Reading Mother Teresa--The Fortunate Fall

For it is by grace you have been saved, 

through faith – and this is not from yourselves, 

it is the gift of God. . . . Ephesians 2:8

One of the most famous yarns about Martin Luther, who was, among other things, marvelously colorful, is the story of him as a young monk, on his knees, climbing the stairs in front of the Lateran Palace when he was, for the very first time, in Rome, the heart of religious life.

Through the years that have passed since the earliest decades of the 16th century, the story now comes to us in several versions; but what each emphasizes is the suffering Luther pushed himself into, on those 28 stone stairs, as he attempted, on his knees, to send someone romping joyfully out of purgatory and into heaven.

What’s true and what’s myth will never be known, but dispute is silly on one point: what Luther learned and eventually taught is that salvation arrived in our lives not by indulgence, or bloody penance or bloody knees, or even an entire lifetime of “Hail Marys,” but by grace alone, a gift of God. Grace isn’t win-able, even by profound suffering. We can’t pay the price for sin, only Jesus can. Grace is the loving gift of a loving God. Nobody earns it. No way. No how.

Before Luther stumbled on the Bible’s own definition of grace, before he discovered that no sentence of stony stairs can atone for sin, young Martin was sorely troubled by his sin, at times to the point of death itself. His profound doubts, like Mother Teresa’s, were legion and prompted similarly dark despair.

In Luther, Eric Till’s 2003 film, one of young Martin’s superiors in the monastery asks him if he’d ever read the New Testament. When Martin says no, the superior says that soon enough he will, now that he’s off to Wittenberg. Luther is shocked. “Here I’m losing my faith, feeling like a fool, even to pray, and you’re sending me away?” he asks.

“You’ll preach,” the superior says.

When Luther says he’ll be a fraud as a preacher, the Superior tells him, “We preach best what we need to learn most.”

It’s always been a fascinating kind of psychological paradox to me – that preachers (and, okay, writers too) do their very best at what they need to learn. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan prelates are always better preachers when they’ve got something to hide – take the good Rev. Hooper from “The Minister’s Black Veil,” for instance. Especially in my tradition, in which the preacher, long ago, was once addressed only as “dominie,” the possibility of the preacher being anything less than a paragon of personal virtue is almost scandalous.

With good reason. It seems to me that had Mother Teresa ever confessed the grave depth of her doubt to those who served with her on the streets, such a revelation could have led her sisters to doubt the whole enterprise. So she held back her honesty, which in all likelihood made her doubt and pain even worse.

“The place of God in my soul is blank. – There is no God in me,” she wrote to a superior, Father Joseph Neuner, when he asked her to write out her inner trials. “When the pain of longing is so great – I just long & long for God – and then it is that I feel – He does not want me – He is not there” (210).

And then, remarkably, she says, “My heart & soul & body belongs only to God – that He has thrown away as unwanted the child of His Love. – And to this, Father, I have made that resolution in this retreat – To be at his disposal” (212). 

I don’t know that anyone will ever determine how it was that a woman of such faith could become so spiritually penniless – could have, for years by her own admission, had no faith at all. But what seems to be true is that her own deprivation – God’s own absence in her own life, her prayer life, her devotional life – somehow strengthened her resolve to live the life of service and love that she did on the dark streets of Calcutta.

Only in the poor did she see Jesus.

Understanding grace made a great difference in the life of Martin Luther. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder whether Mother Teresa, saint though she is, could have been lifted from her near despondency by a reminder that our owning salvation is not something that comes by a purchase any of us could have made.

But she knew. She had to know. She just had to. She just couldn’t believe it somehow, and she’s likely, today too, not alone.

Comfort to Spare (VII)

Trust me, I am woefully aware of how little I have to go on to establish what I'm trying to say about the nature of my grandparents' faith. While this January 30th, 1897, receipt from Central House proves nothing at all, it suggests at least something of what little my mother said, once or twice, about her Grandpa Dirk Hartman. 

Central House was, oddly enough, run by a name associated with the Oostburg Dutch community--a Heinen. The place was at least a tavern; there were countless road houses in Sheboygan County, in the years before prohibition (1920-1933). Certainly, by its own marketing appeals, you could pick up a drink: "FINE WHISKIES AND CIGARS" and "FRESH BEER ALWAYS ON TAP." Somebody was brewing it right then and there.

I can't know for sure what the first charge was, but my best guess is that the word is "Livery," which suggests that "D. Hartman" stayed over in Random Lake at the Central House, and that's understandable. Random Lake is not a long ways from Oostburg, where he had his business, just twenty miles or so. With a team, people might travel as far as thirty miles a day; but let's just assume that Great-grandpa Hartman had tried to make a few sales in Random Lake that day. That he would choose--if he could afford it--to stay over and start back toward home in the morning, makes all kinds of good sense. Central House, Random Lake, was his choice.

My mom remembered one story about her Grandpa Hartman, and that was the time her mother, my Grandma Dirkse, drove to Sheboygan, her little daughter in tow, pulled up outside a tavern on Indiana Avenue, which held more than a few watering holes, walked in, her little daughter in her arm, and located her father, then shoed him home in no uncertain terms. Was he drunk? I don't know. What I do know is that Mom's recollection of all of that was fuzzy, but she said she hadn't forgotten the incident because it was unusual, nothing ever repeated.

Dirk Hartman was an implement dealer, as my mom used to say, often on-the-road, a salesman, a good one, but when she offer that description, there would be more some disdain, not for him, perhaps--I don't think she knew him all that well--but for the profession, as if drinking and philandering came with the territory. 

Although my grandmother never said it at least to me, I have the sense, even the conviction, that Dirk J. Hartman, my great-grandfather, wasn't much of a dad. He was a second-generation American who didn't abide by the morality of the Dutch Calvinist world into which he was born and in which he was raised. Like his parents before him, he was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, unlike my grandfather's family, who were far more strict and worshipped at the Christian Reformed Church, the breakaway church across the street from Grandma's house and Grandpa's blacksmithing business. They were, even in the language of the time, "a mixed marriage."

A friend of mine here in Iowa, a man with the perfectly characteristic Sheboygan County Dutch name of Huibregste (heuw'-brekt-see) told me his family came west all the way out to northwest Iowa because his grandmother used to say she wanted her new husband to have absolutely nothing to do with her own brother and his business back home in Oostburg. Her brother's name was Dirk Hartman.

If by "God-fearing" we intend to describe life in a particular home--as in "a God-fearing home"--then I'm willing to believe that Grandma Dirkse's home may have been lacking. She told me once, giggling about it actually, that she'd learned the Heidelburg Catechism in the Dutch language, even though she didn't know how to speak Dutch. Her own grandparents were among the earliest mid-19th century Dutch immigrants to America, arriving before 1850. Grandma didn't know the Dutch language because she was already third-generation American. 

That Grandma Dirkse didn't fall apart the night the police knocked on her door, bearing the worst possible news any parent could hear--that all makes sense. In her life--she was 56 years old when her daughter was killed--there likely had been some strife and sadness, including the war death of her brother in 1918, her only sibling, her father's youngest. 

What I'm saying is, if we believe the story of that night's horror, that Mabel Hartman Dirkse was the strength makes sense.

Comfort to Spare (VI)

Mom, Aunt Gertie, Grandpa Dirkse, Great-grandpa Hartmann

One of the few stories surrounding the death of Aunt Gertie is the description of what happened in my grandparents' home the night the police came to the door bearing the tragic news of her death.

My grandparents lived downtown, right downtown, where my grandfather had a blacksmith shop that had, through the years, been converted into a service garage and what we used to call a "filling station," Mobile Oil, the big red horse. The front door led immediately into the living room of their home, but a short stairway off the dining room led directly into the "service station," where the men who worked at Dirkse Oil did oil changes. The blacksmith shop was out back.

We can assume, I'd say, that the police didn't come until late, that the downtown Oostburg, Wisconsin, was not full of shoppers or worshippers at either or both of the two big churches within a block of their house. It's hard to imagine that the police coming to the door of their place was any kind of public event. I'm guessing Grandpa and Grandma were in house robes. Their bedroom was upstairs. Perhaps, when they heard the knock, one of them looked out the curtain on the window upstairs and saw a police cruiser. I don't know.

But what happened at that moment is a story that has been passed along. The two of them got to the front door. Grandpa listened to the news and fell apart. The description given in this family story isn't precise or exacting--only that, understandably, he cried and cried hard. What he heard from those cops right then was the worst news any parent can imagine, and he lost emotional control.

Grandma comforted him, I'm sure, but the story goes that, even in her grief, the first thing she did was look up at the men standing there and tell them it was beyond her imagination to understand how they could carry out jobs like the one they just had. Then, she invited them in. 

My grandparents had two other children, both older, both married, both living down the street. Neither of those children were there to witness that moment. In other words, no one made record of exactly what happened right then that night; yet that story gets passed along and no one doubts its veracity.

Is that what happened? I'm guessing the source of the story was Grandma. Sometime in the following few days, she likely told my mother. My mother never forgot.

Whether the uniquely personal reactions amid the immense shock did occur or didn't may not be as important to us and even to our parents, who passed it along, as the fact that we all know the story, even though no one else was there. The story's truth is not simply literal. Grandpa's understandable fit of sobbing contrasts with Grandma's stoicism and selflessness because the significant differences point at the way we've come to define them, our Dirkse grandparents, and the role each of them played in our lives, and through whatever spiritual influences, still do. 

More on that tomorrow.

Comfort to Spare (V)

Seems unfeeling somehow to see the story of Aunt Gertie's death wedged in there amid the headlines of the Sheboygan Press, just one of many stories--front page, at least, but having to wrestle readers' attention away from a sale of damaged timber, a lumber yard fire all the way across the state, and/or President Truman asking Congress to pass a civil rights law. Besides, it was Armistice Day, November 11, 1949, and Grandma Dirkse, then 56 years old, already had reason to lament: in France, her only brother, Edgar Hartman, had been killed in "the war to end all wars."

But there is the story, second column, a bit more than half way down--"Miss Dirkse of Oostburg Dies in Crash."

I'm guessing that she's "Miss Dirkse," on the front page as well as on the second, because she was an elementary school teacher whose students knew her and likely spoke of her as such. Here's the continuing story from page 6. 

Once upon a time, highway 141 was the most efficient thoroughfare to get from Milwaukee to Green Bay. Today, it's I43. After I graduated from college, I lugged sod balls up the inclines created for an endless series of interchanges. Back then, 141 hugged the shoreline of Lake Michigan, ran right past Oostburg and into Sheboygan. Today that little two-lane road honors a greatly forgotten past--"Sauk Trail Road."

Lakeshore fog still quilts the lakeshore at times, as it must have that night. Somewhere amid the few stories I know of Aunt Gertie's death, I heard something that Mom never forgot--that her parents, Harry and Mabel Dirkse, didn't want their youngest daughter to go to wherever the four of them were bound that night on that seeming double-date. Whether or not her parents warned her is probably immaterial, although if they didn't, I'm thinking my grandpa would have lamented his not speaking up--you know, "maybe if I only had." But Aunt Gertie wasn't a kid. She was 24 years old. 

If you have read closely, you'll note, as Press readers would have, that, because of the density of the fog that November night, the driver was travelling on the wrong side of the road. His being over there, according to authorities, was the reason for the accident. The Calvinist in me is certainly willing to grant you that 24-year-olds are not, across the board, without their share of sin; but even with what little I know about the accident or the others in that car that night, I honestly don't believe that the driver's being on the other side of the highway was a result, somehow, or inattentiveness or inebriation. If there's one aspect of the story that was often repeated, it had to do with fog, even the authorities said so.

My sister, who is older than I am and remembers seeing her Aunt Gertie's body in the coffin in my grandparents' dining room, says that somehow she remembers hearing that the man driving was not the owner of the car because the man driving knew the way to wherever the four of them were going. 

None of them were not kids--one couple was married--and they'd come from staunch Dutch Reformed families. For better or for worse, it's not easy to find some villain to blame, even the cops claimed it had to be the thick fog.

On October 11, 2002, 53 years later, ten people were killed and some three dozen others injured in one of the most horrific traffic accidents ever recorded, an accident that piled up 40 cars and trucks on I43. That grisly mess occurred in the morning, in deep lakeshore fog, just eight miles north of the place where the accident that night took place, the accident in which my Aunt Gertie was the only passenger in the car to be killed--November 10, 1949.

______________________ 

(more to come) 

 

Comfort to Spare (IV)

[I'm slowly working on a longer essay that aims at defining the character of my own stubborn faith by looking closely at my grandparents', and their grief at the death of their daughter, my aunt, in 1949. This is the fourth segment. There will be more.]

"Well, sir," said a sympathizing man to the present author, "your son gave his life for the liberty of others, and you may well be proud of his great sacrifice to make possible the victory over evil which the world enjoys today."

The Reverend Van Baalen speaks from experience in this little book gifted to my grieving grandparents. Undoubtedly, Comfort to Spare was passed along to devastated parents throughout the land, because it's clear from this slight mention in the intro that Van Baalen, during the war just concluded, had lost a son in the service of his country, one of thousands of young men who didn't return. He doesn't make a show of his own grief, mentions it only once, here. He knows enough about grief to understand that trying heal the profound sadness of others he doesn't need to march out his own anguish, only say that it's there--and he knows very well how trying grief can be.

But there's a theology to his diffidence.

One of the meditations in this little book relates the story of Dan Crawford, a missionary, who was returning to Africa from furlough. His party was in a hurry, but flood waters kept them from crossing a torrent they might otherwise have forded easily. "They camped and prayed," Van Baalan writes. "After a time a tall tree which had battled with the river for a century, perhaps began to totter, and then fell--clear across the stream. 'The Royal Engineers of Heaven,' Mr. Crawford said, 'had laid a pontoon bridge for God's servants.'"

Van Baalan's typical Dutch Reformed skepticism is evident: "Well, perhaps they did.. . .I doubt it though." He says he "likes to think" the tree's providential fall was "just an ordinary event of nature's work."

But he can't. He's an advocate of God's sovereignty after all.

"It is noteworthy," he says, "that God might have planted that tree right there a couple of hundred years previous and thereby plotted its fall at that exact moment as an answer to prayer." What he means by "noteworthy" is "newsworthy." He's exercising that Calvinist skepticism.

Then he lauds Missionary Crawford's praying, his trust in his Father God in their impossible distress. Crawford, like Van Baalen, believes in prayer. He much prefers prayer to guilt and shame, which, he introduces to his readers as altogether too present an option among his believers.

Maybe we are at fault. Perhaps God does not approve of us. Let's see. Oh yes, someone in the party forgot his morning devotions yesterday, and day before yesterday another member spoke harshly. It was hot, but he should not have gotten cross anyway. There you have it: it's all off, boys! God is sending hard luck to punish us. 

I can't help but think that my grandpa especially was hit between the eyes by that passage. But let me finish as Van Baalen finishes, with what seems a perfectly awful thing to say: "I care not just what the nature of your present difficulty is; it does not matter," he writes. "The greater the obstacle the better." Why? "In that way you won't be able to take any credit yourself for its solution."

I have no idea if the seventh meditation from Comfort to Spare made any headway in helping my grandparents deal with their grief, but I believe--I really do--that what Van Baalen had to say here especially might have helped them--or at least Grandpa Dirkse--because of who he was and how he believed.

Zitkála-Šá

The base of this stained glass window in the Immaculate Conception Church of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, notes its dedication--"In memory of Sybil Bolton. . ."

Sybil Bolton was murdered, a young Osage woman who learned how to play the harp at an exclusive East Coast boarding school. She died back home, at the age of just 21 years old, mysteriously, I should add, with her baby at her side. She was buried in an ermine coat.

Sybil Bolton was one of many Osage people who came to untimely ends in a string of murders by white men, a few of whom were, in fact, married to the women who were killed, even fathers of their children. Those murders required significant collaboration, even with the law. All told, it's a horrible story, told unflinchingly--and most recently-- by the American journalist David Grann in Killers of the Flower Moon (2017). 

Starting with President Andrew Jackson in the 1830's, the American government simply assumed that the best possible solution to "the Indian problem"--Native Americans were simply in the way of real progress--was to slap them all into "Indian Territory," the region of the country where they could do what Indians do forever and ever. The Osage, who'd been pushed west for more than a hundred years, lived north in what eventually became Kansas. When they were herded south onto their parcel of Oklahoma land, no one had the slightest idea that the place floated on an ocean of liquid gold--oil. When the first gusher sprang from beneath the Osage feet, the Osage got filthy rich. Money somehow, maybe especially in America, draws flies and other vermin and, biblically at least, is the root of all evil.

Once the place was drilled, white men did what had to be done to secure what they could get of all that filthy lucre, including kill.

As we speak, Hollywood notables like Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jesse Plemmons, are hard at work in Pawhuska, creating a movie based on Killers of the Flower Moon.

David Grann's work is staggering, but it might be worth noting that one of the original investigations into what was happening in Osage County was accomplished by a writer named Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, a Yankton Sioux, born just west of here on the Yankton Reservation, who wrote "Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes--Legalized Robbery," a forty-page pamphlet published in 1924, when all that horror was still happening.

Just thought I'd mention it because today is her birthday, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, whose Yankton name was Zitkala-Sa.

I'd be amazed if ten people in the entire county ever heard of her, even though she is considered one of the most influential Native writers of the early 20th century. Once upon a time, this really was a Sioux county, Yankton country. I'm guessing she was born and reared not all that far from here, 145 years ago today.

Just thought I'd mention it.

My ashen birthday

I have one of you to thank for bringing this piece of chorale music to my attention. It was passed along by someone who assumed I'd like it, and you were right, abundantly so. Thank you.

Stop me if I repeat myself, but I learned this week that it's not an altogether great idea to have a birthday on Ash Wednesday. At my age--at most ages--birthdays already send out sufficient reminders of time's passing, of how we are, all of us, creatures of the dust to which we shall return. The word of the day on most birthdays is woe, and woe, and woe. 

People in my fellowship have now unofficially adopted traditions from the Roman Catholic church, which is fine--I much prefer it to the excesses of showy evangelicalism. But, for the very first time, on my birthday, I got myself ashen-ed, a black cross placed on the back of my hand. Why the forehead was eschewed I don't know, but getting religiously marked like that was for me, a rookie experience.

I'd never seen the ashen cross on foreheads until 1971. I was 23, a first-year teacher in rural Wisconsin. Some of my students--not necessarily the most religious ones--came back from their noon hour break with smudged foreheads, then acted, oddly enough, as if all that dirt wasn't there, never mentioned a thing about how weird they looked, and had me therefore pretty much flummoxed. I wasn't a total idiot--I didn't ask. I figured it out somehow, although I may have mentioned it to the principal, who was an deeply religious Irish Catholic from New York City. 

"Jim," he said to me one day, "when I take the host, I have Christ in me in the flesh."

I liked the deeply devotional way he told me that, but what he said also made more clear to me how I was, for better or for worse, a child of the Reformation. 

If being moved is at least something of the mission of all worship, then I wasn't moved particularly far at our Ash Wednesday worship, even though I did join the processional and walk away with an ashen cross on my hand.

Years ago, I remember, we were visited here by a big male choir from Urk, the Netherlands, who gave a wonderful concert. I don't remember if they sang Psalm 42 or not. What I do remember is that their visit was charming and wonderful. 

If you haven't clicked on the video above, do it now. It's a recording of Psalm 42, sung in the Dutch language, not in whole notes the way my ancestors likely sang it, but an old Genevan Psalter version nonetheless. The choir, from Urk, the Netherlands loves it. 

On Tuesday I posted this choir's rendition on my Facebook page, where it garnered rave reviews, even from old friends who may have tulips in their hedges but never saw a Reformed church. People loved it.

I'm fifth-generation Dutch-American. I safeguard no sepia-toned images of the old country. I can't speak nor understand the Dutch language. But this music just about draws tears. No, does. I wouldn't trade it for an Ash Wednesday cross. 

For me at least, heart-altering, soul-searching spirituality isn't easily engineered. Those Urk-ers singing their hearts out the way they do on Psalm 42 cues something immensely deep inside me, a birthday present and a Lenten blessing. 

I have no idea if that makes sense or why. What I do know is this first week of lent I've been greatly thankful for Psalm 42.

That lousy signage

It's Lent, officially, so let me confess my shortcomings: I can't help but hate seeing those Trump signs still out along the highway. Three months and more have passed since the election. Trump lost. Please, take down the signs?

People love him, I know. There are those--and they are legion--who see him as a savior sent to deliver us from the blood-sucking cabal that runs a sex trafficking ring out of a Washington D. C. pizza parlor. Maybe the signs are still there to help Trump remember his unfinished business--I don't know.

But for most of us, the signs and flags should go. It's over. It's cold, I know, and maybe whoever owns them doesn't have tall enough snow boots or a warm enough jacket to trudge out there and get them, but it's time.

Mine is a minority view. The tally went like this: Donald Trump: Lyon County, 5,703 votes (83.17 percent); O’Brien County, 5,857 votes (77.73 percent); Osceola County, 2,688 votes (80.84 percent); Sioux County, 15,669 votes (82.72 percent). I know, I know--you're saying, "what the heck is wrong with O'Brien County?"

Of that eighty-some percent, many, I'm sure, hold dearly to the belief that the liberal Dems cheated. CNN did a poll mid-January that found three out of every four Republicans still believed in "the big lie," that Donald J. got robbed because, after all, everybody knows--especially the liberal Dems--that the Orange Man won in a landslide. 

I just hope the rest of us aren't destined to see Trump signs for the next four years, when, once again, the savior will return from his Mara Lago hacienda and rise to run again. Why junk those signs now? people say. Soon enough, the old rallies will start again anew. He'll drop once more from some elevator in the sky.

The Big Lie is just that, so say sixty court cases, all the way up to the Supremes. Trump lost, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College; in the popular vote, he lost by seven million votes. Let me write that out: 7,000,000.

All fake news, Trumpsters say, because Trumpsters trot out alternative facts that prove vote tallies in Milwaukee, Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh--places with majority populations of minority status--were phony and shouldn't have been counted because if all those people of color hadn't voted, America would be blessed with another four years of The Donald. He got robbed. The election was rigged. Stacy Abrams is the devil. Black people voted. 

Not in my lifetime did we come so close to losing representative democracy as we did on January 6. What Trump wanted his massive crowd of disciples to do was interrupt the official determination of election results. He didn't want Mike Pence to do what every VP is required to--announce the election results and name the next President because it wouldn't be him. Democracy was just about dumped.

It's Lent, so let's be truthful about the human condition. Democracy is a stretch. As Ben Franklin said, it's not easy. I might wish that only those who love Henry David Thoreau could vote, only English majors maybe. Others would say only those who come from straight-talking small towns, or women who attend Bible Studies. Here, in northwest Iowa, most would much prefer that voting privileges be granted only to those who work as dang hard as we do. We all have our prejudices. 

But democracy won't have it--"one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Not for some, but for all. 

Biden won because 81,283,361 eligible American voters cast their ballots for him and 74,222,960 did so for the other guy. Them's the facts. Read 'em and weep. 

Better yet, take down the signs. Please?

Birthday stuff

Mom would say, were she here, that 73 years ago today when the doctor came in she was toting a bouncing baby boy--me, a kid so healthy, she claimed, she could drop me off outside of town in some field and I'd do just fine. I must not have had a weird ticker back then. I do today, but I'm not sorry--it kept me out of Vietnam in the worst of times, a blessing back then and even now. Like a couple of million others, I'd guess, I live with afib. 

Otherwise, a few years up from my biblically allotted three-score and ten, I'm in pretty good shape, better, I can't help but think, than my grandpa Dirkse, who was 65 when, one night, his heart stopped running. Grandpa Schaap was 77, which means I'm right there between them. I don't hangout in a cornfield--it'd be an awful place right now--but I've got no plans to die right now, although I grant you that in all likelihood few of us who have, do.

I'm a day away from my first Covid shot. Don't know if that insures anything, but I'll be more comfortable about things when that juice is working, not that I've been paranoid. 

Trump berated Mitch McConnell yesterday, proving he's still alive and kicking, so I've still got him to be get churned up about (not that I'm a fan of Moscow Mitch). 

Today? Well, it doesn't look like a prize-winner. We're not off to Tahiti. This morning I've got the dentist again (I'm a frequent flyer), and tonight there's Ash Wednesday worship to remind me and all of us that we're dust. Even a little redundant maybe. On almost any birthday after your 21st, hardly any of us need reminding, especially when the birthdays start stacking up like mine.

It's my birthday today--there, I've said it. I'm 73 years old. Last night I took what family I could out for buffet at the Pizza Ranch, closest I'll get to a party. Because it was my birthday, I got five bucks off. So there.

There was some talk--nothing firm--about the far-off possibility of a wedding. Didn't surprise me much since my granddaughter and her beau have been sweet for years already. Still, the possibility was daunting because a wedding means her creaky grandparents get escorted down the aisle of some area church by a young man taking my wife's arm. I know the routine. We'd then be placed like museum pieces in a front bench. It'll happen.

I'll always remember my the very first day of teaching--English literature to seniors at Blackhawk High School, South Wayne, Wisconsin--because it meant finding a way to talk about the Venerable Bede, a Benedictine monk I hadn't heard of myself, a man commonly thought of as the father of English history because he wrote that history out in a volume titled The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. 

I don't remember much more of the Venerable Bede than a single, well, meme. It's worth our time. 

O king, it seems to me that this present life of man on earth, in comparison to that time which is unknown to us, is as if you were sitting at table in the winter with your ealdormen and thegns, and a fire was kindled and the hall warmed, while it rained and snowed and stormed outside. A sparrow came in, and swiftly flew through the hall; it came in at one door, and went out at the other. Now during the time when he is inside, he is not touched by the winter's storms; but that is the twinkling of an eye and the briefest of moments, and at once he comes again from winter into winter. In such a way the life of man appears for a brief moment; what comes before, and what will follow after, we do not know. Therefore if this doctrine [Christianity] offers anything more certain or more fitting, it is right that we follow it.

He was, as you can tell, indeed venerable. The night before that class, my very first, I shook my head at what had become my fate. What on earth do high school seniors out here in rural Wisconsin have to do with that lousy sparrow? 

I was 22 years old, hadn't lived much. Today, on my 73rd birthday, me and the Venerable Bede could speak volumes. 

You're wondering about what's up there at the top of the page? A carrot cake my wife will frost this morning, a bag of wicked trail mix (a birthday present from my kids), and a cinnamon roll I just now pulled out of the freezer and will sinfully devour for breakfast. 

Then it's off to the dentist, and Ash Wednesday, and tomorrow my Covid shot.

Life is good, but it sure does move along, Mr. Venerable. It sure does, even at 73.

No on House File 222

KKK in Peterson, Iowa

In the late 60’s, my dad didn’t like Martin Luther King. MLK, he used to say, was a “social agitator.” What’s more, he’d say, some of King’s friends were known communists. In Wisconsin, where I grew up, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed he knew where every communist in America was hiding, held all kinds of political influence.

My dad was a loving and strong Christian man who had little knowledge of African-American history. In Oostburg High School during the years before WWII, I’m quite sure no one talked much about Bleeding Kansas or the Underground Railroad. I’m guessing he knew nothing of the hundreds, even thousands of lynchings during the Jim Crow era. Back then, in most cities, schools were still segregated. With him, that would have been fine. My grandpa was an elder in our church and a passionate Christian, but he cheered for the Philadelphia Phillies because they were the last team to integrate.

But then, how many of us know that at the turn of the century, the local KKK paraded through the streets of Peterson, Iowa (see above) and maintained a proud presence right here in the county?

Some history just isn’t taught, in part because we’d rather not hear it.

That’s good, says our own Iowa state rep, Skyler Wheeler. He wants to prohibit an African-American history project titled 1619 because it’s “a complete assault on conservatives, conservatism and Republicans.” The curriculum, created in part by an Iowan named Nikole Hannah-Jones, who won a Pulitzer for her introductory essay, he says will “deny or obfuscate the fundamental principles upon which the United States was founded.”

His Republican-sponsored bill, House File 222, would ban schools as well as other institutions governed by the Board of Regents from teaching anything—anything!—from the 1619 project. Should they dare such treachery, their funding will be slashed.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) became a best-seller, but infuriated loads of Euro-American readers because it dared attempt to tell our national history as a Native people might talk about it. For instance, you may want to think of what happened at Wounded Knee as a “battle”; after all, the government still does. But every Lakota person I know calls it a “massacre,” and there’s a difference.

Rep. Skyler Wheeler wants to make America great in the way it was in the days of my parents and grandparents. Rep. Skyler Wheeler believes he needs to tell history teachers around the state—elementary, middle-school, high school, college, and university—just exactly how they are to teach history.

I think he’s wrong.

Mind-numbing, bone-chilling, frozen-toe cold

It's that time of year when there's no seriously good reason for living here. My phone sports its own cute digital thermometer--it's there 24/7, even if I don't want to know the temp. For the record, right now it's -23 F, and the phone isn't figuring wind chill.

In fact, what seems chilliest about the world outside my window is that there is no wind. Let me repeat that because it sounds like falsehood: there is no wind. Out here in the Upper Midwest, this killer of a weather phenom isn't going away soon, and it's already overstayed its welcome. 

Yesterday, Sunday, we experienced one of the small blessings of such utterly horrible temperatures. We emptied the freezer, put all the provender outside, then let the thick frost melt away into a pan. Barbara cleaned it up, plugged it in, we shimmied the thing back into its corner, then retrieved the whole mess of frozen goods from the front porch (looked like a food drive outside of our place), and finished up, proving that such horridly cold weather is at least good for defrosting freezers.

But not much else. A good old bachelor named A. J. Boersma once told me that in the little farmhouse they lived in when he and his family immigrated to America--it was out in the hills near Fairview, SD--had no insulation to speak of, shingles just nailed to boards pounded into the studs. When he and his brothers would wake up on mornings like this one, they'd peek up from beneath a ton of blankets and check the nails in the ceiling to see how much frost hung on them. 

It's possible that the Omaha who might have lived here--and certainly did both farther north and farther south--found possible shelter in earth homes the Arikara taught them to build. The Yanktons just stoked up the fire in the tipi, I guess, and laid a half-ton more stones over the bottom edge of the buffalo hides their tipis used for siding.

Buffalo, of course, had no problem. I remember reading somewhere that in the horrible blizzard of the early 90s, North Dakota lost thousands of cattle to three-feet of snow and the extreme temps--and just one buffalo. Of course, bison pull on an extra layer or two (or three) of winter coats, and come factory-equipped with their own snow plows. Just don't worry about buffalo.

 All the sensible retirees are playing "Up and Down the River" in the community room of their Florida trailer courts right now. Even shuffle board sounds good. It's so cold, even the buffalo are thinking seriously about Arizona. 

Just how close is it? So cold that mailmen fear for polar bears. . .that people get morning coffee on a stick. . .that old men fart in snowflakes. . .that cold cops turn tazers on each other. 

Look, no matter how to cut it or slice it or plow it, it's just freakin' cold. 

And that's why, this morning, I'm greatly thankful I'm not in the old Boersma house or even waking up beneath a buffalo robe. I'm just thankful for sweet, warm shelter--and, oh, yes, that the freezer's defrosted.

Reading Mother Teresa: Her Fears and Ours

Make every effort to live in peace with everyone 

and to be holy; 

without holiness 

no one will see the Lord. Hebrews 12:14

We had again trouble at Kalighat [Nirmal Hriday] – they very coolly told me I must thank God that up to now I have not received a shot or a beating from them, since all those who worked for them death has been their reward. Very peacefully I told them, that I was ready to die for God. Hard times are coming, let us pray that our Society will stand the test of Charity. (152)

I’m not altogether sure what Mother Teresa considered to be “the test of Charity,” but one can infer from what she says in this note to Archbishop Périer, that it was something a good deal more than keeping pantry shelves full of food or pots and pans sparkling. She implies that for her as well as the needy, physical danger, even death was lurking in “the holes of the poor,” and that assessing the Society’s successes could prove difficult if one of the Missionaries of Charity were actually to die carrying out the mission.

Calcutta’s slums in the post-war period go far beyond anything some North American might imagine. Comparing the level of your and my suffering is always impossible, and yet it’s fair to say that even the most impoverished children in these United States will not likely be turned down for medical care if they’re carried, as they often are, to Emergency.

Not so in Calcutta. People died on the streets, their bodies left to rot. The poor of Calcutta lived in impoverishment unlike anything most of us can imagine – and that level of poverty often breeds violence. What the Missionaries of Charity did on the streets was often dangerous work.

Consider also the depth of darkness Mother Teresa faced for a very long time, a darkness she really had to cover in order to lead the young women who came to work with her. Imagine for a moment how hard it must have been to wear a smile, to give comfort, to cheer the depressed when she felt herself totally alone in the world, abandoned somehow by the God she meant to serve with every bit of her being, every moment of her life.

What I’m saying is that it’s not hard to build a case for a daily life lived in torturous difficulty, torment, and fear. I am sure her prayers were unceasing, that she asked every day to be freed from the problems she faced all around,
dangers within and violence without.

It’s impossible for me to go on right now without smiling, for, by her own confession, what shook her world unmercifully, what scared her half to death, was not the war without or the battles within, but – stay with me here – speaking to large crowds. The Missionaries of Charity grew in reach and reputation; and in the fall of 1960, for the first time since she’d come to Calcutta in 1929, she left India, bound for the United States, for Las Vegas – of all places! – where she’d been asked to speak at a convention of the National Council of Catholic Women.

Was she stretching it a bit when she said, “My going to U.S. – was the hardest act of obedience I had ever had to give to God” (204)? Was speaking to 3000 women more difficult than answering the call to mission, than walking the desolate streets around her, than facing the darkness within? Seems impossible.

But human. But incredibly and authentically human. She was scared to death of a microphone.

To know the story is to understand the humanness of this tiny woman. She was a saint, not because there was something about her that made her greater than others, but because she listened to the Lord and did extraordinary things in his name out of obedience. She was not an angel and in no way divine.

But she did saintly things, as all of us know – all of us believers. She modeled courage and love in a way few have done.

But put her in front of a microphone and she wilted.

MT was a composite of flesh and blood and soul. She was only one of us, just another of God’s own children.

Comfort to Spare (iii)

I have a tape of my grandfather's holding forth from the pulpit he filled in Oostburg Christian Reformed Church for fourteen years, 1932-1946. Too long?--I don't know; but that tape doesn't commend his rhetorical style or dynamism. I'm not sure if a preacher had to be a stemwinder to keep the pews full, but I can't help thinking that listening to him open the Word, twice a Sunday, for fourteen years may have been, for some, a struggle. Fourteen years was a long time.

In 1945, his wife--Grandma Schaap--died. I don't know what took her. My mother used to say that Mother Schaap was quite unimaginably sweet, an angel no one could possibly dislike. I believe her. On the Schaap side, I come from good, good people, sweet people, kind people.

Her death, it seems, came as no surprise. She'd been sickly for some time. Over the years, her thin and frail body had given birth to ten children, one of whom died when she was three or four, a death that still scares up stories from her grandchildren, all of whom are elderly today and none of whom could have experienced any of the immediate trauma.

Grandpa Schaap--that's him above--was born here, not in Holland, as were his sisters. In 1868, Grandpa's parents, Cornelius C., and his wife Neeltje, left the beautiful island of Terschelling because there was no Gereformeerde church, no Christian Reformed, no break-away church. There was a state church, a Hervoormde church, not far away in Midsland, a darling Dutch hamlet nearby; but C. C. and family were "affies," a brand of doctrinaire Calvinists so weary of the modernism they felt seeping into the church that they determined they weren't going to take it anymore. In the Netherlands I was once told my Schaap family left Terschelling because they wanted to be Gereformeerde, the old-time religion, and there was no such church on the island.

They came to America with a group similarly minded, Terschellingers of the diaspora, and wandered west together from New York, on their way to German Valley, Illinois, where someone in the group knew the preacher or had a relative.

They didn't stay long before moving farther west with much of American populace in the 1870s, stopping again for a time in Parkersburg, Iowa, before moving even farther west to even more remote Newkirk, Iowa. Then, still in search of cheap land and a place to call their own, they went another hundred miles west to Harrison, South Dakota, where drought wiped them out and swept them back east to Sheldon, Iowa, where C. C., a North Sea sailor, who must have had enough of farming, ran a clothing store.

I'm not sure why their youngest child, a son, my grandfather, turned to the ministry, but he did, went off to college Michigan to play football, old family stories claimed, and ended up in seminary, where a few years later he got a degree and married a professor's daughter, Gertrude Hemkes, in the bargain.

In 1905, when Grandpa Schaap was in Bemis, South Dakota, his very first charge, he likely took a train to Orange City, Iowa, to see his parents, who had ended up there, in retirement. On Sunday, father and son hitched up the wagon and drove down the road to four or five miles to Carnes, Iowa, a town that is no more, so Rev. John C. Schaap could fill the pulpit, which he did, morning and afternoon services, at a Christian Reformed Church, now long gone. That night, C. C. Schaap died, having spent his last day in the here-and-now listening proudly, I assume, to his preacher son, just down the road amid a gathering of small houses, a place named Carnes, Iowa. Though the death was unexpected, it has, for someone from my tribe, a kind of storybook end.

My grandpa Schaap, just retired, baptized me in February of 1948. I was, of course, an infant. I have no memory of the event, but I'm sure my parents were overjoyed to witness one of only two sacraments the Reformation felt absolutely crucial to Christian piety--baptism.

"Does this outward washing with water itself wash away sins?" the catechism asks.

The answer is unequivocal: "No, only the blood of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit cleanse us from all sins."

Then why do it at all?

"He [God] wants to teach us that the blood and Spirit of Christ remove our sins just as water takes away dirt from the body. But, even more important, he wants to assure us by this divine pledge and sign that we are as truly cleansed from our sins spiritually as we are bodily washed with water."

The truth? I am altogether not sure how far I'd have to reach into my own family tree to find anyone who believed anything to the contrary.

And I'm now a long, long ways from a frightful automobile accident on a lakeshore highway in November, 1949.

Comfort to Spare (ii)

One of them was a "jack Mormon," a rebel who paid no heed to anything Brigham Young ever said or wrote, laughed it off, even though he'd been born into the fold, his royal LDS kinship rooted in the ruts the Great Trek of the 1840s left across the Plains when all the saints left Nauvoo. Jones was not a religious man. He was a good teacher, but he didn't regard the old ways with any diligence or great respect. He was out of all of that.

The other guy had once been old-line Protestant. Grew up in or around Detroit, as I remember, and talked about what he perceived as the emptiness of the Presbyterian church his parents attended on religious holidays. Jones and Miller were friends of mine, good guys. They liked to drink and smoke a few reefers now and then--it was the mid-70s. I liked them both and they liked me. We were all teaching at a new high school on the northern edge of Phoenix.

I don't remember that we were juiced the night they asked me what they did. The question certainly wasn't one of those that amble out of loosened up minds and shouldn't have been said at all. Don't be mistaken--it wasn't meant to be all that serious. Still, they weren't interested in what I'd answer.

"Schaap," they said, "are you in a cult or something?"

I giggled. As I remember, we were at Miller's apartment. The question was shocking, not offensive, just startling.  They were not asking out of some besotted blitz. They just wanted to know. Neither of them was married. I was. 

"No," I told them. "Of course not."

"You go to church like all the time, man," they said, giggling too.

I've never forgotten that question because its origins seem so clear. By their calculations, the sheer frequency of my church attendance, the commitments my wife and I made to the little church we attended seemed even somewhat dark and mysterious. They'd never heard of "Christian Reformed." I had made no effort to recruit either of them, and, most significant, my attachment seemed slavish, something akin to the ways Wally's old LDS ties might have had, as powerful as it was private.

But I wasn't in a cult--of that I was sure. I'd spent two years completely outside any church doors in fact. I believed I was both capable and free to quit, to change commitments. I could walk away from the church into which I was born.

But I didn't, and I haven't. All of that was 1977, almost a half-century ago, and I stayed with the church and the faith.

Why?

Because God wouldn't let me go? That's the textbook, the catechism answer: a sovereign God holds me in his hands on the basis of an updated Old Testament covenant. I know that one, but I'd just as soon hold that card right now, not play it right away because sometimes it's just too blasted easy to play the God-card. 

Besides, the question is not, "why am I Christian Reformed?" The question is what are the roots of this deep faith that's in me?--because it is deep, and, probably a great deal more cultic than I could or would have cared to admit that night at Miller's apartment. 

A kid named Jeff Krebs--a junior with an able mind--once told me what he'd really like to know about his English teacher: "what makes you tick anyway?"

I'd like to know that answer myself. 

All these years later, I can't help but wonder if there isn't something of an answer to be found in a freakish car accident one misty lakeshore night more than seventy years ago, when I was not yet two years old. 

______________________

more to come. . .

Comfort to Spare (i)

When sorrow suddenly comes--and it usually does--Christians are divided into two groups. There are those who, temporarily at any rate, collapse. Their faith falters. And there are those who receive a new joy, hitherto unknown by them, the avowed and recognized work of the Holy Spirit, whose temple they are by the grace of their heavenly Father and as a result of the merits and the intercession of Jesus Christ their Saviour and Lord. 

There isn't much we know about Aunt Gertie's death. It happened on a foggy night in November of 1949, along the lakeshore in a mist that makes travel so difficult that her mom and dad--my grandparents--had warned their daughter it would be prudent to stay home rather than travel all the way to Milwaukee. But they didn't listen--the four of them. And there was an accident. And Aunt Gertie was killed. No one else was hurt.

Aunt Gertie wasn't a child. She was 24, a teacher at the brand new Christian school a block east from our house and a couple more blocks east of downtown, where the Dirkse family lived. 

These pages are written with the definite purpose of aiding in the transfer of Christians from the first group into the second. For that is possible, and the writer has been informed by more than one minister that far too many Christians are in the first named category. 

I'm quoting from a thin volume of meditations titled Comfort to Spare, and written by a preacher named Rev. J. K. Van Baalen, B. D. The book was published by Eerdmans, a house religiously trusted by members of the tribe of believers their grandson is still very much a part of, the Christian Reformed Church of North America. 

Somewhere along the line, the little book was a gift from my mother, Aunt Gertie's only sister. As likely as not, it came to me with other books when Mom was getting rid of things so she could be off to the Home after the death of her husband, my dad. I don't remember the gift, but it likely came in a box with other things, other books. About her intentions, she was clear; she left a sticky note in the inside cover.

She's been gone now for close to a decade, so I've lost any opportunity to try to decipher what she was saying here, but the handwriting--including the smiley face--is very much "Mom." I don't remember her mentioning the book or the note, but I have no doubt that what she was implying is that while she hadn't spent weeks and weeks with Comfort to Spare, what she had invested in its truth was significant.

Mom wasn't a reader. I honestly don't remember her with a book in her hand, and, because she so deeply valued spirituality, it would be like her to recommend the book. to say the comfort it brings the is immense, even if she hadn't read it herself.

Her note is stuck on a page which contains more inside information, in my grandma's handwriting.

Mr. and Mrs. Harry Dirkse are my grandparents, the parents who lost Aunt Gert on a misty night in November of 1949, a month before Christmas. Rev. John Piersma was their young, dynamic preacher. The date suggests that Van Baalen's book was a Christmas gift. It may well have been. However, Aunt Gertie died in that freakish accident only a month before, and Van Baalen's book has a very clear mission you've already seen: "These pages are written with the definite purpose of aiding in the transfer of Christians from the first group into the second," he says, from those "whose faith falters" to those "who receive a new joy."

In its pages there are more than a few references to a war that took the lives of just over 415 thousand American troops. Comfort to Spare could hardly have been a best-seller, but in the late 1940s hundreds of thousands of Harry and Mabel Dirkses were still suffering through horrible, tragic loss. Van Baalen could have had lots of potential readers.

Just a week or so ago, we'd finished up a study of the book of Luke for after-supper devotions, so I went to library to pick out something new and came back with a little study I don't believe I'd ever seen before. I toted it back to the kitchen and opened the cover to all of this.

Aunt Gertie's death wasn't spoken of much in our house when we were growing up. My sisters, three and five years older than I am, have only the slightest of memories of the days after the accident. My sister, who was five, remembers how Mom tied her daughter's shoestrings with a kind of intensity her daughter had never quite forgotten. I have none. I wasn't yet two years old. My oldest sister remembers the thin drapery over the coffin in the dining room of the house where Grandpa and Grandma lived.

My mother told me more than once how Aunt Gertie had stopped at our house on Superior Avenue after school one day to play with me, the baby of the family. What kind of mood I'd been in, I don't know, but it must have been contrary because Mom told me more than once that I'd told her in no uncertain homes, "Go home." 

I wasn't pilloried for unfeeling remark. Mom didn't cry when she remembered my unkind send-off. She couldn't help think it was cute, childish. She smiled when she remembered. 

But the book's twin inscriptions reminded me of the scarcity of memory surrounding a fatal accident and how it affected the family--and even us, the kids. That it wasn't talked about doesn't mean it didn't color our lives--my life. 

I'm going to try to understand what I can.

Meditation 7 - No Wanting

Last week a mom contacted me, a woman who remembered reading devotional books of mine to her kids many years ago. She said she liked them and decided to do it again, even though the kids are long gone. She picked up No Kidding, God, and there on pp. 24-25, she said, she rediscovered a meditation that helped her understand some things she was only feeling, she says. She wrote to thank me.

No Kidding, God came out 35 years ago, a quarter century before 2016, when the subject of the meditation she read took an elevator into American lives in a fashion that no one will ever forget. For the record, not once in my life did this Calvinist own or even look to a crystal ball.

I meant no politics when I wrote this in 1988. It's just a meditation for middle schoolers. 

No Wanting

When Donald Trump is at home in New York, he sometimes flies around in his ten-million dollar helicopter, a ten-seat French Puma he claims is the safest in the world.

His cottage on the ocean at Palm Beach, Florida, has 118 rooms, its own private golf course, and over four hundred feet of beach. But for quick weekend getaways, he and his wife prefer their Greenwich, Connecticut, hideaway, a modest 47-room bungalow they picked up for a song at only two million.

What's Trump worth? Some say as much as three billion dollars. In addition to operating all kinds of casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, he owns some of New York City's finest real estate, an airline company, his own Boeing 727, and a half dozen helicopters. Not bad for a guy just over forty years old.

Perhaps the gem, however, is the twenty-nine million dollar yacht named, appropriately, the Trump Princess, a cute little runabout with gold-plated shower nozzles, a rotating sun bed and, of all things, an in­side waterfall.

Trump's New York penthouse takes up all kinds of space in his own Trump Tower. It's a homey little nook with an eighty-foot living room that Trump has outfitted with onyx baseboards. And guess what else it has? You knew already? Another waterfall.

Trump, who says, "It's all a game really," plays well and hard at the Monopoly board he's set up over New York's fanciest avenues. When anyone gets in his way or tries to fight him, he calls in his palace guard-ten different legal firms that take care of his affairs.

What's more, he likes fights. "I love to have enemies," he says. "I like beating my enemies to the ground."

Nice guy, too, besides having all those bucks.

"The Lord is my shepherd," David says. "I shall not be in want." Neither will Donald Trump. Not on earth, anyway.

He's become a symbol of the lust for wealth that haunts the dreams of whso many today-people who want to be the high rollers, the ones o make big bucks. With all that loot, Trump shall not want; if he does, he'll just buy. He knows there are just two ways to live in this sworld. One is with God. The other is with big bucks. He's taken the second option, and he's trumped just about everyone in the game.

"Hey, life is life," he says. "We're here for a short time. When we're gone, most people don't care, and in some cases they're quite happy about it."

If that's what he believes, then what he does makes great sense. If all there is to life is one big swing through, one chance to let loose, then you may as well push the pedal to the floor and get what you what you can because you only go around once.

The other way to live is by faith and praise, by trusting that God is the Creator and Governor of the whole world, and by praising that very God for loving us so much that he sent his Son to die for us--a free gift of love, no additional payments.

With that gift, we will never want--not even when Trump will. Because someday he will. Count on it.

That fact you can take to the bank.

_______________________ 

The man's second impeachment trial begins today. 

In honor of Sinclair Lewis

 

Q. You know why the Iowa Hawkeyes don't have grass on the field at Kinnick Stadium?

A. Because the cheerleaders can't graze on astro turf.

That's a Minnesota joke. To many Minnesotans, their Iowa neighbors look like the joke Grant Wood made them out to be in American Gothic. I'm an Iowan. Maybe our neighbor's derision should make me dislike them. Sorry, I don't.

Yesterday, by the way, was the birthday of Sinclair Lewis. In his honor, I thought I'd show you an actual Sinclair Lewis 1/3 pound cheeseburger as served up by the Palmer House, downtown Sauk Center, an old hotel that's not changed its features for a half century, I'm sure, and fronts on Sinclair Lewis Street. I'm not kidding. Just down the way a few blocks, you can find the Sinclair Lewis home, in fact, and on the south side of town, the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center.

All of which is really ironic--and maybe a little sad. But then, there may well be nothing more "Sinclair Lewis" than a "Sinclair Lewis 1/3 pound cheeseburger." Sauk Center's faux-favorite son didn't much care for the codgers who peopled his hometown, or any Midwestern small towns, for that matter. The book that shot the moon for him, Main Street (1921), sold phenomenally and led, eventually, to Lewis's receiving the Nobel Prize (1930), the first American to win.

In high school, I was forcefed Main Street. Hated it. Not even sure I read it. Made no sense to me, largely because the book is acidic satire. What I remember best is how much "Red" Lewis despised the small town folks around me. Perhaps he had reason: small towns can be death on individuals who are individuals. Lewis was tall, gangly, unathletic, and not much to look at. It is said that his father, the town doctor, never quite understood him. All of which is not a recipe for success.

For years, Garrison Keillor celebrated his own Minnesota boyhood, not to mention verifiable Minnesota culture with weekly visits to a place more real than not, Lake Woebegone. For years, he invited the public to dial in, and they did, belovedly. His 30th anniversary show was held in some little towns, to which he invited a crowd to bring their picnic baskets and lawn chairs. Sweet.

The very idea of lawn chairs and picnic baskets would be anathema, I think, to Minnesota's only Nobel Prize winner, Sinclair Lewis. He'd rip and tear at the souls of those who show up. He made a literary life by making fun of Lake Woebegone and Sauk Center.

Garrison Keillor is not above taking shots at Lake Woebegone's silly cast, but he's nothing like Lewis. Some fine Minnesota critics have already parsed out the differences between them, I'm sure, but it seems to me that both have made a decent living by way of Minnesota bumpkins, with this appreciable difference: when push comes to shove, Garrison Keillor likes 'em; Red Lewis didn't.

Today, or so it seems to this Iowan, Minnesota can laugh at itself and love itself, and that's why I admire the place. Look, anyone who can be at home with the tag "Gopher State" can't lack for a sense of humor. Minnesotans buy truly Minnesota gear--caps, jackets, vests--at Bemidji Woolen Mills and wear them with pride, just like some ancient, dorky Sven or Olie. In Fargo, the Coen brothers, themselves Minnesotans, worked the archetype beautifully with their unforgettable small-town cop, Marge Gunderson, who, like a good stout cap with earmuffs, is just corny enough to be loveable when it's minus-twenty. One gets the sense--at least "up north"--that Minnesota's self-image is in fine shape, despite their Nobel Prize winner's hearty disdain.

This is no food review, but let me tell you that cheeseburger wasn't bad at all, believe me, served on a hard roll. What's more, there's some poetic justice in the fact that Sauk Prairie honors its famous Nobel Prize winning son/writer with a big cheeseburger.

Sort of sweet Minnesotan.