Vigil

 

My Father, Dying

by Joyce Sutphen

It was hard work, dying, harder

than anything he'd ever done.

Whatever brutal, bruising, back-

Breaking chore he'd forced himself

to endure—it was nothing

compared to this. And it took

so long. When would the job

be over? Who would call him

home for supper? And it was

hard for us (his children)—

all of our lives we'd heard

my mother telling us to go out,

help your father, but this

was work we could not do.

He was way out beyond us,

in a field we could not reach.

We tried. We asked the nurse when she thought Dad might succumb. She told us what we heard later from other nurses for other parents approaching death. "You just can't tell," she said, hunching her shoulders. "Honestly, I've seen people closer than your dad rally to spend another couple of weeks hanging around." She sort of half-smiled. "Then again. . ."

We were 500 miles east. We'd come because my sister claimed--rightly so--that Dad wasn't doing well and, well, you know. We'd come because there was that kind of tension in her voice that explained clearly where words feared to go.

How long, O, Lord," says Psalm 13, one of the most enigmatic psalms in the canon. David screams, howls (people call it "the howling psalm) at "how long" will we all have to put up with the sadness, the grief that accompanies all of life? 

She said she honestly couldn't know.

We couldn't stay. 

But before we left, I sat with dad for two days. There was no moment of clarity, no final deathbed summation of all the wisdom he wanted to give. There were no epiphanies for either of us. But I sat beside him in a vigil unlike any other before or after. I sat there beside him, just to be there. 

Mom didn't want to come--couldn't, she said; my sisters took care of her needs. That left me. I spent two full days at my father's bedside, alone, watching him pitch in his sleep and moan. I didn't know what dying looked like, but if it was any worse than what he was doing, I'd much prefer not to know. 

Still, consider yourself blessed if you're not surprised when I say I count those days as among the most radiant of my life. It's possible he knew I was there, but less likely that he did. The thing is, I knew I was there watching out for him, my father.

"It was hard work, dying," Sutphen says in that warm poem above. For Dad, it was. I was with him. I know.

We went home to Iowa. We had to. A week later or so, he died. Some odd kind of heartburn woke me that night. I sat at the side of the bed and looked at the clock.

He was 500 miles east, but somehow I know I was with him at the end.

Restoration out west

The old memorial, pretty much as forgotten as forsaken, blasts out a mission that seems these days as shameful as it once seemed shameless. It memorializes an impromptu prayer meeting of three Presbyterian clergymen, in town for a conference, who way back in 1869, high above Sioux City, Iowa, on Prospect Hill, knelt together before their Maker and pledged to evangelize, well, read it yourself: all of the American West.

Amazingly, they were serious. One of them, the Reverend Sheldon Jackson, worked mightily toward that goal throughout his life. Deliberately, Jackson traveled into those vast open spaces, eventually even north to Alaska, where Good Book in hand, he kept birthing Presbyterian fellowships and bringing what he considered "development" to Native people, doing pretty much what he promised up there on Prospect Hill. He took the calling seriously and went out to "win the west."

To say he traveled extensively throughout Alaska is pitifully understated. On one of his trips he made the acquaintance of Capt. Michael A. Healy, the very first African-American to run a government-owned ship, a man who loved booze as much as Jackson didn't. An odd couple if there ever was one, the two of them determined to save both the Aleuts and the Inuits from utter starvation by importing domesticated reindeer, by the hundreds, from Siberia. I'm not making this up. Captain Healy and Reverend Jackson literally saved indigenous people from extinction by herding domestic reindeer into their homelands.

Here's some of his own pictures, from his papers at Princeton.

 

The man in the hat and the vest is the preacher.

That's Captain Healy's Bear out there delivering reindeer. 

Give some folks a reindeer, and they'll eat for a week--how does that old line go?--bring them a herd and they'll beget an industry.

All though his life and ministry, the Reverend Sheldon Jackson preached the Good News but also delivered the goods that let people live. 

So in a fine museum touted as the best in Alaska, the Anchorage Museum, I looked around not long ago to see if I could find some mention of this Presbyterian phenomenon who, by my reading, had done a great deal for Alaskans of all stripes--and especially for the indigenous people of that immense and awesome place.

This is what I found. I may have missed a mention here or there, but this is how he's recognized in Alaska's finest museum:

Just in case you can't read it, let me set it out for you. 

Sheldon Jackson, placed in charge of Alaska's first American schools, wrote that their purpose was Native assimilation into the larger society. Native students were segregated, indigenous languages were forbidden, and children were taught that their cultures were "uncivilized." Until a court settlement in 1976--the Molly Hootch case, named after an Inupiaq student--many Native children had to attend distant boarding schools because no high schools were available in their home communities. 

All of that is true, but it's only half of the story. In Alaska and all the rest of the American West of the 19th century, often as not three factions went to war: Native people, white people with the Bible, and white people with liquor. Without a doubt, Jackson's most profound enemy--and he knew it and he fought them--was white people with liquor.

It's likely fair to say that people Rev. Jackson and Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, devoted 19th century mission spirits, haven't missed personally whatever adulation they once attained. They were fine people, not in the least political; they rarely looked out for themselves.

But I think it only fair to do a little restoration. There's much, much more to the Sheldon Jackson story than what appears in Alaska's best museum. And there's much, much more to the story of a 20-year-old Belgian priest who followed a call to minister to Native people in North America, sneaking away to avoid the tears he knew he'd shed when leaving his family. 

Like the Presbyterian Jackson, the Jesuit De Smet could not have known what he'd go through in the 19th century American West. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Lifetime's singing

“I will sing to the LORD all my life; 

I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.” 

Psalm 104 

When Anchee Min, a Chinese-American writer, stood in some huge hall in Los Angeles, the place must have felt like Babel. With her, 40,000 immigrants were being naturalized. Each of them, devoutly versed in his or her native tongue, was trying to speak strange English words. But when the music started—“Oh, say, can you see. . .,” none of them could get the first line out, she says, because they were crying and laughing and smiling. “We knew what it was like to be an American,” she says. “It was to be allowed to be human, to be ourselves.”

I have no desire to mix faith and politics here, but when I heard her tell that story I couldn’t help but think of this line from Psalm 104—the poet’s pledge, his promise, that he will, as long as he lives, sing God’s praise. And I’m thankful for the Psalms—all of them, the ones that pour their hearts out in anguish as well as those pageants of praise like 104, songs that make glorious promises no mortal can really keep.

Yesterday, the news was all over the media—people who live in the rural Midwest, especially here in the upper tier of states across the Great Plains—live longer than almost any other block of populace in America. What’s more, that new Harvard study shows longevity by zip code. Here’s the startling findings: the county in which I live ranks among the top ten in the nation. Men and women in Sioux County, Iowa, live longer than 99% of the folks in the United States.

What I’m thinking when this line of his echoes in my mind is that the psalmist’s grand pledge is even more difficult for someone like me to offer because “all my life” is statistically longer for me than it is for most people. Can I say this with the Psalmist—that I’ll sing praise as long as I live? I don’t know. What I know well is that I don’t always feel like singing.

My mother-in-law, a lifelong resident of Sioux County, Iowa, now 86 years old and suffering, would just as soon die as live. But her anguish—what seems her resignation—has little to do with whether or not she is praising God. A lifelong believer, she’s simply ready to leave these cornfields. Even though the wondrous machine that is her body doesn’t want to run any longer, that broken condition does not, in any way, belie her praise. What I’m thinking is that she may not be singing, but she’s still more than anxious to go home.

There are times in one’s life when the baritone gravitas of Psalm 90 is simply the best of bromides. I know that’s true. But there are others—the birth of a healthy baby, for instance—when the lungs of a man and a woman simply aren’t spacious enough to contain the praise. There is a time for lament, says the preacher, and a time for song.

And Psalm 104 is sheer praise—no spin, no marketing. I don’t think the psalmist is trying to sell anything to you or me or the guy down the block. His wide-angle lens surveys the immensity of God’s world, and he can’t help but sing, and pledge to keep singing for all of his years. I think I know that feeling, even if I’ve not written the song. Not yet.

I’m thankful for the gift of faith and the realization that though I won’t always feel like singing, God almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, will never leave me alone. And that’s cause for praise, no matter how long I live.

Morning Thanks--Denominational me

I know. I've already praised the Christianity Today's podcasts that follow the demise of the Mars Hill phenomenon and its captain, the pastor Mark Driscoll, who steered the whole Mars operation into the Bermuda Triangle. It's a stunning story, thoughtfully (and bravely) done by CT. 

I liked it so much that I wish I hadn't heard it so I could listen in again. Seriously. For a while at our house those podcasts replaced the news, rang from my phone throughout the kitchen while we made supper. 

Why did I find them so outstanding? I'm somewhat ashamed to say, at least in part, I enjoyed hearing how the kingdom of Mark Driscoll and his charismatic Calvinism went off the rails. Everything about Mars Hill is miles adrift from my own experience of "church." Just now, I had to look up "Acts 29 Network," his organization, where I discovered that it was a loosely affiliated band of church plants that bend toward Calvinism in theology. Never heard of it before.

If you're wondering, as I did, about the name, there is no Acts 29, which is the point exactly. The "acts" of Acts 29 Network is the ongoing work of preaching the gospel to every tribe and nation: the book of Acts contains 28 chapters. Hence, we are Acts 29.

I didn't know that, and that I didn't is both good and bad.

"Church plants" is language I understand. Prayerfully and sometimes painfully, pastors, or their denominational superiors, determine which new suburb or old city is ripe for brand new harvest. Following steps diligently set out in some Driscoll-like playbook, they begin with a handful of people with their cuffs rolled, men and women who hit the streets to see how much attention they can arrest, how many warm bodies they can attract, and, eventually, how many souls they can win for Jesus.

I sort of know about that subject, know that Bill Hybels started small and built an empire, know that "America's Pastor," Rick Warren, who pilots Saddleback Church in Southern California and around the world, has dozens of satellite "campuses" (they're not called "churches," I guess--a kind of naughty word). "Church planting" was really hot stuff some time ago. In fact, it still may be. I don't know.

And, like I say, that I don't know is both good and bad.

I realized I had no dog in the Mark Driscoll hunt. Maybe, for me, the story was altogether too "easy listening." I'd never been particularly "seeker sensitive," although I do remember feeling an amazing kind of high when a new church we were part of opened its doors to whoever showed up. Seeing new people come in the door was a joy and a thrill, like none I'd ever experienced in a church.

I suppose I was both depressed and blessed by the Mars Hill story--depressed this whole story had gone on in evangelicaldom without my knowledge. I didn't even recognize the name of Mark Driscoll, and it was perfectly clear that he was a mover-and-a-shaker like few others in the evangelical world. How could I have not heard of the guy? I've had a subscription to CT for years.

I have to admit I was cooped up, locked up, fenced in by my own faith tradition. I've always been sort of stubbornly denominational, so narrowly focused that I missed huge stories in the Christian church--stories from Calvinists, too. It made me depressed to think that I knew so very little about that world.

But then, I told myself that if given the choice, I don't think I'd change where I stood or stand of what path I'd taken in the last quarter century. I'm happy to have missed what's hot in the evangelical world, content to live with the faith that God almighty created in me when I came from the factory. If that's then, ho-hum, then all right--"ho-hum."

CT's podcasts made me wonder where I was during the whole Act 29 Network thing. At the same time, it made me more confident that I'd been where I should have been, where I wanted to be. I'm happy to have been so depressingly out of it. In my life, there's always been enough life to live and die in a single congregation. That church we worked at starting decades ago?--we left ten years later, beaten up, black-and-blue. 

I liked the Fall of Mark Driscoll, maybe for the wrong reasons. 

But I can live with who I am.

Morning Thanks--another radiant dawn

When I looked out the window this morning, a bright yellow strap of sky ran like a stream of fire across the northeastern sky, enough rumbling and flashing behind it to do more than suggest a storm. I don't go out hunting much anymore, trying to catch the perfect dawn, in part because I can see them light up the sky from the deck--and partly, this summer, because there haven't been that many really big shows. 

This hottest of all summers has featured cloudless dawns, broad yellow skies whose great blessing is the way they unloose the sun to spread a golden robe over everything, its Midas touch. But really dramatic skies need clouds, and when they're storm clouds, if you can get into the right place at the right time--timing is everything--you can't miss.

I missed a little this morning. The sky was really something, but I wasn't well situated to catch the brightest colors. Thus, some of the really blessed shots aren't in the camera. 

Here's Hospers this a.m., from just east of town.

Isn't that sky something?--almost scary if it weren't so murky with color. 

There's some beauty here, not because the cameraman was on top of things, but because the Director of the play put on a great show. 

Next time I'll try to do better, which is, after all, just about any of us can do.

Don't listen to my belly-aching. It was a blessing just to be there to see it.

I'm always thankful for the heavens declaring the glory of God.

Losing the Liberal Arts

The Temple of the Liberal Arts

We're on a panel, two of the five presenters introducing a book that's to be published about the Big Sioux River basin, a humanities approach really, with contributions from a wide-range of study--from geography to hard science, from literature to religion. We're at a Western History Confernece. We take turns. We've got 12 minutes a piece to summarize what it is we're contributing

When he gets up, he begins by announcing that he has no job anymore, that his position has been cut by the college's administration in an attempt to stanch the financial bleeding that's going on where he's taught for a couple of decades. Just like that, the English department is gone, history, he says, and he's troubled. You can see it, feel it. 

I know the guy. He's a fine writer who's taught in the English Department of a Roman Catholic school not far away. Last year he asked me to come and talk about things I do for a local NPR station, to read some short pieces about the region. Maybe ten people showed up, most of them students who tramped in as if having to attend was a death sentence. There was, at that moment, some strange handwriting, so to speak, up on the white board behind me. 

His program and his teaching position, I might have deduced back then, was in trouble. Still, when he announced his not having a job, I could have cried because the sadness he outlined--and reflected in what he said and read--was a take on life-and-death on the Big Sioux River.

Honestly, his being erased from the white boards at Briar Cliff University is not a new story. Just down the road, Northwestern had its English department decimated by huge cuts meant to salvage something from the changes occurring in higher education all around. A long article in Christian Century describes in detail what happened and is happening at a number of colleges further east, traditional "liberal arts" colleges more than a century old who are reading the enrollment tea leaves and making immense and not-to-believed cuts in history, English, philosophy, religion, and foreign languages because students--and their parents--know darn well that if they spend 100 grand, they better leave the institution with something more than a sparkling good paper on gender issues in the minor essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

Kills me. It just kills me because I remember the place on a sidewalk just outside the classroom where I was heading for American Lit, a lecture on Emerson, when I decided that this whole lit thing was something I could do for the rest of my life, something I might just love. I enrolled in Dordt College because it was a tribal school (Christian Reformed Church) and I was a tribal member--and I determined to go there because I thought it was the place I could play basketball. Besides, someday I wanted to coach. That's about it for the future--I wanted to coach.

That agenda transformed when, in English 101 I had a teacher who insisted--flat-out insisted--I could write. That was news. Her directions led me into a closer look a literature, and when I got there, in truth, I never left.

So this friend of mine--friends, really, because he's not the sole suffering victim of administrative cuts--cut me to the quick with his announcement: he was "let go" as the college narrowed its focus to more emphasis on pre-professional programs.

"How can an institution call itself a Methodist college if it has no religion department?" That's a headline in the Christian Century article. And that's a good question.

I'm sure dozens of college administrations have answers to that question because Briar Cliff and Northwestern are not the only institutions making savage cuts that point the institutions in new, more economically-enriching directions.

Do graduates with humanities majors get jobs? 

I think the facts are clear. The truth is, they get hired. If you can write and speak with strength and authority, if you have a solid grasp of issues from a strong historical perspective, you can work just about anywhere.

Morning Thanks--CT

I can't help but think it's unusual. I certainly didn't expect it from Christianity Today, and I've been a subscriber for years. Podcasting itself is nothing new, of course, but the gritty reality of the story CT is telling in this series, the spectacular fall of a rising star in the evangelical world, is, for some reason, surprising. I just didn't expect CT to be doing epic-scale journalism, no-holds-barred truth about a man who created an evangelical enterprise that, at its height, was bringing in sinners by the thousands. 

It has the attributes of classical tragedy--a singular hero blessed with extraordinary talent, who somehow triggers his own horrifying demise by way of a flaw that is entirely his own. If he's a victim, he's a victim of his own sin and that sin, in old-fashioned tragedy, is almost always hubris, which is to say, pride. In classical tragedy, pride most often goeth before the fall.

And thus it was in Seattle at an religious (evangelical) business that went up like a rocket, reached heights everyone could see, then simply blew up. Tragedies are always memorable because they are engineered by the very person who suffers--in this case, a greatly talented young street-fighting preacher named Mark Driscoll.

You want to know the story? Go to where you get your podcasts, or else head toward the Christianity Today website and look for the title above. Just start listening. It's an amazingly adept bit of raw journalism, an hour at a time. But then, there's no alternative way to read the story. It's raw because Driscoll, apparently, was known far and wide for being raw--rawness came with the territory, I guess. 

His rawness was part of his appeal, of which he had mega.  The man had--and still has--the kind of "skill set" which makes for charismatic champions. Mars Hill wasn't just a church; it was a huge business--books, videos, satellite campuses with huge screens. Driscoll was a star. 

When he began to act like one, the business became a meteor shower. What was a clarion call to salvation became a power grab. The series of podcasts are not at all pretty because the fall is extraordinary, epic.

Mark Driscoll is or was not the only big-time pastor to take a fall. There are/were others, including, perhaps most spectacularly, Bill Hybels, who ran a similar, big-time operation at Willow Creek before he crashed and burned for his adoringly concealed sexual exploits. 

In each case, problems were buried, not investigated, not disciplined, because the cause--saving souls--was so perfectly righteous. People were flocking into the churches, souls were being saved, men and women were coming to Christ--can't we just look past a couple of trip-ups?

"He who sups with the Devil had best use a long spoon."

The arc of the Driscoll story, like the Hybels story, is not particularly surprising. Soon enough, a spectacular fall takes down a multi-million dollar enterprise. 

CT tries hard to dig for grace in the Mars Hill story, a job which requires some digging. There's nothing particularly lovely about flat-out deceit and elephantine arrogance. Pride is and likely forever will be the first of the Seven Deadlies.

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a big helping of bitter herbs really, always a part of the Seder meal. In the religious world, where people look up to heaven, they frequently deign to take in what is happening in real time in the real world. 

CT doesn't flinch. Good for them.

I'm thankful they didn't.

Morning Thanks--Microsoft

A great part of the allure of this famous painting, The Heart of the Andes (1859), by Frederic Edwin Church, is its size. This massive canvas is five feet tall and ten feet wide. Who could guess the immensity of the area Mr. Church wanted to cover; in the distance, the top of the mountain has to be at least fifty miles away.

The painting showed up on a screen saver put up in front of me by Microsoft, this huge and muchly famous work of art meant to attract my attention as it most certainly did. I'd never seen it before, nor heard of Frederic Edwin Church, which is not to say there's nothing familiar about it.  What's familiar is that the artist, or so I've read, was part of what's called, in American Art, the Hudson River School, which wasn't a building but a way of looking at art that emphasizes the sheer glory of nature, especially as it exists in places rarely seen. 

The headmaster, so to speak, of the Hudson River School was a man named Thomas Cole, whose breathtaking landscape artistry is very familiar. Here's The Ox-Bow. Then again, even if isn't familiar, even if you've never seen a Thomas Cole, you'll easily recognize this painting as being a cousin--not all that distant either--of Church's famous Andes.

Both try to gather the world itself into the sprawling borders. Both rely almost exclusively on the immensity of nature to stun the viewer. Both are not one bit ashamed of your oohing and aahing, in fact they both really want you speechless. When The Heart of the Andes "opened" in a gallery in New York, those who entered into its presence paid a quarter each (Church made some good money by charging admission) and were loaned opera glasses so they could examine the massive landscape whose exacting detail was beyond anything anyone had ever seen. 

I've been reading an old (1915) biography of Father De Smet (The Life of Father De Smet, S. J.: Apostle of the Rocky Mountains, 1801-1873), who is without a doubt the most beloved Roman Catholic missionary of the 19th century. Just one of the reasons his face graces lots and lots of stained glass windows throughout the west, especially on reservations, is that he was often among the earliest palefaces to walk or ride into the camp of thousands of Native peoples. He put on miles that make Paul's missionary travels look like afternoon hikes, and what he found out west was a land that looked much like that offered for our joy in paintings like these. 

You can't help but feel a little of the 19th century's Manifest Destiny here, the absolutist faith that the vast empire of the west is all, well, ours. We found it and it's ours to claim, even if it wasn't, even if right up the road from where I live, once upon a time a city of 15000 Native people was prospering along the Big Sioux River. No matter. White folks couldn't help thinking that God himself had served up this immense blessing, this new world, just for us, for white people--that's part of what's there on the canvases of the Hudson River School.

It's hard to spot on the tiny rendition of Church's huge canvas, but if you look down in the bottom left, you'll see a white cross and two individuals at the end of a well-worn path that begins off the painting. If you were standing in front of the painting itself, a pair of opera glasses held up to your eyes, you would see it clearly. Trust me, in any print larger than what you see on this post, that white cross manages to wrest our attention, in part because of the darkness behind it. You really can't miss it. 

Frederic Edwin Church was a pious member of a New York Dutch Reformed Church. He thought like a Calvinist, invested his faith in a sovereign God, which made it was impossible for him to look at an immeasurable landscape like this and not see some semblance of the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

When Microsoft put the painting up on my screen, I couldn't help notice that little cross. It's small, but proudly situated on the canvas; and I couldn't help wonder why the artist insisted on it, why it had to be there, why he couldn't leave well enough alone and just glory in creation. The Heart of the Andes wouldn't be any less impressive if there'd been no cross.

I can't help but think that he and my mother shared a common spiritual discipline. She didn't know a bull from a cow, but when she would spot a herd of cattle over the kind of hills that surround the Missouri River, she'd quote scripture, sure as anything, just one line: "the cattle over a thousand hills." She'd say it in a deepened breath of reverie. The immensity she couldn't help seeing prompted nothing less than a vision of the greater immensity of God.

I can't help but think Church was insistent on the cross--same impulse. 

And I've got it too, I suppose. That's why I can't help telling you all of this. 

This morning I'm thankful for Microsoft. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Wrath

“Who knows the power of your anger? 

For your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you.” Psalm 90:11

I’m going to go to make a generalization I’ve no right to. One of the good things about aging is that, through the years, we simply grow less angry—Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, and Grumpy Old Men notwithstanding. Old bucks like me simply have less testosterone to work with, less dignity to protect, less turf to maintain—thus, fewer reasons to boil over.

When so many things recede the way they do as we get older, quarrelsomeness is a possibility—I’ll grant you that. Our aging means fewer people notice us—again, my perception. But that doesn’t make me mad, just bad-tempered. Being peevish isn’t necessarily being wrathful.

Maybe I’m wrong.

Last night I was mad. Last night, I used language I shouldn’t have, even to my daughter, who didn’t have it coming, who had nothing to do with why I was boiling over. Last night—memorably, I might add—I was spitting fire.

This morning I could still throw flames; in fact, I just sent out an e-mail I probably shouldn’t have. But I’ve calmed down a bit now, a bit; and having that rare chunk of rage at arm’s length this morning is helpful when reading this strange verse from Psalm 90. It’s helpful because normally it’s easy for me to get a little embarrassed by the OT’s occasionally draconian Jehovah. I find it hard to know him, maybe in part because, nearly sixty, I don’t know all that much anymore about rage. Wrath isn’t the deadly sin I register all that often.

But I did last night. And the provocation, basically, was injured pride—I was convinced that certain people didn’t respect me. But even that is explanation is subterfuge, half truth. What blew my cork was that I didn’t get my way. We’d worked our duffs off, but the whole project shipwrecked because someone in authority thought maybe someone else might be hurt. Honestly, the whole story is not worth a story.

But my wrath is worth a story when I think about this line from the venerable 90th Psalm. Here’s what I’m thinking: maybe the OT God isn’t a far cry from who I am. If I read the whole Exodus narrative, it seems that what God wants more than anything is not to be an also-ran. In the panoply of gods available to the Israelites, he doesn’t want to be just another silly graven image.

“Who should I say this God is?” Moses—the writer here—asks of this God. “I am the always,” he says. End of story. And if he isn’t respected—when people create golden calves of whatever size and extremity—this God, Jehovah, spits and fumes and, often enough, people die. He’s like me that way. Sort of. But nobody died last night.

Oddly enough, maybe I don’t think of God as human enough. If I were him and people didn’t really give me the dignity I’d deserved, I’d be mad—like I was last night. Maybe all that anger—it’s behind me now—maybe even all that blasted wrath is helpful. You think you got dissed?—just think of Him. And on a daily basis. Shoot, hourly.

That’s scary. And that’s only half of it, this verse says. That’s not even the whole story. Your wrath is everything we can imagine, Lord—that’s what Moses says. And a great deal more.

_______________ 

About 15 years ago, this meditation was written about some kind of provocation I have totally and completely forgotten. Mea culpa.

Environment

On Saturday, news reports claim that rain fell "at the summit of Greenland," two miles above sea level, for the first time. 

Let me just isolate that descriptive phrase: for the first time.

A similar weather event had never been recorded. When moisture comes to Greenland's icy mountains, it comes as snow. Always. For as long as anyone can remember. Don't believe me about the rain? Read it here.  

This morning, in its "Best of the Post" series, the Washington Post is reprinting an article they ran a year ago, a comprehensive summary of weather disasters and their most obvious link to climate change. That article's reappearance is meant to convince people that something, well, different, is happening in our environment, something which requires significant attention and organized response. Read it here. 

Last week, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body created by the United Nations, released a 4000-page report on the issue at hand. The news isn't good. It's bad. It's worse than bad. They also released a 42-page summary. Read it here. 

Last weekend, The Twelve ran a comprehensive essay by Debra Rienstra, who similarly looked at the environment around her and around us, and tried to make sense of it, then recommended some steps we can all take, not just to observe but to act. Read it here. 

Yeah, you say, but all those sources. . .you know, they're all liberals, lefties, they're not rock solid, they're bringing our country down. They don't love America. You know what Sean says, and Tucker's all over that stuff. Just listen to him.

Tell you what. As your local scientist. If you live out here in the northwest corner of the state of Iowa, actual, diploma-carrying scientists are plentiful. They teach in Christian colleges. They know what they're talking about, and they see Creation as God's handiwork. Ask them. Ask any of them.

How can we explain an 80% turnout for Donald Trump in the last Presidential election? Here at least, that level of support could be attributable to abortion. Trump replaced three Supreme Court judges with nominees whose previous rulings made people believe they might just overturn Roe v. Wade.

My fear is that people in my neighborhood have simply begun to believe Fox News, believe, as in "put complete faith in." What happened is that Trump's whole agenda smeared itself into the region's anti-abortion sentiment, an agenda that includes a denial of our (which is to say human) role in climate change. The Trump Agenda includes detesting critical race theory (CRT), not because it's wrong but because it's upsetting. It includes "the big lie." Around here, people hook, line, and sinkered the whole Trump mess.

People who might well have been thoughtful and reasonable about things, like masks, for instance, or vaccinations, or climate change, lose their ability to be reasonably thoughtful. They oppose CRT, not because it might be a way to look at American history, but for reasons that have a base in racism--we don't want them taking over because right now and ever since 1776, we've been in charge. Good Christian white people.

You're right if you think that I'm not an authority on climate change. I'm no scientist, and I'm not as well-informed as I could or should be. I'm not a radical, not on fire. I don't rant and scream.

But Saturday it rained on Greenland's icy mountains, rained like never before. Not once, in a couple of hundred years.

And I know this too. We've got thistles out back that are seeding now. I've been pulling them for the last month or so, but I didn't get them all--does anyone? Yesterday and the day before, it was so hot, I told myself I wasn't going out there to do Adam's work; it'll have to get cooler before I try to sweep up the prairie. Besides, for most of the summer, the sky been pale with smoke from mega-fires a half continent away.

I don't need some guy in a lab coat or some woman flicking a cursor over a wall full of data to tell me that the July just concluded, was, without question, the hottest July on record. I know it was. Out back, the dirt is salty from my sweat.

Don't take my word for it. Ask around. You know what is right.

Morning Thanks--the grasses just outside

Right now, our big blue stem are heavy with seeds, the patch closest to my window sky high, seven feet, I'm sure. We planted them years ago; they're older than most anything in the backyard, but they're still healthy. Then again, this is their world.

We had some worries about the blue stem patches farther out. When these close ones were already shooting up, the patch farther out looked more than a little forlorn. We wondered if we'd done something that had mistakenly brought about an end. But time was the healer. Soon enough the big patch greened up and sent up shoots that today look just fine, although not so tall as what's right here.

Big blue stem didn't really win the west. Out here at least, temperature and rainfall and the fine character of the earth itself combined to create a world where blue stem prospered. Can we call blue stem indigenous? If anything was, once the ocean cleared, blue stem was as native as anything. We wanted some patches as a monument out there in the back yard, the only living monument we thought we needed to have.

If the close bunch could dribble, they'd be D-1 material. They're tall and rangy as a long small forward who can play three or four inches above his height and go to the rim when he can. Their willowy, but tough enough to support the sparrows that, like Robert Frost, love swinging birches.

It's hard to imagine what it was like when out entire backyard, all the way to the river, was blue stem, a tall grass prairie redolent with fragrance of native flowers and alive with dreamy wonderment.

Had to smile last night when I came on a passage from an ancient (1915) biography of the Roman Catholic giant, Father De Smet, a Belgian priest who listened to stories of American Indians and left home, family and country to come to the American frontier to save souls.

There were others like him, many others actually--European priests and missionaries who looked at North American mission fields as ripe for an abundant harvest of souls. What they'd dreamed and what they'd found didn't always match up, and two of them, Father Quickenborne and Father Hoeken, decked out, as always, in long black, holy vestments, set out for who knows where, then wandered into endless tall-grass prairie, an entire world of big blue stem, and just plain lost.

For the record, here's the passage. It's priceless.

the first excursions. . .they were often lost for days at a time, and would traverse the immense prairies in every direction in a vain endeavor to discover their whereabouts. These plains resembled a vast sea; as far as the eye could reach one beheld nothing but a limitless sketch of green pasture and blue sky: deer, chamois, and roebuck were plentiful; prairie-chicken and other wild game abounded. Wolves and bears creeping from their lairs to eat sheep terrified both man and beast.

As you can imagine, this little narrative has to end well--after all, the book is a testimony to God's goodness and his faithful servant, Father De Smet.

But even in such straits they were not abandoned by divine Providence. At nightfall the Fathers would often throw the reins on the horse's neck, letting him take his own direction, and before long would find themselves in sight of some habitation.

Thank goodness--literally. But there's more. There's got to be more, right?

Once an immense and strange dog sprang in front of their horses, and making a path through high grass [i.e. more blue stem] brought them to the home of a Catholic, where they rested and were refreshed and, to their great consolation and that of their host, they celebrated the Divine Mysteries.

It's quiet this morning, almost windless, but the long stems of the big blues just outside my window are stirring a bit, just enough to make them look like those  turkey feet are whispering to each other. 

I think they know I'm talking about them, and they're remembering the story passed on for generations of those two nutty black robes irretrievably lost among 'em.

And they're smiling. Just thought I'd let you know.

Small Wonders: A love story

What happened that day, moment by moment, will never be resurrected exactly. We shape our stories to our ends, even when they bless our hopes and dreams, as does this one, a young Brule Sioux girl who dies before her time.

Even her name is a mystery. Some claim it's Brings Water; others, Fallen Leaf or Fleet Foot, White Flower, even Princess. But this we know: she was the first daughter of Sinte Gleska, or Spotted Tail, the great headman of the Brule, whose sorrow is at the heart of this tender story.

Think broad shoulders. Handsome.  Think fierce, and when tested, combative. Think warrior. Think leader. In 1855, Spotted Tail and several warriors in battle fatigues and war paint rode into Fort Laramie singing their death songs, assuming they were on a path to the next world.

They were wrong about that. Instead, they were taken back east to Fort Leavenworth to be imprisoned. Spotted Tail had deliberately taken the fall for others, lent out his life as a sacrifice for the people he led and served. 

Some historians claim Brings Water and other family members came with Spotted Tail, that his incarceration was not so dreadful as you might imagine. Some claim white men and women in and around Leavenworth sought Spotted Tail's lively company. By all accounts his social skills were warm and inviting. He was a delightful conversationalist, made friends of his captors.

As did Brings Water, his oldest daughter. 

That experience and those acquaintances prompted Spotted Tail to ride into Ft. Laramie once again, years later, in deep grief and sorrow, to make what seemed a most unlikely request. Once, Spotted Tail had come into the fort dressed for war. A few winters later, he'd come in tears. He loved his daughter. 

When Spotted Tail explained himself and his presence, he’d spoken to the commanding officers in a fashion none of them had ever witnessed before. He cried—his eyes filled with tears. They were speechless because none of them had ever seen a great warrior’s tears—an Indian in the throes of deep grief.

Brings Water had suffered during a winter that wouldn’t end, died from deprivation. But before she passed away, she’d asked her father to bury her near the fort, close to those she'd come to know and maybe even love (some claim there was a handsome young soldier in this love story, but it can’t be proved). 

Brings Water's death created a very touching moment and a lovely story just outside Fort Laramie, Wyoming, a funeral ceremony like none other in the 19th century American West. 

It happened this way.

Spotted Tail determined to live up to his promise to his daughter. Thoughtfully, the fort's commander determined he and his troops would offer him their grief and thereby respect his. To that end, behind the fort’s band, 600 troops marched slowly and mournfully out to a spot a few hundred yards north, where Spotted Tail's people, 200 mourners more, awaited them. 

The burial itself was perfectly blessed mix of cultures. Brings Water’s body, wrapped in buffalo hides, was enclosed in a coffin created by the fort’s carpenters but raised on a traditional Lakota scaffold. Two horses were killed for her use in the spirit world, their heads and tails severed out and placed out front and behind the scaffold.

In a gesture as beautiful as any during the Great Sioux Wars, the fort’s commander participated by placing a pair of of his long, leather gloves in the casket beside the body to keep Brings Water’s hands warm on her journey. Other officers followed with other gifts. When the Brule women walked by, they stopped to whisper some things and leave a string of beads or some embroidered things, even a looking glass beside the body, all for her passage to the spirit world.

The chaplain placed a book beside her, a little red book he’d just then received from Spotted Tail himself, an Episcopal prayer book.

When all the salutations were finished, a number of men raised that coffin up atop the scaffold.

All of that happened in March of 1866, ten years before Little Big Horn, 24 before Wounded Knee. The death and burial of Spotted Tail’s daughter didn’t end hostilities. Hundreds more would die. Violence had only just begun.

Still, there’s a grave out there north of Fort Laramie yet today, a stone and a story told so often its grown some variations and even a few blessed sidetracks because Brings Water's story of peace remains very much a love story.   

Remembering beauty

Normally, I start with a photo, something I've taken myself or picked up from a thousand or more other sources. But I'm starting with prose today because yesterday's pictures are too powerful to post, too searing, too woeful to be easily forgotten.

What happened yesterday in Afghanistan is beyond comprehension. I can't help but think that if Joe Biden, who's garnered too many years already, ever considered running again, after yesterday he'll have to reconsider because the images on every screen--Fox as well as MSNBC--won't be forgotten soon, if ever.

No matter what he says, what happened in the airport and throughout the country was beyond obscene, and the horror was attributable to a lack of preparedness, for which he is to blame--not alone, but his desk is where the buck stops.

It would be easy to say that yesterday was a day to forget, but, sadly enough, forgetting is impossible. The images are there. We've all seen them. That the nation is out of Afghanistan is a blessing; that we left the way we did is a curse.

So yesterday, another bright and beautiful day out here on the edge of the plains, I walked out to check my muskmelons, and when I did I couldn't help but notice the search for food in a patch of zinnias right out there beside the garden box. Two royal butterflies--one a monarch, the other what I believe is called a pipevine swallowtail. The pipevine didn't pose exactly, but let's just say that it certainly didn't object to the camera I stuck in its face. It was busy, very busy.

I read that a pipevine swallowtail has no natural enemies because they taste awful, but I was only interested in beauty, not lunch. 

Make no mind, however, because he most certainly was--driven, in fact.

Given the stage, the performance was especially grand, a reminder of the fact that the world is full of little dramas we choose to look past--and shouldn't really. The performance this pipevine put on was pure ballet.

Which is not to say the monarch wasn't beautiful. The difference was a matter of engineering. The monarch simply closed its wings to avoid being swept off the stage by the wind. Once it alighted on a blossom, it closed up its sales and there was nothing to shoot. The pipevine, on the other hand, used those wings of his or hers as ballast, the way an eagle soars in updrafts.

All of that made for a tipsy lunch, I'm sure, but there was no stopping him/her.

Diversion? Maybe. Escapist? Probably. Did paying attention to the dance going on in the garden somehow make the horror at the airport go away? No.

But it was a reminder of the importance of beauty amid the chaos, of finding the eternal somehow, of looking for the light even on the darkest of days.

Prayers for Haiti

Once upon a time, we spent some time in Haiti. I remember having to use bottled water for everything, even for brushing your teeth. I remember the big walls all around people's houses, keeping crime out, or trying. I remember a sea of black faces on crowded streets, every morning and every night, and the explanation that in Haiti almost everyone sleeps with a roof over their head, but lives, for the most part, outside on the street. The weather, after all, is commodious--when it isn't horror. And, oh yes, poverty shadows everywhere.

Weathermen claim that once again Haiti is in the cross hairs of a developing tropical storm, this one named, obscenely, Grace. I'm sure some scientists would say that hurricanes do some good somehow, but finding a silver lining in yet another destroyer to hit the island would take some doing. Haitians most certainly need grace, but not this one.

As many as 1300 Haitians died in a 7.2 earthquake last Saturday, an earthquake that destroyed 7000 homes. Poverty-stricken Haiti still hasn't fully recovered from the last one, which was actually smaller and killed 220 thousand people eleven years ago.

Some call Haiti a failed state, a place where the only government isn't a government at all. Not a month ago, President Jovenel Moïse was murdered in a plot whose mystifying origins are still being investigated. For decades, armies of volunteers and hundreds of millions of dollars in aid of every sort seem to have accomplished little to improve the quality of life. The airport is, almost always, filled with American teenagers in matching t-shirts, church groups coming in and going out. They were everywhere.

From here, an assassination, then a massive earthquake, and, soon enough it seems, a murderous hurricane make even imagining how people are doing this morning on the island impossible. 

I remember watching people four and five abreast flowing through the streets in Port-au-Prince, remember also how difficult all those folks made it to get anywhere in a vehicle--how madly chaotic everything seemed. Right downtown in the city, four or five lanes of traffic inched through an intersection with no red lights. 

And I remember the morning rush filled with children, scores of them, each with a uniform representing the school they'd attended. Something about those neatly-dressed kids, hundreds of them, kept hope alive. 

I remember thinking how those kids too were all praying that morning, talking to the Creator of heaven and earth, as were a gadzillion others around the world; and right at that moment I remember seeing a vision of God almighty a hundred times bigger than anything I'd dreamed of before, because He is a loving God and he does hear us when we pray--I believe those things. Right then, I couldn't help thinking that he's a dispatch operator like no one or nothing imaginable. He loves those sweet choruses of Haitian children fully as much as he loves my grandkids. That's how big he is. That's how many prayers he dispatches every single hour of every single day.

A man from the coastal town of Las Cayes, where the quake devastated homes and businesses, told ABC News, "We only have Jesus now. If it wasn't for Jesus, I wouldn't be able to be here today."

But you can't help but wonder how much the Haitian people can take. A failed state, a murdered President, a monumental earthquake, and now a hurricane named Grace? It takes preposterous faith to roll out Romans 8:28 in Haiti. 

Maybe, just maybe, Grace will swerve north or south as if listening to the urgent prayers of all those kids in Port-au-Prince.

We can only hope. 

And pray.

Morning Thanks--"poor in spirit"*

Being placed into hospice care does not imply imminent death, or so I've learned-- the easy way, you might say. My mother-in-law has been in hospice care for quite some time. While it's clear that her health isn't "getting better," it's not clear that she'll be leaving us any time soon. Hospice care, no matter its length, is an wonderful blessing.

Living the way she is these days, she thinks quite a bit about the way things were; so when, yesterday, she told us a story from years ago, it wasn't the first time.

At one time her mother chatted about her own two unmarried aunts--"old maids," they would have been called years ago, I'm sure. Back then, my mother-in-law was young and impressionable enough to listen to what her mother said. And it's somehow stayed with her.

"Well, I suppose they saved themselves from a lot of sin by never marrying," her mother told her, off-handedly, and then carried on her tatting or whatever.

Just a single line, but it stuck. And now, almost eighty years later, it returned, a puzzle.

Last week, my mother-in-law and her sister talked about what their mother might have meant by that odd assessment, how being single actually might have "saved those old maids from a lot of sin." They still aren't sure exactly, but their speculation had to do with a woman's inability to control reproduction. No birth control, so women simply had babies--again and again and again. My father came from a family of ten, as did my father-in-law, not unusual in the rural Midwest, pre-Second World War.

But how could having babies be sin? Here's what they determined, what they guessed. Without birth control, kids simply showed up, sometimes--maybe often--unrequested, even--dare I say it?--unwanted. During the Thirties, Depression-time, one could make the argument that more hands make less work, more babies undoubtedly made more.

What I need is to imagine is a woman whose small house is already full of kids, whose pocketbook is going to be empty until she can sell chickens, whose crops look dry, whose early pregnancies keep her face in the bedpan, who can already tally age itself in her bones from the many births she's already given--that woman suddenly and unexpectedly realizing that now there is yet another on the way.

Add to that unthinkably high infant mortality, or the fear that this one, like others perhaps, wouldn't live long. Lots of old church records here make dreadfully clear that the death of children was not infrequent.

There was much to fear, in other words. And in the religious culture in which they lived, having babies was seen as a woman's prime calling. Having babies was what women did, what God wanted, what his Word demanded.

That unquestioned theological conviction turned one's private questions about more babies into rebellion against His will. In the wee hours of the morning, the house quiet for once, her husband asleep, it's not hard to imagine a woman reading her signs and weeping, those sad tears made both more frequent and more intense by the conviction that what she felt down her cheeks was rebellion against the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

In that way, not marrying meant being able to avoid sin--or so my mother-in-law reasoned last week, when her own mother's off-hand remark, for some reason, came suddenly back to her many decades later.

Amazing, and sad.

But today we have the pill. Today unwanted babies are few. But that doesn't mean that some 21st century believers still don't translate that which conflicts us, that which makes us cry, into a treacherous darkness that we still equate with sin.

The old looming orthodoxy of a dour Calvinist piety may well be gone from the community I live in, but that doesn't mean that hearty religious people don't still feel the pangs of sin in their sadness, no matter what the cause. Today, a half a century later, the image of true piety may not be a sour face, as it once was. Today, true Godliness might be, ironically, a smiley one; and those who don't manifest that joy--for whatever reason--may still equate their lack of it with the curse of sin.

Sometimes it's a burden being a believer. Honestly.

And then, yesterday, Sunday, a wonderful sermon on the Beatitudes.

Later I got to thinking what a blessing those wise words could have been, years and years ago, to women sitting on hard pews in the cold of January, knowing that by Christmas there would be yet another crying mouth to feed: "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

Could have been. Might have been. In some cases, I'm sure, was. Had to be.

I've heard the Beatitudes a thousand times, I'm sure; but my mother-in-law's story made Jesus's words greatly more profound.

And then, this morning, I heard Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison in 1944. “I’m still discovering right up to this moment that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God.”

That's comfort for all of us--for which, this morning, I'm thankful.

________________________ 

*Posted February 4, 2008.

Walter Wangerin, 1944-2021

He was an exceptional man, so passionate that he seemed almost to burn. As a public speaker, there are and were few like him, in part because he had an amazing stage presence--tall, square shouldered, almost fearful, although he didn't really scare people. As a writer, I know of none cut from quite the same cloth.

Once upon a time long ago, a conference of teachers asked me to introduce him before he spoke to a huge plenary session. I didn't know Walt well at that time, and I wanted to impress him. I remember that I used a brick that still sits behind me on a shelf of my library, a brick I dug out of a pile we found when visiting the place on the red prairie where Willa Cather's grandparents created a homestead, a place where she herself spent some girlhood years. 

I don't remember what I said exactly, but I know I referred to what that old brick meant to me, a symbol of a story that had profound meaning to me and that he, like Cather, had a permanent place in the museum of my own life. 

He loved the introduction--he mentioned it several times later when the two of us became good friends. I heard him speak for the first time several years before that introduction, when he returned to the school from which he once graduated, a preparatory school or seminary in Milwaukee, WI. Sounds contradictory, but he spoke fiercely but tenderly, remembering kindly some childhood years that weren't so bountifully blessed. 

The species of Lutheranism which he remembered in that speech was the kind Garrison Keillor incessantly refers to--dour, unflinching, driven by the kind of willful righteousness that often evolved into its own worst enemy. To me, it was clear that he wanted little to do with the kind of faith he'd learned and experienced as a boy, but he tempered that antagonism with more than a few homey memories.

We became friends when I was asked to join a writers group, the Chrysostom Society, that met annually to talk about faith and writing, some of the most famous names in evangelical publishing--Walt Wangerin, Eugene Peterson, Luci Shaw, Philip Yancey, and others. And me, oddly enough, although as a writer I never achieved what the others had and did. For a quarter century I was blessed to be among them.

Walt wrote everything--poetry, fiction, non-fiction; in The Book of God, he even took a shot at fictionalizing the Bible. He excelled at columns in a denominational magazine, columns that gave him a much valued readership among his own. As a writer, he had come out of nowhere when his The Book of the Dun-Cow, a fantasy he drew from Chaucer's tales, won all kinds of awards. He never stopped writing, not even when cancer dragged him down in its awful teeth. Instead, he wrote about cancer. 

What Walter Wangerin shared with Frederick Manfred, another writer I knew well, was a passion for writing that grew from a vivid sense of calling into a profession that might have seemed to others to be a life sentence from the Lord. He simply couldn't do enough of it; and spinning out more gave him a sense of mission that made him, in addition, capable of stunning performances behind a lectern. The speech he gave after my introduction so many years ago was amazing, electric, a living scrapbook packed full of the teachers he'd had as a boy, some of those descriptions wickedly funny. 

Walt Wangerin once wrote this about himself and his writing: “I present you with the very stuff itself of the events that have shaped this person before you, and so reveal the Shaper shaping. By these stories I am sinfully, gracefully whole, and whole may be the drama of God in me.”

I know he wouldn't like me saying it, but sometimes I couldn't help feeling that writing, to him, was sacramental, "the drama of God," and even its own means of grace. Maybe he wouldn't mind.

A decade ago, at least, he announced the cancer. Chemo was devastating. It beat on him, but he didn't succumb. I remember very well listening to what I thought would be his final speech at a big conference at Calvin College. I wasn't the only friend of his who, that night, simply assumed this would be his last.

Afterwards, the poet John Leax and I went to his room with a bottle of wine, sat there with him and Thanne for a couple of late-night hours; we told stories and quite specifically said our good-byes. It was, I remember, a touching moment. If there weren't tears, there could have been. We believed we'd never see him again.

Instead, he turned out about a dozen more books. His energy was ferocious, his faith, like some others of us, may well have been more luminous on stage and in prose than it was in quieter moments. 

He was a great man I wish, deeply, I could have known better. Two weeks ago he sent me a note, thanking me for an essay I wrote about him for a book about his work, told me he could barely climb the stairs anymore, and asked me about my grandchildren. Ten days later, finally, he was gone.

He taught me a great deal and was, as a writer and friend, a significant presence in my life, as was his wife, Thanne. I will always treasure my memories of being in his and their company, a blessing to me and to many.

"Things We Couldn't Say"--the play

And this, you have to believe, was one of the grandest moments of her life, the day that Dutch royalty--King and Queen--visited Grand Rapids, Michigan--and called on Berendina Eman, an occupation-era hero both here and in her native Holland. Together, they walked, arm in arm toward Meijer Gardens.

I remember asking her to explain to me, an American, this blessed fascination, this seeming idol-worship that she and other Europeans had toward their silly royalty. I didn't understand it. 

She'd come to that moment in the story when the Queen had left occupied Holland for England, and she said the Queen's leaving made her furious. "She was our mother," Diet told me. I couldn't help but thinking such overwhelming affection for royalty was ridiculous. "She was our mother and she'd left us behind," she said.

But soon enough she said her countrymen and women learned that their Mother's leaving was for the best because she could much better lead, play the role she'd gained when she wore the crown, if she were away from the Nazis, safe in England.

The roles seems reversed in the photograph, don't they? King William Alexander and Queen Maxima, hold tight to Diet as if she were their mother. What they know is that, given her role during the war, she was--and is. And Diet?--I swear I could hear her joyful heart three states away.

Tonight, we start rehearsing "Things We Couldn't Say," a readers theater presentation of the book of the same name, the biography of Diet Eman. I wrote them both a quarter century ago at a time when the world was looking back fifty years to commemorate something never to be forgotten, World War II--both it's horrors, Hitler's "final solution," and its joys, unimaginably selfless heroism

"Things" first played in public at a small conference of a AADAS, a Dutch-American historical group, who staged it in the Fine Arts Center of what was then Calvin University, in Grand Rapids, MI.  I don't remember how it had happened, but somehow the word got out and Diet already had a presence among many locals. Shockingly, at least to me, the place was full. 

Writing, my old friend Fred Manfred used to say, requires listening to your "IC," your "internal commentator," the voice that emits unsparing truth unfettered by custom or reputation. Every good writer has to listen to his "IC" if he or she is going to write, Manfred used to say. It's an inner voice that won't be bothered by conscience or political correctness. Whether or not that voice speaks in the writing is of no great importance, but it must operate in the way information--in this case, a woman's war-time experience--is heard or experienced or regarded.

I say that because when I remember the very first performance of the readers theater version of Things We Couldn't Say, what I remember best was being blind-sided afterward, because Diet herself was an emotional wreck, tears abounding. 

I assumed those tears were drawn from the success of the production--a full house, a standing ovation for her, unending lines of people wanting to shake her hand, to hug her.

But that wasn't it. She was broken by a public rehearsal of a life she'd only rarely spoken of, a life--and a death--she'd suffered during the war fifty years before, in a campaign she fought herself so valiantly in the renegade Dutch Resistance. And she'd suffered--two concentration camps, a dangerous hearing, the death of the man she loved more than almost anything.

When she had told me her story--it took a week of interviewing--she'd opened up all of that in a way she never had before. I'd taken it all in, worked on putting it all together chronologically, tried to keep her voice in telling it, then spun it out in a manuscript that was not yet published, as well as this readers theater presentation we debuted that night in a sizeable recital hall full of people. 

What she saw and heard before her that night was a portrayal of what she'd not regarded as secret, but something so heavy with emotions that it had always been hugely unexplainable. She'd left so much of her heart behind in those war years that when it replayed in front of her, the intimacy of her experience was on display as it had never had been before. She told me, in tears, she'd cried all the way through because the intimacies of her life were vividly on display.

The IC in me loved the story and wanted, like nothing else, to tell it, to share it, to make others see the immensity of her suffering and her immense faith in the God she and her fiancé worshipped. It was for His dear sake that they'd taken on the resistance work, after all. But I'd never considered what the experience might do to her. My IC was operating full-strength, my conscience had left the building, never even made an appearance.

She was angry with me because she couldn't help feeling this writer she'd come to know was playing with her, just putting on a play. 

Her life matters--all lives do. They require more.

She's gone now, died a year ago, just a stone's throw from 100 years old. This performance will be the first time she's not around. 

I have a small part, maybe a half-dozen lines, because the play is a dramatization of what I experienced when she told me the story of her life. And when I watch the story unfold once again myself, as I've done dozens of times before, I'll still see her cowering somewhere out there in crowd, as emotionally fragile as she was that first night she saw herself and her fiancé and listened to someone else tell her story to full house in front of them.

She'll be there, royalty herself, and I'll remember all those tears many years ago.