Morning Thanks--Now Thank We All Our God

It may be difficult to imagine a war as destructive as the Thirty Years War, largely fought in Germany in the early 17th century. Starvation, disease, and out-of-control armies literally destroyed the countryside, and thousands and thousands of people died, mercilessly. Here’s a snapshot from Cicely Wedgewood’s history of that brutal war.

At Calw the pastor saw a woman gnawing the raw flesh off a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding .... In Rhineland[city magistrates] watched the graveyards against marauders who sold the flesh of the newly buried for food .... Acorns, goats' skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms ....

Political and religious hatred (Calvinists versus Roman Catholics versus Lutherans) went to war viciously, as Austrians and Swedes and just about anyone else looking for power on the continent took turns thrashing the life out of the German people and countryside. For Christian believers, the Thirty Years War is still a wound.

To those who lived through it, the steel wheels of that horrific war must have seemed to grind on endlessly. Thousands deserted farms and homes for protection in the old walled-in cities. But, soon enough, there was no room. 

At Strassburg, Ms. Wedgwood says, the living shut their windows to death groans just outside. In winter, people stepped over dead bodies left lying all over the streets. Finally, when the city knew it could do no more, the magistrates threw out 35,000 refugees to the terror and death that would stalk them outside the walls.

Spring came in long days of warm rains that kept the earth moist and rich for disease that flourished in the hot summer sun that fol­lowed. Plagues swept through the streets riding the gusts of warm wind. Out­side the gates, law and order crumbled.

At the end of this Thirty Years War, Martin Rinkert was a preacher in his own hometown, Eilenberg, Saxony. In 1637, at the height of the destruc­tion, thick in the swamp of life-draining disease, the only clergyman left in the city, Rinkert held funerals for up to fifty people per day, if you can believe it. Even his wife died of disease.

But sometime during those years--amid the groaning persistence of war's evil--the Reverend Martin Rinkert sat and wrote a magnificent, stately tribute of thanksgiving to his God, the ruler of a world that was crumbling all around him.

Thanksgiving. In the middle of all that horror.

"Now thank we all our God," he wrote, his nostrils full of the stench of death. 

Impossible.

Yet, as we all know, real thanksgiving somehow miraculously arises, even in the worst of times--always has, still does, always will.

Today, almost 400 years later, thousands will sing Martin Rinkert's famous, powerful hymn, wrung from the sheer horror of war’s desolation, a hymn with an unforgettable story--for which I'm thankful, this Thanksgiving morning.
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This famous Virgil Fox rendition of Rinkert's thanksgiving gift to all of us is only half of this you-tube recording.

Morning Thanks--Thanksgiving*

Thanksgiving is the most un-American of holidays.  Christmas should be, I suppose, but it's been so thoroughly co-opted (starting just 48 hours from now with Black Friday) that it's almost silly to talk about it as if the holiday were somehow counter-cultural.  Tons of merchants--small businesses--end the year in the black only because of the flood of holiday shopping. 

In the public mind, Christmas is, in a way, almost the opposite of Thanksgiving because it's all about things--about buying and selling, about giving and getting.  It's about more, a kind of holiday for coveters.

But on Thanksgiving people ritually express their thanks not for what they'll get but for what they already have--be it stuff or health or happiness.  William Jennings Bryan said that on Thanksgiving we celebrate our dependence.  Isn't that a great line?  But could anything be more un-American?

And here's a boost:  according the John Tierney, in the NY Times, Thanksgiving is also the most "psychologically correct holiday of the year" because simple thanks are good for you--good for the mind, good for the heart (literally), and good for the soul.  Seriously.

Thirty-six hours from now, I will, I'm certain, feel as stuffed as our 13-pound turkey was.  I'll try like mad to get outside to move around, to walk, to deflate my insides from that cloud of mashed potatoes and gravy.  That'll happen--trust me.
 
According to Tierney, research makes clear this plain-and-simple fact:  thanksgiving--which is to say giving thanks--is just plain good for you. 

Strange as it may sound, dependence is a blessing.  That's why tomorrow's holiday--barring eating disorders and family feuds--may well be the most blessed of all, if we really do celebrate, with prayer, our dependence on God.  My goodness, I sound like a Calvinist.

Which reminds me, did you know that the that first Thanksgiving lasted three days?  A bit excessive for those staunch and starchy Calvinists, don't you think?  Then again, maybe they knew better than we do.

Anyway, thanks for the idea, Mr. William Jennings Bryan:  on Thanksgiving, we get together and celebrate our dependence. 

Maybe even a bottle rocket or two. 

It's a real Calvinist holiday, a big day for all of us.

Except turkeys. 

This morning's morning thanks are for Thanksgiving.
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An old post--from Thanksgiving, 2011. This morning I should be in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, with a whole bunch of family.

Small Wonders--Galena and the General

You'll find it just over the Mississippi River, a short hike east of Dubuque. Because of the rolling hills all around, when you drop down into Galena, Illinois, it feels somehow like a discovery--and it will be, a 19th century gem of a town where 85 per cent of the buildings are restored and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Galena, the whole of it, is a museum.

The city will happily point out that nine Civil War generals once called the place home. Not bad for a small town. Eight of them you'll have to Google, but one name you'll recognize, the 18th President of these United States, 1869-1877, although his presidency may well be less memorable than his command of the entire Union Army during the Civil War. General Ulysses S. Grant took Lee's sword at Appomattox, and then, after a fashion, boldly and respectfully gave it back. 

As a General he was indefatigable, determined as a strategist, relentlessly disciplined. Yet, when warfare ceased, he championed an impossibly charitable forgiveness that was much harder for others to give than it seemed to be for him.  He was as determined in the horrors of war as he was in the pursuit of peace. A lion and a lamb somehow co-existed in the soul of Ulysses S. Grant. Go figure.

Late in life, when he was suffering from throat cancer, Ulysses S. Grant became a writer when Mark Twain convinced him the world could be a better place if Grant would sit down and record his memories. He told Twain that idea was silly, but Twain wouldn't take no for an answer. A few published essays brought him some significant rewards, Twain made offers Grant couldn't refuse, and number 18 put just about every bit of what strength he had left into the story of his legacy. 

Not long before those memoirs were finished, the New York World published a story that claimed Grant's memoirs were entirely ghost written. While Grant's friends may be asserting that it's his work, the piece said, a nation should not be fooled by the "false idea. . .that he is a writer. He is not." 

Ron Chernow in his massively detailed Grant biography, American Ulysses, spends significant time refuting the charge by describing how hard Grant worked to finish up, even though he was dying. 

But I think you need only to read a letter Grant wrote the grandmother of James Birdseye McPherson, the second-highest ranking Union officer to be killed during the Civil War. McPherson died at the Battle of Atlanta, and when General Grant, his boss and friend, heard the news, he was thrown into deep and reverent sadness. McPherson was beloved by his troops, one of Grant's close friends. 

Our nation grieves as one so dear to our nation's cause. To know him was but to love him. It may be some consolation to you, his aged grandmother, to know that every officer and every soldier who served under your grandson felt the highest reverence for his patriotism, his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability and all the manly virtues that can adorn a commander. 

And then this: "Your bereavement is great,' he wrote, "but cannot exceed mine."

That's not just lyrical style, it's all heart.

None other than  Frederick Douglas, perhaps the most prominent African-American of his time, said this of the 18th President: "To him more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. . .He was accessible to all men. . .The black soldier was welcome in his tent, and the freedman in his house." 

If, like me, you thought President U. S. Grant was hard-nosed general who dallied too close to a bottle, and a dim-witted President who didn't drain the swamp when he dang well should have, drop by Galena sometime, a darling and remarkable old place; visit his house, spend an hour or two at the museum--little Galena has a thousand reasons to be proud of its most famous native son.

Seeking what he may devour

Those who most passionately admire Donald J. Trump love him especially, it seems, because he refuses to live by American institutions and traditions. He's a bull who treats government as if it were a china shop. His people voted him in precisely because he would shake things up, a real estate tycoon, at least no blasted politician. Donald J. Trump would make a mess.

And he has. Nothing so amuses him, it seems, than to jab a sharp stick in the eye of whoever opposes him--or has opposed him. The mere mention of Barack Obama sends him into chilling tirades. But he doesn't stop there. He knocks everything off the shelf and, for good measure, kicks over stools and tables all over the world.

As he did last week, when he determined that long-established United States policy in Israel was flat wrong. "The impetuous and irresponsible Trump administration announced Monday that, effective immediately, the United States government no longer considers Israeli settlements illegal," or so wrote the Editorial Board of the Los Angeles Times. "Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, who made the announcement, said the administration was merely recognizing 'the reality on the ground.'”

"The reality on the ground" is that ever since the 1967 war, U. S. foreign policy has advocated a solution to unending middle eastern problems by way of a two-state solution, maintaining that any substantive peace proposal had to acknowledge the rights of both the Jewish state and the Palestinians who were moved out when the nation of Israel was created after World War II. 

With the one flat flick of a Sharpie, our fearless leader shut that door and opened up the West Bank to further Jewish development, allowing Israel to have its way with land it's controlled since 1967, a wonderful gift to one of Trump's favorite strongman, Prime Minister Netanyahu, who, by the way, finds himself stewing in his own doo-doo. 

Why would Trump do that? No one was advocating for a change of policy last week. What possible reason might he have to announce that he was knocking the legs out of yet another traditional view as well as United Nations Resolution 242--not just Obama's legacy by the way, but the whole succession of Presidents since 1950? Who cares? 

The answer is clear. He did it because he loves Christians, because he adores disciples who claim the name of Jesus, men and women like Franklin Graham (son of Billy) who so notably explained the place of Donald J. Trump in the cosmic warfare between divine light and the powers of darkness, when Graham told interviewer Eric Metaxis last week that he understood the impeachment proceedings in Washington were under control of a "demonic power." That puts me in Satan's legions.

It's the fundamentalist Christians, American's evangelicals, who loved the move he made in Israel, not because they love Jews--some of the most anti-Semitic folks among us are Bible-toting Christians--but because the calendar they zealously keep to determine the Second Coming of Christ points specifically at the reorganization of the Jewish state as a major indicator of the forthcoming Day of Doom. 

No single group of Americans voters have been as unflagging in their approval and support of President Donald J. Trump as Bible-thumpers. And if 45 is to win again--and the only way he can do it is as he did in 2016 by way of a few votes in states with significant white evangelical Midwestern states--he absolutely must maintain his sky-high approval ratings among those white Christians who believe, as does Franklin Graham, that the being at control of the opposition is a horned thing with cloven feet who breathes hellfire. 

Donald J. Trump could care less about Israel or Palestinians or peace in the Middle East. What he cares about is oil and money and holding on to his power by way of a whole ton of votes from pious saints like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr., who follow him (lower-case h).
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Reading Mother Teresa--In all things

“Commit to the Lord whatever you do. . . .” Proverbs 16:3 

“But one thing I beg of you: pray always for me. For that you do not need special time – because our work is our prayer. . . .” Mother Teresa

LuAnn Arceneaux makes several appearances in Andre Dubus’ final book of short stories, Dancing after Hours, but perhaps her most memorable is in “Out of the Snow,” when, armed only with instinct, guts, and a frying pan, she dispatches two would-be rapists who follow her home from the market.

LuAnn’s marriage is not without its scary moments, but their lives, outlined in the stories, grow slowly stronger, as does their commitment, in part because of LuAnn’s maturing Roman Catholic faith. Dubus, who died some time ago, was a practicing Catholic, but he is no saint – for sure, no saint. His son, Andre Dubus III, makes that very clear in his memoir, Townie.

No matter, Dubus the elder’s story “Out of the Snow” is a memorable gift of grace. Before the astounding pasting she puts on the creeps who tail her home, LuAnn tells her husband that she has begun to understand that “she must be five again” to be “like Saint Therese of Lisieux, who knew at a very young age that the essence of life was to be found in the simplest of tasks.”

At breakfast, LuAnn sees her work as sacrament:

Watching the brown sugar bubbling in the light of the flames, smelling it and the cinnamon, and listening to her family talking about snow, she told herself that this toast and oatmeal were a sacrament, the physical form that love assumed in this moment, as last night’s lovemaking was, as most of her actions were. When she was able to remember this and concentrate on it, she knew the significance of what she was doing; as now, using a pot holder, she drew the pan from the oven, then spooned the oatmeal into bowls her family came from the dining room to receive from her hands.

That’s the frying pan she will wield to rout her bozo attackers just a few hours later.

LuAnn’s quest to see her work and life as sacrament is, I believe, what Mother Teresa means when she tells her former confessor in a letter that she needs his prayers, but that he needn’t spend any special time praying “because our work is our prayer.” Later, she would tell others, “Work is not prayer; prayer is not work, but we must pray the work for Him, with Him and to Him” (364).

I wish I were adept at doing that. I wish it were easier. I wish my eyes were open to see a frying pan as a means of grace, because Mother Teresa isn’t wrong. Seeing our lives as holy makes all the difference, whether or not our would-be attackers are routed.

This morning, I’m thankful for LuAnn Arceneaux and Mother Teresa for pointing so enduringly at the true blessing of nothing less than grace itself, grace not simply in the beyond, but in the here and now, in the dust in which we live, in the dust of which we are.

The Phoenix, November 21, 1847

What do we know about her? She was just a kid really, no more than two years old, but she was cutting edge, a propeller-driven steamer built for the Great Lakes in Buffalo, NY, where thousands of European immigrants would be waiting to be transported out to the frontier of the American Midwest, all of them strangers in a strange land. Aboard was as much cargo as she could hold--coffee, molasses, and hardware, not to mention people, hundreds of them. 

It was November of 1847, so when the Phoenix left Buffalo, bound for Wisconsin, the crew might well have been celebrative--after all, it was late in the year, and the owners had made clear this trip would be the last before old man winter would make things treacherous, Lake Michigan winter storminess not to be toyed with.

By weight alone, most of the cargo was Dutch--as many as 250 immigrants climbed on board for the last leg of their trip to a new home in a new country, to Sheboygan County, Wisconsin, the place the leaders had decided upon, a land whose woodlands meant days and days of hard work if the soft and sandy soil were to be cleared for crops. They wanted to farm. Like all immigrant people, what they really wanted was a new chance.

Most, if not all, were "separatists," members of a religious sect some called "the Afscheiding," the rebel church, arch-conservatives who'd departed the state church of the Netherlands not that long before and whose persecution therefore by civil authorities opened their ears and hearts to the possibilities of immigration to a new land where they could be free. They were an American trope.

Historians claim Lake Erie was calm when they left Buffalo on November 11, the weather not at all as menacing as it might have been. But it turned nasty quickly. People took refuge where they could on board as the swells rose like the shoulders of giants and made everything on board roll. When they came through the straits at Mackinaw, Lake Michigan was no more fair a host, the storms went unabated.

Then, slowly southward, the Phoenix moved along into calmer waters and entered the port at Manitowoc, just thirty miles from the dreams of so many aboard. Some cargo was put ashore, but when the captain noted the wind's return, he kept his ship in the harbor until the lake calmed. The crew went ashore. Some claimed they returned drunk.

At one a.m., the lake calm, the night awash with stars, the Phoenix left for the last leg of a trip I'm sure some had believed would never end, on their way to Sheboygan harbor. Maybe it was haste that lit the fire; some believed it was shoddy negligence fueled by drink. Whatever the cause, those boilers overheated and lit the timbers above them. Soon the Phoenix steamer ship went up in flames.

Soon enough, passengers late that night, November 21, 1847, were awakened to two choices: the flames behind them or the water beneath. Both meant death. As many as 250 died, many--most--of them Hollanders. But then, who was counting, really?--after all, they were only immigrants.

When I was a boy, a highway sign along old 141, the Sauk Trail, told the story. My parents didn't know much about it, never mentioned it as I remember. Mom's people were here before it happened; Grandpa Schaap and his family didn't arrive until ninety years after. 

It was the highway sign that put the story into me, not only the tragic and horrifying death out there on the water, on the lake that was a playground when I was a boy; but it was also a story about "tribe" because somehow as a kid I understood--no one taught me as much--that those who died were by some force of nature my own people. 

It was a quiet night, I guess. When the ship went up in flames, Sheboygan residents gathered on the beach because the fire was all-too-horribly visible. When the few lifeboats came to shore (only forty survived), I couldn't help but think that the people there on the beach had to have heard the screams. 

I did--so much so that the very first story I ever wrote was about the Phoenix, about God's presence in darkness and other mystifying questions, about suffering and death, about life and hope.

Somehow, here in the vale of tears, I had in mind that this stark chapter of human sadness was part of a story I carry, as all of us do. 

Phoenix survivor's gravesite stone,
Gibbsville, WI

The story of Saturday's dawn

The clouds at the horizon look formidable, and while the break at the horizon is sure to light things up, whatever gets painted across the broad sky won't stay long. All that cloudiness will descend and put out the fire, shut out the startling color of a sweet November morning. 

I was driving east--and south get up close to this break when "first light's" unmistakable beauty was painting the dawn. Here's what I think: an awesome dawn sky is only rarely anything more than setting in a story, a rich and gorgeous backdrop most certainly. But, like a story, remarkable images of dawn require a character. We're still fifteen minutes from sunrise, but finally, right along the road, I come up on trees--nothing remarkable, but something anyway to people this composition I'm trying to create in my camera.

The colors are stunning, but the saplings front and center are, at best perfunctory. Still, what's here will without question stop the eye. Sunrise is still coming, and I'm not doing bad, or so I tell myself. I get back in the car and start hunting--somewhat frantically--for new characters.

This, I know, isn't going to last long. The sun is still beneath the horizon, but this strange pillar of brightness suddenly appears. Before me is nothing but black horizon, but I tell myself that the setting is the story right now because this little anomaly--the little pillar that makes my camera wince--is all I need. It's rare and its raging. The cloud's edges up above get burnished, and far above, there's a bit of azure sky. I'm not thrilled by the wind turbines waaaaay out there beneath the sun, but they're everywhere these days. You can't miss 'em, and these are at least a couple miles east. (I doubt you'd have seen them if I hadn't pointed them out.)

I stop the car where there's another character, another tree along the road, this one more an oddity with its huge sweeping breadth. 

You can't miss the fact that the setting isn't just "setting" here either. The sky is variegated, cloud shapes and colors seem playfully layered into a composition of at least five distinct sections--the black horizon, this massive cottonwood, a flat orange field complete with a sun pillar; then, there's a few brush strokes running south above the pillar, and finally all that gray frowning above. There's story here all right, but I tell myself, I can do better. Still, I'm conscious of the fact that this moment is going to be gone and irretrievable when I turn my back, so I get up closer to character, thinking maybe there's a shot here too. 

And then, like an idiot, thinking there are greener pastures, I get back in the car, dawn's artistry behind me, and drive north into the hills along the Little Sioux River, thinking I just might get lucky. 

Strangely enough, I come to a place I've been before, where a single burr oak sits out on slope. I must have a half dozen versions of this very image, each of them in a unique dawn. No matter. I know very well that this is the shot that'll outdo the others.

First, from some distance--

The kaleidoscope sky is pretty much gone now, and although the sun still isn't up, it's burn spreads across the horizon as if there's a fire lurking somewhere not that far away. And there is. But here I stand, trusting the camera to get at least something of what I'm seeing in the heavens, which it never will; still, sometimes what it delivers can still deliver real blessing. This shot is a whole story. In a scrapbook or on a calendar or on a wall, this one will stop your eyes in their tracks, begging you to imagine your own.

But while I'm here and while the sun is just now beginning to open to the world around me, I tell myself that this character is nothing to sneeze at all by her lonesome. I put on another lens, pull that burr oak up closer, making fewer colors far more prominent.

Less setting. More character. But that slope somehow pleases the eye, and all those gnarled branches carry along their own story. She's modeled for me before--here she is just last December. It was a no color dawn, so I had to grab setting where I could, the hoarfrost grasses up front. 

But I was talking about Saturday. Right about then the sun rose, and it was just a matter of minutes before the clouds shut like a curtain, and the world went still and monotone. Photography is all about light, and when you don't have it, you know it's gone. 

I went home. 

I have risen early today. Far in the distance, a faint glow paints the horizon. Dawn is coming, gently and full of prayer. This is the quiet time, the time of innocence, the childhood of the day. ~Kent Nerburn, "The Gift of the Dawn," Small Graces: The Quiet Gifts of Everyday Life, 1998.

Morning Thanks--Any morning

Any Morning 

          --William Stafford

Just lying on the couch and being happy.

Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.

Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has

so much to do in the world.

People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can't

monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.

When dawn flows over the hedge you can

get up and act busy.

Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven

left lying around, can be picked up and saved.

People won't even see that you have them,

they are so light and easy to hide.

Later in the day you can act like the others.

You can shake your head. You can frown.

--from The Way It Is. (c) Graywolf Press, 1999

How about that for a little gem from Garrison Keillor this morning?  Makes me what could have possibly possessed me to sign up to teach next semester.  Got to start shaking my head, frowning.  Get in practice.
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The poem and that last little paragraph is a repeat from November 26, 2012, when my retirement had only just begun. It's now seven years later, and, Calvinist that I am, I'm no more practiced in "just lying on the couch" and saving "pieces of Heaven left lying around." 

Dang it. I should be. 

Netherlandisch Proverbs--(vii)

This detail from Brueghel's Netherlandisch Proverbs, like every other square inch of the work, ist overladen mit visdom, wisdom we're meant surely to take to heart. (Look for this space on the top and in the center.) 

Upper left there's a poor man with a inflamed bottom, who appears to be waving madly toward that Dutch house at the top left, while three long-snouted animals (pigs?) are madly running into a wall that marks whatever kind of enclosure they're intended to be in. Atop the tower to the right, one man waves what appears to be a black flag, while another gent, armed with a huge basket, either catches or heaves away things that look to be coins.

Meanwhile, a sad sack in a white cap looks out the tower's window as some kind of bird--a goose perhaps--flies off. 

That's about all I know, so let's have a look at the answer sheet.

The sad sack with the white cap--he looks imprisoned, don't you think?--is watching the white bird, a stork--and nothing more. The Dutch proverb goes like this: De ooievaar nakijken: "gazing at the stork." I don't know why, and the Dutch would likely say neither does he. He's contemplating his naval--wasting time, staring at something totally unworthy of his time or yours or mine. Remember, Calvinists gifted all of us with capitalism. The guy in the window is doing absolutely nothing worth while. He needs to be told to get a job.

Poor guy above him isn't much better. That wide basket he's carrying is emptying as he's tossing out everything it carried--not coins but feathers. He may be working up a sweat, but what he gets done doesn't total a whole lot more than what the sad sack in the white cap has done. He's tossing feathers into the wind--pluimen in de wind waaien, doing nothing that'll get him anywhere, which is another way of saying he's wasting time, and, as Poor Richard told Americans, haste makes waste. This is real Calvinist stuff moral suasion.

The guy in the purple blouse is sitting on the corner of the ramparts waving what long-gone Flemish folks would have recognized as his own coat, waving his cloak in the wind.

The truth? I'm still in the dark. Zijn huik in de wind hangen--his coat hangs in the wind, a description which suggests his spinelessness. He'll wave his coat wherever, a man without principles. I think he's a politician.

That leaves us with the man with the inflamed butt, which happens to be my favorite, maybe because its got that sweet Dutch earthiness. The guy appears to be reaching for fire with his right hand--maybe even having eating it. Not smart. The result?--eat fire, you crap fire. Toy with horror and if you don't watch out, you'll get yourself in trouble.

That may be it, but there's another option. The guy is going wild up there, in sheer distress--look at him. Hij loopd alsof hij het vuur in zijn aars heft, simply translated: he runs as if his ass is burning, which suggests he's in a hurry and well should be. Right now, I might well be led to say that Ambassador Sondland, who faces a grilling from House Oversight Committee members today, in fact, loopt alsof hij het vuur in zijn aars heft, which is to say in all likelihood, tonight, he's in some considerable distress.

Finally, you're going to have to trust me. When we come up close, it's clear there aren't three pigs in the painting, there are six, three of whom have already escaped into the wheat field, and it's their having escaped that's the big deal. Zondra het hek van de dam is, lopende varkens in het koren--that's a mouthful: if you leave the gate open, the pigs, sure as heck, will get in the corn.

You know, a ton of these things sound vaguely parental. Somehow, when I reared my own kids, I missed 'em. Rats. 

Small Wonders--Acculturation

I'm thinking there had to be a whole lot you didn't know. I'm sure some homesteaders read up on what they could, listened to the tales of whoever came back from the frontier to say hello or, sorrowfully, to admit that being the first white folks to live anywhere west of here required a whole lot more than they'd bargained for. But they couldn't know it all.

Isolation drove some of them around the bend, as it did Beret, Per Hansa's long-suffering wife, from Ole Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth. Not long after arriving out here Beret falls into a grand funk and determines not to wish homesteading on anyone. She'd come along a dream fueled by her husband's visions. But what did they know, really--those crusading homesteaders? They were pioneers all right, sometimes prisoners of their own naivete. 

And while many thousands left when they faced odds they knew darn well they couldn't win, some stayed; some held on despite the learning curve, some rolled with the punches and came up smiling. Mrs. LeRoy Sampson, for one, who came to Minnesota in 1854 with six other families from Rhode Island, ended up that first night in a flimsy cabin shared by all those people. She says she didn't sleep a wink that night, in part because the man who'd driven them out there hadn't either. He kept himself awake in a manner that they others simply couldn't miss.

Some woeful noise out in the wilderness all around kept them awake, some baying they all believed the hungry wails of some prowling beasts--probably wolves, they thought, because they'd heard about wolves, packs of  'em, hungry, ravenous wolves, jaws dripping blood. "We none of us slept that night in the windowless cabin," she wrote, on account of all that incessant horror. 

It took some daylight hours before they realized all that noise came up off the lake they'd parked beside, from a bird, a duck-like thing whose cry was more mournful in the first light of morning than it was threatening. Minnesota didn't become a state until 1858, and it would take another whole century before some bird-er declared the loon to be the state bird. But Mrs. Sampson and all those Rhode Islanders woke up to the fact that, "In the morning noise of the loons on the lake that had kept us awake." 

Mrs. Anderson came to Minnesota that same year, 1854, never, ever having met or even seen what she might well have called "an injun'" until one of the neighborhood natives walked into her cabin and, in silence, took a seat at her table. He was, she said, "hideously painted" and likely half naked. What's more, what hung from his belt was a knife so menacing it seemed destined for terror. 

She froze. Literally. "I was overpowered in fright, and for a few minutes," she says, "I couldn't do anything. Her husband was somewhere in the field, and her two little children were asleep behind a curtain hung in the one-room cabin. She said she determined that she needed her husband. She walked out as if the man's presence was terrifying, and then ran about a quarter mile down the path to the field, when "her mother's heart," she says, let her know she absolutely could not leave her precious children alone with that man."

Here's the way she describes what she found: "Entering, I saw my little two-year old boy standing by the Indian's side playing with the things in his belt, while the Indian carefully held the baby in his arms."

The first thing she did was bring out some bread and milk, and thus, with food, began a long friendship.

It happened, in the wild wilderness, out on the frontier. You can't help but think that some stories don't get told often enough.

Reading Mother Teresa--No small thing

“Where you die I will die, 

and there I will be buried. 

May the Lord deal with me, 

be it ever so severely, 

if even death separates you and me.” 

Ruth 1:17 

Hamlet – Act I, scene 1. Hamlet’s father’s ghost appears, speaks only to his son, tells him how his Uncle Claudius, now on the throne and in “the incestuous sheets” of Hamlet’s mother’s bed, murdered him, Hamlet’s own father, the former King. He then spurs on Hamlet to revenge. “Swear!” he moans, as if the fires of hell were already at his ankles. “Swear! Swear! Swear!”

On the first day we discussed the play, a student raised his hand. “They must have taken oaths really seriously in those days,” he said.

The subtext is obvious: the student figured that today, generally, people don’t. He may be right.

“Very seriously,” I told him. We didn’t talk about today.

Yesterday, in church, a young lady stood up and answered three questions and thereby underwent a liturgical ritual we call “Profession of Faith.” I listened to the questions, read them closely, far closer, I imagine, than I did when, almost 50 years ago, those same questions were read to me. Back then, I, for one, didn’t take an oath all that seriously.

That’s the measure of life experiences I bring to Sister Teresa’s oath, her “profession of perpetual vows,” on May 25, 1931, after a two years of initiation into the world she was entering, her novitiate, vows by which she promised a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Her vows, unlike mine, are much closer to those of Ruth, to her mother-in-law, Naomi. Sister Teresa’s vows were a heart-felt dedication built on generations of Roman Catholic tradition, an emphatic personal dedication, as pure as it was resolute. “Before crosses used to frighten me,” she wrote to her spiritual guide, “I used to get goose bumps at the thought of suffering – but now I embrace suffering even before it actually comes, and like this Jesus and I live in love” (20).

Yesterday, in that young lady’s home, where her profession of faith I’m sure was certainly celebrated, her mom and dad threw a great party, thrilled to the soul at what their daughter committed herself to in our public worship.

It’s altogether possible that Sister Teresa listened to voices more akin to Hamlet’s father’s demands, and it goes without saying that she took her “profession of perpetual vows” vastly more seriously than I did, years ago, when I stood before a congregation of worshippers and professed my faith publicly. But neither that young lady yesterday, nor Sister Teresa, nor me – nor anyone else, for that matter – no matter how seriously we take our oaths, is ever going to believe that what was said, what was sworn to, even in the presence of many others, will be some kind of spiritual shield against sadness and woe in this vale of tears. It won’t. It couldn’t have been. Such vows never have.

Still, I hear that ghost. “Swear!!!” he told his son. Heard him just yesterday again, in fact. As did a young Albanian school teacher, in the soaring heat of New Delhi, India. She too swore.

And when she did, all the ghosts, I’d like to think, went joyfully silent. Mother Teresa never simply went through the emotions. She played for keeps. For her, I'm sure, such swearing was no small thing.

Small Wonders--A blizzard where the road ended

General George and Elizabeth Custer

The moon's out right now, so bright the stars are hidden in its glow. 

Be not deceived. It's winter, and that bright and shiny stillness skimming the land'll turn on us, as it has before, and whirl us all into blizzard-y madness. 

My memory may be foul, but we haven't a bender for a couple of years now, a tempest, a two or three-day massacre that stops everything dead, puts the entire region in its place and keeps us there for so long we'd feel downright imprisoned if it weren't for the madness just outside our doors and windows. 

Miss those massive blizzards, do you? Tell you what--do a little reading sometime and you'll start dreaming of daffodils. Elizabeth Custer was out here with her famous husband, late winter 1874, two years before Little Big Horn. Her rock star husband--when the man got a haircut, he liked to give his blonde locks to all the women travelling with the Seventh Cavalry--General George Custer was, as they say, under the weather, with something akin to pneumonia. 

His darling wife Elizabeth tended him faithfully--in truth the two of them, Armstrong and Libby, seemed a textbook model of wedded bliss. Yankton was a brand new town back then, its citizens recently settled. Most of the Army brass stayed at a place called The St. Charles Hotel, but the General and his sweetheart got themselves a little half-finished shack just out of town, adjacent to the place where the Seventh set up their camp. Once the snow started falling, Custer chased his men into town, telling them to knock on doors and stay with townspeople. They did. 

Some, I suppose, may have sensed it coming--the Yanktons probably, the only ones with any history here. But Libby claims in the way she wrote up the story that she had no clue what was coming. When rain turned to snow and wind started bellowing, when what they saw out there before them was a sheet of endless stinging whiteness, she knew it was no passing fancy.

Make no mistake--Libby Custer was a writer. She knew how to handle pen a good deal better than her husband, or so it seems, knew when to ride into battle. But she tended to look on the bright side of things, and describe them delightfully.  

But this storm, right here in Yankton, wore no smiley face. And the two of them--she and her sickly husband--weren't alone for most of the battering.

During the night, I was startled by hearing a dull sound, as of something falling heavily. Flying down the stairs, I found the servants prying open the frozen and snow-packed door to admit a half dozen soldiers who, becoming bewildered by the snow, had been saved by the faint light we had placed in the window. After that several, came and two were badly frozen. 

Meanwhile, she says, "The snow continued to come down in great swirling sheets, while the wind shook the loose window casings and sometimes broke in the door." Warn't fun, is what she's saying. A horse came up close and whinnied, "almost human in its appeal," she remember, so human-like, in fact, that they pried the door open only to find it was horse "peering in for help," giving her an eye she claims "haunted me long afterwards." 

Occasionally, a lost dog "lifted up a howl of distress under our window," she says. Worse, the General's beloved greyhound puppies, despite the attention the soldier specially commissioned to care for them, had frozen "one by one."

In the middle of the storm, darkness all around, the wind pummeling a cabin could hardly be a fortress until it had to be, Libby said she "realized, . . .that we were as isolated from the town, and even the camp, not a mile distant, as if we had been on an island in the river." There they were in the heart of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "the tumultuous privacy of storm."

It was a blizzard, right here on April 14, 1874, just outside of Yankton, and it was beyond brutal. But today it's almost totally forgotten, buried itself by horrors General George Armstrong Custer perpetuated at the Sand Creek massacre, and then suffered himself on a hill just above the Little Big Horn. 

That unfinished two-story cabin is long gone, I'm sure, just like the St. Charles Hotel. But if it wasn't, I'm not sure if the Yankton Chamber of Commerce would put it on their webpage--you know, "George Amstrong Custer slept here." I'm dubious. 

Libby would, I'm sure. Libby remembered. Once her husband was was killed in battle, she kept putting ink on the page because she wanted so badly not to let anyone forget.

But Yankton--like all of us--was different back then, much different. It was the place where the frontier began. 

Listen. The Seventh Cavalry took a Dakota Southern train out of Sioux City and into Yankton. "After so many days in the car," Libby says, opening sentence, "we were glad to stop on an open plain." They were, she says, "about a mile from the town of Yankton," she says, and then, "where the road ended."

Get that? "Where the road ended." Right there in Yankton, she says, "the road ended." 

Remembering the first impeachment

You shouldn't think of him as a victim because he wasn't. The truth of the matter is, as President of these United States, he took reprehensible positions in the long, dark shadow of the greatest horror in American history, the Civil War. 

Andrew Johnson was--as VPs often are--a fine political choice. He became Vice President of these United States because Lincoln hoped that Johnson would be the healer Lincoln believed was needed on the ticket. Johnson was, after all, a southerner by birth (from Tennessee), but a patriot, one of the "Union Democrats" who had stood up before the country and pledged allegiance to the Union, not the Confederacy. That difficult choice of his was not his problem; it got him the job. He became VP in March of 1865, just a month or so before Lincoln's fateful visit to the Ford Theater. 

Johnson's commitment to the Union didn't mean he shared Lincoln's beliefs about slavery and race. On that score, he was every bit a southerner, so he got in trouble almost immediately when he refused to sign bills that guaranteed voting rights for former slaves and favored leniency on members of the ex-rebel military. 

He was an out-and-out racist. On that score, he certainly and defiantly wasn't alone. He told Congress that it was unthinkable to force southern states to enforce voting rights for blacks because "wherever they have been left to their own devises they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism." Ron Chernow, in Grant, his huge biography of President Ulysses S. Grant, says that message "claimed the dubious distinction of being the most racist such message ever penned by an American president." 

While it wasn't a single act that destroyed relations between President Andrew Johnson and, especially, the "Radical Republicans" from the north, Johnson's dismissal of Edwin M. Stanton (a true leftie when it came to voting rights) from his position as "Secretary of War." Stanton was a Lincoln man, a Lincoln appointee. When Stanton got the boot, Republicans (who were the lefties, remember) went ballistic. 

Technically, they charged Johnson with disregarding something called "The Tenure Office Act," which established legislative power over the executive branch by making both the appointments and dismissals of some cabinet-level positions subject to approval by the legislature. When President Johnson fired Stanton without approval, whatever bridge still stood between the aisles were no more. 

When the resolution for Johnson's impeachment finally came to a vote, it was supported by only three major arguments, instead of the nine with which it started or the 23 into which it grew. What happened in both houses of Congress was more of a dog-and-pony show than what we're watching today, since the proceedings were composed only of senators offering rousing displays of their rhetorical skills before a packed house. 

Johnson himself never had opportunity to speak, but he was not silent, meeting the public in a series of press conferences. There's no record of his tweeting, but no one was in the dark about his positions. 

When push came to shove, the vote for his impeachment on those three articles gathered a significant majority but fell one vote short of the two-thirds vote required to remove him from office. Johnson remained President.

Amazingly, of the 19 senators who voted against impeachment, seven were "Radical Republicans," the lefties who had virulently opposed Johnson's politics; but those seven couldn't vote for what impeachment (this was the very first) would do to the union. Among them was an Iowan named James Grimes, who said, “I cannot agree to destroy the harmonious working of the Constitution for the sake of getting rid of an Unacceptable President.”

So, Johnson's Presidency was saved. 

Sort of. In 1868, Andrew Johnson failed to win the nomination of his own Democratic party. Even though he'd not been thrown from office, he never won back favor, even from his own. 

There are those who say they believe--even hope--that that's what will happen today: to wit, that Donald J. Trump doesn't get tossed, but is removed eventually--by those who chose him. 

We shall see. 

Hearings. . .again

Geographically, I was in Arizona, maybe the most conservative state in the Union back then, 1973. With a year of graduate study behind me, I was taking summer classes at that moment. Televisions were set up in the hallways, and what I remember best is streaming outside into those hallways the minute we'd break. The Watergate hearings were front and center on all the TV networks anyone could watch back then. You couldn't miss them. 

I knew all the characters--Rep. Sam Ervin, the Southerner who offered the nation more country wisdom than Pieter Brueghel or Ben Franklin; Sam Dash, a committee council; John Dean, who with his neatnik wife caught the country's attention with color-coordinated outfits; and a rather clumsy blue-collar guy named Alexander Butterfield, who brought down the Nixon White House with the simple testimony that all of this tomfoolery was--guess what?--on tape. End of story.

Geographically, I was in Arizona, but emotionally, I was in Washington because politically I was a confirmed leftie. Me and just a handful of others across the nation had voted for South Dakota's George McGovern a year earlier, my first national election, when even McGovern's home state wouldn't have him and voted instead for Nixon, who beat the tar out of my guy by carrying every state, save Massachusetts. Wipe out. 

That election hadn't gone down easy, but neither had it dampened my anti-war sentiment. It had come as something of a surprise that a heart condition meant I wasn't eligible for the draft. But for some time already--through college and two years of high school teaching in Wisconsin--I was among those who flew an anti-war banner. 

What's more, right then, in that very class, I'd become friends with a kid--a man--named Ron Ridenhouer, who, as a helicopter gunner in Vietnam, had heard about a place called MyLai, collected accounts of what went down there from buddies who knew first hand, and then sent that info out to a couple dozen congressmen. His work led to the imprisonment of William Calley and aired public laundry that documented flat-out mass murder. Some called Ridenhouer a rat, a switch, a stoolie, even a traitor. I liked the guy, but he was scared. There were lots of people who had different opinions.

Politically, I really disliked Tricky Dick, so in June of 1973 I was all in on Sam Ervin's Watergate hearings, listened as soon as we walked out of class. Soon, the President's defenses fell away and left him skinny and naked before the world, doing that stiff-shouldered victory thing, both arms above his head, as he left Washington on the helicopter. 

When push came to shove, I didn't side with President Bill Clinton, hadn't voted for him, in fact. I thought his lying to the nation about his hot stuff with Monica Lewinsky, not to mention a bevy of other women he not-so clandestinely rolled in the hay, was wholly reprehensible. 

But I disliked sanctimonious Ken Starr and the holy-roller Republicans more, so when Clinton wasn't forced to step down, as Nixon had been, I was relieved. But I never trusted the "big dog," as people used to call him. He was the kind of guy an old friend of mine used to say could shake your hand and pee on your foot all at the very same time.

I was all ears when the press got close to the blue dress and finally brought it out of the closet. I wanted the guy caught with his pants down, and he was. But I thought his dalliance--and flagrant lying about it--insufficient grounds to toss him out.

In three hours, they'll start up again--the third round of impeachment hearings in my lifetime. Not much drama this time, I'm afraid. Donald J. Trump is the lousiest excuse we've had for a President since Andrew Johnson, who, by the way, was also impeached but not run out of office. Trump is a crook and a dullard, a man who can barely write a sentence and knows nothing about history or government or law. He is, as Hillary and at least a dozen Republicans once claimed, totally unfit for office.

But approximately a third of the nation believes he walks on water. The economy is flying because he's pulled out a hundred safeguards and let purebred capitalism have its unfettered day. He's done political bribery of another nation in an attempt to secure his own political fortunes. No one can deny that. 

But the outcome of what will soon begin is already established. Republican reps are scared to death of the 80 percent of their base who believe Trump's the Savior. What's more, they're scared of him because he wields that 80 percent like a machete through a week-old bag of bananas. 

So there will be much talk, but the decision will finally be up to the people of this nation, come November 2020. All Congressman Schiff can do is raise some dust. There'll be no shootout at Washington's OK Corral this time, so no one will go down, not surely the guy with the orange hair. 

We're going to have to do that job ourselves. If the Donald is going to go, the people will have to do it.