Reading Mother Teresa--Darkness (3)

But I cry to you for help, Lord; 

in the morning my prayer comes before you. 

Why, Lord, do you reject me 

and hide your face from me? Psalm 88:13–14

Mother Teresa didn’t tell the world about the darkness, but neither did she keep it a secret, scribbling out descriptions of her lonely days and nights outside the presence of God in some diary or journal. More than once – and to more than one person – she did more than simply hint at the painful emptiness in her heart and soul.

Her superior, Archbishop Périer, was the recipient of some of those notices, as in a letter in February, 1956. “I want to say to you something – but I do not know how to express it,” she wrote at the outset of the letter. “I am longing – with a painful longing to be all for God – to be holy in such a way that Jesus can live His life to the full in me.” And then this: “The more I want Him – the less I am wanted” (164).

Then again, in a letter to Jesuit Father Lawrence Trevor Picachy, who had led a spiritual retreat Mother Teresa had attended. After the retreat she told him that the two of them had much to appreciate in the spiritual vitality of her young colleagues, the ones he’d just met. But as for herself, “If you only knew what I am going through – He is destroying everything in me. – But as I hold no claim on myself – He is free to do anything. Pray for me that I keep smiling at Him” (169).

Or, once again to Father Périer, to whom she had to report on her work: “Pray for me – for within me everything is icy cold” (163).

There may be no clear answer to the question of how it could be that this woman, so dedicated, so pious, a bride of Christ, could feel so fully shunned; but in one of those letters, Father Périer offered a possible answer by delving into yet another paradox of all of our lives – the odd pain some of us feel in the middle of what looks like success.

This “feeling of loneliness, of abandonment, of not being wanted,” he told her, “. . . is willed by God in order to attach us to Him alone”; and it occurs, he said, as “an antidote to our external activities, . . . a way of keeping us humble in the midst of applauses, publicity, praises, appreciation, etc. and success.” And then this: “To feel that we are nothing, that we can do nothing is the realization of a fact” (167).

It is a fact that, far more quickly than anyone, including Mother Teresa, would have guessed, her new mission to the poor on the streets of Calcutta had prospered. Soon, it seemed, unforeseen gifts to the mission were accruing in abundance, even though her intent had been, from the outset, to minister to the poor as the poor. Young woman appeared as novitiates, and prayers were offered in all kinds, all over. “Applauses, publicity, praises, appreciation, etc.,” flowed in, far beyond anything Mother Teresa had ever imagined.

Somehow, it’s perfectly understandable that this little woman would have trouble accepting what most of the world might describe as success. After all, on the train to Darjeeling, Jesus had never mentioned anything about accolades, about praise and honor. What she wanted from the outset was not just the wardrobe of poverty but the soul of total pennilessness. She wanted not to have food. She wanted to know the world as the poor knew it; she wanted to know the poor as the poor knew themselves.

What she never wanted and could never have imagined was celebrity.

She wanted only to serve.

The success of the mission could not have been the sole cause of Mother Teresa’s darkness. Undoubtedly, there was more. Neurologists, today, may well think of it was chemical – some drastic imbalance.

What we know, hard enough as it is to believe, is that this pervasive darkness, even in the life of a saint, was very, very real.

"Gallanter" (2)

We were more than a little leery of attending, but, masked, we went to church last week to attend the funeral of a relative, a woman I knew only a bit, who'd died without our knowing, really, of her medical condition. 

Funerals are not rare in our lives these days; in less than a month, I'll be 73. I'm doing just fine, so is my spouse; but the obits in the local weekly inevitably include people we know, some of them of our years--four score and ten, etc. But Covid has kept us away from funerals. In the last year, friends--good friends--have been buried in private ceremonies--no old friends allowed, only family, close family at that. I don't know how long it had been since we'd attended one, at least a year.

This cousin did not die of the virus, but a whole lot of folks have and do. Right here in the county, 59 have succumbed, 4532 Iowans, and somewhere in the area of 433,000 across the nation. Nobody in-the-know makes claims we're on the other side of the horror either. Last year the President of the United States made a habit of saying it, but that President no longer is.

The stories are legion. A woman I know, who happens to be Navajo, lost both parents in just a few days. The toll of victims on the reservation was and is so immense that her individual suffering was only one story of hundreds, so many that individual stories get unceremoniously lost. When she and her siblings went to the funeral home, the director told them that simply scheduling a funeral was rough--there were just so many deaths.

The hospital staff set up a SKYPE for the family when it was clear her father was not going to make it. His daughter claims she barely recognized him--he'd been under care and out of their sight long enough to grow a beard. His children said appropriate last things. “I told my dad ‘thank you’ for taking care of me and my family and my mom," she told me. "I told him Jesus was waiting for him. ‘You can go,’ I said. ‘We’ll be fine. We’ll take care of each other.’ We told him he’d done a great job—that’s what we told him.”

And then, she says, she heard this odd sound in the background, a muffled sound she slowly recognized. The nurse holding the iPad was crying.

That nurse is a hero, a blessing, an angel.

Now read Ms. Dickinson's #138 again.

To fight aloud, is very brave -
But gallanter, I know
Who charge within the bosom
The Calvalry of Wo -

Who win, and nations do not see -
Who fall - and none observe -
Whose dying eyes, no Country
Regards with patriot love -

We trust, in plumed procession
For such, the Angels go -
Rank after Rank, with even feet -
And Uniforms of snow.

That very nurse in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is at the heart of a poem written by a reclusive little woman from Amherst, Massachusetts, 160 years ago, a poet who scribbled her lines on individual slips of paper she rolled up and left in a chest, gifts for all of us. That nurse is there in #138, along with hundreds of thousands of others these days, almost anywhere.

Amazing, in every way. 

"Gallanter"

If you don't know the whole story, it's not hard to hold some animosity towards this guy. His name is Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and he was a true American blue blood, descended from Massachusetts Bay Puritan stock, preachers too. He plays a leading role in the life of a great American poet, Emily Dickinson, who saw in him, a magazine editor, someone who had at least some sense of what she was doing on paper.

To say Emily Dickinson fell in love with Thomas Higginson may be overstatement, but Ms. Emily's imagination was as wide as the horizon, ample space for any speculation. What is verifiably true is that Higginson noted the strength of her poetry. That was all he needed to do. To her, he became a lover thereby.

For years, that was just about all I knew of the man. To me, he seemed something of a jerk because he didn't follow up on his own kindness. He entered Ms. Emily's life with a few sweet words and then, seemingly, forgot her, a Puritan cad.

But, as the old photograph makes clear, Thomas Wentworth Higginson was neither a cad nor a recluse. He was one of "the Sacred Six," the secret financial supporters of John Brown, the John Brown of Harpers Ferry fame. An ardent abolitionist, Higginson charged into the Civil War and was given command of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the very first regiment created from "freedmen," ex-slaves who'd escaped to fight for the North.

If he didn't court Dickinson's favor as he might have--or as she seemed to want to imagine him doing--his inattention wasn't borne out of laziness or abuse. The man was busy. There was a war on--yes, there certainly was, brother vs. brother.

I can't help but think that maybe Thomas Wentworth Higginson is here in #138. This is Emily Dickinson's characteristically spare verse. She used them sparingly because she believed in words.

To fight aloud, is very brave -
But gallanter, I know
Who charge within the bosom
The Cavalry of Wo--

Never mind her spelling, you catch the drift. I'm suggesting Captain Thomas Wentworth Higginson is the man fighting "aloud," maybe even getting headlines--and that's all fine. But, Ms. Emily says, those who fight secret battles of the heart are "gallanter," a word my spell check doesn't recognize. But, there's more:

Who win, and nations do not see -
Who fall - and none observe -
Whose dying eyes, no Country
Regards with patriotic love -

We all have our own battles, don't we? And the warfare that rages within us--many of us anyway--is often covert, something, no one else sees. That beneath-the-surface and in-the-soul warfare, she says, is gallanter.

And it may well have its own rewards--emphasis on may. She moves to a third person narration in the last stanza and begins with "We trust," a phrase which hopes for the best but refuses to totally trust.

We trust, in plumed procession
For such, the Angels go -
Rank after Rank, with even feet -
And Uniforms of snow.

It's quite a blessed and expansive vision, don't you think? Those who battle in secret can look around and see "rank after rank" of angels, in feathery procession, dressed like the military, save one feature--the uniforms are made of snow. We trust that is so, at least. That's Emily Dickinson's characteristic doubt.

I'm speculating, of course, but within the context of Ms. Emily's own life, the poem may well suggest that this man whose attention she craved, off fighting somewhere in a very public war, didn't know the fierce battle he'd created in her heart and soul.

All of that is possible, but purely speculative--and, because it's so biographical it reduces, horribly, the potential reach of what Dickinson says. No matter how she meant it, those few words Ms. Dickinson left on the page carry meaning far beyond her editor/warrior.

More on that tomorrow.

Just another word

On my mother's side, my Dutch-American ancestors have been here since before the Civil War. My people were among the very first immigrants from the Netherlands to put down roots on the western shore of Lake Michigan. I have a picture of a couple dozen elderly Hollanders gathered in some lakeshore park in 1898 for a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Dutch people in Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. My great-great grandfather is among them.

My father's side left the island of Terschelling for America in 1868, once the Civil War was over. Terschelling is a beautiful place--I've been there a few times, sat alone at the harbor and wondered what my life would have been like had C. C. and Neeltje Schaap had stayed, if I'd been born and reared on that kidney-bean Frisian island with all those spacious beaches.

My grandmother could recite the Heidelberg Catechism in Dutch because that's the way she had to learn it in her turn of the century Dutch Reformed congregation. Ironically, she didn't understand Dutch. She was, after all, third-generation American.

A man I know who knows and loves local history, told me about a unkept cemetery just outside of Hull, Iowa. No one gets laid to rest there anymore. For the most part, the community whose people are buried there is gone. "There's a black guy buried in that graveyard," he told me once upon a time. I'd have to look really hard to find the grave of another African-American anywhere in the county, I'm sure.

In the 2020 election, Donald J. Trump would have had to raise the numbers of among his base by five percent in order to offset changes occurring in the demographic profile of the red states he'd won in 2016--just to offset the significant changes in the American populace. The times--like skin tones--are a'changing.

In 2008, I walked across the room during the Iowa Caucuses to join those caucus-goers who supported Barack Obama. I'd been moved by the speech he gave at the Democratic Convention a few years earlier, really moved. He seemed thoughtful, a good man. I'd never liked the Clintons much, so Hillary was out; and this bald man thought John Edwards loved his hair far too much. Besides, I thought Obama had a chance to heal the nation--our first Black president.

I'm guessing that election was the first time I heard people repeat what that little girl up top of the page has emblazoned on her sweatshirt. I thought the idea was cute, and nice, and obviously true--sweet.

And now it's happening again with the VP, Kamala Harris. Some town in India went plain crazy when Biden/Harris won. What's more, Ms. Harris's father was African. She went to Howard University, a traditionally black college in Washington D. C.

Native people I know are thrilled to see Deb Haaland as the new nominee for Secretary of the Interior. Here she is.





She doesn't look at all like me, but she looks a heckuva lot like them.

I understand what that girl has written on her sweat shirt, but the line doesn't thrill me like it does her or her mother or parents or so many people of color.

Why not? Because for my whole life I've been blessed with white privilege. Because for my whole life the only people I saw in significant places in national politics looked pretty much like the gent I see in a mirror every morning. White privilege is something I've borne without knowing it or owning it. But it's always been there.

In 1967 I was a first-year college student. That was the year that anti-miscegenation laws were finally totally repealed in the United States--it was no longer against the law to marry someone from another race. My parents used to say that mixed-race marriages were so sad because the children--"mulattos"--were born to suffer not being accepted in either white or black communities.

Today, people for whom my parents felt so much pathos include an ex-President and our own VP.

I wish I didn't have to say it, but the vast preponderance of human beings who marched on the Capitol a few weeks ago looked very much like the person I see every morning in the bathroom mirror.

White privilege is what I have, and what those who do have don't want to lose.

In a nation where all men and women are created equal, white privilege is a synonym, just another word, for racism.

On the Homestead (2)

[I missed a day because of the death of Henry Aaron. Last Friday, I summarized the story of a unimaginable hero, the woman who came to the region with her husband--she was less than half her age. Her incredible life and impossible character is celebrated by her son, a man named Ernest G. Bormann, in a little memoir of his own life, Homesteading in the South Dakota Badlands. On Friday, I promised a bit more. This is what I promised.]

Here are the Boermanns (for reasons he doesn't mention, he dropped the e in his parents' last name). 

Their daughter, Louisa, on her father's knee, died when she was 13, during the Children's Blizzard of 1888, when she and others left their schoolhouse on the prairie and took refuge under a haystack. Louisa was the only child from Coyote Center school who died in the storm.

Ernest Bormann followed his own "call of the wild," and went west on rumpled, bumpy paths in an old wagon he'd bought and reconditioned, drove it all the way out to the land he'd secured under the Homestead Act, 160 acres of parched prairie at the very edge of the Badlands. He knew there was a tar-paper shack standing (barely) out there awaiting him, the one at the top of the page. At least there was something. No immediate neighbors, nothing, really, for as far as he could see but the Badlands right there over his shoulder. 

The conditions of the Homestead Act were clear. The land was yours, if you could keep it--and keeping it meant "improving" it in one way or another. If you could show clearly that you were doing your best to make the land prosper, it was yours. 

Ernest Bormann's agenda was just as clear: live out there for a year, work at "improving" things so that the land, bad as it was, belonged to him, then sell it, just like that. If he could last a year out there by himself, if he could signal to the authorities that he was actually working at "provin' it up," it was his to do with as he pleased. He considered the land is job.

Most of his little book is about his time out there by himself. It wasn't easy. Even the Native people who were there long, long before white homesteaders called the region "bad land." While there once may well have been roaming buffalo around, no doleful cowboy or homesteader ever sat out beneath a prairie sky and sung the glories of the Badlands. 

He tried to break the ground--it had been attempted previously, but it didn't get accomplished.

Neither did Bormann succeed. Some things just can't be done, no matter how much sweat and tears could be invested. Rattlesnakes were part of the bargain, of course. He had to be careful where he walked. They were everywhere. And he "worked out" a lot--cultivating for ranchers miles away, putting up buildings for others, drilling wells where it was possible. It was 1912. He was alone on his claim, but hard work was not a chore for someone raised by his parents. 

Ernest Bormann's South Dakota homesteading experience was markedly different from that of his parents. From day one he never intended to stay or start a family. That would have been difficult, if not impossible. His hard work at the edge of the Badlands was all about money. He'd get that land for nothing, then, a year later, sell it. The Badlands would make him some bucks.

Ernest Bormann, an immigrant farm kid raised in poverty unlike anyone could find today, became the quintessential American business mogul, even though to call him "rich" would have to be only in comparison with his parents. The land his parents developed, "improved," provided a home for a family. The land he improved was just so much real estate.

What the original occupants of the land, the Lakota people, had all kinds of trouble understanding was that view of the earth beneath their feet--that it was just real estate, something on which to turn a buck. After a year of sleeping alone in the wide open country where he lived in that tarpaper shack, Ernest sold it, stuck whatever he made into his wallet, and moved on. That's what they didn't understand nor appreciate. 

Sometimes I can't help but think that pioneers like Ann Rubin Boermann were absolute marvels, heros, wonders. That she could do what she did for her family was truly heroic. Today, people like the Boermanns are largely forgotten, their stories buried beneath miles and miles of open land worked by farm machinery too big to drive on paved roads. Who really cares about the old stories? Is there a high school within 500 miles where students read Giants in the Earth, a place where they know something of their own origins by their stories? 

The stories we tell are the ones created by Ernest Bormann, who figured out he could turn a buck or two if he lived out there all by himself, did some work to improve his acres, then, turn it around and put it on the market--homesteading as a business. What he gets for what he'd done is something to line his wallet.

He was only doing the all-American thing, wasn't he?  You can't blame him. He grew up in poverty. He wanted more. 

That's basically the story we love to tell.

Hammerin' Hank: 1934 - 2021

 

He was a man who could not be more deserving of his own heroic reputation and character. He was a gem, a star, a prince--in reality one of American's great heroes. At the Martin Luther King National Historic Park I spotted his footprints the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame. 

If you click here, you can hear my story of finding him at the MLK Memorial.

Reading Mother Teresa--Darkness (2)

You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths. 

Your wrath lies heavily on me; 

you have overwhelmed me with all your waves. Psalm 88:6–7

It is abundantly clear from her own letters and notes that Mother Teresa – the most celebrated saint of her time, a woman who not long after her death was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church – that she suffered painfully from the darkness which that descends on believers who feel banished from the presence of the Lord God is abundantly clear from her own letter and notes. About As to her doubt there is none. Often, in fact, “the bride of Christ” felt herself abandoned at the altar of life itself.

How on earth can such a humble, faithful servant of Christ be so adamant that his beloved presence has simply passed her by? How can someone who sacrificed her life to follow Jesus’s own directions into the holes of the poor see, before her, all-encompassing darkness?

Thoughtful psychologists and psychologists may well have substantial, convincing theories, theories I’d love to hear by the way, because the conundrum will be, or so it seems to me, forever a mystery: how can someone so close to Christ feel him so irretrievably gone?

To me, there is no easy answer, save one. Simply stated, Mother Teresa, officially a saint, was human, and as such subject to the score of weaknesses our mutual flesh is heir to. She doubted because, often as not, all of us do. Think not? Read the psalms.

Some like to believe that her darkness was, in fact, a blessing. Here’s the way Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the editor of Come Be My Light, understands the burden of doubt that attended Mother’s life: “Interior darkness was Mother Teresa’s privileged way of entering into the mystery of the Cross of Christ” (156).

It’s a paradox, yet greatly understandable. I spoke to a man just last week who told me that his grandson’s cancer was a horror, save one thing – the immense blessing of prayers and gifts of friends and strangers who helped his own daughter and her husband through the struggle. Once upon a time, a young woman told me that nothing in her life had changed her so fully, remade her into someone who had begun to care for others, as her cancer. Her boyfriend, a research chemist studying cancer itself, grimaced, I remember, as she said it because he didn’t see those cancer cells as haloed as she did.

That suffering can be a blessing seems, to me, irrefutable. But we take the reality of suffering to another level when we see it as “a privileged way of entering into the mystery of the Cross of Christ.”

If that’s true, the utter spiritual darkness in which she found herself would have to be pure blessing – and it wasn’t. She may well have had moments when she considered her estrangement from God to be exactly that; but if that was so, would suffering be suffering? If suffering is totally a blessing, then is it suffering at all? If it was, then why did she so clearly seek relief?

Fr. Kolodiejchuk would like it to be so, and he may well be right.

But there are moments when the Protestant that I am much prefers the empty cross to the crucifix, the risen Lord to the suffering Christ; and this is one of those moments. In my life at least, the despair that accompanies an across-the-board loss of hope has never been a better means by which to understand the mystery of Christ’s suffering. It’s always been a horrifying black hole.

To me, the wonderful good news of the gospel, here and always, is that even those we know as saints are human, not divine, subject to sin’s own horrors; but, by way of grace alone, brought radiantly back into communion with the Lord, only by his hand.

Stuff happens in life, bad stuff. But he loves us, always. That’s the real blessing.

On the homestead

So I was on the lookout for stories about men and women and their kids who homesteaded on ground in and around the South Dakota Badlands. Not all ground covered in the Homestead Act was created equal, and lots of naïve European immigrant families were so taken with the idea of freedom in this new country that they took what they could get--and what they could get was sometimes lousy ground, so lousy the only nearby towns belonged to prairie dogs. 

I found the memoir of the guy in this picture, who grabbed a parcel of Homestead land that must have been, as I imagine it, right about there at the entry to the Badlands National Park--if you come straight south from Wall, close enough to see the real Badlands but on the stretch of the prairies that border the park, real bad land, let me tell you, land not cut out for farming.

It's just a little book, and it's titled Homesteading in the South Dakota Badlands, 1912, "The Last Best West," memories penned by a man named Ernest G. Bormann. It's his story. 

Two things about his story are really memorable. One of them is his description of his mother, Anne Rubin Boermann. She is literally statuesque, the Pioneer woman quintessentially. His description makes her sound like someone straight out of Giants in the Earth, with one huge difference. Unlike Beret, Per Hansa's doleful wife in Rolvaag's novel, a woman who finds life on the open prairie difficult (to say the least), Anne Rubin Boermann reigns a queen on her homestead, a "most extraordinary woman," her son says, a flat understatement.

Listen to this:

She did all the and dish-washing, the cleaning, the laundry, and all that housewives do--all of this without any modern conveniences [he's writing this as an old man in 1971, by the way]. The water for drinking, cooking, laundry, and bathing had to be carried into the house and all of the waste carried out. Fuel for the cookstove and heating had to brought in and ashes carried out. The smoke from coal and lamps created soot and dust the modern housewife does not content with. 

And that's not all. 

In addition to these chores, she always had a large garden and canned food for the rest of the year from it. She also took care of the chickens. She and the younger boys also milked the cows, separated the milk, and then she made cheeses. Many people bought her dairy products. Moreover, she helped with the butchering and made sausages. 

He adds this:

I cannot remember ever having a pair of bought gloves or socks. My mother carded and spun wood and then knitted these items for the whole family.

And there was farm work:

She often helped round off the stacks of grain. We put the bundles into stacks before threshing. 

For the record, Mr. Borman's father was 38 years old when his parents were married, his mother only 16. Try to imagine that without wincing. She was just a kid when he brought her out to Yankton County, South Dakota, where they established their first homestead. Through the years, the two of them had 10 children. His older brother was born in the granary because they were in a place where a house hadn't yet been built. His father was 62 years old when the last of the children--twin girls--were born in 1898. He was a German immigrant, who came to America with nothing but the shirt on his back, his son says. His parents were married in Illinois. She was also of German extraction, but they spoke differing dialects. 

Ernest Bormann worships his mother: Looking back on it, I can't believe how much she did every day of her life. And she was always healthy and cheerful. I can't remember her ever saying she had a headache or had to lie down and rest. 

Takes your breath away. Her life, as her son tells it, feels Herculean, beyond belief, mythic, and today almost lost. She wasn't alone on the Great Plains either. She may well have been alone on the ground her husband worked, but hers wasn't the only difficult life on the prairie. 

But there's more to Mr. Borman's story, another side. That'll come on Monday.

Harvey Dunn, The Prairie is My Garden

Remembering to remember

I hate to admit it, but when it comes to music, I'm basically stuck in the mud. I'm likely to turn on something when I get downstairs, but listening to anything other than classical or a smattering of new age would be, for me, beyond unlikely. What I know about Lady Gaga (am I spelling that right?) could be uploaded in a couple seconds. There's scandals there, I think, is that right? I don't know if she, like others, started her musical career in church, but I have this vague sense that if we we rearrange the letters of her name, we could likely spell something in the uncomfortable neighborhood of sinful. 

What I don't know won't hurt me, so I'm not particularly interested in researching her history. All I know is that her soaring performance of our national anthem created in me about as much teary patriotism as I'm capable of. Wow. I've listened to it a half-dozen times, and not a whit of its power has dwindled. It was--and still is--amazing, deeply stirring.

What most people are saying after 46's inauguration is that it was almost shockingly beautiful in its timid simplicity. It carried none of the flamboyance of most anything 45 ever did in public, now show at all. I can't help but think it is a bit effusive to say, as did Fox's Chris Wallace, that it was the best speech he ever heard. It don't believe it had the the sheer jet engine power of Lady's Gaga's national anthem. 

What made it memorable, like most everything else yesterday, was the ordinariness normality of almost everything that happened. Covid meant no crowds, of course; and those who were there were safely distanced. 

Everything that happened at the nation's capital was the polar opposite of what went down two weeks before. That's what was most memorable. It had absolutely nothing to do with the Trump-bred Capital Mall insurrection--no screaming, no shouting, no confederate flags.

And even though Trump's minions hoisted Jesus signs, there was more honest spirituality in that Inauguration Day than anything 45 and his crew could stage, even if they wanted to. Trump basically emptied the word evangelical of whatever it once held of deeply-felt spirituality. In a post-Trump world, to be an evangelical means you pray a lot, hate gays, and think America is the Kingdom of God. His people, plain and simple, are Christian nationalists; they love Jesus just like they love the flag.

Yesterday, there was none of that. 

But the very best thing about yesterday was what happened the night before, the stirring silence of remembrance on the National Mall. Amazing, isn't it?--how incredibly easy it is to forget what we simply hadn't done as a nation, offered remembrance for the tally of souls that gets harder to imagine the bigger it becomes. 

In Sioux County, we've lost 57 people; in Iowa, 4400; in the USA, 406,000, and in the world, better than two million. The truth is, the Schaaps have not suffered personally from the attack of virus. As long as you don't, 400 thousand men and women is a number so vast it long ago climbed out of our personal and collective imagination. 

Try this: take the entire population of the city of the Des Moines, wipe them off the face of the earth. Now add to that every last resident of Sioux Falls, and then just about all of Sioux City. Wipe all of them out. That's where we're at. 

This morning I'm thankful for whoever in the Biden camp determined that the fitting way of beginning the inauguration festivities was with lament and remembrance. The dead are gone; they no longer need our devotion; but the millions who grieve their losses need to know that the rest of remember and care. To begin what has now begun by remembering to remember, in silence and awe, was a blessing.

This morning I'm thankful for Lady Gaga, but my deepest thanks goes to those who helped all of us remember to remember.

Last night at dusk 

a new era began 

in this country. 

May it be blessed. 

On healthy shame

Perhaps the most widely-known example of community shaming is the A affixed to the chest of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne didn't have much good to say about his American Puritan ancestry, and his novel, once upon a time foisted upon just about every American high school student, didn't hold much back. 

The truth? I've read it twenty or thirty times in preparation to teach it in a class in American literature, loved it every time, always, in large part, I'm sure, because while Hawthorne may have despised his Puritan heritage, he never for a moment lost his serious regard for sin. The Scarlet Letter is all about sin, which is familiar territory for someone like me, someone of the Calvinist persuasion.

Jane Griffioen's London Street grew from similar soil, although the "sin," in the memoir, was secreted away, not displayed upon the chest. Something happened years before, something secret that nonetheless tainted the life of subsequent generations. The memoir slowly--and effectively--works at loosening the knot used to bind the hearts and souls of those who suffered that sin's after-effects. Sin, in London Street, is as serious matter as it is in Scarlet Letter.

I couldn't help wondering about all of that, especially the shame that grows so abundantly in Calvinist communities like my own, communities so tight and close that departing the paths of righteousness was unthinkable.

Today, that kind of shame--or so it seems to me--is considered a bad thing. In the Covid era, half the American populace are vehement about not being shamed into wearing a mask. They refuse to feel any guilt about something they believe is their right to refuse as a citizen of a free nation. They refuse to be shamed by my wearing a mask.

Because I wanted to understand more about shame, I picked up Lewis Smedes Shame and Grace. Smedes grew up in a world I understand; his theology and background, to me, is helpful. He claims, as well he might, that there is something to be said for "healthy shame," as difficult as that is to believe. "Our feelings of inferiority are a sure sign of our superiority, and our feelings of unworthiness testify to our great worth," he says. That's a line I needed to read several times before moving on.

The next line helps, however: "Only a very noble being can feel shame" because "if we never feel shame, we may have lost contact with the person we most truly are." I like that.

And this: "If we can still feel the pain, it is because we are healthy enough to feel uncomfortable with being less than we ought to be," he says, "and less than we want to be. This is healthy shame."

And now this blog post will take an unhealthy turn.

If we believe the historical record, my people administered scarlet letters in a uniquely grotesque form, shame masks, like the handsome one at the top of the page. For public sins, the guilty were sentenced to shaming masks some artists must have had a ball creating. Can you imagine say, six weeks in this?

Right now, you might well guess where all of this is going because I know of only one person who lives, self-confessedly, without shame, a man who once told an interviewer that he'd never done anything for which he'd needed forgiveness. 

Tomorrow, the Senate will begin deliberation on the impeachment the House took last week, indicting the President for feeding mob frenzy to interrupt the lawful proceedings of the legislature. Instead, he perpetuated "the Big Lie," the claim that he had actually won the election in a landslide. Didn't happen. Should that man, the Pres, be kept from ever running for office again? 

What's ahead of us is not going to be pretty, and, as Fox News says, it will make his true believers even more furious.

I say, dump the proceedings. Just sentence the Donald to five years of wearing a shame mask. Let him wander through a museum to choose which he'd find least horrifying, but then make him wear it always for five years. 

Shame him. Let him learn some healthy shame. 

White Privilege

We'd just arrived. Long trip. Hadn't planned ahead. We'd just hopped in the Chevy and left because that's what college students did; they just took off to Florida at spring break. We wanted to be among 'em.

It was April, 1968. I was a college sophomore who thought himself already more worldly-wise than most of my clean-cut peers at the Christian college I attended, but I was looking to be more than that by getting lost in the annual orgy of fun down South.

We left the far corner of Iowa but had car trouble in Memphis—water pump went out in that '62 Chev. We turned in to the next service garage we came to, and were surprised when the boss, the mechanic, and the pump jockey were all African American. We were Northerners from lily-white homes in lily-white towns. None of us ever had to trust a black man to fix anything.

But the guy did fix us up and didn't overcharge. I was a little surprised he didn't take us to the cleaners. It was 1968. In less than a week, Martin Luther King's blood spilled over the balcony of a motel not far away.

We'd done no planning, had little money; but sometimes innocence doesn't hurt you, even if it should. Daytona Beach was darl when we found a sleazy place, an old army Quonset that likely made money only during spring breaks.

We stood in line in the creaky office, where wiry red neon still read "Vacancy." If this wasn't going to be this place, we knew we'd have to keep looking.

The line thinned down until we were second. In front of us stood a black couple. I remember feeling envy, simply assuming the two of them weren't married. I was in the world that night, “in the world.”

We were close enough to hear the old guy tell that couple that the gang right in front of them had just now taken his last room--flipped up his hands, shrugged his shoulders as if there was nothing he could do. He was so sorry but the two of them could probably find another place, he said, just down the street somewhere, but he was full up and really sorry.

They left. We lingered. We'd have to find some place too. We thought we'd ask directions.

"Not to worry," the manager said, "I still got a room. We just don't take their kind."

I knew nothing about reconstruction, of Jim Crow, about lynching, maybe a little about KKK and burning crosses. I'd grown up with sweet Christian parents who said Martin Luther King was an agitator who had friends who were known communists. I'd never seen anything close to what had just happened.

We took that last room, the one that seedy guy in that miserable Quonset wouldn't give to customers who happened to be black.

That story returned to me last night, when I realized that the way it played out for all these years in my memory was, in part, created by my own naivete. I've always assumed that the couple left that firetrap carrying the same anxiety we would have: it was late and they didn't know what they were going to do because there was no room in the inn.

But last night, listening to Trevor Noah talk about racism, it hit me that I may well have judged them by my own innocence. What if they didn't believe the jerk behind the desk? What if they knew why they didn't get a room? What if it wasn't the first time they'd read Jim Crow signs that weren't on the wall but were still strictly enforced?

I’d never considered that before, simply assumed that couple to be as innocent as I was. My naivete I’d call “white privilege.”

On our way back up north from the beaches, somewhere in northern Florida, the car radio told us the news, the death, the murder, of Dr. King.

And that summer, the streets of just about every city in America went mad. Fires raged. It was 1968.

Reading Mother Teresa--Darkness

I am overwhelmed with troubles 

and my life draws near to death. 

I am counted among those who go down to the pit; 

I am like one without strength. Psalm 88:3–4. 

So the sermon yesterday was on worry, and the preacher was agin’ it. Like sin. It was the kind of sermon lifelong churchgoers like me could have written ourselves, or at least outlined, once the scripture was read. Same old, same old. Our old preacher used to say that “Fear not!” was among, if not the greatest of, all the commandments, at least the one most repeated in scripture. I knew that.

Yet, we fear. Yet, we worry. Yet, we feel abandoned. Yet, we know darkness.

We’re human, I guess, all of us.

Somewhere in To Be Near Unto God, Abraham Kuyper says that those who are troubled by insomnia – which often means troubled by something other than not sleeping – should learn, simply enough, to take advantage of the night’s long and empty spaces by reading, by doing worthwhile stuff. Instead of just lying there worrying, he says, spend the time in prayer or in the Word. Read a book.

Abraham Kuyper taught me a great deal in that wonderful devotional book of his, but I remember that advice particularly because it seemed to be to fit under the category my college would students would label “Duh,” as in, “good night, that's startlingly obvious.”

I’ve said it before, – and I must admit it’s an attribute of Come Be My Light that drew me to the life of Mother Teresa, – that this saintly woman, this saint, literally, experienced profound periods of midnight darkness created by her sure conviction that God almighty, the Creator of Universe, and Jesus, his son, had walked away and left her completely alone – that they simply were not to be found. This woman, doing his work, felt at times totally abandoned.

What do we do with that fact? How can we understand someone whose devotion to the Lord Jesus flags so fully? There were times in her life when half the world looked to her as the model of Christian living. By her own confession, she’d walked and talked with Jesus, listened to his very voice, heard his outline for how she and her Daughters of Charity should live. Who on earth could have been closer?

Yet, frequently, she felt alone in a darkness so complete that it seemed all-encompassing. She told few. How could she? After all, to millions she was the purest, shining light of the love of Jesus.

“My own soul remains in deep darkness & desolation,” she confessed to the archbishop (154).

Somewhere in The Treasury of David, Charles H. Spurgeon says that what Mother Teresa experienced is a form of darkness known only to believers, because only those who know the comfort of God’s abiding love can feel the horror of being somehow bereft of his grace.

Whether we call it worry or anxiety or even depression – maybe even despair – it was, in her, very, very real, by her own admission and confession. Her biographers claim she used it – that horrific darkness – to more fully empathize with others. She guided her own personal suffering into the suffering of others, which, they say – and history may well prove – enabled her heart to grow, even as her spirit appeared to wither with the absence of her savior’s voice.

Whether she prayed or read on those awful sleepless nights we’ll never know, but if those who tell her story are right – (and no one but Mother Teresa will ever know if they are) – she used her own despair – and I don’t use that word without regard – to understand the estrangement from God that others admitted. Thus, if we believe them, her biographers might say that she turned her own utter weakness into longsuffering strength.

But there will be more to say about the utter darkness that’s here, almost unbelievingly, in a book of private writings titled by her editor, thoughtfully, Come Be My Light.

What to see at Little Big Horn

When you get to the Visitor’s Center, look for the blue dress–it belonged to Judy’s grandma,” she told me. “Judy” is her friend. I’d just met both at the mission school—middle-aged, Northern Cheyenne women. “Both our grandmas were there—both ofthem.” Sparkling eyes full of pride.

If you think a woman in her mid-forties with a grandma at Little Big Horn way back in 1876 is a stretch, consider a culture where words like cousin and grandmother fit lovingly, and loosely. Some part of her was at Custer’s ignominious “last stand,” that part sure as heck not on the General’s side. That’s what she was telling me. Proudly.

I had told her I was going up the road to the battlefield. “Look for the blue dress in the Visitor’s Center,” she said. “You can’t miss it.”

I did miss it. Covid had shut the place down; but that doesn’t mean I didn’t see two grandmas when I stood on the knoll where Custer was killed. All the way across the river there were hundreds of grandmas that day, I’m sure.

For Native people, Little Big Horn was a victory that insured defeat. For a country then celebrating a birthday, it was a defeat that insured victory.

Twenty years ago I stopped in late June. Lots of people were around, an anniversary, I think. I took a walk south of the Visitors Center on paths through gravestones, while behind me some Crow singers and drummers were playing. Even when I couldn’t see them, I could hear them.

Like millions of others who went west, my immigrant Dutch great-grandparents did too and ended up at Harrison, South Dakota, where some nights, I’m told, back then people could hear Yankton drums from miles away. Twenty years ago I stood on a battlefield sidewalk, imagining how a immigrant Calvinist family of Psalm singers would judge the high-pitched screeching that just wouldn’t have harmonized with Old Hundredth.

But two immensely proud Northern Cheyenne women had just told me how their own grandmas had been there, at a place they still call “Greasy Grass.” Imagine that. It was the end of a December day, the sun casting long shadows, while I swear that ghosts were rising from the hills, a hundred graves of white men and red.

When you’re alone, Little Big Horn is a vast cemetery. Stone markers stand upright over the ridges and through the valleys where the nameless fell. Two hundred of the 7th Calvary didn’t leave that wide open space; almost that many stones remember.

In 1876, I doubt any of my ancestors thought much about what happened there. They were barely American. When they left the Netherlands, they stayed north of the Mason-Dixon because they had no truck with slavery; but the cloistered living they chose likely meant they knew little of “Custer’s last stand.” Had they frequented taverns, they might have seen a painting; but all that hostile stuff was a world away.

Dozens of European immigrants were among the 7th Calvary dead, Euro-Americans who’d not ridden a horse or shot a rifle before they left Ft. Abraham Lincoln. But the day I stopped, I was blessed because I knew someone who had a link, some DNA, a voice crying out in and after the battle, singing a victory song maybe, or a lament for the dead. Gaul, after all, lost two wives and a child. And I’d met women whose grandmas were there. Actually there.

Native women followed up the warriors incredible victory by crossing the river, and, with their knives, creating so much horror that, two days later, the soldiers assigned to burial duty didn’t—couldn’t–forget.

Shooting pictures of grave stones can seem somehow insensitive, but I couldn’t help myself. They’re all over. Besides, it was holiday season; people weren’t wandering far from home. I was alone. Nobody’d see.

But in truth, I can’t imagine a better time to be there—late afternoon, winter solstice, long shadows, a light snow, and no one else anywhere on that monumental battlefield where a couple hundred grave stones, some in groups, some distressingly alone in that forever expanse, mark places where combatants never made it back up on their feet. Everywhere you look really, gravestones mark death.

There’s a measure of Native grief and remembrance too, sacred itself, so sacred that perhaps I shouldn’t have taken this picture. 

Out on the endless horizons of the Little Big Horn Battlefield National Monument, you can’t help feel a level of awe that makes silence the only news worth telling. You are really not alone when surrounded by hundreds of those who were not.

It was perfectly quiet that late afternoon, just the creeping light wind in the grass. Still, I told myself that if I listened really closely, I could hear the Lakota drumming and singing.

Which is not to say that “Old Hundredth,” out there on that barren, snowy ground, wouldn’t have offered a place a soul like mine could abide.

Next time–and the blue dress.

Morning Thanks--for my grandson

When my wife was a lass and the two of us took a shining to each other, I never realized how much I had to learn about life in farm country, even though I'd lived in the area, sort of--as much as any college student ever does--for four years. Lessons needed to be learned. My teachers--my in-laws--were insistent, but neither overbearing nor dogmatic.

 

One moral truth my mother-in-law wouldn't let rest, whether or not she was with us in the car--was the danger of corn corners. Sounds somehow like Hee-Haw--"corn corners." The lessons came as a single directive: "Watch out for corn corners."

So effectively did she drill that warning into her only son-in-law that I never, ever forgot it. Even today I hear her voice whenever I come up on gravel road corners where you can't see what's coming from the other direction. 

For the unlettered, a "corn corner" is an intersection where whoever's working the land sews his hybrids right up to the intersection, tall corn, of course--this is "the tall corn state," after all--so tall it obscures vision. "Watch out for corn corners" means when you come up to one, don't just roar through. You may not have to stop, but slow the heck down because, well, just think about it.

She didn't let up on that one, because once upon a time not that many years before, a kid from next door, home on leave as I remember, went flying through a corn corner at the same moment someone else came flying through in the opposite direction. The neighbor kid was killed in an accident my in-laws' ears witnessed. It happened that close.

"Watch out for corn corners" wasn't a warning that rose from paranoia. She and Dad knew the bloody danger first hand.

It's January. The corner where my grandson had an accident last week had no corn, but he was on a rise right before the intersection, and the guy whose he hit was pitching along on the other side of a farmstead right smack dab on the corner, a lot with a handful of ash trees that meant both drivers were pretty much blind to each other. Pieter broadsided the livestock trailer the other guy was pulling.

The thing about corn corners--or any country corner where your vision is obscured--is that you could spend a day or two going back and forth through the intersection and not meet anyone on the other side. There's no stop sign because meeting someone going the other direction is not impossible but unlikely--corn corner intersections simply don't bear much traffic. Thus, no stop sign.

Sadly, dangerously, this time the two of them were on, as they say, a collision course. Neither of them slowed to a crawl. My grandson was coming to the right of the other guy, so the other guy was at fault, but fault is a scary word because it could have been a much heavier load. Our grandson came off that corner with a concussion that still has him a little groggy, but nothing else. 

We're guessing the air bag knocked him silly but saved his life. If he hadn't been seat-belted in, if he hadn't suffered the wrath of that blessed air bag. . .well, I don't like to think about hypotheticals. Just look at the picture on top of the page.

So I'm thankful this morning, as I've been every morning since the accident, thankful for an air bag and, far more grandly, for the life that airbag saved, and thankful to the Creator of heaven and earth for his favor in allowing us to continue to love our grandson, to simply have him around. 

Sunday he's coming over for dinner with his family--and a girlfriend. I can't believe it yet--that he made it out of that wreck AND that he has a girlfriend. Consider me royally thankful for all of that and always a whole lot more.

Impeach him!

Winter never departed March of 1857, the temperatures as low as temperatures can dip here, deep snow sharply crusted to make walking any distance almost impossible.

For the Gardner family, a band of Indians coming to their door was not rare. Neither was talk. When the Wahpekutes showed up, Abigail’s father picked up his rifle. Her mother, Abbie remembers, told him to put it down. “If we have to die,” she told him, “let us now die innocent of shedding blood.” Thus, the Gardners allowed Inkpaduta’s men into their cabin and cooked up pancakes for breakfast.

Later, when the visitors returned, they demanded flour. When Abbie’s father turned to get what little they had, one of them shot him through the heart. Her mother attempted to push a rifle barrel away and was clubbed, then dragged outside and killed “in the most cruel and shocking manner,” Abbie says. Abbie was little more than a child. In a few moments, both her parents lay dead.

That left her alone with three children. Two were her brothers, the other belonged to an older married sister who happened to be away. The Wahpakutes grabbed the children, dragged them outside, and clubbed all three to death. 

What happened at the Gardner cabin was the first act of a string of atrocities along the lakeshore, a string that, a day later, extended into the town we know today as Jackson, Minnesota. 

In all, Inkpaduta’s band killed as many as 40 settlers in the three-day rampage and took four women captives, in what people here call "The Spirit Lake Massacre." They were never hunted down, never punished. Authorities charged those Native people who hadn't participated with hunting down Inkpaduta's band and bringing him to justice, a job that never got done. 

Five years later, hundreds of other justly disgruntled Dakotas began killing unsuspecting settlers along the Minnesota River in an orgy of blood-letting. Frontier Minnesota had little organization in 1862, so no one really knows how many homesteads were raided, how many white folks--men, women, and children--were killed; estimates vary between 400 and 800, in just a month.

Don't be misled. The Dakota had cause. They were starving. White people abandoned treaties they'd signed as if they had stood on the banks of the river and burned them. Native treachery had cause, but historians, even some Native people themselves, claim one of the reasons was that Inkpaduta's band of Wahpakute Dakotas went unpunished.

Whole library shelves of books have been written on the relationship between justice and mercy, endless titles, I'm sure, devoted to the relative efficacy of strict punishment for crimes done. Our culture's jury system puts much of that decision-making in the hands of judges who pass the judgments jurists ("a jury of their peers") make of the accused. Serving in the juror's box in an obligation of citizenship in a system like ours, but it's not easy and someone has to do it.

There are good reasons not to impeach Donald J. Trump. With just a few days left in the White House, if we do nothing at all, some Republicans say he'll simply disappear. What President-elect Biden doesn't need is even greater national anger as he takes over and attempts to heal a divided union. 

But those hundreds--and even thousands--of people, white people, white men, who tore up the Capital last week have to know that the treachery they perpetuated went beyond the limits of what we might call "dissent." They need to understand that a week ago five people died at their hands in "the people's house."

And Donald J. Trump needs to know that what he did and said right there in front of the crowd played a significant role in pushing that crowd into a mob. He needs to know his speech was not "appropriate." The only way that will happen is that he's punished. 

Not bringing the whole weight of the law down on him will only allow him to continue the tsunami of lies he's pushed throughout his term as President, including the one that has led to the horrors of last week: that some vast conspiracy of men and women from both political parties, literally hundreds of people, got together in secret to perpetuate an immense fraud and thereby declare Joe Biden as President in a national election he, Trump, had actually won in a landside. That story was and still is a damnable lie. He has to know it and own it, as do his fanatic followers. 

I say, impeach him. 

Small Wonders: A Badlands Story

 

It wasn’t gold the man was after. Made good sense that the Ogallalas were suspicious and angry. Made good sense they wouldn’t tolerate yet another white guy hanging around. They weren’t one bit taken with their presence.

What the white man was doing, he told them, was hunting for big bones. Some snickered.

That explanation didn’t help. Some white man coming into the heart of sacred land to look for bones of big four-leggeds who’d lived and died many winters before? Old bones they were digging, he said, not gold. 

Red Cloud and his men were wary about him and all the gold white people swore was lying around, gold that turned them nutty as mules. They’d seen far too many white men swarming in, making promises they never kept, not once.

Red Cloud, the Ogallala Sioux headman, war hero, was skeptical, not thrilled. He didn't buy the whole "bones of ancient animals" madness. Besides, this strange white man was pushy and odd, even for a white man. From way out east, he told them. He talked funny. 

It was early winter, 1874, in the very heart of the Badlands, the place the treaty at Ft. Laramie had said was now and forever Sioux country, and a crazy man--a professor from Yale—was trying to convince the Ogallala Sioux that he wouldn't mess with the ancestors' remains. He was doing something he called science, this man said, gathering bones of huge four-leggeds none of them had ever even seen--fossils, he called them.

White men never told the truth.

Picture it: a Lakota war party amid wasteland spires, jagged peaks, and weird wind-carved sandstone statues all around, a Twilight Zone so eerie travelers still today wonder who on earth created this world—and why? 

Professor Othniel Marsh, the nation's foremost paleontologist, stood there stiff-necked, an Ivy Leaguer with a half dozen chippy students scared to death. In front of them stood the greatest Lakota headman and a war party in full regalia. No John Wayne Western ever posed such polar opposites. 

Red Cloud had been to Washington, had seen white men thick as bats in a cave. Besides, he didn't need to look over his warriors to know his people were hungry. He must have told the professor how preposterous it was for him to ask them to believe him. He must have showed Professor Marsh their poverty, must have made clear that the treaty gave them nothing, no promised reparations. They were starving. His people were dying. Treaties were worthless. White men were liars.

The mad professor Marsh promised Red Cloud he would take their suffering to the Great Father, and somehow, that day in the Badlands, Red Cloud believed him, then warned him to gather his things yet that night and get away with those big bones--fossils, the professor called them. So Marsh and his students did as Red Cloud suggested, cleared out, headed back east. 

When they got back the professor did exactly as he'd promised: he went to Washington, ignited a scandal in the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, and thereby secured provisions for Red Cloud's Ogallalas. He kept his promise.

Now let's be clear. Professor Marsh could be more than mean-spirited. People who worked for him learned quickly to dislike him. Scholars today are convinced that were his tantrums diagnosed, a psychologist might say Othniel Marsh, the great paleontologist, would fit somewhere on the autism spectrum. But the mad Professor kept his Badlands promise.

The picture way up on top was taken 11 years later, when Red Cloud was, once again, taken out east, where he went to New Haven to visit the man he called "the Big Bone Chief" and present him with a peace pipe and a wampum belt, symbols of gratitude and friendship. "He told the Great Father everything just as he promised he would," Red Cloud said, "and I think he is the best white man I ever saw."

Still, less than a decade later, Big Foot and his band would come through the same rugged sandstone spires on his way to Pine Ridge, on his way to Wounded Knee.

There's always more to the story, isn't there?

But the story about big bones is too easily lost. It's a great Badlands story, right out of the Twilight Zone. 

Book Report: London Street

Let me be honest. I have two significant problems talking about this book. The first is that it's a memoir. Memoirs aren't inherently problematic, but they do make us make judgments about people's lives, judgments that aren't always pleasant to make. "Here's what happened," they report, and then they expect us simply to believe it--or, more to the point, expect us not to guess that there isn't more to the events than we're being told. I kept wishing Jane Griffioen's London Street was a novel, not a memoir. If it were a novel, it would be easier to talk about because it's truth would have been fictional and not, as in the case, biography.

And then there's this. Jane Griffioen's London Street examines a life that is so close to mine, so exacting with respect to what it felt like to grow up within the powerful reach of a peculiar American religious community--mine too--at a particular time in that community's history, that at times throughout the book, I could not help feeling she was talking about me.

Frederick Manfred used to say that ethnic writers--and he considered himself one--had to be careful not to use to many "ins," too much ethnic minutiae, because readers who don't share heritage or background can quickly feel walled out. In the world of the old-line Dutch Reformed, a Sunday peppermint is as much as a sacrament as communion bread. 

Jane Griffioen is so precise, so exacting in the verities of a post-World War II Christian Reformed world that the exposition almost hurt. At one point in the memoir, she uses the lyrics from an old psalm no CRC ever sings anymore. I started reading those words without remembering, and suddenly the music returned, drawn eerily from memory's deep recesses. I loved all of that, and mostly I loved the fact that she played with the nuances of a theological history that tried so hard to keep us--Jane Griffioen and me--well away from "worldliness."

"Worldliness." I don't know that I've ever spoken to my children about the dangers of "worldliness." That word would likely have no psychic resonance with either of them. But darkness still arises in me when I see that word, because the evil that constitutes its horror is still resonant, even if its has lost its strength. "Worldliness" creates abundant darkness in the story Jane Griffioen tells of her life, as well it should, saith the old Calvinist. 

And now, since I'm telling you about Jane Griffioen's life, I am myself falling into sin because I can't help the feeling that I'm gossiping. The life she opens up on the pages of her memoir is so vivid to those of us who grew up as she did that simply telling you about it makes me feel I'm talking behind the back of a member of my own small community. And I am.

To me, that exactness is the memoir's great strength, and I loved reading it. London Street, the street in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on which Ms. Griffioen was raised, was in every way a small town, even though she grew up in a city. If you're Dutch Reformed and you don't like the title--too British, maybe--fine; just rename it Oostburg or Lynden or Zeeland or Whitinsville, all of which are cut from the same ethno-religious fabric. 

So one of the problems I have talking about the book is as perfectly obvious as it is an immense attribute: by talking about it, I can't help but feel as if I'm talking behind her back. She prompts guilt by evoking scenes so rich within my own memory that I know it all, chapter-and-verse. 

At the bottom of the story, two deep and difficult concerns eventually emerge. First, mental illness. Much of the memoir arises from a story Griffioen didn't grow up with, even though she did, a story of her mother's horror and humiliation, a story which happened long before Griffioen herself was born. 

But the shame her mother suffered, the humiliation at the hands of a family and a community that simply repressed the story, locked it up behind locked doors, acted as if it hadn't happened, is the real villainy. What happened to her mother put her mother, her sister, and herself into Pine Rest (and that too is an "in"--into a mental hospital) at different times in their individual lives.

But Griffioen doesn't stop there. Why are there stories that really can't be spoken of in this peculiar tightly-knit community? She wants to say--and she does--that we all would rather not mention them, given that we (of the old-line Dutch Reformed cultural and theological ethos) don't want to blame a sovereign God we extol as a great lover and Creator of Heaven and Earth. 

Some say Calvinism rests on two significant pillars--the sovereignty of God and the depravity of man, and that dynamic duo is at the heart of things in the life and the story of Jane Griffioen. 

Which is not to say, she rejects the doctrine. Her father, who, late in life, wanders back into the Protestant Reformed Church of his youth (that's an "in" too), is the source of that overpowering theology, the theology at times you think she would really like to blame for the tonnage of emotional problems of her own story.

But she can't. There's still something there in him she won't forsake--and, oddly enough, it's love. Speaking of her father, she says, "He might be a prisoner to his theology, but he hadn't locked his heart away." The source of terrifying dogma that threatens to lock up the family in its own theological icebox is her father, a man who has literally given his life--held down two jobs for as long as she can remember--for the sake of a family he has always loved hugely, and a wife who had a child before he married her.

It would be nice if we could nail down the true villainy in all of this, but Jane Griffioen can't do it and neither can we, not with the kind of exactness some readers might delight in discovering. Puzzle pieces are missing from this memoir, but then often enough they're missing from our own puzzles too.

That's life. Even for the Dutch Reformed.