Memorial Day

I don't think there's a marketing department in the local American Legion, nor will there be any time soon. The events on Memorial Day morning are planned by men in Legion hats that look just a little bit silly on paunchy old guys forty years or more beyond their years as a fighting force. Every year, the Legion does the very same thing on Memorial Day morning all through the region, which is why there's at least some unacknowledged silliness.

I've attended a bunch of them in a bunch of small towns, and they're not all the same. Yesterday's featured the reading of the names of every last community vet--twice!--both by the conflict in which the man served and the cemetery in which they are buried. It went on and on and on, and yes there were a few women too.

There's always the Pledge and the National Anthem, and a speech, sometimes a classic American Jeremiad, a sermon by a preacher who says that if America would only turn to the Lord, we'd begin a new reign of glory. Just a few years ago, I heard a preacher and National Guard officer berate a President so sharply I couldn't help assume he thought himself god almighty. 

Generally, the "doings" are not upbeat. Most often, they end with "Taps," a musical ritual frighteningly familiar despite the fact that nobody hears it often at all. Yesterday the far off echo was performed by a kid so young his father stood beside him for moral support. 

If there's a committee that puts the Memorial Day Doings together, the job isn't huge. Basically, once they get a speaker and pull together a color guard, all they have to do is make sure there are enough blanks for a 21-gun salute. 

It seems American Legions aren't growing. The Second World War grabbed hundreds of men from communities like those in Sioux County, Iowa, and sent them off to a bloody war against a mustachioed madman and a Japanese tyrant who shared an insane desire to rule the earth.  WWII was an absolutely horrible war that, in retrospect at least, is somehow easy to love.

Not so Korea. Not so Vietnam. Not so Iraq, Not so Afghanistan. 

I suppose that's why Memorial Day ceremonies are run these days by fewer and fewer old men, old guys who insure the program as well as its tone remain as predictable as the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall.

Only the most conservative churches haven't jazzed up their worship these days. Many long ago stopped singing from hymnbooks. Guitars abound. Organs collect dust or have been quietly removed. Drums beat new rhythms. What used to be is no more in churches--we've got to keep the kids so we're all contemporary.

But Memorial Day ceremonies in most villages and towns haven't changed--and likely won't, next year either. 

Quite frankly, I like that. The medium is a goodly part of the message here--no glitz, no show biz. What happens on Memorial Day morning in lots of small towns is exactly what has for fifty years. Things are deadly serious because giving one's life for one's country can't be jazzed up. You can't be but cute about sacrifice. Death will never make splashy entertainment.

And that's good. Those old guys with the blue Legion hats are deadly serious because dying in defense of freedom--and giving up a son, a brother, a mother, a spouse--is deadly serious business, as righteous, finally, as anything we can do on this earth.

My grandma insisted the family attend Memorial Day ceremonies because her only brother never returned from France in 1918. She wouldn't miss the graveyard "doings," as she used to call them, and she didn't think her children should either.

I'm not a veteran. In May of 1970, I went to Washington D. C. to protest the war in Vietnam, to march in the only parade I've ever been in. 

But on Memorial Day morning, I always try to make it to ceremonies in some community where ordinary men and women give patriotic speeches, read the names of fallen heroes, and salute the flag, where little kids await the peal of gunfire by covering their ears. 

I go because my father spent three years on a ship in the Pacific and my father-in-law was gone just as long in Europe. I go because Grandma wants me there, wants me not to forget her brother, his life and his death, things she never could.

Reading Mother Teresa--What she talked about when she talked about love

In Raymond Carver’s story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” two couples, in what is shaping up as to be an all-nighter, soak themselves in far too much drink while discussing, painfully, what they believe love really means. The discussion turns deadly serious and cold sober when one of them, a cardiologist, talks about an old couple whose broken bodies (they’d been in an accident) required full-body casts. The old man grew depressed, the doctor says, not because of his injuries or hers, but because that body cast’s eyeholes simply would not allow him the simple joy of seeing the women he’d loved for so many years.

For a while at least, that love story shuts down their grueling conversation, but my guess is that most retirement home care-givers might just yawn through it because they experience similar stories firsthand almost every week, elderly husbands or wives who drive in to convalescent homes and faithfully attend their spouse’s every meal despite the fact that their spouses couldn’t pick their mates out from a police line.

Dedication. Undying love. Incredible selflessness.

One of the amazing ironies of our culture is that we reward those who take care of our most needy so pitifully.

I don’t know why exactly, but lately – when I’m out on the acreage trimming trees or mowing the lawn or doing almost anything – old gospel songs haunt me to the point where I find myself singing through them on some kind of unending loop. Like this one, almost unknown today, but a part of a repertoire I can't forget:

Give of your best to the Master
Give of the strength of your youth;
Clad in salvation’s full armor,
Join in the battle for truth.

The conceit that runs through that old hymn was apropos for kids, like me, children of war vets: the Christian life as a battle. We’re not so keen on the backdrop any more, which may explain why that old hymn has largely disappeared, save in the sealed vault of my memory.

The Sunday school lesson it teaches is a good one – since no one can serve two masters, the scripture says, give of your best to the master, give of “the strength of your youth.”

Dedication. Undying love. Incredible selflessness.

I can’t say it quite as graphically as Mother Teresa did, but she practiced a devoted sacramentalist faith that’s unlike mine, for better or for worse, faith constructed on what she tasted in the blessed sacrament, a rite that infuses the language she offered those who served in her army of care-givers, language like this: “Let the poor and the people eat you up,” she told the Sisters, a vastly more dramatic take on the old hymn’s commanding admonition.

Let the people “bite” your smile, your time. You sometimes might prefer not to even look at somebody when you had some misunderstanding. Then, not only you look, but give a smile. . . . Learn by heart you must let the people eat you up. 

I don’t think it’s possible, really, to offer a way of life that is more patently un-American. We pass along God’s peace most bountifully when we give ourselves away, when we dedicate our undying love in selflessness that’s so profound as to die to we are, or want or wish to be, in the name of the Lord Jesus.

“Let the poor and the people eat you up,” she said. What she meant was, to them, be the body and the blood. To them, be Jesus.

Dame's Rocket wherever I look

 

Apparently, I'm not supposed to love this stuff. I wish I didn't know that. 

Yesterday, I took a river walk amidst a gorgeous day, mid-seventies, some wind but not much, the open azure sky like a huge crown all around. I took a walk that fits me just about perfectly: a mile to the river, a mile (by another route) back. Maybe a half-dozen fishermen were out at the South Pond, but not much luck going on among 'em.

I'd taken an old camera I hadn't used for ages, just to give it a workout. I didn't take my phone. . .and should have because when I got down to the river banks, glorious mobs of magenta were exploding on both sides. I had no idea they'd be there. 

 Look at those purple troops over there on the other side.

They're called Dame's Rocket, and, if the on-line sources can be believed, they're horribly invasive, their rogue beauty as ample as dandelions and just as dang meddlesome. I wish I didn't know that.

They seemed to have disappeared from ditches last year, or at least I didn't notice them as notably as I had before. Seems as if it's been a while. But this year, like the cicadas, they've come back with a vengeance that's bountiful. 

They somehow escaped people's gardens, I'm told, where they've held down a beloved place for hundreds of years. These days, they're very happily on their own, and down by the river, at least, they're legion. 

They've been beloved in the evening especially, when their fragrance is released, just another facet of their beauty (some think they're an aphrodesiacs--no, I didn't take any home). Anyway, the word is, they've departed a thousand garden plots to populate places where wildlife carry their seeds along to unceded territories (or so the story goes). And they're hearty:  those lugged-along seeds have no trouble finding a place to open. This year--viola!--they're back and, doggone it, they're wonderful. They give the riverbank some shocking technicolor.

When I walked away, I could have kicked myself for not toting a better camera or at least my phone, because none of these shots do the huge stands of Dame's Rocket justice. They're luscious. Purple suggests the robes of kings and queens; yesterday the riverbank was robed in royalty. 

I'm supposed to believe, supposed to testify, supposed to confess that all that blessed periwinkle is a plague, a creeping abomination. 

That's what I'm supposed to say. So I did, right? But it's oh, so painful, even for a Calvinist. 

Sonnet 18 and me

It's shameful for me to say ill of her. She did her darndest to make high school English a class we would find endearing. She was not some crypto-Nazi disciplinarian whose name--Goehring--defined her character. When I look back on her class so many years later, I have to admit she could have been worse. But we called her "Granny Goehring"--an indication of our estimation of her relevance to our lives.

That day, it was Shakespeare, the sonnets, the love sonnets in particular, Sonnet 18 specifically. And who could blame us anyway?--I mean, there was a ball game that night. I'm thinking Random Lake, but it could have been Howards or Plymouth, or Chilton--who knows any more? There was a game and the guys in the back, close to the door, me among 'em, were not one bit interested in Sonnet 18 or most anything Granny Goehring might have served up that morning, fourth period, senior English.

I don't remember exactly how it started because I wasn't listening, I was talking. I wasn't so much being disrespectful as I was dedicated to the day's vital task--preparing for that ball game. We were a fair-to-middlin' team, emphasis on middlin', but we were dedicated, and, if my memory serves me right, we were determined to win. The subject of senior English class that morning was the ball game that night. Granny Goehring was on Sonnet 18, but she was silver-haired irrelevance.

She'd likely taken a warning shot or two across the bow of our indifference before she took finally could tolerate no more and took close aim. When she did, she went after me, even though I'm quite sure the quarry could have been any of us. She wanted simply to break up the distraction. She loved Shakespeare and hated our disinterest. "Jim Schaap," she said, "I want you to take a seat up here at the front of the room."

If I'm not mistaken, she did more than point--she walked over to the desk and rapped its surface. She was irritated. It would take me another five years or so to understand why, but she wasn't playing around.

I don't think I was a "naughty kid." Distracted from Shakespeare's sonnets, or whatever the menu brought up that morning?--sure. Yes. We had a ball game, after all, and the old lady had no sense of its importance. She never went to ball games.

I didn't fight her demand. On my way up front, I walked slowly, at high-school hot shot pace, but not delinquent; I was following orders. I didn't try to fight or make a scene. I spilled my books on the desk up front, crawled into it, and opened my lit book. She let me know the page number, and then began in her immensely mimic-able sing-songy, utterly feminine voice besides.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:. . .

No one's memory is perfect, and what I have created of this story through the years may differ from whatever recording exists others may have in storage--if indeed anyone does; but it didn't take long for me to forge a course of action. It was her m.o. to take a couple of lines, stop, and create a question we might consider, and my behavior came as a revelation right then. I committed myself to do something I'd never, ever done in any English class--answer questions, not just one of them either--all of them! Answer them as if I was interested.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

"Class, what is Shakespeare referring to when he says "the eye of heaven."

Piece of cake. I'll get her goat by raising my hand and answering. Old lady'll be thrilled. I did, and she acknowledged it. "He's talking about the sun, Mrs. Goehring," I told her, maybe a bit like Eddie Haskell. The look on her face said it all. She was as shocked as she was pleased.

"And 'every fair from fair sometime declines'--what's he talking about there?" she asked that question to the rest of the class, but I was all in. I thrust my hand again into the discussion, with grunts for emphasis. I simply could not easily be avoided.\

"Yes, Jim," she said, and I went into what I thought would be a summary of what this guy, Shakespeare, had in mind about some really hot lady friend. "He loves her," I told Mrs. Goehring, or something to that effect. "As great as a summer day is, it's not going to be around forever and therefore not nearly so great as she is."

Years later, I would tell my own high school English classes that one key toward understanding Shakespeare's sonnets is that they're built in sonnets. In high school I had no clue about that, could have cared less.

Granny Goehring, now greatly pleased, went on:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

I get this, I told myself. I'm on to him. He is one lost lover. What he's saying is really kind of rich, that she's still alive wherever people read this poem. Summer days are sweet--sure; but this sweetie of his comes close to being eternal.

And there's this. Hold on to your seat. She's so beautiful or wonderful or sexy or hot or whatever, this guy says, that she'll never really die as long as people read about how beautiful or wonderful or sexy or hot she is.

What follows is what I'd learn to call that final couplet: two lines at the end that wrap up the package and get the job done.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Wow. Gob-smacked me right there in the middle of my chest. Get this: he says as long as people live, as long as they read over these very words, she'll be alive--in our imaginations, we'll still have her. Oh, my word, I thought.

So that day in senior English I kept answering questions, one after another, in part because I the answers to what Granny Goehring seemed so dang obvious, and in part because I knew the guys at the back of the room would be rolling in the aisles, me jabbering away up front about love poetry like some brain from the Honor Society.

But I had a sweet and pretty high school girlfriend, and we'd been a thing for some time even though she went to school down the road where our rivals quite regularly took us to task on the basketball floor. She was a cheerleader for our sworn enemies, but still, to me, a sweetheart whose bouncy little skirt, often as not, set my heart aflame. I knew love, or thought I did. I wasn't yet 18, but oh, my word, I understood that poem. I most certainly did. I just loved it.

I didn't say so, didn't tell my buddies from the team, who were greatly entertained by my antics that day. But I'd learned something that would, that day, change my life: I understood exactly what William Shakespeare says in Sonnet 18. Exactly, because in some podunk town in southeast Wisconsin, 400 years later, a bunch of bored ball players read through a poem that did exactly what the poet said he'd do--create some great lines that would make her divine. Wow.

The next day, fourth period, I had a choice: sit up front and acknowledge what had happened in my heart and soul, or sit in back. I sat in the back. 

No matter. Sonnet 18 had done irreparable damage and charmed the course of my life.

Problems of the Osage

It's a gamble, I suppose, but at least the resolution saves the project. Whether it means a better film remains (literally) to be seen. Meanwhile, for those of us on the outside, this fascinating tussle has much to do with the sometime fine distrinctions between art and craft or art and marketing, even art or justice.

I'm talking about Martin Scorcese's latest film project, Killers of the Flower Moon, and a script based on the 2017 best-seller of the same title, David Grann's journalistic powerhouse that documented abuse afflicted on the Osage people of northern Oklahoma by white men who murdered their victims in order to secure the land rites that had made the Osage to come along among the nation's most wealthy citizens. Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a small, northern Oklahoma town, had a Rolls-Royce dealership--that kind of wealthy. 

The problem had been brewing for some time because the film's star, Leonardo diCaprio, had found himself leaning toward playing another character in the story than the one he'd been contracted to play. He wanted to play the nephew of one of the murderers, although he'd been drawn into the project to play the FBI agent who comes in from Washington to unravel the horrors, the character who, by one measure, is the "hero" of the story.

But diCaprio's desire to play the nephew of a murderer is artistically understandable because there had to be such characters in a story that features such flat-out diabolical behavior. Some fortune-hunting white husbands killed the Osage mothers of their own children in order to secure tribal land rites. It seems diCaprio was more fascinated by those madly conflicted characters than he was the FBI's young agent, the guy in the white hat who rode into town and ended the bloody horrors. 

Makes sense. The actor in DiCaprio wanted to play the conflicted guy, not the wonderful hero, the tough role, not the easy one. He wanted the film to be more character study than good guys vs. bad guys, even though the scenario he preferred would almost certainly result in a movie that was more moody and ethereal than blockbusters tend to be. 

What's more, the insider's role diCaprio much preferred may well make the original story line less prominent--how, for the love of money, white men murdered Native women who'd carried their children. If the story is really about inner wars, terrors of the spirit, in this case between barbarism and love, then the racial injustice that blackens the whole bloody saga loses its power. Whenever a story moves deeply into examination of human character, there is going to be less emphasis on plot; the real story then, takes place inside the soul not outside.

Frankly, those films make less money. What diCaprio wanted may well make the movie less of a box-office bonanza. 

But that's not all. The changes could becloud the racial injustice that lies at the foundation of all the action. DiCaprio's version may well examine a tortured soul, and not create the intense bright lights Hollywood can bring to the injustice afflicted upon the Osage people. 

Then again, neither would his request feature the heroism of a fledgling investigative organization called the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The subtitle of David Grann's book is The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. 

It's a great fight with significant artistic, economic, and social justice implications. Apple owns it now. We'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, if you still haven't, read the book. You won't leave the easy chair unaffected.

Destroyed That Night

Regardless of what he said or did not say, I take some joy knowing he is no longer with CNN as a commentator. Quite regularly during the Trump era--which, btw, is not as over as it should be--he was posted with a few other pundits to represent the conservative point of view on any topics at all, which he did, I thought, rather nobly, even though he was quite regularly blown away by a congregation of more progressive voices.

Santorum will always live in infamy in my scrapbook through no fault of his own. He happened to come by locally one night in 2012, the very same night the college where I taught was visited by a famous Iowa novelist, a Pulitzer Prize winner, someone known throughout the world as a Calvinist, Marilynne Robinson, whose novel Gilead had struck me (and millions of others) as immensely compelling and blessedly Christian. Marilynne Robinson was, in other words, the quintessential Dordt College visiting lecturer. 

Her "First Mondays" speech had been so immensely thoughtful that along the way it lost most of the students assembled in BJ, but I had hoped for a much better crowd than the paltry numbers that showed up for her evening lecture. It was just plain scant. 

I was embarrassed and angered because just next door, the BJ Auditorium was jammed for a stump speech by a right-wing, social conservative from Pennsylvania who, among other things, was quite out front about faith and politics, making the absurd claim that "there's no such thing as a liberal Christian," the kind of red-meat line that the neighborhood loves.

That's why the place was packed. That's why, in 2012, gunning for a win in the Iowa Caucuses, Rick Santorum, whenever he could, campaigned throughout the state in a Pizza Ranch. He was, "the Pizza Ranch candidate," long before Trump corralled the region's huge Christian conservatives. Santorum was "BT," before Trump, but evidence for the theory that things were in place for His Magnificence when he got into the mix four years later. That year, Santorum won. He did (okay, by 34 votes).

Sen. Rick Santorum, the Roman Catholic evangelical, so vastly outdrew Marilynne Robinson that night, that later, after her lecture, I apologized when I brought her back to where she was staying. "I'm so sorry for the small crowd," I said. "Within shouting distance, the college hosted Rick Santorum tonight and you got beat."

I don't remember exactly what she said, but I do remember feeling that she was less perturbed than her ornery host. The beating is what I'll always remember about Rick Santorum, his mad, thronging worshippers packing the BJ the night Marilynne Robinson was two buildings away speaking in a cemetery.

Whatever happened at Dordt College in the runup to the 2012 caucuses had nothing to do with CNN pulling the plug on Santorum. He has been one of a few proponents of Republican views on the network, and hasn't been anywhere near to being fanatically Trumpian. Of course, because he's not running for office he has nothing to lose by disagreeing with the Gread Orange Potentate. The fact is, Santorum messed up. Here's how the Washington Post reported it:

Talking about the founding of this country, Santorum said that American settlers “birthed a nation from nothing,” and that “there was nothing here” when they arrived, ignoring the history and culture of the Native American people.

When given a chance on air to explain himself later, quite simply he didn't get the job done. We're not talking about "political correctness" here; we're talking about denigrating the character of the only minority people who can look at the rest of us and see a host of illegal aliens.

The even greater horror of the original sin was that the earnest audience at the Young America's Forum seemed not to question Santorum's bigotry. They all bought it, as if they too believed it, which they likely did.

Look, if you're a conservative, you can think of the "1619 Project" as rat poison and regard "critical race theory" as some diabolical, Stalinist horror, but still maintain that what the Pizza Ranch candidate said--or didn't say--was abhorrent.

That night, no one, it seems, raised a question. People applauded, like they all must have done back in 2008, when Rick Santorum, held forth in the BJ Haan, and Marilynne Robinson had a crowd of a couple dozen people right next door.

That, I remember.

Reading Mother Teresa--"Holding God between my fingers"

“This is my body, which is for you; 

do this in remembrance of me.” 1 Corinthians 11:24

It sounds draconian now, but I remember those Sundays, the Sundays when we celebrated communion, when my father stayed behind after worship to meet with the church consistory and run through the list of members. I was a kid, so I never attended those sessions, but I knew what went on behind closed doors. What the elders tried to determine was who was – and who wasn’t – present for the sacrament.

Back then, the church governed far more than what happened on Sunday mornings. The authority of “the church” was formidable, and that may be understatement. It offered untold blessings to those who walked steadfastly on the paths of its righteousness; but, like Dame Fortune of ancient iconography, if she turned her lovely face away, what people saw was yet another face, something altogether hideous.

Some people I know have spent lifetimes licking wounds created by a church determined to identify wheat and chaff, a church that only rarely refused making judgments.

My sense is that era is long gone.

Back then, when the elders did a headcount of who was and who wasn’t present for the sacrament, they were making judgments they believed they had to, given the fact that, on earth, they’d been given special privileges along with what we called “the keys of the kingdom.” Furthermore, it was their belief that the supper was, in fact, a “means of grace.” Those who weren’t present, weren’t just skipping church, they were refusing Christ.

Today, those post-worship meetings sound draconian. I doubt that many fellowships practice anything similar today, except perhaps congregations where little or nothing has changed in the last half century
.

But when I read Mother Teresa on the blessed sacrament, I wonder if my father and his ecclesiastical brothers (not sisters) weren’t on to something. After all, what prompted their post-worship headcount was a sacred regard for the sacrament – the bread and wine were not to be missed. Back then, at the evening service, four cordoned-off pews up front, left side, were made available for a repeat if you or your kids were sick in the morning. Communion, a sacrament, was simply not to be missed.

“Some days back – when giving the Holy Communion to our Sisters in the Mother house, suddenly I realized I was holding God between my 2 fingers,” Mother Teresa once explained to one of her spiritual guides (283).

There’s something about her shocking discovery that is marvelous to me, so rich a realization of the reality of Christ and his gift of the eternity of our existence. In the host, she felt God almighty between her fingers. Amazing.

But it’s neither my language nor my experience. And it may never be.

The church I attend these days likes to call the Lord’s Supper a feast, a celebration – and it certainly is. We do it more often, too. If people don’t come, no one notices. I’m not sure anyone cares. It’s all a joy really, a kind of divine party. The wine is gone these days – an AA thing – but the bread is wonderful, homemade, not just Wonder Bread anymore.

At the moment MT determines that God is there between her fingers, she glories in “the greatness of [the] humility of God,” she says. “Really no greater love – than the love of Christ” (283).

After all, there he was between her two fingers.

There Jesus was, right there in her hand. That’s how immensely low he stoops to conquer.

Great is Thy Faithfulness

He was a kid, he said, when he went off to college, a pious kid who asked God, before he left for school, to help him with two things: he wanted God's help to get himself a good Christian education, and, if possible, he added, a good Christian spouse too. Not a lot to ask really, pretty ordinary things from a devout kid in 1966. 

There weren't many of us there for the fiftieth class reunion yesterday. Most of the attendees, like ourselves, live close or relatively close, although some came from far away. The math doesn't quite add up, but Covid put the thing off for a year, so, to be accurate, we'd have to say we were celebrating a college graduation that took place 51 years ago, which I might have called "more than a half-century" if that description didn't sound so awful. A lot has happened in the lives of those who showed, as well as those who didn't, I'm sure.

Someone had taken along print-outs of a couple of obituaries which featured classmates who'd died recently. One of them had a blistering fastball that always left my left hand inflamed after catching him. We were teammates. He was a kid with a lean, athletic build and uncommon ability, who, the obit said, once spotted a blonde freshman walking across campus and told a friend he was going to marry that girl--and then did, happily ever after too. 

Commencement was coming up the next day. He'd asked and been given what he considered a good Christian education; but this other petition seemed beyond even God's awesome reach. It was the night before commencement.

Not to express the truth of what had happened during that half century would have been cold, so, generally in smaller groupings, some of the heartbreaks were shared--widows and widowers, the deaths of small children, despair and depression, broken marriages. An old friend told the whole group that when he was a boy, he lost a little sibling to crib death. The family's preacher, a man who would become the President of the college, had came to visit the family, and there, with other mourners, they'd determined to pray. The preacher started, he said, and then quit because he was sobbing. He was just nine years old. 

Anyway, he and a bunch of his friends determined to have a party that last night before grad, so they descended into their off-campus basement apartment, and proceeded to do just that, mostly reminiscing, he said, a crowd of friends and classmates that slowly began to dwindle until there were just a handful who weren't quite yet willing to leave.

A widowed woman had come to the reunion, she said, to discover whether the college still stood for things she felt it should, things that meant so much to her and her husband, gave them a means by which to see the world, a means they'd felt so rich and important, a tremendous gift. Her husband had loved the college, she said, because he'd come as a new Christian and learned so much about God's kingship. She wondered whether kids were still leaving the way she and her husband had left.

Soon enough, down in that basement apartment, there were only two of them left, he and a girl he'd known, not well, and it was, now, somewhere close to five in the morning. About graduation the next day, he told us all, he remembered absolutely nothing. Even when he had his eyes open, he was asleep. But when that long night had ended, he would not soon forget that it was only the two of them there, and it had been very, very good. 

The reunion oldies sang some hymnbook oldies. In more than a few years of going to chapel at the Home with my wife's father, I'm sure I've tallied my personal limit of "Great is Thy Faithfulness." All year long, visiting preachers would determine how their Sunday afternoon chapel would go. With a measure of surety, they would tell the pianist to play "Great is Thy Faithfulness" because whoever the preacher was--and he was always a he--he was absolutely sure--and likely right--that all those old people would love that hymn--and they did. We sang it one more time last night.

When he told the story, he was up at the front of the room. Beside him stood the woman who had been with him all night, the evening before graduation. Right then, before the punch line had even been delivered, a room full of 73-year-olds knew exactly where this story was bringing us. Amazing. Soon enough, he said, those two hangers-on were married. In a day full of story-telling, it was the most charming story told. 

Even though--believe me!--I've rung up far more than my allotment of "Great is Thy Faithfulness" through those years we brought Dad to chapel, yet another time through that old faithful doesn't mean the lyrics just slipped by for me or any of the old folks who showed up for the reunion.

"Morning by morning, new mercies I see." 

A Small Butte in South Dakota--ii

Just a few months ago, I stopped out that butte again and took this picture. When the sky is gray or even when it isn't, you can't photoshop an image like this into something as beautiful as this butte already has become in my soul. When Mrs. Logterman told me that the church's faithful allowed the Rosebud Sioux their rituals up there, gave them room to practice their faith on a butte they owned, I heard in that vignette just enough respect and reconciliation for that piece of mother earth to became a symbol of peace, divine peace, and that's how I used it in the novel.

In the book, Jan Ellerbroek, a man of splintered faith who has gone west in hopes of leaving behind a broken life, tries as best he can to rebuild his faith amid darkness that includes the horrifying Massacre at Wounded Knee in December of 1890. 

The novel is a long, long letter he's writing a young girl named Touches the Sky, whose life, just after the massacre, hung in the balance. He wants her to know her own story, to know she is loved. More than anything, that's what he wants to say in the story he tells. 

Some lines from the end of the novel.

Two miles south of where we live a small butte rises from the flat land, maybe two acres of a tabletop thirty feet or so above the surrounding grassland. It is a holy place. Young Sioux men go there to see their visions, as they have for many years.  

Some of the people in our church at Purewater think I should keep the Sioux from going there, because what it is they practice is a false religion. some believe that the Brule people will not progress until they become the good Christians we think we are. Some shake their heads at Dalitha and me; they think we're too close to the Indian people.

I don't go up there anymore. I used to. It is, after all, my land. But it is also a sacred place for the Sioux, a place where I have no place.

It seems to me that if my life and yours teach anything, it is that God Almighty wants our will, not only our fear, not only our spiritual ecstasy, not only our feelings, not only our joyful hope. He wants all of us. He wants us from the inside out. He wants us to want him. So I try to be what I am, a believer in Christ's love and his atonement; and I let the Sioux be, waiting on God's call. I try to love as God has loved me, when I can. I say only as much as these friends of mine will hear. 

I have occasionally told people who mentioned the novel--especially the ending--that in my life as a writer I never felt as finished, as fulfilled, as I did when writing the last few pages of Touches the Sky, as if I had in those pages simultaneously filled my soul even as it emptied it. It was a gracious and beautiful moment, so very rare, as if what was on the page I finished left nothing more to be said, a moment in which, I suppose, I touched the sky.

I know this, Touches The Sky--I know this world can be hard. I know that, in part, it is, as the Scriptures say, a vale of tears. I have seen enough of death in my life to know that our joys here are as dependent on the seasons as are the crops I sow every spring. Rough winds can kill. Tornadoes dance across these prairies like pillars of death. Winter's cold freezes life stiff and unyielding. Prairie fires, even today, burn out homesteads as if they were little more than cord wood.

But I live here because it is my home. And what gives me life amid the changing seasons, the trials and joys, the death and the new life, is what I remember always, unseen, beneath us--a deep and life-giving sea of pure water, an ocean of life that is always there in our deepest need.

This I know. God is here. This I know, Touches the Sky. 

You are very welcome to visit, trust me. We will greet you with open arms, Dalitha and I. Please do. Please do.

Fiction requires confluence of heart and mind. We create sentences and images that have not only to fit context, but also carry human emotion somehow true to what we know. What made old-line Christians wary about any kind of fiction is that it is, in fact, a lie. Jan Ellerbroek never existed. There was no Touches the Sky. There was a prototype for Dalitha, but she too never existed.

And yet she did. To me the story is very real. Even today, many years later, when I just now typed out those words, I remember and believe that what's on the page is more than mind and more heart. What's there on the page is my soul. 

I suppose that's why, Karla Walkling, what you said in that wonderful note you sent, about a novel set in a place you know so well-- that's why your note is to me such a joy.  You said you were up there not so long ago, that you took pictures of your place from the top. You can see your land, a centennial farm from there.

I don't live in South Dakota, but I want you to know that you can see a really long ways from that butte you're dad is protecting with trees. You can see all the way to my place. 

Thanks again.

A small butte in South Dakota

Mr. Schaap, I just finished (for the second time) your book “Touches The Sky”. It brings tears to me eyes because your story seems so real to me. My name is Karla Walkling, my great grandparents homesteaded in Purewater (Lakeview) now on the Rosebud Reservation. My father, John Walkling, and mother, Yvonne (Markus) Walkling, live on a centennial farm just 1/2 mile from the butte that you mention at the end of your book. Thank you for writing Touches The Sky, it is a beautiful book.

It's not every day a note like that arrives at the door of your heart. That she loved the novel--she's read it twice--is one precious gift, but that she recognizes that the very site where the novel ends is pure blessing. 

More than a decade ago, I decided to try to write a novel that would bring together my interests in my own Dutch-American heritage, as well as my growing love for Native American history, a particular dalliance that began, oddly enough, with Ian Frazier's Great Plains. In it, he calls the Ghost Dance "the first American religion." He may have overshot a bit, but my deeply religious self became fascinated by what was swept through Native people all over the western half of the continent in the late 1880s. I wanted to know more. 

One cold November day I went out alone to the Pine Ridge Reservation, specifically to the broad and open plain where remnants of Custer's old Seventh Cavalry massacred Big Foot's band at a creek called Wounded Knee. The weather wasn't nice, and I was very much alone. My thanksgiving visit to Wounded Knee was one of the most meaningful moments of my life.

All of that led to a plan for a novel that would be set somewhere out in South Dakota, where the Lakota and Dutch-Americans were neighbors. I knew something about a tiny little church adjacent to the Rosebud reservation, a church whose ethnic origins were in tulips. The address of that church was Valentine, NE. I decided to investigate, went to Valentine, and started hunting. No CRC. I stopped in a convenience mart and asked. The young woman behind the counter told me she'd never heard of a Christian Reformed Church. Valentine is no metropolis, but Christian Reformed? Nothing.

I asked her if I could see a telephone book, and she obliged. I looked through the yellow pages for churches but didn't find it, so I made the most obvious next move--I looked under the Vs for familiar Dutch names, found several, chose one, and called. A man answered. I told him I was in Valentine, looking for Lakeview Christian Reformed Church. He knew, of course. I needed to take fifteen miles of gravel roads north and west of Valentine because Lakeview was out in the country. 

He seemed obliging, so I asked him another question--was there someone from that church, someone old, someone who'd been around the neighborhood for a long time, maybe a member of that church who I could talk to about how life was lived out there, fifteen miles north and west of Valentine, Nebraska. "Mrs. Logterman," he said without giving the question much thought. 

"Would she talk to me?" I asked.

He told me I could ask, so I did. I called this Mrs. Logterman, introduced myself in a tribal way: "My name is James Schaap. I teach at Dordt College. I write in the Banner. . ."

She said she knew the name. She obliged, told me how to get to her trailer.

I spent more than a couple hours with her. Blessedly, she gave me a tour of the area, telling me where Rev. Leonard Verduin had grown up, where the original church was, where the school was, and where the village was. Off we went, a grand tour over really difficult country. "This is not an easy place to live," she told me. 

I didn't record that interview. I wish I had. I hadn't gone to Valentine to interview anyone, hadn't prepared, I guess. But she promised me a copy of her local history of the church and what was once a village, Purewater, South Dakota.

"And what about the Indians?" I asked finally. Lakeview CRC is on the Rosebud Reservation, just a few minutes from St. Francis Mission.

She didn't say much. I know enough about the Dutch--I am one--to know that when they immigrated, like other Northern Europeans, they tended to congregate. We too can be very tribal.

"There's a butte out here," she told me, "where the Sioux people go to do their worship." More than a bit of condescension was deliberately planted in that line. "We let them go up there and see their visions and what not," she told me. 

I stopped the car and got out the camera. If I still have that shot, I wouldn't know where to find it. But the woman who wrote that kind note, Karla Walking, included a picture in the note she sent me on Messenger.

Is this the butte in your book? My sister and I were on top of the butte 9/2019 and took the photo of our Walkling farm which is in the background. Dad planted trees on top and below to preserve its integrity & keep it from blowing away in the Dakota wind. LOL

The picture she sent sits at the top of the page. 

____________________________ 

Tomorrow: the end of the novel.

Morning Thanks--A good afternoon

Yesterday afternoon I sat with a old man who, once upon a time, shot at surfacing German subs in the North Atlantic, tried to pick off the crews who were aiming their anti-aircraft guns at the Navy depth charge bombers whose buzzing explosive cargo could blow those subs out of the water.

In the spring of 1942 he'd gone into flight school after graduation from a small Iowa college, spent a year in series of special schools, then took orders to Norfolk for duty in the North Atlantic. During his years keeping Nazi U-boats away from Allied shipping lanes, his unit of fighter pilots knocked off nine subs. "They didn't give you credit unless there was a heckuva oil stain on the water," he told me, a bowl of soup set on a couple of towels draped over his lap--lime chicken from his daughter in North Carolina. He says they know how to cook in North Carolina.

He should know. He married a North Carolina girl himself.

He's 94 years old, and everything you say has to be heavily amplified. We took a bad turn when we determined ear horns were ridiculous. All afternoon I could have used one, which is to say he could have. Honestly, I didn't say much at all for two hours while he told me about his life, but when I left I was pooped just from yelling the very few questions I did.

But what a joy it was to hear a story he probably doesn't tell all that often anymore, if in fact he ever did.

Twice while I sat there beside him, he cried. Once, when he remembered coming back to Norfolk aboard that cheap aircraft carrier he was aboard for most of the war. It was a merchant marine ship worked over into an aircraft carrier with barely enough space to land fighters. Held just nine, in fact. Made take-offs difficult too, but that was home.

What brewed the tears was his remembering how that carrier sailed into the harbor and how right there on the pier in front of him coming closer and closer and closer was his brand new wife standing there among the others gathered there. That happened 72 years ago. Just seeing her there in his memory still brought tears.

When the Nazis began to recharge their batteries at night on the North Atlantic, he and his fighter plane buddies had to learn whole new technologies for going after subs in the dark. Where there was once a bomb in the hold, the Navy now installed a flood light. To learn the new flying tricks, the whole bunch of them were sent to Florida. He told his sweetheart to take a train down with the other women. "But, honey," she told him, "we're not married."

"Then that'll have to change," he told her.

And it did. They left Florida a few days later, married.

The next time that carrier and its nine planes and crews turned away from combat on the high seas and returned to port for resupply was the time he spotted her on the pier waiting for him--that's the moment he'll never forget. He's 94, and he doesn't walk well, but the memory of seeing her waiting on the pier brought tears from someplace so deep inside we all probably wish we held such a treasure.

That's them in the picture. He'd met her at a dance in Norfolk, asked her to dance three times in a row, then asked her if next time he was in port he could date her. She said yes. He wrote her address on his sharp white cuff.

Look at that picture. It's just about the most beautiful thing, isn't it?

But he broke just enough for me to see an edge of tears in his eyes one other time too when he told me about his life. Land prices skyrocketed in 70s and early 80s; and when they did, farmers loaded up on everything--on land, on machinery, on cattle. As long as their paper worth was out of sight, so was reason.

But the market didn't hold, and when land prices fell off the table the whole works buckled like a house of cards. Good people, hard-working people, people who prayed to the Almighty, suddenly found themselves so far gone in debt there was no way out except to somehow cut losses and dreams.

"That was a bad time, wasn't it?" I asked him.

That's when he cried again.

He'd become a banker, a good one, a man of prayer. "The Board met everyday at six in the morning and we'd go over loans," he told me, his lips shivering in the overheated apartment.

Twice he cried this afternoon, this precious old man who, once upon a time in the inky dark over a cold ocean operated a joystick with a trigger that wasn't a game at all.

Twice he cried. I saw it. Once in joy and once in misery. All in life.

I couldn't have said much, couldn't have been heard. But why talk when there's so much to hear.

So go ahead and ask me about my day yesterday. I'll be happy to tell you.

It couldn't have been richer. I'm thankful for being there.

___________________ 

*Originally published here November 15, 2015

Book Report--Torn by Justin Lee

“Blondes do have a certain allure, don’t they?” 

It was just the kind of question a father asks if he's interested in a man-t0-man with his teenage son, or so says Justin Lee, in Torn, his memoir of growing up gay. 

And yet, for the first time in my life, I felt something I couldn’t say to my dad. How could I tell him what I was really feeling, that I didn’t care that she was blonde, or what she looked like at all, that I never thought about any girls like that, but that there was a blond boy I couldn’t get out of my head—a classmate with a shy smile and cute dimples and bright green eyes? Argh! How could I even think such things about a boy?

That Justin Lee suffered greatly as a child goes without saying. Not only was he somehow inexplicably attracted to boys, his wonderful family was and is devoutly evangelical, Southern Baptist, among whom being gay is something akin to anathema. What makes Torn such a good read is that Justin Lee's story doesn't fudge on either side of the dilemma he clearly faces: he remains as deeply committed to Jesus Christ as he is to his being born with an orientation most evangelicals actually denied and self-righteously abhorred. 

It would make all sorts of sense for him to cut and run from a church in which he had no place, but he doesn't; he stays and attempts to figure out--almost always on his own--how he's going to live as a gay Christian. Torn is more than a memoir; it's a textbook for those who, like Lee, find themselves unwilling or unable to renege either on their commitment to faith or their own sexual orientation. And it's a Bible study on passages that have been the standard ammunition of those who've gone to war about gay marriage.

Recently, the governing body of the Christian Reformed Church, of which I have always been a member, voted to drop Bethany Christian Services from its list of approved agencies. Bethany decided, some time ago, to open up its services to same-sex couples, a move contrary to the CRC stance on gay marriage. The vote was close, 23-21. 

It is still possible to feel the whiplash from the incredible change in American culture's attitude on LBGTQ issues. When ex-President Barack Obama began his presidency, he disagreed with gay marriage, then changed that view only when it was undercut by his Vice President, Joe Biden, who admitted in an interview that he favored it. Ex-President Clinton suggested "don't ask, don't tell" in the armed services as a covert means to deal with the reality of same-sex orientation--"just don't talk about it."

Suddenly, things changed. Culture realigned itself on the issue for reasons that still have researchers scratching their heads. Being gay was no more anathema. Gay marriage became acceptable almost overnight.

But not among those evangelicals who read the Bible as if all of scripture's power originates in The Ten Commandments. 

Nothing in Torn really surprised me. The biblical arguments are neither new nor totally convincing. What makes the book as interesting and readable as it is, is Justin Lee's indominable faith, his religious commitment in the face of so much withering criticism from fellow believers. He holds fast in faith, even when the church won't have him. 

Torn does suffer from basic differences between story and sermon. The book is best when it's a story, but it is, finally, more of a sermon, a fine sermon, one that is needed today in certain circles, like my own, where a denomination erases an adoption agency it once birthed itself. 

I would have liked to hear more of Justin Lee's story. Eventually he came to favor gay marriage. What his memoir conspicuously avoids is any mention of a lover. One can't help but believe that by avoiding sexuality--eros--and clinging to agape, he kept the book free from the most difficult area heterosexuals face in accepting gay life, the physicality of same-sex relationships. There are none in Torn. I couldn't help wondering if there are none in the life of Justin Lee. That I don't know is, I think, a weakness of the narrative.

Still, Torn is a very, very good read for those who are struggling with the issue that threatens most fellowships who claim to find their strength in the testimony of the scriptures. 

And that's a lot of us.

Reading Mother Teresa--Cheerfulness

A cheerful heart is good medicine, 

but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. 

Proverbs 17:22

Cheerfulness is a sign of a generous and mortified person who forgetting all things, even herself, tries to please her God in all she does for souls. Cheerfulness is often a cloak which hides a life of sacrifice, continual union with God, fervor and generosity. A person who has this gift of cheerfulness very often reaches a great height of perfection. For God loves a cheerful giver and He takes close to His heart the religious He loves. (33)

Someone once asked Nelson Mandela, whose years in prison reached despairingly close to a lifetime, why, when finally he was released, he wasn’t more angry. Reportedly, he smiled. “If I thought it would be useful,” he said, “I would be.” A generous spirit was more blessed and more useful.

Cheerfulness had to have been a way of life for Mother Teresa. It had to, for even that immense recognition given to her and her work late in her life was difficult for her accept. She claimed to dislike crowds, and it’s clear that she did. She felt uncomfortable with the adulation showered upon her in foreign places and loved nothing more than returning home after meeting with presidents and potentates and even the pope.

Still, what she found back home in Calcutta was ever more of the dying. She ministered to the lowliest of the low, the most despised of the despicable – the poor, the infirm, those approaching death totally alone. Her terrain was the torn edge of our existence, the seam where life slips painfully into darkness. The landscape she loved was the beaten shroud of human suffering. The faces she looked into were beautiful only because she saw in them the very image of her suffering Savior.

What’s more, impossible as it may seem, she often felt herself despised by God, forgotten, left behind, alone and terrified that the Jesus she so loved had no time for her, her pains or her triumphs. She was, as some call her, a “saint of darkness” (336).

And yet, throughout her life, there is this persistent cheerfulness, this effervescent sense of humor that could, at any moment whatsoever start an entire audience to slapping their knees, or double-up her friends and acquaintances in laughter.

Some of all of that emerged from her belief in providence, in God’s own unmistakably cagey guidance. And while some might bicker about God’s blessings in this particular situation, Mother Teresa loved the often astonishing juxtaposition of human need and divine largesse. “Three days ago,” she once wrote her Archbishop, “we picked up two people eaten alive with worms. The agony of the Cross was on their faces.” She says they proceeded to make the two of them comfortable, when one of them, the old man, asked for a cigarette. “How beautiful of God,” she says, because “in my bag there were two packets of [the] best cigarettes. . . . God thought of this old man’s longing” (254). When with those she served, she seemed never unwilling or unable to smile.

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to nominate a single human being more worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize than Mother Teresa, an award she was given in 1979. In her much heralded – and much hated – acceptance speech in Oslo, Mother Teresa related told a story she’d often related elsewhere. She was asked, she said, by a “very big group of professors,” to “tell us something that will help us.” She told them, in response, simply, to “smile at each other.” One of her learned audience must have been a little skeptical. “Are you married?” he asked. “Yes,” she told him, without missing a beat, “and I sometimes find it very difficult to smile at Jesus because He can be very demanding” (281).

Or this. She confessed to one of her spiritual directors that she simply lacked the wherewithal to accomplish much: “I can do only one thing, like a little dog following closely the Master’s footsteps.” And then, “Pray that I be a cheerful dog” (236).

Comparing my suffering to yours or yours to hers is futile. All suffering is suffering. Besides, what good are such comparisons anyway? “It is a curious fact,” said Oscar Wilde, “that people are never so trivial as when they take themselves seriously.”

Not so apparently, the cheerful dog.

Tulip Festival 2021

I can admit it now, but it's likely I would have back then too because I was proud of being haughty about it, proud of my sinful condescension and scorn, my being downright snooty, a snob. I was demonstrably proud of my Dutch heritage, had written about it extensively. In fact, lots of characters in my fiction carried Dutch names. It wasn't as if I was a heretic. But Tulip Festivals?--spare me.

If you live in some adjacent village here, come May you can't help but smirk at an entire town in short pants, silly hats, and downright painful klompen, for pete's sake. Street-scrubbing? Give me a break. And whose ancestors, really, danced in the streets? Dancing got you thumbed out of church. Get a life, Orange City. Just think--mid-May comes along and you could be putting your dock in up at the lakes. Instead, you're slobbering over cotton candy, spending half your fortune on goofy rides for the kids, and watching waves of marching bands toot down Main, a half-note flat. 

All of it seemed more than a little silly, when the real deal about being Dutch Reformed is the "Reformed" part, the part no OC people talk much about, maybe because, these days especially, it's just about gone.

Don't know that I'd trace my journey as something from the Damascus road--after all, I've not been struck blind or dumb; but since moving to Orange City's suburbs, I've come to appreciate what happens here mid-May. It's a vast and trying community exercise that requires incredible teamwork, buckets of sweat, and even some considerable history study. OC people take it very, very seriously because it's a sprawling enterprise that won't happen without great bands of people working together to pull it off. Silliness? Sure. Funnel cakes? all right, you got me there. But there's also saucijzenbroodjes and poffertjes, itty-bitty pancakes to die for.

My feet and I spent three long hours in the newly refurbished Dutch-American Heritage Museum yesterday, answering all sorts of questions about our collection of Native American artifacts, while, up front, hundreds of people came in and wandered through displays and exhibits featuring all kinds of ethnic stuff that together tell at least something of the story of Dutch-Americans in this far corner of Iowa, of whom I am one. I had to park three blocks away, a considerable distance in small-town U. S. of A., so all I saw of the parade was it dis-assembling. Never got near the rides or the truly sinful cuisine. But the tulips are everywhere, and they're gorgeous this year, perfectly timed, very Dutch; and it goes without saying the town is clean.

I've never donned a Dutch costume, not even a shirt or neckerchief. Not even a hat. It's time to admit that this last vestige of ye olde stubbornness is a vestige of the old man of sin, the Sioux Centerite who sat for years in the seat of the scoffer. 

I'm too old and my feet are too sore for wooden shoes. But at least a neckerchief, maybe a hat? It may be time for the new man of righteousness to edge his way out of the closet. 

The Mountain Meadows Massacre

 

You can name a place "Zion," but naming it doesn't make it so. 

It took a century or more for the LDS to come to terms with what happened at Monument Mountain in September of 1857, when, in 35 wagons, more than 140 emigrants from Arkansas, on their way to California, camped in this very field, while several hundred head of cattle, horses and oxen were out here grazing.

The emigrants were, like so many others, bound for what they believed would be a new life out west, on the trail--the northern route--to California, when they were accosted by revengeful Mormons and the Paiutes the settlers recruited to aid them in a fight the Mormons considered defensive. About that they were wrong.  

For several days, there were skirmishes. Several men died. 

And then, a truce. The locals walked into camp beneath a white flag, determined, they said, to bring hostilities to an end. The deal they cut was easy enough: you give up your arms and we will guarantee your safety. The hostilities will end. It's that simple, that easy.

A system to bring the fight to an end was created. The Mormons said the emigrants would leave the encampment in groups--the wounded and small children first, in wagons, women and other children following on foot; then the men and boys, followed by the Mormon militiamen, of course, to make sure things were done right and in good order.

And then, unsuspectedly and on command, the militiamen simply pulled out their rifles and sidearms and murdered the Arkansans--all of the wounded, the men, and the boys, and all of the women, many of whom died trying to protect their children from fire. Only a few children remained.

Two years later, the badly mangled bodies of the victims were buried by a delegation of U. S. cavalry. Two years later. 

Historians estimate that as many as 50 militia and an untold number of Paiutes shed all that blood. It took twenty years, but one of them, a man named John H. Lee, was tried, convicted, and executed not far from the scene of the massacre. 

That door up top of the post is just one of many in what appears to be some kind of dormitory in Colorado City, Arizona, on a big house built by Warren Jeffs to hold his many wives, some of them as young as 12. Jeffs today, you may remember, is in prison for rape.

But the truth, I believe, holds for everyone, not just the Mormons: You can call a place Zion, but that doesn't make it so.

The Incredible Stories of the Bible

The Rape of Dinah by Sebastiano Ricci

Old Christian Reformed missionaries couldn't do Navajo mission work by ushering out their finest theological rambling. Trolling through the weeds of the consubstantiation/transubstantiation thing wasn't going to offer much reward and could well leave the lost more so. Same with, say, proof texting for the doctrine of common grace. Good luck with that.

According to the old missionary novels, the central mode of mission outreach was cold turkey camp visits: you walk up to a hogan and introduce yourself. If asked, you sit around the fire with other family members, shuffle through your best Bible stories, and pick one or two you hope will be stunners.

What follows, if the old novels tell the truth, is a spirited competition to determine who's got the best stories? If the missionary, via his translator, spins more compelling yarns than locals, well, then, maybe the locals will lend more than an ear to the song-and-dance the white man is slinging. 

In Beyond Words, Frederick Buechner's witty commentaries are presented by topics introduced alphabetically. So last night, on Elijah, for devotions, we read two substantial chapters from I Kings, 18 and 19, and sat spellbound once more by the awesome comedy. Elijah and the prophets of Baal pull on their battle uniforms and go into competition, each conjuring the best work they could from their respective gods. You know the story--three times Elijah tells his troops to soak the sacrifice. Three times. No matter. The Lord descends in all his might and puts a match to the mess that makes Baal's first team look like dried-up phlegm.

Now that is a campfire story. 

A week ago Buechner hauled out the Dinah story. I'd forgotten the prologue, the rape; but no boy can forget the massacre. When I was a kid, I went to a Christian school. I'm not bragging--I'm stating the truth: I know the best Bible stories better than most people; but Dinah's rape was a saga I'd lost or forgotten, not the aftermath.

The story begins with rape. In the chronicles of the Lord, that's not particularly unusual. In the Dinah story, this heathen guy named Shechem did evil in the eyes of the Lord when he took, without asking, Jacob's comely daughter Dinah. Just took her. Rape. 

The complication? He, well, fell in love, or so the story goes. At least, he decided he wanted Dinah's hand in marriage and told his father so. Dinah's brothers weren't thrilled with the idea, even though this Shechem of the infidels and his old man offered a package of goods only a fool could turn down. Jacob was, we know, a chiseler. You wouldn't expect moral outrage from him, even though he was the girl's father, not when there was some heavyweight dollar signs around.

It's not an easy story. Just imagine yourself around a fire, multiple generations of Navajo sit around you, but you've got the floor. It's your job to tell spin the yarn.

Buechner says Shechem and his old man simply won't take no for an answer. Apparently, no one asked Dinah, but Jacob's boys tell him that he should bargain thusly with Shechem: he can have Dinah on the condition that the heathen men, all of them, give themselves over to the knife--get circumcised.

You're in a contest, remember. You have the mike right now. You're telling the story, and right now you can bet they're all tuned in, men and women.

All of 'em? Yeah, all of 'em. They all get worked on and over, get snipped. The whole freakin' bunch, a surgery that lays the heathen up but good. None of their warriors are ready to fight with their goods bandaged and bloodied, so Dinah's brothers just take 'em at the moment of the misery, every last Hivite. Soon enough, they're history.

Revenge killing. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.

What an incredible story. The campfire might well be going out because it's been forgotten in the spell of the incredible saga. There's no internet, no TV, no computer games. There's only the stories you lug in your rucksack. 

But there's a problem. You've got to tell the men on the other side of the fire to stop holding the family jewels. It's just a story, after all.

If you can do that, I'm thinking you win, hands down. Seriously, the Bible has monstrously incredible stories.