The Good Earth

The decision is inevitable--it will be made and, likely, soon. Hundreds of volunteers painstakingly winnow through tons of debris. No earthquake, no hurricane, no bombing brought down Chaplain Towers South, and there was no real-time warning; but soon, a decision to change what's happening in the horror will have to be made. 

Search-and-rescue will cease. Clean-up will begin. The score of loved ones now cowering in hope and fear just down the road will shed even more tears. Loved ones' remains will be trucked away with an eternity of concrete and rebar, all of it broken. So much that is precious will go to the landfill.

Consider the loss.

At Good Earth, it's almost impossible to believe what the signs assert. When you look out over the swatch of river bottom to the east, you'll see an ocean of gorgeous emerald in a winding river valley, but little more. There's land out there just yearning to be developed, good land just outside one of the fastest growing municipalities in America, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. But it's not--it's lovingly being preserved.

Once upon a time, a city lived and grew right there, a city 10,000 residents strong, the Indigenous scholars call the Oneota. For hundreds of years ordinary people lived and worked here, lived and died here. When there was no Chicago, the Good Earth was here. Before Boston, there was a city on the Big Sioux, a trading community that drew America's First Nations from near and far by way of the soft red stone available here and only here, pipe stone. 

The Oneota were ancestors of tribes later named the Ioways, the Omaha, the Ponca, and the Otoe. Once there was a city. If you visit today, it's amazing how little can be seen. If you hike down toward the river on the gravel paths, you'll see some wild life maybe, hear some birds, and walk through lots of prairie being renewed, brought slowly back to the colorful tangle of native flora that once existed here. 

Mr. Frederick W. Pettigrew, a son of Puritan New England in a fiercely committed abolitionist family, created a map of what he called "the Silent City" when he lived here in the 1880s. That map offers out best view of what was once here.

The mounds he mapped, the mounds visible to Mr. Pettigrew, are all but gone today, plowed under when the very good earth was determined to be worth more than an oddity, a cemetery for heathen, stone-age people. The mounds held the remains of those who had passed on, as well as decorative pieces of value to the people. 

Today, most all of what once was "The Good Earth" is plowed under, the mounds Pettigrew noted nearly unidentifiable. To be sure, there's not much to see at South Dakota's newest state park, not much to see but what the area might well have looked like when the one of the biggest cities in America sat right there on the Big Sioux River. Today, it's a ghost town unlike any other in the West. 

Dwellings and mounds may have been erased by plows and harrows, the city residents long gone, but if you walk around the place by yourself and you work hard at imagining what must have been here at a busy trading center, people coming and going, people living and loving and dying, you might just be surprised at how much you can still see when there's really nothing there. 

When you stand there alone, you might just be led to believe you're on holy ground.

Our South American borders

I'm lucky to have taken this one. Seriously. Dickcissels are not particularly rare, and I love having them back. But they're tiny, really, no bigger than a parakeet, and the endless noise they make seems almost akin. To call what they do "singing" is a stretch. It's something of a bleat, nothing at all like the robins, the other serious residents of our prairie backyard. 

Yes, you're right--their goofy name derives from the great noise they put up ceaselessly . "Dick-cissel-cissel-cissel." Something like that. 

This one is a female, although calling gender with regards to birds may be as perilous these days as it is with human beings. The male has a golden chest and a rather regal crest. They look like miniature meadowlarks, which, by the way, we've never seen out back. The likelihood of picking up their song increases as you drive west. 

But most every year we've lived out here we've been blessed by a pair of dickcissels. They're so little that it's impossible to believe they winter in South America. I'm not making that up. Bird lovers in the know claim that dickcissels pick up stakes mid-August to begin their trek, arriving in South America sometime late September or October. I'm serious. Can't help wonder where they carry their passports.

When I say I'm lucky to have taken this picture, I mean these little mites wear camo gear that makes them hard to spot even though they're gutsy little chirpers who don't spook fast. You've got to get up relatively close before they take wing, and ours at least seem rarely to leave our outback. 

When they're filling a prairie landscape with that distinctive noise, the best place to look is generally their choice of hangouts: high places. Last night this young lady staked out some territory high atop one of the quaking aspens just east of the deck, making all kinds of noise despite the fact that I was right there, poking around with a camera. Took me five minutes to find her, but then she wasn't not a dime's worth bigger than the crowd of aspen leaves all around. There she was, riding the top branches, distinguished only by her movement.

Just like that, she left, but kept on singing. I walked out back after her, following all that scratchy noise. Took me some time, but I spotted her again at the farthest end of the acreage. She was riding a spiny weed whose name I don't know--again, barely visible. 

I dream of an occasional bobolink out back, but I think I need more ground to attract them. Once upon a time I saw a couple along the Big Sioux in a broad stretch of prairie at Blood Run. A bobolink would be a beauty of a blessing. So would a meadowlark. 

But having this little lady and her beau around for a chunk of summer is its own rich reward. Come late spring, I look forward to their showing up, as they must after yet another endless pilgrimage. They're the only South Americans I've got in the backyard as far as I know. The fact is, I've even grown to like their ratchet-y song. They're a tiny bird with a big song and a tongue-twisting name: dickcissel. 

Maybe today I'll see if I can get a shot of her royal beau.

Reading Mother Teresa--Home

 

This is how we know what love is:

Jesus laid down his life for us.

And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.

1 John 3:16

The Reverend Stephen R. Riggs died in 1883, many years before I was born. I didn’t know him – I couldn’t have. He may have had an acidic personality – I don’t know. He may have mistreated his wife with, at best, inattention. He was a preacher, but he may well have been ornery as a junkyard dog.

But from what I know about him, I respect him. He played an unimaginably significant role in an American horror story, the Dakota War of 1862, a bloody legacy that still haunts the state of Minnesota, where it happened. Hundreds died, and 38 Dakota men were hanged in the largest mass execution in American history.

Riggs was no saint, at least no one has ever canonized him. He did almost unforgiveable things during the Dakota War, like, without doing any significant investigation, bringing almost instantaneous charges against Dakota men accused of rape and murder, charges that resulted in death by hanging.

I still respect him. He may well have been wrong, but his story is a human story of perseverance. He started a ministry among the Dakota in the Minnesota River valley in the 1830s; by the time of the Dakota War, he and his wife had been there for decades. He translated portions of the Bible into the Dakota language, a language that hadn’t been written before he started work. You can still buy his Dakota grammar on Amazon.

After the war, when Minnesota’s white folks wanted all of the Native people – even the Ojibwe, who hadn’t been involved – dead or deported, Riggs was a tireless advocate. When Native suffering became unbearable – hundreds died – he was there beside them, helping.

But most of all I respect him for staying, for making his mission into something more than a mission. Really, Stephen R. Riggs never left the field. He may have come to Dakota country on a mission, but it wasn’t a mission – it was his life. He stayed with the Sioux; he moved to South Dakota, but he didn’t leave, and neither did his children. He didn’t retire to Ohio, from whence he came. He stayed.

There are, of course, different definitions of "mission." In war, a mission might well be to secure a perimeter or capture a bridge, to free hostages or destroy an airfield, in other words, an important but temporary action: mission, a specific action to be accomplished.

But mission refers to something larger too, a statement of purpose or, even more broadly, a reason for existence.

By the end of her life, Mother Teresa was, by all measures, a celebrity. What she said made news, where she traveled there were crowds. The Missionaries of Charity were still her people, but she’d become a star.

But what I’ll always respect about her is what everyone around her knew: no matter where she traveled or who she met or how many networks carried her picture, she loved nothing better than coming home.

When, as a girl, she went to India, she went to war all right – war against poverty and loneliness and fear. Her mission was to destroy the darkness that people experience when all they see before them is a curtain – life or death without love.

But mission wasn’t something she intended to accomplish, only to return to the home place in Skopje, Albania, or some adorable little flat in Rome with a nice view of the Vatican. Calcutta was home, the streets of the city she’d walked for so many years. Once Mother Teresa started her mission, she never left the home place.

Missionaries come in all sizes, of course, and perfectly understandable reasons exist for leaving the field when it’s impossible to stay. And there are innumerable reasons to canonize Mother Teresa – her life was a gift not just to the poor she served in Calcutta, but to all of us.

But I think the crowning glory of what she did is that she never once saw her mission as something to be accomplished. She lived where she served. She never left. The people she served were her neighbors, her brothers and sisters. Her mission was her home.

Praise be to God.

Morning Thanks--Morning Light

Early on, the eastern skies were brimming with promise. A long flat overcast was slowly drifting out towards Hospers and Granville, promising (I thought) to really light up when our terra firma turned slightly farther toward Old Sol. I pulled out a camera, fixed the tripod, and took a couple of shots because I expected the dawn that did arrive and then some. But far more quickly it left, never quite living up to its promise. 

It wasn't the dawn's fault that the Floyd River is, for the most part, less than knee-deep. There's just not much to light up right now, and there won't be until this dry spell creeps away.

Still, when morning comes everything wears a gold cape, all nature sings, if it's just for a moment, as it was this morning. 

Best of show? This last one, not because it's such an excellent shot but because the moral to the story is not so much about the Great Plains as it is about the phenomenon of dawn. In the bright face of mornings like this--even the ones that slip away quickly-- it's a really a challenge not to wonder "what is man, that thou art mindful of him?" Our place is a but a blip acreage somewhere beneath the immense tangerine canvas of his grace.

MAGA meets CRT

I consider it a blessing to have eaten fish 'n chips twice--that's right, not just once, but twice--while sitting on a dock right there along the water in Victoria, British Columbia. Twice. Once would have been memorable, but twice seems almost sacramental.

But then Victoria B.C., has to rank as one of the most warm-hearted places to visit on the entire continent. Because it's the provincial capital, Victoria has all the proper vestiges of the government, including an ornately turreted Parliament building. These days, the city offers quaint shops and a plethora of world-class cuisines. Separated from the States by the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Victoria will be more than happy to show off its prim English architecture, as well as some of the oldest trees in the world.




But this year there's a cloud, an oppressive sky over Victoria and the entire country. Victoria's City Council voted, ten days ago, to alter its plans for "a virtual Canada Day broadcast." In its place, the City promises a wholly different production, guided by its own First Nations people.

"As First Nations mourn and in light of the challenging moment we are in as a Canadian Nation following the discovery of the remains of 215 children at a former Residential School, Council has decided to take the time to explore new possibilities, instead of the previously planned virtual Canada Day broadcast," or so Mayor Lisa Helps announced.

The entire country is reeling from revelations of 215 Indigenous children's remains discovered in unmarked graves on the grounds of Kamloops Indian Residential School, in Kamloops, B. C. Euro-Canada, its white residents, couldn't believe what the horrible news; First Nations Canada was hurt deeply, but not, however, surprised. They needed to read no news headlines; they knew.

Victoria City Council asserted that the City could lead its citizens by creating the opportunity "for thoughtful reflection of what it means to be Canadian in light of recent events and what we already know from our past."

I don't know that the U.S. of A. could be that reflective, or will be--not now, especially, when the political right has created a bugaboo out of what is called "Critical Race Theory (CRT)" and broadly heralded whatever it is they say CRT is as the absolute worst idea to come along since Karl Marx dreamed up communism.

For the life of me, I don't know what CRT is and, quite frankly, I think its definition says more about the politics of who's defining it than anything from a textbook. What is clear is godless socialist liberals are foisting it on our children, and proud flag-waving Americans (you know, 1/6) won't let that happen because lefties are, foresworn to destroy MAGA and, of course, America.

MAGA hates CRT, whatever it is, because they know this for sure that CRT makes sweet and innocent white children feel down-in-the-mouth about our history and reject the whole MAGA ideology. That's why our own state rep, Skyler Wheeler, and his Republican patriots, the ones in rose-colored glasses, passed HF 802 in the heat of their righteous passions. They want to make darned sure Iowa schools at all levels should never “teach, advocate, act upon, or promote divisive concepts” about race. It's very important, so the legislation explained, that no "individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.”

Kamloops, you say, is a continent away. Victoria is far Pacific Northwest. We eat corn-fed beef and pork out here, not fish and chips. What on earth have all those dead Indian children have to do with us?

Okay. How about this?

Just so you know, that's "Canton S. D." as in the Canton just down the road, the place where, once upon a time, the city hosted the nation's only Indian insane asylum, a place called the Hiawatha Indian Insane Asylum, a boon to the city of Canton, an employer of significant size.

You may read some things about Hiawatha, if you feel so included. If you are, have a look here.

But keep a sharp lookout for CRT. It's evil. If you're not Indigenous, reading about the Hiawatha Insane Asylum may well lead to "discomfort, guilt, or anguish." We certainly wouldn't want that to happen, would we? That's why we made HF802.

Style and Class and Dr. De Lespinasse

Stanley Wiersma's Style and Class quite sweetly documents the cultural differences between two small towns in Dutch northwest Iowa, rivals in all things except what he would have characterized as something akin to a community ethos. Style and Class is a collection of poems that are so, only because they're printed in stanzas; they don't rhyme and they aren't characterized by some artsy economy of words or images. I'm not sure what an English teacher would do with Style and Class, and I was an English teacher.

No matter. The poems work, and the collection is a ball, in great part because Wiersma rehearses tales of yore in a fashion that defines those two towns, great rivals, in giggles and smirks that somehow, thereby, approximate undeniable truth to those of us who live here and recognize unique characters. Orange City, he says, has class--Sioux Center, style. Class begets poffertjes on Main Street; style begets a Wal-Mart on the south edge of town. Style loves bucks; class loves decorum. Style is wild; class is not. Style gets a kick out of cruisin'; class adores tulips. Sioux Center loves Casey's Bakery; Orange City loves Brad's Breads.

Last night, we set up 120 chairs and stuck them into every available open space of the museum, but Orange City filled them, all of them, to watch a readers theater presentation that focused on the life of a man of real old-country aristocratic class, a man who graced city streets at the very dawn of the town's existence. His name was Dr. Adolf Fredrik Henry De Lespinasse, a name so heady to pronounce that I've heard, in the past week, three distinct variations.

De Lespinasse (my preference rhymes, sort of, with "messy") had royal blood in his veins, knew it, showed it, and really wanted you to be aware of it. In addition to the precious liquid circulating through him, he was a Renaissance man, by trade a doctor, but by impulse a politician and by sheer craft, an artist. He hated conventions, especially those that grew out of old-time religion like that practiced by most residents of the town where he lived, Orange City. He started his own church in fact, called it "the Modern Church," built it himself at the same time the very serious Reformed Church built their first house of worship. 

Needless to say, the man's own "Modern Church" never reached mega- status, and its bell tower eventually turned, inauspiciously, into an outhouse, much to religious Orange City's glee (no irreligious Orange City existed, it seems, in 1880.)

But Orange City couldn't help but admire the man, because at medicine he was verifiable royalty. And he knew their language, even if he didn't share their reverences. He healed their diseases, made on-the-money diagnoses, dispensed his own researched and created medicines, and made the people whole, even if he wasn't particularly taken with their creeds and confessions. And he did it all in the Dutch language.

The researcher who spent some significant time discovering the story, a former resident of Orange City, Nella Kennedy, created a readers theater presentation we staged last night at the museum, where we played the piece to the hilt before an eager audience whose giggling throughout made it clear that a wonderful time was had by all.

125 people, a full house, showed up for a show that featured a Freemason Unitarian very few of them had ever heard of, a man who was barely a footnote in the town's 150-year history.

That kind of full house, that kind of joy, that kind of experience, could never have happened in Sioux Center because Orange City is interested in such things. Orange City has class, in case you're wondering, and my telling you that it does, is simple proof that Stanley Wiersma wasn't wrong.

Today, I'll run back to Sioux Center to return that cocktail table we used for last night's performance. I'm sure I'll stop at Wal-Mart. 

But last night, I'll have you know, Prof. Stanley Wiersma, that this long-time resident of Sioux Center and present resident of Alton, was more than happy, was thrilled, in fact, to be from very classy Orange City.

Morning Thanks--"Something that wants to be shared"

How we tend each other's grief is never easy. 

I didn't see him coming. We stepped opposite ways through an open door last night. I wasn't expecting to see him, nor he me, I'm sure, but there he was, with his son, a blonde-haired young man he introduced. I don't think he remembered my name so I filled in the blank for him. His son was visiting, for obvious reasons.

He's alone now, has been for several months, although I can't imagine that it feels like a long time since Covid took his wife, so quickly too, so hellishly unforeseen.

But the two of them were not young, and they were eligible. The thing is, the virus took her before they were ready for one of them to be gone, if they or we ever can be fully ready. When it did, it took all of whatever life he could have imagined along with her because you can't plan anything without the spouse you've spent the last sixty years beside. He'd never considered being as alone as he is now, as he's become.

"There are wonderful people at Landsmeer," he told me, the Home he's found to replace the one she left. They'd planned to move already before she'd gone, I guess--it was in the plans, the only plans they'd had.

 
"'It's a God thing,' people say," meaning his living in a new apartment in the Home. I think he wanted to be sure that to him, at least, nothing about his wife's dying could be attributable in any way to the Almighty. Others may say it that way, those friends who stop by to play cards or chat, who stop by to comfort him. And they may say it because he knows it's true too, even if he can't get himself to say it. The old Calvinist knows and believes in the Father's iron-clad will, but that doesn't mean he has to like it, her being gone, I mean. "My kids say I didn't know how to fry an egg," he says, giggling a little. He looks over at his son, and I do too, who's smiling too.

I tell him that I'm glad to hear he's over there because too often I drive past his house and think about how alone he must be in that place without her. I'm smiling when I say it because, like I say, tending grief is never easy.

It was just Father's Day Sunday--his son is spending a long weekend, he says, belovedly. With the new place established, he gets into the car, a nice one, I notice, and the two of them are off. 

I have no idea if he likes poetry, but I can't help thinking maybe he does more so now than before she left him behind and so very much alone. I don't know. But this poem turned up this morning.

It's his, all his, and this morning I'm thankful to have begun the day with its blessed imagined picture of him, but then, surely, someday of you or me too.

This Is How It Will Be*

You'd already said goodbye,
but I wasn't sure you were already gone.

Emerging from the bathroom, I called your name,
wanting to know if you'd read the news item
about the two women who got lost in the woods,
then were rescued and driven to their car,
then drove their car down a boat ramp in the fog,
at the bottom of a dead-end road—
and drowned.

"Honey?" I called, realizing
I was alone in the house.
Realizing that this is how it'll be,
for one or the other of us, someday:
Something that wants to be shared
will be unheard.

                                         Barbara Quick

_______________________ 

*from The Writer's Almanac 

Church News

Would be a war, people said. The Southern Baptist Convention met last week, 16.000 strong, in fact, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, split at the seams between two conservative views--basically Trumpismist and those not so, although neither side would have advertised itself as such.

On one side stood the conservative conservatives gunning for continuing a pattern of racial reconciliation, as well as a commitment to deal up front with the denomination's nagging problems with sexual abuse--in other words, strong church-like concerns with the problems of racial and gender injustice. Absolutely nothing about those concerns are "progressive" or "liberal," but we're now in the Era Of The Big Lie.

Opposing the conservative conservatives were the ultra-conservative conservatives, who generally eschewed social concerns, SBC people who hammer the horrific extremes of the latest Fox News bugaboo, "critical race theory," which threatens to make our children (gasp!) feel guilty about being white. Not reading racial animosity into the battle lines is well-nigh impossible.

The question the SBC faced?--who will lead? Guess who won? The conservative conservative, who we'll call (to throw salt in the wound) "the progressive conservative." There, I said it. I don't know if the ultra-conservative conservatives are awaiting Donald J. Trump to carp about the election was rigged, but who knows? Stranger things have happened and are happening. And will.

In other church news, last week the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, 400-strong, voted to create guidelines to determine who will or should take communion and who wouldn't or shouldn't, a move generally assumed to be aimed at Joe Biden, who happens to be President of these United States and who attends mass religiously (last Sunday, an English congregation was shocked when the Bidens, unannounced, happened to stop by--a lovely story). But Biden is a Democrat, a life-long member of a party that is pro-life but not rabidly anti-abortion. Expect some kind of ecclesiastical edict sometime soon to see if the Bidens will be barred from the mass.

As Karen Tumulty said in the Washington Post on Saturday, "Catholics — and I am one — should be leery of those in the clergy who treat the Communion wafer as some kind of merit badge, rather than the spiritual sustenance that we were taught to believe it is." But then, she's a liberal, I guess.

Roman Catholics have come along way since JFK. In 1960, I was in sixth grade. I didn't know what to think about my uncle, who, like an Old Testament prophet, spoke at lots of area Dutch Reformed churches, including ours. It was a Sunday night, after worship. Only the truly faithful were there. 

I was a kid. I didn't know what to think. The whole presentation was bitter and angry. Should Kennedy triumph over Nixon that year, my uncle was convinced that the Pope--way over their in Rome!--would be at the controls of the entire American system of government because JFK, as a Catholic, had to listen to, adhere, follow, whatever! the Pope's rulings. America would be governed by the pope, my uncle told the crowd of faithful. Not that many years before, Protestants like us had called the pontiff "the anti-Christ."

Didn't happen. JFK was assassinated three years later in Dallas. But I can remember exactly where we sat in the church that night, and I can't help thinking it was the beginning of my lifelong separation from my parents' politics. I couldn't buy his total conviction that America was moving inexorably down the road to perdition because Kennedy was a Roman Catholic.

Sixty years later, turns out my Uncle wasn't all wrong--the Roman Catholic Church appears to be trying to influence an American President's politics, but in a very limited way: to keep him from the sacraments. Pope Francis hasn't done much dictation of public policy as of yet, but it's early, Uncle Jay, so we'll see what kind of perdition is yet to come our way. 

Thank goodness, that old bugaboo belongs in a museum.

American culture, these days especially, is a ripe melon, split and juicy. If just one man would say, "I've been wrong. Biden won. It wasn't rigged. Joe Biden got more votes than I did. Joe Biden is President. I'm sorry. Please, go home and build a better world." If just one man would say that, maybe we could heal.

That one man, of course, is the ex-President. 

I'm not expecting that speech any time soon. 

The temperature in Alton right now is 51 degrees! Finally, we're cooling off after two weeks' worth of 90+. 

Don't I wish that were true in every way.

Readiing Mother Teresa--A Champion

A man named Paul Tudor Jones, a gadzillionaire hedge fund manager, in a forum of other mega-rich men round-tabling on the campus of a major university, took a question from the audience not long ago, from a woman who wondered why all the panelists were silver-haired gents – and why there were no such women. 

Pity poor, rich Mr. Jones. He tried to give the best answer he knew, but he could not for the life of him reverse the direction of that foot he’d placed so eagerly in his mouth.

Because women have babies, he said; and once women hold those darling newborns to their “bosoms” [his word], those women lose their sharpness, a sharpness prerequisite to hedge fund management. Women are, by nature, wired to love the little ones they bring into the world. They’re lost to the trade because those babies disorient the laser-like commitments required to make really, really big money.

He may be right. I’ve always believed female perception differs from male perception, always felt gender differences to be as mysterious as they are real. But there’s something terribly offensive about what Mr. Jones said and how he said it, something that snorts like a pig of the male chauvinist kind.

He’s stereotyping women, of course, and slighting both sexes – isn’t a man different too once he becomes a father? What’s more, the sexism inherent in the answer he gave suggests exactly why there aren’t more women hedge-fund fat cats? – attitudes like Mr. Jones' are all too brashly trumpeted.

But there’s more. In the broadest sense, the equation he created with his answer goes like this: one can choose to love money or children. If you want to be me up here around this fancy table, he might have said, you got to love money, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And, oh yeah, to heck with the neighbors.

I once knew a man so committed to being a novelist that he told others, including his wife, that nothing – absolutely nothing – would stand in his way. He wrote novels all right – more than twenty; but when he died, he died alone. If you want to read those novels, you can still get some of them, used, from Amazon. They’re out of print.

Was he a better novelist for committing the way he did to his craft? Can someone be a great mathematician if her motivation isn’t fever-pitched? When eight-year-old gymnasts show the kind of natural talent only Olympians have, they’re quickly escorted into worlds different from anything their third-grade classmates will ever know. Is there any other way to be a champion than to give everything?

He may be right.

At eighty years old, burdened with health problems, subject to taxing exhaustion of constant travel, surrounded always by admirers and yet somehow bereft of the love of Christ Jesus, Mother Teresa still rose daily at 4:40 in the morning just to be among the very first into the chapel for morning prayers. Her commitment was total, even when her spirit faltered.

No one could have given more. No one so entirely gave herself away. No one’s commitment was so iron-clad.

But then, she was convinced that she saw in the minds and eyes and hearts of the poor nothing less than her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He may not have been in her heart – at least that’s the darkness she often carried; but he was always there in the visage of the powerless, the dying, the emaciated face of the poor.

She might have made one of America’s finest hedge fund managers, but thank the Lord that with indefatigable commitment to smile, to love, to feed, and to clothe, she choose something vastly different than making big money.

She was, without a doubt, a champion of faith.

An oldie--from September 18, 2008

A shot I took two days later

 Twinkling Eyes

One of the best papers I read in the batch I'm about a return to my students was a story a young woman wrote about going to Africa, where, oddly enough, she saw more poverty--and more happiness--than she was accustomed to seeing here in the affluent west. It was well written and expressive, and I told her as much.

I also told her she had to be really, really careful with how she maintained what she did in the essay--that them poor black folk are just a'dancing and a'singing and a'worshipping the Lord, and isn't that just the sweetest thing! She's courting racism, of course, even though I'm quite sure she didn't mean it. I told her that the black kids in our class wouldn't take kindly to the way she wrote up the subject.

But take color out of the equation, and there's something in what she said that's resoundingly true--at least of me. A few nights ago, I knew we were having a full moon. Despite my conscience's screaming--I had papers to correct, after all, stuff that had to get done!--I got in the car (gas is $3.50 @ gallon!), and went out to watch it come up. Wasn't exactly as awe-inspiring as I thought it would be, but I can't begin to explain how good it was, simply to take an hour out watch the moon rise. Sounds dumb, I know, but the world is, as the poet says, too much with us--or at least me; and even though my student's analysis of happiness on the faces of the poor black folks she met in west Africa may be racist, that doesn't mean that her analysis of her own life--too driven by things in contrast--is far off the mark. Mine too.

"To be grateful is to recognize the love of God in everything he has given us--and he has given us everything," or so says Thomas Merton somewhere. "Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise the goodness of God."

I'm a leap year into this blogging business now--this is #367, the dashboard tells me. And keeping it up has been good for me in this way especially--it's prompted me to remember gratitude, and it's pushed me to try to be "constantly awakening to new wonder and praise."

But I'll be the first to admit that it's a fight. After all, I've got classes to teach, papers to read. I've got things to do, stuff that just has to be done.

Shoot, it's fall again, and you can hardly smell the roses anymore.

But right now soybeans have turned most all of Siouxland gold once more. I've just got to take the time to look.

This morning, I'm thankful for a young woman's innocent, racist essay, for a harvest moon, and for a single unreferenced line from Thomas Merton.

Somewhere in Gilead, Pastor John Ames claims one of his all-time, favorite lines is "a twinkling of an eye." It's something he says he wishes none of us would ever lose. Me neither. But it takes some work to hold on.

The New Messiah Craze

There was no dancing here on the night before the massacre, December 28, 1890, but for almost a year “the Messiah craze” had spread throughout the newly sectioned Native reservations, as unstoppable as a prairie fire. A committee of Sioux holy men had returned from Nevada, where they’d met Wovoka, the Paiute who’d seen the original vision. They returned as disciples of a new religion.

Wovoka designed the ritual from his own visions. Erect a sapling in the middle of an open area—the tree, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, then banned by reservation agents. Purge yourselves, enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious. Show your humility—some warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness of their selflessness.

Then dance—women and men together, something rare in Sioux religious tradition. Dance around that sapling totem, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude. Dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges. Dance into frenzy. Dance into spiritual ecstacy because the promise itself is so wonderful.

The Ghost Dance was a frenetic hobgoblin of Christianity, mysticism, Native ritual, and sheer desperation. If they would dance, they believed Christ would return because he’d heard their prayers and felt their suffering. When he’d come for them, he’d bring with him the old ones (hence, the Ghost Dance). And the buffalo would return. Once again the people could take up their beloved way of life. If they would dance, a cloud of dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, all of them. If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, desperation comforted.

Imagine, here, in all this open space, three hundred men and women being slain by the spirit, most of them writhing in fine dust. Such mass frenzy made wasicu, the white man, of every denomination or political persuasion wary, madness on a cosmic scale—hence, “the Messiah craze.”

The exultation of the Ghost Dance was the vision given to those who fell in frenzy. When they would recover their senses, each of them would reveal what he or she had seen, a collective vision: life would be good, rich, abundant, everything the coming of the wasicu had ended. Jesus Christ, rejected by his own, had heard the voice of the people’s suffering and would bring them joy.

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney in his rich study written already in 1896, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.” It was that simple and that compelling, a vision of heaven.

For me as a white man, a Christian, it is not pleasant to admit that in the summer of 1890, the sheer desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the near death of their culture, created a tragically false religion that played a significant role in what we’ve come to call, simply, Wounded Knee.

Throughout the West, the whole First Nation danced. What was peculiar to the Lakota, however, was this solitary tenet: those who wore the ghost shirt or ghost dress—the prescribed apparel of the faith—could assume themselves impervious to bluecoat bullets. Dancers could not die. They were holy.

It would be dead wrong to assume that that particular belief or any other created by the Messiah craze was the single cause for the horror that happened here in December, 1890. Others are far more prominent: the disappearance of the buffalo, the unceasing trek of white settlers onto traditional Lakota land, a long history of broken treaties, distrust on every side, the searing memory of “Custer’s Last Stand,” and, perhaps most of all, the inability of two peoples to understand each other. When you look down on the shallow valley of the Wounded Knee, bear in mind that what happened here is the confluence of many motives, some of them even well-meaning, but all of them, finally, tragic.

The Ghost Dance swept though Native nations because it offered divine solutions immediate to problems most Native people could not help but feel were insurmountable. They were coming to the end of their entire way of life. Their only comfort was faith because faith, as the Bible says, is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Faith filled their hearts. Nothing else could or would.

In March, a national poll by Monmouth University indicated that 65% of Republicans still believed that Biden's victory came as a result of voter fraud, and that nearly a third of all Republicans claimed they would never accept the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential election. They are, to be sure, true believers. Their faith is in Trump. They believe him with the sheer force of nothing less than pure faith in "the evidence of things not seen." 

On Monday, the FBI warned lawmakers that online Qanon conspirators may carry out more acts of violence as they move from serving as "digital soldiers" to taking action in the real world following the January 6 US Capitol attack. Even though some of the faith's most trusted tenets have not come true or occurred, many of it's disciples have not abandoned the faith. 

At Wounded Knee, some of the slain died because they believed the bullets of the 7th Cavalry wouldn't touch them. They were wrong. Throughout the west, the Ghost Dance died because no matter how hard the people danced and prayed, the promises were never fulfilled.

What exactly does the future hold here in our land? Only those who believe in Donald J. Trump know, but they think they know only because they so strongly believe.

Morning Thanks

It doesn't bug me. The truth is, it thrills me, even scares me a little: my granddaughter is just beginning to be something and someone more than a toddler. She's three whole years old now, and this picture--a "school picture"--is directly from day care. She's at her desk. 

Maybe it's the dark dress, those sleeves festooned with pink frills. Maybe it's the way her bangs are thrown back and tied with a rubber band; maybe it's the setting--so clearly a classroom--but something about his haunting picture has me in its spell.

She's becoming someone, as all of us do. She's becoming something of what she will be, beginning to show to the world all around that she is already who she is becoming.

So I sat out on the deck this morning, waiting for the dawn, having set up my tripod just to see if whatever I might snap of the bold eastern sky would look better than some of the really winning dawns I've witnessed from right here, nothing but earth and sky behind us. Why? I don't know, but I was thinking about this picture and waiting for the dawn to grow when for some reason I thought of John Milton, an old poem, "On his blindness."

Which he was. Milton went blind, had to dictate his poems to his daughters, in fact. Anyway, these lines, a sonnet are what came to me.

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask.

Not so fondly maybe either. He's more than a little chagrined. It's just not fair, he says, that God Almighty expects what he does from me--and us--and then renders me blind. It's not fair. He claims he feels more inclined to serve his maker than he might have when he was younger ("Soul more bent/To serve"), but worries that when called to judgment--yes, Milton was a Puritan--he'll get bawled out for not accomplishing what he should have.

And. He. Was. Blind. Lord, a'mighty, he might have said, how can God expect me to serve you when my lights are out?

Of course, he already knows answers to tough questions. He's cut his teeth on weighing the stress of life's burdens, which is why the answer comes from his own conscience, only secondarily from God.

But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Famous last line, of course, patience-filled. I couldn't help thinking about how much of my granddaughter's life I'm going to miss. It's a painful thought, but very real. Our oldest granddaughter is 21. I'm quite certain I'll see her married; there's a better-the-even chance I'll see a child of her own someday.

But this one in the school picture?--doubtful. In all likelihood, I'll never know her as an adult. I want to see.

I was out on the deck because from the moment I got up because it seemed to me that this June dawn held real promise.




And, to be sure, it came through nicely, a celebration of the Creator's might.






I came heir to a blessing simply as a bystander. I had nothing to do with the imperial beauty proclaimed in and by the eastern sky, had only to enjoy it, only to stand and wait, to remind myself that my missing my granddaughter's life can itself shorten my days. Learn to sit back and enjoy what's up on the screen before you. Give thanks always, for school pictures, Milton's sonnets, and stunning morning lights.

There's so much for which to be thankful.

A precious Luxembourgian story

Men, women, and children huddled in covered wagons crossing endless prairie seem to beckon all by themselves some hovering, mounted Native war parties up there on a rise--see 'em?--an army of warriors aboard nervous paint ponies, holding bows or maybe a feathered lance or even a carbine.

In Iowa, forget it. The Ioways were given two years to evacuate the territory way back in 1824; the Sac and Fox were in Kansas by 1845. Indians weren't the great danger to wagon trains through Iowa, not by a long shot. Real danger lurked where running water crossed the paths because rowdy prairie rivers cut rigid cliff banks that required chains and ropes and engineering feats, not to mention brute strength for those wagons to conquer. 

I can't help but think that crossing those rivers established the outline of the sweet saga of northwest Iowa's Luxembourgian people, the soul of their story. It isn't the statue itself, the image of Mary, mother of Jesus, and our Lord, the statue that today stands in the entry way of Spaulding Catholic School, in Alton. The blessed statue is beautiful, in large part, not because it's so perfectly rendered: if you want magnificent sculpture, go to Rome, not Alton. 

Nor is it rare. That a people so devotedly Roman Catholic would somewhere in their domain own and adore a statue of Mary, Mother of Jesus, their own Madonna and Child, comes as no shock at all. Nothing my Dutch Calvinist childhood taught me made the Catholics so, well "Catholic" as their adoration of Mary. Every afternoon my mother's kitchen was full of holy rosaries prayed in unison on local radio--"Holy Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." "Vain repetitions" my dad called it, using his own referenced biblical language.

What's so blessed about Spaulding school's Mother and Child is the story of its own adoration. When 38 pioneers left St. Donatus, Iowa, just south of Dubuque, in 1870, they took the sculpture with them. Literal truth here may get a little fuzzy and warm-hearted, but the way they like to tell the story is almost certainly indisputable. There were times on the passage west, maybe when crossing streams specifically, that one of the pioneers, probably a woman, made sure she was holding the sculpture--it isn't tiny. May well have been wrapped it in a blanket, maybe even a buffalo hide, when she carried it down the banks and through deep waters. 

That's the story they like to tell themselves and anyone else who'll listen, how the statue so preciously came, and how, today, you can still see it if you just step in the door at Spaulding Catholic. 

Why blue? Tradition that goes back to the Bible, where the people of Israel, God's chosen, are told to wear blue. But if the Bible isn't good not enough, believers have for centuries associated blue with mystery and purity, the color of the sky's transcendence. I can't imagine my parents knew any of that. 

So the story goes that the Spaulding statue came with the people all the way to the northwest corner of the state, sometimes being held in the very first of those ox-drawn wagons, as if the entire trip was pilgrimage, or, better yet, a processional in fine Catholic tradition. 

The story goes that one of the pioneers who came out west was the son of the sculptor, who likely did the statue in the old country to fulfill a requirement of the guild he wanted to be part of. It was made from wood shavings, and glue created from the bones of animals. When he came to America in 1847, he brought it with, and, 23 years later, when his son boarded one of those ox-drawn carts, he made sure his father's work came along.

My people, just down the road, would have considered the whole business idolatry, bizarre Catholic mystic silliness, like fish on Friday. In 1960, when I was 12 years old, I listened to my uncle hold forth from the pulpit of our local church on the danger America would be in should John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, become President of these United States. Last Sunday, in England, worshippers in Falmouth were shocked to see the President of the United States and his wife enter the sanctuary for mass before the last day of the summit.

Last November, I don't think anyone among the people down the road said anything about Biden's devout Catholicism.

And me? I love the story of the Spaulding statue, admire, even adore it, in my own Protestant way. Just think--there are a dozen wagons, maybe more, behind huge, double-yoked oxen, plodding along on thick prairie ground in long grasses through native flowers grown as tall as the beds of the wagons. 

And in the very first one, there's a woman--or a boy maybe--whose arms are around a statue he holds like a body across his lap, a blanket around the Madonna, as if some insulation was required. 

That's the way they cross those rowdy rivers. That's the way they cross all that open land.

That's a wonderful story, greatly worthy of all of our adoration.

Sic transit gloria mundi

 

The oppressive heat we've come heir to for some time now tends to flatten morning skies into something beautiful but plain, something almost oppressively tangerine. It's beautiful, but that's all there is. That kind of sky proclaims just more heat.

This morning, things have changed. The robins out back are happy as larks right because that sky--I just snapped the picture--turned inky for a while and we became the thankful recipients of a cloudburst, not enough rain to quench the drought (I think I may call it that, although it's not official that I know of), but enough to wet the earth's whistle anyway, a sip of wonderful, beloved rain on the parched throat of the earth, enough wet at least to turn out nightcrawler. Those robins are having a ball, busy hunting.

I don't leave home all that often anymore to shoot pictures. The real goal of my old ventures out into open country was simply to look for beauty, beauty itself having unimagined powers to charm the soul. The moment I get up in the morning, all I need to do these days is step out on the deck to know whether the dawn is going to be notable or drab. These days, just about every morning lately, the eastern skies are a vast orange canvas, beautiful its own right, but it's clouds, like this morning, that lend drama to the dawn--like this, same deck, same eastern sky with a good deal more drama.

I've come to believe the Playwright is less scrupulous about what we call him than we are or I've been. So I doubt he'll mind if I refer to him as King Midas because he certainly does have the touch. Every night lately, he comes out to glove the world in gold.

We've got but one cone flower out right now--a herald of an army coming soon, believe me. It's not the only flower out back right now, but there is not many yet, especially in the prairie. Still, on these hot days, King Midas does really breath-taking moments every evening, moments when the western sun lowers into the horizon and shines through whatever havoc he's raised--or we have--throughout the day. The world turns gold. Lengthening shadows give what's there a dappled look that relieves the heavy flatness of a roaring midday sun. 

These days, that's about the only time I get out the camera. The light is perfect for portraiture, so I do my best. I stepped out back on Saturday night, the snoot of my camera a close-up lens, and tried to catch what the light was bountifully offering. 

This is the kind of thing I found.

Not until I caught this flowering bush in that close-up lens did I notice that its flashiness was--it hurts to say this--in decline. Look for yourself. The delicate petals are getting darkening.  Here's another.

 Makes  you weep. This. . .

. . .up close, is this. . .

It was--how should I say it?--discouraging. In the perfect twilight, that told me life is transitory--"only one life will soon be past," the plaque upstairs reminded me almost daily--"only what's done for Christ will last."

But, heck, I'm 73 years old. My petals don't shine. But the truth of the matter, as anyone will tell you is that there's still some beauty left just outside my back door. As people continue to tell me, my wife who's just a month shy of 73, is just as beautiful as she ever was. Just keep shooting, I told myself. What you see isn't awful, it's just what it is. "Our flowers," Poe wrote in one of his depressing little ditties, "are only flowers." But they're still flowers.

Okay. We'll not escape it, I get that. But who's to say there isn't some beauty remaining.

So I kept shooting, and I'm not a bit reluctant, this sweet and rainy morning, of sharing them either. So tonight, when King Midas arrives, I'll shuffle out back again. There'll be more tonight, always more beauty.

Reading Mother Teresa--St. Francis

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, 

and the government will be on his shoulders. 

And he will be called Wonderful Counselor,

 Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Isaiah 9:6

God allowed me to begin my repentance in this way: when I lived in sin, seeing    lepers was a very bitter experience for me. God himself guided me into their midst and among them I performed acts of charity. What appeared bitter to me became sweetness of the soul and body.

If you believe this line is unquestionably Mother Teresa’s, you’re mistaken. But it’s not difficult to understand how she might have said it. It’s actually St. Francis of Assisi’s own story, the story of his conversion. It could well have been MT’s. She might well have used his words.

There’s a scrubby cottontail nibbling at half-a-pan full of kernel corn just outside the patio door. His ears are perked, and he’s munching like an idiot, filling his belly. I have no idea if it’s a he, but the silly thing is cute as the dickens. He’s looking right at me, ten feet away.

There’s a fence up around our tomatoes to keep him and his cohorts out. If that fence wouldn’t be there and wouldn’t be a couple feet tall, our tomatoes would be munched to nubbins. I know a ton of friends who keep a .22 just inside the door, just for bunnies.

On the bird feeder outside, there’s an indigo bunting, a bird whose radiant blue plumage seems cartoon-like, something one could buy in a Hallmark store and then stick, for show, in a bouquet of lilacs. Just a few moments ago, an oriole sat up on a ledge picking at an orange I put up there.

St. Francis – Mother Teresa’s inspiration – had a thing for animals. He claimed to talk to them. One of the most memorable stories of his life concerns the manner by which he lectured a wolf who was terrorizing the village – lectured, as in “explained diligently.” The story goes that he told the wolf to stop preying on the townspeople, his finger right there in the wolf’s face. Then, reportedly, he told the town that that beast’s appetite would dissipate if they fed him it – so they did. Years later, when the animal died, the village mourned.

We’re talking 13th century ad, here, so that whole story is not on YouTube. What’s beyond question, however, is how much St. Francis of Assisi would love the animal circus going on outside my window this June morning.

Contemporarily, St. Francis is likely most heralded for becoming the namesake of the new Pope. I don’t doubt that Amazon has seen his biographies surge or spike in the last few months. Before that, what most all believers knew about him was his prayer for peace, the prayer Mother Teresa herself used at the outset of the speech she gave in acceptance when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. . . .” Most of us, Protestant and Catholic, know much of that famous prayer. Legions of believers have it up on their walls in brilliant cross-stitch. Thousands of variations come up when it’s Googled.

Mother Teresa’s take on peace became one of her most famous creations, offered to the Missionaries of Charity on January 31, 1980.

The fruit of silence is prayer,
The fruit of prayer is faith,
The fruit of faith is love,
The fruit of love is service,
The fruit of service is peace. 

To read the story of Mother Teresa is to stretch one’s understanding of what some call the radical character of the Christian life. What she valued is a package of behavior that cost both nothing and everything. You can’t buy love or faith; you can only give it away. In economic terms, it’s perfectly worthless; but, if you believe her – and St. Francis – life without those qualities is poverty, even madness.

MT’s patron saint hung out with wolves and spoke to indigo buntings – and probably bunnies too. He believed Christ was there in the minds and hearts and faces of lepers, of those without hope. He believed in peace.

So did she, the kind of peace that passes all understanding.

I wonder if she knew the words of the hymn we sang yesterday in church: “– in peace that only Thou canst give, / With thee, O Master, let me live.”

Whether she could hum the tune is questionable, but I have no doubt she knew the words.

Those blasted bells

It was published in 1934, which means no adult reading it at the time would be alive today. Nonetheless, you don't need to be clairvoyant to know that Cobie De Lespinasse's novel, The Bells of Helmus, went over down Main in Orange City like a fart in church, as they say. 

It's an odd book really, all about faith or the lack of it, or the spirit of it, or the simply hideous results of it when carried along by mean-spirited bumpkins far more conscious of the mote in your eye than the log-jam in theirs. Ms. De Lespinasse (Les pin' awesee, or something like that) is the granddaughter-in-law of a unique character in a brand new Dutch-American colony the author calls "Helmus." Be ye not deceived; she's talking about 1875 Orange City, the citadel of Dutch Reformed-ism in a newly homesteaded corner of northwest Iowa, the town in which she was herself born and reared. 

Fred Manfred's "hometown" novels consistently called Orange City "Jerusalem"--and with good reason. Orange City was, after all, the county seat (once righteous Dutch burghers strong-armed the county records from Calliope/Hawarden, where the gangsters who ran the place kept it under lock and key. . .or tried). Inasmuch as Orange City was the seat of political power in the region, it was also home to most all the bright and uppity folks, frontier doctors and lawyers and judges, not to mention the academics who gathered once the town had reared its own Academy. 

Sioux Center long ago surpassed Orange City in sheer business acumen, which is to say, the business of hustling; but even today, the tulip capital of the county with the highest percentage of Dutch-Americans remains the only burg named after Dutch royalty.

In many fictions about the Dutch Reformed, we come off as self-righteous fusspots too full of their own hot air. To mangle an old line from Mencken, we are grim-faced, haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time, dour, no-fun-on Sunday workaholics who register zero tolerance for the sinners who mow their lawns on the Sabbath. 

In those novels, insiders have little to do with outsiders; they are unreasonably clannish and unwelcoming. Because we have so little to do with others, we pick fights with our own, forever igniting petty quarrels to cut each other to shreds if there's even a hint of something unorthodox somewhere close. During the fifties, people hid television antenna in their attics, rather than mount them on the roof for all the world to see.

All of that is in The Bells of Helmus, and in spades, which would be, back then, a shockingly worldly usage for someone like me to employ, "in spades," suggesting I played with "the Devil's cards." 

Card-playing is one thing; the seventh commandment is whole different world of sin and repression. No Dutch Reformed writer of the 20th century, none at least that I know, hasn't written something somewhere about a scandalous violation of the Seventh Commandment--and with good reason: for the most part, "thou shalt not commit adultery" was, after all, verifiably and embarrassingly public and therefore the only commandment of the Big Ten on which the church, the real authority in old-line Dutch Reformed communities, lowered the righteous boom. There were no scarlet letters, but most people my age or older can remember a time when some winsome pregnant girl, unmarried, stood in front of church to take a score of public licks for love. 

And so it is here in Bells of Helmus. The centerpiece of a plot structure that rotates between protagonist characters is a sweet little Dutch maiden in pigtails named Jeannie, who, in all innocence (seriously!) gets herself pregnant by the apostate doctor's wonderful son. Trust me, there's not a word about how that immaculate conception was accomplished; one of the unanswered questions of the story is how on earth the deed got done. We're simply to assume it did. The story is that Jeannie is pregnant, and that, in her time, she delivers a darling little boy, out of town of course, but not out of mind.

She's in Oregon when the precious bundle arrives, where she's being cared for by the town's only medical doctor, who got up and left town because he simply could not handle the insistent militancy of those d___ed  church bells ringing from both sides of Main Street. What drives him batty and eventually out is the overbearing religiosity of the people, demonstrated in a spirituality that grows like poison hemlock out of their own manifest boerishness. Besides, it's his own son who got poor and beautiful Jeannie in the family way. 

There are untold prototypes in the novel, especially if you know the real story of Ms. De Lespinaase's grandfather-in-law, Orange City's first doctor, a cultured gentleman among the rubes, who practiced his brand of humanism via a creed that he'd say had only one commandment--to love people, a creed that makes the thorny Dutch Reformed pietists roll their eyes.

Strangely enough, quite startlingly, in fact, Bells of Helmus is a religious novel, suggesting that Cobie De Lespinasse was somehow herself incapable of escaping her own religious tradition as the whipping she gives Orange City's mega-religious folks in the novel would suggest. The good humanist doctor has his own come-to-Jesus moment late in the novel and thus gives up his secularism in exchange for a level of spirituality he would have disparaged earlier in his life.

It's a bizarre novel meant to carry fiery arrows into the fort Orange City once may have been. But it also insists on rewriting the old creeds. If the novel weren't about us, I'd say, "Don't waste your time." But it's bigger than its obvious limitations. If offers more to consider than its author ever intended, both about her and about us. I don't think I'll write an opera based on the Bells of Helmus for next year's Tulip Festival Night Show. I'm quite sure it wouldn't go.

Bells of Helmus conveys a jaundiced view of what it once meant to be Dutch Reformed or Dutch Calvinist out in the hinterland, and while I can imagine Ms. De Lespinasse had her own good reasons to carpet bomb her hometown, this 73-year-old reader can't help but believe she's not all wrong about how things were or may have been.  

A wonderful thing about novels--about books--is that sometimes they teach you far more than their authors may have ever intended. So 'tis with The Bells of Helmus.