Memorial, a story (i)

This is a old story, 25 years old at least, that I had no right to write, not having served. The heart of the narrative comes from a friend's experience, stories he told me, stories from Vietnam and the years that followed, stories he gave me permission to use. 

The whole time they rode out to the cemetery, Lewie Van Dam talked and talked and talked, the steam chunks around his words filling the pick-up. Out front, a south wind snatched up corn leaves from the frozen fields and sent them dancing across the blacktop, but inside Van Dam's chatter was the only movement in the solid cold air. On and on he went, Wiley thought, as if the man were afraid of silence.

They'd walked out of church together after the funeral, and Lewie told him they might as well ride out to the committal together since both their wives were staying behind to get lunch ready. All the way out there, Lewie Van Dam bitched: how his fuel bills were killing him; how even after forty years on the farm, he gets shaky nervous come spring when everything has to get in on time; how a man might as well get out of farming altogether if he can't make a decent living; how he's got nothing anymore but nitrate poisoning bad enough to kill a cow. Kept jabbering.

He finally quit when they got to the cemetery and joined the thirty people or so already out there, a small crowd, with the temperature what it was and Henry Minnard, the dead man, having no real family to speak of. The snowfields to the south put an icy edge on the wind that snapped the plastic shelter so hard it seemed as if it might shatter and leave the retired farmers and the color guard, all bundled up, nearly defenseless against the cold ridge where the cemetery overlooked town.

Wiley stood in the back in his snorkel jacket, the fur zipped up tight in a tube around his face, while Lewie, hands in his pockets, scrambled up front in his wool dress coat, as if he had to be in the middle of everything. It was so cold they just scratched the whole taps thing, the color guard simply standing at attention instead of walking out in front of the hearse. The minister's lips turned purple as he chopped off the words, Henry Minnard's wife standing in front shaking in her sister's arms.

From the back of the crowd, Wiley watched Lewie Van Dam bawl. County Cattle Feeders chairman, fourteen hundred prime Iowa acres, and what not else, Lew Van Dam stood there and cried.

Once the preacher finished, the Legion commander gave Lew Henry's own flag, neatly folded, and Lew gave it to Henry's widow, a sugary edge of frozen tears around his eyes, then hugged her, his breath trumpeting over her shoulder like a steer's.

On the way back to church the whole story came out--how Lewie claimed he knew Henry Minnard so well that it just about killed him to have to see that shiny casket and lay him down forever in that field of frozen death, how the two of them had been buddies forever during the Second World War.

“I can tell you everything,Wiley,” he said. “I can tell you because you'll understand. You been in the service. You know, don't you?"

Wiley shrugged his shoulders and let the man rattle on in the cold.

He said how he and Hank Minnard were together right from the start, from '42, from the day they left Sioux Falls; how they stood side-by-side when they were issued uniforms, how they did every last thing together.

"Motor pool, both of us," Lewie said. "We followed the front from Normandy across the Rhine, fixing every last piece of army hardware—jeeps to deuce-and-a-halfs to tanks. All through Europe—’44 right through until we got out,” he said. He stopped talking to take a drag of his Winston. “Paris, France?” he said. “Shit, I been there. Germany? I seen it all.”

Wiley did a tour in Vietnam. Out in 1971. He’d always thought there wasn’t much to say about it. Everything had been said or written—even TV and movies. He’d done it, that’s all. The rest of them could say what they wanted to, argue forever but at least he could say he'd done it. He'd been there. Their daughter Mary Lynn did a paper for a school report, and he told her some things; she was even proud, he thought.

"We went through the whole thing together, see?--Hank and me--start to finish." Lewie blew on his fingers. "Damn, Wiley, you put a man like that in the ground and you start to wonder if those times weren't the ones that really counted--back there in Europe. We did it—the two of us.” His nose was running, so he leaned over to pull out a hanky. “Shoot, that was something, but you know it. You know as much. You been there.”

“I didn’t even know you and Hank were that close,” Wiley said.

"Close?" Lewie said, throwing that hanky on the dash in front of him. "What do you mean, close?" He locked his hands up around the top of the steering wheel. "You live with a guy for three years--eat, sleep, drink, even shit with him--you read each other's love letters, you work your butt off, up to your elbows in grease, and all the time--every last day--you're saying to each other how great it's going to be someday to sit out on the back porch on a perfect warm night in June, knowing the whole crop is in down in the ground, every last seed is warm and wiggling.” He sucked some air through his teeth and sniffed. “You got dreams is what I’m saying. That’s what you live for. Who cares about Paris, France? He blew warm air into his gingers. “You know that, Wiley,” Lew said. “I don’t have to tell you. You been in war.”

Wiley sat across the seat with a hand up over his mouth as if to hide his breath.

_________________________

Tomorrow: Wiley and Carolyn

Reading Mother Teresa--Workmanship

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.
Ephesians 2:10

“I was only twelve years old then. It was then that I first knew I had a vocation to the poor. . .in 1922. I wanted to be a missionary, I wanted to go out and give the life of Christ to the people in the missionary countries. . .” Mother Teresa

Wow. Twelve.

When I was twelve, I lived across the street from a school playground where one of the three fields of dreams offered all the joy and thrills I needed: a blacktopped basketball court, hoops sometimes even netted; a sandlot baseball field, scraps of cardboard for bases; and a broad, open space for football, come September. Wasn't an adult in sight. No uniforms, no score books, no instruction. Just play. Oh, yeah--and golf midsummer with ancient wooden clubs we rescued from a neighbor's trash.

When I was twelve, I went to catechism and church and Christian school. I played piano, not well, and sang in choirs. I heard the Bible read every time we ate, and listened to my own parents talk about faith openly and lovingly. When I was twelve, I had every advantage Mother Teresa did spiritually. 

When I was twelve, with buddies, I grabbed cigarettes from a grocery store. That's another story.

When I was twelve, I wrote a letter to Elizabeth Eliot after reading Through Gates of Splendor, the story of those missionaries murdered by Auca Indians somewhere in South America; and I remember getting a letter back from her, too, a sweet one. The letter was a school assignment. I was twelve.

What I don't remember is ever aching to become, someday, a missionary. I just wanted to play ball, and, for a while at least, smoke cigarettes.

I don't think of my childhood as being spiritually or materially impoverished. Not in the least. In fact, I tend to judge it as almost idyllic. Does that make sense?

At twelve I don't think I felt much at all of Mother Teresa's immense conviction of God. It was something I had to learn. Maybe, at twelve, Mother Teresa didn’t feel as if life had a learning curve. I did. Maybe, as a child, she was already capable of what Christ extols when he talks, as he often did, about child-like faith. I don't believe I was.

But honestly, I don’t regret much about my childhood, not even the smokes. Each of us is built of different stuff. She was somehow blessed with a huge head start. But I was blessed too, greatly so. We are, from womb to grave, His workmanship. 

What the two of us share, I’m sure—Mother Teresa and me—is the knowledge that his hand is ever opened lovingly in our lives.

Morning Thanks--What's happening at Academy

Out in the middle of nowhere, the old white frame building is all that remains of a heart-felt dream that, as an answer to prayer, opened its doors in 1893 to frontier kids who wanted the kind of education not otherwise available in the Dakota Territories before the turn of the century. 

A monument stands proudly out front, a tribute to the dreamer, the Rev. Mr. Lewis E. Camfield, a relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson actually, fellow abolitionist, and almost as much a transcendental visionary. The Reverend Camfield put legs beneath that vision and determined he’d make a Christian education available to pioneer kids who, with their hopeful families, were still streaming into the open country, ex-reservation land, all around.

One day in 1892, Camfield and a friend were out among the sodbusters of Charles Mix County, collecting donations for the education of black children in the American South. At the end of the day, when they tallied the purse, they were amazed--they had twenty dollars. They were thrilled.

That’s when they came up with the idea: if a hundred dirt-poor farmers and would-be ranchers could cough up that kind of money for needy kids a thousand miles away, shouldn’t it be possible to create a preparatory school that would serve their own children right here? 

So the Reverend Mr. 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 students. Tuition—nine months’ worth—was nothing to sneeze at--$100. Most kids worked on the grounds and the farm the school created to pay off that daunting bill.



In 1911, when the enrollment hit an all-time high of 148 students, Warren Hall was built, an edifice three stories high—and a basement--that cost in total $20,000. Be sure, Warren Hall was, “commodius,” or so the Reverend Camfield himself described it. All the modern conveniences--a common dining hall, an assembly room, an office, and two dormitories—one for women, the other for teachers.

The broad prairie around Academy, Charles Mix County, South Dakota, is so flat and wide people like to say you can watch your dog run away for three days in any single direction. Amid that kind of land, try to imagine sky-scraping Warren Hall, a three-story monster, tall and formidable as a battleship, a fortress for Christian education amid eternal land and sky. 

For a time, Ward Academy, on the Great Plains of South Dakota, must have seemed, in its hustle and bustle, a purposefully clear and direct answer to L. E. Canfield’s fervent prayer: it was “velvet in a rugged new land of burlap green,” one old local history calls it, way out there, 27 miles from the nearest railroad.

Today, what’s left is a one old building with that sits up on a knoll as if still proclaiming the importance of higher education. Ward Academy hasn’t seen a student in years. Thirty-nine years after its energetic birth, Ward Academy shut its doors. It was 1931—the DustBbowl, the Depression, end of story.



Today, out front, a wide stone memorial commends and memorializes the diligence, the vision, and the commitment of the Camfields:  “To the memory of Dr. Lewis E. and Ella Woodman Camfield, founders of Ward Academy at this site in 1893, [who] dedicated their lives to the building of Christian character through church and school.”

The school is gone, but what's left is a church, not a mega.

Still, all of this is more than a little daunting to someone like me, who has spent most of his adult years at yet another small educational institution not all that far east. I’ve stopped at Academy every so often in the last decade or so to pay respects. To me, something about the place is richly haunted.

Stopped by again last week, wanted to get a picture of that monument. When I drove around the back, guess what's there?

That's new lumber. There's a ladder on the ground. Somebody's working. Somebody's keeping the place alive. 

That morning--and this--all that new lumber is good cause for morning thanks.

Morning Thanks--The Purple Church

It's purple. Well, these days, some twenty years of Dakota sun later, St. Charles Church may well look a little pink; but originally it was purple, an actual purple church. May well be the only one in the world, at least the only one I know of, an honest-to-goodness purple church, St. Charles on the St. Francis Mission, SD. 

Wasn't always. It was built in 1886 with funds provided, in large part, from the gift of St. Katharine Drexel of Philadelphia, heir to her father's banking fortune, who dedicated that fortune and her life to helping people and was sainted by Pope John Paul II in 1987, a century after St. Charles of St. Francis was constructed. 

If Father Pierre-Jean De Smet had worn a fitbit, his mileage would have been out of this world, so traveled was he throughout the American West of the 1840s.  Although he didn't set up an altar at St. Francis, his influence among the Lakota people was significant enough to prompt the Rosebud Lakota people to take note. Years later, their handsome, barrel-chested chief, Spotted Tail, on a visit to Washington in the 1870s, told President Rutherford B. Hayes, "My children, all of them, would like to learn how to talk English. They would like to  learn how to read and write. . . I would like to get Catholic priests. Those who wear black robes." 

In 1881, a subsequent Rosebud headman, Two Strike, asked the "black robes," the Jesuits, to start a school, so they did, dedicating a building in 1886, that first school financed by Katharine Drexel, a school the locals called Sapa Un Ti, or "where the black robes live."

St. Francis Mission's footprint on the reservation is significant. Not only did it establish education among Spotted Tail's folks, today it includes suicide prevention and alcohol and drug abuse recovery programs. But all of that has started, here, with the purple church.

Officially, the purple church is named St. Charles Borromeo Church of St. Francis, which is a mouthful. While it's a noble to hold to a name, in this case, St. Charles Borromeo's own history is so far away in time and place that it's easy to understand how that last name simply disappeared. A 16th century cardinal and Archbishop of Milan, Borromeo is officially a saint, but his clashes with Protestantism were neither saintly nor bloodless, which undoubtedly makes his story of little relevance to a people whose history includes Little Big Horn and a sea of white people moving in. Among the Lakota, there much call for knowing more about the theological terrors of the post-Reformation era in Italy and Switzerland. 

So the name is gone, mostly. And in the little Catholic Academy that's now run out of St. Francis mission, every noon lunch begins with prayer. But it also begins with a plate set with food that will not be eaten but instead left our for those not present, the old ones and others who have gone, an old Lakota ritual meant to honor the ancestors. I'm not at all sure how comfortable St. Charles Borromeo would have been with that such pagan symbolism. 

But the purple church has had to adapt, to change, to bring itself into the world it occupies on the reservation. It has had to stop telling people how to live and to start listening to what good things were all around, to speak less and listen more.

But why purple? Is there some symbolism or something? 

I'm told that it all started in a summer bible school, when one of the priests simply asked the kids a relevant question. "So we've got to paint the church," he told them. "What color do you think the church should be."

Some kid said purple. 

It's that simple. That's why today St. Charles at St. Francis is a purple church. Thanks be to God.

Broken Kettle Retro

I'm not sure what old camera I was toting back then, but it wasn't anything close to the new phone in my hands last night. You can see the mushiness here. It takes great glass to make this kind of wide world come alive. A few significant megapixels doesn't hurt either.

All I knew was at my feet and as far as the eye could see, what lay before me was astonishing beauty. We were there at dawn, about an hour north and west, because I couldn't help but believe that dawn would be the hour to be there. And it was--October 19, 2002.

Sometime later, this is how I described it.

We were standing atop a miniature mountain, looking out over the Big Sioux River from a statuesque bluff not all that far from the confluence of the Missouri and the Big Sioux, over the prairie land of Broken Kettle Nature Preserve, 3000 acres of sheer beauty. No one else was there.

Then came the dawn.

And then, suddenly, in a magician’s flick of a wand, all around us the prairie grass was sheathed in bronze, as if taken from the fire. Down at our feet, the world turned to Oz, the big bluestem, golden rod, and blazing stars burnished as if sacred. We forgot the sprawling open miles to the west because the show right there beneath our feet made us feel, honestly, that we were standing on holy ground.

Then, a year later--a better camera, same place, same time: August 10, 2003.



And then last night, dusk, just a little farther down Butcher Road. Same landscape, better camera (a new phone).



Different light, different space, but same awesome subject. Somewhere out there about 200 buffalo roam on "3000 acres of sheer beauty." No one feeds 'em. They take care of themselves. Just gorgeous.

Broken Kettle Preserve is astonishingly beautiful. Storms arrived about the same time people did last night, but then, quite kindly, kept moving east but stayed an immensely visible presence until dark.






When finally night arrived, I read stories about cottonwoods, big blue stem, buffalo, and Broken Kettle itself, part of that old essay from 16 years ago. I've read to larger audiences, but never a bunch more well-suited to what they heard. We'd just stood hip-deep in prairie grass, looking over all that gorgeous, natural land--and we were still there.

It was a Frank Lloyd Wright kind of thing--whatever art was in those essays was rising right there from the earth beneath us, Lewis and Clark just down the road a bit.

Don't think ill of me for saying it was as sweet a reading as I've ever had or could imagine--out in this magnificent country with the Sierra Club, slack-jawed men and women, thrilled to be right there where we were.

The stuff I read wasn't another world at all. It was right there where we stood and sat. Right there where we were blessed.

A Note of Grief--(vi)

But there's one more page. Yet another poem, a few stanzas from a hymn.

Must Jesus bear the cross alone,
And all the world go free?
No, there’s a cross for everyone,
And there’s a cross for me.

How happy are the saints above,
Who once went sorrowing here!
But now they taste unmingled love,
And joy without a tear.

The consecrated cross I’ll bear
Till death shall set me free;
And then go home my crown to wear,
For there’s a crown for me.

Upon the crystal pavement down
At Jesus’ piercèd feet,
Joyful I’ll cast my golden crown
And His dear Name repeat.

O precious cross! O glorious crown!
O resurrection day!
When Christ the Lord from Heav’n comes down
And bears my soul away.

Strangely, Grandpa Schaap chooses to write only two of the stanzas in this note --the first and the third. Why?

I wonder if one answer might be suggested by the roots of the hymn itself. According to some sources, the original text belongs to Thomas Shepherd (1665-1739), a separatist, like the pilgrims, who published some poetry in 1693 under the title "Penitential Cries." The first stanza of the poem reads like this:

Shall Jesus bear the Cross alone,
And other Saints be free?
Each Saint of thine shall find his own,
And there is one for me.

He determined, I'm sure, that the cross he and his wife bore was the death of their first-born, something they certainly did not suffered willingly, a cross of profound human suffering. In Agnes's death, they'd shared suffering.

Grandpa may well have been suggesting that by way of Nelson's death, his mother and father know better what Christ himself suffered. Your son's death brings you closer to Calvary. . .

But Easter too. After all, Grandpa chooses only to write in the first verse and the third. This is what he says to introduce the lines: "I also have in mind these stanzas." He doesn't call it a hymn, even though he had to know it was. He doesn't advise them to sing it. He simply says that he "has in mind" these particular stanzas, then gives them just these two:

Must Jesus bear the cross alone,
And all the world go free?
No: there's a cross for everyone,
And there's a cross for me.

This consecrated cross I'll bear
Till death shall set me free.
And then go home, my crown to wear,
For there's a crown for me.

Cross and crown create an almost eerie rhyme, even though one suggests torture and the other, victory. By cutting the other stanzas, Grandpa Schaap shaped what he believed to most comforting consolation from the old hymn: that somehow, someway, that cross will someday be a crown.

I don't think Grandpa Schaap would have wanted to suggest that because Nelson's parents are suffering, they would reign forever at God's right hand; that equation would be a form of works righteousness that left grace out of the picture.

But what he didn't want the boy's grieving parents to miss is that someday there will be an end to death and grief. That may be the truth his editing is meant to serve. The hope of all our suffering is the promised crown, a comfort and assurance he himself relied on in the grief that made his wife sit beside him, drying her tears, at the news of a little boy’s death—that's what made him write a letter and quote two poems.

"Well, dear friends," he says in conclusion, "may God uphold you and strengthen you. This is our wish and prayer. J. C. Schaap and Wife.

No "Rev." and an upper-case W.

A woman in Michigan took it upon herself to send me a 100-year old letter her parents could never bring themselves to toss; and when she did, she gave me a beloved sermon on five small sheets of paper, a sermon my grandpa wrote from the pained heart of his own experience.

He could not have imagined that someday, a century later, his grandson would be reading that note, writing these words, or sharing them with you.

On a Note of Grief--(v)

And then a poem—a long one.

Grandpa's father-in-law, a seminary professor, frequently penned what some call "doggerel," poems written in rhyming verses and traditional meters. Grandpa too had a penchant for such things. Perhaps in the days before TV, many did. My father inherited the same poetic wit and agility, and often wrote epic stanzas for weddings and banquets and what not else. Funny things. He was good at it.

The note my grandfather sent to grieving parents is five pages long, three of which are poetry. It's remarkable to hold that note in your hand and realize he took the time to write out eight four-line stanzas of poetry that, he says, meant a great deal to him and to Grandma. But he did.

For a time, I hoped that maybe the verses were his own work, but they aren't. They belong to a 19th century Scotsman named John Dickie. The poem is five stanzas long, has no title. Here's the first stanza:

I am not sent a pilgrim here,
My heart with earth to fill.
But I am here God's grace to learn,
and serve God's sovereign will.

Sure feels like a Calvinist's poem. There's more.

He leads me on through smiles and tears,
Grief follows gladness still;
But let me welcome both alike
Since both work out his will.

The strong man's strength to toil for Christ,
The finest preacher's skill
I sometimes wish,--but better far
To be just what God will.

Why?--I don't know, but Grandpa chooses to fill the page with this poem. The paper is lined, and on all the other pages he observes the boundaries; but here—look for yourself--for some reason he fills the page by writing top to bottom. I don't know why.

But there's more to this title-less, author-less poem.

I know not how this languid life
My life's vast ends fulfill;
He knows,--and that life is not lost
That answers best his will.

No service in itself is small,
None great, though earth it fill;
But that is small, that seeks its own
And great that seeks Gods' will.

Poems, originated as memory devices, means people used to remember significant stories or sentiment because rhythm and rhyme helped people hold on to what they didn’t want to forget. That's why Grandpa spends almost two pages copying out this one poem.

Maybe I’m wrong, but let me be an English teacher again. The poem has a kind of tethered anger, every last stanza marching the reader relentlessly back to God's will. Time and time and time again, the poem corrals unruly thoughts, as if should it not, the human soul would simply take some varied, dangerous path away from God. And the truth is simple, but very hard to swallow at the death of a child--life is all about God's will.

Some readers might say the poem deconstructs its own theology, urging a degree of comfort it can't accept itself.

Here's the final stanza of the poem Grandpa sends to the child's grieving parents, and note the way he underscores bear in the final line:



Then hold my hand, most gracious Lord,
Guide all my goings still;
And let this be my life's one aim:
To do or bear thy will.

Grandpa underlined that word bear, the only time he underlined anything in the poem. That punctuation underscores the determined character of the poem--what happens in life is all a matter of God's will: sign on or you’re lost. Bear it. It's His.

___________________ 

Tomorrow: Yet another poem.

Reading Mother Teresa--The Little Bride of Christ

Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, 

but rather offer yourselves to God 

as those who have been brought from death to life; 

and offer every part of yourself to him 

as an instrument of righteousness. Romans 6:13 

She calls herself “the little bride of Christ,” and even though she was still a child when she used that language, she does so, her letters suggest, with a sense of destiny already in great part fulfilled in her heart and soul – “the little bride of Christ.” There had to be thousands like her during her time, all of them – Roman Catholic girls and women – entirely devoted to Jesus, to the virgin mother, and to their special calling as, well, women of the cloth.

Born in Albania, intimately taken with the lives of saints and missionaries, Mother Teresa committed herself early to “the religious life,” a phrase that meant to her, a woman and a Roman Catholic, entirely different things, I believe, than it means to me.

A friend of mine once met her in passing, shook her hand, in fact. Someone told her she’d better buy a glove to preserve what she could of the blessed touch of a saint.

I am, as Mother Teresa was, a believer in Jesus Christ; but, at least on the outside, very little of how she described herself is language I can borrow or a tradition I can understand. As a child in an evangelical Christian school, I was taught to revere Luther, Calvin, Knox, and Zwingli, those whose burning righteousness valiantly resisted apostate popish claims. My own heritage is deeply Calvinistic, and even though I was reared 500 years after Calvin, a great number of the Reformation’s antagonisms spilled into my consciousness – indulgences, inquisitions, thumb screws, piggish priests growing fat on the poor of the land. Heritage is never quite as pure or sacred as some of us want to believe.

None of the many fine adult Christians I knew as a kid ever asked me – or the little girls in my class – to think of ourselves as “little brides of Christ.” That’s not my language, our language; it’s a metaphor I could never pull over me or feel in my heart. It’s hers, and, in part, I believe, the language familiar to a particular time and place that may well be diminishing, if not gone, these days.

I picked up Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light on a Saturday morning, early, from a bookstore left unlocked at a retreat center in the hill country of Texas. I walked a dozen pages into the book that morning, alone, and was ushered into a story so unlike my own as to be fantasy, yet so much akin that I felt her breath rise from the open page.

I mean no disrespect and have no problems with the canonization of Mother Teresa of Calcutta – hers is a marvelous story, and saints themselves are a venerable tradition. May her thin, angular face, stark and pious, grace a hundred thousand stained glass windows and enrich countless human souls.

That she has much to teach me, and that I have much to learn about being an “instrument of righteousness,” doesn’t alter the fact that the nature of our shared faith is sometimes greatly different.

Still, we’re far more deeply and intimately related than not, the two of us – Mother Teresa of Calcutta and an aging bald male twice her size, lugging a Calvinist pedigree, a man who hails from the emerald edge of the Great Plains in the virtual heart of North America.

As children of Adam, we share a mortal coil. We’re both undeniably and fully human, and we both know our help is in the name of the Lord, in whose love we draw our every breath.

That is a joy, as I begin to write this morning, a reason for morning thanks.

__________________________________ 

One a Note of Grief (iv)

If I've been coached on what happens to parents who suddenly lose a child, I learned what I know from a young father who lost a son in a farm accident. Two stories that young father told me have stuck with me, even though I wrote his story almost 30 years ago. One involves being on the tractor after the accident, after the funeral--how especially, he said, moving up and down the back 40 begs the mind to travel places far afield. During those times, this fiercely religious man told me he used to scream at God for what had happened. And then he said, "But so did King David. Read it yourself in the psalms."

The second lesson he gave me about grief involves answers that come too easily--specifically, answers that people offered him, like, "Jesus just wanted a little jewel for his crown." Answer like that made him angry, he said. "The best way to offer sympathy in a time like that is simply to be there," he told me. Silent presence, he taught me, is always best. Cheap answers are exactly that.

But Grandpa Schaap's silent presence wasn't possible when a boy named Nelson died of scarlet fever in Jenison, MI, in 1918. The grieving family was no more his parishioners, so he had to write. And he did, and I have in my hands a copy of that old letter. 

This is how Grandpa's remedy for their grief begins:

You may ask yourselves the question, "Why did the Lord give us the child so short a time, only to leave us in grief"? We answer, "God wants children as well as adults before His large white throne, and if you look at it like that, you would not dare to demand your child back to this sinful earth, and not to giving your child to praise and adore God better there than he would ever be able to do in this world. God sent out his angel to reap the sheaf that was ready, though you did not know it and God plucked him away so suddenly and unexpectedly as a flower that bloomed in the field.

My grandpa's catechism-like answer includes three metaphors in rapid fire.  The first is God's desire to people his court with young and old alike. He wanted the boy, Nelson, Grandpa says, for his own court, an answer that can, at best, makes God seem almost covetous. The second association is to ripe what: Nelson was simply ready to be harvested. The third equates the boy with a precious flower blooming.

An old truism claims that if you can give ten reasons for not doing something you should be doing, it likely means you probably don't have one good reason. Honestly, I don't want to criticize my grandfather's theology, nor may I properly question his propriety--after all, I have not lost a child. He did. Who on earth am I to judge? 

But I wonder if the quick succession of metaphors here, one after another (God's court, a wheat field, some lovely flower), doesn't frame and suggest his own dilemma. He tried, I might yet today, to throw words at the problem, to fill the emptiness with a tumble of ideas, one after another, hoping either that one of them might fit, or that the barrage itself could bring solace. I'm wondering if his saying so much doesn't suggest that he knows so little.

__________________ 

Tomorrow:  More from the letter.

On a Note of Grief (iii)

I believe literature—even the story of this letter—is most rich when it’s most about us. I’m 71 years old and all of this happened 40 years before I was born. I never lost a child. Scarlet Fever isn’t the scourge it once was. But this letter has my heart in it—and I hope yours. Because, and now I’m asking you to trust me, this old preacher, who happens to be my grandpa, is telling you that the story belongs to all of us.

Somehow, my students had the opinion that poems and stories don’t really belong to all of us. But what my grandfather tells this grieving couple is that this story is all of ours. Here's what he says: "Though you agreed with it then [meaning, that suffering is in the order of things in this life], you will be more convinced of this truth now better than you ever were before."

"Such is life," Grandpa says, the fellow sufferer. This is our lot. I believe what Grandpa is thinking is that now--in the deep hurt of grief--his thoughts have real meaning. That I understand.

And I'm thinking that his use of you here is an editorial you. For a moment at least, he may have lost focus on the grieving couple and marched directly into the pulpit, addressing more than the parents in that quarantined house. He's even talking to me: Truth feels relative until truth is lived. Sermons feel like exercises until they aren't.

"But what should comfort you now, is the comforting fact that God is a covenant God (Verbonds God), who has said that He would be your God and the God of your children."

Comfort twice in the same sentence. An editor would have called it redundant, but I’ll have more to say on that.

But now things get even more delicate. Sitting there at the table, the Reverend Schaap has written a page and a half of empathy wrung from their shared sadness. Both the letter writer and recipient lost a child.

But my grandpa was, after all, the pastor, and as such his words carried authority second only to scripture itself. Reverend Schaap could not simply say, "I feel your pain." The grieving family would have expected the preacher to point the way out of their profound grief, and he does, by the way of what people used to call "covenant theology."

The remedy for their painful grief is, he tells them, is God's promises--that's what my grandfather is saying, even though those were the very promises the boy's parents must have been holding onto tenaciously during that child's last hours. They must have pleaded with God for their son's life, on the basis of those very promises.

So we've arrived at the most difficult question believers ever face:  If God both loves us and rules this world, how is it that we suffer? Explain the Holocaust. Answer why our friends had to die. To such profound questions, there are no simple answers.

I don't think Grandpa would have asked for our pity or sympathy, but we've come to the moment in this letter when he knows he must offer a means for them to put this pain behind them; and I do feel sorry for Grandpa because I believe there are no good answers.

What did Grandpa believe? How did he square the loss of a child--of his own daughter--with the sovereign love of a faithful God? I may be reading too much into it, but I think his answer is here, in the letter, for better or for worse.

_________________

Tomorrow:  More of the grief note.

One a Note of Grief - (ii)

It takes the preacher a few sentences before he begins to do what he must. First, more empathy.

"Our thoughts were with you continually," he writes, after referring to their own loss. And then, this rather strange sentence: "What a gloomy Sunday you must have had!"

The woman who sent the note to me explained that, because of the boy's fever and the risk of his fever spreading, the family had been under quarantine.

Somewhere in the fog of my earliest childhood memories, I see a sign that says "Quarantine," but that's all, just an image way back somewhere. Ninety years ago, both word and practice were routine. Imagine it this way: there is a sign on the door of house, a legal notice that makes you shiver with cold, maybe like this one. No one enters, no one leaves--save the dead.

"What a gloomy Sunday" refers to the fact that this loving, quarantined family, despite their grief, could not attend their own little boy's funeral. An entire century after the fact, that story is still carried along by descendant family members: the family could not attend the funeral.

I cannot imagine being Mom or Dad, locked up in the very house of death on that day, the house with the sign, while somewhere down the road the body of my child is being lowered into a small grave. Neither could Grandpa and Grandma Schaap imagine that particular pain, its immense isolation. An incredibly gloomy day it must have been.

And yet, only someone who’s shared the horrible experience of burying a child can give so much of the heart away. Grandpa and Grandma may well have written the same words had they not lost a child; but the fact that they had changes the way we read the solace in the words.

"This certainly is a shadow in your life which will never be entirely taken away on this side of death and the grave," Grandpa says. Today, I would love to ask him whether he would have written those same words thirty years later, when his many kids gave him dozens of grandkids. I'd like to ask him whether his own daughter's death eventually lost some of its jagged edges. I don't know that.

And then a stunning line. "But such is life," he writes. Such here is feels like a vague pronoun, its antecedent only assumed. Most readers would guess that he's suggesting we suffer agonies throughout our lives, hurts that, like open wounds, never really heal and therefore accompany us right through own final days: "Such is life."

Let me put the two lines together again: "This," he says, speaking of the death of their son, "certainly is a shadow in your life which will never be entirely taken away on this side of death and the grave. Such is life."

What he says feels very dark to me, but then I've never lost a child.



He goes on. "I have made mention of it [presumably, that "such is life"] time and time again in my sermons, . . ."

Grandpa baptized me, but I don't remember ever seeing him in a pulpit; he died when I was six years old. Through the years I've heard stories from people who knew him, and most everyone told me that he was a kind and loving man, no hellfire preacher.

But the way he explains his own preaching here makes him sound as if to him life was the valley of the shadow of death. "Time and time again," he says, he's preached that.

I can’t help but wonder how long it took him to get back into the pulpit after the death of his daughter. When he did, I wonder if, time and time again, he told his parishioners that "such is life."

And I wonder if the character of his preaching changed once he got to that new Lucas church, once he could hold his head up once more and keep his grief at bay.

It seems to me that today any preacher--even a young preacher, as Grandpa was--who tells his congregation, "over and over again" that "such is life" would wear out a welcome very soon.

But then, a five-year window of forgiveness extends, presumably, even to preachers.

"Such is life." Over and over again.
______________________ 

Tomorrow, more letter.

On a note of grief--(i)

The hand is not cramped. It's a mannered cursive that would be perfectly readable if it weren't so tiny: fancy G's on God; an extra swirl on upper-case Ws. He learned his penmanship well. And I can tell, simply by the smooth hand, that he was still a young man, a young father, a young preacher.

"Dear Friends," it begins--somehow he knew them. "One cannot help to express our heartfelt sympathy in your terrible grief and affliction." 

The hand and the voice is my grandfather's, and he's writing to a couple whose son had just died, age six. It is postmarked "Jenison, Michigan, April 8, 1918."  Here's how I picture it--he's writing this note at the kitchen table. My grandma Schaap sits in the chair beside him, reading perhaps. She is almost seven-months pregnant with my father.

"We were greatly shocked at the news that your dear Nelson had passed away." The woman who sent me the note that accompanied the 100-year-old letter explained that it was written to her grandparents, who had treasured it, having received just after the death of their son, who had died suddenly of scarlet fever. 

"Scarlet fever" is one of those childhood killers all but banished from our lives today, but the name still horrifies. A red mask covers the face, a light rash covers the body, a strawberry tongue. Laura Ingalls Wilder's sister went blind from it, and when it came on back then, a century ago, in some communities it came as a plague.

"Mrs. Schaap burst out in tears when I told her what had happened at your place," my grandpa says, and then: 

We can more feel for you since it is yet so fresh in our memory when we lost our little Agnes, of about the same age as your little boy was. 

I taught writing for years. It was my job to evaluate style as well as content, and I can't help but recognize the fractured syntax in that line. Look at it again. The sentence came haltingly to my Grandpa because putting what he felt into words required thinking back. Simply bringing his little daughter’s death up makes the awkward syntax of that sentence weep.

Their little Agnes died of something unknown at the time. Doctors tried to save her life by a procedure thought then very cutting edge, one of the first even attempted in the state of Michigan--something called a transfusion. For some time, Grandpa Schaap lay beside his precious daughter, the doctors having created some means by which the draw his blood out to flow into her veins. For three days, prospects brightened immensely; the local paper carried the story. She seemed to be in recovery.  Then, suddenly, she was gone.

My aunt once told me that she remembered her father, my grandpa, lying face down on the living room floor after his daughter's death. That darkness persisted, she told me, until he packed the family in the wagon and took a call to a country church in Lucas, Michigan, where the congregation met them on the lawn. When he stepped off that wagon, she said, he was a new man.

He doesn't tell that story to the recipients, but it's here nonetheless--in both what he wrote and how he wrote out what he wanted to say.

My grandpa, the writer, and my grandma, his wife, as well as the letter's recipients have all been gone for more than a fifty years; but when I read this 100-year old note of sympathy and grief, the story lingers, as do the characters. 

A Christian psychologist once told me that, following the death of a child, parents should be forgiven for just about anything they do to themselves or to others for the next five years. It takes a long time for grief to find its own level in the heart. I don't know.  But I think it's here in the note.

_____________________

More from the letter tomorrow.

Somehow I belonged

Just a highway sign. All I need to see is that there's an exit coming up, and if I take it, I'll get to Hudsonville. With a pile of relatives in west Michigan, it's entirely possible that I have some there, but I don't know who they'd be and I'm not thinking of them when I see the sign. What I think is "tornado."

Amazing, how some synapses fire images the way they do, in this case a memory without line or shape or form. I don't remember seeing any pictures, and the tornado--a huge one, history says--ripped through a couple of small towns east of Lake Michigan. All I need to do is see that highway sign and I think tornado.  

It's not hard to see why. Eighteen people died, hundreds were injured. Houses and businesses were leveled, some totally gone once the storm passed. The Hudsonville tornado has its own Wikipedia page. It was a monster spun out of a storm that left devastation all over the Midwest. 

That's the tornado I remember, even though, as a boy, I lived all the way across the lake. While other twisters were spun from the same storm, in Wisconsin, where I lived, I had--and still have--no idea where they hit. What I remember is that some monster storm hit Hudsonville.

It was April 3, 1956, a time, the paper says, when the Grand Rapids Press cost seven cents. Nationally, the Hudsonville/Standale tornado had to have been big news. Many died. Shocking devastation. 

I'm 71 years old. If my math is any good, in April of 1956, I was eight years old, just a month away from finishing second grade at Oostburg Christian School, where prayer was a very special part of the curriculum. I remember my teacher fondly, but I don't remember her praying for Hudsonville. She must have. Part of the reason I think tornado when I see the exit results from hearing about it from Miss DeVries, who wasn't from Michigan either. 

It had to be a huge story, and I had to be scared. I was a little boy, eight years old. When adults I knew talked about Hudsonville, I'm sure I felt the timber of their voices quake, not because they knew anyone either, but because it was an F-5. That tornado, just across the lake, was a monster. There are good reasons for the instinctive connections my mind manifests every time I'm on 131. 

But there's more. This tornado got talked about, not simply because it was a monster. My parents, like my teacher, must have conveyed the sense that this one hit very, very close to home--not because it hit just 90 miles away, just across Lake Michigan, but because there were people in Hudsonville who were just like us, who talked like we did, who prayed like we did. Those people weren't just Michiganders, they were Michiganders of a peculiar kind, a people I didn't know but was still a part of, not by choice but something more mysterious.

I can't imagine my parents talking about "Dutch" people, but I don't doubt for a moment that when I listened in to their grief and concern they used language like "our people." My mother was fourth generation American, my father was third; but church affiliation made ethnicity huge. Those who were injured, even some who died, were "our people." 

Sketchy scrapbooked memories from sixty-some years ago always appear at a plain old highway sign in western Michigan, memories that remind me of tornado-torn Hudsonville, memories that once taught me something mysterious about tribe, about belonging, about community. 

Somehow the OCS second-grade was part of it. As were the Schaaps. As was I. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Musing

“I mused, and my spirit grew faint.” Psalm 77

It’s a 19^th century line, something lifted from old novel with a frontispiece portrait of an anxious woman sitting in an English garden.  It’s the kind of line I sometimes get from young women writers, even today, who imitate the old mannered styles they once loved—as in “’Oh, Santana,’” she mused, sighing.”  That kind of thing.

“I mused, and my spirit grew faint,” Asaph says—back of hand quickly to forehead, roll eyes slightly.  When lifted on its own from the text of Psalm 77, it’s hard to take seriously.

I used to cross such usage out of my students’ stories, mark them “Yucch.”  In our post-modernity, when most anything goes, I simply ask the students if they really want to invoke such old-fashioned sentimentality. Used to because eventually I became a kinder, gentler teacher.

If etymology serves us well, muse has an interesting history, its French ancestral usage was related to a dog’s muzzle, a source which prompts word historians to speculate that muse might have to do with the way a dog raises its snoot in the air when it wants to determine direction or difficulty.  Plus, there’s the proximity of the word muse to amused, which Asaph, abed in misery here, it seems, certainly is not.  But nothing in either image helps us with the emotional heft of Asaph’s musing.

Experts say 48 percent of the American public do well nightly; a majority of us, however, do not. If the polling is accurate, more than half of us are up late, most of us musing, maybe, like Asaph, unable to sleep because, like the mythical princess, we bothered by some proverbial pea.

Edgar Allen Poe used to claim his strange visions emerged in that somnambulant state between sleep and consciousness, if we can believe him. But I’m sure that it’s not ghastly visions that kept Asaph awake, nor the fact that he took too much work home. As far as we know, he didn’t have a bad marriage, lousy cash flow, or troubled kids. All we know is, oddly enough, he mused; and that musing felt like too much hot salsa in his soul.

Like old age, Psalm 77 is not for sissies. It’s dark; and I’m not doing Asaph or the song credit by being silly about it—dog snoots, mattress peas, and Poe’s guillotine visions. Asaph claims he sat on his bed all night long, hands raised as if to receive a blessing that never came—nothing funny about that.  But then, perhaps if you can’t sleep, one way of steeling yourself against anxiety may well be laughter, the best medicine. 

By the time he’s finished, Asaph will turn Psalm 77 into a praise song, but before we stumble into the light we’ve got to wander a bit through the dark night of the soul, where sleep is a blessing that simply doesn’t arrive. 

I know I’ve said it before, but here once again—this time in Asaph’s psalm of sleeplessness: the blessing of holy scripture arrives is its story of God’s love; but yet another marvelous feature is that we aren’t alone in our restlessness. Even psalmists were anxious. Even saints couldn’t sleep.

Too many of us likely spend too much anxious time musing, or so says the surveys. Psalm 77 is a reminder that we’re not alone.   

Small Wonder(s)--the Soddie

I used to say there weren't any great old songs about soddies because no one went all rhapsodic living in dirt. A sod house may well have kept out heat and cold in remarkably efficient ways and not once blown away in billowing prairie winds. What's more, sod houses sure as anything were a shelter in the time of storm. But as far as I knew, nobody ever penned a melody that found its way into the American soul--not about soddies. No siree.

Then I found one. Just yesterday. A song about a soddie. Let's be plain here: it's not got the lyrical staying power of "Home on the Range" or "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds," but it's there anyway. So here's a song about soddies: 

When we left our home back yonder we had all that mortal needs:horses, cows and tools abundant, household goods and gardens seeds,
covered wagon full to bursting, Bob and Betty full of glee;
going west to take a homestead, happy kiddies, Kate and me. 

Soon we landed in Nebraska where they had much land to spare,
But most ever since we've been here, we've been mad enough to swear;
First, we built for us a 'sod house' and we tried to raise some trees;
But the land was full of coyotes and our sod house full of fleas.

I know you're saying there's nothing about that ode that's in the least bit celebratory. Whatever sod-buster penned it wasn't much taken with his earthly abode. There's no wide copper bowl of sky above or endless miles of black-eyed susans waving their arms before the Almighty. That ditty is no tribute.

But then, how can anyone be nostalgic about snakes winding out of the ceiling, about ever muddy floors and thick, semi-darkness mid day. Twas a blessing to have a window. Sometimes the only hole in the soddie's three-foot walls was covered in muslin, to keep out. . .well, everything, but at least leave a light on in what otherwise would be abysmal darkness. The only memory this little song musters is forever fleas.

The very first earth dwellings in much of Sioux County, Iowa, weren't even soddies. They were dugouts. Didn't cost a dime but labor, of course, and a dugout, a fox hole, got you out of the wind. It turned you into a worm maybe, but at least you didn't freeze to death in January. Even tornadoes were mostly powerless. Dugouts and soddies were an insulator's dream, but they never came clean. How could they?--they were dirt. 

They required constant maintenance because when the dirt settled--which is always did--you had to fill the holes with something. Not fun.

But you could put 'em up in just a few days, especially where the earth took kindly to be losing its skin. Cost?--five bucks at worst, and whatever it might cost you for a window. Efficient, yes. Ecological?--to a fault. Environmentally attuned?--perfect. Frank Lloyd Wright must have had soddies in mind when he designed his places because they sure as heck fit faultlessly into grassland landscapes.

Not many homesteading Iowans started out in soddies because east of here, sufficient trees made log cabins the much-preferred real estate. But out here trees went as a premium because rivers weren't abundant. If you wanted to homestead much of Sioux County, take possession of some of the best farmland on the continent, your first move was to start cutting sod. 

Nobody stayed long. If you wanted to prove up the claim, you had to make your 160 acres look like it was producing in every way, including the domicile. Average stays in the sod, people say, were about five years. I'm guessing when they were abandoned, no one shed a tear.

No romance either. Most were just one room for the whole family. Not far from here, one immigrant family took in another, so the whole bunch slept in eight-hour shifts. There just wasn't room. 

That hymn to the prairie, up top, is the closest I've ever come to someone actually sitting down, pen in hand, to write out a memory of a way of life once upon a time all around us here, but never, ever beloved. 

The soddie. For some here, it got us by. Thanks be to God, it got us by.

The lies of the righteous

Diet Eman and Hein Sietsma, 1930

One day Hein told me about a family in Nijkerk, a wonderful Christian family, who he thought would help us. We had two Jewish sisters. . .whom we needed to hide. So I went to this fine Christian family, and the father, a very prominent man and a pillar of the church, met me at the door. I identified myself. He knew the Sietsma family, and he knew that Hein was engaged to me. I told him that we were desperate to get a place for these two Jewish girls. We had to find them a place.
"No," he said. "I don't want anything to do with it."
So I started working on his status as a good Christian, and that this was part of his obligation to serve the Lord. I really pleaded with him. I begged.
Still he said no.
I was desperate. I came up with every argument I could, but he was adamant. He wouldn't budge. He wouldn't take any Jews, he said.
"Please, I beg you," I said.
"No," he said, and he shut the door of his house in my face.
When I left, I was ufrious with ths supposedly fine man, a well-known Christian, a man of God, who wouldn't help us. 

Terror, in Nazi-occupied Holland, was all around and ever present. If you did anything at all in resistance of the German occupiers, even if it wasn't for the Resistance itself, significant suffering was simply a given. The "fine Christian man" in this anecdote in Diet Eman's story of the Dutch Resistance knows full well that if he were to be caught hiding Jews, he would lose everything--his house, his property, his family, possibly even his life. Slamming the door in the face of Diet and those two Jewish girls is painfully understandable. He'd be putting his own loved ones at risk.

There's no real horror in this particular incident, only grief and rage and exhaustion. Diet will now have to take those children elsewhere--but where? 

That's a question she doesn't answer. What she wants us to feel is exactly what she felt when a "fine Christian man," a "pillar of the church" slams the door in her face--and in the faces of those two Jewish girls. Lots of good, good Christians hid Jews. Many more did not.

But there's more to her story.

After the war I found out that this man already had Jewish people in his home, people whom he must have taken in from some other group working to hide Jews. But he wasn't about too tell me that the reason he wouldn't take those two sisters into his house was that he already some Jews in hiding.

This fine Christian man stood flat-out lied, committed false witness, the 10 Commandments say, for all the right reasons--to protect himself and his family, but also to protect the Jews he was already hiding. He didn't know Diet. He couldn't be sure this woman with the girls wasn't planted by the Nazis to uncover hiding places. He acted as if he didn't care, lied to her face, slammed the door on her goodwill.

Still, there's more.

He also lied to protect Diet. Even the Resistance fighters didn't want to know things--names, places--because should any of them fall into the hands of the SS, they'd be interrogated, then tortured until they gave up information. They more they knew about operations, the more they'd likely spill. Even though she was furious when this fine Christian man slammed the door in her face, this pillar of the church was lying through his teeth to protect her.

I still have a little sticky note I scribbled on when I was editing this story in Diet's book. It says, "Things we couldn't say," the line that became the title of the book. 

Her story holds far greater horrors--torturous suffering, death, and profound grief. But this little story's labyrinth lies, its subterfuge, somehow captures the terror created by the Nazi occupation. The lies, many of them perfectly righteous, were everywhere, as they had to be. So much couldn't be said.