Sad

I turned it off. 

I cringed at the outset, when it was clear that Trump brought a despicable strategy to the game, something called chaos. It took five minutes, no more, and the whole thing veered into the ditch, where it stayed, muddy and broken and burning. 

Anyone who votes for this man, who backs the madness on stage last night is as perfectly out of balance as he is. We--America--has never, ever had a President anywhere near as demented. I cringed for twenty minutes and then had enough. I turned it off. It was painful, as everyone says this morning. Prime time was outfitted in sheer agony. 

Last night, someone made the point that Donald Trump is the abuser some of us always believed him to be. Last night, he wasn't abusing women, he was abusing Joe Biden. What's worse--what's far worse--is that he was abusing Chris Wallace. He hunted--and subsequently abused the whole idea of a debate. That wasn't a debate. It was jungle ball. Last night, the President of the United States abused the United States, abused a system of government we call democracy. He abused us. He abused the nation.

It's impossible to overstate what was painfully obvious: the man proved himself to be what everyone, even Republicans, said was true on the march up to the 2016 election. Donald J. Trump is unfit to be President. Period. End. Of. Sentence.

Honestly, if I were on the Biden team, I'd advise simply saying that the debates are over. This was not a debate. A debate is two people with contrary views wielding them as well as they can in an effort to make them stick, to make them grow, in order to make the country, the nation, the culture grow. Donald Trump had no interest in a debate. All he cared about was himself.

He must go. Our way of life is at stake. 

Acknowledgements

"Before we begin, I'd just like to begin with a land acknowledgement," she said, "acknowledging the indigenous people who lived in this area." 

Truth be told, there weren't all that many people around. I was a little disappointed in the size of the crowd--three or four dozen people, most of them, like me, decidedly on the far side of their forties. A pandemic is raging in this corner of the state, I told myself. Don't be critical. It was something of a risk being out at all, even if this dedication was occurring outside, on a downtown street of a small town.

I'm not Luxembourgian, but, strangely enough, I've been around Luxembourgian-American strongholds for most of my life, so they've always been on my radar screen. The official Luxembourgian-American museum is just down the road from my still heavily Dutch-American hometown of Oostburg, Wisconsin. The Luxembourgers of northwest Iowa came to this corner of the state--the only region at the time not yet homesteaded by Euro-Americans--in 1870, the same year the region's Dutch unloaded their wagons just a few miles away.

By 1880 or so, Alton, Iowa, like Remsen, just south, was greatly Roman Catholic. Orange City and Sioux Center were not, to say the least. Live embers of the 16th century Reformation were still generating heat in souls of both persuasions--as they may yet be today in the tightest corners of the nearby Dutch Calvinist world.

I'd come--we'd all come--to dedicate a mural, a big, beautiful colorful thing right across from the Veterans Memorial in downtown Alton. It's not particularly easy to get a mural in a camera, so forgive me for missing something of the far end, but this is it.

It's a glorious flutter of butterflies across a darkened prairie landscape. Some ghostly ancestral four-leggeds haunt the place--the buffalo are long gone, of course--and those magical little yellow bubbles, the artist told us, are--I should have thought of it--are fireflies. Let me bring something of it closer.

Iowa is outlined there between it's two mighty rivers--the Mississippi out east, and the Missouri out west. That light jet trail across the state, from Dubuque (a village called St. Donatus actually) to the Siouxland villages of Alton, Marcus, Remsen, Hospers, and LeMars, is the long trek the Siouxland Luxembourger pioneers put down to get here and claim some of Iowa's very best black dirt.

The creative genius, behind all of this, Prof. Amber Hansen, was there for the dedication. She teaches art at the University of South Dakota, but hails from Alton and stoutly claims her own Luxembourgian heritage, even visited "the old country" recently to see the land her ancestors left behind. She calls the mural "a community project," because it was, and is. See those butterfly wings--they're unfinished. She and her crew will fill them in eventually, she promised. Alton, she said, has a lot of good artists.

But the way she started the whole dedication was, to me, stunning, not so much because of what she said, but because she said it at all. "I'd like to begin with a land acknowledgement." I had no idea what a "land acknowledgement" was. Today, I know. 

She said she took this "land acknowledgement" from the U. S. Department of Arts and Culture. This is what she read to begin the program, a dedication of her own big, colorful mural on the wall of a business in downtown Alton, Iowa. 

Every community owes its existence and vitality to generations from around the world, who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that led to this moment. Some were brought here against their will, some were drawn in hopes of making a better life, and some have lived on this land for more generations than can be counted. 

She was acknowledging that the land where her ancestors and mine settled was not so much their own as it was a land with a long history, a legacy that needed to be openly and publicly acknowledged. Human beings lived here and loved here before any of our great-grandparents made homestead claims. 

Truth and acknowledgement are critical to building respect and connection across all barriers of heritage and difference. Today we are standing on the ancestral lands of many indigenous tribes, but most recently of  . . .

. . .and here she named two tribal peoples whose names few in the crowd, if any, had ever heard of, even though many of us, I'm sure, live in Sioux County, in a state, Iowa, named after a tribal people who've been gone for far more than 150 years. I didn't know tribes she listed, nor certainly how to spell their names; and it isn't pleasant right now admitting as much.

We pay respect to their elders, past and present. Please take a moment to consider the many legacies of violence, displacement, migration and settlement that brings us together here today; and please join us in acknowledging these truths in any and all public events.

She was calling us to repentance, something both Catholics and Calvinists have understood for generations, for centuries. 

Have a look again at Prof. Hanson's beautiful mural. Big, colorful butterflies wing their way through the scene, but behind them there are others, shadowy butterfly figures, ghosts of the past, reminders that what's here is only what's here now, not what once was. 

I was perfectly stunned by the "land acknowledgement," stunned and gratified. It was a blessed reminder that this isn't our land at all. It happens to be where we live, but no one should think of it as being ours.

When Prof. Amber Hansen, the artist, read those words, she was teaching us the only really substantive genre of authentic "patriotic history."

This morning, I'm thankful for what she taught me on Sunday morning--and, well, us.

Refuse on the journey

Be careful you do not start 

with any unnecessary baggage. 

The road at present is strewed with nearly everything

 from a steam kettle to a child's cradle.

So wrote George Keller in 1851 in a guidebook for travelers on the Oregon Trail. It's difficult to imagine what things must have looked like, and yet it's understandable that travelers would have to dump things--treasures, heirlooms, precious bulky items--hither and yon along the trail, things like this spinning wheel, on display in a museum at Chimney Rock. 

At an odd little museum that stretches over I-80 at North Platte, NE, the display just below features a piano and books abandoned along the trail. Some remembrances claim so many books left behind created a free-loan library. Pick one up, take it with for a couple days, read it, then drop it off somewhere else farther west. Books and pianos and spinning wheels turned the trail--sometimes four or five miles wide--into a national flea market full of abandoned treasures.

A letter Narcissa Whitman wrote to a friend tells the story fetchingly. She sweetly apologizes to a trunk that, achingly, had to be left behind. (Keep Kleenex handy.) 

Dear Harriet, the little trunk you gave me has come with me so far, and now I must leave it here alone. Poor little trunk, I am sorry to leave thee; thou must abide here alone, and no more by thy presence remind me of my dear Harriet. Twenty miles below the falls on Snake river this shall be thy place of rest. Farewell, little trunk, I thank thee for thy faithful services, and that I have been cheered by thy presence so long. 

The passage doesn't require a picture. That little trunk makes a sad appearance in the imagination without your or my having the slightest idea what it looked like. But, broken-hearted, she can't not blame someone or something for what she must abandon. She points her loving husband's way. "Husband," she calls him.

Thus we scatter as we go along. The hills are so steep and rocky that husband thought it best to lighten the wagon as much as possible and take nothing but the wheels, leaving the box with my trunk. I regret leaving anything that came from home, especially that trunk, but it is best. 

What became especially difficult was having to lug every last item by hand and arm and back and hook and crook over water and through impassable creek beds. 

It would have been better for me not to have attempted to bring any baggage whatever, only what was necessary to use on the way. It costs so much labor, besides the expense of animals. If I were to make the journey again I would make quite different preparations. To pack and unpack so many times, and cross so many streams where the packs frequently get wet, requires no small amount of labor, besides the injury of the articles. Our books, what few we have, have been wet several times. In going from Elmira to Williamsport this trunk fell into the creek and wet all my books, and Richard's, too, several times. The sleigh box came off and all of us came near a wetting likewise. The custom of the country is to possess nothing, and then you will lose nothing while traveling. Farewell for the present.

 And thus, that little trunk full of all those memories is (sniff, sniff) left behind.

Woe and woe and woe.

___________________________ 

P.S. The next day's journal entry begins this way: 

"Dear Harriet, Mr. McKay has asked the privilege of taking the little trunk along, so that my soliloquy about it last night was for naught."

Lost, but not abandoned. 

Relax.

Sabbath on the Trail--from the letters of Narcissa Whitman

Sabbath; came fifteen miles and camped at a fine place, with plenty of good grass for our weary animals. 

It is August 6th, 1836, and the note is the work of Narcissa Whitman, the very first woman to cross the American frontier--Independence, Missouri, to Walla Walla, Washington. She is, in every way, a pioneer, an explorer, although she and her husband and the wagon train with which they're traveling followed a map of the way. Their path will soon become The Oregon Trail, a 19th century superhighway that brought the widely separate edges of a continent together, a continent whose immensity few could even imagine. 

August 6th is the Sabbath, and the Whitmans and their traveling companions, very strict Sabbitarians, generally closed down operations on Sunday to create open space for meditation and worship. Not this Sunday. They're traveling, breaking the order of what should be. That may sharpen her desire for personal devotions. 

This Sunday morning, we'll leave Mother Teresa in Calcutta, and spend a Sunday morning in the Oregon Territory with Mrs. Whitman and her husband (they're newlyweds, by the way). 

On this August morning, they know they're soon to arrive at the place the Society has designated for them. This Sabbath they didn't stop; they kept moving. But Narcissa remembered to praise the Lord.

Thus are blessings so mingled that it seems as if there was nothing else but mercy and blessings all the way. Was there ever a journey like this performed where the sustaining hand of God has been so manifest every morning. 

They've traveled long and hard and far; and the truth is, she's loved every minute of it. They would be ministering to the heathens, the Cayuse Indians, and, like all missionaries, they felt the sustaining prayers of those who, back east, prayerfully supported their mission work.

Nor are we forgotten by our beloved churches, at home in the prayers of the Sanctuary, we are too sensible of its blessed effects to believe otherwise; and oh! how comforting is this thought to heart of the missionary.

What was still a fledgling nation was shocked to hear a woman taking passage across the continent. Who knew what dangers laid in store--and for a woman! The frontier was home to wild men and wilder savages, not to mention all manner of flesh-devouring beasts--it was no place for a woman. But Narcissa Whitman loved it, emboldened by a rich sense of calling that sustained her. The hand of God, she says, had led them on their remarkable journey.

Surely the children of Israel could not have been more sensible of the pillar of fire by night than we have been of that hand that has led us thus safely on. God had heard prayer in our behalf, and even now while I am writing on this holy day is the sweet incense of prayer ascending before the throne of Heavenly grace. 

They're young and idealistic and tough. . .but neither have they forgotten home.

We love to think and talk of home with such feelings as these. It warms our hearts and strengthens and encourages us in the work of our beloved Master, and make our journeyings easy.

It's August 6, 1836, on the Oregon Trail. But somehow all of that works today too, this morning, wherever you are.

Thinking about teaching lit

In 15 years of blogging I don't know that I've ever done what I did yesterday--put up the url of an essay I'd read, no comments and no rationale. The reason I did that, I'm here this morning to say, was rather simple. Yesterday I faced an early appointment with a doctor, and I'd just read the essay on Facebook. It struck me as thoughtful and on the money, and I didn't have time to explain why.

If you didn't read it, let me summarize. What Erik Miller argues is that today Christian colleges are bearing the fruit of having danced with the devil, mammon to put a name on it. In the noble effort to stay alive, they've pursued the American dream instead of a Kingdom vision. Just down the road, for good sound economic reasons, a college dumped their English and philosophy departments and pruned back history and theater. That's the kind of move Erik Miller despises. 

Old fogies like me want to believe that those humanities courses and programs, what most call "the liberal arts," are the heart and soul of every institution of higher learning, Christian or secular. If you can't help feeling that way, in all likelihood you're as old as I am. 

Erik Miller's claims that good Christian academics have gone a-whoring after filthy lucre and thereby walked away from all that is good and right. They're in danger for clearly spiritual reasons. Playing on a line from American streets, Miller claims that " Our minds matter. The Christian mind matters. It’s time we—parents, pastors, presidents, philanthropists—take the sacrificial action required to show it. A silenced Christ, after all, is no Christ at all."

That's heady, Old Testament stuff, and he's not all wrong--that's why I put the essay up. But neither is he all right. Financial solvency is a good, good thing. It's silly to wish a college didn't have to stay afloat financially. Seems to me that college admins have to be wily as foxes--doesn't it say that somewhere in the Gospels?

Mark Edmundson's "Teach What You Love," in a recent American Scholar, is actually a similar essay, an insider's indictment of yet another angle of the phenomenon Erik Miller outlines, but without Miller's "Christian" context. Edmundson looks at a similarly destroyed landscape and laments all over the page. With good reason.

First, he reviews the exciting role that critical theory took throughout English Departments in the last years of the 20th century. He's right. If you didn't do lit crit back then, you weren't listening to the right music. He claims much of literary criticism was negative--Derrida, Foucalt and other philosophers bearing down on the notion that lit'-chwa-chure didn't do what people said it did. Like Miller, Edmundson sees desolation all over the landscape, but he admirably points the finger at himself as the guilty party. The demise of the English department, he says, derives from a self-inflicted wound.

But the essay doesn't stop there. Instead, as the title indicates, it redirects an English department to do what he claims it did long before the nay-saying crowd appeared from the darkness of the lit crit forest: "Teach literature. Teach the literature you love."

Taken at face value, Edmundson might be thought of abandoning critical theory all together and, in the process, critical thinking itself, perhaps the most important "behavioral objective" of traditional higher education. That's not the point. Oddly enough, his point is spiritual--English professors have too quickly abandoned what they love.

Both essays begin with the same sad assessment: liberal arts education is in lousy shape. Miller blames the soul; primarily, Edmundson blames the mind. They're both at least partially right about cause, and, sadly enough, and fully right about effect: the role of the humanities in higher education is in deep, deep trouble.

My grandfather graduated from Parkersburg (IA) High School in 1897. His diploma hangs on the wall in our library. It lists the courses he took at Parkersburg, courses no one teaches anyone anymore--Cicero and Latin Grammar. That diploma has always served to remind me that things change. They do.

And while dealing with change remains a problem, especially with people who reach their three-score and ten years, the inevitability to avoid it requires all of us to adjust, to change. 

I love both essays. I ate 'em up, in part because I share their points of view. 

But the truth is even still more difficult.

 

https://mereorthodoxy.com/market-made-scandal-evangelical-college/?fbclid=IwAR0J6b8RDn6USdA0beUcS0H8_NOjBtEWW0_x8oM6afcVoLa3jGek_YOerfs

The Story of Emma Cogler

She made a scene, all right? She didn't have to--she could have simply got up and left when told to, but she didn't. She refused. She made a scene, such a scandalous thing to do. She should have known better.

Her name was Emma Coger, and we might just say that the reason you've never heard of her is that her story is so old hat that it can't or shouldn't be news at all. But it is. It's a story about will, about dignity, and, first and foremost, about justice.

Start here. Emma was just 19 years old and a teacher--middle school, sixth grade, maybe seventh, not much older than her students. History doesn't say much about her classroom successes, whether she was on the road to becoming a master teacher. What we know--what's essential background material--is her age, her occupation, and her race.

She was Black. Sort of. She was what people called, 150 years ago, "a quadroon"--1/4 African-American, which meant, pigment-wise, she was mostly white. The court records of the time describe her color as "yellow."

"What happened?" you're saying. "Tell the story."

Emma Coger purchased a first-class breakfast ticket on a Mississippi River steamer, the S. S. Merrill, bound for Keokuk, Iowa to visit friends. She was just getting away for the weekend. The clerk gave her her ticket, scribbled with special instructions. Emma was to take her food and eat in one of the designated places blacks were appointed to eat, along the railing or in the back with the help. The clerk kindly returned a half-dollar.

That upset Emma Coger. She'd never been denied the dining room before, so she asked a white man, a fellow passenger, to buy her a ticket for lunch. He did. No problem, no scribbled writing. 

Thus, when dinner was served, Emma Coger took a chair in the elegant dining room, at which time two white women sitting at the table put up a fuss. When Emma wouldn't move, the two snarled at the indignity they were suffering with Emma's sitting right there with the real ladies. They left in a huff.

Footnote:  two women stayed at the table. Isn't that wonderful? Two stayed.

Anyway, one of the appalled women happened to be the captain's wife. Sooner rather than later, the captain himself heard of the foul disgrace and came to the aid of the clerk who'd also failed by that time to get Emma Coger to remove herself from the dining room. She was, you know, making a scene. 

Things took a bad turn. The captain and his clerk demanded and she refused. Often. Not surprisingly, tempers rose. The captain grabbed Emma Coger, and Emma Coger grabbed the table cloth so that she took with her most of the plates and silverware when the captain jerked her away. The mess went spilling to the floor. It was a scene, of course. Emma Coger made a scene right there in beneath the chandeliers. In first-class dining, you just can't have that kind of scene.

When she got home, Emma Coger was determined to sue. But no lawyer in the city would take her case, so she had to return to Keokuk to get one--and did. So the case was brought to the courts in Iowa in February of 1873, just eight year after the Civil War.

The S. S. Merrill's company lawyer, claimed Emma Coger had cut loose at them, swore like a drunken sailor and even used that very bad language right there before the Iowa Supreme Court. Can you imagine? Look it up. You'll see. 

She claimed it never happened. ""I never, never use bad language," she told the court in her defense, "and do not recollect of doing it on that occasion. I was angry because I was refused, and the way I was spoken to."

And she won, won big. Swearing was immaterial, the court said; "the sole question was, and I quote: "Had the defendant as a common carrier of passengers the authority to establish and enforce regulations denying individuals of color of the privileges and rights of white persons?"

And the answer, the court said, was no. And more.

It cannot be doubted that she was excluded from the table and cabin, not because others would have been degraded and she elevated in society, but because of prejudice entertained against her race, growing out of its former condition of servitude, a prejudice, be it proclaimed to the honor of our people, that is fast giving way to nobler sentiments, and, it is hoped, will soon be entombed with its parent, slavery.

Thus saith the Supreme Court of Iowa, February of 1873, in Emma Cogler vs. North Western Union Packet Company.

Emma Cogler was awarded $250, which she gave to her lawyer. She wasn't after money, she told people; she set about to suit the company "to vindicate the rights of my race, and my character of womanhood."

Emma Cogler wouldn't take it, so she made a scene. Praise be.

That's a story to start your day. 

Prof. John C. VanderStelt

The story goes that when the Hulsts came to Dordt College in the early Sixties, they couldn't help be awed by the tight-corset of pietism then in power, a Sabbatarianism, for instance, drawn so tight that on Saturday nights dorm counselors stuck Scotch tape over the coin slots on the Coke machines. Sounds cartoonish, but it wasn't.

By the time I arrived a few years later, the behavioral codes hadn't loosened a whole lot. I remember getting sent back to the dorm by the Dean for wearing jeans to supper. No TV--no football--on Sunday. Women had a curfew--10:30. Men never did. The powers-that-be determined that herding the mares into the corral would leave the stallions with nothing to do. 

For women, slacks were questionable, too "whatever" for the formality of class--except when the temperature, as announced on college radio(!), was -10 degrees below zero, in which case allowances could be made, all of this in spite of the fact that in the mid-Sixties, short skirts flirting above the knees were all the rage. 

No dancing, of course. Definitely, no firewater. An non-traditional student, coming up on thirty years old, already hairless, was seen by a constituent drinking a glass of wine with his dinner at a steak house a half hour away from campus. That constituent reported the transgression to the Dean, who called the man's parents to report their son's offence. The word was, that student's immigrant father had to be told four or five times what all the hoopla was about. When he put down the phone, he still didn't understand.

To live among the Dutch-Americans in northwest Iowa in the early Sixties was to be herded down rigorous paths of righteousness. To be comfortably Dutch Reformed meant adopting codes that prescribed the means-to-grace in strict detail.

When Rev. John C. Vander Stelt began teach philosophy at Dordt College, he was, to be sure, more Dutch than almost anyone in Siouxland. Born and raised and educated in the Netherlands, he'd come to Canada too late to shake the brogue he'd carry for the rest of his years. His childhood--as others like him--was marked by the desperation the German occupation of the Netherlands created for so families, and a moral framework created by a world that justified armed resistance, even murder. Good Christians in the Resistance often as not prayed before their armed robberies.

What's more, in the Netherlands Prof. John Vander Stelt had absorbed a religious vision that was far wider than the pietist views that undergird Dutch northwest Iowa and Dordt College, then barely ten years old. His was a vision shaped by a preacher who became the Dutch Prime Minister, Abraham Kuyper, who believed, as did his contemporary theologian friends, that the Christian life required two "conversions," first a conversion to the Savior, but second--and a like unto it--a return to the world. Prof. Vander Stelt believed Christianity wasn't about keeping the ship from sinking but moving it out and away from harbor.

When I was a boy, "worldliness" was among the vilest of sins. Those faithful who fell away, like the prodigal son, gave their souls over to the pig sty that was the world. Prof. Vander Stelt put a new spin on John 3:16--"that God so loved the world" meant He loved all of life. God almighty wanted to his own to see beauty even when it wasn't in rectitude. 

Prof. Vander Stelt freed me to read John Updike instead of The Sugar Creek Gang, freed me to believe that all of life is religion, that the Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath, that to understand how the world operates, how art glorifies, how vision shapes life, we had to be "in but not of" in a wholly different way than making sure coin slots were taped on the Sabbath. 

That's why Dordt College went to war with itself soon after Prof. Vander Stelt, and others like him, arrived on campus. Two visions of the Christian life walked on to the battle field. Only one view of things would or could prevail. The vision of Prof. Vander Stelt, battered and scarred, somehow prevailed.

In the late Sixties, Prof. Vander Stelt asked tough questions about prejudice when race riots burned through America's cities; the pietists maintained that the Bible commanded to honor those leaders God appoints, like Nixon. When protestors questioned America's role in the Vietnam War, Prof. Vander Stelt dared to ask whether the hippies weren't morally right. Prof. Vander Stelt set us out into a world the pietists denied. Prof. Vander Stelt played a monumental role in my life, as a teacher--a professor--and, later, for so many years as colleague and friend, his fiery passion so readily ample, so divine.

He wouldn't like me saying that, of course--"divine," but John C. Vander Stelt, my friend and colleague, reshaped the course of my faith by pushing me--and so many others--into a world so much bigger and even blessed than that which we meant by "worldliness."

Last Saturday, in the middle of a precious family gathering, my friend John died of a massive heart attack. He went home with his Savior and Lord.

But he has not left us. Not at all.

Morning Thanks--just a poem

 I don't know that I've ever been to the Lower Chesapeake Bay, and I never was a lifeguard, so no one ever told me the different ways to save someone who was drowning. That having been said, I've sure as anything been where Maxine Kumin takes us in this memorable poem that's all about the richness of memory.

The Lower Chesapeake Bay

by Maxine Kumin

Whatever happened to the cross-chest carry,
the head carry, the hair carry,

the tired-swimmer-put-your-hands-on-my-shoulders-
and-look-in-my-eyes retrieval, and what

became of the stride jump when you leap
from impossible heights and land with your head

above water so that you never lose sight
of your drowning person, or if he is close enough, where

is the lifesaver ring attached to a rope
you can hurl at your quarry, then haul

him to safety, or as a last resort
where is the dock onto which you tug

the unconscious soul, place him facedown,
clear his mouth, straddle his legs and press

with your hands on both sides of his rib cage
to the rhythm of out goes the bad air in

comes the good and pray he will breathe,
hallowed methods we practiced over and over

the summer I turned eighteen to win
my Water Safety Instructor’s badge

and where is the boy from Ephrata, PA
I made out with night after night in the lee

of the rotting boathouse at a small dank camp

on the lower Chesapeake Bay?

During my life as a teacher, I used to tease out a little assignment: "Write a 100-word sentence. Go ahead. Take a shot." It was nothing I ever graded, just an exercise to fool around with. "See if you can control the language well enough to create a monster." 

Like me, you probably didn't realize it while reading through, but this behemoth weighs in at a little less than 200 words, all of a piece, just one sentence. 

I'm guessing withholding end punctuation was not something Ms. Kumin planned on when she started into this little memory text. It's just the way she experienced what we all do--how it is that long-forgotten memories unfold from a something tightly wrapped into a tapestry you can hang on your wall. 

That's how this one goes, isn't it?--how things grow from life-and-death lessons taught as a lifeguard, to a situational context--"the summer I turned eighteen," to a real kid from Ephrata appearing--bang!--out of nowhere, in "a rotting boathouse at a small dank camp/on the lower Chesapeake Bay," all of it documenting a memory that sounds like yucch but oh-my-word isn't, not in the least.

And you're shocked that it's still there because it's been gone, long gone, for most of a lifetime; but there it is, unbidden, recreating itself with little bits of your heart and soul. The joy of this poem is its blossoming exuberance.  

We're factory-built with zip files in some file drawer synopsis, mostly unmarked memories, but, almost shockingly, still there. Lord knows there are bad ones too, but "this rotting boathouse is anything but." 

Ice-skating came up in conversation a couple nights ago. Hadn't thought about it for years, but in an instant I was back in seventh grade at a pond the fire department created with fire hoses in the village park. Someone hauled in a little fishing shack with benches, a place for kids to put on and take off skates on January nights I didn't know I hadn't forgotten, cold nights in a steamy shack in Oostburg, Wisconsin, right there beside a summer camp on the lower Chesapeake.

That's what's cool about poetry. This morning I'm thankful for poetry. 

Reading Mother Teresa--Suffering

 

To this you were called, 

because Christ suffered for you, 

leaving you an example, 

that you should follow in his steps. 1 Peter 2:21 

A handsome crucifix hangs on the wall across the room, traditionally a Roman Catholic icon in that it includes, in molded pewter, the image of a suffering Jesus. I like it.

My sister gave it to me after it was given to her from one of the old folks she once visited weekly, a Roman Catholic woman who had an apartment full of traditional iconography, a woman who thought it would be nice if my sister had this one from her collection.

To refuse the gift would have been shameful, she said, so she took it; but she had some trouble knowing exactly what to do with it because she was convinced that it really wasn’t, well, for her, a lifelong Protestant. There’s nothing unbiblical about a suffering Jesus hanging from the cross, but somehow she had the uncomfortable feeling that a crucifix wasn’t exactly a part of her faith tradition. We worship a risen savior, she might have said – the doctrinal answer for why Protestants prefer a cross to a crucifix.

It’s not small, and somehow, understandably, its presence made her uncomfortable.

She thought about tossing it, she said, but she simply couldn’t. How do you drop a crucifix in a garbage can with banana peels and apple cores? An old flag you fold and give to the Boy Scouts. What on earth does someone do with a crucifix?

As an act of mercy, I told her I’d take it off her hands, and now it’s here, even though it’s fair to say I may have spent a good deal more time in Calvin’s Institutes than my sister has or cares to.

Christ’s suffering, celebrated here with my crucifix, isn’t a pleasant thought, nor should it be. If he hadn’t suffered, if he hadn’t been nailed to that cross, his side sliced open, if he hadn’t died there, in mockery – if all of that hadn’t gone on, he could not have buried our sins with him nor, come Sunday morn, could he have stepped from behind that monster stone as if it were a paper weight. Had he not died, he could not have risen triumphant.

I must admit that Mother Teresa’s desire to suffer – desire is the right word, by the way – is, at least to me, difficult for me, both as a human being, and as a Protestant believer. For a time, when her new life in a sari on Calcutta’s streets began, she wondered aloud and to her superiors whether she was actually suffering enough.

“I want to become a real slave of Our Lady [Mary, the mother of Jesus] – to drink only from His chalice of pain and to give Mother Church real saints,” she once wrote to the archbishop (141); and then this: “. . . there is one part still left and that is that I would have to suffer much. – In spite of everything that has happened . . . there has always been perfect peace & joy in my heart” (142). For that she feels the strange need to repent.

Traditionally, I think, that true desire to suffer – actual physical suffering, self-denial – is far more a staple of Roman Catholic piety than it is a part of the Protestant Christian life. And it’s here, above me, in what is now my crucifix. It is not an empty cross.

Am I envious of Mother Teresa’s penchant for suffering? Maybe. How can a Christian not be envious of her, really, of the way she envisioned her world and reality of Jesus Christ, the word made flesh.

I’m envious, even if I'm somewhat uncomfortable.

Maybe that’s why that crucifix will stay with this old Calvinist wherever he goes.

Morning Thanks--Babies

 

Something about babies makes us all babblers.

I remember listening to a adoption center worker go on and on about absolutely not allowing out-of wedlock, high school moms to bring their babies to school because, she claimed, the mere sight of a baby in swaddling clothes is dangerous to young women, who—she claimed—see only the love and nothing of the responsibility we all take on when we “have kids.” Some young women lose all sense of reason when they hold babies, she told me. About that, she was as adamant as some old Puritan preacher.

But I think we all suffer such weakness. I remember being struck with the story of the temple priest, Simeon, who was “righteous and devout,” the Luke account says, a man who, once he held the Savior, simply said he was ready to die. That story rose out of nowhere into my mind the first time I held my first grandchild. I don’t believe my holding her had anything to do with the Biblical account, nor was this little sweetheart any kind of savior. Something had changed forever; something was, strangely enough, behind me. I was ready to go. Weird. There was an epiphany at that moment I’ve never felt before, nor again. 

Right here in my office stands a picture I took the morning of that baby’s baptism. It’s ancient now, my granddaughter rapidly turning thirteen, even though she’s only six; but I wouldn’t replace that image with any of the gallery of sweet shots I’ve taken since.

There’s just something about babies. They are what they are—and a whole lot more, which is, of course, the textbook definition of a symbol. They are hope, they are future, they are somehow life itself, the glorious opposite of death’s grim reaping. When we gaze at them, I suppose, we're celebrating life, human triumph. So we babble.

Yesterday in our church, a baptism. I’m guessing that those evangelicals who don’t do infant baptism have created some ritual to celebrate the joy of birth and the glorious mystery of new life. If they haven't, someone better write something up this afternoon. There is no cause for greater glee.

Once the sacrament was over, our pastor admitted, shaking his head as if coming out of a dream, “One of the best moments in church life.” Who on earth could disagree?

Well, maybe some could. Babies are so rich in meaning that I’m sure they prompt our greatest miseries. I sometimes think of the grandparents in a pew not that far away from where we were sitting yesterday, a couple who lost a grandson more than two years ago. Or the folks on the other side of the church—several of them—who realized, several months after just such a gala sacrament, that their baby carried an incurable disease, a burden that innocent child would have to contend with for their rest of his or her life.

And then yesterday, in the afternoon following the baptism, this story. We walked into my in-law’s apartment, where a grief card funeral parlors create is standing tented on Mom’s table. Not unusual. When you’re almost ninety, you could go to funerals weekly.

This one looked different. I opened it. The woman’s face was young, hair spikey. I asked my father-in-law the story.

It seems that when the mom discovered she was with child, the doctor found cancer. The treatments would be severe enough to threaten the new baby, the oncologist must have told her. It’s almost impossible to create a more horrendous scenario.

I don’t know the people, don’t know how the determination was made, don’t know the anguish or the pain—don’t know whether, once made, she lived her last days in the splendor of peace—that could well be. But whatever happened in the year that passed between conception and death, this young woman chose to give her life for her baby. So last week in some local church, a widowed father stood, babe in arms, two young children at his side.

I felt slapped around—the exhilaration of a baptism just hours before, death in the tented card standing on the table.

That woman so adamantly against unwed moms taking their babies to high school—I told her once that I envied her job, taking adopted babies to new parents who wanted so badly to have children. Must be so gratifying, I told her, those parents so hungry to hold a little one in their arms.

“But I also have to take that child from the arms of a birth mother,” she said, as if to remind me that all of this joy is really about life itself.

My father-in-law claims that people say she was a wonderful woman, 33 years old. Her own grandparents are residents of the home. The woman was deeply religious, he says, a loving personality, a giver. That she was, a giver.

My guess—and my hope—and my prayer—is that her husband is at peace, as much peace as any of us will ever find in this world of ours, this vale of tears.

He has this much at least--he has their beautiful baby. 

And for that, this morning, I give thanks.

___________________

This post is 12+ years old, but the baby, up top, is--you guessed it--our granddaughter.

Life in the Fun House

(Forgive me. Like everyone else, every once in a while I just have to rant.)

Call me crazy. I'm okay with that. Tell me that, like so many others, my scrambled mind is terminally infected by Trump Derangement Syndrome. I won't doubt the diagnosis because by any measurement, our 230-pound POTUS proves himself more and more robustly bonkers every day.

Evidence abounds. Two nights ago, in an ABC News Town Hall that went off the rails several times before staying there (Trump blamed Biden for face mask madness), he told one of the questioners that no, he hadn't downplayed Covid-19, even though Bob Woodward has him ON TAPE saying he did exactly that--Trump's very words. He insisted that he had "upplayed it." Nice of him to create new words in to perpetuate falsehoods. So many others had simply become cliched.

He's thinking now that he "upplayed" the coronavirus, despite his own magnanimous fears that the truth would panic his citizen children. I'm not sure how both of those reactions cohabitate, but then it's Donald J. Trump speaking, a man whose mind really hasn't made any sense since his inauguration--which was, you remember, the world's biggest.

More news. The top spokesman of Department of Health and Human Services, Michael Caputo, another retread from Fox News, entered the Twilight Zone with a bizarre Facebook rant that warned his fellow Trumpsters to buy up whatever they could score of Walmart's ammo because some as yet unnamed demonic lib cabal would be filling the air with lead right there at the nation's Capital, at the moment in January when Trump is crowned once more. I'm not making this up. Caputo was, but I'm not. Delusion anyone? How do you spell Q-Anon?

Yesterday, Caputo apologized and determined a nice, cozy leave of absence was in order to collect his thoughts.

And that's not even yesterday's master stroke. At a congressional hearing, the head of the Center for Disease Control, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, who happens to be a virologist, a retired military medical official, and an appointee of Donald J. Trump, answered two questions with responses that didn't square with Trumpian orthodoxy. 

For the record, here's what Redfield said about masks: "I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against Covid than when I take a Covid vaccine, because the immunogenicity may be 70%. And if I don't get an immune response, the vaccine is not going to protect me. This face mask will."

That, folks, is heresy.

Nor did he sound like the boss when he laid out a vaccine scenario: "A Covid-19 vaccine is the thing that will get Americans back to normal everyday life. The best defense we currently have against this virus are the important mitigation efforts of wearing a mask, washing your hands, social distancing and being careful about crowds."

Oops. 

When questioned later, POTUS claimed the man he'd hired, had, sadly enough, simply misunderstood the questions. Poor guy. He'd been "confused." Seriously--that's what Trump said. "I think he made a mistake when he said that. It's just incorrect information."

Furthermore, the Deceiver-in-Chief said he'd called Redfield and let him know that he--Redfield--had been quite wrong about things. After all, it couldn't be Trump who was wrong, the man who's never needed forgiveness? Impossible.  He's never been wrong about anything. . .well, once or twice maybe in his 73 years, all immaterial stuff, I'm sure. 

Let's just make this clear. Donald Trump, the falsehood's fountainhead, calls his own CDC chief to make sure that the good doctor speaks the gospel truth, Trump truth, rather than what the Dr. Redfield or the CDC believes the medical truth to be.

That's politics, you say.

Some call it totalitarianism. I just call it madness. More of it.

We're in the Fun House right now. The good news is, it's just about over.

A little trip out west--xv

"When times were good, everybody got indoor toilets."

And thus begins a tale by my old friend, Jim Heynen, whose parents, I'm guessing were among the newly rich. The thing is, one rich farmer holds out to what's all the rage, the man "Who Didn't Want an Indoor Toilet." 

"Homes are holy places," he maintained. "You put a place to s___ in them and call it improvement?"

Oddly enough, it makes some sense to me. What seems clear is that we sometimes can't let 'em go. This one, just a good, solid single away from an country school, long deserted, is hardly archetypal. Took the pic a half dozen years ago. With any luck, Mother Nature finally knocked it over.  

On this little trip out west, three of them appeared around my camera, all of them "institutional," you might say, two churches and one school. 

This one's no beauty either. It peaceably resides behind a old church that hasn't been used in decades. In all likelihood, entering--should anyone entertain such a motion--could be accomplished with but limited olfactory offense. Officially, this one is the privy of St. Stephenie Scandinavian Evangelical Lutheran Church, a place that's still standing in the wilds of Nebraska, a house of worship little more than a memory. But there it is, the church privy, almost worshipful.

There's nothing else around the place, absolutely nothing. You can't help asking why does anyone keep the privy? This one is leaning, although not as badly as the one belonging at the South Dakota schoolhouse. No one's painted it in years. It may finally go (sorry).

And then this barely visible church john, bottom left hand corner, same sort of concern. This old church is slowly being unpeeled by Great Plains' seasons. Somebody's put some work into the bell tower, armored it against the trajectory of its own slow death; but the front door needs some work and the windows are there no longer. But there the privy, out back, still standing and seemingly ready for business (yours).

Let me bring this one up a bit. It could use a paint job. That black speck in the sky may well be meadowlark. That'd be a blessing, wouldn't it? Keep you there all day.

The church is still of some use, holding down a place on the country tour of Willa Cather's childhood haunts. No one has worshiped there for years--I mean in the church--but not the privy either. For the record, should you care to research, it's the New Virginia Church privy.

And then there was this one, too--Ash Hollow State Park's old stone schoolhouse. I suppose a state park doesn't believe in destroying old things that witness to the past, but still, why keep the old privy around? It's padlocked anyway, should park visitors suddenly feel the need. It's useless.

But it's worth a smile, I guess, isn't it?

I'm a long ways from gallery show, but I do have some royal thrones. This Presidential privy satisfied the vital needs of Lynden Baines Johnson as a boy--and his family. I'm not kidding.

Somewhere I know I've got a Will Rogers outdoor john too. The guy had to have a joke or two about privies--I'll look it up.

It's not the same thing, but when it's really cold, there's always the white owl. This one is famous too--a century ago it belonged to Carrie Nation, the social activist  from Medicine Lodge, Kansas, who broke up taverns with ax on her way to national prohibition. 

And I'm not about to get all Freudian on you know, but I did want to 'fess up because for almost thirty years the Schaaps had one in our backyard too, camouflaged because it was simply the back corner of the barn. I'm serious--a two-holer too. And it would be there today if some pyromaniac hadn't decided to torch the old barn that stood out back of the house. 

So it's gone. Maybe that's why I'm spending all this time on stools. Pure nostalgia. I miss our privy. 

Not true. I'm just as human as the rest of us--and I prove it every day.

Too stinking often, in fact, these days of my dotage especially.

A little trip west--xiv

Here we went, oxen, cows, mules, horses; coaches, carriages, blue jeans, corduroys, rags, tatters, silks, satins, caps, tall hats, poverty, riches; speculators, missionaries, land-hunters, merchants; criminals escaping from justice; couples fleeing from the law; families seeking homes, the wrecks of homes seeking secrecy; gold-seekers bearing southwest to the Overland Trail; politicians looking for places in which to win fame and fortune; editors hunting opportunities for founding newspapers; adventurers on their way to everywhere; lawyers with a few books. Abolitionists going to the Border War; innocent-looking outfits carrying fugitive slaves; officers hunting escaped negroes; and most numerous of all, homeseekers "hunting country"--a nation on wheels, an empire in the commotion and pangs of birth.

Been reading, lately, a novel by an old Sioux City mayor named Herbert Quick, titled Vandemark's Folly, a story that includes some lengthy travel on the way west in the 1850s. Couldn't help but love this description, not because it's so beautiful but because it creates an image so unlike whatever imagies were in my imagination before reading; because when I think of the Oregon Trail, I can't help but imagine something akin to Ward Bond leading a mule train of, say, twenty prairie schooners all alone beneath that huge prairie sky. And that's it.

Imagine the trail full of men, women, and kids, loneliness only rarely a problem. Sometimes tens of thousands would be camping out at a place like Ash Hollow. It's no wonder that the Lakota, up atop the hillside, couldn't help believing they were being overrun by palefaces. They were. 

Always, out ahead, lay a dream so real that when the train would come up on the landmarks in western Nebraska, they could almost see Oregon or California, wherever all those folks Quick counts were headed. 

Weeks of what could be torturous, mind-numbing travel on an rolling sea of grass, here and there maybe a grove or trapper's cabin; and then, finally, up there on the western horizon, you spot something coming a day or more away, something that makes you think that maybe you are finally and truly getting somewhere.

Hope itself falls into place in line. Smiles grow where they'd been scarce as drinking water for far too long. It seems maybe this whole mad enterprise will finally amount to something.

Doesn't matter that what your eyes won't let you leave doesn't amount to much but a strange, miniature mountain. Doesn't matter that doesn't mean anything more than that you've arrived somewhere east of the mountains you know are coming. Doesn't matter that it's just rock because your imagination sculpts that solitary figure up top into a version of you that you just can't help believing is going to make it now, that your destiny is honestly and truly somewhere in view.

Something in that figure beckons, and, once again, just like it was way back in Independence, you're ready once more to go west like all the others. 

So you let the mules know. You tell them as much. You whisper in their ears.

A little trip out west--xiii

It doesn't require a lot of maintenance. That much you can say for it. There's gravel all around and through it, but the wear-and-tear has to be, at best, minimal. Somebody's got to watch the weeds, I suppose. The town of Alliance owns it today; it's theirs to win or lose. But I'm guessing Alliance taxpayers aren't mounting a revolt because the place just doesn't require much upkeep. Can't.

I'm talking, of course, about Carhenge. If you're anywhere near northwest Nebraska, Carhenge is a must-see, even though when you come by, regardless of how long you stop, you're not at all sure of what you're seeing or why you even got off the road in the first place. One way or another, you can't help wishing you'd know more about Jim Reinders, the 90+ year-old retired architect from Houston, who, thirty years ago, put it together to resemble, with uncanny exactness, Stonehenge, the ancient monument in England. 

Resemble is understatement. It's exact in design. I'm not making this up. Reinders studied Stonehenge closely when he lived in England, wrote down what he could measure of its  dimensions. Jim Reinders, who graduated from high school in Alliance, class of 1944, thought the whole goofy project would be fun. Years ago, he'd returned for a family reunion. The whole thing's there because of a family reunion. I'm serious. 

When Reinders steered his treasures to conform with the specs, the local sheriff got worried calls from locals who couldn't help wonder what on earth was happening just a few miles up the road from town, out in the middle of that field. Sheriff himself called the blame thing an eyesore.  He did. But then, Reinders' own wife went on record to say she thought the whole blame idea was flat-out stupid. 

But there it is, yet today, just outside of Alliance: Carhenge, a perfectly designed display of junk you plain can't not see. Really goofy genius. 

On August 21, 2017, when the sun's total eclipse was visible here in its perfect totality, 4000 people, including the Governor of the state of Nebraska, watched it happen right here at Carhenge. True story. People came from miles and miles around, across the continent, and called the whole event "remarkable."

And it is. Even on a bad day, it's flat-out remarkable. If you're in Alliance, whether or not you're going north out of town, make it a point to drive by. You can't just drive by.

Remarkable. I guess that'll do. Remarkable. Maybe Weird. And bizarre too--strange, kooky, and really, really peculiar. Far out. Freaky. Funky. Eccentric as all heck. Nutty. Queer. 

Call it what you will. I'll say this, having stopped not long ago. Carhenge is remarkable. Yes it is. Remarkable.

I'll leave it at that. 

Reading Mother Teresa--Discipleship

If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless. But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. Philippians 3:4–7

He’d assembled, up there at the front of the church, a museum of memorabilia, buttons and medals and trophies, honors tassels from high school grad, two diplomas and a suitably framed preaching license, a couple decades’ worth of accolades. This energetic young preacher, full of life and spirit, paraded us through his achievements with enough self-deprecation to make the trip humorous and memorable.

It was fetchingly accomplished, but the whole demonstration was rhetorical because once he’d reviewed his own life’s accomplishments – “best three-point shooter in junior high,” etc. – he bashed the whole business, saying what Paul is saying in Philippians, third chapter, that all such hoopla is meaningless, that whatsoever we might achieve in life means total zero in light of the eternity of God’s eternal love for us his own.

Memorably rhetorical, I’d put it. Memorable because it was really cute – a tongue-in-cheek recital of his own greatest hits, and rhetorical because it was a set up for the real punch line – “But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.”

“How many of us could say that?” he said, or words to that effect – that what we are, what we work for, what we want, our dreams and visions and desires – that all of that is less than zilch. How many of us would really give it all up for Christ?

He’s a young kid, full of energy, capable of breaking eardrums in his spirited enthusiasm. The church loves him and that’s wonderful.

But I think I’ve heard that sermon dozens of times before. What’s more, I don’t need a preacher to tell me that I care too much about what I do, about the very words I’m typing right now, the words you’re reading – their order, their precision, their beauty. I care a ton about what happens on this page, and I care a ton about other things as well – about my kids, my grandkids.

Our attachment to this world isn’t cheap or even transient, but I’m fully capable of asking myself, right now, whether these words are really worth my time, and – even more easily – whether the Green Bay Packers sweatshirt I just bought on e-bay (used!) is really something I needed or only something I wanted. The purpose of the sermon was to tell us to shape up our values, to align them with a confession of faith that places our love for the Lord above all else.

Here’s Mother Teresa on the purpose of the new order she was creating for the poor: “The missionary must die daily, if she wants to bring souls to God. She must be ready to pay the price He paid for souls, to walk in the way He walks in search of souls” (140).

Same chapter and verse. Same sermon.

But somehow, given her story, the gospel truth bleeds from the words and the ideas those words create. Somehow, given how she lived, that “same old, same old” has currency beyond anything I could imagine or inflict on my own.

Don’t get me wrong – that young preacher is wonderful, and there was nothing amiss in his sermon. But somehow, for me at least, reading those words from Mother Teresa creates a discourse that operates at a whole different level.

Honestly, I’m not indicting the preacher. He spoke the gospel.

But Mother Teresa really and truly lived it. She experienced death daily on the streets of Calcutta. She paid the price. She walked “in the way He walked in search of souls.”