Morning Thanks

Garrison Keillor once said we'd all be better off if we all started the day by giving thanks for just one thing. I'll try.

Friday, February 28, 2020

A Moment in and out of Time*


I was 32 years old when someone at Bread Loaf Writers Conference called to tell me that my application for a scholarship had been accepted and they were offering me a position as a waiter. I had no idea what being a waiter meant, but I understood from the context that the offer was a plumb.

The house where we lived at that time is long gone, as is the tiny kitchen where I stood, phone in hand, listening. The call had come in the middle of the day, in the middle of a lunch. Our two little kids were sitting beside us.

It’s now close to thirty years later, but I will never forget receiving that call because I had the sure confidence that my being chosen for a waiter’s scholarship to the granddaddy of all writers conferences, Bread Loaf, was a signal that, as a writer, fame and fortune lay just down the road. I had just published a book, my first, with a tiny, local press; now, Bread Loaf beckoned. The New York Times Book Review was a year or so away.




When I flew into Burlington, Vermont, for the Conference—early, because I was a waiter—I met a beautiful woman, my age, married with two children, who said she was an aspiring poet. Her name was Deborah Digges. She’d also be a waiter. Someone from the Conference picked us up, but we took the hour-long drive together into Vermont’s Green Mountains.

Ten days later, when we boarded a plane to leave, she and I stood on the stairway to that jet, waiting to enter the cabin. She looked at me and shook her head. “I hope this plane crashes,” she said, and she meant it.

She’d been wooed by a celebrity poet, and she’d fallen, hard. On the dance floor at night, the two of them looked like smarmy high school lovers, which might have seemed embarrassing if it hadn’t happened to so many others. Another waiter—also married with kids, two of them—told me it was important for him to have an affair because, after all, as an artist he needed to experience everything in order to write anything with authority.

I thought long and hard about her wish on the way home that day, whether someone’s soulful desire could ever turn, magically, into reality. And the very idea made me think, that day, about dying. What if the Lord would take that plane down, as she wished--and what if I would go too?

I remember thinking that it would be really bad, but it wouldn’t be the worst thing. After all, my wife was young and could remarry, if she wanted. My kids were just three and five; to them, in a year, I’d be little more than a picture that would, in time, make it into some indistinguishable drawer. They would all be taken care of. Life would go on.

And for me?—I’d miss it, a ton—life, I mean. I’d miss my children’s growing up, I'd miss what I could have written, I'd miss what I might have been. But, honestly, as I sat on that plane on the way to O’Hare, I told myself that, really, I could live with death.

Someday I’ll worry about it, I imagine--death, I mean. Someday, the grim reaper will look more like the monster he actually is. But ever since that day coming home from Vermont, I’ve been okay with dying.

This morning I’ve reached my three-score years—if I get ten more, as the Bible says, I’ll be lucky. It’s my birthday, and a big one. Today I’m sixty.

And all this morbidity is but a personal excursion into the ars moriendi, the art of dying, a body of Christian literature that appeared in the fifteenth century and provided practical guidance for the dying, prescribed prayers, actions, and attitudes that would lead to a "good death" and thus salvation. I know, I know--heavy, heavy. But I've got too many years invested in literature not to believe that there's some good in a theme or attitude that it's impossible not to see--those who learn to die well have learned, in the process, how to live.

I’m thankful to God for sending me to Bread Loaf way back when, if for no other reason than it gave me a moment in time, almost forty years ago, for a very personal meditation on dying on a plane to Chicago, a meditation I've never forgotten and for which I'm thankful on this birthday, my sixtieth.

But Breadloaf wasn’t an easy place to be, for a waiter or anyone else, I’d guess. I’d lived most of my life in small, conservative communities who prided themselves, maybe even excessively, on their church-going. Adultery was not commonplace, but a sin, a scandal.

The atmosphere in that mountaintop retreat was electric. Aspiring writers like me flirted daily with National Book Award winners, editors, agents, and publishers. Life—dawn ‘till dawn—was always on stage.




In the middle of that frenetic atmosphere, one Sunday morning, I walked, alone, out into a meadow, away from all the people, where I found a lone Adirondack chair and sat for an hour, meditating. I tried to imagine what the soft arm of my little boy would feel like in my fingers; at the same time I recited, over and over again, the words of the 23rd Psalm.

I remember a beautiful mountain stream, but there were no still waters at Bread Loaf Writers Conference the summer of 1980. If there were, I didn’t see them. But that Sabbath’s very personal worship, in the middle of all the madness, brought me—body and soul—to the very place David has in mind in verse two of Psalm 23.

Honestly, I know still waters. He’s led me there, and I’ve been there, mostly, for just about seventy years. And for all of that, this morning, the morning of my birth, I'm very thankful.

_____________________________

*First posted here a dozen years ago. The math is different, but everything else is still true. 

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Nederlandisch Proverbs (ix)


I have not as yet exhausted the bedlam of wisdom Pieter Breughel brought to life in this incredible Lowlands street scene, so why not have another look. Like all worthy art, a little study of this old masterpiece promises vividly to make us all the wiser. The bottom right hand corner is replete with medieval enlightenment.

Your being Dutch (should you be) doesn't mean the zaniness instantly interprets itself. Brueghel was Flemish; his mother tongue was Dutch as are the precepts he's gathered on the canvas. While there are a few shapes and figures you might be able to discern with 21st century perceptions, the wisdom would be more accessible if we were reared on those Flemish fields. 

Still some images need no translation.

Here's spilled porridge in Brueghel's world, but spiltled milk in ours. Whatever the substance, the wisdom translates: this poor guy--look at him holding his head!--is wasting his time crying over it. 

One measure of Breughel's jaw-dropping genius is the way he can dish up so many proverbs in so small a space. Here's just a bit of that lower right hand corner.


The guy on the plank seems tortured, and he is, trying to reach from one loaf of bread to another, obviously an inhuman stretch. Poor guy. Niet van het ene brood tot het andeere weten te gereken translates sadly: he's barely able to stretch from one loaf to the next, which suggests, sadly, that getting his daily bread is a greater chore than it should be. 

The tug of war behind him features two gentlemen in white obviously competing for something. Those who have plumbed the depths of Flemish moralism claim they're fighting over the longest end: ze trekken om het langst, which brings back some furtive moments from my own childhood, times when my dad used to hold three toothpicks in his hand, two of which were broken off, then offer them to his kids. It was a means by which "going first" would be determined. He had three children--hence, three toothpicks. I remember my own anxiety. These two guys are fighting over the longest end. 

That man hugging the pole?--you can't help but notice the leather bag hanging from his belt--a purse, and a purse with something in it--look at it hang. Here's the pearl of great price: Liefde ist war de geldbuidel hangt. That one hurts, Valentine's Day just now behind us. "Love is on the side with the money." Is that depressing level of cynicism Dutch or Calvinist? 

If you were wondering about that spherical thing with the cross in the middle, if you were thinking it was a globe--the world, in fact--you're right. I don't doubt that the appearance of the dandy who's spinning it would mean something to a 16th century Flemish audience, but I'm just guessing that the get up is meant to suggest his being well-heeled (check out the headdress) because he is, in fact, spinning the world on his thumb (tough to do, btw). All of that translates into Hij laat de wereld op zijn duim draaien. He is, or at least thinks he is, on top of things--which begs the question, "Is he in for a great fall?" Don't know. My Calvinist heart says so.

And if the bearded man in the top left corner, the man with what appears to be some kind of halo around his head, the man sitting in what seems to be a throne--if he looks like Jesus of Nazareth, you're onto something. The monkish-looking pious guy in front of him appears to be tweaking Jesus's beard, which is remarkably two-toned. You may have guessed the white beard is something he picked up from the wardrobe department. That monkish guy hung it from Jesus's own jaw. Rather impish of him, don't you think?

Well, apparently Brueghel's people thought so. Voor God een baard van vlas maken is the proverb at the heart of things here, but the idea requires a believer to translate because word by word it would make little sense: "to tie a beard made of flax to the face of Christ." Such silliness is an abomination. What the line suggests is how some people cover their deceit with sweet piety. 

That happens? Seems so, in Antwerp of 1559, and, yes, even today. 

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

In hiding


At least there's no more melanoma on my nose. I'm self-quarantined because I'm quite sure if I'd go out on the street I'd scare the women and the horses. 

The doctor worked over my bulbous nose (her description and she meant it as a compliment) for some time yesterday and left a scar. For a man who's carried a huge one on his cheek for 70 years, this one should be little more than an update. But, like I said, one short look in a mirror suggests clearly that I shouldn't be seen for a while.

She claims her blessed handiwork will make me handsome again, but I've always been skeptical of miracles. 

We'll see. If you don't see me around for a while, I'm in hiding.

Meanwhile, if you know any miracle cures, don't hesitate.

Jim


Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Morning Thanks--Goats Beard


Toting a camera has become second nature to me.  Why?  For starters, a simple shot like this.

First of all, these days pix are free--a thousand of 'em, ten million for that matter.  Sure, there's the entry fee for a decent camera, but that was true long before anyone could pronounce the word "digital."  In photography, like most electronics, the end of the world these days is impossibly far away because this, my friends, is the real Golden Age.  Today, an idiot can buy a terrific camera for considerably less than $50 and do things with more precision and grace than anything even a good amateur could do for twice that much--no, three times--a decade ago, in film.  Look at it mathematically--if a million monkeys take a million shots at Yosemite, one of those shots ought to look something like an Ansel Adams.

But that's engineering and economics.  Big deal.  Why have I become a toter?  There are real spiritual reasons. 

Check out this shot.  Some would say this is nothing more than an ordinary roadside weed--and it is.  It's blessed with a wonderful name--Goat's Beard--but there have to be millions of them thriving all around Siouxland, none of them planted, all of them big, lolling, volunteer puff balls.  They're little more than a dandelion on steroids, but if you look at 'em right, they're gorgeous, even though they seem almost perfectly colorless.  In the right light--like this golden dusk--standing up against a dark background, they'll take your knees out with their sheer beauty.  They're just stunning.

I tote a camera these days because you simply can't tell when sheer beauty will come up and smack you across the face.  And I need that--beauty that is.  The slap I can do without--although sometimes I need that too.

I need it because cynicism's open arms are too ready a solace these days.  Maybe it's me, getting older.  Maybe it's our particular brand of polarized politics.  Maybe it's my DNA or the perils of drinking city water.  Who knows why?  All I know is that catching Goat's Beard in gorgeous light is dang good for me--for my eyes, for my heart, for my soul.  It's a blessing to look for beauty.  It's meditative.

And did I mention?--it doesn't cost me a dime. 

Goat's Beard--what a miracle!
_______________
Originally appeared here mid-summer, 2015.

Monday, February 24, 2020

Katharine Drexell, Patron Saint

Image result for katharine drexel

It was less than a year since her mother, Emma Bouvier Drexell, had died, her step-mom really. Katharine was just two months old when her birth mother passed away. She was well into adolescence before she came to know that blessed Emma, a kind and loving mother, was not the woman who had brought her into the world.

If you think you recognize Emma's maiden name, you do so because of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy. The Drexells, like the Bouviers, were true bluebloods, all-American royalty, silver spoon variety. Her father, an investment banker, was among the richest of the rich in the late decades of the 19th century. You'll have to trust me when I say the family's profound Catholic faith kept the haughtiness of some of the rich at bay. The Francis Anthony Drexell family was as kind and gracious and loving as anyone could imagine or experience. Quite simply, they were wonderful people.

But they had lots and lots of money. Katharine, the second of the three Drexell daughters, was 25 when her mother died, and the loss was devastating--to all. Her father determined that an extended vacation to Europe might aid the grieving. Europe meant Italy for sure, and Rome, and even with the Pope a given.

If you stand in the Piazza San Marco in Venice most any time of year, you'll witness more pictures being taken in five minutes than were taken in the first whole century of photography. Everyone carries a phone and uses it; and tens of thousands of tourists shoot a thousand snapshots because the Piazza cannot really be easily described. The wealth required to build the place goes far beyond imagination.


  
And this is but half of it.

In November of 1883, the Drexells visited here, and Katharine looked up on a statue of the Madonna and child, in all likelihood the one on the clock tower. When she did, miraculously  but maybe not surprisingly, she saw the face of her mother, Emma, who had only recently left them.



Silly maybe, but give Katharine the dignity of her deep faith and the space to grieve the loss of a loving mother. Right here, on the Piazza San Marco, Katharine Drexell saw her mom once again; and her mother spoke to her from behind Mary's gracious smile and gaze. "Freely you have been given," her mother said to her, "freely give."

Katharine Drexell bought a souvenir card somewhere on the Piazza that day, and on it she wrote the date the vision had been given, "November 18, 1883." That card she carried along with her for all of her life. 

Just more than a year ago, I stood in the Piazza San Marco. I may well have looked up at the same clock tower and the same Madonna and Child. When you're there, the place takes  your breath away.

But I wish I'd have known the story of Katharine Drexell standing there in the plaza about a 150 years earlier, wish I would have known the wisdom her mother spoke because Katharine Drexell's life mission was extraordinary. 

Not far from the banks of the Missouri River, at a place where it stepladders through its own massive hills, sits a little tiny town named Marty, SD, named after a famous South Dakota bishop. Out there stands an astounding church in the middle of nowhere, a church you have see to believe--St. Paul's Catholic, a place that serves the Yankton Sioux reservation all around.


Image result for St. Paul's Catholic Church Marty
St. Paul's, Marty, South Dakota

That huge and beautiful church is there today because once upon a time a woman named Katharine Drexell heard her mother speak through a marble statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus, on the Piazza San Marco, Venice, Italy. "Freely you have been given, freely give."


And there's so much more.

Sunday, February 23, 2020

Reading Mother Teresa--The rough road of obedience




















Oh, that my ways were steadfast in obeying your decrees!
Then I would not be put to shame when I consider all your commands.
I will praise you with an upright heart as I learn your righteous laws.
I will obey your decrees; do not utterly forsake me.
How can a young person stay on the path of purity?
By living according to your word.
I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands. Psalm 119:5–10
According to the editor of her letters and diaries, Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, Mother Teresa believed that in obeying her superiors in the Sisters of Loreto, she was, in fact, obeying Jesus, in “submitting to their commands, she was submitting to Christ Himself” (31) is the way he puts it.

I confess that’s a way of life I can’t imagine.

There’s something undeniably saint-like about her inviolable commitment, but something slavish too. If the simple obedience – can I say “blind obedience”? – to one’s superiors is the portal to sainthood, then I’ve yet to trot joyfully through that door.

I can’t imagine it was easy to believe that one’s superiors spoke for the Lord God almighty – then again, maybe it was easy to believe, just hard to live.
Still, that Mother Teresa would believe what she did makes good sense. If you’re going want to be the bride of Christ, if you’re going to commit, via something as permanent as an oath, to live for him always, every second of the day – no time off, no Expedia getaways, no VRBOs – then it seems to me that some kind of infrastructure to that commitment is, in fact, required. In her case, that scaffolding was created by the church – or The Church.

I mean, no human being ever believed that he or she was one with Jesus, 24/7, you think? Even David the King often found himself abandoned – see Psalm 13, the “howling” psalm. I hate to be skeptical, but my guess is no one on the face of the earth ever has ever claimed to have God’s voice in his heart and soul all the time, like the phone in his pocket. No earthling stays permanently in some higher world.

It just doesn’t happen. In his “Personal Narrative,” Jonathan Edwards, the great revivalist Calvinist, claims he suffered long, anguished moments of silence. Ralph Waldo Emerson tried to lift anyone who’d listen to him into bright-and-shiny moments of revelation, but he certainly didn’t stay there himself (read “Experience” sometime). Even Edgar Allen Poe wanted his bizarre verse to lift us, at least for a moment, from our rotten, stinking world. But only for a moment. Abraham Kuyper’s most famous devotional work, To Be Near Unto God, is all about helping his loyal followers find their way to glimpses of glory. Glimpses. 

No one I know would say that Christ’s voice is always within them. But then, I’m not Pentecostal. Maybe if I were. . . .

It’s understandable that someone like Mother Teresa, someone as committed to God’s near physical presence in her life, would believe the way to get there, even and maybe especially through the silences, is by reckoning that the words of the boss – her Mother Superior or her bishop, or whoever was in charge– was always the very voice of God.

I’ve failed badly on that one. But that’s a story for another time.

Here’s what I’m thinking. We’re wired with desire, all of us, desire for God. That g has to be lower case, as in Poe’s case; but human beings share an undeniable spiritual aspiration. Mother Teresa, who is without a doubt a saint, attempted to stifle the doubts she had (and they were considerable) by believing that whatever church authorities said was gospel-level truth. When her superiors spoke, the voice belonged to God (upper case). She believed that because she believed what was required of her, in response, was, total obedience.

I’ve never been so sure as that. But there’s no doubt in my mind – and soul – that I too want God. As hard as it is for an old Calvinist like me to admit it, I think we all want what we believe God is or does, even if that aspiration doesn’t make us saints.

Maybe what makes all of us want to get there is that we can’t.

Only by his doing. Only by grace.

I’m sure Mother Teresa believed that too.

Friday, February 21, 2020

What the Queen said


The guy was a showman. Really, he makes Donald Trump look like small potatoes. 

What Buffalo Bill tried to do--what he accomplished, in fact--was take an entire wild west panorama to Europe--the whole business: cowboys and Indians, cattle and buffalo, sharp-shooting women blasting away from rolling covered wagons, whole families of warriors who had, a decade before, dispatched America's favorite military hero, General George Armstrong Custer. And it's a marvel he didn't raise Custer from the dead to buy him passage to London too. 

The Ogalalas, the Minneconjous, the Two Kettles who got on the boat that would take them over "the big water," didn't quite know what to think of Buffalo Bill Cody. Some liked the idea of seeing the land where the white man came from, and all liked what Cody paid--far, far more than they could have received for any reservation job, and there weren't many of those. Some took their families, even children for Buffalo Bill's "Indian Village" display. Cody wasn't vile or unfeeling. The truth is, they liked him. He treated them well.

Wherever they visited in Europe were tourists of the best kind, men and women who knew absolutely nothing about the worlds they visited and were awe-struck with everything they say. They visited the Tower of London, of course; and despite their limited English they attended worship at Westminster Abbey (a requirement of employment was having been baptized in the Episcopal Church). Just imagine 19th century American Indians in buckskin and beads stopping the show at the theater, where they took seats to watch, of all things, Goethe's Faust.

And they entertained. Among them was a tall, handsome kid named Black Elk, who'd proven himself to be something of a mystic. Native people respected eccentrics; they handled their special-needs people with care and compassion, and Black Elk was one of them. For some years already, the kid had shown signs of seeing more than others did when they stood together on a hill, of feeling spirits in the wind, of knowing how to treat the sick. 

Black Elk was a dancer, a serious dancer who practiced his steps like some diva from the ballet. What's more, because dancing demanded the colorful dress, Black Elk took with him on the long trip over the big water every fine bit of comely costuming he would need to do dances that certainly meant more to him than having been baptized. Dancing was religious ritual; it was worship, an outpouring of heartfelt praise that expressed itself in a swirl of color and fabric and rhythm.

I'm generalizing, but it's fair to say that in the late 19th century, Europeans were far more taken with the American Indian than were Euro-Americans. Wherever Buffalo Bill took his cast, they found crowds willing to adore them, even royalty, even the Queen. 



Cody's people got together with Buckingham Palace and devised the opportunity of a command performance for the Queen Victoria, who, just as planned, arrived with her red-coat retinue and a bevy of court beauties in fifty horse-drawn wagons, at precisely five o'clock, as promised.

Black Elk was one of five warriors chosen to dance for the queen, the Grass Dance, a traditional dance created by the Omaha but eventually spread through west. The imagery was straight from the plains, the dancers recreating the special look of long prairie grasses moving like waves in the wind never ceasing.The effort was to describe the grass and then, in the deep spirituality of the movement, become the grass. 

When it concluded, when the drums stopped and movements ceased, Queen Victoria descended from her seat and walked out to greet the dancers. “All over the world, I have seen all kinds of people, and I have seen all kinds of countries, too," she told them, "and I’ve heard about some people that were in America and I heard they called them American Indians. Now I have seen them today.”

She smiled deeply and honestly. It was clear she was taken with the dance, the performance. “I have seen all kinds of people, but today I have seen the best-looking—the Indians.” She spoke this to Black Elk. “If I owned you Indians, you good looking people, I would never take you on a show like this.” And then more.  “I wish that I had owned you people," she told them, "for I would not carry you around as beasts to show to the people.” 

That's what the Queen said.

For a woman whose court required extreme punctuality, Queen Victoria lollygagged; she stayed almost two hours longer than she had planned, than she had told Cody she would. She walked among the people.

True story. 



Thursday, February 20, 2020

American carnage II


Some are saying President Trump won, and he wasn't even there. 

Last night, six primary candidates stood in front of the nation and put on the kind of show Trump himself used to assemble when he ran Wrestlemania. To say the bunch turned on the new guy, Mayor Bloomburg, pussyfoots with the truth. They did more than bloody him; they left him--or tried to--at the side of the road to the nomination.

But then, in Mike Bloomberg, Bernie and Elizabeth have a flesh-and-blood enemy no graphic artist could create for them. He's a real live billionaire, one of the very power-brokers they've both been hanging up as a shooting-range target for years. The original sin in our society is our billionaires, or so they've said. Last night, there one stood, just to their right, on stage in Vegas. Punch-a-rama. How perfectly American. 

Not that Bloomberg didn't deserve body blows--and now and then a vicious left cross. It's altogether possible that, come November, our choice will be two Big Apple misogynists, two NY billionaires with cash flowing from their every orifice. Together, they could buy whole sections of the nation, two of the mega-rich, each with a sordid history of buying affection on one hand and silence on the other, two of a kind, just about the lowest hand in poker. 

Imagine a November when people will argue that their fat cat has more cash than yours. Those two oligarchs are cut from the same cloth. Bloomberg couldn't stanch the bleeding when Elizabeth Warren asked him, point blank, to release the female employees he paid off from the silence he swore them to. He won't because he can't.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to grab headlines to feed his habit, President Orange rode into Arizona aboard Air Force 1 to ignite praise and worship from his faithful with another two-hour tirade against sin and evil, which is to say the Dems, who are Stalinists and hate America. Thousands, cultishly, believe him.

So who will it be? Which of the Dems will walk into the lion's den with the Orange tiger? Who's going to stand up against a man who will say and do anything, a man whose lies are both legion and legendary? Will it be little Mike? or Pocahantas? or Crazy Bernie? or the totally evil Biden, whose been pummeled for years already, a man who should be locked up in the cell next to Hillary. 

Or will it just come down to "hey, our guy's richer than your guy"?

What an ever-lovin' mess.

I've always loved that old Ben Franklin line about a republic: when asked what the constitutional convention had created, Franklin said, "A republic, if you can keep it." I've never in my life heard it repeated as often as I have in the last year or so. People are scared.

And they should be.

President Trump's "American Carnage" inaugural speech was the darkest national survey on record, an assessment of state of the union that made this country appear as war-ravaged as the Ardennes Forest after the Bulge. You don't have to look far for nay-sayers these days; they come in full-dress uniforms, both red and blue. 

Really, how are we going to get through this? 

God only knows.

Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Beauty in the Ruins


It's still there. Maybe. I haven't been out there for some time now, but as long as that abandoned place is circled by a substantial grove it remains pretty much hidden from passers-by. Apparently, whoever owns it isn't thinking about how much more corn he or she could grow on a homestead that has otherwise disappeared. Friends of ours once pointed to the place as a kind of dream location--and it is. They fantasized snuggling a new house in that grove, up high enough to see for miles all around. Whoever built the place chose well. Still, this picture is 15 years old. Who knows what the place looks like today?



A close friend lived here once upon a time. The family was not rich, although I'm sure the house looked better when his family called it home. I didn't know who had lived there when I stumbled on the place, early in the morning years ago. I snapped pictures because abandoned places tell stories, even if you don't have a clue who lived there or what the story is about. That friend of mine was killed a few years ago in a car accident. Today, the house is gone. Some couple bought the acreage and put up a new one. Maybe that's a good story.



Once upon a time, a kid wanted a hoop. Maybe his mom bought him a basketball, but never thought about his not having something to shoot at. Rather than buy one, dad said he'd make one himself, went into the machine shop, found a couple of otherwise useless iron pieces, put a spot of weld on where needed, then bolted the whole thing above a door--perfectly good rim. Don't think you're going to go out there to shoot some three-pointers. The place is gone too, the picture is also 15 years old.



Just another kind of ruin, really, an old truck parked up against one of the outbuildings, doing nothing, windows open to January. Only thing pronounced about it is the proud lettering.



Here's another, same genre--sort of Bonnie-and-Clyde-ish. Stuff left behind. Found this old abandoned guy somewhere north and east of Cherokee. It may still be there--that was just a couple of years ago. 



The hoarfrost turns this old abandoned place almost Disney-ish. So much virginal here that you have to look twice to notice the ruinous old place amid all the wedding allure. 



Or this. Once upon a time, a reservation church. Up there in the belfry, a bell waiting once again to be rung.


This one feels more than a little obscene. I think I could torch the place myself, rather than have it minister in this way to people passing by.



Or this. Old school still wears a cartoon face in spite of obsolescence.


If I try to tally how many shots I've taken of ruins through the years, I'd be ashamed. What is it with old barns, old houses, old ruins, old cars? Calvinist that I am, is it a predilection for mutability?--do I take pictures like these because the tower at Babel still crumbles in me? Do I find it consoling to roll my eyes at human endeavor? 

Or is it the opposite? When I pull over to the side of the road, is it some devout desire to lend permanence to places and things that appear to have none? Am I trying to make beautiful--to redeem--that which isn't? Is that what I'm doing when I reach for the camera? 

To me at least, it doesn't seem odd or strange to be enchanted by things falling apart; they remind us, sometimes even graciously, of our tenuous hold on the here-and-now. But isn't it just as human to notice that which is passing away in order to keep it from the inevitable dust? 

I don't know that any other human being has ever laid eyes on that image of the homemade basketball hoop. I took that picture years ago. But for reasons I don't understand myself, I've never forgotten it. 

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Lament


This is a golden oldie, a blast from the past--wishful thinking that's no longer true of me, post-retirement. But it's still thematically trustworthy. First appeared here nine years ago.
___________________________

No true, red-blooded Calvinist could ever be guilty of sloth, or laziness, one of the highly respected seven deadlies. Good night, if Max Weber is to be believed, we gifted this culture with capitalism, after all, because to us hard work is, without a doubt, something of a heavenly virtue, and I'm no exception.

But industry is like piety, in a way--you can never quite do enough or be enough. There's always more work lurking right around the corner, always more that could be done. The Bible says "pray without ceasing," after all. We could all be better Christians, harder workers, more passionate, more productive. Go on, take up your calling, take up your bed and walk, get out there, grab those bootstraps and get the job done, get off your butt. As that sage, secular Calvinist, Ben Franklin, used to say, "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."

My clock, right now, says 4:55 a.m. Just call me a Calvinist.

It's one thing not to operate on "Indian time" here (with malice toward none of my Native brothers and sisters), but the fact is, our kitchen clock is actually set five minutes fast because, Lord knows, we can't be late.

Here's the rub: sometimes, just sometimes, it just gets to be too much. Yesterday was one of those days--too much to do and way, way, way too much that wouldn't get done. There wasn't enough time in the day for all the work that had to be done, and the Lord knows I can't--I won't--operate at anything less than maximum output. I'm a Calvinist, after all. Failure is not an option.

Sometimes I think I could use a good healthy shot of sloth. Maybe two. Maybe four or five, in fact, leaning over a bar. I bet the Lord wouldn't mind.

When it really gets bad, my heart rises like a bloody balloon in my chest and beats out a rhythm so heavy that I can feel it in my throat, as if I'm going to burst. Yesterday, on top of everything else, I could not--for the life of me--find my textbook. Drove me just about over the edge, in fact. Night class last night--got to give the students' their money's worth; but I had absolutely no idea where I'd find my text for this morning's 9:00 class. Wit's end, I'm convinced, features a breathtaking cliff. There I stood, panting. Seriously.

Then the book showed up, class went fine, and now it's the morning after.

I'm up early. Got to prepare.

The thing is, I've got a friend whose wife needs an organ transplant, but her heart's in no condition to sustain that traumatic level of surgery. He's been at her bedside for months, miles from here, miles from home, awaiting someone else's liver, a gift that's no longer coming. He's an old friend, not one I see all that often, a real presence in any room, big personality, a hearty sense of life and living, a man who at 60 years old, bought himself a Harley for his birthday. Barring a miracle, he's going to lose his wife of almost 40 years.

In my office at school, I deliberately put up a photo, an 8 x 10, of some wild flower in sunlight, along with a line that you'd have to look closely to see, but a line I know is there. "Consider. . .," it says. Meaning the lilies. Months ago, I stuck it up there deliberately, a reminder, even an admonition, an actual command from Jesus the Lord.

But I haven't seen for a while. I'm too busy. Isn't that sin deadly too?

Monday, February 17, 2020

A Birthday Gallery

 
I keep trying.






Who am I to question Lincoln?





I'll try not.





A heart of wisdom.





Sunday, February 16, 2020

Reading Mother Teresa--Fear and Trembling


“Hear my prayer, Lord, listen to my cry for help; 
do not be deaf to my weeping. 
I dwell with you as a foreigner, 
a stranger, as all my ancestors were.” Psalm 39:12 

There is within me more than a smidgen of my grandfather’s DNA, more than a pint or two of his dark Calvinist blood. I think of him often really, a man so driven by his perception of the depth of his own sinfulness (he was really a good man) that he would take a kind of perverse pleasure in recounting the darkness of his soul – as in, “if I had one thing to do with my salvation, I’d burn in hell.” That kind of thing. Complete with tears. Lots.

He likely had a family background in the old Dutch conventicle tradition, small hotbeds where emotion-laden devotions ran so intense that their neighborly visits became, in no small measure, the church itself. Today, some people believe that house churches are the wave of the future. Good night, they have a history, a past – fevered meditations from intense sinners whose prayers in an intimate circle stretched endlessly. Grandpa had a heavy dose of that.

Back then, I don’t think he was unusual. In most churches there were more Harry Dirkses per capita, I’m sure, than there are today. That kind of exhausting, abject confession promised and likely delivered abundant blessings. After all, the finest means by which to glory – seriously! – in the marvelous grace of God almighty was to lie prostrate on the floor in abject selflessness. Grace, for even lowly me!

By all reports, that was my grandpa. It’s easy to parody.

I’m saying that sometimes he’s in me, too. Maybe more than sometimes. Maybe more than I care to admit.

My mother, his daughter, often wished to be Pentecostal, to speak in tongues, to be ever closer to the Lord than she was, no matter that her son thinks she’s dang well close enough. Her son thinks such unquenchable longing is worrying. For someone who talked constantly about the love of God, it sometimes seemed to me that she was ever an arm’s length away, maybe farther.

She wanted “Blessed Assurance” sung at her husband’s funeral because he never shared her tremulous faith, she said. My father never worried much about his salvation, even though he was, as most who know him would say, something of a saint. She’s never quite understood his confidence because she was never herself so blessedly assured. If she were, the drama would be over; and I think that, like her father before her, she liked the drama.

Now I can giggle about all that, but what I’m confessing this morning is that, like it or not, I remain my mother’s son – and my grandpa’s grandson. And I feel it most when I read something like this from Mother Teresa: “Why must we give ourselves fully to God? Because God has given Himself to us” (29).

Just blows me away. That logic is so airtight that its undeniable truth makes mincemeat of my feeble attempts at being faithful. She is so absolutely right. Just to be sure, let me say that there are no tears here – I’m not my grandfather’s clone. But the way Mother Teresa says what she does here casts a long shadow over my sinfulness. I admit it.

See, there he is – Grandpa Dirkse. In the flesh.

“I live for God and give up my own self, and in this way induce God to live for me,” she wrote. “Therefore to possess God we must allow Him to possess our soul” (29).

Wow. Let me tell you, on that one I’m in the cheap seats. I don't deserve. . .well, you know.

Friday, February 14, 2020

Book Review--John Toland, Battle: the Story of the Bulge


I also remember that Patton said, "You are not here to die for your country, but you are here to make the G--d--- German soldiers die for their country." I always remember what he said.  Pat McLaughlin, Wakpala, SD, from his memoir in the Teton Times, May 26, 2004.
There are those who can judge with more authority whether John Toland's Battle: The Story of the Bulge is a great book. I don't know that I've ever read another tome about war, any war, about D-Day or Pearl Harbor or those horrible trenches in WWI. I've been to Gettysburg and Chattanooga and walked through white crosses at Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery and Memorial in Belgium, even spent a couple of hours at Bastogne. Trust me--we have too many books in our house, but few are about war.

But my father-in-law was at the Bulge, as was a woman, a nurse, whose story I know very well and a man she treated, like her a Lakota, a kid from Lakeview, SD, who lost both legs to a tank amid all the blood in the snow. It is, just now, 75 years since Hitler created "Watch on the Rhine," the almost unimaginable surprise attack on "the Ghost Front" in Belgium, whereby he hoped to cut off Allied supply lines by taking Antwerp. Very, very few saw it coming. Twenty thousand GIs were killed, forty thousand wounded, 23 thousand taken captive. Hitler lost far more, many of them just boys. In fact, Hitler lost the war at Bastogne.

I loved Toland's Battle because he tells the story at ground level. By way of thousands of hours of interviews, he keeps his watch and his calendar in mind as he details the story from both sides, having interviewed everyone--the GIs and Tommies and Wehrmacht. Stories weave around and through the battle lines. Enlisted men and draftees appear, disappear, then appear again and again until Hitler is beaten. Belgian and Luxembourgian civilians are treated as the battle-scarred veterans they were, their towns and village hamlets beaten into dusty madness. Toland's Battle is war, up close-and-personal, no holds barred, bloody and damnable. 

And when it's over, Toland pounds the pulpit. He makes the case he's already made: the American soldier was the hero at the Bulge, not because he wanted to be, not because he was fighting for flag or freedom or anything else all that glorious. 
His love of luxury made him a poor soldier in his first moments of battle. But in the Bulge, he soon learned that there was only one way to survive: he had to fight. And he fought, not for political or ideological reasons, but for his life. 
It's a stunning appraisal, really, a view of battle that makes "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" feel more than a little tinny. All that suffering and all that horror in the frozen woods at Argonne was, Toland says, just a matter of sheer survival. 

"With all its obvious faults the United States Army in World War II was a powerful, democratic army," he writes. It survived immense weaknesses that grew from its own inexperience. "Many of its officers were fumbling and incompetent," he says. "But the school of battle soon destroyed or winnowed most of these. The army that won the Battle of the Bulge and raced through Germany was hard and tough--run by hard and tough men."

After close to 400 hundred pages of hand-to-hand combat, of atrocities (on both sides), of frozen limbs and amputations, Toland's commendations had me convinced: at the Battle of the Bulge, American boys became fighting men, killers. They won the battle. They won the war.

There are likely other views, but John Toland takes his stand right there, and it's the only close-up of the Battle of the Bulge that I've read. 

Finished it on a Friday. 

Then, at church on Sunday, the sermon text was the Beatitudes, a system of justice and righteousness light years afar, a reminder, once again, of how wildly radical Jesus the Savior was. And is.

Kent Haruf's sweet novel, Benediction, includes a woe-be-gone preacher whose life is in shambles and is almost universally hated by Holt, Colorado, the small town Haruf loves. At the start of the Iraq War, the new preacher in town opens up the Bible to the Beatitudes--and is hounded out of town.

I'll admit I really liked John Toland's Battle. At 72, I'm not sure exactly how to love the Beatitudes.