--by way of a gift--that they need to understand something I had to walk away from in order to treasure. 

So I'm still a Calvinist, will always be, for better or worse. One of these Sundays, when my wife is praying with the elders, I'll put 365 back where someone else may pick it up. I wish it weren't so.

But I'm thankful for the book I'm returning, thankful whether or not it was the blessing I thought it would be--and thankful for elders who challenge their children and pray for them. 

This morning and every morning I'm thankful also for a legacy of Calvinist theology that is almost ritually scorned, even by devout fellow believers, a heritage I will honestly hold dear for as long as I live. 

Trump on immigration

C. C. and Neeltje Schaap, circa 1870

Decades ago, I visited a little Christian school in Inwood, Iowa, and read a story or two to kids, middle-schoolers, as I remember, stories from my first book, a collection of tales about Dutch Reformed people from the region. Occasionally, I'd used Dutch words in those stories, especially when I guessed--and sometimes knew--that Dutch-Americans would do the same thing. Words like vies and benauwd, and huis bezoek had no good English equivalents, so those words hung around subsequent generations even when the old country language had departed.

When I read the stories, I'd use the Dutch words, then stop on a dime and ask the kids if they knew meanings. The vast majority of students were of hearty Dutch-American stock, but what happened over and over again was that southeast Asian refugee kids--Vietnamese, Lao, Tai Dam--knew meanings far better than the Vissers, the Ipemas, and the Hoogendoorns. 

None of them had grown up with those Dutch words, and it was highly unlikely they'd regularly heard them, since their families spoke a different language. Still, those kids were the ones with ready answers.

A friend, a linguist, a Dutchman was not at all surprised. "They do it all the time," he told me. "They're constantly determining meaning by context because they don't speak English well. They have to listen carefully, make snap judgments," he told me. "They get really good at it."

Last week, I had lunch with a man who grew up in the area, part of a large family, a farm kid, who claimed that, like other Dutch immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, his father loved theology, even though he'd never had much of an education in the Netherlands. 

They'd been renters. He told me how his father had moved the family, often thinking there were more opportunities elsewhere. His father didn't own land, didn't reach that level of the American Dream. 

But his kids got an education. This kid, this man, eighty years old or so, claimed he wasn't a terrific student. He quit high school in the mid 50s, when that wasn't totally rare, but then swung a deal to get back into Western Christian High, just down the road and finished up just a year later than his class.

I don't think he'd say his family was impoverished. Besides, they had an abundance of other gifts, including the determined ability to be happy with what they did have and a hearty work ethic. 

This man was being courted by a local institution as the kind of donor who could reach into his pocket and fund a new building or an academic chair. He himself had kicked around a bit in life, done a number of different things, accumulated an education, learned a trade, earned a Ph.D., in fact, then became an entrepreneur, the son of immigrant parents who'd come to this country with nothing but expectations and a robust hope to have a better life.

Maybe we dislike immigrants because we know they work harder and do better than we do--or our own kids. 

The most significant motivation for my great-grandfather Schaap to come to this country in 1868, was religious. A man I met from Parkersburg, Iowa, told me he'd looked at old plot maps of the town in the 1870s and found C. C. Schaap's name on a small lot down by the river. "He was likely poor," the guy told me, sweetly, as if breaking bad news. 

They lived in four or five different regions of the country before ending their lives here. It's doubtful they ever learned English. They're buried in Orange City. 

Yesterday, Donald Trump, who was given millions by his father, announced plans to drastically reshape legal immigration in this country. Here's the lede from Fox News: "The Trump administration on Monday issued a long-awaited rule strengthening the ability of federal officials to deny green cards to immigrants deemed likely to rely on government aid." And that's Fox News. For different spin, have a look at the way the American Friends Committee explains the new policies. 

With Trump's new rules, I wouldn't be here, neither would the vast majority of Euro-Americans. It's that simple, and what our President is doing is that wrong.