News of the World--my take

I came upon News of the World the old way, by reading the novel, which I liked very much, by the way, didn't quite love it, but liked it a heckuva lot. 

[It's only in theaters right now, so you've got to brave Covid. There were, I think, six of us there on Monday night, social distance wasn't a problem.)

It's a very simple story. In fact, most things about the story are simple. The devotion Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) pays to Johanna Leonberger (Helena Zengel), the child who's become his charge, is simple. He determines to bring her to her people, German immigrants somewhere near the the Texas Hill Country. No law makes him do that, no force is applied other than his conscience. He's not making a dime either. What pushes him is the sure knowledge that if he doesn't do it, no one will and the unspoken conviction that it's not just a good thing, but the right thing to do.

Despite her beach blonde hair, Johanna is a far cry more Native than she is German-American. Some years before, her parents were killed by the Kiowas who kept her, brought her up, and obviously took care to love her. She'd much prefer them to whatever awaits her at the end of a pilgrimage she neither chose nor, at least initially, desires--and knows nothing of. 

But what she slowly begins to understand--even though she speaks only Kiowa and then not much of that either--is that this odd old Civil War hero is no beast in a world where there is shortage of beasts, many of them in fact in the post-war Reconstruction era. Lawlessness on the frontier is the rule, which the movie and the book make clear from the very start. Johanna, who has no recollection of her former life, has no future worth living outside the protection of Captain Kidd. She's savvy enough to know it. 

News of the World is not complex. Through some very difficult times, the Captain brings his stoic, silent charge back to an uncle and aunt who are surprised she's alive, but are as heavy on the justice as they are short on the mercy. 

Spoiler Alert. When I say it's a simple story, I also mean to say it has few plot surprises. The Captain brings her to a home that really isn't a home and thus ends up with her, a kind of daughter, which is fitting for a man who lost a great deal in war that's just concluded. 

Let's not be shy here--News of the World is a Western, an old-fashioned Western with horses and wagons and Indians and outlaws. It's dusty and woebegone out there in the Texas no-man's land, where the man with the biggest guns wins. But it's a Western in today's cultural world: the Kiowa are a far better people than the white men, who are gravely addled by a long, bloody war they just lost.

When the two of them find their way into a camp of buffalo hunters, Johanna is distraught surrounded as she is by carcasses being stripped, by the wanton, bloody slaughter of an animal her Kiowa family taught her to respect. She is not just stunned, she's mortified, as if a statue of Mary was defiled. Quietly, in Kiowa, she sings her misery because her Native family has blessed Johanna with their ways. She's a wonder. Helena Zengel will likely never have another beautiful, starring role in which she says so very, very little. 

Tom Hanks is this Western's John Wayne, but the savages in News of the World are white men. And, truth be told, the Captain, who ranges through frontier Texas reading news from around the world, is a traveling national magazine who brings his own bit of culture to a world where what little there is is dispicable. He comes to bring peace to frontier towns, not a sword.

The weakness of the novel and the film is that it doesn't offer any surprise. All turns out for the best when the credits role. 

But I say, that's reason enough to walk through the turnstiles. 2020 was no winner. News of the World is. Goodness, truth, mercy, commitment, love--they're are the heart of the News of the World, a healthy bromide as a truly love-starved year--thank goodness!--fades into well-earned oblivion. 

Small Wonders--The story at Devil's Gulch

If the place sounds cliche-ish, you can't blame Garretson, SD, because--doggone it, not every Siouxland burg has a regular tourist trap built in. Seriously, Gerretson has a brand--Jesse James was there. He was. Not some lousy impersonator. The. Real. Jesse James. And there lies the tale.

"Devil's Gulch," someone called it long ago, like something out of John Wayne--"the dust that day in Devil's Gulch was thick as the fur on a buffalo hump." You know. 

But Garretson's not only got a star, they've also got a story, and the story's not moving any time soon. It'll be there tomorrow yet, if you've never checked it out, because it's carved treacherously into the landscape of the region; in this case, a 20-foot-wide gash in the gorgeous pink quartzite all around--Blue Mound, Palisades. It seems our hero, Jesse James, running from the biggest posse in American history, once took a look at Devil's Gulch, spurred his sweaty mount, and took a flying leap over that chasm and made it. Escaped to rob more banks and trains.

That's the mighty jump Gerritson celebrates. Go look for yourself--only a legend could make that leap, someone bigger than life. Maybe only Jesse James.

Can't help ask yourself, however, what the Sam Hell was Jesse James doing in Minnesota? It was the September, 1876. The Vikings were likely out of town, deer opener months away, and I'm guessing the walleyes weren't biting either.  

What drew him was a bank in Northfield, 500 miles north from his Missouri home. He and his brother, along the Youngers and a couple other bad boys, figured to knock off the Northfield Bank, split the loot, and high-tail it back south. Just that easy.

But why--why that far away? Why that far north? 

The answer is a better story than Devil's Gulch. Jesse wanted a piece of man with the namby-pamby name of Adelbert, Adelbert Ames, a Yankee Civil War hero, who'd left his home in the east and taken up residence in Northfield, where his father owned a mill. 

It would be difficult to line up two men as different as Jesse James and Adelbert Ames. Jesse was a criminal, even a murderer. Adelbert had served in his country in war and during that horrible time we call "Reconstruction." Adelbert Ames, the Yankee, served as Governor of the State of Louisiana. He was, by Southern standards, one of the most god-awful carpetbaggers of them all, trying to impose a Yankee justice on Rebs who'd just coughed up a surrender at Appomattox.

Adelbert won the war but lost just about ever battle thereafter. When Adelbert Ames left Louisiana, he stumbled back north, burned out mentally and emotionally because he'd taken on a task no one could have accomplished. With malice towards none, he'd defended the poor black folks of Louisiana against the KKK, who had a penchant for lynching. What he'd discovered in reconstruction years was that plain moral courage took a whipping from viscous brutality. What Adelbert Ames had in mind was a peculiar abolitionist mission: "to buckle on my armor anew," he said, "that I may better fight the battle of the poor and oppressed colored man."

And he'd lost. He'd lost big time. 

And Jesse knew all of that. He was well-read criminal. He wanted to take Adelbert Ames' money. It was that simple. To Jesse, Ames's money was worth a trip up north to Northfield. It wasn't just some ordinary bank heist. The whole deal, from conception on, was political. 

And it went bust, bloody bust. Jesse might have been well-read, but when he and gang came into town, they looked like absolutely no one else on the street. The story goes, the townspeople knew they were bank robbers long before they'd walked up to the bank--they looked like trouble. 

So when they hit the bank, it wasn't news, and what happened inside and out wasn't pretty. People were shot and people were killed. Even Governor Pillsbury weighed when he proclaimed a $5000 reward for the James gang members, dead or alive. 

That ticket created what may well have been the biggest posse in American history, and that posse was chasing Jesse James way down into a little town named Gerretson, where Jesse, on his horse, came up to a chasm named Devil's Gulch, turned around a few steps, then spurred that mount on to jump 20 feet and escape the crowd that was after him and the five grand that came with his scalp.

You can visit Devil's Gulch. You can judge for yourself whether any man and beast could ever make that mammoth leap. The jury is still out on whether or not the whole saga even happened. We create myths where we'd like to believe things true.

 There's a shop there, where you can read up 0n the story and buy a up or a pen or a Devil's Gulch t-shirt. 

But there's no mention of Adelbert Ames, and I think that's a crime. I know I'm speaking as a Yankee, but I can't help thinking Adelbert's the real hero here, not the thug, Jesse. Adelbert served his country in war and peace. Jesse blew a robbery, left blood over the streets of Northfield, and slithered back to Missouri, his gang pretty much destroyed. 

Who knows?--maybe he never leaped over Devil's Gulch. Maybe the whole thing is just another tall tale, right? 

Visit sometime. It's a heckuva leap. It is. Make your own guess.

But pick up a t-shirt because you'll want to remember the place. It just seems to me there's so much good stuff we've forgotten.

“lully, lulay, lully, lulay”

 

Coventry, England, a city of 250,00 in the West Midlands, boasted significant industrial power when the Europe went to war in 1940, industries Hitler wouldn’t and didn’t miss. When the Battle of Britain began, a specific Coventry blitz started immediately and didn’t end for three long months--198 tons of bombs killed 176 people and injured almost 700.

But the worst was yet to come. On November 14, 1940, 515 Nazi bombers unloaded, and left the city in ruins. Its own air defenses fired 67 hundred rounds, and brought down only one bomber. It was a rout.

At 8:00 that night, St. Michael’s, a fourteenth-century cathedral, was destroyed like so much else as a city turned to ruin.

In the skeletal hulk of that cathedral, the BBC recorded an ancient hymn that originated in Coventry in the 16th century, part of a series of morality plays. The BBC’s Christmas program that night was broadcast from the heart of Britain’s “darkest hour,” and perhaps because it was, from that day forward, people remembered that ancient hymn in great part because they couldn’t forget it.

Today, that hymn is called “The Coventry Carol,” and it’s unlikely any of you would find it unfamiliar. The story of that ancient hymn is told in a Christmas tale whose shuddering horror is easier not to remember. After the birth of Jesus, King Herod, determined to hold on to his own kingdom, ordered the execution of every living male child under two years old. To imagine the anguish that flowed down streets all through the region is impossible.

In the old Coventry morality plays, “The Coventry Carol” was sung by three Bethlehem women holding babies sentenced to die. Together, those mothers create a haunting melody of multiple vocal lines. If you’ve not brought the "Coventry Carol" together with its own incredible history, you’ll never listen again without hearing the horror of its setting.

Bruegel, Massacre of the Innocents

The event traditionally called “The Massacre of the Innocents,” is probably best not spoken of on Christmas Eve. It’s way too dark. That most of us sing “The Coventry Carol” right along with “Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Santa Claus is Coming to Town" may well be a blessing.

The “massacre of the innocents” shares the calendar with another historical massacre, this one a day’s travel west of here, a massacre on the open plains beside a creek with an strange name, Wounded Knee. That was exactly 127 years ago today, December 29, 1890.

For a year or more, Native people were gathering all over the West for a religious dance white men determined to be hostile, something called the Ghost Dance. Fear of and hate for Indians brought together the largest gathering of cavalry troops anywhere since the Civil War.

Exactly 130 years ago today, Big Foot, a Mineconjou chief from the Cheyenne River Reservation, known as a peacemaker, was leading his band south to the Red Cloud Agency, when they were stopped by troops from the Seventh Cavalry, who, a couple decades before, had taken a beating with Custer at the Little Big Horn. On a cold morning--this morning, December 29--in a bloody action that ran on for two agonizing hours, 300 men, women, and children, the Lakota say, were massacred in the last fight of what historians call “The Great Sioux Wars.”

To my ears at least, the haunting harmonies of “The Coventry Carol” could just as easily rise from the frozen prairies all around Wounded Knee, as do the lyrics of that ancient medieval lament. Musically at least, the carol’s spectral choral line—“lully, lulay, lully, lulay”--has nothing in common with the chorus of Lakota death songs sung that day on the plains.

But don’t be fooled. Despair speaks a universal language. The words of those Bethlehem women, “lully, lulay,” are, I'm told, an old English expression that long ago fell out of usage. Linguists say that chorus—“lully, lulay, lully, lulay”—repeats the agonizing testimony of those distraught Bethlehem moms: “I saw, I saw; I saw, I saw.” Who among the survivors would not have chanted something similar?

The Massacre of the Innocents may be folklore; some would argue so.

But Wounded Knee most certainly is not, and the determined lament of the old language holds true just the same, on the killing fields out west of here. “Lulay, lully.” I saw. I saw.

Although none of us may have been there, don't be mistaken--all of us were. 

Morning Thanks--Our Christmas

You can't help feeling sorry for Christmas (the holiday, I mean) because no matter what goes on, the day only rarely lives up to its billing. Same thing happens with The Fourth, although the July letdown doesn't end up at the bottom of the stairs, like it can at Christmas. The day itself never quite reaches the glory to which our imagination rises, hyped by a drum roll that begins on Black Friday when stores start playing "White Christmas."

This year, our church, like thousands of others, had a Blue Christmas service, which is, admittedly, appropriate, even if the very idea ratchets up anxieties. A thousand very good reasons exist for acknowledging the darkness all around; 2020 won't make a list of America's finest years. This morning, the NY Times reports 333 thousand Covid-19 deaths, unimaginable last New Years. The country is split like a ripe melon--make that over-ripe--by a soon-to-be ex-Pres who has not and will not concede an election that's two months old. Meanwhile, he flips his buddies out of jail by the carload, a mad, profane bully who stays in power because overwhelming numbers of evangelical Christians think he's a blessing. 

This year we did church by Facebook Live (again). It was fine, but. . .you know.  Someday, once again, the real thing.

Closer to home, we did just fine. Not without caution, we hosted our children and grandchildren, and the dinner ham was to-die-for--ate so much we forgot about pie. We opened presents downstairs because we bought a cheap tree this year and decided to park it in the basement instead of the beside the fireplace on the main floor. Like most everyone else, thanks to the virus, we really have no social life; so here it stands in the corner, all kinds of bald spots from old strings of lights half burned out--hey, it's an off year, right?

A good time was had by all--seriously good. Opened presents without flagrant fouls--my wife gave her son-in-law a big mug with, mistakenly, her own initial on it; her grandson and his grandpa picked out a Walmart pajama for his grandma without checking the size. Ja, well. . . Otherwise all went well. We played a board game--Clue. Barb won, even though she'd never played before. Christmas wonder. Christmas cheer. 'Twas a sweet, sweet holiday.

I missed a Christmas Eve service. Should have found one. Maybe next year, I tell myself again. That may be the cause of my slight case of the blues. On Christmas, Sunday School programs played prelude to opening presents--baseball gloves, and once-up0n-a-time a new 26" bike hidden awkwardly behind the couch on the west wall--complete, shocking surprise, and me in my pajamas and outside anyway a Wisconsin winter. No matter. What joy. What childhood joy.

Nothing will ever rank with a child's Christmas. And the distance between the then and now only serves to make the what is no more so grand and glorious. Of all our decorations, I like an ancient plastic candelabra best. We got it from an aunt's estate. I'm amazed we can still replace bulbs. It's right beside me in the window. Something in it reminds me of my own childhood. And, I suppose, no much compares with candlelit Christmas childhood memories. 

Don't be mistaken. I'm greatly, abundantly, and blessedly thankful this morning for a wonderful family Christmas. Did I mention the ham? Wow.

It was a joy, all of it, Christmas joy. 

 

Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord,

 and he will reward them for what they have done. 

Proverbs 19:17

By nature I suppose, I’m not someone given to making blanket generalizations. Life, to me at least, is too complicated, too many-cornered, too rife with paradox, seeming contradictions that in reality simply are not.

No matter. Here’s one I dare make – every Christian believer understands the absolute importance of taking care of the poor, the voiceless, the powerless. Love is the great commandment, and that love is expressed most clearly in giving one’s life for others. We all know that. No one can read the gospels – no one can read the Bible itself – and not know that Christ’s teaching about the powerless is ever at the heart of things.

But here’s the rub. How? – that’s where the difficulty arises. Enter politics.

Tonight, two Presidential candidates, both of whom confess Jesus, will spar for 90 minutes on just that question. No one expects much agreement.

On February 16, 1949, Mother Theresa wrote this entry, redolent with character, in her diary.

I went to meet the landlord of 46 Park Circus. The man never turned up. I am afraid I liked the place too much – and our Lord just wants me to be a “Free Nun”, covered with the poverty of the Cross. But today I learned a good lesson – the poverty of the poor must be often so hard for them. When I went round looking for a home, I walked and walked till my legs and arms ached. I thought how they must also ache in body and soul looking for home, food, help. Then the temptation grew strong. The palace buildings of the Loreto came rushing into my mind. All the beautiful things and comforts – in a word, everything. “You have only to say a word and all that will be yours again,” the tempter kept saying. Of free choice, My God, and out of love for you, I desire to remain and do whatever be Your Holy Will in my regard. I did not let a single tear come, even if I suffer more than now. I still want to do your Holy Will. This is the dark night of the birth of our Society. My God give me courage now, this moment, to persevere in following your Will. {47}

That entry is not short on theological perception; after all, the tempter himself makes a skulking appearance. But what I find remarkable is MT’s willingness to associate her own fears and anger that day with the perceived experience of those who daily suffer from the dishonor of broken promises, empty cupboards, and leaky roofs. Her own personal distress that day actually led her into considering anew the distress of others, those less fortunate. Instead of gathering her own spite into a fist, she reaches out for others, sees them more clearly in her own distress.

It’s a gorgeous little story, really, a story she didn’t mean to tell us, a story she simply recorded has her personal testimony after a very trying day.

Still, without a doubt, what happened that morning brought her closer to the poor and the destitute, the people she wanted to serve. Her empathy, amply demonstrated here, was the starting point for her mission, as it should be for all of ours.

 Blessings 

for a sweet and wonderful Christmas 

and a wonderful holiday season 

for all of my blogger friends!!

The Algona Nativity

I only wish it was closer. If it were, this year I'd take my whole family to see the Algona Nativity, the POW museum too, because it's fascinating, but especially the Nativity. Last year I went alone a couple of weeks before the Christmas rush so my tour was richly personal--just me and a gentleman who could not have the loved Algona's own story more. The visit was worth every minute of the trip, but my personal guide made the Nativity sing.

I could reprint what I wrote last year, but why not just listen in to the telling I gave it on KWIT.

But this year let me add just one more little story. That wonderful docent told me that once upon a time he'd taken an old preacher through, a Grandpa who brought a couple granddaughters with him, neither of whom were as taken by the whole business as Grandpa was or would have liked. They were getting giddy. Kids do. 

He said through all the tours he'd given, he'd devised a trick that sometimes worked, so he told the little girls to count sheep--there are 33. That ploy would buy Grandpa Preacher some time and maybe quell the uprising. The kids bought the plan, went in, spent the kind of time he'd hoped it would require, and came out bright-eyed.

"There's 34," one of them said. They'd done a good job, but they were wrong.

He says he wasn't hyper-critical about it, but he knew very well that those POWs had created 33 sheep. "Nope," he said, "you're wrong. I know. Let's go count them again." So the whole bunch went back into the scene, and he deliberately pointed them all out, counting as he went along. "So, there's 33," he told them.

And then, as he's telling me this, he started to tear up. 

"And you know," he told me his voice breaking just a bit, "one of those little girls looked up at me and said, 'We counted the baby Jesus too--he's the lamb of God."

I couldn't help wondering how many times he'd told that story while taking visitors through, but that little girl's wisdom still brought tears. 

That's a story I didn't tell last year, a story I've not forgotten.

Enjoy. https://www.kwit.org/post/algona-nativity 

The Devil's Tower

Look, if anything in the vast Powder River neighborhood merits the word "monumental," it's the mile-high monolith that rises out of nowhere, Devils Tower, who long ago, it seems, shook off the apostrophe that was meant to indicate ownership. With or without punctuation, this huge protuberance deserves the title. When you come up on it early, and the thing is perfectly dark even in a background of glowing morning sky, that this thing belongs to the Devil seems wholly legit.

Get this: no geologist knows for sure how it got here. Theories exist, and you can study them, perfectly reasonable theories. But no one knows. Look at this thing. It's mammoth, from miles away it looms up, bold, fist-like, scary. Honestly, scary.

Didn't help that snow fell the night before, so reaching the behemoth could only happen on isolated, winding roads, so empty that early morning that I felt tempted to stop the one or two pickups I met to say hello. That someone way back when called it "Devils Tower" (even without the apostrophe) makes perfect sense, even though the monument didn't push me to recite the opening lines of Macbeth.

That it is America's very first National Monument (designated so by Teddy Roosevelt, the patron saint of America's Western heritage parks) isn't surprising because no matter how you get there, Devils Tower is no small potatoes. You don't look past it. You can't. It was, long before T. R., a lower-case national monument like none other. Teddy just baptized it into the fellowship he was creating.

The truth? When I got up closer, I breathed more easily somehow. The area was lighter, but there was no sun. Some prairie, some fallen trees, and the beast seemed somehow less fearful.

I was worried about not seeing it in sunlight, so when I got to the gate, I asked the ranger when it would catch some, assuming that I'd been hanging around the wrong side. "Oh, I'm sure it'll get sunny out here sometime," he said.

A quarter mile up the road, I suddenly had the sense he must have thought the only customer he'd seen was some old fool.

It was still early and I didn't have time, but I tried to compose some things--but without a sun even good shots just don't pop. I kept going to the end of the road, where there was no one around and nothing open. Even the beast itself gets lost when you're in the woods beneath. So I just as slowly crept back down the icy road. The sky was blue, but from my angle, Devils tower was bedeviled by darkness. Simply didn't want to be captured.

So I left, my GPS steering me away. Devils Tower was huge and it was stirring, but it insisted on the livery of shade I wanted badly doffed.

When I was a kid, maybe ten years old, my family tented across America. I had no clue of what Devils Tower was, but when we stopped, my memory of that event is itself shrouded in fear, probably because that blessed Schaap piety made the name of the place alone strike fear. Even my parents had trouble saying, "the Devil's Tower" because the Devil was real. That I didn't know why people talked like that likely only increased the evil all around.

That was sixty years ago. Devil's Tower hasn't changed, but I'm a good deal less pious. So down the road a ways I went, that massive magma statue in my rear view mirror. The icy road demanded my attention, but when I glanced back for a moment, voila!



And I pulled over.

In a full bath of pure western sunshine, this massive thing simply seemed both far less demonic and far more magnificent. Finally, in my soul, the sun redeemed the thing. It was not only huge but gorgeous.

But nobody knows exactly how it got here. Isn't that wonderful?

Our take on the Great Conjunction

The phenomena was much bally-hooed, so I did my homework, hoping to be one of the pilgrims for the miracle in the evening sky. The Christmas star was all over the internet, on every news show, written up in newspapers and magazines. If you missed this. . .well, you really couldn't. Today, I'm sure there are a couple million shots like that one above, not to mention thousands and thousands more up-close- and-personal.

So Grandpa called the kids, and sure enough if they weren't already interested and planning to head out somewhere into the darkness, a place where there are no farms to speak of, the kind of place recommended and not particularly hard to find here in any direction from town.

I thought a cemetery might be good, an old one, so out we went, west of town.

I guess I didn't catch the fine print because we got out there early--just at sunset, which was itself a downright heavenly show, Christmas-wrapped with braided contrails.





We fully expected that, like the shepherds, we'd be knocked silly by the immensity of that great star. Well, it didn't happen.

And didn't happen. And didn't happen. Fortunately, I picked out a cemetery surrounded by pines, the only place in the county where you can be serenaded by the music of wind through trees--fortunately, because while the temperature was comely for late December, a wickedly cold wind made music all right, but would have turned us all into pillars of frost if it weren't for that circle of pines.

So we waited. And waited. And waited. And waited, authentic Advent-level waiting, all the time looking to the sky. We'd done our prep, set up two tripods, one with a camera and a huge schnoz of a lens, the other with a telescope long as your arm, all of us well-bundled, some wrapped in blankets like wintering prairie aboriginals.

Still nothing. The kids started horsing around--who could blame them? You had to stay warm. Northwest Iowa isn't tropical Galilee. 

A star appeared, north and east from the evening's half-moon--but that was the wrong place; then another, south and west, more of a poke than a glimmer, but unmistakably star-like. We had hope. Still we waited.

When I stared at this tiny heavenly apparition, what I saw seemed a double. Even though I knew what I was looking for, I didn't believe it when I saw it because this oh-ye-of-little-faith guy doubted himself. Like an old man, I was just seeing double. That couldn't be it.

We went to the technology. Powerful magnification doesn't ensure success. Finding that pinpoint against a massively-wide, bare-naked background took some hunting; but when, finally, the telescope brought the Conjunction to the cemetery, the truth was perfectly and blessedly evident--the star we'd seen was indeed a planet, two of them, coming together sweetly then moving away, more, I must admit, like a troubled marriage than a heavenly portent of a child in a manger.

By that time, a few pilgrims had enough of the cold and were warming up in the car. In fact, as we left the cemetery, the heavenly conjunction of Saturn and Mars seemed brighter than it was while we waited. We hadn't missed it--no, no, no, we'd seen it; but the cold might have run us out of the cemetery before the climax of the show. See that picture way up top?--I took it with my phone before I got into the car.

But we had fun. Did I mention the huge snowy owl that got perturbed about how we disturbed him? In that old cemetery he'd probably not been visited by a gang of humanoid noisemakers before. That snowy thing was huge, a portent of something I'm sure--in an evening of portents, as much a star as the star.

Was it perfect? No. We left our real Advent pilgrimage a little early and without ceremony. We might have caroled, that great white owl for an audience. He might have hooted himself a few bars of "Silent Night."

When we got back to town, we ate at a pizza buffet. Then I took our youngest grandchild to Walmart, where he picked out presents for each member of the family--and I paid, a authentic Christmas ritual we've done with one of the kids for years.

When we left their place, our fingers were still a little stiff--when we made our own quiet way home, I couldn't help telling my wife, "That was nice. That was fun."

Even though I didn't get the picture, it felt as if we'd done our advent thing, waited to see the star. And it just felt good--cold, but good. It felt like Christmas.

And for Grandpa and Grandma, you can't do much better than that.

Badlands

If you've never been there, be assured that the Badlands is a huge place. Just a few minutes before I snapped this picture, I'd been down on that parking lot talking to the bearded dad of a Minnesota family who drove up and backed into a parking stall, then let out the kids and the dog. Don't know where the dog is, but one of the kids is visible up against the yellowish slant of hill off the far corner of the parking lot. She's just a sliver in the expanse, but you can tell it's a someone by the slight shadow she's casting up against that side of the hill. There's a whole lot of bad land to the Badlands.

flat 

There's so much space, in fact, that it's almost impossible to get it all in the lens. My flattest wide-angle promises to get the close-in stuff as well as the waaaaaaay far-out stuff in focus. You'll have to be the judge, but this is about the best I can do at long shots. They're big bad lands, and they don't necessarily take kindly to being photographed.

For the record, let there be no doubt that this is "bad land." Ain't nobody going to get a crop here, and not even buffalo would find it worth their time to graze this mess of rock and sand. Which is not to say they're not around. 

Or that these incredible Badlands don't nurture their own four-leggeds. 

Interstate 90 was remarkably empty on Saturday, Covid keeping most people home for the holidays. By mid-morning just few cars wandered the Badlands, not many--and that's okay. I've been there when every parking lot is full. 

The Badlands are not a place to enjoy in a crowd, even though there's no end to the room. Last year, in early morning January cold, I stopped by, pretty much alone. Saturday, I wasn't. But there was no noise, which is its own kind of Christmas blessing. The place is meant to be huge and silent. 

Like I said, there's a girl just visible in that first shot, top of the page. You've got to look to see her, but when you do you realize the sheer, jaw-dropping expanse of all this "bad land."

That slivered shadow of a presence is what we all are when we're here in the heart of the Badlands.

Reading Mother Teresa--The Cross and the Crucifix

 

To this you were called, 

because Christ suffered for you, 

leaving you an example, 

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

A handsome crucifix hangs on the wall just behind me, 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 up on my wall, even though it’s fair to say I’ve 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 the crucifix. This isn’t 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 somewhat uncomfortable.

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

A Story for Christmas--sort of

 

Okay, maybe this isn’t about Christmas, but Christmas is the season for sweetness, so I’m hoping you’ll let me tell a story that fits, even if it’s set so many years earlier in a land that seems ever so far away.

There’s a baby in it. It’s short a manger and a posse of shepherds; but I can’t help thinking this little story is related.

There must be a thousand stories like this—more, in fact, stories about shady first impressions suddenly turned to gold. Here goes.

A woman named Anderson, Mrs. Anderson, was the very first white woman, she says, in the neighborhood of Native people—mostly Dakota. It’s 1854. She has a husband and two darling children—a two-year-old, and a baby. They live—as you can guess—in a log cabin, pretty much all by themselves.

Mrs. Anderson claims she’d never seen an Indian (that’s her language, by the way) and was, therefore, scared to death one day when her husband was gone and she was alone, and a “hideously painted brave” (that’s her language too) dropped by for a visit, startlingly unannounced. Didn’t knock, didn’t ask to come in, just walked in, took a chair, sat down, and looked around as if he were just as amazed as she was.

A huge knife was jammed in his belt. His scary and fearful presence froze her solid, zero at the bone, “overpowered with fright” (that’s her language too).

Even though she knew her tiny precious children were close at hand, she couldn’t help fear that grabbing them and fleeing would kindle the warrior’s wrath. The only out, she determined, in a flashing second, was to go get her husband.

In this memoir of hers, she claims she ran a quarter mile or so toward the place in the field her husband was working, then stopped on a dime because she couldn’t help realize, in a flash, that leaving her children alone was a downright terrible thing to do.

Think of her, at that moment, stopping in place, her husband still out of earshot, her children alone with a man with a knife she couldn’t help but fear. Her “mother heart,” she says, made clear that she had no choice--she had to go back.

Just like that, she turned around and sprinted back to the house and her kids, likely far more fearful than she’d been when the fearful visitor walked in.

Up the path and through the trees she went, running against her own staggered breath. Not for a moment did she waiver from what her mother heart demanded. She barged through the half-open door of the cabin, mind and heart and soul aflame, and there she saw—I’m not making this up—her two-year-old, a little boy, standing beside the still-seated warrior, playing with the man’s tobacco pouch and his pipe and the two furry rabbits, dead, their heads drawn through strings, as well as a couple of prairie chickens hanging from their necks. Awed, that child was. Just. Playing.

“His expression,” she says of her visitor, “remained unchanged.”

And then this: her distressing visitor “carefully held the baby in his arms.”

Mrs. Anderson didn’t say what she felt right then, didn’t have to because what she felt at that moment is woven into the story she said she’d never forget—first shock, then a massive lifting of her hugely anxious mother heart, and a blessing of abiding peace.

“I gave him bread and milk to eat,” she says, “and ever after,” she writes, “he was our friend, oftentimes coming and bringing the children playthings and moccasins.”

Before the warrior left the Andersons that morning, he reached down to that belt and gave the Mrs. both the rabbits and the prairie chickens.

Okay, I know--there are no shepherds in this story, but there’s a baby in the arms of a blessed stranger, and a child fascinated by someone who became right then a friend.

In every small town in Siouxland, every evening, Christmas lights parade down Main in a binge of seasonal color. Andy Williams dreams of a “White Christmas” in every Hy-Vee, every Walmart, and just about every other shop and store.

I can’t help it--something there is about that picture Mrs. Anderson draws of her little boy touching the magic softness of that prairie chicken, while the baby lies silently in the man’s muscular arms—that blessed tableau suggests at least something of a nativity.

So there--Merry Christmas.

Authenticity

This one was grabbed from the scrapbook. It's seven years old, written before I'd heard much about Nadia Bolz-Weber, who has quite a strong ministry. I hereby repent for cheapening Ms. Bolz-Weber's mission. It was written also before we left the little Presbyterian church and returned to the church we've attended for decades. I thought I'd put it up here again, even with the snarky old smear, for which I need to be forgiven.  

It’s age.  Why not tell it like it is? I wouldn’t be ornery if I were 24 or even 48.  I’m not.  I’m 65, and that’s got a lot to do with being cranky about an NPR story featuring the latest tattooed and tousled dominie to do Christianity right for once. She’s got this bruising past that toughened her up enough to go to war with those vile establishment Lutherans Garrison Keillor lovingly lampoons; but up there in Seattle, where her congregation sits in cheap plastic chairs, no pews, she and her fellowship finally, after 2000 years, are doing the Christian faith right. That’s the story line.

If I had a dime for all of those stories in the last fifty years, I could cure Haiti’s ills. They’re all alike, every last one of them, sweeping the detritus of rank tradition out of the aisles or doing away with aisles all together for God’s sake, creating a contemporary worship space for authentic Christianity.

Spare me.

We just want to be authentic, she told NPR. So what am I, phony baloney?

This fellowship happens to be Lutheran, but they come in garden varieties, each of them carrying a petulant sanctimony they’d vehemently deny, a saintliness both repudiated and earned in this preacher’s nifty collection of blue-black Christian tattoos. I mean, I’ve read just about everything from Anne Lamott, but even her shtick gets old.

Here’s a Christmas story. Couldn’t be more tradition-bound, more inauthentic, I suppose.

We go, off and on, to a local Presbyterian church, where, on a good Sunday morning, there’s all of forty people, mostly fewer than all of. The singing is nothing to crow about, the preaching is fair-to-middlin’, and the liturgy is, in the language of the CRC, authentic Samuel Volbeda, circa 1928—every week we sing “Glory Be to the Father.”  You know.  No praise team up front, no power points—which means, of course, we actually hold hymnals. It’s like worshipping in a museum.

The church is close—that’s why we go.  It’s just up the road in town, but it’s also close in a way that most churches work blame hard to be: close, as in, when we greet each other as worship begins, we greet everybody. You get out of your pew. Everyone does. Then again there are only 35 souls, sometimes less.

There’s a childrens’ sermon, but only three kids, floppy-haired, pudgy brothers who sometimes wear really short ties. They live with their grandparents because their mom—well, she lost ‘em somehow.  I don’t how because I don’t know the story, and I’m glad I don’t.

What I do know is that my wife and I have often marveled at the boys’ grandparents, who got drafted to raise an entirely new family after suffering endless hurt with the first one. Honestly, at 65 years old, I don’t know how Grandpa and Grandma do it, but they do, 24/7, and the youngest grandson, it seems, qualifies as special needs.  Where on earth do they find the strength?

Anyway, when I was a boy, we went to church on Christmas Eve, in the kind of darkness where “Silent Night” makes a sanctuary feel like the Judean hills. But even in churchly Sioux County, Iowa, you’ve got to look hard and long for a fellowship that gathers on Christmas Eve.

Maybe it was nostalgia, maybe it was because we’re alone, but we decided to go up the block to the little Presbyterian church where everyone gets greeted. They were going to have a choir, for pity sake. We wondered how many ringers they’d have to draft.

It was wonderful. It was great, and those three boys who live with their grandparents sang a special number, decked out in matching white shirts and skimpy ties.  Someone in the back turned on a piped-in pop rock tune off a CCM disk, and those three boys sort of sang along.  Sort of. It was the first time I remember thanking the Lord for piped-in music.

They had some trouble remembering the words. For that matter, they had trouble with the notes. But their mother was there I think, a woman who looked like she’d known some hard times. She had a little camera up, recording everything, a trio of her own boys singing a song about what Christmas isn’t about—and, bless his holy name, what it is.

But that image wasn’t what jerked my heart strings, not the boys’ singing, although what they gave the rest of us was really “special” music because they looked greatly happy to be up there entertaining.  And it wasn’t their mom’s close attention with that pocket camera, which was touching too.

The real gift I got last night on Christmas Eve at the little Presbyterian church up the block is the way that Grandma mouthed the words, every lyric in that rockin’ number, every sentence, every last phrase, every line of chorus, because she knew ‘em and she wanted her boys to remember. She knew the words because this grandma had been been the one, all week long, doing the coaching, doing the practicing, doing it all.

Real and righteous pride was lighting her face as if she had hold herself of that big candle right square in the middle of the advent wreath. Love was in her eyes--and thanksgiving, which is, really, what Christmas is about, what the Christian life itself is all about.

Nothing’s hip at the Presbyterian church up the block. They don’t try to compete with what’s being done across town. They had no live nativity, no stringed orchestra, no theater, not a bit of hoopla, nothing to make the news. They didn’t even advertise.  I had to call the preacher.

But last night, Christmas Eve, as sure as I’m sitting here this Christmas morning, with my own eyes and ears I saw and heard a real, live chorus of angels, three pudgy boys.

And in case you’re wondering, we sang “Silent Night” in the candlelit darkness, just the way it should be sung. So there.

What’s more, I came home with a paper bag of peanuts, a half dozen or more chocolate stars, an apple, just as if I were, once more, a kid.

Go ahead, roast me for being hopeless and cranky. Go on.

I hope they were just as authentic in Seattle.

Small Wonder(s)--New Hope at Christmas

 Instead of reading, this morning, just sit back and be read to. Click on this line. Another page will come up. When it does, scroll down beneath the picture of Ms. Suckow and click on the arrow marked "Listen."

Review--Jesus and John Wayne (again)

[This isn't the first time I spotlighted Jesus and John Wayne, and neither will it be the last.] 

_______________________

Forty years ago I wrote a book for the Christian Reformed Church (CRC), a series of stories about people from all corners of the fellowship. The powers-that-be said I could choose the subjects. It was a ball. 

One of the chosen was a man named Richard Ostling, who was, at the time, Religion Editor of Time magazine--and a member of the CRC.

Time was literally ten times fatter than it is today, its circulation much broader, its cultural influence much greater. Forty years ago, a variety of media influence peddlers were around, I'm sure, but not as many and not as loud as today. These days, most of us get our news on-line. Magazines--we still get several--are artifacts.

Back then, the Ostlings lived up on a hill in New Jersey. From their front steps, you could see Manhattan's famous skyline. This prairie bumpkin was way out of his comfort zone, but the Ostlings were gracious, and great subjects. The interview was thoughtful, a blessing really.

They were immigrants, not cradle CRC. They'd come to the denomination by way of campus ministry at the University of Michigan, when Richard was in graduate school. But they'd been members of the denomination long enough to know it well. But then Richard's position at Time made the study of American religion a full-time job. 

He'd done cover stories on all the evangelical headliners--Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Bakker, Pat Robertson, and Jimmy Swaggert--in addition to frequent stories on the rise of "fundamentalism." He was a scholar, a real writer. He made it his business to know American religion, inside and out. Want to read him today? Go to Patheos, where he still does an always informative Q and A. 

At one point in the conversation, I told him that Dutch Reformed theology paid little attention to the most powerful movement in American religion--the rise of fundamentalism. The idea that the Bible was "inerrant," or that a belief in "the inerrancy of scripture" could be some kind of litmus test was, well, simply not our way of thinking: the implication was that we were above such silliness.

To say I got chewed out may be pushing it, but his response to what he saw as my arrogance ("we're bigger than that") felt a little Jeremiad-like. What he said stuck with me through all these years. The CRC couldn't sit on the sidelines and consider itself aloof from the struggles of American Christianity, he told me. The denomination isn't in the Netherlands, it's here--he said, and not engaging in the conflicts in American religious life only insures the CRC's eventual demise. He said our denomination will eventually go the way of all other ethnic denominations. It will lose to the forces of Americanization just as every other ethnic fellowship in this nation has. The real question is what will it become?

Forty years ago, the central battle within American Christianity was the hundred-years war between fundamentalists (like Southern Baptists and most Pentecostals) and mainline Protestants (Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians). Even forty years ago, that fight wasn't much of a battle any more. The fundamentalists were bruisers. They were mopping up.

Reading Kristin Kobes DuMez's cogently argued Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation makes me shudder at how isolated and aloof I have been, how "out of it" when it comes to the big-time movements in the fundamentalist world. Richard Ostling's strong advice notwithstanding, the truth is I don't know much about most of the individuals KKDM documents in her study--know of them, sure, but know them well, no. Several of their names I didn't even recognize.

Pretty much without my knowing it, I got drafted into the American battle Ostling told me, correctly, could not be avoided. My lack of knowledge of the powerhouse fundamentalists, the real warriors in this battle, makes clear that somewhere along the line I'd joined forces with the sinking fortunes of the mainline Protestants. 

All of which helps me to understand why I feel isolated here in the northwest corner of Iowa, where, a month ago, 80 per cent of the voting public chose President Donald Trump, the man who yesterday, finally (maybe), lost to a candidate who is the only President in the last several to attend church (Roman Catholic) every Sabbath. 

When we sat in the Ostling's house and talked forty years ago, his stinging criticism was right. The CRC would lose to the expansive powers in place all around in our own adopted American culture, just as every other ethnic church had and would. Today, as the denomination is terrified by issues surrounding tolerance for gay marriage and issues surrounding LGBTQ rights and privileges, the outline of America's long battle between fundamentalism and mainline Protestantism is clearly visible, not as a seam but a schism.

Some people claim that reading KKDM's thoughtful and convincing book is, well, sad--sad because of the pitiable fall of so many evangelical headliners. A ton of stories in Jesus and John Wayne have identically dismal trajectories. To suffer through so many messy falls in one volume is no great joy.

Still, Jesus and John Wayne a terrific book, thoughtfully and painstakingly--but convincingly--argued. It's a terrific book because like all great and wonderful books, it makes you think. 

To be continued. . .

It's always been a compromise. Right from the beginning in 1787, the Congress created it because neither alternative--popular vote or some other representative scheme--seemed right and fair. So the founders found an alternative, a gizmo they called "the Electoral College." If you don't trust the people--"what do they know, really?"--and, like nothing else, you want to avoid a king or monarch, an autocrat, then maybe it would be best to put the whole messy business of voting--yes, voting--in the hands of really responsible people and call it a college or something dignified like that, an electoral college.

Perfect.

Not. 

The thing is, the number of electors has been, right from the start, based on the number of representatives each state sends to Congress, which means, of course, that the numbers are horribly skewed in favor of Iowa, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, those states with very limited populations. If it was a sovereign nation, California (which is full of immigrants from those very states, of course) has the fourth largest economy in the world. Yet, in the all-important Senate of the United States, California gets just two "senators," same as Wyoming, where there are fewer citizens in the whole state than there are on some New York City blocks. If you're from lots-of-people place, you have ever right to scream "unfair."

Among the results of this system is whacky tallying. Biden beat Trump by 7,000,000 votes this year, nation-wide. The 2020 election--let's be clear--was no squeaker. What's more the votes in the Electoral College--if all goes according to plan (don't count on it), was just as heavy laden for VP Biden. For the record, the Democrat should, today, get 306 votes, to the present President's 232. That's not a whisker. Trump got thumped (there's a t-shirt for you--just don't wear it in Sioux County, Iowa). 

BUT, Trump, who has proven himself to be unlike any other candidate in the history of these United States, has simply refused to believe that he actually lost. He did--even the Supremes said so (his Supremes, by the way) and did so twice!  They're just stupid or scared, says the man with the mouth.

He's lying and all but the most blind and faithful--the holy fools--know it. 

So, who knows what'll happen today, when this odd bunch of duly appointed (by the states) get together and cast their votes? Everybody knows what is supposed to happen, but what will happen is anybody's guess when one of the two candidates, the out-sized one, could care less about tradition, honor, and truth--remember the record-breaking size of his "biggest ever" inauguration crowd? 

After today, it should be over.  Should be. 

But no one thinks it will. 

(to be continued, I'm sure)

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 darlingly 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.”

The Frio River's suggestions

 

On the second Wednesday of Advent, Scott Cairns, from Isaiah 40, tells us that the prophet discovers and then proclaims that God is beyond compare--he is unknowable. And then he determines to clear the thicket of paradox that is the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

God is, finally, unknowable. Still, while he is not to be absolutely known, he is apparently willing to reveal something of himself to us at nearly every turn. Think of it like this: he cannot be exhausted, by our ideas about him, but he is everywhere suggested.

That put me in mind of photographs I took just off the Frio River a bundle of years ago, none of which capture the size and power of the place, but instead the odd beauty in and of its intimacies. I don't know that I've ever shown anyone these shots, but I like them, particularly because I can't help thinking that even in the hill country's lonely, weedy places, as Cairns says, "he is everywhere suggested."