“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.
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