Failures*

There's a kid gone from my class. He showed up the first day, and he was, from the get-go, someone unlike almost any kid I've ever had in a class at this college--and I've been here for 32 years. 

He played football. He was a "person of color." He was from a high school where I'm quite sure we had never recruited another kid. Geographically, he was from deep and sunny Florida. His faith, it seemed, was practiced on the gridiron; he believed in football--that's all I knew of him.

Now he's gone. He didn't believe in schoolwork. I'm not sure he believed in Jehovah, but he may have. All I know is he's gone, the only student of 46 in ENG 101 who did absolutely nothing. Once, in class, we did an exercise. He was there that day, and he handed it in. That's the only proof I have that he was in my class. I don't know if he was capable of doing the work.

I tried to be open with him. I tried to bring him into the flow of a class, joked with him--he wasn't shy. When he didn't hand in his papers, I sent him e-mails he never answered. I tried to urge him to be a part of things, told him I'd help him with his work. I'm not at all sure how much talent he had; he never showed his hand.

I heard his name often that first football game. He was a linebacker--seems to me he may led the team in tackles.

Now, he's gone, and I feel somehow as if I've failed him.

Years ago, in a high school in Phoenix where I was teaching, I once believed a young kid who told me he couldn't get his homework finished because his parents were fighting all the time. He was a gymnast, big shoulders, and when he stood before me he cried. I told him he didn't have to have to homework done--that things would get better, etc. I tried to be good, tried to be loving. It was the only thing I knew how to do.

A week later or so, a guidance counselor came down the path, laughing. "You small-town Midwest Christians," he said, "you're so blasted sweet." And then he chewed me out. Seems the crying gymnast had an operation going. "The kid's been doing that for years," the counselor said, "and when he gets away with it, it only encourages him to do it more. I don't know what I'm going to do with you." He was laughing.

So I got whacked. I feel the same today, 35 years later.

I wanted this kid in ENG 101 to succeed. I would have done anything to get him through, sans fix grades. I would have bent over backwards to give him extra time, to read his essays for him, to make sure he learns to write. I would have busted my tail, but he's gone.

He pulled some shenanigans after getting failure notices--one of them mine--and the powers that be put him on a plane and sent him home, a couple of thousand dollars poorer, I suppose, maybe five or six football games under his belt.

Now I'm kind of angry because I invested in that kid. I wanted him to do well, this kid who wasn't like most other, far-above-average Midwestern white kids in his class. I wanted him to make it.

And I don't know who to be mad at. The kid made his own decisions, didn't he? He can't be absolved. He did things he shouldn't have and didn't do the things he should--like write essays.

What about the football team that brought him here, a place he would never have thought of it if it weren't for the gridiron? But football at least gave him the chance to get an education, right?--that's what the administration would say, I'm sure.

That having been said, he was, from day #1, a lousy bet at this college, a place he'd never heard of in a state he likely didn't know from Ohio or Idaho. He'd probably never even been close to a small Iowa town and likely never smelled the peculiar roses in the air. The high school he'd come from--like the one I used to teach in--was probably twice as big as the college he'd found himself in. He was a bad bet at this little Calvinist school on the edge of the Great Plains. He was bad bet right from the get go.

But I invested, and--dang it!--I feel bad having lost him. I feel as if I've failed him.

Maybe I'm just another one of those Midwestern bleeding-hearts. Maybe so.

I'm much older now--I'm 35 years older than I was when I got chewed out for my Christian idealism.

I'm sorry he's gone. Maybe I should just be happy that silly idealism is still here--still getting a beating maybe, but still there.

______________________

*Maybe ten or twelve years old, from the very first year of Dordt College/University football.

More rallies!!!

Whether it ends on Tuesday or continues for another four years, the Trump era will be spoken of as a time in the history of these United States like none other. His incredible, against-all-odds victory over Hillary Clinton four years ago shocked even himself, if reports are accurate. Suddenly, America had a President who, like a 16-year-old locker-room stud, had bragged about what he could do to and with women. He'd made a life in casinos and professional wrestling extravaganzas, starred in a TV show during the era of "reality television," which wasn't, and turned over millions of dollars in penalty for a university that was textbook sham.

In real estate, he established a reputation as a crook. His modus opereindi was to take disgruntled workers to court, where he'd bleed them so dry they'd throw in the towel. He was not well-liked in New York, his hometown; but he made himself a tabloid hero whose sex life seemed a game. No candidate for President was ever as poorly trained. He was--and he remains--a textbook narcissist whose passion for feeding his ego knows no bounds.

He courted evangelical Christians--of all people!--who already had a penchant for believing that everyone hates them, or at least everyone in political power. Evangelicals were--and are--unlikely Trump-ettes, but they saw in him a man who would deliver them from baby-killers. He promised he would, and did, by God: when the opportunities arose to replace three Supreme Court judges--three in three years!--he found established, respected judges whose worldview included significant intellectual resistance to Roe v. Wade. 

Donald Trump was never a religious man; whether or not he is today is arguable. The evangelicals he has to have to win again claim him to be "a baby Christian." Or maybe they're just happy that he begins his rallies with prayer. That'll do it. Once upon a time, in the middle of social unrest right outside his own front door, he cleared the neighborhood with tear gas in order to march across the street and hold a Bible high above his head in a photo op so crass even his followers winced.

He rode to political prominence on racism--no political figure on the road to the 2016 election was as brazen as he was in advancing the notion that Barack Hussein Obama was born abroad and thus was not eligible to hold the office of President. He touted "birtherism" until he didn't need to, and never apologized when it was over. 

But then he never apologized for anything he'd ever done, and told anyone who would listen that that's the way he wanted to live; he never asked forgiveness, he said, because he'd never needed to. No single statement he'd ever uttered could have been more contrary to the truth all those evangelicals would claim to preach. He didn't stand in need of a Savior. Put it this way: he as much as claimed he was without sin. Still, they loved him.

With just a few days to go in the runup to the 2020 election, he is doing more of the same, cramming his schedule with fan club rallies that attract thousands of worshippers, at a point in time when his own White House health experts warn people by all means to avoid exactly the kinds of crowds he creates, the vast majority of them standing up, jammed together, unmasked. 

He puts thousands, even millions of his admirers at horrendous physical risk, in the midst of the fog created by a pandemic the world hasn't seen for a century, a pandemic that has already killed over one million victims out of 44 million cases worldwide. In Wisconsin yesterday, he spoke to a SRO crowd while the state set a record for new cases of the virus. At this moment, 227, 697 Americans have already died. More by the time you're reading this.

He doesn't care. His schedule is full of more rallies, full right up to Tuesday. 

No President in the history of the democracy has ever dealt out the bullshit like he has and continues to do. Here's a tweet from 11 hours ago:

If you vote for Biden, your kids will not be in school, there will be no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgiving, no Christmas, and no Fourth of July!

He doesn't care. He's superman--without a conscience.

Vote him out. 

Revelation

"Some of them just got too big for their britches." 

People said that occasionally, that some farmers who went down during the Farm Crisis of the 1980s, went in too big too fast and got blown off the land by a disaster in the markets. Didn't matter what you were up to either--cattle, hogs, corn or soybeans, all of them fell off a cliff and took a thousand farmers with them. Most of those went down on the coattails of good, strong advice from bankers who were more than willing to hand out cheap money as long as the markets were strong and land prices up there waaaay high. When all of tanked, it became impossible for lots of operators to watch the sun rise.

Lots of them were looking for nothing more than having enough of an operation to pass along to their sons. They got big because they wanted the best for the family. But it didn't matter how right and noble and thoughtful their motives were; whole operations were mortgaged on land whose value dropped off the table, and hit the floor. People went down. It wasn't pleasant.

Then again, there were other farmers too, small-time operations who'd basically got the same work done in the very same way for decades, farmers who didn't grow, didn't prosper, didn't get too big for their britches, because they'd never really wanted all that much out of the operation in the first place. You know?--if there's good fishing to be done out there on the Missouri, well, maybe I can wait a week to get the corn in.

Some of those--many of those--went down too.

The family we were visiting that night were, basically, one of those. They were losing their farm, but people in the know--old-timers in the region and some of the elders in the consistory--were saying in very hushed tones that Benny never had been much of a farmer, not even in good times.

His wife was a queen though, did far too much the milking herself when the old man wasn't around, far too much of the farm work, period. All very hush-hush. Nobody was gleeful Benny was losing his farm, and no one in the church council on which I served back then did much but shake their heads. 

We were out there at Benny's farm that night, two of us, as directed by the council to offer, well, support. The church wasn't going to bale him out, couldn't really. Besides, in Benny's case, you couldn't just blame the dang bank. The Farm Crisis took out good people, hard workers, dedicated farmers. But it took out Bennys too, men who, you know, got by, you might say, during the fat years.

I wish I could remember the house, but I can't. Because I don't, I assume you need simply to see it was an old farmhouse with pint-sized rooms and walls that were beginning to wander a bit out of plumb. Kitchen floor creaks some. Fridge full of Christmas cards. Fluorescents over the table where we sat. 

I was a kid. The office of elder implies age, doesn't it?--an "elder" should be one. I wasn't. What did I know? Not much. Two of us were sent by the consistory we were part of to be a presence, to pray with them in their hour of need. This was the way church worked.

"And then they tell me I shouldn't drink the water--nitrates, you know?" Benny growled, a small, bald man in a collared shirt I suppose he'd worn special because the elders were coming. "'You get it checked?' one of those DNR guys asks me. I told him I'd just learned to live with a gut ache."

I didn't feel like an elder. I didn't understand what people meant by "the farm crisis," didn't really know if we were in it or not. It was like a pandemic in a way: if you didn't have the virus, some instinct to live made you wonder whether truly anyone did. I didn't know the people either. I didn't grow up in the church I was serving.

In one of the stretches of silence that night, Bennie's wife leaned back and picked a book off a stack of things beside the phone, put it down on the kitchen table between us. "I'm loving this, Jim," she said, or something similar, and she pointed at a book of devotions I'd written for children. "And the kids like it too. Been a blessing."

I'd been asked to write devotions for kids, nothing I'd ever planned, nothing I'd ever dreamed of doing. I had no aspirations for preaching. I wasn't fulfilling some calling I'd been preparing to accomplish for years. It was a job. I got asked. I liked it, loved it, in fact; but it wasn't a calling. Art!--now that was a calling. 

All of that was forty years ago, mid-'80s. Not long ago on the obituary page of the local paper, I saw her picture, read her name. Truth be told, she wasn't all that much older than I am. The obituary didn't say how she'd died, but leaving that farm, I'm sure, didn't somehow bring about the end of what some people might have called a hard life. Then again, maybe not. There was, after all, all that fishing.

When I saw her picture, I recognized her and remembered her telling me that some things I wrote in a book of meds for kids brought her joy, maybe even a little peace, just a few words I typed up out of our basement had become some kind of shelter in the time of storm.

To be told that, that night, was somehow shocking and still is. When I saw her picture, I remembered. That night, I got worked over--I got used somehow in that woman's life in a way that was, when we walked into that kitchen, totally unforeseen. Long before I had been an elder, I was one, I suppose, installed into office and put to work by none other than the hand of Almighty. It seemed to me, that night, that I'd had nothing to do with it at all.

My McDonalds senior coffee means I'm elderly today, but no longer an elder. Still, I can't help thinking that there were moments around that table that may well have been among the best things I'd ever done or will do, and I had no clue.

Not long ago, here I sat on our couch, the obituaries open in front of me. Strangely enough, I couldn't help smiling. 

I hope that's okay.

Standing Bear of the Poncas -- iv

It’s near to nine, the evening of May 2, 1879. The courtroom is standing room only on the second long day of an explosive trial that pits a weary band of indigenous people against a massive law-and-order government.

The Omaha courtroom features the famous Indian fighter Brigadier General George Crook, who often took to the military field in buckskin, civilian togs. But today he's donned his full-dress uniform. Just three years earlier the nation’s celebrations at its own big centennial commemoration were muted by bloodletting at Little Big Horn.

But another man in that room captures even more attention than the famous general. An eagle feather dangles from his braided hair. His shirt is bright blue. He wears blue leggings and deerskin moccasins, and a red and blue blanket is flung over his shoulders. His bear-claw necklace hangs around a brass medallion featuring Thomas Jefferson. He could have worn white man’s clothing, but Standing Bear wore his own full-dress uniform.

He and his people were rarely in Omaha courtrooms. They were Indians—they had no rights. Their being in that packed courtroom was rare, unheard of, but dozens of spectators had been reading local papers and knew the story. They wanted to bear witness. 

Rather than rounding up the Ponca and herding them like longhorns back to Warm Country again, General Crook had plotted a new and radical scenario. In a secret meeting, he’d urged a local attorney to obtain a writ of habeas corpus in defense of the Poncas, a move that could usher Standing Bear and his people into court for the very first time. Crook’s mind and soul had determined there had to be a better way than more bloody war.

It’s late—after nine. Lengthy speeches have prolonged proceedings; the case has stimulated passion: should the Ponca be allowed to move back to the Niobrara, their precious homeland, or should the government send them back once again to the place where all of the nation’s indigenous would, by design, eventually live? Is Standing Bear free and his people free, or are they not?

Standing Bear raised his hand up, looked at it patiently before speaking, then started his story, speaking in the his Ponca language, translated by Susanne LaFlesche, "Bright Eyes" to many, an artist and writer from the Omaha people.

“That hand is not the color of yours,” he said to the judge in a deeply pitched voice, “but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain.” It was an extraordinary moment, a Native man speaking for himself and for his freedom in a court of law. “That blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours,” he said, and then uttered a determined testimony: “I am a man,” he told the judge and the hushed courtroom. “The same God made us both.”

He described a dream. He and his wife and child climbed a bluff that overlooked the swift running water of the Niobrara River and the graves of his fathers. Then he told the courtroom that in the dream, only one man stood between him and his homeland. He faced the judge, pointed. “You are that man,” he said.

The silence lay deep in that room. Then, someone started to clap, then to cheer. Many joined.

General George Crook, in full-dress uniform, Brigadier General of the Department of the Platte, commander at Fort Omaha, the government's man, stood from his chair at the front, walked across the courtroom floor to Standing Bear, and shook his hand.

Ten days later, the judge offered his ruling. He said that never before had he adjudicated a case marked by such extremes: a people “weak and unlettered, and generally despised” on one side, and the government of “one of the most powerful, most enlightened, and most christianized nations of modern times” on the other. 

The decision, every word of it, appeared in the Omaha Daily Herald, then in the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Daily Tribune. “Out in Omaha at least,” the New York paper said, “the idea has come to the surface at last, that an Indian is a man with human rights.”

And forthwith, Standing Bear and his people, carrying with them the remains of Bear Shield, Standing Bear’s son, were free to go, free to return to the land of the people. They were free to be human.

Standing Bear of the Poncas -- iii

 

"Warm County," the Poncas called it--Indian Territory, what would become Oklahoma—didn’t sit well with the Poncas. The place didn’t feel at all like home and offered no rest for the weary, just more despair. The people were weary and hungry when they arrived and stayed weary and hungry for months, unable to work.

The government promised wagons, then didn’t distribute them, afraid the Poncas would get aboard and go back home. The government provided plows, but no oxen; and the Poncas’ horses were skin and bones. The people were living in tents, distanced from each other by the agent, who thought keeping the people apart would discourage their plotting some dark-of-night escape. Salty water all around made them to vomit. A year after their arrival in "Warm Country," they’d lost faith in the government and abandoned hope altogether.

“I stayed till 158 of my people had died,” Standing Bear explained later. “Then I ran away with thirty of my people—men and women and children. Some of the children were orphans.”

Mid-afternoon, January 2, 1879, thirty Poncas and three wagons left Warm Country amid sub-zero temperatures that fell into even deeper cold every hour.

Just a few weeks before, Standing Bear had lost his first-born, Bear Shield, a young man, his third child to die since they’d been forced to leave their homes and their lands. In the throes of death, Bear Shield had begged his father to bury his remains back in the land of his grandfathers’, just off the banks of Running Water, the Niobrara River. “I promised him I would,” he told people thereafter. “I could not refuse the dying request of my boy.” A trunk in one of those wagons that pulled out of Warm Country that January afternoon held the fastidiously dressed body of his boy.

The agent stayed holed up in the January cold while those thirty Poncas began the long trip back home. Six days passed before he even recognized they were gone. Six days.

The landscape from eastern Oklahoma north through Kansas and Nebraska alters only when cottonwoods rise in the valleys of occasional rivers that crossed the Poncas’ path and offered the only sustained shelter from icy winds. What money they’d taken with them, and what commodities they’d packed along, were quickly exhausted, forcing them to beg to stay alive. Homesteaders, most of them as poor as Standing Bear’s people, only rarely didn’t or wouldn’t feed them and give them shelter.

On March 4, 62 days after they’d left Indian Territory, Susette LeFlesch and her Omaha friends were apprised that the Poncas had set up camp some distance west of the Omahas, where they were camped, regaining strength for the last push home.

The Omaha and the Poncas were relatives. Between them there was blood and a great storehouse of good will. Planting season was about to begin, so the Omaha, who couldn't help but recognize their cousins' condition, offered the Ponca some open land to grow crops just as they had farther north beside the Niobrara.

But thousands of miles away, Washington was not interested in tolerating the humiliation the rag-tag Poncas had inflicted on their authority by flouting the government's demands. This time, carrying out their original orders, bringing them back, once more, to Warm Country fell to Brigadier General George Crook, the government's premiere Indian fighter. Crook’s had done distinguished service in the Civil War, as well as in Indian wars throughout the west. At the time, General Crook’s residence was Fort Omaha, where you can still visit his house today.

Crook had always been his own man, sometimes going off for days all by himself while his troops were on mission he’d leading. But his military record read like none other.

As commanded by Washington, Gen. Crook and his troops traveled north and west from Fort Omaha to the Ponca encampment, west of the Omaha Reservation, and demanded Standing Bear’s people return, under arrest, with him.

They were worn down by their long, mid-winter pilgrimage. They told General Crook they'd rather die than return to Warm Country, but they followed his demands and returned to the fort at Omaha.

No one—not Standing Bear or any of his people, not their friends the Omahas, not any of the settlers who'd helped them, not even Brigadier General George Crook—no one would have or could have begun to guess what would happen next.

________________________

Tomorrow: The Trial

Reading Mother Teresa -- Possession

Oh, that my ways were steadfast in obeying your decrees!

Then I would not be put to shame when I consider all your commands.

I will praise you with an upright heart as I learn your righteous laws.

I will obey your decrees; do not utterly forsake me.

How can a young person stay on the path of purity?

By living according to your word.

I seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands. Psalm 119:5–10 

According to the editor of her letters and diaries, Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, Mother Teresa believed that in obeying her superiors in the Sisters of Loreto, she was, in fact, obeying Jesus, in “submitting to their commands, she was submitting to Christ Himself” (31) is the way he puts it.

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

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

I can’t imagine it was easy to believe that one’s superiors spoke for the Lord – then again, maybe it was easy to believe, just hard to live. That’s not an altogether human problem either.

But somehow it makes sense that Mother Teresa would believe what she did. If you’re going want to be the bride of Christ, if you’re going to commit, via something as permanent as an oath, to live for him always, every second of the day – no time off, no B and B getaways – then it seems to me that some kind of infrastructure to that commitment is, in fact, essential. In her case, that scaffolding was created by the church – or The Church.

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

It just doesn’t happen. Jonathan Edwards, the great revivalist Calvinist, claims he suffered long, anguished moments of silence in his “Personal Narrative.” Emerson tried to lift anyone who’d hear him into bright and shiny moments of revelation, but he certainly didn’t stay there himself (read “Experience” sometime). Even Edgar Allen Poe wanted his bizarre verse to lift us, at least for a moment, from our rotten, stinking world. But only for a moment.

Abraham Kuyper’s most famous devotional work, To Be Near Unto God, is all about helping his loyal followers find their way, at least, to glimpses of glory. Glimpses.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only by his doing. Only by grace.

I’m sure she believed that too.

Standing Bear of the Poncas -- ii

The story of Standing Bear belongs in a category with story of Rosa Parks, a great American story of freedom. 

I'm telling it in four segments. 

KWIT, in Sioux City, is telling the story in conjunction with the Avery Brothers, who are using their billboards to build community by drawing attention to the Native American history of the region.]

____________________________

Forget every cavalry vs. Indian show you've ever seen—get it out of your consciousness. The Ponca story is not like that.

Just imagine. Once the official from Washington sensed trouble, he let the military brass at Ft. Randall know he needed an army to push the Ponca to Indian Territory. Remember, there’d never, ever been a hostile problem with the Poncas. They’d signed a treaty sixty years before, so when the mounted cavalry from Ft. Randall came riding into the Ponca villages, no Ponca had ever seen the army before. Can you imagine?

The wailing that whole night was robust. No one wanted to leave. The next morning, in come these fighting men with guns and swords.

When a lawyer from nearby Niobrara came by and confronted the official, told him taking the Poncas away was a miscarriage of justice, he was told Washington’s plans were written in stone. “The dignity of the government demands that it should go ahead.” What he meant was it would look bad now for the government to back down.

So 500 Poncas, warned there’d be no food if they refused to go, spent a night crying so loud their neighbors heard the wailing. Then, scared and hungry, they packed up their earthly belongings on wagons, and, readied themselves. Standing Bear stood firm: “This land is ours,” he said. “It belongs to us. You have no right to take it.”

About that, Standing Bear was wrong. Washington could do what it wanted because in the United States of America of 1877, Native Americans weren’t Americans at all. They weren’t people. They weren’t even human beings.

On May 19, after unending rain, the column of Poncas crossed the rain-swollen Niobrara and headed south, their military escort with them.

Abundant tears fell on this horrific trek. Already on the second day, beset by relentless rain and cold, a child died and was buried the next day in the village of Creighton, then the Ponca marched 25 miles to Neligh, where, once again, a child, stricken with pneumonia died. A carpenter in town fashioned a casket and a cross was set down on the grave, where the father of the little girl made the townspeople promise they would care for the grave. “I may never see it again,” he told them. “Care for it for me.”

All these years later the grave of a little girl named White Buffalo Girl, is still blanketed with fresh flowers, the only decorated burial spot in the entire Laurel Hill Cemetery. Two children were lost in five days.

The rains continued. The cold held them icily in its unforgiving hand. No doctors accompanied them. No medicine was to be found.

On June 6, after Standing Bear and his wives buried yet another child, Prairie Flower, a storm arose, “such as I never before experienced,” the agent wrote in his journal. It was a tornado. “Some of the people were taken up by the wind and carried as much as three hundred yards without touching the ground,” he wrote. Amid the crying and lament, he said, “I earnestly hope to be spared any similar experience in the future.”

By the time the Ponca reached Indian Territory, they people had crossed two states, some aboard wagons, many of them walking. Nine people had died. They’d reached their destination, a place achingly far from home, unlike anything they’d ever experienced, pushed on to land already owned by another tribe, who weren’t even told about the Poncas coming. Heat and humidity was sweltering.

The grand plan of the United States of America was to place all the Native people in a region where they would be together, as if all tribes held carbon copy cultures. The list goes on and on: Otoe, Missouri, Wichita, Pawnee, Kaw, Osage, Cheyenne, Apache, and more, all pushed together in a region General William Sherman once claimed to be “a parcel of land set aside for Indians, surrounded by thieves.”

They were in the way of progress, America’s Manifest Destiny.

Standing Bear of the Poncas -- i

[Would you care to see it, this statue of the Ponca chief Standing Bear is on display in the nation's Capitol, where it stands among a host of other notables. Standing Bear was a civil rights advocate long before he or anyone else knew what exactly that meant. Through his intense commitment to the land of his forefathers, he was able to exact American citizenship for himself and his people at a time when Indians were thought to be wards of the state, what they had been since the first white man came to the continent. 

The story of Standing Bear belongs in a category with story of Rosa Parks. It is a great American story. 

I'm telling it in four segments. You can listen to this first chapter here: 

https://www.kwit.org/post/story-standing-bear-part-1 .

KWIT, in Sioux City, is telling the story in conjunction with the Avery Brothers, who have used their billboards to draw attention to the Native American history of the region.]

To be sure, there was a good reason for the Poncas to cut the deal they did with the strange emissary who showed up one day from Washington. He’d come to let them know that “the Great Father” wanted the Poncas to move from their homeland on the Missouri River, to Indian Country, what would become Oklahoma, to a place where, he claimed, they’d be safe from raids by larger and more warlike neighbors.

That argument was, for the Ponca, not total garbage. The Poncas were warriors, but they were few in number when compared to the Brule Sioux. What’s more, their culture was not as nomadic. They’d put down roots on the Niobrara River, literally and figuratively, planted crops long before white men determined agriculture was what they wanted all Native people to do.

The Poncas had no desire to leave home, but escaping suffering was nothing to sneeze at, so they cut a deal. It was January, 1872. Supplies were scarce, as was food, so they told this stranger that they’d agree to his demands if, first, ten Ponca chiefs could go south to see if it was a place they could abide.

If it was a good land, they might agree, but only if they could visit Washington themselves to talk with the Great Father about a move they didn’t want to make.

What those 10 chiefs found in Indian Territory was ground impossible to farm, and residents who seemed to live without hope. “We did not wish to sink as low as they seemed to be,” Standing Bear, one of the ten chiefs said. We’re not moving.

That’s when they were told they had no choice.

In a hotel room in a border town in Kansas, Standing Bear decided they were leaving Indian Territory, bound for home, directionless. “Let us go anyway,” he told the others. That night, eight chiefs left the two others, both sick, and walked on railroad tracks north, confident of somehow finding their way back to the Niobrara, two entire states away.

Eighteen days later they reached the Nebraska border, feet so bloody they left footprints on the floor of the Otoe tribal agent. Their suffering had been immense. It was late March before they reached the Omahas, their relatives and friends.

On March 30, 1872, Chief Standing Bear stood in the offices of the Sioux City Daily Journal and handed the editor a letter recounting their suffering and their unjust fate. The editor published that long letter the next day and told his readers that the Ponca’s story demanded attention from “any persons in this country who believe that every human being, however humble, is entitled to the same justice claimed for themselves.”

Other neighbors wrote letters directly to the President, protesting the Ponca’s treatment and the demand that they remove themselves from their traditional home and move to Indian Territory, a place that looked nothing like the earth where their ancestors lay. That letter recounted the Poncas’s painful, 500-mile journey across rivers and streams in March. We “have been thirty days getting back as far as the Omahas, hungry, tired, shoeless, footsore, and sad at heart. Please answer at once, for we are in trouble,” their letter to the President said.

The answer they received was waiting for them when they returned to the Niobrara. That man had asked his Washington superiors himself. “Removal of the Poncas will be insisted upon,” he was told.

Soon, painfully, those eight chiefs and 500 Ponca were told in no uncertain terms that the question of whether they would live in Indian Territory had been determined. All of them, young and old, every Ponca in the villages along the Niobrara River—they all had to leave for Indian Territory. Those chiefs had already suffered their own “trail of tears,” but there would be yet another, this one much worse, much harder, much bigger, and far more heart-rending.

"Why They Loved Him"

It's a provocative title, intriguing, because to me, understanding how it is that good, good people find Donald Trump so appealing remains the mystery of the Trump era. I like Joe Biden. I voted for him (by mail), but the truth is, I could have been faithful to any number of Democratic candidates this time around. I was pleased to hear every one of them speak.

But I'm not madcap bonkers about Biden, not as crazed as Trump's panting fans, not obsessed or bewitched, willing to risk Covid just to welcome him mask-lessly on a cold airport tarmac. What on earth makes Bible-toting evangelicals buy into a grotesque storyline that a cabal of heinous Democrats and RHINOs, plus some Hollywood star types, and any number of "elites" (of whom I must be one, I guess) gather together ritually to kill children and drink their blood? QAnon anyone?

But let's leave the madness out. Why do ordinary people slavishly pull on their MAGA caps or hoist Trump flags for a Trump flotilla? On that subject I read because I just don't understand.

An opinion piece in the New York Times some time ago made some limited sense. It doesn't explain the evangelical swoon, but abortion IS the Trump card there--and I understand. I don't fall in line, but I understand. If Democrats are baby-killers, as my five-year-old son said of Obama in 2008 as he crawled into my lap, I get that. I don't agree, but I do understand.

In "Why They Loved Him," Farah Stockman, an editor at the Times, took a close look at a man named Tim, who, like dozens of men and women she'd interviewed, lost his job and his way of life by way of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, when thousands of blue-collar jobs went south to Mexico and made fatter cats out of men who had been loaded already.

"A machinist named Tim," she claims, "carried his steelworker union card in his wallet for years after the factory closed, just to remind himself who he was." NAFTA didn't simply steal his job, it robbed him of something far more important--identity. "Tim grew up in a union household. His dad had been an autoworker; his grandfather, a coal miner." He lost his job, AND he lost his way of life.

That Tim would drop his own, generations'-old commitments to the Democratic party, a party that, he said, once stood up for the little guy, and instead surf a big orange wave behind a man with weird hair who promised to bring those jobs to boarded-up main streets all over the rust belt makes good sense. Men and women like Tim have every right to say, "Give me back my life." It wasn't only the living wage those steelworkers wanted returned, it was a loving community, a way of life that gives meaning and order to any of their/our lives.

What resonated with me was that union card, something he couldn't and wouldn't toss. Somehow that union card meant more to him than the unemployed or underemployed guy he saw when he looked in a mirror. Enter Donald J. Trump.

I've been helping a World War II nurse--she's a century old--write her memoirs. She's Lakota. She tells me that the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty essentially "unmanned" her grandfather. When he signed onto the treaty inaugurating the reservation system, everything changed. No longer would the buffalo roam through the heart of their lives, their culture. As long as he could remember, he'd been nomadic--the Lakota had never cities, even towns. Reservations changed everything.

To understand the significant social problems of our reservation, my Lakota nurse told me, start there--with a way of life entirely erased by way of an inky thumbprint, a way of life ended forever.

What Trump offered Tim and so many others is hope, as Stockman says, "false hope, but false hope is better than no hope at all." 

But it was false hope, as Tim--I do hope--has now perhaps come to understand.

The title of the article takes the past tense. In two weeks, we'll see.

Morning Thanks--not just any Puritan preacher

Somehow, or so it seems, this portrait catches what I can't help but believe was the true Jonathan Edwards, the justly famous Puritan divine and one-time President of Princeton University. His eyes seem fixed, but there's nothing haughty or haunted about them. He appears not to be hectoring anyone, but listening, something only accomplished by capable men and women.

His lips are thin, which might signify the kind of tightness one always associates with Puritans; but they're not arched into either smile or frown. Instead, his whole face--his eyes are slightly widened--makes him appear healthily attentive. He wants to know, wants to learn. If Puritanism is the sneaking suspicion that someone somewhere is having a good time, as H. L. Mencken so famously said, this Edwards at least does not appear "Puritannical."

And he wasn't, though he was. For better and/or for worse, he will always be perceived as preacher who ranted on "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," perhaps the only sermon right there in the canon of every high school anthology of American lit. And "Sinners" was his--of that there's no doubt. Edwards, more than any other Puritan prelate, awakened spirituality in the hearts and souls of his countrymen, and he did it, oddly enough, in a soft, almost feminine voice. He was no Billy Sunday, no Billy Graham, no Jerry Falwell. He didn't preach like a locker-room coach, or attempt to mimic the greatest pulpiteer of his time, George Whitefield, whose traveling salvation show packed city squares up and down the colonies.

The story goes that when he actually preached that sermon, parishioners might have found it difficult to hear, so quiet and unassuming was Edwards' voice. However, some claim that no one couldn't listen because the quality of his ideas--"There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God"--somehow resonated with the sleepy moral consciences of New Englanders who, in their quest for material gain, hadn't quite yet lost the cultural memory of what they all still recognized as their own "total depravity."

And thus, Jonathan Edwards "awakened" American's first "Great Awakening," which explains why the quintessential Calvinist theologian--none better during or immediately after his era--so honorably sits on display (or at least did, some years ago) in the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. Quite simply, Edwards lit 'em up big time. From the pulpit, he lacked the crusading presence of a George Whitefield, but not the theological fervency, and he surpassed absolutely everyone is pure intellect.

As a brand new high school English teacher, way back when, I tried turning my classroom into Puritan meeting house, men on one side, women on the other. I borrowed a choir robe from the music department, put a cross up on the podium (probably not a Puritan affectation!), and told the kids that when I'd enter, I wanted them in austere silence before I'd deliver the most dramatic moments of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which I then did, yelling and screaming like a third-rate tub-thumper.

I had it all wrong. Edwards didn't scream out the horrors he wanted to use to introduce his people to their own dark and sinful selves, he let what he said do that work, rather than how he said it.

When I met with a bunch of them last year, a half-century later, some of them brought it up and broke into laughter. That's okay. They weren't derisive. What's soothed my soul was that they remembered the wild-eyed preacher at all.

I wanted them to understand this moment in their own American history because it was so powerfully formative, even if "the Puritan era" can be and has been blamed for just about every social ill from which this culture of ours suffers. And, I suppose, I wanted them to understand me, their first-year teacher, who, at 22 years old, was still wrestling with the twin towers of Edwards' faith, and mine--the sovereignty of God and the depravity of man.

That's a biggie, whether we're talking 17th or 21st century. 

How about this?--Jonathan Edwards on Donald J. Trump. Oh my, that's a sermon I'd attend.

This morning, this old Calvinist gives thanks for a theologian of towering intellect and significance in the American story, a famous Calvinist divine named the Reverend Jonathan Edwards.

The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.

Been a while since I've heard a sermon like that. Maybe that's good. Maybe not.

Monkey Mind and Mine

 

Monkey Mind

When I was a child I had what is called an inner life.
For example, I looked at that girl over there
In the second aisle of seats and wondered what it was like
To have buck teeth pushing out your upper lip
And how it felt to have those little florets the breasts
Swelling her pajama top before she went to sleep.
Walking home, I asked her both questions
And instead of answering she told her mother
Who told the teacher who told my father.
After all these years, I can almost feel his hand
Rising in the room, the moment in the air of his decision,
Then coming down so hard it took my breath away,
And up again in that small arc
To smack his open palm against my butt.
I'm a slow learner
And still sometimes I'm sitting here wondering what my father
Is thinking, blind and frail and eighty-five,
Plunged down into his easy chair half the night
Listening to Bach cantatas. I know he knows
At every minute of every hour that he's going to die
Because he told my mother and my mother told me.
I didn't cry or cry out or say I'm sorry.
I lay across his lap and wondered what
He could be thinking to hit a kid like that.

 by Steve Orlen, from The Elephant's Child: New and Selected Poems

This poem too--I like it, not because I have some memory of abuse, because I don't. But this Writers Almanac poem opens up the crap shoot that growing up is--really, that life is. Who knows what sticks in our minds and souls? Nobody. Nor does anyone know why. On the basis of some undefinable permutations, some impressions and perceptions from each of our pasts simply won't die but knock around in our conscious minds as if they had their own life, which they apparently do.

 Little more than a week ago--and I wrote it here--I got up early in the morning in an unfamiliar cabin and heard, from my own feet, the sound of my grandfather's slippers shuffling over the kitchen linoleum in our house fifty years ago. My grandfather died when I was six. In what crack or crevice did that memory hide for all those years? And why did it stay? 

He knew one joke, or at least the Grandpa in my mind knew only one joke. He likely knew more, but my five-year old memory held on to just one. So a couple walked into a railroad station, looking to get away. "Two to Dulut'," the guy says. The station manager thought the guy was kidding. "Well, tee, teetle, ee." He thought that was blindingly funny, and I laughed along, obligingly.

There's nothing particularly untoward about those memories or my grandfather, but the sound of his slippers was there as if I'd just heard it yesterday. It just happens that last week, for the first time in my life, I was in Dulut'.  Of course, Grandpa's knee-slapper showed up. 

Nothing about his funeral has stayed. I have no memory of it. Or do I? Perhaps some morning, brushing my teeth, some artifact will emerge from whatever primordial ooze holds the catalog of our strange impressions and perceptions. 

In "Monkey Mind," some thorny issues of a whacking he have never really left the narrator's consciousness, even become obsessive. He remembers being swatted unjustly for what he's always assumed was simple, childhood curiosity. Made no sense. Today, he's old enough to understand all of that, but he can't forget, he can't. The whacking has hung in there from the day it happened so long ago, even though today his father is dying.

I'm a victim of all of this too. I suppose we all are. Not only that, but I can't help but wonder what injustices I inflicted on my own children--and have likewise forgotten. The old man likely remembers nothing of the events which haunt the kid. What don't I know about what I said or did when my children were simply curious--or simply kids? Maybe I'd rather not know.

A mind's storehouse of memory is a curious mystery. Even a little scary. What makes "Monkey Mind" a poem, what makes it art, is not it's soaring beauty. This morning this odd little story awakened in me an otherwise forgotten moment of my own life, as, I'm guessing, it did yours.

"Monkey Mind" belongs to Stephen Orlen, but to me and, if I'm right, to you too. It's ours. 

That makes it good.

Reading Mother Teresa--Possession

“Hear my prayer, Lord, 

listen to my cry for help; 

do not be deaf to my weeping. 

I dwell with you as a foreigner, 

a stranger, as all my ancestors were.” Psalm 39:12 

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

He likely had a family background in the old Dutch conventicles, those hotbed small groups where intense devotions ran so emotion-laden that their house meetings became, in no small measure, the church. Some people believe that house churches are the wave of the future. Good night, they have a history, a past – intense meditations for intense sinners whose long prayers in an intimate circle stretched on endlessly. Grandpa had a heavy dose of that.

Back then, in the early years of the 20th century, I don’t think he was unusual. In most churches there were more Harry Dirkses per capita, I’m sure, than there are today. That kind of exhausting, abject confession promised and likely delivered abundant blessings. After all, the finest means by which to glory – seriously! – in the marvelous grace of God almighty was to lie prostrate on the floor in abject selflessness. Grace, for even lowly me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wow. Let me tell you, on that one I’m in the cheap seats watching--even maybe, once in a while, wishing too.

What you see is what you get

 

The thing about October is that, on a good day, just about everything is beautiful. Okay, part of the reason this shot strikes me as attractive is lighting. Had the day been rain besotted, had the woods not been mottled by dark and lurking shadows, this plain old maple leaf would likely draw nothing but flies. If that. But the sky was clear, the sun was bright, and the season itself provided that glorious rusty yellow. 

Or this. A bouquet of aspens, tall as naked ladies, a bevy of them amid some maples, all of it way down there beneath us somewhere.

By rights--or so it seems--the autumn of the year shouldn't be so beautiful because if this shot witnesses anything, it's death and decay--"death and decay in all around I see," but, gulp, it couldn't be more beautiful. People go "up north" almost any time of year, but fall trips call out the thousands because in October the world is an art gallery, full of masterwork accomplished by the Master Artist. 

I forget how the line goes, but it's operative here too--"success is 90 percent sweat and ten percent talent" (maybe the numbers are off, but you get the picture). Photography requires some skill, but the most significant component of any slough of great pictures is being in the right place at the right time. And what I'm saying is that, in a bright October sun, plunked right in the middle of the woods in some northern clime, you're there. You've got to try really hard to screw up on autumnal glory. Just fire away. 

Here's a shot I knew the moment I looked was going to be a winner.

So let's review the facts. It's October, the leaves on those hardwoods absolutely could not be more flashy--factor numero uno. Secondo?--the lake is calm tonight. If there were any more of a ripple, this shot wouldn't be this shot. Three: the sun is dying in the west, bathing the world in its own glorious gold glory. Four: I'm there. I'm not inside the cabin reading my email.

Five: the distance between me and the other side of the lake is perfect. If the channel was just twice as wide, the stretch of all that glorious color wouldn't cover the water like it does. Six: I got a camera in my hand. 

What I'm saying is that beauty is only partially in the eye of the beholder. You see it when you're permitted to. I was, right here, outside a cabin at a Minnesota lake, the passive recipient of grace. Sure, I had a camera, even if it was only my phone), but the Creator of heaven and earth served me up this delicious autumnal salad. All I had to do is click the shutter.

Fall is a blessing, the grandest momentary reprieve we could ever be granted. How sweet it is of the Creator to soften the blow, how tenderhearted. If I were standing right there today, just a few days and some untidy winds ago, what that camera would see would be absolutely nothing like this. 

That's the story. "Not what my hands have done can save my guilty soul"--or something like that. It is, really--it's very much like grace itself, all this beauty is. 

Yesterday, it was there in spades. Today, it's gone.

For just a while, thank the Lord.

Father Baraga

You've got to go a long ways to find a sandy beach along Minnesota's north shore. On almost any beach, the hard and humpy stuff roiling beneath your feet looks and feels a whole lot like lava--which it is, surprising as that may be with not a mountain in sight. Hardened lava, basalt, is unforgiving and almost impossible to walk on--if you're into your 70s anyway. It's pretty much unforgiving. 

"There's a cross just up the beach a ways," some friends of our told us. We'd rented a cabin on the north shore, a little ramshakle thing built in the 1930, but it stood right on the beach, a rocky beach, the one in the picture. 

"A cross?" I said.

They'd hiked up there earlier in the week. "Some priest who came to minister to the Native people," they said. They'd forgotten his name (they're our age). 

I know enough about missionaries and medicine to conjure a story out of some stone cross up the beach somewhere, in all that basalt, even if I'd never heard this story. Father Jean deSmet, a Belgian Jesuit, had blessed Lakota people with whatever medical help he could during a terrible reign of cholera and become much beloved. Andrew and Effa Vander Wagen, native Hollanders, gained blessed acceptance among the Zuni they came to serve when, in 1898, the meager medical provisions they had brought with them created inestimable good will. Besides, Effa was a nurse. Narcissa and Marcus Whitman had tried valiantly--and tragically--to help people deal with a plague of mumps that killed far too many Cayusas in Washington.

The mix of medicine and missions invested in a granite cross just up the rocky beach--a Catholic priest, a suffering people--was more than enough to get me up early to have a look.

Father Frederic Baraga (and, yes, there's a commemorative statue in Grand Rapids, Michigan) was coming over to the north shore of Lake Superior because he'd heard the Chippewa people (Ojibwe) were suffering--thus, at least, the story goes. He and his friend Lewis, a Native, took a birch-bark canoe forty miles across Lake Superior, a trek that would have been 200 miles by land, to get to the north shore. It may be difficult to extract history from myth, but it's not hard to imagine the two of them in a canoe, waves rising, finally coming to shore on a trip during which Father Baraga spent, literally, praying without ceasing.

And so the story goes that Lewis, who did most of the paddling, looked over at the land warily--nothing but basalt, nothing but stony shoreline capable of crunching the canoe. Father Baraga, with the confidence of Jesus himself, assured Lewis they'd be all right and directed him to carry on to sidle up to the shoreline. 

Divine intervention?  Judge that as you will, but by luck or Design they'd rowed up to shore at the inlet of a small, calm river where the landing was somehow manageable. Today, "Cross River" is so named for the wooden cross the two of them erected to signify the blessed answer to prayer. 

All of that happened in 1847. The birch logs they used for the wilderness cross they erected back then was long ago replaced by granite, still there, just up the beach from the cabin where I'd slept the night before. 

And, yes, someone placed a bouquet of fall mums at the base of that cross--purple as the robes of royalty, as if to remember--or not to forget. I am thrilled to report that two bouquets graced that cross that Saturday morning. 

Father Frederic Baraga, "the Snowshoe Priest" fluent in six languages, came to America from Slovenia in 1830, and once crossed Lake Superior on a very treacherous forty-mile passage in a birch bark canoe to a surprisingly easy landing on shore of a land that would become Minnesota ten years later. He came to help a suffering people.  

The story was too good not to tell, but the mums were, for me at least, a special blessing. 

A few moments from the North Shore

 

At dawn's first blush, the world is magical. Fall colors create a cartoon world that slowly becomes even more showy, more outlandish with every passing minute. The plains have an earthiness that's wondrous, maybe especially at dawn. But "up north," as they say, during the gaudy days of late fall, there's barely any room on the palette for the wide and amazing spectrum of bright color. 

So, once you get back your balance, you start to take aim rather than simply firing away. 

Takes some time. For a while you're punch drunk amid the glory all around, but once you regain footing, you don't just look, you see. We're "up north," on Minnesota's glorious North Shore, and while--or so people say--the oaks and maples have already been undressed for the season, bright yellows take over the stage.

Everywhere you look there's something glorious.

Soon enough, even though dawn's Midas touch has lifted, absolutely everything says "praise." 

"Abide with Me" is partly a lament. But fall colors like these give a whole new meaning to "change and decay in all around I see," because change and decay colors the world around. 

Moses was in the desert when he determined God would accept alternatives. So rather than speak to the rock to produce water, he hit it. I'm guessing that if he'd been here instead, he wouldn't have doubted at all. 

"The bedrock was created during the Midcontinent Rift," the science says, "a failed rift which occurred some 1.1 billion years ago. As the continent sundered, magma and lava flowed upward, which cooled into the present-day rock of the Duluth Complex and North Shore Volcanic Group." 

That's the textbook answer. Not for a moment would I doubt that "the continent sundered." 

But what I know is the hands that created this immense bouquet of fall color--even though so much of the extravagance was gone just a day or two later--those hands clearly fashion artistry that can't be assumed to be anything but divine.