Reading Mother Teresa--"the holes of the poor"

Carry each other’s burdens, 

and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. 

Galatians 6:2 

“Come, come, carry Me into the holes of the poor.” (44) 

I must admit that if I were Christ’s English prof, I’d suggest He find some alternative to “the holes of the poor,” language he used, says Mother Teresa, when he told her about the new mission he had for her, language which, these days, to say the least, lacks politically correctness. Holes makes the poor seem like pocket gophers – moles maybe, or, worse, rats. “Think of the image you’re creating,” I might say, professorially.

But some history is in order. If in your imagination, you see Mother Teresa’s work among the poor the way I do, the backdrop is a U.S. slum landscape, circa 1980 or so. Think Chicago, New York, LA. But Calcutta in the 1940s was a slum of wholly different magnitude.

In the Great Famine of 1942 and 1943, somewhere between two and four million people – I’m spelling those words so you don’t think them typos – died on Bengal streets for reasons which that are, trust me, still hotly debated and more than fiercely remembered. Two and four million people. Chicago’s population, in total, in 1940 was 3,400,400. Consider them gone.

Once the Second World War ended, the battle for Indian independence from England resumed mightily until the British partitioned the country into India and Pakistan, one predominantly Hindu, the other Muslim, on Partition Day in August of 1947. At the very heart of the liberation movement and the division between national religions sat Bengal and its central city, Calcutta.

National pride and religious hatred notwithstanding, there is no way to describe what happened in Calcutta in August of 1946, other than sheer madness, just a year before Partition Day. For four days and four nights Muslims slaughtered Hindus, and Hindus slaughtered Muslims in a holocaust of religious madness called today, “the Week of the Long Knives.” Exactly how many people died is almost anyone’s guess – hundreds, thousands.

In September of that year, 1946, just two weeks or so after “the Week of the Long Knives,” Mother Teresa heard Jesus’s voice on the train and at the retreat at Darjeeling. She was cloistered, of course, a teacher in a girls school; but she had to know that just outside those religious walls, hell itself had come to earth.

But there’s more. In the time that surrounded Indian and Pakistani liberation from English rule, the time of national independence, the largest migration of population in the history of the world was taking place, millions of Hindus leaving their homes in Pakistan to take refuge in what would become Hindu Indi – and millions of Muslim Indians leaving their homeland for refuge in what would become Muslim Pakistan. Millions became homeless and hungry, and right there at the heart of the suffering once more was Calcutta.

I don’t claim to know what kind of language Jesus uses in his interlocutions, and I certainly don’t know what’s appropriate for the Savior of Mankind, if and when he speaks to any of us, to you or to me.  But because I know some history, I am not about to critique the language Mother Teresa claims he used to tell her he was calling her to service to the poor, right in their very “holes,” because the world she saw and experienced outside the fortress of the school and convent where she lived was a suffering place unlike anything I can imagine.

The patio door is open now, and a beautiful breeze is coming into my study. It’ll get hot soon once again, and I’ll have to close it all up to keep the sun out, temperatures arising. The truth is, I know absolutely nothing about the suffering Mother Teresa saw every day on the streets of Calcutta – absolutely nothing in my life comes anywhere close.

When he told Mother Teresa to go to “the holes of the poor,” he used language that couldn’t possibly have made the situation more horrible than it actually was. She must have known something of that herself. All that suffering came to her as the voice of the Lord, horror and death happening daily all around.

In 1975, Paul Theroux wrote of Calcutta, “The city seemed like a corpse on which the Indians were feeding like flies.” That was 30 years after Mother Teresa heard the Lord tell her to go to the poor, the ones who lived in holes. The task was not just daunting, it was impossible – without faith.

Confession

I liked this photograph before I took it, surreptitiously, at a cathedral in Honduras, liked it because I respected the personal and silent quality of the man's piety. It's impossible to say he isn't sincere. He's praying, all by himself, at a place he believes God is near--or at least the Virgin, who he's asking to come to his aid in his request for God's hand. Here, knees on the bench, he believes he's in the blessed company of the saints. Look at that incredible altar. I admire him and feel for whatever anxious motives bring him into church. 

"Surreptitiously" because at this point I don't think I was aware of the ban on cameras or camera phones in the cathedral. Eventually I was, and I put the phone away. But whether I knew the rules or not, I did feel as if I was violating the man's privacy by snapping a picture for the sake of what his silent penitence would say in a photograph, this one, the one I took just then. And still like.

All of that is in this picture, maybe even the guilty sense that I shouldn't have taken it at all. Maybe that particular forbidden-ness is part of whatever noteworthy-ness this photograph owns in my scrapbook of shots of our time in Honduras.

And there's this, too, an ancient confessional in the same cathedral, the furniture of piety in his faith. I didn't grow up with this apparatus. It's something foreign, except for the righteousness of the transaction it heartfully signifies--confession of sin and forgiveness. There must haven been a tabloid full of sins recounted here through endless years, but the walls--and those intervening screens--are sworn to silence. 

I remembered this ancient, storied thing just now, when I read a poem by Connie Wanek, who was raised with a piety born here and with such transactions. I was too, of course, but without the furniture. Still I couldn't help thinking of my own sins in that old cathedral. .  .

Confessional Poem

I never told him anything
he didn't expect--
the white lies of a small girl, 
a week's accumulations
related in halting, mouselike whispers.
He blessed me anyway
and gave me my penance
and bade me go in peace.

I suppose all acts of piety, of righteousness, risk becoming rote or knee-jerk, even when you're a child, a little girl seated in that hard seat of confession. Then, Connie Wanek remembers thinking what I couldn't help imaging myself when I stood there at the booth.

Perhaps the next penitent
would offer him what he came for,
a great, meaty, mortal sin like adultery
described in gorgeous language,
words that lit up the confessional
like a flashlight in a closet:
a silk cuff missing its button,
sheer stockings coiled on the floor,
shoes with heels like wineglass stems--
the hypnotic black-and-white images of film noir,
wherein all eyes followed a bad star
with uncontrollable longing. 

End of poem. 

Maybe we aren't so different as the varied apparatus of our one catholic faith might seem. I could be a Catholic. In truth, I suppose, I am. 

Silas Soule and moral courage

As much an adventurer as anyone else from out east, Silas Soule went west when what was back home just wouldn't cut it anymore, not when what he knew was, out there, challenged spirit and truth. His father was an abolitionist, and not just in name. Amassa Soule grabbed his family and headed west when the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) ruled popular sovereignty, the popular vote, would determine whether Kansas would be admitted to the Union as slave or free.

Like other members of the anti-slavery Emigrant Aid Society, Amassa Soule didn't know what he was in for when he left Massachusetts. He assumed they'd arrived close to Kansas when they came to St. Louis, only to find, he said later, that the hardest passage was ahead, on the Missouri, "that river of mud, crooks and shoals." The Soules came to Kansas, the frontier, under the moral imperative to stuff the ballot box, so soul-deep was their hatred of slavery.

When Si Soule was just a kid--maybe 15 years old--he was leading runaway slaves up the Underground Railroad in midnight darkness in eastern Kansas. Blessed with an endearing personality, he shined up to a Missouri jailer and thereby helped spring an abolitionist doctor from a Missouri jail in one of the era's most famous and defiant acts of freedom. Si Soles' father was as doggedly religious as his friend John Brown. In fact, after the Harpers Ferry slave rebellion went down, son Silas worked hard at creating yet another jail break, a plot Brown himself ended because in the end, Soule was told, John Brown sought martyrdom. 

Somewhat disillusioned, Si Soles went farther west with a fervent case of gold fever, worked the mines for a year or so, then joined the Union Army out west and fought, hard, hand-to hand, at Glorietta Pass, New Mexico, part of Colorado's First Regiment, where his valor was noted by the preacher turned Union's field commander John Chivington. 

He was one of several officers in the command of Major Edward Wynkoop who brokered a peace deal with Broken Kettle and the other Cheyenne and Arapaho headman, and led to their coming into frontier Denver, where someone with a camera got this historic and wonderful shot. Once a deal had been determined, the Calvary escorted the Indians into town to ratify the peace. 

And this--the U. S. military and those chiefs at the historic peace conference. Si Soule, hat and pipeless, is front and center.

Chivington too wanted peace too, but he wanted to punish the Indians for the violence they'd perpetrated on the whites who'd homesteaded or were simply travelling through the west. Chivington was the boss. That's how it was Lieutenant Silas Soule came to Sand Creek on November 29, 1864. The night before, he'd made perfectly clear that he didn't intend to have anything to do with the slaughter, claimed anyone who did to be "a low-lived cowardly son-of-a-bitch."

And that's why Lieutenant Silas Soule told his troops not to fire on the Cheyenne village on Sand Creek, told them he'd shoot them if they went along with the carnage. Just about all of the rest of the Colorado cavalry butchered, literally, Native men, women, and children that day.

On the next, Soule wrote a letter to Major Wynkoop, telling him everything he'd seen. Inquiries were held both in Colorado and Washington, Soule was a major witness, despite death threats. 

When he came back to Colorado, he became a town marshal. Just two weeks after getting marryied, he was gunned down in the streets. Back then--and even today--people can't help but believe that the gunslinger responsible for Silas Soule's death was one of Col. John Chivington's many, many supporters. Silas Soule's own moral courage, it seems, didn't create many friends. 

He died at just 26 years old.

He's not disappeared from history. You can google him--I did. You can read his biography, and Sand Creek and Chivington will most certainly turn up in any recitation of the long and painful history of the Plains Indians. They didn't forget.

Didn't take long, and we did. 

But someone asked about heroes. To me and many others, Silas Soule should be on the list.

Morning Thanks--even those that are no more

It's gone now--an old farm house I stumbled across one Saturday morning. Abandoned farm places disappear quickly in Sioux County, where good, wooden shoe capitalists know the land is far too valuable to dedicate to memories. You don’t need to go too far west or east to find many more of them scattered around a section, monuments some farm folks can't push themselves to bulldoze. There's something eerie about 'em, something, well, abandoned. 

They speak a language of another time, a time when there were more here, when farms were smaller and families were bigger. When children's voices carried endlessly across the treeless prairie,, when everything people did out here cost more time and sweat and perseverence. It was no golden age. Never has been. 

This house had a mousetrap on the back door frame--probably a homemade "leave a message" sort of thing. I have no idea why the silly mousetrap grabbed my attention the way it did, or why it sticks with me somehow, begging a revelation or a moral to the story. There's no deeply embedded truth in some long-gone farmer's nailing a mousetrap to the doorframe of the back door. 

There it is. Maybe it speaks of a neighborliness long departed. After all, today the place has no neighbors. For that matter, it’s no longer a place. Today, it's beans. Six months from now, it'll be bare naked, maybe a bit of snow. Today, there on the door there is no mousetrap. There is no door.
  
It's all gone--house and barn, out buildings, trees and weeds and mousetrap. 
  
Sic transit gloria mundi? Ah, that's pushing it.  Probably never was any glory there. And after all, what I'm talking about is nothing more than a repurposed mousetrap. 

Still, once upon a time someone made a life here. Once there were children. Once there were cows probably--and pigs. Once chickens ran helter-skelter across the lawn and cats slept like a ball of fur in a sun spot on a tractor seat. 

I'll never know who, and few will because it's all gone, even the barn and the barbed wire. See that mousetrap. It ain't. No more messages.

I'm always thankful for mysteries, even the little ones that, like a repurposed mousetrap, hold you fast when they are no more. 

Memorial Day

It's in poor repair, the government says, which is not surprising, given its age. It was built in 1907 just outside Hot Springs, SD, for the specific purpose of treating our veterans, many of whom, back then, could sit around a coffee table and spin yarns of Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Lookout Mountain.

I drove in early one summer morning several years ago, in awe at the massive, ornate architecture, so unlike anything built today. I didn't know the place was there, but just up from the old hospital is a national cemetery home to what remains of hundreds of vets who died here after years of residence at this storied old hospital. 

I've been in national cemeteries before, a World War II military graveyard in Belgium where acres and acres of perfectly manicured lawns create an emerald carpet for  thousands of white stones marching in hushed silence all around. The graveyard at the Battle Mountain Veterans Hospital is nowhere near as immense, but just as thoroughly stunning. 

I've been to  Gettysburg, to Vicksburg,  Lookout Mountain, twice to Chickamauga. Battlefield parks are moving, but one warm summer morning in August, alone in the hilly cemetery behind old Battle Mountain Hospital, just me and a couple hundred Civil War dead, was a moment I'd never forgotten--no artillery, no statues with swashbuckling officers wielding swords, no towering monuments. 

Just small graves in perfect order whose faces wouldn't let me forget that an entire regiment was just as certainly here too, men who'd long ago seen death first hand in fields all over the South, then, years later, had come here to die too, often alone. 

I'd gone out early to shoot some pictures of the buffalo herd at Wind Cave National Park, just up the road. I was lucky, caught them when they were all around me. I'd done well. It was still early, so on my way back to the motel, I stopped at a veterans hospital I hadn't even known was there, found the cemetery out back, the dead in rows up and down the hills. 

This Memorial Day that memory was in me when I got up, the cemetery at Battle Mountain, the men who died there, not on the battlefield at all, except the one many of them, if not all of them had likely never left. 

That's what I was thinking about this Memorial Day morning and that's my morning thanks.

Reading Mother Teresa--Guilt

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart 

and with all your soul and with all your mind 

and with all your strength.” Mark 12:30 

The very first Dutchman I ever met – I mean, someone from the Netherlands – told me that my people, Dutch Calvinist Americans, were the kind of uptight people Holland “got rid of,” the kind, he said, who couldn’t ride bikes on Sunday.

I couldn’t ride my bike on Sunday.

My people were Sabbatarians, big-time Sabbatarians, a word my spell checker doesn’t recognize. What I mean is, I had a list as long as my arm of things I couldn’t do on the Sunday. We were orthodox Jews in wooden shoes, although we nailed down the first day of the week, not the last.

I don’t regret my religious childhood. It may well have been, well, strenuously spiritual, but that’s okay. Besides, most people my age – Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Church of Christ – had their own firmly established principles of right and wrong, a code, often only vaguely understood, by which they, as believers, defined themselves.

Many reasons exist to explain why my people were strict on Sunday (my mother-in-law couldn’t use a scissors), and piety was one of them; but another, I think, was identity. Maintaining Sabbath purity separated us even from other Christians and allowed a good heavy dose of assurance about who we were in a polyglot society where you couldn’t count on your neighbor having a pocket full of peppermints.

Codes sustain identity – I know something of who you are if I understand how you spend your Sundays. But to know thyself, as honorable as that is (saith Socrates), also implies knowing who isn’t you – and knowing (tsk, tsk) what isn’t, well, proper. If I know what the word impropriety means, it suggests I know guilt.

Guilt, Garrison Keillor says, is the gift that goes on giving, and I’m as much an unhappy recipient as anyone. Up until July, I was the only member of my family who went to two Sunday services, even though we were all raised that way. I’ve now decided enough is enough. Sound impressive? – come six o’clock Sunday night, I’ll be hiding somewhere, not from others, but from my own thorny guilt.

More confession: I feel guilty when I read what Mother Teresa told the Archbishop in a letter begging him to allow her to create the mission that Christ himself, she claimed, had commanded her to do. “I have been longing to be all for Jesus and to make other souls – especially Indian, come and love Him fervently,” she wrote, “– to identify myself with Indian girls completely, and so love Him as He has never been loved before” (47, emphasis mine).

Striking, I think – really striking: “So love Him as He has never been loved before.” I find that a gargantuan mission. If I honestly didn’t believe her a saint, I’d think it was posturing, wouldn’t you? Rhetoric. Talk, talk, talk. How can anyone really believe that he or she will gain a level of love for Jesus that no one – NO ONE! – in the history of mankind has ever reached?

I don’t envy her. I don’t think I’d ever, ever say anything like that, and yet I believe that in life and in death, in body and soul, I belong to Jesus. Okay, I feel a species of guilt scratching at my throat when I read that line because it’s something I’d never ever considered – that my love for Jesus might possibly be greater than anyone else’s. I’ve never aspired to become the Champion of the World in love for Christ.

But she thought so, and, I believe, she thought so purely.

Here and there MT’s writings suggest what she was made of and how what she was made of nurtured her into what she became. Right here is one such moment. The pledge she sets for herself is way beyond reason: to “so love Him as He has never been loved before.”

Yet, I don’t doubt her. Okay, I doubt myself most every day, but I don’t doubt her.

Amazing.

Inkpaduta

For most of the 19th century, at least the second half, Inkpaduta was Siouxland's most famous, most notorious, most hated, most feared citizen, even though he'd likely left the region long before. He was headman of a band of Santee Sioux called the Wahpakutes (Waa-pa-koot’-ee), a ragtag bunch who lived--who hunted and trapped--along the Little Sioux River, just east and south of here in O'Brien and Woodbury Counties.

How bad was this bunch? Opinions vary. Before the massacre at Spirit Lake, they were at least well-known. Whether they were feared is a good question, still disputed among those who know the story. What we do know is that they were here when the very first white pioneers spearheaded western migration, many of them (although few in number) around what we know today as the Iowa Great Lakes. They watched, warily, as illegal aliens came in and stayed, like some foreign pestilence.

It must have been an incredibly difficult time for those persistent pioneers, whose struggle to survive was mammoth. They'd come in 1856, too late to plant and gather any crops for a winter that, when historians describe it, sounds unlike any winter I can remember in my forty years here. Three feet of snow covered even the flatland, drifts big as boxcars filled in whatever spaces the wind cared to choke. By March, just enough warm temps created a snow crust so hard it could hold up an ox, except when it didn't, which made travel impossible.

Inkpaduta and his band were old-time Iowans, more accustomed to endless blizzards, more capable of a way of life in the wilderness. But their hunger that winter was just as real as that of the newcomers. Hunting was difficult, if not impossible, so the Wahpakutes would stop at homesteads and ask for food. There were many more of them than there were of white folks since immigration had only just begun.

In a reign of blood-letting that ran for four days, Inkpaduta and his warriors slaughtered the white folks--men, women, and children--slaughtered them like animals. Abbie Gardner, a 13-year-old girl watched them kill every last one of her family members before taking her hostage. Much later in her life, she wrote a memoir and described herself at that moment:

After ransacking the house, and taking whatever they thought might be serviceable, such as provisions, bedding, arms and ammunition; and after the bloody scalping knife had done its terrible work; I was dragged from the never-to-be-forgotten scene. No language can ever suggest, much less adequately portray, my feelings as I passed that door.

Why? As I said, opinions vary. Retaliation for the similarly viscous slaughter of one of their tribe sometime earlier? Hunger? Hatred for treaty obligations others had signed? Was violence simply a way of life for them, institutionalized? Was what happened there on the shores of the lake what would have happened if the white folks had been Ojibwe too, their enemies?

Worse, perhaps, was that horror simply whimsical? Did they kill for blood sport? Were Inkpaduta and his band simply unsullied evil?

A dozen reasons have been forwarded, but none of them bring any relief--then or now--to the anxious acceptance of that significant question--why?

Paul N. Beck's Inkpaduta (2008) doesn't really try to mount a defense. What it does attempt is to handle the reputation of Inkpaduta in a way that contextualizes him, his people, and his time, not as if to exonerate him from blood guilt, but to explain him, his personal history, and the roles he played throughout the Great Sioux Wars which were to follow.

Inkpaduta became legendary--that's a cliche, but that it is doesn't mean the characterization is wrong. Inkpaduta became far, far bigger than life for white people who invested in him all the terror First Nations people could incite with their naked midnight dances, their shrieking, their drums and singing--and their drinking.

No white man ever punished Inkpaduta for what he did. His legend not only didn't die, it grew exponentially, both as the epitome of horror for pioneering families throughout the upper Midwest, and the epitome of devoted resistance to those Native people whose lives were altered beyond anything they could have imagined when hoards of whites moved in. It wasn't just their freedom that was lost, they lost everything in the torrential flood of western movement, America's insistent Manifest Destiny.

To the white man, the name Inkpaduta struck fear; he was incarnate evil. To the red man, he was the spirited embodiment of the ancestors staying alive.

For years, people have believed that Inkpaduta was at Little Big Horn. For years, many believed that he was the one who himself finally did in Custer himself. Was he? Yes, mythologically for sure. He was there for both sides--the killer and the redeemer.

Beck's biography makes a game attempt to beg a second look at a mean and bloody killer. He tries, hard. Am I convinced? Not really.

What he does establish that in the character of a single Santee headman, just about every soul in the territory invested either their greatest fears or their most-beloved hopes.

We all have our Inkpadutas, I suppose.

Oirgins: Morning Thanks: Looking for Beauty iii

Our neighbor died in her nineties. None of her kids lived close by, so after the funeral there was a general purge of the house she and her husband (who died a dozen years earlier) lived in for most of fifty years. She was not a hoarder, not by any stretch of the imagination, but for those who don't know, the truth of the matter is that our affluence as a society and a people means we accumulate a lot of "stuff" in our lifetimes, as did she. 

So one summer morning, I sat downstairs in our basement with the window open, a beautiful summer day, and listened all morning long as her children together marched in and out of their mother's house with their arms full of "stuff," then tossed it, armful after armful, into a garbage bin the locals set up for them right behind the back door. I heard the percussion of all of that. I didn't watch, but I heard every crash, and couldn't help think of my own children doing the same thing, should I outlive my wife and not have to leave home for the Home. 

I'm 72 years old, and, by late afternoon today, my body will speak to me quite audibly if I've done anything in the acre out back. I had a little stroke eight years ago now, and I've always had a chaotic heart, something I've learned to live with and take some kind of medicine to monitor. What I mean is, I won't live forever. Reading obits these days make it clear I'm somewhere close to my fourscore and ten. Even if I tried, I couldn't avoid "counting my days" as Moses's sole contribution to the book of Psalms enjoins us. 

So what happens not when but if the ticker runs out? Could happen. What happens if another stroke lays me out, vegetable-like. I'd like to think I'm not in the least afraid of dying or obsessed with death. I'd just as soon live on; I've got a new granddaughter I've only seen on-line, for pity sake. Yesterday, we were visited by four different colorful friends, including one we've never before seen outside our windows, a madcap lunatic American Redstart, a goofy little thing you'd swear spent too much time drinking cider. Nutty little thing. Some may think it small, but life still has incredible joys. 

But if suddenly I am gone, years of essays will be too. Some child or grandchild would have to sift through the hard drive, where they'd find so much writing they would inevitably despair, throw in the towel, and dump the old desktop. I don't blame them. Here he is again. Look at that tail!

What I'm saying, life is a great gift.

So I started to think that I really should go through the close to 5000 blog posts I'd written through the years and create a sort of greatest hits thing, then convert it to hard copy. I'd never, ever find a publisher for such a thing--I self-published my last novel; so I figured I'd do it myself. I'm retired, right? Got all kinds of time.

So I started, backwards, earliest posts, back when we lived in our old house--another town, another time, another place, a time when, once a week at least, I'd say something about teaching. Soon enough it became clear that those 5000 greatest hits (I tossed hundreds, by the way) wouldn't fit between the covers of a single volume. 

I started dumping individual posts into different files, labeling them almost by genre: 1) memoir--posts that talk about my heritage, grandparents, parents, even my own life; 2) faith and religion--it's stunning how often what I wrote about was "matters of faith"; 3) Native America--my foray into understanding what I could about Native culture and history began with the Ghost Dance, something Ian Frazier calls "the first American religion"; 4) photography, thousands of pictures; 5) a gratitude journal; 6) reading--lots of books and poems and no particular theme; 7) teaching--not many in the last seven years, but oodles of them before that; and 8) Small Wonders--vignettes from local history for radio station KWIT in Sioux City.

It's a painstaking process, and I'm still five years from being finished with the sorting, so I thought I'd try to break tedium a bit and design a book--why not the photography thing? Often, people have said I really should make a book, so I took a shot at it. 

What these last three days of blog posts have been aiming at is that particular book: Morning Thanks--what I used to title the original gratitude journal and hundreds of posts since then--and, subtitled, Looking for Beauty, because that's what I've learned through a hundred trips with a camera (well, four or five different ones in all those years). 

Photography, Dad, is a calling, despite what you thought and said. For me at least, it was never a profession, and that's fine--we all need something we practice just because we come to love it. Yet today, on Saturday, I have to scold myself, Calvinist that I am, when I get too concerned with whether or not I'm doing things right and thereby missing the dawn. 

It a calling because there's real joy in chasing the dawn, just to be out there in the inspiration of yet another new day. That's a joy that fishermen, hunters, and trappers--I've been all of those--know darn well, its own blessed form of worship of the Almighty because out here at least, with a spacious sky for a pulpit, the heavens declare the glory of the Creator.

What you see here is that book--Morning Thanks: Looking for Beauty, a hundred pages of pictures and text gathered from a dozen years of blog posts. If the Lord of Heaven and Earth is pleased to give me a bunch more time, there will be more books. Morning Thanks: A Gratitude Journal is, in fact, in production. 

I'm retired. I'm keeping busy. If I could get control of the dandelions, the acre out back would be more welcoming. This morning I'll try once more to subdue 'em. I've got more projects here on a desk that really needs better organization. I'm not looking for things to do. And yesterday just outside my window, in addition to that American Redstart, an indigo bunting showed up too, and a handsome pair of brown thrush, and more orioles than we've ever had. 

None of them will stay. Nothing does. That doesn't mean that what we see or experience isn't worth or time and attention, or praise and thanksgiving. It's a calling, Dad. Life is. You know that.

If you'd like to see a copy of this first one, just ask. Arrangements can be made. :). Just let me know. 

Origins--Morning Thanks: Looking for Beauty ii

After a year of daily thanks in my own way, I wanted an outlet. At a writers conference years ago, I heard Annie Dillard sat that writers could never write too much. I can't begin to remember the quote exactly, but what I remember her saying is that we have inexhaustible material: there's no end to the imagination. For that reason, she said--or something to this effect--we should write and write and write and write. 

I don't remember her talking about how much should be published, but that bit of advice stuck, not because I thought it a strategy as much as, again, a kind of discipline. I was, at that time, going back to being a full-time classroom teacher, not three-quarters as I'd been for a few years, which meant, for me, less time to write. I've known since I was a first-year high school teacher that squeezing out time to write was tough when you're employed full-time in a classroom. I'd done it for decades, but it was tough. Once again going into the classroom full time meant I was scared of doing nothing creative, which would be hard.

When blogging started as a "thing," I don't know, but in 2007, one year of gratitude journaling under my belt, I decided that if I'd stay at it, at writing, blogging might be the thing, whatever blogging was or is. The thanksgiving diary forced me to look around every day, to let my mind wander as I sat in the chair in front of the computer screen at whatever, at "stuff in the basement" where I was sitting. Fine. Whatever. Give it a title "Stuff in the Basement." 

I've never really felt as if I was going off anybody's deep end, but I'd just invested in my first good digital camera at the time, and I've always loved photography--I don't know why, just have. When I was in high school my dad pooh-poohed a career with a camera--"that's not a real calling, is it?" he said or something to that effect. He was still holding out for his son to become the preacher his own father had been. Or a teacher. Which would be fine too. 

I had no idea how photographers made a living, if they did at all, so I listened to my dad and went to school to be a teacher, a real "calling." I have no regrets about that, but what's also true is that I never lost my love for the camera. In 1976, when the Arizona Schaap family (dad, mom, daughter) moved to Iowa, I bought a camera, an expensive Vivitar SLR. 

But, years later, digital photography changed everything, making razor-sharp photographs a snap. Digital cameras got cheap fast, long before your smart phone included a heady camera and onesies became all the rage. 

I'd grown up in Wisconsin, then moved to Iowa for college, northwest Iowa, an almost treeless universe, save for swarms that had grown up around a thousand homesteads. What I knew about what had become my own neighborhoood is that it was not a photographer's paradise. Taking beautiful pictures of the Grand Canyon requires nothing more than pulling a trigger.  Taking beautiful pictures of Siouxland was a challenge I told myself I'd have to learn to do.

So I started practicing, going out on Saturday mornings, when the family was still asleep, just to look for beauty. Besides, going out was its own kind of pilgrimage, good for my mental health, another discipline really, good for the soul. Once a month maybe, I tried to take beautiful pictures of what it didn't take long to identify as gorgeous moments. I did a ton of wandering close by home, because I'd try to be back in the house by the time the family got out of bed. 

These new digital pictures transferred to the screen in radiant beauty, and I learned quickly that a blog was a good place for a show. So started a practice that continued for years--"Saturday Morning Catch" was the title for hundreds of pics I posted on Sunday, often combining them as software programs used to deliver. I'd put up the best shots. Soon I got the sense that people enjoyed them. 

Throughout any given years--2008 to the present--I'd put up pictures from a shoot, thinking of the exercise as if I were fishing. Sometimes the stringer got full; sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes the best one looked something like this--kind of cool and campy, but highly tampered with ("filtered"). 

But losing only ginned up my desire to win. Soon enough, I learned to read the dawn before it arrived. On clear morning, the sun would burn everything up and getting any contrast in a shot wasn't easy for an amateur. Some cloud cover was a blessing because clouds were the sun's canvas. 

So, on good mornings, I knew opportunities were rich. What I needed was foreground. Shooting pictures became something akin to hunting. I'd fly up and down gravel roads looking for abandoned barns like that one or lonely prairie trees--there are hundreds. I started coming home with shots I started to think weren't bad. They never matched the heavenly glory I'd experienced, but part of the whole was there.

Here's McNally, Iowa, at dawn, August 26, 2009. Shots like this didn't come easily to someone untrained. I had to learn how to get them, even when what I saw before me was so stunning. For the first time in my life I really got to thinking what King David meant when he said "the heavens declare the glory of God." Taking even a bit of that home was, I learned quickly enough, totally impossible; but that didn't mean I couldn't try. 

Same area, mid-winter 2010, no sun, winter. I'd begun to see that the arrangement of elements on the shot could generate its own kind of awe. No color here to speak of, the trees on the acreage behind seemingly victimized by a fire. Yet, there's beauty here.

I was learning some things about composition. 

And now, mid-year, 2020, I have thousands of pictures of the world as I see it in rural Siouxland, endless landscapes in a region not many photographers would say holds much promise for a camera. I like to think they're wrong. Combine composition with sunrise and something quite nice shows up on the screen. Always better there, but what the camera saw isn't half bad. 

I have the Artist to thank.

_________________________________ 

Tomorrow--All good things must end, even things not so darn good.

Origins: Morning Thanks: Looking for Beauty

Here's the story of the Morning Thanks: Looking for Beauty, a book that's just now out. In fact, it's not "just out," because the books are still on the way.

It's almost embarrassing to admit, but I've been at this blogging thing since 2006--that's 14 years. 

It started with a journal I kept, not a blog. I'd read an interview with Garrison Keillor in Christian Century, an interview in which Mr. Keillor had said that he thought the whole world would be a much better place if everyone determined to give thanks every day for something, just to stop whatever they were doing to give thanks. If we'd make it a practice, he said, all of us, we'd all be better off. (That quote still is up at the top of the page, where it's been for all these years.)

What Keillor said just struck me right, so I thought I'd try it myself--a whole year of giving thanks, a kind of spiritual discipline. And I did. I sat down in the basement, early in the morning, all year long, and tried to give thanks for something. 

What came out of it 365 days later was a huge collection of these:

I'd try my best to come up with something fresh every day. Sounds easy if you're a believer, but it's not actually. I'd write something out, take off for the gym, then, still sweaty, edit and finally put a picture on it. Once a day--early morning, my own brand of piety.

Whether or not Keillor is right is a good question I can't answer for the world. I do know that trying, every day, to be thankful for something specific, even when there's a whole world around you, is not an easy to thing to do hundreds of days in the row. Took some doing, as they say; but I never really wearied. 

What I've learned, only when I quit however, is that doing a gratitude journal put me in mind of thanksgiving far more fully than I would have been had I not committed it to being a discipline. And that was good thing.

I was already taking pictures--all three of the above are mine.

That little gratitude journal turned into something else, and that's where and when the blog began.
__________________________

Tomorrow: "Stuff in the Basement" develops

Dakota Eclipse

It happened. I'm not making this up. 

We don't know his name. Doesn't matter really because we're talking about something of a staged event that happened 150 years ago on the western banks of the Missouri River, in what is today south-central South Dakota. Tomfoolery really. Some might call it abuse, but the good doctor's goofing around had a point. 

Okay, okay--I'm not being sensitive, but it seemed like a great trick, a kind of heavenly practical joke. He was trying to convince the "loafers," the Brule Sioux who pitched their tipis right there around the agency, that his medicine, which is to say "white man's medicine," was vastly superior to anything of theirs. 

The doctor had an almanac. It was that easy. He knew what was coming, read about it when he was paging through, how the moon would pass directly into sun's perfect brightness and create the eerie darkness eclipses always do. And he knew when. Exactly when.

So the good doctor told the loafers he knew something very, very strange was going to happen right before their eyes. He got them together in preparation for this scary show, lined them up with appropriate smoky glass, and waited.

They would be in awe of his cosmic powers, he told himself. Thereafter he'd rise in their estimation, as would his medical expertise. He was the Whetstone Agency doctor, and his job wasn't easy because convincing people his weird methods were to be believed was no picnic. 

So he put on a show. He'd act as if he were a captain of the universe, responsible for a heavenly event that would leave them speechless. He'd take advantage of their naivete--for good ends, mind  you, to convince them to forsake traditional healers by becoming something of a witch doctor himself. Simple.

And it worked. Sort of. 

The assembly who gathered to witness the event fell perfectly silent. The wide open prairie skies afforded an spectacular amphitheater. There they all sat in stunned silence as gradually, mid-day, the afternoon fell into ghoulish shadows. They looked at their hands, their feet, each other, and knew very well it was beyond creepy; and the white man, the medicine man, had somehow done it.

But then, the animals. They knew something was befuddled. The horses shied, the dogs wouldn't stop whining, even the donkeys wailed. It was weird. It was scary. It was dangerous. So right there at the agency, in the grip of the darkness, fought back with the only arms they had or knew. They raised their rifles to the sky and unloaded in a fusillade meant to ward off some wretched evil spirit and a catastrophe they believed was either happening or certain to come. 

What's more, they did it at exactly the right moment, when the moon began to move off the face of the sun so that, to them, their gunfire put a righteous end to whatever sick darkness the white man's witch doctor had conjured. They'd done it with their hands, their rifles. Their gunfire ended the menacing spell of whatever evil spirit had threatened them. They'd done it, so when they rode away, they did so as warriors, proud, more sure of their own power. 

The good doctor's great show had failed. He'd simply have to show his powers in the old fashioned ways.

Here's the story: two cultures collide in a monumental, staged event, and neither of them change one iota. 

Sort of like politics.

Reading Mother Teresa--Thirsty

“I am thirsty.” John 19:28

Sometimes people here in the upper Midwest claim we’re blessed with only two seasons: winter and Fourth of July. The line works, I think, for two reasons: one, winters can be brutal; and two, so can Fourth of July.

When we moved to Iowa from Arizona, we didn’t expect to be clobbered by heat, but we were. The house we rented was not air-conditioned, and, that first July, we nearly died – that’s overstatement. What we’d left was higher temps, but what we’d re-discovered was humidity.

Right about now, mid-summer, nothing dispatches thirst like lemonade. Pink, white, raspberry – no matter. It’s a reminder of a boyhood bucking bales when icy canning jars full of the stuff were the only antidote to heat stroke. That’s overstatement too.

We just finished a sojourn in New Mexico, where we hiked over murky lava flows and through elegant sandstone at elevations that sucked your body dry. Always pack water. Drink it. Parks and trails at 7000 feet don’t pussyfoot; their signs use the command form. Water is life. I drank buckets.

I’ve spent most of my adult life believing that if we underplay anything at all about Jesus Christ it’s his human side. The great mystery of his existence is that he was, at once, both God and man. Impossible, yet there he is, both. Where we underestimate him, I’ve often thought, is in his humanity. We like him as Lord and Savior, but he could be almost unfeeling at times – witness his seeming disregard for his own mother when he started out on his own in the temple. If you want to follow me, he told his disciples, forget Mom and Dad – actions he modeled himself.

He was human. Jesus Christ was human, too, not just Lord and Maker and King and Redeemer. He pulled human flesh as if it were spandex, for Pete’s sake – and mine.

Therefore, “I am thirsty” is an utterance I’ve often considered to be a clear indication of his humanity. The physical agony of the cross, far beyond my imagination, prompted very human needs – he got thirsty, horrifically so. He was human. Be careful, I might have said – and still would – about over-spiritualizing him.

Then there’s Mother Teresa, whose very ministry was created – by her own account – by her immense interpretive vision of that very Good Friday utterance – “I thirst” (41).

Why does Jesus say “I thirst”? What does it mean? Something so hard to explain in words – . . . “I thirst” is something much deeper than just Jesus saying “I love you.” Until you know, deep inside that Jesus thirsts for you – you can’t begin to know who He wants to be for you. Or who He wants you to be for Him. (42)

That’s what MT believed.

Jesus Christ was Mother Teresa’s sole motivational speaker, and his words, especially those uttered in his agony, were her rallying cry. She transformed his thirst into a metaphor and spent her life working to quench the emptiness he felt at Calvary, an emptiness satisfied only by the poor – their love and their souls. His thirst for them became her soul’s motivation.

She saw Jesus dehydrated, wearied, nearly dead; and she sought to bring him relief on the streets of Calcutta by satisfying his thirst for those poor he loved so greatly.

It may well be I’ve been wrong for all these years. Perhaps in stressing his humanity, I’ve neglected his divinity. Perhaps in taking him literally, I’ve not seen him spiritually, up there on the cross at Golgotha, body and soul dehydrated, his heart overworking to pump his dehydrated blood because he wants, more than anything, not just water but, as MT might say it, those he loves, his people, splashing over him, gushing with love.

That’s the way she read it, and that’s the way she lived in Calcutta.

Something to consider, even in our muggiest July.

Book Report: Among the Sioux of Dakota

Odd. When I read a passage about a man named D. C. Poole, I thought him interesting enough to look him up in the book's index. So I did. Found him and the title of the memoir he wrote back in the late 19th century after having spent some time (very little, actually) at the helm of a reservation agency on the Missouri in southeast South Dakota. 

What I knew was that the planned Whetstone Agency was just across the river from an area eventually settled by Dutch people, immigrant Dutch-Americans, including my own great-grandparents way back in the late years of that century. Also, I knew the government really wanted Spotted Tail, a powerful and charismatic Brule Sioux headman, to locate the Brule reservation there after the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty, at the eastern edge of the Great Sioux Reservation.

Maybe fifteen years ago, I was fascinated by Spotted Tail because he took a position in regard to the legions of white people moving into land where they'd wandered freely. Struck by the Ree, a Yankton, threw in the towel on fighting the white man; Crazy Horse, an Ogalala, like the Santee Inkpaduta (Spirit Lake Massacre) and the Hunkpapa Sitting Bull, never did. 

Spotted Tail, never stopped fighting in other ways that all-out war, like refusing the government's directive for him and his people to live on the west side of the Missouri River at the Whetstone Agency. Fifteen years ago, I read D. C. Poole's Among the Sioux of South Dakota to find out more about this Spotted Tail, a man so highly revered by the Brule Sioux on the Rosebud Reservation that they named their college after him. Spotted Tail (Sinte Geleska) is real Hall-of-Fame material. 

Spotted Tail wanted nothing to do with Whetstone Agency because it was too blame close to white people--just across the river, in fact, far too close to chiseling whites who peddled booze to Indians, lots of it, and made good but dirty bucks in the process. In fine Lakota tradition, Spotted Tail was a great chief because he cared about his people. I found his story fascinating, still do. There's more, lots more.

So I found this man named Poole in the book's index, found his book in the bibliography, looked it up on Amazon--I have a thing for old books I can get used and cheap--and, lo and behold, recognized the cover, even though I hadn't recognized the title. I had the book. 

The hunt began. Took me a while--I don't, to say the least, have the patience for order a good librarian must. But, sure enough, there it was. I pulled it out, flipped through its pages--it's neither big nor long--and found all kinds of notes I'd scribbled in the margins--and forgotten. Not before in my life had I ever read the same book twice, the second time not remembering the first. 

In my own defense, I had different motivations. A decade ago, it was Spotted Tail; this time it was Poole himself, the man who'd written the memoir, the man's whose very short experience on the reservation was very much at the heart of things. Last time I looked for Spotted Tail; this time I listened to D. C. Poole.

And I liked him--that's the bottom line here. I'm prejudice, of course: Poole was Dutch, no relation to my great-grandparents of any of their ilk, but American Dutch (or Dutch-American), born and reared among the Dutch in New York, who, by 1870 or so, had already been on the continent for a couple of centuries. 

But Poole as writer is interesting. He's smart, clearly fascinated with what he'd learned, and a fan of irony, which makes reading him a delight. This unorganized library behind me includes a hundred volumes of Western American history, most of it about Native America. Trust me, thoughtful skeptics are hard to come by. Does Poole hold enlightened 21st century attitudes toward First Nations? No. He's as much a product of his time as I am. Does he recognize injustice? Yes, even if he's the appointed judge of such things. Does he respect Native people? More than many of his contemporaries. 

And, as a writer, he has an eye for telling detail. When the government reparations (the goods--food and clothing and farm implements) arrive at Whetstone, they include white man's clothing, wool pants, among other things. The Brule thought trousers quite novel, but proceeded to cut off the legs and pull them up on their own, tossing the rest of the pants in the trash. He has an eye for telling detail. 

Like so many other Native people, Spotted Tail and some of his lesser headman, are sent off to Washington to meet the Great Father, President Grant. The description is delightful. Poole remembers the fascinating detail of things said and done that reveal the immense gulf between cultures for the first time brought into confluence with each other. One of the Brule reflected on a visit to the President by saying that he'd be more than happy to make a new life by farming if he could live in a big White House like that one. 

You have to want to read such stuff, I suppose. I can't help but think that it's silly to recommend a book that was likely read, last week, by no one else in the world. Furthermore, it helps greatly to know more about the time and the people and the history of what never materialized at the Whetstone Agency because Spotted Tail simply refused to listen to the government and never took his people to live on the west side of the Missouri. Never did. 

In his own way, Spotted Tail was a Crazy Horse, just never "hostile" about it. D. C. Poole's experience with him and with his people is a delight to read, even twice.