The Cathedral at Coventry and Wounded Knee

Coventry, an English city of 250,00 in the West Midlands, was home to significant industrial power when World War II began, a line of industries Hitler wouldn’t and didn’t miss. When the Battle of Britain began, a specific Coventry blitz started immediately and didn’t end for three long months--198 tons of bombs killed 176 people and injured almost 700.

But the worst was to come. On November 14, 1940, 515 Nazi bombers unloaded on Coventry’s industrial region, leaving the city in ruins. Its own air defenses fired 67 hundred rounds, but brought down only one bomber. It was a rout.

At 8:00 that night, St. Michael’s Cathedral, a fourteenth-century church, was hit and burned, destroyed like so much else as a city turned to ruin.

In the skeletal hulk of that Cathedral, the BBC recorded an ancient hymn that had originated in Coventry in the 16th century, part of a series of morality plays, the only such hymn to survive. The BBC’s Christmas program that night was broadcast from the heart of Britain’s “darkest hour,” and because it was, people remembered that ancient hymn because they could not forget it.

Today, that hymn is called “The Coventry Carol,” and it’s unlikely that any of you who are listening to these words would find it unfamiliar.

The story of that ancient hymn is told in its setting, a Christmas story whose shuddering reality is easier not to remember. The old story goes that after the birth of Jesus, King Herod, determined to hold on to his own kingdom, ordered the immediate execution of every living male child under three years old. It is impossible to imagine the anguish that flowed down the region’s streets.

In those old morality plays, “The Coventry Carol” was sung by three Bethlehem women holding babies who were bound to die. Together, they create a haunting melody of multiple vocal lines. If you’ve not brought the Coventry Carol together with its own history, you’ll never hear it again without knowing the horror of its setting.

The event traditionally called “The Massacre of the Innocents,” is probably best not remembered on the night before Christmas. It’s just so dark. It may well be a blessing that most of us blindly sing “The Coventry Carol” right along with “Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”

Oddly enough, the “massacre of the innocents” shares the calendar with another massacre, this one just down the road, a day’s travel west, just 127 years ago, a massacre that took place in a huge open near a creek whose odd name should never be forgotten, Wounded Knee.

In late December of 1890, what white men determined to be hostility on the South Dakota reservations, the Ghost Dance, brought the largest Calvary assembled anywhere since the Civil War a quarter century before.

It was late December cold. Big Foot, a Mineconjou chief from the Cheyenne River Reservation, known as a peacemaker, was on his way to the Red Cloud Agency, when accosted by troops from the Seventh Cavalry, the company that had taken a beating with Custer at Little Big Horn. On a cold morning in an action that lasted for two agonizing hours, 300 men, women, and children, the Lakota say, were massacred, the last fight of what historians call “The Great Sioux Wars.”

To my ears at least, the haunting harmonies of “The Coventry Carol” seem to emerge from the frozen prairies all around us on December 30, as do the words, actually. In vocal style, the carol’s spectral choral line—“lully, lulay, lully, lulay” has absolutely nothing in common with the strains of a chorus of Lakota Death Songs that must have arisen that day on the plains.

Don’t be fooled. Despair speaks a universal language. The words of those Bethlehem women, “lully, lulay,” originate in an old English expression that long ago fell out of usage. Some linguists say that chorus—“lully, lulay, lully, lulay”—repeat the agonizing testimony of those Bethlehem mothers: “I saw, I saw; I saw, I saw.” But who among the survivors would not have chanted something similar?

The Massacre of the Innocents may be folklore; some would argue so.

Even though Wounded Knee is not, the determined lament of the old language holds just the same, on the killing fields out west. “Lulay, lully.” I saw. I saw.

None of us may have been there, but all of us were.

Reading Mother Teresa--Suffering

Praise our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard;
he has preserved our lives and kept our feet from slipping.
For you, O God, tested us; you refined us like silver.
You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs.
You let men ride over our heads; we went through fire and water,
but you brought us to a place of abundance. Psalm 66:8–12

Sister Bernard is making her vows on 23rd January 1938. Thanks be to God now again everything is all right – Jesus has surely chosen her for something special, since He has given her so much suffering. And she is a real hero, bearing up everything courageously with a smile. . . . (24)

Not long ago, in a little privately-printed history of a small town church, I ran through the list of servicemen and discovered the stories of two men, same last name, both pilots, both killed, one in World War II, the other in the Korean War. I mentioned that in a speech I gave in that very small-town church.

Afterward a man came up to me to tell me there was more. “They were brothers,” he said.

The history had not mentioned that.

“And you want to know what else?” he asked. “Their mother lost her husband in the First War.”

It’s the kind of story that must be told to be believed. A woman marries, sometime before 1917. Her husband goes off to “the war to end all wars” and, with thousands of others doughboys, doesn’t return. I can only imagine the heartbreak.

Someone else comes along – some local farmer maybe – and marries this young widow. Together they have children, including two boys. In 1942, one of them goes off to military service, becomes a pilot, and is shot down over Europe. I can only imagine the heartbreak.

Another son enlists when America goes to war in Korea. He too becomes a pilot – what an honor. But he too gets shot down and doesn’t return.

Who, really, can imagine the heartbreak?

There’s a syllogism at work here in Mother Teresa’s assessment that’s worth examining, and it goes like this: major premise: to be blessed means to suffer; minor premise: Sister Bernard suffers greatly; conclusion: Sister Bernard is blessed.

I have no idea who Sister Bernard is, but neither do I doubt that Sister Bernard – or Mother Teresa for that matter – suffered greatly. Still, I don’t know what to make of the logic – “you’re blessed if you suffer.”

Perhaps I’m skeptical because the logic gets easily manipulated. Some politicians curry favor with their loyal followers because they suffer, they say, at the hands of the media: “see my suffering? – I must be worth your vote.” I don’t know if I buy the syllogism, even if Mother Teresa is the one bringing it up.

But then, maybe I’m plumb full of guilt. It's hot, mean hot, but we don't suffer. To eat, I do nothing more than turn brats on the grill. Right now, in our fridge, there’s sun tea, lemonade, some exotic beer from a micro-brewery, two gallons of cold milk, and ice cubes spewing forever from the freezer’s front door. We’re not suffering.

I’m not at all sure I have ever suffered, at least not like that woman who once upon a time lost a husband and then, in two subsequent wars, two sons. Last week’s toll in our church’s “joys and concerns” was staggering. People are suffering – people I know. All kinds of cancers seem to be everywhere. This vale of tears is not without its great and heavy sadnesses.

But are those who suffer somehow blessed for their suffering?

Here’s the only truth I think I know. God almighty wants us, always, on our knees, and somehow – I wish it weren’t true – it’s just plain easier to be on your knees when you can’t stand up. Sometimes he puts us there – me too – because maybe it’s easier to see him when, like a penitent, the only thing before our eyes is the basement floor.

When there’s nowhere else to turn, you can only look up. You have to.

Morning Thanks--a gift at Christmas

I already got my gift. Oh, sure, a couple of things will be there for me under the tree in a week or so, I'd guess. More joy will be arriving, too--like the college kids out caroling a few nights ago, kids who were surprised when one of their profs stepped out on the porch--they were caroling at random, I guess.

But a real gift at Christmas, for me at least, is a moment of startling joy, maybe just an image or single solitary act, the perfect word or melody, some blessed glimpse of the unexpected eternal. Little miracles mean it's Christmas. And last night, I got one.

There may well be some folks around who don't carry heartache into the Christmas season, but they are few and they'll probably get theirs soon. I wish life weren't so heavy-laden, but this vale of tears holds its abundant griefs.

And I sometimes wonder how parents of exceptional kids make a go of it. Many do not, of course; but some, blessed with grace, somehow keep it up, day-to-day, within the walls of their own family's blessed privacy.

Last night at the church Christmas program, an autistic boy, tall and slender, sat right in front of us, under the care of his own one-on-one Sunday school teacher; and when the kids all grouped together for a medley of Christmas songs up front, he and his teacher tagged along, so that there he stood, in the front, with the rest, sometimes singing, mostly not. It was a rich moment.

But there was more. The older kids, he among them, then sat, picked up instruments, and played some carols, while two little girls in tiaras signed the lyrics up front. Most of the kids were on strings, but this boy held forth on a little percussion thing he had to shake to get out the beat. His part was to keep time.

And he did. I watched him. He did.

I don't know much about the autism spectrum. I don't know if anyone else was as delighted as I was to see him keep rhythm. Maybe my expectations are so shallow as to make my joy sentimental. If that's true, I repent. But his keeping time was wonderful, too.

The real gift, however, was not simply the way that boy kept up a beat in the middle school orchestra, bringing carols to life along with the rest. The real gift was in the face--in the eyes--of his teacher, whose joy could hardly be contained. That this kid could participate and did--that was the particular blessing that brought a glow to the sanctuary, I swear. Her face, bright with joy was, for me at least, a real gift at Christmas.

Nothing new there, of course. The blessedness of the season is, like hers, in the giving. Believers like me--ancient as we are--have known that truth for most of our lives, a moral precept as old as the hills around Bethlehem. But some of us are slow learners, and, like the beat of that carol, we have to hear it over and over and over to feel it deeply in our hearts and souls. Far easier to say than to do, or so it seems--to give, that is.

Today, my morning thanks is for a wonderful Christmas gift last night--a kid keeping time, a face bright with joy, and the eternity of it all.
__________________ 

Reprinted from Christmas, 2009.

During the war, where was Grandpa on Christmas? (ii)

It's unlikely Grandpa knew, 75 years ago, that the Allies were soon deep, deep, deep into what we now call "The Battle of the Bulge." He likely could not have known that Hitler's last-ditch effort to save the Fatherland required unimaginable secrecy since der Fuhrer sent 600,000 troops into Belgium on a mission to reclaim the precious port at Antwerp. What he could not have missed, however, is significant changes in what the 555th was doing.

For one thing, they'd moved. Three times they were warned about the very strong possibility of air raids that never came, but after the last of those warnings the whole shop moved out of Liege and took a road north five miles or so and set up shop again.

The Battle of the Bulge

The red arrows are the 600,000 Wehrmacht who broke through the war front drawn in in purple; the blue arrows chart the movements of what eventually became an Allied force of 500,000 required to repel the surprise advance. You can do the math, but over a million troops were part of the action, dead of winter.

Grandpa's motor pool was initially in Liege (circled), but then on December 24, they'd been moved up the road to place called Herstel, Belgium, where one of the 555th was given a medal for bravery. Tech 4 Stratton was a welder. A buzz bomb had taken out a bridge and left the road blocked. In the face of imminent danger, Stratton cut up the steel girders to open the road up for reinforcements.

Grandpa had trained to repair tanks. Before he'd shipped overseas, he'd trained at an International Harvester plant specifically for tank maintenance. But once German troops swarmed through the front all bets were off. As the fighting grew ever more intense, the history of 555th makes clear that the mission of the Grandpa's unit changed to include "'everything and anything that runs' for our Armies." What's more, the shop never closed. It "carried on, night and day."

Grandpa may not have called what was happening around him "the Battle of the Bulge," may not have any sense of the magnitude of danger Hitler's immense surprise offensive created. What he couldn't help knowing and feeling, however, is that his company of grease monkeys were somewhere in the middle of action that was more ferocious, more fierce than anything he'd been close to since July 25, the night they landed on a dark and lonely Utah beach at Normandy.

The fighting was so thick that twenty men from the unit were reassigned, grabbed out of the motor pool to be retrained as infantrymen. Eisenhower needed men with rifles.

Historians claim that Hitler's power waned once he spent his last bit of airpower in attacks meant to cripple Allied air power. At that mission, he was successful. However, his own Luftwaffe was crippled greatly in the process, and Germany, at that point in the war, simply had nothing left to give to making war. Allied industrial power--a host of Rosie the Riveters back home--kept churning out more planes and war munitions.

By late January, all those red arrows had been pushed back east into Germany. Late in February, Grandpa and his company was reassigned--moved from the First and the Ninth Allied Army into the 12th Army Group under General Omar Bradley. On the last day of February, 1945, the 555th left Herstal, Liege, Belgium, for a new permanent station at Kleindorp, Holland. 

Less than two weeks later, they moved again, this time east to Grefrath, Germany, where their mission changed officially "to operate a  Collecting Point for units of the Ninth Army and to service, maintain and repair combat vehicles of units attached to the XVI Corps."

But things were changing rapidly in the waning months of the war, and they no sooner set up operations in Germany when they were, once again, called back into Holland, back to Kleindorp, where the 555th was given what the unit's history calls "the most responsible mission of its entire European campaign." Along with other motor units, they "assumed responsibility of readying scores of amphibious vehicles in preparation for the crossing of the Rhine River."

And at that too they were succesful. "Gratifying news was received the morning of the Rhine Crossing [March 20, 1945] that all amphibious vehicles had made the crossing without a mechanical failure."

On May 8, the Germans surrendered. On the 27th of May, the 555th received their orders for "indirect redeployment" to the Pacific Theater. Had President Truman not dropped the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he and the unit would have been bound for the South Pacific.

Grandpa and his friends departed France on June 17 for a seven-day trip back to the States, and arrived in New York harbor on June 26, 1945. "No doubt this day will be well remembered by every man aboard the ship," the unit historian reports.

Until September 2nd, when President Truman officially announced V-J Day, Grandpa and company stayed in New Jersey. In October he was sent home to the farm in Iowa.

Grandpa's stay in Europe was just 11 months, but it had to be the most unforgettable set of  experiences of his lifetime. He was as close to combat as anyone could come without shouldering a rifle. 

He never spoke much about his war experience, but when you look over where he was, what he did, what he'd seen and what he'd had to feel, his relative silence is understandable. Those two years of his life were so unlike any other that it must have seemed virtually impossible for him to talk about, to explain, to define, to document what had happened. Where would he start? What would make sense to men and women who were not there?

The nation is remembering the Battle of the Bulge, 75 years later. The United States of America suffered 75,000 casualties, the Germans 80,000. You can make the argument that the Wehrmacht lost the war there in Belgium and Luxembourg. 

Grandpa was part of that. Grandpa gave two years of his life to that effort. I'm sure, knowing him, he would have said, some--many--gave more.

During the war, where was Grandpa on Christmas?

The 555th before leaving for Europe

Grandpa wasn't exactly a kid. There were kids galore on both sides--18-year-olds just out of high school and scores of 17-year-olds who'd quit years before. Not that World War II was a young man's war. There were boys out there fighting and dying between the French hedgerows, if they had survived the invasion on June 6; but it didn't take long and they were all men. 

Grandpa wasn't a kid. He was all of 25 on the first Christmas he'd ever spent away from home on the farm. He was out in the cold in Belgium, doing what he loved, what he was good at, what the Army determined he should be doing; he was at work in the motor pool. 

Family and friends at Alton station for Grandpa's leaving into the service

Seventy-five years ago, Grandpa and the 555th Ordinance Tank Maintenance Company had just moved their operations up the road a ways from Liege, Belgium, where they'd been since early November. The war was getting close. Earlier they'd spent six weeks at Brest, where the Gerries didn't quit without a fight because everyone knew Brest was a harbor the Allies needed. In September, 1944, 37 Allied divisions would need 26,000 tons of supplies each and every day. That's a lot of food, a lot of munitions, and a lot of motor vehicles.

The 555th had been officially commended for their good work at Brest, keeping Allied engines running; but the siege itself could hardly be called successful. By the time the city was in Allied hands, the Germans had destroyed the harbor while putting up a fight that became a torrent of bloodshed. Finally, the city belonged to the good guys, what was left of it--and them--anyway.

On September 6, 1944, they'd left for Rennes, France,  where they'd spent a month before being moved east to Liege, Belgium, a move they made in only two days. Nothing was moving at the time. The countryside must have seemed almost eerie. No American officer, not even Eisenhower, had guessed that getting as far as they had into Nazi-occupied Europe could have sped along as quickly as it had. Normandy was a horror of course. Once off the beach, they'd walked into hedgerows that were soon soaked in blood. Thousands of GIs and Brits and Aussies and Canadians had died. But once they got off the coast, the only Wehrmacht lots of guys saw were high-tailing it the other way. 

Conventional warfare that features intense battles always also has long stretches of quiet, of rest and retooling. When the 555th got to Liege, the lull all around them made life seem good. Not that there wasn't anything to do. Eisenhower had his hands full trying to keep troops supplied with guns and grub. Grandpa and his grease monkeys were supporting both the First and the Ninth Armies. Nobody sat on their laurels; after all, war creates wrecks.

Cartoons drawn up by a member of the 555th

Work didn't slow down, but the fierce fighting that characterized some of their earlier days in France has somehow cooled, even though they were never beyond danger. Two days after they'd arrived at Liege, a V-1 or "buzz bomb" came down 150 yards from the shop, sending shards of glass flying all over. Two guys got bloodied enough to earn purple hearts. 

Just living with buzz bombs was trying. You could hear them coming, couldn't miss that infernal buzzing, and when you did you just knew that if one would suddenly go silent, it could be the end of everything. Just because the motor pool was not a hot target didn't mean one of those death devils wouldn't go rogue. You lived with death, even ten or twenty miles from the front.

Just exactly when word got out that Hitler had ordered up a huge gamble to beat back the all but unstoppable Allied advance (and their vastly superior air power and artillery) isn't clear. When did Grandpa learn that something huge was in the offing? Hitler had demanded silence. No one knew what was coming. The little history book doesn't detail what the 555th knew, when.  

Operation Wacht am Rhein ("watch on Rhein") was anything but a watch. Hitler threw just about all he had left into a massive offensive, pushed munitions and manpower into a full-bore blitzkrieg that took aim not simply at the advance of the invading enemy, but at the heart of the front. The Battle of the Bulge was about to break open less than an hour away from where he and his buddies were retooling tanks.

It all started, dead of night, December 18. There's no mention of it in the little book, but it says this for Christmas Day, December 25, 1944: "The first Christmas overseas for the 555th Ordnance Company was spent in the shop from 0745 to 2100."

It's really unimaginable, isn't it? Seventy-five years ago today, Grandpa was hip-deep in grease and oil when he wasn't under the hood of whatever needed service for a momentous battle being fought right then just outside the shop door. 

(More tomorrow.)

May all of you and those you love experience the joy of Christmas

Algona Nativity

The first one was twelve feet wide, still quite a production because Jesus, Mary, and the babe were mud-sculptured, then baked, then painstakingly painted. Back in Germany, Eduard Kaib had been an architect. That’s not to say his hand-made Nativity–all of twelve feet wide–required architectural expertise. It was Christmas, 1944, and Kaib was a long, long way from home. Things just got to him; so he decided to create this most famous barnyard scene, a fully manned–and animal-ed–nativity.

Eduard Kaib was an ocean away from home that Christmas and fairly comfortable, if prison can ever be. He was in a German prisoner of war camp somewhere amid endless Iowa cornfields. Kaib and most a couple thousand others had been captured in North Africa and Italy. By early 1944, other Allied powers–England mostly, but others too–were overwhelmed with captured Gerries, or Huns, or whatever other names with which Allied forces blessed the blitzkrieg-ing enemy.

The U. S. of A. stepped up. Eventually, 425,000 captured prisoners–many German, some Japanese, some few Italian–were shipped to this country and imprisoned in as many as 400 camps, several of them–like the one at Algona, Iowa–“base camps,” home places from which gangs of prisoners could be sent out into the heartland and elsewhere, where necessary work wasn’t getting done. Eleven percent of all Americans–every color, every gender, every last hometown–were gone serving the nation during World War II, 16 million Americans out of the work force.

Across the land, agriculture alone required perspiration that wasn’t being spent. Emergency cleanups from tornadoes to earthquakes, from fires and to floods, kept thousands of German prisoners busy throughout the country. This side of the Atlantic, POWs got work done that otherwise wouldn’t have been.

Eduard Kaib was an officer and therefore had special privileges that allowed him time to create that creche. In all likelihood, Kaib knew that were he not in Iowa, that Christmas he would have spent the winter in Belgium, carrying out Hitler’s last daring offensive, the Battle of the Bulge. Worse, he could have been frozen stiff or dead on the Eastern Front, where two million Germans were killed, thirty million people in all. In December of ’44, Algona was a warm blessing.

The Camp Commander, Lt Col Arthur Lobdell, took one look at Kaib’s twelve-foot nativity arrangement, smiled, and told Kaib that what he should do next was create was something a good deal bigger.  Kaib went to work. What he built that next year--along with five other POWs-- is downright astonishing. Kaib's Algona Nativity, uniquely breathtaking, is still here, displayed in its own little building on the Kossuth County fairgrounds. Every December people from near and far visit, some of them time and time again. Kaib and his builder buddies slathered concrete onto chicken wire fitted around wood to create 65 one-half life-size figures. When you walk into the scene, it's simply amazing. It's that big. You don't look down on the sheep or manger. The whole business doesn't sit on a table or isn't planted in a church yard--it's wingspan is all of fifty feet. There are 33 sheep.

Pardon my insistence, but Algona’s POW Nativity is somehow something else altogether. It’s not just the concrete on chicken wire, not just the hand-painted-ness. Algona’s Nativity is not the biggest or the most expensive or even the most lifelike. I’m not at all sure anyone would call it art.
Most American homes this holiday season will have at least one nativity set. Some are beautifully hand-carved; some are tall silhouetes; some, set on music boxes, pipe their own beloved carols. Some are African or Hispanic or Native American. Some feature leprechauns. Some are tiny. Many are huge, life size, some bigger; some are accented in 24-caret gold. Check out Wal-Mart sometime--they likely stock a dozen or more. These days, some churches do them live.But unlike any other creche I know of, the love story so divinely celebrated in this monumental barnyard moment begins, as impossible as it may seem, with hate and death. This nativity was sculpted from a whole world war of destruction, sadness, and grief. That’s its amazing genesis.

What the Algona Nativity so conspicuously displays, even in its story, is the beloved mystery of the Christmas miracle, a story drawn by a single line from the visions of a prophet named Isaiah–“a little child will lead them.” It’s that mad and that beautiful and still that simple._________________"The Algona Nativity" is being broadcast this morning on KWIT, public radio in Sioux City, Iowa. You can hear it here-- https://www.kwit.org/post/algona-nativity

Reading Mother Teresa--To suffer and to laugh

“Surely God does not reject one who is blameless 

or strengthen the hands of evildoers. 

He will yet fill your mouth with laughter 

and your lips with shouts of joy.” Job 8:20–21

“Sister Gabriela is here. She works beautifully for Jesus – the most important is that she knows how to suffer and at the same time how to laugh. That is the most important – to suffer and to laugh.” (24)

Up beside my office desk stands this picture of the Reverend Bernard J. Haan, founder and first president of the college where I taught for the last 37 years. It’s almost 70 years old, from Life magazine, in fact; he’s outfitted in his finest swallow-tail coat, holding forth in front of the pipe organ, no pulpit in sight.

It has to be posed because I can’t imagine that a professional photographer – some worldly guy from Life – would have been allowed to wander up the aisle during Sunday worship to shoot, willy-nilly, umpteen photographs of the Dominie opening the Word of the Lord. I may be wrong.

I didn’t know the Reverend Haan when he was a young preacher, but I’ve heard enough about him to be able to guess that he hammered that pulpit, beat out his strongest points on the massive Bible that sat up there back then. He was young, robust, opinionated, and charismatic. Within a few years, he had accumulated a following so wide that he’d had sufficient deep-pocketed disciples to start a college, part of that following growing from a reputation he gained for keeping a theater out of Sioux Center – the reason the national  press was in town back then.

A couple of decades later, by the mid-60s, he was a warm and genial old codger, capable of measured self-reflection, a fiery preacher who could – and did, famously – laugh at himself.
By the time he retired, he could actually “do” himself in legendary self-parody. He knew what the crowd expected of him, that he could play himself – with style and grace. And success when his audience understood that he was shucking and jiving, being himself by doing himself.

Late in life, he told me that when he looked back, he wished it hadn’t taken him so long to learn that the way to the human heart is via a smile, a laugh, some sweet joy. That’s what he told me. He regretted not learning that lesson earlier. I keep that old picture of him around because it helps me remember what he says it took so long for him to learn.

I don’t know that the Rev. B. J. Haan suffered – or how, but I’m confident all of us do. And I don’t know about Mother Teresa’s friend Gabriela either – how she might have suffered there on the streets of Calcutta. I can’t compare her suffering with his; but then, really, it’s impossible ever to match my suffering up against yours or anyone else’s. Suffering is suffering.

But I think Mother Teresa wasn’t wrong about laughter. Not to smile is to suffer ceaselessly. There is something like grace in what she says here – “the most important” is to suffer and to laugh.

Down at the bottom of that assessment is paradox: laughter without suffering is silliness; suffering without laughter is horror. Life is a difficult dance between the two, a balancing act.

I was young when B. J. told me about his regrets, young enough to remember what he advised: Learning to laugh is a hard lesson, he said, smiling.

Christmas, France, 1914

Okay, it’s time to get serious. Before you talk about miracles and magic, let's have a good cold look at what happened in No Man's Land between British and German troops, December, 1914. You know the story. Before you grab the Kleenex or get all teary and sentimental, you should remember that perfectly good reasons explain why peace broke out amidst war, why, for one unforgettable Christmas, a battlefield became an enchanted cartoon.

Be reasonable. The magic of that moment is perfectly explainable.

After all, Christmas truces had happened before. In the public mind, the great battleground Christmas of 1914 stands alone. Not so. This was not the first, so stifle yourself.

Second, war giddiness was still in the air. The Great War had just begun. A thousand Brits thought marching to France was a fine and proper test of manhood. Death had not yet held the throne for four long years, as it eventually would. That Christmas, war wasn't yet hell. So why not eat, drink, and be merry? --'twas Yuletide, so "Deck the halls."

What's more, most of the partiers were reservists who'd just arrived at the front. First line veterans had either trudged back, or had not returned at all. Rookies lined the trenches and hopped out quickly that Christmas.

And consider this (the Brits did). Ethnically, the German troops were Saxons and Bavarians, sweet-natured gents. Had they been Prussian, no Brit would have peeked over the edge of the trench, even with a helmet.

Look, you didn't have to have a crystal ball to guess that such a truce would happen. One British captain smelled one coming and commanded his men not to take part:

          Friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices (e.g. “we won’t fire   if you don’t” etc.) and the exchange of tobacco and other comforts, however     tempting and occasionally amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited.

And then there's this: neither Brits nor Gerries were on their home turf. No French or Belgian troops swapped cigars or doffed each other's grog that Christmas. The war was being fought on their land, after all, so pass the ammunition.

Listen! Even the darkness weighed in. No Man's Land was strewn with the dead. Dozens of bloody corpses lay where advances from either side had failed. The yule celebration began as a burial detail--men who’d been shooting at each other teamed up to dig graves and lay their mutual fallen heroes to rest. Read Psalm 90 sometime: "teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” Imagine killing each other with that funeral favorite playing in your soul.

There’s perfectly logical explanations for a Christmas truce in No Man’s Land. No big miracle. Just think about it.

Or not. Imagine how hard it would have been to shoot at men when thirty yards away, suddenly dozens of lighted trees went up on Christmas Eve. Good German folk had sent their boys half the Black Forest. You’d have to be heartless to shoot through a candle-lit chorus of shimmering Christmas trees.

Just imagine. An amazing sight.

And then there’s this. Much of the world sits in silence on Christmas Eve, as if we all await the bejeweled skies all around to come alive once more with a heavenly chorus blessing us all with words we need so badly to hear— “Fear Not. Fear Not.”

There’s a king in a barn, the old story maintains. We’re living a miracle.

No matter how you parse it, the peace that drifted in over the killing fields that night in France still breathes life into us because it came in on angel’s wings. When those boys with their sodden boots climbed out of trenches and into each other’s company, they created a joy that warms the soul a century later and a couple thousand miles away.

No organ, no trumpet, no drum—just a chorus of gravely men’s voices airing an ancient melody in a harmony of language, in the night and the cold. “Silent Night, holy night. . . alles schlaft, einsam wacht.

All is calm. All is bright.

It most certainly was a miracle.

Fear not.
____________________________ 

This essay, produced by Mark Munger, broadcast by KWIT, Public Radio in Sioux City, Iowa, was broadcast on Christmas day, 2017. You can listen to that broadcast at  https://www.kwit.org/post/miracle-no-mans-land

Winter Solstice and our Need for Hope

People I know have tipi rings on their South Dakota ranch, circles of stones visible only in summer, and then, only when cattle keep the grass down. But they're there, broad circles of half-submerged stones that mark the spots where, years ago our indigenous ancestors pitched tents, footprints of a different time.

Those friends claim there’s a long, straight line of stones in that pasture they believe points to the exact spot on the horizon where the sun rises on summer solstice. I haven't seen it, but I believe such things exist--ancient clocks to remind people that the times, they were 'a'changin’. Once the sun aligns with those rocks, people knew, regretfully, that winter was just over the hill.

Frederick Manfred, the Siouxland novelist, used to claim he knew where to find a similar straight line of rocks on Blue Mound, up the road in Minnesota. I never saw it, and you can’t always think a writer; but I’d like to believe it’s there too.

Who knows?--maybe there are more. Out here on the edge of the plains, we still unpack our thick robes once we know winter is on its way.

The Lakota kept their history on buffalo hides. Maybe you’ve seen ‘em. Somebody—the appointed artist, I suppose—kept track of calendar years by a single picture: a mule maybe, because that was the year some feisty donkey wandered into camp. “Winter Counts,” the Lakota people call those sprawling history book hides “winter counts” because the Lakota once counted their years by the winters they endured. Winter Counts. For the record, I have lived 70 winters. Now you know.

Out here, winter is the only season we can’t wait to end the day it starts. No area Chamber of Commerce cheerleader tells tourists that people die here in sub-zero temps, but they can—and do. Thousands escape south, but most of us live with ice cube cars, frostbit ears, and a drop of clear liquid on the end of our noses. When it gets cold enough, you don’t go out at all.

Long lines of solstice stones remind the people that it’s soon to be winter. It’s coming. Pull that buffalo robe up.

And then, right in the middle of all that miserable cold, comes Christmas. Right in the middle of all that wretched cold comes Hannukah, and right in the middle of all that hopeless cold hope itself rides up, the winter solstice, the flipside of the sun’s annual pilgrimage.

In the Netherlands, Sinter Klaas arrives; in Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic, St. Stephen. And Santa Lucia, candles in her hair and sweets in her open arms, comes to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.

In the middle of all that cold comes all that grace, all that blessed warmth.

The story goes that angels on high appeared to low-life shepherds in the Galilean hills at the very best possible time, a night of endless dark and awful cold, even in Israel. “Glory, glory,” they sang, and the music couldn’t have come at a better moment because those shepherds had to be sick to death of winter.

And thus Jesus comes to those who follow him, just when we need him most, in the cold nights of our winter counts.

Not all of us believe in the Virgin Birth, cattle speaking in tongues, or a King in a manger. Not all of us spend our nights lighting menorahs for a rededicated temple. Not many of us dance madly on winter solstice.

But out here where the wind blows out of some unseen northwest icebox, my goodness! do we need the joy of Christmas. We’d be groundhogs without the blessing of that first sweet “Noel.”

Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men and women and children and all living things.

Every winter, just when a frozen world seems hopeless, hope itself arrives to wipe that bead from your nose and mine.

Happy holidays.

______________________________ 

Originally broadcast on KWIT, Public Radio in Sioux City, Iowa and available here:

https://www.kwit.org/post/longest-night-and-our-need-hope

Yesterday's kingdom of alabaster

This is the Schaap outback, shot through the back window yesterday morning. Such hefty hoarfrost makes the world seem perfectly virginal. It's always a blessing, but may be even more a gift when it drops by for a couple of hours so close to Christmas. Sunlight and wind takes down all that feathery frosting, but for an hour or so you can't help thinking you're a part of the original winter wonderland. The whole world wears white gloves.

Yesterday the temps stayed cold enough to keep the powder up 'till noon, even though the sun shone radiantly. By eight, what was right outside our door was so lovely that all I had to do to get at least some of that beauty into a camera was pull on a pair of shoes and a jacket and stand on the deck.

So here we go, gloriously, east to west, a panorama, just out our back door.

Research from the University of East Anglia (GB) makes clear that "exposure to greenspace reduces the risk of type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, premature death, preterm birth, stress, and high blood pressure," according to reports in Science Daily. You may want to run through that quote again--it's good for what ails you, even though there's no mention of hoarfrost.

In other words, what's out there, maybe especially on a morning like yesterday's, is just plain good for you, body and soul. In the late morning, we drove north a couple of hours like sightseers in the kingdom of alabaster, but we never really had to leave our back door.

Morning Thanks--Grudgingly--forgive me!

I tan easily. What can I say?

Lots of my friends with pinker skin have trotted off to the scalpel time and time again. Some make scheduled visits and come home with polka dots. Me? I tan easily.

No matter. Seven years ago I too had a forever open pimple-like thing cut out of my cheek in an operation that left me stitched and ugly for a couple of weeks. All of that's history, but yesterday, once again, I went under the knife in a two-minute operation and walked out of the office holding a Kleenex up to a schnoz that only Rudolf would like. I hate to be Scrooge-ish, but walking around with a banged-up nose during the holidays should get me the part.

No, I'm not pictured above. I used something nice because I'm not doin' a selfie. No way.

I'm 71 years old. For heaven's sake, tomorrow I could have a stroke (I've already had one) that would lay me out in some hospital bed, diapered. Today, I got a hole in my nose. Big frickin' deal, right? 

Here's how it is I pay homage to one of Calvinism's old saws--total depravity. In a thousand ways, I could look and feel much, much worse. In a matter of a couple weeks, this Rudolf schtick will be long gone. If I stop off at Prairie Ridge Home this morning, I could walk into a dozen rooms and find real live human beings, some not much older than I am, who wouldn't know me from the shaggy dog that runs around the place. What I'm saying is, I thought it bad when I had no shoes until. . .well, you know.

I know all that. I know I should be thankful, but I'm way up tight about a hole in my nose that's there, remember, because a guy with a scalpel cut away living tissue identified as. . .drum roll please. . .C-A-N-C-E-R. Granted this variety is quite docile, but the truth is there in all caps anyway--this minor, minor surgery delivered me from honest-to-goodness evil. 

And I'm thankful. Or should be. 

I am. 

Really. 

Sort of.

I didn't put a selfie up top here, not because of your pain upon seeing that bloody hole in my nose but because my pain in being seen would only bring me more pain. Somewhere in that mess is total depravity. Mine. 

"Vanity, vanity, all is vanity"--I can even quote scripture. I know what's in me, but I can't help it. I can't. (That's Paul, isn't it?)

Woe and woe and woe. 

Of the thousands of blog posts on Stuff in the Basement, hundreds end with morning thanks because all of this started with a line from Garrison Keillor you can still read up on top this page--how the world would be a better place if every last one of us would take a moment to thank the Lord for something every day. Over the years, for better or worse, I've slowly wandered from that theme, but I still return to it and will again today. Or try. Here goes. 

This morning's thanks is for the doctor who yesterday rid me of the little spot of skin cancer, right on the tip of my nose. I'm greatly thankful it's gone, but I wish I didn't have the hole.

And now, to show you just how thankful I am--consider it penance if you're Catholic--I'm going to appear out from the cover of darkness this morning. Here I am, black and white--Scrooge.

Merry Christmas. (And yes, I know my t-shirt is inside out.) 

Book Review--Romans Disarmed

COMING SOON TO A CHURCH NEAR YOU!!!

If it's not there already.

It's the gay marriage thing. In my denominational fellowship, it's coming this summer. Wherever it's appeared, strife and conflict, rancor and horror, even schism comes with. And yet, one of the leading Democratic candidates for President has a spouse who's a man, for Pete's sake. It's all around us. A goodly percentage of evangelical families have at least one nephew or niece or uncle or aunt who's out of the closet, and most of those relatives are no more randy with their sexual lives than this year's consistory members. 

Just about wherever you look, church fellowships are coming apart at the seams because its members hold Luther-like, "here-I-stand" positions on gay life and gay marriage: "I shall not be moved." 

Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh would be disdainful of my starting this review of Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire/Demanding Justice with the bedlam of gay marriage. They'd say that their Romans Disarmed is not about gay marriage, and it isn't. 

What it's about is reading the Bible, reading the book of Romans specifically. The most telling litmus tests evangelicalism knows today are manifestations of a deeper, more complex question, and that is, "How do we know what the Bible says?"

Some say that's not at all difficult. You read the words. The Bible is the word. Thus, if Paul says women shouldn't lead, you silence 'em--or make sure they make cookies. If women want to lead, let them do pot lucks, as long as a male opens with prayer.

Or you read words like "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" and follow the blessed example of Salem in 1690. 

Or you read the words, like "Thou shalt not kill" and then go conscientious objector rather than fight Hitler, and in every way possible you fight capital punishment. 

Truth be told, no one just reads words, despite the defense of what people used to call the Bible's inerrancy, a word my spell-check doesn't recognize because of the infrequency of its use, I guess. 

Keesmaat and Walsh embrace what most of us might call "a liberal agenda," but they're not advocates of what my dad used to call "the social gospel." They take the Bible seriously. They don't hunt and peck or cherry pick; they don't roll their eyes at the virgin birth or Christ's resurrection. What they advocate is a realistic understanding of the historical motivations for what God is saying in the book of Romans. As if the Bible were history, they use the story of the Roman Empire to understand motivation. As if the Bible were literature, they open up personalities and character to interpret intent and meaning. Romans Disarmed is, first of all, plain old Bible commentary--just neither plain nor old. 

I couldn't help but wish the book were half as big. Romans Disarmed is not beach reading. It's not a book you peruse. The authors do everything they can to make it readable--and it is. It's a tome, but it's not heavy. It's just huge. Thus, formidable. I wish it weren't. 

What they argue can be summarized in the way they word a treasured text for Calvinists like myself, Roman 8:28. Here it is in the New Revised Standard Version: "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose," one of the most comforting words Paul ever wrote. Here it is in the New International Version: "We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." A little less clear maybe, but still a line of scripture you can rely on.

Here's Keesmaat and Walsh's version: "'We know that in all things God works of good with those who love God and are called to his purpose" (italics theirs). Take a shot at the inclusion of those two words and you've got at least something of the gift of the book.

The authors want Romans Disarmed to equip followers of Jesus Christ for the blessed work of loving others, not saying they do but doing the hard work of taking care of  God's world, of bringing people in not keeping people out, of creating love fests and not constructing fortresses. 

Yes, if you're wondering, they're lefties and their determined. They don't back away from issues. They try their best to be fair to those who aren't, but where they're sure they're right, they say it, and say it clearly.

And that's how it is they get to gay marriage. And that's how they see it--draw no lines in the sand. Learn to love--that's the gospel.

If you ever wonder how evangelical Christians can argue for gay marriage, if you'd like to read a discussion that clearly and fairly takes you through that argument, I highly recommend that chapter in Romans Disarmed.

What we need to remember, they argue, is that for new Christians in Paul's moment, the idea of their own slaves being whole persons, men and women endowed by their creator with the image of God, the very notion of those slaves being loved and not used was as difficult for them to understand as it is difficult for millions of evangelicals to love and include their LBGTQ neighbors. 

The book is huge, but it's not a stiff read. It's a commentary on some of the most familiar passages in the book of Romans. 

Will it change anyone's mind? I don't know. What I do know is that evangelical Christianity faces no more divisive question right now--in many ways--than how to accept Mayor Pete and his husband.

That's where we're at. Romans Disarmed doesn't pull punches. It's all about love.