Reading Mother Teresa -- Pride

Pride brings a person low, 

but the lowly in spirit gain honor. 

Proverbs 29:23

A famous 16th century woodcut by Pieter Brueghel, one of a series based on the Seven Deadly Sins, features mirrors, lots of them, because the moral of story is all about pride. Ours. 

Human pride is often considered the first of what are traditionally called “the Seven Deadlies.” Up front in the old Brueghel print is a woman admiring her reflection while simultaneously clutching something resembling a knife in her other hand. There is a monster in the center foreground who is so taken with himself that he admires even his nether parts. Yet another appallingly grotesque monster – human face, claw-like arms, and extended wings like a cicada-killing wasp – licks his chops delectably at his own image, offered to him by a strange nun-like woman who is gesturing magnanimously, her robe barely covering a reptilian tail.

There’s more to the woodcut – believe me. 

But then, I suppose, there’s no end to the extent of human pride in all of us, pride that bowled over Eve first, then Adam, both of whom wanted more, despite the heavenly garden.

The English language has a thousand synonyms for pride, it seems. Lordly – see it? Or even more exotic, baronial. To be proud is to be high-minded, high-mettled, high-handed, high-plumed, high-flown, or high-toned. There’s arrogance, audacity, aloofness – and we say of some overbearing prigs that they’re “putting on airs.” What we feel when we’re around them is contempt, disdain in the sheer insolence of their pomposity. Lots and lots of words.

I’ve said enough. The fact is, pride belongs not to them, to others, but to us, to all of us. The human condition, life after the fall, makes the cardinal rule of the Christian life – to love others more than we love ourselves – nigh unto impossible.

When her immediate superiors, one after another, gave Mother Teresa permission to leave the convent and follow Jesus’ own voice in the slums of Calcutta, she was left with one more petition – to the Holy See. This is how she wrote Y.E. (Your Eminence):

In all sincerity I admit that I possess no virtue and have no merit; it is a mystery to me how the Good God wants this from poor me. All these years of my religious life, I have been quite happy as a member of the Institute of the Bl. V.M. [Blessed Virgin Mary] and the thought of leaving it breaks my heart. Why Almighty God calls me now to this new life I do not know, but I want to do only His Holy Will without any reserve, whatever the cost be. (116)

I admit it. I find such abject humility hard to believe. We are – all of us – such bloody victims of pride that believing someone could actually expunge the most deeply-embedded sin of human mind and soul is almost beyond me.

But it’s worth noting that believing Mother Teresa’s selflessness was the required first step in the judgments made by each one of her superiors, from her mentor to the Holy See. They had to believe that there was no ego in her vision, no pride in the peculiar mission she was convinced she had been directed to by the very voice of Jesus.

And, not without some lingering doubts, not without some hesitation, they did believe her.

Along with her letter to the Holy See was a cover letter from the archbishop, who wrote a kind of recommendation for her and her unique petition. Among other things, he wrote, “I believe her to be,” he said, “very mortified and very generous” (117).

Mortified – isn’t that a ridiculous word? It’s almost impossible for me to believe that anyone today would ever use that word to recommend someone else – “mortified.”

Here’s the rub. That descriptor, I’m sure, is probably exactly what the Holy See wanted to read. What’s more, if you believe your Bible, it’s what God wants – our mortification, the death of the old man of sin. Be ye mortified, the Bible might well say. Be ye mortified.

What He God wants is impossible, isn’t it? Humanly impossible, given our arrogance.

By grace alone.

A little trip out west--viii

 

Listen, this is Believe It or Not stuff.

But first an old story you might have heard.

There's a guy, an old soldier maybe, some poor soul left behind on an otherwise deserted Pacific island (swap oceans if you'd like). Poor guy's been on his own for fifty years, sole occupant of this tiny island otherwise overlooked. 

One day finally, someone drops by, first visitor in all those years. The visitor is astounded at the city the old guy has built. He had nothing else to do for fifty years, I suppose, so he built himself an entire town.

"There's my post office," the old guy says, "and right there's my town hall. And right up the block here--see the steeple?--that's my church." Broad smile. Proud. 

Mr. First Visitor looks down the other direction, where he's spotted yet another steeple. He points, draws his eyebrows, shrugs his shoulders, as if confounded.

"Oh yeah," the old man says, "that's the church I used to go to."

Where two or three or gathered, someone's pretty likely to leave.

If you think I'm talking about your church, lighten up a bit. When first I heard that story, I heard it from Jewish folks talking "temple." I'm not kidding.

You're not likely to believe this Little Church. It's in a town so small the only gas station is Standard Oil, and that's gone too.

Keystone, Nebraska, is barely a village--but then it wasn't in 1908 either, when its newly settled citizens, blessed with an almost divine civil spirit, built The Little Church. Not mega, believe me, so small you can almost throw it in the back of the van and take it along home. Put a choir inside and there'd be no room for a congregation; you'd have to pipe in a preacher if you wanted a sermon. Some people, I'm sure, have bigger sheds. Five miles away beside the lake hundreds of travel trailers make this look like a water closet.

Seriously, The Little Church is nowhere near fifty feet, stem to stern, front to back--no, front to front. Yeah--"front to front." Here's the thing: this little church has done something for the ages by sweetly combining whole congregations--whole denominations--for the very first time since Luther's Reformation. Seriously. On one end there's an altar for the Catholics, who need to hold mass come the First Day of the week. 

Turn around, and on the other end of the sanctuary stands a pulpit for the Protestants, who need sermons more than wine and wafers. The Little Church is a spiritual switch-hitter. Okay, both sides meeting together could create a problem, but that won't likely occur 'till Kingdom Come. For this time being at least, The Little Church belongs to everyone.

Kevin Costner, years ago, became Iowa's favorite adopted son, when, in Field of Dreams, he said. . .well listen in for yourself.

Keystone, Nebraska, is close enough to Nebraska's big Lake Mac to pick up more vacationers these days than it has since The Little Church was built, but only the truly devoted townies would mistake Keystone for heaven. 

But it testifies to something beautiful anyway.  The Little Church stands in a broad field of green grass cleanly cut. No gravel anywhere because there's no need for a parking lot. It's just this darling little church, a block up from the blacktop that zooms in and out of town. The Little Church is a tiny place, but you can't miss it. 

And you shouldn't. It is its own kind of heavenly place, a shelter in the time of storm, a little palace of peace, a taste of heaven.

I'll admit to my sin. I too was skeptical. I too figured this little church too good to be true, so I left town in a scramble rather than tour Keystone, rather than look around. I didn't want to know if there was yet another church someplace around the town, the church people used to attend. 

I'm not saying there isn't, only that if there are two churches in Keystone, Nebraska, I don't want to know.

Visit Keystone sometime if you're anywhere near to Lake Mac. A visit to The Little Church--just to know it's there--will do your heart a blessing, just plain-old good for the soul. 

A little western tour--vii

 

Found it. 

Here 'tis--the rightfully proud stone of Lieut. G. P. Cather. Here lies a hero. 

His wife wanted his remains here, in the States, and here, where he grew up, the rugged plains of southern Nebraska, a cemetery near a burg named Bladen. Oddly enough, his mother wanted whatever was left of his mortal coil to stay in France, where he'd been buried soon after he fell, on May 28, 1918. Or so says the stone.

It's maybe the finest stone in his area of the cemetery and includes a bronzed portrait, as you can see.

Lieut. G. P. Cather

AUGUST 12, 1883

KILLED IN ACTION

AT THE BATTLE OF

CANTIGNY, FRANCE

MAY 28, 1918

CO.A 26 INFANT FIRST DIV

I came to see much more than a graveyard, but finding this Cather's stone was a major motivation for all the driving. I'd been reading Cather's 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel One of Ours because I never had read that book before; and because I knew it had been both highly prized and heavily scorned. I'm sure the list of Pulitzer winners contains some others that have turned out not to be yawners, but this novel--about the "war to end all wars" was scorned by many, Hemingway and a dozen other heavyweights, for being, well, too--how should I say it?--soft. 

What all agree on is that Willa Cather, G. P's first cousin, is the prototype for Claude Wheeler, the protagonist of One of Ours; and that Cather was gifted with a story because she found a harvest of material in a stack of correspondence G. P. kept up with his mom back in Bladen. 

Which is not to say One of Ours is creative non-fiction. It's a novel that carries a load of created by her own imagination. She's writing a World War I novel, having never spent a moment a mud trench. Before the war, she'd been to France, loved it immensely--and that love is in the novel; but the scenes of battle she created are drawn from her ample imagination.

That, of course, may be why Hemingway hated One of Ours. Having been in war himself, he grew impatient with people who tried their hand at painting a picture of war when they had no history. Knowing Hemingway, he may have despised it because the novelist was a woman. That's not at all out of the question. 

This man, Grosvenor Phillips Cather, wasn't so much a ne'er do well, as he was someone who her cousin Willa decided simply hadn't found himself. Like Wheeler's, G. P.'s marriage wasn't peachy, and he seemed somehow to lack the sense of duty to farm, not the strength or the ability. What he never felt, not until his death was a true sense of calling, the kind of selfless commitment to anything really. He was floundering, as was his marriage. He wasn't a kid when he died. You can do the math yourself, but he was 35 years old, commissioned as an officer when he went in.

What Willa does with Wheeler is give him cause. She granted him a blessed epiphany amid a sense of calling he felt down to his soul for the first moment in his life. The action that war provides, he believes, has given him something he'd never once experienced in his life, a sense of a vital community with his blood brothers out there in the life and death trenches.

Claude Wheeler is killed in action just a few minutes after looking at the horrors of war all around him and realizing that alongside the heroic fighting men in his unit, he'd become somebody, not because he'd been heroic but because he was part of a selfless bunch of stubborn boys who risked everything--and often lost it all--for each other. The war both killed him and made him a man.

We tend to think of the literature of World War I as bloody awful, its power created not by the heroism of its warriors but by the abundant absurdity of all that useless death. Think of John Dos Passos or Siegfried Sassoon. 

Willa Cather's story is about a different vet, one who discovered something rich and true about himself a moment before a bullet caught him.

Up there on that bronze portrait of the doughboy, just to the right of his cheek is the line "For his country." Of that, I'm not so sure. Claude Wheeler wasn't thinking of Old Glory painting the breeze over the fruited Nebraska prairie. His joy, his epiphany was in the unforeseen revelation that, at that moment, between life and death, he was likely never more selfless, more committed to those around him, the boys of war, boys become men.

I enjoyed Willa Cather's One of Ours, but as I stood there at G. P's grave, I couldn't help but love the story of her story even more. 

A little western tour--vi

 

Clearly, the Cathers made it on "the divide." This house, set back in the trees on a gravel road south of Bladen, NE, is a B and B today, if you're interested. And it should be. It was--and still is--a show house. Even if the builder's niece, a woman who won a Pulitzer Prize and unending literary glory, never lived here, this fine country estate is stunning for its region of rural Nebraska. 

There's a cemetery just down the road, a cemetery that could just as well be called "the Cather cemetery" and likely is, given the number of family members buried therein. 

Unfortunately, I hadn't read the tour's small print close enough to know that G. P. Cather, the fallen World War I hero--the mortal remains of the first officer from Nebraska to be killed in the "War to End All Wars," isn't here. Neither is Willa herself, who left Red Cloud, Nebraska, for good when she left for college, even if Red Cloud never really left her. She's buried out east--that I knew. But I thought G. P. would be here, so I got out of the car at a woebegone country graveyard I hadn't visited on previous trips, and I looked around a bit, picking up at least two ticks, one of whom found me intimately before I discovered him.

The Cather cemetery is not well kept--just sayin'. Somebody--I'm told there are still Cathers in the area--really should take a mower out there or let a dozen sheep loose. It's a kind of mess right now, but it's definitely a Cather cemetery.

Those whose mortal coils reside there include some descendants, at least one of which became a famous story-teller himself, a man, an artist responsible, at least in part for one of our long-ago favorite series, Hill Street Blues, a urban television drama set in an unknown city about as far away as could be from Cather Township.

Cather Township cemetery is not a particularly upbeat place (some cemeteries can be, by the way). It's downright unruly, given the particular interest is holds for people as silly about the past as I am. Then again, without two of its most famous family members, in whatever sheer fame Willa has received, the Cather Township cemetery earns little more, at best, than an asterisk.

I got back to the car, read the map a bit closer, and discovered that G. P. wasn't here but down the road in Bladen, a stop I didn't figure on but had to make. 

Didn't get far down the road either before discovering one of those blasted ticks.

A little western tour--v

 

It was always a particular joy to take students out to Red Cloud. Having read My Antonia, they were inexhaustibly teachable. As I've said before, I don't remember students not liking that novel; many loved it, in great part because Tony Shimerda, Cather's Antonia, was so lovable. 

As we'd come down south from Hastings, we'd enter Catherland, and I'd tell them that the prairie as they knew it in northwest Iowa was nothing like what they were going to see. In and around what she called "the divide," that land looked harsh any time of year really, although in late spring it might carry enough emerald to look promising. We'd go in the fall, when, after summer, the landscape was often as red as she describes--red and dry, very dry. 

What's more, just across the Republican River, in Kansas, there stands a plot of prairie whose unsheltered openness still makes anyone who takes a walk out there feel like a pioneer, a land that meets the eye like that grassy inland sea so many early residents claimed was so forever open that it prompted fear. This kind of breathtaking open prairie. 

The students got it too, once they'd arrived. They understood at least something of the homesteading experience when they'd walk out into the tawny nothingness and experience the something you can only really experience when you're in the middle of nothing. 

That expanse of Kansas prairie is still there across the river, but to me, nine years after being there, I couldn't help thinking that prairie like this, Great Plains prairie, had changed because everywhere you looked there was corn. Red Cloud's immediate environs looked all too similar to northwest Iowa.

Look at the corn on the left of the dirt road that leads to the original Cather homestead, the first place Willa lived when she moved to Nebraska from Virginia, the place she really never could forget. That corn, tall and straight, ip and down the hills--some of it somewhat drought-stricken, but most looking pretty sporty for mid-August. 

Here's the way the place looked in 2011, maybe two months closer to winter, mid-October. Not desolate. It's a hayfield, but if you look closely in the background there's something of a corn field too, not much of a crop really, but if you're planning on using what you've grown for silage anyway, right from the get go, earlessness isn't going to surprise you or push you into bankruptcy. 

But last week there was corn all over My Antonia's prairie and some of it seemed northwest- Iowa tall, which, I must admit, was sad, not because I wish Catherland farmers the worst, but because the landscape I found here years ago seemed so stunningly Great Plains-ish on those earlier trips. 

Everywhere you looked were irrigators, monstrous technological wonders that inch over the land and rush water from far beneath the earth, from the Ogallala Aquifer, an underground sea beneath this land that creates agricultural commodities that comprise more than one-sixth of the world's agricultural output. Irrigators--center point as well as the tubes lying at the edge of innumerable fields--have altered the landscape, or so it seemed. 

All the way west and north into Nebraska there was corn, much of it almost shockingly green, and turns the plains into something unimaginable a century ago, a circus of circles when you see it from a plane.

I was in a little Chevy, a rental, that undoubtedly had scant experience on the kind of dusty trails that surround the world of Willa Cather. I didn't fly, so I didn't see art work; all I saw was what seemed endless fields of corn. 

I shouldn't have, I suppose, but I couldn't help feeling a little sad: the world around "the divide" seems to have change significantly. Cather's descendants (I think there are still some out there), if they're still in farming, have to be thrilled with the new income--a hayfield doesn't pay like corn, especially with ethanol gushing forth from every local pump. 

What's more, the roadside weeds are monstrous now, closer to life-giving water. The fact is, I could barely see the land where once the Cather house stood. Buttonweed, ragweed, and sunflowers were ten feet tall.

That sign, a few shots back, wasn't immediately visible. I had to hunt for it. What's more there's a bridge out just down the road a bit, which meant that I had to back out, up and over two hills, maybe a half mile, to get back to gravel. 

This is my favorite shot of the homestead, how it's supposed to look. That pump, sometime long ago, may well have been set in the ground by Cathers. Willa herself, a little girl from Virginia, may well have pumped water right here. Maybe not too. Just let me hold on to my fantasy.

Because that's the way it's supposed to look like out there, the way it will forever look in my imagination. This is the land where Cather's family put down roots in Nebraska. Today, mostly, it's corn. Wherever you look, it's corn. 

Right now, that story is the story of the plains. Once upon a time the land all around the Republican River belonged to the buffalo. Then came Native tribes who did their hunting out here, migrating, families and all, from lands to the east and north and west. Then came the homesteads, people like the Cathers. Some of them, like Willa's own family, left rather quickly, more than a century ago, moved into town because life was somehow easier when you lived in a circle.

All things must pass, I guess. I'm not the first to say that, and, sure as anything, I won't be the last. 

I'd like to understand

Let me try to do this without rancor. I want to understand.

Yesterday, Sunday, after church, and with recommended social distancing, we talked to a new couple in church, an ex-student from too many years ago, a couple of British Columbia natives who have just moved here. Great guy, great people--Dordt University is blessed to have him on staff.

So we got to talking about Covid because these days avoiding it is impossible. When the conversation wandered there, they remarked how different they were finding life in the states, having just left suburban Vancouver for a village in rural Iowa.

They were surprised, they said, by how loose things seemed to be. We'd just come out of a worship service that rotates just a few of its church small groups each Sunday, so the half-empty sanctuary had entire rows roped off. After church, we were outside, because the church much preferred that people socialize in the open air. But in general, they said, things were very different south of the border.

One of them had come to the area alone in May, looking for housing. When she'd returned to BC, she'd gone into self-quarantine for 14 days, as per a schedule spelled out in no uncertain terms at the border, a schedule that included rigid specs she had to maintain. During those two weeks, authorities called twice to be sure she was home, and visited, unannounced, to further ascertain if she was abiding by the mandates.

We left church and drove to Office Max in Sioux Falls to pick up a computer I'd purchased, on-line, on Saturday. When we got to the city, it was time for lunch, so we stopped at Panera Bread--we like the food and I always go home with bagels.

Panera Bread is a national chain. They've created a national protocol for Covid, a protocol announced in detail on their website.

Requiring Masks in our Bakery-Cafes. Beginning Wednesday, July 15, Panera guests are asked to wear a mask inside our bakery-cafes nationwide. To ensure the safety of our associates and guests, masks are required at all times, except while seated and eating or drinking. If any customer does not have or want to wear a mask for any reason, we will happily serve them via Panera Curbside, Delivery or Drive-Thru.

At the Panera Bread in Sioux Falls, that masks were required was announced boldly on both outside and inside doors. You could not walk in without noting the signage. 

Right before us in line stood a family, three teenage-ish kids, a mom and dad, maskless. They were served, got their food, sat down in the north section of the restaurant, and had, I presume, a lovely meal. Before they ate, they prayed together. The place was busy, but during the time we had lunch, this family were the only unmasked customers.

I don't understand. This morning, the numbers look like this: 170,616 Americans have died.

I want to understand. Those parents had to see themselves undertaking a form of civil disobedience. They could not have missed Panera Bread protocol. Willfully they undertook to sidestep options they could have taken--like ordering from the car and eating outside. It was a beautiful day. Instead, proudly they carried their belief, their faith right into the restaurant, testifying to something. I just don't know what.

I would like to know how those parents explained the nature of their civil disobedience to their children. What truth were they placing above all? I don't know what commitment drove them to refuse to comply with the protocols Panera Bread has developed. What's the specific nature of their righteousness?

I honestly don't understand. Could someone please explain? 

Reading Mother Teresa--Taking note

Humble yourselves, therefore, 

under God’s mighty hand, 

that he may lift you up in due time. 1 Peter 5:6 

The crazy thing is, I can’t remember selling the novel – but I must have. Somehow, my copy got into a used book bin, because years later a student in some university down South picked it up, required reading for a lit class she was taking. Faulkner, I think it was As I Lay Dying. 

It’s not my style to toss books that I’ve scribbled full of notes, and I’m sure I wrote in this one because I always do when I use a book of almost any kind in class. I’m sure this one was scored with gloss, a grand mess of under-linings, jots and tittles, and, I’m sure, a rainbow of bright, highlighted sentences.

Or so she said. This woman who became its recipient found me somehow at my college address and sent me an e-mail to thank me for all of my blessed notations. The scribbles, she said, helped her understand Faulkner’s complex novel. She was thrilled with my notes.

I know scholars, literature scholars, who have spent years with original manuscripts, page by page, looking over typed lines a writer edited or reupholstered in finer language, noting changes in how the story’s characters dress or act or speak. A manuscript’s edits create their own stories.

The real reason people in my profession pour over dusty pages is the desire to understand. Sometimes what gets edited or underscored or highlighted can be, I suppose, as revealing as what is actually typed on the page.

As it is in the very sweet letter Archbishop Périer sent to Mother Teresa when, like the persistent widow, she simply couldn’t wait for Mother Gertrude to respond to her questions.

Here’s how the kind Archbishop responded to her request to hurry the process:

In due time the reply will come, remain quiet. Pray much and live intimately with Our Lord J.C. [Jesus Christ] asking for light, strength, decision; but do not anticipate HIS WORK. Try not to put anything of your own in all this. You are His instrument, nothing more. I do pray also, but I would be disappointed if perhaps things went too fast. (112)

A wonderfully pastoral letter.

That letter survives because Mother Teresa gave it to Father van Exem, telling him that he could destroy it when he finished reading because she had, she said, copied what she needed to know. When Father van Exem looked at the note, this is what he found:

In due time the reply will come, remain quiet. Pray much and live intimately with Our Lord J.C. asking for light, strength, decision; but do not anticipate HIS WORK. Try not to put anything of your own in all this. You are His instrument, nothing more. I do pray also, but I would be disappointed if perhaps things went too fast.

Her underscoring what she did, the way she did – single underline, then double underline! – is as full of her character as anything she ever wrote herself. Look at what she noted, what she understood she had to remember, and you can feel her yet.

And she’s there too in the way she explained all this to her mentor. “The letter is simply beautiful,” she told him in a note. And then, “Pray for light that I may see and [for] courage to do away with anything of self in the work. I must disappear completely – if I want God to have the whole” (113).

Humility is a word whose origins are in humus, or the earth itself. In a paradox vastly more mysterious than I can explain or even understand, a seeming contradiction clearly observable in the life of Mother Teresa, her divine work in Calcutta could begin only on the ground, in the supine humility of the earth itself before her God. 

It would be--it would have to be--HIS WORK.

A little trip west--iv

 

The land all around, endless prairie, is so bereft of people today that coming up on St. Stephenie Church is a resounding joy, even though it's but a shell of its former self. It's impossible to imagine the neighborhood filled with Danes and Bohemians and Virginians, a melting pot, each family--eleventy-seven kids too--trying to make a go of it on 80 acres. There had to be a time out here on the plains, early June evenings maybe, when you could stand right here beside the old church and hear the music of children's voices all around because nothing stops sound on an inland sea. 

The armor St. Stephenie wears these days--all metal sides and roof--preserves the place at minimum expense, right here on the property where the church has stood since 1927, the year a tornado blew away its predecessor. If, today, there's anything at all inside the old church, you'd have to ask, because its steel wardrobe appears not to have left a chink. It's testimony as a house of worship is little more than a silhouette, but then those it served are long gone too. What few agribusiness men and women remain raise much smaller families on bigger and bigger spreads, thousands and thousands of acres. But the Dane Church stays, suited up dutifully against the elements, just across the road from its own cemetery. 

The old church was Lutheran, built on land owned by Yance Sorgenson, whose stone stands proudly up front, the most prominent stone in the plot and closest to the road. When I got out of the car, I couldn't help thinking I was being watched. I meant no harm. 

Sorenson insisted, even though "AT REST," that the world remember, as he obviously didn't want to forget, that he was "Born in Norway," as was his bride. 

We're still in Willa Cather country, and this old church--or its predecessor--plays a role in the Cather biography, the same novel whose innards we've been visiting, My Antonia. The cemetery just across the road from St. Stephanie may well have been the one whose board refused burial to Antonia Shimerda's father's family asked if their beloved father could be buried just beyond its gates. Mr. Shimerda was Roman Catholic and Czech, not Danish and Lutheran, but Cather says his origins or church affiliation were not what prompted the board to refuse. 

Mr. Shimerda's prototype, Francis Sadilek, took his life, shot himself in his own barn. For him, America didn't fulfill its wondrous promise. In the old country, he'd been a musician, not a farmer; but he had believed, all the way over on the ship, that he could farm: you put seeds in the ground and then, when the harvest is ready, you eat potatoes or carrots or kale, or put up what's left of the bounty in jars for winter. 

But when he got here and lived just up the road from the church, that's not the way it went exactly and, in deep despair, he ended his life with his own hand and was buried instead on his own farm, where today a crooked sign remains marking the event in the grass. 

Today, clothed in alabaster, St. Stephenie Church is no more a church than a storage shed, but its shape and its proud presence high above the land of a people it once served still feels like a blessing. For years, the bell in its tower must have rung out on Sunday mornings, and must have been tolled for the deaths of its people. For years, that bell had to have been heard for miles around. For years, it created community.

And broke it. 

Once upon a time St. Stephenie had windows and an altar, baptismal font and a communion table. Years ago, doubtlessly, it was a place of hope and grace.

But it was also a place of division, as are all of our St. Stephenies, and as we are ourselves, forever in need of grace.

A little western tour--iii

It seemed ridiculously simple, the promise as sweet as the balmy smell of new-cut hay. Sure it would be difficult. It wasn't a choice for sissies, and what you'd have to suffer for a year or two are conditions that wouldn't be inviting. That's here in the poster. Sort of.

But it was the promise of land, of ownership, of the freedom that goes with it. It was the dream of land of your own that drew them. Immigration posters like this one, created by railroad companies, came in a Babel of European languages--German and Dutch and Danish and a score of others. This particular poster hangs in the old railroad depot in Red Cloud, Nebraska, where a crew of specialty builders are, as we speak, retooling the place for eager readers of the novels of Willa Cather who visit.

Sure as anything, the promise held some white lies. After all, what's up there at the top of the poster and labeled "The Start" isn't inaccurate. In and around Red Cloud, when immigrants starting flowing in for their 80 acres of promise, they started, when they could, with clay shelving draws, like this one, convenient slashes in the ground, from which they could easily--well, with some sweat--create a dwelling to keep out the rain and snow and hail and wind and what not else. All you needed was a spade to make a home.

And what the old immigration poster shows is pretty much that. It's not a lie--well, if it is, it's a white one.

Sorry about the fuzziness, but even if it it was a sharper image it would be deceptively unclear. But, you know, it's not a damnable lie--"the start" is a soddie dugout in the side of the hill, the railroad never completely out of picture. Was it all a dream? No, some hard work was required. Might there be some unwelcome visitors from the animal kingdom?--sure. But the cause was righteous, wasn't it? Real possibilities for "your tired, your poor/your huddled masses yearning to be free." 

And the second year. By the time the sun would rise on a perfect June morning, you'd have trees--cottonwoods and green ash--to keep off the sun, bring some relief from the stark sea of grass as far as you could see. Some shade for the weary. 

If you worked at it, the third year, or so the railroad company promised, there would be a handsome, mammoth crop of wheat just across a road that last year didn't even exist. And now how about a two-room frame place built from lumber cut from some river valley?--no more dirt floor, no more bugs and vermin. Sounds good, eh?

"Land for sale," the poster says, in Danish. Doesn't lie either, but it deals in half truths because there's no image extremes. A woman who grew up in the region told me years and years ago that how her uncle's family had moved from northwest Iowa to a neighborhood close by, intending to settle his family on cheap ground. Come warm May days, he sewed corn, just as he'd always done in Iowa. By July, the field was knee high, but a huge wind, hot as hades, blew in from the southwest and took out every last stalk. The next day already, she said, he put everything they owned on the wagon and started back east. 

By the fourth year, the cramped quarters of the little frame shack becomes something of a play house because just behind there's a brand new palace. This good land is that rich with promise. You buy this super cheap ground and after a spell of hardship any hard worker can weather, there's a kingdom here, a kingdom for everyone.

There's a church down the road--and neighbors just a spittin' distance away, life itself sprouting from soil so rich it births whole neighborhoods. Don't miss the brand new house either. The dugout's still there in the side of the clay shelving draw, but now it's a fruit cellar. And there's a new great house--two stories, bedrooms for all the kids and space for Grandma too. 

In six years, you've got a home more welcoming than anything left behind, a home that grows opportunities, a community.

Come one, come all. 

The truth is, many didn't find it as rich as the illustrations, but some did. The truth is, family life in a soddie was never a picnic and always more delightful in reminisce. The truth is, people died, were killed. Willa Cather's neighbor, Tony Shimerda's father, took a gun to his head when what once seemed to possible turned into total darkness.

But some made it. 

The Great Plains was the stage for two incredible epics running at one--the immense story of an endless stream of emigrant Euro-Americans like my own great-grandparents, who chased--and sometimes even created dreams that begat new life out here where once the buffalo roamed.

That's one huge story, and if you look closely at that slash of clay shelving above, and try to imagine yourself, spade in hand, creating a dugout for your family, it's hard not to be silenced, hard not to be awed. 

But there's another, too, because this land once belonged to the buffalo and the Native people who hunted them, a tribe of human beings whose way of life was clearly in the way of what?--of progress.  

Theirs is a story we seldom tell. We'd rather not. 

A little western tour ii

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And so it is with James William Murphy (1871-1901), just 30 years old when he died. The circumstances of his death are, at least to me, a mystery. We do know that Mr. Murphy's family moved away and left little trace of their presence, save this grave, which still sits in a tiny fenced-in handful of stones on a dirt road just south of the tracks in Red Cloud, Nebraska. 

It is well-kept, given its remoteness and the fact that those buried here have no descendants to honor it with faithful upkeep. Clearly, someone paints the fence and cuts the grass to keep ithe place from turning into a jungle.

Who? Someone who admires Anna Pavelka, the resilient pioneer woman named Antonia Shimerda who rises like some glorious mythical earth-mother from Willa Cather's My Antonia. (I'm overstating, but no one whose read the novel comes away with anything but admiration for her). And, you ask, what possible relation does this tiny country graveyard, little more than a plot, have to do with Anna Pavelka, the prototype for Antonia?

Ah, there lies the tale--only one of them. When she was a just young thing, footloose and fancy free, just like Tony; she never missed a dance, never missed a kiss on the back step or elsewhere. Sometime amid her youthful merrymaking, she must have fancied this man, James William Murphy, here and there identified as a railroad employee. There's even a whisper of his taking her with him "out west," where we do know she soon was "in the family way," at which time she returned to Red Cloud to have her baby, her first (of 13), a girl named Lillian, the only one born out of wedlock and fathered by a man not her husband.

So the man buried here, who has no next of kin anywhere near, whose family is long gone, has an infamous life beyond the grave, thanks to Willa Cather's famous novel, because he is an absolute jerk in My Antonia, leaving Tony Shimerda alone, pregnant, and unmarried.

Which is why, 15 years ago, one of my students (okay, maybe their prof put her up to it) is pictured right there, spitting on James William Murphy's grave, when I took a van full of students out on the land where Willa Cather spent her earliest years on the plains of south-central Nebraska. I wanted them to see for themselves where so much of that novel and others Cather wrote had their genesis.   

In the novel, the character who leaves Tony alone and pregnant is a monster, as was James William Murphy, who jilted Anna Pavelka in like heartless manner--and why the printed tour guide keeps taking visitors past this remote set of graves in the cottonwoods along the Republican River on a dusty dirt road.

Can't help but love the inscription on Murphy's stone, a memorial cliche that, given the story of James William Murphy, has a significant additional meaning than it's meant to carry:

"Gone but not forgotten."

Yes. And probably not for some time. 

Faith and power and fear in the Trump era

 

Sunday's New York Times featured a huge story about the town where we lived for more than forty years, a long story about Christianity and politics that the Times titled "'Christianity Will Have Power,'" a line from a speech which then-candidate Trump gave in the B. J. Haan Auditorium on the campus of the college where I spent so many years. You can read the story here. It's not short. 

Only the most loyal Trumpsters would call it a great read. In sometimes long and often emotional Facebook fracases, most voices were sorely disappointed because they felt, with good reason, that the picture which the writer, Elizabeth Dias, created of our neighborhood was pretty darn ugly. 

I'd spoken to Ms. Dias--she called me--for some time, two hours or so. She asked me great questions about Dutch-American history and Dutch Reformed theology. I was fascinated, really, by her interest in the fundamentals of Reformed theology as well as the history of Dutch Americans. She wanted to know how the Dutch got out to the far corner of Iowa, why they came, and who they were in pedigree. It was an enjoyable conversation about subjects which most Dutch-Americans who live here don't really care all that much about. 

I'm sure she mentioned Donald Trump, sure we talked about politics, but he wasn't the burden of the conversation. She wasn't particularly interested in my take on his presidency, and that was fine. What I remember best was her persistent questioning about really esoteric matters, matters that I find fascinating and important. 

I was in a motel room in Murdo, South Dakota, when I opened up the NY Times on Sunday morning, clicked on the title without even seeing the cover picture (above), then started reading and realized this was the story she'd told me she'd been working on for some time, a story she said took its own leave-of-absence when Covid-19 took over the news. She was finishing up now, she said, and wanted to understand some history.

That Murdo morning I had to be among her most eager readers. I charged through the entire story, as you can imagine, looking for my name. I picked up enough to have a sense of what she was arguing, but when, finally, I came to the end and hadn't found my name, I was greatly relieved. She didn't quote me. Thank goodness.

Then I read the story over closely and, like so many others, got depressed because Elizabeth Dias found MAGA caps all right, sources who, as they themselves confessed, "live in a bubble" so endearingly protective they cannot imagine Trump won't win come November. She found slaves to Fox News, clearly racist young couples who are sweet, hard-working, patriotic Americans, who pray at every meal and don't mow their lawns on the Sabbath, the kind of people Trump insisted were "good people," and, in certain definable ways, are. 

They love Trump because they believe Trump has empowered them. They bought into the man because on the playground of life today, they believe they need a bully. They believe him when Trump says that Biden will "hurt the Bible, hurt God," that Biden and Democrats are "against God." They can't help but think Democrats these days are the very root of all evil. 

Elizabeth Dias found her main subjects, understandably, from the most conservative faith fellowships in the area--the Netherlands Reformed, and the United Reformed churches, where, had she asked, I'd have been likely to tell her to look for real Trumpsters. She created the substance of the article from places she was most likely to find what she was looking for. 

When I read the piece slowly, it just plain made me sad. I didn't want to believe that young-ish couples here might buy the fear that comes with demographic change. The only subject in the story who garnered sympathy was the Hispanic pastor who said he gets along locally, but he doesn't tell his Anglo neighbors what he thinks of the President. 

When I finished it, I was angry--not at her for finding exactly the shoe size she needed  (evangelicals who love Trump because he promises them power), nor at the locals who walked so willingly into her argument. I was mad at myself for breathing a sigh of relief when I didn't find my name. It made me angry to realize that I was cowering, hiding, ducking, lest people like her Trump supporters discover I don't share their passionate righteous politics.

In 2008, I wore an Obama t-shirt to the gym early in the morning. Several times, people I considered friends, fellow profs from the college, engaged in debates that got angry really fast because they couldn't believe I could vote for a baby-killer. 

Another couple, like me, there just after six, was the retired President of the college, John B. Hulst, and his wife, Louise, who heard, more than once, the harangue. If Hulst had enemies during his presidency, I don't know who they would have been. He was highly respected, a man who carried himself with strength and seriousness and a passionate Christian faith. 

The Hulsts took me aside one morning and told me that whatever else I might think, I should know that the two of them "were on my side," not on the side of those who opposed the candidacy of Barack Obama. But, they told me they really couldn't be open about it.

At the time, I respected that position. They knew that people would be soured and angry at the wolves in sheep's clothing. That's what they wanted me to know.

It took me some time to weigh out their words, but eventually I came to the point where I could do nothing but shake my head. They were so conscious of reputation that, in America, the home of the brave, they couldn't speak their mind.

On Sunday morning, when I finished Ms. Dias's story, I was relieved not to have seen my name on the page because, like President Hulst, I didn't want to upset those who believe, like Trump, that Joe Biden is "against God."

I was relieved I wasn't there on the page because I was scared. I was afraid. 

And now I'm disappointed, no, angry--at me. 

A little Western tour--#1

 

I suppose if Red Cloud, Nebraska, has anything to do with it, the town's most favored daughter, Willa Cather, will never pass away. She's long gone, died already in 1947, but she remains a novelist of world stature, having won the Pulitzer, in 1922, for her novel One of Ours, a novel about the loss of single soldier in "the war to end all wars." 

Had she not won that Pulitzer, I can't help but think the town would still celebrate her and her writing anyway because it wasn't winning the Pulitzer that created her prominence and mjany millions of beloved readers; it was her subject matter, what she wrote about. Look at this:

The sign identifies this little brick church on an unpaved street in town (they're just about all unpaved down toward the tracks) as St. Juliana Falconieri Catholic Church. Willa Cather never attended there, but if you take the tour the beautifully designed new Willa Cather Center advises, you'll note the place when you pass by, not because any Cathers ever attended (they were Baptist, then Episcopal), but because, as the sign explains, Anna Pavelka did.

And who is Anna Pavelka, you ask? No, Willa Cather never married. Anna wasn't a daughter. In fact, Ms. Cather's sexual orientation remains something of a mystery. But if any writers could be said to have "mothered" or "fathered" a live human being, Cather would most certainly be among them. Anna Pavelka is the prototype for Tony Shimerda, Antonia Shimerda, whose immigrant family homesteaded alongside the Cathers out north and west of town, a woman who married a local farmer, and lived out her life in the harsh world of the American Great Plains.

So let's get this straight. You go to Red Cloud, NE, just across the Republican River from Kansas, down in south-central Nebraska, you pick up to town tour guide from the Willa Cather Center (there's a country tour guide too--grab one while you're at it), and you follow directions. Soon enough you find this little brick church, kept up nicely, where, the sign says, ". . .Anna Pavelka, the Antonia of Cather's well-loved novel My Antonia, was married and here her first child was baptized." 

So what you're visiting is a site that has, well, nothing to do personally with Willa Cather, but much to do with the life of the prototype for a character in a novel, a beloved novel and a beloved character. The place is kept up for what some might consider a reason only tangential to the famous novelist herself, but then, if you know My Antonia, Tony Shimerda is not just a random character but the American pioneer woman, an earth-mother figure who suffers through all kinds of trials and difficulties but never quite stops smiling. 

When Willa Cather was a long-time resident out east and rarely made it back to Red Cloud, she sent Anna Pavelka money because her xx-large pioneer family--here she is with husband and kids--

needed a washing machine, which is what Anna (seated) bought with Willa's Christmas gift. 

Once again, Cather never married, never had children. But in some odd literary and imaginative sense of the word, she had something of a child in a woman she watched grow up into a powerhouse pioneer. Don't know which of the three boys in the back row is the eldest, but no matter. Choose any one of them--maybe the one directly behind Anna, and simply assume that one to be the one baptized in St. Juliana Falconieri, that little brick church on a bumpy, unpaved street in a part of town that is no more really, the only well-kept place anywhere near. 

All because of Willa. No, all because of Tony the Beloved. I took students through My Antonia for ten years maybe, as long as I taught a course in American novels. I don't think I ever had a student that didn't enjoy the novel.

And love Tony Shimerda. 

"He will not break"

The land out back is vacant, all flood plain.  Nobody will build behind us, so we’ve got an acre of grass and native flowers and Russian thistles, who get my almost daily attention.

It’s wide open back there, the horizon yawning out for miles. When the river comes  lapping up at our back door, which it has, we make sure the sump pump runs.  But we like it here.

Nary a tree in the back, but then this is the only corner of the state where white settlers, my own great-grandparents among ‘em, cut up sod for building materials. Was no Home Depot. Out here, trees had to fight to stay alive. Most lost. Good dark sod there was in abundance.

The wind blows free and fearsome in all the treelessness—today from the northwest, yesterday and the day before from some place so far south it carried intolerable heat. I’m overstating, but it’s not wrong to say that for a goodly chunk of the year the wind makes the place almost hostile territory. Hot or cold, it can take your face off.

A month ago I made up my mind to let a couple of volunteers live--a five-foot green ash and some kind of bush. I mowed around them as if to create someday a little sheltering bower, even though we’ll be in the Home before any shade spreads out over the grasses.

For the last few days, that little tree and its buddy bush were permanently bent over, enslaved to mad winds. They’re kids, and I worry about them. I know the intent of the passage has nothing to do with a baby green ash, but the blessed assurance Matthew insists the Jesus he’s following is doing to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy springs to mind when I watch those two try to stand upright in all that blasted wind: “A bruised reed he will not break,” or so Matthew repeats.

That’s what I tell myself when I’m out there trying to keep my hat on.

“Promise?” I ask God.

I don’t get an answer. He’s got bigger fish on the line. But I can’t help but think he smiles because he knows a green ash is a joke of a tree, fast-growing, short-lived. Hardly a noble project--seedy, dirty, no striking beauty.

Still. In our winds it hurts to watch them bend. The north wind takes one look at that sad little tree’s temerity. “This is grassland, kid,” the wind says, “an ocean of it--moves in waves, see? Go find a river bank.”

For some lousy reason they brought to mind two great aunts, women I never knew. Just the way those two get blown around out back brings those great aunts to life because they were shaking too, a bundle of nerves back in 1904, when their little brother, my grandpa, newly ordained, took his very first call from a country church—their church--just outside a podunk named Bemis, South Dakota.

My grandpa’s older sisters, who’d married brothers who worked farms around there, trembled at the thought of their little brother and his brand new helpmeet stepping off the train way out in the country because his tender young missus was the daughter of—if you can believe it!—a actual seminary professor. In all likelihood this city girl had never been anywhere near rural South Dakota, had no idea what real frontier was like or how she’d get along when the closest burg was in every possible way a one-horse town.

Did she know how to garden? Could she raise chickens? Could she butcher ‘em? Would she have to? Or would they? And what would she think of them, her country bumpkin sisters-in-law? Would she turn up her nose? And what about boiling summers, deadly winters, grasshoppers, good crops maybe, maybe not. Would she learn country ways? Those two sisters were shaking in the wind of their own fear, worried sick, as well they should have been.

For some odd reason, I see those two great aunts in the two little trees trying mightily to stand straight.   

“A bruised reed he will not break.” Where on earth did I get that from?

Well, what of that story do we know? I know my great-grandfather the professor made it clear in letters I have in my drawer that he would keep working to get his beloved daughter back to Michigan, to civilization. His own little girl out there somewhere with the Indians. It was unthinkable.

I don’t know why things happened the way they did, but the record is clear. Despite having two older sisters at Bemis, their little brother and his citified wife stayed at the Bemis church for only two years before heading back east.

And those two aunts?—at least they could breathe again, you know? They must have been sad to see them go. But no more worrying meant they could throw back their shoulders.

My grandma’s father was delighted to have his daughter out of the wind and all that hardscrabble country. Must have been a joy to pick them up off the train, get them settled in a place called Reeman, another country church. Back. Safe. Smiles all around.

But it wouldn’t be five years later and their oldest child, a little girl, would die from some blood thing no doctor understood in 19-aught whatever. She was three maybe four. Took my grandfather’s heart away. I’ve got that letter too. My aunt told me that for a week he lay, face down, on the floor.

It’s evening now, the wind has settled; those two little plants are working at righting themselves, like we all do.

“A bruised reed he will not break.” There’s just so much comfort in those words, isn’t there? Even when sometimes it seems it seems silly, or worse, a lie, a it just feels right to say it again, to let hope play in your mind and heart: “A bruised reed he will not break.”

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.