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.